Hitler first visited Vienna in May 1906, aged seventeen, ostensibly to study the paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Fine Arts). He stayed a fortnight, agog before the Opera House, the Parliament building, the great mansions around the Ringstrasse and the glittering omnipotence of the House of Habsburg, the architecture of which he would study and imitate. The great stamp of imperial power awed but did little to diminish Hitler’s scorn for the Austro-Hungarian regime; he continued to despise the Habsburgs as weak and decadent, incapable of ruling their racially polyglot realm.
That was the curious thing about this young man: he seemed barely aware of his status as just one of millions of disenfranchised ‘non-people’, whose lives sloshed around in the dregs of empire. Hitler spoke as if he’d already acquired the power to rebuild cities and challenge Austrian might: the grandeur of Habsburg Vienna, even in the festering twilight of the emperor’s reign, was merely another problem that he, the dawdling nonentity from Linz, would one day fix.
The opera was the high point of Hitler’s brief visit. He attended two performances, of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and The Flying Dutchman, conducted by Gustav Mahler and designed by Alfred Roller, two of the greatest names in operatic performance. Hitler deeply admired them both, and in these early years would defend Mahler whenever he heard anyone making anti-Semitic comments about the composer. Though born a Jew, Mahler had converted to Catholicism, but that did little to disguise his ‘race’ in the eyes of Austrian anti-Semites. (The Nazis would not recognize converts; because Mahler had ‘Jewish blood’, they would later ban his music.)
On his return to Linz, Adolf regaled Gustl with the aesthetic splendours of Vienna and the magnificence of Wagner’s operas. His passion for Wagner knew no bounds and would never abate. While his youthful favourite remained Lohengrin, a lesser-known work made a deep impression: Rienzi: The Last of the Tribunes, a claustrophobic opera the composer had disowned. In the story, set in fourteenth-century Rome, Rienzi is portrayed as the victim of the malicious plotting of ‘the super-powers, the Church and the German Emperor’.1
Hitler first saw Rienzi in Linz in 1906, with Kubizek. He closely identified with the besieged hero and emerged from the opera in raptures, transported to another time and place. Gustl found himself being led to the top of the city’s Freinberg Hill, where Hitler unleashed a speech of dazzling self-aggrandizement, addressed more to himself than to his baffled friend. ‘In grand, captivating images,’ Gustl wrote, ‘he told me about his future and the future of his people. He spoke of a special mission that would one day be his.’ Entranced by his plans for the German people, Hitler pleaded tearfully with Gustl that he needed to be left alone and sauntered off into the night. Gustl would take decades ‘to understand what these hours of otherworldly rapture had meant to my friend … It was an unknown youth who spoke to me in that strange hour.’2
Hitler would never forget that night at the opera, confiding in Winifred Wagner, the composer’s daughter-in-law, in 1939, ‘That was the hour everything started’. He meant the start of his life’s mission, to avenge the German people against their oppressors. It was a backward projection on to a time in which he had no identifiable mission, no schooling and no job, but the episode would sit well in the heroic pantheon that Nazi propagandists would construct of his life.
Rienzi certainly had a profound impact on Hitler, even if we overlook Kubizek’s embellishments and the Nazis’ myth-making. It was almost as if he believed Rienzi had sent him a psychic message, to lead the German people out of darkness. Hitler would refer to the opera throughout his life and cast himself, like Rienzi, as the avenging hero of his nation. The opera’s overture even became the unofficial anthem of the Third Reich.3
Aware of his love of the opera, Frau Wagner later gave the Führer the original score. Her devotion to him would never diminish throughout her long life, provoking rumours that they were lovers. Fittingly, the manuscript would accompany the Führer into his Berlin bunker in 1945 and disappear into the flames of his personal Götterdämmerung.4
Vienna was all Hitler could talk about, for now. ‘In his mind,’ wrote Kubizek, ‘he was no longer in Linz, but lived at the centre of Vienna.’5 At the end of 1906 he resolved to return to the city to study drawing. He had every confidence that the famous Academy of Fine Arts would accept him. His mother, Klara, approved of the scheme, hoping it would give her aimless son a direction. His aunt Johanna Pölzl (‘Hanitante’), Klara’s handicapped younger sister, offered to finance his studies, contingent on him passing the academy’s entry exams, to be held in October 1907.
Early that year the life of the one person who truly loved him was at risk. In January 1907 Klara Hitler complained of a severe chest pain and Dr Bloch diagnosed breast cancer. She probably wouldn’t survive, he told the family. Hitler wept. ‘His long, pale face twisted,’ Bloch would recall. ‘Tears flowed from his eyes. Did his mother have no chance, he asked.’6
Hitler devoted himself at once to his mother’s care. He sat by her bedside as she recovered in Linz’s Barmherzige Schwestern Hospital from a double mastectomy. According to the hospital’s invoice, ‘the son’ paid the medical bill, of 100 crowns (the family had had no medical insurance), presumably with his aunt’s assistance.7 Her condition improved, but she was not strong enough to climb the three floors to the Humboldstrasse flat, so in May the family moved to an elegant apartment in the small town of Urfahr, across the Danube from Linz. Though expensive – the rent consumed half of Klara’s pension – the first-floor flat was easier on the weak woman, and she enjoyed striking views of Mount Postling.
