1.1. The foundation and beginning of all things is the understanding of life.
1.2. The understanding of life is God.
1.3. All is built upon the understanding of life, without which there can be no living.
1.4. In this is true life.
1.5. This understanding is the light of truth.
And these from the opening page of Ludwig's Tractatus:
1. The world is all that is the case.
1.1. The world is the totality of facts not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts and by their being all the facts.
1.12. For the totality of facts determines what is the case.
1.13. The facts in logical space are the world.
Common to both texts is the notion of eternal life belonging only to the present. As Tolstoy put it:
7. This present life in time is the food of the true life.
8. And therefore the true life is outside time; it is in the present.
9. Time is an illusion in life; the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.
Ludwig's Tractatus expresses the same idea, but perhaps a little more succinctly:
6.4311... If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those in the present. Our life has no end in just the way our visual field has no limits.
Ludwig's family was alarmed, disconcerted, alienated and embarrassed by his sudden conversion. Hermine, Gretl and Paul read Tolstoy's Gospel in an attempt to understand him better. Hermine, often overwhelmed by Ludwig's intellect and struggling to keep up with him, read several other books by Tolstoy as well. Gretl studied Ernest Renan's hugely popular Life of Jesus to see if it was compatible with Tolstoy. Paul took a teasing, controversial and not altogether sympathetic line. "Even if Paul should by chance ever like the same book as Ludwig, he would always look for and find something essentially different in it," Gretl told Hermine. Of all Ludwig's siblings she was the one who came closest to sharing in Ludwig's new spirituality, but Tolstoyan Christianity was not a religion in the sense of a shared communion. What The Gospel in Brief offered to Ludwig, as a young man crippled by conflicting urges to narcissism and self-loathing, was the long-sought opportunity for radical self-improvement--a thorough rinsing of all those parts of his personality that he found most distasteful, and an opportunity for conscious self-elevation and transfiguration from mere mortal to immortal Jesus-like, prophet-like, perfect human being. "There are two godheads: the world and my independent I," Ludwig wrote in his notebook in July 1916. "For life in the present there is no death." According to Dr. Max Bieler, an officer serving with Ludwig at Sokal in the autumn of 1915, "Ludwig had all the characteristics of a prophet."
When Ludwig's Tractatus appeared in print after the war, it confounded the expectations of the small circle that had grown to admire his ideas on logic and many, including Bertrand Russell, found the work's "urge toward the mystical" incomprehensible and rather depressing as though it were not a philosophical tract but some impenetrable Gospel according to Ludwig:
6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found, after a long period of doubt, that the sense of life became clear to them have been unable to say what constituted that sense?)
GRETL'S ISSUES
When war broke out the Stonboroughs had hoped to return to England. Gretl, by virtue of her marriage to Jerome, had become an American citizen, but as a Wittgenstein she was driven by strong patriotic urges to do her duty by Austria. Whatever assistance she could give to her country she preferred it on a grand scale and wished, by her largeness of heart, her ingenuity of mind and her vast fortune, not just to lend a hand, but to influence things in a major way, to win the war for Austria. She needed to feel engaged "with all my strength. To do my utmost both physically and mentally," which is why she was not at all happy in the voluntary work she had undertaken, organizing meals for between eighty and a hundred men a day at a small hospital in Ischl.
This war affects me just as it does you [she wrote to Hermine]--I can achieve nothing, absolutely nothing. But I would give a lot to be able to contribute something to this campaign. It seems so dreadful that one could have lived through such a thing and yet not actually lived through it.
Gretl left the hospital after catching an infection from one of her patients and was advised by her doctor never to return. Now she could apply her mind to higher things, but first she had to struggle with the dead weight of a marriage that was not working well. Her problem was that she was an irritating person. Her opinions, her modes of expression and her manner of dress all tended to grate on people's nerves--her mother's, Ludwig's, Paul's and especially her husband Jerome's. Hermine, who admitted on occasion to wanting to slap Gretl in the face, was nonetheless her sister's staunchest ally, constantly reminding others of her "inner greatness."
I can hardly say how much I love and admire Gretl [she wrote to Ludwig]. Why then does she possess such characteristics as give rise to sharper censure than is received by many people who do not act as well and generously in greater matters as she does? That always hurts me immeasurably.
But neither Gretl's manner nor her reserved attitude to sexual matters can be held entirely responsible for the failures of her marriage, for Jerome--morose, tetchy, paranoid, prone to grandiose delusions--was an impossible husband. At the beginning of 1916 he was in a particularly bad way, terrified by and obsessed with the notion that America was planning to join the war against the Austrians. He talked and thought of little else. For days on end he would disappear only to return, sometimes in the middle of the night, shaking, staring ghoulishly into space, silent and motionless, or exploding suddenly into aggressive rages. His behavior tested Gretl's nerves to their limits. Unsure how to cope, she tried to intellectu-alize the problem, seeing her husband as a split personality with an "inner life" that was "once clear and is now confused" and an "outer life" that "no longer takes place (as it used to) between things, but is now oriented among people." Such cryptic assertions did little to improve the situation--nor did a move in October 1915 from Gmunden to a gracious rented apartment in the Palais Erdody on the Krugerstrasse. She could, of course, sue for divorce, but whenever the idea was mooted Jerome threatened to take the boys, Thomas and Ji, to America with him. What was the matter with Jerome? At first Gretl tried to work it out for herself by reading books on psychology and psychiatry. Nothing came of it and many years later she was persuaded to send him to the famous neurologist Julius Wagner-Jauregg, who had recently won a Nobel Prize for his controversial treatment (injecting psychotic patients with tuberculin and malaria parasites) that was proving effective in cases of syphilitic dementia paralytica. It is not known whether Jerome was suffering from syphilis, but his erratic behavior and psychotic paranoia rank among the classic symptoms of that disease. Pierre Stonborough (his grandson) stoutly denies the possibility, but no alternative explanation has been offered for Jerome's psychosis. Whatever the truth of it, Wagner-Jauregg had no success and Jerome's condition continued, off and on, until the day of his death.
PAUL'S ONE-HANDED DEBUT
In the early months of 1916 each member of the Wittgenstein family was suffering from one health problem or another. Mrs. Wittgenstein's legs were still "terribly painful." She had had them operated upon and was confined to a wheelchair for the weeks of her recuperation. She was also worried about her eyesight and the rapid advancement of what seems to have been some form of macular degeneration--a loss of central vision--that would eventually leave her completely blind. Helene was in bed with stomach cramps "and associated complaints," Gretl was worried about her palpitating heart, Ludwig was losing his mind on the eastern front, and Hermine, Jerome and Paul all had problems concerning their fingers. By coincidence, Hermine and Jerome each had an infected swollen finger on his/her right hand so that both had to be discharged from their voluntary
hospital duties. Paul had slipped and fallen over in the bathroom, landed on his hand and broken a finger bone. It was a bitter blow. For almost a month he was unable to play the piano and, more than anything, he was looking forward to trying out the new piece that Labor had composed especially for him. Labor too was disappointed, for it was not until March 11 (two and a half months after the accident) that "my apostle, Paul" was able to give a first rendering of the work at a private concert in the Musiksaal of the Wittgenstein Palais. A young student of Leschetizky played the orchestral part on a second piano, but the great Polish pedagogue was himself unable to attend as he had died four months earlier while Paul was awaiting his release from the quarantine hospital at Leit-meritz. The concert was a grand success. Paul played beautifully and the whole piece, to Labor's unconcealed delight, had to be encored.
On October 28, Paul gave a performance of another work by Labor, a quartet in which the piano part had been arranged for one hand by the composer's acolyte Rosine Menzel. Again the concert was a private affair at the Wittgenstein Palais and again Paul played "very beautifully, with great warmth and fire." The composer was deliriously happy. Even Hermine, whose reaction to Paul's playing was typically negative, rejoiced in his interpretation of two short Mendelssohn pieces that she felt he had executed "very well and with feeling."
Paul's case has naturally made me very upset [she told Ludwig] and as much as I would like to deny him the right to pursue music on account of many rough patches, I am equally happy to grant him that right for the sake of a piece played with feeling.
Among those present in the audience was the lean, elegant figure of Hugo Knepler, a popular Viennese impresario who had helped to stage and promote one of Paul's chamber concerts before the war. Knepler (who was murdered in 1944 at Auschwitz) was given the task of organizing the first public performance of Labor's Konzertstuck and on December 12, 1916, in the same hall (the Grosser Musikvereinsaal), with the same conductor (Oskar Nedbal) and the same orchestra (the Wiener Tonkunstler) that Paul had used for his two-handed debut exactly three years earlier, the public heard, for the first time, some music composed for orchestra and a left-handed pianist.
Paul had worked with obsessive diligence and determination, practicing sometimes as many as seven hours at a sitting, to be ready for this concert. "It was like trying to climb a mountain," he later admitted; "if I could not reach the summit by one route I would climb down and start again from the other side." He had received a few useful tips from Count Zichy and from his former teacher Malwine Bree, but the artful pedaling and fingering techniques that he employed to create an illusion of not just two but sometimes three or four hands playing, were entirely of his own invention. He placed himself at the instrument, not opposite the middle of the keyboard, where a two-handed pianist normally sits, but far to the right so that he could strike the highest notes without twisting his body to reach them. By constant exercise he developed a formidable strength in his fingers, wrist and upper arm; he played sometimes with his fist or with two fingers on one note for extra force; he learned to use his thumb and index finger to carry a melodic line while his middle, ring and little fingers accompanied at a different volume. His most far-reaching innovation was a combined pedaling and hand-movement technique that allowed him to sound chords that were strictly impossible for a five-fingered pianist to play. By striking a chord loudly in the middle register, using a subtle " half-pedal" technique with his right foot, and by following immediately with a barely audible pianissimo note or two in the bass, he was able to deceive even the sharpest-eared critic into thinking that he had played a chord with his left hand alone that required a span of two and a half feet across the keyboard.
The main difficulty he faced was to make his music sound complete in itself. It simply would not do to be "half as good as a two-handed pianist" and yet his phenomenal achievement in disguising the loss of his right hand served only to create a new set of vulgar problems. There was a danger, for instance, that the public, seeing the name "Paul Wittgenstein" on a billboard, would buy tickets not in order to appreciate the music but to see the spectacle, as though he were some kind of cheap-jack conjuror or amusement park exhibit. It was precisely for this reason that Ludwig could not bear to attend his brother's public concerts.
On the plus side Paul was not displeased to discover that his predicament--that of a young wounded war hero with a prodigious artistic talent--was deeply attractive to women. Successful classical musicians were lionized in Vienna as in no other place in the world, and Paul's pitiful condition, his stubborn masculine determination and, one supposes, his colossal bank balance made him the idol of every soft-hearted female in the city. Women of all ages, types and sizes gathered around the piano to talk to him and to admire his playing, always sincere in their appreciation of his talent. "Although it was only elderly and weak women yesterday," Hermine informed Ludwig, "he could also have young and pretty ones, so pleasant and charming is he to the ladies (almost as conciliatory towards them as he can be abrupt and arrogant towards men)." One wonders if Hermine were not, in her heart, a little jealous. "A lady recently told me with tears in her eyes how touching she found Paul's playing; whoever would have thought it! But we are delighted to realise how wrong we were!"
