By the spring of 1902, though he had failed his first year and was barely passing his second year in the same grade, the young Adolf Hitler had many reasons to be proud of himself. Though he had only just turned thirteen, he had already successfully stood up to the four strongest forces in a preteen-ager’s life: (1) the authority of the family; (2) the demands of school and society; (3) the pressure of his peers; and (4) his own inner fears and insecurities. Further, he had, by this young age, not only found but already set out on his own unique course, alone and unsupported in his choice by anyone.
Let us consider these four forces more specifically in order to grasp their importance for a boy at this age. He had stood up against his father’s demands as to a career despite the most intense pressures and most severe canings, and he had not once given in. Let us further note that, according to August Kubizek, Adolf’s mother supported the father in his goals for the boy, if not his methods.[1] Thus Adolf had no support within the home for his ambitions. In regard to the demands of society that he must obtain an education, Adolf deliberately changed from being one of the best students to one of the worst. He did this based on his firm belief—unusual by any standard for a boy so young—that he did not want what school and society had to offer him. It undoubtedly took exceptional courage for him to set himself against all the pressures that school and society can exert on a boy to conform to expectations. He himself knew the cost of making such a choice, yet he never wavered from the course he had set for himself of non-acquiescence and non-cooperation.
The third force he successfully rebuffed was peer pressure. Though failing a grade in school marked a boy in the eyes of his peers, Adolf never complained to his classmates that he was being treated unfairly or unjustly. He coolly decided that he did not care what his peers thought. They were nothing but “future civil servants.” He sought neither their friendship nor approval. He behaved the same way toward his teachers. In any normally constituted boy of his age, such isolation would have elicited the deepest insecurities and fears for his future. But Adolf endured without support from any quarter, and he persisted in his course without crying or complaining and without asking for sympathy or help from anyone.
Adolf decided to become an artist, a painter. No one in his home or school environment suggested this to him or encouraged him in it. Though he may have had only the haziest idea of what being an artist might entail, he molded not only his hopes and dreams but also his daily life around this goal.
What could have been the resources upon which the young Adolf might have drawn to give him the strength to stand against all of these forces, and the stamina to pursue his lonely course? Almost all historians, biographers, and psychologists who have examined this period of Hitler’s life have sought to explain it in terms of weakness—some illness, trauma, or psychological maladjustment that would have caused him to fail, to isolate himself, and to drop out of school. But if the picture I have drawn is a fair representation of the facts and situation he faced at this time, then what needs to be explained is not his weakness but his strength.
The facts suggest that Adolf Hitler was an extraordinary boy. Let us, therefore, attempt to analyze the facts logically. Abductive logic suggests that the facts, by which I mean the will power, strength, and stamina displayed by Hitler in the face of all the forces arrayed against him, are the “effects” of an antecedent cause or causes. Based upon an examination of these effects, the task that presents itself is to form a hypothesis that would be competent to explain them.
I offer the hypothesis that the young Adolf’s strength and determination to pursue his lonely course in the face of all the forces and pressures ranged against him were derived from three ideas held together by a very different logic. These three ideas were: (1) Adolf’s idea of “greatness” that had been growing in his mind ever since his rejection of the department store world; (2) the idea of history that in Mein Kampf he attributed to his teacher, Leopold Poetsch; and (3) the example of Old Shatterhand in the novels of Karl May, from whom he learned a method of survival in a strange and hostile world.
No single one of these ideas, nor even the three in combination, would have been sufficient. Indeed, it may be argued that these three ideas are not related to one another—by which I mean that they are not logically derived from nor logically dependent on one another according to normal deductive and inductive reasoning. But there is a strange and singular logic—a third form of logic—by which each of these ideas was fused with the other. In Hitler’s mind, this strange logic permeated these ideas so that they mutually reinforced one another, despite the conflict at home, his isolation from friends, and his rebellious failure at school, to give him complete inner peace—“immutable” confidence in the rightness of his course[2] —and the strength and determination to pursue it.
The underlying logic to which I refer was called, when it initially appeared, “The Method of Zadig” by Voltaire and Thomas Henry Huxley. It led Zadig to leave home and city so that he might study in an entirely new way never taught in the schools, but which nonetheless gave him powers that astonished the king of Babylon and caused the magi to want to have him burned as a sorcerer. Edgar Allan Poe had called it the “faculty of analysis” and the “abstractly logical”—a form of reasoning that conferred upon Dupin seemingly “praeternatural” powers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called it a form of “backward reasoning,” which gave Sherlock Holmes astonishing abilities. Today, thanks to Charles Saunders Peirce, we know the powers described in each of these cases as the logic of abduction.
