THE HOUSE OF WITTGENSTEIN: A FAMILY AT WAR
By Alexander Waugh
Doubleday, $28.95, 333 pages, illus.
Reviewed by Martin Rubin, Washington Times, May 4, 2009
In “The House of Wittgenstein,” Mr. Waugh has, indeed, taken on a tribe about as different from his own as you might find. . . . And if all [steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein’s] children were bright, two of them were bona fide geniuses: Paul, one of the finest concert pianists of his generation, who managed to keep on playing splendidly with one hand after losing an arm during combat service with the Austro-Hungarian army against czarist Russia in 1914; and Ludwig, widely considered – by his peers and others – the greatest of 20th-century philosophers. . . .
If the book has a fault, it is the author’s inability or unwillingness to engage or sufficiently elucidate the nature of Ludwig’s accomplishments as a philosopher. Given that he is for most readers the most famous of the Wittgenstein family, this leaves a hole at the book’s core.
Mr. Waugh has no such trouble with Paul. A devoted amateur pianist himself, he has written knowledgeably about music and brings to his discussion of Paul’s career a host of empathetic virtues. When he writes near the beginning of the book that “Clammy fingers and cold hands figure in every pianist’s worst dream. … The sweaty-fingered pianist is slave to his caution. If his hands are too cold, the finger muscles will stiffen. Coldness in the bones does not drive sweat from the skin and in the worst instances the fingers may be immobilized by cold while remaining slippery with sweat” – you know that he is surely on home ground.