The Nazis skinned the saps of much of their fortune – two grumbled to death in the US, and Ludwig fought poker duels in Cambridge
BY ALEXANDER WAUGH (BLOOMSBURY, £20) THE Wittgensteins of Vienna would make a marvellous television soap. Of the nine children of steel magnate Karl, the youngest emerged as a great philosopher, an elder brother played left-hand
piano and a sister was one of the most famous faces on canvas. Of the rest, three committed suicide, one died in infancy and two lived blameless lives. Soon, none of the survivors were speaking to the others. And then came the nuns and the Nazis. Maybe it's a musical.
Karl, the sixth child of Jewish parents who converted to Christianity, slipped away to America in his teens and worked as a bouncer. Back home, he married a nice Jewish girl and set up a failed steel mill in business with the new Russian railways. He made several hundred million dollars in today's terms, enough to build a palace off the Ringstrasse with a salon where Brahms played his latest pieces.
Karl was feared by his children. The oldest son, Hans, went missing in America, presumed dead. The next, Rudi, poisoned himself with potassium cyanide in a Berlin bar, apparently fearing exposure as a homosexual. A third brother shot himself on the Italian front at the end of the First World War.
Margaret is the subject of one of Gustav Klimt's celebrated portraits, which she hated because it did not show her best side (you can find it in any poster shop). She married an American Jew, Jerome Steinberger, who called himself Stonborough, and lived in frigid misery.
Paul, the penultimate brother, had his right arm shot off early in the First World War, was carted around Russian prisoner camps in unspeakable conditions, and returned to make a name as a one-armed pianist, commissioning works from Richard Strauss, Ravel, Prokofiev, Franz Schmidt and Britten. He kept mistresses in squalid cottages, forcing one of them to have an abortion, from which she died.
Ludwig, the youngest, shared a classroom in Linz with Hitler before going to Cambridge where Bertie Russell acclaimed him as "perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating". Ludwig published one book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and pursued guilt-ridden relationships with bright young men. He gave all his money to his brothers and sisters but found no contentment in genteel poverty.
When the Nazis rolled into Vienna, the Wittgensteins went to enormous lengths to deny their Jewish antecedents. The Nazis skinned the saps of much of their fortune, leaving Paul and Margaret to grumble to death in America, while Ludwig fought poker duels in Cambridge common rooms.
Their untold saga is related with infectious relish and a degree of schadenfreude by Alexander Waugh. Plundering family correspondence, Waugh leaves his characters with few redeeming features – even their charitable gifts are somehow compromised – but the Wittgensteins are compellingly recognisable as the nouveaux riches of our own times.
Waugh gives inadequate accounts of Ludwig's philosophical breakthrough, and of the relative merits of Paul's commissions, none of which, except the Ravel and Prokofiev, are works you'd want to hear twice (I heard the Schmidt left-hand concerto in Vienna some months ago and prayed for it to end). Waugh exhibits a cloth ear for Viennese anti-Semitism and for the nuanced self-loathing of Christian Jews. These deficiencies, though, do not derail a work of real discovery and rollicking narrative, a memorable biography, not to be missed.
The full article contains 608 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
