Hitler's Favorite Jew: The Enigma of Otto Weininger

By Allan Janik

Otto Weininger (1880-1903) is the most controversial figure to emerge from fin de siècle Vienna. The son of a Jewish goldsmith, he studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna and spoke six languages by the time he was 21. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1902, he converted to Christianity and, in 1903, he published his book Sex and Character—a groundbreaking and highly provocative study that would come to influence Adolf Hitler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and James Joyce, among others. As troubled as he was brilliant, Weininger took his own life on October 3, 1903, leaving behind a small number of works, an array of challenging ideas, and many unanswered questions.

In Hitler’s Favorite Jew, Professor Allan Janik draws upon a half-century of research to explore the life and legacy of Otto Weininger, and to illuminate his outsized impact on some of the greatest thinkers and the greatest monster of the twentieth century. Janik explains how Weininger came to write his bizarre book featuring outrageous claims about women and Jews, and argues that, contrary to the received wisdom, Weininger’s true goal was progressive and humanistic.

With its deep insights into both Weininger the man and Viennese intellectual life at the turn of the century, Hitler’s Favorite Jew offers a rich and multifaceted portrait that challenges our ideas about sexuality, the nature of anti-Semitism, and the puzzle of human identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simply Charly
• Release date: Dec 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781943657803

Allan Janik

Prof. Dr. Allan Janik (b. 1941, Chicopee. MA) has degrees from Villanova University and Brandeis University, and taught philosophy at Innsbruck University until 2006, remaining a research fellow of the Brenner Archives there until 2013. Janik is adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. Visiting professorships include those at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology; UNAM, Mexico City; Innsbruck; Northwestern; Stockholm School of Economics; Swedish Center for Working Life; University of Paris; and at Graz and Bergen. His books in English include Assembling Reminders: Studies in the Genesis of Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy; Theater and Knowledge; The Use and Abuse of Metaphor; Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy; and Wittgenstein’s Vienna, also including a guide to the Austrian capital Wittgenstein in Vienna (with Hans Veigl).

Book preview