Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  An episode Hitler described at length in Mein Kampf may have happened at this time. “In order not to starve,” Hitler claimed, he had worked on a building site. Here the conversations of the unionised construction workers had “enraged him to the extreme.” Everything was dragged through the dirt—the nation, the fatherland, the authority of law, religion and morality. When he dared contradict them, the construction workers threatened to throw him from the scaffolding. He quit the job, one experience richer.48 It seems unlikely, however, that this story was true. Hitler probably invented it as an illustration of how heroically he had combated the “false teachings” of Marxism even as a 20-year-old.49

  On 22 August 1909, Hitler moved to cheaper quarters on Sechshauser Strasse 58. Previously, when registering his address, he had described himself on the forms as an “artist” or a “student.” Now he called himself a “writer,” although he had yet to publish a line.50 On 16 September, he had to vacate his room, probably because he could not pay the rent. Under the heading “new address,” his deregistration card read “unknown.” It seems that Hitler had no fixed address during the following months. Looking back on the autumn of 1909 in January 1914, he wrote that it had been an “endlessly bitter time.” Even five years later, he still carried “mementoes in the form of frost boils on my fingers, hands and feet.”51 This may be one of Hitler’s typical exaggerations, but there is no doubt that he had hit rock bottom.52 The young man, who according to Kubizek had always dressed properly and was extremely conscious of hygiene, was now one of the army of homeless people who slept on Vienna’s park benches or gathered in the city’s soup kitchens for a hot meal and to warm up when the weather was cold.53

  In the late autumn of 1909, Hitler went to the Meidling homeless shelter, which offered some 1,000 people a bed and soup and bread every night. There he made the acquaintance of the man in the neighbouring cot, a convicted vagrant named Reinhold Hanisch. As Hanisch recalled in May 1933: “On the metal cot to my left was a spindly young man with bloody feet. I still had some bread from the farmers, and I shared it with him. Back then, I spoke in a thick Berlin dialect. He was crazy about Germany. I had wandered through his home town Braunau am Inn so it was easy to follow his stories.”54 Every morning the men using the shelter had to pack their things. They were not allowed to return until the evening. In the meantime, Hanisch and Hitler tried to earn some money as day labourers, but Hitler did not hold out long shovelling snow. “He had no winter coat and was frozen blue,” Hanisch recalled.55

  When the 20-year-old Hitler, who was too weak for physical labour, boasted to his new friend that he had gone to the Academy of Fine Arts, Hanisch hit upon the idea of exploiting Hitler’s artistic talent. He suggested that Hitler paint postcards, which Hanisch would then sell in taverns. They would split the profits. Pressed by his new partner, Hitler asked his aunt Hanni for 50 crowns to buy paint and brushes. Business was better than expected: on 9 February 1910, the two men were able to quit the homeless shelter for a men’s home on Meldemannstrasse 27.56 Hitler would spend his next three years there.

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  The men’s home in the working-class district of Brigittenau on the periphery of Vienna was a modern facility for its time, offering its more than 500 residents comfortable accommodation compared with the homeless shelter. Residents did not have to sleep in large halls; instead, every man got a small sleeping chamber with a bed, a table, a bureau and, as a special attraction, electric light. There were also a number of common rooms including a large reading room with a library, where nine newspapers were laid out, and a small “writing room.”57 Hitler sat there during the day, drawing and painting. Mostly he depicted Viennese landmarks such as the Karlskirche, the Stephansdom and the town hall on his postcards which Hanisch sold to tourists and frame-sellers. At 8 p.m. each night, Hitler withdrew to his chamber to devote himself to his autodidactic studies. “I painted to earn money and learned for the joy of it,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. “I think the people around me then thought I was an oddball.”58

  And indeed the 21-year-old would-be artist was an outsider in the colourful society of the men’s home, in which unmarried workers and small-time clerks lived side by side with dissipated university graduates. Hitler avoided other people’s company. He did not drink or smoke and had little to say when the conversation turned to women. Female visitors were strictly forbidden on Meldemannstrasse as they were in all men’s homes, but Hitler does not seem to have tried to find female companionship anyway. He would have had ample opportunities to do so during his time with Kubizek, who reported that female eyes were always on Hitler whenever the two friends went to the opera. Kubizek had asked himself what the attraction was. Was it Hitler’s “extraordinarily light eyes” or the “strangely strict expression on his ascetic face”? Perhaps, Kubizek concluded, it was Hitler’s “manifest uninterest in the members of the opposite sex” that had made women “want to test this male source of resistance.”59 Whatever the reasons may have been, the young Hitler was an ascetic within the erotically charged atmosphere of pre-war Vienna, in which Arthur Schnitzler’s sex-themed play La Ronde and Klimt’s explicit paintings caused such scandals. But there is no plausible reason to conclude that Hitler was attracted to men and was unable to acknowledge his true inclinations.60 He had no shortage of potential contacts of this sort in his time in the men’s home, but there is not the slightest indication of any homosexual orientation.

