“If we were ever to meet on Judgement Day”: Wittgenstein beyond genius

What if Wittgenstein wasn’t an angel? That was the question his friends used to ask themselves, chuckling to themselves, back when he was still just a young man – before he became Wittgenstein, when he was in his late twenties or early thirties. They were all enchanted by the ‘noble beauty of his face’ and by his speech – which began hesitantly, stammering, then gained momentum like a river in flood, only to subside again and return to a hushed tone – and which was captured in caricatures (all of which were subsequently lost during the Hitler era) in which he appeared intent on listening to pieces by Brahms and Schubert and discussing Mörike and Tolstoy. The good-natured irony of the caption accompanying one of those drawings suggests that the suspicion that Wittgenstein might, in fact, be an angel certainly did circulate amongst the members of the exclusive, privileged circle in Olmütz into which the future philosopher had arrived, as if fallen from the sky, on an autumn day in 1916. It was the time of the Great War, and the scion of a Viennese billionaire family – his father was a steel industry magnate – had enlisted as a private as early as August 1914. Within a couple of years he was promoted to corporal and posted to the officers’ training school in Olmütz – a Moravian town that was to remain so only for a short while, for as long as the Habsburg Empire lasted, soon becoming part of Czechoslovakia and now known in the Czech Republic as Olomouc. He spent several months there before returning to the eastern front – the bloodiest of the war – between Galicia and Bukovina, and it was precisely during this period of military training that ‘the famous and important architect’ Adolf Loos, the author of "Parole nel vuoto", having learnt that the young man was in the area, asked him to call at the Engelmann house to convey his regards to Paul, a student at the Loos Bauschule and his collaborator.

And so it was that, on a sunny September afternoon, Ludwig Wittgenstein rang the doorbell of the ‘building on Mauritzplatz’, as it was affectionately known to those who frequented it. In reality, the building stood on a dark side street off the square with the splendid Church of St Maurice and consisted of a few gloomy, uncomfortable rooms with dilapidated varnished wooden floors. It was home to a bankrupt merchant, forced to reinvent himself as an insurance agent to provide a decent living for his family, and his wife, Ernestine – Paul’s mother, the daughter of a fallen upper-middle-class family and the muse of the circle of artists who gathered around her for her evenings of poetry and music at that address. On the day he arrived there and asked for Paul, Wittgenstein was greeted by the maid and shown into a room lit only by a narrow little window. When Engelmann joined him, he saw, standing in a beam of sunlight, a man in uniform who looked much younger than his years. He was wearing the Waffenrock, the extremely elegant dress uniform of the Imperial Army’s artillerymen, chocolate brown with a high collar and cinnabar-red cuffs. An outfit ‘of unmistakable, classical beauty, as were the Austrian uniforms of yesteryear’, Engelmann would recall more than forty years later, still impressed by that apparition. An angel.

Was it? The story of the friendship between the two men in their youth leaves the question open, and the book that reconstructs it – with a wealth of original documents, primarily the letters that Wittgenstein and Engelmann exchanged over a period of fifteen years and more, plus notes, commentaries, bibliographies and recollections skilfully orchestrated by the translator and editor Daniele Pisani – encourages the reader to harbour the most intriguing of doubts. Starting with the title chosen by the publisher Giometti&Antonello of Macerata: “Se mai dovessimo incontrarci il giorno del giudizio”.

