by Kershaw, Ian
Most responsible for introducing the raucous aggression of nationalist agitation into parliament was Georg Ritter von Schönerer. Born in Vienna in 1842 to wealthy parents, Schönerer became a modernizing and benevolent landlord in the Waldviertel, the poor region on the borders of Bohemia where Hitler’s own forebears had their smallholdings. He was deeply affected by Austria’s defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1866 at the battle of Königgrätz. Shame at Austria’s exclusion from the German Federation, adulation of Bismarck, and, eventually, agitation aimed at the reuniting of Austria with the German Reich followed. He had first come to prominence in the 1870s as the voice of German small farmers and radicalized artisans, castigating the rapaciousness of big business and liberal laissez-faire economics.27 His programme came to embrace an early brand of ‘national socialism’ – above all else radical German nationalism (meaning the primacy and superiority of all things German), social reform, anti-liberal popular democracy, and racial antisemitism. ‘The strongest and most thoroughly consistent anti-Semite that Austria produced’28 – before Hitler, that is – Schönerer’s antisemitism was the cement of his anti-liberal, anti-socialist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Habsburg ideology. Hitler had imbibed the Schönerer creed in nationalist Linz. The ‘Heil’ greeting, the title of ‘Führer’ (bestowed by Schönerer on himself and used by his followers), and the intolerance towards any semblance of democratic decision-making in his movement were among the lasting elements of the Schönerer legacy which Hitler carried over to the later Nazi Party.29
By the time Hitler came to Vienna, popular support for the ageing Schönerer had dwindled and fragmented. Schönerer had, in any case, never advocated a mass party, believing that, as always in the course of history, any breakthrough would come from a loyal elite.30 His appeal had always been primarily located in student circles and among the nationalist middle classes.31 Schönerer’s programme, of which Hitler later wrote so approvingly, had, however, if anything hardened and become more radical and implacable in its demands for integral connection with Germany, in its boundless adoration of Kaiser Wilhelm and his German Reich, its ‘away-from-Rome’ church policy, and its attacks on the Habsburg polyglot state, all laced together with ferocious racial antisemitism.32 Though he thought Schönerer’s political philosophy correct, Hitler would later criticize his readiness to participate in sterile parliamentarism, his mistake in antagonizing the Catholic Church, and above all his neglect of the masses.33 This was where Hitler was prepared to learn from his second Austrian political hero, Karl Lueger, the Viennese ‘tribune of the people’.
The rise of Lueger’s Christian Social Party made a deep impression on Hitler.34 Starting as a Schönerer supporter, he came increasingly to admire Lueger. The main reason lay in the presentation of politics. Where Schönerer neglected the masses, Lueger, as Hitler approvingly recognized, gained his support by ‘winning over the classes whose existence was threatened’, the small- and lower-middle classes and artisans.35 With a heady brew of populist rhetoric and accomplished rabble-rousing, Lueger soldered together an appeal to Catholic piety and the economic self-interest of the German-speaking lower-middle classes who felt threatened by the forces of international capitalism, Marxist Social Democracy, and Slav nationalism. Like Schönerer, the vehicle used to whip up the support of the disparate targets of his agitation was antisemitism, sharply on the rise among artisanal groups suffering economic downturns and only too ready to vent their resentment both on Jewish financiers and on the growing number of Galician back-street hawkers and pedlars. Back in the 1880s, he had supported Schönerer’s bill to block Jewish immigration into Vienna.36 But unlike Schönerer’s, Lueger’s antisemitism was more functional and pragmatic than ideological: ‘I say who a Jew is’ (‘Wer a Jud ist, bestimm i!’), was a phrase commonly attributed to him.37 It was more political and economic – the coating for an attack on liberalism and capitalism – than it was doctrinally racial.38
But it was nasty all the same. In a speech in 1890, he had quoted with no dissent a remark made by one of Vienna’s wildest antisemites, that the ‘Jewish problem’ would be solved, and a service to the world achieved, if all Jews were placed on a large ship to be sunk on the high seas.39 By the time Emperor Franz Joseph was compelled to retreat from his earlier refusal and to appoint ‘handsome Karl’ to be Lord Mayor of Vienna in 1897, the overt antisemitism had been sublimated into a programme of social reform, municipal renewal, populist democracy, and loyalty to the Habsburg monarchy all welded together by popular Catholicism.40 But it remained vitriolic – in sentiment little different from the poison Hitler would later spread in the beerhalls of Munich. In a speech in 1899, to thunderous applause, Lueger spoke, for instance, of Jews exercising a ‘terrorism, worse than which cannot be imagined’ over the masses through the control of capital and the press. It was a matter for him, he continued, ‘of liberating the Christian people from the domination of Jewry’.41 On another occasion, he declared wolves, leopards, and tigers to be more human than the Jews – ‘these beasts of prey in human form’.42 When taken to task for stirring up hatred of the Jews through his agitation, he retorted that antisemitism would ‘perish when the last Jew perished’.43 Accused of saying that it was a matter of indifference to him whether Jews were hanged or shot, he provided the correction: ‘Beheaded! is what I said.’44
When Hitler came to live in Vienna, it was Lueger’s city. Two years later, on Lueger’s death, Hitler was among the mourning thousands who watched his funeral cortège pass by.45 Lueger’s pro-Habsburg, Catholic programme held little appeal for him. And in his later appraisal of Lueger, he criticized the shallowness and artificiality of the antisemitism on which his Christian Social Party had been built.46 But what he took from the Viennese mayor was Lueger’s command of the masses, the moulding of a movement ‘to attain his purposes’, his use of propaganda to influence ‘the psychological instincts’ of the broad mass of his supporters.47 That is what endured.
Following in the wake of liberalism’s demise and forming the third new current of Viennese mass politics besides nationalism and Christian Socialism was Social Democracy. Here, too, Hitler’s Vienna years were to leave lasting impressions. His fear of organized labour dated back to this time.
The Social Democrats had won no seats in the 1891 elections, three years after the foundation of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party.48 But in the year that Hitler moved to Vienna, 1907, they won eighty-seven out of 516 Reichsrat seats in the first election held under universal male suffrage.49 It was nowhere near a controlling representation. But a third of the votes cast in Lueger’s own domain of Vienna, and 41 per cent of all votes in Bohemia, was by any reckoning impressive.50 The party, led by Viktor Adler, from a wealthy Prague Jewish family, was committed to a Marxist programme that it saw, somewhat along the lines of Bernstein revisionism, coming to fruition through evolution within the existing framework of the Austro-Hungarian multinational state.51 Internationalism (though in fact there was a growing schism between German and Czech Social Democrats),52 equality of individuals and peoples, universal, equal, and direct suffrage, fundamental labour and union rights, separation of church and state, and a people’s army were what the Social Democrats stood for.53 It was little wonder that the young Hitler, avid supporter of Schönerer’s pan-Germanism, hated the Social Democrats with every fibre of his body. But what did impress him was their organization and activism.54 In autumn 1905, just before Hitler went to Vienna, it had been Social Democratic agitation that had influenced Franz Joseph to agree, in the wake of the concessions made by the Tsar following the Russian revolution that year, to universal male suffrage.55 The demonstration of approaching a quarter of a million workers in red armbands that followed in Vienna in late November took four hours to march past the Parliament building.56 A similar spectacle some years later was to leave a lasting impression on Hitler, as he stood for nearly two hours, gazing at ‘the endless columns of a mass demonstration of Viennese workers that took place one day as they marched past
four abreast’, ‘watching with bated breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding by’. It struck him as ‘a menacing army’, and his reaction, as he made his way home, was one of ‘oppressed anxiety’. But from Social Democracy, he said later, he also learnt the value of intimidation and intolerance, that ‘the psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak’.57
Such lessons were all in the future when Hitler made his way back to Vienna in early 1908. Politics were not in his mind then, or in the months that followed.
II
The eighteen-year-old Adolf Hitler left Linz for Vienna in February 1908. He kept up the connection with the family home at least until May.58 In August, probably in the hope of shoring up his dwindling funds, he visited his relatives in the Waldviertel.59 But after the death of his mother, his family held few attractions for him. Letters home soon dried up.60 The only relative of real interest was his Aunt Johanna, now back in the Waldviertel, whose life-savings had already provided him with financial support.61 After her death in 1911, the links with his family faded and were not revived for many years.62
Following his mother’s death, his guardian, Josef Mayrhofer, a simple man of peasant stock and mayor of Leonding, tried once more to persuade him to take up the apprenticeship as a baker that he had found for him. Adolf was contemptuous.63 Equally vain was a last attempt by Aunt Johanna to get him to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the civil service.64 Once family matters following his mother’s death had been settled, and the Raubals had agreed to look after his sister, Paula, Adolf went to see his guardian, in January 1908, and simply told him he was going back to Vienna. Mayrhofer later recounted that it was pointless trying to dissuade him: he was as stubborn as his father had been.65 The decision to move to Vienna had, in fact, already been taken the previous summer. Anticipating that he would be studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, he had in late September or the beginning of October rented a small room on the second floor of a house in Stumpergasse 31, near the Westbahnhof in Vienna, owned by a Czech woman, Frau Zakreys.66 This is where he returned, some time between 14 and 17 February 1908, to pick up where he had left off before his mother’s death.
