Nestroyplatz: The Comedian Who Fought the Censor

Why is it significant?

You are standing on a busy square where Praterstraße widens, with trams, traffic and an underground station beneath your feet. Look along the boulevard: broad pavements, grand nineteenth-century apartment houses, and on the corner a handsome building with the name Nestroyhof on it.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You are standing on a busy square where Praterstraße widens, with trams, traffic and an underground station beneath your feet. Look along the boulevard: broad pavements, grand nineteenth-century apartment houses, and on the corner a handsome building with the name Nestroyhof on it.

The square is named after Johann Nestroy, born in Vienna in 1801, the funniest and most dangerous man in Viennese theatre. He trained in law, sang bass at the opera, and then discovered that his real talent was making audiences laugh until it hurt. He wrote more than eighty plays, comedies full of songs and wordplay, and acted the leading roles himself, tall, lanky and razor-tongued.

The problem was the censor. In the age of Metternich every script had to be approved, and Nestroy's specialty was the line the censor had cut, delivered anyway, with a look or an ad-lib. He once ended up under arrest for a few days for insulting a critic from the stage. Here is the surprising part: one of his plays, Einen Jux will er sich machen, crossed the Atlantic. Thornton Wilder adapted it into The Matchmaker, and that became the musical Hello, Dolly.

Praterstraße was the theatre street of Leopoldstadt. The Carltheater stood a few steps from here, and Nestroy ran it in the 1850s. It was destroyed in the Second World War and later demolished. The Nestroyhof on the corner, built in 1898 by the architect Oskar Marmorek, held a small theatre that in the 1920s and 1930s became a stage for Jewish theatre and cabaret, until 1938 ended it. Today it is a theatre again. And a little further up the boulevard, at number 54, Johann Strauss the younger lived when he wrote the Blue Danube waltz in 1867.

Before you move on, there is one more place in these streets that should not be missed. Turn into the small side street just south of the square, Tempelgasse, and walk a few steps to four tall white columns standing in front of a modern building.