Not Habsburg, but Hitler: Struggle over Vienna’s Neue Burg

A palace hotel, a restaurant, cinema, casino or wine bar—or a “pleasure establishment on the grandest of scales”? These were some of the proposed uses for the Neue Burg (“New Castle”), the final section to be built of the Hofburg, the imperial palace complex in Vienna. After the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the interior of the Neue Burg was never completed. The plans made for its use were as varied as they were spectacular. The Neue Burg is a component of the Kaiserforum (“Emperor Forum”) plan by Gottfried Semper and Carl Hasenauer, which was only ever implemented in part. In the years of the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg dictatorship and the Nazi regime, the building served as an impressive background for carefully staged political events, but it was more than that. Initially there were plans to use the interior as a museum of the First World War. Then it was used as a depot for looted art Numerous rooms of the Neue Burg were opened for the public for the first time when they were needed for propaganda exhibitions for the Nazi regime. Once fiercely fought-over, today this section of the Hofburg is a museum and library cluster—and since 2018 the House of Austrian History is part of that.