Tower of fools

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The tower of fools in 2006
The Narrenturm in refurbished condition (May 2019)

The Narrenturm in the grounds of the Old General Hospital of the City of Vienna was built in 1784 as the first psychiatric clinic in continental Europe. Today the tower houses the Federal Pathological-Anatomical Museum , which was incorporated into the Natural History Museum Vienna in 2012 .

building

The tower of fools around 1895
Remains of one of the oldest lightning rods in Vienna on the Narrenturm

The building was erected in 1784 under Emperor Joseph II by Josef Gerl . It was a five-storey round building with 28 rooms per floor, narrow windows and a central wing oriented in a north-south direction. There were a total of 139 individual cells for the patients (occupants). Each cell measures around 13 square meters and can be entered from the round corridor. The guards were housed in the middle wing, and the staircase was built on one side, creating a large and a small courtyard. Joseph II also had the opportunity to study various institutions on his travels to France. With many findings from the 20th and 21st centuries, the erection of the Fool's Tower is seen as a testimony to a new attitude towards the insane; it should represent the beginning of the exclusion of the mentally ill from society and should separate them from the social category of the "poor". Nevertheless, in view of the historical and social context, the erection of the Fool's Tower represented a step forward - it was the shift towards a recognition of a medically relevant ailment and an attempt at care and healing.

The cells had no doors when they were built and the building was not connected to the sewer network. Shortly after commissioning, cell doors were installed and the tower was given a canal access. In 1789, a few years after the opening, a traveler also inspected this "main attraction" during his visit to Vienna:

“A large number of the unfortunate, those imprisoned here, are soldiers. Many are not imprisoned in the containers, but sit and walk in the corridors. Some are on chains in their dungeons and are attached to the walls. "

Ten years later, as a result of the innovations in the therapy of the “mentally ill”, the tower was already considered completely outdated, as only a small proportion of the mentally ill - this is considered the overall trend for the 18th and 19th centuries - socially precisely graded and treated differently, hospitalized and could be supplied; however, it was occupied with patients until 1869. From its round shape, the guides in Vienna usual colloquial name ring cake for mental hospitals or psychiatric hospitals from. The assumption that the tower of fools is an implementation of the idea of ​​the Panopticon by Jeremy Bentham is not correct, since the cells cannot be controlled from a center.

In 1869 the institution in the Narrenturm was closed.

Lightning arrester

Even on the oldest model of the Narrenturm there is a lightning rod or “lightning catcher” on the roof ridge . Two of his brackets in the inner courtyard still exist as of 2017. Josef II was aware of the attempts by Prokop Diviš , who were primarily concerned with the suspected healing power of currents, but also with keeping out thunderstorms with the help of “meteorological machines”. Whether the facility in the tower of fools served as a lightning catcher to treat the inmates or as a lightning rod in the modern sense is controversial.

museum

Exhibition rooms with showcases

The museum was founded in 1796 under Emperor Franz II as a museum of the Pathological-Anatomical Institute . The collection has been in the Narrenturm since 1971. At the instigation of the pathologist Karl Alfons Portele , the museum moved from this university institute to the care of the Ministry of Education in 1974. The current name is Pathological-Anatomical Federal Museum . When the other federal museums due to the Federal Museums Act to 2003, public and scientific institutions law in the so-called discharged full legal capacity , were that spun off from the Federal Administration, the museum was too small to form merely because its own scientific institution. After long deliberations about the combination with other collections in which the outsourcing could be achieved, the last federal museum still managed directly by the ministry was incorporated into the scientific institute Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (NHM) on January 1, 2012 by federal law .

collection

Since the beginning of the collection, the focus has been on wet and dry specimens. From 1974, Karl Portele added further collections from Austria and Germany, including several moulage collections , such as those from Carl Henning . In 1977 a thematically appropriate device collection was created. Today the pathological-anatomical collection in the Narrenturm consists of around 49,000 objects and is the largest collection of its kind in the world.

Electro-pathological collection

Parts of the former electro-pathological museum of the physician Stefan Jellinek are also housed in the Narrenturm . This museum was opened by Jellinek in 1936 before he had to leave the country as a Jew in 1939. After the Second World War he got his collection back. His colleague Franz Maresch reorganized the exhibition after the founder's death in 1968. In the 1980s, a large part of the collection was taken over by the Technical Museum , while the animal and human specimens were handed over to the Pathological-Anatomical Museum.

See also

literature

  • Alfred Stohl: The tower of fools or the dark side of science . Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-205-99207-5 ( online ).
  • Ernst Hausner: The pathological-anatomical federal museum in the Narrenturm of the old general hospital in Vienna . Edition Hausner, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-901141-27-8 .
  • Gerhard Roth: The Archives of Silence . tape 7 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-596-11407-1 , pp. 110–130:  The Tower of Fools .
  • Johann Werfring: Nothing human is alien to people Article in the "Wiener Zeitung" on February 23, 2017, supplement "ProgrammPunkte", p. 7.

Web links

Commons : Fool's Tower  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Scheutz, University of Vienna, lecture History of Poverty and Begging in Modern Times ( Memento from January 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ From the “Narrenturm” to the Steinhof: The Development of the Viennese “Insane Care” . Steinhof Memorial, a project of the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance. Retrieved March 1, 2018.
  3. ↑ a b NHM: Pathological-anatomical collection in the Narrenturm
  4. ↑ Budget Accompanying Act 2012, Federal Law Gazette I No. 112/2011
  5. ^ Opening of the electro-pathological collection in the Vienna Narrenturm on February 12, 2010 ( Memento from October 8, 2011 in the Internet Archive )

Coordinates: 48 ° 13 ′ 7 ″  N , 16 ° 21 ′ 12 ″  E