,14=/,15=#,23=%,24==> 1Family Resemblances T~H~E house of Wittgenstein with which we are concerned took its rise at the end of the eighteenth century in the village of Laasphe in the county of Wittgenstein not far from the castle of the princely family of that name. In some year unknown, or perhaps in no definite year, Moses Meier, the son of Meyer Moses of Laasphe and the prince's factor, adopted the name of the county as his surname. The love of legend, the need to fit every event into a familiar category, and later, perhaps, the desire not so much for a princely ancestor as for one who was not a Jew have surrounded the assumption of this name with incident and motive. The prince is said to have thrashed his presumptuous factor; the factor is said to have been expressing (surely in an improbable manner) his indignation at the fact that the son born to him in 1802 was in reality a princely bastard; the edict of Jerome Bonaparte that every Jew must take a family name has seemed to place the event in 1808. Perhaps this is the most probable explanation: the alternation Meier Moses, Moses Meier belongs to the old style of naming among Jews and Jerome's legislation explicitly forbade them to take a town name such as Laasphe. For this reason, no doubt, a number of families in or from the district took the name Wittgenstein, so for example one in Berleburg and another in Ho$3xter. There is no reason to suppose them to be related to our Wittgensteins. If the name was adopted in 1808 Moses Meier had already moved to Korbach in the principality of Waldeck, where the son mentioned was born in 1802 and where his father died in 1805. The portraits of Moses Meier Wittgenstein and his wife Brendel Simon, stiff and patriarchal and remote, still hang in the Viennese villa of their great-great-great-granddaughter but little is recalled about their originals. It is (surely) Moses' father that lives on in the less reverent side of family tradition as "old Meyer Laasphe, who sold fish in the market-place at Korbach'. Here probably there is too acute a sense of the contrast between the cultivation and riches achieved in Vienna and the humble origins of the family, for the Wittgensteins had one of the largest businesses in Korbach and charitable foundations were instituted by the old man as well as by his son and by one of his grandsons. But Jewish the family certainly was: "pur sang', as Moses Meier's grandson Louis said to his sister Milly, with something of the irony that we have just observed_they were proud, not of being, but of having been Jewish. And in the next generation when the suggestion of 2 Wittgenstein: A Life Hermann Christian's illegitimacy was set afloat or revived,1 Margaret Stonborough scornfully rejected this way out for her sisters: they preferred to base their claim to special treatment on the nineteenth- century achievements of their family and especially on the character of their grandfather about whose ways and life there was nothing specifically Jewish. This ambivalence to their Jewish origin was a feature determined by time and place. Jews of the assimilation, particularly in what became the German Empire, not only took pains to lose all traces of the old culture themselves but viewed its manifestations in others and even viewed the race itself as a sort of taint from which only good fortune and self-mastery had managed to free them, in so far as they were free. Thus when Hermann Christian's son Karl is reported as saying "In matters of honour one does not consult a Jew'_and he was certainly capable of such directness of language_and when his son Ludwig (the particular subject of our study) speculated whether a Jewish thinker (such as himself) could ever be more than reproductive, they were only examples of a common phenomenon of their times, the Jew who understands antisemitism. Today, after Hitler, most families with Jewish blood, among them some of the descendants of Hermann Christian, have, with whatever justification, a different attitude towards their origin and see it as the source of their energy and intelligence, but Ludwig belonged to an earlier way of thinking, with something of the Jewish self-hatred of Karl Kraus and Otto Weininger. In 1938 when the Nazi authorities investigated the ancestry of Ludwig's sisters they could not find any record of Hermann Christian's birth in the Jewish archives of his region of birth, even though Mrs Stonborough made them look twice. The name Christian of course could not have occurred in such archives and even Hermann is an unlikely name for a Jew and may have been taken at baptism. The date of baptism is uncertain: his granddaughter Hermine thought it was just before his marriage in 1839: other family accounts place it during childhood in 1811 (aet. 8) or 1815 (aet. 12) agreeing only that he was "baptized standing'. We know that his future wife was indeed baptized just before marriage and it seems more likely that she was conforming with him than that both became Christians in order to be married. If he had for some time been a Christian it might help to account for a certain estrangement from his family implied by the words of his will, where, after thanking God for the fact that he need not feel unable to provide a modest existence for his wife and children, he proceeds: 1.The ruling suggestion then was that he was a bastard of the house of Pyrmont-Waldeck, in whose principality Korbach, his birthplace, lay. Some likeness to the Wittgenstein family has been seen or fancied among the ancestral portraits of the Pyrmont-Waldecks, but there is no record of contact with their family, as there is with the Sayn-Wittgensteins. 3 1Family Resemblances I began my career in other and troublesome circumstances. Thrown back upon my own powers I was never despondent, never solicited or received any man's favour, and, endeavouring to emulate my betters, I never became an object of their contempt. Steif und wu$3rdevoll_stiff and dignified_the words used by his granddaughter Hermine to describe his manner are surely borne out by this brief testament of his life. He shows in it also a religious earnestness, a sense of life as a task, which was to reappear in many of his descendants. No less typical of him is the impression he gives that this task resides principally in the decent and orderly conduct of business in such a way as to win a solid position in the world. The means to this end were provided by the other commercial virtues of energy and persistence. Photographs show him as an elderly man, ruddy, determined, and not a little irascible. He was probably just as formidable at 35 or 36 when he met Fanny Figdor, who was to marry him and who has left us the first personal impression of him. Her brother Gustav had met him in Pesth_he was active in the wool-trade and visited his sources of supply in Hungary and Poland as often as his customers in Holland and England. Some time in 1838 he was in Vienna for eight days with a Dutch business associate. Gustav brought both to his father's house and it fell out that Wittgenstein was assigned to Fanny as a table companion. His stern, cold, and forbidding expression and the seriousness of his conversation were a striking contrast to the charming superficiality that even then characterized a Viennese dinner-table. Two further meetings produced some thaw: to her he now seemed, if no better-looking, at any rate more appealing, whereas on his side he had seen enough to apply for her hand. For the first time (she was already 24 and must have had many offers) she felt no positive aversion,2 but papa had to go to Baden, Wittgenstein (after prolonging his stay so that he had known his prospective bride for nearly three weeks) could no longer put off his business in Frankfurt, Madame Obermeier in Augsburg had to be consulted about his character and financial standing, and so on. As was likely with two principals of decided views, all went well and in the course of 1839 the Biedermeier furniture was bought, the siver and the linen (much still in use today) was prepared, the dowry was paid over in 20-florin pieces, and Fanny went to Dresden first for baptism, and then for marriage, in the Lutheran church.3 Hermann Christian had evidently already settled on Leipzig as a centre. Trade in Korbach had declined by this time and he seems in any case to have become independent of his family's firm. After 1838 or 1839 (as later in Vienna) he was in partnership with his wife's family. The 2.So she had told a friend, forgetting perhaps, or silently suppressing, a Hungarian count that Papa had turned down. 3.The marriage seems also to have been registered in the Jewish records in Vienna. 