English
Without reducing the Germans to the condition of blonde, beer drinkers beasts, some day we will have to heed Nietzsche in this aspect too and study the history of societies so inseparable from the history of food and drugs and the environment in which both were and are consumed.
We will start, for example, with Vienna around the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Christian era and gauge the significance that the café life had –from which thanks to Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Hermann Broch and Robert Musil we have inhereted an invaluable literary testimony- in the cultural epicenter of the Austro-Hungarian twilight during those bright and ambivalent Belle Epoque years.
It’s so much so, that at that time the Viennese café became an institution of a very special class. As it not only was the most crucial axis of social life but also the indisputable center of cultural activity. Thus, the avant-garde artists association Hagenbund, whose formal language came to dominate the artistic activity in Vienna after the Great War, it took its name from Herr Hagen, the owner of the café-restaurant Zum blauen Freihaus, where they met. Another group of artists, the Siebener Club, had its origin in the cafe Sperl, and the militant group of Austrian Artists Association -better known as the Viennese Secession- originated on April 3, 1897 in the Coffee Griensteidl the same way another coffee table six years later was witness of the birth of a group attracted by a more rational and practical aesthetics emerged within Secession itself The Wiener Werkstätte or Viennese Workshops.
The original Viennese Secession had 50 members chaired by Gustav Klimt. A year after its foundation its first showroom and activities opened, a memorable beautiful building designed by cubic forcefulness Joseph Maria Olbrich around 1898 whose frontispiece, with the inevitable sign of the times referring to a pantheistic mysticism- whether it is about the heading “Sacred spring” in the front or, more uniquely, the extraordinary gold leaf dome shaped in a huge laurel wreath crowns the building, you can still read the famous inscription ” To the age its art, to art its freedom“, a veritable declaration of principles affirming the need for a new art characteristic of the new times that at that time was present in Europe, at the very threshold of transforming the face of the old continent, and very specifically of the Danube civilization orbiting around Vienna and its cafés devoted to its particular swan song, forever.
For more details on the coffee Griensdteil visit: http://www.cafegriensteidl.at
Paul Oilzum
Both the grand exhibition pavilion of the Viennese Secession (Friedrichstrasse 12) as Griensteidl café, where it was founded, remain in full use. These are two inexcusable visits when you rent one of the apartments in Vienna
Translated by: Maria
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