  Paying prostitutes to initiate him into the ways of love, as was common among men of his age from middle-class backgrounds, was out of the question for Hitler: according to Kubizek, he was terrified of contracting syphilis.61 Perhaps Hitler was following his role model Schönerer, who recommended that male members of the pan-Germanic movement remain celibate until they were 25. “Nothing is more beneficial to young people than extended celibacy,” Schönerer argued. “It trains every muscle, makes the eyes gleam, quickens the wits, refreshes the memory, inspires the imagination and fortifies the will. With this feeling of strength, one sees the world, as it were, through a colourful prism.”62 If Hitler stuck to such a vow of celibacy, which seems likely, he would have still been a virgin when he left Vienna at the age of 24.63

  We can only speculate about the consequences of Hitler’s dormant sex life. Perhaps it was connected to his aversion, recognisable from a young age, to physical contact with others and his idealised views of women such as we encountered in his silent love for Stefanie in Linz. Possibly it was one cause of the short-temperedness from which Kubizek had suffered so much during their time together. But many men and women at the turn of the century suffered from nervousness—or as doctors fashionably called it, “neurasthenia.” This had less to do with repressed sexuality than with the enormous acceleration of every aspect of daily life thanks to modern means of transport and communication.64

  The business partners Hanisch and Hitler soon quarrelled. To keep both their heads above water, Hitler had to paint a postcard a day. But sometimes he preferred to read the newspaper or take part in political discussions in the reading room. He needed to be in the “proper mood for artistic creation,” Hitler said whenever Hanisch nagged him to get on with his painting.65 Hanisch also resented the fact that Hitler increasingly befriended another resident of the men’s home, a 31-year-old copper-polisher from a Jewish family named Josef Neumann, who peddled wares of various sorts. Neumann also sold Hitler’s paintings, putting him in direct competition with Hanisch. In June 1910, Hitler disappeared with Neumann from the men’s home, only to return five days later.66 Quite possibly the two men had tried to establish an economic existence elsewhere. If so, the plan had quickly failed and, in July, Neumann informed the authorities that he was leaving Vienna. Hitler was forced to depend on Hanisch.

  Nonetheless, the two fell out for good a few weeks later. Hitler accused Hanisch of cheating him out of the price of two paintings, and an acquaintance of his from the men’s home officially filed charges against Hanisch. On 5 August 1910, Hitler testifie
d at the Brigittenau police station that “For roughly two weeks, Hanisch has not returned to the men’s home, taking with him a painting by me entitled ‘Parliament,’ which was worth 50 crowns, and a watercolour worth 9 crowns.”67 Hanisch was given seven days in jail, in part because he had registered in another men’s home in mid-July under a false name. From that point on, Hitler sold his paintings himself, primarily doing business with two Jewish owners of picture-framing and art shops, Jakob Altenberg and Samuel Morgenstern. They paid so well that Hitler was finally able to stand on his own two feet.68

  In late March 1911, Hitler’s aunt Johanna died, and the family learned that he had received large sums of money from her. Angela Raubal, whose husband had died the previous year and who was now forced to support not only her own three children but also Hitler’s sister on a widow’s pension, took the chance to claim the entirety of the orphans’ benefit, which had previously been split between Adolf and Paula. In early May, Hitler was summoned at the behest of the district court in Linz to appear before the Leopoldstadt district court in Vienna. There he declared that he was able to support himself and agreed that the entire orphans’ pension should be given to his sister.69 This statement is one of the few documents we have concerning Hitler in 1911 and 1912. He then reappears in 1913, in an account by a man named Karl Honisch who lived in the men’s home for a few months and wrote extensively about his time there for the NSDAP main archive in 1939.70

  In this account, Hitler seemed strangely frozen in time. Honisch described him sitting at his familiar working spot in the window arch of the writing room: “Slight of build, with drawn cheeks and a dark shock of hair that kept falling down his forehead, dressed in a worn-out dark suit, he worked diligently from early in the morning until late afternoon.”71 No one even thought of occupying Hitler’s customary spot. He had become something of a fixture in the men’s home, respected and even admired by the others for his painting skills. “We were proud to have an artist among our ranks,” recalled Honisch, who in 1939 was of course at pains to present Hitler in a positive light.72 Hitler was a “friendly and likeable fellow” who “showed an interest in the travails of all the others” while taking care “not to get too close to anyone.” For that reason, the others were careful not to take “liberties.”73

  Hitler, as Honisch presented it, rarely revealed much of himself. When he did, it was because the discussion turned to politics, and he felt compelled to take a stand within the small circle of “intelligentsia” in the men’s home. “On such occasions he would stand up, toss his brush or pencil across the table and state his views with a fiery temperament, not shying away from strong expressions,” Honisch recalled. “His eyes flashed, and he would jerk his head back to keep the shock of hair out of his forehead.” At the end of such outbursts, Hitler would suddenly fall silent and sit back down at his easel with a resigned gesture, “as if to say, ‘What a shame that I wasted my words on you since you don’t understand them.’ ”74 Hitler was particularly prone to anger when the talk was of “the Reds and the Jesuits”—Social Democrats and Catholics. Honisch did not recall Hitler making any anti-Semitic statements, however. So what was his attitude towards Jews at this point?

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  Hitler was no anti-Semite when he arrived in Vienna. The recollections of Dr. Bloch are more plausible on this score than those of Kubizek, who claimed that Hitler had held anti-Semitic opinions even back in Linz.75 In Mein Kampf, Hitler himself wrote that he was first converted to Jew-hatred in Vienna: “At that time, I underwent the greatest internal upheaval I have ever experienced. I went from cosmopolitan weakling to fanatic anti-Semite.”76 Most of Hitler’s biographers have taken this statement at face value, for it seems plausible that Hitler’s obsession with Jews was a compensatory mechanism for his failure as an artist. Joachim Fest, for instance, writes that “his previously vagabond hatred…had finally found an object.”77 But the historian Brigitte Hamann has shown that Hitler’s account was just one of the many legends with which the demagogue, writing in the early 1920s, tried to suggest that his world view had developed in a straight line. Hitler did not experience an anti-Semitic epiphany in Vienna. The reality is far murkier than historians have traditionally assumed.78

  One thing is certain: Hitler would not have been able to avoid contact with anti-Jewish movements during his Vienna years. The Austrian capital in the early twentieth century was a major stomping ground for anti-Semites. In particular, the immigration of Jews from eastern Europe had given rise to fears that Vienna was being “Jewified,” and the successes enjoyed by some of these immigrants, who knew the value of education and worked hard to climb the social ladder, elicited envy and resentment among many native Viennese.79 Numerous politicians played on anti-Semitic sentiments. Hitler’s idol Schönerer combined his fight on behalf of “Germanity” with a racial anti-Semitism previously unknown in Austria. Lueger, too, was not above employing slogans like “Greater Vienna must not become Greater Jerusalem” or pillorying the “Jewish press.”80 It would have been unusual if such sentiments had no influence whatsoever on the young Hitler.

  Fin-de-siècle Vienna was fertile ground for crass racist theories. Pan-Germanic newspapers and pamphlets discussed the obscure teachings of Guido von List, who divided humanity into Aryan “masters” and the non-Aryan “herd,” as well as the fantasies about racist breeding put forward by List’s disciple Joseph Adolf (Jörg) Lanz von Liebenfels. In 1906, Lanz founded Ostara, “the first and only journal devoted to the researching and cultivation of the master race and its dominance.”81 Hitler read the Alldeutsches Tageblatt (Pan-German Daily), whose offices were located not far from Stumpergasse, and it is likely that he was also acquainted with Ostara. But although Lanz later claimed to have “given Hitler his ideas,” we do not know what sort of influence the journal may have had on the future dictator.82 Without doubt, part of the poisoned legacy of Hitler’s Vienna years was that, in the course of his autodidactic studies, he was introduced to the broad repertoire of anti-Semitic clichés and prejudices popular among local nationalists and racists. But this doesn’t mean that he already identified with them.

