What I Didn’t See

Claire Oelkers, an entertainer and TV presence I know mostly from magazines and music television, made a series about what German-ness actually means when you strip away the clichés. Not the official version - the one buried in places most people don’t explore.

Hamburg ended up being her subject, and one episode lands her in an SM club in the red-light district. She spends time with Kalle Schwensen, who runs the underground scene, and his circle. There’s something almost journalistic about the approach, except she’s not maintaining distance. She’s just there, watching how people move through their world, what rules bind them together.

The SM scene is its own complete structure - rituals, community, a kind of social order built in the margins. You see it from the outside and suddenly realize this is what the city actually looks like beneath the tourism, beneath the creative mythology it sells. The real character of a place isn’t in the neighborhoods everyone knows about. It’s in the clubs where no one’s performing, where people are exactly what they are.

I chose Berlin years ago over Hamburg and never really wondered what I’d missed. But watching Claire move through these spaces with genuine curiosity rather than any agenda, the choice itself starts to feel smaller. You realize it wasn’t about which city was more anything. It was about where you could find people who weren’t pretending to be interesting. And that’s everywhere - you just have to know where to look.