My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “Speaking generally, it may be said that the evils are uncontrolled in England.”

  And Hitler:

  In a basement apartment, consisting of two stuffy rooms, dwells a worker’s family of seven. Among the five children there is a boy of, let us assume, three years. This is the age in which the first impressions are made on the consciousness of the child. Talented persons retain traces of memory from this period down to advanced old age. The very narrowness and overcrowding of the room does not lead to favorable conditions. Quarreling and wrangling will very frequently arise as a result. In these circumstances, people do not live with one another, they press against one another. Every argument, even the most trifling, which in a spacious apartment can be reconciled by a mild segregation, thus solving itself, here leads to loathsome wrangling without end. Among the children, of course, this is still bearable; they always fight under such circumstances, and among themselves they quickly and thoroughly forget about it. But if this battle is carried on between the parents themselves, and almost every day in forms which for vulgarity often leave nothing to be desired, then, if only very gradually, the results of such visual instruction must ultimately become apparent in the children. The character they will inevitably assume if this mutual quarrel takes the form of brutal attacks of the father against the mother, of drunken beatings, is hard for anyone who does not know this milieu to imagine. At the age of six the pitiable little boy suspects the existence of things which can inspire even an adult with nothing but horror. Morally poisoned, physically undernourished, his poor little head full of lice, the young “citizen” goes off to public school. After a great struggle he may learn to read and write, but that is about all. His doing any homework is out of the question. On the contrary, the very mother and father, even in the presence of the children, talk about his teacher and school in terms which are not fit to be repeated, and are more inclined to curse the latter to their face than to take their little offspring across their knees and teach them some sense. All the other things that the little fellow hears at home do not tend to increase his respect for his dear fellow men. Nothing good remains of humanity, no institution remains unassailed; beginning with his teacher and up to the head of the government, whether it is a question of religion or of morality as such, of the state or society, it is all the same, everything is reviled in the most obscene terms and dragged into the filth of the basest possible outlook. When at the age of fourteen the young man is discharged from school, it is hard to decide what is stronger in him: his incredible stupidity as far as any real knowledge and ability are concerned, or the corrosive insolence of his behavior, combined with an immorality, even at this age, which would make your hair stand on end.

  What position can this man to whom even now hardly anything is holy, who, just as he has encountered no greatness, conversely suspects and knows all the sordidness of life, occupy in the life into which he is now preparing to emerge?

  The three-year-old child has become a fifteen-year-old despiser of all authority. Thus far, aside from dirt and filth, this young man has seen nothing which might inspire him to any higher enthusiasm.

  But only now does he enter the real university of this existence.

  Now he begins the same life which all along his childhood years he has seen his father living. He hangs around the street corners and bars, coming home God knows when; and for a change now and then he beats the broken-down being which was once his mother, curses God and the world, and at length is convicted of some particular offense and sent to a house of correction.

  There he receives his last polish.

  And his dear bourgeois fellow men are utterly amazed at the lack of “national enthusiasm” in this young “citizen.”

  Day by day, in the theater and in the movies, in backstairs literature and the yellow press, they see the poison poured into the people by bucketfuls, and then they are amazed at the low “moral content,” the “national indifference,” of the masses of the people.

  It seems unlikely Hitler came close to any such family in Vienna; at the time he was living outside history, in the sense that we have no eyewitness accounts of his life then, firstly in a room on his own for a year, then in the weeks and months of homelessnesss before his appearance at the flophouse, when it seems reasonable to assume he was sleeping rough in the parks rather than in some overcrowded basement lodging with a family he did not know. His description is an example, a concretization of something otherwise abstract, the decline of working-class youth in the face of social circumstances. Hitler provides many examples throughout Mein Kampf, though practically no narrative such as this, and certainly he never seems to empathize with his examples the way he does here, where moreover he appeals to the reader’s sympathies in a way that seeems quite out of keeping with the tone of the book as a whole. There is also an element of identification.

  Ian Kershaw suggests there might be a touch of autobiography here, writing:

  A passage in Mein Kampf, in which Hitler ostensibly describes the conditions in a worker’s family where the children have to witness drunken beatings of their mother by their father, may well have drawn in part on his own childhood experiences. What the legacy of all this was for the way Adolf’s character developed must remain a matter for speculation. That its impact was profound is hard to doubt.

  If indeed he is giving vent to experiences from his own childhood here, as if under cover of the example’s neutrality he somehow were able to write about himself, then it is the only instance that occurs.

  Respect for human life need not necessarily be diminished by the baseness of what Hitler saw in Vienna, though this may certainly happen, and apparently did so in Hitler’s case, even though he clearly states in Mein Kampf that it did not, emphasizing that the individual is without blame in his or her misery, which rather is brought about by a miserable system. But how does he express this?

  Then, from all the misery and despair, from all the filth and outward degeneration, it was no longer human beings that emerged, but the deplorable results of deplorable laws; and the hardship of my own life, no easier than the others, preserved me from capitulating in tearful sentimentality to the degenerate products of this process of development.

  This is a treacherous statement, typical not only of Hitler but of the times. By saying it is not the fault of the individual that he or she has become brutalized, but of the system within which the individual exists, one thereby expresses a humanistic attitude by which it is emphasized that it is the conditions under which the people live that are unfit and wretched, rather than people themselves. However, one consequence of this is that the individual is thereby seen to be a manifestation of class, and if class is the important category here, then the life of the individual diminishes in value, being seen in relation to the common goal. Not the face or the name, but the mass and the number. The reduction or absorption of the individual by the mass was indeed a new phenomenon, a direct and highly perceptible result of industrialization and urbanization: hordes of poor, in which the individual was an expression not of itself but its poverty; droves of workers filing in and out of factory gates in the mornings and evenings; armies of protesters taking to the streets, converging into surging crowds marching on the squares and parks. Baudelaire was fascinated by the city’s rivers of people in which the dandy so to speak bathed, Chaplin juxtaposes herded sheep with workers milling toward a factory in Modern Times, and Hamsun, primarily and in everything the individualist and therefore never one to hold the worker in contempt, only the mass in which the worker himself was everyone and no one, the rabble, had his protagonist in the 1920s, August, come to a grisly end, swept under by a tide of sheep. A recurring motif in the literature of the Weimar Republic was the human mass, and a frequently employed perspective was that of remoteness, in which the human world seemed to consist of busy swarms of insects or great flocks of teeming animals. The reduction of the human that such a perspective entailed was not unambiguous, since at this time, perhaps more tha
n any other, the power of the masses and the potential they held for change began to be understood.

  Another consequence of the mass perspective is that it propels the human in the direction of biology, the biological human. Jack London’s urban exploration of 1903 construed man as a cow, and in describing how the ghetto is constantly drained of its best stock he uses for his metaphor the image of blood being drawn from the body. This was a common way of thinking, such metaphors were in frequent usage, no one found them to be suspect, no one was anxious about their use, as yet they were unladen with cruelty, still neutral in a way. The fact that blood became the great symbol of the national socialist movement has to do with man as a mass as well as with man as biology, for blood is the same for all of us, the same blood in the rich as in the poor, in the educated as in the uneducated, and in its being bound up with the people, das Volk, whose institutional expression was the nation-state, blood moreover separated out those who did not belong, according to the racial theory of the day, which again was in no way frowned upon, issuing as it did from those most elevated seats of learning, the universities.

  Hitler never formulated any ideological manifesto apart from what may be gleaned from the various reasonings, assertions, and analyses that go to make up Mein Kampf, and which in actual fact cannot be extracted from it without turning them into something else, for the most unusual aspect of the book is that it is so characterized by impulsive notions, so inextricably bound up with the temperament of its author and with its time by virtue of the psychology that is transported backward and forward throughout its pages, and also so intent on building up a persona by way of this peculiar plainsong, as we might call it, of indignation, self-assertion, and obdurate resentment, that any superstructure would ring false, so no, there is no superstructure here, nor any kind of consolidated whole, the sheer centrifugal force of pettiness and rhetorical crudeness being so strong as to prevent this.

