"You know, ever since I can remember, I've always wished for an organ, but never had the money," Labor told Alma Schindler. "I've given up all hope now--in the next world perhaps." Alma wrote in her diary that evening: "God willing, if ever I were really well off--the first thing I'd do would be to buy Labor an organ!" In the end it was Paul's mother, Leopol-dine Wittgenstein, who paid for Labor's new Rieger-Jaegerdorf organ, and Karl, who, on Labor's seventieth birthday in June 1912, paid to have many of his finest compositions published by Universal Edition in Vienna. Ludwig tried (without success) to get Labor's music performed by musicians in Cambridge. In Vienna the Wittgenstein family promoted regular "Labor Evenings"--concerts dedicated to the performance of his works. At such events the family servants--cooks, gardeners, huntsmen and chambermaids--were all urged to attend and, in the words of Gretl's younger son, Ji, "commanded to applaud super-vigorously (They did!!!) and blind Labor was delighted that the public was so enthusiastic."
"I could never hear enough of Labor's music," Hermine admitted, "for it touched me often to tears--tears which I let freely course down my cheeks, since I knew he could not see them." The Wittgenstein family was besotted by him. He became their property--their in-house composer, musical adviser, recipient of their charity, friend and all-round philosophical and psychological guru. When a public charity calling itself the Labor-Bund was set up to publish more of his music, promote concerts and erect a statue of the composer in front of the Konzerthaus, the Wittgensteins were very jealous.
LUDWIG'S PREDICAMENT
Between his three surviving sons Karl could choose no heir. Kurt was lightweight, Paul and Ludwig both worryingly neurotic and fundamentally uninterested in business. By the time of his dying, none of them was married. He had hoped that at least one might succeed as an engineer and for a while it seemed that Ludwig alone might have made it. In 1906, shortly after leaving school, Ludwig had read a book called Populare Schriften (Popular Writings) by the renowned Viennese physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, which contained an essay on aeronautics in which it was suggested that any advancement of this burgeoning science would require the attentions of "heroes and geniuses"--the former to test-fly the planes and the latter to understand how and why they worked. Reading this at the height of the Weininger cult and knowing also that Weininger had himself attended several of Boltzmanm's lectures, Ludwig (the young aspiring hero-genius) promptly applied for a place in Boltzmann's class at the University of Vienna. Had he succeeded, he would have sat on a classroom bench next to Erwin Schrodinger (winner in 1933 of a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics), but both students' aspirations were dashed when on October 5, 1906, the great physicist, while holidaying at the seaside resort of Duino near Trieste, hanged himself in his hotel bedroom as his wife and daughter were splashing about in the warm waters of the bay. So Ludwig went instead to the Technical High School of Berlin-Charlottenburg to study hot-air balloons. This he later claimed to have been a complete waste of his time. A year later, with encouragement from his father, he moved to Manchester in England, first to experiment with kites on the Derbyshire moors and afterward to engage as a research student at Manchester University investigating propellers. The female students at Manchester appalled him, as he was irritated by their flirtatious manner with the professors. "All the women I know are such idiots," he said.
By June 1911 Ludwig had patented a small refinement to the propeller of his day, but his engineering enthusiasms (for which he later claimed to have possessed "neither taste nor talent") were waning and by the end of the year he resolved to seek out Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, to see if he might not prefer to study philosophy.
Boltzmann, Weininger and Beethoven ranked among the icons whom Ludwig most admired and whom he most wished to emulate. Each exemplified to him genius in its purest form, not limited by literary, artistic or scientific achievement, but extending beyond that, to embody in his mind the very essence of genius as expressed by force of personality. In the case of Weininger Ludwig repudiated much of his philosophy but continued nevertheless to insist on his genius. "His greatness lies in that with which we disagree," he once said. "It is his enormous mistake that is great." Ambitious, unstable and driven by a neurotic urge for self-improvement, Ludwig needed geniuses to worship as much as he desired to be regarded as one of them himself. "Improve yourself, that is the only thing you can do to better the world," he said.
