Author: Valentina Pfattner
General information
Address: Prater 92 (Straße des 1. Mai),1020 Vienna
Website: https://www.wienmuseum.at/pratermuseum
Contact: https://www.wienmuseum.at/prater
Brief history
The Prater Collection is one of the collections within the Wien Museum. It is centred on Vienna’s Prater, a renowned and long-standing site of leisure and entertainment. At the heart of the collection lies the legacy of Hans Pemmer (1886–1972), a dedicated urban researcher whose private collection – comprising approximately 8,000 individual items – spans from the Prater’s beginnings as a public space in 1766 up to the 20th century. Pemmer’s access to unique artifacts was made possible through close relationships with showpeople, artists and performers. His collection includes original memorabilia such as blueprints, artworks, photographs, film stills, musical scores, theatre programs, posters and rare items from the Prater itself – like carousel horses, wax figures, mechanical games and signage from traditional establishments. Importantly, Pemmer’s efforts preserved a cultural heritage that might have otherwise perished in the devastating Prater fire at the end of World War II. In 1964, Pemmer donated his extensive collection to the city, leading to the opening of the Prater Museum as a dedicated institution within a wing of the newly built Planetarium. This followed a significant shift from his earlier private museum, which he maintained in his own apartment. The museum underwent major renovations in the early 1990s due to asbestos concerns. In March 2024, the collection was relocated to a central and symbolic site in the heart of the Wurstelprater – the famous amusement park area of the Vienna Prater, which is distinct from the adjacent “green Prater,” the large public park. Over the years, the collection was significantly expanded: first in the mid-1980s through the acquisition of a collection compiled by Felix Adanos, a Viennese juggler and avid collector of Prater memorabilia with a particular focus on “freak shows.” Later, in 1990, the museum received Ernst Hrabalek’s extensive laterna magica collection, brought together by the collector and magic lantern expert.
Holdings
The Wien Museum serves as one of Vienna’s central institutions for urban history and cultural heritage. Its extensive holdings – comprising over one million objects – span from archaeological artifacts and historical documents to fine art and everyday items. The museum’s collection is organised into several key areas, including urban development, social history and the visual arts, with notable strengths in Biedermeier painting, Viennese Modernism and contemporary art. Special collections focus on themes such as fashion, timekeeping and popular entertainment, reflecting the multifaceted nature of the city’s cultural landscape. Through its diverse collections, the Wien Museum offers a comprehensive narrative of Vienna’s evolution.
The Prater Collection within the Wien Museum encompasses a wide range of materials that reflect the cultural and social history of Vienna’s Prater, from its role in urban identity to its function as a stage for imagination, theatricality and mass entertainment. Items include architectural plans, carnival attractions, mechanical figures, early film and photo documentation, posters, printed music, circus and theatre programs, as well as artistic depictions of Prater life.
Thematically, the collection addresses the evolution of the amusement park, its use as an exhibition and fairground site, as well as its broader cultural implications – from bodies and pleasure to city image and control of public space. Highlights include unique artifacts such as figures from grotto rides, early slot machines, puppet theatre figures, and the famous whale statue “Poldi,” which is on permanent display at the Wien Museum’s main building at Karlsplatz.
Structure and access
The structure of the collection differs significantly between the museum presentation and the storage depot. At the museum, objects are categorised thematically into clusters such as “Prater as a site of modernity,” “A space for all,” “Urban transformation,” “Artificial experiences,” “Worldviews, Bodies and desire,” “Freedom and regulation,” “Soundscapes and voices,” “Theatricality and travesty,” “Timeless amusements” or “Imagination and urban identity.” In contrast, the storage depot follows a more technical and preservation-oriented logic. Objects are grouped by curatorial responsibility (e.g., urban life, topographical views, archaeology, fine arts, biographies) as well as by material type, size, conservation needs, and storage logistics.
A significant part of the Prater Collection has been on permanent display at the Prater Museum since its renovation in 2024. Additional selected objects, including some iconic pieces like “Poldi” the whale, are exhibited at the Wien Museum at Karlsplatz. Furthermore, the museum provides access to a substantial digital archive, which includes over 118,000 digitised items from across the museum’s holdings, including the Prater Collection. The platform enables browsing and search functions and provides metadata, imagery, and historical context for a wide array of objects.
Access to items in the depot – located in Himberg, Lower Austria – is more restricted and requires advance arrangement. While smaller and transportable items can be viewed in the Wien Museum’s dedicated study room, special arrangements are necessary for larger pieces. Visitors must contact the museum at least one week prior to their visit via: studienraum@wienmuseum.at Access may be limited based on the condition of the objects, and final decisions are made solely by the museum staff.
