My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Kubizek finds exactly the same restlessness and unease in the sixteen-year-old Hitler’s character and he sees the civil-servant conflict between father and son as described in Mein Kampf in this very light. The father’s volatile nature is kept in check by the demands of his position, the discipline which gave direction and meaning to his unstable character, the uniform of the state official served to conceal his stormy private life; the authority to which he thereby submitted allowed him to steer clear of the dangerous reefs and sandbanks on which his life might otherwise have foundered, Kubizek suggests. The father must have seen the same traits in his son and for this reason would have been more than unusually keen to direct his son’s future career. It is by no means certain that Hitler’s father was aware of the inner reason for his attitude, Kubizek writes, but his insistence on imposing his point of view would seem to indicate that he indeed realized how much was at stake for his son. “So well did he know him,” Kubizek writes.

  This idea provides a more sympathetic picture of Hitler’s father than is normally presented, and it is neither untrustworthy nor improbable; on the contrary, the traits parents tend to be most implacable toward in their children are often those most similar to their own, and in acts of brutality toward children there is always an element of self-loathing even if one is unaware of its existence, perhaps especially so when the emotions that well to the surface are so powerful and all-consuming as to eliminate any semblance of reason. A will as strong as this, in which the father invests all his power and authority, contains solicitude too, however impossible for a child to understand or recognize, in that it firstly seeks to subjugate the child without listening to his objections or even trying to put oneself in the child’s place, and secondly is quite bereft of the language by which love more generally is communicated. Whether such love existed or did not, we have no way of knowing. Hitler’s own feelings for his father lay somewhere between hatred, terror, and respect for his authority. The changes of address, the infidelity, the age gaps in the marriages would point toward a troubled and restless soul, and it seems likely that Alois recognized this in his son’s rebellious manner. The idea that he knew his son better than his son knew himself shifts the whole conflict away from responsibility and subjugation, or from the mechanical aspect of such responsibility, such subjugation, into something essential, unknown to those involved, who were helpless against themselves.

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  Where did the notion of becoming a painter come from? There were no artists in the family or its milieu; the closest Hitler came to art must have been what he saw in the churches and what he read about in books. Yet this is what he wants to be when he grows up. Not a soldier, not a priest, not a teacher, not a civil servant, but the absolute opposite of a civil servant, an artist. That Ludwig Wittgenstein should become a philosopher is not in the slightest bit odd or surprising, his world was awash with art and culture, the very finest the contemporary age could offer. But Hitler could draw, and may have been encouraged, he wanted something quite different from the life that surrounded him, so perhaps art seemed to him to be a way out.

  His father died suddenly from a violent hemorrhage when Hitler was thirteen.

  The question of my profession was to be decided more quickly than I had previously expected.

  In my thirteenth year I suddenly lost my father. A stroke of apoplexy felled the old gentleman who was otherwise so hale, thus painlessly ending his earthly pilgrimage, plunging us all into the depths of grief. His most ardent desire had been to help his son forge his career, thus preserving him from his own bitter experience. In this, to all appearances, he had not succeeded. But, though unwittingly, he had sown the seed for a future which at that time neither he nor I would have comprehended.

  The word “hale” echoes Hitler’s use of “husky” to decribe the boys with whom he played, and by association himself, making the notion of robustness a governing one, contrasting with his mother, who is “anguished,” and with a sedentary indoor life as a “stay-at-home.” “Hale” evokes his father’s vitality, a man not in any way sick or in decline.

  In the text Hitler’s father is the very antithesis of art, the pattern being: indoors/reading/mother/stay-at-home versus outdoors/in the open/ friends/combative, and ecclesiastical ceremony/art/freedom versus father/ coercion/strength/vitality. “Hale” is an honorific here, held up as a positive, but beneath it flows the nonrobust. The only place where there is a bridge between them is in the description of his reading about the war, where the active, vigorous, and robust aspects of soldiers’ heroic lives meet the passive, dreamy, mother-bound stay-at-homeness of reading and art.

  His father dies, but Hitler does not leave school to begin with, his mother wishing him to continue. “Then suddenly an illness came to my help and in a few weeks decided my future and the eternal domestic quarrel. As a result of my serious lung ailment, a physician advised my mother in most urgent terms never to send me into an office.” The fact of the doctor advising “in most urgent terms” suggests her having to be persuaded, and her having to be persuaded suggests that it was no easy task. The illness seems to have been minor, an excuse to which his mother surrendered. The fact that she gave in to the will of her son is hardly surprising in that she had been witness to her husband’s beatings of the boy without being strong enough to step in, he was twice her age and a man of authority, and she had lost four children. Hitler is the survivor, nothing is too good for him.

  The goal for which I had so long silently yearned, for which I had always fought, had through this event suddenly become reality almost of its own accord.

  Concerned over my illness, my mother finally consented to take me out of the Realschule and let me attend the Academy.

