The Forgotten Museum

One institution once housed in the Neue Burg, the Museum of Austrian Culture (MÖK), is almost completely forgotten today. Founded as a separate department of the Art Historical Museum by August Loehr, the first director of the institution, it was based on an idea from the 1920s. After preliminary installation in 1946, the official opening of the museum, which was originally restricted to just three rooms on the first floor of the Neue Burg, took place on 29 May 1947. At the same time, the weapons collection was reopened in the neighbouring rooms and the Collection of Historical Musical Instruments was exhibited for the first time in one of the halls. This Museum of Musical History transferred from the Palais Palavicini on Josefplatz, where it had been opened as part of Nazi cultural policy. The MÖK had set itself the task of presenting “Austrian history particularly with regard to its cultural, economic and social development” in a way that was visually easy to understand while emphasising “the Austrian accomplishments”. After the years of Nazi rule, there was a deliberate attempt to stress “Austrianness” and the task of forming a nation. Although according to the annual report of 1949, “independently critical observation should be fostered, primarily to protect against propaganda, which is threatening to take the upper hand”. Contemporary photographs of the exhibition rooms show how the difficult themes were presented with reference to models, photos and educational diagrams. Like the Museum of the First and Second Republics, which moved into the Leopoldine wing of the Hofburg at the same time, the MÖK was not fated to survive for long. The expansion from three to six exhibition rooms was followed over the next two decades by a reallocation of the rooms within the Art Historical Museum. The collections of weapons and musical instruments were gradually enlarged and the small national museum increasingly lost importance. The end of its time at the Neue Burg came in 1975, when the Museum of Austrian Culture had to make way for the Ephesos Museum, which would open in 1978. A revival under different management in 1987 in the city of Eisenstadt, Burgenland, did not last long—the institution was finally closed in 1994.