Alsergrund

• 1. Introduction

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  Alsergrund is the ninth district of Vienna, a place where the apartment of a dying composer sits within walking distance of a psychiatrist's consulting room, and both draw visitors from around the world. At just under three square kilometers, this compact stretch of north-central Vienna holds the birthplace of Franz Schubert, the final address of Ludwig van Beethoven, and the office where Sigmund Freud spent nearly five decades rethinking how the human mind works. How did a single Viennese district come to concentrate so much of Western culture's intellectual and artistic inheritance? And what does the neighborhood look like today, behind the famous addresses?

• 2. A District Takes Shape

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  Alsergrund was formally incorporated in 1862, stitched together from seven older suburbs that had grown up on the northern edge of Vienna's inner city. Those suburbs did not simply disappear: their names survived as the names of the district's internal sections, and many residents still identify with them by name rather than by the district number.

  The physical geography shaped where people settled and where they built. The Als river, the waterway that gave the district its name, used to cause frequent flooding before it was bricked over during the nineteenth century. The same fate met the smaller Wienerwald streams that fed into it. Their buried courses still define the topography in subtle ways: the lowest point in the district sits at 163 meters near Bauernfeldplatz, while the ground rises to 202 meters near Michelbeuern.

  In the Middle Ages, the foothills of the Vienna Woods that push into the district's northern edge were planted with vineyards. By the time Alsergrund was incorporated, those slopes had long since been given over to the roads and buildings that now define the area. The waterfront edge along the Danube Canal remains legible in the waste ground between Nußdorfer Straße, Währinger Straße, and Lichtenstein-Straße.

• 3. The Freud Address

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  Berggasse 19 is not a grand building. It is a residential address in the Rossau section of Alsergrund, and Sigmund Freud moved there in 1891. He stayed for forty-seven years, until 1938, when the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany forced him to flee to England.

  Almost every patient Freud saw during the decades when he was working out the core ideas of psychoanalysis came to that Alsergrund office. The theories of the unconscious, of dream interpretation, of the talking cure: all of them were developed within the walls of a building that still stands. The apartment and office at Berggasse 19 now operate as the Vienna Sigmund Freud Museum.

  The city did not limit its memory of Freud to that address. The park in front of the Votivkirche, at the corner of Währingerstrasse and Schottenring, was named after him in recognition of his habit of walking there. Freud is listed among the notable residents of Alsergrund and his dates are given as 1856 to 1939; he died the year after leaving Vienna.

• 4. Composers and Their Fates

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  Franz Schubert was born in Alsergrund in 1797. The Romantic composer who would write more than six hundred songs died in 1828, at thirty-one, before the district he came from had even been formally incorporated.

  Ludwig van Beethoven arrived at his Alsergrund address from the other direction: he came there to die. The apartment at Schwarzspanierstraße 15 was where Beethoven spent his final days; he died there in 1827. The two composers, born twenty-seven years apart, both left the world before the neighborhood that holds their memory was officially constituted as a district.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart also lived in Alsergrund, though briefly. His stay there is dated to 1788 and 1789, years that fell in the final chapter of his life; he died in 1791. Arnold Schoenberg, who would later upend the tonal tradition that all three of his predecessors had inhabited, also lived in Alsergrund. His dates are 1874 to 1951.

• 5. A University District

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  The University of Economics and Business, known in German as the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, operated in Alsergrund until 2013, when it relocated to the second district. Its departure left a vacancy, but the district's academic identity remained intact through the other institutions that stayed.

  Multiple faculties of the University of Vienna are based in Alsergrund, including geosciences, mathematics, pharmacology, and biology. The Technical University of Vienna and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, known as BOKU, also have departments there. The Campus of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna anchor the southern suburb of Alser. The St. Anna Children's Hospital is also located there.

  The biggest hospital in Vienna, the AKH, the Allgemeines Krankenhaus or General Hospital, occupies much of the Michelbeuern section in the eastern part of the district. Viktor Frankl, the neurologist and psychiatrist who would later develop logotherapy after his experience of Nazi concentration camps, is listed among Alsergrund's notable residents, born there in 1905 and dying in 1997.

• 6. Lives Lived Here

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  Theodor Herzl, the journalist and political thinker who founded modern Zionism, lived in Alsergrund. He was born in 1860 and died in 1904, and the district that shaped part of his life sits less than a kilometer from the Votivkirche park that was later named after his contemporary Freud.

  The list of residents who called Alsergrund home at some point reads as a cross-section of Vienna's cultural and intellectual life across more than a century. Heimito von Doderer, the novelist, was born there in 1896 and died there in 1966. Erich Fried, the poet, was born in 1921 and died in 1988. Arthur Schnitzler, the dramatist, lived there; so did Karl Farkas, the cabaret performer born in 1893. Rudolf Prikryl, who became the mayor of Vienna for three days in 1945, was raised in the district.

  Alsergrund's sister-city relationship with Takarazuka in Japan dates to 1994, and the district also has a formal relationship with the Dongcheng District of Beijing. The census of 2001 recorded 37,816 people living across those 2.99 square kilometers.