The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  Lord Russell! remonstrated Moore, rapping the gavel.

  Russell couldn’t hear him. Never had they seen the unrufflable Russell in such a state. Why, they thought the old boy would charge out and drag Wittgenstein back, so furious was he at being cheated of the last word. But of Russell’s sudden, extravagant anger, what they most remembered was how he shook his fist at Wittgenstein’s departing back, bellowing:

  Run away, then! But it’s you, Wittgenstein! Yooooou are the source of confusion!

  BOOK I

  The Foreworld

  All men are equally mystified by unaccountable evidence, even Homer, wisest of the Greeks. He was mystified by children catching lice. He heard them say, What we have found and caught we throw away; what we have not found and caught we still have.

  — Heraclitus

  Strong Wind

  WITTGENSTEIN’s association with Russell began, not with philosophy or logic, but as an outgrowth of his study of aeronautics in England, at the University of Manchester. It was the summer of 1912, another season of international air shows, crackups and aviation records. Wittgenstein was twenty-three. André Gobe had flown a breathtaking 459 miles, Jules Védrines, attaining 90 m.p.h., had broken the record Nieuport had set seven months before and Roland Garros, piloting a Blériot, had set a world altitude record of 12,960 feet. Wittgenstein had been working on propeller designs — a basically mathematical task — and experimenting with various wing surfaces, which had led him into work with kites.

  But Wittgenstein was also thinking that summer of branching off into the study of philosophy, specifically, the philosophy of logic. This was not as sudden and unaccountable a change as it seemed to his father, Karl Wittgenstein, who by then had concluded that Ludwig would remain a dilettante just like his other sons, the gifted pianist Paul and the woeful Kurt, who was interested in little more in life than French cooking, stamps and opera.

  But though Karl Wittgenstein might ridicule, hector or ignore — though he might wax “philosophical,” painting himself as a sorry Job cursed with boils for boys — whatever else, he was not about to repeat the fatal mistake of cutting one of them off. Karl Wittgenstein groaned when his son announced his intention of leaving aeronautical engineering — a course he had hardly greeted with enthusiasm — for the study of logic and philosophy. Wittgenstein knew his father was about to give him the treatment. His father opened his mouth, then stopped himself. He lowered his head and thought for a moment. He was quite, quite calm now. Very well, he said, blinking at a notion so clearly imbecilic. But please tell me: if I should be asked, what title shall I give your new profession? Aviator-philosopher?

  Karl Wittgenstein was a wealthy steel magnate, a peer of the Krupps and a good friend of his American counterpart and fellow philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. During Austria’s economic expansion in the 1880s and 1890s, Karl Wittgenstein almost single-handedly modernized the empire’s decrepit, ill-organized steel industry, earning himself the sobriquet “The Rationalizer of Industry.” But Karl Wittgenstein was equally prominent in Vienna as a patron of the arts. As a result of his daughter Mining’s early association with the painter Gustav Klimt, Karl Wittgenstein, in the late 1890s, had largely underwritten the cost of building Vienna’s Secession Hall, where the bold new artists, breaking with the bankrupt classical historicism of the salons, proclaimed their objective of showing modern man his own face. Karl Wittgenstein was even better known as a patron and impresario of music. Brahms and Mahler, Josef Labor and Bruno Walter, the young Pablo Casals — these and other artists were featured in Karl Wittgenstein’s soirees at the Palais Wittgenstein, where as many as three hundred of Vienna’s wealthy and prominent would be in attendance.

  In that ancient, hierarchical city, names and titles for even the lowliest were an obsession. Families schemed and groveled for two and three generations to get the noble von affixed to their names, yet Karl Wittgenstein did the unthinkable when he declined the emperor’s offer to ennoble the Wittgenstein family in recognition of his contributions to the empire. It was not modesty that led Karl Wittgenstein to do this; quite the contrary, he believed the title to be superfluous to his noble nature, which he felt was manifest in the very grandeur of his achievements.

