Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

Copyright © 1935 by H.E. Jacob

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2015

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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

TO THE 1998 EDITION

On the Trail of Coffee . . .

T
HE
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:

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.