On a wonderful late-summer afternoon, a small group gathered on the leafy patio behind Café Lisbeth to toast. The desk ordered bottle after bottle of prosecco to accompany a large unfold. Because the wine and schnapps flowed, they grew boisterous, laughing and telling tales properly into the night. An informal observer may need assumed it was a celebration, or maybe a reunion of previous buddies. In reality, this was a funeral.
“A part of our raison d’être is to be right here for folks to have a spot to come back collectively after the funeral, to eat, drink, and simply to be heat and held by an area.” says Alexis Hyman Wolff, who based the café and artwork house in Friedhof II der Sophiengemeinde, a Protestant cemetery in Mitte, in 2022. Crossing the edge into this quiet oasis close to the previous Berlin Wall appears like stumbling throughout a secret.
“Berlin has this custom of cemetery cafés as a result of cemeteries listed below are extraordinary inexperienced areas,” Wolff says. “The character right here in our cemetery is so attractive. There are folks with child carriages going for walks and others tending to the graves.”
If the thought of eating close to the deceased feels macabre, relaxation assured this place feels very a lot alive. Friends embody households enjoying board video games within the afternoon and teenage women with their tarot decks on a Friday evening. Café Lisbeth is only one of a number of such areas in Berlin that bridge the hole between the dwelling and the lifeless. The oldest, Café Finovo, has been in operation for almost 20 years in Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof, the place the Brothers Grimm lie. Kaffeebar Jacobi resides simply off of the Alter St.-Jacobi-Friedhof in Neukölln. All pay lease to the cemeteries, serving to fund the maintenance of gravestones whereas serving as group gathering areas.
When the proprietor of Café Strauss, a Kreuzberg establishment within the Friedrichswerderscher Friedhof for over a decade, retired earlier this 12 months, she wished to make sure it didn’t develop into a “mainstream café,” says Jack Vowinckel, who co-runs the house. She handed the baton to the proprietor of one other neighborhood café and bakery. The newly rechristened Café Friedberg, which opened in April, is understood for its lemon mousse cake.
Kaffee und Kuchen—nonetheless a day by day ritual for a lot of the older era—is an enormous a part of 21gramm’s enterprise as properly. On the café in St. Thomas-Kirchhof in southern Neukölln, muffins are available in beneficiant rectangular slabs: an exceptionally moist carrot cake and seasonal choices like zwetschgenkuchen, a yeasted plum cake. Whereas 21gramm is trendier than a few of its friends, the house owners wished to maintain it a spot the place costs are honest, the ambiance respectful, and the vibe welcoming to all.
“I’ve lived in Neukölln for 20 years and seen how a lot the neighborhood has modified,” says co-owner Jeremias Stüer. “For me, it was all the time necessary to be there for everyone. We will’t simply be for the hip vacationers. There are people who find themselves coming from visiting somebody’s grave.”
Earlier than the café opened, the century-old constructing lay fallow and closed off for years. Somebody had as soon as painted the partitions a garish ’90s crimson. Because the group stripped away the paint and tore down inner partitions, they uncovered murals and gothic-lettered inscriptions, restoring a way of what the ethereal, Corinthian-columned chapel may as soon as have regarded like. Now, vegetation hold from the ceiling, and a well-tended backyard shields the patio seats. “We all the time mentioned we wished to carry the soul again into this place and to make it alive once more,” Stüer says—therefore the title, which refers back to the supposed weight of a human soul.
Come on a Saturday and also you may see a brunch crowd devouring hangover-friendly croque monsieurs exterior, whereas a marriage occasion pops crémant on the lengthy communal desk inside. Or there could also be a Leichenschmaus—actually, a “corpse feast”—a raucous affair, usually with an overabundance of food and drinks. In German custom, this funerary banquet is usually held a number of weeks after the demise, as soon as the preliminary shock has settled. Whereas some cafés, like Café Friedberg, host these gatherings in personal rooms, 21gramm opts to maintain them out within the open.
“Particularly on Tuesdays, virtually each week there’s a bunch of 4 to twenty folks in the course of the restaurant who simply got here from a funeral, whereas on the subsequent desk, others is likely to be on a date,” Stüer says. “From the very starting, it was clear to us that we don’t should separate the 2. It’s all part of life.”
The café enterprise additionally helps maintain the worth level cheap for households of the bereaved. Nobody is ever turned away. “It appears like our obligation, being situated in a cemetery,” Stüer says. “It’s necessary to have the ability to collect afterwards, and the households who manage a funeral aren’t doing it by selection. Even for individuals who can’t afford our common choices, we all the time discover a technique to serve them as properly.”
Café Lisbeth additionally hosts many funerary feasts. Chiara De Martin, initially from the Veneto area of Italy, is behind the ever-evolving menu of antipasti, together with vitello tonnato and focaccia with mortadella, stracciatella, and pistachio cream. Topranin says she has needed to get artistic—sous-vide cooking octopus for 8 hours or discovering different methods to raise the dishes and not using a full kitchen. “There’s lots of pleasure that comes via the meals,” Wolff says.
Whereas Topranin handles the culinary aspect, Wolff, who spent years on the Museum of Jurassic Expertise in Los Angeles, oversees the curatorial features of the house. Café Lisbeth hosts exhibitions on themes of transience and the way people have grappled with life’s passages all through historical past. A current collaboration with the Institute of Meteorology at Berlin’s Freie Universität centered on the sky as a spot the place generations have believed their family members go.
The exhibitions, summary by design, are an invite to contemplation. In accordance with Wolff, not everybody who stops by for espresso notices them or chooses to interact, however many do. Grief counseling can be a central a part of the café’s mission.
“This isn’t simply any house. To achieve our entrance door, you go via the cemetery gate,” Wolff says. “We’re on sacred floor right here.”