Having thrown himself at Bertrand Russell's feet, Ludwig soon discovered that, without having completed a single significant piece of written philosophical work and while still only in his mid-twenties, he was being hailed by many of the brightest minds of Cambridge University as a genius. "Perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating," is how Russell later described him.
Ludwig's seduction of Russell may be followed through an entertaining series of letters that Russell sent to a "very tall [woman] with a long thin face something like a horse, indomitable courage and a will of iron." She was the daughter of a duke and the wife of a brewer, his mistress at the time, Lady Ottoline Morrell. He first wrote to her about Ludwig in a letter of October 18, 1911, in which he described the aspiring young philosopher as "an unknown German, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German" who had interrupted a private tutorial in his rooms. Ludwig, uncertain whether to commit himself to philosophy at Cambridge or to return to his aeronautical experiments in Manchester, insisted on being allowed to sit in on Russell's famous philosophy classes. The don graciously obliged, but soon became apprehensive when Ludwig started stalking him around the rooms and colleges of the university. Suddenly and unexpectedly he would appear in Russell's rooms, just as he was changing for dinner, or at midnight as he was climbing into bed, insisting on talking philosophy late into the night and threatening to kill himself if Russell turned him out. Russell consequently endured hour upon hour of Ludwig, pacing around his rooms "like a caged tiger," testing his patience to the uttermost, stuttering and blathering long and incomprehensible monologues on the subject of logic and mathematics.
"My German friend threatens to be an infliction," a wearied Russell wrote to Lady Ottoline; "he came back with me after my lecture and argued till dinner time--obstinate and perverse, but I think not stupid." In subsequent letters Ludwig is described as "very argumentative and tiresome. ... a bore ... excitable and rather sad... In his flat moments he talks slowly, stammering, and saying dull things... My German engineer I think is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable--I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room but he wouldn't," and a fortnight later: "My ferocious German came and argued at me after my lecture. He is armour-plated against all assaults of reasoning. It is really rather a waste of time talking to him." Meanwhile Russell's philosophical colleague, George Moore, became so perplexed, intrigued, excited and irritated by Ludwig that he contemplated keeping a diary entitled "what I feel about Wittgenstein."
The same happened to Russell, who within a few months was enthralled by his young student. "I am getting to like him, he is literary, very musical, pleasant mannered and I think really intelligent." Should he then return to his aeronautical studies or plug on with philosophy? As Russell later recalled, Ludwig put the question in typically obtuse form: At the end of his first term he came to me and said: "Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?" I replied "My dear fellow, I don't know, why are you asking me?" He said "Because if I am a complete idiot I shall become an aeronaut; but if not I shall become a philosopher." I told him to write me something during the vacation on some philosophical subject and I would then tell him whether he was a complete idiot or not. At the beginning of the following term he brought the fulfilment of this suggestion. After reading only one sentence, I said to him: "No you must not become an aeronaut." And he did not.
BACK IN VIENNA, Karl was bitterly disappointed to receive news that his last and youngest son had, like all the others, sp
urned his chances of becoming a great engineer. Cambridge, however, rejoiced. Russell was particularly delighted. Still no clearer in his understanding of Ludwig's philosophical message, he felt abundant admiration for his young student, and wrote to his horse-faced mistress to tell her so:
He has pure intellectual passion in the highest degree; it makes me love him ... He is the young man one hopes for. But as is usual with such men, he is unstable, and may go to pieces ... in discussion with him I put out all my force and only just equal him. With all my other pupils I should squash them flat if I did so. When he left I was strangely excited by him. I love him and feel that he will solve the problems that I am too old to solve.
Russell's joy in Ludwig soon came to the attention of others at Cambridge, among them the economist John Maynard Keynes, the historian Lytton Strachey and various members of the so-called Cambridge Conversazione Society, a secretive conclave of intellectual, left-wing and mainly homosexual men, which wanted to have Ludwig elected to the membership as a fellow "Apostle." Russell (known as Bertie by his friends) guarded Ludwig's company jealously and, although himself a signed-up Conversazione Society Apostle, was disturbed by the prospect of having to share his trouve with the others. In November 1912 Strachey wrote to another society member, Saxon Sydney Turner:
The poor man [Russell] is in a sad state. He looks about 96 with long snow-white hair and an infinitely haggard countenance. The election of Wittgenstein has been a great blow to him. He dearly hoped to keep him all to himself, and indeed succeeded wonderfully, until Keynes at last insisted on meeting him and saw at once that he was a genius and that it was essential to elect him ... Their decision was suddenly announced to Bertie, who nearly swooned. Of course he could produce no reason against the election except the remarkable one that the Society was so degraded that his Austrian would certainly refuse to belong to it... Bertie is really a tragic figure, and I am very sorry for him, but he is most deluded too.
All his life Ludwig had been unsettled by feelings of self-hatred, psychological loneliness and urges to kill himself. In 1912 he was once again contemplating suicide, even while conceding that his work was worthwhile. He was pleased to have given up aeronautics, pleased to have a voice in the world of Cambridge philosophy and to be adulated by a small but influential clique of philosophers. In the figure of David Pinsent, a clever, easy-going student of maths at Trinity College, Ludwig had also found his first real friend. By his own bleak standards the year 1912 was probably one of the happiest in Ludwig's life.
THE NEWLYWEDS
In the octave of years that passed between her 1905 marriage to Jerome Stonborough and her father's final illness in 1913, Gretl had not been altogether happy either. Since the death of Rudolf, she had connected herself, umbilically, to her sister Hermine, upon whom she depended for guidance and friendship as well as moral support and motherly love. "I do not think that my marriage [to Jerome] will change anything between you and me," she wrote on the evening after her wedding, "because I am completely unchanged ... I live at all times of day with you at the Alleegasse." She had left Vienna in a state of high anxiety. The first stop on the long honeymoon trip was a visit to the Wittgenstein summer retreat, a panoramic estate called Hochreit situated on a high ridge where the Traisen and Schwarza valleys meet among the Mittelgebirge mountains of Lower Austria. "The parting was terribly hard," she wrote to Hermine, "far worse even than I had feared; truly I have been heavy-hearted ever since. On the journey I had a private cry ... So it was an abysmal first evening." From the Hochreit she and Jerome traveled to Venice and from thence to Cairo and up the Nile on a boat to Aswan and Luxor. Jerome was thrilled by the Sphinxes and the great temple at Karnak, but Gretl was not. "The Egyptian ruins do not impress me at all and the Nile is rather boring." At least she seemed to be pleased with her new husband. "He is quite changed. Imagine, he is not jealous any more and is smiling from morning to evening."
Shortly after their return to Europe in the late spring of 1905, Gretl and Jerome moved to Berlin, where he had decided to embark upon a study of chemistry. As a wedding present Karl had paid for the couple's rented flat near the Tiergarten to be kitted out by the controversial interior decorators Joseph Hoffmann and Koloman Moser. The result, a mixture of stark modernity and nursery kitsch, greatly pleased her and as soon as work on the flat was completed she too decided to enroll in a course of study at the Scientific Institute. In Vienna she had found few members of her own sex able to share in her excitement about science, but to her surprise and disappointment there were ten female students in her embryology and histology class in Berlin and she loathed them all. "Six of these women are Russian Jews," she complained. "They are dirty, careless and mainly dressed in transparent things. Then there are the others, blonde Germans who smile all the time. None of them has a natural relationship with men. They are all poor, ugly and miserable little souls."
In 1906 Gretl gave birth to a son who was christened Thomas (nicknamed Tommy), and a year later the Stonboroughs, abandoning Berlin, went for a long and luxurious visit to their Guggenheim in-laws in New York. On their return to Europe they set up a new home in Switzerland. It was a feature of Jerome's neurosis that he could never stay in the same place for long. He and his family were constantly on the move, with the excuse always that he had to study another science with another professor at another university. For all his university meanderings he never seemed to gain any qualifications. In Switzerland he enlisted at the Federal Technical College in Zurich to study with Professor Richard Will-statter, who in 1915 was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry for his investigations into chlorophyll. Gretl tried to enlist on a course in physics and mathematics at the University of Zurich but was told she had first to pass her Abitar (final-year school exams). She did so, but no sooner had she enrolled than Jerome let it be known that he desired to move again, this time to Paris.
