AUSGEBUCHT: Mini-Serie "FACING TIME– Then and Now: Die Schatulle des David Josef Bach" – eine Lecture Performance | Vienna Art Week 2025

EVENT LANGUAGE: GERMAN

Whereas birthdays regularly draw attention to one’s own transience, birthday presents make up for it. In the case of exile and expulsion, they sometimes bear witness to a bygone era, as was the case with David Josef Bach (b. 1874, Lemberg, d. 1947, London).

The music critic and cultural mediator was an early member of Freud’s Wednesday Psychological Society, which met regularly between 1902 and 1906 in Freud’s first practice on the mezzanine floor of Berggasse 19. Like Freud, David Josef Bach also fled to London to escape National Socialism.

A few years ago, a casket was found in Bach’s estate in England, which was presented to him by his artistic companions on his 50th birthday in Vienna in 1924. It contains 88 birthday letters with artistic dedications in the form of compositions, poems and drawings, including from Hanns Eisler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Oskar Kokoschka, Lina Loos, Arthur Schnitzler, Arnold Schönberg, Richard Strauss, Stefan Zweig and many more.

Registration required. FULLY BOOKED.

ART SPACE

Berggasse 19, 1090 Wien

freud-museum.at

+43 1 319 15 96-11

office@freud-museum.at

Sigmund Freud Museum

Vienna IX, Berggasse 19. This is the address where Sigmund Freud lived and worked for 47 years until he was forced to flee from the Nazi regime in 1938. In 1971 , the Sigmund Freud Museum was founded here, and after extensive renovation and expansion reopened in 2020. Three permanent exhibitions in Freud’s former living and office rooms, an art presentation in the Showroom Berggasse 19 as well as special exhibitions present Freud’s multi-layered cultural legacy: they are dedicated to his life and work, the development of psychoanalysis in theory and practice, and its importance for the fields of society, science, and art. The history of the house at Berggasse 19 and the fates of its occupants are also brought into focus.