the house of wittgenstein a family at war

The first time Paul Wittgenstein's friend Marga Deneke encountered him, he was wearing a 'greasy oil-stained uniform' and carrying a clarinet in a sock. The music of the Grateful Dead has a similar effect on us.Īnother thing everybody seems to agree on is that Ludwig was a strange character. His philosophy was a kind of intuitive fog that dissipated only when he himself was in the room. Even Wittgenstein himself despaired of explaining it to people, although some claimed to have understood it after hearing him talk about it, only to lose this priceless knowledge immediately upon leaving his company. We've tried to read his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but it gives us a headache. One of the more welcome pieces of information we've picked up from Waugh's book is that nobody, and we mean nobody, seems to have understood a word of what Ludwig Wittgenstein was saying. Of him Waugh writes cryptically, 'After the First World War, in which Herr Schania got his head stuck between a cannon and a rock face at the battle of Isonzo, he became a dedicated socialist and suffered severe depression.' Huh? We've spent hours trying to visualize poor Herr Schania with his head pressed between a cannon and a rock face, but to no avail. We can understand, however, how a flat head might lead to a darkening of one's worldview.

Then there was Franz Schania, the father of Paul Wittgenstein's mistress Hilde. A man who could play that with such bad feeling would murder his own mother.' There's the famed piano teacher Theodore Leschetizky, the 'octogenarian erotomaniac' whose entire response to one hopeful student, who auditioned for Leschetizky by playing a Beethoven piano sonata, was, 'Goodbye! We shall never meet again at the piano.

Sure, the Wittgenstein clan-brilliant, mad, irascible, suicidal-makes for great reading. Reminds us why we love to read biographies: for the secondary characters.

The house of wittgenstein a family at war