by Ian Kershaw
The Wagnerian model was even more evident in the idea Hitler had of writing an opera. A chance remark by Kubizek that he had heard in one of his music lectures that Wagner’s writings included a brief sketch for a musical drama of Wieland the Smith led to Hitler immediately looking up the saga in a book he had on Gods and Heroes, then starting to write the same night. The following day, sitting at the piano, Hitler told Kubizek he was going to turn Wieland into an opera. He would compose the music and Kubizek would write it down. For days, despite difficulties which the patient Kubizek raised along with hesitant remarks on Adolf’s limited musical expertise, he was engrossed in the work, eating, drinking, and sleeping little. But after a while he ‘spoke less and less of it, and in the end did not mention it at all’.88
Other Utopian schemes included, according to Kubizek, plans to solve Vienna’s housing problems and design new houses for workers, the creation of a new popular drink to replace alcohol, a travelling orchestra to take culture into the provinces, and – as always – the grandiose cultural rebuilding of Linz.89 Kubizek unquestionably embellished Hitler’s social conscience, as in the story of Adolf returning from spending three nights wandering the streets of Vienna studying the housing problem,90 and his far-sightedness, as in plans for social and cultural reform in his imagined ‘ideal state’.91 But the description of a Hitler opinionated on all subjects, gripped by sudden and temporary enthusiasm for wholly unrealistic ideas, and fantasizing wildly ambitious pipe-dreams that dissolved as quickly as they were formulated, rings true. And always there was the obsession with the monumental, the grandiose, the spectacular. The avant-garde Jugendstil architecture of Otto Wagner passed Hitler by, as did the modern art of the Sezession and its major star Gustav Klimt.92 He showed not the slightest interest in this cultural revolution which had gripped end-of-the-century Vienna.93 His architectural and artistic tastes were traditional and anti-modernist, firmly anchored in the neo-classicism and realism of the nineteenth century. And buildings for him were primarily for representation. The sketches he was constantly making were invariably of grandiose buildings. The magnificent Ringstraße, begun towards the end of the 1850s, with its majestic buildings – the neo-baroque Hofburg, the classical-style Parliament and Rathaus, the imposing museums, opera, and Burgtheater (which he specially admired) –enthralled him from the first time he saw them.94 He regaled Kubizek for hours on their architectural history and design, fascinated – as was the later master of propaganda – by the visual impact on the individual of buildings representing power and grandeur.95
Kubizek, naïve and impressionable as ever, did not cease to be astonished by Hitler’s knowledge of detail on the subjects he pontificated about, quite especially on architectural matters.96 He describes Hitler as constantly immersed in his studies. He could not imagine his friend without books, he stated: ‘books were his world’.97 Hitler had arrived in Vienna, wrote Kubizek, with four cases mainly full of books.98 He had been a member of three libraries in Linz, and was now a regular user of the Hof Library in Vienna.99 There were always, he added, piles of books in the room in Stumpergasse.100 However, only one title – Legends of Gods and Heroes: the Treasures of Germanic Mythology – stuck in Kubizek’s memory.101 Soon after the war, when asked about Hitler’s reading, he could recall only that Adolf had two books in the room for several weeks, and owned a travel guide as well.102 Kubizek’s later claim that Hitler had read an impressive list of classics – including Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Herder, Ibsen, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche – has to be treated with a large pinch of salt.103 Whatever Hitler read during his Vienna years – and apart from a number of newspapers mentioned in Mein Kampf,104 we cannot be sure what that was – it was probably far less elevated than the works of such literary luminaries. However, there is no reason to doubt that Hitler did read extensively in his Vienna period, as he himself later claimed.105 After the end of the Third Reich, in fact, Hitler’s sister Paula recalled him writing to recommend books to her (and sending her a copy of Don Quichote) during the first months he was in Vienna in 1908, before communications with his family faded.106 But like everything else he undertook at this time, his reading was unsystematic. And the factual knowledge that he committed to his formidable memory was used only to confirm already existing opinions.
