Blixa Bargeld with his parents. Café Mitropa, West Berlin. Circa 1981.
Photo: Guido Schirmeyer
West Berlin's Café Mitropa turns 40:The days and nights of the eighties
Blixa Bargeld was there, David Bowie too? The garish coolness of Café Mitropa was typical of the New Wave West Berlin of the eighties.
Translation:
In view of the glut of pubs with which Gastro-City Berlin spoils us, another pub anniversary would not be worth mentioning if it weren't for Café Mitropa in Schöneberg. The Mitropa is one of those West Berlin trendy pubs that are writing their own little cultural history. Hangouts such as Exil, Ax Bax, Paris Bar, Dschungel, SO 36, Café Einstein and Café Mitropa were cultural nuclei in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s.
Wim Wenders, Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria and many more sipped their lattes at Mitropa, and many of tomorrow's Berlin scene greats fortified themselves here with a hangover breakfast. The café turned Schöneberg's Goltzstraße into an underground promenade. When the weather was nice, you only had to sit in front of the café for two hours and you were offered a summer theater, each ego an actor. A handful of guests from the early days still come today.
In 1979, six students, led by Michaela Buescher, who now practices as a general practitioner in Zehlendorf, designed an avant-garde café with the charm of an Italian ice cream parlor by the standards of the time. "Running a shop, that was the thing. It was about self-realization. Not about making money. Our cash register was a wooden drawer. That's when the turnover came in, and at the end of a shift, everyone took their wages. That was collective thinking, as the people from the jungle collective also implemented it in the beginning," Buescher recalls forty years later on the phone while mountaineering in Bavaria, slightly out of breath.
"In Italy, I was inspired by the light, the freshness. Away with the swampy and sloppy" was Buescher's aesthetic concern: chalk-white walls, metal furniture on black and red mosaic flooring, illuminated with glistening neon rings under the ceiling. After the omap plush and the Indian carpets of the seventies, the garish coolness of the interior came across as cool.
Mitropa was the name of the dining car company of the GDR Reichsbahn, notorious for sparse menus, which also sounded cool in the walled city. However, the kitchen of Café Mitropa was not far from the original. Alexander Hacke from Einstürzende Neubauten still shakes it today when he remembers the "dreaded chicken salad".
On the other hand, his mouth still waters at the memory of the rum ball-sized energy balls with coconut chips: "The bar girls could hand them over to us inconspicuously in the hollow of our hands when we were hungry and no money," he continues. A stone's throw away was Winterfeldtplatz, the squatters' combat area, with the primeval jungle (today Slumberland) and the ruins as night stations.
The censor delivers the records
At the time, I myself lived with Rio Reiser in a shop apartment at Belziger Straße 23, right next to Burkhardt Seiler's record store Zensor, which opened at the same time as Mitropa, and was another important place for the scene with his records imported from Great Britain and the United States. In my bedroom, I was often woken up during the day when Burkhardt turned up his audition discs so loudly that it echoed through the backyard. If I liked a sound, I ran over to his shop and bought the record.
Because at night I DJed at Moon (today Rickenbacker's on Bundesallee), where Mania D. and Einstürzende Neubauten performed for the first time. Seiler was also the supplier for the music that was played at Mitropa.
The perch were the kings
Cassettes were the thing. We not only recorded John Peel's broadcasts, which could be heard on the British soldiers' radio station BFBS. We also dubbed Zensor's singles and mixed our own tapes. "The respective perch lamps were always the kings in our pubs," Hacke says in Café M, "because they had sovereignty over the cassette recorder." Each bartender was a recognized personality who put him or her in the limelight not only by his or her own outfit, but also by playing his or her own cassettes.
Dozens of barmaid personalities such as the Frenchwoman Dinah Leipzig have worked shifts at Mitropa. Therese, Gunda, Wee Flowers, Patrizia, Ulla, Bea, Mo Asumang. "In the evening we helped them get the chairs in, that was our cavalier service," says Alexander Hacke.
A sandbox for young New Wavers
The styled Mitropa attracted everyone immediately. It was our living room, a playroom for self-actualizers, a sandbox for young New Wavers who wanted to play a little longer, and for many family substitutes. The artist candidates were in the starting block, it was a creative hanging out, in which plans were forged, ideas were born – and implemented – in a frenzy.
