Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (11 page)

The vital importance of any comestible can best be realized from the shadow it casts upon legal life. Julius Bernhard von Rohr, who, in 1719, made a compendium of the laws relating to the necessary and useful supplies of a German household, in a work of one thousand pages devoted more than twenty to “matters that concern the brewing of beer.” This gives plain proof how great a part beer had come to play in the economic and domestic life of the Germans. Beer-drinking likewise left many traces among German family names. In the fifteenth century began the lines of Biermer, Biermann, Bierschwale, Bierhals, Bierfreund. Bierwagen, Biertümpel, Biersack—waggish names to begin with, conferred upon persons whose potations of beer were especially copious.

The citizen’s day began and ended with beer. A good draught to wet your whistle at the start. At the noonday meal there was a beer soup; and at supper, of course, there must be egg-flip made with beer. Raisin-beer and sugar-beer, fish and sausages boiled in beer, beer in all conceivable forms, to say nothing of abundant draughts of plain beer when paying visits, talking business, at baptisms, and at funerals. Thus the body was deluged with carbohydrates, which were transmogrified into fat as already described. When we remember that the main purpose of the process of respiration is to rid our blood of carbonic acid, we can see that the unceasing supersaturation of the human organism with H
₂
CO
₃
cannot fail to have remarkable effects both on the individual and on the community. Whereas wine makes people bold and lively, beer makes them maudlin and bad-tempered.

In twentieth-century Scandinavia there has been a very effective temperance movement, and the Nordic slimness and persistent youthfulness of the inhabitants of the peninsula bear witness to the fact. Goethe longed for a similar movement among the Germans. Of all the enemies of excessive beer-drinking, no one had keener insight than he. Writing to Knebel, tutor to the princes at the court of Weimar, he said that beer dulled the nerves and thickened the blood. “If our people go on swilling beer and smoking as they now do for another three generations, woe to Germany! The effect will first become noticeable in the stupidity and poverty of our literature, and our descendants will declare themselves greatly astonished thereat!”

But how was coffee to wage war successfully against this titan? The combat was too unequal. Especially so at a time when beer was routing wine, so that in certain parts of Germany viticulture was coming to an end.

Prior to the victory of beer, the vine had gained a strong footing in Germany. During the Middle Ages, vineyards were successfully established in the northern and eastern parts of the country. If they have now disappeared, the ignorant are likely to suppose that the disappearance is due to a change of climate. There are, however, no reasons for such an assumption. It is far more probable that the Germans, fatigued by the wars of religion, were prone to abandon the more difficult culture of the vine and the more delicate processes of preparing wine for the much easier preparation of beer.

German viticulture receded southward and westward, into the valleys of the Rhine, the Main, and the Danube. Everywhere else, King Beer was victorious. This took place, more especially, after Gambrinus, at a comparatively late date and helped by the invasion of master-brewers from Brunswick, had occupied the Munich plateau. How could coffee be expected to advance from Vienna and Ratisbon into this beer country? No one felt the need for a beverage that was looked upon as un-German.

Liselotte of the Palatinate, wife of Philip Duke of Orléans, and therefore obliged to live in Paris, is a signal example of this trend. In her letters, she is perpetually railing against coffee. Thus, in 1712, at Christmas, she writes: “I cannot endure coffee, tea, or chocolate, nor am I able to understand why anyone likes to drink them. Give me a beer-soup; that is what I should like best. But you can’t get it here, for French beer is no good.” On October 22, 1714: “I am always amazed that people here are so fond of coffee, tea, and chocolate. To my way of thinking sauerkraut and smoked sausages make a meal fit for a king . . . I like cabbage-soup with bacon in it better than all the dainties people prize so much in Paris.” On February 26, 1716: “I seldom take any breakfast; and when I do, it is only a roll and butter. I loathe all these foreign spices. I never drink either coffee, tea, or chocolate, for I detest them. I have remained thoroughly German in my tastes, and like to eat and drink what my forefathers used to.”

