The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

by Charlie English

  Nothing more terrible could have happened to his friend, Kubizek recorded, but he was unable to console him, as Hitler didn’t share the news with anyone, not even his mother. Instead, he withdrew into himself, resolving to cope alone and always to press on along his chosen path, since “obstacles do not exist to be surrendered to, but only to be broken.”

  He soon had a more urgent crisis to deal with. On a return visit to Linz that month, Hitler was told by the family’s Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch, that Klara was in the terminal stages of cancer. Adolf nursed her through the final, excruciating weeks of her life with “loving, sympathetic affection,” according to Bloch. She passed away in the early hours of December 21, age forty-seven, and when the doctor reached the house that morning, he found the grief-stricken young man sitting by his mother’s body. Bloch had witnessed many such scenes in his career, but he had never seen anyone as hard hit by bereavement as Hitler. To preserve a last impression, the eighteen-year-old sketched her on her deathbed.

  In the space of two months, Hitler’s dreams of becoming an artist had been shattered, and he had lost the only person on earth he had really loved and who had loved him in return. This might have been a moment to compromise, to take a regular job, to consolidate the family’s money and property and take care of his eleven-year-old sister, Paula. But that was not Hitler’s way. When a neighbor suggested he find work with the postal service, he replied that he was intent on becoming “a great artist.” The neighbor questioned whether he had the necessary means or connections, to which Hitler retorted: “Makart and Rubens too worked themselves up from impoverished conditions!” Soon after Klara’s funeral, he hurried back to Vienna, this time with Kubizek in tow.

  The city that had once seemed so lustrous now showed Hitler its darker side. Vienna’s dramatic growth meant it was home to some of the worst poverty and poorest housing in Europe. At least half the city’s residents were immigrants, mostly from the eastern part of the empire. In this “Babylon of Peoples,” Germans mixed with Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Hungarians, Croats, Italians, Rumanians, and a large minority of Jews. Whatever the architectural glories of the Ringstraße, the real story of the capital was one of overcrowding, of back alleys threading shoddily built slums, of prostitution and criminality, hunger, disease, and homelessness. When Hitler took Kubizek to the digs he had arranged in the overbuilt Mariahilf neighborhood, the younger man was horrified to be led across a dark courtyard and down a stairwell to a small basement room riddled with vermin and rank with the smell of kerosene.

  In this tiny, sunless space, Kubizek observed his bereaved friend with increasing alarm. Hitler still harbored the secret of his failed exam and pretended to attend the academy each day, a bizarre situation made worse by Kubizek’s easy acceptance to the Conservatoire to study music. Hitler, always high-strung, achieved new heights of apoplexy. Kubizek remembered him “choking with a catalogue of hates.” He would “pour his fury over everything, against mankind in general who did not understand him, who did not appreciate him and by whom he was persecuted.” After Kubizek bought a piano, there was so little space left in the room that when Hitler launched a tirade, Gustl had to get into bed. He would lie there as Adolf ranted and cried and gesticulated, and if Kubizek fell asleep Hitler would shake him awake to shout at him some more. On top of his grief and humiliation, Hitler was sexually repressed, afraid of women and masturbation. His anger was “boundless,” Kubizek recalled, his “mania” growing; he was a “crazed young man” with a “hymn of hate.” When at length Kubizek discovered the truth about the exam, Hitler began to fire “salvoes of abuse” at the academy, which was “old fashioned, fossilized,” and had “no understanding for true artistry.” There was a great conspiracy against him: Trip wires had been “cunningly laid” for the purpose of ruining his career. He would show the “incompetent, senile fools” that he could get along without them! On the day that Hitler renounced Stefanie, Kubizek knew the crisis had passed into a new and difficult phase: Without the dream of young love to sustain him, what, he wondered, would become of Adolf?

  In July 1908, when the Conservatoire’s term had ended, Kubizek left for Linz. When he returned to their room later in the year, he found that Hitler had cleared out, leaving no explanation or forwarding address.

