Cafe Coral

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The majority of the area between the houses Porzellangasse 39, 41 and 43 was the pub garden of the “Café Koralle”, today it serves as a parking lot

The Café Koralle or the Café Koralle Bar was a well-known coffee house in the 9th district of Vienna , which was located in the Porzellangasse 39-43 house planned by Hugo Mandeltort and comprised of a 400 m² corner bar and a 250 m² dance bar in the basement and a 70 m² summer terrace (“Schanigarten”).

history

The "Café Koralle" located at Porzellangasse 39 was run by the Weigel family from 1935, when it was still called "Café Industrie", until 1968. It was leased between 1968 and 1978 and was finally closed on May 31, 1978. Between 1979 and 2015 the premises were used as business premises by “ Bank Austria ” (formerly “ Zentralsparkasse der Gemeinde Wien ”).

The artistically designed “Café Koralle” by the architect Bruno Buzek , his later first wife Susi Weigel and Franz von Zülow , who had his studio at Porzellangasse 41, consisted of a 400 m² corner bar that offered 400 visitors, a 250 m² one Dance bar in the basement that could hold 200 visitors and a 70 m² summer terrace (“ Schanigarten ”) that offered 70 people, since the house built by Hugo Manhardt in 1912/13 was a “special street courtyard design "Hat:" (between symmetrical side wings a building component that recedes from the street is placed, creating a cul- de -sac-shaped courtyard), the historical model of which is the palace front with the courtyard of honor . This construction resulted in longer window fronts on the much more desirable side of the street (opposite the rear courtyard front) and thus better use of the property ”.

Bruno Buzek's redesign of the coffee house was discussed in detail in the Neue Freie Presse in October 1935 :

“The 'Industry' café in a new look. Thanks to a complete redesign, the 'Industrie' café in Porzellangasse has become the talk of the town in the district. With original ideas, the architect Bruno Buzek has done a job completely different from the template, the colorful tones of the walls, the almost lavish lighting that bathes all rooms in a flood of pleasant light, and the comfortable leather armchairs . A special system supplies all rooms with fresh air at a pleasant temperature from the large air reservoir of the Liechtenstein Park and keeps the entire restaurant completely draft-free and smoke-free. There is a large billiard room and two games rooms available to the players , in which a new material for the wall cladding has been used for the first time. The wall decoration was done by painter Professor Franz von Zülow in several groups of funny and colorful pictures. As a special attraction of the house, architect Buzek created the Kongo-Diele, where the hours fly by every day from 9 in the evening to 4 in the morning as if in a dream. The entire set of murals by Susi Weigel lives up to its erotic role models and provides the framework for really fun entertainment with music and dance, which Jules Carpe tirelessly ignites with his Kongo band. The recent opening was a resounding success and has proven that the Café Industrie is a home for good company. "

Advertisement from "Party comrades Hans and Eugen Weigel" that they have renamed their "Coffee Industry" to "Coffee Berchtesgaden " on the occasion of the annexation of Austria , where Jewish guests are no longer served.

On the occasion of the annexation of Austria , the "party comrades Hans and Eugen Weigel" advertised in the "Deutsche Telegraf" on March 19, 1938, that they deliberately renamed their "coffee industry" to "Kaffee Berchtesgaden ", where Jewish guests no longer exist to be served. From autumn 1939 the politically hallmarked name "Kaffee Berchtesgaden" was printed in small print in advertisements and over the years it was replaced by the larger printed "Kaffee Korralle". While "Party comrade Hans" Weigel saw his mistake after the war and also treated his Jewish fellow citizens, who made up the majority of the coffeehouse audience, with respect, his brother, "Party comrade [...] Eugen Weigel", remained so obstinate that he and his wife were banned from the house.

The “coral” (“The black stained chairs with red belts and black cushions”) was popular with the Viennese not only because of the wide range of domestic and foreign newspapers and magazines, the fashion books and the dance bar, which open between 9 pm and 4 o'clock in the morning, a term, as Meta Menz , the former " Mary Wigman " employee and later wife of the "Koralle" café animal Hans Weigel, remembers:

“Young people studied in the Koralle, editors preferred to write their articles in the Koralle than in the publishing house of the“ Kleine Zeitung ”in the Seegasse. The guests could even be woken up from the coffee house on request. The writer Leo Perutz was a daily guest (very sensitive in the color scale of his coffee), the visitors to the hall included Maria Eis , Werner Krauss , Franz Theodor Csokor , Eugen Roth , Oskar Werner etc. General Lehmann with his daily circle of friends. With the classical band of Wilhelm Schild, Viktor Prinz, Emo Weihovsky a very cultivated audience was won. "

Literary traces

Towards the end of the 1960s, the Viennese cafetier Siegfried Hostnik was a tenant of the “Café Koralle”. Then around 1970 he took over the “ Café Bräunerhof ”, which became known as the Viennese favorite coffee house of the writer Thomas Bernhard , who in turn mentions the “coral” in his novel “ Der Untergeher ” (1983) as a place where the protagonists spent half the nights . In his fragmentary, earlier version of the story “ Gehen ”, Bernhard names the “coral” as “Cafe Coralle”, which the protagonists of the story visited two years earlier and when they walked to visit, but not stepped: “Here to go the two to the Cafe Coralle (which really existed at that time: Porzellangasse 39), where they were last two years ago and which they do not dare to visit (which is what the considerations about the Gasthaus Obenaus in the final version echo; cf. GE, 80 ) because it would exhaust them too much - why remains unclear. From the Coralle it goes to the clothing store "Zum Eisenbahner", in front of which the two pause for a long time to observe the square opposite the Franz-Josefs-Bahnhof [...]. The scene is structured in more detail and is not reduced to the naming of traffic areas and locations: for example, the Cafe Coralle and the Gasthaus Obenaus are not explicitly described in the final text, but at least something like a scene is made - by naming elements of this Scene - which just makes a Viennese coffee house imaginable. "

In the poem "korallen in porzellan", Traude Schleichert-Veran recalls the dance café "Koralle", which was furnished by Susi Weigel with some African straw huts, to which the "reed walls" allude:

" Corals in porcelain that's
how we dived between the
reed walls at night
for the bizarre wonders of music
and love
during the day everything was smooth and clear
a fulfilled life"

- Traude Schleichert-Veran: corals in porcelain.

Web links

literature

  • Susanne Blumesberger: Processing of the estate and the biography of the graphic designer and illustrator Susi Weigel . Vienna, January 2008. Online: Part 1 (contains some information about Café Koralle on pages 4 and 11ff) and Part 2. Pictures from Susi Weigel's estate (contains some advertising material designed by Susi Weigel for the Café Koralle).
  • Helfried Seemann and Christian Lunzer (eds.): Kaffeehaus Album 1860–1930. With many contemporary photographs and feature articles from the Viennese magazine Die Bühne . Vienna 2000 (contains two photographs of the Café Koralle).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The house had some famous residents: At the address Porzellangasse 39 lived about the psychoanalyst Hermann Nunberg , harpsichordist Julia Menz , the Mary Wigman -Mitarbeiterin Meta Menz and the children's book illustrator Susi Weigel , in the house Porzellangasse 41 Francis of Zülow and House at Porzellangasse 43 of the publisher Adolf Josef Storfer .
  2. ^ Architects lexicon Vienna 1770-1945: Hugo Mandeltort (Manhardt).
  3. ↑ In: New Free Press. October 6, 1935. p. 11.
  4. ^ Advertisement in: Deutscher Telegraf. March 19, 1938, p. 3.
  5. ^ Helfried Seemann and Christian Lunzer (eds.): Kaffeehaus Album 1860–1930. With many contemporary photographs and feature articles from the Viennese magazine Die Bühne . Vienna 2000.
  6. ^ Meta Weigel : Letter of August 26, 1978 to Hans Weigel . Hans Weigel's estate in the Vienna library .
  7. ↑ Stefan Winterstein: Reductions, blank space, contradictions: A rereading of the story Gehen by Thomas Bernhard. In: Martin Huber, Manfred Mittermayer, Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Svjetlan Lacko Viduliö (eds.): Thomas Bernhard Yearbook 2004. Vienna: Böhlau 2005. pp. 31–54. 45f.
  8. ↑ Traude Schleichert-Veran: corals in porcelain . In: Bringing public spaces to life - creating identity with poetry  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.agenda21.or.at   (PDF; 1.2 MB). P. 6.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Diele refers to the years in which the coral applied as a wine hall . - See: (Ad :):  KORALLE, the atmospheric wine hall. In:  Wiener newest Nachrichten , No. 6751/1941 (17th year), December 15, 1941, p. 5, bottom center. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / wnn.

Coordinates: 48 ° 13 '22.1 "  N , 16 ° 21' 40.2"  E