Sex club becomes Covid-19 test centre as lockdown freezes German culture

The blood red letters on the Kitkat Club's long metal gate are impossible to miss, yet easy to misunderstand: KLUBSTERBEN – club death. Exactly a year ago I visited Berlin's most notorious fetish and sex club because it faced an existential threat from plans to convert its ramshackle complex into luxury flats.

A year later, the “club death” threat remains, this time from an invisible virus. There’s still a queue outside to get in – Wednesday to Sunday – but it’s daytime, 9am to 4pm, rather than at night.

The door policy is noticeably looser, too: anyone with €24.90 can enter for a Covid-19 antigen rapid test. The dusty, windowless dance halls are filled with makeshift desks, cubicles and the ghost of Berlin’s pre-pandemic nightlife.

Was it just a year ago I slipped inside this muggy space filled with latex and leather lovers? In the corner, I can still see, on an illuminated circular platform, a lithe Josephine Baker lookalike dancing in a tight catsuit and Louboutin platform pumps.

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Even in February 2020, Kitkat was a hedonist’s paradise. In February 2021, it is a more sober affair. Some are at the test centre because they want to travel, others want to visit elderly relatives; all seem simultaneously amused, amazed and depressed to see the inside of the legendary club in such unusual circumstances.

“Personally I think a real lockdown would be more efficient than all this testing,” said Elmar Fleischer, a local standing outside the club in the grey February cold, “but that would only work if everyone played along”.

Technically Germany has been in lockdown since mid-December – with only essential shops open – but the brisk midday trade at the kebab kiosk beside Kitkat gives an indication of how locals interpret lockdown.

Low-hanging cloud

Even at the best of times, post-Christmas Berlin is a grim place, with a landlocked Mitteleuropa climate guaranteeing a ceiling of low-hanging cloud that can obscure the sun for weeks at a time.

Those who can afford it flee to the sun; many who stay take refuge in the Berlinale. But now even the Berlin film festival has been pushed back to June and the capital, which thrives on culture and international visitors, seems even bleaker than usual.

Live music is now a monopoly of churches and theatres; opera houses and cinemas remain shuttered.

The Club Commission, a lobby group for the capital’s nightlife operators, says many venues are slowly sinking into a vicious circle of debt and liquidity problems.

“There’s more of perspective this year with a vaccine and rapid tests,” said Lutz Leichsenring, commission spokesman. “Our goal is to find a way to make nightlife safe, a nightlife that, at the moment, doesn’t exist.”

As the second lockdown tightens its chokehold, Germany’s federal culture minister Monika Grütters has promised €1.5 billion in emergency funding on top of the original €1 billion that already attracted 34,000 applications from cultural providers.

“There is a clear need for even more funding,” said Grütters, warning of “immense damage for our cultural riches”.

‘Cultural need’

With museum and orchestra lobby groups demanding a concrete timetable, Grütters has promised that, “cultural venues were among the first that were closed and must be among the first to reopen”.

Despite the lockdown, likely to remain in place for most venues until Easter at the earliest, the Irish Embassy in Berlin has kept its cultural flag flying.

“Corona’s been challenging and pushed us to our limits, but we’re able to do things not possible in normal times,” said Candice Gordon, the Embassy’s new cultural officer. “There’s a cultural need people have that we’ve been able to fulfil by thinking outside the box.”

Last month she organised An Irish Night In, offering Irish music, word games and cook-along videos online for more than 2,000 registered participants.

This week the Embassy’s Brigid Meets Berlin festival of Irish female literary creativity used its online presence to broaden its focus to Germany’s second city, Hamburg.

Germany estimates its creative economy is worth an estimated €100 billion annually but, facing an open-ended lockdown, the cultural cost of Covid-19 is making itself felt in every corner.

The latest casualty is Schott, the 250-year-old publisher of 8,000 musical works of composers from Beethoven to the contemporary composer Jörg Widmann, chief conductor of the Limerick-based Irish Chamber Orchestra.

Schott manager Christiane Albiez told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel daily that, with no venues performing works from its catalogue, it and other historic music publishers are fighting for survival. Whether your taste is Kitkat house music or a classical concert, pandemic Berlin is an unusually quiet place. Europe’s premier party city is gripped by a historic case of cultural cold turkey.