My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  A person such as this, in whom a pervasive sense of inner nobility buffers all outer abjection, was of course the main character in Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger, published seventeen years before Hitler’s own wretchedness in Vienna. Like Hitler, Hamsun’s character exists from hand to mouth in a city where he knows no one, has no friends, no job or income of any sort other than the money he occasionally earns writing a piece for a newspaper. He harbors the ambition of becoming a writer, the idea of which is the only thing that keeps him going. Applying for work at a fire station he is met with rejection, and subsequently makes no further effort to find a job, instead spending his days drifting about the streets, trying to write, trying to think, moving to increasingly shabbier lodgings, disgusted by the poverty that surrounds him. He never mentions the place he grew up, his childhood or youth, his parents, brothers, or sisters, it is as if they do not exist. He is himself only, and though in the profoundest material need, he never once doubts himself.

  Hitler possessed the same self-belief and some measure of the same feverish imagination; at the hostel in Meidling he is reported by Hanisch to have claimed that science would soon eliminate the force of gravity from objects, allowing even the heaviest iron blocks to be moved from place to place without difficulty, and that people would in future nourish themselves with pills alone.

  His mode of survival too is highly reminiscent of Hamsun’s hero; not short pieces in the newspapers, but small paintings he sells in inns and drinking establishments.

  Selling paintings was Hanisch’s idea. Hitler lied and told him he had attended the Academy. Hanisch suggested he paint to earn a living. Hitler buys the necessaries and starts work; since the shelters are overcrowded he sits painting at cafés while Hanisch hawks the canvases around. They do brisk business and before long can move into a new, permanent men’s hostel a cut above the ones for the very poorest; here they pay a modest sum each week for a small private cubicle with a bed and a daily meal. The hostel is big, housing some five hundred residents, for some it’s a permanent home, though for most a temporary measure. About 70 percent of the residents are under the age of thirty-five. Seventy percent are workers and tradesmen, the remainder coachmen, shop assistants, waiters, gardeners, unskilled men, and unemployed, with a smattering of fallen aristocrats, unsuccessful artists, divorcés and bankrupts, Hamann writes. The ethnic backgrounds represented were quite as diverse. Hitler lived for three years in this environment. He had his own cubicle, where he could relax between the hours of eight in the evening and nine in the morning. There was a dining room and two reading rooms, one for smokers, one for nonsmokers. There were newspapers and a small library for the use of the residents, where Hitler according to Hanisch spent most of his time. He would read the papers in the mornings, paint during the day, and read in the evenings, provided he was not attending one of the many public debates and discussions that still went on all around the city, where the political challenges were so great and so conspicuous. Selling his canvases meant Hitler and Hanisch made just enough money to pay for rent and food, though not enough for clothes, and by Hanisch’s account Hitler kept his coat on indoors for a period, having a hole in the seat of his trousers and no shirt to cover it. To make ends meet Hitler needed to paint a picture a day. Hanisch kept him to the grindstone, Hitler eventually becoming so annoyed with him that after a year and a half, in June 1910, he turned to another occupant, Josef Neumann, and asked him to take over the sale of his pictures. Hitler had previously disappeared from the hostel for a whole week in the company of Neumann without informing Hanisch and was obviously quite friendly with him. Liljegren writes that they toured the art galleries together.

  Eleven years Hitler’s senior, Neumann was, moreover, a Jew, so if Hitler did hold any anti-Semitic views at this stage they most certainly cannot have featured as prominently in his mind as they would later. Nothing suggests that he did. His political views were, however, nationalistic, he was against the Social Democrats, and anti-Marxist, and according to Hanisch held the workers in low esteem, saying repeatedly that they were “an indolent mass that cared about nothing but eating, drinking, and women,” in other words possessing no sense of life’s finer cultural values, interested only in its material level. Yet one must assume Hitler’s own self-image at this time to have been somewhat muddled; certainly he painted, in the region of seven or eight hundred pictures during the period, but there is little reason to believe he saw any prestige at all in what was entirely a matter of earning money for his survival; in 1939 he would prohibit their continued sale, presumably embarrassed and unpleasantly affected by their circulation.

  But if he was not an artist, not an architect, not a worker, and not a layabout, what was he then? Did he consider this to be a gap, an interlude while waiting for better times? And what did he expect such times to bring?

  What separates Hamsun’s young alter ego in Hunger from Hitler is that Hamsun would later write the book he imagined he would and break through as a writer, whereas in Hitler’s case nothing happens. Why not? For want of talent? For want of drive? Was he not strong enough to cope with the lack of artistic environment his marginalization entailed? Did he give up and allow himself to drift aimlessly wherever his fortunes might take him?

  His youthful reveries about art were perhaps more to do with the life of the artist than with art as such; in contrast to the civil servant, the artist’s life is an expression of the self, a person is an artist by virtue of being that self, with that particular talent, and such a thought must surely have appealed to him. He saw no need to work for the sake of achievement, it was sufficient simply to be the person he was. Only one figure could transcend the rigid framework of bourgeois culture and elevate himself above it, one figure of whom this moreover was expected, and that figure was the genius. The one against the mass’s many. This was an idea born of the understanding that the one should manage the culture of the many, and this by its idealization, by evoking the sense of there being something the many could reach out and long for, by distilling the insights of the many into one: such is our life in this world. This is the mandate of Goethe and Wagner. What happened in art at the end of the nineteenth century was that this figure, the artist genius, altered character. The one no longer represented the all, but went against them. An example is Munch. He went beyond the social world – not positively, but negatively. He was met with scorn and disdain. To do this, to not be a part of the all but to express his particular self, which so deviated from the accepted mainstream, he had to either go against it, which required enormous strength, or be unattached to it. In Munch’s case, as in the case of many artists, he chose to be unattached, living for long periods of his life within himself, having little or no contact with family and practically no friends. Only then could he go beyond, for Munch was not Hans Jæger, and lacked his strength and will. Jæger lived in the social world, cavorted with the social world, went to the wall in the social world. Munch turned away, turned in, painted. Such solitude and lack of social attachment was not dissimilar to the way Hitler was living during this period of his life, but in Hitler’s case this transgression of the bourgeois was only social in nature, not artistic. On the contrary, his aesthetic was identical with that of bourgeois culture, sharing with it the imperative that art should be splendid, beautiful, ideal.

  The foremost shaper of such a conception of art, to many still so obvious as to resemble a law, was perhaps G. E. Lessing, who put the idea into words in his Laocoon, originally published in 1766, in which he writes of the difference between ugliness and beauty in art. The ugly form “wounds our sight, offends our sense of order and harmony, and excites aversion without regard to the actual existence of the object in which we perceive it.” Lessing divides art into two: imitative art, which seeks to reproduce reality the way it is, and art that strives for beauty. “Painting as imitative skill can express ugliness; painting as a fine art will not express it. In the former capacity its sphere extends over all visible objects; in the latter i
t confines itself to those which produce agreeable impressions.” To Lessing’s mind, ugliness in art was a threat also to order and harmony in society as a whole, and he wished to forbid representation of ugliness altogether in favor exclusively of art that presented beauty. “The object of art … is pleasure, and pleasure is not indispensable. What kind and what degree of pleasure shall be permitted may justly depend on the law-giver.”

  With the advent of realism in the middle of the nineteenth century, which represented ugliness as well as beauty, the hideous as well as the sublime, Lessing’s view of art fell into decline, though no more so than that the bourgeoisie reacted with repugnance and rage at the direction in which painting was going at the turn of the century, which they believed had nothing to do with art, since it did not elevate or make agreeable, but was the expression merely of the sick mind of the artist.

