The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh

Paul, a classmate of Adolf Hitler, became an outstanding concert pianist. The philosopher Ludwig claims to have begun thinking about suicide when he was 10 or 11. Kurt seems to have shot himself 'without visible reason' while serving as a soldier in the first world war. He was a shy, ungainly, possibly autistic child with a prodigious gift for maths and music, whose first spoken word was 'Oedipus'. Two years earlier, Hans Karl had disappeared without trace and is thought to have killed himself at sea. Handsome, intelligent, homosexual Rudolf strolled into a Berlin bar, dissolved potassium cyanide into his glass of milk and died in agony on the spot. The sons of the household had a distressing habit of doing away with them selves. They combined the aristocrat's cavalier disdain for convention with the underdog's suspicion of authority. Despite being one of the premier families of the Austro-Hungarian empire, most of the Wittgensteins were spiritual outlaws and adventurers. Before making his pile in Vienna he was a restaurant violinist, a night watchman, a steersman on a canal boat, and taught the tenor horn in an orphanage. He ran away from home at 17, boarded a ship bound for New York and joined a minstrel band. Almost all the males of the family were seized from time to time by bouts of uncontrollable fury that bordered on insanity.īehind Karl the prosperous bourgeois lay a madder, more reckless man. Helene was plagued by stomach cramps Gretl was beset by heart palpitations and sought advice from Sigmund Freud about her sexual frigidity Hermine and Jerome both had dodgy fingers Paul suffered from bouts of madness and little Ludwig was scarcely the most well balanced of souls. Leopoldine was afflicted by terrible leg pains and eventually went blind. The family was a seething cauldron of psychosomatic disorders.

She was an emotionally frigid mother and a neurotically dutiful wife, from whom all traces of individual personality had been violently erased. She once lay awake all night, agonised by an ugly wound in her foot but terrified of moving an inch in case she disturbed her irascible husband. A fabulously wealthy steel magnate, Karl rigged prices, bleeding his workers dry and doing much the same to his timorous wife Leopoldine. He was an engineer by vocation, and his son Ludwig would later do some original work in aeronautics at Manchester University. The father, Karl, was a brutal autocrat as well as a high-class crook.

T he Wittgensteins, ensconced in their grand Winter Palace in fin-de-siècle Vienna, were hardly a model family.

The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh