From Berlin to a session: why the journey leads to Munich
I live and work in Munich. If you type ‘dominatrix Berlin’ into a search engine and find your way to me, what you are really looking for is a journey: in person I receive guests only at Studio 60, a BDSM studio in the north-west of Munich. I do not come to Berlin – not to a flat, not to a hotel.
This is how a search becomes an appointment:
- Go to choose a date and pick the kind of session, the day and the time. One click opens WhatsApp or Telegram with a message already written for you, price and reference included.
- I reply personally. The appointment is binding only once I have confirmed it, and a €50 deposit secures it.
- You reserve and pay for the room directly with Studio 60 and send me a screenshot of the booking. This room hire is not part of my fee.
If you cannot make the journey, or would rather not, you can meet me in a remote session by video: 45 minutes, worldwide, from €180. I speak and write German and English, and I am equally strict in both. What rope bondage with me involves is set out in Bondage in Munich; you will find the fees in detail under Prices. If you live south-west of the city limits, you may prefer the story in Dominatrix Potsdam.
Berlin nights: clubs, neighbourhoods and fetish
Berlin wears its nights in the open. Berghain, in a former power station in Friedrichshain near the Ostbahnhof, opens its club night at 11.59 pm on Saturday and often does not let it end until Monday morning. The KitKatClub in Mitte, not far from Jannowitzbrücke, was founded in 1994, owes its name to the club in the musical ‘Cabaret’ and to this day describes itself as hedonistic and kinky. On Saturdays it hosts its ‘CarneBall Bizarre’, and the door decides whether latex, leather or a well-considered fetish outfit suits the night.
‘Cabaret’ itself leads to Schöneberg. Around 1930 Christopher Isherwood lived on Nollendorfstraße, and his Berlin stories became the musical’s source. The streets around Nollendorfplatz and Motzstraße now form the Regenbogenkiez, the rainbow quarter, with its bars and the Lesbian and Gay City Festival in July. A few streets away, around Fuggerstraße, Folsom Europe takes place every September: a street fair for leather and fetish that began in 2004 on Fuggerstraße and Welserstraße with around 3,500 guests, and for which the organisers now expect more than 20,000 people.
Berlin has many dominatrix studios, spread across the whole city – small rooms in which a mistress works alone, as well as larger houses with dungeon and clinic rooms. Much of what stays behind closed doors elsewhere also has a stage in Berlin: at parties, in clubs, on the street. My work is the opposite. One room, one door, one guest. That is precisely why some people make the journey south.
An evening in the winter garden
It was February, the last winter before the Literaturhaus closed for its long renovation. I was in Berlin off duty, for a reading in the main hall, and when the last questions had been asked I went across to the winter garden. The villa on Fasanenstraße stands back behind its front garden, less than a hundred metres from the Kurfürstendamm, and yet hardly any of the boulevard’s noise finds its way in. A Magdeburg industrialist had it built in 1889 as a wedding present for his daughter and her husband, a lieutenant commander who had taken part in both the first and the second German North Polar Expeditions. I liked the thought that a sailor had once lived here, a man from a trade in which you learn knots before you give orders.
In December 1929 Thomas Mann read here from ‘Felix Krull’, then still unfinished, the novel of a man who has mastered every pose. That evening the winter garden held the haze of coffee and wet coats, newspapers lay ready, and outside the bare garden was waiting for summer and its tables.
At the next table a man sat alone over a cup, drawing on a napkin: two crossed sticks from which fine lines ran down to a small figure without a face.
‘A marionette cross,’ I said.
He looked up, not surprised – caught out, rather. He built marionettes, he told me, and at Berlin theatres he rigged the flying sets from which backcloths and loads hang above the performers’ heads: hand-operated counterweight sets, their iron weights, hemp lines worked by feel. ‘I hold strings all evening,’ he said, ‘and then I trip over the threshold into the canteen.’ Later he would sign his messages E.
The evening had been devoted to Kleist’s dialogue ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, which appeared in December 1810 in the Berliner Abendblätter, Kleist’s own newspaper. E. quoted it from memory: ‘Every movement […] has a centre of gravity; it is enough to govern this from within the figure.’ Then he laughed quietly. ‘With puppets it works. With me, the soul sits in the elbow.’ That, too, is in Kleist: Herr C. describes a young dancer who, as Paris, hands Venus the apple, and whose soul as he does so sits in his elbow; it is, he says, a frightful thing to see. I liked that E. aimed the mockery at himself before anyone else could. It was self-protection, neatly built, like a counterweight.
‘And who guides your centre of gravity?’ I asked.
He did not answer at once. Then he spoke of rehearsals at which twenty people stood beneath loads he had secured. Responsibility, he said, had long ceased to be a weight for him; it had become a posture, one he never relaxed, even in his sleep.
I told him what I do. Not bashfully, and not as an offer, but the way one names a profession: that I work in Munich, at Studio 60, and tie up people who have forgotten what it is like not to be the one holding on. He turned the napkin over, as if the drawing might be listening. ‘Would you hoist me up? On ropes, like a marionette?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Kleist’s puppets need the ground only to brush against it. You need it to rest on. I would give you back to the ground.’
