Over at Teekay’s

Novala of Sodazitron fame sent me, unwittingly no doubt, down memory lane this morning (I worked in Vienna for a few months a while back) and also made me appreciate once again what a wonderful place the internet is.

There’s people out there who think it’s alienating!

Anyway, through a series of associations starting with my St*rbucks post a while ago I arrived at the German Wikipedia article on Viennese cafes and from there, by iron necessity, to the excellent entry on Friedrich Torberg. How amazing! Who’d have thought this dude would have devoted enough followers to have his own entry — and a very good one at that.

I’ve only read one of Torberg’s books, Die Tante Jolesch, oder Der Untergang des Abendlandes in Anekdoten (Aunt Jolesch, or the decline of the West in anecdotes), which not only evokes a lost world but is a product of it — a world where Germans, Czechs, and Jews lived together or at least next to each other and where the written and the spoken word were cultivated with equal zeal. A world where people had time to talk and write and read — and drink coffee.

There’s a Treatise on the Viennese Cafe annexed to Tante Jolesch: “Vienna is the city of functioning legends. Malevolent people claim that the legends are the only thing that actually functions in Vienna, but that’s certainly an exaggeration.”

Torberg’s take on the time issue — and this was written in 1959 — is this:

This isn’t to say that there are no literary types, intellectuals, or people interested in artistic issues or matters of the mind in Vienna any more. Of course there are. But not only are they tangibly reduced in number, they are also tangibly reduced in their ability to visit the cafe. They are — and this is where sociology enters the picture — busy. They have work to do. They are regulars of these cafes only potentially, not actually. They bring along all the requirements of the regular, just not themselves. They have no time. And having time is the most important, indispensable precondition for any cafe culture — in the end quite possibly for any culture. The regulars of the old literary cafes were also busy: in part with hanging out in cafes, in part with things they could and would do at the cafe.