The latest on Kakania

Mr. Waggish has a new post about Robert Musil, in which a new book on Musil by Genese Grill is discussed.

The Monist's submissions deadline for its Musil issue has just passed. Achille Varzi, a philosophy professor at Columbia University (who was a tutor in my first logic class), has contributed a paper on the Confusions of Young Törleß, a draft of which is available as a pdf.

At Wuthering Expectations, Amateur Reader is on a pre-WWI Austrian lit kick, with posts on Hofmannsthal, Zweig, and Schnitzler.

From the Vienna Review: 'It is perhaps less well-known that [Arthur] Schnitzler also wrote for the cinema. Intrigued by the new medium and its language – shifting perspectives, the use of close-ups and montage techniques – Schnitzler wrote altogether nine film scripts based on his works and left a number of sketches for new projects.'

How did I not know that Stefan Zweig's post-secondary education was in philosophy? He completed a dissertation on Hippolyte Taine. It was supervised by Friedrich Jodl (source), who also supervised Otto Weininger.

Roger Boylan's review of Joseph Roth: a Life in Letters. And a review of Roth's Emperor's Tomb in the Economist (the latest of Michael Hofmann's Roth translations).

Douglas Glover on Thomas Bernhard's The Loser. And a neat recounting of Bernhard's relation to his long-suffering publisher.

M.A.Orthofer's new review of Franz Werfel's Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand (reviewed last year by Brooke Allen),  and Liel Leibovitz's review of Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

There's a new website devoted to Hermann Ungar, who attended the same school in Brno as Ernst Weiss.

From an interview with translator Mark Corner about Jaroslav Hašek: 'I have a colleague at the university where I teach in Brussels, who always says to me, "If you want a new idea, read an old book." ... I think that Hašek is still very relevant, and the sense of being a traveller in a disordered universe does bear some parallels with the modern day.'

Old Vienna

Three new Random House books are adorned by Klimt's art. First, there's Eric Kandel's new book: 'Kandel's key contribution to neuroaesthetics in The Age of Insight, Zeki says, is to focus on the work and milieu of three Austrian Expressionist artists: Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele, all of whom Kandel has studied extensively and whose work he and his wife have collected since the 1960s.'

Next, also featuring on its cover the painting of  Adele Bloch-Bauer, is Anne-Marie O'Connor's book about that portrait, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. All Things Considered has a clip about this book.

Then there's Tim Bonyhady's book about his art-collecting, Viennese ancestors, Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900, on the cover of which is Klimt's portrait of Hermine Gallia.

Guy Cunningham on the new English translation of Oliver Matuschek's biography of Stefan Zweig, and Miranda Seymour on the same bio in the Literary Review.

Anthony Heilbut reviews Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters (trans. & ed. by Michael Hofmann): 'If you want a high literary experience, to be rocked between emotional extremes by a writer with perfect pitch in any realm, you won’t do better than this collection of letters by an impoverished alcoholic, who died with two bedraggled suitcases to his name.' Daniel Johnson on the same collection in the Literary Review. From Stefany Anne Goldberg's review of Roth's letters: 'The fact that these people, like Zweig, continued their relationship with Roth, bearing the constant criticisms which came attired sometimes in white gloves, sometimes in vitriol, is both a testament to their devotion and to their position in Roth’s life as intimates he could keep at arm’s length.' Here's Philip Hensher's review; and Tess Lewis'; and Adam Kirsch's; and, finally, here's Michael Hofmann on his collection of Roth's letters: 'Still, I like the idea of a sort of accidental biography, told in the subject's own words, the sort of book that isn't nine parts starch, that is always medias in res, and that doesn't begin with a date of birth.'


Update (April 8): Jonah Lehrer interviews Kandel about Age of Insight. (ht Man Without Qualities) The above clip is the audio for Paul Holdengräber's interview with Kandel at the New York Public Library.

'Fin de siècle Vienna was, in the words of Jewish satirist Karl Kraus, a “research laboratory for world destruction.” Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler agreed; his play, Professor Bernhardi, was one of the first plays in German to confront the rising tide of anti-Semitism in early 20th-century Central Europe.'

