Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum

Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum sits in the centre of Leipzig and has served coffee there since 1711. A first mention of the house dates to 1556, which places it among the oldest coffeehouses in Europe. It is counted as Germany's oldest café-restaurant in unbroken operation. The building itself is a cultural and art-historical monument. A baroque sculpture from 1720 crowns the entrance, an oriental figure offering a cup of coffee.

Johann Sebastian Bach, Goethe, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler all spent time here. Schumann and his fellow musicologists kept a regular Stammtisch in the nineteenth century. In the GDR years, from 1978, the artists' café met in the house, and later decades brought Bill Clinton and Kurt Masur. Sixteen historic rooms fill the building, among them the Schumann Room, the Kaisersaal, the Café Français and the Wiener Café. The museum inside covers the history of coffee in Saxony and Leipzig. It runs from strict eighteenth-century coffeehouse rules through the GDR coffee crisis to global trade today. Among the exhibits are August the Strong, the 'Gaffeesachsen' with their 'Bliemchengaffee', Melitta Bentz's coffee filter and the legendary 'Moka Efti'.

The ground floor is step-free and has accessible toilets, while the museum and some of the cafés sit on the upper floors. A narrow historic staircase is the only way to reach them, and there is no lift.