It’s a warm summer day, patches of sunlight dance on the tables and chairs behind them, and one of the group is slowly and carefully mixing coffee in a tall coffee-pot with a spoon. To make the coffee powder sink faster to the bottom of the pot and allow the ladies to enjoy another cup - out of three coffee pots on the table, one feels to be empty, the coffee inside another one is still brewing and the group seem to be looking forward to drinking from this one.

But why bother? Why not order ready-made coffee in those pots instead?

Here is why. The scene depicts an old Berlin tradition, which was born by the end of the eighteenth century and started with Friedrich The Great inviting Saxon settlers to Berlin and Brandenburg.

The settlers were needed to help boost Prussia’s economic output - the king believed in his land becoming a tad more self-reliant in this respect. Make your own food, grow your own grains, weave your own silk: Friedrich II famously tried to establish silk-weaving industry in Berlin and around it, mostly to save money on preposterously expensive garments but also to sell said garments - if produced by Prussia - to other eager buyers. And, in a nutshell, it did not work out (topic for another story).

The Saxons who settled in Treptow quickly noticed how popular their area was with Sunday visitors from Berlin. And what did day-tripping guests need? Something to eat and something to drink. It did not take long for the settlers to start inviting Berliners to their gardens and orchards, and offering them a small bite and simple beverages. Beer, Schnaps and coffee. And this is where a conflict enflamed.

The place, Vorwerk Treptow, already had at least one well-functioning place known as “Spreebudike” (Budike is a Berlin word for a small stand). And its owner as well as other local food-and-drink sellers were not happy about the competition. So they complained to the authorities.

The authorities looked into the matter and decided that - not unlike today - the settlers were in the wrong. They had, indeed, no right to sell food or beverages, especially coffee (taxes!) without a licence. Had they paid for the licence, they could feed their guests to their hearts’ content. Only that the Saxons were not interested in the deal. The price of the licence would chop their meagre income to nearly nil, so it was a no.

Instead, one of them, Frau Taube (her first name was not recorded), came up with an ingenious work-around. Since it was specifically coffee that she was not allowed to sell, she decided to sell hot water instead. Hot water and crockery (coffee pots, cups and saucers) as well as spoons (the latter two were “leased” for a couple of Groschen). Anyone could bring their own coffee powder and get the rest provided at her place.

As you can imagine, the business model was quickly picked up by others.

But it also enraged the competition who duly sued Frau and Herr Taube, hoping for the court to end the practice. As it turned out, in vain. The court went in a different direction, considering the exact word of law (which did not forbid selling hot water or providing cups), as well as the social impact of the phenomenon (which it by then had become). The verdict was clear: if people arrive with their own coffee powder, the Taubes can provide and require money for the rest they needed to brew a beverage.

A tradition was born. Berlin outdoor cafes and Biergärten quickly nailed signs “Hier können Familien Kaffee kochen” to their entrance gates and guests could officially brew their own drinks instead of buying them from the owner. This tradition held for the next 150 years - even long still after the Second World War there were places in Berlin where a guest with their own coffee tin or powder in a paper bag could enjoy a nice hot drink.

That’s why in his painting Hans Baluschek captured so much more than just a moment, a brief snippet of a Berlin Sunday afternoon some day in July or maybe August 1895. He captured a piece of history. And now it is time for a cup.

If you enjoy reading the Berlin Companion, you can always buy me a coffee - otherwise, I always brew my own:-)

Buy me a coffee

After the court astrologist, Johann Carion, prophesized that a massive flood would destroy the city, swallowing the royal palace in the process, his “employer” - Brandenburg’s Elector, Joachim I Nestor - fled to the top of the highest elevation he could find in and around the capital at the time - the Weinberg (Wine Hill).

Still the tallest natural elevation in central Berlin, the 66-metre Tempelhofer Berg or what you might now know better as the Kreuzberg was a scene of an almost royal drama…

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Wine shop and restaurant of Berthold and Helena Kempinski in Berlin’s Leipziger Str. 25 - the Kempinskis second Berlin location after a smaller and much more modest place nearby, in Friedrichstraße c…

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Through his mother, Luise Henriette of Orange, Prussian king had a valid claim to the temporarily empty throne of the Duchy of Orange. Unfortunately, the French got there first. Unsurprisingly, too: the Duchy lay in the south of France, near Avignon in today’s Department Vauclouse.

