Marguerite Respinger and Ludwig Wittgenstein Love and Power
by Annick Sjögren
FOREWORD
by Radmila Schweitzer
New details about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life are rare these days, with two towering biographies by Brian McGuinness and Ray Monk, as well as a substantial literature of memoirs by those who knew him. After Hermine Wittgenstein’s unique memoir, what has been missing are more recent voices of the enlarged family in which he grew up and to which he remained bound all his life.
Yet, now and then new information comes to light. Now retired, Andreas Sjögren (Arvid Sjögren’s son and Ludwig’s grandnephew) and his wife Annick Sjögren have gathered diverse sorts of material in a memoir which will be published in 2027: WITTGENSTEINS-SJÖGRENS Family Stories and Reminiscences. It tells the story of what it meant to be a Wittgenstein in Vienna in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was Ludwig’s upbringing and the world to which he belonged all his life.
During the preparation of the book, it became evident that there was an episode in the Wittgensteins’ story so significant that it had to be told separately: Ludwig’s friendship with Marguerite Respinger, the only woman with whom he ever considered a romantic liaison. The episode is often mentioned peripherally. When researched and contemplated properly, it gives a unique insight into Wittgenstein’s inner world and his much-discussed sexuality, as well as into the dynamics of his family.
Annick Sjögren, née Isle de Beauchaine, entered the Austrian Salzer-Wittgenstein-Sjögren family in 1957 and for decades took their history and idiosyncrasies for granted. French-born and resident in Sweden, Annick has her own academic career as an ethnologist. Therefore, her account is coloured by two fundamental factors: her close knowledge of the family, and her professional curiosity as an ethnologist. Annick’s essay has something in common with Hermine Wittgenstein’s Family Recollections and, like hers, is often coloured by strong feeling and opinion.
This text is not an academic paper on Wittgenstein. It occupies its own, quite original place.
INTRODUCTION
Who was Marguerite Respinger, the woman who, before her marriage to Talla Sjögren, shared a profound and unusual friendship with Ludwig Wittgenstein? If she was the only woman this famously exacting philosopher is known to have loved, she must have stood apart in ways that deserve closer attention.
The beginnings of this attachment need not be left to speculation, for Marguerite later recorded her first meeting with Ludwig in striking detail.
In 1926, shortly after starting her autumn term at the drawing school, l’École des Métiers, in Berne, she received a telegram from friends in Vienna, where a place had opened up for her at a well-known drawing school. She left Switzerland at once. After arriving in Vienna, she lived with the Stonborough family in the bel étage of Palais Schönborn. Half a century later, she describes the first time she met Ludwig:
The second event of those first few days was meeting L.W., Mrs St.’s brother, who had sprained his foot and was staying with his sister to recover. As our group of young people used to meet at Mrs St.’s house on Saturdays for lunch and then spend the afternoon there, we gathered around the injured man’s bed to listen to him reading stories by Peter Hebel aloud[1]. His reading these charming stories made me feel at home, and I listened with delight to the poetry of my German-speaking homeland read with such deep understanding.
As a grandmother, Marguerite wrote a memoir of the first half of her life, GRANNY et son temps, a publication for family and friends. By that time, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reputation was steadily growing, and the book was likely also written with a few trusted scholars in mind. It describes her childhood and youth, her years in Vienna, her married life with Talla, and ends abruptly, in the middle of her life, with Talla’s death in 1945.
In the few lines of her introduction, she uses the French idiom, ‘le troisièmeâge’. She writes: Let us not forget that to reach third age, there was a first age that preceded it, and a second age that resulted from that. She describes how both the extraordinary life she had lived for several years in Vienna, and the different one, also rather unusual, in Chile, can only be understood if her childhood is also considered. Thereafter, life took a slower pace; it announced the third age and needed no telling.
The core of the book is about her unusual friendship with Ludwig Wittgenstein, a man acknowledged as a genius long before she knew him. This tale is embedded in the story of her integration into the large Wittgenstein family, mainly through Margaret Stonborough’s mediation. There she found the demanding and fascinating milieu which she needed at that point in life. I will call it the Wittgenstein Circle in the following pages.
The book was published in 1982, at a time when the literature about Ludwig Wittgenstein was starting to expand rapidly, with Marguerite appearing in different contexts. Her own perspective is a valuable addition to the story of his personal life. Ludwig and his sister, Margaret Stonborough, Gretl, did not spare their efforts to mould Marguerite into the person they were convinced would be the right one. But they disregarded the role of her childhood. Moreover, the views they had of her too often do not fit those our family (the Sjögrens) formed through direct contact with her children, Andreas’s cousins, or on the few occasions when we met her, by then an impressive old lady.
