Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (30 page)

But the rise in the consumption of tea on the mainland of Europe during the first decade of the Restoration was partly determined by other causes than commercial ones.

In the Napoleonic era, Russia had been for a time allied with France, and then had become one of her most formidable adversaries. Russia had, to begin with, participated willingly enough in Emperor Napoleon’s commercial war against Britain, closing her harbours to British ships, and therefore to commodities brought round the Cape from Hindustan. Unceasingly, however, throughout the years of the blockade, caravan traffic across Asia continued. While in the rest of Europe the stimulating beverages to which people had become accustomed were no longer obtainable, it was otherwise in Russia. There tea was still to be had, tea which, like coffee, contained trimethyldioxypurin. Tea relieved both thirst and hunger, and was also a remedy for excessive cold or excessive heat. Nobles and serfs alike drank tea. What had been carried across the snows and across the blazing deserts from China to Russia was a fraternal link uniting all classes of the Russian people. The northern route led by Kiakhta and Omsk; the southern route, by way of Bukhara and Tashkent.

The Russians had conquered France, and as a result, tea suddenly became a Paris fashion. The green-clad Alexander, the mightiest of the allied rulers, and his suite of Russian officers—men who tramped along the boulevards wearing top-boots ornamented with clanking spurs–all drank tea. They brought with them the romance and the far-flung distances of the Russian steppes. For years after this incursion, Parisian life had a Russian note. Never before had the French seen so many Russians. At the courts of Catherine I and Catherine II people had thought, conversed, and loved in the French manner. But now Russianism was the mode in France. The army of the victorious Alexander brought with it the ideas and customs of Russia.

For a long while there existed mystical ties between St. Petersburg and Berlin. Through the instrumentality of Frau von Krüdener, the tsar, with his literary tastes, exercised a considerable influence in German intellectual circles. Now the wave flowed over Paris. This was strange, for one might have expected the vanquished to be hostile to anything that reminded them of their conquerors—but it was a remarkable proof of suppleness in the French character. Hardly was Napoleon crushed when, easily and lightly, Paris renounced the literary trappings of the First Empire, to become Bourbon and Christo-Romantic.

Throughout Europe, the Christo-Romanticists drank tea. This infusion influenced poetry, opinions, conversation. It promoted gentleness and thoughtfulness, but also emotionalism and sentimentality. Chateaubriand, the leading light of the new poetic world, read his epics aloud at the famous Parisian tea-parties. He read well, but when he reached a climax in one of his descriptions of
Weltschmerz
he was likely to be so carried away by his own eloquence as to burst into tears. Even when the reading was over, his tears would drop into his teacup. Such scenes were repulsive to those who were out of tune with the Restoration epoch, to Italian carbonari, to Spanish revolutionists, to enthusiasts who were ready to fight for the liberation of Greece. In a word, the political opponents of “a Europe that had gone to sleep” remained true to the ardours of coffee.

As far as Germany was concerned, it was especially in the circles that were out of sympathy with beer-drinking students that tea was widely consumed. Even before the inauguration of the Continental System, before 1806, tea had been a favourite beverage in the literary salons of Berlin—English tea imported by way of Hamburg.

It need hardly be said that Britons travelling on the Continent were great propagandists for tea. After the downfall of Napoleon, when a German tour became the vogue for Londoners, the English who went up the Rhine on their way to Switzerland wanted tea-rooms, so tearooms were provided for these travellers with money to spend. Even in typical coffee-drinking countries like Austria and Italy, Englishmen insisted on being supplied with Ceylon tea. But they were not able to impose their beverage upon the inhabitants. In Italy today, according to the latest statistics, the consumption of tea is no more than one ounce per annum per head of population. The quantity is so small that we may assume the only tea-drinkers in Italy to be British visitors.

Nevertheless, tea made headway in Germany both before and after the Napoleonic epoch, as we can learn from the literature of the period. Uhland wrote a poem in praise of tea. The evening tea-parties that became fashionable in literary circles were gently ridiculed by that prince of satirists, Heinrich Heine.

Y
ET
it would be an illusion to suppose that in those days more tea than coffee was drunk in Germany. The reverse was true, and herein we have an elementary instance of how the writers of history err when they depend mainly on “literary evidence.” Such evidence is all we have to rely upon as regards the greater part of antiquity. But when we come to the nineteenth century, we are guided by figures relating to economic life, by the science of statistics.

During the year 1841, Hamburg imported 36,000 tons of coffee, but only 137 tons of tea. The figures show indisputably the interesting fact that two hundred and seventy times more coffee was imported than tea.

The figures are remarkable even though the difference between the consumption of tea and coffee was not so extensive as they might seem to imply. From a given weight of leaves, six times as many cups of tea can be prepared as of coffee from the same weight of beans. Allowing for this fact, however, we learn that forty-five times as much coffee was consumed as tea.

The port of Hamburg, of course, did not supply German territory exclusively, being in part a place of transit trade supplying various regions in northern and eastern Europe. Still, since this applied both to tea and to coffee, the consumption of the respective beverages in Germany was not notably affected by the consideration.

