The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  Ludwig, rashly (for his health was also failing), accepted an invitation from a former philosophy student, Norman Malcolm, to stay at Ithaca in New York State. In April, before leaving for America, he went to see Hermine in Vienna. Paul had already left the city, and Ludwig found his sister's life hanging by its final thread. He wrote to Professor Malcolm: "I haven't done any work since the beginning of March & I haven't had the strength of even trying to do any. God knows how things will go on now." The doctor in Dublin told him that he was suffering from a pernicious, atypical anemia that could be corrected with iron and liver pills. An X-ray of his stomach where a growth was suspected revealed no abnormalities. On July 21 he sailed on the Queen Mary.

  Ludwig found America hot and bewildering. The Malcolms were kind to him but he felt like "an old cripple" and "too stupid" to write letters. He paid a surprise visit to Paul's house on Long Island but found it empty except for a maid and left without leaving a note. Once again he felt ill, bad enough to submit himself to the rigors of a medical inspection, and once again nothing seriously wrong was found. The day before he had murmured to Malcolm in a breathless frenzy: "I don't want to die in America. I am a European. I want to die in Europe. What a fool I was to come!"

  Returning to London he had himself checked again and was finally told the proper cause of his malaise. He had an inoperable and advanced cancer of the prostate, which had spread to his bone marrow, causing anemia. The treatment, a regular oral administration of the female hormone estrogen, was prescribed to arrest his production of testosterone. The side effects of this therapy include sickness, diarrhea, hot flashes, impotence and breast swelling. Unable to work and still feeling restless he decided to return to Austria for Christmas, where he imagined he would die in his old room at the Palais. "I am thinking of going to Vienna for some time as soon as possible. There I'll just do nothing & let the hormones do their work." He gave instructions to his friends not to mention his illness to anyone as it was "of the greatest importance" that his family should not get to hear about it while he was staying there.

  On Christmas Eve Ludwig arrived at the Palais and retired to bed. It was on such a Christmas thirty-seven years earlier that Karl had lain dying of cancer and now--another grim Yuletide in the same palatial surroundings--it was the turn of Karl's eldest and youngest children. For two months Ludwig remained in Vienna, spending most of his time prostrate. Each day he went to see Hermine but she could hardly talk to him and when she did it was impossible to understand what she was trying to say. On February 11, 1950, she died. Ludwig wrote to a friend in England: "My eldest sister died very peacefully yesterday evening. We had expected her end hourly for the last 3 days. It wasn't a shock."

  Most of Hermine's seventy-five years had been occupied in maidish time-filling activities, spoiled by feelings of inferiority and social inadequacy. She had produced one or two pictures of average merit, the best being of Josef Labor on his deathbed. Her friendships were few but loyal. Above all she had been keeper of the family flame. She had worked hard since her father's death to maintain his estates, standards and values and to honor his memory. She had maintained the Viennese Palais and made significant improvements to Hochreit and the Palais at Neuwaldegg. Her unpublished memoir, written for her great-nephews and -nieces, portrays the Wittgensteins in a fairytale aspect and reveals her to have been fonder and prouder of her uncles and aunts than of most of her siblings or even her mother. Only Ludwig and Gretl are honored in this work. Hans, Rudi, Kurt, Helene and Paul are dismissed with few words. For all Hermine's obvious faults the effect of her death on Ludwig was profound. "Great loss for me and all of us," he wrote in his diary. "Greater than I would have thought."

  Ludwig was himself expecting to die, but for a year after Hermine's demise he continued writing and moving from place to place. In April 1950, he went to Cambridge, then, after a brief sojourn in London, moved to Oxford, took a holiday in Norway in August, settling on his return into the house of his doctor Edward Bevan and his wife in Cambridge. By February his decline was such that it was decided any further treatment would be pointless. Bucked by this, Ludwig told Mrs. Bevan, "I am going to work now as I have never worked before." Immediately he set about writing a large portion of the book now known as On Certainty. He made it (just) to his sixty-second birthday. "Many happy returns!" said Mrs. Bevan. "There will be no returns," he answered. On the following morning he composed his last philosophical thought:

  Someone who dreaming says "I am dreaming," even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream "it is raining," while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.

