There is something of the poseur about this side of Hitler in the sense that it is the role itself that seems to appeal to him, an impression accentuated by his inability to invest the role with the necessary practice and talent, and by the way he dresses, the young dandy in black coat and white shirt, the ivory-handled cane, on occasion even a black top hat, and yet the matter is not as simple, he does not do this to impress or to be seen, since basically he is on his own, and the intensity with which he absorbs himself in the operas they attend, for instance, seems anything but affected or shallow and would seem to saturate his entire being. The same is true of the frenzy he exhibits when devoting himself to his architectural drawings, which often lie scattered about his room. He is impassioned, burns with enthusiasm, is willing to put everything else aside for their sake. Why? Both Hitler and Kubizek believe in the supreme position of art in human life, and in that belief they express a rather typical attitude of the age in which they live, in the provinces shared only by a small handful of young people, certainly, yet highly prevalent in Vienna and the other major cities. From the picture Kubizek paints of Hitler this would seem to be not simply a fad but so much a part of his character as to be imperative. “His intense way of absorbing, scrutinizing, rejecting, his terrific seriousness, his ever-active mind needed a counterpoise,” Kubizek writes. “And only art could provide this.”
Noticeable in Kubizek’s descriptions of Hitler are the elements of mania he exhibits; Hitler talks incessantly, he is quick-tempered and irritable, he harbors grand designs and seems never to doubt that he will see them through to completion, and he can work frenetically on a project for nights on end. On the other hand, and such loftiness always has its counterweight, there are periods where Hitler does not appear to speak at all but withdraws and goes for long walks on his own in the environs of Linz, dejected and dispirited. Art is somewhere outside this, and he seeks it presumably so that something else may fill his soul and that he may express himself in it.
Another obvious reason for art being so important to him as a teenager was that it was the only way he could see of moving beyond the social class from which he came. This becomes apparent in his remote infatuation with Stefanie. Why does he not approach her? He is bashful and clearly lacks the courage. Perhaps he has no will or feels unable to try his fortune, knowing at some level that to make his desires known to her would be for reality to intrude on the dream and that the perfection and ideal of the dream is preferable to inadequate reality. Moreover, there is the fact that he is a nobody. Pressed by Kubizek, this is what he says, that to introduce himself to the mother he needs to be someone, to have a profession, and not just any profession, a postman, for instance, would not impress her, the widow of a high-standing official, but an academic painter would fit the bill admirably.
In a certain sense art is classless insofar as it is available to all; in Linz in the first decade of the twentieth century there were no such things as television, radio, gramophones, or cinemas; music had to be heard live, though it cost little, and these two sixteen-year-olds of the lower middle class frequented the theater and the opera and attended all manner of concerts, absorbing everything, and on their way home they would be fired with enthusiasm, discussing what they had seen and heard; admission to art galleries was cheap too, and then there were books. In another sense art too is a class issue. The fact that it exists and is available does not mean that it is actually accessible to all; anyone growing up in a home without books, without pictures, without music, among people who never speak of art and do not care for it, perhaps even think it to be a waste of time and money, has no easy path in art’s direction. And even if they discover that path and venture along it, they will more than likely find themselves lacking the basic means possessed by those belonging to more elevated classes, the self-assurance with which they embrace culture and its expressions. Hitler, who came from a home quite without books and with no interest at all in art, overcame this first hindrance, though would never wholly surmount those that remained. His taste in art, and his understanding of it, was throughout his life always provincial and conservative, even though at the time he lived in the provinces and opposed the petty bourgeois with all his might, his attitudes and ideas must have seemed radical to those in his surroundings.
* * *
This radical streak is what Kubizek finds so striking about Hitler when they first meet. They notice each other at the opera and strike up a conversation in the intermission of a late performance, and from then on it was as if Hitler monopolizes him completely. Whenever Kubizek is late for an appointment, Hitler will go at once to fetch him from his father’s upholstery workshop; he has no understanding of the fact that his friend must work, insisting that they stroll through the town together, more often than not with Hitler holding forth.
Kubizek is surprised that Hitler has so much time on his hands, does he not work? Of course not, Hitler snaps back, the very idea of a “bread-and-butter” job is beneath him. Kubizek is rather impressed by this, yet finds it somewhat puzzling. Perhaps this Adolf is a student at a school somewhere? “School?” Hitler snorts back at him in a first outburst of temper. The mere mention of the word incenses him, school is a red rag. He hates it, hates the teachers, hates his classmates.
Kubizek tells him how little success he had at school himself.
Hitler demands to know the reason for this, apparently dissatisfied with his new friend having done poorly. This self-contradiction confuses Kubizek but is something he will soon get used to; self-contradictions are a characteristic of Hitler. In this first instance in the upholstery workshop, however, it seems innocuous enough. Self-contradiction arises when two incompatible utterances collide, and in this case they are easy to identify: Hitler’s experiences apply to him alone, they are his, perhaps precious and inalienable in that they define his character, he hates school and the very notion of it, and this makes him what he is, an independent man with no need of what school could possibly give him, no intention of assimilating himself into the society it represents, the petty bourgeois world of Linz, for he is destined for greater things in the wider world. Kubizek sharing that same experience would mean Hitler was no longer unique, and this he cannot tolerate.
However, this simply does not exist for him as an insight, he is completely blind to it; for Kubizek different rules apply, Hitler does not regard him in the same light as he regards himself, but wholly from without, and in that external light not doing well at school looks like failure. Is his new friend a failure? A failure in the eyes of his teachers and the other students? No, he does not care for the thought; Kubizek doing badly at school is not good at all.
What this little scene reveals is the gap between Hitler’s inner and outer selves, how distinctly they are separated, and this separation is significant in that the inner self is thereby beyond reach and unamenable to correction. Self-insight is the ability to apply the outer perspective to the inner, it is the presence in the ego of the voice or gaze of the indefinite other, and if that is prevented, then the two will be unconnected, there will be no accommodation within the ego, which then will be left to its own devices, and this abandonment means that interaction with and understanding of others essentially becomes an external phenomenon, occurring outside the I, without empathy, without involvement of the inner self, which is empathy’s first and to all intents and purposes only condition.
Hitler was by no means wholly unable to empathize with others, but his empathy was weak; everything Kubizek writes suggests it. He was ruled by emotions, almost in their thrall, they could overpower him, overcome him completely; this too is in the pattern of the abandoned ego. His asocial nature too. And not only was he asocial, he avoided moreover all points of potential confrontation between his inner and outer selves, as the examples of Stefanie and Roller show. Nor would he tolerate any kind of dissent from Kubizek or his mother. On the other hand, he was only sixteen years old, at a stage of his development when a person is perhaps the most challe
nging of life, hurtling on, and in turmoil.
* * *
Later Hitler would refer to the two years in Linz as the happiest of his life. Just as Kubizek was a frequent visitor in his home, Hitler spent much time in Kubizek’s. Kubizek’s mother was fond of him, he was polite and well brought up, Kubizek’s father being rather more skeptical, he had hoped his son might find a more stable and dependable friend, sensing perhaps the direction in which he was going, the lure of the upholstery business pale compared to the world of music that now seemed to open itself to him even more.
On weekends, Hitler and Kubizek enjoyed going for long walks together into the countryside, often meeting up with Kubizek’s parents, who would take the train to some appointed place and treat them to a meal at a local inn. Hitler was fond of them and attentive to their well-being; as late as 1944 he would send Kubizek’s mother a present on her eightieth birthday.
The provincial prewar life Kubizek describes seems quite as sleepy and secure as Zweig’s descriptions of his young days in Vienna ten years earlier. Evening strolls along the boulevard, Schiller at the theater, and Wagner at the opera, bandstand concerts, long walks and outings in the surrounding countryside. There are no cars, no planes, hardly any engines of any kind, no telephones, no radio or television, barely an electric light. They are, however, anything but wealthy; Kubizek’s father toils to keep his tiny business running, Hitler’s mother scrimps and saves to make her widow’s pension last. Poverty is no abstract concept, something that only applies to others: Hitler’s mother came from the humblest of circumstances in one of Austria’s poorest regions, one of twelve children. The young Hitler’s contempt for the petty bourgeoisie must have grown out of a strong though probably unarticulated class consciousness; he came from quite a different background to the vast majority of his classmates in the Realschule, it took him an hour to get there in the mornings and there was something rural and unsophisticated about him, and when later he moves to Linz with his mother, he refuses even to talk to them – Kubizek mentions an episode when Hitler is approached by a former schoolmate who asks him sincerely how he is doing, Hitler instantly flies into a rage and tells him it’s none of his business – but his sense of being better than them, these representatives of the provincial bourgeoisie, who complete their schooling and take on normal work, must find articulation in some way, and this is a problem: how to rise above something basically unfamiliar to him, how to abandon and leave behind a level for which he has never really qualified himself? He dresses like a student or a young artist and insists he will never take on ordinary work as long as he lives, he is certain of it. He despises middle-classness and yet is its captive.
Adolf set great store by good manners and correct behavior. He observed with painstaking punctiliousness the rules of social conduct, however little he thought of society itself … It is most revealing that the young Hitler, who so thoroughly despised bourgeois society, nevertheless, as far as his love affair was concerned, observed its codes and etiquette more strictly than many a member of the bourgeoisie itself … It was apparent in his neat dress, and in his correct behavior, as much as in his natural courtesy, which my mother liked so much about him. I have never heard him use an ambiguous expression or tell a doubtful story.
