Auerbachs Keller, Leipzig

The claim

A vaulted wine cellar under the Mädlerpassage in the middle of Leipzig, reached by two flights of stairs and running back through four rooms. It dates itself to 1525, the year of the Faust barrel ride, and a wine tap on this ground is recorded earlier still. Goethe drank here as a student and made it the only real place in Faust. The Mephisto bar keeps its own hours, so a glass without dinner is easy.

What the records show

The cellar sells itself as being there since 1525 and kept a five-hundredth birthday in 2025. What 1525 dates is a story rather than a deed: a folk tale has the magician Johann Georg Faust riding a barrel up out of this cellar in that year, and two panels painted about 1625 and given to Andreas Bretschneider hang in the Goethe room, which shows how old the telling is rather than how old the house is. The wine trade is older than the claim. German Wikipedia and the Leipzig-Lexikon, a local reference work, both record a wine tap mentioned on this ground in 1438, and the Lexikon calls the house the second-oldest surviving eating house in Leipzig after the Burgkeller. The two disagree by ten years about when the physician and city councillor Heinrich Stromer, called Dr Auerbach after his birthplace, bought the plot — 1519 in one, 1529 in the other — and agree on what he did with it: he fitted out a tap in the wine cellar already under the house, and built Auerbachs Hof above it between 1530 and 1538. Neither names the document behind the 1438, so the grade rests on two accounts and not on an archive. Goethe drank here as a student between 1765 and 1768 and put the cellar into Faust I, the only real place in the play. The cellar came down in 1912 when Anton Mädler built his arcade over the site, was rebuilt with the old substance and reopened as a licensed house on 22 February 1913. Whether a drink is served without a meal is answered by the operator: the Mephisto bar publishes its own hours, to midnight on Friday and Saturday with last orders half an hour before, while the great cellar takes bookings for dinner. An older Leipzig account was read on 18 September 2026, digitised by the Bavarian State Library: the small chronicle of Auerbachs Keller compiled from old chronicles and documents by P. H. Sillig and published in 1854 by H. Schulze, who was the cellar's landlord when it came out — which has to be weighed, because the book is in part the house advertising itself. Its list of owners runs from 1438 to 1854 and opens with Dr Nicolaus Schulthes, a city juror; so the 1438 that two modern accounts give as a wine tap appears here as the first recorded owner of the ground, which is not the same thing, and the document behind it is still unread. On the cellar Sillig is careful: what suggests it was there before the Hof was built above it, he says, is that the old pictures in it carry the year 1525; and on the succession of landlords he says plainly that the records are very poor. The earliest name he has is a legend — a landlord called Arno, about 1578, whose treatment of his guests had ruined the trade until a painter put the Faust ride on his wall — and beyond that he records a gap in the names until 1717, when the Leipzig address book of that year has Gottfried Kahldorf keeping the cellar. After him come Johann Jakob Key from 1732 to 1750, Dominico di Pietro Mainone in 1799, Joseph Sala taking the business in 1816, Otto Pierer in 1831, and then Schulze, who reopened the rebuilt rooms on 12 September 1850. On the Hof above, Sillig settles the ten-year disagreement recorded here: Stromer bought the front house in 1519 from the heirs of the councillor Hanns Hommelshain, married his daughter Anna in 1522, bought further houses so that he could open a passage through, and built between 1530 and 1538 on the Leipzig Chronicon's dating. The inscription under his portrait calls him the first founder of the Auerbach houses and gives his death on 25 November 1542, in his sixty-fourth year. Gustav Wustmann's two volumes of sources from the city archive and library, of 1889 and 1895, were searched the same night for the 1438 and for the cellar's drinking trade and have neither, though they name Auerbachs Hof repeatedly and record Stromer entering the city council in 1520 — so that is a search and not a guess. One smaller thing: the Leipzig city museum's catalogue holds a postcard of the barrel ride whose printed caption dates the Bretschneider wall painting to 1636, where this note has the panels at about 1625. That is a postcard publisher's wording inside a museum record rather than the museum's own dating, and either year is long after the ride it shows.

Dated evidence for Auerbachs Keller, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1525	Claimed founding	The pub
1438	First record of a drinking house here	Wikipedia

What to look for inside

Goethe made it the only real place in Faust I
Bronze groups of Faust and Mephistopheles at the head of the stairs, cast for the arcade in 1913
A Bacchus boy house mark of 1530 set into the wall of the barrel cellar

Visiting

Auerbachs Keller is in Leipzig, Germany, at Grimmaische Straße 2-4, 04109 Leipzig. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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