 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Romanisches Café" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(March 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
TheRomanisches Café ("Romanesque Café") was acafé-bar inBerlin known as a meeting place for artists. It was located in what is nowBreitscheidplatz at the end of theKurfürstendamm in theCharlottenburg district (although that section of the Kurfürstendamm was renamedBudapester Straße in 1925). The name was derived from theNeo-Romanesque style of the building.
The Romanisches Café was situated in theRomanisches Haus, which was erected between 1897 and 1899 to a design byFranz Schwechten, who had also built theKaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church located opposite. The house, equipped with two towers, stood at the eastern corner ofAuguste-Viktoria-Platz (today Breitscheidplatz), approximately on the site of the present-dayEuropa-Center. It was initially the location of the Hotel Kaiserhof'spatisserie; the café did not open until 1916. Since the old Café des Westens (another artists' haunt) had shut in 1915, it quickly developed into the most important artists' cafe in Berlin, particularly after the end of theFirst World War.
The café was a meeting place for theintelligentsia, a place at which the leading writers, painters, actors, directors, journalists and critics of the day consorted. At the same time it became a place for budding artists, who would try to start their careers by establishing their first contacts here. The already established artists, for their part, would group intoséparées in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the mass of talent.
Towards the end of theWeimar Republic, as the political situation inGermany became more violent, the Romanisches Café gradually lost its role. As early as 1927 the Nazis instigated a riot on the Kurfürstendamm during which the café, as a meeting place for the left-wing intellectuals they hated, was among the targets of violence. The coming to power of theNazi Party and the subsequent emigration of most of its regulars signalled the final end of the café as an artists' haunt. The Romanisches Haus was completely destroyed by anAllied air-raid in 1943.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
52°30′19″N13°20′04″E / 52.5053°N 13.3345°E /52.5053; 13.3345
