Local Museums Bring Me Joy
Let me explain. I’m Scottish, but I’ve spent most of my working life in Austria. I was incredibly homesick for the first five years. The mountains were too sharp. The lakes didn’t smell like the sea. I could speak German, but I couldn’t be myself when I was flustered and groping for words in situations where, in English it would be easy to make small talk. I’d walk around Vienna feeling like my ‘imposter syndrome’ emitted an aura. Luckily, I feel about galleries and bookshops the same way that most people feel about warm baths, they’re comforting. So when my desire to be anywhere else but Vienna got so bad that I couldn’t hide at home, that was where I’d make myself go. I didn’t have to talk, I could browse, think and stare until my anxiety wilted and something that I couldn’t really put into words started to slip a little bit more into line.
Thankfully, Vienna is a city of museums.
There are palaces. There’s a snow globe museum and a tour of the tiny apartment that belonged to Sigmund Freud. There are museums of schnapps and chimney sweeps. There’s even a museum of forged art. But my favourites? The 23 district museums dotted around the spiral of neighbourhoods where people live. These district museums are run by volunteers, who range from bemused, to exasperated, to absolutely delighted to see you. They’re stocked with the contents of attics, cellars, dressing tables and school cupboards. Open for about two hours, twice a week and never open during the holidays. Most of them are hidden in administrative buildings, but at least one is in an old public shower block. They’re a small jigsaw piece of the city and in lifting up the pieces, you see a small space where you might be able to fit as well. The first time I visited one of these museums some of the strange and beautiful things that I saw were:
-The old mayoral chain laid out on navy velvet.
-A piece of stone from a church, with a notice stating that someone had stolen the original and could we please refrain from doing it again.
-A basket of ornamental soaps.
-A 100-year-old school wastepaper basket, with a notice saying that it was a part of the exhibit and could we please refrain from throwing anything in.
Back in 2019, before my second child was born, before house moves, and global pandemics, I tried to visit as many of Vienna’s local museums as I could. I went to lectures on the history of the canal that had given the 11th district its shape, its industry and flood protection to the rest of the city and I took my daughter to a children’s concert in the 21st district where we pretended to be horses while the oil paintings watched.
Each one of the local museums had its own degree of organised chaos. The items on display included the good and the bad, the funny and the weird. They were all here muddled together. Each one of them showing me something that’s stayed with me. For example:
-The watercolour portrait of ‘Lilli the Goose’, who sat at the end of the tramline in Döbling until the drivers got out to carry her off, and accompanying photograph of the statue that was erected in her honour, as she exemplified the ‘easy-going and comfortable’ spirit of a district full of vineyards.
Everything that I found in the museums reminded me that I wasn’t alone. Even in the moments when I was lonely, I saw documentation of people who had felt the same way and still built a life here. If the museums didn’t throw ropes between countries and cultures, they at least showed me where the strings were, so I’d know how to do it on my own.
I looked at the basket of ornamental soaps. They were inside a glass case but I could smell them. They were the same ones my granny had had in her bathroom. She had never been to Vienna, but she did have porcelain figurines in ballgowns, and silver statues of cockerels, and tins of tea. All of these things were staring back at me, in the place that was now my home.
In the same room, there were pictures of the street that I live on. There was an old photo of the day a local shop had a sale, and the queue stretched almost all the way to my front door. Someone had thought to save a plastic bag and it was in the museum too. I was glad that I’d pushed myself out of the house. These local museums were bringing me joy.
One day I was standing in the local park, as I had at least once a week for at least three years. There’s a climbing frame there that looks like a fire engine. The steering wheel turns and has buttons so that you can pretend to start the siren and then cover your ears as the kids yell NEE NAW as loud as they can. I’d learnt from the museum there's been a fire engine here since 1954. I thought of how many parents have stood here, like me. At 7am. In the snow. In the summer. In tears. Tipsy on mulled wine. With extended family. Alone. The fire engine is a crack in time through which I can put down a root until the homesickness blows away. It’s a ‘secret' I wouldn't have known about without the local museum and the people who decided that the things we touch every day matter just as much as the portraits in the palaces. They broke open the soil of the city and said, “let me explain.” And now it feels like home.