Reading the essay “Theorie des Café Central” by Alfred Polgar (in English here and in German here), I was struck by the demographic similarities between the Café’s regular customers and heavy users of modern social media:
“The Café Central lies on the Viennese latitude at the meridian of loneliness. Its inhabitants are, for the most part, people whose hatred of their fellow human beings is as fierce as their longing for people, who want to be alone but need companionship for it. Their inner world requires a layer of the outer world as delimiting material; their quivering solo voices cannot do without the support of the chorus. They are unclear natures, rather lost without the certainties which the feeling gives that they are a little part of a whole (to whose tone and color they contribute).
The Central-ist is a person to whom family, profession, and political party do not give this feeling. Helpfully, the coffeehouse steps in as an ersatz totality, inviting immersion and dissolution. It is thus understandable that above all women, who can really never be alone and need at least one other person along with them, have a weakness for the Cafe Central. It is a place for people who know how to abandon and be abandoned for the sake of their fate, but who do not have the nerve to live up to this fate. It is a true asylum for people who have to kill time so as not to be killed by it. It is the beloved hearth of those to whom the beloved hearth is an abomination, the refuge of married couples and lovers from the fear of undisturbed togetherness, a first-aid station for the confused who, all their lives in search of themselves and all their lives in flight from themselves, conceal their fleeing ego behind a newspaper, dreary conversations, and card playing, and press the pursuer-ego into the role of kibitzer who has to keep his mouth shut.”
Frittering away your time at the Café at least requires you to get up, get dressed, and leave your house, which is an improvement over Facebook or Twitter.
