With Kurt's death shares in his steel plant at Judenburg went to his business partner Sebastian Danner, while his properties in Austria and his portion of the family trust was divided by his siblings. One million kronen was left to charity. Paul, as executor of the will, had the idea to spend it all on garden allotments for the poor. Driven by his conviction that cultivation of the soil was a healing occupation, that it would improve the moral and physical well-being of the Viennese, help them fight starvation and offer a sensible alternative to Bolshevism, Paul encountered many difficulties. Buying the land and resolving how it should be distributed proved to be insurmountable problems, and he eventually handed the million to the worthy burghers of the city council, who failed to accomplish anything with it.
In Switzerland Gretl had complained of feeling lonely, cut off from her family and vexed at having no useful occupation or outlet for her patriotism. In point of fact she had made many friends, one of whom was Napoleon's great-grand-niece Princess Marie of Greece, who lived for a while in the same hotel in Luzern. Like many of Jerome and Gretl's friends, Princess Marie had connections in high diplomatic and political circles. She was a one-time mistress of the French Prime Minister Aristide Briand, and later introduced Gretl to her hero Sigmund Freud, from whom she had originally sought advice about her frigidity. Wherever Jerome and Gretl found themselves, in Vienna, Berlin, London or Bern, they tended to make friends with the American ambassador or American consul there. These ties--which have the faint whiff of espionage about them--were later to prove extremely useful.
One of the Stonboroughs' friends in Switzerland was the American Envoy and Minister Plenipotentiary Pleasant Stovall, with whom Gretl pleaded for help in sending a special train from Switzerland to Vienna containing 161,472 cans ($10,000 worth) of condensed milk for the starving children of the old empire. At first American officials were opposed to any activity within the neutral states that might benefit Germany or Austria, and Jerome berated Gretl for drawing attention to herself by trying. U.S. diplomats were suspicious of the Stonboroughs' close friendship with Princess Marie of Greece, but when Gretl and Jerome assured them that they would move out of the Hotel National, they came at length to be trusted. The U.S. administration had reasons of its own for wanting to feed the starving Austrians, and the U.S. Legation in Switzerland eventually agreed to offer Gretl a helping hand. The condensed milk that her money bought was theoretically enough to keep 4,000 children nourished for a month, but the Austrian authorities never acknowledged receipt and one wonders, in an age of pillage and acute starvation, whether it ever reached its intended destination.
By August 1919, much to the disapproval of her brother Paul, Gretl was appointed special representative of the American Relief Administration, or ARA, a U.S. government organization originally set up to supply the Allies with surplus American food under the banner "Food Will Win the War." As soon as she had returned to Vienna, Gretl met the ARA's chairman, Herbert Hoover (later thirty-first U.S. President), who was seeking to distribute 500,000 tons of food among the starving population of Austria. To many, the operation may have seemed nothing more than a pleasant, altruistic, humanitarian gesture by a conquering nation toward its recently defeated enemy, but the scheme was in reality motivated in Washington by the unspoken political aim of halting the advance of communist revolution from the east. According to White House theory a starving population was more likely to embrace a socialist ideology than a well-nourished one. So when, in December 1919, Gretl was sent by the ARA to the United States to help raise money for Austrian famine relief, she was (wittingly or unwittingly) operating as an American government agent in a covert U.S. operation to stem the spread of European Bolshevism.
FAMILY TENSIONS
Early in 1938 Ludwig, chatting with one of his Cambridge disciples, Theodore Redpath, asked him: "Have you had any tragedies in your life?"
"It depends what you mean by tragedy," Redpath replied.
"Well I don't mean the death of your grandmother at the age of eighty-five," said Ludwig. "I mean suicides, madness or quarrels."
By this definition Ludwig's own life was a tragic one and so too were the lives of all the Wittgensteins. As the suicides and madness increased in the family, so too did the quarreling. Ludwig and Gretl were rivals. He resented her because she was controlling and patronizing, she resented him for being disrespectful and ungovernable. When the Palais at Neuwaldegg was being cleared of Karl's influence, Gretl had stipulated that Ludwig should have no hand in the redecoration as his intransigent tastes were "not even the best of a rotten bargain." In Switzerland Gretl had been touched by the long letters Paul had written her with his left hand, but even before her return to Vienna in June 1919 she found a cause to quarrel bitterly with him.