  Karl Wittgenstein’s human grandeur and vaunted standards were no less evident in his home, where his seven children and thirty-odd servants lived in fear of his periodic eruptions. Typically, these rages occurred as a result of some peccadillo or misunderstanding, the culprit summarily tried and hanged with no last words or stay of execution. Besides being a stickler for deportment, Karl Wittgenstein was fond of drilling his children in Latin, Greek, geometry, history or musical theory at the dinner table — this while three servants stood by, ready to leap lest a soup drop soil his cravat or his scrupulous cuff scrape a butter pat embossed with the regal W. Like gifts from the East, each successive course would be brought to him first for tasting. Hot from the spirit lamp, steaming in their silver chafing dishes and quickly swaddled in crisp linen by a white-gloved butler — Behold, sir, a Vorspeise of crayfish in dill — followed, in season, by roast boar or perhaps a golden carp fattened in the cook’s tub for a week before being steamed and smothered, Czech style, in a pungent black sauce. Course after course it came, poached squab and veal tongues, hot puddings and brook trout au bleu, all expiring as if with a squeal into the master’s trembling nostrils. The father never tired of this presentation ritual. The liveried butler would produce a gleaming spoon, and all would breathlessly watch as Karl Wittgenstein brought it to his bearded lips, his eyes gliding up quizzically while his sensitive palate discerned whether he would praise or dress down the head cook or perhaps write a patronizing two-page disquisition to the Mehlspeiseköchin, the dessert cook, on the proper presentation of a soufflé or the secret to glazing a Sachertorte.

  The father seemed massive at the head of the table, which was covered with an embroidered damask cloth and bathed under the light of three fiery candelabras. Wittgenstein remembered the room as being dizzyingly overwarm, the rich food heavy with flour-thickened gravies and sauces, with sour cream and Schlagobers that raised his temperature under his thick woolen suit until his itchy starched shirt was soaked through. His head, by the fifth course, would sometimes feel almost insupportable. And then his feet would be going to sleep in the tightly laced high boots that his manservant had blacked and set out with his clothes, which were laid across the bed like an inflatable replica of himself that he was expected to stuff with food and knowledge, growing, like his father, to impossible size.

  His mother, Poldy, was an intelligent, loving woman and an accomplished organist, but for the life of him Wittgenstein could not remember her ever saying a word at that table except in those extreme instances when she felt compelled to defend one of the children from their father’s wrath. Through interminable courses they were admonished not to eat too slowly or too fast. Moreover, des Vaters food was to be eaten properly, almost sacramentally, without frivolous talking, slumping or giggling. At the same time, they were expected to adopt a “philosophical” — meaning, serious-minded — attitude as they discussed Karl Wittgenstein’s latest hortatory economic essay in Das Neue Wiener Tageblatt or sat through his brilliant, though stultifying, monologues on Goethe, Brahms, the industrial dynamism of America (where he had lived several years as a young man) or the chronic need to reassess the crippling effect of the government’s tax and tariff policies.

  Even the vaultlike Palais Wittgenstein seemed an extension of Karl Wittgenstein. Three stories tall and imperial in its pretensions, it was a glacier of Baroque stone and stucco that seemed to have slid over mountains, palaces and assorted shrines before skidding down Vienna’s tree-lined boulevards to the fashionable Allegasse, where it finally came to rest, by then encrusted with every kind of pillar, gargoyle and relief that human imagination had ever concocted after a dyspeptic night. Ugly or not, the house did have wonderful acoustics. It rang with music. Karl Wittgenstein played the cello, and his
wife played the piano, of which the house had four, along with a pipe organ and a harpsichord. All of the Wittgenstein children were musical, and often as a Sunday divertissement Karl Wittgenstein would lead his versatile family ensemble through Haydn trios or Schubert quartets, sometimes managing to get through an entire composition without indulging in a thirty-minute diatribe on tempo or proper feeling that would leave them all red in the face or near tears.