  That night Ludwig's condition deteriorated considerably and when Dr. Bevan told him that he was not likely to survive more than a couple of days he said, "Good!" Before passing out for the last time he murmured to Mrs. Bevan: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life!" His final moments-unconscious and oblivious--were attended at his bedside by four of his former students and, at their behest, a Dominican monk. He was buried the next day (April 30, 1951) by Catholic rite in the cemetery of St. Giles, Cambridge. None of his family or friends from Vienna was present.

  If ever there were a case to show that cancer is a genetic disease, the Wittgenstein family should be submitted as the first exhibit of concluding proof. Eighteen months before Hermine's death Maria Salzer (He-lene's daughter) was killed by cancer. In time both of Helene's daughters and several of her granddaughters as well as her great-granddaughters would be stricken by the same disease. Helene herself died of it in 1956. She had not seen her brother Paul since 1938.

  As for Gretl, she outlived Helene by a couple of years, but they were not especially happy ones. She returned to Vienna but with none of the old gaiety or sense of purpose. Her social life was not the same as it had been in the 1920s and 1930s and she was lonely. The burden she felt at the antics of her rakish elder son (who married five times and was a constant financial drain) was compounded by her disappointment over the postwar idleness and lack of ambition of her younger son. After 1945, Ji had turned his back on his high-flying Washington career; he opted instead for the indolent life of an English country squire, settling in Dorset, where he and Veronica raised a family.

  Of Paul, Gretl never spoke again, but she mentioned him in letters to Ludwig before he died. "For a time I really believed that Paul would get over his attitude," she told him, "but now I see that we have really lost him. He is not a forgetter & I don't see that age is going to make him mellower. I understand him so much better now than in the old days, when his outward overbearingness fooled me."

  In 1958 the heart which had given her trouble since the days of her maidenhood finally gave in. She had three strokes in quick succession, rallied enough to pretend to her grandson that she had plenty of energy and would be all right, but spent the remainder of her days struggling for consciousness at an expensive private clinic on the Billrothstrasse. It was in a small bedroom here, in the Rudolfinerhaus, that she died on September 27. Of the Wittgenstein siblings, Gretl was the warmest, the most humorous and the kindest, but she was also the bossiest, the most ambitious and the most worldly. She hated these traits in herself but lacked the strength to resist them. Despite her knack for irritating and interfering she was remembered with deep affection by her many friends and descendants. She was buried on October 1, 1958, in the town cemetery at Gmunden, next to her husband.

  THE END OF THE LINE

  Paul Wittgenstein died on March 3, 1961. He was seventy-three years old. Like his younger brother, he too had fallen prey to cancer of the prostate and its attendant anemia, but in the end it was an acute attack of pneumonia that killed him.

  In outward appearance his last years in America had been successful. His family, which by the end of November 1941 included a son, Paul Jr., moved from Huntington to a comfortable mock-Tudor residence with land and views across Long Island Sound at Great Neck. He continued to spend most of his time, except
for the weekends and the longer holidays, in Manhattan, but despite this unconventional arrangement and the disparity of age between him and his wife, the marriage was, by some accounts at least, a happy one. In 1946 he and his family were granted full American citizenship and Paul never repined. During semiretirement from the concert platform in 1958 he published three books of piano music for the left hand, including some of his own arrangements, of which he was exceedingly proud. In the same year he was awarded an honorary doctorate, in recognition of his services to music, by the Philadelphia Musical Academy.

