The enterprising Hanisch, wise in the ways of the world, familiar with all the miseries and shifts open to his class, one day asked Hitler his occupation. Hitler replied that he was a painter. Assuming that Hitler meant a house painter, Hanisch said that he certainly should be able to earn money at such a trade. And, despite all our suspicions of Hanisch’s reliability, we cannot help recognizing the young Hitler in the phrases that follow: “He was insulted and replied that he was not that kind of painter, but an academician and an artist.” The two men eventually went into partnership—the idea seems to have come from Hanisch. Shortly before Christmas they moved into a kind of hostel, the home for men on Meldemann Strasse, in the Twentieth District of Vienna. By day, when regulations forbade staying in the tiny bedrooms, Hitler sat in the reading room perusing the newspapers or popular-science journals, or else copying postcards and lithographs of Viennese scenes. Hanisch sold these careful water colors to picture dealers, framers, and sometimes to upholsterers who, in the fashion of the day, “worked them into the high backs of easy chairs or sofas.” The proceeds were shared on a fifty-fifty basis. Hitler himself felt that he would not be able to sell his works since he “could not be seen in his bedraggled clothes.” Hanisch, however, maintains that he managed “sometimes to get a very good order, so that we could live fairly well.”
The inhabitants of the home for men came from all classes; the largest group consisted of young workers, both blue- and white-collar, with jobs in nearby factories and shops. In addition there were some solid, industrious small craftsmen. Hanisch mentions music copyists, sign painters, and monogram carvers. But more characteristic of the place and the neighborhood were the shipwrecked of various kinds, adventurers, bankrupt businessmen, gamblers, beggars, moneylenders, discharged army officers—flotsam and jetsam from all provinces of the multinational state. There were also the Jews from the eastern regions of the monarchy who, as door-to-door salesmen, peddlers, or knitware dealers were trying to rise. What linked them all was common wretchedness; what separated them was the desperate determination to escape from that world, to scramble out even at the expense of all others. “The lack of solidarity is the supreme characteristic of the great class of the declassed.”33
Again, in the home for men Hitler had no friends aside from Hanisch. Those who knew him there remembered him as a fanatic; on the other hand, he himself spoke of his dislike for the Viennese personality, which he felt to be “obnoxious.” Possibly he avoided friendships; intimacies of any kind irritated and exhausted him. What he became acquainted with, on the other hand, was that sort of cameraderie among ordinary people which simultaneously affords contact and anonymity, and offers a kind of loyalty that can be canceled at any time. This was an experience he was never to forget, and in the following years he repeatedly renewed it on the most varied social planes, with virtually unchanging personnel: in the trenchcs during the war; in the midst of his orderlies and chauffeurs, whose company he preferred as a party leader and later as Chancellor; and finally in the underground bunker of the Fuhrer’s headquarters. He always seemed to be repeating the life style of the home for men, which provided only distant forms of social life and in general neatly fitted into his concept of human relations. The management of the home considered him difficult, a political troublemaker. “Tempers often rose,” Hanisch later recalled. “The exchanges of hostile looks made the atmosphere distinctly uncomfortable.”
Hitler evidently argued his views sharply and consistently. During the Vienna years he was in a constant state of perturbation, in strong contrast to the famous lightheartedness of the city but in fact far more in keeping with the temper of the times. He was obsessed by fears of Jews and Slavs, hated the House of Hapsburg and the Social Democratic Party, and envisioned the doom of Germanism. His fellows in the home for men did not share his paranoid emotions.
Radical alternatives, wild exaggerations formed the pattern of his thinking. His hate-filled mind pushed everything to extremes, magnified events of minor importance into metaphysical catastrophes. From early on only grandiose themes had attracted him. This tendency was one of the reasons for his naive and reactionary leaning toward the heroic, the nobly decorative, the idealizing elements in art. Gods and heroes, gigantic aspirations, or horrendous superlatives stimulated him and helped to mask the banality of his circumstances. “In music Richard Wagner brought him to bright flames,” Hanisch writes clumsily but vividly. Hitler himself later claimed that as far back as this he began sketching his first plans for the reconstruction of Berlin. His bent for grandiose projects fits into this context. A job in the office of a construction company instantly awoke his old dreams of being an architect; and after a few experiments with model planes he already saw himself as the owner of a great airplane factory and “rich, very rich.”
Meanwhile, reputedly through Greiner’s mediation, he produced a poster advertising a hair tonic, another poster for a bed-feathers shop, another for an antiperspirant sold under the brand name “Teddy.” A copy of this last poster, with Hitler’s signature in a corner, has been found. It shows two rather stiff, clumsily drawn figures of letter carriers; one has sat down in exhaustion wringing heavy blue drops of sweat out of his sock; the other is informing his “dear brother” that 10,000 steps a day are “a pleasure with Teddy powder.” In another poster that has come down to us the tower of St. Stephan’s cathedral rises majestically above a mountain of soap. What Hitler himself considered noteworthy about this period of his life was that he was at last master of his own time. During the long hours he spent over the newspapers in cheap little cafes, he read by preference the anti-Semitic Deutsches Volksblatt.
If we were to define the characteristic quality of that period in the life of this eccentric, solitary twenty-year-old (Hitler, too, spoke of himself as having been “eccentric” at this time),34 we should have to stress the essentially unpolitical nature of his interests. Richard Wagner was his idol during those years, not only “in music.” In fact, Hitler saw Wagner’s early disappointments, lack of recognition, and obstinate faith in his own vocation, a “life flowing into the glory of world fame,”35 as a prototype of his own destiny. Hitler was not the only victim to be seduced by that romantic concept of genius whose merits and failings Richard Wagner embodied. Because of Wagner a whole generation was confused, misguided, and alienated from the bourgeois world.
The boy who fled the disciplines of school and then fell prey to the delusive promises of the big city found his idol in the Master of Bayreuth. Many young men of his generation followed the same course, and with similarly exalted expectations. It was a way with great appeal to gifted “outsiders” who otherwise would have no choice but to sink into mediocrity. It may surprise us to find that this unprepossessing son of a Linz customs official represents so typical a phenomenon. With the turn of the century legions of these sons of the nineteenth-century middle class made their appearance. In 1906 Hermann Hesse, in Under the Wheel, vividly described the sufferings of one such youth under contemporary conditions and gave a dismal forecast of his future. Robert Musil, in Young Torless, and Frank Wedekind, in The Awakening of Spring, were among the many writers who dealt with the same theme. Whether these heroes sought escape from the toils of the world or went down to destruction, all of them opposed to the bourgeois world a wild enthusiasm for the arts. They despised their fathers’ mean accomplishments and felt only contempt for their values. By contrast, an artist’s existence was noble, precisely because it was socially unfruitful. Everything that stood for order, duty, endurance, they dismissed as “bourgeois.” The bourgeois mentality, they maintained, promoted efficiency but did not tolerate the extraordinary. The tremendous intensifications of true culture, on the other hand, the glories of the “spirit,” could be achieved only in isolation, in extreme human and social aloofness. The artist, the genius, the complex personality in general, was bound to be utterly out of place in the bourgeois world. His true locale was far out on the fringes of society, where the morgue for suic
ides and the pantheon for immortals were both situated—as Henri Murger, the first analyst of this type bathetically observed. Though the lodginghouses to which Hitler betook himself were squalid, though his notion of being an artist was ridiculously highflown; though no one so far had acknowledged his talent; though his actual life in the home for men was marked by deceit, parasitism, and asociality—all this could be secretly justified in terms of the prevailing concept of genius. And Richard Wagner was the supreme example of the validity of that concept.
Hitler himself, in fact, later declared that with the exception of Richard Wagner he had “no forerunners,” and by Wagner he meant not only the composer, but Wagner the personality, “the greatest prophetic figure the German people has had.” One of his favorite ideas, to which he returned frequently, concerned Wagner’s towering importance “for the development of German man.” He admired the courage and energy with which Wagner exerted political influence “without really wishing to be political,” and on one occasion admitted that a “literally hysterical excitement” overcame him when he recognized his own psychological kinship with this great man.36
The parallels are, in fact, not at all hard to detect. The points of contact between the two temperaments—all the more marked because the young postcard painter consciously modeled himself after his hero—produce a curious sense of family resemblance, which Thomas Mann first pointed out in his disturbing essay Brother Hitler. In 1938, when Hitler was at the height of his peacetime triumphs, Mann wrote:
Must we not, even against our will, recognize in this phenomenon an aspect of the artist’s character? We are ashamed to admit it, but the whole pattern is there: the recalcitrance, sluggishness and miserable indefiniteness of his youth; the dimness of purpose, the what-do-you-really-want-to-be, the vegetating like a semi-idiot in the lowest social and psychological bohemianism, the arrogant rejection of any sensible and honorable occupation because of the basic feeling that he is too good for that sort of thing. On what is this feeling based? On a vague sense of being reserved for something entirely indefinable. To name it, if it could be named, would make people burst out laughing. Along with that, the uneasy conscience, the sense of guilt, the rage at the world, the revolutionary instinct, the subconscious storing up of explosive cravings for compensation, the churning determination to justify oneself, to prove oneself…. It is a thoroughly embarrassing kinship. Still and all, I would not want to close my eyes to it.37
But there are other striking parallels between Hitler and Wagner: the uncertainty about ancestry, the failure at school, the flight from military service, the morbid hatred of Jews, even the vegetarianism, which in Wagner ultimately developed into the ludicrous delusion that humanity must be saved by vegetarian diet. Also common to both was the violent quality of their moods: the abrupt alternation of depressions and exaltations, triumphs and disasters. In many of Richard Wagner’s operas the theme is the classic conflict between the outsider, subject only to his own laws, and a rigid social order governed by tradition. In Rienzi or Lohengrin or Tannhäuser, Hitler, the rejected Academy candidate sitting over his water colors in the reading room of the home for men, recognized magnified aspects of his own confrontation with the world. Both Wagner and Hitler, moreover, possessed a furious will to power, a basically despotic tendency. All of Richard Wagner’s art has never been able to conceal to what extent its underlying urge was the boundless need to dominate. From this impulse sprang the taste for massive effects, for pomposity, for overwhelming hugeness. Wagner’s first major composition after Rienzi was a choral work for 1,200 male voices and an orchestra of one hundred. This blatant reliance on mass effects, employed to cover up basic weaknesses, this medley of pagan, ritual and music-hall elements anticipated the era of mass hypnosis. The style of public ceremonies in the Third Reich is inconceivable without this operatic tradition, without the essentially demagogical art of Richard Wagner.
Another point in common was a kind of cunning knowledge of the popular mind along with a remarkable insensitivity to banality. This combination resulted in an air of plebeian pretentiousness in which again they were remarkably similar. Gottfried Keller once called the composer a “barber and charlatan”; similarly, a contemporary observer described Hitler, with the acuteness born of hatred, as having “the aura of a headwaiter”; another spoke of him as a speechmaking sex murderer.38 The element of vulgarity and unsavoriness that phrases of this sort tried to catch was present in both Hitler and Wagner. They were masters of the art of brilliant fraudulence, of inspired swindling. And just as Richard Wagner could call himself a revolutionary yet pride himself on his friendship with a king (“Wagner, the government bandleader,” Karl Marx said scornfully), so Hitler, in his vague dreams of mounting the social ladder, reconciled his hatred of society with his opportunistic instincts. Wagner dismissed the patent contradictions in his views by declaring that art was the goal of life and that the artist made the ultimate decisions. It was the artist who would intervene to save the situation wherever “the statesman despairs, the politician gives up, the socialist vexes himself with fruitless systems, and even the philosopher can only interpret but cannot prophesy.” His doctrine then was that of the aesthetician who would subordinate life entirely to the dictates of the artist. The state was to be raised to the heights of a work of art; politics would be renewed and perfected by the spirit inherent in art. Elements of this program are clearly visible in the theatricalization of public life in the Third Reich, the regime’s passion for histrionics, the staginess of its practical politics—a staginess that often appeared to be the sole end of the politics.
There are still other parallels. The innate tendency toward “dilettantism,” which Friedrich Nietzsche noted even while Wagner was still his admired friend, was likewise a trait of Hitler’s. In both men there was the same striking need to intervene officiously in all sorts of spheres; both had to be forever proving themselves, dazzling the world with their many talents. Yesterday’s glory rapidly turned stale for both of them; they had constantly to be surpassing themselves. In both cases we find an outrageous pettiness side by side with far-ranging inspiration; this very conjunction seems to have defined their peculiar mentality.
Hitler, to be sure, entirely lacked the self-discipline and the artist’s capacity for taking pains that distinguished Wagner. Hitler’s lethargy, his almost narcoticized dullness, are his alone. But at bottom we find in both men a horror of proletarianization, which they are determined to fend off at any cost. Their struggle to raise themselves to the level for which they felt themselves destined represents a remarkable achievement of the will. That sense of destiny was crucial: they were sustained by their premonitions that some time in the future everything would change for them, and all the humiliations they had endured, all the wretchedness of years in the lower depths, would be fearfully avenged.
Hitler’s theatrical, essentially unpolitical relationship to the world, in the vein of Richard Wagner, emerges from an anecdote he himself relates. Once, after days of “musing and brooding,” he came upon a mass demonstration of Viennese workers. His description of the experience, recollected fifteen years later, still vibrates with the impression that those “endless columns four abreast” made upon him. For nearly two hours, he says, he stood “watching with bated breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding by,” before he turned away “in oppressed anxiety” and went home. What had chiefly moved him, to all appearances, was the theatrical effect of the parade. At any rate, he writes not a word about the background or the political motivations for the demonstration. Evidently these concerned him much less than the question of how to achieve such effects upon masses of human beings. He brooded on theatrical problems; as he saw it, the chief concerns of the politician were matters of staging. Kubizek had in fact been struck by the importance his friend, in his occasional attempts at drama, attributed to “the most magnificent possible staging.” Although this naïve early admirer of Hitler could not recall afterward the contents of Hitler’s p
lays, he never forgot the “enormous pomp” Hitler went in for, which put anything Richard Wagner had ever demanded for the stage “completely in the shade.”39
In retrospect, Hitler laid claim to an intense intellectual development. During the approximately five years he spent in Vienna, he maintained, he read “enormously and thoroughly.” Aside from architecture and visiting the opera, he wrote, he “had but one pleasure: books.” But it would probably be more accurate to say that the real influences of this phase of his life stemmed not so much from the intellectual realm as from that of demagogy and political tactics. As a construction worker, a declassed bourgeois filled equally with his sense of superiority and fear of intimacy, he kept carefully to one side while the other men had their lunch. Nevertheless, he eventually was drawn into political wrangles. When his fellows threatened, according to his story, to throw him off the scaffolding, he learned something from the clash. As he later put it, with an undertone of admiration, he discovered that a very simple method existed to deal with arguments: “bashing in the head of anybody who dared to oppose.” The pages of Mein Kampf that deal with his political awakening are extremely scanty on theory; they do not suggest that grappling with the ideas of the time which he claims to have engaged in. Rather, he uncritically followed the existing, widespread ideology of the German bourgeoisie. On the other hand, questions of the manipulation of ideas, of their power over the masses, aroused his eager interest and produced his first flashes of insight.
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