The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  The autobiographical notes that Karl had dictated to Hermine were in no fit state for publication. Instead the family decided to honor his memory with a privately printed edition of his politico-economic writings and pieces he had written about his travels. On January 25, 1913, he was buried in a plot long reserved for himself and his family, occupying a prime position in the grand, hierarchical cemetery and tourist center known as the Zentralfriedhof. The Wittgenstein family crypt, a crumbling octagonal edifice of once-modern design, can be located at a distance of forty paces from the graves of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Johann Strauss. Soon after Karl's death, his son Rudi's mortal remains were moved from their original place of burial to be next to his. Rudi is the only one of the five Wittgenstein sons to be interred here. Next to Karl now lies the body of Leopoldine, his wife, and on the other side that of an eagle-nosed servant who went by the name of Rosalie.

  PAUL REVIEWED

  Paul's concert debut on December 1, 1913, with which this story opened, was considered a huge success by his family, by his friends and perhaps also by the Palais servants, even before the first reviews started to appear in the papers. Albert Figdor, an eccentric billionaire cousin, wrote to him on the day after the concert to say that he was overjoyed by the success of it and that all of Vienna was praising him. "Please accept the enclosed joke as a small token of my affection." His present was an original autograph manuscript of a humorous canon by Felix Mendelssohn.

  Paul was acutely sensitive to the opinions of others--furious about praise when he believed it to be unmerited, and indignant about negative criticism of any kind. He preferred his performances not to be discussed at all. Most of all he was allergic to the views of his younger brother, for though Ludwig conceded an admiration of Paul's technique, he was seldom enthusiastic about the manner of his interpretation. Ludwig was hypercritical of all musicians, even the best (he once interrupted the famous Rose String Quartet during one of their rehearsals to tell them they were playing a Schubert quartet all wrong), but his low opinion of Paul's musicianship, though typical of his fastidiousness, agitated his elder brother beyond endurance. While Paul was practicing at home one evening he suddenly stopped playing and rushed through to the next-door room where Ludwig was sitting minding his own business, and shouted at him, "I cannot play when you are in the house as I feel your scepticism seeping towards me from under the door."

  "My opinion of your playing is, in and of itself, UTTERLY IMMATERIAL," Ludwig insisted, but Paul, who would never let the matter drop, came to the conclusion that his younger brother could not stand his musical performances.

  In the Volksgarten Cafe on the Burgring, Ludwig once tried to explain his position. He began, as tactfully as he was able, by comparing Paul's piano playing to the performance of a fine actor who regards the text of a play as a springboard from which he can express to the audience aspects of his own personality, and went on to admit that Paul's musical interpretations were spoiled (for him at least) by the intrusion of too much ego into the music. "You do not, I believe, seek to hide behind a musical composition but want to portray yourself in it. If I wish to hear a composer speak (which I often do) I shall not turn to you."

  Like most performing artists, Paul affected to despise professional critics, even though he later became one himself. "From an artistic point of view they are not important," he wrote to his agent. "What does it matter what so-and-so thinks or makes believe to think? Unfortunately though, from a practical point of view, they are of the utmost importance," and it was precisely for want of good press reviews that he had planned his Musikverein debut in the first place. Max Kalbeck, the distinguished sixty-three-year-old critic and Brahms scholar, was the first to appear with a highfalutin piece in the Neues Wiener Tagbhtt on December 6:

  Any young man, a member of Viennese high society, who launches himself on the public in the year 1913 as a piano virtuoso with a concerto by John Field must either be a fanatical enthusiast or a very self-confident dilettante. But Herr Paul Wittgenstein--for it is he of whom we speak--is neither one nor the other but (better than either as far as we are concerned) a serious artist. He undertook this hazardous adventure without knowing quite how risky it was, driven by a pure love for the task and guided by the honourable intention of placing before the public a test, both reliable and rare, of his eminent skills.

