The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  FURTHER COMPLICATIONS

  What the forty-seven-year-old Paul did not realize, as he boarded the Majestic at Cherbourg bound for New York on October 24, 1934, was that one of his piano students, an attractive, dark-haired, eighteen-year-old, half-blind Beethoven enthusiast, was pregnant with his child.

  Hilde was the daughter of Franz Schania, an amateur pianist, zither player and a left-wing Roman Catholic, who had worked first for a large brewery at Schwechat, near Vienna, and later as a health inspector for the Wiener Stadtische Strassenbahn, the city tram network. He may have been head of a small department, or maybe not. In any case he was considered nicht standesgemdss (not of the right class) by Paul's family, who put it about that he was a humble bus conductor: "a Strassenbahn Kontrolleur--a. man who checked tram tickets--very, very small beer" is how Ji Stonborough later described him. After the First War, in which Herr Schania got his head stuck between a cannon and a rock face at the battle of Isonzo, he became a dedicated socialist and suffered severe depressions. His wife Stefanie, who worked as secretary for a wood-chopping firm, was also depressed. She separated from her husband in 1933 and is said to have taken her own life in January 1936. Hilde was brought up with her elder sister Kathe, first at Rannersdorf and afterward in a council flat in one of "Red Vienna's" new socialist housing experiments on the Geyschlagergasse in the 15th District.

  At the age of five, after an attack of measles and diphtheria, Hilde's optic nerve was damaged; her eyesight waned and continued to do so until she was completely blind. When Paul first met her she was partially sighted but so adept at disguising it that he was unaware of any problem. In later life when her sight was considerably worse she still managed to look people in the eye, played the piano with confidence and walked briskly around the house without crashing into things. Visitors were often unaware of her blindness. Some even believed that she was faking it. Her poor vision forced her to stare intently with large dark eyes into people's faces. Men found this attractive in the same way, a generation earlier, as Mahler, Zem-linsky, Klimt, Kokoschka, Werfel and Gropius had fallen for the charms of Alma Schindler, "the loveliest girl in Vienna," whose slight deafness forced her to gaze intently upon men's lips as they spoke.

  In the autumn of 1934, Hilde enrolled as a piano student at the New Vienna Conservatoire. Paul had longed to teach advanced pupils since his successes with Ludwig's friend Rudolf Koder in June 1929. His performing schedule was stressful and he never succeeded in controlling his nerves. He was bad at relaxing and needed some sort of supplementary work to fill the hours between practicing and performing. From 1932 he worked as an unpaid assistant music critic on the Neues Wiener Journal. His intemperate reviews had to be reined in by the editor from time to time, but the fact that he would never send an invoice made him an attractive employee.

  Though he affected to despise the critics, Paul's admiration for Leschetizky and Labor enabled him to place "great teachers" on an equal plain with "great performers" and his experiences with Rudolf Koder encouraged him to take on several private pupils. In October 1930 he applied, with Franz Schmidt's support, for an unsalaried post at the Hochschule fur Musik. Erich Korngold recommended that he send a formal application to the professorial staff:

  I lost my right arm in the war and have had to train myself up exclusively as a left-hand pianist; in this capacity I have given concerts over a number of years both at home and abroad. Although I have had to modify in some respects the standard piano technique taught me by Leschetizky, I believe nonetheless that I am capable of successfully teaching two-handed students ...

  Franz Schmidt had warned Paul that the academy had enough piano teachers already and that his request was likely to be rejected. In the minutes of the professorial staff committee meeting it was recorded: "Both Hofrat Dr. Marx and Professor Mairecker referred to Wittgenstein's remarkable musical talent (upon which the Rector agreed) and to his already proven teaching abilities, whereas others warned of his nervousness that almost amounted to an illness."

  As expected Paul was turned down, but a year later he was accepted for the post of unpaid professor of piano at the New Vienna Conservatoire, a private music-teaching establishment that had rented a few tuition rooms from the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the distinguished Viennese music society, at the Musikverein on the Himmelpfortgasse. By all accounts Paul was an unconventional teacher. He would not allow his students to take holidays and when the Conservatoire was closed required them to attend lessons at the Palais or, in the summer, at his house at Neuwaldegg. "I love teaching," he said. "When I have a gifted student to work with I find my greatest happiness." He did not pull his pupils' hair or box their ears as Ludwig had done, but he often lost his temper with them. If they played wrongly he would flick their hands off the keys as they were playing, and throw away or tear up their music. Most of all he deplored them repeating mistakes that they had once learned to correct.

  During the lesson and while you played Professor always had to be walking about, up and down the enormous Saal [one student remembered]. In the Neuwaldegger Palais, the dream summer house, he would march right out into the surrounding Wiener Wald and disappear. You might have thought he had gone and would not hear you, but the slightest carelessness on your part would bring him back like lightning and thunder with his shoes covered in mud. He did not worry about his dirty shoes, he was completely unaware of it.

  Much of the time was spent working out correct fingering, and the student would have to sit silently while Paul closed his eyes and the stump of his arm twitched with his thinking. He could still feel the fingers of his right hand and was able to work out the best fingering by imagining them moving across the keys. To choose a new piece students would be asked to sight-read the bass line while Paul played the right-hand part with his left hand--and then again the other way round. Maybe it was during just such an exercise that his seduction of Hilde Schania took place. Hilde later remembered Hermine sitting in as a silent chaperone on some of her lessons, but she cannot have been there all of the time.

  The trauma of Gretl's interference in Bassia's abortion two years earlier increased Paul's determination that there should be no abortion this time around, that the baby should be born and that his sisters and brother should know nothing whatsoever about it. Hilde was moved into a flat in a small house on the Gersthoferstrasse overlooking the Turken-schanzplatz. It was registered in her father's name, but Paul paid the rent and put a maid at her disposal. On May 24, 1935, a daughter, Elizabeth, was born--named apparently after the late Empress "Sisi," who was stabbed to death by an anarchist as she boarded a steamship on Lake Geneva in September 1898. It may be calculated that the period from Hilde's first formal piano lesson to the less formal consummation of their relationship was a brief one. She had joined as a student of the Conservatoire in the autumn of 1934 and was delivered of her baby at the end of May 1935. Elizabeth's conception must have occurred soon after Hilde's first lesson with Paul.

  The secret of Hilde and the new baby was well guarded. Only the Wittgenstein servants knew of it and they were well trained to secrecy. On most evenings Paul's chauffeur drove to and from Hilde's villa in the Gersthoferstrasse. He knew where he was supposed to go without having to be asked. One month after Elizabeth was born Hilde played a Beethoven sonata in a concert of Paul's students at the Conservatoire, but after that she seems to have given up her lessons as well as her ambitions to play in public. Less than two years later, on March 10, 1937, their secret still intact, she gave birth to another daughter, Johanna.

  Hilde's father was not impressed. Franz Schania, quiet and withdrawn, seething with irritation and bad temper, was three and a half years younger than Paul, and disliked him intensely. He could never forgive him for seducing and impregnating his daughter, for refusing to marry her, and later for failing to buy him a smart house in Vienna. He referred to him, always with a sneer, as "Herr Graf" (Sir Count). Paul, in his turn, avoided contact with Hilde's family.

  RISING TENSIONS<
br />
  Ludwig's effect on both men and women continued to override people's frustrations at not being able to understand his philosophy. When Marga first met him as she and Paul were walking up the staircase that separated the bachelors' quarters from the main part of the Palais, he appeared in a greasy, oil-stained uniform carrying a clarinet in a stocking, but she remembered him still as "extremely handsome with the neck of a Greek god--fresh in colouring--his fair hair sprang up like a wreath of flames, there was a very serious look in his deep blue eyes." This description correlates with another, slightly homosexual, one that the philosophy student and, later, distinguished Buddhist thinker John Niemeyer Findlay has left:

  At the age of 40 [Ludwig Wittgenstein] looked like a youth of 20, with a godlike beauty, always an important feature at Cambridge ... like Apollo who had bounded into life out of his own statue, or perhaps like the Norse God Baldur, blue eyed and fair haired... an extraordinary atmosphere surrounded him, something philosophically saintly that was also very distant and impersonal: he was the philosophe Soleil... the tea one drank with him tasted like nectar.

  From 1933 to 1935 Ludwig--tense, stammering, sweating like the Prophet Muhammad as he proclaimed the Koran at Medina--dictated two books of his philosophy to his students at Cambridge. These came to be known as the Blue and Brown books. As Ludwig himself conceded, "I think it's very difficult to understand them." To a small but ardent group of Cambridge disciples Ludwig was God. That they did not understand him was of small concern, because what mattered to them was to be close to his presence, to be part of his inner circle and to be able to witness the spectacle of his thinking. His lectures were exclusive events to which only the chosen were admitted, and the Blue and Brown books, which circulated among them, came to be regarded with the same reverence and mystical fascination as the apocalypse gospels that passed surreptitiously under the togas of ancient Christians in the period of Rome's decline.

  Paul was probably unaware of Ludwig's Christ-like status among the philosophers of Cambridge or of the fact that he was living some of the time with Francis Skinner, a man twenty-three years his junior, but in neither case would he have minded. He was not censorious. On the rare occasions when they met, the two brothers got on well. Their correspondence during this period is of a mainly frivolous nature. They sent each other newspaper cuttings, pictures and articles that they thought would amuse. Paul posted Viennese delicacies, unprocurable in England, to Ludwig and, on one occasion, a letter from the wife of a rotten composer, Max Oberleithner, inviting him to contribute his favorite recipe to a musicians' cookery book she was compiling. Paul refused to admit to her that scrambled eggs with lots of pepper was what he liked best, but Ludwig drafted a comical response ("Greetings to you from Dr. Ludwig Wittgenstein") in which he asked Frau Oberleithner if he, as a philosopher, might be permitted to make some contribution to her anthology for "Is not philosophy music and music philosophy?" "My favourite food," he added, "is tomatoes in mayonnaise ... If you should decide to honour me with inclusion in your little book, please quote my full name as I do not wish to be confused with the pianist, Paul Wittgenstein, who may well enter your Pantheon but with whom I have no connection whatsoever."

  The brothers' relationship worked because of a tacit agreement between them never to discuss politics or philosophy as on both subjects they profoundly disagreed. Paul, an ardent fan of Schopenhauer, regarded Ludwig's branch of linguistic philosophy as pure nonsense, and like all Austrians at that time who divided themselves between the ultra-right and ultra-left wings, Paul and Ludwig stood at opposite poles of the political spectrum.

  Some of Ludwig's students in Cambridge believed him to be a Stalinist. "The important thing," he said of Stalinist Russia, "is that the people have work ... Tyranny doesn't make me feel indignant." In 1933 he started taking Russian lessons and within two years had decided that he wanted to live in the Soviet Union with Francis Skinner. It has been suggested that he served as a recruiting agent for Soviet spies at Cambridge and, though the evidence is inconclusive, his close contact with many known communists and communist agents has long been regarded as suspicious. In 1935 friends arranged for Ludwig to see Ivan Maisky at the Embassy in London, where he succeeded in persuading the Soviet Ambassador of his need for a Russian visa. On a three-week visit to the Soviet Union in September he tried to find himself work as a laborer on a collective farm, but, according to one source, the "Russians told him his own work was a useful contribution and he ought to go back to Cambridge." On his return he reported, "One could live there, but only if one was aware the whole time that one could never speak one's mind." But this alone was not enough to put him off. "I am a communist at heart," he told his friend Roland Hutt, and for several years he continued to play with the idea of emigration to the Soviet Union.

  Paul's politics were, in contrast, far to the right. He supported the Austro-fascist Heimwehr, the army of the young swashbuckling aristocrat Prince Ernst Rudiger von Starhemberg, by secretly supplying funds to his campaign for a Heimwehr dictatorship. He paid for huge billboard posters to be erected all around Vienna and for newspaper advertisements urging patriotic Austrians to support the Prince after the Rote Aufstand or "Red Uprising" of February 1934. He also financed a sanatorium on behalf of Prince von Starhemberg's paramilitary commander, Major Baron Karg-Bebenburg.

  Austria's economy had rallied in the mid-1920s when the krone was replaced by the schilling at a rate of 1:10,000, but there remained high unemployment and an extremely volatile political atmosphere, continually tested by the presence of several private armies. On the left there was the Republikanische Schutzbund (Republican Defense League) run by the Social Democrats and on the right the Frontkampfer (Battle-Front Veterans) that eventually merged into the Heimwehr (Home Defense). As well as these opposing paramilitary forces was the rapidly growing illegal army of brown-shirt Nazi fascists whose aim was to unite Austria with Germany in a pan-German anti-Semitic Reich under Adolf Hitler, as well as several armed Marxist groups trying to foment communist revolution among the workers.

  Violent clashes between these opposing forces were as frequent as they were inevitable. In January 1927 a fight among Schutzbund and Frontkampfer troops at Schattendorf, Burgenland, resulted in the shooting of a man and child. When the Frontkampfer paramilitaries responsible were acquitted in court, angry left-wing demonstrators took to the streets, 89 of whom were killed and 600 wounded on the Ringstrasse as the Ministry of Justice building went up in flames. The Stonboroughs were at their villa in the country when all this was going on, feeling nervous that the red towns of Steyrermuhl a few miles to the north and Ebensee to the south might stage a "pincer movement" and take Gmunden by force.

  In May 1932 a very small but charismatic right-winger called Engelbert Dollfuss, known as the "Millimetternich," became chancellor of Austria at the head of a bickering coalition government. His aim was to make Austria prosperous, drawing it out of the Great Depression, while containing the threat of Hitler's National Socialist movement on the one hand and the agitation of the Marxists on the other. Eight months later Hitler was voted chancellor of Germany by democratic election. Knowing that the Berlin Fuhrer's chief aim was to join Germany with Austria, Chancellor Dollfuss's immediate response was to declare a state of emergency and suspend the Austrian parliament in favor of his own authoritarian Austro-fascist rule by decree. Gretl wrote to her son Thomas to say that the transition from democracy to dictatorship had been painless and to tell him a Dollfuss joke that was doing the rounds in Vienna at the time: "He has had an accident: He fell off the ladder while he was picking strawberries." Soon Dollfuss would establish his Stdndestaat and outlaw the National Socialists, the communists and all jokes about his size.

  In February 1934, Prince von Starhemberg's private Heimwehr army helped the Dollfuss government to crush what was left of the now-banned socialist Schutzbund. On the 12th a forced search of socialist premises in Linz led to violent clashes between left-and right-wing paramilitaries that qu
ickly spread to Vienna, Graz, Judenburg and other towns. In the capital armed members of the Schutzbund barricaded themselves into several of the city's Gemeindebauten (council housing-estate buildings), the most famous of which, the half-mile-long Karl Marx Hof, nicknamed the Ringstrasse des Proletariats, came under heavy artillery fire. The socialists were roundly beaten; but the action, which lasted several days and cost many lives, left many of those on the right still feeling nervous of the threat of socialist uprising. Anton Groller, the Wittgensteins' business factotum, recommended that they take Liechtenstein citizenship to save the family fortune in the event of a socialist takeover, but Paul refused on the grounds that he was an "Austrian with his heart and soul" and thought only ill of those who changed their citizenship for purely financial reasons. His brother-in-law, Helene's husband Max Salzer, trustee of the foreign fortune, expressed her fear that by taking Liech tenstein citizenship he might miss some of the hunting season at Hochreit, and thus Herr Groller's idea was roundly rejected.