#WUNDERBAR Part One – Birthing Pains

WORM sat down with former WORM director and philosopher, proprietor and uomo universale, Hajo Doorn, to find out the origin myths and the early history of #Wunderbar. We start at the beginning, and as Hajo said, “only we know the only truth!” Now, read on.

When we started working in this building back in 2010, we wanted a night license and a bar license. And a café. But the city government said, you can’t have it all yet. First you’ll have to prove yourselves. This is the reason why #Wunderbar came later [2014 – Ed]. We had a lot of trouble getting things going in WORM in the beginning, too, so we just didn’t have time. But after a while we had saved a bit of money, through various adjustments to the building, to organise the bar. Then the owner of the NRC said he wanted to take what is now #Wunderbar terrace. He said, I can pay you some money so I can build a terrace and added, first I have to do some calculations and said, I am very good at maths. And we said, so are we! [Laughs]. And in the end we wanted to do it ourselves.

The essence of basing #Wunderbar in this specific spot in WORM was that there were a few things already fixed in place, such as infrastructure. The water was there: stuff like that. And the windows at ground level, the idea of using a window as an entrance into the bar came from some bars we saw in Berlin. We just made some small changes [you can still see that in the original plans – Ed] but that wasn’t workable so we had to make a door on the outside, around the corner. This was basically the former fire exit of the NRC building [on the Boomgaardstraat].

What we did – and what we did more often back then, was using a couple of keywords to summon the energy. We always wanted to involve as many people as possible. Because if you have a specific design or idea in mind, that prevents other people from putting their own ideas into something. The “WORM thing” for me has always been about organising the energy, with everyone.

Mike Gaasbeek [WORM’s then-business director] and I went to Berlin to visit some bars. And I came up with a concept that the name should be something like the German word for cellar, keller. And one of the interns, I think it was Frank [Ed – Frank! Make yourself known!] came up with the name, ‘Wunderbar’, which became #Wunderbar.

When we had eventually saved some money, we planned #Wunderbar. But before that happened, we married Roodkapje, after I proposed in De Witte Aap.

The marriage was important to us and for me especially. I knew WORM had to change a bit, because we had to become a bit more sexy, being now in the city centre. But I also didn’t want to change WORM’s essence, our DNA, which was this rough, grimy, pretty male, eclectic style. I thought that was too big a step. And I thought some people change in a good marriage. In a marriage you don’t have to be everything yourself, but you do it better together. Back then Roodkapje was an organisation that had this flair: it had this femininity to it, also this strong intersectionist, trans feel. We didn’t have that at all. So I thought, why don’t we just marry, and we get something of them for ourselves. And also let them run our café bar. Roodkapje and their café, the Burgertrut, was originally based on the Meent. Then they had to move because of gentrification and came here and ran Burgertrut for a few months, and we watched how they did it. And then we started doing it ourselves. Roodkapje went off to the north of Rotterdam to their [then] new location. But we had seen how things were done.

I will tell you a story. It didn’t go well: we were not professionals, and the other bars were professionally run, you know, cramming seats together, outside heating lamps, all that stuff. And we were just playing at being a bar. I was sitting with the former owner of the Witte Aap and the King Kong hostel. I said to him that it wasn’t going well, and he said, what are you talking about, you have a fantastic bar and it’s a great place, but you just have to go for it. And at that moment I thought, okay, now we have to go for it and make it into a more professional bar.