Gopnik, What Cafés Did For Liberalism

21/08/2023, 23:30 What Cafés Did for Liberalism | The New Yorker
Books
What Cafés Did for

Liberalism
They were essential social institutions of political modernity—caffeinated
pathways out of clan society and into a cosmopolitan world.
By Adam Gopnik
December 17, 2018
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/24/what-cafes-did-for-liberalism 1/10
European cafés were “thirdspaces,” neither entirely public nor entirely private, where revolutionary discourse
flourished. Illustration by Rutu Modan
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hachar Pinsker’s “A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish

S Culture” (New York University) might seem, at a glance, like one of those
“Bagels of Our Fathers” books that a Leo Rosten could have written back when
Jewishness, as a cultural subject, still struck Americans as fresh and mostly
funny. The cover shows an appealing pastel of a sunny, amazingly high-
ceilinged and arch-filled café in Berlin—a lost Eden of conviviality and
conversation. And the book itself is hugely entertaining and intimidatingly well
researched, with scarcely a café in which a Jewish writer raised a cup of coffee
from Warsaw to New York left undocumented. Yet it’s really a close empirical
study of an abstract political theory. The theory, associated with the eminent
German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, is that the coffeehouses
and salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped lay the
foundation for the liberal Enlightenment—a caffeinated pathway out of clan
society into cosmopolitan society. Democracy was not made in the streets but
among the saucers.
When social spaces were created outside the direct control of the state
(including commercial ones, run for profit), civil society could start to flourish
in unexpected ways. This was visible in the spread of café life through
European cities, Pinsker observes, in the nineteenth century and afterward. It
wasn’t that the conversations in the café were necessarily intellectually
productive; it was that the practice of free exchange itself—the ability to
interact on equal terms with someone not of your clan or club—generated
social habits of self-expression that abetted the appetite for self-government.
For Jews, with their constant habit of self-expression and their distant dream of
self-government, the café was an especially inviting space.
here was a time—astonishing to a contemporary New Yorker, shuffling

T ratlike to a precarious lunchtime perch at a Hale and Hearty Soups—
when the places you’d go for a nosh and a cup were genuinely splendid,
spacious and rich in an overcharge of luxury. The Israeli Nobel laureate Shmuel
Agnon wrote of his first experience as a kid from a town in Galicia visiting a
big-city café in Lviv: “Gilded chandeliers suspended from the ceiling and lamps
shining from every single wall and electric lights turned on in the daytime and
marble tables gleaming, and people of stately mien wearing distinguished
clothes sitting on plush chairs, reading big newspapers. And above them,
waiters dressed like dignitaries.” All that for the price of a coffee.
One of the pleasures of Pinsker’s book, for anyone with a longing for a lost era
of public splendor, is to be introduced to the locales where people shared that
splendor. In Vienna, the Café Griensteidl proved a magnet for “malcontents
and raisonneurs,” with bentwood chairs and plenty of reading light and
newspapers on sticks. The still extant Café Central had an interior like a
miniaturized San Marco, with hallucinatory Byzantine columns and swooping
enclosing spandrels and squinches. (The fin-de-siècle modernist writer Peter
Altenberg listed his address as “Vienna, First District, Café Central.”) Yet in its
prime it was a “place of politics,” and crowded with émigré revolutionaries. A
famous story had Leopold Berchtold, the Foreign Minister of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, being warned that a great war might spark a revolution in
Russia. “And who will lead this revolution?” he scoffed. “Perhaps Mr.
Bronshtein sitting over there at the Café Central?” Mr. Bronshtein took the
name Leon Trotsky, and did.
For Jews, Pinsker argues, the investment in the café as a social institution was,
across Europe through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
particularly intense. The great cafés were “thirdspaces,” neither entirely public
nor entirely private; they were escape zones where, contrary to the theme from
“Cheers,” people often didn’t know your name, or what shtetl you hailed from.
A patriotic Polish writer could meet other Polish patriots at a Warsaw café,
read the papers, make plans, share poems, or just decide to flee to Paris. A
Jewish writer in the same café had first to decide just how Polish to appear, and
just how Jewish to remain. This affected how he dressed and whom he sat with,
but also which language he wrote in, Yiddish or Polish, and what he chose to
write about as he sat there. Pinsker, who teaches Judaic studies at the University
of Michigan, tells the story of how, in Warsaw in the nineteen-thirties, a group
of Jewish actors came into a café, dressed, as a comic provocation, as “Jews”—in
caftans and fake beards—and were urged by the manager to go elsewhere. It
was the Jewish regulars who were made most uncomfortable by the practical
joke. Not because they were ashamed—as writers, they often wrote
unabashedly as Jews—but because they were suddenly made aware of the
ambiguities that they relied upon.
The cafés of the various European cities that Pinsker focusses on—Warsaw,
Vienna, and Berlin—reflected, with startling specificity, the Jewish reality
around them. In Warsaw, which had Europe’s largest concentration of Jews
(and a vast hinterland of orthodoxy), the struggle for Jews to be both Poles and
Jews, or neither Poles nor Jews, takes on particular pathos. The Warsaw café
beats out a theme of “Otherness” and “Difference.” Many Jews were at once
proud to be different and conscious of being readily “Othered,” even when they
felt most at home. In the nineteen-twenties, the poet Antoni Slonimski wrote,
in Polish, a poem in which he asserted his dual love of a still gestating Israel
and of Poland, merged into the image of a single idealized woman. (“You are
my snowy Lebanon, dark-haired girl. . . . For one kiss I’ll give two
fatherlands.”) Polish nationalists saw betrayal in his preference for pluralism.
Later, Slonimski was assaulted in his café by an indignant right-wing Pole.
The milieu of the Warsaw café can even be seen as the basis of Isaac Bashevis
Singer’s entire œuvre. Singer wrote of his first night at a famous Warsaw café:
Before I opened the door . . . I tried for some time to summon courage. Why am I trembling
like this?—I asked myself. . . . I opened the door, and I saw a hall. Opposite, on the other
side of the hall, there was a buffet, like in a restaurant. The writers sat by the tables. Some of
them ate, others played chess, and some chatted. All of them seemed terribly important to
me, full of wisdom and higher knowledge of the kind that elevates man above worldly
troubles. . . . I expected someone to ask me who I am, what do I want, but no one
approached me. I stood there with wide-open mouth.
Singer eventually transposed the complexities of that space—the habit of

