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No one in their right mind could have believed that either would become rulers. Stendhal met an old officer who had served with Napoleon Bonaparte before 1789. He remembered ‘a young windbag arguing interminably whatever the subject, determined to reform anything and everything’, adding that he had known scores of similar ‘ranters’. In the autumn of 1909 a tramp in a Vienna doss-house saw a nightmarish apparition called Adolf Hitler, with a thin, starving, bearded face and burning eyes, an apparition naked save for a pair of trousers.
Yet the sons of the Carlo de Buonaparte ‘Noble’ (a lawyer by profession) and the Zolloberamstrat Aloïs Hitler both came from assured if contrasting backgrounds, despite the Führer’s description of himself as ‘a poor devil’. One father was a nobleman, the other a petit-bourgeois, but each advanced his standing. They did so by making shrewd use of opportunities offered by the State.
Napoleon’s noble blood has been exaggerated. The Buonaparte family derived a scanty income from a few small farms, their peasants calling them by their Christian names. Only the accident of Corsica’s conquest by the French in 1769 and the creation of Corsican nobility transformed them into patricians, for all Carlo’s purchasing certificates of nobility from the Tuscan government; they were never more than gentry of the pettiest sort, well-to-do peasants with a coat-of-arms. Carlo’s desertion of the Corsican cause and assiduous wooing of the new French régime in the person of the island’s governor, the Comte de Marboeuf – a keen admirer of his wife – secured posts and privileges, in particular expensive State education for his children.
Aloïs Hitler also made the best of his chances. Born in 1837, he came from a long line of alarmingly intermarried peasants in Upper Austria, on the borders of Bohemia and Bavaria, whose name was probably Czech in origin – Hidler or Hidlarcek. He was illegitimate, the bastard of a cook named Maria Anna Schickelgrüber, his father’s identity being unknown. Five years after his birth his mother married a local ne’er-do-well, Johann Georg Hiedler, who over thirty years later acknowledged Aloïs as his son, possibly for the sake of Aloïs’s career; the parish priest was persuaded to alter the baptismal register so that the name became Hitler instead of Schickelgrüber. The couple were so poor that at one point they slept in a cattle-trough. When he was thirteen the boy ran away to Vienna, apprenticing himself to a cobbler before entering the customs service. Despite his lack of education, he was a success, rising to the rank of senior inspector.
However different the two fathers, each had a profound influence. Carlo taught his son that, as a nobleman, he was superior to other men – a belief which received a rude shock in the presence of the great nobles of ancien régime France. Aloïs bequeathed his fear of becoming déclassé, of sinking back into the mud and being a man of no consequence.
‘Napoleone’ was born in Ajaccio on 15 August 1769. He grew up there and in the country round about, exploring its dense heathland on a pony or visiting the family farms with his brothers and sisters. When in the city he led a band of friends in vicious fights against the local urchins. He left Corsica at the age of nine to go to a French military boarding school at Brienne, and therefore saw little of his parents. Carlo died from cancer of the stomach in 1785. ‘It would be useless for me even to try to express the pain which I felt,’ he wrote on St Helena. ‘In everything he was the prop of our youth.’ This was not true. As a small boy he had been sent to fetch Carlo from taverns where he was gambling, and even at a distance was aware that his father was a spendthrift. He was unquestionably fond of his strong-minded mother Letizia Ramolino. Yet there was a period during the late 1790s when, dazzled by his success, he questioned his paternity because of his forebears’ lack of military talent. The only possible alternative to Carlo was the governor, the Comte de Marboeuf, a gallant old soldier whose admiration of Letizia had been remarked on. But she was as strict a Catholic as she was beautiful and, barely literate, had absorbed the traditions of a people who punished adultery with death.
At Brienne the young Bonaparte excelled in mathematics while acquiring a taste for ancient history – notably Plutarch and Polybius, which he read in translation. According to Louis de Bourrienne, his contemporary at school, he was self-absorbed and solitary, unpopular because of his acid tongue. He himself recalled that he found ‘unspeakable charm in reading and pondering far away from my companions’ noisy games’, admitting ‘I was not liked in school.’ On the other hand, he claims to have been the leader in snow fights during the winter of 1783-4, commenting that the authorities stopped them because so many boys were injured by stones concealed inside the snowballs. When he was teased about his Italian accent and odd name he retorted, ‘Had there been only four French to one Corsican, Corsica would never have been conquered, but there were ten to one.’ His hero was General Paoli, who led the islanders ‘against tyrants, luxury and courtiers’. Throughout his early years he was a Corsican nationalist, secretly hating the people whose king he was being trained to serve.
Napoleon went to the École Militaire at Paris in October 1784, to spend a year before being commissioned into the artillery regiment of La Fère the following September. He remembered how at the École ‘We were magnincently fed and waited on, treated at all times like officers with vast incomes, greater than those of the richest Corsican families, larger than any pay we would ever receive.’ Here he acquired a grasp of the theory and practice of gunnery in accordance with the new cannon of Gribeauval. Yet despite his good record at the École Militaire, there are indications that he did not work quite so hard there as he afterwards suggested, and was prone to pick quarrels.
