Printen-Schmitz Café

A Café Meditation on Memory

A Note Before:
I wrote this on 9 May 2025, sitting in Printen-Schmitz Café, a 180-year-old café and pastry shop in the heart of Cologne. What began as a quiet coffee break became a meditation on layered time, past and present Germans, my grandfather’s flight, the street’s forgotten banners, and one small act of tenderness that outshone the ghosts. The poem is simply the scene as I lived it, unpolished and unresolved, exactly as the café felt: open-ended.

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Printen-Schmitz Café

I sit in Printen-Schmitz Café, downtown Cologne.
On the display window, the words gleam proudly:

180 Jahre
Printen Schmitz
Seit 1842.

How different it was to be a Jew in Cologne then…
And just when this café turned one hundred—
what was it like when my grandfather fled that same land?

Today
the place seems unchanged.
Elderly Germans sit outside,
soaking up the sun.
The street swarms with tourists,
yet they step around the café,
as if it were invisible.

To my left an old German with a walker;
beside him, a man a generation younger—perhaps his son.
They speak softly,
shoulder to shoulder,
not face-to-face.
if we skipped back one more generation,
would the father of that father
be wearing a black uniform?

I can picture this street draped in red flags,
black swastikas at their heart.
Such a scene once unfolded here,
in this very café.

I began my European journey on Holocaust Day.
The six million rise again:
yesterday in Nussbaum’s paintings in Osnabrück,
today in a café that witnessed that war—and far more.

Where does it meet me now,
Israeli, Jew,
in Cologne, 2025?
Part of me feels I belong:
the coffee is good,
the language is pleasing to me.
A hint of brotherhood.
I know the Yekke customs and like them.
But is Cologne my home?
Was it ever home to my grandfather?

Of course not.

I lift my eyes.
At the distant left-hand table sits an elderly woman in a wheelchair.
Beside her, a younger-yet-still-elderly woman.
The younger feeds and waters the other
with a grace that feels regal,
an unmistakable pride.
She lays her hand upon her,
smiles at her—
tender, genuine,
beautiful human warmth.

May it be, if I ever need such care,
that it is given only from absolute love
like hers.

I don’t know how to end this poem.
Perhaps it has no ending—
like this café.

— Printen-Schmitz Café, Cologne, 9 May 2025

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