page_title: History of coffee
section_title: Germany
hierarchical_section_title: History of coffee / Europe / Germany
caption_attribution_description: English: Zimmermann's Coffee-House, Leipzig.Important in Johann Sebastian Bach's life as meeting-place of his Collegium Musicum since 1729
context_page_description: The history of coffee dates back to the 15th century, and possibly earlier with a number of reports and legends surrounding its first use. The earliest substantiated evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree is from the early 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen, spreading soon to Mecca and Medipol. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, South India, Persia, Turkey, the Horn of Africa, and northern Africa. Coffee then spread to the Balkans, Italy, and to the rest of Europe, as well as Southeast Asia and then to America, despite bans imposed during the 15th century by religious leaders in Mecca and Cairo, and later by the Catholic Church.
context_section_description: In Germany, coffeehouses were first established in North Sea ports, including Bremen (1673) and Hamburg (1677). Initially, this new beverage was written in the English form coffee, but during the 1700s the Germans gradually adopted the French word café, then slowly changed the spelling to Kaffee, which is the present word. In the 18th century the popularity of coffee gradually spread around the German lands, and was taken up by the ruling classes. Coffee was served at the court of the Great Elector, Frederick William of Brandenburg, as early as 1675, but Berlin's first public coffee house did not open until 1721.
  Composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who was cantor of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig, in 1723–50, conducted a musical ensemble at Café Zimmermann in that Saxon city. Sometime in 1732–35 he composed the secular "Coffee Cantata" Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (BWV 211), in which a young woman, Lieschen, pleads with her disapproving father to accept her devotion to drinking coffee, then a newfangled fashion. The libretto includes such lines as:
  Ei! wie schmeckt der Coffee süße,
  Lieblicher als tausend Küsse,
  Milder als Muskatenwein.
  Coffee, Coffee muss ich haben,
  Und wenn jemand mich will laben,
  Ach, so schenkt mir Coffee ein!
  
  (Oh! How sweet coffee does taste,
  
  Better than a thousand kisses,
  
  Milder than muscat wine.
  Coffee, coffee, I've got to have it,
  And if someone wants to perk me up, *
  Oh, just give me a cup of coffee!)
caption: Café Zimmermann, Leipzig (engraving by Johann Georg Schreiber, 1732)
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