This conservatism in national habits certainly has its seamy side. If coffee made its way more slowly in central Europe than in the West, so that it did not become a popular beverage in High Germany until eighty years after it had been generally esteemed in England and France, the upshot was that in Central Europe the drinking of heavy liquors continued far longer than elsewhere. As I have said, at the beginning of the modern age the Germans were heavy drinkers, and during the Thirty Years War all classes were intemperate. Excessive consumption of brandy and beer, and of wine likewise where this was not too expensive, seemed to be the only way in which, throughout those terrible decades, people could drown their sorrows. Whereas the English, who, as we shall see, were also heavy drinkers, had begun to detoxicate themselves at this period, the Germans, in general, had no knowledge of anti-Bacchic beverages.

In Germany, during those times, alcohol became a part of life. It was used not merely to satisfy thirst, but to create more thirst, so that drinkers positively wallowed in their potations. Princes, sovereigns, handicraftsmen, men of learning, peasants, soldiers, and the nobility drank to excess. The effects of such universal drunkenness were worse than would have been those of a second Thirty Years War.

At some of the courts “unchristian and bestial drinking” was prohibited, but few bothered about these prohibitions. In a fit of self-criticism, the Elector of Saxony hung upon the wall of his dining-room a picture showing swine and dogs engaged in deep potations.

Sophia Charlotte of Hanover relates that on one occasion the Duke of Holstein drank from so mighty a tankard that his stomach rejected its contents, whereon he drank his vomit once more. “Et il l’avala une seconde fois pour marquer la passion, qu’il avait pour moy.” Only in those parts where wine-growing was still in fashion, on the Italian border, in Tyrol, and in Styria, were the courts better behaved. At the Kaiserhof in Vienna, where Burgundian and Spanish manners prevailed, such swinish drunkenness was, of course, out of the question—at least in theory, for there were exceptions!

This was the strange epoch when Jacob Balde, a Jesuit father and a famous preacher, founded the “Congregado Macilentorum,” the Society of the Lean. For in 1638, a slim and upright German figure had become a rarity among the well-to-do; one and all of them were pot-bellied. Somewhat prematurely, G. W. Leibniz, returning in 1690 from his Italian tour, wrote that people were no longer so “crazy and full of beer” in the north. That is was premature was shown by the fact that he went on to write, concerning the vice of drunkenness: “If our forefathers could come back to life and rub shoulders with us, we should regard them as impoverished peasants.” We gather from this that the men of the seventeenth century were much harder drinkers than their ancestors had been!

On the forty-eighth birthday of King Augustus the Strong of Saxony and Poland, Countess Dönhoff gave a banquet. It was in the year 1718. We are told that the Elbgarten was illuminated, and that the ladies were dressed as shepherdesses. There were parrots, monkeys, and blackamoors on show—every conceivable ornament suitable to a wealthy court of the Baroque era. Now there happened something which could never have taken place at a contemporary Italian court. “People drank deep where the king was,” relates Johann Michael von Loen, “and of a sudden there were issued strict orders that no one was to leave the garden. The Saxon courtiers had resolved to drink their Warsaw guests under the table, to show that they had stronger heads than the Polish magnates who, although there was a personal union of the crowns of Saxony and Poland, were regarded as rivals. The Poles, unused to such deep potations, were already pale as death, their heads waggling on their shoulders, their gait unsteady, so that they reeled as they walked before the king.”

The underlings naturally followed the bad example set by their “betters.” The general idea, in other countries, therefore, was that a German must be an obese beer-swiller. When the Saxon Count Dohna, a man of culture and of refined aspect, went abroad, he aroused widespread astonishment. King Henry IV, presenting this Count Dohna to Marie de’ Medici said: “Le voilà! Le prendriez-vous bien pour un Allemand?”

At that date civilization and morals in central Europe were indeed mightily debased. Armin Vambery (1832–1913), the Hungarian traveller and orientalist, inquired in all seriousness whether the Turks, though they appeared at the gates of Vienna as invaders and devastators, were not, at that time, a more highly civilized people than the Germans.

Of course there were German courts at which the rulers would not allow such excesses. Frederick William of Brandenburg was a monarch of this order, so that early in these licentious times Berlin acquired a good reputation.

