The son of one of my tenants is becoming a painter, has gone to school in Vienna since the fall, he wanted to attend the Austro-Hungarian Academy of Visual Arts, but was not accepted and went to a private institution instead (Panholzer I believe). He is a serious, ambitious young man, nineteen years old, more mature and settled than his age indicates, nice and sensible, from a perfectly decent family. His mother died before Christmas, suffered from breast cancer, was only forty-six years old, the widow of a higher-up official at the local main customs office; I liked the woman very much, she lived next to me on the first floor; her sister and her daughter, who is in high school, are keeping the apartment for the time being. The family’s name is Hitler; the son, in whose behalf I’m asking your help, is called Adolf Hitler. We happened to talk about art and artists the other day, and among others, he mentioned that Professor Roller is a famous man among artists, not only in Vienna, but one could even say he has world renown, and that he reveres him in his works. Hitler had no idea that I am familiar with the name Roller, and when I told him that I used to know a brother of the famous Roller and asked him if it might be helpful to him in his endeavors if he received a recommendation to the director of the Court Opera’s Scenery Department, the young man’s eyes started glowing; he flushed crimson and said he would consider it the best luck he ever had if he could meet that man and got a recommendation to him! I would love to help the young man; he simply has no one who could put in a good word for him or help him by word and deed; he arrived in Vienna a complete stranger and alone, and had to go everywhere alone, without anyone giving him direction, to find entrance. He has the firm intention of learning something solid! So far as I have got to know him, he won’t “operate in a low gear,” since he is focusing on a serious goal; I hope you won’t waste your good offices on someone unworthy!
Roller replied by return of post in a three-page letter, writing among other things, “Do tell young Hitler to call on me and to bring some of his works so I can see how he is doing. I surely will advise him as best I can. He can meet me every day in my office at the Opera, entrance Kärntherstrasse, Principal Offices staircase, at 12:30 and at 6:30 p.m.”
But Hitler never appeared. Later he would say that his courage had failed him. He had gone to the Opera some days after arriving in Vienna, but had not found it in him to go in and had turned around instead. After much deliberation with himself he conquered his fear and went back, only with the same result, he was too scared. On a third occasion he had been standing outside Roller’s office when someone asked him his business and he had muttered an apology and fled. After that he destroyed the letter of recommendation and never returned. At this point he had been turned down by the Academy, so there was much at stake for him; an introduction to Roller would clearly have been invaluable to a provincial teenager wanting to become a painter. If nothing else Roller could have cast an eye over Hitler’s sketches and pictures and told him what aspects of his work he should try to develop, what was good about them and what was lacking, thereby equipping him better in case he should try again for admission to the Academy. Hitler’s problem was that he was self-taught and had little if any contact with other artists or artistic communities. This meant he was most likely unaware of what was required, unaware of what was important, and to anyone wanting to get into one of the major institutions, such ignorance would be fatal; these places were the very seat of the cultural establishment
But still he lacked the courage. Why? One reason is shyness, and Roller was a man he admired greatly, he had seen two of Mahler’s Wagner operas to which Roller had contributed, Tristan and The Flying Dutchman, to speak to him must have been to speak to a god; another likely reason is that he feared rejection. The artist identity was so important to him, he had gone through so much in order to keep it alive, defying his father’s will, then his mother’s, and, after they were dead, the forceful wishes of his remaining family and his guardian. Everyone expected him to get a normal job, to grow up, earn his own money, start a family. Shortly before leaving home for Vienna he was offered a job at the local post office by a relative. He turned it down, presumably not without contempt, for according to Kubizek there was always contempt in his voice when he spoke of “bread-and-butter” jobs. Art was Hitler’s opposition to civil life, and so strong was the dream of art inside him that he found himself unable to run the risk of Roller deeming him without talent and advising him to go back to Linz and get himself a job like anyone else. He could not risk having to face such a fate, even if it were to become reality. Better then to live on with the dream.
