Ashby, Charlotte; Gronberg, Tag and Shaw-Miller, Simon (eds). The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 554 (white) privileged males. She notes that hip hop was often used to homogenize oppression, a form of disadvantage applicable to both rich and poor. In order to participate in hip hop culture, many felt compelled to purchase items, clothing, records and spend money in clubs, often draining limited resources. Men seem to be particularly attracted to hip hop’s sense of masculinity, which is an integral element of the way in which it is marketed and consumed. In appropriating the global web-based debate, many hip hop supporters refashioned the idea of an oppressed racial minority and turned it into race as class, equating whites as victims and blacks as other/poor. Hip Hop Ukraine portrays the music as a forceful influence on worldwide social and cultural expression. Its origins in the American dispossessed gave a voice to many who identified with a similar race/class/ethnic experience, which has become tailored to local contingencies. Nevertheless, as Helbig suggests, despite the complexity that is hip hop, at times the music is in practice the expression of an individual voice and about how that voice is used to silence others. Thus Hip Hop Ukraine also speaks to that which can become lost in translation. Department of Afro-American Studies, Sociology, Michael C. Thornton and the Asian American Studies Program University of Wisconsin-Madison Ashby, Charlotte; Gronberg, Tag and Shaw-Miller, Simon (eds). The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture. Austrian and Habsburg Studies, 16. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2013. xii + 244 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $95.00: £60.00. A Mélange with whipped cream. Dense tobacco smoke. Newspapers skewered on wooden sticks. The clack of billiard balls. Threadbare writers gathered around tables, appraising an essay, swapping gossip or awaiting mail. From the beginning, these images of the Viennese café were couched in myth and legend, yet they have proven remarkably enduring. As Charlotte Ashby observes in her introductory chapter, although fin-de-siècle Vienna had thousands of coffeehouses, this multiplicity has been reduced to a single, consistent cultural memory of ‘the Viennese Café’. The power of this memory lies at the heart of this edited volume, which emerged from an exhibition and conference organized by scholars from the Royal College of Art and the University of London. The book’s eleven chapters carefully investigate the café as a site of sociability and cultural creativity, even as they work to dispel the myths that have grown up around it. REVIEWS 555 Scholars have long recognized the link between cafés and modern culture. In recent decades, the work of café habitués such as Karl Kraus, Alfred Polgar, Stefan Zweig, Peter Altenberg and Joseph Roth has received sustained attention. The essays in this volume draw on many of these writers and reaffirm the role of cafés as literary hothouses. As Ashby notes: ‘The revolt against tradition witnessed in their writing, the subjective, self-reflective, ambiguous, paradoxical and transitory shifts they played with were well suited to this association with the café as a site of frivolity, play and fecklessness’ (p. 23). Yet Ashby and other authors also complicate this view, underscoring the subtle patterns of inclusion and exclusion that governed café life. The clientele was decidedly male and bourgeois: women occupied an uncertain position in the cafés (a topic explored in Mary Costello’s chapter on Adolf Loos’s Kärntner Bar), and workers were much more likely to frequent suburban Wirtshäuser than inner city Kaffeehäuser. Conversely, Jewish men frequented cafés in part because they had been excluded from Vienna’s wine gardens and taverns, as essays by Steven Beller and Shachar Pinsker demonstrate. Extending this analysis, Jeremy Aynsley and Edward Timms explore how the physical space of the café could encourage both mixing and segregation. In ‘The Cliché of the Viennese Café as an Extended Living Room’, Richard Kurdiovsky challenges the received view that Vienna’s cramped housing explains the popularity of the city’s cafés. The legends surrounding the Viennese café thus provide the book’s second major theme. Taking as his starting point the demolition of the Café Griensteidl...