4 Wittgenstein: A Life newly married couple settled in Gohlis, then on the outskirts, now towards the centre of Leipzig. Here they rose to a solid prosperity, here most of their eleven children were born, and here their family life received its decisive stamp. It was the house and the life of a German merchant, living at the centre of the trade in books and wool alike, in the birthplace of Richard Wagner, and in the town where Gustav Freytag wrote his Soll und Haben,4 a book possibly read for longer in the family than elsewhere. It does indeed need an historical eye to read it. The commercial values of the middle class: the order, the quiet, the austerity in the midst of plenty in the house of T.O. Schro$3der are too crudely contrasted with the idleness and luxury of the aristocracy, the envy and greed of the Jews (except for the favourite son Bernhard who becomes a scholar and dies young), and the disorderly circumstances (true polnische Wirtschaften) and aimless insurrection of the neighbouring Poles. Not that the later Wittgensteins identified themselves wholeheartedly with figures in this social novel, in which, if truth be told, there is a certain insensitivity: the author cannot quite convey the flavour or the content of a friendship or a personal problem and seems to describe them from a little way outside. In such matters the Wittgensteins judged by the highest standards and they saw the German period of their family through other glasses_that for example of Ku$3gelgen's In Bygone Days,5 which describes the revival of the German spirit through the first decades of the century but in the framework of a close family life with a mother's calm and unquestioning because unreasoned insistence on the highest standards of honesty and dutifulness and a father's quiet confidence in his work and his own worth: uncles, tutors, family friends all conspired to show the boys that the truest affection could and should be combined with justice. Only later is there added to this scrupulous bourgeois morality a religious element with the realization that one is, despite it all, still worthless. The book became for later generations of the Wittgenstein family a kind of mirror of right feeling_their Sachsenspiegel, so to speak. Another book with the help of which they looked back to that time was Fritz Reuter's An Old Story of my Farming Days:6 here, as in life, some of the landowners are feckless, some of the Jews are grasping, and some of the peasants are curmudgeonly, but the main lesson is the way in which a man's honesty and diligence and the strength in him of simple and natural human feelings, though in one way they magnify misfortune when it arises, yet they also make it possible for him to support it, secure in his own conscience and in the confidence of a few who know him well and can judge him fairly. 4.1855: translated into English with the title Debit and Credit. 5.Jugenderinnerungen eines alten Mannes (1870). 6.Ut min stromtid (1864). Ludwig's friends and his young relations had to struggle to get their thoroughly Austrian tongues round its Low German text. His sister Hermine's name in the form "Mining' was taken from the book. 5 1Family Resemblances It was a world of deep feelings as well as of hard work but for all that a little austere and Fanny Figdor, who brought into it a breath of the more urbane world of Vienna, is said to have cried when she first saw the scoured and sandstrewn floors of her new Leipzig home. The story probably is her own: at any rate no one would have invented it to fit the future mother and grandmother who saw, indeed, everything that was amiss but was quicker to censure than to repine. It is consonant with the story, however, that the Wittgensteins moved after ten years to Austria, a move naturally but probably truly ascribed to Fanny's influence. Anna, Marie, Paul, Fine, Louis, Karl, Bertha, Clara, Lydia, Milly, and finally Clothilde (who spent a long life in tutelage) were none the less brought up by this energetic and sharp-tongued lady in a strict household and more frugally than the family fortunes demanded. The girls wore clothes passed down from their sisters. Transgressions were punished by locking in a room or cellar and even as they grew up the daughters were, less literally, locked away from unsuitable admirers. In the family their very number protected the children to a certain extent and the others were able to mitigate the severity that occasionally fell to the lot of one of them. In some cases they inherited, in others they learned to live with, their mother's impatience and quickness of decision. (A favourite story was that of her taking a boat to Egypt as part of an Italian holiday.) Something of this rapidity of judgement, which goes with a brisk general intelligence, can be seen in later generations, only modified by an imbued politeness. One quality very characteristic of the Wittgensteins Fanny did not possess or not in the same measure as her husband: it is a very general quality and hard to define but is immediately recognizable when one has to rely on another person_it is the ability to get a thing done, etwas durchzusetzen. This showed itself in an exaggerated form in the obstinacy with which Hermann Christian persevered with even a bad investment _an estate bought in ignorance of local conditions which he was determined to make pay. Another aspect of it was his complete confidence in his own authority in the family. When Fanny could not impose her authority on her younger cousin Joseph Joachim he advised her, sensibly enough, to find the boy a room in another house and concluded his advice by saying: I am so fully persuaded of the truth of what I write that I await your consent with confidence and turn to another subject. It rankled with him that his son Karl always went his own way even though he recognized that it had led to success. Yet Karl, as will be seen, had been following in his father's footsteps and carrying out his precepts. Like Hermann Christian he had allowed himself to be cast back on his 6 Wittgenstein: A Life own resources and, as Hermann Christian had intended in the case of Joachim, he had learnt that a human being could be thrown from the arms of a comfortable life on to the hard paving-stones of privation with nothing to protect him except the induced toughness of a Stoic.7 In this he was alone in the family, for though the mother's briskness conspired with the father's principles in teaching the children to be indifferent to comfort, none of the others was ever in real need. Karl was also alone, it seems, in going his own way. Some signs of it are visible in his sister, Fine, who jumped from a window when locked up as a child and retained some irreverence and originality throughout her 89 years. She was a favourite aunt of Ludwig's but the favourite of them all was the professional aunt, Clara, who remained unmarried and was taken as a model for her courtesy, her considerateness, her concern for the moral and physical improvement of others, and also for the dignity and presence that made it only half a joke to call her the Empress of Laxenburg. Paul and Louis, the two other brothers, fell in more readily with their father's wishes. One gave up his legal studies to help his father, the other did likewise so as not to vie with his brother. Cultivated and sensible men they trod the path prepared for them but it is hard to resist the impression that the education they had all been given suited the sisters best, and (apart from her father) it was to them that Ludwig's sister Hermine looked back when she wrote about the family at the end of the Second World War. It was naturally part of Hermine's aim to make younger generations aware of the former distinction of the family at a time when its name had been obscured_and in some cases literally deleted from monuments_by Nazi rule, but the atmosphere and the reverence she sought to evoke was also that in which Ludwig had grown up. The brighter pages of the family history were always before his eyes and the number and variety of his relations and their various dependants and companions provided in itself a social world. What did their distinction and eminence consist in, as seen now with more dispassionate eyes and if Karl is treated as a special case? To see this it is first necessary to look at the social position of the family. Hermann Christian came to Vienna in the late 50's as one of a number of settlers from Germany proper who were to transform, perhaps too late, the Dual Monarchy. Typically he was at first an agent for the house of Esterhazy and he also managed or bought, and restored to rentability, properties with which their noble owners could do nothing. True, his wife came from an Austrian Jewish family, art- collectors, and friends of Grillparzer, but his own and his family's more notable associates in Vienna_Hebbel, Bonitz, Bru$3cke, even Brahms_ though famous names in Austrian history, also came from Germany 7.Phrases drawn from another letter of Hermann Christian's to Fanny about Joachim. 