The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  As the months passed with no announcement from the Vatican, Mrs. Wittgenstein's patience continued to fray. At the end of May she reported: "I have had good news from Paul, as far as his health is concerned, but not a syllable about the exchange. It makes one despair!" And when she discovered that he had been hauled before the prison commandant and ordered into confinement for a month, she was beside herself with agitation. The reasons for the disciplinary action are unknown, though it is possible that he was one of eleven officers punished at that time for failing to report an attempted breakout. Whatever the reason, Paul, without a piano, new to the Krepost and low in spirits, took it badly. Hermine confided to Ludwig:

  Mama is, of course, really upset about it and it's very fortunate that Paul mentions the kindness of the Danish Consul to which he attributes significant preferential treatment and he makes a number of light-hearted remarks, which at least soften the overall sad impression a little.

  Another cause for concern was the tone of Paul's letters home in which he had started making dangerously subversive remarks, which Mrs. Wittgenstein feared might lead him into further trouble with the prison authorities. In one of them, which by a stroke of fortune seems to have eluded the notice of the Russian censors, he wrote that his only real concern was for an Austrian victory in the war and that he would willingly donate one million gold kronen to support the Austrian troops.

  What Paul did not mention in his letters home, as he knew it would distress his mother gravely, was that a typhus epidemic had broken out among the prisoners. This disease, which killed indiscriminately, hung over the Krepost like a nameless horror. It was carried by body lice, from which Paul believed himself immune. Its early symptoms--a high fever with severe pain in the muscles and joints--are followed by dark-red rashes that spread rapidly from the victim's bottom and shoulders to the rest of his body. In the second week the infected person loses control of his bowels and becomes delirious. Within days he is most likely to be dead. By Easter 1915, when the epidemic was at its height, some twenty to thirty men were removed from the Krepost every day and brought into hospital. None of them returned. Neither of the two hospitals in Omsk could cope with the daily intake from the camps in the region as doctors, nurses and attendants themselves started to fall victim to the disease. One especially galling incident is preserved in the diary of Hans Weiland, an Austrian officer held at Krasnoyarsk:

  The men lie side by side pressed closely against each other in tiered rows of bunks. The air, a repellent, almost sweet stink, is thick enough to cut. Water drips continuously from the ceiling ... Then, late in the evening, a guard comes to me with an order from the camp commandant: the company is to provide five attendants immediately for the typhus hospital; the other attendants are either sick or dead ... There is a sudden silence; everyone is thinking it over; everyone holds back. This message is the way to death, a deliberate parting from family, wife, children, life. Nobody volunteers. I repeat the request and explain the need for this duty to be carried out. The hazy atmosphere makes it impossible to see across the room; you can hardly see the next man's face. You can almost hear the breathing and the pulse beats in the silence. Then a young fellow from the Sudetenland calls out from his bunk: "I'll go; it has to be." He stands in front of me, says quietly that his mother is old but if he has to die then his brother will probably come home from the war and look after her. Four other men follow his lead with hardly a word. They go to the hospital, take over the nursing duties, become ill and all five die. Heroes!

  A CHANCE OF ESCAPE

  In the summer of 1915, after months of querulous, drawn-out negotiation, the first batch of sick and wounded prisoners was finally exchanged out of Russia, but Paul Wittgenstein, whose name had been on the list since January, was not among them. His mother had been sending him too much money in the post and the Russians, intercepting and stealing it, were anxious not to forfeit their income. In the meantime, two captives, who had been with Paul in the Krepost and had succeeded in getting themselves exchanged out of Omsk, came to see Mrs. Wittgenstein in Vienna. One of them, Captain Karl von Liel, had been wounded in September 1914 and as he lay on the ground unable to move was mutilated by the enemy. Two fingers of his right hand and four of his left were cut off. "This amazing individual," Leopoldine told Ludwig, "is in good spirits despite having to undergo every possible type of operation here to fit prosthetic attachments." Captain von Liel told Mrs. Wittgenstein that, when last seen, Paul was looking well, healthy and cheerful, that he was now good enough at Russian to translate the newspapers for those men who had not made such progress, that he was teaching French to a former fellow pupil of his old school, and that both teacher and pupil were taking their lessons very seriously.

