The question, though, is: for how much longer? But this evening's "CarneBall" fetish party, drawing crowds from all over Germany and beyond, is far more creative than any Sally Bowles musical number.
#OPEN GAY SEX CLUBS IN EUROPE SERIES#
A new bar, Moka Efti, is a nod to a vanished interwar nightclub featured in the television series Babylon Berlin, which returned on January 24th for a third series.Įven today's KitKat is named after the fictional night club in the musical Cabaret, set in pre-Hitler Berlin. There are Weimar concerts, exhibitions, parties and tours. Today, a cottage industry has grown up in Berlin to memorialise – and monetise – the fascination with the so-called Weimar era. As the pressure began to build, extremes of wealth and poverty in the interwar capital made living for the moment – even the hour – the order of the day in a city that was dynamic, desperate and drugged-up to the gills. Within hours, newly-printed money had lost all its value, offering an opening for political extremists. The new decade in 1920 ushered in a new era where war debt and economic crises triggered the horrors of hyperinflation. 'Locals know to have a disco nap, show up later and observe the strict dress code: fetish, latex & leather, uniform, kinky, glitter and glamour, elegant evening wear, sackcloth, ashes' It served as a touchstone 100 years ago in the "Golden 20s" in Berlin, as world war defeat collapsed the old order and discredited its political and moral authority. In the centuries since, and particularly in the KitKat club, Berliners have made it a point of honour to live up to the king’s “each to their own” mantra. It’s 5am in Berlin’s KitKat club, and the half-naked crowd is dancing furiously to a deep bass track as a woman performs energetic oral sex on a very happy man reclining to my right.Īs I sip a warm gin and tonic, I’m reminded of Prussian King Frederick II and his progressive promise, 280 years ago, that “everyone should be happy in their own way”.