Abstract
The Café Central is indeed a coffeehouse unlike any other coffeehouse. It is instead a worldview and one, to be sure, whose innermost essence is not to observe the world at all . . . If all the anecdotes related about this coffeehouse were ground up, put in a distillation chamber and gassified, a heavy iridescent gas, faintly smelling of ammonia, would develop: the so-called air of the Café Central.
Numerous scholarly and popular books and articles concerned with culture in Europe’s cities quote these lines from Alfred Polgar, one of Vienna’s most famous coffeehouse regulars. Without a doubt, for Polgar, his Café Central companions, as well as artistic, intellectual, and literary circles in many of Europe’s urban centers in the decades around 1900, the coffeehouse served as an important third place (not home, not work). 2 European cafés were sites of much of the dynamic interaction and creativity that shaped the emerging culture of modernism.
As Robert Liberles documents in the first chapters of Jews Welcome Coffee, the bitter hot drink was consumed in Europe even before the seventeenth century. Knowledge of the coffee bean, which originated in East Africa, filtered through to Europe from the Arab and Ottoman lands around the Mediterranean. The first European establishments offering the beverage and a comfortable place to imbibe it appeared in Oxford in the 1650s, in Paris a decade later, and in Venice in the 1680s. In the case of Vienna, there is at least some truth to the colorful tale of the 1683 Ottoman siege of the Habsburg capital and the adventures of Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki (German: Georg Franz Kolschitzky)—the legendary Polish–Lithuanian noble, Cossack, spy, entrepreneur, polyglot, and barista. According to tradition, Kulczycki snuck out of Vienna in Turkish disguise in-service of the besieged city. Polish King Jan III Sobieski later presented Kulczycki with bags of coffee beans left by the retreating Ottoman forces. Kulczycki soon opened a coffeehouse in Vienna, helped to popularize coffee by adding milk—thereby inventing the Wiener Melange—and regularly greeted his customers in pseudo-Turkish attire.
The cost of the beans dropped with the expansion of coffee cultivation in Dutch Batavia and in the Western hemisphere. By the mid-eighteenth century, the café/coffeehouse had become one of the most ubiquitous and characteristic institutions of Europe’s urban centers. Philosophers and Jacobins in the eighteenth century, liberal–nationalist–romantic revolutionaries in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the intellectual and artistic elites of the fin-de-siècle and beyond would meet, talk, write, and conspire in coffeehouses.
The three books under review here—two collected volumes and one monograph—represent very different approaches to the history of coffee and cafés in Europe. Some of the contributions offer little more than lists of cultural producers who spent time in particular establishments. The best essays and chapters bring into sharp focus the social, economic, and cultural significance of the popular caffeinated beverage and the locations where it was enjoyed.