  Hitler, who wished to transcend the bourgeois by following the path of genius, almost brims over with the same ideas:

  Thus, the saddest thing about the state of our whole culture of the pre-War period was not only the total impotence of artistic and cultural creative power in general, but the hatred with which the memory of the greater past was besmirched and effaced. In nearly all fields of art, especially in the theater and literature, we began around the turn of the century to produce less that was new and significant, but to disparage the best of the old work and represent it as inferior and surpassed; as though this epoch of the most humiliating inferiority could surpass anything at all. And from this effort to remove the past from the eyes of the present, the evil intent of the apostles of the future could clearly and distinctly be seen. By this it should have been recognized that these were no new, even if false, cultural conceptions, but a process of destroying all culture, paving the way for a stultification of healthy artistic feeling: the spiritual preparation of political Bolshevism. For if the age of Pericles seems embodied in the Parthenon, the Bolshevistic present is embodied in a cubist monstrosity.

  In 1907 and 1908, when Hitler applied for admission to the Academy, painting was exploring its forms of expression in hitherto unprecedented ways, as for instance in the Expressionism of Munch, Kirchner, and Nolde, the Fauvism of Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck, the Cubism of Braque and Picasso, the radical simplification and nascent abstractions of Burliuk and Kandinsky, the Primitivism of Jawlensky, to mention but a few examples of the hugely radical currents that ran through European culture of the day, Vienna being one if its most important cities.

  The question that arises is of the kind of relationship that exists between the contemporary age and its art, whether art is simply a weather vane occupation, a fashionable way of life whose purpose is to do what everyone else is doing, though not “everyone else” in the sense of anyone at all, but a defining elite, the happy few, the standard-bearers of the arts, those on everyone’s lips in all the cafés, culture then being a locus of ingratiation?

  Hitler looked on these currents as a sign of decay; the latest thing, the new, the next has nothing to do with art in Hitler’s eyes, to him art is the expression of something everlasting and timeless. He shows no understanding of how inextricably the everlasting and the timeless in art is bound up with the contemporary and the social, or how crucial that dynamic, between what is living and what is dead, is to its power of expression and to its significance, and the reasons for this failure to comprehend are presumably the same ones as make it impossible for him to conceal the low and small-minded aspects of his person in his writing, which is to say a poorly developed sense of form, according to which content and the feelings it gives rise to are the only things of real importance.

  But his failure as an artist is not down to being out of touch with the zeitgeist. That none of these currents is present in Hitler’s pictures is hardly surprising and tells us little else about him other than that he was the product of the lower middle class and excluded from what was happening at the vortex of the culture, or else he excluded himself, in that he chose to adhere so firmly to the preferences of his class, these not yet having been deemed void nor necessarily entirely forsaken; the Academy to which he sought entrance, held in such great esteem, guarded the same neoclassicist and realistic aesthetic that formed the basis of his own painting. That he was not accepted to study there would seem more due to the lack of expressive force in his painting, the almost exclusively decorative nature of his canvases, which possess no element of self. On the other hand he was only seventeen years old when he applied there, and only a couple of years older when he was painting his other pictures. A relevant comparison could be Hamsun’s early attempts at the novel, for instance, Bjørger, which in the same kind of way lacks originality and is without soul, an image of what its author saw to be literature, where the idea of the literary stands between himself and the world, much as the way Hitler’s idea of what art was and should be stood between him and what he painted. The presence of such an idea is destructive enough in itself, but in Hitler’s and Hamsun’s cases its destructive thrust was compounded by its provincial and homely nature. Their social points of departure were not dissimilar, though Hamsun was from more humble circumstances by far, his parents near destitute, with no education, and he himself, in contrast to Hitler, had not even finished school. Hamsun taught himself everything, Hitler did too, but whereas Hitler gave up painting, Hamsun stuck at his writing, eventually finding success as a novelist. What Hitler lacked as a painter and Hamsun gained for himself as a writer was intimacy with the form of his art. Hitler’s weakness as a painter was that he found no way of expressing his own inner being, or else lacked the will to address it, and perhaps this was the reason he gave up and settled for painting as a simple means of making ends meet.

