The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture

by Charlotte Ashby (Editor), Tag Gronberg (Editor), Simon Shaw-Miller (Editor)

Overview

The Viennese café 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-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857457653
Publisher:	Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/01/2013
Series:	Austrian and Habsburg Studies , #16
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Charlotte Ashby is a Lecturer in Art and Design History at Birkbeck, University of London and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Viennese Café Project at the Royal College of Art. In 2008 she curated the exhibition “Vienna Café 1900” at the Royal College of Art and co-convened the conference “The Viennese Café as an Urban Site of Cultural Exchange.”

Tag Gronberg, is a Reader in the History of Art and Design and a Tutor for Postgraduate Research in the Department of Art History, Birkbeck, University of London.

Simon Shaw-Miller is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Bristol. He is an Honorary Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, London. His publications include: Visible Deeds of Music: Music and Art from Wagner to Cage (Yale University Press 2002), Samuel Palmer Revisited (co-edited, Ashgate 2010) and Eye hEar: The Visual in Music (Ashgate 2013). He won the Prix Ars Electronica Media.Art.Research Award in 2009.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"Like a well-made Melange, 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 cafe is revealed as a key site of fin-de-siecle 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 cafe 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-siecle 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

EBOOK COMMENTARY

“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

From the Publisher