The Department Store of the West – continental Europe’s largest, whose sixth-floor food halls fed West Berlin’s defiance and the reunited city’s appetite.
At a glance
- Type
- Department store
- Period
- 1907; rebuilt postwar; renovations ongoing
- Style
- Wilhelmine commercial; modern interiors
- Location
- Tauentzienstrasse, Berlin, Germany
- Coordinates
- 52.5016, 13.3416
- Founder
- Adolf Jandorf
Overview
The Kaufhaus des Westens opened 1907 as Jandorf’s bid for elegant Berlin – the West’s name then geography, later destiny: continental Europe’s largest store became West Berlin’s shop window through blockade and Wall, the sixth-floor Feinschmeckeretage’s 30,000 delicacies arguing abundance against the East’s queues. The winter-garden restaurant crowns the food floors’ legend.
History
Aryanized from Jandorf’s Jewish successors’ Tietz empire – restitution’s postwar reckonings noted in the house’s history – and bombed to shell (a US plane crashed through it 1943), KaDeWe’s 1950 partial reopening drew tearful queues: normality’s altar. East visitors’ first-stop pilgrimages after 1989 wrote reunification’s retail chapter.
Architecture and Design
The stone facade’s Wilhelmine ranks survived rebuilds; Rem Koolhaas’ OMA quadrant renovation spirals new voids through the floors. The food halls’ counters – oyster bars to wurst chapels – remain the architecture that matters.
Cultural significance
KaDeWe is Berlin’s consumer history incarnate – imperial ambition, persecution’s shadow, Cold War showcase, reunified appetite – the store as political biography.
Visiting today
Open Monday-Saturday; ascend direct to floor six’s grazing. Wittenbergplatz station’s restored 1913 hall makes the proper approach.
Getting there
U1/U2/U3 Wittenbergplatz faces the entrance.
Sources and resources
Find it on the map
See this place and what’s around it →Record researched and written by Luigi De Marchi for Cultural Heritage Online, 2026.
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