S*n
2 楼
我对维特根斯坦一直不太感冒。不过昨天看了个8g，太特么神／牛了。。。看完很虚幻。
书作者，就像这里被评价的有点夸张。
不过一战、二战之间的奥匈帝国／奥地利確是很有趣。
顺便再隆重推荐一下，我成年以后唯一记得有印象的长篇小说，奥地利作者robert
musil 的《the man without quantities》（中译：没有个性的人）。
ps，维特根斯坦弟弟paul wittengenstein的故事里，我偶像Prokofiev还友情出演了。
。。
为什么没有我偶像maurice ravel呢？呃，以前就听说paul介个左手刚擎家，当时还想
ludwig witetngenstein他弟很牛阿，看prokofiev的评价，凡事都抗不住有钱。。。
有点点长。。。的文:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_01/3520
Sniveling Rivalry
On April 27, 1951, a few days before he died of cancer, Ludwig Wittgenstein
completed one of his most important books, On Certainty. The previous day
had been his sixty-second birthday. As Ray Monk tells it in his definitive
biography,
he knew it would be his last. When Mrs. Bevan [the wife of the
doctor with whom Wittgenstein was staying] presented him with an electric
blanket, saying as she gave it to him: “Many happy returns,” he stared
hard at her and replied “There will be no returns.” . . . When told by Dr.
Bevan that he would live only a few more days, he exclaimed “Good!” Mrs.
Bevan stayed with him the night of the 28th, and told him that his close
friends in England would be coming the next day. Before losing consciousness
he said to her: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”
I relay this little story because it so tellingly controverts the rather
cartoonish image of the “neurotic” Ludwig that emerges from Alexander
Waugh’s absorbing, highly readable, but reductive portrait of the
Wittgenstein family—A Family at War, as Waugh, himself a member of a famous
and controversial literary family, calls it. In his account, each member of
the Viennese-Jewish (though converted to Christianity by the mid-nineteenth
century) Wittgenstein family was neurotic in his or her own way, beginning
with the father, Karl, a seventeen-year-old runaway to the United States,
who had become, by the time he was thirty-five, one of Austria’s great
tycoons, a steel magnate of seemingly unlimited wealth and the owner of an
elegant palais on the Alleegasse, where concerts were attended by Brahms,
Mahler, and Richard Strauss.
Karl was a tyrannical and bullying father. His wife, Leopoldine (“Poldy”),
a passionate musician like her husband, is described by Waugh as too
withdrawn and cold to be a good mother: “She was a small woman of long nose
and round face—an intensely introverted and nervous character, detached
and dutiful. In adult life she suffered regular attacks of migraine and
phlebitis, a complication of the arteries, nerves and veins of her legs.”
After nine children (Dora, the second, died in her first month) in fifteen
years, Poldy’s condition is quite understandable, but Waugh presents it as
somehow a personal failing. The couple’s eldest child, Hermine, who never
married, was “a repressed person . . . whose manner . . . appeared to be
arrogant or aloof. In fact she suffered from low self-esteem.” The youngest
daughter, Margherita (“Gretl”), who married American fortune hunter
Jerome Stonborough (born Steinberger), is best known for the portrait Gustav
Klimt painted of her. Of this famous artwork, Waugh writes, “She stands
self-conscious and discomfited, in a flamboyant, ill-fitting, shoulderless
white silk dress . . . her hands clasped in a neurotic twist of fingers at
her stomach.” Gretl, Waugh explains later, was frigid and once sought help
from Freud. As for Helene, the middle daughter, the most “normal” of the
clan, she, too, “suffered from tensions of a pathological and neurotic kind
. She was terrified of thunderstorms and was also anemic.”
But the Wittgenstein daughters were models of stability compared with the
five sons. The eldest, Hans, a musical and mathematical prodigy but
extremely shy and withdrawn, was on a “study trip” to America when he
disappeared, ostensibly on a canoe outing, never to return. He may well have
been a suicide, as were two of his brothers. Rudolf poisoned himself in a
Berlin bar when he was twenty-two, evidently because he could not face the
impending revelation of his homosexuality. Waugh sensationalizes this story
(“As the music wafted across the room, Rudolf took from his pocket a sachet
of clear crystal compound”), as he also does that of Kurt, who was forty
when, fearing court-martial or, worse, imprisonment by the Italians, he shot
himself in the last days of World War I.
The two remaining brothers, Paul and Ludwig, who did become prisoners of war
, were the survivors, saved, perhaps, because each had a real vocation. The
Ludwig sections of Waugh’s narrative—his life at the front, the reception
of the Tractatus (1921), the teaching experiment, the Cambridge years, the
designing of the Kundmanngasse house, the trip to the Soviet Union—are
little more than recyclings of familiar lore. Indeed, The House of
Wittgenstein intentionally downplays the importance of Ludwig so as to
foreground its real subject, Paul. Waugh had the good fortune of gaining
access to a cache of unpublished papers from the pianist’s daughter, Joan
Ripley. From these letters, journals, and documents, he has stitched
together an absorbing narrative, beginning with the loss of Paul’s right
arm in the first year of the war and the gulag conditions in the Russian
prisons where Paul spent long months in 1914 and 1915. Back home in Vienna,
he was, not surprisingly, moody and irascible but also determined, more than
ever, to be a great pianist. In the ’20s, he began to commission left-hand
concertos from such well-known composers as Paul Hindemith and Franz
Schmidt, paying princely sums for their execution. Richard Strauss was paid
an advance of twenty-five thousand dollars for Parergon zur Sinfonia
Domestica, a piece Paul then insisted on reworking, much to Strauss’s
annoyance. Another commission, this time for Sergei Prokofiev, whom Paul had
met in Paris in 1930, was never performed, Paul claiming not to “
understand a single note.” Distrust was mutual: “I don’t see any special
talent in his left hand,” Prokofiev told a friend. “It may be that his
misfortune has turned out to be a stroke of good luck, for with only his
left hand he is unique but maybe with both hands he would not have stood out
from a crowd of mediocre pianists.”
Cruel as this remark is, there seems to be a grain of truth in it. The
twenty-six-year-old Paul’s concert debut in prewar Vienna had, in fact,
received rather mixed reviews. Then, too, his career suffered repeatedly
from personal setbacks. After various sexual misadventures, he formed a
liaison with a near-blind piano student named Hilde Schania, a brewer’s
daughter less than half his age, whom he impregnated, set up in an apartment
, and finally married after his emigration to America but never quite lived
with, though she bore him three children. Meanwhile, there were Paul’s
incessant quarrels with his sisters over investments and later over their
maneuvers to remain in Vienna as Mischlinge (only half rather than three-
quarters Jewish, as was actually the case) and make over a sizable amount of
the family fortune to the Nazi regime.
After 1938, Paul understood he could not stay in Vienna. A staunch defender
of the Hapsburg monarchy, he knew his relationship with the Christian Hilde
would open him up to persecution for Rassenschande (racial defilement); he
needed, moreover, to protect his foreign investments from Hitler. Paul’s
flight, first to Zurich, then to America, leaving his sisters more or less
in the lurch, led to a final break with Ludwig, soon to be a British citizen
, from whom he had long been estranged. After 1938, the two brothers never
spoke or corresponded.
In Waugh’s telling, no one comes off well: The sisters emerge as
materialistic, self-centered, and neurotic; Gretl finally divorces
Stonborough, whom Waugh labels “psychotic”; and the next generation is as
weak and fatuous as Grandfather Karl was strong and oppressive. Why, then,
so detailed an account of the family’s endless trials and tribulations?
Waugh evidently regards the troubles of “the house of Wittgenstein” as
representative of the larger collapse of Hapsburg Vienna, with its ominous
blend of imperial splendor and grinding poverty, high culture and provincial
politics. The difficulty is that Waugh’s book gives no evidence of any
real grounding in the history and culture of fin de siècle, much less
postwar, Vienna. The information—facts, dates, the furnishings of the
various Wittgenstein properties, specific Nazi edicts—is all there, but the
richness and complexity of this culture, the texture so brilliantly
chronicled by Karl Kraus or, more recently, by Brigitte Hamann in Hitler’s
Vienna, is missing. The Vienna Circle of philosophers, the architectural
interventions of Ludwig’s close friend Paul Engelmann, the hopeless
economic struggles and class warfare of the now-small republic—all this is
absent.
Waugh clearly believes that what justifies The House of Wittgenstein is the
artistic importance—and relative neglect—of Paul. “In adult life,” the
biographer posits, “Paul Wittgenstein was far more famous than his younger
brother,” although he immediately qualifies this assertion, admitting that
“nowadays it is the other way around.” Exactly! Would any reader of the
twenty-first century care about the house of Wittgenstein were it not that
this was the family of one of the great philosophers of our time, a
philosopher whose life has been made more than familiar by such excellent
biographers as Monk and Brian McGuinness, not to mention the many novelists,
poets, dramatists, and even filmmakers like Derek Jarman who have made
Ludwig, as Waugh himself notes, an iconic figure?
Indeed, The House of Wittgenstein might have been a much more interesting
book had it focused on the differences, rather than the similarities,
between Ludwig and the other Wittgensteins. How was it, after all, that out
of eight siblings—siblings brought up so similarly in such particular
circumstances— a single one emerged as so unlike the rest? Ludwig did share
his family’s anti-Semitism—the self-hatred endemic to the bourgeois and
upper-class Jews of Vienna, trying to free themselves from their past—but
he also recognized himself as irrevocably Jewish and possessed a spiritual
dimension lacking in the others: Witness the many searching reflections on
God, Christianity, and the human condition collected in Culture and Value
and elsewhere. Again, he shared his siblings’ passion for music and their
snobbery about the “right” composers, but he understood that musical taste
is largely culturally determined. And the materialism of the others is
countered by his austerity: He gave all his money away early in the game.
Most important, he could take the ordinary statements made by those around
him and discover, quite unlike the others, that there are no answers, only
questions, and that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. He
would have shuddered, for example, at Waugh’s pat characterization of
Hermine as “suffer[ing] from low self-esteem.” What Freudian nonsense,
Ludwig would have said.
“The world of the happy is a happy world,” Ludwig wrote famously while he
was serving on the eastern front in 1916. When the dying man so surprisingly
told Mrs. Bevan that he had had a wonderful life, I think he meant it. He
was “happy,” not in his personal life, but in that he had thought through
some of the great philosophical problems as strenuously as he possibly could
and had tried to judge himself as severely as he had judged others. Compare
what Monk calls “the duty of genius” of this uniquely complex and
conflicted but brilliant figure with his family’s overall failure (Paul is
something of an exception) to turn its staggering wealth into any lasting
form of accomplishment, and the house of Wittgenstein emerges as little more
than a house of cards.
Marjorie Perloff is a scholar-in-residence at the University of Southern
California and the author of the memoir The Vienna Paradox (New Directions,
2004).
书作者，就像这里被评价的有点夸张。
不过一战、二战之间的奥匈帝国／奥地利確是很有趣。
顺便再隆重推荐一下，我成年以后唯一记得有印象的长篇小说，奥地利作者robert
musil 的《the man without quantities》（中译：没有个性的人）。
ps，维特根斯坦弟弟paul wittengenstein的故事里，我偶像Prokofiev还友情出演了。
。。
为什么没有我偶像maurice ravel呢？呃，以前就听说paul介个左手刚擎家，当时还想
ludwig witetngenstein他弟很牛阿，看prokofiev的评价，凡事都抗不住有钱。。。
有点点长。。。的文:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_01/3520
Sniveling Rivalry
On April 27, 1951, a few days before he died of cancer, Ludwig Wittgenstein
completed one of his most important books, On Certainty. The previous day
had been his sixty-second birthday. As Ray Monk tells it in his definitive
biography,
he knew it would be his last. When Mrs. Bevan [the wife of the
doctor with whom Wittgenstein was staying] presented him with an electric
blanket, saying as she gave it to him: “Many happy returns,” he stared
hard at her and replied “There will be no returns.” . . . When told by Dr.
