The House of the Fatherland in Berlin

The Berlin establishment called Haus Vaterland was a large restaurant and entertainment palace by the Potsdamer Platz with about one million visitors a year.

There were a variety of different theme restaurants : Rhine Terrace , Bavarian beer restaurant, 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).

In addition to food and drinks, there were also musical and artistic events and variety programs. 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.

  

The building conveyed the impression of a massive stone construction, but in fact it was a steel skeleton construction with a stone facade.

So why all this business about The Fatherland ? Let's see: the Haus was located in the premises of a café once called Piccadilly. In 1914 the name had to be changed, for anglophobical reasons, 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. Which brings us back to Berlin, where the Charlottenburg district, during the 20s, went under the nickname Charlottengrad, due to the huge amount of Russian exiles living there.