Marc Aurel-Strasse, Vienna: The last surviving Jewish textile merchant in what in former days was the "textile district", the Iranian hotel proprietor and the Café Salzgries with its regulars... From Summer 1999 until Spring 2000, Ruth Beckermann undertook a series of small journeys on and around her own doorstep and investigated her locality with the help of a film camera. "There's too much to show everything", as the film tells us "and after all, anyone can imagine what a street in the oldest part of Vienna looks like. What interests me are the people, debating and gesticulating, machinating and speculating, or just simply perambulating past. It's them I want to film".
The passing of the year is marked not only by the changes of seasons but also by a change of government. One in three Austrians voted for Jörg Haider of the extreme right-wing Freedom Party. The film shows how the political turmoil is reflected in the coffee house which constitutes, to quote Alfred Polgar, "a world-view. A view whose innermost essence is to avoid viewing the world. After all, what is there to see there?"

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The Coffee House

Peter Altenberg
The coffee house

You've got worries of one sort or another --- off to the coffee house!
She can't come for some entirely plausible reason or other --- off to the coffee house!
Your boots have split --- coffee house!
Your earn 400 crowns and spend 500 --- coffee house!
You're careful with your money and never indulge yourself --- coffee house!
You're a civil servant but always wanted to be a doctor --- coffee house!
You can't find the right woman --- coffee house!
You're contemplating killing yourself --- coffee house!
You loathe and despise people and yet you can't do without them --- coffee house!
No one will give you credit any more --- coffee house!

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Bertold Viertel
The refuge of impotent scoundrels

(...) But at the café ­ it's teeming with people, it's life, drama...At the café there's no wit, no humour, no knowledge. The sole ruler there is King Mania... The café kills friendships and enmities alike, a demoralising effect of sitting there next to one another, a sad comradeship of imbecility. The café lumps the social classes together in a disorderly fashion. It is a place of false pretences. The coffee house is the refuge of impotent scoundrels... At the café nobody acts, but everybody talks.

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Stefan Zweig
Young people at Café Griensteidl

(...) In order to grasp this, one must know that the Viennese coffee house represents a special kind of institution which cannot be compared to any other similar institution in the world. It is in fact a sort of democratic club, open to everybody for his cheap cup of coffee, where each guest, in return for this small sum, may sit for hours, debating, writing, playing cards, receiving his post and above all consuming an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.

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Alfred Polgar
A theory of Café Central

The patrons of Café Central know, love and look down on one another. Even those who have no connection with one another look upon this lack of connection as a connection; even mutual loathing has an adherent quality in Café Central, recognising and practising a kind of Masonic solidarity. Everybody knows about everybody else. Café Central is a provincial backwater in the bosom of the metropolis, steaming with tittle-tattle, curiosity and médisance.