The Thinking Space: The Café as Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy and Vienna juxtaposes essays on coffeehouses in Paris, Vienna, and Italian cities from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, allowing for implicit comparisons across borders and centuries. The volume is the result of years of collaboration among an international group of historians and literary scholars. Like so many such collections, the essays are uneven in length and content; however, together they offer the reader an introduction as well as important new insights into the history of coffee and coffee culture in urban Europe. As W. Scott Haine writes in the introduction, The study of writers and artists in cafés allows scholars to examine in greater detail and logical depth the relationships between writers and their environments—in particular the spaces, rituals, and sociabilities that are key in the creation of culture. (p. 21)
The opening section of the book—devoted to Vienna—is the least satisfying. The first essay offers a brief overview of the history of coffeehouses in Europe and what distinguished the Viennese establishments; the second provides a look at some of the cultural producers (and their cultural production) who spent so many of their waking hours sitting in Café Griensteidl, Café Landtmann, Café Central, and others around 1900. Sacher Pinsker’s “Jewish Modernism and Viennese Cafes, 1900-1930” is a serious and striking contribution. Pinsker does not focus on the “assimilated” Jews and those of at least partial Jewish descent at the center of so much discussion of Vienna 1900 (Karl Kraus, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, etc.). Instead, his essay explores the lives and writings of a “small but extraordinary group of Hebrew and Yiddish writers and thinkers” (p. 59) from Eastern Europe—mostly from Habsburg Galicia and the Russian Empire—who came to Vienna and sought community in its cafés before and during World War I. Café Arkaden, near the Votive Church just off the Ringstrasse, offered Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers and magazines along with German-language publications. After the war, more Jewish writers who fled dislocation and devastation in the east discovered and frequented Vienna’s cafés. Here, they socialized with and were influenced by German-speaking modernists: Last but not least, the café was the space where much of their literature was created, and the very object of modernist literary representation of the urban space. Some of the most distinctive representations of the cityscape focus on the café as a site of negotiation between inside and outside, public and private, real and imaginary, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, “the local” and the immigrant. (p. 64)
The second section, the real heart of this volume, consists of seven fine essays on cafés and modern culture in Paris. This section gives a sense of the wide variety of people—and the equally wide variety of interactions, connections, and confrontations—found in Paris’s cafés. Tabetha Ewing’s chapter draws from literary sources and government documents to present the mid-eighteenth century Parisian café as a place of performance, opinion making, and critical political speech. Edward Ahearn’s short (eight pages in length) contribution is one of the most gripping in the volume. Ahearn explores Charles Baudelaire’s “The Eyes of the Poor,” a “prose poem” that treats class conflict in Haussmann’s reconceived Paris in the setting of a café. A father and two children in rags enter a café. Fashionable patrons come face to face with the reality that their own wealth was dependent on the poverty of others. The regulars nervously call on the “headwaiter to send them away.” In “When Objective Chance Takes over Cafés,” Gerard-Georges Lemaire brings his readers into the cafés frequented by Dadaists and surrealists in the early post-war period. Here, we see groups of artists interacting, mutually influencing each other, bickering, dividing, and regrouping in rival cafés. W. Scott Haine’s piece focuses on Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre sought to place himself inservice of the French resistance while writing in some of Paris’s 15,000 cafés. Jeffrey Jackson’s “Arguing about Jazz in the Parisian Café: Jazz, Race, and Literary Communities in 1920s Paris” is among the strongest chapters in this section. Jackson shows how different “literary communities” in Paris were defined “in part by the ways in which authors thought about, reacted to, and wrote about the jazz they experienced” in cafés (p. 135). Jazz cafes in Paris provided African Americans hoping to find a zone free of the race tensions prevalent in the United States the space for creative interactions between black writers and musicians. F. Scott Fitzgerald and other white American writers experienced jazz as a musical backdrop for a bohemian lifestyle. For them, jazz was fun, not necessarily artistic inspiration. For French intellectuals like ethnographer and surrealist poet Michel Leiris, jazz evoked the possibilities of cultural renewal and the “crossing of racial lines” as well as French colonial connections to the Caribbean and to Africa.
The final three essays of the volume turn to Italy. They explore gossip, gambling, and theatricality in the Florian in Venice; sociability and social class and the coffeehouse in Casanova’s memoirs; and futurism, fascism, and anti-fascism in Florence’s Guibbe Rose Café.
As the title suggests, the essays in The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture are more clearly framed by geography and chronology even as they reflect a wide range of scholarly approaches. Charlotte Ashby argues that the liberalization of the public sphere after the constitutional reforms in the 1860s opened up the possibilities for free discussion in Vienna’s cafés at the very moment when mass politics, mass entertainment, and the mass press were reshaping public life in the monarchy. Vienna’s coffeehouses, like those across Europe, were places of social interaction: respectable enough for the elite, but flexible enough for students, bureaucrats, Jews, and artists, as well as for those simply seeking somewhere to spend a few leisure hours to interact. They were sites of both conservative and bohemian (mostly male) sociability. The Vienna cafés around 1900 mirrored the tensions between art and life that proved a vibrant source for intellectual innovation.
