Wednesday Night Fever Has Germans Partying Till the Crack of Yawns

When trying to fathom the latest fad to hit this city’s legendary night scene, it pays to remember that it was two German brothers by the name of Grimm who gave Cinderella her famous curfew.

It’s no longer just abused stepdaughters who have to halt the search for Prince Charming by midnight, it’s the whole clientele at a handful of new “after-work discos” designed to draw the restrained and the responsible who prefer to party as if there is a tomorrow.

By summer, the clubs here and in Hamburg, Bremen, Kiel and five other cities will be tapping a market for measured revelry that few knew existed: the conscientious young professionals who place a priority on getting a good night’s sleep so they’ll be fresh and alert in the morning.

“This is very practical for working people,” says Berit Seidland, a 31-year-old software developer bouncing to the beat at the Caroshi disco at Potsdamer Platz. “You don’t have that feeling that you might miss something by going home early, because there’s a finite end to the evening.”

Berlin has long been the night-life nexus of Germany and much of Europe, from the smoky cabarets of the 1920s and ‘30s to the Cold War-era rock clubs of walled-in West Berlin to the east side’s newly hip cafes that sometimes don’t even open until midnight. Now, yuppies and Gen-Xers with alarm clocks in their near futures are content to be Cinderella socializers, heading out into a night so young that it’s still daylight.

With the goal of going home early topping the agenda, these disco patrons presumably also expect to go home alone. But the founder of the after-work clubs contends that his customers are just as keen as late-night lounge lizards on finding Herr or Fraulein Right.

“I think these are pretty much the same people with the same motivations. They just get things going earlier on weeknights,” says Alex Schulz, an event coordinator who opened the first 6 p.m.-to-midnight disco in Hamburg in October.

Schulz discovered so much pent-up passion for after-work partying that over the past few weeks he has expanded the weekly Thursday events to the Caroshi club here in Berlin as well as to Kiel and Bremen. An after-work club opens at the Hanover fairgrounds with the start of Expo 2000 next month, and Schulz has summer expansion plans for Cologne, Munich, Leipzig and the Swiss banking capital, Zurich.

Competitors have cropped up recently to offer similar early-entertainment options here on other weeknights, like the popular Oxymoron Club’s Wednesday parties and the Far Out Club on the famous Kurfuerstendamm shopping street, which hosts the only west Berlin Cinderella disco on Tuesdays.

“Younger people tend to go to clubs in the east because that’s where all the techno and other new music is, but we’ve been in business here for 17 years and have our own clientele,” says Far Out manager Punyesh Schlueter. His club also holds special Wednesday night events for patrons older than 30, and those regulars make up much of the crowd on Tuesdays as well, he says.

To call the turnout at the Far Out Club a crowd might be stretching the truth, at least for the past few Tuesdays, when the switch here to daylight saving time and the advent of sunny weather lured residents to the cafe sidewalk scene.

“When it’s this nice out, people tend to want to have their drinks outside,” Schlueter says by way of explaining why his cavernous disco had only six customers at 8 p.m. “Things pick up after dark, though.”

Light is less of an intrusion at Oxymoron, one of Berlin’s most popular weekend night spots, which is set in an atrium of the east’s trendy Hackesche Hoefe complex of reclaimed factories and brownstones.

“We were worried there would be a big falloff with summer arriving so early, but it’s just been great every week,” says Torsten Schliestedt, one of the club’s owners and the initiator of early Wednesdays.

“There are a lot of people who can’t stay out late on weeknights, either because they’ve got kids or jobs they have to get up early to deal with,” Schliestedt says. “Now they can expect to have fun without getting off schedule.”

The entrepreneurs and patrons alike concede that the sudden popularity of imposed moderation enhances the national stereotype of a people obsessed with order and being on time.

“But that doesn’t make it a bad idea,” counters 42-year-old Manuela Helmut, whose job for British Petroleum starts at 7 a.m. “If people in other countries want to go out at night but still get the rest they need, this could really catch on.”

Schliestedt laughs off the image of Germans as hung up on routine and insists that the Cinderella night life has global applications.

“Actually, I got the idea from America,” says the club keeper. “I saw something like this on ‘Ally McBeal.’ ”