The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  These great events inevitably made an impact on the lives of each of the Wittgenstein brothers. Ludwig, during the July offensive, had retreated with his Austrian comrades from a forward position at Bukovina to the western side of the Lomnica River, and when the Russian spirit suddenly withered and the Austrian rout began, he joined in the counterattack assisting in the recapture first of Czernowitz and then of Bojan at the end of August--actions for which he was once again decorated. When the Russians were finally withdrawn from the war, the Austrian forces were able to turn their attentions from the eastern front to the south, and in the spring of 1918 Ludwig was posted to the Alpine front near Asiago in Vicenza.

  Oblivious to the threat of execution, Paul was determined to rejoin the war from the moment he returned to Vienna in November 1915 and, like his brother, demanded a posting to a place where things would be most dangerous. Unlike Ludwig, however, his motives in wishing to return to action were entirely patriotic and had nothing to do with spiritual self-improvement. When he was awarded his medals in March 1916, Paul was ordered into retirement with an annual pension of 1,696 kronen, but he was having none of it. He was determined to fight on, and after a long period of lobbying generals at his club in Vienna and twisting the arm of his red-nosed retired uncle, Cavalry General Josef von Siebert, he finally received his call-up papers in August 1917. His mother and sisters were in general agreement that he had made the right decision, though Hermine hoped he would not be sent too close to the front. "One hardly knows what is the best thing to wish for Paul," she wrote. "What another wound would mean for him now that he is only half a man hardly bears speaking about, when you consider how passionately he loves playing the piano. He lives only for it and through it." When orders were sent for him to report to army headquarters at Villach in Carinthia he was "somewhat put out that it was nothing more dangerous."

  For several weeks Paul was deputed to minor office tasks at Her-magor, a small town to the west of Villach, which made him restless and irritable, but from late September 1917 he was assigned to Fourth Army Command Headquarters at Wladimir Wolynski in the western Ukraine, where he was given employment in the communications office. Here he discovered that he could operate with one hand the Hughes type-printing telegraph machine, which had a small keyboard very similar to that of a piano, consisting of fourteen white and fourteen black keys. Paul's fellow officers were astounded to find that he could type messages on it with one hand faster than they could manage with two.

  At the end of February 1918 he was granted several weeks' leave as the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army, under its competent but incapacitated commander Karl Graf von Kirchbach auf Lauterbach, was being dissolved. At home Hermine found him "very pleasant and approachable." For once there was no friction between Paul and Kurt--at least she did not notice it--but, as she told Ludwig, "It was a good thing that your more finely tuned apparatus was not present--it would most certainly have detected a slight tension and have inflamed it as a result--the two brothers are so different."

  Returning to duty, Paul was posted to the fortress town of Riva on the northern shores of Lake Garda as adjutant to the fifty-five-year-old General Anton von Schiesser. Though it was captured by the Italians in November 1918, Schiesser's courageous and determined defense of the town (for which he was subsequently ennobled) made him a national hero.

  In retirement at Innsbruck he was saluted as he walked the streets and when he died in 1926 a plaque celebrating his deeds at Riva was appended to the house of his birth at Schenkenfelden. An official army report on Schiesser from 1918 describes him as "a very efficient, lively and energetic general. Faithful in his duties ... an athletic and strong-willed commander."

  Paul's posting to Riva brought all three Wittgenstein brothers to within a hundred miles of one another on the Italian front, but this did not last for long. For some unknown reason Paul was discharged from the military in August 1918. He was determined to serve, and after the war took pride in his military record, so it is inconceivable that he was dismissed, or left for any dishonorable reason. Ill health may have had something to do with it for, in the middle of July while on leave with his family at Neuwaldegg, he collapsed with a high fever that lasted several weeks. It is possible that by the time he was recovered the situation at Riva was too chaotic for him to return and that no new position presented itself in the few months of the war that remained.

