Kimberley Cornish - Reception

Reception

The book proved controversial, with reviewers criticizing it for drawing unwarranted connections between disparate events. The main criticisms were that:

1. Cornish's evidence is thin.
2. Hitler and Wittgenstein did attend the same school at the same time, but there is little evidence that they knew each other.
3. There is no evidence that there was a personal antagonism between them, or that Hitler's dislike of Wittgenstein shaped the course of Nazi anti-Semitism.
4. Despite the wealth of material which has emerged from the archives of the KGB since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is no evidence that Wittgenstein was one of the most important Soviet agents in the UK, or a Stalinist agent at all.
5. Cornish misrepresents Wittgenstein's thought and his philosophical context, or simply does not understand him.

Tom Appleton called it "a venturesome thesis", adding of its critics: "Already upon its original publication in English, the book had been met with scathing reviews throughout Germany. However, in my opinion the book is so interesting that the pact of silence imposed on it since the German edition came out is nothing short of unacceptable and grossly negligent: a defense of the blind spot, essentially a refusal to perceive one's history in a truly undistorted manner."

One of the main issues of contention is the claim that Wittgenstein triggered or substantially contributed to Hitler's antisemitism while they were at school together. It is a view that has some support. British professor Laurence Goldstein, in his Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein's Development and His Relevance to Modern Thought (1999), called Cornish's book important, writing: "For one thing, at the K.u.k. Realschule in Linz, Wittgenstein met Hitler and may have inspired in him a hatred of Jews which led, ultimately, to the Holocaust. This, naturally enough, weighed heavily on Wittgenstein's conscience in his later years ... It is overwhelmingly probable that Hitler and Wittgenstein did meet, and with dire consequences for the history of the world."

Reviewing Goldstein's own book, Mary McGinn called it a sloppy and irresponsible argument: " ne is amazed at the sheer looseness of thought that allows him to assert that 'at certain points in Mein Kampf where Hitler seems to be raging against Jews in general it is the individual young Ludwig Wittgenstein whom he has in mind', and to suggest that Wittgenstein 'may have inspired … (the) hatred of Jews which led, ultimately, to the Holocaust'. It is exactly this sort of sloppy, irresponsible, 'plausible' style of thought that Wittgenstein's philosophy, by its careful attention to the particular and to not saying more or less than is warranted, is directed against."