He was not long alone. We can recall that he had persuaded August Kubizek’s parents to let their son join him in Vienna to carry out his studies to become a musician. Kubizek’s father had been most reluctant to let his son go off with someone he regarded as no more than a failure at school and who thought himself above learning a proper trade.67 But Adolf had prevailed. On 18 February he sent a postcard to his friend, urging him to come as quickly as possible. ‘Dear Friend,’ he wrote, ‘am anxiously expecting news of your arrival. Write soon so that I can prepare everything for your festive welcome. The whole of Vienna is awaiting you.’ A postscript added: ‘Beg you again, come soon.’68 Four days later, Gustl’s tearful parents bade him goodbye, and he left to join his friend in Vienna. Adolf met a tired Kubizek at the station that evening, took him back to Stumpergasse to stay the first night, but, typically, insisted on immediately showing him all the sights of Vienna. How could someone come to Vienna and go to bed without first seeing the Court Opera House? So Gustl was dragged off to view the opera building, St Stephen’s cathedral (which could scarcely be seen through the mist), and the lovely church of St Maria am Gestade. It was after midnight when they returned to Stumpergasse, and later still when an exhausted Kubizek fell asleep with Hitler still haranguing him about the grandeur of Vienna.69
The next few months were to be a repeat, on a grander scale, of the lifestyle of the two youths in Linz.70 An early search for lodgings for Gustl was rapidly given up, and Frau Zakreys was persuaded to swap her larger room and move into the cramped little room that Hitler had occupied.71 Adolf and his friend now occupied the same room, paying double the rent (10 Kronen each) that Hitler had paid for his earlier room.72 Within the next few days, Kubizek learnt that he had passed the entrance examination and been accepted for study at the Vienna Conservatoire. He rented a grand piano which took up most of the available space in the room, just allowing Hitler the three paces to do his usual stomping backwards and forwards.73 Apart from the piano, the room was furnished with simple necessities: two beds, a commode, a wardrobe, a washstand, a table, and two chairs.74
Kubizek settled down into a regular pattern of music study. What Hitler was up to was less clear to his friend. He stayed in bed in the mornings, was missing when Kubizek came back from the Conservatoire at lunchtimes, hung around the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace on fine afternoons, pored over books, fantasized over grandiose architectural and writing plans, and spent a good deal of time drawing until late into the night. Gustl’s puzzlement about how his friend could combine so much leisure time with studying at the Academy of Fine Arts was ended only after some considerable time. A show of irritation about Kubizek practising his piano scales led to a full-scale row between the two friends about study timetables and ended in Hitler shouting that ‘the whole Academy ought to be blown up’, exploding with rage about the ‘old-fashioned, fossilized civil servants, bureaucrats, devoid of understanding, stupid lumps of officials’ who ran it. He then admitted that ‘they rejected me, they threw me out, they turned me down’.75 When Gustl asked him what, then, he was going to do, Hitler rounded on him: ‘What now, what now?… Are you starting too: what now?’76 The truth was, Hitler had no idea where he was going or what he would do. He was drifting aimlessly.
Kubizek had plainly touched a raw nerve. Adolf had for mercenary reasons not told his family about his failure to enter the Academy. Otherwise, his guardian would probably have denied him the 25 Kronen a month he received as his share of the orphan’s pension.77 And he would have come under even more pressure to find a job. But why did he deceive his friend? For a teenager to fail to pass an extremely tough entrance examination is in itself neither unusual nor shameful. But Adolf could evidently not bear to tell his friend, to whom he had always claimed to be so superior in all matters of artistic judgement, and whose own studies at the Conservatoire had started so promisingly, of his rejection. The blow to his self-esteem had been profound. And the bitterness showed. According to Kubizek, he would fly off the handle at the slightest thing.78 His loss of self-confidence could flare up in an instant into boundless anger and violent denunciation of all who he thought were persecuting him. ‘Choking with his catalogue of hates, he would pour his fury over everything, against mankind in general who did not understand him, who did not appreciate him and by whom he was persecuted and cheated.’79 On another occasion, railing against the lack of ‘understanding for true artistry’ at the Academy, he spoke of traps laid –Kubizek claimed to remember his exact words – ‘for the sole purpose of ruining his career’.80 ‘Altogether, in these early days in Vienna,’ commented Kubizek, ‘I had the impression that Adolf had become unbalanced.’81 The tirades of hate directed at everything and everybody were those of an outsized ego desperately wanting acceptance and unable to come to terms with his personal insignificance, with failure and mediocrity.
Adolf had still not given up hope of entering the Academy. But, typically, he took no steps to ensure that his chances would be better a second time round. Just before he left Linz, he had been given an introduction, arranged by the owner of the block of flats in Urfahr where the Hitlers lived, to Professor Alfred Roller, brilliant stage designer at the Court Opera and a prominent member of the Viennese cultural scene, who offered to talk to Hitler when he came to Vienna.82 Hitler made no use of the recommendation.83 That alone suggests there is nothing in the suggestion that Adolf, through Roller’s help, took art lessons under the guidance of a sculptor by the name of Panholzer.84 Systematic preparation and hard work were as foreign to the young Hitler as they would be to the later dictator. Instead, his time was largely spent in dilettante fashion, as it had been in Linz, devising grandiose schemes shared only with the willing Kubizek – fantasy plans that usually arose from sudden whims and bright ideas and were dropped almost as s
oon as they had begun.85
One idea was to write a play. Kubizek was astonished when Adolf showed him a few hastily written sides describing the Wagnerian-style scene for a drama he intended to write, set in the Bavarian Alps at the time of the arrival of Christianity.86 The project was taken no further. It was the same with a number of other supposed dramas, each derived from Germanic mythology, all with an eye particular to the massive scale of the production – dwarfing even the most pretentious Wagnerian settings. The more down-to-earth Kubizek pointed out that it would be impossible to finance such productions, but Hitler contemptuously dismissed suggestions for more modest ventures.87
