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Psychedelic Futurology in Berlin

1988

Berlin’s anarchic underground—punks, Greens, New Agers, and psychedelic dreamers—forms a joyous coalition of ideas and hash smoke, confounding stodgy intellectuals while hinting that real political vitality emerges from creative chaos, unity, and a sudden Eastward glance.

Published in Reality Hackers, Number 5, page 63.

Mentions
Timothy Leary Robert Anton Wilson

BERLIN: Few place names in our political lexicon are so charged with intense associations: from the image of the burning Reichstag to the periodic “Berlin Crises” that were benchmarks in the Cold War of my childhood. I flew to Berlin last weekend quite unexpectedly, as a last minute stand-in for Tim Leary at Forum Futurum, a futurological congress and New Age idea fair. It was held in the Kongresshalle, a UFOish building with circus tents nearby at the Tempodrom. My expectations were minimal—what I found blew my mind. Berlin is alive! Its life consists of a vital and activist underground community of punks, freaks, Greens, feminists, psychedelicos, New Agers, and eccentric dreamers. All swirling around me in a non-stop party of people and ideas that runs on hash joints that one can smoke anywhere and beer to die for.

What we can learn from the German underground is that the path to political effectiveness runs through tolerance and unity. In the U.S., heavy metal punks and New Age types are poles apart and not likely to be aware of each other’s agenda or defend each other’s right to non-conformity. In Berlin there exists something that approaches an underground united front.

One of the events that I participated in was a panel discussion among myself, Robert Anton Wilson, and Micky Remann, the international networker and pataphysical commando responsible for bringing me to Berlin. While we debated psychedelics, spaceflight, and the End of History before a stoned and enthusiastic crowd of eight hundred that ran heavily to silver studded black leather, skin heads, and violet hair, we were telecast and critically dissected by constipated mainline German eggheads watching on TV monitors in the relative safety of a pyramid-shaped glass studio a hundred yards away. “Obscurantists,” sneered Joseph Huber, a leading German sociologist obviously appalled by the churning creative chaos. “Potentially protofascist,” chimed in Robert Jungk, the octogenarian social philosopher who is known as a historian of the atomic age. To her credit, Eva Quistorp, feminist and founding Green member, tried to hold them back.

Meanwhile, back inside the Tempodrom bigtop, things were heating up. Joints were handed up to the stage: it was a liberating experience to get stoned at the focus of a thunderous public gathering. It lets you know what a sandbox our political dialogues here in America have become. Quickly the ebb and flow of rave and translation blurred to cacophony. At last we were having fun.

Berlin is dynamic and vital and Berlin is looking East. And so should we. During photophone connections to Moscow—the Berlin–Moscow Teleport—we looked into rooms in Moscow filled with musicians, poets, and the new breed of dreamers unleashed by Perestroika. “Everything is now possible in Moscow,” Joel Shatz, the photophone anchor in Moscow told us. And everything is happening now in Berlin. Hardly going to bed, I lived a week in three days while I was in Berlin. Be there or be square.

Terence McKenna

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