Fin-de-siècle Vienna and the Challenge of Family Biography

In 1851, a middle-aged German wool trader named Hermann Christian Wittgenstein entered into a partnership of sorts with his Austrian in-laws, who also dealt in raw materials, only on a greater scale. Hermann moved to Austria, where he began giving, in today's parlance, extreme makeovers to estates local aristocrats had neglected, with the understanding that his in-laws would help him sell the wool, coal, wood, and corn the estates produced. The arrangement worked brilliantly. Frugal and hard driving—and eager to use industrial methods in a country that had been slow to industrialize—Hermann transformed poorly tended lands into robust enterprises. Meanwhile, his in-laws not only did their part, but they thought, as well, to direct the money that came streaming in toward lucrative holdings in Viennese property. Within a few years, Hermann was able to install himself, his wife, and several of their eleven children in a palace outside Vienna. They soon left it, despite Hermann's parsimony, for an even grander residence, a castle in which one of Empress Maria-Theresa's prime ministers had lived. Never mind that Hermann leased the place: he had built a House of Wittgenstein.

It would be hard to think of a family more deserving of a group biography. After all, Hermann Christian was far outpaced by the son from whom he expected the least—namely, Karl, who failed out of high school and ran away to America as a teenager. Not long after his return, Karl, the third of Hermann Christian's sons, followed his father in marrying well; then, thanks to good instincts, an appetite for risk, booming