A typical trait of Hitler’s, revealing itself on many occasions described by Kubizek, seems to be that he lives a vital inner life, intensely nourished by fantasies he goes to great lengths to preserve from any confrontation with reality. Perhaps the most typical example of this is his four-year infatuation with Stefanie, a young Linz girl who catches his eye on a number of occasions on the Landstrasse in the center of the city, where Linzers would stroll in the afternoons and evenings, to see and be seen, to stop and chat with friends and acquaintances, to look in the shop windows, enjoying provincial life as it was lived at the time. One evening in 1905 when Kubizek and Hitler are out taking their usual stroll, Kubizek writes, Hitler suddenly grips his arm excitedly and asks him what he thinks of the slim blond girl walking arm-in-arm with her mother along the boulevard.
I am in love with her, Hitler says.
It transpires that he has never spoken to her. The evening strolls along the Landstrasse were occasions for flirting, for glances and smiles, yet the formalities were strict; if he wanted to speak to her he would first have to be introduced, a matter that lay beyond his reach, as Kubizek explains. Hitler asks him what he should do, Kubizek tells him he should approach the mother, introduce himself and ask her permission to address the daughter and escort them.
Adolf looked at me doubtfully and pondered my suggestion for quite a while. In the end, however, he rejected it. “What am I to say if the mother wants to know my profession? After all, I have to mention my profession straight away; it would be best to add it to my name – ‘Adolf Hitler, academic painter’ or something similar. But I am not yet an academic painter, and I can’t introduce myself until I am. For the mama, the profession is even more important than the name.”
Hitler never takes that step, never approaches the mother to introduce himself, consequently he does not exchange a single world with the girl during the four years that ensue, a time in which according to Kubizek she is Hitler’s great love. He makes do with looking at her from afar. Now and then their eyes meet, now and then he receives a smile, making him certain that her feelings for him are just as great as his own for her. He plans out a future down to the smallest detail; he even draws up plans for the house in which they will live; for a time he is utterly absorbed in the project. He writes poems about her, “Hymn to the Beloved” is the title of one, according to Kubizek’s account. Stefanie is a near-dreamlike, perfect, and utterly idealized woman, perhaps best related to Wagner’s mythological heroines, and when the real world, so compelling that it cannot be denied forever, intervenes, Hitler’s reaction is one of anger. He has asked Kubizek to investigate her background, and Kubizek has spoken with an acquaintance who is a friend of her brother’s. Her family is of the upper middle class, he finds out, and she lives with her mother, a widow, and likes to dance; the previous winter she had attended all the important dances in the town along with her mother. As far as Kubizek’s acquaintance knew, she was not engaged. Hitler is highly satisfied with the report, apart from one thing, the fact that she dances. The thought does not accord at all with his image of her, nor with the life he leads himself.
Kubizek describes Hitler as an exceptionally serious person, dedicated to his interests, which at the time are mostly art and architecture. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, has no interest in sports, no interest in provincial social life. Dance is completely alien to him. The fact of her dancing, and thereby belo
nging to that life, troubles him intensely.
After having been his butt for so long, at last I had a chance of pulling his leg. I proclaimed with a straight face, “You must take dancing lessons, Adolf.” Dancing immediately became one of his problems. I well remember that our lonely perambulations were no longer punctuated by discussions on “the theater” or “reconstruction of the bridge over the Danube” but were dominated by one subject – dancing.
As with everything that he couldn’t tackle at once, he indulged in generalizations. “Visualize a crowded ballroom,” he once said to me, “and imagine that you are deaf. You can’t hear the music to which these people are moving, and then take a look at their senseless progress, which leads nowhere. Aren’t these people raving mad?”
“All this is no good, Adolf,” I replied. “Stefanie is fond of dancing. If you want to conquer her, you will have to dance around just as aimlessly and idiotically as the others.” That was all that was needed to set him off raving. “No, no, never!” he screamed at me. “I shall never dance! Do you understand! Stefanie only dances because she is forced to by society on which she unfortunately depends. Once she is my wife, she won’t have the slightest desire to dance!”
