The House of Wittgenstein : a family at war Part 4

WAR IN EUROPE RAGES

Despite the long hours that Paul spent preparing his one-handed concert debut he managed to find time for "welfare" work. He had vowed to donate one million kronen for the troops and saw to it that this pledge was properly fulfilled by organizing the making and distribution of thousands of army greatcoats. In Russia he had been horrified by the flimsiness of the Austrian jackets compared with those worn by the enemy and was convinced that the plight of POWs during the eight-month Siberian winters was made intolerable by them. From factories in Bohemia he ordered thousands of bales of strong, warm, gray material, but was dismayed to find the operation hindered by a shortage of tailors--most of them were dead, wounded or still fighting on the front. With characteristic determination he advertised in cities around the monarchy for old tailors to come out of retirement and work for him. In this way the job was done and tens of thousands of greatcoats finally delivered to a storehouse in Teplitz ready for distribution via Sweden to POW camps in Russia and Siberia. In 1916 Paul's million-kronen contribution represented one-twentieth of the total national expenditure on POW clothing aid for that year.

Ludwig also elected to donate a million kronen toward the Austrian war effort but being on active duty was unable to supervise it. His idea--less practical than Paul's--was to build a giant new mortar cannon. The biggest in the Austrian army was the ma.s.sive 305mm Skoda that weighed 22.9 tons and could throw an 842-pound sh.e.l.l 13,000 yards at the rate of ten rounds per hour. These were the finest heavy howitzers produced in the war, but Ludwig, with characteristic obstinacy, didn't think them good enough, and had the money transferred to a fund in Vienna to be spent on the development of a better weapon. It was never used. Ludwig was not concerned to follow up the matter and when Hermine, many years later, attempted to trace what had become of his donation she was told that the whole lot had disappeared in the hyperinflation of the 1920s.

At the end of March 1916, Ludwig was given the opportunity to prove himself at the front, being a.s.signed to the duties of an artillery observer at Sanok, east of Krakow. His new position did not however alleviate relations with his comrades-in-arms as he remained consumed with disgust for himself and by intense loathing of those around him. "Within myself I am full of hatred and cannot let the spirit come to me. G.o.d is love." The men of his unit, he claimed, detested him simply because he was a volunteer, but more likely they were put off by his self-obsession and lofty manner. In his notebook Ludwig conceded: "So I am nearly always surrounded by people that hate me. And this is the one thing which I still do not know how to take. There are malicious and heartless people here. It is almost impossible to find any trace of humanity in them."

Despite these inner tensions Ludwig proved himself as valiant in battle as his elder brother. Of course he was desperately afraid, but fear in the face of death was, he had decided, "the sign of a false, i.e., a bad life." From June to August he was caught on the wrong side of the Brusilov Offensive, the huge and well-planned forward strike by the Imperial Russian army under its regional commander Alexei Brusilov, which resulted in the loss of 1.5 million Austro-Hungarian troops (including 400,000 taken prisoner) and thus put the Austro-Hungarians on the defensive for the rest of the war.

In a moment of piety Ludwig decided he would not accept promotion to the rank of officer and was only persuaded to recant his position by the earnest entreaties of his family. "Perhaps you are not such an odd person as I think," Hermine wrote to him, "but I am worried that you might regard promotion as some kind of s.h.i.+rking from hard work and fail to see that it might be a question of life and death ... I don't think it's a laughing matter!" Paul reminded him of the dangers of being captured: "It would have meant certain death for me if I had had to suffer the treatment meted out to the rank and file who were taken prisoner in Siberia." In the end Ludwig accepted his destiny, rising to the rank of lieutenant in the Reserve. He continued, however, to pester higher command with requests for postings to places where the fighting was most dangerous, for his new spirituality demanded of him that he test himself to the uttermost, and that he accede always to his own highest standards. In May 1916 he duly volunteered to man an observation tower upon which he knew that he would frequently come under enemy fire. "Perhaps nearness to death will bring light into my life," he pondered. A year later he enlisted Paul's help in demanding of various senior officers that he be allowed to transfer from the artillery to the more dangerous infantry. As a member of an officers' club in Vienna, Paul was able to use his connections to advance his brother's cause, but in the end nothing came of it. Meanwhile, in action against British troops, Ludwig was commended for his "courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid and heroism" under fire and awarded the Militar-Verdienstmedaille--the Military Merit Medal with Swords on the Ribbon. By the end of the war he had been decorated many times.

In March 1916, Paul was finally decorated for his bravery in the opening month of the war with the Military Cross (cla.s.s III), and was promoted to first lieutenant (retroactive from September 1915). In October he received a further medal, the Military Cross (cla.s.s II), pinned to his chest by the thirty-five-year-old Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, a lovelorn German aristocrat who, fifteen months after the ceremony, took his dog for a walk in a wood near Neustrelitz and shot himself in the head.

AMERICA JOINS THE WAR

For more than two years President Woodrow Wilson had done his best to steer a neutral course between lobby groups demanding that the United States join the war on one side or the other, or stay out of it altogether, but when, on March 18, 1917, three American merchant s.h.i.+ps were sunk by German submarines, the President's burgeoning resolve to support the Allied Powers was stiffened. On April 2, Congress met in special session and two days later the Senate pa.s.sed a resolution in favor of war by ninety votes to six. In the House of Representatives, after a seventeen-hour debate, it was agreed by 373 votes to 50. The public galleries of both Houses echoed to wild cheering as the motions were carried, but Wilson returning to the White House buried his head in his hands and wept. "My message was one of death for young men. How odd it seems to applaud that."

Jerome s...o...b..rough reacted to the news from America by insisting that he and his family leave Austria right away. Gretl demurred, arguing that she had things to do in Vienna and didn't wish to emigrate, but her husband was adamant and on April 14, eight days after President Wilson's declaration, they arrived at a hotel in Zurich in neutral Switzerland. Exile from Austria did not suit Gretl's bossiness as she liked to believe that she was always at the center of things and always useful. Her social life in Austria was a whirl of politicians, high-flying diplomats, well-known artists, composers and performers from whom she was loath to be separated.

Arriving in Switzerland, Gretl sank into a depression, lying in bed all day, for weeks on end, rising only for short walks or to inspect a Pica.s.so that she was tempted to purchase. At times she was overwhelmed by acute feelings of loneliness, homesickness and aggressive patriotism. Stress caused her heart to fibrillate and each time this happened she said to herself, " Oh my G.o.d! It's starting' and I die the thousand unnecessary deaths that every coward dies." Her depressions were aggravated by acute hypochondria and a paranoid fear of dying. "I am always thinking of death and picturing my own end," she wrote in her journal. "I do not dare to think of returning home as I am sure I will die before I get there." Like Ludwig she too sequestered herself behind the altar rails of Tolstoyan Christianity. "I am well, apart from my health, because I have a clear conscience. As Tolstoy writes: 'bound by the flesh but free through the spirit.'"

For Jerome, the move to Switzerland served only to refuel his neurotic restlessness, and within a few months he moved the family from Zurich to the fortified lakeside town of Luzern, where they stayed at the Hotel National. But as soon as they arrived in any new place Jerome was once again making plans to remove to somewhere else. Under these conditions there could be no permanence in their lives and as they dashed from St. Moritz, to Bad Tarasp-Vulpera, to Bern, to Ouchy near Lausanne and back again to Luzern, the strain in Gretl and Jerome's relations.h.i.+p came once again close to breaking point.

Jerome insisted that he needed to take their elder son, Tommy, off to America for an indefinite period. Gretl tried her best not to react to this provocation, for the boy, then aged eleven, was beginning to show signs of emotional instability and the last thing she wished was for him to be uprooted from a German-to an English-speaking school; but seeing no point in engaging herself in battle with someone to whom she felt bound for the rest of her life, she failed to take any action. "What can I do then?" she asked her sister. "If I rebel divorce would be the only consequence. Jerome talks about divorce all the time but I am against it for the sake of the children. For theirs and for his own sake, because he does not know what he is talking about."

By moving to Switzerland in April 1917, Gretl just missed her brother Kurt's eagerly awaited return from New York. "Kurt is back home just the same big child as when he left three years ago. But that doesn't matter at the moment," Hermine reported. "He comes home on Sundays and dashes around with the children...Let's hope things always go smoothly for him!" Kurt's initial training as an infantry officer at the Danube town of Stockerau ten miles north of Vienna lasted for two months. On July 15, 1917, he was sent on a six-week training period behind the lines. His mother never mentioned her sorrow at his parting except on the occasions when her legs were hurting too much for her to be able to restrain herself. In the Wittgenstein family difficult feelings were subsumed by playing beautiful music, and just before Kurt left for battle he and his mother practiced a Schubert quartet for many hours together on the piano. "Thank G.o.d that such things exist," wrote Hermine. "They are a blessing whatever life brings!"

PAUL'S ALTERED CHARACTER

The mask of cheerfulness with which Paul had greeted his family on his return from Siberia could not be worn for long for, despite his determination to bear his sorrows with fort.i.tude, one piled upon the other until the cracks began to show. Memories of his father, of his suicidal brothers Hans and Rudi, guilt at having deserted his comrades in the Krepost, the grim realization of his present armless condition, thoughts of his wrecked career, of Ludwig's unstable mind, of the starvation and disease that were overtaking Vienna, frustrations of every kind--artistic, familial, s.e.xual--not to mention the endless, slow, slow losing of the war, these were the things that preyed upon him and sought eventually to destroy his moral equilibrium.

Since his return to Vienna in November he had been attending also to the gradual disintegration of Rosalie Hermann, a tall, bony and much admired former servant of his grandmother's with whom he had been especially close since his childhood. Paul was her favorite among the Wittgenstein children, and he in turn looked on her with the same degree of fondness with which many sons are able to look upon their mothers. Rosalie had been employed as Mrs. Wittgenstein's mother's maid for fifty-two years and Frau Kalmus had bequeathed her enough money and furniture to live independently in a plush flat on the Brahmsplatz, but when Rosalie's coughing fits began and her health was failing Mrs. Wittgenstein had her moved into a grand bedroom at the Alleega.s.se Palais. Here, every day, Paul brought her fresh flowers, sat by her bedside, recounted stories, told her jokes, read her books and played her music. Rosalie's dying was attenuated over many months of high fever and unsightly swellings, during which time she impressed the whole family with her stoicism in the face of death. In May 1916 she went into hospital. When she died she was buried with honor next to Karl in the Wittgenstein family tomb. Under her mattress she had left a thank-you letter addressed to Mrs. Wittgenstein. Rosalie was a peacemaker among querulous people and Paul felt her loss deeply.

After her death Paul's agitation and irritability increased. In the company of his family, of strangers or of guests his frustrations vented themselves in violent clashes. Hermine and Mrs. Wittgenstein worried at the frequency of his "crazy moods," and, shortly before her departure for Zurich, Gretl gave him a thorough ticking-off To her surprise Paul's response was both apologetic and contrite. He explained to her, in touching tones, how much he was suffering from his own irritability and how he believed her reprimand to be wholly appropriate. Hermine wrote to Ludwig: "If necessary Gretl's rocket will be repeated and possibly, as Paul has already requested, with even greater severity." Ludwig was astounded. "I cannot begin to imagine it. But there are still things in this world that are unimaginable." For a while Gretl's forthright ministrations seemed to do the trick and Hermine reported that her brother was "completely changed," but no sooner were the s...o...b..roughs departed for Zurich than Paul was back to his old ways.

Ludwig's solution was for Paul to move out of the Palais and find himself an apartment elsewhere in Vienna, but Hermine, shuddering at the prospect of life on her own with her mother, insisted that he stay. "Between Mama and me there is no contact without friction," she wrote. "If it were just me at home it would be really dead." When Paul was behaving well he was capable of cheering up the Palais in a way that Mrs. Wittgenstein and Hermine were not. They were too reserved, too anxious. Hermine's taciturnity was, in her own view, contagious, while Mrs. Wittgenstein "can't get much pleasure from strangers if they have no connection with her children." Paul, on the other hand, was energetic and his busy life ensured a coming and going of interesting people that would enliven their days. He could cheer his mother by playing piano duets with her. So it was agreed that he would stay, for, despite his bouts of madness, his presence at the Palais was deemed a bonus. After all, "The hours pa.s.sed in stimulating company at home would not be greatly diminished by the odd (or even by several) unpleasant scenes," Hermine conceded.

On the second floor of the Palais, Paul arranged a bachelor suite for himself. Approached by a separate staircase with windows looking on to the courtyard and gardens below, it consisted of a sitting room (with dining table), a bathroom and a bedroom, into which he could withdraw and have meals brought up to him by the servants. One of the Palais's seven grand pianos was installed and on "crazy days" Paul practiced undisturbed, furiously pounding the keys with his left hand for hour upon hour--behavior that reminded Hermine of her father. "Unfortunately, to my really great distress, [Papa's] restlessness shows itself in Paul's piano playing. When I hear him practicing upstairs not a single bar accords with my way of thinking and feeling and that is a torture for me and a lasting source of sorrow."

Like his father, Paul had scant control of his temper and his brothers were just the same. When all three were together, the rowing was always at its worst. They yelled at one another, sometimes for whole afternoons, moving from room to room as they did so, and as much as Mrs. Wittgenstein liked the idea of seeing them all together the reality of it strained her nerves. Paul generally was held to blame.

Like Ludwig, Paul was at his happiest when he was busy and he loved especially to be away from home. In the year-long wait to rejoin the army he performed several concerts outside Vienna. Labor's concerto had opened doors for him, and his playing was now regarded by the authorities as a source of inspiration to flagging morale. Not all crippled soldiers were so lucky. Those who returned from the front with their faces shot to pieces were held behind locked hospital gates where the public was not able to see them. Paul, though, was encouraged to vaunt his fighting spirit, and in the early months of 1917 he performed with striking success to audiences of troops, invalids and steel workers at Wroclaw, Kladno, Teplitz, Brno and Prague. On at least three of these occasions he played Labor's new piece, and the delighted composer started on a second left-handed piano concerto ready to perform in the summer.

In March 1917 Paul made his Berlin debut at the Beethoven-Saal. The German capital was at that time one of the major musical centers of the world and Berliners' appet.i.te for music was insatiable. By 1939 the city boasted no fewer than 81 orchestras, 200 chamber groups and over 600 choirs. To be well received as a concert pianist in Berlin and Vienna was to have succeeded upon the world stage. Paul had not been back to Berlin since his years of banking apprentices.h.i.+p and had mixed feelings about the place. He had enjoyed the music, but derided the boardinghouses on the Kurfurstendamm and the Tauentzienstra.s.se as "abominable places full of cheap knickknacks, cheap paintings, unliveable and overused at the same time; middle cla.s.s in the worst sense of the word."

The hall, which he expected to be half empty due to sloppy publicity, was in fact full and the audience discerning and appreciative. On his return to Vienna, he was grilled by Hermine and his mother for news of how it had gone, but his pathological need for privacy denied them the intelligence they sought and it took five days to glean from his chirpy manner that it had all been a huge success. Hermine was overjoyed on her brother's behalf. The Berliners, she felt, had judged Paul entirely on the quality of his playing, unlike the dreadful Viennese who were always more interested in the stump of his right arm than his music. "And that is really something!" she said.

ENDGAME

The death on November 21, 1916, of Emperor Franz Joseph served only to dampen Austrian morale. He had ruled for sixty-eight years and, despite his aversions to innovation and his much derided obsession with petty court protocol, the longevity of his reign had lent him an air of authority that had grown with familiarity and custom. He symbolized perhaps more than he achieved but at least he guided Austria and sixteen other subject states through a long period of peace and stability. Stefan Zweig called the time in which he grew up before the First World War "The Golden Age of Security" and few in 1916 could remember an Austria that was any different; but by November of that year the people had grown war-weary and dispirited. No amount of trumpet noise or funeral pomp could rouse them from their negative stupors or restore to them their previous sense of national pride. Everything the army had fought to protect and uphold now seemed irretrievably lost. The comfortable, immutable, Epicurean, easygoing life of the Austrian people, ruffled already by the storm of two years' war, was now, upon the death of their octogenarian emperor, transformed into the "world of yesterday."

The Wittgensteins, though broadly monarchist in temperament, were not aristocrats nor did they move in court circles. Some of Karl's descendants believe that he was offered the n.o.bility "von" but declined it on ethical grounds. In truth he felt underrated by the Austrian establishment and was greatly excited by the smallest attention he could get from the Hapsburgs. He was delighted that the Emperor once noticed his good seat when riding and put great store on a royal visit to one of his factories. When his boys were young Karl would pick them up by their ears. If they kept quiet he shouted "Hochgeboren!" (well bred!), but if they cried or squealed in pain he yelled "Nichtgeboren!" (lower cla.s.s--literally " notborn").

If Hermine and Paul felt the pa.s.sing of an era at the death of their emperor they did not express it. They did, however, make a conscious effort to disconnect from their past by redecorating and restructuring their two palaces at the Alleega.s.se and at Neuwaldegg. Hermine hoped that the new designs would help her mother "loosen her ties to Papa," but in the end all the siblings were pleased to rid these places of certain decorative vestiges of Karl's overbearing personality.

At court the Emperor was succeeded by his grand-nephew, Archduke Karl von Hapsburg-Lothringen, known during his brief reign as Emperor Charles I, who immediately tried to sue for peace, but who by the end of 1917 had succeeded only in ceding most of Austria's military command to the Germans. In the meantime, on the eastern front, his dilapidated and dispirited army managed by a miracle to win the war against Russia. This had more to do with the state of internal Russian politics than the superiority of Austrian arms. In February a revolution had deposed the Tsarist regime, and the new provisional government, in order to bolster its popularity at home, had ordered a great offensive against the whole Galician sector. After ten days of spectacular territorial gain, the exhausted Russian soldiers suddenly lost their enthusiasm and refused to fight on. The Austro-German armies routed them in a fierce counterattack that forced them to retreat to positions 150 miles east. This catastrophic humiliation led many in Moscow to call for the war to be immediately ended and when the head of the provisional government, Alexander Kerensky, refused to capitulate, chaos ensued. Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians started calling for their independence from Russia, while the powerful Bolsheviks, who favored an end to the war, quickly seized control in the so-called October Revolution. Two months later, on December 15, Lenin's envoy Leon Trotsky effectively ended his country's partic.i.p.ation in the war by signing an armistice with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk.

These great events inevitably made an impact on the lives of each of the Wittgenstein brothers. Ludwig, during the July offensive, had retreated with his Austrian comrades from a forward position at Bukovina to the western side of the Lomnica River, and when the Russian spirit suddenly withered and the Austrian rout began, he joined in the counterattack a.s.sisting in the recapture first of Czernowitz and then of Bojan at the end of August--actions for which he was once again decorated. When the Russians were finally withdrawn from the war, the Austrian forces were able to turn their attentions from the eastern front to the south, and in the spring of 1918 Ludwig was posted to the Alpine front near Asiago in Vicenza.

Oblivious to the threat of execution, Paul was determined to rejoin the war from the moment he returned to Vienna in November 1915 and, like his brother, demanded a posting to a place where things would be most dangerous. Unlike Ludwig, however, his motives in wis.h.i.+ng to return to action were entirely patriotic and had nothing to do with spiritual self-improvement. When he was awarded his medals in March 1916, Paul was ordered into retirement with an annual pension of 1,696 kronen, but he was having none of it. He was determined to fight on, and after a long period of lobbying generals at his club in Vienna and twisting the arm of his red-nosed retired uncle, Cavalry General Josef von Siebert, he finally received his call-up papers in August 1917. His mother and sisters were in general agreement that he had made the right decision, though Hermine hoped he would not be sent too close to the front. "One hardly knows what is the best thing to wish for Paul," she wrote. "What another wound would mean for him now that he is only half a man hardly bears speaking about, when you consider how pa.s.sionately he loves playing the piano. He lives only for it and through it." When orders were sent for him to report to army headquarters at Villach in Carinthia he was "somewhat put out that it was nothing more dangerous."

For several weeks Paul was deputed to minor office tasks at Her-magor, a small town to the west of Villach, which made him restless and irritable, but from late September 1917 he was a.s.signed to Fourth Army Command Headquarters at Wladimir Wolynski in the western Ukraine, where he was given employment in the communications office. Here he discovered that he could operate with one hand the Hughes type-printing telegraph machine, which had a small keyboard very similar to that of a piano, consisting of fourteen white and fourteen black keys. Paul's fellow officers were astounded to find that he could type messages on it with one hand faster than they could manage with two.

At the end of February 1918 he was granted several weeks' leave as the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army, under its competent but incapacitated commander Karl Graf von Kirchbach auf Lauterbach, was being dissolved. At home Hermine found him "very pleasant and approachable." For once there was no friction between Paul and Kurt--at least she did not notice it--but, as she told Ludwig, "It was a good thing that your more finely tuned apparatus was not present--it would most certainly have detected a slight tension and have inflamed it as a result--the two brothers are so different."

Returning to duty, Paul was posted to the fortress town of Riva on the northern sh.o.r.es of Lake Garda as adjutant to the fifty-five-year-old General Anton von Schiesser. Though it was captured by the Italians in November 1918, Schiesser's courageous and determined defense of the town (for which he was subsequently enn.o.bled) made him a national hero.

In retirement at Innsbruck he was saluted as he walked the streets and when he died in 1926 a plaque celebrating his deeds at Riva was appended to the house of his birth at Schenkenfelden. An official army report on Schiesser from 1918 describes him as "a very efficient, lively and energetic general. Faithful in his duties ... an athletic and strong-willed commander."

Paul's posting to Riva brought all three Wittgenstein brothers to within a hundred miles of one another on the Italian front, but this did not last for long. For some unknown reason Paul was discharged from the military in August 1918. He was determined to serve, and after the war took pride in his military record, so it is inconceivable that he was dismissed, or left for any dishonorable reason. Ill health may have had something to do with it for, in the middle of July while on leave with his family at Neuwaldegg, he collapsed with a high fever that lasted several weeks. It is possible that by the time he was recovered the situation at Riva was too chaotic for him to return and that no new position presented itself in the few months of the war that remained.

It is equally possible that Paul's illness (a violent influenza) was the same virulent strain, known as Spanish flu, that would go on to claim more than twenty million lives in a Europe-wide pandemic. The disease was officially acknowledged to have reached Vienna in October, when among those killed were the twenty-eight-year-old artist Egon Schiele and his pregnant wife Edith. Not everyone who contracted the disease died from it, and it was soon discovered that a transfusion of blood from someone who had survived the disease was the best cure. In the worst cases a victim's face would turn blue, he would cough blood and soon his lungs would be swamped by his own body fluids. Edith Schiele's first symptoms appeared on October 26 and she died on the 28th, while her husband, nursing her over those three days, got a blue face on the 28th and died on the 31st. That same month five servants in the Wittgenstein household contracted the virus. Mrs. Wittgenstein and Hermine were spared.

At the same time as Schiele and his wife were dying in Vienna, Corporal Adolf Hitler, fighting the British at Ypres, was rendered blind and speechless by a chlorine-gas attack on his line. "When this happened," he told an interviewer in 1923, "I saw my future. These questions flashed through my mind: 'You never feared death--Why? You are still alive when others around you fell--Why?' And I told myself, because fate has singled you out to accomplish something. I resolved to consecrate my life to my country--to the task of driving out the enemies within her borders."

On the Italian front, meanwhile, Austro-Hungarian troops were fast becoming dejected and defeatist. They had lost 100,000 soldiers trying to force their way into northern Italy at Lombardy, Trentino and across the lower Piave. On the western front the Germans too were struggling and could ill afford to send troops to their aid. South of the river, the Italian commander General Armando Diaz planned a forward offensive of five armies that would divide the Austrian forces in two, by advancing in a line from Monte Grappa to the mouth of the Piave. By October 27, with the help of a British corps under Lord Cavan, Diaz had secured a strategic foothold on the left bank of the river. This success caused mutiny to break out among the Austrian ranks and on the 28th the Austrian High Command ordered a general retreat. This gave the Italians the confidence to surge forward and succeed in their aim of splitting the Austrian army. On November 3 an armistice was signed at Villa Giusti near Padua. With twenty-four hours between signature and the agreement officially taking effect, the Italians continued rampaging forward in order to seize as much land as possible in advance of territorial negotiations. Many Austrians, unaware that an armistice had been signed, pointlessly lost their lives defending against the Italian attack. Thirty-eight thousand casualties were reported on the Italian side, but 300,000 Austro-Hungarians were taken prisoner, of whom General Anton von Schiesser was one and Ludwig Wittgenstein another. It was somewhere in the middle of all this chaos that Kurt Wittgenstein met his end.

n.o.body from the Wittgenstein family in Vienna seems to have known of Kurt's death until sometime in December. The first that Ludwig knew of it was from a letter that his mother wrote to him at his POW camp near Como on December 27.

My dearest son,After the dreadful anxiety we were suffering for your sake, your card dated 6th November which we received on 6th December did us infinite good; and today's news by telegraph is doubly cheering because it is up to date. You can't imagine how overjoyed we were. There was general delight involving the whole family. Whatever shall we do when we expect to see you back here? We are well and all is well with the Salzers. But we have suffered a severe loss. Our dear Kurt fell in the very last days of the war at the end of October. I embrace you, my dearest beloved son, with the tenderest love and my only wish is that you should remain in good health and that you may return home in the not too distant future. With her every thought, your mother is with you today.

Clearly there had been worry in Vienna that Ludwig, who had been out of contact since December 6, might also have been killed or even have killed himself, for Hermine wrote to him at the same time as her mother: "I'm indescribably happy to know that you're alive! Kurt fell on 27th November. Mama very distressed but brave and cheered by your news. All in good health here; also good news from the s...o...b..roughs, nothing but good news to report...."

It may be noticed that Hermine and her mother each give different dates for Kurt's "fall." Mrs. Wittgenstein says "end of October" and Hermine "27th November." In a further letter dated January 10, 1919, Hermine writes, "Kurt fell on 27th September, it's very sad." The most probable date for the death is the end of October as Mrs. Wittgenstein originally a.s.serted, most likely on the 27th, the day that Lord Cavan and General Diaz secured their bridgehead on the Piave and the Austrians started to mutiny. On the Italian front the fighting was over by November 27, so Hermine's date must be wrong.

Perhaps more interesting than the day Kurt died are questions as to why and how it happened. In her memoirs Hermine wrote, "My brother Kurt shot himself without visible reason on a retreat from Italy in the last days of the First World War." This ignores the fact that explanations for his suicide were sought at the time and that various conflicting stories have since filtered down through different branches of the family. One version that Paul gave to his friend Marga Deneke in the 1920s was written up in 1961 shortly after his death. This then may loosely serve as Paul's version: A special poignancy marks Kurt Wittgenstein's death for he was safely installed in an office in the USA but, supported by his family, he deployed every available means to get himself recalled for military service in Austria. An army order commanded him to expose his battalion to complete annihilation before a battery of enemy guns. Knowing that no conceivable military advantage was involved, he disobeyed the order. Then fear of a court martial preyed upon his mind. It became too much for him and he killed himself. This was on the eve of surrender in 1918. In the confusion of these days there would have been no inquiries. The waste of it all was bitter.

This version, however, conflicts with that of Gretl's son, Ji s...o...b..r-ough, who was told (possibly by his mother) that Kurt had shot himself, like many other Austrian officers, in the twenty-four-hour period after the signing of the armistice of November 3 because he refused to be taken prisoner by the Italians. If this were indeed the case then the story may have been changed to save Ludwig's blushes, since he had accepted surrender to the Italians and had himself been taken prisoner at the same time.

Another version recorded by Paul's daughter Johanna, following her interviews with family members in Austria in the 1980s, broadly supports the Deneke account, adding a little more detail. Kurt, she says, was ordered to lead his men across the River Piave. There followed a heated exchange with his commanding officer in which he shouted: "I am not offering my men in vain. The war is already lost." At that point he drew his pistol from its holster and threatened the officer that if he did not remove himself immediately from his sight he would be shot. The astonished commander withdrew, loudly hissing threats about a court martial. Kurt then summoned his men, instructed them all to go home, and minutes later shot himself.

A fourth version suggests that it was the men, not Kurt, who rebelled; that it was he who ordered them to action and they who refused to obey by deserting him on the field. Standing alone with an 11mm Ga.s.ser revolver in his hand, with no men to support him and in the face of a heavy Italian bombardment, he was forced to take a rushed decision between three galling alternatives: to desert with his men; to fight on alone and be shot or captured by the enemy; or to put a bullet through his head. He chose the last, dispatching himself in a sudden burst of fury.

Perhaps it is of little matter now which of the above scenarios comes closest to the historical truth for in November 1918, as far as the surviving members of his family were concerned, Kurt--childish, light-hearted, frivolous Kurt--was (for the time being at least) the family hero. Like so many of the eight and a half million soldier victims of the Great War he was given no funeral and his remains lie today at some undiscovered, unmarked spot somewhere along the banks of the Piave. To Paul, a fourth son suddenly finding himself head of the family, to Ludwig incarcerated at a camp in Italy, to Gretl, exiled in Switzerland, and to Mrs. Wittgenstein and her daughters Hermine and Helene at home in Vienna, the news of Kurt's death recalled from within suppressed memories of unspeakable tragedy; but this time at least there was a difference, for with the bitter news came also a faint rea.s.surance: that, unlike the wretched fates of Hans and Rudolf, Kurt's suicide could be counted as an "honourable death."

Paul and Ludwig's belief in his heroism never wavered, but Her-mine's, for some unknown reason, did. In her fairytale memoirs many pages are devoted to effusive praise of her worthy aunts and uncles, to family connections and to her beloved Rosalie. There is a whole chapter also on Ludwig, whom she describes as "the most interesting and worthwhile of my brothers;" she leaves a fond and puzzled description of Hans in youth but says next to nothing about Paul or Rudolf. Her portrait of Kurt is squeezed to a single paragraph in which she portrays him as a "relaxed" person, a "typical rich bachelor without serious duties" with a "harmless, cheerful disposition" and a "natural and delightful musicality" who, despite all this, appeared to carry "the germ of disgust for life within himself." No mention of any heroism in 1918, not a whisper; if anything she deplored his suicide as an act of weakness. To her brothers' intense irritation she frequently compared them unfavourably to their father. "Papa would not have done it this way; if Papa were only here he would have ..." Did Kurt, she mused, "finally die from a lack of the 'hard must,' a conception my father so much wanted to impart to his sons; or was it simply a lack of endurance which seized the upper hand at one moment, and certainly not the most difficult one in the war?" This she never knew.

Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strange soundeth the precept: "Die at the right time!" Die at the right time: so teacheth Zarathustra.

AFTERMATH

By mid-November 1918 the fighting was at last over. In defense of empire two million Austro-Hungarian soldiers had lost their lives in violent clashes with Russians, Italians, Serbs and Rumanians across a front that ran from the Alpine barrier of northern Italy to the undulating landscape of central western Poland. More than two million had been imprisoned in Russia and Siberia, and three million severely wounded. The mighty monarchy in whose honor these actions had been fought had collapsed and disintegrated, and with it Austria's long epoch of grandeur had come to a sorry end. On November 11, Charles I, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia, relinquished "every partic.i.p.ation in the administration of the state" and, four months later, without formal abdication, departed by train with his black-clad wife, Empress Zita, for the Swiss border station at Feldkirch and a life in exile. His short reign had been spent in pursuit of peace. He was the only leader of a belligerent state to ban the use of poison gas. In 1921 he was deported to the Atlantic island of Madeira where, a year later, he died of pneumonia.

With the demise of the last emperor a new era was born in Austria as the once-proud state transformed itself into a small, weak and unstable republic. None of the new political parties was in favor of national independence, as everyone feared that the country would be too weak to survive on its own. Some, like Adolf Hitler, agitated for Anschluss Anschluss (connection with Germany) even though this had been specifically prohibited under the terms of the armistice. Others, like Paul Wittgenstein, hoped for a restoration of the old order, but the Czechs, the Poles, the Southern Slavs and the Hungarians recoiled at the suggestion of a return to Hapsburg rule and rejected economic union with Austria on the basis that the country was now too poor. (connection with Germany) even though this had been specifically prohibited under the terms of the armistice. Others, like Paul Wittgenstein, hoped for a restoration of the old order, but the Czechs, the Poles, the Southern Slavs and the Hungarians recoiled at the suggestion of a return to Hapsburg rule and rejected economic union with Austria on the basis that the country was now too poor.

Vienna, once the hub of the monarchy's free-trade area and the heart of a spreading European empire, was caught unprepared for the turn of events. The old railway system upon which the Hapsburg economy had depended ground to a halt as each newly formed state claimed owners.h.i.+p of the rolling stock. Food and raw materials, once supplied to the Viennese from Hungary, were stopped by the new administration in Budapest to extract better trade terms in the future and to avenge past wrongs. The coal that had once been brought to Vienna by rail from the Bohemian lands was similarly embargoed by the new Czechoslovak regime in Prague. Many Viennese lost their lives in the harsh winter of 1918-19 and starvation in the city affected most of its two million inhabitants. Within one year of the war's end, 96 percent of Austrian children were officially cla.s.sed as "undernourished." In the streets the gaunt faces of a ravenous population cast a darkening pall over the city's spirit as the black-net widow's veil came to be recognized as the sign of a touting prost.i.tute.

In the countryside the peasant farmer, circ.u.mventing a government law of maximum tariffs, sold his highly prized bread, milk and eggs secretly to the man from the town for an extortionate sum, but when that same peasant arrived at the shops, gleeful, with his fist full of cash, hoping to buy tools, pots, hammers, scythes and kettles, he was dismayed to discover that the shopkeeper had been forced to quadruple prices in order to pay for his bread, milk and eggs. In the feverish atmosphere of hyperinflation the burgher and the peasant soon came to an understanding that money didn't work and that goods must be traded by exchange for other goods. Antiques, leatherbound books, jewelry and works of art were thus pa.s.sed from the bourgeois to the peasant in exchange for a weekly food ration. During the war the value of the Austrian krone had fallen sixteen-fold due to the government's extravagant printing of banknotes to pay its bills, and by August 1922 paper money was virtually worthless as consumer prices rose to a level 14,000 times higher than they had been before the war.

With Kurt's death shares in his steel plant at Judenburg went to his business partner Sebastian Danner, while his properties in Austria and his portion of the family trust was divided by his siblings. One million kronen was left to charity. Paul, as executor of the will, had the idea to spend it all on garden allotments for the poor. Driven by his conviction that cultivation of the soil was a healing occupation, that it would improve the moral and physical well-being of the Viennese, help them fight starvation and offer a sensible alternative to Bolshevism, Paul encountered many difficulties. Buying the land and resolving how it should be distributed proved to be insurmountable problems, and he eventually handed the million to the worthy burghers of the city council, who failed to accomplish anything with it.

In Switzerland Gretl had complained of feeling lonely, cut off from her family and vexed at having no useful occupation or outlet for her patriotism. In point of fact she had made many friends, one of whom was Napoleon's great-grand-niece Princess Marie of Greece, who lived for a while in the same hotel in Luzern. Like many of Jerome and Gretl's friends, Princess Marie had connections in high diplomatic and political circles. She was a one-time mistress of the French Prime Minister Aristide Briand, and later introduced Gretl to her hero Sigmund Freud, from whom she had originally sought advice about her frigidity. Wherever Jerome and Gretl found themselves, in Vienna, Berlin, London or Bern, they tended to make friends with the American amba.s.sador or American consul there. These ties--which have the faint whiff of espionage about them--were later to prove extremely useful.

One of the s...o...b..roughs' friends in Switzerland was the American Envoy and Minister Plenipotentiary Pleasant Stovall, with whom Gretl pleaded for help in sending a special train from Switzerland to Vienna containing 161,472 cans ($10,000 worth) of condensed milk for the starving children of the old empire. At first American officials were opposed to any activity within the neutral states that might benefit Germany or Austria, and Jerome berated Gretl for drawing attention to herself by trying. U.S. diplomats were suspicious of the s...o...b..roughs' close friends.h.i.+p with Princess Marie of Greece, but when Gretl and Jerome a.s.sured them that they would move out of the Hotel National, they came at length to be trusted. The U.S. administration had reasons of its own for wanting to feed the starving Austrians, and the U.S. Legation in Switzerland eventually agreed to offer Gretl a helping hand. The condensed milk that her money bought was theoretically enough to keep 4,000 children nourished for a month, but the Austrian authorities never acknowledged receipt and one wonders, in an age of pillage and acute starvation, whether it ever reached its intended destination.

