Der Jude aus Linz: Hitler und Wittgenstein Add a review

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 1904 but in the second semester of the 1903/1904 academic year.