7 1Family Resemblances proper. Like many Americans living in England the Wittgensteins combined strong affection for the country with considerable impatience at its ways. They resented those ways rather as a husband is often irritated by the very qualities he married his wife for. It is entirely characteristic that admiration for Bismarck ran strong in them and no surprise that they favoured the German-speaking elements in the Monarchy and (in some cases) even union with Germany after the First War. Their Protestantism too (though in time diluted by marriage) put them into a slightly suspect class, and, more than the scholars and writers, they represented the new class of entrepreneurs, intruders on the ancient home of the Hapsburg empire. The distinction that the family claimed for itself did not reside solely in its effectivness_in its wealth, its cohesion, and its outward success_ but much more in the style of life that they combined with this_ comfort, correctness, and taste without ostentation; private and public patronage for music and hospitals and churches and research institutes. They were connected by marriage with most departments of Austrian life_a brother and a sister married into the Franz family, leaders of the Protestant community, who were later ennobled and were represented in Ludwig's day by an army officer of some distinction and by an ambassador. The Franz's were connected with the Salzers (again Protestants) two of whom were adopted, and two of whom married into the Wittgenstein family, bringing into it surgeons and civil servants. Another sister married Karl Kupelwieser, son of the painter and friend of Schubert: the connexion was to bring Karl Wittgenstein into the steel industry. There remained marriages with a professor of forestry, a high-ranking officer (though this was possible only after Hermann Christian's death), and a judge, Theodor von Bru$3cke (a son of the physiologist). Only Karl married a wife who was partly Jewish. On the whole the effect of these marriages was to produce a dynasty not of businessmen but of professional men with inherited property. It was as if they all aspired to something other than their origin and, while Karl resisted this tendency in his children, it must be taken into acount in assessing what sometimes seems to be the rise and fall of the house of Wittgenstein. The boldness and energy that characterized them during the Gru$3nderzeit did not simply, though it did in part, vanish: it had all along been accompanied by ideals which eventually forced it into other channels. From an external point of view this extended family provided for most of the contingencies of life_a cousin who could obtain a visa, an uncle who could procure an introduction to a general, a nephew who could direct a projected research institute, a brother who was competent to give advice on or actually assist with the children's education. As for the quality of the life thus led, it was partly conditioned by this very 8 Wittgenstein: A Life interdependence which led to a close involvement of the members of the family in one another's lives and only in rare cases (perhaps Ludwig and his brother were the most notable) provoked a measure of withdrawal and secrecy. It was also a life on a high cultural level. Hermann Christian who wrote out his own anthology of German poems and took his wife's cousin, the young Joachim, to be taught by Mendelssohn in Leipzig, also had his daughters taught by Clara Schumann and gave his children every opportunity to develop their musical and artistic abilities. These, though not startling, were not inconsiderable: one of the Geschwister Wittgenstein, Paul, painted portraits of the rest, another also painted, a third modelled busts, several themselves made music as well as supporting and encouraging it in their large houses and in the concert-room. They belonged to a spacious world with time as well as energy enough, and above all to a culture not yet fragmented and specialized, so that the music they made, or the pictures they painted, at home differed in degree perhaps but not in kind from the highest achievements of their age. In some ways this was a survival of older attitudes. The world of Biedermeier, of the Prince Consort, of Mendels- sohn was already past but they still retained its attitudes, its perhaps illusory sense of the unity of culture, and its equation of civilized values with those that were bu$3rgerlich. In this respect Ludwig was reflecting a family attitude, though with more self-consciousness, when he reflected that European culture had really come to an end in the 1840s. But it is not at all clear how far even he saw that the decline of this culture was connected precisely with the achievements of the Gru$3nderzeit, which he also mentioned in a special tone of voice_for the faculty of reverence was as strongly developed in him, though as selective in its objects, as in any of the Wittgensteins. "The Wittgensteins'_Die Geschwister Wittgenstein_how far were their descendants and friends right to see them as more than a large and variously successful family? Were there traits of character running through them? Were there elements in all or many of them that could truly be referred to (in a word often reverentially used) as wittgenstein- isch? The generation we are speaking of were taught under the frosty Leipzig starlight that Cassiopeia stood for "Wittgenstein': a century later, in the Cambridge water-meadows, Ludwig would not hear the sugges- tion that it stood for "Malcolm'. Perhaps the most general characteristic associated with the family was one ascribed to Hermann Christian, the determination to do a thing properly. Not the competitiveness that goes with a feeling of inferiority and is often ascribed to families of Jewish origin but a much more aristocratic attitude, a consciousness of their capacities and a strong feeling of a duty to realize them. It was not a matter of ambition: Ludwig's Uncle Louis was not of a type to vie consciously with other landowners yet he brought it about that his land 9 1Family Resemblances near Puchberg was recognizable by the excellence of its crops alone. Nor a desire for recognition: they were too sure of their worth to behave like nouveaux riches; press attacks were a matter for disdain; and when the offer of ennoblement came (as to Karl and to Bertha's husband Karl Kupelwieser) reasons were found to decline it. Another quality that was in many cases a modality both of their intelligence and of their characters generally was the quickness and the nervous energy observed principally in Fanny. Their speed of thought appeared often in speed of decision, sometimes in impatience, occasionally in too hasty a judgement that a friend or an agent was to be trusted. They had exceptional loyalty to chosen friends but also a nervousness and a degree of sensibility which interacted with this and made many of them difficult to live with save for a companion endowed with an unusual placidity of temperament. Such a one was Karl Kupelwieser who answered his wife's excited account of the alterations her brother Karl Wittgenstein had planned in their house with a calm Nix geschieht, nix geschieht, nix geschieht ("Nothing is going to be done...') on a descending note. Another