Soldatenkaffee

Somehow I got back to the post written almost two years ago, in which I presented the images of a little town in ruins since WWII on the German-German border. The thing is not so absurd: just think of the Geisterbahnhofs in Berlin, laying along the U-Bahns 6 and 8 which started from and arrived at the territory of West Berlin, but located under the territory of East Berlin, so that the metro just crossed them without stopping until as long as last autumn, and they will completely disappear only now, with the ongoing rebuilding of the area. Only by the end of the post emerged behind the small city, like the Statue of Liberty in the Planet of the Apes, the high-rise tower block of Moscow, indicating that what we see is only a scenery in the Mosfilm studio.


It becomes thus understandable as a movie blooper also the gibberish inscription which says Sparkass des kreises rohel. For the purpose it’s good enough.


And thus becomes understandable also the other blooper, the presence of a Soldatenkaffe in a small German town. For such coffee bars existed only in the occupied territories, where it was important to channel the German soldiers to reliable locations, where they are not exposed to the disruptive effect of the contact with the local population.




You certainly remember from your military service the loose leaf listing the places of entertainment in the area of the barracks which were permitted to visit, don’t you? The German soldiers were also equipped with such lists, that specified, which cafés, cinemas and brothels can be visited, and the Soldatenkaffee Madeleine at Faubourg Saint-Honoré 9 (U-Bahn Concorde) was high in their ranks.









With the end of the occupation the heyday of the Soldatenkaffees was also over, in today’s evil conditions of the liberal Europe a German soldier can enter any Parisian café. But who wishes for order, does not have to go far. By recognizing the gap in the market, this July they opened in Indonesia the first modern Soldatenkaffee für Aryans, wannabe-Aryans, those wishing to indulge in nostalgia and those coming to shiver, a thematic restaurant, just like the pseudo-Communist nostalgia pub Marxim in Budapest, or the Ukrainian Nazi restaurant Bunker on the main square of Lwów. Jedem das Seine.

One is reluctant to even comment such nauseating idiotisms, but that Gross, you see, is the
truncation of the original Kommandantur Groß-Paris, that is, Garrison Command
Great Paris. In this form it looks more like some enterprise of Gross und Kohn.