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The Central Cemetery is a cult in Vienna and among Viennese people. But tourists are now also increasingly finding it on their must-see lists. And rightly so, because this is where the who's who of the republic rests. Here you can stroll and ponder for an endless amount of time. Nowhere is death as inviting and full of stories as in the southeast of Vienna on Simmeringer Hauptstrasse.
Graves of honor only in the central cemetery
If the Viennese are said to desire a beautiful corpse, i.e. burial, then there would be a postmortem level of improvement: the honorary grave. The central cemetery, which opened in 1874 and has around 300,000 graves on an area of 2.5 square kilometers, making it the second largest cemetery in Europe - the largest is in Ohlsdorf near Hamburg - has its own areas. The now around 1,000 honorary graves have no expiry date, meaning that the right of use exists for the duration of the cemetery. The administration, including grave maintenance, is in the hands of the Cultural Department (MA 7) of the City of Vienna. From a geological point of view, the honorary graves are located in loess, i.e. Ice Age dust. It cannot be ruled out that the remains of mammoths could appear here or there. Anyone who finds a date before 1874 in the death dates on the honorary graves knows: This person was previously buried in a different cemetery.
Friedrich Mohs: Buried three times
The mineralogist Friedrich Mohs (1773–1839) is known for his ten-point hardness scale (talc = one, diamond = ten). The German native from Gernrode in Saxony-Anhalt came to Vienna in 1802, then went to Graz before becoming professor of mineralogy at the University of Vienna in 1826. When he died of dysentery, an intestinal infection (dysentery), in Agordo in Veneto on September 29, 1839, he was buried as a Protestant outside the local Catholic cemetery. This was not a worthy burial place for his students. They did everything they could to bring their teacher home to Vienna. In 1865 a committee was formed, which included the geologist and paleontologist Moriz Hörnes, the mineralogist and author of the Kochen directory, Ludwig Ritter von Kochenel, and Wilhelm von Haidinger, director of the k. k. Geological Reichsanstalt, also a mineralogist. Ziel war, Mohs' Leichnam nach Wien zu holen und ihm ein würdevolles Grabmal zu errichten. The intended location was the “Protestant cemetery next to the Matzleinsdorf line” (Matzleinsdorfer Friedhof in Vienna-Favoriten).
On March 10, 1866, the "definitive" burial took place in Vienna after the body had previously been transported by train from "Conegliano to Vienna without payment". These details come from the detailed report by Hörnes and Kochenel from 1866. The contributions of the donors, who collected a total of 3,622 guilders, are also worth reading. The amount was used to finance not only the tomb made of blue-gray Mauthausen granite, including the inscription and foundation (1,560 guilders), but also the party slip (30 guilders).
"The skull was covered with humus ..."
When the possibility of honorary graves in the Vienna Central Cemetery arose, people wanted Mohs to be buried here too. Some deserving men, including State Councilor Adolf Freiherr von Braun, the secretary of the scientific club, Felix Karrer, and the Viennese mineralogists Albrecht Schrauf and Gustav Tschermak took up the matter. During the second exhumation, Mohs' body was also scientifically examined. Details in the "Neues Wiener Tagblatt" from November 29, 1888: "The skull was covered with humus and had taken on a brown color, individual bone remains lay scattered in the coffin, while the skirt with which the corpse was dressed showed no particular signs of destruction." The anatomist Carl Toldt and the anthropologist Augustin Weisbach measured Mohs' skull for scientific purposes before he was buried at the Central Cemetery, now for the third time (Group 32A).
Wilhelm von Haidinger: From Dornbach to Group 0 in Simmering
The above-mentioned Haidinger, founding director of the k. k. Geological Reichsanstalt (1849), was made a hereditary knight of Haidinger in 1865 before retiring in 1866. He died on March 19, 1871 in Dornbach (Hernals) in Vienna and was also buried in the cemetery there. He too should receive a grave of honor, as Emil Tietze, the fifth director after him, noted: "Once the arrangement of graves of honor in the Central Cemetery had been created, there could be no doubt that the remains of a scholar like Haidinger deserved a place among those graves."
No sooner said than done: On May 24, 1892, not only Tietze, but the entire Reichsanstalt colleagues were united at the wall along Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, where the honorary graves of Group 0 are located. Here he lies next to the poet Johann Nepomuk Vogel and the painter Johann Baptist, Imperial Knight of Lampi. The inscription on Haidinger's gravestone, "founder of scientific life in his fatherland", is interesting and identifies him as a pioneer. Haidinger was also one of the founding members of the Academy of Sciences in 1847. His name has been on Haidingergasse since 1874; Mohs had previously been honored on Mohsgasse in Vienna-Landstrasse in 1865.
Ida Pfeiffer: From St. Marx to Simmering
Of course, Ida Pfeiffer (1798–1858) is not considered a scientist in the narrower sense, but “only” as a world traveler or travel writer, although she was a pioneer in this regard. In 1842 she made her first trip to Palestine and Egypt. More were to follow, including two trips around the world in the years 1846 to 1848 and 1851 to 1855. Today her grave of honor is on the cemetery wall along Simmeringer Hauptstrasse (Group 0), just a few steps away from Haidinger's. First she was buried in the cemetery of St. Marx, where Mozart had also found his first resting place. But soon after her death she was forgotten.
Just when the whole of Vienna was under the spell of the two polar heroes Julius Payer (1842–1915) and Carl Weyprecht (1838–1881), who arrived at Vienna's North Station with their team from the Austro-Hungarian North Polar Expedition in September 1874, a journalist from the "Neue Wiener Tagblatt" remembered Pfeiffer on October 4, 1874. He praised her actions, spoke of “a half-forgotten person” and called for a street to be named after her. "Maybe now, when you look for new street names, people will remember them." Of course, it wasn't so easy for her as a woman back then. The initiative for the grave of honor came from the Association for Advanced Women's Education, which sent a petition to the Vienna City Council, which was dealt with on May 17, 1892.
On November 5, 1892, the dignified reburial took place in the central cemetery. Among those present were the President of the Concordia Association of Journalists and Writers, Professor Wilhelm Friedrich Warhanek, representatives of the military-geographical institute, the Association for Advanced Women's Education and the Housewives' Association. The celebration was musically accompanied by the Schubertbund and trombonists from the Court Opera.
Ida Pfeiffer was not given a street name, but on October 7, 2008, the Vienna City Council decided to name the "Ida-Pfeiffer-Weg" in Vienna-Landstrasse after her - as a late public recognition. As we all know, good things take a little longer. (Thomas Hofmann, November 1st, 2020)