The prominent Jewish presence in Vienna’s cafés is at the center of two contributions. In his brief chapter, Steven Beller asks why Jews and people of Jewish descent were so closely associated with café life in Vienna around 1900. Beller offers several possible—and convincing—answers. Jews, like coffee, were seen as exotic, foreign, and tied to international trade and commerce. From the perspective of Jews themselves, participation in court circles, university fraternities, or aristocratic salons proved difficult or impossible. The more open literary coffeehouses with their mix of bohemian and established clientele and the informal communities defined by connections rather than roots proved attractive for many Jews. The increasing antisemitism and radical nationalism of the 1880s and 1890s made the literary coffeehouse seem an even more attractive refuge. In his essay, Sacher Pinsker introduces Jewish Hebrew and Yiddish writers like Gershon Shofman, who migrated from the Russian Empire to Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv, then from there to Vienna’s second district (Leopoldstadt), sometimes called the Mazzesinsel (“Matzo Island”).
The essays by Ian Sabotic and Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius stand out in this collection. Both consider coffeehouses in other Habsburg urban centers and, therefore, the complicated cultural relationships between the imperial center and the periphery. Murawska-Muthesius argues that Cracow’s Michalik’s Café and the caricatures drawn by its guests and papering its walls challenged conventional notions of beauty. Some of the art and literature produced in this café, which housed the famous Green Balloon Cabaret, lampooned Jews and the New Woman even while acknowledging the important presence of both in central Europe’s cultural cafés and public spaces. As Sabotic shows, Zagreb coffeehouses shared similarities with their Vienna counterparts—marble table tops, Thonet chairs, rich upholstery, billiard tables, elegant light fixtures, game rooms, newspapers, young writers, word play, jokes, and caricatures. Yet, they were also very different places. In Vienna, the (mostly Jewish) writers of Jung Wien viewed themselves as individuals creating art in confrontation with modernity. In contrast, the cultural circles frequenting Zagreb cafes shared a widespread resentment of Hungarian domination, focused on language as a tool of Croatian national rebirth, were deeply concerned with “national” identity, and viewed themselves as creators of “national” culture.
A number of engaging essays in this volume concentrate on material culture and interconnections between organized space and intellectual innovation. Tag Gronberg explores the “various dynamics sustained by this remarkably resilient Orientalist myth of origins” of Vienna’s coffeehouse culture (p. 60). Mary Costello analyzes the architecture and decoration of Adolf Loos’s Kärtner Bar through photographs and a copy of the bar made in Dublin in the 1980s. She concludes that Loos’s break with the ornamental style of secessionism was more gradual than the architect would later claim. Jeremy Aynsley takes seriously the Viennese coffeehouse as an important site in the history of interior design, advertising, poster art, and graphic design. Richard Kurdiovsky considers the clichéd vision of the Vienna café as a comfortable extension of the bourgeois living room. Edward Timms compares the (very male) space of the Vienna coffeehouse and the (female) London private tea party while exploring the intellectual circles around Sigmund Freud and Virginia Woolf.
Both edited volumes consider coffeehouses as third places, where the dynamic interaction of different groups played important roles in urban culture. The best chapters in each take us in unexpected directions. Their authors treat coffee as a consumer product and as part of the changing material world that shaped the social and intellectual lives of Europeans in the modern period. Still, the collections might have benefitted from contributions on cafés in cities like Warsaw, Berlin, Munich, St. Petersburg, Budapest, or Prague. Readers will find little about the global context of the coffee trade in these volumes. No essays center on the café as a business; none explores the culture and personnel of coffee import and distribution. The essays devote few lines to the coffeehouse as a site of interaction between workers and wealthy consumers. Despite these limitations, both volumes bring together challenging and sophisticated sets of essays on coffee and coffee culture. They constitute serious contributions to the intellectual and cultural history of Europe in the modern period.
In sharp contrast to the two collected volumes discussed above, the brief and engaging Jews Welcome Coffee does not focus on grand cafés and literary circles. Robert Liberles engages instead with the very beginning of coffee drinking in Europe and the businesses, social changes, and religious issues that came along with it. He argues that coffee did not spur revolutionary change, “but it just may be what revolutionaries were drinking” when they dreamed of transforming the world (p. xiii). Some of the brief chapters in this volume have previously appeared. Together, they offer fascinating and surprising insights into the everyday life of Jews in the German-speaking lands in the early modern period.
The first two chapters offer a brief history of coffee and coffee drinking from the Middle Ages into the early modern period. In the Islamic world, some religious leaders had opposed coffee and coffeehouses out of concern about nocturnal gatherings and the drink’s intoxicating effects. In the 1500s, there were European doctors who believed coffee suppressed the appetite and sexual desire, led to hemorrhoids and headaches, and, when ingested with milk, could cause leprosy. Some early modern European rulers opposed the spread of coffee because the beverage and establishments serving it allegedly inspired idleness and opposition to authority among the lower classes. In the later eighteenth century, with the beans imported into central Europe from the French and British empires in larger quantities, the mercantilist Frederick the Great viewed the import of coffee as a danger to the Prussian economy. He promoted beer drinking as a patriotic alternative, outlawed the preparation and ingestion of coffee, and even hired coffee sniffers to seek out illicit roasters. Despite such efforts, however, coffee gradually spread from the elite to the middle and lower classes.
Chapters 3 through 6 present the results of Liberles’s “chaotic research” into thousands of pages of documents related to Jews and coffee held in German archives. Although central European authorities often opposed coffee consumption for alleged health and economic reasons, rabbis welcomed coffee as a commodity. Responsa by leading rabbis like Jacob Emden and the Hatam Sofer were concerned with coffee preparation and public consumption, not with the drink itself. Could Jews drink coffee roasted and prepared by gentiles on the Sabbath? Were the implements kosher? To answer these questions, rabbis in central Europe looked to writings by earlier generations of rabbis living in the Islamic world or personally investigated how the beans were prepared and the drink produced. Chapter 4 considers consumption patterns, the trade in coffee (even on Saturdays) by Jewish widows and Jewish poor, and the integration of coffee into religious life. Rabbis appreciated coffee as a stimulant that livened night-time and early morning prayers. Chapter 5 follows two decades-long court proceedings, as Christian merchants attempted to prohibit Jews from engaging in the coffee trade. In the final chapter, Liberles shows that Jews in Frankfurt in the Napoleonic period confronted gentile coffeehouse owners who attempted to prohibit Jews from entering their cafés. Eventually, the authorities confirmed the right of Jews to public accommodation.
This is a nuanced, persuasive, and original study. Liberles deftly used his archival finds to bring to life the story of Jews in the early modern German lands. Jews in the early modern period welcomed some material innovations like coffee. Rabbis may have been divided on specific questions related to coffee making and public coffee drinking; however, there was no serious religious opposition to the integration of coffee consumption into Jewish daily life. Scholars of early modern Europe, central European history, and Jewish history will welcome this volume, which was published by Brandeis University Press just weeks after the author’s passing.
The editors of The Thinking Space close their collection with a piece by Fannie Peczenik. Peczenik offers her impressions of café life in present-day Italy. Her contribution echoes the introduction’s optimistic contention: even in the day of social media and online shopping, the ever-increasing need for the development of new ideas and new connections means that “intellectual cafes and the functions they serve will never become obsolete” (p. 22). Perhaps the grand European coffeehouses are not doomed to be little more than tourist attractions offering newspapers, magazines, desserts, caffeinated drinks, and nostalgic evocations of the intellectual and artistic circles that once frequented them.