This Frederick William, styled the Great Elector, had many of the best characteristics of a Western sovereign. At his accession, the Thirty Years War was still in progress, and his dominions had been greatly wasted thereby. Contemplating his neighbours with an outlet on the Atlantic, he saw that, while Germany was squandering its energies in fratricidal strife, they were expanding across the seas. Holland, too, was winning a colonial empire and prospering. During the Pomeranian war between Brandenburg and Sweden, Raulé, a Dutchman, equipped a navy for Frederick William. When the war was over, the Elector retained the little armada, and sent it to the Guinea coast to found a colony on African soil. Von der Groeben, the navigator, established the Gross-Friedrichsburg port, and hoisted the Brandenburg flag upon the Gold Coast. A deputation of Negro chiefs came to Berlin to pay honour to the Elector of Brandenburg. In Senegal, likewise, a settlement was established, and was held for a few decades until the jealousy of Amsterdam nipped this early German colonial empire in the bud.

What had induced Frederick William, a petty territorial prince, to found these distant settlements? Not merely the will-to-power, but in addition the belief that, in days when ships laden with spices were returning across the seas, he would be able to secure supplies for his own country without paying tariffs. West Africa furnished gold and sugar, timber, palm-oil and other fats, ground-nuts, ostrich feathers, and ivory.

The Great Elector was by no means satisfied with the limited produce of his own narrow territories. Remarkable to tell, at his court in Berlin, though only in restricted circles, coffee was being drunk in the sixteen seventies. Supplies for the Elector and his lady came from Holland. There can be little or no doubt that the Elector, a man eager for new knowledge, was made acquainted with coffee by his Dutch physician-in-ordinary, Cornelius Buntekuh. This scientist, who would have attained wide celebrity had he not died prematurely, aimed at the reformation of dietetics. His real name was Cornelius Decker. In Alkmar, where he was born, his father kept an inn, at the sign of the “Bunte Kuh,” the mottled cow. His fellow-citizens therefore nicknamed him “Bontekoe.” This pseudonym was used by Cornelius as signature to his scientific publications. Having studied the writings of Descartes, he went to Amsterdam and then to Hamburg; wrote a book containing new chemical outlooks upon the nature of acids and bases; and was ultimately appointed by Frederick William as professor at the University of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder.

René Descartes came to regard human thought as a mode of motion, summing up his views in the pithy phrase, “Cogito, ergo sum.” The most noteworthy physiological analogy to this psychological notion was provided by William Harvey, in 1619, when he announced the discovery of the circulation of the blood. Decker was never weary of telling his students that Harvey’s discovery of the circulation had been the greatest discovery, not only of the century, but of many centuries. No one before Harvey had been able to establish the fact of this perpetual flow of the blood through all the organs of the body, irrigating them and nourishing them as the Nile irrigates and nourishes the soil of Egypt. One of the most marvellous features of the process was the elliptical course of the circulation, akin to the elliptical orbits of the planets, which begin and end their movements at the same spot. The blood pumped by the left ventricle into the aortic arch, returns into the heart through the right auricle twenty-three seconds later. One who has acquired a vivid impression of this unceasing circulation of the blood, gains thereby a new outlook upon the nature of man—so much more active and mobile than the nature of any plant; be-pinioned, as it were. One of the cravings of the period was connected with this discovery of the circulation of the blood: the craving to circumnavigate the globe. All parts of the earth were to be interconnected and fertilized by an ellipse of traffic. It was only to be expected that the bold outlook of his physician should encourage a sovereign to engage in navigation and foreign trade. From the macrocosm, however, Buntekuh came back to the microcosm; since he knew that blood was not healthy and useful unless it was in lively motion, he was inclined to think well of anything that could accelerate the circulation.

Above all he recognized that tea and coffee were able to overcome the inertia of the blood. They could stimulate the working of the vital machine (Descartes’ view was that men and the lower animals were vital machines) by promoting the circulation of the blood. Coffee released the wheel-work from the brakes.

Buntekuh went too far in his recommendation of the use of tea. In his
Medizinischen Elementarlehre,
he writes: “We advise tea for the whole nation and for every nation. We advise men and women to drink tea daily; hour by hour if possible; beginning with ten cups a day, and increasing the dose to the utmost quantity the stomach can contain and the kidneys eliminate.” Since he informs us that he prescribed for his patients as many as fifty cups per diem, it can hardly be doubted that, at the court of Berlin, Buntekuh helped a good many sick people out of the world. All the same, an epoch in which notables were, as a rule, hurried to an early death by carbonic acid, alcohol, and apoplexy, could find admirable use for such a man as Buntekuh.