From an interview with Wittgenstein published in the Architektonische Rundschau 1891:
"So, is it true that you and Franz Kafka were going to get together to start a brass oompah band called "The Beetles" ?"
"Our music has always been a “master simile, as it were, for anything which is fluid, non-mechanical, context-laden, incalculable, and indeterminate in language—first and foremost, expression.*" he answered, "We are not an oompah band, why don't you realise that ?" he angrily continued.
It was, indeed, true.
In "The Arcades Project" reviewer, critic, and flâneur Walter Benjamin wrote of a concert seen in Paris:
"-: Only Words :- A review
One enters the salon and observes the performers are assembled on stage in beautiful, architectured boxes, hiding them from the audience, so one cannot be sure what instruments are being played at any moment. Is it brass instruments ? It sounds like brass instruments, who can say ? The tunes are haunting and vaguely familiar. The audience is enraptured. The Beetles, fronted by Wittgenstein and Kafka, are as they say of music “It is here and it is part of our entire life”"
Much earlier..
Wittgenstein and Kafka meet at a quiet cafe...
"Franz, We are getting the band back together. What do think of the name 'The Beetles' for the revival ?" said Ludwig
Kafka with a look of concern replied "That is sailing perilously close to the wind, my friend"
"Do not worry, your secret is safe with me. About which we cannot speak, we pass over in silence,"
Earlier...
Ludwig takes leave from his day job as an aeronautical engineer designing steam-powered propellers for Count Von Zeppelin's Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG and writes to his friend and mentor Bertrand Russell ...
Dear Russell,
Two years ago, or so, I promised to send you a manuscript of mine. Now the one I am sending you to-day isn't that manuscript I'm still pottering about with it, and God knows whether I will ever publish it.
It has sometimes been said that what music conveys to us are feelings of joyfulness, melancholy, triumph, etc , etc and what repels us in this account is that it seems to say that music is an instrument for producing in us sequences of feelings...
I feel we could do better and so Franz and I are putting a band together. We will be known as "The Beetles" for the obvious reasons.
If you should have nothing better to do and if you should get some mild enjoyment out it, perhaps you could join us ?
As I say, if you don't it doesn't matter at all .
Yours ever,
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig, Franz and the band members travel from place to place in the airship Wittgenstein constructed with help from Graf Von Zeppelin, the Number "7" . The philosophical community is impressed by the superb architecture of the ships gondola, the high ceilings and the engineering detail of the steam-propeller system.
They perform music by day and solve philosophic conundrums by night, "There are no philosophical problems" says Ludo "not when The Beetles are here to set things right"
*this phrase by Eran Guter