I would have liked to have asked Adolf whether his studies in the Academy left him so much free time that he could write dramas, too, but I knew how sensitive he was about everything appertaining to his chosen profession. I could appreciate his attitude, because certainly he had struggled hard enough to get his chance to study. I suppose that is what made him so touchy in this respect, but nevertheless there seemed to me something not quite right about it all.
His mood worried me more and more as the days went by. I had never known him torment himself in this way before, far from it. In my opinion, he possessed rather too much than too little self-confidence. But now things seemed to have changed round. He wallowed deeper and deeper in self-criticism. Yet it only needed the lightest touch – as when one flicks on the light and everything becomes brilliantly clear – for his self-accusation to become an accusation against the times, against the whole world. Choking with his 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. I see him before me, striding up and down the small space in boundless anger, shaken to his very depths. I sat at the piano with my fingers motionless on the keyboard and listened to him, upset by his hymn of hate, and yet worried about him, for his ranting at the bare walls was heard only by me, and perhaps by Frau Zakreys working in the kitchen, who would be worrying whether the crazed young man would be able to pay his next month’s rent. But those at whom these burning words were directed, they did not hear him at all. So of what use was all the great display?
Suddenly, in the middle of this hate-ridden harangue in which he challenged a whole epoch, one sentence revealed to me how deep was the abyss on whose edge he was tottering. ‘I shall give up Stefanie.’ These were the most terrible words he could utter, for Stefanie was the only creature on God’s earth whom he excepted from this infamous inhumanity – a being who, made radiant by his glowing love, gave his tormented existence sense and purpose. His father dead, his mother dead, his only sister still a child, what was there left to him? He had no family, no home; only his love, only Stefanie in the midst of all his sufferings and catastrophes had remained steadfastly by his side – admittedly only in his imagination. Until now this imagination had been strong enough to be a help to him, but in the spiritual convulsion through which he was now passing, apparently even this obstinately-held conviction had broken down. ‘I thought you were going to write to her?’ I interposed, meaning to help him by this suggestion.
He brushed my remark away with an impatient gesture (it was only forty years later that I learned he really had written to her then), and then came the words that I had never before heard him utter: ‘It’s mad to wait for her. Certainly mama has already picked out the man for Stefanie to marry. Love? They won’t worry about that. A good match, that’s all that matters. And I’m a poor match, at least in the eyes of mama.’ Then came a furious reckoning with ‘mama’, with everybody who belonged to these fine circles who, through cleverly arranged marriages among themselves, continued to enjoy their unmerited social privileges.
I gave up the attempt to practise the piano and went to bed whilst Adolf absorbed himself in his books. I still remember how shocked I was then. If Adolf could no longer cling to the thought of Stefanie, whatever would become of him?
My feelings were divided: on the one hand, I was glad that he was finally released from this hopeless love for Stefanie, and on the other hand I knew that Stefanie was his only ideal, the only thing that kept him going and gave his life an aim.
The next day, for a trifling reason, there was a bitter row between us. I had to practise. Adolf wanted to read. As it was raining he could not go off to Schönbrunn. ‘This eternal strumming’, he shouted at me, ‘one’s never free from it.’
‘It’s quite simple,’ I answered, and getting up, took my timetable out of my music case and with a drawing pin fixed it to the cupboard door. Now he could see exactly when I was out, when not, and just when my hours for practising were. ‘And now hang your timetable under it,’ I added. Timetable! He did not need any such thing. He kept his timetable in his head. That was good enough for him and it had to be good enough for me. I shrugged my shoulders doubtfully. His work was anything but systematic. He worked practically only at night: in the morning he slept.
I had quickly settled into the life of the Conservatoire, and my teachers were satisfied with my work – more than satisfied, as was shown by their offering me the extra coaching. Naturally I was proud of it, and certainly a bit conceited. Music is perhaps the one art where a lack of formal education does not seem to matter so much. So, pleased with myself and contented, I set off happily every morning for the Conservatoire. But just this sureness of purpose, this certainty of success, awoke in Adolf the most bitter comparisons, although he never mentioned it.
So now, the sight of the timetable stuck on the wall, which must have seemed to him like an officially accredited guarantee for my future, brought about an explosion.
‘This Academy’, he screamed, ‘is a lot of of-fashioned fossilised civil servants, bureaucrats, devoid of understanding, stupid lumps of officials. The whole Academy ought to be blown up!’ His face was livid, the mouth quite small, the lips almost white. But the eyes glittered. There was something sinister about them, as if all the hate of which he was capable lay in those glowing eyes! I was just going to point out that those men of the Academy on whom he so lightly passed judgement in his measureless hatred were, after all, his teachers and professors, from whom he could certainly learn something, but he forestalled me: ‘They rejected me, they threw me out, they turned me down.’
I was shocked. So that was it. Adolf did not go to the Academy at all. Now I could understand a great deal that had puzzled me about him. I felt his hard luck deeply, and asked him whether he had told his mother that the Academy had not accepted him. ‘What are you thinking of?’ he replied, ‘How could I burden my dying mother with this worry?’
I could not help but agree. For a while we were both silent. Perhaps Adolf was thinking of his mother. Then I tried to give the conversation a practical turn. ‘And what now?’ I asked him.
‘What now, what now,’ he repeated irritably, ‘Are you starting too – what now?’ He must have asked himself this question a hundred times and more, because he had certainly not discussed it with anyone else. ‘What now?’ he mocked my anxious enquiry again, and instead of answering, sat himself down at the table and surrounded himself with his books. ‘What now?’
He adjusted the lamp, took up a book, opened it and began to read. I made to take the timetable down from the cupboard door. He raised his head, saw it and said calmly, ‘Never mind.’
* * *
Chapter 16
Adolf Rebuilds Vienna
We often saw the old Emperor, dressed in his gala uniform, when he rode in his carriage from Schönbrunn through the Mariahilfe Strasse to the Hofburg. On such occasions Adolf did not make much ado about it, neither did he refer to it later, for he was not interested in the Emperor as a person but only in the state which he represented, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
All my recollections of life in Vienna are sharpened by contrast, and thus are more clearly etched in my memory. Indeed, in the course of the turbulent year 1908, there took place two political events which agitated the people.
On the one hand was the Emperor’s diamond jubilee. Franz Josef had ascended the throne in 1848, and in all the years since there had been long periods of peace. Since 1866, forty-two years previously, Austria had not been involved in a war, and only rarely did one come across a veteran who could describe Königgratz or Custozza at first hand. Therefore the people rather saw the Kaiser as the champion of peace, and the preparations for the celebrations were proceeding with great enthusiasm.
On the other hand, there was the annexation of Bosnia, decreed in connection with the jubilee, a matter which caused heated arguments amongst the citizens. This extension of the
external power of the country only revealed its weakness within, and soon all the signs were of war. In fact, the events which took place in 1914 might easily have happened then, six years earlier. It was no mere coincidence that the 1914–18 war actually had its origins in Sarajevo.
The people of Vienna, among whom we two unknown youngsters were living, were at that time torn between loyalty to the old Emperor and anxiety about the threatened war. Everywhere we noticed a deep chasm between the social classes. There was the vast mass of the lower classes who often had too little to eat and merely existed in miserable dwellings without light or sun. In view of our standard of living, we unhesitatingly included ourselves in this category. It was not necessary for us to go out to study the mass misery of the city – it was brought into our own home. Our own damp and crumbling walls, bug-infested furniture and the unpleasant odour of paraffin were typical of the surroundings in which hundreds of thousands of people in this city lived. When we went with empty stomachs into the centre of the city, we saw the splendid mansions of the nobility with garishly attired servants in front, and the sumptuous hotels in which Vienna’s rich society – the old nobility, the captains of industry, landowners and magnates – held their lavish parties: poverty, need, hunger on the one side, and reckless enjoyment of life, sensuality and prodigal luxury on the other.
I was too homesick to draw any political inferences from these contrasts. But Adolf, homeless, rejected by the Academy, without any chance of changing his miserable position, developed during this period an ever-growing sense of rebellion. The obvious social injustice which caused him almost physical suffering also aroused in him a demoniacal hatred of that unearned wealth, presumptuous and arrogant, which we saw around us. Only by violently protesting against this state of affairs was he able to bear his own ‘dog’s life’. To be sure, it was largely his own fault that he was in this position, but this he would never admit. Even more than from hunger, he suffered from the lack of cleanliness, as he was almost pathologically sensitive about anything concerning the body. At all costs, he would keep his linen and clothing clean. No one, meeting this carefully dressed young man in the street would have thought that he went hungry every day, and lived in a hopelessly bug-infested back room in the 6th District. It was more the lack of cleanliness in the surroundings in which he was forced to live than the lack of food which provoked his inner protests against the prevailing social conditions. The old imperial city, with its atmosphere of false glamour and spurious romance, and its now evident inner decay, was the ground on which his social and political opinions grew. All that he later became was born of this dying imperial Vienna. Although he wrote later, ‘The name of this city of lotus-eaters represents for me five years of misery and distress,’ this statement shows only the negative side of his experience in Vienna. The positive side was that his constant revolt against the existing social order produced his political philosophy, to which little was added in later years.
In spite of this sympathetic interest in the poverty of the masses, he never sought direct contact with the inhabitants of the imperial city. He profoundly disliked the typical Viennese. To begin with, he could not stand their soft, though melodious, accent, and he ever preferred the clumsy German spoken by Frau Zakreys. Above all, he hated the subservience and dumb indifference of the Viennese, their eternal muddling-through, their reckless improvidence. His own character was just the opposite. As far as I can remember, Adolf was always very reserved, simply because he disliked any physical contact with people, but within him everything was in a ferment and urged him on to radical and total solutions. How sarcastic he was about the Viennese partiality to wine, and how he despised them for it. Only once did we go to the Prater pleasure gardens, and this only out of curiosity. He could not understand why people wasted their precious time with such nonsense. When he heard people laughing uproariously at some side-show, he would shake his head, full of indignation at so much stupidity, and ask me angrily if I could understand it. In his opinion, they must have been laughing at themselves, which he could well understand. In addition, he was disgusted at the medley of Viennese, Czechs, Magyars, Slovaks, Romanians, Croats, Italians and God knows what else which surged through the Prater. To him, the Prater was nothing but a Viennese Babel. There was here a strange contradiction which always struck me: all his thoughts and ambitions were directed towards the problem of how to help the masses, the simple, decent but under-privileged people with whom he identified himself – they were ever-present in his thoughts – but in actual fact he always avoided any contact with people. The motley crowd in the Prater was practically repugnant to him. However much he felt for the little man, he always kept him at the greatest possible distance.
On the other hand, the arrogance of the ruling classes was equally alien to him, and he understood even less the apathy and resignation which in those years was gaining a hold on the leading intellectuals. The knowledge that the end of the Habsburg state was inevitable had bred, especially among the traditional upholders of the monarchy, a kind of fatalism which accepted whatever might befall, with the typically Viennese ‘there’s nothing one can do about it’. This bitter-sweet tone of resignation also prevailed amongst Vienna’s poets, for instance Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Wildgans – names which never reached us, not because we had no appreciation of the words of a poet, but because the mood which prompted the work of those poets was foreign to us. We had come from the country and were nearer to nature than were the city folk. In addition, we were of a different generation from those weary and resigned people. Whilst the hopeless social conditions and their apparent inevitability produced in the older generation nothing but apathy and complete indifference, they forced the younger generation into radical opposition and violent criticism. And Adolf, too, felt the need to criticise and counter-attack. He did not know what resignation meant. He who resigned, he thought, lost his right to live. But he dissociated himself from his contemporaries, who were at that time very arrogant and turbulent, and went his own way, refusing to join any of the then existing political parties. Although he always felt a sense of responsibility for everything that happened, he was always a lonely and solitary man, determined to rely upon himself, and so to reach his goal.
