Berlin’s most famous nightclub, Berghain, should be stripped of its trading licence, according to a formal request submitted to a district office in the German capital on behalf of the rightwing populist party Alternative für Deutschland.

The AfD request calls for Berghain’s opening hours to be limited to 10pm to 6am to align with “natural circadian rhythms”, and for sexual activity in the club’s “dark rooms” to be suppressed by use of “appropriate lighting and personnel”.

Berghain is widely seen as Germany’s most famous techno club, regularly drawing dance music fans who visit the city with the sole purpose of getting past the strict door policy and spending a weekend inside the disused power station on the border of Berlin’s Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain districts.

In 2016, Berlin’s fiscal court ruled that the nightclub should be taxed at a lower rate because it was providing high-culture entertainment comparable to a classical concert venue.

The request submitted on behalf of the AfD references the death by overdose of a 30-year-old American woman in Berghain last year, and argues that the club’s policy of continuous opening hours was “provoking” the use of amphetamines.

Sybille Schmidt, a district councillor and the author of the paper, suggested that Berghain’s organisers should learn lessons from nightclubs in “Manchester, London, Rio, or on Sardinia” to improve door policy. She dismissed the club’s bouncers as “unintelligent, unsightly posers”.

Schmidt is an independent councillor who ran as an AfD-backed candidate in council elections last year, gaining 6.2% of the vote. A former leftwing activist who used to run her own nightclub in the city in the 1980s, she told Berliner Zeitung newspaper that she had decided to run as an AfD councillor in the wake of the refugee crisis but had not joined the party.



Frank Hansel, an AfD delegate in the Berlin assembly, distanced his party from Schmidt’s request on Thursday: “The applicant is an independent and cannot speak for the party,” Hansel said on Twitter.

Maximilian Schirmer, a Left party councillor who uploaded the formal request on Twitter, said: “The AfD wants to close down Berghain. Now they’ve blown it completely with the under-40s.”