The Viennese cafe was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural and political world of fin-de-siecle Vienna.

List of Illustrations Preface Notes on Contributors Introduction Charlotte Ashby Chapter 1. The Cafés of Vienna: Space and Sociability Charlotte Ashby Chapter 2. Time and Space in the Café Griensteidl and the Café Central Gilbert Carr Chapter 3.The Jew Belongs in the Coffeehouse’: Jews, Central Europe and Modernity Steven Beller Chapter 4. Coffeehouse Orientalism Tag Gronberg Chapter 5. Between ‘The House of Study’ and the Kaffeehaus: The Central European Café as a Site for Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism Shachar Pinsker Chapter 6. Michalik’s café in Kraków: Café and Caricature as Media of Modernity Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius Chapter 7.  The Coffeehouse in Zagreb at the turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Similarities and Differences with the Viennese Coffeehouse Ines Sabotic Chapter 8. Adolf Loos’s Kärntner Bar: Reception, Reinvention, Reproduction Mary Costello Chapter 9. Graphic and Interior Design in the Viennese coffeehouse around 1900: Experience and Identity Jeremy Aynsley Chapter 10. The Cliché of the Viennese Café as an Extended Living-room: Formal Parallels and Differences Richard Kurdiovsky Chapter 11. Coffeehouses and Tea Parties: Conversational Spaces as a Stimulus to Creativity in Sigmund Freud’s Vienna and Virginia Woolf’s London Edward Timms Bibliography Index

“Like a well-made Mélange, this volume is rich and satisfying.” · Slavonic and East European Review “Eleven highly stimulating articles, including several dazzling ones....one of the most constructive... treatments that the subject has ever received.” · Contemporary Austrian Studies “This volume forms a convincing starting point, in which the Viennese café is revealed as a key site of fin-de-siècle modernity and of several modern urban identities. One cannot but hope for a sequel — that is, an even more extensive volume but one that is just as carefully prepared with beautiful illustrations and very extensive footnotes.” · Austrian Studies All in all, this work contains fascinating essays that indeed flesh out some of the intricate issues of literary life that lie behind a simple cup of coffee. The café was a place of refuge for many artists and writers; in addition, it acted as an active, lively, and, at times, boisterous place for political and social debate… For any course on fin-de-siècle Central Europe, this book will provide a necessary springboard into how and why intellectuals were so heavily invested in the modern times of the new century.” · Journal of Austrian Studies