"Healthy and wealthy without you!"—The German's Historical Trouble with Coffee/ 德国人与咖啡的历史纠缠

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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Coffee and the Protestant Ethic

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992).

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Until the seventeenth century, coffee remained a curiosity for Europeans, mentioned in accounts of journeys to the exotic lands of the Orient. They could not imagine consuming a hot, black, bitter-tasting drink--much less with pleasure. It reminded them too much of hot pitch, which was used in medieval times for battle and torture. (17)

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The seventeenth-century bourgeois was distinguished from people of past centuries by his mental as well as his physical lifestyle. Medieval man did physical work, for the most part under the open sky. The middle-class man worked increasingly with his head, his workplace was the office, his working position was sedentary. The ideal that hovered before him was to function as uniformly and regularly as a clock. (The first example that comes to mind is the famous clocklike regularity of Kant, whose neighbors allegedly set their watches by his precisely timed daily walks.) It is perfectly obvious that this new way of life and work would affect the entire organism. In this connection coffee functioned as a historically significant drug. It spread through the body and achieved chemically and pharmacologically what rationalism and the Protestant ethic sought to fulfill spiritually ideologically. With coffee, the principle of rationality entered human physiology, transforming it to conform with its own requirements. The result was a body which functioned in accord with the new demands--a rationalistic, middle-class, forward-looking body. (38)

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Hitler’s Oratory and Beethoven’s Pastoral/ 希特勒的演说术与贝多芬的《田园交响乐》

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 60-61.

Our post-1945 impression of Hitler’s speeches is deceptive. As a rule, what we know of his oratory consists of excerpts, aggressive, often hoarse passages in which his staccato-fortissimo dominates.

But these were only a part of his speeches, and often not the part that had the greatest effect on the audience. As rhetorician Ulrich Ulonska noted in 1990, Hitler’s speeches typically followed the tripartite structure of classical oratory—or, musically speaking, Beethoven’s Pastoral. Ulonska writes:

Hitler usually begins calmly with anecdotes and seemingly objective descriptions of facts. In particular, he invokes the values and desires of his audience, and in so doing portrays himself as one of them and appeals for their trust…. There are no wild affects in this phase of his speeches.

The second phase is dominated by defamations and insults. Hitler awakens untamed emotion…he creates an enormous amount of interpersonal tension by depicting the values and needs of his listeners as being under threat. He calls forth fear, worry, desperation, and the desire for salvation and a leader to show the way out of danger.

All of Hitler’s speeches conclude with a positive, constructive phase. There are fewer and fewer defamations. Hitler releases his listeners from the tension that he previously induced by offering them a vision of a better future attainable through the achievement of certain topically specific goals…. With emotional force and conviction, Hitler simultanelusly sets out the ethical basis for the better days to come and positions himself as an example of moral integrity. With that, he elevates himself to a position of symbolic rescuer, moral savior, and collective superego for everyone in attendance.

The Industrial Base of "Esthetic Freedom"/ “审美自由”的工业化前提

The "esthetic freedom' of the pre-industrial subject was discovered at the very moment when the pre-industrial methods of production and transportation seemed threatened by mechanization: this is a typical process of romanticization, one that even the young Marx was not entirely immune to. As long as the pre-industrial methods and their forms of work and travel were the dominant ones, a Carlyle or Ruskin or Morris would never have thought of seeing them in an esthetic light. As every travel journal and every social history of artisanship demonstrates, they were quotidian and cumbersome. When industrialization suddenly caused these old forms to be seen from an esthetic and romanticizing viewpoint, we learn less about those forms themselves than about general attitudes towards industrialization.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1987), 121.

© Copyright by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。

Opium and Tea--Schivelbusch (1)/ 鸦片和茶

Opium for tea—a formula which not only explains the successes of English imperialism in the Far East, but which thoroughly typified Europe’s relationship to the Third World.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 223.