French Catholics immediately insisted on Protestants leaving the territory - which, considering that French history knew less considerate ways of getting rid of their Reformed countrymen and women (see: Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre), was a blessing in disguise.

Eventually, an agreement would be struck to allow the Protestants to travel to Brandenburg - they chose Friedrich I’s land over others, believing him to be the rightful heir to the throne of Orange.

In total some 4,000 Orangeois arrived in Brandenburg and some 10% of them settled in Berlin. For the King, they were a welcome addition to the local social landscape - just as French Huguenots who arrived in the days of the Great Elector, they brought with them plenty of know-how (gardening, tapestry, textile manufacturing, etc). And, of course, their cuisine.

“The House of Orange” set up in Berlin was a place for those among them who were impoverished or unable to work. The money for the project was collected simultaneously in Prussia and in England - Queen Anne very much supported her Prussian “colleague’s” plan to offer sanctuary to persecuted Calvinists. The English donations - over several years it was quite a sum, too - were then passed into the capable of hands of Thomas Wentworth, 3rd Baron Raby, who had been appointed English ambassador and dispatched to Berlin. Here he was appointed the head of the charity of Maison d’Orange.

With that money, plus the sum collected in Prussia, the welfare organisation could support the descendants of the Orangeois until 1914. A person applying for assistance had to prove their lineage and once accepted, could relay on free abode, free medical care, free medicines, and plenty of other small means of support.

The badly-weathered Maison d’Orange, which stood either on the corner of today’s Dorotheenstraße and Neustädtische Kirchstraße, or a bit further south on the next corner (Mittelstraße) - historians have not found a final proof of its exact location yet - had to be demolished in 1792. A new building was erected but in 1893 it was sold to a new investor - who built one of Berlin’s most popular and vanished hotels, the “Continental”.

Buy me a coffe

Meanwhile, Orangenhaus moved to Ulmenstraße in Berlin-Tiergarten, to a villa in a street that ceased to exist. Ulmenstraße vanished as the French Secondary School was built there in 1971.

However, Maison d’Orange had left it much earlier, too: the villa was purchased in 1910 by a wealthy Berlin newspaper publisher and art collector, Franz Ullstein (of Ullstein-Verlag and Ullsteinhaus). You will find the building away from the Derfflingerstraße, behind the French Gymnasium.

Maison d’Orange moved again, this time to the historic French Huguenot-colony site in Berlin-Mitte: to Hugenottenviertel. The historic Huguenot Quarter is well-hidden between Friedrichstraße 129 and today’s Claire-Waldoff-Straße.

The Orangenhaus became part of the French Hospital on the site - the latter, together with a shelter for women and children’s hospice, was completely destroyed during the Second World War.

If you want to learn more about the Hugenottenviertel and the history of Friedrichstraße north of Unter den Linden, yours truly collection of Voicemap audio-walks contains just the thing: a self-guided audio-walk, Silk, Sin and Stages: In and Out of Northern Friedrichstraße, available via VoiceMap App. You can find it in your Apple or Android app store.

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“If any place deserves to be turned into a lavishly decorated plaza filled with flowers, fountains and the like, then it’s a place inhabited by people who can’t afford their own gardens. In this sense, floral decorations are not a luxury. They can be of great social significance.”

According to Erwin Barth, a Lübecker who moved to Berlin in 1912 and rose to the position of Berlin’s gardener-in-chief, a park needs structure. It requires ornaments but only if served in the right measures. As a great advocate of the idea of a Volkspark - “people's park” - a place easily accessible to all city residents but especially to those particularly disadvantaged in their urban environment, Barth believed that a public park should be a bright, airy place with a calm frame of paths and greens. And serving all age groups, hence his particular attention to playgrounds and quieter nooks for the elder…

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Fighting for compensation is never easy but hardly any other experience of this kind was more disillusioning or draining than what victims of Nazi crimes and persecution had to go through after the war.