Hitler explained his style of reading in Mein Kampf:
I know people who ‘read’ enormously, book for book, letter for letter, yet whom I would not describe as ‘well-read’. True, they possess a mass of ‘knowledge’, but their brain is unable to organize and register the material they have taken in. They lack the art of sifting what is valuable for them in a book from that which is without value… For reading is no end in itself, but a means to an end… A man who possesses the art of correct reading will, in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet, instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing. Once the knowledge he has achieved in this fashion is correctly coordinated within the somehow existing picture of this or that subject created by the imagination, it will function either as a corrective or a complement, thus enhancing either the correctness or the clarity of the picture… Only this kind of reading has meaning and purpose… Since my earliest youth I have endeavoured to read in the correct way, and in this endeavour I have been most happily supported by my memory and intelligence. Viewed in this light, my Vienna period was especially fertile and valuable.107
Apart from architecture, Hitler’s main passion, as it had been in Linz, was music. Particular favourites, certainly in later years, were Beethoven, Bruckner (an especial favourite), Liszt and Brahms. He greatly enjoyed, too, the operettas of Johann Strauß and Franz Lehár.108 Wagner was, of course, the non plus ultra. Adolf and Gustl were at the opera most nights, paying their 2 Kronen to gain the standing place that they had often queued for hours to obtain. They saw operas by Mozart, Beethoven, and the Italian masters Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini as well as the main works of Verdi and Puccini. But for Hitler only German music counted. He could not join in the enthusiasm for Verdi or Puccini operas, playing to packed houses in Vienna. When he heard a street organ-grinder intoning ‘La donna è mobile’, he said to Kubizek: ‘There you have your Verdi.’ To his friend’s protest that any composer might have his work debased in such a way, he replied: ‘Can you imagine Lohengrin’s grail narration on a barrel organ?’109 Adolf’s passion for Wagner, as in Linz, knew no bounds. Now he and his friend were able to see all Wagner’s operas performed at one of the best opera houses in Europe.110 In the short time they were together, Kubizek reckoned they saw Lohengrin – which remained Hitler’s favourite – ten times.111 ‘For him,’ remarked Kubizek, ‘a second-rate Wagner was a hundred times better than a first-class Verdi.’ Kubizek was of a different mind; but to no avail. Adolf would not rest until his friend agreed to forget about going to see Verdi at the Court Opera and accompany him to a Wagner performance at the less highbrow Popular Opera House. ‘When it was a matter of a Wagner performance, Adolf would stand no contradiction.’112
Hitler was, of course, only one of the thousands of Wagner fanatics who flocked to the Hofoper in Vienna around the turn of the century to hear the works of the Bayreuth master. To the younger generation especially, Wagner was ‘the vindicator of the heart against the head, the Volk against the mass, the revolt of the young and vital against the old and ossified’.113 The Wagner cult was at its height around this time. Easily the most popular composer of the era, his operas were played at the Court Opera alone on no fewer than 426 evenings during Hitler’s time in Vienna.114 Many attending the performances, including Kubizek himself, were far more skilled than Hitler, with his self-taught, amateurish, opinionated approach, in understanding and interpreting Wagner’s music. But for Hitler, Wagner was more than the music alone. ‘Listening to Wagner,’ commented Kubizek, ‘meant to him, not a simple visit to the theatre, but the opportunity of being transported into tha
t extraordinary state which Wagner’s music produced in him, that trance, that escape into a mystical dream-world…’115 ‘When I hear Wagner,’ Hitler himself much later recounted, ‘it seems to me that I hear rhythms of a bygone world.’116 It was a world of Germanic myth, of great drama and wondrous spectacle, of gods and heroes, of titanic struggle and redemption, of victory and of death. It was a world where the heroes were outsiders who challenged the old order, like Rienzi, Tannhäuser, Stolzing, and Siegfried; or chaste saviours like Lohengrin and Parsifal.117 Betrayal, sacrifice, redemption and heroic death were Wagnerian themes which would also preoccupy Hitler down to the Götterdämmerung of his regime in 1945. And it was a world created with grandiose vision by an artist of genius, an outsider and revolutionary, all-or-nothing refuser of compromise, challenger of the existing order, dismissive of the need to bow to the bourgeois ethic of working for a living,118 surmounting rejection and persecution, overcoming adversity to attain greatness. It was little wonder that the fantasist and drop-out, the rejected and unrecognized artistic genius in the dingy room in the Stumpergasse, could find his idol in the master of Bayreuth.119 Hitler, the nonentity, the mediocrity, the failure, wanted to live like a Wagnerian hero. He wanted to become himself a new Wagner – the philosopher-king, the genius, the supreme artist. In Hitler’s mounting identity crisis following his rejection at the Academy of Arts,120 Wagner was for Hitler the artistic giant he had dreamed of becoming but knew he could never emulate, the incarnation of the triumph of aesthetics and the supremacy of art.121
III
The strange coexistence of the young Hitler and Kubizek continued into midsummer 1908. During those months, almost the only other person, apart from his friend, with whom Hitler had regular contact was his landlady, Frau Zakreys. Nor did Kubizek and Hitler have any joint acquaintances. Adolf regarded his friendship with Gustl as exclusive, allowing him no other friendships.122 When Gustl brought a young woman, one of a small number of his music pupils, back to his room, Hitler, thinking she was a girlfriend, was beside himself with rage. Kubizek’s explanation that it was simply a matter of coaching a pupil in musical harmony merely provoked a tirade about the pointlessness of women studying.123 In Kubizek’s view, Hitler was outrightly misogynist.124 He pointed out Hitler’s satisfaction that women were not permitted in the promenade stalls of the opera.125 Apart from his distant admiration for Stefanie in Linz, Kubizek knew of Hitler having no relations with any woman during the years of their acquaintance in both Linz and Vienna.126 This would not alter during his remaining years in the Austrian capital. None of the accounts of Hitler’s time in the Men’s Home gives a hint of any women in his life. When his circle of acquaintances got round to discussing women – and, doubtless, their own former girlfriends and sexual experiences – the best Hitler could come up with was a veiled reference to Stefanie, who had been his ‘first love’ – though ‘she never knew it, because he never told her’. The impression left with Reinhold Hanisch was that ‘Hitler had very little respect for the female sex, but very austere ideas about relations between men and women. He often said that, if men only wanted to, they could adopt a strictly moral way of living.’127 This was entirely in line with the moral code preached by the Schönerer pan-Germans. Celibacy until the twenty-fifth year, the code advocated, was healthy, advantageous to strength of will, and the basis of physical or mental high achievement. The cultivation of corresponding dietary habits was advised. Eating meat and drinking alcohol – seen as stimulants to sexual activity – were to be avoided. And upholding the strength and purity of the Germanic race meant keeping free of the moral decadence and danger of infection which accompanied consorting with prostitutes, who should be left to clients of ‘inferior’ races.128 Here was ideological justification enough for Hitler’s chaste lifestyle and prudish morals. But, in any case, certainly in the time in Vienna after he parted company with Kubizek, Hitler was no ‘catch’ for Women.129
It can be said with near certainty, then, that by the time he left Vienna at the age of twenty-four Hitler had had no sexual experience. In a city in which sexual favours were so widely on offer to young men as the Vienna of that day, who were widely expected to visit prostitutes while publicly upholding a strict moral codex, this was in all likelihood unusual.130 Probably, he was frightened of women – certainly of their sexuality. Hanisch recalled Hitler telling him of a brief encounter with a milkmaid while he was still at school, ending abruptly when she made advances and he ran away, knocking over a churn of milk in his haste.131 Hitler later described his own ideal woman as ‘a cute, cuddly, naïve little thing – tender, sweet, and stupid’.132 His assertion that a woman ‘would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling’133 may well have been a compensatory projection of his own sexual complexes.
Kubizek was adamant that Hitler was sexually normal (though on the basis of his own account it is difficult to see how he was in a position to judge).134 This was also the view of doctors who at a much later date thoroughly examined him.135 Biologically, it may well have been so.136 Claims that sexual deviance arising from the absence of a testicle were the root of Hitler’s personality disorder rest on a combination of psychological speculation and dubious evidence provided by the Russian autopsy after the capture of the burnt remains of his body in Berlin.137 And stories about his Vienna time such as that of his alleged obsession with an attempted rape of a model engaged to a half-Jew, and his resort to prostitutes, derive from a single source with no credence and can be regarded as baseless.138 However, Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and repressed sexual development.
