The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  What induced Jerome and Gretl to take a romantic interest in one another is not obvious. They came from different backgrounds. Hers was musical, his was not; while she embraced the company of others, he was inclined to shun it. Both, however, took a keen interest in matters medical and scientific--she, as a teenager, had embroidered a cushion for her bedroom that depicted a human heart complete with coronary vessels and arteries. After his father's bankruptcy Jerome must have been excited at the prospect of sharing in her vast fortune; she was, after all, the daughter of one of the Hapsburg Empire's richest men. And it may equally be possible that she, in her turn, was attracted to those qualities in him--his impatient, domineering personality, commanding presence, unpredictable mood swings--that most reminded her of her father. These speculations may, in the case of Gretl and Jerome, be wide of the mark, but similarities of personality did exist between Jerome Stonborough and Karl Wittgenstein, and, even if Jerome had not been primarily motivated to marry Gretl for her fortune, he could not have failed to be impressed by her father's luxurious, treasure-filled palace in Vienna.

  Gretl was nine years younger and several inches taller than her new American husband, dark-eyed, dark-haired and of pale complexion. It would be misleading, on the strength of surviving snapshots, to describe her as beautiful, at least in the conventional sense of the term, but the photographic art may have been unjust to her as many who knew her personally attested to her striking and attractive looks. "She possessed a 'rare' beauty," said one, "and was elegant in an exotic manner. Two arches on her forehead formed by her hair growing to a point made her appearance unique." Gustav Klimt struggled to capture these elusive nuances in a full-length portrait commissioned by Mrs. Wittgenstein shortly before her daughter's marriage.

  Gretl loathed the finished picture, blaming Klimt's "inaccurate" depiction of her mouth, which she later had repainted by a lesser artist. Even then, the picture failed to please, so she left it to molder, unhung and un-feted, in her attic. Visitors to the Neue Pinakothek gallery in Munich, where the picture presently hangs, might enjoy trying to work out for themselves why the sitter was so displeased with it. They may point to the rings of gray under Gretl's eyes, identify her expression as tired, doubtful, possibly frightened; they may observe how she stands self-conscious and discomfited, in a flamboyant, ill-fitting, shoulderless white silk dress, or remark on the pallor of her hands clasped in a neurotic twist of fingers at her stomach. But by examining the portrait, however intently, the visitor will never learn the reasons for all this--reasons that were unconnected to any apprehensions that she may have been feeling about her marriage to Jerome, or even to her awkwardness at having to sit for the sexually predatory Klimt. In May 1904, at the time Klimt started work on the painting, Gretl's brother, her closest sibling in age and the boon companion of her teenage years, had suddenly, theatrically and very publicly poisoned himself.

  THE DEATH OF RUDOLF WITTGENSTEIN

  At the time of his demise Rudolf Wittgenstein, known in the family as "Rudi," was twenty-two years old and a student of chemistry at the Berlin Academy. By all accounts he was an intelligent, literate, good-looking man with grand passions for music, photography and the theater. In the summer of 1903, anxious about an aspect of his personality that he termed "my perverted disposition," he sought help from the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, a charitable organization that campaigned for the repeal of Section 175 of the German Criminal Code--a draconian law against die widematurliche Unzucht (unnatural sexual acts). The same organization published an annual report of its activities under the florid title Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen unter besonderer Berucksichtigung der Homosexualitdt (Yearbook for Transsexuality with Specific Consideration of Homosexuality) and it was in one of these volumes that a case study, written up by the distinguished sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, described in detail the problems of an unnamed homosexual student in Berlin. Rudi, fearing that the article had identified him as the subject, immediately set himself upon his fatal course of action. That, at least, is one version of the story. The facts that follow are less contentious.

  At 9:45 on the evening of May 2, 1904, Rudi walked into a restaurant-bar on Berlin's Brandenburgstrasse, ordered two glasses of milk and some food, which he ate in a state of noticeable agitation. When he had finished he asked the waiter to send a bottle of mineral water to the pianist with instructions for him to play the popular Thomas Koschat number "Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich":

  Forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I!

  Like a stone in the roadway, for no lass loves me!

  I shall go to the chapel, to the chapel way off

  And there on my knees, I'll cry my heart out!

  In the forest stands a hillock where many flowers bloom,

  There sleeps my poor lass, whom no love can revive.

  Thither my pilgrimage, thither my desires,

  There I'll feel keenly, how forsaken I am.

  As the music wafted across the room, Rudolf took from his pocket a sachet of clear crystal compound and dissolved the contents into one of his glasses of milk. The effects of potassium cyanide when ingested are instant and agonizing: a tightening of the chest, a terrible burning sensation in the throat, immediate discoloration of the skin, nausea, coughing and convulsions. Within two minutes Rudolf was slumped back in his chair unconscious. The landlord sent customers out in search of doctors. Three of them arrived, but too late for their ministrations to take effect.

  A report in the next day's paper indicated that several suicide notes had been found at the scene. One of them, addressed to his parents, said that Rudi had killed himself in grief at the death of a friend. Two days later his mortal remains were taken from a Berlin morgue back to Vienna to be buried without honor; for his father Karl, the pain and humiliation were unspeakable. No sooner were the burial rites concluded than he hurried his family from the cemetery, forbidding his wife from turning to look back at the grave. In future neither she nor any member of the family would be permitted to utter Rudolf's name in his presence again.

  Eight months after the funeral, as Gretl and her new husband were leaving the church in which they had just been married, the bride placed her frozen wedding bouquet into the hands of a trusted friend with instructions to take it to the place where her brother was buried, and to strew her flowers, in memory, upon his grave.

  THE TRAGEDY OF HANS

  Karl's decision to forbid any mention of Rudolf was actuated, not by a lack of feeling on his part, but by a surfeit of it, which, unleashed, might prove destructive. There were practical considerations too, a desire to pull his family together and stop them from mourning, something that only a stiff-lipped resistance could achieve. But if his intention was to bind the surviving members of his family closer together he could not have failed more signally, for the effect of his censorship created an atmosphere of unbearable tension in the home, causing a split between the Wittgenstein children and their parents that time would never heal. Karl was blamed (but not to his face) for loading his sons with excessive career pressure, for insisting that none of them should pursue any profession that did not involve the two disciplines that had made him his fortune--engineering and business. Mrs. Wittgenstein, Leopoldine (or Poldy as she was called within the family circle), was also accused by her children of failing to stand up to her autocratic husband, of being mouse-like, indecisive, and insecure. More than forty years after her brother's death Hermine recorded with bitterness:

  When my seven-year-old brother, Rudi, had to take his public school entrance examination, he was so unhappy and afraid that the examining teacher told my mother: "He is a very nervous child; you should be careful with him." I have often heard this sentence repeated with irony, as if it were nonsensical. My mother could not seriously consider that one of her children could be overly nervous; that, for her, was out of the question.

  Family discussion of Rudi's suicide was forced by Karl's ban into furtive conclaves, with the inevitable consequence t
hat the facts mutated over time in the manner of a Chinese whisper. It was rumored, for instance, that he had killed himself because his pampered Viennese upbringing had inadequately prepared him for the rigors of student life in Berlin; that he had killed himself because his father had refused to allow him to train as an actor, or because he had contracted a venereal disease that had sent him off his head. All these things and many more were said, some of them, no doubt, inaccurate and disheartening, and yet they were as nothing compared with the distorted tattle that emanated from the disappearance of another brother, Johannes (known as Hans).

  As Oscar Wilde might have remarked, "To lose one son, may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness." As strange as this may appear, Rudi's suicide was not the first such tragedy to befall the House of Wittgenstein, for two years earlier Hans, Karl's eldest son, had vanished without trace. He too was a forbidden topic of conversation.

