David Whitley skips the dancing horses and architecture in Vienna, deciding to concentrate on contraception, globes, crime and Esperanto instead.
Bizarre Museums
For some of us, a recent travel trend has become a little like that moment when a wilfully obscure band you’ve been secretly cherishing suddenly has a whopping great mainstream hit.
Alas, bizarre museums now appear to be the ‘in’ thing. They’ve happily existed for years, completely unvisited by all but a small band of perverse enthusiasts who would far rather see a collection of celebrity lawnmowers than sample Europe’s cultural highlights.
However, in recent months, it’s hardly been possible to move for stories, books and lists of such brilliantly over-specific gems. It seems as though the world has caught on to Hungarian marzipan modelling, Icelandic penis bone collections and English castles full of dog collars. And if this is really the case, then Vienna can expect a tourism boom rather soon.
Wedding Cake Architecture
The fabulously grand Austrian capital is best known for its majestic pomp; wedding cake architecture, proud history, musical heritage and dancing horses. But it has another, better hidden side that if exposed would reveal it to be the unquestioned world epicentre of odd museums.
A short walk from the Westbahnhof is a heavy wooden door, almost specifically designed to make people go away. To get through it, you need to press a buzzer, and once finally upstairs you’re ushered into what looks disturbingly like the waiting room of a family planning clinic.
Museum of Contraception and Abortion
This is the Museum of Contraception and Abortion (though the tourist board literature prefers to leave that last bit out), and it is a bizarre combination of the serious and the frivolous.
Cases are filled with pills and applicators from through the years, while on the walls pie charts and statistics about illegal abortions are opposite cartoons of Victorian types blowing up condoms in some kind of hilarious parlour game.
It covers the whole gamut – diaphragms to sterilisation, via anti-baby lipstick and bidets designed specifically for a post-coital wash. And then there are some implements where it’s probably best to have a limited understanding of German.
Crime Museum
If this is all a bit too squeamish for some, then it’s probably advisable to skip the Crime Museum. Tucked away in what seems like a relatively small old building, this place is a veritable TARDIS of gore. Again, it’s all in German, and the stories of Vienna’s ancient crimes are going to get lost in translation, but much of the utterly sinister collection is visual. And visceral, for that matter.
The Crime Museum is clearly aimed at the sort of demographic that enjoys walking through extensive cellars, looking at picture after picture of murder victims. Yes, there are some bits on the sterling work of the police force, but the emphasis is certainly skewed towards rusty torture instruments, brutal weapons and photos of de-limbed torsos being dug up.
But sometimes it’s a refreshing change to settle in for a couple of hours of witch-burnings, violent confession extractions, lynch mobs and mummified heads in jars.
The whole thing is an engaging, morally ambiguous romp through Vienna’s criminal past. Much is ordered chronologically, with illustrated year-by-year and blow-by-blow accounts about the most newsworthy murders complimented by extensive profiles of the crooks. Lovely stuff.
Mercifully, it is possible for the faint-hearted to get a weird museum fix in Vienna, although they’re probably advised to strike the Funeral Museum from the list too.
Globe Museum
It’s hard to get anything more wholesome than globes, and there are absolutely hundreds of them in the Austrian National Library. Once a private collection, it has now ballooned across an entire floor, and walking in is quite surreal. It’s almost as if someone has gone to the drawing room of every fictional Victorian detective commandeering them, then bundled them all willy-nilly into massive glass cabinets. There are 420 of them in total, and just when you think it’s all over, there’s another room with an even higher concentration.
As all good bizarre museums should be, it is ludicrously over-detailed and answers questions you’d never even thought of asking. Has anyone ever seriously thought about how globes are made? Well here you can find out as interactive screens painstakingly go through the process, step by step.
The whole place gives a peek of a whole new world that most of us never knew existed. Making globes is part art, part craft, part science, and old, highly-styled ones are worth a fortune. They date back to 360BC, and a few makers are revered as artists (despite getting countries in the wrong place and covering up parts they didn’t know all that much about with pictures of lions).
One from 1541 is fabulously inaccurate, and we know because an actual map has been superimposed on top of it. Half of Africa is in the Indian Ocean, Jerusalem is in Sudan, New Delhi is where Arabia should be and Tokyo has been transported to Mongolia. Australia, of course, hadn’t been discovered by that time, and is conveniently replaced by a few sea monsters.
The National Library is also home to one for the purists: a museum devoted to a language that hardly anyone speaks and no nation recognises as an official mother tongue.
Esperanto Museum
And what could possibly be better than learning Esperanto by playing Pacman? The computer game is the unquestioned highlight of the International Esperanto Museum. A word comes up on the screen, and visitors have to pick the right suffix by eating the correct ghost.
This isn’t quite as implausibly difficult as it sounds. It was designed as an auxiliary language – something the whole world could speak as a second language in order to communicate with each other better – and is structured to be as simple as possible. It also steals heavily from the Latin languages, so anyone with vague Spanish or French is in with a chance. Rapida means fast, urbo means town, sana means healthy – all fairly logical, and the ghosts take a pounding.
The rest of the exhibition charts the history of the language, created in 1887 by well-meaning Pole L. L. Zamenhof, and much of it is brilliantly pointless. There are photos of people meeting at Esperanto congresses (with a predictably high concentration of beards), translations of famous books and headphones where you can listen to people reading in the doomed language. It’s almost enough to make you want to learn out of solidarity.
But it also manages to make the point that the idea of an invented language isn’t quite as silly as many may think. After all, we speak one ourselves. The exhibition runs through everyday English words that have been made up on the spot by someone (usually Shakespeare). Bedroom, amazement, serendipity, fashionable, worthless… even God.
It’s bizarrely gripping, and makes skipping all those spectacular Hapsburg palaces and art galleries seem inherently worthwhile.
Trip Notes
The Vienna Tourist Information Office gives out a free city map, which lists all the city’s museums on it. The staff might not know much about any of them (they probably don’t get all that many enquiries about the Contraception and Funeral Museums), but at least the map covers the what and where.
The Globe Museum and International Museum at the Austrian National Library can be found in the Palais Mollard, near the Herrengasse U-Bahn station.
The Museum of Contraception and Abortion can be found at 37/1 Mariahilfer Gürtel, the big main road outside the Westbahnhof station.
The Crime Museum is at 24 Große Sperlgasse, over the bridge of the Danube Canal, just north of the city centre.
Other quirky attractions that may be of interest include the Old Vienna Brandy Museum, the Chocolate Museum, the Clock Museum and the Torture Museum.
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