The classic Berliner Kneipe is an endangered species these days. A year ago, German newspapers reported on the closure of one of Berlin’s longest-running cult Kneipen: Prenzlauer Berg’s Höher’s Eck, which had been around for 120 years, shuttered after the investment company who owned the property declined to renew their lease.
In 2023, the owner of Neukölln’s beloved Kindl-Klause was forced by court order to hand over the keys to his century-old Kneipe – where “the walls [were] wood-paneled, and the oldest photo dates back to 1930” – after a long bureaucratic fight. Later that year, Mommsen-Eck in Charlottenburg, which had been serving beer since 1905, turned off its taps forever and became a coffee shop.
There were once as many as 20,000 neighbourhood pubs in Berlin, but that number had dwindled to around just 500 by 2024, with even fewer of the round-the-clock bars still hanging on, according to a report from the Berlin Hotel and Restaurant Association (DEHOGA). In 1905, there was one Kneipe for every 157 Berliners; today, that’s fallen to one for every 4,000, and shrinking.
So, in the spirit of documenting a beloved but dwindling culture, The Berliner spent a full 24 hours in one of Neukölln’s most notorious never-closed bars.
10:00 am
- 12 people in the bar
- Now playing on the jukebox: Bier by Kiz X Drunken Masters
“Kann ich noch ein Bier haben?” It’s Friday morning, the sun is out, and the bartender on duty, Nicki, is teaching a customer with rudimentary German how to get another round. Outside, Sonnenallee is bustling with people on their way to work and running errands. Not us: we’re bellying up to the bar at Bierbaum 2, where it could really be any hour of the day. The smokey 24-hour establishment doesn’t subscribe to arcane concepts like time.
The group of English speakers just got here, Nicki says. Everyone else in the Kneipe has been here overnight; the tables are cluttered with beer-logged coasters and cigarette butts. To the right of the bar, an older German man wearing a bright orange windbreaker appears to be asleep at one of the slot machines. Nobody is using the pool table, or the electronic dart board. A sign above the bar lets customers know that, for just €1, someone will charge your phone for 30 minutes.
“Life is suffering,” he says. “Cheers!”
In the moments where nobody needs anything, Nicki stands at the counter, eating a breakfast of Graubrot with cream cheese and smoking a cigarette, chatting to two of the bar’s regulars – who have both been here all night, and who, we’ll later discover, will be here most of the day. There’s “Dr” Rolf, a slim 79-year-old German with a white-haired ponytail, a scruffy beard and a worn navy blue coat that he says was once issued by the German navy.
Next to him is a man who introduces himself as Abdul Aziz. He’s a Sudanese father of six with a beaded wooden necklace on. He calls Dr Rolf “Papa”, and Nicki behind the bar “Mama”. Together the men drink their beer, communicating through garbled language and drunken expressions, grasping one another’s hands for emphasis. For long-haul Stammgäste, they’re surprisingly alert.
In 2020, a reporter for the Wedding Weiser – a local outlet dedicated to all things Wedding – spent 11 hours at a Kneipe underneath the Ringbahn at Nettelbeckplatz called Zum Magendoktor (which Google clunkily translates to ‘The Gastroenterologist’, though it’s more likely a cheeky play on the literal translation, “stomach doctor”). The publication wrote that the Kneipe was “like a snow globe of society. It seems as if people from all walks of life have been randomly picked up, placed there, and shaken.”
It’s by a similar principle that Dr Rolf and Abdul Aziz have come to share their bar with the pair of British-born Berliners that have just arrived. Eric is dressed head to toe in black denim; his girlfriend Sarah is also in the Berlin uniform, a long black coat and sunglasses. They’re with a German-Italian man who proclaims the couple some of his closest friends, even though they met just hours earlier. Technically, Eric’s at work right now – he shows us his active Slack status to prove it. His job is at a tech startup (for now, at least; he’s being let go at the end of the month). He and Sarah both seem hammered; they inquire about cocaine.
