Café Bilderbuch in Schöneberg occupies one of the largest and least altered Wilhelmine café interiors in Berlin — a sequence of rooms with stucco ceilings, dark wood booths, and the particular depth of a space that has been a café continuously for over a century. The name comes from the illustrated books and drawings that line the shelves and walls. The coffee is correct, the cake selection is the old-fashioned Central European kind, and the clientele on weekday afternoons is the Berlin mix of writers, retired academics, and people who have nowhere specific to be. Schöneberg is the neighbourhood of the gay bars that opened in the 1920s and of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin diaries; the Bilderbuch is its literary café.
Schöneberg, Berlin, Germany