Looking for a dominatrix in Zurich: why the road leads to Munich
A man looking for a dominatrix in Zurich usually looks first in his own city. I do not receive guests there. I meet guests in person only in Munich, at Studio 60; everything else happens by video. For men from Zurich, this very fact has a value that only becomes apparent on the far side of the border: between Paradeplatz and my room lie a good three and a half hours on the train, the shore of Lake Constance and two national frontiers. The distance is part of it: a man who travels that far has made his decision long before he arrives.
This is how a request from Switzerland comes about:
- In the calendar under choose a date you select the format – one hour, three hours of Intensive or 45 minutes by video – and after that the day and the starting time.
- A session at the studio needs a room: you reserve it for exactly that time directly with Studio 60, pay for it there and confirm this with your request, sending me the screenshot.
- A single click opens WhatsApp or Telegram with a pre-written message that already contains the price and the reference.
- I confirm personally. You then secure the appointment with a deposit of €50, which is credited against the fee.
My prices are euro prices: €250 per hour, €300 for hours starting at 8 pm or later, plus the Studio 60 room fee. You pay the remainder in cash at the start of the session; the details are under prices and booking. If you would rather not leave Zurich, you can meet me in a remote session: 45 minutes by video, worldwide, from €180. I speak and write German and English.
The story further down is about an interrogation, about the question as an instrument of mental dominance. Interrogations count as mental work with me and are included in the hourly rate; if you want to combine them with a fixed role, you will find more under role play, always between adults. Other beginnings, other cities: read the stories under Dominatrix Stuttgart and Dominatrix London too.
Zurich by night: Niederdorf, Dada and Zurich West
By day Zurich presents itself as a city that gives nothing away; by night it catches up on a good deal. On the right bank of the Limmat, just above Central square, the Niederdorf begins: narrow lanes full of bars, cafés and small restaurants, and down on the Limmatquai the old guild houses. A few lanes further south, at Spiegelgasse 1, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened the Cabaret Voltaire on 5 February 1916, the stage on which Dada was born. Today the house is once again a bar, a stage and an exhibition space; in the vaulted cellar ‘DadaZwischenSprachen’, an exhibition on the multilingual sound poems of Dada, runs until January 2027.
North-west of the main station, in District 5, the old industrial quarter around the former Escher Wyss works has become Zurich West. In the Schiffbau, a former boiler works built in 1892, the Schauspielhaus theatre and the jazz club Moods now have their stages; beneath the arches of the viaduct there are shops and a market hall; and at Hive on Geroldstrasse DJs play electronic music through the night.
Once a year, usually on the second Saturday in August, the lake basin belongs to the Street Parade, which moves from the Utoquai across the Quaibrücke to the Mythenquai; in August 2026 some 900,000 people came. In June, Zurich Pride marches through the streets of the city. Fetish and BDSM evenings are announced by the scene through its own channels; dates and venues change, which is why I name none here.
There are professional dominatrices in Zurich and its surroundings too, with studios and websites of their own; I deliberately leave them unnamed. If you are looking for a dominatrix studio in Zurich, that is where you will find one. If you want to escape your own city for a few hours, you take the train to Munich.
The Customs Post above the Schipfe
This story is pure fiction. The banker and everything that happens between us are invented; the Lindenhof, its stones and its legends are real.
I was in Zurich for an exhibition about Dada, and as always when this city leaves me an afternoon to spare, I climbed up to the Lindenhof. There is no way up except on foot, through the narrow lanes of the old town, and that is what I like about this hill: whoever stands at the top has got there on his own feet.
I first saw the man in the Pfalzgasse. He was standing in front of the copy of the Roman tombstone set into the wall there, and he was reading. Not like a tourist skimming a plaque, but like someone checking a contract: line by line, his index finger just above the stone, never touching it. A dark coat without a badge, a watch that did not want to be noticed and was noticed precisely for that reason.
‘Praepositus stationis Turicensis,’ I said as I stopped beside him. ‘Head of the Zurich customs post. This stone is the first record of the city’s name, and the name stands beside a customs officer.’
He read the line to its end before he looked at me – politely, appraisingly, with the courtesy of a man whose profession it is never to remain in anyone’s debt. ‘A city that begins with a border check,’ he said. ‘I have never thought about that.’
‘With a question,’ I said. ‘What are you carrying? That is the oldest question on this hill.’
We walked the last stretch up side by side, as though we had arranged it. At the top, some twenty-five metres above the Schipfe, the leaves of the lime trees already lay yellow on the gravel. Below, the Limmat ran green and fast; across the water the roofs of the Niederdorf climbed the slope. He was a banker, he said after a while. Private bank, third generation. His profession consisted in knowing things and not saying them. He said it without pride, the way a man might state his height.
