Alexanderplatz

Alex as Alfred Döblin may have known it. Around 1920.

Alexanderplatz, or Alex, as Berliners often name it, is, along with Kurfürstendamm the most emblematic name among streets and squares. Alex, in the eastern part of the city, was and is an important transport hub, like Potsdamer Platz, more to the west. But besides, it is the novel by Alfred Döblin, from 1929, filmed several times, which made Alex known even outside Germany's borders.

As a hub, Alex is the eastern counterpart to Potsdamer Platz. Neither is a planned square, like Pariser Platz or Leipziger Platz. They emerged as a result of different factors and their shape wasn’t clear-cut and regular.

Alex has experienced dramatical changes during its history. If you look at pictures from 1900, you will hardly recognize the place. The two famous buildings, Alexanderhaus and Berolina Haus, were not yet there, nor was the U-Bahn station. Around 1930 the two "Haus" by the architect Peter Behrens emerged from the ground underlining clearly the south-eastern border of the square. They were miraculously spared by the allied bombings in WWII, and they resisted the drastic planning of the GDR-urbanists. But the rest is gone. When the remodeling of Alex by the East Germans planner was ready, around 1960-70, what had been a square was a vast empty area of 3 ha, bordered by the above mentioned Behrens’ buildings and by some anonymous newly produced skyscrapers.

After the reunification in 1989, the empty space was filled with new, not especially graceful buildings, among others the Kaufhof department store at the very place were another big store, Hermann Tietz, had stood before the war. Those new buildings have still the merit of making the place smaller, not exactly cozy but at least a space easier to apprehend, to grasp. Comparing today’s Alex with old photographs, not much is recognized. But if you look at it from the north-east angle, focusing on the south-western part, it doesn’t differ that much from its look in, say, 1932, thanks to the two massive survivors (Berolinahaus and Alexanderhaus), to the S-Bahn viaduct, with the elevated railroad station’s glass roof and steel structure and to the red tower of the Town Hall in the background. You'll need of course to disregard the TV-tower. When the people behind the TV-series Babylon Berlin shot scenes here, they recreated (with digital means) the defunct red building of the police headquarters (Rote Burg), they replaced the advertisements and put in an old tram. The reconstruction was quite satisfying, I feel.

Around 1935. Compare with the pic below.

From "Babylon Berlin", with the red police headquarters to the left

It is important to note that the famous TV-tower, pride of GDR’s Berlin, is not IN the square but some 200 meters to the south-west. The same goes for the train station, which appears in most pictures: it is outside Alexanderplatz proper, but very close to it.

From the beginning, Alexanderplatz was just an empty space between different quarters. "No planned square defined by the structures bordering it, more a left-over space, one which simply grew out of the coming together of various arbitrary patterns of movement and housing development". (Martin Kieren in Alexanderplatz, Städtebaulicher Ideenwettbewerb)

Then came the transports : the horse-drawn buses replaced by electric powered tramways in 1898, the underground in 1913 and soon amounting to three lines, and the suburban train S-Bahn. All those lines, irradiating in all directions, granted the square its status of traffic-hub. It is worth to note that the S-Bahn was not just the original circle line  from the end of the XIX century which went in a ring around inner Berlin; several lines were added in time to the network, which connected important points of the inner city as well, Alexanderplatz among others. 

Romanisches Café

 

Paris had Café de Flore, Vienna had Café Central, Madrid had Café Gijón, Prague its Café Arco. At the beginning of the 20th century, Berlin's answer to those legendary haunts was Café des Westens, on the Kurfürstendamm, but after the First World War the artists moved just a few hundred meters to the Romanisches, on the other side of the Gedächtniskirche. They changed establishment but they stayed true to the neighbourhood, to the trendy West End.

No one knows why they chose the Romanisches, which had opened in 1916. Comfort can’t have been the reason, as the place "could compete with any waiting room in Prussia in terms of architectural ugliness and culinary tastelessness", as someone put it. The proprietor had surely decided that the food could and should be bad, as the well-to-do regulars anyway ate elsewhere and the less well-off ordered just two cooked eggs which they may not even pay in cash. If they stretched too much on the credit, a card was placed next to their coffee cup with the text: "You are kindly asked to leave our establishment after paying your meal and never to return." Romanisches Café was also very dirty, as guests knocked the ash off their cigarettes and even threw them directly to the floor. Despite this, its popularity grew steadily and it became inevitable for those who wished to play a role in the artistic and intellectual scene to pay regular visits to the "waiting room of talent", as Erich Kästner called it.

