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One day at Café Central in Vienna in 1894, Peter Altenberg was reading a story in the newspaper about the disappearance of a 15-year-old girl. He decided to write a short poem in her honour. Then, by mere chance, some of the great names of the Viennese literary world entered the café: Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Felix Salten, Richard Beer-Hofmann and Hermann Bahr. Schnitzler, surprised to find that Altenberg wrote poetry, abruptly took his poem and passed it along to Beer-Hofmann, who read it at a gathering that Sunday. Then Bahr, after hearing it in person, sought out Altenberg to write for a magazine. Later, the satirist Karl Kraus brought him to a publisher.
Such were the circumstances that led to Altenberg, a cigarette salesman, becoming a writer at 34. ‘Just think,’ he later wrote, ‘of the coincidences on which a person’s destiny depends!’ For the rest of his life, he gave the Café Central as his postal address.
At the time, there were about 1,000 such coffeehouses in the city alone. Café Central was among the most famous, and the director Berthold Viertel likened it to a ‘house of life’. A succession of smoke-filled rooms went deep into the house – made for billiards, chess, card games and, of course, coffee drinking – culminating in a high and open courtyard at its end, inhabited by people farthest removed from the reality outside. One could lose their whole life here, and many did. It was debated whether coffeehouses were truly a place of creativity or frivolous laziness. Many resolved to leave the coffeehouse behind, as if it were a vice, and then failed to kick the habit. ‘No, from now on, no more of this torpid existence, this beastly lounging about,’ wrote one dejected patron; the lost time had only ‘blunted my own intelligence’.
Yet creativity did flourish here. Modernist art was born in these coffeehouses, and the literary crowd that christened Altenberg was called Young Vienna. For many of its artist-patrons, the relaxed social environment was a sanctuary from the hostility in the street. Like any insular world, the coffeehouse created its own private sensibility – ironic toward life and cynical about what institutions can provide. For Altenberg, the coffeehouse was home. Salten said he was ‘indigenous here and yet comes from elsewhere.’
Outside these leisurely café rooms was Austria-Hungary, a vast multicultural empire, unlike any other on the continent. The Habsburg dynasty had ruled Austrian lands since the 13th century. In 1867, Austria merged with Hungary to form the Dual Monarchy, a tangled mix of nationalities, languages and religions that were often at odds with one another. By 1910, it had a population of more than 51 million people speaking 11 different languages. On a visit in 1898, Mark Twain humorously wrote there were instead ‘eleven distinct varieties of jealousy, hostilities, and warring interests.’ Brawls in parliament were common, and even naming a street could provoke bitterness. In the army, officers spoke to their multi-ethnic soldiers in a rudimentary pidgin known as ‘Army Slavic’. However, even this ended up becoming offensive.
Though the many different peoples in Austria-Hungary made the empire politically electric, it maintained its tottering stability for a long time. The empire’s diversity came not from any liberal conviction, but from the Habsburgs’ slow accumulation of territory over centuries. To appease its new Muslim subjects, in 1912 Austria-Hungary even added Islam as a legally recognised religion alongside Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Protestantism and Judaism.
Atop this sprawling empire was Emperor Franz Joseph I, whose reign (1848-1916) was so long it gave the impression of permanent stability. While the society below him was quickly modernising, he presided like a patriarch, following decorum to a fault. But the Habsburgs themselves were in disarray. Franz Joseph’s first heir, his son Rudolf, died by suicide in a love-pact with his mistress; the second in line, the emperor’s brother, died of typhoid. Another brother, Maximilian, was briefly emperor of Mexico until his execution, and Franz Josef’s own wife Elisabeth was assassinated in 1898. Given the extraordinary circumstances, it fell on his nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to succeed him. While reformist, Ferdinand was no less traditionalist than Franz Joseph himself, and was just as passionately committed to the integrity of the Dual Monarchy.
Coffee was enjoyed along with potent alcohol that was easily consumed to excess
The empire’s strict order gave some buffer against the rise of national separatism convulsing Europe then. To many nationalists, Austria-Hungary was a stain on historical progress. For Serbian nationalists in particular, the empire’s existence was an affront to their greater dreams. Serbia achieved international recognition of its independence only in 1878, and most Serbs and other Southern Slavs did not even reside in its borders. The fact that most of them lived in Austria-Hungary rather than Serbia was viewed by its nationalists as a great tragedy.
