76 FORTEAN TRAVELLER
No 110. The Museum of Funeral History, Vienna
Among the many curious museums ofVienna, the Bestattungsmuseum, or Museum of Funeral History, is not undeserving of mention. It is situated in one of the pavilions at the entrance of the Zentralfriedhof, a large cemetery in the city’s southern suburbs and houses displays of model hearses, undertakers’ uniforms, coffins and various mourning paraphernalia.
It is worth a visit not only by those of a gloomy and funereal frame of mind, but also by historians of the development of cemeteries and sepulchral culture, and those with an interest in apparent death and the risk of premature burial. Among its exhibits, the museum boasts a Herzstich-Messer, a sharp knife intended for use by people who did not trust doctors and had made wills to avoid the dreadful fate of being buried prematurely, stating that the family practitioner should stab them in the heart with this knife after they had been declared dead. Readers of my book Buried Alive (or Lebendig Begraben as it is called in the German translation) will know that it was a regular occurrence inVictorian times that people fearful of being entombed alive left a will saying that their arteries should be cut, that they should be stabbed in the heart or the throat, or that their heads should be cut off. In their wills, both Hans Christian Andersen and Alfred Nobel directed that their arteries should be cut after death. The legal position of the doctor if blood gushed out when an artery was cut, or if the apparently dead ‘patient’ groaned loudly with pain after the HerzstichMesser had been applied, does not seem to have been considered at the time; reassuringly, however, there is nothing to suggest that any person died as a result of their excessive precautions against a premature tomb.
Interestingly, the Museum of Funeral History also boasts another very curious contraption to detect apparent death and safeguard against a premature burial, namely a Rettungs-Wecker or mortuary alarm bell. The mechanism works as follows: a rope is tied around the wrist of the presumed deceased in the mortuary, so that if the ‘corpse’ moves, the alarm is triggered and the bell rings in the office of the mortuary attendant. The RettungsWecker came to the Museum of Funeral History in the early 1970s, on loan from the Electro-Pathological Museum. When the electro-pathologists wanted their mortuary alarm bell back in 1976, a fully working replica was made by the Schollgruber clockmaking firm, and set up at the Museum of Funeral History. The collection of the Electro-Pathological Museum is today part of the Technical Museum of Vienna, but although this large museum has voluminous display cabinets full of antique vacuum cleaners and other archaic paraphernalia of yesteryear, the original Rettungs-Wecker is kept in storage and is not on public display. It is said to have been made in 1828, at the order of the prison governor Johan Nepomuk Peter, for use in a small civic mortuary at the cemetery in Währing, which is today a suburb in north-western Vienna.
It is recorded that in 1860, after an appeal from the pædiatrician Franz Hügel, a new waiting mortuary was constructed at the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna. It was still operational in 1874, when it was featured in an illustrated magazine. A top-flight, modern hospital for the dead, it boasted a large corpseroom full of corpse-beds equipped with electrical contacts and bells of recent manufacture, presumed to be less conducive to false alarms than the earlier systems. The mortuary attendant could sit watching a large frame with little electrical bells under indicators for each of the corpse-beds, rather like a hotel porter waiting for one of the guests to ring for room service. There was a smaller corpse-room for suicides, conspicuously lacking the electrical alarm system.
Due to its primitive manufacture, it can be discounted that the mortuary alarm bell at the Museum of Funeral History has anything to do with the waiting mortuary at the Zentralfriedhof itself, however; the story of its manufacture in 1828, for use at a small provincial mortuary, is to my mind fully credible. Moreover, a book from 1834, describing the waiting mortuary in Weimar, features a mechanical alarm system very much resembling theVienna Rettungs-Wecker. Although Germany and Austria once had waiting mortuaries aplenty, most of them equipped with mechanical or electrical systems for the detection of apparent death, the mortuary alarm bell at the Museum of Funeral History is probably unique in the world, along with the original contraption kept in storage at the Technical Museum. The only waiting mortuary that has survived world wars and peacetime ‘development’ is the old Schijndodenhuis [house for the apparently dead] of The Hague, which today houses offices for the funeral administrators.
JAN BONDESON is a regular contributor to FT. His latest book is The Ripper of Waterloo Road: The Murder of Eliza Grimwood in 1838 (History Press, 2017).