What do you think of, when I mention coffee or the coffee house in a historical meaning.
You might think of the coffee houses in the Arab muslim world with their initial
adoption of the beverage, or about the first european coffee houses in Itally,
or about the Perisian coffee houses during the age of enlightenment,
you might even think of the Loyds coffee house in London which was the beginnings of one of the
largest insurance and reinsurance companies in the world. But, even though all of those coffee
houses have interesting stories in their own right, there is usually one aspect of coffee
house history that is often overlooked and even forgotten about by many people and that is the
historic Viennese coffee scene which arguably had just as much influence on world’s history as did
all the other coffee houses I have mentioned. And it is due to this influence that the quote
“Viennese Coffee House Culture” is today part of UNESCO as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage”.
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So why did Vienna of all places end up with a coffee scene so strong that it was later enshrined
in UNESCO, after all it wasn’t the first city in Europe to have a coffeehouse that title goes
to Venic, nor was it the second or third or forth, Oxford, London, Hamburg, Paris, Marseilles all had
coffee houses before the first one ever opened in Vienna in 1683 well actually 1685, let me explain.
The story goes that during the Ottoman retreat after their second unsuccessful siege of Vienna
in 1683 they left large amounts of coffee beans behind. The Viennes were unfamiliar with this
new bean and didn’t know what to do with it. In comes Kolschitzky an Austrian subject who
had previously worked with the Ottomans and therefore is aware of the fact that
these coffee beans could be used for making coffee and so he takes those coffee beans,
sets up the first coffee shop in Vienna with them and introduces the Viennese people to
the wonders of coffee making. At least that’s how the myth goes. In reality the first coffee
house in Vienna was opened in 1685 by two entrepreneur Armenians Diodato and Luca.
Nonetheless once coffee was introduced into the city it started to slowly gain traction with the
local population who enthusiastically started using the new coffee houses as a meeting place
for simple discord or just a casual reading space. This coffee house culture started to
be more and more popular in the city when in the 18th century it suddenly blew up.
A tourist visiting Vienna in the 18th century wrote “The city of Vienna is filled with coffee
houses where the novelists or those who busy themselves with the newspapers delight to meet,
to read the gazettes and to discuss their contents.”
These establishments, however, wouldn’t have always looked the way you might be picturing them.
For one smoking was very common and some cafes could have ended up looking very
foggy although a fun anecdote is that it was considered ungentlemanly to smoke in
the presence of women. For example Princess Pauline von Metternich an enthusiastic promoter
of Richard Wagner and Betrich Smetana and a regular of the Viennese coffee scene was onced
asked by a man if him smoking would bother her to which she replied “I don’t know,
nobody has ever dared smoke in my presence”.
But circling back, another maybe surprising aspect of the early Viennese coffee house was billiard.
Billiard was in fact so popular in the Viennese coffee house scene that some people just showed up
to the coffee house solely to see the best players perform. In some instances these people showed up
at such high numbers that the floor collapsing became an actual issue, after which in 1745 the
Viennes police issued a prohibition on billiards being set up anywhere else but the ground floor.
With this boom of coffee house culture in Vienna other kinds of coffee houses
started to be established, ones that were a bit more refined, ones that would have resembled a
more quote “stereotypical” style cafe with classical music playing in the background.
For example both Beethoven who was known to compose in a coffee house and Mozart were
known to perform in the Augarten Cafe, Strauss sometimes performed with an entire orchestra in
the Stadtpark Cafe and Schubert would often take his friends to Cafe Bogner. With all that said,
however, probably the most grandest of them all was Cafe Schwender which started off as
just a coffee house but later expanded to a full size restaurant, ballroom,
and even a music theater employing its own entire orchestra to entertain the guests.
There was also Cafe Kramer whose regulars consisted of the University of Vienna professors
and as such the cafe gained a reputation as the quote “the scholarly coffee house”. There
was also the Museum Cafe where Franz Lehar and Gustav Klimt used to hang out just to name a few.
By the 19th century the coffee house became the center point of the Viennes society
and everyone from field marshals, writers, journalists, aristocrats, philosophers,
painters and many more visited these establishments on a daily basis.
With so many high status people hanging out in these cafes it meant that they also became a
center point of not just revolutionary movements but also counter revolutionary movements.
Many Viennese cafes were involved in the 1848 uprising and after it many cafes were
filled with government spies listening to the conversations being had. Scholarly Coffee House
With all that said, the Austrian coffee scene continued on in its prominence and
probably the best quote to explain the coffee house culture is by Stefan Zweig
a well known Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer.
“Our finest place of education for everything new was the coffee house. To understand this, one has
to know that the Viennese Café is an institution of a special kind which is not comparable to
any other in the world. It is actually a kind of democratic club, accessible to anyone for an
inexpensive cup of coffee, where every guest can sit for hours for this small obolus,
discuss, write, play cards, receive his mail and above all consume an unlimited number of
newspapers and journals. In one of the better Viennese coffee houses all Viennese papers were
available and not only the Viennese ones but those of the entire German Empire as well as the French
and English and Italian and American ones, in addition to all the important literature and art
magazines of the world, the “Mercure de France” no less than the “Neue Rundschau,” the “Studio”
and the “Burlington Magazine.” Thus we knew everything that went on in the world first-hand,
we knew of every book that appeared, of every performance no matter where it took place and
compared the critiques in all newspapers. Nothing perhaps has contributed as much to
the intellectual agility and international orientation of the Austrian as the fact that
he could exhaustively find out in the coffee house about all activities in the world and discuss them
at the same time in the circle of his friends. We sat there daily for hours, nothing escaped us.
