Family Background and Origins
The grandfather of Karl Wittgenstein, estate manager Moses Meyer, came from Laasphe in the former Wittgenstein kreis (county). He moved to Korbach before 1802, where he opened a dry goods store.
The Napoleonic effort of equality before the law for all Jews in the kingdom of Westphalia in 1808 decreed that all people should take a surname within three months. Moses Meyer took the name of his birthplace and thereafter was known as Moses Meyer-Wittgenstein.
At first, Meyer-Wittgenstein's business became the biggest and most successful enterprise in the city of Korbach, but also shortly thereafter began to decline. He had a son, Hermann Christian (b. September 12, 1802 in Korbach; d. 1878 in Vienna) who moved the business to Gohlis at the end of the 1830s. From there, the family continued to prosper financially. In 1938, to escape Nazi racial laws and to be reclassified as half Jewish, his descendants claimed that Herman Christian was not the son of Moses Meyer-Wittgenstein but rather the illegitimate offspring of a prince of the House of Waldeck. Although the claim was probably fabricated, it was somewhat substantiated by the princely protection enjoyed by the Wittgensteins when they were living in Hesse.
After Hermann Christian converted to Protestantism he married Fanny Figdor in 1839. She came from one of the most important business families in Vienna.
Karl, born in 1847, was the sixth of eleven children of Hermann and Fanny. Three years later the family moved to Vösendorf (Mödling district) in Austria, where his four younger siblings were born. One of his brothers, Paul Wittgenstein (1842-1928), was the father of Dr Karl Paul Wittgenstein who married Hilde Köchert, daughter of renowned Viennese jeweller Heinrich Köchert: their son Paul Wittgenstein (1907-1979) was "Wittgenstein's Nephew", the central character of a book by his friend Thomas Bernhard.
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