Familienerinnerung by Hermine Wittgenstein (review)

Discussion and criticism of most cultural figures generally proceed along settled lines of debate, so that in assessing the recent upsurge of interest in Stefan Zweig, for example, it isn't necessary to reinvent the wheel. Readers are able to negotiate fairly clear parameters of evaluation. Established categories of discourse do not preclude revisionist views, of course, but even revisionists set out along the usual approach routes. In some cases, however, commentators are uncertain or even bewildered. W. G. Sebald pointed out more than once, for example, that critics simply do not know what to say about Peter Handke: "An wenigen Beispielen ist das Missverhältnis zwischen Kultur und Kulturbetrieb deutlicher geworden als an dem Peter Handkes" (Unheimliche Heimat: Essays zur österreichischen Literatur, 162). Or in the case of H. C. Artmann, Waltraut Schwarz points out in the new Bio-Bibliographisches Lexikon der Literatur Österreichs that almost all commentators agree that his dizzying plenitude is held together by a glue that unifies the whole oeuvre but that no one can say what this glue is made of (1:227).

Ludwig Witt genstein fits this latter category of a cultural phenomenon, a protean creator whom no one quite knows how to fathom. It would be overstating the matter to say that there needs to be a unified field theory reconciling all aspects of Wittgenstein's activity—he might well rank, along with Goethe, as one of the very last universal geniuses—but discussions of him could end up reminding us of the proverbial group of blind men who visit the circus to find out what the elephant is like. One feels the tail, another the trunk, the third a leg, the fourth an ear, each coming away certain that he alone has the one true understanding of the animal. Logical positivists and structuralists decry any resort to biography, for instance, but in excluding it they miss the purport of the famous last proposition in the Tractatus, which not only allows but encourages a mysticism that discursive language cannot enter but poetry can. If the extreme formalists stopped to study Wittgenstein's relations to Trakl, they would have to start operating from different presuppositions. Reversing the token, scholars of literature are eager to rush in and "explain" what Wittgenstein's philosophy "really" means in light of literary categories often unsupported by training in linguistics. A justifiable interest by queer theorists has been pointedly ignored so far, and while any ideologically based method is bound to be limited, what is one to make of Wittgenstein's declaration, when asked whom he would like to meet in the United States, that he wanted to be introduced to Betty Hutton and Carmen Miranda, two gay icons? (Best not to ask any members of his family about this.) Nor have we even touched on Wittgenstein's competencies in engineering, architecture, mathematics, music, and other areas without an understanding in which we are likely to become as falsely self-certain as one of those blind men.

These thoughts emerge from the appearance of the book now under review. Equipped by the editor with a foreword, a bibliography, an afterword, an admirably thorough commentary (323–477) that provides information on persons, places, and events mentioned in Hermine Wittgenstein's memoirs; and an editorial note on provenance (529–533), the volume is manifestly laying claim to scholarly status. Even so, it is published not as a work of research but as Belletristik, a category that in Europe accommodates autobiography and memoir. The decision on the publisher's part seems fair, since the supplements by Somavilla, conscientious and thoroughgoing as they are, function more as background information and orienting apparatus than as part of a critical/scholarly project. The editor is clearly caught betwixt and between, giving her very best to her task but performing that task, perhaps in cooperation with the family, under such limits as do not allow for, and perhaps never even intend, an inquiry into the content of the memoirs themselves.

The purpose of the present volume appears to be...