Time Warp

History

Time Warp traces back to 1993, when Steffen Charles started organizing club nights out of his own record shop in Mannheim, Germany, booking international guest DJs into local venues around the city. Michael Hock joined him the following year, and together they staged the first event to actually carry the Time Warp name on November 26, 1994, at the Ludwigsburg Waldebene near Stuttgart, with a lineup that included Laurent Garnier, Robert Armani and Speedy J. The idea from the start was a rave built with club-level intent: real sound design and visual production rather than a field and a rig, and a booking policy built around the underground end of techno rather than whatever was breaking through commercially at the time.

The event moved to Mannheim in 1995 and never really left. Early years were financially precarious, cross-subsidized by Charles's record shop and local club nights, and the festival weathered a rough patch in the early 2000s, including police raids in 2002 and 2003 and a ticket-sales drop from around 18,000 to 9,000 between 2001 and 2003, rough enough that its 10th anniversary edition in 2003 was billed as "the big finale" out of genuine uncertainty about the festival's future. It recovered, and by 2008 was selling out every year. Cosmopop, the company that has run Time Warp ever since, was formally established in 2003 by Charles and Robin Ebinger, who'd joined the team in the late '90s. Mannheim became the festival's permanent home base in 2000, with the event settling into the Maimarkthalle, part of the city's Maimarkt fairground and exhibition complex, where it still runs today across a rotating set of themed stage designs built fresh for each edition.

Time Warp's booking philosophy has stayed consistent enough to be a running theme in coverage of the festival: a returning cast of artists including Sven Väth, Carl Cox, Richie Hawtin and Laurent Garnier alongside newer names it has helped push toward headliner status, including Amelie Lens, who topped the bill at the 2026 Mannheim edition alongside Hawtin, Väth and Adam Beyer. That harder-edged, distinctly German end of the techno spectrum, the schranz sound that grew out of Frankfurt and Cologne clubs around the turn of the millennium, found one of its main stages at Time Warp, a lineage tracked in our look at hard techno's more recent American boom.

The Mannheim edition now runs as a single continuous 19-hour night spread across five stages inside Maimarkthalle, under the festival's own "One Day | Five Stages | 19 Hours" tagline, with tiered entry times built around when people want to arrive rather than a single gate time. Alongside the German flagship, the Time Warp name has been licensed out to international editions over the decades, most short-lived, but with São Paulo emerging as the festival's second-largest market after Germany since its 2018 launch, and newer editions running in Madrid and Miami.

FAQ

When is Time Warp in Mannheim?

The German flagship edition runs for one night each spring at Maimarkthalle in Mannheim. The 2027 edition is scheduled for April 3.

How long does the Mannheim edition actually run?

It's built as one continuous 19-hour night across five stages, under the festival's own "One Day | Five Stages | 19 Hours" format, rather than a multi-day event with overnight breaks.

Is Time Warp only held in Germany?

No. Mannheim is the original and flagship edition, but the Time Warp name has been licensed to international editions over the years. São Paulo, running since 2018, is the festival's second-largest market by attendance after Germany, and more recent editions have run in Madrid and Miami.

Who runs Time Warp?

Cosmopop, a Germany-based promoter founded in 2003 by original Time Warp co-founder Steffen Charles and Robin Ebinger, operates the festival.