The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  In a moment of piety Ludwig decided he would not accept promotion to the rank of officer and was only persuaded to recant his position by the earnest entreaties of his family. "Perhaps you are not such an odd person as I think," Hermine wrote to him, "but I am worried that you might regard promotion as some kind of shirking from hard work and fail to see that it might be a question of life and death ... I don't think it's a laughing matter!" Paul reminded him of the dangers of being captured: "It would have meant certain death for me if I had had to suffer the treatment meted out to the rank and file who were taken prisoner in Siberia." In the end Ludwig accepted his destiny, rising to the rank of lieutenant in the Reserve. He continued, however, to pester higher command with requests for postings to places where the fighting was most dangerous, for his new spirituality demanded of him that he test himself to the uttermost, and that he accede always to his own highest standards. In May 1916 he duly volunteered to man an observation tower upon which he knew that he would frequently come under enemy fire. "Perhaps nearness to death will bring light into my life," he pondered. A year later he enlisted Paul's help in demanding of various senior officers that he be allowed to transfer from the artillery to the more dangerous infantry. As a member of an officers' club in Vienna, Paul was able to use his connections to advance his brother's cause, but in the end nothing came of it. Meanwhile, in action against British troops, Ludwig was commended for his "courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid and heroism" under fire and awarded the Militar-Verdienstmedaille--the Military Merit Medal with Swords on the Ribbon. By the end of the war he had been decorated many times.

  In March 1916, Paul was finally decorated for his bravery in the opening month of the war with the Military Cross (class III), and was promoted to first lieutenant (retroactive from September 1915). In October he received a further medal, the Military Cross (class II), pinned to his chest by the thirty-five-year-old Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, a lovelorn German aristocrat who, fifteen months after the ceremony, took his dog for a walk in a wood near Neustrelitz and shot himself in the head.

  AMERICA JOINS THE WAR

  For more than two years President Woodrow Wilson had done his best to steer a neutral course between lobby groups demanding that the United States join the war on one side or the other, or stay out of it altogether, but when, on March 18, 1917, three American merchant ships were sunk by German submarines, the President's burgeoning resolve to support the Allied Powers was stiffened. On April 2, Congress met in special session and two days later the Senate passed a resolution in favor of war by ninety votes to six. In the House of Representatives, after a seventeen-hour debate, it was agreed by 373 votes to 50. The public galleries of both Houses echoed to wild cheering as the motions were carried, but Wilson returning to the White House buried his head in his hands and wept. "My message was one of death for young men. How odd it seems to applaud that."

  Jerome Stonborough reacted to the news from America by insisting that he and his family leave Austria right away. Gretl demurred, arguing that she had things to do in Vienna and didn't wish to emigrate, but her husband was adamant and on April 14, eight days after President Wilson's declaration, they arrived at a hotel in Zurich in neutral Switzerland. Exile from Austria did not suit Gretl's bossiness as she liked to believe that she was always at the center of things and always useful. Her social life in Austria was a whirl of politicians, high-flying diplomats, well-known artists, composers and performers from whom she was loath to be separated.

  Arriving in Switzerland, Gretl sank into a depression, lying in bed all day, for weeks on end, rising only for short walks or to inspect a Picasso that she was tempted to purchase. At times she was overwhelmed by acute feelings of loneliness, homesickness and aggressive patriotism. Stress caused her heart to fibrillate and each time this happened she said to herself, " Oh my God! It's starting' and I die the thousand unnecessary deaths that every coward dies." Her depressions were aggravated by acute hypochondria and a paranoid fear of dying. "I am always thinking of death and picturing my own end," she wrote in her journal. "I do not dare to think of returning home as I am sure I will die before I get there." Like Ludwig she too sequestered herself behind the altar rails of Tolstoyan Christianity. "I am well, apart from my health, because I have a clear conscience. As Tolstoy writes: 'bound by the flesh but free through the spirit.'"

  For Jerome, the move to Switzerland served only to refuel his neurotic restlessness, and within a few months he moved the family from Zurich to the fortified lakeside town of Luzern, where they stayed at the Hotel National. But as soon as they arrived in any new place Jerome was once again making plans to remove to somewhere else. Under these conditions there could be no permanence in their lives and as they dashed from St. Moritz, to Bad Tarasp-Vulpera, to Bern, to Ouchy near Lausanne and back again to Luzern, the strain in Gretl and Jerome's relationship came once again close to breaking point.

  Jerome insisted that he needed to take their elder son, Tommy, off to America for an indefinite period. Gretl tried her best not to react to this provocation, for the boy, then aged eleven, was beginning to show signs of emotional instability and the last thing she wished was for him to be uprooted from a German-to an English-speaking school; but seeing no point in engaging herself in battle with someone to whom she felt bound for the rest of her life, she failed to take any action. "What can I do then?" she asked her sister. "If I rebel divorce would be the only consequence. Jerome talks about divorce all the time but I am against it for the sake of the children. For theirs and for his own sake, because he does not know what he is talking about."

  By moving to Switzerland in April 1917, Gretl just missed her brother Kurt's eagerly awaited return from New York. "Kurt is back home just the same big child as when he left three years ago. But that doesn't matter at the moment," Hermine reported. "He comes home on Sundays and dashes around with the children...Let's hope things always go smoothly for him!" Kurt's initial training as an infantry officer at the Danube town of Stockerau ten miles north of Vienna lasted for two months. On July 15, 1917, he was sent on a six-week training period behind the lines. His mother never mentioned her sorrow at his parting except on the occasions when her legs were hurting too much for her to be able to restrain herself. In the Wittgenstein family difficult feelings were subsumed by playing beautiful music, and just before Kurt left for battle he and his mother practiced a Schubert quartet for many hours together on the piano. "Thank God that such things exist," wrote Hermine. "They are a blessing whatever life brings!"

  PAUL'S ALTERED CHARACTER

  The mask of cheerfulness with which Paul had greeted his family on his return from Siberia could not be worn for long for, despite his determination to bear his sorrows with fortitude, one piled upon the other until the cracks began to show. Memories of his father, of his suicidal brothers Hans and Rudi, guilt at having deserted his comrades in the Krepost, the grim realization of his present armless condition, thoughts of his wrecked career, of Ludwig's unstable mind, of the starvation and disease that were overtaking Vienna, frustrations of every kind--artistic, familial, sexual--not to mention the endless, slow, slow losing of the war, these were the things that preyed upon him and sought eventually to destroy his moral equilibrium.

  Since his return to Vienna in November he had been attending also to the gradual disintegration of Rosalie Hermann, a tall, bony and much admired former servant of his grandmother's with whom he had been especially close since his childhood. Paul was her favorite among the Wittgenstein children, and he in turn looked on her with the same degree of fondness with which many sons are able to look upon their mothers. Rosalie had been employed as Mrs. Wittgenstein's mother's maid for fifty-two years and Frau Kalmus had bequeathed her enough money and furniture to live independently in a plush flat on the Brahmsplatz, but when Rosalie's coughing fits began and her health was failing Mrs. Wittgenstein had her moved into a grand bedroom at the Alleegasse Palais. Here, every day, Paul brought her fresh flowers, sat by her bedside,
recounted stories, told her jokes, read her books and played her music. Rosalie's dying was attenuated over many months of high fever and unsightly swellings, during which time she impressed the whole family with her stoicism in the face of death. In May 1916 she went into hospital. When she died she was buried with honor next to Karl in the Wittgenstein family tomb. Under her mattress she had left a thank-you letter addressed to Mrs. Wittgenstein. Rosalie was a peacemaker among querulous people and Paul felt her loss deeply.

  After her death Paul's agitation and irritability increased. In the company of his family, of strangers or of guests his frustrations vented themselves in violent clashes. Hermine and Mrs. Wittgenstein worried at the frequency of his "crazy moods," and, shortly before her departure for Zurich, Gretl gave him a thorough ticking-off To her surprise Paul's response was both apologetic and contrite. He explained to her, in touching tones, how much he was suffering from his own irritability and how he believed her reprimand to be wholly appropriate. Hermine wrote to Ludwig: "If necessary Gretl's rocket will be repeated and possibly, as Paul has already requested, with even greater severity." Ludwig was astounded. "I cannot begin to imagine it. But there are still things in this world that are unimaginable." For a while Gretl's forthright ministrations seemed to do the trick and Hermine reported that her brother was "completely changed," but no sooner were the Stonboroughs departed for Zurich than Paul was back to his old ways.

  Ludwig's solution was for Paul to move out of the Palais and find himself an apartment elsewhere in Vienna, but Hermine, shuddering at the prospect of life on her own with her mother, insisted that he stay. "Between Mama and me there is no contact without friction," she wrote. "If it were just me at home it would be really dead." When Paul was behaving well he was capable of cheering up the Palais in a way that Mrs. Wittgenstein and Hermine were not. They were too reserved, too anxious. Hermine's taciturnity was, in her own view, contagious, while Mrs. Wittgenstein "can't get much pleasure from strangers if they have no connection with her children." Paul, on the other hand, was energetic and his busy life ensured a coming and going of interesting people that would enliven their days. He could cheer his mother by playing piano duets with her. So it was agreed that he would stay, for, despite his bouts of madness, his presence at the Palais was deemed a bonus. After all, "The hours passed in stimulating company at home would not be greatly diminished by the odd (or even by several) unpleasant scenes," Hermine conceded.

  On the second floor of the Palais, Paul arranged a bachelor suite for himself. Approached by a separate staircase with windows looking on to the courtyard and gardens below, it consisted of a sitting room (with dining table), a bathroom and a bedroom, into which he could withdraw and have meals brought up to him by the servants. One of the Palais's seven grand pianos was installed and on "crazy days" Paul practiced undisturbed, furiously pounding the keys with his left hand for hour upon hour--behavior that reminded Hermine of her father. "Unfortunately, to my really great distress, [Papa's] restlessness shows itself in Paul's piano playing. When I hear him practicing upstairs not a single bar accords with my way of thinking and feeling and that is a torture for me and a lasting source of sorrow."

  Like his father, Paul had scant control of his temper and his brothers were just the same. When all three were together, the rowing was always at its worst. They yelled at one another, sometimes for whole afternoons, moving from room to room as they did so, and as much as Mrs. Wittgenstein liked the idea of seeing them all together the reality of it strained her nerves. Paul generally was held to blame.

  Like Ludwig, Paul was at his happiest when he was busy and he loved especially to be away from home. In the year-long wait to rejoin the army he performed several concerts outside Vienna. Labor's concerto had opened doors for him, and his playing was now regarded by the authorities as a source of inspiration to flagging morale. Not all crippled soldiers were so lucky. Those who returned from the front with their faces shot to pieces were held behind locked hospital gates where the public was not able to see them. Paul, though, was encouraged to vaunt his fighting spirit, and in the early months of 1917 he performed with striking success to audiences of troops, invalids and steel workers at Wroclaw, Kladno, Teplitz, Brno and Prague. On at least three of these occasions he played Labor's new piece, and the delighted composer started on a second left-handed piano concerto ready to perform in the summer.

  In March 1917 Paul made his Berlin debut at the Beethoven-Saal. The German capital was at that time one of the major musical centers of the world and Berliners' appetite for music was insatiable. By 1939 the city boasted no fewer than 81 orchestras, 200 chamber groups and over 600 choirs. To be well received as a concert pianist in Berlin and Vienna was to have succeeded upon the world stage. Paul had not been back to Berlin since his years of banking apprenticeship and had mixed feelings about the place. He had enjoyed the music, but derided the boardinghouses on the Kurfurstendamm and the Tauentzienstrasse as "abominable places full of cheap knickknacks, cheap paintings, unliveable and overused at the same time; middle class in the worst sense of the word."