Paul's mistake was to have authorized the investment of a large part of the family's domestic fortune in government war bonds without consulting her. Although most of Gretl's wealth was invested in the American stock market, she had inherited a share of Kurt's estate, which remained in Vienna, superintended by Paul as nominal head of the family. The value of the bonds plummeted to such an extent that, by the time Gretl got to hear about it, they were worth less than the coupons would have been worth as paper. Most of the Wittgensteins' great domestic fortune was irretrievably lost. Gretl was infuriated by the waste, but this, she claimed, was the least of her concerns. Paul had been "utterly thoughtless," for allowing the story to get into the newspapers, which she feared would get her and her husband, as American citizens, into serious trouble with the U.S. authorities. At a time when she was desperately trying to prove her loyal American credentials to the diplomats in Bern, the last thing she wanted was for them to discover that she and her family had been financially supporting the enemy from neutral Switzerland during the war. In a rage she wrote to Hermine: "Good old Paul has managed one piece of hare-brained nonsense after another, putting on Papa's airs and graces, and without a thought in his head has put me in the most terrible position." Jerome meanwhile was pacing around their Swiss hotel bedroom bellowing like a buffalo: "It is no way to do business!"
"And he is right!" Gretl insisted. "And I of course will always take Jerome's side."
Relations between Gretl and Paul were not soothed by her return to Vienna in June. Jerome had not wanted to go but was hoping to travel directly from Switzerland to America instead. They did as she insisted, but moods were fraught when they got there. After an absence of two years she wrote in her diary: "Everything in the Alleegasse was just as before ... Big quarrel with Paul about politics in the evening." Paul had criticized her condensed-milk charity operation and deplored her working for the Americans. Politically she was anti-Bolshevik but in favor nevertheless of the new left-wing socialist republic. "The Austrians are desperate," she complained, "they preferred the old sloppiness to the new disorder but the new disorder contains new seeds unlike the old one ..." Earlier she had written to her sister Hermine: "I have always had red tendencies and now I have become even redder. I am afraid that I think in a different way than you all do and do not know if I shall be sensible enough to hold my tongue." Tongue-holding was never Gretl's virtue, and her outspoken "red tendencies" grated against Paul's staunch right-wing monarchism. But politics alone could not be blamed for the Wittgensteins' failure to get along with one another for whatever the subject of conversation--art, music, books, money, personal plans--they always found cause to quarrel, and when all five siblings were together, things were at their most fractious.
It is not in the nature of us 5 siblings to be social together [Ludwig wrote to Hermine]. You are able to have a conversation with me or Gretl, but it is difficult for the three of us together. Paul and Gretl even less. Helene fits well with any one of us but it would never occur to you, Helene and me to come together as a group. We are all rather hard, sharp-edged blocks who find it difficult to fit together snugly ... we are only sociable with each other when we are diluted by friends.
The siblings' social incompatibi
lity forced them to use the Palais as a hotel, avoiding where possible communal activity, bagging rooms for private conclaves with their own invited guests. One such, a woman invited to stay by Paul, remembered the tension in the Alleegasse when, after lunch, Ludwig asked his guest, Marie Baumayer, to play the piano for him after lunch. The two of them withdrew to an adjacent room.
Hearing the music in the next-door room made me long to listen more closely, but I gathered "Lucki" did not tolerate intruders. Perhaps least of all someone who was Paul's friend. Patriotism and family pride held the Wittgensteins together, but each brother and sister kept firmly to his own ideas.
Ludwig, along with hundreds of thousands of Austrian soldiers, was held captive in Italy long after the armistice. The Italians used their prisoners as bargaining chips in negotiation to gain disputed territory north of the Piave. Nor did the cease-fire do much to end Ludwig's personal quest for absolution. Even in a prisoner-of-war camp he maintained a Christlike determination to push himself through every conceivable test, rejecting officer privileges and demanding of his guards that he be transferred from the officers' prison to a nearby rank-and-file camp where a typhoid epidemic had broken out. When well-connected friends in Switzerland wrote to officials at the Vatican begging their intercession to release Ludwig (on the compassionate grounds that his mother had already lost three sons and had only one cripple left at home) he was brought before a medical tribunal, where he made it plain that he would not be released before any one of his fellow prisoners. His moral drive, intense seriousness, arresting looks and personal magnetism attracted disciples in prison camp as on the battlefield. One of them, Franz Parak, who was held with Ludwig at Monte Cassino, worshipped the young philosopher, greeting his every statement with sighs of adulation. This irritated Ludwig, who claimed that the soldier reminded him of his mother and, to Parak's bitter regret, never wished to see him again after their release.
Arriving in Vienna at the end of August 1919, Ludwig went straight to his bank to tell them that he did not want his money anymore and that his intention was to rid himself of all of it. The manager was alarmed--"financial suicide!" he called it--and Herr Trenkler, manager of the family assets, threw his arms in the air when Ludwig demanded that he draw up the necessary papers so that not a single brass heller remained in his possession. On the same day Ludwig had written to a friend: "as far as my state of mind is concerned I am not very well." He was clearly in a wretched state but his resolve was adamantine and no one could deflect it. When he told his family what he planned to do they too were extremely worried on his behalf, though Hermine was more appalled by his new choice of profession than by his scheme of self-impoverishment. "A man with your philosophically trained mind working as an elementary school master is like a precision instrument being used to open a wooden crate," she said. He is said to have answered: "And you remind me of someone looking through a closed window unable to explain the strange movements of a passer-by, unaware that a storm is raging outside and that the person is only with great effort keeping himself on his feet."
Tolstoy's influence lay behind Ludwig's decisions to discard his fortune and take up teaching, for the great Russian novelist had fifty years earlier cast aside his own aristocratic fortunes for a life of ascetic self-denial and humble toil. Jesus's injunction to renounce wealth is given in The Gospel in Brief as a commandment in the fourth chapter--"Do not lay up store on earth. On earth the worm consumes and rust eats, and thieves steal." Curiously Tolstoy's redaction did not include any of the original Biblical passages in which Jesus requires that a person's wealth be handed specifically to the poor. The most famous of these appears in the Gospel of St. Matthew as the story of a rich young man to whom Jesus says: "If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; then come follow me."
Ludwig decided to give his fortune to his three rich siblings, Paul, Hermine and Helene. Gretl was excluded from the handout on the basis that she was much richer than the others because most of her fortune, safely invested on the American stock market, had not been affected by the deleterious forces of Austrian hyperinflation. This, however, was not made clear at the time. Hermine, for one, believed that Gretl had been cut out simply because she and Ludwig were on bad terms. It has been suggested that he gave his fortune to his siblings (instead of the poor) for reasons of convenience, since much of it was bound in shared real estate. This may be partly the case, but it was also true that he believed money to be corrupting and that since his siblings had so much of it already, they, he reasoned, could hardly be corrupted any further.
The row that ensued about Ludwig's money affected the whole family. Karl's eldest brother, Uncle Paul, was furious with those of Ludwig's siblings who had accepted his money and accused them of taking advantage of their younger brother who was clearly sick. They ought, he insisted, to have laid some secret fund aside in case he changed his mind and wanted his money back. Hermine, who admitted doing "everything to fulfil Ludwig's wishes down to the smallest detail," argued that her greater knowledge of her brother's state of mind left no alternative but to do as he asked. Uncle Paul, who loved his own possessions so greatly that he left instructions for several of them to be buried with him in his coffin, neither could nor would try to understand his nephews and nieces and in high moral dudgeon cut himself off from those he accused of having profited by Ludwig's madness.
