BERLIN — The toaster belonged to a woman named Birgit, it was 11 years old, and it had stopped toasting on one side. Horst Wiedemann, 71, a retired telecommunications engineer, turned it upside down, removed four screws, and found a hairline crack in a heating element. Twelve minutes later, the toaster was toasting on both sides and Birgit was being shown exactly which part had failed and why.
“That is the whole thing,” Mr. Wiedemann said, wiping his hands. “Not that we fixed it. That she saw it being fixed. Next time she will open it herself.”
The Reparatur-Café Neukölln, held every second Saturday in a community hall off Karl-Marx-Strasse, is one of about 45 such volunteer workshops in Berlin and more than 3,000 across Europe. For years they occupied a modest niche — part environmentalism, part hobbyism, part social club. This autumn they are crowded.
The reason, organizers say, is the E.U. right-to-repair directive, which member states were required to transpose into national law by the end of July. The law obliges manufacturers to repair common household goods — washing machines, vacuum cleaners, phones, tablets — at a reasonable price for years after the warranty expires, to make spare parts available, and to stop using software or design tricks that prevent independent repair. Germany added a repair bonus that reimburses up to 200 euros a year for professional repairs.
“The law did not send people to us. The news about the law did,” said Ayşe Demirtaş, 38, who coordinates the Neukölln café. “Suddenly everyone remembered the drawer with the broken headphones. Our visitor numbers have doubled since August, and the age range has dropped by about 20 years.”
Across Europe, an estimated 35 million tonnes of products that could have been repaired are discarded each year, according to a European Commission study. The commission estimates the directive could save consumers about 177 billion euros over 15 years.
On Saturday the queue included a 1986 Grundig radio, two laptops, a food processor, a child’s electric scooter and a lamp whose owner, a 24-year-old design student named Jakob Fenske, said he had come mainly to learn. “I can design a chair,” he said. “I could not rewire a plug. That felt wrong.”
Not everything can be saved. The volunteers keep a tally; about 65 percent of items leave working, 15 percent leave with a diagnosis and a part number, and the rest are gently pronounced dead. Mr. Wiedemann does not regard the last category as failure. “They know why it died,” he said. “They will buy the next one differently.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2026, Section C, Page 6 of the European edition with the headline: Berlin’s Repair Cafés Were a Hobby. A New E.U. Law Has Made Them a Movement..
