Three million graves, Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert in one plot, and a section that has been left to the foxes on purpose.
It is larger than the Innere Stadt: two and a half square kilometres, around 330,000 graves and something like three million people buried. Opened in 1874, deliberately outside the city and deliberately interdenominational, which was controversial at the time.
The Viennese have a well-documented relationship with death — the phrase is a schöne Leich, a beautiful corpse, meaning a funeral done properly — and this is its headquarters. Tram 71 goes there, and “he’s taken the 71” is still Viennese for someone having died.
The composers
Group 32A, near Gate 2, holds Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Johann Strauss II, Gluck, Hugo Wolf and Suppé, arranged around a monument to Mozart — who is not there. Mozart was buried in a common grave at St Marx cemetery in 1791 and the exact spot is unknown; there is a memorial at St Marx that is worth the separate trip, and it is a lovely, half-forgotten Biedermeier graveyard.
Beethoven and Schubert were moved here from their original graves in 1888. Falco is buried in the same area and his grave is usually the one with fresh flowers on it.
Arnold Schoenberg’s cube-shaped monument, by Fritz Wotruba, is in Group 32C.
The church
The Karl Borromäus Church at the centre, by Max Hegele, was finished in 1911 and is a full-blown Jugendstil building — copper dome, mosaic, and a crypt holding the mayors of Vienna, including Karl Lueger, whose antisemitic populism Hitler admired and cited. The building is named for him locally, which remains contested.
The Jewish sections
The old Jewish section, at Gate 1, was vandalised in 1938 and neglected for decades afterwards, and much of it has been deliberately left as woodland — stones tilting under ivy, foxes and deer living among them. The community that would have tended it was destroyed. It is the most affecting part of the cemetery and it is not tidy, on purpose.
There is a newer Jewish section at Gate 4, and Protestant, Orthodox, Muslim and Buddhist sections elsewhere.
Practicalities
Take tram 71 and get off at Gate 2 for the composers. The cemetery has its own internal bus route, line 106, which is useful given the distances. Opening hours change with the season and it closes earlier in winter.
Around All Saints’ Day, 1 November, the whole place is lit with candles and the Viennese come in their thousands. If you are here then, go in the late afternoon.
