MORE coffee entered northern Germany by way of Hamburg than entered the Danubian monarchy by way of Trieste. Statistics show that Germany consumed more than Austria. But in Germany, coffee remained inconspicuous, almost invisible. It was elsewhere than in Germany that coffee and its use took visible shape, becoming a distinct factor in Austrian social life.
What the prefects or lords-lieutenant were, politically considered, in the new Austro-Hungarian empire, the coffee-houses were, considered socially. They bore witness to unity of manners and customs. Just as in the Imperium Romanum one encountered the military milestones every thousand double paces along the high road, so, throughout Austria-Hungary, among the territories inhabited by various nationalities, one encountered the prefectoral headquarters built of yellow sandstone and fitted with green shutters—and coffee-houses after the Viennese model. For official business, for registration and the like, the burghers’ life centred round the prefecture. There the emperor’s subjects were kept under supervision, for administrative purposes; but in other respects their existence circled round the coffee-houses. The administrative offices and the coffee-houses were among the chief determinative factors in the lives of Austro-Hungarians. The better the relations between these two departments, the more genial the association between officialdom and non-officialdom, the more harmoniously flowed the existence of the monarchy.
It was an agreeable enough life! Foreigners found it charmingly attractive. No matter whether the stranger entered Austria from the north, at Bodenbach on the Elbe, or landed at a village in Istria after a Mediterranean voyage, or made his way into Vorarlberg after a so-journ in highly civilized and comfortable Switzerland, or entered Bukovina coming by train from Russia, he instantly became aware of the smell of coffee, an agreeable testimony to the habits of the Austrians. Germans, Hungarians, Italians, and Slavs, in other respects often at odds, were unified at least by the approved Viennese method of making and drinking coffee. A “Viennese breakfast” denoted coffee with a crescent-shaped roll, served by a friendly waiter. There was nothing like this outside the royal and imperial frontier. A waiter who was “Vienna-trained,” even though the man had never been in Vienna, was a product of Austro-Hungarian unification, almost as much as if he had been a soldier fighting under the Austro-Hungarian flag. When the incoming express drew to a stop and one of these waiters, with deft movements, acting on a stage created by his own imagination, drew near, the traveller instantly felt that with such a servitor and such a breakfast the day had begun pleasantly. Yes, this was really Austria!
The Austrian coffee-house was invented in Vienna. It spread into neighbouring territories in the wake of the conquering armies of the Habsburgs.
As soon as, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Maria Theresa had first combated and then destroyed the corporative avarice of the coffee-boilers, the coffee-house industry began to flourish with tropical luxuriance. It paid well! There is no record of a coffee-house proprietor going bankrupt in the Vienna of Joseph II. On the contrary, one could see three coffee-houses side by side in Leopoldstadt. The urge to sit down in a coffee-house was so powerful among the Viennese that many foreigners were inclined to think that every block of flats in Vienna had a coffee-room of its own, as an atrium, a vestibule, for the use of all the families domiciled therein!
Had not this instinct been so deeply rooted in the life of the Viennese, the conviction that everyone had a right to his private coffee-house, to a place which, though public, was a sort of annex to his own dwelling, it would be impossible to explain the multiplication of little cafés in the city of Vienna. At his café, the Viennese feels that he is simultaneously at home and taking part in public life. He is no longer confined within the four walls of his own domicile, and yet he is in a place more peculiar to himself than the street. His relations with the waiter, the young lady at the pay-desk, and the man who makes the coffee, are of a quasi-familiar nature.
Together with his quantum of the stimulating beverage, there is brought to him a newspaper fresh from the press, with its atmosphere of the wide world. The Viennese citizen breakfasts in a coffee-house. Thus his day begins filled with images and possibilities. What he makes out of these possibilities is his own concern. Many quit the café to go about their various affairs. Many remain sitting where they are, hypnotized by the murmuring sea of newspapers. No press is so chatty and alluring as that of Vienna.
A great deal of water has run under the bridges between 1780 and the present day. Civilizations have completely changed their visage. Forms of government have decayed, empires have perished, kings have been dethroned. Tallow candles were replaced by gas; then came carbon-arc lights; then tungsten incandescents; and then flood-lighting as the modern form of electric illumination. Only the most conservative people have clung to the habits of a century and a half ago. The Viennese clings to his coffee-house.
He goes there thrice a day. First of all in the morning, between eight and nine. Then at three o’clock in the afternoon, for the “small black,” which he drinks soon after his mid-day meal. Then in the evening, between nine and ten. At the first visit, as aforesaid, he gets into touch with the outer world by reading the newspapers, and does not talk much; but the evening visit is devoted to social intercourse, to friendly conversation.
