The House of Wittgenstein : a family at war Part 3

ARRIVAL IN SIBERIA

For his twenty-seventh birthday on November 5, 1914, Paul was cooped up in a freezing, slowly moving cattle wagon. One-armed and distressed, he had been shunted from hospital to hospital for nearly three months, so that by the time he had pa.s.sed the Urals into the vast and empty steppe of Western Siberia it was winter and the weather was biting cold. With temperatures dropping as low as 76 degrees below zero, the sliding doors of the teploshki teploshki, which had been rolled open in the morning hours of the early autumn--affording him welcome ventilation and spectacular views of the great sunflower plains of the Volga--were now kept firmly closed. Sickness, despair and filthy odors suffused the darkness within. When a man died his corpse remained on board until the next change of guard-sometimes several weeks later. In February 1915 two boarded-up wagons arriving at the southeastern city of Samara were found to contain sixty-five prisoners, only eight of whom were still alive. The carriages were shunted a mile out of town, where Russian guards with axes and spades removed the fifty-seven frozen bodies and threw them into a hole dug by the side of the track. This was not uncommon. Boarded-up wagons arriving at Moscow and Omsk thought to contain valuable goods turned out, upon inspection, also to be filled with frozen corpses.

In accordance with Article 17 of the Hague Convention, Paul was ent.i.tled, as a junior officer, to payment of fifty rubles a month with which to buy food, soap and other necessities. In reality the money was seldom received. To avoid payment Russian officials ensured that prisoners were transferred out of camp on the day before their pay was due. In transit, the duty for distributing the prisoners' cash fell to the transport commandant of each train. Some were honest, but many sought to embezzle the money, claiming inability to find the correct change. On such occasions prisoners were left with no nourishment, having to subsist, sometimes for days on end, on nothing but kiputok kiputok--boiling water provided free of charge at each station along the line.

As a junior officer Paul received marginally more humane treatment from his captors than that which they meted out to the rank and file. POW officers were not obliged to work for the Russians, but soldiers in the ranks were put to manual labor--25,000 of them perished constructing the Murman Railway in the winter of 1914-15.

Omsk, a city situated at the confluence of the rivers Om and Irtysh in the gubernL gubernL or province of Akmolinsk some 1,600 miles east of Moscow, is the capital of Western Siberia. In 1914 it had a resident population of 130,000 which, within four years, was increased by 96,000 prisoners of war. In the ten months to August 1915, some 16,000 of them died there. On his arrival at Omsk station, Paul was hauled off the train in a blizzard and escorted under armed guard to a modern vodka distillery recently converted into a POW hospital. Others from the same train were escorted to prison camps outside the town, some as many as thirty miles away. Frozen, homesick, underdressed, many of them died before reaching their destinations. or province of Akmolinsk some 1,600 miles east of Moscow, is the capital of Western Siberia. In 1914 it had a resident population of 130,000 which, within four years, was increased by 96,000 prisoners of war. In the ten months to August 1915, some 16,000 of them died there. On his arrival at Omsk station, Paul was hauled off the train in a blizzard and escorted under armed guard to a modern vodka distillery recently converted into a POW hospital. Others from the same train were escorted to prison camps outside the town, some as many as thirty miles away. Frozen, homesick, underdressed, many of them died before reaching their destinations.

At the entrance to the hospital Paul was handed a blank postcard on which to write to his family informing them of his new location before being pushed into a communal bathroom on the ground floor where his face and hair were shaved, his clothes were taken for disinfection and he was ordered to bathe. Though bitterly cold, the hospital at Omsk was preferable to many of the places of internment that Paul had visited en route. All the Russian hospitals were suffering from a shortage of bandages and medicine, but at least Omsk was cleaner than the one at Orel (where Paul had been placed in the same ward as typhoid and diphtheria victims); it was less crowded than the hospital at Moscow (which held 4,000 patients); and safer than the Nikolai in Petrograd, where the guards were insanely brutal. It was here, in the officers' ward, that an Austrian captain was bayoneted in the back for attempting to go to the lavatory. The sentry's blade punctured his lung and in a hasty court judgment he (the guard) was acquitted of wrongdoing, while the severely wounded officer and three invalid prisoners who had testified on his behalf were each sentenced to six years' hard labor.

THREE SOURCES OF INSPIRATION

Paul's decision to continue his career as a concert pianist, despite the loss of his right arm, was taken in the early days of his captivity, long before he had reached the hospital at Omsk. The alternative to success was not failure but death, and although his mother and sisters anxiously scoured letters from Russia for hints that he might be contemplating suicide, the trauma of his condition had, if anything, made him more determined than ever to return to his homeland and resume his concert career. He had been groomed by his father to confront fear and despise self-pity, and these lessons were taken to heart. In a solitary effort of will, he trained himself to understate the gravity of his condition and to dismiss, often quite rudely, the sympathy of friends and their well-meaning offers of help. If, at any stage, he had feared for his future as a five-fingered pianist, at least he would have relished the opportunity to face that fear down. The means by which he put his courage to the test often disconcerted his friends. He would astound them by swimming, one-armed, far out to sea in lightning storms, by striding within inches of the upper edges of the great cliffs of Dover or by balancing along the high iron-framed railway track that crosses the marshes at Southwold. His secretary once screamed when she came into his New York apartment to find him tightrope-walking along a thin balcony parapet with a drop, on one side, of 200 feet to the concrete pavement below.

There were, of course, other role models, beside his father, whose example inspired Paul's resolve to continue playing the piano. His blind mentor Josef Labor was one of them, Count Geza Zichy another. Though Paul had not yet met this eccentric and ebullient Hungarian aristocrat, he knew of him by reputation. Liszt had been dazzled by Zichy's one-armed piano playing; so too had the critic Eduard Hanslick, who described him in the Viennese press as "the greatest marvel of modern times on the piano." In 1914 Zichy, moved by the plight and sheer number of amputees returning from the front, wrote a self-help book, complete with photographic examples, showing the amputee how to eat a crayfish using his teeth, how to crush meat rather than cut it, how to wash a single hand by rubbing it with soap against the chin and how to get in and out of his underpants: "You must learn how to put your pants on by yourself," he insisted. "It would be too humiliating to have to ask someone else's help." Zichy's manual contained a preface by Dr. von Eiselsberg, the surgeon who had operated unsuccessfully on Karl's tumor in November 1912. "This book will comfort the amputee," Eiselsberg had written, "and it will also show him that, with an iron will, even the terrible loss of an arm may be borne more easily." In May 1915 the Count gave a piano recital in Berlin before an audience consisting entirely of one-armed soldiers. Paul knew nothing of this, but a copy of Zichy's book had been sent to him in Russia and when he and Zichy eventually met, Paul, though scathing of his artistry, was much inspired by his energy and enthusiasm.

A key source of inspiration to Paul in his darkest hours of captivity was Leopold G.o.dowsky, a virtuoso Lithuanian, believed by many to possess the finest technique of any living pianist. G.o.dowsky had created a sensation at his Viennese debut in 1904, playing his own firework version of Strauss's "Blue Danube" Waltz, as well as a short sequence of Chopin Studies spectacularly rearranged for the left hand alone. It is likely that Paul attended this concert. If not he would certainly have heard about it. "I can a.s.sure you I am the topic of Vienna," G.o.dowsky wrote to a friend. "The criticism I got is in the Freie Fresse Freie Fresse, the most important daily in Austria. The critic, I am told, is the terror of Vienna. All my friends are jubilant over the article he wrote and they say this will settle my name here."

After that G.o.dowsky was invited back to Vienna many times, and early in 1909 he accepted the prestigious post of Director of the Piano School at the Imperial Academy of Music with the highest salary of any piano teacher in Europe. G.o.dowsky's controversial left-handed arrangements of Chopin Studies were published between 1894 and 1914. Paul did not own copies of these pieces before the war but he knew all about them, and it was while recuperating in the hospital at Omsk that one day he carefully marked out the image of a piano keyboard in charcoal on an empty crate and, for the first time, attempted to figure out how G.o.dowsky had succeeded in arranging Chopin's tempestuous "Revolutionary" Study for the left hand alone.

Paul had worked on this piece in its original two-handed form with Leschetizky and performed it at least twice in public--once at Graz in February 1914 and once at the Vienna Musikverein in March--so he knew the notes by heart. The puzzle was how to join the pa.s.sionate, restless theme of the right hand to the rapid figurations of the left in such a way that both tune and accompaniment could be played simultaneously with only five fingers of one hand. Many pianists would have dismissed the idea as an impossibility, but Paul, aware that G.o.dowsky had achieved it ten years earlier, was determined to figure out how.

Day after day and for hour upon hour, he addressed himself to this arduous and improbable task, tapping his freezing fingers on the wooden box, listening intently to the imagined music sounding in his head and creating, in the corner of a crowded festering invalids' ward, a tragicomic spectacle that aroused the sympathy and curiosity of his fellow prisoners and all the hospital staff.

A GLIMMER OF HOPE

Paul's relentless finger-tapping came to the attention of a thirty-two-year-old Danish diplomat called Otto Wadsted on one of his routine visits to the hospital. The Danes, neutral in the war, maintained a consulate at Omsk from which they were able to monitor the condition of prisoners and report to the Danish Red Cross. Consul Wadsted ran a dedicated office, taking pains to visit all the camps as regularly as the Siberian authorities would allow, aiding and befriending many of the Austro-Hungarians and Germans imprisoned there. A highly cultivated man, he was fluent in both French and German, widely read, a keen amateur painter and an enthusiastic violinist. Moved by Paul's plight and concerned for his physical and mental condition, he interceded with the Military Governor of Omsk, General Moritz, to ensure that as soon as he was discharged from hospital Paul could be transferred to a place of internment where there was a piano. In the first years of the war, Omsk was not equipped to accommodate the huge and sudden influx of prisoners from the west and so long as the concentration camps outside the town were still in the process of construction, captives were held in whichever buildings came to hand. These, in January 1915, included a circus, a cellar, a brothel and a disused slaughterhouse, as well as several hotels and private dwellings.

In Vienna Mrs. Wittgenstein had succeeded in opening a line of communication to Paul via her nephew Otto Franz, a diplomat working at the Austrian Emba.s.sy in Copenhagen. Franz was in direct contact with the Danish Foreign Office, which in turn received regular bulletins from Wadsted's Consulate at Omsk. In this way Franz was able to telegraph his aunt in Vienna on February 20, 1915: "Paul transferred to small hotel Omsk as of second half of January. Freedom of movement within the town. Has to report three times a week." Paul had already written to his mother to impart the same news, but his letter of February 2 failed to reach Vienna until March 28: My dear, well-beloved and darling mother,I have already been discharged from hospital as being in good health and, thanks to the intercession of the Danish Consul, have been given permission to remain here and live in town, which I am very happy about. So, the best thing is to write via registered mail via Copenhagen to the following address: Lieutenant P.W. and, thanks to the intercession of the Danish Consul, have been given permission to remain here and live in town, which I am very happy about. So, the best thing is to write via registered mail via Copenhagen to the following address: Lieutenant P.W., prisonnier de guerre, Nomera Stepanovskaya, Omsk...I'm well: I'm even playing the piano. Am enormously pleased at every bit of news from home and sincerely thank all those who have written to me. My greetings to all! And to you, my dear mother, the most tender embraces from your son Nomera Stepanovskaya, Omsk...I'm well: I'm even playing the piano. Am enormously pleased at every bit of news from home and sincerely thank all those who have written to me. My greetings to all! And to you, my dear mother, the most tender embraces from your sonPaul.

Twenty officers were billeted in the same hotel, sharing four to a room. All but two of them were Austro-Hungarians. Prisoners here were permitted to visit the town. At first, if they gave their word that they would return, they could come and go as they pleased, but their strict code of honor required them to attempt escape at all times. Too many tried to escape, and in the end exasperated Siberian officials restricted them to two town visits a week in groups of six under the strict supervision of an armed guard.

Every day for three months Paul practiced on a shabby, untuned upright piano that some say was brought to the hotel by a sympathetic Russian guard and according to others had been sitting disused in a closet in the hotel. His aim was to rearrange as many pieces as he could remember by heart into workable performing versions for the left hand. By late February he was able to write to his mother that he was feeling "splendid" and that if he were allowed to stay in the hotel he would have every reason to be happy. Mrs. Wittgenstein wrote to her youngest son: "Paul seems to be practising industriously. What a blessing for him!" Hermine was not so sure, for she feared that failure to succeed as a pianist could only prove devastating to Paul. "You were quite correct to suppose that he has already formed an opinion about his misfortune," she informed Ludwig, "and even though I fear that his sole aim is still to become a virtuoso I am nevertheless happy for him that he doesn't have to look for a completely new field of activity."

By the beginning of April 1915 Paul's confidence in his piano playing was such that he was able to send a message to his mother, via Consul Wadsted, via the Danish Foreign Office, via Otto Franz, to ask her to inquire of Josef Labor if he would compose a piano concerto for the left hand. Ludwig, on military duty in Vienna, had spent two days with Labor at his flat on the Kirchenga.s.se on January 4 and 5, and the idea of composing a piano concerto for the left hand (something that had never been done before) may have been cooked up between the composer and the philosopher at this time, for when Mrs. Wittgenstein pa.s.sed Paul's message to Labor he was able to tell her that he had been working on the piece for some time already.

