Berlin is change. Nothing is done in this city, so people scold. And they forget that that is what attracts people. The unfinished. In Berlin, nothing remains as it was. What was just there, familiar, because it always seemed to be there, is suddenly gone. Sometimes that's good, the city is constantly skinning, but sometimes it's just sad. Berlin is also loss. Right now.
The Café Rizz on the Grimmstraße in the Graefekiez, where Kreuzberg was once very Kreuzbergisch, has resided there for 35 years. The end of the year is over. The landlady wants it that way. Something else is there, if possible something fancier. And another piece of old Kreuzberg dies away.
The Rizz with his boss Alois Smitka and his landlady Birgit Huster was a number in the neighborhood, a second home for many. Not a tourist hot spot, but a contact point for all who live around it, for some who have landed and stranded in Kreuzberg, contact point as well for families and eternal singles as not least for dogs, as guests loved by the landlady.
Bruno Ganz and Münte, Mattes and Riexinger
The author Carolin Emcke returned here, the "Tagesspiegel" - columnist Harald Martenstein made himself comfortable, the left-boss Bernd Riexinger, who lives around the corner, eats here, you have to say, has eaten here. Bruno Ganz and Franz Müntefering were there, the "Tatort" crew around Commissioner Eva Mattes celebrated their TV premieres here, singer Yvonne Catterfeld had breakfast here. Andreas Hoppe, the crime scene detective Mario Kopper, stopped by. It should have tasted as good here as it did with his Italian movie mom.
But the Rizz was not a celebrity pub, not at all. Rather first address for all who wanted to watch sports in the neighborhood. Birgit Huster and her team have everything on screen: From the Champions League to the Motorcycle Grand Prix, Super Bowl and ice hockey, but also "crime scene", the TV chancellor duel and the general election.
For the Twitter community on both sides of Berlin, the Rizz was a kind of central meeting place in the capital. Birgit Huster tweeted about guests, football and the rest of the world at @CafeRizz, there was a Twitter root table.
The Rizz was proud to be political
And the Rizz was, of course, old Kreuzberg honor, political. The MSF held their annual meetings here, there are not many restaurants that offer space for such a thing. It is among the footnotes that the Rizz has to close in the year in which it became known nationwide because of its political position. Birgit Huster had announced prior to the World Cup in June by Twitter right-wing bans house and also explicitly included the AfD. André Poggenburg, the former AFD head in Saxony-Anhalt, had taken up the tweet and drawn publicity parallels to the "Jews undesirable" of the Nazis.
The result: The Rizz received threatening messages, officials of the State Office of Criminal Investigation were in the taproom to ensure normal operation under police protection, from the "taz" on "star" to "world" reported all about the landlady and her anger with the AfD.
That's all over now. At the farewell party just before Christmas, regulars once again enjoyed their favorite food and poured their favorite drinks, the guests gave short, improvised speeches. One said she had dragged her grandparents from California into the rizz "to show them the place that has become my living room - they saw it and understood it immediately."
The homely places disappear
The living room is no longer there, again a cozy place in the city less - not only in Graefekiez, not only in Kreuzberg. In the triangle Kreuzberg-Mitte-Friedrichshain they gradually disappear, the calm places, where one met at noon, in the afternoon or in the evening or at all these times.
The cuddly beer garden "Heinz Minki" is no longer there, no one can sink well in the "friendship between peoples" at the Schönhauser Allee, the former GDR artist bohemia has become homeless since the death of "Pieper" in the Sredzkistraße in Prenzlauer Berg. At the Spree the beach bars Kiki Blofeld and Oststrand have given way to the construction projects. There, around the Mercedes-Benz Hall, a soulless concrete necropolis has emerged instead, without any urbanity, dominated by a huge shopping mall, licked, over which sits the glowing Mercedes star in the dark.
But the good old World Restaurant Markthalle, where Sven Regener's literary characters around Mr. Lehmann consumed their roast pork, has survived a change of ownership largely unscathed.
Officially, the Rizz is closed since December 23 because of renovations, the signs are already dismantled, 35 years of neighborhood history are settled. And many people now have to look for a new living room. In a city that is changing, forgetting the living rooms.