By DPA
Berlin : On the Unter den Linden, close to the heavily fortressed American embassy, you find the Cafe Einstein in Berlin. Most days it heaves with politicians, actors, writers and media types.
"I liked the idea of having my own living room on the Unter den Linden," its proprietor Gerald Uhlig, a one-time actor-cum-gallery owner, explains. "You don't make any appointments; you just sit and watch the people roll in."
Actually, there's more to it than that, as he knows.
Uhlig insists on a "personal presence" at the cafe – in contrast to Hollywood colleagues Sylvester Stallone, Robert de Niro and Arnold Schwarzenegger who have all invested money in restaurants but are rarely seen in them.
A quiet, self-effacing personality, he glides about the premises seeing that nothing is amiss. The café walls feature photos of famous political and show-biz personalities, all of who have been guests at the café in recent years.
Elsewhere on the premises, a selection of newspapers, German and international, are available for guests.
The Café Einstein is popular with foreign guests. When ex-US president Bill Clinton dropped by to look at an "Einstein Gallery" exhibition organised by Uhlig showing previously unknown photos of Marilyn Monroe by Sam Shaw, "he (Clinton) hugged a waitress and gave a barman a $20 tip".
Other times Uhlig has exhibited photographs by Dennis Hopper and drawings by German rock singer Udo Lindenberg.
That said, the times when people would spend hours reading newspapers or indulge in deep conservation in Berlin while sipping endless coffees is somewhat seldom nowadays, partly due to faster-paced life trends, and soaring cafe rents.
Instead, a bewildering number of coffee bars have sprouted in Berlin in the past 12 years. The North American coffee chain Starbucks alone now boasts 60 outlets in the German capital, and more are planned.
The days of simple cappuccino and espresso are also over in Berlin and Vienna, with cafes now extending their range of beverages to include almost any coffee-based drink.
Berlin resonates to the cry of "coffee to go" as professional people, hard pressed for time, hustle in and out of coffee bars, taking with them sealed coffee beakers.
Sure, the Berliners still enjoy their "Koffee und Kucken" (coffee and cake), albeit on a lesser scale than in the 1950s and '60s when the city had an enormous ratio of ageing World War II widows, most of whom relished pastries and iced cakes.
When they passed on, Berlin's cafes and restaurants lost a large slice of their clientele. Some cafes went out of business, to be replaced by fast-food outlets and American style coffee bars offering besides cappuccino, bagels, muffins, brownies and cookies.
The trend extends right across Europe. Even Vienna, long regarded as Europe's cradle of coffee house culture, has a centrally located Starbucks opposite the Opera House. Twenty other stores are found elsewhere in Austria.
From the mid-1990s onwards, the Seattle-based coffee chain indulged in a daring bout of global expansion, creating close on 5,000 coffee bars around the world.
After reunification, Germany soon became a prime Starbuck's target, with Berlin in particular capturing the company's attention, what with the city teeming with young people, many of them students at the city's Humboldt, Technical and Free Universities.
"Germany represents one of the major strategic continental European markets for Starbucks," claimed Peter Maslen, the president of Starbucks International in 2002, when plans were announced for 200 coffee outlets in major cities. That target has now long since been passed.
Facing the Brandenburg Gate on Berlin's prestigious Pariser Platz, Starbucks has a store alongside the city's recently opened Kennedy Museum, close to the French Embassy.
On a sunny May morning customers sit outside the premises, watching the antics of a troupe of black-clad artists, face white-daubed, manipulating the arms and legs of a life-sized marionette.
"You can't be in a hurry all the time," says an American computer expert from Dallas. "One has to relax once in a while."
Back in the 1920s, a favourite haunt of the Berlin literary set was the Romanisches Café, which attracted playwrights and publishers, poets and musicians.
The publisher Wieland Herzfelde and his brother John Heartfield, the world's first artist in photomontage, who had Anglicized his name during the war in protest against the prevailing Anglophobia, were among its "regulars."
Like many other famous Berlin buildings, the Romisches Café was destroyed in World War II. Later, the city's Cold War division brought more problems.
Many of the city cafes that survived the conflict and difficult early post-war years subsequently went bust as trade declined and habits changed. By the early 1990s even the legendary Moehring cafes on the Kurfuerstendamm, famous for their pastries and cream cakes, had closed.
"A faster way of life has had its impact on peoples' habits," says a Berlin city government official almost wistfully.