Letters from Vienna #190
Letter to Baron Bethell #13
A virtual guided tour of Vienna, Part 13, The Viennese Café
Dear James,
The next item is one extremely dear to my heart: the Viennese Café, so I hope you’ll indulge the care, time and attention I’m going to devote to this one, particular topic.
Café Ritter, Ottakring
„A Viennese café” opined Heimito von Doderer, “has absorbed that meditative silence and the purposeless letting go of time that everyone who’s visited an oriental, a Turkish café knows”. Stefan Zweig remarked that: “The Viennese coffee house represents an institution of a special kind that cannot be compared with any similar one in the world. It’s actually a kind of democratic club, accessible to everyone for a cheap cup of coffee, where every guest can sit for hours, discuss, write, play cards, receive their mail and, above all, consume an unlimited number of newspapers and magazines for a small fee.”[1]
Café Korb
There’s a wonderful story, doubtlessly apocryphal, about a waiter at Café Central who, hearing of Trotsky’s and Lenin’s victorious revolution, reportedly said: “Well, I guess they won’t be paying for their coffees now.” At the same time Freud is reputedly to have got his idea for the Traumdeutung (Interpretation of Dreams) while sitting in Café Belvedere.
K. u. K. Hofzuckerbäckerei Demel
As always, there’s something of a discrepancy between myth and reality: “One of the heroic myths linked to the Turkish siege of 1683 is Kolschitzy’s glorification as founding father. The interpreter from the “Raizian” Serbian southern Hungary, who ventured through the Turkish lines, received a sack of coffee beans as thanks for his services and opened Vienna’s first coffee house “alla turca”…”
“A baroque case of “invention of tradition”, triggered by the “Warhaffte Erzehlung“ (“Truthful Narrative”), a boastful pamphlet by Kolschitzky.”
Café Mozart
“As a matter of fact: coffee wasn’t wholly unknown in Western Europe at the time. The Ethiopian stimulant was documented in Constantinople as early as 1517, while coffee houses were founded in Venice in 1645, London in 1652, Marseille in 1671 and Paris in 1672. In the Hanseatic cities of Bremen and Hamburg, there were also early coffee house pioneers who brewed the first non-alcoholic social drink. Sources show that the Istanbul-born Armenian Yovhannes Astouadzaturian, who later Italianized his name to Johannes Diodato, received a coffee house privilege from Leopold I on January 17th 1675...”
Café Ritter, Mariahilf
“Although initially viewed with suspicion by the government, the number of coffee boilers skyrocketed. In 1819 150 coffee houses were registered in Vienna, and in 1900 there were no fewer than 600 of them; quite a few of which stayed open for twenty-four hours.”
Café Griensteidl
“The high windows of the typical coffee house have a secret police genesis – the rooms of the Metternich era had to be easily visible while guests had to stay on the ground floor…”[2]
Café Diglas
[1] p.62 Kulturgeschichte der österreichischen Küche, Peter Peter
[2] Ibid pp. 65-66