It must have been at the beginning of the noughties, probably before, when I first went to Café Schwarzsauer on Kastanienallee on New Year’s Eve. Not to mark the turn of the year there, but hours beforehand, around three or three-thirty in the afternoon. The Schwarzsauer has been around since 1993.
The shop is a dinosaur of Berlin bar life, formerly a bar and breakfast shop at the same time, from old-fashioned “trendy magazines” (“Prinz” etc) to the Senate website called “hip bar” (whichever scene was and is always meant by this). What’s more, the Schwarzsauer is a smart crash store with large windows, a counter with three sides and toilets that didn’t look nicer, more colorful or worse in New York’s CBGB’s in the eighties and nineties.
For many years I was there with friends on New Year’s Eve: to drink beers, to ring in the evening wherever that continued, and yes, of course, to show myself. And last but not least, to demonstrate that the days of the Café M or the fish laboratory were definitely over, there were alternatives not only in Mitte but even in Kastanienallee.
Outside of time and space
Little did you suspect that there would be such a run on the relevant nightlife spots in the EasyJet era that even the Mysliwska in Silesian, the M in Goltzstraße or the Schwarzsauer should still exist today.
Anyway, like Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve is a special day. This day feels different, you are in a different mood, the world around you as well, and there are certain expectations.
So why not meet up with friends in the afternoon? When we got older and, above all, the parents of small children, these meetings and the afternoon New Year’s Eve in the Kastanienallee were unfortunately more of a crowd.
The hour of the illusionists
But I continued this tradition on my own: For a long time I went to Schwarzsauer on New Year’s Eve, in the early evening, at six, six thirty, to drink my first small beers, two, three, no more. That was of course not the case last year, Corona !, and I mean that it was not the case in 2019 either, because the Schwarzsauer had actually closed on that day (I suspect it will be the same again this Friday, damn it!).
So it is quite possible that I will have to look for another New Year’s Eve shop, in any case after the pandemic.
It’s not so much about reviewing the year again (good? Bad? Without special incidents?) Or stopping for a break, but about celebrating this unique day and its special hours.
These hours, according to the beautiful illusion, run outside of time and space, everything seems to be possible – before the usual begins with the New Year’s Eve dinner or the New Year’s party, before one has to be hard-pressed to realize that another year is up. And didn’t it pass very quickly?
