The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  "Our battle," as Paul openly referred to it, continued by letter for several weeks without either side offering the smallest concession. Resenting the impasse, Paul wrote again to Britten:

  In the museum in Vienna I have seen a terrible weapon used in the Middle Ages--it looks like an easy chair but when you sit down the two sides snap over your body and you can't get out again. The German word for it is Fangstuhl. My idea was to have privately constructed a sort of Fangstuhl, then to invite you, let you sit down in it and only let you out of your prison when you have conceded the different alterations to your concerto that I am going to propose.

  Eventually the composer agreed to a few small changes but, ever after, felt extremely bitter about them. The premiere took place in Philadelphia on January 16, 1942. Britten agreed to attend, if only "to hear Wittgenstein wreck my Diversions" and was distinctly put out by the changes that the pianist had forced upon his score. All but one review was highly favorable--the most influential being the critic Linton Martin of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

  A one-armed pianist, whose right sleeve hung empty at his side while his left hand swept the keyboard with fairly magical mastery, thrilled the Philadelphia Orchestra audience in the Academy of Music yesterday with a performance of virtuoso brilliance that would have spelled triumph for a greatly gifted artist exercising all ten digits.

  Two months later, on March 13, 1942, Diversions received its New York premiere at a broadcast concert from the Town Hall with Charles Lichter conducting the Columbia Concert Orchestra. Britten did not attend and Peter Pears wrote to a friend: "Wittgenstein is playing his piece on Friday 3:30-4:30 on CBS. Do listen if you can, tho' I expect it will be bad." Gretl, however, did turn up, to see her brother for the first time since May 1939. Paul did not notice her and a friend slip into their seats at the back of the auditorium. To Ludwig she wrote:

  I felt I wanted to see him (unseen by him) & also to hear him. He looks well & astonishingly young & as sympathetic as always on the podium. But his playing has become much worse. I suppose that is to be expected, because he insists on trying to do, what really cannot be done. It is eine Vergewaltigung [a violation]--Yes, he is sick ...

  THE WITTGENSTEINS' WAR

  At the beginning of 1938, embarrassed by his continued sensual interest in Francis Skinner, Ludwig scribbled in his diary: "Thought: it would be good and right if he had died, and thereby rid me of my folly ... Although, there again, I only half mean that." For years Ludwig and Francis had been inseparable until on October 11, 1941, the twenty-nine-year-old gardener and mechanic died from a severe and sudden attack of polio--the same disease that had taken the life of Ludwig's nephew Fritz Salzer after the First World War. Ludwig was devastated. Fed up with teaching philosophy at a time of international crisis, he sought and was offered a 28-shilling-a-week job as ward-porter at Guy's Hospital in London. When a doctor there recognized him as the distinguished Cambridge philosopher and went up to greet him, Ludwig "turned white as a sheet and said 'Good God, don't tell anybody who I am.' "

  "My soul is very tired. It isn't at all in a good state." His job was to carry pills from the dispensary to the wards where he apparently advised patients not to take them. At Guy's the emotional void left by Francis Skinner's death was filled to some degree by a twenty-one-year-old man of humble East End origins and modest mind who worked in the dispensary. His name was Roy Fouracre, and his affectionate name for Ludwig was Old So-and-so. He and Ludwig remained close friends until Ludwig's death in 1951 when he left Roy a little money in his will. From the position of lowly porter Ludwig was soon promoted to that of "ointment maker" and surprised his boss by devising improved methods of ointment preparation that had never been previously considered. His stint at Guy's came to an end when Roy joined the army and Ludwig moved to Newcastle to work as a laboratory assistant to two doctors who were studying an irregular breathing disorder known as pulsas paradoxus. Once again Ludwig demonstrated his originality by devising an altogether novel method by which a patient's pulse might be recorded--"an ingenious departure from standard practice which worked well," as one of the doctors recalled.

