Romanisches Café - Berlin

The 'Romanische Café' was a local spot for artists in Berlin, located in Kurfürstendam 238 in Berlin-Charlottenburg, in a nearby restaurant Hannah Arendt spent her last evening prior to her immediate and final departure from Germany following the rise of National Socialism, in order to board illegally a train to Prague, from there to Switzerland and finally to France... only in order to emigrate to the United States in 1941 after eight years of statelessness. Since the renovation of that part of Kurfürstendam in 1925, the café moved to Budapester St. 10.

The Romanische Café stood in a representative Romanian-style house built in between 1900 and 1901 designed by Franz Schwechten. The structure, composed of two towers, was located on the same spot with the Europa-Center stands today. In the beginning it was a bakery of the Kaiserhof Hotel and in 1916 the Romanische Café opened its doors. Since the closure of the 'Café des Westens' in 1915, the 'Romanische Café' positioned itself after the end of World War I as the most prominent artists' meeting point in Berlin.

In the Romanischen Café the local intelligentsia often gathered, and there ran in and out the most important writers, painters, actors, journalists, critics and and producers. It also become the most frequented place by artists in the make to establish contacts with the art world. There the most successful artists of the period tried to differentiate themselves from the large masses of talent and more talent. As the end of the Weimar Republic drew closer the political arguments turned into violence the Cafè lost gradually its roll (this not without saying that the crowds of artists around Breker and the other Nazi artists also had their own venues from about this time until the very end of the war). Already on the 20th March of 1927 the Nazis organized a riot in Kurfürstendam, whereby the Café was located and where their most hatred foes were to be found - the left intelligentsia. There Café of course was the target of Nazi violence.

The official rise of National Socialism and the imminent immigration of most of the guests at the Café constituted the definitive end of the Café as an artistic venue. The actual house was completely destroyed in 1943. Putting an end to a long line of 'salons' that existed since the Romantic period, starting with the respective salons of two prominent Jewesses, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense and Henriette Herz... followed by smaller literary venues during the Imperial Era (of which I know very little) and finally the 'Café des Westen' in the fin-de-siècle, then replaced by the 'Romanischen Café'; other important circles were those around the Von Humboldt in the Romantic era and that of Max Weber and his wife Marianne already in Weimar times. The last vestiges of the salon were taken by the emigrants with them, who constituted its very last heirs. Hannah Arendt to New York, Else Lasker-Schüler to Jerusalem (from the testimony of Yehuda Amichai), Margarete Susman (to Zürich), and even Stefan Zweig to Brasil. This whole period extending over a hundred years is beautifully phrased by Arendt:

"Most representative of these salons, and the genuinely mixed society they brought together in Germany, was that of Rahel Varnhagen. Her original, unspoiled and unconventional intelligence, combined with an absorbing interest in people and truly passionate nature, made her the most brilliant and the most interesting of these Jewish women. The modest but famous soirées in Rahel's 'garret' brought together 'enlightened' aristocrats, middle-class intellectuals, and actors - that is, all those who, like the Jews, did not belong to respectable society. Thus Rahel's salon by definition did not share any of its conventions or prejudices".

Some of the visitors of the 'Romanischen Café' included Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, George Grosz, Mascha Kaléko, Erich Kästner, Else Lasker-Schüler, Joachim Ringelnatz, Joseph Roth, Kurt Tucholsky and Franz Werfel. There was also a lively musical scene around the cabarets, like the famous El Dorado (where both Nazis and homosexuals - for a time a hardly distinguishable crowd, made their first appearances in the night life of Weimar Berlin) and of which Brecht remained one of the most cherished guests. I haven't done much research about these cabarets, although it only reminds me of having met the old woman from the Brecht archives on the train to Berlin last year, who confessed she's still waiting for anybody to come and do some little research on this glorious time of Berlin's night life to which so much popular theatre and poetry were consecrated. Perhaps one day, when I'm less tired, less urgent, less unspeakable. Like my painter would write me last week, 'I dedicate all parties in my life to you, as they are simple reminders of our real feasts'; in re-writing albeit so briefly the history behind so many life-stories there, one returns home for a passing moment and that's quite enough with things being as they're, to have some diremption.