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'''''The Jew of Linz''''' (1998) is a controversial book by [[Australia]]n writer [[Kimberley Cornish]]. It alleges that [[Ludwig Wittgenstein]], later a renowned philosopher, as a schoolboy was acquainted with and had a profound impact on [[Adolf Hitler]], later leader of [[Nazi Germany]], and thereby on subsequent history, and that Wittgenstein later was involved in a [[Cambridge Five|pro-Soviet spy ring]].
{{sprotect|72 hours}}
'''''The Jew of Linz''''' (1998) is a controversial book by the [[Australia]]n author [[Kimberley Cornish]]. It raises some contested claims about the Anglo-Austrian Jewish philosopher [[Ludwig Wittgenstein]] – who was an important influence on twentieth-century philosophy from his position at [[Trinity College, Cambridge|Trinity College]], at the [[University of Cambridge]] – and his school-fellow, [[Adolf Hitler]].


==The book's major claims==
==The book's major claims==


#The occasion for Adolf Hitler becoming [[anti-Semitic]] was a schoolboy interaction in Linz, circa 1904, with Ludwig Wittgenstein
#The occasion for Adolf Hitler becoming [[anti-Semitic]] was a schoolboy interaction in [[Linz]], circa 1904, with Ludwig Wittgenstein
#In order to fight the growing power of the Nazis in the 1920s Wittgenstein joined the [[Comintern]]
#In order to fight the growing power of the [[Nazi]]s in the 1920s Wittgenstein joined the ''[[Comintern]]''
#As a [[Trinity College, Cambridge|Trinity College]] don, Wittgenstein recruited the Trinity College spies [[Guy Burgess|Burgess]], [[Kim Philby|Philby]] and [[Anthony Blunt|Blunt]] (and [[Donald Duart Maclean|Maclean]], from nearby [[Trinity Hall]]) for the [[Soviet Union]]
#As a [[Trinity College, Cambridge|Trinity College]] don, Wittgenstein recruited the Trinity College spies [[Guy Burgess|Burgess]], [[Kim Philby|Philby]] and [[Anthony Blunt|Blunt]] (and [[Donald Duart Maclean|Maclean]], from nearby [[Trinity Hall]]) for the [[Soviet Union]]
#Wittgenstein was responsible for the secret of decrypting the German "[[Enigma machine|Enigma]]" code being passed to [[Stalin]], which resulted ultimately in the Nazi defeats on the Eastern Front and liberation of the remnant Jews from the camps.
#Wittgenstein was responsible for the secret of decrypting the German "[[Enigma machine|Enigma]]" code being passed to [[Stalin]], which resulted ultimately in the Nazi defeats on the Eastern Front and liberation of the remnant Jews from the camps.
#Both Hitler's oratory and Wittgenstein's philosophy of language derive from the [[hermetic tradition]], the key to which is Wittgenstein's "no-ownership" theory of mind, described by the late British Academician Sir [[P. F. Strawson]] in his book ''Individuals''.
#Both Hitler's oratory and Wittgenstein's philosophy of language derive from the [[hermetic tradition]], the key to which is Wittgenstein's "no-ownership" theory of mind, described by the late British Academician Sir [[P. F. Strawson]] in his book ''Individuals''.<ref>Peter Strawson: ''Individuals'', Methuen, 1958.</ref>


==Cornish's argument==
==Cornish's argument==


The point of departure for Cornish's argument is the fact that Wittgenstein and Hitler both attended the ''[[Realschule]]'' in [[Linz]], a school of about 300 students and were simultaneously at the school when they were 15 years old in the school year 1903-4. (McGuinness, p.51 and Monk, p.15.) This was established by Hermann Möcker, the Austrian professor who examined the Realschule records, which even record the donations of [[Karl Wittgenstein]] (Ludwig's wealthy father) to the school. Some of these Realschule records are viewable on the University of Passau website[http://www.phil.uni-passau.de/dlwg/ws07/15-1-97.txt]). Amongst other matters, these show that Wittgenstein and Hitler had the same highly nationalistic German History teacher (Dr [[Leopold Poetsch]]) whom Hitler refers to and commends in ''[[Mein Kampf]]''. While Hitler was just six days older than Wittgenstein, they were two grades apart at the ''Realschule'' &mdash; Hitler was repeating a year and Wittgenstein had been advanced a year. Cornish's thesis is not only that Hitler did know the young Wittgenstein (who was heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the [[Austro-Hungarian Empire]] and indeed, all of Europe) but that he hated Wittgenstein, and that Wittgenstein was specifically the "one Jewish boy" from his school days referred to in the section of ''[[Mein Kampf]]'' where Hitler traces out the origins of his [[anti-Semitism]]. He argues from this that Hitler's anti-Semitism is traceable to 1903/4 and that it involved a projection of the young Wittgenstein's traits onto the whole Jewish people.
The point of departure for Cornish's argument is the fact that Wittgenstein and Hitler both attended the ''[[Realschule]]'' in [[Linz]], a school of about 300 students and were simultaneously at the school when they were 15 years old in the school year 1903-4.<ref>McGuinness, p.51 and Monk, p.15.</ref> While Hitler was just six days older than Wittgenstein, they were two grades apart at the ''Realschule'' &mdash; Hitler was repeating a year and Wittgenstein had been advanced a year. Cornish's thesis is not only that Hitler did know the young Wittgenstein but that he hated Wittgenstein, and that Wittgenstein was specifically the "one Jewish boy" from his school days referred to in the section of ''[[Mein Kampf]]'' where Hitler traces out the origins of his [[anti-Semitism]]. He argues from this that Hitler's anti-Semitism is traceable to 1903/4 and that it involved a projection of the young Wittgenstein's traits onto the whole Jewish people.


Cornish also argues that Wittgenstein is the most likely suspect as recruiter of the "[[Cambridge Five]]" spy ring. This thesis has been accepted by the British philosopher Professor [[Antony Flew]]. Flew wrote <ref>Review of The Jew of Linz, Free Life, (ISSN: 0260 5112) Issue 32, July 1999)</ref>:
Cornish also argues that Wittgenstein is the most likely suspect as recruiter of the "[[Cambridge Five]]" spy ring. The author suggests that Wittgenstein was responsible for British [[decryption]] technology for the German [[Enigma machine|Enigma]] code reaching the [[Red Army]] and that he thereby enabled the Red Army victories on the [[Eastern Front (World War II)|Eastern Front]] that liberated the camps and ultimately overthrew the Reich.


The first section of ''The Jew of Linz'' introduces these two ideas. Other sections of the book deal with Cornish's theories about what he claims are the common roots of Wittgenstein's and Hitler's philosophies in mysticism, magic, and the "no-ownership" theory of mind. Cornish sees this as Wittgenstein's generalisation of [[Schopenhauer]]'s account of the Unicity of the Will, in which despite appearances, there is only a single Will acting through the bodies of all creatures. This doctrine, generalised to other mental faculties, such as thinking, is presented in [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]]'s "Essays". The doctrine, writes Cornish, was also held by the Oxford philosopher [[R. G. Collingwood]] who was one of Wittgenstein's electors to his Cambridge chair. Cornish tries to tie this to Wittgenstein's arguments against the idea of "mental privacy" and in conclusion says "I have attempted to locate the source of the [[Holocaust]] in a perversion of early Aryan religious doctrines about the ultimate nature of man". Cornish also suggests that Hitler's oratorical powers in addressing the group mind of crowds and Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and denial of mental privacy, are the practical and theoretical consequences of this doctrine.
:Chapter 2 concerns "The Spies of Trinity" (College, Cambridge). Mr Cornish opens by pressing a question never previously asked: "What is the explanation for the fact that Wittgenstein was in 1935 offered the Chair of Philosophy in the [[University of Kazan]]?" An explanation is needed since Wittgenstein was very far from being a Marxist philosopher. And the [[Great Terror]], which had been signalled by the assassination of S.M. Kirov in late 1934, was during 1935 in full swing. Mr Cornish contends that the reason why the government of the USSR treated Wittgenstein with such peculiar generosity was that he had been the recruiter of all the Cambridge spies. The question whether or not this hypothesis is true or false can be definitively settled only if and when the relevant Soviet archives are examined. But I am myself as confident as without such knock-down decisive verification it is possible to be that Mr Cornish is right.

If Wittgenstein were indeed responsible for British [[decryption]] technology for the German [[Enigma machine|Enigma]] code reaching the [[Red Army]], as the author argues, then the very same boy who was the occasion of Hitler becoming anti-Semitic, enabled the Red Army victories on the [[Eastern Front (World War II)|Eastern Front]] that liberated the camps and ultimately overthrew the Reich.