The young Hitler is acutely aware of the importance of dress and behavior in assessing a person, and while he couldn’t care less about the bouorgeoisie, in actual fact he has no choice, being wholly without qualifications: if he dressed like an ill-bred peasant or an ignorant son of the lower middle class, there would be nothing separating them, he would be exactly that in the eye of the beholder, and with justification, so if he is to elevate himself to the status he believes he deserves, he has no other means than correctness, which, with a little dash of effort, can be embellished with the panache and flair of the dandy, the young artist.
* * *
The Young Hitler I Knew was published more than forty years after the events it portrays. As Ian Kershaw points out, no one can remember exactly what was said in a given situation decades later, the way Kubizek pretends when quoting both Hitler and Hitler’s mother. But memoirs are no exact science, readers understand this and know from their own lives how later events twist and turn what happened at some earlier time, adding new shades, illuminating from new angles according to where we are in life. We need to be alert whenever events shape themselves into narratives, for narratives belong to literature and not to life, and occurrences of the past seep into and absorb expectations of the future, for the true present stands open and knows as yet no consequence. So when Kubizek allows the story of Hitler’s infatuation with Stefanie to coincide with the death of his mother, in a scene where the funeral cortège passes Stefanie’s house and she at that very moment opens the window and leans out to see what is going on, we should have every reason to doubt that this was how it actually happened. And when Kubizek describes how deeply affected Hitler was by a performance of Wagner’s opera Rienzi, about a Roman demagogue –
Adolf stood in front of me and now he gripped both my hands and held them tight. He had never made such a gesture before. I felt from the grasp of his hands how deeply moved he was. His eyes were feverish with excitement. The words did not come smoothly from his mouth as they usually did, but rather erupted, hoarse and raucous. From his voice I could tell even more how much this experience had shaken him.
Gradually his speech loosened and the words flowed more freely. Never before and never again have I heard Adolf Hitler speak as he did in that hour, as we stood there alone under the stars, as though we were the only creatures in the world.
– there is no doubt that they saw the opera and that it made an impression on them both, but the definitive and fateful aspect the description lends to the moment, the sense that Hitler gazed into the future and found his destiny is obviously constructed after the event, as Kershaw points out. Much of what Kubizek writes about Hitler is in this way colored by what was to happen, which does not mean to say that what he writes did not take place, only that those events were not accorded any such weight at the time, were not in any way inclined toward fortunes at which neither could as much as hazard a guess. But the advantage of Kubizek’s memoir is that the period with which it deals is sufficiently short, and the events sufficiently small and quotidian, as to hinder the construction and development of any larger narrative, at the same time as the temporal constraint, the fact of Kubizek never having met Hitler until he was sixteen years old, and not meeting him again until almost thirty years later, frames the events portrayed and renders them clear. Hitler’s presence was a unique and brief occurrence in Kubizek’s life, and Hitler himself was such a curious character as to make it likely indeed that Kubizek should remember him well. In his recollection Hitler is an unusually ambivalent figure, his memoir is certainly no hagiography, and the traits he describes of his friend’s character are fully in accordance with what emerges from other sources, only clearer, because no one before or since came as close to him as Kubizek did. The fact that Kubizek values Hitler greatly and sees him as if through a veil of admiration, does little to detract from what is a many-sided and nuanced portrait. The following description is typical:
But although he was often brusque, moody, unreliable, and far from conciliatory, I could never be angry with him because these unpleasant sides of his character were overshadowed by the pure fire of an exalted soul.
Hitler vanished from Kubizek’s life in the summer of 1908, and he neither saw him nor heard anything of him until 1933 when Hitler became Reich chancellor and Kubizek sent him a letter, a reply to which arrived some months later.
My Dear Kubizek,
Only today was your letter of 2 February placed before me. From the hundreds of thousands of letters I have received since January it is not surprising. All the greater was my joy, for the first time in so many years, to hear news of your life and to receive your address. I would very much like – when the time of my hardest struggles is over – to revive pers
onally the memory of those most wonderful years of my life. Perhaps it would be possible for you to visit me. Wishing yourself and your mother all the best, I remain in the memory of our old friendship,
Yours,
Adolf Hitler
In 1938, during the so-called Anschluss, Hitler crosses the border of Austria at the town of his birth, Braunau on the Inn, thereby fulfilling the ambition he had set out at the beginning of Mein Kampf. This attention to the power of the symbolic was typical of him. That same evening he spoke from the balcony of the city hall in Linz. Kubizek was unable to attend, but when Hitler returned in April that same year Kubizek visited him at the Hotel Weinzinger. There was a huge crowd on the square outside, the guards took him for a madman when he asked to see the Reich chancellor, but after showing them the letter he was led into the foyer, where, he writes, the activity was like a beehive. Generals, ministers of state, Nazi Party bosses, and other uniformed officials came and went, all buzzing around one man, Adolf Hitler, now separated from Kubizek by a wall of power. He is told by a senior adjutant by the name of Albert Bormann that the Reich chancellor is feeling unwell and will not be receiving guests that evening, but that he should come back the following afternoon. The adjutant then invites him to take a seat for a moment so that he might ask him a few questions.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 61