Small Cards, Diverse Stories:
Cartes de Visite and Cartes de Cabinet in the Photo Collection of the Volkskundemuseum Wien

“Do you collect the stickers, too?”

Many of us have probably heard this question quite often at a supermarket checkout. This effective promotional call to collect small stickers with various designs creates a connection between our present day and the special formats for photographs from the late 19th century, which are also part of the collection at the Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art). Thanks to the digitization initiative of the Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport (BMWKMS), the museum was able to carry out an ambitious digitization project. From a wide range of collection objects, a collection of approximately 1,200 photographs from the museum’s photo collection was selected for the project. This is a collection of positives, all of which conform to the standard formats of carte de visite (approx. 9 cm × 5.5 cm) or carte de cabinet (approx. 14.5 cm × 10 cm). We still recognize the subjects captured back then (e.g., landmarks, travel photos, picturesque landscapes (pos/63274), and family portraits) today, and we find similar scenes on stickers from the supermarket as well as in our personal photo albums.

Between Greenland and Sardinia: The Photographic Collection of Rudolf Trebitsch

Rudolf Trebitsch (1876–1918), a physician, ethnologist, collector, and traveller, left behind not only numerous publications and phonographic recordings but also a photographic collection that is now being made accessible on a larger scale for the first time. Comprising nearly 1,400 photographs, the collection primarily documents his journeys to West Greenland (1906), the British Isles (1907, 1909), the Mediterranean region (1907, 1909), and Brittany (1908). In addition to landscapes and geological formations, he photographed people, music, and everyday culture. Trebitsch combined photography, sound recordings, publications, and public lectures to document his research comprehensively and to present it to audiences as vividly as possible. His humanistic worldview found expression in 1917 in a public statement opposing hierarchical thinking, racism, and war (Trebitsch 1917). Trebitsch died in Graz on 10 October 1918 from the consequences of a suicide attempt. In 1940, the Museum für Volkskunde (Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in Vienna) donated a commemorative plaque dedicated to Trebitsch, which had been installed in the museum in 1920, to the „Metallspende des deutschen Volkes“ (‘Metal Donation of the German People’). By doing so, the museum removed from both its internal memory and its public presentation the commemoration of – and gratitude for – Rudolf Trebitsch's extensive, committed, and generous support for the association, its collections, and the museum.

Staged Heritage: Glass Slides Between Public Education, “Preservation of Local Heritage,” and Ideology

A collection of glass slides, cataloged at the Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) between 1927 and 1937, illustrates how folklore knowledge was organized, conveyed, and publicly staged through images in the first half of the 20th century. The slides served as projection images for lectures and in teaching, but at the same time point to the (cultural) political contexts of their production and use. More than half of the series was donated to the museum in 1936 from the collections of the Verein Deutsche Heimat. The motifs focus on traditional costumes, customs, religion, field monuments and small monuments, as well as work.

The Emilie Flöge Textile Pattern Collection

Approximately 350 objects in the textile and clothing collection at the Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) come from the estate of Emilie Flöge (1874–1952), fashion designer and partner of Gustav Klimt (1862–1918). In keeping with the tastes of the turn of the century, Flöge collected examples of folk textile art, which she also used as a source of inspiration and material in her fashion salon. The Volkskundemuseum Wien’s collection consists, on the one hand, of pieces of fabric with embroidery in bright colors or in black and white, primarily from Western Slovakia and Moravian Slovakia, and, on the other hand, of lace—mainly bobbin lace— white embroidery, and tulle embroidery, as used in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the clothing of all social classes, depending on their financial circumstances. The collection also includes several headdresses and a few other complete garments. In addition, the Museum of Folk Art houses a few Art Nouveau objects that were presumably used by Emilie Flöge herself.

Capturing the Velvet Revolution: Photographs from Bratislava and Prague, 1989

When people took to the streets in the former Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1989 to express their dissatisfaction with the ruling totalitarian system, a few courageous individuals used their cameras to document this historic moment. 161 of these photographs—now part of the Volkskundemuseum Wien's (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) photo collection—depict demonstrations, banners, and posters from the “Velvet Revolution.” They are far more than mere historical records: even decades later, they vividly bring back the atmosphere of those weeks.

