The Jew of Linz by Kimberly Cornish (review)

232 Leonardo Reviews context, Duchamp is once again viewed as having opened up modernism to broader categories, and the author moves on to show how the redefinition of artistic production helped to create ground for the era of appropriation at the core of postmodernity (what is original and what is not?). Her complex arguments offer detailed and finely woven interpretations. More reproductions, especially some in color, would have better illustrated Duchamp’s art and made the longer texts more compelling in this new paperback edition. Although a bit linear in terms of approach, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit is a high-minded read for the dialectically predisposed. Another text for Duchamp’s canon. THE JEW OF LINZ by Kimberly Cornish. Century Books, London, U.K., 1998. 298 pp., illus.£17.99. ISBN: 0-7126-7935-9. Reviewed by Sophie Hampshire, 148 Fellows Road, London, NW3 3JH, U.K. In Kimberly Cornish’s book The Jew of Linz, the central aim is to give credence to the view that an encounter between philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Hitler as school boys in Linz caused Hitler to spurn European Jewry. Of course, the plot in the book is a little more psychologically interwoven: as a young boy of 14, Wittgenstein was sent to the Realschule in Linz, where he was supposed to have met and had a school-boy quarrel with the young Hitler. Moreover, he supposedly introduced Hitler to the work of Schopenhauer. Hitler, on the other hand, is supposed to have deduced Wittgenstein’s Jewish ancestry, been highly jealous of the wealthy and cultured boy and to have been acquainted with the Secession movement, thus resenting Karl Wittgenstein’s entrepreneurial activities, which included financial support for the Secession building. From these and numerous other suppositions , Cornish derives the argument that contained within Hitler’s antiSemitic publication Mein Kampf are personal references to the Wittgenstein family. In other words, Hitler is said to have taken the characteristics of Wittgenstein and the Wittgenstein family as paradigmatic in his assessment of the Jews. Furthermore, Wittgenstein was to have unwittingly contributed to Hitler’s ideology of what the author calls “Nazi metaphysics” and later to have become a KGB agent in order to demolish Nazi rule. Cornish’s writing is sorely in need of sound inference. As this book stands, it only provides the reader with the author’s idiosyncratic impressions of historical events and persons. What is regarded as evidence is at best circumstantial . Although the author presents his writing as a set of conjectures—and indeed the initial pages are riddled with conditionals—he swiftly moves to factual assumptions. For example, in his hypothesis on Wittgenstein’s communist activities, he predicates Wittgenstein as being “Stalinist.” Why are we compelled to believe that Wittgenstein and Hitler were known to one another? We are asked to consider, amongst the numerous snippets of conjecture , a computer-enhanced school photograph representing Adolf Hitler and a highly probable Wittgenstein. Similarly , we are invited to speculate upon a claim that both boys whistled Wagnerian themes. Is this what can be classed as concrete evidence or is it the product of an over-zealous imagination? What are the reasons motivating the author to assert that Wittgenstein is reflected through the texts of Mein Kampf? One reason, we are told, is that Hitler makes a derogatory reference to the Jews, stating that they stammer the German language, and that this should be correlated with Wittgenstein’s own speech impediment. Cornish attributes as sources for Nazi ideology not only Hitler’s interest in the occult but Hitler’s use of Schopenhauer’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophies. He further supposes Wittgenstein’s concept of “non-ownership of mind” to have been a part of this influence. (In fact, it is not wholly clear whether the author argues that Hitler acquired this idea from young Ludwig’s interpretations of Schopenhauer at the Realschule, or that Hitler read and assimilated Wittgenstein’s mature logical treatise. If the former, we are left wondering how the 14-year old Wittgenstein could have developed such a cogent theory of mind; if the latter, we may ask for a little more evidence of Hitler’s knowledge of the...