The Hungarian born film-maker Geza von Cziffra (1900 1989) started as an assistant director to Alexander Korda in Vienna. In 1923 he made the fatal entrance to the Romanisches Café which he describes in his book Der Kuh im Kaffeehaus, full of anecdotes about the golden twenties. (The above from Kaféliv, Stockholm 1996, a selection of texts by Daniel Hjorth)
 

Geza von Cziffra: 

The café, which so many aesthetes favoured, was anything but beautiful. But thanks to the large windows, which let the light into the high room from 2 different streets, it was bright and friendly in contrast to Café des Westens. The long and wide terrace of the large pseudo-Romanesque house, stretched from Tauentzienstrasse to Budapester Strasse. When you entered the café through the revolving door, which rotated almost incessantly, you were faced with a decision: left or right. This was by no means a political problem. There was no political right at Romanisches Café, at most a few who later, more precisely after 1933, changed sides. For example, the terribly progressive Arnolt Bronnen, former Bertolt Brecht's best friend and comrade-in-arms, author of the expressionist play Vaterrnord, who later at the premiere of All quiet on the Western Front by E.M. Remarque, was the leader of some young SA-men who released white mice in the salon. 

To the left of the revolving door was the smaller part of the café with about twenty tables, the other side with the table-covered balustrade was about three times as large. The left was called "Swimmers pool", the right "Non-swimmers pool". The established people sat on the left, and also the less established who in any case could get by with their writing. The "non-swimmers" sat on the right. Many of them were adventurous figures, ancestors of the "hippies", but with completely bourgeois ambitions apart from a few stubborn anarchists. On the balustrade sat the "moon inhabitants", the chess players immersed in their boards, and among them none other than the world champion Emanuel Lasker. Admittedly, there was also a table of fame among the non-swimmers, but that will be discussed later. An ordinary honest citizen goes to a coffee house to drink coffee, to eat cakes, to relax. But visitors to Romanisches Cafe came there to work or to fight. Against friends at the same table, against a friend or enemy at the next table, sometimes against the whole world. Only with pen and printed words of course. Others, mostly poets and writers, retreated in spite of the noisy surroundings, as a snail in its shell, as if sitting alone at their desk, to create important or even immortal works. Among them was the playwright Ferenc Molnår, the creator of Liliom, who once said in an interview he gave at Romanisches: "It would be nice to know how many masterpieces were created in this café, on these small round tables".

Romanisches meant home for many, it was their hometown, their beginning and their end. Tucholsky, who was often on the road because he could never stay in the same place for long, said: "All roads lead back to Berlin. And to the Romanisches." One of my first days in Berlin, when I was not yet familiar with the customs at Romanisches Café and when, for once, I came without Deborah, I took a seat to the right of the non-swimming section, at the only vacant table right next to the revolving door. I had no idea that it was reserved for the prominent painters Liebermann, Slevogt, Orlik, Carl Hofer and other equally famous. I had barely sat down when an old man entered the cafe with gentle steps, said "My god!" and sat down. Then he tried me out and asked with unadulterated Berlin accent: "Whose son are you, my boy?" "My father's son," I answered drily, because I found the question silly. The old gentleman laughed : "I didn’t want to annoy you, I just thought you might be the son of some of my table comrades, of Slevogt for instance."

I had no idea who this Slevogt was, but before I could ask, a waiter rushed to the table and greeted the old gentleman:" Oh, herr professor! You haven’t been here for a long time! " "When you approach eighty, Wannsee is at the end of the world," answered the old man, adding: "I think I deserve a brandy now." "Certainly", said the waiter, and then asked the old gentleman. "And the young man?" "You may ask him himself." The waiter was astonished: "Isn’t he with you, herr professor?" The old man shook his head: "No, he was sitting here at the table when I came".

The waiter was dumbfounded but tried to be polite: "This is a highly reserved table! Would you be kind enough to sit somewhere else ?" Mumbling an apology, I got up but remarked that there was no sign on the table. "No sign on the table!" shouted the indignant waiter. "All Berlin knows who this table is reserved for!" "Well, I don’t", I stubbornly insisted and wanted to go but the old gentleman held me back: "Sit down!" Then to the waiter: "We'll have two brandies, Emil." Emil left and I sat down again. The old gentleman who had obviously noticed my terrible German asked me: "Are you from Hungary? There are many talented painters there."  (From Der Kuh im Kaffeehaus, Munich, 1981, by G.von Cziffra)

Later, von Cziffra learned who the old gentleman was: the famous painter Max Liebermann. The table at which he sat was known as Slevogt’s table, Slevogt being another big name in the arts. Only well established artists sat at that place. Also painters from other towns were welcome, one of them was Max Beckmann, of a younger generation.

The young and less well known artists pushed the boundaries of art convention, but they still respected their older colleagues and used to bow respectfully when they passed Slevogt’s table, recalls von Cziffra.

 

More about the Romanisches Café, clicking on this link

Hotels on Potsdamer Platz

Grand Hotel Esplanade

 

Being close to two major railway stations (Potsdamer Bahnhof and Anhalter Bahnhof), it is no wonder that Potsdamer Platz boasted several grand hotels. The first one of that category was Hotel Bellevue, already in the 1880s. But other establishments followed soon. 

 

Hotel Bellevue

 

Hotel Bellevue

 Click for more information about Hotel Bellevue

Hotel Esplanade

Grand Hotel Esplanade

Click for more information about Hotel Esplanade

Palast Hotel

Palast Hotel

 

Click here for more information about Palast Hotel 

Hotel Fürstenhof

 

Click for more info about Hotel Fürstenhof

 

 

 

Haus Vaterland, on Potsdamer Platz

 

Bundesarchiv, 102-13681/CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, //commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5481137

The Berlin establishment known as Haus Vaterland had little to do with patriotic feelings. Opened in 1928, it was a large restaurant and entertainment palace with about one million visitors a year. It was situated by the Potsdamer Platz.  The six-storey building looked as if built with massive stone but was in fact a steel skeleton construction with a stone facade. 

Inside the building there was a café for 2,500 people, a cinema that could seat 1,400 and an enormous ballroom. The café drew a great variety of Berliners: white collar workers, businessmen, tourists, and even prostitutes at night.

Haus Vaterland (Fatherland's House) offered on top of all that a whole array of theme restaurants : Rhine Terrace, Bavarian beer hall, a Viennese Café and wine tavern, a turkish café, a spanish bodega, a hungarian tavern, a japanese tea room, a wild west bar, an osteria with Italian specialties, as well as a Palmensaal (Palm Hall), which was a dance hall, decorated with sculptures signed Josef Thorak (he was later to become one of the Third Reich’s official artists). 

Note that there were no British or French sections as Kempinski, the owner, was too patriotic to forgive those countries for the Treaty of Versailles 1919, which many Germans judged unfair. Haus Vaterland was the flagship of that family of restaurant owners. Kempinski's patriotism didn't help him when Hitler came to power. He was forced to sell the establishment for an insignificant sum and leave the country.

 

The main entrance, on Köthener Strasse

Side view from Köthener Strasse

 

Above, the exact position of the Vaterland Haus, between Köthener and Dessauer Strasse. Its famous 35 meters high copper dome was at the angle with Königgrätzerstrasse, our days' Stressemannstrasse.

If Vaterland Haus was still there and if you were standing at its feet today, looking towards the traffic lights of Potsdamer Platz, this is what you would see (pic above).

 

 

Besides food and drinks, there were also musical and artistic events. The weather simulations on the Rhine terrace were famous. Thunder and lightning were simulated every hour in a replica of the Rhine Valley landscape. Model trains drove around the valley, ship models sailed on the river and miniature airplanes (in cooperation with Lufthansa) zipped among the guests.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

So why all this business about The Fatherland ? The Haus was located in the premises of a café once called Piccadilly. In 1914, First World war, that English sounding name had to be changed to « The Fatherland’s Café ». About the same time, the British royal house of Battenberg changed its German-sounding name for Mountbatten, and the tsar of all Russias rechristened his capital, from the teutonic St.Petersburg to the slavic Petrograd. By the way, the district of Berlin-Charlottenburg went during the 20s under the nickname Charlottengrad, due to the huge amount of Russian exiles having settled there after 1917.

Just to add that, during the Iraq war 2003, a number of US restaurants stopped selling « french fries ». Instead, their menu offered «Freedom Fries ».

The writer Franz Hessel gave an ironic description of the establishment in his book "Walking in Berlin", 1929:

“Our tour-leader announces: “Café Vaterland, the largest café in the capital! ” We stare at the great ornate dome of the building, and those who have already experienced Berlin in the evening advise the others to visit this monster establishment with all its departments, its culinary ethnological museum and its panoramas in nocturnal light. Yes, they should do it. What use are our old palaces and museums? You are here to see mammoth Germany. So, just get in there tonight, gentlemen, into old Piccadilly, now House of Fatherland! Here are both patriotic and foreign things easily available. If the elevator has carried you up from the magnificent vestibule, you can comfortably look at the panorama from the Rhine terrace while enjoying the usual grape juice, where a first-class thunderstorm is shown over the vine hills, the river and the ruins. When the sky clears up again, Rhenish girls dance to you under vine hoops and velvet-jacketed scholars sing to them. You must have seen this. From there, please stumble into the bodega, where strange men with colorful bandages around your their head and stomach will bring you something fiery to transport you to a Spanish tavern. The two shy Spanish girls from Ackerstrasse (a street in East Berlin) in the corner will dance to raise your mood. Entering the Wild West Bar, according to the program, you will feel all the romance of the American prairie. By the way, don't forget to buy a program!" (my own translation)

And another writer, young Irmgard Keun, describes it like this in her novel "The artificial silk girl" from 1932:

"At Haus Vaterland there are terribly elegant stairs as in a castle with countesses walking - and landscapes and foreign lands and Turkish and Vienna and vine leaves and a colossal Rhine landscape with a real nature show in the form of thunder. We sit down, it gets so hot, it starts to get boring - the wine makes us feel like blown up - 'isn't it beautiful here and absolutely wonderful?' Because it is beautiful and wonderful, there is no other city that has something like this, with one room after another in a long row so that the whole thing feels like a real palace suite. Everybody is in such a hurry - often they seem so pale in the light here, the girls' clothes look like they haven’t been paid for and the men seem like they can’t really afford the wine they are drinking - maybe there is no one here who is happy?" (my own translation)