Book Chapter

Jewish Modernism and Viennese Cafés, 1900–1930

Pinsker, Shachar

2013

Overview

The Cafés of Vienna during the first three decades of the twentieth century highlight many of the elements of the Café as a third space, as well as the tangled relationship between Café culture, modernism, and Jewishness. At the turn of the century, Vienna became one of the most important centers of modernism in literature, philosophy, art, and architecture. And at the same time that the Viennese Café was in its heyday as a commercial and cultural institution. The world of the Viennese Café has usually been described in writings of acculturated Jews such as Schnitzler, Roth, Torberg, Polgar, and Zweig, who are well-known in Austrian and international modernism. The Viennese Kaffeehaus proved to be the place that brought these immigrant writers, artists, and intellectuals together and opened new paths for them. Indeed, Vienna fostered close collaboration between Hebrew and Yiddish writers at a time when these two literatures were gradually separating from each other for ideological and political reasons. The caf was transformed from an urban curiosity at its inception in 1686 to an institution of everyday life, with the existence of several hundred in Paris by the 1740's. It was a part of the theater of everyday life, which held a unique dangerno one could fully anticipate the direction of the next performance. Despite the presence of aristocrats and clerics, the caf was a forward-looking institution exempt from courtly protocols. The caf evolved in tandem with the state's regulatory and disciplinary functions, both in licensing different types of public drinking establishments and in the surveillance of writing and speech. The Enlightenment caf draws scholarly attention precisely because its representation in literary sources of the period point to later-century forms of sociability and democratic expression to which the caf space was central. The caf's recurrence, rhetorically, in tales of sedition and Enlightenment indicates the important place that it held in the collective imaginary about speaking and subjectivity.

• Publisher: Routledge
• ISBN: 9781409438793, 1409438791