Labor's blindness prevented him from writing down his own music; instead he composed by touch at the piano, feeling his way round the keyboard and memorizing each part, then playing it back to an amanuensis who took it down by ear. In the early days the composer's mother did this for him, later his sister Josephine, but by 1900 the task was always undertaken by one of his doting pupils called Rosine Menzel. By mid-May, Mrs. Wittgenstein found "dear Labor fully immersed in his composition for Paul--It is touching to see with what love and joy he sets about his work." The piece he planned was a Konzertstuck Konzertstuck or short concerto-like piece in the key of D major, consisting of an introduction, five variations on an original theme, an intermezzo and a cadenza in improvised style. His aim was to send the music out to Paul in Siberia as soon as it was ready, but circ.u.mstances changed and the score, which was completed in June 1915, remained in Vienna until Paul's return. or short concerto-like piece in the key of D major, consisting of an introduction, five variations on an original theme, an intermezzo and a cadenza in improvised style. His aim was to send the music out to Paul in Siberia as soon as it was ready, but circ.u.mstances changed and the score, which was completed in June 1915, remained in Vienna until Paul's return.

Toward the end of March a letter from Consul Wadsted to the Royal Danish Emba.s.sy in Petrograd was intercepted by the Russians. It contained complaints about the manner in which Austro-Hungarian prisoners were being treated at Omsk--complaints that Wadsted had already voiced to the face of Alexei Plavsky, the commandant of the prison camps at Omsk. Plavsky, a choleric old general, anxious lest news of his rough and illegal treatment of prisoners should come to the attention of a higher authority, inst.i.tuted a conspiracy against Wadsted, accusing him of acting as a spy for the Germans. Bogus witnesses were brought forth. A young Austrian officer, imprisoned at the same hotel as Paul, was sentenced to death for colluding. Pressure was applied to the Danish Emba.s.sy in St. Petersburg to have its Consulate at Omsk closed down and Consul Wadsted recalled. By chance the case came to the attention of Princess Cunigunde von Croy-Dulmen, a tenacious German aristocrat working as a volunteer POW camp inspector for the Red Cross. Acting above and beyond the call of duty, the Princess hired, at her own expense, a famous Russian defense lawyer who succeeded in exposing Plavsky's conspiracy and getting the Austrian officer's death sentence commuted to two months' imprisonment.

Unfortunately none of this happened in time to prevent Paul and his fellow officers of the small hotel from being transferred to a more secure and far nastier camp in the center of Omsk. Russian policy dictated that prisoners of Slav origin were to be treated with greater leniency than those of Germanic blood. This, it was hoped, would encourage the Slavs to switch sides and fight for the Russian army against the Hapsburg forces. The original plan was to hold all of them in European Russia so that the traitors among them could quickly and easily be deployed against the Austrians on the Galician front. German and Austrian POWs, or germanskis germanskis as the Russians called them all, were to be sent to Siberia and prov inces farther east, but, owing to the large numbers of captives and the incompetence and crookedness of the Russian system, thousands of Slav prisoners ended up with the as the Russians called them all, were to be sent to Siberia and prov inces farther east, but, owing to the large numbers of captives and the incompetence and crookedness of the Russian system, thousands of Slav prisoners ended up with the germanskis germanskis in Siberia. General Moritz, the district Military Governor, had been accused, during the Wadsted conspiracy, of colluding with the Danish Consulate in placing Austrian and German officers at all the best places of internment while cramming the Slavs (contrary to official policy) into the crueler and more punitive prisons. Worried that his German surname and friendly a.s.sociations with Wadsted's Consulate might make him suspicious in the eyes of Russian authority, Moritz hastily ordered that all in Siberia. General Moritz, the district Military Governor, had been accused, during the Wadsted conspiracy, of colluding with the Danish Consulate in placing Austrian and German officers at all the best places of internment while cramming the Slavs (contrary to official policy) into the crueler and more punitive prisons. Worried that his German surname and friendly a.s.sociations with Wadsted's Consulate might make him suspicious in the eyes of Russian authority, Moritz hastily ordered that all germanskis germanskis interned at hotels and private houses be transferred to harsher camps to allow POWs of Slav origin to take their places. For Paul and the other officers at Nomera Stepanovskaya, this was a bitter blow. interned at hotels and private houses be transferred to harsher camps to allow POWs of Slav origin to take their places. For Paul and the other officers at Nomera Stepanovskaya, this was a bitter blow.

BURIED ALIVE IN THE KREPOST

What Paul could not have known was that his transfer out of the hotel at Omsk would probably have taken place with or without General Moritz's intervention on behalf of the Slavs, for at the same time General Plavsky was under siege from the townsfolk of Omsk demanding that crippled POWs be removed from their streets. The daily spectacle of legless, armless, earless and noseless germanskis germanskis was proving detrimental to local morale. For this reason, Paul (along with 800 amputees) was moved into the town prison to be out of the sight of the sensitive townsfolk of Omsk. was proving detrimental to local morale. For this reason, Paul (along with 800 amputees) was moved into the town prison to be out of the sight of the sensitive townsfolk of Omsk.

The Krepost ("fortress" in Russian) is famous even today as the criminal dungeon into which the exiled Fyodor Dostoevsky was thrown in the middle of the nineteenth century, and which he later used as the setting for his novel, variously translated into English as Buried Alive in Siberia Buried Alive in Siberia and and The House of the Dead. The House of the Dead. In spirit little had changed there since Dosto-evsky's day. The POWs of 1914 called it "the big mousetrap"--a place of utmost horror. Built in the eighteenth century as an army barracks, few traces of the original structure remained standing, for when Paul arrived there it consisted of several low, wooden and brick shacks and an exercise yard, surrounded by a twenty-one-foot-high wooden palisade fence with six watchtowers for armed guards. Each shack was a single narrow, leaking, unheated room that held seventy prisoners with nowhere else to go. Nurse Brandstrom, who inspected the Krepost when Paul was there, reported to the Red Cross in Geneva, "as the weeks and months go by men of the highest culture, tortured by homesickness, are treated as were Russia's worst criminals seventy years ago." It was, she wrote, "universal opinion that even in Siberia the Krepost of Omsk is unique." In his memoirs (published in Berlin in the spring of 1918) the German officer Julius Meier-Graefe described it as a " dung-shack, an ice hole, a place to catch typhoid and other maladies, an establishment for lice. The Krepost is the endmost, a meanness, a dishonour to Russia." In spirit little had changed there since Dosto-evsky's day. The POWs of 1914 called it "the big mousetrap"--a place of utmost horror. Built in the eighteenth century as an army barracks, few traces of the original structure remained standing, for when Paul arrived there it consisted of several low, wooden and brick shacks and an exercise yard, surrounded by a twenty-one-foot-high wooden palisade fence with six watchtowers for armed guards. Each shack was a single narrow, leaking, unheated room that held seventy prisoners with nowhere else to go. Nurse Brandstrom, who inspected the Krepost when Paul was there, reported to the Red Cross in Geneva, "as the weeks and months go by men of the highest culture, tortured by homesickness, are treated as were Russia's worst criminals seventy years ago." It was, she wrote, "universal opinion that even in Siberia the Krepost of Omsk is unique." In his memoirs (published in Berlin in the spring of 1918) the German officer Julius Meier-Graefe described it as a " dung-shack, an ice hole, a place to catch typhoid and other maladies, an establishment for lice. The Krepost is the endmost, a meanness, a dishonour to Russia."

For a Russian POW camp to be even barely tolerable the prison commandant (or nachalnik) nachalnik) and his a.s.sistant and his a.s.sistant (praporshchik) (praporshchik) needed to demonstrate qualities of kindness and competence. This sometimes happened, but not at the Krepost. Here the commandant, conscious of his social inferiority to the educated prisoners under his charge, issued pointless and s.a.d.i.s.tic commands purely to a.s.sert his power over them. He addressed them all as "German swine," had them stripped and horsewhipped in front of him, constantly searched, forced to run the gauntlet of Cossack knouts for minor offenses, and deprived of all manner of basic needs. One officer told a Red Cross inspector that he had been held in an unlit, unheated cell for thirty days simply for quipping that a place as unpleasant as the Krepost should be built in Germany for Russian prisoners. Another was beaten up and punished with three months' solitary confinement for making a sketch of the prison in oils. At the time of Paul's arrival all musical instruments were confiscated and the prisoners forbidden from singing or whistling. "Sheer malice" Paul called it at the time. He cursed the governor privately, and took to teaching his fellow prisoners French instead. needed to demonstrate qualities of kindness and competence. This sometimes happened, but not at the Krepost. Here the commandant, conscious of his social inferiority to the educated prisoners under his charge, issued pointless and s.a.d.i.s.tic commands purely to a.s.sert his power over them. He addressed them all as "German swine," had them stripped and horsewhipped in front of him, constantly searched, forced to run the gauntlet of Cossack knouts for minor offenses, and deprived of all manner of basic needs. One officer told a Red Cross inspector that he had been held in an unlit, unheated cell for thirty days simply for quipping that a place as unpleasant as the Krepost should be built in Germany for Russian prisoners. Another was beaten up and punished with three months' solitary confinement for making a sketch of the prison in oils. At the time of Paul's arrival all musical instruments were confiscated and the prisoners forbidden from singing or whistling. "Sheer malice" Paul called it at the time. He cursed the governor privately, and took to teaching his fellow prisoners French instead.

With over 1,000 interns the Krepost, originally built for 300 criminal prisoners, was grossly overcrowded. Those who could find no place on one of the hard bunks were forced to sleep on the bare asphalt floors. Bunks were placed edge to edge so close that the narrow gangway between them was scarcely wide enough for one person to pa.s.s. There was nowhere to sit and no furniture on which to put things. Prisoners were expected to eat their meals lying down or perched on the rungs of the bunk-bed ladders. The food was disgusting, for although it was prepared by the prisoners themselves, the daily meat ration, to which each officer was ent.i.tled, was sold by the prison guards for profit and subst.i.tuted with scrag ends, boiled head, ear or hooves. Even the tea was made from water that some insane Krepost commandant had insisted be dragged up by the prisoners in buckets from the exact spot in the river where all the town's sewage was disgorged. For lavatories the prisoners had to make do with holes in the ground. Amputees with one or no legs needed to be supported by their comrades to use them and when a delegation of prisoners came forward to ask permission to construct a lavatory seat from a wooden box their request was s.a.d.i.s.tically turned down.

In the midst of all this homesickness, degradation and despair, some of the crippled officers of the Krepost were clinging to a distant hope. Paul was one of them. He had heard of Pope Benedict XV's initiative to bring the leaders of opposing belligerent nations to some agreement over the exchange of severely wounded and disabled prisoners. At first it was envisaged that some prisoners might even be home by Christmas, but negotiations dragged on and for months there was no news of a breakthrough.

That Paul was being considered as a possible exchange prisoner was known to him at least two months before he was transferred to the Krepost. Having heard nothing from him since January 3, his mother in Vienna continued to pester her nephew for news. Consul Wadsted telegraphed Franz by return: "GOOD NEWS. NAME APPEARS ON A PRELIMINARY LIST OF PRISONERS TO BE EXCHANGED. FINAL DECISION SOON. GOOD LUCK." Mrs. Wittgenstein wrote immediately to Ludwig: "You can imagine how happy I am! Even though it will require much more patience, as long as the matter has been put into motion, there is reason to hope that we may see Paul again in the foreseeable future."

As the months pa.s.sed with no announcement from the Vatican, Mrs. Wittgenstein's patience continued to fray. At the end of May she reported: "I have had good news from Paul, as far as his health is concerned, but not a syllable about the exchange. It makes one despair!" And when she discovered that he had been hauled before the prison commandant and ordered into confinement for a month, she was beside herself with agitation. The reasons for the disciplinary action are unknown, though it is possible that he was one of eleven officers punished at that time for failing to report an attempted breakout. Whatever the reason, Paul, without a piano, new to the Krepost and low in spirits, took it badly. Hermine confided to Ludwig: Mama is, of course, really upset about it and it's very fortunate that Paul mentions the kindness of the Danish Consul to which he attributes significant preferential treatment and he makes a number of light-hearted remarks, which at least soften the overall sad impression a little.

Another cause for concern was the tone of Paul's letters home in which he had started making dangerously subversive remarks, which Mrs. Wittgenstein feared might lead him into further trouble with the prison authorities. In one of them, which by a stroke of fortune seems to have eluded the notice of the Russian censors, he wrote that his only real concern was for an Austrian victory in the war and that he would willingly donate one million gold kronen to support the Austrian troops.

