The Lights Come On
The AfD—Germany’s far-right nationalist party—decided they need to shut down the Berghain’s darkroom because people are having sex in it. Which is, you know, exactly what the darkroom is for. Not corrupt housing policy, not a broken healthcare system, not anything that actually matters. Just sex in a dark room that needs their immediate legislative attention.
An AfD city council member named Sibylle Schmidt submitted an actual official proposal with actual demands, delivered in absolute deadpan sincerity. Revoke the club’s license entirely, or at minimum install lights in the darkroom to prevent sexual activity. Cap operating hours at 10 PM to 6 AM—as if that means anything to a place that’s been running around the clock forever. Ban drugs. Make sure staff are carefully managing customer wellbeing. The whole thing reads like someone’s fever dream of authoritarian nightclub management, complete with rhetoric about drug abuse and young women in hospital beds. She actually connected the dots from people fuck in the dark
to public health crisis.
For anyone not tracking German nightlife: Berghain is this legendary industrial techno club in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. The whole mythology is built on anonymity, freedom, darkness. You go in and you’re untethered—sexually, chemically, however. The door policy is famously brutal and opaque. They don’t want your Instagram. They don’t want you performing. That’s the entire thing. You can’t replicate that in a space that’s been neutered with bright lights and restricted hours and staff monitoring your state of mind.
What gets me is the actual sincerity underneath the absurdity. Schmidt isn’t joking around. She wrote this all down, submitted it through official channels, genuinely believes this is how you solve problems. The moral panic is so clean, so transparent. Somewhere, adults are having sex without permission, and the state must intervene. Full stop.
Nothing’s going to happen. The Berghain isn’t going anywhere. But that’s not the point for the AfD. The point is the gesture itself—we’re the party of order, of traditional values, the ones who’ll protect you from darkrooms full of horny anarchists. Even when defending those values means arguing that consenting adults should be denied a space to be free. Even when it requires state-mandated brightness and bathroom monitoring in the name of public safety.
There’s this thing that exhausts me about it, which is just having to keep asserting that people get to fuck in the dark, with whoever they want, however they want. That this is still worth fighting for. That it’s still remarkable to have a space where that freedom exists without apology or justification.