Author: Luise Klähn
General Information
Address: Burgring 7, 1010 Vienna, Österreich
Website: https://www.nhm.at/
Contact: info@nhm.at
Brief history
As is the case with many Viennese institutions, the history of the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (NHM; Natural History Museum Vienna) is strongly intertwined with that of the house of Habsburg-Lothringen. The institution traces its origins to the acquisition of Johann von Baillous’ collection by Franz Stephan von Lothringen (Emperor Francis I.) in 1748, containing a variety of fossils, snails, shells, minerals and precious stones, totaling at around 30.000 objects. Franz Stephan also founded the Schönbrunn Zoo and the Botanical Garden of Vienna and funded expeditions under the scientist Nikolaus Joseph Freiherr von Jacquin to the Caribbean and into the South Americas with the express purpose of collecting animal and plant specimens for these collections. Emperor Francis II. shared in his predecessors’ interests and instituted an “animal cabinet”, initially based on the Habsburgs’ significant collection of hunting trophies, as well as the private collection of the falconer Joseph Natterer. In 1807 he also instated a „plant cabinet“. The natural history collections saw further growth in the following years; among other things, the marriage of Leopoldina of Habsburg to Brazilian crown prince Dom Pedro prompted Francis II. to send a delegation of scientists to Brazil who in turn sent back a plethora of objects back to Austria. Similarly, the world circumnavigation by the ship “Novara” from 1857 to 1859 provided the “cabinet” with even more objects of scientific interest.
With the Habsburgs’ collection ever expanding through constant exchanges and acquisitions, the decision was made to split the collection – a zoological, botanical and mineralogical collection were created. By the 1870s, the associated exhibits were of great importance for the teaching and training of Austrian scientists; however, it became increasingly difficult to house and order everything in an appropriate manner. Thus, under Emperor Francis Joseph I., plans were made for a new building expressively created for this very purpose. On August 10, 1889, then, the building that is now known as the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien was opened to the public. In 1928, a split between the Weltmuseum (World Museum) and the NHM occurred – the former used to be part of the latter’s department of Anthropology. Before 2013, the Weltmuseum was called the Museum für Völkerkunde (Museum of Ethnology). Today, the NHM does not house ethnological collections anymore, but they certainly were part of the historical collections.
Holdings
The NHM is one of the largest and most important museums in Austria. In addition to an archive on the history of science, it houses various collections of international importance in the fields of earth, life and human sciences – from stuffed animals and dinosaur fossils to human remains, from the famous Venus of Willendorf to one of the world’s largest meteorite collections. The museum is open to the public; however, the institution also manages over 100,000 objects in its storage and laboratory facilities which are only available to researchers.
Structure and access
Ever since the first split of the “cabinet” system into broader collections, the museum has periodically reorganised its holdings. Nowadays, they are divided into departments of Mineralogy and Petrography, Geology and Paleontology, Botany, Anthropology and Prehistory, as well as three different sub-departments of Zoology. Each of them contains preserved objects of the natural world and associated documentation. Additionally, the museum houses the “Archiv für Wissenschaftsgeschichte”, (“Archive for the History of Science”), containing documents of acquisition, expedition diaries, research notes and an extensive paper trail relating to the house’s own history. There is also a department for Ecology and Environmental Education. Most, if not all, of these departments house their own libraries and, occasionally, archives. A detailed graph of the NHM’s department structure and the persons responsible for the respective collections is available online.
Some 90.000 of 500.000 library titles held by the museum are searchable via its library database KOHA. Presently, the museum is working on establishing its own database DIVINA (Digital Information for Vienna Natural History Museum). As of 2025, parts of the Archive of the History of Science as well as the Myriapoda (millipedes and centipedes) and Aves (birds) collections have been digitised. Additionally, the “Top 100” objects in the museum’s collections have been recreated as 3D renderings, which are viewable online. However, the majority of objects are only to be viewed in person – the different departments of the museum operate mostly independently, so it is advised to individually contact all the departments of interest individually. A good starting point to find appropriate contact persons is the research database of the Federal Ministry for Women, Science, and Research. It lists every department of the NHM separately, including contact information for the respective managers.
What makes this collection global?
As shown through the history of the house, the NHM’s collections had global connections from the very start. It was a foregone conclusion that military and diplomatic expeditions undertaken in the name of the Habsburg empire would also produce new objects for the natural history collections. Be it the “Orientreise” (“Oriental Journey”) of Crown Prince Rudolf in 1881, which introduced middle-eastern birds into the collections, or the aforementioned Novara expedition resulting in thousands of new additions, taking decades to be researched and sorted through – historically, collecting globally was self-evident. To this day, the Natural History Museum of Vienna is world-leading in the scope of some of its collections. It contains the third-largest collection of meteorites worldwide, its herbarium is world-renowned with its scope of around 200.000 type-specimens, and some of its zoological collections are leading by the sheer number of preserved individual animals, as is, for instance, the case with millipedes and pseudo-scorpions. It should go without saying that the vast majority of these objects are not originally from Austria or the former Habsburg territories.
In the past few decades, the museum itself has increasingly started to re-examine the global implications of its collections. It is also in this global context of natural history research that Austria’s colonial history has to be examined. The Habsburg Empire was not a colonial power as such, but the acquisitions of the NHM certainly took place in a colonial context.
Due to the long history of the collections, with their many restructurings and varied sources for the different objects, this is easier said than done. One prominent example would be the Brazilian collections acquired in the context of the Habsburg Princess Leopoldina’s wedding to Pedro I. of Brazil in 1817, of which a majority was destroyed in fires in the Hofburg palace during the revolution of 1848. In a way, it is exactly this interplay of Habsburg politics, the history of science and that of the myriads of objects gathered from all over the world that make the NHM such a fruitful source for global history endeavours. However, this interplay also poses its unique challenges – sources related to the global history of the house are not exclusively found in-house but can be spread all over various Viennese archives (and beyond). For instance, the Habsburg collections proper are best analysed together with sources from the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, while sources related to the ethnological endeavours of bygone times can be found in the collections of the Weltmuseum.
One of the projects presently in motion at the museum, Kolonialer Erwerbskontext im Naturhistorischen Museum Wien (KolText; Colonial Acquisition Contexts at the Natural History Museum Vienna), seeks to survey the collections and archives of the NHM in exactly that colonial context. Since 2021 a research group is working on making the provenance of the museum’s collections more traceable, starting with first case studies on osteological collections from New Zealand and Tierra del Fuego housed in the Department of Anthropology. The aim of this project is to develop and establish research strategies to better define the term “colonial acquisition context” with the end goal of establishing “in-house provenance research examining specific colonial contexts associated specifically with natural history collections.”
Similarly, colonial and global implications of the collections are regularly examined in papers published by the in-house scientific publication, “Annalen des Naturhistorischen Museums Wien” (“Annals of the Natural History Museum”). It should be mentioned, however, that most of the articles therein are written in German, which is also the case for the vast majority of sources and documents found within the museum’s collections.
Lastly, it should be mentioned that the museum hosts various special exhibits further examining its and Austria’s colonial history which also increasingly open the stage for researchers and artists from outside of Austria and Europe. Even then, as an Austrian institution it is still very much the Austrian perspective that is emphasised simply by matter of location and cultural context – the collections with their historical roots are, by their very nature, colonial and that is an aspect that cannot be removed from the modern museum, which is also in turn based on a Western understanding of science. In that vein, a lot of projects that seek to clarify colonial contexts are very much academic in nature and take place inside of academic journals or within museum walls. There is also the matter of repatriation efforts, especially regarding the anthropological collections.
Featured primary source
An object, or rather a pair of objects, that exemplifies all that has been detailed above is the pair of Ganges Gharials in the public exhibition room 28.
These two stuffed crocodilians are not only impressive to behold in size, measuring at 5m and 4m respectively, but also serve as a prime example for the intersection of natural history and global history. The fish-eating Ganges Gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) is, as the name implies, native to the Indian subcontinent’s major river systems. It used to be a ubiquitous species but is now considered critically endangered due to habitat loss, pollution and, historically, over-hunting for their skins and eggs.
