Vienna Media News 03/2020 Berggasse 19 - Freudian trip

9.3.2020 - Vienna’s Sigmund Freud Museum will reopen at the end of May 2020. Space for new exhibitions has been added during an extensive refurbishment project that also brought the museum’s facilities up to the state of the art.

The Sigmund Freud Museum will reopen at its original location in Vienna at the end of May 2020. A new exhibition and contemporary museum format tells the story of Sigmund Freud and his family’s life at Berggasse 19, bringing the original rooms to life and shedding light on the different ways they have been used over the decades. The museum also presents the development, contemporary relevance and global spread of psychoanalysis, which was invented by Freud. The physical space left behind by the absent couch has the effect of a memorial commemorating the horrors of the Holocaust. Freud, who fled the country in 1938, took all of his possessions with him into exile in London.

New and optimized facilities help create a significantly enhanced museum experience: a lift opens up access to all of the floors in the building, the shop and ticket desk on the ground floor are designed to cope with the 100,000 or more visitors expected each year, and the improved amenities will make it easier for groups to circulate. The museum’s café will also serve as a place to meet. Opening up new spaces on the upper ground floor and mezzanine level means that visitors now have access to even more rooms – including Freud’s private apartment – as well as the museum’s collection of conceptual art, which includes works by Franz West, Joseph Kosuth and Jenny Holzer. The library of psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum – Europe’s largest study library devoted to the subject with around 40,000 media – is a key part of the redesign and refurbishment project. This contemporary facility will be accessible to a greater number of library users. A multipurpose reading room and event space will provide a new focal point.

Until the Sigmund Freud Museum opens at the end of May 2020, the Moving Freud Museum around the corner will continue to provide an insight into the life and work of the founding father of psychoanalysis in a specially curated temporary exhibition. Freud’s waiting room, and a number of belongings, and pictures relating to this key intellectual figurehead of Viennese Modernism are also on show, alongside selected highlights from his collection of antiquities. Freud family home videos can also be seen at Berggasse 13.

In spring 2020 streaming giant Netflix will release an eight-part TV series produced in collaboration with the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF). Available to 148 million households in 30 different languages, Freud is a portrait of a developing young man, whose passionate belief in his theories meant that he was no stranger to controversy.

Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, 1090 Vienna, www.freud-museum.at, reopens end of May 2020
Until end of May 2020: Moving Freud Museum, Berggasse 13 / Liechtensteinstrasse 19, 1090 Vienna, www.freud2020.at