After the gangsters

 As a young man, Wittgenstein fought with the Austro-Hungarian army. He finished Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in an Italian camp for prisoners of war.

The young Wittgenstein could go on about the achievements of German-speaking artists, logicians, mathematicians, scientists and engineers. He loved music and spoke of the great German-speaking composers. Then came the 1930s, and he told a friend:

 

Just think what it must mean when the government of a country is taken over by a set of gangsters. The Dark Ages are coming again.

 

As historian Heather Cox Richardson has suggested, those who don’t learn from history are not doomed to relive all of history — just the worst parts that they didn’t learn from.

Wittgenstein wondered what would follow the public adulation of gangsters. Perhaps, he said, people would take up witch burning again.

• Source: Recollections of Wittgenstein, edited by Rush Rhees; Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 138.