The Young Hitler I Knew

by August Kubizek

  The Landestheater was a very dignified building, but the stage was far too small for the performance of Wagner operas, inadequate in every respect. The technical installations needed for a worthy standard of presentation of these works were not fitted. There was a major shortage not only of suitable costumes, but of wardrobe in general. The orchestra was too short-handed to reach the sound levels required. To provide just one example, when Die Meistersinger was staged, a number of instrumental parts were discarded, these being, as I established as a ‘technical expert’, the bass clarinet, the English horn and the contra-bassoon in the woodwind section and the so-called Wagner horn in the brass while the string section was short of three players. But even if there had been available the instrumentalists necessary to make up the numbers, there would still have been nowhere near enough space in the narrow orchestra pit to put them all. This was the truly pitiful state of affairs confronting the conductors. To attempt a Wagner performance with a twenty-man orchestra was thus something of an adventure. The choir, needless to say, was a disgrace, turned out in completely unsuitable costume and often requiring the indulgence of the public as for example in Die Meistersinger when the males were all equipped with English-style false moustaches which made Hitler hit the roof. For a provincial stage the soloists were not bad, but there were only a handful of real Wagner-singers amongst them.

  The stage scenery came in for constant criticism. The backdrop flapped with every footstep; this was particularly annoying when it was supposed to represent a rocky landscape. My hair stands on end when I remember the fire at the capitol which brought one Rienzi performance to its conclusion. The palazzo stood centre-stage with a projecting balcony upon which Rienzi and Irene stepped forward to pacify the mob. To the right and left of them was some burning resin representing the beginnings of the ‘conflagration’. A stage hand had to let down a huge prop depicting the palazzo with bright flames licking it to destruction. This prop was hung to one side from a braced strut. When someone loosened the strut, the prop rustled to the floor. One always had to reckon with this kind of accident. It was all well and good for Hitler to say that these ‘modest’ presentations held the promise of something better, such as we were later to find at the Viennese Hof Opera, but it amazes me today that such woefully inadequate performances could possibly ‘inspire’ or ‘transport’ us. The idealism in our young hearts ensured that we were never spiteful in our criticism of the performances.

  The theatre was always sold out for Wagner. We would often queue for up to two hours waiting for the doors to open if we intended to fight for a column in the standing area. The intervals were interminable. As we glowed with enthusiasm, desperate for a cooling drink, an old usher with a white beard would sell us a glass of water, allowing us to remain in occupation of our conquered territory around the pillars. We would put a small coin in the empty glass and return it to the usher. Often the performance would go on until midnight. Then I would accompany Adolf home, but the walk there was too short to allow us to shake off the powerful vibrations of the evening and so he would accompany me to my home in the Klammstrasse. During this period he would really get into the spirit of the thing, and we would then return together to the Humboldtstrasse. I do not recall that Adolf ever got tired; the night seemed to fire him up and he rarely had anything much to do in the morning. Thus it would happen after a performance that we strolled back and forward between our two homes until I started yawning and found it difficult to keep my eyes open.

  From his childhood, Adolf had been intoxicated by tales of the ancient German heroes. As a boy he could not read enough about them. He had a book by Gustav Schwab which presented these sagas of early German history in a popular format. This book was his favourite, and at Humboldtstrasse had pride of place in his library where it was always to hand. On his sickbed, he engrossed himself with true fervour in the mysterious world of myth which this book had opened up for him. In our Viennese student rooms, I remember that Adolf had an especially fine edition of the German Heldensagen to which he had frequent and eager recourse despite the pressing day-to-day problems which beset him at that time.

  His familiarity with these sagas was by no means the passing fad which it might be with other people. It was essentially the thing which captivated him, and in his historical and political considerations you could be sure it was never far from his thoughts, for this was the world in which he felt he belonged. He could not imagine for himself a finer existence than that lived by these radiant heroes of early German history. He identified himself with the great men of this vanished epoch. Nothing appeared more worthy of the struggle than a life like theirs, full of brave acts of great consequence, the most heroic life possible, and from there to enter Valhalla* and so become an immortal of myth, joining those already present whom he so venerated. This strange, romantic perspective of Hitler’s thinking should not be overlooked. In a world of harsh political reality, the tendency will be to reject these youthful musings as fantasies, but the fact remains, despite everything at this time of his life, that Adolf Hitler’s personality dwelt only in the truly pious beliefs to which the German heroic sagas had introduced him.

  In conflict with a bourgeois world, which with its deceit and false rectitude had nothing to offer him, he sought instinctively his own world and found it in the origins and early history of his own peoples. He considered it their finest era, and this long-vanished epoch, known only from a very patchy historical record, became for the fiery young Hitler the full-blooded present. The intensity with which he lived this age 1,500 years previously was such that it often made my head spin, entrenched as I was in the early twentieth century. Did he really live amongst the heroes of that misty dark age, of whom he spoke as if they were camped out in the woods through which we took our nightly rambles? Was the dawning century in which we found ourselves no more than a waking dream for him? This century-shift often concerned me to the extent that I feared for his sanity: maybe one day he might find himself unable to escape from the time warp he had created for himself.†

  The constant, intensive preoccupation with the heroes of German mythology appeared to have made him peculiarly receptive to the life work of Richard Wagner. As soon as the twelve-year-old heard Lohengrin, which translated his boyish dreams into poetry and music, his longing for the sublime world of the German past manifested itself within him and, from the moment Wagner entered his life, the dead genius never set him free. In Wagner’s work, Hitler saw not only a confirmation of his path of spiritual ‘transmigration’ into early German history, but it fortified the idea that this long-gone era must have something in it of use for the future.

  In the years of my friendship with Adolf Hitler I lived through the first phase of his development into adulthood. As an enthusiastic musician I also had idols whom I attempted to emulate, but what my friend looked for in Wagner was much more than a role model. I can only say that he ‘put on’ the personality of Wagner just as though it were possible for his ghost to possess him.

  He read avidly everything he could get hold of concerning Wagner, the good and the bad, written by those in favour and those against. He was particularly keen on biographical literature about him, read his notes, letters, diaries, his self-appraisal, his confessions. Day by day he penetrated ever deeper into the man’s life. He was well-informed about the most trivial details and unimportant episodes. It might happen that on one of our rambles Adolf would suddenly abandon the subject upon which he had been up to that moment holding forth – perhaps the supply of an inventory needed by a poor provincial concert hall from a notional state fund set aside for such deserving cases – and recite the text of some note or letter by Wagner, or maybe a thesis – Kunstwerk und Zukunft (‘Artistry and the Future’) or Die Kunst und die Revolution (‘Art and the Revolution’). Although it would not always be an easy matter to follow the thread of these I would always pay close attention and look forward to Hitler’s concluding observations, which were invariable. ‘So you see’, he would say
, ‘even Wagner went through it just like I have. All the time he had to tackle the ignorance of his surroundings.’

  These comparisons seemed very exaggerated to me. Wagner lived to be seventy years of age. In such a productive life there were bound to have been ups and downs, successes and failures, but my friend, who saw his own life as a parallel to that of Wagner, was barely seventeen, had created nothing but a few drawings, water-colours and architectural plans and experienced nothing of life except the death of his father and failure at school. Yet he spoke as though he had been the victim of persecution, fought his enemies and been exiled.

  Fervently he compiled the decisive episodes from Wagner’s life, of which in due course I would be on the receiving end. He described Wagner’s stormy sea passage in the Skagerrak with his young wife as the result of which the idea of Die fliegende Holländer had been conceived. I heard out the adventurous flight of the young revolutionary Wagner, the years of rejection, the exile. I enthused with my friend over Ludwig II, protector of the arts, who had accompanied Wagner on his last voyage to Venice. It was not that Adolf refused to recognise the human weaknesses of Richard Wagner, his profligate spending and so on, but he forgave him on the grounds of the immortal greatness of his work.

  At that time, Wagner had already been dead over twenty years, but the battle to have his work generally recognised and accepted was still in full swing. It is difficult today to imagine the passion this controversy engendered amongst the music-loving youth of those times. For us there were only two categories of people: friends and foes of Richard Wagner. Modern-day debates about music are so tame in comparison they raise only a smile. But in those days, there was no radio, television, cinema or recording equipment, only theatres, and what was presented there was a matter of great import. Whenever a performance was staged, we became as animated as those heroes on the stage itself. We sought ever more means to express our unrestrained passion and enthusiasm, and in conductor August Göllerich, who had worked under Wagner, we had not only a worthy interpreter of the great master’s material, but also a veteran guardian of his legacy. In our eyes, he was the keeper of the grail.

  We were convinced that we were experiencing the birth of a new German art form. This sort of musical drama was something completely new, scarcely thought of previously, combining for the first time poetry and music and setting them in a mythical world which had become our own.

  Adolf’s great longing was to visit Bayreuth, the national pilgrimage centre of Germany, to see ‘Wahnfried’, the house where the genius had lived, to meditate beside his grave and see the performance of his works in the theatre he had constructed. If many dreams and wishes of his life remained unfulfilled, at least this one was satisfied to the uttermost.

  These are pleasing memories for a 64-year-old man such as I, memories to make the heart young again, and happy, the same heart that beat so fiercely for the master of Bayreuth! Actually I would not have wanted to miss these youthful experiences, seeing the first phase of Hitler’s ecstasy for Wagner. Whereas I was merely an intermediary in his relationship with Stefanie, reporting information, I was more positively involved in his Wagner experience, having a better musical foundation than he did. The secret of his love for Stefanie certainly brought me closer to him, for nothing forges a friendship better than a secret shared, and in addition we had in common the highest devotion to Richard Wagner.

  * Valhalla, according to Professor Heinrich Niedner in his Nordic Mythology, Section XVI, was the glorious destination for those select who fell in battle. The word means ‘place of the dead warriors’. It was ruled over by the god of war Odin (also known as Wotan), whose daughters, the Valkyries, were sent to choose those who were to be admitted. [Ed.]

  † In the First World War, Hitler always carried with him in his gas-mask canister not Die Deutschen Heldensage but the five volumes of Schopenhauer (Heims: Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, Orbis, Munich, 2000, entry for 19 May 1944). Since he also stated (Monologe, 14 October 1941) that ‘our mythology of the gods was already defunct when Christianity came’ and that it seemed ‘utterly stupid to resurrect the cult of Wotan’, it is logical to infer that by 1914 his religious-philosophical ideas had gone through a metamorphosis. [Ed.]

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  Chapter 9

  Hitler the Young Volksdeutscher

  When I remember the political thoughts and ideas of the youthful Hitler I hear his voice saying to me, ‘You don’t understand’, or ‘One can’t discuss a thing like that with you’, and often he condemned me in even stronger terms as when, for example, during one of his monologues I nodded at the wrong point, he erupted in indignation: ‘Politically, Gustl, you are a turkey.’

  The fact was, only one thing mattered in my life – music. Adolf had agreed that art should have priority in all areas of life, but in the course of the years we spent together politics gradually gained the upper hand without noticeably compromising his efforts in the direction of art. One can put it this way: the Linz years were under the star of art; those in Vienna under the star of politics. I felt that I was only really useful to him in the arts. The more the stress fell on politics, the less our friendship could give him. Not that he would ever allow me to gain this impression from himself, for he took our friendship far too seriously, or maybe he did not realise the fact.

  Politics became critical for our relationship. Politically I had hardly any opinions, and those I did have were not held with enough passion for me to need to defend them or impose them on others, and so in me Adolf had himself a poor partner. He liked to convert by persuasion, but I accepted willingly and uncritically whatever he advocated. I noted things so that now and again I could discuss them with him at quite a skilful level, but I did not extend to being an opposition which he would have found useful for verbal sparring purposes. In essence I was like the deaf man at a symphony concert: I could see that something was being played, but had no idea what it was. Nature had provided me with no bodily organ which could handle politics. This could bring Adolf to despair. He considered it impossible that there ever could be a person with my lack of interest for, and knowledge of, politics. He would not let me off the hook, however. I remember how often he needed me to keep him company for some reason at the parliament even though it had no interest for me and I would rather have remained at the piano. But Adolf would not have it and he forced me to go even though he knew that the parliamentary business bored me to tears. But I dared not say so, of course.

  People tend to assume that politicians come from a highly politicised home environment. This was not true of Adolf Hitler – on the contrary. Here we have another of the many contradictions about him. His father liked to talk politics and made no secret of his partiality to free thought, although he would not entertain any talk against the monarchy. As an Austro-Hungarian customs official, he was very hot on this point. When he put on his parade uniform every 18 August, the Habsburg Kaiser’s birthday, he was the perfect picture of a servant of the state from the parting in his hair to the soles of his boots.

  I think that little Adolf got to hear very little about politics, for in Alois Hitler’s opinion they belonged in a bar and not at home. If things got heated at the inn, one knew nothing of it at the hearthside. I can never recall that Adolf ever mentioned his father in connection with any of his own political views.

  Even less trace was there to be found of it in the Humboldtstrasse flat. Klara Hitler was a simple, pious woman with no interest in politics. When her husband was alive, she had probably heard him arguing about politics with others but never became involved in it herself or repeated the substance of what she had heard to her children. It probably seemed right and proper to the choleric husband and father that what he thundered out at the inn should be unknown to his quiet little wife and not ruffle the still waters of family life. Nobody would be welcome in the Hitler household who brought politics along with him. I never remember a single occasion in the Hitler family when a political subject was spoken o
f. Even if some event of great political moment caused ripples through the town, one would remain oblivious of it in this quiet home, for even Adolf respected the rule there.

  The only change in family circumstances I witnessed was when Frau Klara moved from Humboldtstrasse to Urfahr in 1906. This had nothing to do with the endless shifting of address which had been the father’s custom, but rather a practical consideration. Urfahr, now part of Linz, was then a separate little town of mainly rural character, a favourite choice for retirement on a good pension. As no duty was levied in Urfahr on many things, such as meat, it was cheaper there than in Linz itself. Frau Klara was hoping that her modest pension of 120 crowns monthly, which she split 90:15:15 between herself and her two children, would stretch further, and in any case she felt more at home living within sight of green fields and pasture. The house at Blütengasse 9 is unchanged at the time of writing so that often when I go down that little street off the beaten track beyond which the countryside begins I almost expect to see Frau Klara appear on the elegant little balcony. For Adolf it was a special thing to live ‘on the other side of the river’ in the same town as Stefanie. Our evening walk home through the outskirts to Urfahr now took longer, although at least it gave Adolf and me additional time to discuss many pressing matters. The route took us over the Danube bridge, and if something was preoccupying us particularly, we would go back and forth across the Danube until the conversation came to an end or more accurately, Adolf exhausted the possibilities of his monologue while I listened.