My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way [Ludwig wrote at the end of the Tractatus]: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them, as steps, to clamber up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
Things were not made any clearer with an explanation that he gave to his literary friend Ludwig von Ficker: "My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely the second part that is the important one." The young Cambridge philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey traveled to Puchberg to talk through the work with him, spending four to five laborious hours each day going over it point by point. After two days the two men had managed only seven pages. Ramsey wrote to his mother from Austria:
It's terrible when he says "Is that clear?" and I say "no" and he says "Damn it's horrid to go through that again." Sometimes he says: "I can't see that now, we must leave it." He often forgets the meaning of what he wrote within 5 minutes ... Some of his sentences are intentionally ambiguous having an ordinary meaning and a more difficult meaning which he also believes.
Undeterred, Ramsey returned to Cambridge bemused, exhausted, but by now a confirmed Wittgenstein disciple. In the July 1924 edition of the philosophical journal Mind, he wrote a glowing review. "We really live in a great time for thinking," he added in a letter that same summer, "with Einstein, Freud and Wittgenstein all alive, and all in Germany or Austria, those foes of civilisation!"
Ramsey, like Russell, Moore, Engelmann and others, had fallen under the spell of Ludwig's striking looks, manner and extraordinarily persuasive personality. From these small beginnings was the great industry of Wittgenstein exegesis born. Thousands of books have since been written to explain the meaning of the Tractatus, each different from the last. Ludwig himself later disavowed parts of it in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, but still this brief, gnomic work of the First World War continues to give the philosophical world a great deal of gristle to chew upon and in this sense, at least, the influence of Wittgenstein the philosopher has been considerable.
There were of course at that time (and still are, now) many doubters--those who roll their eyes and mutter about "the Emperor's new clothes!" Ludwig's uncles, aunts and extended family of Austrian cousins were among those who were the least impressed. Many of them were simply embarrassed by what they perceived to be his eccentric behavior and thought it perverse that he, the dupe of the family--an elementary school teacher--should be honored as a great philosopher abroad. "Shaking their heads, they found it amusing that the world was taken in by the clown of their family, that that useless person had suddenly become famous and an intellectual giant in England."
Ludwig's nuclear family also continued to worry about him, but he had shut himself off from them, refused to answer their letters and often returned unopened the food parcels that Paul and Hermine sent him. Their best way of reaching him was through covert association with his friends. One of these was Dr. Hansel, whom Ludwig had met during his Italian imprisonment, and whom he now treated as some kind of mentor-batman, seeking his moral advice on the one hand, while ordering him on the other to send books and supplies and run errands for him on a daily basis. Another of Professor William Bartley III's sins was to have revealed in his book on Wittgenstein that the highly moral Dr. Hansel was the author of a polemical treatise, Die Jugend und die leibliche Liebe (Youth and Carnal Love), which railed against homosexuality and masturbation. Hermine, who would never have read such a book, corresponded regularly with him about her youngest brother and was always grateful for his reassuring responses. "It is not easy having a saint for a brother," she told him. "There is an English proverb: A live dog is better than a dead lion' to which I would add, that I should rather have a happy person for a brother than an unhappy saint."
In November 1923, Paul, who deemed the heart to be more important than the intellect, was distressed to learn that Ludwig was suffering from a painful colonic ulcer and, aware that he could do nothing directly for him, gingerly approached another of Ludwig's friends, Rudolf Koder:
Dear Mr. Koder,
I have a request and would be most pleased if you could help me. My brother Ludwig suffers from colitis, which is very dangerous when left untreated for too long as it weakens the body and attacks the nerves, even worse when the patient is tired or stressed. Because of this my brother looks terrible, run down and exhausted. This could be remedied by a special diet. The doctor says that he should, for example, eat plenty of gruel and barley soup, that he mustn't move about too much but rest and stay calm, but Ludwig complains that the whole thing is too expensive and causes too much bother.
May I ask you, dear Mr. Koder, to exert some influence on him to persuade him to take this diet. You must of course not tell him that I told you to do so. You must ask him as a friend how he is and then tell him what he should be eating and to be wary of the serious consequences of his condition. If his servant is not able to produce the right gruel soup I would be prepared to send all necessary ingredients to you, dear Mr. Koder, and then maybe he would believe that you had made it yourself. I cannot imagine that the ingredients are very difficult to obtain for such a simple dish. I trust to your diplomatic skills. You would receive our deepest thanks for this. Sorry to bother you but I could think of no other way. Maybe you will manage with your good influence that which my sister and I have been unable to achieve.
