Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (31 page)

Grinding coffee, especially by a man, always seemed funny to the Berliners. This was presumably an exemplification of the overbearingly masculine attitude of Germans towards their women, and of the fact that the preparation of coffee, in contrast with the preparation of beer, was regarded as a feminine occupation. An English caricature of about the same date (1869), when the bicycle had recently come into use, shows an English cyclist—velocipedist he would then have been called—whose back wheel is connected by cranks and a lever with a coffee-mill behind his saddle. In nineteenth-century England, coffee-houses were as rare as in northern Germany of the period.

Although Berlin business folk regarded public coffee-drinking with good-natured contempt, coffee was nevertheless drunk in considerable quantities publicly in the German capital. Behind a screen! The Berliners drank coffee in confectioners’ shops.

The “Konditorei,” or pastry-cook’s, was, in truth, the creation of the women of Berlin. Although middle-class German women did not mix well in society, the confectioners’ shops were meeting-places for both sexes. This went on for decades, and indeed, among the few vestiges of the comparatively recent past in Berlin, are the pastry-cooks’ or confectioners’ shops, with their threadbare plush sofas and their strange aroma of burnt sugar and the punch with which the fruit-tarts are flavoured.

B
ICYCLE
C
OFFEE
-M
ILL
(English cartoon, 1869)

Characteristically, where women ruled, much coffee was drunk, but it was bad coffee. Furthermore, the beverage was flanked by piles of cakes and tartlets. The pastries of Berlin deserve to be better known than they are. There is, in truth, a “Berlinese style,” in pastry, although the world at large thinks only of a Parisian or a Viennese style. The confectionery of Berlin is solid stuff, which has been made out of an extremely substantial dough. The icing is almost as thick as armour-plate. The Parisian epicure’s notion that one should rise from one’s meal with a light stomach is not suited to the Berlinese character. “Everything you eat must be as solid as the sands of Brandenburg,” was meant as a commendation of the pastry-cook’s art in Berlin. It applies to almost all the wares of the Berlin confectioner—wares for which no name exists in other languages than German. Fine, filling pastries, made toothsome by liberal quantities of whipped cream. The preamble to a large proportion of Berlin weddings used to be a tryst in a pastry-cook’s shop.

For these were the only places in which, without losing caste, German lads and lasses of good family could make assignations. Here, woman held sway. She was responsible for the fact that the cakes were so strong and the coffee so weak!

Small confectioners’ shops were as numerous in Berlin (since many bakers were pastry-cooks as well) as coffee-houses were in Vienna. But there were bigger establishments of the kind that were not the haunt of lovers. They were for middle-aged people, persons of rank and station. The most celebrated was Kranzler’s, situated at that important street-corner in Berlin, where the Friedrichsstrasse impinges upon Unter den Linden. In no other town in the world would a pastry-cook have established himself here instead of a coffee-house keeper. Two busy streams of wayfarers jostled one another, but Kranzler’s remained Kranzler’s, an oasis of peace.

As famous as Kranzler’s were Josty’s and Stehely’s. These much-visited confectioners, one of them in the Jägerstrasse and the other in the Potsdamerplatz, these social centres, were, characteristically enough, not run by natives of Berlin. The history of the French capital was repeating itself almost two centuries later in the history of the capital of Prussia. Just as long before, in Paris, the first to open coffee-houses had been Armenians and Persians, so did Josty and Stehely come north from the classic land of sugar-bakery, from Grisons. “Josty” would seem to have been the German-Swiss variant of the Rhaeto-Romanic “Giusti.” The name Stehely is still common in Switzerland under the form of Stehelis or Stäheli. It was a new thing for Germans of position to eat cakes and pastries in public. During the Napoleonic epoch, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn had knocked a piece of cake out of the mouth of a boy who, thought Jahn, ought to have been eating bread. In those days, “luxury” was regarded as un-Prussian and effeminate. With the aid of the confectioners, a less harsh time followed upon the iron age of Fichte.

