by Ian Kershaw
In his first year in his secondary school, 1900 – 1901, Adolf was recorded as ‘unsatisfactory’ in mathematics and natural history, ensuring that he had to repeat the year. His diligence was noted as ‘variable’. There was some improvement during the repeated year, presumably following a wigging at home, but it was not sustained, and Adolf’s school record, down to the time he left in autumn 1905, hovered between poor and mediocre.
In a letter to Hitler’s defence counsel on 12 December 1923, following the failed putsch attempt in Munich, his former class teacher, Dr Eduard Huemer, recalled Adolf as a thin, pale youth commuting between Linz and Leonding, a boy not making full use of his talent, lacking in application, and unable to accommodate himself to school discipline. He characterized him as stubborn, high-handed, dogmatic, and hot-tempered. Strictures from his teachers were received with a scarcely concealed insolence. With his classmates he was domineering, and a leading figure in the sort of immature pranks which Huemer attributed to too great an addiction to Karl May’s Indian stories together with a tendency to waste time furthered by the daily trip from Leonding and back.88
Whether in fact Hitler was a leading light among his schoolmates, as Huemer suggested, is doubtful. Other teachers and classmates claimed Hitler had not stood out at school in any particular fashion, either negatively or positively.89
There can be little doubting, however, that Hitler’s attitude towards his school and teachers (with one exception) was scathingly negative. He left school ‘with an elemental hatred’ towards it, and later mocked and derided his schooling and teachers.90 Only his history teacher, Dr Leonard Pötsch, was singled out for praise in Mein Kampf for firing Hitler’s interest through vivid narratives and tales of heroism from the German past, stirring in him the strongly emotional German-nationalist, anti-Habsburg feelings (which were in any case widely prevalent in his school, as in Linz generally).91
The problems of adjustment that Adolf encountered in the Realschule in Linz were compounded by the deterioration in relations with his father and the running sore of the disputes over the boy’s future career. Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf heroicizes his own defiance of his father’s attempts to turn him into a civil servant and blames his poor performance in school upon this intentional rejection of his father’s wishes.92 This was an oversimplification. But there seems no doubt that his early years at the Linz school had a backcloth of conflict at home with his father. Even in the 1940s, Hitler recounted how he had been taken, when he was thirteen years old, into the Linz customs office to encourage him to take an interest in a civil service career, not realizing that it would only fill him with horror, hatred, and lasting disgust for the life of a civil servant.93 For Alois, the virtues of a civil service career could not be gainsaid. But all his attempts to enthuse his son met with adamant rejection. ‘I yawned and grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time,’ wrote Adolf in Mein Kampf.94
The more Adolf resisted the idea, the more authoritarian and insistent his father became. Equally stubborn, when asked what he envisaged for his future, Adolf claimed he replied that he wanted to be an artist – a vision which for the dour Austrian civil servant Alois was quite unthinkable. ‘Artist, no, never as long as I live!’, Hitler has him saying.95 Whether the young Adolf, allegedly at the age of twelve, so plainly stipulated he wanted to be an artist may be doubted. But that there was a conflict with his father arising from his unwillingness to follow a career in the civil service, and that his father found fault with his son’s indolent and purposeless existence, in which drawing appeared to be his main interest, seems certain.96 Alois had worked his way up through industry, diligence, and effort from humble origins to a position of dignity and respect in the state service. His son, from a more privileged background, saw fit to do no more than dawdle away his time drawing and dreaming, would not apply himself in school, had no career path in view, and scorned the type of career which had meant everything to his father. The dispute amounted, therefore, to more than a rejection of a civil service career. It was a rejection of everything his father had stood for; and with that, a rejection of his father himself.
There was an added dimension to the conflict between father and son. The almost homogeneously German population of the provincial town of Linz, numbering around 60,000, was strongly German nationalist, but politically divided in its expression of nationalist feelings. Hitler’s father’s nationalist sentiment was of the kind which vehemently supported the continued dominance of German interests within the Austrian state (especially at the time in the later 1890s when they seemed threatened by concessions made to the Czechs). He would have no truck, however, with the pan-German nationalism of the Schönerer variety – the ideas of the movement that had emerged in the 1870s, led by Georg Ritter von Schönerer – which rejected the Austrian state and lauded the virtues of Wilhelmine Germany. Adolf, on the other hand, was plainly drawn in his Linz school – a hotbed of German nationalism – to the symbols and incantations of the shriller Schönerer-style pan-German nationalism which, whatever its limited general appeal in Linz, found ready backers for its emotional appeal among the youth.97 Adolf was not actively involved in any way with the Schönerer movement. But it is almost certain that the opinionated and disputatious son further riled his father through his pan-German ridiculing and deriding of the very state to which his father had devoted his life.98
Adolf’s adolescence, as he commented in Mein Kampf, was ‘very painful’.99 With the move to the secondary school in Linz, and the start of the rumbling conflict with his father, an important formative phase in his character development had begun. The happy, playful youngster of the primary school days had grown into an idle, resentful, rebellious, sullen, stubborn, and purposeless teenager.
When, on 3 January 1903, his father collapsed and died over his usual morning glass of wine in the Gasthaus Wiesinger,100 the conflict of will over Adolf’s future was over. Alois had left his family in comfortable circumstances.101 And whatever emotional adjustments were needed for his widow, Klara, it is unlikely that Adolf, now the only ‘man about the house’, grieved over his father.102 With his father’s death, much of the parental pressure was removed. His mother did her best to persuade Adolf to comply with his father’s wishes. But she shied away from conflict and, however concerned she was about his future, was far too ready to give in to Adolf’s whims.103 In any case, his continued poor school performance in itself ruled out any realistic expectation that he would be qualified for a career in the civil service.
In 1902–3 – the year in which his father died – Adolf’s school report again registered a failure in mathematics and he had to pass a re-sit examination before being allowed into a higher class. His application was once more recorded as ‘variable’, and remained so in 1903–4, when he was registered as ‘unsatisfactory’ in French. He was granted a pass in the re-sit examination, but only on condition that he leave the Realschule in Linz. At this failure, Adolf was removed to the Realschule in Steyr, some fifty miles away, where he had to take up lodgings because the school was too far from his home.104 He recalled much later how sick at heart he was at being sent away to school, and how he detested Steyr to that very day.105
Adolf’s performance at Steyr showed no initial improvement.106 In his school report for the first semester in 1904–5 he gained good marks for physical education and drawing. His ‘moral conduct’ was satisfactory, his diligence ‘variable’, and he received mediocre results in religious instruction, geography and history (which he later claimed to have been his best subjects),107 and chemistry, a marginally better grade in physics, but failures in the optional course in stenography and two obligatory subjects, German language and mathematics.108 These failures, had they been continued in the second half of the school year, would have condemned him to yet another repeated year.109 By September 1905, according to the report for the second semester, he had evidently applied himself better and wa
s able to improve his grades and effort in most subjects, now passing mathematics and German, though failing in geometry, which meant a re-sit before being allowed to pass the final-year examination in the lower Realschule. On 16 September, Adolf returned to Steyr, and passed the re-sit in geometry. With this qualification, he was now eligible for consideration for entry to the higher Realschule, or to a technical school.110 Whether he would have been admitted with his mediocre school record of the previous five years is doubtful.111 But in any case Adolf by this time had no more stomach for schooling. He used illness – feigned, or most likely genuine but exaggerated112 – to persuade his mother that he was not fit to continue school and in autumn 1905, at the age of sixteen, gladly put his schooling behind him for good with no clear future career path mapped out.113
The time between leaving school in autumn 1905 and his mother’s death at the end of 1907 is passed over almost completely in Mein Kampf. From the vagueness of the account, it could be presumed that Klara’s death followed two, not four, years after that of her husband, and that Adolf’s time was spent in careful preparation for attendance at the Viennese Academy of Art, before orphanage and poverty meant that he had to fend for himself.114 Reality was somewhat different.
In these two years, Adolf lived a life of parasitic idleness – funded, provided for, looked after, and cosseted by a doting mother, with his own room in the comfortable flat in the Humboldtstraße in Linz, which the family had moved into in June 1905. His mother, his aunt Johanna and his little sister Paula were there to look after all his needs, to wash, clean and cook for him. His mother even bought him a grand piano, on which he had lessons for four months between October 1906 and January 1907.115 He spent his time during the days drawing, painting, reading, or writing ‘poetry’; the evenings were for going to the theatre or opera; and the whole time he daydreamed and fantasized about his future as a great artist. He stayed up late into the night and slept long into the mornings. He had no clear aim in view.116 The indolent lifestyle, the grandiosity of fantasy, the lack of discipline for systematic work – all features of the later Hitler – can be seen in these two years in Linz. It was little wonder that Hitler came to refer to this period as ‘the happiest days which seemed to me almost like a beautiful dream’.117
A description of Adolf’s carefree life in Linz between 1905 and 1907 is provided by the one friend he had at that time, August Kubizek, the son of a Linz upholsterer with dreams of his own about becoming a great musician. Kubizek’s post-war memoirs need to be treated with care, both in factual detail and in interpretation. They are a lengthened and embellished version of recollections he had originally been commissioned by the Nazi Party to compile.118 Even retrospectively, the admiration in which Kubizek continued to hold his former friend coloured his judgement. But more than that, Kubizek plainly invented a great deal, built some passages around Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf, and deployed some near plagiarism to amplify his own limited memory.119 However, for all their weaknesses, his recollections have been shown to be a more credible source on Hitler’s youth than was once thought, in particular where they touch upon experiences related to Kubizek’s own interests in music and theatre.120 There can be no doubt that, whatever their deficiencies, they do contain important reflections of the young Hitler’s personality, showing features in embryo which were to be all too prominent in later years.
August Kubizek – ‘Gustl’ – was some nine months older than Adolf. They met by chance in autumn 1905 (not 1904, as Kubizek claimed)121 at the opera in Linz. Adolf had for some years been a fanatical admirer of Wagner,122 and his love of opera, especially the works of the ‘master of Bayreuth’, was shared by Kubizek. Gustl was highly impressionable; Adolf out for someone to impress. Gustl was compliant, weak-willed, subordinate; Adolf was superior, determining, dominant. Gustl felt strongly about little or nothing; Adolf had strong feelings about everything. ‘He had to speak,’ recalled Kubizek, ‘and needed someone to listen to him.’123 For his part, Gustl, from his artisanal background, having attended a lower school than the young Hitler, and feeling himself therefore both socially and educationally inferior, was filled with admiration at Adolf’s power of expression. Whether Adolf was haranguing him about the deficiencies of civil servants, schoolteachers, local taxation, social welfare lotteries, opera performances, or Linz public buildings, Gustl was gripped as never before.124 Not just what his friend had to say, but how he said it, was what he found attractive.125 Gustl, in self-depiction a quiet, dreamy youth, had found an ideal foil in the opinionated, cocksure, ‘know-all’ Hitler. It was a perfect partnership.
In the evenings they would go off, dressed in their fineries, to the theatre or the opera, the pale and weedy young Hitler, sporting the beginnings of a thin moustache, looking distinctly foppish in his black coat and dark hat, the image completed by a black cane with an ivory handle.126 After the performance Adolf would invariably hold forth, heatedly critical of the production, or effusively rapturous. Even though Kubizek was musically more gifted and knowledgeable than Hitler, he remained the passive and submissive partner in the ‘discussions’.
