Berlin and Detroit, An Alien Techno Alliance: Cultural Politics and Social Transformation after the Fall of the Wall

The Cold War’s end infused electronic music from Detroit and Berlin in the early-to-mid-1990s with an unrivalled intensity. The events around the Mauerfall provided conditions for encounters between Detroit techno producers and a nascent Berlin scene celebrating a new – short-lived – openness. Cemented in Berlin’s Wende era, techno reached across decades-old geopolitical barriers between divided Berlin and the Fordist heartland of the American Dream. This essay argues that the music brought together enthused communities to live out energetic experiments in conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future. In Berlin, displaced Cold War identifications met the placelessness of Detroit techno’s utopian-dystopian form. Detroit techno and re-unification met on this territory, where a social imaginary of radical difference strongly appealed, and experiments with social forms seemed possible. The music had long explored a placelessness that left behind earlier struggles, connecting it with the “transitional” experience of the Wende. Berlin’s nascent club scene became the place to play out Detroit techno’s alienated relation to identity. The article foregrounds alienation within Detroit techno and techno’s break with the past via Afrofuturism. In Berlin, Detroit techno becomes a trace of the future in a setting dedicated to the future’s exploration.