The House of Wittgenstein : a family at war Part 1

The House of Wittgenstein : a family at war.

by Alexander Waugh.

VIENNESE DEBUT

Vienna is described--over-described--as a city of paradox; but for those who do not know this or have never been there, it may be pictured as a capriccio drawn from the flat sound bites of the Austrian Tourist Board, a place defined by its rich cream cakes, Mozart mugs and T-shirts, New Year's waltzes, grand, bestatued buildings, wide streets, old fur-coated women, electric trams, and Lipizzaner stallions. The Vienna of the early twentieth century was not marketed in this way. In those days it was not marketed at all. Maria Hornor Lansdale's once-indispensable guide of 1902 draws a portrait of the Hapsburg capital that is at once grubbier and more dynamic than anything suggested in our modern guidebooks. Her book describes parts of the Innere Stadt or city center as "dark, dirty and gloomy" and of the Jewish quarter she wrote: "The interiors of the houses are unspeakably squalid. As one ascends the stair the rickety banister sticks to one's fingers, and the walls on either side ooze. Entering a small dark room the ceiling is covered with soot and the furniture crowded close together."

A German might step onto a Viennese streetcar and find himself unable to exchange a word with any of his fellow pa.s.sengers, for the city then was home to a rapidly expanding population of Magyars, Rumanians, Italians, Poles, Serbs, Czechs, Slovenes, Slovaks, Croats, Ruthenians, Dalmatians, Istrians and Bosnians, all of whom lived together apparently in happiness. An American diplomat describing the city in 1898 wrote: A man who had been but a short time in Vienna, may himself be of pure German stock, but his wife will be Galician or Polish, his cook Bohemian, his children's nurse Dalmatian, his man a Servian, his coachman a Slav, his barber a Magyar, and his son's tutor a Frenchman. A majority of the administration's employees are Zechs, and the Hungarians have most influence in the affairs of the government. No, Vienna is not not a German city! a German city!

The Viennese were regarded abroad as a good-natured, easygoing, and highly cultured people. By day the middle cla.s.s congregated in cafes, spending hours in conversation over a single cup of coffee and a gla.s.s of water. Here newspapers and magazines were provided in all languages. In the evenings they dressed for dancing, for the opera, the theater or the concert hall. They were fanatical about these entertainments, unforgiving of the poor player who forgot his lines or the singer who sang sharp, while idolizing or deifying their favorites. The Viennese writer Stefan Zweig remembered that pa.s.sion from his youth: "Whereas in politics, in administration, or in morals, everything went on rather comfortably and one was affably tolerant of all that was slovenly and overlooked many an infringement, in artistic matters there was no pardon; here the honour of the city was at stake."

ON DECEMBER 1, 1913, there was cold sunshine over most of Austria. By the evening a mist had spread from the northern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains down to the rolling hills and verdant lowlands of the Alpine Foreland. In Vienna, the air was still, the streets and pavements quiet and the temperature uncommonly cold. For the twenty-six-year-old Paul Wittgenstein this was a day of high excitement and excruciating tension.

Clammy fingers and cold hands figure in every pianist's worst dream--the slightest sheen from the glands of the pads can cause the fingers to slip or "glitch," accidentally hitting two adjacent keys at once. The sweaty-fingered pianist is slave to his caution. If his hands are too cold, the finger muscles will stiffen. Coldness in the bones does not drive sweat from the skin and in the worst instances the fingers may be immobilized by cold while remaining slippery with sweat. Many concert artists spend a nervous hour or two before a winter recital with their hands plunged into a basin of hot water.

Paul's concert debut was scheduled to start at 7:30 p.m. in the Grosser Musikvereinsaal, a hallowed place, of near perfect acoustic, where Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler heard many of their works performed for the first time. It is from here--the "Golden Hall"--that the famous New Year orgy of waltzes and polkas is annually broadcast to the world. Paul did not expect his debut to sell out. The auditorium had a seating capacity of 1,654, with 300 standing places. It was a Monday night, he was unknown, and the program he had chosen to perform was unfamiliar to the Viennese public. He was, however, well acquainted with techniques for papering a house. As a boy he had been sent by his mother to buy 200 tickets for a concert in which a family friend was playing the violin. The man at the ticket office dismissed him as a tout, shouting in his face: "If it's tickets for resale you're wanting you can go elsewhere!" Paul returned to his mother, begging her to appoint someone else to the task. For the first time in his life he felt ashamed of being rich.

If the hall was going to be half empty, at least those seats that were occupied should be filled with as many allies as possible. He wanted to create an atmosphere that would give the impression of strong public support. The Wittgenstein family was large and well connected. All siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts were expected to attend and to applaud uproariously at the end of each piece regardless of how they felt he had played. Tenants, servants and the servants' distant relations, many of whom had never before attended a concert of serious music, were plied with tickets and summoned to appear. Paul could have hired a smaller hall but was advised that the critics might not show up if he did so. He needed Max Kalbeck of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt Neues Wiener Tagblatt and Julius Korngold of the and Julius Korngold of the Neue Freie Presse Neue Freie Presse to be there. These were the two most influential music critics in Vienna. to be there. These were the two most influential music critics in Vienna.

Every detail was carefully considered. A concert with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra would have cost him nearly twice as much as the less prestigious Tonkunstler Orchestra, but money was no object. "Quite apart from the price," he later wrote, "I would not hire the Vienna Philharmonic. Probably they won't play as you want them to do, it will look like a horse which you can't ride; and then if the concert is a success, people might say it was only due to the orchestra's merit." He chose the Tonkunstler.

The conductor, Oskar Nedbal, was twelve years older than Paul, an ex-pupil of Dvorak, a composer and a first-cla.s.s violist who had joined the Tonkunstler Orchestra in 1906 after ten years as conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. On Christmas Eve 1930, he threw himself head first from a fourth-story window of a hotel in Zagreb and was heard of no more.

Paul's program was unusual, obstinate and provocative. He wanted to present four consecutive works for piano and orchestra--four virtuosic concertos in a single evening. Irrespective of success or failure, this young man's debut would long be remembered as an audacious gymnastic spectacle.

Works by the inebriate Irish composer John Field, who had died in Moscow of cancer of the r.e.c.t.u.m in 1837, had long fallen from fashion in Vienna. Nowadays "Drunken John" is best remembered as the man who invented the nocturne--a form of short piano reverie later popularized by Chopin. Paul's valet and cook were probably not the only ones in the audience that night never to have heard of him. Even among the musical cognoscenti of 1913, few would have rated Field as worthy of the Golden Hall, for Vienna had a musical heritage of its own, the most ill.u.s.trious of any city in the world, and to those raised on a diet of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler (all of whom had lived at one time or another within the city walls), Field's music would have seemed at best an insipid curiosity, at worst a bad-taste joke.

History does not record how Paul felt in the hours leading up to the concert or his state of mind as he dressed in his tails, warmed his hands in the green room, climbed the steep steps onto the concert platform and took his bows before an audience of friends, strangers, critics, mentors, teachers and servants, but he never succeeded in controlling his nerves. Later he was observed to bash the walls with his fists, tear up his music or hurl furniture across the room in the fraught final minutes before walking onto the stage.

The Field Concerto is in three movements lasting a total of thirty-five minutes. If Paul failed to notice at the time, he must have been informed afterward that Julius Korngold, chief critic of the Neue Freie Fresse Neue Freie Fresse, had left the auditorium during the applause and had not returned to hear his renditions of Mendelssohn's Serenade and Allegro giocoso, the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Czerny by Josef Labor, or Liszt's crashing bravura Concerto in E flat. As he and his family scoured the papers and music journals in the days following the concert, this critic's curious behavior must have weighed heavily on their minds.

Ludwig, Paul's younger brother, was not in Vienna to hear him play. Three months earlier he had moved from England (where he had been studying philosophy at Cambridge) into two rooms of a postmaster's house in a tiny village at the bottom of a fjord, north of Bergen in Norway. According to the diaries of his closest friend, his decision to exile himself was "wild and sudden." In September he had stated that he wished to withdraw from a world in which "he perpetually finds himself feeling contempt for others and irritating others by his nervous temperament." He was also at this time suffering (as he often did) from delusions of his own death. "The feeling that I shall have to die before being able to publish my ideas is growing stronger and stronger in me every day," he wrote to his tutor and mentor at Cambridge. A fortnight later a shock spurred him on his course of action--it took the form of a letter announcing that his sister Gretl and her husband Jerome were coming to live in London. "He can't stand either of them and he won't live in England liable always to visits from them," his friend recorded. "I am leaving at once," Ludwig exclaimed, "because my brother-in-law has come to live in London and I can't bear to be so near him."

The whole family wanted Ludwig to come to Vienna for Paul's concert and for Christmas, but he was resistant and the obligation to conform weighed heavily upon him. His family depressed him, the previous Christmas had been horrific, he was in low spirits and his philosophical work was advancing at a snail's pace. "UNFORTUNATELY I have to go to Vienna for Christmas," he wrote to a friend. "The fact is my mother very much wants me to, so much so that she would be grievously offended if I refused. She has such dreadful memories of just this time last year that I do not have the heart to stay away."

THAT TIME LAST YEAR

Christmas at the Wittgensteins' Winter Palais on the Alleega.s.se in Vienna's Wieden district was, by tradition, an extravagant and ceremonious affair to which the family attached the greatest significance; but the Christmas of 1912 (the year before Paul's concert debut) was different from all the rest, for on that occasion the family's energies and enthusiasms were subdued by the grim realization that its head (Paul and Ludwig's father Karl Wittgenstein)--stout-chested and leathery of complexion--was dying in his bedroom upstairs. He was suffering from cancer of the tongue and a month earlier had submitted himself to the scalpels of the distinguished Viennese surgeon Baron Anton von Eiselsberg. To gain access to the lesion Dr. von Eiselsberg had needed first to remove a large section of Karl's lower jaw. Only then was he able to proceed with the extirpation of the neck glands, the floor of the mouth and whatever was left of Karl's tongue after previous surgical raids. His bleeding was staunched by a team of a.s.sistants using the modern technique of electrical cautery.

Karl had smoked large Cuban cigars all his adult life and continued to use them even after the first symptoms of his disease had been diagnosed seven years earlier. Then he was advised by doctors not to move in order to effect a cure. By the end, he had endured seven operations, but the cancer continued to outmaneuver every stratagem that Dr. von Eiselsberg could devise against it, shifting in a sequence of malignant sideways steps from thyroid to ear to throat and eventually to his tongue. His final operation took place on November 8, 1912. Eiselsberg had warned him that there was a risk of his dying under the knife and on the evening before, as the doctors were sharpening their tools, Karl and his wife Leopol-dine retired to the opulent gloom of the Musiksaal. Musiksaal. He took out his violin, she sat at the piano, and together they played through some of their favorite works by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms in a long, unspoken farewell to one another. He took out his violin, she sat at the piano, and together they played through some of their favorite works by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms in a long, unspoken farewell to one another.

The next morning, in the center of his plain, well-lit, clean-tiled theater, Dr. von Eiselsberg cut the tumor from Karl's mouth. Perhaps this time he had finally succeeded in eradicating the last traces of the cancer, but for Karl--flat, speechless and entrapped by the curse of a secondary infection--it was already too late. He left the clinic to die at home. And thus it was that on Christmas Day 1912, as he lay outstretched, weakened and feverish upon his bed, his family was gathered round in a mood of grim expectation.

KARL'S GREAT REBELLION

Hermine (p.r.o.nounced Hermeena) Hermeena), nicknamed Mining, was the firstborn of Karl's nine children and his favorite child. Named after her grandfather, Hermann Wittgenstein, her birth marked a turning point in Karl's business fortunes and as a consequence he always treated her as a lucky mascot. She was thirty-nine years old at the time of his dying, unmarried, still living at home and still at his beck and call. In character she was inward looking, a repressed person, whose movements were stiff, whose stance was erect and whose manner (to those who did not know her well) appeared to be arrogant or aloof. In fact she suffered from low self-esteem and was ill at ease in the company of strangers. When Brahms came to dinner and she was allowed to sit with him at the top table, she became so agitated with nervous tension that she had to leave the room and spend most of the evening vomiting into one of the Palais lavatories. Photographs of the youthful Hermine portray her as alert, feminine, perhaps even pretty, but an instinctive need for privacy put her always on her guard against the approaches of men. They say she had one or two suitors in her prime but none so ardent as to relieve her of her maidenhood.

As the years piled on she withdrew from all but her closest circle of friends and family, her smile shortened and she grew self-conscious, gracious, vigilant and schoolmarmish. On the hottest days, she dressed in the heaviest and most somber clothes, brushing her hair flat back against her head and pressing her ponytail into a tight coil at the nape of her neck. Her ears were broad and heavy and her nose uncommonly prominent--both features inherited from her father. In her last years she resembled a handsome army officer in the first gloat of early retirement, a bit like Captain von Trapp in the film version of The Sound of Music. of The Sound of Music.

Despite her inhibitions, Hermine was a talented pianist and a good singer, but her main pa.s.sions were for painting and drawing. Since the early 1890s, when her father bought the Palais (for 250,000 florins off a bankrupt property developer who had built it for himself twenty years earlier), Hermine had helped and encouraged him in ama.s.sing his art collection. At first she was allowed to choose which works to buy and decide where and how they should be displayed--her father jokingly referred to her in those days as "my Art Director"--but as his instinctive bossiness took over, her role diminished and eventually faded into the shadows of his domineering enthusiasm. She remained, however, her father's close companion, accompanying him on arduous trips of inspection to his factories and rolling mills around the Hapsburg Empire, superintending his business receptions, suggesting countless improvements to his hunting estate in the mountains and, in the weeks before his final operation, sitting patiently by his bed jotting autobiographical notes that he dictated to her in wheezing, staccato gasps: 1864 Advised to leave school. Should have continued private studies until graduation.Ran away from home in January 1865.Lived two months in a rented room on the Krugerstra.s.se.Took with me a violin and 200 florins that belonged to my sister Anna.Noticed in a newspaper ad a young student's request for support and gave him some money in exchange for his pa.s.sport.At the frontier, in Bodenbach, officials asked to see all pa.s.sports.Forced to wait in a large room.Called individually to be scrutinized by two frontier guards.The false pa.s.sport just happened to be all right.

The so-called "advice to leave school" took the form of what Germans and Austrians call a Consilium abeundi Consilium abeundi--Karl was effectively expelled. Hermann Christian Wittgenstein, though frequently furious at his son's dila-toriness, attempted on this occasion to limit his reproach. Karl had always given cause for concern; he had always been a stubborn, single-minded and difficult child and there had been many occasions on which the need to reprimand him had arisen--the time, for instance, when he had p.a.w.ned his violin to buy a gla.s.s-cutting apparatus; the time he fiddled with the tower clock to make it strike every fifteen minutes and rouse the household at regular intervals throughout the night; the time when he "borrowed" one of his father's coaches, took his sister and her friend out for a spin, drove too fast and crashed on a bridge, breaking his sister's friend's nose. And what about the time when he ran away from school to the neighboring town of Klosterneuburg? He was only eleven, had jettisoned his expensive overcoat in order to pa.s.s for a street urchin and was recognized begging in a coffeehouse doorway by the town mayor. Held over night, he was returned the following morning to his furious parents.

