Berlin, Berlin ! At least once !

By A.Vennemann

In 1927, the Berlin authorities created a board which was to be responsible for the city's advertising campaigns. Its first slogan was presented graphically: "Jeder einmal in Berlin", where the six letters of "Berlin" build the pillar of a stylized Brandenburg Gate.

The meaning of the slogan is "Everyone should be at least once in Berlin". In proper German the complete phrase would be "Jeder sollte einmal in Berlin sein".

Below is the complete version of the collage above. It is by Albert Vennemann. In it we recognize the famous light traffic tower from Potsdamer Platz, the Brandenburg Gate, the Rotes Rathaus, the radio tower, the frantic traffic including a bus with an advertisement for the Scala, a very successful variety hall. 

The poster above advertises also a song: "Jeder einmal in Berlin", music by Hugo Hirsch, lyrics by Alfred Müller-Förster, with Efim Schachmeister's orchester and the voice of Fritz Berger.

                                               CLICK TO LISTEN !
 

Another collage by Albert Vennemann: Potsdamer Platz

By Albert Vennemann

By Albert Vennemann

The bear, symbol of the city, invites the tourists to buy some Juno cigarettes as a lasting souvenir of the capital city.

    

Wenzel Hablik

Interior from his house at Itzehoe

"Utopian architectural designs, expressionist interiors, fantastic worlds of colour – all of this is only a fraction of the work of Wenzel Hablik (1881-1934), who dedicated himself to a synthesis of the arts as a universal artist. Hablik is considered one of the most important representatives of the German expressionist avant-garde in architecture and design. Even if the paths of modern art seem extensively researched his work still offers up surprises. The focus of the exhibition in Berlin is comprised of his architectural visions and his colourful 1923 masterpiece of spatial concept as reconstruction. These are complemented by the presentation of paintings and designs, as it is in combination that the basic idea of the synthesis of the arts as pursued by Hablik first becomes comprehensible. This is the first extensive solo exhibition of his work in Berlin.

"Hablik enjoys a particularly deep connection with Berlin. Here he participated in exhibitions of the Berlin Secession, presented his first etchings in the “Creative Forces” Cycle in 1912 at Herwarth Walden’s gallery “Der Sturm” alongside works by Picasso, Kandinsky, Kokoschka and Gauguin. In 1919 he participated in the “Exhibition of Unknown Architects” by the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers' Council for Art) at the invitation of Walter Gropius and became a member of it shortly thereafter. As part of the community of letters of the “Glass Chain”, Hablik held active discussions about Utopian architectural ideas with Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut as well as other architects and painters; amongst them Hermann Finsterlin, Hans and Wassili Luckhardt, Hans Scharoun und Max Taut. Together with them Hablik participated in the “New Building” exhibition in May 1920 at the Neumann Graphics Cabinet in Berlin.

 

1922 - http://www.ifg.uni-kiel.de/eckenundkanten/tafel29.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=581226

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
"It is something close to a minor sensation, that Wenzel Hablik’s colourful 1923 spatial concept design for a dining-room survived relatively unscathed for 80 years. He designed the dining-room of his villa in Itzehoe in multi-coloured and strict geometric forms from the floor to the ceiling. In 1933, he had it hidden under neutral wallpaper. The valuable paintings were uncovered in 2013. A reconstruction of this work of art can be seen at Martin-Gropius-Bau.

"Influenced by his studies at the School for Applied Arts in Vienna and the Art Academy in Prague, his development can be traced from art nouveau through expressionism and 1920’s enthusiasm for colour right up to the New Objectivity movement. His works are defined by a design vocabulary whose modernism is surprising even today.

Interior Itzehoe

Interior Itzehoe

 
"Born in 1881 in Bohemian Brüx, present-day Most in the Czech Republic, Hablik already learned the cabinetmaker's trade in his father’s workshop during his school days. During this period, he not only acquired a fundamental understanding of a craftsman’s work, but also laid the cornerstone of a crystal and natural history collection that accompanied his artistic creativity throughout his lifetime. It is the basis of his Utopian architectural concept developed over a period of 20 years, for which Hablik is internationally renowned until today. Since 1902 with the beginning of his study of painting at the Applied Arts in Vienna, Hablik drew groups of crystals, which in his fantasy formed fairy-tale castles on steep mountain slopes. These “crystal buildings”, as he called them, belong to the earliest known designs of crystalline architecture in European art history. They mark the beginning of Hablik’s later Utopian architectural designs.


 

Interior Itzehoe

At Sylt - 1910 By Wenzel Hablik - anagoria, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45221363

 
Undoubtedly influenced by the art and literature of romanticism, Hablik revered nature as the highest creative force and saw the most important symbol of natural creativity in the crystal – for him crystal architecture would become a societal utopia on the path to a better living environment. Inspired by writers such as H. G. Wells, Paul Scheerbart, Kurd Laßwitz and Jules Verne, Hablik’s architectural designs featured an increasingly technical component. He designed flying machines and air colonies, furnished them with detailed comments on construction and usage, whereby he not only sought technical solutions, but also devised innovative machines. It was a matter of overcoming reality with modern technology and changing society. In relation to this, travel to space should also seem possible – a topic to which he turned his attention in large format oil paintings. This preoccupation also influenced Hablik’s formal language in the design of arts and crafts. Folded star-shaped or prismatic boxes and inkwells made of brass and rolled silver recall Utopian buildings, become small architectural elements or heavenly bodies. As a member of the German Werkbund, Hablik made a fundamental contribution to modernism in almost all fields of applied art – from designs of weaving patterns, furniture and wallpaper, jewelry and lighting right up to silverware designs.

 

"With the help of art patrons, Hablik was able to devote himself intensively to his artistic creations in Schleswig-Holstein in Itzehoe starting in 1907. The experience of nature always remained the most important inspirational source for Hablik’s oeuvre. Impressed by the elemental power of fire and the sea, he implemented these topics with the most diverse techniques. Landscapes of his Bohemian homeland with their mountainous world as well as North German coastlines and heathlands were the subjects of his paintings time and again. Portraits and still-life paintings were also created next to these. Following the idea that artistic quality is valid for design in all spheres of life, Hablik also developed extravagant spatial concepts for multiple public and private interiors in North Germany.

"As the funding organisation of the Wenzel Hablik Foundation, the Wenzel Hablik Museum in Itzehoe disposes of the most comprehensive collection of his works and accompanies this exhibition."



The text above is from the exhibition     
 Wenzel Hablik – Expressionist Utopias. Painting, Drawing, Architecture. Rediscovered Modern II - 
2017-2018 at the Gropius Bau in Berlin.

Architektur - Auktionshaus Aldag, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23021510

1914 - foto Jindřich Nosek, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74434240

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=581171

1912 - First uploaded as Museumsberg-flensburg-wenzel-hablik-sylt-sonnenuntergang-duenen.jpg to de.wikipedia 18:22, 15. Jan 2006 by de:Benutzer:Kuwi, Quelle: Museumsberg Flensburg (mit freundlicher Genehmigung © Museumsberg Flensburg), (wrongly) marked GFDL., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=581192

1918

Friedrich Peter Drömmer, painter and visual designer

City, 1923

Friedrich Peter Drömmer (1889-1968) was a German expressionistic artist nearly forgotten today. Born in Kiel, he studied in Weimar. Under the impression of the revolutionary events of 1918-1919, in Kiel as well as in Berlin, he produced a series of paintings depicting the failed uprisings.

He joined a progressive artist group working in the Expressionistic style. The group organized exhibitions in Kiel, with the intention of overcoming Kiel's reactionary image as the principal Prussian navy base. There, Drömmer first showed his architectural phantasies, paintings between Gothic cathedral and prismatic abstraction symbolizing the social and cultural utopia of a classless society, and reminescent of similar ideas by Lyonel Feininger and Wenzel Hablik.

The card player, 1919

Those architectonic inspired works put him into contact with The Bauhaus in Dessau. Between 1923 and 1933, he directed the design department of the Junkers-Werke, also located in Dessau, and at that time Germany's largest aeroplane manufacturer.

After Hitler came to power, he was arrested, and, since 1935, had to work as a freelance designer. Shortly after the war, he suffered a physical and mental breakdown. He died in 1968 .

The Revolutionary, 1919

Café Josty on Potsdamer Platz

Café Josty as seen in the TV-series Babylon Berlin

Café Josty was located on Potsdamer Platz. It had been founded by Swiss immigrants in the beginning of the 19th century.
 
In the twentieth century, the place became a meeting place for artists, especially those active in the movements of Expressionism and New Objectivity, attracted by the modernity and dynamism of the surroundings (the Potsdamer Platz).

Poet Paul Boldt (1885-1921) described the appearance of the cafe in his sonnet, « On the terrace of Café Josty ». The poem describes the Potsdamer Platz’ « eternal roar », automobiles and trams, people running over the asphalt, but also (and this sounds very Expressionist indeed) « the smoke of the night, like the pus of a plague ».

Josty had branches in other Berlin neighbourhoods too. Erich Kästner used the Kaiserallee branch as the setting for a scene in the children's book Emil und die Detektive.

The cafe closed in 1930, and the building was destroyed in World War II. In Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire, an old man attempts to find the location of the cafe but fails. In recent years, a new Café Josty opened in the Sony-Center, some 200 meters away from the original location.

Babylon Berlin

The original Cafe Josty

Romanisches Café

Scene from Babylon Berlin

The Romanisches Café, which appears in the third season of Babylon-Berlin, was well known as a meeting place for intellectual and artists, situated in what is now Breitscheidplatz at the end of the Kurfürstendamm (although that section of the Ku’damm was renamed Budapester Straße in 1925). The reason of the café’s name was the Neo-Romanesque style of the building where it was located.

Scene from Babylon Berlin

 

 

But, the Romanisches having been destroyed long ago, I wonder where these two scenes were shot. Somewhere in Vienna, maybe? In Munich? We'll soon have an answer, no doubt.


More about the Romanisches Café:

It 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, Else Lasker-Schüler, Erich Maria Remarque, Joseph Roth, Ernst Toller, Kurt Tucholsky, Franz Werfel, Billy Wilder.

 

 

Click here for more about this café 

 

 

This is how the writer Erich Kästner maliciously described the place 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 somewhat scornfully about black people and Jews, as Kästner does 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

The real Romanisches

    

KaDeWe, thirty thousand goods to choose from

KaDeWe in Babylon Berlin

In a number of episodes of the Babylon Berlin series we see some of the characters standing at the entrance of a warehouse called KaDeWe.What are they doing there? Are they going to buy some of the 30.000 goods from around the world on sale at the store? Have some refreshments at the tea-room while listening to the orchestra? Well, if you have watched the series you know the reason why all those interesting Babylon Berlin characters are there: KaDeWe was, besides a store, also a popular meeting place.

It was and still is Berlin's most famous department store. KaDeWe means Kaufhaus des Westens – or "Warehouse of West Berlin". It is the capital's shopping paradise, a favourite, easy to spot landmark on Wittenberg square. With 60,000 sqm, 40,000 visitors a day, it is the largest department store in Europe.

For more than a century it has been Berlin's equivalent of Harrods, Magasins du Printemps or El Corte Inglés.

The department store, owned by Jewish entrepreneur Adolf Jandorf, first opened on Wittenberg Platz in 1907. Designed by architect Emil Schaudt, it served the increasingly affluent middle class neighbourhood of the new Tiergarten district. In 1927 it was bought by Hermann Tietz, another warehouse.

KaDeWe presented customers with an array of desirable goods from around the world at the traffic junction Wittenbergplatz – including products that were rare or entirely unknown to the German customers. The fashion assortment presented creations from the latest Paris shows, and exotic south sea fruits could be admired in the food department.

Moreover, the warehouse offered exclusive services, for example a library and almost two dozen elevators. Enthusiasts of architecture were impressed with the opulent window frontage, light-flooded halls and wood-panelled walls in the restrooms. The Tauentzienstrasse, where the store was situated, quickly evolved into one of the busiest boulevards in the city.

The other big department stores in Berlin were Hermann Tietz and Wertheim. The 20th century was the century of the department store, the "cathedrals of trade" praised by the French writer Émile Zola, which revolutionized consumer behavior in the Western world. They were not just places of consumption, but urban meeting places, architectural icons and tourist attractions.

KaDeWe has survived the turmoil of 20th century German history unscathed. The store was a constant Berlin presence, its highs and lows reflecting those of the city.

On the sixth and seventh floor is the gourmet department, a paradise for every taste bud.

KaDeWe today