There are cafes beyond the usual routine. They leave an impression and are cultural identifiers. I have been fortunate enough to try a few. Café Dorian in Venice I may be back to; Oslo’s Grand Café, where I went in November 2013, is another. But this blog is dedicated to another landmark space, Vienna’s Café Central. I had always hoped to go to a Viennese Kaffeehaus, having constructed in my imagination some idea of what its interior must be like. I expected grand, dark rooms with brown leather armchairs scattered about here and there, each occupied by an old man either rummaging through a stack of papers or sleeping blissfully. I was very much mistaken.

When Annette and I finally arrived in Vienna we were able to tour a number of noted cafes. Although the Café Central was not our favorite, it definitely drew attention. Vienna itself has been around for more than 10,000 years and Palais Ferstel and its Café Central is found within one of its oldest districts; however, it was not Vienna’s original café.

The first Kaffeehaus opened in 1685, thanks to an Armenian merchant, Johannes Diodato, who had been issued a sole 20-year privilege to sell coffee by Emperor Leopold I earlier during the year (the first public coffee house independent of an Imperial concession was opened in 1697 by another Armenian, Isaak de Luca). By the beginning of the eighteenth century the most important and most ‘elegant’ café was the Milani on Kohlmarkt; and by 1784 there were at least 64 coffee houses in Vienna. The following decade, from 1848, the ‘year of revolutions’, was the golden age of the Viennese café: there were 140 of them (and a further 71 substitute coffee houses, which could not sell bean coffee but ersatz coffee of cereal or chicory composition). Another factoid: in 1849 Michael Thonet started to produce bentwood furniture, most renowned being the Thonet chair no. 14 ‘mit Wickeruntersitz’ (50 million of which were produced by 1930). Café Central has Thonet furnishings. From the 1850s women too began visiting Vienna’s coffee houses.

In 1857 Emperor Franz Joseph I resolved to modernize the inner city district. A by-product was the bank and stock exchange, which opened in 1860: Heinrich von Ferstel was the architect. In 1876 the Pach brothers opened the Café Central in the ground floor of this building. It quickly became a draw not just for the nobility and well-to-do but for scholars, artists, politicians, writers, journalists et al. In short, it supplanted its competitors.

And now here are numbers that shock. Who was to go to Cafe Central? Here’s a launch, in Andreas Augustin’s own words:

Over there is Baron von Schonerer, who shares Pan-German notions. At the next table, Thomas Masaryk sips his ‘Melange’ coffee: within a few years he will be the Republic of Czechoslovakia’s first president. The bearded gentleman perusing the daily paper is Theodor Herzl; the ‘father of Zionism’ has recently published his book about the Jewish state’. Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt follow in their footsteps. Victor and Alfred Adler …

Lev Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky, was one of the Café Central’s familiar faces, together with his pal Vladimir Illyich Uljanov (also known as Lenin). Trotsky lived among Russian exiles in Vienna between 1907 and 1914. One of the contemporaries draws a scene in which Trotsky and Victor Adler, the Austrian Socialist Party’s founder, sat with their heads in deep conversation, while Lenin and Iosiph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, alias Stalin, pored over their revolutionary declarations at another.

But none of these is Café Central’s most noted client. That distinction belongs to Peter Altenberg, son of a wealthy, Jewish Austrian family and the very Weberian ideal type of ‘the bohemian’. In the years before his death in 1919 he dabbled in many a pool without ever getting his feet wet. Equipped with a sad moustache, baggy checky coats and trousers and a pair of clogs worn all the year round as a matter of principle, he was an aphoristic and eccentric sponger. It is his life-size statue that sits outside the café now (see the photograph at the top of this blog).

His other frequent client was the publisher and author Karl Kraus. Café Central served as his office. Furthermore, according to his Pro Domo et Mundo, he had very precise demands:

Being alone at a table does not fulfill one’s requirement of being alone. There need to be vacant chairs standing by. If the waiter pushes away a chair on which no one is sitting, I feel a vacuum, and it brings out my sociable nature. I cannot do without vacant chairs.

As the twentieth century progressed, great names remained a common sight at Café Central, as did visitors on holiday. Playwright, essayist and short story writer Alfred Polgar formulated his ‘theory of the Café Central’ there (discussed in Café Society, 2103, which I co-edited with Aksel Tjora). He also came up with the term Centraliste, referring to him and other habitués:

‘The Café Central is situated below Vienna’s latitude on the meridian of solitude. Its denizens are largely individuals whose antipathy to man is as strong as their need to be with individuals who wish to be alone but who require companionship in order to do so.’ His philosophy is more applicable to me than that of Kraus, but more of this anon.

As Austria did four years before, Café Central came to an end in 1943. Palais Ferstel did not share the same fate. Plans were made in the 1970s to convert it into an office and shopping complex. The construction started in 1978; and in 1982, in the glass-covered, arched inner courtyard, Café Central reopened its doors. Its revival was expedited by hosting a hit Austrian TV talk show, ‘Café Central’. On 30 October Café Central moved back into its original rooms. But there is more to the story. In 2001 benefactor Karl Wlaschek fell in love with the old Viennese Kaffeehaus and opted for a complete refurbishment. It re-opened – once again – in 2002. In 2006 the famous Café Central Torte (marzipan and chocolate and orange).

So what did I think of it (and for that matter Vienna’s other coffeehouses, many of them with long and no-less alluring histories)? Sociologically I was intrigued. These salons were less quietly exclusive and more noisily touristy than the fantasies of my imagination, a thoroughly admirable disappointment I must admit. But I should find it hard to work in them: not, as Klaus, due to any particular individual needs; but due to the fact, in the style of Polgar, I prefer being alone (I work alone) among others, but others made up of plain everyday folk about their business. Café Central’s customers appeared to be a combination of local wealthy and inquisitive visitors. The cakes were too high-class. And the waiters! They are apparently renowned for a haughty contempt for visitors, only attending to them when they feel like it. Bloody rude I thought. It took ages to pay the bill.