by Peter Watson
But other responses – and perhaps the best – would take years to ripen. They would form part of the great literature of the 1920s, and even later.
All the developments and episodes discussed so far in this chapter were direct responses to war. In the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the work he produced during the war was not a response to the fighting itself. At the same time, had not Wittgenstein been exposed to the real possibility of death, it is unlikely that he would have produced Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when he did, or that it would have had quite the tone that it did.
Wittgenstein enlisted on 7 August, the day after the Austrian declaration of war on Russia, and was assigned to an artillery regiment serving at Kraków on the eastern front.70 He later suggested that he went to war in a romantic mood, saying that he felt the experience of facing death would, in some indefinable manner, improve him (Rupert Brooke said much the same). On the first sight of the opposing forces, he confided in a letter, ‘Now I have the chance to be a decent human being, for I am standing eye to eye with death.’71
Wittgenstein was twenty-five when war broke out, one of eight children. His family was Jewish, wealthy, perfectly assimilated into Viennese society. Franz Grillparzer, the patriotic poet and dramatist, was a friend of Ludwig’s father, and Johannes Brahms gave piano lessons to both his mother and his aunt. The Wittgensteins’ musical evenings were well known in Vienna: Gustav Mahler and Bruno Walter were both regulars, and Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet received its first performance there. Margarete Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s sister, sat for Gustav Klimt, whose painting of her is full of gold, purple, and tumbling colours.72 Ironically, Ludwig, now the best remembered of the Wittgensteins, was originally regarded by other family members as the dullest. Margarete had her beauty; Hans, one of the older brothers, began composing at the age of four, by which time he could play the piano and the violin; and Rudolf, another older brother, went to Berlin to be an actor. Had Hans not disappeared, sailing off Chesapeake Bay in 1903, and Rudolf not taken cyanide in a Berlin bar after buying the pianist a drink and requesting him to play a popular song, ‘I Am Lost,’ Ludwig might never have shone.73 Both his brothers were tortured by the feeling that they had failed to live up to their father’s stiff demands that they pursue successful business careers. Rudolf was also tormented by what he felt was a developing homosexuality.
Ludwig was as fond of music as the rest of the family, but he was also the most technical and practical minded. As a result, he wasn’t sent to the grammar school in Vienna but to Realschule in Linz, a school chiefly known for the teaching of the history master, Leopold Pötsch, a rabid right-winger who regarded the Habsburg dynasty as ‘degenerate.’74 For him, loyalty to such an entity as the Habsburgs was absurd; instead he revered the more accessible völkisch nationalism of the Pan-German movement. There is no sign that Wittgenstein was ever attracted by Pötsch’s theories, but a fellow pupil, with whom he overlapped for a few months, certainly was. His name was Adolf Hitler. After Linz, Wittgenstein went to Berlin, where he became interested in philosophy. He also developed a fascination with aeronautics, and his father, still anxious for one of his sons to have a lucrative career, suggested he go to Manchester University in England, where there was an excellent engineering department. Ludwig duly enrolled in the engineering course as planned. He also attended the seminars of Horace Lamb, the professor of mathematics. It was in one of his seminars that Wittgenstein was introduced by a fellow student to Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. This book, as we have seen earlier, showed that mathematics and logic are the same. For Wittgenstein, Russell’s book was a revelation. He spent months studying The Principles and also Gottlob Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Fundamental Laws of Arithmetic).75 In the late summer of 1911 Wittgenstein travelled to Jena in Germany to visit Frege, a small man ‘who bounced around the room when he talked,’ who was impressed enough by the young Austrian to recommend that he study under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge.76 Wittgenstein’s approach to Russell coincided with the Englishman just having finished Principia Mathematica. The young Viennese arrived in Cambridge in 1911, and to begin with people’s opinions of him were mixed. Nicknamed ‘Witter-Gitter,’ he was generally considered dull, with a laboured Germanic sense of humour. Like Arnold Schoenberg and Oskar Kokoschka he was an autodidact and didn’t care what people thought of him.77 But it soon got about that the pupil was rapidly overtaking the master, and when Russell arranged for Wittgenstein to be invited to join the Apostles, a highly secret and selective literary society dating back to 1820 and dominated at that time by Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes, ‘Cambridge realised that it had another genius on its hands.’78
By 1914, after he had been in Cambridge for three years, Wittgenstein, or Luki as he was called, began to formulate his own theory of logic.79 But then, in the long vacation, he went home to Vienna, war was declared, and he was trapped. What happened over the next few years was a complex interplay between Wittgenstein’s ideas and the danger he was in at the front. Early on in the war he conceived what he called the picture theory of language – and it was this that was refined during the Austrian army’s chaotic retreat under Russian attack. In 1916, however, Wittgenstein was transferred to the front as an ordinary soldier after the Russians attacked the Central Powers on their Baltic flank. He proved brave, asking to be assigned to the most dangerous place, the observation post on the front line, which guaranteed he would be a target. ‘Was shot at,’ his diary records on 29 April that year.80 Despite all this, he wrote some philosophy in those months, until June at least, when Russia launched its long-planned Brusilov offensive and the fighting turned heavy. At this point Wittgenstein’s diaries show him becoming more philosophical, even religious. At the end of July the Austrians were driven back yet again, this time into the Carpathian Mountains, in icy cold, rain, and fog.81 Wittgenstein was shot at once more, recommended for the Austrian equivalent of the Victoria Cross (he was given a slightly lesser honour) and promoted three times, eventually to officer.82 At officer school he revised his book in collaboration with a kindred spirit, Paul Engelmann, and then returned as a Leutnant on the Italian front.83 He completed the book during a period of leave in 1918 after his uncle Paul had bumped into him at a railway station where Wittgenstein was contemplating suicide. The uncle persuaded his nephew to go with him to Hallein, where he lived.84 There Wittgenstein finished the new version before returning to his unit. Before the manuscript was published, however, Wittgenstein was taken prisoner in Italy, with half a million other soldiers. While incarcerated in a concentration camp, he concluded that his book had solved all the outstanding problems of philosophy and that he would give up the discipline after the war and become a schoolteacher. He also decided to give away his fortune. He did both.
Few books can have had such a tortuous birth as the Tractatus. Wittgenstein had great difficulty finding a publisher, the first house he approached agreeing to take the book only if he paid for the printing and the paper himself.85 Other publishers were equally cautious and his book did not appear in English until 1922.86 But when it did appear, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus created a sensation. Many people did not understand it; others thought it ‘obviously defective’, ‘limited’ and that it stated the obvious. Frank Ramsay, in the philosophical journal Mind, said, ‘This is a most important book containing original ideas on a large range of topics, forming a coherent system …’87 Keynes wrote to Wittgenstein, ‘Right or wrong, it dominates all fundamental discussions at Cambridge since it was written.’88 In Vienna, it attracted the attention of the philosophers led by Moritz Schlick – a group that eventually evolved into the famous Vienna Circle of logical positivists.89 As Ray Monk, Wittgenstein’s biographer describes it, the book comprises a Theory of Logic, a Picture Theory of Propositions and a ‘quasi-Schopenhauerian mysticism.’ The argument of the book is that language corresponds to the world, as a picture or model corresponds to the world that it attempts to depict. The book was written in an uncompr
omising style. ‘The truth of the thoughts that are here communicated,’ so runs the preface, ‘seems to me unassailable and definitive.’ Wittgenstein added that he had found the solution to the problems of philosophy ‘on all essential points,’ and concluded the preface, ‘if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.’ The sentences in the book are simple, and numbered, remark 2.151 a refinement of 2.15, which cannot be understood without reference to the remarks in 2.1. Few of these remarks are qualified; instead each is advanced, as Russell once put it, ‘as if it were a Czar’s ukase.’90 Frege, whose own work had inspired the Tractatus, died without ever understanding it.