  No one in the family could have found these lectures more odious than Wittgenstein’s two oldest brothers, Hans and Rudolf. Both were musical prodigies, and both, despite Karl Wittgenstein’s astounding ability to ignore the fact, were homosexual. Looking back on it, Wittgenstein felt his older brothers were perhaps too musical, too feverishly overbred and severe for this life. For them it proved impossible to live under the interdict of this father, who loomed before them like the Last Judgment. The oldest, Hans, committed suicide by syringe in Cuba in 1902, when Wittgenstein was thirteen. By all appearances, Karl Wittgenstein managed to almost completely expunge this tragedy from his consciousness. Hans’s life was his own, he said, willfully forgetting that Hans had been deeply depressed after his father banished him for his defiant insistence on a career in music and not in that bold consortium of coal, iron ore, steel plants and capital known as the Wittgenstein Gruppe. The Rationalizer of Industry was somewhat less successful in his rationalizations two years later when Rudolf took his own life under similar circumstances. Wittgenstein’s sister Gretl once said she felt like a lump of coal, living under such a mountain of a father. The mountain produced some diamonds, she said, but they were brittle diamonds and some had shattered, or very nearly shattered. Wittgenstein very nearly shattered several times. Music and philanthropy weren’t the only traditions in the Wittgenstein family.

  * * *

  Hitler was born in Austria in the same year Wittgenstein was, 1889. Catholic Vienna was a cosmopolitan but anti-Semitic city, and around this time anti-Semitism was becoming an increasing force in its politics and consciousness. One of the most successful politicians of the period was the Christian Social party’s Karl Lueger, who served as mayor from 1897 to 1910. “Handsome Karl,” who wanted Jews barred from all participation in public life, was more anti-Semitic in his rhetoric than in practice, but he was still successful in bringing anti-Semitism once more to the forefront of public discourse. The other force in the city was the paunchy, mutton-chopped old Hapsburg emperor, Franz Josef, who on his birthday would don full military regalia of scarlet and plumes and ride through the city in an open carriage while the women waved their lace hankies and the men gravely doffed their top hats and bowlers. The emperor, while mildly anti-Semitic in outlook, was careful to keep silent on the subject. But the ambitious and opportunistic Lueger troubled himself with neither scruples nor coherence, whipping up a misty confection of democracy, social reform, anti-Semitism, Catholicism, concern for the little man and sheer personality. The emperor loathed Lueger so much that he refused to ratify his election as mayor in 1895. Sigmund Freud, no supporter of the monarchy, smoked a cigar in celebration of the emperor’s courageous decision. It was only a temporary reprieve. Two years later, the emperor caved in to the popular tide for den schönen Karl, beautiful Karl with the waltzing walk and golden side whiskers. Thereafter, Franz Josef did little to oppose Lueger or the brand of demagoguery he found so barbaric and irrational. Still, Lueger’s politics could hardly be less bankrupt than the woolgathering of the old order, a monarchial bureaucracy whose values were by then as dull and ceremonial as the sabers the nobles gravely dragged across sundry palace rugs, ballrooms and reviewing stands. Distasteful as it was, Lueger’s splattering, red-faced oratory was effective — indeed, the mayor was one of Hitler’s earliest influences.

  Lueger’s ascendancy also roughly coincided with the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French army officer accused of treason. But of course Dreyfus was only a pawn, a proxy: it was not Dreyfus but Europe’s Jews who were on trial, and though Dreyfus was eventually acquitted, Europe’s Jews were not.

  Covering the Dreyfus trial in Paris for the Neue Freie Presse, the young journalist Theodor Herzl became convinced that assimilation would never work and, upon his return to Vienna, revived the old dream of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Many prominent Gentiles agreed with Herzl’s estimation of the Jewish question. Why, they were even so generous as to provide him with money and introductions to courts and politicians, regarding the extraordinary young revolutionary as a kind of Pied Piper sent to rid Europe of her Jews.

  Karl Wittgenstein wanted no part of these mass delusions or of Herzl’s messianism. He accepted the fact that there would be periodic flare-ups of anti-Semitism, yet on the whole he preferred to continue along the assimilationist course, having accepted the Devil’s proposition that people are, on the whole, more reasonable than they are unreasonable. Vienna, after all, was a city of converts who had put off the old clothes, the old language and ways, to, if not exactly embrace, then at least go through the motions of Christianity. Karl Wittgenstein had been baptized a Protestant at an early age, while his wife was a baptized Catholic. Poldy insisted the children should be baptized Catholic, and since this was the most practical religion from a purely social standpoint, Karl Wittgenstein ceded to her wishes.

  So it was that Wittgenstein and his brothers and sisters were raised to receive communion under the instruction of Monsignor Molke, who frequently served mass at the Palais Wittgenstein for the family and servants. Still, there were reminders of the family’s Jewish past in the guise of their bearded paternal grandfather, Hermann Wittgenstein, and several decrepit aunts and uncles who clung to the old ways, whispering in Yiddish and reading their obscure Hebraic newspapers. This was charming, if distant, like the Menorah, the fringed prayer shawl and the ancient leather-covered prayer book that could be found in the library, locked in a chest of unvarnished oak carved with apocalyptic creatures. Still more haunting to the boy were the cracked daguerreotypes in their frames, wobbly photographs the color of muddy water, showing the dark, wild-looking shtetl ancestors dressed in black gabardine and gazing out fearfully at the camera. Looking at them, the boy would feel that through some black keyhole of time they were staring out at him — wondering at this child with the slick brown hair and modern white shirt, sitting with his books on the tassled sofa in the tall, wainscotted library.

  His Jewish roots were hardly a constant concern, and yet as a boy it had sometimes troubled Wittgenstein to realize that his family had not always been the same people, as if one time or faith had been true and the other a lie. They were a becoming people, the Wittgensteins. Later in life, he would recall this queer sense of a family remembering forward, with the past a kind of becoming that might be skillfully retouched, unraveled and re-remembered with the fiery Yule tree, the greens that wreathed the door and, outside, the eerie little manger with its garishly painted wise men — not joyful tidings, it seemed, but talismans to ward off danger and hasten the tide of becoming.

  Unfortunately, in Vienna it took several generations at least before one was considered completely assimilated, so far as one was ever assimilated. For some, this purgatorial process took longer than for others, and for some like Wittgenstein, the effects were delayed for years as the Christian scraped bones with the vestigial Jew within. But there was another, somewhat parallel legacy for Wittgenstein to overcome, one that began when his brother Hans took his life in Cuba. Hans was guilty of the elementary sin: the sin of despair. Banished, scuttled with sin, lost even from God, Hans had not just poisoned himself or his hated father; in that act of revenge, he had poisoned a whole family and even the future. Life was the fold into which Hans could not assimilate, but then Hans was hardly the only one in that fomenting city to fail at this task. Like caged canaries sunk in a mine shaft, other raw and excitable souls were beginning to smell the fumes of that futurity.

  Odd how the impossible negation of death — the sudden absence of life where once there was promis
e — can stimulate an early philosophical bent. In Wittgenstein’s case, it was a growing sense of precariousness — indeed, a profound suspicion — of what until then had seemed life’s givens. From earliest childhood, Wittgenstein had been haunted and frightened by the morbid Hans, but then one day in 1902 the boy was suddenly told that his old tormentor and nemesis, that aesthete’s aesthete, was dead. Yet how did he know this for certain? There was no body. His brother returned from Cuba as a funeral urn, a ghastly hunk of crusted Spanish silver that would have turned Hans’s sensitive stomach.

  The boy had no doubt that the obsessive Hans had composed a death that would yield the utmost in pain and ambiguity. When they finally interred his ashes in the family crypt, even their friend Monsignor Molke, by then archbishop of Vienna, could not officially bury the suicide. All the priest could offer was a few mumbled aves and a faint pass of the hand. Wittgenstein stood huddled in a clump with his ruined siblings and their inconsolable mother, who was shrouded beneath a tent of black veils. As a family they were broken, but the boy could see that his father was by no means broken: Karl Wittgenstein’s face was a pink wall of wanton health. Was the father not relieved, in a way, to be rid of this miserable invert, this Judas goat who had defied him? Had the boy not heard his father say with a sigh to an uncle that it was probably all for the best?

  That day in 1902, the boy stood watching his father with something like loathing that burned his stomach. If his father could not feel sorrow, thought the boy, he might at least feel shame. But Karl Wittgenstein betrayed no shame for the simple reason that he felt, or said he felt, no guilt or responsibility for Hans. The truth was, Karl Wittgenstein betrayed no discernible emotion then or any day after save a kind of vague, chaste disgust — an almost aesthetic reaction, as if his son had committed a breach against good taste. And all the while the boy kept wondering if the ashes were really Hans’s, or if the Cubans had merely shoveled dirt into that ugly urn which seemed so impossibly small to contain his brother.