“A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses,” a wag once observed. Well, when it comes to dysfunction, the Wittgensteins of Vienna could give the Oedipuses a run for their money. The tyrannical family patriarch was Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913), a steel, banking and arms magnate. He and his timorous wife, Leopoldine, brought nine children into the world. Of the five boys, three certainly or probably committed suicide and two were plagued by suicidal impulses throughout their lives. Of the three daughters who survived into adulthood, two got married; both husbands ended up insane and one died by his own hand. Even by the morbid standards of late Hapsburg Vienna these are impressive numbers. But tense and peculiar as the Wittgensteins were, the family also had a strain of genius. Of the two sons who didn’t kill themselves, one, Paul (1887-1961), managed to become an internationally celebrated concert pianist despite the loss of his right arm in World War I. The other, Ludwig (1889-1951), was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.
Who better to chronicle such a clan than Alexander Waugh, himself the scion of a distinguished and colorful family? In his previous book, “Fathers and Sons,” Waugh wrote with a fine comic touch about his grandfather Evelyn and his father, Auberon. Here he moves from a farcical to a tragic vein. Yet the Wittgensteins, for all their Sturm und Drang, can be as funny as the Waughs. We are told, for example, that the first spoken word of one of the Wittgenstein boys was “Oedipus.”
Who better to chronicle such a clan than Alexander Waugh, himself the scion of a distinguished and colorful family? In his previous book, “Fathers and Sons,” Waugh wrote with a fine comic touch about his grandfather Evelyn and his father, Auberon. Here he moves from a farcical to a tragic vein. Yet the Wittgensteins, for all their Sturm und Drang, can be as funny as the Waughs. We are told, for example, that the first spoken word of one of the Wittgenstein boys was “Oedipus.”
The author brings another advantage to his subject: he is a music critic (and sometime composer), and the Wittgensteins were the musical family par excellence. Their palatial residence in Vienna contained seven grand pianos, including two Bösendorfer Imperials. Among the guests at their home concerts, which took place in a special Musiksaal adorned with a marble statue of the nude Beethoven squatting and glowering atop a high plinth, were Brahms, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Mahler. All the Wittgensteins, parents and children alike, were prodigiously talented musicians. They “pursued music with an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered on the pathological,” Waugh writes. Concertizing together seems to have been for them a wordless medium of communication, affording a respite from the usual family tension and bickering.
It was apparently not enough of a respite for the eldest son, Hans, who fled the household and disappeared into America, where he ended his life under mysterious circumstances, possibly by drowning himself in Lake Okeechobee. Nor was it enough for his brother Rudi, a closeted homosexual (like Hans), who killed himself by drinking a cyanide-laced glass of milk at a restaurant bar in Berlin. The only Wittgenstein brother who came close to having a sunny disposition, Kurt, shot himself in the head on the battlefield, perhaps to avoid being taken prisoner, while fighting for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in World War I.
That leaves the two youngest sons. Paul, who made his debut as a concert pianist on the eve of the war (the conductor, to be sure, went on to commit suicide), showed great bravery as an Austrian soldier. After a bullet shattered his right elbow, the arm was amputated and he was taken prisoner by the Russians. Yet he was determined to stick with his pianistic career. Confined to the invalid ward of a Siberian P.O.W. camp under the most miserable of conditions, Paul set about solving a puzzle: how could a single hand play both melody and accompaniment? Obsessively tapping out a memorized Chopin piece with his freezing fingers on a wooden box and imagining the music, he began to develop an ingenious bag of tricks that would fool even the sharpest ear. “His most far-reaching innovation,” Waugh writes, “was a combined pedaling and hand-movement technique that allowed him to sound chords that were strictly impossible for a five-fingered pianist to play.”
As for Ludwig, the baby of the family, he seems to have had a sense of his genius from an early age. After finishing high school (where one of his classmates was Adolf Hitler), he decided to find a fellow genius who might serve as his mentor. His first choice was the great physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, but Boltzmann hanged himself before Wittgenstein could meet him. In 1911, Wittgenstein sought out Bertrand Russell in Cambridge. Russell was initially wary of the strange (and startlingly handsome) young Viennese, who would show up in his rooms late at night to stutter out philosophical monologues, pacing “like a caged tiger” and threatening to kill himself if Russell turned him out. Before long, though, the older philosopher succumbed, writing to his mistress, Lady Ottoline Morrell, that Wittgenstein “has pure intellectual passion in the highest degree; it makes me love him.” Returning to Vienna, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian Army in World War I, insisting, out of spiritual motives, that he be assigned to the most dangerous missions. It was during the war that he produced his first philosophical work (the only one to be published in his lifetime), the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” which opens with the arresting proposition, “The world is all that is the case.”
Ludwig’s subsequent career, familiar from numerous biographies and memoirs, is briskly told here. Renouncing his share of the family fortune (among the largest of war-ruined Europe, thanks to the Wittgensteins’ shrewd American investments), he pursued self-mortification as a schoolteacher in an impoverished Alpine village. But his pedagogical methods included slapping the children rather violently, and he got run out of town. Turning to architecture, he designed an austere cubical house, now regarded as a modernist masterpiece, for one of his sisters in Vienna. Most of the rest of his life was spent in Cambridge, where he developed a radically new vision of philosophy, one that marked a decisive break with his early work. As for his sex life, Waugh notes that at least one of the several relationships Ludwig had with adoring young men was frankly physical, but he is agnostic about whether the philosopher pursued rough trade in public parks. (When that claim was made in a scandalous 1973 biography, Wittgenstein’s outraged nephew announced his readiness to vomit on the hat of the publisher — surely one of the most inspired threats of all time.)
Ludwig may be the famous Wittgenstein today, but it’s the now forgotten Paul who looms largest in this book. Having perfected his piano technique between the wars, he thrilled concert audiences (especially women — he was something of a lady-killer), who delighted in the spectacle of this one-arm wonder pounding out fortissimos. “The sheer speed at which he was able to move his fingers across the keyboard was breathtaking,” Waugh writes. Backed by the Wittgenstein family fortune, Paul set about commissioning piano concertos for the left hand from the leading composers of the day. His dealings with them proved comically tempestuous. He rejected Hindemith’s composition as unplayable and wrote to Prokofiev, “Thank you for your concerto, but I do not understand a single note and I shall not play it.” He accused Benjamin Britten and Richard Strauss of over-orchestrating — “How can I with my one poor hand hope to compete with a quadruple orchestra?” — and made an enemy of Ravel by altering the composer’s Concerto for the Left Hand to suit his own taste.
Paul’s quarrels with his own family were equally fierce. He got out of Austria just after the Anschluss in 1938, ending up in New York (where he initially lived at the Webster Hotel on West 45th Street and gave lessons on the bar piano). His three sisters, who remained in Vienna, were astonished to discover that, despite having grown up Catholics, they were deemed Jews under the Nuremberg laws, since they had three Jewish grandparents. The only thing standing between them and the camps was the hoard of gold the Wittgenstein family had stashed away in Switzerland, which the Nazis were eager to get their hands on. The legal wrangling over the fortune among Paul, his sisters and the Reichsbank lawyers, and the arrest and imprisonment of the sisters for passport fraud, culminate in dramatic fashion with Hitler himself granting a humiliating but life-sparing change in status to the family — from Volljuden (“full Jews”) to Mischling (“half breed”).
Paul’s quarrels with his own family were equally fierce. He got out of Austria just after the Anschluss in 1938, ending up in New York (where he initially lived at the Webster Hotel on West 45th Street and gave lessons on the bar piano). His three sisters, who remained in Vienna, were astonished to discover that, despite having grown up Catholics, they were deemed Jews under the Nuremberg laws, since they had three Jewish grandparents. The only thing standing between them and the camps was the hoard of gold the Wittgenstein family had stashed away in Switzerland, which the Nazis were eager to get their hands on. The legal wrangling over the fortune among Paul, his sisters and the Reichsbank lawyers, and the arrest and imprisonment of the sisters for passport fraud, culminate in dramatic fashion with Hitler himself granting a humiliating but life-sparing change in status to the family — from Volljuden (“full Jews”) to Mischling (“half breed”).
“The House of Wittgenstein,” entertainingly told throughout, ends on an elegiac note, with the deaths of the still mutually alienated siblings: Ludwig in Cambridge, Paul (survived by his wife and three children) on Long Island, and the sisters in Vienna, where the Palais Wittgenstein, damaged by an American bomb near the end of the war, was finally demolished by a developer. The author does not care to raise Paul Wittgenstein’s posthumous reputation as a pianist, observing that his performances now strike the ear as “harsh and ham-fisted” (a judgment born out by a recording I found on the Internet of Paul Wittgenstein playing the Ravel concerto in 1937 with Bruno Walter and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra).
My only serious complaint about the book concerns Waugh’s glancing treatment of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical work. He dismisses it as “incomprehensible” and attributes Wittgenstein’s influence to his “striking looks, manner and extraordinarily persuasive personality.” His view of Wittgenstein is substantially the same as the one taken in Derek Jarman’s 1993 film, “Wittgenstein,” to which Terry Eagleton contributed the script. In both cases, Wittgenstein is depicted as a gurulike source of gnomic utterances. Jarman’s attitude toward this caricature is solemnly reverential, whereas Waugh’s is mocking and somewhat philistine. But Ludwig Wittgenstein was not a guru; he was a supremely rigorous thinker who, by paying minute attention to the structure and limits of language, sought to clear away the conceptual confusions that plague philosophy. Waugh is not obliged to give the reader an understanding of his accomplishment — there are plenty of books that do that pretty well — but he should not be positively misleading.
For all their quarreling, madness and self-destruction, the Wittgensteins were at least spared one sort of dysfunction: there is no trace of incestuous impulses among them. The same, alas, cannot be said of the author’s own family. Evelyn Waugh freely avowed feelings of more than paternal tenderness for his daughter Meg. When she announced her intention to wed a young man, her father sadly wrote to a friend, “She wants children, and that is a thing I can’t decently provide for her.” Even Oedipus would blush."
THE HOUSE OF WITTGENSTEIN
A Family at War
By Alexander Waugh
Illustrated. 333 pp. Doubleday. $28.95
