Café Bauer (Berlin)
The Café Bauer was a well-known coffee house in Berlin . It was opposite the Café Kranzler on the boulevard Unter den Linden at the corner of Friedrichstrasse in what is now the Mitte district . The building, built according to designs by Wilhelm Böckmann , was one of the first houses in the Viennese coffee house style in Berlin and later found many imitators.
history
On October 13, 1877, the Viennese café animal Mathias Bauer opened Café Bauer. He previously owned cafes in Vienna and in the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin . However, this fell victim to a fire just a few days after it opened. With the insured sum paid out, Bauer set up the Bauer Café in the luxurious style of the Belle Époque .
In addition to the large hall on the ground floor, the house at Unter den Linden 26 also had a billiard room and reading and ladies' rooms.
The establishment of women's rooms in cafes of the Belle Époque made it possible for women to visit public coffee houses, which was previously not considered appropriate. Coffee houses were a man's domain and they had an air of disgrace and depravity. Female waitresses were exposed to the gaze of men, to which a woman of class would not expose herself. Contemporary depictions of cafés, however, show that the culture of seeing and being seen had taken hold for both sexes - especially in middle-class society.
The café was decorated with numerous murals: including the six-part cycle The Roman Life by Anton von Werner , framed by stucco work by the Berlin sculptor Otto Lessing , Roman landscapes by Christian Wilberg and his students (1882–1885) and other pictures by Albert Hertel .
The 800 European daily newspapers that were displayed for the guests were legendary. Bauer spent the immense sum of 30,000 marks annually on this. In relation to the year 1882, this corresponds to a purchasing power of around 223,000 euros in today's currency. A Turkish-style mocha then cost 25 pfennigs (around 2 euros) - a proud amount for the time.
Café Bauer was the first to be equipped with electric light in 1884 . In 1886, Siemens & Halske installed a power generating set consisting of a steam turbine and generator in the basement of the house , which supplied the entire block. Allegedly the turbine got so hot that the waiters had to cool it with ice from the champagne cellar.
The idea caught on and a short time later Berlin's first public power station was built not far from Café Bauer at Markgrafenstrasse 44 ( Gendarmenmarkt ) . The Städtische Electricitäts-Werke , founded in 1884, wanted to replace the street lamps with gas lighting with electric lamps.
The lighting of the coffee house represented an important innovation for the hospitality of a house, because in earlier times it was a nuisance when the daily newspaper could hardly be read in the dim gas or candlelight.
After Mathias Bauer's death, his widow Therese and his sons Josef and Oskar continued to run the coffee house and the renamed Hotel Behrens. In 1910 it was sold to Hotelbetriebs-AG (today's Kempinski AG ) and the Unter den Linden location was given up. The newly founded Café Bauer and Hotel Bauer Josef und Oskar Bauer GmbH moved into the Central Hotel complex, which belongs to the stock corporation, opposite the Friedrichstrasse train station . The building complex was completely destroyed in World War II. The Unter den Linden building was also destroyed and the Lindencorso was built there in 1964 .
Other facilities with the same name
Also under the name of Café Bauer
- Frankfurt's most famous coffee house was opened in 1884, soon after it opened. The Frankfurt Café Bauer was located in the center, at Schillerplatz / Frankfurter Hauptwache, in the splendidly designed Bavaria building by Simon Ravenstein - following the Berlin model - and was decorated with paintings by Hans Thoma , among other things . The building and café were destroyed by fire bombs in the air raids on Frankfurt am Main in 1944 .
- There was a facility in Jordanstrasse 1 in Frankfurt-Bockenheim for a good 50 years until 2010 . In the immediate vicinity of the university and the Karl Marx bookstore , numerous Frankfurt personalities (including Theodor W. Adorno , Jürgen Habermas , Daniel Cohn-Bendit , Joschka Fischer ) were among the guests.
literature
- Renate Petras: The Café Bauer in Berlin . Verlag für Bauwesen, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-345-00581-6
- Peter Lummel (Ed.): Coffee from smuggled goods to lifestyle classic . be.bra Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-930863-91-X
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ The amounts were determined with the template: Inflation and apply to last January.
- ↑ stadtgeschichte-ffm.de ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 1.8 MB)
Coordinates: 52 ° 31 ′ 0.1 ″ N , 13 ° 23 ′ 20.9 ″ E