Cafe des Westens, Berlin, May 1912

‘Du lieber Gott!’
Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; — and THERE the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;

Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten’s not verboten.
ειθε γενοιμην . . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —

The Café des Westens on No.18/19 Kurfürstendamm Berlin, was an establishment which operated from 1898 to 1915, and became famous as a meeting place for the artists of turn-of-the-century Berlin. It was known colloquially as the Café Größenwahn; the German Größenwahn meaning “delusions of grandeur”.

It was the setting for Rupert Brooke’s poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester subtitled Cafe des Westens, Berlin, May 1912.

The café lost the patronage of many artists after management changes in 1912 and closed in 1915. The building reopened as the Rosa Valetti’s Kabarett Größenwahn from 1920 to 1922.[1] In 1932 the rooms were reopened as a branch of the Café Kranzler but the building was destroyed in bombing in April 1945. Wikipedia