was Nepomuk Oser who was content to let his new wife travel on their wedding journey in a non-smoking compartment provided he could travel in a smoking one. These robust Austrians brought a very necessary element into the family, but nephews and nieces had no such resources against an uncle like Paul who could not be reconciled to Ludwig once he had presumed to give up philosophy for architecture or to Ludwig's brother and sisters once they had accepted (or rather failed to prevent) his distribution of his inheritance. It was hard for the Geschwister Wittgenstein to keep or restore a friendship when it fell away from complete intimacy, hard to overcome the series of offences too small for comment and too large not to be felt that in time diminish most human relationships. Thus Clara had to suffer the pain of seeing close friends turn to her less demanding sister-in-law Poldy. Her nature was of a refinement to be scarred by the loss without resenting the replacement. Clara has been mentioned already as the paragon of the Geschwister Wittgenstein and one trait that ran strong in them she particularly exemplified: the need to improve and educate others. This need, with its demand for time and intimacy, partly conditioned the style of life of many of them. Companions, nieces, prote$0ge$0s, servants provided sufficient company when so much attention was given to each. The story of Clara's three successive identical lunches, the first made by the cook with the niece watching, the second by the cook with the niece helping, and the third by the niece alone can be taken as typical of the forethought involved. Most of the eleven lived to a great age. In so large a family illness and sudden death was bound to take its toll of their children and, as luck would have it, its tendency was to increase the preponderance of women. 10 Wittgenstein: A Life A darker side_then accepted largely as inexplicable_appeared in the severe nervous disorder of the youngest aunt and the suicide of one of Ludwig's male cousins and three of his brothers. In their own behaviour the aunts and uncles did all that their times required: that is to say, the aunts were beyond reproach and if one uncle lost a house at cards and another preferred to live with his sister-in-law rather than his wife, such failings were within the limits of toleration. These secure and self- sufficient figures form the background, itself remarkable enough, from which the lives of Karl and his children stand out. Karl's ability was not from the first so evident as his originality and waywardness. His were the jokes and the imitations that were most in demand and it was he that christened the meal solemnly eaten with their father das Hochamt (high mass). He remained impatient throughout life, apt to cut off a serious conversation with a joke, fond too of practical jokes, quick to detect or suspect humbug. His escapades as a child were often enterprises_the castle clock mended that then struck all night, the violin pawned to pay for experiments in glass-cutting. These and others showed ingenuity and a practical bent. A larger undertaking was his running away from school (and home) at eleven. The family had by then moved from the castle at Vo$3sendorf to Vienna and Karl got as far as Klosterneuburg where he failed to pass himself off as an orphan from Leipzig. (The children could still manage but regarded as faintly amusing the accent that had piqued Goethe.) Karl was much attached to his violin-playing but the schoolwork irked him. In a number of cases the Wittgensteins seemed to be late developers and some childish incapacities did remain with Karl for longer than usual, as for example an uncertainty of spelling and punctuation that appears also in Ludwig's letters and manuscripts. A truer account of the matter may lie in the Gru$3ndlichheit already mentioned: he needed to learn things for himself and reacted with perversity to the instruction in the Gymnasium. His elder brothers and sisters were much more content with the tutor they had at home_Herr Wessel, a learned man and a friend of the great Theodor Gomperz. Karl's dissatisfaction at school seemed to his father (about whose own formal education we know nothing) to be unwillingness to work, so that it is unlikely that he was doing particularly well even in Latin and Mathematics, the subjects he favoured for his own children. He was later much opposed to subjects such as history and geography, and here not only his impatience but his intolerance of received ideas played a role. It was an early instance of this, an essay denying the immortality of the soul, which was the proximate cause of his being given the consilium abeundi from his Gymnasium in 1864. Karl was in his last year of school at this time and his father resolved that he must continue to study privately and sit his Matura the following Easter. 'He must be brought to see that a goal can be reached only by 11 1Family Resemblances work and that it can actually be reached by that means....' But in the event Karl disappeared from the house in January 1865 and was not heard from for a good part of a year. At the end of his life Karl dictated some chastely factual autobio- graphical notes to his daughter Hermine, fuller for this period than for his business career. He left home with 200 florins of his sisters' and a violin. After two months in hiding_in the centre of Vienna_he bought the passport of a needy student and used it to reach New York, quite without money, in April. There he worked as a waiter, then as a violinist in saloons until Lincoln's assassination put a halt to public amusements. He was then a hand on a barge going to Washington, where he became a bar-tender and earned his first reasonable wages because, unlike the owner, he was able to distinguish one black face from another. In November he went back, with new clothes, to New York, sent word home for the first time, and supported himself for another year teaching the violin, the horn, mathematics, Latin, Greek, mathematical drawing, and (as he says in a letter) everything possible in various parts of New York state. He records that he returned home at the beginning of 1867 with money and new clothes but, as his sister Fine recalled it, his clothes and person alike attested to the trials he had undergone and he seemed to be in the dispirited state of one not recovered from shock. Such an adventure was bound to stamp Karl for a while as "the son who turned out badly' (der missratene Sohn) and he himself felt that he had deeply offended his parents, from whom he needed forgiveness, and his brothers and sisters, whose continued affection surprised him. These feelings probably were what kept him in America so long, for his brothers and sisters sent him money (which he did not always immediately touch) and would no doubt have helped him to return earlier. His letters show that he wanted to be sure of a reconciliation with his father: his actions that he also wanted not to return in the style of a prodigal son. There is little evidence of what was thought at the time about the causes of it all, if indeed much thought was given to them. His daughter, reflecting on it much later, thought that while it seemed as if a deep rift had appeared in a fair young life it was really a matter of a bitter but necessary phase of transition.8 A personality so out of the ordinary required, she thought, a development out of the ordinary. It was a healthy nineteenth-century instinct to see in the accidents of youth only aspects of the developing personality and those that appeared in Karl's case were indeed aspects of a strong personality. He turned his back on his family. He did not try to find the best solution or some compromise inside the framework presented for him. He broke with everything and above all he did it at one blow, without a long period of visible tension. One day he was as amusing as ever, the next he was gone. 8.Hermine Wittgenstein: Familienerinnerungen. 