The Bleibtreu Cafe in a Greek Song

Every winter, when snow covers Berlin for a few weeks—like these days—a particular song always comes to mind: "Bleibtreu Café" by Haris and Panos Katsimichas, two of the most important figures in Greek music.

Anyone who grew up in Greece musically in the '80s and '90s would almost certainly know their work. This is one of their lesser-known but deeply meaningful songs, describing their experience living in West Berlin in 1976. Through the café window, watching "December's snow," they reflect on everything Berlin represented at the time.

Berlin is a city tied not only to history and politics, especially of the 20th century, but also to culture and the arts.

It has always functioned as a place of passage and a laboratory of experience for many cultural figures, including several Greeks. Whether before the war, like architect Ioannis Despotopoulos, or after, with Alexis Akrithakis as the most prominent figure, a tradition between Greece and Berlin—particularly in the visual arts scene—was formed, one that remains alive and strong to this day.

The Katsimichas brothers, living in West Berlin for a year, captured with remarkable precision the environment of the divided city and its society, which at the time lived in the space between historical responsibility for World War II and the Holocaust, the Cold War and the Wall, and the need for freedom and joy that defined the Western '60s and '70s.

The "island of the defeated" they mention is West Berlin, in the middle of East Germany, surrounded by the Wall. The fact that "they celebrated every night in silence" reflects the historical condition of those twenty-somethings born after 1945 who, in the echo of May '68 and anti-war protests over Vietnam, had to manage a tragic memory that must not be forgotten while also living in the present.

The line "will we ever see each other again" captures another defining feature of Berlin during that period: migration and impermanence. A city of passage for people in the Arts, which shaped a particular type of resident—neither the permanent local nor the tourist, but someone who lives in the city for a few years, experiences its daily life as part of their identity, and then leaves.

This condition of impermanence, under different terms, continues to this day and remains part of the city's character.

In the rest of the song, which speaks of war and its aftermath, the spirit of the '70s is captured: an experience that becomes sensation, silence, and weight in the city's present.

Bleibtreu Café closed two years ago, an event widely discussed in the local press as the loss of an iconic landmark.

But even though the space no longer exists—with only the awning sign reminding us what once was there—what the Katsimichas brothers wrote and experienced, like that entire generation, remains present in Berlin's daily life to this day—whether it's the snow, the history that repeats itself, or the constant sense of uncertainty.