Traditional coffeehouse — Austria

The Viennese coffee house

Also known as: Wiener Kaffeehaus, Viennese café, Kaffeehaus, Literatencafé, Vienna coffeehouse culture

A public room in which a single small coffee buys an afternoon — marble tables, Thonet chairs, a wall of newspapers and a glass of water refilled unasked — and the most self-conscious coffeehouse culture in Europe.

Country: Austria
Cities: Vienna
Period: Late 17th century to the present, with a golden age c.1890-1930
Kind: Traditional coffeehouse
Served: Melange, brauner, kleiner Schwarzer and the rest of a large and specific ordering vocabulary

What it was

The Viennese coffee house sells time. Austria's own heritage inventory puts it better than any description could: it is a place "where time and space are consumed, but only the coffee is found on the bill". Everything physical about the room follows from that. Marble-topped tables and bentwood Thonet chairs are hard-wearing rather than comfortable; newspapers are mounted on wooden holders and belong to the house; the waiter brings a glass of cold tap water with the coffee and replaces it, unasked, for as long as somebody sits there. None of that is decoration. It is the business model made visible, and it is the opposite of the espresso bar's.

What the institution is remembered for is its golden age, roughly the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, when particular cafés functioned as the working address of a literary and intellectual culture. Peter Altenberg had his post delivered to the Café Central; Karl Kraus wrote much of Die Fackel in cafés; Arthur Schnitzler, Alfred Polgar and Friedrich Torberg belong to the same rooms. It is also true, and usually mentioned for effect, that Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler and Tito were all in Vienna's cafés in 1913, which says more about Vienna in 1913 than about coffee.

The institution nearly died twice — once with the culture that made it, and again in the 1950s, when Viennese writing has its own phrase for the period, Kaffeehaussterben, the dying of the coffee houses, as television and Italian espresso bars took the trade. What exists now is partly continuous and partly a revival sustained by tourism, and the honest description says both.

Traditional coffeehouse. A public house whose identity is coffee, in the line that begins with the Ottoman kahvehane.

Local names

German (Austrian): Wiener KaffeehausWiener KaffeehausVEE-ner KAH-feh-howsThe institution, and since 2011 the name of an entry in Austria's national intangible-heritage inventory.
German (Austrian): Literatencaféli-teh-RAH-ten-ka-fay'Writers' café' — the form the institution took in its golden age, and the reason it is remembered.
German (Austrian): SchanigartenThe pavement terrace. A Viennese institution in its own right and a seasonal one.

Earliest attestation

Recent scholarship attributes Vienna's first licensed coffee house to Johannes Theodat, an Armenian merchant also recorded as Diodato or Deodat, in 1685. Within about fifteen years several further privileges were held by Greek and Armenian traders. The popular attribution to Georg Franz Kolschitzky is legend — see the contested claim.

What it was for

An extension of the flat. Vienna's nineteenth-century housing was cramped and expensive to heat, and the coffee house supplied warmth, light, newspapers, a writing surface and an address for correspondence at the price of one melange. For a particular generation of writers it was literally the office. The billiard tables, chess and card games are part of the same logic: the room is rented by the hour and paid for in coffee.

Literary and intellectual life
News and information
Neighbourhood sociability
Political organisation
Games
Commerce and trade

What was served

Melange, brauner, kleiner Schwarzer and the rest of a large and specific ordering vocabulary
Einspänner, served in a glass under whipped cream
A glass of cold tap water, always, and refilled unasked
Wine, beer and spirits in most houses

Entertainment

Newspapers in wooden holders, in several languages
Billiards, chess and tarock
Piano music in the larger houses
Reading, writing and correspondence

Setting

Marble-topped tables, bentwood Thonet chairs, upholstered banquettes, high ceilings, Historicist interiors, and newspaper racks. In summer the Schanigarten extends onto the pavement.

Who could go in

Writers, journalists, academics, civil servants, students and local residents. Individual houses had reputations and regulars, and being a Stammgast — a regular with a habitual table — is a recognised status.

More open than the Ottoman-descended institutions in this layer, and not open. Women were present in Viennese coffee houses substantially earlier than in London or Cairo, but their access was conditional through the nineteenth century — respectability, accompaniment and which house it was all mattered, and the literary cafés that the culture is famous for were overwhelmingly male in their documented membership. The more durable exclusion was economic and social rather than formal: the price of a coffee was small, and the confidence required to occupy a table for four hours in a room full of regulars was not evenly distributed. CoffeeHQ has found no source that surveys this properly and states the shape of it rather than a figure.

What happened next

Twice interrupted. The literary culture that made the golden age was destroyed by the 1930s and the annexation, and the people who made it were exiled or murdered — a fact usually left out of accounts that treat the golden age as simply ending. The second decline, the Kaffeehaussterben of the 1950s onward, was commercial: television kept people at home and Italian espresso bars sold coffee faster and cheaper.

Substantial and partly commercialised. Long-established houses trade profitably, several sustained by tourism as much as by regulars, alongside a modern Viennese specialty scene that is a separate thing. The listing in Austria's national inventory in 2011 is itself a symptom: cultures inventory practices when they start worrying about them.

Contested claims

That Vienna's first coffee house was opened by Georg Franz Kolschitzky with coffee abandoned by the retreating Ottoman army in 1683.

The story is told throughout Vienna, taught as local history, and commemorated with a street name and a statue: Kolschitzky, a Polish-Ukrainian interpreter and courier during the 1683 siege, is said to have been rewarded with sacks of captured coffee beans and to have opened the first coffee house with them, adding milk and sugar to make the drink palatable.
Recent scholarship attributes the first licensed coffee house to the Armenian merchant Johannes Theodat in 1685, two years after the siege. The Kolschitzky version appears to have been popularised much later, and the detail about inventing milk-and-sugar coffee has no support at all.

How CoffeeHQ treats it: CoffeeHQ states the Theodat attribution as what the evidence currently supports and the Kolschitzky account as a legend the city tells about itself — which is a real and interesting fact about Vienna rather than a fact about coffee. It is worth noticing what the legend does: it makes Viennese coffee a trophy of victory over the Ottomans, when the sober version is that the institution arrived through Armenian and Greek merchants in the ordinary way, as it did everywhere else.

That Viennese coffee house culture is UNESCO-listed.

It is very widely described as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage, including by cafés and tourism material.
The 2011 listing is on Austria's **national** inventory of intangible cultural heritage, maintained by the Austrian UNESCO Commission. It is not an inscription on the UNESCO Representative List, which is a different and higher-profile instrument.

How CoffeeHQ treats it: CoffeeHQ records the national listing accurately and does not describe it as a UNESCO inscription. The distinction is the same one the atlas already makes for Hong Kong's yuenyeung, which is on a territory-level inventory rather than UNESCO's list, and the same care is applied for the same reason.

Related institutions

The Ottoman coffeehouse (kahvehane) — The institution that invented the coffeehouse — a public room, open to men of any rank who could pay, where coffee was drunk, backgammon played, news exchanged and stories performed, and which the Ottoman state repeatedly tried to close.
The London coffeehouse — The room where English commerce and science did their talking for a century — Lloyd's, the Stock Exchange and the Royal Society all trace to one — sold on a penny's admission, open to men who could pay and effectively closed to women.
The Sarajevo kafana — The Ottoman coffeehouse as it survived in Europe — copper džezva on a tray with lokum and a glass of water, drunk slowly enough to have its own word, in a city whose coppersmiths still make the pots.

Elsewhere on CoffeeHQ

What CoffeeHQ could not establish

The Theodat attribution comes from secondary accounts of recent Austrian scholarship rather than from that scholarship directly.
Women's access across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is described impressionistically in everything located and surveyed nowhere. The statement here is deliberately shaped rather than quantified.
No count of Viennese coffee houses at any period is reproduced; figures circulate and none was traced to a source.
The relationship between the surviving houses and the pre-1938 institution — how much is continuity and how much is revival — is a real historical question this record raises and does not answer.

Sources

Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity
Encyclopaedia Britannica coffee and coffeehouse history entries
National-language food, culture and lifestyle media

Evidence confidence for this record: known. See CoffeeHQ's source and evidence policy.