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 (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 assassination 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 canal boat of pressed straw from New York to Washington, where he remained for six months serving whiskeys in a crowded "Nigger-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 lassitude 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 assured of the sincerest gratitude 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 destitute children at Westchester for a short spell as nightwatchman. 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 feckless, 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 aptitude, 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 assistant 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 assortment 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 massage 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 leered down on Hermann and his guests as they filed through the door. When the service was over, everyone assembled 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 hell with you! Are you going to drive off?" The force of this blow shattered the glass 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 competition 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 accumulated 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 Krugerstrasse 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 principal 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 manuscripts.
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 Stonborough and took a course in humanities at a college in Chicago. His father, an immigrant from Nassau 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. Stonborough, 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 Dorotheergasse, 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 God, and keep it," "Let all that breathes praise the Lord. Alleluia!"
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War Page 2