Price question: In which place in the world are discreetly worn upholstered furniture and slightly yellowed plaster that follows the laws of gravity and thus spontaneously flaking off as a reason to close the store immediately and undergo a radical thorough renovation – on the contrary, as inevitable traces of the passing of Time as a natural backdrop for one’s own existence, even for some as a condition for the possibility of happiness?
Where are the rules of the capitalist exploitation of time so invalidated that lingering for hours in front of a cup or two of coffee while reading the newspaper at the same time not only results in no sanctions, but from head waiters who perfect the art of switching between visible and invisible dominate, seemingly ignored, in truth, of course, is simply respected?
Want to be alone, but need company to do so
Where can you find those who – in a familiar phrase from Alfred Polgar – “want to be alone but need company”? For whom a sitting area becomes a truly Handke’s no-man’s bay, in which – according to another quote from Polgar’s “Theory of Café Central” – “the futility sanctifies the stay”? The term has already been used: Of course, we are talking about the Viennese coffee house.
Sipping a hot drink, eating a chive bread or a pastry is in itself a banal process and in principle possible anywhere. It remains a mystery why the specific milieu of a Viennese coffee house can really only arise in this city – and, with some reservations, in smaller cores of the Austrian way of life like Salzburg.
Not in Zurich, not in Berlin, Rome or Paris. And certainly not in London. The proximity to the Balkans, the peculiar mixture of longing for morbidity, melancholy, ridicule and discrete insidiousness (read: insulting the other person without them even noticing) play a role. And acute love of the past.
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Where Berlin has always looked at its own history with contempt and would like to tear itself apart and rebuild every 20 years (which in turn seems “cool” in the eyes of some Austrians), the Viennese first look, if not with them Love, so back with a lot more serenity and affection.
Sure, a lot of unbearable things are swept under the carpet, such as hatred of Jews, which has always been much more pronounced in Vienna than in Berlin. But that’s just the way it is, the constellation that makes the Viennese coffee house – which was visited not least by many Jews – possible in the first place.
Quite a challenge to find new words and thoughts for an institution about which so much illuminating has already been written. Brandstätter Verlag is now daring with the heavyweight and splendid volume “Das Wiener Kaffeehaus” – and is looking for salvation in a mélange of new texts from 2020 and those by canonical authors.
We are a city facing the Mediterranean
With a sure instinct, this book devotes over 300 pages to the essential elements that constitute a Viennese coffee house: the myth of its origins from the Turkish sieges, reading the newspaper, playing chess, smoking, the still mostly male waiter (who is only taciturn, is really a Viennese coffeehouse waiter and of course, even more important in Corona times: the Schanigarten, as the terrace is called in Vienna.
Gastronomy is also tight in Vienna
Oh yes, the pandemic. It has to be mentioned, of course. Vienna’s coffee houses have been closed for months; What was unthinkable a year ago is now taken for granted. Longing and worry increase when reading the book to the unbearable.
The Rüdigerhof, the Ritter, the Sperl, the Savoy at the Naschmarkt, the Eiles at the town hall, the Prückel at the city park with the wonderful large windows through which the afternoon sun falls and which also allow a view of the monument to the anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger – tops and flops are often only a breath away from each other in Vienna – the Bräunerhof, where one still thinks to meet the spirit of Thomas Bernhard (“Since I suffer from the coffeehouse disease, I am forced to go into a literary coffeehouse again and again, even if everything in me defends against it ”): Will you survive this catastrophe of an endless lockdown unscathed?
The unfortunately not exactly cheap book lives at least as much from its texts as it does from the spectacular drawings, illustrations and historical photos with which it delves deep into the history of the coffee house: Ringstrasse architecture, interior furnishings around 1900 or 1950, portraits by Robert Musil and Friedrich Torberg or Peter Altenberg.
Women are more likely to appear in their capacity as guests, even if on page 266 the head of is in a larger group Ingeborg Bachmann is hiding – this photo, like many in this volume, comes from Franz Hubmann, who in the 50s and 60s not only captured the atmosphere in Café Hawelka, but also the Viennese coffee house in wonderfully quiet black and white pictures. A lonely hat on the table or on one of the chairs designed by Adolf Loos tells a whole story.
[Christian Brandstätter (Hg.): Das Wiener Kaffeehaus. Brandstätter Verlag, Wien 2020, 70 €.]
Which brings us to perhaps the only problem with the book: It has a strong nostalgic flip side. Despite a few photos from 2020 and the current introductory text, in which the writer Doris Knecht introduces her “coffee house as a place of longing” and explains what distinguishes it from a pub or a restaurant (“You lack the ease, this will to an equality that is blind to social differences, this step-every-one-low-threshold ”): We are mainly dealing here with a declaration of love to a great one at that time.
The coffee house is pure, pulsating present
This runs the risk of promoting a misunderstanding that is particularly rampant outside of Vienna. The Viennese coffee house is not just a bygone era. Rather, that is precisely what is special, at the same time pure, pulsating present.
They all sit in a Viennese coffee house: housewives, housewives, students with laptops, professors, castle actors, local politicians, tourists and regular customers with wavy hair who have been devoting themselves to their curd cheese strudel at the same regular place since 1984.
The past continues to develop organically in a Viennese coffee house, it folds into the present in a way that does not seem to be possible in Germany, without being destroyed in the process. It’s best to go there and see for yourself. As soon as it is possible again.
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