  That was Ludwig's English war. In Vienna, the people's enthusiasm for National Socialism, for fighting and even for Hitler himself had started to wane with news of defeat at the battle of Stalingrad. Of the 50,000 Austrian troops of the German Sixth Army that had been surrounded by Russian forces, only 1,200 had survived. Wiener Neustadt was bombed by the Americans in August 1943 and when the heavier bombing of central Vienna started in September 1944 a bleak mood of defeatism spread for the first time among the hearts and minds of the Viennese people.

  Towards Hermine and Helene the Nazis had held true to their word, and the two old ladies lived without interference from the authorities for the duration of the war. Helene's husband Max Salzer died in April 1941. His debilitated mental state had played heavily on her nerves, as had the emigration of her only surviving son, Felix, to America. With three of her grandsons fighting in the Wehrmacht, two of whom went missing at the end of the war, these were taxing years for Helene. Hermine too, always shy, now reclusive, had long given up drawing and teaching. Encouraged by members of her family she set about writing her memoirs--a collection of selective, sentimental and sometimes bitchy reminiscences of the family. At first she stayed at Hochreit (the mountain retreat she had inherited from her father). In October 1944, fearing Russian invasion from the east, she fled to Vienna, and as soon as the capital looked set to become a bloody battlefield she moved to a house on Gretl's estate at Gmunden. The Wittgenstein Palais, now entirely hers, was converted for use as a hospital for wounded officers.

  Of Gretl's two adopted sons the eldest, Wedigo, fought on the German side and was killed. "It goes very near me," Gretl wrote to Ludwig. "I was very fond of him in spite of all of his weaknesses and nothing he could ever have done could have changed that. In fact he was damned innocent.--He was made of a material alien to ours and was built for a different environment than ours and I was always amazed and troubled by his evident affections ..." Jochen, the younger, fought for the Allies, was captured by the Germans and tortured as a traitor. He did however survive the ordeal. When Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941, Gretl's house on the Kundmanngasse was expropriated and put to Nazi use. Many of the things in it were stolen.

  In Washington, Ji fell in love with an unusual woman, a mechanically minded enthusiast for Heinz baked beans and fast cars called Veronica Morrison-Bell. She was the third daughter of an obscure Northumberland baronet and was twenty-nine years old when she arrived in America for the first time. As a woman of independent spirit, she had taken a holiday in Tokyo before the war broke out only to find that her route back to Europe was blocked by warships and mines. So she headed east across the Pacific, arriving in California on October 2, 1940. A friend of her parents, the rich patroness Dorothea Merriman, had found her a secretarial post in the Washington office of the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staffs, where they were making hush-hush plans for a Churchill government in exile. Veronica, whose brother was a captain in the 7th Lancers, was fiercely patriotic and it was rumored that her consent to marrying Ji depended upon his giving up his desk job and joining the army to fight the Nazis. In the spring of 1941 Ji duly enlisted as a volunteer officer cadet with the Duke of York's Royal Canadian Hussars, and on July 17, 1942, the couple were married at an officer-training camp at Brockville, Ontario, with a taxi driver as witness. Gretl mourned the loss of her "golden boy" but accepted the situation as best she could. "I like Veronica," she wrote to Ludwig, "I like her very much although I realize that she has a hard & bitter kernel under the soft cover."

  Ji, or Stoney as he was known to his fellow officers, trained hard and was considered a proficient soldier, even though he swore too much, and denigrated the Canadian army as "a damned inefficient bunch of dolts." Once his detachment had arrived in France in 1944, he saw action in battles against the Hitler Youth's specially formed Panzer Division. His fluen
t German made him a useful interrogator, translator and intelligence officer, but he never rose beyond the rank of major as "some bastard of a Canadian General" blocked his advancement. The problem came at the end of the war when he was involved in the trial of SS Brigadefuhrer Kurt "Panzer" Meyer, a highly decorated German soldier, wrongly accused of ordering the assassination of Canadian POWs in Normandy in 1944. Ji was working for the prosecution and even before the trial had begun had let it be known that a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion and that Meyer would be sentenced to death. During the proceedings, at which he was serving as interpreter, it was revealed that he had tried to influence a witness statement by shouting and intimidation, at which point "some bastard of a General," that is the Judge Advocate, dismissed him from the court, summoning a new interpreter to take his place. Meyer was sentenced to death but, after vigorous campaigning by both Germans and Canadians, was released from prison in September 1954.

  The battles of Paul's war assumed a very different form. In New York he joined an exile group calling itself Austrian Action, run by Count Ferdinand Czernin, the son of the Austrian Foreign Minister during the First World War. The group's membership was made up of all types and all political persuasions, and was formed to campaign for an overthrow of the Nazi regime in Austria. Paul gave his money and time to supporting the group, playing in several high-profile Austrian Action fund-raising concerts in New York; as a result he was treated with suspicion by the jittery American administration, which believed that all members of Austrian Action were communists. During the war years Paul also gave concerts to rally American troops, performing, for soldiers at Oakland, Camp Shanks and Gulfport Field, an arrangement of Ravel's Concerto with military brass band accompaniment. In New York in April 1944 he gave a concert in support of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Every week he sent weekly parcels of food and money to old friends and old retainers in Austria, France and England.

  With no control over what was happening musically in Europe, he became suspicious that the great repertoire of left-handed piano pieces he had spent his fortune commissioning and which had brought him his career's successes was being stolen from him. There were two sorts of theft. One consisted in rearranging his original left-handed pieces for two hands, and the other in his works being performed by other two-armed or single-armed pianists. Already, before the war, Ravel, incensed by the liberties Paul had taken with his concerto, had championed the French pianist Jacques Fevrier to play his work as soon as the Wittgenstein contract had expired. To Paul's irritation, Fevrier recorded Ravel's Concerto in 1943. At the same time Richard Strauss, in a move guaranteed to enrage Paul, rededicated his Panathendenzug to the young German pianist Kurt Leimer, who went on to make the first recording.

  In Austria, due to the exodus of Jewish composers, Franz Schmidt became the new embodiment of pure-blood German musical genius. Schmidt was a sick man at the time of the Anschluss and the excitement of long-awaited official recognition went straight to his head. At the premiere of his oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln (The Book of Seven Seals), he gave a Nazi salute from his balcony seat at the Musikverein and undertook to compose another work in praise of the Nazi Party called Die deutsche Auferstehung (The German Resurrection). He died before completing it, but these acts severely limited Schmidt's posthumous international reputation.

  Paul, who revered Schmidt almost as a father, was heartbroken to discover, shortly after the composer's death in 1939, that a young fascist pianist called Friedrich Wuhrer was making and performing two-handed arrangements of all the six works originally composed for Paul's left hand. Wuhrer was an ex-student of Schmidt's who Paul later claimed "went about for ten years shouting 'Heil Hitler!' and now only plays music to erase the past." He detested Paul as vehemently as Paul detested him. "In Austria," he wrote to a fellow pianist, "we do not take Herr Wittgenstein seriously. A choleric neurasthenic--rich, presumptuous and, as a pianist, lousy."

  Wuhrer claimed to have visited Schmidt on his hospital deathbed, where he had pointed out to the composer that he had not yet written anything "right" for the piano. Schmidt is said to have replied: "But I have already written a piano concerto. You only need to arrange it for two hands!" This, Wuhrer claimed, gave him sanction to rearrange all the works for two hands. Paul wrote furious letters of protest to the composer's widow from America but her replies were muddled and equivocal. She had become unbalanced and was later "put to death" under the Nazi euthanasia scheme. "I know that Wuhrer is lying but how can I prove it?" Paul wrote to Koder in frustration.

  During these years Wuhrer performed all of Schmidt's left-hand works in his own two-hand arrangements, ignoring the fact that they were still exclusively contracted to Paul. He had agreed to print a short notice in each concert program--"This work was composed for Paul Wittgenstein and is an arrangement of an original composition for the left hand"--but since Paul was an exiled Jew, listed in the official Nazi handbook Lexikon derjuden in der Musik as a banned concert artist, nobody in Vienna had to agree to any of his transatlantic demands. Wuhrer's programs consequently appeared without the notice.

  By late 1944 support in Vienna for Adolf Hitler had all but evaporated. The American planes that came to bomb the Viennese were called Liberators. In sortie after sortie their pilots pounded the city from the air believing that they were freeing the people below from the heavy yoke of German oppression. And this is how many of the Viennese saw it too--not as a punishment for having welcomed a hellish, compatriot ideologue, surrendered their country to him, implemented his savage schemes with more vim and enthusiasm than the crazed dictator himself could have dreamed possible, or for having defended his brutal regime for five years with their guns, their bombs and their lives--no, the Americans were to be seen as "liberators" and with the bloodthirsty Russian army now approaching at speed from the east it became crucial to the Viennese that the more lenient Americans should get to their city first.

  In December 1944 on a wet, wintry day, a U.S. Liberator bomber on a routine mission released a cluster over Vienna's once-prosperous Wieden district. A bomb landed on the roof of the Wittgenstein Palais. The explosion tore through the back of the building, smashing the garden elevation and bringing down half of the rear exterior wall--the lavish bedroom where Karl had lain dying in 1913 was reduced to rubble; the ceiling of the Musiksaal where Brahms, Mahler and Hanslick had once sat in rapt attention came crashing down to the floor; and the great glass dome that for seventy years had allowed the sunlight through to the marble staircase below was shattered into thousands of fragments of twisted metal and broken glass. After a deafening report, the air was filled with dust. Distant sirens disturbed the monotonous patter of rain.

  ROADS' END

  In the years after the war Vienna was divided into French, British, Soviet and American sectors of occupation. Movement between these zones was restricted. The Palais found itself in the Russian sector. For a month the great building stood open to the elements and, for nearly a year after that, was boarded up and abandoned. The task of repairing the damage fell to Hermine, but it was not until the spring of 1947 that she was able to move back in. Pictures, furniture, manuscripts and a porcelain collection held in storage that had belonged to Paul were shipped out to him in America, but there was no reconciliation, nor any contact with him except through lawyers. If Hermine was elated to be back in the old home, even without her brother as companion, the sensation did not last long, for within six months of her return she was diagnosed with a fatal gynecological cancer.

  Ludwig returned to Vienna for the first time in nine years to visit her. He had not been feeling too well himself and had given up his professorship at Cambridge in order to write, moving to Ireland, where he had been hopping from address to address in a state of near nervous collapse. In Vienna he found his eldest sister in a bad way and throughout 1948 her condition worsened. After a big operation at the beginning of 1949 she was told she had but a short time to live--two or three years at most. She then had a slight
stroke, followed by another, heavier one, and it was soon apparent to everyone that her death was imminent. Gretl and Helene were at her side as she slipped in and out of consciousness.

  Ludwig wanted to return to Vienna again in March, but Gretl tried to block his visit on the grounds that it would only upset Hermine, who was incapable now of recognizing anybody. Rudolf Koder wrote a slightly different account to Ludwig, who replied furiously:

  It seems that my sister Gretl gave me false news by implying that Hermine is not able to recognise anyone at all. It's very unpleasant to receive contradicting pieces of information. Please don't get influenced by anyone and continue to write the truth as you see it. Don't trust Gretl's judgement, it's too temperamental.

  In March 1949, Paul, who had stayed clear of Vienna for over eleven years, was invited to play in two concerts to mark the tenth anniversary of Franz Schmidt's death. Ludwig wrote to Marga Deneke to tell her to inform his brother that Hermine was dying. Presumably she did this, but Paul, who played Schmidt's Beethoven Variations with the Vienna Philharmonic on March 13 and two quintets in the Brahmssaal on the nineteenth, did not go to see his ailing sister.

  Vienna was no longer the safe and grandiose city that he remembered from his eager youth, nor did it any longer resemble the quick, cosmopolitan, cultural hub of the inter-war years. The cityscape of 1949 still bore the scars of the war; and the flame of the people, bereft of its Jewish energy, dimmed by the shame of complicity in the Nazi terror, was now reduced to a tragic ember. Paul had long ago thrown in his lot with the Americans and, though he remained at heart a patriotic Austrian, he came to Vienna in 1949, not as an exile yearning for his home, but as a visitor, a hotel guest and an international concert artist. He did not visit the Palais nor even look at it from the street. His heart was full of bitterness.