Jonny Knüppel

A workshop in Lohmühlen turned into a dancefloor

In the spring of 2015, a collective rented the site of an old workshop on the island of Lohmühlen, between Kreuzberg and Treptow, and started throwing parties without waiting for permission. Jonny Knüppel was born as an interim use: containers, reused material, and a manifesto that, in the absence of positive utopias, proposed cultivating an inertial system to test the social order. On that bank of the Landwehrkanal, between Club der Visionäre, Ipse, and Birgit & Bier, it didn't want to be just a techno club. There was electronica, jazz, jam sessions, readings, sound exhibitions, and assemblies. The door, say those who opened it, was not there to select: the more mixed the room, the better.

Fire, noise, and goodbye to Kreuzberg

Growth ran into a single residential building with acquired rights. After a wiring fire in 2017, the district cut off public access until noise and fire safety standards were met. A crowdfunding campaign raised about 70,000 euros for concrete, heating, and electrical grid, but the contract was not renewed: on May 1, 2018, the Kreuzberg site was closed. The collective, structured into diskoBabel, moved that same year to the old freight pier next to Greifswalder Straße, again as a temporary occupation until a housing project started.

Containers facing Thälmannpark

On Lilli-Henoch-Straße, they rebuilt the cosmos with ISO containers: the Salon, the Bunga, and an exterior with a garden, tent, and vegetation also used as an acoustic screen. The program remains collective and electronic—techno, house, lives, label parties, daytime raves—and coexists with workshops and politics. A 6.1 system with directed bass arrays and a door team sensitive to awareness mark the dancefloor as much as the ban on photos. In 2024, the Tag der Clubkultur recognized it as a space of the Berlin scene.

The season that fits in a truck

The site was always provisional. At the end of 2025, the club announced it was at its financial limit; a solidarity party and donations allowed it to open in 2026. The official September calendar already speaks of farewell: diskoBabel and its collectives plan to leave the venue in October 2026. The containers, they say, can be taken; a site and the money are missing. While the walls are still standing, the Knüppel remains what it wanted to be since the Lohmühlen workshop: a DIY club that does not let itself be governed by the extractive logic of brick.