![]() ![]() Three of the male children - Rudi, Hans, and Kurt - committed suicide. Wittgenstein’s children - Hermine, Gretl, Helene, Rudolph, Paul, Hans, Kurt, and Ludwig - all displayed precocious musical talent, but Paul was the only one to pursue performing as a vocation. ![]() In this cultural hothouse little time was devoted to learning about the practicalities of the world. His wife Leopoldine (“Poldi”) was apparently not much of a parent but, like the entire family, deeply devoted to music, and the Wittgenstein’s Winter Palais on the Alleegasse in Vienna’s Wieden district was often filled with the cream of Europe’s musical crop: Brahms, Mahler, Richard Strauss and others played with - and for - the family. Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein follows the fortunes of the nine children of Karl Wittgenstein through every hapless chapter of their sad yet intriguing story.Ī Jewish convert to Catholicism, as a businessman industrialist “Karl was a chancer whose great fortune was accumulated as much by the successful outcomes of the big risks he took as by his hard work and lively intuition,” Waugh writes. They were also self-destructively quarrelsome, suicidally deranged, unworldly, wracked with illnesses both psychological and physical, and constitutionally incapable of being responsible stewards of their then-vast wealth. The Wittgensteins were one of the wealthiest and most culturally significant families in Vienna in the first half of the 20th century. ![]()
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