Hitler’s class-mate June 10, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary , trackback
Beachcombing has five files on Hitler and will soon have to start on a sixth. The moustached one was, after all, a whirlpool in history dragging the strange, coincidental, bizarre and outrageous into his cursed depths.
A favourite curiosity is examined in Kimberley Cornish’s The Jew of Linz: Wittgenstein, Hitler and Their Secret Battle for the Mind (1998). In this book the Australian author notes that Hitler had become anti-semitic having got to know a Jewish classmate, and Cornish argues that the classmate in question was none other than Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the most celebrated of twentieth-century philosophers.
Now Ludwig and Adolf are certainly among Beachcombing’s least favourite people. And Beachcombing confesses that he likes the idea of them being friends. He would even have paid a lot to watch this pair of miscreants build, say, a lego fort together.
But while trying to imagine what said fort would have looked like Beachcombing’s scepticism kicked in: isn’t this all a bit too good to be true?
Well, yes and no. Hitler and Wittgenstein were the same age and both attended the same Linz school – the Fadingerstrasse Bundesrealgymnasium – at the same time. Hitler, true to form, had been held back a grade and Wittgenstein, true to form, had been pushed forward a grade. But the school was small – about 300 students – so they could easily have bumped into each other or even have become buddies.
Cornish’s book, however, is fundamentally unsound with the author insisting on possibilities as probabilities and probabilities as certainties. For example, Hitler does speak of a Jewish student at his school in Mein Kampf – but this Jewish boy is not, as Cornish claims, given the blame for having inspired Hitler’s hatred of the Jewish people:
‘At the Realschule I knew one Jewish boy. We were all on our guard in our relations with him, but only because his reticence and certain actions of his warned us to be discreet. Beyond that my companions and myself formed no particular opinions in regard to him… There were very few Jews in Linz. In the course of centuries the Jews who lived there had become Europeanized in external appearance and were so much like other human beings that I even looked upon them as Germans… As I thought that they were persecuted on account of their Faith my aversion to hearing remarks against them grew almost into a feeling of abhorrence. I did not in the least suspect that there could be such a thing as a systematic anti-Semitism.’ (Murphy 52)
Cornish wants us to believe that the boys knew each other well giving as proof (of sorts) the photo printed below. There is much argument over the identification of Wittgenstein. The other boy though is certainly Hitler. Beachcombing has decided that even if Ludwig is absent the shot is worth reprinting for Hitler’s terrifying proto pout.
For more on LW at school or anything else strange, coincidental, bizarre or outrageous about AH [drbeachcombing[AT]yahoo[DOT]com].
