by Susan Ronald
Like so many things, school proved a challenge Hitler was unwilling to tackle. In fact, his performance was so poor that he was sent to a boarding school at Steyr to force him to improve his grades. There his mediocrity abounded, punctuated with outbursts of vile temper. Hitler employed every excuse to explain away his lackluster grades, ranging from illness to his tyrannical father (who had already died), to his artistic temperament fueled by his unbridled ambition to achieve greatness (without toil). His teachers were accused of political prejudice, and they often received a tongue-lashing from the teenage Hitler for their narrow-mindedness against his strongly held social views.
If Klara believed that the move to the city of Linz would improve her tempestuous son’s prospects, her hopes were soon shattered. Hitler made no effort to socialize—either with his former classmates or other young men and women his age. His social inadequacy compounded his mother’s worries, for he had become a young man who could be described only as an irascible, bone-idle daydreamer. Still, Klara, like many mothers, soldiered on.
During his purposeless days, Hitler often wandered alone along the Danube or up the 1,329-foot-high Freiberg Hill* to take in the panoramic views. In the shadow of the building known as Franz Joseph’s outlook, he’d sit on his favorite bench to sketch or read. Naturally, the sketches were a wild and sweeping redesign of Linz to his personal liking, including new bridges and, of course, his own temple to the arts.
His evenings were habitually spent at the theater, particularly if a Wagner opera was slated for a performance. While standing in the gallery one evening, Hitler met a local upholsterer’s son, August Kubizek, whose passion was music. Like Hitler, Kubizek was prone to be moody, blaming his artistic temperament for his sullen behavior. Their love of music became their instant bond. As they walked back home that evening, they enthused about the music they’d heard and found they had much in common.9 In short order, Kubizek became Hitler’s only friend. Later, in his book Adolf Hitler: Mein Jugendfreund, Kubizek would describe Hitler as “a thread that ran throughout my life.”10
This young Hitler, a “pale and skinny but well-dressed boy standing next to him in the gallery,” dominated all their conversations with his own didactic views on the arts. Yet Kubizek did not recall that Hitler was political in any conversations at this stage of their lives. What did strike him, however, was Hitler’s mesmerizing, icy blue, wide-staring eyes.11
* * *
Despite this new and promising friendship, Klara gazed on helplessly as her nineteen-year-old son became increasingly obsessed, lost in pipe dreams of becoming an architect, or a recognized artistic genius. Klara, of course, knew better. She’d sent Adolf to Vienna to stay with relatives for a few weeks the previous year, hoping he’d find some sensible direction, since she knew full well that without a high-school diploma he could not attend university. Hitler returned home from his Viennese sojourn ablaze with the splendor of the city’s art galleries, the opera, and its sublime buildings. As his sketchbook swelled with hundreds of sketches and watercolors, his enthusiasm to redesign a “new” Linz spanning both sides of the Danube became a magnificent obsession that would last until his final days of World War II in his Berlin bunker.12
Whether Klara was able to make her son understand that his options were limited is not recorded. However, sometime early in 1907 young Hitler made another journey to Vienna, presumably to find out about enrolling in the Academy of Fine Arts.13 Hitler applied himself to the process with an unknown vigor. He even hatched a plan with his friend Kubizek for them to share a room. Kubizek would attend the music conservatory and Hitler the fine-arts academy. While Klara remained anxious and reticent, she finally agreed to let her son go.
Hitler left for Vienna early that September to prepare for his entry exams. He stayed at 29 Stumpergasse in the dingy single-story home of a Polish Jewish landlady off the Mariahilferstrasse, Vienna’s main shopping street at the time.14 While Hitler nervously waited, he imbibed the city’s prosperity, its theaters and art galleries. He saw that high-society Vienna moved at the pace of a “cavalry camel.” Its men, with their black frock coats and flowing tails, their high, stiff collars—called “patricides”—and chimney-pot hats, were strange to him. Wasp-waisted women doing violence to their figures with whalebone corsets and incongruous, billowing bell-like skirts that covered their toes were bizarre to Hitler, too.15 Both became figures of ridicule to the budding despot.
Hitler later wrote, “… preoccupied by the abundance of my impressions in the architectural field, oppressed by the hardship of my own lot … in the first few weeks my eyes and my senses were not equal to the flood of values and ideas. Not until calm gradually returned and the agitated picture began to clear, did I look around me more carefully in my new world.”16 Hitler did not see what author Stefan Zweig referred to as the “archangels of progress,” the triumphs of human intellect in experimentation in the arts, or modern technological inventions or indeed the pioneering spirit of its proponents.
When Hitler regained focus, he suddenly concentrated on Vienna’s nearly two hundred thousand Jews, who dominated, so he believed, a city of some two million souls. Like the dreary burghers who abhorred change, Hitler ranted to his friend Kubizek that the art and designs of Klimt, Schiele, and the other Viennese Secessionists of the Jugendstil, or “young style,” were pornographic and degenerate.17 In music, he fulminated that the turbulent composer and conductor Gustav Mahler was nothing but an ill-mannered, untalented Jew, with a reputation for disrupting the performances of his competitors to boot.
Frankly, the art and music world had gone mad, Hitler raged at whoever would listen. There was the new trend for atonal composition in modern music that made him wince in pain. The only beacon on the horizon was that the Viennese audiences agreed with him, hissing and brawling openly when confronted with the shock of atonal modernism. Ingrained in the old traditions of staid Vienna, Hitler saw foreign influences of polyglot Austria-Hungary—and Hitler loathed anything that smacked of the cosmopolitan or foreign, anything that rebelled against his beloved völkisch, or folk, ways.18 Indeed, the cacophony of languages of the Austro-Hungarian Empire revolted him. The thought that Czech, Romanian, Magyar, or Slavic dialects corrupted his beloved German language, as they often did in cosmopolitan Vienna, was a discordant anathema.
Still, Hitler’s greatest contempt was reserved for the assault on architecture by the Secessionists. Their “home,” designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich and built some nine years earlier, was initially nicknamed the “Mahdi’s Tomb.” Then some witty Viennese journalist dubbed it the “Assyrian Comfort Station,” while others called it a cross between a glasshouse and blast furnace. By the time Hitler saw the building, crowned with its gilded openwork sphere of laurel leaves and berries, it had become known as “the golden cabbage.”19 The façade of the building was adorned with the words of the Jewish feuilletonist and art critic Ludwig Hevesi: Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit—“To every age its art, to art its freedom.”20 For the newly alert Hitler, it embodied all that was wrong with Vienna, the changing European avant-garde art scene, and the relationship between art and design.
* * *
Naturally, Hitler’s entry-exam results for the Academy of Fine Arts were catastrophic. While he scraped through the first part of the examination in September, he failed the drawing test in October. His art was banal, devoid of human form and originality. The academy’s classification list states simply:
The following took the test with insufficient results or were not admitted …
Adolf Hitler, [place of birth] Braunau a.Inn, 20 April 1889.
German. Catholic. Father, civil servant. 4 classes in Realschule. Few heads. Test drawing unsatisfactory.21
Hitler thundered with anger. The examiners were nothing but a lot of fossilized bureaucrats devoid of understanding his exceptional talents. The academy ought to be blown up! How could the academy be so myopic? How could they accept the golden designs of this Gustav Klimt and
his Portrait of Adele Bauer-Bloch, painted in oils, silver, and gold on canvas that very year, when they denied him his natural calling? Why did the Viennese flock to see modernist paintings and not appreciate his classicism? Of course, Hitler ignored the recommendation that he reapply for architecture the following term. He would have needed a high-school diploma to attend.22
Instead of returning home to Linz, the infuriated and frustrated Hitler remained in Vienna, begrudging every Magyar, Slav, Czech, Marxist, Freemason, homosexual, and Jew their place in a society where he had none. The main exception to Hitler’s unrelenting tirade against the city was Vienna’s Bürgermeister, or mayor, Karl Lueger, dubbed Der schöne Karl (handsome Karl) because of his good looks. Lueger adored a good crowd to rouse and was famous for bending their energies to his will. He was also a noted anti-Semite who refused to have Jews, Pan-Germans, or Social Democrats in his administration. A devout Catholic, Lueger swayed public opinion against the Jews in particular, dubbing Budapest “Judapest”—mocking the Hungarian city for its thriving Jewish community. It is little wonder that Lueger became the strategic and tactical catalyst for Hitler’s formative political career.
Hitler reasoned that in order to save Austria from itself, the country needed to cease to be a state of multiple nationalities.23 “In this period,” Hitler wrote, “my eyes were opened to two menaces of which I had previously scarcely known the names, and whose terrible importance for the existence of the German people I certainly did not understand: Marxism and Jewry.”24 Hitler the artist manqué, ultranationalist, and racist was already brewing, bubbling over with rancor.
Unexpectedly, shortly before Christmas 1907, Klara Hitler succumbed to cancer, freeing her son to become the sociopath and tyrant who straddled two decades of the twentieth century as its dark force, capable of any evil. Klara’s deathbed regret, however, was that she would never see her long-held dream of her beloved son, Adolf, earning a living and at long last gaining his place in society.
Thankfully for her, she never did.
4
CAUSE AND EFFECT
… the Monarchs of Europe have paid no attention to what I have to say. Soon, with my great navy to endorse my words, they will be more respectful.
—KAISER WILHELM II to the king of Italy
The young lives of Hildebrand Gurlitt and Adolf Hitler, like the lives of millions, were about to change forever. Communism, Marxism, and socialism vied with age-old empires to wrest away power. Women wanted the vote.* Conquered nations and downtrodden people clamored for greater freedom. Ideology and threats had already been transformed into deeds by the beginning of the century—a century irretrievably marred by isms and two world wars of unimaginable dislocation and bloodshed.
Every nation suffered from an embarrassment of riches in new beliefs that divided regions, cities, places of worship or work, homes, and families. The age of the ism had arrived vengefully, and colored everything red—if not in blood, then in the red mist of hotly held convictions. Locking political and social horns in the farthest reaches of the world were imperialism, republicanism, socialism, Marxism, Bolshevism, communism, capitalism, liberalism, libertarianism, fascism, Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Italianism,* trade unionism, nihilism, atheism, anarchism, terrorism, pacifism, feminism, and anti-Semitism. Some were ideologies, others isms of blame. The isms of faith—Catholicism, Protestantism, Islamism, Judaism, Buddhism, and other established religions—were subsumed increasingly into the maelstrom of other religious, political, and social isms. Faced with this onslaught of new ideas, the silent mainstream in society embraced traditionalism and conservatism, believing that if they spurned anything new, their world would not be disrupted.
This ignored the threat of Pan-Germanism in the hands of Kaiser Wilhelm II. From the German-speaking perspective, Kaiser Wilhelm was fighting the good fight against French and Russian aggression. In less than ten years, Pan-Germanists and their Alldeutscher Verband, or Pan-German League, had grown from a radical, unoriginal, hateful right-wing splinter group to a mainstream political association supported by the national press throughout Austria-Hungary and Germany. The kaiser chose to ignore the implied threat the Alldeutscher Verband represented to his neighbors with their vow to unite all German-speaking peoples, since it ultimately suited his own expansionist plans. No one wanted to unite Germans behind the ailing Austro-Hungarian Empire.
* * *
Hildebrand Gurlitt attended his secondary school specializing in fine art amid these quarrelsome and exciting times. At home on Kaitzer Strasse, “Pan-Germanism” was a word that was pronounced proudly. His father was among the intelligentsia who adopted Pan-Germanism wholeheartedly, like many university lecturers. It was intended to unite all German-speaking peoples under the auspices of a German superstate, and Cornelius Gurlitt, like Hitler, believed that only the kaiser was worthy of promoting the German cause.1
The Austro-Hungarian Empire had long been hobbled by dissent among its multiethnic population. Worse still, its German-speaking bourgeoisie, dreaming of a strong Pan-Germanic nation that sprawled across the middle of Europe, were shocked by its ancient emperor, Franz Joseph, who wanted self-government for his Slavic citizens. Similar to German aspirations, the Slavs visualized a Pan-Slavic world stretching from the Mediterranean to the Baltic Sea in Eastern Europe.
