Hitler (12 page)

But fear weighed upon him as oppressively as ever, the fear of sinking to the point of being indistinguishable from the down-and-outs, the antisocial, the proletarians. The “school of life” had taught him to think in terms of catastrophe. Fear was the overwhelming experience of his formative years, and ultimately, as will be seen, the impulse behind the fierce dynamism of his whole life. His apparently consistent views of the world and of people, his harshness and inhumanity, were preponderantly gestures of defense and a compensation for that “frightened manner” which the few witnesses of his early years observed in him. Wherever he looked he saw nothing but symptoms of exhaustion, dissolution, loss and contamination; signs of blood-poisoning, racial submergence, ruin and catastrophe. In this, it is true, he shared the fundamentally pessimistic attitude that was one of the deeper strains of the nineteenth century and cast its shadow over the faith in progress and science which was another aspect of the age. But in the radical extremes to which he carried this feeling, in the thoroughness with which he yielded to these fears, he made them unmistakably his own.

This state of anxiety shows through his explanation of why, after years of drift and daydreaming, he finally left Vienna. His reasons are a strange mélange of Pan-Germanism and sentimentality, but he leads off by expressing his hatred for the city :

 

I was repelled by the conglomeration of races which the capital showed me, repelled by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere, the eternal parasitic fungi of humanity—Jews and more Jews.

To me the giant city seemed the embodiment of racial desecration....

For all these reasons a longing rose stronger and stronger in me, to go at last whither since my childhood secret desires and secret love had drawn me.

I hoped some day to make a name for myself as an architect and thus, on the large or small scale which Fate would allot me, to dedicate my sincere services to the nation.

But finally I wanted to enjoy the happiness of living and working in the place which some day would inevitably bring about the fulfillment of my most ardent and heartfelt wish: the union of my beloved homeland with the common fatherland, the German Reich.
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It is possible that he did have some such yearnings. Other factors of greater or lesser weight conceivably contributed to the decision. He himself later confessed that he had never been able “to learn the Viennese jargon.” He had also decided that the city and Austria as a whole “in the field of cultural and artistic matters... showed all symptoms of degeneration.” Thus there were no opportunities for him as an aspiring architect, and he was simply wasting his time. “The new architecture could achieve no special successes in Austria, if for no other reason because since the completion of the Ring its tasks, in Vienna at least, had become insignificant....”
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But all these reasons were not the decisive ones. What actuated him was once again his repugnance toward normality, his horror of the rules and obligations to which everyone else was subject. In the 1950's the military records pertaining to Adolf Hitler came to light again; in March, 1938, immediately after the invasion of Austria, he had ordered a feverish search for these papers. The documents make it plain beyond a doubt that in moving to Munich he was determined to escape his military obligations. In order to conceal the facts, he registered with the police in Munich as stateless. In
Mein Kampf
he also falsified the date of his departure from Vienna. Actually he left the city not in the spring of 1912, as he maintained, but in May of the following year.

For a time the Austrian authorities searched for him fruitlessly. On August 22, 1913, a Constable Zauner of Linz, who was conducting the investigation, noted: “Adolf Hietler [sic] appears to be registered with the police neither in this city nor in Urfahr, nor can he be located in other places.” Hitler's former guardian, Josef Mayrhofer, could provide no information about his whereabouts; and the two sisters, Angela and Paula, when queried about their brother, declared that they had “known nothing about him since 1908.” Inquiries in Vienna, however, disclosed that he had moved to Munich and was registered there at 34 Schleissheimer Strasse. On the afternoon of January 18, 1914, an official of the criminal police suddenly turned up at this address, arrested the wanted man, and the following day took him to the Austrian consulate.

The charge he faced was serious, and Hitler, after having imagined himself quite safe, was in imminent danger of a prison sentence. This was one of those prosaic incidents which, like so many later ones, might have changed the whole direction of his career. For with the disgrace of draft dodging on his record it was scarcely likely that Hitler could have mobilized a following of millions and created his paramilitary forces.

But again, as was to happen repeatedly, chance came to his aid. The Linz authorities had given him so little time to report that it was impossible for him to obey the summons. A postponement afforded him the opportunity to draw up a carefully calculated written statement. In a letter of several pages to the Linz Magistracy, Section II—the most voluminous and important document of his youth—he attempted to justify his conduct. The letter shows that his spelling and command of German were still deficient. Beyond that, it reveals that his life in Munich had remained as irregular and aimless as it was during his Vienna years.

 

In the summons I am called an artist. Although I am rightly accorded this title, it is nevertheless only conditionally correct. It is true that I earn my living as a free-lance painter, but only, since I am entirely without property (my father was a government official), in order to further my education. I am able to devote only a fraction of my time to earning a living, since I am still training myself as an architectural painter. Therefore my income is a very modest one, just large enough for me to get along.

I submit as evidence of this my tax statement and request you kindly to return this document to me. My income is estimated as 1200 marks, rather too much than too little, and does not mean that I make exactly 100 marks a month. Oh no. My monthly income is extremely variable, but certainly very bad right now, since the art trade sort of goes into its winter sleep around this time in Munich...

 

The explanation he offered for his conduct was extremely flimsy. He had missed his first notice to report but shortly afterward had reported of his own accord, only to have his documents lost in the bureaucratic channels. In lachrymose accents, full of self-pity and a servile cunning, he attempted to excuse the omission on the grounds of his desperate circumstances during his years in Vienna:

 

As far as my sin of omission in the autumn of 1909 is concerned, this was a terribly bitter time for me. I was an inexperienced young man, without any financial aid and also too proud to accept any from anyone, let alone to ask for it. Without any support, dependent on myself alone, the few crowns or often coppers I earned from my works were scarcely sufficient to provide me with a bed. For two years I had no other friend but care and need, no other companion but eternally gnawing hunger. I never knew the beautiful word youth. Today, even after five years, I have the mementos in the form of chilblain sores on my fingers, hands and feet. And yet I cannot recall this period without a certain rejoicing, now that I am after all over the worst. In spite of the greatest misery, in the midst of often more than dubious surroundings, I have always preserved my name unsullied, am altogether blameless before the law, and pure before my own conscience....

