My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “This Academy,” he screamed, “is a lot of old-fashioned fossilized civil servants, bureaucrats devoid of understanding, stupid lumps of officials. The whole Academy ought to be blown up!” His face was livid, the mouth quite small, the lips almost white. But the eyes glittered. There was something sinister about them, as if all the hate of which he was capable lay in those glowing eyes! I was just going to point out that those men of the Academy on whom he so lightly passed judgment in his measureless hatred were, after all, his teachers and professors, from whom he could certainly learn something, but he forestalled me: “They rejected me, they threw me out, they turned me down.”

  I was shocked. So that was it. Adolf did not go to the Academy at all. Now I could understand a great deal that had puzzled me about him. I felt his hard luck deeply, and asked him whether he had told his mother that the Academy had not accepted him. “What are you thinking of?” he replied. “How could I burden my dying mother with this worry?”

  I could not help but agree. For a while we were both silent. Perhaps Adolf was thinking of his mother. Then I tried to give the conversation a practical turn. “And what now?” I asked him.

  “What now, what now,” he repeated irritably. “Are you starting too – what now?” He must have asked himself this question a hundred times and more, because he had certainly not discussed it with anyone else. “What now?” he mocked my anxious inquiry again, and instead of answering, sat himself down at the table and surrounded himself with his books. “What now?”

  He adjusted the lamp, took up a book, opened it, and began to read. I made to take the schedule down from the cupboard door. He raised his head, saw it, and said calmly, “Never mind.”

  That Hitler can construct and live such a lie instead of admitting to his friend that he has failed must surely have been a great strain on his life and tells us something about his ability to deny the real world in favor of illusion, but most of all it is revealing of his pride. Their friendship is based on Hitler talking and Kubizek listening, Hitler acting and Kubizek tagging along, in short Hitler dominating and Kubizek submitting. During that spring a fundamental shift occurs in this power structure, for not only does Kubizek gain admittance to the music conservatory, with Hitler having failed the entrance exam to the Academy, he also makes great strides in his studies. Soon he is entrusted with teaching, and as part of the conservatory’s end-of-term festivities he conducts the first-night concert, with three songs of his own composition being performed on the second night as well as two movements from his sextet for strings. Hitler is in attendance and witnesses the congratulations Kubizek receives from his professors and even from the director of the conservatory. Hitler is enthusiastic and proud, though, as Kubizek writes, one can well imagine “what he was thinking in his heart of hearts.” His friend’s success throws his own failure emphatically into relief. And while he may still dominate him when they are on their own together and appear totally superior, when things are boiled down, the fact of the matter is that he is outshone and overlooked.

  Summer arrives, and they have been living together for five months; Kubizek returns to his parents in Linz for the holidays, after which he is to undergo eight weeks of training in the Austro-Hungarian army reserve before coming back to Vienna to continue his studies. Hitler remains in the apartment, having no money to travel anywhere and no one to visit. He sends Kubizek postcards and letters while his friend is away, all is fine, and in the main he is occupied by the building projects going on in Linz and wants Kubizek to keep him informed as to their progress. Kubizek does as he asks while putting in hours in his father’s workshop, sending his share of the rent to their landlady in Vienna; he departs for his military training and writes to Hitler announcing his arrival back in Vienna so that his friend might meet him and lend a hand with his luggage. By then it is November.

  I had, as I had written to him, taken the early train to save time, and arrived at the Westbahnhof at three o’clock in the afternoon. He would be waiting, I thought, at the usual spot, the ticket barrier. Then he could help me carry the heavy case which also contained something for him from my mother. Had I missed him? I went back again, but he was certainly not at the barrier. I went into the waiting room. In vain I looked around me: Adolf was not there. Perhaps he was ill. He had indeed written me in his last letter that he was still being plagued by his old trouble, bronchial catarrh. I put my case in the left-luggage office and, very worried, hastened to the Stumpergasse. Frau Zakreys was delighted to see me, but told me immediately that the room was taken. “But Adolf, my friend?” I asked her astonished.

  From her lined, withered face Frau Zakreys stared at me with wide-open eyes. “But don’t you know that Herr Hitler has moved out?”

  No, I did not know.

  “Where has he moved to?” I asked.

  “Herr Hitler didn’t tell me that.”

  “But he must have left a message for me – a letter, perhaps, or a note. How else shall I get hold of him?”

  The landlady shook her head. “No, Herr Hitler didn’t leave anything.”

  “Not even a greeting?”

  “He didn’t say anything.”

  Thirty years would pass before Kubizek again laid eyes on Hitler. He had vanished and did not wish to be found. Had he wanted to keep in touch, Kubizek reasons, Hitler would have asked for his address from their former landlady, his parents in Linz, or the music conservatory. He never did, so there was no doubt he wanted to be left alone. Kubizek looked up his half sister the next time he was in Linz, but she knew nothing of his whereabouts or what he might be up to.

  There are many conceivable reasons why Hitler would take such a drastic step as to sever all contact with the only person in his life. The most obvious of these is pride: while Kubizek was undergoing his military training in September Hitler had again taken the Academy’s entrance exam and had once again failed; this time he was rejected after the first round. From what Kubizek tells us of his character and nature it would not be unreasonable to assume that his failure this time was too great for him to be able to tell Kubizek. Another reason has also to do with pride; after a year in Vienna punctuated by the death of his mother, his funds were beginning to run out, he could no longer afford to keep up the room in the Stumpergasse, nor did there seem any likelihood of him earning money without degrading himself by taking on what he so disdainfully referred to as “bread-and-butter” work; another loss of prestige in relation to Kubizek. Another reason still was that Kubizek represented his only contact with Linz and Hitler’s family there; through Kubizek’s parents they could easily find out where Kubizek – and therefore Hitler himself – was living. By vanishing the way he did, all ties to his family, which is to say the family of his half sister, were broken.

  With Kubizek out of the picture we know little about Hitler’s life in the year that followed. This is telling indeed, given that his life as a whole is one of the century’s most thoroughly charted and dissected. From the public records we know he moved out of the Stumpergasse into cheaper lodgings not far away in the Felberstrasse. The form required by the local police authority states his profession as “student” – on his arrival in Vienna he had registered as an “artist.” He remained in the Felberstrasse for a year until the following summer. What he did during that time is not known. The only existing information tells us he canceled his membership in the museum association in Linz on March 4, presumably in order to save the cost of the subscription. In August 1909, after a year, he moves to even cheaper accommodation, a room on the outskirts in the Sechshauserstrasse, where he registers himself as a “Schriftsteller,” or “writer.” He lives there no more than three weeks before moving out again, at which point all trace of him is lost. On the registration form a hand has written “moved, no known address.” Everything points to him now being homeless, sleeping out through the autumn and winter. It was not possible to rent a room without registering with the police, and even though everything relating to Hitler was removed by th
e Nazis from the Austrian archives following the Anschluss, the documents were not destroyed but kept in the archives of the NSDAP, and tell us nothing. Another indication that he now lived on the streets consists of a sighting of him, the only one reported during this time, by a relative of his first landlady, Frau Zakreys, who recognized him standing in line at a soup kitchen for the destitute: “His clothes looked very shabby and I felt sorry for him, because he used to be so well dressed.”

  The next time he appears in police archives is in December 1909, when he found his way to a flophouse in Meidling. There he made the acquaintance of a tramp, Reinhold Hanisch, a man with a police record for a variety of misdemeanors including fraud and theft. Later, Hanisch would publish a memoir, in which he writes that Hitler, then twenty years old, looked in a sorry state, depressed, tired and hungry, and with sore feet. His blue-checked suit had turned purple due to rain and the disinfectant with which anyone staying at the hostel was obliged to delouse their clothing. He had no possessions, presumably having sold everything he had brought with him from Linz. According to Hamann, Hitler told Hanisch he had been thrown out by his landlady, that he had sat around in all-night cafés the first few nights until his money ran out, and that since then he had been sleeping on park benches. He had not eaten for some days and told of approaching a drunken gentleman one night and begging him for money, only for the man to hurl insults at him. Hanisch shared some bread with him and put him in the know as to where to get free soup and medical attention.

  This is not the Vienna in which Stefan Zweig and Ludwig Wittgenstein grew up; and if Hitler belonged to the lower social strata when renting his room in the Stumpergasse with Kubizek, he had now definitively fallen through the floor into the gutter. This was rock bottom. He has no work, nowhere to live, no money, no food, no friends, barely an acquaintance. He owns nothing, his clothes are shabby, he is cold and he is hungry. That he should be indolent, a layabout, as Kershaw suggests, accords poorly with the fact that he remains in Vienna. To be indolent is to choose convenience, to be indolent is to proceed by the easiest route. The life he is now living, at a minimum level of existence, depending on the charity of others, is no convenient life, but the most strenuous life imaginable. Knowing as we do that Hitler had offers of work at the time of his leaving Linz, from one of his former neighbors and from his guardian, that he had relatives in the countryside whom he visited in the summer with his mother, and that his brother-in-law was a state official in a secure tenure, with whom he almost certainly would have been able to stay for a period of time if only he would bow his head in humility, the fact that we now find him here, in such extreme destitution, indicates the opposite of convenience and indolence, it is a life far from that of the layabout. His rejection of bourgeois existence is no convenient rejection, but an absolute rejection, a “no” for which he is prepared to pay quite a high price.

  One must ask oneself why. What was it he wanted? He has sought admittance to the Academy of Fine Arts, not once but twice, John Toland suggests three times, that he reapplied in September of that year, but the fact remains that he has his whole life set on it. “Artist,” he calls himself when registering as tenant of his first lodgings, “student” the second time, “writer” the third. His talk was of becoming a painter, then an architect, and in the meantime he has written plays, stories, and an opera. None of these ventures has been successful, but he is undeterred, for next time may be different. Another headstrong young man from the lowest levels of society with an unbounded, and in the eyes of others unfounded, reservoir of self-confidence, lived similarly from hand to mouth for many years with no other ambition than becoming a writer, something he achieved at the age of thirty with the publication of his first novel: Hunger. Van Gogh was another artist of that time who lived in extreme poverty, wanting nothing else than to paint, even though in his lifetime he sold not a single canvas. We have no way of knowing if this was what Hitler was doing, but if it was not, his “no” must then have been all the more emphatic, all the more obstinate, since in that case he was rejecting society itself and all that came with it of work, career, marriage, children. Rather than being a part of that, he chose to live in the gutter. This is not an expression of indolence, but of something else entirely. Could he simply have allowed himself to drift? Nothing would indicate to us that he struggled against it in the way of a man possessed by a particular goal, rather he seems to have positioned a framework of circumstances about his life that slowly but surely sent him to the subterrain, to the flophouse in Meidling at whose doors the subterraneans flock: down-and-outs, tramps, beggars, winos, criminals, the jobless, the poor, hustlers, and fraudsters.

  * * *

  The social problems that existed in Vienna around the turn of the century were huge. Poverty was rampant, the housing shortage severe, several hundred thousand people existed in the most abject circumstances, and still more continued to join them, migrants flooding from all corners of the great empire to converge on its capital. The cost of housing rocketed, and landlords exploited the situation to its limit; the workers’ district of Favoriten, Hamann writes, housed an average of ten persons per rental unit, which consisted of one room and a kitchen with no running water. Child mortality was astoundingly four times greater here than in the city’s more affluent areas. Almost all basements were utilized for habitation, and beds unused during the daytime were rented out to so-called Bettgeher, literally “bed-goers,” homeless people permitted to use a bed for some eight hours or so but not to stay in the apartment the rest of the time. In 1910 the city contained more than eighty thousand of these bed-goers. No system of social security existed, the only poor care being charity-based in the form of soup kitchens, shelters, hostels, and children’s homes, all private sector, many of them established by Jewish philanthropists. Some of the needy were lucky enough to be allowed to take leftovers from the taverns and hospitals, and whenever a baker gave away unsold bread, Hamann writes, hordes would descend and fights could break out. The housing shortage became increasingly acute and the so-called shelters, overcrowded with bed-goers during the daytime, began to stay open at nights. The worst conditions, however, were in the illegal sublets. Hamann cites the report of a journalist at the time: the flats are crammed with people unknown to each other, many are children, often they sleep in the same bed, crawling with lice and vermin, inhabiting a single room for cooking, washing, living, sleeping, studying, and carrying out work to earn money; he mentions a stable deemed unfit for animals, inhabited by ten people with three children among them. A two- or three-room apartment in a crumbling, condemned tenement could house eighty or more people, men and women, able and infirm, alcoholics, and prostitutes, and children. “Everything around me was a confused mass of people, rags, and dirt. The room looked like a humongous dirt ball.” These places were infested with rats, and disease spread quickly – cholera, tuberculosis, syphilis. Begging generated little income and for many prostitution was the only option, and it was prevalent too among children.

  Outside the flophouse in Meidling, which could take in about a thousand people, and where Hitler duly appeared in December of 1909, the destitute lined up in long lines each evening, watched by the guards deployed to prevent rioting among those for whom there would be no room. The newspapers would mention the place only in the case of some tragic incident such as a child freezing to death outside the hostel gates or someone being denied medical assistance and dying there. In 1908 the opposition on the city council moved to establish shelters and to open up tram sheds to the homeless, but the authorities pointed merely to existing measures, though these were practically nonexistent, claiming, according to Hamann, that no one could possibly be homeless in Vienna without bearing the blame themselves. There was no help to be had from the city, and in this unregulated social mire the immigrant population, in this case Slavs and east-European Jews, ranked lowest; many citizens were of the opinion that the hospitals ought only to accept Austrian natives and turn everyone else away.


  Hitler himself describes housing conditions for casual laborers as follows:

  Even more dismal in those days were the housing conditions. The misery in which the Viennese day laborer lived was frightful to behold. Even today it fills me with horror when I think of these wretched caverns, the lodging houses and tenements, sordid scenes of garbage, repulsive filth, and worse.

  This was the situation in all of Europe’s major cities of the time, and had been ever since the great tides of industrialization and urbanization in the first part of the nineteenth century. This was a new kind of poverty, concentrated in the urban conglomerations where the lowest classes lived so densely, and were so many in number, and so faceless as to be conspicuously referred to throughout the available sources as hordes or masses or armies of poor.

  * * *

  In 1903 the American writer Jack London published a firsthand account of life in the slums of east London, The People of the Abyss, referring to that inner-city area as a ghetto, a place “of remarkable meanness and vastness … where two million workers swarm, procreate, and die.” Some 1.8 million people in London are estimated to be very poor, he writes, one million exist with one week’s wages between them and pauperism. The misery he describes is difficult to take in and comprehend, but the consequences of the extremely high mortality rate and the extremely poor housing conditions are nonetheless clear: here, inside the ghetto of the poor, life is worth less than life outside. It is worth less because death is a constant presence and because the inhuman circumstances in which the poor live are practically insurmountable. In the city’s West End, he writes, 18 percent of all children die before the age of five; in the East End 55 percent of all children die before the age of five. In other words, every other child. “And there are streets in London where out of every one hundred children born in a year, fifty die during the next year; and of the fifty that remain, twenty-five die before they are five years old. Slaughter!”