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Cafe National, Friedrichstraße 76 in Berlin-Mitte.

Among many postcards of what used to be one of Berlin’s main thoroughfares and most popular streets, you will find this image: “Café National” –  Friedrichstraße No. 76 corner Jägerstraße. Following the fashion of the time, the photo is quite obviously a collage – a composite or early cut-and-paste technique. Something you probably noticed at once, mildly disturbed by the oddly artificial, staged arrangement of people in the photo. And by the funny proportion-ratio between various objects.

Thanks to its location and cosy yet elegant furnishings “Café National” was quite a popular venue from the start. Its guests greatly appreciated the four Venetian glass mosaics decorating the interior walls: designed by Wiener, they symbolised four different nations and were made for the café by Dr. Salviati, a renown mosaic-maker whose own shop was located at No. 149. Salviati’s is largely forgotten today but one look at the fantastic mosaics decorating Berlin’s Siegessäule (Victory Column) in the Tiergarten and you know: this was no just any glass-beads game. Salviati was big.

Which would suggest that “Cafe National” did not open to cater to the taste of the “Great Unwashed”. Its target audience had to have reached a certain financial level, mid-middle-class and up, you understand. The place did quite a lot to win them, too: it gained its fame as the “largest billiard club in Berlin” (posters in the upper-floor windows bear witness to that). Billiard, as it is easy to guess, was not a working-class leisure activity.

But the glory days of Friedrichstraße did not last long. Soon enough it was the west of the city – or then still, in fact, completely different cities like Charlottenburg, Schöneberg and beyond – that became the desiderable addresses for the well-heeled Berliners. And when they and their families abandoned the city centre for the plush, leafy neighbourhoods of Grunewald, Lichterfelde or Dahlem, and began to do spend their time on Kudamm and at the KaDeWe, the fate of Friedrichstraße was sealed.

From then on this is where you went to have cheap fun. This is where you went you came from a provincial little town somewhere in West Prussia and wished to spend a couple of days breaking your marital vows and as many of the ten amendments as you possibly could without getting caught or thrown into Hell-fire at once.

After the First World War and in the early 1920s, with the hyperinflation raging in Berlin, destroying human lives and sinking businesses, Friedrichstraße became synonymous with abandonment and sin – it became the volcano on which all those lost souls seemed to have danced.

But our “Cafe National” paved this road long before the so-called “Golden Twenties” hit Berlin. Still before the Great War broke out this café was a favourite address for the Friedrichstraße prostitutes working between this street and Leipziger Straße: this is where they came to warm up and have some rest.

In his 1955 autobiography “Ein kleines Ja und Ein großes Nein” (A Small Yes and a Big No”) brilliant German painter, George Grosz, wrote: “Friedrichstraße was crawling with whores. They stood in the house-doorways like sentries, whispering their classics. ‘Kleiner, kommste mit?’ Those were the days of great feather hats, feather shawls and laced-up bosoms. A handbag swung back and forth was the guild’s trademark. The best-known whore-café was the Friedrichstraße ‘Cafe-National’.”

He was right. If you have another look at our postcard, you will see it at once: the cut-out ladies pasted into the photo might not be swinging their handbags but the way they reveal their ankles under exciting layers of frilly underskirts, says it all. We might safely assume that it is not to the “Cafe National” that they and their clearly interested cut-out partners would be going next…

The building which used to house the café is long gone – its site is occupied today by Berlin’s “Galerie Lafayette”.

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Gustav Wunderwald, 1927, U-Bhf “Schönhauser Tor”

It is never easy to find your way within a vanished city. But then again, it is never boring to try to do so. Especially when such quest involves deciphering a beautiful painting. Like this 1927 work by a gifted artist, Gustav Wunderwald.

“Film-Palast Schönhauser Tor” was a popular cinema built in Hankestraße 1 in Berlin-Mitte. But the address most likely won’t help you find its former site – it vanished from the maps of the city just as the cinema disappeared from Berlin’s cityscape. In 1969 Hankestraße became the northern section of today’s Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße, which means that Gustav Wunderwald’s painting shows the place shortly before the street crosses with today’s Torstraße.

The location of the cinema on a 1928 aerial photo of Bülowplatz (now Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz).

The U-Bahn station in front of the cinema, opened in 1913, was the picture show’s namesake: after several re-naming campaigns (including “Bülowplatz”, the Third-Reich inspired “Horst-Wessel-Platz” and post-war “Liebknechtplatz” followed by “Luxemburgplatz”), station “Schönhauser Tor” on today’s Line U2 was eventually called “Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz”.

