Sigmund Freud Museum (Berggasse 19)

Museum · Alsergrund (9th)Vienna,Austria

The Vienna flat where Freud lived and saw patients for forty-seven years, left deliberately empty since he took everything to London in 1938.

Berggasse 19 was Sigmund Freud's home for forty-seven years and the flat where he saw his patients, and it is empty. He left in June 1938, three months after Germany annexed Austria. The Nazi authorities let him emigrate to London with his furniture and the thousands of ancient figures he had collected, so what stayed behind was a set of bare rooms. When the museum opened in his practice rooms it did not refurnish them, and it still has not. You are walking through an absence, and that is deliberate. A rebuilding finished in 2020 added the family's private rooms and made the emptiness itself the subject. The rooms are small and the visit is mostly reading: wall texts and display cases carry the story, and several rooms hold nothing else at all. Two are exceptions — the waiting room kept its own furniture, and in the family's sitting room a few of their pieces stand where they used to. Below the flat, where Freud saw patients before he moved the practice upstairs, hang a dozen works of contemporary art.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come at opening time — The rooms are small, and a single guided group fills the treatment room. Standing in an empty room only works if you are more or less alone in it.
Take the stairs slowly — The entrance gate and the stairwell are the original ones, so this is the climb Freud's patients made. The flat and the practice opened off the same landing at the top.
Look at the shop windows before you go in — Siegmund Kornmehl ran a kosher butcher's shop behind them for forty-four years, until he was forced to sign the business over in October 1938.
Walk on to the Strudlhofstiege — Berggasse itself has nothing else to see. A few minutes away, a stone staircase of curving ramps climbs between two streets, built in 1910 and famous from a 1951 Viennese novel.

Things to do

1
Count the chairs Freud's Wednesday group sat on
Anna Freud sent the waiting-room furniture back from London when the museum was being set up in the early 1970s. Stand in the doorway and count the chairs. From 1902 Freud's Wednesday evening discussion group met in this room, and this is the furniture they sat on.
2
Find the daughter's consulting room beside the father's
Anna Freud rented two rooms of her own on this floor in the 1920s and saw her own patients, most of them children, in the larger one. Stand in it and work out where you are. Her consulting room and her father's were a few steps apart, and they worked that way until they both left in 1938.