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Hitler, Stalin, Freud, Trotsky, and Franz Joseph all lived within a radius of a few km in Vienna in 1913-14. “Stalin could have, with real probability, walked past a homeless Hitler trying to sell his mediocre watercolor paintings on the street…”

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A
Andrew Nathanson

Tom Stoppard wrote a wonderful play called Travesties in which Lenin, James Joyce, and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara all run across each other in Zurich in 1917.

J
Jason KottkeMOD

From the Wikipedia page for Vienna's Café Central:

A well known story is that when Victor Adler objected to Count Berchtold, foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, that war would provoke revolution in Russia, even if not in the Habsburg monarchy, he replied: "And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) sitting over there at the Cafe Central?"

(via @berniemichalik.ca)

J
Jason KottkeMOD

A reader fact-checked this: In 1913 Hitler, Stalin, Freud and Trotsky all lived within a 2.36mi (3.8km) radius.

Between January and February of 1913, Stalin took a field trip to Vienna using a forged passport under the name of "Stavros Papadopoulos". He went there at the request of Lenin to investigate the interaction with the most diverse peoples in the multi-ethnic state of the Danube Monarchy. He stayed with a Russian emigrant couple, Alexander Antonovich and Yelena R. Trojanovsky on Schönbrunner Schloßstraße 30.

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