The World as I Found It (6 page)

Lueger's ascendancy also roughly coincided with the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French army officer accused of treason. But of course Dreyfus was only a pawn, a proxy: it was not Dreyfus but Europe's Jews who were on trial, and though Dreyfus was eventually acquitted, Europe's Jews were not.

Covering the Dreyfus trial in Paris for the
Neue Freie Presse
, the young journalist Theodor Herzl became convinced that assimilation would never work and, upon his return to Vienna, revived the old dream of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Many prominent Gentiles agreed with Herzl's estimation of the Jewish question. Why, they were even so generous as to provide him with money and introductions to courts and politicians, regarding the extraordinary young revolutionary as a kind of Pied Piper sent to rid Europe of her Jews.

Karl Wittgenstein wanted no part of these mass delusions or of Herzl's messianism. He accepted the fact that there would be periodic flare-ups of anti-Semitism, yet on the whole he preferred to continue along the assimilationist course, having accepted the Devil's proposition that people are, on the whole, more reasonable than they are unreasonable. Vienna, after all, was a city of converts who had put off the old clothes, the old language and ways, to, if not exactly embrace, then at least go through the motions of Christianity. Karl Wittgenstein had been baptized a Protestant at an early age, while his wife was a baptized Catholic. Poldy insisted the children should be baptized Catholic, and since this was the most practical religion from a purely social standpoint, Karl Wittgenstein ceded to her wishes.

So it was that Wittgenstein and his brothers and sisters were raised to receive communion under the instruction of Monsignor Molke, who frequently served mass at the Palais Wittgenstein for the family and servants. Still, there were reminders of the family's Jewish past in the guise of their bearded paternal grandfather, Hermann Wittgenstein, and several decrepit aunts and uncles who clung to the old ways, whispering in Yiddish and reading their obscure Hebraic newspapers. This was charming, if distant, like the Menorah, the fringed prayer shawl and the ancient leather-covered prayer book that could be found in the library, locked in a chest of unvarnished oak carved with apocalyptic creatures. Still more haunting to the boy were the cracked daguerreotypes in their frames, wobbly photographs the color of muddy water, showing the dark, wild-looking
shtetl
ancestors dressed in black gabardine and gazing out fearfully at the camera. Looking at them, the boy would feel that through some black keyhole of time they were staring out
at him
— wondering at this child with the slick brown hair and modern white shirt, sitting with his books on the tassled sofa in the tall, wainscotted library.

His Jewish roots were hardly a constant concern, and yet as a boy it had sometimes troubled Wittgenstein to realize that his family had not always been the same people, as if one time or faith had been true and the other a lie. They were a becoming people, the Wittgensteins. Later in life, he would recall this queer sense of a family remembering forward, with the past a kind of becoming that might be skillfully retouched, unraveled and re-remembered with the fiery Yule tree, the greens that wreathed the door and, outside, the eerie little manger with its garishly painted wise men — not joyful tidings, it seemed, but talismans to ward off danger and hasten the tide of becoming.

Unfortunately, in Vienna it took several generations at least before one was considered completely assimilated, so far as one was ever assimilated. For some, this purgatorial process took longer than for others, and for some like Wittgenstein, the effects were delayed for years as the Christian scraped bones with the vestigial Jew within. But there was another, somewhat parallel legacy for Wittgenstein to overcome, one that began when his brother Hans took his life in Cuba. Hans was guilty of the elementary sin: the sin of despair. Banished, scuttled with sin, lost even from God, Hans had not just poisoned himself or his hated father; in that act of revenge, he had poisoned a whole family and even the future. Life was the fold into which Hans could not assimilate, but then Hans was hardly the only one in that fomenting city to fail at this task. Like caged canaries sunk in a mine shaft, other raw and excitable souls were beginning to smell the fumes of that futurity.

