Prior to World War I the intelligentsia of Europe and most of the academic world spoke German. Yet, while hundreds of the greatest minds may have shared the same dialect, in some cases this seems to be the only commonality they had with one another — as their philosophical beliefs and theorems diverged in the most polar of ways. This of course is no different than with the lingua franca of today, English.
For instance, economist Ludwig von Mises, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Adolf Hitler were all born and raised in Austria at around the same time (Wittgenstein and Hitler were a mere six days apart).
That said, I found the following picture of interest:
I couldn’t tell you much more about Wittgenstein aside from the material gleaned from his wiki entry (although one of my “logic” professors was a proponent of ol’ Witts theories); to me he seemed like just another logical positivist and socialist — philosophies diametrically opposed to the a priorism and liberalism espoused in Mises’ Privatseminar.
It would be curious to know how the two men (Witt and Hitler) would interact with one another, say in 1940, 50 or so years after that picture was taken. Wittgenstein’s family was Jewish and eventually migrated to parts of the West (both America and England), and Wittgenstein himself was opposed to the Nazi regime. [Note: Mises, who was also Jewish and an ardent critic of Nazism, was forced to flee to Switzerland and America, and had much of his corpus confiscated by the Nazis and later the KGB]
And as an added bonus, here are two strange bedfellows:
The backstory on the image above can be found in the National Security Archive at George Washington University. It eerily foreshadows to the Cheney’s 1994 interview with C-SPAN regarding the aftermath of Iraq after Operation Desert Storm.
See also: Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action (PDF)