People often compare it to Harrods, to the Galeries Lafayette, and to other great modern temples of commerce and consumption. People come to KaDeWe for thousands of reasons. Many love it, and many others hate it, but KaDeWe is in and of itself neither good nor bad. It is simply a place where you can acquire many things of good quality at prices which are relatively higher than average. Many seem to consider being able to shop the sign of belonging to a more elevated social class and so many a nouveau riche never misses the chance to cross the threshold of this Olympus of the well-to-do with a considerable and showy amount of goods. The salespeople are hired to be courteous and polished, the customers are often dedicated to the cult of appearances and to control, and the groups of tourists just stumble about wide-eyed and yelling “Look at this! And that!” In any event, when all’s said and done, there’s worse to be had in the world. For us, KaDeWe is just the perfect outpost from which we can observe another aspect of life.
For those who are somewhat well-off as well as for those who aren’t whatsoever, KaDeWe might seem to be a difficult world. Many who come here to shop know that they will never be among those who come here to buy diamonds or luxury watches and therefore feel a bit frustrated. KaDeWe, a bit like everything, should be taken in a light-hearted way and for what it is, without too much mythologizing, otherwise there’s always the risk that the myth will overwhelm us. Even the tourist who limits themselves to observing it all with curiosity and distance – just like they would if they were watching the animals of the zoo, without any crises of compassion or identification – will continue to sleep peacefully at night. Sadly, however, there are sometimes tourists who are brought here on their first day in Berlin; and sometimes, one of them falls in love with a pair of underwear, remains enchanted by a coffee machine, hurls themselves to the floor for a stuffed dinosaur, and for the rest of their time in Berlin can’t manage to think of anything else. “Who cares about the bust of Nefertiti, Checkpoint Charlie, or the Natural History Museum! I want that underwear! I want that coffee machine! I want that dinosaur!” Thankfully, we shall be here for only the briefest of olfactory sojourns.
On the ground floor you’ll find the cosmetic and fragrance department, jewelry, and luxury items like pens, watches, and furs, and a café. The diamond and jewelry stores are not frequented so often and their smell is completely dominated by that of the perfumes next door and to a small extent by the coffee roasting by the entrance on Passauerstraße. Many people associate KaDeWe with this violent mix of smells that besieges every visitor immediately upon entering. It really is an olfactory assault and is almost as if these aromatic notes were instead musical notes hurled at an audience by an insane orchestra. There is no harmony. It is literally just a maelstrom not at all unlike the brawls in old Westerns. You can’t figure out what smell belongs to what, where the line between the masculine and the feminine may be, and groups of heavily made up salespeople are ready to spray something on you at every step. By this point, the majority of adventurers are already disoriented and seek some sort of refuge in the corner where the so-called neutral and natural cosmetics have been set up. However, those hoarders of eau de toilette continue to flit from one display case to another, breathlessly sniffing about like anti-drug dogs at the airport. Soon enough they’ll bite.
At this point a coffee would help to neutralize this stupefaction post-olfactory-aggression. Let’s go have a look at the café, and then we’ll go up to the first floor: Men’s Apparel.
Up here on the first floor the air is still full of the smells from down below but with the addition of that typical odor of garments in any large department store throughout much of the world. You’ll notice that the jeans smell slightly burnt in comparison to other kinds of cotton trousers while all the swimming trunks smell of rubber.
The second floor is dedicated to women. Here the fragrances you encounter don’t come from the ground floor, but from the individual customers and come and go according to the patterns with which these ladies come closer or move away. In addition to these smells, there is the unmistakable and powerful synthetic one of varnish, which makes you immediately think of fingernail polish (could it really come directly from these customers?). No, for the most part it belongs to the accessories in glossed plastic: from handbags to belts and other objects.
On the third floor you find shoes and leather bags. The leather here is real leather, of course, no imitation anywhere in sight. But, strangely, among the bags we start to detect the faint smells of sandwiches that no doubt have nothing to do with the objects. It’s as if a customer had first had a quick and cheap bite to eat before – driven by curiosity or need – coming here to check out the new collection. The hairdressers here, however, smell like hairdressers with their typical sprays – as first class and discreet as they may be – but, above all, the air here smells of the dry air of hairdryers. The swimsuits smell of good rubber and this is what distinguishes them from the more aggressive smell of poor quality rubber in the swimsuits in more price-friendly stores.
The fourth floor is dedicated to housewives as well as to wedding and gift registries. Here the people and smells are less intense, and we even find the first area to have a delicate fragrance of the entire store: the glassware department. Next to the glass objects are air fresheners. Here we might indeed find something of interest! Once again, the quality of the products here surpasses the average quality of similar articles in supermarkets and, naturally, this extends to the experience of even the most demanding noses. You could suddenly be overcome by the desire to once again begin the search for that hint of orange or orange flower or orange peel or orange seed that might, just might, be perfect for your home and that you’d never find anywhere else because you’ve never been able to explain exactly what it was you were looking for. And who knows? Maybe just by spraying one of these fragrances onto a little piece of paper that paper might turn into a Neapolitan pastry like the ones they make in Naples for important occasions, evidently, out of orange peel. KaDeWe and all of its merchandise could disappear and all of the sudden there’s your grandmother, your house, the sea, the terrace over the port of Salerno, the lemon trees, the Church of San Giorgio and its colored maiolica…Yes, we can now see maiolica even here, even if, of course, it’s a different kind. But for now let’s put the little piece of paper into our pockets and bless KaDeWe for having brought us back home a few seconds.
The fifth floor has office supplies that smell of paper, a book store that smells of glue, and toys that smell like plastic, but there are also stuffed animals from Steiff that don’t smell like anything and that’s good.
Our trip to KaDeWe will end on the sixth floor, the floor of gastronomic delights. More than an arrival, however, it is a departure, for here you can leave Berlin behind and travel throughout the world. The most important international enclave in all of Berlin is to be found on the sixth floor of KaDeWe. Whoever has dreamed of travelling around the world can simply come here for an hour and dream in the midst of aromas from all around the world. And to whoever might say that KaDeWe is expensive you can simply say that it costs nothing at all to smell. You want China? Over there are the most delicate and sweetest smelling spring-rolls in the entire city. Chinese tea? In the tea department, marked by its huge porcelain vases and especially its lovely smells, you can choose from among more than two hundred varieties and price tags. For the sniffer, everything is free and is a mystical experience. You can smell pear tea, Caribbean Love Dream, New York Cheesecake, full-leaf Golden Bug which is harvested by hand in the spring, the exquisitely silky Milky Olong, the intense and sweet Japanese Green which is harvested only once a year…Who says that KaDeWe is only for the elect?
We’ll bypass the fruit which here seems to be more for the eye than the nose, allow ourselves a quick smile when passing through the smells of turnips and potatoes that could never compete with the vivid memory of Winterfeldtplatz and instead we’ll try to focus on the slightly acidic and delicate smell of bread and the sweet and heavy smell of cake.
The Thai corner is so discrete it’s almost evanescent and even the area dedicated to champagne is completely dominated by the imperious, fat, invasive, explosive, exaggerated smell of the cheeses. Cheese, as we know, leaves no one indifferent. There are those who swoon with emotion before it, and there are those who collapse in disgust.
Now, speaking about the smell of sausage and potatoes is simply impossible. There are just too many possible variations. And here on the sixth floor we find ourselves faced with a superlative version of the concept. If you a silly tourist still maintains that it’s possible to be ironic about German cuisine, just grab them by the ear and bring them here to Kartoffelacker.
The marzipan and the chocolate are wrapped up as they are have difficulty expressing themselves, but a curious nose will manage to sniff out the corners where they are still sold by weight and go there to secretly dream whatever it is they will.
From the area dedicated to chocolate you pass with no to-do to the one that is dedicated to olives. There are a lot of them and fresh too. How wonderful!
The poultry section is among the most exquisite in the world, while the adjacent section devoted to sausage comes with completely Bavarian zest. But now, that’s right, we’re entering into the section of smoked meats, of prosciutto and salami and, provided we’re not vegetarians, we may never want to leave. We can feel our salivary glands beginning to act up and we have to mentally repeat to ourselves that we’re only here on an olfactory reconnaissance mission, that we will never, ever, buy salami here at KaDeWe and that…but before you even get close to finishing that thought, you’ll probably find yourself at the check-out ready to pay any price for that little piece of smoked meat in your hand. And, well, maybe that’s okay.
Those who love the sea but can’t afford a trip to the tropics or even a quick hop down to the Mediterranean can station themselves in front of Fischkutter and close their eyes. The fish here smells like real, fresh fish from the open sea and the salads accompanying them honor them to the nth degree. What more can you ask for? A rock jutting out of the water? The oyster bar is there to help you dive into Brittany, the Algarve, Capri, or Santorini…how much iodine spraying onto the rocks! The servers crack open the shells and we greedily breathe it all in. And the wonderful thing is that when we’re done with the sea, we’ll just get back onto the elevator and go back down to earth.
Translated by Alexander Booth