What Paul did not mention in his letters home, as he knew it would distress his mother gravely, was that a typhus epidemic had broken out among the prisoners. This disease, which killed indiscriminately, hung over the Krepost like a nameless horror. It was carried by body lice, from which Paul believed himself immune. Its early symptoms--a high fever with severe pain in the muscles and joints--are followed by dark-red rashes that spread rapidly from the victim's bottom and shoulders to the rest of his body. In the second week the infected person loses control of his bowels and becomes delirious. Within days he is most likely to be dead. By Easter 1915, when the epidemic was at its height, some twenty to thirty men were removed from the Krepost every day and brought into hospital. None of them returned. Neither of the two hospitals in Omsk could cope with the daily intake from the camps in the region as doctors, nurses and attendants themselves started to fall victim to the disease. One especially galling incident is preserved in the diary of Hans Weiland, an Austrian officer held at Krasnoyarsk: The men lie side by side pressed closely against each other in tiered rows of bunks. The air, a repellent, almost sweet stink, is thick enough to cut. Water drips continuously from the ceiling ... Then, late in the evening, a guard comes to me with an order from the camp commandant: the company is to provide five attendants immediately for the typhus hospital; the other attendants are either sick or dead ... There is a sudden silence; everyone is thinking it over; everyone holds back. This message is the way to death, a deliberate parting from family, wife, children, life. n.o.body volunteers. I repeat the request and explain the need for this duty to be carried out. The hazy atmosphere makes it impossible to see across the room; you can hardly see the next man's face. You can almost hear the breathing and the pulse beats in the silence. Then a young fellow from the Sudetenland calls out from his bunk: "I'll go; it has to be." He stands in front of me, says quietly that his mother is old but if he has to die then his brother will probably come home from the war and look after her. Four other men follow his lead with hardly a word. They go to the hospital, take over the nursing duties, become ill and all five die. Heroes!

A CHANCE OF ESCAPE

In the summer of 1915, after months of querulous, drawn-out negotiation, the first batch of sick and wounded prisoners was finally exchanged out of Russia, but Paul Wittgenstein, whose name had been on the list since January, was not among them. His mother had been sending him too much money in the post and the Russians, intercepting and stealing it, were anxious not to forfeit their income. In the meantime, two captives, who had been with Paul in the Krepost and had succeeded in getting themselves exchanged out of Omsk, came to see Mrs. Wittgenstein in Vienna. One of them, Captain Karl von Liel, had been wounded in September 1914 and as he lay on the ground unable to move was mutilated by the enemy. Two fingers of his right hand and four of his left were cut off. "This amazing individual," Leopoldine told Ludwig, "is in good spirits despite having to undergo every possible type of operation here to fit prosthetic attachments." Captain von Liel told Mrs. Wittgenstein that, when last seen, Paul was looking well, healthy and cheerful, that he was now good enough at Russian to translate the newspapers for those men who had not made such progress, that he was teaching French to a former fellow pupil of his old school, and that both teacher and pupil were taking their lessons very seriously.

I was extremely pleased [Mrs. Wittgenstein wrote] that both the exchanged officers spoke of Paul with great respect and love and praised his kindness, decency and idealism. Captain von Liel asked Paul whether he would rather the war had not broken out and that he still had his arm but Paul said he would rather things were as they were. That's really splendid!

When a second officer from Omsk, Lieutenant Gurtler, told Mrs. Wittgenstein about the money and why Paul was not being exchanged, she thought to herself, "If this is really an obstacle to Paul's release, it would surely be possible to come to some arrangement." If she succeeded in doing this the process certainly took its time, for at the beginning of October she was informed that Paul was scheduled not for exchange but for transfer from Omsk to some other prison camp in the south. "Perhaps we may have to be grateful for that," she wrote to Ludwig, "but while we still had hope that he might be imminently considered for exchange, this represents a dreadful disappointment!"

It was not until the very end of the month that she received a telegram from Otto Franz bearing the good news that Paul and six other invalided officers had been sent for examination before a committee in Moscow. "That represents at least a glimmer of hope!" she wrote. There was, of course, still plenty of room for pessimism and Hermine felt it strongly: "As to whether Paul will be exchanged? I've really very little hope, and I find the prospect of Mama's disappointment really terrible."

The medical commissions to which prospective exchange prisoners were sent were degrading affairs. Invalids arrived in a state of optimism, having traveled thousands of miles from camps in the east, only to be informed that they were not ill enough to be exchanged and must return to the prisons from whence they came. In Kazan, prison doctors were held liable for the expense of an invalid's return journey, which made them understandably reluctant to recommend anyone for exchange in the first place. Prisoners who made it to Moscow or Petrograd found themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous medical NCOs operating a reign of terror. At Lazaret 108 in Petrograd, the Angel of Siberia had reported: They sold their patients' food. Prisoners who still had their wedding rings, watches and so forth had to give them up. Those who refused and thereby made themselves disliked were kept as a punishment from the medical commission which, from time to time, held the decisive examination. In this way men might remain up to ten months in the hospital while trains of exchange prisoners departed with a half or a third of their full complement.

As soon as Paul arrived in Moscow he was examined by doctors to confirm that he qualified as a "severely wounded or disabled prisoner of war whose disablement permanently prevented his military service," questioned by military interrogators and warned that, if he were ever to rejoin the Austro-Hungarian ranks and be recaptured in action by the Russians, he would face summary execution.

From the moment Mrs. Wittgenstein knew that Paul was up before the exchange tribunal she became very anxious and she remained in this state for a fortnight, during which time her legs were more painful than ever, and her boon companion and former servant Rosalie Hermann had started to cough in a noisy and alarming way. But she waited and waited until news of her captive son came at last to Vienna. The details of her reaction are preserved in a letter she sent Ludwig: My dear, good LudwigJust imagine: early on the 9th--after we had heard nothing of Paul for a long time other than that he was in Moscow to be examined, we read that he was among the group that was being exchanged and which had arrived at the Finnish-Swedish border post in Haparanda on the 8th. On the afternoon of the 9th we had a telegram from Paul from Ljusdal in Sweden. Yesterday, we learned that the group had pa.s.sed through Sa.s.s-nitz and today Paul is already in Leitmeritz. Today I had a report from Stradels and Wolframs; both were at the station at midnight to greet him and they a.s.sure me that he looks in splendid form, very well and in the best of moods. Paul now has to spend a period in quarantine in Leitmeritz. If this lasts any great length of time, I think Hermine will go to see him there. If only you, my dear good Ludwig could come again, that would be a real blessing for me. I shall have to do without poor sidelined Kurt but as far as you are concerned, I hope I will be lucky enough to have you here in the foreseeable future. Apart from a few bouts of catarrh and my ankle, we are in good health.With the tenderest embraces from your mother.

FAMILY REUNION

Neither of Paul's two surviving brothers was in Vienna on November 21, 1915, to welcome him back from captivity. Kurt was still languis.h.i.+ng in New York and Ludwig on active duty as an engineer in an artillery workshop at the train station at Sokal, a Ukrainian town fifty miles east of Zamosc. The veins in Mrs. Wittgenstein's legs were bulging and far too painful for her to consider the 400-mile round trip from Vienna to Leit-meritz, where Paul was detained for ten days in quarantine, so Hermine went alone. On the journey out she feared that she might not recognize her brother when she saw him, expecting to be greeted by a depressed, emaciated and somehow damaged figure, but she was relieved and surprised by his good spirits, writing immediately to her mother and siblings: "Paul's appearance and nature are so unchanged (apart from his arm of course). Seeing him again was not much different than if he had been on a long journey and we were telling each other all the latest news and couldn't stop talking."

Meier-Graefe wrote that the Krepost scarred a man for life, and although Paul was altered by his Siberian ordeal he managed, for a while at least, to conceal the worst of it from his family. Mrs. Wittgenstein wrote of their reunion: "I took much delight in Paul's calm and composed disposition ... He really looks very well and is astonis.h.i.+ngly cheerful and hasn't lost any of his ability to tease." Hermine reported that "he speaks of his misfortune in such a matter-of-fact way. You never get the feeling that you have to be careful in what you say for fear that one thing or another might hurt him, and this makes it enormously easy."

But despite Paul's ease of manner he was suffering acute physical discomfort. The doctors at Krasnystaw had accomplished their task imperfectly and in their anxiety over Russian troop movements had failed to cut skin flaps large enough to cover the exposed bone of his right arm adequately. As a result the scar at the end of the stump was stretched too tight and had started to adhere to the bone. The nerve ends, trapped between bone and skin, were extremely sensitive. On his return to Vienna Paul took the problem immediately to Dr. von Eiselsberg's surgery on the first floor of a rickety eighteenth-century building close to the Ring -stra.s.se. Among the staff there were eight unpaid volunteers, one of whom, recently joined, was Paul's bald and moody American brother-in-law, Jerome s...o...b..rough.

Paul's operation was not as straightforward as Jerome had explained it to his mother-in-law, nor, as he had a.s.serted, did it involve the simple removal of a growth. The doctor had to reopen the wound, cut some of the dense membrane, known as the periosteum, away from the end of the bone and sc.r.a.pe about half an inch of marrow out of the inside with a curette. Only then could he rest.i.tch the wound in such a way that the soft tissue at the end of the stump would remain freely movable over the end of the bone. For two weeks after the operation Paul was in great pain, suffering from loss of appet.i.te and unable to sleep. The doctors ascribed this to the effects of the anesthetic, though it might equally have been caused by depression. His intention was to have a prosthetic arm fitted as soon as the stump was healed, but this was never done and, for the rest of his life, Paul instead wore the empty sleeve of his jacket neatly tucked into his right-side hip pocket.

As soon as he was feeling strong enough to reenter the swing of life, he did so with vibrant energy, walking each morning through the Baumgartner Wald and the steep parkland of the Wittgenstein estate at Neuwaldegg. He practiced with his left hand, tying ties and shoelaces, doing up and undoing b.u.t.tons, cutting meat, peeling apples, swimming, riding, writing and reading. He studied the self-help books that were published to cater to the thousands of amputees returning each month from the front and set up a modus operandi with his batman, Franz. In the afternoons, he practiced long hours at the piano, started to organize (as he vowed he would in his letter from the Krepost) his million-kronen donation to the Austrian troops, and took steps--despite the threats of execution that he had received at the tribunal in Moscow--to rejoin the army and return once again in uniform to the chaos of the eastern front.

A TRANSFORMATION

Ludwig was not given leave to join his family for Christmas in 1915. Having recently been promoted to Militarbeamter Militarbeamter (military official), he remained at Sokal singing "Stille Nacht" in the officers' mess instead. In July he had taken three weeks' leave (suffering from shock but not gravely injured) after accidentally blowing himself up in the workshop. As yet, he had not been posted to the front but craved the experience and had surprised his senior commanders with requests for dangerous action. He had been involved in what might loosely be described as a "skirmish" while serving as a searchlight operator on board the river s.h.i.+p (military official), he remained at Sokal singing "Stille Nacht" in the officers' mess instead. In July he had taken three weeks' leave (suffering from shock but not gravely injured) after accidentally blowing himself up in the workshop. As yet, he had not been posted to the front but craved the experience and had surprised his senior commanders with requests for dangerous action. He had been involved in what might loosely be described as a "skirmish" while serving as a searchlight operator on board the river s.h.i.+p Goplana. Goplana. Six weeks after the outbreak of war he and the crew had been forced to abandon s.h.i.+p and flee a sudden Russian advance. "I am not afraid of being shot," he wrote, "but of not fulfilling my duty properly. G.o.d give me strength! Amen. Amen. Amen." The enemy kept coming. Ludwig and his comrades (men whom he had earlier described as "a bunch of pigs ... unbelievably crude, stupid and malicious") were forced to retreat for thirty sleepless hours. "Have been through terrible scenes," he wrote. "I feel very weak and see no hope anywhere. If my end is coming now, may I die a good death, attending myself. May I never lose myself." Two days later he added: "There is nothing between us and the enemy ... Now I should have the chance to be a decent human being, for I am standing eye to eye with death. May the spirit bring me light." Six weeks after the outbreak of war he and the crew had been forced to abandon s.h.i.+p and flee a sudden Russian advance. "I am not afraid of being shot," he wrote, "but of not fulfilling my duty properly. G.o.d give me strength! Amen. Amen. Amen." The enemy kept coming. Ludwig and his comrades (men whom he had earlier described as "a bunch of pigs ... unbelievably crude, stupid and malicious") were forced to retreat for thirty sleepless hours. "Have been through terrible scenes," he wrote. "I feel very weak and see no hope anywhere. If my end is coming now, may I die a good death, attending myself. May I never lose myself." Two days later he added: "There is nothing between us and the enemy ... Now I should have the chance to be a decent human being, for I am standing eye to eye with death. May the spirit bring me light."

In his memoirs Meier-Graefe recalled telling a Russian guard that he was being transferred to Siberia. The guard looked at him sympathetically and shuddered: "In Siberia, all men search for G.o.d." As far as Paul was concerned there was no need to postulate the existence of any deity, and he neither found nor sought to find one in Siberia. Though he had been brought up as a Catholic, his line on religion broadly followed that of his idol, Arthur Schopenhauer, reams of whose philosophical writings he could quote by heart. "Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think." From this position Paul never wavered.

Ludwig on the other hand, a philosopher of logic and language, now reunited in friends.h.i.+p with the atheists Bertrand Russell and George Moore, was a lost soul who, during the early months of the war, may not have been consciously searching for G.o.d but found him nevertheless in a little bookshop in the Baroque city of Tarnow, twenty-five miles east of Krakow. It was here that he bought a book simply because it was the only one in the shop--and this in itself he believed to be a sign. It was a German translation of The Gospel in Brief of The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy--a redaction of the four New Testament gospels, which excluded all those parts of the original of which Tolstoy did not approve--sections on Jesus's birth and genealogy, his miracles (walking on water, turning water into wine, raising the dead and so on), his beating up of a fig tree, his fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies and his resurrection. The work had a profound effect on Ludwig, who devoured it with fervor, carrying his copy wherever he went. "This book virtually kept me alive," he told a friend afterward. His comrades at the time, seizing upon this eccentricity, nicknamed him by Leo Tolstoy--a redaction of the four New Testament gospels, which excluded all those parts of the original of which Tolstoy did not approve--sections on Jesus's birth and genealogy, his miracles (walking on water, turning water into wine, raising the dead and so on), his beating up of a fig tree, his fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies and his resurrection. The work had a profound effect on Ludwig, who devoured it with fervor, carrying his copy wherever he went. "This book virtually kept me alive," he told a friend afterward. His comrades at the time, seizing upon this eccentricity, nicknamed him "der mit dem Evangelium" "der mit dem Evangelium"--"the man with the gospel."

Tolstoy's vision (if that is the term) was broadly anti-church. He believed that Christ preached a message that had been corrupted by exegesis, that Christianity (that is to say his own Tolstoyan version of it) was "neither pure revelation nor a phase of history but the only pure doctrine which gives meaning to life." The message was simple--that man has a divine origin, "the will of the Father," which is the source of all human life. This he must serve. Doing this obviates any need for him to satisfy the desires of his own will and is a " life-giving" process. A true Christian must therefore imitate the ways of Jesus, renounce physical gratification, humble himself and draw himself close to the spirit. This is precisely what Ludwig attempted to do, but he was not always very successful at it: From time to time I become an animal animal [he wrote in his notebook]. Then I can think of nothing but eating, drinking, sleeping. Terrible! And then I suffer just like an animal, without the possibility of internal salvation and am then at the mercy of my appet.i.tes and aversions. The authentic life is then unthinkable. [he wrote in his notebook]. Then I can think of nothing but eating, drinking, sleeping. Terrible! And then I suffer just like an animal, without the possibility of internal salvation and am then at the mercy of my appet.i.tes and aversions. The authentic life is then unthinkable.

In the preface to his slim philosophical treatise, Tractatus Logico-PhihsophicttSj Tractatus Logico-PhihsophicttSj Ludwig acknowledged that some of his ideas may have been drawn from other writers, adding: "It is a matter of indifference to me whether the thoughts that I have had have been antic.i.p.ated by someone else." There are many similarities between this work and Tolstoy's Ludwig acknowledged that some of his ideas may have been drawn from other writers, adding: "It is a matter of indifference to me whether the thoughts that I have had have been antic.i.p.ated by someone else." There are many similarities between this work and Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief. Gospel in Brief. Both books are laid out in six sections (though Ludwig added a seventh to the Both books are laid out in six sections (though Ludwig added a seventh to the Tractatus Tractatus consisting of a single, now famous, proclamation, "That which we cannot speak about we must pa.s.s over in silence") and both works are presented as a sequence of connected, numbered, gnomic utterances. Consider these from Tolstoy: consisting of a single, now famous, proclamation, "That which we cannot speak about we must pa.s.s over in silence") and both works are presented as a sequence of connected, numbered, gnomic utterances. Consider these from Tolstoy: 1.1. The foundation and beginning of all things is the understanding of life.1.2. The understanding of life is G.o.d.1.3. All is built upon the understanding of life, without which there can be no living.1.4. In this is true life.1.5. This understanding is the light of truth.

And these from the opening page of Ludwig's Tractatus: Tractatus: 1. The world is all that is the case.1.1. The world is the totality of facts not of things.1.11 The world is determined by the facts and by their being all all the facts. the facts.1.12. For the totality of facts determines what is the case.1.13. The facts in logical s.p.a.ce are the world.

Common to both texts is the notion of eternal life belonging only to the present. As Tolstoy put it: 7. This present life in time is the food of the true life.8. And therefore the true life is outside time; it is in the present.9. Time is an illusion in life; the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.

Ludwig's Tractatus Tractatus expresses the same idea, but perhaps a little more succinctly: expresses the same idea, but perhaps a little more succinctly: 6.4311... If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those in the present. Our life has no end in just the way our visual field has no limits.

Ludwig's family was alarmed, disconcerted, alienated and embarra.s.sed by his sudden conversion. Hermine, Gretl and Paul read Tolstoy's Gospel Gospel in an attempt to understand him better. Hermine, often overwhelmed by Ludwig's intellect and struggling to keep up with him, read several other books by Tolstoy as well. Gretl studied Ernest Renan's hugely popular in an attempt to understand him better. Hermine, often overwhelmed by Ludwig's intellect and struggling to keep up with him, read several other books by Tolstoy as well. Gretl studied Ernest Renan's hugely popular Life of Jesus Life of Jesus to see if it was compatible with Tolstoy. Paul took a teasing, controversial and not altogether sympathetic line. "Even if Paul should by chance ever like the same book as Ludwig, he would always look for and find something essentially different in it," Gretl told Hermine. Of all Ludwig's siblings she was the one who came closest to sharing in Ludwig's new spirituality, but Tolstoyan Christianity was not a religion in the sense of a shared communion. What to see if it was compatible with Tolstoy. Paul took a teasing, controversial and not altogether sympathetic line. "Even if Paul should by chance ever like the same book as Ludwig, he would always look for and find something essentially different in it," Gretl told Hermine. Of all Ludwig's siblings she was the one who came closest to sharing in Ludwig's new spirituality, but Tolstoyan Christianity was not a religion in the sense of a shared communion. What The Gospel in Brief The Gospel in Brief offered to Ludwig, as a young man crippled by conflicting urges to narcissism and self-loathing, was the long-sought opportunity for radical self-improvement--a thorough rinsing of all those parts of his personality that he found most distasteful, and an opportunity for conscious self-elevation and transfiguration from mere mortal to immortal Jesus-like, prophet-like, perfect human being. "There are two G.o.dheads: the world and my independent I," Ludwig wrote in his notebook in July 1916. "For life in the present there is no death." According to Dr. Max Bieler, an officer serving with Ludwig at Sokal in the autumn of 1915, "Ludwig had all the characteristics of a prophet." offered to Ludwig, as a young man crippled by conflicting urges to narcissism and self-loathing, was the long-sought opportunity for radical self-improvement--a thorough rinsing of all those parts of his personality that he found most distasteful, and an opportunity for conscious self-elevation and transfiguration from mere mortal to immortal Jesus-like, prophet-like, perfect human being. "There are two G.o.dheads: the world and my independent I," Ludwig wrote in his notebook in July 1916. "For life in the present there is no death." According to Dr. Max Bieler, an officer serving with Ludwig at Sokal in the autumn of 1915, "Ludwig had all the characteristics of a prophet."

When Ludwig's Tractatus Tractatus appeared in print after the war, it confounded the expectations of the small circle that had grown to admire his ideas on logic and many, including Bertrand Russell, found the work's "urge toward the mystical" incomprehensible and rather depressing as though it were not a philosophical tract but some impenetrable Gospel according to Ludwig: appeared in print after the war, it confounded the expectations of the small circle that had grown to admire his ideas on logic and many, including Bertrand Russell, found the work's "urge toward the mystical" incomprehensible and rather depressing as though it were not a philosophical tract but some impenetrable Gospel according to Ludwig: 6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanis.h.i.+ng of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found, after a long period of doubt, that the sense of life became clear to them have been unable to say what const.i.tuted that sense?)