One other thing should be mentioned – Adolf’s visits to the typical working-class district of Meidling. Although he never told me exactly why he went there, I knew he wanted to study personally the housing and living conditions of the workers’ families. He was not interested in any individual: he only wanted to know the ways of the class as a whole. Therefore he made no acquaintances in Meidling, his aim being to study a cross-section of the community quite impersonally.
However much he avoided close contact with people, he had nevertheless grown fond of Vienna as a city; he could have lived quite happily without the people, but never without the city. Small wonder then that the few people whom he later came to know in Vienna thought of him as a lone wolf and eccentric, and regarded as pretence or arrogance his refined speech, his distinguished manners and elegant bearing, which belied his obvious poverty. In fact, the young Hitler made no friends in Vienna.
All the more enthusiastic was he about what people had built in Vienna. Think only of the Ringstrasse! When he saw it for the first time, with its fabulous buildings, it seemed to him the realisation of his boldest artistic dreams, and it took him a long time to digest this overwhelming impression. Only gradually did he find his way about this magnificent exhibition of modern architecture. I often had to accompany him on his strolls along the Ring. Then he would describe to me at some length this or that building, pointing out certain details, or he would explain to me its origins. He would spend literally hours in front of it, forgetting not only the time but all that went on around him. I could not understand the reason for these long drawn out and complicated inspections – after all, he had seen everything before, and already knew more about it than most of the inhabitants of the city. When I occasionally became impatient, he shouted at me rud
ely, asking whether I was his real friend or not; if I were, I should share his interests. Then he continued with his dissertation. At home he would draw for me ground plans and sectional plans, or enlarge upon some interesting detail. He borrowed books on the origin of various buildings, the Hof Opera, the parliament, the Burg Theatre, the Karlskirche, the Hof Museums, the City Hall. He brought home more and more books, among them a general handbook of architecture. He showed me the various architectural styles, and particularly pointed out to me that some of the details on the buildings of the Ringstrasse demonstrated the excellent workmanship of local craftsmen.
When he wished to study a certain building, the external appearance alone did not satisfy him. I was always astonished how well informed he was about side doors, staircases and even back doors and little-known means of access. He approached a building from all sides; he hated nothing more than splendid and ostentatious façades intended to conceal some fault in the layout. Beautiful façades were always suspect. Plaster, he thought, was an inferior material that no architect should use. He was never deceived, and often was able to show me that some construction which aimed at mere visual effect was just bluff. Thus the Ringstrasse became for him an object by which he could measure his architectural knowledge, and demonstrate his opinions.
At that time also, his first schemes for the replanning of large squares emerged. I distinctly remember his expositions. For instance, he regarded the Heldenplatz, between Hofburg and Volksgarten, as an almost ideal spot for mass meetings, not only because the semi-circle of the adjacent buildings lent itself in a unique way to holding the assembled multitude, but also because every individual in the crowd would receive a great monumental impression whichever way he looked. I thought these observations were the idle play of an overheated imagination, but nevertheless I always had to take part in such experiments. The Schwarzenbergplatz was also very much beloved by Adolf. We sometimes went there during an interval at the Hof Opera in order to admire in the darkness the fantastically illuminated fountains. That was a spectacle after our own hearts. Incessantly the foaming water rose, coloured red, yellow and blue in turn by the various spotlights. Colour and movement combined to produce an incredible abundance of light effects, casting an unreal and unearthly spell over the whole square.
The Young Hitler I Knew Page 19