Outside on the pavement of Fasanenstraße, under a street lamp, I gave him the address of my website. ‘Write if you mean it,’ I said. ‘And don’t write to please me.’
Letters about a centre of gravity
His first message came eleven days later, and it was too long. He had built it like a flying set: loads, forces, safety lines. He wrote that he had never let anyone else take the lead, not on stage and not in life. He wrote of a shoulder that had troubled him with certain movements ever since a fall from the fly gallery, and of blood pressure he kept in check with a tablet every morning. He wanted to be tied ‘properly’, he wrote, and I knew that with him ‘properly’ meant: in a way he could still control.
I replied in seven lines. That I took his shoulder seriously and would therefore tie his arms in front of his body, not behind his back. That no rope would come near his neck. That I would check his fingers and hands as often as I saw fit, would never leave him long in the same position because of his blood pressure, and that he was to tell me at once about any tingling or numbness instead of bravely bearing it. That a pair of shears would lie beside us, quicker than any knot. That he would come sober. No intercourse, no oral sex – that was settled before he could ask. And that a safeword is no weakness but the point at which my trust in him begins.
He chose ‘Schnürboden’, the German word for the grid high above a stage from which everything is flown. He used the word twenty times a day, he wrote, but it had never once meant that something stops. In case words should desert him while he was tied, we agreed on a second sign: he would hold a small marionette cross of limewood in his hand, one of his own. If it falls, I stop. No questions, no negotiation.
He asked whether an hour would be enough. I wrote that an hour was more than he thought. He chose a Tuesday at four, reserved the room at Studio 60 himself and sent me the screenshot, exact to the minute; after my confirmation the deposit arrived that same evening. His last message before the journey consisted of a single sentence: ‘I’m afraid I’ll play along.’
I wrote back: ‘You will. At first.’
Six millimetres of jute
He came on a morning train from Berlin Hauptbahnhof and was in Moosach half an hour early. I let him wait. Arriving early is a way of managing things; I wanted this to be half an hour he could not manage.
In the room the ropes lay on a cloth, seven hanks of jute, six millimetres thick, singed and oiled, the shears beside them. I had him take off his shoes, remove his watch, switch off his phone. He kept his shirt and trousers on; for what I had in mind I needed not his skin but his attention. I placed the marionette cross in his right hand myself.
‘Your word?’
‘Schnürboden.’
‘And if it fails you?’ He opened his fingers, the wood tipped, and he caught it before it touched the floor. Of course he caught it. ‘Then you let it fall,’ I said. ‘And you don’t catch it.’
He played along, as he had said he would. When I laid the first rope around his wrists, he was already lifting his arms into the position he took to be the right one. He helped me. He helped the way he helps his colleagues up on the grid, alert, anticipating, tireless – and every time he helped, his soul sat somewhere other than at his centre.
I stopped. I undid everything I had tied, unhurried, wrap by wrap, and laid the ropes back on the cloth. He stood there and did not understand. ‘You built that,’ I said. ‘I only watched.’ Then I began again.
This time I did not speak. I guided his arms to where I wanted them, in front of his body, one forearm laid on the other, and each time I waited until the small resistance in his muscles gave way before I went on tying. It took time. The jute rustled as it ran through its own loop, dry as straw. I tied the harness above and below his chest, left his shoulders free of strain and his neck untouched, and drew the rope only tight enough to hold, never so tight that it cut.
‘Thumbs,’ I said. He spread them. ‘Fist.’ He closed his hand around the marionette cross. His fingers were warm, the colour good. I had him kneel on a cushion and tied his thighs to his calves, first the left, then the right, so that he could no longer stand up unless I allowed it.
Then I did nothing more. I sat down facing him and looked at him. He knelt, held by seven ropes, the wood in his hand, and I watched him go on working: shifting his weight, straightening his back, searching for a posture that looked good. Minutes passed. At some point – I can name the moment exactly, because his breathing changed – he stopped. He did not collapse. He settled into his ropes the way you settle into an armchair you finally trust to take your weight.
I stood up, laid one hand flat between his shoulder blades and the other on his good shoulder, and let him sink a little to the side, into my hand, and back again. He yielded without resistance, without intention. A man who had stopped deciding how he looked. I asked whether his hands and legs were still all right. ‘Yes,’ he said, and the word came from further down than usual. The marionette cross lay still in his fist. It did not fall.
Puppet or god
At the end of the dialogue Kleist’s Herr C. asserts something outrageous: grace appears most purely in a body that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one – in the puppet or in the god. In between stand the rest of us, with our affectation. And affectation, so the text says, appears ‘when the soul […] is located at any point other than the centre of gravity of the movement’.
At Studio 60 I saw what he meant, only from the other side. E. did not become a puppet. He had not lost his consciousness; he had handed it over, to the ropes and to me. Nor did I become a goddess. But in that hour I brought more attention to his body than he himself could ever have summoned: to the warmth of his fingers, the pressure on the inside of his upper arms, the weight on his knees, the breath that grew slower.