argument and the uncertainty of origin, the pensive love stories shared and the
brave assertions never quite backed up—into the humbler cafeterias of the
Upper West Side.
The talk and arguments that went on in the cafés covered every imaginable
subject under the Jewish sun, and the Gentile ones, too. Emigration, Zionism,
assimilation, the flight to America, the urge to stay home. The cafés “are the
meeting place of the like-minded,” a journalist wrote in the early years of
Berlin’s café culture. “The merchant who wants to consider his affairs and the
status of his stocks with someone; the journalist who must hear the latest and
must catch up on the day’s events from the newspaper; the man of private
means who does nothing and yet wishes to appear as something; officers,
students, in short, everyone who has any kind of interest at all in public life.”
The cafés became theatres of flirtation and romance as well, especially in

interwar Vienna. “The presence of so many women in the cafés,” Pinsker notes,
“is described in literary texts by mostly male Jewish writers.” One of them,
Melech Chmelnitzki, wrote a Yiddish poem titled “Beautiful, Strange Woman
in a Noisy Café.” The cafés remained, though, largely a male preserve. Vicki
Baum, who began her literary career in Vienna and went on to write “Grand
Hotel,” adapted into the movie for M-G-M, said, acidly, “I don’t remember a
ladies’ room in the Kaffeehaus.”
Each café town had its own character. In Vienna, the café city par excellence,
the Jewish cafégoer wanted to seem not Austrian but, instead, a sophisticated
cosmopolitan. City pride was the keynote. The patron writer-saint of the
Viennese café in the first third of the twentieth century was Karl Kraus, who
was at once Jewish and anti-Semitic, a satirist of the cafés and a habitué of
them. In Berlin, you had a smaller Jewish population and a simpler problem:
the choice seemed more narrowly poised between being Jewish and being
German.
And finally, in New York, as café culture was exported, the model of the central
café in which all kinds come together often gave way to the neighborhood café
that belonged to a subsect, usually on the political left. Emma Goldman, as a
young Russian immigrant, found herself at home in New York when she
arrived at a Lower East Side café that was well known as an anarchist hangout.
The melting pot of New York, curiously, produced the most distinct and
separate crucibles, each annealing the complexities of identity into political
causes. In every case, you could see your life in a single commercial space.
insker, lovingly attentive to the habitués of his cafés, leaves the economics
P of the cafés quite shadowy. The rule, still in place in much of Europe, was
that you need buy only a cup of coffee to occupy a seat indefinitely. Customer
loyalty is the commercial principle here. Better to sell the same writer a
hundred cups of coffee than to sell a hundred writers one cup of coffee, since
the hundred-cup man is almost certain to return for the next hundred, and the
hundred after that. Recent scholarship has made the case that repeat business is
worth much more to a small enterprise than new business, given the stability of
“recurring revenue.” The one proviso would seem to be that there has to be
enough room for new customers to find a place. The café can’t become too
exclusive a club and remain profitable. This may be why the adjective regularly
applied to the café is “grand,” or why so many cafés in Europe were
exceptionally large spaces, even if, to judge by contemporary drawings and
photographs, they were seldom close to being fully occupied.
In one of the greatest of café comedies, Charlie Chaplin’s “The Immigrant,” the
tramp, newly arrived in America from an unnamed but clearly Eastern
European place of origin, tries to put off the arrival of a check he can’t foot
simply by ordering more coffee. And it mattered that what café habitués were
habituated to was drinking coffee. Pinsker is oddly reticent about how the
coffee was made and dispensed. For coffee is in itself a kind of wonder drug—a
stimulant that seems to ease attention-based tasks. The shape and meaning of a
café surely has much to do with the connection between coffee and social
stimulation. Indeed, one of the historical functions of coffee was to not be
alcohol. European cultures that had always drunk beer instead of unsafe water
were liberated from their own stupor by the rise of caffeinated brews. The cafés
were training playgrounds in attentiveness. They made the town alert.
hat, then, of the Habermasian vision of the café as an arena of civil

