II

Hitler was the product of circumstances as much as anything else. Had things been different, he might never have come to political prominence. At the time of the Bavarian Revolution, he was an obscure rank-and-file soldier who had so far played no part in politics of any kind. Born on 20 April 1889, he was a living embodiment of the ethnic and cultural concept of national identity held by the Pan-Germans; for he was not German by birth or citizenship, but Austrian. Little is known about his childhood, youth and upbringing, and much if not most of what has been written about his early life is highly speculative, distorted or fantastical. We do know, however, that his father Alois changed his name from that of his mother, Maria Schicklgruber, to whom he had been born out of wedlock in 1837, to that of his stepfather, Johann Georg Hiedler or Hitler, in 1876. There is no evidence that any of Hitler’s ancestors was Jewish. Johann Georg freely acknowledged his true paternity of Hitler’s father. Alois was a customs inspector in Braunau on the Inn, a minor but respectable official of the Austrian government. He married three times; Adolf was the only child of his third marriage to survive infancy apart from his younger sister Paula. ‘Psychohistorians’ have made much of Adolf’s subsequent allusions to his cold, stern, disciplinarian and sometimes violent father and his warm, much-loved mother, but none of their conclusions can amount to any more than speculation.¹²

Map 6. Nationalities in the Hasburg Empire 1910

What is clear is that the Hitler family was often on the move, changing houses several times before settling in 1898 in a suburb of Linz, which Adolf ever after regarded as his home town. The young Hitler did poorly at school and disliked his teachers, but otherwise does not seem to have stood out amongst his fellow-pupils. He was clearly unfitted for the regular, routine life and hard work of the civil service, for which his father had intended him. After his father’s death early in 1903, he lived in a flat in Linz, where he was looked after by his mother, his aunt and his younger sister, and dreamed of making a future career as an artist while spending his time drawing, talking with friends, going to the opera and reading. But in 1907 two events occurred which put an end to this idle life of fantasizing. His mother died of breast cancer, and his application to the Viennese Academy of Art was rejected on the grounds that his painting and drawing were not good enough; he would do better, he was told, as an architect. Certainly, his forte lay in drawing and painting buildings. He was particularly impressed by the heavy, oppressive, historicist architecture of the public buildings on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, constructed as symbolic expressions of power and solidity at a time when the real political foundations of the Habsburg monarchy were beginning to crumble.¹³ From the very beginning, buildings interested Hitler mainly as statements of power. He retained this interest throughout his life. But he lacked the application to become an architect. He tried again to join the Academy of Art, and was rejected a second time. Disappointed and emotionally bereft, he moved to Vienna. He took with him, in all probability, two political influences from Linz. The first was the Pan-Germanism of Georg Ritter von Schonerer, whose supporters in the town were particularly numerous, it seems, in the school that Hitler attended. And the second was an unquenchable enthusiasm for the music of Richard Wagner, whose operas he frequently attended in Linz; he was intoxicated by their romanticization of Germanic myth and legend, and by their depiction of heroes who knew no fear. Armed with these beliefs, and confident in his future destiny as a great artist, he spent the next five years in the Austrian capital.¹⁴

Hitler’s subsequent account of this period lent a retrospective coherence to it that it does not seem to have possessed in reality. There is, again, little reliable independent evidence about what he did or thought. But a few things seem clear enough. First, unable to come to terms with his failure to get into the Academy, Hitler conceived a violent hatred for bourgeois convention, the establishment, rules and regulations. Rather than train or apply for a regular job, he lived an idle, chaotic, bohemian life, and spent his savings on going to Wagner operas. When the money ran out, he was forced to sleep rough, or find night-quarters in a doss-house. Things only looked up when he received some money from his aunt, and began to sell small paintings, mostly copies, providing himself with the means to live in a Men’s Home, where he rented a cheap room and was able to use the library and the reading-room. Here he stayed for three years, living a life that belonged to the outermost fringes of bohemian culture.

The political views Hitler had imbibed in Linz were strengthened as he encountered in a more direct form the Pan-Germanism of Schönerer that had been so influential in Linz. Hitler undoubtedly loathed the Habsburg monarchy and its capital city, whose institutions had denied him the fulfilment of his artistic ambitions. He found Schönerer’ s demand that the German-speaking areas of Austria be absorbed into the German Empire irresistibly appealing as a result. The racial mixing of Vienna was repulsive to him; only a racially homogeneous nation could be a successful one. But Schonerer, he realized, was incapable of winning the support of the masses. This was the achievement of Vienna’s Mayor Karl Lueger, whose antisemitic demagogy revealed, Hitler thought, a true understanding of men. Hitler could scarcely ignore the everyday antisemitism of the kind of newspapers that were available in the reading-room of the Men’s Home, and the cheap antisemitic pamphlets he later described reading at this time. And his enthusiasm for Wagner, whose operas he went to hundreds of times in this period, can only have strengthened his political views. Virtually all the followers of Schönerer, Wagner and Lueger were antisemitic by this time, many of them rabidly so, and there is no reason why Hitler should have been an exception. The fact that he sold his pictures to Jewish traders and borrowed money from Jewish inmates of the Men’s Home does not mean that he was not antisemitic. Nevertheless, it is likely that his antisemitism at this time had an abstract, almost theoretical quality to it; his hatred of Jews only became visceral, personal and extreme at the end of the First World War.¹⁵

Some of the most interesting pages of Hitler’s later autobiographical work My Struggle (Mein Kampf) describe the feelings of excitement he experienced when watching Social Democratic mass demonstrations in Vienna. He found the Social Democrats’ Marxism abhorrent, and thought their propaganda full of loathsome and vicious slanders and lies. Why did the masses believe in it, then, rather than in the doctrines of someone like Schönerer? His answer was that the Social Democrats were intolerant of other views, suppressed them within the working class as far as they could, projected themselves simply and strongly and won over the masses by force. ‘The psyche of the great masses’, he wrote, ‘is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak ... The masses love a commander more than a petitioner.’ He added: ‘I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror towards the individual and the masses ... Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror.’ The Social Democrats, he concluded, ‘command weaklings in both mind and force. They know how to create the illusion that this is the only way of preserving the peace, and at the same time, stealthily but steadily, they conquer one position after another, sometimes by silent backmail, sometimes by actual theft ...’ All of this may have been to some extent retrospective rationalization, as Hitler projected his own feelings and purposes back onto the most successful mass movement of the Austria of his youth. But, certainly for anyone who lived in Vienna before 1914, there was no escaping the power of the Social Democrats over the masses, and it is reasonable to suppose that Hitler was impressed by it and learned from it even as he rejected the doctrines which the Social Democrats purveyed.¹⁶

Perhaps the most important political lesson he derived from his time in Vienna, however, was a deep contempt for the state and the law. There is no reason to disbelieve his later statement that as a follower of Schönerer he considered the Habsburg monarchy to be the oppressor of the Germanic race, forcing it to mix with others and denying it the chance of uniting with Germans in the Reich. ‘If the species itself is in danger of being oppressed or utterly eliminated,’ he wrote, ‘the question of legality is reduced to a subordinate rule.’ Racial self-preservation was a higher principle than legality, which could often be no more than a cloak for tyranny. Any means were justified in this struggle. Moreover, the ‘rotten state’ of the Habsburgs was completely dominated by parliamentarism, a political system for which Hitler acquired an abiding contempt by spending a great deal of time in the public gallery of the Austrian Parliament, where parties of rival nationalities shouted, and screamed at each other, each in its own language, and prevented anything much being achieved. He conceived a special hatred for the Czechs, who were specially disruptive. It was Schonerer’s mistake to try and reach his goal through Parliament, he thought. Hitler concluded that only a strong leader directly elected by the people could get anything done.¹⁷

There is no indication, however, that Hitler thought of himself as that leader before 1914, or indeed that he considered entering politics at all. On the contrary, he was still wedded to the idea of becoming an artist. The abject financial misery to which his failure to achieve this ambition had brought him was alleviated somewhat by the payment of a legacy from his father’s estate, which he received at the age of 24, on 20 April 1913. Hitler quickly wound up his affairs in Vienna and departed for Germany, thus giving practical expression to the Pan-Germanism he had imbibed from Schönerer. He later described, with every appearance of authenticity, the happiness he felt when he moved to Munich, leaving behind him the colourful and, to him, repulsive racial cosmopolitanism of the Austrian capital and the sense of political confusion and decline that characterized the Habsburg political system. Such a system, he felt, was not worth fighting for; and not the least reason why he left was to avoid the military service for which he was shortly to become liable. Now he was in Germany, he felt at home.

He rented a room on the edge of Schwabing, and resumed the kind of life he had led in Vienna, copying postcards of famous Munich buildings in watercolour and selling enough of them to make a meagre living. Like other Schwabing bohemians, he whiled away much of his time in coffee houses and beer-cellars, but he was an outsider to the real bohemian world as well as the world of respectable society, for while men like Eisner, Toller, Landauer or Mühsam were heavily involved in the theatre, discussing anarchist utopias, or making a name for themselves as poets and writers, Hitler continued his previous, aimless existence, and made no attempt to acquire in Munich the artistic training he had been denied in Vienna. And while the official art establishment remained closed to him, the unofficial avant-garde that generated so much excitement in the more fashionable of Schwabing’s coffee houses, with painters like Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, August Macke and the ‘Blue Rider’ group, broke with convention and moved into Expressionism and abstraction. The avant-garde aroused in Hitler only incomprehension and revulsion. His own practice of art was limited to painstaking, lifeless reproductions of buildings; his own taste in art never moved beyond the kind of conventional, classically inspired representations that were the stock-in-trade of the Academy that he had so wanted to join in Vienna.¹⁸ What Hitler did share with the Schwabing bohemians, however, was an inner contempt for bourgeois convention and rules, and a belief that art could change the world.

Hitler was rescued from his existence as a bohemian on the margins of cultural life by the outbreak of the First World War. A photograph exists of him in the crowd that gathered in the centre of Munich on 2 August to celebrate the declaration of war, his face shining with excitement. Three days later, he volunteered to join the Bavarian army. In the chaos and confusion of the first days of the war, when vast numbers were volunteering, nobody seems to have thought of checking up on whether or not he was a German citizen. He was enlisted on 16 August, and was sent almost immediately to the Western Front. This was, he wrote later, a ‘release from the painful feelings of my youth’. For the first time, he had a mission he could believe in and follow, and a close-knit group of comrades with whom he could identify. His heart ‘overflowed with proud joy’ at the fact that he was now fighting for Germany.¹⁹ For the next four years he remained with his regiment, acting as a dispatch runner, gaining promotion to corporal, and winning two decorations for bravery, the second being the Iron Cross, First Class, on the recommendation, ironically, of a Jewish officer. Shortly afterwards he was caught in a poison-gas attack, a frequent occurrence on both sides in the later stages of the war. Temporarily blinded, he was sent to a military hospital at Pasewalk, in Pomerania in the German north-east, to recover. Here he learned in due course of the German defeat, the Armistice and the Revolution.²⁰

In My Struggle, Hitler described this as ‘the greatest villainy of the century’, the negation of all his hopes, rendering all his sacrifices futile. As he was told the news, ‘everything went black before my eyes’, he tottered back to his dormitory and wept. There is no reason to doubt that it was a terrible trauma for him. The memory of 1918 was to play a central role in all his subsequent thought and action. How had the disaster happened? Searching for an explanation, Hitler seized eagerly on the rapidly spreading story of the ‘stab-in-the-back’. The Jews, whom he already regarded with suspicion and distaste, must have been to blame, he thought. All the inchoate and confused ideas and prejudices he had so far garnered from Schönerer, Lueger, Wagner and the rest now suddenly fell into a coherent, neat and utterly paranoid pattern. Once more, he looked to propaganda as the prime political mover: enemy war propaganda, undermining Germany’s will from without, Jewish, socialist propaganda spreading doubt and defeatism from within. Propaganda, he learned from contemplating the disaster, must always be directed at the masses:

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be ... The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.

And it had to appeal to the emotions rather than to reason, because: ‘The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.’ Finally, propaganda had to be continuous and unvarying in its message. It should never admit a glimmer of doubt in its own claims, or concede the tiniest element of right in the claims of the other side.²¹

Armed with these thoughts - or perhaps earlier, more rudimentary versions of them - Hitler obeyed his superior officer’s orders and went along to the political instruction courses in June 1919 that were to launch him on his political career. The moment was the right one. Munich was a world that in the view of many conservatives had been turned upside down, and it was time to put it the right way up again. Where Prussia had failed, Bavaria could show the way. The whole language of politics in Munich after the overthrow of the Communist regime was permeated by nationalist slogans, antisemitic phrases, reactionary keywords that almost invited the rabid expression of counter-revolutionary sentiment. Hitler was to prove adept as few others were at mastering its cadences and mobilizing the stereotypical images of the enemies of order into an emotionally violent language of extremism.²²