Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (10 page)

At the same time, Hitler’s statements about Jews, as quoted by Hanisch, were very contradictory. On the one hand, he praised Jews for being the first civilised nation because they had done away with polytheism in favour of belief in a single god. He also praised charitable Jewish organisations in Vienna, from which he as a pauper had personally benefited, dismissed anti-Semitic claims that Jews carried out ritual murder, and defended the cultural achievements of Jews like the poet Heinrich Heine and the composer Gustav Mahler. On the other hand, he once supposedly answered the question of why Jews always remained foreigners in whatever nation they lived by saying that they were “a race unto themselves.” He also occasionally remarked that Jews “smelled different.”
⁸⁶
Thus Hitler seems to have shared some of the anti-Semitic prejudices and clichés that abounded in German nationalist circles, but he was a long way away from the paranoid Jew-hatred that would become the centrepiece of his political activity. By no means did he have a “closed world view” or strict anti-Semitic convictions, so contrary to what his first biographer Konrad Heiden concluded, Hitler—or at least the public persona of “Hitler”—was anything but a finished product by the end of his Vienna years.
⁸⁷
He would have to have further dramatic, life-changing experiences before he became an obsessive anti-Semitic demagogue lecturing in Munich’s beer halls.

—

Hitler did not attract any attention with radical views in the coffee house he began to frequent in his final weeks in Vienna. On the contrary, the owner, Maria Wohlrab, later described him as a serious, introverted young man who read a lot and did not say much. Occasionally a woman came with him, and on his last visit, she was quoted as saying, “Dolfi, go to Germany.”
⁸⁸
It is doubtful that, thirty years after the fact, Wohlrab was able to remember her reticent customer quite as well as she made out, but Hitler had talked in the men’s home about his desire to emigrate to Germany. He found Munich, the Bavarian capital, particularly alluring. There, he thought, he would be able to develop his artistic talent better than in Vienna, and he was attracted by the city’s galleries with their impressive art collections. But first he had to wait for his twenty-fourth birthday on 20 April 1913 so he could claim his paternal inheritance. The original sum of 652 crowns in 1903 had grown into 819 crowns, 98 hellers—a sizeable amount of money indeed. The district court in Linz paid it out to Hitler on 16 May.
⁸⁹

Hitler spent the days that followed busily preparing for his move. He bought new clothes and told the authorities in Vienna that he was leaving the city. On 25 May he was on a train to Munich. Travelling with him was a 20-year-old apprentice pharmacist named Rudolf Häusler, who had moved into the men’s home in February 1913. The two probably became close because Häusler’s biography recalled Hitler’s own. Häusler came from a well-situated Viennese family, but had got thrown out of school for playing a youthful prank, whereupon his strict father had banned him from the family home. Hitler, who was four years older, had taken him under his wing, introduced him to the world of Wagner’s operas and persuaded him to come along to Munich. As he had previously done for Kubizek, Hitler had convinced Häusler’s mother Ida, who remained devoted to her son, to let him go.
⁹⁰
Upon arriving in Munich, Hitler and Häusler rented a small room in the fourth-floor apartment of the tailor Joseph Popp on Schleissheimerstrasse 34, on the edge of the bohemian Schwabing district. When he registered himself with the residence authorities on 29 May 1913, Hitler listed his occupation as “artistic painter.” Under the rubric “expected length of stay,” he wrote “2 years.”
⁹¹
The new arrival thus intended to remain in Munich for the foreseeable future.

Looking back in 1924 on his time before the First World War, Hitler positively gushed about Munich.
⁹²
Many aspects of the Bavarian capital could hardly fail to appeal to the young man. By the start of the twentieth century, Munich had become known as the “Athens on the Isar River,” a major cultural metropolis that attracted growing numbers of painters, sculptors and writers.
⁹³
Hitler was not interested at all in the avant-garde of the
Blaue Reiter
school around Vassily Kandinsky, but he was drawn to the Alte Pinothek with its collection of old masters, the Neue Pinothek, which contained the private collection of Ludwig I of Bavaria, and the Count Adolf Friedrich von Schack collection, which included works by Hitler’s favourite Böcklin, Anselm Feuerbach, Carl Spitzweg and the late Romantic Moritz von Schwind.
⁹⁴
He was also impressed by Munich’s imposing architecture and its grand boulevards. In
Mein Kampf
he rhapsodised about the “magic” of the royal Munich Residenz, “that wonderful marriage of primeval strength and fine artistic sentiment.”
⁹⁵

Hitler apparently also felt quite at home in the bohemian milieu of Schwabing with its vivid mixture of determined artists and eccentric do-gooders. The anarchist writer Erich Mühsam once described Schwabing’s population as “painters, sculptors, poets, models, slackers, philosophers, founders of new religions, revolutionaries, reformers, sexual ethicists, psychoanalysts, musicians, architects, people who do arts and crafts, runaway daughters from respectable families, eternal students, the diligent and the lazy, those hungry for and tired of life, people with bushy locks and dapperly parted hair.”
⁹⁶
Among this cast of eccentrics the introverted, peculiar young Hitler did not stand out, and he could give in to his disinclination towards regular working hours and his fondness for daydreaming. Like many of the regulars at Café Stefanie, nicknamed Café Megalomania, Hitler believed he had a higher calling without knowing precisely what it was or how it could be achieved.

In one of his later monologues, Hitler talked about what he called his “decision to keep working as an autodidact”: “I went to Munich with joy in my heart. I intended to keep learning for three more years and then, when I turned 28, to become a draughtsman at Heilmann and Littmann [a major construction company]. I would have taken part in the first competition, and I told myself that, then, people would see that this fellow had talent.”
⁹⁷
In reality, Hitler did nothing concrete in Munich to prepare himself for a career as an architectural draughtsman. Instead, he continued to pursue his chosen lifestyle. Every two or three days he would paint a picture. As had been the case in Vienna, these were mostly copies of postcards featuring famous city landmarks—the Hofbräuhaus, the Feldherrnhalle, the Frauenkirche, the Alte Hof or the Theathinerkirche. He would then try to sell his works in shops and beer gardens.

The Munich doctor Hans Schirmer recalled that one evening in the Hofbräuhaus garden, a “modest-looking young man who seemed to have been through a lot” approached his table and tried to sell him an oil painting. Schirmer did not have enough money on him, so he asked Hitler to come to his apartment the next day, where he ordered two further works, which Hitler promptly delivered. “I concluded that this man had to work very hard in order to earn money for the basic necessities,” Schirmer remembered.
⁹⁸
Gradually, Hitler built up a set of loyal customers, from whom he could earn a reasonable living.

But on 18 January 1914, Hitler was abruptly ripped from his cosy, bohemian existence. An officer from the Munich criminal police appeared at the Schleissheimerstrasse apartment and handed Hitler a letter from the magistrate’s office in Linz ordering him to appear in two days’ time for military examination.
⁹⁹
As someone born in 1889, Hitler should have registered for the draft in the late autumn of 1909 and submitted to an examination in the spring of 1910, but he had done neither. One likely reason why Hitler left Vienna was to avoid these duties. “Illegally absent because whereabouts unknown,” read his file in Linz. Since August 1913, police there had been trying to track Hitler down, and in mid-January 1914 they succeeded. On 19 January, he was taken to the Austro-Hungarian general consulate in Munich. Only now did Hitler realise that he was in serious trouble: refusing to appear for the draft carried a penalty of four weeks to one year of imprisonment and a fine of 2,000 crowns.

