TX002.0F
Das KLO, the Toilet Bar and What George Foreman Knew About Gnomes
The KLO dispatch: a toilet bar, a famous visitor, and the gnomes.
Watch on YouTube ↗
Berlin Footnote · TX002
Charlottenburg · A transmission in the making
Romanisches Café
and the Degenerate Art
of the 2030s
Our next walk begins at a toilet bar.
A wrong turn, on purpose
First, surrender
your dignity.
Since 1971, Das KLO has made a night out into a small assault on composure: tilting stools, wayward furniture, unexpected water. At Leibnizstraße 57, respectable Charlottenburg loosens its collar.
It is a fitting place for Agnes von Witzleben to open the next Berlin Footnote transmission. The walk leads from this living cabinet of curiosities into a neighbourhood of café tables, rented rooms, drawings, gossip and exile. Who gets a room? Who gets an audience? Who gets to leave a trace?
The Romanisches Café comes later. Before its vanished tables become a legend again, we want to look at the people and the work that kept a cultural scene alive.
Two dispatches from the KLO thread
The bar. The gnomes.
The unlikely portal.
Two published shorts to enter the story. The Iowa episode is a narrative detour; the walking route stays in Berlin.
TX002.0H
Das Klo and the portal in Sioux City, Iowa
The story escapes Charlottenburg. A surreal American detour from the KLO thread.
Watch on YouTube ↗People you will meet along the way
The company we keep along the way.
Wielandstraße 15
Charlotte Salomon
A life told in colour, text and music. At her family’s former home, Life? or Theatre? opens a question about who gets to tell a life and what survives of its voice.
Walter-Benjamin-Platz
Walter Benjamin
A philosopher’s name on a square; the city’s contradictions beneath your feet. We follow the gap between commemorating a thinker and learning to look with him.
Spazieren in Berlin
Franz Hessel
Hessel gives the walk its slower pulse: reading a street through doorways, shop windows and the apparently unimportant. His Berlin invites a second look.
Galerie Nierendorf
Otto Dix
War, bodies and a gaze that refuses to flatter. Dix brings us to the printed image and the gallery work that gets difficult art into the world.
George-Grosz-Platz
George Grosz
Respectability under a merciless pen. From the square bearing his name, Grosz’s satire asks what a well-dressed city would prefer us not to notice.
Meinekestraße 6
Irmgard Keun
Ambition, money and the performance of being somebody. Keun’s sharp-eyed women move through a city that sells glamour and sends the bill.
Fasanenstraße 72
Essad Bey
Lev Nussimbaum, Essad Bey, a life made and remade in print. Here, self-invention meets exile, literary celebrity and the danger of being classified by others.
Savignyplatz · Kurfürstendamm
Mascha Kaléko & Jeanne Mammen
The office day, the rented room, the woman watching from the edge of the scene. Poetry and drawing return the boulevard to the people who have to live in it.
A glimpse of the working route
From a living bar
to an absent café.
About 5.4 km through Charlottenburg and City West. These are selected passages from the current route, which is still being developed.
- Opening
- Das KLO · Leibnizstraße 57
- Finale
- Romanisches Café · Breitscheidplatz
- Audio walk
- In production · English & German
The guided event has its own meeting arrangements; check the calendar before travelling. For a visit inside KLO, see the bar’s current opening times. Klo.de ↗
- 01
Das KLO
Leibnizstraße 57
The opening doorway. A room that makes an event of losing your composure.
- 02-07
Giesebrechtstraße → Walter-Benjamin-Platz → Wielandstraße
Salomon · Mommsenstraße · Grosz
From public performance to public memory: a square, a family home, a name in the street.
- 08-17
Savignyplatz → Steinplatz → Nierendorf
Kaléko · Bücherbogen · Lilith · Amerika Haus
Books, waiting rooms, galleries and the people who keep culture in circulation.
- 18-24
Theater des Westens → Kurfürstendamm → Fasanenstraße
Mammen · Baker · Essad Bey · Keun
Stages and studios, invented identities and the lives behind them.
- 25-27
Café des Westens → Atelier Riess → Romanisches Café
Breitscheidplatz
The route ends at an absent room and the question of who will be remembered at its tables.
And why the 2030s?
Who decides what
the future gets to keep?
“Degenerate art” was a term of Nazi persecution. Our title turns that language into a question for Agnes’s imagined future archive: which voices will be welcomed, ridiculed, silenced or misfiled next? The history is real; the future remains an uncomfortable invitation to think.
Sources & image notes
Field photography: Berlin Footnote / Daniel Scheimberg. Route preview based on the current TX002 working route; the complete audio walk is in production. The two videos are the published Berlin Footnote YouTube editions.