Magazine “History” · Reading time approx. 10 min

Nine children, a Viennese palace full of music, a father who tolerated no contradiction — and three sons who took their own lives. What the Wittgensteins show is not an inheritance, but a pattern.

A house where Brahms had been a guest

Anyone who rang the bell on the Alleegasse in turn-of-the-century Vienna — today the Argentinierstraße in the fourth district — was entering one of the most remarkable private houses in the city. In the music room of the Palais Wittgenstein stood instruments that Johannes Brahms had played; over the years, the guests at the family’s private concerts included Clara Schumann, the violinist Joseph Joachim, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg. Paintings by Gustav Klimt and Giovanni Segantini hung on the walls; sculptures by Auguste Rodin and Max Klinger’s bust of Beethoven stood in the rooms.

All of it was paid for with steel. Karl Wittgenstein (1847–1913) had worked his way to the top of the Austro-Hungarian iron and steel industry within a few decades and was at times considered one of the richest men in the monarchy. He financed what mattered to him: for the construction of the Secession Building, the exhibition hall of the Vienna Secession erected in 1897, he gave 120,000 crowns. One can therefore read the Wittgensteins as what they were on the outside — a family at the summit of bourgeois culture.

One can also read them differently. Of the five sons of this house, three took their own lives.

The father: ascent as a way of life

Karl Wittgenstein had been no obedient child himself. As a young man he ran away from home, went to New York and spent two years there scraping by as, among other things, a waiter, a violin teacher and a night watchman, before returning and beginning the career that made him an industrialist. This life story — rupture, self-assertion, success — became for his children not a model but a measure.

The plan for the sons was settled early: they were to take over the business. Not music, not science, not art — even though there was music in the house every day and Karl himself was a generous patron of artists. What he supported in others he would not permit his own sons to make a profession. The four daughters — Hermine (1874–1950), Helene (1879–1956), Margarethe (1882–1958) and a sister who died early — grew up in a setting where education was a matter of course, but a professional career was not envisaged.

Of the nine children born to Karl Wittgenstein and Leopoldine Kalmus, one died at birth. Eight grew up: five sons, three daughters. The youngest was Ludwig, born in 1889.

Hans and Rudolf: two sons in two years

Johannes, known as Hans, was the eldest of the brothers, born in 1877, and by all accounts highly musical. Studying at a conservatoire was out of the question for him; his father insisted on a career in the business. In 1902 Hans left the family and went to America. In May of that same year he disappeared from a boat in Chesapeake Bay. His death was never conclusively explained; the family and most biographers assume suicide. He was 24 years old.

Two years later, in 1904, Rudolf, the third-eldest son, died in Berlin. He was 22 and, according to the widely repeated account, could not face the impending exposure of his homosexuality — at a time when it was a criminal offence and could be socially devastating. Shortly before his death he had sought advice at a counselling centre in Berlin.

Within two years the family had lost two grown sons. It was not spoken of publicly. The names of the two vanished from conversation in the house — behaviour typical of bourgeois families of the period, and one that carried a particular message for the remaining siblings: what has happened is not to be named.

Kurt: the third, 1918

Kurt Wittgenstein, born in 1878, was the brother who came closest to following his father’s plan. He worked in industry, went to the United States and served in the First World War as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army. In October 1918, in the weeks when the Austro-Hungarian front in Italy was disintegrating and entire units were dissolving, he shot himself. According to the account handed down in the family literature, this happened after his soldiers had refused to obey orders.

His youngest brother, Ludwig, was taken prisoner by the Italians on the same front a few weeks later and spent nine months in captivity. Ludwig too, as he later indicated on several occasions, contemplated suicide at various points in his life. He died of cancer in 1951.

What stands in a single sibling row, then, is something a genogram makes visible at once: five brothers, three suicides, and a fourth with documented suicidal thoughts.

Genogram of the Wittgenstein family: Karl and Leopoldine with their nine children in birth order
The Wittgenstein family as a genogram after McGoldrick & Gerson: square = male, circle = female, ✕ = deceased. Siblings appear in birth order, eldest on the left. Dora (reduced symbol) died at birth in 1876. Hans, Kurt and Rudolf took their own lives — the standard provides no symbol of its own for suicide; here it can be read from the life dates: 25, 40 and 23 years against 62 to 77 for the remaining siblings.

The survivors

What distinguishes this family as much as its losses is the sheer force of what those who remained achieved.

Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961) was a concert pianist. On 23 August 1914 he was shot in the right elbow in Galicia; the arm had to be amputated. Instead of ending his career, he rebuilt it: he developed a left-hand technique and commissioned the most important composers of his time to write works for the left hand alone. The most famous of these is Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, composed in 1929–1930, which Paul premiered in Vienna on 5 January 1932. That he altered the score to suit his own ideas and fell out with Ravel over it is part of the story — the will to arrange things by one’s own measure was no isolated trait in this family.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) became one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. And in 1919 he did something that, in the context of this family, is more than an anecdote: after his father’s death he renounced his entire inheritance. Part of it went to charity, the rest to his siblings. He never regretted the decision and never reversed it — the son who stepped out completely from the fortune that held the family together and put it under pressure at the same time.

Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein (1882–1958), known as Gretl, was the most intellectually and socially mobile of the sisters. Klimt painted her portrait in 1905 on the occasion of her wedding — the picture hangs in Munich today. She took an interest in psychoanalysis and knew Sigmund Freud personally. For her, Ludwig designed the house on the Kundmanngasse in Vienna together with the architect Paul Engelmann between 1926 and 1928, a severely geometric building on which he worked with the same uncompromising rigour as on his philosophy.

Hermine (1874–1950) and Helene (1879–1956), the two eldest sisters, held the family together — in practical terms, in material terms, and in what today would be called memory work. Hermine’s notes remain one of the most important sources on the family’s history.

1938: the price of origin

After the “Anschluss” of Austria in March 1938, the family was confronted with a question it had considered settled for generations. On their father’s side the Wittgensteins descended from Jewish ancestors; Karl’s father had converted to Protestantism and the children were raised Catholic. Under the Nuremberg Laws that counted for nothing. Hermine and Helene, who had stayed in Vienna, were classified as Jews.

What followed is one of the strangest episodes in the family’s history: for months the siblings — with Gretl, an American citizen by marriage, leading the talks — negotiated with German authorities over a reassessment of their grandfather’s ancestry. The bargaining chips were the foreign currency, securities and gold held by a family trust in Switzerland. In the end a deal was struck: the family handed a substantial part of its foreign assets to the German Reich, including 1.2 million Swiss francs; in return, the responsible Reich agency reclassified the Wittgensteins as “Mischlinge” in August 1939. Hermine and Helene survived the war in Vienna.

A fortune that a father had built up to make his family independent was spent, thirty years after his death, on allowing two of his daughters to stay alive.

What only becomes visible in the genogram

Told chronologically, this story is a chain of misfortunes: a disappearance in 1902, a death in Berlin in 1904, a shot at the front in 1918, and in between an amputated arm and a renounced inheritance. Draw the same family as a genogram — generations one above the other, siblings side by side — and a different picture emerges.

The sibling row becomes legible. Three of the five brothers died by suicide, all three between the ages of 22 and 40, all three at a point where it had to be decided whether they would follow their father’s design for their lives. The daughters — same parents, same house, same origins — were never covered by that design in the first place. They stood under different expectations, and none of them took her own life. A genogram makes this difference visible as structure, not as coincidence.

The transmission becomes legible. The father had broken away himself, had run off, had asserted himself against his origins and had been successful in doing so. What he passed on to his sons was not only a business but an assignment: be like this. Helm Stierlin coined the term delegation for such assignments — the child takes on a mission it did not choose and cannot abandon without breaking loyalty. The Wittgensteins show what happens when that mission excludes one’s own talent: Hans wanted to be a musician and was not allowed to be.

And the rule becomes legible. After 1902 and 1904, the dead brothers were no longer spoken of in that house. The silence was not a side effect of grief; it was the form in which the family dealt with it — and for Kurt, for Paul, for Ludwig it meant that no place was provided for their own distress. In genogram work this is one of the most revealing questions: not only what happened, but what was no longer talked about afterwards.

One caveat belongs to this family as much as the facts do: three suicides in one sibling row are no evidence of an inherited disposition towards suicide, and a genogram is not an instrument for predicting such a thing. What a genogram shows are relationships, expectations, positions and patterns of speaking and staying silent — things that can be changed. That is precisely why the Wittgenstein story is also a story about the survivors: Paul, who reinvented his career with one hand; Ludwig, who stepped out of the fortune; Hermine, who wrote down what nobody else did. In the same family, under the same pressure, there were ways out. Those are in the genogram too.

If you are struggling yourself: Reading about suicide can be distressing. In Germany, Telefonseelsorge is available free of charge around the clock on 0800 111 0 111 and 0800 111 0 222; in Austria, Telefonseelsorge on 142; in Switzerland, Die Dargebotene Hand on 143. In other countries, please contact your local crisis line.

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