The Jew of Linz is a 1998 book by Australian writer Kimberley Cornish, in which the author presents the fringe theories that philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was the childhood catalyst for the antisemitism of Adolf Hitler and that Wittgenstein was involved in the Cambridge Five Soviet spy ring. Cornish is also responsible for the claim that a school photo that features Hitler also shows Wittgenstein, though it has been reliably dated to two years before the latter's time at the Realschule in Linz. There is no evidence the two ever knew each other.
Despite being only days apart in age, Hitler and Wittgenstein were never in the same class, or indeed year (or grade) at the secondary school. Cornish himself did not claim otherwise, though neither did he clearly acknowledge it. Hitler and Wittgenstein only overlapped at Linz over the academic year of 1903/1904, not 1904/1905 as is often wrongly stated, Hitler having spent that later year at the Realschule in Steyr. Cornish, like Hitler in Mein Kampf, is entirely silent about the year at Steyr and also finds a novel way to be wrong about the time Wittgenstein arrived at Linz by suggesting it was in 1904, but it was in the second semester of the 1903/1904 academic year.
Contents
Summary The occasion for Adolf Hitler becoming anti-Semitic was a schoolboy interaction in Linz, circa 1904, with Ludwig Wittgenstein.Monk, Ray. "A mind on fire: A century alter its publication, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus remains one of the most radical works of modern philosophy." New Statesman, vol. 150, no. 5637, 17 Sept. 2021, pp. 58 "Hitler, who was almost exactly the same age as Wittgenstein ... attended the same school, which in 1998 prompted the writer Kimberley Cornish to speculate that Wittgenstein was the original cause of Hitler's anti-Semitism. But there is no evidence of this or even of them having met." Wittgenstein joined the Comintern, and as a Trinity College don, and a member of the Cambridge Apostles, Wittgenstein recruited fellow Apostles Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, all students at Trinity—as well as Donald Maclean from nearby Trinity Hall—to work for the Soviet Union. Wittgenstein was responsible for the secret of decrypting the German "Enigma" code being passed to Joseph Stalin, which resulted ultimately in the Nazi defeats on the Eastern Front and liberation of the surviving 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 P. F. Strawson in his book Individuals (1958).Strawson, Peter. Individuals. Methuen, 1958.
Realschule
The photograph Cornish claims that "a photograph of Hitler aged fourteen at the school also shows the fourteen-year-old Wittgenstein". Dating it to 1904, Cornish says the Victoria Police photographic evidence unit in Australia examined the photograph and confirmed that it was "highly probable" the other boy is Wittgenstein. "The matter of the photograph" writes Cornish, "is clearly of great significance for our hypothesis". Why two boys not in the same class would be together in the photograph was a question raised by . Cornish, in the Notes, says only that "It appears to be the photograph of an age group, not a class."
The photo was published with the caption "Professor Oskar Langer mit der Klasse I b , 1900/1901 Rechts oben der 12jährige Adolf Hitler"(Professor Oskar Langer with Class I b, 1900/1901. Top right: 12-year-old Adolf Hitler) in both Hugo Rabitsch's Aus Adolf Hitlers Jugendzeit (1938) and contemporary publicity for that book in Börsenblatt. The photograph also appears in multiple other near contemporary sources that all identify it as a class photograph featuring Hitler in his first year or at an age he would have been during it. A portrait of Langer on the same page of Rabitsch's book is captioned "Hitlers Klassenvorstand 1900/1901" (Hitler's class teacher 1900/1901). Langer has been established by Hermann Möcker as having worked at the school from 1884 only until 1901.
At the time of Cornish's publication, historian Brigitte Hamann dated the photograph to 1900 or 1901 for Focus magazine. Since then, German historian Werner Maser has insisted that, contra Cornish, it is "Ein Foto der Linzer Realschulklasse 1B. des Schuljahres 1900–1901" (a photograph of the Linz Realschule class 1B from the school year 1900–1901), Austrian historian has asserted it is from 1901 and Israeli historian Steven E. Aschheim has also said it has been "reliably dated" to that year. Wittgenstein did not arrive at Linz until the 1903/1904 academic year, as Cornish himself acknowledges.
Wittgenstein and Hitler at Linz
Hitler started at the school in September 1900, repeated the first year in 1901/1902, and left in autumn 1904 to spend the 1904/1905 academic year at the Realschule in Steyr. The year at Steyr is discussed by Franz Jetzinger and by Joachim Fest near to passages Cornish quotes, and by Alan Bullock on a page of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny that he cites. Yet, Cornish makes no mention of Hitler's time there. Möcker charitably allows for the possibility that Cornish is unaware of Hitler's year at Steyr (Hitler being silent about it in Mein Kampf). But he also does not discount the idea that Cornish withheld knowledge of it because it did not fit his desired narrative of a close relationship between Hitler and Wittgenstein in Linz. "Blatant manipulation of secondary sources" is a charge levelled against Cornish by Claudia Pugh-Thomas.Pugh-Thomas, Claudia "Books: Paperbacks." The Observer [London, England], 21 Mar. 1999, p. 14. "Blatant manipulation of secondary sources and a tendency to hyperbole accentuate the lack of coherent analysis."
Cornish asserts that Wittgenstein arrived at Linz in 1904, during the "second semester of the academic year 1903/4". The citation given suggests this is a misunderstanding of Wuchterl and Hübner (1979) whose talk of the second semester is about the classes missed by Wittgenstein following the suicide of his brother Rudolf on 2 May 1904, It is not about when Wittgenstein began schooling at Linz, which is given by the same authors later as autumn 1903. Brian McGuinness, like Ray Monk, also reports that it was in 1903 that Wittgenstein was sent to Linz. Later scholarly commentary reasserts this and that Wittgenstein and Hitler were together at the Linz Realschule from 1903 to 1904.
While Hitler was just six days older than Wittgenstein, they were two grades apart at the school, Hitler having repeated the first year and Wittgenstein being advanced a year, as McGuinness records (and Cornish quotes without correction). There is no evidence that the two got to know each other.Sluga, H. (1996). Ludwig Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein: Life and work, An introduction. In H. D. Sluga & D. G. Stern (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (p. 4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. "It is one of the ironies of history that the future philosopher and the future dictator actually attended the same school for a year. There is, however, no evidence that the two got to know each other in that period." But, as, Aschheim notes, this did not deter Cornish from asserting that the cause of Hitler's 'genocidal anti-Semitism' is a supposed 'schoolboy spat' with Wittgenstein. Even though, as Ray Monk is quoted as commenting, "at this time Wittgenstein was not obviously Jewish: He had never been to a synagogue, was brought up a Catholic and considered himself to be ethnically German."BIBLIO FILE: [A EDITION]. (1998, Apr 12). Sunday Star - Times
The Jew of Linz Cornish's thesis is that the young Wittgenstein was "the very first link in the chain of hatred that led to Auschwitz" and the one Jewish boy from Hitler's school days referred to in Mein Kampf. The last claim referred to the following, as quoted by Cornish:
"This paragraph — a mere forty words in English translation — is the focus of our investigation" writes Cornish. Though, as Nicholas Mosley points out: in the next sentence Hitler goes on to say about the boy (and Mr Cornish does not quote this): "Beyond that, my companions and myself formed no particular opinions in regard to him." And a few lines later Hitler is explaining that at this time ... hearing hostile remarks about Jews ... aroused in him "a feeling of abhorrence". (Mr Cornish does not mention this either.)Mosley, N. (1998, Mar 14). "Books: Root of the nazi party's anti-semitism? Nicholas Mosley disputes claims made for a philosopher's childhood influence on a future dictator, and later role in bringing him down." The Daily Telegraph Thus Hitler, whilst denying that he was yet anti-Semitic, does refer to a Jewish boy at 'the Realschule''' but, as Steven Poole notes, "only due to his lack of 'discretion', rather than his race".Steven Poole "Books: The List." Guardian [London, England], 26 Mar. 1998, p. 14. Gale Academic OneFile As Sean French writes, there is "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 [Wittgenstein] was the boy Hitler distrusted".French, Sean. "The idea that Hitler and Wittgenstein were once schoolmates is certainly compelling. But it's hardly the stuff of serious historical conjecture." New Statesman, vol. 127, no. 4376, 13 Mar. 1998, p. 18. Still, as Richard J. Evans notes, "Cornish speculates that this boy was Wittgenstein" and as Poole notes "reads this as a revelation of how Hitler's anti-Semitism took root".
Möcker suggests the passage could just as easily refer to an incident in Steyr where Hitler had a Jewish classmate. That pupil has been identified as Josef Sommer, the son of the owner of the Reichraming brass factory in the Steyr-Land district. Even if Hitler were referring to Linz, as Maser notes, since 17 of the 329 pupils in 1903 were Jewish, it cannot be assumed that Hitler meant Wittgenstein. And those practising Jews, unlike Wittgenstein, would normally be identifiable as Jewish to their fellow pupils by their absence from Mass.
Sandgruber, following Mocker, suggests a more likely candidate than Wittgenstein as 'the jew of Linz' is Hans Hatschek (1890–1956), son of the locally-based industrialist Ludwig Hatschek, who spent three years in the same class as Hitler (from 1901). Hatschek, though Catholic like Wittgenstein, was a first-degree Mischling by Nazi racial doctrine as his paternal grandfather (who had owned a local brewery of some wealth and fame) and his wife were Jewish. Sandgruber reports that Eduard Bloch mentioned in 1941 that Hitler had had a dispute with Hatschek at school and he had feared targeted retaliation after the Anschluss. The report, given so much weight by Cornish, of a schoolmate "Herr Keplinger" (recorded by Jetzinger after the Second World War) of Hitler once using the slur "Saujud!" during a quarrel with a boy who was shocked and unaware of his Jewish heritage until years later is much more likely to have been aimed at Hatschek than Wittgenstein. The interviewee Josef Keplinger, was a classmate of Hitler's from 1900, and from 1901 of both Hitler and Hatschek, and both Keplinger and Hatschek lived on in Linz for many years after school. But Cornish knows nothing of this or about Keplinger's other interviews about Hitler, or his identifiable presence in the Linz class photograph.
Still, as Richard J. Evans notes. Cornish argues that Wittgenstein "annoyed Hitler so much as a schoolboy that Hitler attributed his character-defects to Jews in general and tried to avenge himself by exterminating them."Evans, R. (1998, Mar 22). Books: Silly schoolboy howlers did a childhood meeting change history? no, says Richard Evans. The Sunday Telegraph