The Romance of the Viennese Coffeehouse
Dana Harrison, H Band
The draw of the writer
or artist to the coffeehouse in his search for mental solitude was a culturally
European phenomenon throughout the late 19th century. The coffeehouses of Vienna,
however, took on the proportions of a monument. Each one distinguished, such
as the literary mecca Cafe Griensteidl, or
its successor, Cafe Central, they were all
embedded with a history recorded and told through the various art
forms that were produced in and about its setting and atmosphere. Its patrons,
writers such as Karl Kraus, Alfred
Polgar, and Peter Altenberg stood
as witnesses to the necessity of the coffeehouse as an institution which encouraged
modernity through the space
given for freedom of artistic expression and reaction during the period
of fin-de-siecle.
The essence of the Viennese
coffeehouse rings with the same frequency as French literatus Charles Baudelair's
interpretation of beauty. The coffeehouse has taken on a characteristic mystical
quality, parallelly containing what Baudelaire would describe as an "eternal,
invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine."
Man's eternal search for an understanding of his own existence found an observation
post at the coffeehouse. In his "Physiognomics: Observation,"
written in 1931, writer Anton Kuh questions "what is a coffeehouse man
of letters?" and his answer, "a person who has the time to contemplate
in the coffeehouse what others on the outside do not experience."
The Fin-de-Siecle era, between 1890 and 1938, which was also the coffeehouse
heyday, created a community of literati who infused the institution with a spirit
so pure to the very age in which it flourished. The power of the coffeehouse
was very much grounded in the transient nature of an time period, and the aspect
of beauty which Baudelaire described as a "relative, circumstantial element
which will be...the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions." As it
were, the emotions of the age were fashioned by "Young
Vienna," the avant-garde intellectuals who served as the artistic proponents
of modernism and liberalism. For these composers, artists, writers, and
politicians, the coffeehouse formed a societal niche that provided a public
space for social interaction, discussion, and debate. It was equally a second
home, a private space, which left a man to his solitude, a cup of coffee, and
his work.
The living room to free discourse and new thought, the coffeehouse stood as a linchpin for the state of intellectual modernity. It was the cradle which nurtured the intellectual desire to transform Austrian life through transformation of aesthetics, such as the innovative art of "small forms" or kleinkunst. The patrons, the circle of "Young Vienna" nestled themselves in the coffeehouse. It was there that they found a unique public privacy, and an environment, free from the claustrophobic constraints of time, in which they could hear their own voices against the backdrop of their contemporaries. As they sharpened their social, political, and literary reaction against conventional notions of realism or Hapsburg monarchy, the coffeehouse culture flourished, virtually synonymous as an icon of liberalism as the patrons themselves.