Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 72-73, 76.
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The German relationship to coffee was an index of Germany's relationship to the advanced nations of the West. Coffee, in fact, would never have attained the eminent position it did in German middle-class life had it not already been a beverage that symbolized the power England and France had assumed in the world at that time. With coffee, the German middle class got to sample, as it were, a bit of Western urbanity it had not yet achieved for itself. The same mechanisms were at play as those that made English literature the supreme model for eighteen-century German authors and that prompted Lessing, for instance, to give his heroines English names.
The German relationship to coffee was further complicated by political-economical problems. These too were intimately tied to Germany's non participation in world history, that is world economy. For colonial powers such as England, Holland, and France, procuring coffee posed no problems. Until about the end of the seventeenth century they obtained their supplies directly from Arabia. When it became clear that the popularity of coffee would not be a passing phenomenon, that coffee had indeed become the daily beverage of increasingly broader sectors of the population, these nations began to produce it independently.
Germany, which had no colonies, had to satisfy its demand for coffee through imports procured through middlemen. In this way vast sums of money left the country. For the most part, they flowed into Dutch and French coffers, since the coffee plantations of the French and the Dutch produced not only to meet their own demands, but also for export to third nations, particularly Germany.
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"Healthy and wealthy without you!" The attempt to reduce coffee consumption through prohibitions and to return to beer was to remain an isolated episode. An entirely different development eventually led to the solution of the foreign exchange problem and at the same time to an acquired taste for a specifically German coffee flavor. This was the discovery of a coffee substitute, namely chicory coffee. The similarity in taste and color between chicory and coffee had been noted as far back as the eighteenth century. Twenty years later, at the height of active opposition to coffee, the hotel keeper Christian Gottlieb Forster saw an occasion for trying out the substitute. He applied for, and received, from the Prussian state of Frederick II, a six-year privilege to grow, process, and sell chicory coffee. The raison d'etre of chicory coffee was graphically presented on the package in which it was sold. In the background we see an exotic landscape and a sailing ship carrying sacks of coffee, in the foreground a German peasant, sowing chicory and waving away the ship with a gesture of his hand. The caption reads, "Healthy and wealthy without you!"
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