Karl Wittgenstein

Origins and early life

Karl Wittgenstein was born at Gohlis near Leipzig on 8 April 1847, the grandson of Moses Meier Wittgenstein, a Jewish wool merchant and land agent of Korbach who took the family name from the principality where he lived.

Work and career

His father Hermann Christian Wittgenstein had converted to Protestantism and in 1839 married Fanny Figdor, herself of a Jewish Viennese family and a cousin of the violinist Joseph Joachim; the family moved to Vienna in 1859. Karl was therefore born a Protestant, and this fiche says plainly that the Jewish descent in his case runs through his grandparents on both sides, that his father was the convert, and that the family did not practise Judaism — a fact of no interest to the Nazis, who in 1938 classified his surviving children as Jews and had to be bought off with the family's foreign gold reserves to grant them German status.

He ran away to New York at seventeen with no money, worked as a waiter and a violin teacher for two years, came back, took an engineering degree, and rose in fifteen years from draughtsman to director of the Bohemian iron and steel industry. By the 1880s he controlled the Austrian steel cartel and had built one of the largest fortunes in the empire; he wrote in the press for free trade and against state protection, and retired from business in 1898 to manage his investments, most of them abroad, which is why the family fortune survived the war.

He was the greatest private patron of art in Vienna: he paid for the Secession Building of 1898, the golden-domed manifesto of the new art, supported Klimt, Hoffmann, Moser and Rodin, and filled his Palais Wittgenstein with music, where Brahms, Mahler and Richard Strauss came to play. His household was severe: three of his five sons took their own lives.

Later years

He died of cancer of the tongue in Vienna on 20 January 1913, leaving Ludwig, who has his own fiche here, one of the largest inheritances in Austria, which Ludwig gave away in its entirety.