Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  But the glamorous façade concealed deep social cracks. The splendid architecture of Ringstrasse and the broad boulevards that expressed the self-confidence of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, as well as their need to show off, stood in stark contrast to the shabby tenement buildings in the outer districts where working-class families lived in cramped quarters. “From a social perspective, Vienna around the turn of the century was one of the most difficult cities,” Hitler remarked in Mein Kampf. “Gleaming wealth alternated abruptly with repellent poverty.”5 But Vienna was more than just a city of stark social contrasts. It also attracted and magnified the problems of the multinational Austro-Hungarian state. Other than Berlin, no European city had such a high rate of immigration. Between 1880 and 1910 the city’s population doubled. The largest group of immigrants were the Czechs—by 1910 every fifth person in Vienna had Czech roots.6 Vienna’s Jewish population was also proportionally larger than in most other European cities. In 1910, over 175,000 Jews lived there—that was 8.7 per cent of the total population. The poorer segment of this group, chiefly immigrants from the eastern parts of the empire—Hungary, Galicia and Bukovina—lived in the Leopoldstadt district, nicknamed “Matzo Island” in the local slang.7

  Among Vienna’s ethnic Germans and in the German-speaking parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this massive immigration gave rise to fears of “foreignisation,” of losing the cultural and political hegemony that German Austrians considered their birthright. In reaction, numerous radical nationalist associations, political parties and popular movements had formed since the end of the nineteenth century.8 That, of course, provoked counter-reactions from other ethnic and cultural groups. One of the main arenas for nationalist conflict was the Reichsrat or Imperial Council, the parliament of the western half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1907, with the introduction of universal suffrage for men over the age of 24, Germans were no longer the strongest faction there, and the verbal duels fought between the spokesmen for various nationalities, right out in the public eye, were so bitter that many people believed the Habsburg monarchy was in crisis and the multinational state would soon be dissolved. Nowhere was the oft-cited fin-de-siècle mood—the intimation of coming seismic shifts and catastrophes—more palpable than in Vienna. “Everyone is stopped and waiting, maître d’s, hansom cab drivers and governments,” wrote the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus in 1899. “Everyone’s waiting for the end. Let’s hope the apocalypse is pleasant, Your Highness.”9

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  Immediately upon arriving in Vienna, Hitler told readers of Mein Kampf, he was cast into “a world of misery and poverty.”10 This was intentionally misleading. The financial cushion of his maternal inheritance, his orphan’s pension and occasional gifts from Aunt Hanni meant that the new arrival could continue his idle existence. In late February 1908, after Kubizek had joined him, the two friends moved into the larger room in Maria Zakrey’s apartment on Stumpergasse. Their rent was 20 crowns a month. Kubizek passed the entrance examination to the conservatory on the first go, so while his friend pursued his studies, Hitler whiled away his days with no goal or plan. He tended to get up late, a habit he retained even as Nazi Party leader and Reich chancellor, and when Kubizek returned from the conservatory, he usually found Hitler making sketches or brooding over his books.

  Hitler would often read until the early hours of the morning. “Books, always books,” recalled Kubizek. “I can’t picture Adolf without books. Books were his whole world.”11 Hitler’s favourite reading material was Germanic myths and heroic sagas, closely followed by art and architectural histories. But he also read contemporary works such as the plays of Ibsen and Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening.12 He quickly memorised everything he found important and useful and forgot the rest. In Mein Kampf, he would devote a long section to the “Art of Proper Reading,” which he claimed to have mastered from an early age. This consisted of “separating what’s valuable from what’s worthless so as to retain the former in your head for ever while not even seeing the latter, if possible, and definitely not carrying around senseless ballast.”13

