30-12-2004, 12:25
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Who was the schoolboy who triggered Adolf Hitler's hatred of the Jews? Kimberley Cornish points the finger at one of the great thinkers of the 20th
 School days: circled above, the young Wittgenstein (left) and the young Hitler. Soon after it enters Austria on its journey from Germany to the Black Sea, the River Danube flows into a wide valley and passes through the city of Linz. Trade routes have criss-crossed at Linz since Roman times and its ancient buildings chronicle many centuries of Austrian power. Nowadays Linz is a provincial capital and industrial centre, but it holds a particular niche in the violent history of the 20th century. Adolf Hitler went to school there and later revealed in his racist testament, Mein Kampf, that his initial feelings of anti-semitism had been stirred by an unnamed Jewish schoolboy in the city. This was the first link in the chain of hatred that led to Auschwitz. One of the mysteries of the 20th century has been the identity of this boy who turned Hitler into the killer of 6m Jews. Hitler hated him with an all-consuming fire and he was perhaps the very first victim of the future Führer's bullying. But who was he? Did he survive the Holocaust? Although there is not much to go on in Hitler's book, it is possible to make a fair bet who he was, and this "fair bet" is astonishing. The Jew of Linz grew into a seminal 20th-century thinker, a logician and philosopher of the first rank, a man as extraordinary as Hitler himself. His name was Ludwig Wittgenstein. There could be even more to this story. Nazism and the Holocaust were both influenced by Wittgenstein - but did he also assist the Stalinist triumph in eastern Europe, because he was so desperate to defeat Hitler that he secretly resorted to evil means that seriously damaged Great Britain, his adopted country? Piecing the strands of the story together involves pioneer detective work. The implications may, on the face of it, seem utterly implausible. To show its plausibility, we must first look at the era that spawned Hitler and his fellow schoolboy and find out how they met each other. ADOLF HITLER was born on April 20, 1889, in the frontier town of Braunau on the River Inn, which separated the Austro-Hungarian empire from Bavaria. Six days later, a rich socialite called Leopoldine Wittgenstein gave birth to Ludwig, her eighth child, in the glittering imperial capital, Vienna. The two boys were born in the dying decades of a glorious empire. Once Austria had guided Europe's destiny. Now Prussia had usurped it as the dominant Germanic power; Austria's emperor, Franz Josef, ruled over a vast rump of nationalities and territories that sprawled from Bosnia to Ukraine. This empire was huge, weak and unwieldy, and its aristocratic elite had no great purpose beyond self-preservation and the enjoyment of Vienna's prosperity and gentle way of life. "There was no ambition for world markets or world power," Robert Musil, the Viennese novelist, observed. "Ruinous sums of money were spent on the army, but only just enough to secure its position as the second-weakest among the great powers . . . And the country's administration was conducted in an enlightened, unobtrusive manner by the best bureaucracy in Europe, which could be faulted only in that it regarded genius, and any brilliant initiative not backed by noble birth or official status, as insolent and presumptuous." None the less, genius flourished. Sigmund Freud uncovered the sexual neuroses of Viennese high society; Gustav Klimt decorated its homes with sinuous art nouveau, only to be ousted from the vanguard of fashion by the modernist pioneer Adolf Loos; Johannes Brahms still haunted the salons of the rich; Gustav Mahler offended refined Viennese taste with the emotionalism of his music; Arnold Schoenberg stunned his audiences and musicians alike; Arthur Schnitzler chronicled the hedonism, irony, cynicism and self-righteousness of the bourgeoisie; and the satirist Karl Kraus savaged its hypocrisy and corruption. One of the two boys born in April 1889, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was brought up at the heart of this intellectual ferment. He was a member of a fabulously rich Viennese family that, in the face of prevailing anti-semitism, had tried to cut itself off from its Jewish past by embracing Christianity. Karl Wittgenstein, Ludwig's father, owned a steel works and had made himself one of the wealthiest figures in Austria-Hungary by forming a cartel with the Rothschilds. Together they produced more than 60% of the empire's iron and steel and controlled its railway and tyre industries. Despite its nominal Catholicism, the Wittgenstein family's Jewish origins were well known. At home the atmosphere was one of rarefied high culture. Brahms