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DROP-OUT

‘Wherever I went, I now saw Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they set themselves apart in my eyes from the rest of humanity.’

Hitler, in Mein Kampf

‘In those days Hitler was by no means a Jew hater. He became one afterward.’

Reinhold Hanisch, a friend of Hitler in 1909–10

‘I owe it to that period that I grew hard.’ Hitler was referring to the years he spent in Vienna between February 1908 and May 1913, when he left the Austrian capital for Munich and the beginning of a new life in Germany. The ‘mother’s darling’ had lost his ‘soft downy bed’ and the carefree existence he had enjoyed in Linz. Instead of ‘the hollowness of comfortable life’, he was now thrown into ‘a world of misery and poverty’, with ‘Dame Care’ as his new mother. Even as he dictated Mein Kampf, during his internment in Landsberg in 1924, Vienna aroused in Hitler only ‘dismal thoughts’ of ‘the saddest period’ of his life.

But the Vienna years, Hitler stressed, were crucial to the formation of his character and his political philosophy. ‘In this period my eyes were opened to two menaces of which I had previously scarcely known the names… : Marxism and Jewry.’ The social and political naïvety with which he arrived in the city was during this time replaced, he claimed, by the ‘world-view’ that formed the ‘granite foundation’ of his political struggle.¹ His own account of these years, spread over two chapters of Mein Kampf,² describes graphically how deprivation, dire poverty, life among the dregs of society, and avid study brought him political understanding and the decisive shaping of his ‘world-view’. ‘Vienna was and remained for me,’ wrote Hitler more than a decade after he had left the city, ‘the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life.’³

Hitler was writing, as always in his public statements, for effect. By 1924 the failed putsch, fiasco though it was, and the subsequent trial that he had turned into a propaganda triumph had brought him celebrity on the extreme nationalist Right. But the Nazi Party was by then banned, and thevölkisch movement hopelessly divided. Hitler was seeking in Mein Kampf to establish sole and undisputed claim to leadership of the völkisch Right. The heroic image of a genius whose unique personality and ‘world-view’ had beenforged through the triumph of willpower over adversity was the basis of that claim. It was largely myth. National leaders who emerged from the traditional ruling classes and background – a Bismarck, say, or a Churchill – left few mysteries in their early development. But the very contrast between Hitler’s early anonymity – culminating in his disappearance into the black hole of Vienna’s doss-houses – and his later elevation to almost demi-god status invited both myth and counter-myth.

The autobiographical parts of Hitler’s tract were not, then, written with an eye to their factual correctness, but only to their political purpose. But an accurate reconstruction of Hitler’s period in Vienna is far from easy.⁴ Much, apart from the evidence of Mein Kampf itself, has to rest upon the testimony – in varying degrees questionable – of four individuals: August Kubizek, Reinhold Hanisch, Karl Honisch (despite the similarity in name not to be confused with Hanisch), and a further passing acquaintance who remains anonymous. Each knew Hitler for only brief periods during his stay in Vienna.⁵ A fifth alleged eye-witness account, that of Josef Greiner, like the others compiled many years after the events it purported to describe, has been used by most historians writing on this part of Hitler’s life, but is, in fact, largely if not wholly a fabrication – so thoroughly flawed and discredited that it has to be discounted.⁶ Many details, some of them significant, of Hitler’s Vienna years remain unclear. Not least, how and when Hitler’s ‘world-view’ came to be formed is far less evident than his own account suggests. Yet, whatever the uncertainties, there can be no doubting that the Vienna ‘schooling’ did indeed stamp its lasting imprint on his development.

I

The city where Hitler was to live for five years was an extraordinary place. More than any other European metropolis, Vienna epitomized tensions –social, cultural, political – that signalled the turn of an era, the death of the nineteenth-century world.⁷ They were to mould the young Hitler.⁸

Vienna in the first years of the twentieth century was a city of contradictions. The capital radiated imperial grandeur, dazzling opulence and splendour, cultural excitement, and intellectual fervour. But behind its resplendent royal palaces, imposing civic buildings, elegant cafés, spacious parks and splendid boulevards, behind its pomp and glitter, lay some of the direst poverty and human misery in Europe. It oozed bourgeois solidity and respectability, self-righteousness, moral rectitude, refined manners, and proper etiquette. But beneath the surface, vice, prostitution, and criminality were rampant. It offered the very limits of the avant-garde, the pinnacle of innovation and modernism, outshining even Paris and Berlin in the brilliance of its cultural and intellectual life. But both cultural traditionalism and popular philistinism fiercely resisted the new art, antagonized by those with whose artistic and intellectual achievements – Klimt and the Sezession, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Mahler, Schönberg, Otto Wagner, Freud – the city is indelibly linked. The long reign of Franz Joseph on the Habsburg throne implied the stability of an ancient empire. But in reality it was an empire wracked by modern nationalist and ethnic conflict, ill at ease with itself, struggling to cope with new social and political forces pulling it apart, decaying. Fear and anxiety were in the air. Germans felt their culture, way of life, living-standards, and status under threat. The liberal bourgeoisie felt pessimistic about the future, menaced by the new forces of mass politics and democracy; small traders and craftsmen resented department stores, large outlets, and modern mass-production; the rise of organized labour reminded them too of Marx’s prophecy that they were doomed to slide into the proletariat. The mood of disintegration and decay, anxiety and impotence, the sense that the old order was passing, the climate of a society in crisis, was unmistakable.⁹

It was easy to transfer the impotent anger and fear into race hatred – above all into hatred of Jews, the ‘supra-national people of the multi-national state’.¹⁰ The uncrowned king of Vienna, its mayor Karl Lueger, whom Hitler greatly admired, and Vienna’s gutter press that supported him, which Hitler read with relish, were adept at it.¹¹ No major city apart from Berlin had grown as fast as Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its population had increased two-and-a-half-fold between 1860 and 1900- four times the growth of Paris or London.¹² Of the 1,674,957 residents of Vienna in 1900, fewer than one in two had been born there.¹³ Many had poured into it from the eastern parts of the massive empire of over 50 million, with its ethnic mix of Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Italians, Rumanians and Hungarians. Among them was a sizeable minority of Jews. Vienna’s Jewish population was larger than that of any German city at the time. In mid-century, there had been only a little over 6,000 Jews in Vienna, some 2 per cent of the population. By 1910 this had risen to 175,318 Jews, or 8.6 per cent of the population.¹⁴ As in Germany, Jews had historically had a strong presence – far greater than their numbers in the population – in the professions, academic life, the mass media, the arts, and in business and finance.¹⁵ And as in Germany, Jews had striven to be assimilated to liberal society and German culture.¹⁶ Different to German cities, however, was the stratum of poor Jews, similar to that in a good number of east European towns and cities. Many were Galician, or were descendants of families that had originally fled from the pogroms in Russia. Among these poorer sectors of the Jewish community, accepted by none, hated by many, doctrines of Marxism and Zionism (whose founder, Theodor Herzl, had grown up in Vienna) held some appeal.¹⁷ Conveniently, therefore, Jews could be blamed both as capitalist exploiters and as social revolutionaries. The poorer Jews lived in the old city, and especially in the run-down districts in the north of Vienna. In Leopoldstadt, the site of the old ghetto, a third of the down-at-heel population was Jewish, mainly small traders and pedlars, often dressed in the traditional caftan and black hat. In adjacent Brigittenau, the depressing district where Hitler would spend his last three years in Vienna, some 17 per cent of the inhabitants were Jews.¹⁸ This was the setting in which Hitler would be fully subjected to race hatred. Repelled by the ‘conglomeration of races’ in the capital, he later wrote: ‘to me the giant city seemed the embodiment of racial desecration (Blutschande)’.¹⁹

On the Habsburg throne he had occupied for more than fifty years, Kaiser Franz Joseph signified unchangeability in a changing world. His court at the Hofburg, or in summer at the Schönbrunn Palace, retained all the gilt and glitter, the pomp and circumstance, of past centuries. Power in the vast and sprawling multi-ethnic empire stretching from the Carpathians to the Adriatic was still in the hands of ministers, all from traditional noble families, directly appointed by the Kaiser. But beneath the façade, the edifice was crumbling. New social and political pressures were undermining the foundations.

The empire was increasingly beset by its mounting internal contradictions. The granting, in the complex constitutional arrangement of 1867, following the defeat in the ‘German brothers’ war’ the previous year, of near autonomy to Magyar national leaders in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy had stirred nationalist feelings throughout the empire. Slavs became increasingly resentful of the continued domination of the Magyars and, in the Austrian ‘half’ of the empire, of the German-speaking minority – only around a third of the population even there.²⁰ The Austrian Germans, enjoying disproportionate prosperity, position, and power, responded by ever shriller defence of their advantage. Attempted concessions made to national demands, as in the proposed Badeni reforms of 1897 which sought to grant the Czech language equality with German in Bohemia and Moravia, massively exacerbated the tensions.²¹ By the beginning of the new century, these tensions were reflected in bitter forms of mass politics, superseding the liberal factionalism of the bourgeois notables and threatening to tear apart the fragile balance of the empire and the semblance of Imperial unity personalized in the Emperor and King. Any dignity of parliament (where Germans after the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907 were no longer the strongest national group)²² had collapsed in the face of the vituperation and threatening rhetoric of nationalist fanatics.²³ Sessions could be chaotic – a heady mixture of nationalist and class politics frequently reducing them to a shambolic farce. A bill in February 1909, again aiming to put the Czech language on an equal footing to German in Bohemia, had, for instance, to be abandoned and the parliamentary session suspended when a cacophony of noise from rattles, bells, children’s trumpets, horns, and banging desk-lids rendered debate impossible, leading to fisticuffs amid chaotic scenes while rival sets of deputies chimed in with competing anthems.²⁴ Laws could only be passed by horse-trading between the numerous interests and factions represented. The unseemly spectacle of squabbling deputies trading multilingual insults, and even swapping blows, was capable of alienating any observer.²⁵ It certainly filled the young pan-German supporter Adolf Hitler with the lasting contempt and revulsion for parliamentarism that poured out when he wrote of his Vienna experience more than a decade and a half later.²⁶

Most responsible for introducing the raucous aggression of nationalist agitation into parliament was Georg Ritter von Schönerer. Born in Vienna in 1842 to wealthy parents, Schönerer became a modernizing and benevolent landlord in the Waldviertel, the poor region on the borders of Bohemia where Hitler’s own forebears had their smallholdings. He was deeply affected by Austria’s defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1866 at the battle of Königgrätz. Shame at Austria’s exclusion from the German Federation, adulation of Bismarck, and, eventually, agitation aimed at the reuniting of Austria with the German Reich followed. He had first come to prominence in the 1870s as the voice of German small farmers and radicalized artisans, castigating the rapaciousness of big business and liberal laissez-faire economics.²⁷ His programme came to embrace an early brand of ‘national socialism’ – above all else radical German nationalism (meaning the primacy and superiority of all things German), social reform, anti-liberal popular democracy, and racial antisemitism. ‘The strongest and most thoroughly consistent anti-Semite that Austria produced’²⁸ – before Hitler, that is – Schönerer’s antisemitism was the cement of his anti-liberal, anti-socialist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Habsburg ideology. Hitler had imbibed the Schönerer creed in nationalist Linz. The ‘Heil’ greeting, the title of ‘Führer’ (bestowed by Schönerer on himself and used by his followers), and the intolerance towards any semblance of democratic decision-making in his movement were among the lasting elements of the Schönerer legacy which Hitler carried over to the later Nazi Party.²⁹

By the time Hitler came to Vienna, popular support for the ageing Schönerer had dwindled and fragmented. Schönerer had, in any case, never advocated a mass party, believing that, as always in the course of history, any breakthrough would come from a loyal elite.³⁰ His appeal had always been primarily located in student circles and among the nationalist middle classes.³¹ Schönerer’s programme, of which Hitler later wrote so approvingly, had, however, if anything hardened and become more radical and implacable in its demands for integral connection with Germany, in its boundless adoration of Kaiser Wilhelm and his German Reich, its ‘away-from-Rome’ church policy, and its attacks on the Habsburg polyglot state, all laced together with ferocious racial antisemitism.³² Though he thought Schönerer’s political philosophy correct, Hitler would later criticize his readiness to participate in sterile parliamentarism, his mistake in antagonizing the Catholic Church, and above all his neglect of the masses.³³ This was where Hitler was prepared to learn from his second Austrian political hero, Karl Lueger, the Viennese ‘tribune of the people’.

The rise of Lueger’s Christian Social Party made a deep impression on Hitler.³⁴ Starting as a Schönerer supporter, he came increasingly to admire Lueger. The main reason lay in the presentation of politics. Where Schönerer neglected the masses, Lueger, as Hitler approvingly recognized, gained his support by ‘winning over the classes whose existence was threatened’, the small- and lower-middle classes and artisans.³⁵ With a heady brew of populist rhetoric and accomplished rabble-rousing, Lueger soldered together an appeal to Catholic piety and the economic self-interest of the German-speaking lower-middle classes who felt threatened by the forces of international capitalism, Marxist Social Democracy, and Slav nationalism. Like Schönerer, the vehicle used to whip up the support of the disparate targets of his agitation was antisemitism, sharply on the rise among artisanal groups suffering economic downturns and only too ready to vent their resentment both on Jewish financiers and on the growing number of Galician back-street hawkers and pedlars. Back in the 1880s, he had supported Schönerer’s bill to block Jewish immigration into Vienna.³⁶ But unlike Schönerer’s, Lueger’s antisemitism was more functional and pragmatic than ideological: ‘I say who a Jew is’ (‘Wer a Jud ist, bestimm i!’), was a phrase commonly attributed to him.³⁷ It was more political and economic – the coating for an attack on liberalism and capitalism – than it was doctrinally racial.³⁸

But it was nasty all the same. In a speech in 1890, he had quoted with no dissent a remark made by one of Vienna’s wildest antisemites, that the ‘Jewish problem’ would be solved, and a service to the world achieved, if all Jews were placed on a large ship to be sunk on the high seas.³⁹ By the time Emperor Franz Joseph was compelled to retreat from his earlier refusal and to appoint ‘handsome Karl’ to be Lord Mayor of Vienna in 1897, the overt antisemitism had been sublimated into a programme of social reform, municipal renewal, populist democracy, and loyalty to the Habsburg monarchy all welded together by popular Catholicism.⁴⁰ But it remained vitriolic – in sentiment little different from the poison Hitler would later spread in the beerhalls of Munich. In a speech in 1899, to thunderous applause, Lueger spoke, for instance, of Jews exercising a ‘terrorism, worse than which cannot be imagined’ over the masses through the control of capital and the press. It was a matter for him, he continued, ‘of liberating the Christian people from the domination of Jewry’.⁴¹ On another occasion, he declared wolves, leopards, and tigers to be more human than the Jews – ‘these beasts of prey in human form’.⁴² When taken to task for stirring up hatred of the Jews through his agitation, he retorted that antisemitism would ‘perish when the last Jew perished’.⁴³ Accused of saying that it was a matter of indifference to him whether Jews were hanged or shot, he provided the correction: ‘Beheaded! is what I said.’⁴⁴

When Hitler came to live in Vienna, it was Lueger’s city. Two years later, on Lueger’s death, Hitler was among the mourning thousands who watched his funeral cortège pass by.⁴⁵ Lueger’s pro-Habsburg, Catholic programme held little appeal for him. And in his later appraisal of Lueger, he criticized the shallowness and artificiality of the antisemitism on which his Christian Social Party had been built.⁴⁶ But what he took from the Viennese mayor was Lueger’s command of the masses, the moulding of a movement ‘to attain his purposes’, his use of propaganda to influence ‘the psychological instincts’ of the broad mass of his supporters.⁴⁷ That is what endured.

Following in the wake of liberalism’s demise and forming the third new current of Viennese mass politics besides nationalism and Christian Socialism was Social Democracy. Here, too, Hitler’s Vienna years were to leave lasting impressions. His fear of organized labour dated back to this time.

The Social Democrats had won no seats in the 1891 elections, three years after the foundation of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party.⁴⁸ But in the year that Hitler moved to Vienna, 1907, they won eighty-seven out of 516 Reichsrat seats in the first election held under universal male suffrage.⁴⁹ It was nowhere near a controlling representation. But a third of the votes cast in Lueger’s own domain of Vienna, and 41 per cent of all votes in Bohemia, was by any reckoning impressive.⁵⁰ The party, led by Viktor Adler, from a wealthy Prague Jewish family, was committed to a Marxist programme that it saw, somewhat along the lines of Bernstein revisionism, coming to fruition through evolution within the existing framework of the Austro-Hungarian multinational state.⁵¹Internationalism (though in fact there was a growing schism between German and Czech Social Democrats),⁵² equality of individuals and peoples, universal, equal, and direct suffrage, fundamental labour and union rights, separation of church and state, and a people’s army were what the Social Democrats stood for.⁵³ It was little wonder that the young Hitler, avid supporter of Schönerer’s pan-Germanism, hated the Social Democrats with every fibre of his body. But what did impress him was their organization and activism.⁵⁴ In autumn 1905, just before Hitler went to Vienna, it had been Social Democratic agitation that had influenced Franz Joseph to agree, in the wake of the concessions made by the Tsar following the Russian revolution that year, to universal male suffrage.⁵⁵The demonstration of approaching a quarter of a million workers in red armbands that followed in Vienna in late November took four hours to march past the Parliament building.⁵⁶ A similar spectacle some years later was to leave a lasting impression on Hitler, as he stood for nearly two hours, gazing at ‘the endless columns of a mass demonstration of Viennese workers that took place one day as they marched past four abreast’, ‘watching with bated breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding by’. It struck him as ‘a menacing army’, and his reaction, as he made his way home, was one of ‘oppressed anxiety’. But from Social Democracy, he said later, he also learnt the value of intimidation and intolerance, that ‘the psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak’.⁵⁷

Such lessons were all in the future when Hitler made his way back to Vienna in early 1908. Politics were not in his mind then, or in the months that followed.

II

The eighteen-year-old Adolf Hitler left Linz for Vienna in February 1908. He kept up the connection with the family home at least until May.⁵⁸ In August, probably in the hope of shoring up his dwindling funds, he visited his relatives in the Waldviertel.⁵⁹ But after the death of his mother, his family held few attractions for him. Letters home soon dried up.⁶⁰ The only relative of real interest was his Aunt Johanna, now back in the Waldviertel, whose life-savings had already provided him with financial support.⁶¹ After her death in 1911, the links with his family faded and were not revived for many years.⁶²

Following his mother’s death, his guardian, Josef Mayrhofer, a simple man of peasant stock and mayor of Leonding, tried once more to persuade him to take up the apprenticeship as a baker that he had found for him. Adolf was contemptuous.⁶³ Equally vain was a last attempt by Aunt Johanna to get him to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the civil service.⁶⁴ Once family matters following his mother’s death had been settled, and the Raubals had agreed to look after his sister, Paula, Adolf went to see his guardian, in January 1908, and simply told him he was going back to Vienna. Mayrhofer later recounted that it was pointless trying to dissuade him: he was as stubborn as his father had been.⁶⁵ The decision to move to Vienna had, in fact, already been taken the previous summer. Anticipating that he would be studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, he had in late September or the beginning of October rented a small room on the second floor of a house in Stumpergasse 31, near the Westbahnhof in Vienna, owned by a Czech woman, Frau Zakreys.⁶⁶ This is where he returned, some time between 14 and 17 February 1908, to pick up where he had left off before his mother’s death.

He was not long alone. We can recall that he had persuaded August Kubizek’s parents to let their son join him in Vienna to carry out his studies to become a musician. Kubizek’s father had been most reluctant to let his son go off with someone he regarded as no more than a failure at school and who thought himself above learning a proper trade.⁶⁷ But Adolf had prevailed. On 18 February he sent a postcard to his friend, urging him to come as quickly as possible. ‘Dear Friend,’ he wrote, ‘am anxiously expecting news of your arrival. Write soon so that I can prepare everything for your festive welcome. The whole of Vienna is awaiting you.’ A postscript added: ‘Beg you again, come soon.’⁶⁸ Four days later, Gustl’s tearful parents bade him goodbye, and he left to join his friend in Vienna. Adolf met a tired Kubizek at the station that evening, took him back to Stumpergasse to stay the first night, but, typically, insisted on immediately showing him all the sights of Vienna. How could someone come to Vienna and go to bed without first seeing the Court Opera House? So Gustl was dragged off to view the opera building, St Stephen’s cathedral (which could scarcely be seen through the mist), and the lovely church of St Maria am Gestade. It was after midnight when they returned to Stumpergasse, and later still when an exhausted Kubizek fell asleep with Hitler still haranguing him about the grandeur of Vienna.⁶⁹

The next few months were to be a repeat, on a grander scale, of the lifestyle of the two youths in Linz.⁷⁰ An early search for lodgings for Gustl was rapidly given up, and Frau Zakreys was persuaded to swap her larger room and move into the cramped little room that Hitler had occupied.⁷¹ Adolf and his friend now occupied the same room, paying double the rent (10 Kronen each) that Hitler had paid for his earlier room.⁷² Within the next few days, Kubizek learnt that he had passed the entrance examination and been accepted for study at the Vienna Conservatoire. He rented a grand piano which took up most of the available space in the room, just allowing Hitler the three paces to do his usual stomping backwards and forwards.⁷³ Apart from the piano, the room was furnished with simple necessities: two beds, a commode, a wardrobe, a washstand, a table, and two chairs.⁷⁴

Kubizek settled down into a regular pattern of music study. What Hitler was up to was less clear to his friend. He stayed in bed in the mornings, was missing when Kubizek came back from the Conservatoire at lunchtimes, hung around the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace on fine afternoons, pored over books, fantasized over grandiose architectural and writing plans, and spent a good deal of time drawing until late into the night. Gustl’s puzzlement about how his friend could combine so much leisure time with studying at the Academy of Fine Arts was ended only after some considerable time. A show of irritation about Kubizek practising his piano scales led to a full-scale row between the two friends about study timetables and ended in Hitler shouting that ‘the whole Academy ought to be blown up’, exploding with rage about the ‘old-fashioned, fossilized civil servants, bureaucrats, devoid of understanding, stupid lumps of officials’ who ran it. He then admitted that ‘they rejected me, they threw me out, they turned me down’.⁷⁵When Gustl asked him what, then, he was going to do, Hitler rounded on him: ‘What now, what now?… Are you starting too: what now?’⁷⁶ The truth was, Hitler had no idea where he was going or what he would do. He was drifting aimlessly.

Kubizek had plainly touched a raw nerve. Adolf had for mercenary reasons not told his family about his failure to enter the Academy. Otherwise, his guardian would probably have denied him the 25 Kronen a month he received as his share of the orphan’s pension.⁷⁷ And he would have come under even more pressure to find a job. But why did he deceive his friend? For a teenager to fail to pass an extremely tough entrance examination is in itself neither unusual nor shameful. But Adolf could evidently not bear to tell his friend, to whom he had always claimed to be so superior in all matters of artistic judgement, and whose own studies at the Conservatoire had started so promisingly, of his rejection. The blow to his self-esteem had been profound. And the bitterness showed. According to Kubizek, he would fly off the handle at the slightest thing.⁷⁸ His loss of self-confidence could flare up in an instant into boundless anger and violent denunciation of all who he thought were persecuting him. ‘Choking with his catalogue of hates, he would pour his fury over everything, against mankind in general who did not understand him, who did not appreciate him and by whom he was persecuted and cheated.’⁷⁹ On another occasion, railing against the lack of ‘understanding for true artistry’ at the Academy, he spoke of traps laid –Kubizek claimed to remember his exact words – ‘for the sole purpose of ruining his career’.⁸⁰ ‘Altogether, in these early days in Vienna,’ commented Kubizek, ‘I had the impression that Adolf had become unbalanced.’⁸¹ The tirades of hate directed at everything and everybody were those of an outsized ego desperately wanting acceptance and unable to come to terms with his personal insignificance, with failure and mediocrity.

