by Kershaw, Ian
Admission to the examination itself was decided on the basis of an entry test resting on assessment of pieces of work presented by the candidates. Adolf had, he later wrote, left home ‘armed with a thick pile of drawings’.145 He was one of 113 candidates and was allowed to proceed to the examination itself. Thirty-three candidates were excluded following this initial test.146 At the beginning of October, he sat the two tough three-hour examinations in which the candidates had to produce drawings on specified themes. Only twenty-eight candidates succeeded. Hitler was not among them. ‘Test drawing unsatisfactory. Few heads,’ was the verdict.147
It apparently never occurred to the supremely self-confident Adolf that he might fail the entrance examination for the Academy. He had been, he wrote in Mein Kampf,‘convinced that it would be child’s play to pass the examination… I was so convinced that I would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue.’148 He sought an explanation, and was told by the Rector of the Academy that there was no doubt about his unsuitability for the school of painting, but that his talents plainly lay in architecture. Hitler left the interview, as he put it, ‘for the first time in my young life at odds with myself. After a few days pondering his fate, he concluded, so he wrote, that the Rector’s judgement was right, and ‘that I should some day become an architect’ – not that he then or later did anything to remedy the educational deficiencies which provided a major obstacle to studying for a career in architecture.149 In reality, Adolf probably did not bounce back anything like so quickly as his own story suggests, and the fact that he reapplied the following year for admission to the painting school casts some doubt on the version of a lightning recognition that his future was as an architect. At any rate, the rejection by the Academy was such a body blow to his pride that he kept it a secret. He avoided telling either his friend Gustl, or his mother, of his failure.150
Meanwhile, Klara Hitler lay dying. The sharp deterioration in her condition brought Adolf back from Vienna to be told by Dr Bloch, towards the end of October, that his mother’s condition was hopeless.151 Deeply affected by the news, Adolf was more than dutiful. Both his sister, Paula, and Dr Bloch later testified to his devoted and ‘indefatigable’ care for his dying mother.152 But despite Dr Bloch’s close medical attention, Klara’s health worsened rapidly during the autumn. On 21 December 1907, aged forty-seven, she passed away quietly.153 Though he had witnessed many deathbed scenes, recalled Dr Bloch, ‘I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.’154 His mother’s death was ‘a dreadful blow’, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf,‘particularly for me’.155 He felt alone and bereft at her passing.156 He had lost the one person for whom he had ever felt close affection and warmth.
‘Poverty and hard reality,’ Hitler later claimed, ‘now compelled me to take a quick decision. What little my father had left had been largely exhausted by my mother’s grave illness; 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.’157 When after her death he returned to Vienna for the third time, he continued, now to stay for some years, his old defiance and determination had come back to him, and his goal was now clear: ‘I wanted to become an architect and obstacles do not exist to be surrendered to, but only to be broken.’ He claimed he set out to overcome the obstacles, inspired by the example of his own father’s rise through his own efforts from poverty to the position of a government official.158
In reality, his mother’s careful housekeeping – aided by not insignificant contributions from her sister Johanna – had left more than sufficient to pay for the considerable medical costs, as well as a relatively expensive funeral.159 Nor was Adolf left nearly penniless. There was no question of immediately having to earn his own living. Certainly, the monthly orphan’s pension of 25 Kronen which he and his younger sister Paula – now brought up by their half-sister Angela and her husband Leo Raubal – received could scarcely provide for his upkeep in inflation-ridden Austria. And apart from interest, Adolf and Paula could not touch the inheritance from their father until their twenty-fourth year. But what his mother had left – perhaps in the region of 2,000 Kronen once the funeral expenses had been covered – was divided between the two orphaned minors. Adolf’s share, together with his orphan’s pension, was enough to provide for his upkeep in Vienna for a year without work.160 And on top of that, he still had the residue of his aunt’s generous loan. He scarcely had the financial security which has sometimes been attributed to him.161 But, all in all, his financial position was, during this time, substantially better than that of most genuine students in Vienna.162