  On the contrary, Hitler had no problems in his day-to-day interactions with the Jewish residents of the men’s home, and he even maintained something approaching a friendship with Neumann. “Neumann was a good-hearted fellow who liked Hitler a lot and whom Hitler greatly respected,” recalled Hanisch.83 Among Hitler’s Jewish acquaintances in the men’s home were the locksmith’s assistant Simon Robinson, who occasionally gave Hitler small sums of money, and the salesman Siegfried Löffner, who helped Hitler peddle his postcards. The fact that Hitler sold his pictures to Jewish merchants also argues against the notion that he already felt a strong antipathy towards Jews. Hanisch was probably being truthful when he asserted: “Hitler was by no means a Jew-hater in those days—that came later.”84 This statement is backed up by the recollection of an anonymous man from Brünn who resided at the home in early 1912: “Hitler got along well with Jews. Once he said that they were a clever people who stuck together better than the Germans.”85

  At the same time, Hitler’s statements about Jews, as quoted by Hanisch, were very contradictory. On the one hand, he praised Jews for being the first civilised nation because they had done away with polytheism in favour of belief in a single god. He also praised charitable Jewish organisations in Vienna, from which he as a pauper had personally benefited, dismissed anti-Semitic claims that Jews carried out ritual murder, and defended the cultural achievements of Jews like the poet Heinrich Heine and the composer Gustav Mahler. On the other hand, he once supposedly answered the question of why Jews always remained foreigners in whatever nation they lived by saying that they were “a race unto themselves.” He also occasionally remarked that Jews “smelled different.”86 Thus Hitler seems to have shared some of the anti-Semitic prejudices and clichés that abounded in German nationalist circles, but he was a long way away from the paranoid Jew-hatred that would become the centrep
iece of his political activity. By no means did he have a “closed world view” or strict anti-Semitic convictions, so contrary to what his first biographer Konrad Heiden concluded, Hitler—or at least the public persona of “Hitler”—was anything but a finished product by the end of his Vienna years.87 He would have to have further dramatic, life-changing experiences before he became an obsessive anti-Semitic demagogue lecturing in Munich’s beer halls.

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  Hitler did not attract any attention with radical views in the coffee house he began to frequent in his final weeks in Vienna. On the contrary, the owner, Maria Wohlrab, later described him as a serious, introverted young man who read a lot and did not say much. Occasionally a woman came with him, and on his last visit, she was quoted as saying, “Dolfi, go to Germany.”88 It is doubtful that, thirty years after the fact, Wohlrab was able to remember her reticent customer quite as well as she made out, but Hitler had talked in the men’s home about his desire to emigrate to Germany. He found Munich, the Bavarian capital, particularly alluring. There, he thought, he would be able to develop his artistic talent better than in Vienna, and he was attracted by the city’s galleries with their impressive art collections. But first he had to wait for his twenty-fourth birthday on 20 April 1913 so he could claim his paternal inheritance. The original sum of 652 crowns in 1903 had grown into 819 crowns, 98 hellers—a sizeable amount of money indeed. The district court in Linz paid it out to Hitler on 16 May.89

  Hitler spent the days that followed busily preparing for his move. He bought new clothes and told the authorities in Vienna that he was leaving the city. On 25 May he was on a train to Munich. Travelling with him was a 20-year-old apprentice pharmacist named Rudolf Häusler, who had moved into the men’s home in February 1913. The two probably became close because Häusler’s biography recalled Hitler’s own. Häusler came from a well-situated Viennese family, but had got thrown out of school for playing a youthful prank, whereupon his strict father had banned him from the family home. Hitler, who was four years older, had taken him under his wing, introduced him to the world of Wagner’s operas and persuaded him to come along to Munich. As he had previously done for Kubizek, Hitler had convinced Häusler’s mother Ida, who remained devoted to her son, to let him go.90 Upon arriving in Munich, Hitler and Häusler rented a small room in the fourth-floor apartment of the tailor Joseph Popp on Schle​isshe​imers​trasse 34, on the edge of the bohemian Schwabing district. When he registered himself with the residence authorities on 29 May 1913, Hitler listed his occupation as “artistic painter.” Under the rubric “expected length of stay,” he wrote “2 years.”91 The new arrival thus intended to remain in Munich for the foreseeable future.