The cinema itself was known under several different names, too. When it opened in 1926 it commemorated the old, eighteenth-century city gate but by 1934 it had already been known as the “Hanke-Lichtspiele”, the “Gloria-Palast” and in the end as “Ton-Eck” (Sound-Corner). With seats for 600 and later around 500 guests, it offered pleasant and intime atmosphere while remaining modern and situated in a perfect mid-city location. Sadly, the latter became its downfall – the cinema did not survive the Second World War.

But what remains is this fine image of it, a sunny ghost captured by the painter who found joy in exploring the metropolis, providing us with pictures of it we would otherwise never get to know.

Bülowplatz (now Rosa-Luxemburg.Platz) with Oskar Kaufmann’s Volksbühne Theatre. The “Schönhauser Tor” cinema as well as the two buildings behind it visible in the top-right corner. (Image: AKG-Images, author NN, 1928).

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The gate to Schloß Monbijou captured by Hermann Rückwardt in 1885 (image PD).

Schloß Monbijou – here its decorative gate captured by Hermann Rückwardt in 1885 –  is one of Berlin’s lost palaces and sites. Built on the northern bank of the river Spree opposite today’s Museum Island, it started in the seventeenth century as a model farm.

In the 17th century the first wife of the Brandenburgian Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm, Luise Henriette of Orange – Dutch and excelling at both gardening and horticulture – set up a model farm where Park Monbijou is today. After her death in 1667 her Vorwerk vorm Oranienburger Tor (Farming Estate outside the Oranienburg Gate) became one the Great Elector’s gifts to his second wife, Dorothea.

Her still rather modest summer house she had erected for herself and her family was later replaced by a “bijou” (only 400m²) palace built by the husband of King Friedrich I’s concubine, Countess Wartenberg. The King thanked his general for providing him with so charming a house and promptly gifted it to the latter’s wife to use it as hers and the monarch’s love-nest. A bit of a French twist in an otherwise very Prussian story.

But it was not her who eventually gave the place its immortal name: Friedrich II’s (The Great) mother, Sophie Charlotte, came up with “Monbijou” or “My Jewel”. Her son named his favourite palace in Potsdam “Sanssouci” (Carefree).

Refurbished several times over the next 200 years, in 1887 it became home to Berlin’s Hohenzollern Museum devoted entirely to the history of the last ruling house of Prussia. After the First World War and the collapse of German monarchy its collection remained in the hands of the by then former ruling family but both the site and the palace itself became the state property. The new republican government took it upon itself to maintain the museum and allow the citizens to take long sentimental trips down the imperial memory lane.

Hit by bombs during the November 1943 air-raid, Schloß Monbijou partly burnt down. Most of the collection had been removed by then and stored in one or several of the secret Nazi storage locations, only to be discovered by the Red Army troops and taken as war booty to the USSR. It is also possible that many of the objects were taken – effectively stolen – by other people and remain in private hands until today.

As for the palace, its remains were demolished in the late 1950s as an unwanted remainder of the Hohenzollerns and the role they played in the lead-up to both world wars. The park originally surrounding the palace – by then an empty site – was used to create a public park and (by now probably visited by millions of them) children’s lido. The lido, one of the most popular places for children in Berlin, operates until today.

Park Monbijou and the lido on July 14, 1955. Photo by Rainer Mittelstädt via Bundesarchiv.

 

 

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Early 1870s view towards Am Weidendamm and the old water canal which later became Planckstraße. (Photo: F.A. Schwartz)

Today’s photo was taken around 1870 by one of Berlin’s best visual chroniclers, F.A.Schwartz, at the time when he himself lived nearby in Friedrichstraße.

The location on the 1891 Sineck-Plan of Berlin: the canal is clearly visible between Admiralsgarten-Bad and the Artillerie-Kaserne with the depots.

The view is practically impossible to match to today’s situation: the photographer stood on the northern bank of the Spree looking towards what is today Planckstraße, a street – built as Prinz-Louis-Ferdinand-Straße, in the filled-in bed of the water canal whose mouth you see in the picture. The then popular inn, the “Hammelkopf”, is visible on the left corner of the canal’s end.

The “Hammelkopf” (Ram’s Head) inn photographed by the same artist, F.A. Schwartz, in 1888.

Both the small canal and the inn would disappear soon as the city continued its steady northbound expansion.

The same spot on the 1910 Straubeplan of Berlin, with Prinz-Louis-Ferdinand-Straße running behind the Admirals-Garten and what is today Admiralspalast.