In none of these authors—Voltaire, Poe, Huxley, Doyle, or May—was the logic taught in schools. This third form of logic was left for isolated individuals to find on their own. When it was found and grasped by the mind of an isolated individual, it had the power to form a unique character, e.g., Zadig, Dupin, Holmes, and Old Shatterhand. Hitler was one of those who discovered its power. Let us now explore how the three ideas of the young Adolf Hitler were tied together by abductive logic.
When Konrad Heiden reviewed Adolf Hitler’s entire life, he said it was the working out of a single ideal. That ideal held that there was greatness in the world. In the vast panorama of everyday life—what the young Adolf called the “department store world”—Hitler struggled against all that was “ordinary” and “everyday” in order to seek the “extraordinary.” He made the search for greatness the goal and purpose of everything he thought and did. Konrad Heiden saw this quest for greatness as the most deep-seated and essential element in Hitler’s character, which he describes as Hitler’s “flight into greatness”:
Hitler’s whole career was designed according to a principle that has carried him high and far, which in the most impossible and difficult situations sometimes opened up to him escapes which ordinary men would not have found; but which sometimes, without a firm brake, would have smashed him to bits. That life principle might be designated as “flight into greatness.” . . . [This] was Hitler’s decisive realization.[3]
Thus Adolf Hitler’s first idea arose from his rejection of ordinary life. It prepared him for the conflict with his father and undergirded his opposition to a civil service career. It furnished the basis for his refusal to study in Realschule, and it was why he decided to become an artist. Hitler had early “conceived a picture of himself,” writes Heiden, and his whole life consisted in “constantly mixing the colors for this picture.”[4] But though the colors changed, the picture always remained the same. “The image of the great man always hovers like a model and catchword before his inner eye. He always tries to act as in his opinion the image would act.”[5] From his earliest youth, this image became his “way out of the difficulties, defeats [and] insignificance of his private life.”[6] Thus, “flight into greatness” became the bedrock of his life. “Flight into the great image has from early youth been this man’s answer to all of life’s enmity,” writes Heiden.[7]
The logic that connects this idea of greatness with his life at this time is the logic that distinguishes between the ordinary and the extraordinary. In deduction, the fundamental distinction for the operation of the logic is between universals and particulars. In induction, it is between the generalizable and the testable. In abductive logic, the distinction is between the ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary is what is normal and expected. There is no need to form a new hypothesis to explain what is normal and expected; it is normal because one already has reason to expect it. Abduction only operates when something occurs that is not normal and not expected, when something surprising and out of the ordinary takes place. In other words, the only proper object and distinction relevant to abduction is the extraordinary.[8]
Let us now explore the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary may be defined as that which is: (1) expected and unsurprising when it occurs; (2) normal, usual, routine, and “everyday”; and (3) undistinguished, mediocre, unimpressive, unimaginative, uninteresting, dull, inconsequential, insignificant, trivial, or vulgar. The extraordinary, on the other hand, may be defined as that which is: (1) unexpected and surprising when it occurs; (2) exceptional, rare, and singular; and (3) great, superior, impressive, imaginative, important, consequential, or significant.
The distinctions that I have provided so far are primarily definitional. There is little logical content to them except the opposition of their terms. However, definition becomes a matter of logical analysis as soon as one goes behind the terms to inquire into the causes of the distinction. What is it, logically, that causes one thing to appear to be ordinary and another to be extraordinary? This is really a one-sided question; what is ordinary is taken for granted, what is extra-ordinary stands out. Only the appearance of the extraordinary is subject to abductively logical inquiry.
By the age of nine, the young Adolf’s mind had divided the world into these two categories: the ordinary and the extraordinary. This is the first prerequisite to becoming an abductive reasoner, i.e., turning away from or disregarding what is ordinary and looking for the extraordinary. This is not yet abductive reasoning; it is only a prerequisite to it. But by age eleven it was sufficient for the young Adolf to differentiate himself from the goals and aspirations of his father, his classmates, his teachers, school, and society. From the time he entered Realschule, he was determined to be and to do that which was not expected of him. By definition, he became extraordinary.
Over a period of five years, however, from the time he first reacted against the dullness and ordinariness of the department store world in 1897, until he decided to become an artist in 1902, the young Adolf was being led by the inevitable logic of his position to ask certain questions. He wanted to escape the ordinary, everyday world and wanted to find an exceptional one. This engaged his logical faculty. It was not enough merely to define himself as different. Abductively, he had to form a hypothesis to explain what causes the extraordinary to occur. This was essential to understand himself, what he had done, and where he was going. If he wanted to be outside of the ordinary world, he had to find a way to make greatness happen. For, logically, greatness is not a quality that inheres in a person or object; rather, it is an event that unexpectedly happens, something that breaks through ordinary reality. What is the cause of great events, and how can the great man cause them to happen?
In order to answer that question, the mind of the young Adolf moved “backward.” He was in the ordinary world, and he did not like it. He began backing away from it by age eight or nine. This direction is important logically. For he did not move “forward” in his situation by accepting it. He moved backward in order to explain it. This raised the question: Where was he? When he moved back, away from the ordinary world, where did he find himself? Logically, he again looked backward to try to find some basis on which to exist outside of the ordinary, everyday world. The question that he asked could be phrased like this: looking away from the ordinary world that was offering him a future, he wanted to find something that was not part of that proffered future.
He had first found it in the childhood games of which he was so fond. These were the real “battlefields on which the ‘conflicts’ which exist everywhere in life were decided.” The games were his earliest insight into rebellion against the ordinary, everyday, workaday world, and he formed his character around them. As Joachim Fest writes, “He always saw everything as child’s play.”[9] But when, at the age of ten, he faced the question about the rest of his life—the choice of schools, and his father’s demand that he become a civil servant—he had to find a more substantial place outside of ordinary life.
Hitler’s answer was art. Konrad Heiden correctly identifies the logic that led Hitler to want to become an artist. For, Heiden writes, Hitler saw art as the “struggle of the great man against the dull resistance of the world.”[10] Rejection of the ordinary world leads to the extraordinary. The extraordinary man creates his own world, and that is a work of art and a form of greatness. Thus, he was led to the recognition that his act of rejecting the department store world was an event that caused him to be both an artist and a great man. It was, as both August Kubizek and Konrad Heiden observed, the “great decision” of his life. In other words, he reasoned backward from the evidence of his mental act of rejecting the ordinary world to infer that he was great. His act of rejecting the ordinary world was in itself art. It is art, Hitler said, “that distinguishes the noble men from the common herd.”[11] Therefore, it was only logical that he, in his rejection of the department store world, was both a great man and an artist.
Adolf had found the source of greatness. Greatness consisted in the desire—and the decision—to escape the ordinary, department store world. Thus art confirmed who he was. But this led to the next logical question. Greatness is not simply being. Great men cause the unexpected to occur; great men cause great things to happen. What is great, therefore, is not what exists in a person, but what he causes to happen outside of himself, i.e., the effects he causes. This logically led the young Adolf to the ideas about history that he was learning at this time.
Hitler was once asked to identify the most revealing statement that he made about himself in Mein Kampf. Without hesitation he replied: “A short sentence at the beginning of the book in which I say that as a youth I learned the meaning of history.”[12] The statement to which Hitler refers is found on page 10 of Mein Kampf, and reads: “If now, after so many years, I examine the results of this period [i.e., his years in Realschule], I regard two outstanding facts as particularly significant.” One of these was: “I learned to understand and to grasp the meaning of history.”[13]
If we accept Hitler at his word, this statement can be viewed, according to ordinary logic, as pretentious. History has many meanings, and Hitler surely had not read them all.[14] But if the statement is looked at abductively, it points to what Hitler had learned the meaning of history to be for him. As soon as his statement is analyzed this way, it becomes very revealing, because four pages later in Mein Kampf, Hitler defines precisely what it means for him: “To ‘learn’ history means to seek and find the forces which are the causes leading to the effects which we subsequently perceive as historical events.”[15]
Like his statement that he had learned the meaning of history, his definition of what that meaning is, is also one of his most personally revealing statements. The key word in this statement is “effects.” Hitler saw history as the record of the creation of extraordinary effects. History is not the recording of everything; that which is “ordinary” is insignificant. History is only the recording of what occurred that was not ordinary. Peirce once defined ancient history as “simply the narrative of all the unlikely events that happened.”[16] Thus, to understand history abductively is to be able to identify “the forces which are the causes” of extraordinary events. To Hitler, therefore, the “learning of history” meant to understand how great men, by rejecting the ordinary world, found the forces to make extraordinary things happen. That was the young Hitler’s understanding of history—and the most personally revealing statement about himself.
