My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  His eyes blazed, his temper flared up. “Incurable – what do they mean by that?” he screamed. “Not that the malady is incurable, but that the doctors aren’t capable of curing it. My mother isn’t even old. Forty-seven isn’t an age where you give up hope. But as soon as the doctors can’t do anything, they call it incurable.”

  He says he will stay in Linz and look after his mother and the housekeeping. Kubizek asks him if he can manage, knowing his friend’s distaste for the necessary chores others have always carried out on his behalf, how disdainful he is of such monotonous work. Hitler replies that a person can do anything if they have to. For the next month he does exactly that. Not a word does he say about the issues on which he normally holds forth; politics, architecture, art, none of these things seems to occupy him any longer, only his ailing mother, close to death, and the grief of that. He moves her bed into the kitchen, the warmest room in the apartment, and sleeps on the couch next to her. He reads to her, cooks her food, helps his younger sister with her homework. One day Kubizek finds him scrubbing the floor, Frau Hitler smiles on seeing his surprise and says with pride, “There, you see, Adolf can do anything.”

  I had never before seen in him such loving tenderness. I did not trust my own eyes and ears. Not a cross word, not an impatient remark, no violent insistence on having his own way. He forgot himself entirely in those weeks and lived only for his mother. Although Adolf, according to Frau Klara, had inherited many of his father’s traits, I realized then how much his nature resembled his mother’s. Certainly this was partly due to the fact that he had spent the previous four years of his life alone with her. But over and above that there was a peculiar spiritual harmony between mother and son which I have never since come across. All that separated them was pushed into the background. Adolf never mentioned the disappointment which he had suffered in Vienna. For the time being, cares for the future no longer seemed to exist. An atmosphere of relaxed, almost serene contentment surrounded the dying woman.

  December is cold and bleak, a damp mist hangs over the river; the few hours in which the sun shines allow no warmth. Kubizek visits them daily; on one occasion he is not admitted, Hitler comes out instead and tells him his mother is suffering terrible pain. Snow falls, dusting the rooftops white, Christmas approaches. On the morning of the twenty-first of December, Hitler appears at the Kubizek home. From his distraught expression they realize what has happened. She has died, he tells them. Her final wish was to be buried next to her husband in Leonding. Hitler is beside himself and barely able to speak.

  Kubizek writes nothing of the doctor’s presence during the final weeks of Klara Hitler’s life, yet according to Hamann he was there in daily attendance from November 6. He administered morphine and treated her with iodoform, a treatment “typical of the time and extremely painful” – cloths containing the substance were laid on the open wound to “burn it out,” resulting in excruciating thirst and the simultaneous inability of the patient to swallow.

  In 1941, Bloch published an article in Collier’s magazine detailing the course of the illness and the circumstances surrounding it, in which he stated that Hitler was tormented by his mother’s treatment and expressed gratitude to him for administering the morphine. Bloch’s version confirms Kubizek’s account.

  In the practice of my profession it is natural that I should have witnessed many scenes such as this one, yet none of them left me with quite the same impression. In all my career I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.

  Bloch also briefly described his general impression of Hitler:

  Many biographers have put him down as harsh-voiced, defiant, untidy; as a young ruffian who personified all that is unattractive. This simply is not true. As a youth he was quiet, well-mannered, and neatly dressed. He was tall, sallow, old for his age. He was neither robust nor sickly. Perhaps “frail-looking” would best describe him. His eyes – inherited from his mother – were large, melancholy, and thoughtful. To a very large extent this boy lived within himself. What dreams he dreamed I do not know.

  On December 23, Kubizek and his mother visit Hitler’s home. The weather has changed, the snow in the streets turned to slush, the air a mist. Frau Hitler is laid out in her bed, her face waxen, Kubizek writes that death must have come to her as a release from terrible pain. Paula, who is eleven years old, is crying, but not Hitler. Kubizek and his mother go down into the street. The body is placed in a coffin and brought down into the hall. The priest blesses the deceased and the small cortège begins its progress. Hitler follows the coffin, wearing a long black overcoat and black gloves, carrying a black top hat in his hand. He is stern and composed. To his left is his brother-in-law, Raubal, and between them Paula. His half sister, Angela, heavily pregnant, follows in a closed carriage. The rest of the cortège comprises only a few neighbors and acquaintances. Kubizek describes it as miserable.

  The next day is Christmas Eve, Kubizek invites Hitler to spend it with his family, Hitler declines. Nor does he wish to join Raubal and his sister, who from now on are to look after Paula. Instead he wanders about the streets of Linz through the night, if what he later tells Kubizek is true.

  Little mention is made of any of this in Mein Kampf. Of his mother’s death and the circumstances surrounding it, Hitler writes as follows:

  It was the conclusion of a long and painful illness which from the beginning left little hope of recovery. Yet it was a dreadful blow, particularly for me. I had honored my father, but my mother I had loved.

  Poverty and hard reality now compelled me to take a quick decision. What little my father had left had been largely exhausted by my mother’s grave illness; the orphan’s pension to which I was entitled was not enough for me even to live on, and so I was faced with the problem of somehow making my own living.

