Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (9 page)

When the 20-year-old Hitler, who was too weak for physical labour, boasted to his new friend that he had gone to the Academy of Fine Arts, Hanisch hit upon the idea of exploiting Hitler’s artistic talent. He suggested that Hitler paint postcards, which Hanisch would then sell in taverns. They would split the profits. Pressed by his new partner, Hitler asked his aunt Hanni for 50 crowns to buy paint and brushes. Business was better than expected: on 9 February 1910, the two men were able to quit the homeless shelter for a men’s home on Meldemannstrasse 27.
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Hitler would spend his next three years there.

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The men’s home in the working-class district of Brigittenau on the periphery of Vienna was a modern facility for its time, offering its more than 500 residents comfortable accommodation compared with the homeless shelter. Residents did not have to sleep in large halls; instead, every man got a small sleeping chamber with a bed, a table, a bureau and, as a special attraction, electric light. There were also a number of common rooms including a large reading room with a library, where nine newspapers were laid out, and a small “writing room.”
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Hitler sat there during the day, drawing and painting. Mostly he depicted Viennese landmarks such as the Karlskirche, the Stephansdom and the town hall on his postcards which Hanisch sold to tourists and frame-sellers. At 8 p.m. each night, Hitler withdrew to his chamber to devote himself to his autodidactic studies. “I painted to earn money and learned for the joy of it,” he wrote in
Mein Kampf
. “I think the people around me then thought I was an oddball.”
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And indeed the 21-year-old would-be artist was an outsider in the colourful society of the men’s home, in which unmarried workers and small-time clerks lived side by side with dissipated university graduates. Hitler avoided other people’s company. He did not drink or smoke and had little to say when the conversation turned to women. Female visitors were strictly forbidden on Meldemannstrasse as they were in all men’s homes, but Hitler does not seem to have tried to find female companionship anyway. He would have had ample opportunities to do so during his time with Kubizek, who reported that female eyes were always on Hitler whenever the two friends went to the opera. Kubizek had asked himself what the attraction was. Was it Hitler’s “extraordinarily light eyes” or the “strangely strict expression on his ascetic face”? Perhaps, Kubizek concluded, it was Hitler’s “manifest uninterest in the members of the opposite sex” that had made women “want to test this male source of resistance.”
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Whatever the reasons may have been, the young Hitler was an ascetic within the erotically charged atmosphere of pre-war Vienna, in which Arthur Schnitzler’s sex-themed play
La Ronde
and Klimt’s explicit paintings caused such scandals. But there is no plausible reason to conclude that Hitler was attracted to men and was unable to acknowledge his true inclinations.
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He had no shortage of potential contacts of this sort in his time in the men’s home, but there is not the slightest indication of any homosexual orientation.

Paying prostitutes to initiate him into the ways of love, as was common among men of his age from middle-class backgrounds, was out of the question for Hitler: according to Kubizek, he was terrified of contracting syphilis.
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Perhaps Hitler was following his role model Schönerer, who recommended that male members of the pan-Germanic movement remain celibate until they were 25. “Nothing is more beneficial to young people than extended celibacy,” Schönerer argued. “It trains every muscle, makes the eyes gleam, quickens the wits, refreshes the memory, inspires the imagination and fortifies the will. With this feeling of strength, one sees the world, as it were, through a colourful prism.”
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If Hitler stuck to such a vow of celibacy, which seems likely, he would have still been a virgin when he left Vienna at the age of 24.
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We can only speculate about the consequences of Hitler’s dormant sex life. Perhaps it was connected to his aversion, recognisable from a young age, to physical contact with others and his idealised views of women such as we encountered in his silent love for Stefanie in Linz. Possibly it was one cause of the short-temperedness from which Kubizek had suffered so much during their time together. But many men and women at the turn of the century suffered from nervousness—or as doctors fashionably called it, “neurasthenia.” This had less to do with repressed sexuality than with the enormous acceleration of every aspect of daily life thanks to modern means of transport and communication.
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The business partners Hanisch and Hitler soon quarrelled. To keep both their heads above water, Hitler had to paint a postcard a day. But sometimes he preferred to read the newspaper or take part in political discussions in the reading room. He needed to be in the “proper mood for artistic creation,” Hitler said whenever Hanisch nagged him to get on with his painting.
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Hanisch also resented the fact that Hitler increasingly befriended another resident of the men’s home, a 31-year-old copper-polisher from a Jewish family named Josef Neumann, who peddled wares of various sorts. Neumann also sold Hitler’s paintings, putting him in direct competition with Hanisch. In June 1910, Hitler disappeared with Neumann from the men’s home, only to return five days later.
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Quite possibly the two men had tried to establish an economic existence elsewhere. If so, the plan had quickly failed and, in July, Neumann informed the authorities that he was leaving Vienna. Hitler was forced to depend on Hanisch.