Note, too, the last clause of Hitler’s definition of learning history: “which are subsequently perceived as historical events.” Events are historical only to the extent that they are “perceived” as extraordinary. The learning of history, therefore, meant for Hitler an insight into how to cause events to happen that will be “perceived” as extraordinary, and, therefore, will be recorded as history. For Hitler, perception was reality, and to enter history meant to create effects.
Thus for Hitler history did not mean the establishment of the historical record of the facts about the past. Rather, understanding history for him was an exercise in abduction, i.e., in forming hypotheses about how “great men” utilized the forces of their time in order to cause extraordinary effects.
Looking at history this way, Hitler saw history not as facts, nor even as story, but as revealing the secrets of power. History was to him instruction in what “great men” did in order to cause extraordinary effects. Learning history was, therefore, not about the past, but about the present and future. What he meant was that if one understood how history had been made in the past, then one could “make” history in the present and future. In practical terms, Hitler’s understanding of history meant that he had found a way to make a future that was an alternative to the future offered by school and ordinary society. Two pages later in Mein Kampf, he explains that this was precisely what he meant:
The habit of historical thinking which I thus learned in school never left me in the intervening years. To an ever-increasing extent world history became for me an inexhaustible source of understanding for the historical events of the present; in other words, for politics. I do not want to ‘learn’ it, I want it to instruct me.[17] (Emphases added.)
This is a theme repeated throughout Mein Kampf: “The purpose of studying history,” he writes in book 1, chapter 3, “is precisely its lesson for the present.”[18] Again, in book 2, chapter 3, he writes, “For we do not learn history just in order to know the past, we learn history in order to find an instructor for the future.”[19] Thus, for Hitler, the understanding of history in no way meant an understanding of the nature of Man, nor even an understanding of humanity as a story. It meant finding the method that would enable him to do extraordinary things. History was the means to learn the technique of greatness. “For,” as Joachim Fest observes, “Hitler’s rationality was always limited to methodology.”[20]
Hitler once said of himself, “All I say or do belongs to history.”[21] This followed logically from the view of himself he had formed by the age of sixteen, when he left school. He had rebelled against the ordinary world. This proved him to be a great man. Everything he said or did was the action of a great man. Therefore, everything he said or did was intended to be extraordinary. He intended that everything he said or did to be “subsequently perceived as an historical event.”
In this light, it is significant that the first close friend Hitler made at the time he entered politics, the only man who used the familiar “du” in speaking to him long after Hitler had became Der Fuehrer, was Ernst Roehm. Ernst Roehm had a philosophy of politics and history nearly identical to Hitler’s. “I divide people,” Roehm once said, “into two classes—those who raise revolts and those who don’t raise revolts.”[22]
Hitler’s idea of “greatness” and his idea of history were not two separate ideas, but melded into one idea. “History” was the record of the happening of extraordinary events, and “greatness” was conferred on those who made them happen. Thus all of Hitler’s thinking begins with his movement backward and away from the ordinary world and with his determination to create “history,” which he perceived as the creation of extraordinary events.
Let us now review the backward nature of Hitler’s thought process. At an early age he had looked at the adult world and at the future he was headed for. He did not like it, and backed away from it. He then found himself outside the ordinary world, cut off from family, friends, school, and society. He once again looked back, to see what was behind the strange world in which he now found himself. He found that those who struggled against the ordinary world were artists and great men. He then logically moved back farther and asked: What is the source of (in other words, what is behind) the art of great men? He discovered that it is their ability to create extraordinary effects.
Ernst Nolte observes that “[t]he dominant trait in Hitler’s personality was infantilism.”[23] I believe that Nolte is correct. Hitler made a conscious decision that he would not grow up and become a responsible adult in an ordinary world. He backed away from it. He further developed an alternative path: creating a dream world of special effects. This, too, has a childish element to it. But, whatever the psychological basis of this infantile trait, the importance of it for his future was its logical basis. Many people never grow up—but few childish men ever acquire the power Hitler subsequently did. The difference was the logic that the young Hitler discovered. As Joachim Fest points out, one of the major sources of Hitler’s strength “lay in his ability to build castles in the air with acute rationality.”[24]
In this analysis, I have characterized each step of Hitler’s logic as a “backward” step. This is because Hitler’s logic was abductive logic. If I were speaking of deductive or inductive logic, I would have characterized each stage as going more “deeply” into the question. But abductive logic, while it leads backward, does not lead deeper. As Dupin notes in regard to the logic he employs: “There is such a thing as being too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, she is invariably superficial.”[25]
This is an essential characteristic of Hitler’s thinking. It was a profound understanding of abductive logic, which is often, paradoxically, profound knowledge of the superficial. For, abductive logic does not necessarily lead to depth of understanding. Peirce insists that pragmatism, which he equates with abductive logic,[26] “does not bestow a single smile upon beauty, upon moral virtue, or upon abstract truth—the three things that alone raise Humanity above Animality.”[27] Hitler’s logic, too, did not confer a single smile on beauty, virtue, or truth. His logic is solely the logic for contriving to create extraordinary effects.
