Café Sibylle

Café Sibylle at Karl-Marx-Allee 72 opened in October 1953 as a milk bar and was later named after the GDR women's magazine Sibylle. Besides coffee and cake, it hosts a free permanent exhibition on post-war modernism in East and West. The most famous exhibit is an ear from the Stalin Monument, which stood on the avenue until 1961.

Café Sibylle on Karl-Marx-Allee: From Milk Bar to House Museum

Café Sibylle is located at Karl-Marx-Allee 72 on the ground floor of one of Friedrichshain’s ‘Workers’ Palaces’, halfway between Weberwiese and Strausberger Platz. It opened on October 29, 1953, as a milk bar on what was then Stalinallee and was intended from the outset as a showcase for the new showpiece avenue. It was part of the strip of shops and restaurants designed to animate the ground floors of the avenue. In the 1960s, it was named after the popular GDR women’s magazine Sibylle, whose editors and models met here and even organized fashion shows in the dining room. This made the address in East Berlin one of the more exclusive, yet also a completely normal meeting place in the neighborhood. After reunification, the building initially closed, reopened in the early 2000s, had to close again in April 2018 after contractual disputes, and was reopened on November 16, 2018, with a ceremony attended by Hans Modrow.

Stalin’s Ear and an Exhibition about the City of Tomorrow

During the renovation, original murals from the 1950s were uncovered inside and incorporated into the design, making the room itself an exhibit. The most famous piece in the collection is an ear, along with a piece of beard, from the Stalin Monument, which stood on the avenue from 1951 to 1961. Workers who carried out the dismantling preserved the fragments and handed them over to the exhibition organizers after 1990. The originals are now housed in the Military History Museum in Dresden; copies can be seen at Café Sibylle. Since June 2024, the permanent exhibition ‘Berlin East West East’ has been running here, which for the first time shows Karl-Marx-Allee and the Interbau areas in Hansaviertel together, thus juxtaposing the post-war modernism of both halves of the city. It was developed by the Stalinbauten association and supported by the Berlin State Monuments Office, curated by Carsten Bauer and Achim Bahr. Access to the exhibition is free, so it can be viewed casually over a piece of cake.