12 Wittgenstein: A Life It is evident that his love of the bold and unconventional set him at odds with his father's formality and there was never (certainly not after America) a warm and open relation between them as there was between Hermann Christian and his son Paul. Yet the son exhibited in America precisely those qualities that the father prized_the ability to turn his hand to things, the willingness to support privation, the determination to carry through to the end something once undertaken. The difference between them was in part one of temperament. Hermann Christian was a father ill-suited to a son more remarkable for liveliness than for duty, but the two men also shared qualities which made either end of the relationship between father and son difficult for them. Both combined sturdy independence with decided views about what was good for others. Each therefore became in a measure a self-made man and each had difficulties with at least one son. The influence of these Wanderjahre remained with Karl. He acquired confidence in his own powers. He was confirmed in the view that a variety of experience was preferable to a formal education. In America he came to know a capitalist system untrammelled by tradition. Many of the articles he wrote from 1888 on sing its praise. "It is impossible to think of an apter school for the education of a human being than that which every immigrant passes through in his first years. He is placed under a dread necessity to strain his powers to the uttermost in order simply to survive.'9 As regarded independence from his father, Karl had carried his point. His further formation was in a pattern chosen by himself. In America he had thought his father would expect him to practise estate management, like his brothers, but in fact it was his mother's suggestion of a technical education that was followed. After a brief respite on a rented estate, he studied engineering for a year at the Technical High School in Vienna, working for the State Railway in the afternoons. His further training consisted in a succession of posts as draughtsman or engineer in railways, ship-building, and the construction of turbines. Often, as in the last case, he had to deal with matters he at first knew nothing about. But everywhere, in Budapest as in Trieste, his energy and determination and adaptability made him seem anything but the son who had gone to the bad. His career proper can be seen to have begun in 1872 when he went to Ternitz in Lower Austria to work as a draughtsman under Paul Kupelwieser, the brother of his brother-in-law and a director of the Teplitz Rolling Mill, for which he was to draw plans. In the autumn of 1873 he moved to Teplitz itself in the Sudetenland as an engineer concerned with the construction of the Bessemer furnace there. At about 9.Article in the Neue Freie Presse of 15 August 1888 (reprinted in Karl Wittgenstein: Politico-Economic Writings, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1984). 13 1Family Resemblances the same time he records his engagement to Leopoldine Kalmus_the sister-in-law of an officer quartered since 1872 in the small castle at Laxenburg that was the Wittgenstein family home. Fra$3ulein Poldy was well known to his sisters Clara and Fine and to his mother and he himself had come to know her principally through making music with her. Mother and sisters had long looked forward to the match. Karl has a good heart [wrote Fanny to her newly promised daughter- in-law] and a clear head but_he left his parents' home too young. The completion of his education, regular and orderly life, and self-discipline: these are things I hope he will obtain through your loving companionship.10 It is striking that Hermann Christian had not met Poldy and Karl was in some embarrassment when he had to tell his father of his intention to marry "an angel'. "That's what they all are, until they slough off their skins' (Das sind sie alle. Aber spa$3ter ha$3uten sie sich.) was the reply. It will be seen that the mother was more right in her expectations than the father. In his autobiographical notes Karl records only his salary (1200 florins a year) at the time of the engagement. Before the first child was born he had given up his position out of a characteristically uncom- promising loyalty to Paul Kupelwieser in a boardroom dispute. In the event Kupelwieser's opponent resigned within two years and Karl became a director, working from Vienna, but he cannot have calculated on this at the time. A year later, in 1877, he succeeded Kupelwieser as managing director though he continued to live in Vienna. This was the time, fortunate for those who knew how to take advantage of it, at which the Austrian economy began to recover from the stagnation that followed the Stock Exchange crash of 1873. Wittgenstein's career was henceforth that of a manager and an industrialist and though a considerable technical knowledge was essential to his success the main reasons for it were his rapidity of decision, his daring, and his gift for the unexpected, which enabled him to think of a solution or a project which his customers or his rivals had not expected. Thus, in competition with Krupp and others, he secured a contract to supply the Russians with rails for their Turkish war of 1878 by suggesting to the minister that lighter rails would serve and by working out on the spot the saving in puds and versts. It was not even certain that the rails he promised would be released by a previous customer. Again, in 1880 he bought rights to the Bessemer process (permitting the use of the phosphoric Bohemian ore) not only for the Teplitz works but for all of Bohemia except Kladno. 10.Letter quoted in Hermine Wittgenstein: Familienerinnerungen. 14 Wittgenstein: A Life It was important to cut out the Bohemian Mining Company which owned large deposits of phosphoric ore and could thus exploit the process more effectively than himself. Their representative, Duschanek, had not supposed it possible that so small a firm as Wittgenstein's could be seriously interested. Also he felt he must wait for Prince Fu$3rstenberg's consent and turned up with it the morning after his option expired, only to find that Wittgenstein had dined with Massanetz (who held the patent) and had concluded the bargain at midnight. The natural reaction of the B.M.C., now largely under the control of Bontoux, was to attempt to take over the Teplitz Mill. Wittgenstein reacted with great daring and undertook himself to buy out the Gutmanns, who were chief shareholders in it. Friends and family money (including his wife's) assisted him but the success (as it proved) of the gamble really depended on his management of the Teplitz works in the next years and on the setting-up of the Austrian Rail Cartel and later the Tyre Cartel largely by his efforts and those of Paul Kupelwieser, now managing director of the Rothschild works at Witkowitz. The Bohemian Mining Company was in any case a defeated competitor but the failure of Bontoux's Union Ge$0ne$0rale in France in 1882 enabled the Wittgenstein Group (Karl Kupelwieser, Weinberger, Wessely, Wolfmann, and Wittgenstein himself) to take it over on favourable terms. The organization of the Bohemian iron industry was completed in 1885 when the Prague Iron Industry Co. nominally took over the group's holdings, Wittgenstein managing the whole complex and placing trustworthy men at the head of the various enterprises. At Kladno he commemorated his wife by building a new works, the Poldihu$3tte, still notorious as the Poldinka in Czech novels of social revolt. The remaining large ironworks in Bohemia was that of Witkowitz, and Wittgenstein had no difficulty in arranging with Paul Kupelwieser that they should have a joint sales office in Vienna. He also organized the Austrian Iron Cartel (now covering all products) in 1886. An industrialist must take risks [wrote Wittgenstein himself in 1898]: when the moment demands it, he must be prepared to place everything on a single card even at the danger of failing to reap the fruits that he hoped for, losing his initial stake, and having to start again from the beginning.11 The words were inspired by a tour of America, and indeed Wittgenstein himself seemed to those he supplanted, to Duschanek with his feudal loyalties for example, to be an aggressive businessman of the American style. His rise was part of another phenomenon of the time_the growth of Jewish and Protestant capital in the Monarchy. Bontoux's adventures there and in France were a forlorn attempt to counter this in the interests 11."Die Ursachen der Entwicklung der Industrie in Amerika', Politico-Economic Writings, pp. 22ff. 15 1Family Resemblances of Catholicism and the aristocracy. Prejudice and conservatism might have sufficed to create a climate of opposition in official circles to Wittgenstein and his associates but this opposition was at the same time a reflection of political realities. The tax and tariff policy of the government, the protection of the farmers, and above all the special position of Hungary were scornfully attacked by Wittgenstein in newspaper articles. He took it for granted that industrialization and the increase of productivity were the only sensible aims for a government. Failings in the national character and the stupidity of ministers had led to the Monarchy's falling behind Western countries. Many of its best workers emigrated because for decades not one of our many governments has had a single man whose capacity, experience, and influence might have entitled him to undertake the work required in the economic sphere.12 Thus Wittgenstein from his tent in the Alleegasse. But if Austria needed a Bismarck or even a Karl Wittgenstein, the Monarchy could not well support them. In some measure the struggle of its nationalities was indeed, as Wittgenstein said, a struggle for bread, but the growth of industry accentuated the contrast between the races and the more successful he was in expanding his enterprises and in employing Czechs for wages that Germans would not accept, the more he contributed (as Karl Kraus pointed out)13 to Slavicizing the industrial regions of the Czech lands and to sharpening the racial conflict. For many reasons the future of the countries of the Dual Monarchy was not to be determined by capitalists and liberals of his stamp. Wittgenstein himself gave something like this as his reason for his dramatic resignation from the boards of all steel companies at the beginning of 1898. The hostility of the government towards himself was, he announced, harming the works he directed. The Berliner Bursen-Kurier for 10 January gives as the immediate occasion of this some discussions between the Minister for Trade, Baron Di Pauli, and Wittgenstein's colleague Kestranek, in which the government put pressure on the steel cartel to reduce prices by threatening to increase taxes. This does not seem to have been the only point of difference, however. Wittgenstein was at the height of his career and might now have stepped into a really commanding position in the Austrian economy. Over thirteen years his group had purchased mines and factories in Bohemia and Styria to supply and be supplied by their steelworks. Finally, in 1897, their Prague company, having previously relied on a Prague bank, exchanged directors with the great Credit-Anstalt and transferred their business to 12."Neujahrsbetrachtungen' [1905], Politico-Economic Writings, pp. 167ff. 13.Die Fackel 31 (February 1900), p. 3. 16 Wittgenstein: A Life it. Both bank and company now purchased considerable holdings in the Alpine Steel Company which no longer drew any advantage from its supplies of non-phosphoric ore and was not well-managed. Mauthner of the Credit-Anstalt denied that they had any intention of influencing the management but this was clearly the aim of the Wittgenstein group. They put in their own man, von Hall, who introduced new systems of accounting and revived the company. A full merger with the Prague Iron Co. was prevented, however, by the tax authorities who used their discretion in a way unfavourable to the Wittgenstein group. Wittgenstein detached himself from his industrial affairs only gradually and not without controversy. Towards the end of 1898 his colleagues attempted to distribute some of the reserves of the Prague company which, in part, had been only recently accumulated. This seemed to be a transparent stock exchange manoeuvre and was severely criticized in the official newspaper. It is even said that the heir apparent, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand intervened. In the event the distribution was delayed for a year and the Credit-Anstalt directors left the Prague company's board while Wittgenstein himself left that of the Credit- Anstalt. It can hardly have been an accident that the value of the shares (which had fallen by 27 fl on the day Wittgenstein left the steel board) was driven up in this manner just when he was divesting himself of his interests: a year later Karl Kraus was able to point out14 that on the one hand the dividend had in fact fallen from 60 to 50 florins and the shares by 100 fl and on the other Wittgenstein had declared that he had nothing more to do with the company. Another consequential change was the merger of two banks to provide the Prague company with an alternative to the Credit-Anstalt. The modalities of this too were criticized but Wittgenstein was able to claim that his meetings with Feilchenfeld, Kestranek, and Weinberger were of a purely friendly character. So, at 52, Wittgenstein retired into private life. Not indeed completely: he wrote a few articles and he was in his office each morning, available, he said, if the Minister for Commerce wished to call. But he accepted no director's fees, and transferred his monies into property and foreign equities, thus securing his family's future, not out of pique or by a fortunate stroke but by the capacity_necessary for an industrialist_"to take into account not only all obvious factors but also those uncertain ones that the future holds.'15 14.Die Fackel 56 (October 1900), p. 7. 15."Die Ursachen der Entwicklung Industrie in Amerika' [1898], Politico-Economic Writings, pp. 22ff. 17 1Family Resemblances This capacity, and also the courage necessary for its exercise are not innate, like musical talent for example, but must be inculcated, must be earned by diligence and practice.16 Karl Wittgenstein was quite certain that he had deserved well of his country. He was always sure that he was right in employing all the devices of the market and while he referred to money as the by-product of sweat he clearly thought of it as the evidence of merit. He was a paternalistic capitalist who paid his workers what he and the market thought was due to them and used the profits that remained partly for the style of life that he thought due to himself and partly to assist his servants, his employees, or the community in the ways that he thought most fitting. Hence the hospitals built at his works, the specialist who had treated Bismarck brought from Berlin for an employee, the cigars handed out to railway-drivers, the double-eagles casually thrown onto the table at Monte Carlo on the way from the restaurant, the financing of the Sezession building with the extra gratification of a slight provocation to official art: all the arbitrary trappings of self-confidence and wealth. When the leading German economist Adolf Wagner defended in Vienna the thesis (which now seems, at least in theory, a modest one) that a city should take the largest part of the unearned increment in property values since this was produced by the economic activity of the whole community, Wittgenstein laughed him to scorn. Every economic activity owed its success to society as a whole. Wagner would be saying next that society should profit from all of them and give part of what it gets to its professors.17 Much of the criticism and envy that Wittgenstein incurred sprang from his doing more successfully and with more style what many others were doing. There was a touch of distinction too in the less controversial side of his life. His daughter thought he had acquired a taste for spacious surroundings from a childhood spent in the castles of rented estates but it was also a taste for the life of a grand seigneur which he shared with many a successful businessman. It was entirely characteristic of his class that he should buy a grandiose and frowning house in the Alleegasse which had been built by a Count Nako earlier in the century and should fill it with the best, though not always the lightest, of furniture and tapestry and bronzes. This became, though the family of course never called it so, the Palais Wittgenstein, the centre of their lives, with its Dienstmann sitting on his stool outside, the business-rooms on the ground floor, the card-tray where the children were careful to put the tame Princess's card on top, the imposing staircase, the large music room, and the numerous prote$0ge$0s