Adolf Hitler was Klara Hitler’s fourth child, he was sickly, and yet it was he who survived, and his mother, according to his friend Kubizek, was forever fretting and worrying about him. When the fifth child, Edmund, died, Hitler was eleven years old, old enough to grieve over him and to remember him for the rest of his life.
According to the ideology expressed in Mein Kampf, Hitler’s younger brother died because he was too weak and therefore unworthy of life. What Hitler himself thought and felt as an eleven-year-old boy is a matter of conjecture, but it would not seem unreasonable to suggest that he was affected by his brother’s death and that he pondered on why it had happened. Why him rather than another? As a teenager Hitler distanced himself from the Church; his mother attended devoutly every Sunday, his friend and his friend’s family likewise, but not Hitler, who would stand outside and wait for them, suggesting that he was certainly not looking for any religious explanation of the brutality of existence.
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In Mein Kampf everything belonging to Hitler’s own biography is related to his ideology. It is not his father’s life as such that is significant to him, the person he was in real life, the man whose smell could be described in such and such a way, who walked and stood and sat like this or like that, who expressed himself in this way rather than that and who filled a room with his very own presence, but rather what he in his life represented. His father is presented as a man who worked his way up from the humblest beginnings, in other words he belongs to the strong, and in this way Hitler turns his problematic social background to his advantage, at the same time as he keeps private that which would ruin the trajectory, the striving to surmount, that which takes place in the material world among real people, who not only belong to a lineage, but also belch and shit and yell and lash out, and with a certain regularity drink themselves senseless; who slurp and spit and reek of piss and sweat, who drag their sons here and there by the hair, behavior that presumably cannot have been unusual in the home of a customs official at the end of the nineteenth century – all this vanishes too in the ancestral circle closed by his father’s passage from cottager’s son to farmer.
But while Hitler translated his father’s history into an example of vitality and strength, there is something else in that history that Hitler is not sensitive enough as a writer to be able to control. Almost everything that follows on the subject of his father concerns the disparity between him and his son. The conflict is very much toned down and yet occupies some considerable surface area, and in this asymmetry there is tension.
It was at this time that the first ideals took shape in my breast. All my playing about in the open, the long walk to school, and particularly my association with extremely “husky” boys, which sometimes caused my mother bitter anguish, made me the very opposite of a stay-at-home. And though at that time I scarcely had any serious ideas as to the profession I should one day pursue, my sympathies were in any case not in the direction of my father’s career.
In his own self-image, Hitler is a child of the outdoors, playing with “extremely ‘husky’ boys,” “rather hard to handle,” and “a boy who in reality was really anything but ‘good’ in the usual sense of the word.” In other words, he is indignant, obstinate, unruly, perhaps also aggressive, all of which is directed toward his father, no one else being named in this context, his father who could “achieve no understanding” of the “youthful ideas” in his son’s head and was thereby made to feel “concern.” As a result, his father begins “the relentless enforcement of his authority,” this by later accounts involving beatings and harsh corporal punishment. But Hitler lends another side to this depiction:
I had become a little ringleader; at school I learned easily and at that time very well, but was otherwise rather hard to handle. Since in my free time I received singing lessons in the cloister at Lambach, I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal. For a time, at least, this was the case. But since my father, for understandable reasons, proved unable to appreciate the oratorical talents of his pugnacious boy, or to draw from them any favorable conclusions regarding the future of his offspring, he could, it goes without saying, achieve no understanding for such youthful ideas. With concern he observed this conflict of nature.
As it happened, my temporary aspiration for this profession was in any case soon to vanish, making place for hopes more suited to my temperament. Rummaging through my father’s library, I had come across various books of a military nature, among them a popular edition of the Franco-German War of 1870–71. It consisted of two issues of an illustrated periodical from those years, which now became my favorite reading matter. It was not long before the great heroic struggle had become my greatest inner experience. From then on I became more and more enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or, for that matter, with soldiering.
But in another respect as well, this was to assume importance for me. For the first time, though as yet in a confused form, the question was forced upon my consciousness: Was there a difference – and if so what difference – between the Germans who fought these battles and other Germans? Why hadn’t Austria taken part in this war; why hadn’t my father and all the others fought?
Are we not the same as all other Germans? Do we not all belong together? This problem began to gnaw at my little brain for the first time. I asked cautious questions and with secret envy received the answer that not every German was fortunate enough to belong to Bismarck’s Reich.
This was more than I could understand.
Both fascinations are embellishments of reality. The splendor of Church ceremonial, in which he delights, is theatrical and external, whereas the narrative of the heroism of war is an internal transformation, the character of the soldiers, their courage and self-sacrifice giving luster to an otherwise trivial and quotidian reality, not in itself, but in the sympathetic insight into their heroism the books about them make possible, the viewpoint thereby established, the notion that this ordinary landscape could be transformed and become uniquely significant. Both fascinations are associated with his father; the first making Hitler’s idealization of the abbot natural, a reflection of his father’s veneration of the village priest in his boyhood days. A male ideal to any boy of such age is the ideal of his father, and to Hitler’s father nothing was more natural since he had no father of his own. Hitler, however, does, and his idealization of the abbot must be seen in that light. It is this “conflict of nature” in his son’s character that makes his father feel anxious. He seeks what is furthest from his father. In the description of his infatuations with war, the two realities, the one in which he grew up and the one he dreamed about, are brought even closer together, the nearest the book gets to an accusation without tearing away the veil of euphemism by which it shrouds all things proximate. Why did Austria not fight? Why did my father and all the others not fight in that struggle?