  Surviving photographs of Hans in his youth, with angled head and intense squinting eyes, suggest that he may have been a little imbecilic, perhaps what is nowadays termed an idiot savant--defined as a backward child who displays an uncommon talent in some restricted area such as memorizing or rapid calculation. He was certainly shy--painfully so--and his inner world was intense. Physically large and ungainly, stubborn and resistant to discipline, he was regarded by his eldest sister as "a very peculiar child." The first word he ever spoke was "Oedipus."

  From his earliest youth he followed a strange impulse to translate the world around him into mathematical formulas. As a small boy strolling with his sister through a Viennese park one afternoon he came across an ornate pavilion and asked her if she could imagine it made of diamonds. "Yes," Hermine said, "wouldn't that be nice!"

  "Now let me have a go," he said, and setting himself upon the grass proceeded to calculate the annual yield of the South African diamond mines against the accumulated wealth of the Rothschilds and the American billionaires, to measure every portion of the pavilion in his head, including all of its ornament and cast-iron filigree, and to build an image slowly and methodically until--quite suddenly--he stopped. "I cannot continue," he said, "for I cannot imagine my diamond pavilion any bigger than this," indicating a height of some three or four feet above the ground. "Can you?"

  "Of course," Hermine said. "What is the problem?"

  "Well, there is no money left to pay for any more diamonds."

  For all his mathematical savvy Hans's abiding interest was in music, for which he displayed prodigious and phenomenal talent. At four years old he could identify the Doppler effect as a quarter-tone drop in pitch of a passing siren; at five, he flung himself to the ground in tears crying "Wrong! Wrong!" as two brass bands at opposite ends of a long carnival procession played, simultaneously, two marches in different keys. When the family went out to hear the famous Joachim Quartet in concert at the Kleiner Musikvereinsaal, Hans refused to come. He was not interested in musical interpretation, instead he lay on the floor at home with the parts of the score that were being performed at the concert spread out in front of him. Without ever having heard the piece he was able, simply from his study of the single, separately printed sheets, to construct in his head a clear impression of how all four musical lines would sound together and, from that, to play the whole from memory on the piano to his parents on their return.

  Although left-handed, Hans could play the violin, organ and piano to a deft standard. Julius Epstein, Mahler's teacher and a distinguished professor of piano at the Vienna Conservatoire, once hailed him a "genius," but Hans's musical interpretations, for all their dexterity and flashes of warmth, were marred by extreme violence and spontaneous eruptions of tension, typical of his nature from its earliest years. Hermine blamed this on the strained, simmering atmosphere of the Wittgenstein home, concluding:

  It was tragic that our parents, in spite of their great ethical seriousness and sense of duty, did not succeed in creating some sort of harmony between themselves and their children; it was tragic that my father had sons who were as different from him as if he had found them in an orphanage! It must have been a bitter disappointment to him that none of them would follow his path and continue the work of his life. One of the greatest differences--and one of the most tragic--concerned his sons' lack of vitality and will for life in their youth.

  So what exactly happened to Hans? A short piece in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt of May 6, 1902, explained: "Industrialist Karl Wittgenstein has suffered a terrible misfortune. His eldest son, Hans (24), who has been in America for about three weeks on a study trip, has had a canoeing accident." The date of this short notice suggests the possibility that Rudi may have chosen the second anniversary of his brother's "terrible misfortune" as a significant date on which to end his own life in Berlin. But if Hans had indeed killed himself on May 2, 1902, the Wittgensteins were still a long way from admitting it publicly, and this all too brief report, which gives no indication of Hans's eventual fate, was by no means the last word on the matter. Family gossip has since produced many alternative explanations. Some say he fled to America, others to South America, one report has him last seen in Havana, Cuba. His name does not appear on any of the extant passenger lists. Maybe he traveled on a false passport. It is known that he was sent by his father in his early twenties to work at production plants in Bohemia, Germany and in England, where he was expected to take on duties and responsibilities that he greatly resented and from which he failed to reap any noticeable benefit. Instead of working he preferred to play music.