  Hitler drifted from one rented room to another, refusing work, frittering away his small inheritance. He tried again for the academy and this time didn’t even get through the preliminary test. He became a down-and-out, sleeping outdoors or queueing for hours for a place in the city’s filthy, overcrowded homeless shelters. The chemicals the shelters used to delouse their residents turned the blue-checked fabric of his only suit lilac, and he went without food for days at a time. At last, toward the end of 1909, he found a way to live through art.

  Shortly before Christmas, he met an ex-convict and grifter named Reinhold Hanisch in the Meidling homeless shelter. When Hanisch discovered Hitler could paint, he suggested he copy postcards of famous Viennese views, which Hanisch would try to sell. The plan worked: Soon there were enough orders for them to move into the safer environment of the men’s hostel in Brigittenau. Hitler would live there for the next three years, copying tourist scenes in watercolor from a spot in the corner of the reading room. The paintings were not good—even he later admitted, “I painted that stuff only to make a living”—and he was infuriating to work with: Lazy and easily distracted, he sometimes disappeared for days at a stretch. When conversation in the hostel turned to politics, he tended to leap up from his bench and start shouting his half-informed opinions. The partnership fell apart when Hitler accused Hanisch of fraud. Even so, the most difficult phase of Hitler’s early life was behind him, and when he was forced to leave Vienna, he would continue to paint for money.

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  In May 1913, Hitler caught the train to Munich, carrying a portfolio of watercolors that he would keep for the rest of his life. He later claimed that he felt an immediate connection as he stood on German soil for the first time: “The city itself was as familiar to me as if I had lived for years within its walls,” he wrote. “[My artistic study] at every step had led me to this metropolis of German art.” In fact, he had moved to Bavaria to escape the Linz authorities, who were pursuing him for evasion of military service. He rented a room above a tailor’s shop on the edge of the Schwabing and continued to knock out copies of postcards—of the Theatinerkirche, the Hofbräuhaus, the Alter Hof, the Altes Rathaus—touting his work around the cafés and bars. As in Vienna, he showed little interest in the thriving avant-garde, preferring the late Romantic works that hung in the Neue Pinakothek and the Schack collection.

  When war broke out the following summer, he joined a Bavarian regiment in a rush of pan-German enthusiasm. His comrades in arms called him “the artist” and found him strange and aloof. He didn’t drink, visit brothels, or ever speak of his relatives, but he loved the army as a replacement for the family he had lost. He was brave, winning the Iron Cross first class, a rare achievement for a corporal, and he continued to paint: farm buildings, shell-damaged villages, soldiers moving along a railway cutting under fire. At the start of 1916, he was sketching Fournes-en-Weppes, on the French-Belgian border, just across the front line from a British lieutenant colonel, Winston Churchill, who was painting another village, Ploegsteert, in a far freer, more impressionistic style.

  The early hours of October 14, 1918, found Hitler on the heights near Wervik, in western Flanders, when mustard gas filled his trench. He was seized with pain, and he and his comrades retreated, half blind, clinging to one another to find the way out of the line. He was evacuated to a hospital at Pasewalk, with eyes that were “glowing coals.”

  Hitler’s account of what happened next is one of Mein Kampf’s most exalted passages. The damage to his sight was so severe, he wrote, that he believed his painting career was over. He could “distinguish the broad outlines of the things
,” but could never hope to be able to draw again. On November 10, an elderly pastor arrived at the hospital with news of Germany’s capitulation. Revolutionaries had taken control of the country, he told the men, “sobbing gently”: the kaiser had abdicated, and a parliamentary government had been installed. Not an eye was dry, Hitler remembered, and he himself was distraught:

  I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again, everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my back, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow.

  He had not wept since the day when he had stood at his mother’s grave, he wrote. Now, as he contemplated the ruin of his artistic career, as he considered the brave soldiers who had died in their millions and the wretched civilian politicians who had betrayed their sacrifice in an act of the greatest villainy, and as the tears began to flow, the blinded artist realized his destiny: to save the German people.

  Most of this version of events was untrue. The German high command had tried to hide its failings, and when the hopeless military situation was revealed, the generals left politicians to clean up the mess, even as they spread the word that they had been “stabbed in the back” by Bolsheviks and Jews in the new republican government. If Hitler did suffer a second episode of “blindness,” it didn’t last long, since he was soon back on full duties. Karl Wilmanns, who read Hitler’s case file before it mysteriously disappeared, diagnosed a mental breakdown, telling his Heidelberg students years later that even “a strong man like Herr Hitler” could suffer from a hysterical symptom. Hitler’s decision to follow his “destiny,” meanwhile, came months later, after the army had sent him to spy on the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the group he would infiltrate and turn into the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), or Nazi party.

