Geymüller Castle

The Geymüllerschlössel is a small castle (in Viennese: Schlössel or Schlössl, less commonly Schlösschen) in the western 18th Viennese district of Währing in the cadastral community of Pötzleinsdorf. It is located north of the Pötzleinsdorf Palace Park.

The Geymüllerschlössel is named after its builder Johann Jakob Geymüller (1760–1834), brother of the landlord and owner of Pötzleinsdorf Palace Johann Heinrich Geymüller (1754–1824). The "pleasure building", erected in 1808 by an unknown architect, shows, in keeping with the fashion of the time, a mixture of Gothic and Oriental stylistic elements. The property later passed into various hands, including those of Johann Heinrich von Falkner-Geymüller, who squandered his fortune and, according to one (disputed) view, is said to have been the model for Ferdinand Raimund's "Verschwender" (The Spendthrift) (hence also popularly known as "Verschwender-Villa").

Since 1888, the building was owned by the textile industrialist Isidor Mautner (hence also "Mautner-Villa"), who had to mortgage it to the Austrian National Bank in 1929 due to the poor economic situation. The mortgage was transferred to the German Reichsbank in 1938, which formally "Aryanized" the Jewish private property in 1944. In 1948, the Austrian National Bank sold the building to the Republic of Austria, with the director of the State Printing Office, Franz Sobek, advancing the purchase price in foreign currency and receiving a lifelong right of residence in return. Sobek also housed his well-known watch collection there. Today, the Schlössel is an outpost of the MAK Museum of Applied Arts, which provides insight into the living culture of the Empire and Biedermeier periods and displays the extensive watch collection of Dr. Franz Sobek.