Moreover, Adolf was in less of a hurry to leave Linz than he implies in Mein Kampf. Though his sister almost forty years later stated that he moved to Vienna within a few days of their mother’s death, Adolf was still recorded as in Urfahr in mid-January and mid-February 1908.163 Unless, as seems unlikely, he made brief visits to Vienna between these dates, it looks as if he stayed in Urfahr for at least seven weeks after the death of his mother.164 The family household account-book indicates that the break with Linz was not made before May.165
When he did return to Vienna, in February 1908, it was not to pursue with all vigour the necessary course of action to become an architect, but to slide back into the life of indolence, idleness, and self-indulgence which he had followed before his mother’s death. He even now worked on Kubizek’s parents until they reluctantly agreed to let August leave his work in the family upholstery business to join him in Vienna in order to study music.166
His failure to enter the Academy and his mother’s death, both occurring within less than four months in late 1907, amounted to a crushing double blow for the young Hitler. He had been abruptly jolted from his dream of an effortless path to the fame of a great artist; and the sole person upon whom he depended emotionally had been lost to him at almost the same time. His artistic fantasy remained. Any alternative – such as settling down to a steady job in Linz – was plainly an abhorrent thought. A neighbour in Urfahr, the widow of the local postmaster, later recalled: ‘When the postmaster asked him one day what he wanted to do for a living and whether he wouldn’t like to join the post office, he replied that it was his intention to become a great artist. When he was reminded that he lacked the necessary funding and personal connections, he replied tersely: “Makart and Rubens worked themselves up from poor backgrounds.”’167 How he might emulate them was entirely unclear. His only hope rested upon retaking the entrance examination for the Academy the following year. He must have known his chances were not high. But he did nothing to enhance them. Meanwhile, he had to get by in Vienna.
Despite the drastic alteration in his prospects and circumstances, Adolf’s lifestyle – the drifting existence in an egoistic fantasy-world – remained unchanged. But the move from the cosy provincialism of Linz to the political and social melting-pot of Vienna nevertheless marked a crucial transition. The experiences in the Austrian capital were to leave an indelible mark on the young Hitler and to shape decisively the formation of his prejudices and phobias.
2
DROP-OUT
‘Wherever I went, I now saw Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they set themselves apart in my eyes from the rest of humanity.’
Hitler, in Mein Kampf
‘In those days Hitler was by no means a Jew hater. He became one afterward.’
Reinhold Hanisch, a friend of Hitler in 1909–10
‘I owe it to that period that I grew hard.’ Hitler was referring to the years he spent in Vienna between February 1908 and May 1913, when he left the Austrian capital for Munich and the beginning of a new life in Germany. The ‘mother’s darling’ had lost his ‘soft downy bed’ and the carefree existence he had enjoyed in Linz. Instead of ‘the hollowness of comfortable life’, he was now thrown into ‘a world of misery and poverty’, with ‘Dame Care’ as his new mother. Even as he dictated Mein Kampf, during his internment
in Landsberg in 1924, Vienna aroused in Hitler only ‘dismal thoughts’ of ‘the saddest period’ of his life.
But the Vienna years, Hitler stressed, were crucial to the formation of his character and his political philosophy. ‘In this period my eyes were opened to two menaces of which I had previously scarcely known the names… : Marxism and Jewry.’ The social and political naïvety with which he arrived in the city was during this time replaced, he claimed, by the ‘world-view’ that formed the ‘granite foundation’ of his political struggle.1 His own account of these years, spread over two chapters of Mein Kampf,2 describes graphically how deprivation, dire poverty, life among the dregs of society, and avid study brought him political understanding and the decisive shaping of his ‘world-view’. ‘Vienna was and remained for me,’ wrote Hitler more than a decade after he had left the city, ‘the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life.’3
Hitler was writing, as always in his public statements, for effect. By 1924 the failed putsch, fiasco though it was, and the subsequent trial that he had turned into a propaganda triumph had brought him celebrity on the extreme nationalist Right. But the Nazi Party was by then banned, and the völkisch movement hopelessly divided. Hitler was seeking in Mein Kampf to establish sole and undisputed claim to leadership of the völkisch Right. The heroic image of a genius whose unique personality and ‘world-view’ had been forged through the triumph of willpower over adversity was the basis of that claim. It was largely myth. National leaders who emerged from the traditional ruling classes and background – a Bismarck, say, or a Churchill – left few mysteries in their early development. But the very contrast between Hitler’s early anonymity – culminating in his disappearance into the black hole of Vienna’s doss-houses – and his later elevation to almost demi-god status invited both myth and counter-myth.