  Kalbeck's review winds on in verbose, affected prose that would be considered unprintable in modern times. It is perhaps for this reason that his Boswellian eight-volume biography of Brahms, written over fifteen years between 1898 and 1913, though still the seminal source of Brahms scholarship, has never been translated into English. Of Paul's concert the great critic continued:

  Under the fading light of our feelings, well-loved figures of antiquity hovered before us and initiated us into the secrets of poetic twilight. A dryly written composition had unexpectedly blossomed into a poem. Inside that immaculately clean technique, which seems to us today as cool as inorganic matter, lives a tender and sensitive soul and we felt its warm breath.

  Kalbeck was a friend of the Wittgensteins--a regular guest at their Alleegasse music evenings--and his rave review of Paul's performance may have been biased. His description of Paul's "immaculately clean technique" and "the pure and faultless luster of the pianist's delicate, soft and sparkling touch" may be compared with comments from another unsigned review published in Das Fremdenblatt on December 10 which stated that "further practice would add greater perfection to his abilities and refine his performance," and that his playing was "particularly careful and exceedingly cautious." But the Fremdenblatt critic went on to add that "the force with which the notes were struck and the unassuming precision of a healthy rhythmical sense legitimise his performing in public" (hardly consistent with his point about "cautiousness"), and that the programme's considerable hurdles were "cleared by a performer who was obviously firm in the saddle."

  Julius Korngold, the all-important critic of the Neue Freie Presse who had mysteriously walked out of the concert after listening only to the first piece, eventually produced a short paragraph for his newspaper that attempted to justify his behavior: "The debut of the young pianist Paul Wittgenstein aroused lively interest... [his] freshly acquired technique, his sheer joy in music making and his classically trained feeling for style could all be sympathetically indulged without the need for taking further risks." Korngold's review, appearing a full three weeks after the concert, refreshed the young pianist's confidence and bolstered him with renewed authority to continue in pursuit of his chosen career. Paul had fought hard against his family's objections, sometimes rebelling against and sometimes making concessions to his father's tyranny. On Karl's insistence he had enrolled at Vienna's Technical University in 1910 and soon afterward taken a job (much resented) as a banking apprentice in Berlin. Now at last he had secured a victory for his pianism. The Korngold review may have been late in coming and slapdash in its execution, but that did not matter, for it was a final and very public vindication of Paul Wittgenstein's talent that succeeded not only in filling him with hope and confidence but also in alleviating the gloom of a family Christmas which, that year, everyone had been dreading.

  On December 3, 1913, two days after Paul's triumphant debut, a short piece appeared in the pages of Srbobran, the Chicago journal for emigre Serbs in America:

  The Austrian Heir Apparent has announced his intention of visiting Sarajevo early next year. Every Serb must take note of this ... Serbs, seize everything you can lay your hands upon--knives, rifles, bombs and dynamite. Take holy vengeance! Death to the Hapsburg dynasty and eternal remembrance to the heroes who raise their hands against it.

  MONEY MATTERS

  Karl Wittgenstein's estate was divided equally between his wife and six surviving children. Gretl had opted for a hugh cash settlement and promptly bought herself a villa and a castle and some land at Gmunden for 335,000 Austrian kronen, but no sooner had she invited the architects and decorators to doll the place up t
han Jerome, restless as usual, was insisting on a move to England. So in April 1914 the Stonboroughs packed their bags and went to live in a Jacobean manor house at Besselsleigh near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. Jerome, having slightly more experience of business than his wife, took command of her considerable investments, transferring the bulk of her liquid fortune to the American stock market. Paul and his other siblings divided among themselves their late father's Austrian properties as well as his large portfolio of foreign stocks held at the Central Hanover Bank in New York, the Kreditanstalt and Blankart depots in Zurich and at the Dutch bank Hope & Co. in Amsterdam.

  Each of the siblings was made exceedingly rich by their father's demise, but the money, to a family obsessed with social morality, brought with it many problems. Each was generous, donating large sums, often secretly, to the arts, to medicine, to friends and to other worthy causes. Ludwig distributed 100,000 kronen among various Austrian "artists." These included the architect Adolf Loos, the painter Oskar Kokoschka and the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. The last of these killed himself with an overdose of cocaine in the following year. Seventeen other recipients wrote thank-you letters to Ludwig, most of which he repudiated as "extremely distasteful" on account of their "ignoble almost fraudulent tone." Hermine, in a muddled quasi-philosophical way, tried to draw some distinction between the sort of money that she called "ethical" and the sort she labeled "bourgeois." Gretl dreamed longingly of a life without any money at all. "It would be healthy," she wrote in her diary, "if destiny would kick me off the high life from which I could never voluntarily depart. Maybe, but only maybe, I would then become a human being. But I am not brave enough. As things stand now I can see the right path clearly in front of me but I cannot decide to take it."

  Paul believed that strong government was more important than any amount of personal wealth and gave large sums to anticommunist and anti-anarchist political organizations. For a rich young man wanting to make his way as a concert pianist, things were not as easy as they may have seemed. When people in the classical music business smell money (which isn't very often), they are drawn to it like wasps to a jam pot. If a performer is rich enough to stage his own concerts, however good he is at playing his instrument, he will find himself in the dispiriting position of being invited to play only on a no-fee basis, or in consideration of sponsorship. This was to prove a problem for Paul that lasted the whole of his performing life. In the months following his debut promoters and agents buzzed around eager to partake of his fortune, but on the advice of his blind and wise mentor, Dr. Labor, he held them at bay:

  Nothing [said Labor to Alma Schindler] is more dangerous for a young talent than not allowing it to mature. For all young artists the example of Rubinstein and Goldmark should be held up as the direst warning--two such talents--ruined because they did not wait until they were ready. Rubinstein bestowed his spring buds upon us all, but never brought forth fruit.

  In the six months following his debut Paul played no more than a handful of concerts. There was an evening of chamber music by Mendelssohn and Labor with the well-known violinist and friend of the family Marie Soldat-Roeger. Hermine, in attendance with her mother and sisters, wrote to inform Ludwig that Paul had played "very beautifully and had received praise from all sides." At Graz, in February 1914, he gave a solo recital, which was complimented by the fastidious critic of the Grazer Tagespost. Another chamber concert in March was followed, three weeks later, by a second high-profile outing at the Musikverein. This time the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the Slovakian pianist and composer Rudolph Reti, played Josef Labor's Variations on a Theme of Czerny, an anodyne nocturne by Field and a handful of studies by Chopin. These scattered events may appear insignificant, but to Paul they were the necessary rungs in a ladder of experience that he hoped might lead him towards his long-cherished goal of a busy international career. But neither Paul nor anyone else in the complacent, easy-going, coffeehouse atmosphere of Habsburg Vienna had reckoned on that summer's catastrophic interruptions.

  PRELUDE TO WAR

  When news reached Vienna, on June 28, 1914, that the heir to the Haps-burg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, had been shot in the neck by a juvenile anarchist at the Bosnian town of Sarajevo, there was no wailing or rending of veils. The Austrians, by and large, took it on the chin, for the Emperor's nephew had never been popular. The reasons for this were neither political nor considered, but instinctive and emotional--the people had long ago made up their minds that he was fat and ugly and ungracious. The Archduke had married morganatically, that is to say he had espoused a woman deemed by Hapsburg house law to be too lower class to attend state occasions and too lower class to bear future heirs to the Imperial throne. In order to marry her, Franz Ferdinand had been forced to renounce the right of any future issue to the Austrian throne. The public knew that the Emperor disliked his nephew intensely, and since the old man's life had been full of woe--his brother was put to death by firing squad in Mexico, his sister-in-law lost her marbles, his wife was murdered by a rough brute in Geneva, and his only son was the Prince Rudolf who had apparently shot himself in a suicide pact with his mistress--public sympathy was all with the Emperor against his ponderous and overbearing heir. Stefan Zweig, who on several occasions observed the Archduke in his box at the theater, remembered his sitting "broad and mighty, with cold fixed gaze."

  He was never seen to smile and no photographs showed him relaxed. He had no sense of music and no sense of humour, and his wife was equally unfriendly. They were both surrounded by an icy air; one knew that they had no friends and also that the old Emperor hated him with all his heart because he did not have sufficient tact to hide his impatience to succeed to the throne.

  In a photograph taken on that fatal day at Sarajevo the Archduke and his wife are both, contrary to Zweig, depicted with broad grins on their faces, but their last, perhaps their only, smiles came too late to warm the hardened hearts of the Viennese, as did the news of Franz Ferdinand's last utterance, gasped at his Archduchess as she sat grim-faced and upright behind him in their carriage: "Sopherl! Sopherl! Don't die! Keep alive for the children ... It is nothing! It is nothing! It is nothing!" She could not hear him, for she was already dead.

  Historians have suggested that within the psyche of the men and women of all German-speaking lands was a will to war, that the artists and composers and writers were demonstrating a restless predilection for the destruction of their states. This instinct drove them to an atavistic, primeval savagery. Shortly after the outbreak of war the German writer Thomas Mann explained:

  This world of peace, which has now collapsed with such shattering thunder--had we not all of us had enough of it? Was it not foul with all its comfort? Did it not fester and stink with the decomposition of civilisation? Morally and psychologically I felt the necessity of this catastrophe and that feeling of cleansing, of elevation and liberation, which filled me, when that which one had thought impossible really happened.

  And yet in the immediate aftermath of the Sarajevo assassination the public showed itself to be more concerned with the funeral arrangements--particularly the vexed question of whether the Archduchess's corpse was grand enough to be buried with that of her husband in the Kapuzinergruft, or Imperial Crypt--than with the possibility or probability of any war proceeding from it. On a higher, governmental level, however, things were a little different. Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, and Foreign Minister Leopold Berch-told seized upon the Archduke's murder as an opportunity to humiliate Serbia and strengthen Austro-Hungarian influence in the Balkans. The Serbian government, they claimed, had had a hand in the assassination and must therefore be punished. The inevitable rejection, by the Serbs, of an unacceptable Austrian ultimatum on July 25 led to Vienna's declaration of war against Serbia on the 28th.

  The rest--an extraordinary scrimmage of nations roused to action in the name of honor--is, as they say, history. On July 31, Germany declared war on the Russians, w
ho were mobilizing troops in Serbia's defense; France, in honor of its agreement with Russia, moved against Germany; Germany, to protect itself against the French, invaded Belgium, whereupon the British (who had not the slightest interest in the Serbian quarrel) declared war on Germany in defense of Belgium's neutrality. On August 5, Austro-Hungary declared war on Russia; on August 6, Serbia on Germany; and the day after that Montenegro declared itself against the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans. On August 10, France declared war on Austro-Hungary and on August 12 Great Britain did the same. By August 23 Japan, thousands of miles away, had pitched in against Germany with the immediate effect that Austro-Hungary, in honorable defense of its ally, declared war on Japan. On August 28, two short months after the Sarajevo shootings, Austro-Hungary declared war on Belgium. More countries would follow, for events were proceeding at a horrifying pace, but even before the last of these belligerent nations had time to throw itself into the ruckus, disaster had struck the House of Wittgenstein.

  SIGNING UP

  With regard to their conscription, the circumstances of the three surviving Wittgenstein brothers--Kurt, Paul and Ludwig--were each very different. Kurt was thirty-six years old when war broke out and was living in New York. He had arrived aboard the newly built German liner Imperator on April 9, 1914, with the purpose of exploring opportunities for investment in the American and Canadian steel business. For a while he stayed at the Waldorf Hotel, before moving to the Knickerbocker Club on East 62nd Street. He made friends in high society, bought himself a luxurious automobile, took several holidays at the Virginia spa resort of Hot Springs and settled into his New World lifestyle with apparent ease. When the news of war in Europe reached him, he was on his way back to New York from Cranbrook, a steel-manufacturing town in British Columbia, intending to sail back to Austria at the beginning of July, but the American authorities would not let him leave. When he presented himself at the Austrian Consulate in Manhattan he was put to work by the Consul General, Alexander von Nuber, in the organization's propaganda department, whose task it was to persuade the American people, the American press and more importantly the American administration to support the Austro-Hungarian cause in the war.