A mystery solved

I love reading book reviews. I’ll read reviews of books that I would never actually spend my time reading. Especially ones about books on history. To grab people’s attention, the reviewer will sometimes pepper in all sorts of weird historical facts. It’s where I learned the source of that line about Hitler’s shortcomings that is sung to the tune of The Colonel Bogey March in Bridge on the River Kwai. These are the little bits of trivia that make me a monster at Trivial Pursuit.

In the last month I’ve read no less than three reviews about a book on the Wittgenstein family (for Monty Python fans, they of “Wittgenstein was a beery swine” fame). The book focuses on the period at the start of the 20th Century when they were crazy rich, crazy for music, and given the number of them who committed suicide, possibly just crazy.

The little bit of trivia that just fascinates me is that one of the sons disappeared and is assumed to have committed suicide by jumping off a boat on a Florida lake in 1902. Given this and the fact that the Wittgenstein family had a habit socking money away in stray Swiss bank accounts, I’m perfectly willing to put out there that I’m the long lost descendant of Hans Wittgenstein. I mean, really. It makes perfect sense. My love of the alpine horn and beer. My sense of having mysterious origins. My fear of sailing. And alligators. I had always thought I might be a lost Hapsburg. But this is sooooo much more logical.

Okay, the fact that he was quite probably gay is a bit of a wrinkle. But who knows? Given a slightly soggy, disoriented Austrian, the moonlight over Lake Okeechobee and a young, impressionable girl from the swamps . . . well, things can happen.

Frankly, I find this all the empirical evidence any court could possibly need. So, if any stray checks drawn on long inactive Swiss bank accounts belonging to an H. Wittgenstein happen to pop up, you can just forward them on to me. Call it an inheritance.