Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity Read online

  Copyright © 1935 by H.E. Jacob

  First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2015

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Owen Corrigan

  Cover photo credit: Thinkstock

  ISBN: 978-1-63220-296-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-782-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION TO THE 1998 EDITION

  Book One: Islam’s Wine

  I. NIGHT IN THE LAND OF YEMEN

  II. THE FIGHT AGAINST BACCHUS

  III. TRIMETHYLDIOXYPURIN

  IV. PERSECUTION AND VICTORY

  V. KOLSHITSKY’S VALIANT DEED

  Book Two: Health of the Nations

  VI. VENETIAN COMMERCE

  VII. KING BEER

  VIII. DOCTORIAL DISCUSSIONS IN MARSEILLE

  IX. SULEIMAN AGA AND THE PARISIANS

  X. BROTHER COFFEE

  Book Three: Planters, Traders, and Kings

  XI. THE ISLAND REALM OF THE DUTCH

  XII. COFFEE AND ABSOLUTISM

  XIII. THE LITERARY CENTURY

  XIV. LUXURIES AND POTENTATES

  XV. NAPOLEON’S ALLIANCE WITH CHICORY

  Book Four: Coffee in the Nineteenth Century

  XVI. THE ADVANCE OF TEA

  XVII. PLEASURES OF THE LADIES OF BERLIN

  XVIII. COFFEE-HOUSE FREQUENTERS IN AUSTRIA

  XIX. SPECULATION AND THE SPANISH CRISIS

  XX. OVERSEAS HARVESTS, WORLD MARKETS, AND PRICES

  Book Five: Brazilian Dictatorship

  XXI. SOIL, EMPIRE, AND THE LABOUR PROBLEM

  XXII. RUIN OF THE PLANTATIONS IN CEYLON

  XXIII. THE ECONOMIC STRUGGLE OF BRAZIL

  XXIV. REASON BECOMES NONSENSE—BONFIRES OF COFFEE

  XXV. ENVOY

  POSTSCRIPT

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Introduction

  TO THE 1998 EDITION

  On the Trail of Coffee . . .

  THE reprinting of Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity is long overdue. It stands as a landmark in the evolution of twentieth-century European literature, and its author was among a company of brilliant minds with whom he interacted and corresponded. Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel (author of The Song of Bernadette and The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, both classics which were ultimately made into Hollywood movies), the well-known early-twentieth-century German poet Stephan Zweig, German political philosopher Hannah Arendt, and German film director Max Reinhardt, to name a few, were his friends and contemporaries. And his subject was one which has captured the minds and hearts of late-twentieth-century Americans, just as it had captured the attention of Jacob’s turn-of-the-century Vienna.

  Two years ago, I began working on an introduction to a wonderful book I’d found: Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History by German author, Heinrich Eduard Jacob. The book was an obscure classic, originally published in English in 1944. Following its initial enthusiastic reception, it had lain quietly gathering dust in the libraries of dedicated bread lovers and food historians. Laurel Robertson, author of The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, had drawn my attention to it. Her comments set me on the trail of an adventure which would lead me into the world of Heinrich Eduard Jacob and the political, social, and literary stage of early-twentieth-century Berlin and Vienna.

  Jacob was well-known and respected in his day as a poet, playwright, novelist and chief of the Central European bureau (headquartered in Vienna) of Berlin’s largest newspaper; as such, he socialized and worked with everyone who was “anyone” in the world of German literature, art, and society. I was surprised to learn that not only had he written a thorough history of bread, but he had also written, among other renowned works, an equally comprehensive history of coffee. Jacob was the first to explore the history of a commodity by presenting his information in a dramatic form; thus his “saga of coffee” was considered a landmark in European literature.

