The story usually stops at the patent. It is worth pursuing, because the fortune made from decaf financed one of the strangest streets in Europe, and because its owner ended up publicly humiliated by the regime he was courting.

Ludwig Roselius, born in Bremen in 1874 and died in Berlin in 1943, became very rich with Kaffee HAG. He used this fortune as a patron. Among other things, he bought the largest collection in the world of Paula Modersohn-Becker, a painter of the Worpswede artists' colony, who died at thirty-one in 1907.

Then he moved from the painting to the building. Between 1922 and 1931, he bought a medieval alley in central Bremen, the Böttcherstraße, the coopers' street, and had it entirely rebuilt. He entrusted the artistic direction to the Expressionist sculptor Bernhard Hoetger, with the architects Alfred Runge and Eduard Scotland.

The result is a street one hundred meters long in dark brick, twisted, sculpted, half Gothic, half dreamlike. It resembles nothing else, because it obeys no collective program: one man pays for it, one artist designs it. Since 1927 it has housed the Paula Modersohn-Becker museum, the first museum in the world devoted to a woman painter.

Roselius then supported the Nazi party and hoped his street would become a manifesto for it. It turned out badly for him. Hitler detested Expressionism, and at the party congress in September 1936, in Nuremberg, he publicly condemned the Böttcherstraße and its owner. The street was classed as “degenerate art.” It nevertheless escaped demolition, thanks to Barbara Goette's intervention with Hitler, and because Roselius agreed in exchange to invest heavily in Focke-Wulf, the Bremen aircraft maker.

The museum devoted to a woman painter who died in 1907 thus survived the regime, paid for by caffeine-free coffee, saved by a deal made over fighter planes. Three quarters of the street were later destroyed by the bombing of 1944 and rebuilt identically in the 1950s; it can be visited today.

Wikipedia, Ludwig Roselius, Bernhard Hoetger, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Barbara Goette, accessed on 09/18/2026

Kaffee HAG left another trace, gentler and more unexpected. Between 1913 and 1939, the brand slipped coat-of-arms stickers into its packages, the Kaffee-HAG-Alben: thousands of coats of arms of German towns and provinces, to be pasted into albums sold for a few pfennigs. Generations of German children learned the geography of their country from a collection of cards given away by a coffee whose decaffeinated version their parents drank. It is today one of the most widely used iconographic sources for German municipal heraldry, including by online encyclopedias.

Wikipedia, Café HAG, accessed on 09/18/2026