KitKat ‘closure’ claims in Berlin media dismissed as fake news
Adding an unexpected layer of darkness on the eve of this year’s Black Friday, a story in German newspaper Berliner Zeitung claimed that Berlin’s KitKatClub was set to close in June 2020.
The building (above) on the corner of Köpenicker Strasse and Brückenstrasse which houses KitKatClub and its Sage Club neighbour is a Mecca for Berlin’s fetish crowd.
It is also famous on the international fetish scene for hosting annual events such as FetishGuerilla Revolution (during German Fetish Ball Weekend) and the Wasteland Berlin parties.
Headlined KitKat and Sage Club have to close, the November 28 article said Lukas Drevenstedt, of the city’s nightclub association, the Club Commission, had stated KitKat and its Sage host had been given notice to cease their occupancies in June 2020.
It suggested the context for the KitKat closure was the general state of pressure currently on Berlin clubs, as a result of concerns around neighbourhood noise, increasing rents and property companies’ desire to acquire traditional club sites for redevelopment.
The story gained considerable traction on social media, with fetish folk expressing anger and sadness over the apparent loss of yet another ‘historic’ fetish venue.
But some commentators were more circumspect, suggesting that the BZ report was no more than “rumours exaggerated by the press”. And it looks like those people will turn out to be correct.
A second article the following day, this time in Der Tagesspiegel, provided a substantially different take on the ‘facts’ offered by the first story.
It states confidently that KitKatClub “can still stay in its old rooms”. The building’s manager, it says, has confirmed that the building owner is “negotiating to conclude a lease” directly with the operators of KitKat, who currently rent their space from Sage Club.
After the rental agreement runs out in June 2020, this could mean Sage not only losing that rental revenue
but also ending up renting from KitKat for its Thursday night events, which Sage might not consider ideal.
Could the prospect of this potential role reversal go some way towards explaining how the original ‘KitKat closure’ story found its way into the media? You might well wonder!
We’ve since been able to check the story out with a source close to KitKat who reckons the Tagesspiegel account gets things basically right.
It now seems that, if all goes to plan, KitKat — which has recently refurbished its bars and opened a new floor in the building — will take over as the leaseholder and come to an accommodation with Sage.
“So my guess,” our informant concludes, “is that nothing will change.”
Either way, the current venue will definitely house next May’s FetishGuerilla Revolution party during the 2020 German Fetish Ball Weekend.
And it will also be open for business as usual over the last weekend of February, when Torture Garden Berlin makes its debut at the Metropol.
But even in the now seemingly unlikely event that the club doesn’t manage to hang on to its current venue, it doesn’t mean KitKat closure will follow. The club has occupied several premises in its life and it would basically just move somewhere else.
It’s true to say that, because of the shortage of available venues in the centre of Berlin, any relocation might well mean moving a bit further out.
But wherever it ends up, the chances of KitKatClub ceasing to exist are, we are reliably informed, zero.
kitkatclub.org
berliner-zeitung.de/kitkat
tagesspiegel.de/berlin/kitkat
Published December 6, 2019
Tags: Community, Parties, Performers, Venues