Adolf had still not given up hope of entering the Academy. But, typically, he took no steps to ensure that his chances would be better a second time round. Just before he left Linz, he had been given an introduction, arranged by the owner of the block of flats in Urfahr where the Hitlers lived, to Professor Alfred Roller, brilliant stage designer at the Court Opera and a prominent member of the Viennese cultural scene, who offered to talk to Hitler when he came to Vienna.⁸² Hitler made no use of the recommendation.⁸³ That alone suggests there is nothing in the suggestion that Adolf, through Roller’s help, took art lessons under the guidance of a sculptor by the name of Panholzer.⁸⁴ Systematic preparation and hard work were as foreign to the young Hitler as they would be to the later dictator. Instead, his time was largely spent in dilettante fashion, as it had been in Linz, devising grandiose schemes shared only with the willing Kubizek – fantasy plans that usually arose from sudden whims and bright ideas and were dropped almost as soon as they had begun.⁸⁵

One idea was to write a play. Kubizek was astonished when Adolf showed him a few hastily written sides describing the Wagnerian-style scene for a drama he intended to write, set in the Bavarian Alps at the time of the arrival of Christianity.⁸⁶ The project was taken no further. It was the same with a number of other supposed dramas, each derived from Germanic mythology, all with an eye particular to the massive scale of the production – dwarfing even the most pretentious Wagnerian settings. The more down-to-earth Kubizek pointed out that it would be impossible to finance such productions, but Hitler contemptuously dismissed suggestions for more modest ventures.⁸⁷

The Wagnerian model was even more evident in the idea Hitler had of writing an opera. A chance remark by Kubizek that he had heard in one of his music lectures that Wagner’s writings included a brief sketch for a musical drama of Wieland the Smith led to Hitler immediately looking up the saga in a book he had on Gods and Heroes, then starting to write the same night. The following day, sitting at the piano, Hitler told Kubizek he was going to turn Wieland into an opera. He would compose the music and Kubizek would write it down. For days, despite difficulties which the patient Kubizek raised along with hesitant remarks on Adolf’s limited musical expertise, he was engrossed in the work, eating, drinking, and sleeping little. But after a while he ‘spoke less and less of it, and in the end did not mention it at all’.⁸⁸

Other Utopian schemes included, according to Kubizek, plans to solve Vienna’s housing problems and design new houses for workers, the creation of a new popular drink to replace alcohol, a travelling orchestra to take culture into the provinces, and – as always – the grandiose cultural rebuilding of Linz.⁸⁹ Kubizek unquestionably embellished Hitler’s social conscience, as in the story of Adolf returning from spending three nights wandering the streets of Vienna studying the housing problem,⁹⁰ and his far-sightedness, as in plans for social and cultural reform in his imagined ‘ideal state’.⁹¹ But the description of a Hitler opinionated on all subjects, gripped by sudden and temporary enthusiasm for wholly unrealistic ideas, and fantasizing wildly ambitious pipe-dreams that dissolved as quickly as they were formulated, rings true. And always there was the obsession with the monumental, the grandiose, the spectacular. The avant-garde Jugendstil architecture of Otto Wagner passed Hitler by, as did the modern art of the Sezession and its major star Gustav Klimt.⁹² He showed not the slightest interest in this cultural revolution which had gripped end-of-the-century Vienna.⁹³ His architectural and artistic tastes were traditional and anti-modernist, firmly anchored in the neo-classicism and realism of the nineteenth century. And buildings for him were primarily for representation. The sketches he was constantly making were invariably of grandiose buildings. The magnificent Ringstraße, begun towards the end of the 1850s, with its majestic buildings – the neo-baroque Hofburg, the classical-style Parliament and Rathaus, the imposing museums, opera, and Burgtheater (which he specially admired) –enthralled him from the first time he saw them.⁹⁴ He regaled Kubizek for hours on their architectural history and design, fascinated – as was the later master of propaganda – by the visual impact on the individual of buildings representing power and grandeur.⁹⁵

Kubizek, naïve and impressionable as ever, did not cease to be astonished by Hitler’s knowledge of detail on the subjects he pontificated about, quite especially on architectural matters.⁹⁶ He describes Hitler as constantly immersed in his studies. He could not imagine his friend without books, he stated: ‘books were his world’.⁹⁷ Hitler had arrived in Vienna, wrote Kubizek, with four cases mainly full of books.⁹⁸ He had been a member of three libraries in Linz, and was now a regular user of the Hof Library in Vienna.⁹⁹There were always, he added, piles of books in the room in Stumpergasse.¹⁰⁰ However, only one title – Legends of Gods and Heroes: the Treasures of Germanic Mythology – stuck in Kubizek’s memory.¹⁰¹ Soon after the war, when asked about Hitler’s reading, he could recall only that Adolf had two books in the room for several weeks, and owned a travel guide as well.¹⁰² Kubizek’s later claim that Hitler had read an impressive list of classics – including Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Herder, Ibsen, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche – has to be treated with a large pinch of salt.¹⁰³ Whatever Hitler read during his Vienna years – and apart from a number of newspapers mentioned in Mein Kampf,¹⁰⁴ we cannot be sure what that was – it was probably far less elevated than the works of such literary luminaries. However, there is no reason to doubt that Hitler did read extensively in his Vienna period, as he himself later claimed.¹⁰⁵ After the end of the Third Reich, in fact, Hitler’s sister Paula recalled him writing to recommend books to her (and sending her a copy of Don Quichote) during the first months he was in Vienna in 1908, before communications with his family faded.¹⁰⁶ But like everything else he undertook at this time, his reading was unsystematic. And the factual knowledge that he committed to his formidable memory was used only to confirm already existing opinions.

Hitler explained his style of reading in Mein Kampf:

I know people who ‘read’ enormously, book for book, letter for letter, yet whom I would not describe as ‘well-read’. True, they possess a mass of ‘knowledge’, but their brain is unable to organize and register the material they have taken in. They lack the art of sifting what is valuable for them in a book from that which is without value… For reading is no end in itself, but a means to an end… A man who possesses the art of correct reading will, in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet, instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing. Once the knowledge he has achieved in this fashion is correctly coordinated within the somehow existing picture of this or that subject created by the imagination, it will function either as a corrective or a complement, thus enhancing either the correctness or the clarity of the picture… Only this kind of reading has meaning and purpose… Since my earliest youth I have endeavoured to read in the correct way, and in this endeavour I have been most happily supported by my memory and intelligence. Viewed in this light, my Vienna period was especially fertile and valuable.¹⁰⁷

Apart from architecture, Hitler’s main passion, as it had been in Linz, was music. Particular favourites, certainly in later years, were Beethoven, Bruckner (an especial favourite), Liszt and Brahms. He greatly enjoyed, too, the operettas of Johann Strauß and Franz Lehár.¹⁰⁸ Wagner was, of course, the non plus ultra. Adolf and Gustl were at the opera most nights, paying their 2 Kronen to gain the standing place that they had often queued for hours to obtain. They saw operas by Mozart, Beethoven, and the Italian masters Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini as well as the main works of Verdi and Puccini. But for Hitler only German music counted. He could not join in the enthusiasm for Verdi or Puccini operas, playing to packed houses in Vienna. When he heard a street organ-grinder intoning ‘La donna è mobile’, he said to Kubizek: ‘There you have your Verdi.’ To his friend’s protest that any composer might have his work debased in such a way, he replied: ‘Can you imagine Lohengrin’s grail narration on a barrel organ?’¹⁰⁹ Adolf’s passion for Wagner, as in Linz, knew no bounds. Now he and his friend were able to see all Wagner’s operas performed at one of the best opera houses in Europe.¹¹⁰ In the short time they were together, Kubizek reckoned they saw Lohengrin – which remained Hitler’s favourite – ten times.¹¹¹ ‘For him,’ remarked Kubizek, ‘a second-rate Wagner was a hundred times better than a first-class Verdi.’ Kubizek was of a different mind; but to no avail. Adolf would not rest until his friend agreed to forget about going to see Verdi at the Court Opera and accompany him to a Wagner performance at the less highbrow Popular Opera House. ‘When it was a matter of a Wagner performance, Adolf would stand no contradiction.’¹¹²

Hitler was, of course, only one of the thousands of Wagner fanatics who flocked to the Hofoper in Vienna around the turn of the century to hear the works of the Bayreuth master. To the younger generation especially, Wagner was ‘the vindicator of the heart against the head, the Volk against the mass, the revolt of the young and vital against the old and ossified’.¹¹³ The Wagner cult was at its height around this time. Easily the most popular composer of the era, his operas were played at the Court Opera alone on no fewer than 426 evenings during Hitler’s time in Vienna.¹¹⁴ Many attending the performances, including Kubizek himself, were far more skilled than Hitler, with his self-taught, amateurish, opinionated approach, in understanding and interpreting Wagner’s music. But for Hitler, Wagner was more than the music alone. ‘Listening to Wagner,’ commented Kubizek, ‘meant to him, not a simple visit to the theatre, but the opportunity of being transported into that extraordinary state which Wagner’s music produced in him, that trance, that escape into a mystical dream-world…’¹¹⁵ ‘When I hear Wagner,’ Hitler himself much later recounted, ‘it seems to me that I hear rhythms of a bygone world.’¹¹⁶ It was a world of Germanic myth, of great drama and wondrous spectacle, of gods and heroes, of titanic struggle and redemption, of victory and of death. It was a world where the heroes were outsiders who challenged the old order, like Rienzi, Tannhäuser, Stolzing, and Siegfried; or chaste saviours like Lohengrin and Parsifal.¹¹⁷ Betrayal, sacrifice, redemption and heroic death were Wagnerian themes which would also preoccupy Hitler down to the Götterdämmerung of his regime in 1945. And it was a world created with grandiose vision by an artist of genius, an outsider and revolutionary, all-or-nothing refuser of compromise, challenger of the existing order, dismissive of the need to bow to the bourgeois ethic of working for a living,¹¹⁸ surmounting rejection and persecution, overcoming adversity to attain greatness. It was little wonder that the fantasist and drop-out, the rejected and unrecognized artistic genius in the dingy room in the Stumpergasse, could find his idol in the master of Bayreuth.¹¹⁹ Hitler, the nonentity, the mediocrity, the failure, wanted to live like a Wagnerian hero. He wanted to become himself a new Wagner – the philosopher-king, the genius, the supreme artist. In Hitler’s mounting identity crisis following his rejection at the Academy of Arts,¹²⁰ Wagner was for Hitler the artistic giant he had dreamed of becoming but knew he could never emulate, the incarnation of the triumph of aesthetics and the supremacy of art.¹²¹

III

The strange coexistence of the young Hitler and Kubizek continued into midsummer 1908. During those months, almost the only other person, apart from his friend, with whom Hitler had regular contact was his landlady, Frau Zakreys. Nor did Kubizek and Hitler have any joint acquaintances. Adolf regarded his friendship with Gustl as exclusive, allowing him no other friendships.¹²² When Gustl brought a young woman, one of a small number of his music pupils, back to his room, Hitler, thinking she was a girlfriend, was beside himself with rage. Kubizek’s explanation that it was simply a matter of coaching a pupil in musical harmony merely provoked a tirade about the pointlessness of women studying.¹²³ In Kubizek’s view, Hitler was outrightly misogynist.¹²⁴ He pointed out Hitler’s satisfaction that women were not permitted in the promenade stalls of the opera.¹²⁵Apart from his distant admiration for Stefanie in Linz, Kubizek knew of Hitler having no relations with any woman during the years of their acquaintance in both Linz and Vienna.¹²⁶ This would not alter during his remaining years in the Austrian capital. None of the accounts of Hitler’s time in the Men’s Home gives a hint of any women in his life. When his circle of acquaintances got round to discussing women – and, doubtless, their own former girlfriends and sexual experiences – the best Hitler could come up with was a veiled reference to Stefanie, who had been his ‘first love’ – though ‘she never knew it, because he never told her’. The impression left with Reinhold Hanisch was that ‘Hitler had very little respect for the female sex, but very austere ideas about relations between men and women. He often said that, if men only wanted to, they could adopt a strictly moral way of living.’¹²⁷ This was entirely in line with the moral code preached by the Schönerer pan-Germans. Celibacy until the twenty-fifth year, the code advocated, was healthy, advantageous to strength of will, and the basis of physical or mental high achievement. The cultivation of corresponding dietary habits was advised. Eating meat and drinking alcohol – seen as stimulants to sexual activity – were to be avoided. And upholding the strength and purity of the Germanic race meant keeping free of the moral decadence and danger of infection which accompanied consorting with prostitutes, who should be left to clients of ‘inferior’ races.¹²⁸ Here was ideological justification enough for Hitler’s chaste lifestyle and prudish morals. But, in any case, certainly in the time in Vienna after he parted company with Kubizek, Hitler was no ‘catch’ for Women.¹²⁹

It can be said with near certainty, then, that by the time he left Vienna at the age of twenty-four Hitler had had no sexual experience. In a city in which sexual favours were so widely on offer to young men as the Vienna of that day, who were widely expected to visit prostitutes while publicly upholding a strict moral codex, this was in all likelihood unusual.¹³⁰ Probably, he was frightened of women – certainly of their sexuality. Hanisch recalled Hitler telling him of a brief encounter with a milkmaid while he was still at school, ending abruptly when she made advances and he ran away, knocking over a churn of milk in his haste.¹³¹ Hitler later described his own ideal woman as ‘a cute, cuddly, naïve little thing – tender, sweet, and stupid’.¹³² His assertion that a woman ‘would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling’¹³³ may well have been a compensatory projection of his own sexual complexes.

Kubizek was adamant that Hitler was sexually normal (though on the basis of his own account it is difficult to see how he was in a position to judge).¹³⁴ This was also the view of doctors who at a much later date thoroughly examined him.¹³⁵ Biologically, it may well have been so.¹³⁶ Claims that sexual deviance arising from the absence of a testicle were the root of Hitler’s personality disorder rest on a combination of psychological speculation and dubious evidence provided by the Russian autopsy after the capture of the burnt remains of his body in Berlin.¹³⁷ And stories about his Vienna time such as that of his alleged obsession with an attempted rape of a model engaged to a half-Jew, and his resort to prostitutes, derive from a single source with no credence and can be regarded as baseless.¹³⁸ However, Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and repressed sexual development.

Hitler’s prudishness, shored up by Schönerian principles, was to a degree merely in line with middle-class outward standards of morality in the Vienna of his time. These standards had been challenged by the openly erotic art of Klimt and literature of Schnitzler.¹³⁹ But the solid bourgeois puritanism prevailed – at least as a thin veneer covering the seamier side of a city teeming with vice and prostitution.¹⁴⁰ Where decency demanded that women were scarcely allowed even to show an ankle, Hitler’s embarrassment – and the rapidity with which he fled with his friend – when a prospective landlady during the search for a room for Kubizek let her silk dressing-gown fall open to reveal that she was wearing nothing but a pair of knickers was understandable.¹⁴¹ But his prudishness went far beyond this. It amounted, according to Kubizek’s account, to a deep disgust and repugnance at sexual activity.¹⁴² Hitler avoided contact with women, meeting with cold indifference during visits to the opera alleged attempts by young women, probably seeing him as something of an oddity, to flirt with or tease him.¹⁴³ He was repelled by homosexuality.¹⁴⁴ He refrained from masturbation.¹⁴⁵ Prostitution horrified, but fascinated, him. He associated it with venereal disease, which petrified him.¹⁴⁶Following a visit to the theatre one evening to see Frank Wedekind’s play Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), which dealt with sexual problems of youth, Hitler suddenly took Kubizek’s arm and led him into Spittelberggasse to see at first hand the red-light district, or ‘sink of iniquity’ as Hitler called it. Adolf took his friend not once, but twice, along the row of lit windows behind which scantily clad women advertised their wares and touted for custom. His voyeurism was then cloaked in middle-class self-righteousness by the lecture he proceeded to give Kubizek on the evils of prostitution.¹⁴⁷ Later, in Mein Kampf’, he was to link the Jews – echoing a commonplace current among antisemites of his Vienna years – with prostitution.¹⁴⁸ But if this association was present in his mind in 1908, Kubizek did not record it.

Though seemingly repelled by sex, Hitler was at the same time plainly fascinated by it.¹⁴⁹ He discussed sexual matters quite often in lengthy talks late at night with Gustl, regaling him, wrote Kubizek, on the need for sexual purity to protect what he grandly called the ‘flame of life’; explaining to his naïve friend, following a brief encounter with a businessman who invited them to a meal, about homosexuality; and ranting about prostitution and moral decadence.¹⁵⁰ Hitler’s disturbed sexuality, his recoiling from physical contact,¹⁵¹ his fear of women, his inability to forge genuine friendship and emptiness in human relations, presumably had their roots in childhood experiences of a troubled family life.¹⁵² Attempts to explain them will inevitably remain speculative. Later rumours of Hitler’s sexual perversions are similarly based on dubious evidence. Conjecture – and there has been much of it – that sexual repression later gave way to sordid sado-masochistic practices rests, whatever the suspicions, on little more than a combination of rumour, hearsay, surmise, and innuendo, often spiced up by Hitler’s political enemies.¹⁵³ And even if the alleged repulsive perversions really were his private proclivities, how exactly they would help explain the rapid descent of the complex and sophisticated German state into gross inhumanity after 1933 is not readily self-evident.

Hitler was to describe his life in Vienna as one of hardship and misery, hunger and poverty.¹⁵⁴ This was notably economical with the truth as regards the months he spent in Stumpergasse in 1908 (though it was accurate enough as a portrayal of his condition in the autumn and winter of 1909–10). Even more misleading was his comment in Mein Kampf that ‘the orphan’s pension to which I was entitled was not enough for me even to live on, and so I was faced with the problem of somehow making my own living’.¹⁵⁵ As we have noted, the loan from his aunt, his share of his mother’s legacy, and his monthly orphan’s pension certainly gave him sufficient to live comfortably – perhaps even equivalent to the income of a young teacher – over a year or so at least.¹⁵⁶ And his appearance, when he put on his fineries for an evening at the opera, was anything but that of a down-and-out. When Kubizek first saw him on their reunion at the Westbahnhof in February 1908, young Adolf was wearing a dark, good-quality overcoat, and dark hat. He was carrying the walking-stick with the ivory handle that he had had in Linz, and ‘appeared almost elegant’.¹⁵⁷ As for working, in those first months of 1908, as we have noted, Hitler certainly did nothing whatsoever about making his own living, or taking any steps to ensure that he was on the right track to do so.

If he had a reasonable income during his time with Kubizek, Hitler nevertheless scarcely led a life of wild extravagance. His living conditions were unenviable. The sixth district of Vienna, close to the Westbahnhof, where Stumpergasse was situated, was an unattractive part of the city, with its dismal, unlit streets and scruffy tenement blocks overhung with smoke and soot surrounding dark inner courtyards. Kubizek himself was appalled at some of the accommodation on view when he was looking for a room the day after he had arrived in Vienna.¹⁵⁸ And the lodging he and Adolf came to share was a miserable room that stank constantly of paraffin, with crumbling plaster peeling off dank walls, and bug-ridden beds and furniture.¹⁵⁹ The lifestyle was frugal. Little was spent on eating and drinking. Adolf was not a vegetarian at that time, but his main daily fare usually consisted only of bread and butter, sweet flour puddings (Mehlspeisen), and often in the afternoons a piece of poppy- or nut-cake. Sometimes he went without food altogether. When Gustl’s mother sent a food parcel every fortnight, it was like a feast.¹⁶⁰ Adolf drank milk as a rule, or sometimes fruit-juice, but no alcohol.¹⁶¹ Nor did he smoke.¹⁶² The one luxury was the opera. How much he spent on the almost daily visits to an opera or a concert can only be guessed. But at 2 Kronen for a standing place¹⁶³ – it infuriated Hitler that young officers more interested in the social occasion than the music had to pay only 10 Heller, a twentieth of the sum¹⁶⁴ – regular attendance over some months would certainly begin to eat away at whatever savings he had.¹⁶⁵ Hitler himself remarked, over three decades later: ‘I was so poor, during the Viennese period of my life, that I had to restrict myself to only the very best performances. This explains that already at that time I had heard Tristan thirty or forty times, and always from the best companies.’¹⁶⁶ By the summer of 1908, he must have made big inroads into the money he had inherited. But he presumably still had some of his savings left, as well as the orphan’s pension that Kubizek presumed was his only income,¹⁶⁷ which would allow him to last out for a further year.¹⁶⁸

Though Kubizek was unaware of it, by summer the time he was spending with his friend in Vienna was drawing to a close. By early July 1908, Gustl had passed his examinations at the Conservatoire and term had ended. He was going back to Linz to stay with his parents until autumn. He arranged to send Frau Zakreys the rent every month to guarantee retention of the room, and Adolf, again saying how little he was looking forward to remaining alone in the room, accompanied him to the Westbahnhof to see him off.¹⁶⁹They were not to meet again until the Anschluß in 1938.¹⁷⁰Adolf did send Gustl a number of postcards during the summer, one from the Waldviertel, where he had gone without enthusiasm to spend some time with his family.¹⁷¹ It was to be the last time he would see his relatives for many years.¹⁷² Nothing suggested to Kubizek that he would not be rejoining his friend in the autumn. But when he left the train at the Westbahnhof on his return in November, Hitler was nowhere to be seen. Some time in the late summer or autumn, he had moved out of Stumpergasse. Frau Zakreys told Kubizek that he had left his lodgings without giving any forwarding address.¹⁷³ By 18 November he was registered with the police as a ‘student’ living at new lodgings in room 16 of Felberstraße 22, close by the Westbahnhof, and a more airy room – presumably costing more – than that he had occupied in Stumpergasse.¹⁷⁴

What had caused the sudden and unannounced break with Kubizek? The most likely explanation is Hitler’s second rejection – this time he was not even permitted to take the examination – by the Academy of Fine Arts in October 1908.¹⁷⁵ He had probably not told Kubizek he was applying again. Presumably he had spent the entire year in the knowledge that he had a second chance and in the expectation that he would not fail this time. Now his hopes of an artistic career lay totally in ruins. He could not now face his friend again as a confirmed failure.¹⁷⁶

Kubizek’s recollections, for all their flaws, paint a portrait of the young Hitler whose character traits are recognizable with hindsight in the later party leader and dictator.¹⁷⁷ The indolence in lifestyle but accompanied by manic enthusiasm and energy sucked into his fantasies, the dilettantism, the lack of reality and a sense of proportion, the opinionated autodidactism, the egocentrism, the quirky intolerance, the sudden rise to anger and the outbursts of rage, the diatribes of venom poured out on everyone and everything blocking the rise of the great artist – all these can be seen in the nineteen-year-old Hitler portrayed by Kubizek. Failure in Vienna had turned Hitler into an angry and frustrated young man increasingly at odds with the world around him. But he was not yet the Hitler who comes clearly into view after 1919, and whose political ideas were fully outlined inMein Kampf.