The autobiographical parts of Hitler’s tract were not, then, written with an eye to their factual correctness, but only to their political purpose. But an accurate reconstruction of Hitler’s period in Vienna is far from easy.4 Much, apart from the evidence of Mein Kampf itself, has to rest upon the testimony – in varying degrees questionable – of four individuals: August Kubizek, Reinhold Hanisch, Karl Honisch (despite the similarity in name not to be confused with Hanisch), and a further passing acquaintance who remains anonymous. Each knew Hitler for only brief periods during his stay in Vienna.5 A fifth alleged eye-witness account, that of Josef Greiner, like the others compiled many years after the events it purported to describe, has been used by most historians writing on this part of Hitler’s life, but is, in fact, largely if not wholly a fabrication – so thoroughly flawed and discredited that it has to be discounted.6 Many details, some of them significant, of Hitler’s Vienna years remain unclear. Not least, how and when Hitler’s ‘world-view’ came to be formed is far less evident than his own account suggests. Yet, whatever the uncertainties, there can be no doubting that the Vienna ‘schooling’ did indeed stamp its lasting imprint on his development.
I
The city where Hitler was to live for five years was an extraordinary place. More than any other European metropolis, Vienna epitomized tensions –social, cultural, political – that signalled the turn of an era, the death of the nineteenth-century world.7 They were to mould the young Hitler.8
Vienna in the first years of the twentieth century was a city of contradictions. The capital radiated imperial grandeur, dazzling opulence and splendour, cultural excitement, and intellectual fervour. But behind its resplendent royal palaces, imposing civic buildings, elegant cafés, spacious parks and splendid boulevards, behind its pomp and glitter, lay some of the direst poverty and human misery in Europe. It oozed bourgeois solidity and respectability, self-righteousness, moral rectitude, refined manners, and proper etiquette. But beneath the surface, vice, prostitution, and criminality were rampant. It offered the very limits of the avant-garde, the pinnacle of innovation and modernism, outshining even Paris and Berlin in the brilliance of its cultural and intellectual life. But both cultural traditionalism and popular philistinism fiercely resisted the new art, antagonized by those with whose artistic and intellectual achievements – Klimt and the Sezession, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Mahler, Schönberg, Otto Wagner, Freud – the city is indelibly linked. The long reign of Franz Joseph on the Habsburg throne implied the stability of an ancient empire. But in reality it was an empire wracked by modern nationalist and ethnic conflict, ill at ease with itself, struggling to cope with new social and political forces pulling it apart, decaying. Fear and anxiety were in the air. Germans felt their culture, way of life, living-standards, and status under threat. The liberal bourgeoisie felt pessimistic about the future, menaced by the new forces of mass politics and democracy; small traders and craftsmen resented department stores, large outlets, and modern mass-production; the rise of organized labour reminded them too of Marx’s prophecy that they were doomed to slide into the proletariat. The mood of disintegration and decay, anxiety and impotence, the sense that the old order was passing, the climate of a society in crisis, was unmistakable.9
It was easy to transfer the impotent anger and fear into race hatred – above all into hatred of Jews, the ‘supra-national people of the multi-national state’.10 The uncrowned king of Vienna, its mayor Karl Lueger, whom Hitler greatly admired, and Vienna’s gutter press that supported him, which Hitler read with relish, were adept at it.11 No major city apart from Berlin had grown as fast as Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its population had increased two-and-a-half-fold between 1860 and 1900- four times the growth of Paris or London.12 Of the 1,674,957 residents of Vienna in 1900, fewer than one in two had been born there.13 Many had poured into it from the eastern parts of the massive empire of over 50 million, with its ethnic mix of Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Italians, Rumanians and Hungarians. Among them was a sizeable minority of Jews. Vienna’s Jewish population was larger than that of any German city at the time. In mid-century, there had been only a little over 6,000 Jews in Vienna, some 2 per cent of the population. By 1910 this had risen to 175,318 Jews, or 8.6 per cent of the population.14 As in Germany, Jews had historically had a strong presence – far greater than their numbers in the population – in the professions, academic life, the mass media, the arts, and in business and finance.15 And as in Germany, Jews had striven to be assimilated to liberal society and German culture.16 Different to German cities, however, was the stratum of poor Jews, similar to that in a good number of east European towns and cities. Many were Galician, or were descendants of families that had originally fled from the pogroms in Russia. Among these poorer sectors of the Jewish community, accepted by none, hated by many, doctrines of Marxism and Zionism (whose founder, Theodor Herzl, had grown up in Vienna) held some appeal.17 Conveniently, therefore, Jews could be blamed both as capitalist exploiters and as social revolutionaries. The poorer Jews lived in the old city, and especially in the run-down districts in the north of Vienna. In Leopoldstadt, the site of the old ghetto, a third of the down-at-heel population was Jewish, mainly small traders and pedlars, often dressed in the traditional caftan and black hat. In adjacent Brigittenau, the depressing district where Hitler would spend his last three years in Vienna, some 17 per cent of the inhabitants were Jews.18 This was the setting in which Hitler would be fully subjected to race hatred. Repelled by the ‘conglomeration of races’ in the capital, he later wrote: ‘to me the giant city seemed the embodiment of racial desecration (Blutschande)’.19
On the Habsburg throne he had occupied for more than fifty years, Kaiser Franz Joseph signified unchangeability in a changing world. His court at the Hofburg, or in summer at the Schönbrunn Palace, retained all the gilt and glitter, the pomp and circumstance, of past centuries. Power in the vast and sprawling multi-ethnic empire stretching from the Carpathians to the Adriatic was still in the hands of ministers, all from traditional noble families, directly appointed by the Kaiser. But beneath the façade, the edifice was
crumbling. New social and political pressures were undermining the foundations.
The empire was increasingly beset by its mounting internal contradictions. The granting, in the complex constitutional arrangement of 1867, following the defeat in the ‘German brothers’ war’ the previous year, of near autonomy to Magyar national leaders in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy had stirred nationalist feelings throughout the empire. Slavs became increasingly resentful of the continued domination of the Magyars and, in the Austrian ‘half’ of the empire, of the German-speaking minority – only around a third of the population even there.20 The Austrian Germans, enjoying disproportionate prosperity, position, and power, responded by ever shriller defence of their advantage. Attempted concessions made to national demands, as in the proposed Badeni reforms of 1897 which sought to grant the Czech language equality with German in Bohemia and Moravia, massively exacerbated the tensions.21 By the beginning of the new century, these tensions were reflected in bitter forms of mass politics, superseding the liberal factionalism of the bourgeois notables and threatening to tear apart the fragile balance of the empire and the semblance of Imperial unity personalized in the Emperor and King. Any dignity of parliament (where Germans after the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907 were no longer the strongest national group)22 had collapsed in the face of the vituperation and threatening rhetoric of nationalist fanatics.23 Sessions could be chaotic – a heady mixture of nationalist and class politics frequently reducing them to a shambolic farce. A bill in February 1909, again aiming to put the Czech language on an equal footing to German in Bohemia, had, for instance, to be abandoned and the parliamentary session suspended when a cacophony of noise from rattles, bells, children’s trumpets, horns, and banging desk-lids rendered debate impossible, leading to fisticuffs amid chaotic scenes while rival sets of deputies chimed in with competing anthems.24 Laws could only be passed by horse-trading between the numerous interests and factions represented. The unseemly spectacle of squabbling deputies trading multilingual insults, and even swapping blows, was capable of alienating any observer.25 It certainly filled the young pan-German supporter Adolf Hitler with the lasting contempt and revulsion for parliamentarism that poured out when he wrote of his Vienna experience more than a decade and a half later.26