While the empire enjoyed a sense of permanence, Serbia endured constant upheaval. The country’s 19th century was defined by a long struggle against Ottoman rule. Serbians fought two major uprisings in the early 1800s before achieving autonomy. They spent the rest of the century consolidating a fragile statehood, guarding themselves amid great power rivalries. Serbia’s neighbours were just as fragile and prone to instability. Neighbouring Ottoman Macedonia faced constant insurgencies, and the Balkan states fought two wars between 1912 and 1913. Then there was Bosnia – the fixation of all Serbian nationalists. Occupied by Austria-Hungary in 1878, it was then annexed entirely by 1908, causing widespread anger among Serbs.
Though Austro-Hungarian officials knew that war with Serbia was possible, it was avoided until 1914 through delicate diplomacy and some luck. However, they underestimated the depth of animosity toward them in Serbia. It was simply not felt in the empire’s everyday life. But the feelings were intensifying, kindled in Serbia’s own coffeehouses: the kafanas. These were places of deep emotion, gossip and radicalism. Coffee was enjoyed along with potent alcohol that was easily consumed to excess. Patrons indulged in both joyous entertainment and grief, and the restless energy accumulated as if asking for some release. The clash of these two very different worlds provoked the end of what was thought to be a permanent empire.
We don’t know for sure how coffee first came to Vienna, but lore says that it was brought during the Ottoman siege of 1683. Mysterious sacks of beans left by the defeated soldiers were discovered to be aromatic. They were then refined with milk and sugar, and the first coffeehouse in Vienna was opened in 1685 by an Armenian merchant. In the succeeding two centuries, a culture developed around these cafés as a place to socialise and read the papers. By the mid-1820s, they had started to gain a literary reputation, specifically around the Silbernes Kaffeehaus – a predecessor to the modernist scene that would take over Vienna.
But in the Balkans, coffee culture had deeper roots since the Ottomans directly ruled there and imposed their customs. As the Ottoman-Bosnian historian Ibrahim Peçevi noted, even in the 16th century the kafana was associated with idlers, pleasure-seekers and the literati. However, the writers who frequented the kafanas in Ottoman times were grouped with the immoral and the talentless. A contemporary of Peçevi, the historian Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, couldn’t resist observing that ‘the true poets and scholars are not those who compose verses in kafanas.’
The People’s Radical Party met at the Bulevar and the Moskva; the Progressives at the Kasina
In the succeeding centuries, the kafana took on an outsized importance for Serbs and other Southern Slavs under Ottoman occupation. Because they had so few public institutions of their own, social life had to find other outlets. People found their voice in the marketplace, the inns and, most of all, in kafanas. As the Serbian writer Branislav Nušić noted, ‘our kafanas before the war were the sole expression of our public life.’ Labourers came looking for work. The sick found their doctors here, as did clients their lawyers. Matchmakers arranged possible marriages. In Belgrade, kafanas became the place of many firsts: the first electric light bulb, the first telephone line, the first book fair, and the first film screening. Even theatre halls had trouble competing with these spaces, which the public often preferred because they hosted vaudeville, light musical comedy, and other interactive performances. The kafana was where the drama of life resided.
By the late 19th century, Serbian kafanas became politically marked territories, each a world unto itself, differentiated by values and class. Rarely did a disciplined supporter of one party set foot in another’s kafana. The People’s Radical Party met at the Bulevar and the Moskva; the Progressives at the Kasina. Elections themselves were volatile and often violent affairs, especially after King Milan I nullified the results in 1883. As Nušić recounts, kafanas commonly served as ‘field hospitals where some conscious voter with a cracked skull was brought to have wounds cleaned and his strength restored.’
Political anger festered in these places, and so did conspiracies, most famously in 1903. That June, dozens of army officers met in Belgrade’s kafanas, drinking and working themselves up. Herbert Vivian, a British traveller, accompanied them at the Srpska Kruna on the night of the plot. He described the officers’ faces as growing ‘redder and more shiny, their eyes sparkled like those of wild beasts, and there was something particularly devilish about the madness of their laughter.’ As the hours passed, the laughter gave way to unnerving seriousness. Intoxicated, the officers moved toward the palace and killed the Serbian King Alexander and Queen Draga, whom they considered to be traitors to the nationalist cause. They proceeded to mutilate their bodies before throwing them off the bedroom balcony onto the garden below. Along with the Srpska Kruna, four other kafanas were implicated in the conspiracy that resembled a brutal, drunken rampage but was in fact a meticulously planned cruelty.
