The author is Alexander Waugh, a well-known writer, BBC music critic, composer, presenter and other identities. "Wartime Family: Wittgenstein" describes the life of Wittgenstein, a prominent family in Vienna, Austria, in the war years: the night before the war, the singing, the travel and vacation, the elegant art; the wartime homesickness, the upheaval and displacement, the difficult choice between protecting the family's wealth or personal freedom, and finally scattering all the family property for peace, and the family is broken. A family that is rich and invincible to the country, from prosperity to decline, time also, luck also.
The book is a masterful compilation of musical knowledge, rich in complex things about wealth and psychology to interpret the fate of the Wittgenstein family. Today I'm going to read about this family from the psychological part of the book.
Some people are cured by childhood all their lives, and some people are cured of childhood all their lives. A lot of things we thought had passed, but they were always there! Deeply or shallowly affecting our lives. Early memory and family upbringing are critical to a person's growth. The Wittgenstein children had self-destructive, neurotic tendencies that were inextricably linked to the environment in which they grew up. The following details in the book show that they have a very harsh, authoritarian father and a neurotic and indifferent mother.
One by one, the eight children of the Wittgenstein family realized that the best way to communicate with their mother was through music, because that was the way to weld every very different member of the family to her. It is in this kind of wordless interaction with each other that her indifference as a mother is at least disturbing to the children."
It can be seen that the mother does not give the children love and security. The mother is the first person the baby comes into contact with, the first person he is interested in, and the first bridge to his social life. From birth, children strive to establish a connection with their mother, and this connection is very close and far-reaching. Although personality tendencies will be affected by genes, if the mother has wisdom and three views, the negatives in those personalities have also been adjusted, trained, taught and reconstructed by the mother, so there is an old Chinese saying: a good woman Wang Sansheng. If a mother cannot establish a connection with her child, or if the connection cannot be extended to the father, others around her, or even society as a whole, it is very detrimental to the child's growth.
The wittgenstein children, especially the boys, can clearly see this, the five brothers, hans, Rudy, and Ludwig, three of whom are homosexual or homosexual; and Kurt never married; Paul "lived married, Hilde lived with the children on Long Island, while Paul stayed in his Apartment on Yellow River Road in Manhattan, visiting them on weekends and parts of school holidays." ”
"The pressure on the Wittgenstein brothers Hans, Kurt, Rudy, Paul, and Ludwig to get ahead in the steel, arms, and banking businesses that their fathers built contributed to the nervous and self-destructive tension in all five of them."
"At first, Karl didn't let Paul and Ludwig go to school at all, insisting on asking for a tutor at home relative to other children... The scarcity of playmates led all the children of the Wittgenstein family to grow into cold individualists, who spent their entire lives trying to create and maintain important relationships. ”
Father Karl, the absolutely authoritative patriarch, was authoritarian, domineering, unreasonable, and demanded that members act according to their own will, which made the family always freeze a tense atmosphere. In order to escape from his control and free from his will, the children all rose up to rebel, so that there was no successor to the great kingdom of wealth, hastening the demise of the family. If the father is very successful and unattainable, then children generally feel that they will never be able to catch up with his achievements. If the father cannot give them affirmation or guidance, the child's growth will be frustrated and his development will be hindered.
Every stage of life has its psychological development task, when the task of each stage can not be successfully completed, the human psychology is easy to appear obstacles, it is obvious that the children of the Wittgenstein family face such a father, there are problems in self-identification, psychology is contradictory, repressive, evasive, passive resistance, powerlessness, helplessness. Therefore, successful fathers, it is best to talk about their achievements at home, not to mention their own achievements to compare with their children, everyone is born in a different era and encounter, so the personality, interests, and choices will be different. Everyone's attitude towards pressure and responsibility is different, and the way they cope is different: going up against the current, transferring, suppressing, escaping, lying flat... Even suicide. Of the five brothers of the Wittgenstein family, Hans, Kurt, and Rudy all chose to end their lives by suicide, and "Paul and Ludwig were often separated from the danger of suicide at different stages of their lives." The two of them realized their salvation through music and philosophy.
Wittgenstein's children were all artistically gifted, excellent musical talents, and only music connected everyone in the family. And Paul and Ludwig were in their most difficult and darkest moments when art gave them light and gave them hope for life.
One-Armed Pianist: Paul
Paul became a Russian prisoner of war during World War I and had his right arm amputated after being hit by a bullet. After wandering between prisons and hospitals in Russia, experiencing many physical and mental pains that ordinary people could not imagine, he rekindled his youthful dream with an iron will: to become a pianist.
"Despite his mother's and sisters' uneasy search for signs that he might consider suicide in russian letters, the trauma he suffered only made him more determined than ever to return to his homeland and resume his concert career." He had three main sources of encouragement: the first was that his father had trained him to face fear and despise self-pity and self-love, and these precepts were remembered by him, and in the lone struggle of the will, he exercised himself to downplay the seriousness of his situation, and often quite rudely refused the sympathy and kind help of his friends. The second was his blind mentor Joseph Laber, and Count Gerzatzhi, another, who wrote a self-help book for the large number of amputees who returned from World War I and played the piano for them with one arm, gave Paul hope. The third was Opodgordowski, one of the most skilled pianists of his time. Day after day, Paul played with his left arm, concentrating on this difficult and not necessarily possible task.
After the end of World War II, the fate of the Wittgenstein family was not over, when the German Nazis coveted and exploited the family's wealth with "Jewish descendants", the brothers and sisters fell into trouble, running around, fleeing in exile, and Paul crossed the ocean to the United States and became a pianist. The family's dispute over how to keep the property and fight for peace and freedom did not end, so the brotherhood and sisterhood fell apart, and Paul finally broke off relations with his siblings in the family and died alone in the United States.
Paul's life was spent in a strange emotional world, he was very autistic, dissatisfied with his father's tyranny, indifferent to family affairs, and Paul even voluntarily gave up the right to inherit property in order to escape his father's will. Only the dedication and dedication to the music career allowed his life to survive.
Mad genius: Ludwig
The amazing Ludwig is the greatest wealth that the Wittgenstein family has contributed to the world, he is a famous philosopher, mathematical logician, and the founder of the philosophy of language. Genius and madness are only between one thought, and the madness of his personality and the depth of his thoughts have amazed him in the philosophical community and have had a profound impact. "Throughout his life, Ludwig was deeply self-hated, and was at peace because of his loneliness of mind and the urge to commit suicide." He allegedly participated in world war I in order to "commit suicide with dignity". He applied to the most dangerous places of the battle, "because his soul at that time demanded that he be tested to the maximum, and always to his highest standards." In May 1916, he voluntarily held a watchtower, where he was most vulnerable to enemy fire, "and being close to death might bring light to my life, he pondered." Perhaps only by constantly raising the threshold of the soul can we feel the meaning of our existence and life.
He was deeply influenced by the Russian novelist Tolstoy, who believed that suffering was the salvation of the soul. After returning to Vienna in August 1919, Ludwig went straight to his bank and said that he no longer wanted his money and intended to get rid of it and go to humble work. After completing his "economic suicide", Ludwig went to teach at the mountain village elementary school, wearing old military uniforms to teach children about architecture, botany and zoology. He brought microscopes from Vienna, built a steam engine, and even went so crazy that he wanted to teach higher mathematics to schoolchildren.
In November 1922, Ludwig's mysterious philosophical treatise , The Philosophy of Logic , which Ludwig had been writing tirelessly during the war , was finally released , but his friends were immediately overwhelmed by the work , and were deeply impressed by it , and implored him to give up teaching and return to Cambridge. Ludwig was annoyed by the painful realization that his short and simple work would be misunderstood by all, and his refusal to give definitions of his own terms, or to illustrate his arguments by example, also created the main difficulty in understanding the theory of logical philosophy. "Paul may not have noticed Ludwig's Christ-like position among Cambridge philosophers." One sentence amply demonstrates the achievements of Ludwig's thought in the field of philosophy. In 1951, when Ludwig died of prostate cancer in England, he told Ms. Bevin: "Tell them I have a wonderful life!" "It put an end to his rich life.
The road of life, up and down, each unique soul deserves to be taken seriously. Especially for children, caring, inclusive, unconditional respect and support, coupled with appropriate guidance, they can achieve self-adjustment and adapt to their own special small universe. The mind is pure, and as long as it finds the right exit, it can shine.
(There is also a wealth of classical music and financial wealth material in the book, and it is worth reading for interested students.) ）