Interestingly, the conflicting Pan-German/Pan-Slavic movements had been revived after the unification of Germany in 1870. It was just one of the serious upheavals in thought that led to the war of 1914–1918. Empire building was at the heart of that war, with Germany coming late to the party.
Many Americans were astonished when the United States, too, became a late entry into the empire sweepstakes. After all, republics did not have colonies. Yet when President McKinley was assassinated, in 1901, the new president, Theodore Roosevelt, rode roughshod over Panama. He even bullied the kaiser out of Venezuela. Yet by 1905, Roosevelt uncharacteristically brokered peace between Japan and Russia—in his first adventure into the realm of international peace.2 Under Roosevelt, the United States waltzed onto an already overcrowded empire stage.
* * *
A European war that would engulf the world’s empires was breathed in hushed tones at posh salons and gentlemen’s clubs. In 1898 Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, like McKinley in 1901, was assassinated. The Spanish prime minister Canovas, President Carnot of France, and the king of Italy were assassinated early in the new century, too. The first attempted Russian revolution in 1905 was savagely put down, and the czar’s earlier concessions to the Duma (Russia’s parliament) were quashed. Nicholas felt personally vulnerable to his cousin Wilhelm’s increasingly patronizing and belligerent attitude, his long letters haranguing the young czar to make “more speeches and more parades, more speeches more parades” in an effort to win over the Russian people, whom “the curse of God” had “stricken forever.”3
For over fifteen years, Kaiser Wilhelm lusted after a navy and empire to rival that of Great Britain and had even sacked the maker of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck, over their disagreement about unnecessary expansionist policies and Germany’s seizure of Alsace and Lorraine from France in 1871.
Notwithstanding Bismarck’s vast contribution to the German ideal of greatness, Wilhelm’s view was one shared by many Germans, including the Gurlitts. The kaiser’s brand of German nationalism was best summed up by the militaristic Prussian general Friedrich von Bernhardi, who claimed that Germany’s “legitimate aims” were to “secure to the German nationality and the German people throughout the globe that high esteem which is due them … and has hitherto been withheld from them.”4 From Vienna, Hitler, too, heartily concurred.
In France, the humiliating recollection of the Imperial German Army marching down the Champs-Élysées in 1871 after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine was as vivid and suffocating as if it were yesterday. Then Bismarck made war “pay” by demanding an indemnity of 5 billion francs from a defeated France—the first time that the cost of waging wa
r was firmly and officially placed on the shoulders of the defeated.5
Still, Bismarck had the foresight to appreciate that the French desire for revenge would lead to alliances hostile to the German Empire, and that these coalitions could ultimately unleash renewed hostilities. The kaiser, however, continued on regardless, concluding alliances with Austria-Hungary in a Dual Alliance (1879), which became the Triple Alliance with Italy in 1882.6 A truncated France responded, albeit slowly, and sealed the Franco-Russian Alliance in 1894 with the czar.
Aside from the kaiser’s envy of his cousins’ empires, “living space” further drove German aggression. Fear of Einkreisung, or encirclement, resulting from the Franco-Russian alliance was a factor. The Entente Cordiale signed in a series of agreements in 1904 between the French and British positively fed their alarm.
Germany must strike at its enemies before encirclement ripped it apart, the kaiser urged. Cornelius Gurlitt and Adolf Hitler staunchly supported him. Yet the only way to successfully attack France, with its massive fortifications in the east, was to invade via Belgium. When Field Marshal Goltz profoundly espoused that “we have won our position through the sharpness of our sword, not through the sharpness of our mind,” the last qualms about the invasion of Belgium, whose neutrality had been guaranteed by the British since 1839, were erased.