Forty-five times as much coffee was drunk in Germany, as compared with tea. At the first glance this seems barely credible. Where were these great quantities of coffee consumed? In the public life of the country there is little vestige of anything of the kind. Coffee-drinking did not leave any noteworthy traces in the street life of Berlin during those days. About the middle of the nineteenth century, when there were numerous coffee-houses in the streets of Paris, and a still larger number in the streets of Vienna, there were hardly any such places in Berlin. The Prussian capital was abundantly supplied with eating-houses, beer-saloons, wine-shops of all sorts and sizes, but had very few coffee-houses. Since we know that at that date, in literary circles, tea was the principal beverage, we have to ask who, during the epoch in question, were the consumers of these vast quantities of coffee?

M
UNICIPAL
C
OUNCILLOR
C
HICORY
Gentlemen! It is true that there is a general rise in prices, but we have an
infallible remedy—the use of substitutes. (One vote in their favour.)
(Coffee famine cartoon, 1855)

Women, chiefly! Women of the middle-class, who played no part in the salons or in literary circles, and of whose life little record remains. It was the wives of worthy German burghers who drank coffee. The women of this class would on Monday go to visit Kätchen; on Tuesday, Lottchen; on Wednesday, Gretchen; and so on. When they had finished their daily round of housework, when the needs of husband and children had been attended to, these good women foregathered to drink coffee together. Over their coffee and their cakes they chattered and they sewed. From the plump coffee-pot there flowed a continuous stream into coffee-cups and thence into stomachs.

It is part of the nature of coffee that it can never become the favourite beverage of women. It makes the intelligence wakeful and critical. It stimulates to a reconstruction of the world. Its effects on the brain are antagonistic to the longing for harmony and peace which is characteristic of the best of women. If, during the period we are now considering, and thenceforward down to the opening of the great war, it was chiefly women who drank coffee in Germany, we infer that the coffee must have been extremely weak. The beverage must have been so watery that it could have had little effect in producing the cerebral excitement characteristic of the coffee-drinker. Among German women it was a social drink of which from ten to twelve cups could be consumed in an afternoon without risk—little more than bitter hot water, strongly sweetened. The large supplies of coffee that found their way into the stomachs of the Berliners were copiously diluted.

As aforesaid, this diluted beverage was consumed chiefly by women—and, in man-ruled Germany, their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, and their sons made fun of them for it. Two new terms were introduced into the German language by the practice, and remain current to this day:
“Kaffeeklatsch”
and
“Kaffeeschwester”
The former word means the gossip or scandal talked by women at a coffee-party; and the latter, primarily a person who is fond of coffee, and secondarily a gossip or a scandal-monger. Coffee was regarded by the men as a “woman’s drink,” and this idea finds vent in numerous caricatures of the period.

Part of the joke is, however, that men drank coffee, too, though not much in Germany as a social beverage. They all wanted it, and still want it, for breakfast; and any considerable increase in the price of coffee, such as occurred in 1855, evoked loud protests. Witness the caricature showing a race run by the necessities of life to attain the highest price, coffee taking the lead. Next comes a sugar-loaf, followed by an oil-butt and a pepper-sack.

“In the thirties,” writes Helmuth von Moltke (the elder), “much political talk went on in the saloons, in the theatres, and in the beersaloons.” It is eminently characteristic of Berlin that he should make no mention of coffee-houses. There were, in fact, very few coffee-houses in Berlin. In Paris, Milan, Vienna, and Venice—to name only the chief focuses of European unrest—coffee-houses at that date had a strong political flavour. “The Café Florian in Venice,” writes Balzac in his tale
Massimilla Doni
, “is a strange place. . . . It is at one and the same time a lawyer’s office, an exchange, a theatre foyer, a club, and a reading-room. . . . Of course it is crowded with political spies, but their presence serves only to stimulate the acuteness of the Venetians, who have been accustomed to be overlooked by these gentry for centuries past.” In Berlin, on the other hand, coffee was far too private a concern to become associated with politics, so eminently public. Coffee-drinking, for the Germans, was one of the privacies of domestic life.

“T
HE
W
ETTER
,
THE
B
ETTER
”
Even the granite basin before the Old Museum must serve the Berlin nursemaids
in their rage for coffee.
(Cartoon of the 1850’s
)

What the men of Berlin drank in public was beer. For the lower orders there was “white beer,” an effervescent beverage containing very little alcohol, being hardly more intoxicating than diluted fruit-juice. It was the favourite tipple of cab-drivers and of handicraftsmen of one sort and another. The Berliners have a dry humour of their own, and this “white beer,” now dying out, seemed to stimulate it as they quaffed vast quantities from huge glass beakers resembling gold-fish-bowls, and not infrequently used as such.

Before 1890, coffee-houses of the Viennese type scarcely existed in Berlin. How could they, since the Viennese way of doing business in a café, where the greater part of the day was spent, was repugnant to the Berliners? The “public-houses” of Berlin were beer-saloons. Beer provided rest, amusement, and comfort, when men got together after the day’s work was over. Coffee came in as a bad second, being regarded as a trifle ridiculous, if only because of its exotic origin. There is a remarkable caricature that was printed during the war of 1870. As is well known, during the war the Prussians made great fun of the mitrailleuse, a French innovation in artillery. The cut shows a French artilleryman turning the crank of a mitrailleuse in which coffee is being ground.