 

Some two weeks later, on February 5, 1914, Hitler appeared before the draft board in Salzburg. The record of his physical examination, which the candidate had to sign, and which bears his signature, read: “Unfit for military and auxiliary service; too weak. Incapable of bearing arms.”
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He immediately returned to Munich.

By all indications, Hitler was not altogether unhappy in Munich. He later spoke of the “heartfelt love” this city had inspired in him from his first moment there. This was a phrase that did not normally occur in his vocabulary. He applied it above all to “the wonderful marriage of rustic strength and fine artistic mood, this unique line from the Hofbräuhaus to the Odeon, from the October Fest to the Pinakothek.” Significantly, he does not adduce any political motive to explain his affection. He continued to be solitary, holing up on Schleissheimer Strasse; but he seems to have been as unaware as ever of his lack of human relationships. Actually, he did form a rather tenuous connection with his landlord, the tailor Popp, and with the latter's neighbors and friends, and engaged in a certain amount of socializing and political discussion with them. For the rest, he evidently found in the Schwabing taverns—where origins and status counted for nothing and everyone was socially acceptable—the kind of human contact that was the only kind he could stand because it afforded him closeness and strangeness simultaneously: the loose, chance acquaintanceships over a glass of beer, easily formed and easily lost. These were those “small circles” he later spoke of, where he was considered “educated.” Here, for the first time, he apparently encountered more agreement than disagreement when he expatiated on the shakiness of the Dual Monarchy, the dire potentialities of the German-Austrian Alliance, the antiGerman, pro-Slavic policy of the Hapsburgs, the Jews, or the salvation of the nation. In a milieu that favored outsiders and assumed that eccentric opinions and manners were a sign of genius, such views did not seem peculiar. If a question excited him, he frequently began to shout; but what he said, no matter how excessively he behaved, struck his listeners as consistent. He also liked to predict political developments in prophetic tones.

Later, he declared that by this time he had given up all plans to become a painter and that he painted only enough to earn a living so that he would be able to pursue his studies. For hours he sat over the newspapers in cafes or in the Hofbräuhaus, brooding, sallow, easily irritated. Sometimes, amid the fumes of beer, he dashed down vignettes of the scene around him, or a rendering of an interior in the sketch pad he carried with him. Josef Greiner claims to have met him in Munich at that time and to have asked what he had in mind to do in the future. Hitler answered, Greiner says, “that there would be a war shortly in any case so that it did not matter whether or not he had a profession beforehand, because in the army a corporation director was no more important than a dog barber.”

Hitler's premonition—if Greiner has reported it accurately—was not mistaken. In
Mein Kampf
Hitler has impressively described the earthquake atmosphere of the prewar years, the intangible, almost unendurable feeling of tension on the verge of discharge. It is surely not accidental that these sentences stand out as among the most successful passages in the book, as writing:

As early as my Vienna period, the Balkans were immersed in that livid sultriness which customarily announces the hurricane, and from time to time a beam of brighter light flared up, only to vanish again in the spectral darkness. But then came the Balkan War and with it the first gust of wind swept across a Europe grown nervous. The time which now followed lay on the chests of men like a heavy nightmare, sultry as feverish tropic heat, so that due to constant anxiety the sense of the approaching catastrophe turned at last to longing: let Héaven at last give free rein to the fate which could no longer be thwarted. And then the first mighty lightning flash struck the earth; the storm was unleashed and with the thunder of Heaven there mingled the roar of the World War batteries.
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By chance a photograph has been preserved in which Adolf Hitler can be seen in the cheering crowd on the Odeonsplatz in Munich when the state of war was proclaimed on August 1, 1914. His face is plainly recognizable: the half-open mouth, the burning eyes, which at last have a goal and see a future. For this day liberated him from all the embarrassments, the perplexities, and the loneliness of failure. Describing his own emotions in
Mein Kampf,
he wrote:

 

To me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart.

 

Virtually the whole era shared this emotion; seldom had Europe seemed more unified than it was in the martial frenzy of those August days in 1914. One did not have to be an artistic wastrel with no prospects to regard the day on which the war “broke out and swept away the ‘peace'...” as “beautiful for a sacred moment” and even to feel that it satisfied an “ethical yearning.”
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The whole European world, including Germany, was suffering from profound ennui. The war seemed an opportunity to escape from the miseries of normality. Here again we may see Hitler's intense attunement to his time. He shared its needs and longings, but more sharply, more radically; whereas his contemporaries felt mere discontent, he felt desperation. He hoped that the war would overturn all relationships, all starting points. And wherever the resort to arms was cheered, people sensed, at bottom, that an age was at last coming to its end and a new one was in the making.
Fin de siècle
—that was the formula in which the bourgeois age, with more than a touch of melancholy complacency, summed up this mood of farewell. In keeping with the romanticizing tendencies of the age, the war was viewed as a purification process, the great hope of liberation from mediocrity, weariness with life, and self-disgust. And so the war was hailed in “sacred hymns”; it was described as “the orgasm of universal life,” creating chaos and fructifying it so that the new might be born.
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When Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Minister, declared at the outbreak of the war that the lights were going out all over Europe, he was sorrowing at the end of civilization as he knew it. But there were many who exulted at this end.