By August 1919, much to the disapproval of her brother Paul, Gretl was appointed special representative of the American Relief Administration, or ARA, a U.S. government organization originally set up to supply the Allies with surplus American food under the banner "Food Will Win the War." As soon as she had returned to Vienna, Gretl met the ARA's chairman, Herbert Hoover (later thirty-first U.S. President), who was seeking to distribute 500,000 tons of food among the starving population of Austria. To many, the operation may have seemed nothing more than a pleasant, altruistic, humanitarian gesture by a conquering nation toward its recently defeated enemy, but the scheme was in reality motivated in Was.h.i.+ngton by the unspoken political aim of halting the advance of communist revolution from the east. According to White House theory a starving population was more likely to embrace a socialist ideology than a well-nourished one. So when, in December 1919, Gretl was sent by the ARA to the United States to help raise money for Austrian famine relief, she was (wittingly or unwittingly) operating as an American government agent in a covert U.S. operation to stem the spread of European Bolshevism.

FAMILY TENSIONS

Early in 1938 Ludwig, chatting with one of his Cambridge disciples, Theodore Redpath, asked him: "Have you had any tragedies in your life?"

"It depends what you mean by tragedy," Redpath replied.

"Well I don't mean the death of your grandmother at the age of eighty-five," said Ludwig. "I mean suicides, madness or quarrels."

By this definition Ludwig's own life was a tragic one and so too were the lives of all the Wittgensteins. As the suicides and madness increased in the family, so too did the quarreling. Ludwig and Gretl were rivals. He resented her because she was controlling and patronizing, she resented him for being disrespectful and ungovernable. When the Palais at Neuwaldegg was being cleared of Karl's influence, Gretl had stipulated that Ludwig should have no hand in the redecoration as his intransigent tastes were "not even the best of a rotten bargain." In Switzerland Gretl had been touched by the long letters Paul had written her with his left hand, but even before her return to Vienna in June 1919 she found a cause to quarrel bitterly with him.

Paul's mistake was to have authorized the investment of a large part of the family's domestic fortune in government war bonds without consulting her. Although most of Gretl's wealth was invested in the American stock market, she had inherited a share of Kurt's estate, which remained in Vienna, superintended by Paul as nominal head of the family. The value of the bonds plummeted to such an extent that, by the time Gretl got to hear about it, they were worth less than the coupons would have been worth as paper. Most of the Wittgensteins' great domestic fortune was irretrievably lost. Gretl was infuriated by the waste, but this, she claimed, was the least of her concerns. Paul had been "utterly thoughtless," for allowing the story to get into the newspapers, which she feared would get her and her husband, as American citizens, into serious trouble with the U.S. authorities. At a time when she was desperately trying to prove her loyal American credentials to the diplomats in Bern, the last thing she wanted was for them to discover that she and her family had been financially supporting the enemy from neutral Switzerland during the war. In a rage she wrote to Hermine: "Good old Paul has managed one piece of hare-brained nonsense after another, putting on Papa's airs and graces, and without a thought in his head has put me in the most terrible position." Jerome meanwhile was pacing around their Swiss hotel bedroom bellowing like a buffalo: "It is no way to do business!"

"And he is right!" Gretl insisted. "And I of course will always take Jerome's side."

Relations between Gretl and Paul were not soothed by her return to Vienna in June. Jerome had not wanted to go but was hoping to travel directly from Switzerland to America instead. They did as she insisted, but moods were fraught when they got there. After an absence of two years she wrote in her diary: "Everything in the Alleega.s.se was just as before ... Big quarrel with Paul about politics in the evening." Paul had criticized her condensed-milk charity operation and deplored her working for the Americans. Politically she was anti-Bolshevik but in favor nevertheless of the new left-wing socialist republic. "The Austrians are desperate," she complained, "they preferred the old sloppiness to the new disorder but the new disorder contains new seeds unlike the old one ..." Earlier she had written to her sister Hermine: "I have always had red tendencies and now I have become even redder. I am afraid that I think in a different way than you all do and do not know if I shall be sensible enough to hold my tongue." Tongue-holding was never Gretl's virtue, and her outspoken "red tendencies" grated against Paul's staunch right-wing monarchism. But politics alone could not be blamed for the Wittgensteins' failure to get along with one another for whatever the subject of conversation--art, music, books, money, personal plans--they always found cause to quarrel, and when all five siblings were together, things were at their most fractious.

It is not in the nature of us 5 siblings to be social together [Ludwig wrote to Hermine]. You are able to have a conversation with me or Gretl, but it is difficult for the three of us together. Paul and Gretl even less. Helene fits well with any one of us but it would never occur to you, Helene and me to come together as a group. We are all rather hard, sharp-edged blocks who find it difficult to fit together snugly ... we are only sociable with each other when we are diluted by friends.

The siblings' social incompatibility forced them to use the Palais as a hotel, avoiding where possible communal activity, bagging rooms for private conclaves with their own invited guests. One such, a woman invited to stay by Paul, remembered the tension in the Alleega.s.se when, after lunch, Ludwig asked his his guest, Marie Baumayer, to play the piano for him after lunch. The two of them withdrew to an adjacent room. guest, Marie Baumayer, to play the piano for him after lunch. The two of them withdrew to an adjacent room.

Hearing the music in the next-door room made me long to listen more closely, but I gathered "Lucki" did not tolerate intruders. Perhaps least of all someone who was Paul's friend. Patriotism and family pride held the Wittgensteins together, but each brother and sister kept firmly to his own ideas.