and tutors and servants. But in it, as well as the equestrian portrait of 16.ibid. 17.Cf. Die Fackel 71 (March 1901), pp. 10ff. 18 Wittgenstein: A Life himself by Kra$3mer and later the fashionable portrait by Laszlo, which any successful businessman might have, he assembled a collection of pictures painted between 1870 and 1910 of much more modern inspiration_Segantini, Rudolf von Alt, and Klimt among them. These were set off by sculptures by Rodin and Mestrovic, and a famous one of Beethoven by Max Klinger. His eldest child and perhaps closest companion, Hermine, helped him to assemble the collection, though his taste, she said, was decisive. It was to form a unity: a Goya was rejected because it would have jarred with the others. It seemed to her that all the pictures, curiously enough, were characterized by a certain serious- ness and calm in their composition, a stressing of the verticals and horizontals that she wanted to call "ethical'. "Curiously enough'18 because, no doubt, calm was the last quality she associated with her father. Yet there was something very wittgensteinisch in the idea of an intense and even febrile nervous energy channelled and contained in an apparent spontaneity. It appears again and again in Ludwig Wittgen- stein's life and in his work, in the exhortations to his sister and his friend's daughter Mareile Ha$3nsel to draw honestly and decently, in his admiration for the sunniest and least forced works of Schubert written in the most miserable circumstances, in the obsessive rephrasing and rearrangement of his philosophical remarks in order to find the most natural and least professorial expression and sequence of thought. We find it too in the manner and subject of his sister's portrait by Klimt. Klimt had no good reputation for his attitude towards his models and there were those who smiled at Karl Wittgenstein's entrusting the young Margaret Stonborough to him. But the result justifies the father and shows all the energy and passionate intellectual intensity of the daughter somehow held in a repose emphasized by the rich but judicious ornament of the background. There is none of the brooding sexuality of many of Klimt's portraits of fashionable women. The father and the daughters at least remained untouched by this malaise at the end of the century. Karl's taste, however, was uneven. His love of the unexpected led him to some strokes of originality_as for example the rich Sezession style interior by Josef Hoffmann for his Blockhaus, not even the main house of his country retreat, an extravagantly urban setting yet intended only for his wife and himself. In this vein were his paying for Klimt's fresco of Philosophy when it and the three that were to follow were rejected by an outraged professorate at Vienna University; and also his burying a statue by the proletarian artist Kundmann in his garden at Neuwaldegg. But he could also conform to the usual tastes or tastelessness of his class, as, perhaps, in the choice of the Alleegasse house and, surely, in the building of a pompous stone mansion near the Blockhaus already mentioned, a 18.Hermine Wittgenstein: Familienerinnerungen, p. 77. 19 1Family Resemblances surprise for his wife and daughter less welcome than he expected, or than they affected, to find it. More perhaps than a house of pictures and statues, more than one of servants and wealth, the Alleegasse (as the family called it) was a house of music. F.R. Leavis remembers that Ludwig Wittgenstein told him there were seven grand pianos in his childhood home:19 the emphasis placed on this fact is interesting, though it is hard to establish that there were more than three or four, unless one counts those in Karl's other houses at Neuwaldegg or on the Hochreith. Bruno Walter saw little of Viennese society: but the Wittgensteins' real feeling for music drew him to the Alleegasse.20 Hermine Wittgenstein felt they had contact with the later classical composers, not merely with the romantics. The Joachim quartet played in the house and Joachim, who had sat under Mendels- sohn, had heard musicians who knew Beethoven. Karl's sisters as we have seen had been taught by Clara Schumann and Brahms knew the family well. The high point of the Alleegasse was perhaps the evening in 1892 when Karl Wittgenstein arranged for a private performance, which he had been told Brahms wished to hear, of the clarinet quintet, already performed but only in public. Brahms came often enough after that and Hermine and her mother visited him in his last illness. A visit from him was a scene to remember_the daughters meeting him at the door, walking hand in hand with him up the stairs, the champagne brought up when he said one of them needed to put it on her hair, the old man left to sit alone on the landing so he could hear the music in peace_Uncle Paul the painter made a drawing of him there. He fitted into the house very well. He disliked being lionized, to be sure, but he found no party spirit in the Alleegasse, where the chidren indeed learned the Meistersinger by heart, and he could not object to the Wittgensteins' faculty of reverence when it so clearly took its origin, in his case, from their deep musicality. They divided the human race into great men (Karl himself was one such in his daughters' eyes) and ordinary mortals, and they did not allow (as will be seen in other cases) for development or for contradictions in a personality. Every trait in a great man was an aspect of his greatness. Not least, perhaps, Brahms's prickliness, of which he was himself rather proud and which had much in common with Karl's dislike of humbug. "That's what the waste-paper-basket is for!' they would quote_Brahms's comment to the composer of a score submitted to him. But the greatness itself corresponded to their particular historical situation. Brahms was the last representative of the age, from Haydn on, which essentially constituted music for them. His was a structured music, not relying for its effect on orchestral colour, but accessible in chamber works and arrangements for four hands, which they could hear or play in the house. 19.In Rush Rhees (ed.): Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford, 1984), p.54. 20.Bruno Walter: Theme and Variations (London, 1967), p. 168. 20 Wittgenstein: A Life Further, as well as his sunny side_Brahms von der Sonnenseite_there was his sense of the devils that might break out: Ludwig heard it, for example, in one of his quartets and it was to Brahms's music with these two aspects that he insisted on listening during his leaves from the Front in the First World War. Brahms was, like the older Wittgensteins, a German who found in Vienna an environment that complemented the too earnest or melancholy elements in his nature. His need for this appears in his admiration for Hungarian music and the waltzes of Strauss. Above all, however, Brahms represented no rebellion against inherited forms but an attempt to work out within them, though in a down to earth manner, as Ludwig said, and certainly in one more suited to his age, the very problems that had confronted Beethoven. The Wittgensteins had an executant's sense of the significance of every passage in a musical work and Brahms is remarkable for "the appropriate- ness of each theme to the exact emotional state to be expressed'.21 The Alleegasse was a musical house. There were visits by Brahms, performances by the young Casals, by the Rose$0 quartet or by Josef Labor. There was the privileged position in the household of Brahms's favourite violinist Marie Soldat-Roeger and of the pianist Marie Baumayer (both women companions and practically prote$0ge$0es of Clare Wittgenstein). But above all the organ and grand pianos were for the family itself. Karl took his violin everywhere with him and played sonatas when on holiday with his wife and unaccompanied suites on his business trips. It was in his style to make a joke of the tears that certain passages brought to his eyes. But music was a need for him during his last illness. When he had to face a serious operation he spent the evening before it making music with his wife. For Leopoldine Wittgenstein music was perhaps the mainspring of her life. Music was her chief means of real contact with her husband and children_music and perhaps the stories that she told to children so beautifully. Slight and transparent, with hands that could scarcely span an octave, and feet that could scarcely reach the pedals, she surmounted at the piano or the organ every physical disadvantage, every failure of co-ordination that age brought with it. Intellectual limitations, too, or what seemed to be such, vanished when it came to music, so that she who, by her daughter's account, was slow to follow a complicated sentence could play from sight the most elaborate pieces of music. A pupil of Goldmark's, a fit partner in four-handed playing for Bruno Walter, able to sight-read, to transpose, or to improvise charmingly, she was yet no professional or virtuoso. She could not play from an orchestral score_her music was the house music of the nineteenth 21.Fuller Maitland in Encyclopaedia Britannica^1^1 4.390. The phrase is interesting because it corresponds closely with Paul Engelmann's account of Ludwig Wittgenstein's aesthetic ideal (Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, 1968, p.86). 