by James Longo
Dearest Mama,
…How happy I am with my family, and how I can’t thank the good Lord enough for my happiness! And next to the Lord I must thank you who did so much to bring this happiness about. The best thing I’ve done in all my life was to marry my Soph. She is everything to me, wife, advisor, doctor, companion—in a word, my whole happiness. We’re in love after four years as on the first day of our marriage, and not for one second has our happiness been dimmed. … And you, dearest Mama, were the only one not to forsake me when I was down; that I am so happy was all your doing.
The week before Christmas 1909, Franz Ferdinand celebrated his forty-sixth birthday. His health had never been better. During his sickly childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, he was painfully thin and tubercular. For the first time in his life, he looked healthy, even plump, surrounded at Konopiste by the family he loved. Much to the disgust of enemies in and out of court, his marriage had made him a modern Lazarus, a man back from the dead. Following years of snubs, slights, and vicious gossip, his wife was also finally being accepted in the capitals of Europe. The Archduke prayed acceptance there would earn her respect and acceptance in Vienna.
He also believed he had finally found an ally among the vipers of the Habsburg court, his nephew and political heir, Karl. Franz Ferdinand had stood as Karl’s godfather at the time of his birth and became his legal guardian when Franz’s scandalous brother, Otto, died. They enjoyed each other’s company, hunted together, respected each other’s opinions, loved their wives, and had unusually happy marriages, a rarity in the Habsburg family. Lastly, they shared similar political views on the future of the Empire.
As Christmas 1909 came and passed, Franz Ferdinand was as happy as Adolf Hitler was miserable. The Habsburg Archduke whom Hitler hated above all others celebrated the holiday surrounded by his family in the Czech countryside outside of Prague. Hitler, hungry, homeless, and defeated in Vienna, was at the lowest ebb of his life.
He never could have imagined any Christmas worse than the one he had spent two years earlier. Then, next to the tiny family Christmas tree, he watched his mother die a slow, painful death from cancer. Klara Hitler had always been his champion, the only person whose loyalty and faith never wavered. Her bed had been moved to the kitchen because it was the warmest of the three small rooms in their apartment. The tree was there in a futile attempt to cheer the melancholy scene. After Klara’s death, she was buried next to her late husband. Hitler spent Christmas Eve alone at his mother’s freshly dug grave in the Catholic cemetery outside of Linz.
On the second anniversary of his mother’s death, Adolf Hitler found himself in a Viennese homeless shelter surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of failed lives. At times, his only escape from the suffocating reality of his failed dreams was found in reading. German writers Goethe and Schiller comforted him, but he returned again and again to the writer he considered their superior, William Shakespeare. The English bard translated into German had become his favorite wordsmith, The Merchant of Venice his favorite play, and Shylock his favorite villain.
That winter, the winter of 1909 when he shoveled snow for the Habsburgs at the Hotel Imperial, the Christmas he spent invisible and alone in a crowded Vienna homeless shelter as Franz Ferdinand’s star rose and his own star fell, it could have been the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III that haunted him. It was the winter of his discontent.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE GRANITE FOUNDATION
“He validates Vienna’s lower class in all its qualities, in its lack of intellectual wants, in its distrust of education, in its tipsy silliness, in its love of street songs, in the adherence of the old fashioned, in its boisterous smugness; and they rave, they rave blissfully when he talks to them.“
—AUSTRIAN AUTHOR FELIX SALTER
Franz Ferdinand needed time. The heir to the Habsburg throne had wealth, health, and a family he loved, but to fulfill the rest of his dreams he needed time. He worried that the growing threat of nationalism would destroy the Empire and the peace of Europe. To prevent the restless ethnic groups from devouring each other, he also needed ideas and allies. During his 1909 trip to Rumania, he met with representatives of the Empire’s ethnic minorities, including Aurel Popovici, a Hungarian exile. Popovici’s controversial book, The United States of Greater Austria, proposed federalizing the nation-states of the Habsburg Empire into sixteen units along the lines of the United States. Although the Hungarian authorities labeled him a traitor, the Archduke recruited him to join his staff at Belvedere. Popovici’s book became their bible.
As a young man, the Archduke had sailed around the world. He was impressed with the United States, a nation of immigrants, and the federal government holding them together. He believed Popovici’s ideas could serve as a model not only for Austria, but all of Europe. His embrace of Popovici, his willingness to meet with ethnic minorities, and the diverse staff of visionaries he assembled at Belvedere Palace further alienated him from the Emperor’s tradition-bound court, the elites of Austria, the oligarchs of Hungary, and Adolf Hitler.
The Archduke’s dreams for his two sons and daughter were on a less grand scale. He told one of their tutors, “Please bring it home to my children that to rule and wear a crown is a heavy burden imposed from heaven and that one should never yearn for such things. My children are destined to become simply large Bohemian landlords.” His secretary recalled:
Franz Ferdinand seemed to envy his children their tranquil future. In the entire education he prepared for them, there was nothing which might be construed as a preparation for eventual succession to the throne. He wanted his boys to enjoy the untrimmed existence of country squires and not the artificial life imposed by court. He had similar intentions for his daughter. He believed she would be a thousand times happier at the side of a socially suitable partner who she loved rather than be subjected to those marriages of convenience—which so often went wrong—entered into by a princess of the royal house.
The Archduke was a private man surrounded at court by enemies, by a calcified bureaucracy threatened by change, and by family members who disliked, even hated him. He kept his thoughts, hopes, and plans to himself. Many believed Crown Prince Rudolph’s openness regarding the need for political reforms led to his untimely death. Conspiracy theorists whispered his “suicide” had been staged by reactionaries within the government or by members of the Habsburg family themselves. Franz Ferdinand and Rudolph had been close in life, and perhaps closer in death. He would not make the fatal mistakes his cousin had made by writing and openly talking about reforms, but the diverse staff of reformers he surrounded himself with at Belvedere revealed the direction of his thinking. To Adolf Hitler, they reinforced his worst fears about the future of German Austrians.
In February 1910, one of the family members Hitler referred to as a “Philistine” sent him enough money to relocate to a poor working-class neighborhood north of the city center. The district surrounding his new residence, the Mannerheim Men’s Hostel, was peopled by immigrants, Jews, and foreign dialects, but the rent was cheap, a single room was available, and he could have both the privacy—and the audience—he craved. The shelter had been built in 1905 by the Franz Joseph Anniversary Foundation for Public Housing and Charitable Institutions. The Emperor himself had visited, but Baron Rothschild and other Jewish philanthropists paid for its construction.
There in a third-floor, five-foot by seven-foot room, the frustrated dreamer attempted to regain control over his life. The four large suitcases he had brought from Linz had been reduced to a thin summer jacket and pants faded by wear, a single pair of socks, and worn scuffed shoes. Unlike most of the hostel’s five hundred residents, Hitler did not smoke, drink, or look for a job. Although he claimed Jews were “a different race” with a “different smell,” he befriended many Jewish residents, and they befriended him. His usual verbal targets of choice were rooted in his middle-class childhood years in Linz: the Czechs, the communists, and
politically meddling Jesuit priests. His newly found dependence on Jewish friends at the hostel may have tempered his anti-Semitism.
Its ground-floor common room afforded him a space to read, a view of the hostel garden where he could paint, and a less-than-enthusiastic audience of listeners. He and Reinhold Hanisch, who had moved to the hostel with him, formed a business partnership. Hitler would paint watercolors from postcards and Hanisch would sell them to frame dealers, saloon patrons, and Jewish junk shops. They split the profits 50-50. Hanisch was a self-promoter who made a better impression as a salesman than the shabbily dressed antisocial artist. It took three years of communal living at the Mannerheim Hostel to socialize Hitler.
Marriage, meanwhile, had polished Franz Ferdinand’s own brusque introverted social skills. He had no childhood memories of being touched, held, or embraced by his ill mother who died of tuberculosis when he was seven. Nearly everyone assumed he would soon follow her to the grave. To their surprise, the infant survived a rambunctious but sickly childhood and adolescence, and tenaciously reached adulthood. His late overbearing father, Karl Ludwig Habsburg, younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph, isolated him from his healthier younger brothers and sister, and smothered him with prayers, doctors, nurses, and Jesuit priests.