‘And who questions you?’
He was silent for so long that a leaf fell onto the wall between us. ‘No one,’ he said at last. ‘That is the whole point.’
I pointed to the fountain with the helmeted figure of a woman. When Duke Albert of Habsburg laid siege to Zurich in 1292, so the story goes, Hedwig ab Burghalden led the women of the city onto this square in armour. From below it looked like an army, and the duke is said to have withdrawn. Whether it is true, nobody knows. ‘This city,’ I said, ‘was once saved by a disguise. I suspect you are too. Every morning.’
Then he mentioned, casually, as though it were part of his address, that he lived on the right shore of the lake, not far from Küsnacht. ‘Jung lived there for more than fifty years. I drive past his house every day and have never opened a single one of his books.’
‘Yet you know his word for what drove you up here today,’ I said. ‘He called it the shadow. Everything one does not wish to see in oneself and therefore carries everywhere. Undeclared.’
The muscles of his jaw worked like those of a man drawing up a counter-calculation in his head. ‘And you? Are you the customs officer?’
‘I ask questions,’ I said. ‘Professionally. In Munich.’ I gave him my name and nothing else, no number, no card. Whoever wanted to find me would find me. Then I walked away across the gravel and did not turn round.
A Word from the Spiegelgasse
He got in touch eleven days later, through the calendar on my website, like everyone else. Intensive, three hours, a Tuesday from 2 pm, and in the notes field a single sentence: ‘I would like to be questioned.’ No form of address, no reason given. I did not confirm straight away. First I sent him questions of my own, and there were more of them than he had expected.
About his body: for two years he had been taking medication for raised blood pressure, nothing else; his lower back was stiff from sitting. I noted both; anyone who has sat with me for a long time gets up slowly, with my hand on his arm. About his limits: no marks, anywhere at all; he saw clients on Wednesdays and did not want to have to explain anything. No questions about clients, accounts, names. That, he wrote, was not negotiable. I wrote back that nobody was asking. What he kept safe for others was none of my business. All that interested me was what he kept safe for himself.
Then I asked about his wife. Whether what he was seeking with me would take something away from her. He took two days to answer. ‘I fear she has long sensed that something is missing. I just don’t know what.’ I laid down that she would stay outside: as a subject, and even more so as leverage. I would not ask about her. Whether he spoke of her was for him to decide.
The safeword I let him find for himself. He came back with ‘jolifanto’, the first word of Hugo Ball’s sound poem ‘Karawane’. After our encounter, he wrote, he had crossed the Limmat and walked up into the Spiegelgasse, past the Cabaret Voltaire, which Ball and Emmy Hennings had opened in 1916 and where Dada came into the world. A word without meaning, he wrote, was one he could never say by accident, and no one could ever twist it into something else. I accepted it. In case speaking became difficult for him, he was to hold his own front-door key in his right hand. If the key falls, everything ends, no questions asked.
After that came my conditions: sober and punctual, the room at Studio 60 booked and paid for exactly those three hours, the confirmation as a screenshot, the deposit in advance. He took the train from Zurich HB in the morning, a good three and a half hours via St. Gallen, Bregenz and Lindau. On the way he wrote nothing. Only from Munich did a line arrive: ‘Arrived. Nothing to declare.’
‘That is for me to decide,’ I wrote back.
A Chair, a Lamp, No Clock
I had cleared the room of everything except what I needed. In the middle stood a heavy chair with armrests, in front of it a small table with a lamp on a swivel arm. No mirror and no clock anywhere in his field of vision. Beside the door stood a shallow bowl.
‘What are you carrying?’ I asked, before he had the chance to take off his coat.
He understood at once. The phone, switched off. The wallet. Last of all the watch, which he took off slowly, as though he were turning a screw out of himself. He laid everything in the bowl and then reached for his wedding ring. ‘You keep that,’ I said. ‘It does not belong to me.’
I buckled leather cuffs around his wrists and fastened them to the armrests, leaving room beneath each one for two of my fingers. Into his right hand I placed the key. I checked the colour of his fingertips, then I angled the light: not into his eyes but just beside them, onto his cheek, so that behind the glare he saw me only as an outline. The lamp did not get hot; even so, I held my own hand in its beam for a full minute before I moved the lamp closer.
‘The rules,’ I said. ‘You answer in whole sentences. Once an hour you may say: I don’t know. Every evasion costs you a question that you put to yourself, out loud, over and over, until I am satisfied.’