For thanks to the collectiveness of our interests we followed the orbis pictus of artistic events
not with two but with twenty and forty eyes; what one overlooked, the other noticed for him.”
This cultivation of thought in the Viennese coffee house drastically affected Sigmund Freud
the founder of psychoanalysis along with many of his friends like Abraham Brill the
first American psychoanalyst who all used to frequent Cafe Herrenhof or Cafe Siller.
On the other hand these same Cafes were also frequented by Alfred Adler who was
instrumental in forming the psychotherapy school.
By the turn of the 20th century Vienna had around 600 to a thousand coffee houses and
it’s coffee house culture had spread all across the Empire. Viennese style coffee-houses could
be seen in Budapest, Zagreb, Prague, Krakow, etc. and in one of these coffee houses in Krakow
sat a man in exile, a man called Lenin. A man who met another man to whom he referred to as
a "wonderful Georgian" a man known as Stalin. Lenin sent Stalin to Vienna in 1913 to learn more
about Marxism, and there Stalin met another man, a man who frequented Cafe Centra, a man who liked
playing chess in the Viennese coffee houses and a man who later described meeting Stalin by saying
“He was short... thin... his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks... I saw nothing
in his eyes that resembled friendliness.” This man was none other than Leon Trotsky.
There’s a famous anekdote about Trotsky where an official warned Count Berchtold,
foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, saying that if a war was to start it
might provoke a revolution in Russia or even within the Habsburg monarchy itself,
to which the foreign minister jokingly replied "And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps
Mr. Trotsky (Bronstein) sitting over there at the Cafe Central?"
It is almost certain that Trotsky took Stalin to Cafe Central at some point but
these two weren’t the only infamous people visiting this establishment.
An aspiring Austrian artist being rejected from the Academy of Fine arts was also known
to frequent many Viennese coffee houses one of which was Cafe Central. Lastly
it is often mentioned that Tito who was also in Vienna in the early 20th
century frequented Cafe Central but I didn’t find any evidence for this.
No one knows if Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler and even Tito happened to be in Cafe Central at
the same time but it is certainly a possibility. Karel Kramář and Masaryk the first Czechoslovak
president were also known to frequent Cafe Central when they were in Vienna.
But Cafe Central didn’t only attract political
figures it also attracted many writers, Cafe Central along with Café Griensteidl was the
center of the “Young Vienna” movement that was instrumental for many Austrian literary works.
Plus Franz Kafka was also known to frequent cafe Central every time he was in Vienna.
But with all this said you cannot mention the Viennese coffee house especially in the first
half of the 20th century without mentioning the jewish aspect of the coffee house.
Vienna by the 20th century had many aspiring jewish citizens
who were instrumental in shaping the Viennese coffee house culture.
Hermann Bahr, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg, Stefan Zweig, Felix Salten, Egon Friedell,
Alfred Polgar, Anton Kuh, Edmund Wengraf, Sigmund Freud, and many many more were jews who
actively participated in the Viennese coffee house scene.
Steven Beller in 2008 even gave a lecture on the Viennese Coffee Scene titled “The [Viennes] Jew
Belongs in the Coffeehouse” because that was where in the first half of the 20th century
most of the Viennese jewsih history took place.
All of this, however, is not to say that the Viennese coffee house was just an upper class
thing or only an intellectual thing, it permeated all the social classes of the Viennes citizens.
For every Cafe Central there was a working class cafe like Cafe Weghuber located in Viennas 7th
district which at the time of the 19th century was the center of the Viennes silk factory business.
In this sense the Viennese coffee houses weren’t just for gathering of intellectuals,
they were places where young people used to gather and flirt, where business meetings were conducted,
where illegal card games were played in secret backrooms, where workers
decomposed after a hard day in the factory and where political movements were organized.
For example Cafe Eiles was the center for the Austrian Nazi movement
and it was even the headquarters during the unssescefule Austrian Nazi coup attempt in 1934.
What makes the Viennese coffee houses so crucial and so fascinating is that it
wasn’t just one social class or one political movement that used them,
it was everyone, from the intellectuals to the working class from the fascists to the socialist,
from the rich businessman to the pour factory workers, all hung out in Viennese coffee houses.
However, the Viennese coffee house culture sufefred a very hard blow
after the second world war, not only were many prominent members of these
social establishments killed during the war or emigrated to the UK or the USA but
many of the actual physical buildings where destroyed during the bombings of the city.
On top of that the post war politics didn’t at first allow any large recovery for the Viennese
coffee house scene as Austria found itself on the borderlines between two major powers. This
political situation combined with the economics of the coffee changing with the introduction
of coffee chains, instant coffee and espresso machines, exacerbated the worsening situation and
from the 1950s, the following decades became to be known as the period of the "coffee house death".
With all that said, in recent decades a renewed interest into the history
of the Viennese Coffee house along with rising tourism helped few of
the old surviving coffee houses stay afloat and start thriving once again,
plus many new coffee houses got built with the old Viennes coffee house culture in mind.
Because after all the Viennese coffee house isn’t just a simple coffee shop
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Once again I had no time to mention everyone who participated in the history and social
culture of the Viennese coffee house. I mentioned the well known names but
there were many more influential and important people that I just didn’t have time to mention.
I also didn’t have time to mention the Viennes innovations and contributions to
the process of making and serving coffee itself.
But as always these videos can only be so long and I hope you
found this video informative and entertaining.
As always thank you very much to my Patreons and stick around for history