Romanisches Café

The Romanisches Café was situated in the Breitscheidplatz, about where Europa-Center is today. It opened in 1916. As the old Café des Westens had shut in 1915, it developed into the most important artists' cafe in Berlin, especially after 1918.

The café was a meeting place for the intelligentsia, for the leading writers, painters, actors, directors, journalists and critics of the day. At the same time it became a place for newbies, who would try to start their artistic careers by establishing contacts here. The already established artists, for their part, would group into séparées in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the mass.

Towards the end of the Weimar Republic, as the political situation in Germany became more violent, the Romanisches Café gradually lost its role. As early as 1927 the Nazis instigated a riot on the Kurfürstendamm during which the café, as a meeting place for the left-wing intellectuals they hated, was among the targets of violence. The coming to power of the Nazi Party and the subsequent emigration of most of its regulars signalled the final end of the café as an artists' haunt. The Romanisches Haus was completely destroyed by an Allied air-raid in 1943.

Famous regulars : Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Alfred Döblin, Hanns Eisler, George Grosz, Sylvia von Harden, Erich Kästner, Irmgard Keun, ElseLasker-Schüler, Erich Maria Remarque, Joseph Roth, Ernst Toller, Kurt Tucholsky, Franz Werfel, Billy Wilder.

This is how the writer Erich Kästner maliciously described it in 1928:

"The Romanisches Café is a waiting room for talent. Some people have been waiting for talent here every day for twenty years. They master the art of waiting to an astonishing extent, even if they don’t master anyhing else. (...) It is an infernal mass of Characters and those who want to be Characters. The first impression you have: hair, mane, curls all falling over the face. The second impression: how often do these people wash ?

This second impression may be unjustified in many cases, but the very fact you have it is significant in itself (...) Everyone knows everyone, they greet each other jovially or - another method - casually, in order not to interrupt their brain’s activity with poetry or other thinking. You sit at one table, then at another, first to tell gossip, second to explain to the waiter that you are just sitting there en passant. You read mountains of newspapers. You wait for happiness to step from behind the chair and tell you: "Sir, you are engaged!"

Artists who already have a name also come here. Why do they do it ? A bad habit, maybe. But there are also pathological cases: established artists who consider it a pleasure (and a cup of coffee is not so expensive after all) to look at the crowd of the wretched and the hopeless, while letting themselves be admired. For it is a wave of admiration when a succesful person enters the place. And whoever he greets feels honoured, consecrated …

Can you get an idea of the Romanische if to the preceding description I add that it is also called the ´Rachmonische´ and that besides the mentioned types there are artists, musicians, boxers and negroes sitting around? "

By Erich Kästner, Das Rendezvous der Künstler, Neue Leipziger Zeitung from 26 April 1928.

Today it would be risky to write a bit scornfully about black people and Jews, as Kästner does here in the last paragraph. But then, he was writing one century ago...

And the fact is that Yiddish writers did frequent the Romanisches Café, nicknamed the Rachmonisches ('pitiful' in Yiddish) by its regulars because of its poor food and run-down interior. 



And this is how another writer, the then young Irmgard Keun, saw the place:

"And beyond, is the Romanisches Café where men have so long hair! And there I spent the evenings with the cultural elite, which means a selection of the best (but every crossword-solver knows that). And we formed like a coterie the whole bundle, and the Romanisches Cafe is unrecognizable nowadays. And everyone says now: Lord, that place where all those penniless writers sit, you cannot go there anymore. But they go there. I learned a lot, it was like teaching yourself a foreign language. And none of them has much money, but they live in any case, and some of the elite play chess instead of having money. And it takes a lot of time, that's the point of it all, but the waiters don’t see it that way, because a cup of coffee brings a tip of five pfennig and it's not much from a chess-guest who sits there for seven hours."

By Irmgard Keun, "The artificial silk girl", 1932 

 

 

 

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