The museum tells the story of how the Esperanto movement enjoyed tremendous prestige and support before the World Wars. But the wars themselves were damaging to Esperanto in almost every possible way -- reducing peaceful international cooperation, harming modernist optimism (cf. Eliot's "The Waste Land"), making some kinds of internationalism seem naive or impractical, and starting the U.S. on its course to become the sole superpower. Also, as this article describes, Hitler and Stalin were both incredibly opposed to Esperanto and Esperantists, and violently repressed them.
HN user Mediterraneo10 has pointed out in a number of interesting prior HN Esperanto threads that the Esperanto movement in its original form did not resemble its present-day version -- in particular there was not originally a consensus that Esperanto aimed to preserve natural languages (and serve as a bridge between them) rather than supplant them. I'm still curious when that consensus emerged (Mediterraneo10 said as late as the 1970s, but I think that Otto Jespersen, a prominent Idoist in the 1920s and creator of Novial, who may have coined the term "auxiliary language", had a view of the role of such languages that would be closer to the usual Esperantist view today than to the view of planned languages as supplanting natural languages).
Maybe we need a collection of prior HN threads on Esperanto; some of them have been pretty interesting.
https://www.onb.ac.at/en/museums/esperanto-museum/
The museum tells the story of how the Esperanto movement enjoyed tremendous prestige and support before the World Wars. But the wars themselves were damaging to Esperanto in almost every possible way -- reducing peaceful international cooperation, harming modernist optimism (cf. Eliot's "The Waste Land"), making some kinds of internationalism seem naive or impractical, and starting the U.S. on its course to become the sole superpower. Also, as this article describes, Hitler and Stalin were both incredibly opposed to Esperanto and Esperantists, and violently repressed them.
HN user Mediterraneo10 has pointed out in a number of interesting prior HN Esperanto threads that the Esperanto movement in its original form did not resemble its present-day version -- in particular there was not originally a consensus that Esperanto aimed to preserve natural languages (and serve as a bridge between them) rather than supplant them. I'm still curious when that consensus emerged (Mediterraneo10 said as late as the 1970s, but I think that Otto Jespersen, a prominent Idoist in the 1920s and creator of Novial, who may have coined the term "auxiliary language", had a view of the role of such languages that would be closer to the usual Esperantist view today than to the view of planned languages as supplanting natural languages).
Maybe we need a collection of prior HN threads on Esperanto; some of them have been pretty interesting.