When you look at the analogue photos Christian Stemmler took in East Berlin, back when he was seventeen, you can almost hear the bass shaking speakers already pushed to their limit. You hear laughter and the dull noise Dr. Martens make when their soles hit the floor. You smell smoke. Smoke from cigarettes as well as this thick fog that sometimes spreads inside clubs. You can see chaotic flats, when they still used to be cheap. There’s sweat. Rain. Weed. These smacking sounds when teenagers make out.
There’s not a single cell phone. But wild, fun days. Freedom. Community. Joy. Intensity, tenderness, honesty and this sweet feeling of not thinking about the future. It’s an archive of a time long gone. An archive that is now collected in Stemmler’s book Anfang/Beginning: Berlin 1994-99.
“We thought it would last forever,” the German photographer, stylist, and fashion editor says today about the freedom in the late 90s. Because Berlin isn’t that Berlin anymore. No matter how much we wish it still were. So, thinking about it in 2025 feels like remembering a distant utopia. Something we still dream about. Younger people only hear stories about it. Like a legend. A myth about when the city was still fun. Everyone wants to claim it, wants to experience it and wants to be part of it, but only those who were actually there truly know what it was like. Stemmler, for example, was right at the centre of it all.
Back then, he had just left home and moved into a squat in East Berlin. He started working in clubs, finding new friends, a new kind of family. He picked up his analogue camera and began capturing those fleeting moments you only realise were special once they’re gone: DJs behind their decks, artists, bohemians, couples, crowds. Moments at home on the cold kitchen floor. On public transport, or in a Trabi lighting multiple cigarettes at once. On the street, in the club, in bars, or in bed. The images, snapshots and portraits, balance brutality with humanity. They spark a naïve euphoria that can only exist in the past. And although Stemmler long believed his analogue images had no place in a hyper-professionalised photo world, they ended up hitting people exactly where they needed it — or where they didn’t yet know they did.
So, a few days after the launch of the second edition of Anfang/Beginning: Berlin 1994–99, we had the chance to speak with the person behind the lens. The person who stood in those crowds, grew up there, and watched the city change. We used the moment to dive into a conversation about the death of a subculture, about who he is still in touch with, about legendary clubs like KitKat and SchwuZ and about how the book can inspire us to live in the future.
Hi Christian, what’s your favourite place in Berlin right now?
I left Berlin three years ago, but my favourite place is still Tempelhofer Feld; it represents the old Berlin. There is space, and you can see the sky. A closed-down airport turned into a public park. That’s how I want to remember Berlin forever.
Some of your images were taken in KitKat. Does the club still look the same as it did back then?
The images of KitKat Club in my book are from the very first years, when the club was still in a backyard in Kreuzberg on Glogauer Straße. It was very small, fitting maybe two-hundred people, and there was never a queue. It’s a boxing gym now — I went there to check the other day. If only the boxers knew what happened within these walls…
Do you remember the exact sound or smell of one of those nights you photographed? Memories that no digital or analogue image could ever capture?
I remember a lot of sounds and smells, but mostly the smell of cigarettes. The smell of cigarettes in sticky, small clubs with little ventilation; cigarette smell in cars where we would sit for hours in front of the clubs; and also at after-parties in people’s homes. Full ashtrays and cigarette smoke everywhere.
Is there an image in the book that you hesitated to include because it felt too personal or too fragile?
I think almost all the images are actually very personal. Most of the people in the pictures are very close friends and show us in intimate moments. When no one was watching, and we were sometimes awake for days. I think this is what creates the feeling that many people who look at it describe, as if they feel part of what’s happening there.
What was emotionally or physically the most challenging part about creating the photo book?
I think the scanning of the negatives. I did it all by myself, picture by picture. Almost three-hundred films. I was so exhausted sometimes that I had to take breaks for days or weeks and thought I wouldn’t continue. I scanned the years 1994 to 1999 chronologically, so I basically relived half of the 90s during that time. It was intense.
Did reliving those days and nights change your understanding of who you were back then, or who you became later?
Oh yes, I reflected a lot on that while making the book. I understood that this time shaped who I am as a person, as an artist, my style as a photographer and as a stylist. And it taught me a sense of community that I keep trying to recreate to this day.
You said that when you first moved to Berlin, groups of friends of twenty or thirty people were looking out for each other. Are you still in touch with them? Are you still looking out for each other?
A handful of them I still consider my close friends, and with a few I still text every now and then. Especially since with social media, it’s easier to stay in touch. Through making the book, I got in touch with almost everyone again, and with most of them it felt like no time had passed.
Nowadays, isolation has replaced solidarity. Do you believe art can create that sense of community again?
I think my book is a good example of that. My intention was to create a monument for the people I love so much, the people I spent so many important years of my life with. They showed me what community really means. Many of them came to my launch event a few days ago in Berlin. It was a very emotional reunion, and the people from the book mixed beautifully with the crowd of my colleagues from twenty plus years in the fashion and media industry. People in their twenties who love the book and party in Berlin nowadays, mixed with the children of my friends featured in the book.
I read that you’ve never seen yourself as a “real photographer.” How do you define what real means in art today?
I said I’m not a real photographer because I compared myself to the ones I knew in the 90s and early 2000s. Everything was big production, very technical, and the people in the magazines and campaigns looked so different from the people I photographed. I looked at the work of Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber, Ellen von Unwerth, and Herb Ritts. Everything was so glamorous and full of supermodels. And I never studied, so I thought that’s why I couldn’t consider myself a professional photographer.
You said “We thought it would last forever.” When did you first feel, first notice that this freedom was ending?
I first sensed that freedom slipping away after twelve years in nightlife, including long stretches working behind the bar. I was exhausted, but more than that, I felt ready for something new. It was 2005, and after three years juggling a job as a fashion assistant at a magazine while still working nights at the club, I realised it was time to fully commit to my daytime activities.
SchwuZ just closed. What impact do you think that will have on Berlin?
SchwuZ is an important part of Berlin’s queer history, and we are both the same age, born in 1977. Its closure feels like another sign of the city’s ongoing Clubsterben. More clubs are likely to follow, and the Berlin that once defined itself as the capital of clubbing and alternative nightlife is slowly disappearing.
Rosalía just released the song Berghain. Do you see that as appreciation for Berlin safe spaces, or just another sign of a dying subculture?
I think Rosalía’s song has not much to do with Berghain, the club. She’s never been there, I heard her say that in an interview, and she meant it more as a literal translation of arboleda de la montaña, which means Hain des Berges in German and mountain grove in English. But it’s definitely smart marketing and a great piece of music. In the end, Subculture died a long time ago. I guess around the time the internet became popular, or at the latest with the rise of social media.
How can the photo book help us to look not only at the past but also at the future?
From the reactions I’ve got to the book, I understood that it’s not only a piece of cultural history; it’s also an inspiration for a way of life that we can still aspire to. We can still create spaces and form real-life communities outside the heteronormative gender-binary norm. It’s harder, but not impossible.
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