  For the Hitler myth, though, it was vital to connect the moment of national humiliation with the political awakening of the artist-Führer. As his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, would later state: “He comes from architecture and painting, and only the nameless misfortune of the German people, which began on November 9, 1918, called him into politics.”

  8.

  DINNER WITH THE BRUCKMANNS

  Hitler walked free of Landsberg five days before Christmas 1924, having served little more than a year of his lenient term. He was transformed. The rabble-rousing street fighter of the previous year was intent on becoming a respectable politician, or at least looking like one. He moved back to his small room in Munich, at 41 Thierschstraße, and began to “start again, from the beginning,” as he told his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. Three days after his release, he visited a woman who would be instrumental in his reinvention, Elsa Bruckmann.

  Bruckmann was fifty-nine years old, a Romanian princess, the daughter of an ancient family of Byzantine aristocrats. She and her wealthy husband, the publisher Hugo Bruckmann, had been linchpins of the Munich intellectual scene for two decades and lived at one of the city’s most prestigious addresses, the Prinz-Georg-Palais on Karolinenplatz. Every Friday night, Elsa held a salon in these airy, art-filled rooms, which in earlier times had echoed with the conversation of Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, and Ludwig Klages, to name a few. In recent years, the salon had taken a turn to the far right. The Bruckmanns had always been close to the Wagner family, and Hugo published Wagner’s son-in-law, the racist English historian Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In his influential 1899 book, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The foundations of the nineteenth century), Chamberlain built on Gobineau’s race theory to portray the story of humanity as a chronicle of conflict between the Aryan “founders of culture” and the Jewish “destroyers of culture.” Everything good in the world was due to the former group—in which Gobineau conveniently included the ancient Greeks—while everything evil was the fault of the latter. Although he was old and paralyzed by the early 1920s, Chamberlain had become an early promoter of the Nazi leader, writing to him in an open letter that it was “a testament to Germany’s vibrancy that in the hour of its greatest need it gives birth to a Hitler.”

  That May, Elsa Bruckmann had visited Hitler in Landsberg, carrying Chamberlain’s greetings. For her, the meeting was a quasi-religious experience: The NSDAP leader wore lederhosen and a yellow linen jacket, and was “plain and chivalrous and bright-eyed,” she gushed. Standing close to him, she had felt his “simple greatness,” the “authenticity” of a life that flowed “directly from the root.” Now that he was at liberty, she was determined to help his cause by inviting him to the salon and introducing him to her elite sphere of influential right-wing friends.

  With his riding crop and velour hat, and with a pistol at his belt, Hitler cut an odd figure at the Karolinenplatz apartment. The snobbier guests saw him as a curiosity, the Bruckmanns’ “house boy,” while he himself felt “like a monkey being shown off at the zoo.” But the wealthy couple and their contacts were critical to his new, law-abiding strategy. Soon after first visiting Elsa, he accepted the Bruckmanns’ invitation to an intimate dinner with their friend, the architect and cultural theorist Paul Schultze-Naumburg.

  Schultze-Naumburg would become one of the most widely read German writers of the early twentieth century. His many race-based polemics included a rant against the flat roof as being essentially Arab in character, and thereby “un-German” and inferior, and his ideas about the ethnic German Volk and their homeland would be used to help formulate the anti-Semitic, anti-urban “blood and soil” rhetoric of National Socialist cultural policy. At this first meeting, the architect knew almost nothing of Hitler, only vaguely associating him with the Beer Hall Putsch. He found the party leader to be unimpressive, a “slight figure” with a boyish nature, and for much of the meal, he recalled, Hitler wore a thousand-yard stare and remained silent, perhaps out of shyness. But later, after Schultze-Naumburg had put forward his hypothesis that the height of an artistic epoch could be gauged from the racial “type” that had shaped it, Hitler grew animated. Here was a topic that he had spent much of the past year deliberating for the cultural passages of his book. He began to spout his theories with such vehemence that he didn’t stop talking for the rest of the evening.