It was his first experience of Paris, in those days still at the height of its ancien régime elegance and gaiety. Superficially the monarchy appeared secure, the social order rock-solid. The French and the Americans had just defeated and humiliated Britain. The country seemed prosperous, and the government’s imminent bankruptcy was skilfully concealed. The capital itself was particularly cheerful, with over 600 cafés and restaurants – both comparatively recent inventions. As Alexis de Tocqueville observes, ‘France in those days was a nation of pleasure seekers, all for the joy of life.’ However, the young gunner officer was scarcely ‘all for the joy of life’. In May 1786 he seriously contemplated suicide. He still hated the French, lamenting that his fellow-Corsicans were suffering beneath ‘the oppressors’ hand’ and how ‘I am compelled by duty to like people whom it is natural for me to hate’. Later he returned to Paris on several occasions before the Revolution, losing his virginity to a young prostitute whom he picked up in the Palais Royal in November 1787. He had already been in love, with Caroline du Colombier, but the affair went no further than ‘eating some cherries together’. There was more to depress him than mere homesickness or the sufferings of Corsica. Although he was well paid for a subaltern, much of his pay had to go to his widowed mother, since she and his family were now in some poverty. His prospects of promotion were remote.
He tells us how his brother Joseph remembered him visiting Corsica in 1786 with a trunk ‘much larger than the one holding his clothes’, packed with books which included translations of Plutarch, Plato, Cornelius Nepos, Livy and Tacitus, together with the works of Montaigne, Montesquieu and Raynal. He was also pasionately fond of the poems of Ossian, a bogus Celtic bard whose true name was James Macpherson, of which a French prose translation had appeared in 1771. Yet, as he recalled, he was obsessed by Rousseau (‘my hero’) and the cult of feeling. ‘Always alone in the midst of people, I return home to give myself in my dreams to unspeakable melancholy.’
Napoleon was a supporter of the French Revolution from the moment the Estates-General was replaced by a Constituent Assembly in July 1789. He believed that it meant the rebirth of France and, more important, of his Corsican homeland. Louis XVI’s inept attempt to escape in June 1791, the Flight to Varennes, turned him into a firm republican. However, to begin with he spent most of his time in Corsica, plunging into political intrigue, working for a Revolutionary Corsica which would be firmly allied to France. His occasional visits to the mainland made him uneasy. He was disgusted by the anarchy which he found in 1791, and revolted by ‘the lowest scum’ whom he saw storming the Tuileries in August of the following year.
Even so, he welcomed the Revolution as ‘a general rising of the people against the privileged classes’. In his view ‘The new France gave to the world the remarkable phenomenon of 25 million souls, all equal, governed by the same laws, the same rules, the same government. All the changes were in harmony with the good of the people, with its rights, with the progress of civilisation.’
In Corsica General Paoli, the island hero who had returned to lead its patriots once again, came to regard ‘Citizen Buonaparte’ as a danger. He was too pro-French, too much of a revolutionary. In June 1793 Napoleon and his family fled from Corsica. ‘This is no country for us’, he told his mother.
The former nobleman became a Jacobin of the deepest dye. He was accepted by other Jacobins because of the poverty and obscurity of the Bonaparte family. He was appointed commander of the artillery during the siege of Toulon from September to December 1793. Toulon, nauseated by the local excesses of the Terror, had rebelled against the Convention in Paris and invited the English to occupy it. Here Napoleon found himself. ‘On this occasion’, he wrote many years later, ‘I displayed for the first time those brilliant military gifts which have since earned such renown for the French army.’ His skilful siting of the batteries and devastating employment of their guns, firing red-hot cannon-balls ‘to burn the despots’ ships’ (his words), made it impossible for the enemy fleet to use the harbour, and the fall of royalist Toulon was due entirely to him. Throughout the siege he slept at the batteries, on the ground next to his guns. He personally captured an English general, was bayoneted in the leg, had two horses shot beneath him. He reported to the Minister of War, ‘I promised you brilliant successes and, as you see, I have kept my word.’ The Convention was so impressed that it promoted him to Brigadier-General, giving him command of the Army of Italy’s artillery. He then crushed another royalist plot at Toulon.
While Major Bonaparte’s cannon had been shelling Toulon a thirteen-year-old Prussian officer saw action on the Rhine against the French army. Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz was serving as a Fahnenjunker (ensign) in the Prinz Ferdinand Regiment, andhe must have watched the enemy’s new-style Revolutionary troops, burning with fanaticism, singing the Marseillaise as they charged. One day he was going to write a book which would be read either as a brilliant treatise on war or, in the words of Liddell Hart, as ‘a Prussian Marseillaise which inflamed the blood and intoxicated the mind’.
