The Pinguin Bar – African Resilience and Presence

In 1949, the “Pinguin Bar” opened its doors at Bülowstraße 6 in Berlin-Schöneberg. Conceptualised and run exclusively by people from African countries, it plays a conflicted role in the city’s history of Black lives. On the one hand, it was a meeting point by and for African artists and activists, for jazz and performance as well as a meeting point for performative Arts, resistance and memories for the Black community who had survived the war and the Shoah. On the other hand, the Pinguin Bar, an idea from Kala Kinger from Cameroon, was financed and advertised by a white married couple called Gruß and Hans von Hellfeld. It was also a space where racist continuities and exoticising fantasies of the white mainstream society could be upheld and which was based on the de-humanising colonial heritage of the Africa-shows and “Völkerschauen”, folkloristic ethnological displays. In 1951 the authorities closed the very successful bar, pretexting tax reasons.

For “Performing Exiles”, the Senegalese curator and multidisciplinary artist, Alibeta, will re-enact the “Pinguin Bar” with a programme featuring concerts, film screenings and performances to open a bigger conversation and to address the issue of African traces and presence in Germany today. This first act of an upcoming series is connecting the origin of the bar to the current situation of the Black community in Berlin – as a story of jazz, as a music of traces and healing of the African community.