My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Or, conversely, on what basis does Kershaw overrule the account of his only source with a version of what in fact happened?

  The issue with biography as a genre, and this is as true of autobiography as it is of the memoir, is that the author purports to be omniscient, a sole authority, he or she knows how it all turned out, and as such it is almost impossible not to accord emphasis to any sign, be it character trait or event, that points in that one direction, even if, as in this instance, it is merely one trait, one event among many others that in no way called attention to themselves. Of course, the truth of any past situation is elusive, it belongs to the moment and cannot be separated from it, but we may ensnare that moment, illuminate it from different angles, weigh the plausibility of one interpretation against that of another, and in that experiment endeavor to ignore what later happened, which is to say refrain from considering one character trait, one event, as a sign of something other than what it is in itself.

  This “in itself” is both riddle and solution at the same time. If we view Hitler as a “bad” person, with categorically negative characteristics even as a child and a young man, all pointing toward a subsequently escalating “evil,” then Hitler is of “the other,” and thereby not of us, and in that case we have a problem, since then we are unburdened of the atrocities he and Germany later committed, these being something “they” did, so no longer a threat to us. But what is this “bad” that we do not embody? What is this “evil” that we do not express? The very formulation is indicative of how we humans think in terms of categories, and of course there is nothing wrong with that as long as we are aware of the dangers. In the night of pathology and the predetermined there is no free will, and without free will there is no guilt.

  No matter how broken a person might be, no matter how disturbed the soul, that person remains a person always, with the freedom to choose. It is choice that makes us human. Only choice gives meaning to the concept of guilt.

  Kershaw and almost two generations with him have condemned Hitler and his entire being as if pointing to his innocence when he was nineteen or twenty-three, or pointing to some of the good qualities he retained throughout his life, were a defense of him and of evil. In actual fact the opposite is true: only his innocence can bring his guilt into relief.

  * * *

  The day after Kubizek’s arrival in Vienna the two friends begin their hunt for a room he can rent. The task is a difficult one, most rooms being too small for the piano he needs, and when they do find one big enough the landlady refuses to hear of having a lodger practice such an instrument. Kubizek’s impression of Vienna is not good, the city seems to him full of indifferent, unsympathetic people, gloomy courtyards, narrow, ill-lit tenements and stairs. Despairing and miserable, he happens on another “room-to-rent” notice in the Zollergasse; they ring the bell and a maid opens the door and shows them into an elegantly furnished room containing magnificent twin beds.

  “Madame is coming immediately,” said the maid, curtsied, and vanished. We both knew at once that it was too stylish for us. Then “madame” appeared in a doorway, very much a lady, not so young, but very elegant.

  She wore a silk dressing gown and slippers trimmed with fur. She greeted us smilingly, inspected Adolf, then me, and asked us to sit down. My friend asked which room was to let. “This one,” she answered, and pointed to the two beds. Adolf shook his head and said curtly, “Then one of the beds must come out, because my friend must have room for a piano.” The lady was obviously disappointed that it was I and not Adolf who wanted a room, and asked whether Adolf already had lodgings. When he answered in the affirmative she suggested that I, together with the piano I needed, should move into his room and he should take this one. While she was suggesting this to Adolf with some animation, through a sudden movement the belt which kept the dressing gown together came undone. “Oh, excuse me, gentlemen,” the lady exclaimed, and immediately refastened the dressing gown. But that second had sufficed to show us that under her silk covering she wore nothing but a brief pair of knickers.

  Adolf turned as red as a peony, gripped my arm, and said, “Come, Gustl!” I do not remember how we got out of the house. All I remember is Adolf’s furious exclamation as we arrived back in the street. “What a Frau Potiphar!” Apparently such experiences were also part of Vienna.

  These are a pair of inexperienced young men from the sticks; the man of the world he thought Hitler was vanishes in the blushing cheeks that also give us a picture of Hitler’s chastity and fear of women. He is eighteen years old and utterly unversed, Kubizek tells us there were no women in Hitler’s life in the four years they spent together and he did not masturbate. This latter point is of course impossible to verify, yet it fits well with what we know of Hitler’s sexuality from Mein Kampf and various other sources. Womanhood was associated with purity and exalted, a part of the ideal world he so cultivated, and his later romantic relationships were all with very young and innocent women. His obsession with purity and the way that obsession also pertained to sexual matters reveals itself in several episodes in Kubizek’s book. On one occasion, after they had been to a performance of a play the press had made infamous for its supposedly immoral nature, Hitler takes Kubizek by the arm and leads him to the red-light district so that he might see with his own eyes how depraved and morally corrupted humanity has become. The prostitutes sit in illuminated rooms in low, one-story houses along the street, men amble back and forth, stopping to conduct whispered interchanges with the girl of their choice, after which the light inside would be put out. Hitler and Kubizek pass down the length of the street, but as they reach the end Hitler turns to go back. “Sink of iniquity” is a recurring phrase, and when Kubizek suggests that seeing it once is enough, Hitler drags him back past the windows with him. The prostitutes try to win their attention, one rolls down her stockings and shows her bare legs as they pass, another casually takes off her chemise as if to change, and as soon as they are out of the area Hitler rages against their “tricks of seduction.” Back home in his room in the Stumpergasse he proceeds to hold forth and deliver a lecture on these new impressions and what they mean. Now, he declares, he has learned the customs of the market for commercial love and the purpose of his visit has thereby been fulfilled.

  The episode makes plain three of the young Hitler’s various modes of relating to the world around him: at first he is within it, filled with unmanageable feelings of attraction and disgust, lust and shame; then he rages against it, eventually, at due distance, to analyze it. Analysis is the preferred mode, and the remoteness it requires is one of the most striking elements of Hitler’s character and cannot be underestimated.

  * * *

  Hitler and Kubizek live in the middle of one of the world’s biggest cities, they are eighteen years old, and Hitler at least is completely free in the sense that both his parents are dead, he has no family to tie him down, and in principle he can do whatever he wants. The possibilities are many, the world stands open. Yet he associates with no one, does not so much as look at a woman, takes no part in the life that is going on around him. The seriousness with which he approaches life is immense, he has only disdain for anyone having fun, enjoying oneself is superficial and in some way beneath him. He sees much hardship and misery in his surroundings and possesses a strong sense of social indignation, he speaks often of the little man and of poverty; at one point he makes an excursion into the poorest district so that he might know what he is talking about, but the poor themselves, the people who live in such poverty, are anathema to him, he ignores them, will not speak to them or even be close to them, his dislike of contact is immense and conspicuous. The same applies to women, he can speak of them, idealize them, or consider them depraved, but he cannot have them close to him, expressing relief that women have no access to the area where he and Kubizek usually stand at the opera.

  The strict morals he champions and according to which he conducts his life, these harsh rules he follows in all their rejection of the
physical body, would clearly seem to be a way of controlling his inner self, which by all accounts is chaotic in the extreme. And since the outside world too is chaotic, which is to say complex and expanding in every way, as the city and culture were in the first decade of the twentieth century, marked by rampant poverty, political chaos, prostitution and sexual liberation – it has to be remembered that Freud was living and writing in the same city, and that Gustav Klimt was painting there too – it is hardly surprising that he should apply to society the same rules he has applied to himself, rules of abstinence and control, the two things, individual and society, meeting and leveling out in the emotions, which in his case are powerful. The contempt of his “Frau Potiphar!” or “tricks of seduction” stem clearly from emotions thereby occasioned inside him, lust and disgust, perhaps, and applied to society as a whole, the “sink of iniquity.” He is manically obsessed with cleanliness and a well-groomed appearance, dressing always as neatly as possible, another way of controlling his inner chaos. And this must be why he is so interested in art, it affords him peace in which to devote himself to something else, something grand and beautiful and majestic.

  When he listened to Wagner’s music he was a changed man: his violence left him, he became quiet, yielding, and tractable. His gaze lost its restlessness; his own destiny, however heavily it may have weighed upon him, became unimportant. He no longer felt lonely and outlawed, misjudged by society.

  These emotions that so uplift him are his too, they belong not to the music, not to Wagner, but to him, and the feeling of being elevated by the music and language of the stage, of being permeated by the exquisite, is so important to him that he even forgoes eating so as to have money to buy opera tickets.

  His immense energy, construed by Kershaw as indolence insofar as it exists outside any academic framework or meaningful enterprise whatsoever, is hard not to read into the same pattern, for when he is most deeply immersed in a project, he vanishes completely, and the only thing that exists is his urgent industry: his thoughts, plans, and sketches. His behavior is eruptive, obsessive, on the threshold of normal. Indeed, if Hitler’s personal morals and those he applies to society at this time are strongly constraining, his artistic industry is quite without boundary. There are simply no limits to what he will apply himself to, nothing can stand in his way, everything is wide open. “It is not the professor’s wisdom that counts,” he says to Kubizek, “but genius,” and begins promptly to compose an opera. He can play no instrument, has no knowledge of harmony or orchestration, and yet he pushes such limitations aside as technicalities, striving to delve into his fiercest emotions and express them in the language he admires most of all. He experiments with an ill-fated system attempting to combine sound and color, works out a prelude and asks for Kubizek’s opinion of it. Kubizek tells him the basic themes are good, but that he has to realize that on such a basis alone it will be impossible to write an opera, at the same time declaring his readiness to teach him the necessary theory. “Do you think I’m mad?” Hitler shouts at him. “What have I got you for? First of all you will put down exactly what I play on the piano.”

  They proceed accordingly. Kubizek tries to make it clear to him that he must keep to one key. “Who is the composer, you or I?” Hitler rants back. Eventually he decides that the opera, based on a legend of Germanic mythology, should be performed in the musical mode of expression pertaining to the period in question. He asks Kubizek if anything remains preserved of Germanic music. Kubizek tells him there is nothing save for a few instruments, drums, bone flutes, and horns. Hitler reminds him that the skalds had sung to the accompaniment of harp-like instruments and proposes they do likewise. To make the thing tolerable for the human ear, as he puts it, Kubizek talks him out of the idea. Reverting to more conventional instrumentation they forge ahead, however slowly. Hitler designs the scenery and costumes in detail and pens the libretto. He eats nothing, goes without sleep, hardly drinks. Throughout, he demands that Kubizek not only be party to the process, but quite as devoted as he is, and berates him repeatedly. Hitler is the roommate from hell.

  It would have been easy for me to take as an excuse one of our frequent quarrels to move out. The people at the Conservatoire would have been only too pleased to help me find another room. Why did I not do it? After all, I had often admitted to myself that this strange friendship was no good for my studies. How much time and energy did I lose in these nocturnal activities with my friend? Why, then, did I not go? Because I was homesick, certainly, and because Adolf represented for me a bit of home. But, after all, homesickness is something a young man of twenty can overcome. What was it then? What held me?

  Frankly it was just hours like those through which I was now living which bound me even more closely to my friend. I knew the normal interests of young people of my age: flirtations, shallow pleasures, idle play, and a lot of unimportant, meaningless thoughts. Adolf was the exact opposite. There was an incredible earnestness in him, a thoroughness, a true passionate interest in everything that happened and, most important, an unfailing devotion to the beauty, majesty, and grandeur of art. It was this that attracted me especially to him and restored my equilibrium after hours of exhaustion.

  Like so many of Hitler’s projects, his opera comes to nothing. He is far too restless and has far too little patience to see such a demanding enterprise through to completion, and furthermore we can assume that his frustrations at his own musical shortcomings must eventually have wearied him.

  Other projects on which he embarked in this period included a grand attempt at solving the housing crisis in Vienna, a task that involved him redesigning the entire city as well as meticulously drawing plans for the new workers’ units he envisaged. Another idea was that the music he so cherished should be taken to those living outside the city, a “mobile Reichs-Orchestra” whose organization and repertoire he planned down to the smallest detail, even the color of the orchestra members’ shirts, Kubizek recalls. All these projects were pipe dreams, remote from reality and basically meaningless, yet they tell us a lot about Hitler’s character, the way he could dedicate himself, the boundless belief in his own abilities and the way he thereby found out how he might connect his internal and external existences without having to pass through the social domain he seemingly either feared or loathed, and which, regardless of all else, always broke down his inner dreams by confronting them with external reality, presenting to him, in other words, their real-world consequences. Our internal existence is abstract, external reality tangible, and in these grand yet unrealistic designs the two aspects collide in a way he is unable to manage.

  * * *

  Kubizek and Hitler lived together in Vienna for five months over the spring and summer of 1908. Hitler never let on that he had been turned down by the Academy, and he led his life in such a way as to make his friend believe he had been accepted and attended its lessons. They shared a room; after the incident with Frau Potiphar they had decided it was convenient. Hitler made inquiries with his landlady, Frau Zakreys, who agreed to move into Hitler’s old room, while the two friends moved into hers. Kubizek took the conservatory’s entrance exam the following day. He passed and was admitted, but Hitler seemed anything but pleased on his behalf. “I had no idea I had such a clever friend,” he remarks baldly. He was often irritable during this period, and Kubizek considers this the reason he does not wish to hear about his studies. Kubizek is puzzled by a number of aspects of his friend’s behavior, among them the fact that he spends so little time painting, devoting his attention to any number of other things instead; he writes a play, he reads books that have nothing to do with painting. Kubizek clearly senses that all is not well, but he is used to Hitler’s obstinacy and eccentric manner and puts it down to that, besides him having only recently lost his mother.

  His mood worried me more and more as the days went by. I had never known him to torment himself in this way before, far from it. In my opinion, he possessed rather too much than too little self-confidence. But n
ow things seemed to have changed round. He wallowed deeper and deeper in self-criticism. Yet it only needed the lightest touch – as when one flicks on the light and everything becomes brilliantly clear – for his self-accusation to become an accusation against the times, against the whole world. Choking with his catalog of hates, he would pour his fury over everything, against mankind in general who did not understand him, who did not appreciate him and by whom he was persecuted. I see him before me, striding up and down the small space in boundless anger, shaken to his very depths. I sat at the piano with my fingers motionless on the keyboard and listened to him, upset by his hymn of hate, and yet worried about him.

  They argue a lot in these first weeks about how to arrange themselves in the apartment; Kubizek wants to practice, Hitler wants to read; when poor weather forces them both to stay in, the mood can be tense. At one point Kubizek fixes his schedule to the cupboard door with a thumbtack and asks Hitler to do likewise so they can see when the other one is going to be out. But Hitler has no schedule, he doesn’t need one, he says, he keeps it all in his head. Kubizek shrugs his shoulders, unconvinced. Hitler’s work is anything but systematic, mostly he works at night and sleeps until late in the mornings. To see his friend doing so well cannot have been easy for Hitler. And now, with the schedule on the cupboard door a clear and visible symbol of his friend’s progress, he explodes with rage.