GRANNY et son temps can be seen as a document for the defence. The author, it seems to me, chose the facts which might explain the misunderstandings she encountered with both Ludwig and Gretl. This choice reflects the emotionally loaded atmosphere of her time in Vienna. Autobiographies and memoirs are not objective. Nor will my contribution be, for several reasons. First, I am by marriage a part of the Sjögren family in the same way as Marguerite was. My husband is Andreas Sjögren, Arvid Sjögren’s son and Talla’s nephew. The second reason is that Marguerite and I share the same experience, a decisive turn in life upon encountering an entirely new and stimulating milieu, for her the Wittgensteins in Vienna, for me their descendants on the Hochreit and in Vienna. A third reason concerns standpoint. It is the feminine perspective from which I study certain aspects of Ludwig’s private life. I still hope to keep enough of the distance required by my professional life as a researcher in ethnology to provide a text that brings some new knowledge to the history of two families, the Wittgensteins and the Sjögrens. Writing from the perspective of the individuals, I tend to express psychological conclusions without being a psychologist. I therefore turned to Susanne Fogl, a friend and experienced psychotherapist, and I am grateful that she detected the hazardous speculations to be corrected.
For this essay, the main source of information has been Marguerite’s memoir, GRANNY et son temps, and the considerable number of quotations from it throughout the text. For this, I am grateful to Marguerite’s youngest daughter, Bernadette Perrey du Cray, and the descendants of her three other deceased children, Kristina Wavre, Gösta Sjögren and Torsten Sjögren, who have agreed to let me do so. Invaluable help has come from her granddaughter, Caroline Wavre, who has gathered many interesting photographs and given information which has modified my analysis on some essential points. This help includes a large utilisation of Un voyage, the second little book Marguerite wrote, and which is about her trip with the children back to Europe in 1946.
Another book of which I have had great use is Harald Vatne’s bilingual book, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the people of Skjolden / Ludwig Wittgenstein og skjoldingane. Vatne is a Norwegian local historian, himself from Skjolden. He describes the local people and the atmosphere in the village, with the aim of integrating the philosopher with his peculiar personality in the interplay of the villagers. I am grateful to him.
The other essential source of information comes from the Brenner Archives at the University of Innsbruck (BA) under different forms. Already some years ago, when I started writing about Andreas’s ancestors, Josef Wang, at the request of Allan Janik, selected the letters BA had to and from Ludwig Wittgenstein with the search term “Sjögren”. More recently, I had an interesting and useful exchange on Marguerite with Ilse Somavilla, editor of LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN Denkbewegungen Tagebücher 1930-1932 / 1936-1937. I refer to that book below as ‘Ludwig’s diary’. I am very grateful to both of them for providing me with such basic information.
All this work would not have been possible without the invaluable help I received from Allan Janik, the late friend and mentor we now miss so much. When I told him that I was writing for children and grandchildren about Andreas’s ancestors, Hermann and Fanny Wittgenstein, Allan was delighted. He considered Hermann to be a key figure in the Wittgenstein story. He provided Andreas and me with a vast and well-chosen literature, an especially appreciable generosity in view of our unfamiliarity with philosophy as well as our confinement at home due to the afflictions of old age. He came to suggest collaboration with Radmila Schweitzer from the Wittgenstein Initiative in Vienna in view of publication, which proved to be a very constructive idea.
This writing, which brings together stories and reminiscences, is the result of teamwork, and I would like to say a word about its several stages. I write in English, the lingua franca among our grandchildren and the language of much of my professional life in Sweden. Language has never been my strong point, and whatever I write in English or Swedish needs correcting. Fortunately, I married a polyglot. Andreas grew up with German as his mother tongue, but English became his first language when, at fourteen, he was sent to England to finish school and later to study medicine, during which British English became an integral part of him. He read through every page of this essay and improved the language. However, more still could be done. Here our son, Philip, came to the rescue, applying AI’s Claude to review the text and suggest edits and spot inconsistencies. Radmila oversaw the process with the greatest attention. It is for you, the reader, to judge the result.
One more important piece of information is about the translation of French and German sources I used, that is, Marguerite’s memoir and a quantity of books and letters in German. As I wrote, I used AI whenever I needed it, and its draft translations were then modified when needed.
Now, it is time to return to Marguerite Respinger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Before telling about Marguerite’s first and second age, as she herself calls it, I will first turn to the Wittgenstein Circle, taking up its origin and its particularities. Friendship is at its core; power pervades it.
THE WITTGENSTEIN CIRCLE
Both Marguerite and Talla, at some time in life, belonged to the Wittgenstein Circle. For Marguerite, it was a few years that marked her life forever. As for Talla, he was born into it.
For those chosen, this social circle offered deep and lasting friendships, both rewarding and demanding. It was a privilege to take part in a cultural life of the highest quality: family members and friends took part in musical, theatrical, literary and humanitarian activities. The rules came from within and had to be accepted.
However, belonging to the Wittgenstein Circle implied a relationship that was not always easy to manage, whether for Ludwig’s chosen friends, such as Marguerite, with whom he was both thoughtful and exacting, or for family members, such as Clara Salzer, later Sjögren, my mother-in-law and great friend. Once, sitting outside the Kleine Blockhaus at the Hochreit, she and I discussed the differences between our lives and characters. I happened to say that she was a strong person. At that point, her face turned white, and she said in a very emotional and sharp voice: Annick, please, never, never again use that word for me. All my life I have tried to be kind. I hate the so-called ‘strength’ of the Wittgensteins. I was flabbergasted. There was so much of the past of which I was unaware. Nevertheless, whether she wanted to or not, she had inherited some of the Wittgensteins’ typical traits, and did not entirely succeed in avoiding that strength, despite having herself been a victim of it in her youth.
Friendship, kindness, and power in the Wittgenstein Circle were intertwined in a way worth analysing.
Hermann & Fanny
The origins of the Wittgenstein Circle are to be found in Ludwig’s grandparents, Hermann and Fanny Wittgenstein, and the views they shared on education, implemented during the key years of their children’s childhood.
Hermann, Jewish for the first part of his life and thereafter Calvinist, transmitted to the family the strict morals characterising these two confessions. Fanny, educated in one of the very few Jewish families accepted in the Viennese higher circles, mastered the arts of social life, and especially music.
The Wittgensteins had come from Germany with eight children, and three more would be born in Vösendorf near Vienna. Large families were common at this time. The children, when adults, would ensure the future with welfare in poor families, survival in threatened minorities, and proper alliances in royal and imperial courts. The Empress Maria Theresia is an interesting example. She ruled over an empire, fought two wars, and gave birth to sixteen children. She promoted modern education and tried to give motherly attention to the personality of each child, but still, the keen politician in her took priority, and she was tirelessly engaged in studying the web of thrones in Europe to settle the future marriages of her children for the best of the Empire[2]. At his more modest level, Hermann was faced with a similar dilemma. Hermann and Fanny were at the same time strict and liberal. Both were advocates of the liberal education that characterised Austria. The State, and not the Church, was to have the main responsibility of schooling and to base it on science, not dogma. The historian Deborah Coen has written most illuminatingly on the subject through the story of a family, the Exners, contemporaries of the Wittgensteins, and in many ways like them[3]. The children enjoyed much liberty and learned to discover things by themselves, within clearly indicated limits; this came to be called the responsibility of freedom. This was not always easy to reconcile with the conventions of the upper-class society to which they belonged.
Hermann was ambitious. As head of the family, he had to calculate where in society, through studies and marriage, the children would make their lives. The more children there were, the more possibilities were offered. First, a happy upbringing and liberties within limits; then, in due time, transition to a more formal way of life which would favour alliances with the upper circles of Viennese society, such as law, the sciences, or state administration, new domains for people of Jewish descent.
Hermann always calculated far ahead. Moving from Germany to Austria had several reasons, professional and private. It coincided with the extensive transformation which took place in Vienna. The old fortification walls had been demolished to make way for a series of imposing buildings on what would soon become the Ring, the boulevard encircling the very heart of Vienna, and there his brother-in-law and future collaborator, Gustav Figdor, was having a palais built. But Hermann did not follow his example. Nor did he choose an apartment in Vienna, which would have been more in line with his simple tastes; instead he chose a medieval castle out of town. There must have been reasons for it.
Before trying to present those reasons, it might be interesting to get a picture of Hermann and Fanny’s unusually large family, the well-being of which must have been one of the essential reasons in the choice of Vösendorf. There are no photos or paintings of that time. The only representation of the eleven children all together was taken much later, on the occasion of Hermann and Fanny’s silver wedding anniversary in 1864. It is striking that the parents do not appear in either of the two known versions of this picture. Their pride was in their children.