Odd how the impossible negation of death — the sudden absence of life where once there was promise — can stimulate an early philosophical bent. In Wittgenstein's case, it was a growing sense of precariousness — indeed, a profound suspicion — of what until then had seemed life's givens. From earliest childhood, Wittgenstein had been haunted and frightened by the morbid Hans, but then one day in 1902 the boy was suddenly told that his old tormentor and nemesis, that aesthete's aesthete, was dead. Yet how did he know this for certain? There was no body. His brother returned from Cuba as a funeral urn, a ghastly hunk of crusted Spanish silver that would have turned Hans's sensitive stomach.

The boy had no doubt that the obsessive Hans had composed a death that would yield the utmost in pain and ambiguity. When they finally interred his ashes in the family crypt, even their friend Monsignor Molke, by then archbishop of Vienna, could not officially bury the suicide. All the priest could offer was a few mumbled
aves
and a faint pass of the hand. Wittgenstein stood huddled in a clump with his ruined siblings and their inconsolable mother, who was shrouded beneath a tent of black veils. As a family they were broken, but the boy could see that his father was by no means broken: Karl Wittgenstein's face was a pink wall of wanton health. Was the father not relieved, in a way, to be rid of this miserable invert, this Judas goat who had defied him? Had the boy not heard his father say with a sigh to an uncle that it was probably all for the best?

That day in 1902, the boy stood watching his father with something like loathing that burned his stomach. If his father could not feel sorrow, thought the boy, he might at least feel shame. But Karl Wittgenstein betrayed no shame for the simple reason that he felt, or said he felt, no guilt or responsibility for Hans. The truth was, Karl Wittgenstein betrayed no discernible emotion then or any day after save a kind of vague, chaste disgust — an almost aesthetic reaction, as if his son had committed a breach against good taste. And all the while the boy kept wondering if the ashes were really Hans's, or if the Cubans had merely shoveled dirt into that ugly urn which seemed so impossibly small to contain his brother.

By the time Wittgenstein decided to leave aeronautics for philosophy ten years later, his relationship with his father was even more tense and tangled. During that period, Karl Wittgenstein had changed as a father, loosening the reins while growing ever more cautious and shrewd. Now an indefatigable man of sixty-five, he had no need of edicts or ultimatums. Diplomacy has other, more subtle means, and so it continued, with the father and son conducting their affairs like two rival heads of state, albeit a big state over a little one.

What had never changed in those ten years were his father's expectations, which were heavier for being unspoken. Contrary to Karl Wittgenstein's accusations, his son had not failed to consider his father's feelings in his latest decision, nor was this course as illogical and precipitous as the old man wanted to believe. Wittgenstein had already given three years of study to Bertrand Russell's
Principles of Mathematics
. More recently, he had been poring over the first volume of the book's successor,
Principia Mathematica
, a mountainous three-volume work on the logical foundations of mathematics that Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were completing after nearly a decade of labor. Besides studying Russell, Wittgenstein had been reading Russell's most immediate predecessor, the virtual inventor of modern symbolic logic, Gottlob Frege. Earlier that summer, in fact, Wittgenstein had traveled to Jena, a medieval university town in central Germany where Frege was a professor, to consult the old logician about his future.

Before their meeting, Wittgenstein sent Frege a courtly letter praising his work and declaring his interest in logic. Frege, in turn, sent Wittgenstein a brief reply, thanking him for his letter and saying that he would be pleased to meet him if he cared to come to Jena. Literalist that he was, Wittgenstein took Herr Professor Frege at his word: a month or so later, Frege's housekeeper answered the door only to find a young man dressed in a dark and expensively tailored suit and carrying under his arm a box of cigars. The housekeeper looked askance when he asked for the professor and curtly presented his card: he looked young for a card, especially for so expensive a card, slender and embossed and edged with gold.

As someone who had been raised with servants, the young man knew how to handle the housekeeper; it was clear from his subdued and correct manner that he was not to be trifled with. At the same time, the housekeeper had her station. She did not keep house for just anybody, she kept the house for a famous university professor who received many important visitors, and she was apt to take her sweet time, or even to tell the person to call later if she didn't like his manner or looks. But few visitors were so refined, or so finely dressed, as this young man. And fewer still came with their own cards, much less bearing expensive cigars. She fetched Herr Professor Frege.

