But other responses – and perhaps the best – would take years to ripen. They would form part of the great literature of the 1920s, and even later.
All the developments and episodes discussed so far in this chapter were direct responses to war. In the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the work he produced during the war was not a response to the fighting itself. At the same time, had not Wittgenstein been exposed to the real possibility of death, it is unlikely that he would have produced Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when he did, or that it would have had quite the tone that it did.
Wittgenstein enlisted on 7 August, the day after the Austrian declaration of war on Russia, and was assigned to an artillery regiment serving at Kraków on the eastern front.70 He later suggested that he went to war in a romantic mood, saying that he felt the experience of facing death would, in some indefinable manner, improve him (Rupert Brooke said much the same). On the first sight of the opposing forces, he confided in a letter, ‘Now I have the chance to be a decent human being, for I am standing eye to eye with death.’71
Wittgenstein was twenty-five when war broke out, one of eight children. His family was Jewish, wealthy, perfectly assimilated into Viennese society. Franz Grillparzer, the patriotic poet and dramatist, was a friend of Ludwig’s father, and Johannes Brahms gave piano lessons to both his mother and his aunt. The Wittgensteins’ musical evenings were well known in Vienna: Gustav Mahler and Bruno Walter were both regulars, and Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet received its first performance there. Margarete Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s sister, sat for Gustav Klimt, whose painting of her is full of gold, purple, and tumbling colours.72 Ironically, Ludwig, now the best remembered of the Wittgensteins, was originally regarded by other family members as the dullest. Margarete had her beauty; Hans, one of the older brothers, began composing at the age of four, by which time he could play the piano and the violin; and Rudolf, another older brother, went to Berlin to be an actor. Had Hans not disappeared, sailing off Chesapeake Bay in 1903, and Rudolf not taken cyanide in a Berlin bar after buying the pianist a drink and requesting him to play a popular song, ‘I Am Lost,’ Ludwig might never have shone.73 Both his brothers were tortured by the feeling that they had failed to live up to their father’s stiff demands that they pursue successful business careers. Rudolf was also tormented by what he felt was a developing homosexuality.
Ludwig was as fond of music as the rest of the family, but he was also the most technical and practical minded. As a result, he wasn’t sent to the grammar school in Vienna but to Realschule in Linz, a school chiefly known for the teaching of the history master, Leopold Pötsch, a rabid right-winger who regarded the Habsburg dynasty as ‘degenerate.’74 For him, loyalty to such an entity as the Habsburgs was absurd; instead he revered the more accessible völkisch nationalism of the Pan-German movement. There is no sign that Wittgenstein was ever attracted by Pötsch’s theories, but a fellow pupil, with whom he overlapped for a few months, certainly was. His name was Adolf Hitler. After Linz, Wittgenstein went to Berlin, where he became interested in philosophy. He also developed a fascination with aeronautics, and his father, still anxious for one of his sons to have a lucrative career, suggested he go to Manchester University in England, where there was an excellent engineering department. Ludwig duly enrolled in the engineering course as planned. He also attended the seminars of Horace Lamb, the professor of mathematics. It was in one of his seminars that Wittgenstein was introduced by a fellow student to Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. This book, as we have seen earlier, showed that mathematics and logic are the same. For Wittgenstein, Russell’s book was a revelation. He spent months studying The Principles and also Gottlob Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Fundamental Laws of Arithmetic).75 In the late summer of 1911 Wittgenstein travelled to Jena in Germany to visit Frege, a small man ‘who bounced around the room when he talked,’ who was impressed enough by the young Austrian to recommend that he study under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge.76 Wittgenstein’s approach to Russell coincided with the Englishman just having finished Principia Mathematica. The young Viennese arrived in Cambridge in 1911, and to begin with people’s opinions of him were mixed. Nicknamed ‘Witter-Gitter,’ he was generally considered dull, with a laboured Germanic sense of humour. Like Arnold Schoenberg and Oskar Kokoschka he was an autodidact and didn’t care what people thought of him.77 But it soon got about that the pupil was rapidly overtaking the master, and when Russell arranged for Wittgenstein to be invited to join the Apostles, a highly secret and selective literary society dating back to 1820 and dominated at that time by Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes, ‘Cambridge realised that it had another genius on its hands.’78
By 1914, after he had been in Cambridge for three years, Wittgenstein, or Luki as he was called, began to formulate his own theory of logic.79 But then, in the long vacation, he went home to Vienna, war was declared, and he was trapped. What happened over the next few years was a complex interplay between Wittgenstein’s ideas and the danger he was in at the front. Early on in the war he conceived what he called the picture theory of language – and it was this that was refined during the Austrian army’s chaotic retreat under Russian attack. In 1916, however, Wittgenstein was transferred to the front as an ordinary soldier after the Russians attacked the Central Powers on their Baltic flank. He proved brave, asking to be assigned to the most dangerous place, the observation post on the front line, which guaranteed he would be a target. ‘Was shot at,’ his diary records on 29 April that year.80 Despite all this, he wrote some philosophy in those months, until June at least, when Russia launched its long-planned Brusilov offensive and the fighting turned heavy. At this point Wittgenstein’s diaries show him becoming more philosophical, even religious. At the end of july the Austrians were driven back yet again, this time into the Carpathian Mountains, in icy cold, rain, and fog.81 Wittgenstein was shot at once more, recommended for the Austrian equivalent of the Victoria Cross (he was given a slightly lesser honour) and promoted three times, eventually to officer.82 At officer school he revised his book in collaboration with a kindred spirit, Paul Engelmann, and then returned as a Leutnant on the Italian front.83 He completed the book during a period of leave in 1918 after his uncle Paul had bumped into him at a railway station where Wittgenstein was contemplating suicide. The uncle persuaded his nephew to go with him to Hallein, where he lived.84 There Wittgenstein finished the new version before returning to his unit. Before the manuscript was published, however, Wittgenstein was taken prisoner in Italy, with half a million other soldiers. While incarcerated in a concentration camp, he concluded that his book had solved all the outstanding problems of philosophy and that he would give up the discipline after the war and become a schoolteacher. He also decided to give away his fortune. He did both.