Café Kramer

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The Café Kramer (also Kramer's coffee house ) was a Viennese coffee house and hangout for numerous poets and philosophers.

It goes back to Josef Kramer , who from 1719 ran a simple coffee house in the now no longer existing Schlossergasse bei Graben in the 1st district , but which only achieved a certain level of awareness when Andreas Furthmoser , member of the external council, church master of St. Stephan and captain of the mayor's regiment, took over the coffee house in 1750.

In 1771 Katharina and Johann Michael Hertl bought the coffee house. Hertl recognized the change within society at the end of the 18th century and the importance of literati and writers. By making plenty of reading material available to his guests, Café Kramer became a regular hangout for well-read circles and a meeting place for mutual exchange - especially the newspapers and magazines from Germany aroused great interest. Around 1780 the coffee house was one of the most visited in Vienna and had a small pub garden and a billiard room on the upper floor. Guests were among many others Cornelius Hermann von Ayrenhoff , Aloys Blumauer , Lorenz Leopold Haschka , Joseph Franz Ratschky and Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch . At the end of the 18th century, during Josephinism , the coffee house took an opposing position and was sometimes referred to as a "dark political temple" or "diplomatic coffee house".

With the death of Johann Michael Hertl († 1797), the coffee house soon lost its reputation, and new visitors who did not come because of the now limited selection of newspapers could hardly make friends with the atmosphere. After the takeover by Anton and Anna List in 1799, the house was completely realigned and expanded in the direction of Graben, so that the neighbors immediately complained, but after long disputes, the expansion of the restaurant was personally approved by the emperor, thus the fate of the originally literary Coffee house was finally sealed. In 1821 the business was moved to the first floor of the house at the golden crown.

At the same time, the so-called Ludlamshöhle was set up in the Zum Haidvogel inn right next to the old Café Kramer, thus continuing the basic literary concept of Café Kramer. The owner Bonifaz Haidvogel even acquired the new Kramer coffee house in 1830 and continued to run it as an elegant establishment for fine society. Café Kramer disappeared in 1866 when the elephant house on the Graben was demolished.

literature

  • Franz Gräffer: Small Viennese Memoirs and Viennese Can Pieces in: Memories from Old Austria , Volume 13, pp. 341–342