  In 1922, an American author, William Ukers, had written a monumental work (800 pages) on the subject of coffee. The Ukers book, with which Jacob was familiar, was a fascinating collection of primary sources: writings, observations, and documents on coffee down through the ages, yet Ukers made no attempt to weave his facts into the fabric of a story as Jacob had done. Robert Barker, who spent his early years hauling pastries to the famed Café Trieste in San Francisco’s North Beach, and who is now a green coffee buyer for a specialty coffee roaster as well as the owner of an historic coffee farm in Colombia, thinks that Jacob’s dramatic presentation of “that silly goat story”—the legend of how coffee was discovered by a goatherd and his goats—is the first account that sounds even remotely plausible. And the Deutsches Biobibliographie, the standard German biographical reference book, claims, “. . . Myth and the Triumphal March of Coffee [as it is called in German] is considered the first of the modern nonfiction books . . . in which Jacob meshed mythological speculation, historically accurate details and facts with observations on economics and cultural criticism into stimulating reading matter.”

  How did Jacob conceive this idea? Hans Jörgen Gerlach quotes Jacob in his book, Heinrich Eduard Jacob: In Two Worlds:

  “Gerhardt Hauptmann [the foremost German dramatist of the twentieth-century], Leo von König [one of Europe’s most important twentieth-century painters] and I took a stroll over the Island Hiddensee. Hauptmann had been unusually talkative, praising the classical Greeks and their habit of making ‘gods out of things.’ ‘Such a true god is the god of wine (Bacchus), to whom everyone owes reverence and gratitude,’ proclaimed Hauptmann. At this point, von König gave me a sly, amused sidelong glance, for Hauptmann had a reputation as an infamous drinker.

  I remained silent. To my mind there existed an anti-Bacchus; namely, coffee. For what was wine to me? Wine may well encourage the creativity of characters like Hauptmann, but it only led me to the vestibule of sleep. To me, it was coffee, the great resurrector, that gave me courage and vigor. So I decided to write its history. The book would be a novel and then some. Something which would require digging deep through entire libraries; a narrative which would be given soul by a coffee-driven euphoria.

  My friend Ernst Rowohlt suggested calling it the ‘Saga of Coffee.’ It would be a documentary novel; the very first of its kind. Oddly enough, the genre became quite popular in America. Odd because it was particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries where there bloomed a rigid separation between fiction and non-fiction. Today, of course, all that has changed; and writers recognize that scientific books, too, regardless of their serious nature, can be written using epic techniques.”

  Myth and the Triumphal March of Coffee met with phenomenal success upon its publication in Germany in 1935. Jacob’s work had been blacklisted by the Nazis since 1933 (Jacob was a Jew, a Mason, and a pacifist)
, but Jacob’s friend, publisher Ernst Rowohlt, in a gesture designed to foster the spirit of literary freedom, had made it his business to publish many works considered undesirable by the Nazis. Jacob’s work met with such success in fact, that Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, allegedly telephoned Rowohlt himself to ask that he “call off his Jew.”

  Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity was eventually translated into twelve languages and published in England, America, France, Italy, Sweden, Greece, Portugal and Spain. In December, 1938, a reviewer in The New York Times said, “All this noble arras of adventure, this ‘epic of a commodity’ one reads in Coffee . . . far more a tale from the Thousand and One Nights than the sober account of a breakfast necessity.” And the Montreal Daily Star called it “a book whose flavor is as stimulating as its subject.” A reviewer in the New York Herald claimed, “Herr Jacob’s Coffee kept me awake to the last page.” And The Pittsburgh Press lauded, “He has produced a book as stimulating and as satisfying as your morning cup of coffee.”

  Yet I am puzzled by the fact that this book, so very popular upon its publication, has gathered dust on the shelves for over sixty years. Since Jacob’s book appeared, no one else has attempted the formidable task of telling the tale and yet the world has gone “coffee crazy,” witness the enormous popularity of gourmet coffee vendors and houses on every street corner in America. Jacob’s Vienna was renowned for its coffee and coffeehouses: Jacob stated, “Just as in the Imperium Romanum one encountered the military milestones every thousand double paces along the high road, so, throughout Austria-Hungary one encountered the prefectoral headquarters built of yellow sandstone and fitted with green shutters . . . and coffee-houses after the Viennese model.” Vienna had, among other things, become “coffee central” in Jacob’s day. And he considered living in Vienna to be one of the most important formative aspects of his life. Yet not even Jacob, with his great passion for coffee, could have foreseen the powerful hold coffee would have on the world of today.

  What would Jacob think if he could visit the streets of a modern American Metropolis and see his “anti-Bacchus” enjoying enormous popularity side-by-side with its very antithesis? I cannot imagine he would be altogether surprised at the results of this twentieth-century alliance. Alice Lampel, Jacob’s half-sister, writing for the International Herald Tribune in 1936, said of Jacob, “everything he undertakes aims at reconciling divergencies,” so I cannot imagine he would be anything but pleased.

  Consciously or unconsciously, Jacob approached this theme of reconciliation, this time between the Arab and the Christian worlds, when he tackled the task of telling the tale of coffee. Just as wine is at the very foundation of the Judeo-Christian European culture, so coffee is the very hallmark commodity of the world of Islam. And just as you find wine wherever you find a Christian-based civilization, so you find coffee wherever the Arab world has made significant inroads. (It is interesting to note that until the most modern times, China remained relatively immune to both of these commodities and religions, testifying to its traditional isolationist stance.) In a sense, just as the Crusaders of twelfth-century Europe returned from the Holy Wars bringing with them an appreciation of things Arab (and forever changing the shape of things to come in Western Europe), so Heinrich Eduard Jacob sought to acknowledge and honor the “wine of Islam” which has had such an enormous impact upon the twentieth-century world.

  Inasmuch as wine has long been associated with the feminine (André Tchelistcheff has compared a good Merlot to a “charming, beautiful lady”), relaxation and romance, coffee has long been viewed as masculine and equated with the world of intellectual stimulation. Jacob points out that seventeenth-century English literature was born in the London coffeehouses frequented by Johnson, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison and Steele. And the 1960s coffeehouses of New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach spawned a whole “beat generation” of writers. In actuality, coffee and its attendant conversation have often spelt trouble for the status quo. Jacob reports that in 1517, Khair Bey, the new viceroy of the Mecca, forbade the drinking of coffee on the premise that it “led to riots;” and in December of 1675, Charles II of England closed the country’s coffeehouses because he considered them “hotbeds of sedition and a breeding ground for subversive movements,” all of which was not far from the truth. In 1774, a letter sent by the Committee of Correspondence from Merchants’ coffee house in New York to Boston proposed the American Union. Merchants’ had been dubbed by some as the “birthplace of the Union” as well as the “true cradle of American liberty,” and in 1789, George Washington was officially greeted there as President of the United States. Jacob further describes how, on July 12, 1789, French revolutionary Camille Desmoulins mounted a table outside the Café Foy in Paris’ Palais Royale and incited the crowd to storm the Bastille! Likewise, Jacob believed that the French Revolution was born in the cafés of Paris.

  When Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity first appeared in English in 1935, the “coffee shop” had become an American institution and the country was ready for the saga of its morning wake-me-up. As the millennium comes to a close, there is a specialty coffee vendor on every street corner in America and coffee comes from the four corners of the earth. The country is again crazy for coffee and ready for the retelling of its exciting story.

  I am grateful to Peter Burford and his newly-formed Burford Books for having the good sense to recognize and publish this unique book. Its publication would also not have been possible without the generous help of my friend, Dr. Jeffrey B. Berlin, a well-known authority on the subject of early-twentieth-century German authors and keeper of a wealth of knowledge about Heinrich Eduard Jacob, his contemporaries, and his era, who has graciously shared many conversations and many manuscripts with me. In addition, I wish to thank Hans Jörgen Gerlach of Berlin, who is the executor of Jacob’s estate, and who has proven himself more than worthy of the confidence bestowed upon him by Heinrich Eduard Jacob’s widow, Dora, when she placed her husband’s works in Herr Gerlach’s care. Without his permission and generous assistance, this book could not have been reprinted in English. Thanks to Beth Hensperger and Helen Mildner for patient proofreading. And most of all, I wish to thank M., who gives heart to all I write.

  —LYNN ALLEY

  July, 1998

  Coffee

  THE EPIC OF A COMMODITY

  BOOK ONE

  Islam’s Wine

  1

  Night in the Land of Yemen

  THE ground, which was but a skin of lava and limestone, had little time to cool down at night. The fierce, red sun rose early and set late, so the night was short, hot, and oppressive.

  By walking a few miles westward, one could reach the sea. But it was a shallow sea, tepid, and not wide. From time immemorial it had been known as the Red Sea.

  Scant vegetation was to be found among the foothills of Yemen. On the flanks of the hills and in the wadies grew dense bushes. Dwarf acacias stood gaunt and motionless in the parched and torrid air. Cushions of golden and brown furze saddled the crests. The aloe was bitter, the date-palm bore sweet fruit. Across them one glimpsed the rust-coloured mountains, the terrible Jebel Shomer from which, of old, fiery streams of lava had descended. Nothing grew on these heights, and men did not visit them. Only the runaway goats, from time to time, climbed the topmost peaks. No one bade them go thither, but thither they went, moved by the lust of adventure and the longing for solitude. After weeks, they would return, lean and out of condition.

  The herds of goats belonged to the monastery. The monastery, “Shehodet”—the name means “bear witness”—belonged to Allah, as everything on earth belongs to the Creator.

  Between goats and men there has, since the dawn of history, been a bargain. Such was the case here. The goats supplied the monastery with milk and goat-hair; in return, the monastery provided the goats with herdsmen, watchdogs, and protection. Often enough, however, the monks broke their side of the contract. Then the goats were, in part, el
aborated into morocco or cordovan. Sometimes, as parchment leaves of the Koran, they testified to the greatness of Mohammed, the Prophet of Allah—after their flesh had been devoured and their skins thoroughly dried in the baking air. Nevertheless most of the goats continued to dwell among the foothills, though they could easily have wandered beyond the reach of dogs and men.

  Goatherds have little to do. That is why they have always been liars, braggarts, and intriguers. Was not Melantheus, the goatherd in the Homeric saga, a busybody; did he not reflect the covetousness and disquiet of the beasts under his care? Exceptionally false-tongued must have been those goatherds who misled Claudius Aelianus, the writer of classical Rome, into believing a quaint item of natural history: “One of the peculiar merits of the goat is the strange way in which it is able to breathe. For this animal can breathe through its ears as well as through its nostrils, and is, speaking generally, the most sensitive of all cloven-footed beasts. I do not know why they breathe thus, but merely record what I have learned. Since the goat was created by Prometheus, he alone, I presume, knows why he created it no otherwise. . . .”

  The goatherds of Shehodet Monastery knew their charges well, as was meet; knew the creatures’ Promethean disinclination for peace and quiet; their fondness for climbing, for butting, and for gnawing the bark off trees; their perpetual craving for salt. The goatherds knew that goats would often take to the high mountains for a week or more, and be slow to return. But now the beasts were displaying a new characteristic, one which was troublesome to their keepers. Hitherto a goat’s day had been, like a man’s, a day of twelve hours. At sunset, they were wont to go to sleep, lying with outstretched limbs, as motionless as stone. But now the goats were affected with sleeplessness.

  All night, for five nights in succession—nay, for seven or eight—they clambered over rocks, cutting capers, chasing one another, bleating fantastically. They turned their bearded heads hither and thither; with reddened eyes they gambolled convulsively when they caught sight of the goatherds, and then they darted off swift as arrows speeding from the bow.