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The House of Wittgenstein: a Family at War Free FREE THE HOUSE OF WITTGENSTEIN: A FAMILY AT WAR PDF Alexander Waugh | 384 pages | 30 Dec 2009 | Bloomsbury Publishing PLC | 9780747596738 | English | London, United Kingdom The House of Wittgenstein : A Family at War - - His youngest child, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, once asked a pupil if he had ever had any tragedies in his life. Ludwig often thought of doing so, as did his surviving brother, Paul. There were three sisters: Gretl, Helene, and Hermine. Helene was highly neurotic, and had a husband who suffered from dementia. Gretl was regarded as irritating by most people, including her unpleasant husband, who committed suicide, as did his father and one of his aunts. Bad temper and extreme nervous tension were endemic in the family. All of this was before the Nazis got to work. The Wittgenstein children were brought up as Christians, but they counted as full Jews under the Nuremberg racial laws because three of their grandparents had been born Jewish and did not convert to Christianity until they reached adulthood. The fourth, their maternal grandmother, had no Jewish ancestry. After Germany annexed Austria, inthe family money bought the lives of the three sisters—Paul had escaped, and Ludwig The House of Wittgenstein: A Family At War safe in England—but at the cost of estranging several of the surviving siblings from one another. A few days before the invasion of Poland, inHitler found the time to issue an order granting half-breed status to the Wittgenstein children, on the pretext that their paternal grandfather had been the bastard son of a German prince. Nobody believed this tale, but the arrangement enabled the German Reichsbank to claim all the gold and much of the foreign currency and stocks held in Switzerland by a Wittgenstein trust. The negotiations for this exchange seem to have involved a The House of Wittgenstein: A Family At War pact in which Gretl and Hermine sided with Nazi officials against Paul. After the war, Paul performed with his single hand at a concert in Vienna but did not visit Hermine, who was dying there; Ludwig and Paul had no contact after ; nor did Paul and Gretl. This was not a happy family. If Karl Wittgenstein ever read it, he must have nodded in recognition. But Karl insisted that he The House of Wittgenstein: A Family At War a career in industry or finance. Rudi and Ludwig were homosexual, and Hans may have been, too. There the parallels end. Thomas Mann traced the decline of the Buddenbrooks through four generations, but the Wittgensteins rose and fell within the span of two. Karl more or less built the family fortune himself. He was no stolid merchant but an audacious risk-taker, and something of a rebel in early life. At the age of seventeen, he absconded to New York, where he arrived in the spring of with a violin and no money. He worked as a waiter, then, among other things, he played in a minstrel band, a gig that came to an abrupt end when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in a theatre and musical performances were banned. Karl was too ashamed to write to his family or answer their letters. It was only when he got a steady job as a teacher at a college in upstate New York that he recovered enough pride to agree to return. His father was a land agent and a trader, and at first Karl was put to work on one of his rented farms. After dropping out, he took a series of engineering jobs. Energy and intelligence got him into management, audacious deal-making The House of Wittgenstein: A Family At War him higher, and some capital from his wife he married in provided the first grains of powder for an explosive entrepreneurial rampage. Waugh says that Karl Wittgenstein was a chancer, whose enormous fortune owed as much to the favorable outcomes of his gambles as to his hard work and his skills. That is implausible; nobody has quite such a consistent run of good luck. Karl was adept at swinging the odds in his own favor, and he knew exactly which chances to take—in particular, he appreciated the significance of technology more keenly than his competitors did. Newspaper articles by Karl Wittgenstein show that he believed in unfettered capitalism though not in free trade and was opposed to any legislation aimed at protecting consumers from cartels or fraud. Such laws, in his opinion, would interfere with the crucial work of The House of Wittgenstein: A Family At War entrepreneurs, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family At War would ultimately raise the standard of living for everybody. An early master of the leveraged buyout, he no doubt cut some corners while assembling his ingeniously integrated empire of mines, iron- and steelworks, and hardware factories. He certainly reaped the benefits of monopoly wherever he could find them. Karl was no philanthropist on the scale of his American friend Andrew Carnegie. Brahms was a family friend. Richard Strauss came and performed duets with the young Paul. Music was more than entertainment for the Wittgensteins, though, and more than art. For one thing, it became a store of value. Pages from the Wittgenstein collection of autographed musical manuscripts flutter through this wonderfully told story. Music was also, Waugh writes, the only effective way in which the Wittgenstein children could communicate with their shy, nervous, and intensely musical mother. And music provided consolation and distraction from the tragedies of the family, about which they were mostly required to remain silent. Sometime inHans fled from his father and went to America, much as his own father had done thirty-six years earlier. Inhe disappeared, by most accounts, from a boat, which may have been in the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps on the Orinoco River in Venezuela, or in several other places. Wherever it was, no one doubted that he had committed suicide. Rudi was a twenty-two-year-old chemistry student in Berlin when he walked into a bar on a May evening inrequested a sentimental song from the pianist, and then mixed potassium cyanide into a glass of milk and died in agony. The suicide note left for his parents said that he had been grieving over The House of Wittgenstein: A Family At War death of a friend. A more likely explanation is that he thought he was identifiable as the subject of a published case study about homosexuality. Waugh thinks that this enforced silence, which the dutiful Mrs. Wittgenstein supported, created a permanent rift between parents and children. Perhaps it was because Paul, after he lost his right arm, had the most tangible affliction in the family that he found the focus to remake himself. His determination to succeed on the concert stage was, in part, inspired by the example of Josef The House of Wittgenstein: A Family At War, a blind organist and composer who was a favorite of the Wittgenstein family. Paul worked furiously and ingeniously to develop techniques that would enable him to perform. The training began while he was still recovering from the amputation in a Russian prison hospital, tapping on a dummy keyboard that he had etched in charcoal on a crate. Later, on a real piano, he often practiced for up to seven hours at a sitting. He made few recordings, and Waugh, who is also a composer and a music critic, remarks that most of them are bad. His most lasting significance comes from having commissioned one-handed works from at least a dozen composers, including Richard Strauss, Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, Paul Hindemith, and Maurice Ravel, whose Piano Concerto for the Left Hand remains widely performed. Strauss extracted a particularly large fee, and Britten, at least, affected to be in it just for the money. InSiegfried Rapp, a pianist who had lost his right arm in the Second World War, asked for permission to perform some of these works, many of which had been written a quarter of a century earlier. Paul usually bought exclusive performing rights for his commissions, and he said no. He even felt betrayed by composers who wanted to rearrange his commissions to produce two-handed versions. Russell later grew less indulgent toward his erstwhile pupil, but he had identified a family characteristic: when they believed that an important principle was at stake—which, for The House of Wittgenstein: A Family At War, was often—the Wittgensteins were not inclined to be nice. He was a fiercely private man who liked to book entire railway carriages for himself, even when travelling with his family. His wife, Hilde, who was half blind and had been his pupil, bore him two children in Vienna before their marriage; the elder child had been conceived shortly after their first piano lesson, when Hilde was eighteen years old and Paul was forty-seven. When his wife and children arrived in the United States, inhe set them up in a house on Long Island, which he visited on weekends from his apartment on Riverside Drive. Arriving in New York without a valet, he soon ran into trouble. When his The House of Wittgenstein: A Family At War were stolen from a hotel—he had left them outside his room, presuming that someone would wash them—he sat around in bedsheets until a candidate for the post of personal assistant came up with the suggestion that more clothes be bought from a shop. She was hired. Another anecdote has him sallying forth into the street wearing a hat that was still attached to its box. In the Wittgenstein family, it was not the philosopher who was the unworldly one.
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