Bevan that he would live only a few more days, he exclaimed “Good!” Mrs.
Bevan stayed with him the night of the 28th, and told him that his close
friends in England would be coming the next day. Before losing consciousness
he said to her: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”
I relay this little story because it so tellingly controverts the rather
cartoonish image of the “neurotic” Ludwig that emerges from Alexander
Waugh’s absorbing, highly readable, but reductive portrait of the
Wittgenstein family—A Family at War, as Waugh, himself a member of a famous
and controversial literary family, calls it. In his account, each member of
the Viennese-Jewish (though converted to Christianity by the mid-nineteenth
century) Wittgenstein family was neurotic in his or her own way, beginning
with the father, Karl, a seventeen-year-old runaway to the United States,
who had become, by the time he was thirty-five, one of Austria’s great
tycoons, a steel magnate of seemingly unlimited wealth and the owner of an
elegant palais on the Alleegasse, where concerts were attended by Brahms,
Mahler, and Richard Strauss.
Karl was a tyrannical and bullying father. His wife, Leopoldine (“Poldy”),
a passionate musician like her husband, is described by Waugh as too
withdrawn and cold to be a good mother: “She was a small woman of long nose
and round face—an intensely introverted and nervous character, detached
and dutiful. In adult life she suffered regular attacks of migraine and
phlebitis, a complication of the arteries, nerves and veins of her legs.”
After nine children (Dora, the second, died in her first month) in fifteen
years, Poldy’s condition is quite understandable, but Waugh presents it as
somehow a personal failing. The couple’s eldest child, Hermine, who never
married, was “a repressed person . . . whose manner . . . appeared to be
arrogant or aloof. In fact she suffered from low self-esteem.” The youngest
daughter, Margherita (“Gretl”), who married American fortune hunter
Jerome Stonborough (born Steinberger), is best known for the portrait Gustav
Klimt painted of her. Of this famous artwork, Waugh writes, “She stands
self-conscious and discomfited, in a flamboyant, ill-fitting, shoulderless
white silk dress . . . her hands clasped in a neurotic twist of fingers at
her stomach.” Gretl, Waugh explains later, was frigid and once sought help
from Freud. As for Helene, the middle daughter, the most “normal” of the
clan, she, too, “suffered from tensions of a pathological and neurotic kind
. She was terrified of thunderstorms and was also anemic.”
But the Wittgenstein daughters were models of stability compared with the
five sons. The eldest, Hans, a musical and mathematical prodigy but
extremely shy and withdrawn, was on a “study trip” to America when he
disappeared, ostensibly on a canoe outing, never to return. He may well have
been a suicide, as were two of his brothers. Rudolf poisoned himself in a
Berlin bar when he was twenty-two, evidently because he could not face the
impending revelation of his homosexuality. Waugh sensationalizes this story
(“As the music wafted across the room, Rudolf took from his pocket a sachet
of clear crystal compound”), as he also does that of Kurt, who was forty
when, fearing court-martial or, worse, imprisonment by the Italians, he shot
himself in the last days of World War I.
The two remaining brothers, Paul and Ludwig, who did become prisoners of war
, were the survivors, saved, perhaps, because each had a real vocation. The
Ludwig sections of Waugh’s narrative—his life at the front, the reception
of the Tractatus (1921), the teaching experiment, the Cambridge years, the
designing of the Kundmanngasse house, the trip to the Soviet Union—are
little more than recyclings of familiar lore. Indeed, The House of
Wittgenstein intentionally downplays the importance of Ludwig so as to
foreground its real subject, Paul. Waugh had the good fortune of gaining
access to a cache of unpublished papers from the pianist’s daughter, Joan
Ripley. From these letters, journals, and documents, he has stitched
together an absorbing narrative, beginning with the loss of Paul’s right
arm in the first year of the war and the gulag conditions in the Russian
prisons where Paul spent long months in 1914 and 1915. Back home in Vienna,
he was, not surprisingly, moody and irascible but also determined, more than
ever, to be a great pianist. In the ’20s, he began to commission left-hand
concertos from such well-known composers as Paul Hindemith and Franz
Schmidt, paying princely sums for their execution. Richard Strauss was paid
an advance of twenty-five thousand dollars for Parergon zur Sinfonia
Domestica, a piece Paul then insisted on reworking, much to Strauss’s
annoyance. Another commission, this time for Sergei Prokofiev, whom Paul had
met in Paris in 1930, was never performed, Paul claiming not to “
understand a single note.” Distrust was mutual: “I don’t see any special
talent in his left hand,” Prokofiev told a friend. “It may be that his
misfortune has turned out to be a stroke of good luck, for with only his
left hand he is unique but maybe with both hands he would not have stood out
from a crowd of mediocre pianists.”
Cruel as this remark is, there seems to be a grain of truth in it. The
twenty-six-year-old Paul’s concert debut in prewar Vienna had, in fact,
received rather mixed reviews. Then, too, his career suffered repeatedly
from personal setbacks. After various sexual misadventures, he formed a
liaison with a near-blind piano student named Hilde Schania, a brewer’s
daughter less than half his age, whom he impregnated, set up in an apartment
, and finally married after his emigration to America but never quite lived
with, though she bore him three children. Meanwhile, there were Paul’s
incessant quarrels with his sisters over investments and later over their
maneuvers to remain in Vienna as Mischlinge (only half rather than three-
quarters Jewish, as was actually the case) and make over a sizable amount of
the family fortune to the Nazi regime.
