Moka Efti: does it exist?

In the German TV-series Babylon Berlin, a great deal of the action takes place in a nightclub called Moka Efti. You would look in vain for that place in today’s Berlin. But, had you been there back in the 1920s, you had been luckier.

 

There was indeed one Moka Efti in Berlin in those days, but it was not really a nightclub, it was rather a cafe, situated where Leipziger Strasse meets Friedrichstrasse. It opened in April 1929, in the 1st and 2nd floors of a massive building from the 19th century known as the Equitable-Palast, and it was named after its Greek-Italian owner, Mr Giovanni Eftimiades. As to the word "moka", it has its origin in a Yemenite city called Mocha, an important market-place for coffee from the 15th to the 18th century.

 

At a later time, Eftimiades purchased a larger two-floor palais, on the Friedrichstrasse.

The decor inside the original place was even wilder than anything the TV producers' imagination could fantasize. One of the most striking features was the escalator that took customers from the ground floor to the first floor. People came to Moka Efti with the sole purpose of admiring the escalator; escalators were a new amenity, still rare in 1929. For the opening, the owner organized a contest : those who rightly guessed the number of visitors that used the escalators in one day were rewarded with the sum of one thousand marks.

  

In the TV series, Berlin’s superclub has a futuristic design with stripped-back walls and geometric towers of light. Modern architecture being fashionable in Weimar Germany, that doesn’t strike one as especially out of place (or time). Still, the original joint was more backward-looking. Customers could marvel at Moorish arches, panoramic paintings and Turkish and Egyptians salons, all in a style reminding of the 1001 Arabian Nights.

 

There was a billiard hall, a barber shop and correspondence room filled with typists ready to take dictation. A white marble pastry shop connected to a bar via a corridor that was designed to look like a sleeper train on the Orient Express.

In the 1930s, the swing band of James Kok became the house orchestra. It played in the 1st floor while the dancing room was in the 2nd. The solution : an opening in the floor, which allowed the guests to dance to the rythms of the orchestra downstairs.

  

The dance scenes in Babylon Berlin were shot in the auditorium of the Delphi cinema, in Berlin-Weissensee. But the glass façade was built by Uli Hanisch at the Babelsbergs studios. 

 

 

 

1929: a post office (!) is installed at Moka Efti - Ullsteinbild colour/edit©estherfleischel

 

 

    

 

 

The Delphi at Weissensee

The "fake" façade at Babelsberg

If Moka Efti doesn’t exist anymore (it was destroyed during WWII), there is since some months ago a dance hall in Berlin-Kreuzberg where an orchestra, called Moka Efti, plays the music of the series.

Along with the HausVaterland on Potsdamer Platz, where model trains and miniature planes on strings zipped among the coffee drinkers, Moka Efti was one of the most prominent themed establishments offering exotic entertainment. Unlike in the series, there was no brothel in the basement at Moka Efti, but the link is not far-fetched: a number of dance halls were markets for prostitution as well. And there were not just women offering escort services : the director Billy Wilder is said to have worked as a “taxi dancer” at a Berlin hotel in 1926. Which is not to say that his job included sexual services, though. 

The picture above shows Charlotte Ritter entering the basement of café Moka Efti, which, unlike the ground floor, was (in the TV-series, not in the real Moka Efti)  a brothel. Charlotte can of course not be described as a "whore". Though young, she is the provider of a family of 5-6 persons and she tries to make a living out of taking occasional clerical jobs at the High Commission of Berlin police. But, those small jobs not being enough to make both ends meet, she does sell sex on occasions, at Moka Efti's basement. When no customer requires her services, she amuses herself at the nightclub like any other guest.

It is surprising how thin the line could be between prostitution and "decent life" in 1920s Berlin. And in the TV-series we can see how easily customers glide between the restaurant part and the brothel, which has nothing specially clandestine about it. They had, though, to be waved through by the receptionist, the scantily clad lady to the left of the picture above.

More about similar places in 1920s Berlin, in this link.