The political life of Austria-Hungary might have been raucous, but it never reached the level of violent intensity seen in Serbia. In his autobiography The World of Yesterday (1942), Stefan Zweig likened the prewar period to a ‘golden age of stability’ where ‘everything in our almost 1,000-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency.’ The citizens of Vienna, he wrote, lived in their empire as if it were a ‘solid stone house’.
Despite the empire’s faults, its patriots felt the future was secure. The middle class looked healthier, dressed better and had more amenities than ever. Many believed, said Zweig, that ‘the technical progress of mankind must inevitably result in an equally rapid moral rise.’ What happened in neighbouring Serbia, or anywhere beyond Austria-Hungary, was all too easy to ignore. ‘The Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Balkan War itself did not penetrate the existence of my parents,’ he wrote, ‘and truly, what did it matter to them what took place outside of Austria?’
With the empire’s stability as their anchor, Viennese artists instead probed inward. They pursued art with painful awareness of the inner turmoil that modernity wrought. Hofmannsthal, who was there when Altenberg was discovered at Café Central, wrote a long fictional letter that captured the mood. In The Lord Chandos Letter (1902), he lamented losing the ability to think or speak clearly: ‘For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts.’ Young Vienna viewed life expressed as a coherent whole to be a lost cause. Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem about a caged panther might as well have been written about the empire’s modernists: ‘It seems to him there are/a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.’
The Viennese café was a rumour mill. While gossipy, it had a democratic sensibility, albeit a male-dominated one
Young Vienna was indebted to one man who seemed to be speaking directly to their condition. In the 1890s, the philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach developed a devoted following by asserting that the self is a ‘convenient fiction’. Mach seemed to confirm the impressionistic impulse arriving from Paris: sensory life was a means for understanding one’s fractured interiority. Altenberg likened his own writing to a kind of ‘telegram-style of the soul’. Mach was giving this style an empirical basis, and his words electrified Young Vienna. For them, whose literary life was defined by happenstance and instability, to write and live in the coffeehouse was to embody Mach’s ideas. Art had to be reinvented to suit this new sense of self. Young Vienna took up these ideas passionately through aphoristic writing, semi-journalistic feuilletons of daily life and sketches – composing their works in the coffeehouses they haunted.
As Vienna enjoyed the security to write freely, one critic felt otherwise. Karl Kraus is remembered as a firebrand satirist who began his career lambasting the Viennese literary scene that congregated around Café Griensteidl (often pejoratively called ‘Café Megalomania’). His essay ‘Demolished Literature’ (1897), published when he was just 23 years old, earned Kraus notoriety. Parodying the impressionistic style, he wrote: ‘Lack of talent, premature mellowness, poses, megalomania, local girl, cravat, mannerisms, incorrect datives, monocle, and mysterious nerves – they all have to go.’ The text was so incendiary that he was assaulted by a fellow writer, Felix Salten.
These dramas coincided with the last days of Café Griensteidl, which was demolished for urban redevelopment in 1897. The following year, Young Vienna officially migrated to their new home, Café Central. Despite the camaraderie, the critic Alfred Polgar recounted how they lived ‘at the meridian of loneliness’. The artist’s circle was an ‘organisation of the disorganised’, made up of people who loved and resented each other in equal measure. One lived ‘parasitically on the anecdote that circulates around him’. The coffeehouse was a rumour mill. While gossipy, it had a democratic sensibility, albeit a male-dominated one. Zweig called it the ‘finest place of education for everything new … a kind of democratic club, accessible to anyone for an inexpensive cup of coffee.’ Even if not strictly true, this was the ideal.
Kraus maintained that the coffeehouse was merely his workplace. For many other artist-patrons, though, it was an entire worldview. ‘It is a coffeehouse, take it as it is!’ wrote Polgar. Altenberg’s poem ‘Coffeehouse’ (1918) lists the many reasons to enter: ‘Your boots are torn … you’re virtually on the verge of suicide … you loathe and revile people and yet can’t live without them – coffeehouse!’ Unlike the world outside, this was a place where purposelessness sanctified the stay. And artists were attracted to it like a ‘murderer to the scene of a crime’, in Polgar’s words, a place where they, too, had ‘killed so much time, wiped out entire years.’
