The consulting rooms at Berggasse 19, kept deliberately empty because the furniture went to London in 1938 and never came back.
Freud lived and worked at Berggasse 19 from 1891 until June 1938, when, at 82 and with cancer of the jaw, he was permitted to leave Vienna after the Anschluss on payment of a substantial exit tax and after his daughter Anna had been detained by the Gestapo. He took the furniture, the books and the antiquities with him to London, where they remain at 20 Maresfield Gardens.
Four of his five sisters stayed. All four were murdered — three at Treblinka and Theresienstadt, one at Auschwitz.
What you see
The apartment was reopened after a major renovation in 2020, and the decision the museum made is the important one: it does not reconstruct. The consulting room and study are largely bare. There is no replica couch. What fills the rooms instead is documentation — photographs, first editions, letters, the waiting room furniture, which is original, and Freud’s hat and stick.
The bareness is the argument. The objects are in London because their owner was driven out, and putting copies back would tell a comfortable lie about that.
Some visitors find this frustrating, and it is worth knowing in advance so you come for the right thing.
The collections
The renovation added the Freud family’s own rooms, previously closed, and a substantial exhibition on the history of psychoanalysis, Anna Freud’s work with children, and the dispersal of the Viennese analytic community after 1938 — which is also, incidentally, the story of how psychoanalysis reached Britain and America.
There is a research library, open to the public, and a good bookshop.
Practicalities
Berggasse is in the ninth district, a fifteen-minute walk from the Ring or a short tram ride, in a residential street that still looks much as it did. The apartment is on the mezzanine, up a staircase, and step-free access has been improved but is limited.
Open daily. Allow ninety minutes, more if you read properly.
More Museums
Kunsthistorisches Museum
The Habsburg collection: the largest group of Bruegels anywhere, a Vermeer, and a staircase Klimt painted before he broke with the establishment.
The Albertina
A million prints and drawings, Dürer's hare, and a permanent Monet-to-Picasso collection in the old Habsburg state rooms.
Leopold Museum
The largest Egon Schiele collection in the world, assembled by an ophthalmologist who started buying when nobody wanted them.