Haus Vaterland (Fatherland House) was a pleasure palace on the south-east side of Potsdamer Platz in central Berlin. Preceded by Haus Potsdam, a multi-use building including a large cinema and a huge café, from 1928 to 1943 it was a large, famous establishment including the largest cafe in the world, a major cinema, a large ballroom and numerous theme restaurants, promoted as a showcase of all nations. It was partially destroyed by fire in World War II, reopened in a limited form until 1953, and was finally demolished in 1976.
History
Haus Potsdam The six-storey building was designed by Franz Heinrich Schwechten, who was also the architect of the Anhalter Bahnhof and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. It was constructed between 1911 and 1912 as Haus Potsdam. It was primarily an office building; from 1917 or 1919 until 1927 Universum Film AG or UfA, which owned the site, was headquartered there;Hans Borgelt, Die UFA - ein Traum: hundert Jahre deutscher Film: Ereignisse und Erlebnisse, Berlin: Ed. q, 1993, , pp. 70, 127 (1917)Klaus Kreimeier, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945, 1996, repr. Berkeley: University of California, 1999, , p. 43 (1919) but the lower floors contained a 1,196-seat cinema, called the Lichtspieltheater im Piccadillyhaus or the Kammerlichtspiele im Haus Potsdam (Cinematograph in the Piccadilly House, Moving Pictures in Haus Potsdam),Sylvaine Hänsel and Angelika Schmitt, eds., Kinoarchitektur in Berlin 1895-1995, Berlin: Reimer, 1995, p. 193 and the Café Piccadilly.Roger Green, "The City and Entertainment: Coney Island and Haus Vaterland", Berlin/New York: Like and Unlike: Essays on Architecture and Art from 1870 to the Present, ed. Josef Paul Kleihues and Christina Rathgeber, New York: Rizzoli, 1993, , pp. 210–23, p. 216, and illustrations p. 217. The building was faced with sandstone and gave the impression of masonry, but had a steel frame and the cinema space was spanned by five girders.Peer Zietz, Franz Heinrich Schwechten: ein Architekt zwischen Historismus und Moderne, Stuttgart: Menges, 1999, p. 51 At the northern end, facing the square, was a circular pavilion topped by a copper dome rising 35 metres above the pavement, with a row of Attic statues beneath it;Otto Sarrazin and Friedrich Schultze, "Der Neubau 'Haus Potsdam' in Berlin", Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung May 18, 1912, pp. 254–57, p. 254 this was essentially a recreation of the mausoleum of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great in Ravenna. The cafe entrance was on the bottom two floors of this section.Zietz, p. 50. Behind it, a long, narrow section in a simplified Wilhelmine architectural style, with a mansard roof, extended some 100 metres alongside the Potsdamer Bahnhof.
The Café Piccadilly could accommodate some 2,500 guests and was lavishly decorated with wall and ceiling paintings and Sienese marble.Photographs Sarrazin and Schultze, p. 259, Plate 16; Green p. 218, Plate 12. Operated by Heinrich Braun,Franziska Nentwig, ed., Berlin im Licht, Exhibition catalogue, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Berlin: G & H, 2008, , p. 177 Knud Wolffram, Tanzdielen und Vergnügungspaläste: Berliner Nachtleben in den dreißiger und vierziger Jahren: von der Friedrichstraße bis Berlin W, vom Moka Efti bis zum Delphi, Reihe Deutsche Vergangenheit 78: Stätten der Geschichte Berlins, Berlin: Hentrich, 1992, , p. 202 it was an attraction comparable to the Moulin Rouge in Paris,Walter Austin, A War Zone Gadabout: Being the Authentic Account of Four Trips to the Fighting Nations during 1914, '15, '16, Boston: Hinkley, 1917, , p. 22. drawing "white collar workers, business people and tourists" by day, "amusement seekers, restaurant and variety patrons and also prostitutes" at night. One of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Street Scenes cycle of paintings, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1914), depicts two prostitutes on a traffic island in front of the building and the Potsdamer Bahnhof.Martin Ignatius Gaughan, German Art 1907-1937: Modernism and Modernisation, Bern/Oxford: Lang, 2007, , p. 93.Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen, What Great Paintings Say, Volume 2, Cologne/London: Taschen, 2003, , p. 420.Katharina Gerstenberger, Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature, Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture, Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2008, , p. 142. After World War I began in 1914, it was renamed to the more patriotic Café Vaterland.Eberhard Buchner, Kriegsdokumente, Munich: Albert Langen, 1914, p. 241 There is disagreement about the exact new name of the cafe and about when the building was renamed. According to Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2000, p. 87, Café Piccadilly became Deutsches Café (German Café); according to Werner Hecht, et al., ed., Bertolt Brecht, Werke: grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Volume 1, Stücke I, [East] Berlin: Aufbau/Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989, /9783518400616, p. 561 , it became Deutsches Kaffeehaus 'Vaterland' ('Fatherland' German Coffeehouse); according to Mark R. McGee, Berlin: A Visual and Historical Documentation from 1925 to the Present, Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 2002, , p. 136, it became the Deutsches Cafehaus (German Coffeehouse), and he and Zeitz among others state that the entire building was renamed Haus Vaterland in 1914; Hänsel and Schmitt, p. 193, also implies this, saying that the cinema became the Kammerlichtspiele im Haus Vaterland in 1914, and Kreimeier, p. 43, refers to it as "the Fatherland House (formerly the Piccadilly)" in 1919. However, according to Green, the building was Haus Potsdam for 16 years. Also Elfi Pracht, M. Kempinski & Co., Historische Kommission zu Berlin, Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung Beuermann, 1994, , p. 72 dates the renaming of the building to 1 February 1928.