Hitler’s prudishness, shored up by Schönerian principles, was to a degree merely in line with middle-class outward standards of morality in the Vienna of his time. These standards had been challenged by the openly erotic art of Klimt and literature of Schnitzler.139 But the solid bourgeois puritanism prevailed – at least as a thin veneer covering the seamier side of a city teeming with vice and prostitution.140 Where decency demanded that women were scarcely allowed even to show an ankle, Hitler’s embarrassment – and the rapidity with which he fled with his friend – when a prospective landlady during the search for a room for Kubizek let her silk dressing-gown fall open to reveal that she was wearing nothing but a pair of knickers was understandable.141 But his prudishness went far beyond this. It amounted, according to Kubizek’s account, to a deep disgust and repugnance at sexual activity.142 Hitler avoided contact with women, meeting with cold indifference during visits to the opera alleged attempts by young women, probably seeing him as something of an oddity, to flirt with or tease him.143 He was repelled by homosexuality.144 He refrained from masturbation.145 Prostitution horrified, but fascinated, him. He associated it with venereal disease, which petrified him.146 Following a visit to the theatre one evening to see Frank Wedekind’s play Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), which dealt with sexual problems of youth, Hitler suddenly took Kubizek’s arm and led him into Spittelberggasse to see at first hand the red-light district, or ‘sink of iniquity’ as Hitler called it. Adolf took his friend not once, but twice, along the row of lit windows behind which scantily clad women advertised their wares and touted for custom. His voyeurism was then cloaked in middle-class self-righteousness by the lecture he proceeded to give Kubizek on the evils of prostitution.147 Later, in Mein Kampf’, he was to link the Jews – echoing a commonplace current among antisemites of his Vienna years – with prostitution.148 But if this association was present in his mind in 1908, Kubizek did not record it.
Though seemingly repelled by sex, Hitler was at the same time plainly fascinated by it.149 He discussed sexual matters quite often in lengthy talks late at night with Gustl, regaling him, wrote Kubizek, on the need for sexual purity to protect what he grandly called the ‘flame of life’; explaining to his naïve friend, following a brief encounter with a businessman who invited them to a meal, about homosexuality; and ranting ab
out prostitution and moral decadence.150 Hitler’s disturbed sexuality, his recoiling from physical contact,151 his fear of women, his inability to forge genuine friendship and emptiness in human relations, presumably had their roots in childhood experiences of a troubled family life.152 Attempts to explain them will inevitably remain speculative. Later rumours of Hitler’s sexual perversions are similarly based on dubious evidence. Conjecture – and there has been much of it – that sexual repression later gave way to sordid sado-masochistic practices rests, whatever the suspicions, on little more than a combination of rumour, hearsay, surmise, and innuendo, often spiced up by Hitler’s political enemies.153 And even if the alleged repulsive perversions really were his private proclivities, how exactly they would help explain the rapid descent of the complex and sophisticated German state into gross inhumanity after 1933 is not readily self-evident.
Hitler was to describe his life in Vienna as one of hardship and misery, hunger and poverty.154 This was notably economical with the truth as regards the months he spent in Stumpergasse in 1908 (though it was accurate enough as a portrayal of his condition in the autumn and winter of 1909–10). Even more misleading was his comment in Mein Kampf that ‘the orphan’s pension to which I was entitled was not enough for me even to live on, and so I was faced with the problem of somehow making my own living’.155 As we have noted, the loan from his aunt, his share of his mother’s legacy, and his monthly orphan’s pension certainly gave him sufficient to live comfortably – perhaps even equivalent to the income of a young teacher – over a year or so at least.156 And his appearance, when he put on his fineries for an evening at the opera, was anything but that of a down-and-out. When Kubizek first saw him on their reunion at the Westbahnhof in February 1908, young Adolf was wearing a dark, good-quality overcoat, and dark hat. He was carrying the walking-stick with the ivory handle that he had had in Linz, and ‘appeared almost elegant’.157 As for working, in those first months of 1908, as we have noted, Hitler certainly did nothing whatsoever about making his own living, or taking any steps to ensure that he was on the right track to do so.