Exhibition Horror Patriae
Ward of Wild Fantasies

A fascination with the alleged “wild” exoticism of other cultures and climes runs through European history. Regional museums such as the Joanneum collected exotic artifacts and rare taxidermy specimens from all over the world. This fascination—several examples from different epochs can be seen in this room—was often fed by naivete, ignorance, and racism.

Yet, it was not just far away cultures that became objects of careful—or careless—constructions of otherness. With interest in folklore rising in the 19th century, the local bourgeoisie throughout Europe engaged in folkloric fantasies (sometimes even based on research) and projected their own cultural and political ideals into a Volk (people) they might hardly know.

To create a monument to this world, Viktor Geramb (1884–1958), who founded of the Joanneum’s folkore department (later Folk Life Museum) in 1913, radically changed the museological practice. His museum, a lifelong project, was not meant to be a collection of attractive objects and was hence never called a museum of folk art. Instead, Geramb conceived it as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a theatrical installation showing an imaginary simple Christian lifestyle, whose scenography—partly real, partly remade—was more important than its small, often modest and monotonous elements. His even larger dream was to turn the entire Schloßberg into a Potemkin village of idealized rural life.

Geramb’s successor as museum director was his junior colleague Hanns Koren (1906–1985), who went on to become a major Styrian politician. Faced with the broader task of constructing the country’s identity after the Nazi era, he made the local—with the almost exclusively rural associations of Volkskultur (folk culture)—his clear priority. It prevails in Styria up to this day. Koren launched an Archduke Johann jubilee campaign to make the Archduke’s enlightened, quasi-liberal nationalism a model for the locals. An enormous pageant organized for this 1959 event, shown in this room as a slide show, demonstrated agricultural as well as cultural achievements of the region, with Tyrol and contested South Tyrol (part of Italy after World War II) as guests of honor. Folkloric and historical references—some costumes were copied from a 1568 manuscript—might have looked exotic and enigmatic to a postwar urban population.