The World as I Found It (89 page)

But now as he stood before her, she found nothing to say. Gretl's social gifts quite failed her in the face of the big, gale-voiced regimental sergeant. Gretl wanted to ask him what he thought of himself in his black suit gleaming with SS lightning runes and death's heads. She wanted to ask him how many defenseless Jews he had kicked with those big boots, strutting about like God Almighty. And most of all she wanted to ask him what had happened to his kindly Christian God — why He had turned so vengeful and Yahweh-ish, turning a good man into a beast? But she was too sick and frightened to say a word. And Max himself seemed at a loss for words. At first, Gretl thought he was testing her nerves, the way he seemed to stare through her. He was standing stock still, but his suit was so tight that he creaked like a windlass as he faintly rocked in that black pistol harness. He must have been forty or more but he didn't look it, trim and vigorous as ever. His hair was cropped short, and there was a red dent in his long Dürer nose that she didn't remember — token of some brawl, no doubt. Lightly, his restless hand was patting his thigh — patting it, she thought, as if with an absent riding crop. Max then took a breath — clearly this was extremely hard for him — and said with a glowering, exerted look:

I am not here in any official capacity, Frau Gretl. I come here out of duty to you and your good brother to tell you that you are under suspicion and must leave Vienna as soon as possible. I can see to papers or any other arrangements that must be made for you and Frau Mining and Stefan to safely leave Austria. I can also give you money if you need it. But you must not wait. Please. In a week, I may be unable to help you.

Max looked like he wanted to say something further, but something stopped him and he just stood there, his boots creaking, looking captive and extremely uncomfortable now that he had unburdened himself. He could not have been there five minutes. Afterward, Gretl thought that she must have thanked him — if only automatically — and yet she couldn't remember saying another word. Handing her a blank card with his telephone number written on it, Max told her to call him, saying that if she did not, he would call on her again in two days' time.

That was the extent of it. Having reached the ragged limits of entreaties, words or even looks, Max then gazed at her — looked
out
, it seemed, with those two trapped little eyes. Gretl did not say good-bye to him as he turned and walked out the door, black as the devil. It occurred to her that he must have come at personal risk, and yet she did not feel grateful for anything but the fact that he left quickly, without pausing to pass pleasantries or good wishes. Yes, that was like Max — he would not play false by invoking any of life's ordinary offices under intolerable circumstances. Done like a true soldier.

Max wrote Wittgenstein after his visit. His letter arrived the day before Gretl's did.

M
AX'S LETTER
cast Wittgenstein into a depression that only deepened the next day when he received Gretl's letter, telling him all about Max and the first incident with the Gestapo, which she said she had kept from him, not wanting to upset him with things he was powerless to change.

Gretl, in any case, said she had decided to take Max up on his offer of safe passage and told Wittgenstein that she would contact him once they were safely out of Austria. Wittgenstein passed an anxious week before he finally received a wire from Gretl saying that the three of them — Mining, Stefan and herself — were in Switzerland, where they planned to stay a month before leaving for New York, the only city in the world that met Gretl's basic criteria of being great, cosmopolitan and an ocean away from Europe.

Having his family out of Vienna relieved Wittgenstein's immediate fears, but it still did not break the depression that Max's letter had brought on. What especially bothered him was Max's reproachful question of why he had never admitted his Jewish origins. Wittgenstein felt like a moral coward — a liar. It made no difference that he had never actually denied his Jewishness. The fact was, he had never acknowledged or firmly stood up for it with Max, Father Haft or other anti-Semites. Even in England, where prejudices were more subtle, his Jewishness had been a matter of fairly conscious omission — which was to say, he had lied.

Now, once and for all, Wittgenstein wanted to see the truth of his life, no matter what the truth was or what it cost him. It was not for mere goodness' sake that Wittgenstein resolved to do this: it was a matter of moral survival. Not since his days on the eastern front had he been so shaken. Now, in this summer of darkness, with his native country having fallen, Wittgenstein's past was seeping over him with thoughts of Max, the radical, self-anointed Christian wearing SS death's heads, and Otto Weininger, the sex-crossed, self-hating Jew who had written
Sex and Character
, a book that for Max had been an explosive. Yet here, too, Wittgenstein saw that he had nobody to blame but himself: it was he who had introduced Max to Weininger, having once shown Max a copy of
Sex and Character
while they were living in Trattenbach.

Weininger had stimulated Wittgenstein's own thinking for good and bad, and in directions not necessarily suggested by the poisonous major themes of
Sex and Character
. Weininger was only twenty-two when he had written the book, and he committed suicide in the fall of 1901, not long after its critical reception — indifference and opprobrium, mixed with ecstatic acclaim from several prominent anti-Semites and misogynists, including Strindberg, who said the precocious young doctor had finally solved in his virile book the great problem of Woman and Sex.

Despite its obvious faults, and for all its haste and malice,
Sex and Character
was a dark work of genius that was as extraordinary in its scope as in its ambition to radically reorient thinking about questions of sex and ethics, freedom and will, crime and salvation, slavery and emancipation and, ultimately, the fate of mankind. For Weininger, the way was narrow and labyrinthine, growing progressively darker and more airless to the sarcophagus, wherein lay the truth. Life was man's Original Sin. Good was guilt, shame was health, and death, which lay beyond the goring poles of sex, was man's salvation. Eternity was man's rightful woman. Woman was man's death and cross. Thus, Weininger said, the female sex could be grossly divided into prostitute or mother, but in either case woman amounted to the same thing. Completely unconscious and malevolent, utterly without soul or will and unknown even to herself, woman was an erotic ghost — a syphilitic orifice capable only of sucking out man's soul, pulling man down from higher pursuits with her shrill, idle desires for sex, pleasure, children, perpetuation — life. Spiritually, said Weininger, the most debased man was incomparably higher than the most advanced woman. Yet complicating these distinctions, Weininger said, was the fact that both men and women were bisexual, such that each man and each woman, to a greater or lesser degree, contained the seeds of the other sex, a fact that accounted for why there were masculine women and feminine men and all shades in between.

In his vaunting ambition, Weininger went on to discuss more than just these ideas in his book, which proceeded from a discussion of male and female plasmas to the laws of sexual attraction; from questions of homosexuality and pederasty to “characterology,” his own “science” of character; from discussions of genius to considerations of memory, logic and ethics — and from there to still other questions: the problem of the “I,” motherhood and prostitution, erotics and aesthetics, the essentially female nature of the Jew, and finally the ultimate problem of woman, the ruin of mankind. Here, the moralist was quick to add that this tragedy was man's fault, not woman's. Devoid of soul or conscience, and without any intellectual or moral faculties to speak of, woman could not be held accountable for her sirenlike temptations. Man had let her pull him down with her Judas kiss.

For Weininger, there was no middle ground in this question. What was called for was a complete spiritual revaluation of society. There must be an irrevocable sundering of the sexes — a draconian spiritual hygiene. Certainly, Weininger said caustically, there was no
moral
reason to perpetuate the human species — what man had ever entered into the act of coitus with the idea of perpetuating the race? The only thing perpetuated thus, he said, was universal guilt and anguish, the insolvable riddle of life. Rather, said Weininger, the only decent course was to renounce sex entirely and thus to allow humankind to wither like a dead fruit so that Spirit could at last flourish and ascend out of the world.

Above all else, Weininger's book was a young man's effort — Wittgenstein found it inconceivable that an older man, accustomed to the realities of compromise, could have produced such a work. Wittgenstein could remember reading Weininger's remorseless self-autopsy as a boy and even as a young man, and wanting to die. Weininger was nothing if not searingly honest, nothing if not pure and burning in his insane idealism, which was less a moral state than a self-imposed death sentence: no inquisitor could have prosecuted his case with less pity when faced with what he took to be the rancid and pitiable facts of humanity as embodied in his own foul life.

At fifty, Wittgenstein saw Weininger much differently. He acknowledged Weininger's influence and saw that there was much in his hasty book, besides the more sensational themes, that was highly original and worthwhile — if only as a goad to thinking. Wittgenstein did find Weininger philosophically stimulating in his discussions of logic and ethics, genius and character and other more general questions. On the other hand, Wittgenstein could clearly see Weininger's manifold faults. He could see the obvious errors, glosses and unconscious evasions, could see the artful but forced conclusions, the logical leaps and wild exaggerations of legitimate points. So too could he feel Weininger's thwarted sexual drives and tortured doubleness, could feel, in the overheated, often byzantine prose, the alternating fear and exaltation of Weininger's pathological egotism — his overarching ambition to write a great and revolutionary book that would not so much save the world as cure it into extinction.

At times, Wittgenstein could even laugh at Weininger. Once, Wittgenstein had said to Max that everything Weininger said was absolutely true — if one put a
not
before it. Wittgenstein could still hear himself saying that it was the enormity of Weininger's mistake that was great. But this mistake, Wittgenstein saw, was also his own, and now he too had been bitten by the stretching and circling of Weininger's black prophecy. For Wittgenstein,
Sex and Character
was one of those books read in youth that, for better and worse, hold a lifelong and uneasy claim to one's moral and mental map. Certainly in his youth, the book had been too rich and ripe for his delicate and enervated constitution.
Sex and Character
entered his blood like a malaria, stimulating dreams that he now saw he would spend his life periodically sweating out.

Thinking of Weininger then in that period after the
Anschluss
, Wittgenstein saw the fantastic delusion of his own life. Toward sundown he would walk in the Cambridge Backs, through tall brakes and drifts of green. The frogs would be starting with a roaring. Darkness would be collecting in the drains. Toward the breathing dark, in coves of cool above the water, were little globes of flies that he would brush from his eyes. Each year, there were always the same flies. Each year, there were always the same dreams, always the same slow trail of days to be brushed from the eyes so that one might capture a few good things like lightning bugs before it was too light to see and then too dark ever to go back.

If only he could have been an inch higher than the truth, or just to the right or the left of it. But he couldn't climb outside his own skin or exceed his own height, nor could he see his own sin while knee-deep in it. And here, when his own influence was mounting, Wittgenstein saw that he was not a single man but a composite — a concatenation of the various influences that went under the name or tag of fate known as
Ludwig Wittgenstein
. This was only a further burden, because with what he took, consciously or unconsciously, of another life to make a mental life of his own, he accepted also a portion of that person's fate, evading and accepting it at the same time. In this sense, then, Weininger was certainly a part of him, just as he and Weininger were both, in some way, a part of Max. This, he saw, was the burden and paradox of influence: to wonder what truly is yours while yet accepting responsibility for it.