Wittgenstein's Nephew (3 page)

came to myself
, as it were, in the lung clinic, while Paul came to himself in the mental clinic. Just as the mental specialists again and again ruined Paul and then got his energies going again, so the lung specialists again and again ruined me and then got my energies going again. Paul, I am bound to say, was ultimately conditioned by madhouses, while I, it seems, have been conditioned by lung hospitals. He was educated by madmen for long periods of his life, I by lung patients; he developed in the company of madmen, I in the company of lung patients; and to develop among madmen is not so different from developing among lung
patients. He learned the crucial lessons of life and existence from the madmen, whereas I learned my equally crucial lessons from the lung patients—he from mental disease, I from lung disease. It might be said that Paul succumbed to madness because one day he lost control, just as I succumbed to lung disease because I one day lost control. Paul went mad because he suddenly pitted himself against everything and lost his balance, just as one day I too lost my balance through pitting myself against everything—the only difference being that he went
mad
, whereas I, for the selfsame reason, contracted
lung disease
. But Paul was no madder than I am: I am at least as mad as he was, as he was said to be, though I have lung disease in addition to my madness. The only difference between us is that Paul allowed himself to be
utterly
dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness; one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine. Paul never controlled his madness, but I have always controlled mine—which possibly means that my madness is in fact much madder than Paul's. Paul had only his madness to live on; I have my lung disease as well as my madness. I have exploited both, and one day I suddenly made them
the mainspring of my existence
. For decades Paul
lived
the part of the madman; similarly I
lived
the part of the victim of lung disease. Just as for decades Paul
played
the madman, so I
played
the victim of lung disease; and just as he
exploited
his role for his purposes, so I
exploited
my role for mine. Some people spend all their lives cherishing some great possession or some exceptional art, daring to exploit it by every
possible means and making it, for as long as they live, the sole content of their lives: in the same way Paul spent all his life cherishing and exploiting his madness and using every possible means to make it the content of his life. Similarly I cherished and exploited both my lung disease and my madness, which together may be said to constitute my art. However, just as Paul became increasingly ruthless toward his madness, so I became increasingly ruthless toward my lung disease and my madness, and as our ruthlessness toward our diseases increased, so did our ruthlessness toward the world around us, which naturally became increasingly ruthless toward us. The consequence was that we ended up, at diminishing intervals, in our respective institutions—Paul in mental institutions, I in pulmonary institutions. Yet whereas our respective institutions had always been far apart, in 1967 we suddenly came together on the Wilhelminenberg, and it was there that our friendship
deepened
. Had we not ended up on the Wilhelminenberg in 1967, there might have been no such
deepening
of our friendship. Having abstained from friendship for many years, I suddenly found myself with a real friend, who understood even the maddest escapades of my far from simple and indeed quite complex mind, and was prepared to become involved in them—something that the others around me were never willing to do, because they lacked the capacity. I had only to touch on a subject, as they say, and our thoughts would develop in the right direction, and this was true not only of music, which was his specialism and mine, but of every other subject. I had never known anyone with a sharper talent for observation or a greater capacity for thought. The trouble with Paul
was that he was as profligate with his intellectual fortune as he was with his financial fortune, but his intellect, unlike his finances, was inexhaustible. He never ceased to throw it out of the window, yet it never ceased to grow; the more he threw it out of the window, the more it grew. It is characteristic of people like Paul, who are at first merely crazy and are finally pronounced insane, that their intellectual fortune increases as fast as they throw it out of the window (of the mind). As they throw more and more of it out of the window, it goes on building up in the mind and naturally becomes more and more dangerous. Eventually they cannot keep up the pace, with the result that the mind can no longer endure the buildup and finally explodes. Paul's mind quite simply exploded because he could not discard his intellectual fortune fast enough. In the same way Nietzsche's mind exploded, just as all the other mad philosophical minds exploded, because they could no longer sustain the pace. Their intellectual fortune builds up at a faster and fiercer rate than they can discard it, then one day the mind explodes and they are dead. In the same way Paul's mind exploded one day and he was dead. We were alike and yet completely different. Paul, for instance, had a concern for the poor and was
also
touched by them: I too had a concern for the poor, but I was not touched by them; my mind works in such a way that I have never been able to be touched as Paul was. On one occasion Paul burst into tears at the sight of a child squatting by the Traunsee. I saw at once that it had actually been stationed there by a scheming mother in order to arouse sympathy and a bad conscience in passersby and induce them to open their wallets. Unlike Paul, I
saw not only the wretched child, shamefully exploited by a greedy mother, but the mother herself, crouching in the bushes and counting a wad of bills in an appallingly businesslike manner. Paul saw only the child and its wretchedness, not the mother in the background, counting the takings. He actually cried and gave the child a hundred-schilling bill, feeling ashamed of his own existence, as it were. While I saw through
the whole scene
, Paul saw only the surface—the distress of the innocent child, not the monstrous mother in the background. This shameful exploitation of my friend's good nature was bound to remain concealed from him, while I could not fail to see it. It was typical of him that he saw only the superficial picture of the suffering child and parted with the hundred-schilling bill, while I could not help seeing through the whole scene and naturally gave the child nothing. And it was typical of our relationship that I kept my observation to myself, wishing to spare my friend, and did not tell him about the unspeakable mother counting her money behind the bushes and forcing her child to act out this charade of suffering. I left him with his superficial view of the scene; I let him give the child the hundred-schilling bill and go on blubbering, and even later I forbore to enlighten him. He often referred to this incident and recounted how he had given a hundred-schilling bill to a poor lonely child (in my presence), but I never disclosed the truth of the matter. Where the wretchedness—or ostensible wretchedness—of human beings (and humanity) was concerned, Paul never saw beneath the surface; he never saw the whole picture as I did, and the likelihood is, I fancy, that throughout his life he quite simply refused
to see the whole picture, contenting himself with surface appearances for reasons of self-protection. I was never content with surface appearances—also for reasons of self-protection. That was the difference between us. In the first half of his life Paul squandered millions in the belief that he was helping the helpless (and thereby himself!), but in reality he squandered those millions on the basest and unworthiest causes—though in doing so he was of course helping himself. He continued to squander his money on those who were supposedly destitute and deserving of charity until he had none left, until he was thrown upon the mercy of his family, but their mercy was short-lived and quickly withdrawn, since mercy was to them an alien concept. Paul, for his sins, was born into one of Austria's three or four richest families, whose millions automatically multiplied year by year under the monarchy, until the proclamation of the republic led to the stagnation of the Wittgenstein fortune. Paul very soon threw away his share, more or less in the belief that by doing so he could combat poverty. The result was that for most of his life he had virtually nothing, being persuaded, like his uncle Ludwig, that it was his duty to distribute his
dirty
millions among his
spotless
fellowmen and so ensure their salvation and his own. Paul would walk through the streets with wads of hundred-schilling bills in order to distribute those dirty bills among his
spotless
fellow citizens. But the recipients were nearly always like the Traunsee child: wherever he found people to press his money on,
in order to help them
and
to make himself feel good
, they were always
Traunsee children
. When his money was gone, his relatives supported him for a
very short time, acting out of a certain perverse sense of propriety, not out of generosity and not as a matter of course, because they too, it must be said, saw not just the superficial aspect of his situation but
the whole dreadful picture
. For a whole century the Wittgensteins had produced weapons and machines, until finally they produced Ludwig and Paul—the famous, epoch-making philosopher and the madman who, in Vienna at least, was equally famous and possibly more so. Paul the madman was just as philosophical as his uncle Ludwig, while Ludwig the philosopher was just as mad as his nephew Paul. Ludwig became famous through his philosophy, Paul through his madness. The one was
possibly
more philosophical, the other
possibly
more mad. But it may well be that the philosophical Wittgenstein is regarded as a philosopher merely because he set his philosophy down on paper and not his madness, and that Paul is regarded as a madman because he suppressed his philosophy instead of publishing it, and displayed only his madness. Both were quite extraordinary men with quite extraordinary brains; the one published his brain, and the other did not. I would go so far as to say that whereas the one
published
his brain, the other
put his brain into practice
. And where is the distinction between a brain that is published and constantly publishing itself and a brain that is constantly putting itself into practice? Yet if Paul had published anything, it would have been quite different from anything that Ludwig published, just as Ludwig would have practiced a form of madness quite different from Paul's. In either case, the Wittgenstein name guaranteed a certain standard, indeed the highest standard. Paul the madman unquestionably achieved a standard equal to
that of Ludwig the philosopher: the one represents a high point in philosophy and the history of ideas, the other a high point in the history of madness—that is, if we insist on adhering to the conventional designations of philosophy, history, ideas, and madness, which are nothing but perverse historical concepts. In the Hermann Pavilion I was completely cut off from my friend, even though he was only two hundred yards away. I longed for nothing more intensely than to see Paul again, having for so many months been deprived of all contact with his mind and having almost suffocated among hundreds of other minds, which for the most part had nothing to offer. For let us not deceive ourselves: most of the minds we associate with are housed in heads that have little more to offer than overgrown potatoes, stuck on top of whining and tastelessly clad bodies and eking out a pathetic existence that does not even merit our pity. But the day will come when I really will visit Paul, I thought, and I made some notes about things that I intended to discuss with him, things that I had been unable to discuss with anyone for so many months. At that time I found it quite simply impossible, without Paul, to have any conversation about music or philosophy or politics or mathematics. If my musical thinking became moribund, for instance, I had only to pay Paul a visit in order to revive it. The poor fellow is locked up in the Ludwig Pavilion, I thought, possibly even in a straitjacket, when he would so much like to be at the opera. He was the most passionate operagoer Vienna has ever had, as the
cognoscenti
know. He was an opera fanatic, and even when he had become totally impoverished and finally embittered (which was inevitable), he managed to afford daily visits to the opera,
even if it meant standing through the performance. Even when he was gravely ill he would stand through the six hours of
Tristan
and still have the strength to shout “Bravo” or to whistle louder than anyone before or since. He was feared on opening nights. If he was enthusiastic he carried the whole house with him by beginning to applaud a few seconds before the rest. If, on the other hand, he led them in whistling, the biggest and most expensive productions would be flops, because
he
wanted them to be, because
he
was in a particular mood. I can make a show a success whenever I want, given the right conditions, he would say, and I can also make it a total flop, given the right conditions—and the conditions are always right—by being the first to shout “Bravo” or the first to whistle. For decades the Viennese did not realize that Paul was ultimately the author of their operatic triumphs, just as he was the author of the failures at the opera house on the Ring, failures that could be utterly disastrous if he chose. His approval or disapproval had nothing to do with objectivity, however, but had only to do with his capriciousness and volatility—in other words, his madness. Many Viennese conductors whom he could not stand fell into his trap; he would whistle and shout at them, actually foaming at the mouth. It was only with Karajan, whom he detested, that he met his match. Karajan was too great a genius to be so much as irritated by Paul. Having observed and studied Karajan for decades, I regard him as the most important conductor of the century, along with Schuricht, whom I