  On his returns home Hans's relationship with his father was, by turns, sulphurous and tempestuous. Karl was a frightening man, even in a cheery mood. As Gretl wrote in a private notebook: "My father's frequent joking didn't seem funny to me, only dangerous." Karl, a poor judge of character, nursed an intense desire for his eldest son to excel in business, to shine as an entrepreneur and industrialist, to mirror his own soaring achievements--but the higher you soar, the smaller you look to someone who cannot fly and Karl, though musical himself, abhorred Hans's morbid obsession with music and eventually forbade him from playing any instrument except during strictly designated hours. Karl's own youthful rebellion against his father had led directly to his great success in business, but it was unwise of him to assume that Hans was made of the same mettle, and shortsighted to suppose that relentless paternal pressure upon such a young, volatile and unstable man would lead to any but the most catastrophic consequences.

  The consensus of opinion points to his having dodged his father by fleeing abroad sometime in 1901. Hans had put on weight in his early twenties, had grown obsessed with the gloomy nihilistic philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and was, according to one report, "known to be homosexual." Some claim that he lived to the age of twenty-six. One source records that he died at the Everglades in Florida, another that "in 1903 the family was informed that a year earlier he had disappeared from a boat in Chesapeake Bay and had not been seen since. The obvious conclusion to draw was that he had committed suicide."

  But do parents "obviously conclude" that their child has killed himself when they are informed that he was last seen in a row boat a year earlier? Would it not be more typical for any parent caught by such strained and unusual circumstances to wait patiently, hoping, expecting, hour by hour, year by year, for a knock at the door? At what point does a parent concede, without corpse or witness, that his son has not simply run away and hidden himself but has actually committed suicide?

  Sailing off in a boat is just about the only theme consistent with most variants of the tale. Some say that Hans shot or poisoned himself in the boat, others that he scuttled it in order to drown himself. One of his nephews believed that the boat must have capsized during a tropical storm on Lake Okeechobee: "Of course a man can take a pistol out on the lake and kill himself, but unless very drunk, no one would seek that damn lake as a place to leave life." A letter from one of Hans's aunts suggests that the family sent an employee out to the Orinoco in Venezuela in search
of him. A boat, an unspecified date, at least five different locations--the truth is unlikely ever to emerge.

  Hans may, of course, have lived a full life abroad and in secret from his family in Vienna, but the most likely scenario is that he did indeed commit suicide somewhere outside Austria, that the family had prior intimations, or direct warnings, of his suicidal intent, and that the spur that induced them to declare openly that he had taken his life was the very public death in Vienna, on October 4, 1903, of a twenty-three-year-old philosopher called Otto Weininger.

  The Weininger story is quickly told. He was an intense, clever, misguided young man, small and simian of aspect, from a family of rigid moral outlook. His father was a goldsmith. His short life was lived at the poles of self-hatred and self-worship with no saner resting place in between. "I believe that my gifts are such," he wrote, "that in some way I can solve all problems. I do not think that I could ever be wrong for any considerable length of time. I believe that I have deserved the name Messiah (Redeemer) because I have this nature."

  In the spring of 1903 Weininger published his magnum opus, a long treatise called Geschlecht and Charakter (Sex and Character) which took a tough line on women (he was a misogynist) and on Jews (of which he was one). As the book was passing through the presses he remarked to a friend: "There are three possibilities for me--the gallows, suicide, or a future so brilliant that I don't dare to think of it." In the end a hostile press reception determined him on the second option. On the evening of October 3 he took a room in a house on the Schwarzspanierstrasse where the Austrian poet Lehnau had for several years repined and where, on March 26, 1827, Beethoven had died. No sooner were the letting terms agreed with his landlady than Weininger asked for two letters to be delivered to his family and, shortly after 10 p.m., retired to his room, locked the door, took out a loaded pistol, pointed the barrel at the left side of his chest and fired. When his brother arrived the next morning in urgent reaction to the letter he had just received, the bedroom door had to be kicked in; inside he found Otto sprawled in a pool of his own blood, fully clothed and still breathing. The young philosopher was rushed unconscious by voluntary ambulance to the Vienna General Hospital, where, at 10:30 that morning, he died.