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.
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 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".
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, 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.
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 Joachim Fest near to passages Cornish quotes, and by Alan Bullock on a page of ' that he cites. Yet, Cornish makes no mention of Hitler's time there. Möcker 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.
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). Their talk of the second semester of 1903/04<nowiki/>' 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. 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.
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 â a mere forty words in English translation â is the focus of our investigation" writes Cornish. Though, as Nicholas Mosley points out: <blockquote>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.)</blockquote>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". Cornish "nevertheless reads this as a revelation of how Hitler's anti-Semitism took root".
Sean French writes that 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 he was the boy Hitler distrusted". Still, as Michael Feld notes:<blockquote>Cornish concludes that Hitler hated Jews because he hated Ludwig Wittgenstein. He hated Wittgenstein's family, too -- his Catholic family, his assimilated family -- because they tried to pass for Austrian, and because they had made themselves fabulously wealthy by establishing a steel cartel in the heart of the Habsburg empire. He hated all assimilated Jews. But at root Hitler hated Jews, Cornish tells us, because of his hatred for Ludwig Wittgenstein.</blockquote>Jackie Assayag asserts that 'a single factâÂÂthat the Wittgenstein family in Vienna was never harassed by the NazisâÂÂundermines the argument of the entire book'. Roz Kaveney also suggests that "if Hitler spent his life hating Wittgenstein, it is odd that Wittgenstein's sisters spent the entire war unmolested in Vienna".
As Nigel West notes, Cornish identifies Wittgenstein "as a central figure in the Cambridge spy ring: the talent spotter and recruiter".
Frank McLynn reports that Cornish poses the question of why Wittgenstein, who hated academic life, returned to Trinity in 1929. His answer being that:<blockquote>Wittgenstein, alarmed by the rise of the Nazis and knowing from his schooldays the manner of man the Fuhrer was, thought the way he could best serve humanity was by becoming a Soviet agent in England.</blockquote>As McLynn notes, the "obvious objection is that Hitler in 1929 was nowhere near the centre of power".
Cornish presses the question of why the Soviet government offered Wittgenstein the chair in philosophy at what had been Lenin's university during the Great Purge. On this point, Cornish contends in interview that it is undeniably proven that Wittgenstein worked for the Soviets by the fact that he was offered a chair in philosophy in 1935 at Kazan, and that even if this were the only proof it would be quite sufficient.
Antony Flew agrees an explanation is needed "since Wittgenstein was very far from being a Marxist philosopher" and offers some support: <blockquote>Cornish contends that the reason why ... the USSR treated Wittgenstein with such peculiar generosity was that he had been the recruiter of all the Cambridge spies. The question ... can be definitively settled only if and when the relevant Soviet archives are examined. But I am myself as confident as ... it is possible to be that Mr Cornish is right. For people who during the crucial years between Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge in 1929 and that 1935 offer were attending his classes and/or enjoying other personal contacts with him have given me accounts both of the ... overwhelming force of Wittgenstein's personality and of the absoluteness in those years of his Stalinist commitment.</blockquote>Adam Shatz writes:<blockquote>There is, to be sure, a simple explanation for the Russian proposal. As Monk notes, "Wittgenstein was perceived as one of the world's greatest philosophers, and it would have been a great coup for any regime to have him. The Soviet authorities probably offered him the job as a courtesy to John Maynard Keynes, who was friendly with Ivan Maiskii, the Russian ambassador." But Cornish thinks such an explanation is far too simplistic.</blockquote>Further, West says, not only that there is "nothing to suggest that the Austrian refugee ever met any of his putative subordinates" but that:<blockquote>The mechanics of recruitment of each of the Cambridge spies are, following the release of the KGB file in Moscow, now well established. ... So the issue of another individual, a talent spotter remotely directing operations, hardly arises.</blockquote>Similarly, Paul Monk, suggests that "long-standing disputes about who really recruited Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross" appeared to have been already settled. Like West, he also notes Cornish reached his conclusions without consulting the Soviet archives. West writes that "the KGB files tell quite a different story" but "for the committed conspiracy theorist that, too, is further proof of the plot".
Cornish also attributes Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk to their having obtained the key to the Enigma code from Alan Turing, via Wittgenstein. Kaveney asserts that "in fact, the crucial information was given to them by John Cairncross" noting that "the Cambridge spy who arguably won the war for Russia never had anything to do with Wittgenstein".
Steve Clarke classifies Cornish's spymaster thesis as a conspiracy theory.
Shatz remarks that "Cornish's book caused a stir in England when it was published" and that "a number of drolly dismissive commentaries ran in The Guardian, The Economist, The New Statesman, and The Times Literary Supplement" but "nobody took the book seriously". Some of the book's claims did however resurface in the last chapter of a 1999 book by philosopher Laurence Goldstein.
