Club Bahnhof Ehrenfeld | CBE

In the location's words:

Club Bahnhof Ehrenfeld is a venue for urban subcultures in the beautiful district of Ehrenfeld. With a cozy beer garden and several hundred events of all genres per year, we set programmatic and cultural-political accents through content and quality.

The CBE opened on May 22, 2010 and is a nightclub and cultural center in Ehrenfeld, one of Cologne's most creative and multicultural neighborhoods. The extraordinary venue is located directly under Ehrenfeld's S-Bahn station and has now taken up residence in three of the station's arches. With its wide-ranging program of parties, concerts, poetry slams, cultural entertainment shows and numerous other cultural events, such as winter, summer or record flea markets, the club has quickly been able to make a name for itself in the cathedral city. After a very short time, the CBE has become firmly established as a cultural venue in Cologne's music landscape - thanks to national and international bookings, the club reaches people from all over North Rhine-Westphalia, who can experience energetic live concerts here directly under the tracks.

The club's booking is particularly characterized by its flair for talented and creative artists who work at a highly professional level. In recent years, we have hosted Marteria, Seeed, Tony Allen, Ghostface Killah, DJ Premiere, José James, Robert Glasper, Grand Master Flash, Hiatus Kaiyote, Taylor McFerrin, Talib Kweli, Kamasi Washington, Ed Motta, LGoony, Odesza or even Wanda, among others. The urban and appealing flair of the railroad arches also makes the club perfect for more personal club shows.

The expansion of the third arch led to the opening of the club YUCA ("Your Urban Club of Arts") in 2015, which was partly financed by the people of Cologne, with the help of crowdfunding. Smaller concerts and support for newcomers, as well as hosting larger parties or multiple events at the same time, is made possible with our third arc.

As the individual artists already suggest, the program is composed of a wide variety of musical genres. The focus is on alternative black music, i.e. jazz, soul, funk, hip hop, house, salsa, Latin jazz, reggae and blues. However, it is precisely through the rentals incorporated into the program that the club can offer its guests music from a wide variety of genres. Overall, the program is composed of high-quality and innovative bookings, as well as cultural projects conceived and implemented by the CBE itself, which also create space for unknown up-and-coming artists.

In this sense, the CBE joins a currently quite diverse Cologne club landscape, whose reputation and diversity place Cologne in an international setting with cities such as Barcelona, Los Angeles or Rio de Janeiro. This gives Cologne an international profile that is reflected not least in the self-portrayal of city representatives when the city is to be staged as a "metropolis on the Rhine". The city's attraction, especially for young people, as a tourist destination and not least as a place to study can hardly be denied by the presence of the country's largest university. In this context, a rich club culture functions as a facet of a vibrant and creative city. This model of the creative city and the development and strengthening of the settlement of a "creative class" seems to be indispensable for Cologne as a media city and part of the policy of our city fathers. Club culture as a living and creative space for diverse subcultures plays a central role here as a field of experimentation and as a barometer of new trends.

We would like to see a neighborhood in which the cultural diversity that has grown up and is lived out does not have to fight for the places it has conquered over and over again, and in which the revitalization of inner-city brownfields is not to be equated with gentrification from the drawing board. For us, cultural diversity also means co-determination and self-responsible shaping of one's own living space for all inhabitants and residents of a neighborhood.