Hitler
Page 4
In addition, the surging nationalism of the various peoples of the empire was no longer countered by the traditional calmness of a self-assured German leadership. Rather, the epidemic spread of nationalism had seized the ruling class of Germans with special intensity from the time that Austria was excluded from German politics in 1866. The Battle of König-grätz had turned Austria’s face away from Germany toward the Balkans and forced the Germans into the role of a minority within their “own” state. They felt themselves being swamped by alien races and began to grumble at the monarchy for ignoring that danger. They themselves compensated by a more and more immoderate glorification of their own breed. “German” became a word with a virtually moralistic cast, carrying strong missionary overtones. It developed into a concept imperiously and pretentiously opposed to everything foreign.
The anxiety underlying such reactions can be fully understood only against the broader background of a general crisis. In the course of a creeping revolution “old, cosmopolitan, feudal and peasant Europe”—which had anachronistically survived in the territory of the Dual Monarchy—was going down to destruction. No class was spared the shocks and conflicts connected with its death. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois in particular felt threatened on all sides by progress, by the abnormal growth of the cities, by technology, mass production, and economic concentration. The future, which for so long had been imagined in hopeful terms, in the form of pleasant private or societal utopias, became associated for greater and greater numbers of people with uneasiness and dread. In Vienna alone, in the thirty years after the abolition of guild regulations in 1859, some 40,000 artisans’ shops went bankrupt.
Such troubles naturally gave rise to many contrary movements that reflected the increasing craving for an escape from reality. These were chiefly defensive ideologies with nationalistic and racist overtones, offered by their advocates as panaceas for a threatened world. Such doctrines gave concrete form to vague anxieties, expressing these in familiar, hence manageable, images. One of the most extreme of these complexes was anti-Semitism, which drew together a variety of rival parties and leagues, from the Pan-Germans under the leadership of Georg Ritter von Schönerer to the Christian Socialists under Karl Lueger. There had been an outbreak of anti-Jewish feeling at the time of the depression at the beginning of the 1870’s. This emerged afresh when the stream of immigrants from Galicia, Hungary, and Bukovina increased. In the temperate atmosphere of the Hapsburg metropolis, Jews had made considerable progress toward emancipation. But for that very reason the Jews in the East flocked in greater numbers to the more liberal zones of the West. In the interval from 1857 to 1910 their proportion of the population of Vienna rose from 2 per cent to more than 8.5 per cent, higher than in any other city of Central Europe. There were some districts of Vienna where Jews formed about a third of the population. The new immigrants retained both their customs and their style of dress. In long black caftans, tall hats on their heads, their odd and alien-seeming presence strikingly affected the street scene in the capital.
Historical circumstances had confined the Jews to specific roles and specific economic activities. These same circumstances had also bred in them a freedom from bias, an uncommon flexibility and mobility. Representatives of the old bourgeois Europe were still caught up in their traditions, their sentiments and their despairs, and hence were far more apprehensive about the future. The type of personality the Jews had developed corresponded better to the urban, rationalistic style of the age. That, as much as the fact that they had thronged into the academic professions in disproportionate numbers, exerted a dominant influence upon the press, and controlled virtually all the major banks in Vienna and a considerable portion of local industry13—produced in the Germans a sense of danger and of being overwhelmed. Generalized anxiety condensed into the charge that the Jews were rootless, seditious, revolutionary, that nothing was sacred to them, that their “cold” intellectuality was opposed to German “inwardness” and German sentiment. In support of this idea anti-Semites could point to the many Jewish intellectuals prominent in the working-class movement. It is characteristic of a minority outcast for generations that it will incline toward rebellion and dreaming of utopias. Thus Jewish intellectuals had indeed flung themselves into the socialist movement and become its leaders. Thus there arose that fateful picture of a grand conspiracy with parts carefully assigned, some to work within capitalism, some within the coming revolution. The small tradesman confusedly feared that both his business and his bourgeois status were being menaced by the Jews in a kind of two-pronged attack. And his racial uniqueness was under assault as well. In the 1890’s one Hermann Ahlwardt wrote a book with the significant title, Der Verzweiflungskampf der arischen Völker mit dem Judentum (“The Desperate Struggle of the Aryan Peoples with Jewry”). Ahlwardt drew the materials for its “documentation” from events and conditions in Germany. Yet, in the Berlin of the nineties, despite all the fashionable currents of anti-Semitism, this book sounded like the crotchet of a pathological crank. In Vienna, however, it caught the imagination of wide strata of the population.
In this city of Vienna, against this background, Adolf Hitler spent his next six years. He had come to Vienna full of high hopes, craving rich impressions and intending to continue his pampered life style in a more brilliant, more urban setting, thanks to his mother’s financial support. Nor did he have any doubts of his artistic vocation. He was, as he himself wrote, full of “confident self-assurance.”14 In October, 1907, he applied for the drawing examination at the Academy. The classification list contains the entry: “The following gentlemen submitted unsatisfactory drawings or were not admitted to the examination:… Adolf Hitler, Braunau a. Inn, April 20, 1889, German, Catholic, Father civil servant, upper rank, four grades of Realschule. Few heads. Sample drawing unsatisfactory.”
It was a cruel shock. In his consternation, Hitler called on the director of the Academy, who suggested that the young man study architecture, at the same time repeating that the drawings “incontrovertibly showed my unfitness for painting.” Hitler later described this experience as an “abrupt blow,” a “glaring flash of lightning.”15 Now he was being punished for having quit secondary school, for he would have needed to have passed the final examination in order to enroll in a school of architecture. But his aversion for school and for all regular study was so great that it did not even occur to him to try to make up for this omission by working toward the examination. Even as a grown man he called this requirement of completing his preliminary education “incredibly difficult” and remarked tersely: “By all reasonable judgment, then, fulfillment of my dream of being an artist was no longer possible.”16
It is probable that after such a failure he shied away from the humiliation of going home to Linz, and above all of returning to his former school, the scene of his previous defeat. In perplexity, he stayed in Vienna for the present and evidently did not write a word home about his not being accepted. Even when his mother fell severely ill and lay dying, he did not venture to return. He did not go back to Linz until after his mother’s death on December 21, 1907. The family doctor who had treated his mother in her last illness declared that he had “never seen a young man so crushed by anguish and filled with grief.” According to his own testimony, he wept. For not only were his own hopes shattered, but he had now to face alone, without help, the shock of disenchantment. The experience intensified his already pronounced tendency to keep to himself and to indulge in self-pity. With the death of his mother whatever affection he had ever had for any human being came to an end—except one later emotional tie, again linked to a close relative.
Possibly his mother’s death reinforced his intention to return to Vienna. The eighteen-year-old boy’s decision to go back to the city that had rejected him, to try again to find his way and his opportunities there, testifies equally to his determination and to his desire to escape into anonymity from the inquiring looks and admonitions of his relatives in Linz. Moreover, in order to qualif
y for his orphan’s pension he had to give the impression that he was engaged on a formal course of studies. Consequently, as soon as the formalities and legal questions were settled, he called on his guardian, Mayor Mayrhofer, and declared—“almost defiantly,” as the mayor afterward reported—“Sir, I am going to Vienna.” A few days later, in the middle of February, 1908, he left Linz for good.
A letter of recommendation gave him new hope. Magdalena Hanisch, the owner of the house in which his mother had lived until her death, had connections with Alfred Roller, one of the best-known stage designers of the period, who worked at the Hofoper and also taught at the Vienna Academy of Arts and Crafts. In a letter dated February 4, 1908, she asked her mother, who was living in Vienna, to arrange for Hitler to meet Roller. “He is an earnest, aspiring young man,” she wrote, “nineteen years old, more mature and sedate than his years warrant, pleasant and steady, from a very honorable family…. He has the firm intention of learning something substantial. As far as I know him now, he will not ‘loaf,’ since he has in mind a serious goal. I trust you will not be interceding for someone unworthy. And you may well be doing a good deed.”
Only a few days later the answer came that Roller was prepared to receive Hitler, and the Linz landlady thanked her mother in a second letter: “You would be rewarded for your pains if you could have seen the young man’s happy face when I had him summoned here…. I gave him your card and let him read Director Roller’s letter! Slowly, word for word, as though he wanted to learn the letter by heart, as if in reverence, with a happy smile on his face, he read the letter quietly to himself. Then, with fervent gratitude, he laid it down in front of me. He asked me whether he might write you to express his thanks.”
Hitler’s own letter, dated two days later, has also been preserved. It is composed in labored imitation of the elaborate style of Imperial Austrian bureaucrats:
Herewith, esteemed and gracious lady, I wish to express my sincerest gratitude for your efforts in obtaining access for me to the great master of stage decoration, Prof. Roller. It was no doubt somewhat overbold of me, Madam, to make such excessive demands upon your kindness, since you after all had to act in behalf of a perfect stranger. All the more, therefore, must I ask you to accept my sincerest thanks for your undertakings, which were accompanied by such success, as well as for the card which you so kindly placed at my disposal. I shall at once make use of this fortunate opportunity. Once again my deepest gratitude. I respectfully kiss your hand.
Sincerely yours,
Adolf Hitler.17
The recommendation seemed to open the way for him to enter his dream world: the free life of an artist; music and painting combined in the grand pseudo-world of opera. But there is no indication of how the meeting with Roller came out. The sources are silent. Hitler himself never said a word about it. It seems most likely that the famous man advised him to work, to learn, and in the autumn to apply once more for admission to the Academy.
Hitler afterward called the following five years the worst of his life. In some respects they were also the most important. For the crisis of those years formed his character and provided him with those formulas for mastering fate to which he clung forever after. They became, in fact, so calcified within his mind that they account for the impression his life gives, despite his mania for mobility, of utmost rigidity.
Among the persisting elements of the legend that Hitler himself constructed over the carefully obscured trail of his life is the allegation that “necessity and harsh reality” formed the great and unforgettable experience of those years in Vienna: “For me the name of this Phaeacian city represents five years of hardship and misery. Five years in which I was forced to earn a living, first as a day laborer, then as a small painter; a truly meager living which never sufficed to appease even my daily hunger. Hunger was then my faithful bodyguard; he never left me for a moment….”18 However, careful calculation of his income has since shown that during the first period of his stay in Vienna, thanks to his share in his father’s inheritance, his mother’s legacy, the orphan pension, and without counting any earnings of his own, he had at his disposal between eighty and one hundred crowns a month.19 This was the monthly earnings of a junior magistrate at that time.
In the latter half of February August Kubizek came to Vienna, on Hitler’s urging, to study at the Conservatory of Music. Thereafter the two friends lived together in the rear wing of Stumpergasse 29, occupying a “dreary and wretched” room let to them by an old Polish woman named Maria Zakreys. But while Kubizek pursued his studies, Hitler continued the aimless idler’s life he had already become accustomed to. He was master of his own time, as he cockily stressed. Usually it was almost noon before he got up, sauntered in the streets or in the park at Schönbrunn, visited the museums, and at night went to the opera. There, during those years alone, he blissfully heard Tristan und Isolde thirty to forty times, as he afterward averred. Then again he would bury himself in public libraries, where, with the indiscriminateness of the self-educated, he read whatever his mood and the whim of the moment suggested. Or else he would stand in front of the pompous buildings on Ringstrasse and dream of even more monumental structures he himself would erect some day.
He gave himself up to such fantasies with almost maniacal passion. Until the small hours of the morning he would sit over projects to which he brought equal measures of practical incompetence, intolerance, and priggish conceit. “He could not let anything alone,” we are told. Because bricks, he decided, were “an unsolid material for monumental buildings,” he planned to tear down and rebuild the Hofburg. He sketched theaters, castles, exhibition halls; he developed a scheme for a nonalcoholic drink; he looked for substitutes for smoking or drew up plans for the reform of schools. He composed theses attacking landlords and officials, outlines for a “German ideal state,” all of which expressed his grievances, his resentments, and his pedantic visions. Although he had learned nothing and achieved nothing, he rejected all advice and hated instruction. Knowing nothing of composition, he took up an idea Richard Wagner had dropped, and began writing an opera about Wieland the Smith, full of bloody and incestuous nonsense. Despite his uncertain spelling he tried his hand as a dramatist, using themes from Germanic sagas. Occasionally, too, he painted; but the small water colors filled with finicky detail betrayed nothing of the forces raging in him. Incessantly, he talked, planned, raved, possessed by the urge to justify himself, to prove that he had genius. He concealed from his roommate his failure to pass the entrance examination at the Academy. When Kubizek occasionally asked him what he was doing so intensively day after day, he replied, “I am working on a solution to the wretched housing conditions in Vienna and carrying on certain studies to that end.”20
In this behavior, despite all the elements of bizarre overstrain and sheer fantasizing—in fact, partly because of those elements—the later Hitler is already recognizable. He himself later remarked upon the connection between his seemingly confused reformist zeal and his subsequent rise. Similarly, the peculiar combination of lethargy and tension, of phlegmatic calm and wild activity, points to the future pattern. With some uneasiness Kubizek noted the abrupt fits of fury and despair, the variety and intensity of Hitler’s aggressions, and his seemingly unlimited capacity for hate. In Vienna his friend had been “completely out of balance,” he remarked unhappily. States of exaltation alternated frequently with moods of deep depression in which he saw “nothing but injustice, hatred, hostility” and “solitary and alone [railed] against the whole of humanity, which did not understand him, would not accept him, which he felt persecuted and cheated him” and had everywhere set “snares” for him for the sole purpose of preventing his rise.
In September, 1908, Hitler once more made an attempt to enter the painting class at the Academy. The candidates’ list noted that this time he was “not admitted to the test”; the paintings he had submitted did not meet the preliminary requirements for the examination.
This new rejection, even more d
efinite and offensive in its tone, seems to have been one of those “awakening” experiences that determined Hitler’s future. How deeply wounded he was is indicated by his lifelong hatred for schools and academies. He was fond of pointing out that they had misjudged “Bismarck and Wagner also” and rejected Anselm Feuerbach. They were attended only by “pipsqueaks” and aimed at “killing every genius.” At his headquarters thirty-five years later, leader and warlord of the German people, he would launch into furious tirades against his wretched village teachers with their “dirty” appearance, their “filthy collars, unkempt beards and so on.”21 Humiliated and evidently keenly embarrassed, he withdrew from all human contact. Soon his married half-sister, Angela, who lived in Vienna, heard no more from him. His guardian, too, received only a last curt postcard, and at the same time his friendship with Kubizek broke up. At any rate, he utilized Kubizek’s temporary absence from Vienna to move abruptly out of their shared apartment, without leaving so much as a word of explanation. He disappeared into the darkness of flophouses and homes for men. Thirty years passed before Kubizek saw him again.
First, he rented an apartment in the Fifteenth District, Felberstrasse 22, Entrance 16. It was here that he was introduced to the ideas and notions that decisively influenced his future course. He had long explained his failures in terms of his singular character, of precocious genius uncomprehended by the world. By now he needed more specific explanations and more tangible adversaries.