A 1970s Trip to the Museum

Welcome to the Museum of Austrian Military History in Vienna

May 02, 2024

Every now and then I am going to write a bit more about those parts of the Erich Sonntag Postcard Collection that tell ‘more’ about the collector. This is one of these posts, and in it we shall “visit” the Museum of Military History, or Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, of HGM, in Vienna.

Like its probably better-known peer, the Imperial War Museum, this is an odd place to visit to begin with. Unlike the London-based museum, change typically occurs much less infrequently. As of late, there has been quite a bit of “controversy”, as the former director was said be too friendly to “right-wing” content. Curiously enough, during the 2010s, one visitor record after the other seemingly occurred, which says less about the contents of the exhibitions—paintings, weapons, armour, and more modern military hardware and social issues from the period 1848 to the present.

The building itself, though, is perhaps an even more interesting site than any of its contents (sorry, my friend Georg Hoffmann who has been appointed director of the HGM about a year ago). The building, part of the much larger Arsenal complex, was the first of the famous museums adorning the Ringstraße. It was also a “dual use” building, for it served as both an artillery barracks (to have troops at-hand in case “1848” happened again) and an integral part of the old “black-yellow” late Habsburg patriotism. Shown here is the main entrance to the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum as painted by Rudolf von Alt, which was built by Eduard van der Nüll (1812-1868) and August Sicard von Sicardsburg (1813-1868) who oversaw construction of the command building and most of the barracks and magazines, Ludwig Förster (1797-1863; rifle factory and foundry), and Carl Roesner (1804-1869) who designed the Arsenal Church.

For picture credit and the below quotes, click here.

It took another 16 or years to finish the interior, and if you’re interested in its story, please let me know and I shall write something about it, too. For here, I have adapted two paragraphs from my forthcoming book:

Austria’s emergence during this period appears even more spectacular when compared to the military and strategic history of the preceding century: during the final stages of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), the Habsburg emperor had cut at best a mediocre military figure; a dozen years into the reign of Charles VI (r. 1711-40), the double-headed imperial eagle cast a wide shadow. From the North Sea to the tip of the Italian peninsula, from the gates of Milan to the peaks of the Eastern Carpathians, a colossus of unprecedented proportions bestrode Central Europe. Vienna’s imposing Karlskirche (1716-37), with its mimicry of Roman and Greco-Byzantine styles, testifies to Charles VI’s aspirations and illusions, but the message of the architectural ensemble was clear: a “second Habsburg empire”, as Charles Ingrao contends, had arisen.
As contemporaries celebrated—and opponents feared—Vienna’s new power in image, spectacle, and text, these events are also the foundation for scholarly attempts to make sense of this history. Nineteenth-century historians developed a narrative of state formation that interpreted the crucial decades around 1700, especially the victories over the Ottomans, as the Habsburgs’ finest hour. The unforeseen and unexpected string of triumphs in the East after the successful defence of Vienna (1683) was given the resounding name “Age of Heroes” (Heldenzeitalter) by mid-nineteenth century historians whose selective interpretation was instrumentalised to paper over then-current military blunders. Carved out of stone and displayed with much splendour in the Army Museum’s “Hall of Glory” (the Ruhmeshalle in today’s Museum of Military History, erected 1850-56), this triumphalist, if teleological, interpretation of history was recounted the Habsburgs’ rise to greatness and, in a way, it also reflected late nineteenth century hopes and dreams of resurgence.

If you wish to virtually take a tour of the building, the HGM’s website allows that.

The main purpose of the museum—and of today’s posting—is its extremely rich collection of Habsburg artefacts covering virtually the entirety of the period from around 1500 until the First World War (and beyond).

And this, finally, brings me to today’s picture postcard drop—for I have, out of a good many things, scanned the ones in the “war” box, and I would like to share them with you for two reasons:

On a personal level, Erich Sonntag was a soldier for the better part of his life, from 1941-45, and from 1961 until his retirement a few years of before his death. Judging from the many other war-related postcards and photographs I found in his collection, he appears to have displayed great interest in “stuff” related to his profession (which, to be fair, I can understand as a historian: I love books and manuscripts and, generally, “old stuff”).

On a more general level, though, these picture postcards are interesting in and of themselves as they show the early modern (c. 1500-1800) exhibition that as it was curated in the early 1970s. It hasn’t been “updated” or “revised” since, and therefore you could—still (!)—visit that arrangement (I did so in 2014), and it is quite a bit of “time travel” that doing so entails. As it happens, the 1848-1918 rooms were re-done in the 1990s, and the new director is currently preparing a major upgrade to the 1918-55 (“First Republic, Democracy, and Dictatorship”) section. We shall see when and how this will be accomplished…

So, enough with the text now—I hope you are ready for some picture postcards now?

From the HGM’s Early Modern Collections

Shown above is a hall containing “beautiful artillery pieces from the 16th to the 19th centuries”.

Below, by contrast, an “arquebusier, c. 1632”. An arquebus is a European “long gun”, or rifle, with the below armour and set-up dating from the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48).

Below, from the first half of the 17th century, behold a “Croat”, found in the Prince Eugene Hall:

The next one is a wonderful exhibit—it’s a French observation balloon acquired as a spoil of war at the Battle of Würzburg on 3 Sept. 1796 during the War of the First Coalition against Revolutionary/Republican France; it is found in the Archduke Charles Hall:

Finally, two images—the picture postcard below shows the “The 1910 Gräf & Stift Bois de Boulogne phaeton automobile in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated” on 28 June 1914, incl. his blood-stained uniform: