Salzburg Museum

Brief information

The Salzburg Museum is important not only as a collection of art and the city’s history, but also as a museum that literally survived the collapse of its former home. In 1944, bombing badly damaged the building and destroyed much of it, but the collection had been dispersed in advance to sixteen protected locations: from the Hallein salt mine to castles and farms near the city.

For this reason, the present museum on Mozartplatz in the New Residence should be seen not as an old institution in an unchanged shell, but as the result of relocation, rescue, and reassembly. The clearest fact supporting this view is Sattler’s Panorama: it was extracted from beneath the ruins and restored. A single exhibit here can speak about the war and postwar reconstruction more precisely than a long chronology.

What to notice first

It makes sense to compare three levels of the museum: the main location in the New Residence on Mozartplatz, the restored Sattler Panorama, and the network of separate branches. The New Residence shows the later stage in the institution’s history: the museum moved there in 1997, and received its current name in 2007. Sattler’s Panorama is important as an object with a biography: it is not merely kept within the museum system, but was found under the rubble and returned to display after the building’s destruction.

The separate branches help explain why the museum cannot be reduced to a single hall or a single theme. Under its administration are the Panorama Museum, the Fortress Museum, the Cathedral Excavations Museum, the Toy Museum, the Folklore Museum, and the Celtic Museum Hallein. This list is best read as a map of dispersed fragments of urban memory: the fortress, the cathedral excavations, the panorama, and the toys explain the city through different material traces.