the esperanto museum

Vienna is the city of a thousand cafes and coffee houses. It is a city where the exchange of new ideas seem as native to the atmosphere as the overpowering waft of the spice market is to Bangkok. Perhaps not surprisingly, this city became an early hotbed of Esperanto enthusiasts.
There was a sense in the waning days of the Hapsburg empire that nothing about what made Austria-Hungary an empire was logical, at least in the more modern nationalist sense. It was a polygot incorporation of Hungarians, Germans, Slavs, and Romanians, all clamoring for regional sovereignty; the ornate architecture that seemed to unite Zagreb, Lubijana, Vienna, Prague,and Sibiu was an esthetically pleasing facade for an archaic regime. Maybe it's just me but it seems like more than chance that such an interest in a planned, utopian tongue like Esperanto should find root in a multi-national capital like Vienna. Esperanto was an attempt to crawl from under the Babel and speak on equal terms. Perhaps it wasn't multinational, it was anti-national.
Regardless, there is today a Department of Planned Languages in Vienna, founded in 1927 as part of the National Library and with a huge collection of Esperanto documents and literature. The Department was shut down in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria. (Hitler was not surprisingly opposed to Esperanto and outlawed it.)
In addition to a small but fascinating Esperanto museum, the Department has done work on over 500 planned or constructed languages, Ido, Volapuk, and even Klingon among them. I am not sure that I will ever hunker down and learn Esperanto but I am continually amazed and beautifully amused by its endurance, appeal, and its serious academic history.