  Language, more so than the image, is intimately connected with the social environment, and while the Nazis’ meticulous orchestrations were able to mobilize the seductive power that lies in the mythological and in the past, and while they managed to make tangible the idea of the nation as rendering each and every individual significant, Hitler’s own language is stuck in prosaic experience, which is to say the hum and sputter of the linguistic reality that surrounded him in Vienna, where for instance anti-Jewish sentiment was rife in the press, and where the air was thick with political agitation and propaganda as if the great political issues of the day had been taken out into the streets and deprived of any Olympian perspective, construed there as manifestations of the own, the local, the private: What are the Czechs doing here? What are the Jews doing here? The housing situation is critical, poverty rampant, inflation spiraling. There are mass protests and riots, windows and streetlights are smashed, trams and motor cars vandalized, troops are deployed, violence spreads through the workers’ districts. What will happen if a revolution comes? The violence escalates, tangibly at street level, in clashes between police and protesters, police and homeless, police and the poor, and within families, but also at the structural level, in the shape of a societal order that looks after the well-to-do and completely ignores everyone else. Parliament has ceased to function and is in a state of near-dissolution; with its myriad of political parties from the disparate countries and cultures of the Dual Monarchy it can barely muster a quorum, representatives fighting for attention with whistles, children’s trumpets, and rattles, Hamann writes, as indeed Hitler himself witnessed during his first year in Vienna, when he would often drag Kubizek along with him to spend entire days in the parliament, barely able to contain his excitement, according to his friend. Hitler immerses himself in political reading, mostly newspapers, pamphlets, and journals, and it is in the secondary, popularized form he becomes familiar with the works of some of the great and most controversial thinkers of the age, such as Darwin, Nietzsche, Chamberlain, and Schopenhauer, so Hamann tells us. Inherent in the zeitgeist was dwindling esteem for academia and scientific knowledge, while idiosyncratic and autodidactic thinkers seething with distrust of the establishment flourished, and what we know of Hitler’s preferences at the time, of which he later offers glimpses, points, according to Hamann, almost exclusively in the direction of such unorthodox, unscientific renegade figures. So in the year he lived alone in his room, socializing with not a soul, we can assume theirs were the works he read, and without academic or even human context of any sort everything was then down to his own judgment and instinct, and this lack of opportunity for correction was perhaps the most characteristic aspect of his private world of thought. What few books he might have owned must have been sold when his money ran out, because when Hanisch encounters him in Meidling in December 1909 he owns nothing but the clothes on his back.

  That evening, when after a year and a half hidden from the light of history he once more steps into it by joining the line outside a flophouse two and a half hours on foot from the city center, thereby to have his name registered in the police archive, tired, cold, and hungry, in a shabby purple suit, pale and thin, twenty years old, with eyes that in Kubizek’s words dominated his features with the piercing look Kubizek’s mother found almost frightening, he is not the all of everyone, nor is he the nothing of no one, for though he is unimportant in the eyes of others, to all intents and purposes socially nonexistent, there is no reason to believe that the grandiosity of his self-image, this boundless belief in his own abilities, has been entirely lost. Weakened it must surely have been, however, for this is the nadir of his life, quite intolerable for a young man of Hitler’s self-confidence and pride, yet in the picture Hanisch paints of him he appears meek and without resistance.

  The hostel plays an important social role, a source of information about places to keep warm in the day and sleep at night, favorable begging pitches and possible openings as to a chance of work. To Hitler, Hanisch became a kind of helper; they began to hang out together. In the daytime they would look for work, in the evenings they bedded down in one of the establishments that existed, a night shelter in Edberg, for instance, and another in Favoriten, perhaps then to return to Meidling again. According to Hanisch Hitler was unsuited to physical labor; once, some men were needed for ditch digging, but Hanisch advised him against it, realizing it would be too much for him. Instead, Hitler hung around the railway station offering to carry luggage for people, or, when winter came, he stood in line to shovel snow, though without a winter coat, freezing and coughing miserably – he did this only a few times, Hanisch reports. So helpless and frail was he that he was even considered poor compared to the other destitutes who at least could labor for a day’s wages. Hitler “thought of all sorts of jobs, but he was much too weak for hard physical work.”

  This is in stark contrast to Hitler’s own account of this period in Mein Kampf.

  The actual business of finding work was, as a rule, not hard for me, since I was not a skilled craftsman, but was obliged to seek my daily bread as a so-called helper and sometimes as a casual laborer.

  I adopted the attitude of all those who shake the dust of Europe from their feet with the irrevocable intention of founding a new existence in the New World and conquering a new home. Released from all the old, paralyzing ideas of profession and position, environment and tradition, they snatch at every livelihood that offers itself, grasp at every sort of work, progressing step-by-step to the realization that honest labor, no matter of what sort, disgraces no one. I, too, was determined to leap into this new world, with both feet, and fight my way through.

  I soon learned that there was always some kind of work to be had, but equally soon I found out how easy it was to lose it.

  The uncertainty of earning my daily bread soon seemed to me one of the darkest sides of my new life.

  This may not be untrue, but knowing that he earned money carrying luggage at the railway station and shoveling snow, a young man who in his adult life so far has set his sights exclusively on b
ecoming an artist, but has failed and withdrawn from all human company, tormented and grossly humiliated, a loser in the eyes of all others, the comparison with the pioneers in America, who worked the soil and made fields and built houses, seems eccentric to say the least. But this is what Mein Kampf is like: Hitler construes his poverty in words that fall sorely short of its actual consequences, yet rather than denying it he instead turns it into something immensely powerful and productive, weaving it into a political viewpoint that finds much of its force in, and indeed practically bases itself on, this distortion of his life.