For a long period Napoleon was a committed Jacobin, declaring ‘Marat and Robespierre, those are my saints.’ It was true that he had a family to support – his adored mother, his brothers Joseph, Lucien, Louis and Jerome, his sisters Elisa, Caroline and Pauline – and his Corsican clan loyalty was such that as he prospered they would prosper with him. Yet his ideological commitment was perfectly genuine; indeed, he was so extreme in his opinions that he earned the reputation of being a ‘Terrorist’ – one of those responsible for the Terror. He never denied that he had held such views, admitting on St Helena, ‘I was very young and my opinions were not settled’, claiming that Robespierre ‘possessed more foresight and policy than is generally appreciated’. He made firm friends with the ‘Incorruptible’s’ brother Augustin – in so far as it was in his nature to make friends – and the younger Robespierre is known to have admired the little general.
‘Everyone had accepted the thought of death,’ he told Count Bertrand in 1821, just before he died. ‘It was present every day in front of our eyes. They had grown used to the idea.’ On another occasion he observed that had the Bonaparte family been a little richer or more distinguished his career would never have taken off. He deliberately coarsened his manners and appearance to curry favour with the sons-culottes, acquiring a filthiness of vocabulary which he was never able to lose in his days of glory. Barras recalls how he discerned in Bonaparte a striking resemblance to Marat, the bloodiest Jacobin of them all. Barras gives a description of Napoleon dancing attendance on the wife of an especially influential friend of the younger Robespierre, carrying her gloves and fan to ingratiate himself. He also has a hilarious account of the citizen general’s behaviour at a dinner given by some local Revolutionary Committees to the Convention’s commissioners, members of the former dining in one room, the commissioners in another – ‘already playing the double role natural to him, he somehow managed to alternate between the commissioners’ dinner, which he was happy and proud to attend, and that for the sans-culottes in the other room into which he went as though to apologise for not being with them’.
Bonaparte’s first serious study of politicians was during his Jacobin period. The nine (later twelve) members of the Committee of Public Safety formed a joint dictatorship inspired by Rousseau’s theory of the General Will – that the very best and wisest men decide what is to be done in the public interest, since representative democracy is impossible. They had taken over the government of France in April 1793 and ruled by martial law, sending opponents to the guillotine or massacring them, in order to save the Revolution from the armies of ancien régime Europe. The ‘Terror’ was Danton’s invention; in coldly objective terms it meant the use of the strongest methods available to ensure the effectiveness of the Nation-in-Arms. The Law of Suspects extended the death penalty not only to obvious enemies like returned émigrés but to those who failed it, such as generals who let themselves be defeated. Danton declared that the Republic would never be safe so long as a single opponent was left alive; even ‘indifférents’ must be hunted down. Considered insufficiently extreme, Danton himself was sent to the scaffold by his colleagues. Henceforward Maximilien de Robespierre dominated the Committee. One of Robespierre’s friends, Armand de Saint-Just, had warned that in certain circumstances the General Will could grow ‘depraved’, in which case it would establish itself in any conceivable form – ‘in twenty years the throne might even be re-established’. (In The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy J. S. Talmon comments: ‘It took less than twenty years for Napoleon to make the claim that he embodied the general will of the French nation and to find theoretical support for it.’) The Terror unleashed a truly awful slaughter, until even Jacobins grew frightened. The coup of 9 Thermidor [27 July] established a milder régime, the Robespierrists going to the guillotine.
As has been seen, Napoleon always retained a soft spot for Robespierre, pointing out that ‘Marat, Billaud de Varennes, Fouché and others were infinitely more ferocious’. He had particular respect for another formidable member of the joint dictatorship, Lazare Carnot, the Committee’s ‘architect of victory’, whose ruthlessness and gifts of organization made the undisciplined French levies so extraordinarily effective. A Burgundian who in 1789 had been a sapper captain and a Chevalier of St Louis, he hated noblemen even more than Robespierre; Bonaparte says the latter had to stop Carnot sending too many of them to the guillotine.
The coup of Thermidor and fall of Robespierre was a shattering blow for Napoleon. Arrested the following month as a Robespierrist, for some weeks he was in very real danger of being guillotined like his former leader. The Thermidorians were Jacobins themselves, men who had been Terrorists, who had voted for the execution of Louis XVI. They finally seized power because they went in fear of their own lives. It is revealing that they regarded Citizen Bonaparte as being potentially a rabid extremist. His situation was so alarming that a Lieutenant Junot (a former sergeant whose bravery had impressed him during the siege of Toulon) offered to arrange his escape from prison. Fortunately, his commanding general persuaded the commission of inquiry that the Directory could not afford to lose so talented a soldier, and saved his life.
