By Oliver Ohmann
How could we forget Bobby on the newsstand series? One who sold the BZ and all other newspapers for so many decades. Bobby wasn’t a count, but a real kiosk king. His story goes like this…
“My father came to Berlin as a boy from Lodz, that was in 1919.” A photo shows Siegmund Seidel – that’s Bobby’s real name – as an apprentice in the bakery. “But the baker’s boy was nothing, he then switched jobs,” reports his son Peter Seidel.
The beginning: In 1937 Bobby (l.) took over the kiosk in the Hansaviertel from his predecessor (r.) Photo: Siegfried Purschke
The 83-year-old leafs through old recordings. You see Berlin more than 80 years ago, bourgeois residential buildings, hustle and bustle on the streets, newspaper stands – and always right in the middle: Bobby.
At first he didn’t have a permanent kiosk, but sold newspapers and magazines from a trolley. There was a lot of that in Berlin back then. Stand-up company on wooden wheels.
As a child, son Peter carried the precious cigarettes home in his suitcase in the evening and also delivered newspapers to the front door Photo: Siegfried Purschke
Son Peter pulls a small photo from 1937 out of a stack. “Here he just took over his first kiosk in the Hansaviertel, that was at the corner of Lessingstraße and Flensburger. That’s how the newspaper business really got started for Bobby, because someone else gave up for reasons of age.”
Siegmund, nicknamed Bobby, supplied the old Hansaviertel in Tiergarten with presses and tobacco. A fine area, mainly merchants, bankers, civil servants and artists lived there, including many Jewish families.
The first kiosk was in front of this apartment building in the Hansaviertel. It was hit by bombs during World War II and destroyed, as was the newspaper stand Photo: Siegfried Purschke
But everything was destroyed during the Second World War, during nights of bombing in March and November 1943. Of the 343 houses in the district, only 70 remained halfway habitable. Peter Seidel: “My father then became a soldier, but after a short period as a prisoner of war he remained loyal to his corner, even though there was no longer a house.”
The Hansaviertel kiosk after the war. There were no more houses, so the smugglers came Photo: Siegfried Purschke
With the help of friends, Bobby built a new kiosk out of planks. “Then came the sliders,” remembers Peter Seidel. In the post-war period, there was a lot of black market activity in Moabit and during raids the wild traders sometimes hid in the kiosk. Bobby also sold beer and sold Christmas trees during Advent.
In September 1963 at the modern kiosk, Bobby had moved from Moabit to Charlottenburg Photo: Siegfried Purschke
At the end of the 1950s, Bobby moved on and leased a modern kiosk on Kantstrasse in Charlottenburg. “There was a lot of red-light milieu around back then, the prostitutes got change from Bobby.” Son Peter lent a hand even as a boy, lugging the valuable cigarettes home in his suitcase in the evening (“because of the risk of burglary”).
Peter Seidel (83) tells the story of his father, whom everyone called Bobby Photo: Siegfried Purschke
Bobby continued into old age. The kiosk legend died in 1991 when he was 81. Bobby never got rich, but he was happy at the kiosk. The beautiful old photos prove it!
