Alexander Wells delves into five of the city’s iconic dives, past and present…
“Secretly we all think of the café as the devil, but what would life be without the devil?” —Else Lasker-Schüler, 1912
The history of any great European city can be told through its cafés, whether those still standing from yesteryear or those long vanished. Germany’s very first coffee house appeared in Bremen in 1672, with the beverage making an appearance at the court of the great elector of Brandenburg in 1675.
Berlin’s cafe culture officially got going quite a bit later, in 1721, with an opening on the Lustgarten by a Frenchman, who had been granted permission by Prussian King Frederick William I. Others followed—The Royal in Behrenstrasse, City of Rome on Unter den Linden, Arnoldi in Kronenstrasse, Miercke in Taubenstrasse, Schmidt in Poststrasse—along with several Jewish spots opened by Philipp Falck.
By the time of Frederick the Great (1712–1786) there were at least a dozen coffee houses in the inner-city, with more informal tent-like venues serving up coffee in the suburbs, and coffee had even entered homes, replacing flour-soup and warm beer at Berlin breakfast tables. Frederick, however, annoyed at the money being made by foreign merchants, opted to issue a decree against the substance later in 1777—a thinly disguised attempt to regain control of the trade and maintain it only for the wealthier classes.
“It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects,” he wrote, “and the amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. Everybody is using coffee. If possible, this must be prevented. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were his ancestors, and his officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer; and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be depended upon to endure hardship or to beat his enemies in case of the occurrence of another war.”
Despite Frederick’s resistance, the word was out and coffee steadily gained in importance, seeping steadily into the veins of all classes of society, the poor included, where it has stayed ever since.
As the academic Shachar M. Pinsker has argued in A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture, the café was also vital in the development of the transnational Jewish modernity that emerged across cities from Vienna and Warsaw through Berlin to Odessa, Tel Aviv and New York. By the late eighteenth century, Berlin was home to a wealth of meeting places with mixed-religion crowds, such as the members-only Gelehrtes Kaffeehaus (Learned Coffee House) club that was frequented by Moses Mendelssohn, and several private intellectual salons run by Jewish women.
Below are some of the most notable coffee spots that have kept the city’s population dutifully caffeinated and also served as significant cultural, artistic and social hubs.
Café Stehely
Before Berlin’s café culture was fully developed, the most prominent kinds of coffee houses were small Café–Konditoreien, which served as both cafés and confectionary outlets. One of the finest of these was Café Stehely (founded 1820), which stood on what is now Jägerstraße near Gendarmenmarket.
Here, anyone who was interested in public life—mostly men who could afford such pleasures—could come and enjoy the café’s drinks, desserts and conversation. Berlin journalist Ernst Dronke described it as the “Eldorado of Berlin’s idlers” but also “the grandest, most often visited educational institution” of the city: while many of the city’s other cafés also had adjacent “reading rooms” filled with periodicals and journals, Stehely’s was considered to be the finest.
Every day, radical writers and students would meet in the café’s Rote Stube (Red Room), which was named for the colour of the wallpaper, not the politics. Among its regular visitors was a clique of radical young Hegelians that called itself the “Doktorenklub”, a club that happened to include a spirited young law student by the name of