At the beginning of 1989, in the empty hall of a car workshop in Schöneberg, Britt Kanja co-initiated a club. The street outside, Dennewitzstraße, turns a right angle into Kurfürstenstraße at that exact spot, so Bob Young and Britt called the place 90 degrees (90°).
8 months later the Berlin Wall came down, and the half-city that had lived for twenty-eight years as an island in the East was suddenly whole. For the next sixteen years the room was where Berlin went to find out who else was in Berlin: artists and bankers, royalty and outsiders, and, when they were in town, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Hugh Grant and George Clooney.
Once a month Kanja dressed the whole club to a new theme, put white lilies and fresh fruit on the tables. She enchanted the guests inside the club and brought them into contact with one another.
The city gave her a title for it, and it stuck: the Grande Dame of Berlin nightlife.
Today Kanja is one of the most photographed people in the city: a style icon with 100,000 followers, a wardrobe of vintage she takes apart and redesigns, and a collection of hats she has stopped counting.
With Locals Insider, Britt Kanja shares how the parties started, what made them work, how Berlin has changed in forty years, and the places she still goes: the bars, the galleries, the vintage shops, the hidden lake. Everything, in other words, that makes Berlin sexy.