ANTI-SEMITICS
The threat of a Bolshevik takeover in Vienna felt very real. The Russian Revolution according to Paul "began with the Jews ... Under the Tsarist regime they were suppressed, and at least the poor among them have reaped benefits from the overthrow and, as in Vienna, they compose a large part of the leadership." There were many Jews in Vienna before the war--10 percent of the population according to some estimates--and their numbers were greatly increased during the conflict and in the months that followed it. Multitudes of Galician Jews had sought refuge in the city from the Russian invasion of Poland and in 1919 a further influx poured in from Hungary after the fall of the Jewish Bolshevist leader, Bela Kun. Kun's short hold on power was repressive and on his expulsion all Hungarian Jews--not just those involved in his government--were subject to brutal reprisals. Many of them, including Kun himself, fled to Austria. There and in Berlin he attempted, without success, to foment a Marxist revolution. Kun's days ended in the USSR, where he was murdered by Stalin's assassins.
The arrival in Vienna of Kun and his communist plotters did nothing to allay suspicions among the Viennese that the Bolshevik movement was Jewish led and that it might, at any moment, seize the reins of power in Austria. This fear led to a sharp increase in anti-Semitism in Vienna.
Is there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness in which at least one Jew does not participate [Hitler asked in Mein Kampf]? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovers, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew often blinded by the sudden light.
Hitler claimed in his autobiography of 1924 that, although he had been aware as a young man of the "moral pestilence" of the Jewish hold over the press, art, literature, the theater and white-slave trafficking ("It was worse than the Black Plague of long ago"), it was not until he discovered the extent of Jewish participation in the political life of Vienna that a Damascene conversion took place within him. "In the face of that revelation the scales fell from my eyes," he wrote. "My long inner struggle was at an end ... The knowledge [that the Jews were responsible for communism] was the occasion of the greatest inner revolution that I had yet experienced. From being a soft-hearted cosmopolitan I became an out-and-out anti-Semite."
And so it was that this soi-disant " soft-hearted cosmopolitan" from Upper Austria resolved, in the years following the Great War, that his life's great mission should be to rid the world of a "noxious bacillus":
Should the Jew, with the aid of the Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his crown will be the fun
eral wreath of mankind ... And so I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.
People nowadays draw little distinction between the anti-Semitism of a generalized joke or complaint against Jews and the anti-Semitism of the medieval autos-da-fe and Nazi extermination camps; the one, it is argued, proceeds from the other as sure as night follows day. Let us not consider these arguments but only observe that in Vienna, long before Hitler had any power or influence, the former type of anti-Semitism (that is to say the generalized grumbling against Jews) was extremely common and that the Austrian administration, to this day, makes a distinction between Hitler's yobbish anti-Semitism and the so-called "gentlemanly anti-Semitism" of Vienna's turn-of-the-century mayor Karl Lueger, whose name is commemorated in modern Vienna by the Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring, by the Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Kirche at the Zentralfriedhof, by Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Platz, and by a prominent Karl Lueger monument standing at the start of the Stubenring.
The Wittgensteins were not anti-Semitic in the Hitlerian sense of the term for, like their hero the anti-Semitic philosopher Jew Otto Weininger, they deplored any form of persecution, and yet, out of the context of their time, judged by today's standards, the family's attitude to the Jews would be considered questionable. Their grandfather, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein, refused to allow his children to marry Jews. Karl, his son, remarked that "in matters of honour one does not consult a Jew." In a letter from Hermine to Ludwig we find the casual aside, "the woman is particularly likeable, although of course Jewish," for she believed that the "Aryan and Jewish races are diametrically opposed as regards merits and deficiencies, and that they must combat each other either openly or furtively." Paul believed, like his father, that "dishonesty lies at the heart of every Jew," and his friend Marga Deneke explained that "If he ever named Jews it was with the hatred of the dog for the wolf." Ludwig, much influenced by Weininger's curiously elaborate anti-Semitism, would have "nothing to do with the communist Jews," and believed that the Jews in general were "unnatural creatures" by virtue of their having lived in "foreign states under foreign laws and living conditions and restraints," and (again like Weininger and also like Richard Wagner in the previous century) Ludwig judged the Jews to be incapable of creating "original" (as opposed to "reproductive") art. In December 1929 he recorded a dream about a Jewish car-driver who opened fire with a machine gun killing a passing cyclist and a young, poor-looking girl. Ludwig, in the dream, thought to himself: "Must there be a Jew behind every indecency?"
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War Page 15