Viennese instinctively feel that coffeehouses are completely special places where you can spend the whole day without haste
Vienna has a brilliant reputation as one of the most creative cities in the world. It gave us Mozart (born in Salzburg) and Freud (born in Freiburg, now Czech Republic), and dozens of other geniuses. Today, Vienna is not as prominent in the world and lacks the energy of Berlin or the multilingual culture of London. But it has retained something else unique to itself: laziness, or, I would say, "productive idleness." I say this as a compliment, because this particular kind of laziness is admirable.
During one of my recent visits to Vienna, we were sitting in a café (where else?!) with Dardis McNeely, who has long lived in this city, the editor of the online newspaper The Vienna Review.
"In Vienna, business is not business at all and never was," she says to me as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. "In Vienna, life itself is business. You can know a person for many years and have no idea how they make a living."
"Is it not customary to ask?"
"No, it's not that it's not customary," explains McNeely. "Here, people simply don't talk about it. People talk about where they spent their last vacation; what they saw at the theater or what movie they watched; what they read or what lecture they attended; what new restaurant they discovered."
In Vienna, nobody is in a hurry. Determination, which in other places is admired, here rather earns a frown. Culture is what matters in this city. Opera houses and concert halls are perceived not as a whim of the elite, but as an integral part of life. Georg Jahn, head of the Vienna bureau of the Associated Press news agency, tells me with undisguised despondency how, as part of his job, he writes reviews of new premieres every season. But all these texts disappear without a trace: hardly any newspaper or website will publish them.
"For the rest of the world, it's 'opera-schmopera,' but not for Vienna. There is no such concept as 'opera-schmopera' here," says Jahn. "People here really care about it."
According to him, in Vienna it is impossible to get opera tickets, they are always sold out. And he also tells about how the Austrian government spent 700 million euros (almost 800 million dollars) on building an opera house in the middle of nowhere. In Austria, he says, and especially in Vienna, "art is a religion."
Vienna consistently ranks at the top of the list of the most livable cities, surpassing such comfort giants as Copenhagen, Zurich, and New York. The consulting firm Mercer takes into account indicators such as health, happiness, and quality of life of residents when compiling the ranking. Although Vienna no longer gives the world a new Mozart or a new Klimt and has lost the infectious energy of immigrant culture that could foster new art movements, music and theater still develop remarkably strongly in the city.
The epicenter of Viennese "productive idleness" is, undoubtedly, the coffeehouse. Like the concert halls of this city, the coffeehouse is a secular cathedral, an incubator of ideas, an intellectual crossroads, in short – as inalienable a part of the city's soul as apple strudel.
The honor of inventing the coffeehouse does not belong to Vienna. The first establishment of this kind in the world appeared in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1554. The first European coffeehouse appeared a century later, when an enterprising young man named Jacob opened an establishment in English Oxford that served a "bitter black brew." But it was Vienna that perfected the idea of the coffeehouse, raised it to its proper height.
The Viennese coffeehouse is a classic example of a "third place" (the other two being home and work). It is an informal, neutral meeting ground. Imagine a New York diner, a Parisian bookstore, or a British pub. Third places are refuges, "temporary worlds within the everyday world," as one scholar put it.
My favorite coffeehouse in Vienna is Café Sperl. Everything here breathes history. It was at Café Sperl that the artist Gustav Klimt announced the creation of the Secession in 1897, thus beginning his own movement in modern art – Viennese Art Nouveau (The Café Sperl website does not confirm this information. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, architects and artists who created the Viennese Secession, such as Koloman Moser and Josef Olbrich, and musicians, including Franz Lehár and Emmerich Kálmán, indeed gathered here. Before World War I, the café was also a favorite place for Austrian military personnel. – Ed.).
Today, Sperl remains a blessed corner that has escaped attempts at renovation. No LED lighting. No Wi-Fi. No overly friendly baristas. Only simple wooden booths and grumpy waiters. In one corner sits a billiard table. Nearby, newspapers hang, by long tradition, on wooden rods.
I spent many hours at Café Sperl, indulging in a typical Viennese activity – sitting and thinking about nothing and everything. Over time, something strange happens in a Viennese coffeehouse. It doesn't exactly stretch. It just becomes so abundant that you can spend it freely. There is so much of it that it loses meaning and has as much relation to your ordinary day as the moons of Jupiter.
Another oddity of the Viennese coffeehouse is that coffee itself, in fact, hardly matters. It is not coffee that explains the sparks of creativity that flare under the vaults of these establishments; let us leave it to other judges to decide whether caffeine aids the imagination or, on the contrary, hinders it. But if not coffee, then what can explain the charge of creative productivity that is inherent in the atmosphere of the coffeehouse? Listen carefully – and you will hear the answer. The barely audible voices of random interlocutors, the rustle of turning newspaper pages, the clinking of cutlery.
When we think of the ideal place for reflection, we imagine some quiet corners, but completely quiet – does not mean the best. Researchers from the University of Illinois found that people exposed to moderate noise levels of 70 decibels show greater success on exams requiring creative thinking than those who were affected by loud noise or were in complete silence. Moderate noise allows us to immerse ourselves in a state of mind that is capable of creative breakthroughs, the authors of the study concluded.
Most residents of Vienna do not need such research, they have no use for it. Viennese instinctively feel that coffeehouses are completely special places where one can happily, productively and without fuss spend the whole day. They also know that laziness may be a sin, but with reasonable handling it can turn into a virtue. In this sense, Viennese are the most virtuous people in the world.