It is perhaps easier to grasp what Wittgenstein was driving at in the Tractatus if we concentrate on the second half of his book. His major innovation was to realise that language has limitations, that there are certain things it cannot do and that these have logical and therefore philosophical consequences. For example, Wittgenstein argues that it is pointless to talk about value – simply because ‘value is not part of the world’. It therefore follows that all judgements about moral and aesthetic matters cannot – ever – be meaningful uses of language. The same is true of philosophical generalisations that we make about the world as a whole. They are meaningless if they cannot be broken down into elementary sentences ‘which really are pictures.’ Instead, we have to lower our sights, says Wittgenstein, if we are to make sense. The world can only be spoken about by careful description of the individual facts of which it is comprised. In essence, this is what science tries to do. Logic he thought was essentially tautologous – different ways of saying the same thing, conveying ‘no substantial information about the world.’
Wittgenstein has been unfairly criticised for starting a trend in philosophy – ‘an obsession with word games.’ He was in fact trying to make our use of language more precise, by emphasising what we can and cannot meaningfully talk about. The last words of the Tractatus have become famous: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’91 He meant that there is no point in talking about areas where words fail to correspond to reality. His career after this book was as remarkable as it had been during its compilation, for he fulfilled the sentiments of that last sentence in his own highly idiosyncratic way. He fell silent, becoming a schoolteacher in the Austrian countryside, and never published another book in his lifetime.92
During the war many artists and writers retreated to Zurich in neutral Switzerland. James Joyce wrote much of Ulysses by the lake; Hans Arp, Frank Wedekind and Romain Rolland were also there. They met in the cafés of Zurich, which for a time paralleled in importance the coffeehouses of Vienna at the turn of the century. The Café Odèon was most well known. For many of those in exile in Zurich, the war seemed to mark the end of the civilisation that had spawned them. It came after a period in which art had become a proliferation of ‘isms,’ when science had discredited both the notion of an immutable reality and the concept of a wholly rational and self-conscious man. In such a world, the Dadaists felt they had to transform radically the whole concept of art and the artist. The war exploded the idea of progress, which in turn killed the ambition to make durable, classic works for posterity.93 One critic said the only option facing artists was silence or action.
Among the regulars at the Café Odèon were Franz Werfel, Aleksey Jawlensky, and Ernst Cassirer, the philosopher. There was also a then-unknown German writer, a Catholic and an anarchist at the same time, named Hugo Ball, and his girlfriend, Emmy Hennings. Hennings was a journalist but also performed as a cabaret actress, accompanied by Ball on the piano. In February 1916 they had the idea to open a review or cabaret with a literary bent. It was ironically called the Cabaret Voltaire (ironic because Dada eschewed the very reason for which Voltaire was celebrated)94 and opened on the Spiegelgasse, a steep and narrow alley where Lenin lived. Among the first to appear at Voltaire were two Romanians, the painter Marcel Janco and a young poet, Sami Rosenstock, who adopted the pen name of Tristan Tzara. The only Swiss among the early group was Sophie Taueber, Hans Arp’s wife (he was from Alsace). Others included Walter Serner from Austria, Marcel Slodki from Ukraine, and Richard Hülsenbeck and Hans Richter from Germany. For a review, in June 1916 Ball produced a programme, and it was in his introduction to the performance that the word Dada was first used. Ball’s own journal records the kinds of entertainment at Cabaret Voltaire: ‘rowdy provocateurs, primitivist dance, cacophony and Cubist theatricals.’95 Tzara always claimed to have found the word Dada in the Larousse dictionary, but whether the term ever had any intrinsic meaning, it soon acquired one, best summed up by Hans Richter.96 He said it ‘had some connection with the joyous Slavonic affirmative “Da, da,” … “yes, yes,” to life.’ In a time of war it lauded play as the most cherished human activity. ‘Repelled by the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to art,’ wrote Arp. ‘We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious madness of those times … we wanted an anonymous and collective art.’97 Dada was designed to rescue the sick mind that had brought mankind to catastrophe, and restore its health.98 Dadaists questioned whether, in the light of scientific and political developments, art – in the broadest sense – was possible. They doubted whether reality could be represented, arguing that it was too elusive, according to science, and therefore dubious both morally and socially. If Dada valued anything, it was the freedom to experiment.99
Dada, no less than other modern movements, harboured a paradox. For though they doubted the moral or social usefulness of art, the Dadaists had little choice but to remain artists; in their attempt to restore the mind to health, they still supported the avant-garde idea of the explanatory and redemptive powers of art. The only difference was that, rather than follow any of the ‘isms’ they derided, they turned instead to childhood and chance in an attempt to recapture innocence, cleanliness, clarity – above all, as a way to probe the unconscious.
No one succeeded in this more than Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters. Arp produced two types of image during the years 1916–20. There were his simple woodcuts, toylike jigsaws; like children he loved to paint clouds and leaves in straightforward, bright, immediate colours. At the same time he was open to chance, tearing off strips of paper that he dropped and fixed wherever they fell, creating random collages. Nonetheless, the work which Arp allowed into the public domain has a meditative quality, simple and stable.100 Tristan Tzara did the same thing with poetry, where, allegedly, words were drawn at random from a bag and then tumbled into ‘sentences.’101 Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) made collages too, but his approach was deceptively unrandom. Just as Marcel Duchamp converted ordinary objects like urinals and bicycle wheels into art by renaming them and exhibiting them in galleries, Schwitters found poetry in rubbish. A cubist at heart, he scavenged his native Hanover for anything dirty, peeling, stained, half-burnt, or torn. When these objects were put together by him, they were transformed into something else entirely that told a story and was beautiful.102 Although his collages may appear to have been thrown together at random, the colors match, the edges of one piece of material align perfectly with another, the stain in a newspaper echoes a form elsewhere in the composition. For Schwitters these were ‘Merz’ paintings, the name forming part of a newspaper advertisement for the Kommerz- und Privat-Bank, which he had used in an early collage. The detritus and flotsam in Schwitters’s collages were for him a comment, both on the culture that leads to war, creating carnage, waste, and filth, and on the cities that were the powerhouse of that culture and yet the home of so much misery. If Edouard Manet, Charles Baudelaire, and the impressionists had celebrated the fleeting, teeming beauty of late-nineteenth-century cities, the environment that gave rise to modernism, Schwitters’s collages were uncomfortable elegies to the end of an era, a new form of art that was simultaneously a form of relic, a condemnation of that world, and a memorial. It was this kin
d of ambiguity, or paradox, that the Dadaists embraced with relish.103
Towards the end of the war, Hugo Ball left Zurich for the Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, and the centre of gravity of Dada shifted to Germany. Hans Arp and Max Ernst, another collagist, went to Cologne, and Schwitters was in Hanover. But it was in Berlin that Dada changed, becoming far more political. Berlin, amid defeat, was a brutal place, ravaged by shortages, despoiled by misery everywhere, with politics bitterly divided, and with revolution in the wake of Russian events a very real possibility. In November 1918 there was a general socialist uprising, which failed, its leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered. The uprising was a defining moment for, among others, Adolf Hitler, but also for the Dadaists.104
It was Richard Hülsenbeck who transported ‘the Dada virus’ to Berlin.105 He published his Dada manifesto in April 1918, and a Dada club was established. Early members included Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Hannah Hoch, who replaced collage with photomontage to attack the Prussian society that they all loathed. Dadaists were still being controversial and causing scandals: Johannes Baader invaded the Weimar Assembly, where he bombarded the delegates with leaflets and declared himself president of the state.106 Dada was more collectivist in Berlin than in Zurich, and a more long-term campaign was that waged by the Dadaists against the German expressionists, such as Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, who, they claimed, were no more than bourgeois German romantics.107 George Grosz and Otto Dix were the fiercest critics among the painters, their most striking image being the wretched half-human forms of the war cripple. These deformed, grotesque individuals were painful reminders for those at home of the brutal madness of the war. Grosz, Dix, Hoch and Heartfield were no less brutal in their depiction of figures with prostheses, who looked half-human and half-machine. These mutilated figures were gross metaphors for what would become the Weimar culture: corrupt, disfigured, with an element of the puppet, the old order still in command behind the scenes – but above all, a casualty of war.