By Kimberley Cornish

Century Books, 298 pages, $32.95

Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the great philosophers of this century. Like his teacher Bertrand Russell, he renounced great wealth. Unlike Russell, he hated the academic life, and periodically abandoned it for one of menial toil. If you have read his works, you likely think of him as a logician with a mystic bent. His primary work was in the philosophy of language. He popularized the complex linguistic theory of logical atomism, and invented the notion of language games. He saw philosophy as a trap, and assigned the philosopher the task of freeing us from the trap.

Kimberley Cornish's Ludwig Witt-genstein is another man entirely. Cornish portrays this Wittgenstein in The Jew of Linz

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a work of biography, history and metaphysics. It is quite the strangest book I've ever read.

An Australian biographer, Cornish tells us that when Adolf Hitler was in grade school in the Austrian city of Linz he came to loathe a schoolmate, one Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a hate so passionate that it produced the Holocaust.

As self-described detective historian, Cornish argues that Wittgenstein was responsible for Germany's defeat and Hitler's suicide. Finally, as philosopher, Cornish attempts to demonstrate that Nazism, contrary to the common view, did have deep theoretical underpinnings; that these derived from Wittgenstein's philosophy of Mind; that, against all the scholarly views on Wittgenstein's writings, Wittgenstein embraced pantheism (a "We are all part of one great Mind" philosophy that Witt-genstein would never have developed but for his family's conversion from Judaism to Catholicism); and that Wittgenstein's pantheism was essentially correct.

Let us consider these themes in turn.

1) Wittgenstein caused the Holocaust:

Cornish tells us that Hitler hated all Jews because he hated one particular Jew, the unnamed "Jew...