Kubizek had had time to read Mein Kampf by the time he wrote his own account of Hitler’s political development – something which in any case was of less interest to him than matters cultural and artistic. His passages are in places heavily redolent of Hitler’s own tale of his ‘political awakening’ in Vienna. They are not, therefore, reliable and often not credible – scarcely so when he claims Hitler was a pacifist, an opponent of war at this stage.¹⁷⁸ However, there is no reason to doubt Hitler’s growing political awareness. His bitter contempt for the multi-language parliament (which Kubizek visited with him),¹⁷⁹ his strident German nationalism, his intense detestation of the multinational Habsburg state, his revulsion at ‘the ethnic babel on the streets of Vienna’,¹⁸⁰ and ‘the foreign mixture of peoples which had begun to corrode this old site of German culture’¹⁸¹ – all these were little more than an accentuation, a personalized radicalization, of what he had first imbibed in Linz.¹⁸² Hitler fully described them in Mein Kampf.¹⁸³ The first months of the Viennese experience doubtless already deepened and sharpened these views. However, even by Hitler’s own account it took two years in Vienna for his attitude towards the Jews to crystallize.¹⁸⁴ Kubizek’s assertion that Hitler attained his ‘world-view’ during the time they were together in Vienna is an exaggeration.¹⁸⁵ Hitler’s rounded ‘world-view’ was still not formed. The pathological hatred of the Jews that was its cornerstone had still to emerge.

IV

There are no witnesses to Hitler’s activity during the nine months that he stayed in Felberstraße.¹⁸⁶ A young woman called Marie Rinke later claimed to recall speaking to him occasionally in the tenement block where he lived, and that his quiet manner had made a good impression on her, setting him apart from other young men.¹⁸⁷ Otherwise, this phase of Hitler’s life in Vienna remains obscure. It has often been presumed, nevertheless, that it was in precisely these months that he became an obsessive racial antisemite.¹⁸⁸

Close to where Hitler lived in Felberstraße was a kiosk selling tobacco and newspapers. Whatever newspapers and periodicals he bought beyond those that he devoured so avidly in cafés, it was probably from this kiosk. Which exactly he read of the many cheap and trashy magazines in circulation at the time is uncertain. One of them was very likely a racist periodical called Ostara.¹⁸⁹ The magazine, which first appeared in 1905, was the product of the extraordinary and warped imagination of an eccentric former Cistercian monk, who came to be known as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (though his real name was plain Adolf Lanz).¹⁹⁰ He later founded his own order, the ‘New Templar Order’ (replete with a full panoply of mystical signs and symbols, including the swastika), in a ruined castle, Burg Werfenstein, on a romantic stretch of the Danube between Linz and Vienna.

Lanz followed in the ideological footsteps of Guido von List – the ‘von’ was added to denote his membership of the ‘Aryan ruling class’ – whose prolific writings had established his credentials as the guru of the cultist believers in the superiority of the Aryan-German race, destined for mastery of the world. List had helped popularize the swastika, the sign of the sun found among ancient Hindu symbols which he took as the sign of the ‘Unconquerable’, the Germanic Hero, the ‘Strong One from Above’.¹⁹¹ That Hitler was acquainted with List’s ideas is certain.¹⁹² Lanz – also an enthusiastic supporter of Schönerer¹⁹³ – even managed the near-impossible and took List’s zany notions a stage further.

Lanz and his followers were obsessed by homoerotic notions of a manichean struggle between the heroic and creative ‘blond’ race and a race of predatory dark ‘beast-men’ who preyed on the ‘blond’ women with animal lust and bestial instincts that were corrupting and destroying mankind and its culture. Lanz’s recipe, laid down in Ostara, for overcoming the evils of the modern world and restoring the domination of the ‘blond race’ was racial purity and racial struggle, involving the slavery and forced sterilization or even extermination of the inferior races, the crushing of socialism, democracy and feminism which were seen as the vehicles of their corrupting influence, and the complete subordination of Aryan women to their husbands.¹⁹⁴ It amounted to a creed of ‘blue-eyed blondes of all nations, unite’.¹⁹⁵ There are indeed elements in common between the bizarre fantasies of Lanz and his band of woman-hating, racist crackpots and the programme of racial selection which the SS were to put into practice during the Second World War. Whether Lanz’s ideas had direct influence on Himmler’s SS is, however, questionable. Unsustainable is Lanz’s claim to a unique place in history as the man ‘who gave Hitler his ideas’.¹⁹⁶

It is usually taken for granted that Hitler read Ostara and was at least to some extent influenced by it.¹⁹⁷ Writing in Mein Kampf of his ‘conversion’ to antisemitism, Hitler recounted – no date is given – that he started to read on the subject and:

for a few hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life. Unfortunately, they all proceeded from the supposition that in principle the reader knew or even understood the Jewish question to a certain degree. Besides, the tone for the most part was such that doubts again arose in me, due in part to the dull and amazingly unscientific arguments favouring the thesis.

I relapsed for weeks at a time, once even for months.

The whole thing seemed to me so monstrous, the accusations so boundless, that, tormented by the fear of doing injustice, I again became anxious and uncertain.¹⁹⁸

Hitler mentions no pamphlet by name in this passage, suggesting that he read several, not just a single one. And whether Ostara would have compelled him to focus his attentions so acutely on the ‘Jewish Question’ might be doubted. Ostara was, in fact, far more centred upon racist theory than it was upon antisemitism, which figured only in a subordinate role.¹⁹⁹ The main evidence that Hitler was acquainted with Ostara comes from a post-war interview in which Lanz claimed to have remembered Hitler, during the time he lived in Felberstraße in 1909, paying him a visit and asking him for back-copies of the magazine. Since Hitler looked so run-down, Lanz went on, he let him have the copies for nothing, and gave him 2 Kronen for his journey home.²⁰⁰ How Lanz knew that this young man had been Hitler, when it was to be well over ten years before the latter would become a local celebrity even in Munich, he was never asked in the interview more than forty years after the purported meeting.²⁰¹ Another witness to Hitler’s reading ofOstara in post-war interviews was Josef Greiner, the author of some fabricated ‘recollections’ of Hitler in his Vienna years. Greiner did not mention Ostara in his book, but, when later questioned about it in the mid-1950s, ‘remembered’ that Hitler had a large pile of Ostara magazines while he was living in the Men’s Home from 1910 to 1913, and had vehemently supported Lanz’s racial theories in heated discussions with an ex-Catholic priest called Grill (who does not figure in his book at all).²⁰² A third witness, a former Nazi functionary called Elsa Schmidt-Falks, could only remember that she had heard Hitler mention Lanz in the context of homosexuality, and Ostara in connection with the banning of Lanz’s works (though there is in fact no evidence of a ban).²⁰³

Most likely, Hitler did read Ostara along with other racist pulp which was prominent on Vienna newspaper stands. But we cannot be certain.²⁰⁴ Nor, if he did read it, can we be sure what he believed. His first known statements on antisemitism immediately following the First World War betray no traces of Lanz’s obscure racial doctrine.²⁰⁵ He was later frequently scornful of völkisch sects and the extremes of Germanic cultism.²⁰⁶ As far as can be seen, if we discount Elsa Schmidt-Falk’s doubtful testimony, he never mentioned Lanz by name. For the Nazi regime, the bizarre Austrian racist eccentric, far from being held up to praise, was to be accused of ‘falsifying racial thought through secret doctrine’.²⁰⁷

When Hitler, his savings almost exhausted, was forced to leave Felberstraße in mid-August 1909 to move for a very short time to shabbier accommodation in nearby Sechshauserstraße 58, it was certainly not as a devotee of Lanz von Liebenfels.²⁰⁸ Nor, anti-Jewish though he undoubtedly already was as a Schönerer supporter, is it likely that he had yet found the key to the ills of the world in a doctrine of racial antisemitism.

Hitler stayed in Sechshauserstraße for less than a month. And when he left, on 16 September 1909, it was without filling in the required police registration form, without leaving a forwarding address, and probably without paying his rent.²⁰⁹ During the next months, Hitler did learn the meaning of poverty. His later recollection that autumn 1909 had been ‘an endlessly bitter time’ was not an exaggeration.²¹⁰ All his savings had now vanished. He must have left some address with his guardian for his orphan’s pension of 25 Kronen to be sent to Vienna each month. But that was not enough to keep body and soul together.²¹¹ During the wet and cold autumn of 1909 he lived rough, sleeping in the open, as long as the weather held, probably in cheap lodgings when conditions forced him indoors.²¹² Reinhold Hanisch, who came to know Hitler soon afterwards, told of him sleeping in a cheap café on Kaiserstraße.²¹³ He was later said to have stayed for a while in November at Simon-Denk-Gasse 11, but this is unlikely. It is doubtful that by this date he had the money to pay for regular lodgings; the address lay well away from his usual haunts in the south of the city, in a fairly middle-class district; and no official registration of Hitler living there has survived.²¹⁴

Hitler had now reached rock-bottom. Some time in the weeks before Christmas 1909, thin and bedraggled, in filthy, lice-ridden clothes, his feet sore from walking around, Hitler joined the human flotsam and jetsam finding their way to the large, recently established doss-house for the homeless (Asyl für Obdachlose) in Meidling, not far from Schönbrunn Palace.²¹⁵ The social decline of the petty-bourgeois so fearful of joining the proletariat was complete.²¹⁶ The twenty-year-old would-be artistic genius had joined the tramps, winos, and down-and-outs in society’s basement.

It was at this time that he met Reinhold Hanisch, whose testimony, doubtful though it is in places, is all that casts light on the next phase of Hitler’s time in Vienna.²¹⁷ Hanisch, living under the assumed name of ‘Fritz Walter’, came originally from the Sudetenland and had a police record for a number of petty misdemeanours. He was a self-styled draughtsman, but in reality had drifted through various temporary jobs as a domestic servant and casual labourer before tramping his way across Germany from Berlin to Vienna.²¹⁸ He encountered a miserable-looking Hitler, down at heel in a shabby blue check suit, tired, hungry, and with sore feet, in the hostel dormitory one late autumn night, shared some bread with him and told tales of Berlin to the young enthusiast for all things German.²¹⁹ The hostel was a night-shelter offering short-term accommodation only. A bath or shower, disinfection of clothes, soup and bread, and a bed in the dormitory were provided. But during the day the inmates were turned out to fend for themselves. Hitler, looking in a sorry state and in depressed mood, went in the mornings along with other destitutes to a nearby convent in Gumpendorferstraße where the nuns doled out soup. The time was otherwise spent visiting public warming-rooms, or trying to earn a bit of money. Hanisch took him off to shovel snow, but without an overcoat Hitler was in no condition to stick at it for long.²²⁰ He offered to carry bags for passengers at the Westbahnhof, but his appearance probably did not win him many customers.²²¹ Whether he did any other manual labour during the years he spent in Vienna is doubtful. While his savings had lasted, he had not been prepared to entertain the prospect of working.²²² At the time he was in most need of money, he was physically not up to it.²²³ Later, even Hanisch, his ‘business associate’, lost his temper over Hitler’s idleness while eking out a living by selling paintings.²²⁴ The story he told in Mein Kampf about learning about trade unionism and Marxism the hard way through his maltreatment while working on a building site is almost certainly fictional.²²⁵ Hanisch, at any rate, never heard the story at the time from Hitler, and later did not believe it.²²⁶ The ‘legend’ probably drew on the general anti-socialist propaganda in the Vienna of Hitler’s day.²²⁷