It is a childish accusation, for there were any number of good reasons for his father not having fought, but the childish nature of it suggests that it preys on him during the time about which he is writing; nothing else in the first three or four pages seems to be so, everything is controlled, held in the same grip and tone as is used throughout the work.
The suggested conflict escalates when a decision is to be made as to what kind of school the eleven-year-old Adolf is to attend. Hitler himself prefers the classical Lyceum, whereas his father wants him to attend the non-classical Realschule.
Then barely eleven years old, I was forced into opposition for the first time in my life. Hard and determined as my father might be in putting through plans and purposes once conceived, his son was just as persistent and recalcitrant in rejecting an idea which appealed to him not at all, or in any case very little. I did not want to become a civil servant. Neither persuasion nor “serious
” arguments made any impression on my resistance.
I did not want to be a civil servant, no, and again no.
All attempts on my father’s part to inspire me with love or pleasure in this profession by stories from his own life accomplished the exact opposite. I yawned and grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time and being compelled to force the content of a whole life into blanks that had to be filled out.
The odd thing is that the book says nothing of how it turned out, what happened, how the conflict ended. Instead, this is merely suggested, a dozen lines on: “In this respect my attendance at the Realschule, which now commenced, made little difference.”
He describes an absolutely intractable conflict, he is eleven years old, for the first time confronting the wishes of his father, who is harsh and strict and high-handed, nothing can break down his opposition – and then, although nothing apparently happens, Hitler has given in and is in the midst of everything he so fiercely rejected.
The narrative is clearly hiding something, but what? Is it his defeat itself and the way it must have altered his relationship with his father? His father broke his will, and insofar as he had been open in his opposition and squared up to him in a battle of strength, that defeat must have been humiliating indeed. Yet there is something odd about this entire depiction. That a father should have plans as to his son’s education is only natural, but the son being so farsighted in respect to his future as to invest, at the age of eleven, all his strength in opposing his father’s will in the matter of something as far off in time as a civil servent’s position sounds strange.
Why was it so urgent for Hitler to say that he was sent to the Realschule in Linz against his will? It was a highly respectable school, Ludwig Wittgenstein, born in the same year as Adolf Hitler, went there, and he was from one of the wealthiest and culturally most well-endowed families in Austria, if not the whole of Europe. Wittgenstein and Hitler both did poorly at the school, Hitler especially so, failing in several subjects and having to retake his first year, then failing again in his third year with the result that he was not allowed to continue before improving his grades at another, less prestigious school. Could it be that this whole story of his father forcing him to attend was something he made up, allowing him to state that he could have passed had he wanted to, but that what he wanted was something else, for which reason he saw no reason to make an effort? It sounds like a rather circuitous route.
The conflict surrounding the civil servant’s position is escalated further. Hitler attends the Realschule against his will, forced to give in to his father’s wishes, but in his own words he is “persistent and recalcitrant” and instead of standing firm on Lyceum over Realschule, he redoubles the conflict a year later:
How it happened, I myself do not know, but one day it became clear to me that I would become a painter, an artist. There was no doubt as to my talent for drawing; it had been one of my father’s reasons for sending me to the Realschule, but never in all the world would it have occurred to him to give me professional training in this direction. On the contrary. When for the first time, after once again rejecting my father’s favorite notion, I was asked what I myself wanted to be, and I rather abruptly blurted out the decision I had meanwhile made, my father for the moment was struck speechless.
“Painter? Artist?”
He doubted my sanity, or perhaps he thought he had heard wrong or misunderstood me. But when he was clear on the subject, and particularly after he felt the seriousness of my intention, he opposed it with all the determination of his nature. His decision was extremely simple, for any consideration of what abilities I might really have was simply out of the question.
“Artist, no, never as long as I live!” But since his son, among various other qualities, had apparently inherited his father’s stubbornness, the same answer came back at him. Except, of course, that it was in the opposite sense.
And thus the situation remained on both sides. My father did not depart from his “Never!” And I intensified my “Oh, yes!”
The consequences, indeed, were none too pleasant. The old man grew embittered, and, much as I loved him, so did I. My father forbade me to nourish the slightest hope of ever being allowed to study art. I went one step further and declared that if that was the case I would stop studying altogether. As a result of such “pronouncements,” of course, I drew the short end; the old man began the relentless enforcement of his authority. In the future, therefore, I was silent, but transformed my threat into reality.
