The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  In a passage uncomfortably reminiscent of some of Hitler's rhetoric in Mein Kampf Ludwig compared the Jewish people to a Beule in Austrian society. Wittgenstein scholars have been squabbling among themselves ever since about whether he intended by this German word to mean a "boil," a "pustule," a "tumor," a "bump" or a "swelling." In any case it was clearly not intended as a compliment.

  SEX LIVES

  Of the sex lives of the three Wittgenstein sisters, things may be succinctly recapitulated thus: Gretl was sexually aloof and may, like her friend Princess Marie of Greece, have sought Sigmund Freud's advice on the matter. Hermine (it is supposed) never experimented and possibly recoiled at the thought. Helene's sex life is reckoned to have been the most normal of all eight siblings. She had four children (the first born in 1900) and was greatly upset, some twenty years after her marriage to Max Salzer, to discover that she was pregnant once again in 1919.

  About Paul's erotic life very little is known until the early 1930s. He was aware that one day a biography might come to be written about him and, as a neurotically private man, did his best to conceal his tracks from future investigation by keeping as much of his life as possible secret even from his brothers and sisters. "In truth," his nephew Ji Stonborough later recalled, "he led two or three lives of which we in the family only knew one." In the 1950s he was approached by Hollywood moguls wanting to make a film about his life. He told them to go away, and when later contacted by a writer seeking help with a proposed biography of his brother, Paul replied curtly offering the minimum assistance:

  Concerning the biography of my brother: I really believe that Ludwig would have resisted ANY biography. For biography is indiscretion. A biography without indiscretion is worthless. But since all men of note have to have biographies written about them, then I suppose my brother will also have to suffer the same indignity. In any case it is better that the facts be right than they be wrong or, even worse, just silly rumours.

  Paul made it clear that he never wished to have a biography written about him unless it concerned itself solely with his artistic life. None of his incoming correspondence (except letters from composers and musicians, and an incomplete batch from his brother Ludwig) can be found. Other, personal letters may still exist and may yet turn up, though it is suspected that they were destroyed in accordance with his wish that his life remain private. What then can be said about Paul's sex life before 1930? He was certainly heterosexual and, as can be gathered from clues in Hermine's letters to Ludwig, he was attractive to and attracted by a great many women.

  Viennese women, it would seem, were particularly alluring in the first years of the twentieth century, as Paul was reaching puberty. The following description of them appears in Maria Hornor Lansdale's 1902 guide to Vienna and the Viennese:

  Observe attentively the passers-by on a Vienna Street... The women have the vivacity of the Slavonic races; their hair is superb and their teeth even and as white as milk; they are well formed, slender, nervous; their feet are pretty, with well-arched insteps, altogether unlike the Bavarian goose-foot, or the elephant pad of the Prussian.

  According to Ji Stonborough, Paul "had endless mistresses and all from the scum of this or that country. The servants knew all about it but we in the family had few suspicions. He bought houses for the mistresses." Stonborough perhaps gives away the lie by acknowledging that the family had few suspicions. How then did he know? Later in life Ji conceded: "I disliked Paul intensely and, I admit, I did not like Ludwig much either."

  That Paul kept mistresses for whom he bought houses is certainly possible, as this was common practice among the rich Viennese bachelors of his day. It is also possible (though there is no evidence for this) that he visited prostitutes before the war. At that time in Vienna "female wares were offered for sale at every hour and at every price, and it cost a man as little time and trouble to purchase a woman for a quarter of an hour, an hour or a night, as it did to buy a packet of cigarettes or a newspaper." These lines were written by Stefan Zweig, who was from the same generation as Paul, was brought up in the same city, of similar education and social background. In his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, Zweig describes a veil of pseudo-morality that repressed normal sexual relations between young Viennese men and women and led to a boom in prostitution and syphilis in the city:

  Try as I might I cannot recall a single comrade of my youth who did not come to me with pale and troubled mien, one because he was ill, or feared illness, another because he was being blackmailed because of an abortion, a third because he lacked the money to be cured without the knowledge of his family, a fourth because he had to pay hush-money to a waitress who claimed to have had a child by him, a fifth because his wallet had been stolen in a brothel and he did not dare to go to the police.

  Zweig also records that Viennese fathers of a certain class, in order to discourage their sons from visiting brothels, would engage pretty servant girls in the house with the task of educating them by sexual experience. There is no means of discovering whether Karl adopted such a system for Hans, Kurt, Rudi, Paul or Ludwig--we must rely upon our hunches.

  As to Ludwig's erotic life, this has been the subject of much heated and acrimonious debate in the years since his death. Like his sister Gretl, he seems to have found sexual arousal disturbing and, having discovered Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief, was pleased to try as hard as he could to stick to the letter of the commandment written in Chapter 4: "Do not seek delight in sexual gratification ... All sensuality destroys the soul, and therefore it is better for you to renounce the pleasure of the flesh than to destroy your life." In 1931 he proposed marriage to a Swiss woman, Marguerite Res -pinger, on condition that they be excused sex together.

  In the aftermath of Ludwig's death the keepers of his flame and the holders of his copyrights concealed evidence in their archives which could have proved that he had been homosexual. As one of them wrote at the time: "If by pressing a button it could have been secured that people would not concern themselves with [Ludwig's] personal life, I should have pressed that button." In 1973 an academic from California State University, William Warren Bartley III, bypassing the Wittgenstein estate, published a book about Ludwig in which it was claimed that during his period of teacher-training in Vienna he would regularly walk to the famous Prater park where "rough young men were ready to cater for him sexually. Once he had found this place Wittgenstein found to his horror that he could scarcely keep away from it." With this a torrent of rebuke cascaded upon Professor Bartley's head. Among those to join the ruckus was Ji Stonborough, who tried to injunct publication of his book through the courts, while sending a bombastic piece to the periodical the Human World, in which he threatened to vomit on the hat of the publisher, described the work as "a book of obscene denigration ... a farrago of lies and poppycock" and dismissed the author as a "slovenly and prurient rogue." Stonborough's indignation failed however to close the case. Author Ray Monk, researching his comprehensive biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990), was given unrestricted access to all the so-called "coded remarks" of Ludwig's notebooks. Among them he found a confession of a physical relationship with a friend, Francis Skinner, in 1937: "Lay with him two or three times. Always at first with the feeling that there was nothing wrong in it, then the shame." Whether this indicts Ludwig of homosexual activity with rough men in the Prater seventeen years earlier is, of course, quite another matter. Frustratingly Professor Bartley refused to reveal his sources for the story and is now dead, so while some continue to disbelieve it, others (Ray Monk being chief among them) hold to the view that if Ludwig's compulsive visitations to the park ever happened, his behavior there was probably not participatory but voyeuristic.

  A LITTLE TEACHING

  The Stonboroughs' campaign to raise money in America for the Austrian famine was not entirely successful. When they arrived in December 1919 Jerome made a long statement to the New York Times and Gretl was described, in the Chicago Tribune, as an Austrian countess, which wa
s amusing enough, but then they found that most of the Christian and Jewish German-Americans among whom they were campaigning were reluctant to give money to erstwhile enemies of America, and Jerome, who had been longing to return to the land of his birth, collapsed, within days of his arrival in New York, into a mood of deep depression and nervous paranoia. At every turn he threatened suicide. Gretl, exasperated, had him put under the permanent surveillance of a psychiatric orderly. For two months his neurotic behavior persisted. Only by February was he beginning to show slight signs of improvement, but Gretl remained "very unhappy about his condition," writing to Hermine that "during the day he was almost normal, only the nights are still terrible."

  In America, the Stonboroughs must have decided that their marriage was finally over for when they returned in July 1920 Gretl took an apartment in the Palais Schonbrunn, while Jerome rented a separate flat in the Palais Erdody where his neighbor in the same building was Albert Henry Washburn, American Ambassador to Vienna. But Jerome soon grew tired of Vienna and found himself an expensive flat in Paris. Over time the Stonboroughs accrued many secrets. In her memoir Hermine does not reveal why a "slightly psychotic" blackmailer came to Gretl's house one day, threatening to throw a stick of dynamite at her unless she paid him more money, but the story was offered as an illustration of her sister's pluck, for Gretl told the extortionist to go ahead and throw his bomb as she was not afraid.

  With Jerome spending most of his time buying art in Paris and their eldest son Thomas at Cambridge University, Gretl decided to adopt a boy as a companion for her eleven-year-old son Ji, and in January 1924 she went to Berlin and returned not with one but with two aristocratic youths. They were brothers whose father had been killed in the war and whose mother was impoverished and sick. Jochen and Wedigo von Zas-trow were twelve and thirteen years old at the time and Ji did not immediately take to either of them. Jerome was furious with Gretl when he heard what she had done and refused to speak to the Zastrow boys, or even to acknowledge their presence, for almost six years.

  Gretl saw little of her eldest sister in Vienna for Hermine, with her low self-esteem, was refusing to heed anyone's advice. If she had ever seriously entertained the idea of marrying and having a family she realized now that she had probably missed the boat. In December 1919 she was forty-five years old and more aware than ever that her destiny was to be a maidish one: to look after her aging mother (by whom she was permanently irritated), to offer emotional succor to her younger siblings (of whom she was a little jealous), to keep the Palais open for their guests, and the Hochreit available for her Salzer, Stonborough and Zastrow nephews and nieces to enjoy in their long summer holidays. In life Hermine was lonely, and this she resented. When she felt that her siblings showed insufficient enthusiasm for her drawings, she tore them up in despair and after a while stopped painting altogether on the basis that it was a "pointless and egocentric" pastime. To force herself out of the house and to imbue her life with purpose she found herself a job as an apprentice mistress at a day-care school for children whose parents had been killed in the war. This shortly led to her setting up her own Occupational Institute for Boys in a former military hospital barrack at Grinzig. Over sixteen years the venture cost her several hundred thousand kronen and she frequently lost control of her boys. But it was a job that took her away from her mother and, although she did not love the work, it offered consolation and distraction in an otherwise empty life.

  Ludwig, true to his word, spent his postwar years as a humble teacher. Having completed a training course on the Kundmanngasse, he took a job for the summer holidays of 1920 as an assistant gardener at a mon astery in Klosterneuberg, sleeping nights in the potting shed. At the beginning of September, he applied, under a false name, for a teaching post at Reichenau, was awarded the job but declined it when his identity was discovered. Gossip soon spread that mad Ludwig had disowned his family. When Paul came to hear of it he sent an avuncular letter of reproach to his younger brother:

  It is out of the question, really completely out of the question that anybody bearing our name and whose elegant and gentle upbringing can be seen a thousand paces off, would not be identified as a member of our family. Even changing your name as an ultima ratio would gain you nothing. It is a fact, however hard it may seem, with which you must come to terms and which, as harsh as this may sound, you will have to get used to.

  Ludwig failed to reply, and Paul sent a "supplement" three days later:

  That it was unavoidable that your origins and the family to which you belong should become public knowledge ... I've already mentioned in my letter. If it hadn't been Mautner [the wife of Karl Wittgenstein's former employee] then it would have been the woodman who worked for us on the Hochreit; or the teacher who was formerly employed at the Alleegasse or a waiter in the public house who had once been a waiter in the company hotel at Kladno or in the community inn at Miesenbach, or a factory worker who had once been employed by Uncle Louis in Koritschan or Friesach or a farm girl who had previously been a milkmaid in the Trauch and who recognised you and all sorts of other possibilities. That you can neither simulate nor dissimulate anything including a refined education I need hardly tell you. Precisely for this reason it would have been more sensible if you had said straight away who and what you were. You then would have taken the sting out of the exaggerated rumours right from the start.

