You are standing on Kurfürstendamm, in front of a Berlin legend—Café Kranzler. It has been a fixture here since 1932, yet its history reaches back much further: to 1825, when Johann Georg Kranzler opened his first café on the boulevard Unter den Linden.
The original establishment was destroyed by bombs in 1944—but Kranzler did not give up. That very same year, he reopened his doors at a different location nearby. In 1932, the branch on the Ku’damm in West Berlin was opened. In 1945, it met
the same fate as the original establishment.
The building you see today—with its distinctive rotunda and red-and-white awning—was constructed in 1958. Since then, the Ku’damm has been almost unimaginable without Kranzler. It was here that West Berliners drank their coffee; here sat artists, politicians, and tourists—and, after the fall of the Wall, East Germans as well, who quickly discovered Kranzler for themselves.
Celebrities flocked through its doors: Helmut Kohl, Boris Becker, Udo Lindenberg. The latter even immortalized Kranzler in a song, with a tongue-in-cheek lyric about Russians, tanks—and cream pastries.
In the year 2000, a new era began: the 16-story Kranzler-Eck building marked the transition. The café experienced its share of ups and downs, at one point even transforming into a bar. Today, it is owned by a Berlin coffee roastery—making it, once again, a place
where stories begin.
Perhaps you will step inside now yourself—and, for a moment, become part of this long history of Berlin cafés. Image 1: Own work
Image 2: By Rijksmuseum - https://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.289874, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85634859
Image 3: By Willem van de Poll - http://proxy.handle.net/10648/aea29a3e-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73597343
Image 4: By Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F002774-0010 / Brodde / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5448505
