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In Berlin clubs it’s common to see people having sex on the dance floors.

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    In Berlin clubs it’s common to see people having sex on the dance floors.

    Ah Berlin, that romantic city of the north. Almost forgot how crazy it was until reading this. Yet strangely it quickly becomes the norm and accepted.

    http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/...icle851969.ece

    D riving along the rain-slicked winter streets of Berlin in a Mercedes taxi with Conny Opper, one of the city’s best-known club owners. It’s Friday, around midnight. Opper has just opened The Flamingo, where DJs in admirals’ uniforms spin for Berlin’s art and fashion crowd. But we’re on our way to the ironically named King Size Bar, one of his other venues. This tiny joint is so jammed that if anyone tries to move, a ripple runs through every other sweaty body in the room. Insistent music tenderises your muscles, thick smoke eats its way into your lungs, and vodka pulses through your veins.

    Neon flashes red, green and blue across Opper’s pallid face as the taxi cruises along Oranienburger Strasse. He’s oblivious to the East European prostitutes braving the freezing night in white fur coats, fake tans and little else. Open-street prostitution in the city’s commercial centre seems unremarkable to a long-time Berliner. Opper, 38, large and genial, has the weariness of a man who has seen the dawn once too often after another long night in one of his clubs. He’s wearing an ill-fitting white shirt and bow tie. There’s glitter smeared on his cheek.

    In the past few years, Berlin has gained a well-deserved reputation as the club capital of Europe. As many as 20,000 people a weekend, many from Britain and other European countries, hit an apparently inexhaustible myriad of clubs. The money from these clubbers, many of whom fly in on cheap Easyjet flights, has become a cornerstone of the fragile economy of Germany’s capital, which has no main industry. To entice them, Berlin clubs cater to every musical taste and to every sexual preference.

    What I hadn’t realised before I spent a long weekend with a photographer exploring the city’s nightlife was the extent to which the Berlin scene is driven by such blatant sexual licentiousness and ubiquitous drug-taking that it would make the denizens of the notoriously decadent Weimar clubs of 1920s Berlin blush in their velvet coffins. Not only do today’s Berlin clubs encourage extravagant sexual and narcotic excess, it is actively condoned by Berlin’s liberal, left-wing administration, desperate to attract tourists to the near-bankrupt city, and by Klaus Wowereit, the city’s openly gay mayor, who is often seen in the venues he oversees.

    In Berlin clubs it’s common to see people having sex on the dancefloors. In the venues’ “dark rooms”, specifically set up for anonymous sex with strangers, there are mass orgies involving hundreds of people. The blatant sex is fuelled by brazen drug-taking. In every Berlin nightspot you see people openly snorting speed or cocaine. Toilet tops and almost any other flat surface have telltale remnants of white powder. “As far as I know, there has never been a drug raid in any Berlin club,” says Tobias Rapp, who writes about pop culture for Der Spiegel, the German news magazine. “Which is kind of astonishing because it is a very drug-infested scene.”



    Given the looming economic storm clouds, this orgiastic frenzy in the capital of Europe’s most prosperous and powerful, yet most historically troubled country gives Berlin a disturbingly fin de siècle mood. It’s eerily reminiscent of the decadence of Weimar Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s before the Nazis came to power.

    To those with a metaphorical inclination, the furiously debauched excesses of today’s Berlin might seem to portend the imminent end of the Euro empire more accurately than any plummeting currency index. “Come with me,” whispers Simon Thaur, Berlin’s circus-meister of darkness, in a thick Teutonic accent, as he leads us in to his KitKat Club.

    Bald, haunted, topless, his eyelids lined with kohl, his hands clutching for the nearest naked body, Thaur seems as satanic as the club he owns.

    You’re only allowed into the KitKat if you’re wearing fetish clothing or nothing at all. The KitKat, the walls lined with huge pornographic paintings, caters to as many as 1,500 people each weekend. Kate Moss has said it’s her favourite club in Berlin, a city she rightly calls “dark and erotic”.

    It’s 2am and there are maybe 300 people here, strolling from red-lit room to room as the lights flash and the trance music pumps, in leather trousers, vinyl jock-straps or cut-out bras, casting lascivious glances over each other. As we venture towards the dancefloors, we’re confronted by an astonishing mélange of sexual fetishism, from hardcore, muscled-up gay men to beautiful women with their breasts pierced and their bottoms exposed. The delicate young woman behind the bar is wearing a long black leather dress which splits just above her waist; she wears nothing underneath.

    Just a few feet behind us, in plain view, a long-haired man is pleasuring a blonde woman who is bare but for a tight leather top and knee-length vinyl boots. On a wide couch by the dance floor a model-beautiful blonde woman in her early twenties is being taken from behind by an athletic young guy as she orally gratifies another man while stimulating a third with her hand. A dozen other people are gathered closely in, watching, touching. Tall transvestites strut in super-high boots and bouffant wigs. A short, fat man minces by in an orange baby-doll nightie. A massively pregnant woman in her thirties in a tight leather bustier is dancing with three leather-clad men. A pudgy, bald man in his mid-sixties, sitting in a plastic garden chair on his own, completely naked, nonchalantly masturbates as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to be doing in front of hundreds of people.

    On the dance floor, near the cage at the front in which a half-clothed oriental woman is having her bottom whipped, a 60-year-old man with straggly grey hair and glasses bops around dressed only in a cut-off, see-through black top. Another man sits at the feet of a bored black woman, licking the soles of her boots. And a man in a wheelchair with the short arms of a thalidomide sufferer paints the bare breasts of a pretty young woman with his hands. She shrieks wildly.

    In the “dark room” upstairs things become, if this is possible, even more sexually dissipated. As my eyes accustom to the darkness I make out a seething mass of perhaps 50 bodies — men, women and everything in between — having sex in unthinkable combinations. The smell is rank. The sex, in its intensity and frenzy, seems to describe a circle of hell that even Dante would have found it hard to encompass.

    The KitKat may be the most flamboyant club in Berlin where people openly have sex, but it is certainly not the only one. Clubs like Insomnia, offering nights like Kinky Gang Bang and Pervy XXX-mas, seem to straddle the divide between brothels, sex clubs and discos. “More and more swingers seeking adventure travel from all over the world to Berlin,” say the owners of Insomnia, “to communicate in the international language of lust and to widen their sexual horizons.” The club offers “erotic games in an atmosphere of Babylonian diversity”.
    "Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience". Mark Twain

    #2
    Well me and the current mrs stek lived in Berlin for a year and we saw nowt like that, and we lived in the centre, nr the Zoo. Berlin is a bit crap for UK style drinking...

    Some excellent cocktail bars tho - one dead long one forget the name, and this place, on Kantstrasse, love it, love it, love it...

    pantalla

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by scooterscot View Post
      Ah Berlin, that romantic city of the north. Almost forgot how crazy it was until reading this. Yet strangely it quickly becomes the norm and accepted.
      A short, fat man minces by in an orange baby-doll nightie. .... A pudgy, bald man in his mid-sixties, sitting in a plastic garden chair on his own, completely naked, nonchalantly masturbates as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to be doing in front of hundreds of people.
      Amazing that they saw MF and Sasguru in the same club!
      "A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It’s the s*** that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come." -- Lester Freamon

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by stek View Post
        Berlin is a bit crap for UK style drinking...
        That can only be a good thing

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by TiroFijo View Post
          That can only be a good thing
          +1

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            #6
            After all, life is a cabaret!

            Comment


              #7
              A non-story. Written by a Sunday Times journalist to titillate prudish English minds. These are clubs which only cater for this type of thing and most clubs in Berlin are not like that at all (I bet they don't write about suburban English car key parties...) This type of thing has been going on for many years in most major cities in Europe, in Paris there are the famous 'orgy' clubs, in London you have the fetish parties. God, what a sanctimonious twat that reporter is (probably has a sexual hang-up.)
              Brexit is having a wee in the middle of the room at a house party because nobody is talking to you, and then complaining about the smell.

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by Freamon View Post

                Amazing that they saw MF and Sasguru in the same club!
                Damn - Beat me to it
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