Connected collections
While the Prater Collection captures much of this complexity, it cannot fully represent the broader global histories to which it is connected. For instance, the World Exhibition of 1873 is only partially documented here. A comprehensive view requires drawing on related collections dispersed across Vienna. The Technisches Museum Wien provides essential insight into industrial innovation and media technologies. The Weltmuseum Wien and the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK) house significant collections tied to global material cultures, including East Asian objects once acquired by collectors like Heinrich von Siebold. The Theatermuseum explores themes of performance and bodily display, closely linked to the Prater’s own theatrical traditions. The adjacent Circus and Clown Museum offers in-depth documentation on traveling entertainment and popular amusement.
Additional institutions provide further dimensions: the Österreichische Mediathek and the Phonogrammarchiv document the auditory culture of modernity; the Picture Archives and Graphics Department of the Austrian National Library hold key sources on visual marketing and urban imagery; the Volkskundemuseum Wien offers critical frameworks for understanding rituals, popular culture, and everyday practices. The Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, with its rich holdings of historical city documents, newspapers, and ephemera, is indispensable for exploring Vienna’s cultural and political transformations as they intersect with leisure and entertainment. Finally, the Verein für Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung contributes class-based perspectives on leisure and sociability. Together, these institutions allow researchers to weave a multi-perspective analysis of the Prater’s global dimensions.
What makes this collection global?
The Prater Collection at the Prater Museum offers a fertile ground for exploring global history through a local lens. It presents a dynamic portrait of global interconnections, technological transfer, cultural hybridisation, and social negotiation within an urban context.
The Prater served as a meeting ground for individuals across class, ethnic, and professional boundaries. Since its official opening to the public in 1766 by Emperor Joseph II, it was often denoted as a “space for all” – a site of coexistence, but also friction. The Prater was simultaneously a playground for the aristocracy and a refuge for working-class communities, migrants, traveling performers, and artists. Its open structure and vast area – sometimes perceived as being beyond societal or governmental control – allowed for experimental social and cultural interactions and, at times, even became the site of open conflict, such as the Praterschlacht of 1848.
This microcosm of urban life also functioned as a stage for global spectacles. The 1873 World Exhibition epitomised Vienna’s entanglement in global circuits of trade, technology, and imperial ideology. Artefacts preserved in the Prater Collection document such moments of global convergence, while also highlighting their limits: the representation of the “Other” often mirrored Eurocentric fantasies and colonial worldviews.
The collection includes dioramas, miniature theatres and wax displays that illustrate how the world was imagined in the Prater. These exhibits recreated foreign lands for local audiences, drawing from the visual language of colonialism, often exoticizing non-European cultures. Such popular forms of staged “world knowledge” were in line with contemporary practices seen at international world fairs or amusement parks.
The globality of the collection is not limited to visual culture. Its acoustic dimension is equally compelling. Mechanical instruments – such as barrel organs, orchestrions, and early sound machines – played tunes ranging from Viennese waltzes to so-called “Oriental” melodies.
Technological innovation is another vector through which the Prater becomes globally legible. Carousel mechanisms, early cinema projectors, electric amusements – these devices illustrate how industrial-age inventions were reinterpreted within popular entertainment. The Prater operated as an urban laboratory of sensation and spectacle, linking Vienna to a broader techno-cultural network.
Even everyday artefacts – costumes, tools, posters, multilingual signs, restaurant menus – betray global motifs in the Prater visitors’ and showpeople’s collective imagination. One example includes a Hungarian restaurant adorned with portraits of Chinese personalities: a convergence of references and identities that exemplifies the overlapping cultural layers found in the Prater. The performers themselves – traveling artists, acrobats, and circus workers – also embodied this global entanglement. Many of these individuals came from marginalised communities or migrated across national borders, bringing with them diverse performance traditions. The Prater gave them a stage – and, in many cases, a temporary community.
Yet, despite these rich transnational traces, the global history potential of the Prater Collection remains fragmentary and selective. Its holdings are shaped by the curatorial priorities and archival practices of the past, which often privileged spectacle over context, and visibility over voice. The perspectives of those who performed, built, cleaned, or otherwise sustained the Prater’s global machinery—especially women, migrants, and subaltern actors—are frequently underrepresented or entirely absent. Many objects tell stories of cultural contact, but rarely of cultural conflict, appropriation, or resistance. As such, while the collection opens doors to global entanglements, it also demands a critical reading of its silences and omissions.
Exemplary primary source
The selected source is a historical photograph from the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair, depicting a “North American Wigwam” structure that functioned as a gastronomic venue. This photograph, taken by Josef Löwy and distributed by the Wiener Photographen-Association, is preserved in the Prater Collection of the Wien Museum. The tent-like structure, styled after an Indigenous American dwelling, was operated by the New York-based restaurateurs Boehm & Wiehl, who also managed the American Buffet inside the main exhibition hall – the Rotunde – as well as an associated Viennese-style coffeehouse.
The Wigwam was situated approximately 500 meters east of the fair’s main entrance, in proximity to the Waagner Palm House and the music pavilion. It quickly became one of the fair’s gastronomic highlights. The exterior was decorated with a wide array of stereotypical and fabricated objects meant to evoke North American Indigenous culture: flags, masks, shields, feathered headdresses, lassos, and other ornamental motifs. Painted imagery included depictions of “noble savages,” tomahawks, horses, and mythologised tribal leaders. Surrounding the structure were tables and chairs for guests; inside, a bar served refreshments.
The venue was staffed entirely by African American workers. These servers offered a range of products that were considered exotic novelties to the European public, such as iced beverages, tropical fruits like pineapple, and American-style cocktails.
A contemporary reporter quipped that the design of the tent showed the audience “exactly how a wigwam does not look.” This tongue-in-cheek critique captured what many observers surely sensed: the structure had little to do with ethnographic accuracy and everything to do with commercialised exoticism.
This photograph offers valuable insight into the visual culture, racial dynamics, and commercialisation of global identities in the context of the 19th-century world’s fair phenomenon. It embodies how international expositions served not merely as platforms for technological and artistic exchange, but also as stages for the performative display of cultural “otherness.”
Far from being an authentic representation of Indigenous North American architecture or culture, the Wigwam functioned as a profit-driven entertainment concept. Its aesthetic design was not rooted in cultural accuracy but aimed to satisfy European expectations of exoticism and spectacle. The structure’s hybridised elements and theatrical embellishments exemplify how cultural traditions were freely appropriated, stripped of context, and recombined to create eye-catching consumer experiences. The inclusion of African American service staff in a venue thematically centred on Native American motifs presents a telling case of racial juxtaposition. It reflects how labour, racialised bodies and cultural identities were commodified within imperial hierarchies. Their presence as exotic “hosts” serving drinks in stylised costume environments reveals how race was performed, manipulated, and consumed in ways aligned with Eurocentric entertainment frameworks. Through its imagery and structure, the Wigwam can be seen as an aestheticised domestication of colonial power. The fairground setting, combined with the deployment of stereotypical imagery and racialised labor, served to render the colonial “other” both familiar and subordinate. The commercial framing of the space masked the underlying colonial logics at work, presenting them instead as pleasurable, even charming, spectacles.
This source, though singular, reflects broader patterns in the cultural history of globalisation. It stands as an early example of the global circulation and commodification of cultural forms. The Wigwam scene illustrates how cultural symbols were uprooted, repurposed, and aestheticised to fit commercial and imperial narratives. In doing so, it demonstrates how world fairs functioned not just as showcases of global achievement, but also as arenas where power, identity, and cultural meaning were contested and redefined.
Further reading
Austrian Academy of Science. Wiener Weltausstellung 1873 revisited. 2013.Accessed November 12, 2025. http://www.wiener-weltausstellung.at/
Gruber, Susanne. “Die Warenkundesammlung am Technischen Museum Wien und deren Wurzeln von der Wiener Weltausstellung 1873.“ Schriften des Vereins zur Verbreitung naturwissenschaftlicher Kenntnisse 151–152 (2013): 89–104.
Pemsel, Jutta. Die Wiener Weltausstellung von 1873: Das gründerzeitliche Wien am Wendepunkt. Vienna/Cologne: Böhlau, 1989.
Schwarz, Werner Michael, and Susanne Winkler. Der Wiener Prater: Ein Ort für alle. Exhibition catalogue. Vienna: Birkhäuser, 2024.
Schwarz, Werner Michael, and Susanne Winkler. Der Wiener Prater: Labor der Moderne. Vienna: Birkhäuser, 2024.
Ujvári, Hedvig, ed. Zwischen Bazar und Weltpolitik: Die Wiener Weltausstellung 1873 in Feuilletons von Max Nordau im Pester Lloyd. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2011.