Bringing the Buzz Back to the Café

Once they plotted revolutions, now they're typing blogs. Today's cafe society is a weak decaf
By Michael Idov
The coffeehouse may just be mankind's greatest invention. It certainly is the most collective one: In the classic, which is to say Viennese, form, the coffeehouse is perhaps the finest collaboration between Europe, Asia and Africa. It is almost as if every great civilization in the world had taken a brief time-out from trying to kill one another to brainstorm what a perfect public space should look like. The result was equal parts Athenian agora, Saharan oasis and Continental court, with pastries. Modernity in its bloody splendor has tumbled out of the coffeehouse: In January of 1913 alone, as Frederic Morton describes in his Vienna history "Thunder at Twilight," Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler, Freud and Josip Broz Tito were using the same cups at Vienna's Café Central. (Stalin was in town, too, but he was too much of a country bumpkin for espresso.)
And yet it seems that we're losing the coffeehouse—less to the usual suspects like the Internet and Dunkin' Donuts than to our own politeness. We've brought the noise level down to a whisper and are in the process of losing even the whisper: Enter the modern café and the loudest sound you'll hear will be someone typing, in ALL CAPS, an angry blog comment. We've become a nation of coffee sophisticates—to the point where McDonald's feels compelled to roll out some semblance of an espresso program—but we're still rubes when it comes to the real purpose of the place: It's not the coffee. It's what your brain does on it.
It's telling that the people credited with the invention of the coffeehouse tend to be rogues with tangled multinational roots. There's George Franz (or Jerzy Franciszek, or Yuri-Frants—his very name holds at least three passports) Kolschitzky. A kind of Austrian-Polish-Ukrainian-Cossack cross between Paul Revere and Ray Kroc, he is said to have slipped out of the Turk-beseiged Vienna in 1683, disguised in a fez, to call up reinforcements. When invited before the emperor to collect his reward, he asked for the sacks of "camel fodder" left behind by the retreating enemy, and opened Vienna's first café shortly afterward. This whole coffee caper whiffs mightily of folklore—it's even reminiscent of one Arabic fable—and sure enough, no historical record of it exists. Kolschitzky's real-life counterpart, however, is hardly less exotic: an Armenian named Johannes Diodato, who's been given a royal monopoly on coffee for his services as a spy.
It's no wonder, then, that the coffeehouse became a hotbed of a proudly rootless culture. Psychoanalysis and socialism sprang partly from the espresso cup. In 17th-century London, coffeehouses were derided, in a fantastic turn of phrase, as "seminaries of sedition." By the end of that century, they numbered over 2,000. Poet John Dryden held court at Will's; the so-called "Learned Club" gathered at the Grecian, where a sword fight once erupted over the correct pronunciation of a Greek word; and the London Stock Exchange itself began with a newsletter John Castaing distributed in 1698 at Jonathan's. A bit later, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and Samuel Johnson—with Boswell in tow, naturally—enjoyed interdisciplinary shouting matches with actors and painters at the Turk's Head. And then the East India Trading Company buried the kingdom in affordable tea, private clubs closed their doors to the rabble, and the age of the coffeehouse in the British Isles was over.
In the late 19th century, the global nexus of café culture returned to Vienna for arguably the greatest stretch of coffee-fueled creativity known to man. This is when every convention of the modern coffeehouse—the many-antlered coat rack, the marble tabletop, the day's newspaper spread Torah-like on bamboo holders—fell into place, and its role as the intellectual sparring ring was cemented. Turn-of-the-century Vienna gave rise to a generation of close-knit "Jung Wien" writers, including Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, most of whom practically lived in cafés. This is not an exaggeration. Peter Altenberg had his mail delivered to Café Central.
The arrangement was hardly idyllic. The Jung Wieners steadily went through a limited pool of girlfriends and came to blows with each other over reviews. Yet out of the friction came the kind of humanist thought that still reverberates throughout literature, design, philosophy, even architecture. And once again, a cosmopolitan, slightly alienated attitude permeated the room: Most of the writers were, after all, Jewish, including Schnitzler.