One of the main issues of contention is the claim that Wittgenstein triggered or substantially contributed to Hitler's antisemitism while they were at school together. This is a view that, says Sandgruber, "must be referred to the realm of inventions". But it is one that had some support from Laurence Goldstein. In his Clear and Queer Thinking (1999), Goldstein called Cornish's book important, writing: "it is overwhelmingly probable that Hitler and Wittgenstein did meet, and with dire consequences for the history of the world" (though the evidence is "admittedly circumstantial").
Goldstein says that "Cornish suggests, with some plausibility, 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 that Wittgenstein "may have inspired [...] the hatred of Jews which led, ultimately, to the Holocaust". According to Marie McGinn, this is "exactly this sort of sloppy, irresponsible, but '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. Goldstein's susceptibility to the charms of such obvious myths makes his hubristic claim that his 'understanding of Wittgenstein's work has improved immeasurably as a result of developing an empathy for the man' offensive as well as risible."
Anthony Palmer notes that "while prepared to grant Ray Monk's view that there is no evidence that Wittgenstein and Hitler had anything to do with one other, this does not prevent Goldstein from speculating that they did". Palmer takes Goldstein to make 'a genuine contribution' in 'the core of the book', but considers it "a pity" that he includes such "fanciful speculations on Wittgenstein the man".
Goldstein suggests that:<blockquote>After Hitler had established his programme of persecutions, one can easily imagine Wittgenstein being haunted by the thought of what difference it might have made had he taken the trouble to behave less obtrusively and obnoxiously as a schoolboy in Linz.</blockquote>In response, a review in the journal Philosophy concludes:<blockquote>It is all too easy to imagine all sorts of things in relation to the Third Reich. Industries are built on such imaginings. Better perhaps to stick to facts ...</blockquote>Despite such criticisms, Goldstein remained convinced of the book's importance, writing in a 2010 review, that the author Béla Szabados "to his discredit" and "like many of Wittgenstein's admirers, entirely disregards Kimberly Cornish's controversial book" (and its "not yet conclusive evidence").
David G. Stern described Cornish's "account of Wittgenstein's Jewishness as the driving force behind Hitler's anti-Semitism" as "a good example of the dangers of applying the conspiracy theory approach to Wittgenstein". Hans Sluga describes Cornish as a "gossip-writer" and says his book "constructs a completely fantastic narrative".
A leading article in The Economist remarks of Cornish's argument, "The logic is simple: if a claim has not been conclusively refuted, then that is a good reason to believe it. This principle is of little use in the natural sciences, but it works profitable wonders in the science of publishing." That, on the "slender basis" that his "family were Jewish converts to Christianity, and the young philosopher went to the same school as Adolf Hitler", Wittgenstein is deemed "unwittingly responsible for the Holocaust" is, according to an editorial in Philosophy Now, a "tasteless piece of nonsense"
Alan Bennett remarks, "it seems probable that the 'one Jewish boy' mentioned early on in Mein Kampf was, as Cornish asserts, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The trouble is Cornish makes his case in such a tendentious and overheated fashion, and utterly without humour, that he invites scepticism." Peter Bradshaw refers to the book as "far-fetched speculation" that had been "attacked by historians as fiction masquerading as history".
Jane Kramer describes The Jew of Linz as "right-wing idiocy ... a fantasy disguised as a disquisition ... which holds that Hitler murdered six million Jews because of an unfortunate brush with Ludwig Wittgenstein in a Linz Realschule". Glen Newey describes it as a "wacko book". Andreas Kapsner notes that the work "has gained infamy instead of acclaim as a historical work. ... The usually disdainful verdict of the reviewers of the book ... is based on the fact that there is precious little evidence for Cornish's claims".
"The lack of any logical framework makes the work in this book insupportable. Moreover, it is erroneous to think that tenuous fragments of information taken as a sum total lead to a weighty hypothesis." writes Sophie Hampshire in Leonardo, "Cornish needs to exercise rigorous deductive analysis and to curb his imagination if he is to continue writing on such complex topics."
Paul 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."
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 nonsensical shades into the downright sinister.
Sean French wrote in the 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." In the same magazine 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."
Antony Flew, though persuaded by Cornish's claims about Wittgenstein's role as a Soviet spymaster, is less impressed by his philosophical claims: "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.'"
Boyd Tonkin, remarks that as "a bizarre showcase of the paranoid style in history, The Jew of Linz would be hard to beat ... this sad obsessive fantasy displays the depth to which ideas about the past can sink once you dump structural causes and simply chronicle the random collisions of actors who move the world (as Hitler desired) by Will alone".
German historian Michael Rissmann argues that Cornish overestimates Hitler's intellectual capacities and uses fraudulent talks Hermann Rauschning claims to have had with Hitler to prove Hitler's alleged occultist interest.
In contrast, Douglas Davis of the Jerusalem Post describes the theory that Wittgenstein "could have been the catalyst that drove Hitler" as "persuasively argued".