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![]() (Sigmund Freud lived just round the corner.) Almost all of the children were prodigiously talented. Three of Ludwig’s brothers committed suicide, including one whose first spoken word was “Oedipus”. The whole family was a seething cauldron of psychosomatic disorders. Karl Wittgenstein was a fabulously rich steel magnate and high-class crook who rigged prices, bled his workers dry and did much the same to his timorous wife Leopoldine. He was born into a patrician Viennese family in 1889, the son of the wealthiest industrialist in the Habsburg empire. In the course of the book he dismisses as “lurid” rumours that Wittgenstein was gay, though he was indeed gay and seemed to feel little guilt about it.Ī lot more had happened to him than sleeping with other men, however. The same can’t be said about one of his closest friends, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom my tutor wrote a rather stiff little memoir. This man’s problem was not that something appalling had happened to him, but that nothing had happened to him at all. ![]()
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