The first rule of the Spatio Temporis Correctores is that you don't talk about the Spatio Temporis Correctores except to say they are the team who travel through time to make sure that things happen exactly as they should do so sort of going to do what they know they are going to do because they have already done it because if they hadn't done it already they wouldn't be here to make sure it gets done. Or something like that but the question they get asked the most is what time would you choose to go back to just for the hell of it and they always answer the same, January 1913.
Not that anything particularly noteworthy happened in 1913, a British suffragette ran out in front of the King's horse, Stainless Steel was invented and Gandhi was arrested but the place to be in 1913 was amongst the 2 million residents living in Vienna, Austria.
The Capital of Austria was buzzing with people coming from all over Europe to find fame and drink in the Coffee Houses and on any given day you could meet Croatian's, Georgian's, Czechs or Ukrainian's just milling about and there was the chance the Young Royal next in line to the throne would happen by as he sometimes did and all were sipping coffee and just waiting to see what the New Century would bring, as it happened it bought them.
One of the Croatian's was Josip Tito who dreamt of bigger things while he worked in the cities Daimler automobile factory and there was a young artists called Adolf Hitler with dreams of studying painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
A couple of Russians Revolutionaries, in Lev Davidovich Bronstein from Ukraine (aka Trotsky) and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin from Georgia plotted their return to Russia one day and in the city centre a doctor called Sigismund Schlomo Freud was perfecting his Psychoanalysis technique.
The young heir to the Austria-Hungary throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was living in the Capital's Belvedere Palace and was free to move amongst his citizens so within the same January in 1913, you had Tito, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Freud and Franz Ferdinand all within 2.5 miles of each other, six men who would go on to dominate the rest of the Century.
No idea if they ever met but they must have at least walked past each other in the street or stood behind one another in the shops which is just mind boggingly weird.
Thursday, 27 February 2025
Just Another January Day In 1913 Vienna
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1 comment:
a couple dominated the world. a couple influenced their industry. a couple merely influenced their small sphere.
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