The Viennese
Coffee House Culture
When the Turks
left Vienna in 1683 after an unsuccessful siege of the city, they left behind
bags of coffee beans, and these beans mark the beginning of the Viennese coffee
house culture (Kafeehauskultur), which has survived, unparalleled, to the
present day.
If Vienna was not
the first European city to open a ‘coffee house’, or Kaffeehaus, she knew
better than any other to develop a culture around this fine beverage.
One thing is
certain: it was an Armenian of the name Diodato who opened a café around 1700
which had a large number of characteristics that continue to mark such
establishments even today: the glass of water served with each cup of coffee,
the pool table, the possibility of playing cards, and a wide selection of
foreign and national newspapers freely available to consumers.
The beginnings of
the industrial revolution gave rise to the luxury of spending several hours
over a single cup of coffee. Due to the raging housing crisis, the living room
was a rare commodity at the time, and many workers had to share the same bed.
When they neither worked nor slept, they would sit in coffee houses for hours.
Another pioneer of the coffee house culture, in 1788 Michael Diegand was the
first to organise a ‘café concert’. His contemporaries frequented the concerts,
as well as the coffee house. It is therefore not surprising that Mozart himself
played some of his works in a Kaffeehaus, as did Beethoven, Johann Strauss Jr.,
and Johann Lanner.
In the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, another component of the coffee house culture evolved
which continues to inspire many authors to follow in the footsteps of their
predecessors.
A visit to a
Kaffeehaus requires one thing only: a lot of time! If you do not have enough of
it, the waiter might approach you and say, charmingly: "Guests who leave before
they have even arrived are multiplying like rabbits! They wish to taste their
boiled beef before they have even ordered it. No, no – that’s not the way it
works! This is no life, it is a race.”