Dominatrix Potsdam: a day without a care

Dominatrix Potsdam: the road to me leads to Munich

I am not a dominatrix in Potsdam, and I do not pretend to be one. My in-person sessions take place exclusively at Studio 60 in Munich – no appointments on the Havel, no visits to your home or your hotel. So if you want to come to me from Potsdam, you make the journey. Five hours south is long enough to shed, along the way, whatever you should not bring with you.

This is how an appointment comes about:

• In the calendar you choose the type, the day and the time: a single hour, the three-hour Intensive or a 45-minute Remote session.
• One click turns your choice into a message to me, already worded and sent via WhatsApp or Telegram as you prefer, with the price and a reference number. The appointment becomes binding only with my personal confirmation; you buy the train ticket afterwards, not before.
• The deposit of €50 secures it and is credited against the fee. You book and pay for the room yourself with Studio 60; the room hire comes on top of my fee.
• My fee is €250 an hour, and €300 for any hour that begins at 8 pm or later; the details are under Prices and booking.

If the journey still gives you pause, or you would first like to hear how I lead, book a remote session by video: 45 minutes, from €180, from wherever you are. I speak and write German and English. The principle behind the story further down – a whole day under my command – is set out in my essay Total Control.

Potsdam by night: Schiffbauergasse, Babelsberg and the train to Berlin

Potsdam is not a city that raises its voice. Its nights end earlier than those of its big neighbour to the north-east, but they have places you ought to know before you pass judgement on them.

• Waschhaus at Schiffbauergasse. Built as the steam laundry of the Prussian garrison, and since the early nineties a cultural venue on the shore of the Tiefer See: concerts, club nights, readings, dance and exhibitions in the Kunstraum, open-air concerts in summer.
• Lindenpark in Babelsberg. A youth-culture and family centre that turns into a stage in the evening – for rock and metal, for salsa, tea dances and DJ nights.
• freiLand on Friedrich-Engels-Straße. A cultural site with halls of its own, also home to the Spartacus club, with concerts and club nights.
• The Dutch Quarter. Its 134 red-brick houses stand in four blocks, built under the Amsterdam-born master builder Jan Bouman and completed in 1742. In the evenings people sit in its small pubs, restaurants and cafés.

If it is fetish you are after, you go to Berlin. The regional express gets you to Berlin Hauptbahnhof in about 25 minutes, and from there it is not far to clubs with a strict dress code such as KitKatClub in Mitte. Every September the Folsom Europe street fair fills Fuggerstraße in Schöneberg with leather and rubber, most recently on 11 and 12 September 2026. I do not name studios in Potsdam itself here; if you want a scene and a choice, look to Berlin, as I describe on my page Dominatrix Berlin.

A hundred and thirty-two steps and a comma

This story is fiction. Its places are not.

On a Sunday at the end of September, shortly after ten, I stood on the top terrace of Sanssouci. I was in town privately, for two days, with no appointments. Below me the vineyard fell away in six broad steps, the walls curving inwards as if for an embrace, and in their glazed niches fig trees stood behind panes, as though someone had locked the south into display cases so that it might survive the Brandenburg winter. Beyond the dark pyramids of yew, down in the parterre, the water of the Great Fountain rose. Frederick had the basin laid out in 1748, and in his lifetime the fountain never played; only a century or so later did a steam engine force the water upwards. I like places where a will remains visible, even where it failed.

The man who caught my eye was counting. He came up the central axis, a hundred and thirty-two steps in six flights, and his lips moved with them. At the top he held a phone to his ear and gave four instructions in four sentences: a time, a name, a number, a no. Then he put it away and stopped in front of the garden façade, beneath the sandstone figures Friedrich Christian Glume carved in 1746 as the retinue of Bacchus, and read the gilded letters above the central window.

‘The comma,’ I said, because I could see that it bothered him. SANS, SOUCI. – with a comma and a full stop, a small thing whose meaning people are still puzzling over today.

‘On our lot, someone would reshoot that,’ he said.

His lot was Babelsberg, where films have been made since 1912. He was a producer; the next morning a shoot would begin with three hundred and forty names on the call sheet, and of every one of them he knew when they would be woken, when they would eat and whom they would speak to. He said it without pride, more like a man describing a weight he no longer feels because he never puts it down. I call him T. here; this story needs no more of his name than that.

We walked to the grave on the same terrace, a plain stone slab. Frederick had wanted to lie here, buried at night, with the smallest of retinues and by the light of a lantern. The place was granted to him only in 1991, on the two hundred and fifth anniversary of his death; the small retinue he never got. On the stone lay potatoes, left there by visitors who still remember his decrees that the country should grow them.