The first section of ''The Jew of Linz'' introduces these two ideas. Other sections of the book deal with Cornish's theories about what he claims are the common roots of Wittgenstein's and Hitler's philosophies in mysticism, magic, and the "no-ownership" theory of mind. Cornish sees this as Wittgenstein's generalisation of [[Schopenhauer]]'s account of the Unicity of the Will, in which despite appearances, there is only a single Will acting through the bodies of all creatures. This doctrine, generalised to other mental faculties, such as thinking, is presented in [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]]'s "Essays". McGuinness writes (p.224) on Wittgenstein's reading during the Great War, that Emerson's Essays "... open with a favourite thought of his in these years: 'There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same' ('History', in Emerson's Works, 1888, p.1)". Emerson, for example, held that Plato's very thinking could occur in someone today. This is not the commonplace that the content of Plato's thought is accessible to everyone, but that Plato's very act of thinking "in eternity" can move various different human vehicles in physical time, just as a unitary thunderclap can break multiple windows across a city. This doctrine was also held by the Oxford philosopher [[R. G. Collingwood]] (p.301) who was one of Wittgenstein's electors to his Cambridge chair. That Wittgenstein did adhere to the no-ownership theory of mind in the 1930's was argued by the British academician, the late [[P. F. Strawson|Sir Peter Strawson]] in his book ''Individuals''. (Cornish labels this doctrine "mental socialism"). He identifies the doctrine of the unicity of mental life as central to Hindu mysticism, which he sees as deriving from (what used to be called) the "[[Aryan]]" invaders of [[India]] whose religious doctrines are preserved in the [[Rig-Veda]]. Cornish tries to tie this to Wittgenstein's arguments against the idea of "mental privacy" and in conclusion says "I have attempted to locate the source of the [[Holocaust]] in a perversion of early Aryan religious doctrines about the ultimate nature of man". Cornish also suggests that Hitler's oratorical powers in addressing the group mind of crowds and Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and denial of mental privacy, are the practical and theoretical consequences of this doctrine.


==Evidence==
==Evidence==
[[Image:WittRealschuleCrop.jpg|thumb|right|300px|Blowup of part of the Realschule photograph from 1904, with annotation by Kimberley Cornish. Identification of boy Hitler is not in doubt, but identification of boy Wittgenstein has been disputed by [[Brigitte Hamann|Hamann]] and others.]]
Cornish used a school photograph on his book cover, of which a partial blowup is shown below, as his first piece of evidence.


Cornish used a school photograph on his book cover, of which a partial blowup is shown opposite, as his first piece of evidence. In it, the author identifies Hitler and Wittgenstein only centimetres apart. However, while the authenticity of the picture and the identification of young Hitler is undisputed, the identification of the other boy as Wittgenstein has been challenged, but Cornish claims that the Victoria Police photographic evidence unit examined the photograph and confirmed the presence of Wittgenstein in it as "highly probable".
[[Image:WittRealschuleCrop.jpg|thumb|center|800px|Blowup of part of the Realschule photograph from 1904.]]


Cornish's prime argument for Wittgenstein's having been the recruiter of the Cambridge spy ring is that the Soviet government offered Wittgenstein the chair in Philosophy at what had been Lenin's university ([[Kazan University|Kazan]]) at a time (during the [[Great Purge]]) when ideological conformity was at a premium amongst Soviet academics and enforced by the very harshest penalties. Wittgenstein was known to have left-wing sympathies and wanted to emigrate to Russia, first in the twenties (as he wrote in a letter to [[Paul Engelmann]]) and again in the thirties, either to work as a labourer or as a philosophy lecturer. Cornish argues that given the nature of the Soviet regime, the possibility that a non-Marxist philosopher (or even one over whom the government could exert no ideological control) would be offered such a post, is unlikely in the extreme.
It is part of a contemporary school photograph, in which the author identifies Hitler and Wittgenstein only centimetres apart. However, while the authenticity of the picture and the identification of young Hitler is undisputed, the identification of the other boy with Wittgenstein has been challenged, but Cornish states (naming the staff involved) that the Victoria Police photographic evidence unit examined the photograph and confirmed the presence of Wittgenstein in it as "highly probable", the highest degree of confirmation the unit offers in all court cases. (Cornish, p.11 and pp.240-41.)


==Response==
A further item of evidence is the testimony of Franz Keplinger, who was in Wittgenstein's class in 1903/4. (See the class list on the University of Passau website [http://www.phil.uni-passau.de/dlwg/ws07/15-1-97.txt]). Keplinger was interviewed by Dr Franz Jetzinger and recounted:
:"Once Adolf shouted at another boy, 'Du Saujud!'. The boy concerned was staggered; he knew nothing of his Jewish ancestry at the time and only discovered it years later ... " (Jetzinger, p.71.)
This is the very earliest report of Hitler having made an anti-Semitic comment. Cornish deduces that the abused boy could not have been one of the sixteen officially Jewish students at the school, because they all knew they were Jewish. Brian McGuinness, however, comments on the use of "Saujud" ("Pig-Jew") at the school, saying that it was used "only in the formulaic manner in which a Bavarian would refer to a Saupreuss" ("Pig-Prussian") (McGuinness, p.51). (Hitler, born in Brunau, spoke a Bavarian dialect.)


Some of the reviewers of ''The Jew of Linz'' contend that:
Since it was Adolf Hitler who hurled the epithet "Pig-Jew" at this non-Jewish boy of Jewish descent (who Cornish argues was the only one at the school and thus Wittgenstein) and that in any case McGuinness intimates Wittgenstein was subject to abuse by it (else it is unclear why he raises the matter in his biography of Wittgenstein) it follows that there was indeed some personal antagonism between the young Hitler and the young Wittgenstein, and an antagonism based on anti-Semitism at that. The date is significant because it establishes that Hitler's anti-Semitism is dateable to 1904 at the latest, unlike most accounts of Hitler's anti-Semitism which date it to his time in Vienna or even (Ian Kershaw) later. Cornish' argument thus runs:
# Cornish's evidence is thin (most of the arguments adduced in favour of the claim are based on circumstantial associations and speculation).
# There is little evidence that Hitler and Wittgenstein knew each other.
# There is no evidence at all for the more sensational claims that there was a personal antagonism between them, or that Hitler's personal hatred of Wittgenstein shaped the course of Nazi anti-Semitism.
# Despite the wealth of material which has emerged from the archives of the [[KGB]] since the collapse of the [[Soviet Union]], there is no evidence that Wittgenstein was one of the most important Soviet agents in the UK, or a Stalinist agent at all.
# Cornish misrepresents Wittgenstein's thought and his philosophical context or simply does not understand him.


''Andrew Harrison'', writing in the ''Richmond Review'', asks: "Could it really be that six million Jewish victims and all those others were systematically murdered by the mass production methods of a significant part of a civilised society just because of an antagonism between two bewildered small boys? The horrifying thought belongs not to 'the detective work of history' (Cornish's description of his project) but to speculative drama. There is a powerful play to be written that presents it, but this book is not its vehicle."<ref>Andrew Harrison, [http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/jewoflin.html ''Review: The Jew of Linz''] ''Richmond Review'', undated.</ref>
:1. A boy at the Linz Realschule was of Jewish descent, but ignorant of his Jewish ancestry.


[[Daniel Johnson (journalist)|Daniel Johnson]] viewed ''The Jew of Linz'' as a "revisionist tract masquerading as psycho-history". He wrote, {{cquote|Cornish correctly identifies "the twist of the investigation" as the thesis that "Nazi [[metaphysics]], as discernible in Hitler's writings . . . is nothing but Wittgenstein's theory of the mind modified so as to exclude the race of its inventor". So the "Jew of Linz" was indirectly responsible, at least in part, for the Holocaust. Cornish tries to deflect the implications of his argument thus: "Whatever 'the Jews' may have done, nothing humanly justifies what was done to them." But he then offers "a thought that might occur to a [[Hasidic]] Jew, and that is more fittingly a matter for Jewish, as opposed to gentile, reflection: the very engine that drove Hitler's acquisition of the magical powers that made his ascent and the Holocaust possible was the Wittgenstein [[Covenant (biblical)|Covenant]] violation". At this point, the non-sensical shades into the downright sinister.<ref>Daniel Johnson, [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/incomingFeeds/article776585.ece ''What didn't happen in Linz''] ''Sunday Times Literary Supplement'', 17 April 1998.</ref>}}
:2. Hitler yelled "Saujud!' at this boy.


