by Ian Kershaw
Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.
For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form:
Is this a German?282
Following this encounter, Hitler continued, he started to buy antisemitic pamphlets. He was now able to see that Jews ‘were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves’. Vienna now appeared in a different light. ‘Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.’283
Now, to stay with his own account, his revulsion rapidly grew. The language Hitler uses in these pages of Mein Kampf betrays a morbid fear of uncleanliness, dirt, and disease – all of which he associated with Jews.284 He also quickly formed his newly-found hatred into a conspiracy theory. He now linked the Jews with every evil he perceived: the liberal press, cultural life, prostitution, and – most significant of all – identified them as the leading force in Social Democracy. At this, ‘the scales dropped from my eyes’.285 Everything connected with Social Democracy – party leaders, Reichsrat deputies, trade union secretaries, and the Marxist press that he devoured with loathing – now seemed to him to be Jewish.286 But this ‘recognition’, he wrote, gave him great satisfaction. His already existent hatred of Social Democracy, that party’s anti-nationalism, now fell into place: its leadership was ‘almost exclusively in the hands of a foreign people’. ‘Only now,’ Hitler remarked, ‘did I become thoroughly acquainted with the seducer of our people.’287 He had linked Marxism and Jewry through what he called ‘the Jewish doctrine of Marxism’.288
It is a graphic account. But it is not corroborated by the other sources that cast light on Hitler’s time in Vienna. Indeed, in some respects it is directly at variance with them. It is generally accepted that, for all the problems with the autobiographical parts of Mein Kampf, Hitler was indeed converted to manic racial antisemitism while in Vienna. But the available evidence, beyond Hitler’s own words, offers little to confirm that view. Interpretation rests ultimately on the balance of probabilities.
Kubizek claimed Hitler was already an antisemite before leaving Linz. In contrast to Hitler’s assertion that his father had ‘cosmopolitan views’ and would have regarded antisemitism as ‘cultural backwardness’, Kubizek stated that Alois’s regular drinking cronies in Leonding were Schönerer supporters and that he himself was certainly therefore anti-Jewish. He pointed also to the openly antisemitic teachers Hitler encountered in the Realschule. He allegedly recalled, too, that Adolf had said to him one day, as they passed the small synagogue: ‘That doesn’t belong in Linz.’ For Kubizek, Vienna had made Hitler’s antisemitism more radical. But it had not created it. In his opinion, Hitler had gone to Vienna ‘already as a pronounced antisemite’.289 Kubizek went on to recount one or two episodes of Hitler’s aversion to Jews during the time they were together in Vienna.290 He claimed an encounter with a Galician Jew was the caftan story of Mein Kampf. But this, and a purported visit to a synagogue in which Hitler took Kubizek along to witness a Jewish wedding, have the appearance of an outright fabrication.291 Palpably false is Kubizek’s assertion that Hitler joined the Antisemitenbund (Antisemitic League) during the months in 1908 that the friends were together in Vienna. There was no such organization in Austria-Hungary before 1918.292
In fact, Kubizek is generally unconvincing in the passages devoted to the early manifestations of Hitler’s antisemitism. These are among the least trustworthy sections of his account – partly drawing on Mein Kampf, partly inventing episodes which were not present in the original draft version of his recollections, and in places demonstrably incorrect. Kubizek was keen to distance himself in his post-war memoirs from the radical views of his friend on the ‘Jewish Question’.293 It suited him to emphasize that Hitler had from Linz days hated the Jews. His suggestion that Hitler’s father (whom he had not known) had been a pronounced antisemite is probably incorrect. As we have seen, Alois Hitler’s own more moderate form of pan-Germanism had differed from that of the Schönerer movement in its continued allegiance to the Emperor of Austria and accorded with the line adopted by the dominant party in Upper Austria, the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party), which admitted Jews to membership.294 The vehemently antisemitic as well as radical German nationalist Schönerer movement certainly had a strong following in and around Linz, and no doubt included some at least of Hitler’s teachers among its supporters. But antisemitism seems to have been relatively unimportant in his school compared with the antagonism towards the Czechs.295 Hitler’s own later recollection was probably in this respect not inaccurate, when he told Albert Speer that he had become aware of the ‘nationalities problem’ – by which he meant vehement hostility towards the Czechs at school – but the ‘danger of Jewry’ had only been made plain to him in Vienna.296
The young Hitler, himself taken while still in Linz by Schönerer’s ideas, could scarcely have missed the emphatic racial antisemitism which was so integral to them.297 But for the Schönerer supporters in the Linz of Hitler’s day, antisemitism appears to have been a subdominant theme in the cacophony of anti-Czech clamour and trumpeted Germanomania. It certainly did not prevent Hitler’s warm expressions of gratitude in postcards and the present of one of his watercolours to Dr Bloch, the Jewish physician who had treated his mother in her last illness.298 The deep, visceral hatred of his later antisemitism was of a different order altogether. That was certainly not present in his Linz years.
