The Jew of Linz is a 1998 book by Australian writer Kimberley Cornish, in which the author alleges that the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had a profound effect on Adolf Hitler when they were both pupils at the Realschule (lower secondary school) in Linz, Austria, in the early 1900s. Cornish also alleges that Wittgenstein was involved in the Cambridge Five Soviet spy ring during the Second World War.
Summary
The occasion for Adolf Hitler becoming anti-Semitic was a schoolboy interaction in Linz, circa 1904, with Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In the 1920s, Wittgenstein joined the Comintern.
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)
Wittgenstein and Hitler both attended the Linz Realschule, a state school of about 300 students, and were there at the same time only from 1903 to 1904, according to Wittgenstein's biographers.[5] While Hitler was just six days older than Wittgenstein, they were two grades apart at the school—Hitler was repeating a year and Wittgenstein had been advanced a year. Cornish's thesis is not only that Hitler knew the young Wittgenstein, but that he hated him, and that Wittgenstein was specifically the one Jewish boy from his school days referred to in Mein Kampf. The last claim referred to the following quote:
Likewise at school I found no occasion which could have led me to change this inherited picture. At the Realschule, to be sure, I did meet one Jewish boy who was treated by all of us with caution, but only because various experiences had led us to doubt his discretion and we did not particularly trust him; but neither I nor the others had any thoughts on the matter.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1943 English translation by Ralph Manheim
Cornish argues further that Hitler's anti-Semitism involved a projection of the young Wittgenstein's traits onto the whole Jewish people. Wittgenstein did have three Jewish grandparents but Wittgenstein himself, and his mother and father, were Roman Catholics.
British professor Laurence Goldstein, in his Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein's Development and His Relevance to Modern Thought (1999), called Cornish's book important, writing: "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 … It is overwhelmingly probable that Hitler and Wittgenstein did meet, and with dire consequences for the history of the world."[6]
Reviewing Goldstein's own book, Mary McGinn called it a sloppy and irresponsible argument: "[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',
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jew_of_Linz