‘A king who wanted a house without care,’ said T. ‘Did it work?’

‘He called the ruler the first servant of the state,’ I replied. ‘Whoever serves everyone belongs to no one. Least of all to himself.’

He did not laugh. He asked what I did for a living. I told him: I am a dominatrix. Sometimes I take over other people’s days, when they ask me to in earnest, and whatever happens behind a closed door in the course of it happens in Munich, in a studio, and nowhere else. He could write to me once he knew what he wanted to hand over. Not before.

A shooting schedule I do not read

His first message came eleven days later, at two in the morning, and it was a shooting schedule. He had written down what he had in mind, with times, locations and scenes, neatly numbered. I replied with a single sentence: I do not read scripts that someone else has written for me. Whoever wants to give up control stops planning first.

His second message was shorter. He wanted a day on which he decided nothing. Not an hour in which to let go, only to take everything back in hand afterwards, but a day with a morning and an evening, on which someone else knew what came next.

Then began what he took for bureaucracy and I take for the foundation. His profile in the Safe Room said that he took tablets for high blood pressure every morning and that, since a fall on set, his right shoulder would not tolerate his arms being drawn behind his back. I asked about marks he would have to explain on Monday. I asked who could reach him in an emergency and who would make the decisions for his production that day. I asked what he was afraid of. It took him a night to answer: not knowing what time it is.

We set down the frame in writing, as he was used to, except that this time I was the one who wrote. A Sunday in October in Munich, from seven in the morning until eleven at night. Three hours of it at Studio 60, from one in the afternoon, in the Intensive format; the rest in the city, according to my plan. My authority covered five things: clothing, meals, routes, speech, time. Excluded were his health, his tablets, any emergency and any person who had not been asked – nobody but the two of us was to become part of this day. There would be no alcohol, not at any hour.

As his safeword he chose Glienicke, after the bridge between Potsdam and Berlin on which agents were exchanged during the Cold War. ‘A word at which everyone goes back to his own side,’ he wrote. For the shades in between we took colours: green means go on, yellow means slower, and Glienicke ends everything, in the studio and out in the city alike, at once and with no questions asked.

He chose the date in the calendar, booked the room with Studio 60 and sent me the screenshot before I had confirmed anything. A week before the Sunday an envelope arrived for him in the post. Inside lay two sealed, numbered cards in my handwriting and a single sentence: You open the first in Munich, the second only at the signal written on the first. On the evening before, I added, you put your watch into an envelope of its own, seal it, sign across the flap and carry it with you. Your phone stays off; you may switch it on only in an emergency. He asked whether that was necessary. I did not answer.

Munich without a watch

The first card, which he opened on Saturday evening in his hotel, named exactly one time, and that time did not belong to him: a wake-up call at seven, to be ordered at reception. Everything after that hung on things he did not own. Dark trousers, white shirt, no tie, no watch. For breakfast: bread, an egg, tea instead of coffee, the tablets. Then on foot into the Old Town and up the tower of St Peter’s, without counting the steps. At the top, wait until the Glockenspiel begins in the town hall tower opposite. Only then the second card. He was to speak only to people who served him, and only to order or to thank them.

He told me later what that morning had done to him. At the breakfast table his right hand reached three times for his left wrist, where there was nothing. On the way into the Old Town he walked too fast, because he did not know whether he was late. There were clocks everywhere all the same – on church towers, in shop windows, above the stairs down to the U-Bahn. The rule did not say he must see none; it said he must not look, and that morning he learned to let his eyes pass over clock faces as one passes acquaintances one would rather not meet. In the tower he caught himself counting after a few landings and from then on miscounted on purpose, so as not to learn the number; I knew it, and he was not meant to. Up on the viewing platform he stood among strangers who were all looking at their phones and could have told him the time. He asked no one. That, he said, had been the first act of obedience nobody had ordered: not asking, though the answer was standing all around him.

At eleven the figures opposite began to move, and he opened the second card. It was short: Go down. Buy yourself a pretzel and a bottle of water and eat it standing up on the square. When the Glockenspiel begins for the second time, you set off. He stood among the crowd for almost an hour and watched people making decisions: which café, which direction, one more photograph or not. He had none to make. Nobody on the square could tell anything by looking at him. It had been a relief, he wrote to me weeks later, and at first he had been ashamed of it – as though he had granted himself something that was not his to have.

After the second Glockenspiel he walked to the S-Bahn without knowing how long the ride would take. He rang the bell at Studio 60, and I opened the door.

‘You are on time,’ I said. ‘And you do not know why.’

The collar and the clock at his back

He laid the rest of my fee on the table, as agreed, and beside it the envelope with his watch, the signature across the flap. I left it where it lay. First I asked what I ask before every session, even when it has long been settled in our messages: whether he had taken his tablets, whether he was sober, whether anything had changed with the shoulder. Then he spoke the safeword aloud, once, so that we had both heard it. Glienicke.

The collar was black leather, broad and plain, with the buckle at the nape. I fastened it so that two fingers fitted between leather and skin, and checked it with those two fingers while he held still. No ring, no lead, no pull. A collar holds nothing fast, I told him. It only shows to whom the rest of the day belongs.

Then I set up the clock: a small brass travel clock whose ticking, in a quiet room, grows louder than you would expect of so small a case. I put it on the floor behind him, its face to the wall. He could hear it the whole time. See it, he could not.

The first hour belonged to posture. He knelt on a cushion I laid down for him without his having to ask, and held a tray with a glass of water at chest height until I allowed him to set it down. I read, wrote something in my diary, had him stand, kneel, stand again. He was a shelf, a servant, a piece of furniture – and above all he was waiting. For a man whose profession consists in nobody ever having to wait for him, waiting is a language he has never learned.

At some point I asked, in passing: ‘What time is it?’ He hesitated for no more than a breath. ‘Just before two.’ With that he had given away what I had suspected. On this day time belonged to me – so said the frame he had confirmed himself – and he had been counting it in secret all along, tick by tick, like the steps of the stairway at Sanssouci. I said nothing about it. Instead he was to tell me when ten minutes had passed from that moment, measured by the ticking behind his back. After barely six minutes he said: ‘Now.’ He was, as always in his life, too early – and he had laid claim to a time he did not possess.

What a breach of the day’s order would cost, we had settled beforehand: six strokes of the cane, counted aloud by him. I secured his wrists with leather straps in front of his body, not behind his back, because of the shoulder, and asked for his colour. ‘Green.’ I gave him the six slowly, with pauses in which only the clock spoke. He counted. At the fourth his voice grew quieter; by the sixth it was calm.

Yellow, then silence

In the second hour I had him kneel again, his hands still bound, and after a while he said a word I had been waiting for without wishing for it. ‘Yellow.’ The shoulder was pulling. I released the straps at once, let him lower his arms, checked the warmth and feeling in his hands and sat him down on a low stool. Yellow is not a breach, I said. Yellow is information, and I need every piece of it you can give me. He nodded, and I saw that this answer shook him more than the six strokes before it.

Then came the silence. I sat behind him, beside the clock, and for a long time said nothing. The ticking filled the room, second by second, and I watched how at first he reckoned against it, how his shoulders kept count of the minutes, how his mind went on writing a plan nobody had asked of him. I waited. I can wait; it is part of what I offer.

‘Do you want to know what time it is?’ I asked at last.

He took a long time. Then he said: ‘No.’

I have witnessed this moment many times and cannot describe it more precisely than this: a person stops working against time and begins to be inside it. His shoulders sank. His breathing grew slower than the ticking. For the first time that day he no longer even wished to know anything, and that was more surrender than any kneeling.

In the third hour I read him the rest of the day, and he was allowed neither to write any of it down nor to comment on it. When the Glockenspiel plays for the third time, you will be standing on Marienplatz again, watching until the figures come to rest. For dinner you eat whatever the waiter recommends. You speak to nobody about this day. When the night watchman and the angel appear high up on the town hall and the lullaby sees the Münchner Kindl into the night, you go to your hotel. The envelope with your watch you open when the bells strike eleven. He said: ‘Yes.’ Nothing more.

Before he left he sat on the stool for a while, a blanket round his shoulders, a glass of water in both hands. I asked about the shoulder, the hands, his head, and I allowed him to answer in whole sentences. I let him talk until his voice was firm again.

Last of all I opened his envelope. The watch was five minutes fast, of course. I set it right, added a folded card, put both into a fresh envelope, sealed it and signed across the flap, as he had done the evening before. Then I undid the buckle at his nape and took the collar off. He was still touching the place where it had lain as he stood at the door.

First servant, top terrace

Frederick built Sanssouci to recover from a state whose first servant he wished to be. That is the contradiction T. had sensed on the terraces without being able to name it: whoever decides everything serves everything. Three hundred and forty people on a call sheet are not power; they are a duty that never clocks off. For one day, total control turned that order around. He served a single plan, and that plan had an end.

That, I believe, is the secret of the comma. SANS, SOUCI. Between ‘without’ and ‘care’ stands a pause, a breath. Care is not abolished; it is set aside for a moment, and after it comes a full stop. Surrender needs that full stop. Nobody surrenders to a frame that has no end; one surrenders to a frame whose end is fixed. Even the figs in the niches grow in Brandenburg only because wall and glass hold them. No frame, no fruit.

