The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh

Waugh tells it, Karl Wittgenstein, who made a fortune as an industrialist, was “able to appreciate his sons only by measuring their achievements against his own.” He was dismissive of their musical and artistic gifts, and the pressure on the brothers Hans, Kurt, Rudolf, Paul and Ludwig to “make their own mark in the great iron, steel, arms and banking business that he had founded contributed to a nervous and self-destructive strain in all five of them.” These include the suicide of Rudolf Ludwig and Paul’s 22-year-old brother in a Berlin restaurant in 1904 the declaration of their father, Karl, that any mention of Rudolf was henceforth forbidden (which “created an atmosphere of unbearable tension in the home, causing a split between the Wittgenstein children and their parents that time would never heal”) and the disappearance (and likely suicide) of another brother, Hans, who seems to have fled his authoritarian father by leaving the country in 1901 some say to America never to return.Īs Mr. Waugh deftly conjures the ambience of pre-World War I Vienna and recounts the early tragedies that would forever scar the House of Wittgenstein. Although the book bogs down in the middle, its opening chapters are gripping, as Mr. Waugh’s narrative gifts and the melodramatics of the Wittgensteins’ story, this volume is never less than interesting.

Waugh tackles another well-known and notoriously eccentric family: the Wittgensteins of Vienna, a family that included Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the 20th century’s foremost philosophers, and his brother Paul, an accomplished musician who after losing an arm in World War I went on to gain considerable international fame as a one-handed concert pianist. In his uneven new book, “The House of Wittgenstein,” Mr. Alexander Waugh wrote about his famous progenitors with a mixture of bemusement and sangfroid, regaling the reader with one outrageous anecdote after another, even as he showed how the bonds of affection and resentment bound one generation of fathers and sons to another, and how that theme of filial love and dread animated much of the Waugh family’s voluminous canon of novels, memoirs, diaries and letters. In his 2007 book, “Fathers and Sons,” Alexander Waugh son of the satirist Auberon Waugh and grandson of the novelist Evelyn Waugh created a spirited, Dickensian portrait of his extended family: a highly eccentric, often outlandish clan, endowed with extraordinary literary gifts and, in many cases, a shocking absence of parental skills.

The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh