Mitkuschelzentrale

» see mitkuschelzentrale.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The Mitkuschelzentrale was a non-commercial German platform for finding somebody to be physically close to, with the motto Einfach nur Kuscheln, which translates to simply just cuddling, and the word simply is carrying the whole policy. It started in Leipzig in 2015 around Sebastian Nichele Wallenstein and ran partly as a website and partly as a set of regional groups that met in person. It named people with disabilities and older people as the users it was built for, on the reasoning that those are the people a society most reliably stops touching.

The rules did the heavy lifting. Like the cuddle party format it borrowed from, the Mitkuschelzentrale explicitly ruled out the sexual and the romantic, which is what separated it from a dating platform using softer language. That exclusion was never small print. It was the premise, and the whole thing stops making sense without it.

German media found it reasonably early. The Rheinische Post published an interview with the founder in April 2016 under a headline saying that this man wants to cuddle with you, and Deutschlandfunk Kultur covered it as cuddling with strangers against loneliness. The project also pointed people toward the research on oxytocin and skin contact, which gave journalists a respectable hook and gave the organizers something to say when the obvious question arrived.

In July 2021 it ended. The reason recorded is the COVID-19 restrictions, and there is nothing complicated to interpret there: a project whose entire output was physical contact between people from different households spent the better part of two years unable to produce any. The Internet Archive has the site serving its normal WordPress homepage on 14 April 2021 and redirecting away by December, which brackets the ending where the record says it is.

~ the record ~

~ the kuschelboten ~

There was no company here. The platform leaned on social media groups and was run without commercial intent by a team around the founder, and the volunteer administrators who kept the regional groups going had a title: Kuschelboten, cuddle messengers. It also ran a project page on Startnext, the German crowdfunding site, which is where small German non-profits of that decade went when they needed money and did not want investors.

Running a thing like this on volunteers is both the reason it could exist at all and the reason it was fragile. The product was not a database of users. It was a group of local coordinators willing to vouch for a format that is easy to sneer at and easy to get wrong, in public, under their own names.

~ what the pandemic took ~

Plenty of websites claimed COVID killed them when what died was their advertising revenue. This one has the cleaner version of the claim. From March 2020 the specific activity it organized was the thing German public-health rules named and prohibited, in wave after wave, for longer than anyone expected. There is no remote mode for it and no pivot available.

This is a category I am reading about rather than remembering. Organized platonic touch between strangers, run as an unpaid volunteer project with local chapters and a press profile, is a German civil-society shape, and nothing built on that template ever reached me in Ankara. What is familiar is the smaller thing underneath it, which is that there are a lot of people who go weeks without anybody putting a hand on their shoulder, and almost nothing is organized around that.

Some of the regional groups outlived the platform. The domain now forwards to a SoundCloud profile holding archived radio pieces about the project, and in December 2025 the founder published a book under an imprint carrying the same name. The organization is gone and the word kept being used.

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