Voltaire, who lived at the court in Potsdam from 1750 to 1753 and left in a quarrel with the king, published Candide six years later. After all the grand systems that set out to explain why the world is as it is, after all the catastrophes and speculations, one plain sentence remains at the end: ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ We must cultivate our garden. Not a design for the world, but a task. On that Sunday in Munich T. had been given nothing but tasks of that kind, small and not open to negotiation, and none of them required him to understand the world.

At eleven at night, in his hotel room, he heard the bells strike and opened the envelope. The watch was right. On the card, in my handwriting, was that sentence of Voltaire’s and nothing else.

On Monday he travelled back, first by ICE to Berlin, then by regional express to Potsdam. Weeks later he wrote to me. He had let his line producer make every decision on her own for an entire shooting day, and he had gone to Sanssouci on a Sunday with no appointment afterwards. He had believed, he wrote, that whoever lets himself be led gives something up. Now he knew that you must first own something before it can be handed over.

I picture the terraces that morning: the figs behind the glass, the fountain down in the parterre, the potatoes on the stone. A man on the topmost step, the watch on his wrist, not looking at it. His message ended with a single sentence: I did not count.

Two voices from the guestbook

The two entries that follow come from my guestbook. They are genuine, written in German and faithfully translated here, and neither comes from a character in the story: T. is invented; the two guests who wrote these lines are not.

‘I spent a whole Saturday under her direction. She decided what I wore, when I ate, whom I spoke to – even though I was out in the world, in ordinary life. Nobody noticed a thing. Inwardly I was in a state unlike anything else.’ — her instrument, guestbook entry (translated from German)

‘She tells me what to do, and I do it. Not because I have to. Because at last I no longer have to decide for myself. That is not weakness. That is the luxury I can never afford in my ordinary life.’ — your L., guestbook entry (translated from German)

Total control in a real session

What is a whole day in the story begins smaller in reality, and grows only if the foundation holds. With me, total control does not mean that I give you orders for an hour. It means that for a set period I decide on set areas of your life – and that both are fixed in advance, discussed explicitly, with a beginning and an end.

• Preliminary conversation: We clarify which areas I take over, such as clothing, meals, routes or speech, and what stays excluded: health, medication, emergencies, professional obligations and every person who has not personally consented. Outsiders never become part of the game.
• Health: You tell me about blood pressure, heart, joints, allergies and medication beforehand, ideally in your profile in the Safe Room; before every request you confirm the consent and health declaration.
• Safeword: It ends everything at once, in the studio and in the hours outside alike. In between I ask for your colour, and yellow is never a breach.
• Sober: You come to the studio free of alcohol and drugs, or I will not receive you. What applies to the hours before and after, we settle in the preliminary conversation.
• Price: I arrange enslavement beyond the session from a minimum of 180 minutes. Its frame is the three-hour Intensive format: €750 starting at 1 pm, €850 starting at 7 pm, each plus the room fee paid to Studio 60. Restraints, role play and cane discipline are included in the hourly rate.

No intercourse, no oral sex. Total control does not come first: if you do not know me yet, you will usually begin with an ordinary session; whether and when it becomes a day under my command, I decide. How rules and rituals grow over several encounters is described under Slave training, the basics of limits and stopping under Limits and safety.

From Potsdam to Studio 60

From Potsdam to Munich the fast route runs via Berlin. The RE1 regional express takes about 25 minutes from Potsdam Hauptbahnhof to Berlin Hauptbahnhof, the S7 a little longer. There you board the ICE: the Sprinter services with few stops cover the line to Munich in about four hours, the other trains in roughly four and a half. With the change and a buffer, allow around five hours to München Hbf; from there the S-Bahn runs out to the north-west of the city. You receive the exact address of the studio with my confirmation.

• Plan early. For an appointment in the early afternoon, travel the evening before or take one of the first trains; for the evening rate from 8 pm, a morning train will do. If the train is running late, write to me. If you are 30 minutes late or more without a word, the appointment counts as missed, and lateness does not extend the time.
• Room first. You book and pay for the room yourself with Studio 60, and you send the screenshot of the booking with your request.
• Sober and on time. The glass of wine in the restaurant car stays where it is. If you have been drinking, you will not be received.
• Discretion. Five hours on a train is distance enough. Nobody in Potsdam needs to know where you are going; what happens in the studio stays there, with me as with you.

If you are travelling from elsewhere in the region, you will find your own route described – for instance under Dominatrix Magdeburg.