The first person I met in Berlin was a boar-hunting friend of a friend, who agreed to talk to me only if I didn’t print his name. He was in his early forties, six and a half feet tall, muscular, lean, and fair, with shaggy reddish-brown hair, some stubble, and a great deal of self-confidence. He had on worn jeans, biker boots, a loose faded black T-shirt, and a scarf, and yet I’ll confess I found myself picturing him trim and tidy in Heidelberg duelling garb. Preconceptions can be hard to shake when you’re fresh in town.

It was a Sunday night in the dregs of December, sleety and dark. We were at a bar in Mitte, the formerly bombed-out and abandoned East Berlin district that was reclaimed by squatters, clubbers, and artists after the Wall came down and is now agleam with fancy restaurants, galleries, and shops. Transplants often describe Berlin’s neighborhoods as analogues of New York’s, to assess where they fit along the gentrification continuum. Mitte, they say, is SoHo. Like SoHo, it is often full of tourists. But this bar, an early post-Wall pioneer, had a gruff, local air.

The boar hunter stirred an espresso at arm’s length and regarded me with martial skepticism. He was a veteran of the city’s after-hours party scene, but he seemed weary of it. “Everyone knows about this,” he said. “You should write instead about black rhinos.” He’d recently bought fifteen thousand acres in Namibia, in a rhinoceros preserve, to help support a conservation program. He said, “I once shot an elephant.”

He had moved to Berlin from Düsseldorf in 1993. He was a philosopher by training (his business card had him as a “Dr.”) but an industrialist by trade: he’d inherited a manufacturing firm from his father, and had done well enough with it to pursue a life of pleasure and ease, though without ostentation, in keeping with the ethos of Berlin. He’d recently returned from a four-week surfing trip to the Basque coast, where he and a girlfriend—two, actually: one for the first half of the trip, and one for the second—had lived out of a VW bus. There were other women in his life, among them a physician’s wife, whom he’d met online. (“He gave her fake tits—Thank you, Mister!”) He described his plans for the following weekend: a day hunting wild boar in a forest on the city’s outskirts, then a “sex party” (which should never be said without a German accent) at an acquaintance’s apartment, where he’d arrive with one woman but pair up with others (“It’s a seedy thing”), and, finally, perhaps, just before Sunday dawn, Berghain.

Berghain is a night club that opened in 2004 in an abandoned power plant in what used to be East Berlin. The name is a mashup of the last syllable of its neighborhood, Friedrichshain, and the one across the Spree, Kreuzberg, on what was once the other side of the Wall. It is the most famous techno club in the world—to Berlin what Fenway is to Boston—and yet still kind of underground and, as such, a microcosm of Berlin. The people I’d talked to who had been to Berghain—and there were many—conjured ecstatic evenings, Boschian contortions, and a dusky Arcadia that an American hockey dad like me had never even imagined wanting to experience.

Berghain’s renown rests on many attributes: the quality of the music, and of the d.j.s who present it; the power and clarity of the sound system; the eyeball-bending decadence of the weekend parties, which often spill into Monday morning; the stringent and mysterious door policy, and the menacing head doorman, with a tattoo on his face; the majesty and complexity of the interior; and the tolerant and indulgent atmosphere, most infamously in its so-called dark rooms, where patrons, gay and straight, can get it on with friends or strangers in an anonymous murk. For some Berliners, Berghain is an elemental part of their weekly existence, a perfectly pitched and carefully conceived apotheosis of Berlin’s post-Wall club culture. To pilgrims and many expats, it is a temple of techno, a consecrated space, a source of enchantment and wonder.

“It’s half art project, half social experiment,” a friend in New York had told me. “It’s the vampire night club to end all vampire night clubs. People want something like it here, but New York could never metabolize it.”

“It’s a social-political-economic achievement,” another friend said. “It’s such a fucking unicorn.”

“It’s dystopian and utopian,” a third said. “Prepare yourself.”

The boar hunter had been going to Berghain for years, mainly for the music and the sex. He said he preferred it to, say, the KitKatClub. “The sex clubs have bad music,” he explained. He avoided drugs, mostly. He drank alcohol and occasionally smoked damiana, a mild herbal stimulant that is thought to have some aphrodisiac effects. “It’s like pot, except it doesn’t make you stupid,” he said. Perhaps it was for this reason that he had a more prosaic affection for the place. He didn’t seem to see it in transcendental terms. He had a Teutonic bluntness with regard to sex. Typically, he’d dance and then go to the dark room. He explained that straight couples, in deference to the predominantly gay clientele in the dark rooms, often preferred the toilet stalls, but, for whatever reason, he didn’t like the idea of screwing on a toilet. He’d noticed in recent visits to the dark room that, to judge by wandering hands, the patrons were less interested in him than in the woman he was with. Also, he’d had two cell phones stolen. All this was a symptom of gentrification. “Berghain’s not as kinky as it used to be, not as eccentric,” he said. “There are the easyJet people—Spanish people, Italians. The black-leather homosexuals are gone.” Apparently, they patronized the club downstairs—Lab.oratory, which has a separate entrance and a more single-minded clientele. In Berlin, offhand references to instances of excess at Lab.oratory—oh, the things that men will do to each other!—are as commonplace as best-burger recommendations in New York.

After a moment, the boar hunter said, “We could go to Berghain now. Would you like to go?”

“Now?” I was jet-lagged. It was Sunday. He looked me up and down, the way Germans do when you walk into a restaurant. He didn’t think I’d get in. We made a plan to meet there in a week.

The next morning, the sidewalks in Mitte teemed with citizens on their way to work. Through the windows of an office building across the street from my hotel, you could see young people busy in their cubicles. Somehow, I’d assumed that on Monday mornings everyone in Berlin would be lurking in a club somewhere or else sleeping it off. But it turns out there is a Berlin of museums and gallery openings, of the Bundestag and the Chancellery, of Holocaust remembrance and Naziphilia, of Turkish immigrants and academics on sabbatical, and even of ordinary middle-class families going about their lives and escaping to Wannsee on weekends. It’s just that, if you are on techno time, you hardly see any of it. You can’t fathom that, a few U-Bahn stops away, Angela Merkel is busy presiding over the affairs of Europe.