Café Josty

The café Josty was a Berliner pastry, whose most famous branch was the artists' café at Potsdamer Platz. A branch was located in the imperial avenue 201 (now Federal Avenue) corner Trautenaustraße in the district of Wilmersdorf, another in the Joachimstalerstraße 44 in Charlottenburg Bahnhof Zoo. On April 27, opened in 2001 at the Sony Centre, not far from the former site of the main branch, a new cafe Josty.

History

19th century

The brothers emigrated Josty end of the 18th century from Sils in Switzerland to Berlin, where she 1796, the confectioner Johann Josty & Co. founded. For this company out to the cafe Josty that existed from at least 1812 developed, first at the Stechbahn 1 ( at the former Berlin City Palace ), and finally from 1880 on Potsdamer Platz.

Already perverted to the previous addresses in the café Josty artists such as Heinrich Heine, Joseph von Eichendorff and the Brothers Grimm, the Empire then Theodor Fontane and Adolph Menzel. In 1900 the family sold the café Josty to the widow of the founder of the Café Bauer. The Josty was then modernized but retained its traditional name.

20th century

In the 20th century the café was with his view of the busy Potsdamer Platz again become an important meeting place for artists, particularly of Expressionism and New Objectivity. She put on especially the dynamics of the place and its modernity. Paul Boldt perpetuated the view from the cafe in a sonnet published in 1912 on the terrace of the Café Josty:

Potsdamer Platz in an endless roar Glaciates all resounding avalanches The street complex: trams on rails Automobiles and the refuse of mankind. People trickle over the asphalt, Ant- like lizards nimble. Forehead and hands, flashing thoughts, Swim like sunlight through the dark forest. Night Rain enveloped the place in a cave, Where bats, white, with beating wings And purple jellyfish are - colorful oils; The multiply, dissected out of the car. - Spurts Berlin, the day glistening nest, From the smoke of the night like the pus of a plague.

In one of the most famous novels of the Weimar Republic, the children's book Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner, not only plays an important scene in the cafe Josty, Kästner wrote the book there as well, but in the store in Berlin -Wilmersdorf.

In March 1930, the Café Josty pulled from Potsdamer Platz in the Friedrich- Ebert-Straße (today: Ebertstraße ). The building in which the artists' café was located at the Potsdamer Platz, was destroyed as almost all buildings at this location during the Second World War.

In Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire studied in one scene an old man the place where the café Josty once stood, but can not find him - so complete is the destruction.

The new café Josty

The new café Josty originated in 2001 at the Sony Centre, about 200 meters away from the previous location of the main branch. Today it is a restaurant and has apart from the name nothing in common with its predecessor. Here mostly by tourists and during the Berlinale also actors and starlets.