  In my hand a suitcase full of clothes and underwear; in my heart an indomitable will, I journeyed to Vienna. I, too, hoped to wrest from Fate what my father had accomplished fifty years before; I, too, wanted to become “something” – but on no account a civil servant.

  The little “but” in the sentence concerning his mother and father, “but my mother I had loved,” more than suggests that he did not love his father, and by dwelling so little on his mother’s death and immediately directing the text toward the future, and so optimistically, in such a way as to close the circle of what, if Mein Kampf is to be believed, has been the predominant and governing conflict in his life so far, his refusal to become a civil servant, he gives the impression that the grief of losing his mother was transient, an impression reinforced by the fact that she is hardly mentioned at all in the text and that the two years they spent together are passed over in a single sentence. This gives a sense of vigor and drive, a new beginning, pockets empty, his own devices being his only resource. In the chapter that follows he goes back in time, writing:

  When my mother died, Fate, at least in one respect, had made its decisions.

  In the last months of her sickness, I had gone to Vienna to take the entrance examination for the Academy. I had set out with a pile of drawings, convinced that it would be child’s play to pass the examination. At the Realschule I had been by far the best in my class at drawing, and since then my ability had developed amazingly; my own satisfaction caused me to take a joyful pride in hoping for the best.

  He gets through the first part of the exam, but fails the remainder. “I was so convinced that I would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue. Yet that is what happened.”

  This happens before the death of his mother, and since he has already described that event, and the previous chapter concludes with his moving to Vienna, his rejection by the Academy is tacked on to the description of his arrival in Vienna following his mother’s death, meaning that the rejection and his mother’s death are reported in reverse order and separated. This gives the impression that while his mother’s death was a blow it was also a release in that it brought with it a s
ense of future, though in real life it must have seemed quite different: his mother is gravely ill, he leaves for Vienna to take his entrance exam, fails, his dream thereby in ruins, and with that failure he returns home to his mother, who then dies. In this there is no future, but quite the opposite, his life closes in on him. She was the very center of his existence, and he of hers. His mother’s condition deteriorates, he returns from Vienna, they both know she is dying, she is concerned as to his future, and he never tells her he failed the entrance exam to the Academy.

  * * *

  The first eighteen years of Hitler’s life are described in only fourteen pages of Mein Kampf, and the narrative is furthermore dotted with reflections on nationalism, history, and his own theories on a number of subjects. The period in which he lived in Vienna, the five years from 1908 to 1913, takes up all of ninety-eight pages. But there is hardly a sentence that touches on his personal life, and what little he writes in this respect is general in nature.

  To me Vienna, the city which, to so many, is the epitome of innocent pleasure, a festive playground for merrymakers, represents, I am sorry to say, merely the living memory of the saddest period of my life.

  Even today this city can arouse in me nothing but the most dismal thoughts. For me the name of this Phaeacian city represents five years of hardship and misery. Five years in which I was forced to earn a living, first as a day laborer, then as a smaller painter; a truly meager living which never sufficed to appease even my daily hunger. Hunger was then my faithful bodyguard; he never left me for a moment and partook of all I had, share and share alike. Every book I acquired aroused his interest; a visit to the Opera prompted his attentions for days at a time; my life was a continuous struggle with this pitiless friend. And yet during this time I studied as never before. Aside from my architecture and my rare visits to the Opera, paid for in hunger, I had but one pleasure: my books.

  At that time I read enormously and thoroughly. All the free time my work left me was employed in my studies. In this way I forged in a few years’ time the foundation of a knowledge from which I still draw nourishment today.

  Nothing of this is untrue. He was poor, often hungry, and eked out a living painting for tourists or frame makers, a “meager” time indeed. In Mein Kampf he makes this out to be a necessary apprenticeship, a time in which, from his lowly position in society, he learned what it meant to be poor, what it meant to live in social misery, experiencing firsthand the dissolution of shared values and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. He presents himself as a manual laborer, describing how he involves himself in workers’ politics, the violence and the suppression of opinion that occurs at society’s lower levels, and he puts forward his visions of how all this may and ought to be dealt with. He tells of his visits to the parliament, giving rise to his disdain for parliamentarism and democracy. And he describes his first encounters with Jews, not personal but in the form of strange figures he sees on the streets. He gives a picture of a world disintegrating on all levels and in every imaginable way. Everything he experienced, even the misery in which he lived, is in this way given meaning: he observes, perceives, reads, thinks, and though his circumstances are poor, his life at this time is a school he would not have wished to have done without. He has entered the school of life, nothing of what he can do comes from any university, nothing of what he takes in and writes about is down to any theory, but is alone the result of practical reality.

  The pride in this account hides how badly he wants to enter the Academy and is clearly a rationalization after the fact. Everything points forward to the person he is now. But if we are to understand the kind of life he led in those five years, all Hitler’s future must be discarded. Nothing of what he did then pointed toward anything else. The misery into which he gradually sank was indeed misery. He was seen standing in line at a soup kitchen for the homeless; everything indicates he slept in the parks for a time. He had no friends, hardly any acquaintances, and what little social contact he had consisted of the fellow destitutes he encountered at a flophouse. Moreover, the five years he spent living in this way are perhaps the most crucial of all in a person’s life, those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three. Hitler was destitute, nothing of what he had believed in had turned out to be right, his dreams had fallen short, he was a person no one wanted and no one needed. He had lost his grip on reality, had practically no footing at all in the real world. If he had frozen to death in the night, no one would have cared. He was, in every sense, a nonentity, vanished into total anonymity, in the very gutter of society.

  Yet it began in a different place altogether. It began well. Arriving in Vienna he had with him his mother’s money, enough to keep him going for a year providing he was thrifty. He could reapply to the Academy. And he was not alone in the big city, Kubizek came with him.

  In his Hitler biography Ian Kershaw provides this depiction:

  When he did return to Vienna, in February 1908, it was not to pursue with all vigor the necessary course of action to become an architect, but to slide back into the life of indolence, idleness, and self-indulgence which he had followed before his mother’s death. He even now worked on Kubizek’s parents until they reluctantly agreed to let August leave his work in the family upholstery business to join him in Vienna in order to study music.

  Kubizek himself was for the rest of his life grateful that Hitler had talked his parents into allowing him to pursue his desire to study music. Self-indulgence was undoubtedly one of Hitler’s most prominent traits, yet it was this very eruptive, near-manic side of him too that meant he would throw himself with great abandon and urgency into whatever subject or issue might capture his imagination at a given time, this often being followed by periods of despondency, though such moods too could be quite as restless and insistent. What Kershaw is perhaps alluding to is that this urgency was never directed, would never follow any plotted course or plan. While Hitler’s relatives most likely would have endorsed the description of him giving himself up to “indolence, idleness, and self-indulgence,” Hitler himself must certainly have seen things differently, there was something he wanted to become, something never quite within reach, that never quite turned out, which of course is by no means unusual for a young man of eighteen years old with ambitions of becoming an artist. Hitler was in every respect an autodidact, and like so many of his kind he became gradually more opinionated, a development exacerbated by his essentially solitary nature, inclined never to seek the company of others; he had a favorite bench in one of Vienna’s parks, slightly out of the way, where he would sit and read whenever he was not seated at one of the city’s many cafés poring through the newspapers, or else immersed in one of his many projects in his lodgings, whether drawing up plans for apartment buildings, opera houses, and concert halls, or writing plays and short stories – these all being matters to which he devoted himself during this time, all abandoned before completion, all witnessed by Kubizek, who lived by his side.

  * * *

  Kubizek arrives at the railway station in Vienna late one evening in winter. Hitler is waiting for him, elegantly clad, the ivory-handled walking stick in his hand, seemingly acclimatized and at ease with the hustle and bustle, already the city dweller. Hitler kisses him lightly on the cheek in greeting, they take a handle each of Kubizek’s heavy bag and head out into the city, “such a terrible noise that one could not hear oneself speak,” Adolf eventually leading them down a side street, Stumpergasse, to his rented room in a rear courtyard building.

  In the small room that he occupied, a miserable paraffin lamp was burning. I looked around me. The first thing that struck me were the sketches that lay around on the table, on the bed, everywhere. Adolf cleared the table, spread a piece of newspaper on it, and fetched a bottle of milk from the window. Then he brought sausage and bread. But I can still see his white, earnest face as I pushed all these things aside and opened the bag. Cold roast pork, stuffed buns, and other lovely things to eat. All he said was, “Yes, that’s what it is
to have a mother!” We ate like kings. Everything tasted of home.

  Kubizek is tired after his journey, his senses already bombarded, the hour is late, but still Hitler insists on showing him the city. How could someone just arriving in Vienna go to bed without first having seen the opera house? They go out. Kubizek writes that it feels as though he has been transported to another planet, so overwhelming is the impression. They proceed to the Stefansdom. The evening mist is so dense they cannot see the spire: “I could just make out the heavy, dark mass of the nave stretching up into the gray monotony of the mist, almost unearthly, as though not built by human hands.”

  Kershaw describes the same events as follows:

  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, Saint Stephen’s Cathedral (which could scarcely be seen through the mist), and the lovely church of Saint 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.

  Kershaw’s only source as to this evening is Kubizek’s book, which says nothing of Hitler “haranguing” him, and the sense, on seeing the opera, of having been transported to another planet, and of the cathedral appearing unearthly in the mist, as Kubizek writes, charging the experience with positive energy, is ignored by Kershaw; in his version the mist is negative, making the spire scarcely visible, and this is so in order to make Hitler out to be an unreasonable, self-indulgent, and egotistical young man oblivious to the needs of his friend. But if this had been the case, if the experience had been unambiguously negative, why does Kubizek not say so? Kubizek is a friend, his arrival has been greatly anticipated, Hitler is eager to show him all the things he has seen himself, all that is marvelous about the city, and can anyone blame him for that? How can we say that Hitler’s enthusiasm was in fact disregard for his friend, when at the same time his friend has described what happened as a positive experience? Was Kubizek duped? Was he too stupid to realize that Hitler was using him? Did he not understand that viewing a cathedral in the mist is a washout, not an unearthly experience?