YET it would be an illusion to suppose that in those days more tea than coffee was drunk in Germany. The reverse was true, and herein we have an elementary instance of how the writers of history err when they depend mainly on “literary evidence.” Such evidence is all we have to rely upon as regards the greater part of antiquity. But when we come to the nineteenth century, we are guided by figures relating to economic life, by the science of statistics.
During the year 1841, Hamburg imported 36,000 tons of coffee, but only 137 tons of tea. The figures show indisputably the interesting fact that two hundred and seventy times more coffee was imported than tea.
The figures are remarkable even though the difference between the consumption of tea and coffee was not so extensive as they might seem to imply. From a given weight of leaves, six times as many cups of tea can be prepared as of coffee from the same weight of beans. Allowing for this fact, however, we learn that forty-five times as much coffee was consumed as tea.
The port of Hamburg, of course, did not supply German territory exclusively, being in part a place of transit trade supplying various regions in northern and eastern Europe. Still, since this applied both to tea and to coffee, the consumption of the respective beverages in Germany was not notably affected by the consideration.
Forty-five times as much coffee was drunk in Germany, as compared with tea. At the first glance this seems barely credible. Where were these great quantities of coffee consumed? In the public life of the country there is little vestige of anything of the kind. Coffee-drinking did not leave any noteworthy traces in the street life of Berlin during those days. About the middle of the nineteenth century, when there were numerous coffee-houses in the streets of Paris, and a still larger number in the streets of Vienna, there were hardly any such places in Berlin. The Prussian capital was abundantly supplied with eating-houses, beer-saloons, wine-shops of all sorts and sizes, but had very few coffee-houses. Since we know that at that date, in literary circles, tea was the principal beverage, we have to ask who, during the epoch in question, were the consumers of these vast quantities of coffee?
MUNICIPAL COUNCILLOR CHICORY
Gentlemen! It is true that there is a general rise in prices, but we have an
infallible remedy—the use of substitutes. (One vote in their favour.)
(Coffee famine cartoon, 1855)
Women, chiefly! Women of the middle-class, who played no part in the salons or in literary circles, and of whose life little record remains. It was the wives of worthy German burghers who drank coffee. The women of this class would on Monday go to visit Kätchen; on Tuesday, Lottchen; on Wednesday, Gretchen; and so on. When they had finished their daily round of housework, when the needs of husband and children had been attended to, these good women foregathered to drink coffee together. Over their coffee and their cakes they chattered and they sewed. From the plump coffee-pot there flowed a continuous stream into coffee-cups and thence into stomachs.
It is part of the nature of coffee that it can never become the favourite beverage of women. It makes the intelligence wakeful and critical. It stimulates to a reconstruction of the world. Its effects on the brain are antagonistic to the longing for harmony and peace which is characteristic of the best of women. If, during the period we are now considering, and thenceforward down to the opening of the great war, it was chiefly women who drank coffee in Germany, we infer that the coffee must have been extremely weak. The beverage must have been so watery that it could have had little effect in producing the cerebral excitement characteristic of the coffee-drinker. Among German women it was a social drink of which from ten to twelve cups could be consumed in an afternoon without risk—little more than bitter hot water, strongly sweetened. The large supplies of coffee that found their way into the stomachs of the Berliners were copiously diluted.
As aforesaid, this diluted beverage was consumed chiefly by women—and, in man-ruled Germany, their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, and their sons made fun of them for it. Two new terms were introduced into the German language by the practice, and remain current to this day: “Kaffeeklatsch” and “Kaffeeschwester” The former word means the gossip or scandal talked by women at a coffee-party; and the latter, primarily a person who is fond of coffee, and secondarily a gossip or a scandal-monger. Coffee was regarded by the men as a “woman’s drink,” and this idea finds vent in numerous caricatures of the period.
Part of the joke is, however, that men drank coffee, too, though not much in Germany as a social beverage. They all wanted it, and still want it, for breakfast; and any considerable increase in the price of coffee, such as occurred in 1855, evoked loud protests. Witness the caricature showing a race run by the necessities of life to attain the highest price, coffee taking the lead. Next comes a sugar-loaf, followed by an oil-butt and a pepper-sack.