In September that year Hitler resumed his plan to return to Vienna and sit the entrance exams for the Viennese Academy. He rented a small room off a sunken courtyard, with a shared toilet, in a non descript block at Stumpergasse 31 in Mariahilf, an impoverished district, home of the ‘little people’ of the Austrian capital: students, the unemployed, tramps and vagrants. His landlady was a Czech seamstress named Maria Zakreys.
About 2 million people lived in Vienna at the time, making it the fourth largest city in Europe and the sixth largest in the world, host to the usual excesses of the fabulously rich and privations of the wretchedly poor. Electric streetlighting had reached most of the centre, but not here: gas lamps shed pools of dreary light on the streets and kerosene flickered in the little flats.
Supremely confident of his success, Hitler convinced himself that passing his exams would be child’s play: ‘Now I was in the fair city for the second time, waiting with burning impatience, but also with confident self-assurance, for the result of the entrance examination.’8 Of the 112 candidates, 33 (including Hitler) made it through the first round. He failed the second, from which 28 were accepted. ‘Drawing exam unsatisfactory’ was the abrupt assessment of his six rudimentary sketches on the set themes: ‘Expulsion from Paradise’, ‘Hunting’, ‘Spring’, ‘Construction Workers’, ‘Death’ and ‘Rain’.
Hitler was mortified: ‘… when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue.’9 He complained to the rector of the academy, who advised him to apply to the School of Architecture, as his drawings showed an aptitude for urban design. For this, though, he was ineligible, as he lacked his school leaving certificate. It is untrue that Hitler’s extreme anti-Semitism grew out of his rejection from the Academy of Fine Arts; none of the five faculty professors who selected the successful candidates was Jewish, debunking this idea.
Every young person experiences rejection at some point, but for Hitler this was a mortal wound. In Mein Kampf he endows this episode with extraordinary portent, a revelation of his mysterious ‘dual’ character:
Downcast, I left von Hansen’s magnificent building [where the Academy of Fine Arts is housed] … for the first time in my life at odds with myself. For what I had just heard about my abilities seemed like a lightning flash, suddenly revealing a conflict with which I had long been afflicted … In a few days I myself knew that I should some day become an architect. To be sure, it was an incredibly hard road; for the studies I had neglected out of spite at the Realschule were sorely needed.
So he simply gave up: ‘The fulfilment of my artistic dream seemed physically impossible.’10
Shortly after this humiliation, Hitler heard that his mother’s condition was grave. In fact, the situation was hopeless, Dr Bloch informed the eighteen-year-old on his return to Linz that October. Klara was dying. In despair at the imminent loss of the only person he loved, Hitler did everything he could to ease her last weeks. His devotion was ‘indefatigable’, as both Dr Bloch and his sister Paula later testified.11 Kubizek wrote: ‘Adolf read her every wish from her eyes and showed her the tenderest sort of care. I had never seen him be so solicitous and gentle.’12
Little was known of breast cancer at the time. There were no mammograms, chemotherapy or adequate painkillers. Surgery was the only way of controlling the disease, but that was a very blunt tool. The cancer often returned in a fungating form, as it did to Klara Hitler: the cancerous mass was eating through the skin of her chest.
Dr Bloch’s treatment, customary at the time, was excruciatingly painful: iodoform, then a widely used antiseptic, was poured into the open wound. ‘The suffering of such patients from the bleeding, sometimes rotting, sometimes painful tumour deposits can be horrible to see,’ according to Professor Sandy Macleod, a cancer specialist, in a 2005 article on the treatment.13 Klara endured this pain for six weeks. ‘Her son agonized over every moment of her suffering.’14
Mercifully, Klara died on 21 December 1907, aged forty-seven, in the house at Blütenstrasse 9, Urfahr. Hitler was found by her bedside the next morning, distraught. ‘It was a dreadful blow,’ he later wrote, ‘particularly for me. I had honoured my father, but my mother I had loved.’15 Recalling the impact on the boy, Dr Bloch would write, in 1941: ‘In all my career I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.’16
The funeral procession made its melancholy way through Linz on 23 December to the churchyard at Leonding where Alois was buried, the proximity to the festivities of Christmas intensifying the family’s loss: ‘The black-clad Hitler, pale and gaunt, carrying a top hat under his arm stalked solemnly through the streets … leading a small band of mourners.’17 When the cortège wound past Stefanie’s house, she herself paused at the window, leading Hitler to think she was paying her respects; in fact, she had no idea for whom the church bells tolled.
Later claims that Dr Bloch’s failure to save Klara produced in Hitler the violent anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust are groundless.18 There is no evidence that Bloch poisoned Hitler’s mother by applying massive doses of iodoform, as Rudolph Binion and other historians have claimed.19 At the time, Hitler profusely thanked Bloch for trying to help her: ‘I will be forever grateful to you, Doctor,’ he told the Jewish surgeon on the day of Klara’s funeral.20 He later sent the doctor self-painted postcards from Vienna and in 1940, in what may be seen, in the circumstances, as a tyrant’s concession, put Bloch under special protection of the Gestapo and approved the doctor’s and his family’s safe passage to America.21
On 1 January 1908 Hitler visited his parents’ graves in Leonding. With his mother’s death, he had lost the only person he loved. There was nobody left for him in Linz. He was not in touch with his older half-siblings; meanwhile, Paula, whom he would not see again for many years, went to live with their half-sister, Angela Raubal. Young Hitler resolved to leave his childhood home at once and return to Vienna.