by Bruce Duffy
Above all, Wittgenstein could feel Weininger’s root sickness and revulsion in the face of his unforgivable Jewishness — his doubleness. Yet, as Max had pointed out in his letter, Jewishness, for Weininger, was less a matter of race than an essentially feminine condition — an infirmity of the mind. Anyone could be a Jew, according to Weininger, Jewishness being not a race, people or creed but a tendency of mind that is most conspicuously evident in Jews. The Jew warned the true Aryan to guard himself against such traits: the rootlessness and irreverence, the lack of fixed beliefs and the resulting fixation on material things rather than spiritual values. Conversion, if it was sincere, might help, but it was no real solution and still less any salvation. True, as with homosexuality, the Jewish character might be partly combatted by frankly facing one’s deficiencies, but ultimately, Weininger implied, the only sure cure was death, death, for him, being a moral condition, like Heraclitus’s transforming fire, whose life fans up with the death of earth. Thus Weininger maintained that Christ was the greatest man in the history of the world because he had conquered man’s greatest enemy: the Jew within. Judaism was Christ’s original sin, Weininger said, and Christ was, and would remain, the only Jew in history to conquer the spiritual death of Judaism through his death on the Cross.
Could Wittgenstein have been surprised that all these ideas found an immediate home in Max? Though Wittgenstein was inclined to agree with elements of Weininger’s basic diagnosis of the Jewish character, he thought his chapter on Jews was among the craziest in the book. He told Max this; he told him this several times — forcefully. It did no good. If Wittgenstein could not completely put the book in perspective, certainly Max could not. So why, Wittgenstein asked himself, had he ever shown Max this awful book, so steeped in nullity, death and self-hatred? Hadn’t he known the effect it would have? Or had he just been curious about Max’s reaction, wondering what it might reveal of Max’s own attitude toward him, the Jew within?
Over and over, Wittgenstein asked himself this question, but each time the answer came down to this: ambivalence. Jewish lineage he had, but no true allegiance. He was philosophical. About Jews he could say, in an echo of Weininger, that even the greatest of Jewish thinkers was merely talented. Certainly, he could say this about his own talent, which he thought was the useful but essentially unoriginal Jewish talent for clarifying the ideas of other men, Gentile men — men of authentic genius with original minds. Wittgenstein did not mean this in a disparaging way. He was only trying to be realistic. After all, it was precisely because the Jewish mind was being measured by standards that did not fit it that it was consistently over- or underestimated. But, again, he thought, this was an evasion in the face of — ambivalence. So what, then, was at the root of this ambivalence? But his concentration was broken. It seemed he couldn’t look that deep. His will faltered and his mind dimmed — with ambivalence, empty ambivalence.
For so long Wittgenstein had been forcing back his past, his youth, that it came back with redoubled force that summer, with memories of his native city and his boyhood.
Vienna was such a small town at bottom. Or at least it was small within one’s milieu — so long as it was the right milieu. Certainly, Weininger, a contemporary of Wittgenstein’s brother Hans, would have known who the Wittgensteins were. So, too, Weininger must have known about the brilliant Hans, a dandy and aesthete like himself who moved in the same general intellectual circles. Hans, in any case, certainly knew who Otto Weininger was.
It occurred to Wittgenstein that his father might well have known Weininger’s father, Leopold. They were men of the same mold. Leopold Weininger was not a wealthy man, nor was he Karl Wittgenstein’s social equal, but, like Karl Wittgenstein, Leopold Weininger was a self-made man, a prominent goldsmith and art expert who fashioned miracles of gold and enamel in the tradition of Cellini. The two fathers were also alike in their passion for music, which they followed with a devotion that could only be described as religious. It now seemed to Wittgenstein that in this age of low culture people no longer listened to music with quite that same feverish intoxication: they had lost the necessary powers of concentration. Karl Wittgenstein possessed the necessary concentration. Music moved the unmoved mover; it shook him to his depths. Gone was the ocean of reserve, the brute deliberation — the dikes would burst. There he would be at two A.M. after a concert, pounding the floor, humming the theme and swinging his arms in wild oblivion, unaware of the boy peering down the grand red-carpeted stairway. Nobody was permitted to enter his father’s reverie, nobody was to speak or intrude upon the sacred Art Experience. It would have been like shaking a man in prayer — like throwing cold water on the backside of a man engaged in sex. What did his father, this vampire, derive from music? He must have been starving; what he sought seemed more than art could decently provide. The boy, too, was starving but did not know it. He was shocked, certainly. He must have even felt slightly betrayed to see his father behave in this way — to realize that there was another father whom he did not know and would never be permitted to know. The boy might have felt more had there been much left to feel, but it seemed that his father had used up all the feeling, inhaled all the air, gulped down all the life and gnashed up all the coal and ore to make iron, and with iron, money, so he could gorge himself on solitary art feeling in the middle of the night. This was the Dionysian man. But there was also the Apollonian man, the idolator who could confess to his wife once, after returning from the symphony, that he had felt guilty warming a plush seat while others played for him like demons, saying that for decency’s sake he should have gotten down on his knees to behold such a torrential mountain of music! Even forty years later, Wittgenstein remembered this with humiliation, feeling even then, as he had at age ten, that his father had somehow said something unspeakable, that in some fundamental way he had profaned himself, making of art an altar.
From what Wittgenstein understood, Leopold Weininger was much the same way. Wittgenstein could well imagine the melancholy that must have fallen over Leopold Weininger, that idolator of Wagner, after the exaltation of these musical evenings, when Siegfried had slain the dragon Fafner and won Brünnhilde — when the tumult of the orchestra collapsed and he returned to the listless banality of his comfortable house with his invisible wife, his four meek daughters and his three sullen sons. This was the same pattern with Wittgenstein’s own father, who would crash through the house the next morning finding everything out of place, his sturdy factory of a house filled with disorder, mendacity, conspiracy, disobedience. Leopold Weininger was no less a tyrant. Wittgenstein had heard that he would fly into sudden rages, bludgeoning the air with his fists, then lumber off into days of crushing silence, when no one, least of all his wife (whose very absence in these stories perhaps spoke for itself), dared ask him what was wrong.
But there was one fundamental difference between Karl Wittgenstein and Leopold Weininger: Leopold Weininger was a practicing Jew who raised his children as Jews. At the same time, however, Leopold Weininger was a bitter anti-Semite who had nothing but contempt for these Dreyfusards and Zionists, believing that, in the main, Jews had no one but themselves to blame for their misfortunes. Leopold Weininger was, by nature, an angry, accusing, unreflective man, and he did not perceive his views as being traitorous or contradictory. It was a severe blow to him when the rabbi told him that his son Otto had officially resigned from the synagogue. This was Otto’s break from the Pharisees, his declaration of holy war and the beginning of his public ministry. Leopold Weininger apparently sent his cruel son a wounded et tu, Brute letter, asking him how he could do this — to publicly humiliate his father and sever himself from the fold of his own people. But this was nothing compared to his reaction when Otto’s book came out and he read his son’s cold-blooded attack on womankind and Judaism. Leopold Weininger was thunderstruck. He couldn’t believe his son would say such things. He seemed genuinely perplexed and at the synagogue even professed not to know where his son had gotten it, nor to know why, with
such a decent and hard-working mother, he would express such loathing and contempt for the opposite sex. For Leopold Weininger, Sex and Character must have been an unpleasant mirror. But then didn’t Otto Weininger write that the most virulent anti-Semites are apt to be Jews? That we loathe in others what we most loathe in ourselves?
Wittgenstein could still remember finding Sex and Character at his brother’s bedside. This was not long before the break, when their father banished Hans from the house. Wittgenstein was twelve, and the Blocker made him feel it. But Hans made him feel much else, now directing his self-hatred and spleen at him in the form of subversive, belittling barbs that implicitly questioned the boy’s worth and sexuality, as if the worst — meaning, that he would wind up like Hans himself — were foreordained. Hans’s own homosexuality cried out, and yet, as if from some unspoken injunction from their father, who scarcely could not have seen it, it was strenuously ignored like some obnoxious family ghost — ignored to the point that his younger brothers had to swallow their own personalities to make room for Hans’s: two or three such ghosts in the Palais Wittgenstein would have been impossible.
Besides his interest in music, Hans delved into biology, physiology and genetics, as well as the divinations of palmistry, phrenology, astrology and tarot. His library was filled with books on these subjects, and whether they were written by learned men or by quacks, Hans seemed to burrow through them with the same indiscriminate zeal. Reading and taking notes, he was a man obsessed with tracing his lineage, as if he belonged to a secret and separate race with its own craniums and hands and its own shrouded history to be divined by timbre of voice and density of chest hair as extrapolated over various Pythagorean formulas of width of palm in relation to length of foot. And with these books were other books, expensively bound folio editions with ponderous scientific titles containing photographs of expressionless naked men. Here were tattooed men, hairy bushmen and hairless Chinamen; here, too, were madmen, murderers, freaks and monstrosities with prehensile toes, gaping craniums and pinched faces, each specimen carrying below it a pseudoscientific caption noting certain race-linked irregularities: generally hirsute, muscular or of the sometimes horse-sized sexual organs.
These forbidding picture albums both excited and repelled the boy, and it was while looking for them in Hans’s cache that he found Sex and Character. Wittgenstein could vividly recall being drawn to the word SEX in the title and opening the book to what seemed the first page and having his eye drill down to the incriminating word “homosexual,” his stomach burning with anxiety as he pored over the text, wishing he had never found the book but unable to put it down. Surely, much in that strange book must have gone completely over his head, but now, nearly forty years later, he remembered less of what it said than the indelible feeling that it evoked: shame and an overpowering sensation of corruption and death in the querulous, high-pitched voice of a guide who seemed to say: I know how you are because I am the same.
What most struck the boy was how much Weininger sounded like his brother — or vice versa. It wasn’t just the ideas, it was that distant, attitudinizing tone, seemingly so detached and scientific, when the feeling, at bottom, was more akin to hysteria. Hans was a human tuning fork. Playing the piano with his preternaturally slender fingers, he was one quivering nerve ending, rising to an impossible pitch of grace and perfection — then collapsing on the least note of dissonance, which only he could hear. Critical as his father was of him, Hans was far more critical of himself, until at last his father didn’t have to criticize him at all. Hans didn’t have the stamina to contain his enmity toward his father. His hands would tremble and his face would break out with nervous eczema, weeping with a glutinous poison that would dry and flake off in a yellow crust. At other times, he would be struck down with brutal stomach cramps that would leave him doubled up in bed for days, writhing and sobbing in agony and frustration at pains that were meant as much to punish him as to punish his father. But Karl Wittgenstein wasn’t about to be manipulated by this whining hypochondriac. He fought back by not bothering about him at all. It was all in his head, Karl Wittgenstein would say to his wife when she would beg him to see his son. Then, reddening, with even more justice and certainty in his voice, Karl Wittgenstein would say: No, I absolutely refuse to see him when he is doing this to himself — saying this quite as if the head, with its vague and immaterial feelings, did not experience pain.
Hans had a high, contralto voice that quailed and quavered around his father and grew even more stretched and anxious around his circle of male friends. Karl Wittgenstein loathed them, these wealthy idlers, these vain popinjays, as he called them, cologned and bespatted, wearing mouse-colored gloves and hats and preposterous, severely cut suits. Furtive, secretive and exclusive, Hans and his friends were always glancing around and gathering in corners, always disappearing and hastily shutting doors, where they could be heard whispering in a rush punctuated with mocking, hysterical titters that left Karl Wittgenstein fuming.
Wittgenstein could remember Hans and his circle discussing the book, and he could remember himself reading it and clearly seeing in his own nature virtually every fault that Weininger enumerated. He remembered going through a terrifying period in which it seemed he could actually smell his sex rising over him like gas. He could smell it issuing from Hans when he was around his friends, and he could smell it in his own smoldering glands, cooking in his own urgency. This was the period when he would climb out on the roof, seeking air yet feeling burdened by a vastness that magnified his own paltriness and rottenness. He was Jewish and he was Catholic, and he knew, without being able to admit it to himself, that he liked men, which made him an invert and sinful, part man and part woman while combining the worst features of each. He didn’t go to school, didn’t mix, in his strangeness, with other boys. He had only his tutors and siblings and Otto Weininger, so that it seemed that across the world people were reaching the same impasse, with no decent way back and no decent way forward but through the black egress of death in which everyone would either be cleansed and made decent or else rendered forever incapable of inflicting further evil. This was the dialogue the boy heard; this was the full range of possibilities. He was out on the roof and Weininger was now out on a limb. Weininger must have felt the pressure, with Hans and others, too, speculating whether he would follow his own moral code and cede either to celibacy or to death, the ultimate celibacy and immaculate conception, thereby making himself the second greatest Jew in the world’s history and the second Christ, bearing a new and everlasting covenant of universal death.
Wittgenstein remembered this, and he remembered Hans’s morbid excitement when Weininger did finally kill himself, shooting himself in the chest after having checked into the same hotel room in which Weininger’s god, Beethoven, had died. Wittgenstein still had Hans’s copy of Sex and Character with its meticulously underlined passages and his emphatic marginal notes — notes that Wittgenstein could not read now without feelings of queasiness and embarrassment: So true! As I myself have felt! Duly observed in K.P. Can I be this way? YES! A fundamental insight that must be ACKNOWLEDGED! In the front cover of this book Hans had glued a now brown clipping of the notice — or rather, proclamation — that Weininger’s clear-thinking father had placed in the papers the morning after his son’s suicide:
Our poor son, Otto Weininger, doctor philosophiae, yesterday morning of his own free will took his own life. His friends will please note that the funeral will take place at 4:30 Tuesday afternoon at Matzleindorf Cemetery.
Vienna, October 5, 1901.
HIS PARENTS
Even as a boy, Wittgenstein had found this notice odd and cold. It still chilled him, with its unflinching restraint. Even more peculiar was the mention of free will, as if for that the Weininger family was absolved from any blame for Otto’s carefully composed suicide — this while unwittingly fostering the myth of his death as an act of moral courage in a dissembling city of men who flew between their wives and mistresses like
fat bumbling bees. Surely, Weininger would have approved of the notice, Wittgenstein thought — why, he might have even written it himself, so well did it contribute to the legend of the fervent, sex-crossed young man courageously gulping the hemlock that his corrupt and moribund culture had given him to drink.
What Wittgenstein still did not understand was why, as a boy, he had felt so driven to attend Weininger’s funeral. Partly homage, partly morbid curiosity, partly a desire to observe Hans — Wittgenstein supposed it was all these things. But it still did not explain the desperate sense of urgency that made him lie to his tutor, Herr Mössbauer, about a doctor’s visit, then slip behind the house and change into a dark suit that he had smuggled out the night before.
Wittgenstein was certainly the youngest of the many uninvited onlookers who came to Matzleindorf Cemetery that day to pay homage to the now famous — or at least notorious — young doctor. There must have been a hundred or more of them, but they had none of the cohesiveness of a crowd. Scattered over the cemetery grounds, they came alone and they stood alone, dubiously loitering at a barely respectful distance among the packed stones and the tangled black trees whose leaves were just beginning to turn at the edges. It was an old Jewish cemetery that was cluttered with the generations, a babble of stones. Down a hill that might have been a vineyard rose a forest of stout mausoleums with worn stars on their eaves and ancient plots where families lay interred — whole generations stretching from massive black marble monuments down to sunken and listing tablets, some barely the size of cobbles and washed clean of any earthly identity. It was not the boy’s first funeral but it was his first suicide, and it was several minutes before it dawned on him that all of the uninvited onlookers were men. Later, he would learn that, just as there are those who make a practice of attending weddings and trials, there are those who do the same for suicides. They were all there: shabbily dressed students and intellectuals, unhappy bachelors or lowly civil servants wearing sloven cravats, idlers and drunks and even wealthy-looking scions like Hans and his friends, whom he could see to his left, darkly and carefully dressed and clasping bunches of closed white roses with drooping heads.