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  Art had sustained Hitler through his social and academic failings, through the horrors of the Viennese homeless shelters and the terror of the trenches, and he carried it with him into politics. It continued to provide a fantasy world into which he could escape, and it gave him a sophisticated skin in which to negotiate the elevated social circles he now sought. It delivered a Nazi aesthetic, too, in the party emblems, badges, uniforms, and monuments he designed, the stage sets he oversaw, and the propaganda he sponsored. His theories about art also provided a bridge to the public, many of whom shared his dislike of the avant-garde. Most significantly, art gave Hitler a higher political purpose. In millennia to come, he told his audiences again and again, the Germans would be judged by the quality of their cultural achievements and their monuments, just as the great civilizations of the past were now judged by theirs. To restore German culture was to restore the community of ethnic Germans, the Volksgemeinschaft; to see it decline was to witness Germany decline. And contemporary art, as he and Schultze-Naumburg could agree, represented a decline of epic proportions.

  Like so much of his worldview, the cultural critique that poured out of Hitler that evening was cherry-picked from nineteenth-century pseudoscience. At its heart lay a doctrine of victimhood and racial despair based on the concept of degeneracy promoted by Gobineau, Wagner, and Nordau: Everything that had once been noble, glorious, and pure was threatened by genetic degradation and Jewish pollution. By the time he was composing Mein Kampf, this paranoid reading of history had been extended by a host of latter-day conservative thinkers, so that Hitler and the ideologues around him had a library of degeneration-based texts fro
m which to borrow. The result was incoherent—his technique in the early days was to hurl out any argument that came to him to see what stuck—but it was highly emotional, and it resonated with a certain type of audience.

  “Blood” was the key to his manifesto. The sole purpose of sex and marriage, Hitler wrote, was to increase the genetic strength of future generations. The depravity of the modern era, the unregulated coupling of Aryans and Jews, and the assumption that “every creature, regardless how miserable, must be preserved” meant the Volk were now suffering a “complete degeneration.” There was a “general weakening,” a “Jewification of our spiritual life,” a “poisoning of the blood,” as any visitor to the lunatic asylums could observe. Nowhere was this more evident than in art. He had seen it for himself in Vienna, once a great bastion of German culture, which had become the embodiment of “racial desecration,” overtaken by “the eternal mushroom of humanity,” the Jew. In the old German Reich, too, political collapse had been foreshadowed by a degradation of art: An “entirely foreign and unknown” element had intruded into painting, signaling the advent of a “spiritual degeneration” that would prove fatal to national identity.

  Hitler held up the avant-garde’s interest in insanity as clear evidence of degeneration in action. Though there is no direct proof that he had read Bildnerei der Geisteskranken by this time, he would have been exposed to its ideas through reviews and polemics in a wide range of newspapers, including those of the far right, and it could well have served as a catalyst for his views. Even before Bildnerei’s publication, he had attacked the “inner feeling” modern artists aspired to find: The sole purpose of this quest was the eradication of “healthy attitudes,” and the whipping of people into a state “in which no one knows whether the environment is mad or he is.” Afterward, in Mein Kampf, he railed against the “half-wits” and “scoundrels” who had attempted to stultify the “healthy artistic feeling” of the high Romantic genre painters he loved. Modernist attempts to dish up all sorts of “nonsense” and “obviously crazy” stuff as “so-called inner experience” were a cynical ploy to stave off criticism by their horrified fellow citizens, while movements such as Cubism and Dada were “the morbid excrescences of insane and degenerate men.” Sixty years earlier, he wrote, anyone who had tried to organize a show of Dadaistic “experiences” would have “ended up in the madhouse,” but now such people presided over the art associations. Art’s insane direction was not mere coincidence, but a deliberate plot by the Jewish-Bolshevik nexus to destroy Germany. He synthesized these straw enemies with doom-laden compound nouns such as Kulturbolschewismus (cultural Bolshevism), Kunstbolschewismus (art Bolshevism), and Verfallskunst (art of decay), all of which became powerful vectors in the spreading of his new religion.