The collection of eleven essays entitled The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture are the fruit of the 2008 conference, “The Viennese Café as an Urban Site of Cultural Exchange,” itself the result of a three-year research project on the subject. The intention of the project was to explore “the Viennese café as a key site of turn-of-twentieth-century modernity” (p. 3) and involved an interdisciplinary approach that concentrated mainly on the literary and artistic dimensions of the coffeehouse phenomenon. While a laudable goal, like most such group efforts, it's in the nature of the beast that multiple authors will produce mixed results, and the essays in this volume bear that out.

After a brief introduction by one of the editors, Charlotte Ashby, the first essay, also by her, begins the collection under the title, “The Cafés of Vienna: Space and Sociability.” The essay serves as a well-presented overview of the history of the Viennese coffeehouse that gives the reader a point of orientation for the essays that follow. That orientation also involves a discussion of the ways the coffeehouse contributed to social interaction and cultural exchange. By using as her foil the outdated paradigm developed by Jürgen Habermas that privileged the rather elitist coffeehouse clientele of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France as the sources of a genuine public sphere later destroyed by the mass culture represented by the very accessibility of the Viennese coffeehouse, Ashby underscores the continued viability and cultural relevance of the institution as part of a modern public sphere.

The essay that follows by Gilbert Carr on “Time and Space in the Café Griensteidl and the Café Central,” while it does, initially, address the actual physical dimensions of these two famous coffeehouses, most of the content deals with the literary conceptualization of time and space present in autobiographical recollections and fictionalized representations of the coffeehouse that, at best, have an esoteric relevance to the book's broader purpose. Fortunately, the next essay brings the collection back to a topic of clear relevance. In Steven Beller's “‘The Jew Belongs in the Coffeehouse’: Jews, Central Europe and Modernity,” the recurring question of why Jews were so closely identified with the life and literary culture of Viennese coffeehouses is addressed by a brief presentation of the historical factors in tandem with a validation of Yuri Slezkine's theory about the division of societies between “Apollonian” and “Mercurian” peoples. Historically speaking, Beller's points about the coffeehouse as a welcoming, nonalcoholic site where first the exchange of goods and later of ideas appealed to Vienna's Jews is persuasive, but his adherence to Slezkine's controversial argument that historically societies are divided between settled and relatively unimaginative people (Apollonian) and those who are peripatetic traders but creative (Mercurian) with Jews filling this latter role seems a somewhat crude dichotomy to apply to Vienna's sophisticated context.

In the contribution by another of the editors, Tag Gronberg, on “Coffeehouse Orientalism,” the legend of the first coffeehouse and the significance of its connection to the Turkish siege of 1683 are discussed. It debunks the legend and the traditional role of Georg Kolschitzky in the foundation myth, but shows the lingering attachment to the oriental exoticism of the stories and their part in defining the unique character of the coffeehouse as a place apart from conventional life. The next three essays continue the theme of the coffeehouse having connections beyond Vienna. Shacher Pinsker's “Between the House of Study and the Coffeehouse: The Central European Café as a Site for Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism” points out that the literary movements nurtured over coffee involved more than assimilated Jews. In Vienna, Lemberg, and as far afield as Berlin, coffeehouses were the locations for more overt expressions of Jewish culture. In Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius's “Michalik's Café in Kraków: Café and Caricature as Media of Modernity,” the role of the Vienna-style coffeehouse among the Polish bohemians of Galicia is explored through the uses to which visual caricatures were put in critiquing writers, gender roles, and the image of Jews. Finally, Ines Sabotič discusses the relatively late flowering of coffeehouse culture in Croatia, its legally defined hierarchy of establishments, and politicized literary movements in her essay, “The Coffeehouse in Zagreb at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Similarities and Differences with the Viennese Coffeehouse.”

Oddly, the next essay by Mary Costello on “Adolf Loos's Kärtner Bar: Reception, Reinvention, Reproduction” has nothing to do with the coffeehouse and, while interesting, should have been excised by the editors. The same fate should have befallen Jeremy Aynsley's “Graphic and Interior Design in the Viennese Coffeehouse around 1900: Experience and Identity.” With the apparent exception of the Café Lurion, the author admits that Viennese coffeehouses generally did not use posters and relied on highly conventional print ads and a variety of signage. He also adduces only two examples of coffeehouse interiors (the Cafés Lurion and Lebmann) discussed in design publications of the time. This is much ado about very little.

Happily, the essay by Richard Kurdiovsky on “The Cliché of the Viennese Café as an Extended Living Room: Formal Parallels and Differences” makes a substantive contribution by providing a well-executed comparative discussion of domestic and coffeehouse life as it actually was. His coverage of the real and the imagined includes both lifestyle and the physical characteristics of the two milieus leading to the conclusion that the notion of an “extended living room,” was, indeed, only a cliché. Less happily, the essay by Edward Timms on “Coffeehouses and Tea Parties: Conversational Spaces as a Stimulus to Creativity in Sigmund Freud's Vienna and Virginia Woolf's London,” is largely about the Bloomsbury Group's reception of Freud and his ideas in the interwar period and very little about Viennese coffeehouses except as briefly discussed examples of meeting places for overlapping social and intellectual circles.

As the foregoing discussion indicates, the essays in this volume range from the very useful to the nearly useless with most falling within the middle range of quality. As a guide to the role of the coffeehouse in fin-de-siècle Viennese culture this volume can be praised for its courage in addressing the topic, but courage does not necessarily lead to success.