Hitler’s logic, therefore, always led him backward from his hatred of the ordinary world to history as manipulation and the creation of effects. This eventually affected his concept of art. Once touched by Hitler’s abductive mind, art lost any sense of the beautiful or the sublime. With his starting point, his logic inevitably led him to see art as no more than contriving to create effects. The greatest artist was the one who had the greatest effect. This led him inevitably to see art as nothing more than politics. Viewing all of life with the logic of abduction, he came to believe that “art and politics belong together as nothing else on this earth,”[28] and to insist that “[a]rt has been in all ages the expression . . . of a political will to power.”[29]
But this is getting ahead of our story. For we are still with Hitler as a teenager, when he was still enthralled with becoming an artist. He was soon to make the connection between art and politics, for it was dictated by his logic. But before he did, there was one other influence in his life that pushed him in that direction.
In chapter 4, I presented at length the logic in Karl May’s novel Winnetou and referred to that work as a “learner’s textbook” on abductive logic. The young Adolf took the logic exemplified in Karl May’s stories very seriously, as was discussed in the previous chapter. But there is another dimension of that work that reflects on Hitler’s character.
Charlie—Old Shatterhand—was Hitler’s exemplar. Charlie left ordinary life for the same reason that the young Adolf rejected it. Charlie wanted to become something great. To him, that meant becoming a “Man of the West.” This, of course, is every boy’s dream, and boys throughout Europe still thrill to Karl May’s stories of adventure. But just as the young Adolf Hitler took the games of Cowboys and Indians that he was playing at the age of nine extremely seriously, in a way few other boys of his age do, so too did he take Old Shatterhand seriously in a way almost no one else has ever done. Hitler’s ideal, observed Joachim Fest, was “essentially a literary one . . . Hitler was always prone to translate literature into reality.”[30] In Winnetou, he found the logic with which to translate his dreams into reality.
Winnetou is the story of how a boy makes a childhood dream come true. But it is more than a story. It also contains a lesson in the kind of logic that can make dreams happen. Just as the stories of Sherlock Holmes were eventually taken seriously by police forces everywhere to revolutionize the science of crime detection,[31] Hitler took Old Shatterhand seriously as a revolutionary new way to become a “great man.”
“A man’s will is his kingdom” is a recurring theme in Winnetou.[32] The meaning of it is that a man can do anything he wants to do, become anything he wants to be, if only he can change from the way society teaches him to think, and learns to understand the natives better than they understand themselves.[33] This is the key to creating any effect on them that he desires. Old Shatterhand learns how to judge a man’s character on first sight, read the minds of people he has never met, follow tracks even when they disappear, and read every sign as a clue to the intentions of others. He outguesses and outwits his opponents, and amazes his friends. Through the use of cunning and deception, and waiting for the right moment, he can defeat anyone. And all of this serves no purpose but his own ambition:
Old Shatterhand was . . . a charismatic leader, a redeemer, avenger, executioner, judge, jury, teacher and protector, rolled into one superhuman cowboy. He had supernatural powers; there was an aura about him from which his inner power beamed. . . . Old Shatterhand led his groups of cowboys with a heavy hand and demanded total obedience from his followers. When his companions were in trouble, Old Shatterhand was instantly on the scene. . . . His cowboy followers obeyed him willingly, but only at the price of their freedom as individuals. Woe to the Westmann who foreswore his total allegiance to Old Shatterhand; he was ostracized from the group, and was ultimately destroyed. Old Shatterhand put it succinctly: “I don’t have anything to do with anyone who doesn’t obey me.”[34]
Old Shatterhand’s character is, in almost all respects, similar to that of Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes—and Hitler. They were all “Ratiocinative Men.” Old Shatterhand’s desire to become a “Man of the West” serves no purpose other than his desire to live outside of, and to prove himself superior to, ordinary society.[35] There is no meaning or cause in most of his many fights. In all respects he meets Daniel Hoffman’s description of the new type of hero quoted earlier in this work:
A romantic genius. He has all the powers of a man of the Renaissance . . . save that in no way does he show any interest toward man in society. He cares not a whistle for the knowledge that benefits mankind.[36]
