The Esperanto Museum was founded in 1927 by Hugo Steiner. In 1928 it became part of the Austrian National Library, and was opened in the Hofburg in 1929. Today, the Esperanto Museum is located in the Palais Mollard on Herrengasse, and serves not only as a museum but also as an archive for Esperanto and other planned languages.
Visitors to the museum can learn about Esperanto, Hildegarde von Bingen’s cryptic Lingua Ignota, and even the Star Trek language Klingon, through interactive media exhibits. The museum tries to impart a sense of the complex relationship between man and language, and how it has developed over time.
The library, which in 1990 became the Department of Planned Languages, has over 25,000 library volumes, 2,500 magazine titles, 3,000 museum items, 2,000 hand-written and printed manuscripts, 23,000 photographs, 1,100 placards, and 40,000 flyers. |
