Now available in paperback

Adam Phillips writes:
He has a more compelling story to tell about Karl Wittgenstein, their father, and about Gretl and Hermine, the more ‘interesting’ of their older sisters. It is, at least in Waugh’s version, a story of the astounding success of a self-made industrialist in Austria in the second half of the 19th century whose family fortune came to grief when the Nazis discovered that the Wittgensteins had Jewish ancestors and so, by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, were suddenly liable to have their considerable wealth confiscated. How this self-invented dynasty dealt with and survived the loss of what Ludwig would call, in his philosophical writings, their ‘form of life’, and what this return of a virtually repressed past confronted them with, is the real drama of the book. And even though Waugh wants the book to be sensational – the four sections are entitled ‘A Dirty Thing to Do’, ‘Nasty Mess’, ‘The New Disorder’ and ‘Connection and Meltdown’ – he can’t distract us from the fact that the Wittgenstein family was unlike most others in Central Europe, and not only because of its famous son. Indeed, if anything, because of its once famous – and famously rich – father. The mothers in the book are the other people that Waugh is determined we shouldn’t be impressed by.

(LRB 4 December 2008)

Bloomsbury | hardback 366 pp. |ISBN: 9780747591856