At 92: Former Berlin playboy Rolf Eden is dead

Former Berlin playboy Rolf Eden is dead. He died on Thursday at the age of 92, his family said on Friday.

“With Rolf Eden, Berlin also loses an icon of his time and he loved and changed this city like no other.” “Bild” and “BZ” had previously reported. As a former nightclub owner, Eden shaped post-war Germany.

His “Big Eden” was legendary

He influenced West Berlin nightlife with his clubs, he is said to have partied with the Rolling Stones and danced with Ella Fitzgerald. Anyone who went on a class trip to West Berlin in the 1980s had to go to the “Big Eden” on Kurfürstendamm. He later sold the clubs.

Eden was born in 1930 into a Jewish family in Berlin. The family fled to Palestine three years later from the National Socialists. It was lucky that his parents were so clever and left Germany in 1933, Eden once told the German Press Agency in an interview.

As a young man he was in the military. Later he lived as a musician in Paris, then moved to West Berlin. In the 1950s he opened his first jazz club in the Cold War frontline town. Filmmaker Peter Dörfler documented the eventful life of Eden in his film “The Big Eden”. The film ran at the Berlinale.

In it, Rolf Eden said of himself that he was both a playboy and a businessman. He was known for his white jackets and blond hair. A city magazine once voted him the “most embarrassing Berliner” – that’s a huge honor, he thinks it’s very good, said Eden in the trailer for the film. At the age of 82 he had submitted his biography. Her title was “Always lucky. How I became Germany’s most famous playboy”.

Berlinale for the film “The Big Eden” Trailer for “The Big Eden”