Eric insists that being in Bierbaum before lunch isn’t grim, or even “that deep”. “I mean, we’re not fucking alcoholics. We just went out for a beer, and then another. We all have jobs. We’re not trash like maybe some other people here.” He gestures broadly toward Dr Rolf and Abdul Aziz. “Sometimes you’re just looking for that certain vibe of a place like Bierbaum, if you know what I mean.” Meanwhile, Dr Rolf and Abdul Aziz are trying to get Bierbaum’s jukebox to work. “Macht du Take Five, bitte? T-A-K-E und dann five,” says Dr Rolf, attempting to queue up some jazz.
At 11 am, Eric and Sarah try to order another round. “Three beers? Absolutely not,” Nicki tells them, pointing to Srah. “That lady is wasted. I mean, look at her. She can’t even stand up straight.” Eric tries again. “Alright, but the lady only gets Coca-Cola!” A few minutes later, Nicki spots Sarah taking a sip of Eric’s beer, and the pair knows they’re busted; they leave. They’ve misunderstood the world of the Kneipe, if you ask Christoph Wulf, an anthropologist at Freie Universität. “It’s not about drunkenness, but rather the state of mild intoxication,” he once told Deutsche Welle.
For Berlin’s 24-hour Kneipen – and for party-loving Berliners writ large – the big question is always: When does night become day? How long can you go before you have to acknowledge that it’s tomorrow? Around noon, two delivery men drop off a massive fresh supply of booze – crate upon crate of Heineken, soda, and 50-litre kegs of Schultheiss. They grab two Red Bulls on their way out. A handful of older German men arrive to start drinking. It seems tomorrow, in the world of the Kneipe, has officially begun.
For Dr Rolf, the Thursday-to-Friday shift is his weekly ritual. He lives in the neighbourhood, in the same apartment he’s been in for the last 50 years (90 square metres, €350, the dream). On Thursday nights, he starts at another Kneipe in the area, then moves to Bierbaum around 1 or 2 am. Over time, he’s developed a trick: he wears a long red scarf around his neck, which works as a conversation starter. “I have made an interesting empirical observation,” he tells us. “Whenever I wear this scarf, people seem very interested in me, like I have a captivating aura. They just come up and talk to me. If I didn’t wear it, maybe nobody would.”
Dr Rolf was born in the aftermath of World War II, and in his telling, it was a rough childhood. He began studying to be a doctor at 29, eventually working as a neuroscientist between Berlin and Lüneburg. He was supposed to go to Harvard, he claims, but instead adopted two children from Cameroon, when he was 48. Even though both still live in the area, he rarely sees them anymore. “They never make time for their old man, won’t even drive me to the doctor,” he says sadly. He’s lonely, eager to talk about world politics, psychology, women. “I just wish I would’ve settled for a nice lady at some point, but I never felt quite ready, you know?”
By the early afternoon, the crowd – now about 20 people – is mostly older men in work overalls, sharing a quiet Feierabendbier while smoking cigarillos. Nicki eats another Graubrot mit Wurst and complains that the guests choose terrible music. Lonely Day by System of a Down plays on the jukebox. A blonde woman named Maria walks in and orders a coffee. Setting her plastic Edeka bag aside, she settles in on the slot machines, smoking Marlboro Reds. Two hours later, we ask if she’s had any luck. Maria doesn’t look up, just keeps pushing buttons, and says in a heavy Eastern European accent: “Nothing, absolutely nothing. It’s a shit day.” She lights another cigarette.
At 3 pm, Johanna, the evening bartender, arrives for her shift wearing a shirt that says “Vodka Bärchi”. On her way out, Nicki opens a few of the windows facing Sonnennallee to clear out some of the lingering smoke.
4:00 pm
- 20 people in the bar
- Now playing on the jukebox: German rap
Bierbaum 2 has, by now, turned from a hangover tour to something of a living room. At the counter, two silver-haired men are locked in a long game of dice later determined to be a variation of Yahtzee. At one of the high-top tables across from the bar, an elderly man exhibits stunning beer-pouring ineptitude, emptying a bottle of pilsner into a glass from such a height that it nearly overflows with foam. It’s an impressive defiance of technique for someone who looks well-practised at day drinking.
