The Jew of Linz

The Jew of Linz (1998) is a controversial book by the Australian 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, at the University of Cambridge – and his school-fellow, Adolf Hitler.

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.

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[1]). 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 — 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.

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 (Review of The Jew of Linz, Free Life, (ISSN: 0260 5112) Issue 32, July 1999):

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 was indeed responsible for British decryption technology for the German 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 that liberated the camps and ultimately overthrew the Reich.

These two theses are introduced in the first section of The Jew of Linz. 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 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

Cornish used a school photograph on his book cover, of which a partial blowup is shown below, as his first piece of evidence.

File:WittRealschuleCrop.jpg

Blowup of part of the Realschule photograph from 1904.

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.)

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 [2]). 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 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).

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:

1. A boy at the Linz Realschule was of Jewish descent, but ignorant of his Jewish ancestry.

2. Hitler yelled "Saujud!' at this boy.

3. Wittgenstein was the only boy at the school who was of Jewish descent and ignorant of his Jewish ancestry.

Ergo

4. The boy at whom Hitler yelled "Saujud", was Wittgenstein.

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 [3]). 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.)

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.) It ought to be reasonably clear that Wittgenstein's arrival at the Linz Realschule was noteworthy, Wittgenstein being heir to one of the richest Jewish fortunes in Europe. 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) labelled Wittgenstein's own father as a Jewish crook, might have been withheld from fourteen-year-old Wittgenstein.

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 established by Keplinger's testimony to Dr Jetzinger, also referenced above.)

Cornish also 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.

Slightly affirming Cornish, the Austrian historian Brigitte Hamann writes in Hitler's Vienna

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)

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 (page 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 Keplinger, who visited Hitler in Munich in 1927 at Nazi Party Headquarters had the following conversation with Dr Jetzinger

'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!'

The boys, then, did not take well to being addressed as "Sie" by Hitler. And 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 locution, says Cornish, points to some sort of interaction between Hitler and Wittgenstein.

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 Wittgenstein's sister.

Cornish ties the Wittgenstein family with the development of Antisemitism from another direction. He points out that Franz Liszt's daughter Cosima, had come to hate her father's paramour Carolyne Wittgenstein, and Jews in general. She married Richard Wagner. Josef Joachim, a prominent critic of Wagner, was a cousin of Ludwig Wittgenstein's grandmother and raised in the same house in Leipzig as Karl Wittgenstein. 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 "Judaism in Music", that marked the start of modern German anti-Semitism.

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 deportation to a 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. 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 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:

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.

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 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
• 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
• Ray Monk: Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, 1990. (Biography) ISBN 0-14-015995-9
• Trevor Redpath: Ludwig Witgenstein: A Student's Memoir (Duckworth) 1990
• Rush Rhees (ed): Recollections of Wittgenstein, 1981. ISBN 0-19-287628-7
• Michael Rissmann, Hitlers Gott. Vorsehungsglaube und Sendungsbewußtsein des deutschen Diktators, Zürich München: Pendo, 2001, ISBN 3-85842-421-8
• 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

• Review by Andrew Harrison, Richmond Review.
• Review by John Mann, private website.
• Review by Alex Ross, Slate.
• Letter written by Cornish to David Irving
• Report that there were 329 students in the school
• List of 16 students registered as Jewish in 1903 - Wittgenstein was registered as Catholic
• Nearly the entire photo with 40 kids & 1 adult male - possibly a few more kids cut out
• Serialisation of the book by The Sunday Times