Das Kaffeehaus – ein (Un-)Ort der slowenischen und kroatischen Moderne

Abstract

In this article, Michel Foucault's famous concept of heterotopia is used to demonstrate how the essential literary topic of the cafe in Slovene and Croatian modernist literature can be linked to closed and open semantic spaces. Milutin Cihlar-Nehajev, for example, followed the literary tradition of Viennese fin de siecle-literature and conceptualized the cafe as a heterotopia in opposition to its surroundings. In Ivan Cankar's short stories (Vinjete) and in Artur Grado's essay Mlada Hrvatska, on the other hand, the cafe is not able to become a heterotopia due to its manifold contacts with the social sphere outside.