By 5 pm, a new regular has arrived: Thorsten has his Pink Floyd hat on backwards and has accessorised his blue work overalls with a chain and what we can only hope is a purely decorative leather knife pouch. “Hast du Youtube?” he asks. He wants to show us his favourite album, ‘Earthsong and Stardance’ – epic Gregorian chants and orchestral arrangements from an Austrian New Age composer named Gandalf. Thorsten is gregarious, not a believer in personal space. And, like a good Kneipe patron, he’s convinced that we’re already friends. Maybe he knows us from a phone hotline? Doesn’t matter, he’s buying either way. And he’s emptying a bag of hard candies onto the table to share.
Suddenly, the jukebox stops. The silence is jarring. Thorsten scrambles for some coins. He picks Pink Floyd’s Wearing the Inside Out, which he says reminds him of a former girlfriend from the 80s. This seems sweet until he adds that the girlfriend had a difficult history with drugs, often prostituting herself at Bahnhof Zoo, and Thorsten once found her passed out on the toilet with a needle in her arm. As dark as the story is, it’s not the first moment that the Kneipe has felt like a confessional. There’s something about the space that makes people who can hold their liquor all too happy to spill their life story.
In Thorsten’s case, he’s what he calls a “Kneipenjunge” – he grew up in this environment. In the 1970s, he tells us, his grandmother worked at Kindl-Stube, a Gaststätte in Moabit. It’s a half-timbered house near a former rail yard that, as the oldest privately-run restaurant in Moabit, has changed hands multiple times since opening in 1897. At the end of WWII, according to Berliner Morgenpost, a “Mutter Busch” took over as proprietor, serving beer and pub food on the ground floor and operating a truck driver’s brothel upstairs.
“There were three rooms for the love services, downstairs the legendary Schultheiss beer and festive food from the counter, like meatballs, lard sandwiches, and pickles,” Wolfram Ritschl, who bought the property in 1984 and now operates it as Restaurant Paris-Moskau, told the paper. Today, it’s where Angela Merkel eats steak tartare. It’s not clear if Mutter Busch is, in fact, Torsten’s grandmother, but it seems possible – using Google Street View, he points out the windows on the first floor where he remembers his grandmother living, and where the kitchen was. Torsten’s father, he says, was a long-distance truck driver who regularly moved goods between Turkey and the UK; the Moabit pub, just 400 metres from Hauptbahnhof, was long a popular watering hole for long-haul truckers.
At 7 pm, the first non-human customer enters Bierbaum: an aged Dachshund named Chica, who parks herself with quiet dignity beside the bar. She’s still there hours later when war breaks out over the jukebox. An older couple, who have been canoodling at a high-top, have loaded up the queue with back-to-back-to-back Schlager. When they get up to clunkily waltz to the music, a grumpy-looking man jumps up and chooses a new song, using up one of their credits in what is obviously poor jukebox etiquette. Harsh words are exchanged. But the tension doesn’t last long; beer heals all wounds. In fact, the former jukebox bandit cheers along with the bar crowd when Stereoact’s deep-house remix of Kerstin Ott’s Die Immer Lacht starts playing. In the hubbub, Chica makes a break for it toward Sonnennallee. The Schlager-loving man, back at the high-top, leans to the side, lifts up a single butt cheek, and lets out a slow fart.
10:00 pm
- 18 people in the bar
- Now playing on the jukebox: Les Wagonnets by Michel Jonasz
By the time night falls, the lights inside Bierbaum 2 feel oddly bright. Dr Rolf and Abdul Aziz are still at the bar together. Abdul Aziz has turned morose. “Life is suffering,” he says. “Cheers!”
The 1995 academic monograph Verbale Kommunikation in der Stadt dedicated several chapters to what the pair are doing right now. Conversations inside a Kneipe “do not require a shared history between the conversation partners, but they do offer the individual considerable scope for self-presentation. Since Kneipe-goers and bar patrons gladly make use of this, a field of mutual recognition arises that can include many types of people, from the taciturn oddball to the everyday philosopher to the prototypical drunk and virtuoso braggart.” Kneipen, the book adds, are “an escape space”, where social status recedes into the background in favour of mutual behavioral security. “Drinking and speaking, loud action and dull emptiness, dynamics and silence constantly alternate. But that does not mean that nothing is happening.”
At half past 10, a mullet brigade arrives; a group of young men with moustaches and baseball caps. Two of them engage in a back-slapping bro hug for so long it feels sensual. People are playing darts. For the first time in our Bierbaum tour of duty, there are people here that appear to be on a first date. The woman has a silent, thousand-yard stare. Perhaps she expected to be wined and dined, not taken to a Kneipe where Baby B Mine by Dj Armz feat. Michael Jackson and 2pac are playing while an old man hovers his finger perpetually over the screen for TANO, the African savannah casino game.
Dr Rolf says he’s leaving. (He stays.) A middle-aged woman in a pink top and a massive pink handbag takes shots of Futschi, a traditional Berlin Kneipe drink made of cheap brandy and cola whose name derives from the slang word “futschikato”, meaning “gone” or “broken”. Left Outside Alone by Anastacia comes on the jukebox, and the woman whose date isn’t going well finally perks up.
At midnight, we mention, in passing, a birthday; Abdul Aziz mishears. “It’s your birthday? Happy birthday!” he says. Word spreads rapidly through the Kneipe, and everyone begins singing. Dr Rolf offers two wishes – the first is incoherent, but the second is for lasting happiness. “I will buy you 2,000 pints, if you want,” promises a man called Anis. Finally, some fake birthday respect! His circular sunglasses are stuck on his forehead, and he’s missing a front tooth. Anis is visiting Berlin from Frankfurt. “I don’t know why I came to Bierbaum,” he says, “but I’m loving it.” He teaches us his preferred drinking custom (clinking both the top and bottom of one’s glass) and then retreats across the bar, where he makes millennial-style heart-hands at us.
By now, the bartender has changed again, to a tall man in a grey t-shirt who is more concerned with pilfering cigarettes from regulars than pouring pints. There are some new Bierbaumers: three friends wearing brightly-coloured fleeces and backpacks, as if they’ve just walked off a mountain, and a woman at the end of the bar with an industrial-sized vape whose friend is sleeping with his head on her shoulder. Abdul Aziz sings along to the reggae on the jukebox; he’s surprisingly good. “I don’t have a family. I’ve never felt like I fit in anywhere. This is my family,” he says, inviting us to the dance class he runs when he’s not at Bierbaum 2. A blonde couple makes out in the corner by the pool table. When Abdul Aziz finally leaves at 1 am, Dr Rolf goes with him.
Nearby, at one of the tables in the smoking corner, a woman named Liz has set up camp. She’s arranged two bags of tobacco, a necklace in the shape of the sun, a metal cup and a squashed pastry, plus a small menagerie of plastic animals: a white leopard, a panda, a unicorn. With a tree branch stuck through her grey bun, she examines a book of Buddhist mantras. “I have a number of gurus, but I like the female one best,” she tells us. She takes out a small jar and paints her nails a sparkly blue.
Strategically or not, Liz has forgotten any form of payment, so her drinks are being bought by other guests. She shoots tequila and shrieks in disgust. There’s a hole in her nose where a piercing used to be. She’s 60 years old, and has lived in Berlin for 34 of them. “But I don’t know if I’d call myself a Berliner. I could be anything, you know.” What she is, she tells us, is a polyglot mother of two and a bartender over at Bierbaum 1, near Körnerpark. (“It’s much cleaner and calmer, you should come by.”)
She also works at a women’s shelter, and regularly hosts refugees in her home. “The way we treat refugees here is terrible,” she opines. Her 35-year-old “lover” is Algerian, and she’s fighting for his right to stay in Germany. “I was worried about the age gap, judging myself and worried if people would judge me, but then I thought, well, if it’s good enough for Madonna! Her boyfriends keep getting younger and younger and she keeps getting more…” She puffs out her cheeks, mimicking filler.
