Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (8 page)

In their room on Stumpergasse, the two friends began to get on each other’s nerves. Not only did Hitler feel disturbed in his autodidactic studies whenever Kubizek practised the piano, he was also jealous that his room-mate proudly went to the conservatory every morning and enjoyed one success after another, while he, who felt himself called to be an artist, had had the doors of the Academy of Fine Arts slammed in his face. The excitable 19-year-old had still not told Kubizek about his rejection, but one night after they had fought yet again, it burst out of him. “They rejected me,” Hitler confessed. “I was thrown out, excluded.” His confession was accompanied by a wave of insults. As Kubizek recalled:

“This academy!” Hitler yelled. “Nothing but a pack of cramped, old, outmoded servants of the state, clueless bureaucrats, stupid creations of the civil service! The whole academy should be dynamited!” His face was pale, his lips were pressed so tightly together that they went white. His eyes were glowing. How uncanny his eyes were! As if all the hatred of which he was capable were burning in those eyes.
²⁵

It was one of the rare moments when the otherwise secretive Hitler opened up to another person. The arrogant pose, with which Hitler sought to demonstrate his superiority over his friend, actually concealed his own massive uncertainty as to his future as an artist.

—

Perhaps that was one of the reasons why the young Hitler, in Kubizek’s account, began to get interested in politics. On numerous occasions, he visited the Imperial Council and listened in the gallery to the debates, which were conducted in ten different languages. In retrospect, he claimed to have been outraged by what he called a “pathetic spectacle—a gesticulating, wildly motioning mass shrieking in every key at once and over them all a harmless old uncle, who worked himself into a sweat, ringing a bell and trying to restore the dignity of the house with words of conciliation, then warning.”
²⁶
Such scenes, Hitler would have his readers believe in
Mein Kampf
, had produced his deeply ingrained contempt for parliamentarianism and the entire concept of democratic majority rule. Kubizek, who once tagged along with Hitler and soon decided to leave, disgusted by the tumult, observed his friend reacting quite differently: “He stood up, his fists clenched and his face burning with excitement. I decided to remain seated quietly, although I had no idea what the debate was about.”
²⁷

There can be no doubt that the incendiary political climate in Vienna greatly influenced the young man from the provinces, who was susceptible to radical slogans. As a pupil back in Linz, he had got involved in the German School Association, whose mission was to set up German-language schools and kindergartens in multilingual areas.
²⁸
Hitler was convinced of the cultural superiority of everything German before he arrived in the Austrian capital. “When I came to Vienna, my sympathies were already fully and exclusively with the pan-Germanic movement,” he wrote—this time plausibly—in
Mein Kampf
.
²⁹
Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the founder of the movement in Austria, was one of the politicians the new arrival in Vienna most admired. Schönerer’s desire to unite the German part of Austria with Imperial Germany, which entailed the dissolution of the multinational Habsburg state, must have exercised a considerable fascination on the young Hitler. He would later praise the fervent nationalist and Bismarck admirer Schönerer for “recognising more clearly than anyone else the inevitable end of the Austrian state.”
³⁰
It is uncertain whether the 19-year-old Hitler had much time for the cult of personality that grew up around Schönerer within the pan-Germanic movement. But he did take over some elements of that cult, for example the “Heil” greeting and the title Führer, into the NSDAP.
³¹

By the turn of the century Schönerer was past the height of his power—1907 was the last time he had a seat in the council. His fight against the Catholic Church, pursued under the slogan “Let’s get free of Rome,” had offended a lot of his Catholic sympathisers. In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler criticised the “free of Rome” campaign as a major mistake, saying that Schönerer had possessed “insufficient understanding of the psyche of the broad masses.”
³²
But what Schönerer lacked, Hitler found in another politician: Karl Lueger, the Vienna mayor and founder of the Christian Social Party, who was at the height of his popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lueger’s political activity, Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf
, was focused on the middle classes, which were threatened with extinction and who gave him an “unshakeable base that was willing to make sacrifices and fight tenaciously.”
³³

As a disciple of Schönerer, Hitler maintained in one of his later monologues, he had initially opposed the Christian Social Party, but with time he had developed a “great personal respect” for Lueger. “I heard him speak for the first time in the Volkshalle in the city hall,” Hitler recalled. “I was of two minds. I wanted to hate him, but I couldn’t help admiring him. He had a great talent for speaking.”
³⁴
Lueger’s oratorical skills were not the only quality Hitler admired. He also appreciated Lueger’s rigorous Germanophile policies, advanced with the slogan “Vienna is German and must remain German.”
³⁵
Moreover, Hitler was impressed with the remarkable modernisation of the city’s infrastructure for which the mayor had been responsible since taking office in 1897. Lueger had not only municipalised Vienna’s gas and electricity suppliers and its public transport system, he also oversaw improvements to healthcare and social benefits, and established parks and other green areas. “Lueger was the greatest example of a local politician and the most brilliant mayor we’ve ever had,” Hitler later said as Reich chancellor.
³⁶
When Lueger died in March 1910, his young admirer Hitler was among the hundreds of thousands of people who lined the streets to watch the funeral procession.
³⁷

Next to Lueger’s Christian Social Party, the Social Democrats were the strongest political force in pre-war Vienna. Hitler’s relationship with them was strangely ambiguous. On the one hand, he was moved by the social misery that he encountered everywhere in the city. He spent weeks drawing up plans for social housing blocks so that the working population would have cheaper and better accommodation.
³⁸
On the other hand, he was scared of sinking down into the proletariat himself. “Perhaps,” Kubizek mused, “the unbelievable energy he poured into his autodidactic studies masked the instinctive attempt to protect himself from the misery of the masses by acquiring the broadest and most thorough education he could.”
³⁹
Hitler attended a number of workers’ demonstrations in Vienna, but he found them more threatening than inspiring. “For almost two hours,” he wrote in
Mein Kampf
of one such incident, “I stood there and watched with bated breath the unsettling human dragon-worm that slowly crawled by. Anxious and downcast, I finally left the square and wandered home.”
⁴⁰