There is no evidence that Hitler was distinctively antisemitic by the time he parted company with Kubizek in the summer of 1908. Hitler himself claimed that he became an antisemite within two years of arriving in Vienna.299 Could, then, the transformation be placed in the year he spent, mainly in Felberstraße, between leaving Kubizek and becoming a vagrant? The testimony of Lanz von Liebenfels would fit this chronology.300 But we have seen that this is of highly doubtful value. Hitler’s descent into abject poverty in autumn 1909 might seem an obvious time to search for a scapegoat and find it in the figure of the Jew. But he had the opportunity less then than at any other time in Vienna to ‘read up’ on the subject, as he claimed in Mein Kampf.301
Not only that: Reinhold Hanisch, his close companion over the following months, was adamant that Hitler ‘in those days was by no means a Jew hater. He became one afterwards.’302 Hanisch emphasized Hitler’s Jewish friends and contacts in the Men’s Home to demonstrate the point. A one-eyed locksmith called Robinsohn spared Hitler some small change to help him out financially from time to time. (The man’s name was actually Simon Robinson, traceable in the Men’s Home in 1912–13.303) Josef Neumann, as we have seen, became, as Hanisch put it, ‘a real friend’ to Hitler. He was said to have ‘liked Hitler very much’ and to have been ‘of course highly esteemed’ by him. A postcard salesman, Siegfried Löffner (misnamed Loeffler by Hanisch), was also ‘one of Hitler’s circle of acquaintances’, and, as we remarked, took sides with him in the acrimonious conflict with Hanisch in 1910.304 Hitler preferred, as we have seen, to sell his pictures to Jewish dealers, and one of them, Jacob Altenberg, subsequently spoke well of the business relationship they had conducted.305 Hanisch’s testimony finds confirmation in the later comment of the anonymous resident of the Men’s Home in the spring of 1912, that ‘Hitler got along exceptionally well with Jews, and said at one time that they were a clever people who stick together better than the Germans do.’306
The three years that Hitler spent in the Men’s Home certainly gave him every opportunity to pore over antisemitic newpapers, pamphlets, and cheap literature. But, leaving aside the fact that the chronology no longer matches Hitler’s own assertion of a transformation within two years of arriving in Vienna, Karl Honisch, as we have seen, mak
es a point of emphasizing Hitler’s strong views on ‘Jesuits’ and the ‘Reds’, vehemently expressed in his numerous interventions in the debates in the writing-room, though makes no mention at all of any hatred of Jews. Hitler certainly joined in talk about the Jews in the Men’s Home. But his standpoint was, according to Hanisch’s account, by no means negative. Hanisch has Hitler admiring the Jews for their resistance to persecution, praising Heine’s poetry and the music of Mendelssohn and Offenbach, expressing the view that the Jews were the first civilized nation in that they had abandoned polytheism for belief in one God, blaming Christians more than Jews for usury, and dismissing the stock-in-trade antisemitic charge of Jewish ritual murder as nonsense.307 Only Josef Greiner, of those who claimed to have witnessed Hitler at first hand in the Men’s Home, speaks of him as a fanatical Jew-hater in that period.308 But, as we have noted, Greiner’s testimony is worthless.
