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Kaiser-Café

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The Kaiser Café opened in November 1908 in the newly built Chamber of Commerce and Industry building on Elisabethplatz (Elisabeth Square) in Chernivtsi. The café advertised in the newspapers that the architect Friedrich Gottesmann had created a splendid salon “magnificently furnished in every sense of the word. It is elegant without being cold, elegant and yet cosy, luxurious without being overloaded and with a sunny cheerfulness”. (Die Wahrheit, 7 November 1908, p. 26).

Kaiser-Café

Hotels & Cafés

erbaut

1907 - 1909

The café consisted of three rooms: a reading room with a portrait of the Emperor in a “glass and pencil mosaic”, a games room and a concert hall, “a masterpiece of modern architecture”. Outside there was a terrace and a pavilion with many tables. According to sources, 160 local and international newspapers and magazines from major European cities were displayed there (Bukovinaer Post, 8 November 1908, p. 5). Concerts were also held outside in the summer. The Kaiser Café was owned by merchants Heinrich Mannheimer and Grindlinger, and from 1918 by Grindlinger and Ensel. The café regularly advertised events in the Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, inviting guests to free military concerts, charity evenings and performances by the „Militärkapelle“, „Zigeunerkapelle“, „Eisenbahnerkapelle“, „k. und k. Regimentskapelle“ or the „Salonkapelle Laszlo“. The “world-famous Munich Hofbräu draught beer” was also on offer (Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 November 1913, p. 4).

Shortly before the end of the First World War, the café reopened and immediately organised an evening with “excellent string music from our house regiment, certainly the best military orchestra we have heard so far during the war”. (Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 March 1918).

Text: Kateryna Stetsevych