Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture

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.”

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceNotes on ContributorsIntroductionCharlotte AshbyChapter 1. The Cafés of Vienna: Space and SociabilityCharlotte AshbyChapter 2. Time and Space in the Café Griensteidl and the Café CentralGilbert CarrChapter 3.The Jew Belongs in the Coffeehouse’: Jews, Central Europe and ModernitySteven BellerChapter 4. Coffeehouse OrientalismTag GronbergChapter 5. Between ‘The House of Study’ and the Kaffeehaus: The Central European Café as a Site for Hebrew and Yiddish ModernismShachar PinskerChapter 6. Michalik’s café in Kraków: Café and Caricature as Media of ModernityKatarzyna Murawska-MuthesiusChapter 7.  The Coffeehouse in Zagreb at the turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Similarities and Differences with the Viennese CoffeehouseInes SaboticChapter 8. Adolf Loos’s Kärntner Bar: Reception, Reinvention, ReproductionMary CostelloChapter 9. Graphic and Interior Design in the Viennese coffeehouse around 1900: Experience and IdentityJeremy AynsleyChapter 10. The Cliché of the Viennese Café as an Extended Living-room: Formal Parallels and DifferencesRichard KurdiovskyChapter 11. Coffeehouses and Tea Parties: Conversational Spaces as a Stimulus to Creativity in Sigmund Freud’s Vienna and Virginia Woolf’s LondonEdward TimmsBibliographyIndex

“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 StudiesAll 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