When released Napoleon made the mistake of refusing a posting to the Vendée (to fight royalist guerrillas) and was put on the half-pay list. He had been short of money before, but this was his first experience of real poverty. For a time he received no pay at all. Living in a seedy hotel near the Place des Victoires, he ate at cheap eating houses, wrapping the sums he paid with in paper to conceal how little he was spending. His uniform was ragged and he could not afford gloves. His brother Joseph sent him small sums which saved him from starving. Only a miraculous loan stopped him drowning himself in the Seine.
After 10 Thermidor 1794 and the fall of Robespierre there seemed small chance of Bonaparte ever soldiering again with the French army. He made fruitless inquiries about joining the Turkish service. Bourrienne saw much of him at this time and says he ‘was always pensive, frequently anxious and depressed … None of his plans came to anything. Not one of his petitions received an answer. The ill treatment soured him. He was tormented by his need for activity, finding it unbearable to be just one of the crowd.’ A lady friend of Stendhal (one of his earliest and most perceptive biographers) remembered meeting the unemployed citizen general early in 1795:
Truly he was the thinnest and oddest being I ever met in my whole life. He wore huge “Spaniel’s Ears” down to his shoulders, in the fashion of the day. Italian eyes with a piercing and occasionally gloomy look are not set off by such a mass of hair. Far from receiving the impression of a man of fiery genius, one is more apt to feel that this is someone it would be alarming to meet too close to a wood late at night.
The Paris in which Napoleon very nearly starved was a comparatively happy one, much happier than under Robespierre. He wrote to his brother Joseph in July 1795:
Here luxury, pleasure and the arts are reviving astonishingly. Yesterday Phèdre was played at the Opera for the benefit of a retired actress; although the prices trebled there was an immense crowd by two o’clock. Carriages and dandies are reappearing, and remember their eclipse only as a long dream…
Everything that can delight and make life pleasant is available. One has no time to think and how could one be gloomy in the midst of so gay a round and such a display of wit. The ladies are everywhere: in the theatre, out driving, in the libraries. You see lovely creatures in the scholar’s study.
For all his Jacobinism and rejection of privilege, Napoleon never forgot what Carlo had instilled into him – that he was a nobleman. He only condemned privilege because it was expedient to do so, or when it was in hands other than his own. Later, despite his insistence on an ‘open road for talent’, he could not resist assuring Metternich that he was of aristocratic birth and ancient family (much to the latter’s amusement). This conviction was an important element in his self-respect and belief that he was destined to be a leader. By contrast Adolf Hitler had no pretensions to nobility. When he came to dominate the European continent he would place Hungary first among ‘the sickest communities of New Europe’, apparently because it was still ruled by its aristocracy. One night in 1941 he would recall resentfully that in the world of his youth ‘every man existed only by virtue of his origin’. Unlike Bonaparte – who secretly venerated blue blood – he condemned the nobles of ancien régime France as ‘degenerates’.
Hitler’s favourite reading was pro-German from a very early age, although he was an Austrian. This was a popular illustrated history of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, in consequence of which ‘I was forced to accept the fact, though with a secret envy, that not all Germans had the good luck to belong to Bismarck’s Reich’. He would only learn why when he went to the Realschule (secondary school) at Linz, where he was to be fascinated by the lessons of a Dr Poetsch. Young Hitler was going to acquire (as he put it later), ‘a feeling of intense love for my German-Austrian home and a profound hatred of the Austrian state, together with a conviction that the House of Habsburg did not, and could not, have any love for us Germans’.
He had been born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a little town on the Austro-Bavarian border where Aloïs was stationed. Two years later the Hitlers moved to the much bigger town of Passau, but early in 1895 Aloïs retired and bought a farm at Hafeld near the small market town of Lambach, thirty miles south-east of Linz, where he kept bees and tended his orchard. The farm began to lose money, so after a brief sojourn in Lambach, the Hitler family moved into a cottage with a garden in the substantial village of Leonding near Linz, where Aloïs continued to keep bees. Adolf had ‘pleasant memories of woods and fields’.
His timid, mousy mother, Klara Poezl – one of the few people of whom he was genuinely fond – resembled Letizia only in her piety. Of the same peasant stock as Aloïs – she was his second cousin – Frau Hitler was twenty-three years younger than her gruff, tyrannical husband, of whom she went in awe. She had been his foster-daughter during his first marriage before going to Vienna as a servant. She returned to be his housekeeper while his second wife was dying, marrying him after her death. Aloïs was over fifty when Adolf was born. There was another son who just survived infancy, Edmund, born in 1894, together with a daughter, Paula, born two years later. She also had two stepchildren, from her husband’s second marriage; Aloïs the younger, born in 1882, and Angela, born the following year. A quiet, gentle and affectionate woman who doted on her children, Klara was extremely hardworking and her house was spotlessly clean.