Old Shatterhand is a hero with no wife, no family, and no fixed home, living and becoming famous in a country that is not his own. His goal is to learn how to survive, overcome, and dominate strange people in an alien land. Hitler first made himself a stranger among his own people, and then went to another country not his own to survive, overcome, and dominate. Hitler used precisely the same methods as Old Shatterhand. Old Shatterhand became the “Man of the West” who always won and got his way. Hitler would become Der Fuehrer whose will always triumphed. Though I disagree with Klaus Mann on many of his characterizations of Karl May’s novels, there is more than a little truth in his observations that Adolf Hitler, “nourished in his youth by Old Shatterhand, is now attempting to rebuild the world,” and that “[t]he Third Reich is Karl May’s ultimate triumph.”[37]
All of the ideas and decisions that followed, according to Hitler’s “peculiar form of logic,”[38] after his first rejection of the department store world, dramatically came together five to seven years later, in 1905, and set him on the path to becoming Der Fuehrer. The dramatic moment is recorded by August Kubizek as one of his most unforgettable experiences.[39] He devotes a special chapter of his memoirs to “the most impressive hour that I ever spent with my friend.”[40]
Gustl and Adolf originally met in November 1904 while attending an opera, and soon became the closest of friends based on their mutual love of art—especially music. Thereafter they were inseparable, and they attended every opera together, especially Wagner’s operas.
On a cold night in January 1905 they met excitedly to go to see Wagner’s Rienzi, an opera neither had seen before.[41] They hurried to the theater to secure their accustomed places and watched the performance with “burning enthusiasm.” But when this particular opera was over, Kubizek recalls, Adolf was strangely different. “Usually, after an artistic experience that had moved him, he would start talking right away, sharply criticizing the performance, but after Rienzi he remained quiet a long time.”[42] Obviously, something had touched young Adolf personally.
Instead of their usual banter, the two boys walked silently through the streets of Linz. Adolf’s silence about the performance “surprised me,” recalls Kubizek, “and I asked him what he thought of it.” Hitler did not answer his friend but instead threw Kubizek “a strange, almost hostile glance.”[43] So they walked along toward home in silence as Adolf brooded. Suddenly Adolf turned off their normal course to take the road to the Freinberg, a mountain near Linz. Kubizek wanted to ask him where he was going, but “his face looked so forbidding” that Kubizek suppressed the question and followed him up the mountain road.
When they reached the mountaintop it was after midnight, and the stars shone brilliantly in the vault of sky above them. Suddenly Adolf turned to face his friend, reaching out to grasp both of his hands. “He had never made such a gesture before,” recalls Kubizek. “I felt from the grasp of his hands how deeply moved he was. His eyes were feverish with excitement.” Whatever he had seen or identified with in that opera, Kubizek felt, “had shaken him.”[44]
Then Hitler began speaking. “The words did not come smoothly from his mouth as they usually did, but rather erupted, hoarse and raucous.” Kubizek recalls, “Never before and never again have I heard Adolf Hitler speak as he did in that hour, as we stood there alone under the stars, as though we were the only creatures in the world.”[45] As the words erupted from Adolf, Kubizek was astonished, feeling that not only he, but even Hitler himself “listened with astonishment and emotion to what burst forth from him with elementary force.” What erupted from Hitler was “a state of complete ecstasy and rapture, in which he transferred the character of Rienzi . . . with visionary power to the plane of his own ambitions.”[46]
What was it that Hitler had seen in that opera that so touched him? Rienzi is the story of a medieval youth of Rome who, at a time of Rome’s degradation—with the pope at Avignon and Rome despoiled by its ruling families (the Colonna and the Orsini)—dreamed that “he might become the chosen instrument to revivify the dominion of the proud Republic, might live to become the tribune of her people and the appointed symbol of her resurrection to life.”[47]
By some accounts, Rienzi is nothing but “a demagogue and a charlatan.” According to others, he was a “visionary and dreamer [who] held the torch of idealism high in an age when a realism of boundless baseness dominated.”[48] By mingling with the common people, and by outstanding oratory, Rienzi won the crowds of Rome to his side and, with the support of the Church, became the dictator of Rome in 1347.
Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote a stirring novel about Rienzi that was published in 1835. It was his most popular novel, was translated into many languages, and served as one of the sources of inspiration for Wagner’s opera of the same name. Wagner presented Rienzi as a “messianic redeemer of the people” who strove to create an ideal state. Rienzi is cast as “the charismatic leader of a republic, the Tribune who was above the ordinary politics of class.” It is an opera about “the mystic unity between ruler and people.”[49] It was this with which Hitler had identified, and it revealed to him a role which he could dream of someday reaching. Here was the perfect artist turning an entire people into the materials of his dream to transform ordinary life into something extraordinary.
In Hitler’s identification of himself with this role, Kubizek recalls: “Like flood waters breaking their dykes (sic) his words burst from him. He conjured up in grandiose, inspiring pictures his own future and that of his people.”[50] Kubizek was astonished at the outpouring triggered by the opera. It was a different friend he saw that night:
Hitherto I had been convinced that my friend wanted to become an artist, a painter or perhaps an architect. Now this was no longer the case. Now he aspired to something higher, which I could not yet fully grasp. It rather surprised me, as I thought that the vocation of the artist was for him the highest, most desirable goal.[51]
But at this moment that goal was forgotten or, perhaps, transmuted. Hitler was dreaming of something far grander: “Now he was talking of a mandate which, one day, he would receive from the people, to lead them out of servitude to the heights of freedom.”[52] In this hour on the Freinberg, all the ideas that the young Adolf had been forming over the past six or seven years—his rejection of the ordinary world, his belief that he was exceptional, his search for the extraordinary, and his ideas of art and greatness—suddenly came together. “He spoke of a special mission which would one day be entrusted to him.”[53]
Neither Adolf nor Gustl ever mentioned that evening again until thirty-three years later, when Hitler invited Kubizek to be his guest for the 1939 Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. On that visit, Hitler twice confirmed the importance of that night on the Freinberg as the beginning of his political career. The first occurred when Kubizek mentioned that night to Hitler in a private conversation. Hitler listened to Kubizek retell the story and confirmed Kubizek’s recollection, adding, “In that hour it began.”[54] Later, on the same visit, Kubizek heard Hitler recount the same story to Frau Winifred Wagner, again concluding solemnly, “In that hour it began.”[55]
For more than half a century, the credibility of August Kubizek’s memoirs[56] has been in doubt in two regards: first, as to Kubizek’s general credibility; and second, as to the specific facts relating to Kubizek’s account of Hitler’s Rienzi experience.
The issue of Kubizek’s general credibility historically arose due to a vituperative attack by Franz Jetzinger in Hitler’s Youth (1955), in which Kubizek was accused of dozens of misstatements of fact. In addition, Jetzinger was incensed at the tone and what he believed to be the Kubizek’s purpose, accusing the latter of attempting to “rehabilitate his friend” by “obscuring the true features of the abominable criminal, Hitler, with a mist of myth and flattering fairy tales.”
Jetzinger’s attack tainted almost all subsequent scholars’ estimation of Kubizek’s credibility. Frederic Spotts in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (2002) gives the most recent summary of the case against Kubizek’s general credibility.[57] However, Spotts fails to take into account Brigitta Hamann’s Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (1998), in which she reports of her specific investigation of the witnesses who claimed to know Hitler in Linz and Vienna. Regarding Jetzinger’s claims against Kubizek, Hamann finds Kubizek to be more accurate, concluding that although he sometimes gets dates wrong, “Yet, altogether, Kubizek is reliable. His book is a rich and unique source for Hitler’s early years.”[58]
Ian Kershaw appears to bless Kubizek’s general credibility by contributing the introduction to the latest translation of Kubizek’s memoirs by Geoffrey Brooks, also entitled The Young Hitler I Knew (2006). While recognizing that Kubizek’s memoirs may have many flaws relating to any set of recollections recorded decades after the events recorded, nevertheless, Kershaw concludes that “Kubizek’s book rings true in the portrait of Hitler’s personality and mentality.”[59]
As to the second issue, Kubizek’s specific account of Hitler’s experience on the Freinberg after attending a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi opera, I have addressed this issue at length in “Hitler’s Rienzi Experience: Factuality.” There I present extensive evidence that Kubizek’s uncontradicted eyewitness account of Hitler’s conduct on that occasion is strongly corroborated by multiple independent sources, justifying the conclusion that it meets the normal common law standard for primary evidence worthy of prima facie acceptance.[60]
Kubizek, The Young Hitler, 52–54.
“My own firm determination . . . sufficed to give me complete inner peace. And this decision in me was immutable” (Hitler, Mein Kampf, 9).
Heiden, Der Fuehrer, 357.
Ibid., 360.
Ibid., 361.
Ibid., 359.
