Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (7 page)

After New Year’s Day 1908, Hitler visited his parents’ graves in Leonding. “Adolf was very composed,” wrote Kubizek. “I knew how deeply his mother’s death had shaken him…I was astonished how calmly and clearly he spoke about it.”
⁷⁷
There was nothing keeping Hitler in Linz now, and he immediately started preparing his move to Vienna. Together with his sister Paula, he applied to the Linz authorities for orphans’ pensions. They were each entitled to 25 crowns a month. The inheritance from their father of 625 crowns each was deposited in a closed account they could not access until they had reached the age of 24, but the two siblings could make use of an inheritance of 2,000 crowns from their mother. Hitler was by no means wealthy, as some have claimed, but the money was enough to live on in Vienna for a year without having to work regularly.
⁷⁸

On 4 February, the owner of the house on Blütenstrasse, Magdalena Hanisch, asked her Viennese friend Johanna Motloch to try to convince the set designer Alfred Roller, who was also a professor at the Academy of Applied Arts, to intervene on Hitler’s behalf. “He’s a serious, ambitious young man, very mature for his age of 19, from a completely respectable family,” Hanisch wrote. Roller promptly answered: “Young Hitler should come see me and bring samples of his work so that I can see what they’re like.” Several days later, Hanisch described Hitler’s reaction to her friend: “He read the letter silently, word for word, with reverence and a happy smile on his face, as though he wanted to memorise it.” Could it be, after his disappointment the preceding October, that a door was opening to the sort of artistic life he coveted? In a letter to Johanna Motloch, Hitler expressed his “deepest gratitude” for giving him “access to the great master of stage design.”
⁷⁹
It is strange, therefore, that in Vienna he never took Roller up on his offer. If we believe Hitler’s later explanations, the reason was shyness. In one of his table talks he claimed that he had been too nervous during his early days in Vienna to approach a person like Roller. That, he said, was as impossible for him “as speaking before five people.”
⁸⁰

On 12 February 1908, Hitler left for Vienna. His bags contained his books and a few important family documents such as letters from his mother, which he ordered to be burned in 1945.
⁸¹
He had convinced Kubizek, who brought him to the train station, to move to Vienna as well to get musical training at the conservatory. His sister Paula and aunt Hanni initially remained in the apartment in Urfahr, but Hanni soon moved back to Waldviertel to be near her relatives. Twelve-year-old Paula then went to live with her half-sister Angela Raubal.
⁸²
As he had done on his last visit in October, Hitler moved in with the unmarried seamstress Maria Zakrey in the courtyard of Stumpergasse 29 of the Viennese district of Mariahilf, an area for “little people.” On 18 February, he sent a postcard to Kubizek that read: “I eagerly await news of your arrival…All of Vienna is waiting. So come soon.”
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2

The Vienna Years

“Vienna was and is the most difficult, if also the most thorough, school I went through,” Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf
. “I came to the city half a boy and left it as a quiet, serious adult.”
¹
The five years from 1908 to 1913 that Hitler spent in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were deeply significant. In many respects the impressions his new environment made upon him and the experiences he had there greatly influenced his character and his political views. It was no accident that he would always come back to these years in the monologues he later held in his headquarters.

Fin-de-siècle
Vienna was a major European metropolis—with around two million inhabitants, it was the continent’s fourth most populous city after London, Paris and Berlin. The seat of the Habsburg monarchy was not only famous for its glorious past. With its industry, large commercial firms, banks and modern means of transport, it was also a vibrant economic centre, and its theatres, concert halls, artists’ studios, publishing houses and newspapers made it a hive of culture as well. “Hardly any other city in Europe had such cultural urgency as Vienna,” wrote Viennese author Stefan Zweig, looking back on the years before the First World War.
²
Modernists in various branches of culture—the painters Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, the architects Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, the writers Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the composer Arnold Schönberg and many others—were creating a furore.
³
Emperor Franz Josef I, nearly 80 years old, still resided in the Hofburg Palace. When Hitler moved to Vienna in 1908, the aged monarch—a guarantee, so it seemed, of absolute stability and a symbol of lasting leadership—celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of his rule with a series of gala dinners and a parade full of pomp.
⁴

But the glamorous façade concealed deep social cracks. The splendid architecture of Ringstrasse and the broad boulevards that expressed the self-confidence of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, as well as their need to show off, stood in stark contrast to the shabby tenement buildings in the outer districts where working-class families lived in cramped quarters. “From a social perspective, Vienna around the turn of the century was one of the most difficult cities,” Hitler remarked in
Mein Kampf
. “Gleaming wealth alternated abruptly with repellent poverty.”
⁵
But Vienna was more than just a city of stark social contrasts. It also attracted and magnified the problems of the multinational Austro-Hungarian state. Other than Berlin, no European city had such a high rate of immigration. Between 1880 and 1910 the city’s population doubled. The largest group of immigrants were the Czechs—by 1910 every fifth person in Vienna had Czech roots.
⁶
Vienna’s Jewish population was also proportionally larger than in most other European cities. In 1910, over 175,000 Jews lived there—that was 8.7 per cent of the total population. The poorer segment of this group, chiefly immigrants from the eastern parts of the empire—Hungary, Galicia and Bukovina—lived in the Leopoldstadt district, nicknamed “Matzo Island” in the local slang.
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Among Vienna’s ethnic Germans and in the German-speaking parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this massive immigration gave rise to fears of “foreignisation,” of losing the cultural and political hegemony that German Austrians considered their birthright. In reaction, numerous radical nationalist associations, political parties and popular movements had formed since the end of the nineteenth century.
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That, of course, provoked counter-reactions from other ethnic and cultural groups. One of the main arenas for nationalist conflict was the Reichsrat or Imperial Council, the parliament of the western half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1907, with the introduction of universal suffrage for men over the age of 24, Germans were no longer the strongest faction there, and the verbal duels fought between the spokesmen for various nationalities, right out in the public eye, were so bitter that many people believed the Habsburg monarchy was in crisis and the multinational state would soon be dissolved. Nowhere was the oft-cited
fin-de-siècle
mood—the intimation of coming seismic shifts and catastrophes—more palpable than in Vienna. “Everyone is stopped and waiting, maître d’s, hansom cab drivers and governments,” wrote the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus in 1899. “Everyone’s waiting for the end. Let’s hope the apocalypse is pleasant, Your Highness.”
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—

