Vienna 1900: Musil

If all the anecdotes related about this coffeehouse were ground up, put in a distillation chamber and gassified, a heavy, iridescent gas, faintly smelling of ammonia, would develop: the so-called air of the Cafe' Central. This defines the spiritual climate of this space, a quite special climate in which unfitness for life, and only this one, thrives in full maintenance of its unfitness. Here weakness develops those powers unique to itself, the fruits of unfruitiulness ripen, and every non-ownership bears interest. Only a real Central-ist will grasp it entirely, one who, when his coffeehouse is shut, has the feeling that he's been thrown out into raw life, abandoned to the unpredictable circumstances, anomalies, and cruelties of the unknown.

The Café Central lies on the Viennese latitude at the meridian of loneliness. Its inhabitants are, for the most part, people whose hatred of their fellow human beings is as fierce as their longing for people, who want to be alone but need companionship for it. Their inner world requires a layer of the outer world as delimiting material; their quivering solo voices cannot do without the support of the chorus. They are unclear natures, rather lost without the certainties which the feeling gives that they are a little part of a whole (to whose tone and color they contribute).

The Central-ist is a person to whom family, profession, and political party do not give this feeling. Helpfully, the coffeehouse steps in as an ersatz totality, inviting immersion and dissolution. It is thus understandable that above all women, who can really never be alone and need at least one other person along with them, have a weakness for the Cafe Central. It is a place for people who know how to abandon and be abandoned for the sake of their fate, but who do not have the nerve to live up to this fate. It is a true asylum for people who have to kill time so as not to be killed by it. It is the beloved hearth of those to whom the beloved hearth is an abomination, the refuge of married couples and lovers from the fear of undisturbed togetherness, a first-aid station for the confused who, all their lives in search of themselves and all their lives in flight from themselves, conceal their fleeing ego behind a newspaper, dreary conversations, and card playing, and press the pursuer-ego into the role of kibitzer who has to keep his mouth shut.

The Cafe Central thus represents something of an organization of the disorganized.

In this hallowed space, each halfway indeterminate individual is credited with a personality. So long as he remains within the boundaries of the coffeehouse, he can cover all his moral expenses with this credit. And any one of them who shows disdain for others' money is granted the anti-bourgeois crown.

The Central-ist lives parasitically on the anecdote that circulates about him. That is the main thing, the essential thing. Everything else, the facts of his existence, is in small print, addenda and embellishments that can also be omitted.

The guests of the Cafe Central know, love, and disdain one another. Even those who are bound by no association regard this nonassociation as association. Mutual aversion itself has the power of association in the Cafe Central; it honors and practices a Freemason-like solidarity. Every-body knows about everybody else. The Cafe is a provincial nest in the womb of the metropolis, steaming of gossip, envy, and backbiting. I think the fish in the aquarium must live like the habitues of this coffeehouse, always in the narrowest circles around one another, always busy without purpose, using the slanting refraction of light of their environment for diverse amusement, always full of expectation, but also full of anxiety lest sometime something new, playing "Sea" with a stern look, fall into the glass tank, onto their artificial miniature sea-bottom. And if, God forbid, the aquarium should turn into a banking house, they would be utterly lost.

Naturally, the Central-fish, which share the same few cubic meters of breathing space for so many hours of their lives, no longer have any timidity or reticence. The proper Central-ist leads the private life of others and doesn't play the fence with his own. Supported by the customary inclination of the place to self-mockery and to calm surrender of one's weaknesses, this creates a sphere of suspended sociability in which any kind of prudery withers and dies off. There are Central guests who go about psychically naked, without having to fear that their childlike-innocent nakedness be misinterpreted as shamelessness. Several years ago, the owner of the Café Central tried to accommodate this paradisiacal strain in the character of his regular guests by putting in a palm tree. But the young lady from the Orient did not endure the climate of the locale, despite its rather eastern character. She was hacked into small pieces, and her divided substance found use in the kitchen- either as fuel or as coffee beans- the researchers are not of one mind on the matter.

The only person who partakes of the most essential charm of this splendid coffeehouse is he who wants nothing there but to be there. Purposelessness sanctifies the stay. Perhaps the guest doesn't really like the place or the people who noisily populate it, but his nervous system imperiously demands the daily dose of Centralin. This can hardly be explained by habit alone. Nor by the fact that the Central-people are always attracted, like the murderer to the scene of the crime, to where they already killed so much time, wiped out entire years. Then what is the explanation? The atmosphere! I can only say: the atmosphere! There are writers, for example, who are unable to carry out their literary chores anywhere but at the Cafe Central. Only there, only at the tables of idleness, is the worktable laid for them, only there, enveloped by the air of indolence, will their inertia become fecundity. There are creative types to whom only in the Central does nothing come to mind, indeed elsewhere far less. There are poets and other industrialists to whom profitable thoughts come only in the Café Central; constipated people to whom only there does the door of relief open; those who long ago lost their appetite for the erotic who only there experience hunger; the silent who only in the Central find their own or somebody else's tongue; and the greedy whose money gland secretes only there.

This enigmatic coffeehouse soothes in the peaceless people who visit it something that I like to call cosmic uneasiness. In this place of loose relationships, the relationship to Cod and the stars also loosens. The creature escapes from its compulsory relations to the universe into an irresponsible, sensuous, chance relationship to nothingness. The intimidations of eternity do not penetrate the walls of the Café Central, and between them you enjoy the sweet unconcern of the moment.

On the love life of the Café Central, on the balance of social distinctions in it, on the literary and political currents by which its frayed shores are washed, on those buried alive in the Central-cavern longingly awaiting their excavation yet hoping that it will not occur, on the masked play of wit and foolishness that in those rooms turns every night into Mardi Gras, on these and other things there is still much to say. But whoever is interested in the Café Central knows all this anyway, and whoever isn't interested in the Café Central we have no interest in.

It is a coffeehouse, take it as it is! Never will you ever come upon such a place again. What Knut Hamsun says about the city of Christiania in the first sentence of his immortal Hunger applies to it as well: "No one leaves her whom she did not mark."

“Theorie des 'Cafe Central,’” 1926. Original text in Alfred Polgar, Kleine Schriften, 4:254-59.

1 A reference to the seventeenth century German mystic writer Johann Schefler (1624-77), best known under his pseudonym, Angelus Silesius (the Angel of Silesia). His major work was Das Cherubinische Wandersmann (The Angelic Pilgrim), essentially a collection of moral apothegms.