The Geography of Fashionability: Drinking Coffee in Eighteenth-Century Leipzig

In 1734, in one of its weekly Friday-evening performances at Zimmermann’s coffeehouse in Leipzig, the Collegium musicum performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s new Coffee Cantata. As the “fashionable drink” (Modegetränk) steamed from their coffee bowls, Zimmermann’s customers drank up Bach’s decidedly worldly musical offering. The role of Lisgen, twenty-some daughter and slave to fashion, was possibly sung that night by a countertenor. S/he trilled the delights of the à la mode beverage in the Cantata’s first aria,

Ei, wie schmeckt der Coffee süße, Lieblicher als tausend Küsse, Milder als Muskatwein. Coffee, Coffee muß ich haben, Und wenn jemand will mich laben, Ach so schenkt mir Coffee ein.

(11–15).

[Oh! Coffee’s taste provides such bliss, / More lovely than the thousandth kiss, / More mild than muscat wine. / Coffee, coffee I must have it, / And if someone hopes to refresh me / Oh then pour me a coffee fine.] ¹

The libretto by Bach’s frequent collaborator Picander (Christoph Friedrich Henrici, 1700–1764) played on the proximity between fashionable coffee and sexuality. Lisgen knew coffee to be still “more lovely than the thousandth kiss.” It was her only refreshment. She just had to “have it.”

In 1730s Leipzig, coffee provided more than just a pleasant buzz. As the Cantata insinuated, it could also act as a sexual stimulant. What Lisgen really had to have would have been well understood by the audience that night in Zimmermann’s coffeehouse. The Cantata’s broad hints echoed an assertion made widely across various eighteenth-century media, from botanical, pharmacological, medical, satirical, and moral teachings, to play texts as well as a series of engravings. But, as this article explores, the fashionable drink’s effects were hardly homogenous. The consumer mattered.

While coffee threatened to undo Lisgen and undermine the rule of fathers, it also lent an air of cosmopolitanism to coffeehouse patrons such as the men listening to the Coffee Cantata. While it unleashed Lisgen’s potentially disruptive desires, it also provided Zimmermann’s patrons the occasion for a sophisticated chuckle. Unlike Lisgen, when these men drank coffee, the world was safe in their hands. This paper explores these different effects – one all body, the other all brain – of coffee on eighteenth-century consumers.

To understand the drink’s diverse effects, we need to explore its domestic consumption within an economy that connected the Saxon trade hub to the far corners of the globe. Throughout the eighteenth century, coffee and its consumption featured in starring roles among the fashionable goods and social practices that constituted life à la mode. The effects of fashion in general, like coffee in particular, depended on the consumer. Taking coffee as a fashionable case study, this article proposes to explore the geography of fashionability. Probing fashion’s foreign origin and domestic progress facilitates a grasp of the strategies developed to manage anxieties unleashed by early modern globalism.

This insistence on coffee’s global purchase allows a critical intervention into an account of the eighteenth-century public (Öffentlichkeit). Since Habermas’s seminal study, coffee and the coffeehouse have held starring roles in the structural transformation of the public sphere (for English coffeehouse culture see Cowan; for Germany see Albrecht, also Bödeker). Foregrounding coffee’s worldliness allows us to glimpse the global energies that profoundly shaped the structure of domestic Öffentlichkeit. By the early eighteenth century, as “useful men” drank their coffee, they simultaneously grappled with problems of what they diagnosed as nascent consumerism, commodification, and the domestication of always foreign fashion. While the geography of fashionability spanned the globe, it also sliced the nascent public sphere. If the coffeehouse was central to the emergence of a reasoning public, this public space was populated by Europeans living exotic fantasies. As Woodruff Smith suggests, the coffeehouse was often the stage, and coffee itself an essential theatrical prop, for fantasy performances of a hazily defined Turkishness (72–73; see Wiggin).

When coffee became fashionable throughout Europe in the late seventeenth century, fashion itself remained a parvenu. For the concept of fashion, bestowed with meanings emphasizing novelty as its raison d...