Café Central

In January 1913, you could have walked into Café Central and found, at various tables on any given week, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Sigmund Freud, Josip Broz Tito, and Adolf Hitler — all living in Vienna simultaneously, all unknown to history, all nursing coffees in the same neighbourhood. When Austria's foreign minister was warned that war might provoke revolution in Russia, he reportedly scoffed: "And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein sitting over there at Café Central?" Mr. Bronstein was Trotsky's real name. The foreign minister was not a good judge of character.

Opened in 1876 in the ground floor of the Palais Ferstel — Heinrich von Ferstel's neo-Renaissance former stock exchange building — Café Central became the beating heart of Vienna's intellectual life. Peter Altenberg, the poet, essentially lived here: he had his mail delivered to the café, used it as his living room, and a papier-mâché figure of him still sits by the entrance, permanently occupying his favourite seat.

The café earned the nickname "Die Schachhochschule" — the Chess University — because so many chess players occupied the upper floor that it functioned as an informal academy. Trotsky was a regular player. The Vienna Circle of logical positivists held meetings here. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan Zweig, Alfred Polgar, and Robert Musil all worked at these marble-topped tables, producing some of the most important literature in the German language while eating Apfelstrudel.

The Central closed after World War II and didn't reopen until 1975, in a renovated section of the Palais Ferstel. Today it walks the line between tourist attraction and functioning coffeehouse with surprising grace. The vaulted ceilings soar, the pastries are excellent, and the ghosts are everywhere.