Leona Rittner,W. Scott Haine and Jeffrey H. Jackson,eds,The Thinking Space: The Café as a Cultural Institution in Paris,Italy and Vienna

Reviewed by: Tag Gronberg, Birkbeck College, London, UK

The jacket for The Thinking Space rightly points out that over the past decade cafés have been the subject of renewed interest amongst scholars. The year 2013 for example saw the publication of at least two scholarly edited collections on the subject: as well as Ashgate’s The Thinking Space, Berghahn Books published The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture (eds Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg and Simon Shaw-Miller). Both studies proceed from the assumption that cafés can be understood as institutions, in other words that such spaces were more than simply the backdrops for urban social encounter. The Thinking Space provides a fascinating account of ways in which, since the eighteenth century, the intelligentsia of three countries deployed the amenities of the café as part of their professional practice: the entire panoply (it would seem) of Modernist writers, artists and composers in Vienna; Baudelaire, Aragon, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sartre in Paris; Casanova and Goldoni in Venice, the Futurists in Florence and Milan. At the generic level, it would seem that cafés can epitomize (and authenticate) the cultural achievements of an entire city – Paris, Vienna – if not indeed the nation itself. This proves relevant well beyond the realms of academia. Today’s traveller soon discovers that whether in Oxford or Paris, Venice or Vienna, refurbished ‘historical’ cafés are considered good business, both for the establishment and for the local tourist industry, allowing customers to bask in the knowledge that they are following in the footsteps of the great and the good.

The title The Thinking Space offers readers a pleasing play on words; we are invited to consider the café as a place to think, the means whereby to think and perhaps most enticingly, to ponder the possibility that space itself can in some sense think. As the essays in various ways make clear, these are not so much alternatives, as overlapping paradigms through which to explore the significance of the café in different historical contexts. However, if cafés were important means of establishing professional and national identities, they also (as stressed in The Thinking Space) formed part of transnational and international exchanges. This was (and as many would argue, remains) in no small part due to the complex role of cafés as communications hubs: as places for writing, reading, conversing and performing. Cafés were well known for their provision of newspapers and journals (often in different languages). The titles of certain journals such as the eighteenth-century Italian Il Caffè asserted this link between the written and spoken word, just as nowadays discussion groups or websites often refer to themselves as ‘cafés’. The Thinking Space demonstrates, how cafés functioned as networks for professional, ethnic and political groupings, both within and across different national boundaries.

The diverse case studies which make up The Thinking Space may well prompt readers to reconsider the intellectual agendas, along with the different disciplinary contexts and methodologies, involved in pursuing the café as an object of academic study. At the same time, one is struck by the passionate investment of scholars (myself included) in the pursuit of their subject, as made explicit by The Thinking Space in its final coda, a series of personal ‘Reflections’ on scenes from Italian cafés. The book’s editors acknowledge the importance of sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s concept of ‘third places’ (The Great Good Place, 1989) for their project. Oldenburg argues for the necessity of sites distinct from both home and work as the means to provide opportunities for social relations which can transcend those based on kinship or labour. He subtitles his book ‘How They Get You Through the Day’. But how do they exactly? Along with Oldenburg on third places, many scholars have been fascinated by the ways in which cafés offer their clientele ostensibly opposite or contradictory experiences: opportunities for solitude and sociability, the means to be both active and passive. As with the beverage itself, there is simultaneously the scope for relaxation and stimulation. Cafés hold out the promise of a make-believe space, where daily routines can be productive rather than enervating, where wits can be sharpened through mutual attention and conversation. In this permutation cafés stand for a kind of protected space which enables writing and thinking. For some, café life has formed part of a larger political agenda. Jean-Paul Sartre for example in his War Diaries proclaimed ‘At Le Havre, I used to achieve the maximum degree of collectivization: sleeping in the hotel, dividing my days between the Café Guillaume Tell and the municipal library’. The continuing grip of café culture on the academic imagination may well be due as much to the state of mind associated with cafés as to a fascination with their historical significance.