It was Vienna's postwar generation that grew tired of what they now saw as an irredeemably quaint antebellum lifestyle. In the early 1950s, dozens of famous coffeehouses—some of them centuries in operation—shuttered one by one. The Viennese had a special word for this phenomenon, as the Viennese tend to: kaffeehaussterben, coffeehouse death. Some placed the blame on the more casual "espresso bar," with its new and blasphemous practice of selling coffee to go, but many suspected a deeper malaise. Critic Clive James, in his collection "Cultural Amnesia," logically blames it on the decimation and scattering of the Jewish civil society and the lost art of Jewish conversation. An even likelier culprit, I think, is the Germanic postwar self-loathing jag. "The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouse," Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard wrote in his memoir, "because in them I am always confronted with people like myself, and naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted with people like myself."
Compared to the passions that roiled London and Vienna, the American coffeehouse was always genteel and, dare I say it, elitist; the only surviving art genre our café society has birthed is coffeehouse folk music—sensitive-guy or –gal tunes that fade almost eagerly into the background. Sure, we love the idea of the coffeehouse because it dovetails with our idea of urbanity in general: That's why a coffeehouse is the first harbinger of a gentrifying area, and the last stand of a neighborhood in decline. As with a hospital or a bookstore, we may not even go there but feel better knowing one is near.
We've also used it to balkanize ourselves. The Viennese coffeehouse is a communal exercise in individuality: As an Austrian friend noted recently, his compatriots don't go to cafés to socialize—everyone goes to watch everyone else. This phenomenon doesn't quite work in America because cafés here tend to draw specific crowds: a hipster café, a mom café, a student café. With the exception of the ubiquitous Starbucks, where slumming and aspiration meet, we use our coffeehouses to separate ourselves into tribes.
Don't get me wrong—any coffeehouse is better than none at all, and their second, post-Starbucks, wave of proliferation is a fantastic phenomenon, bringing jobs and the pleasure of good espresso to communities across the country. The only trouble with the new, proudly bean-centric places that keep popping up is that they tend to be austere obsessives. There's barely anything to eat other than a perfunctory pastry, and never, ever any alcohol. You're supposed to contemplate your coffee, top notes to finish, in worshipful silence, a notion as wrongheaded as a caramel frappucchino.
The coffeehouse experience is inextricably linked with newsprint: Coffee and a paper are an even more powerful pair than coffee and a cigarette. Early London coffeehouses used to have "runners"—people who would go from café to café to announce the latest news; there's just something about the intake of data tidbits from many sources that goes well with coffee. Same goes for writing in cafés. Hemingway nails it down within the very first pages of "A Moveable Feast": the author alone with his café au lait, shavings from his pencil curling into the saucer, and, of course, a girl with "hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek" at the next table.
Which brings us to the laptop. At any given moment, a typical New York coffeehouse looks like an especially sedate telemarketing center. Recently, there's been a movement afoot to limit the use of laptops. The laptoppers hog the tables, but they do the coffeehouse experience an even deeper disservice. They make it a solitary one, and it's a different kind of solitude from the stance sung by Hemingway. You're not just alone—you're in another universe entirely, inaccessible to anyone not directly behind you.
Perhaps the economic downturn will untie our tongues and restart the conversation. With rents going down, the next Café Abraco or Café Regular may be able to afford a larger space and have some money left for tables and chairs. And the new Lost Generation of creative strivers is already here to fill these chairs. In Los Angeles, friends report, where the lavish business lunch is no longer the industry standard, the café society is in unexpectedly full swing. Somewhere in the caffeinated ether, the ghost of Schnitzler is smiling.
— Latvian-born Michael Idov is a contributing editor at New York Magazine and author of the novel "Ground Up."