Opting for hilarity over condemnation, ''Adam Shatz'' wrote, "If you read Cornish’s book for too long a sitting, you may find yourself seized by his delirium and asking all sorts of questions.
:3. Wittgenstein was the only boy at the school who was of Jewish descent and ignorant of his Jewish ancestry.
How did ordinary Germans come to share Hitler’s hatred of the Wittgensteins? Was the fall of Stalinism a defeat for Wittgenstein’s thought? Do anti-Wittgensteinians in philosophy departments present an imminent genocidal threat? If so, should there be Wittgenstein-tolerance seminars? Is [[Steven Spielberg]] interested in getting involved?
Such questions leave us speechless, which is, of course, exactly how Wittgenstein would have it."<ref>Adam Shatz, [http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9810/ip.html ''School Ties''] ''Lingua Franca'', October 1998.</ref>


[[Nicci French|Sean French]] wrote, in ''[[New Statesman]]'': "There is something heroic about this argument and it would be a good subject for a novel about the dangers of creating theories out of nothing. [[Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov|Vladimir Nabokov]] should have written it. It is not just that there are weak links in the theory. There are no links in the theory. No evidence that Hitler, in his final unhappy year, even knew a boy two years above him. If they did know each other, there is no evidence that he was the boy Hitler distrusted, no evidence that Hitler's remarks on snitching related to specific incidents at the Linz Realschule, no evidence that Wittgenstein informed on his fellow pupils."<ref>Sean French, ''[[New Statesman]]'', 3 March 1998.</ref>
:Therefore


In the same journal, [[Roz Kaveney]] calls it "a stupid and dishonest book", and says "[Cornish's] intention is to claim Wittgenstein for his own brand of contemplative mysticism, which he defines as the great insight that IndoEuropeans (or, as he unregenerately terms them, Aryans) brought to Hinduism and Buddhism."<ref>Roz Kaveney, ''[[New Statesman]]'', 5 June 1998.</ref>
:4. The boy at whom Hitler yelled "Saujud", was Wittgenstein.


''Paul Monk'' concentrates on the inconsistencies in Cornish's theory that Wittgenstein was the head of the Cambridge spy ring, asking why Cornish has apparently not bothered to verify any of his theories by checking the [[KGB]] archives. Ultimately, Monk says "As I read ''The Jew of Linz'', I found myself wondering how on earth Cornish had confected so strange a piece of work. I found it by turns puzzling, funny, challenging and outrageously nutty... Cornish calls his book 'pioneer detective work', but I think it is really pioneer detective fiction."<ref>Paul Monk, [http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Jew+of+Linz:+Wittgenstein,+Hitler+and+Their+Secret+Battle+for+the...-a021172488 ''The Jew of Linz: Wittgenstein, Hitler and Their Secret Battle for the Mind''], originally in ''Quadrant'', Sept 1998 v42 n9.</ref>
Some readers have found it surprising that Hitler might have been aware of Wittgenstein's Jewishness while Wittgenstein himself was ignorant of it. But public discussion of Karl Wittgenstein's dubious business practices was in the newspapers all over central Europe. Karl Wittgenstein himself wrote lengthy articles in the popular newspapers defending his iron and steel cartel with the Rothschilds and Gutmanns and his own Judenberg ("Jews' mountain") production of scythes, which had been confiscated by the authorities. (See Karl Wittgenstein's "Politico-Economic Writings", edited by J. C. Nyiri, with an introduction by J. C. Nyiri and Brian McGuinness, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Philadelphia 1984. For a web profile of Karl Wittgenstein and the industrial troubles at the Wittgenstein plants, reported in the Vienna newspapers, see [http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phil/forum/KarlWittgenstein.htm]). The general community across the empire, that is, knew of the family's Jewish roots. The Wittgenstein boys, for example, had tried to join a gymnastics club, but been blackballed on account of their non-Aryan origin. (Monk, p.14.)


''Sophie Hampshire'' writes, "[T]he author fuses both early and later work of Wittgenstein. He is I presume, trying to exemplify a linear progression of Wittgenstein's theory of mind that is to say, universal mind. Passages which are extracted from the [[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus|Tractatus]] are mainly confined to 5.55 - 6, and it is apparent Cornish lacks critical reason. ... Moreover the emphasis on the so called no-ownership theory in the Tractatus is a gross oversimplification. Wittgenstein was mainly concerned with logical form between propositions and states of affairs, the division between what can be described in language and what must remain silent, how propositions as pictures of states of affairs acquire their semantic content, to name a few of his concerns."<ref>
Hitler's father was an avid newspaper reader and his obituary notice in the Linz "Tagespost" described him as "universally well-informed, he was able to pronounce authoritatively on any matter that came to his notice." (Toland, John. "Adolf Hitler", Ballantine Books, New York 1976, p.19.) Wittgenstein's arrival at the Linz Realschule being noteworthy (Wittgenstein being heir to one of the richest Jewish fortunes in Europe, if not the world)it is thus not at all surprising that Hitler's family knew of his Jewish origins. Equally it is not at all surprising that papers that (in 1903 anti-Semitic Austria) labeled Wittgenstein's own father as a Jewish crook, might have been withheld from fourteen-year-old Wittgenstein.
Sophie Hampshire, [http://leoalmanac.org/journal/Vol_6/lea_v6_n12.txt ''Book Review: The Jew of Linz''] ''Leonardo Electronic Almanac'', Volume 6, No. 12, December 1998.</ref>


In a review that originally appeared in [[Philosophy Now]], ''John Mann'' likewise focuses on the philosophical content of the book but draws very different conclusions from Hampshire's. In his opinion, the contentions that so riled up the book's many critics were simply a clever ruse by Cornish designed to attract more readers. Mann approvingly writes, {{cquote|"Cornish is clever enough to know if he wrote a book on his 'no ownership' theory of language it would not have a wide readership. If he says this 'no ownership' theory was taught by Wittgenstein, learned and twisted for his own ends by Hitler, and actually needs Cornish to explain it all in great detail for the rest of the book[,] he has the book reviewed in every paper and even serialised in the Sunday Times. ... If you’re looking for a book which offers history, politics, magic and philosophy, try ''The Jew of Linz''."<ref>John Mann, [http://www.fountain.btinternet.co.uk/philosophy/jewof.html ''The Jew of Linz by Kimberley Cornish''] ''Fountain of Language'', originally in ''Philosophy Now'', 19 June 1998.</ref>}}
Even some adult members of the family were in ignorance of its Jewish origins. Ray Monk reports that one of Wittgenstein's aunts did not know the family was Jewish and had to be informed its members were "pur sang" (Monk, p.5). Cornish argues this is evidence that the matter of Jewish descent was therefore not common knowledge within the family, even to adults, and so unless there were other boys of detectable Jewish descent at the school, the boy whom Hitler abused had to have been - as in point 3. in the argument above - the young Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Premises 1 and 2, of course, are supported by Keplinger's testimony on this matter to Dr Jetzinger, referenced above.)Should the three premises be true, Cornish' argument go through as a straightforward and logically valid deduction. Critics, then, are forced to attack one or more of its premises.


[[Alex Ross]], writing for [[Slate]], describes ''The Jew of Linz'' as a "silly book" and "an excellent case study in the Hitlerological mania" and, playing on the German word for "muck" and an English homonym, calls it "mist of one kind or another".<ref>Alex Ross, [http://slate.msn.com/id/3073/sidebar/38635/ ''Regarding Hitler''], ''Slate'', 1 July 1998.</ref>
In further discussion on the argument's premises, Cornish notes that there were no more than 1,102 Jews in all of Upper Austria; that the number of Jews in Linz was roughly constant over the decade 1900-10 at about 5-600 (and the Linz Realschule Jews at about 15); that there was no intermarriage in Linz and precious little in all provincial Austria. It is therefore unlikely, he says, that there were boys of detectably Jewish descent at the school other than Ludwig Wittgenstein. (The matter is in any case settled through student birth registrations, which record student religious affiliations.) Readers who feel that "Saujud" was a commonly used insult, or that Hitler might have used it indiscriminately, should note that McGuinness does not state the expression was used commonly (merely that its use was "formulaic"). There is no other record in the literature of any specific person using the expression at the Realschule except Hitler. And Keplinger explicitly stated (see the quote) that the boy against whom Hitler directed his abuse did in fact later find out that he really was of Jewish descent.


[[:de:Carlos Widmann|Carlos Widmann]] writes of the "renowned historian [[Brigitte Hamann]], author of [[Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship]]", and her skeptical assessment of the photographic evidence: "She considers it entirely probable that Wittgenstein attracted the notice of boy Adolf -- but not as a 'Jew of Linz'. Instead, Wittgenstein was the rich, elegant, unapproachable little prince from Vienna who attended Catholic religious instruction. ... But aren't the two boys standing almost shoulder to shoulder in the yearbook picture? Hamann comments, 'The picture was not taken in 1903 and the child standing close to Hitler was not Wittgenstein'. Instead, as Hamann continues, 'The picture was taken at an earlier date when Ludwig ... was [still] being taught in Vienna'."<ref>Carlos Widmann, [http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/74/44/dokument.html?titel=Der+Indiana+Jones+von+Linz&id=7934447&top=SPIEGEL&suchbegriff=&quellen=&vl=0 ''Der Indiana Jones von Linz'', in DER SPIEGEL 28/1998], 6 July 1998, p. 165. {{de icon}}</ref>
Slightly affirming Cornish, the Austrian historian [[Brigitte Hamann]] writes in ''Hitler's Vienna''


[[:de:Eva Reichmann|Eva Reichmann]], in a review for the Austrian website ''literaturhaus.at'', concludes: "The death of six million Jews, thousands upon thousands of soldiers of all nationalities, the murder of thousands in German concentration camps -- to reduce all this to an unprovable encounter between Hitler and Wittgenstein, to an unprovable mutual influence (which Cornish does not manage to prove!) heaps insult upon the wrongs done to all the victims and represents a travesty of the body of literature on the topic."<ref>Eva Reichmann, [http://www.literaturhaus.at/buch/fachbuch/rez/cornish/ ''Der Jude aus Linz''], ''literaturhaus.at'', 10 November 1998. {{de icon}}</ref>
:Hitler is bound to have at least laid eyes on Wittgenstein, for in Linz the latter was a conspicuously bizarre fellow: he spoke an unusually pure High German, albeit with a slight stutter, wore very elegant clothes, and was unusually sensitive and extremely unsociable. It was one of his idiosyncrasies to use the formal form of address with his schoolmates and to demand that they too - with the exception of a single friend - address him formally, with "Sie" and "Herr Ludwig". (pp.15-16)


A review by ''Kathrin Chod'' in ''Berliner Lesezeichen'' reels off, with an increasingly weary air of stunned sarcasm, the conjectures put forward by Cornish. At the end, the reviewer refrains from delivering a ''coup de grace'' or even a conclusion, trusting the reader to supply one themselves in light of what has been shown.<ref>Kathrin Chod, [http://www.luise-berlin.de/Lesezei/Blz99_04/text32.htm ''Zwei pfiffen zusammen''], ''Berliner Lesezeichen'' 4/99. {{de icon}}</ref>
In discussing this, Cornish points out that unlike his other school-fellows such as Keplinger, Hitler adopted this same unusual mannerism of insisting he be addressed with "Sie". Thus Cornish (p.21) quotes the Hitler biographer [[Joachim Fest]] on Hitler's mannerisms: "One of the former boarders recalls 'None of the five other boys made friends with him. Whereas we schoolmates naturally called one another du, he addressed us as Sie ...'". And Dr Jetzinger also records his conversation with Keplinger (who visited Hitler in Munich in 1927 at Nazi Party Headquarters) as follows:


''Jan Westerhoff'', in a review for ''literaturkritik.de'' wrote: "Cornish's book is an interesting show piece of a nearly paranoid understanding of history which views the whole of 20th century history from a single vantage point (namely, the putative exchange between the pupils Wittgenstein and Hitler). In this way Cornish tries to obtain evidence for his hypothesis from within history itself. However, if someone cries 'Ludwig' and 'Adolf' into the forest, he should not be surprised if the answering cries are 'Wittgenstein' and 'Hitler'. This clearly shows the methodical inadequacy of amassing a large quantity of almost-evidence in support of a hypothesis for which no evidence exists."<ref>Jan Westerhoff, [http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=207&ausgabe=199906 ''Gefährliche Beziehungen''], ''literaturkritik.de'' No. 6 (June 1999). {{de icon}}</ref>
:'How did you greet him?'
:'I said, "Servus, Hitler."'
:'Did he answer with "Thou", or "You"?'
:'"Thou", of course! I wouldn't have taken "You" from a class-mate!'


[[Antony Flew]] offers a mixed review: "Mr Cornish contends that the reason why the government of the USSR treated Wittgenstein with such peculiar generosity was that he had been the recruiter of all the Cambridge spies. The question whether or not this hypothesis is true or false can be definitively settled only if and when the relevant Soviet archives are examined. But I am myself as confident as without such knock-down decisive verification it is possible to be that Mr Cornish is right." On the other hand, "On the very first page of Part III, Mr Cornish explains that the essence of this doctrine<blockquote>was expressed by Emerson in his restatement of the original Aryan doctrine of consciousness: ‘… the act of seeing and the thing seen, the see-er and the spectacle, the subject and the object is one'.</blockquote>I confess, not very shamefacedly, that confronted with such doctrines I want to quote Groucho Marx: 'It appears absurd. But don't be misled. It is absurd.'"<ref>[http://www.seangabb.co.uk/freelife/flhtm/fl32flew.htm Free Life], Issue 32, July 1999</ref>
The boys, then, did not take well to being addressed as "Sie" by Hitler. And quite independently, Wittgenstein's sister Hermine writes on this "Sie" locution that Wittgenstein addressed "his school-fellows, for example, with the formal pronoun 'Sie'; which created a barrier ...". (Rhees, p.1). The boys, then, did not take well to being addressed as "Sie" by Wittgenstein either. The existence of this common unusual (and, for Germans, rude) locution, says Cornish, points to some sort of interaction between Hitler and Wittgenstein.


British professor ''Laurence Goldstein'' is more sanguine: "For one thing, at the K.u.k. Realschule in Linz, Wittgenstein met Hitler and may have inspired in him a hatred of Jews which led, ultimately, to the Holocaust. This, naturally enough, weighed heavily on Wittgenstein's conscience in his later years."
Hitler's adolescent ambition (confirmed by the records of his failed application to Art school) was to be an artist. Cornish stresses the role of Karl Wittgenstein in financing the Sezession building in Vienna for artists such as Gustav Klimt, whom he commissioned to paint a portrait of his daughter, Wittgenstein's sister Margarete.


''["I'll say!" one can hear Dame Edna exclaim at this point.]''
Cornish also points out that the pianist and composer [[Franz Liszt]] had abandoned the mother of his children, the Comtesse Marie d'Agoult, for Princess Carolyne Wittgenstein, who was of Jewish descent and had taken the Liszt/d'Agoult children away from their mother. Liszt's daughter, Cosima Liszt, thus grew up hating Jews and her father's paramour Carolyne Wittgenstein in particular. (Cornish quotes the opera singer Dietrich Fischer-Deskau as his authority for Princess Wittgenstein's Jewishness.) [[Cosima Liszt|Cosima Liszt]] married Richard Wagner.


Goldstein goes on: "Monk flatly states: 'There is no evidence that they had anything to do with one another' …. Even if this were true, it is a well known fallacy (argumentum ad ignorantiam) to infer from there being no evidence that p to the conclusion that p is not the case. … It is overwhelmingly probable that Hitler and Wittgenstein did meet, and with dire consequences for the history of the world.The evidence for believing so (admittedly circumstantial) has been assembled by Kimberley Cornish, a journalist trained in philosophy, in an important recent book …"<ref>Goldstein 1999, p.164</ref>
The leader of the anti-Wagnerian forces in Wilhelmine Germany was [[Josef Joachim]], of the Royal Academy in Berlin, famous as a violinist and leader of the "Joachim Quartet". He was a cousin of Wittgenstein's grandmother and raised as an adopted Wittgenstein in the same house in Leipzig as Wittgenstein's father. Besides the well-known general anti-Semitic diatribes penned by Wagner, Wagner also referred specifically to Joachim. At one stage they were familiar enough to use "Du" and Joachim was to have been lead violinist in the first performance of "The Ring". After their falling-out, Joachim/Wittgenstein led those whom Wagner termed "the music-Jews" against Wagnerianism in Music. The composer Friedrich Kiel, also at Joachim's Berlin Hochschule, was yet another anti-Wagnerian Wittgenstein protege. Cornish's argument is thus that Josef Joachim, and the Wittgenstein patronage of [[Friedrich Kiel]], [[Johannes Brahms]], [[Bruno Walter]], [[Gustav Mahler]], [[Clara Schumann]] and other musicians, enables us to identify the Wittgensteins as the "music Jews" against whom Wagner wrote the paper [[Das Judenthum in der Musik|"Judaism in Music"]], that marked the start of modern German anti-Semitism. It is of enormous parenthetical interest for the study of Wagner's anti-Semitism and the Wittgensteins that Cosima Wagner's mother Marie d'Agoult (whom Franz Liszt abandoned for Carolyne Wittgenstein) was descended through her maternal line from a German Jewish banking family named Bethmann and that Cosima Wagner was thus halachically Jewish, as was Richard Wagner's own son Siegfried, sired through her. This important historical matter concerning Cosima Wagner and her full halachic Jewish descent was unnoticed before "The Jew of Linz" was published, but the Bethmann Jewishness is attested in:


''Mary McGinn'' is having none of it: "Goldstein describes as 'overwhelmingly probable' the completely unfounded claim (…) that Wittgenstein, as a schoolboy in Austria, met Hitler and became the source of the latter's anti-Semitism. … [O]ne is amazed at the sheer looseness of thought that allows him to assert that 'at certain points in Mein Kampf where Hitler seems to be raging against Jews in general it is the individual young Ludwig Wittgenstein whom he has in mind', and to suggest that Wittgenstein 'may have inspired … (the) hatred of Jews which led, ultimately, to the Holocaust'. It is exactly this sort of sloppy, irresponsible, 'plausible' style of thought that Wittgenstein's philosophy, by its careful attention to the particular and to not saying more or less than is warranted, is directed against."<ref>[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/incomingFeeds/article770843.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2 ''Hi Ludwig!'', Times Literary Supplement], 26 May 2000, p. 24. Michael Fitzgerald agrees "entirely with Mary McGinn's assessment of Wittgenstein's non-relations with Hitler," in Michael Fitzgerald: ''Autism and Creativity: Is There a Link Between Autism in Men and Exceptional Ability?'' Psychology Press, 2004, ISBN 1583912134</ref>
Gutman, Robert W . "Richard Wagner: The Man, his Mind and his Music" , Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego, New York, London, 1968, 1990, pp.210 - 211.


''Hermann Möcker'', the former chair of the ''Institut für Österreichkunde'', published an article in ''Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur'' with the dismissive title "Was Wittgenstein Hitler's 'Jew of Linz', as claimed by antipodean writer Kimberley Cornish? Biographical corrections on the pupil Adolf and thoughts on a woolly-headed book".<ref>[http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:M8CX90vBYasJ:www.fachportal-paedagogik.de/fis_bildung/suche/fis_set.html%3FFId%3D604883+%22Gedanken+zu+einem+krausen+Buch%22&hl=de&ct=clnk&cd=3 Fachportal Pädagogik]: ''Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur'', 44 (2000) 5-6, p. 281 . {{de icon}}</ref>
Pereny, Eleanor. "Liszt", Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1974, pp.90-91.


German historian ''Michael Rissmann'' judges that Cornish's thesis "rests on all too bold a speculation" and adds, {{cquote|"Kimberley Cornish bases his thesis on both attending the same class at Linz secondary school and being personally acquainted with each other; as evidence he produces a photo, on which he wills himself to recognize Wittgenstein. Furthermore, he constructs parallels between Wittgenstein's philosophy and Hitler's world view. In doing so, he overestimates the dictator's intellectual capacities and uses the fraudulent talks [[Hermann Rauschning]] claims to have had with Hitler to prove Hitler's alleged occultist interest."<ref>Rissmann 2001, p. 95 and footnote 456. {{de icon}}</ref>}}
Stock-Morton, Phyllis "The Life of Marie d'Agoult, alias Daniel Stern", John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 2000, p.8.


In a review of another book, ''Juliet Floyd'' writes: "… Wittgenstein as a kind of cipher reflecting essential features of twentieth century history and culture has led some to use certain facts about his life as a springboard for preposterous claims about twentieth century history—I think of Kimberley Cornish’s ''The Jew Of Linz'' (…) hopelessly coarse and inaccurate mischaracterizations of Wittgenstein’s life."<ref>[http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1137 Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews], review of ''Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy'', 4 June 2004.</ref>
Vier , Jacques. "La Comptesse d'Agoult et son Temps", Paris, five vols, 1955 - 1962, volume 1, p. 326.


In contrast, ''Tom Appleton'' penned an enthusiastic review of the out-of-print German edition<ref>[http://www.amazon.de/dp/3550069707 Amazon.de] {{de icon}}</ref>, which he called a "forgotten book". Though calling Cornish's book "a venturesome thesis", he concludes with attacks on the book's critics: "Already upon its original publication in English, the book had been met with scathing reviews throughout Germany. However, in my opinion the book is so interesting that the pact of silence imposed on it since the German edition came out is nothing short of unacceptable and grossly negligent: a defense of the blind spot, essentially a refusal to perceive one's history in a truly undistorted manner."<ref>Tom Appleton, [http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/27/27319/1.html ''Wittgenstein und Hitler?''], ''[[Telepolis]]'', 22 March 2008. {{de icon}}</ref>
Watson, Derek. "Liszt", J M Dent & Sons, London, 1989, pp.30 - 31.


==Notes==
There is supporting references on the Bethmanns in the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia entry on Moritz Wilhelm August Breidenbach, who was the grandfather of the German Chancellor Bethmann-Holweg. The text (viewable on the (June 8th 2008) Wikipedia entry on Breidenbach, reads "he was the son of Wolf Breidenbach and an offspring of the Jewish banking family of von Bethmann from Frankfurt. Cosima Wagner was his relative from the von Bethmanns side". The matter is historically important because it puts Hitler's deprecating references (in "Mein Kampf") to the WWI German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, in the context of full Hitlerian anti-Semitism, rather than to some mere disenchantment with German policy. That is to say, the German Chancellor in the Great War, was of Jewish descent, as was his halachically Jewish relative, Richard Wagner's wife, who hated the Wittgensteins.
{{reflist}}


==Bibliography==
Cornish's prime argument for Wittgenstein's having been the recruiter of the Cambridge spy ring is that the Soviet government offered Wittgenstein the chair in Philosophy at what had been Lenin's university (Kazan) at a time (during the [[Great Purge]]) when ideological conformity was at a premium amongst Soviet academics and enforced by the very harshest penalties. [[Evgeniya Ginzburg]] - who was a University of Kazan academic at the time - outlines the atmosphere there in her biography "Into the Whirlwind", describing the circumstances prior to her 18-year exile to slave labour camp. Wittgenstein was known to have left-wing sympathies and wanted to emigrate to Russia, first in the twenties (as he wrote in a letter to Paul Engelmann) and again in the thirties, either to work as a labourer or as a philosophy lecturer. He visited Sophia Janovskaya - a graduate of the Stalinist "Institute of Red Professors" who had an interest in Logic, but was also responsible for ideological supervision. She recommended Wittgenstein to the Kazan Chair. John Moran, in "Wittgenstein and Russia" quotes from a Soviet academician who informed him that Sophia Janovskaya - Stalinist ideologue and official editor of MArx' mathematical manuscripts - saw Wittgenstein again in 1939. Against this, Monk quotes friends of Wittgenstein (some of them Marxists), who took the view that his admiration for Soviet Russia had more to do with a romantic admiration for peasant life and his love of [[Leo Tolstoy|Tolstoy]]'s Christian work ''[[The Gospel in Brief]]'' than with Marxism. Cornish argues that given the nature of the Soviet regime, the possibility that a non-Marxist philosopher (or even one over whom the government could exert no ideological control) would be offered such a post, is unlikely in the extreme. Multiplying this improbability is Wittgenstein's status as the son of one of Central Europe's most rapacious capitalists, whose "Poldinka" steelplant in Czechoslovakia featured in Czech novels of capitalist exploitation of workers. (McGuinness, p.14.) On Wittgenstein's actual political views, Monk quotes one of Wittgenstein's students (actually [[Douglas Gasking]], a then Cambridge communist and future professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University) as saying that Wittgenstein was "a bit of a Stalinist". A. C. Jackson, also a Wittgenstein student and later professor of Philosophy at Monash university, used the very same words. [[Trevor Redpath]] points in the same direction on p.36 of his "Ludwig Witgenstein: A Student's Memoir" (Duckworth, 1990).

Wittgenstein was [[homosexual]] and a member as the [[Cambridge Apostles]], as were Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, both of whom went on to spy for the Soviet Union. While there is no evidence that Wittgenstein had any sort of romantic attachment to any of the Cambridge spies, and Blunt reputedly disliked him, a number of the Trinity College communist students (David Haden-Guest, [[John Cornford]], [[Julian Bell]], [[Maurice Cornforth]], [[Douglas Gasking]] and many others) knew Wittgenstein, attended his lectures and wrote of his influence upon the development of their ideas as they moved towards Communism. Alister Watson, another of Wittgenstein's long-term acolytes, was accused of spying for the Soviets by Peter Wright, a former assistant MI5 director, in his book "Spycatcher". Wright states Watson to have been "probably the most damaging of all the Cambridge spies" (p.256). Anthony Blunt's partner, [[Julian Bell]], wanted to write a PhD thesis on Wittgenstein and wrote a poem on Wittgenstein in the style of [[John Dryden]]. Many of Wittgenstein's homosexual friends, acquaintances and students, such as Oliver Strachey and [[Alan Turing]], were key personnel at [[Bletchley Park]] and therefore prime targets for Soviet intelligence. Turing, according to Hodges' biography "Enigma", unauthorisedly took mechanical parts from Bletchley Park back to Trinity College during the time he was attending Wittgenstein's lectures and discussing logical issues with him. Given Wittgenstein's known intention to settle in Stalin's Soviet Union, Cornish's point is that Wittgenstein has to be considered the most likely of the Trinity College dons to have been the recruiter. Certainly no other Trinity College don was offered the Chair in the critically ideologically important subject of Philosophy at Lenin's university.

==Opposing views==

Some of the reviewers of ''The Jew of Linz'' contend that:
# Cornish's evidence is thin (most of the arguments adduced in favour of the claim are based on circumstantial associations and speculation).
# There is little evidence that Hitler and Wittgenstein knew each other.
# There is no evidence at all for the more sensational claims that there was a personal antagonism between them, or that Hitler's personal hatred of Wittgenstein shaped the course of Nazi anti-Semitism.
# Despite the wealth of material which has emerged from the archives of the [[KGB]] since the collapse of the [[Soviet Union]], there is no evidence that Wittgenstein was one of the most important Soviet agents in the UK, or a Stalinist agent at all.

[[Nicci French|Sean French]], in ''[[New Statesman]]'' ([[3 March]] [[1998]]) says: "There is something heroic about this argument and it would be a good subject for a novel about the dangers of creating theories out of nothing. [[Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov|Vladimir Nabokov]] should have written it. It is not just that there are weak links in the theory. There are no links in the theory. No evidence that Hitler, in his final unhappy year, even knew a boy two years above him. If they did know each other, there is no evidence that he was the boy Hitler distrusted, no evidence that Hitler's remarks on snitching related to specific incidents at the Linz Realschule, no evidence that Wittgenstein informed on his fellow pupils."

[[Roz Kaveney]], writing in the same journal on [[5 June]] [[1998]], calls it "a stupid and dishonest book", and says "[Cornish's] intention is to claim Wittgenstein for his own brand of contemplative mysticism, which he defines as the great insight that IndoEuropeans (or, as he unregenerately terms them, Aryans) brought to Hinduism and Buddhism."

A review by Dr Paul Monk (''Quadrant'', Sept 1998 v42 n9) concentrates on the inconsistencies in Cornish's theory that Wittgenstein was the head of the Cambridge spy ring, asking why Cornish has apparently not bothered to verify any of his theories by checking the KGB archives. Ultimately, Monk says "As I read The Jew of Linz, I found myself wondering how on earth Cornish had confected so strange a piece of work. I found it by turns puzzling, funny, challenging and outrageously nutty... Cornish calls his book "pioneer detective work", but I think it is really pioneer detective fiction."

German historian Michael Rissmann judges that Cornish's thesis "rests on all too bold a speculation" and adds "Kimberley Cornish bases his thesis on both attending the same class at Linz secondary school and being personally acquainted with each other; as evidence he produces a photo, on which he wants to recognize Witttgenstein. Furthermore, he constructs parallels between Wittgenstein's philosophy and Hitler's world view. In doing so, he overestimates the dictator's intellectual capacities and uses the fraudulent talks [[Hermann Rauschning]] wants to have had with Hitler to prove Hitler's alleged occultist interest." (Rissmann, pp. 95 and footnote 456)

==References==
* R. G. Collingwood: ''The Idea of History'', Oxford 1946.
* Kimberley Cornish: ''The Jew of Linz'', 1998. ISBN 0-7126-7935-9
* Kimberley Cornish: ''The Jew of Linz'', 1998. ISBN 0-7126-7935-9
* Franz Jetzinger: ''Hitler's Youth'' (translated by Lawrence Weston, foreword by [[Alan Bullock]]), 1958.
* Brian McGuinness: ''Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein's Life 1889-1921'', 1988. ISBN 0-19-927994-2
* Brian McGuinness: ''Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein's Life 1889-1921'', 1988. ISBN 0-19-927994-2
* Ray Monk: ''Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius'', 1990. (Biography) ISBN 0-14-015995-9
* Ray Monk: ''Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius'', 1990. (Biography) ISBN 0-14-015995-9
* James C. Klagge, ed., ''Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy'', 2001, ISBN 0-521-00868-9.
* Trevor Redpath: ''Ludwig Witgenstein: A Student's Memoir'' (Duckworth) 1990
* Rush Rhees (ed): ''Recollections of Wittgenstein'', 1981. ISBN 0-19-287628-7
* Laurence Goldstein: ''Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein's Development and His Relevance to Modern Thought'', 1999, ISBN 9780847695461
* Michael Rissmann, Hitlers Gott. Vorsehungsglaube und Sendungsbewußtsein des deutschen Diktators, Zürich München: Pendo, 2001, ISBN 3-85842-421-8
* Michael Rissmann, ''Hitlers Gott. Vorsehungsglaube und Sendungsbewußtsein des deutschen Diktators'', Zürich München: Pendo, 2001, ISBN 3-85842-421-8 {{de icon}}
* Peter Strawson: ''Individuals'', Methuen 1958.
* Peter Strawson: ''Individuals'', Methuen 1958.
* Peter Wright: ''Spycatcher'', Heinemann 1988. ISBN 0-85561-166-9
* Michael Blum: ''The Monument to the Birth of the 20th Century'', 2005. ISBN 3-86588-047-9


==External links==
==External links==
* [http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/jewoflin.html Review] by Andrew Harrison, ''Richmond Review''.
*[http://www.blumology.net/monument.html Nearly the entire photo with 40 children & 1 man - possibly a few more children cut out]
* [http://www.fountain.btinternet.co.uk/philosophy/jewof.html Review] by John Mann, private website.
* [http://slate.msn.com/id/3073/sidebar/38635/ Review] by Alex Ross, ''Slate''.
* [http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/27/27319/1.html Review] by Tom Appleton, ''Telepolis''.
* [http://www.fpp.co.uk/Letters/History/Cornish1.html Letter] written by Cornish to [[David Irving]]
* [http://www.fountain.btinternet.co.uk/philosophy/jewof.html Report that there were 329 students in the school]
* [http://www.fpp.co.uk/Letters/History/Cornish1.html List of 16 students registered as Jewish in 1903 - Wittgenstein was registered as Catholic]
* [http://www.blumology.net/monument.html Nearly the entire photo with 40 children & 1 man - possibly a few more children cut out]
* [http://usuarios.iponet.es/ddt/sunday.htm Serialisation of the book] by ''[[The Sunday Times (UK)|The Sunday Times]]''


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[[de:Der Jude aus Linz]]

Revision as of 22:48, 13 December 2008

The Jew of Linz (1998) is a controversial book by Australian writer Kimberley Cornish. It alleges that Ludwig Wittgenstein, later a renowned philosopher, as a schoolboy was acquainted with and had a profound impact on Adolf Hitler, later leader of Nazi Germany, and thereby on subsequent history, and that Wittgenstein later was involved in a pro-Soviet spy ring.

The book's major claims

  1. The occasion for Adolf Hitler becoming anti-Semitic was a schoolboy interaction in Linz, circa 1904, with Ludwig Wittgenstein
  2. In order to fight the growing power of the Nazis in the 1920s Wittgenstein joined the Comintern
  3. As a Trinity College don, Wittgenstein recruited the Trinity College spies Burgess, Philby and Blunt (and Maclean, from nearby Trinity Hall) for the Soviet Union
  4. Wittgenstein was responsible for the secret of decrypting the German "Enigma" code being passed to Stalin, which resulted ultimately in the Nazi defeats on the Eastern Front and liberation of the remnant Jews from the camps.
  5. Both Hitler's oratory and Wittgenstein's philosophy of language derive from the hermetic tradition, the key to which is Wittgenstein's "no-ownership" theory of mind, described by the late British Academician Sir P. F. Strawson in his book Individuals.[1]

Cornish's argument

The point of departure for Cornish's argument is the fact that Wittgenstein and Hitler both attended the Realschule in Linz, a school of about 300 students and were simultaneously at the school when they were 15 years old in the school year 1903-4.[2] While Hitler was just six days older than Wittgenstein, they were two grades apart at the Realschule — Hitler was repeating a year and Wittgenstein had been advanced a year. Cornish's thesis is not only that Hitler did know the young Wittgenstein but that he hated Wittgenstein, and that Wittgenstein was specifically the "one Jewish boy" from his school days referred to in the section of Mein Kampf where Hitler traces out the origins of his anti-Semitism. He argues from this that Hitler's anti-Semitism is traceable to 1903/4 and that it involved a projection of the young Wittgenstein's traits onto the whole Jewish people.

Cornish also argues that Wittgenstein is the most likely suspect as recruiter of the "Cambridge Five" spy ring. The author suggests that Wittgenstein was responsible for British decryption technology for the German Enigma code reaching the Red Army and that he thereby enabled the Red Army victories on the Eastern Front that liberated the camps and ultimately overthrew the Reich.

The first section of The Jew of Linz introduces these two ideas. Other sections of the book deal with Cornish's theories about what he claims are the common roots of Wittgenstein's and Hitler's philosophies in mysticism, magic, and the "no-ownership" theory of mind. Cornish sees this as Wittgenstein's generalisation of Schopenhauer's account of the Unicity of the Will, in which despite appearances, there is only a single Will acting through the bodies of all creatures. This doctrine, generalised to other mental faculties, such as thinking, is presented in Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Essays". The doctrine, writes Cornish, was also held by the Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood who was one of Wittgenstein's electors to his Cambridge chair. Cornish tries to tie this to Wittgenstein's arguments against the idea of "mental privacy" and in conclusion says "I have attempted to locate the source of the Holocaust in a perversion of early Aryan religious doctrines about the ultimate nature of man". Cornish also suggests that Hitler's oratorical powers in addressing the group mind of crowds and Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and denial of mental privacy, are the practical and theoretical consequences of this doctrine.

Evidence

File:WittRealschuleCrop.jpg
Blowup of part of the Realschule photograph from 1904, with annotation by Kimberley Cornish. Identification of boy Hitler is not in doubt, but identification of boy Wittgenstein has been disputed by Hamann and others.

Cornish used a school photograph on his book cover, of which a partial blowup is shown opposite, as his first piece of evidence. In it, the author identifies Hitler and Wittgenstein only centimetres apart. However, while the authenticity of the picture and the identification of young Hitler is undisputed, the identification of the other boy as Wittgenstein has been challenged, but Cornish claims that the Victoria Police photographic evidence unit examined the photograph and confirmed the presence of Wittgenstein in it as "highly probable".

Cornish's prime argument for Wittgenstein's having been the recruiter of the Cambridge spy ring is that the Soviet government offered Wittgenstein the chair in Philosophy at what had been Lenin's university (Kazan) at a time (during the Great Purge) when ideological conformity was at a premium amongst Soviet academics and enforced by the very harshest penalties. Wittgenstein was known to have left-wing sympathies and wanted to emigrate to Russia, first in the twenties (as he wrote in a letter to Paul Engelmann) and again in the thirties, either to work as a labourer or as a philosophy lecturer. Cornish argues that given the nature of the Soviet regime, the possibility that a non-Marxist philosopher (or even one over whom the government could exert no ideological control) would be offered such a post, is unlikely in the extreme.

Response

Some of the reviewers of The Jew of Linz contend that:

  1. Cornish's evidence is thin (most of the arguments adduced in favour of the claim are based on circumstantial associations and speculation).
  2. There is little evidence that Hitler and Wittgenstein knew each other.
  3. There is no evidence at all for the more sensational claims that there was a personal antagonism between them, or that Hitler's personal hatred of Wittgenstein shaped the course of Nazi anti-Semitism.
  4. Despite the wealth of material which has emerged from the archives of the KGB since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is no evidence that Wittgenstein was one of the most important Soviet agents in the UK, or a Stalinist agent at all.
  5. Cornish misrepresents Wittgenstein's thought and his philosophical context or simply does not understand him.

Andrew Harrison, writing in the Richmond Review, asks: "Could it really be that six million Jewish victims and all those others were systematically murdered by the mass production methods of a significant part of a civilised society just because of an antagonism between two bewildered small boys? The horrifying thought belongs not to 'the detective work of history' (Cornish's description of his project) but to speculative drama. There is a powerful play to be written that presents it, but this book is not its vehicle."[3]

Daniel Johnson viewed The Jew of Linz as a "revisionist tract masquerading as psycho-history". He wrote,

Cornish correctly identifies "the twist of the investigation" as the thesis that "Nazi metaphysics, as discernible in Hitler's writings . . . is nothing but Wittgenstein's theory of the mind modified so as to exclude the race of its inventor". So the "Jew of Linz" was indirectly responsible, at least in part, for the Holocaust. Cornish tries to deflect the implications of his argument thus: "Whatever 'the Jews' may have done, nothing humanly justifies what was done to them." But he then offers "a thought that might occur to a Hasidic Jew, and that is more fittingly a matter for Jewish, as opposed to gentile, reflection: the very engine that drove Hitler's acquisition of the magical powers that made his ascent and the Holocaust possible was the Wittgenstein Covenant violation". At this point, the non-sensical shades into the downright sinister.[4]

Opting for hilarity over condemnation, Adam Shatz wrote, "If you read Cornish’s book for too long a sitting, you may find yourself seized by his delirium and asking all sorts of questions. How did ordinary Germans come to share Hitler’s hatred of the Wittgensteins? Was the fall of Stalinism a defeat for Wittgenstein’s thought? Do anti-Wittgensteinians in philosophy departments present an imminent genocidal threat? If so, should there be Wittgenstein-tolerance seminars? Is Steven Spielberg interested in getting involved? Such questions leave us speechless, which is, of course, exactly how Wittgenstein would have it."[5]

Sean French wrote, in New Statesman: "There is something heroic about this argument and it would be a good subject for a novel about the dangers of creating theories out of nothing. Vladimir Nabokov should have written it. It is not just that there are weak links in the theory. There are no links in the theory. No evidence that Hitler, in his final unhappy year, even knew a boy two years above him. If they did know each other, there is no evidence that he was the boy Hitler distrusted, no evidence that Hitler's remarks on snitching related to specific incidents at the Linz Realschule, no evidence that Wittgenstein informed on his fellow pupils."[6]

In the same journal, Roz Kaveney calls it "a stupid and dishonest book", and says "[Cornish's] intention is to claim Wittgenstein for his own brand of contemplative mysticism, which he defines as the great insight that IndoEuropeans (or, as he unregenerately terms them, Aryans) brought to Hinduism and Buddhism."[7]

Paul Monk concentrates on the inconsistencies in Cornish's theory that Wittgenstein was the head of the Cambridge spy ring, asking why Cornish has apparently not bothered to verify any of his theories by checking the KGB archives. Ultimately, Monk says "As I read The Jew of Linz, I found myself wondering how on earth Cornish had confected so strange a piece of work. I found it by turns puzzling, funny, challenging and outrageously nutty... Cornish calls his book 'pioneer detective work', but I think it is really pioneer detective fiction."[8]

Sophie Hampshire writes, "[T]he author fuses both early and later work of Wittgenstein. He is I presume, trying to exemplify a linear progression of Wittgenstein's theory of mind that is to say, universal mind. Passages which are extracted from the Tractatus are mainly confined to 5.55 - 6, and it is apparent Cornish lacks critical reason. ... Moreover the emphasis on the so called no-ownership theory in the Tractatus is a gross oversimplification. Wittgenstein was mainly concerned with logical form between propositions and states of affairs, the division between what can be described in language and what must remain silent, how propositions as pictures of states of affairs acquire their semantic content, to name a few of his concerns."[9]

In a review that originally appeared in Philosophy Now, John Mann likewise focuses on the philosophical content of the book but draws very different conclusions from Hampshire's. In his opinion, the contentions that so riled up the book's many critics were simply a clever ruse by Cornish designed to attract more readers. Mann approvingly writes,

"Cornish is clever enough to know if he wrote a book on his 'no ownership' theory of language it would not have a wide readership. If he says this 'no ownership' theory was taught by Wittgenstein, learned and twisted for his own ends by Hitler, and actually needs Cornish to explain it all in great detail for the rest of the book[,] he has the book reviewed in every paper and even serialised in the Sunday Times. ... If you’re looking for a book which offers history, politics, magic and philosophy, try The Jew of Linz."[10]

Alex Ross, writing for Slate, describes The Jew of Linz as a "silly book" and "an excellent case study in the Hitlerological mania" and, playing on the German word for "muck" and an English homonym, calls it "mist of one kind or another".[11]

Carlos Widmann writes of the "renowned historian Brigitte Hamann, author of Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship", and her skeptical assessment of the photographic evidence: "She considers it entirely probable that Wittgenstein attracted the notice of boy Adolf -- but not as a 'Jew of Linz'. Instead, Wittgenstein was the rich, elegant, unapproachable little prince from Vienna who attended Catholic religious instruction. ... But aren't the two boys standing almost shoulder to shoulder in the yearbook picture? Hamann comments, 'The picture was not taken in 1903 and the child standing close to Hitler was not Wittgenstein'. Instead, as Hamann continues, 'The picture was taken at an earlier date when Ludwig ... was [still] being taught in Vienna'."[12]