Ludwig, along with hundreds of thousands of Austrian soldiers, was held captive in Italy long after the armistice. The Italians used their prisoners as bargaining chips in negotiation to gain disputed territory north of the Piave. Nor did the cease-fire do much to end Ludwig's personal quest for absolution. Even in a prisoner-of-war camp he maintained a Christlike determination to push himself through every conceivable test, rejecting officer privileges and demanding of his guards that he be transferred from the officers' prison to a nearby rank-and-file camp where a typhoid epidemic had broken out. When well-connected friends in Switzerland wrote to officials at the Vatican begging their intercession to release Ludwig (on the compa.s.sionate grounds that his mother had already lost three sons and had only one cripple left at home) he was brought before a medical tribunal, where he made it plain that he would not be released before any one of his fellow prisoners. His moral drive, intense seriousness, arresting looks and personal magnetism attracted disciples in prison camp as on the battlefield. One of them, Franz Parak, who was held with Ludwig at Monte Ca.s.sino, wors.h.i.+pped the young philosopher, greeting his every statement with sighs of adulation. This irritated Ludwig, who claimed that the soldier reminded him of his mother and, to Parak's bitter regret, never wished to see him again after their release.

Arriving in Vienna at the end of August 1919, Ludwig went straight to his bank to tell them that he did not want his money anymore and that his intention was to rid himself of all of it. The manager was alarmed--"financial suicide!" he called it--and Herr Trenkler, manager of the family a.s.sets, threw his arms in the air when Ludwig demanded that he draw up the necessary papers so that not a single bra.s.s h.e.l.ler remained in his possession. On the same day Ludwig had written to a friend: "as far as my state of mind is concerned I am not very well." He was clearly in a wretched state but his resolve was adamantine and no one could deflect it. When he told his family what he planned to do they too were extremely worried on his behalf, though Hermine was more appalled by his new choice of profession than by his scheme of self-impoverishment. "A man with your philosophically trained mind working as an elementary school master is like a precision instrument being used to open a wooden crate," she said. He is said to have answered: "And you remind me of someone looking through a closed window unable to explain the strange movements of a pa.s.ser-by, unaware that a storm is raging outside and that the person is only with great effort keeping himself on his feet."

Tolstoy's influence lay behind Ludwig's decisions to discard his fortune and take up teaching, for the great Russian novelist had fifty years earlier cast aside his own aristocratic fortunes for a life of ascetic self-denial and humble toil. Jesus's injunction to renounce wealth is given in The Gospel in Brief as The Gospel in Brief as a commandment in the fourth chapter--"Do not lay up store on earth. On earth the worm consumes and rust eats, and thieves steal." Curiously Tolstoy's redaction did not include any of the original Biblical pa.s.sages in which Jesus requires that a person's wealth be handed specifically to the poor. The most famous of these appears in the Gospel of St. Matthew as the story of a rich young man to whom Jesus says: "If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; then come follow me." a commandment in the fourth chapter--"Do not lay up store on earth. On earth the worm consumes and rust eats, and thieves steal." Curiously Tolstoy's redaction did not include any of the original Biblical pa.s.sages in which Jesus requires that a person's wealth be handed specifically to the poor. The most famous of these appears in the Gospel of St. Matthew as the story of a rich young man to whom Jesus says: "If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; then come follow me."

Ludwig decided to give his fortune to his three rich siblings, Paul, Hermine and Helene. Gretl was excluded from the handout on the basis that she was much richer than the others because most of her fortune, safely invested on the American stock market, had not been affected by the deleterious forces of Austrian hyperinflation. This, however, was not made clear at the time. Hermine, for one, believed that Gretl had been cut out simply because she and Ludwig were on bad terms. It has been suggested that he gave his fortune to his siblings (instead of the poor) for reasons of convenience, since much of it was bound in shared real estate. This may be partly the case, but it was also true that he believed money to be corrupting and that since his siblings had so much of it already, they, he reasoned, could hardly be corrupted any further.

The row that ensued about Ludwig's money affected the whole family. Karl's eldest brother, Uncle Paul, was furious with those of Ludwig's siblings who had accepted his money and accused them of taking advantage of their younger brother who was clearly sick. They ought, he insisted, to have laid some secret fund aside in case he changed his mind and wanted his money back. Hermine, who admitted doing "everything to fulfil Ludwig's wishes down to the smallest detail," argued that her greater knowledge of her brother's state of mind left no alternative but to do as he asked. Uncle Paul, who loved his own possessions so greatly that he left instructions for several of them to be buried with him in his coffin, neither could nor would try to understand his nephews and nieces and in high moral dudgeon cut himself off from those he accused of having profited by Ludwig's madness.

ANTI-SEMITICS

The threat of a Bolshevik takeover in Vienna felt very real. The Russian Revolution according to Paul "began with the Jews ... Under the Tsarist regime they were suppressed, and at least the poor among them have reaped benefits from the overthrow and, as in Vienna, they compose a large part of the leaders.h.i.+p." There were many Jews in Vienna before the war--10 percent of the population according to some estimates--and their numbers were greatly increased during the conflict and in the months that followed it. Mult.i.tudes of Galician Jews had sought refuge in the city from the Russian invasion of Poland and in 1919 a further influx poured in from Hungary after the fall of the Jewish Bolshevist leader, Bela Kun. Kun's short hold on power was repressive and on his expulsion all Hungarian Jews--not just those involved in his government--were subject to brutal reprisals. Many of them, including Kun himself, fled to Austria. There and in Berlin he attempted, without success, to foment a Marxist revolution. Kun's days ended in the USSR, where he was murdered by Stalin's a.s.sa.s.sins.

The arrival in Vienna of Kun and his communist plotters did nothing to allay suspicions among the Viennese that the Bolshevik movement was Jewish led and that it might, at any moment, seize the reins of power in Austria. This fear led to a sharp increase in anti-Semitism in Vienna.

Is there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness in which at least one Jew does not partic.i.p.ate [Hitler asked in Mein Kampf]? Mein Kampf]? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovers, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew often blinded by the sudden light. On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovers, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew often blinded by the sudden light.

Hitler claimed in his autobiography of 1924 that, although he had been aware as a young man of the "moral pestilence" of the Jewish hold over the press, art, literature, the theater and white-slave trafficking ("It was worse than the Black Plague of long ago"), it was not until he discovered the extent of Jewish partic.i.p.ation in the political life of Vienna that a Damascene conversion took place within him. "In the face of that revelation the scales fell from my eyes," he wrote. "My long inner struggle was at an end ... The knowledge [that the Jews were responsible for communism] was the occasion of the greatest inner revolution that I had yet experienced. From being a soft-hearted cosmopolitan I became an out-and-out anti-Semite."