Channeling the Author and Journalist Joseph Roth
By Francesca D’Agata
The Joseph Roth Diele bills itself as a restaurant for writers and artists, where authors, poets and journalists stop for a quick, cheap lunch surrounded by literature and history, a place to take a break or keep working, just around the corner from the Berlin State Library. It’s a local haunt with red-checkered tablecloths and Berliners clinking beer and eating hearty German food.
“I love meeting a friend for lunch,” says Berlin-based writer Julia Bosson about going to the Diele. “It is like an oasis, a special secret community.”
“Diele,” translates into English as an old school drawing room or living room, and elicits an “at home” feel for both first-timers and regulars at the restaurant.
This intimacy is what owner Dieter Funk hopes to evoke for his guests, creating a quaint, cozy atmosphere. Regulars share a Stammtisch — a social meeting on a routine basis — some conversing at the bar in bottle green, leather arm chairs.
Funk, who opened the restaurant in 2002, is a super-fan of Austrian-Jewish journalist and writer Roth, who is best known for his book Radetzky March. Roth lived and wrote in Berlin from 1920 to 1933, when he left for Paris after Hitler became Reich Chancellor of Germany.
According to Funk, Roth lived right next door to the current location of the restaurant, on Potsdamer Straße 75, which inspired him to open the restaurant as an homage to the writer.
“It was a coincidence,” Funk told a local newspaper in 2016. “At some point I found out that Roth had lived in the house next door for a while.”
Roth had moved to Berlin from Vienna to pursue journalism and fiction. “I am going to Berlin,” Roth said, “because in summer you can spend the night on a park bench and then fill yourself up with a bag of cherries.”
In Berlin, Roth wrote short essays on culture (feuilletons) for the Frankfurter Zeitung, about everything he witnessed. He found a sincerity and fascination in everyday life in Berlin.
“I see a girl, framed in an open window, who is a part of the wall and yearns to be freed from its embrace, which is all she knows of the world,” Roth wrote in Berlin Börsen-Courier, in May 1921.
A century later, Julia Bosson is writing a novel inspired by Roth’s life and work. “Roth had a certain nostalgia in his writing,” Bosson said. “He was old fashioned and had a love of structure and tradition. The restaurant mirrors that.”
Roth is well known for his observational journalistic style. During his writing years in Berlin, he stationed himself at bars similar to this one, watching clientele, drinking, and coordinating his world of characters and creativity amongst the chatter.
“I like it very much in Gipsdiele,” Roth wrote in Neue Berliner Zeitung in February 1921 about a similar Diele. “It’s a cozy sort of place, small and right, and the man behind the bar — who looks like a little costume-party beer barrel that somebody’s stuck a head on — occupies a substantial portion of it himself.”
Personal photos and literature from Roth’s time in Berlin are scattered like memories covering the walls of the 21st century Diele, encased in delicate frames accumulated from local flea markets across the city.
Across the ceiling, Roth’s signature is scrawled from one end of the dining hall to another, as if the restaurant itself is an anecdote once written in his personal notebook.
On a recent summer evening, a German mother, daughter and husband sat in the corner of the Joseph Roth Diele. With Bratwurst and Schnitzel heaped on their plates, accompanied by small glasses of red and white wine, they chattered amid the scraping of knives and mouthfuls of Spaetzle (German noodles.) The restaurant was full of locals, who make up 70% of the clientele.
Keeping with the trend of most Berlin restaurants this summer, the Diele was willing to break its early 20th century mood by pulling a screen down over the window to project the Germany versus Spain Euro Cup football game.
There were greetings, laughs, and kisses among familiar friends, as well as sighs and exclamations as restaurant patrons gritted their teeth over another “almost” goal.
As the diners roared, a waiter tap-danced down a winding, dark-wood stairway to the kitchen to share news of the first goal of the game. The chefs squeaked and squealed in delight and hid themselves halfway up the stairs to catch a glimpse of the screen, their white hats barely visible behind the bar.
It was a scene that Roth himself may have captured in a feuilleton, if he were still writing today.
Francesca D’Agata is an undergraduate student of Media and Journalism at University of California, Santa Barbara who is reporting from Berlin this summer.
