Romanesque café

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
New Romanesque house, around 1901

The Romanisches Café was a well-known Berlin artist's bar east of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the Charlottenburg district . The Europa-Center has stood on Breitscheidplatz between Tauentzienstrasse and Budapester Strasse since 1965 .

History of the cafe

Main room, later called "pool for non-swimmers", 1908

The first floor of the “New Romanesque House” , completed in 1901, was the Kaiserhof café-pastry shop (as a kind of branch of the famous Kaiserhof hotel ). The Berlin address book for 1902 already called this restaurant Romanisches Café - an obvious name in view of the elaborate neo-Romanesque interior design of the rooms, which some visitors found rather gloomy and heavy. Later it was under the direction of Bruno Fiering until the Second World War.

After the decline of the Café des Westens on Kurfürstendamm , from 1915 onwards, the Romanisches Café attracted the intellectuals and artists who had previously frequented it: renowned writers, painters, actors, directors, journalists, critics. At the same time, it was the point of contact for artists-to-be looking for first contacts. Those who were already successful tried to fend off any too clumsy advances. Their territory was the so-called "pool for swimmers", the adjoining room with around 20 tables. All others were referred to the main room with around 70 tables, the "pool for non-swimmers". The chess players traditionally met in the gallery, the "strangers" romped about on the terrace.

Regulars jokingly called it "Rachmonisches Café" in the 1920s. When the political conflicts became more violent towards the end of the Weimar Republic , the Romanisches Café gradually lost its role as a meeting point. As early as March 20, 1927, the National Socialists staged a riot on Kurfürstendamm, and the Romanisches Café was also a target of vandalism . The " seizure of power " by the National Socialists and the associated emigration of many, often Jewish, regular guests meant the final end of the artist café. In 1933 the uniformed Gestapo took a seat at their own table.

The building was badly damaged in an Allied air raid in 1943 and its ruins were demolished in the 1950s.

Contemporary reception

Girls in the Romanesque Café , Lesser Ury , 1911

Erich Kästner noted:

“The room is like a wave of admiration when someone who is lucky enters it. And whoever he greets feels consecrated [...] "

The journalist Pem targeted the guests:

“The tireless revolving door of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church never stands still and repeatedly throws guests from the noisy street into the quiet, musicless café.
Here they crouch at the small, round marble tables, read countless newspapers and discuss everything from La-ot-se to the modern theater to the latest traffic regulations, spread the soft gossip of writers and despite their worries, they feel like something special. […] The many nameless people, from whom a good head now and then promises a future, sit here; but also the stars have remained loyal to the place of their pre-famous life. And everything knows each other, even if sometimes only by looking away. "

The publicist Walther Kiaulehn expressed himself ambiguously:

“The 'Romanesque' was loveless and devoid of any mood, a particularly unsuccessful building from the Wilhelmine era, only large, two huge rooms, one of which was ranked, lit as bright as day until morning, but always packed. Only the terrace was nice, especially in the early morning when the literature was still asleep. The tradition of the 'Romansh', over fifty years old, was rooted in the old ' Café des Westens ' on Kurfürstendamm, called 'Café megalomania' by the citizens. One day the owner got fed up with the nickname and gave painters and writers their home, and so they moved to 'Romansh', which until then no one had ever gone to. They [...] named the front room a 'non-swimmer pool', which could also be used by the general public [...] "

- Berlin, fate of a cosmopolitan city

The journalist Karlernst Werle rhymed rather sarcastically :

"Place of overheated thinking,
spirit-laden rendezvous'
café, mystical immersion,
cradle of shimmering Lulus."

Wolfgang Koeppen on the decline of the café after 1933:

"[...] we saw the terrace and the coffee house blow away, disappear with its mental load, dissolve into nothing [...] and the guests of the café scattered all over the world or were caught or were killed or killed themselves or crouched and sat still in the café with moderate reading and were ashamed of the tolerated press and the great betrayal [...] "

Mascha Kaléko wrote the poem Scrawled on a café table about the Romanesque café:

I'm not used to long waiting,
I've always kept others waiting.
Now I'm crouching between empty coffee cups
and wondering if it's all worth it.

It's so different from the earlier days.
We both feel silently: that's the rest.
Don't ask like that. - A lot can be said that
actually cannot be said.

Half past twelve. So late! The guests are to be counted.
I wrap up my optimism.
In this city of four million souls,
a soul seems to be pretty rare.

In 1927 Friedrich Hollaender's cabaret revue "Around the Memorial Church with us" premiered. The Romanesque Café was one of the scenes. Willi Schaeffers sang the theme song as "Romanischer Kellner". Anni Mewes sang the chanson of a ragged girl: Two dark eyes, two eggs in a glass .

The film Menschen am Sonntag was made in 1929 based on an idea by Moriz Seeler . One scene takes place in a café.

In 1932, the 23-year-old Siegfried Sonnenschein composed the hit Auf der Terrasse vom Romanisches Café .

Regular guests

Afterlife in art

Romanisches Café comes from Gerhard Haase-Hindenberg . A theater revue , world premiere in 1990, Freie Volksbühne Berlin / Maxim-Gorki-Theater , Berlin.

Tom Peuckert wrote the play Artaud remembers Hitler and the Romanisches Café , premiered in 2000 in the Berliner Ensemble . The monologue-drama causes the French actor and playwright Antonin Artaud to fantasize insanely about having met Adolf Hitler in the Romanisches Café in 1932 .

Romanesque cafes No. 2 and 3

In the Europa-Center , which opened in 1965, there was a new Romanesque café in the same location in the 1970s . Since 2012 there has been  a café on the west side of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Hardenbergstrasse 28, whose name was also intended to tie in with the tradition of the original Romanesque café. It belonged to the newly built Hotel Waldorf Astoria in the zoo window . In the meantime (as of June 2016) the concept has been revised and the restaurant has been reopened under the name "Roca".

literature

  • John Höxter : That's how we lived! 25 years of bohemian Berlin . Biko, Berlin 1929.
  • Georg Zivier : The Romanesque Café. Apparitions and marginal phenomena around the Memorial Church . Haude & Spener, Berlin 1965.
  • Wolfgang Koeppen : Romanesque café. Narrative prose . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972.
  • Gabriele Silbereisen: The "Romanische Café" in the New Romanisches Haus ... In: Historical Commission of Berlin (Ed.): Charlottenburg, Part 2, The New West. (=  History Landscape Berlin, Places and Events , Volume 1.) Nicolaische, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-87584-143-3 , pp. 325-335.
  • Hermann-J. Fohsel: In the waiting room of poetry. Else Lasker-Schüler, Benn and others. Images of times and morals from the Café des Westens and the Romanisches Café . Arsenal, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-921810-31-0 .
  • Jürgen Schebera: Back then in the Romanisches Café. Artists and their bars in Berlin in the twenties. Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-360-01267-4 .
  • Edgard Haider: Lost splendor. Stories of destroyed buildings. Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2006, ISBN 978-3-8067-2949-8 .

Web links

Commons : Romanisches Café  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Romanesque café in the district lexicon Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf on berlin.de; Retrieved January 4, 2011
  2. ↑ Yiddish ráchmon = 'merciful'; The Talmud attaches this adjective to the Jewish people. Georg Zivier, p. 39 f., The creation of the name relates somewhat nebulously to the 'pitiful' state of the nation after the war.
  3. ↑ Edgard Haider: Lost Splendor. Stories of destroyed buildings . Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2006, ISBN 3-8067-2949-2 , pp. 162-167.
  4. ^ Georg Zivier: Romanisches Café , Berlin 1965, p. 99
  5. ↑ Erich Kästner: The rendezvous of the artists . ( Memento of the original from April 16, 2013 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. In: Neue Leipziger Zeitung , April 26, 1928. - Quoted from: Das Romanische Caféhaus (Mascha Kaleko - A homage; cf. Erich Kästner on the Romanisches Café - with photo) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.septembernebel.de
  6. ^ Paul Markus (d. I. Paul Marcus or Pem ): Die Bleibe . In: Der Junggeselle , No. 10, March 2nd, 1926, pp. 4–6, here: p. 5
  7. ↑ Walther Kiaulehn : Berlin, fate of a cosmopolitan city . Munich 1958, p. 233
  8. ↑ Quoted from: Edgard Haider: Lost splendor - stories of destroyed buildings. Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2006, p. 167
  9. ↑ A coffee house . In: Klaus Wagenbach (Ed.): Atlas . Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-8031-3188-X , p. 94 (1st edition 1965)
  10. ↑ Waldorf Astoria serves up something new . In: Allgemeine Hotel- und Gastronomiezeitung (print edition No. 2016/23), June 11, 2016, accessed on August 31, 2016