  Whenever they could, the two friends attended the Vienna State Opera. “Before the world war, the opera was something wonderful!” Hitler still rhapsodised in 1942. “The culture there—unparalleled!”14 Often he and Kubizek had to stand in line for hours to get one of the coveted standing-room tickets. As they had in Linz, they found Wagner particularly intoxicating. “For Adolf everything else receded in importance before this unique mystical world the great master conjured up for us,” Kubizek recalled.15 Gustav Mahler had got fed up with being attacked by anti-Semites, and given up the directorship of the opera in 1907, but both young Wagnerians took the side of the Jewish conductor and composer in the controversy surrounding his interpretations of the operas.16

  Otherwise, Hitler’s taste in art remained utterly uninfluenced by Viennese modernism. He had no time for the works of Klimt and the Secession. Hitler preferred traditional art: the late romanticism of Arnold Böcklin, the neo-baroque monumental paintings of Hans Makart and above all the idyllic genre works of the Munich painter Eduard Grützner.17 “As a young man in Vienna I once saw a Grützner in the window of an art dealership,” he later told his “court photographer” Heinrich Hoffmann. “I was so thrilled I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”18 By contrast, Hitler regarded all abstract painting as “nothing more than crippled spattering.”19 He had equally little sympathy for the pioneers of a new functionalism in architecture like Adolf Loos. Hitler’s architectural heroes were the neoclassicists Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Gottfried Semper, and he spent hours staring up at the majestic buildings on Ringstrasse.20 “He forgot not just the time, but everything around him,” Kubizek wrote. “At home he would make me sketches of floor plans and longitudinal cuts, trying to recreate every interesting detail…For him Ringstrasse became a living object of study that allowed him to test his architectural knowledge and argue for his ideas.”21

  As time passed, Kubizek began to notice a change in his friend’s behaviour. Hitler would explode in rage at the slightest provocation, cursing a world that allegedly conspired against him. He was also prone to bouts of depression, in which he tortured himself with self-critical reproaches. Phases of frantic activity alternated with stretches of lethargy in which he succumbed to total idleness.22 One day, Hitler stunned Kubizek by announcing that he was going to write an opera called “Wieland the Blacksmith,” although he had only had a few months of piano lessons—from early October 1906 to late January 1907—and no idea at all how to compose music. Kubizek was forced to assist him in this adventurous project, until one day after several sleepless nights in which Hitler had worked himself into a frenzy, he gave up on the idea.23 The same thing happened with other projects. When an idea took hold of him, Hitler would immediately set to work in a blaze of activity only to suddenly lose interest and devote his attention to something else.

  In his 1938 essay “Brother Hitler,” Thomas Mann recognised “a manifestation of an artist’s nature” in the young man’s daydreaming. “Although it makes me feel ashamed,” Mann wrote,

  everything is there: the tendency to be “difficult,” the laziness and pathetic amorphousness of adolescence, the refusal to be accommodated, the what-do-you-really-want, the semi-idiotic vegetation of a social and spiritual bohemian, the arrogant, self-inflated refusal of all reasonable and honourable activity—and on what basis? For the sake of an obscure intimation that one is destined for something indefinable, which would make people burst into laughter if it were ever possible to name.24

  In their room on Stumpergasse, the two friends began to get on each other’s nerves. Not only did Hitler feel disturbed in his autodidactic studies whenever Kubizek practised the piano, he was also jealous that his room-mate proudly went to the conservatory every morning and enjoyed one success after another, while he, who felt himself called to be an artist, had had the doors of the Academy of Fine Arts slammed in his face. The excitable 19-year-old had still
not told Kubizek about his rejection, but one night after they had fought yet again, it burst out of him. “They rejected me,” Hitler confessed. “I was thrown out, excluded.” His confession was accompanied by a wave of insults. As Kubizek recalled:

  “This academy!” Hitler yelled. “Nothing but a pack of cramped, old, outmoded servants of the state, clueless bureaucrats, stupid creations of the civil service! The whole academy should be dynamited!” His face was pale, his lips were pressed so tightly together that they went white. His eyes were glowing. How uncanny his eyes were! As if all the hatred of which he was capable were burning in those eyes.25

  It was one of the rare moments when the otherwise secretive Hitler opened up to another person. The arrogant pose, with which Hitler sought to demonstrate his superiority over his friend, actually concealed his own massive uncertainty as to his future as an artist.

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  Perhaps that was one of the reasons why the young Hitler, in Kubizek’s account, began to get interested in politics. On numerous occasions, he visited the Imperial Council and listened in the gallery to the debates, which were conducted in ten different languages. In retrospect, he claimed to have been outraged by what he called a “pathetic spectacle—a gesticulating, wildly motioning mass shrieking in every key at once and over them all a harmless old uncle, who worked himself into a sweat, ringing a bell and trying to restore the dignity of the house with words of conciliation, then warning.”26 Such scenes, Hitler would have his readers believe in Mein Kampf, had produced his deeply ingrained contempt for parliamentarianism and the entire concept of democratic majority rule. Kubizek, who once tagged along with Hitler and soon decided to leave, disgusted by the tumult, observed his friend reacting quite differently: “He stood up, his fists clenched and his face burning with excitement. I decided to remain seated quietly, although I had no idea what the debate was about.”27

  There can be no doubt that the incendiary political climate in Vienna greatly influenced the young man from the provinces, who was susceptible to radical slogans. As a pupil back in Linz, he had got involved in the German School Association, whose mission was to set up German-language schools and kindergartens in multilingual areas.28 Hitler was convinced of the cultural superiority of everything German before he arrived in the Austrian capital. “When I came to Vienna, my sympathies were already fully and exclusively with the pan-Germanic movement,” he wrote—this time plausibly—in Mein Kampf.29 Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the founder of the movement in Austria, was one of the politicians the new arrival in Vienna most admired. Schönerer’s desire to unite the German part of Austria with Imperial Germany, which entailed the dissolution of the multinational Habsburg state, must have exercised a considerable fascination on the young Hitler. He would later praise the fervent nationalist and Bismarck admirer Schönerer for “recognising more clearly than anyone else the inevitable end of the Austrian state.”30 It is uncertain whether the 19-year-old Hitler had much time for the cult of personality that grew up around Schönerer within the pan-Germanic movement. But he did take over some elements of that cult, for example the “Heil” greeting and the title Führer, into the NSDAP.31

  By the turn of the century Schönerer was past the height of his power—1907 was the last time he had a seat in the council. His fight against the Catholic Church, pursued under the slogan “Let’s get free of Rome,” had offended a lot of his Catholic sympathisers. In Mein Kampf, Hitler criticised the “free of Rome” campaign as a major mistake, saying that Schönerer had possessed “insufficient understanding of the psyche of the broad masses.”32 But what Schönerer lacked, Hitler found in another politician: Karl Lueger, the Vienna mayor and founder of the Christian Social Party, who was at the height of his popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lueger’s political activity, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, was focused on the middle classes, which were threatened with extinction and who gave him an “unshakeable base that was willing to make sacrifices and fight tenaciously.”33

  As a disciple of Schönerer, Hitler maintained in one of his later monologues, he had initially opposed the Christian Social Party, but with time he had developed a “great personal respect” for Lueger. “I heard him speak for the first time in the Volkshalle in the city hall,” Hitler recalled. “I was of two minds. I wanted to hate him, but I couldn’t help admiring him. He had a great talent for speaking.”34 Lueger’s oratorical skills were not the only quality Hitler admired. He also appreciated Lueger’s rigorous Germanophile policies, advanced with the slogan “Vienna is German and must remain German.”35 Moreover, Hitler was impressed with the remarkable modernisation of the city’s infrastructure for which the mayor had been responsible since taking office in 1897. Lueger had not only municipalised Vienna’s gas and electricity suppliers and its public transport system, he also oversaw improvements to healthcare and social benefits, and established parks and other green areas. “Lueger was the greatest example of a local politician and the most brilliant mayor we’ve ever had,” Hitler later said as Reich chancellor.36 When Lueger died in March 1910, his young admirer Hitler was among the hundreds of thousands of people who lined the streets to watch the funeral procession.37

  Next to Lueger’s Christian Social Party, the Social Democrats were the strongest political force in pre-war Vienna. Hitler’s relationship with them was strangely ambiguous. On the one hand, he was moved by the social misery that he encountered everywhere in the city. He spent weeks drawing up plans for social housing blocks so that the working population would have cheaper and better accommodation.38 On the other hand, he was scared of sinking down into the proletariat himself. “Perhaps,” Kubizek mused, “the unbelievable energy he poured into his autodidactic studies masked the instinctive attempt to protect himself from the misery of the masses by acquiring the broadest and most thorough education he could.”39 Hitler attended a number of workers’ demonstrations in Vienna, but he found them more threatening than inspiring. “For almost two hours,” he wrote in Mein Kampf of one such incident, “I stood there and watched with bated breath the unsettling human dragon-worm that slowly crawled by. Anxious and downcast, I finally left the square and wandered home.”40

  As a pan-Germanic sympathiser and a radical nationalist, Hitler loathed the Austrian Social Democrats’ internationalist policy of mutual understanding with Slavic peoples. He suspected the Social Democratic leadership of exploiting the hardship of the working populace for their own gain. “Who are the leaders of these people living in misery?” Kubizek recalled Hitler asking after a demonstration. “They’re not men who have experienced the hardships of the little guy themselves, but rather ambitious, power-hungry politicians, some of whom have no idea of reality and who are getting rich off the misery of the masses.”41 Hitler concluded his bitter indictment with a tirade against political profiteering. Opposition to the Social Democratic outlook, which he considered “un-German” and corrupt, would remain a constant in Hitler’s political world view. It was part of the poisonous legacy of his Vienna years.

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  In early June 1908, at the end of his second semester, Kubizek travelled back to Linz to spend the holidays with his parents. When Hitler brought him to the train station Kubizek did not suspect that it would be thirty years before he would see his friend again. Left behind in Vienna, Hitler sent Kubizek several postcards and two longish letters in which he described his “hermit’s existence” with forced good cheer. He reported that he had killed a “monster bedbug” in their room and got over a “bronchial flu.” Hitler also stressed that he had been anything but lazy in his friend’s absence: “I’m writing a lot right now, usually in the afternoons and evenings.”42 In the latter half of August, Hitler sent one last postcard from Waldviertel, where he was visiting relatives. Then he broke off all contact. When Kubizek returned to Vienna in November 1908, Zakrey informed him that Hitler had moved out without leaving a forwarding address.43

  In September 1908, Hitler had applied for a second time to the A
cademy of Fine Arts. This time he was not even invited to take the entrance exam.44 This may well be the reason he abandoned his friend so suddenly and with no explanation. Hitler’s self-confidence was badly shaken. His dream of a great artistic career seemed to be over. Hitler’s recurrent tirades even as Reich chancellor against the Academy “schoolmasters” who had “rejected him as untalented” showed how deeply he had been insulted.45 The young Hitler no doubt felt that he and his mission were being utterly neglected and he decided to withdraw completely in the autumn of 1908. He broke off contact not only with Kubizek but with his family as well. On 18 November, he rented a new apartment on Felberstrasse 22, near the western train station and not far from Stumpergasse. He lived there until 20 August 1909.46

  We have no reliable information about Hitler’s time on Felberstrasse. For three quarters of a year, it is as though he had disappeared from view. But we can assume that his financial situation was getting worse and worse every month. He must have just about used up his maternal inheritance by that point, and his orphan’s pension alone was not enough to live on. For the first time, Hitler had to make the sort of hard sacrifices he later boasted about. “For months I didn’t have a hot meal,” he claimed in one of his monologues. “I lived off milk and dried bread.”47