The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

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The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

3.58 · rating details · 120 ratings · 28 reviews

From Alexander Waugh, the author of the acclaimed memoir Fathers and Sons, comes a grand saga of a brilliant and tragic Viennese family.

The Wittgenstein family was one of the richest, most talented, and most eccentric in European history. Karl Wittgenstein, who ran away from home as a wayward and rebellious youth, returned to his native Vienna to make a fortune in the iron

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Hardcover, 320 pages

Published February 24th 2009 by Doubleday

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Jul 02, 2009

Andy rated it

· review of another edition

In this lively history of the Wittgenstein family, Alexander Waugh has captured in fine detail the extraordinary events that defined the family’s life in war-time Europe. And yet, for all of his plucky reporting and colorful anecdotes, Waugh makes little progress towards illuminating the depths of the Wittgenstein’s troubled psyche.

First, of course, there were the suicides. Before age twenty-five, two of the Wittgenstein sons were dead by suicide—most theatrically, Rudi, who finished...moreIn this lively history of the Wittgenstein family, Alexander Waugh has captured in fine detail the extraordinary events that defined the family’s life in war-time Europe. And yet, for all of his plucky reporting and colorful anecdotes, Waugh makes little progress towards illuminating the depths of the Wittgenstein’s troubled psyche.

First, of course, there were the suicides. Before age twenty-five, two of the Wittgenstein sons were dead by suicide—most theatrically, Rudi, who finished off his meal at a Berlin restaurant with a glass of cyanide-laced milk. A third son, Kurt, killed himself at fifty, and Ludwig himself often struggled with thoughts of suicide. Once a fairly tight-knit group, in adulthood, deep rifts emerged between the five surviving siblings (in order of birth: Hermine, Helene, Gretl, Paul, and Ludwig).

After Hitler’s occupation of Austria, by virtue of their distant Jewish ancestry, the Wittgensteins were declared Volljuden (full Jews). They were in the unique and humiliating position of attempting to prove that their paternal grandfather was not in fact a Jew but a bastard son of a German aristocrat. Eventually, the Wittgensteins surrendered a large portion of their fortune to the Reichsbank to purchase “half-Jewish” certification and thus a measure of safety from the Nazis. The siblings fought bitterly as the family fortune crumbled amid mounting debts.

Certainly, these were awful times for the Wittgensteins, but Waugh presents mostly the surface story, never quite uncovering (or even positing) the roots of the family’s dysfunction. And, maddeningly, the center of Waugh’s account is Paul Wittgenstein, a very reserved man who eventually fled to America, never to return again. Paul was a pianist and thus a natural choice for Waugh, who has written several books on opera and classical music. Though less a cipher than his brother Ludwig, Paul is certainly not the most dynamic subject for a biography or the best lens through which to glimpse the entire Wittgenstein clan.(less)

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Aug 18, 2009

Alan rated it

This book examines the Wittgenstein family, a fabulously rich Austrian dynasty, through three generations. The elder Wittgenstein, Karl, cornered the steel market in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the latter part of the 19th century and became one of the richest men in the world.

The family was headquartered in a lavish Vienna palace and often hosted personalities like Brahms and Mahler for musical evenings. One of the daughters, Gretl, was painted by Gustav Klimt. They were scions o...moreThis book examines the Wittgenstein family, a fabulously rich Austrian dynasty, through three generations. The elder Wittgenstein, Karl, cornered the steel market in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the latter part of the 19th century and became one of the richest men in the world.

The family was headquartered in a lavish Vienna palace and often hosted personalities like Brahms and Mahler for musical evenings. One of the daughters, Gretl, was painted by Gustav Klimt. They were scions of artistic life in the Austrian capital even though three of the four grandparents were Jews who converted to Christianity. Later, this was to be the cause of great trouble when the occupying Nazis classified them as Jews.

Of Karl's eight children, three committed suicide and two achieved fame: Ludwig has been hailed as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century while Paul, who lost an arm fighting in World War I, became a well-known left-handed virtuoso who commissioned works from Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, Hindemith and most notably the great left-handed concerto of Maurice Ravel.

