There is nothing neutral about names given to places of origin. The Latin word patria can refer to a city, village, or even the house you were born in. Its German translation, Vaterland (fatherland), already sounds more official, like a nation with borders and an army that will ask a sacrifice of you. The German word Heimat (literally, homeland) is special, to the extent that it has become known in English, too.

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In a 16th-century painting, Austria thrones over both Europe and Africa, defying logic and geography. The painting’s hierarchy is based upon different rules, a premodern world in which there are neither passports nor borders nor national languages. Peasants identified with their villages, while the ruling classes thought of themselves in more abstract terms: through allegiance to a dynasty.

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With its eclectic historicism, 19th-century architecture gave individual and state customers a vast palette of aesthetics to identify with. Often, the choice of style was a political statement. For the multiethnic Habsburg monarchy, neoclassicism was the universal language of bureaucracy and power, allegedly neutral and nonnational. This was precisely the reason it became universally hated in the mid-19th century, when the “German national” style was championed by the oppositional bourgeoisie.

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It was the European Romantics who first grew to appreciate the spectacle of high mountains rather than seeing them as a logistical obstacle. As early as the mid-18th century, English philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797) connected mountains to the idea of the sublime—a form of nonclassical, modern beauty that contains a terrifying, superhuman element.

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Long before nation-states existed, people were fascinated if not obsessed with the classification of national characters. Early pseudoscientific typologies were often based on false assumptions about differences in climate and geography. They were also often racist—toward Blacks and Jews, in the first place, but also toward Eastern and Southern Europeans.

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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.

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Every region and country has poets, writers, or artists it worships as national icons—disregarding the contradictions at their core. But Austria has, at every moment of its history, known a cohort of writers and artists whose attitude toward their homeland was radically critical, up to becoming almost an aversion to it.

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Today, no political party would dream of using brown as their color, as it has painful associations with Nazis: it was the color of the colonial surplus uniforms worn by storm troopers in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet, scratch any surface in postfascist Germany or Austria, and you might find brown uniforms and other attributes of the Third Reich, like in the painting by Johannes Wohlfart (1900–1975) exhibited in this room.

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