An Irishman's Diary

I WAS wrong when, in yesterday’s diary, I described Erwin Schrödinger as an “Austrian Jew”. In fact he was the product of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, and was himself brought up Christian, until becoming a professed atheist. Not that being an atheist Jew would have saved him from the Nazis. But his need to escape Austria after the Anschluss stemmed from his political principles rather than religion.

For my confusion on the issue, I plead the partial excuse of having recently read a book called Wittgenstein’s Poker, which is about another famous Austrian who spent some of the 1940s in Ireland. Not that Ludwig Wittgenstein was Jewish either, strictly speaking. But the extent to which he was considered so, anyway, was a big part of his story.

Like many Viennese Jews, Wittgenstein’s ancestors had been baptised into the Christian faith as part of their assimilation by Austrian society. And like Schrödinger’s, his included both Catholic and Protestant ancestors. But there was a sense in Vienna and other European cities that, once Jewish, a family was always Jewish, and that even several generations of baptism didn’t alter this.

Thus there were euphemisms in German – used sometimes, mockingly, by Jews themselves – to indicate the recent or strategic nature of a conversion.

These ranged from “liegend getauft” (“baptised as a baby“), through “als Kind getauft” (“baptised as a child) to “Übergetreten”, which meant the person himself had decided to convert.

The Wittgensteins’ conversion, by contrast, went back to their grandparents. Even so, the family’s Jewishness was like a club membership they had never cancelled.

Under the absurd but ominous Nazi classification system, you were considered fully Jewish if you had three or more Jewish grandparents. Fewer than that and you were “Mischlinge”, or of mixed race. Even then, your prospects differed depending on whether you were a “Mischlinge of the first degree” (having a maximum of two Jewish grandparents) or of the second (only one grandparent).

As the shadow of the Nuremberg laws fell on them, the Wittgensteins applied for reclassification to Mischlinge status, based on a combination of doubts about one of their grandparents’ religion and on the family’s military record in the first World War.

That could also have a bearing on the decision and, to their potential benefit, both Ludwig and his brother Paul had served with valour.

But in the event it was neither of these get-out clauses that saved them. Part of Nazi policy was to levy large taxes from wealthy Jews, wherever possible.

And it so happened that, thanks mainly to Ludwig’s father, a steel magnate who had invested his fortune shrewdly, the Wittgensteins were one of Austria’s wealthiest families.

Even after the Great Depression, they still owned multiple properties in Vienna, including several mansions, and a vast estate in the country. They had large overseas shareholdings too. And such affluence had not escaped the Nazis’ attention. On the contrary, it became a bargaining tool in the family’s application for Mischlinge status, which was granted eventually, but for an enormous price.

The negotiations were carried out by Paul Wittgenstein, who arranged the liquidation of assets to pay the bill.

And according to Wittgenstein’s Poker, the family’s safety was thereby “bought for a sum big enough to interest the Nazi government at the highest levels: a staggering 1.7 tonnes of gold, equivalent to 2 per cent of the Austrian gold reserves taken over by Berlin in 1939”.

AND YET the book’s title is not, as you might think from the foregoing, a reference to this high-stakes game played by Paul Wittgenstein for the family’s survival. On the contrary, it refers to a small but important event in the life of Ludwig, who had in any case renounced his share of the family wealth and had already escaped the Nazis by going to England, where he spent most of the 1930s and 1940s at Cambridge University.

Indeed the small but important incident happened in Cambridge, one night in late 1946, during a meeting of a philosophical society.

The poker in question was a metal one. By some accounts it was red hot. If the story is believed, Wittgenstein brandished it at his fellow Austrian philosopher Karl Popper during an angry argument on their only meeting. But despite the presence of several other great minds in the room, including Bertrand Russell, widely varying versions of the argument soon emerged and it continued to be debated for years afterwards.

Which made it an ideal subject around which a book about Wittgenstein could be constructed. And sure enough, subtitled The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument between Two Great Philosophers, Wittgenstein’s Poker teases the incident out to a 300-page discussion of his ideas and, in particular, his rivalry with Popper, also Austrian and also Christian of Jewish ancestry, but in many other respects his opposite.

The incident happened late in Wittgenstein’s life. Not long afterwards, he left Cambridge and moved to Ireland. But unlike Schrödinger, he wasn’t here for a job. Rather, as the books puts it, he was periodically “in the habit of retreating to cold and desolate parts of Europe” where he could think more clearly.

He had been to Iceland and Norway on similar missions. And after a time in Dublin, and Wicklow, he moved to a cottage in Connemara, where he spent several months in 1948. He then returned to Austria for the first time since the war, and later visited America and again Norway.

But he was in poor health by then, with prostate cancer, and spent his final days back in Cambridge, where he died in 1951.