Berlin Bohème – In the swimming pool of the writers

People came to Berlin 100 years ago with the intention of becoming famous. And people went to the Romanisches Café to belong and have their importance recognized. In the 1920s, Berlin was an Eldorado for the avant-garde and its centerpiece was this legendary café in the New West between Kurfürstendamm, Tauentzien, Budapester Straße and the Zoo. It takes its name from the Romanesque Quarter, a building ensemble in the neo-Romanesque style with the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the center.

After just 14 months of construction, the Romanesque Café opened on April 1, 1901 in Romanesque House II and from then on became a center of attraction for artists and writers – especially those who never had much money. In the middle of the inflation, the young Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1923: “When I show up at the Romanesque Café, there are shouts at many tables. But I can’t live. I don’t drive or go to gambling dens. I can no longer pay my living expenses with my earnings.«

The coffee house runs all night long. The largest room with its Art Nouveau furniture is nicknamed the “non-swimmers’ pool” for those who don’t quite fit in yet (but would like to); The pastry shop is known as the “swimmer’s pool” because of its prominent guests. The most crowded place is always the café terrace with its view of the hustle and bustle of the metropolis, lively and exciting.

The modern cinema palaces are in the immediate vicinity, and so numerous actors are drawn here. The operetta star Fritzi Massary, for example, captures the attitude to life of the time with the song “Why shouldn’t a woman have a relationship?” Else Lasker-Schuler’s affair with Gottfried Benn also begins here. And next to them you can see the famous faces of the regular guests: Irmgard Keun and Erich Kästner, Mascha Kaléko and Egon Erwin Kisch, Valeska Gert and Wolfgang Koeppen, Elisabeth Bergner and Albert Einstein, Ruth Landshoff, Joachim Ringelnatz and Leni Riefenstahl.

They all frequent the café at their specific times. Writers and visual artists create the glamorous flair, which is repeatedly captured in drawings and collages. Painters like Christian Schad (“Sonja”) or the lesser-known Ulrich Jahr – the book’s cover photo comes from him – convey the inimitable atmosphere of the coffee house with their works. Walter Benjamin gave it the apt name “Headquarters of the Bohemians”. That was a century ago, and yet its aura is still unforgotten today.

All this and much more is offered in the magnificently presented volume “The Romanesque Café in Berlin in the 1920s” from the Verlag für Berlin und Brandenburg, which presents the unique genre picture of a historical artists’ meeting with texts and illustrations from the time. It is the volume for an exhibition about the café, which can be seen in Berlin’s Europa Center until the end of January.

“For hundreds of us in the 1920s it was a ‘pumping station’, a salon, an information office, a discussion club, a reading room, an office and a panopticon at the same time,” writes the journalist and contemporary witness Hans Tasiemka in his memoirs. If one of them has run out of money, they can always find a cup of coffee, a few encouraging conversations and the country’s latest newspapers for free in the Romanisches Café. A team of authors led by editor Katja Baumeister-Frenzel – who is also the curator of the exhibition – has done a great job.

In a fast-paced chronicle from the end of the 19th century through the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era to the wartime destruction of the building complex around the Memorial Church in August 1943, the authors show how and why the Romanisches Café (after the Café des Westens, the original meeting place, had to close in 1921) could become such a magnet. It radiated far beyond Berlin and has become recognized as a synonym for modern German literature and art.

This had to be a thorn in the side of the new rulers, and so in 1933 most of the regular guests were expelled by the Nazis. Among them is a veteran like John Höxter, painter, poet and morphinist, who is also homosexual and of Jewish descent. He lost his footing with the café and took his own life in 1938. An era soon ends.

Katja Baumeister-Frenzel (ed.): The Romanesque Café in Berlin in the 1920s. VBB, 196 p., hardcover, numbered. Fig., €25; Exhibition until 31.1. in the Europa Center, Tauentzienstraße 9, Berlin.