Marcel Krueger on Berlin’s foremost Weimar-era hangout for artists and intellectuals…
“All roads lead back to Berlin,” Kurt Tucholsky once famously stated, adding: “And to the Romanisches.”
He was referring to the Romanisches Café—the café located on the ground floor of the Neues Romanisches Haus, a large neo-romanesque building with two distinctive towers that opened in 1901, approximately where the Europa Center sits today on what is now Breitscheidplatz, but back then was known as Auguste-Viktoria-Platz.
The building was designed by Franz Schwechten, the royal architect responsible for the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church that still stands on the same square, its spire conspicuously damaged during World War Two, as well as the Anhalter Bahnhof, now a solitary ruin, and Prenzlauer Berg’s Kulturbrauerei, which miraculously escaped Hitler’s carnage more or less intact.
When it was opened, the café on the ground floor of the Neues Romanisches Haus was called the Café-Konditorei Kaiserhof and its elaborate vaulted ceilings, large outside terrace and an allegedly somewhat gloomy interior was simply one more place for West Berlin’s upper middle-classes to enjoy kaffee und kuchen.
But just a year later, in 1902, the Berlin Address Book–and no doubt most locals—was already referring to it as the Romanisches Café, with some of its customers starting to refer to it as the Rachmonische, a Yiddish portmanteau meaning “mercy” or “pity”—a sarcastic take on the locale’s less-than-superlative culinary offerings and interior.
This demeaning nickname is more understandable when placed in context of this area during the interwar years. Located fashionably far from the cramped medieval streets of Mitte and the overcrowded, unsanitary tenement buildings in the worker districts of Wedding, Prenzlauer Berg and Moabit, ‘The New West’ continuously sprouted theatres, restaurants, cabarets and cafés, especially around the Ku’damm, which by the turn of the twentieth century was being hyped as the city’s Fifth Avenue or Champs-Elysee.
Hence the area had been a popular working and gathering place for the city’s writers, artists and intelligentsia since the early 1900s, bolstered by the abundant publisher and newspaper offices along nearby Kantstrasse. The most frequented establishments for this intellectual demi-monde before World War One were Schwannecke’s and the Café des Westens, but a change in ownership at the latter venue in 1915 became the Romanisches Café’s good fortune as it suddenly became West Berlin’s place du jour.
And how! Contemporary research has linked over 400 regulars to the café—writers, painters, critics, artists, performers—who helped fill its interior with shouts, curses and advice, cigarette and pipe smoke, critiques and gossip, spilled coffee and schnapps. The impressive roster of names includes Walter Benjamin, Gottfried Benn, Joseph Roth, Bertolt Brecht , Bruno Cassirer, Géza von Cziffra, Otto Dix, Alfred Döblin, George Grosz, Sylvia von Harden, Mascha Kaléko, Erich Kästner, Irmgard Keun, Stefan Zweig, Egon Erwin Kisch, Else Lasker-Schüler, Max Liebermann, Erich Maria Remarque, Renée Sintenis, Ernst Toller, Vicki Baum, Franz Werfel, Billy Wilder—and, yes, Kurt Tucholsky.
At a time when so much artistic networking and creative collaboration takes place online, it’s quite difficult to imagine the impact and importance the café had during its heyday. Unlike today, where ubiquitous gentrification has put many apartments out of our price range, even poor, down-and-out artists could afford an apartment or shared living around Auguste-Viktoria-Platz in the early twentieth century. Indeed, more impoverished guests at the Romanisches could order the minimum of two boiled eggs, which were even available on credit—up to a point, after which the customer would get a scribbled note with their coffee that kindly asked them to pay and never return.
The trend for gathering at cafés such as the Romanisches was mostly due to the Weimar era’s cultural boom and there not being much in the way of communal or studio space available. Establish…