Wittgenstein was educated at home until 1903 with private tutors and few friends. His father had wanted him and Paul to be educated entirely at home, but after Hans's death he had finally relented, and allowed them to be sent to school. Alexander Waugh writes that it was too late for Wittgenstein to pass his exams for the more academic school, the Gymnasium in Wiener Neustadt; he failed his entrance exam and only barely managed after extra tuition to pass the exam for the more technically oriented K.u.k. Realschule in Linz, a small state school with 300 pupils.[1] When he was 13, he began three years of schooling there, lodging nearby in term time with the family of a Dr Srigl, a master at the local gymnasium, where he came to be known as Luki.[2] Historian Brigitte Hamann writes that he stood out from the other boys and was bullied; he spoke an unusually pure form of High German with a stutter, dressed elegantly, and was sensitive and unsociable.[3] His first impressions of the school, recorded in fragmentary form in a notebook, were: "Mist! (A shower). Relation to the Jews. Relation to Pepi [Dr Strigl's son, who died in August 1914]. Love and pride. Knocking hat off. Break with P. Suffering in class." He also talked about the need to make confession, a regular theme throughout his diaries.[2]
Adolf Hitler was a student at the same school, but was two grades below Wittgenstein, though they were born just six days apart.[4] Brian McGuinness, one of Wittgenstein's biographers, writes that during the year they overlapped at the school, which he writes was a stronghold of German nationalism, it seems Hitler was in the third year and Wittgenstein in the fifth, the former having been held back a year and the latter moved forward one.[2] Ray Monk, another Wittgenstein biographer, writes that the boys were both there during the school year 1904–1905.[5] There is disagreement as to whether they would have known each another. Hamann argues in Hitler's Vienna (1996) that Hitler was bound to have laid eyes on Wittgenstein, because the latter was so conspicuous,[3] though she told Focus magazine they were in different classes and would have had nothing to do with one another.[6]
Hitler referred in Mein Kampf to a Jewish boy at the school: "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 opinion in regard to him.[7] Hamann writes that there were 17 Jews in the school at the time,[3] and McGuinness writes that Wittgenstein was registered at the school as a Roman Catholic.[2]
Several commentators have written that a photograph of Hitler taken at the school (see right; Hitler is the boy on the top right) shows Wittgenstein in the lower left corner,[8] but Hamann told Focus the photograph stems from 1900 or 1901, before Wittgenstein's time.[9] Laurence Goldstein argues in Clear and Queer Thinking (1999) that it was "overwhelmingly probable" the boys met each other. He writes that Hitler, vicious and aggressive, would have viewed with "envy, hatred and mistrust that stammering, precocious, precious, aristocratic upstart who ... disdainfully flaunted his wealth and superiority."[10] Commentators have reacted angrily to the suggestion that Wittgenstein's wealth and unusual personality may have fed Hitler's antisemitism; reviewing his book, Marie McGinn calls Goldstein's position sloppy and irresponsible.[11]
According to Waugh, Wittgenstein and Hitler were both misfits, insisting the other children address them with the formal German "Sie."[1] Wittgenstein was often absent, and the other boys made fun of him, singing after him: "Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts" ("Wittgenstein wends his woeful windy way Vienna-wards").[5] In his leaving certificate, he received a top mark only once, in religious studies; a 2 for conduct and English, 3 for French, geography, history, mathematics and physics, and 4 for German, chemistry, geometry and freehand drawing. He had particular difficulty with spelling—Harmann writes that when he went to university in Berlin in 1906, his spelling was little better than Hitler's[3]—and he failed his German written exam because of it. He wrote in 1931: "My bad spelling in youth, up to the age of about 18 or 19, is connected with the whole of the rest of my character (my weakness in study)."[2]
- Notes
- ^ a b Waugh, Alexander. The House of Wittgenstein: a Family at War. Random House of Canada, 2009, p. 33.
- K.u.k. stood for "Kaiserlich und königlich.
- ^ a b c d e McGuinness, Brian. Wittgenstein: a life : young Ludwig 1889-1921. University of California Press, 1988, p. 51ff.
- ^ a b c d Hamann, Brigitte and Thornton, Thomas. Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship. Oxford University Press, 2000 (first published 1996 in German) pp. 15–16, 79. Cite error: The named reference "Hamann15" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- ^ Hitler started at the school on 17 September 1900, repeated the first year in 1901, and left in the autumn of 1905; see Kersaw, Ian. Hitler, 1889-1936. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, p. 16ff.
- ^ a b Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Penguin, 2001 (first published 1990), p. 15.
- ^ Thiede, Roger. "Phantom Wittgenstein", Focus magazine, 16 March 1998.
- ^ Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Translated by James Murphy, CreateSpace, 2010, p. 38. The German reads: "In der Realschule lernte ich wohl einen jüdischen Knaben kennen, der von uns allen mit Vorsicht behandelt wurde, jedoch nur, weil wir ihm in bezug auf seine Schweigsam-keit, durch verschiedene Erfahrungen gewitzigt, nicht sonder-lich vertrauten; irgendein Gedanke kam mir dabei so wenig wie den anderen." See the original German edition, published by the Zentralverlag der NSDAP, August Pries GmbH, Leipzig, 1925–1926, p. 55.
- ^ For examples of commentators saying the image shows Wittgenstein, see Cornish, Kimberley. The Jew of Linz. Arrow, 1999.
- Blum, Michael; Rollig, Stella; and Nyanga, Steven. "Monument to the birth of the 20th century", Revolver, 2005. Blum's material is also on display in an exhibition in the OK Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz, and in the Galerija Nova, Zagreb, 2006, accessed 9 September 2010, and
- Gibbons, Luke. "An extraordinary family saga", Irish Times, 29 November 2008.
- For an opposing view, see Hamann, Brigitte and Thornton, Thomas. Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship. Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 15–16, 79.
- See the full image at the Bundesarchiv, accessed 8 September 2010. The archives give the date of the image as circa 1901.
- Also see McGuinness, Brian. Wittgenstein: A Life : Young Ludwig 1889-1921. University of California Press, 1988, p. 97ff, and Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Penguin, 2001 (first published 1990), p. 15.
- ^ Thiede, Roger. "Phantom Wittgenstein", Focus magazine, 16 March 1998.
- The German Federal Archives says the image was taken around 1901; it identifies the class as 1B and the teacher as Oskar Langer. See the full image and description at the Bundesarchiv, accessed 6 September 2010. The archive gives the date as circa 1901, but wrongly calls it the Realschule in Leonding, near Linz. Hitler attended primary school in Leonding, but from September 1901 went to the Realschule in Linz itself. See Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 1889-1936. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, p. 16ff.
- Christoph Haidacher and Richard Schober write that Langer taught at the school from 1884 until 1901; see Haidacher, Christoph and Schober, Richard. Von Stadtstaaten und Imperien, Universitätsverlag Wagner, 2006, p. 140.
- ^ Goldstein, Lawrence. Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein's Development and his Relevance to Modern Thought. Duckworth, 1999, p. 167ff. Also see "Clear and Queering Thinking", review in Mind, Oxford University Press, 2001.
- ^ McGinn, Marie. "Hi Ludwig," Times Literary Supplement, 26 May 2000.