Only humour could help them put up with the seemingly endless vile ingenuity with which the German state and hordes of still active Nazi sympathisers as well as high-rank Nazis themselves managed to thwart their attempts at seeking justice. In June 1950 the Allgemeine Jüdische Illustrierte published a cartoon by Peter Holstein who turned a popular German board game Mensch, ärgere Dich nicht (it can be loosely translated as “Keep calm and carry on”), played in the UK as “Ludo”.

Here, each station was a direct commentary on the contemporary situation of the survivors of the Third Reich thieving and murderous policies. From procrastination to mounting insurmountable hurdles to actually treating the perpetrators better than their victims. Like in the legendary case alluded to at the station No. 25.

One of the more remarkable episodes of post-war West Germany involved Werner Best - trained legal expert, former SS-Obergruppenführer, senior Gestapo organiser and Reich Plenipotentiary in occupied Denmark.

The man is credited with having spawned the idea of Einsatzgruppen – Nazi deployment troops used in mass murders of East Europeans. Einsatztruppen which carried out mass murders in Rumbula or at Babi Yar (just two of the horrific Nazi massacres, where in just a matter of days they shot dead 25,000 and 33,771 Jewish men, women and children respectively). Werner Best was one of the main cogs in the “Final Solution” machinery.

He was well-educated, he was ambitious and he was ruthless. Götz Aly, one of the truly admirable German journalists and historians, wrote about him in Der Spiegel in 1996:

He was the highest-ranking survivor of the Nazi terror apparatus—the third man after Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler. Yet despite determined efforts by prosecutors, he never faced justice before a post-war German court. Instead, he gradually faded from public memory.

Dr Werner Best was not the kind of banal bureaucratic perpetrator described by Hannah Arendt. He was one of the intellectual architects of National Socialism—a man who fused the German civil service’s cult of administrative efficiency with the imperial dream of a Nazi ‘Großraum’ (”Greater Germanic Sphere”) and the planned annihilation of those the regime considered unworthy of life.

So naturally, in the Third Reich he went on to have a flourishing career. Career which was to keep on flourishing well after no outstretched right arms would be raised in the open…

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On this day at around 7.30 AM legal practitioner and jurist from Chemnitz, Walter Linse, left his flat at Gerichstraße 12 in Berlin-Lichterfelde, only to be stopped by a man asking him for a match:

He wanted to have a smoke but had nothing to light his cigarette with. Second later half-conscious but still resisting Linse was dragged into a waiting Opel and spirited away into the East German territory.

Walter Linse was abducted by the Stasi. As one of the leading men in the West-Berlin Association of Free German Jurists, an organisation said to have focused on following and uncovering violations of human rights in the DDR, he was an enemy. But he was also an East German enemy - Linse, born in 1903 in Chemnitz, spent the Second World War and the first years after its end working in the city and only fled to the West in 1949.

In East Berlin the car carrying the abducted and his kidnappers (hired straight from an East Berlin prison) headed for the U-Boot - the notorious interrogation prison of East German Ministry for State Security (better known as the Stasi). There he spent the following half a year, before being passed into the always eager hands of the Soviet MBG (short for Министерство государственной безопасности, Soviet pendent to the Stasi and soon to be replaced by the KGB), residing in Berlin-Karlshorst.

There he was put before a military court and pronounced guilty of espionage, sabotage and generally acting in a way harmful to the state interests of the DDR and the USSR. Walter Linse’s German Association of Free German Jurists was established and financed by the CIA.

And for that there was just one sentence. Death.

The next stop for Linse was the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow (the HQ of Stalinist persecution). It was there that on December 15, 1953 he heard his death sentence confirmed. On the same day Walter Linse was brought to another dark Moscow prison commonly known as Butyrki and immediately executed. Linse’s body was then cremated and the ashes buried in a mass grave.

A man who became a heroic figure in the fight against the Communist regime. A man who deserved to have his name and his deeds commemorated. And so in 1961 the street where he lived and where the drama began to unfold on July 8, 1952 - Gerichtstraße - was re-named in his honour.

In 2007 the Hohenschönhausen Stasi-Gedenkstätte, now no longer a scene of horrors but a memorial site, decided to name a new award after him as well. And that’s when the Truth raised its ugly head.

Historians and researchers had already been digging into Walter Linse’s past. They had good reasons for it. Many other capable civil servants and active members of all sorts of bodies and organisations, previously considered de-Nazified and trustworthy, turned out to have thrown a shade of a much deeper hue of brown that expected.

Like Linse’s close co-activist within the Association, Horst Erdmann. Erdmann, according to the declassified CIA papers “the head of the West Berlin agents’ Center ‘Investigation Committee of Free Lawyers’1, turned out to have lied about practically every single thing about his past, including his place of birth, date of birth, education, as well as the fact that joined the NSDAP on 1 August 1937 (membership number 3,925,549), was Hitler Youth Stammführer, and a general busy-body within the complex structures of Nazi administration. Fast forward nearly two decades and he would also commit fraud and embezzle quite a sum of money.

Linse himself joined the NSDAP in 1940 but already since 1938 he worked hard at the office for „Bearbeitung von Entjudungsvorgängen“ (“Processing of Systematic De-Judaization”, responsible for - here another hateful Nazi word - “Aryanization” of Jewish estates.

In Chemnitz during the war Linse worked - fully aware of what it was that he was doing - within a system which stole Jewish property prior to its owners’ planned extermination. Stealing by putting Jews under pressure and even denouncing the unwilling to the Gestapo. He remained in his office position even after the war had ended - obviously with a different scope of work, but undeterred and not much burdened by his conscience.

The latter might have been due to the fact that he allegedly helped some Jewish people avoid the fate of their brothers and sisters. One person vouched for him in the summer of 1945, claiming he had been active in a resistance group called “Ciphero” - historians are still to find any traces of the said group and might never do so. It would not be the first or the last time one person equips another with a “Persilschein” (Persil is a popular washing powder brand famous for its cleaning power, especially for white textiles - a Schein stands for a certificate) - a phenomenon so widely spread after the war that it became part of the German language.

Another witness vouched for Linse from the US: his life was saved thanks to Linse’s intervention at the KZ Buchenwald - the notorious concentration camp just outside picturesque little city of Weimar (about which you can now read in Katja Hoyer’s excellent book called “Weimar”). Since no evidence for a similar rescue could be found, Linse even left the Liberal Party he had joined in the hope of building up a political career.

The latter is not to say that Walter Linse’s tragic fate should not be looked at with grief or empathy. But it is crucial to remember that most heroes are artificial constructs built of legends, persistent repetition of preferred interpretation, of manipulating facts to soften the spotlight and of willing suspension of disbelief.

Looking closer, we might suddenly find ourselves facing a dark, disturbing image. It takes courage, too, to admit it is there.

Hohenschönhausen Stasi-Gedenkstätte decided to abandon the idea of naming an award after Linse. The street, the old Gerichtstraße in Berlin-Lichterfelde, still bears his name.

For more declassified CIA material on Linse incident go to CIA’s archive page (the “sanitized” text might be of special interest).

Thank you for reading Berlin Companion. As always, please comment, subscribe and share - the Berlin Calendar dispatches are automatically available to all paying supporters.

According to Casanova’s own diary entries: "There was nothing further to attract me at Brunswick, and I thought of spending the summer at Berlin, which I concluded would be more amusing than a small provincial town." The tone would have suggested a leisure trip. A journey undertaken on a whim for nothing else but pleasure and self-gratification. It was everything but…

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Many passers-by walking down the middle-strip of Unter den Linden where it meets Pariser Platz in the small hours of July 7, came to a sudden halt. Where, normally, their view of Brandenburger Tor would have been quite unobscured, a pair of oversized round buttocks and shapely legs stood between them and city’s best-known landmark…

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Krolloper’s management did not choose to close the curtain forever - Otto Klemperer, who ran the house from 1927, was forced to do so. Officially, the city - at that point in time blessed with not one but three opera houses - had to reduce the offer. With the world in the thrall of a soul-drenching financial crisis, maintaining three such establishments was simply not viable.

Unofficially, a conflict between Krolls’ management and several other chief players who never made any secret for their dislike for the modern and progressive style of the Tiergarten house, had the latter pull some important strings.

All attempts to save the stage were in vain. The alleged Kulturbolschwismus practiced by the bold and progressive opera house management served as a perfect excuse to nail their coffin. Once again, being progressive and venturing into new exciting territories would turn against Berlin’s art world. Despite the promising start and in spite of the fact that Otto Klemperer managed to established one of the most harmonious opera ensembles in Europe and perhaps even worldwide. An ensemble which performed on stage within Bauhaus-designed scenography: Bauhaus artists regularly co-operated with Klemperer’s opera house.