The gharials of the NHM have been on public display as a centrepiece of one of the museum’s reptile halls since 1904. They were proudly shown to emperor Francis Joseph I. in 1905, and today are part of the aforementioned “Top 100” digitised object collection. The larger of the two can be viewed online as a 3D model. However, the provenance of these two individuals remained largely in the dark until 2023, where Silke Schweiger and Andre Koch set out to uncover the skins’ origins. They could trace the animals to Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913), an animal seller, zoo director and organiser of “Völkerschauen” (“ethnic exhibitions,” human zoos) from Hamburg. According to his memoirs, he acquired two Ganges gharial skins as early as 1893 from one Jörgen Johannsen (1859-?) who worked for Hagenbeck and other such salesmen as a procurer of animals.
The exact origin of these specific skins is still unknown, as it appears that Johannsen did not keep notes on them; however, it is to be assumed that he either shot the animals himself or bought them from locals. He is at least quoted to have shot at two gharials on the Brahmaputra river in the northeast of India – whether these were the two reptiles in question is unknown. Hagenbeck, meanwhile, claims in his memoirs that Johannsen sold the crocodiles to the firm Umlauff in Hamburg, from where Hagenbeck bought them and in turn used them for his reptile exhibitions. Presumably, this is how they first caught Viennese attention, as Hagenbeck organised a reptile show in the Viennese Prater in 1897. They were bought for the NHM by Franz Steindachner (1834-1919) who was director of the museum from 1898 until his death. According to what information can be scoured from the NHM Archive for the History of Science, Steindachner gifted the gharials to the herpetological collection in 1902, though no further information was provided.
Within the display, the two are listed as NHMW 32226 (male) and NHMW 32227 (female) and said to originate from „British India,“ which is the extent of traceable information on the two. They are a prime example of how provenance of objects can be lost over time and how natural history intersects with global and cultural history. After all, Hagenbeck was, in a sense, working in show business and was no doubt aware of the visual appeal of the two large crocodiles, which to this day are amongst the largest on public display worldwide.
The work of Schweiger and Koch then serves as a great example for possible research projects related to the NHM, for there are plenty more objects on display with provenances yet in the dark – while the show pieces serve as examples for species, clades and holotypes, the acquisition context is primarily not made explicit in the public collection and has to be researched within the museum’s archives and beyond. As mentioned above, the museum is, at the time of writing, in the process of establishing new strategies as how to deal with similar and related matters of provenance within its KolText project. There is a steadily growing corpus of research projects relating to re-examining global and colonial roots of the collection – such as with these two Indian crocodilians as a prime example. Similar projects in the past have dealt, for instance, with colonial motifs in the museum’s wall decorations or the relationship of Austro-Hungarian researchers with colonial Brazil.
Further reading
Berner, Margit, Sabine Eggers, Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel, Martin Krenn, Julia Landsiedl and Katrin Vohland. “Ist Kontextualisieren schon Dekolonialisieren? Das Ringen um einen angemessenen Umgang mit kolonialen Bildwelten am Beispiel des dekorativen Programms der ehemaligen ethnografischen Schausäle des Naturhistorischen Museums Wien.” neues museum 24, no. 4 (2024): 28–31.
Koch, André and Silke Schweiger. “Zur Provenienz der beiden großen Gangesgaviale in der Schausammlung des Naturhistorischen Museums Wien.” Annalen des Naturhistorischen Museums in Wien, Serie B 125 (2023): 83–100.
Schölnberger, Pia, Elke Kellner and Nicholas Somers, eds. Das Museum im kolonialen Kontext. Annäherungen aus Österreich. Vienna: Czernin, 2021.
Hoffmann, Eva, Constanze Schattke, Dominik Spörker and Andrea Zaremba. “Im Namen der Wissenschaft? Die Sammlungen der österreichischen Kriegsmarine für das k.k. Naturhistorische Hofmuseum.” RETOUR (blog), April 10, 2024. Accessed August 31, 2025. https://retour.hypotheses.org/3545.