  It is equally possible that Paul's illness (a violent influenza) was the same virulent strain, known as Spanish flu, that would go on to claim more than twenty million lives in a Europe-wide pandemic. The disease was officially acknowledged to have reached Vienna in October, when among those killed were the twenty-eight-year-old artist Egon Schiele and his pregnant wife Edith. Not everyone who contracted the disease died from it, and it was soon discovered that a transfusion of blood from someone who had survived the disease was the best cure. In the worst cases a victim's face would turn blue, he would cough blood and soon his lungs would be swamped by his own body fluids. Edith Schiele's first symptoms appeared on October 26 and she died on the 28th, while her husband, nursing her over those three days, got a blue face on the 28th and died on the 31st. That same month five servants in the Wittgenstein household contracted the virus. Mrs. Wittgenstein and Hermine were spared.

  At the same time as Schiele and his wife were dying in Vienna, Corporal Adolf Hitler, fighting the British at Ypres, was rendered blind and speechless by a chlorine-gas attack on his line. "When this happened," he told an interviewer in 1923, "I saw my future. These questions flashed through my mind: 'You never feared death--Why? You are still alive when others around you fell--Why?' And I told myself, because fate has singled you out to accomplish something. I resolved to consecrate my life to my country--to the task of driving out the enemies within her borders."

  On the Italian front, meanwhile, Austro-Hungarian troops were fast becoming dejected and defeatist. They had lost 100,000 soldiers trying to force their way into northern Italy at Lombardy, Trentino and across the lower Piave. On the western front the Germans too were struggling and could ill afford to send troops to their aid. South of the river, the Italian commander General Armando Diaz planned a forward offensive of five armies that would divide the Austrian forces in two, by advancing in a line from Monte Grappa to the mouth of the Piave. By October 27, with the help of a British corps under Lord Cavan, Diaz had secured a strategic foothold on the left bank of the river. This success caused mutiny to break out among the Austrian ranks and on the 28th the Austrian High Command ordered a general retreat. This gave the Italians the confidence to surge forward and succeed in their aim of splitting the Austrian army. On November 3 an armistice was signed at Villa Giusti near Padua. With twenty-four hours between signature and the agreement officially taking effect, the Italians continued rampaging forward in order to seize as much land as possible in advance of territorial negotiations. Many Austrians, unaware that an armistice had been signed, pointlessly lost their lives defending against the Italian attack. Thirty-eight thousand casualties were reported on the Italian side, but 300,000 Austro-Hungarians were taken prisoner, of whom General Anton von Schiesser was one and Ludwig Wittgenstein another. It was somewhere in the middle of all this chaos that Kurt Wittgenstein met his end.

  Nobody from the Wittgenstein family in Vienna seems to have known of Kurt's death until sometime in December. The first that Ludwig knew of it was from a letter that his mother wrote to him at his POW camp near Como on December 27.

  My dearest son,

  After the dreadful anxiety we were suffering for your sake, your card dated 6th November which we received on 6th December did us infinite good; and today's news by telegraph is doubly cheering because it is up to date. You can't imagine how overjoyed we were. There was general delight involving the whole family. Whatever shall we do when we expect to see you back here? We are well and all is well with the Salzers. But we have suffered a severe loss. Our dear Kurt fell in the very last days of the war at the end of
October. I embrace you, my dearest beloved son, with the tenderest love and my only wish is that you should remain in good health and that you may return home in the not too distant future. With her every thought, your mother is with you today.

  Clearly there had been worry in Vienna that Ludwig, who had been out of contact since December 6, might also have been killed or even have killed himself, for Hermine wrote to him at the same time as her mother: "I'm indescribably happy to know that you're alive! Kurt fell on 27th November. Mama very distressed but brave and cheered by your news. All in good health here; also good news from the Stonboroughs, nothing but good news to report...."

  It may be noticed that Hermine and her mother each give different dates for Kurt's "fall." Mrs. Wittgenstein says "end of October" and Hermine "27th November." In a further letter dated January 10, 1919, Hermine writes, "Kurt fell on 27th September, it's very sad." The most probable date for the death is the end of October as Mrs. Wittgenstein originally asserted, most likely on the 27th, the day that Lord Cavan and General Diaz secured their bridgehead on the Piave and the Austrians started to mutiny. On the Italian front the fighting was over by November 27, so Hermine's date must be wrong.