As a pan-Germanic sympathiser and a radical nationalist, Hitler loathed the Austrian Social Democrats’ internationalist policy of mutual understanding with Slavic peoples. He suspected the Social Democratic leadership of exploiting the hardship of the working populace for their own gain. “Who are the leaders of these people living in misery?” Kubizek recalled Hitler asking after a demonstration. “They’re not men who have experienced the hardships of the little guy themselves, but rather ambitious, power-hungry politicians, some of whom have no idea of reality and who are getting rich off the misery of the masses.”
⁴¹
Hitler concluded his bitter indictment with a tirade against political profiteering. Opposition to the Social Democratic outlook, which he considered “un-German” and corrupt, would remain a constant in Hitler’s political world view. It was part of the poisonous legacy of his Vienna years.

—

In early June 1908, at the end of his second semester, Kubizek travelled back to Linz to spend the holidays with his parents. When Hitler brought him to the train station Kubizek did not suspect that it would be thirty years before he would see his friend again. Left behind in Vienna, Hitler sent Kubizek several postcards and two longish letters in which he described his “hermit’s existence” with forced good cheer. He reported that he had killed a “monster bedbug” in their room and got over a “bronchial flu.” Hitler also stressed that he had been anything but lazy in his friend’s absence: “I’m writing a lot right now, usually in the afternoons and evenings.”
⁴²
In the latter half of August, Hitler sent one last postcard from Waldviertel, where he was visiting relatives. Then he broke off all contact. When Kubizek returned to Vienna in November 1908, Zakrey informed him that Hitler had moved out without leaving a forwarding address.
⁴³

In September 1908, Hitler had applied for a second time to the Academy of Fine Arts. This time he was not even invited to take the entrance exam.
⁴⁴
This may well be the reason he abandoned his friend so suddenly and with no explanation. Hitler’s self-confidence was badly shaken. His dream of a great artistic career seemed to be over. Hitler’s recurrent tirades even as Reich chancellor against the Academy “schoolmasters” who had “rejected him as untalented” showed how deeply he had been insulted.
⁴⁵
The young Hitler no doubt felt that he and his mission were being utterly neglected and he decided to withdraw completely in the autumn of 1908. He broke off contact not only with Kubizek but with his family as well. On 18 November, he rented a new apartment on Felberstrasse 22, near the western train station and not far from Stumpergasse. He lived there until 20 August 1909.
⁴⁶

We have no reliable information about Hitler’s time on Felberstrasse. For three quarters of a year, it is as though he had disappeared from view. But we can assume that his financial situation was getting worse and worse every month. He must have just about used up his maternal inheritance by that point, and his orphan’s pension alone was not enough to live on. For the first time, Hitler had to make the sort of hard sacrifices he later boasted about. “For months I didn’t have a hot meal,” he claimed in one of his monologues. “I lived off milk and dried bread.”
⁴⁷

An episode Hitler described at length in
Mein Kampf
may have happened at this time. “In order not to starve,” Hitler claimed, he had worked on a building site. Here the conversations of the unionised construction workers had “enraged him to the extreme.” Everything was dragged through the dirt—the nation, the fatherland, the authority of law, religion and morality. When he dared contradict them, the construction workers threatened to throw him from the scaffolding. He quit the job, one experience richer.
⁴⁸
It seems unlikely, however, that this story was true. Hitler probably invented it as an illustration of how heroically he had combated the “false teachings” of Marxism even as a 20-year-old.
⁴⁹

On 22 August 1909, Hitler moved to cheaper quarters on Sechshauser Strasse 58. Previously, when registering his address, he had described himself on the forms as an “artist” or a “student.” Now he called himself a “writer,” although he had yet to publish a line.
⁵⁰
On 16 September, he had to vacate his room, probably because he could not pay the rent. Under the heading “new address,” his deregistration card read “unknown.” It seems that Hitler had no fixed address during the following months. Looking back on the autumn of 1909 in January 1914, he wrote that it had been an “endlessly bitter time.” Even five years later, he still carried “mementoes in the form of frost boils on my fingers, hands and feet.”
⁵¹
This may be one of Hitler’s typical exaggerations, but there is no doubt that he had hit rock bottom.
⁵²
The young man, who according to Kubizek had always dressed properly and was extremely conscious of hygiene, was now one of the army of homeless people who slept on Vienna’s park benches or gathered in the city’s soup kitchens for a hot meal and to warm up when the weather was cold.
⁵³

In the late autumn of 1909, Hitler went to the Meidling homeless shelter, which offered some 1,000 people a bed and soup and bread every night. There he made the acquaintance of the man in the neighbouring cot, a convicted vagrant named Reinhold Hanisch. As Hanisch recalled in May 1933: “On the metal cot to my left was a spindly young man with bloody feet. I still had some bread from the farmers, and I shared it with him. Back then, I spoke in a thick Berlin dialect. He was crazy about Germany. I had wandered through his home town Braunau am Inn so it was easy to follow his stories.”
⁵⁴
Every morning the men using the shelter had to pack their things. They were not allowed to return until the evening. In the meantime, Hanisch and Hitler tried to earn some money as day labourers, but Hitler did not hold out long shovelling snow. “He had no winter coat and was frozen blue,” Hanisch recalled.
⁵⁵