The Vienna Prater [2024]
A Place for Everyone
To the reopening of the Pratermuseum 2024
Description
The Vienna Prater is many things: amusement park, meadow, woodland, park, natural landscape, recreational area, open space, and sports ground. When Emperor Josef II opened it to the public in 1766, this was a revolutionary act and marked the beginning of a new era. The imperial hunting grounds, long closed to the public, were now open to everyone regardless of social status. For a long time, the Prater was Vienna’s central site of innovation and experimentation, serving as a laboratory of modernity and a window to the wider world.
At the Prater, people grappled with modern life’s big issues in ways that were at once pleasurable, amusing, instructive, spectacular, transformative, and distorting: the transformation of nature; the relation between humans and animals; the revolutions of science and technology; the social and political order of societies, nations, and the world; the changing perceptions of the human body; and the rethinking of beauty ideals and the good life.
![Der Wiener Prater [2024]](https://shop.wienmuseum.at/cache/large/product/599/OzE4SXNpeT6P9ZyktNKKZQU0VHMoNQAe336SgHF8.jpg)