“Coffee-house three times a day” is a fixed prescription. But the length of the visit varies. Although the Viennese punctuates his day by spells in the coffee-house, these spells may be short or long. Sometimes they are so greatly extended that they overlap, especially when he has found it possible to transfer part of his business life to his café. So numerous are the coffee-houses that there is no shortage of space in them. An habitué can write his letters there, or find a convenient corner for a private negotiation. I have spoken of the Viennese as conservative; and, in very truth, many of the cafés of the Austrian capital retain the function such places had in the London of 1680. They are business resorts. Whereas in London this sort of thing came to an end nigh upon two centuries ago, the Viennese coffee-houses continue, as of old, to play the part of exchanges. Of course a merchant with a large business learned long ago to transfer his affairs to his private office. Fifty years back, to do such a thing in Vienna would have been regarded as “putting on side.” The Viennese “city man” was looked up by other Viennese in “his” coffee-house. This was a place that seemed to be democratically accessible to every visitor; but where, nevertheless, the staff could, at a hint, make fine distinctions when the host wanted the reception to be cordial or otherwise; when the guest was to be courted or cold-shouldered; when the standing of the man of business who was receiving visitors was to be shown in a more exalted light than would have been possible in his office. Only to outward seeming were these coffee-houses neutral ground. They were and are attuned to the qualities of particular sorts of men, who know one another by repute. “That is a man from my coffee-house!” a Viennese will say during a Sunday walk in the Wiener Wald, when he encounters an acquaintance whose name perhaps he does not know.
The proprietor and the waiter showed great discrimination in their treatment of the guests. They played as if upon a piano by making delicate distinctions in their attention to this, that, and the other customer, and in the deference they showed to persons with official titles. The frequenters were appropriately flattered, a well-to-do member of the middle-class being unjustifiably addressed as “von,” an intellectual being belauded as “Professor” or “Doctor.” The “attachment” of a coffee-house keeper to his respective guests was not solely determined by material causes. It did not depend upon the amount of the particular bill. Regular visitors were those most affectionately received, and to lose a guest of long standing was and is regarded as a disaster, a misfortune, a mortification.
The affection is mutual. I know a paper-merchant whose business went down so that he had to remove to a distant quarter of the town, but he continued for twenty years thereafter to frequent his familiar coffee-house. When I asked him the reason for this strange and unpractical behaviour, he replied that he could not stomach the idea of hurting his host’s feelings by making a change. . . . The high respect paid to the coffee-house keepers of Vienna has often aroused a smile, perhaps unjustly. Assuredly a Viennese coffee-house keeper who for thirty or forty years in succession has ministered to the comfort of his fellow-citizens during the many hours they pass in public is entitled to all respect. Tokens of honour were almost too conspicuous upon the breast of Ludwig Riedl! A good many foreign princes also bestowed decorations upon the man who ran the favourite coffee-house of Emperor Francis Joseph. They would have been hard put to it to give a reason for doing so. It was the thing to do, and that was the long and short of it. The proprietor of the Café de l’Europe assembled upon his breast, as a symbol of the coffee-house industry, tokens of the reverence the Viennese feel for themselves and their peculiar type of civilization. It delighted them that a coffee-house keeper should be honoured—all the more because his business was carried on where the cathedral of St. Stephen’s throws its shadow at noon.
There were two things which primarily attracted the Viennese into coffee-houses.
The first lure was billiards. The billiard-tables were longer than those of today, furnished with very heavy legs, screwed to the floor. The game played upon these tables was not billiards, but pool. When a ball was pocketed, a bell rang. The table was lighted with candles, and on the floor was a stool which the marker could mount when the candles needed snuffing. The cost of a game of billiards was four kreuzer, the price of a couple of litres of wine. Though the charge was thus high, the billiard-tables were greatly patronized. When, towards 1810, Napoleon’s officers introduced “French billiards,” a game played upon a table without pockets, masters in the art of this cannon game developed in Vienna. The most famous resort for billiard-players was Hugelmann’s coffee-house close to Ferdinand Bridge.
The second attraction was a more notable one. It occurred to a man named Cramer to have the latest newspapers lying about on the tables of his coffee-house. He was inspired by the notion that merchants and men-of-letters, intellectuals and officials, are eager for the latest news, and that the provision of newspapers for public reading would save their pockets. Cramer did things on the grand scale. He subscribed to almost all the dailies and weeklies published in the German tongue, providing also Italian, French, and English newspapers and magazines. The cost was heavy, but the venture paid amazingly. Cramer’s Café became transformed into a reading-room, and the impatience of the incessant stream of newcomers saw to it that guests should not sit too long over their papers. Thus the goddess of curiosity had made her way into the coffee-house. There she remained. There are newspaper-addicts everywhere, but especially in Vienna. Newspapers are the opium of the Viennese.