Haus Vaterland Haus Potsdam became less successful during the 1920s, and in 1927 was sold to the Bank für Handel und Grundbesitz, which leased it for ten years to the Kempinski family of restaurateurs. They had an exclusive contract to provide all food and drink and to manage the business, which became their flagship.Gottfried Korff and Reinhard Rürup, Berlin, Berlin: die Ausstellung zur Geschichte der Stadt, Exhibition catalogue, Berlin: Nicolai, 1987, , p. 412 Jochen Kleining, M. Kempinski & Co.: die "Arisierung" eines Berliner Traditionsunternehmens, M.A. thesis, Humboldt University Berlin, 2007, Hamburg: Diplomica, 2008, , p. 43 A history in Der Spiegel, "Kino - das grosse Traumgeschäft: Bei der UfA machte man das so ...", 29 November 1950 represents it as a direct sale to Kempinski. In 1928, the building was reopened as Haus Vaterland, based on an idea by Leo Kronau, who had visited Coney Island in New York and wanted to emulate the international attractions in the amusement parks there and improve on Berlin's own imitation, Lunapark.Green, pp. 212, 216. He persuaded the Kempinski family, who had a 65-year track record of success as restaurateurs in Berlin, to convert Haus Potsdam into a Haus der Nationen (house of nations), and became its first artistic director, arranging entertainment to suit the flavour of each of the gastronomic units.Green, pp. 216, 220.
The architect for the conversion, Carl Stahl-Urach, the architect for Fritz Lang's Doctor Mabuse films,McGee, p. 136, describes him as an entrepreneur. modernised the exterior by applying stucco and in particular by wiring the domed section to be illuminated at night as an example of Architecture of the Night (Architektur der Nacht) or Light Architecture (Licht-Architektur) which also emulated Coney Island lighting effects.Green, p. 218. The lettering around the rotunda was illuminated, and approximately 4,000 bulbs arranged in intersecting arcs on the dome turned on and off to create the illusion of spinning motion. A reporter in Germania applauded the "Babylonian dome" as irrefutable evidence that "here, world-capital life is pulsing."Green, p. 218 and note 34, p. 223. David Clay Large describes it as "a beacon of commercial kitsch". Inside, the cafe was renovated and the building extended and the cinema moved to make room for a new entrance block in the centre of the building; in the rest of the space, restaurants dedicated to different countries and regions of the world were constructed. Each was decorated appropriately with dioramas up to 6 metres deep,Wilhelm Klauser, "Vom Pot au Feu zum Processed Food: Das Restaurant als Ort der Moderne", Petra Hagen Hodgson and Rolf Toyka, Der Architekt, der Koch und der gute Geschmack / The Architect, the Cook, and Good Taste, Akademie der Architekten- und Stadtplanerkammer Hessen, New York: Birkhüser/Basel: Springer, 2007, , pp. 110–19, p. 114 panoramas, and lighting effects, and served appropriate food; it was an early example of modern theme dining or experiential gastronomy.Andreas Muhs and Heinrich Wefing, Der neue Potsdamer Platz: ein Kunststück Stadt, Berlin: be.bra, 1998, , p. 22 Michael Sontheimer, Berlin Berlin: Der Umzug in die Hauptstadt, Hamburg: Spiegel, 1999, , p. 164 While the main shows took place in the ballroom, each theme restaurant also had musicians of the appropriate origins on staff to complete the dining experience, including at least six dance bands.A 1979 article in Cadmos, referring to it as the peak of the early modern movement to entertain the customer with complete experiences of exotica: p. 85 : "Le comble est atteint à Berlin . . . une sorte d'immense bâtisse où sont installés des restaurants de toutes les cuisines et employés des orchestres de toutes les nationalités."John Chilton, Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz, London: Macmillan/New York: Oxford University, 1987, , p. 85.Green notes (p. 223, note 40) that Richard Fleischer, the artistic director from 1935 to 1943, told him that the Wild West cowboys were Americans, but most of the other performers were Germans playing parts. Sontheimer also says the "gypsy" violinists were from Neukölln (p. 164). A central kitchen occupied the entire top floor, connected to the different dining establishments by pneumatic tubes, through which orders came up, and dumbwaiters, by means of which food was sent down and dirty dishes sent back up; conveyor belts at kitchen level transferred the dishes to be machine washed, dried and stacked. The whole was run on American-influenced principles of industrial efficiency.Green, p. 220. It published a house magazine called Berolina - Latin for Berlin and most famously embodied in the statue in the Alexanderplatz.Chilton, p. 86.
It was an enormous and popular establishment,Klauser, p. 114, characterises it as "one of the greatest gastronomic sensations of Europe." and like Haus Potsdam before it, is frequently alluded to in both artistic and tourist contexts, for example in Irmgard Keun's 1932 novel Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl). Its combination of spectacle, variety performances, international dining and cinema was unique.MatHias Bleckman, Harry Piel: ein Kino-Mythos und seine Zeit, Düsseldorf: Filminstitut der Landeshaupstadt Düsseldorf, 1992, , p. 194 Large sees it as having been "a kind of proto-Disney World".David Clay Large, Berlin, New York: Basic Books, 2000, , p. 206. The building could accommodate up to 8,000 people; the 4,454 square metres of theme restaurants had a capacity of 3,500 people and Café Vaterland was the largest in the world; the one millionth guest was recorded in October 1929, barely a year after the opening.Green, pp. 211, 220.Pracht, p. 75.
Third Reich and World War II