VIENNESE CONFECTIONARY PRODUCTION & SWEET SHOPS SINCE THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19th CENTURY & THE IMPACT OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST REGIME 1938-1945

My grandmother Lola Kainz, née Sobotka, as a sweet shop girl around 1930 in Vienna /left)

A typical Viennese sweet shop window display with glass containers for candy (right)

My grandmother, Lola, born in 1902, worked as a shop girl in a Viennese sweet shop around 1930 after having given up her education as a pianist at the Viennese Musical Conservatory. At that time Vienna abounded with sweet shops and the job as a sales girl in a sweet shop was quite prestigious, but badly paid, as virtually only female personnel were employed there. Sales girls in sweet shops were supposed to be pretty, well-mannered, and polite. So, qualification criteria for the job were prettiness, good manners, and politeness and the selection process was tough because the number of applicants was usually abundant. It is known that for instance the company Altmann & Kühne put a special focus on the appearance and behaviour of its female sales personnel. When Lola worked at a sweet shop in Währingerstrasse, she was spotted by the young son of the innkeeper of the nearby “Gasthaus Anton Kainz” in Währingerstrasse 146, Toni Kainz. It was love at first sight on Toni’s side and every day Toni bought sweets in the shop – candy which he did not even like very much – just to see Lola. Lola was a pretty, young woman, a bit superficial, who loved life – socialising, fashion, entertainment and a good laugh (That’s what she later told about herself). She even ignored her father’s strict order stipulating that his four daughters were not allowed to have their hair cut short, as it was the fashion of the 1920s and early 1930s in Vienna. Her father, Ignaz Sobotka, had been the manager of the brewery in Kaiserebersdorf near Vienna.  After secretly having had her hair cut short – see photo above -, she came home with a funny hat sitting at an awkward angle on her head and she did not even take it off in the family dining room. When her father told her harshly to take off her hat, her funny face and clown demeanour made him laugh and she escaped punishment, much to the astonishment of her three sisters. She was the sunshine of her otherwise severe father.

“Anton Kainz Gasthaus”,18th district of Vienna, Währingerstrasse 146, the inn of Toni’s father in the early 1930s with Lola in the entrance (left) and now (right)

In order to reach her workplace in the 18th district of Vienna, Lola had to take public transport from her parent’s flat on Margaretengürtel 98/8 in the 5the district of Vienna. Here is her monthly tram and “Stadtbahn” (city train) ticket of March 1927:

Lola had worked in another sweet shop before, “Confiserie & Patisserie Alfred Spitzer” in the first and 7th district of Vienna (below left)

In June 1930 the sweet shop owner of Währingerstrasse 158 rented out his shop and had to make her redundant. He wrote the following appraisal, an excellent assessment of Lola’s job performance (right)

A sweet shop on Währingerstrasse in the 18th district of Vienna

In 1932 Lola and Toni were married and from then on Lola worked in the inn of her parents-in-law:

Viennese chocolate & sweets production

At the Emperor Charles VI’ court in Vienna the exotic product “chocolate” was introduced in 1711, but chocolate drinks were already popular before among the high clergy. Pietro Buonaventura Metastasio even composed a “Cantata alla Cioccolata” at the court of Charles VI in Vienna and the ascetic preacher there, Abraham a Santa Clara, scolded the aristocratic ladies in his sermons for their habits of drinking chocolate at eleven in the morning. Empress Maria Theresia issued an order for Viennese balls in 1752, which stipulated that tea, coffee and chocolate were to be offered at Viennese balls “of good quality, high quantity and at a cheap price”. She herself did not even like chocolate, but her husband, the Emperor Franz Stephan, did. The haute bourgeoisie of Vienna followed in the footsteps of the aristocracy, which is documented in the dialogues of Viennese comedies of the 18th century and even in the libretti of operas, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutti” and “Don Giovanni”, where chocolate is much in demand. Mozart himself wrote that he loved walking in the “Augarten” (a park in the 2nd district of Vienna) in the morning, where he had his breakfast with coffee, chocolate, and tea. He even sent large amounts of chocolate from Vienna to his much-revered master in Italy, padre Martini. As chocolate was extremely expensive at the time, the amounts consumed were very small, from 1812 until 1816 400 tons of cocoa beans were processed in Vienna. Yet before 1800 the majority of the population had never tasted chocolate, as it was a status symbol and a stimulating luxury drink.

For candy the most important ingredient was sugar, which until the middle of the 18th century was cane sugar, whose trade and production was extremely costly and cumbersome. Apart from apothecaries, who were allowed to use cane sugar for the concoction of medicine, only the rich classes of the society could afford cane sugar. But in 1747 the fodder beet, indigenous in Europe, was discovered as an excellent natural resource of sugar. From the fodder beet the sugar beet was cultivated and changed the manufacturing of sweets in Europe dramatically. The sugar beet cultivation and the production of beet sugar turned into a flourishing business sector at the end of the 18th century and the Habsburg Empire turned into one of the biggest producers of beet sugar. Within a few decades sugar had become a commodity that was affordable for a much larger part of the population. Consequently, the manufacturing of candy and other sweets experienced a boom in Vienna and the Habsburg Empire. Yet the fabrication of confectionary products was still a very complex procedure done by hand. A cook of Prince Joseph von Schwarzenberg, Franz G. Zenker, left several recipes for manufacturing “Zuckerl” (candy) in 1834, for example “vanilla bonbons” or “venus bonbons”. Every bonbon was wrapped in colourful paper together with an appropriate motto and on the outside jokes or funny words were printed, which expressed taste, spirit, and wit. The recipe book was aimed at middle-class housewives and their cooks. The commercial production of candy and sweets was to a diminishing degree still in the hands of pharmacists and increasingly in the hands of confectioners. In 1861 the Viennese “Lehmann” directory counted 240 confectioners in the city and with the enlargement of the territory of Vienna in 1895 there were 400. They soon faced fierce competition from the rise of large industrial producers, such as Victor Schmidt. While important Viennese companies, for example Pischinger, Cabos and Manner (see table of Viennese producers below), focussed on the production of wafers, cocoa, chocolate, cakes, and biscuits, Ullmann, Heller, and Schmidt concentrated on the manufacturing of candy and sweets; whereby different types of cough lozenges were always part of their product range. All these companies had their specialities, often with glamorous foreign names, for example “Rock Drops”, “Military Rocks”, “Candy Caramels”, “Brioni”, or “Grado Bonbons”.

In 1887 Anton Hausner warned against the use of toxic materials in the industrial production of candy and in wrapping papers, namely various colourants, and essential oils, such as white lead, chrome yellow or Prussian blue, and he recommended natural plant and animal substitutes, for example saffron, curcuma or indigo.

VIENNESE SUBURBAN COFFEE HOUSES UNTIL WORLD WAR II

Café Hummel, Josefstädterstrasse (next to Hamerlingpark) in the suburb of Josefstadt. The house was built in 1805 and in 1856 an inn opened there which was later turned into a coffee house. In 1896 a vaudevillian singer, Carola Biedermann, wife of the Viennese folk singer Julius Biedermann took over the coffee house and named it “Café Carola”. This coffee house offered separate reading and gaming rooms, a smoking room and a ladies’ room, as well as a conservatory with palm trees. The couple had to flee from its creditors to New York and the new owner staged daily concerts and kept the coffee house open the whole night. Among the many owners that followed was Joseph Carlo Popper, who had worked as a lion tamer and circus employee in South Africa in his youth and had earned his living as a gold digger. In memory of his youth he called the coffee house “Café Pretoria”. The coffee house changed its name often until 1937, when the family Hummel finally bought it.

In the vicinity, just outside the “Linienwall” (today’s Gürtel) in the suburb Neulerchenfeld, a coffee house with a conservatory, palm trees and parrots continued this tradition until the 1960s, the “Café Wintergarten”, where I went with my grandmother, Lola, as a child. Today it’s a musical event location, the “Café Concerto”.

In 1934 my grandparents, Toni and Lola Kainz, took over the running of a coffee house on Hamerlingplatz in the suburb of Josefstadt. My grandmother loved the contact to the guests and my great-grandmother Ritschi (Rudolphine Sobotka) helped with the cooking. Her specialities were “Krautfleckerl” (small pasta with cabbage), a Jewish speciality that is much praised in Friedrich Torberg’s book “Die Tante Jolesch” (Aunt Jolesch), “Sulz” (brawn) and sweet dishes, such as “Buchteln”, chocolate cake and “Apfelstrudel”. The recipes of these coffee house classics have been passed on in the family.

Here are some simple and tasty recipes of Ritschi and Lola, which are typical Viennese coffee house specialities. There are not always precise indications of quantity as the recipes were communicated orally:

Simple chocolate cake

Ingredients: 40g butter, 100g sugar, 1 egg,  40g cocoa, some milk, 1/2 package of baking powder, 150g flour

Mix everything and beat for some time, then bake in the oven in a square baking dish until no longer liquid inside. Fill with the following cream:

100g butter, 3 soup spoons of cocoa, 2 soup spoons of black coffee, 3 soup spoons of sugar and whip everything until it is creamy

“Buchteln”

Mix 500g flour with active dry yeast, 250g butter, 3 eggs, 70g sugar and ¼ l of milk and beat for at least 10 minutes. Then put the dough in a warm place to rest for an hour. As soon as it has doubled its volume, cut it in small dumplings, fill them with a special plum jam (Zwetschkenröster) or sweetened cottage cheese, then dip the dumpling in melted butter and fill a square baking tray with the dumplings. Let the dish rest in a warm place for half an hour before baking in the oven until the dumplings are golden. Serve them still warm.

“Krautfleckerl”

Cook 250g small square noodle pasta “al dente”. Meanwhile slice half a white cabbage thinly. Heat a little lard, add a little sugar and cumin. Then fry the white cabbage until it is brown, add pepper and salt and in the end mix it with the small pasta noodles.

“Sulz”

Fill a pressure cooker with: 4 pig’s feet, and a pig’s tail, 400g tender pork meat, an onion, two garlic cloves, salt, pepper, 1/8 l of vinegar, a carrot, some celery, some parsley and fill the pot with water until everything is totally covered. Cook in the pressure cooker for an hour. Then pour the liquid into a porcelain bowl through a sieve and cut up the meat in small slices together with some of the jellied skin of the pig and stir it into the liquid. Put it into the fridge overnight. When solid, cut it up in slices and serve with thinly sliced onions and a little bit of vinegar and sunflower oil.


Menu card of the coffee house and restaurant in the suburb Leopoldstadt, Prater “Konstantinhügel” , 1927

In some Viennese coffee house coffee was formerly made in the traditional porcelain “Karlsbader” coffee makers – widespread in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Two of my grandmother’s “Karlsbaders” have survived. When preparing the coffee, she added a pinch of salt and a spoonful of cacao to the ground coffee beans in the porcelain sieve before slowly pouring the boiling water over it.


“Karlsbader” coffee makers

THE BALKANS & THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE AROUND 1914

Novi Sad, Serbia

In the context of World War I the marginalization of the Serbian and thereby of the larger Balkan dimension already began during the July crisis itself. Serbia and its actions occupied a subordinate place. Furthermore the fact that Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia emerged as one of the victor states of the war seemed implicitly to vindicate the act of the murder of the Austro-Hungarian crown prince and his wife on 28 June 2014. In an era when the national idea was still full of promise, there was sympathy with south Slav nationalism and little affection for the ponderous multinational commonwealth of the Habsburg Empire. But our moral compass has shifted by now. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s have reminded us of the lethality of Balkan nationalism. Since Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo, it has become harder to think of Serbia as the mere object or victim of great power politics and easier to conceive of Serbian nationalism as a historical force in its own right. From the perspective of today’s European Union we are inclined to look more sympathetically on the vanished imperial patchwork of Habsburg Austro-Hungary. Putting Sarajevo and the Balkans back at the centre of the outbreak of World War I does not mean demonizing the Balkans or their politicians. We need to understand the July crisis of 1914 as a complex event. Far from being inevitable this war was in fact inconceivable for most Europeans of the time, at least until it actually happened. So the conflict was not the consequence of a long-run deterioration, but of short-term shocks with the Balkans at the centre.

THE END OF THE MULTICULTURAL STATE

Synagogue, Krakov

During the 1920s and 1930s Austrian intellectual life was still dominated by men who had grown up under the empire. Many of them deemed the Habsburg Empire a lost paradise, whose lustre brightened as time passed. In 1938 the last vestiges of cosmopolitanism perished from Vienna and much of the Danube basin as Jews were decimated, saddling their successors with a corrosive guilt. After 1938 for a long time no other forum for debate has emerged to replace what Hitler had destroyed. The demise of intellectual Vienna is a major reason why post-1945 Central and Eastern Europe has produced so few innovative thinkers.

 

With the Treaty of Paris of 1919, i.e. the treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, Trianon and Sèvres, the disintegration process of the whole Danube region, which during the Habsburg Empire had constituted a homogenous economic free-trade area with a well-working division of production and provision of services, was speeded up in a disastrous way. After the break-down of so many regimes, the collapse of the Russian, German, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, the map of Central and Eastern Europe was redrawn along nationalistic lines. The main aim was the creation of ethnic-linguistic nation states according to the belief of the US President Wilson that nations had the “right to self-determination”, a belief that was easily held by those far from the ethnic and linguistic realities of the regions which were to be divided into neat nation states. The whole attempt was a disaster and triggered the national conflicts that have torn the continent apart in the 20th century. The Balkans wars of the 1990s and the Ukrainian conflict can be seen as the latest “legacies of Versailles”. …

EASTERN JEWS

Jewish cementery, Krakov

Joseph Roth, born to a Jewish family, grew up in Brody near Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv in Eastern Galicia, the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Brody had one of the biggest Jewish populations in Europe and Jewish cultural life played an important role there. He began his studies in Lemberg and then went on to study philosophy and German literature in Vienna in 1914. In 1916 he quit university and volunteered in the Austro-Hungarian Army. The collapse of the empire had a lasting and detrimental effect on him, as on many other Jewish intellectuals. “My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the dual Monarchy of Austro-Hungary.” In 1927 he wrote his famous essay “The Wandering Jews” about the minority of Eastern Jews and their plight. “The Eastern Jew does not know anything about the social injustice of the West; nothing about the reign of prejudice, that governs the paths, actions, customs and ways of life of the average Western European,….nothing of the hate which is already so strong that it is cherished like a life-giving (but life-killing) eternal fire that warms the egotism of every man and every country…. For the Eastern Jew the West means freedom, the possibility to work and to develop his talents, justice and autonomous rule of the mind. Western Europe sends engineers, automobiles, books and poems to the East. It sends propaganda soaps and hygiene, the useful and the sublime….For the Eastern Jew Germany for example is still the country of Goethe and Schiller, of the German poets, who every ambitious young Jew knows better than a swastika-loving grammar school pupil.” They started migrating from the borderlands to the Russian Empire, where “every year there is a war and every week a pogrom”. Some returned, many more continued their journey. “The Eastern Jews have nowhere a fatherland, but graves in every cemetery…. Most give to the West at least as much as the West takes from them. Some give more to the West than the West gives to them. They all have the right to live in the West who sacrifice themselves, in that they venture to the West.” …

VIENNA, THE MELTING POT OF CENTRAL EUROPE

Crest of the Ephrussis, migrated to Vienna from Russia

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution Vienna had the largest multi-ethnic immigration of all European big cities. in 1880 65 % of the population were not born there and in 1910 the share was still 51 %. The famous Ringstrassen buildings can act as a symbol for this multi-ethnic climate. They were built by architects from different nationalities, constructed by workers and craftsmen who had immigrated to Vienna from all parts of the empire and were partly inhabited by first and second generations of immigrated industrialists of the Ringstrassen era. These architects built similar representative buildings in all the big cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and this architectural heritage can still be seen in many cities of the Danube region, restored to new splendour after 1989.…

THE DANUBE REGION UNTIL 1918: MOSAIC OR MELTING POT OF CENTRAL EUROPE

Budapest, market hall

The Canadian historian William Hubbard showed how tightly social, economic and demographic developments in the second half of the 19th century in Cisleithania, the western Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were linked to the migrational processes and the minorities issue. In the seven biggest cities in this area, namely Vienna, Graz, Trieste, Prague, Brno, Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv and Krakow, the share of the population born in these cities was rather small. As in other European and American cities urbanisation was fed by migration from the countryside, not by higher birth rates in the cities. In Vienna you had in 1880 a share of immigrants of 65 %. Especially in Vienna immigration was a hot issue of social and political debate. The dynamisms of migrational processes and the political, economic and social status of minorities in the 19th and 20th century were undoubtedly due to urbanisation and industrialisation processes. Immigration followed the allocation of capital, but also traditional migrational processes continued that added to the numbers of already existing minority groups dispersed across the Danube region. One should not forget that migration was already a central phenomenon of the pre-industrial society here.…

THE MULTICULTURAL EMPIRE: “KRONPRINZENWERK” published 1885-1902 by the Habsburg Crown Prince Rudolf

Before the dramatic rise of nationalism, the monarchy officially still celebrated its ethnic and cultural diversity. One important and interesting scientific project had as its patron the crown prince Rudolf. In 1884 he asked the permission of the Emperor to carry out a comprehensive survey of the ethnic diversity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 17 years (until 1902) all crown lands, peoples and regions of the monarchy were researched and the results were published in 24 German and 21 Hungarian volumes. Subscribers could buy the individual issues at a subsidised price of only 30 Kreuzer per issue very cheaply. The political character of the scientific project was to propagate the pride of the Empire in its ethnic and cultural diversity. Despite this propaganda attempt, the knowledge about the lands of the Habsburg monarchy in the West was marginal. Still in 1938 Neville Chamberlain spoke out against a declaration of war against Hitler by saying British solders should not be sacrificed for a conflict “in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” – meaning Czechoslovakia.…

A COMPARISON OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF BANKING AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT IN CEE IN THE 1890s & THE 1990s

Trieste, maritime trading centre of the Habsburg Empire

Close ties of banks with the industry of the Austro-Hungarian Empire can be identified, yet a leading role of banks in the industrialisation process cannot be seen. On the contrary, Austrian banks were for years averse to industrial promotion in the 19th century. The caution which pervaded the banking circles in Austria and the Czech Lands was evident in the general lack of risk capital, and in the preference for participating in or granting extended credit to only the booming enterprises. The caution and the lack of entrepreneurial spirit of the banks can be seen from the fact that in the periods of economic expansion the banks lagged behind with their investments. So industrial development was not triggered by investments of banks, but was preceded by private investment or an expansion of government programmes such as railroads. This was not only true for Austrian and Czech, but also for Hungarian banks. Yet despite the fact that economic development was not bank-led in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the banks did fulfil the important role of providing financial intermediation services. The widespread development of banking services, such as credit on current account, open book advances, and discount of bills, were the main contribution of banks to industrial development. They were very efficient in mobilising capital.…

THE GREAT DEPRESSION: CREDIT-ANSTALT CRISIS 1931

Former Österreichische Creditanstalt building, architects Gotthilf and Neumann (built 1916-1921)

The Credit-Anstalt crisis played a crucial role in the dramatic economic developments of the 1930s in Europe as the collapse of the Credit-Anstalt affected the largest bank of Austria and at that time also the largest bank east of Germany. The collapse of the Credit-Anstalt in Vienna started the spread of the crisis in Europe and forced most countries off the Gold Standard within a few months. A feeling of financial distrust and insecurity spread from Vienna and led to runs on other banks in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland and Germany. The collapse in May 1931 set off a chain reaction that led from the run on German banks to withdrawals in London and the devaluation of the pound to large-scale withdrawals from New York and another series of bank failures in the United States. So in brief the news of the crisis of the Credit-Anstalt, the most important bank in Central Europe, shook the whole economic structure of Europe and sent shock waves through the rest of the world.…