Until recently the Parisian coffee-house keeper supplied no newspapers to his customers, and even now, except for those left there by the guests, the number of journals on the tables is scanty. Therein lies a notable distinction between a French café and an Austrian one. Although the modern Parisians drink a good deal of coffee, nowadays (unless the café is also a restaurant), their stay in the coffee-house is short. Small cafés are extremely numerous in Paris, and they supply alcoholic liquors as well as coffee. The proprietors speed the circulation of their customers by furnishing coffee and other drinks at the bar at far lower prices than are paid by persons who sit down at the tables. When you sit at a table, to avoid the possibility of dispute the enhanced price of your coffee or other drinks is often stamped on the saucer!
The furnishing of the coffee-houses was, to begin with, extremely simple. The only adornment was to put up on the walls a few mirrors with rococo frames. But even this seemed splendid for those days. When, subsequently, the voice of Rousseau reached Vienna from France, demanding a “return to nature,” and when the Viennese discovered the Prater, they built among rustling trees three coffee-houses which became centres of social life. The distance between them and the distance from the town became symbolical of distance in general. People took note of the time required to reach the first coffee-house. On the way to these resorts, the Viennese learned how to ride and to drive. Furious driving, originally a Hungarian practice, now became one of the favourite sports in Vienna.
The final defeat of Napoleon brought wealth to the Austrian bourgeoisie, which had hitherto lived frugally. One of the outcomes of the consequent expansion was, in the year 1820, the opening of the Silver Coffee-House in the Plankengasse. The host, Ignaz Neuner, provided silver utensils and table-service, and even had the hangers for hats and overcoats made of silver. There were three rooms in the café. One of them was for billiard-players, the second for chess-players, and the third (how great an innovation!) was a ladies’ room. Prior to 1840, very few Viennese ladies entered a coffee-house. Only through much reading of foreign literature could they be brought to this emancipation and to adopting so masculine a practice. At Neuner’s, however, they were to be found—in the famous Silver Coffee-House which was, above all, the café of Austrian poetry. Grillparzer and Lenau were among its frequenters. We are told of Lenau that for more than twelve years he was to be seen every day at Neuner’s, sometimes in melancholy mood, sometimes genial, sometimes manfully fighting down his inward disquiet. He was a fine billiard-player. He held his billiard cue like St. George’s spear, though the dragon was invisible. It was far from his beloved coffee-house that the dragon of lunacy at length claimed him for its own.
BEETHOVEN URGES GRILLPARZER TO SEEK HIM AT THE COFFEE-HOUSE (“Opposite the Golden Pear—but alone and without a tiresome appendix”)
Of course the Viennese coffee-houses were not exempt from the old-standing enmity of governments against the political activities of coffee-house frequenters. We find again and again in history that the “spirit of the coffee-houses” becomes especially powerful after defeat. Political agitators are stimulated by the overthrow of national armies in war. Thus, very soon after the retreat of Kara Mustafa from Vienna, somewhere about 1690, the coffee-houses of Constantinople were closed, as being centres of agitation. For centuries, coffee has been a support to citizens in their revolts against authority. The Madrid revolution began in the Café Lorenzoni; and in Northern Italy the revolts against Austrian rule at Venice, Padua, Verona, and other towns were almost always the outcome of coffee-house conspiracies. In one of her Italian novels, Federigo Gonfalonière, Ricarda Huch describes the program of the young Milanese intellectuals in the year 1820. It contains the following demands: gas-lighting in the houses and streets, newspapers, public baths, and, above all, “coffee-houses, in which newspapers shall be provided, and where interesting persons can exchange ideas.” Coffee “dilates the blood-vessels.” It sounds like a joke, but is true, that Baptista d’Andrade, the Brazilian chemist, was able to distil from one hundred litres of coffee-berries ten grammes of explosive, a variety of nitromannite.
The idea of awakening, of a “rising”—the notion of the Italian revival, the “risorgimento,” is physiologically coincident with the chemical effect of coffee upon the human organism.
Even in the gentler climate of Vienna, an explosive mood prevailed against Metternich. The discharge occurred in 1848. A year before, the Café Griensteidl had been founded. This promptly became the headquarters of the malcontent nationalists and democrats, who were opposed to the conservative supporters of the government, frequenters of the Café Daum, hard by. The Austrian police were so suspicious of the Griensteidlians, that they bribed one of the waiters at the café, a man named Schorsch, to act as a spy upon the habitués, and to report many of their incautious utterances. When this transpired, there was an internal revolution in the Café Griensteidl. Schorsch was promptly given the sack, and the comic papers of Vienna made fun of the matter. In 1862, when one of the north-German governments was secretly recruiting volunteers in Vienna to help in the invasion of Denmark, there were again troubles in the Café Griensteidl; and once more, in 1870, there were feuds between francophils and germanophils. But the police soon put a stop to the attempts of these factions to re-fight the Battle of Sedan in the cafés!