“In the thirties,” writes Helmuth von Moltke (the elder), “much political talk went on in the saloons, in the theatres, and in the beersaloons.” It is eminently characteristic of Berlin that he should make no mention of coffee-houses. There were, in fact, very few coffee-houses in Berlin. In Paris, Milan, Vienna, and Venice—to name only the chief focuses of European unrest—coffee-houses at that date had a strong political flavour. “The Café Florian in Venice,” writes Balzac in his tale Massimilla Doni, “is a strange place. . . . It is at one and the same time a lawyer’s office, an exchange, a theatre foyer, a club, and a reading-room. . . . Of course it is crowded with political spies, but their presence serves only to stimulate the acuteness of the Venetians, who have been accustomed to be overlooked by these gentry for centuries past.” In Berlin, on the other hand, coffee was far too private a concern to become associated with politics, so eminently public. Coffee-drinking, for the Germans, was one of the privacies of domestic life.
“THE WETTER, THE BETTER”
Even the granite basin before the Old Museum must serve the Berlin nursemaids
in their rage for coffee.
(Cartoon of the 1850’s)
What the men of Berlin drank in public was beer. For the lower orders there was “white beer,” an effervescent beverage containing very little alcohol, being hardly more intoxicating than diluted fruit-juice. It was the favourite tipple of cab-drivers and of handicraftsmen of one sort and another. The Berliners have a dry humour of their own, and this “white beer,” now dying out, seemed to stimulate it as they quaffed vast quantities from huge glass beakers resembling gold-fish-bowls, and not infrequently used as such.
Before 1890, coffee-houses of the Viennese type scarcely existed in Berlin. How could they, since the Viennese way of doing business in a café, where the greater part of the day was spent, was repugnant to the Berliners? The “public-houses” of Berlin were beer-saloons. Beer provided rest, amusement, and comfort, when men got together after the day’s work was over. Coffee came in as a bad second, being regarded as a trifle ridiculous, if only because of its exotic origin. There is a remarkable caricature that was printed during the war of 1870. As is well known, during the war the Prussians made great fun of the mitrailleuse, a French innovation in artillery. The cut shows a French artilleryman turning the crank of a mitrailleuse in which coffee is being ground.
Grinding coffee, especially by a man, always seemed funny to the Berliners. This was presumably an exemplification of the overbearingly masculine attitude of Germans towards their women, and of the fact that the preparation of coffee, in contrast with the preparation of beer, was regarded as a feminine occupation. An English caricature of about the same date (1869), when the bicycle had recently come into use, shows an English cyclist—velocipedist he would then have been called—whose back wheel is connected by cranks and a lever with a coffee-mill behind his saddle. In nineteenth-century England, coffee-houses were as rare as in northern Germany of the period.
Although Berlin business folk regarded public coffee-drinking with good-natured contempt, coffee was nevertheless drunk in considerable quantities publicly in the German capital. Behind a screen! The Berliners drank coffee in confectioners’ shops.
The “Konditorei,” or pastry-cook’s, was, in truth, the creation of the women of Berlin. Although middle-class German women did not mix well in society, the confectioners’ shops were meeting-places for both sexes. This went on for decades, and indeed, among the few vestiges of the comparatively recent past in Berlin, are the pastry-cooks’ or confectioners’ shops, with their threadbare plush sofas and their strange aroma of burnt sugar and the punch with which the fruit-tarts are flavoured.
BICYCLE COFFEE-MILL
(English cartoon, 1869)
Characteristically, where women ruled, much coffee was drunk, but it was bad coffee. Furthermore, the beverage was flanked by piles of cakes and tartlets. The pastries of Berlin deserve to be better known than they are. There is, in truth, a “Berlinese style,” in pastry, although the world at large thinks only of a Parisian or a Viennese style. The confectionery of Berlin is solid stuff, which has been made out of an extremely substantial dough. The icing is almost as thick as armour-plate. The Parisian epicure’s notion that one should rise from one’s meal with a light stomach is not suited to the Berlinese character. “Everything you eat must be as solid as the sands of Brandenburg,” was meant as a commendation of the pastry-cook’s art in Berlin. It applies to almost all the wares of the Berlin confectioner—wares for which no name exists in other languages than German. Fine, filling pastries, made toothsome by liberal quantities of whipped cream. The preamble to a large proportion of Berlin weddings used to be a tryst in a pastry-cook’s shop.
For these were the only places in which, without losing caste, German lads and lasses of good family could make assignations. Here, woman held sway. She was responsible for the fact that the cakes were so strong and the coffee so weak!
Small confectioners’ shops were as numerous in Berlin (since many bakers were pastry-cooks as well) as coffee-houses were in Vienna. But there were bigger establishments of the kind that were not the haunt of lovers. They were for middle-aged people, persons of rank and station. The most celebrated was Kranzler’s, situated at that important street-corner in Berlin, where the Friedrichsstrasse impinges upon Unter den Linden. In no other town in the world would a pastry-cook have established himself here instead of a coffee-house keeper. Two busy streams of wayfarers jostled one another, but Kranzler’s remained Kranzler’s, an oasis of peace.
As famous as Kranzler’s were Josty’s and Stehely’s. These much-visited confectioners, one of them in the Jägerstrasse and the other in the Potsdamerplatz, these social centres, were, characteristically enough, not run by natives of Berlin. The history of the French capital was repeating itself almost two centuries later in the history of the capital of Prussia. Just as long before, in Paris, the first to open coffee-houses had been Armenians and Persians, so did Josty and Stehely come north from the classic land of sugar-bakery, from Grisons. “Josty” would seem to have been the German-Swiss variant of the Rhaeto-Romanic “Giusti.” The name Stehely is still common in Switzerland under the form of Stehelis or Stäheli. It was a new thing for Germans of position to eat cakes and pastries in public. During the Napoleonic epoch, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn had knocked a piece of cake out of the mouth of a boy who, thought Jahn, ought to have been eating bread. In those days, “luxury” was regarded as un-Prussian and effeminate. With the aid of the confectioners, a less harsh time followed upon the iron age of Fichte.
Still, it was but slowly that the Berliners learned to prize the milder European climate into which they had been introduced by their sudden acquisition of wealth and by the new standing of Prussia as a world state. But this newly acquired wealth gave them a chance of getting away from Berlin now and again! Before 1870, an annual summer holiday in the country or at the sea-side, which had long since become a commonplace for the well-to-do of other metropolises, had been regarded as an almost chimerical luxury for the average citizen of Berlin. A townsman was a townsman, a countryman was a countryman, that was all there was to say about the matter. Nevertheless, the good people of Berlin had always longed for things out of their reach. To the Viennese, whose hills and brooks thrust their way into the town, it seemed natural enough that a Schubert should be born in their city. Much more enigmatic was the birth of a Mendelssohn, upon whose ears the strains of his Sommernachtstraum suddenly fell in central Berlin, in a stone house in the Leipzigerplatz. Characteristically Berlinese was his music, the expression of a yearning for distant nature!
When, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, twenty years before the fashion of summer excursions began, the Berliners discovered the environs of their city, the Kaffeeschwestern led the way. Had it not been for the Kaffeeschwestern, who could not get on without their abundance of weak coffee, the natural beauties of Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Schöneberg, Stralau-Rummelburg, Pankow, and Niederschöneweide would never have been discovered. Beer, which during the heat of summer made men bad walkers, beer, which made excursions costly because it necessitated the hiring of huge breaks, was a bad travelling-companion. It was otherwise with coffee. To the great delight of the good wives, the city soon became encircled with coffee-gardens. Beside some marshy backwater over which the flies hovered, or where beech woods were interspersed with pine groves, one could sit on a rustic seat in front of a rustic table. “Families can make their coffee here!” would be the sign. Such signs are to be seen in the outskirts of Berlin even today. They show the true function of woman in the Berlinese family. A frugal supper enhanced the enjoyment of nature, while the setting sun displayed its carmine glories. For the atmosphere of Berlin produces at nightfall a colouring even more splendid than that of the steppes.