Hitler must have got a nasty shock. On 21 January, he wrote a letter justifying his behaviour. It was three and a half pages, quite long by Hitler’s standards, and represents the most extensive surviving sample of his early handwriting.
¹⁰⁰
In it, he admitted to not registering in Linz in 1909, but claimed that he had done so in Vienna in February 1910 but had never heard anything further from the authorities. That laid the blame on bureaucratic negligence: it had “never occurred to him” to attempt to evade military service. He also tried to win over the magistrate in Linz with an extensive and sometimes exaggerated description of his years of privation in Vienna:

Despite great desperation, amidst often more than dubious company, I kept my name respectable and remained entirely guiltless in the eyes of the law and untroubled by my own conscience except for my failure to register for military service, which I was not even aware of. That is all I feel responsible for. I would ask to be allowed to pay a small sum of money to atone for this and declare myself willing to do so.

Hitler also asked to be examined in Salzburg, which was closer to Munich, rather than Linz. The general consulate passed on Hitler’s letter to the Linz magistrate, noting that it was “well worth taking into consideration,” and Hitler got what he wanted. On 5 February 1914, he was given a military examination in Salzburg and was deemed “unsuitable for combat and support duty, too weak, incapable of firing weapons.”
¹⁰¹
Hitler was then allowed to return to Munich.

Häusler had moved out of their shared room when Hitler was away. In all likelihood, he could no longer bear living in such close confines with a room-mate who read until the early hours and liked to hold forth. But Hitler seems to have had little difficulty paying the entire rent on his own. He continued to frequent the cafés of Schwabing, although he did not make any close friends. Nor did he establish contact with any of the local chapters of ultranationalist organisations like the Pan-Germanic League, which was the largest of its kind in Wilhelmine Germany and had an influential spokesman in the publisher Julius F. Lehmann. His landlady characterised Hitler as a reticent young man who had secluded himself in his room “like a hermit” and refused all invitations to eat dinner together, saying that he had to work.
¹⁰²

Hitler’s lack of social contact was the external symptom of a deep inner uncertainty. Having spent a year in Munich, he had to admit that he had made no progress and that his precarious existence as “artistic painter” did not offer many prospects for the future. But out of nowhere the beginning of the First World War in early August 1914 would release him from his frustrating lack of prospects.

3

The Experience of War

“As probably was the case for every German, the most unforgettable and exciting time in my life had begun,” Hitler wrote rather melodramatically in
Mein Kampf
. “Everything previous paled into nothingness compared to the events of this giant struggle.”
¹
The First World War was Hitler’s defining experience and marks a caesura in his life. Having failed to achieve his lofty artistic ambitions, after seven years of privations, disappointments and rejections, the 25-year-old loner finally thought he had found a way out of his disoriented, useless existence. Hitler would never have developed as he did had he not fought in the First World War, and it was the war that made his political career possible in the first place.
²

On 28 June 1914, when Hitler heard the news that the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife had been assassinated in Sarajevo, he was sitting, as was his wont, over his books in his room on Schleissheimerstrasse. Given the tense situation in Europe, and in particular the drastically deteriorating relationship between Austria–Hungary and Serbia over the previous years, Hitler had no doubt that “a stone had begun to roll and there was no stopping it.”
³
He was hardly alone in thinking that a major European conflict was inevitable. People all the way up to the highest echelons of political and military power in Wilhelmine Germany shared that view. In point of fact, however, war could have been averted in July 1914, had the Reich leadership in Berlin, urged on by military commanders, not decided to use the assassination as a pretext for a test of strength with the Triple Entente of France, Britain and Russia. The aim was to drive apart the powers “encircling” Germany and alter the European balance of power in the Reich’s favour. On 5 and 6 July, not only did Germany assure its ally Austria–Hungary of its complete support in the event of military action against Serbia; Berlin also encouraged Vienna to respond quickly and with determination. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg was all too aware that Germany was incurring a tremendous risk in issuing Austria–Hungary such a blank cheque. “Military action against Serbia could lead to a world war,” he admitted on the evening of 6 July to an intimate, Foreign Ministry Legation Secretary Kurt Riezler.
⁴