Immediately upon arriving in Vienna, Hitler told readers of
Mein Kampf
, he was cast into “a world of misery and poverty.”
¹⁰
This was intentionally misleading. The financial cushion of his maternal inheritance, his orphan’s pension and occasional gifts from Aunt Hanni meant that the new arrival could continue his idle existence. In late February 1908, after Kubizek had joined him, the two friends moved into the larger room in Maria Zakrey’s apartment on Stumpergasse. Their rent was 20 crowns a month. Kubizek passed the entrance examination to the conservatory on the first go, so while his friend pursued his studies, Hitler whiled away his days with no goal or plan. He tended to get up late, a habit he retained even as Nazi Party leader and Reich chancellor, and when Kubizek returned from the conservatory, he usually found Hitler making sketches or brooding over his books.

Hitler would often read until the early hours of the morning. “Books, always books,” recalled Kubizek. “I can’t picture Adolf without books. Books were his whole world.”
¹¹
Hitler’s favourite reading material was Germanic myths and heroic sagas, closely followed by art and architectural histories. But he also read contemporary works such as the plays of Ibsen and Frank Wedekind’s
Spring Awakening
.
¹²
He quickly memorised everything he found important and useful and forgot the rest. In
Mein Kampf
, he would devote a long section to the “Art of Proper Reading,” which he claimed to have mastered from an early age. This consisted of “separating what’s valuable from what’s worthless so as to retain the former in your head for ever while not even seeing the latter, if possible, and definitely not carrying around senseless ballast.”
¹³

Whenever they could, the two friends attended the Vienna State Opera. “Before the world war, the opera was something wonderful!” Hitler still rhapsodised in 1942. “The culture there—unparalleled!”
¹⁴
Often he and Kubizek had to stand in line for hours to get one of the coveted standing-room tickets. As they had in Linz, they found Wagner particularly intoxicating. “For Adolf everything else receded in importance before this unique mystical world the great master conjured up for us,” Kubizek recalled.
¹⁵
Gustav Mahler had got fed up with being attacked by anti-Semites, and given up the directorship of the opera in 1907, but both young Wagnerians took the side of the Jewish conductor and composer in the controversy surrounding his interpretations of the operas.
¹⁶

Otherwise, Hitler’s taste in art remained utterly uninfluenced by Viennese modernism. He had no time for the works of Klimt and the Secession. Hitler preferred traditional art: the late romanticism of Arnold Böcklin, the neo-baroque monumental paintings of Hans Makart and above all the idyllic genre works of the Munich painter Eduard Grützner.
¹⁷
“As a young man in Vienna I once saw a Grützner in the window of an art dealership,” he later told his “court photographer” Heinrich Hoffmann. “I was so thrilled I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”
¹⁸
By contrast, Hitler regarded all abstract painting as “nothing more than crippled spattering.”
¹⁹
He had equally little sympathy for the pioneers of a new functionalism in architecture like Adolf Loos. Hitler’s architectural heroes were the neoclassicists Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Gottfried Semper, and he spent hours staring up at the majestic buildings on Ringstrasse.
²⁰
“He forgot not just the time, but everything around him,” Kubizek wrote. “At home he would make me sketches of floor plans and longitudinal cuts, trying to recreate every interesting detail…For him Ringstrasse became a living object of study that allowed him to test his architectural knowledge and argue for his ideas.”
²¹

As time passed, Kubizek began to notice a change in his friend’s behaviour. Hitler would explode in rage at the slightest provocation, cursing a world that allegedly conspired against him. He was also prone to bouts of depression, in which he tortured himself with self-critical reproaches. Phases of frantic activity alternated with stretches of lethargy in which he succumbed to total idleness.
²²
One day, Hitler stunned Kubizek by announcing that he was going to write an opera called “Wieland the Blacksmith,” although he had only had a few months of piano lessons—from early October 1906 to late January 1907—and no idea at all how to compose music. Kubizek was forced to assist him in this adventurous project, until one day after several sleepless nights in which Hitler had worked himself into a frenzy, he gave up on the idea.
²³
The same thing happened with other projects. When an idea took hold of him, Hitler would immediately set to work in a blaze of activity only to suddenly lose interest and devote his attention to something else.

In his 1938 essay “Brother Hitler,” Thomas Mann recognised “a manifestation of an artist’s nature” in the young man’s daydreaming. “Although it makes me feel ashamed,” Mann wrote,

everything is there: the tendency to be “difficult,” the laziness and pathetic amorphousness of adolescence, the refusal to be accommodated, the what-do-you-really-want, the semi-idiotic vegetation of a social and spiritual bohemian, the arrogant, self-inflated refusal of all reasonable and honourable activity—and on what basis? For the sake of an obscure intimation that one is destined for something indefinable, which would make people burst into laughter if it were ever possible to name.
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