French and central European philosophers in WWI

This war has indeed wrought great havoc in scholarship. (Edward P. Buffet, Monist 26, no. 2 [April, 1916], 'Karl Eugen Neumann', p. 319)

In addition to Étienne Gilson and Pierre Rousselot, another French philosopher who served in WWI is Émile Bréhier. Although he was 40 years old in 1916, he was at the Battle of Verdun, as a result of which his left arm was amputated (in October, 1916). Martial Gueroult also was in the army, as was the historian Marc Bloch.

On the German side, in addition to Emil Lask and Adolf Reinach (noted in an earlier post), there is Heinrich Friedemann, who had studied philosophy at Marburg with Paul Natorp and belonged to one of Stefan George's circles. Friedemann had published a book on Plato (Platon; seine Gestalt, 1914) and was, when the War began, habilitating at Heidelberg with Friedrich Gundolf. On Feb. 22, 1915, Friedemann was killed in action.

Another member of George's circle who was killed in the War is Norbert von Hellingrath. He was a Munich philologist who is known for having re-discovered Hölderlin's poetry.

From Ernst Robert Curtius's letter to Friedrich Gundolf (November, 1914):

What is horrifying about modern war is that human beings do not fight against other human beings, but against gruesome impersonal machines. Land mines, machine guns, artillery fire: that is the anonymous horror on which every idealistic perception of the war must founder. (quoted from Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle, [Cornell University Press, 2002], p. 530)

Otto Dix - Stormtroopers advancing under a gas attack (1924)

There was also Wilhelm Metzger, who taught at Leipzig. He was a prominent Schelling scholar and had published Die Epochen der Schellingschen Philosophie von 1795 bis 1802, Ein problemgeschichtlicher Versuch. He was drafted into the army and sent to the western front. You will have to excuse my extremely weak German-language abilities, but if I interpret correctly a passage from Peter Hoerres' book (Krieg der Philosophen: die deutsche und britische Philosophie im Ersten Weltkrieg, 2004), Metzger died in 1916 of cancer.

Outside of philosophy but doing work of interest in the philosophy of art, there was Fritz Burger, an art history professor in Munich who was killed on May 22, 1916. Born in 1877, Burger was almost as old as Bréhier.

Robert Staiger, a privatdozent in art history at Göttingen and Felix Klein's son-in-law, was killed in action in August, 1914. Another Göttingen privatdozent who was killed in the War, and who was close to Klein, was the mathematician Wilhelm Behrens.

I learned of Behrens from this incredible source: Placing World War I in the History of Mathematics, by David Aubin and Catherine Goldstein (2013). See also the collection edited by Aubin and Goldstein: The War of Guns and Mathematics, ed. David Aubin and Catherine Goldstein (American Mathematical Society, 2014)

Here's a quotation from Arthur Bauer's piece in the July, 1916 issue of Revue Philosophiques de la France et de l'Étranger. Treat my following attempt at translation more as a paraphrase. According to Bauer, in extended periods of peace, for philosophers who do not attend sufficiently to history,

Humanity is in a state of constant progress and moves ... towards the ultimate end of its evolution: an altruism so natural and so powerful that everyone, forgetting his own interests, would serve his neighbor from inexhaustible reserves of charity. ... The terrible shock of current events wakes from their dream the most obstinate sleepers. By the light of howitzers that ... destroy whole battalions, illusions vanish, and reality appears in a relief so striking that no one can mistake it. (Bauer, 'Le role de la Fôrce' Revue Philosophiques de la France et de l'Étranger 82 [1916], p. 44)

In the Austro-Hungarian forces, in addition to Wittgenstein, philosopher Ernst Mally was in the front lines. Vienna-Circle mathematician Hans Hahn was wounded in the Isonzo region.

There was also a philosophy student and poet, Franz Janowitz, who was killed in 1917 in the Isonzo area. Janowitz, a friend of Franz Werfel's, was from Prague. His poetry was admired by Max Brod and Karl Kraus. He was studying philosophy in Vienna when the War began. One of his older brothers, Hans Janowitz (also a war vet), co-wrote the script for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Jerzy Żuławski

Photo source.

Jerzy Żuławski joined the Polish forces that fought on the Austro-Hungarian side. Żuławski had studied philosophy with Richard Avenarius in Switzerland. The product of that work was a dissertation called The Problem of Causality in Spinoza, which was the basis for a popular-philosophy book on Spinoza that Żuławski later published in Polish (Benedykt Spinoza: człowiek i dzieło, 1902). Żuławski translated several works of German philosophy into Polish. He is now known chiefly for his science-fiction books, especially his Lunar Trilogy (or Moon Trilogy). Stanisław Lem read these books when he was young and continued to admire the first book of the trilogy (The Silver Globe) later in life. Here's a 1985 item that Lem wrote about Żuławski's work. A film version of The Silver Globe was made by Żuławski's grand-nephew Andrzej Żuławski in 1976. The Lunar Trilogy sounds interesting. One of its themes was the transposition of events from the remote past into the language of mythology; the distant historical events in the novels concern the formation of a colony on the moon. While it has been translated into several languages, The Silver Globe hasn't been rendered in English. In WWI, Jerzy Żuławski worked mainly behind the battle front. He died in 1915 from an illness that he caught while visiting the front line.

From F. C. S. Schiller's review of John Dewey's book German Philosophy and Politics:

[The War] revealed that the actual world was a very different thing from the cosmic order they [philosophers] had constructed in their minds....Even though the rational order of human affairs was shattered before their eyes and the belief that thought controls man's feelings and determines his acts should have been among the first of the illusions swept away in the wreckage of the war, they insisted on finding ideal reasons to which to attribute the catastrophe.' (Schiller, Mind 25, no. 98 (Apr., 1916): 250)

Other philosophy students who served in the War and who achieved some distinction as novelists or poets include:

Miloš Crnjanski -- a Serb in the Austro-Hungarian army who wrote the The Journal of Carnojevic, which was recently produced as a play in Belgrade;

Camil Petrescu -- a Romanian who was wounded and taken prisoner by the Austro-Hungarians;

Milutin Bojić -- a poet in the Serbian army who died in May, 1917;

Sima Pandurović -- another poet in the Serbian army, Pandurović was taken prisoner by the Austro-Hungarians and survived the War.

Upddate (April 12): Slobodan Perovic has brought to my attention the Serbian philosopher Branislav Petronijević, who was a friend of Bertrand Russell's. (Thanks to Slobodan for those two links.)

Finally, here's an article by Nil Santiáñez (of St. Louis University) comparing Ernst Jünger's WWI writing with that of communist author Adam Scharrer; the article is called 'Ernst Jünger and Adam Scharrer: Two Global Views of the Great War'.

The latest on Kakania

Mr. Waggish has a new post about Robert Musil, in which a new book on Musil by Genese Grill is discussed.

The Monist's submissions deadline for its Musil issue has just passed. Achille Varzi, a philosophy professor at Columbia University (who was a tutor in my first logic class), has contributed a paper on the Confusions of Young Törleß, a draft of which is available as a pdf.

At Wuthering Expectations, Amateur Reader is on a pre-WWI Austrian lit kick, with posts on Hofmannsthal, Zweig, and Schnitzler.

From the Vienna Review: 'It is perhaps less well-known that [Arthur] Schnitzler also wrote for the cinema. Intrigued by the new medium and its language – shifting perspectives, the use of close-ups and montage techniques – Schnitzler wrote altogether nine film scripts based on his works and left a number of sketches for new projects.'

How did I not know that Stefan Zweig's post-secondary education was in philosophy? He completed a dissertation on Hippolyte Taine. It was supervised by Friedrich Jodl (source), who also supervised Otto Weininger.

Roger Boylan's review of Joseph Roth: a Life in Letters. And a review of Roth's Emperor's Tomb in the Economist (the latest of Michael Hofmann's Roth translations).

Douglas Glover on Thomas Bernhard's The Loser. And a neat recounting of Bernhard's relation to his long-suffering publisher.

M.A.Orthofer's new review of Franz Werfel's Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand (reviewed last year by Brooke Allen),  and Liel Leibovitz's review of Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

There's a new website devoted to Hermann Ungar, who attended the same school in Brno as Ernst Weiss.

From an interview with translator Mark Corner about Jaroslav Hašek: 'I have a colleague at the university where I teach in Brussels, who always says to me, "If you want a new idea, read an old book." ... I think that Hašek is still very relevant, and the sense of being a traveller in a disordered universe does bear some parallels with the modern day.'

Erratic Schwabinger Otto Gross

"Dear Jung, -- I climbed over the asylum wall and am now in the Hotel X. This is a begging letter. Please send me money for the hotel expenses and also the train fare to Munich. -- Yours Sincerely." (Ernest Jones, Free Associations: Memories of a Psychoanalyst, [p. 164])

This wonderful letter was sent by Otto Gross to Carl Jung shortly after Gross had left Jung's care. Gross was a brilliant young physician (a neurologist who worked with Emil Kraepelin) and early psychoanalyst who conducted many of his analyses in Schwabing's Café Stefanie. He at times resided in the early hippie haven, Monte Verità. In my post on that settlement, I noted its similarity to the 1960's counterculture. One missing element, it seemed, was the experimentation with drugs. Well, it wasn't missing when young Otto arrived. As a physician, he had access to drugs, and he did more than just experiment with them. In fact, among the ills for which Jung was treating him at the Burghölzli clinic were addictions to cocaine and morphine.

Gross' brilliance is attested by Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, who met Gross in Schwabing. Jones says, "[Gross] was the nearest approach to a romantic genius I ever met .... He was my first instructor in the technique of psycho-analysis .... Such penetrative power of divining the inner thoughts of others I was never to see again." (Ibid., pp. 163-4)

Gross was a prototype of the young punk rebel. The focus of his rebellion was the constricting, martial culture of German-speaking central Europe. The point of his rebellion is captured by Sam Whimster and Gottfried Heuer, who say that Gross'

central insight was that it was not fathers alone ... who formed the repressive structure of personality in their children but that instead it was the structure and culture of a patriarchal society that had institutionalized repression in the family. His solution was to call for an expressive and unrestrained sexuality, which the unique conditions of Schwabing had shown to be possible. ('Otto Gross and Else Jaffé and Max Weber', Sam Whimster and Gottfried Heuer, Theory Culture Society [1998] 15: 129) 

Indeed, it was Gross who coined the phrase "sexual revolution" (or its German equivalent).

So, for Otto the political was very personal. This brought him into conflict with Freud, who resisted efforts to link a political program to psychoanalysis.

The fusion of personal and political themes in Gross' life is especially clear in connection with his father, Hans Gross, an influential early criminologist (whose classes Kafka attended). Hans was the very opposite of Otto. Hans thought that 'degenerates' (e.g., vagabonds and revolutionaries -- e.g., his son) who didn't respond to treatment should be sent to Africa. Hans studied and tried to develop more effective forms of incarceration, including the concentration camp.

Karl Valentin

So, it's easy to sympathize with Otto Gross in his conflict with his father. Still, Otto was schizophrenic and did great harm to others. For instance, he was wanted by the police in Switzerland because of his role in the deaths of two women -- one an assisted suicide (Lotte Hattemer in 1906), the other a death by overdose (Sophie Benz in 1910). Also, he took no, or little, responsibility for his four children, as is indicated by the fact that both his sons (born in 1907 to different women) were named 'Peter'. He took no role in their naming.

It seems that Otto, though he meant well, didn't know what 'well' meant. It's not entirely surprising, then, that his father tried to have Otto committed to an institution. Hans succeeded in having Otto arrested in Berlin on Nov. 9, 1913. Otto was sent back to his homeland, Austria, and confined there in asylums at Tulln and Troppau. This father-son conflict became a cause célèbre, prompting Blaise Cendrars and Apollinaire (among others) to oppose in print the father's incarceration of the son, an act that became emblematic of a generation's wider conflict with the patriarchy


The battle of the Gross's, père et fils, resonated with Kafka and engendered his generally sympathetic response to Otto Gross' ideas. Indeed, Hartmut Binder and others have claimed that the conflict fed Kafka's conception of The Trial. Still, it's difficult to find evidence of any influence by Gross on Kafka, and some authors deny that there was any (see, e.g., Jennifer E. Michaels, Anarchy and Eros: Otto Gross' Impact on German Expressionist Writers [NY: Peter Lang Publishers Inc., 1983], p. 164).