It’s 3 am now; Robbie Williams is playing. Liz shows Anis and his friends her crystals. When they leave, she swipes their unfinished drinks. (At the Kneipe, anthropologist Wulf told DW, “you meet acquaintances, not friends”.) This is the turning point of the night: it’s leave now or stay forever. Someone falls asleep against a decorative barrel, underneath a sign proclaiming Prosecco to be just €4. Liz, barefoot, dances to John Legend.
4:00 am
- 40 people in the bar
- Now playing on the jukebox: Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum
The collective Bierbaums – there are three, all in Neukölln – are a much-memed institution in Berlin. “They should film the next season of white lotus here”, above a photo of Bierbaum 2’s facade; “How it feels to sit at Bierbaum on Monday morning” with a Degas painting that depicts a Victorian woman looking dazed; “Bierbaum energy” and a photo of Timothee Chalamet and Larry David drinking together. It’s clear now, at 4 am, why Bierbaum inspires the public imagination in this way; the beauty of the all-hours bar is that it’s rarely the night’s first stop.
“It’s like Hotel California,” says Klaus, at a table with his friends Paul and Chrissy, all of them in leather jackets. “Very hard to leave.” Another group in their mid-twenties, all of them in pastels – one yellow, one purple one blue – have the corner bench. Aya, the yellow one, has never been to Bierbaum before, but she loves a traditional Kneipe. “They’re old and melancholy, and they never change,” she says. “It’s like a dystopia in here – it’s like Blade Runner,” adds her friend Charlie. Presumably she means the overhead lighting, which in its oppressive wattage is the least Kneipe-y part of Bierbaum. “I like the tree, though. Very festive.”
By 6 am, there are at least 55 people in the bar – the most we’ve seen. Candy Shop by 50 Cent plays. Sunlight filters in. A violently redheaded woman with a large cross necklace and a black leather cowgirl hat comes by and clears our glasses. Does she work here? No, she’s just a regular pitching in. This is how it’s been for the duration of our stay: the regulars consider themselves caretakers of this bar.
There’s been another bartender shift, and a matronly woman with short hair and glasses is in charge. She commands an authority that the graveyard shift bartender either couldn’t or didn’t care to exude. At one point, she flies over to a group of men with an iPad in hand, showing them CCTV footage of one of them doing a line of coke off the table.
An hour later, she cuts the jukebox to issue a loud verbal warning to the whole of Bierbaum: “Smoking pot is not allowed here. Going to the bathrooms together is not allowed. I don’t give a shit what you do to your bodies – but our interior stays whole! We’re going [to the bathrooms] separately. Male, female. Alone and with some decency. Like adult human beings and not like children.” Her warning does little to disturb the vibe.
Hannes, 19, is here with his brother. They’re native Berliners, dressed in identical Adidas tracksuits and Kangol hats. “We came here from Poison. It’s karaoke. Did a lot of blow,” he tells us. He sang Green Day’s ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’. He and his brother “accidentally” wore the same jacket. Hannes loves a Kneipe, and claims his longest stint is 25 hours. “I just took a nap,” he says by way of explanation.
His record, it seems, is easily topped by Liesa, a 33-year-old Bavarian who is definitely losing her voice. She claims her longest run – in this very Bierbaum – was 49 hours, a Saturday-to-Monday marathon. “I quit my job last year and decided I’d have a hot girl summer,” she explains. It helps that she lives just across the street. Liesa, who is wearing zebra-striped pants, also claims to be the “resident DJ”. (Having spent the last day here, some regulars might object to that.) “It’s the magic of Bierbaum 2. It’s where everyone goes when everything else is closed. It’s the first decision and the last decision, and the worst decision.”
At 9:12 am – just 48 minutes shy of what we came to achieve – Liesa points to a man who is setting his backpack down near the bar, grinning, wearing a “Berlin ist Beste” t-shirt. “That’s Malik,” she says. “Everybody knows him. He’ll be here until Tuesday.”
By José-Luis Amsler, Sophie Field, Lily Johnston, Ivona Alavanja and Ruth Weissmann.