After 1938, Paul understood he could not stay in Vienna. A staunch defender
of the Hapsburg monarchy, he knew his relationship with the Christian Hilde
would open him up to persecution for Rassenschande (racial defilement); he
needed, moreover, to protect his foreign investments from Hitler. Paul’s
flight, first to Zurich, then to America, leaving his sisters more or less
in the lurch, led to a final break with Ludwig, soon to be a British citizen
, from whom he had long been estranged. After 1938, the two brothers never
spoke or corresponded.
In Waugh’s telling, no one comes off well: The sisters emerge as
materialistic, self-centered, and neurotic; Gretl finally divorces
Stonborough, whom Waugh labels “psychotic”; and the next generation is as
weak and fatuous as Grandfather Karl was strong and oppressive. Why, then,
so detailed an account of the family’s endless trials and tribulations?
Waugh evidently regards the troubles of “the house of Wittgenstein” as
representative of the larger collapse of Hapsburg Vienna, with its ominous
blend of imperial splendor and grinding poverty, high culture and provincial
politics. The difficulty is that Waugh’s book gives no evidence of any
real grounding in the history and culture of fin de siècle, much less
postwar, Vienna. The information—facts, dates, the furnishings of the
various Wittgenstein properties, specific Nazi edicts—is all there, but the
richness and complexity of this culture, the texture so brilliantly
chronicled by Karl Kraus or, more recently, by Brigitte Hamann in Hitler’s
Vienna, is missing. The Vienna Circle of philosophers, the architectural
interventions of Ludwig’s close friend Paul Engelmann, the hopeless
economic struggles and class warfare of the now-small republic—all this is
absent.
Waugh clearly believes that what justifies The House of Wittgenstein is the
artistic importance—and relative neglect—of Paul. “In adult life,” the
biographer posits, “Paul Wittgenstein was far more famous than his younger
brother,” although he immediately qualifies this assertion, admitting that
“nowadays it is the other way around.” Exactly! Would any reader of the
twenty-first century care about the house of Wittgenstein were it not that
this was the family of one of the great philosophers of our time, a
philosopher whose life has been made more than familiar by such excellent
biographers as Monk and Brian McGuinness, not to mention the many novelists,
poets, dramatists, and even filmmakers like Derek Jarman who have made
Ludwig, as Waugh himself notes, an iconic figure?
Indeed, The House of Wittgenstein might have been a much more interesting
book had it focused on the differences, rather than the similarities,
between Ludwig and the other Wittgensteins. How was it, after all, that out
of eight siblings—siblings brought up so similarly in such particular
circumstances— a single one emerged as so unlike the rest? Ludwig did share
his family’s anti-Semitism—the self-hatred endemic to the bourgeois and
upper-class Jews of Vienna, trying to free themselves from their past—but
he also recognized himself as irrevocably Jewish and possessed a spiritual
dimension lacking in the others: Witness the many searching reflections on
God, Christianity, and the human condition collected in Culture and Value
and elsewhere. Again, he shared his siblings’ passion for music and their
snobbery about the “right” composers, but he understood that musical taste
is largely culturally determined. And the materialism of the others is
countered by his austerity: He gave all his money away early in the game.
Most important, he could take the ordinary statements made by those around
him and discover, quite unlike the others, that there are no answers, only
questions, and that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. He
would have shuddered, for example, at Waugh’s pat characterization of
Hermine as “suffer[ing] from low self-esteem.” What Freudian nonsense,
Ludwig would have said.
“The world of the happy is a happy world,” Ludwig wrote famously while he
was serving on the eastern front in 1916. When the dying man so surprisingly
told Mrs. Bevan that he had had a wonderful life, I think he meant it. He
was “happy,” not in his personal life, but in that he had thought through
some of the great philosophical problems as strenuously as he possibly could
and had tried to judge himself as severely as he had judged others. Compare
what Monk calls “the duty of genius” of this uniquely complex and
conflicted but brilliant figure with his family’s overall failure (Paul is
something of an exception) to turn its staggering wealth into any lasting
form of accomplishment, and the house of Wittgenstein emerges as little more
than a house of cards.
Marjorie Perloff is a scholar-in-residence at the University of Southern
California and the author of the memoir The Vienna Paradox (New Directions,
2004).
t*a
3 楼
太长了给个摘要吧。
S*n
4 楼
我对维特根斯坦一直不太感冒。不过昨天看了个8g，太特么神／牛了。。。看完很虚幻。
书作者，就像这里被评价的有点夸张。
不过一战、二战之间的奥匈帝国／奥地利確是很有趣。
顺便再隆重推荐一下，我成年以后唯一记得有印象的长篇小说，奥地利作者robert
musil 的《the man without quantities》（中译：没有个性的人）。
ps，维特根斯坦弟弟paul wittengenstein的故事里，我偶像Prokofiev还友情出演了。
。。
为什么没有我偶像maurice ravel呢？呃，以前就听说paul介个左手刚擎家，当时还想
ludwig witetngenstein他弟很牛阿，看prokofiev的评价，凡事都抗不住有钱。。。
有点点长。。。的文:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_01/3520
Sniveling Rivalry
On April 27, 1951, a few days before he died of cancer, Ludwig Wittgenstein
completed one of his most important books, On Certainty. The previous day
had been his sixty-second birthday. As Ray Monk tells it in his definitive
biography,
he knew it would be his last. When Mrs. Bevan [the wife of the
doctor with whom Wittgenstein was staying] presented him with an electric
blanket, saying as she gave it to him: “Many happy returns,” he stared
hard at her and replied “There will be no returns.” . . . When told by Dr.
Bevan that he would live only a few more days, he exclaimed “Good!” Mrs.
Bevan stayed with him the night of the 28th, and told him that his close
friends in England would be coming the next day. Before losing consciousness
he said to her: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”
I relay this little story because it so tellingly controverts the rather
cartoonish image of the “neurotic” Ludwig that emerges from Alexander
Waugh’s absorbing, highly readable, but reductive portrait of the
Wittgenstein family—A Family at War, as Waugh, himself a member of a famous
and controversial literary family, calls it. In his account, each member of
the Viennese-Jewish (though converted to Christianity by the mid-nineteenth
century) Wittgenstein family was neurotic in his or her own way, beginning
with the father, Karl, a seventeen-year-old runaway to the United States,
who had become, by the time he was thirty-five, one of Austria’s great
tycoons, a steel magnate of seemingly unlimited wealth and the owner of an
elegant palais on the Alleegasse, where concerts were attended by Brahms,
Mahler, and Richard Strauss.
Karl was a tyrannical and bullying father. His wife, Leopoldine (“Poldy”),
a passionate musician like her husband, is described by Waugh as too
withdrawn and cold to be a good mother: “She was a small woman of long nose
and round face—an intensely introverted and nervous character, detached
and dutiful. In adult life she suffered regular attacks of migraine and
phlebitis, a complication of the arteries, nerves and veins of her legs.”
After nine children (Dora, the second, died in her first month) in fifteen
years, Poldy’s condition is quite understandable, but Waugh presents it as
somehow a personal failing. The couple’s eldest child, Hermine, who never
married, was “a repressed person . . . whose manner . . . appeared to be
arrogant or aloof. In fact she suffered from low self-esteem.” The youngest
daughter, Margherita (“Gretl”), who married American fortune hunter
Jerome Stonborough (born Steinberger), is best known for the portrait Gustav
Klimt painted of her. Of this famous artwork, Waugh writes, “She stands
self-conscious and discomfited, in a flamboyant, ill-fitting, shoulderless
white silk dress . . . her hands clasped in a neurotic twist of fingers at
her stomach.” Gretl, Waugh explains later, was frigid and once sought help
from Freud. As for Helene, the middle daughter, the most “normal” of the
clan, she, too, “suffered from tensions of a pathological and neurotic kind
. She was terrified of thunderstorms and was also anemic.”
But the Wittgenstein daughters were models of stability compared with the
five sons. The eldest, Hans, a musical and mathematical prodigy but
extremely shy and withdrawn, was on a “study trip” to America when he
disappeared, ostensibly on a canoe outing, never to return. He may well have
been a suicide, as were two of his brothers. Rudolf poisoned himself in a
Berlin bar when he was twenty-two, evidently because he could not face the
impending revelation of his homosexuality. Waugh sensationalizes this story
(“As the music wafted across the room, Rudolf took from his pocket a sachet
of clear crystal compound”), as he also does that of Kurt, who was forty
when, fearing court-martial or, worse, imprisonment by the Italians, he shot
himself in the last days of World War I.
The two remaining brothers, Paul and Ludwig, who did become prisoners of war
, were the survivors, saved, perhaps, because each had a real vocation. The
Ludwig sections of Waugh’s narrative—his life at the front, the reception
of the Tractatus (1921), the teaching experiment, the Cambridge years, the
designing of the Kundmanngasse house, the trip to the Soviet Union—are
little more than recyclings of familiar lore. Indeed, The House of
Wittgenstein intentionally downplays the importance of Ludwig so as to
foreground its real subject, Paul. Waugh had the good fortune of gaining
access to a cache of unpublished papers from the pianist’s daughter, Joan
Ripley. From these letters, journals, and documents, he has stitched
together an absorbing narrative, beginning with the loss of Paul’s right
arm in the first year of the war and the gulag conditions in the Russian
prisons where Paul spent long months in 1914 and 1915. Back home in Vienna,
he was, not surprisingly, moody and irascible but also determined, more than
ever, to be a great pianist. In the ’20s, he began to commission left-hand
concertos from such well-known composers as Paul Hindemith and Franz
Schmidt, paying princely sums for their execution. Richard Strauss was paid
an advance of twenty-five thousand dollars for Parergon zur Sinfonia
Domestica, a piece Paul then insisted on reworking, much to Strauss’s
annoyance. Another commission, this time for Sergei Prokofiev, whom Paul had
met in Paris in 1930, was never performed, Paul claiming not to “
understand a single note.” Distrust was mutual: “I don’t see any special
talent in his left hand,” Prokofiev told a friend. “It may be that his
misfortune has turned out to be a stroke of good luck, for with only his
left hand he is unique but maybe with both hands he would not have stood out
from a crowd of mediocre pianists.”
Cruel as this remark is, there seems to be a grain of truth in it. The
twenty-six-year-old Paul’s concert debut in prewar Vienna had, in fact,
received rather mixed reviews. Then, too, his career suffered repeatedly
from personal setbacks. After various sexual misadventures, he formed a
liaison with a near-blind piano student named Hilde Schania, a brewer’s
daughter less than half his age, whom he impregnated, set up in an apartment
, and finally married after his emigration to America but never quite lived
with, though she bore him three children. Meanwhile, there were Paul’s
incessant quarrels with his sisters over investments and later over their
maneuvers to remain in Vienna as Mischlinge (only half rather than three-
quarters Jewish, as was actually the case) and make over a sizable amount of
the family fortune to the Nazi regime.
After 1938, Paul understood he could not stay in Vienna. A staunch defender
of the Hapsburg monarchy, he knew his relationship with the Christian Hilde
would open him up to persecution for Rassenschande (racial defilement); he
needed, moreover, to protect his foreign investments from Hitler. Paul’s
flight, first to Zurich, then to America, leaving his sisters more or less
in the lurch, led to a final break with Ludwig, soon to be a British citizen
, from whom he had long been estranged. After 1938, the two brothers never
spoke or corresponded.
In Waugh’s telling, no one comes off well: The sisters emerge as
materialistic, self-centered, and neurotic; Gretl finally divorces
Stonborough, whom Waugh labels “psychotic”; and the next generation is as
weak and fatuous as Grandfather Karl was strong and oppressive. Why, then,
so detailed an account of the family’s endless trials and tribulations?
Waugh evidently regards the troubles of “the house of Wittgenstein” as
representative of the larger collapse of Hapsburg Vienna, with its ominous
blend of imperial splendor and grinding poverty, high culture and provincial
politics. The difficulty is that Waugh’s book gives no evidence of any
real grounding in the history and culture of fin de siècle, much less
postwar, Vienna. The information—facts, dates, the furnishings of the
various Wittgenstein properties, specific Nazi edicts—is all there, but the
richness and complexity of this culture, the texture so brilliantly
chronicled by Karl Kraus or, more recently, by Brigitte Hamann in Hitler’s
Vienna, is missing. The Vienna Circle of philosophers, the architectural
interventions of Ludwig’s close friend Paul Engelmann, the hopeless
economic struggles and class warfare of the now-small republic—all this is
absent.
Waugh clearly believes that what justifies The House of Wittgenstein is the
artistic importance—and relative neglect—of Paul. “In adult life,” the
biographer posits, “Paul Wittgenstein was far more famous than his younger
brother,” although he immediately qualifies this assertion, admitting that
“nowadays it is the other way around.” Exactly! Would any reader of the
twenty-first century care about the house of Wittgenstein were it not that
this was the family of one of the great philosophers of our time, a
philosopher whose life has been made more than familiar by such excellent
biographers as Monk and Brian McGuinness, not to mention the many novelists,
poets, dramatists, and even filmmakers like Derek Jarman who have made
Ludwig, as Waugh himself notes, an iconic figure?
Indeed, The House of Wittgenstein might have been a much more interesting
book had it focused on the differences, rather than the similarities,
between Ludwig and the other Wittgensteins. How was it, after all, that out
of eight siblings—siblings brought up so similarly in such particular
circumstances— a single one emerged as so unlike the rest? Ludwig did share
his family’s anti-Semitism—the self-hatred endemic to the bourgeois and
upper-class Jews of Vienna, trying to free themselves from their past—but
he also recognized himself as irrevocably Jewish and possessed a spiritual
dimension lacking in the others: Witness the many searching reflections on
God, Christianity, and the human condition collected in Culture and Value
and elsewhere. Again, he shared his siblings’ passion for music and their
snobbery about the “right” composers, but he understood that musical taste
is largely culturally determined. And the materialism of the others is
countered by his austerity: He gave all his money away early in the game.
Most important, he could take the ordinary statements made by those around
him and discover, quite unlike the others, that there are no answers, only
questions, and that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. He
would have shuddered, for example, at Waugh’s pat characterization of
Hermine as “suffer[ing] from low self-esteem.” What Freudian nonsense,
Ludwig would have said.
“The world of the happy is a happy world,” Ludwig wrote famously while he
was serving on the eastern front in 1916. When the dying man so surprisingly
told Mrs. Bevan that he had had a wonderful life, I think he meant it. He
was “happy,” not in his personal life, but in that he had thought through
some of the great philosophical problems as strenuously as he possibly could
and had tried to judge himself as severely as he had judged others. Compare
what Monk calls “the duty of genius” of this uniquely complex and
conflicted but brilliant figure with his family’s overall failure (Paul is
something of an exception) to turn its staggering wealth into any lasting
form of accomplishment, and the house of Wittgenstein emerges as little more
than a house of cards.
Marjorie Perloff is a scholar-in-residence at the University of Southern
California and the author of the memoir The Vienna Paradox (New Directions,
2004).
书作者，就像这里被评价的有点夸张。
不过一战、二战之间的奥匈帝国／奥地利確是很有趣。
顺便再隆重推荐一下，我成年以后唯一记得有印象的长篇小说，奥地利作者robert
musil 的《the man without quantities》（中译：没有个性的人）。
ps，维特根斯坦弟弟paul wittengenstein的故事里，我偶像Prokofiev还友情出演了。
。。
为什么没有我偶像maurice ravel呢？呃，以前就听说paul介个左手刚擎家，当时还想
ludwig witetngenstein他弟很牛阿，看prokofiev的评价，凡事都抗不住有钱。。。
有点点长。。。的文:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_01/3520
Sniveling Rivalry
On April 27, 1951, a few days before he died of cancer, Ludwig Wittgenstein
completed one of his most important books, On Certainty. The previous day
had been his sixty-second birthday. As Ray Monk tells it in his definitive
biography,
he knew it would be his last. When Mrs. Bevan [the wife of the
doctor with whom Wittgenstein was staying] presented him with an electric
blanket, saying as she gave it to him: “Many happy returns,” he stared
hard at her and replied “There will be no returns.” . . . When told by Dr.
Bevan that he would live only a few more days, he exclaimed “Good!” Mrs.
Bevan stayed with him the night of the 28th, and told him that his close
friends in England would be coming the next day. Before losing consciousness
he said to her: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”
I relay this little story because it so tellingly controverts the rather
cartoonish image of the “neurotic” Ludwig that emerges from Alexander
Waugh’s absorbing, highly readable, but reductive portrait of the
Wittgenstein family—A Family at War, as Waugh, himself a member of a famous
and controversial literary family, calls it. In his account, each member of
the Viennese-Jewish (though converted to Christianity by the mid-nineteenth
century) Wittgenstein family was neurotic in his or her own way, beginning
with the father, Karl, a seventeen-year-old runaway to the United States,
who had become, by the time he was thirty-five, one of Austria’s great
tycoons, a steel magnate of seemingly unlimited wealth and the owner of an
elegant palais on the Alleegasse, where concerts were attended by Brahms,
Mahler, and Richard Strauss.
Karl was a tyrannical and bullying father. His wife, Leopoldine (“Poldy”),
a passionate musician like her husband, is described by Waugh as too
withdrawn and cold to be a good mother: “She was a small woman of long nose
and round face—an intensely introverted and nervous character, detached
and dutiful. In adult life she suffered regular attacks of migraine and
phlebitis, a complication of the arteries, nerves and veins of her legs.”
After nine children (Dora, the second, died in her first month) in fifteen
years, Poldy’s condition is quite understandable, but Waugh presents it as
somehow a personal failing. The couple’s eldest child, Hermine, who never
married, was “a repressed person . . . whose manner . . . appeared to be
arrogant or aloof. In fact she suffered from low self-esteem.” The youngest
daughter, Margherita (“Gretl”), who married American fortune hunter
Jerome Stonborough (born Steinberger), is best known for the portrait Gustav
Klimt painted of her. Of this famous artwork, Waugh writes, “She stands
self-conscious and discomfited, in a flamboyant, ill-fitting, shoulderless
white silk dress . . . her hands clasped in a neurotic twist of fingers at
her stomach.” Gretl, Waugh explains later, was frigid and once sought help
from Freud. As for Helene, the middle daughter, the most “normal” of the
clan, she, too, “suffered from tensions of a pathological and neurotic kind
. She was terrified of thunderstorms and was also anemic.”
But the Wittgenstein daughters were models of stability compared with the
five sons. The eldest, Hans, a musical and mathematical prodigy but
extremely shy and withdrawn, was on a “study trip” to America when he
disappeared, ostensibly on a canoe outing, never to return. He may well have
been a suicide, as were two of his brothers. Rudolf poisoned himself in a
Berlin bar when he was twenty-two, evidently because he could not face the
impending revelation of his homosexuality. Waugh sensationalizes this story
(“As the music wafted across the room, Rudolf took from his pocket a sachet
of clear crystal compound”), as he also does that of Kurt, who was forty
when, fearing court-martial or, worse, imprisonment by the Italians, he shot
himself in the last days of World War I.
The two remaining brothers, Paul and Ludwig, who did become prisoners of war
, were the survivors, saved, perhaps, because each had a real vocation. The
Ludwig sections of Waugh’s narrative—his life at the front, the reception
of the Tractatus (1921), the teaching experiment, the Cambridge years, the
designing of the Kundmanngasse house, the trip to the Soviet Union—are
little more than recyclings of familiar lore. Indeed, The House of
Wittgenstein intentionally downplays the importance of Ludwig so as to
foreground its real subject, Paul. Waugh had the good fortune of gaining
access to a cache of unpublished papers from the pianist’s daughter, Joan
Ripley. From these letters, journals, and documents, he has stitched
together an absorbing narrative, beginning with the loss of Paul’s right
arm in the first year of the war and the gulag conditions in the Russian
prisons where Paul spent long months in 1914 and 1915. Back home in Vienna,
he was, not surprisingly, moody and irascible but also determined, more than
ever, to be a great pianist. In the ’20s, he began to commission left-hand
concertos from such well-known composers as Paul Hindemith and Franz
Schmidt, paying princely sums for their execution. Richard Strauss was paid
an advance of twenty-five thousand dollars for Parergon zur Sinfonia
Domestica, a piece Paul then insisted on reworking, much to Strauss’s
annoyance. Another commission, this time for Sergei Prokofiev, whom Paul had
met in Paris in 1930, was never performed, Paul claiming not to “
understand a single note.” Distrust was mutual: “I don’t see any special
talent in his left hand,” Prokofiev told a friend. “It may be that his
misfortune has turned out to be a stroke of good luck, for with only his
left hand he is unique but maybe with both hands he would not have stood out
from a crowd of mediocre pianists.”
Cruel as this remark is, there seems to be a grain of truth in it. The
twenty-six-year-old Paul’s concert debut in prewar Vienna had, in fact,
received rather mixed reviews. Then, too, his career suffered repeatedly
from personal setbacks. After various sexual misadventures, he formed a
liaison with a near-blind piano student named Hilde Schania, a brewer’s
daughter less than half his age, whom he impregnated, set up in an apartment
, and finally married after his emigration to America but never quite lived
with, though she bore him three children. Meanwhile, there were Paul’s
incessant quarrels with his sisters over investments and later over their
maneuvers to remain in Vienna as Mischlinge (only half rather than three-
quarters Jewish, as was actually the case) and make over a sizable amount of
the family fortune to the Nazi regime.
After 1938, Paul understood he could not stay in Vienna. A staunch defender
of the Hapsburg monarchy, he knew his relationship with the Christian Hilde
would open him up to persecution for Rassenschande (racial defilement); he
needed, moreover, to protect his foreign investments from Hitler. Paul’s
flight, first to Zurich, then to America, leaving his sisters more or less
in the lurch, led to a final break with Ludwig, soon to be a British citizen
, from whom he had long been estranged. After 1938, the two brothers never
spoke or corresponded.
In Waugh’s telling, no one comes off well: The sisters emerge as
materialistic, self-centered, and neurotic; Gretl finally divorces
Stonborough, whom Waugh labels “psychotic”; and the next generation is as
weak and fatuous as Grandfather Karl was strong and oppressive. Why, then,
so detailed an account of the family’s endless trials and tribulations?
