Hitler’s grades did not improve. In 1903–4 he was only promoted after taking a supplementary test and agreeing to transfer to a different school. His mother enrolled him in another Realschule in Steyr, eighty kilometres away from Linz, where he lived with foster parents. For the first time Adolf was separated from his mother, and he was apparently quite homesick. Even as Reich chancellor, he still complained about “how he had been filled with yearning and resentment when his mother sent him to Steyr.”43 One of his teachers there recalled a “medium-sized, somewhat pale pupil” who “acted somewhat shy and cowed, probably because it was the first time he had been away from home.”44 But Hitler did not stay in Steyr very long. In the autumn of 1905, with his grades remaining poor, he faked an illness and convinced his mother to take him out of school. He would retain a deep hatred of schools and teachers for the rest of his life. “Teachers—I can’t stand them,” he once remarked. “The ones who are any good are the exceptions to the rule.”45 Among the few good ones in Hitler’s eyes was his history teacher in Linz, Leopold Poetsch, whom he singled out for praise in Mein Kampf. Poetsch, Hitler wrote, had known how “not just to captivate but to motivate when he spoke.”46
By the time the drop-out Hitler returned to his family, Klara had already sold their house in Leonding. In June 1905 she rented an apartment in Humboldtstrasse 31 in Linz. Her stepdaughter Angela had just moved in with her new husband, a civil servant named Leo Raubal, so only four people lived in the apartment: Klara, Adolf, Paula and Hanni. For a while a boarder, a pupil named Wilhelm Hagmüller, also ate lunch with the Hitlers.
Linz, the provincial capital of Upper Austria, had some 60,000 inhabitants around 1900, many of whom like the Hitlers originally came from the countryside. Thanks to its location on the right bank of the Danube, the city had become an important railway crossing, and its main attraction was its central train station, which was a stopping point for the express trains that connected Munich and Vienna. For a provincial capital, Linz had a lot of culture on offer. During Hitler’s time there, the director of the Linz Conservatory, August Göllerich, developed an impressive repertoire of operas and established a reputation as a leading interpreter of Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner.47
In retrospect, Hitler described the two years he spent in Linz before moving to Vienna as “almost a beautiful dream.”48 His life was one of comfortable idleness. Hitler had no intention of starting an apprenticeship. At the age of 16, he spent most of his days in his room drawing, painting and reading. He also took long walks along Linz’s main boulevard, which led from the train station to the bridge over the Danube; he was always neatly attired, affecting the airs of a dandified university student, swinging a black walking stick with a delicate ivory handle.49 In the evenings, he attended the operas in Linz’s Landestheater. It is presumably here that he met his friend August Kubizek, the son of a decorator and upholsterer, in 1905.50
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In the autumn of 1953, three years before his death, Kubizek published his recollections of the “friend from his youth.” They are significant in so far as they are the only substantial account of Hitler’s Linz years, but they must be read critically since they are based on an earlier shorter manuscript that Kubizek had written for the Nazi Party archives in 1943 at the behest of Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann. Not surprisingly, Kubizek’s recollections are full of admiration for the later Führer. Nonetheless, although he embellished the odd incident post-war and his memory occasionally failed him, Kubizek’s memoirs remain a credible source.51
Kubizek is the author of the only description of Hitler as a young man, and it is worth quoting extensively:
Hitler was of medium build and thin. Even then he was a bit taller than his mother. He didn’t seem all that strong. On the contrary, he was somewhat gangly and slight…His nose was straight and well proportioned, nothing unusual. He had a high forehead that sloped back slightly, and I found it unfortunate that he was already in the habit of brushing his hair as deeply as possible over it…In my entire life, I have never met a person…whose eyes dominated his face as much as my friend’s. He had his mother’s light-coloured eyes and a greatly intensified version of her penetrating stare…It was uncanny how his eyes changed their expression, especially when Adolf spoke. Adolf literally spoke with his eyes…When he visited me at home for the first time and I introduced him to my mother, she said to me that night before going to bed: “Your friend has such remarkable eyes!” I remember that all too well. There was more fear than admiration in her voice.52
Hitler’s eyes would always be described as his most extraordinary feature. Many people thought they were the secret of his attractiveness to women.53
The two young friends could hardly have differed more in personality. “While I was a quiet, somewhat dreamy boy, sensitive, adaptable and conciliatory,” Kubizek wrote, “Hitler was very wild and temperamental. Harmless things, like a couple of hasty words, could make him explode with anger.”54 Although he was a year younger than Kubizek, Hitler dominated their relationship, doing most of the talking. “He felt compelled to speak and needed someone to listen,” Kubizek recalled.55 It was in early life then that the egomaniacal Hitler developed the habit of holding monologues that was to make life so hard for his entourage later on.
