In the last decade, the increase in boutique coffee shops has encouraged much popular and academic interest in café culture.Footnote 2 From the earliest western coffee houses in Oxford (1650) and London (1652) to the European intellectual cafés of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café is a space of inspiration, equally suited to both caffeinated conversations and solitary introspection. It is a universal element of European cities; however, few publications have explored how the daily life of the café interacts with social history. The most recent of publications on café culture, The Thinking Space: The Café as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy and Vienna, addresses this overlooked aspect. The chapters in the collection are organized around Vienna, Paris and Italy, and each part is ordered chronologically, enabling the reader to trace the development of European café culture in line with the intellectual practices of the people who gathered in them. In covering such a broad historical and social range, three countries and 400 years, the volume illustrates the fundamental role of the café in the formation of Modernity.
The first part of The Thinking Space focuses on Vienna, and Herbert Lederer provides an overview of the significance of the literary café prior to the fin-de-siècle. Viennese coffee house culture thrived during the late nineteenth century and this period is discussed in more detail by Egon Schwarz, who gives examples of lesser-known writers who were motivated by the café space, such as Karl Kraus (1874–1936), Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929). Much like the boulevards of Haussmannized Paris, Vienna's Ringstraße was the location of coffee shops which were havens for displaced writers and artists. Schwarz argues that as well as providing inspiration, the hospitality of the coffee house was also a refuge in the metropolis.
The second and largest part of The Thinking Space focuses on Paris, which is perhaps not surprising given the academic interests of the editors. Beginning with coffee shop culture in the mid-eighteenth century and ending with Jean-Paul Sartre's use of the café as somewhere to write during World War II, this section emphasizes the connection between the performative and the political in French café life. The theatricality of the café recurs in Leona Rittner's fascinating chapter on Le bœuf sur le toit (cabaret), first opened in 1921 and named after the Surrealist ballet. This is complemented by Gérard-Georges Lemaire's abridgment of his work on intellectual coffee shops and their attractiveness to Dadaists and Surrealists.
No collection on intellectual café culture would be complete without a chapter on Charles Baudelaire, and Edward J. Ahearn comments on the effect Haussmannization had on the Parisian café. Ahearn argues that in the prose poem ‘Les yeux des pauvres’ (1864), Baudelaire equates the pristine boulevard café with superficiality and materialism, rather than just being a space to write and think amidst the hum of the multitude. This essay is unique in the collection, focusing on how the vantage point of the coffee house window can also be perceived as a site of bourgeois privilege or a lonely location separated from the crowd.
Literary cafés continued to multiply during the fin-de-siècle and through the early years of the twentieth century. The penultimate part of The Thinking Space illustrates this trend in Italy, beginning with a chapter on the development of Venetian coffee culture in the late seventeenth century and ending with Stefano Giannini's reflection on the modern café and how it still exists as a stimulating space for twentieth-century writers. Rather than lamenting the loss of the intellectual environment of the literary café, as it is replaced by internet cafés and sterile coffee house chains, Giannini examines the use of provincial coffee houses as more than just settings in the novels of Piero Chiara (1913–86). This positive perspective on the fate of the café is continued in the concluding part of The Thinking Space, entitled ‘Reflections’, in which Fannie Peczenik gives an evocative first-person account of three Italian cafés, emphasizing the recurring idea in this collection that the café is a unique urban space which engenders unique ideas.
The Thinking Space is a diverse collection that supports existing scholarship on European café culture. It illustrates how cafés are distinctive spaces in the landscape of the city, and yet share traits and characteristics. The café is shown to be a reflexive space, modelled by the personality and presence of its regular customers, and this connection between space and ideas underpins some of the most interesting outcomes of the volume.
