Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  It is clear from Kubizek’s memoirs that Hitler spent most of his time immersed in a fantasy world. When Kubizek first visited his friend in the little room he had in his mother’s flat, he thought he had ‘entered an architect’s office’; the whole room was covered with architectural plans and drawings. For apart from heroic sagas and his passion for Wagner, at this time Hitler was preoccupied with comprehensive plans for the reconstruction of the whole of the city of Linz and its surroundings. But he also wrote poems, drew, and painted, and acquired a strong interest in politics and various contemporary developments.66 Kubizek describes the young Hitler as almost entirely focused on himself and his fantasy projects, which he pursued with monomaniacal energy. According to his friend, Hitler’s personality was marked by something ‘fixed, obdurate, inflexible, stubborn, obsessive, which showed itself to the outside world in the form of an uncanny degree of seriousness’. This was ‘the basis on which all his other characteristics developed’.67 Kubizek illustrates this trait with the following story: At Hitler’s request, the two of them bought a joint lottery ticket and Hitler, absolutely convinced that they would win the main prize, encouraged Kubizek to join him in planning their future lives. They looked for and found a suitable flat, went into all the details of its furnishing, aiming to use it as the centre for a group of cultivated friends, and made plans to go on educational trips together. The household was to be run by a distinguished lady of advanced years, so that, as Kubizek summed up Hitler’s thinking, ‘no expectations or intentions can arise that might be detrimental to our artistic calling’. Then, when, contrary to Hitler’s clear expectations, they failed to win the main prize, he was naturally hugely disappointed.68

  Vienna

  In the spring of 1906 Hitler went on his first trip to Vienna. During his stay of several weeks, he spent most of his time visiting the architectural sights of the city. He went to the city theatre and the Court Opera, where he attended performances of ‘Tristan’ and the ‘Flying Dutchman’, both produced by the current director of the Opera, Gustav Mahler.69 This Vienna trip made a deep impression on Hitler, reinforcing his desire to become an artist in the metropolis.70

  More than a year later, in September 1907, he took a decisive step in that direction. He set off for Vienna in order to study at the Academy of Fine Art. He found lodgings in the Mariahilf quarter, at Stumpergasse 31, where he rented a room from a seamstress from Bohemia, Maria Zakreys.71 Hitler cleared the first hurdle for study at the Academy, admission to a drawing examination lasting several hours, by presenting a set of drawings he had brought with him. But, like three-quarters of the examinees, he completely failed the actual examination. The assessment of the clearly conservative professors read: ‘Few heads’. The examiners had evidently disapproved of the fact that Hitler’s talent was too one-sidedly focused on drawing buildings and his ability to depict the human figure was seriously underdeveloped. Hitler had no real interest in people.72 This rejection came ‘like a terrible bolt from the blue’ for Hitler, who, according to his own recollection of the incident as described in Mein Kampf, was entirely convinced of his own talent. But in Mein Kampf he reinterpreted the experience as an opportunity that was to determine his future life. For the rector of the institution had referred to his undoubted architectural talent. ‘In a few days’, he continued, ‘I myself knew that some day I would become an architect’. Although he lacked the requisite school leaving certificate, he was determined to meet the challenge: ‘I wanted to become an architect.’73 In fact, however, he was to apply once again to the Academy’s painting class.74

  But first he returned to Linz. In January 1907, Klara Hitler had had to undergo an operation for breast cancer and her condition worsened in the autumn of 1907. Hitler took over looking after his mother, who, after an agonizing final stage of her cancer, died on 21 December.75 The Jewish general practitioner, Eduard Bloch, who treated Klara Hitler – given the state of medical expertise at the time, she was a hopeless case – made an attempt to reduce her pain. In 1941 Bloch, by then living in exile in New York, published a piece in a journal in which he described the powerful emotional impact which the sickness and death of his mother had had on the young Adolf Hitler, but also the devoted care he had given her. ‘In the whole of my practice I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.’ Hitler was very grateful for the selfless efforts of the doctor (who, moreover, had charged only a small fee), as is indicated by two postcards Hitler sent Bloch from Vienna. When, thirty years later, after the Anschluss with Austria, he returned to Linz in triumph, he is said to have made friendly enquiries after Bloch. During the following period Bloch enjoyed a special status in Linz, until he finally succeeded in emigrating in 1940.76 Like other Jewish doctors, he had been forced to close his practice, but he was left in peace by the local Nazis and the Gestapo.