Porcelain beer stein lid medallions – a reflection of social life

Beer steins with porcelain lids were an integral part of Gasthaus (inn) culture up until the early 20th century. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, beer steins made of colourless glass with pewter holders came into fashion; their round-shaped porcelain inserts – known as medallions – often contained personalised motifs. These miniature depictions showing landscapes, hunting scenes or humorous motifs not only served as decoration but also as status symbols. They reflected the preferences, professions and social status of their owners. The motifs ranged from Alpine landscapes and guild symbols to erotic or satirical scenes, offering insights into the aspirations and sense of humour of the male regulars at that time. Some of these motifs are problematic as they show racist or sexist depictions; they are marked accordingly with a disclaimer. The collection at Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) comprises 969 porcelain and two glass medallions, which were in use during the period before the First World War. Today, they offer a unique insight into 19th-century beer drinking culture and the world of imagination of that time.

Eugenie Goldstern Photographic Collection – Research-Oriented Ethnographic Photography

The photographic estate of Eugenie Goldstern (1883/84–1942), preserved at the Volkskundemuseum Wien, comprises around 470 photographs and ranks among the early visual records of ethnographic fieldwork. Between 1913 and 1921, Goldstern documented architecture, everyday life, and material culture in the Alpine regions of France, Austria, and Switzerland. Complemented by photographs from Egypt and Eastern Europe, her images reflect the transition from collecting practices to a more scientific and respectful mode of observation at a time when folklore studies remained strongly shaped by normative and hierarchical perspectives. Approximately two-thirds of the photographs in the collection were taken by Goldstern herself – an exceptionally high proportion that attests to the active photographic practice of this pioneering ethnologist, who was murdered in 1942 as a victim of Nazi persecution in the Sobibor extermination camp. After decades of neglect, Goldstern’s photographic estate was fully catalogued, conserved, and made digitally accessible beginning in 2018. Today, the collection is available through the Online Collection Plus together with her publications, archival materials, and literature on her life and work, providing for the first time a comprehensive resource for the study of her methods, biography, and the history of ethnographic research.

Merely a Means to an End? The Early Negatives of the Volkskundemuseum Wien

The first 1,500 entries in the negative inventory – predominantly glass plates – depict ‘the rural’ in the Alpine and Danube regions between 1900 and 1938: farmhouses, village squares, traditional costumes, and sacred objects. Produced by museum staff and regional specialists, they reflect the research interests and visual aesthetics of their time. Many negatives were created as reproductions of positive images or as excerpts from publications. They served for the production of prints, slides, and printed illustrations and were long regarded merely as a means to an end. Today, however, they are increasingly valued as material objects in their own right, particularly in research contexts: retouchings, interventions, material deterioration, and traces of storage become visible in color digitizations, opening up new insights for a range of disciplines.

Embroidery Patterns

The pattern sheets for canvas embroidery held by Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) provide insight into the wide range of diverse motifs found in embroidery patterns, which were mass-produced from the Biedermeier period onwards. In fact, there were countless figurative, floral and ornamental patterns on point paper to choose from in the 19th century. The embroidery patterns were used by both upper-class ladies for doing needlework as a leisure activity in company of others, befitting their social standing, and by embroiderers who had to earn a living from it.

The museum’s collection comprises around 200 embroidery patterns for canvas embroidery. These consist of individual sheets in different formats, the majority of which are hand-coloured stippled patterns. Most of the sheets originate from the catalogues of well-known publishers and art dealers based in Vienna and Berlin. This article focuses in particular on the embroidery patterns from the first half of the 19th century.

Bauchranzen: splendour worn around the waist

Bauchranzen are wide, usually intricately crafted leather-buckled belts that are still worn today, mainly in parts of Austria, Italy, Germany, Czechia, Romania and Poland. They serve both practical and representative purposes. Their production requires a considerable amount of time, material and labour, which, particularly in the past, reflected the social status of the wearer. In addition to being a decorative leather accessory and a means of storage and transport, these belts often have a personal and symbolic meaning and express belonging. Their elaborate embellishments range from quill, gold and Zirm embroidery to pewter or brass studs. This type of belt is still worn today as part of traditional costume and marksmen’s clubs (Trachten- and Schützenvereine) or on festive occasions.

Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) has acquired a wide variety of Bauchranzen since its foundation in 1894. While the Textile and Clothing Collection contains around 230 items, the Online Collection Plus comprises 50 selected examples (as of April 2026) that provide insight into the different places where these belts were manufactured, their use, shapes, materials, techniques and motifs.

The Imaginative World of Eleonore Grant

In 2021, the Volkskundemuseum Wien received a small collection of handmade, imaginatively illustrated booklets and little books as a donation. The images in these small-format works were created by Eleonore Grant, an aunt of the donor. Produced around 1945, the unique items were intended as personal gifts from the artist, born in 1930, to her family.

The 17 originally illustrated booklets in the collection complement the museum’s existing holdings of personally produced picture books made for private use. The donation also included an illustrated calendar and ten loose sheets with watercolour and ink drawings. In the imaginative stories and images of these carefully crafted individual works, personified flowers and insects as well as humanoid mythical creatures play a central role. With her small booklets, Eleonore Grant shared moments of joy in a period when her life was shaped by war and displacement.

Hairwork Pictures

The museum’s wide-ranging collection of objects made from human hair includes love tokens and gifts, jewellery, commemorative and memorial pictures, album pages, artistic hairwork images, devotional pieces, and votive offerings. Giving, preserving, and artistically working with human hair were deeply personal acts, expressing affection, remembrance, and devotion.

In 1981, the special exhibition Jewellery Made of Hair (Schmuck aus Haaren) presented works from the museum’s entire collection of hairwork, including many pictures created with hair embroidery and cut-and-paste techniques. During the preparation of the exhibition, the already established collection of commemorative, devotional, and memorial images, as well as artistic works featuring human hair at the Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art), was selectively expanded through new acquisitions. As a result, the collection has grown to 66 hair pictures, representing a wide range of techniques and forms associated with this unique culture of remembrance.

R.I.P. – Memorial Cards Collected by Josef Schwarzbach

Our collection holds over 1,000 memorial cards. These are small, individually designed slips of paper or cards, often including prayers, created to commemorate the deceased and distributed at funerals. The memorial cards preserved at the Volkskundemuseum Wien date mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries. They speak of people, lives, death, beliefs, moral concepts, mourning, and remembrance. Taken together, they are valuable historical and socio-cultural sources; individually, they provide genealogical insights. The collection at the Volkskundemuseum can be traced back above all to one person: more than 900 examples were gathered by school principal and teacher Josef Schwarzbach (1853–1896). In 1898, they were inventoried as a generous donation.

‘The lights were like a sea – and the sea is invincible.’

It was with these impactful words that Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Verzetnitsch, then President of the Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB), described one of the greatest civil society events in the history of the Second Austrian Republic: the ‘sea of lights’, which took place in Vienna on 23 January 1993.

Up to 300,000 people gathered on Heldenplatz square and in the adjacent streets in Vienna’s First District to send out a powerful signal against xenophobia, exclusion and an increasingly polarising migration policy using candles, torches and their silent presence.

Lights Off, Spotlight On: 1,000 Glass Slides and the First Slide Lectures of Volkskundemuseum Wien

The first 1,000 slide numbers in the inventory of Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Art and Folk Life) were primarily produced between 1900 and 1927 for (popular) scholarly slide lectures, often focusing on geographical and cultural aspects of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. As early as around 1900, many of these glass slides were used by museum staff in so-called "sciopticon lectures" (from Greek dia = through, skopein = to look). However, a systematic cataloguing and inventorying of the slides only began around 1915. The corresponding entries are usually limited to a brief description of the depicted subject. Additional information – such as details on production or use – is almost entirely lacking.

Only the clear thematic structure of the inventory book provides clues about the content of the lectures illustrated by these images. Lecturers with backgrounds in folklore studies – such as Michael Haberlandt (1860–1940), Arthur Haberlandt (1889–1964), Rudolf Trebitsch (1876–1918), Marianne Schmidl (1890–1945), and Konrad Mautner (1880–1924) – presented their slide shows primarily at the Wiener Urania, the University of Vienna, various associations, and at the Volkskundemuseum Wien itself. After the founding of the State Office for Adult Education (Volksbildungsamt) in 1919, the slides were increasingly used in educational courses for teachers.

Between Documentation and Staging: Photographs of Galicia and Bukovina in the Volkskundemuseum Wien Photo Collection

The first inventoried item in the Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) photo collection, pos/1, was taken by Josef Szombathy (1853–1943) in Bukovina in 1894. It shows Austriaplatz square in Chernivtsi (Czernowitz). Additional photographs from the former Austrian crown lands, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, and the Duchy of Bukovina, were added to the photo collection from 1896 onwards, which at that time was still part of the Museum für österreichische Volkskunde (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) library.

The name Galicia refers to a historical region that stretched across what is now southern Poland and western Ukraine. At the eastern end of Galicia was the smaller historical region of Bukovina. Today, this region belongs to Ukraine and Romania. The former territory of Poland-Lithuania was divided into three parts (1772, 1793 and 1795) following armed conflicts between Prussia, Russia and Austria. Galicia and Bukovina were the names given to the territories that were assigned to Habsburg rule.

Beehive Front Panels

Apiaries equipped with box-shaped beehives became increasingly popular in Carniola (Krain), Carinthia and northwestern Slovenian Styria in the 19th century.

A special feature of the beehives in this region are painted beehive panels mounted on the front of the wooden boxes, which have an entrance hole at the bottom edge. Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) possesses more than 230 of these painted panels with different decorative images. The paintings depict religious motifs, peasant life, satirical scenes, technical innovations and historic events.

Franz Gaul and Josef Löwy – The Collectible Picture Series "Austro-Hungarian National-Costumes" (1881–1890)

The collectible picture series Austro-Hungarian National-Costumes (1881–1890) consists of 72 illustrations depicting regional costumes from various areas of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. It was produced by Franz Gaul (1837–1906), a historical painter and costume expert, and photographer Josef Löwy (1834–1902). The series was published in various formats, including leather-bound portfolios and individual images in the rarely used Carte de Boudoir format. It was aimed at the wealthier circles of society, with a single image costing the equivalent of approximately 25 euros in today’s purchasing power.

With its focus on Alpine regions, particularly Tyrol and South Tyrol (now part of Italy), the series soon became a source of inspiration for the bourgeois costume movement. The Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) houses 145 images related to the series, including duplicates and drafts, providing valuable insights into production processes. These holdings not only enable comparative analyses but also inspire new research questions.

Old Gmunden Faience

During the period between the museum's foundation and the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the museum consistently acquired Gmunden objects. In an era of increasing industrial production, museums collected handcrafted objects in order to save them from disappearing and being forgotten. Every now and then, extensive collections from private individuals would also find their way into the museum’s collection. The majority of today's holdings of around 350 objects had already been catalogued by 1918.

Acquisition activity continued on a smaller scale from then on, with holdings from the period between 1938 and 1945 now being investigated by restitution research. Hardly any major new acquisitions were made after that, apart from some green-flamed bowls from a private collection, which were purchased in 2005.

Right From the Start – The First 1,000 Positives of the Photo Collection

The origins and early history of the photo collection are best and most impressively shown when we look at positive inventory numbers pos/1 to pos/1000 (see Hammer 2020). The photographs in this collection were acquired in the first ten years after the museum was founded, i.e. between 1895 and 1905.

Collecting these photographs was important to the museum from the very beginning. After all, photographs were seen as witnesses to a ‘disappearing’ culture as well as a medium for depicting or ‘collecting’ what was intangible or too bulky for the collections (see Haberlandt 1896), e.g. small monuments or houses.

Prinzess-Keramik

Prinzess-Keramik is the name of a company that produced ceramics in Vienna during the post-war period. In addition to utility ceramics, such as mirror frames, lamps and candlesticks, the company mainly manufactured figurines based on both secular and religious motifs. Being exported to many countries around the world, these ceramic figures used to shape the image of Austria at home and abroad.

In 2005, the Volkskundemuseum purchased a group of Prinzess-Keramik objects by a private collector couple. These objects were added to the ceramics collection and given the inventory numbers ÖMV/83123 to 83193. At the time, there was no literature on this type of ceramics and no objects were known to exist in other museums.

Pencil Drawings by Leopold Forstner

The 29 pencil drawings were created between April 1917 and May 1918. During this time, Leopold Forstner was travelling on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian army administration as a collection officer in the Balkans occupied by Austria-Hungary.

Mythenbibliothek

The so-called ‚Mythenbibliothek‘ has been on permanent loan from the federal government to the Volkskundemuseum Wien since 1946. According to the inventory book, it comprises 1.629 copies or binding units. The publications focus on myths, fairy tales and legends – hence the designation of this library collection as the Mythenbibliothek. Since the loan agreement was signed in November 2019, the collection has been digitised and made accessible online.