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Could the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, who attended school with Hitler, have been the catalyst for the Fuhrer's antisemitism? A new book, 'The Jew of Linz,' argues that he might well have been. Douglas Davis reports. Box at end of text.
Who is the unidentified Jewish schoolboy in Adolf Hitler's racist testament Mein Kampf who stirred the future Nazi leader's hatred of Jews? A startling clue may be found in a photograph of 14-year-olds at the Linz Realschule in 1904.
There, within arm's length of each other, are two boys who would grow up to shape their age. One is Adolf Hitler, bovine and sullen; the other - delicate, sensitive and staring intently into the camera - is the brilliant Ludwig Wittgenstein, destined to become one of the great minds and seminal philosophers of the 20th century.
The theory that the young scion of a highly cultured, fabulously wealthy Viennese family could have been the catalyst that drove Hitler, product of a relatively impoverished family from the primitive backwoods of northern Austria, is explored - and persuasively argued - by Australian academic and Wittgenstein specialist Kimberley Cornish in The Jew of Linz, published in London this month by Century, an imprint of Random House.
Wittgenstein and Hitler were born just six days apart in April 1889 and represented the polar opposites of fin- de-siecle Austrian society. While Brahms and Mahler were regular visitors to the rarefied cultural and intellectual atmosphere of the Wittgenstein home, Hitler was the abused child of uncultured peasant parents, whose family was reportedly afflicted with deformity and insanity as a result of generations of inbreeding.
And while the Wittgenstein family had formed a famous cartel with the Rothschilds to control more than 60 percent of the iron and steel production of the Austro-Hungarian empire (and the railway and tire industries), Hitler's father, an illegitimate peasant, clawed his way up to the post of minor customs official.
Wittgenstein's father, Karl, acutely aware that a virulent strain of antisemitic poison was spreading through Europe, tried to insulate his family members from its effects and cut them off from their Jewish roots by embracing Christianity. But, as author Cornish notes: "Despite its nominal Catholicism, the Wittgenstein family's Jewish origins were well known."
The Realschule in...