Nonetheless, the two fell out for good a few weeks later. Hitler accused Hanisch of cheating him out of the price of two paintings, and an acquaintance of his from the men’s home officially filed charges against Hanisch. On 5 August 1910, Hitler testified at the Brigittenau police station that “For roughly two weeks, Hanisch has not returned to the men’s home, taking with him a painting by me entitled ‘Parliament,’ which was worth 50 crowns, and a watercolour worth 9 crowns.”
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Hanisch was given seven days in jail, in part because he had registered in another men’s home in mid-July under a false name. From that point on, Hitler sold his paintings himself, primarily doing business with two Jewish owners of picture-framing and art shops, Jakob Altenberg and Samuel Morgenstern. They paid so well that Hitler was finally able to stand on his own two feet.
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In late March 1911, Hitler’s aunt Johanna died, and the family learned that he had received large sums of money from her. Angela Raubal, whose husband had died the previous year and who was now forced to support not only her own three children but also Hitler’s sister on a widow’s pension, took the chance to claim the entirety of the orphans’ benefit, which had previously been split between Adolf and Paula. In early May, Hitler was summoned at the behest of the district court in Linz to appear before the Leopoldstadt district court in Vienna. There he declared that he was able to support himself and agreed that the entire orphans’ pension should be given to his sister.
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This statement is one of the few documents we have concerning Hitler in 1911 and 1912. He then reappears in 1913, in an account by a man named Karl Honisch who lived in the men’s home for a few months and wrote extensively about his time there for the NSDAP main archive in 1939.
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In this account, Hitler seemed strangely frozen in time. Honisch described him sitting at his familiar working spot in the window arch of the writing room: “Slight of build, with drawn cheeks and a dark shock of hair that kept falling down his forehead, dressed in a worn-out dark suit, he worked diligently from early in the morning until late afternoon.”
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No one even thought of occupying Hitler’s customary spot. He had become something of a fixture in the men’s home, respected and even admired by the others for his painting skills. “We were proud to have an artist among our ranks,” recalled Honisch, who in 1939 was of course at pains to present Hitler in a positive light.
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Hitler was a “friendly and likeable fellow” who “showed an interest in the travails of all the others” while taking care “not to get too close to anyone.” For that reason, the others were careful not to take “liberties.”
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Hitler, as Honisch presented it, rarely revealed much of himself. When he did, it was because the discussion turned to politics, and he felt compelled to take a stand within the small circle of “intelligentsia” in the men’s home. “On such occasions he would stand up, toss his brush or pencil across the table and state his views with a fiery temperament, not shying away from strong expressions,” Honisch recalled. “His eyes flashed, and he would jerk his head back to keep the shock of hair out of his forehead.” At the end of such outbursts, Hitler would suddenly fall silent and sit back down at his easel with a resigned gesture, “as if to say, ‘What a shame that I wasted my words on you since you don’t understand them.’ ”
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Hitler was particularly prone to anger when the talk was of “the Reds and the Jesuits”—Social Democrats and Catholics. Honisch did not recall Hitler making any anti-Semitic statements, however. So what was his attitude towards Jews at this point?

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Hitler was no anti-Semite when he arrived in Vienna. The recollections of Dr. Bloch are more plausible on this score than those of Kubizek, who claimed that Hitler had held anti-Semitic opinions even back in Linz.
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In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler himself wrote that he was first converted to Jew-hatred in Vienna: “At that time, I underwent the greatest internal upheaval I have ever experienced. I went from cosmopolitan weakling to fanatic anti-Semite.”
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Most of Hitler’s biographers have taken this statement at face value, for it seems plausible that Hitler’s obsession with Jews was a compensatory mechanism for his failure as an artist. Joachim Fest, for instance, writes that “his previously vagabond hatred…had finally found an object.”
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But the historian Brigitte Hamann has shown that Hitler’s account was just one of the many legends with which the demagogue, writing in the early 1920s, tried to suggest that his world view had developed in a straight line. Hitler did not experience an anti-Semitic epiphany in Vienna. The reality is far murkier than historians have traditionally assumed.
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One thing is certain: Hitler would not have been able to avoid contact with anti-Jewish movements during his Vienna years. The Austrian capital in the early twentieth century was a major stomping ground for anti-Semites. In particular, the immigration of Jews from eastern Europe had given rise to fears that Vienna was being “Jewified,” and the successes enjoyed by some of these immigrants, who knew the value of education and worked hard to climb the social ladder, elicited envy and resentment among many native Viennese.
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Numerous politicians played on anti-Semitic sentiments. Hitler’s idol Schönerer combined his fight on behalf of “Germanity” with a racial anti-Semitism previously unknown in Austria. Lueger, too, was not above employing slogans like “Greater Vienna must not become Greater Jerusalem” or pillorying the “Jewish press.”
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It would have been unusual if such sentiments had no influence whatsoever on the young Hitler.

Fin-de-siècle
Vienna was fertile ground for crass racist theories. Pan-Germanic newspapers and pamphlets discussed the obscure teachings of Guido von List, who divided humanity into Aryan “masters” and the non-Aryan “herd,” as well as the fantasies about racist breeding put forward by List’s disciple Joseph Adolf (Jörg) Lanz von Liebenfels. In 1906, Lanz founded
Ostara
, “the first and only journal devoted to the researching and cultivation of the master race and its dominance.”
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Hitler read the
Alldeutsches Tageblatt
(Pan-German Daily), whose offices were located not far from Stumpergasse, and it is likely that he was also acquainted with
Ostara
. But although Lanz later claimed to have “given Hitler his ideas,” we do not know what sort of influence the journal may have had on the future dictator.
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Without doubt, part of the poisoned legacy of Hitler’s Vienna years was that, in the course of his autodidactic studies, he was introduced to the broad repertoire of anti-Semitic clichés and prejudices popular among local nationalists and racists. But this doesn’t mean that he already identified with them.

On the contrary, Hitler had no problems in his day-to-day interactions with the Jewish residents of the men’s home, and he even maintained something approaching a friendship with Neumann. “Neumann was a good-hearted fellow who liked Hitler a lot and whom Hitler greatly respected,” recalled Hanisch.
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Among Hitler’s Jewish acquaintances in the men’s home were the locksmith’s assistant Simon Robinson, who occasionally gave Hitler small sums of money, and the salesman Siegfried Löffner, who helped Hitler peddle his postcards. The fact that Hitler sold his pictures to Jewish merchants also argues against the notion that he already felt a strong antipathy towards Jews. Hanisch was probably being truthful when he asserted: “Hitler was by no means a Jew-hater in those days—that came later.”
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This statement is backed up by the recollection of an anonymous man from Brünn who resided at the home in early 1912: “Hitler got along well with Jews. Once he said that they were a clever people who stuck together better than the Germans.”
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