Berlin has a language you must learn if you plan to live here, and that language is certainly not German. Of course, living anywhere requires learning the local code, but Berlin’s vernacular can be particularly fatiguing: it’s full of vagueness and cliché, of nodding and nudging at concepts using sweeping umbrella terms to hedge your meaning. Everything is a “scene” – the club scene, the running scene, the music scene, the coffee scene, the queer performance art scene, the sustainable sex-toy scene. Everything is culture, and everyone works in tech – no idea what they do all day. Everything is a protest if you bring your boom box. Every venue is an institution; every art installation is interdisciplinary, experimental and underground. Every restaurant opening is a rave, solidarity comes with a cocktail, every DJ is up-and-coming and everyone is dripping with hedonism – or is it drowning in it? I’m no longer sure what hedonism is.
These terms are usually employed with some layer of self-aware irony – it’s a joke, and hey, we’re all in on it, right? But there’s one overused Berlin word nobody is talking about, and I believe it has to be held to account: for the love of God, can we please stop calling everything a collective?
For a city that is singular in many ways, the collective abounds here. Being a collective is, of course, a real and valid group structure, and we’re all in favour of cooperation and employee-owned businesses. But Berliners seem willing to attach the word to basically any project – their small music label, their art gallery, their petsitting business, their photography club – whether or not they’re set up as one. In the years that I’ve been editing this 100-page monthly magazine, the number of perfectly well-intentioned groups, organisations, businesses, event series, fashion brands, craft circles, fair housing initiatives, sneaker repair shops, pickleball clubs, et cetera, that have requested that we use the word “collective” to describe them – whether or not it’s in their name – has begun to defy logic. I’m always happy for people to self-identify, but I really need everyone to plop down on their palette beds and have a good long think about why you’re all so collectively obsessed with being called a collective.
Part of the Berlin penchant for being a collective is that the word can act as value-signal to the outside world that you and the unspecified number of people you hang around with aren’t fucking around about inclusivity.
In my estimation, part of the Berlin penchant for being a collective is that the word can act as value-signal to the outside world that you and the unspecified number of people you hang around with aren’t fucking around about inclusivity. It’s a word that gestures towards community-oriented values – “community” being another term that, by 2025, has gone the way of miso paste and Timothée Chalamet (in everything).
Since I began paying attention to this, I’ve kept a list in my Notes app; a conscious collection of collectives illustrating our collective unconscious, if you will. I’ve got multiple queer and FLINTA*-centred organisations (subcategorised by hobby), a comic book store, a basket business, a boutique fitness studio, a therapy practice, a knitting club, a classical music performance group, and a state-funded open-air nightclub: collectives, all. (There is one emeritus entry: the Berlin Strippers Collective rebranded last year after restructuring their business, they are now called Slut Riot.) Perhaps my favourite run-in with the term was at a lovely Italian place in my Kiez where my boyfriend and I went to dinner – they had the word right there in the logo. Personally, I think the profit-sharing is great, but I don’t need to know about it to enjoy a ragu.
In fairness, you can’t really blame people for being collective crazy. The word “club” in Berlin is already loaded with meaning. If you called it the Great Tit Club, prospective members might mistake your benign birdwatching group for something they could show up to in a harness. And “forming a collective” is a lot cooler-sounding than “filed paperwork to incorporate”. But it’s clear to me that this is getting out of hand.
So Berliners, here’s your permission. We can cull this one from the city vocabulary. And in the meantime, I’ll leave you with the [adapted] words of beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, from her poem ‘Wild Geese’:
You do not have to be a collective.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through a flat hierarchy, repenting.
You only have to let a group be a group.
