Jewish Café Culture in Berlin

Shortly afterwards, around 1740, Berlin became a center of Aufklarung, the German Enlightenment. The Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement, gained force in Berlin during the last decades of the 18th century and from there spread to other cities in central and eastern Europe and beyond. "Enlightened" cultural creativity was aligned with the development of coffee culture.

 Moses Mendelssohn , the father figure of the Haskalah movement, made his first significant entry into German Enlightenment circles in the Gelehrtes Kaffeehaus (Learned coffeehouse). The educator, journalist, and translator Johann Georg Müchler was the initiator of the Gelehrtes Kaffeehaus. In a letter from April 1756, Müchler wrote,

“I must inform you of a new establishment that I founded here in Berlin. I created a society of forty people, mostly men of learning, but artists too, who have rented two large rooms; in one we placed a billiards table, where the society can make money. Members can go there every day. Coffee and whatever one wants is to be had at a cheap price, and one meets a pleasant company. Once a week all members assemble. One talks, jokes, and reads something to others. One finds there all kinds of learned newspapers, journals...Each member pays an entrance fee of only two thalers. The remaining costs are covered by billiards.”

Berlin in the first half of the nineteenth century attracted a number of migrants of Jewish origin following the establishment in 1810 of the Universität zu Berlin—where 7 percent of the students were Jewish—and the 1812 Prussian “Edict of Toleration.” In the coming years, a period known as “restoration” in central Europe meant increasing conservatism and repression of freedoms in Prussia. Especially notorious were the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, a series of harsh laws mandating censorship, surveillance, and other limitations designed to suppress dissent.

These political and social developments in the early decades of the nineteenth century coincided with the appearance of a new, increasingly popular institution in Berlin: the Café-Konditorei (café-confectionery). Café-Konditoreien, although far from being free of government surveillance, emerged as places for exchanging and expressing ideas, especially for those who were not part of the aristocracy. Of the konditoreien, Ernst Dronke wrote:

“Cafés-[Konditoreien] are the meeting place of the like-minded who speak out about their interests; they are a kind of club. The merchant who wants to consider his affairs and the status of his stocks with someone; the journalist who must hear the latest and must catch up on the day’s events from the newspaper; the man of private means who does nothing and yet wishes to appear as something; officers, students, in short, everyone who has any kind of interest at all in public life turns out in the Café-Konditoreien.”

Later, Heine’s narrator stops in Café Royal:

“Outside, it is the handsomest café in Berlin; inside, it is the prettiest restaurant. It is a meeting place of the educated fashionable world. Interesting men are often to be seen here.”

In Café Royal, Heine subtly hints at perceptions of Jewishness of the Berlin coffeehouse. The narrator points out a figure in Royal who reminds him of “Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl,” a reference to the protagonist of the 1814 novella Peter Schlemihl about the man who sold his shadow. Peter Schlemihl was modeled after the assimilated Berlin Jew that Chamisso found in the figure of Julius Eduard Hitzig. The narrator also encounters Eduard Gans in the café, a friend of Heine and the cofounder of  Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden . He asks: “My dear Herr Gans, what is the news?” Gans “shakes his gray reverent head and shrugs his shoulders,” incapable of supplying interesting news, likely because of the restrictions and censorship which Heine later refers to explicitly in the letter.

Jews and coffeehouses appear again in the second letter of Heine’s fuelliton, as the narrator links the opening of Berlin’s stock exchange and the “old but newly revived project of the conversion of the Jews.” In April 1822, the Berlin Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews was established with the aim of making religious conversion a necessary condition to full civic emancipation, reflecting a prevalent view that Jews could never really become Prussian citizens if they clung to their Jewish religious identity. The comment linking this to the stock exchange was especially poignant because many of Berlin’s acculturated Jews chose to convert to Christianity in order to advance in the worlds of business, academia, and literature. Heine himself felt that in order to get a chance of making a living as a writer and intellectual, he had to be baptized, a choice that he famously described as an “admission ticket to European culture.”

The Jewish population of Berlin grew significantly during the second half of the nineteenth century, as did the city itself. Most newcomers emigrated from surrounding Prussia but also from Galicia, Poland, and the Russian Pale of Settlement. In both class and culture, the Jewish community was overwhelmingly bourgeois and educated. Under the new constitution, Jews were legally equal to all other citizens, though civic and social equality were tenuous for many people in imperial Germany.

Another major change in Jewish life was the Austrittsgesetz, the Secession Law of 1876, which meant that German Jews could choose to remain members of the Jewish community or leave it but had to be registered as Jews. These new developments caused Jews in Berlin to search for spaces where both their Jewish and German belonging was expressed, and chief among these spaces were Berlin cafés.

Around the turn of the century a number of important Hebrew and Yiddish writers flocked to Berlin, and its cafés, from the Pale of Settlement. Many of these figures lived in and around the Scheunenviertel (the barn quarter), a district in the center of Berlin that emerged as a center of migration for eastern European Jews before, during, and after World War I.

While Romanisches physically continued to exist, this Berlin institution clearly lost its importance as a center of culture after the Nazi takeover, when most of its Jewish habitués migrated to other cities in Europe, America, or Mandatory Palestine. Some of them killed themselves; others frequented cafés in whatever city they fled to.