Hanisch had meanwhile thought of a better idea than manual labouring. Hitler had told him of his background, and was persuaded by Hanisch to ask his family for some money, probably under the pretext that he needed it for his studies. Within a short time he received the princely sum of 50 Kronen, almost certainly from his Aunt Johanna.²²⁸ With that he could buy himself an overcoat from the government pawn-shop.²²⁹ With this long coat and his greasy trilby, shoes looking like those of a nomad, hair over his collar, and dark fuzz on his chin, Hitler’s appearance even provoked his fellow vagrants to remark on it. They nicknamed him ‘Ohm Paul Krüger’, after the Boer leader.²³⁰ But the gift from his aunt meant that better times were on the way. He was now able to acquire the materials needed to begin the little business venture that Hanisch had dreamed up. On hearing from Hitler that he could paint – Hitler actually told him he had been at the Academy – Hanisch suggested he should paint scenes of Vienna which he would then peddle for him, and they would share the proceeds. Whether this partnership began already in the doss-house, or only after Hitler had moved, on 9 February 1910, to the more salubrious surrounds of the Men’s Home in the north of the city, is unclear from Hanisch’s garbled account. What is certain is that with his aunt’s gift, the move to Meldemannstraße, and his new business arrangement with Hanisch, Hitler was now over the worst.²³¹

The Men’s Home was a big step up from the Meidling hostel. The 500 or so residents were not down-and-out vagrants, but, for the most part, a mixed bunch of individuals, some – clerks and even former academics and pensioned officers – just down on their luck, others simply passing through, looking for work or in temporary employment, all without a family home to go to. Unlike the hostel, the Men’s Home, built a few years earlier, funded by private donations (some from wealthy Jewish families), offered a modicum of privacy, and for an overnight price of only 50 Heller. Residents had their own cubicles, which had to be vacated during the day but could be retained on a more or less indefinite basis. There was a canteen where meals and alcohol-free drinks could be obtained, and a kitchen where they could prepare their own food; there were washrooms and lockers for private possessions; in the basement were baths, along with a cobbler’s, a tailor’s, and a hairdresser’s, a laundry, and cleaning facilities; there was a small library on the ground floor, and on the first floor lounges and a reading-room where newpapers were available. Most of the residents were out during the day, but a group of around fifteen to twenty, mainly from lower-middle-class backgrounds and seen as the ‘intelligentsia’, usually gathered in a smaller room, known as the ‘work-room’ or ‘writing-room’, to undertake odd jobs – painting advertisements, writing out addresses and the like.²³² This is where Hanisch and Hitler set up operations.

Hanisch’s role was to hawk Hitler’s mainly postcard-size paintings around pubs. He also found a market with frame-makers and upholsterers who could make use of cheap illustrations. Most of the dealers with whom he had a good, regular trade were Jewish. Hitler’s view, according to Hanisch, was that Jews were better businessmen and more reliable customers than ‘Christian’ dealers.²³³ More remarkably, in the light of later events and his own claims about the importance of the Vienna period for the development of his antisemitism, his closest partner (apart from Hanisch) in his little art-production business, Josef Neumann, was also a Jew – and one with whom Hitler was, it seems, on friendly terms.²³⁴

Hitler invariably copied his pictures from others, sometimes following visits to museums or galleries to find suitable subjects. He was lazy and had to be chivvied by Hanisch, who could offload the pictures faster than Hitler painted them. The usual rate of production was about one picture a day, and Hanisch reckoned to sell it for around 5 Kronen, split between him and Hitler. In this fashion, they managed to make a modest living.²³⁵

Politics was a frequent topic of conversation in the reading-room of the Men’s Home, and the atmosphere easily became heated, with tempers flaring. Hitler took full part.²³⁶ His violent attacks on the Social Democrats caused trouble with some of the inmates.²³⁷He was known for his admiration for Schönerer and Karl Hermann Wolf (founder and leader of the German Radical Party, with its main base in the ‘Sudetenland’).²³⁸ He also waxed lyrical about the achievements of Lueger.²³⁹ When he was not holding forth on politics, Hitler was lecturing his comrades – keen to listen or not – on the wonders of Wagner’s music and the brilliance of Gottfried Semper’s designs of Vienna’s monumental buildings.²⁴⁰

Whether politics or art, the chance to involve himself in the reading-room ‘debates’ was more than sufficient to distract Hitler from working.²⁴¹ By summer, Hanisch had become more and more irritated with Hitler’s failure to keep up with orders.²⁴² Hitler claimed he could not simply paint to order, but had to be in the right mood. Hanisch accused him of only painting when he needed to keep the wolf from the door.²⁴³ Following a windfall from the sale of one of his paintings, Hitler even disappeared from the Men’s Home for a few days in June with Neumann. According to Hanisch, Hitler and Neumann spent their time sight-seeing in Vienna and looking around museums.²⁴⁴ More likely they had other ‘business’ plans, which, then, quickly fell through, possibly including a quick visit to the Waldviertel to try to squeeze a bit more money out of Aunt Johanna.²⁴⁵Hitler and his cronies in the Men’s Home were at this time prepared to entertain any dotty scheme – a miracle hair-restorer was one such idea – that would bring in a bit of money.²⁴⁶ Whatever the reason for his temporary absence, after five days, his money spent, Hitler returned to the Men’s Home and the partnership with Hanisch. Relations now, however, became increasingly strained and the bad feeling eventually exploded over a picture Hitler had painted, larger than usual in size, of the parliament building. Through an intermediary – another Jewish dealer in his group in the Men’s Home by the name of Siegfried Löffner – Hitler accused Hanisch of cheating him by withholding 50 Kronen he allegedly received for the picture, together with a further 9 Kronen for a watercolour. The matter was brought to the attention of the police, and Hanisch was sentenced to a few days in jail – but for using the false name of Fritz Walter. Hitler never received what he felt was owing to him for the picture.²⁴⁷

With Hanisch’s disappearance, Hitler’s life recedes into near obscurity for two years or so. When he next comes into view, in 1912–13, he is still in residence in the Men’s Home, now a well-established member of the community, and a central figure among his own group – the ‘intelligentsia’ who occupied the writing-room.²⁴⁸ He was by now well over the depths of degradation he experienced in 1909 in the doss-house, even if continuing to drift aimlessly.²⁴⁹ He could earn a modest income from the sale of his pictures of the Karlskirche and other scenes of ‘Old Vienna’.²⁵⁰ His outgoings were low, since he lived so frugally.²⁵¹ His living costs in the Men’s Home were extremely modest: he ate cheaply, did not drink, smoked a cigarette only rarely, and had as his only luxury the occasional purchase of a standing place at the theatre or opera (about which he would then regale the writing-room ‘intellectuals’ for hours).²⁵² Descriptions of his appearance at this time are contradictory. A fellow resident in the Men’s Home in 1912 later described Hitler at the time as shabbily dressed and unkempt, wearing a long greyish coat, worn at the sleeves, and battered old hat, trousers full of holes, and shoes stuffed with paper. He still had shoulder-length hair and a ragged beard.²⁵³ This is compatible with the description given by Hanisch which, though not precisely dated, appears from the context to refer to 1909–10.²⁵⁴ On the other hand, according to Jacob Altenberg, one of his Jewish art dealers, in the later phase at least in the Men’s Home Hitler was clean-shaven, took care to keep his hair cut, and wore clothes which, though old and worn, were kept neat.²⁵⁵ Given what Kubizek wrote about Hitler’s fussiness about personal hygiene when they were together in 1908, and what was later little short of a cleanliness fetish, Altenberg’s testimony rings truer than that of the anonymous acquaintance for the final period in Meldemannstraße.

But, whatever his appearance, Hitler was scarcely enjoying the lifestyle of a man who had come by a substantial windfall – what would have amounted to a king’s ransom for someone living in a men’s hostel. Yet this is what was long believed. It was suggested – though based on guesswork, not genuine evidence – that towards the end of 1910 Hitler had become the recipient of a sizeable sum, perhaps as much as 3,800 Kronen, which represented the life-savings of his Aunt Johanna.²⁵⁶ Post-war inquiries indicated that this was the amount withdrawn from her savings account by Johanna on 1 December 1910, some four months before she died, leaving no will.²⁵⁷ The suspicion was that the large sum had gone to Adolf. This feeling was enhanced by the fact that his half-sister Angela, still looking after his sister Paula, soon afterwards, in 1911, staked a claim to the whole of the orphan’s pension, still at that time divided equally between the two children. Adolf who, ‘on account of his training as an artist had received substantial sums from his aunt, Johanna Pölzl’, conceded that he was in a position to maintain himself, and was forced to concede the 25 Kronen a month which he up to then received from his guardian.²⁵⁸ But, as we have already noted, the household account-book of the Hitler family makes plain that Adolf, alongside smaller gifts from ‘Hanitante’, received from her a loan – amounting in reality to a gift – of 924 Kronen, probably in 1907 and providing him with the material basis of his first, relatively comfortable, year in Vienna.²⁵⁹ Whatever became of Aunt Johanna’s money in December 1910, there is not the slightest indication that it went to Hitler. And the loss of the 25 Kronen a month orphan’s pension would have amounted to a serious dent in his income.²⁶⁰

Though his life had stabilized while he had been in the Men’s Home, during the time he had been trafficking in paintings, Hitler seems to have remained unsettled. He was still, as has been rightly said, ‘more threatened by than threatening to the social order’ in which he lived.²⁶¹ He was disdainful about the quality of his own ‘dilettante’ paintings, as he described them, and felt he still needed to learn how to paint. He seems, indeed, for a time in 1910 to have entertained yet a further attempt to enter the Academy in Vienna, but nothing came of it, and his bitterness and anger about his rejection remained unabated.²⁶²

Karl Honisch – keen to distance himself from his near-namesake Hanisch, of whom he had heard nothing good – knew Hitler in 1913. His account, written in the 1930s for the NSDAΡ –Hauptarchiv, was consciously intended to portray Hitler in the best light possible, but for all that paints a plausible picture of him towards the end of his stay in the Men’s Home. Honisch described Hitler at the time as slight in build, poorly nourished, with hollow cheeks, dark hair flopping in his face, and wearing shabby clothes. Hitler was rarely absent from the Home and sat each day in the same corner of the writing-room near the window, drawing and painting on a long oak-table. This was known as his place, and any newcomer venturing to take it was rapidly reminded by the other inmates that ‘this place is taken. Herr Hitler sits there.’²⁶³ Among the writing-room regulars, Hitler was seen as a somewhat unusual, artistic type. He himself wrote later: ‘I believe that those who knew me in those days took me for an eccentric.’²⁶⁴ But, other than his painting skills, no one imagined he had any special talents. Though well regarded, he had a way, noted Honisch, of keeping his distance from the others and ‘not letting anyone come too close’. He could be withdrawn, sunk in a book or his own thoughts. But he was known to have a quick temper. This could flare up at any time, particularly in the frequent political debates that took place. Hitler’s strong views on politics were plain to all. He would often sit quietly when a discussion started up, putting in the odd word here or there but otherwise carrying on with his drawing. But if he took exception to something said, he would jump up from his place, hurling his brush or pencil on the table, and heatedly and forcefully make himself felt before, on occasion, breaking off in mid-flow and with a wave of resignation at the incomprehension of his comrades, taking up his drawing again. Two subjects above all roused his aggression: the Jesuits and the ‘Reds’ – at whose hands it was well known that he had suffered unpleasant experiences.²⁶⁵ No mention was made of tirades against the Jews.

The criticism of the ‘Jesuits’ suggests that some embers of his former enthusiasm for Schönerer’s vehement anti-Catholicism were still warm, though the Schönerer movement had by this time effectively collapsed.²⁶⁶ His hatred for the Social Democrats was also long established by now. His own version in Mein Kampf of the emergence of this hatred tells the story – as we have already suggested, almost certainly fictional – of the victimization and personal threats he allegedly experienced, on account of his rejection of their political views and refusal to join a trade union, at the hands of Social Democrat workers when he was employed for a short time on a building site.²⁶⁷ If Hitler had suffered physical maltreatment, perhaps while living rough or later in the Men’s Home, through making no secret of the evidently strong aversion he already felt towards Social Democracy, it might have been expected that he would have spoken about it to his cronies. Yet none of those who later recounted anecdotes of Hitler at the time refers to it – with the exception of Josef Greiner, whose account is a plain fabrication, no more than an elaborated and embellished variant of the Mein Kampf story.²⁶⁸

There is, in fact, no need to look beyond the strength of Hitler’s pan-German nationalism as an explanation of his detestation of the internationalism of the Social Democrats. The radical nationalist propaganda of Franz Stein’s pan-German ‘working-class movement’, with its repeated shrill attacks on ‘social democratic bestialities’ and ‘red terror’, and its boundless agitation against Czech workers, was the type of ‘socialism’ soaked up by Hitler.²⁶⁹ A more underlying source of the hatred most likely lay in Hitler’s pronounced sense of social and cultural superiority towards the working class that Social Democracy represented.²⁷⁰ ‘I do not know what horrified me most at that time,’ he later wrote of his contact with those of the ‘lower classes’: ‘the economic misery of my companions, their moral and ethical coarseness, or the low level of their intellectual development’.²⁷¹ In a further telling passage in Mein Kampf Hitler wrote:

The environment of my youth consisted of petty-bourgeois circles, hence of a world having very little relation to the purely manual worker… The cleft between this class… and the manual worker is often deeper than we imagine. The reason for this hostility… lies in the fear of a social group, which has but recently raised itself above the level of the manual worker, that it will sink back into the old despised class, or at least become identified with it. To this, in many cases, we must add the repugnant memory of the cultural poverty of this lower class, the frequent vulgarity of its social intercourse; the petty bourgeois’ own position in society, however insignificant it may be, makes any contact with this outgrown stage of life and culture intolerable.²⁷²

Though Hitler’s account of his first encounter with Social Democrats is almost certainly in the main apocryphal, status-consciousness runs through it, not least in his comment that at that time ‘my clothing was still more or less in order, my speech cultivated, and my manner reserved’.²⁷³ As we noted, Hitler’s appearance and lifestyle while with Kubizek were anything other than proletarian.²⁷⁴ Later, in the Men’s Home, his status as an ‘artist’ in the ‘intellectual’ group that frequented the writing-room preserved his distance from the manual workers in the Home. Given such status-consciousness, the level of degradation he must have felt in 1909–10 when the threat of social decline into the proletariat for a time became dire reality can be readily imagined. But far from eliciting any solidarity with the ideals of the working-class movement, this merely sharpened his antagonism towards it. Not social and political theories, but survival, struggle, and ‘every man for himself marked the philosophy of the doss-house.²⁷⁵

Hitler went on in Mein Kampf to stress the hard struggle for existence of the ‘upstart’, who had risen ‘by his own efforts from his previous position in life to a higher one’, that ‘kills all pity’ and destroys ‘feeling for the misery of those who have remained behind’.²⁷⁶ This puts into context his professed interest in ‘the social question’ while he was in Vienna. His ingrained sense of superiority meant that, far from arousing sympathy for the destitute and the disadvantaged, the ‘social question’ for him amounted to a search for scapegoats to explain his own social decline and degradation. ‘By drawing me within its sphere of suffering’, the ‘social question’, he wrote, ‘did not seem to invite me to “study”, but to experience it in my own skin’.²⁷⁷

Similarly, Hitler’s views on Social Democracy were shaped by personal experience. Hitler not only hated Social Democracy; he feared it. We noted earlier his anxiety at watching ‘the gigantic human dragon’ of marching workers through the streets of Vienna.²⁷⁸The threat he sensed in Social Democracy left its lasting mark in an ‘understanding of the importance of physical terror’.²⁷⁹ Hitler’s ‘gut feeling’ – truly a visceral hatred – that arose from his status-consciousness and first-hand experience of Social Democracy was ‘confirmed’ by voracious but one-sided reading. Whether he read any serious theoretical works may be doubted. His understanding of Marxism was probably for the most part picked up in Social Democratic literature, such as the Arbeiterzeitung which he read, and in anti-Marxist articles in the nationalist and bourgeois press.²⁸⁰ By the end of his Vienna period, it is unlikely that Hitler’s detestation of Social Democracy, firmly established though it was, had gone much beyond that which had been current in Schönerer pan-German nationalism – apart from the additional radicality deriving from his own bitter first-hand experiences of the misery and degradation that enhanced his utter rejection of international socialism as a solution. That his hatred of Social Democracy had already by this date, as Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf, married with a racial theory of antisemitism to give him a distinctive ‘world-view’ that remained thereafter unchanged, can be discounted.

V

Why and when did Hitler become the fixated, pathological antisemite known from the writing of his first political tracts in 1919 down to the writing of his testament in the Berlin bunker in 1945? Since his paranoid hatred was to shape policies that culminated in the killing of millions of Jews, this is self-evidently an important question. The answer is, however, less clear than we should like. In truth, we do not know for certain why, nor even when, Hitler turned into a manic and obsessive antisemite.

Hitler’s own version is laid out in some well-known and striking passages in Mein Kampf. According to this, he had not been an antisemite in Linz. On coming to Vienna, he had at first been alienated by the antisemitic press there. But the obsequiousness of the mainstream press in its treatment of the Habsburg court and its vilification of the German Kaiser gradually led him to the ‘more decent’ and ‘more appetizing’ line taken in the antisemitic paper the Deutsches Volksblatt. Growing admiration for Karl Lueger – ‘the greatest German mayor of all times’ – helped to change his attitude towards the Jews – ‘my greatest transformation of all’ – and within two years (or in another account a single year) the transformation was complete.²⁸¹ Hitler highlights, however, a single episode which opened his eyes to the ‘Jewish Question’.

Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.

For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form:

Is this a German?²⁸²

Following this encounter, Hitler continued, he started to buy antisemitic pamphlets. He was now able to see that Jews ‘were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves’. Vienna now appeared in a different light. ‘Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.’²⁸³

Now, to stay with his own account, his revulsion rapidly grew. The language Hitler uses in these pages of Mein Kampf betrays a morbid fear of uncleanliness, dirt, and disease – all of which he associated with Jews.²⁸⁴ He also quickly formed his newly-found hatred into a conspiracy theory. He now linked the Jews with every evil he perceived: the liberal press, cultural life, prostitution, and – most significant of all – identified them as the leading force in Social Democracy. At this, ‘the scales dropped from my eyes’.²⁸⁵Everything connected with Social Democracy – party leaders, Reichsrat deputies, trade union secretaries, and the Marxist press that he devoured with loathing – now seemed to him to be Jewish.²⁸⁶ But this ‘recognition’, he wrote, gave him great satisfaction. His already existent hatred of Social Democracy, that party’s anti-nationalism, now fell into place: its leadership was ‘almost exclusively in the hands of a foreign people’. ‘Only now,’ Hitler remarked, ‘did I become thoroughly acquainted with the seducer of our people.’²⁸⁷ He had linked Marxism and Jewry through what he called ‘the Jewish doctrine of Marxism’.²⁸⁸

It is a graphic account. But it is not corroborated by the other sources that cast light on Hitler’s time in Vienna. Indeed, in some respects it is directly at variance with them. It is generally accepted that, for all the problems with the autobiographical parts of Mein Kampf, Hitler was indeed converted to manic racial antisemitism while in Vienna. But the available evidence, beyond Hitler’s own words, offers little to confirm that view. Interpretation rests ultimately on the balance of probabilities.

Kubizek claimed Hitler was already an antisemite before leaving Linz. In contrast to Hitler’s assertion that his father had ‘cosmopolitan views’ and would have regarded antisemitism as ‘cultural backwardness’, Kubizek stated that Alois’s regular drinking cronies in Leonding were Schönerer supporters and that he himself was certainly therefore anti-Jewish. He pointed also to the openly antisemitic teachers Hitler encountered in the Realschule. He allegedly recalled, too, that Adolf had said to him one day, as they passed the small synagogue: ‘That doesn’t belong in Linz.’ For Kubizek, Vienna had made Hitler’s antisemitism more radical. But it had not created it. In his opinion, Hitler had gone to Vienna ‘already as a pronounced antisemite’.²⁸⁹ Kubizek went on to recount one or two episodes of Hitler’s aversion to Jews during the time they were together in Vienna.²⁹⁰ He claimed an encounter with a Galician Jew was the caftan story of Mein Kampf. But this, and a purported visit to a synagogue in which Hitler took Kubizek along to witness a Jewish wedding, have the appearance of an outright fabrication.²⁹¹ Palpably false is Kubizek’s assertion that Hitler joined the Antisemitenbund (Antisemitic League) during the months in 1908 that the friends were together in Vienna. There was no such organization in Austria-Hungary before 1918.²⁹²

In fact, Kubizek is generally unconvincing in the passages devoted to the early manifestations of Hitler’s antisemitism. These are among the least trustworthy sections of his account – partly drawing on Mein Kampf, partly inventing episodes which were not present in the original draft version of his recollections, and in places demonstrably incorrect. Kubizek was keen to distance himself in his post-war memoirs from the radical views of his friend on the ‘Jewish Question’.²⁹³ It suited him to emphasize that Hitler had from Linz days hated the Jews. His suggestion that Hitler’s father (whom he had not known) had been a pronounced antisemite is probably incorrect. As we have seen, Alois Hitler’s own more moderate form of pan-Germanism had differed from that of the Schönerer movement in its continued allegiance to the Emperor of Austria and accorded with the line adopted by the dominant party in Upper Austria, the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party), which admitted Jews to membership.²⁹⁴ The vehemently antisemitic as well as radical German nationalist Schönerer movement certainly had a strong following in and around Linz, and no doubt included some at least of Hitler’s teachers among its supporters. But antisemitism seems to have been relatively unimportant in his school compared with the antagonism towards the Czechs.²⁹⁵ Hitler’s own later recollection was probably in this respect not inaccurate, when he told Albert Speer that he had become aware of the ‘nationalities problem’ – by which he meant vehement hostility towards the Czechs at school – but the ‘danger of Jewry’ had only been made plain to him in Vienna.²⁹⁶

The young Hitler, himself taken while still in Linz by Schönerer’s ideas, could scarcely have missed the emphatic racial antisemitism which was so integral to them.²⁹⁷ But for the Schönerer supporters in the Linz of Hitler’s day, antisemitism appears to have been a subdominant theme in the cacophony of anti-Czech clamour and trumpeted Germanomania. It certainly did not prevent Hitler’s warm expressions of gratitude in postcards and the present of one of his watercolours to Dr Bloch, the Jewish physician who had treated his mother in her last illness.²⁹⁸ The deep, visceral hatred of his later antisemitism was of a different order altogether. That was certainly not present in his Linz years.

