Saly Noémi: Café?! Változatok és változások Időszaki kiállítás 2007. február–május (Budapest, 2007)

2000 portions of espresso coffee daily. This quantity and this pace - which demonstrated clearly the new demands ol the era - would have been inconceivable in a traditional café. Let us read írom Sándor Marais short essay ol the 1940s, entitled 'Espresso'! 'What is this espresso bar? ...a place that is fitted out lor short stays: the tables are small, and I, accustomed to the dimensions of a café, a stout product of peacetime, can only settle mysell awkwardly on these Lilliputian chairs, drooping over them a little. Serves me right (...) The espresso bar is a short genre - not a long-winded epic, just a kind of small sculpture. And they are growing now in Pest, like truffles alter the rain. One or two have opened on every busy street. (...) The cale is a more billowing, more ceremonious and therefore more expensive genre! The café proprietors provide an abundance ol light, large spaces, comfortable box seats, all the national and international papers, hot and cold dishes, all kinds ol alcohol, billiards and a gaming room. The espresso bar offers none ol these earthly goods, but a sip of black coffee, a small measure of uncomfortable intimacy, shelter lor the homeless young - and all this lor a mere forty-five fillers per head, including lip. The secret ol its success is that there is something hurried and cheap about it, like everything in this new lile. The secret of its success is that there is something impermanent about it. (...) I understand everything, I will gladly resigne myself to everything. But just lor this short time which is still mine, I will quietly return from the espresso bar to the cafe.' (Sándor Márai: Vasárnapi krónika [Sunday Chronicle]. Budapest, Publisher: Révai, 1943, pp. 180-185) Back to the café? The reality was reluctant to adapt itsell to this desire. The future was to be that ol the espresso - we will return to this: in what manner and for what reasons - and il is a significant fact that the year of Marais emigration - 1948 - also turned out lo be ihe year of the liquidation ol cafés through nationalisation. At this point, let us examine the literary café, or the myth of the specifically literary nature of ihe café, which not only in private, but also in academic memory, is almost ihe only valid one. If the subject ol the cafe of the old days comes up m the media or simply in friendly conversation, it immediately turns to the literary calé. Similarly, il we pick up a volume or photo album on cafés, we see that the publisher has turned the author's attention, gently but firmly, to ihe literary or at leasi the artists' cafes. This exclusivity is just as understandable as it is unacceptable. Understandable, since lor the general public it is only in literature that the memory of the cafés has been preserved, where it could assume the final form - il at all - of the multitude of personal experiences scattered in all directions and where it was most capable of capturing and transmitting the unparalleled experience of café life. But also unacceptable, since ihe literary and/or artists' calés, no matter how important from a cultural standpoint, comprised both numerically and sociologically in every large city and thus also in Budapest, only the minority of cafés - typically a very small minority. The brilliant achievements of Hungarian artistic and literary modernism of the turn of ihe last century - and not incidentally the historical research into the past of the cafés - would indeed be difficult lo imagine without ihe literary cafés and café literature, not to mention the often even more valuable café journalism. However, even taking inio account broader periods of time and with the best of intentions, we cannot count - just as in Vienna

1 - more than twenty cafés that could be included in ihis category, while