Like Adolf Hitler, the Archduke was a poor student. But unlike the son of a provincial customs official, he was not allowed to quit school. From the age of six until nineteen, when not confined to his sickbed, he spent eleven hours a day, six days a week, at his school desk. Twenty minutes were allowed for meals. His nervous energy, restless mind, impulsivity, distractibility, and hyperactivity brought him into constant conflict with the rote memorization and endless recitation demanded by his teachers. He became the most physically disciplined of any Habsburg of his generation. Franz Ferdinand remembered his early schooling with bitterness, telling his daughter:
Everything was mixed together from morning until night one hour after the other. We were allowed to go outside only once between lessons, holding the hands of the chief of the household for short walks. The outcome of such an education was that we were pushed to learn everything and at the end knew nothing.
The Archduke, like Hitler, devoted the rest of his life to learning about what he had not been taught. Hitler supplemented his own sketchy education with his love of opera, passion for architecture, and voracious reading. He later wrote, “Since my early youth I tried to read in the right way and supported in the best way possible by memory and understanding. Looked at in that manner, my time in Vienna was especially fruitful and valuable.”
Schiller, Dante, Carlyle, and composer Richard Wagner’s political tracts on race, politics, and religion supplemented the newspapers Hitler read each morning at the hostel. He returned time and again to novelist James Fennimore Cooper’s tales of heroes and villains, and Karl May’s fictional western novels filled with racial stereotypes of American cowboys and Indians. May’s sixty books were among Hitler’s favorites as a child, read “by candlelight and with a large magnifying glass by the light of the moon.” To Hitler, the Germans were the cowboys, and everyone else the Indians. He regularly quoted Shakespeare, but Goethe’s Faust was another favorite, which he claimed “contained more than the human mind could grasp.”
Although his paintings and watercolors finally provided Hitler an income, he preferred spending his time talking politics. His hatred of the Habsburgs, the heir to the throne, and his Czech-born wife were favorite topics. Austria’s 1867 constitution proclaimed, “All ethnic groups in the nation have equal rights, and each ethnic group has an inalienable right to preserve and cultivate its nationality and language.” The Habsburg embrace of ethnic groups, their religious tolerance of Jews and non-German Aryans, and the Czech marriage of Franz Ferdinand agitated and continually fueled his self-righteous indignation.
Adolf Hitler regularly shared his anger with his fellow hostel inhabitants. He seethed that there were more Czechs in Vienna than in Prague, more Croats than in Zagreb, and muttered more Jews than in Jerusalem. He had begun wearing a long dark overcoat and a greasy derby hat that made him look like the Bohemian immigrants he hated. His appearance did nothing to win over his listeners, who enjoyed baiting and mocking him. Jokers sometimes tied his coat to the back of his chair. When he jumped up to emphasize a point, the chair would loudly follow, accompanied by the laughter of his tormentors. Hitler gritted his teeth, waved his arms, and screamed at them. Supervisors at the hostel were forced to intervene, but even his detractors began to take notice that he was becoming very good at making speeches.
Vienna offered him a menu of demagogic role models to emulate. The editorial offices of George Schönerer’s Pan-German newspaper were located doors from the room he and Kubizek once rented. For months the newspaper’s stridently pro-German banner headlines must have been the first news greeting him every morning. Although Schönerer’s star had set by the time Hitler moved to the city, the newspaper he founded continued trumpeting his bigoted views. Schönerer proclaimed himself Führer of the Empire’s German-Austrians, incorporated Richard Wagner’s music into political rallies, urged the expulsion of Jews, Gypsies, Czechs, and other Slavs from the Empire, and campaigned for the union of Austria with Germany. Hitler found much to like, and much he would use in the future, in Schönerer’s rhetoric.
Shortly before his death, Crown Prince Rudolph condemned Schönerer and his anti-Semitic rhetoric. Pan-German attacks on Vienna’s newspapers by his rabid supporters resulted in his being arrested and expelled from parliament. Schönerer’s prestige and movement were further damaged when he ordered followers to convert to the Protestant faith. Many viewed his “Away with Rome” crusade as a step toward annexation by Germany. In the heart of Catholic Austria it was a step too far. Franz Ferdinand declared, “Away with Rome means away from Austria.” The Archduke sealed Schönerer’s fate by rallying religious and politically loyal Catholics against him. His role in Schönerer’s downfall provided Hitler another reason to hate the heir to the Habsburg throne.
Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, provided an even more charismatic tutor for Hitler. As immigration to the city reached an all-time high, so, too, did Lueger’s popularity. He masterfully presented himself as the champion of Austrians fearful that their place in society was being overtaken by foreigners. His motto—“We must help the little man”—spoke to the heart, soul, and concern that their language, culture, and political dominance were threatened. Felix Salten, a popular Austrian writer at the time, wrote of Lueger:
He surrenders everything that intimidates and confines the masses. He throws it down, stomps on it laughing. The cobblers, the tailors, the coachmen, the green grocers and shopkeepers rejoice. They roar with enthusiasm. … He validates Vienna’s lower class in all its qualities, in its lack of intellectual wants, in its distrust of education, in its tipsy silliness, in its love of street songs, in the adherence of the old fashioned, in its boisterous smugness; and they rave, they rave blissfully when he talks to them.
Karl Lueger thundered, “The soil on which the old imperial city stands is German soil and will remain German soil. Vienna is not in any position to make any concessions to the Slavic elements who are pouring into the center of the Empire, but on the contrary it is up to the Czechs, etc., who accept Vienna’s hospitality, to foreswear any conspicuous display of their tribal affiliation and to get accustomed to the German environment.”
When Hitler first heard the demagogic mayor speak, he found his political and oratorical mentor. The same anti-Semitic rhetoric that attracted Hitler had put Lueger on a collision course with Franz Joseph. The Emperor stubbornly refused to accept his selection as Vienna’s mayor in four straight elections. Lueger’s fifth landslide victory convinced him to warily accept the will of the people. In 1897, Lueger had become mayor of the world’s sixth-largest city.
For two decades he modernized and successfully governed the city supported by a powerful voting block that united German Aus
trians young and old, conservative Catholics, and pro-Habsburg monarchists. Children and adolescents were continually recruited into his movement through songs, slogans, recreational activities, and handsome uniforms. Hitler was mesmerized by the mayor’s political skill and acumen.
One out of four Viennese claimed Czech ancestry, but the mayor focused his most venomous racial diatribes against Jews. “Down with Jewish terrorism” was the battle cry heard at his massive political rallies. It was a calculated political decision. Cracow, Budapest, and Prague had larger concentrations of Jews than Vienna, but the Habsburg capital was where Jewish immigrants found the greatest educational opportunities, political freedom, and upward mobility. Almost half of the city’s secondary school students and one-third of its university students were Jewish. Lueger’s words reinforced Hitler’s increasingly paranoid conspiracy theories. Twice he had been rejected from his school of choice. Twice his talent and genius had been dismissed by non-Jewish academics, but somehow he held Jews responsible for his failure to thrive. His own work ethic was the opposite of many of its industrious immigrants, but in their success, and his failure, he blamed Jews.
The mayor’s speeches provided a healing balm to Hitler’s troubled soul. Lueger raged, “Here at home, all the influences on the masses is in the hands of the Jews, the major part of the press is in their hands, by far the largest part of capital and, in particular, of big business is in Jewish hands, and the Jews are practicing a kind of terrorism here which couldn’t conceivably be worse.”
Lueger’s virulent racism threatened violence, but to Hitler’s disappointment and frustration, he never acted on such threats. The mayor’s followers “wore the effigy of a hanged Jew on their watch chains,” but hung no Jews. Eventually Lueger toned down his anti-Semitism. He befriended selected Jews in order to cultivate the friendship of the Habsburg court. That behavior frustrated Hitler, but he never stopped admiring the mayor’s political and oratorical skills.