#WUNDERBAR Part Three – The Wunderbar Set

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!” Part three tracks the “Germanic” beginnings of The Wunderbar Set…

Another thing is that #Wunderbar is a German themed bar. The first in Rotterdam. Nowadays it’s normal, it’s spread everywhere over the last ten years. But we wanted to push that idea. In 2016 we commissioned this installation by Arno Coenen [Hoorn des overvloeds (2014) in Rotterdam’s Markthal, ao]. I was in Switzerland, and there you have all these paper cut outs, these very intricate silhouette artworks. We all wanted this atmosphere in #Wunderbar, and we already have this wood left over, so we started with Arno, who made a fantastic design with skulls and sheaves of corn and deer, in the spirit of the Swiss cut-out idea.

A really good thing about [WORM’s then-business director] Mike Gaasbeek was his thoroughness. We were checking the regulations and we made a 3-d model of Arno’s design that matched the official regulations for having a structure on the street. And Mike made a dummy installation with scaffolding pipes that was exactly to the regulations out here on the street. After the real installation was finished, the guy from the city council came and said, this is forbidden, you made a structure that can’t be there. But we said, no, these are within the regulations. We later saw some civil servants measuring everything out here on the terrace, but we were right. WORM is the only organisation to have the Gemeente Rotterdam on their knees, literally. [Laughs] And they had to acknowledge the fact we were completely right. Also the whole structure was not fixed to the wall, it was hooked. So it was steady and it wasn’t damaging the wall structure. Little things like that make all the difference.

Slowly #Wunderbar started working as a bar in its own right, in its own way. That was something. And especially when you still see the other cafes here being much more eager and professional, because they want to make more money out of their terraces. In my opinion, they are just in it for the money.

Nowadays, you really notice the shift of audience in this street. When we started there was really nothing. The Witte Aap and De Schouw, Opa’s and maybe NRC but nothing else. It used to be a very quiet street.

Wunderbar started to attract its own set of people. Crazy good people. The people who worked here also used it as a front office. #Wunderbar had a very different character to other bars on the street: it was half work, half play. And that was partly instructed by us! Also because our colleagues liked it. It’s always difficult to balance character and the goal of making money. And normally, more character means less money [Laughs]. So we needed to find a good balance.

Also #Wunderbar was one of the reasons why a night programme finally took off, and why we changed from a volunteer organisation to a more professional organisation. We needed to pay people to create that revenue to spend on other things. But it wasn’t doable anymore to let people work for hours and hours and earn all the money, just for other people to spend it! That was a difficult balance to reach.

#Wunderbar became its own monster: what goes in goes out. You may have a percentage of profit without rent, but you need a lot of time and energy to find people to work in the bar, to organise it, to buy the drinks and so on. The good thing was that WORM was now open every day. Before the bar we had to organise that someone was here to let bands in, but after we started with #Wunderbar, we had people here from 3 or 4 o’clock every day.

The #Wunderbar was for us as WORM a game changer in terms of being attractive. We always had good nights but it was a secret place and people didn’t know that #Wunderbar was nothing more than another part of WORM. They would say, we’re going to #Wunderbar, never WORM, because WORM was too exclusive or too strange, or whatever. So the fact there was an easy way in, somewhere to sit and dance a bit, and finally discover they were actually in WORM was brilliant. It helped WORM a lot in terms of getting more audience, but also for us being more visible in the city.