In the old cafés of Vienna, many people still sit reading newspapers. They set a coffee on a small marble table and open the paper. Around them there is the murmur of conversation and the clink of cups, and in the midst of it all, they spend time of their own. This scene still lives on in the city's café culture.

The history of the city's cafés goes back to the end of the 17th century. In 1683, the Ottoman army laid the Second Siege of Vienna. The sacks of beans left behind by the retreating Turkish troops were taken by the people for camel feed. The one who recognized them as coffee was Georg Franz Kolschitzky, a Pole who understood Turkish and had served as a secret messenger during the siege. He is said to have received the beans as a reward and opened the first café in the city.
The historical facts are somewhat more modest: Vienna's first license to serve coffee was granted in 1685 to the Armenian merchant Johannes Diodato. But it is meaningful that the legend is the one still told today. Viennese coffee was turned into a story of "spoils of war" born from tension with the East, and this city on the eastern edge of Europe remade an Oriental drink in its own manners.

Through the 18th century, cafés multiplied, and billiard tables, playing cards, and newspapers came to be placed in them. The predecessor of the Wiener Zeitung, founded in 1703 and later called the world's oldest daily newspaper, also dates from around this time. You drink coffee in a place where you learn of distant events. Someone opens the paper that someone else has finished reading. Newspapers came to serve as a link between the café table and the outside world.
In the first half of the 19th century, under Chancellor Metternich's police state, cafés were also places where informers listened closely. Newspapers were censored, yet people still read them in cafés and argued. In the revolutionary year of 1848, it was only natural that cafés became gathering places for radicals.

By the end of the 19th century, cafés had also grown in importance as places where literature and ideas were born. Writers such as Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal gathered in cafés, and afterward the center of exchange moved to places such as Café Central. For townspeople living in cramped homes, a café was like an extension of the living room into the city. They received letters addressed to the café, wrote manuscripts in the café, and read newspapers in the café. Newspapers were not cheap enough for an individual to subscribe to many, so a café stocking them was close to running a small public library.

Needless to say, newspapers have no algorithm. If you search for words that interest you and follow people you like, you can pursue your interests in depth. Precisely because we use that convenience every day, we also want, now and then, to spend time with "stories we did not choose ourselves." Above all, a paper newspaper has a last page. When you finish today's edition, you can fold it and set it on the table. Away from an endless screen where information keeps appearing, you are left with the lingering afterglow of thinking about a single article. That sense of closure gives birth to a truly rich time and space in everyday life, where we can receive information without limit.

Perhaps that is why the sight of someone reading a newspaper seems so rich to me. There is no need to broadcast something by reflex, as if by spinal reflex, nor to state an opinion on the spot. You don't rush to judgment, and can keep your thoughts close at hand for a while. Surrounded by the presence of other people, there is still a place for you within yourself.

In 2011, Vienna's café culture was inscribed on Austria's national inventory of intangible cultural heritage. Along with marble tables, bentwood chairs, and the fittings for holding newspapers, the very habit of spending time there is recognized as culture.
Restoring an old building requires skill and funds. But to carry on the daily life lived inside it, people who still come there today are indispensable. Someone takes the order, someone prepares the newspapers, someone sits down in their usual seat. Culture endures only through the repetition of such small acts.

Go out alone, order a coffee, open the newspaper, read to the last page, and look up out of the window.

On my travels, I want to find a chair like that.