Albert Lichtblau on the Jewish population in Vienna (1848-1938): 'The tension specific to Vienna was not only characterised by a tradition of distance between the Jewish and non-Jewish population ... but also by ... economic as well as social and political crises. The short phase of relief for the Jewish population, as a result of the emancipation of 1867, was shattered by a massive economic crisis, which was followed by a fundamentally political one.'

Adele Bloch-Bauer from Sebastian Cosor on Vimeo.

Some philosophy, lit, and art links

Here's an interesting new-ish journal, nonsite.org, the focus of which seems to be on issues straddling the boundary between philosophy and literary studies. Issue 3 of nonsite has some articles on Wittgenstein. Issue 4 includes Gary Hagberg's reply to 'Wittgenstein on the Face of a Work of Art', which was in Issue 3.

Robert Pasnau has a nice article on 'The Islamic Scholar Who Gave Us Modern Philosophy', Averroës.

From an interview with George Steiner: 'My multilinguism enabled me to teach, and to write After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, and to feel at home everywhere. Every language is an open window on the world. This is in contrast to the grim attachment to roots advocated by someone like Maurice Barrès. Trees have roots; I have legs.'

While poking around looking for on-line stuff by or about Kleist for the previous post, I found this long reflection on Freud's development of the notion of the uncanny by reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman'.

Daniel Johnson reviews a book about  'the Jewish Haute Bourgeoisie of Vienna 1800–1938'.

Miranda Seymour reviews a biography of Stefan Zweig.

I first heard of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach when I was doing some research on Gusto Gräser. I didn't realize, though, that Diefenbach was even more of a wild-man-with-a-prophet's-beard than Gräser was. Strange Flowers has a post on Diefenbach with some neat pics. In the slide show at the bottom of that Diefenbach post, one of the photos shows Diefenbach and several other proto-hippies with flowers in their hair.

Here's the ultimate site for Samuel Johnson's dictionary. 'Pudding: ... A kind of food very variously compounded, but generally made of meal, milk, and eggs.'

Richard Marshall reviews Stephen Barber's Walls of Berlin.

Cool but creepy photos by Stephen Berkman.

Joan Didion interviewed at the NY Public Library by Sloane Crosley:
 

Reviews, anniversaries & re-issues

Antonina Pirozhkova, an engineer who designed several stations in the Moscow subway system, and who was Isaac Babel's common-law wife, and about whom I learned from Elif Batuman's funny book, The Possessed

A map of Turkey's reading culture. Among the findings: the most popular Turkish authors are Ömer Seyfettin, Ayşe Kulin and Orhan Pamuk, and people in the northern province of Tokat prefer detective novels. No word on William S. Burroughs' popularity -- one of his books is being investigated in Turkey for 'incompliance with moral norms' and 'hurting people’s moral feelings.'

The Hindu's review of Orhan Pamuk's Naive and Sentimental Novelist: the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Here's Alberto Manguel discussing the same book. 

There's a Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg

An article by Gerard Smyth in the Irish Times on the centenary of Czeslaw Milosz's birth

Chandrahas Choudhury on George Szirtes' translation of Sandor Marai's Portraits of a Marriage

Marjorie Perloff reviews a new book on Georg Trakl: 'Christian Hawkey’s brilliant Ventrakl, which puts Trakl’s tragic life squarely into the poetic equation, testifies to the enormous change that has come over lyric poetry in the twenty-first century.'

A clip from Barbara Gowdy's 1993 interview with Leonard Cohen:

Robert Boyers reviews Anthea Bell's translation of Stefan Zweig's Journey into the Past.

Jesse Freedman reviews Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters

Amelia Atlas on Joseph Roth's Radetzky March

Willard Spiegelman on The Leopard: 'If one mark of a great novelist is the ability to forgive everything by understanding everything, then [Giuseppe] Tomasi [di Lampedusa]'s only rivals are George Eliot, Tolstoy and Proust.'