GRETL'S ISSUES

When war broke out the s...o...b..roughs had hoped to return to England. Gretl, by virtue of her marriage to Jerome, had become an American citizen, but as a Wittgenstein she was driven by strong patriotic urges to do her duty by Austria. Whatever a.s.sistance she could give to her country she preferred it on a grand scale and wished, by her largeness of heart, her ingenuity of mind and her vast fortune, not just to lend a hand, but to influence things in a major way, to win the war for Austria. She needed to feel engaged "with all my strength. To do my utmost both physically and mentally," which is why she was not at all happy in the voluntary work she had undertaken, organizing meals for between eighty and a hundred men a day at a small hospital in Ischl.

This war affects me just as it does you [she wrote to Hermine]--I can achieve nothing, absolutely nothing. But I would give a lot to be able to contribute something to this campaign. It seems so dreadful that one could have lived through such a thing and yet not actually lived through it.

Gretl left the hospital after catching an infection from one of her patients and was advised by her doctor never to return. Now she could apply her mind to higher things, but first she had to struggle with the dead weight of a marriage that was not working well. Her problem was that she was an irritating person. Her opinions, her modes of expression and her manner of dress all tended to grate on people's nerves--her mother's, Ludwig's, Paul's and especially her husband Jerome's. Hermine, who admitted on occasion to wanting to slap Gretl in the face, was nonetheless her sister's staunchest ally, constantly reminding others of her "inner greatness."

I can hardly say how much I love and admire Gretl [she wrote to Ludwig]. Why then does she possess such characteristics as give rise to sharper censure than is received by many people who do not act as well and generously in greater matters as she does? That always hurts me immeasurably.

But neither Gretl's manner nor her reserved att.i.tude to s.e.xual matters can be held entirely responsible for the failures of her marriage, for Jerome--morose, tetchy, paranoid, p.r.o.ne to grandiose delusions--was an impossible husband. At the beginning of 1916 he was in a particularly bad way, terrified by and obsessed with the notion that America was planning to join the war against the Austrians. He talked and thought of little else. For days on end he would disappear only to return, sometimes in the middle of the night, shaking, staring ghoulishly into s.p.a.ce, silent and motionless, or exploding suddenly into aggressive rages. His behavior tested Gretl's nerves to their limits. Unsure how to cope, she tried to intellectu-alize the problem, seeing her husband as a split personality with an "inner life" that was "once clear and is now confused" and an "outer life" that "no longer takes place (as it used to) between things, but is now oriented among people." Such cryptic a.s.sertions did little to improve the situation--nor did a move in October 1915 from Gmunden to a gracious rented apartment in the Palais Erdody on the Krugerstra.s.se. She could, of course, sue for divorce, but whenever the idea was mooted Jerome threatened to take the boys, Thomas and Ji, to America with him. What was the matter with Jerome? At first Gretl tried to work it out for herself by reading books on psychology and psychiatry. Nothing came of it and many years later she was persuaded to send him to the famous neurologist Julius Wagner-Jauregg, who had recently won a n.o.bel Prize for his controversial treatment (injecting psychotic patients with tuberculin and malaria parasites) that was proving effective in cases of syphilitic dementia paralytica. dementia paralytica. It is not known whether Jerome was suffering from syphilis, but his erratic behavior and psychotic paranoia rank among the cla.s.sic symptoms of that disease. Pierre s...o...b..rough (his grandson) stoutly denies the possibility, but no alternative explanation has been offered for Jerome's psychosis. Whatever the truth of it, Wagner-Jauregg had no success and Jerome's condition continued, off and on, until the day of his death. It is not known whether Jerome was suffering from syphilis, but his erratic behavior and psychotic paranoia rank among the cla.s.sic symptoms of that disease. Pierre s...o...b..rough (his grandson) stoutly denies the possibility, but no alternative explanation has been offered for Jerome's psychosis. Whatever the truth of it, Wagner-Jauregg had no success and Jerome's condition continued, off and on, until the day of his death.

PAUL'S ONE-HANDED DEBUT

In the early months of 1916 each member of the Wittgenstein family was suffering from one health problem or another. Mrs. Wittgenstein's legs were still "terribly painful." She had had them operated upon and was confined to a wheelchair for the weeks of her recuperation. She was also worried about her eyesight and the rapid advancement of what seems to have been some form of macular degeneration--a loss of central vision--that would eventually leave her completely blind. Helene was in bed with stomach cramps "and a.s.sociated complaints," Gretl was worried about her palpitating heart, Ludwig was losing his mind on the eastern front, and Hermine, Jerome and Paul all had problems concerning their fingers. By coincidence, Hermine and Jerome each had an infected swollen finger on his/her right hand so that both had to be discharged from their voluntary hospital duties. Paul had slipped and fallen over in the bathroom, landed on his hand and broken a finger bone. It was a bitter blow. For almost a month he was unable to play the piano and, more than anything, he was looking forward to trying out the new piece that Labor had composed especially for him. Labor too was disappointed, for it was not until March 11 (two and a half months after the accident) that "my apostle, Paul" was able to give a first rendering of the work at a private concert in the Musiksaal Musiksaal of the Wittgenstein Palais. A young student of Leschetizky played the orchestral part on a second piano, but the great Polish pedagogue was himself unable to attend as he had died four months earlier while Paul was awaiting his release from the quarantine hospital at Leit-meritz. The concert was a grand success. Paul played beautifully and the whole piece, to Labor's unconcealed delight, had to be encored. of the Wittgenstein Palais. A young student of Leschetizky played the orchestral part on a second piano, but the great Polish pedagogue was himself unable to attend as he had died four months earlier while Paul was awaiting his release from the quarantine hospital at Leit-meritz. The concert was a grand success. Paul played beautifully and the whole piece, to Labor's unconcealed delight, had to be encored.

On October 28, Paul gave a performance of another work by Labor, a quartet in which the piano part had been arranged for one hand by the composer's acolyte Rosine Menzel. Again the concert was a private affair at the Wittgenstein Palais and again Paul played "very beautifully, with great warmth and fire." The composer was deliriously happy. Even Hermine, whose reaction to Paul's playing was typically negative, rejoiced in his interpretation of two short Mendelssohn pieces that she felt he had executed "very well and with feeling."

Paul's case has naturally made me very upset [she told Ludwig] and as much as I would like to deny him the right to pursue music on account of many rough patches, I am equally happy to grant him that right for the sake of a piece played with feeling.

Among those present in the audience was the lean, elegant figure of Hugo Knepler, a popular Viennese i