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Exactly a hundred years before the COVID-pandemic broke out, in March 1920, the city of Berlin found itself in the state of chaos. Reactionary militant groups marched in, threatening to upturn the new German republic, using direct and indirect violence – 2020 marked the centennial of what came to be known as Kapp-Lüttwitz-Putsch.

What the men behind the coup did not expect was millions standing up against them. What they expected even less was that this protest would extinguish their flame-throwers and bring their well-oiled, rubble-rousing machinery to a halt.

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Dear Readers, Followers and Supporters of the blog,

You might have noticed an email in your mailbox, informing you about a new post but coming not from WordPress but from a new platform, Substack.

It has been 13 years since I started publishing my blog as kreuzberged.com and I have always remained faithful to WordPress. However, with the platform becoming more and more complex and hard to handle (at least not without spending days or hours trying to burrow your way through gadzillions of links and helpful tips leading to further helpful tips), I decided to sail for new shores and see if the weather conditions yonder would make me less exhausted dealing with unnecessarily complicated technicalities.

This page will remain active for another year, but at the same time a new Kreuzberged: Berlin Companion will undergo some serious testing. I hope you will accompany me on this journey, and will keep on reading my tales of lesser-known Berlin!

If you do not wish to receive the Substack newsletter, please let me know and I will take care of the rest.

In the meantime, thank you for being here – iss ooch dufte1!

Hermannplatz in the fog, Berlin-Neukölln (photo by Berlin Companion)
  1. Berlinerisch for “ist auch dufte” or “that’s really great”. ↩︎

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Café des Westens. The world outside called it “Café Größenwahn” (Café Megalomania), the world inside referred to itself as “German Literature”.

Here sat all the genres: from the survivors of Naturalism to Expressionist youths; from Esoteric Mystics to tattlers writing for three different dailies under three different names.

Quote from from Egon Erwin #Kisch’s 1914 text “Literatur in Berlin”.

Café des Westens on Kurfürstendamm Boulevard at No. 18-19: later it would move to a new location at the Union-Palast, at Ku’damm 26 but the artists, disappointed at the changes and not exactly welcome among the new fine – and conservative – clientele, abandoned it for “Romanisches Café“.
Newspaper clipping from “Der Weltspiegel”, 21 May 1905.