  Perhaps more interesting than the day Kurt died are questions as to why and how it happened. In her memoirs Hermine wrote, "My brother Kurt shot himself without visible reason on a retreat from Italy in the last days of the First World War." This ignores the fact that explanations for his suicide were sought at the time and that various conflicting stories have since filtered down through different branches of the family. One version that Paul gave to his friend Marga Deneke in the 1920s was written up in 1961 shortly after his death. This then may loosely serve as Paul's version:

  A special poignancy marks Kurt Wittgenstein's death for he was safely installed in an office in the USA but, supported by his family, he deployed every available means to get himself recalled for military service in Austria. An army order commanded him to expose his battalion to complete annihilation before a battery of enemy guns. Knowing that no conceivable military advantage was involved, he disobeyed the order. Then fear of a court martial preyed upon his mind. It became too much for him and he killed himself. This was on the eve of surrender in 1918. In the confusion of these days there would have been no inquiries. The waste of it all was bitter.

  This version, however, conflicts with that of Gretl's son, Ji Stonbor-ough, who was told (possibly by his mother) that Kurt had shot himself, like many other Austrian officers, in the twenty-four-hour period after the signing of the armistice of November 3 because he refused to be taken prisoner by the Italians. If this were indeed the case then the story may have been changed to save Ludwig's blushes, since he had accepted surrender to the Italians and had himself been taken prisoner at the same time.

  Another version recorded by Paul's daughter Johanna, following her interviews with family members in Austria in the 1980s, broadly supports the Deneke account, adding a little more detail. Kurt, she says, was ordered to lead his men across the River Piave. There followed a heated exchange with his commanding officer in which he shouted: "I am not offering my men in vain. The war is already lost." At that point he drew his pistol from its holster and threatened the officer that if he did not remove himself immediately from his sight he would be shot. The astonished commander withdrew, loudly hissing threats about a court martial. Kurt then summoned his men, instructed them all to go home, and minutes later shot himself.

  A fourth version suggests that it was the men, not Kurt, who rebelled; that it was he who ordered them to action and they who refused to obey by deserting him on the field. Standing alone with an 11mm Gasser revolver in his hand, with no men to support him and in the face of a heavy Italian bombardment, he was forced to take a rushed decision between three galling alternatives: to desert with his men; to fight on alone and be shot or captured by the enemy; or to put a bullet through his head. He chose the last, dispatching himself in a sudden burst of fury.

  Perhaps it is of little matter now which of the above scenarios comes closest to the historical truth for in November 1918, as far as the surviving members of his family were concerned, Kurt--childish, light-hearted, frivolous Kurt--was (for the time being at least) the family hero. Like so many of the eight and a half million soldier victims of the Great War he was given no funeral and his remains lie today at some undiscovered, unmarked spot somewhere along the banks of the Piave. To Paul, a fourth son suddenly finding himself head of the family, to Ludwig incarcerated at a camp in Italy, to Gretl, exiled in Switzerland, and to Mrs. Wittgenstein and her daughters Hermine and Helene at home in Vienna, the news of Kurt's death recalled from within suppressed memories of unspeakable tragedy; but this time at least there was a difference, for with the bitter news came also a faint reassurance: that, unlike the wretched fates of Hans and Rudolf, Kurt's suicide could be counted as an "honourable death."

  Paul and Ludwig's belief in his heroism never wavered, but Her-mine's, for some unknown reason, did. In her fairytale memoirs many pages are devoted to effusive praise of her worthy aunts and uncles, to family connections and to her beloved Rosalie. There is a whole chapter also on Ludwig, whom she describes as "the most interesting and worthwhile of my brothers;" she leaves a fond and puzzled description of Hans in youth but says next to nothing about Paul or Rudolf. Her portrait of Kurt is squeezed to a single paragraph in which she portrays him as a "relaxed" person, a "typical rich bachelor without serious duties" with a "harmless, cheerful disposition" and a "natural and delightful musicality" who, despite all this, appeared to carry "the germ of disgust for life within himself." No mention of any heroism in 1918, not a whisper; if anything she deplored his suicide as an act of weakness. To her brothers' intense irritation she frequently compared them unfavourably to their father. "Papa would not have done it this way; if Papa were only here he would have ..." Did Kurt, she mused, "finally die from a lack of the 'hard must,' a conception my father so much wanted to impart to his sons; or was it simply a lack of endurance which seized the upper hand at one moment, and certainly not the most difficult one in the war?" This she never knew.

  Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strange soundeth the precept: "Die at the right time!" Die at the right time: so teacheth Zarathustra.

  AFTERMATH

  By mid-November 1918 the fighting was at last over. In defense of empire two million Austro-Hungarian soldiers had lost their lives in violent clashes with Russians, Italians, Serbs and Rumanians across a front that ran from the Alpine barrier of northern Italy to the undulating landscape of central western Poland. More than two million had been imprisoned in Russia and Siberia, and three million severely wounded. The mighty monarchy in whose honor these actions had been fought had collapsed and disintegrated, and with it Austria's long epoch of grandeur had come to a sorry end. On November 11, Charles I, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia, relinquished "every participation in the administration of the state" and, four months later, without formal abdication, departed by train with his black-clad wife, Empress Zita, for the Swiss border station at Feldkirch and a life in exile. His short reign had been spent in pursuit of peace. He was the only leader of a belligerent state to ban the use of poison gas. In 1921 he was deported to the Atlantic island of Madeira where, a year later, he died of pneumonia.

  With the demise of the last emperor a new era was born in Austria as the once-proud state transformed itself into a small, weak and unstable republic. None of the new political parties was in favor of national independence, as everyone feared that the country would be too weak to survive on its own. Some, like Adolf Hitler, agitated for Anschluss (connection with Germany) even though this had been specifically prohibited under the terms of the armistice. Others, like Paul Wittgenstein, hoped for a restoration of the old order, but the Czechs, the Poles, the Southern Slavs and the Hungarians recoiled at the suggestion of a return to Hapsburg rule and rejected economic union with Austria on the basis that the country was now too
poor.

  Vienna, once the hub of the monarchy's free-trade area and the heart of a spreading European empire, was caught unprepared for the turn of events. The old railway system upon which the Hapsburg economy had depended ground to a halt as each newly formed state claimed ownership of the rolling stock. Food and raw materials, once supplied to the Viennese from Hungary, were stopped by the new administration in Budapest to extract better trade terms in the future and to avenge past wrongs. The coal that had once been brought to Vienna by rail from the Bohemian lands was similarly embargoed by the new Czechoslovak regime in Prague. Many Viennese lost their lives in the harsh winter of 1918-19 and starvation in the city affected most of its two million inhabitants. Within one year of the war's end, 96 percent of Austrian children were officially classed as "undernourished." In the streets the gaunt faces of a ravenous population cast a darkening pall over the city's spirit as the black-net widow's veil came to be recognized as the sign of a touting prostitute.

  In the countryside the peasant farmer, circumventing a government law of maximum tariffs, sold his highly prized bread, milk and eggs secretly to the man from the town for an extortionate sum, but when that same peasant arrived at the shops, gleeful, with his fist full of cash, hoping to buy tools, pots, hammers, scythes and kettles, he was dismayed to discover that the shopkeeper had been forced to quadruple prices in order to pay for his bread, milk and eggs. In the feverish atmosphere of hyperinflation the burgher and the peasant soon came to an understanding that money didn't work and that goods must be traded by exchange for other goods. Antiques, leatherbound books, jewelry and works of art were thus passed from the bourgeois to the peasant in exchange for a weekly food ration. During the war the value of the Austrian krone had fallen sixteen-fold due to the government's extravagant printing of banknotes to pay its bills, and by August 1922 paper money was virtually worthless as consumer prices rose to a level 14,000 times higher than they had been before the war.