German Fetish Ball 2023 Weekend is promising a return to full-scale, pre-Covid glory days when it opens in Berlin this week.

The festival, running from Wednesday to Sunday, May 17-21, sees the German Fetish Ball itself back in its traditional Spindler & Klatt venue on the banks of the River Spree, folowing last year’s temporary relocation to Club Ost.

This year’s five-day programme also sees the revival of the previously popular fetish river cruise, set for Thursday afternoon and now called the GFB Spree Cruise. However, Friday’s Sweet Surrender GFB play party has finally been dropped from the schedule.

Ditching the play party can no doubt be attributed in part to the Berlin gathering becoming increasingly popular with the international latex/fetish fashion crowd and less attractive to BDSM devotees, who have been better served by other, newer German events in recent times.

But there are those who would say that pitching Sweet Surrender each year up against Friday night’s FetishGuerilla Revolution at KitKat — regarded by many as the killer party of the whole Berlin programme — was a contest that could only ever have one winner anyway.

There are, of course, some politics. There will always be some politics in a country where fetish scene rivalry appears to be a national sport.

This year, Savage Wear Fetish Night — which was once (but is no longer) the official launch party of GFB Weekend — has moved from its Wednesday night slot (where it had clashed with official GFB Kinky Cocktails launch parties) to Thursday, while continuing at its usual Baderhaus venue.

So this year, Savage Wear clashes instead with the official GFB SonicBoom party taking place at Matrix. And if you think this doesn’t look like the friendliest gesture, you might be right: there’s no love lost nowadays between the GFB and Savage Wear hosts, who were once collaborators.

Given this talk of rivalry though, it will no doubt have been a relief to international globe-trotting pervs that GFB weekend does not directly clash with Florida Fetish Weekend (May 25-28) this year.

Previous clashes of these two big events have never happened out of spite — the two organisers in this case are good friends. But each has hitched his kinky wagon to different national public holidays whose dates move around every year and sometimes move into perfect alignment with each other.

By now, everyone planning to visit Berlin for the whole GFB Weekend programme (or any part of it) will have already organised their travel and accommodation. So they’ll already have had some advance indication that Berlin is continuing to get more costly every year.

In fact, a survey just published by the travel money department of the British Post Office has revealed that the German