21 1Family Resemblances century. All the emphasis was on the expression of the musical idea and it was this that was discussed with a minimum of technical terms and in the vocabulary of cultivated and perceptive participants in the long Alleegasse analyses that followed each Vienna Philharmonic Concert. It was at the piano that Poldy best performed her role of wife and mother, her part holding together the father and sons when they played chamber works, her accompaniment guiding a song. Few now remember her playing: those that do thought it superior to that of the son who became a concert pianist and it was said to be superior to that of the musical prodigy who was not allowed to. It was characterized above all by an avoidance of exaggeration, of any striving for effect, of any distortion of the logic of the music. In other spheres she was sure, indeed, of what she herself ought to do but perhaps too slow to detect or correct the failings of others. Here she had absolute confidence: How could she play with such a musical idiot? Did the piano have to be belaboured? The first was said to her grandson, the second (not in his hearing) of her son. Poldy and her relations figured much less than the Wittgensteins in the picture that Ludwig and his brother and sisters had of themselves and their family. Partly this was due to the patrilineal emphasis common at the time, partly the Wittgensteins expressed themselves more vividly and really were more remarkable. Thus the younger generation spoke of the Kalmuses and Stallners less even than of the Figdors, the maternal line of the preceding generation. There they had the connexion with Joachim and with the art-collector Willi Figdor not only to pride themselves on but to enjoy. These Figdors belonged to their world and, in token of it, both Willi Figdor and Uncle Paul were married to Hochstetters, and so related to the eminent Protestant geologist. The Kalmuses had lived more simply. Jakob Kalmus, who died in 1870, was the mild and uxorious husband of Marie Stallner, a pretty girl from Lichtenwald, then in Styria now in Yugoslavia, who was Ludwig Wittgenstein's only attested non-Jewish grandparent, the daughter of a provincial merchant who had become a landowner.22 A widower, he required from her little more than good manners and an elegant appearance: she was to owe her moral education to her mother-in-law. Jakob Kalmus, himself a reasonably successful merchant, had been born in Prague where Ernst Wehli, one of his maternal grandfathers, had been President of the Jewish community. But Sophie Kalmus, the daughter of this Wehli and the moral tutor of Marie, had accepted baptism late in life and was a devout Catholic. There were already converts on her husband's side for a cousin, Pater Kalmus, was well-known as a chaplain first in the army and then in a fashionable Ursuline convent, affecting, like all priests, to find the former much less trouble than the latter. It is 22.Professor F.A. von Hayek, the first to collect biographical material on Ludwig Wittgenstein, is descended from this family. 22 Wittgenstein: A Life perhaps possible that some ancestral traces remained_dim memories of the frugal dignity of the Prague ghetto: but for Poldy's children the Kalmuses represented rather what was Austrian in their background_ the slower and deeper, Catholic stream of German culture to which even Goethe looked with envy. Poldy's mother lived in long widowhood until 1911, some early difficulties with Karl forgotten, cherishing the daughter who had been devoted to her. The two elder sisters, less agreeable in character, were not redeemed in the Wittgenstein eyes by any special distinction. Elsa von Bruckner (later Elsa Stradal), the daughter of one, was always welcome for her fine voice and a more distant cousin, Dora Hauser, for her painting and her independence of spirit. She continued to live in Cilli near the Stallner home until her house was burnt down (despite her vigorous defence of it) by the partisans in the Second World War. But these closer contacts were few and despite friendly relations with other cousins_the Gra$3zers in Zurich, for example, who provided a valuable neutral postbox in the First World War_Poldy Wittgenstein's relations did not form an important part of the framework of her children's lives. She and they were absorbed into the Wittgenstein connexion. Poldy herself, however, brought two elements of extreme importance into their lives: first music_her single talent well employed_and second a moral earnestness and a selflessness which it is proper to call extreme. Her son Ludwig was later to say that for all that he had written he had left half his life_the music in it_unexpressed. As for the moral life, Poldy's mother-in-law soon saw that it was after all not best to be "an angel': "Dear Poldy, there is such a word as {"too{': it is possible to be too good, too unselfish.'23 The unselfishness which had made her the favourite daughter made her perhaps less than the perfect wife. It would have been difficult for a woman of the most decided opinions to provide a counterweight to the confidence and energy of Karl Wittgenstein. For Poldy whose main fear was to have incommoded someone else or to have failed in her duty, it was impossible: the more so as it was duty to her husband that filled her horizon. It was not only that she sacrificed herself completely to him in his last illness. Then indeed she may have been right to lie in pain rather than to disturb him, to bloody her nose rather than let him think the doctor's news had caused her tears. But by treating him so all her life she had (even his daughter thought) spoiled him and above all she had been unable to offer any rational opposition to his less well-judged plans or prejudices. In his marriage, as well as in his business enterprises, he had for better and for worse sleeping partners. Of all the children of the Geschwister Wittgenstein a special place was occupied by the Karl-Kinder: there were scientists, managers, surgeons among their cousins, who indeed, on average, achieved at least as much 23.Fanny Figdor quoted in Hermine Wittgenstein: Familienerinnerungen, p.93. 23 1Family Resemblances worldly success as they, with less of the counterpoint of tragedy. But for promise, for intensity, for distinction, for the quality, in fact, of being wittgensteinisch these children stood out. Karl, the rebel, had alone married into a family with some Jewish blood and while, from one point of view his was the marriage of understanding with feeling, of aggressive practical ability with almost marked self-distrust, from another he had by marriage not offset but reinforced tendencies present in his own heritage_the moral earnestness, the scrupulosity and melancholy of Hermann Christian and the quick nervous artistic temperament of Fanny Figdor. Rather as (so it is thought) intermarriage has tended to produce among Jews a higher incidence of scientific and musical gifts and of the manic-depressive psychosis, so in this one instance what Karl and Poldy had inherited and transmitted, genetically and by the moral atmosphere they lived in and recreated, all of this conspired to form a generation of human beings remarkable much more for the exceptional gifts distributed among it than for its capacity to achieve harmony and happiness.