Café des Westens

The café opened in 1893 on the ground floor of a newly erected lavish residential building in Charlottenburg, part of the Wilhelmine Ring in the fashionable "New West" area next to the German capital.

At the café, Ernst von Wolzogen sketched the idea for his Überbrettl cabaret, opened in 1901 and soon followed by Max Reinhardt's Schall und Rauch ("Smoke and Mirrors"), the first of numerous Kabarett venues in Germany.

Reinhardt and Christian Morgenstern were heads of an aspiring Bohème circle; Richard Strauss, Maximilian Harden, Ludwig Fulda, Paul Lindau, Frank Wedekind, and Carl Sternheim were regular guests.

In pre-World War I times, Café des Westens became a centre of the German Expressionist literary movement: around Else Lasker-Schüler and her husband Herwarth Walden, artists like René Schickele, Roda Roda, Johannes Schlaf, Erich Mühsam and John Henry Mackay, Paul Scheerbart, Frank Wedekind, Carl Sternheim und Leonhard Frank, Salomo Friedlaender, and Jakob van Hoddis met up here.

Our world was a different one from the emancipated crowd that surrounded us there...Once, Else Lasker-Schüler drew me over to her table...”[1] Under increasing attacks by the conservative press, the café lost the patronage of many artists after management changes in 1913 and closed two years later.