The bond between two such unequal young men was their joint passion for music, especially Richard Wagner. “My youthful enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth knew no limits,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.56 Such enthusiasm was common among many adults in both the Habsburg monarchy and the German Reich. Thomas Mann, for instance, wrote in 1907 that people had to experience Wagner’s art “to understand anything about our age.”57 Hitler read everything he could find on Wagner. Sometimes, when out on an extended walk in Linz with his friend, he would suddenly stop and recite a passage from Wagner’s correspondence or his diaries.58 Lohengrin always remained Hitler’s favourite opera. The Hitlers’ boarder Hagmüller recalled the young Adolf pacing his room in Humboldtstrasse singing “Du Schwan zieh hin.”59
Kubizek described Hitler as being completely enraptured at a performance of the early Wagner opera Rienzi, which tells the story of the medieval Italian populist Cola di Rienzi, who freed Rome from tyranny but was ultimately betrayed by his people and died in the rubble of the burning Italian capital. For a long time, Kubizek recalled, Hitler was silent. Then he led his friend up to the top of the Freinberg hill, clasped his hands and the words began to spill out. “In grand, captivating images, he told me about his future and the future of his people,” Kubizek wrote. “He spoke of a special mission that would one day be his. I…could hardly follow him. It took me many years to understand what these hours of otherworldly rapture had meant to my friend.” While visiting the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth in August 1939, Hitler recalled that evening on Freinberg and turned to Winifred Wagner with the remark, “That was the hour everything started.”60 Obviously, this account was driven by the desire to transform the Rienzi episode into a moment of profound political awakening: Kubizek’s projection and Hitler’s need for exaggerated self-importance dovetailed perfectly. But if we filter out the mythologising, we can see the role the young Hitler’s passion for Wagner played in his unstable psyche. It gave him the intoxicating feeling of being much more important than he was. It helped him escape into a dream world, where his own future was not dark but bright and clear.
More than once Hitler announced that he felt an artistic calling and loathed any sort of middle-of-the-road “breadwinning” job. His friend Kubizek, who himself aspired to a career in music, admired Hitler for the apparent seriousness with which he pursued his ambitions. Hitler was constantly drawing and sketching, and he developed fantastical plans for remaking Linz that included a new gigantic Danube bridge and a new concert hall. “I felt as though I had entered an architect’s office,” Kubizek wrote, recalling the first time he visited Hitler’s room.61 But the bold urban developer never seems to have asked himself whether the sketches he put on paper could ever
be realised. He cocooned himself in a bizarre, alternative world somewhere between dream and reality.
The same is true for the 17-year-old Hitler’s “first love.” In Kubizek’s more-than-ample account, the two friends encountered a beautiful blonde girl named Stefanie Isac in the spring of 1906 while out for an evening stroll through the centre of town. Hitler immediately developed a huge crush on her and could think of nothing else, although he never dared to introduce himself. For her part, Stefanie never noticed that she had a secret admirer. Kubizek explained his friend’s unusual reticence with the idea that actually meeting the girl would have destroyed Hitler’s ideal picture of her as the embodiment of everything feminine. No matter whether Kubizek’s tale of young romance was true, it reflects Hitler’s characteristic disinclination to let cold, hard reality get in the way of wishful thinking.62
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For two weeks in early May 1906, Hitler travelled to Vienna for the first time and was overwhelmed by the many sights the metropolis had to offer—the museums, the State Opera, the Austrian parliament, the town hall, the Ringstrasse—which reminded him of the “magic of A Thousand and One Nights.”63 On two evenings, Hitler attended the opera to see productions of Tristan and The Flying Dutchman by Gustav Mahler and with sets designed by Alfred Roller. He sent four postcards back to Kubizek and these are the earliest surviving examples of Hitler’s handwriting. His hand was full of verve and astonishingly adult, although the 17-year-old was no master of spelling, grammar and punctuation. The occasional grandiloquent, melodramatic tone presaged his later speeches and writings. Describing the State Opera on his second postcard, Hitler wrote:
The interior of the palace is not uplifting. Whereas the outside is full of powerful majesty that gives the structure the gravity of a monument to art, the interior triggers admiration rather than makes one appreciate the dignity. Only when the powerful waves of sound flood the space and the rushing of the wind yields to those aural waves, does one feel sublimity and forget the gold and velvet with which the interior is burdened.64
Even this brief postcard excerpt contained five spelling and grammatical errors.