  By the time that Ludwig was getting his brother's letters, in November 1920, he was reemployed (under his real name) as a schoolteacher in the tiny mountain village of Trattenbach. He stayed there for two years, then taught briefly at Hassbach near Neunkirchen, followed by two further years at Puchberg-am-Schneeberg and finally from November 1924 to April 1926 at a small elementary school in the village of Otterthal in Lower Austria.

  All this time he ate and drank little and continued to wear his old army uniform on an almost daily basis. "Why should you care about clothing?" asks Tolstoy's Gospel. "Do not trouble and worry yourselves; do not say that you must think of what you will eat and how you will be clothed." Aware of his propensity to squabble with his siblings in Vienna, Ludwig kept, for the most part, out of their way.

  But I tell you [says the Gospel in Brief] that everyone is worthy of judgement who gets angry with his brother. And still more to blame is he who abuses his brother ... And so it is the first commandment: do not be angry, do not abuse; but having quarrelled, make peace in such a way that no one may have cause for offence against you.

  These were bad years for Ludwig. More than ever he was plagued by demons, unsettled by violent memories of war and grieving over the death of his closest friend. "Every day I think of Pinsent. He took half my life with him. The devil will take the other half." This bleak mental state can be observed through a series of confiding letters that he sent to an intellectual army friend, Paul Engelmann. "I have continually thought of taking my own life, and the idea still haunts me sometimes. I have sunk to the lowest point" and "I am in a state of mind that is terrible to me." He hoped and believed that teaching might save him from all of this, for he needed to be working every day "or else all the devils in hell will break loose inside me." As usual, he was consumed with self-loathing and described himself to Engelmann as "morally dead," "base," "stupid and rotten," and, despite Tolstoy's injunction, he could not prevent himself from detesting most of the people around him. The Trattenbachers were "obnoxious, good-for-nothing and irresponsible," the Otterthalers "inhuman beings" and the people of Hassbach "repulsive grubs."

  In November 1922 Tractatus Logico-Phtlosophicus, his mystical-philosophical treatise upon which he had been working on and off throughout the war, was finally published in a German edition with an English parallel text and an introduction by Bertrand Russell. Ludwig's philosophical friends, who were at once nonplussed and deeply impressed by it, pleaded with him to abandon teaching and return to Cambridge. Ludwig was painfully aware that his work, though short and simple in layout, would be misunderstood by everyone, and this irked him. The mai
n difficulty in the Tractatus was caused by his blunt refusal to define his terms or to elucidate his points with examples. He tried to explain the meaning to Paul Engelmann, who later conceded that it "went far beyond my own mental grasp." His former Cambridge colleague George Moore thought he could understand it when Ludwig went through the work with him line by line, but as soon as he had parted company from the author found himself totally muddled and quite unable to explain it to anyone else. In the end Moore had to concede that it was the indomitable force of Ludwig's will which convinced him that his friend must be right, whether he could understand him or not.

  Even Gottlob Frege, the great German logician to whom Ludwig had sent a copy in the summer of 1919, failed to progress beyond the first page and wrote to Ludwig in frustration: "You see, from the very beginning I find myself tangled in doubt as to what it is you want to say and can make no headway with it." Ludwig complained to Russell: "he doesn't understand a word of it... it is very hard not to be understood by a single soul!" But Russell also was forced to admit that, after several readings, there were many "important" points that he was still unable to grasp. Ludwig tried to explain them to him, but was not entirely successful. Later he attempted to ban Russell's explanatory introduction from the first edition on the grounds that, in German translation at least, it revealed nothing but "superficiality and misunderstanding." In his notebooks Ludwig recorded a nightmare in which people failed to get his meaning, and yet he remained incapable of explaining his thoughts clearly to others. To his perpetual irritation, the central thesis of Tractatus Logico-Phtlosophicus, which concerned the limitations of language, seemed to be all too vividly demonstrated by its own impenetrability.