As was noted (above), Hans Gross was one of Kafka's professors. In fact, according to Martin Green (Mountain of Truth: the Counterculture Begins Ascona, 1900-1920 [Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986], p. 40), "Kafka had sat under Hans Gross for sixteen class hours a week in his fifth, sixth, and seventh semesters of law at Prague University." Shortly after he graduated, Kafka met Otto Gross briefly in 1907 (although only the linked source reports that encounter). Later, in 1917, Kafka and Gross met at least twice, first on a night train from Budapest to Vienna (or from Vienna to Prague -- sources differ here) and later in Prague. Of the meeting on the train, Henrik Jensen says (pdf), "Kafka was with Gross ... listening to his meanderings, afterwards claiming that he had not understood a word. Still, he did see something 'essential' beyond the ridiculous, as he later stated in a letter to Milena Jesenská." Here's an excerpt from Kafka's letter (as quoted in a paper by Gottfried Heuer): 

I have hardly known Otto Gross; but I realised that there was something essential here that at least with its hand reached out of the "ridiculous." The perplexed frame of mind of his friends and relatives (wife, brother-in-law, even the enigmatically silent baby amongst the travelling bags ...) was somewhat reminiscent of the mood of the followers of Christ as they stood below him who was nailed to the cross.

(The 'wife' was actually Gross' mistress, Marianne Kuh, and the 'brother-in-law' was her brother, Anton Kuh.) Later in 1917, Gross met in Prague with Kafka, Franz Werfel, Max Brod, and others to discuss a new journal in which Kafka showed interest. It was to have been called the Journal Against the Will to Power. Also, Martin Green reports (Mountain of Truth, p. 40) that Kafka read all of the articles that Gross had published in a journal called Die Aktion. Finally, in 1922, three years after Gross' death, Kafka severely criticized Werfel for casting Gross in a bad light in his play called Schweiger, in which the loathsome character of Dr. Ottokar Grund was made the spokesman for Gross' ideas (according to Peter Stephan Jungk, Franz Werfel [NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990], p. 92).

Im Café by Jeanne Mammen

Otto Gross had direct or indirect connections with many other famous people -- Max Weber, D. H. Lawrence, Gustav Landauer, etc. -- but one of these in particular stood out for me. One of Gross' followers was Heinrich Goesch, who befriended Paul Tillich and (rather more intimately) his wife, Hannah Tillich. (That last link is to an article about his parents by René Tillich -- highly recommended. It even mentions a trip to Lake Ascona, near Monte Verità.) According to Martin Green (Mountain of Truth, p. 192), the Tillichs were receptive to many of Gross' ideas, as mediated by Goesch.

Update (Nov. 27, 2011): In a NY Times review of David Cronenberg's film A Dangerous Method, Otto Gross is described as, "A fellow analyst, sent to Jung by Freud, who turns out to be a feral and charming emanation of pure id, an imp of the Freudian perverse."

Rowohlt and friends in Leipzig

Riquet Café with Nikolaikirche behind it

In Saxony, Dresden is a more popular tourist destination than Leipzig. I was short of time at this stage of my trip, so I could visit only one of these cities. I opted for Leipzig, and I'm glad that I did. Historically, Dresden was the more extravagant capital of Saxony, while Leipzig was more prominent as a trade centre, but a very cultured one. Among Leipzig's former residents are Leibniz, Bach, Goethe, Mahler, Schumann, Wagner, Luther, Lessing, Nietzsche, and Schiller.

The city drew so many geniuses partly because it has long been a university town and partly because it was home to many publishers. For me, the most interesting of these publishers was Rowohlt, which was run by Ernst Rowohlt and Kurt Wolff.

Rowohlt preferred to do much of his work in nearby bars and cafés. Over the lunch hours (one gets the impression that with Rowohlt lunch took hours), he and his associates did business at Wilhelms Weinstube [Wilhelm's Wine Parlour].

The student who introduced me to Hasenclever soon led us to the regular midday gathering in the back room of Wilhelm's Wine Parlour .... [T]he little circle was dominated by a colossal figure with enormously broad shoulders; beneath a tuft of ginger hair beamed the reddish face .... This was Ernst Rowohlt, bursting with vitality and joie de vivre .... [Kurt Pinthus, 'Leipzig and Early Expressionism', in The Era of Expressionism, p. 68]

According to my guide (Literarisches Leipzig), this wine parlour was located at Hainstrasse 23, where the ugly, low building is (lower right) in this photo:



Among Rowohlt's early writers were Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Kafka, Hugo Ball, Georg Heym, Albert Ehrenstein (whom Pinthus dubbed 'the bitterest poet of the century whom I called the "cosmic Schlemihl"' [p. 73]), and Arnold Zweig (audio plays at that last link).

[T]he midday gathering at Wilhelm's Wine Parlour ... became a breeding ground, then a centre, a place of pilgrimage for the young writers from the German-speaking world. Whenever any writer of the young or older generation came to Leipzig from Berlin, Prague, Munich, Vienna, West Germany he knew that he would meet Rowohlt and Werfel and Hasenclever and me and others like himself in that wine parlour. And he knew that he would then go on to the traditional coffee houses: the refined Café Felsche ... the stark Café Merkur ... or Café Bauer on whose old-fashioned red plush benches generations of men of letters had sat. [Pinthus, p. 71] (audio plays at last link)

Pinthus says that Werfel arrived in Leipzig at the end of October, 1911, and became an employee at the publishing firm.

With a powerful, though untrained, voice [Werfel] sang arias from his beloved Verdi ... and thunderously declaimed his hymnic poems. Every other day he would come and see me with a new magnificently declaimed poem. [Pinthus, p. 70]

Here's a photo that was reproduced in Reiner Stach's book on Kafka:

Hasenclever, Werfel, and Pinthus in Leipzig (1912)

Pinthus recalls (p. 73) the day when he met Kafka (June 29, 1912): 'Brod turned up with a tall, thin, very pale, very shy person who hardly spoke at all: Franz Kafka.' In advance of this meeting, while Kafka toured the city, Brod had met with Rowohlt and the others and raved about his friend's work. Intrigued, Rowohlt suggested that Brod bring Kafka around for lunch.

Brod and Kafka headed straight for Wilhelm's Tavern, where Rowohlt sat and waited with Pinthus and his friend and freelance editor Walter Hasenclever over several large mugs of wine spritzer.  [Kafka: The Decisive Years, Rainer Stach, p. 74]

Stach says that the meeting didn't go well, for Rowohlt was impressed by other extroverts, like Werfel, and not so much by shy, nervous characters like Kafka. (Kurt Wolff, at that time Rowohlt's 'silent' partner, wasn't so disapproving of shyness.) Kafka, too, didn't seem pleased with the encounter. He wrote in his diary, 'Strange daily gathering at noon in the Wine Parlour. Large, wide wine goblets with slices of lemon.' [Quoted from Pinthus, p. 73] Still, Brod succeeded in persuading the publisher to add Kafka to his small stable of authors.

As Pinthus said, in the evenings Rowohlt and company typically headed for a café, though it sounds like Werfel often went his own way. (Singing and thunderously declaiming all the while?) 'He usually went to the Café Felsche or the theater in the evenings, then spent the night making the rounds of bars, cabarets, and brothels.' [A Life Torn By History: Franz Werfel 1890-1945, Peter Stephan Jungk, p. 32]

While Werfel was making his evening rounds, Rowohlt could usually be found in the Café Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum, which opened for business in 1694. Its past customers include Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Lessing, Gottsched, Goethe, and Bach. (The apple strudel here is perfect.) Here's the decoration above its entrance.

Pinthus says that this decoration was installed by Augustus the Strong (and the profligate), and that it depicts 'a Turk sitting under a coffee bush holding a huge coffee pot while a cherub is passing him a cup of what the Leipzigers call the "hot stuff".' [Pinthus, p. 72] Of the café's past customers, its owners seem especially impressed by Schumann, to whom they've dedicated a room.

Once ensconced here for the evening,

Rowohlt reigned at a clean scrubbed wooden table where great quantities of Pilsner were drunk and many ham and egg sandwiches consumed. This was rounded off by a session in the spacious Central Theater Bar .... And there about midnight we would really let ourselves go [!?!], especially Ernst Rowohlt, full of enthusiasm, laughter and boisterous good spirits. [Pinthus, p. 72]

Rowohlt, Wolff and their employees were in their twenties at this time. Werfel, Pinthus, Hasenclever, and Willy Haas (a friend from Prague) shared an apartment. They enjoyed the lifestyle of rowdy grad students while launching one of the most important publishing companies of the 20th century.

Cafes Sperl and Zartl

I took these pictures of the entrance and billiard tables at Cafe Sperl, an old cafe that's still open. It was once a favourite gathering spot for musicians such as Mahler and Lehar, as well as authors such as Franz Werfel. Here's more about its history (in German).

Another interesting cafe outside the central part of the city (like the Sperl) is Cafe Zartl. It was a favourite spot for Robert Musil (who lived nearby -- as did Wittgenstein) and Heimito von Doderer. More recently, the author Robert Schindel has said that he does much of his writing there.