The visit convinced Hitler that he had to move to the Austrian capital. “In his mind, he was no longer in Linz, but lived at the centre of Vienna,” Kubizek recalled.65 But then his mother suddenly fell seriously ill, disrupting his plans. In January 1907, Klara’s Jewish family doctor, Eduard Bloch, diagnosed breast cancer. Thirty-four years later in American exile, Bloch described how the young Hitler had taken the terrible news: “His long, pale face twisted. Tears flowed from his eyes. Did his mother have no chance, he asked.”66 On 18 January, Klara Hitler was operated on in the Barmherzige Schwestern hospital in Linz.67 She was discharged on 5 February and seemed to be on the mend. Because she could not manage the flights of stairs up to the Hitlers’ third-floor apartment in Humboldtstrasse, the family moved to the borough of Urfahr on the other side of the Danube in mid-May 1907, where they occupied a small but bright apartment in the first floor of a new building on Blütenstrasse 3.
In early September 1907, with his mother’s condition apparently stable, Hitler travelled again to Vienna to take the entrance test for the Academy of Fine Arts. One hundred and twelve candidates applied. Hitler made it past the first round, in which thirty-three candidates were weeded out, but he failed to clear the second one, in which only twenty-eight applicants got through. “Too few heads. Sample drawing unsatisfactory” was the admissions committee’s verdict.68 Hitler had gone to Vienna convinced that he would pass the exam with flying colours, so the rejection hit him all the harder—like “an abrupt blow from nowhere,” as he would write in Mein Kampf.69 When he asked for an explanation, the academy director told him that his talent lay in architecture, not art. But he could not study architecture because he had not completed the Gymnasium. “Downtrodden, I left Theophil Hansen’s marvellous building,” Hitler later wrote.70 People have perennially speculated about how history might have turned out had Hitler passed that admissions test. Most likely not only his life story, but Germany’s and the world’s would have taken a different course.
When Hitler returned to Linz in October, his mother’s health had deteriorated and he tended to her with great devotion. “Adolf read her every wish from her eyes and showed her the tenderest sort of care,” Kubizek recalled. “I had never seen him be so solicitous and gentle.”71 That account tallies with the observations of Dr. Bloch, who made daily house calls to ease his patient’s pain. In the night of 20–21 December 1907, Klara Hitler died at the young age of 47. The doctor found her son the next morning at her death bed. “In almost forty years of practice, I have never seen a young man so utterly filled with pain and grief as the young Adolf Hitler,” Bloch recalled in November 1938.72
After his rejection by the Academy of Fine Arts, which he concealed from his family and friends, it was doubly difficult for Hitler to get over his mother’s death. In her he likely lost the only person he ever loved.73 Yet there is no evidence that her doctor’s Jewishness was at the root of his pathological hatred for Jews.74 On 23 December, the day of Klara Hitler’s funeral, the 18-year-old Hitler appeared in Bloch’s office and declared, “I will be forever grateful to you, Doctor.”75 And he did not forget his gratitude in his later years. In 1938, when he celebrated Austria’s incorporation into the German Reich with a triumphant march into his “home city” of Linz, he is said to have asked: “Tell me, is good old Dr. Bloch still alive?”76 Alone among Linz’s Jews, Bloch was put under the special protection of the Gestapo. In late 1940, he and his wife were able to flee to the United States via Portugal.
After New Year’s Day 1908, Hitler visited his parents’ graves in Leonding. “Adolf was very composed,” wrote Kubizek. “I knew how deeply his mother’s death had shaken him…I was astonished how calmly and clearly he spoke about it.”77 There was nothing keeping Hitler in Linz now, and he immediately started preparing his move to Vienna. Together with his sister Paula, he applied to the Linz authorities for orphans’ pensions. They were each entitled to 25 crowns a month. The inheritance from their father of 625 crowns each was deposited in a closed account they could not access until they had reached the age of 24, but the two siblings could make use of an inheritance of 2,000 crowns from their mother. Hitler was by no means wealthy, as some have claimed, but the money was enough to live on in Vienna for a year without having to work regularly.78
On 4 February, the owner of the house on Blütenstrasse, Magdalena Hanisch, asked her Viennese friend Johanna Motloch to try to convince the set designer Alfred Roller, who was also a professor at the Academy of Applied Arts, to intervene on Hitler’s behalf. “He’s a serious, ambitious young man, very mature for his age of 19, from a completely respectable family,” Hanisch wrote. Roller promptly answered: “Young Hitler should come see me and bring samples of his work so that I can see what they’re like.” Several days later, Hanisch described Hitler’s reaction to her friend: “He read the letter silently, word for word, with reverence and a happy smile on his face, as though he wanted to memorise it.” Could it be, after his disappointment the preceding October, that a door was opening to the sort of artistic life he coveted? In a letter to Johanna Motloch, Hitler expressed his “deepest gratitude” for giving him “access to the great master of stage design.”79 It is strange, therefore, that in Vienna he never took Roller up on his offer. If we believe Hitler’s later explanations, the reason was shyness. In one of his table talks he claimed that he had been too nervous during his early days in Vienna to approach a person like Roller. That, he said, was as impossible for him “as speaking before five people.”80
On 12 February 1908, Hitler left for Vienna. His bags contained his books and a few important family documents such as letters from his mother, which he ordered to be burned in 1945.81 He had convinced Kubizek, who brought him to the train station, to move to Vienna as well to get musical training at the conservatory. His sister Paula and aunt Hanni initially remained in the apartme
nt in Urfahr, but Hanni soon moved back to Waldviertel to be near her relatives. Twelve-year-old Paula then went to live with her half-sister Angela Raubal.82 As he had done on his last visit in October, Hitler moved in with the unmarried seamstress Maria Zakrey in the courtyard of Stumpergasse 29 of the Viennese district of Mariahilf, an area for “little people.” On 18 February, he sent a postcard to Kubizek that read: “I eagerly await news of your arrival…All of Vienna is waiting. So come soon.”83
2
The Vienna Years
“Vienna was and is the most difficult, if also the most thorough, school I went through,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. “I came to the city half a boy and left it as a quiet, serious adult.”1 The five years from 1908 to 1913 that Hitler spent in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were deeply significant. In many respects the impressions his new environment made upon him and the experiences he had there greatly influenced his character and his political views. It was no accident that he would always come back to these years in the monologues he later held in his headquarters.
Fin-de-siècle Vienna was a major European metropolis—with around two million inhabitants, it was the continent’s fourth most populous city after London, Paris and Berlin. The seat of the Habsburg monarchy was not only famous for its glorious past. With its industry, large commercial firms, banks and modern means of transport, it was also a vibrant economic centre, and its theatres, concert halls, artists’ studios, publishing houses and newspapers made it a hive of culture as well. “Hardly any other city in Europe had such cultural urgency as Vienna,” wrote Viennese author Stefan Zweig, looking back on the years before the First World War.2 Modernists in various branches of culture—the painters Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, the architects Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, the writers Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the composer Arnold Schönberg and many others—were creating a furore.3 Emperor Franz Josef I, nearly 80 years old, still resided in the Hofburg Palace. When Hitler moved to Vienna in 1908, the aged monarch—a guarantee, so it seemed, of absolute stability and a symbol of lasting leadership—celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of his rule with a series of gala dinners and a parade full of pomp.4
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