According to Kimberley Cornish's A Jew Of Linz, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein caused the Holocaust. Of all the blame-the-Jew hypotheses that have emerged around Hitler over the years, this one may be the most peculiarly repulsive. The book has appeared in Canada and the United Kingdom but not in this country. It might have stayed in the crackpot bin had not Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times elected to trumpet its discoveries on its front page last March. Cornish takes off from a fact that has raised eyebrows occasionally over the years: Hitler and Wittgenstein attended school together in Linz in 1903-04. They were not in the same class, even though they were born six days apart in 1889: Hitler had been held back a year and Wittgenstein was a year ahead. Cornish reproduces a photograph in which a boy who is certainly Hitler is standing a few feet away from a boy who could be Wittgenstein. It's hard to tell because there are few photographs of Wittgenstein at that age. My uneducated guess is that the boy's chin is a little too weak to belong to the future dreamboat author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

The one fleck of evidence for an acquaintanceship between Hitler and Wittgenstein comes in the pages of Mein Kampf. "At the Realschule," Hitler writes, "I did meet one Jewish boy who was treated by all of us with caution, but only because various experiences led us not to trust him particularly, with regard to his discretion [Schweigsamkeit]; but I thought as little of it as any of the others." Could this have been Wittgenstein? There is plentiful evidence that Wittgenstein was an outsider at his school and was treated warily by his classmates. He was considered "aristocratic" and "arrogant," his lone friend from those years recalled; he addressed the others by the formal "sie" and not the familiar "du"; he came from a "strange world," the Viennese upper class and cultural haut monde; his melancholy cast was mocked. But there were 15 Jewish pupils at the Realschule when Wittgenstein was there; the likelihood that this one boy was Wittgenstein is low.

Yet Cornish claims that Wittgenstein must have been indiscreet about some action of Hitler's and forced his departure from the school at the end of that year:

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.

He bases this claim on the ghostly story in Mein Kampf and a general denunciation later in the book of the type of schoolboy who gets his classmates in trouble. He must set aside as somehow fabricated or incomplete the evidence that Hitler was ejected from the school because his grades were too low. He must reject the import that Hitler gives to the story in Mein Kampf: that he thought little of the mysterious Jewish boy at the time and did not develop anti-Semitic feelings until he reached Vienna. He must overlook the fact that various members of Wittgenstein's family were generously classified either as Aryan or Mischlinge (mixed race) in exchange for a transfer of money from Wittgenstein family accounts to Nazi banks. (If Hitler had nursed a lifelong grudge against Wittgenstein, it's doubtful such a transaction would have gone through.)

Most of all, he must set aside descriptions of Wittgenstein's aloof demeanor at school and instead suppose that he gossiped with his classmates and reported on them. Cornish is certainly right to draw a connection between the "one Jewish boy" story and the discussion of "the little informer" elsewhere in Mein Kampf Whether rooted in reality or fantasy, the idea of a Jewish tattletale seems to have played some small role in Hitler's consciousness. Yet to follow Cornish all the way requires us to picture Wittgenstein as "talkative," as "frivolous," to use Hitler's words. Cornish tries to assist this unlikely image by describing Wittgenstein's sometime habit of abruptly confessing details of his personal life to friends. He then quotes from a fragmentary autobiographical document in which Wittgenstein mentions a "talk about confession with colleagues" at school. But confessing about oneself is a rather different thing than gossiping about others. And given that Wittgenstein speaks in this same passage about a "halfway confession" to his own sister, it seems doubtful that he was bold enough to speak candidly about anything to his classmates. He was probably, at this time, the model of the boy who had "learned how to be silent," to quote Hitler again. Connoisseurs of Wittgenstein's philosophy can insert their own ironies.

I'm taking this silly book too seriously, but it makes an excellent case study in the Hitlerological mania that Rosenbaum describes. It's difficult to tell at times whether Cornish is an idiot or a fraud. I had to read the Wittgenstein sources several times before I untangled the mess he'd made of one passage in that autobiographical document, in which Wittgenstein remembers exclaiming "Mist!" to himself as he first encountered his lower-class schoolmates. This is German for "muck," "crap," etc. Ray Monk, in his Wittgenstein biography, translates it as such, and Cornish quotes Monk on Page 9 of his book. Then, on Page 17, Cornish records Brian McGuinness' fuller citation of the same text, with "Mist!" now rendered bizarrely as "a shower." (I'm guessing that Wittgenstein's text was in English and McGuinness tried to treat "mist" in its English sense. Monk is obviously correct.) Now, it's bad enough that Cornish prints two contradictory versions of the text. But the truly amazing thing is that he then takes McGuinness' word "shower" at face value and writes a long footnote speculating that Wittgenstein was frightened of having his circumcision exposed to the other boys at gym! The Jew of Linz is mist of one kind or another.