Contrary to the rule, this time his own words did not convince him; for he brought up the question of dancing again and again. I rather suspected that, secretly at home, he practiced a few cautious steps with his little sister.
To extract himself from this torment, Hitler came up with the idea of kidnapping Stefanie. This was something he seriously contemplated, Kubizek writes. When for a time she seemed unfriendly and would avert her gaze, passing Hitler on the street as if he did not exist, he began to despair, proclaiming that he would commit suicide, an act as meticulously detailed in his imagination as all his other plans. Sometime later, however, she takes part in a festival parade and tosses him a flower. Kubizek writes that he would never again see Adolf as happy as he was at that moment. “I can still hear his voice, trembling with excitement, ‘She loves me! You have seen! She loves me!’” When Hitler moves to Vienna after his mother’s death two and a half years later, in February 1908, with the letter of recommendation addressed to Roller, he sends Stefanie a postcard saying that he is to begin at the Academy and that she must wait for him, he intends to ask for her hand as soon as his studies are completed and he returns to Linz. He leaves the card unsigned, and she has no idea who on earth might have sent it to her.
The ambivalence of not putting his name to his words is the same failing as emerges in his inability to act on his introduction to Roller – he lacks the courage to take the final step. The world he dreams about, his future as an artist, his future with Stefanie, exists partly within him and partly without – he seeks her out, he sees her, she exists, the future is possible, in the same way as he sketches and paints and puts his work forward to the Academy with a view to acceptance – yet he is too afraid to actually join these two planes of reality together. What reality does, and brutally so, is to correct. And a prominent trait of the young Hitler’s character is precisely an unwillingness to accept correction. It is anathema to him. Even the slightest contradiction incenses him and leaves him indignant.
It is hard not to see his inner strength and its expression as a means of defense. But against what? Seemingly against the social world. Hitler takes no part whatsoever in any social life, he is completely uninterested by it and looks with disdain on his contemporaries as they have fun, drinking and dancing, playing sports and flirting. He has no friends either; Kubizek appears to be the exception, but their friendship is basically monological: Hitler talks, Kubizek listens. Hitler is primary, Kubizek secondary. Kubizek knows this and accepts it since he admires Hitler and feels advantaged by his friendship; moreover, so he writes, he understands that Hitler needs him.
Soon I came to understand that our friendship endured largely for the reason that I was a patient listener. But I was not dissatisfied with this passive role, for it made me realize how much my friend needed me. He, too, was completely alone.
At one point Kubizek has to attend a funeral, his former violin teacher having died, and to his surprise Hitler decides to go with him. Hitler had no association with Kubizek’s teacher, so why would he want to go to his funeral? Hitler replies, “I can’t bear it that you should mix with other young people and talk to them.”
He wants Kubizek for himself, which in a way is touching, revealing vulnerability, yet disturbing too in that he almost wants to own him.
What is it then about Hitler that Kubizek so admires?
Above all, perhaps, it was his standing apart from his contemporaries, to Kubizek’s mind radically so. Most had their lives mapped out by the time they were sixteen; Hitler had not, he was “just the opposite” as Kubizek states. “With him everything was uncertain.” His shunning of middle-class life appealed to Kubizek, who worked in his father’s upholstery workshop and was expected by everyone to eventually take over the family business, whereas what he himself wanted, a wish he hardly dared utter to anyone, was to train as a musician and conductor. When Hitler moved to Vienna, he insisted on Kubizek following, approaching Kubizek’s parents himself and managing to convince them to allow his friend to leave.
Hitler, then, represented something Kubizek himself wanted to become. However, they were by no means alike. Kubizek hardly spoke when they were together and had none of his friend’s restless energy, though he possessed the patience Hitler lacked. Kubizek practiced and was admitted to the conservatory in Vienna at the age of eighteen, whereas Hitler practiced nothing, had no patience, threw himself into the loftiest projects without ever completing them, and would never gain admittance to Vienna’s Academy.
Hitler’s most striking trait, acccording to Kubizek, was his holding forth on everything he saw and thought about, usually involving some form of change: a building in one style, he might suggest, ought to be pulled down to make way for another in a different style, Linz needed an underground railway, a pension scheme required an overhaul, a traveling opera had to be set up to bring Wagner to the outlying districts. Seemingly there were no limits to what he might take an interest in and hold an opinion about. Describing this aspect of his friend’s personality, Kubizek emphasizes the restlessness of which it was an expression, his need for things to happen, and this gives an impression of Hitler as being in some way menaced, as if there were something he needed to get away from, and since the things that caught his attention in this way were so external, there always being some element of his surroundings with which to take issue, it is easy to think that there was something inside him that he wanted to escape or get rid of. A conspicuous aspect of what is revealed of Hitler’s inner life in Mein Kampf as well as in Kubizek’s memoir is his almost dreamlike remoteness from reality, as if he were turned toward another age, another place, whether rooted in the intense experiences the two friends shared at the opera, which they frequented, in what he would read of German history and mythology, or in what he would relate of his own life, which never was concerned with what it was but what it would become. To this picture belongs the wholly asocial nature of his character, his disinterest in social life, and his strikingly serious demeanor.
I have often been asked, and even by Rudolf Hess, who once invited me to visit him in Linz, whether Adolf, when I knew him, had any sense of humor. One feels the lack of it, people of his entourage said. After all, he was an Austrian and should have had his share of the famous Austrian sense of humor. Certainly one’s impression of Hitler, especially after a short and superficial acquaintance, was that of a deeply serious man. This enormous seriousness seemed to overshadow everything else. It was the same when he was young. He approached any problem with which he was concerned with a deadly earnestness which ill suited his sixteen or seventeen years. He was capable of loving and admiring, hating and despising, all with the greatest seriousness. But one thing he could not do was pass over something with a smile.
Kubizek finds the same earnestness
in Hitler’s mother. When he meets her she is forty-five years old. He writes that she still looked like the only known photograph of her, but that “the suffering was more clearly etched in her face and her hair had started to go gray.” He felt sympathy for her, stating that she made him feel like he wanted to do something for her. “Every smile which crossed that serious face gave me joy,” he writes. She was disinclined to talk about herself and her worries, yet found relief in confiding to Kubizek her concerns about Adolf and the uncertainty of his future.
Her preoccupation with the well-being of her only surviving son depressed her increasingly. Often I sat together with Frau Hitler and Adolf in the tiny kitchen. “Your poor father cannot rest in his grave,” she used to say to Adolf, “because you do absolutely nothing that he wanted for you. Obedience is what distinguishes a good son, but you do not know the meaning of the word. That’s why you did so badly at school and why you’re not getting anywhere now.”
The family lived in a small flat comprising two rooms and a kitchen. Hitler had one room for himself, while his mother, his half sister, and his younger sister shared the other. He never helped out at home, his mother did everything for him, and there is no doubt he was spoiled. At one point he announced that he wanted to learn the piano, his mother bought him one and paid for lessons, all presumably beyond her means. After four months Hitler gave up, enraged by his teacher’s insistence on “stupid” finger exercises. Music was about inspiration, not finger exercises, he declared, and laid his ambitions to rest. Placing the blame for his inadequacy on his music teacher was typical of him. He read all he could lay his hands on about Wagner and identified almost entirely with him; the adversity he encountered in his young life was the same as the young Wagner had to battle against. “So you see,” he would say after quoting from some letter or essay, “even Wagner went through it just like I have. All the time he had to tackle the ignorance of his surroundings.” Kubizek found these comparisons somewhat exaggerated, Wagner having led a long and productive life with plenty of ups and downs, whereas Hitler was only sixteen years old with hardly any experience at all. Nevertheless he spoke “as though he had been the victim of persecution, fought his enemies and been exiled.”
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 60