The poster advertising Paul's left-handed concert debut made no mention of the fact that the starring artist had lost an arm, but simply listed the repertoire he intended to play (Labor's concerto, three of Godowsky's arrangements of Chopin Studies, pieces by Bach and Mendelssohn and the Liszt Rigoletto Paraphrase) with a small line underneath explaining that some of the pieces were to be performed in arrangements for the left hand. Ludwig, who had recently been promoted in rank to officer cadet in the Reserves, was for once able to attend. Paul, clearly nervous, complained afterward that he had performed badly and made too many mistakes, but Labor--who was "all fired up and dead keen as regards Paul"--complimented him extravagantly. A week later Julius Korn-gold's equivocal review was published in the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna:
Paul Wittgenstein does not play the piano with one hand in a way one plays in a world where two hands are needed for such a task, but in a way one would play in a world where people only had one hand. His playing should then only be evaluated on its own terms ... Wittgenstein's interpretations are those of a spirited and sensitive musician. Let us, after his debut, crowned with success, clasp the courageous hand, which he has learned to use so skilfully. The sounds produced by his left hand do not betray the artist's melancholy at no longer possessing a right hand, rather they express his triumph at being able to bear his loss so well.
WAR IN EUROPE RAGES
Despite the long hours that Paul spent preparing his one-handed concert debut he managed to find time for "welfare" work. He had vowed to donate one million kronen for the troops and saw to it that this pledge was properly fulfilled by organizing the making and distribution of thousands of army greatcoats. In Russia he had been horrified by the flimsiness of the Austrian jackets compared with those worn by the enemy and was convinced that the plight of POWs during the eight-month Siberian winters was made intolerable by them. From factories in Bohemia he ordered thousands of bales of strong, warm, gray material, but was dismayed to find the operation hindered by a shortage of tailors--most of them were dead, wounded or still fighting on the front. With characteristic determination he advertised in cities around the monarchy for old tailors to come out of retirement and work for him. In this way the job was done and tens of thousands of greatcoats finally delivered to a storehouse in Teplitz ready for distribution via Sweden to POW camps in Russia and Siberia. In 1916 Paul's million-kronen contribution represented one-twentieth of the total national expenditure on POW clothing aid for that year.
Ludwig also elected to donate a million kronen toward the Austrian war effort but being on active duty was unable to supervise it. His idea--less practical than Paul's--was to build a giant new mortar cannon. The biggest in the Austrian army was the massive 305mm Skoda that
weighed 22.9 tons and could throw an 842-pound shell 13,000 yards at the rate of ten rounds per hour. These were the finest heavy howitzers produced in the war, but Ludwig, with characteristic obstinacy, didn't think them good enough, and had the money transferred to a fund in Vienna to be spent on the development of a better weapon. It was never used. Ludwig was not concerned to follow up the matter and when Hermine, many years later, attempted to trace what had become of his donation she was told that the whole lot had disappeared in the hyperinflation of the 1920s.
At the end of March 1916, Ludwig was given the opportunity to prove himself at the front, being assigned to the duties of an artillery observer at Sanok, east of Krakow. His new position did not however alleviate relations with his comrades-in-arms as he remained consumed with disgust for himself and by intense loathing of those around him. "Within myself I am full of hatred and cannot let the spirit come to me. God is love." The men of his unit, he claimed, detested him simply because he was a volunteer, but more likely they were put off by his self-obsession and lofty manner. In his notebook Ludwig conceded: "So I am nearly always surrounded by people that hate me. And this is the one thing which I still do not know how to take. There are malicious and heartless people here. It is almost impossible to find any trace of humanity in them."
Despite these inner tensions Ludwig proved himself as valiant in battle as his elder brother. Of course he was desperately afraid, but fear in the face of death was, he had decided, "the sign of a false, i.e., a bad life." From June to August he was caught on the wrong side of the Brusilov Offensive, the huge and well-planned forward strike by the Imperial Russian army under its regional commander Alexei Brusilov, which resulted in the loss of 1.5 million Austro-Hungarian troops (including 400,000 taken prisoner) and thus put the Austro-Hungarians on the defensive for the rest of the war.
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War Page 12