Austria at the time of Emperor Joseph II.

Melk Abbey, one of Lower Austria's most striking landmarks, was the venue for the provincial exhibition in 1980 and once again confirmed itself as a first-class center of art and culture in the province. 20 years earlier, the Benedictine monastery had hosted the first Lower Austrian provincial exhibition on Jakob Prandtauer.

The theme of the exhibition was the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the reign of Joseph II. He and his mother Maria Theresa were closely associated with Melk Abbey, they were frequent guests and were also among its particular admirers.

Burkhard Ellegast, the abbot of the monastery, formulated this thought into a question that many visitors have probably also asked themselves: “An exhibition of the monastery striker in a monastery?” But the pious Joseph II did not want to harm the church, said the abbot, because he gave it a long-needed organization.

This exhibition showed Joseph II in a new light. The monarch was relatively uninfluenced by philosophical ideas, he was primarily a pragmatist of the state and did what was useful to the state: “The state was not only supposed to take, to force its citizens to behave in certain ways, it also wanted to give, above all to guarantee the material existence of every person who lived within its borders” (exhibition director Karl Gutkas). The Josephinian state was not only an absolute state, but also the first socially-oriented state in Austria.

This meant that the state should take on social tasks, that it had to take care of improving education and that, among other things, human dignity was respected more (e.g. through the abolition of serfdom and the abolition of torture and capital punishment).

In order to implement these ideas, it was necessary to restructure the state. “Everything that had been hypertrophied in the preceding period of the Counter-Reformation and the Baroque was now to be scaled back to what was necessary and useful” (Gutkas).

This era became very important for Austria's future and has left its mark on many areas of daily life to this day. All of this was shown in the provincial exhibition, which was divided into four parts: Joseph's childhood and youth and his work as co-regent; the Josephine state (including the areas of schools, healthcare and administration); the cultural work of the time and, as the fourth part, the presentation of Melk Abbey.

For the first time, an attempt was made to present the life's work and image of the emperor to a large public in a large-scale museum exhibition, a “further step on the way to providing the Austrian people with new access to their history” (Gutkas). The public interest was enormous: 663,074 visitors saw “Austria in the time of Emperor Joseph II”, a show presenting the life and work of the ruler who was of the greatest importance for the development of Austria at the end of the 18th century.

Melk Abbey