Their savage-tempered father beat the boys every day, the principal victim being Aloïs, who ran away when he was fourteen, to become a waiter in Paris. Adolf seems to have had marginally better treatment. According to him, he infuriated his father by refusing even to think of a career in the customs service, and by wanting to be an artist. ‘Naturally the resulting situation was not pleasant’, Hitler recalled in Mein Kampf. ‘The old gentleman was bitterly annoyed; and indeed so was I, although I really loved him.’ He adds: ‘It nauseated me to think how one day I might be fettered to an office stool, that I would not be able to dispose of my own time but forced to spend my entire life filling out forms.’
The Realschule at Linz was a worthy product of the highly efficient Austrian educational system, and should not be underestimated. Clearly it possessed some excellent masters, as is shown by Adolf’s enthusiastic response to Dr Poetsch’s teaching. The curriculum omitted Latin and Greek and was designed to equip pupils for commercial or technical careers; it included German, French, History, Geography, Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Natural History and Drawing. Despite his intelligence (which was recognized by all those who taught him), young Hitler did poorly at all subjects save drawing, for which he received excellent marks; surprisingly, even his history was only ‘adequate’. The reason for this lacklustre performance seems to have been pure laziness.
When the Führer looked back in Mein Kampf on his days at the Realschule he none the less says that ‘the ridiculously easy school tasks which we were given made it possible for me to spend more time in the open air’. It was an hour’s walk from his home to the school, and in bad weather he would go there by train; later he lodged in Linz, with five other boys. A fellow-pupil, Joseph Keplinger, records ‘We all liked him, both in the classroom and in the playground’, adding ‘He had guts.’ The masters disagreed. One, Dr Hümer, thought him ‘notoriously cantankerous, wilful, arrogant and irascible’, recording that ‘the gaunt, palefaced youth … demanded of his fellow-students their unqualified subservience, fancying himself in the role of leader.’ Another master recalled Adolf Hitler talking to trees as they waved in the wind, and making up replies. Probably he was not particularly strong, if good at gymnastics, and he may have suffered from chest trouble. The earliest-known sketch of him, when he was sixteen, shows a consumptive face, even though he did not suffer from tuberculosis. In Mein Kampf he states that he left the Realschule because a doctor told his mother that he should stay away from school for at least a year.
Adolf claims to have felt ‘deeply bereaved when old Aloïs Hitler died suddenly from a stroke in January 1903, but one is inclined to doubt it – he certainly did not mourn him in the way Napoleon did Carlo. Aloïs had been a success, and received an obituary in Linz’s leading newspaper, which paid tribute to the way he had risen in the world. He left his widow well provided for, so that she was able to maintain her standard of living. Now she was able to spoil her beloved Adolf to her heart’s content: when he left school in 1905 she let him moon around, indulging his taste for foppery. He dressed smartly by the standards of his class, and carried an ivory-topped cane. Just as Napoleon had set his heart on becoming a soldier, so he was determined to become a famous artist and go to Vienna and study at the Academy of Fine Arts. He went to the opera and paid one or two trips to the capital. He had acquired a friend with similar tastes, Gustl Kubizek, who shared his passion for music.
In December 1907 Klara Hitler died. She had been suffering from cancer for the past year and a mastectomy failed to halt the disease. The doctor who had attended her, Dr Edward Bloch, recalled ‘In all my long career I never saw anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.’ He had been a kind physician, and although he was a Jew Hitler never forgot that, allowing him to emigrate years later.
When he was nearly eighteen and a half, in September 1907, Adolf Hitler had taken a room in Vienna near the Westbahnhof, the railway station for Linz – much to the sorrow of his failing mother, by then in constant pain. The landlady was an aged Polish crone, the tiny apartment cramped and verminous. Nevertheless, his friend Kubizek came to stay there with him for a time. Almost as soon as he had installed himself in Vienna Adolf suffered the first major setback of his life. He failed the entrance examination to the Academy of Fine Arts, news which ‘struck me like a bolt from the blue’. He thought of becoming an architect but did not have the qualifications to study. Nevertheless, he stayed in Vienna, sightseeing, going to the opera in cheap seats, not even considering a career other than art or architecture, let alone a job. His father had left him a little money, and probably his mother did too; after her death he was paid an orphan’s pension. He had in all 83 kronen a month, which was as much as a junior schoolmaster’s salary. His mother’s indulgence had provided him with an excellent wardrobe. He neither smoked nor drank – unusual for an eighteen-year-old – while, as a German study puts it, he incurred ‘no flirtatious expenses’.