His brother Edmund dies of the measles in February 1900. Hitler begins at the Realschule in Linz in September that same year. How his brother’s death affects him is impossible to glean from his own writings about the period. Some biographies describe a transformative impact on his personality, suggesting that Hitler went from pleasant and outgoing to argumentative, sullen, and introverted, but even if this was the case we have no way of knowing what might have occasioned it, all we can do is note that at some point during this time he left one milieu for another, going from a small village school to a big city school where he knew no one and made no friends, and that his brother died some months before. But then again, it was his younger brother who had died, it must have left a crater, and was bound to have darkened his mind and his life in general. Everything his little brother was in life, and then his ceasing to exist, no longer being alive among them, would perhaps be more difficult for an eleven-year-old to accept than to understand. And when the child of a family dies, the grief of its parents is unfathomable; in that grief those who do not die must live on. The parents must have been quite differently attached to him than to those who had died at birth, the future must have been meshed into their gaze whenever they looked at him. The death of a child is a crisis greater than any other, and how can an eleven-year-old relate to that, other than to dwell on the injustice of it? This tragedy resonates through Hitler’s years at the Realschule, his disinclination to apply himself, his impudence and self-confidence; he is his own person, with no reason to give a damn apart from his father’s attempts to thrash sense into him. The beatings cannot have been decisive in shifting his character, he had been beaten before, it was a circumstance of his life, as doubtless it was for many other children of the time, certainly in that environment. He writes nothing about his mother, nothing about his siblings, nothing about friends, only about his father. If we are to believe his account, the way he sabotages his schooling to demonstrate to his father that he was wrong, then certainly there is something self-destructive about his behavior here. Only a darkened mind would pursue the thought, refuse to work, make him see what he has done, when no other opportunity exists but this to take revenge, no other way to hurt the one you hate. While this entire elaborate operation may conceivably be a concoction designed to excuse Hitler’s poor grades and lack of schooling, it is nevertheless descriptive of the remoteness that existed between father and son, a deadlock, though there seems to be no obvious reason to consider it fictitious, since it clearly seems to have been working at various levels and is confirmed by other sources. “The old man … as I loved him” would seem to be a rather kind way of referring to an obstinate, cantankerous, and bitter customs official who beats his children senseless, but the representation here is not of Hitler’s father, but the more abstract “father,” a presence in almost any life, to be looked up to and respected, hence the form Hitler uses slightly further on, “the old gentleman.”
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Few had much good to say about Alois Hitler, born Schicklgruber. In her book Hitler’s Vienna Brigitte Hamann cites one of his acquaintances, Josef Mayrhofer, as saying this of him: “In the bar he always had to be right and had a quick temper … At home he was strict, not a gentle man; his wife didn’t have an easy life.” Yet the picture is by no means unambiguous; the obituary in the Linz Tagespost describes a cheerful and sociable man, “always … happy” and “of a downright youthful j
oyfulness even,” Hamann quotes, and also “a friend of song.” “Even though a rough word may have escaped his lips once in a while, a good heart was hiding behind a rough exterior,” the obituary went on. Basically, then, he would seem to have been a jovial sort socially, a pig at home. To his secretary Hitler later confided that he had not loved his father, and moreover had been frightened of him. “He had tantrums and immediately became physically violent. My poor mother would always be very scared for me.” Hitler’s older brother, Alois Junior, draws much the same picture, adding that Adolf was spoiled and protected by his mother, Alois Junior’s stepmother, who pampered him from morning till night. But Alois Junior too states that Adolf was beaten, on one occasion so brutally he thought him to be dead.
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Undeniably the most important source about Hitler’s early days in Linz, and to a certain extent in Vienna too, is August Kubizek’s book The Young Hitler I Knew: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Childhood Friend, which came out in 1953. Kubizek was nine months older than Hitler and they first met at the theater in Linz when they were both sixteen. This means that Kubizek never met Hitler’s father, but he became a friend of the family and writes that Alois was still very much a presence in their lives. A large portrait of him adorned the most prominent place on the sitting-room wall; the long pipes he used to smoke were still arrayed on a shelf in the kitchen, and Kubizek writes that they were in some strange way a symbol of the father; often when Frau Hitler spoke of her late husband she would gesture toward his pipes “as though they should bear witness how faithfully she carried on the husband’s tradition.”
According to Kubizek, the father’s colleagues at the customs office described him as precise, dutiful, and strict, proud of his rank, though an unpopular superior. The most notable trait highlighted by Kubizek is a near-manic restlessness. He changes address twelve times during the years he lives in Braunau, twice when living in Passau, and seven times after his retirement. Adolf himself recalls seven different homes and five different schools. The moves had nothing to do with the quality of the dwellings, often he would move to a poorer habitation. Kubizek’s explanation is that his temperament required constant change, and since his job demanded stability his restlessness had to find another outlet. Kubizek interprets his starting three different families in his life in the same way; while married to his first wife, a considerably older woman, he was unfaithful with the woman who would become his second wife, and the same thing happened again when he embarked on his affair with Hitler’s mother. “This strange and unusual habit of the father’s, always to change his circumstances, is all the more remarkable as those were peaceful, comfortable times without any justification for such change.”
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 58