and while we were here: Leydicke's Revisited

138 years, that is how old one of Berlin's oldest bars is. Imagine what the walls could tell if they were able to speak. Of the emperor, of Bismarck, WWI, of the Weimar Republic, the roaring twenties, WWII, the swinging sixties, the student revolts, a city divided, the wild 70s, the sound of the 80s, the fall of the wall, the beginning of a new millennium. Very much happening, all things different, never the same as they were. But somehow, inside the thick, wooden walls of this small little room, time didn't change as much as it did in the city and in the world around it. The people are different now, the subjects discussed in the evenings, the music the bands play. Instead of playing cards and newspapers today there are mobile phones at the tables.

The innkeeper, managing this little time-absorbing bar as did his grandfather and great grandfather before him, he knows all the stories. The stories he was told in the more than 30 years he has been managing the place, and especially the stories his grandmother told him. His grandmother was Lucie Leydicke, whose spirit is still in the air when you sit at the century old counter, sipping the sweet, straightforward, home-made liqueur. As the story goes, she was this place, a Berlin woman with a sharp tongue and an honest soul. Over all the decades, from the beginning of the 20th century until the 80s, when she was 82, she had seen and served them all, all who found their way into the E. & M. Leydicke Bar. "My fair Lady Lucy" is the title of an orbituary published on 29th August 1980 in DIE ZEIT, a famous German paper.

The pictures below are the result of a photoshoot at this unique place with original costumes from the 20s, reviving the times when most of these stories where still stories from the future.