  But what actually was his own inner being?

  The writer Ernst Jünger, Hitler’s senior by ten years, who came from a considerably more elevated social background, and who in the interwar years came out on the extreme antiliberal and antidemocratic right, published a number of essays in the Nazi Party journal, writing as follows in 1929:

  And I also know that my basic experience, what finds expression through life’s events, is the typical experience of my generation, a variation on the motif of the times, an exotic species perhaps, but one that still displays the characteristics of the genus.

  Reading biographies of the period, patterns emerge, certain recurrent connections and types, perhaps this is what Jünger means by “a variation on the motif of the times,” for the very structure of society and the views by which it is characterized set up spaces that are astonishingly alike, and those who inhabit them go through the same experiences, which become typical for them. Hitler was not the only person in the Habsburg Empire with an authoritarian father and a loving mother, with siblings who perished and dreams of becoming a metropolitan artist. No, the age was full of them. An example is Alfred Kubin, born in 1877, twelve years before Hitler, who grew up in a small town in Austria called Zell am See. He too had an authoritarian father he hated, a loving mother who died, and he too left for the city as a young man in order to become an artist.

  The many resemblances between Hitler and Kubin’s biographies might lead us to wonder if similarity of background and experience begets similarity of mind, whether what each on his own considers and understands to be unique, particular failures and shortcomings, longings and urges, experiences and preferences, hopes and fears, might not in fact merely be variations on a common theme, in Jünger’s sense, arising out of an age and a place and a class. Not that Hitler and Kubin were alike in temperament or talent or character, but the feelings that streamed through them, the things they held back or allowed themselves to show, the things they despised and the things by which they were attracted, looked to be, or in certain cases perhaps even were, the same. It is tempting to entertain the thought in this instance, since the pictures Kubin painted as a young man are so full of death and fear of women and possess such remoteness from the human aspects of what they depict, their figures
being seen as biological entities, lending them a repugnant, distasteful quality, as if he thereby were expressing directly what Hitler suppresses and which with all his might he tries to eschew.

  Hitler wishes to elevate the world, Kubin describes it the way it is, which is to say the way he perceives it, sunken into hell, as in his drawing of a powerful woman standing naked with both hands raised in the air, sprinkling something onto the ground; her belly is large, grotesquely shaped, perhaps she is pregnant, and on the ground about her feet are the severed heads of men, some with mouths gaping. She is Mother Earth.

  Another drawing depicts a huge vulva into which a tiny man dives from the woman’s knee, which from his perspective is as tall as a mountain. There are others too, of masses on their way to hell, seen from such distance that nothing of any individuality may be discerned, and there are drawings of death in the shape of a great skeleton leaning over a house and sprinkling something on it from a pouch, the title being Epidemic. Elsewhere, an ape holds a woman tightly from behind and paws at her genitals, there are men with the heads of birds, a vast congregation of helmeted soldiers gathered beneath the towering sculpture of an ox, chopped-up animal carcasses, severed heads on stakes, the state depicted as a trundling machine in a field, suicides, dogs frothing at the mouth, a man with his head between a woman’s legs, she in a coffin and thin as a skeleton, another is an actual skeleton, though with a pregnant belly rising like the top of an egg. These are fin de siècle pictures, yet they are filled with a horror of the body, with an extravagance and a mood of man as mass that distinguishes them radically from fin de siècle elsewhere, in other countries; Kubin would have been unthinkable in England, for instance, and also in America, and while some of his pictures come close to the French pastelist Odilon Redon, their mood is nonetheless radically different, finding their like only in other areas of German expressionism of the day, with the exception of some of Goya’s darkest and most apocalyptic drawings, in which Kubin most likely found inspiration.