Hitler's Favorite Jew: The Enigma of Otto Weininger by Allan Janik

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hitler's Favorite Jew: The Enigma of Otto Weininger by Allan Janik Vincent Kling Janik, Allan. Hitler's Favorite Jew: The Enigma of Otto Weininger. New York: Simply Charly, 2021. 191 pp. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Heimito von Doderer, Hermann Broch, Arnold Schoenberg, Elias Canetti, and numerous others in Austria; August Strindberg, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Italo Svevo elsewhere—these are only a handful of the artists profoundly influenced by Otto Weininger, who nonetheless is still often dismissed as a self-hating Jewish anti-Semite, a venomous misogynist, and a generally unbalanced fanatic. Weininger's suicide at an early age contributed further to the image of a disturbed crackpot trading in dubious, half-baked philosophical and psychological concepts of his own eccentric devising. In his lucid and helpful new study, Allan Janik confronts these distortions head-on, pointing out that mangled editions and clumsy translations have long fostered misunderstanding of the actual work, much of which was dismissed without even being read anyway, since "scholars" had already made their minds up that Weininger need not, indeed could not, be taken seriously. As Janik notes, goodwill is often lacking, especially to reconstruct the then-current state of the disciplines on which Weininger drew. It takes time and effort to clear away impeding misconceptions, and indeed, "We have to work hard to re-contextualize Weininger" (xiv), who is victimized by the prevalent error of being judged according to today's knowledge and insights, not within the framework of his own time. Janik succeeds so well here, especially in linking Weininger to his culture [End Page 95] at large, that his study is likely to remain definitive. Although in a different context, Martin Mosebach offers the helpful reminder that Vienna around 1900 was a hotbed of great and near-great minds devising new systems of order, new modes of understanding, new means of expression, new ways of seeing and hearing. Janik shows that Weininger was a full participant in these many-sided explorations and not the lone wolf or outlier he is made out to be. (Again, how could so many creative and analytical minds have been so fascinated by Weininger unless he were embodying currents and streams of thought in many disciplines?) For instance, Janik demonstrates Weininger's full familiarity with psychoanalytic thought, knowledgeably participating in the prevailing discourse, aware that the future of the discipline lay with Freud (15–16). Weininger occupied a position at the center of philosophical thought, too, as a member of the Philosophical Society, regularly meeting with Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, Sigmund Exner, and Friedrich Jodl, among others (11–14), and his presentations at the Viennese Sociological Society, even though he was still an adolescent, were greeted with esteem by specialists (12). Only in retrospect does the negative view of Weininger seem to have arisen; in his own day, and for a good many years after his death, he was regarded as a first-rate, formidable intellectual. Another area of unfair disparagement is the glibly cited snap judgment that Weininger was a Jew filled with Jewish self-hatred and therefore not to be taken seriously on the basis of purported psychological imbalance. Janik skillfully challenges this irresponsible distortion in his excellent chapter on "Judaism and Anti-Semitism" (93–109), demonstrating that Weininger's views were shaped by Kant's moral thought, not by personal dimensions; he counters false assessments by citing Weininger's own understanding of Judaism (94–96) and even more by offering a nuanced discussion of the topic as treated in Sex and Character based on Peter Pulzer's The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (99–104). The four varieties of anti-Semitism Pulzer outlines are powerful and apt guides for understanding the subtlety and depth of Weininger's arguments. Three chapters devoted to Sex and Character again present Weininger's thought against the backdrop of his culture and show how comprehensively that major work amalgamated and organized many areas of contemporary thought. The first of those chapters (38–56) is uniquely excellent in its discussion of "Early Sexology and the Theory of Plasms." No other treatment [End Page 96] of the matter is this lucid; Janik has...