The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh

We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Their opulent world, recaptured by Waugh in digestible, appealing biographical segments, was gone for good.Īn immensely readable literary account of eccentric, memorable characters. Raised as Catholics and vaguely anti-Semitic, the now-middle-aged siblings were horrified to learn that three grandparents who had converted to Christianity cut no ice with the Nazis, who classified them all as “full Jews.” Led by well-connected Gretl, they collectively had to sign away much of their fortune in order to stay out of prison. In direct, thematic chapters, the author leads readers through family tragedies and crumbling of the old order, culminating in the Anschluss of 1938.

Helene married a pillar of the Austrian Protestant establishment and had many children. Gretl married a rich American who succumbed to syphilitic psychosis and lost much of his fortune in the 1929 stock-market crash. Sister Hermine, the eldest, remained unmarried and tended the flame at the Wittgensteins’ Vienna homestead, writing a sanitized family memoir in her old age. Three of Paul’s older brothers-Hans, Rudolf and Kurt-committed suicide, possibly as a result of their “sulphurous” relationship with their father, while youngest son Ludwig became a philosopher of cult status.

All the siblings were marvelously musical, perhaps, Waugh speculates, as a means of communicating with their diffident mother. Waugh begins and ends with his evident favorite among the siblings: Paul, the artistic middle child, who lost an arm in World War I and nonetheless went on to become a famous pianist. He focuses on the nine children of maverick entrepreneur Karl Wittgenstein, who in defiance of a difficult father forged a career as a wildly successful steel magnate. The author is quite taken with the messy, convoluted genealogy of Vienna’s Wittgenstein family, enormously wealthy industrialists, philanthropists and artists. Having dealt with four generations of his famous family in Fathers and Sons (2007, etc.), Waugh delves into another quirky, brilliant, ill-starred clan.

The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh