The Jew from Linz

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The book The Jew from Linz. Hitler and Wittgenstein from 2002 is a work by the Australian writer Kimberley Cornish . In it, the author tries to prove an important relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Hitler and to expose Wittgenstein as an agent leader on behalf of the Soviet Union .

Differences to the English original edition

The out-of-print German version is an extension and revision of the English edition from 1998. The translator and publisher have taken into account the author's criticism of serious rearrangements and cuts in his manuscript and used the original text for the German version, which made the German edition more extensive and the The intention of the author.

Theses of the book

  1. As a schoolboy, Adolf Hitler became an anti-Semite around 1904 in Linz due to an argument with his classmate Ludwig Wittgenstein .
  2. To counter the growing power of the Nazis , Wittgenstein joined the Comintern in the 1920s .
  3. As a professor at Trinity College in Cambridge, Wittgenstein recruited Burgess , Philby and Blunt as well as Maclean as spies for the Soviet Union.
  4. Wittgenstein was responsible for secretly passing on the decryption of the German Enigma code to Stalin , which ultimately led to the defeat of the Nazis on the Eastern Front and the liberation of the surviving Jews from the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
  5. Both Hitler's rhetorical power and Wittgenstein's linguistic theory came from the hermetic tradition , the key of which was Wittgenstein's doctrine of "non-possession" or the "non-subjectivity" of the ego , which Peter Strawson called it.

resonance

The following criticisms are particularly common in the reviews of Der Jude aus Linz :

  1. Cornish's evidence is flimsy (most of the arguments put forward in support of the theses are based on circumstantial evidence and speculation).
  2. There is little evidence that Hitler and Wittgenstein were known to each other.
  3. There is no evidence for the particularly sensational theses that there was personal enmity between the two or that Hitler's hatred of Wittgenstein determined the course of National Socialist anti-Semitism.
  4. Despite the multitude of materials that have emerged from the KGB archives since the collapse of the Soviet Union , there is no evidence that Wittgenstein was an agent of Stalin, let alone one of the most important Soviet agents in Great Britain.
  5. Cornish grossly misrepresents Wittgenstein's thinking and his philosophical origins or did not understand them at all.

Carlos Widmann mocked the author's lax dealings with facts:

"And why not? 'What is conceivable is also possible', says the 'Tractatus logico-philosophicus', on which the young mathematician Ludwig Wittgenstein was already working when his schoolmate Adolf Hitler, who was six days older, was still staying in men's homes in Vienna. Cornish, as a philosophy student, must have stumbled upon this theorem, for he seems to have developed the guideline of his own science ('psycho-history') from it. Their motto is obviously: Even what could have been is history. [...] Under such ideal conditions for creative history writing, it must be a pleasure to develop into a historian. "

Eva Reichmann writes:

"The death of six million Jews, of thousands upon thousands of soldiers of all nationalities, the murder of thousands in German concentration camps - all of this to be reduced to an undetectable encounter between Hitler and Wittgenstein, to an undetectable mutual influence (because Cornish can't prove it!) is more than a mockery of all victims and all previous scientific work on this topic. "

Ludger Lütkehaus sums up:

“This is how you turn almost nothing into almost anything. There is only one thing we don't understand: why did Cornish get stuck in the run-up? Because after reading his book, it is clear to even the most dumbfounded: Wittgenstein was Hitler. The only question is who its author is. Was Cornish Wittgenstein and Hitler in the end? "

Kathrin Chod's review in Berlin Bookmarks piles Cornish's assumptions and assertions in a mixture of alienation and sarcasm, and in the end leaves it to the reader to form an impression.

Jan Westerhoff writes:

“Cornish's book is an interesting cabinet piece of an almost paranoid understanding of history that sees the entire history of the 20th century from one point of view (namely that of the presumed exchange between the pupils Wittgenstein and Hitler). In this way Cornish seeks to get evidence of his thesis from history itself. However, anyone who shouts 'Ludwig' and 'Adolf' into the forest shouldn't be surprised when it sounds like 'Wittgenstein' and 'Hitler'. This clearly shows how inadequate the method is to accumulate a large amount of near-evidence to support a thesis for which there is no evidence. "

According to Michael Rissmann, Cornish's thesis that Hitler's religious beliefs were already decisively shaped by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Linz is based on “too bold speculation”, whereby Cornish overestimated the dictator's intellectual capacities and, in order to prove Hitler's alleged occult interests, on the invented conversations fall back that Hermann Rauschning claims to have led with Hitler.

Hermann Möcker published an article in History and Literature in Austria with the headline Was Wittgenstein Hitler's 'Jew from Linz', as Kimberley Cornish thinks from an antipodean point of view? Biographical corrections to the pupil Adolf and thoughts on a curly book.

In contrast, Tom Appleton wrote a laudatory review of the “forgotten book”. Although he calls the basic assumption in Cornish's book a "quite adventurous thesis", this does not prevent him from criticizing the previous reviewers:

“The book had already received massive reviews from German countries after the publication of the English edition, but I think it is so interesting that the total silence since the publication of the German edition seems to me to be an almost negligently inadmissible procedure, as a conscious adherence to one stuck optics, as a defense of the blind spot, basically as a refusal to really perceive one's own story undistorted. "

literature

  • Kimberley Cornish: The Jew from Linz. Hitler and Wittgenstein . Ullstein, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-550-06970-7 .
  • Michael Rissmann: Hitler's God. The German dictator's belief in providence and sense of mission . Pendo, Zurich a. a. 2001, ISBN 3-85842-421-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brief description. In: Amazon.de. Retrieved September 6, 2008 .
  2. ↑ Peter Strawson: Individual thing and logical subject . Reclam, Ditzingen 1972, ISBN 978-3-15-009410-5 .
  3. ^ Carlos Widmann: The Indiana Jones of Linz . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1998 ( online ).
  4. ^ Eva Reichmann: Kimberley Cornish: The Jew from Linz. In: Literaturhaus. November 10, 1998, accessed September 6, 2008 .
  5. ^ Ludger Lütkehaus: Literature on Ludwig Wittgenstein's life . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . January 21, 1999.
  6. ↑ Kathrin Chod: Two whistled together . In: Berlin Reading Signs . No. 4 . Edition Luisenstadt, Berlin 1999 ( luise-berlin.de [accessed on September 6, 2008]).
  7. ↑ Jan Westerhoff: Dangerous relationships. In: literaturkritik.de. June 1999, accessed September 6, 2008 .
  8. ↑ Michael Rissmann: Hitler's God. The German dictator's belief in providence and sense of mission . Pendo, Zurich / Munich 2001, p. 95 u. 241-242 .
  9. ↑ Hermann Möcker: Was Wittgenstein Hitler's "Jew of Linz" as Kimberley Cornish says of antipodal point of view? Biographical corrections to the pupil Adolf and thoughts on a curly book . In: Austria in history and literature . No. 44 , 2000, pp. 281–333 ( alws.at [PDF; accessed on September 6, 2008] online (from page 78)).
  10. ↑ Tom Appleton: Wittgenstein and Hitler? In: Telepolis . March 22, 2008, accessed September 6, 2008 .