This breezily-written book goes into great detail about the strained relations between various family members but is overbalanced in favor of Paul, who emerges clearly as the book's hero.

Paul behaved with great courage when captured by the Russians in World War I. He underwent awful suffering in squalid prison camps. The cruelty with which the Russians treated their prisoners of war should not I suppose have come as any surprise, but I was not previously aware of it.

The main shortcoming of the book is the relatively cursory treatment it affords to Ludwig, who was certainly the family member with the best lasting claim to fame. I think I learned more from the Wikipedia pages on Ludwig (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstei...) than from this book. The author makes little attempt to grapple with the meaning of his philosophy or analyze his lasting influence. He basically suggests that Wittgenstein was hailed as a genuis because his work was so incomprehensible. I had the impression that for this author, the emperor had no clothes. But there must have been more to it than that.

Instead, we get pages and pages about Paul, whose limited historical importance today rests on the piano music he commissioned. Paul quarreled with most of the composers he patronized, always insisting on a more prominent piano part and less orchestra. He never played the Prokofiev concerto and drove Ravel crazy by insisting on changes.

The vast Wittgenstein fortune was lost through a combination of poor investments, the stock market crash of 1929 and the Nazis who fought tooth and nail to get their hands on what was left. The chapter on the Wittgensteins' frantic efforts to have themselves declassified as Jews or escape from Austria makes harrowing reading. With all their money and influence, they succeeded. Others were not so fortunate.

In the end, I wondered what this book added up to. It was interesting but most of the characters were so mediocre, petty and pathetic that I eventually tired of them. (less)

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Oct 18, 2009

Lauren Albert rated it

Shelves: biography-autobiography

I've said before that group biographies are difficult to do well. In this biography of the Wittgenstein family, Waugh really isn't doing a group biography, in my opinion. His focus is clearly on the two most famous Wittgensteins--Paul, the musician and Ludwig, the philosopher. He certainly includes the rest of the family--parents and children--as much as any individual's biography rightfully includes family background--but they are not his focus. This is not a criticism. The book is very read...more

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Mar 17, 2011

Joseph Rice rated it

Shelves: history

still reading this book. the author has a unique way of jumping from one family member to another, and this can be a bit frustrating if you're inclined to follow a more traditional linear narrative. this family, however, has a lot of interesting personalities that the author has no problem sorting through, although a scorecard would be nice at times.

UPDATE: the book has picked up quite a bit as the author moves the House of Wittgenstein into WW2. the family's dealings with the Naz...more

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Apr 08, 2009

Anna rated it

Shelves: reviewed-for-watermark

My recent doxographical inamorata The Book of Dead Philosophers relates this anecdote about Ludwig Wittgenstein: “After he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer . . . [a friend:] presented him with an electric blanket on his birthday and said, ‘Many happy returns.’ Wittgenstein replied, staring back at her, “There will be no returns.’” Not a cheery man, was Ludwig (though perhaps vindicated by his death three days later).
But he came by it honest, as I learned reading this well-researched...moreMy recent doxographical inamorata The Book of Dead Philosophers relates this anecdote about Ludwig Wittgenstein: “After he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer . . . [a friend:] presented him with an electric blanket on his birthday and said, ‘Many happy returns.’ Wittgenstein replied, staring back at her, “There will be no returns.’” Not a cheery man, was Ludwig (though perhaps vindicated by his death three days later).
But he came by it honest, as I learned reading this well-researched and diverting biography of his family, written by Evelyn Waugh’s grandson Alexander. Depression certainly was a hereditary curse: three of the five sons of Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein committed suicide—Hans simply disappeared; Kurt, an officer in the Austrian army, shot himself at the end of the Great War; Rudi theatrically drank potassium cyanide at a cafe, after requesting his favorite song. But the Wittgensteins were also brilliant, musical, and driven. The other surviving brother, Paul, made his debut as a concert pianist in December 1913, an inauspicious time for any young European man to start a career; less than a month after war was declared, he’d lost his right arm and been captured by the Russians. He spent months being shuffled amongst Siberian prison camps, rewriting concertos—from memory—for just the left hand, tapping out the arpeggios on tables and packing crates. Astonishingly, he spent the rest of his life playing piano professionally, commissioning works for the left hand from Strauss, Prokofiev, Ravel, and Britten, among others.
The story of this idiosyncratic and unhappy clan serves as a microcosm of larger experiences. During the late 1930s, for instance, when Austria joined with Nazi Germany in Anschluss, the siblings found themselves suddenly Jewish: three sets of grandparents were born in that faith, and their later conversions meant nothing to the Reich. Ludwig was in Cambridge, and safe; sister Gretl was married to an American, thus untouchable; but Paul had had two children with an irreproachably Aryan mistress, making him guilty of “race pollution.” He fled to Switzerland and eventually Cuba, and managed to smuggle out his mistress and daughters too. Hitler’s genocidal ideology, however, was not immune to corruption, and the Wittgensteins were rich. Very rich, even after losing a great deal to runaway inflation in the decades between the wars, when consumer prices in Austria rose 14,000-fold. (Gretl’s American investments took a hit in 1929, of course, but she was still left with an income of $30,000 a year.) The Reichsbank essentially held the two sisters remaining in Vienna hostage until the others relinquished a great deal of their fortune, whereupon one of their grandfathers became the illegitimate son of German nobility, and presto! they were Mischling (half-breed), a far more advantageous social and legal status.
Ludwig famously ended his most significant work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with the engimatic proposition “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” and I’m afraid I must echo him here: I can’t possibly tell all the stories I found in this lively history, so I’ll just end the attempt.(less)

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Sep 19, 2009

Arwen Downs rated it

To further immerse myself in early twentieth century Viennese culture, I checked this out from the library last week. . . and I am so glad I did. The Wittgensteins were a wealthy, opinionated, influential, and (possibly as a result) very strange family whose notable and peculiar experiences during the generation this book largely concerns itself with make for captivating reading!

The juxtaposition of political and moral sentiments and actions within the family creates an interesting ...more

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May 05, 2009

Harold rated it

Ludwig Wittgenstein is often credited with collapsing 2000 years or so of Western philosophy into a linguistic conundrum, and reducing its grand endeavors to little more than a system of tautologies and definitions. This book puts him into context with several generations of his truly remarkable family, within which the reader begins to see how he could seem to be among the lesser-distinguished members. Written by a Waugh (not sure how traces back to Evelyn), it's got a very upper-Euro-crust t...more

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Sep 09, 2011

Susan rated it

· review of another edition

Ludwig is a well-known philosopher of the twentieth century. But who knew that he was actually the least interesting of this strange, talented, and extremely rich Austrian family. The central figure of this non-fiction account is Paul, who lost an arm in WWI and yet stubbornly pursued a career as a pianist. Although every one of them was musically talented and at least slightly mad, the family managed to stick held together until they were identified as Jews by the Nazis, even though they had...more

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Mar 05, 2011

Willem van der Scheun rated it

· review of another edition

A recent visit to Vienna was a good reason to read this book about the Wittgenstein family. Actually it is mostly a portrait of Paul Wittgenstein, the one-armed pianist, as he gets most of the author's attention. The whole family, all eight brothers and sisters come out of this book almost as complete lunatics, which seems to be a bit overdone. Extremely rich, pushed to extremes by their father resulting in three suicides and lifelong fights, this was not a happy family. Nevertheless it has not ...more

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Mar 18, 2011

Elizabeth rated it

This is a nicely written biography and it is quite entertaining to read. Waugh is attentive to the complexity of the Wittgenstein family and also to their larger cultural influence, but he often writes in a very astringent manner about his subjects. About the profound suffering Paul and Ludwig underwent during the first World War, Waugh appears largely unsympathetic, and yet he can still detail how this experience impacted them. At times the dispassion seemed a little too much for me, but Wau...more

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Feb 09, 2010

Madeline rated it

Shelves: 2010, non-fiction, library-books, history, biography, wwi, wwii, family, music, marriage-lets-you-down

The House of Wittgenstein is an interesting, but rather bitchy book. I got the impression that Waugh sometimes couldn't help himself, and while (to his credit) he uses biography-bitchy, which is fairly subtle as bitchy goes, it does kind of detract from the book. Maybe if he seemed to have more of a sense of humor it would be different . . . but maybe not.

Still - it's a neat group biography, with an idiosyncratic structure. Waugh focuses mostly on Paul Wittgenstein, who certainly see...more

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May 01, 2009

Bob rated it

This Waigh can write (he's inherited the gene), and there is much that is fascinating in this story of the wealthy but unhealthy Wittgenstein bunch. However, the book is fatally flawed by the author's classic British philistinism regarding continental philosophy - he demonstrates zero comprehension of Ludwig Witttgenstein's work, and worse, an ignorant contempt for and bewilderment at its lofty reputation (which, frankly, is the main thing that would entice most people into reading this family h...more

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Aug 20, 2009

Mary Paynter rated it

This is a fascinating story of a family that included the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the pianist Paul Wittgenstein-- as well as a host of other characters. If it were a novel, it might be considered too exaggerated in its depiction of the family, but here they are!

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Jul 28, 2010

Gordon rated it

Another of the books I've read that spans the period of 1890 through 1950. Obviously, the central figure to us is Ludwig, the mysteriously brilliant philosopher, but his one-armed brother Paul emerges as the hero of this dysfunctional family.

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Oct 05, 2009

Anne Van rated it

Just starting this book. I liked Alexander Waugh's "Fathers and Sons", so I'm anticipating a well told story of family, class, and society that is unfamiliar to my world.

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Apr 04, 2010

Deborah rated it

· review of another edition

This book started out well, although I am not a fan of the bitty chapter approach. However, halfway through the whole story became too convoluted and complicated, bogged down with too much detail - it needed a broader sweep.

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Dec 29, 2011

Michelle rated it

Not a pretty picture of a very important Jewish Family. Very informative

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Jan 16, 2012

Adrienne rated it

Shelves: family-history

Whew, quiet a family. music and angst and war.

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Oct 25, 2009

Wgscherban rated it

slow

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May 08, 2009

Rock rated it

· review of another edition

When I finish books quickly I have to wonder whether it's me or the book that made it go so fast. Sure, I finished reading Wittgenstein on a cross-country train ride. I had nothing to do but read for forty hours. But I started the book before I got on the train, and I don't think it went any faster on the rails.

So is it the writing? The author's tone is gossipy throughout, and the narrative is broken up into innumerable short little stories

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Jul 24, 2009

Ruth rated it

What a fascinating (both dysfunctional & talented) family!

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Apr 03, 2009

Walter rated it

Great book review of the book:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov...

A spiritual outlaw. I like that.

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Mar 21, 2009

Vicki rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

This book showed me that my family is very normal... Actually, any family would probably look good next to this bunch of nuts! Very entertaining book! The most interesting thing about it is that it is about real people. You couldn't make this stuff up!

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Nov 11, 2009

Dan Pierce rated it

· review of another edition

Fascinating account of a rich and f***ed up family. A lot of war detail which gets a bit tedious if you're not into that sort of thing. But, an amazing insight into the disintegration of a great European family in the 20th century.

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Jun 23, 2009

Adam rated it

· review of another edition

I would have liked a bit more focus on Ludwig rather than Paul, but I guess Ludwig has a few bios already. Really, really amazing family.

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Jun 05, 2009

Lloyd rated it

Not quite as wonderful as his "Fathers and Sons" but proves that even the most dysfunctional of families can fascinate the reader

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Apr 20, 2010

Joe rated it

· review of another edition

Amazing history. A family of lunatics try to survive two world wars, cold-hearted relatives, and general bitchiness.

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Aug 07, 2008

Lisa rated it

Enjoyably written history/biography with sweeping subject matter.

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Feb 08, 2012

Abby marked it as to-read

Feb 06, 2012

Cezar Popescu added it

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