In the French capital, where they rented a luxurious flat on the Rue de la Faisanderie, Gretl signed up for another scientific course. "I cannot tell you how much I enjoy learning," she wrote to Hermine. "If only one could prescribe study to every human being. I am sure that it is a universal cure for all dissatisfaction and a good replacement for a husband and a child!" Six long years after the birth of Thomas, she and Jerome had a second son called John Jerome, whom they nicknamed Ji or Ji-Ji.
KARL'S LOSS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Let us now return to the deathbed scene that was abandoned, some while back, with Hermine sitting by her father's side taking autobiographical dictation, as Karl's life dangled by a thread in an upstairs room at the Palais over Christmas 1912. When a person is unquestionably dying and everyone around him knows it, even those who love him most begin to hope that the final curtain will hurry up and fall. The Wittgensteins were growing impatient. Ludwig was eager to return to Cambridge, to his new friends and, above all, to his philosophy. "On arriving here I found my father very ill," he wrote to Russell. "There is no hope that he may recover. These circumstances have--I am afraid--rather lamed my thoughts & I am muddled although I struggle against it." But Karl, fragile as he was, somehow survived Christmas and Boxing Day and into the New Year. By January 6, 1913, Ludwig had to concede that he would not be able to get back to Cambridge for the start of the new term "as the illness of my poor father is growing very rapidly." To his moral science tutor he wrote four days later: "Although it is certain that he will not recover, one can not yet tell whether the illness will take a very rapid course or not. I will therefore have to stay here another ten days & hope I shall then be able to decide whether I may go back to Cambridge or must stay in Vienna, until the end." On the same day he informed Russell:
He is not yet in any great pain but feels on the whole very bad having constant high fever. This makes him so apathetic that one cannot do him any good by sitting at his bed etc. And as this was the only thing that I could ever do for him, I am now perfectly useless here. So the time of my staying now depends entirely upon whether the illness will take so ra
pid a course that I cannot risk leaving Vienna.
This comedy of vanities, shuffling visitations and bedside vigils went on for another week until, on 20 January, Karl finally lost consciousness, and submitting to the inevitable, graciously breathed his last.
Dear Russell,
My dear father died yesterday in the afternoon. He had the most beautiful death that I can imagine; without the slightest pain and falling asleep like a child! I did not feel sad for a single moment during all the last hours, but most joyful & I think that this death was worth a whole life. I will leave Vienna on Saturday the 25th & will be in Cambridge either on Sunday night or Monday morning I long very much to see you again.
Yours ever,
Ludwig Wittgenstein
IN MEMORIAM K.W.
Karl Wittgenstein's obituaries, as all obituaries tended to be in those days, were dignified and complimentary. None of them mentioned his price-fixing, his cartels or his squeeze on the workers that had so vexed the left-wing press at the time of his grand resignation. Instead they dwelt upon his charitable giving, focusing especially on his legacy as a patron of the arts, without whose spontaneous generosity the famous Secession building on the Friedrichstrasse would never have been built. "Karl Wittgenstein was a man of unusually creative energy and strong organisational talent," reported the Neue Freie Presse. "The Austrian Iron industry, which thirty years ago was in a less than advanced state, had him to thank for its dramatic progress." The last paragraph was a warm tribute:
Karl Wittgenstein had a wild temperament and an extraordinarily rapid grasp of a subject, brilliantly quick-witted in discussions and a charming sense of humor. He was often irascible but never bore a grudge; always willing to help his friends and even those who held opposing views valued his traits of character. His charitable largesse was frequently carried out in secret; he promoted young talent and was always ready to support artistic endeavors.
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War Page 6