The Hamburg That Got Away

When I moved to Berlin, I told myself there were only three cities worth considering: Munich if you wanted money and clean streets, Hamburg if you wanted rain and port-city edge, Berlin if you wanted everything slightly broken and twice as interesting. I chose the middle option, and I’ve never seriously regretted it. But sometimes a specific person makes Hamburg sound a lot more tempting than it has any right to be.

Claire Oelkers is one of those people. She’s a German presenter and media personality—you’d know her from music television, or maybe from an album cover by the band Karpatenhund, or possibly from the copy of Playboy that’s been sitting next to someone’s toilet for years. For a web series she made called GERMAN-NESS, about dismantling the usual clichés of what being German is supposed to mean, she headed north to Hamburg and talked her way into rooms that most people only hear rumors about.

One of those rooms belongs to Kalle Schwensen, a figure from Hamburg’s red-light world who runs what the show politely calls an alternative SM club. Claire goes in, hangs out with him and his friends, and lets them show her—and by extension us—how it actually works. Not in a scandalized way. More in the way of: here’s a thing that exists, here are the people inside it, they’re not what you expected. That’s the whole spirit of the series. Other episodes bring in DJs, rappers, local characters. The premise is simple and the execution warmer than you’d think.

I watched it and thought: Hamburg, let’s talk.