When he was twelve he had been to a performance of Lohengrin, the first opera he ever heard. ‘I was fascinated at once. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth master knew no limits. Again and again I was drawn to hear his operas.’ He dated his ambition to be a politician from the moment he saw Rienzi – whose plot is the tragedy of medieval Rome’s great tribune. He considered Tristan to be Wagner’s masterpiece. In January 1942 he recalled nostalgically ‘At the beginning of this century there were people called Wagnerians. Other people had no special name. What joy each of Wagner’s works has given me!’ He went to the Vienna State Opera whenever he could. It is impossible to exaggerate the composer’s influence on Hitler, who compared him with Frederick the Great and Martin Luther. Through Wagner he attuned himself to the Germanic intellectual climate of the early twentieth century, a climate largely dominated by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Wagner had enthusiastically accepted the former’s interpretation of music as the immediate language of the will, while it was no accident that the latter dedicated The Birth of Tragedy to the composer. It was from Nietzsche, however indirectly, that the Führer took his rejection of what he later termed ‘the effeminate Judaeo-Christian pity ethic’, although the philosopher had despised nationalism and anti-Semitism, and eventually Wagner himself. Wagner’s combination of selfishness, cynicism and romanticism appealed deeply to the young Adolf.
Hitler’s first-known flirtation was pure fantasy. During his mother’s last illness she moved to Urfahr, a suburb of Linz. Here, walking with his friend Kubizek one day, he saw a tall, statuesque, blonde maiden, ‘a real Valkyrie’. Adolf immediately told Kubizek, ‘I’m in love with her!’ She was two years older than him, and her name was Stefanie Jansten; she had studied at Munich and Vienna, and she had a whole host of admirers. He began to dog her footsteps, and once during a flower festival she threw a rose at him, but he never spoke to her. He sent her a letter saying that he was about to study at the Academy of Fine Arts and that she must wait for him to come back and marry her. She was puzzled, since she did not know the writer. He composed poems in her honour, and dreamt about her for months. He told Kubizek that he contemplated drowning himself in the Danube, but since he wanted a joint performance, a suicide pact, and she did not know him the scheme had certain difficulties.
The Vienna in which he found himself was the capital of an empire containing many nationalities, much of which had been acquired by dynastic marriage. It was the successor of the old Holy Roman Empire (Heilige Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation) and yet in some ways it was the first modern international state, its territories constituting a symmetrical economic unit – even if its component races detested each other. Full of feudal pomp, dominated by an ancient and august dynasty and by a proud aristocracy, it was at the same time the city of Freud, of Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, of Richard Strauss, Mahler and Alban Berg, of Robert Musil and Hugo von Hofmansthal, and of Karl Kraus. Yet the young Hitler could see little to admire, although he admits that there was a certain glamour.
In the centre and in the Inner City one felt the pulse-beat of an empire which had a population of 52 million, with all the perilous charm of a state made up of multiple nationalities. The dazzling splendour of the court acted like a magnet on the wealth and intelligence of the whole empire … Vienna presented an appearance which made one think of her as an enthroned queen whose authoritative sway united the conglomeration of heterogeneous nationalities that lived under the Habsburg sceptre.
But, he goes on, ‘the radiant beauty of the capital city made one forget the sad symptoms of senile decay which the state manifested as a whole.’
He was horrified by the Reichsrat (Parliament). ‘A turbulent mass of people, all gesticulating and bawling against one another, with a pathetic old man shaking his bell and making frantic efforts to call the House to a sense of its dignity.’ He could not help laughing. Next time he visited it, the chamber was empty save for a few yawning deputies. He admits ‘In the light of my then attitude towards the House of Hapsburg I would have considered it a crime against liberty and reason to think of any kind of dictatorship as a form of government’, that at that time he could not imagine any régime other than a parliamentary system. Yet he concluded ‘If the Parliament was useless, the Habsburgs were worse.’ There is no doubt that much of his hatred of democracy derived from what he saw in Vienna.
In Mein Kampf Hitler writes of poverty in Vienna.
Dazzling riches and loathsome destitution were mingled in violent contrast … Thousands of unemployed loitered in front of the palaces on the Ring Strasse; and below the Via Triumphalis of old Austria the homeless huddled together in the murk and filth of the canals … I shudder even today [1923] when I think of the woeful dens in which people dwelt, the night shelters and the slums, and all the tenebrous spectacles of ordure, loathsome filth and wickedness.
He knew what he was talking about, but it was his own fault that he had experienced such things. He refused to consider any career other than one studying art or architecture. A second attempt to enter the Academy in September 1908 failed, his sketches being rejected as below standard; the finality and the humiliation must have been shattering. Yet instead of trying to find a job – he could easily have become a clerk or a shop assistant – he severed his links with his few friends, moved to another room and began to study politics. The politicians who attracted him were all extreme German nationalists. They included Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna and leader of the Christian Social Party; an unfrocked Cistercian monk called Jorg Lanz von Liebenfals, ‘Prior of the Order of the New Temple’; and Georg Ritter von Schönerer, leader of the Pan-German Movement. All three were anti-Semitic. To a young man sinking inexorably down the social scale – for all his delusions of grandeur – a sense of superiority over anyone, let alone Jews, provided a desperately needed sense of status. His own hopeless circumstances induced extremism. Schönerer’s repudiation of the Habsburgs and of Catholicism also appealed to him, even if he was not yet quite ready to abandon a religion so dear to his mother.
