While at the Men’s Home, Hitler engaged in almost daily disputations, sometimes about art, sometimes about music, but often about politics and the miserable state of affairs in Vienna, the city he had come to loathe. He lectured; he argued; he harangued. At the first hint of a political discussion he would spring from his chair, leaving his postcards unfinished, to thunder at his fellow patrons. He fulminated against the Slavs, the Socialists, the labor unions. His favorite targets were “the Jesuits and the Reds,” but, oddly enough considering the violent anti-Semitic obsession that would later come to dominate his life, not the Jews. Sometimes the men fired back at him; sometimes they just laughed at his earnest, overheated rhetoric, a reaction that sent a chagrined Hitler back to his cubicle to be consoled by Hanisch. Hitler in this period was an ardent German nationalist, a champion of all things German and contemptuous of the moldering multinational Habsburg Empire, with its polyglot population of Germans, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Hungarians, Italians, and Jews. Nowhere was that exotic brew of ethnicities, languages, and national cultures more in evidence than in Vienna. Hitler sometimes attended the sessions of the Austrian Parliament where he watched from the gallery as representatives of the various nationalities spewed venom at one another in a cacophony of languages, and the sessions disintegrated into chaos. The delegates rang cowbells, sang competing national songs, chanted party slogans, and sometimes even fought in the aisles. These rancorous displays of ethnic and class conflict filled Hitler with disgust, revealing to him the depths of Habsburg impotence and the chaos and dysfunction at the core of parliamentary democracy.
During Hitler’s years in Vienna an air of decay, of impending crisis hung in its narrow streets and its broad sunlit boulevards. The city was experiencing a fin de siècle cultural flowering—it was the center of the European avant-garde, home to composers Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler, to literary figures Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and to painters such as Gustav Klimt; it was the cradle of psychotherapy, the home of Sigmund Freud. Hitler had no interest in any of these manifestations of the Modern. His Vienna was a city of slums and squalor, soup kitchens and homeless shelters. It was a cold, pitiless dog-eat-dog world where the strong prevailed and the weak fell by the wayside, a dynamic that permanently shaped his view of the world and its most elemental principles.
Vienna was also a city bristling with class and ethnic hatreds. In 1908 it was the sixth largest city in the world, and its population was growing by thirty thousand each month. Although the Germans had long enjoyed a position of power and privilege in the city (and in the empire), that predominance was increasingly threatened, especially after the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907. Like many Germans appalled by the specter of being overwhelmed by the “inferior peoples” of the empire, Hitler was an ardent admirer of Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the leader of the Austrian Pan-German movement. Schönerer rose to political prominence in the aftermath of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, when he appeared on the scene as a rabid German nationalist, deploring Austria’s exclusion from the Bismarckian Reich and lamenting the dilution of German preeminence in the Habsburg Empire. In the last decades of the nineteenth century Schönerer’s Pan-German movement gained a prominence far beyond its numbers, as its leaflets, pamphlets, and newspapers carried Schönerer’s words into every German corner of the empire.
Above all else, he protested the influx of Eastern European Jews into Vienna, and in 1884 introduced a bill to block Jewish immigration into the capital. Schönerer’s brand of anti-Semitism was a new phenomenon in Austria; it was not only religious and socioeconomic but racial in nature. The motto of his Pan-German movement was “Through Purity to Unity,” and Schönerer famously declared that “a Jew remains a Jew, whether he is baptized or not.” He favored a strict separation of the races, arguing that whoever refused to embrace anti-Semitism was a “traitor to the German Volk” and “a slave of the Jews.” The Jews were “like vampires” who derived their strength by “sucking the blood of the Aryan peoples.” Hence, “every German had the duty to help . . . eliminate Jewry.”
He also launched an “Away from Rome” campaign against the Catholic Church and engaged in a running battle with the liberal “Jewish press.” He inveighed against big business and liberal economic policies that hurt tradesmen and small farmers. In addition to its anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic stance, the Pan-German movement called on its followers to adhere to a strict dietary regimen—“Aryans” should be vegetarians and should abstain from tobacco and alcohol. As the movement gained momentum, it produced a full-blown Schönerer cult, generating songs and poems devoted to its self-styled “Führer” and introduced the phrase Heil dem Führer (Hail to the Leader!) into the country’s political lexicon.
Hitler admired Schönerer and his Pan-German movement, but when he arrived in Vienna, it was the city’s rabble-rousing populist mayor, Karl Lueger, who most impressed him. Lueger, who had been mayor since 1897, had once been an admirer of Schönerer, but Lueger was not a German nationalist but a devout Catholic and a loyal subject of the Habsburg monarchy. He did, however, share Schönerer’s rabid anti-Semitism, becoming, even more than Schönerer, the very embodiment of the anti-Semitic movement in Austria. In contrast to Schönerer, Lueger’s anti-Semitism was not racial but religious, though for many the distinction was moot. A master politician who was, even an opponent acknowledged, “the uncrowned king” of the city, he understood how to tap the anti-Semitic paranoia stirred up by Schönerer to mobilize support among his largely lower-middle-class following.
The influx of Eastern European Jews into the empire in the late nineteenth century was an incandescent issue, and Lueger vigorously exploited it. “Greater Vienna,” he warned, “must not become greater Jerusalem.” In Vienna, he complained, Jews had become as plentiful as “sand on the beach.” The Jews dominated the city, controlling the press, the banks, big capital, and even the Social Democrats were nothing more than “the protection squad of the Jews.” So inflammatory was his rhetoric, so demagogic his public appearances that despite Lueger’s electoral victories in 1895 and 1896 the aged Emperor Franz Joseph refused to recognize him as mayor for two years.
It was not so much Lueger’s ideological views that most impressed Hitler but his unrivaled ability to mobilize popular support. In an emerging age of mass politics Lueger presented himself as the “tribune of the people.” Always image conscious, he paid great attention to the theatrics of politics, and his numerous public appearances were carefully staged for maximum impact. Lueger was an exemplar of a new kind of politician. A charismatic speaker, he did not appeal to the educated, cultured Vienna. He spoke in a populist idiom, often lapsing into dialect, and his ability to move crowds, to agitate, and to mobilize the only recently enfranchised lower middle class made a deep impression on Hitler.
While Schönerer relentlessly linked the Jews with big capital and liberals, Lueger was determined to associate Jews with the Social Democratic movement as well. Just as in Germany, the Social Democrats and the labor unions were making steady, sometimes spectacular gains in Austria, and the reaction to the threat they posed was swift and shrill. Typical was the headline in Lueger’s Deutsches Volksblatt: “Who leads Social Democracy? The Jews. . . . Who aids them with the public? The entire Jewish press. And who gives them money: Jewish high finance. Just as in Russia, the Jews are the agitators and instigators [of disorder].” When the Socialists held a rally for an expanded suffrage in 1908, the Lueger press countered with the slogan: “Down with the Terrorism of Jewry.”
Hitler’s fear and loathing of Marxism, embodied in the Social Democratic movement and the labor unions, certainly had its origins in Vienna. He was frightened by the militant Social Democrats but also impressed by their mastery of propaganda and mass mobilization. He later wrote that after watching a Social Democratic demonstration, for the first time he “understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neithe
r morally nor mentally equal to such attacks.” At a given signal, the Socialists could unleash “a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down. . . . This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty.” The Social Democrats also taught Hitler another important lesson, one he would employ to great effect during his rise to power and, most terrifyingly, in the Third Reich: “an understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses.”
Given the torrent of anti-Semitic influences churning around him during his Vienna years, it seems reasonable to locate the origins of Hitler’s pathological hatred of the Jews at that time and place. And yet, firsthand testimony about Hitler’s attitudes toward Jews in those years is both sparse and contradictory. Kubizek maintained that Hitler arrived in Vienna already an anti-Semite, and that these feelings only intensified in the charged atmosphere of the city. Writing a decade later, Hitler, too, claimed that he “left Vienna as an absolute Anti-Semite, as a mortal enemy of the entire Marxist world view.” He was no doubt influenced by Schönerer and Lueger and the powerful current of vicious anti-Semitism that coursed through Austrian and especially Viennese political culture in the early years of the twentieth century. He certainly read the anti-Semitic newspapers and broadsheets that could easily be found in the cafés and newsstands and on the benches of the shelters.
And yet Hanisch, his close associate in the homeless shelters, claimed never to have heard him utter an anti-Semitic remark. “In those days,” Hanisch declared, “Hitler was by no means a Jew hater.” Hitler, he reports, was on friendly terms with Jews in the shelter, had good relations with Jewish art dealers, and his closest associate in the Meldemannstrasse home, Jacob Neubauer, was a Hungarian Jew. Neubauer helped obtain a winter coat for Hitler, and the two even planned a trip to Munich together. Of course, it could be that anti-Semitism was such a commonplace in his surroundings that his anti-Jewish views were simply too unexceptional to be noticed or remembered. Never open with his feelings, Hitler might also have kept his views to himself for quite pragmatic reasons—he needed the assistance of Jewish associates in the men’s home and the goodwill of the Jewish art dealers who bought his paintings. Both are quite possible, but the fact remains that there is no documented evidence of Hitler making anti-Semitic remarks or displaying anti-Semitic attitudes while in Vienna.
Still, whatever can be surmised from his personal relations with individual Jews, there can be no doubt that during his years in Vienna Hitler absorbed the rampant anti-Semitism of the city—possibly the most odious in Europe—reading from the scurrilous Jew-baiting gutter press available in the downtrodden neighborhoods he haunted. He clearly internalized the anti-Semitic language of Lueger and Schönerer, their slogans, their clichés, their appeals, their hatreds. “Vienna,” he later wrote, “was and remained for me the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life. I had set foot in this town while still half a boy and I left it a man grown quiet and grave. In it I obtained the foundations for a philosophy in general and a political view in particular which later I only needed to supplement in detail, but which never left me.” Yet when he left Vienna in 1913, his anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist attitudes amounted to little more than a jumble of inchoate ideas, personal prejudices, resentments, and fears that had not yet crystallized into a systematic worldview or ideology. That would come only in the aftermath of the First World War, in the turbulent crucible of revolutionary Munich.
What Hitler did learn in Vienna was hate, distrust, suspicion, a Darwinian view of human relations, and a lifelong resentment against comfortable bourgeois convention and the establishment that had crushed his ambitions, humiliated him, and reduced him to the pitiless life of homeless shelters, warming rooms, and soup kitchens. This was the deeply ingrained view of the world that would not change. In those prewar years, he did not have friends and did not want or need them. This was not simple shyness or social awkwardness. For all his maudlin statements later about loneliness, a friend, even a close associate, was unwelcome. Anyone who might intrude into his private world where his views, his enthusiasms, his hatreds, his delusions held sway was a threat. In spite of the fact that he was an utter failure in Vienna, a nobody, in the interior world of his colossal narcissism, he was neither shy nor awkward nor diffident. There he reigned supreme. There he was the maker of worlds.
* * *
Hitler left Vienna in May 1913. His destination was Munich. He had long dreamed of living in Germany, and Munich, whose many museums and galleries he had once visited as a boy, exerted an almost magnetic attraction for him. There he would continue his “studies” and finally achieve the artistic recognition that had been so cruelly denied him in Vienna. Two more immediate events triggered his move. On April 20, 1913, his twenty-fourth birthday, he received the balance of his father’s legacy, and for the first time had the resources to fulfill his dream. He could buy suitable clothes, look presentable; he could purchase a railway ticket; he could afford a modest room. More pressing was a far less pleasant incentive. In 1909 he had failed to register for the Austrian draft as required by law. Nor had he done so in subsequent years. He had no intention of serving in the army of the empire he detested. Although he later claimed to have left Austria “for primarily political reasons,” implying some sort of principled political protest, he left to avoid military service. Having passed safely into Germany, he believed that the Austrian authorities had forgotten him and that he was at any rate beyond their reach. But that was not the case. Far from forgetting him, the Linz police were on his trail, and unbeknownst to him, they were closing in. Failing to register for military service was a serious offense, but leaving the country under these circumstances amounted to desertion, which carried a severe prison sentence. By 1913 he was officially classified a draft dodger.
For months Hitler lived undisturbed in Munich. He was painting postcards again, now of Munich landmarks, and selling them in the cafés and beer halls that dotted the city. He took a room in the home of a respectable family and continued to live the life bohemian, sleeping late, lounging in cafés, reading deep into the night. He had no friends. His landlady would later recall that in the year that young Herr Hitler was her boarder, he had no visitors. Still, reminiscing nostalgically about his time in Munich, he would write that these fifteen months were “the happiest and by far the most contented of my life.”
Then in January 1914, a shock. Answering a knock at his door, he opened it to find an officer of the Munich criminal police waiting for him. He was taken into custody and delivered to the Austrian consulate, where he would be formally charged and returned to Linz. In a series of frantic telegrams and letters between Hitler and the Linz police, he pled his case. In a three-and-a-half-page letter he accepted responsibility but claimed it had all been a misunderstanding. He had, indeed, failed to register in 1909 when he was down and out in Vienna but had done so in 1910; then he had heard nothing further from the Linz authorities, and he had let the matter slide. He made such an abjectly humble impression that the consul took pity on him and agreed to allow him to report to nearby Salzburg rather than returning to Linz for his induction. In Salzburg, frail and visibly weak, he was declared physically unfit for military service.
Shaken but relieved, he returned to Munich, where he continued to drift along. He would later claim that during this period in Munich he made a study of Marxism, but he participated in no organized political activity; he joined no party or political association, and there is scant evidence that he actually read Marx. At any rate, as he later acknowledged, he read to confirm his views, not to learn. He was apparently content to live the life of a beer hall intellectual, a café radical, haranguing anyone who would listen to his views on the mounting threats to Germany. Still directionless, he was living day to day, treading water, with no plan, no career, and no future. In Munich, as i
n Vienna, he remained a nonentity, a mere shadow.
Then came the war.
August 2, 1914, the day after war was declared, found a twenty-five-year-old Hitler in the cheering throng gathered on the Odeonsplatz, waving his hat in jubilation, singing “Deutschland über Alles” and “Die Wacht am Rhein.” It was, he later wrote, the happiest day of his life. “To me, those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. . . . Overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.” The country was swept up in a typhoon of patriotic enthusiasm. Schoolboys rushed to the colors; married men enlisted; jubilant civilians reveled in the streets, as if suddenly released from years of pent-up tension. The Kaiser issued a dramatic call for national unity, a Burgfrieden or political truce, summoning all Germans to put aside their deep social and political differences while the enemy was at the gates. From this day forward, he declared, he would no longer recognize parties; he would recognize only Germans. Even the Social Democratic Party (SPD), a party with an ostensibly radical Marxist platform and an implacable critic of the government, overcame its pacifist scruples and joined the war effort. This was a major victory for the regime, which viewed the Social Democrats as dangerous subversives determined to undermine the capitalist system and the conservative political order with it. Between 1890 and the outbreak of war, the SPD had become the largest, most energetic party in the Reich, relentlessly pressing for fundamental political and social reforms. Like all socialist parties in Europe, it was also officially pacifist. But in the “spirit of 1914,” the bitterly divisive social and political issues that had rent the country for decades seemed swept beneath the surface as the nation girded for war.
The Third Reich Page 2
