Anyone who has heard of St Andrews nestled on the East coast in Fife would probably disregard this little town immediately and thus not worth consideration for application, as it is after all remote, and unbearably cold. But it is without a doubt that St Andrews has the rarity of smallness. The concoction of students who have been everywhere and anywhere from all corners of the world is what makes this place so special.
Branded by poor nights out, this reputation can only go so far as the exceptionally tightknit community of students that make up for it. The magnitude of what it can potentially offer is far greater than its suffocation. KitKat club along the Köpernicker Straße in Berlin Mitte is certainly a niche taste and far, far away from the realms of the average St Andrews club nights. Remotely like a Szentek club night in Tignes on the annual Snowsports ski trip, a trip to this underground club offers many life lessons in one night.
The notorious club at hand is a Tardis of underground rooms and a series of small club spaces. On the walls in Kitkat are paintings in fluorescent and ultraviolet by Vigor Calma, Der Träumer. Vigor is concerned with psychedelic pornographic surrealism. It’s a profound and uncomfortable work at play that attacks life to its core, venturing beyond the realms of physicality.
Opened in the hangover of the Soviet Union in 1994, by filmmaker Simon Thaur, Kitkat is truly like something out of killing eve with club goers elaborate costumes where waves of techno slice perfectly and eloquently through the smoky mist. It’s something ethereal and unworldly.
It is hedonism at its finest. It’s a drug heaven. The fetish isn’t disarming, it’s just animalistic. Vigor’s work, along with the experimental Kitkat dress code, questions how much we should, or can, embrace our animalism whilst hidden beneath the cloak of fantastical dress.
The club itself is like a subdued kaleidoscopic dreamland beneath the city, a foreign land where time simply does not exist.
What has come from the years of invisible terror inflicted by the Stasi in the GDR?
It is if phones don’t belong in one place, they certainly don’t belong amongst the Berlin club scene and they certainly do not belong in KitKat.
Clubs in St Andrews should introduce the simple but genius no phones rule. It makes for a drastically elevated experience. The rule in many of Berlin’s clubs is testament to Berlin’s night scene truly as an adult’s playground, dedicated to the temple of our memory, intimately the individuals own. It allows us to escape the manacles of our phones for a little while at the very least.
Berlin is a dark, moody, and arty city, built around its history that the modern Berlin preserves so well. Colourful undertones of growth and vibrancy are like an ebb and flow beneath the concrete Eastern Berlin. The city embodies the undeniable strength of resolve, and what can come riding straight out of desolation. Compared to the Moorish doll’s town of St Andrews, Berlin is an urban cosmopolitan machine that has grinded out art and life. Both are steeped in history and have undeniably fiery souls.
St Andrews can feel, at times, cold and lonely. Yet it has the intimacy of small rooms, and the compatibility for exclusivity. Compared to the rest of Scotland, St Andrews is not that cold after all.
And when you leave the bubble, it felt like a dream.
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