The mystique of the Vienna coffeehouse is extraordinary. The literature on it is formidable.¹ Even now when it no longer plays the role it once did in the cultural life of the great city, it continues to inspire lore and legend. The challenge to capture its essence is irresistible. One of its most astute observers, Milan Dubrovic, recalls it this way in his book of Vienna coffeehouse reminiscences:

Were one to define it sociologically, it was a milieu of smooth transitions, of existential mixed forms and relativizing individualities, hence a particularly suitable forum for free speech, impulsive discussion, and the...

Photographs from Bahrʹs middle years show him as a burly, densely bearded man. With the eventual whitening of his mane he came to resemble Tolstoy in his prophetic aspect. Had Bahr not looked so in life, one would have tended to imagine him this way. He was a cultural figure of prodigious energies and talents, a powerful advocate and catalyst of change who approached what he regarded as a necessary transvaluation of Austrian society and culture with a true sense of missionary zeal. He was the leading advocate of the modernist movement in turn-of-the-century Austria and the driving force in...

That is how Kraus, with his usual perspicacity, summed up the significance of his writing in one of his many aphorisms. The annoyance he in fact caused his contemporaries is legendary. Fearless, uncompromising, high-principled, dogged, vindictive, Kraus, above all through the medium of his own journal,Die Fackel(The Torch), waged an extraordinary, indeed unique, campaign throughout his life for the highest standards of morality and ethics in Austrian public life. He disliked far more than he liked and his detractors were many. His relentless exposure of corruption wherever he thought he found it and his acrimonious but satirically masterful...

Peter Altenberg, or P. A., as he preferred to be called, was born Richard Engländer. There was little in his family background to suggest that he was destined to become the embodiment of the turn-of-the-century bohemian and a writer whose reputation in his own country has reached legendary proportions.¹ His father, Moritz, was a cultured and successful Viennese wholesaler of Yugoslav peasant goods with a penchant for French literature (Hugo was his favorite author), which his son inherited, and his mother was an adoring parent. Much of what we know of Altenberg’s family and his early years comes from his...

Salten has three different reputations.¹ Internationally, he has a permanent place in world literature for something that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Vienna coffeehouse. Wherever children read and wherever people love animals, Salten will be celebrated as the author ofBambi(1923). SubtitledA Life in the Woods,the charming tale of a deer was published in English translation in 1928 with a foreword by John Galsworthy.² It was subsequently made into a film by Walt Disney in 1942, and that more than the book itself assures Salten’s immortality.

Whatever the popularity ofBambiin his native Austria,...

Egon Friedell¹ was a born entertainer, and like all true entertainers, drew sustenance from an audience, whether in a coffeehouse, cabaret, or on the stage of a theater. A big, robust, cigar-chomping life of the party, he was a landmark of the Vienna coffeehouse scene and an intimate of Peter Altenberg. Storytelling came easily to him. His sparkling good-natured wit earned him a large following, and when cabaret culture became part of Viennese nightlife in the early years of the twentieth century, Friedell found a new environment as felicitous to his talents as the coffeehouse. When the short-lived Cabaret Nachtlicht...

Alfred Polgar¹ enjoys a formidable reputation as a writer of ʺsmall forms,ʺ so much so that he is usually referred to as the ʺGerman master of the small formʺ (der deutsche Meister der kleinen Form). This is, in fact, the title bestowed on him by Walter Benjamin.² The list of his admirers among twentieth-century German-language writers is impressive. It includes, to mention just the best-known names, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Hermann Brach, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel, and, of course, Walter Benjamin. The other side of the ledger is meagerly represented...

Anton Kuh¹ may be remembered most for his no-holds-barred assault on Karl Kraus in the form of a public lecture delivered on 25 October 1925 in the auditorium of the Vienna Konzerthaus. There were certainly many who thought Kraus had it coming to him—he had engaged in enough character assassination in his time—but few would have dared this kind of frontal attack in a public forum. Kuh could not have cared less. He was a monocle-wearing rebel who lived a bohemian coffeehouse life and obviously reveled in it. He had a great way with words, was as flamboyant...

Edmund Wengraf is represented here only on the basis of his small piece, ʺKaffeehaus und Literaturʺ (ʺCoffeehouse and Literatureʺ), a critique of the Vienna coffeehouse because of its harmful effect, in Wengrafʹs view, on Austrian literary culture. The piece was published in theWiener Literatur-Zeitungon 15 May 1891. Wengraf himself was a well-known and respected Viennese journalist in his day. He studied law and philosophy but soon turned to a career in journalism. From 1889 to 1893 he wrote theater reviews and social-political pieces for theWiener Allgemeine Zeitung. In 1894, he and Heinrich Osten became the editors of...