W society, and of civil society as the foundation of enlightened societies?
Certainly the café could be the foundation of emancipated life—that was why
Agnon’s generation rushed there so ardently. But the study reveals a paradox of
some poignancy: no matter how elaborately articulated, no matter how high its
ceilings and how dignified its servers, civil society can’t protect cosmopolitan
communities from assault when it happens. The café may have been a
foundation, but it could never be a fortress. The most heartbreaking scenes in
Pinsker’s book are from Warsaw, where much loved ghetto institutions like
Café Sztuka stayed in business right up to the final expulsion of the Jews to
Treblinka, in 1943. Singers sang and dancers danced, with the forbearance of
easily bribed Germans, and while many condemned the frivolity (and the
implicit collaboration with the Germans) of these last cafés, the writer Michel
Mazor rightly praised their “continuous existence in a city which the Germans
regarded as a cemetery—was it not, in a certain sense, the ghetto’s protest, its
affirmation of the right to live?”
Pinsker ends his book with a melancholy account of a couple on the Lower
East Side of Manhattan who attempted to open a classic Central European-
style café a decade or so ago and failed. The rent was too high, the clientele too
restless. Still, the streets of every American city these days are littered with
coffee shops that attract hordes of laptop-equipped patrons aspiring to fill them
for as much of the day as possible. The standard thing to say, in differentiating
our post-Starbucks civilization from the vanished café civilization, is that,
where in the classic cafés the point was to interact with your fellows, the point
of spending a day working in a Starbucks, or in its cuter and more local-
seeming rivals, is never to interact with your fellows. Spending the day online,
one may be in touch with friends and advocates and lovers, but they exist
outside in the ether, not inside the coffee shop. We aren’t sharing space in a
modern coffee shop; we’re simply renting it.
Yet all those lonely and alienated Jewish writers were elsewhere, too—lost in
books and newspapers, which were the true pastime of the café. What matters
is not the words of the person at the next table but the feeling of nearness—the
sense of being able to carve out an identity among other identities, of being
potentially private in a public space and casually public even while lost in
private reveries. Those subtle habits of coexistence are taught by the
simultaneous clack of keyboards in a glass-front espresso chain as much as by
the jostling of elbows in Warsaw as the pages of the Literarishe Bleter were
turned. Mere silent proximity of social kinds seems an ignoble and inadequate
social ideal. But it remains the first principle of the more potable forms of
pluralism. ♦
Published in the print edition of the December 24 & 31, 2018, issue, with the headline
“One More Cup of Coffee.”
Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is
the author of, most recently, “The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery.”
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21/08/2023, 23:30 What Cafés Did for Liberalism | The New Yorker

What Cafés Did for

Save this story

hachar Pinsker’s “A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish

here was a time—astonishing to a contemporary New Yorker, shuffling

Singer eventually transposed the complexities of that space—the habit of

The cafés became theatres of flirtation and romance as well, especially in

hat, then, of the Habermasian vision of the café as an arena of civil

More: Cafes Liberalism Histories Books

Books & Fiction

Are Liberals on the Wrong Side of History?

Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write

Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

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