  I was extremely pleased [Mrs. Wittgenstein wrote] that both the exchanged officers spoke of Paul with great respect and love and praised his kindness, decency and idealism. Captain von Liel asked Paul whether he would rather the war had not broken out and that he still had his arm but Paul said he would rather things were as they were. That's really splendid!

  When a second officer from Omsk, Lieutenant Gurtler, told Mrs. Wittgenstein about the money and why Paul was not being exchanged, she thought to herself, "If this is really an obstacle to Paul's release, it would surely be possible to come to some arrangement." If she succeeded in doing this the process certainly took its time, for at the beginning of October she was informed that Paul was scheduled not for exchange but for transfer from Omsk to some other prison camp in the south. "Perhaps we may have to be grateful for that," she wrote to Ludwig, "but while we still had hope that he might be imminently considered for exchange, this represents a dreadful disappointment!"

  It was not until the very end of the month that she received a telegram from Otto Franz bearing the good news that Paul and six other invalided officers had been sent for examination before a committee in Moscow. "That represents at least a glimmer of hope!" she wrote. There was, of course, still plenty of room for pessimism and Hermine felt it strongly: "As to whether Paul will be exchanged? I've really very little hope, and I find the prospect of Mama's disappointment really terrible."

  The medical commissions to which prospective exchange prisoners were sent were degrading affairs. Invalids arrived in a state of optimism, having traveled thousands of miles from camps in the east, only to be informed that they were not ill enough to be exchanged and must return to the prisons from whence they came. In Kazan, prison doctors were held liable for the expense of an invalid's return journey, which made them understandably reluctant to recommend anyone for exchange in the first place. Prisoners who made it to Moscow or Petrograd found themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous medical NCOs operating a reign of terror. At Lazaret 108 in Petrograd, the Angel of Siberia had reported:

  They sold their patients' food. Prisoners who still had their wedding rings, watches and so forth had to give them up. Those who refused and thereby made themselves disliked were kept as a punishment from the medical commission which, from time to time, held the decisive examination. In this way men might remain up to ten months in the hospital while trains of exchange prisoners departed with a half or a third of their full complement.

  As soon as Paul arrived in Moscow he was examined by doctors to confirm that he qualified as a "severely wounded or disabled prisoner of war whose disablement permanently prevented his military service," questioned by military interrogators and warned that, if he were ever to rejoin the Austro-Hungarian ranks and be recaptured in action by the Russians, he would face summary execution.

  From the moment Mrs. Wittgenstein knew that Paul was up before the exchange tribunal she became very anxious and she remained in this state for a fortnight, during which time her legs were more painful than ever, and her boon companion and former servant Rosalie Hermann had started to cough in a noisy and alarming way. But she waited and waited until news of her captive son came at last to Vienna. The details of her reaction are preserved in a letter she sent Ludwig:

&nb
sp; My dear, good Ludwig

  Just imagine: early on the 9th--after we had heard nothing of Paul for a long time other than that he was in Moscow to be examined, we read that he was among the group that was being exchanged and which had arrived at the Finnish-Swedish border post in Haparanda on the 8th. On the afternoon of the 9th we had a telegram from Paul from Ljusdal in Sweden. Yesterday, we learned that the group had passed through Sass-nitz and today Paul is already in Leitmeritz. Today I had a report from Stradels and Wolframs; both were at the station at midnight to greet him and they assure me that he looks in splendid form, very well and in the best of moods. Paul now has to spend a period in quarantine in Leitmeritz. If this lasts any great length of time, I think Hermine will go to see him there. If only you, my dear good Ludwig could come again, that would be a real blessing for me. I shall have to do without poor sidelined Kurt but as far as you are concerned, I hope I will be lucky enough to have you here in the foreseeable future. Apart from a few bouts of catarrh and my ankle, we are in good health.

  With the tenderest embraces from your mother.

  FAMILY REUNION

  Neither of Paul's two surviving brothers was in Vienna on November 21, 1915, to welcome him back from captivity. Kurt was still languishing in New York and Ludwig on active duty as an engineer in an artillery workshop at the train station at Sokal, a Ukrainian town fifty miles east of Zamosc. The veins in Mrs. Wittgenstein's legs were bulging and far too painful for her to consider the 400-mile round trip from Vienna to Leit-meritz, where Paul was detained for ten days in quarantine, so Hermine went alone. On the journey out she feared that she might not recognize her brother when she saw him, expecting to be greeted by a depressed, emaciated and somehow damaged figure, but she was relieved and surprised by his good spirits, writing immediately to her mother and siblings: "Paul's appearance and nature are so unchanged (apart from his arm of course). Seeing him again was not much different than if he had been on a long journey and we were telling each other all the latest news and couldn't stop talking."

  Meier-Graefe wrote that the Krepost scarred a man for life, and although Paul was altered by his Siberian ordeal he managed, for a while at least, to conceal the worst of it from his family. Mrs. Wittgenstein wrote of their reunion: "I took much delight in Paul's calm and composed disposition ... He really looks very well and is astonishingly cheerful and hasn't lost any of his ability to tease." Hermine reported that "he speaks of his misfortune in such a matter-of-fact way. You never get the feeling that you have to be careful in what you say for fear that one thing or another might hurt him, and this makes it enormously easy."

  But despite Paul's ease of manner he was suffering acute physical discomfort. The doctors at Krasnystaw had accomplished their task imperfectly and in their anxiety over Russian troop movements had failed to cut skin flaps large enough to cover the exposed bone of his right arm adequately. As a result the scar at the end of the stump was stretched too tight and had started to adhere to the bone. The nerve ends, trapped between bone and skin, were extremely sensitive. On his return to Vienna Paul took the problem immediately to Dr. von Eiselsberg's surgery on the first floor of a rickety eighteenth-century building close to the Ring -strasse. Among the staff there were eight unpaid volunteers, one of whom, recently joined, was Paul's bald and moody American brother-in-law, Jerome Stonborough.

  Paul's operation was not as straightforward as Jerome had explained it to his mother-in-law, nor, as he had asserted, did it involve the simple removal of a growth. The doctor had to reopen the wound, cut some of the dense membrane, known as the periosteum, away from the end of the bone and scrape about half an inch of marrow out of the inside with a curette. Only then could he restitch the wound in such a way that the soft tissue at the end of the stump would remain freely movable over the end of the bone. For two weeks after the operation Paul was in great pain, suffering from loss of appetite and unable to sleep. The doctors ascribed this to the effects of the anesthetic, though it might equally have been caused by depression. His intention was to have a prosthetic arm fitted as soon as the stump was healed, but this was never done and, for the rest of his life, Paul instead wore the empty sleeve of his jacket neatly tucked into his right-side hip pocket.

  As soon as he was feeling strong enough to reenter the swing of life, he did so with vibrant energy, walking each morning through the Baumgartner Wald and the steep parkland of the Wittgenstein estate at Neuwaldegg. He practiced with his left hand, tying ties and shoelaces, doing up and undoing buttons, cutting meat, peeling apples, swimming, riding, writing and reading. He studied the self-help books that were published to cater to the thousands of amputees returning each month from the front and set up a modus operandi with his batman, Franz. In the afternoons, he practiced long hours at the piano, started to organize (as he vowed he would in his letter from the Krepost) his million-kronen donation to the Austrian troops, and took steps--despite the threats of execution that he had received at the tribunal in Moscow--to rejoin the army and return once again in uniform to the chaos of the eastern front.

  A TRANSFORMATION

  Ludwig was not given leave to join his family for Christmas in 1915. Having recently been promoted to Militarbeamter (military official), he remained at Sokal singing "Stille Nacht" in the officers' mess instead. In July he had taken three weeks' leave (suffering from shock but not gravely injured) after accidentally blowing himself up in the workshop. As yet, he had not been posted to the front but craved the experience and had surprised his senior commanders with requests for dangerous action. He had been involved in what might loosely be described as a "skirmish" while serving as a searchlight operator on board the river ship Goplana. Six weeks after the outbreak of war he and the crew had been forced to abandon ship and flee a sudden Russian advance. "I am not afraid of being shot," he wrote, "but of not fulfilling my duty properly. God give me strength! Amen. Amen. Amen." The enemy kept coming. Ludwig and his comrades (men whom he had earlier described as "a bunch of pigs ... unbelievably crude, stupid and malicious") were forced to retreat for thirty sleepless hours. "Have been through terrible scenes," he wrote. "I feel very weak and see no hope anywhere. If my end is coming now, may I die a good death, attending myself. May I never lose myself." Two days later he added: "There is nothing between us and the enemy ... Now I should have the chance to be a decent human being, for I am standing eye to eye with death. May the spirit bring me light."

  In his memoirs Meier-Graefe recalled telling a Russian guard that he was being transferred to Siberia. The guard looked at him sympathetically and shuddered: "In Siberia, all men search for God." As far as Paul was concerned there was no need to postulate the existence of any deity, and he neither found nor sought to find one in Siberia. Though he had been brought up as a Catholic, his line on religion broadly followed that of his idol, Arthur Schopenhauer, reams of whose philosophical writings he could quote by heart. "Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think." From this position Paul never wavered.

  Ludwig on the other hand, a philosopher of logic and language, now reunited in friendship with the atheists Bertrand Russell and George Moore, was a lost soul who, during the early months of the war, may not have been consciously searching for God but found him nevertheless in a little bookshop in the Baroque city of Tarnow, twenty-five miles east of Krakow. It was here that he bought a book simply because it was the only one in the shop--and this in itself he believed to be a sign. It was a German translation of The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy--a redaction of the four New Testament gospels, which excluded all those parts of the original of which Tolstoy did not approve--sections on Jesus's birth and genealogy, his miracles (walking on water, turning water into wine, raising the dead and so on), his beating up of a fig tree, his fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies and his resurrection. The work had a profound effect on Ludwig, who devoured it with fervor, carrying his copy wherever he went. "This book virtually kept me alive," he told a frie
nd afterward. His comrades at the time, seizing upon this eccentricity, nicknamed him "der mit dem Evangelium"--"the man with the gospel."

  Tolstoy's vision (if that is the term) was broadly anti-church. He believed that Christ preached a message that had been corrupted by exegesis, that Christianity (that is to say his own Tolstoyan version of it) was "neither pure revelation nor a phase of history but the only pure doctrine which gives meaning to life." The message was simple--that man has a divine origin, "the will of the Father," which is the source of all human life. This he must serve. Doing this obviates any need for him to satisfy the desires of his own will and is a " life-giving" process. A true Christian must therefore imitate the ways of Jesus, renounce physical gratification, humble himself and draw himself close to the spirit. This is precisely what Ludwig attempted to do, but he was not always very successful at it:

  From time to time I become an animal [he wrote in his notebook]. Then I can think of nothing but eating, drinking, sleeping. Terrible! And then I suffer just like an animal, without the possibility of internal salvation and am then at the mercy of my appetites and aversions. The authentic life is then unthinkable.

  In the preface to his slim philosophical treatise, Tractatus Logico-PhihsophicttSj Ludwig acknowledged that some of his ideas may have been drawn from other writers, adding: "It is a matter of indifference to me whether the thoughts that I have had have been anticipated by someone else." There are many similarities between this work and Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief. Both books are laid out in six sections (though Ludwig added a seventh to the Tractatus consisting of a single, now famous, proclamation, "That which we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence") and both works are presented as a sequence of connected, numbered, gnomic utterances. Consider these from Tolstoy: