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.
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