There is no evidence that Hitler was distinctively antisemitic by the time he parted company with Kubizek in the summer of 1908. Hitler himself claimed that he became an antisemite within two years of arriving in Vienna.²⁹⁹ Could, then, the transformation be placed in the year he spent, mainly in Felberstraße, between leaving Kubizek and becoming a vagrant? The testimony of Lanz von Liebenfels would fit this chronology.³⁰⁰ But we have seen that this is of highly doubtful value. Hitler’s descent into abject poverty in autumn 1909 might seem an obvious time to search for a scapegoat and find it in the figure of the Jew. But he had the opportunity less then than at any other time in Vienna to ‘read up’ on the subject, as he claimed in Mein Kampf.³⁰¹

Not only that: Reinhold Hanisch, his close companion over the following months, was adamant that Hitler ‘in those days was by no means a Jew hater. He became one afterwards.’³⁰² Hanisch emphasized Hitler’s Jewish friends and contacts in the Men’s Home to demonstrate the point. A one-eyed locksmith called Robinsohn spared Hitler some small change to help him out financially from time to time. (The man’s name was actually Simon Robinson, traceable in the Men’s Home in 1912–13.³⁰³) Josef Neumann, as we have seen, became, as Hanisch put it, ‘a real friend’ to Hitler. He was said to have ‘liked Hitler very much’ and to have been ‘of course highly esteemed’ by him. A postcard salesman, Siegfried Löffner (misnamed Loeffler by Hanisch), was also ‘one of Hitler’s circle of acquaintances’, and, as we remarked, took sides with him in the acrimonious conflict with Hanisch in 1910.³⁰⁴ Hitler preferred, as we have seen, to sell his pictures to Jewish dealers, and one of them, Jacob Altenberg, subsequently spoke well of the business relationship they had conducted.³⁰⁵ Hanisch’s testimony finds confirmation in the later comment of the anonymous resident of the Men’s Home in the spring of 1912, that ‘Hitler got along exceptionally well with Jews, and said at one time that they were a clever people who stick together better than the Germans do.’³⁰⁶

The three years that Hitler spent in the Men’s Home certainly gave him every opportunity to pore over antisemitic newpapers, pamphlets, and cheap literature. But, leaving aside the fact that the chronology no longer matches Hitler’s own assertion of a transformation within two years of arriving in Vienna, Karl Honisch, as we have seen, makes a point of emphasizing Hitler’s strong views on ‘Jesuits’ and the ‘Reds’, vehemently expressed in his numerous interventions in the debates in the writing-room, though makes no mention at all of any hatred of Jews. Hitler certainly joined in talk about the Jews in the Men’s Home. But his standpoint was, according to Hanisch’s account, by no means negative. Hanisch has Hitler admiring the Jews for their resistance to persecution, praising Heine’s poetry and the music of Mendelssohn and Offenbach, expressing the view that the Jews were the first civilized nation in that they had abandoned polytheism for belief in one God, blaming Christians more than Jews for usury, and dismissing the stock-in-trade antisemitic charge of Jewish ritual murder as nonsense.³⁰⁷ Only Josef Greiner, of those who claimed to have witnessed Hitler at first hand in the Men’s Home, speaks of him as a fanatical Jew-hater in that period.³⁰⁸ But, as we have noted, Greiner’s testimony is worthless.

There is, therefore, no reliable contemporary confirmation of Hitler’s paranoid antisemitism during the Vienna period. If Hanisch is to be believed, in fact, Hitler was not antisemitic at all at this time. Beyond that, Hitler’s close comrades during the First World War also recalled that he voiced no notable antisemitic views.³⁰⁹ The question arises, then, whether Hitler had not invented his Viennese ‘conversion’ to antisemitism in Mein Kampf; whether, in fact, his pathological hatred of the Jews did not emerge only in the wake of the lost war, in 1918–19.³¹⁰

Why might Hitler fabricate the claim that he had become an ideological antisemite in Vienna? And, equally, why might a ‘conversion’ at the end of the war be regarded as something to be concealed by a story of an earlier transformation? The answer lies in the image Hitler was establishing for himself in the early 1920s, and particularly following the failed putsch and his trial. This demanded the self-portrait painted in Mein Kampf, of the nobody who struggled from the first against adversity, and, rejected by the academic ‘establishment’, taught himself through painstaking study, coming – above all through his own bitter experiences – to unique insights about society and politics that enabled him without assistance to formulate at the age of around twenty a rounded ‘world-view’. This unchanged ‘world-view’, he was saying in 1924, provided him with the claim to leadership of the national movement, and indeed with the claim to be Germany’s coming ‘great leader’.³¹¹ Perhaps by then Hitler had even convinced himself that all the pieces of the ideological jigsaw had indeed fallen into place during his Vienna years. In any case, by the early 1920s no one was in a position to gainsay the story. An admission that he had become an ideological antisemite only at the end of the war, as he lay blinded from mustard gas in a hospital in Pasewalk and heard of Germany’s defeat and the revolution, would certainly have sounded less heroic, and would also have smacked of hysteria.

However, it is difficult to believe that Hitler of all people, given the intensity of his hatred for the Jews between 1919 and the end of his life, had remained unaffected by the poisonous antisemitic atmosphere of the Vienna he knew – one of the most virulently anti-Jewish cities in Europe. It was a city where, at the turn of the century, radical antisemites advocated punishing sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews as sodomy, and placing Jews under surveillance around Easter to prevent ritual child-murder.³¹²Schönerer, the racial antisemite, had notably helped to stir up the hatred. Lueger, as we noted, was able to exploit the widespread and vicious antisemitism to build up his Christian Social Party and consolidate his hold on power in Vienna. Hitler greatly admired both. Once more, it would have been strange had he of all people admired them but been unaffected by such an essential stock-in-trade of their message as their antisemitism. Certainly, he learnt from Lueger the gains to be made from popularizing hatred against the Jews.³¹³ The explicitly antisemitic newspaper Hitler read, and singled out for praise, the Deutsches Volksblatt, selling around 55,000 copies a day at the time, described Jews as agents of decomposition and corruption, and repeatedly linked them with sexual scandal, perversion, and prostitution.³¹⁴ Leaving aside the probably contrived incident of the caftan-Jew, Hitler’s description of his gradual exposure through the antisemitic gutter press to deep anti-Jewish prejudice and its impact upon him while in Vienna has an authentic ring about it.³¹⁵

Probably no single encounter produced his loathing for Jews. Given his relations with his parents, there may have been some connection with an unresolved Oedipal complex, though this is no more than guesswork.³¹⁶ Hitler’s linkage of Jews and prostitution has prompted speculation that sexual fantasies, obsessions, or perversions provide the key.³¹⁷ Again, there is no reliable evidence. The sexual connotations were no more than Hitler could have picked up from the Deutsches Volksblatt. Another explanation would be a simpler one. At the time that Hitler soaked up Viennese antisemitism, he had recently experienced bereavement, failure, rejection, isolation, and increasing penury. The gulf between his self-image as a frustrated great artist or architect, and the reality of his life as a drop-out, needed an explanation. The Viennese antisemitic gutter press, it could be surmised, helped him to find that explanation.³¹⁸

But if Hitler’s antisemitism was indeed formed in Vienna, why did it remain unnoticed by those around him? The answer might well be banal: in that hotbed of rabid antisemitism, anti-Jewish sentiment was so commonplace that it could go practically unnoticed. The argument from silence is, therefore, not conclusive. However, there is still the evidence from Hanisch and Anonymous about Hitler’s friendship with Jews to contend with. This seems to stand in flat contradiction to Hitler’s own lurid account of his conversion to antisemitism in Vienna. One remark by Hanisch, however, suggests that Hitler had indeed already developed racist notions about the Jews. When one of their group asked why Jews remained strangers in the nation ‘Hitler answered that it was because they were a different race.’ He added, according to Hanisch, that ‘Jews had a different smell.’ Hitler was said also to have frequently remarked ‘that descendants of Jews are very radical and have terroristic inclinations’. And when he and Neumann discussed Zionism, Hitler said that any money of Jews leaving Austria would obviously be confiscated ‘as it was not Jewish but Austrian’.³¹⁹ If Hanisch is to be believed, then, Hitler was advancing views reflecting racial antisemitism at the same time that he was closely associated with a number of Jews in the Men’s Home. Could it have been that this very proximity, the dependence of the would-be great artist on Jews to off-load his little street paintings, at precisely the same time that he was reading and digesting the antisemitic bile poured out by Vienna’s gutter press, served only to underline and deepen the bitter enmities taking shape in his mind?³²⁰ Would the outsized ego of the unrecognized genius reduced to this not have translated his self-disgust into inwardly fermenting race-hatred when the plainly antisemitic Hanisch remarked to him that ‘he must be of Jewish blood, since such a large beard rarely grows on a Christian chin’ and ‘he had big feet, as a desert wanderer must have’?³²¹Whether Hitler was on terms of real friendship with the Jews around him in the Men’s Home, as Hanisch states, might be doubted. Throughout his life Hitler made remarkably few genuine friendships. And throughout his life, despite the torrents of words that poured from his mouth as a politician, he was adept at camouflaging his true feelings even to those in his immediate company. He was also a clever manipulator of those around him. His relations with the Jews in the Men’s Home were clearly, at least in part, self-serving. Robinson helped him out with money. Neumann, too, paid off small debts for him.³²² Löffner was Hitler’s go-between with the dealers.³²³ Whatever his true feelings, in his contacts with Jewish dealers and traders, Hitler was simply being pragmatic: as long as they could sell his paintings for him, he could swallow his abstract dislike of Jews.³²⁴

Though it has frequently been claimed, largely based on Hanisch’s evidence and on the lack of reference to his antisemitic views in the paltry sources available, that Hitler was not a racial antisemite during his stay in Vienna, the balance of probabilities surely suggests a different interpretation? It seems more likely that Hitler, as he later claimed, indeed came to hate Jews during his time in Vienna. But, probably, at this time it was still little more than a rationalization of his personal circumstances rather than a thought-out ‘world-view’. It was a personalized hatred – blaming the Jews for all the ills that befell him in a city that he associated with personal misery. But any expression of this hatred that he had internalized did not stand out to those around him where antisemitic vitriol was so normal. And, paradoxically, as long as he needed Jews to help him earn what classed as a living, he kept quiet about his true views and perhaps even on occasion, as Hanisch indicates, insincerely made remarks which could be taken, if mistakenly, as complimentary to Jewish culture. Only later, if this line of argument is followed, did he rationalize his visceral hatred into the fully-fledged ‘world-view’, with antisemitism as its core, that congealed in the early 1920s. The formation of the ideological antisemite had to wait until a further crucial phase in Hitler’s development, ranging from the end of the war to his political awakening in Munich in 1919.

VI

That was all still in the future. In spring 1913, after three years in the Men’s Home, Hitler was still drifting, vegetating – not any longer down and out, it is true, and with responsibility to no one but himself, but without any career prospects. He gave the impression that he had still not given up all hope of studying art, however, and told the writing-room regulars in the Men’s Home that he intended to go to Munich to enter the Art Academy.³²⁵ He had long said ‘he would go to Munich like a shot’, eulogizing about the ‘great picture galleries’ in the Bavarian capital.³²⁶ He had a good reason for postponing any plans to leave for Munich. His share of his father’s inheritance became due only on his twenty-fourth birthday, on 20 April 1913. More than anything else, it might be surmised, the wait for this money was what kept Hitler so long in the city he detested.³²⁷ On 16 May 1913 the District Court in Linz confirmed that he should receive the sizeable sum, with interest added to the original 652 Kronen, of 819 Kronen 98 Heller, and that this would be sent by post to the ‘artist’ (Kunstmaler) Adolf Hitler in Meldemannstraße, Vienna.³²⁸ With this long-awaited and much-welcome prize in his possession, he needed to delay his departure for Munich no further.

He had another reason for deciding the time was ripe to leave Vienna. In autumn 1909 he had failed to register for military service, which he would have been due to serve the following spring, after his twenty-first birthday.³²⁹ Even if found unfit, he would still have been eligible in 1911 and 1912 to undertake military service for a state he detested so fervently.³³⁰ Having avoided the authorities for three years, he presumably felt it safe to cross the border to Germany following his twenty-fourth birthday in 1913. He was mistaken. The Austrian authorities had not overlooked him. They were on his trail, and his avoidance of military service was to cause him difficulties and embarrassment the following year.³³¹ The attempt to put any possible snoopers off the scent in later years is why, once he had become well known, Hitler persistently dated his departure from Vienna to 1912, not 1913.³³²

On 24 May 1913, Hitler, carrying a light, black suitcase containing all his possessions, in a better set of clothes than the shabby suit he had been used to wearing, and accompanied by a young, short-sighted, unemployed shop-assistant, Rudolf Häusler, four years his junior, whom he had known for little over three months in the Men’s Home, left the co-residents from the writing-room who had escorted them a short distance, and set off for Munich.³³³

The Vienna years were over. They had indelibly marked Hitler’s personality and the ‘basic stock of personal views’ he held.³³⁴ But these ‘personal opinions’ had not yet coagulated into a fully-fledged ideology, or ‘world-view’. For that to happen, an even harder school than Vienna had to be experienced: war and defeat. And only the unique circumstances produced by that war and defeat enabled an Austrian drop-out to find appeal in a different land, among the people of his adopted country.