Coming around the staircase several minutes later, still putting on his rumpled little suit jacket with his stubby hands, Frege was a trifle dismayed to see the owner of the card standing so darkly and fiercely correct, with his springy hair standing on end like a waxwing's crest. Frege knew at a glance what the housekeeper knew: the young man sprang from wealth and social position.

As for Wittgenstein, he could hardly hide his dismay when he realized the author of the great
Begriffsschrift
was this pudgy, elfin old man with a grizzled beard and white hair. At least, thought Wittgenstein, Frege might have kept his suit coat brushed and his cravat in better repair. In this respect Wittgenstein was still his father's son, still the
haute
Viennese. Such things still mattered to him then.

Wittgenstein made a slight bow and presented Frege with the cigars. These were princely cigars, choice Havanas wrapped in tissue paper and rollers of shaved cedar. Frege was delighted, though he protested that such a lavish gift was entirely unnecessary — and yet the warm tropical fumes as he opened the well-fitted humidor on its brass hinges. Glorious! he groaned, sticking his blunt nose into the box. If Frege did not expect cigars, neither did Wittgenstein expect the great logician to luxuriantly sniff the length of one as if it were a rind of ripe cheese.

Sensing the young man's hauteur — and nervousness — Frege then took him down a peg, saying, Well, you're certainly
punctual
, Herr Wittgenstein — though I can't say by whose clock. But, please, sir, come into my study.

The interview began stiffly, but Wittgenstein soon showed the logician his mettle. Within minutes, Wittgenstein was pacing the floor, declaiming.

Unwrapping one of the Havanas, Frege licked it with a practiced twirl, then set it to match, saying with a smile, You didn't say I was going to have to work for this nosegay, Herr Wittgenstein.

The young man's ideas were half-baked, and Frege duly gave him a theoretical bruising. But what Wittgenstein said wasn't so important; it was how he fought Frege's mind, how he fought for the primacy of his own understanding —
this
was what seized Frege's attention. Manners fell by the wayside; there wasn't time. The young Viennese was stubborn and argumentative. Worse, he had a bad habit of interrupting.
No!
protested Wittgenstein, and then he stopped himself. It cannot be … I just —
I don't know!
he snapped, and then he turned away, the blood blurting up into his face, blinded by the shame of
not seeing
, at once forty steps ahead and forty behind. But even more, Frege saw how the young man would not let go, saw his tremendous, irascible impatience to get at it — at what he could not quite see but vividly intuited.

The pungent cigar was faintly narcotic. Sitting slumped in his heavy, overstuffed chair, the cigar raised like an exclamation point, Frege inwardly flagged then. Now a man over sixty, he felt a vague melancholy sifting over him, saddened, in the face of this rampant youth, to realize his own diminished energies. He simply didn't have the strength, not for this one. This one, he saw, needed a younger man to take him in tow. Frege puffed out his cheeks with smoke, then exhaled, saying in a low, rasping voice,
Rus-sell
.

Wittgenstein looked up quizzically. Watery eyed with the smoke, Frege said, Work with Russell at Cambridge. He's the one doing the new work now. Write to him. You may use my name.

Frege roused himself from the chair and cleared his throat. Wittgenstein was still staring when the old logician looked back in good-natured dismay and said, On second thought, I will send Russell a note myself. Not to recommend you, you understand, but to warn him. That's all. Just a friendly note of warning.

Wittgenstein took Frege's advice: he wrote to Russell. Russell replied favorably, and by early September Wittgenstein was officially enrolled at Cambridge. Karl Wittgenstein, meanwhile, was fulminating over his son's latest letter formally notifying him of his intentions. Wittgenstein was in England finishing up his aeronautical work when he received his father's reply — a warning shot across the bow: