Hitler’s Favorite Jew: The Enigma of Otto Weininger

 

Source : Hitler’s Favorite Jew: The Enigma of Otto Weininger by Allan Janik.

In his Eastern front military headquarters called the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler asserted this on the night of December 1, 1941: “Dietrich Eckart once told me that he was acquainted with only a single decent Jew, Otto Weininger, who took his own life when he recognized that the Jew lives from the deterioration of other nationalities.”

Otto Weininger (April 3, 1880 – October 4, 1903) was an Austrian philosopher. In 1903, he published the book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) which gained popularity after his suicide at the age of 23. Today, the book is generally viewed as misogynistic and antisemitic in academic circles; however, it continues to be held up as a great work of lasting genius and spiritual wisdom by others.

In his book Sex and Character, Weininger argues that all people are composed of a mixture of the male and the female substance, and attempts to support his view scientifically. The male aspect is active, productive, conscious and moral/logical, while the female aspect is passive, unproductive, unconscious and amoral/alogical. Weininger argues that emancipation should be reserved for the "masculine woman", e.g. some lesbians, and that the female life is consumed with the sexual function: both with the act, as a prostitute, and the product, as a mother. Woman is a "matchmaker". By contrast, the duty of the male, or the masculine aspect of personality, is to strive to become a genius, and to forego sexuality for an abstract love of the absolute, God, which he finds within himself.

In a separate chapter, Weininger, himself a Jew who had converted to Christianity in 1902, analyzes the archetypical Jew as feminine, and thus profoundly irreligious, without true individuality (soul), and without a sense of good and evil. Christianity is described as "the highest expression of the highest faith", while Judaism is called "the extreme of cowardliness". Weininger decries the decay of modern times, and attributes much of it to feminine, and thus Jewish, influences. By Weininger's reckoning everyone shows some femininity, and what he calls "Jewishness".

In 1903, three months before Weininger’s suicide, Swedish playwright August Strindberg wrote Weininger, “in the end—to see the Problem of Woman’s Nature solved is a release for me—please accept my admiration and my gratitude.” Weininger’s impact on our culture is, for better or worse, undeniable and enormous. 

For many of Weininger’s readers, Hitler’s remark serves to classify Weininger once and for all. He was an insightful, self-hating Jew who was consistent enough to execute the logical implications of his insight. He was driven to madness and, ultimately, self-destruction by realizing fully what his ideas implied. His suicide was rooted in a perverse integrity. This widely spread interpretation assumes that there is a direct link between what he alleged in his book and his suicide; a presumption that Weininger’s friends and foes alike have maintained. This essay will show that there is no substance to the charge because Weininger’s claims in Sex and Character fully contradict the thesis that we find vulgar anti-Semitism there. Returning to Hitler, in making this allegation, he claimed to have heard about Weininger from his Munich “mentor” Dietrich Eckart, who is seldom the subject of investigation in discussions of Weininger. We shall have to correct that.

 The 20th century’s most influential philosopher, its greatest writer, and one of the three fathers of modern drama (along with Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekov), arguably its most brilliant misogynist. 

About Woman

Woman is thoroughly sexual.

Woman’s physiology determines that she is incapable of rational thinking. That implies that she is neither artistically creative nor moral in her nature.

Woman is completely nihilistic.

All Women are either mothers or prostitutes, fully egocentric or entirely without a self.

Only Women are happy.

Women, like children, idiots and criminals, should not be allowed to participate in public life.

Love and understanding are incompatible.

"The practice of merely calling any one who assails woman a misogynist, instead of refuting argument by argument, has much to commend it. Hatred is never impartial, and, therefore, to describe a man as having an animus against the object of his criticism, is at once to lay him open to the charge of insincerity, immorality, and partiality, and one that can be made with a hyperbole of accusation and evasion of the point, which only equal its lack of justification. This sort of answer never fails in its object, which is to exempt the vindicator from refuting the actual statements. It is the oldest and handiest weapon of the large majority of men, who never wish to see woman as she is .

No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.

 

A New Man 

Anderson describes Weininger’s “New Man” as containing the classic Germanic virtues seen in Wagner’s operas. In exchange for this ethical mastery, the New Man would “be rewarded with inner harmony… the erotics of art [replacing] the function of sexual coitus.” As the population dwindles because sex is had by only the lowest of the remaining men, “art is the replacement for children, who, in [Weininger’s] thinking, aren’t ‘real’ children, just bad copies of the bad woman who carried them.” Though his body will die, the New Man concerns himself only with the immortal neo-Platonic forms of beauty and order and thereby finds peace. Weininger’s ideal masculinity is indeed stranger than anything he might have seen in Wagner, Kant, or mainstream society, but its appeal was that it was fresher and more apparently solid (if doomed) than any other broken ideology available at the time.

About Jews 

In his discussion of Judaism, Weininger saw the characteristics of the Jew as even worse than those of Woman. The Jew is a force which exists within people, not just in individual Jews (it is found also in non-Jews). The disadvantage of the Jew compared to Woman is that the latter at least believes in the Male while the Jew believes in nothing. Hence the Jew gravitates towards Communism, anarchism, materialism, empiricism, and atheism. Zionism, Weininger claimed, could only come about after the rejection of Judaism, since Jews could not grasp the idea of a state. The Jewish religion he saw as belief in nothing, in contrast to the positive faith he found in Christianity. Weininger's views combined elements of romanticism, Wagnerianism, Nietzscheanism, modern psychology, and biology, with many original insights. His opinions and arguments were taken over by Nazi thinkers as justification for their views. After the war the attitude towards Weininger's work and figure shifted from an ideological use of his ideas towards a search for an understanding of his thoughts and behavior within the framework of the humanities and social sciences. In 1982 the Israeli playwright Y. Sobol wrote for the stage Nefesh Yehudi: ha-Layla ha-Aḥaron shel Otto Weininger (Weiningers Nacht, 1986, 19882).

 

Sex and Character >>>

"[Sex and Character] is essentially incomprehensible without some appreciation of the contexts as different as Viennese traditions of cultural criticism, fin-de-siècle feminism, Ernst Mach’s theories of the self, neo-Kantian philosophy, and the racial ideas of Richard Wagner. He’s a photographic negative of his time, revealing its hidden, hateful structure."

 

"The man came as a meteor and disappeared as suddenly. It was only when he had passed that his ideas started to sparkle, electrifying the world. Some regarded him as a biologist, others as a psychologist, still others called him a mystic. Though generally considered a realist, he was at the same time strongly suspected of dealing in fantasies. He was praised for his invincible logic and attacked for his crusade against women. He was full of contradictions. His name became the signal for dispute and controversy in a thousand cities."

"Weininger's nature forced his mind on long expeditions into psychology, biology, literature, and philosophy, journeys from which he never returned. Dissatisfied with scientific research, discontent with his own restless nature, he went farther and farther along the paths of speculative thought until he was, at the end, quite alone."

"It would be hard to find another man who showed even in mild form the characteristics and the mental processes that Otto Weininger revealed in the extreme."- Abrahamsen

Otto Weininger- On the Internet ->>>


Otto Weininger - Wikipedia

Otto Weininger"The only honest Jew"

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The Tragic Flash of
Otto Weininger

The Ontological Dualism of Otto Weininger: A Comprehensive Analysis of Sex, Character, and the Crisis of the Modern Subject

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The intellectual history of Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century is often characterized as a period of profound transition, marked by what contemporary scholars describe as the "crisis of the subject". Within the pressurized environment of fin-de-siècle Vienna, few figures embody the radical contradictions, existential anxieties, and ideological ferment of this era more starkly than Otto Weininger. A Jewish intellectual who converted to Protestantism on the day he received his doctorate, Weininger produced a single, monumental work, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), before ending his life at the age of twenty-three. This work, a complex synthesis of biology, psychology, and metaphysical philosophy, sought to provide a "scientific" and "principled" foundation for a theory of human nature based on a rigid dualism of masculine and feminine principles. Despite its virulent misogyny and antisemitism—traits that later made it a sourcebook for Nazi propagandists—the book achieved a legendary status among some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce. To understand Weininger is to examine the "photographic negative" of modernism: a thinker who revealed the hidden, hateful structures of his time by attempting to "fence off" the disintegration of the autonomous individual through a system of absolute categories.   

The Crucible of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna and the Jewish Identity Crisis

The cultural landscape of Vienna between 1890 and 1914 was defined by a unique tension between a flourishing artistic and scientific modernism and a burgeoning, exclusionary political climate. This period witnessed a massive demographic shift; by the end of the nineteenth century, Vienna’s Jewish population had expanded to approximately 150,000, representing nearly nine percent of the city’s inhabitants. However, only twenty percent of these individuals were born in Vienna, as the majority had migrated from the outlying provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This rapid urbanization and assimilation created a class of Jewish intellectuals who often found their identity to be a source of profound psychological conflict, a phenomenon frequently analyzed through the lens of "Jewish self-hatred".   

The political environment was increasingly hostile, dominated by the rise of the Christian Social movement under Karl Lueger, whose ascent to power in 1897 signaled the end of traditional bourgeois liberalism and the beginning of a mass-based politics of exclusion. In this context, conversion to Christianity became a frequent, if controversial, strategy for cultural assimilation among the Jewish elite. Figures such as Victor Adler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Otto Weininger himself were part of the roughly twenty-five percent of Jews who left Judaism for Protestantism or Catholicism. For Weininger, this conversion was not merely a social maneuver but a symbolic gesture of total transformation, coinciding with the completion of his academic studies.   

Contextual Factor of fin-de-siècle Vienna	Intellectual and Social Impact
Demographic Explosion (Jewish Population)	150,000 Jews by 1900; 24-fold increase since 1860.
Rise of Antisemitic Politics (Lueger)	Transformation of political life into a struggle of ethnic and religious exclusion.
Intellectual Pluralism	Convergence of psychoanalysis (Freud), logical positivism (Mach), and a-tonal music (Schoenberg).
Crisis of the Subject	A perception that the Enlightenment ideal of the rational individual was disintegrating.
Cult of the Genius	Fixation on the "redeemer" figure as a solution to social and cultural decline.

  

Biographical Foundation and Intellectual Trajectory

Otto Weininger was born on April 3, 1880, into the family of an affluent goldsmith, Leopold Weininger, and his wife Adelheid. From an early age, he demonstrated a brilliant aptitude for linguistics and the humanities. By the age of sixteen, he attempted to publish an etymological essay on rare Greek adjectives found in the works of Homer. By the time he was eighteen, Weininger was fluent in German, Spanish, and Norwegian, and possessed strong competencies in French, English, and Italian. His registration at the University of Vienna in 1898 marked the beginning of an intense engagement with philosophy, psychology, and the natural sciences.   

Weininger’s early intellectual development was influenced by the "critical positivism" of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach, a school of thought that viewed the "self" as a useful fiction rather than a stable entity. However, as his work on Sex and Character (initially titled Eros and the Psyche) progressed, Weininger underwent a profound philosophical shift. He began to reject Mach’s skepticism, asserting instead that the self was an absolute, ontological reality that did not need to be "salvaged" because it was the core of all being. This turn toward German idealism and Kantian ethics would define his mature system, where the autonomous subject—connoted as male—was positioned against the disintegrative forces of nature and modernity.   

The System of Sex and Character: Universal Bisexuality and Characterology

Published in 1903, Geschlecht und Charakter was presented as an "investigation of principles" that aimed to reduce the spiritual and psychological differences between the sexes to a singular, systematic principle. The book’s fundamental premise is the theory of universal bisexuality, which Weininger attempted to ground in embryological and biological evidence. He argued that all living organisms are composed of varying proportions of "male" (M) and "female" (W) substances or "plasms". In this system, no individual is purely male or purely female; rather, every human being is a mixture of these two ideal types, which Weininger treated as Platonic Ideas or "Forms" rather than mere biological categories.   

The "Law of Sexual Attraction," as formulated by Weininger, states that individuals are attracted to partners who complement their own proportions of masculinity and femininity to form an "ideal" whole. He used this pseudo-mathematical jargon to explain why certain unions succeeded or failed, even extending this logic to criticize Jewish marriages of the time as common "marriages for other reasons than love," which he linked to the "degeneration of modern Jews".   

The Ontological Mapping of Masculinity and Femininity

Weininger’s system ascribes specific, immutable traits to the masculine and feminine principles, creating a rigid hierarchy of being. The "Ideal Male" (M) is characterized by activity, productivity, consciousness, logic, and morality. He is the possessor of an "intelligible ego" or soul and has a direct relation to the "thing-in-itself," the absolute, or God. Conversely, the "Ideal Female" (W) is characterized as passive, unproductive, unconscious, and amoral. Weininger asserts that woman has no relation to the absolute, no share in ontological reality, and is, in the deepest philosophical sense, "nothing".   

Trait Category	Masculine Principle (M)	Feminine Principle (W)
Cognitive Mode	Clear Judgment, Logic, Reasoning	Henids (Unclarified Feelings)
Moral Status	Moral, Ethical, Possesses a Soul	Amoral, Alogical, "Mindless"
Relation to Being	Something (Ontological Substance)	Nothing (Ontological Void)
Social Roles	Seeker, Fighter, Creative Genius	Prostitute, Mother, Matchmaker
Goal of Existence	Transcendence of Sexuality	Consumption by Sexual Function

  

The Concept of the Henid

A pivotal psychological concept introduced by Weininger is the "henid," a term derived from the Greek word for "single thing". A henid represents a piece of psychical data—a vague, half-formed thought or feeling—that has not yet been "clarified" into a distinct idea. Weininger posits that the feminine mind operates almost entirely through henids, lacking the capacity for the clear, logical distinction required for true judgment. According to this view, the male’s duty is the "clarification" of these henids, a process that moves from the unconscious "mist" of feeling to the "limpid clearness" of conscious thought. The degree to which an individual can clarify their own consciousness is the measure of their proximity to the ideal of the "genius".   

The Construct of Judaism and the Antisemitism of the Modern

In the final quarter of Sex and Character, particularly in Chapter XIII, Weininger extends his gendered dualism to racial and religious categories, mapping Christianity onto the masculine principle and Judaism onto the feminine. He argues that the "Jew" is the ultimate "blurrer of boundaries" (Grenzverwischer) who, like the "woman," lives only in the collective and lacks a true individual soul. This antisemitism was not primarily biological in the traditional völkisch sense but was a "metaphysical" critique of the "Jewish spirit".   

Weininger associates Judaism with the "mechanistic and materialistic worldview" of modern science and the "disintegrative dynamic of modernity" that threatens to undermine independent individuality. He characterizes the "Jew" as a skeptic and a nonbeliever who takes refuge in material things and recognizes no value except money. In a remarkable moment of self-reflection, Weininger acknowledges that "we hate in others only what we never want to be, but always are in part," admitting that his virulent antisemitism was an outward projection of his own unwanted Jewish heritage.   

Aspect of Judaism	Weininger's "Metaphysical" Characterization
Relation to Truth	Skeptical, Critical, Nonbelieving.
Relation to Nature	Adaptable to any environment, lacking a fixed soul.
Economic/Social	Associated with both Capitalism and Communism.
Ontological Status	"Feminine" in its lack of transcendent principles.
The "New Man" Path	Conversion as a way to "redeem" the Jewish mind-set.

  

The Ethics of Genius and the Cult of Personality

Weininger’s work is deeply preoccupied with the nature of "genius," which he defines as "intensified, perfectly developed, universally conscious maleness". He rejects the idea that a person can have a genius for a specific field, such as music or mathematics; instead, he posits the existence of a "universal genius" in whom everything exists and makes sense. This genius is the ultimate moral agent, a figure who reflects the macrocosm within his own microcosm and whose consciousness is of the highest order.   

For Weininger, genius is not an accidental gift but a "noble duty" that requires the total suppression of sexuality in favor of an abstract love of the absolute. He argues that the possession of genius is identical to profundity, and that a "female genius" is an ontological contradiction, as femininity is inherently "unproductive" and "amoral". This "cult of the genius" was part of a broader sociocultural response in Germany and Austria to the perceived "danger" of social decline, democratization, and the erosion of traditional gender categories.   

The Plagiarism Controversies: Freud, Fliess, and Möbius

The publication of Sex and Character was followed by intense controversy regarding the priority and originality of Weininger’s ideas. Paul Julius Möbius, a professor at Leipzig and author of On the Physiological Deficiency of Women, accused Weininger of plagiarizing his work. However, a more significant dispute emerged involving Wilhelm Fliess, Sigmund Freud, and Hermann Swoboda.   

Fliess, a Berlin physician and former confidant of Freud, had developed theories on universal bisexuality and "periodicity" that he believed Weininger had stolen. Fliess alleged that Freud had discussed these theories with his patient Hermann Swoboda, who then relayed them to Weininger during their close friendship. While modern assessments suggest that Weininger was indeed stimulated by Freud’s indirect communication of Fliess’s ideas, there is no evidence that he plagiarized the specific biological calculations of Fliess’s theory. Fliess, nonetheless, published a pamphlet titled In Eigener Sache to defend his priority, and the controversy contributed to the total rupture between Freud and Fliess.   

The Final Act: Suicide at Schwarzspanierstraße 15

In the autumn of 1903, distressed by the lukewarm initial reception of his book and the accusations of plagiarism, Weininger’s mental state deteriorated. He began to suffer from what modern scholars suspect was manic-depression or an extreme form of ethical anxiety. On October 3, 1903, he rented a room in the house in Vienna where Ludwig van Beethoven had died—Schwarzspanierstraße 15. The following morning, he was found lying on the floor with a gunshot wound to the chest and died in the hospital at the age of twenty-three.   

The location of his suicide was a final, symbolic act; Weininger sought to "search for the death realm" of one of the few men he considered a true universal genius. His death transformed him overnight from an obscure doctor of philosophy into a national celebrity and a cult figure for the Viennese intelligentsia. His father’s epitaph characterized him as a "young man whose mind never really found peace on earth," a sentiment that resonated deeply with a generation of intellectuals grappling with their own sense of fragmentation.   

Intellectual Legacy and the Wittgenstein Connection

The influence of Otto Weininger on the twentieth century is as vast as it is paradoxical. Despite the repellent nature of his views on women and Jews, his "theory of everything" was taken seriously by thinkers such as Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Elias Canetti. Karl Kraus, the editor of Die Fackel, was an enthusiastic supporter, as was the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, who praised Weininger’s "thoroughly male pessimism".   

The most significant philosophical connection remains with Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein included Weininger on a list of ten authors who had influenced him and frequently recommended Sex and Character to friends and students as a work of genius. He famously described the book as "great and fantastic," noting that "if you add a '~' [negation sign] to the whole book, it says an important truth". Wittgenstein’s engagement with Weininger centered on themes of character, logic as a duty to oneself, and the concept of "physiognomy"—the idea that inner qualities are directly visible in outer forms.   

Influenced Thinker	Nature of Weiningerian Influence
Ludwig Wittgenstein	Concepts of "clarification," logic as ethics, and the unalterability of character.
August Strindberg	Found confirmation for his own misogynistic theories and philosophical pessimism.
Karl Kraus	Admiration for the "elemental corrosiveness" and ethical rigor of Weininger’s system.
James Joyce	Use of the "Woman/Jew" archetype in Ulysses, influenced by On Last Things.
Franz Kafka	Engagement with themes of self-loathing and the crisis of Jewish identity.

  

Post-War Obscurity and Contemporary Re-evaluation

Following the Second World War, Weininger’s work fell into relative obscurity, largely due to its popularity among Nazi ideologues who used it to justify racial and gender hierarchies. However, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in Weininger as an exemplary text of modernism. Modern scholarly critiques, such as those by Chandak Sengoopta and Jacques Le Rider, analyze the work as a symptom of the "crisis of the bourgeois subject".   

Recent scholarship, often employing Critical Theory, argues that Weininger was defending the "rational, bounded subject" of the Enlightenment against disintegration. In this reading, "Woman" symbolizes the threat of nature and libidinal drives, while "the Jew" symbolizes the threat of modern mass society and economic intangibility. By projecting these internal contradictions onto external categories, Weininger attempted to salvage a "hypertrophied version" of the autonomous individual.   

Conclusion: Weininger as a Monument of Modern Anxiety

The life and work of Otto Weininger represent a tragic intersection of brilliant linguistic and philosophical talent with a devastatingly exclusionary worldview. Sex and Character remains a "notorious" yet foundational text because it articulates the deepest anxieties of its era with an apodictic style and a sense of apocalyptic urgency. While his conclusions are indefensible in light of modern values, the work continues to serve as a vital document for understanding the intellectual history of modernism, the origins of radical misogyny and antisemitism, and the enduring problem of identity in a world of shifting boundaries. Weininger remains, in the words of contemporary scholarship, a "photographic negative" of his time: a thinker who reveals the structure of a collapsing world by attempting to construct a system that could no longer hold it together.