Still, it was but slowly that the Berliners learned to prize the milder European climate into which they had been introduced by their sudden acquisition of wealth and by the new standing of Prussia as a world state. But this newly acquired wealth gave them a chance of getting away from Berlin now and again! Before 1870, an annual summer holiday in the country or at the sea-side, which had long since become a commonplace for the well-to-do of other metropolises, had been regarded as an almost chimerical luxury for the average citizen of Berlin. A townsman was a townsman, a countryman was a countryman, that was all there was to say about the matter. Nevertheless, the good people of Berlin had always longed for things out of their reach. To the Viennese, whose hills and brooks thrust their way into the town, it seemed natural enough that a Schubert should be born in their city. Much more enigmatic was the birth of a Mendelssohn, upon whose ears the strains of his
Sommernachtstraum
suddenly fell in central Berlin, in a stone house in the Leipzigerplatz. Characteristically Berlinese was his music, the expression of a yearning for distant nature!

When, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, twenty years before the fashion of summer excursions began, the Berliners discovered the environs of their city, the Kaffeeschwestern led the way. Had it not been for the Kaffeeschwestern, who could not get on without their abundance of weak coffee, the natural beauties of Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Schöneberg, Stralau-Rummelburg, Pankow, and Niederschöneweide would never have been discovered. Beer, which during the heat of summer made men bad walkers, beer, which made excursions costly because it necessitated the hiring of huge breaks, was a bad travelling-companion. It was otherwise with coffee. To the great delight of the good wives, the city soon became encircled with coffee-gardens. Beside some marshy backwater over which the flies hovered, or where beech woods were interspersed with pine groves, one could sit on a rustic seat in front of a rustic table. “Families can make their coffee here!” would be the sign. Such signs are to be seen in the outskirts of Berlin even today. They show the true function of woman in the Berlinese family. A frugal supper enhanced the enjoyment of nature, while the setting sun displayed its carmine glories. For the atmosphere of Berlin produces at nightfall a colouring even more splendid than that of the steppes.

M
ORE
coffee entered northern Germany by way of Hamburg than entered the Danubian monarchy by way of Trieste. Statistics show that Germany consumed more than Austria. But in Germany, coffee remained inconspicuous, almost invisible. It was elsewhere than in Germany that coffee and its use took visible shape, becoming a distinct factor in Austrian social life.

What the prefects or lords-lieutenant were, politically considered, in the new Austro-Hungarian empire, the coffee-houses were, considered socially. They bore witness to unity of manners and customs. Just as in the Imperium Romanum one encountered the military milestones every thousand double paces along the high road, so, throughout Austria-Hungary, among the territories inhabited by various nationalities, one encountered the prefectoral headquarters built of yellow sandstone and fitted with green shutters—and coffee-houses after the Viennese model. For official business, for registration and the like, the burghers’ life centred round the prefecture. There the emperor’s subjects were kept under supervision, for administrative purposes; but in other respects their existence circled round the coffee-houses. The administrative offices and the coffee-houses were among the chief determinative factors in the lives of Austro-Hungarians. The better the relations between these two departments, the more genial the association between officialdom and non-officialdom, the more harmoniously flowed the existence of the monarchy.

It was an agreeable enough life! Foreigners found it charmingly attractive. No matter whether the stranger entered Austria from the north, at Bodenbach on the Elbe, or landed at a village in Istria after a Mediterranean voyage, or made his way into Vorarlberg after a so-journ in highly civilized and comfortable Switzerland, or entered Bukovina coming by train from Russia, he instantly became aware of the smell of coffee, an agreeable testimony to the habits of the Austrians. Germans, Hungarians, Italians, and Slavs, in other respects often at odds, were unified at least by the approved Viennese method of making and drinking coffee. A “Viennese breakfast” denoted coffee with a crescent-shaped roll, served by a friendly waiter. There was nothing like this outside the royal and imperial frontier. A waiter who was “Vienna-trained,” even though the man had never been in Vienna, was a product of Austro-Hungarian unification, almost as much as if he had been a soldier fighting under the Austro-Hungarian flag. When the incoming express drew to a stop and one of these waiters, with deft movements, acting on a stage created by his own imagination, drew near, the traveller instantly felt that with such a servitor and such a breakfast the day had begun pleasantly. Yes, this was really Austria!

The Austrian coffee-house was invented in Vienna. It spread into neighbouring territories in the wake of the conquering armies of the Habsburgs.

As soon as, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Maria Theresa had first combated and then destroyed the corporative avarice of the coffee-boilers, the coffee-house industry began to flourish with tropical luxuriance. It paid well! There is no record of a coffee-house proprietor going bankrupt in the Vienna of Joseph II. On the contrary, one could see three coffee-houses side by side in Leopoldstadt. The urge to sit down in a coffee-house was so powerful among the Viennese that many foreigners were inclined to think that every block of flats in Vienna had a coffee-room of its own, as an atrium, a vestibule, for the use of all the families domiciled therein!

Had not this instinct been so deeply rooted in the life of the Viennese, the conviction that everyone had a right to his private coffee-house, to a place which, though public, was a sort of annex to his own dwelling, it would be impossible to explain the multiplication of little cafés in the city of Vienna. At his café, the Viennese feels that he is simultaneously at home and taking part in public life. He is no longer confined within the four walls of his own domicile, and yet he is in a place more peculiar to himself than the street. His relations with the waiter, the young lady at the pay-desk, and the man who makes the coffee, are of a quasi-familiar nature.

Together with his quantum of the stimulating beverage, there is brought to him a newspaper fresh from the press, with its atmosphere of the wide world. The Viennese citizen breakfasts in a coffee-house. Thus his day begins filled with images and possibilities. What he makes out of these possibilities is his own concern. Many quit the café to go about their various affairs. Many remain sitting where they are, hypnotized by the murmuring sea of newspapers. No press is so chatty and alluring as that of Vienna.

A great deal of water has run under the bridges between 1780 and the present day. Civilizations have completely changed their visage. Forms of government have decayed, empires have perished, kings have been dethroned. Tallow candles were replaced by gas; then came carbon-arc lights; then tungsten incandescents; and then flood-lighting as the modern form of electric illumination. Only the most conservative people have clung to the habits of a century and a half ago. The Viennese clings to his coffee-house.

He goes there thrice a day. First of all in the morning, between eight and nine. Then at three o’clock in the afternoon, for the “small black,” which he drinks soon after his mid-day meal. Then in the evening, between nine and ten. At the first visit, as aforesaid, he gets into touch with the outer world by reading the newspapers, and does not talk much; but the evening visit is devoted to social intercourse, to friendly conversation.

“Coffee-house three times a day” is a fixed prescription. But the length of the visit varies. Although the Viennese punctuates his day by spells in the coffee-house, these spells may be short or long. Sometimes they are so greatly extended that they overlap, especially when he has found it possible to transfer part of his business life to his café. So numerous are the coffee-houses that there is no shortage of space in them. An habitué can write his letters there, or find a convenient corner for a private negotiation. I have spoken of the Viennese as conservative; and, in very truth, many of the cafés of the Austrian capital retain the function such places had in the London of 1680. They are business resorts. Whereas in London this sort of thing came to an end nigh upon two centuries ago, the Viennese coffee-houses continue, as of old, to play the part of exchanges. Of course a merchant with a large business learned long ago to transfer his affairs to his private office. Fifty years back, to do such a thing in Vienna would have been regarded as “putting on side.” The Viennese “city man” was looked up by other Viennese in “his” coffee-house. This was a place that seemed to be democratically accessible to every visitor; but where, nevertheless, the staff could, at a hint, make fine distinctions when the host wanted the reception to be cordial or otherwise; when the guest was to be courted or cold-shouldered; when the standing of the man of business who was receiving visitors was to be shown in a more exalted light than would have been possible in his office. Only to outward seeming were these coffee-houses neutral ground. They were and are attuned to the qualities of particular sorts of men, who know one another by repute. “That is a man from my coffee-house!” a Viennese will say during a Sunday walk in the Wiener Wald, when he encounters an acquaintance whose name perhaps he does not know.