There is, therefore, no reliable contemporary confirmation of Hitler’s paranoid antisemitism during the Vienna period. If Hanisch is to be believed, in fact, Hitler was not antisemitic at all at this time. Beyond that, Hitler’s close comrades during the First World War also recalled that he voiced no notable antisemitic views.309 The question arises, then, whether Hitler had not invented his Viennese ‘conversion’ to antisemitism in Mein Kampf; whether, in fact, his pathological hatred of the Jews did not emerge only in the wake of the lost war, in 1918–19.310
Why might Hitler fabricate the claim that he had become an ideological antisemite in Vienna? And, equally, why might a ‘conversion’ at the end of the war be regarded as something to be concealed by a story of an earlier transformation? The answer lies in the image Hitler was establishing for himself in the early 1920s, and particularly following the failed putsch and his trial. This demanded the self-portrait painted in Mein Kampf, of the nobody who struggled from the first against adversity, and, rejected by the academic ‘establishment’, taught himself through painstaking study, coming – above all through his own bitter experiences – to unique insights about society and politics that enabled him without assistance to formulate at the age of around twenty a rounded ‘world-view’. This unchanged ‘world-view’, he was saying in 1924, provided him with the claim to leadership of the national movement, and indeed with the claim to be Germany’s coming ‘great leader’.311 Perhaps by then Hitler had even convinced himself that all the pieces of the ideological jigsaw had indeed fallen into place during his Vienna years. In any case, by the early 1920s no one was in a position to gainsay the story. An admission that he had become an ideological antisemite only at the end of the war, as he lay blinded from mustard gas in a hospital in Pasewalk and heard of Germany’s defeat and the revolution, would certainly have sounded less heroic, and would also have smacked of hysteria.
However, it is difficult to believe that Hitler of all people, given the intensity of his hatred for the Jews between 1919 and the end of his life, had remained unaffected by the poisonous antisemitic atmosphere of the Vienna he knew – one of the most virulently anti-Jewish cities in Europe. It was a city where, at the turn of the century, radical antisemites advocated punishing sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews as sodomy, and placing Jews under surveillance around Easter to prevent ritual child-murder.312 Schönerer, the racial antisemite, had notably helped to stir up the hatred. Lueger, as we noted, was able to exploit the widespread and vicious antisemitism to build up his Christian Social Party and consolidate his hold on power in Vienna. Hitler greatly admired both. Once more, it would have been strange had he of all people admired them but been unaffected by such an essential stock-in-trade of their message as their antisemitism. Certainly, he learnt from Lueger the gains to be made from popularizing hatred against the Jews.313 The explicitly antisemitic newspaper Hitler read, and singled out for praise, the Deutsches Volksblatt, selling around 55,000 copies a day at the time, described Jews as agents of decomposition and corruption, and repeatedly linked them with sexual scandal, perversion, and prostitution.314 Leaving aside the probably contrived incident of the caftan-Jew, Hitler’s description of his gradual exposure through the antisemitic gutter press to deep anti-Jewish prejudice and its impact upon him while in Vienna has an authentic ring about it.315
Probably no single encounter produced his loathing for Jews. Given his relations with his parents, there may have been some connection with an unresolved Oedipal complex, though this is no more than guesswork.316 Hitler’s linkage of Jews and prostitution has prompted speculation that sexual fantasies, obsessions, or perversions provide the key.317 Again, there is no reliable evidence. The sexual connotations were no more than Hitler could have picked up from the Deutsches Volksblatt. Another explanation would be a simpler one. At the time that Hitler soaked up Viennese antisemitism, he had recently experienced bereavement, failure, rejection, isolation, and increasing penury. The gulf between his self-image as a frustrated great artist or architect, and the reality of his life as a drop-out, needed an explanation. The Viennese antisemitic gutter press, it could be surmised, helped him to find that explanation.318
But if Hitler’s antisemitism was indeed formed in Vienna, why did it remain unnoticed by those around him? The answer might well be banal: in that hotbed of rabid antisemitism, anti-Jewish sentiment was so commonplace that it could go practically unnoticed. The argument from silence is, therefore, not conclusive. However, there is still the evidence from Hanisch and Anonymous about Hitler’s friendship with Jews to contend with. This seems to stand in flat contradiction to Hitler’s own lurid account of his conversion to antisemitism in Vienna. One remark by Hanisch, however, suggests that Hitler had indeed already developed racist notions about the Jews. When one of their group asked why Jews remained strangers in the nation ‘Hitler answered that it was because they were a different race.’ He added, according to Hanisch, that ‘Jews had a different smell.’ Hitler was said also to have frequently remarked ‘that descendants of Jews are very radical and have terroristic inclinations’. And when he and Neumann discussed Zionism, Hitler said that any money of Jews leaving Austria would obviously be confiscated ‘as it was not Jewish but Austrian’.319 If Hanisch is to be believed, then, Hitler was advancing views reflecting racial antisemitism at the same time that he was closely associated with a number of Jews in the Men’s Home. Could it have been that this very proximity, the dependence of the would-be great artist on Jews to off-load his little street paintings, at precisely the same time that he was reading and digesting the antisemitic bile poured out by Vienna’s gutter press, served only to underline and deepen the bitter enmities taking shape in his mind?320 Would the outsized ego of the unrecognized genius reduced to this not have translated his self-disgust into inwardly fermenting race-hatred when the plainly antisemitic Hanisch remarked to him that ‘he must be of Jewish blood, since such a large beard rarely grows on a Christian chin’ and ‘he had big feet, as a desert wanderer must have’?321 Whether Hitler was on terms of real friendship with the Jews around him in the Men’s Home, as Hanisch states, might be doubted. Throughout his life Hitler made remarkably few genuine friendships. And throughout his life, despite the torrents of words that poured from his mouth as a politician, he was adept at camouflaging his true feelings even to those in his immediate company. He was also a clever manipulator of those around him. His relations with the Jews in the Men’s Home were clearly, at least in part, self-serving. Robinson helped him out with money. Neumann, too, paid off small debts for him.322 Löffner was Hitler’s go-between with the dealers.323 Whatever his true feelings, in his contacts with Jewish dealers and traders, Hitler was simply being pragmatic: as long as they could sell his paintings for him, he could swallow his abstract dislike of Jews.324
Though it has frequently been claimed, largely based on Hanisch’s evidence and on the lack of reference to his antisemitic views in the paltry sources available, that Hitler was not a racial antisemite during his stay in Vienna, the balance of probabilities surely suggests a different interpretation? It see
ms more likely that Hitler, as he later claimed, indeed came to hate Jews during his time in Vienna. But, probably, at this time it was still little more than a rationalization of his personal circumstances rather than a thought-out ‘world-view’. It was a personalized hatred – blaming the Jews for all the ills that befell him in a city that he associated with personal misery. But any expression of this hatred that he had internalized did not stand out to those around him where antisemitic vitriol was so normal. And, paradoxically, as long as he needed Jews to help him earn what classed as a living, he kept quiet about his true views and perhaps even on occasion, as Hanisch indicates, insincerely made remarks which could be taken, if mistakenly, as complimentary to Jewish culture. Only later, if this line of argument is followed, did he rationalize his visceral hatred into the fully-fledged ‘world-view’, with antisemitism as its core, that congealed in the early 1920s. The formation of the ideological antisemite had to wait until a further crucial phase in Hitler’s development, ranging from the end of the war to his political awakening in Munich in 1919.
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