A review of a collection of lectures by Natsume Soseki (published by Columbia Univ Press)

Finnegan's Wake on-line, with glosses for the puzzling words and phrases

Nicholas Allen reviews R. F. Foster's Words Alone re. Yeats' intellectual origins

A newly recovered story by Daphne du Maurier 

Brendan Behan at the pub:


Jane Smiley on the re-issue of Nancy Mitford's novels

Paul Theroux on the 'the trouble with autobiography'

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Here's an extensive site by the Australian Broadcast Corporation (with several audio clips) to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible 

Three talks by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Narnia

Grass, Bernhard & Sebald

Kurt Eisner (NY TImes pdf)

Günther Grass interviewed in the Guardian. I didn't realize how much in the Tin Drum was drawn from Grass's life. He really did have a Nazi father and a Slavic uncle who was killed by the Germans at the outset of the war.

Michael Hofmann reviews Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters (trans. Ewald Osers and re-issued in Penguin's Central European Classics series) in the LRB. Here's a podcast in which Hofmann keeps a low voice during a panel discussion of Stefan Zweig.

Jessica A. Sequeira discusses Bernhard's Correction

Stephen Sparks reviews Bernhard's Prose

Shifting Sands identifies a difference between Bernhard and Sebald -- Sebald explores the melancholy mind via its projection onto, or interpretation of, its surroundings (landscapes, cities, etc.) while Bernhard's focus is on the different shapes that melancholy takes (esp. bitterness) in interior monologue

It's old news now, but Conversational Reading noted a while back that three newly translated books by Sebald will be published in the next couple of years.They'll be tranlsated by Jo Catling. Catling will also contribute to this upcoming collection of papers about Sebald. Other contributors include Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell.

Brian Oard wrote a nice series of posts last August about Sebald's Vertigo, Emigrants, Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz (inc. a second, short post on the latter).

Here's a podcast of Will Self's 'Sebald Lecture' from last January.

Mitteleuropa items

Hans Blumenberg. Telos issues a Call for Papers for a special issue on his work.

Here's an intriguing new book from Cambridge, Thinking the Unconscious, about the idea of the unconscious in 19th-Century German thought, with articles about Schelling, Nietzsche, Fechner, Goethe, etc.

We've heard of the great influence on North American science by Jewish immigrants from central Europe, but it's interesting also to see the impact of these immigrants on our pop culture (beyond Hollywood), from Barbie to PR to the shopping mall to ... surfing. Here's Peter Lunenfeld on Freud, Gidget and the Austro-Hungarian roots of the surfer ethos -- 'It's gnarly on the Ringstrasse, dude!'

Beyond the Ringstrasse -- Red Vienna architecture.

Here's a PEN panel-discussion in NY of Stefan Zweig from last April, which includes Michael Hofmann, Paul Holdengräber, and others. Here's some coverage of the event.

Summer literary links

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

The newly discovered Kafka texts in Tel Aviv and Zurich: "Among the papers found in the sealed boxes were letters to or from Stefan Zweig."

Robert Leiter reviews Amos Oz's Rhyming Life & Death

Colin Marshall interviews translator Suzanne Jill Levine about Borges

James Meek reviews four books concerning Tolstoy

Levi Stahl reviews Tolstoy's Hadji Murat

Aaron Stuvland reviews Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

Lesley Chamberlain on Nabokov in Berlin

Staff Pick's at The Millions: Andrey Platonov's Soul

Adam Kirsch on two works by Hans Keilson: Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key

John Crowley looks back at Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game

Peter Swirski: "Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace (1982) is a neo-Darwinian beast fable about morality in a thermonuclear age. It serves me as a starting point for a fresh look at the fundamental questions surrounding morality and altruism."

Professor Gauri Viswanathan interviews Salman Rushdie about religion and rights

David Burleigh on Meira Chand's A Different Sky

"[Jose] Saramago is known for committing mischief with religious and historical texts"

'The Best Magazine Articles Ever' (from the 1960's until 2010)

"Not all Baron Cohens are public figures"

Artists and writers each select five books for their summer reading list

Mid-June philosophy & literature links

Wilhelm Dilthey

Mr. Waggish mentions Dilthey in the lead-up to some remarks on a passage by Hans Blumenberg. Telos has issued a call for papers for a special issue on Blumenberg (deadling: June 1, 2011).

Catherine Pepinster reviews John Cornwell's new book on Cardinal Newman, and here's Cornwell interviewed about Newman by Jonathan Derbyshire

Michael Ruse: 'Lament for the Humanities'

'Hegel at Georgetown -- The Master-Slave Dialectic'

A posthumous review by Martin Gardner, and here's an interview with Gardner in 1997

Roger Scruton on 'the conflict between value and price'

A nice intro to Bayes' theorem

Steven Laureys & David Chalmers on 'the hard problem' of consciousness. Here are the mp3's, etc. for Chalmers' John Locke lectures at Oxford (see his site for more).

Cian Dorr defends analytic metaphysics from Ladyman, Ross, et al. (More discussion here.)

'What is a law of nature?' A report on a meeting of philosophers & physicists, inc. Julian Barbour. The talks from this conference are on-line.

The New Statesman finds J. G. Ballard's answers for a mid-90's interview but can't recollect what the questions were

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, has a nice reply to Steven Pinker's NY Times attack

Simon Winchester is preparing a new book on Lewis Carroll

Transaction Publishers has re-issued Stefan Zweig's essays on Dickens, Dostoevsky and Balzac, and will soon (end of summer?) re-issue his essays on Holderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche. These two volumes are part of a projected trilogy of Zweig's works entitled 'Master Builders of the Spirit'. They include new introductions by Transaction's senior editor, Laurence Mintz. I can't find any indication of what will be in the third volume.

Zweig's previously unpublished novella, Journey Into the Past, will soon be published by New York Review Books, who will also be issuing the first full English translation of Gregor von Rezzori's The Ermine of Czernopol

An article about German translator, John E. Woods

"Writers have no more moral authority than plumbers or butchers," says Han Magnus Enzensberger.

Another review of Ernst Weiss's Georg Letham

Here's the text of the late Peter Porter's poem 'Wittgenstein's Dream' along with a recording of him reading it

Working towards a PhD online lets you explore more literature and study philosophers.

Marilynn Robinson, Calvin and Stefan Zweig

I've just received Marilynn Robinson's new book, Absence of Mind, an excerpt from which can be found at the Guardian. There's a review of this new work by Tim Teeman at the Times of London, and a very favourable review of it by the Archbishop of Canterbury. For more reviews, see this Complete Review page.

Calvin doesn't figure much in Robinson's new book; he's mentioned in passing once (in the chapter on Freud). Robinson wrote extensively on Calvin in her collection of essays, The Death of Adam, and she wrote the Preface for John Calvin: Steward of God's Covenant. Here's a good article on her treatment of Calvin.

Another sympathetic expositor of Calvin in popular forums is Paul Helm, who wrote the Guardian's series on Calvin last year. And here's Melvyn Bragg's BBC podcast on Calvin.

Remarkably, there's a relevant link to Stefan Zweig (who's become a lurking presence on this blog), since Zweig wrote a book called The Right to Heresy: Castellio Against Calvin (I think this is Zweig's book on-line but with a slightly different title). Calvin's Geneva served as Zweig's dystopia, with Calvin and his minions playing the role of Big Brother. The protagonist was Sebastian Castellio, who had the temerity to disagree with Calvin over Biblical interpretation.

Castellio has since become a sort of saint for liberal Protestants such as the Unitarian minister Duncan Howlett, who wrote an essay called 'Sebastian Castellio: Neglected Saint of the Liberal Church', and the Quaker scholar Roland Bainton, who contributed a paper on Castellio to a volume called Persectution and Liberty.

Zweig is blamed even now for Calvin's bad image in Germany.

Some recent Mitteleuropa links

Gustav Landauer, grandfather of Mike Nichols
Penguin announces a new series devoted to Central European classics

On the Stefan Zweig front, Will Stone has posted a riposte to Michael Hofmann's LRB evisceration of Zweig. Damian Kelleher reviews Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, and here's Stephen Maughan on Zweig's collection of music manuscripts

New translation of a Thomas Bernhard story

A review of Peter Handke's Don Juan

Dezső Kosztolányi's novel, Skylark, reviewed by Deborah Eisenberg. Mooks & Gripes on the same book, which gets a favourable review also from His Futile Preoccupations. Ottilie Mulzet translates one of Kosztolányi's poems

Two on Czech artist, Alfons Mucha

A review of Claudio Magris' Danube

Sebastan Smee's review of Roberto Calasso's Tiepelo Pink, and Peter Conrad's

Adam Kirsch reviews David Ruderman's Early Modern Jewry

Susan Bernofsky interviewed about her Walser translation

Her translation reviewed

Danuta Borchardt interviewed about her Gombrowicz translation

Her translation reviewed

Hofmann damns even Zweig's suicide note

In the London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann pours torrents of abuse on Stefan Zweig.

Here are some of the more pointed zingers: "Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing."

"... this uniquely dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s; this un-Austrian Austrian and un-Jewish Jew ...; not a pacifist much less an activist but a passivist; this professional adorer, schmoozer ... who logged his phone calls and logged his letters and logged his books, and, who knows, probably logged his logs; ... who left a suicide note which, like most of what he wrote, is so smooth and mannerly and somehow machined – actually more like an Oscar acceptance speech than a suicide note – that one feels the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it ...."

Quit beating around the bush, Mr. Hofmann, and tell us what you really think about Zweig.

I'm not in a position to evaluate Zweig's writing. I've read only one of his works, Fantastic Night, about which I have mixed views (it's repetitive but has some good writing in places). He may have been an inveterate schmoozer, but at least he was generous, trying to help a younger writer schmooze, too.

Here's Zweig with Joseph Roth in 1936.

Update (Jan. 22): Well, I've slept on it and decided three things about Hofmann's article. First, it's outrageously unfair. Second, I'm glad he wrote it, and that the LRB published it without softening Hofmann's vituperation. Third, I've got to read more Zweig ASAP.

I've followed Hofmann's work and have high regard for it, but I also have lots of respect for Anthea Bell, who, as John Self has noted (in the comments to one of his posts), has devoted much time to translating Zweig, so she must want his novels to be read. Hofmann notes that several giants of Zweig's culture didn't take Zweig's work seriously. However, while I'm loath to disagree with Thomas Mann, Musil and Karl Kraus, I'm not convinced by their low estimation of Zweig's abilities. After all, Musil apparently held Thomas Mann's work in low regard, and Kraus ridiculed Freud (who was admired by Schnitzler). Then again, these guys might have disliked Zweig's work because he was a hack-writer, not much better in their eyes than a writer of pulp fiction, but some pulp-fiction and supposedly hack writers have drawn more appreciation in recent times than they received in their own day. Also, Zweig was seen as a tireless self-promoter, which, esp. in his culture, was definitely a vice (not so much being a self-promoter, but being seen as one). So, perhaps these luminaries disliked Zweig and allowed their personal disdain to colour their opinion of his work.

What's an early 21st-century anglo reader to do? I guess I've just got to knuckle down and read me some Zweig!

Update (Feb. 3, 2010): The next issue of the LRB (Vol. 32, no. 3) is on-line and contains six letters objecting to Hofmann's review. Notice, though, that Hofmann's article is the "most-read" on-line item at the LRB's site. This is lit-crit tabloid journalism. Scandal and intrigue sell papers. Yes, I've changed my mind. While it's good for the LRB to run a bracing critique, they shouldn't have run Hofmann's review with its more scathing personal remarks.

Update (March 14, 2010): Nicholas Lezard has a word or two about Hofmann's attack in a review of Pushkin's latest Zweig publication

Update (March 26, 2010): Stuart Walton in the Guardian -- "[Hofmann] has called [Zweig's] output 'just putrid.' A tad harsh, perhaps, but he has a point."

Update (May 13, 2010): Will Stone replies to Hofmann's article.

Update (Oct. 9, 2010): Here's a PEN panel-discussion in NY of Stefan Zweig from April 30, which includes Michael Hofmann, Paul Holdengräber, and others. Here's some coverage of the event.

Macabre photo

Life.com has put on-line the photos from the Life and Getty Archives. It's a nice collection through which to browse, but I've stumbled across one macabre, disturbing image, a photo of the bodies of Stefan Zweig and his wife, Charlotte Zweig, after they took their own lives. The picture is pathos incarnate.