He spent the first hour advising me. He answered well, smoothly, in sentences with an introduction and a conclusion, as though a client were sitting across the desk. What was the last thing he had wished for without justifying it? He talked about a house on the lake and about a boat. ‘Those are acquisitions,’ I said. ‘I asked about a wish.’ What had he never said to his father? He gave me a lecture on the history of the bank. When had he last felt ashamed? Perfectly calm, he offered me a counter-question.
That was when I switched off the lamp.
I said nothing. I stepped behind him, close enough for him to hear me but not to see me, and waited. Silence is the instrument most underestimated in any interrogation. A man who has kept silent all his life so as to give nothing away is the one least able to bear someone else’s silence. After four minutes he began to speak, into the dark, without my having asked anything. After seven minutes he stopped defending himself.
I switched the light back on and crouched down beside the chair. ‘Colour?’
‘Yellow,’ he said. Honestly, for the first time that afternoon.
I opened the left cuff, let him circle his wrist, gave him water and asked about his back. He wanted to carry on at once. When we carried on was for me to decide. Three minutes later I closed the cuff again, no tighter than before.
Then I asked the question everything had been running towards, and I asked it quietly: ‘What would I have to know about you for you never to come back?’
His right hand closed around the key until the knuckles turned white. I saw it, and I did not ask for the answer; I asked about him. ‘Colour?’
‘Green,’ he said. ‘Green.’ And then came the sentence that in thirty years of discretion he had never thought, only felt. That he did not keep secrets out of duty but out of fear. That behind all that discretion lay a room he himself had never looked into, because he was afraid of finding nothing there. No affair, no guilt, no abyss. Only a man whom nobody had ever asked what he wanted, and who for that reason did not know.
I stepped in front of him and swung the lamp past him onto the wall behind his back. The light fell on the pale plaster, and there stood his shadow, reaching far above the back of the chair, larger than the man himself. ‘Look round,’ I said. He turned his head as far as his position allowed and looked at it. For a long time.
The third hour no longer belonged to the questions. I left him sitting in the light and took every decision away from him: when he spoke, when he was silent, where he looked, even what he thought about. Towards the end his shoulders loosened like a knot that nobody has pulled at for a long time.
What the Shadow Gives Away in the Light
For Jung, working on the shadow is not a purification. In his essay ‘The Philosophical Tree’ he writes, in essence, that one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The shadow does not vanish when you look at it. It merely stops trailing along behind you and from then on walks at your side.
An interrogation as I conduct it is therefore not a search for information. Everything I needed to know about this man I knew before the first question. What I was looking for was the moment in which he would hear his own answer. In Athens, Socrates did nothing but question people until they noticed that they did not know what they believed they knew. In Plato’s Apology he tells his judges that the unexamined life is not worth living. He needed no lamp for that. I use one all the same, because light and darkness teach the body what the mind is not yet willing to admit.
On the way back to the station, he wrote to me later, a Latin sentence had come to him that he had read in Augustine decades earlier and thought long forgotten: factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio. I had become a great question to myself. Augustine wrote it about the time after the death of a friend, and directly after it comes what the sentence sets in motion: he questioned his soul as to why she was so sad, and she had no answer to give him. A self-interrogation more than sixteen hundred years old. Whoever becomes a question to himself has, for the first time, something to examine.
What does that mean for the power in this room? From the outside it looks as though I held everything in my hands: the light, the time, the cuffs, the order of the questions. But the right to ask was something he had given me, and he could have taken it back with one word. Jolifanto. A sound without sense, and everything would have been over. That is precisely why his answers were real. He did not stay because he had to, but because he chose to stay again with every minute that passed.
And freedom? Whoever declares nothing has to hide everything, and whoever hides everything lives permanently at the border, between checkpoints, never quite inside the country. Whoever has declared what he carries may travel on. In an interrogation like this, surrender does not mean losing the secret. It means ceasing to stand guard over it.
Hedwig’s Armour, Seen Up Close
At the end I opened the cuffs, rubbed his wrists until the imprints faded and checked the skin. No marks, as agreed. He sat on the floor for a while, his back against the chair that had held him for three hours, a glass of water in his hand and a blanket over his shoulders, until his sentences had a direction again. When he stood up, slowly, my hand was on his arm, as we had discussed beforehand. Then he went to the bowl by the door. Phone, wallet and, very last of all, the watch. He held it in his hand for a long time before he put it on.
I gave him a single task to take back to Zurich: every evening a question to himself, written by hand in a notebook, with no answer beneath it, for four weeks. No question about other people, none about the bank. The key he took with him again. It belonged to him.
