When war comes, Paul signs up but is taken prisoner by the Russians, and endures privations so appalling that you feel that it is only by miracle he managed to survive. Paul had to break off once when Ludwig was sitting in the next room he burst in and said "I cannot play when you are in the house as I feel your scepticism seeping towards me from under the door." Ludwig was hypercritical of his brother's playing, and as Paul was hypersensitive to criticism (he couldn't even stand it when he felt he was being praised unjustly), even practising was problematic. However, the family is bound together by a love of music, although even this doesn't run smoothly. Two, or even three, of his sons killed themselves (the confusion arises with the oldest son, Johannes, who went missing in 1902). But Karl is a martinet, a bully, a tyrant his very photograph is terrifying. "Stupendously rich", is how he leaves it, and life at the Viennese Palais Wittgenstein seems pretty cushy there's even someone employed there for no other purpose than to bow to visitors. Patriarch Karl, a rebel who runs away from home as a young man to America, working, among other things, as a travelling musician and a barman, eventually returns and becomes a steel magnate so wealthy that not even Waugh, an assiduous researcher, can count how much money he has.
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