As conviviality and creativity are part of our model to reimagine politics, we’re always on the lookout for great examples. And none better, this week, than the story of how dance culture, and illegal raves, helped to heal divides between East and West after the fall of the Berlin Wall, exactly 30 years ago.

This BBC blog does a brilliant reporting job, recovering some of the voices from that time:

Berlin today is a temple for dance music fans from all corners of the globe, ready to leave their prejudices at the nightclub door and collectively surrender to the beat.

There was a time not so long ago though when scenes of this nature were a physical and ideological impossibility.

While baggy ravers in the UK were coming together for an extended Second Summer of Love, people in the German capital remained divided by a 27-mile wall.

After it came down on 9 November 1989, as well as rubble and dust, there was a sudden explosion of underground parties in vacant buildings, train stations and power plants.

Unlike the discos of old, these ecstasy-fuelled nights took their lead from the new sounds of Detroit techno and Chicago acid house, while emulating the free-spirited experience of parties in Ibiza and at Manchester's Hacienda club.

Heiko Hoffmann, who was a teenager at the time, said the "massive shift" to rave culture instantly "changed my life".

Previously, West Berliners like him were only able to visit the east with a day pass. Generally speaking, people in the east could not cross the border.

"Just a couple of weeks after the fall of the wall I was dancing in industrial ruins next to people from the east, who just a couple of months earlier I wouldn't have been able to meet," says Hoffmann, the co-curator of the new No Photos on the Dance Floor! exhibition.

"All of this was happening to mostly very raw techno music," he adds, explaining that the name of the collection refers to the prevailing culture of protecting revellers from the judgement of the all-seeing camera.

"If someone would tell you today that next week North and South Korea would be reunited, and a radical new form of music that you didn't know existed before would be coming, and people would be dancing together in spaces that were new and unused for both of them, you would think that's completely utopian.

"That's what happened 30 years ago."

Martin Eberle Outside Tresor nightclub, which was built in the vaults of a former department store next to Potsdammer Platz - a literal no-man's land during the partition.

Wild nights in often temporary and industrial spaces near where the wall had stood - from Potsdamer Platz to Friedrichshain - fitted the primitive music and light/sound systems perfectly.

Hoffmann believes the conditions were ripe for this unique scene to grow, because there was "a social change happening, as well as a musical one."

"Germany was first reunited on the dancefloor of these parties. You didn't really have to make a distinction any longer between east and west.

"I think it's crucial that it was not people from East Berlin dancing to music that was already around, or going to spaces that were West Berlin spaces, but it was really that people from the west and east could discover something radically new together."

It took almost a year for Germany to be officially re-unified in October 1990, and even then there were still plenty of legal grey areas.

East Berliner Sebastian Szary, of electronic music duo Modeselektor, recalls how budding young DJs and party people like himself at the time took full advantage.

"Anything was possible because there was no rule, the government was still in a grey zone - in a no-man's land - and the law was not written," he says.

Sebastian Szary (right) and east Berlin schoolmate Gernot Bronsert, as Berlin electronic duo Modeselektor

"The re-unification was done but there were a lot of things which were unclear. Like the police knew there were illegal parties but [they said] 'We don't know what do - let them do the party!'"

People from the UK and across western Europe soon "found the playground to make dreams happen", forming collectives, while enjoying east Berlin's cheap rent and "positive energy".

Birgit Kaulfuss Sebastian Szary and east Berlin schoolmate Gernot Bronsert formed Berlin electronic duo Modeselektor

"I'm 100% sure that is was the result of a friendly revolution," he adds.

"There was a chance the revolution was going to go in another direction with riots and war - it was really close.

"For the next four years there were an uncountable amount of illegal parties, some in forests for hundreds and thousands, and also the Love Parade was growing."

More from the article here (and delighted to see Alternativet’s “friendly revolution” philosophy quoted, intentionally or not!). Also, the dance culture publication MixMag has also done a light oral history of DJ’s from that era - see this quote from Ellen Allien:

It almost felt like living in a cage. When the wall came down, I did not believe it. I cried like crazy, it was like a dream. It was a celebration of freedom, like somebody coming out of a prison – I explored East Berlin straight away. It was so different.

I started playing at Tresor in around ’96 — Tresor is my godfather, my mentor. Acid house actually came first from the UK and America. It was the new underground sound. Then that sound became more minimal, harder and faster, and techno started.

Mentioned above is the No Photos on the Dancefloor! exhibition in Berlin - nevertheless showing photos that were captured by photographers who were immersed in, and legitimate to, the scene. See the embedded promo video below for the exhibition.

The "friendly revolution" that united East and West on the rave dancefloors of Berlin, 30 years ago