Hermann adored, petted and indulged his eldest son Paul, slipping him secret gifts and grooming him as heir to his fortunes, but with Karl, his third son, he could never get along. From the start the relationship was frosty, distrustful and antagonistic, and so it would remain until the day of Hermann's death in May 1878. Hermine cited differences in personality between her father and grandfather. They were too dissimilar-chalk and cheese as the English say; Tag and Nacht Tag and Nacht (night and day) as she would have put it. Karl was humorous, unpredictable and free spirited, his father Hermann ponderous, parsimonious and rigid. In other respects they were of similar mold; both were domineering and unyielding and it was by reason of these common failings (more perhaps than by reason of their differences) that their great enmity arose. (night and day) as she would have put it. Karl was humorous, unpredictable and free spirited, his father Hermann ponderous, parsimonious and rigid. In other respects they were of similar mold; both were domineering and unyielding and it was by reason of these common failings (more perhaps than by reason of their differences) that their great enmity arose.

When Karl ran away for the second time, he did so suddenly, without warning and without note of explanation. It was January 1865. He was seventeen years old. At first it was supposed that he had had an accident. The weather was bad--blizzards and subzero temperatures. Ice covered the streets of Vienna and all roads leading out of the city were blocked by drifts of heavy snow. Karl's photograph was distributed among policemen who confidently predicted his imminent return, but as the days stretched into weeks and the weeks turned to months, Karl was nowhere to be found, and tension in the Wittgenstein household had risen to such a pitch that soon it became impossible to mention the boy's name in front of his parents.

From the frontier checkpoint at Bodenbach, Karl had made his way to the port of Hamburg, where he boarded a ship bound for New York. He arrived there in the early spring, penniless and with nothing but the clothes on his back and an expensive violin under his arm. First he took a job as a waiter in a restaurant on Broadway, but left after a fortnight to join a minstrel band. Following President Lincoln's a.s.sa.s.sination at Ford's Theatre on April 14, all theater and music performances were banned throughout the Union and Karl's group was forced to break up. Soon he found himself piloting a ca.n.a.l boat of pressed straw from New York to Washington, where he remained for six months serving whiskeys in a crowded "n.i.g.g.e.r-bar."

Main activity was to distinguish between one black man and the next, to know who had paid and who hadn't. The owner of the bar himself could not tell the blacks apart.Made my first decent pay there.Newly dressed and equipped, returned to New York in November and wrote home for the first time.

The dying man's memory was not quite precise. His first letter--a few laconic lines--was actually sent, three months earlier, in September 1865 and was addressed to a Wittgenstein servant with whom he was on friendly terms. The effect was instant: a flurry of letters issued from his siblings and from his mother in Vienna, but nothing from his father, with whom he remained in deep disgrace. At first he felt too ashamed to respond to any of them and his silence prompted his sister to write a begging letter urging him to make contact with his parents. Karl responded, not to them, but to her: "I cannot write to my parents. Just as I would not have the courage to stand before them now and ask their forgiveness, I could do so even less on paper, paper that is patient and does not blush. I shall only be able to do it when the occasion will permit me to show them my improvement."

For months the stalemate persisted while his mother, eager for word from her wayward boy, continued to ply him with letters and remittances of money. Still he refused to respond to her directly. On October 30 he wrote to his brother Ludwig (nicknamed Louis): Mother's letter made me terribly happy; as I read it my heart was beating so strongly that I could not go on ... At the moment I carry food and serve drinks. The work is not difficult, but I have to keep going until 4 a.m.... I have only one desire--you can probably guess it--to be on better terms with Father. As soon as I have entered a business I shall write to him but business is very bad here so you should not be surprised that I have not yet found myself another job.

Karl's la.s.situde was both mental and physical. He felt depressed, and for six months had been suffering from a grotesque form of diarrhea (possibly dysentery) that had left him weak spirited and emaciated. Only by strenuous effort could he muster the strength to write to his mother: You may think that I am a rotten son for thanking you only now after I have received several letters from you and not yet written myself but I cannot find the inner peace I need in order to write to my parents. Every time I think of you and of my sisters and brothers I feel shame and regret... dearest mother, please talk to Father in my favour and be a.s.sured of the sincerest grat.i.tude of your son.

Direct correspondence with his father remained out of the question, at least before he had found himself employment on a level higher than barman. Returning from Washington to New York, he took a job teaching mathematics and violin at a Christian school in Manhattan. Unable to control his pupils, he transferred to an asylum for dest.i.tute children at Westchester for a short spell as night.w.a.tchman. After that he went to teach at a smart college in Rochester where the food was good and the salary, for the first time since he had been in America, reasonable. Only now could he turn his thoughts to Vienna and to his father.

ENTREPRENEUR

There were no red carpets or silver bands to welcome Karl home on his return from New York in the spring of 1866, and the very sight of him served only to deepen the distress that his flight had caused within his family. He was in a shocking state: skinny, delirious and bedraggled, speaking a garbled mixture of incorrect German and Yankee slang.

His mother had written to warn him that he was expected to take a job in agriculture on his return. "If it is Father's urgent wish that I should work on a farm, I shall of course do it," Karl had told his brother Louis. On arrival, still in disgrace, he was dispatched to one of his father's rented farms near the small market town of Deutschkreutz, in what was at that time a part of German West Hungary. Here it was hoped he might recover his energies and develop some enthusiasm for his father's line of business.