Cafe Imperial

I wasn't much interested in Cafe Imperial. It seemed to be just an extension of a ritzy hotel, so I didn't even venture inside. Too bad, since it turns out to have a very interesting history.

First, Elias Canetti gives a mean-spirited anecdote about his meeting there with Stefan Zweig. I don't believe this anecdote to be accurate -- Canetti's autobiography is not that reliable, especially when he's talking about someone he didn't like. He evidently didn't like Zweig. Here's the relevant quotation:

"Soon after my return I ran into [Stefan] Zweig at the Cafe Imperial. He was sitting alone in one of the back rooms, holding his hand over his mouth to hide the absence of teeth [due to dental work]. Though he did not like to be seen in that condition, he beckoned me over to his table and bade me be seated. 'I've heard the whole story from Broch,' he said. 'You've met Joyce. ... Get Joyce to write a preface. Then your book will get attention.'" (Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, p. 186)

Cafe Imperial also appears in Robert Musil's Diaries, but (again) Musil doesn't have much of interest to say about a cafe: "Yesterday, or the day before yesterday, spent some time with Morgenstern in the Cafe Imperial." (Robert Musil, Diaries, entry for March 26, 1930, p. 366)

More interestingly, Ludwig Wittgenstein met at this cafe with Ludwig von Ficker during the latter's visit to Vienna (so that Wittgenstein could give away part of his family's fortune to worthy artists under Ficker's guidance). Here's Ficker's description of a meeting with Wittgenstein on July 24, 1914:

"We met in Cafe Imperial, where there ensued a somewhat strenuous, but positively stimulating conversation between [Ludwig Wittgenstein] and the hard-of-hearing builder [Adolf Loos] on the still contoversial Haus am Michaelerplatz on questions of modern architecture, which seemed to interest Wittgenstein." (Ludwig von Ficker describing a meeting on July 24, 1914 at Cafe Imperial; quoted from Wittgenstein in Vienna, Allan S. Janik & Hans Veigl [Springer, 1998], p. 123)

The cafe in the Hotel Imperial was initially called Cafe Frohner. It's mentioned by Fritz Wittels, a med student and budding psychoanalyst in Freud's circle. According to Edward Timms, Wittels was also part of Karl Kraus' circle in 1907-08. Timms summarizes Wittels' description as follows:

"Later they [Kraus and Wittels] would go on to the Cafe Frohner, situated in the luxurious Hotel Imperial. Kraus was a heavy smoker, but never took a drop of alcohol. He was a gifted conversationalist and on good days, Wittels recalls, he enchanted everyone. All kinds of people -- senior government officials as well as artists, actors, and attractive girls -- would come to his table; and Kraus made them feel they were the 'centre of the universe'. Later, feeling the need to escape from the stifling atmosphere of bourgeois coffee houses, Kraus and his circle would move on to lower-class cafes patronised by prostitutes and bookies." (Edward Timms, 'The 'Child-Woman': Kraus, Freud, Wittles, and Irma Karczewska', in Vienna 1900: from Altenberg to Wittgenstein, ed. E. Timms and R. Robertson [Edinburgh University Press, 1990], p. 88)

Cafe Imperial was favoured by musicians; Mahler was a regular, as were Schonberg, Berg and Webern. According to Janik and Veigl, the Imperial was also visited by Freud, Hofmannsthal, Werfel, Rilke, Bruckner, Wagner, Brahms and Trotsky -- which raises a question: Is there a Viennese cafe from Trotsky's time in the Habsburg capital in which he did not luxuriate, excogitate or vegetate?

Update: I just read that Stalin was in Vienna briefly in early 1913 with Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky. I can't find evidence that Stalin frequented any cafes. In his excellent Stalin biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore reports that Stalin, like Hitler, liked to take walks in the park around the Schonbrunn Palace.

Montefiore quotes Trotsky's description of his first encounter with Stalin: "I was sitting at the table beside the samovar in the apartment of Skobelev ... in the ancient capital of the Habsburgs [...] when suddenly the door opened with a knock and an unkown man entered. He was short ... thin ... his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks ... I saw nothing in his eyes that resembled friendliness [...] Then, as silently as he had come, he left, leaving a very depressing but unusual impression on me." (Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin [Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2007], p. 275)

Viennese Cafes

I was in Austria for about ten days and spent about half that time in Vienna.

Here are some nice descriptions of the ethos of Viennese cafes which suggest why they were so attractive and stimulating for artists and intellectuals (a feature which has prompted at least one academic conference about Viennese cafes).

1. Alfred Polgar wrote an essay about Café Central ('Theory of Café Central'). His article is included in H. B. Segel's collection Vienna Coffeehouse Wits. Polgar writes, “Its inhabitants are … people whose hatred of their fellow human beings is as fierce as their longing for people, who want to be alone but need companionship for it” (Segel, p. 267). Polgar adds, “There are writers … who are unable to carry out their literary chores anywhere but at the Café Central. Only there, only at the tables of idleness, is the worktable laid for them, only there, enveloped by the air of indolence, will their inertia become fecundity” (Ibid.).

2. Here's an observation by Stefan Zweig: "The Viennese coffeehouse is a particular institution which is not comparable to any other in the world. As a matter of fact, it is a sort of democratic club to which admission costs the small price of a cup of coffee. Upon payment of this mite every guest can sit for hours on end, discuss, write, play cards, receive his mail, and, above all, can go through an unlimited number of newspapers and magazines" (Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday [University of Nebraska Press, 1964; 1st published in English in 1943]).

3. Here's a more recent blurb from Friedrich Torberg in his Tante Jolesch, or the Decline of the West in Anecdotes (Ariadne Press, 2008; published in German in 1975): "The classical attitude of a true habitué was possibly demonstrated even more convincingly by District Court Judge Reiter. Judge Reiter appeared each day -- for decades -- at Café Colosseum at four o'clock in the afternoon, sat down each day at the same table, was served a Melange with whipped cream and two horn-shaped shortbreads, received the evening papers first and then successively all other national and international newspapers, read them, paid, and did not have to utter a single word during this entire procedure." (p. 98 of Torberg's Tante Jolesch).

4. From Peter Altenberg's 'Coffeehouse': "You've got troubles of one kind or another -- get thee to the coffeehouse! ... You make four hundred Crowns and spend five hundred -- coffeehouse! ... You're a paper pusher and would've liked to become a doctor -- coffeehouse! ... You loathe and revile people and yet can't live without them -- coffeehouse! No place else will let you pay on credit -- coffeehouse!" (Telegrams of the Soul, trans. Peter Wortsman [Archipelago Books, 2005], p. 13)

5. In her article 'The City as a Context for Scientific Activity' (Endeavour 28 [March, 2004]), Maria Rentetzi writes: "The role of coffee houses as locations of scientifc exchange, as sites of learning ... has recently become the interest of historians of science. For Vienna, coffee houses have been associated with the city's cultural pre-eminence at the turn of the 19th century, and have been portrayed as clubs of philosophical, political and artistic circles." [Rentetzi here cites U. Heise's Kaffee und Kaffeehaus (Insel Verlag, 2002), which has been translated into English.]

6. In a book published just last year (Sacred Spring [Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmanns Publishing Company, 2007]), Robert Weldon Whalen writes: "Vienna's coffeehouses were highly specialized. Journalists could be found at one cafe, artists at others. While artists frequented the Scheidl, and the Fenstergucker, actors tended to congregate at the Dobner or perhaps the Café Stadtpark. Café Gabesam was a good general place for middle-class people. ... Public places with a strong sense of privacy, open businesses with intimate charm, they were the Viennese equivalent to public squares. Landsdale, in her turn-of-the-century guide to [Vienna], noted that 'the café is the centre of social life; there business is discussed and bargains concluded ... it corresponds to the Forum of the ancients.'" [Whalen here cites Maria Horner Landsdale, Vienna and the Viennese, (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates, 1902), p. 146.]

One of the above-mentioned artists' cafes, the Fenstergucker, is now a Starbucks.