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Phantasies of the „Origin“. The imagery of the coffee bean and the Hamburg coffee merchants.
| The paper aims at exploring the exotics and the erotics of the coffee plant and fruit in the imaginary world the Hamburg coffee merchants created about what they called the "Origin" (Ursprung), that is the countries where coffee was produced, namely in Latin America. Hamburg was the most important harbour for coffee imports during the 20th century, and at the same time the home of ca. 200 coffee trade companies at a time in the first half of the century. The most important of these companies, based in a small quarter of the port’s free trade zone, was an all male world focussing around the coffee business. Images of the product as the “other” of this cosmos of contracts, money and the stock market were very present in the self understanding and self representation of this social group. The paper will analyse these images in regard to their symbolic content and the function they had (and still have) for the collective self of the European coffee trade, for which Hamburg is an ideal case study.
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