This would not be the first time that this historic building would be facing the end.

Berlin’s Staatsoper am Königplatz (since 1926 "am Platz der Republik") opened in what once used to be the city’s most popular entertainment venue - the 1844 Krolls Etablissement. Less than a decade later, in February 1951, the favoured location would burn down completely, leaving especially wealthy Berliners in mourning.

Seven months later it re-opened again.

After decades of constant ups and downs, including problems with leasing the space, Kaiser Wilhelm II spoke the final word: Krolloper was to be torn down. The emperor wished a new opera house for Berlin, so both Krolls and the eighteenth-century Staatsoper Unter den Linden would have had to go. Ironically, both would be saved by the same Kaiser, albeit indirectly.

Wilhelm’s political carelessness and arrogance would pull Germany into the void of the First World War, forcing his attention to shift to other matters instead.

However, by July 1931 the final verdict stood. Krolls would no longer operate as a temple of opera music.

Otto Klemperer - brilliant German composer and conductor who would soon leave Germany to escape Nazi persecution and go to lead renown US orchestras in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco - was in charge of the house at the time. And he would absolutely refuse to take that verdict without making big noise.

Klemperer sued against the government's decision but lost. The argument that Krolloper "cost too much" won.

In 1933 new masters would move into the building: after the Reichstag burnt in February 1933, the old Krollsoper would become the main seat of the Third Reich “Parliament”. From that moment everyone would be dancing to a completely different tune.

Thank you, as always, for reading the Berlin Companion. Please comment, follow and share.

With the weather in Berlin finally picking up again to be worthy of the title “summer weather”,…

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Today, Berlin has some 400 church buildings, albeit not all of them are still used as religious centres.

One of the best-known still-active temples is the Sophienkirche, consecrated on this day in 1713. Berlin’s oldest still existing Baroque church opened in the historic district of Spandauer Vorstadt (fun fact: actually Spandower Vorstadt as until 1878 Spandau, like Pankow, was officially spelled “Spandow”).

Its first name “Spandauische Kirche” was correct as far geography went - it was built to serve the growing number of Spandauer Vorstadt’s residents. However, there was another, far less benevolent reason, for that first official label. A family feud as old as the hills.

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In well over two decades spent in Vienna, Robert Musil did a lot of walking. Strolling through the city - keen observer of its goings-on that he was - and passing one immortalised, stone-cold hero after another, he came to a simple but profound conclusion: "The remarkable thing about monuments is that one does not notice them. There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument."1

The pre-war Berlin was very much like Musil’s Vienna: with its roughly 300 major monuments (96 of them in the Tiergarten alone!), you could mark your itinerary from one statue to another. As people, indeed, did. Children were taught the name of the nearest marble or bronze heroic effigy to help them find the way back home in case they should be lost.

But otherwise the streetscape Puppen (German for dolls) were passed by with the same indifference as water pumps and benches.

Until they vanished and their loss would be mourned as crushing. As robbing the city of its original “self”. Something that happened in Berlin a lot. Here’s one such bronze hero who, however, returned, but - as the city around him - could never become what he was.

On this day in 1895 the Lutherdenkmal (Luther Memorial) was unveiled on Berlin's Neuer Markt.

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“I miss the old Berlin of the …

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It did not leave anyone out, rich or poor: including Austrian emperor, king of Spain, Russian tsar, Swedish queen and a French monarch. At best it left its victims scarred for life (like Stalin, who contracted smallpox at the age of 7), or blind and/or deaf: Beethoven’s deafness is contributed to his contact with the disease.

Johannes Kepler’s vision was quite limited after at the age of four he suffered bout of smallpox himself - later he would lose his wife and one of three children to the disease.

For at its worst, the disease killed its victims after many days of vile suffering.

That’s why after in 1801 nearly 1,700 people died of Blattern (German name for Smallpox) in Berlin, on 7 June 1802, successful trial smallpox inoculations (carried out mostly on Berlin orphans) began…

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It took nearly a decade to complete Berlin’s Reichstag building, the seat …

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