was a frequent visitor to the family musical salon. So was Mahler, and Pablo Casals played his cello there. Karl Wittgenstein was a patron of the visual arts, as well, enjoying the sensuality of Klimt but also the pioneering expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka. Ludwig was educated at home by governesses and tutors for his first 14 years, but his father decided in 1904 to send him away from this cosseted, highly cultivated environment to a state school in the provinces. The reasons are not known but Hans, one of Ludwig's elder brothers, had committed suicide in 1902 and another, Rudolf, did so in 1904. Both were homosexual; Rudolf expressed despair over his "perverted disposition" in his farewell letter. Ludwig, a delicate boy with a high-pitched voice and a stammer, also became an active homosexual as an adult. Karl Wittgenstein enrolled him at the Realschule which was more than 100 miles away in Linz. As it was a day school, Ludwig boarded with a teacher. His first reaction on meeting his fellow pupils was to regard them as "muck", according to biographers. They regarded him as an objectionable prig. He was desperately unhappy, did badly at his lessons and did not stay there long. The episode is not something that can be dismissed as a painful but ultimately unimportant interlude, however. On the contrary, the Linz Realschule is of enormous significance because of another pupil there whose actions were to shape the 20th century. This was, of course, the boy from Braunau, Adolf Hitler. HITLER had been born at the far end of the social spectrum from the Wittgensteins and was ashamed of his background. His family came originally from the Waldviertel, a remote, inhospitable region in northern Austria. "Rife among the peasants, inbreeding damaged many of the families, including Hitler's, which was afflicted with deformity and insanity," writes Ronald Hayman in his book Hitler and Geli, which probes the Führer's childhood. His father, Alois, an illegitimate peasant, had clawed his way to provincial status and relative affluence as a customs officer. His mother, Klara, had been successively Alois's maid, mistress and third wife. She spoiled the sickly young Adolf but did not intervene when, as the boy grew older, his father repeatedly beat him. While she "loved, honoured and obeyed" her husband, writes Hayman, "the young Hitler learnt that bullying produces results". As he approached adolescence, Hitler was enrolled at the Realschule in Linz for his secondary education and was already well established there as a stand-offish, low-achieving pupil when Wittgenstein arrived in the second term of 1904. Two of the 20th century's most spectacularly unusual personalities found themselves confined together in one school with, as it were, 300 also-rans. Despite being the same age, they were not in the same class, as Hitler was a year behind and Wittgenstein a year ahead of normal. There were, however, strange similarities between them. Both were living unhappily away from their family homes and both found it hard to communicate with other boys. Both used the polite form "Sie" to address boys who normally spoke to each other with the familiar "du". Hitler did so from aloofness, Wittgenstein because he knew no different. A photograph from the school at this time shows the two 14-year-olds less than an arm's length from each other. Hitler looks withdrawn and glum, while Wittgenstein stares intensely at the camera. They shared unusual interests to a remarkable degree. Both were fascinated by architecture and the power of language. Both displayed a youthful enthusiasm for Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th-century philosopher, and for music. Wittgenstein had learnt Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger by heart; so had Hitler. Both had a talent for whistling the music they loved, accurately and at length. Hitler did so with a "curious, penetrating vibrato", according to a contemporary; Wittgenstein tended to correct those who got the tunes even slightly wrong. Adolescents who share a passion for common intellectual interests tend to drift together - but these two boys had personalities so dominating as to count as remarkable within 20th-century history. A clash was more likely. Compare the reports of Wittgenstein's habitual correction of others with this account of Hitler as a wartime leader: "One evening during the war, Hitler was whistling a classical air. When a secretary had the temerity to suggest that he had made a mistake in the melody, the Führer was furious, shouting, 'I don't have it wrong. It's the composer who made a mistake'." Above all, Hitler knew his art and modelled his clumsy adolescent efforts on Rudolph von Alt, an Austrian master; Wittgenstein came from a home where von Alt's work hung on the walls. Hitler attended opera regularly even as a schoolboy. So did Wittgenstein, but to him all the expensive frippery required for opera attendance was mere pin money. Moreover, conductors, composers and musicians visited his home. "Jewry raised Brahms to the pinnacle. He was lionised in the salons," Hitler grumbled in later life. The chief such salon as far as Brahms was concerned was the Palais Wittgenstein. IN Mein Kampf, Hitler was at pains to deny that he came from an anti-semitic household, and some commentators have attributed the origins of his Jew-baiting to the reading of pamphlets after he had left school. But it seems to me a lunatic hypothesis that these alone could have been the source of such all-consuming hatred. His only close friend in Linz, August Kubizek, is recorded as saying that he was already "distinctly anti-semitic" at school; the real clue comes on a page of Mein Kampf where Hitler talks of a Jewish boy at school who "we did not particularly trust". "Various experiences," he wrote, "had led us to doubt his discretion." Although there were a handful of other Jewish boys at the Realschule, Wittgenstein fits perfectly. He had an almost fanatical attitude to what he regarded as honesty, which he valued above all other qualities in personal relationships. He saw the process of being honest as demanding that he make confessions to others. This is a common symptom in a certain type of neurotic, lonely individuals who use the act of confession as a means of establishing a sort of intimacy. In a cryptic boyhood journal, Wittgenstein recorded a "talk about confessions with my colleagues" shortly after joining the Realschule; but what a refined and cultured Viennese might see as a brave act of soul-baring, less precious country lads might treat with contempt, particularly if his confessions got them into trouble. Small, unathletic, stuttering, homosexual adolescents are notoriously badly treated at school, more so if they tell tales. In the second volume of Mein Kampf is a long passage attacking schoolboy confession and betrayal. Hitler concludes: "A boy who snitches on his comrades practises treason and thus betrays a mentality which . . . is exactly the equivalent of treason to one's country. Such a boy can by no means be regarded as a good, decent child . . . more than once, a little informer has grown up to be a big scoundrel." Could there be a connection here? Hitler's bullying father was dead and the boy had started to misbehave. He was asked to leave school at the end of the year. In Mein Kampf Hitler recounts his later experience of other Jews as well, in an attempt to justify his anti-semitism, but the Jewish boy at the Realschule is the first and the only one referred to as an individual Jew he had met, rather than as a type. Something happened between Hitler and Wittgenstein at the Realschule. We face, I think, the astounding possibility that the course of the 20th century was radically influenced by a quarrel between two schoolboys. If I am right, Wittgenstein's complex, prickly personality was a contributory cause of the events that climaxed in the attempted extermination of European Jewry. Hitler, with his own complex, prickly personality, was repelled by Wittgenstein and came to attribute what he saw as Wittgenstein's particular personality defects to Jews in general. Tied in with Hitler's transfer of hatred to Jews was the unparalleled wealth and power of the Wittgenstein family in Austrian industrial and cultural life in contrast to Hitler's background as an essentially small-town yokel from Braunau. Previous accounts of Hitler's anti-semitism have assumed he had no acquaintance with any Jew of substance. It is now reasonably clear that - at a very impressionable age - he had a school-fellow link to the family of the single most significant Jewish-controlled industrial sector of the empire. Hitler could not fail to be aware of this, nor of reports of Karl Wittgenstein's profligacy on holiday in the south of France - again denounced in Mein Kampf. Nor of his role as the grand patron of the most vital art movement of the time, the secessionists led by Gustav Klimt, who painted a famous work of Ludwig Wittgenstein's sister. Hitler was a struggling artist in Vienna when the secessionists subsequently split; he promptly became a slavish disciple of its anti-Wittgenstein faction. He seems to have pursued more information about the Wittgenstein family in the newspapers, which also resurfaced much later in Mein Kampf where he virulently attacked Jews who converted to Christianity and married into the Aryan race (the Wittgensteins affected to have aristocratic German forebears); Jews who manipulated the stock market (Wittgenstein's father faced repeated public accusations of this); Jews who gulled the public (Wittgenstein Sr wrote columns in the