Young people from all over the world danced throughout Berlin after the fall of the Wall. The boom-boom of the basses was hard, metallic, raw. Sweaty bodies flickered in the flashing strobe light on deeply fogged dance floors. Techno music was new and had been captivating young people from East and West since the early 1990s. The Tresor club opened in March 1991, one and a half years after the fall of the Wall. It was the first Techno club in the reunified city with a permanent location.
The club was located in a long-forgotten basement room – a safe – that once belonged to the traditional Wertheim department store on Leipziger Platz. In GDR times, the ruin of the department store on the border strip initially stood empty, and was then demolished in the mid-1950s. Only the basement, where money and valuables used to be stored behind steel and concrete, survived the division. After the fall of the Wall, such vacancy attracted many creative people from the music and art scene to the city.
Berlin had been a city of rock music for a long time, until techno spread from the end of the 1980s onwards. The new music came from Detroit in the United States. As early as the summer of 1989, the first Love Parade was organised in West Berlin as a techno parade. At that time, only a few hundred people took part. After the fall of the Wall, the scene grew massively. For many, the booming basses conveyed the feeling of the times and brought young people from both parts of the city together. Techno became the first all-German youth movement. The scene quickly attracted party people from all over the world to the city.
Around the former border area stood decaying department stores, factory buildings and bunkers. In East Berlin, the administration collapsed with the fall of the Wall. Ownership was occasionally unclear. Often, electricity was still available in the empty buildings. The organizers only had to connect their equipment. The parties were rarely officially registered. The rooms were usually transformed into a party location only for a short time or even once. There was no closing time in Berlin. People danced through the whole weekend, drugs were also part of it. A DJ from back then sums it up: "Anyone who can still remember it, did not really take part in it." But not everyone could take part. At the doors of the locations it was selected who was welcome and who was not.
With the opening of the Tresor, Techno was ultimately established in Berlin. The old vault door was an entrance to another world. Berlin and Detroit merged. The parties and the Tresor’s own music label influenced the Techno scene in all of Europe. Legendary DJs and pioneers of the machine-funky Detroit Techno, such as Jeff Mills and Juan Atkins, flew in from the United States to perform between hundreds of broken-up lockers. Many German DJs became well known here as well.
The property in a central Berlin location was attractive and contested for development. The club only received short-term leases. In 2005, the Tresor had to move out and an investor built on the site. The club moved to an old heating plant in Berlin-Mitte. Here the Techno party continues since 2007.