It was an expression Wittgenstein often used, with his eyes downcast and a pensive air about him. A pang of conscience? Restlessness tormented the Austrian genius, as attested not only by his extensive correspondence but also by his diaries, conversations and "Various Thoughts": expressions of the formidable, two-way bond between thought and existence in the philosopher who made authenticity the hallmark of his very raison d’être. The term ‘authenticity’ is not his own but that of his contemporary Heidegger, who, like him, was born in 1889. His friend Engelmann, referring to that quality or aspiration of Wittgenstein’s, called it ‘purity’ on more than one occasion. Wittgenstein preferred to speak of ‘decency’, Anständigkeit, a word that defies any attempt at translation, because in ‘decorum’, ‘good manners’ and ‘propriety’ there resonates all the futility of conforming to rules of etiquette, norms of behaviour and superficial opportunism. Rather, it is more a matter of living up to one’s standards, in the sense of moral dignity, fidelity to oneself, and being equal to one’s task. The young Wittgenstein’s turmoil stemmed precisely from the awareness of having a task and from the obstacles that continued to stand in the way of its fulfilment. He had a great idea on his mind during the years when he poured out his unease candidly in letters to Engelmann and in their lengthy discussions. An idea that had come ‘by inspiration’ – the only source which, from his point of view, made it credible and valuable. Its development was taking shape in the sequence of numbered propositions of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", the drafting and composition of which he finalised whilst at the front, completed during a period of leave in 1918 and revised whilst a prisoner at Monte Cassino. The fervent gestation of his masterpiece—which would be the only text Wittgenstein published during his lifetime—the determined and desperate search, grotesque in hindsight, for a publisher willing to publish it, the focusing of its core, its motivation, its living core – that is, what the scrupulous definition of the boundaries of language required to be kept silent but which could not be forgotten – unless one were to continue climbing up and down that famous, exquisitely refined staircase whilst neglecting to consider where it leads – are the themes of the exchange, both personal and epistolary, between the philosopher, who was still unknown at the time, and his friend the architect, four years his junior. That the theme of architecture should also serve as both a meeting point for an occasional collaboration and an apparent point of rupture between the two is indeed true, and is of the utmost interest, but it is of secondary importance. It does, however, help – like a magnet drawing iron filings – to orient many details of the Wittgensteinian hagiography, turning it into an allegory.

It so happened that, in November 1925, Margaret, one of Wittgenstein’s sisters, who was married to the American billionaire Jerome Stonborough, summoned Engelmann to her villa in Gmund – ‘Villa Toscana’, as it had been built by Leopold II of Tuscany – to commission him to design a building on Kundmanngasse, which was to be her future home in Vienna. Her other sister, Hermine, together with Wittgenstein’s mother, had already invited Engelmann years earlier to design the renovation of the house on Neuwaldegger Strasse, where Wittgenstein was born, and seemed enthusiastic about his work – “he draws like a man possessed”, “he works superbly”, “we’ll never have anything built by anyone but him”, she wrote to her brother in 1917 – until Ludwig, the final arbiter of family decisions even in matters of aesthetics, intervened, disapproving of his friend’s ideas and taking charge of the matter himself. On that occasion, Engelmann backed down without a word of protest; he admitted that he had misinterpreted the client’s requirements, that he had been unconvinced of his own solutions from the outset, and he relinquished the commission. How could one blame him? The intellectual and spiritual superiority (undoubtedly also financial, at least at that time, given all those houses and those billions) of his charismatic and revered friend left him speechless. In 1925, eight years later, the balance of power had shifted slightly, but the dynamic of usurpation, abuse of power and hijacking of the project remained the same.

Meanwhile, Wittgenstein was penniless; after the war, he had renounced his share of his father’s substantial inheritance in favour of his various brothers and sisters (who, however, undertook to help him in case of difficulty), as well as a number of Austrian artists in financial straits, whom he had asked Ludwig von Ficker, editor of the Innsbruck-based magazine Der Brenner, to select. Among those who benefited were Rilke, Trakl, Lasker-Schüler, Kokoschka and von Ficker himself (who, however, was soon among those who did not take the risk of publishing the Tractatus in the pages of the magazine). Incidentally, in order to carry out such a ‘financial suicide’ with no possibility of turning back, Wittgenstein drove the notary to distraction by forcing him to draw up clause after clause to prevent him from having any second thoughts. This striking, self-imposed act of self-denial stemmed from the very same passion for authenticity that held him back from the temptation to pay a publisher to have the "Tractatus" printed. It would have been indecent to buy the publication of the text. The world had to accept it. ‘Either it is a work of the highest order or it is not,’ he said, ‘in the former case it does not matter whether it appears in one, twenty or a hundred years’; in the latter, he would have been the first not to want to see it in print. He was also encouraged to take such a courageous step by the consistency with which he believed unreservedly in the words of the Gospels, which he—a Jew by birth but from a family that had converted to Christianity—read and reread in Tolstoy’s extraordinary abridgement. ‘First of all, you possess nothing of your own; you carry nothing with you—neither a bag, nor bread, nor money—only the clothes you are wearing, and your shoes.’ At the front, they called him ‘the man of the Gospels’. He had unearthed Tolstoy’s Gospel in a bookshop in the Galician town of Ternów and always carried it with him like a talisman. However, there were also other edifying readings that sustained him in his decision to transform his life. Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, particularly the character of Alyosha, who, unlike Ivan, possessed nothing and therefore had nothing to worry about. Tolstoy’s “Folktales”. These were the books which, once the war was over and he had returned from captivity – a penniless veteran who had taken up the post of primary school teacher, a role he carried out for six years in various rural villages – he would read aloud to his pupils, to his own satisfaction and that of his class. Bertrand Russell, who would eventually help him publish the Tractatus in London in a bilingual English-German edition in 1922, and who – like the Vienna Circle’s neo-positivists and the analytic philosophers who would later regard the early Wittgenstein as their forerunner – considered his work a treatise on logic, could not understand it: ‘He has become a mystic; he reads Kierkegaard and Silesius; he is thinking of becoming a monk,’ he wrote, perplexed, in a letter.

Wittgenstein had foreseen it: no one would understand him, ‘even though to me it all seems as clear as crystal’. Incidentally, even his job as a teacher – for which he, having studied engineering in Berlin and logic at Cambridge, had even gone back to studying – pedagogy, practical exercises, hygiene, calligraphy, singing… – was about to come to an end: accused of mistreatment for slapping a young boy who subsequently fainted, he was acquitted when it was shown that the child was suffering from leukaemia and was prone to fainting spells, but he left the school nonetheless.

It was during this period of crisis for the misunderstood and unemployed philosopher that Engelmann involved him in the project for the house on Kundmanngasse, on which he had been working for months and for which he had already devised the basic layout and room arrangement. Wittgenstein threw himself headlong into the project and made his mark, leaving his imprint not only on the interior design and the details: the slightest alterations dictated by the formative power of his vision even transformed the structural plan devised by his friend. His “spiritual dominance” and “creative superiority” were so indisputable, remarked his sister, Margaret Stonborough, the lady of the house, that “Engelmann and I became so small in comparison”. A tyrant.

Unpunished. The building, of course, would have remained the ‘Wittgenstein Haus’, his own creation (it now houses the Bulgarian Cultural Institute). And Engelmann, the friend who was mistreated and trampled upon, with whom, during his time in Olmütz, he would discuss the propositions of the *Tractatus* deep into the night – after evenings at the palace on Mauritzplatz, Paul would walk Ludwig back to his lodgings in a suburb next to the shooting range, but, caught up in conversation, they would often turn back as far as St Mauritius, covering the same ground twice – the listener enamoured of his reasoning, so in tune with him that he could intuit and anticipate his thoughts – if Wittgenstein stammered and struggled to formulate his ideas, ‘along comes Engelmann and extracts them for me with forceps’, he admitted –, the naive, amateur interpreter of the "Tractatus" who, better than many high-and-mighty professors and luminaries, had grasped its profoundly spiritual meaning in the fundamental idea of the ‘mystical’ and the ‘inexpressible’ – ‘when he directs his immense efforts towards delimiting with meticulous precision what can be said in language, it is not to trace the outline of this island but the limits of the ocean’, he summarised – in the course of their contrasting destinies (one would become a professor at Cambridge, the other would emigrate to Palestine) he would have forgiven him. Although, who knows, should they meet on Judgement Day…