Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19
Why is it significant?
Stand on the sloping pavement of the Berggasse and find number 19, a sober apartment block with a red and white flag by the door bearing a single name: Freud. For forty-seven years, from 1891 to 1938, this was the address where the twentieth century learned to look inside itself.
Key Facts
| Place | Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19 |
|---|---|
| Address | Berggasse 19, 1090 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.21870, 16.36310 |
| Part of Walk | Couches, Wax and Radium: Freud's Vienna and the Medical Quarter of Alsergrund |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the sloping pavement of the Berggasse and find number 19, a sober apartment block with a red and white flag by the door bearing a single name: Freud. For forty-seven years, from 1891 to 1938, this was the address where the twentieth century learned to look inside itself.
Sigmund Freud lived upstairs with his wife Martha, their six children and his sister-in-law Minna, and he saw patients in rooms on the same floor. Here he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, which appeared in November 1899 but was dated 1900, as if he knew it belonged to the new century. On Wednesday evenings a small circle of doctors and thinkers met in his waiting room, the seed of the psychoanalytic movement. His study was crowded with small antiquities, Egyptian, Greek and Roman figures that he collected passionately and liked to keep on his desk as he wrote.
The famous couch is not here. It travelled with him to London. But in May 1938 a young photographer, Edmund Engelman, quietly photographed every room, every desk and every antique figure on the shelves, knowing the Freuds were about to leave. Those pictures are why we know what Berggasse 19 looked like, and the waiting room, sent back later by his daughter Anna, is the original furniture.
After the Anschluss in March 1938, the Gestapo searched the apartment and questioned Anna Freud. With help from abroad, and after paying the so-called flight tax, the family left for London in June. Freud died there in September 1939. Four of his sisters stayed behind in Vienna. All four were deported and murdered in the Holocaust.
The museum was renovated and reopened in 2020, and it is one of the few places where you can stand in the very rooms in which an idea was born. Now walk a few steps down the Berggasse, turn left into the Servitengasse, and you will see a baroque church at the end of the lane.