IT SOUNDS like the world’s worst dinner party line-up, but apparently it’s true. At the same time, a century ago, the same city was home to Stalin, Hitler, Trotsky, the future Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia and Sigmund Freud.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, also had a residence nearby, though somewhat grander than those housing most of our other residents of Vienna in 1913.

Okay, as the main city of a highly cosmopolitan empire it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that an intriguing mix of characters would lurk in its streets. But even so, as the BBC noted last week, there’s a certain fascination that so many key figures from possibly the most violent and destructive century in human history should have been such relatively close neighbours, mostly entirely oblivious to each other (fellow Bolsheviks Stalin and Trotsky did deliberately meet there).

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone decided to write one of those plays based on historical fact around an imaginary encounter between them; Trotsky impersonates Freud while hiding from the police and ends up psychoanalysing Hitler, while Stalin, Freud and Tito go on a massive booze-up, accidentally shooting Franz Ferdinand during a drunken argument, all to Midge Ure wailing Vienna in the background – or something like that. More seriously, it strikes me that most of these characters, with the exception of Freud and possibly the archduke, might have remained in the richly deserved obscurity they experienced in Vienna had it not been for a cataclysmic event that rocked Europe only a year later.

Without the mass death, destruction and the political, social and economic disruption of the First World War – sparked by Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo in June 1914 – it seems to me highly unlikely that any of these future leaders would have got their claws on power, meaning a great deal of mass bloodletting by totalitarian states might never have happened.

Even Freud’s legacy would probably have been different; for one thing, he wouldn’t have had to flee Vienna for our own shores to escape the Nazis.

Next year we are due to commemorate the centenary of the First World War and I, for one, find it almost impossible to imagine that being any sort of celebration. Some have feared that, given we were on the winning side and British forces won some huge victories, particularly towards the end, the whole thing could smack of triumphalism, perhaps offending our German Euro-partners.

I don’t share that fear. Though the last of the war’s survivors are gone, emotions remain.

Many young British people visit the trenches; I remember watching a teenage girl in floods of tears at the Menin Gate in Ypres, perhaps mourning a relative who died many decades before she was born. Our cultural references to the war are no longer about “Hunnish brutality” but the brutality of life in the trenches, the hundreds of thousands dead and “lions led by donkeys” into bloody and futile battles.

There is also the sense of loss partly evoked by the BBC’s discussion of pre-1914 Vienna, of a sort of “golden age” destroyed by the war, ushering in a bitter new reality in which the likes of Hitler and Stalin could thrive. Some of this is viewing the past in Downtown Abbey-style rose-tinted lenses; we ignore the harshness of life and civil discontent which threatened stability in much of Europe, including Britain.

Our collective memory of the war also contains misconceptions and gross oversimplifications about why the Western Front was locked in stalemate for so long. It may also be that Europe’s eclipse, seen as a product of the conflict, would have happened anyway, as one future superpower, the US, was already an economic giant in 1914, while Russia’s development was actually set back by the war.

But what matters is what people believe – which is that the First World War was an unmitigated disaster which blew away a happier and more innocent world and replaced it with something meaner and more dangerous.

That’s why I don’t think we’ll be having much of a celebration in 2014.