Three weeks later a message came, on a Sunday evening. He had been up on the Lindenhof with his wife, for the first time in years, at her suggestion. At the fountain she had asked him what he was thinking about. In the past he would have answered as though delivering a quarterly report, smooth and with nothing left over. This time he had said: ‘About a question I asked myself last night.’ She had wanted to know which one, and he had read it out to her from the notebook, in the middle of the square. After that they had said nothing for a long time, and for the first time his silence had not felt like hiding. I did not ask about her. His wife was not my subject, and that evening did not make her one.
I replied with a single question, without a greeting and without an answer underneath. What it was stays between him and me.
In the evenings I sometimes picture the square as I left it: the lime trees, the yellow leaves on the gravel, and down below the Limmat sliding past the Schipfe as though in a hurry to get across the border. And in the middle of it all Hedwig on her fountain, the helmet on her head. The armour of the women of 1292 was made for distance, for a duke looking up from below. Up close you can see who is standing inside it.
Two voices from the guestbook
The banker from the Lindenhof does not exist. The two entries that follow most certainly do: they appear word for word in my guestbook, written in German by real guests who have nothing to do with the characters in the story, and they are faithfully translated here. I place them beside the story because they speak from their own experience about two things the story also circles around: how much of it reaches home, and what it means to hand over decisions for a while.
‘I was sceptical as to whether what my wife would one day sense would trigger a crisis. She has sensed nothing – except that I am more present. I do not need Mistress Alexa in order to give my wife less attention. I need her in order to be able to give her more.’ — Frank W., guestbook entry (translated from German)
‘Every day I take decisions on which people’s livelihoods hang. Since I began placing myself, for three hours each month, in a position in which I am not permitted to decide anything, I have been taking those decisions with greater clarity. That sounds paradoxical. It is not. Mistress Alexa has given me a mode in which my mind re-sorts itself.’ — Robert, CEO, 49, guestbook entry (translated from German)
Interrogation and mental dominance in a real session
With me, an interrogation is not a piece of theatre with a desk and a dossier but work with questions, light and silence. The story condenses it into a single afternoon; what is real is the framework in which it takes place. Beforehand we clarify which subjects stay outside – work, family, the past, whatever you want to leave out – and we talk about your body: heart and circulation, epilepsy, allergies, injuries, medication. Ideally you enter all of this in advance in your profile in the Safe Room. You confirm the consent, health and liability declaration before every request.
We agree the safeword before we begin, and it ends everything at once, even in the middle of a question. If you are restrained or meant to keep silent, we add a signal that works without words. Along the way I ask where you stand, and I expect the truth rather than bravery. At the end of intense mental work I take as much time as you need to be fully back in the room.
- Included in the hourly rate: interrogations, verbal play, humiliation, role play and restraint with cuffs, straps or ropes.
- With a minimum duration: psychological torment and confinement, each with a minimum of 120 minutes.
- What does not happen: No intercourse, no oral sex.
Why a well-placed question reaches deeper than any instrument, I describe in the essay Mental Dominance; why men who carry a great deal of responsibility seek out this form in particular, I explain under why men see a dominatrix. How I deal with limits and with stopping is set out under limits and safety. A Munich story that begins in the Hofgarten shows the same work from another side.
From Zurich to Studio 60: train, border, planning
Several times a day, direct EuroCity trains run between Zurich HB and München Hbf, via Winterthur, St. Gallen, Bregenz, Lindau-Reutin, Memmingen and Buchloe. Since December 2020 they have run electrically over the upgraded line through the Allgäu; according to the timetable the journey takes about three and a half hours. Engineering works on the German side keep adding a few minutes to individual journeys; what counts is the timetable on the day you travel. From München Hbf you reach the studio by S-Bahn or U-Bahn; you receive the exact address after confirmation and deposit.
What guests from Zurich should bear in mind:
- Fix the date early: a journey of three and a half hours is not something you plan on the morning itself. For three hours of Intensive, a day off or a night in Munich is worth it; from the hotel it is then only a short way to the studio.
- Room before ticket: reserve the room at Studio 60 for exactly the time you request, pay for it and send me the screenshot.
- Sober and punctual: the beer on the journey stays untouched. Allow an hour’s margin; if the railway announces a delay, write to me at once. After 30 minutes without a message the appointment counts as missed, and a delay does not extend the session.
- ID and euros: you travel through three countries, and I may ask for proof of age in any case. You pay the rest of the fee in cash at the start, in euros.
Discretion needs no explaining to anyone from Zurich. With me it runs in both directions: what is said in the room does not leave it, and I ask about your life outside only as far as you allow.