Hitler’s passion for Wagner knew no bounds.127 A performance could affect him almost like a religious experience, plunging him into deep and mystical fantasies.128 Wagner amounted for him to the supreme artistic genius, the model to be emulated.129 Adolf was carried away by Wagner’s powerful musical dramas, his evocation of a heroic, distant, and sublimely mystical Germanic past. Lohengrin, the saga of the mysterious knight of the grail, epitome of the Teutonic hero, sent from the castle of Monsalvat by his father Parzival to rescue the wrongly condemned pure maiden, Elsa, but ultimately betrayed by her, had been his first Wagner opera, and remained his favourite.130
Even more than music, the theme, when Adolf and Gustl were together, was great art and architecture. More precisely, it was Adolf as the future great artistic genius. The young, dandified Hitler scorned the notion of working to earn one’s daily bread.131 He enraptured the impressionable Kubizek with his visions of himself as a great artist, and Kubizek himself as a foremost musician. While Kubizek toiled in his father’s workshop, Adolf filled his time with drawing and dreaming. He would then meet Gustl after work, and, as the friends wandered through Linz in the evenings, would lecture him on the need to tear down, remodel, and replace the central public buildings, showing his friend countless sketches of his rebuilding plans.132
The make-believe world also included Adolf’s infatuation with a girl who did not even know of his existence. Stefanie, an elegant young lady in Linz to be seen promenading through the town on the arm of her mother, and occasionally greeted by an admirer among the young officers, was for Hitler an ideal to be admired from a distance, not approached in person, a fantasy figure who would be waiting for the great artist when the right moment for their marriage arrived, after which they would live in the magnificent villa that he would design for her.133
Another glimpse into the fantasy world is afforded by Adolf’s plans for the future when, around 1906, the friends bought a lottery ticket together. Adolf was so certain they would win first prize that he designed an elaborate vision of their future residence. The two young men would live an artistic existence, tended by a middle-aged lady who could meet their artistic requirements – neither Stefanie nor any other woman of their own age figured in this vision – and would go off to Bayreuth and Vienna and make other visits of cultural value. So certain was Adolf that they would win, that his fury at the state lottery knew no bounds when nothing came of their little flutter.134
In spring 1906, Adolf persuaded his mother to fund him on a first trip to Vienna, allegedly to study the picture gallery in the Court Museum, more likely to fulfil a growing ambition to visit the cultural sites of the Imperial capital. For two weeks, perhaps longer, he wandered through Vienna as a tourist taking in the city’s many attractions. With whom he stayed is unknown.135 The four postcards he sent his friend Gustl and his comments in Mein Kampf show how captiva
ted he was by the grandeur of the buildings and the layout of the Ringstraße. Otherwise, he seems to have spent his time in the theatre and marvelling at the Court Opera, where Gustav Mahler’s productions of Wagner’s Tristan and The Flying Dutchman left those of provincial Linz in the shade.136 Nothing had changed on his return home. But the sojourn in Vienna furthered the idea, probably already growing in his mind, that he would develop his artistic career at the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts.137
By the summer of 1907, this idea had taken more concrete shape. Adolf was now aged eighteen but had still never earned a day’s income and was continuing his drone’s life without career prospects. Despite the advice of relatives that it was about time he found a job, he had persuaded his mother to let him return to Vienna, this time with the intention of entering the Academy.138 Whatever her reservations, the prospect of systematic study at the Academy in Vienna must have seemed to her an improvement on his aimless existence in Linz. And she did not need to worry about her son’s material welfare. Adolf’s ‘Hanitante’ – Aunt Johanna – had come up with a loan of 924 Kronen to fund her nephew’s artistic studies. It gave him something like a year’s salary for a young lawyer or teacher.139
By this stage, his mother was seriously ill with breast cancer. She had already been operated on in January, and in the spring and early summer was frequently treated by the Jewish family doctor, Dr Bloch.140 Frau Klara – now in the new family home at Urfahr, a suburb of Linz – must have been seriously worried not only about the mounting medical costs, but about her eleven-year-old daughter Paula, still at home and looked after by Aunt Johanna, and about her darling boy Adolf, still without a clear future. Adolf, described by Dr Bloch as a tall, sallow, frail-looking boy who ‘lived within himself, was certainly worried about his mother. He settled the bill of 100 Kronen for her twenty-day stay in hospital at the start of the year.141 He wept when Dr Bloch had to tell him and his sister the bad news that their mother had little chance of surviving her cancer.142 He tended her during her illness and was anguished at the intense pain she suffered.143 He had, it seems, to take responsibility for whatever decisions had to be made about her care.144 Despite his mother’s deteriorating condition, however, Adolf went ahead with his plans to move to Vienna. He left for the capital in early September 1907, in time to take the entrance examination for the Academy of Fine Arts.