  Hitler and his younger sister, Paula, most probably divided the cash left by their mother between them. In 1905, after the sale of the Leonding farm, this had amounted to 5,500 Kronen. But some of this was undoubtedly needed to defray part of his mother’s living expenses, and also the costs of her medical treatment and burial. Hitler may have received 1,000 Kronen, a sum that would more or less cover a year’s living expenses. Furthermore, he and his sister successfully applied for an orphans’ pension, which provided them with a monthly income of 50 Kronen until the age of 24 and which they shared between them. However, the precondition was that they were both unprovided for. This applied to Hitler for as long he continued his education, or at least gave the impression in Linz that he was doing so.77

  After he had disposed of his mother’s effects, in February 1908 Hitler returned to Vienna, where he once again took up lodgings in Stumpergasse 31. A former neighbour of his mother’s from her days in Linz had arranged an interview for him, via a Vienna friend of hers, with Alfred Roller, the famous set designer of the Vienna Opera, whose work Hitler admired. But, in the end, the shy young man lacked the courage to take up the opportunity, as he told Roller on meeting him decades later.78

  A short time after Hitler’s arrival in the capital his friend Kubizek, whom he had persuaded to study music at the Vienna Conservatoire, followed him there. He had even succeeded in persuading his friend’s parents to agree to this.79 For details of the following months that Hitler and Kubizek spent together in Vienna we have, in addition to Kubizek’s book, the original, much shorter, text he prepared for the Party Chancellery prior to 1945.

  In his book Kubizek recalled how Hitler had waited for him impatiently at the station: ‘In his dark, good quality overcoat, dark hat, and with his walking stick with an ivory handle, he appeared almost elegant. He was obviously pleased to see me, greeted me warmly and, as was then the custom, kissed me lightly on the cheek’.80 Evidently in order to prevent speculation about his friendship, Kubizek had slightly altered the original text, which read: ‘My friend . . . greeted me with joyous enthusiasm with a kiss and then took me straight to his lodgings.’ Kubizek then goes on to describe in his book how they both succeeded in persuading Hitler’s landlady to exchange his room for the sitting room, which the two of them now shared. Kubizek was accepted by the Vienna Conservatoire and borrowed a piano, which he managed with some difficulty to fit into the small room.81

  In the meantime, Hitler continued with what he had enjoyed doing in Linz: reading a fair amount, drawing, and developing his architectural plans. Soon he started preparing comprehensive plans for the remodelling of the Austrian capital. In fact, it is evident that Hitler’s architectural knowledge and preferences were very strongly influenced by Vienna models, in particular the prestige architecture of the Ringstrasse.82 According to Kubizek, Hitler also attempted to write a play and an opera,83 both of which were based in the world of Germanic heroes, but without success. Kubizek reports that, during this period, Hitler concocted all sorts of fantastic projects, particularly after his mental balance had been upset by the death of his mother and his rejection by the Academy. He torture
d himself with recriminations, which, however, could suddenly turn into tirades aimed at the ‘whole of humanity’, who ‘did not understand him, did not respect him and by whom he felt persecuted and cheated’.84

  Kubizek claimed that Hitler had delayed telling him about his rejection by the Academy, saying that he had not informed his mother because of her illness.85 However, he had in fact told his mother’s landlady in Linz in February 1908,86 and it is clear from Kubizek’s original text that the latter knew about it before arriving in Vienna. Thus, the idea that Hitler made a secret of his rejection by the Academy is a piece of fiction by Kubizek from the 1950s designed to explain Hitler’s eccentric traits as a response to a major disappointment.

  In fact, Hitler used his stay in Vienna in order to prepare for a further attempt to get into the Academy in autumn 1908, at least that is how he is likely to have viewed it. Kubizek’s report reflects the contradictory impressions that the capital city, Vienna, made on the two young men from the provinces. On the one hand, they enjoyed the privilege of living in one of the most brilliant cultural metropolises in Europe. The two friends visited the Vienna theatre and the musical venues, particularly the Court Opera, and Kubizek noted ‘their undivided love and enthusiasm for the music dramas of Richard Wagner’. For Hitler a Wagner opera was not simply a visit to a cultural event, but ‘the opportunity of being transported into that extraordinary state which Wagner’s music produced in him, that trance, that drifting into a mystical dream-world which he needed in order to cope with the enormous tension of his turbulent nature’. In Vienna it was possible to see almost all of Wagner’s operas; Hitler had certainly seen his favourite opera, ‘Lohengrin’, at least ten times.87

  On the other hand, it was only too obvious that all this prestige architecture and high culture was in striking contrast to the reality of life for most people in the city. The stark social differences and the misery of the masses – the two young men were living on the borderline of poverty – the movements of social protest that were emerging among the working class and also among the lower-middle class, who were fearing social decline, were all too apparent. Moreover, in a multi-ethnic city like Vienna the monarchy’s nationality conflicts were omnipresent.88 In three places in the book Kubizek claims that Hitler was anti-Semitic: Hitler disliked going to the Mensa [student cafeteria] because it was also frequented by Jews; he was annoyed by an encounter with a begging Jewish peddler; and he had signed both of them up as members of the ‘Anti-Semitic League’ [Antisemitenbund], although this association did not in fact exist in Austria before the First World War. In the original manuscript this last reference and the one about the peddler do not occur, whereas Hitler’s anger about the Jewish visitors to the Mensa receives much more space, and there is also a lengthy section about Hitler’s negative opinion of Jewish visitors to the opera, which does not appear in the book. However, Kubizek notes in both versions of his memoirs that, despite his anti-Semitic views, Hitler defended Mahler’s Wagner productions, which at the time were subject to anti-Semitic attacks.89

  Kubizek was convinced that, during their time together in Vienna, despite being 18–19 years old, Hitler had not had a relationship with a girl or a woman. Although members of the opposite sex often showed interest in his friend, he had ignored them and, what is more, had refused to allow Kubizek to have a love affair. In general, Hitler had been decidedly hostile to women.90 Yet, despite his prudishness and rejection of sex, and, according to Kubizek, this included homosexuality, at the same time Hitler was fascinated by sexual topics. In the course of long nocturnal conversations he had expatiated on the ‘flame of life’ and, accompanied by Kubizek, had paid an extensive visit to a Vienna red-light district.91

  In the summer of 1908, at the end of term, Kubizek went back to Linz, assuming that he would once again be sharing accommodation with Hitler in the Stumpergasse when he returned to Vienna in the autumn. His friend wrote him a few letters during the summer, but when Kubizek returned to Vienna in November Hitler had moved out without leaving an address.92

  In the meantime, Hitler had moved to lodgings in Felberstrasse 22, near the Westbahnhof railway station and had failed in his second attempt to gain admission to the Academy of Fine Art, this time without even being shortlisted for the examination.93 It is plausible to assume that this final blow to his future study plans hit Hitler much harder than his initial rejection. Then he had been able to maintain the illusion that he could correct the flaws in his work by practice; but now it was clear that, in the eyes of the Academy professors, he was simply not suited to be an artist.

  According to Kubizek, Hitler had already been unstable and irascible when he was living in Linz;94 he had suffered periodically from depression and spent whole days and nights wandering the streets.95 It is clear from Kubizek’s report that Hitler regarded his friend above all as a patient audience and admirer to whom he could outline all his grandiose pipe dreams. He evidently exploited the relationship one-sidedly to his own advantage, protecting it jealously against outside interference; he did not even bother to seek out other friends. His infatuation for Stefanie had only served as the key to a dream world in which the young woman merely functioned as an accessory to a career as a successful artist. Hitler only acquired an interest in other people when he could fit them into his fantasy world – even if Kubizek, who could never escape from the spell of this ‘friendship’, continued to maintain, decades later, that Hitler had been a good and true friend, who had always been considerate towards him, respecting his feelings and needs.96

  Hitler’s grand ideas about his future invariably envisaged his playing roles in which he would be admired and celebrated. The almost manic efforts which Hitler put into his plans to reconstruct first Linz and then Vienna – his later places of residence, Munich and Berlin, would also be subjected to his mania for reconstruction – demonstrate an extreme determination completely to reshape his immediate surroundings in accordance with his ideas. But all this, the eccentric plans and roles, was not just playing around; it formed the actual content of his life. At the turn of the century, Hitler was admittedly by no means alone in his flight from reality, his conviction that he was basically an unrecognized genius and must now pursue his own path as an artist, a future that was preordained by his exceptional talent. Youthful escapism as a reaction to a society that set strict limits for young people was a favourite trope of contemporary literature: ‘the artist’s life’ versus the complacent world of the bourgeoisie. Above all, his favourite composer, Wagner, evidently provided him with the appropriate role model for the unrecognized genius.97

  Kubizek perfectly summed up Hitler’s tendency to compensate for the deficiencies of his private life by creating a huge ‘public self’: ‘He made up for the complete insignificance of his own life by making categorical statements on all public issues. His desire to alter the status quo thereby acquired a sense of direction and a goal.’ What is also clear from Kubizek’s report, however, is that Hitler had become so caught up in his fantasies that he could no longer tolerate disappointments, the simple confrontation with reality. The only thing that helped Hitler in such situations was to indulge in monologues for hours at a time, to which Kubizek had patiently listened and during which Hitler was once again able to revive his vulnerable dream world and in an even more grandiose fashion.

  However, the rejection of his second application to the Academy of Fine Art had damaged his self-image to such an extent and was so intolerable that this time his only way out was to do something drastic. He did not mention this at all in Mein Kampf; instead, he tried to create the impression that, after the death of his mother, he was preparing to be trained as an architect, which, as we know, was untrue. In fact, he had tried once more to be admitted to the Academy’s painting class.98 Now he not only broke off all contact with Kubizek but also with his relatives, presumably because he was ashamed of his failure.99 Moreover, he wished to conceal from his sister the fact that, after his plan to study had proved abortive,
he was no longer entitled to draw half the orphans’ pension they had been granted jointly. His second rejection produced an even more intensive flight into megalomaniacal plans, which were so monomaniacal that Hitler could no longer envisage any alternative form of education or future career. As a result, he experienced a rapid decline in his social status. He lived in the Felberstrasse until August 1909 and then moved for a few weeks to Sechshauserstrasse 58. Although, in the summer of 1908, he had secured a loan of 924 Kronen from his aunt,100 a year later these not inconsiderable financial reserves had been used up and he could no longer afford a room or a regular place to sleep. At any rate, no address for him can be found; his tracks were lost in the metropolis; he may have spent the night in the open or in a café.101 Hitler himself provided an extensive description of his miserable existence in Vienna during this period in Mein Kampf, but stayed silent about the details of his life at this time.102 This remained the case throughout his life, although occasionally he referred to casual labour ‘on building sites’ or claimed to have studied art history or related subjects.103

  We do, however, have a detailed report that provides some information about Hitler’s life between autumn 1909 and the summer of 1910. It comes from Reinhold Hanisch and appeared in 1939 (two years after Hanisch’s death) in the American journal New Republic; the publication was based on Hanisch’s own written account of his encounter with Hitler, which is also available as a document in the NSDAP-Hauptarchiv.104 Hanisch was a rather dubious figure. In the early 1930s he made his living from the sale of forged Hitler ‘originals’, and by providing journalists hostile to Hitler with revelations about the man who in the meantime had become a prominent figure. Nevertheless, his report appears entirely plausible. His descriptions of Hitler’s lifestyle tally in many respects with Kubizek’s memoirs and in some cases can be verified from other sources.