Starters
What did Freud, Adler, Einstein, Picasso, Dali, Sartre, Camus and Ginsberg all have in common?
What was the Hapsburg Empire's greatest gift to Italy?
Where, according to an Austrian Foreign Minister, was Trotsky when the October Revolution was declared?
If you answered 'café' to any or all of these questions then you, too, are probably an afficionado and this magazine needs no rationale.
If not, you could well be asking yourself, 'What's so special about cafés? And why make such a fuss?'
For those of you still untouched by the infectious allure of the café or who know little of its history, here's our reply:
The idea of 'café' - that public institution which so epitomises the cosmopolitan pleasures of urban life - is a fairly recent invention closely connected with the development of social and artistic movements.
Distinct from taverns and restaurants, cafés began to spread through Europe in the latter part of the 17th century, during a period of intense social and economic upheaval. In England and Holland, cafés became the focal point of the new economies, serving as an adjunct to the developing stock exchanges and a meeting point for a new breed of businessmen. In France, cafés became the birthplace of artistic and literary movements. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they were the centre of cultural life as well as the hatching-ground of Machiavellian plots.
The origin of cafés was also bound to another phenomenon - the coming of coffee. This new commodity which was a product of the Moslem world, became the basis, along with sugar and tobacco (the café triumvirate, so to speak), for the plantation economies. All addictive to one degree or another, they provided the fuel which powered the industrial revolution - on one hand stimulating a more efficient labour force and, on the other, creating the capital for industrial might.
Ironically, these same commodities which were consumed in the cafés, also fired the flames of dissent. Coffee, sugar and tobacco, which enslaved the new world, became, through the institution of the café, elixirs of liberation.
By 1900, literally thousands of cafés had sprung up in practically every city in Europe -Vienna, alone, had over 1,200 coffee houses. In Prague, Trieste, Milan and Barcelona, the café had become the focal point of political and social life. There were coffee houses for writers, for artists and even for scientists.
Known as 'Penny Universities', cafés provided a real education for generations bred on caffeine and the infinite diversity of coffee house life. Offering a universal sitting-room for cultural exchange, they were worlds unto themselves - blurring over class divides and barring little but Babbit-like conformity. Even more, they were the midwives of modernism, upholding the ideals of the Enlightenment - ideals which, themselves, were forged in the crucible of the café.
It was only in the last few decades that cafés began to decline in number.Due to a ruinous combination of urban economics and social agoraphobia, the café as a common meeting-ground began to disappear.
Fortunately, the nineties have seen a turn-around. Cafés are blossoming once more. And though they may be of different form and run with an eye to efficiency and business, the true 'bohemian' café - a safe haven from bureaucrats, technocrats or autocrats - where a client, pen or book in hand, may ponder the ironies of life whilst sipping the most mellow ambrosia, can still be found if one searches hard enough.
Back to Archives Homepage