Ibid., 361.
Peirce devotes an extensive discussion to this distinction as the basis of abduction in his essay, “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents,” EP2, 75–114 (see especially 86–95).
Fest, Hitler, 531.
Heiden, Der Fuehrer, 362.
Ibid.
Quoted in Waite, Psychopathic God, 46.
Emphasis in original. The other “fact” he mentions, not of immediate relevance here, is: “I became a nationalist.”
See, for example, Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (New York: World Publishing Company, 1956).
Mein Kampf, 14.
Peirce, “On the Method of Drawing History from Ancient Documents,” in EP2, 80.
Mein Kampf, 14. (Emphasis added.)
Ibid., 118.
Ibid., 421.
Fest, Hitler, 532.
Quoted in Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography, trans. Winifred Ray (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 97.
Ibid., 49.
Nolte, Three Faces, 289.
Fest, Hitler, 4
Poe, RUE, 154.
“Pragmatism whatever else it may be is nothing else than the true Logic of Abduction” (Peirce, “The Nature of Meaning,” EP2, 224). See, also, Peirce’s essay on “Pragmatism as the Logic of Abduction,” EP2, 227–241.
Peirce, “An Essay on Reasoning in Security and Uberty,” EP2, 465.
“Speech of April 5, 1929,” in Hitler’s Words, ed. Gordon W. Prange (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1944), 142.
“Speech of November 26, 1929,” Hitler’s Words, 157.
Fest, Hitler, 534.
Stanton A. Berg, “Sherlock Holmes: Father of Scientific Crime Detection,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, vol. 61, no. 3 (September, 1960): 446–452.
See, for example, May’s Winnetou, 33 and 675.
Albert Speer recorded, for example, that Hitler believed “a people could be wholly foreign to you, as foreign as the Bedouins or the American Indians were to Karl May, and yet, with some imagination and empathy, you could nevertheless know more about them, their soul, their customs and circumstances, than some anthropologists or geographers who had studied them in the field” (Spandau, 384–385).
Cook, “Nazism,” 343.
As Hitler Youth Leader Fritz Helkes wrote, “The youth book we want is not an insipid moral-soaked thing—the youth would disdain such literature—Karl May is the type of author we want.” Ibid., 347.
Quoted earlier in Ch. 4, at p. 79, and cited to: Daniel Hoffman, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe (New York, Doubleday, 1972), p. 127.
Mann, “Cowboy Mentor,” 222.
Heiden characterized Hitler’s logic as “eine eigentuemliche Art von Logik,” in Eine Biographie, 111.
The corroborating evidence to establish the actual happening of this event is set forth in Ben Novak, “Hitler’s Rienzi Experience: Factuality,” Revista de Historia Actual, no. 5 (Invierno, 2007), 105–116.
Kubizek, The Young Hitler, 98.
There has been considerable debate as to the date when Adolf and Gustl attended this opera, as well as Hitler’s age at the time. The dates when the opera was actually performed have been ascertained from the local Linz newspapers by Herr Friedrich Ortner of the Oberösterreichische Landesbibliothek, Linz. These dates are: Tuesday, January 3 and 10; Thursday, January 5 and 19; and Sunday, February 12, 1905; it was not performed on any other dates. Hitler’s age at the time was variously said by Kubizek to be seventeen (The Young Hitler, 118); and at another point sixteen (Ibid., 272). He was fifteen; his sixteenth birthday would not have been until a few months later, April 20, 1905. Here it is assumed that Hitler and Kubizek attended one of the first performances in January while Hitler was still on Christmas vacation from his school in Steyr.
Ibid., 99.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 100.
E. H. Blackeney, introduction to Rienzi: The Last of the Tribunes, by Edward Bulwer Lytton (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1911), vii.
Ibid., ix.
Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 25.
Kubizek, The Young Hitler, 100.
Ibid.
Ibid. (Emphasis in original.)
Ibid.
Ibid., 101. (Kubizek recounts the same story again at 290.)
Ibid.
August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler: mein jugendfreund (Graz: Leopold Stocker, 1953), translated by E. V. Anderson and published in England as Young Hitler: The Story of Our Friendship (London: Paul Popper, 1953), and in the United States as The Young Hitler I Knew (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954).
Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson, 2002), xv–xviii.
Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna, 56.
August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. Geoffrey Brooks (London: Greenhill Books, 2006), 14.
Ben Novak, “Hitler’s Rienzi Experience: Factuality,” Revista de Historia Actual, vol. 5, no. 5 (2007): 105–116.