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One night I was surfing through some of my old diaries and I came across this old mini-comment thread about LGBT’s in the Great War. My comment:
The writings in The Really Interesting Question are mostly short and varied. For example, there is correspondence dated 1916 on the issue of conscription into the army; Strachey, and several members of his various circles were anti-conscription; both Lytton and James Strachey were active an anti-conscription group. There are also number of short dramatic sketches on the subjects like Freud, hashish, and even a parody of the American expatriate writer Henry James.
Ludwig Wittgenstein also wrote about some of his World War I experiences...in addition to that, I have this novel (can’t remember the name of it) where Wittgenstein was described as having had an affair with a man who eventually became a member of the SS...which becomes an important plotline because the Wittgenstein family remaining in Vienna was given advance notice by this same SS member that they needed to get out of Vienna when Hitler invaded.
Wittgenstein’s own wartime experiences are rather interesting.
This sounds like an interesting project to pursue, actually.
I did scrape the surface of the issue of LGBT writers during World War I when I wrote about Lytton Strachey. But I’ve long had an interest in both Wittgenstein’s philosophy (which I must confess that I don’t understand that well) and his life.
In 2022, I purchased a hardcover translation of Private Notebooks 1914-1916 by Ludwig Wittgenstein (translated by Marjorie Perloff), which covers a period of time in which he was a volunteer for the Austrian Army. I browsed through some of the pages but, for the most part, it remained on my bookshelf, unread. And then I was browsing through some old diaries about a month and a half ago and ran across that comment thread and remembered that I had the perfect book to pursue the project that I had so casually talked about eight years ago. And so I did.
Why did Wittgenstein go to war in the first place?
Wittgenstein qualified for a medical deferment from being conscripted into the war because of his history of hernias. Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, A Duty of Genius, describe Wittgenstein’s motives for enlisting in the with the Austrian Army as more of feeling the need to improve his personal character as opposed to any sort of nationalistic feeling for Austria.
Like many of his generation (including, for example, some of his contemporaries at Cambridge, such as Rupert Brooke, Frank Bliss and Ferenc Békássy) Wittgenstein felt the experience of facing death would, in some way or other, improve him…
Poet and historian Richard Barnett put a finer point on it.
In Cambridge Wittgenstein worked, and harangued his supposed supervisor, and took tea with the undergraduate mathematician David Hume Pinsent, his closest English friend and (perhaps) the first love of his adult life. Within two years he had grown tired of the airlessness of academic philosophy. Seclusion would give him space to write and think, and in autumn 1913 he moved to a cottage beside a fjord in western Norway. He intended to stay until his work was finished, but a summer visit to his family caught him in Vienna in the late summer of 1914.
Why did Wittgenstein volunteer? His chronic hernias could have secured a medical exemption, or a little string-pulling might have obtained a comfortable sinecure in Vienna. Patriotism, in part—though he was always undeceived about the Central Powers’ chance of victory—but most of all his ingrained sense of duty. For so many of his generation August 1914 promised to satisfy their “quest for authenticity and self-fulfilment” (in Perloff’s phrase). Going to war was a kind of experiment, a chance to find out, empirically, what he would become when he faced death. Within two months Private LJJ Wittgenstein was patrolling the Vistula aboard a captured Russian gunboat.
As Wittgenstein was to write in his first notebook written at the beginning of the war (in code):
10.8.14
I have done none of my own work. The situation here is a test of fire one’s character, precisely because it takes so much strength not to lose one’s temper & one’s energy.
For Wittgenstein, entering World War One was very much about fulfilling a general sense of moral duty and self-improvement as opposed to “hiding his sexuality”; to, as Perloff put it in her introduction, “turn into a different person.” He did not hide his affection for the mathematician David Pinsent, whom he met at Cambridge in 1912, and, in fact, he maintained his personal correspondence with Pinsent throughout the war until Pinsent’s death in 1918. There is no indication in the Private Notebooks that he was sexually attracted to any of the soldiers that he encountered in the army.
In fact, what jumps out throughout the Private Notebooks is his utter hatred and contempt for his fellow soldiers.
15.8.14
...my shipmates are a bunch of swine! No enthusiasm for anything, unbelievable crudity, stupidity & malice! So it turns out not to be true that a great common cause inevitably ennobles people...
A certain class prejudice might be expected, perhaps, of the man who was, after all, from the richest family in Vienna at the time. There’s a good chance, of course, that many of these soldiers were, for the most part, conscripts, having no particular feeling about the war. Perloff also notes the other nationalities among the conscripts.
We must remember that he impulsively enlisted as an ordinary soldier when he could easily have been an officer and that the men with whom he served came...from the distant Serb, croat, and Hungarian parts of the empire. Many were illiterate and did not speak German; no doubt they were a violent, aggressive, and nasty bunch...his fellow recruits eventually made fun of him, taunting and harassing this somewhat delicate, arrogant stranger, who must have appeared, from their perspective, to be a sissy to boot.
In the face of being taunted and teased, Wittgenstein ultimately decides not to be confrontational, to do his assigned tasks, to fulfill his moral mission to become something different, and to work on his first book. He finds some solace in reading Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief, Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, and a collection of Emerson’s essays. And...he masturbates...a lot!…
2.9.14
Yesterday for the first time 3 weeks, masturbated. I am almost entirely free of sexual desire.
12.10.14
...One should enjoy the good hours of life gratefully, as a blessing, and otherwise feel indifferent toward life. Today I fought for a long time against depression, then for the first time in ages masturbated & finally wrote the preceding sentence.
The Private Notebooks show Wittgenstein masturbating when he’s in a depression, not in a depression, coming out of a depression, going into a depression. Receiving a letter from David Pinsent is, perhaps, the one sure thing where you know what’s coming next. Which leads me to a major observation about Wittgenstein’s sexuality.
I know that at an earlier period in life, Wittgenstein was heavily influenced by the Jewish anti-semite Otto Weininger’s book Sex and Character. When reading biographical material about the earlier Wittgenstein, anxiety usually describes the way various biographers write about Wittgenstein’s feelings about his Jewishness and sex.
But in the Private Notebooks, while he remains anxiety-ridden about most other matters (as Wittgenstein was to remain for the rest of his life) I am not reading that he was all that anxious about sex. Masturbation is something that...happens. He “kissed” a letter that he received from Pinsent. There’s a freedom in expressing these thoughts that I found natural and unexpected (given the times), which I attribute to being around Cambridge and his loose affiliations with societies like the Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury set and the fact that he found and stayed with a partner (although it’s unknown whether Pinsent and Wittgenstein had sex).
At one point in the first few months of 1915, he receives no letters from Pinsent and sinks into a depression, contemplating suicide. Then he receives a letter from Pinsent and, all of a sudden, loves his work and is even able to to write out some of what is becoming his first work of philosophy, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
By the time of his third notebook, which covers the entirety of 1916, it seems as if Wittgenstein moves closer to the accomplishment of his mission, “to become a different person.” Various entries to the notebook are composed almost entirely of lines which make it verbatim to the Tractatus; the logic and the ethics beginning to be woven together into some sort of system. He seems to have more of a faith in God even if he continues to feel that he has to suffer more still. He still hates his fellow soldiers.
17.4.16
The platoon, with few exceptions, hates me because I am a volunteer. So I am nearly always surrounded by men who hate me...
The idea of “becoming a different person,” of being “made over”, of learning to think in a new way (as one can read in some of the later works of Michel Foucault), is probably very important to anyone’s existence and an especially critical experience for LGBT’s in a world where….well, straight folks would like to make us over all right! Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Rodriguez (among many many others) chart a road that must be traveled. Barnett is correct. Wittgenstein could not have finished the Tractatus without going through this metamorphosis. He found a way through enlisting in the army. Each of has to find his or her own way and method.
Indeed, we have a duty to do so.
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