The food was bad, the tables weren’t particularly comfortable – so why did this café become the essential meeting place for the intellectual elite of Weimar Berlin? According to recollections of the journalist Pem (real name Paul E. Marcus), the initial cause was remarkable for its triviality: the comprehensive Brockhaus encyclopaedias were kept within easy reach on the main floor.
These volumes were a great resource for the artists, playwrights, feuilletonists and authors who transformed what could have been a stuffy café on Kurfürstendamm into the great intellectual marketplace of the age.
Each table was provided with its own ink, and a waiter would bring you whichever newspaper you wanted.
That same collection of encyclopaedias is now on display at the Romanisches Café exhibition, which opened at the Europa Center on Kurfürstendamm – the exact place where the legendary meeting spot once stood – last year. “The intellectuals would write here,” says curator Katja Baumeister-Frenzel. “Everyone had their project – a play or a book. Back then, most people sublet rooms from a landlady, and oftentimes, other people were not allowed to visit. Cafés were a place to get together and work.”
If the enduring image of 1920s Berlin has become something of a cliché (at best a George Grosz caricature; more often, a Babylon Berlin-style vision of cabaret and bob-haired flapper girls), one of the strengths of this exhibition is its ability to reveal the cultural vitality of the age. “Under the Kaiser, there had always been censorship,” says Baumeister-Frenzel. “That vanished in 1918, and it was like an explosion of intellectual activity.”
By 1920, Berlin had over 200 book publishers, 70 cabaret stages, countless theaters and cinemas, and more than 50 newspapers being published daily. Old photos of the Romanisches Café show ceiling-high newspaper shelves. “It was the high point in Berlin for daily newspapers.
Famous reporters were regulars here, too, with their own Stammtisch. Each table was provided with its own ink, and a waiter would bring you whichever newspaper you wanted. They didn’t just read the papers – they were written here.” As Walter Benjamin put it, a café was “more of a strategic headquarters than a place for leisurely relaxation”.
Benjamin was among the regulars at the Romanisches Café, alongside writers like Elias Canetti, Irmgard Keun, Bertolt Brecht and Else Lasker-Schüler, as well as painters like Otto Dix, Max Liebermann and Emil Orlik. The café was split in two. There was one entrance for “swimmers” (that is, high-profile regulars), where the tables were divided according to profession.
As theater critic Hans Sahl reported in his memoirs: “There was a sculptor’s table, a philosopher’s table, a stock exchange courier’s table, a table for critics, dramatists, essayists, sociologists, and psychoanalysts. Sometimes one pays a visit to another table, but that requires permission to join, which is granted only hesitantly.” The regular (“non-swimmers”) entrance to the café led to 60 or 70 tables where libertines, aspiring writers and bohemians mingled more freely.
The cultural life of the Romanisches Café was already being mythologised in 1927, when a cabaret about the area, Bei uns um die Gedächtniskirche rum (“Around the Memorial Church”), was performed. Around the same time, Walter Benjamin noticed the artists and intellectuals fading into the background, becoming “little more than part of the décor, while the bourgeoisie – represented by stockbrokers, managers, film and theater agents, and literature-loving clerks – began to take over the space.”
Its reputation for fostering dissenting opinion remained powerful enough, however, to attract the attention of the Nazis. In 1926, Joseph Goebbels wrote in one of the publications of the growing Nazi movement that “The Bolshevik Jews … sit in the Romanisches Café and hatch their sinister plans for a revolution”.
The exhibition currently showing at the Europa Center has taken great care to bring back original features of the Romanisches Café, a task made more difficult by the fact that the building was largely destroyed in an air raid in August of 1943. “After it was bombed, like many buildings in Berlin, it was just left. There was nothing remaining that you could buy or have in a museum,” Baumeister-Frenzel explains.
“We had to do a lot of research. We went into archives and did our detective work, looked at a lot of pictures to try and figure out how it was back then. How was the café organised? What did they sit on? What was placed on the tables? What did the guests hold in their hands?”
That detective work has paid off in authentic touches. The chair and table at the entrance to the exhibition are an exact match for those that once stood on the terrace of the Romanisches Café, sourced from a company in Vienna. The curators have also located the same matchholder-cum-ashtrays that sat on the tables, and the exact thick-stemmed glass serving dish that contained two boiled eggs for the cheap menu snack ‘Eier im Glas’.
When I visited, Baumeister-Frenzel had also just received a package. While many of the items on display are the exact model or make of the original, this would be the only object on display that actually once belonged there: a coffee cup, with the name Romanisches Café written on its front in pale-green letters.
Although the official date of the destruction of the Romanisches Café is 1943, its true death came a decade earlier, with the Nazi assumption of power. Many of the regulars were deported, driven into exile or committed suicide.
One of the most memorable accounts of the Romanisches Café, by German author Wolfgang Koeppen, gains its power by describing the café in its zombified afterlife – when its most prominent guests had fled, and those who remained behind were almost ashamed to bear witness to the ruins: “The guests of the café scattered all over the world or were captured or were killed or took their own lives or cowered and still sat in the café with mediocre reading material, ashamed of … the great betrayal … When they spoke with each other, they whispered, and when they left, they regretted that they had only whispered… the little gentlemen of the small powerless newspapers, beaten persecuted politicians, silenced poets, bound artists…”
Koeppen was also there to witness the air raid in 1943, which finally destroyed the building. He captured the moment in an image that conveys both destruction and violent revenge: “The city blazed, the firestorm roared, I climbed out of the shaft, the church tower was shattered, and the Romanisches Café glowed, as if in victory the Oriflamme of a secret fatherland was shining.”
- ‘Romanisches Cafe’ open indefinitely at Europa Center, Tauentzienstr. 9-12, Charlottenburg, details.