  He had many piano pupils, all of whom he taught for free, and the work brought him fulfillment. One of his students, the talented composer and later award-winning film director Leonard Kastle, became his closest friend. His playing during this period, however, deteriorated sharply. At its peak, in the period between 1928 and 1934, he was a world-class pianist of outstanding technical ability and sensitivity who was able to galvanize an audience by his arresting stage manner. His posthumous reputation as a pianist is however low. This is partly caused by his altering the music of famous composers who subsequently railed against him. Ravel continued to complain about him until his death, Prokofiev insulted him in his autobiography and Britten revised the score of his Diversions after 1950 in order to create an "official version" that would stop Paul playing it by rendering his version obsolete. It is also the case that Paul made very few recordings, most of which are bad. A 1928 piano-roll performance of his own arrangement of the Bach-Brahms D minor Chaconne is faultless, but the two recordings he made of the Ravel Concerto and one of Strauss's Parergon are not so good. Clumsy errors, thoughtless phrasing and unnecessary tampering with the music spoil all three performances.

  It would appear that the nervous strain of concert-giving was too great for him. While in the early years he could turn in performances of high quality, his playing was occasionally harsh and ham-fisted. As the years progressed the physical and mental effort overwhelmed him and he produced more of the latter and fewer of the former. Orchestras and conductors that had invited him once, seldom sought to rebook him. In England Marga continued to search for work for her old friend but found it increasingly difficult. The conductor Trevor Harvey, who had performed Diversions with Paul in Bournemouth in October 1950, wrote to her eight years later:

  I think I am going to have a great deal of difficulty in getting much for Paul. I'm sure I know you well enough to say exactly what I think and that you won't be offended because of your old friendship with P.W. The question is--how does he now play? Because last time he was here he didn't create a good impression--frankly, the Britten performance with me in Bournemouth had lots of moments of brilliance but there was a good deal of hard playing and as a performance it sometimes misunderstood Britten's intentions ... Paul may, of course, be playing infinitely better than he was last time but it's going to be difficult to persuade people without any evidence.

  Two weeks after that Bournemouth performance Paul played Diversions again under Sir Malcolm Sargent at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The Times critic recorded "a warm reception" but continued: "familiarity with these works has bred in him a certain contempt for refinement of detail, which he could well remedy by studying each afresh from the printed score."

  The pianist Siegfried Rapp, who had lost his right arm during a battle in the Second World War, was especially bitter. He wrote to Paul asking permission to perform some of the works that he had commissioned and was bluntly refused:

  You don't build a house [Paul told him] just so that someone else can live in it. I commissioned and paid for the works, the whole idea was mine ... Constructing this house has cost me a great deal of money and effort--I was in any case far too generous with contracts as in the Ravel case, and I am now being punished for it. But those works to which I still have the exclusive performance rights, they are to remain mine as long as I still perform in public; that's only right and fair. Once I am dead or no longer give concerts, then the works will be available to everyone because I have no wish for them to gather dust in libraries to the detriment of the composers.

  Rapp was determined to wrestle something from Paul's catalogue of commissions and after Prokofiev's death succeeded in getting a copy of the left-hand concerto from the composer's widow, and in 1956, to Paul's acute irritation, he gave the world premiere performance in Berlin. His attitude to Paul was aggressively negative. Writing to the Czech pianist Otakar Hollmann, Rapp remarked: "I had imagined that there might be nothing special about Wittgenstein's playing but what I heard on the records was indescribably bad... I am mightily horrified and disappointed. He's no pianist at all! To me Wittgenstein is now nothing but a rich dilettante."

  Paul should have retired earlier from the concert platform, but he was a fighter and continued to view each performance as a test of his endurance and his nerve. To give up would have been, for him at least, an unacceptable admission of failure. He continued giving tours and public performances of ever-decreasing merit through his final illness, and right up until the year before his death. It was not vanity that compelled him, for at heart he was a modest man. "You are overrating me by far," he wrote to his student Leonard Kastle shortly before his death. "I have only a few redeeming points, the rest isn't worth much, and that's not fishing but the truth."