  The hall, which he expected to be half empty due to sloppy publicity, was in fact full and the audience discerning and appreciative. On his return to Vienna, he was grilled by Hermine and his mother for news of how it had gone, but his pathological need for privacy denied them the intelligence they sought and it took five days to glean from his chirpy manner that it had all been a huge success. Hermine was overjoyed on her brother's behalf. The Berliners, she felt, had judged Paul entirely on the quality of his playing, unlike the dreadful Viennese who were always more interested in the stump of his right arm than his music. "And that is really something!" she said.

  ENDGAME

  The death on November 21, 1916, of Emperor Franz Joseph served only to dampen Austrian morale. He had ruled for sixty-eight years and, despite his aversions to innovation and his much derided obsession with petty court protocol, the longevity of his reign had lent him an air of authority that had grown with familiarity and custom. He symbolized perhaps more than he achieved but at least he guided Austria and sixteen other subject states through a long period of peace and stability. Stefan Zweig called the time in which he grew up before the First World War "The Golden Age of Security" and few in 1916 could remember an Austria that was any different; but by November of that year the people had grown war-weary and dispirited. No amount of trumpet noise or funeral pomp could rouse them from their negative stupors or restore to them their previous sense of national pride. Everything the army had fought to protect and uphold now seemed irretrievably lost. The comfortable, immutable, Epicurean, easygoing life of the Austrian people, ruffled already by the storm of two years' war, was now, upon the death of their octogenarian emperor, transformed into the "world of yesterday."

  The Wittgensteins, though broadly monarchist in temperament, were not aristocrats nor did they move in court circles. Some of Karl's descendants believe that he was offered the nobility "von" but declined it on ethical grounds. In truth he felt underrated by the Austrian establishment and was greatly excited by the smallest attention he could get from the Hapsburgs. He was delighted that the Emperor once noticed his good seat when riding and put great store on a royal visit to one of his factories. When his boys were young Karl would pick them up by their ears. If they kept quiet he shouted "Hochgeboren!" (well bred!), but if they cried or squealed in pain he yelled "Nichtgeboren!" (lower class--literally " notborn").

  If Hermine and Paul felt the passing of an era at the death of their emperor they did not express it. They did, however, make a conscious effort to disconnect from their past by redecorating and restructuring their two palaces at the Alleegasse and at Neuwaldegg. Hermine hoped that the new designs would help her mother "loosen her ties to Papa," but in the end all the siblings were pleased to rid these places of certain decorative vestiges of Karl's overbearing personality.

  At court the Emperor was succeeded by his grand-nephew, Archduke Karl von Hapsburg-Loth
ringen, known during his brief reign as Emperor Charles I, who immediately tried to sue for peace, but who by the end of 1917 had succeeded only in ceding most of Austria's military command to the Germans. In the meantime, on the eastern front, his dilapidated and dispirited army managed by a miracle to win the war against Russia. This had more to do with the state of internal Russian politics than the superiority of Austrian arms. In February a revolution had deposed the Tsarist regime, and the new provisional government, in order to bolster its popularity at home, had ordered a great offensive against the whole Galician sector. After ten days of spectacular territorial gain, the exhausted Russian soldiers suddenly lost their enthusiasm and refused to fight on. The Austro-German armies routed them in a fierce counterattack that forced them to retreat to positions 150 miles east. This catastrophic humiliation led many in Moscow to call for the war to be immediately ended and when the head of the provisional government, Alexander Kerensky, refused to capitulate, chaos ensued. Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians started calling for their independence from Russia, while the powerful Bolsheviks, who favored an end to the war, quickly seized control in the so-called October Revolution. Two months later, on December 15, Lenin's envoy Leon Trotsky effectively ended his country's participation in the war by signing an armistice with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk.