Mr. Kaniuk described how surprised people were that Mr. Eden would move to Germany after the Holocaust. He insisted to his friend that, as a refugee, he was a victim, too. Mr. Eden rejected the label utterly. His philosophy is one of relentless optimism. According to Mr. Dörfler, one of the working titles for the memoir is “Everything Always Happy.”

“My whole life I’ve been lucky,” Mr. Eden said.

Yet life was anything but easy for the family after their move to Haifa. Mr. Eden’s father, who had been a factory owner in Berlin, went bankrupt in 1936 and ended up working as a taxi driver. His parents later ran a cafe.

Mr. Eden, who plays saxophone, drums, piano and accordion, dropped out of school when he was 14 and made his living as a musician. Publicity stunts were always part of his game plan. A black-and-white photograph from the time shows him playing accordion on the back of a donkey, while an old man holds a sign in Hebrew advertising a club.

Mr. Eden was living in Paris in 1956 when he read an advertisement in a newspaper announcing that exiles returning to Berlin would receive 6,000 marks (worth about $12,000 today). He said that he boarded the next train planning to take the money and return to France. He had no childhood memories of the city, which was still visibly ravaged by the destruction of World War II, but something about the place appealed to him, and he decided to stay.

HE started the Eden Saloon the next year, at the corner of the historic boulevard Kurfürstendamm and Nestorstrasse. It was a hit from the start. When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, Mr. Eden did not see it as a reason to close up shop, but an opportunity to expand as other businesses fled. He bought the space for his cabaret, the New Eden.

His clubs had fire eaters and striptease shows. Mr. Eden claims to have brought the first D.J. to Berlin as well as the first topless D.J. His burlesque shows included a transvestite stripper. “It’s a man!” he yelled, laughing, imitating the reaction of the American G.I.’s. “We can’t believe it’s a man.”

Out of the club business for a decade, Mr. Eden now makes his living as a real estate investor, which he said had made him very rich. Asked how much he is worth he replied, “If you know how much you have, you don’t have enough.”