From this follows something about power that is easily missed in a city where so much of it is staged in public: whoever holds the strings is not free. Kleist’s operator finds the line of a movement only by placing himself in the puppet’s centre of gravity – by dancing along, in other words. I could not leave E. alone for a second, could not forget a single knot, could not have a minute to myself. My dominion over him was complete, and it bound me to him like the other end of a rope.
And freedom? It lay not in the moments when he had resisted, but in the one in which he stopped. A man who for years had secured every load above other people’s heads was allowed to become a load himself, secured by someone else. ‘But paradise is bolted, and the cherub behind us,’ Kleist writes; ‘we must make the journey round the world and see whether it is perhaps open again somewhere at the back.’ E. had not made a journey round the world, only a good six hundred kilometres by rail to the south. But he had come in by a back door, and for one hour it stood open.
A marionette cross without strings
I untied him slowly, in reverse order, and kept my hand on his back as the last wrap fell away. He sat on the floor for a long time, a blanket round his shoulders, a glass of water between his hands, the jute’s imprint a fine pattern of diamonds on his forearms. The hour was over, and he did not ask the time. A man who flies loads above a stage every evening, cued to the second, did not want to know how long he had knelt.
In the evening he travelled back. On the way, somewhere beyond Erfurt, he wrote to me that at seven the next morning he would be standing up on the grid, responsible for everything that hangs above the heads of others. And that for the first time in years he did not think of it with reluctance, because he now knew there is a place where one may set that load down, as long as someone else is holding it.
He came to Munich a few more times. This autumn, a good two and a half years after that February, he sent me a card from Berlin. The Literaturhaus was returning to its villa after more than two years of building work, he wrote; he had walked along Fasanenstraße and looked from the pavement across the front garden to the house where we had met. As he walked on, he wrote, he had not tripped over a single kerb. He only noticed it at the corner of the Kurfürstendamm, between the noise ahead of him and the quiet at his back: that he had walked without thinking about how.
On the back he had drawn a marionette cross. No strings, no figure. Only two crossed sticks that no longer have anything to carry.
Two voices from the guestbook
The two entries below appear word for word in my guestbook; here they are translated from the German. They do not come from the characters in the story, and E. did not write them; I place them beside the story because they say something about time and responsibility that needs no invention.
‘The first session was an hour. I thought it would be short. It was longer than any day I had lived before. Mistress, I thank you.’ — Slave B., guestbook entry (translated from German)
‘For forty hours a week I carry responsibility for sixty employees. When I walk out of Alexa’s room, that responsibility is mine again. But between the leaving and the coming back lies something I did not know I needed. She showed me that my system is capable of a pause – when the right person leads it.’ — Marcus S., entrepreneur, 52, guestbook entry (translated from German)
You will find more entries, in the original German, in the guestbook.
Rope and restraint in a real session
The story condenses a good deal. On safety it condenses nothing. Restraint with rope or straps, restrictive bondage included, is covered by my hourly fee; a mummification needs at least 90 minutes. Which position, how long and how tight is my decision – within the limits we set beforehand.
- Preliminary conversation: You tell me in advance about problems with joints or back, cardiovascular complaints, medication and anything that changes how your body responds under pressure. Ideally, enter it in your profile in the Safe Room.
- Safeword and signal: We agree on a word and, for the most intense moments, a sign without words. Either one ends whatever is happening at once.
- While you are tied: I check fingers, colour and sensation, ask about tingling or numbness and would rather release you too early than too late. Your neck stays free, the shears lie within reach, and for as long as you are bound I do not leave the room.
- Marks: Jute can leave imprints for a few hours. If nobody in Berlin is to see them, tell me beforehand.
No intercourse, no oral sex. More on material, duration and how to begin with rope is under Bondage in Munich, the ground rules on limits and stopping under Taboos, limits and safety.
From Berlin to Studio 60
The ICE Sprinter trains between Berlin and Munich stop on the way in Halle, Erfurt and Nuremberg and take about four hours; ICE services with more stops take longer, and considerably longer during engineering works. So check the timetable before you send your request. From Munich Hauptbahnhof the S-Bahn takes you to Moosach. If you board in Berlin in the morning, you can be with me in the afternoon and travel back in the evening; for a late appointment, you would do better to plan a night in Munich.
- Order: First pick the appointment in the calendar, then book and pay for the room at Studio 60 for exactly that time, then send the request with the screenshot. Your train ticket is best bought only after my confirmation.
- Buffer: Allow an hour in reserve. A delayed train does not extend the session, and if you arrive 30 minutes late without letting me know, you count as a no-show. Write to me as soon as you notice it is getting tight.
- Arrive sober: Four hours on a train is a long time, and the bistro car is never far away. If you have been drinking, my door stays closed.
- Punctual and well groomed: Come as you would to an important appointment, and switch off your phone before we begin.
Discretion works both ways. You receive the exact address only after confirmation and deposit, and nobody in your everyday Berlin life needs to know where you are going. Leave yourself some room between the session and your departure; the hours on the train heading north then make a good transition, better than leaping straight into the Berlin evening.