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BERLIN LITERATI HANG WITH EINSTEIN
Havacuppa Joe at the Cafe'

Leave it to me to find the only cab driver in Berlin who doesn’t know where the original Café Einstein is. Okay, maybe a lot of folks from the economically struggling former east come to Berlin for work and end up driving cabs. it’s a good thing I knew where it was, or at least knew it when I could see it. I’d had a meeting there once a couple of years before on a movie project and was running late for this one. There are so many of them now, it's good I remembered.

There are several Cafe Einsteins, so popular it's become a chain. The Cafe Einstein on Unter den Linden a few blocks from the Brandenberg Gate is now the flagship upscale spot of what is starting to be called Berlin's "upper east side", emulating New York's stylish neighborhoods, surrounded by museums, designer stores and glossy windowed car dealerships selling Bentleys and Ferraris, a respite from shopping bag carrying. While many Berliners embrace the glitz and growth of modern Berlin, you'll find many who lament the slow disappearance of city's rough edged Bohemian character, still to be found at the original Cafe Einstein, located down east on Kurfürstenstrasse (not to be confused with the Kurfürstendamm shopping street), halfway between the heart of the old west Berlin surrounding the Zoo to the reconstructed vibrancy of the former East, the café is a longish walking distance or short cab or bus ride from Potsdammer Platz.

Named after the mathematical genius of physics, the Café Einstein was Berlin’s answer to the intellectual and artistic salons of the prewar years, both National Socialist and Cold, when the artists and burgeoning intellectualism used to gather in the capital of advanced ideas to discuss and argue the tenets of existentialism and minimalist art. The original Einstein Café has been a popular hangout for TV, film and publishing media creative types who come into town from “the burbs” like Babelsburg Studios for a more European coffee house literati feeling of long relaxed caffein infusion while reading or writing, an escape from the corporate commerce institutionalism of the central city, back to the bohemian feel of old world creative discourse. © Bargain Travel Europe

Cafe Einstein
Kurfürstenstrasse 58
10785 Berlin
www.cafeeinstein.com

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SEE ALSO:

BERLIN ZOO

OSTEL - BERLIN’S DDR DESIGN HOSTEL

GUTENBERG’S BIBLE AND LITTLE GUT WEIN

BAROQUE IN BAVARIA - ETTAL BASILICA

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