I thank you in advance. PW
Years later, Ludwig was remembered by an old man from Kirchberg as "that totally insane fellow who wanted to introduce advanced mathematics to our elementary school children." To others, particularly his brighter pupils, he was recalled with affection as an outstanding teacher. He taught them architectural styles, botany and geology, he brought a microscope from Vienna, made model steam engines; showed them how to dissect a squirrel, and boil the flesh off a fox in order to reassemble its skeleton. But for all his enthusiasm and ability, Ludwig was a tyrannical, impatient and often violent teacher. One girl whose hair he had pulled in a rage found it falling out in clumps that very evening when she combed it, another was hit so hard that she bled behind the ears. When, in April 1926, he boxed a weak and unintelligent eleven-year-old several times round the head, the boy collapsed unconscious on the floor. In a panic, Ludwig dismissed the class and carried the boy to the headmaster, bumping, en route, into the father of the girl whose ears he had previously caused to bleed. The man lost his temper, accusing Ludwig of being some kind of animal trainer rather than a teacher, and insisted on calling the police. As he rushed off to raise the alarm, Ludwig put down the unconscious boy and fled from the village. The law soon caught up with him and he was summoned to appear at the district court of Gloggnitz on May 17. At the hearing he lied to the court--something that he deeply regretted for the rest of his life--and the judge, suspecting that he might be too deranged to be held accountable for his actions, ordered an adjournment until such a time as the accused had been psychologically examined. Ludwig waited in Vienna for the doctor's summons. "I'm curious to know what the psychiatrist will say to me," he wrote to his friend Koder, "but I find the idea of the examination nauseating and am heartily sick of the whole filthy business."
PAUL'S RISE TO FAME
Despite the family's huge loss of fortune following Paul's ill-advised investment in government bonds, the Wittgensteins remained--by the impoverished standards of most of Vienna's middle class--extremely rich. The reasons for this were foreign investments. From the bequests of his father and three brothers, augmented by Ludwig's benefaction of 1919, Paul found himself in possession of an impressive asset portfolio. In Vienna's 1st District he owned an immense block of shops, offices and apartments in the fashionable Kohlmarkt as well as a big building at No. 1 Plankeng (since demolished and rebuilt as a modern hotel). In the 2nd District he owned an apartment block on the Stuwerstrasse and another with shops at street level at Mariahilferstra
sse 58 in the 7th. Of the family dwellings he owned half of the Palais on the Alleegasse (Hermine owned the other half) and one-third of the Palais and estate at Neuwaldegg (Hermine and Helene holding the other two-thirds); but Paul's rented properties were not the cause of his wealth in the troubled years after the war, for the government had put a strict bar on rent increases so that, as the price of everything rose 14,000 times, rents remained stuck at pre-inflationary levels. By 1922 a whole year's rent on a family apartment would earn the landlord just enough to buy himself dinner at an averagely priced restaurant.
In 1912, maybe sensing some national collapse, Karl had invested a considerable part of his personal fortune in foreign stocks and shares. After his death this portfolio was managed on behalf of his heirs by his religiously minded brother Louis, as a stille Gesellschaft--a silent or sleeping partnership--at the Dutch bank Hope & Co. The scheme was set up to save tax. The bank knew the name only of Louis, as trustee, but was not privy to those of the Trust's individual owners. In 1919, fearing a Bolshevik uprising in Austria, and by virtue of his owning an estate whose lands spread across the border into the newly created Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Louis adopted foreign citizenship. In this way he was able, as trustee of the family fortune, to transfer the whole lot abroad. This clever move endowed the Wittgensteins with power to pay for things in Swiss francs or U.S. dollars at a time when the domestic currency of Austria was practically worthless.
After his return from soldiering in 1918, Paul became withdrawn and cautious concerning his future career as a pianist. It was rumored that he had shaved off all his hair and locked himself into a distant room of the Palais, where he practiced for nine hours a day, refusing to see anyone, even the servants, who were under strict orders to push his food through a crack in the door and leave without entering. This was an exaggeration. His hair was indeed cropped extremely short, as it had been in Siberia. It is also true that the strain of playing the piano with one hand had forced him into a radical revision of his technique, and that between August 1918 and April 1922 he did not give any large-scale public performances. Hermine was probably referring to this period in Paul's life when she wrote that he had come so close to suicide that "it is perhaps only due to an accident that [he] remained in this world and finally came to terms with life."
Doubts flooded his mind as to whether his one-handed piano enterprise was ever going to work. He gave a few private performances in the Alleegasse Palais during this period and was egged on by his ever-enthusiastic mentor Josef Labor, who continued to ply him with new works, some especially written for his disability, others being rearrangements for one hand of music he had previously composed for two. These included two trios, a quartet, a quintet divertimento, a third piano concerto and a fantasie for piano solo.
Paul knew, however, that he could not survive off Labor alone, and yet was able to find little else to play. In an effort to build a concert repertoire he had scoured the antiquarian music stores of Paris, Vienna, Berlin and London for works written for the left hand alone. Predictably he found only a small handful of pieces: two short works by Scriabin composed after he had sprained the wrist of his right hand, an arrangement by Brahms written for Clara Schumann, six studies by Saint-Saens; the Godowsky arrangements of Chopin, one and a half pieces by Charles Alkan and some mediocre things by unknown and untalented composers such as Alexander Dreyschock, Adolfo Fumagalli and Count Zichy As to Paul's own arrangements of works by Mozart, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Wagner and others, these had taken him a great deal of time and effort to compose and, while they helped him to improve his technique, he was among the first to recognize that they were not especially good. Moreover they were arrangements, and as such they were compromised versions of original works. "Interesting, but not as good as the original," people would say. If there were to be any hope for Paul's one-handed career he would need to commission new works from great composers.
On June 29, 1922, Josef Labor celebrated his eightieth birthday. In Vienna, the occasion was marked with a week-long binge of his music culminating in a premiere performance at the church of Sankt Josef ob der Laimgrube, of a Mass that he had composed in 1918. All the Wittgensteins attended. Four days earlier Paul had contributed to a concert in Labor's honor at the ceremonial hall of the Hofburg Palace and on the twenty-third gave a "very nice" performance of the concerto that Labor had composed for him in 1915 with the Vienna Ladies' Symphony Orchestra under Julius Lehnert. The composer, however, was too ill to attend. His friends thought he might be dying.
Labor's health had been in steady decline for years and it was now obvious (if it had not been so earlier) that the Wittgensteins' championing of his work was not going to make him an international celebrity during his lifetime, that he did not have many new pieces left in him and that Paul's career could not be sustained by playing his music and his alone. The name Josef Labor on a concert program was box-office death even then, and although Paul played his music with tremendous passion, audiences often found it bewildering. Even Ludwig admitted that his music was "subtler than anything else" and therefore "particularly hard to understand."
But just as everyone was expecting his death, the blind old master was advised by a homeopath to change his diet and suddenly rallied. The Wittgensteins were overjoyed. "Labor's feeling well again!" exclaimed Her-mine, while her mother enthused: "One cannot praise enough the miracle which the homeopath has achieved in his case. The complete change of diet has immediately improved his physical and emotional state and Labor has become his old self, the youthful musician."
Indeed, Labor felt so well on this new diet that he started immediately working on another piano concerto for Paul.
My dear Labor,
The joy it gives me to know that you are again engaged in writing something for me needs to find some expression and I should like to give you a little something to make you happy. Please be so kind as to accept the enclosed package from your ever faithful former pupil, Paul Wittgenstein.
The package is said to have contained a lock of Beethoven's hair, but despite this characteristic act of generosity the blind composer remained a jealous man. If there were any truth in the notion that the Wittgensteins felt a sense of "owning" Labor, the same certainly pertained in reverse. Paul was his prodigy, and the old man did not approve of his "ever faithful" former pupil's plan to commission new works from a raft of other composers more distinguished than himself. His resistance took time to overcome, but when engaged on his final concerto for Paul the eighty-year-old composer acknowledged that it would be his last large-scale work for the left hand and gave his solemn sanction for Paul to commission other works from whomsoever he chose.
Between December 1922 and Easter 1923, Paul approached three prominent composers and one less well known, with invitations to write concertos for piano and orchestra (left hand) in exchange for highly prized U.S. dollars, and by the late spring of 1923 all four of them (Paul Hindemith, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Schmidt and Sergei Bortkiewicz) were working industriously on his behalf. Since the purpose of each commission was to advance Paul's career, the choice of composers needed to be carefully made. His favorite music--upon which subject he was a recognized expert--was that of the early Romantic, late Classical period. He detested so-called modern music and although he was personally acquainted with Arnold Schoenberg (another protege of Labor's), as well as other members of the Second Viennese School, he would never have considered commissioning music from any of them.
Erich Korngold, the son of Julius, chief music critic of the Neue Freie Fresse, was still in his twenties when Paul commissioned him, but the Viennese public had already embraced him as their greatest musical prodigy since Mozart. Mahler proclaimed him a genius at ten, and Richard Strauss, hearing two works composed at the age of fourteen, confessed to mixed feelings of awe and fear. With his opera Die tote Stadt (first performed in 1920) Korngold achieved world renown. His music may have been a little more modern than Paul would have liked, but for $3,000 he could at
least be sure that the work would reach a wide audience, for as the precocious composer had himself confirmed: "Every conductor in Germany will automatically perform a new piece by me."
The works of Franz Schmidt were, and still are, very highly rated in Austria and it is a shame that his beautiful, natural, personal and instinctive music is so infrequently performed elsewhere in the world. By commissioning a new work from Schmidt (price $6,000) Paul could guarantee himself dates in the major venues of German-speaking countries.
Hindemith, a rising young German of the avant-garde, was a riskier choice. Whereas Paul was convinced that music should appeal to the heart, Hindemith's works of that period were aggressively cerebral. He first met Paul at a concert in Vienna in December 1922, at which he was playing the viola part of his own Second Quartet. That this dense, tortured work should have appealed to Paul's conservative tastes is surprising. With the money that Paul offered him, Hindemith planned to buy and restore a fifteenth-century watchtower, known as the Kuhhirtenturm, in the Sachsenhausen district of Frankfurt. This he succeeded in doing, but the tower was blown up by Allied bombers in 1943.
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War Page 17
