To understand this, you have to know that the Viennese coffee house is an institution of a peculiar kind, not comparable to any other in the world. It is really a sort of democratic club, and anyone can join it for the price of a cheap cup of coffee. Every guest, in return for that small expenditure, can sit there for hours on end, talking, writing, playing cards, receiving post, and above all reading an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.
A Viennese coffee house of the better sort took all the Viennese newspapers available, and not only those but the newspapers of the entire German Reich, as well as the French, British, Italian and American papers, and all the major literary and artistic international magazines, the Mercure de France as well as the Neue Rundschau, the Studio, and the Burlington Magazine. So we knew everything that was going on in the world at first hand, we heard about every book that came out, every theatrical performance wherever it took place, and we compared the reviews in all the newspapers.
Perhaps nothing contributed so much to the intellectual mobility and international orientation of Austrians as the fact that they could inform themselves so extensively at the coffee house of all that was going on in the world, and at the same time could discuss it with a circle of friends. We sat there for hours every day, and nothing escaped us, for thanks to our collective interests we pursued the orbis pictus of artistic events not with just with one pair of eyes but with twenty or so; if one of us missed something, another would point it out to him, since, with a childish wish to show off, we were always vying with each other, showing an almost sporting ambition to know the newest, very latest thing. We were engaged in constant competition for new sensations. For instance, if we were discussing the works of Nietzsche, who was still frowned upon at the time, one of us might suddenly remark, assuming a superior air: âBut Kierkegaard is better on the subject of egotism,â and at once we would all be jittery. âX knows about Kierkegaard and we donât, who is he?â
Next day we would all be racing off to the library to find the works of the dead Danish philosopher, for we felt it was a slur on us not to know something new when another boy did. Discovering and being right up to date with the very latest, most recent, most extravagant and unusual subject, one that had not yet been flogged to deathâin particular not by the official literary critics of our worthy daily papersâwas our passion, and I myself have indulged it for very many years. We were particularly keen to know all about what was not yet generally acknowledged, was difficult to get hold of, extravagant, new and radical; nothing was so abstruse and remote that our collective and avidly competitive curiosity did not want to entice it out of hiding.
During our schooldays Stefan George and Rilke, for instance, had been published in editions of only two or three hundred copies in all, and at most three or four of those copies had found their way to Vienna; no bookseller stocked them, no official critic had ever mentioned the name of Rilke. But through a miracle of the will, our little band knew every verse and every line of those poets. We beardless boys, not yet fully grown, who had to spend our days on the school bench, were the ideal readers for a young poet: curious, with enquiring and critical minds, and enthusiastic about enthusiasm itself. In fact we had a boundless capacity for enthusiasm.
For years, we adolescents did nothing during our lessons, on the way to and from school, in the coffee house, at the theatre and on walks but discuss books, pictures, music, philosophy. Anyone who performed in public as an actor or conductor, anyone who had published a book or wrote in a newspaper, was a star in our firmament.
-- Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
