Café Corso (Leipzig)

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Today's Café Corso on Brüderstraße (2018)

Café Corso is the name of a café in Leipzig and several other coffee houses that have operated in the city for the past hundred years. Their history is linked to the Fischer family of confectioners .

history

Augustusplatz and Königshauspassage

Ernst Fischer

The history of the Corso family business began on October 1, 1912 in Oschatz , when master confectioner Ernst Fischer (1886–1975) opened a café with a pastry shop here with his wife. They gave up this in 1919, as did the Café Parsifal in Dresden, which they also took over in 1915, and moved to Leipzig. Here they leased confectionery Chancellor in the Goethe street corner Brühl. ( ⊙ ) In order to stand out from the competition, they established a reading of coffee with 200 domestic and foreign journals one.

When the former owner of the Chancellor took over the café himself, the Fischers acquired the Café Corso, founded in 1912 in the so-called Königsbau on Augustusplatz, Goethestrasse 1 ( ⊙ ), and kept the name. Here they had to face competition from the neighboring Café Felsche , which they encountered not only with their extensive range of magazines but also with the concerts in their café. Well-known bands and soloists performed twice a day on the first floor of the café.

The bakery was in the back Ritterstrasse. It supplied the café, the street sales there and the mail-order business already started by the Reich Chancellor, in particular Christmas stollen . In 1932 a shop was also rented in the newly built Königshauspassage ( angem ), which existed almost without interruption until the 1990s. Business was so good that in 1933 the Reichskanzler café could also be taken over again.

  • Königsbau on Augustusplatz

  • Corso in the Königsbau

  • Guest room in the Corso

  • Corso Königshauspassage

The café on Augustusplatz survived the arson attack on the Jewish department store Bamberger & Hertz in the same building by the National Socialists during the pogrom night of November 9, 1938 , but, like the café and the bakery, became Reich Chancellor and the bakery during the air raid on Leipzig on December 4, 1943 destroyed.

Café Hennersdorf

A few weeks later, a disused bakery in the Brüderstraße was rented and production resumed. On July 1, 1944, Ernst Fischer leased the only undestroyed café in a wide area, Café Hennersdorf in Gewandgäßchen 4 ( ⊙ ), including its Art Deco furnishings. After the war, business did very well. In particular, artists, academics and students occupied the first floor of the café, so that it was soon named lecture hall 41 after the legendary lecture hall 40 of the university. Besides ideas and jokes that were not always loyal to the party line, some printed matter from the FRG was passed on here in secret.

  • Café Hennersdorf

  • Rise in the café

In 1945 Ernst Fischer's son Werner also entered the business. In 1951 a patio was set up on a fallow land next to the house. In 1956 Werner Fischer left the GDR, but returned in 1961 to take over his father's business. In 1962 the Corso became a company with state participation and was now called Corso-Konditorei KG. The state partner was VEB Leipziger Brotfabrik, which later became the baked goods combine.

In January 1968 the café was closed and the building demolished because of a construction project that never came to fruition. Only at the end of the 1990s was the property included in the construction of the Galeria Kaufhof Leipzig department store, which opened in 2001 .

Neumarkt and Grimmaische Strasse

Werner Fischer managed to rent rooms on the ground floor of the Central Exhibition Palace on Neumarkt ( ⊙ ). In March 1968 the new café with 150 seats was opened under the name Café am Neumarkt . Furniture and other furnishings from the old café could be reused. The walls received the usual dark green fabric covering.

In the wake of the wave of nationalization in the 1970s, the Fischersche company was fully nationalized in 1972, but remained independent as VEB Corso Konditorei Leipzig with Werner Fischer as the director. After his retirement in 1978, Christa Knieb was director until 1990 and managing director until 1992.

After the end of the GDR, the Corso came back into family ownership in 1990. In 1991, the building contractor Jürgen Schneider bought the Central Exhibition Center. He quit the café on Neumarkt, which closed at the end of 1993. In rooms arranged by Schneider at Grimmaische Strasse 12/14 ( ⊙ ) In February 1994, the Corso opened at the new location, this time under the direction of Uwe Fischer, the grandson of the company founder Ernst Fischer.

The café, which has now been furnished in a modern style, was no longer accepted by the public as it had previously, ran into financial difficulties and was closed again in 1995. After a court settlement, the trading and investment company Corsoela was founded in 1996 , which operated smaller cafes spread across the Leipzig city districts and was active until 2002.

Brothers Street

After a five-month downtime, operations were resumed in October 2002. A café in the front building of the traditional production facility at Brüderstraße 6 ( ⊙ ) is operated under the name Corso , which has always been family-owned. The managing director is Jacqueline Fischer, Uwe Fischer's second wife.

In addition to café and street sales of confectionery products, including Baumkuchen and Leipziger Lerchen as specialties , the mail order business, especially Christmas stollen, is an essential pillar. That is why the number of employees is almost tripled from ten in the run-up to Christmas.

literature

Web links

Commons : Café Corso  - collection of images