  It was of course the same cocktail of pride, honor and obstinacy that stood in the way of any reconciliation with his siblings, but here each of the Wittgensteins was similar and each equally to blame. When Gretl and Paul were summoned to a court hearing in New York to swear on behalf of a friend applying for U.S. citizenship, they both sent representatives as they could not face meeting one another. Or as Gretl put it: "I was sure that he would have hated meeting me, so I sent my lawyer." Hermine said that she thought often of Paul on her deathbed but would not go the length of asking to see him, and as she lay dying Ludwig speculated: "I believe that she wants to make peace, so to speak, from her side and to extinguish all the bitterness." But nothing was done about it.

  A similar situation had arisen with a memorandum that Paul drew up concerning the great Wistag quarrel. He commissioned it "since it is possible that at a later date it might be needed in order to save my honour" but sent instructions to his lawyer: "I would ask you initially not to send a copy to my brother, but to do so only if he expressly requests it." Of course Ludwig did nothing of the sort and therefore never read it, despite the fact that, in its final form, the memorandum was headed with a note: "The following was not originally intended as an appendix to my testament or for my children, but was much more intended for my brother who lives in England to read."

  If Paul had been at home when Ludwig breezed by in 1949, the bitter feud--at least as it existed between the brothers--might well have ended there. Both felt miserable about the rift but with the exception of that one ad hoc visit neither was prepared to make the first move. Marga tried, on several occasions, to bring them together but her efforts were clumsy and caused great offense:

  Paul is in Oxford with the Denekes [Ludwig wrote to Rudolf Koder in March 1949] and recently I received a strange invitation, which filled me with disgust, from Miss Deneke, asking to visit her during Paul's stay. I wrote back stating my reasons about my unwillingness to accept the invitation ... I am certain it was not written on Paul's instructions. I believe rather that she wanted to bring about the get-together and my brother gave her the permission to invite me, which she, because of her stupidity, did in a most stupid way.

  A year later, when Paul was in England playing Diversions, Marga, undaunted by Ludwig's previous response, tried him again. This time she went to see him in person at his attic lodgings in St. John Street, Oxford:

  He was sitting in a dressing gown over a fire [she recalled]. His voice still had its old musical huskiness but it sounded weak and suffering was written on his pale face. After a minute he asked me to leave him. He said it made him shudder to recall old memories and seeing me brought back thoughts of Vienna and his hom
e that were too much for him.

  Paul rarely spoke to his children about Ludwig or about his sisters. In 1953 he wrote to Rudolf Koder: "I kept out of contact with my brother from 1939; he wrote me one or two letters when I was visiting England, in response to Miss Deneke's invitation. I did not answer them. I do not know whether I would have done anything if I had been aware that he was terminally ill." By then Paul had managed to put his past behind him. Ludwig and Gretl believed that he had to estrange himself from his family in order to lead a free, fulfilled and happy existence.

  After Hermine's death the once glorious Palais Wittgenstein was sold for development. Razed to the ground by cranes, bulldozers and wrecking balls, the final demolition marked the symbolic end to the Wittgenstein story. Paul and his son were the last surviving descendants in the male line from Karl and without the slightest hope of a return to the Palais in Vienna they looked to find a new identity and a new hope in the brash, optimistic life of America.

  That our house in the Alleegasse is not only to be sold but razed to the ground is very sad but, I suppose, unavoidable [Paul wrote to Rudolf Koder]. But who can nowadays live in and upkeep a palais of such extravagance of space and grandiosity? Just think of the staircase and the salons on the first floor. Even at the time when I and my late sister were living there, the maintenance costs were far more than we could afford.

  On Monday, March 6, 1961, friends were invited to pay their last respects in the American way. Paul's body had been moved from the North Shore Hospital where he had died to the Fliedner Funeral Home on Middle Neck Road where, on the following day at 10 a.m., a service was given. No words were said. A small congregation assembled. A man at the front stood up and placed a phonograph needle on a 33 rpm recording of Brahms's German Requiem. Each time a side was finished the man went forward and turned the record over until, at length, the music reached its winding conclusion: