Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

by Ian Kershaw

  The eugenics movement, originating in England and finding followers in Scandinavia and America, but gaining new levels of support in Germany, fomented the fears, bordering on paranoia, of racial degeneration resulting from a declining birthrate among the better social groups and a rise in the proportion of ‘inferiors’ within the population. There was also growing resentment at the cost of supporting those seen as a burden on society – the ‘worthless lives’ of antisocials, the handicapped, ‘inferiors’, and especially the mentally sick whose alleged uninhibited sexual drive was regarded as a further stimulus to racial degeneration. It was in this context that the idea of sterilizing certain categories of ‘degenerates’ – an idea already described by one doctor in 1889 as ‘a sacred duty of the state’ – found growing support in medical circles.23

  Above all, national assertiveness derived from the sense of greatness attained through conquest and based on cultural superiority – the feeling that Germany was a great and expanding power, and that a great power needed and deserved an empire. Germany had been late on the act in the imperialist carve-up in Africa. The bits and pieces of territory it had acquired in the 1880s could by no means match its pretensions, least of all satisfy the growing clamour on the Right that the rapid growth of population had left Germany a ‘people without space’.24 The demand for colonial and commercial empire built into the slogan of ‘Weltpolitik’ was in essence little different to the claims of British and French imperialists. But alongside ‘Weltpolitik’ grew ideas of territorial expansion into eastern Europe at the expense of Slav ‘Untermenschen’ – ideas voiced ever more shrilly by some of the most important nationalist pressure-groups and increasingly entering the ideology of the German Conservative Party.25 These pressure-groups, crucial to the dissemination of nationalist, imperialist, and racist ideas of all varieties, offered new possibilities of propaganda, agitation, and extra-parliamentary opposition. The largest, the Navy League, founded in 1898 to push for the building of a large battle fleet, had over a million members and associates by 1914.26 The propaganda output – newpapers, pamphlets, even films – of such organizations was massive.27 While the Navy League could be said to have been mainstream in its nationalist message, the Eastern Marches Association (Ostmarkenverein) and, especially, the Pan-German League were, if smaller, more radical and more racist. The former advocated harsh measures of legal discrimination in a racial struggle against the Poles in the Prussian border provinces.28 The Pan-Germans, influential beyond their numbers and with a high leaven of teachers and academics in their ranks, were the most radical of all in their ideology built up of völkisch nationalism and racist imperialism, embedded in a Manichaean ‘world-view’ of a struggle between good and evil – ideas which anticipated a good part of the Nazi ‘world-view’ – and an organization, though small, that formed a link to the huge Fatherland Party of 1917 and the post-war radical Right.29 The leader of the Pan-German League, Heinrich Claß, writing in 1912 under the pseudonym of Daniel Frymann, advocated in his polemical tract, Wenn ich der Kaiser wär (If I Were the Kaiser), franchise restrictions, press censorship, repressive laws against socialism, and anti-Jewish legislation as the basis of national renewal.30 Not least, given the widespread profound disappointment in the Kaiser, he demanded ‘a strong able leader’, whom ‘all who have remained unseduced by the teachings of ungerman democracy yearn for… because they know that greatness can only be brought about through the concentration of individual forces, which again can only be achieved by the subordination to a leader’.31 By the time the war began, Clatß’s book had gone through five editions – an indication that the ideas of the ‘new Right’, though still a minority, were falling increasingly on fertile ground in the years before Germany became enveloped in the European conflagration.32 This shift on the nationalist Right already before the war is important for an understanding of the radicalization that took place during the war itself, and the links with the rapid spread of völkisch politics immediately thereafter.33

  On the eve of the First World War, Germany was certainly a state with some unattractive features – among them those of the unbalanced character sitting on the Imperial throne.34 But nothing in its development predetermined the path to the Third Reich. What happened under Hitler was not presaged in Imperial Germany. It is unimaginable without the experience of the First World War and what followed it.

  II

  Looking back just over a decade later, Hitler spoke of the fifteen months he spent in Munich before the war as ‘the happiest and by far the most contented’ of his life.35 The fanatical German nationalist exulted in his arrival in ‘a German city’, which he contrasted with the ‘Babylon of races’ that, for him, had been Vienna.36 He gave a number of reasons why he had left Vienna: bitter enmity towards the Habsburg empire for pro-Slav policies that were disadvantaging the German population; growing hatred for the ‘foreign mixture of peoples’ who were ‘corroding’ German culture in Vienna; the conviction that Austria-Hungary was living on borrowed time, and that its end could not come soon enough; and the intensified longing to go to Germany, to where his ‘childhood secret desires and secret love’ had drawn him.37 The last sentiments were plainly romanticized. Otherwise, the feelings were genuine enough. And of his determination not to fight for the Habsburg state there can be no doubt. This is what Hitler meant when he said he left Austria ‘primarily for political reasons’.38 But the implication that he had left as a form of political protest was disingenuous and deliberately misleading. As we have already noted, the prime and immediate reason he crossed the border into Germany was very tangible: the Linz authorities were hot on his trail for evasion of military service.

  The city to which Hitler became ‘more attached… than to any other spot of earth in this world’39 was, in the years before the First World War, alongside Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, one of Europe’s most vibrant cultural capitals, a hotbed of creativity and artistic innovation. Schwabing, the pulsating centre of Munich’s artistic and bohemian life, drew artists, painters, and writers from all over Germany, and from other parts of Europe as well. They turned Schwabing’s cafés, pubs, and cabarets into experimental hothouses of ‘the modern’. ‘In no city in Germany did old and new clash so forcefully as in Munich,’ commented Lovis Corinth, one celebrated artist who experienced the atmosphere there at the turn of the century.40 The theme of decline and renewal, the casting off of the sterile, decaying order, contempt for bourgeois convention, for the old, the stale, the traditional, the search for new expression and aesthetic values, the evocation of feeling over reason, the glorification of youth and exuberance, linked many of the disparate strands of Munich’s modernist cultural scene. The Stefan George circle; the scourge of bourgeois morality, playwright and cabaret balladist Frank Wedekind; the great Prague lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke; and the Mann brothers – Thomas, famous since the publication in 1901 of his epic novel of bourgeois decline, Buddenbrooks, and whose vignette of bourgeois decay, Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) had been published the year that Hitler arrived, and his elder, more politically radical brother Heinrich – were but some among the galaxy of literary luminaries in pre-war Munich. In painting, too, the challenge of ‘the modern’ characterized the era. Around the very time that Hitler was in Munich, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Alexej von Jawlensky, Gabriele Müter, and August Macke were leading lights in the group Der Blaue Reiter, revolutionizing artistic composition in brilliant and exciting new forms of expressionist painting. The visual arts would never be the same again.

  It was not for political reasons, but as a ‘metropolis of German art’ that Munich attracted the drop-out, failed artist, and street-scene painter Adolf Hitler.41 Once again, as a few years earlier, he made his way to an epicentre of the modernist cultural revolution. But in Munich as in Vienna, the avant-garde passed him by. His cultural taste remained locked in the nineteenth century, closed to modern art forms, hostile to the works of all those for whom Munich before the First World War is renowned.
What impressed him, as they had done in Vienna, were the imposing representative buildings, the neo-classical façades, the wide boulevards, the great galleries of works of the old masters, the architecture of grandeur and power. It was the city of the Wittelsbachs, not the city of artistic innovation, that appealed to Hitler.42 He rhapsodized about the Pinakothek, a ‘most marvellous achievement’ attributable to one man alone: ‘what Munich owes to Ludwig I is unimaginable’.43 The Glyptothek and Propyläen on the Königsplatz (later the scene of the Nazi commemoration each year of the ‘heroes of the Movement’ who had been killed in the putsch fiasco of 1923), the Wittelsbach Residenz and the expansive Ludwigstraße flanked by its monumental façades were other constructions of that era that stirred the impressionable Hitler.44 He later saw similarities in the representative buildings of nineteenth-century Munich to those of Berlin in the time of Frederick the Great; in both cases they had been erected cheaply, since funding was so limited.45 His own plans for a gigantic rebuilding of Munich after a second war were not intended to encounter similar difficulties: the massive bill would have been paid by the conquered peoples of Europe.46

  Hitler wrote that he came to Munich in the hope of some day making a name for himself as an architect.47 He described himself on arrival as an ‘architectural painter’.48 In the letter he wrote to the Linz authorities in 1914, defending himself against charges of evading military service, he stated that he was forced to earn his living as a self-employed artist (Kunstmaler) in order to fund his training as an architectural painter (Architekturmaler).49 In the biographical sketch he wrote in 1921, he stated that he went to Munich as an ‘architecture-designer and architecture-painter’.50 At his trial three years later, in February 1924, he implied that he had already completed his training as an ‘architecture-designer’ (Architekturzeichner) by the time he came to Munich, but wanted to train to be a master builder.51 Many years later he claimed his intention was to undertake practical training in Germany; that on coming to Munich he had hoped to study for three years before joining the major Munich construction firm Heilmann and Littmann as a designer and then showing, by entering the first architectural competition to design an important building, just what he could do.52 None of these varying and conflicting accounts was true. There is no evidence that Hitler took any practical steps during his time in Munich to improve his poor and dwindling career prospects. He was drifting no less aimlessly than he had done in Vienna.

  After arriving in Munich on 25 May 1913, a bright spring Sunday, Hitler followed up an advertisement for a small room rented by the family of the tailor Joseph Popp on the third floor of 34 Schleißheimerstraße, in a poorish district to the north of the city, on the edge of Schwabing and not far from the big barracks area.53 His travelling companion, Rudolf Häusler, shared the cramped room with him until mid-February 1914. Apparently, Hitler’s habit of reading late at night by the light of a petroleum lamp prevented Häusler from sleeping, and so irritated him that he eventually moved out, returning after a few days to take the room adjacent to Hitler’s, where he stayed until May 1914.54 According to his landlady, Frau Popp, Hitler quickly set himself up with the equipment to begin painting.55 As he had done in Vienna, he developed a routine where he could complete a picture every two or three days, usually copied from postcards of well-known tourist scenes in Munich – including the Theatinerkirche, the Asamkirche, the Hofbräuhaus, the Alter Hof, the Münzhof, the Altes Rathaus, the Sendlinger Tor, the Residenz, the Propyläen – then set out to find customers in bars, cafés, and beerhalls.56 His accurate but uninspired, rather soulless watercolours were, as Hitler himself later admitted when he was German Chancellor and they were selling for massively inflated prices, of very ordinary quality.57 But they were certainly no worse than similar products touted about the beerhalls, often the work of genuine art students seeking to pay their way. Once he had found his feet, Hitler had no difficulty finding buyers. He was able to make a modest living from his painting and exist about as comfortably as he had done in his last years in Vienna. When the Linz authorities caught up with him in 1914, he acknowledged that his income – though irregular and fluctuating – could be put at around 1,200 Marks a year, and told his court photographer Heinrich Hoffmann at a much later date that he could get by on around 80 Marks a month for living costs at that time.58

  As in Vienna, Hitler was polite but distant, self-contained, withdrawn, and apparently without friends (other than, in the first months, Häusler). Frau Popp could not recall Hitler having a single visitor in the entire two years of his tenancy.59 He lived simply and frugally, preparing his paintings during the day and reading at night.60 According to Hitler’s own account, ‘the study of the political events of the day’, especially foreign policy, preoccupied him during his time in Munich.61 He also claimed to have immersed himself again in the theoretical literature of Marxism and to have examined thoroughly once more the relation of Marxism to the Jews.62 There is no obvious reason to doubt his landlady’s witness to the books he brought back with him from the Königliche Hof- und Staatsbibliothek (Royal Court and State Library), not far away in Ludwigstraße.63 In all the millions of recorded words of Hitler, however, there is nothing to indicate that he ever pored over the theoretical writings of Marxism, that he had studied Marx, or Engels, or Lenin (who had been in Munich not long before him), or Trotsky (his contemporary in Vienna). Reading for Hitler, in Munich as in Vienna, was not for enlightenment or learning, but to confirm prejudice.

  Most of it was probably done in cafés, where Hitler could continue his habit of devouring the newspapers available to customers. All of human kind and the whole gamut of views on politics and society, God and the universe, were represented at this time in Munich’s cafés, pubs, and beerhalls. In well-known venues like Café Stephanie in Amalienstraße, left-wing intellectuals – some of whom would several years later be involved in the revolutionary upheavals – and Schwabing’s artists and writers voiced their biting social and political critique, designing innumerable variants of the coming utopia. Hitler’s scene was less high-flying. His milieu was that of the beer-table philosophers and corner-café improvers of the world, the cranks and half-educated know-alls. This is where he kept abreast of political developments, and where, at the slightest provocation, he could flare up and treat anyone in proximity to his fiercely held views on whatever preoccupied him at the time.64 Café and beerhall ‘discussions’ were the nearest Hitler came in his Munich period to political involvement. His statement in Mein Kampf that ‘ in the years 1913 and 1914, I for the first time in various circles which today in part faithfully support the National Socialist movement, expressed the conviction that the question of the future of the German nation was the question of destroying Marxism’ elevates coffee-house confrontation into the philosophy of the political prophet.65

  Hitler’s captive audiences in the cafés and beerhalls were for most part the closest he came to human contact in his months in Munich, and presumably offered some sort of outlet for his pent-up prejudice and emotions. It is likely, as an Austrian who despised the Habsburg monarchy and had arrived starry-eyed in Germany, that, as his account in Mein Kampf suggests, he was much exercised by the approving views on the German-Austrian alliance that he was hearing in Bavaria and could neither comprehend nor tolerate.66 But most of his ‘reflections’ on foreign policy in the chapter dealing with his time in Munich plainly postdate his pre-war stay in the city, and present his position in 1924. Contrary to his own depiction of the Munich months as a time of further preparation for what fate would eventually bring him, it was in reality an empty, lonely, and futile period for him. He was in love with Munich; but Munich was not in love with him. He did not belong in the avant-garde café culture of Schwabing and the ‘smart set’ of Munich’s artists and literati; he was not in tune with ‘white-blue’ Bavarian provincialism, the dominance of political Catholicism, and the strength of anti-Prussian feeling that ran from the ruddy-faced vegetable sellers on the Viktualienmarkt to the sophistic
ated lampooners of the Kaiser in the satirical magazine Simplicissimus; he was left to his own form of the Munich Bohème – loitering in cafés, browsing in newspapers and periodicals, and waiting for the chance to harangue those around him on the error of their political ways. As regards his own future, he had no more idea where he was going than he had done during his years in the Vienna Men’s Home.

  He very nearly ended up in an Austrian prison. Already in August 1913 the Linz police had started inquiries about Hitler’s whereabouts because of his failure to register for military service. Evasion of military service was punishable by a hefty fine. And leaving Austria to avoid it was treated as desertion and carried a jail sentence. By way of his relatives in Linz, the Viennese police, and the Men’s Home in Meldemannstraße, the trail eventually led to Munich, where the police were able to inform their Linz counterparts that Hitler had been registered since 26 May 1913 as living with the Popps at 34 Schleißheimerstraße.67 Hitler was shaken to the core when an officer of the Munich criminal police turned up on Frau Popp’s doorstep on the afternoon of Sunday, 18 January 1914 with a summons for him to appear two days later in Linz under pain of fine and imprisonment to register for military service, and promptly took him under arrest prior to handing him over to the Austrian authorities.68 The Munich police had for some reason delayed delivery of the summons for several days before the Sunday, leaving Hitler as a consequence extremely short notice to comply with its demand to be in Linz by the Tuesday. That, together with Hitler’s run-down appearance, lack of ready money, apologetic demeanour, and somewhat pathetic explanation, influenced the Austrian consulate in Munich to look with some sympathy on his position. Hitler’s request by telegram on Monday, 19 January to delay the summons to the subsequent mustering in Linz on 5 February was rejected by the Linz magistracy. But the telegram from Linz arrived in Munich only much later that day, after the consulate was closed. The consulate handled it the following morning with customary bureaucratic sluggishness so that Hitler received it only at 9a.m. on Wednesday, 21 January, the day after he had been due to appear in Linz. Luck was again on Hitler’s side. But he was left in no doubt about the seriousness of the situation. In some agitation, he now wrote a three-and-a-half-page letter humbly accepting his fault in failing to register in autumn 1909, at a very bitter time for him, when he had hit rock-bottom, but claiming he had done so retrospectively in February 1910, and heard nothing thereafter even though he had been registered throughout with the police in Vienna.69 He impressed the consular officials, who thought him ‘worthy of consideration’, and the Linz magistracy now granted him permission to appear, as he had requested, on 5 February, in Salzburg instead of Linz. No fine or imprisonment was imposed; his travel expenses were paid by the consulate. And, in the event, on duly attending at Salzburg he was found to be too weak to undertake military service.70 Hitler had escaped with shock and embarrassment, but little else, from the difficulties he had created for himself. He still had to cope at a later date with the capital his political enemies would draw from the affair.71 And his frantic efforts to recover the files immediately after the Anschlß were doomed to failure: before the Gestapo could get its hands on them, they had already been removed into safe keeping, from which they could be retrieved for publication in the 1950s.72