Eva Reichmann, in a review for the Austrian website literaturhaus.at, concludes: "The death of six million Jews, thousands upon thousands of soldiers of all nationalities, the murder of thousands in German concentration camps -- to reduce all this to an unprovable encounter between Hitler and Wittgenstein, to an unprovable mutual influence (which Cornish does not manage to prove!) heaps insult upon the wrongs done to all the victims and represents a travesty of the body of literature on the topic."[13]

A review by Kathrin Chod in Berliner Lesezeichen reels off, with an increasingly weary air of stunned sarcasm, the conjectures put forward by Cornish. At the end, the reviewer refrains from delivering a coup de grace or even a conclusion, trusting the reader to supply one themselves in light of what has been shown.[14]

Jan Westerhoff, in a review for literaturkritik.de wrote: "Cornish's book is an interesting show piece of a nearly paranoid understanding of history which views the whole of 20th century history from a single vantage point (namely, the putative exchange between the pupils Wittgenstein and Hitler). In this way Cornish tries to obtain evidence for his hypothesis from within history itself. However, if someone cries 'Ludwig' and 'Adolf' into the forest, he should not be surprised if the answering cries are 'Wittgenstein' and 'Hitler'. This clearly shows the methodical inadequacy of amassing a large quantity of almost-evidence in support of a hypothesis for which no evidence exists."[15]

Antony Flew offers a mixed review: "Mr Cornish contends that the reason why the government of the USSR treated Wittgenstein with such peculiar generosity was that he had been the recruiter of all the Cambridge spies. The question whether or not this hypothesis is true or false can be definitively settled only if and when the relevant Soviet archives are examined. But I am myself as confident as without such knock-down decisive verification it is possible to be that Mr Cornish is right." On the other hand, "On the very first page of Part III, Mr Cornish explains that the essence of this doctrine

was expressed by Emerson in his restatement of the original Aryan doctrine of consciousness: ‘… the act of seeing and the thing seen, the see-er and the spectacle, the subject and the object is one'.

I confess, not very shamefacedly, that confronted with such doctrines I want to quote Groucho Marx: 'It appears absurd. But don't be misled. It is absurd.'"[16]

British professor Laurence Goldstein is more sanguine: "For one thing, at the K.u.k. Realschule in Linz, Wittgenstein met Hitler and may have inspired in him a hatred of Jews which led, ultimately, to the Holocaust. This, naturally enough, weighed heavily on Wittgenstein's conscience in his later years."

["I'll say!" one can hear Dame Edna exclaim at this point.]

Goldstein goes on: "Monk flatly states: 'There is no evidence that they had anything to do with one another' …. Even if this were true, it is a well known fallacy (argumentum ad ignorantiam) to infer from there being no evidence that p to the conclusion that p is not the case. … It is overwhelmingly probable that Hitler and Wittgenstein did meet, and with dire consequences for the history of the world.The evidence for believing so (admittedly circumstantial) has been assembled by Kimberley Cornish, a journalist trained in philosophy, in an important recent book …"[17]

Mary McGinn is having none of it: "Goldstein describes as 'overwhelmingly probable' the completely unfounded claim (…) that Wittgenstein, as a schoolboy in Austria, met Hitler and became the source of the latter's anti-Semitism. … [O]ne is amazed at the sheer looseness of thought that allows him to assert that 'at certain points in Mein Kampf where Hitler seems to be raging against Jews in general it is the individual young Ludwig Wittgenstein whom he has in mind', and to suggest that Wittgenstein 'may have inspired … (the) hatred of Jews which led, ultimately, to the Holocaust'. It is exactly this sort of sloppy, irresponsible, 'plausible' style of thought that Wittgenstein's philosophy, by its careful attention to the particular and to not saying more or less than is warranted, is directed against."[18]

Hermann Möcker, the former chair of the Institut für Österreichkunde, published an article in Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur with the dismissive title "Was Wittgenstein Hitler's 'Jew of Linz', as claimed by antipodean writer Kimberley Cornish? Biographical corrections on the pupil Adolf and thoughts on a woolly-headed book".[19]

German historian Michael Rissmann judges that Cornish's thesis "rests on all too bold a speculation" and adds,

"Kimberley Cornish bases his thesis on both attending the same class at Linz secondary school and being personally acquainted with each other; as evidence he produces a photo, on which he wills himself to recognize Wittgenstein. Furthermore, he constructs parallels between Wittgenstein's philosophy and Hitler's world view. In doing so, he overestimates the dictator's intellectual capacities and uses the fraudulent talks Hermann Rauschning claims to have had with Hitler to prove Hitler's alleged occultist interest."[20]

In a review of another book, Juliet Floyd writes: "… Wittgenstein as a kind of cipher reflecting essential features of twentieth century history and culture has led some to use certain facts about his life as a springboard for preposterous claims about twentieth century history—I think of Kimberley Cornish’s The Jew Of Linz (…) hopelessly coarse and inaccurate mischaracterizations of Wittgenstein’s life."[21]

In contrast, Tom Appleton penned an enthusiastic review of the out-of-print German edition[22], which he called a "forgotten book". Though calling Cornish's book "a venturesome thesis", he concludes with attacks on the book's critics: "Already upon its original publication in English, the book had been met with scathing reviews throughout Germany. However, in my opinion the book is so interesting that the pact of silence imposed on it since the German edition came out is nothing short of unacceptable and grossly negligent: a defense of the blind spot, essentially a refusal to perceive one's history in a truly undistorted manner."[23]

Notes

  1. ^ Peter Strawson: Individuals, Methuen, 1958.
  2. ^ McGuinness, p.51 and Monk, p.15.
  3. ^ Andrew Harrison, Review: The Jew of Linz Richmond Review, undated.
  4. ^ Daniel Johnson, What didn't happen in Linz Sunday Times Literary Supplement, 17 April 1998.
  5. ^ Adam Shatz, School Ties Lingua Franca, October 1998.
  6. ^ Sean French, New Statesman, 3 March 1998.
  7. ^ Roz Kaveney, New Statesman, 5 June 1998.
  8. ^ Paul Monk, The Jew of Linz: Wittgenstein, Hitler and Their Secret Battle for the Mind, originally in Quadrant, Sept 1998 v42 n9.
  9. ^ Sophie Hampshire, Book Review: The Jew of Linz Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 6, No. 12, December 1998.
  10. ^ John Mann, The Jew of Linz by Kimberley Cornish Fountain of Language, originally in Philosophy Now, 19 June 1998.
  11. ^ Alex Ross, Regarding Hitler, Slate, 1 July 1998.
  12. ^ Carlos Widmann, Der Indiana Jones von Linz, in DER SPIEGEL 28/1998, 6 July 1998, p. 165. Template:De icon
  13. ^ Eva Reichmann, Der Jude aus Linz, literaturhaus.at, 10 November 1998. Template:De icon
  14. ^ Kathrin Chod, Zwei pfiffen zusammen, Berliner Lesezeichen 4/99. Template:De icon
  15. ^ Jan Westerhoff, Gefährliche Beziehungen, literaturkritik.de No. 6 (June 1999). Template:De icon
  16. ^ Free Life, Issue 32, July 1999
  17. ^ Goldstein 1999, p.164
  18. ^ Hi Ludwig!, Times Literary Supplement, 26 May 2000, p. 24. Michael Fitzgerald agrees "entirely with Mary McGinn's assessment of Wittgenstein's non-relations with Hitler," in Michael Fitzgerald: Autism and Creativity: Is There a Link Between Autism in Men and Exceptional Ability? Psychology Press, 2004, ISBN 1583912134
  19. ^ Fachportal Pädagogik: Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur, 44 (2000) 5-6, p. 281 . Template:De icon
  20. ^ Rissmann 2001, p. 95 and footnote 456. Template:De icon
  21. ^ Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, review of Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, 4 June 2004.
  22. ^ Amazon.de Template:De icon
  23. ^ Tom Appleton, Wittgenstein und Hitler?, Telepolis, 22 March 2008. Template:De icon

Bibliography

  • Kimberley Cornish: The Jew of Linz, 1998. ISBN 0-7126-7935-9
  • Brian McGuinness: Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein's Life 1889-1921, 1988. ISBN 0-19-927994-2
  • Ray Monk: Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, 1990. (Biography) ISBN 0-14-015995-9
  • James C. Klagge, ed., Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, 2001, ISBN 0-521-00868-9.
  • Laurence Goldstein: Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein's Development and His Relevance to Modern Thought, 1999, ISBN 9780847695461
  • Michael Rissmann, Hitlers Gott. Vorsehungsglaube und Sendungsbewußtsein des deutschen Diktators, Zürich München: Pendo, 2001, ISBN 3-85842-421-8 Template:De icon
  • Peter Strawson: Individuals, Methuen 1958.
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