“All for the good of the fools”

Emperor Franz Josef was impressed by the new “Mauer Öhling State Hospital and Nursing Home” that bore his name after the opening in 1902, which he himself attended. “Everything for the good of the fools!” he wrote to his friend Katharina Schratt about the new asylum, which, with its reinforced concrete management building, its Art Nouveau pavilions and the doctors’ new treatment methods, towered far above the previous fools’ towers.

Not everything was always for the best for the psychiatric patients here, quite the opposite: During the Nazi era, the notorious euthanasia doctor Emil Gelny had at least 39 patients killed in Mauer-Öhling with pills and injections. At a meeting of psychiatrists from the “Old Reich” in Gugging, he demonstrated the electric killing device he used in Mauer. The 2026 State Exhibition does not want to avoid the darkest chapters in particular; a special pavilion will be designed to commemorate the atrocities and terrible crimes of the Nazi era and their victims, as the scientific director, Armin Laussegger, announced yesterday at the groundbreaking ceremony in the ballroom.

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