Hermann Wittgenstein was no ordinary farmer. He had never plowed a field or milked a cow, for his business successes were rooted in a partnership with his in-laws, rich Viennese merchants called Figdor. At the time of Karl's birth in 1847, he was a wool trader living at Gohlis, near Leipzig in Saxony. Four years later he moved with his wife and children to Austria, where he acted as factor, or estate manager, transforming the dilapidated inheritances of flaky aristocrats into thriving concerns in exchange for a percentage of the profit. The money he made from this, and from his collaboration with the Figdors (who traded the coal, corn, timber and wool that these estates produced), was prudently invested in Viennese property.

Though frugal to a fault, Hermann lived with his family in considerable style. In Austria he took a lease on the famous palace at Bad Voslau, moving three years later to the huge, cubed, towered castle of Vosendorf (now a town hall and bicycle museum) nine miles south of Vienna. Later, he occupied the main portion of a rented castle at Laxenburg, originally built to house the Empress Maria Theresa's Prime Minister, Anton von Kaunitz. His youngest child, Clothilde (who ended her days as a reclusive morphine addict in Paris), was the only one of Hermann's eleven children to be born in Austria. Karl was the sixth in age, and his parents' third and youngest son.

Hermann Wittgenstein never lavished money upon his children for he was determined that they should make their own way in the world. Of his three sons, he considered Karl to be the most f.e.c.kless, but strict parsimony, combined with incessant reprobation and disparagement of Karl's abilities, succeeded only in kindling within the boy's hardening heart a steely ambition to prove his father wrong.

At the end of his career Karl liked to hear himself described as a " self-made man," but the term was only partially accurate. His vast fortune was certainly earned by his energy and business apt.i.tude, but like many soi-disant " self-made" men Karl tended to overlook the fact that he had married a lady of considerable fortune, without whose bountiful trust fund he might never have succeeded in making the first leap from business employee to capitalist owner.

The story of Karl Wittgenstein's rise from rebellious American barman to multimillionaire Austrian steel magnate may be succinctly summarized. After the year spent farming at Deutschkreutz he enlisted at the Technical University in Vienna, acquiring there only as much knowledge as he felt might later be of use to him, skipping afternoon lectures and taking a low-paid work-experience job at the factory of the Staatsbahn (National Railroad Company). In 1869 he left the university without qualifications and spent the next three years employed in various jobs--as a.s.sistant design engineer at a naval shipyard in Trieste; at a turbine construction firm in Vienna; with the Hungarian North-East Railroad at Szatmar and Budapest; at the Neufeldt-Schoeller Steel Works at Ternitz; and finally at the spa town of Teplitz (or Teplice), where he was hired, initially on a part-time basis, to help draw up plans for a new rolling mill. The manager took him on as a favor to the family, expecting little of him, but soon Karl's energy, originality of mind, and ability to find quick solutions to a wide a.s.sortment of business and engineering problems earned him a full-time salaried position at the mill.

Feeling at last secure, with an annual income of 1,200 gulden, Karl resolved to ask for his sweetheart's hand in marriage. She, Leopoldine Kalmus, was the sister of a woman who rented a wing of the castle at Lax-enburg. Karl's mother cautiously welcomed the news of her son's engagement, but was unsure if he would make a good husband. To her future daughter-in-law she wrote: "Karl has a good heart but he left his parents' home too early in life. As to the final improvements in his upbringing, reliability, order, self-control, all this, I hope, he will learn in your loving company."

Hermann, who had yet to meet Miss Kalmus, was less positive. Her father (deceased) had been a wine merchant. By blood she was half Jewish and by faith a Roman Catholic, offending at a stroke his Protestant ethic and his anti-Semitic sensibility. In point of fact Leopoldine was a distant cousin of Hermann's wife, Mrs. Wittgenstein--both could claim descent from a Rabbi Isaac Brillin in the seventeenth century--but Hermann may not have known this at the time. In any case he had long made it clear to his children that he did not wish them to marry Jews. Of the eleven, only Karl disobeyed. Hermann had a legal right to forbid the marriage and it fell to Karl to request his father's formal permission. He duly went through the motions but did so in such a sloppy and inconsiderate manner as to throw his father into a rage.

Hermann was lying in bed complaining of backache when his son arrived in high spirits from Teplitz. Karl offered a ma.s.sage to soothe the pain and no sooner was his father flat down, groaning into his pillow, than Karl casually let slip the information that he was en route to Aussee, where he intended to propose to Miss Kalmus. Whether the matter of her faith was raised at that moment, history does not relate, but as Karl was extolling the beauties and virtues of his bride-to-be, Hermann cut him short. "Well, they are all like that at first," he said, "until they shed their skins!" Only once the engagement had been publicly declared would the old man write to his future daughter-in-law: Dear Miss,My son Karl, unlike his brothers and sisters, has always, from his earliest youth, chosen to follow his own direction. In the end this has not perhaps turned out to be such a grave disadvantage. He even asked for my consent to the engagement, though only when he was already on his way to ask for your hand. Since he is so full of praise for you, and since his sisters warmly concur in their appraisal of you, I do not feel that I have the right to make difficulties, and so I can only wish that your desires and hopes for a happy future be met. Let this expression of my sincere frame of mind suffice at least until I have had the opportunity to make your personal acquaintance.Yours truly,H. Wittgenstein Karl and Leopoldine were married on St. Valentine's Day, February 14, 1874, in a side chapel of St. Stephen's, the great Catholic cathedral of Vienna. It was a windy day. On the cathedral roof polished, colored tiles gleamed like the scales of an exotic fish while high on the front portal, among carved figures representing ugliness and evil, the face of a Jew in his pileum cornutum pileum cornutum leered down on Hermann and his guests as they filed through the door. When the service was over, everyone a.s.sembled to cheer the bride and groom--but Karl, in a fury at his coachman's sloth, smashed his fist against the carriage window shouting: "To h.e.l.l with you! Are you going to drive off?" The force of this blow shattered the gla.s.s and gashed his hand, spilling blood across the clean interior of the coach. leered down on Hermann and his guests as they filed through the door. When the service was over, everyone a.s.sembled to cheer the bride and groom--but Karl, in a fury at his coachman's sloth, smashed his fist against the carriage window shouting: "To h.e.l.l with you! Are you going to drive off?" The force of this blow shattered the gla.s.s and gashed his hand, spilling blood across the clean interior of the coach.

THE COUPLE WENT TO LIVE AT EICHWALD, near Teplitz, but Karl's remunerative job there did not last as long as he had expected. Soon, he found himself embroiled in an internal dispute at the climax of which he resigned in protest at the chairman of the board's rough treatment of his friend, the managing director. For a year he remained unemployed (it was at this time that Hermine was born) and in the summer of 1875 he took a desultory job as an engineer with a company in Vienna. After a year in the capital, the hostile chairman at Teplitz himself resigned and Karl was reinstated at the old firm, this time with a seat on the board. The mill's fortunes were in a parlous state but he managed to turn them round by securing a hefty order for railway tracks against stiff compet.i.tion from Krupp. This he achieved by chasing the Russian financier, railroad builder and trusted counselor to Tsar Alexander II, Samuil Poliakov, halfway around Europe and getting him to agree to the purchase of much lighter and cheaper rails than his rivals were offering. The Russians, at war with the Turks, needed the rails for a military campaign in the Balkan Peninsula. Karl's deal stipulated that he would continue manufacturing rails until such a time as Poliakov telegraphed him to stop. When the order finally came through Karl reported to the Russians that his company had several thousand of their rails in his yard ready for shipping--a lie of course--but it ensured that the final payment was much bigger than it otherwise would have been.

In his business dealings Karl was an opportunist whose great fortune was acc.u.mulated as much by the successful outcomes to the risks he took as by his hard work and lively intuition. He made promises, unsure as to how he could ever fulfill them, he agreed to buy companies and shares with money he did not possess, and he offered for sale stocks that had already been promised to other clients. In the end he trusted always to his wits to extricate himself from the problems he created. "An industrialist must take chances," he wrote. "He must be prepared to gamble everything on a single card when the moment demands, even at the risk of failing to reap the fruits that he had hoped to gain, losing his initial stake and having to start again from scratch."

In 1898, aged fifty-one, he returned to Vienna after a long holiday abroad to announce his retirement from business. With immediate effect he withdrew from all of his directorships and executive positions, choosing, in the years that followed, to keep a beady eye on the industry from his office in the Krugerstra.s.se that was always kept open "just in case the Minister of Commerce should drop in for my advice." At the time of these resignations he was at the peak of his career. In the course of it he had been owner or princ.i.p.al shareholder of the Bohemian Mining Company, the Prague Iron Industry Company, the Teplitz Steel Works, the Alpine Mining Company and a host of lesser factories, rolling mills, and coal and metal mines throughout the empire. He had occupied seats on the boards of at least three major banks as well as a munitions company and possessed, scattered within his three main Austrian residences, magnificent and valuable collections of furniture, art, porcelain and autograph musical ma.n.u.scripts.

For as long as his health permitted, Karl dedicated part of his retirement to his private pleasures--hunting, shooting, fencing, riding, commissioning and collecting art, writing articles on business and economic affairs, playing the violin and, in the summer, taking long walks through the Alpine countryside. It would be idle to speculate on how much money he was worth. Karl Menger, a cousin, wrote that his fortune before the First World War "had been estimated at 200 million kronen--the equivalent of at least that many dollars after World War II." But these figures are meaningless. He was stupendously rich.

MARRIAGE TO AN HEIRESS

Jerome Steinberger was the son of a bankrupt kid-glove importer from New York. His father, Herman, had committed suicide on Christmas Day 1900. One of his Steinberger aunts had thrown herself into the Hudson River. It is thought that an uncle, Jacob Steinberger, may also have killed himself in May 1900. Jerome made audacious attempts to rescue the family firm but failed, changed his name to s...o...b..rough and took a course in humanities at a college in Chicago. His father, an immigrant from Na.s.sau in Saxony, was rumored to have insured his life for $100,000. His sister, Aimee, married William, the black-sheep brother of the powerful Guggenheim clan.

In 1901, styling himself Dr. s...o...b..rough, Jerome traveled for the first time to Vienna and, a year later, returned to the city to study medicine. It is not known where, how or even if he converted from Judaism to Christianity, but on January 7, 1905, twelve weeks after his sister's Jewish marriage in New York, he was back to Vienna, on one of the coldest days in Austrian history, shivering before the altar of a Protestant church on the cobbled Dorotheerga.s.se, with a tall, nervous, twenty-two-year-old Viennese bride at his side.

Her friends called her Gretl, though she had been christened Margherita and would, in due course, anglicise the spelling of her name to Margaret. She was Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein's youngest daughter. Among her aunts and uncles ranked judges, soldiers, doctors, scientists, patrons of the arts and government administrators--all of them prominent. Affixed to the walls of the church above the spot where she and Jerome exchanged their vows were three polished plaques, each of them sponsored by a member of the family: "Thy Kingdom Come," "Blessed are they that hear the word of G.o.d, and keep it," "Let all that breathes praise the Lord. Alleluia!"

What induced Jerome and Gretl to take a romantic interest in one another is not obvious. They came from different backgrounds. Hers was musical, his was not; while she embraced the company of others, he was inclined to shun it. Both, however, took a keen interest in matters medical and scientific--she, as a teenager, had embroidered a cushion for her bedroom that depicted a human heart complete with coronary vessels and arteries. After his father's bankruptcy Jerome must have been excited at the prospect of sharing in her vast fortune; she was, after all, the daughter of one of the Hapsburg Empire's richest men. And it may equally be possible that she, in her turn, was attracted to those qualities in him--his impatient, domineering personality, commanding presence, unpredictable mood swings--that most reminded her of her father. These speculations may, in the case of Gretl and Jerome, be wide of the mark, but similarities of personality did exist between Jerome s...o...b..rough and Karl Wittgenstein, and, even if Jerome had not been primarily motivated to marry Gretl for her fortune, he could not have failed to be impressed by her father's luxurious, treasure-filled palace in Vienna.

Gretl was nine years younger and several inches taller than her new American husband, dark-eyed, dark-haired and of pale complexion. It would be misleading, on the strength of surviving snapshots, to describe her as beautiful, at least in the conventional sense of the term, but the photographic art may have been unjust to her as many who knew her personally attested to her striking and attractive looks. "She possessed a 'rare' beauty," said one, "and was elegant in an exotic manner. Two arches on her forehead formed by her hair growing to a point made her appearance unique." Gustav Klimt struggled to capture these elusive nuances in a full-length portrait commissioned by Mrs. Wittgenstein shortly before her daughter's marriage.

Gretl loathed the finished picture, blaming Klimt's "inaccurate" depiction of her mouth, which she later had repainted by a lesser artist. Even then, the picture failed to please, so she left it to molder, unhung and un-feted, in her attic. Visitors to the Neue Pinakothek gallery in Munich, where the picture presently hangs, might enjoy trying to work out for themselves why the sitter was so displeased with it. They may point to the rings of gray under Gretl's eyes, identify her expression as tired, doubtful, possibly frightened; they may observe how she stands self-conscious and discomfited, in a flamboyant, ill-fitting, shoulderless white silk dress, or remark on the pallor of her hands clasped in a neurotic twist of fingers at her stomach. But by examining the portrait, however intently, the visitor will never learn the reasons for all this--reasons that were unconnected to any apprehensions that she may have been feeling about her marriage to Jerome, or even to her awkwardness at having to sit for the s.e.xually predatory Klimt. In May 1904, at the time Klimt started work on the painting, Gretl's brother, her closest sibling in age and the boon companion of her teenage years, had suddenly, theatrically and very publicly poisoned himself.

THE DEATH OF RUDOLF WITTGENSTEIN

At the time of his demise Rudolf Wittgenstein, known in the family as "Rudi," was twenty-two years old and a student of chemistry at the Berlin Academy. By all accounts he was an intelligent, literate, good-looking man with grand pa.s.sions for music, photography and the theater. In the summer of 1903, anxious about an aspect of his personality that he termed "my perverted disposition," he sought help from the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, a charitable organization that campaigned for the repeal of Section 175 of the German Criminal Code--a draconian law against die widematurliche Unzucht die widematurliche Unzucht (unnatural s.e.xual acts). The same organization published an annual report of its activities under the florid t.i.tle (unnatural s.e.xual acts). The same organization published an annual report of its activities under the florid t.i.tle Jahrbuch fur s.e.xuelle Zwischenstufen unter besonderer Berucksichtigung der h.o.m.os.e.xualitdt Jahrbuch fur s.e.xuelle Zwischenstufen unter besonderer Berucksichtigung der h.o.m.os.e.xualitdt (Yearbook for Transs.e.xuality with Specific Consideration of h.o.m.os.e.xuality) and it was in one of these volumes that a case study, written up by the distinguished s.e.xologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, described in detail the problems of an unnamed h.o.m.os.e.xual student in Berlin. Rudi, fearing that the article had identified him as the subject, immediately set himself upon his fatal course of action. That, at least, is one version of the story. The facts that follow are less contentious. (Yearbook for Transs.e.xuality with Specific Consideration of h.o.m.os.e.xuality) and it was in one of these volumes that a case study, written up by the distinguished s.e.xologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, described in detail the problems of an unnamed h.o.m.os.e.xual student in Berlin. Rudi, fearing that the article had identified him as the subject, immediately set himself upon his fatal course of action. That, at least, is one version of the story. The facts that follow are less contentious.

At 9:45 on the evening of May 2, 1904, Rudi walked into a restaurant-bar on Berlin's Brandenburgstra.s.se, ordered two gla.s.ses of milk and some food, which he ate in a state of noticeable agitation. When he had finished he asked the waiter to send a bottle of mineral water to the pianist with instructions for him to play the popular Thomas Koschat number "Verla.s.sen, verla.s.sen, verla.s.sen bin ich": Forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I!Like a stone in the roadway, for no la.s.s loves me!I shall go to the chapel, to the chapel way offAnd there on my knees, I'll cry my heart out!

In the forest stands a hillock where many flowers bloom,There sleeps my poor la.s.s, whom no love can revive.Thither my pilgrimage, thither my desires,There I'll feel keenly, how forsaken I am.

As the music wafted across the room, Rudolf took from his pocket a sachet of clear crystal compound and dissolved the contents into one of his gla.s.ses of milk. The effects of pota.s.sium cyanide when ingested are instant and agonizing: a tightening of the chest, a terrible burning sensation in the throat, immediate discoloration of the skin, nausea, coughing and convulsions. Within two minutes Rudolf was slumped back in his chair unconscious. The landlord sent customers out in search of doctors. Three of them arrived, but too late for their ministrations to take effect.

A report in the next day's paper indicated that several suicide notes had been found at the scene. One of them, addressed to his parents, said that Rudi had killed himself in grief at the death of a friend. Two days later his mortal remains were taken from a Berlin morgue back to Vienna to be buried without honor; for his father Karl, the pain and humiliation were unspeakable. No sooner were the burial rites concluded than he hurried his family from the cemetery, forbidding his wife from turning to look back at the grave. In future neither she nor any member of the family would be permitted to utter Rudolf's name in his presence again.

Eight months after the funeral, as Gretl and her new husband were leaving the church in which they had just been married, the bride placed her frozen wedding bouquet into the hands of a trusted friend with instructions to take it to the place where her brother was buried, and to strew her flowers, in memory, upon his grave.

THE TRAGEDY OF HANS

Karl's decision to forbid any mention of Rudolf was actuated, not by a lack of feeling on his part, but by a surfeit of it, which, unleashed, might prove destructive. There were practical considerations too, a desire to pull his family together and stop them from mourning, something that only a stiff-lipped resistance could achieve. But if his intention was to bind the surviving members of his family closer together he could not have failed more signally, for the effect of his censorship created an atmosphere of unbearable tension in the home, causing a split between the Wittgenstein children and their parents that time would never heal. Karl was blamed (but not to his face) for loading his sons with excessive career pressure, for insisting that none of them should pursue any profession that did not involve the two disciplines that had made him his fortune--engineering and business. Mrs. Wittgenstein, Leopoldine (or Poldy as she was called within the family circle), was also accused by her children of failing to stand up to her autocratic husband, of being mouse-like, indecisive, and insecure. More than forty years after her brother's death Hermine recorded with bitterness: When my seven-year-old brother, Rudi, had to take his public school entrance examination, he was so unhappy and afraid that the examining teacher told my mother: "He is a very nervous child; you should be careful with him." I have often heard this sentence repeated with irony, as if it were nonsensical. My mother could not seriously consider that one of her children could be overly nervous; that, for her, was out of the question.

Family discussion of Rudi's suicide was forced by Karl's ban into furtive conclaves, with the inevitable consequence that the facts mutated over time in the manner of a Chinese whisper. It was rumored, for instance, that he had killed himself because his pampered Viennese upbringing had inadequately prepared him for the rigors of student life in Berlin; that he had killed himself because his father had refused to allow him to train as an actor, or because he had contracted a venereal disease that had sent him off his head. All these things and many more were said, some of them, no doubt, inaccurate and disheartening, and yet they were as nothing compared with the distorted tattle that emanated from the disappearance of another brother, Johannes (known as Hans).

As Oscar Wilde might have remarked, "To lose one son, may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness." As strange as this may appear, Rudi's suicide was not the first such tragedy to befall the House of Wittgenstein, for two years earlier Hans, Karl's eldest son, had vanished without trace. He too was a forbidden topic of conversation.

Surviving photographs of Hans in his youth, with angled head and intense squinting eyes, suggest that he may have been a little imbecilic, perhaps what is nowadays termed an idiot savant--defined as a backward child who displays an uncommon talent in some restricted area such as memorizing or rapid calculation. He was certainly shy--painfully so--and his inner world was intense. Physically large and ungainly, stubborn and resistant to discipline, he was regarded by his eldest sister as "a very peculiar child." The first word he ever spoke was "Oedipus."

From his earliest youth he followed a strange impulse to translate the world around him into mathematical formulas. As a small boy strolling with his sister through a Viennese park one afternoon he came across an ornate pavilion and asked her if she could imagine it made of diamonds. "Yes," Hermine said, "wouldn't that be nice!"

"Now let me have a go," he said, and setting himself upon the gra.s.s proceeded to calculate the annual yield of the South African diamond mines against the acc.u.mulated wealth of the Rothschilds and the American billionaires, to measure every portion of the pavilion in his head, including all of its ornament and cast-iron filigree, and to build an image slowly and methodically until--quite suddenly--he stopped. "I cannot continue," he said, "for I cannot imagine my diamond pavilion any bigger than this," indicating a height of some three or four feet above the ground. "Can you?"

"Of course," Hermine said. "What is the problem?"

"Well, there is no money left to pay for any more diamonds."