Vienna, winter, 1913.
An empire entangled in a pointless war & a housing crisis.
At the same time, Vienna was incubating in its own streets some of the century’s prime virtuosos of violence. One of them was active close to the imperial palace, Schloss Schönbrunn, where the emperor had received his heir. An elegant building on Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse housed young Josef Stalin, dispatched by Lenin to explore the empire’s explosive nationalities situation. It was during Stalin’s weeks in Vienna that he initiated his lethal feud with young Leon Trotsky, who, a few streetcar stops away, was publishing the original Pravda. All this while on the other side of town young Adolf Hitler was seething obscurely, painting postcards for a living.
And how did all this mess work out? If you don't know w/o looking it up, you are too young & too ignorant to be reading this.
“Austria,” said Karl Kraus, who was Habsburg Austria’s H. L. Mencken, “is the laboratory for the apocalypse.” What would he say about America today?
Who knows, but we certainly have a few choice things to say concerniing America today.
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