Winter, spring, summer, or fall, visitors to Vienna will line up outside on the corner of Herrengasse and Strauchgasse just to get a table at Café Central. One of the city's most storied coffee houses, visitors to Palais Ferstal marvel and its high ceilings, columns, and archways and follow in the footsteps of Sigmund Freud (when he wasn't at Café Landtmann), the architect Adolf Loos, writers Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler, Adolf Hitler (when he had enough pennies to rub together from selling his terrible art), and, during his pre-revolutionary European exile, Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was here from 1907 to 1914, and it was at that time that he took on the editorship of Pravda (in 1908), moving its operations to Vienna in 1909. An well-worn anecdote goes that after the great social democratic politician Viktor Adler warned the Austro-Hungarian Empire's foreign minister in 1914 of the danger that war in Europe could lead to revolution, Leopold Berchtold was said to have turned to Adler and remarked off-handedly, "And who will lead this revolution? Mr. Bronstein over there at the Café Central?"
Zweig is supposed to have said of Café Central, "It is actually a kind of democratic club that is open to anyone who is able to afford a cheap cup of coffee, where in return for this nominal contribution every patron can sit for hours, talk, write, play cards, collect their post and, above all, read an unlimited number of newspapers and magazines." Perhaps. Though the coffeehouse culture of which Zweig speaks lives on in Vienna to be sure, I don't know that it does at Café Central, where the coffee is no longer cheap and its regulars like Zweig died long ago. Still, the name Café Central retains its cachet and remains a destination not merely for its architecture and atmosphere but its Kaiserschmarrn and the treats inside its dessert counter, including its Apfelstrudel, Cremeschnitte, and its house cake, Café Central Torte, a creation built out of layers of chocolate and orange sponge cake (in that sense, having some relationship with the Slukatorte), marzipan, and milk chocolate.
