SNAX CLUB (at Berghain)

A party to nearly die for, SNAX remains the centrepiece event of Berlin's annual Easter leather/rubber/fetish weekend, seemingly with no limits, staged with panache inside Germany's grandest den of iniquity, Berghain [see entry]. The East Berlin club features a magnum dance floor driven by throbbing, never-uncool techno, but it's the attention to detail in every corner and space of this labyrinthine former power plant that gives the SNAX party its wow factor, including an imaginatively conceived set piece that changes each year. Sex happens here on every level, literally and figuratively, and the facilities are unrivalled in their level of sophistication and accommodation, particularly in the normally separate-entrance club area known as Lab-oratory (aka Lab) [see entry]; all so-called depravities are catered for, and yet one hears that it was even more hardcore back in the day. The SNAX party takes over the entire Berghain except for the straight-friendly Panorama Bar [see entry], and is alone worth the trip to Berlin. Expect now-ritualistic extended queueing (read: interminable-feeling), with or without a ticket, and in frigid temperatures to boot, depending on where Easter falls. A second now-annual party, FC SNAX UNITED, prescribing sportswear and trainers and held in November, kicked off in 2011. 'FC' = Football Club. For the record, SNAX started in 1992 on the top floor of a four-story techno club built by the Nazis as a bunker, on the corner of Albrechtstraße (no. 24/25) and Reinhardtstraße in Mitte. Police shut down the club in 1995; SNAX shifted to Milchhof in Anklamer Straße, then a place in Revaler Straße in Friedrichshain before the move in 1998 to a nearby spacious former railway warehouse off the Mühlenstraße, close to the river. It was here at the newly named Ostgut that SNAX went full-throttle, staging parties several times a year and eventually opening up the space to all techno party people, regardless of sexuality. The male-only SNAX sessions continued, but Ostgut shut down in January 2003, with the building demolished in 2004, when the club shifted to Berghain. Warning: Since at least 2016 SNAX has seen a conspicuously higher circuit-party quotient, with the fetish-to-flesh ratio tipped heavily in favour of the latter (harnessed hunks), much to the chagrin of leather and rubber purists who now choose to abstain, hitting the Schöneberg bars instead.