Waugh evidently regards the troubles of “the house of Wittgenstein” as
representative of the larger collapse of Hapsburg Vienna, with its ominous
blend of imperial splendor and grinding poverty, high culture and provincial
politics. The difficulty is that Waugh’s book gives no evidence of any
real grounding in the history and culture of fin de siècle, much less
postwar, Vienna. The information—facts, dates, the furnishings of the
various Wittgenstein properties, specific Nazi edicts—is all there, but the
richness and complexity of this culture, the texture so brilliantly
chronicled by Karl Kraus or, more recently, by Brigitte Hamann in Hitler’s
Vienna, is missing. The Vienna Circle of philosophers, the architectural
interventions of Ludwig’s close friend Paul Engelmann, the hopeless
economic struggles and class warfare of the now-small republic—all this is
absent.
Waugh clearly believes that what justifies The House of Wittgenstein is the
artistic importance—and relative neglect—of Paul. “In adult life,” the
biographer posits, “Paul Wittgenstein was far more famous than his younger
brother,” although he immediately qualifies this assertion, admitting that
“nowadays it is the other way around.” Exactly! Would any reader of the
twenty-first century care about the house of Wittgenstein were it not that
this was the family of one of the great philosophers of our time, a
philosopher whose life has been made more than familiar by such excellent
biographers as Monk and Brian McGuinness, not to mention the many novelists,
poets, dramatists, and even filmmakers like Derek Jarman who have made
Ludwig, as Waugh himself notes, an iconic figure?
Indeed, The House of Wittgenstein might have been a much more interesting
book had it focused on the differences, rather than the similarities,
between Ludwig and the other Wittgensteins. How was it, after all, that out
of eight siblings—siblings brought up so similarly in such particular
circumstances— a single one emerged as so unlike the rest? Ludwig did share
his family’s anti-Semitism—the self-hatred endemic to the bourgeois and
upper-class Jews of Vienna, trying to free themselves from their past—but
he also recognized himself as irrevocably Jewish and possessed a spiritual
dimension lacking in the others: Witness the many searching reflections on
God, Christianity, and the human condition collected in Culture and Value
and elsewhere. Again, he shared his siblings’ passion for music and their
snobbery about the “right” composers, but he understood that musical taste
is largely culturally determined. And the materialism of the others is
countered by his austerity: He gave all his money away early in the game.
Most important, he could take the ordinary statements made by those around
him and discover, quite unlike the others, that there are no answers, only
questions, and that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. He
would have shuddered, for example, at Waugh’s pat characterization of
Hermine as “suffer[ing] from low self-esteem.” What Freudian nonsense,
Ludwig would have said.
“The world of the happy is a happy world,” Ludwig wrote famously while he
was serving on the eastern front in 1916. When the dying man so surprisingly
told Mrs. Bevan that he had had a wonderful life, I think he meant it. He
was “happy,” not in his personal life, but in that he had thought through
some of the great philosophical problems as strenuously as he possibly could
and had tried to judge himself as severely as he had judged others. Compare
what Monk calls “the duty of genius” of this uniquely complex and
conflicted but brilliant figure with his family’s overall failure (Paul is
something of an exception) to turn its staggering wealth into any lasting
form of accomplishment, and the house of Wittgenstein emerges as little more
than a house of cards.
Marjorie Perloff is a scholar-in-residence at the University of Southern
California and the author of the memoir The Vienna Paradox (New Directions,
2004).
t*a
5 楼
太长了给个摘要吧。
S*n
6 楼
abstract
维特根斯坦兄弟姐妹的悲惨生活：维特根斯坦能精神正常的死去，临死抱怨，呃，不，
感慨一下：我读过愉快的一生，literally make sense。
这文章bbs看確是不可行，哈哈，我ipad上看的，最近ios 5整合了字典，我们文盲忽然
也能飞快的看长文啦。。
我感到有趣的是：
(1)
以前钻研我的偶像ravel的时候听说有个也姓维特根斯坦的左手钢琴家，我还以为是个
牛人，并且怀疑是维特根斯坦的弟弟；但是看了本文发现(1.1)发现原来不过是一掷千
金的有钱公子。（1.2）但是尽管提到其他几个重要同期composer，却没有出现ravel，
所以我還是不确定此wittgenstein是否彼wittgenstein
(2)
奥地利在20c上半叶很有意思，重要的作曲家音乐家辈出。尤其这个国家的upper
middle class很有意思。
虽然像wittgenstein家这样兄弟姐妹普遍非常不幸的upper middle class很少见，但是
也可以作为极端例子看到一些侧影。
标题“牛”也是这个意思，这些人和他们的文化真是相当不幸－－虽然没有像中国文化
那样屡受打击，明日黄花的倾颓感，中国精英恐怕还是熟悉的 XD
【在 t**a 的大作中提到】
: 太长了给个摘要吧。
维特根斯坦兄弟姐妹的悲惨生活：维特根斯坦能精神正常的死去，临死抱怨，呃，不，
感慨一下：我读过愉快的一生，literally make sense。
这文章bbs看確是不可行，哈哈，我ipad上看的，最近ios 5整合了字典，我们文盲忽然
也能飞快的看长文啦。。
我感到有趣的是：
(1)
以前钻研我的偶像ravel的时候听说有个也姓维特根斯坦的左手钢琴家，我还以为是个
牛人，并且怀疑是维特根斯坦的弟弟；但是看了本文发现(1.1)发现原来不过是一掷千
金的有钱公子。（1.2）但是尽管提到其他几个重要同期composer，却没有出现ravel，
所以我還是不确定此wittgenstein是否彼wittgenstein
(2)
奥地利在20c上半叶很有意思，重要的作曲家音乐家辈出。尤其这个国家的upper
middle class很有意思。
虽然像wittgenstein家这样兄弟姐妹普遍非常不幸的upper middle class很少见，但是
也可以作为极端例子看到一些侧影。
标题“牛”也是这个意思，这些人和他们的文化真是相当不幸－－虽然没有像中国文化
那样屡受打击，明日黄花的倾颓感，中国精英恐怕还是熟悉的 XD
【在 t**a 的大作中提到】
: 太长了给个摘要吧。
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