The coffee of my life: From going to the coffee house

My

1983

edition of Hermann Kesten's

was once a soft yellow, but even this pale color has now been bleached from its place in the library right by the window. On the wrinkled spine of the paperback from the Ullstein edition is a disgusting ironic coffee stain, and a torn sugar sachet from the

am Salzhaus in Frankfurt am Main marks the far too small paragraph in the chapter "Vienna"

which Kesten dedicates to one of my favorite places. the

. Farther back is one of those soft waiter slips that no longer exist today, on which the sum of 8 marks 35 is added up by hand. Because the head of the note bears the logo of Azul Kaffee, a jagged mountain range with a setting red sun, I still know exactly what it was about: a pot of coffee and a piece of cake in the

on Kaiserstraße, which meanwhile, like the

, no longer exists. The invoice slip with the elegant handwriting marks the place in the chapter

where the

from which I later had one of my literary characters write a desperate letter to his beloved, which ended with the four words: "Nobody reaches my world."

Almost everything has been said with that. Because there is no better place to withdraw from life than the café. With the punch line that nowhere else is it possible to immediately let the rest of the world participate in this retreat. This is its irresistible paradox. The tables are small enough that no stranger joins them. But you sit close enough to each other to be a guest audience in countless conversations around you. An ideal state for the writer, which is almost equivalent to the childhood dream of invisibility. Although you are on your own, you have the opportunity to participate in the life of others. Yes, even in world events. Because the café has not only been a popular hub for news and communication of all kinds since the beginning of its existence, but also the placewhere newspaper readers find the necessary peace and quiet to immerse themselves in their favorite papers. The coffee house in Vienna is unthinkable as an institution without the excellent selection of newspapers that hang on the wall every morning, still smelling of printer black, elegantly clamped in wooden poles and rolled up. Nowadays one almost has to remember that before the digitalization of life began, a daily newspaper was the most important and most direct source of news from all over the world, alongside radio or the very latest television.Nowadays one almost has to remember that before the digitalization of life began, a daily newspaper was the most important and most direct source of news from all over the world, alongside radio or the very latest television.Nowadays one almost has to remember that before the digitalization of life began, a daily newspaper was the most important and most direct source of news from all over the world, alongside radio or the very latest television.

Notebook entries begin with the name of a café

My enthusiasm for the café did not come from the newspaper, but directly from my discovery of literature. The moment I began to study writers seriously, I began to take ample notes on the books I read. The first remaining notebook is black and made of leather, on the front page under the heading “My address”, which I dutifully filled out as an adolescent, there is the great word “telephone”. And the first word I handwritten on the checkered pages is, in retrospect, to be understood programmatically, “adventure”. Because entries in such a notebook sound much nicer when they begin with the name of a café, I began to go straight to the coffee house in imitation of Viennese decadent literary writers like Peter Altenberg,to write there. The notebook comes from the time when I founded the “Stadtfräcke” association as a high school student with three of my friends.