In the kafanas, men spoke of ‘arms and bombs they had hidden at their lodgings’, of conspiracies and future war
While war was a distant memory for Austria-Hungary, in Serbia the wounds were still fresh. In 1912, it joined the other Balkan states in attacking the dying Ottoman Empire and emerged victorious. In 1913, it fought another war against Bulgaria, which had occupied Macedonia. Emboldened by both victories, doubling in size as a country, Serbian public life was restless. The borders were disorderly and the outside world was constantly infiltrating, filling the kafanas with rumours and heroic stories.
Inexpensive coffee and drink was the shared activity for soldiers returning from the front. The veterans preached the ideas of revolution and Greater Serbia. In the kafanas they frequented, these men boasted openly about their exploits against the Turks and the Bulgarians. They spoke of the ‘arms and bombs they still had hidden at their lodgings’, of conspiracies and future war. These stories spread, and many viewed Austria-Hungary as the final adversary of Serbia.
Their grievances concentrated on neighbouring Bosnia, annexed years prior in 1908. That year, the revolutionary Young Turks took power in Constantinople, and fears emerged that the new government would reassert Ottoman claims on Bosnia. To forestall the possibility, Austria-Hungary annexed the territory. Since a plurality of Bosnia’s population was Serbian, this was met with anger. At a momentous rally led by the writer Branislav Nušić in Belgrade, he spoke to the anger with a call to arms: ‘To the battle! To the Drina! War to Austria! Death to plunderers!’
The annexation produced a wave of disaffected youths from Bosnia pouring into Belgrade. In the city’s kafanas, they were drawn to the chatter of veterans and ideologues. The veterans, sporting traditional Orthodox beards and with the authority of wartime experience, took these young émigrés under their wing like fathers. Most of these chosen sons were poor and easily swayed, and the stories kept them in a ferment.
As the historian Joachim Remak wrote in Sarajevo (1959), ‘both groups seemed forever to be living in the expectation of some great happening that would change their lives.’ There was a shared poverty, but also a conviction that they would be the vanguard of an altogether different future: a country for Serbs and all other Southern Slavs called Yugoslavia. It was during this feverish climate that an impressionable and impoverished young man named Gavrilo Princip came to Belgrade. Rejected by the Serbian army because of his small stature, he felt humiliated, forced to absorb wartime stories second-hand. He and his co-conspirators frequented the Zlatna Moruna kafana. In the courtyard, he practised shooting.
What did Kraus see in Vienna’s literary coffeehouses that so disturbed him? He did not know the depth of anger and resentment in the Balkans. Yet he understood the fractured and inward-looking attitudes of Viennese writers as having disastrous consequences. He likened the empire to an ‘experimental station for world destruction’. For Kraus, the artists had turned the outside world into a detached ornament. They cultivated a kind of beautiful neurosis that made them ignorant of catastrophe. In an early 1893 letter, Kraus said: ‘I hate and hated this false, lying “Decadence”, which eternally flirts with itself.’ The style was even seeping into the newspapers. As he wrote during the Balkan Wars: ‘Austria was represented on the Balkans by the impressionists.’ War journalists were writing as if mainly preoccupied with their own subjective feelings.
The violent nationalism fermenting in the Balkans was alien to Vienna, but its radicals did find their way to the city. Vladimir Gaćinović, the leader of the revolutionary secret cell Young Bosnia, studied at Vienna University from 1910 to 1912 as part of a cohort of 30 youths from Bosnia. A puritan possessed by historical grievance, he was disgusted by the hedonistic attitudes of his peers. In Vienna, he saw his Serbian and Bosnian compatriots spending ‘empty hours’ in cafés, and viewed this as evidence of their ‘physical, intellectual, and moral degeneration’. He chastised fellow students for living a ‘catastrophic way of life in cafés full of cynicism’. He feared they might bring this fecklessness home. As Gaćinović wrote, ‘these young men are … absorbing in the gutters of Vienna, Berlin and Paris, the ugliest side of Europe, which they later bring back among us.’ Instead, he worked to set up underground cells, establishing two in Vienna, five in Sarajevo, one in Zagreb, and another in Pakrac, Croatia.
Gaćinović represented an antithesis to Young Vienna. The Viennese artists turned inward to explore their own interiority. Gaćinović and Young Bosnia were instead ascetics for whom the body and its pleasures had no meaning. The core members abstained from sex and alcohol. Unlike Young Vienna, which elevated its purposelessness into art, Young Bosnia was defined by an all-consuming commitment to their cause. They were described as ‘quiet, young, undernourished, intense, swinging furiously between moods of sentimentality and ruthless revolutionary aggression.’ The group operated without a formal structure. Politically, they sought a single state for Southern Slavs, and the influences were drawn from various anarchist, socialist, and nationalist texts. What unified them most was a romantic belief that through destruction comes beautiful creation. The radical act would provide their lives with meaning.
Knowing they would likely die of tuberculosis intensified their desire to act
Though most patrons of the Café Central knew nothing of Gaćinović and his followers, there was one exception: Leon Trotsky. Known then by his birth name Bronstein, he had been living in Vienna since 1907. The café served him well with its 250 international newspapers. He gained a reputation for being a skilled chess player, and often sat alone among papers and cigarettes. While we don’t know how much Trotsky interacted with Young Vienna at Café Central, he must have known them; Kraus was surprised to learn of him later leading the 1917 Russian Revolution: ‘Who would have expected that of Herr Bronstein from Café Central!’
Trotsky met Gaćinović only once, at the Café de la Rotonde in Paris, but never in Vienna. He was shocked by Gaćinović’s asceticism, describing him as ‘one of these types which are born to provoke a feeling of uneasiness among orderly people.’ Yet Trotsky, much like Gaćinović, had his suspicions that the leisurely pace of Vienna hid darker truths. In his dealings with the socialists of Austria-Hungary – he wrote little about the literary scene itself – he criticised them for not acknowledging the calamity that could soon befall them. Trotsky seconded Kraus’s diagnosis of coffeehouse myopia. Viennese intellectuals could not see the ‘gigantic soldier’s boot over the ant-heap in which they were rushing about with such self-abandon.’
Gaćinović first met Princip in Sarajevo in 1912. The impression he made on Princip, despite being only four years older, was enormous. Borivoje Jevtić, who introduced the two in his apartment, later wrote that Princip was ‘with Gaćinović even when he was not with him.’ He wished to emulate Gaćinović’s disdain for worldly pleasures, ideological zeal and calm demeanour in enduring suffering.
The Zlatna Moruna was a modest establishment with a seedy reputation. Like many kafanas in Belgrade, it was frequented by workers, merchants, artisans and students, along with the always-present police informants. Billiards and gambling were a common way to pass the time, as was smoking and drinking. Across the street was a fish market which sold beluga sturgeon (moruna), from which the kafana got its name. On more than one occasion, Princip slept across the Zlatna Moruna after being evicted for a small sum owed. Along with two other co-conspirators, Trifko Grabež and Nedeljko Čabrinović, they made this kafana their home base. The trio lived on the extreme edge. They had little left to lose since all three suffered from tuberculosis. Knowing they would likely die of illness intensified their desire to act. The motto of Young Bosnia captured their fanatical drive: ‘We want either to die in life or live in death.’
In April 1914, a letter arrived at the Zlatna Moruna addressed to Čabrinović. Inside was a newspaper clipping announcing that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent, would soon visit Sarajevo. It contained no advice or call to action. Jevtić testified years later (perhaps untruthfully) that they opened the letter together. The clipping was passed ‘hand to hand almost in silence.’ The date alone of Ferdinand’s visit – 28 June – was ‘sufficient to make us unanimous, without discussion, as to what we should do about it.’ The Archduke’s arrival also fell on Vidovdan, a holiday commemorating the Serbian loss to Ottoman armies in Kosovo. This gave their plan a prophetic quality. On that day, Princip killed the Archduke, and soon Europe erupted into a war that would annihilate Austria-Hungary.
Princip’s arrest after the assassination was the first time he ever set foot in the Austro-Hungarian heartland. He spent his last days in the Terezín fortress in Bohemia. Sick with tuberculosis, he had his right arm amputated, and died malnourished on 28 April 1918. He did not see the end of the First World War. Despite never having visited Vienna, he scratched on the walls a quote that may as well have come from his idol Gaćinović: ‘Our ghosts will walk through Vienna and roam through the Palace, frightening the lords.’