Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  His spontaneous emotions turned against the bourgeois world that had rejected him, although he felt he belonged to it by inclination and origins. The embitterment he harbored toward it henceforth is among the paradoxes of his existence. That bitterness was both nourished and limited by his fear of social upheaval, by the terrors of proletarianization. In Mein Kampf he describes with surprising frankness the deep-seated “hostility” of the petty bourgeois for the working class, a hostility he too was imbued with. The reason for it, he declares, is the fear “that it will sink back into the old, despised class, or at least become identified with it.”22 He still had some money left from his parental legacy, and he continued to receive his monthly allowance, but the uncertainty of his personal future nevertheless depressed him. He dressed carefully, still went to the opera, the theater, and the coffeehouses of the city; and, as he himself remarks, he continued, by careful speech and restrained bearing, to keep up his sense of bourgeois superiority to the working class. If we are to believe a somewhat dubious source on those years, he always carried with him an envelope of photographs showing his father in parade uniform and would smugly inform people that his late father had “retired as a higher official in his Imperial Majesty’s Customs Service.”23

  In spite of the occasional rebellious gestures, such behavior reveals the young Hitler’s intrinsic craving for approval and for a sense of belonging, which is basic to the bourgeois personality. It is in this light that we must evaluate his remark that from early on he was a “revolutionary” in both artistic and political matters. In fact, the twenty-year-old Hitler never questioned the bourgeois world and its values. Rather, he moved toward it with undisguised respect, dazzled by its brilliance and its wealth. He remained a civil servant’s son from Linz, full of sentimental admiration for the bourgeois world. He craved a share in it. His response to his rejection by the bourgeois world was an intensified longing for acceptance and recognition—and this, perhaps, is one of the more remarkable aspects of a youth unusual in many other respects. Europe, after all, had been ringing with denunciations of bourgeois sham for nearly twenty years, so that he could easily have picked up arguments enough to rationalize his own humiliation, and exonerate himself by passing judgment on the age. Instead, worsted and submissive, he held silently aloof from any of that. The rage for total unmasking had no appeal for him. Indeed, all the artistic excitement and clash of ideas so characteristic of the era were lost on him—as well as its intellectual daring.

  Vienna in those years shortly after the turn of the century was one of the centers of ferment, but Hitler, astonishingly, remained unaware of this. A sensitive young man with many reasons for protest, for whom music had been among the great liberating experiences of his youth, knew nothing about Schonberg. No reverberations of the “greatest uproar… in Vienna’s concert halls in the memory of man,” which Schonberg and his pupils, Anton von Webern and Alban Berg, had unleashed at that very time seemed to have reached his ears. Nor did he pay any attention to Gustav Mahler or Richard Strauss, whose work seemed to a contemporary critic in 1907 the “hurricane center of the musical world.” Instead, the young man from Linz relived in Wagner and Bruckner the raptures of his parents’ generation. Kubizek had reported that names like Rilke, whose Book of Hours had been published in 1905, or Hofmannsthal, had “never reached” either of them. And although Hitler had applied to the Academy of Fine Arts, he took no part in the affairs of the Secessionists and was in no way stirred by the sensations that Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele or Oskar Kokoschka were provoking. Instead, he battened on the works of the midnineteenth century, venerating Anselm Feuerbach, Ferdinand Waldmüller, Karl Rottmann or Rudolf von Alt. And this future architect with his soaring visions stood enthralled before the classicistic façades of the Ringstrasse, unaware of the proximity of the revolutionary leaders of a new architecture: Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffman, and Adolf Loos. In 1911 a heated controversy had flared over the flat unornamented façade of Loos’s commercial building on Michaeler Platz, directly opposite one of the baroque portals of the Hofburg. Moreover, Loos had written an article maintaining that there was an inner link between “ornament and crime”—a scandalous thing to say. But Hitler consistently directed his naïve enthusiasm toward the fulsome style accepted by Viennese salons and respectable society. Here, too, he proved himself reactionary. In everything new he seemed to sense a tendency toward the debasement of sublimity, the emergence of something alien and unknown. And with his bourgeois instincts he shrank back from anything of that sort.

  His first brush with political reality took a similar course. Once again, despite his feelings of alienation, revolutionary ideas had no attraction for him. Instead he once again revealed himself a partisan of the establishment, paradoxically defending a reality that he simultaneously repudiated. Rejected himself, he seemingly canceled the humiliation by taking over the cause of the society that had rejected him. Beneath this psychological mechanism was concealed one of the lines of fracture in Hitler’s character. He himself has related how as a construction worker he would go off to one side during the noon lunch break to drink his bottle of milk and eat his piece of bread. And whatever we may or may not believe in this story, his “extremely” irritated reaction to the attitude of his fellow workers was consonant with a basic element in his personality: “They rejected everything: the nation as an invention of the ‘capitalistic’… classes; the Fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the working class; the authority of the law as a means for the repression of the proletariat; school as an institution for breeding slave material, but also for training the slavedrivers; religion as a means for stupefying the people intended for exploitation; morality as a sign of stupid, sheeplike patience, etc. There was absolutely nothing at all that was not dragged through the mire of horrible depths.”24

  Significantly, the series of ideas that he defended against the construction workers—nation, fatherland, authority of the law, school, religion, and morality—contains virtually the complete catalogue of standards for bourgeois society, against which he himself was at this time conceiving his first resentments. It is precisely this divided relationship that will come to the fore repeatedly on the most diverse planes throughout his life. It will reappear in the political tactics of constantly seeking alliances with the despised bourgeois, and in the ritualistic formality—verging on the ridiculous—that prompted him to greet his secretaries by kissing their hands, or at the afternoon teas in the Führer’s headquarters to serve them personally their cream cake. In all vulgarity he cultivated the airs of a “gentleman of the old school.” His manners were his way of demonstrating that he had achieved a desired social affinity; and if there is anything in the picture of young Hitler that betrays specifically Austrian traits, it must be this special status consciousness with which he defended the privilege of being bourgeois. In a society whose craze for titles tended to assign a social ranking to every activity, he wanted at least to be a Herr, a gentleman. It did not matter that his life was narrow and gloomy as long as he could claim this distinction. This was why he stayed away from the artistic and political oppositions of the period. Much of his outward behavior, his language and his clothing, and his ideological and aesthetic choices as well can be most plausibly explained as the effort to conform to the bourgeois world, which he admired uncritically, even to its presumptions. Social disdain he felt to be far more painful than social wretchedness; and if he despaired, it was not from the flawed order of the world, but from the insufficient part granted to him to play in it. He was therefore very careful to avoid any dispute with society; he wanted only to be reconciled to it. Staggered by the grandeur and glamour of the metropolis, wistfully standing outside locked gates, he was not revolutionary. He was merely lonely. No one seemed less destined to be a rebel than he.

  The Granite Foundation

  D’où vient ce mélange de génie et de stupidité?

  Robespierre

  Near his room on Felberstra
sse there was a tobacco shop that sold periodicals, including one highly popular magazine devoted to racial anthropology. Its title page carried the headlines: “Are you blond? Then you are a creator and preserver of civilization. Are you blond? Then you are threatened by perils. Read the Library for blonds and advocates of Male Rights.”[1] Its editor was a defrocked monk with the arrogated name of Jöorg Lanz von Liebenfels. The magazine, which he had named Ostara after the Germanic goddess of spring, proclaimed a doctrine, as deranged as it was dangerous, of the struggle between heroic men whom he called Asings or Heldings, and dwarfish, apelike creatures called Afflings or Schrattlings. Some wealthy industrialist backers had made it possible for Lanz von Liebenfels to buy the castle of Werfenstein in Lower Austria. From this headquarters he directed the formation of a heroic Aryan league that was to form the advance guard of the blond and blue-eyed master race in the coming bloody confrontation with the inferior mixed races. Under the swastika flag, which he had already raised over his castle in 1907, he promised to counter the socialistic class struggle by race struggle “to the hilt of the castration knife.” Thus early he called for a systematic program of breeding and extermination: “For the extirpation of the animal-man and the propagation of the higher new man.” Along with genetic selection and similar eugenic measures, his platform included sterilization, deportations to the “ape jungle,” and liquidations by forced labor or murder. “Offer sacrifices to Frauja, you sons of the gods!” he wrote. “Up, and sacrifice to him the children of the Schrattlings.” In order to popularize the Aryan idea, he suggested racial beauty contests.

  Hitler had missed some of the older issues of the magazine, and this gave him a pretext for visiting Lanz several times. He left an impression of youth, pallor, and modesty.25

  The importance of this rather ludicrous founder of an order does not consist in anything he suggested to or did for Hitler but in the symptomatic place he occupied: he was one of the most eloquent spokesmen of a neurotic mood of the age and contributed a specific coloration to the brooding ideological atmosphere, so rife with fantasies, of Vienna at that time. To say this both describes and delimits his influence upon Hitler. One might say that Hitler did not so much absorb the man’s ideology as catch the infection that underlay it.

  From this and other influences, such as the newspaper articles and cheap pamphlets that Hitler himself mentioned as early sources of his knowledge, some scholars have concluded that his world view was the product of a perverted subculture opposed to bourgeois culture. And in fact the plebeian hatred for bourgeois mores and bourgeois humanity repeatedly erupts in his ideology. The dilemma, however, consisted in the fact that this culture was in a way permeated by its subculture and had long ago become a blasphemy of everything it was founded on. Or, to put the same thought in a different way, the subculture that Hitler found expressed by Lanz von Liebenfels and others of his ilk in turn-of-the-century Vienna was not the negation of the prevailing system of values but only its rather battered and sordid image. Turn where he might in his craving for ties with the bourgeois world, he came upon the same notions, complexes, and panicky fears that were expressed in the cheap pamphlets, only in a more sublimated and respectable form. He did not have to abandon a single one of the trivial ideas that had helped him to achieve his initial orientation in the world. Everything he had picked up, with reverent astonishment, in the speeches of the most influential politicians of the metropolis, seemed familiar to him. And when he sat in the upper balcony of the Opera House and listened to the works of the most celebrated composer of the era, he encountered only the artistic expression of the familiar vulgarities. Lanz, the Ostara pamphlets, and the trashy tracts merely opened for him the rear entrance into the society he wanted to belong to. But, rear or not, it was an entrance.

  The need to legitimize and consolidate this affinity also underlay his first groping efforts to give some ideological shape to his resentments. With the morbidly intensified egotism of one who felt threatened by social debasement, he more and more took over the prejudices, slogans, anxieties, and demands of upper-class Viennese society. Among the elements were both anti-Semitism and those master-race theories that reflected the apprehensions of the German populace of the empire. Two other ingredients were a horror of socialism and what were called “social-Darwinist” notions—all founded upon exacerbated nationalism. These were upper-class ideas, and by adopting them he attempted to raise himself to the level of that class.

  In later years Hitler always went to considerable lengths to represent his thought as the fruit of personal struggles. He was supposed to have arrived at his ideas by his own penetrating observation and the labors of his intellect. In order to deny all determining influences he even pretended to have been through a period of wild liberalism. For example, he stressed the “repugnance” that “unfavorable remarks” about Jews had aroused in him during his years in Linz. It is more likely, and various persons have attested to this, that his youthful views were marked by the ideological climate of that provincial city.

  Linz at the turn of the century swarmed with nationalistic groups and sects. Moreover, a decidedly nationalistic temper prevailed at the secondary school that Hitler attended. The pupils flaunted in their buttonholes the blue cornflower popular among German racist groups. They gave preference to the colors of the German unity movement, black-red-gold; they greeted one another with the Germanic “Heil!” and sang the tune of the Hapsburg imperial anthem with the text of “Deutschland über Alles.” They felt themselves part of a nationalistic opposition directed chiefly against the Hapsburg dynasty and even put up some youthful resistance to school religious services and Corpus Christi processions—for they identified with the “Protestant” German Reich.

  At the Realschule, the spokesman for these trends was Dr. Leopold Pötsch, town councilor and teacher of history. Evidently he had made a deep impression upon young Hitler. His eloquence, and the colored oleos of yesteryear with which he supplemented his lessons, guided the imaginations of his pupils in the desired direction. The pages his pupil devoted to him in Mein Kampf contain a measure of hindsighted exaggeration. But the border dweller’s sense of being menaced, the hatred for the Danube monarchy’s mixture of nations and races, and Hitler’s fundamental anti-Semitic attitudes undoubtedly came to him through his old schoolmaster. It is also probable that Hitler read the largely satiric magazine of the Schönerer movement, Der Scherer, Illustrierte Tiroler Monatsschrift für Politik und Laune in Kunst und Leben (“Illustrated Tyrolean Monthly for Politics and Entertainment in Art and Life”) which was published in Linz during those years. It had a good deal to say about the decline of morals and the evils of alcoholism, but it specialized in attacks on the Jews, the “papists,” the suffragettes and members of Parliament. As early as the first issue of May, 1899, it carried a picture of the swastika, which was being taken up as the symbol of Germanic, völkisch, (i.e., racial and nationalistic) attitudes. In the magazine, however, it was still described as the “fire whisk” which, according to Germanic myth, had twirled the primal substance at the creation of the universe. Hitler also seems to have read—both during his schooldays and in the following aimless years—the Pan-German and aggressively anti-Semitic sheet Linzer Fliegende Blätter. For it was not only in Vienna that anti-Semitism formed a component of political and social ideology—as the author of Mein Kampf would have had his readers believe. It was just as strong in the provinces.

  In Mein Kampf Hitler speaks of an “inner struggle” lasting two years, in the course of which his emotions resisted the inexorable commands of his reason “a thousand times” before he completed his metamorphosis from “a weak-kneed cosmopolitan” to a “fanatical anti-Semite.” In fact, what he calls his “greatest spiritual upheaval” was merely development from a groundless and almost elusive dislike to fixed hostility, from mere mood to ideology. The anti-Semitism of Linz had been of a dreamy sort, tending toward neighborly compromises; now it took on the sharpness of principle. It focused on a w
ell-defined enemy. At the beginning of his stay in Vienna Hitler had sent “respectfully grateful” regards to Dr. Eduard Bloch, his parents’ Jewish family doctor. Dr. Josef Feingold, the lawyer, and Morgenstern, the picture framer, had encouraged the would-be artist by buying his small water colors. Toward Neumann, his Jewish companion at the home for men, Hitler had felt an exaggerated sense of obligation. Now, during the process of change that continued for several years, all these marginal figures of his youth started to recede into the background. Their place was taken by a vision that steadily acquired an almost mythological power, the “apparition in a long caftan and black hair locks” which once struck him “as I was strolling through the Inner City.” He forcefully described how this chance impression “twisted” in his brain and gradually began to become an obsession that dominated all his thinking:

  Since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans…. All this could scarcely be called very attractive, but it became positively repulsive when, in addition to their physical uncleanliness, you discovered the moral stains on this “chosen people.”… Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light—a kike!… Gradually I began to hate them.26