It cannot be too much stressed that, like the young Napoleon, Hitler’s ideas were those of his time. There has been controversy about the scope and depth of Adolf’s reading, whether he read as voraciously as he claimed or merely absorbed knowledge throughmagazines and popular digests. Certainly it was undisciplined and, if he expressed admiration for Goethe and Schiller, his literary taste was often execrable, as for example his passion for the cowboy-and Indian novelettes of Karl May.
While young Adolf disagreed with Karl Lueger’s programme of saving the Habsburg empire by regenerating Vienna, and regretted that his Christian Socialist Party was ‘only outwardly anti-Semitic’, he was none the less impressed by his tactical skill. He contrasted it with Georg von Schönerer’s political ineptitude. Lueger ‘saw only too clearly that in our epoch the political fighting power of the upper classes is quite insignificant … he chose as the social basis of his new party that middle class which was threatened with extinction’. He was also struck by Lueger’s cunning handling of the Catholic Church, and how he recruited many of the younger clergy. ‘Dr Lueger’s special talent’ in Hitler’s view was ‘his rare gift of insight into human nature and he was very careful not to take men as something better than they were in reality’.
By the autumn of 1909 Hitler’s resources were insufficient to support him. He had spent the money left by his parents, and could no longer afford to rent a room. He slept in coffee-houses, on park benches or in doorways, pawning what was left of his elegant wardrobe to buy food, queuing up at soup kitchens. Winter came early that year, and it was a bitter one. Starving, without an overcoat and frozen, his feet became so blistered by ceaseless trudging through the snow that he could barely hobble. In December, at the very end of his strength, unwashed and lousy, with matted hair and a beard, he was admitted to the Asyl für Obdachlose (Institute for the Homeless), near the Danube. Here his rags were taken away for delousing and he received a ticket entitling him to a bed and bread and soup for five days – perhaps longer, if he looked for a job.
We know something about Hitler at this time from Reinhold Hanisch, a German-speaking tramp from Bohemia who was in the next bed and wrote down an account in the 1930s – ‘I was Hitler’s Buddy.’ He describes Adolf as a nightmarish figure even after his rescue from the streets, with a thin, famished face, burning eyes, a beard and long hair, who dressed in a cast-off black overcoat (a present from a Jewish second-hand clothes merchant) and a greasy old bowler-hat. Discovering he was ‘an artist’, Hanisch said that there was a market for painted postcards and small pictures, that if Adolf would paint some he would sell them. The little enterprise was a success and they moved to better accommodation, the Männerheim (Home for Men), near the Jewish quarter of Leopoldstadt. A cubicle could be rented for three kronen a week, there was a canteen and reading-rooms, and facilities for washing clothes. In the summer of 1910 Hitler quarrelled with his partner, though he continued to live at the Männerheim until 1913, supporting himself by his paintings. But for Hanisch he would probably have gone under.
Before Hanisch suggested painting they had lived by begging, carrying luggage at the Westbahnhof – one wonders if Adolf saw any old friends arriving from Linz – or by shovelling snow. When he returned to Vienna in triumph at the Anschluss in 1938 he told his cronies that one night, after a fierce blizzard, he was clearing the snow away from outside the Imperial Hotel and watched Archduke (later Emperor) Karl and Archduchess Zita going in over a red carpet. The spectacle and the strains of cheerful music which emerged made him bitter at the sheer injustice of life; he swore that one day he too would enter the Imperial along the same carpet. The trouble with this reminiscence is that Karl and Zita were not married until 1911, by which time he could support himself and did not have to shovel snow. There is no need to question his dislike of the Habsburgs. In Mein Kampf he states that the German-Austrian people had come to feel strongly that the historical mission of the House of Habsburg as rulers of the First Reich had ended after the Franco-Prussian War when the Second, Hohenzollern, Reich came into existence.
He was determined to avoid military service with the Habsburg army. After five years in Vienna he decided to flee. But where was he to take refuge? Despite his rural upbringing, he was essentially a creature of cities, of artistic capitals. There were only two other artistic capitals in the German-speaking world, Dresden and Munich. Saxony was comparatively far away, while he had been born on the Bavarian border. Munich was the obvious place to go. In May 1913, on a sunlit Sunday, he therefore arrived at the Hauptbahnhof in Munich, on the train from Vienna. He had come to a city almost as romantic and musical. Its Wittelsbach royal family were perhaps not so worthy of reverence as the unifying Hohenzollerns, but at least they were Germans who ruled over Germans. As a devout Wagnerian, he approved of the late Ludwig Il’s idolatry of his hero, admiring deeply the King’s fantastic palaces and castles. He may even have respected Ludwig III and Crown Prince Rupprecht, who both spoke that broad Bavarian dialect he found so soothing. There were three fine opera houses where he could hear his favourite music. As Hanisch observes quaintly, ‘In music Richard Wagner brought him to bright flames.’
