Kreuzberger Himmel: The Berlin restaurant transforming the lives of refugees

The founders imagined a place where Germans could meet refugees eye to eye. Hazel Sheffield reports

Andreas Tölke, second from left, with asylum seekers that have worked at Kreuzberger Himmel

Alaa Akad knows she is one of the lucky ones. The 40-year-old woman in a headscarf and winter coat sits across the table at the Kreuzberger Himmel, a restaurant in Yorckstrasse in West Berlin. She explains that many wives and children never make it out of Syria, where conflict has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced 6 million.

Akad’s husband left their home in Damascus first and travelled over land and sea to Europe. He later sent for his wife and their young son. Akad had an office job in her hometown, but in Germany she has found work working for Kreuzberger Himmel as a pastry chef.

The job has given her security, but also a connection to a community of people with similar experiences and the support of a team of volunteers, she explains. She apologises for her English, explaining it has got worse since she has been learning German. It is her son who has really excelled at German and at school, she says. It is on him they pin their hopes.

Akad goes to the kitchen in the handsome, low-lit restaurant and comes back later with tiny delicacies: a pastry studded with pistachios and soaked in honey, and white nougat-like sweets. Since the migrant crisis began in 2015, many Syrian restaurants have appeared in Berlin. But Kreuzberger Himmel is not like any of the others. It opened in January 2018 after Be An Angel, a charity that works with migrants, pitched the idea of a restaurant run by refugees to the Catholic owners of the building.

Andreas Tölke, a former journalist and director of the project, saw a restaurant as an opportunity to give jobs and training to people fleeing conflict in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. But the project was more than just a mechanism for helping migrants to start new lives without fear of deportation. “We wanted to have a restaurant where you could meet refugees as humans,” Tölke says. “No ‘refugees welcome’ signs, just a low-key setting for Germans to have readings, lectures, music and food.”

It is an experience familiar to Tölke. One million migrants arrived in Germany in 2015 alone after chancellor Angela Merkel made the historic decision to welcome them. But when people arrived in the country, they found little help. By August, migrants gathered in train stations and public places with no where else to go.

Tölke saw the reports on the news and was shocked at how poorly the state was coordinating its efforts. A makeshift camp had sprung up around the State Office for Health and Social Services, or LaGeSo, in Berlin, where refugees have to register. The camp had no facilities, so volunteer groups stepped in to provide support, including coordinating places to stay. Often, Germans volunteered spare rooms in their homes.

Tölke had spent 30 years travelling the world and writing about high art and architecture. One night he was watching the pictures of desperate people arriving with nothing, and he starting thinking about how he was sat in a massive, empty apartment, furnished with designer sofas and other nice things he picked up on his travels.

He called a friend who was coordinating emergency housing. Before he knew it, he had offered to house four migrants.

“I hung up the phone thinking I must be completely insane to take complete strangers in my private location,” he remembers. “I thought all those things you think when you don’t know people and you don’t know where they have come from.”

Five refugees arrived that night, one more than Tölke had bargained for. For the next six months, 400 asylum seekers passed through his flat. When they arrived, he showed them the fridge and the oven and told them to make themselves at home. The only rule: when his bedroom door was closed, he was not to be disturbed.

Nothing bad ever happened to Tölke or his property. His iPad was always where he left it, by his bed. But after three weeks of hosting, he went to see a therapist to talk about the many terrible things he had heard. He gives an example of a father who showed him a video of a smuggler throwing his child overboard in case the coastguard heard it crying. “I asked him why he kept the video,” Tölke says. “He said it was his last memory of the child.”

Our philosophy is that we take the entire human for what she or he is

Andreas Tölke

Before long, Tölke’s days were filled with helping his guests figure out the immigration system, taking them grocery shopping and finding them medical help when necessary. When the number of migrants arriving in the country slowed down in 2016, Be An Angel shifted from emergency response to helping those who had arrived to settle. This holistic approach lives on in Kreuzberger Himmel.

“Our philosophy is that we take the entire human for what she or he is,” Tölke says. “We see ourselves as a multiplicator. Once we know what someone needs we can provide experts, doctors or lawyers.” Housing is more difficult as prices rise across the city, he adds, though all those who stayed with Tölke in 2015 now have their own apartments.

Tölke, who is now on the board of Be An Angel, came up with the idea of using surplus revenue from Kreuzberger Himmel to fund the charity. On a good night the restaurant can host up to 170 guests and in December it hosted politicians from all the major parties apart from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. Guests dine on Syrian cuisine, including little dishes of hummus and tzatziki and warm bowls of fatteh makdous, an aubergine casserole served with yoghurt. The food is served on Rosenthal china, donated by the manufacturer.

The business has been so successful that it has contributed €18,000 (£15,600) to Be An Angel, which is run entirely on donations.

Fourteen asylum seekers passed through Kreuzberger Himmel in the first year, and another three are about to leave because they secured work in hotels. One of the greatest things they learn during their time at the restaurant is how to work together, Tölke says. “A lot of these biographies end with people being super egos because they had to fight for their lives,” he says. “So now to be part of a team is tough.”

Cultural differences can make this even harder. “We think refugees are one group, but Afghans and Syrians have never worked together,” he says. “Syrians are like Italians – loud – and if they have an outburst it doesn’t mean anything. Afghanis have a very restrictive communication system and to them this kind of behaviour might seem rude.”

The migrants also have very different skills. Some took up positions in the restaurant after a lifetime of catering in big hotels and restaurants. Some learnt to wait tables even though they might have professional qualifications in other fields, in order to get the paperwork to stay.

The idea has been so successful that a second restaurant is planned in nearby Ritterstrasse, plus a small pension near Bad Doberan on the Baltic Sea. A Syrian family have plans to turn the pension into a boutique hotel staffed by migrants from different countries.

He sounds excited about the prospect of designing the interiors and employing the expertise learnt in his former life. But Tölke’s love of fine things is now in service to a much greater mission: “Our aim is to spread the idea that refugees are normal people – and to give them the opportunities to create their own lives.”