I'll note here this nice guide to Austria for historically inclined literature buffs.

Cafe Imperial

I wasn't much interested in Cafe Imperial. It seemed to be just an extension of a ritzy hotel, so I didn't even venture inside. Too bad, since it turns out to have a very interesting history.

First, Elias Canetti gives a mean-spirited anecdote about his meeting there with Stefan Zweig. I don't believe this anecdote to be accurate -- Canetti's autobiography is not that reliable, especially when he's talking about someone he didn't like. He evidently didn't like Zweig. Here's the relevant quotation:

"Soon after my return I ran into [Stefan] Zweig at the Cafe Imperial. He was sitting alone in one of the back rooms, holding his hand over his mouth to hide the absence of teeth [due to dental work]. Though he did not like to be seen in that condition, he beckoned me over to his table and bade me be seated. 'I've heard the whole story from Broch,' he said. 'You've met Joyce. ... Get Joyce to write a preface. Then your book will get attention.'" (Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, p. 186)

Cafe Imperial also appears in Robert Musil's Diaries, but (again) Musil doesn't have much of interest to say about a cafe: "Yesterday, or the day before yesterday, spent some time with Morgenstern in the Cafe Imperial." (Robert Musil, Diaries, entry for March 26, 1930, p. 366)

More interestingly, Ludwig Wittgenstein met at this cafe with Ludwig von Ficker during the latter's visit to Vienna (so that Wittgenstein could give away part of his family's fortune to worthy artists under Ficker's guidance). Here's Ficker's description of a meeting with Wittgenstein on July 24, 1914:

"We met in Cafe Imperial, where there ensued a somewhat strenuous, but positively stimulating conversation between [Ludwig Wittgenstein] and the hard-of-hearing builder [Adolf Loos] on the still contoversial Haus am Michaelerplatz on questions of modern architecture, which seemed to interest Wittgenstein." (Ludwig von Ficker describing a meeting on July 24, 1914 at Cafe Imperial; quoted from Wittgenstein in Vienna, Allan S. Janik & Hans Veigl [Springer, 1998], p. 123)

The cafe in the Hotel Imperial was initially called Cafe Frohner. It's mentioned by Fritz Wittels, a med student and budding psychoanalyst in Freud's circle. According to Edward Timms, Wittels was also part of Karl Kraus' circle in 1907-08. Timms summarizes Wittels' description as follows:

"Later they [Kraus and Wittels] would go on to the Cafe Frohner, situated in the luxurious Hotel Imperial. Kraus was a heavy smoker, but never took a drop of alcohol. He was a gifted conversationalist and on good days, Wittels recalls, he enchanted everyone. All kinds of people -- senior government officials as well as artists, actors, and attractive girls -- would come to his table; and Kraus made them feel they were the 'centre of the universe'. Later, feeling the need to escape from the stifling atmosphere of bourgeois coffee houses, Kraus and his circle would move on to lower-class cafes patronised by prostitutes and bookies." (Edward Timms, 'The 'Child-Woman': Kraus, Freud, Wittles, and Irma Karczewska', in Vienna 1900: from Altenberg to Wittgenstein, ed. E. Timms and R. Robertson [Edinburgh University Press, 1990], p. 88)

Cafe Imperial was favoured by musicians; Mahler was a regular, as were Schonberg, Berg and Webern. According to Janik and Veigl, the Imperial was also visited by Freud, Hofmannsthal, Werfel, Rilke, Bruckner, Wagner, Brahms and Trotsky -- which raises a question: Is there a Viennese cafe from Trotsky's time in the Habsburg capital in which he did not luxuriate, excogitate or vegetate?

Update: I just read that Stalin was in Vienna briefly in early 1913 with Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky. I can't find evidence that Stalin frequented any cafes. In his excellent Stalin biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore reports that Stalin, like Hitler, liked to take walks in the park around the Schonbrunn Palace.

Montefiore quotes Trotsky's description of his first encounter with Stalin: "I was sitting at the table beside the samovar in the apartment of Skobelev ... in the ancient capital of the Habsburgs [...] when suddenly the door opened with a knock and an unkown man entered. He was short ... thin ... his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks ... I saw nothing in his eyes that resembled friendliness [...] Then, as silently as he had come, he left, leaving a very depressing but unusual impression on me." (Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin [Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2007], p. 275)