However, Hitler could not afford to go the opera very often. He found lodgings in the house of a tailor, Herr Popp, for which he paid in part by shopping, fetching coals and beating carpets. His main income seems to have come from working as a tourist guide. He continued to paint his postcards, though they did not sell as well. Often he was behind with his rent. His basic diet was bread and sausage. However, he managed to go fairly often to a coffee-house or a bierkeller where he could talk politics. And he read voraciously – ‘all political stuff and how to get on in Parliament’, according to Frau Popp. We know from a photograph of August 1914 that he smartened himself up, shaved off his beard, dressed neatly. He established surprisingly friendly relations with the Popps. Later he wrote how happy he had been, because of ‘the charm of the marvellous Wittelsbach capital, which has attracted probably everybody who is blessed with an awareness of beauty instead of commercial instincts’.
Much has been made of his evading military service-when finally forced to appear before a board at Linz he was rejected as unfit – but it was not from cowardice: he did not wish to serve in a Habsburg regiment. He considered war inevitable; people feared ‘the very existence of the German nation was at stake’. ‘On 3 August 1914 I presented an urgent petition to His Majesty King Ludwig III requesting to be allowed to serve in a Bavarian regiment.’ He joined the List Regiment (reserve infantry), and at the end of October was in action at the first battle of Ypres. He was so happy in the army that an officer commented that the List Regiment was Hitler’s ‘homeland’. He himself wrote: ‘I look back on those days with wistful pride.’ He became a dispatch runner, noted for ability to take messages through the heaviest bombardment. In December 1914 he won the Iron Cross Second Class. In October 1916 he was wounded in the leg and sent home for several months, during which he visited Munich and Berlin and was horrified by the defeatist mood (which he blamed on Jews and enemy propaganda); he began to contemplate a career in politics after the War. He was only too pleased to get back to the Front, and received a certificate of bravery from his regiment in May 1918, being awarded the Iron Cross First Class the following August – a decoration seldom given to noncommissioned officers. Oddly, he never rose above the rank of corporal, being considered deficient in ‘leadership qualities’, but he was perfectly content with his lot.
In October 1918 Corporal Adolf Hitler was caught in a British gas attack. ‘My eyes were like glowing coals and all was darkness around me.’ He was sent to a hospital in Pomerania. A chaplain visited the patients on 10 November, and, in tears, told them thatthe War had been lost. The shock sent Hitler blind again. ‘Darkness surrounded me as I staggered and stumbled back to my ward and buried my aching head between the blankets and the pillow. I had not cried since the day I stood beside my mother’s grave … my hatred grew – hatred for the originators of this dastardly crime.’ His world had indeed come to an end. The War had all been in vain.
From 1918 to 1920 Adolf Hitler’s prospects were bleaker than ever. The Hohenzollern Reich had collapsed, and the social order looked as though it would follow it. Berlin was taken over by the communist Spartacists under leaders like Rosa Luxemburg, while Bavaria became a socialist republic under Kurt Eisner. Understandably, middle-class Germans were terrified. The country swarmed with refugees from Soviet Russia, with grim tales of Bolshevik atrocities against the bourgeoisie. (Before 1914 German had been Russia’s commercial language, so they had no difficulty in communicating their experiences.) The Freikorps came to the rescue of the middle class, unofficial paramilitary bands of veterans from the trenches. In Berlin they put down the Spartacists bloodily, ‘executing’ Rosa Luxemburg; in Munich they killed many Reds long after Eisner’s government had been toppled and he himself assassinated. In mid-1919 the Peace Treaty of Versailles came as almost as bitter a blow as the Armistice of November 1918: Germany had to pay crippling reparations, allow the French to occupy the Rhineland, surrender her colonies, and reduce her army to 100,000 men. Most of the army refused to believe it had been defeated – the bearing of the Prussian Guard as it marched back into Berlin beneath the Brandenburger Tor was scarcely that of beaten men. There grew up the legend of the Dolchstoss, the Stab-in-the-Back; that the enemy had triumphed only because the troops had been betrayed at home by greedy financiers, agitators hoping for a revolution and Jews – regardless of the fact that large numbers of them had fought gallantly for Germany.
The drastic reduction in troop numbers could well mean Corporal Hitler’s discharge. A ruined Germany was not going to buy many painted postcards. It was not impossible that he might sink back into the beggary he had known in Vienna during that dreadful winter of 1909.
Nothing could have been more different than the early careers of Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. One, a regular officer and a former petty noble, had destroyed his career prospects through dabbling in extremist politics. The other, a war-time ranker and sometime tramp, had fought loyally in defence not only of his country but of the old-established order – and, ironically, had seen far more of life and death in the front line. All they had in common was failure and the prospect of penniless oblivion.
I saw the world spin away beneath me, as if I had been borne up into the air.
Napoleon Bonaparte
I was forced now to scoff at the thought of my own personal future, which hitherto had been the cause of so much worry to me.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf