Café Helms
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The Café Helms , also known as Restaurant Helms , restaurant helmet or Helms'sches inn called, was a well-known Berlin restaurant. It was located in an interim building at the Schloss Freiheit on the Spree island in what is now the Mitte district near the city palace .
The building was constructed between 1882 and 1883 based on designs by the renowned Berlin architects Hermann Ende and Wilhelm Böckmann . It was an early example of a prefabricated house with an iron framework construction in Germany. The two wing pavilions of the building were connected by a long hall wing in which the tavern was located.
The Café Helms, named after its operator, developed into a popular meeting place for Berlin society, but only existed for ten years. The demolition took place from 1893.
Location and surroundings
The two Werderscher mills , which had existed since the 17th and 18th centuries, stood on the property of Café Helms until 1876 . A mill moat, which was still there, had been branched off from the Spree especially for them and led back into the left arm of the Spree halfway between the Schleusenbrücke and Schloßbrücke .
The Werderschen Mühlen were at right angles between the Schloss Freiheit and the short street An den Werderschen Mühlen , which only reached as far as the lock bridge. The street was renamed after the mill that gave it its name was demolished and was then called An der Stechbahn like its eastern extension until 1962 . Today the street Werderscher Markt runs there .
The official address of Café Helms was Schloßfreiheit 10/11 . The hall wing with the tavern, however, was on the Stechbahn . The left pavilion stood on a headland between the branch of the Spree and the mill moat. Nearby, at the current location of the State Council building , was the Rotes Schloss office building , which, like Café Helms, was designed by the architects Ende and Böckmann. On the other side of the Spree was the building academy of Karl Friedrich Schinkel .
Most of the Café Helms was demolished in the winter of 1893/1894, nothing is known about the reuse of the supporting structure, which was considered during the construction. An unspecified part of the café remained standing for the time being and was used as a construction office for the Kaiser Wilhelm National Monument built here, before it had to give way to the south wing of the monument in the spring of 1896. The mill moat was covered with vaults that were strong enough to support the monument, which weighs around 500 tons.
architecture
An early prefabricated building
Since the demolition of all buildings on the Schloss Freiheit was envisaged as early as the 1870s, the Berlin authorities only allowed temporary development of the area after the Werderschen mills were demolished. After several years of negotiations, based on a design by the architects Hermann Ende and Wilhelm Böckmann, an agreement was reached in 1882 with the innkeeper and purveyor to the court, Fritz Helms, who wanted to open a 'refreshment hall' on the property.
The lease of the site to Helms was subject to the condition that he built his restaurant in lightweight construction so that it could be removed quickly if the contract was terminated. In order to allow the building to be rebuilt elsewhere, the architects devised a simple half-timbered construction made of iron pillars and girders with individual flat diagonal struts behind the masonry. The lightweight construction was also based on statics and served to avoid placing too much stress on the poor building site.
Café Helms was an early example of prefabrication in Germany, where prefabricated house development lagged behind the UK, United States and France. The infilling of the iron skeleton was made with thin Verblendsteinen and terracotta . Inside, the building was covered with board walls, which disappeared in the guest area under leather wallpapers that were decorated with ornaments influenced by Japonism . The air in the spaces was used for thermal insulation . The roofs consisted of self-supporting, galvanized corrugated iron sheets that were held together with tie rods. In the hall wing, the tin roof was paneled with pine wood, which was supported by wooden pillars.
Overall system
Ende and Böckmann were given the comparatively rare task of planning a building that was to be used exclusively as a restaurant but was located in a busy inner city area. They designed a long hall wing between two pavilions. The connecting wing and the right pavilion were single-storey, the larger left pavilion had an upper floor and a lower basement.
In front of and behind the hall wing were gardens that could be used as beer gardens in the warmer half of the year . The rear garden stretched to the end of the headland so that it was partially surrounded on three sides by water. A terrace had also been built in the front garden on the street side . It covered iron flaps under which the opening devices for the locks of the dam on the mill ditch were attached.
The guests entered the garden through two side entrances in the front enclosure of the property. The two entrances to the pub were arranged in the same way in the symmetrical, nine-axle hall wing. The two pavilions had separate entrances.
The construction time was nine months. The cost of erecting and equipping the building was 200,000 marks (adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency: around 1.47 million euros).
Floor plan
In the connecting wing was the 5.30 meter high restaurant of the restaurant. The kitchen was set up in a large room on the north side of the left pavilion. In front of it was the washing-up room on the left and a dressing room on the right, separated by stairs that led to the upper floor or the basement. On the front garden side, there was another guest room that could be used as a billiard room. The toilets and washrooms for the guests were located between the hall wing and the two pavilions - on the left for men, on the right for women.
The right pavilion served as a pastry shop and coffee room. The room had been placed lower than the hall wing so that ground level access was possible from the Schloss Freiheit. It reached a height of 5.90 meters. In order to compensate for the difference in the windows to the front garden, the guest tables were there on a pedestal. To the west, the pavilion had its own coffee kitchen, which also served as a bakery. Below her was the laundry room of the house. The rear veranda could be reached via the large lounge as well as via the sideboard and the coffee kitchen.
On the upper floor of the left pavilion there were living rooms for the landlord and staff. The basement, which was also accessed via an outside staircase, contained a changing room, an office, storage rooms and the potato crate as well as the coal cellar. The spacious beer cellar had found space under the billiard room.
Facade design
The cladding of the iron framework was done with facing stones and terracottas, which had been manufactured by the Ernst March & Sons company. The tone was, building on a tradition of Italian Renaissance been burned so that although he appeared to more color, the colors but not too strong chan lusted .
The facades of the pavilions were characterized by rectangular fields resulting from the half-timbered construction. Some of them had large windows and some ornamental or figural terracottas based on designs by the sculptor Otto Lessing were incorporated into them. The pavilions had delicate decorative gables on three sides . Below them were medallions separated by balusters that symbolized the luxury goods wine, beer, tea, coffee and tobacco.
reception
Café Helms developed into a popular meeting place for Berlin society. Theodor Fontane lets characters from his novels Effi Briest (1895) and The Poggenpuhls (1896) come to the restaurant. In doing so, the writer refrained from giving a more precise description of the location, which the contemporary Berlin reader should have been familiar with anyway. With Effi Briest , however, Fontane underwent an anachronism , because at the time the novel happened in 1880, the Café Helms was not yet open.
In 1904, the Architecture Handbook stated that it was regrettable that “the charming building has now been replaced by the Kaiser Wilhelm monument”. Adolf Hartung made a similar statement in 1908 in an obituary for Hermann Ende, who died the previous year, in the specialist journal Berliner Architekturwelt . He described the Café Helms as "an extremely charming building with a cheerful colored brick and terracotta architecture".
literature
- M. Friedeberg: Café Helms in Berlin . In: Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung , 4th year 1884, No. 1 (from January 5, 1884) ( online ), pp. 4–5.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ At the Werderschen mills . In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein , An der Stechbahn . In: Luise. , Lock freedom . In: Luise.
- ↑ Lock freedom . In: Berliner Adreßbuch , 1890, part 2, p. 411., part II, p.
- ↑ The founding work for the construction of the national monument for Kaiser Wilhelm I at the Freedom Palace in Berlin. In: Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung , Volume 16, 1896, No. 34 (from August 22, 1896), pp. 373–375.
- ^ Claudia Fuchs: Dripstone caves under the castle square . In: Berliner Zeitung , August 12, 2002.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung , 4th year 1884, No. 1, pp. 4–5. (see literature )
- ^ Theodor Fontane : Complete novels, short stories, poems, bequests. Edited by Walter Keitel. Department 1, Volume 4: Effi Briest, Ms. Jenny Treibel, Die Poggenpuhls, Mathilde Möhring. Hanser, Munich 1963, p. 754, footnote 205.
- ↑ Kurt Junghanns : The house for everyone. On the history of prefabrication in Germany. Ernst, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-433-01274-1 , pp. 24-28.
- ↑ a b c d e Eduard Schmitt (ed.): Handbuch der Architektur , part 5, half volume 4, issue 1. 3rd edition, Kröner, Stuttgart 1904, pp. 125–126.
- ^ Walter Hettche: From Wanderer to Flaneur. Forms of metropolitan depiction in Fontane's prose. In: Hanna Delf von Wolzüge (Ed.): Theodor Fontane - at the end of the century. Vol. 3: History - Forgetting - Big City - Modernity. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1797-8 , pp. 149–160, here p. 154.
- ↑ Bernd W. Seiler: The scenes. Chapter twenty-fourth. ( Memento of June 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) On: Fontane's “Effi Briest”. A literature commentary on CD-ROM. Büchner, Bamberg 2004, ISBN 3-7661-9612-X . Excerpts from the Bielefeld University website; Retrieved June 3, 2009.
- ^ Adolf Hartung: Hermann Ende. March 4, 1829 to August 10, 1907 . In: Berliner Architekturwelt , Volume 10, 1907/1908, Issue 7 (October 1907) ( online as PDF; 11.0 MB), pp. 241–244.
Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 58.1 ″ N , 13 ° 24 ′ 0.5 ″ E