The Lost Café Schindler

Viennese-style cafés are a glory of European civilisation. ‘Coffeehouse’ does not do them justice, because they serve so much more than coffee and cake; they are open from breakfast to late evening, they are places where you are served efficiently but then left alone unless you ask for attention. You can sit for hours with just one drink, watching the world move around you to the clinking of crockery, cutlery and glass. Despite their busyness, they are ideal places for reflecting and reading.

In her new book, The Lost Café Schindler: one family, two wars and the search for truth, Meriel Schindler puts it well:

I can concentrate well with a gentle flow of noise around me. When I read about their history, I realised the importance of coffee houses to society: they allowed men - and it was only men, to begin with - to meet on neutral territory, to discuss the issues of the day, to transact business, and above all to think, away from rowdy beer-soused taverns. Coffee was transformative … Cafés are inherently radical affairs.

One of my favourite such establishments is not actually in Vienna itself but in the capital of the Land of Tyrol, the city of Innsbruck, a place I know very well through a family connection. Café Central is a minute’s walk from the main street, Maria-Theresien-Strasse, and it is mentioned by Meriel Schindler as being the only such venue in the city until the founding of the establishment which bore her family’s name, and which is at the centre of her absorbing narrative. I took the photos in the gallery above a couple of years ago during a lovely three-hour stint of coffee, reading, lunch, coffee, cake.

For part of the twentieth century the Café Schindler was in prime position on the main drag (a modern establishment on the same premises has revived the name) and was the visible marker in the city of the presence of this successful Jewish family. The book goes back several generations into the Schlinder-Dubsky family tree, looking at significant figures such as the café owner Hugo and a relative by marriage, Dr Edmund Bloch. The latter, in an extraordinary twist, was the Jewish doctor who treated Hitler’s mother and Adolf himself with such care that he was never forgotten by the Führer, protected and given privileges despite the terror that overwhelmed the Jewish population of Linz. The rest of the family, though, was blighted by the all too familiar story of central European Jews in the middle of the last century, including the extermination camps. One of the most vivid moments of the book charts in detail the events of Kristallnacht in Innsbruck, and the horror that descended on Hugo on that night in November 1938.

Despite those darknesses, this is not a depressing book. It is a richly woven account of an extended family whose personal history has been drawn is constantly interesting. Meriel Schindler (a lawyer) has patiently researched deep into every nook of her own family’s past, and Austria’s. I can certainly recommend the result.