Anyone traveling through the cities of Europe cannot avoid visiting literary cafés. Not only as a welcome break while sightseeing, but also to breathe in the air of literary greatness, history, anecdotes and bestsellers.

Literary cafés

The Café Central in Vienna or the now finally closed Café Griensteidl are places where Friedrich Torberg, Peter Altenberg, Karl Kraus, Egon Erwin Kisch and Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote their literary works. Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek and a number of artists called Café Hawelka their home. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre spent time at the Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots in Paris. And Joanne K. Rowling allegedly wrote the first parts of Harry Potter in the Café Majestic in Porto.

Many a writer literally lived in the café. The best-known story is that of the writer Alexander Roda-Roda, whose trademark was the red vest. A letter with no address but only the red vest was successfully delivered.

Revolutions also started in coffee houses, where people could discuss ideas and had access to the Internet of the 1900s in the form of newspapers and encyclopaedias. Leon Trotsky met Joseph Stalin in Vienna in 1913, allegedly in the Café Central. Legendary in this context is the later comment made by a senior Austrian civil servant, who received reports on the outbreak of the October Revolution in 1917 with the remark “Who is supposed to make this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Trotsky from Café Central?” as unlikely[1].

Modern literature and start-up cafés

Today, literary cafés have lost their literati. Frequented by tourists and officials, they are neither quiet nor affordable for the poor poet. The encyclopaedias have finally disappeared with the last one in the now closed Café Griensteidl, and the selection of newspapers has thinned out. And you don’t really need them any more.

After all, the Internet ushered in the modern world and allowed for a different kind of literary creation. Blog posts, podcasts and videos are produced with a laptop and broadband connection. With the exception of Vienna, however, the internet connections in the cafés are appallingly poor, if available. Truly literary work is only possible to a limited extent.

And yet the literary cafés have not disappeared, they are somewhere else than you might think. The Central or Café de Flore are no longer the places where writers hang out, they are the Starbucks of this world. Young people, good Internet connection, and worldwide.

Today’s mobile urban generation in particular can be sure that Internet access and consistent coffee quality are available wherever they are in the world. And plenty of sockets. You can find sockets in Café Central or Prückel in Vienna. The Tomaselli Literature Café in Salzburg? Forget it. And the Griensteidl had two sockets, one of which was broken. Not nice when the laptop battery is already weakening.

Even the best pastries and cakes won’t help if the computer runs out of power. The modern literary work is finished, the search for a café with a power socket begins. And you can find them at the godsend of traditional coffee houses.

A visit to Starbucks makes it clear why it is now the literary and start-up café. The laptops are open, the coffee is steaming, the muffin is melting in your mouth. Not only Starbucks, but also a number of café bars and new coffee house concepts are populated by creatives and used as workspaces.

It doesn’t matter if the espresso comes in a paper cup, the main thing is that the Internet connection is stable and fast.

My last nine books of the past five years were mainly written in coffee houses. In the Starbucks around the corner in San José in California, or in the Voyageur du Temps in Los Altos, and less at home at your own desk. I wrote this article in Café Central, but only because I was the first to get a table with one of two power sockets at 7:30 in the morning. And it’s better to leave the place around 11 o’clock because the café is packed and the waiters’ looks have become a little more reproachful.

Some newspapers and magazines still use coffee houses for regular editorial meetings. The Café Korb in Vienna serves as an extended office for the Falter editors. And for my now defunct satirical magazine Rappelkopf, Café Diglas in the Schottenstift served as our editorial office. We didn’t have anyone else.

Whereas cafés used to play the role of starting points for revolutions, today they are the starting point for disruption. Many a start-up that has swept away entire industries with innovative solutions and business models began in a coffee house. Not where the newspapers and tourists are, but the places with the open laptops are the literary cafés of our time.

Just as you have to earn a coffee house with a good internet connection and good coffee, literary cafés have to earn their writers. The literary cafés are dead, the literary cafés are alive. But it is not those who call themselves that. I am a coffee house writer. Visit me!