The café was also an artist's dressing room. We performed experimental costumes coram publico. Plastic in all its designs was the material of the hour. Hacke writes about it in his autobiography "Krach": "A gentleman named Blixa Bargeld made a performance out of every appearance in the café by announcing with welding goggles on his nose: 'I am a fly.' Or by ordering a Coke with vanilla ice cream with a croissant to stipple."
Flirts, amours, breakups
The loud and the quiet checked each other out, flirts, amours, separations, dramas played out – the whole program. Posers had their small and big appearances, drove up on thick machines. Contemporaries who had already climbed a few rungs of their career ladder parked their classic cars in front of the Mitropa. How chic was the old red Volvo of ZDF colleague Bernd Kungel. "I still drive it today," he says modestly.
"It was the mood of the 'Cold War' and no one really knew whether it would still bang, so there was always an apocalyptic mood in the air," wrote the artist Betty Stürmer about the West Berlin scenery in her autobiographical book "Szenegirl", which was published last year.
Coffee with milk from white porcelain bowls
At Mitropa, we began and ended the days of the eighties – before moving on into the night. Nightly. To wait in front of the Mitropa door in the morning after nights of drinking in the jungle until it was finally unlocked: latte! Made of white porcelain bowls.
The Central European Travel Company soon objected to the use of its name, which was emblazoned on the dining cars of the Reichsbahn. The students who opened the shop handed over to the landlords Erwin and Werner after three years, and from then on the Mitropa was called "Café M", until today. "I would have found 'itropa' funnier," says Alexander Hacke in retrospect.
Werner fucks Anna
"Once someone sprayed 'Werner fucks Anna' on the cigarette machine. Landlord Werner commissioned Thierry Noir, Kiddy Citny, Oliver Schunt and me to spray more graffiti on the walls so that the said slogan would get lost in it. Our action eluded us into a disaster, we threw paints, I was afraid for my cowboy boots and tore mosaics barefoot out of the ground. We messed up the whole place. In any case, the shop had to be completely renovated afterwards. But Thierry probably got his idea for his later trademark, the gay lips on the Berlin Wall, on LSD," Hacke continues.
The writer Bernd Cailloux represented the writing guild at Mitropa as a regular guest. The budding painters, musicians and films all sat separately at the tables depending on the faculty, he observed. The fact that he himself was mentioned in the intro of the café menu pleases the author "almost as much as a literary prize".
Was Bowie there?
Padeluun, who made it to the Bundestag, organized the legendary "All Power of the Super 8" at Mitropa in 1980. Among them: Super 8 pioneer Knut Hoffmeister, then assistant to Martin Kippenberger. Mitropa film footage of him can be seen on YouTube. Mitropa founder Michaela Buescher was studying film herself at the time and filmed with patients in a Munich psychiatric hospital.
"God is dead," Nina Hagen belted out at the time, "the Lord is gone." This was aimed at David Bowie, who was one of our gods. And even today, almost four years after Bowie's death, some young guests at Café M are still haunted by the question: Was Bowie a guest at Café Mitropa? "Nope," says Alexander Hacke, "never seen." Bernd Cailloux disagrees: "Of course it was there!"
The leafer annoyed guests with the taz
And today? A new generation of regulars sits relaxed in Café M. Michael, an architect, has been artistically painting white sheets of paper with lettering here for ten years, thirty thousand of them already. A guest terror named Falco sometimes comes in uniform. As Captain of Köpenick. At Mitropa, weird figures such as the "General" also became locally prominent. Or "Der Blätterer", as ex-communard Antje Krüger remembers. The leafer annoyed guests with "making wind" when leafing through the taz, which is still on display in the M today. Or the volunteer glass clearer, a limping travesty Berber who was good at aiming: every now and then he threw pieces of sugar at guests from a long distance.
"When we took over the café ten years ago," says the current landlady Lina, "there was still a piece of paper under the counter with the names of three psychotherapists whom I was supposed to call if he or she went crazy." Meanwhile, her boyfriend tries to persuade Falco to stay away from the café for a while.
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The West Berlin Café Mitropa turns 40: The days and nights of the eighties - taz.de