newspapers that Hitler read); Jews who controlled the economy (the Wittgenstein-Rothschild cartel was "Jewish monopoly capital" with a vengeance). Until the end, Hitler had an obsession with making Linz a greater centre of art than Vienna. Art treasures from all over Europe were to be sent there for the Adolf Hitler Museum. This was not simply to help the home town; he was doing it to rub the noses of the Wittgensteins in the dirt. As for the Wittgenstein steel company, he had set up the Hermann Goering steelworks in Linz, which then owned the Wittgenstein cartel's plant. The plans for Linz and the Hitler museum were his consolation in the Berlin bunker as the Russian guns grew closer in the spring of 1945. This was an unfulfilled part of his life - but as for the Jews . . . well, he had shown them. They could not laugh at him now, and never would again. THE real denouement of this story took place in Cambridge in the 1930s, however. On leaving school, Wittgenstein had studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester; this had prompted an interest in mathematics and logic that led to Cambridge, where Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, recognised him as a genius. During the first world war, when he served with reckless bravery in the Austrian army, he had jotted down his thoughts on logic and ethics and after the defeat of Austria and Germany these were published as the Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus. Dauntingly complex, this was hailed as a classic. The work addresses the question of how language and human thought are possible. In the words of Bryan Magee, the British philosopher, it "maintained that almost everything that is most important cannot be stated at all but only, at the very best, indicated by our use of language". At the time, however, and for decades afterwards, it was thought to mean the opposite of this. By inheritance, Wittgenstein had become one the richest men in postwar Austria, but he preferred poverty to wealth and obscurity to academic distinction. Giving away much of his money, he became a village school teacher. He also developed a reputation as a leftwinger and discussed "flight to Russia" with a friend. Vienna was the playground of warring political gangs. The experiences that would produce the British leftwingers of the 1930s were in no way as bad as the experiences of those unfortunate enough to have suffered life in Vienna from the mid-1920s. Instead of going to Russia, however, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929 as a philosophy lecturer. His reasons for doing so are to this day quite opaque as commentators agree that he detested academic life and the academics at Trinity College. He had several particularly interesting contemporaries at Trinity College, among them the future spies Kim Philby (who started at Trinity in October 1929), Guy Burgess (October 1930) and Anthony Blunt (elected a Trinity fellow in 1932). Donald Maclean attended nearby Trinity Hall. All came to communism in close proximity to Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge. Of course, the mere fact of their attending Trinity at the same time proves nothing - but Wittgenstein knew them, through his academic work, through the communist ferment that gripped Cambridge for much of the 1930s, through his homosexuality and - above all - through the Apostles, the secretive intellectual "conversazione" society. Wittgenstein developed a reputation not just as a leftwinger but as a Stalinist. I do not wish to labour the point, but one has to consider a question that has never been satisfactorily resolved: who was the Soviet recruiter who created the Soviet spy ring? Various names have been put forward, but one possible hypothesis is that Wittgenstein himself was this mysterious man, the long-sought Trinity College homosexual Apostle who recruited Blunt and the other Cambridge spies. All the investigations chasing the recruiter have looked at overtly communist dons or sympathisers. Yet 50 years of the most intense detective work based on this hypothesis have yielded precisely nothing. There is no consensus on who he was. That he must have been a remarkable individual goes without saying; that he might have been one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century has not been suspected. Wittgenstein, though a staunch defender of Stalin, was not, so far as we know, a party member; but he was a moulder of people's lives. There is no doubt that his students were moved by and responded to the extraordinary power of his dominant and charismatic personality. "One almost felt that he was God's representative on earth," a member of the Apostles said at the time. Of the Trinity College dons, how many others were able to inspire their students to regard them as a god? How many were fully aware of the origins of Hitler's Jew-hate and the sort of man Hitler was? How many had worked just across the border from Bavaria as Nazism in Munich grew from strength to strength? How many had seen the armed Nazi insurrection against the government of their country, or striking workers shot in the streets? How many had seen doomed and broken Jewish refugees fleeing across the mountain passes into Austria? What must have been the temptation to think: "I can help. I'll select people who in my judgment can further the cause of the only international organisation that stands for armed opposition to Hitler, the Comintern." Wittgenstein learnt Russian and visited the Soviet Union with a view to settling there. How many of the other Cambridge dons actively welcomed the chance to live under Stalin's regime? Wittgenstein's name connects to many of the players in the Cambridge spy drama and in many different ways. If these suspicions are correct, his disciples transferred the crown jewels of British intelligence to Stalin during the second world war. The hand of Hitler's nightmares, that of "the Jew", really did contribute to his undoing. If this hypothesis is right, Wittgenstein was the master spy recruiter of the 20th century and, like Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt, he escaped the hangman while his old schoolboy rival blew his brains out in Berlin. ------------------------------------------------------------ Zie je toch dat een indruk die iets of iemand op je maakt in je jonge jaren dat zoiets je het leven lang kan achtervolgen. 
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Man is the Unnatural Animal, the Rebel Child of Nature, and more and more does He turn himself against the Harsh and Fitful Hand that reared Him.
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30-12-2004, 13:29
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samenvatting graag.
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Единый, могучий Советски
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30-12-2004, 13:48
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Harry Potter is leuker.
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30-12-2004, 13:58
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Ik vind het een erg onwaarschijnlijk verhaal.
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30-12-2004, 15:18
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ik ga dit niet helemaal lezen...
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30-12-2004, 18:25
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Het zou zomaar kunnen.
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"Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child." - Dan Quayle
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30-12-2004, 19:35
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Citaat:
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Man is the Unnatural Animal, the Rebel Child of Nature, and more and more does He turn himself against the Harsh and Fitful Hand that reared Him.
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30-12-2004, 21:58
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Wat is de bron?
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As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough.
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31-12-2004, 10:42
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Iets kortere versie graag. Ik lees graag, maar dit is wel erg veel.
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Disgustibus non est disputandem
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31-12-2004, 12:22
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Pfff...
 Nou het gaat erover dat Adolf Hitler zo rond zijn puberteit in contact kwam met een ander historisch figuur namelijk de Jood Ludwig Wittgenstein. Zowel Hitler als Wittgenstein waren exentrieke en intellectuele leerlingen maar in plaats van een vriendschap te ontwikkelen, ontwikkelde er zich afkeer tussen de twee pubers. Hitler's famillie was arm terwijl Wittgenstein's famillie rijk was, dit versterkte Hitler's afkeer en die steeg tot een grote haat tegen Joden in het algemeen. Want Hitler refferreert vaak naar Wittgenstein als de Joodse mede leerling in zijn boek Mien Kampf zonder zijn naam te noemen. Ten tijde van de Tweede Wereldoorlog voerde Hitler Nazi-Duitsland aan en Wittgenstein stond onder de bescherming van Stalin in Rusland. En rekruteerde spionnen die tot veel ontdekkingen zijn gekomen over het Derde Rijk. Dus Wittgenstein heeft wel zeker meegeholpen aan Hitler's ondergang. Wittgenstein ontsnapte de galg terwijl Hitler een pistool in z'n mond stopte in Berlijn.  Het komt uit de Sunday Times 8 Maart 1998 door Kimberly Cornish. Ze heeft er ook een boek over geschreven genaamd The Jew of Linz.
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Man is the Unnatural Animal, the Rebel Child of Nature, and more and more does He turn himself against the Harsh and Fitful Hand that reared Him.
Laatst gewijzigd op 31-12-2004 om 12:30.
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31-12-2004, 14:39
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Het komt me voor als onzin dat Wittgenstein de aanleiding zou zijn van zijn extreme anti-semitisme want zo extreem was hij in die periode nog niet.
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31-12-2004, 15:28
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Citaat:
dus.
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Recht voor je raapje!
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31-12-2004, 15:39
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Citaat:
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Man is the Unnatural Animal, the Rebel Child of Nature, and more and more does He turn himself against the Harsh and Fitful Hand that reared Him.
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31-12-2004, 16:22
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Citaat:
maar?
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Recht voor je raapje!
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31-12-2004, 16:25
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Citaat:
__________________
Man is the Unnatural Animal, the Rebel Child of Nature, and more and more does He turn himself against the Harsh and Fitful Hand that reared Him.
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01-01-2005, 00:14
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Hitler als intellectueel. Hmmm, het was eerder een wanna-be. Hij faalde een carriere te krijgen in, schilderen, filosofie, schrijven enz. Gewoon omdat hij het gewoon niet goed genoeg kon.
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"Scriabins fifth and tenth piano sonata contain the most sublime organization of tones I have ever heard." - Shawn Lane
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02-01-2005, 15:59
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Citaat:
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Man is the Unnatural Animal, the Rebel Child of Nature, and more and more does He turn himself against the Harsh and Fitful Hand that reared Him.
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02-01-2005, 17:04
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Ik ga in dit topic, volledig met Machiavelli mee.
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02-01-2005, 17:09
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Als de kern van dit hele betoog is dat Hitler in zijn antisemitische opvattingen beïnvloed is door figuren uit zijn jeugd, dan zie ik niet in waarom dat schokkend is, want het is algemeen bekend dat iedereen gevormd wordt door de ervaringen in zijn jeugd.
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03-01-2005, 14:22
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__________________
As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough.
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03-01-2005, 14:35
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04-01-2005, 16:55
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Laat ik dit zeggen. Het idee dat Hitler in zijn antisemitisme beinvloed zou zijn door juist Wittgenstein is intrigerend, natuurlijk. Niettemin is zoals iemand al zei de ontwikkeling van een persoonlijkheid niet zo eenduidig. De hypothese van de tekst faalt er dan ook in aan te tonen dat dit het geval was, omdat de data die daarvoor nodig zijn ontbreken. Dat de "Joodse schooljongen" waar Hitler naar verwijst Wittgenstein was is zuiver speculatie. Niettemin zijn de parallelen interessant en is het leuk om te denken dat Hitler zou door Wittgenstein beinvloed zou zijn.
Kunnen auteurs Voortaan direct de bron bij hun artikelen vermelden, danku.
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We are all one. I do not follow a better path, I just follow another path.
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04-01-2005, 18:38
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Man is the Unnatural Animal, the Rebel Child of Nature, and more and more does He turn himself against the Harsh and Fitful Hand that reared Him.
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04-01-2005, 20:13
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__________________
As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough.
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04-01-2005, 23:32
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De stelling zou een stuk interessanter zijn als Mein Kampf niet door Hitler geschreven bleek te zijn en hij de hele Tweede Wereldoorlog onder hypnose van een ander zou hebben gevoerd.
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05-01-2005, 00:03
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Citaat:
Zo ken ik er nog wel een paar 
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In Memoriam: Matthew Shepard(1976-1998)-Wake up, meet reality! mccaine.blogspot.com|geengodengeenmeesters.blogspot.com
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05-01-2005, 10:15
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05-01-2005, 10:30
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En de concentratie kampen waren eigenlijk Disney-land.
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As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough.
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05-01-2005, 11:30
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Drinken halveert je leven, maar je ziet dubbel zoveel...
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