  When Germany entered Austria in 1938, Hitler ordered the Gestapo to remove all documents relating to himself and his family from the public archives. Seemingly he wished to wipe away all traces of his past. Nevertheless, a wealth of material concerning his life during those years still remains, and hardly a single person who entered his sphere has not been interviewed. The past resists control, it lives on in memory, in recollections and stories, rumor, letters, diaries – and whereas normally such things might never be brought together but remain solely with each individual, spread out in the way fate and destiny spread out the people of any generation, the progress of a single individual may cause them to converge and condense, as in the case of Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf is by no means an unambiguously credible source, but in giving us a picture of Hitler as he saw himself in 1924 it nevertheless tells us a lot. He describes his childhood the way he wanted it to be, though with elements of his childhood the way it was, intact, in the sense that some key characters and events are included, albeit not all and not necessarily the most significant. The five years that pass between the deaths of first his father, then his mother, are treated in nineteen lines, the two years he lived in Linz with his mother and sister without attending school are dealt with in a single sentence: “These were the happiest days of my life and seemed to me almost a dream; and a mere dream it was to remain. Two years later, the death of my mother put a sudden end to all my high-flown plans.”

  These two happy, though in Mein Kampf silent, years are dealt with in Kubizek’s book. It is the single most important source as to Hitler’s life between the ages of sixteen and twenty, and provides at the same time the best documentary insight into Hitler’s personality, Kubizek being the only real friend he had in his life.

  As in the case of other accounts provided by contemporaries of Hitler, Kubizek’s motives and the reliability of the picture he draws must be scrupulously assessed. This indeed has been the case with Kubizek’s book. Having pointed out some minor errors, Brigitte Hamann concludes: “Yet altogether, Kubizek is reliable. His book is a rich and unique source for Hitler’s early years, not even counting the letters and postcards by young Hitler that it includes.”

  Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler’s two-volume biography, Hubris and Nemesis, is m
ore critical, stating:

  Kubizek’s postwar memoirs need to be treated with care, both in factual detail and in interpretation. They are a lengthened and embellished version of recollections he had originally been commissioned by the Nazi Party to compile. Even retrospectively, the admiration in which Kubizek continued to hold his former friend colored his judgment. But more than that, Kubizek plainly invented a great deal, built some passages around Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf, and deployed some near plagiarism to amplify his own limited memory. However, for all their weaknesses, his recollections have been shown to be a more credible source on Hitler’s youth than was once thought, in particular where they touch on experiences related to Kubizek’s own interests in music and theater. There can be no doubt that, whatever their deficiencies, they do contain important reflections of the young Hitler’s personality, showing features in embryo which were to be all too prominent in later years.

  The reasoning here is typical of Kershaw’s work, which is marred by his describing everything, and I mean everything, about Hitler extremely negatively, even such aspects as relate to his childhood and youth, as if his whole life were tainted by what he would become and do some twenty years later, as if in some way he were evil incarnate, or as if evil were some core inside him, immutable and irremediable, and thereby an explanation of why things turned out the way they did. Such an understanding of Hitler is immature, and makes Kershaw’s books, renowned as the definitive Hitler biography, almost unreadable. Is it possible for everything a person does, even when that person is sixteen years old, to be appalling and bad? Kershaw’s descriptions of Hitler’s youth are invariably thickly strewn with negatives. He writes of the father’s aversion to his son’s “indolent and purposeless existence,” he writes that “Alois had worked his way up through industry, diligence and effort from humble origins to a position of dignity and respect in the state service,” whereas his son “from a more privileged background saw fit to do no more than dawdle away his time drawing and dreaming.” Given the evidence to suggest the father would beat the daylights out of his son and was in every sense a domestic tyrant, casting the father as the hero and the son as the villain in this way appears severe indeed.

  The transformation in Hitler’s character that would seem to have occurred in his adolescence is described by Kershaw in the following manner: “The happy, playful youngster of the primary school days had grown into an idle, resentful, rebellious, sullen, stubborn, and purposeless teenager.” Of the time between Hitler leaving school at sixteen and his mother’s death when he was eighteen he writes, “In these two years, Adolf lived a life of parasitic idleness – funded, provided for, looked after, and cosseted by a doting mother.”

  He spent his time during the days drawing, painting, reading, or writing “poetry”; the evenings were for going to the theater or opera; and the whole time he daydreamed or fantasized about his future as a great artist. He stayed up late into the night and slept long into the mornings. He had no clear aim in view. The indolent lifestyle, the grandiosity of fantasy, the lack of discipline for systematic work – all features of the later Hitler – can be seen in these two years in Linz.

  How great the disdain in the inverted commas dashed around “poetry”! And how conservative the negative inflection concerning his staying up late and sleeping into the mornings! How often he states that the boy was “indolent” or “lazy,” that his existence was “purposeless” or “parasitic,” and how negatively charged the words “daydream,” “fantasize,” “dream”! Together with the idea of drawing being a “dawdling away” of one’s time, all this is the very expression of the mind-set and attitudes that Hitler’s life at that time would seem to be protesting against. If we substitute “Hitler” with “Rilke,” for instance, and imagine someone writing of the young Rilke that he was indolent, lazy, and parasitic, with no aptitude for systematic work, that he stayed up late and lay in bed in the mornings when he was sixteen; if one read such a damning rant in a biography of Rilke, one would be left perplexed at the author’s outlook on life and art. Kershaw views everything even verging on art negatively, art being construed as the opposite of actual work. Of course, it might be objected that Hitler was no true artist, and that such damnation thereby is justified, but when a boy is sixteen years old no one can possibly know what he will become or not become, and it is by no means a given that artistic talent was what primarily distinguished Hitler and Rilke when they were sixteen.

  Kubizek’s picture of Hitler is drawn from within this reality, of which Kershaw is so disdainful, and it is a picture of a young man fired with enthusiasm for life. Hitler lives for the opera, for the theater, for music, for poetry, for painting, for architecture. He writes poetry, he draws, he paints watercolors, he draws and designs buildings as he sees and imagines them. Instead of wondering about where such vigorous interests could come from and what they might express, as striking and conspicuous as they are in the young Hitler’s life, such a powerful presence in his first twenty-five years, Kershaw sees them as an expression of Hitler’s personal, and thereby base, character. But he is sixteen years old, his poetry is bound to be poor, the buildings he draws in detail cannot possibly match the work of a trained architect, obviously he is a dilettante, but what sixteen-year-old is not?

  Kubizek’s description of his friendship with Hitler, and of the time and milieu in which that friendship occurred, where music, art, and literature provide the very fulcrum of youth, is reminiscent of the picture Stefan Zweig gives of his formative years in Vienna in his memoir The World of Yesterday. Zweig was ten years older than Hitler, and what he writes about Austria in the years prior to the outbreak of World War I, that it was a period characterized by stability and liberal idealism, a “Golden Age of Security,” as he calls it, must also have been true of life in Linz in 1905–6.

  Zweig’s description of his youth in Vienna emphasizes how obsessed he and his friends were with everything to do with culture. They line up outside the theaters for every opening night, the poems of Rilke are stuck between the covers of their Latin grammars at school, they sneak-read Nietzsche and Strindberg under their desks, they keep up with literary criticism and follow all the discussions, and if one of them should spot Gustav Mahler on the street one evening, the event would be proudly reported at school the very next morning.

  A première of Gerhart Hauptmann’s in the Burgtheater had our entire class on edge for weeks before the rehearsals began. We slipped in to the actors and understudies to be the first – before the others! – to know the plot and learn about the cast. We had (I do not hesitate to report upon absurdities) our hair cut by the barber of the Burgtheater, so that we could gather secret information about Wolter or Sonnenthal, and a pupil in one of the lower classes was particularly spoiled by us older boys and bribed with all sorts of attentions, merely because he was the nephew of one of the lighting inspectors at the Opera, and through him we were sometimes smuggled on to the stage during rehearsals – the shock of treading on that stage exceeded that of Virgil when he mounted into the holy circles of Paradise. The radiant power of fame was so strong for us that even if it were seven times removed from us, it still forced us to respect it; a certain poor little old woman seemed like an immortal being to us because she was a grandniece of Franz Schubert, and on the street we gazed respectfully at Josef Kainz’s valet because he had the good fortune to be close to the most beloved and most genial of all actors.

  Stefan Zweig was a Jew born into Vienna’s upper bourgeoisie. He wrote his memoirs under the shadow of the brutal and destructive regime of Nazism before committing suicide “in despair at the fall of European culture,” as it says on the cover of the Norwegian edition of The World of Yesterday. Few have provided a better or more fascinating picture of the lost reality of prewar Europe than Zweig in that book. This is the golden age of the middle class, a time of wealth, continuity, caution, harmony, and security, so staidly sedate that the ideal to which its youth aspires is middle age; he write
s that anyone wishing to get along in life was compelled to conceal his youth in every conceivable way. Young men of twenty-four and twenty-five grew impressive beards and acquired paunches, strolled leisurely in long frock coats, and wore glasses even if their vision was perfect.

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  Thomas Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks, published in 1901, provides the same double exposure as Zweig’s memoir: on the one hand the staidness of commercial prosperity and an unfluctuating bourgeois existence, on the other the children of this bourgeoisie and their fascination with art and the culture of the great emotions, who in Mann’s universe invariably have something fragile and almost destructive about them. Citizen and artist, these are the two figures both Mann and Zweig hold up for scrutiny. Mann’s Munich and Zweig’s Vienna were among the great centers of European culture at the twentieth century’s beginning, but although Hitler was to live in both cities, at the same time as Zweig in Vienna and Mann in Munich, he was separated from the culture of which the two were a part by what amounted to an abyss. Hitler’s Vienna was a slum, Hitler’s Munich not much better. Yet despite the great social divide between them, Hitler still frequented the same world; during his time in Vienna he attended Gustav Mahler’s stagings of Wagner’s operas, which he admired greatly, and on his arrival in the city he carried with him a letter of recommendation to the famous Alfred Roller, not only a professor at the academy of arts, but also Mahler’s collaborator and scenographer, a person Zweig and his friends would have turned their heads to look at on the street. This recommendation had come about through the owner of the Hitler family’s apartment in Linz, a woman who had taken a liking to the young Adolf; she knew Roller’s brother and wrote the following about him to a female friend in Vienna, quoted in Hitler’s Vienna: