![]() Helene married a pillar of the Austrian Protestant establishment and had many children. Gretl married a rich American who succumbed to syphilitic psychosis and lost much of his fortune in the 1929 stock-market crash. Sister Hermine, the eldest, remained unmarried and tended the flame at the Wittgensteins’ Vienna homestead, writing a sanitized family memoir in her old age. Three of Paul’s older brothers-Hans, Rudolf and Kurt-committed suicide, possibly as a result of their “sulphurous” relationship with their father, while youngest son Ludwig became a philosopher of cult status. All the siblings were marvelously musical, perhaps, Waugh speculates, as a means of communicating with their diffident mother. Waugh begins and ends with his evident favorite among the siblings: Paul, the artistic middle child, who lost an arm in World War I and nonetheless went on to become a famous pianist. He focuses on the nine children of maverick entrepreneur Karl Wittgenstein, who in defiance of a difficult father forged a career as a wildly successful steel magnate. ![]() The author is quite taken with the messy, convoluted genealogy of Vienna’s Wittgenstein family, enormously wealthy industrialists, philanthropists and artists. ![]() Having dealt with four generations of his famous family in Fathers and Sons (2007, etc.), Waugh delves into another quirky, brilliant, ill-starred clan. ![]()
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