Museum of Military History (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum)

Museum · Landstraße (3rd)Vienna,Austria

The Habsburg army's account of itself in a fortress built against Vienna's own citizens, holding the car Franz Ferdinand was shot in.

The Museum of Military History keeps the open Gräf & Stift car in which Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were shot at Sarajevo in 1914. It is in a small room with his tunic, the bullet hole at the collar, and the couch he died on. The rest of the museum is the Habsburg army's account of itself, and you enter it through a hall of fifty-six marble commanders. The building is banded red and yellow brick with pointed arches and a low dome, borrowed from Byzantine and Moorish models. It opened in 1856, and nothing in Vienna was built to be a museum earlier. The army raised it for itself and the Ministry of Defence still runs it. It stands at the centre of the Arsenal, a walled barracks town that Franz Joseph ordered after the revolution of 1848, so that troops could hold the capital if the city rose again. Upstairs, under the dome, forty-five frescoes show one Habsburg victory after another, and the museum itself now calls that programme glorifying and historically distorted.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The story on show starts in the 1800s — the two halls covering the Thirty Years' War and Maria Theresa's army are shut, and the museum's exhibition list gives neither a reason nor a date.
The heavy machinery is not in the museum building — the guns and the tanks stand in separate halls across the Arsenal yard, and the artillery halls stay shut through the cold months.
Look past the car to what Sophie left — the case beside it holds the lace jacket she was wearing that morning, together with dried roses and letters.
In the domed hall upstairs, look down as well as up — the floor was a mosaic of round cherub panels, and after wartime bombing only the strip along the window wall survives as it was.

Things to do

1
Read the two attacks off one car
In the Sarajevo room, walk around the open Gräf & Stift car. Find the single bullet hole punched through the side canopy. Then move to the back and look for the shrapnel scars left by the grenade thrown at the motorcade earlier that morning, which bounced off this car and exploded behind it.
2
Cross the marble ranks before you climb
Give the entrance hall a slow walk before you take the stairs. Every one of the fifty-six commanders was cut from Carrara marble to the same height of 186 centimetres. A margrave who died in 994 meets your eye at exactly the level a field marshal does.
3
Find the stone-thrower among the bronze barrels
In the artillery halls, walk past the engraved bronze guns with their animal heads and coats of arms until you reach the Pumhart von Steyr. It is a fifteenth-century iron bombard, a siege gun that threw stone balls weighing more than six hundred kilograms. Around 550 barrels and mounted guns stand in these halls.