In receipt of an orphan’s pension of 25 crowns a month and his share of his mother’s small estate, Hitler left for Vienna on 12 February 1908, with no plans to return to Linz. He was to live in the Austrian capital for the next five years, tossed about, in his later telling, in a world of misery and poverty, ‘the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life’.1
This image of himself – an echo of Rienzi, rising out of the darkest depths to lead the German people into light – would prove useful to Nazi mythologists. But it was wide of the mark. No doubt he lived modestly, like most students, and for nearly a year, as we shall see, in wretched poverty. And yet his circumstances were initially far better than he later claimed. He and his sister had inherited 2,000 crowns (the equivalent, in relative terms today, of about £74,000 or US$94,400), to be shared between them – enough to allow him to live in Vienna without work for a year at the time – and he would come into their father’s trust fund, worth 625 crowns, when he turned twenty-four.
On his return to the city, he moved back into the flat in which he’d stayed on his previous visit, with the seamstress Maria Zakreys, in the sunken courtyard of Stumpergasse 31, Mariahilf, and promptly wrote to Kubizek: ‘All of Vienna is waiting. So come soon.’ To Hitler’s delight, Gustl replied that he would arrive in April: his parents had agreed to let him continue his musical studies at the Vienna Conservatory (where he had been accepted to play in the orchestra). He would bring his viola, Gustl warned. Hitler’s cheerful reply, sent on 19 April 1908, offers a glimpse of his belittling sense of humour and a hint of sensitivity to Gustl’s success:
Dear Gustl … I am delighted that you are bringing a viola. On Thursday I shall buy two Kronen’s worth of cotton wool and 20 Kreuzer’s worth of sticking plaster, for my ears naturally. That, on top of all this, you are growing blind, has plunged me into a profound depression: you will play even more wrong notes than before. Then you will go blind and I will eventually go deaf. Alas! Meanwhile I wish you and your esteemed parents at least a happy Easter, and I send them my hearty greetings, and to you, too. Your Friend.2
When Gustl arrived, the friends shared the room with a large piano and little else in the way of furniture. They lived in the city amidst everything they admired: fine musicians, classical architecture, grand opera. They were two young men in their prime, with the money and freedom to enjoy themselves in the heart of Europe. They attended the opera and concerts, and Hitler frequently visited Parliament, where the motley array of races, languages and special interests, shouting and vying for influence, heightened his disdain for Austrian society and politics. Where some saw a human comedy in this polyglot society – the funniest expression of the empire’s identity crisis was The Good Soldier Švejk, the classic novel by Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, whose hero is utterly confused over which nation he is supposed to be fighting for in the First World War3 – Adolf Hitler saw only a shambles of lesser races cavorting for power. Vienna’s racial mélange affronted his dream of a greater Germany, a Pan-German hegemony over Austria and its vassal states. He felt contempt for Vienna’s Parliament, for the inability of its barking politicians to get anything done in the name of democracy, for the very notion of democracy itself, primitive as it then was:
How soon was I to grow indignant when I saw the lamentable comedy that unfolded beneath my eyes! Present were a few hundred of these popular representatives who had to take a position on a question of the most vital economic importance … The intellectual content of what these men said was on a really depressing level, in so far as you could understand their babbling at all; for several of the gentlemen did not speak German, but their native Slav languages or rather dialects … A wild gesticulating mass screaming all at once in every different key, presided over by a good-natured old uncle who was striving in the sweat of his brow to revive the dignity of the House by violently ringing his bell and alternating gentle reproofs with grave admonitions. I couldn’t help laughing.4
The experience utterly disabused him of any interest he might have had in ‘parliamentary democracy’.5 As he sat in the public gallery, aghast at the ugly rant that passed for public debate below, Hitler’s mind slowly closed on a vision of Europe led by a strong, authoritarian ruler, a German ruler, who would tolerate none of the delays, duties and decencies of an elected Parliament.
In contrast with his absorption in Parliament, young Hitler showed little if any interest in the large number of Jews in pre-war Vienna. Many had been refugees from Russian persecution, many had fled Hungary or Galicia (in present-day Poland) and settled in the poorer districts of Vienna, relieved to find themselves living in a relatively tolerant city, free of terror. In 1910, there were 175,318 Jews living in Vienna, comprising 8.6 per cent of the city’s population (up from 6,000, or 2 per cent, fifty years earlier6), a higher proportion than in any other Central European city. In some areas, Jews formed about a third of the population, and 17 per cent of the residents of the impoverished Brigittenau district, where Hitler would spend his last years in Vienna, were Jews.
The city’s Jews were themselves divided, along ethnic and socio-economic grounds. The old Viennese Jewish families tended to be assimilated and respected. The orthodox eastern Jews, descendants of refugees from Russia’s pogroms, were poor traders who lived on the fringes of society, ‘accepted by none, hated by many’, Kershaw writes,7 as alien to the wealthy Viennese Jews as to the gentile rump. And, as in many European cities, the wealthier Jews were highly influential in the cultural life of the capital, thanks to their hard work, education and commercial connections, as Brigitte Hamann’s superb study shows.8 They tended to be university educated and held a disproportionate share of senior roles in medicine, law, art, commerce and the media, fomenting the usual envy and resentment among elements of the non-Jewish population.
Politically, too, they were high achievers. But they did not, and never would, correspond to a communist bloc, as Hitler would later hysterically claim. Jews had prominent roles in all political parties in pre-war Vienna, and while it is true to say they preponderated on the left, most of these were moderate socialists, not violent Marxists. And contrary to what he later claimed in Mein Kampf, Hitler was only passingly aware of the Jewish presence in Vienna and a long way from seeing them as a monolithic threat; nor had he yet developed any racial or ‘Aryan’ conception of his dream of a Greater Germany.
Hitler shunned the attractions that usually occupied young men in a big city: taking out girls, making money, drinking, attending dances and parties. He even failed to follow up an invitation – arranged through Magdalena Hanisch, his mother’s former landlady in Linz – to meet the great set designer Alfred Roller, whose operas Adolf had seen a year earlier. Hanisch had generously written a reference to a friend who knew Roller, in which she described Hitler as ‘a serious, ambitious young man, very mature for his age of 19, from a completely respectable family.’9 Roller himself replied to the reference: ‘Young Hitler should come see me and bring samples of his work so that I can see what they’re like.’ Poring over these words, from the master whom he revered, Hitler mysteriously failed to respond. He would later claim he had been too shy to meet the great Roller. The more likely explanation is that he knew his work fell short of the mark and so avoided the possibility of another rejection.
Hitler’s acute disappointment at his failure to gain admission to the Academy of Fine Arts, which he had not mentioned to Gustl, deepened with every sign of Kubizek’s progress as a music student. The pair argued, and one night Hitler exploded, admitting that the academy had ‘rejected me’, as Kubizek recalled:
‘This academy!’ Hitler yelled. ‘Nothing but a pack of cramped, old, outmoded servants of the state, clueless bureaucrats, stupid creations of the civil service! The whole academy should be dynamited.’ His face was pale, his lips were pressed so tightly together that they went white. His eyes were glowing. How uncanny his eyes were! As if all the hatred of which he was capable were burning in those eyes.10
Hitler’s contempt for the academy spread to its graduates and the wider artistic movement. He detested the new masters of the Modernist movement. The work of artists such as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele he would later dismiss as ‘nothing more than crippled spattering’. He found similarly repulsive their counterparts in architecture and music. He simply failed to comprehend the artistic upheaval going on around him. He passed through Vienna indifferent to the music of Richard Strauss; the architecture of Josef Hoffman, Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner; and the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. The Jewish-born experimental composer Arnold Schoenberg would be a source of particular revulsion, later condemned by the Nazis. Hitler perceived merely the sounds and scenes of a monstrous decadence.
In the visual arts, his heroes were nineteenth-century figurative and realist painters, such as Anselm Feuerbach, Carl Rottmann and Rudolf von Alt; and in architecture, the Neoclassicists Gottfried Semper and Karl Friedrich Schinkel. His artistic taste would always default to safe, middle-class respectability, the certain forms and solid outlines of a passing world. He closed his eyes and ears to the new revolution in aesthetics, which, despite the fact that few of its leading lights were Jews, was often construed as ‘Jewish Modernism’. In Hitler’s mind the seeds of a bizarre conflation were being sown.
Nor had he the patience or intellect to bother with Vienna’s intelligentsia, whose rising stars were the Jewish psychologist Sigmund Freud and the Jewish philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who had been in his school in Linz). Hitler moved in a very different city, a Sodom of soaring inflation and rising taxes, of prostitutes, vagrants and anarchic students; a Gomorrah of violent dissent, political oppression and crushing poverty.
Furious at society’s indifference to what he saw as his obvious gifts, young Adolf threw himself into various pursuits, none of which yielded fruit: he churned out scores of sketches and watercolours; he immersed himself in plans to write dramas based on German legends; and he remodelled the grandest architecture of the Austrian capital, devoting days to the Ringstrasse alone. Opera consumed him: he later claimed he had heard Tristan between thirty and forty times in Vienna. His moods oscillated between fury and despair, lethargy and anxiety. ‘Incessantly, he talked, planned, raved, possessed by the urge to justify himself, to prove that he had genius,’ wrote the biographer and historian Joachim Fest.11
Returning home from his music studies in the evening, Kubizek would cautiously enquire of his friend how he had spent his day, dreading some explosive reaction. On one occasion, Adolf stunned Gustl by announcing that he was writing an opera, to be called ‘Wieland the Blacksmith’ – despite never having composed a line of music, or mastered the ability to read it, and regardless of his inexperience of the smithy trade. The project came to nothing, notwithstanding Gustl’s encouragement. Another time, when Gustl asked about his daily activities, Hitler solemnly announced: ‘I am working on a solution to the wretched housing conditions in Vienna and carrying on studies to that end.’12
Conscious of the poverty that surrounded him, Hitler directed his disgust at the politicians he deemed responsible. He felt little compassion for the victims, whose condition he found repellent or pathetic, something to be cleaned away; and yet he could write with eloquence of the misery around him:
Dazzling riches and loathsome poverty alternated sharply … The host of high officers, government officials, artists, and scholars was confronted by an even greater army of workers, and side by side with aristocratic and commercial wealth dwelt dire poverty. Outside the palaces on the Ring loitered thousands of unemployed, and beneath this Via Triumphalis of old Austria dwelt the homeless in the gloom and mud of the canals.13
If he were in charge, he wrote, he would bundle the poor off the streets and order them into uniforms, as servants of the state. There spoke the civil servant’s son, assuming he could fix by diktat chronic economic problems of which he knew nothing. At the time, Hitler reputedly carried a photo of his father in parade uniform and proudly referred to him as a top official in ‘His Imperial Majesty’s Customs Service’. It was indicative of Hitler’s true character in Vienna. Far from being a bohemian or a revolutionary, as he later portrayed himself, he was ‘full of sentimental admiration for the bourgeois world. He craved a share in it … Social disdain he felt to be far more painful than social wretchedness.’14
His reaction to a huge rally for the unemployed outside the Viennese Parliament in February 1908 revealed a cast of mind without a scintilla of sympathy for the poor. At one point a man sat down on a tramway line and screamed, ‘I’m hungry!’ Hitler watched this with lofty detachment, as though taking mental notes on how not to behave if you wanted to start a revolution. ‘He took everything in so dispassionately and thoroughly,’ wrote Kubizek, ‘as if all that was important to him – just like during his visits to Parliament – was to study the mise-en-scène of the whole event, the, as it were, technical execution of a rally.’15 When a line of workers passed him on a Viennese street, Hitler stood ‘watching with bated breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding by’.16
Much as he claimed to feel solidarity with the ‘little people’, Hitler considered it beneath him to participate in demonstrations. Only later that night would he vent his fury – at the politicians, i.e. the new socialists, who ‘organised rallies like that’: ‘Who is leading this suffering people?’ he shouted at Kubizek. ‘Not men who have experienced the hardships of the little man themselves, but ambitious, power-hungry politicians … who enrich themselves with the misery of the masses.’17 His visits to Parliament exacted a similar, incendiary response: he would stand up and shake his fists from the visitors’ gallery, ‘his face burning with excitement’.18
Kubizek spent the summer of 1908 with his family in Linz. He returned to Vienna in November to find their flat deserted. Adolf had disappeared, leaving no contact address. During their months apart, he had corresponded with Gustl as usual, giving no sign of his impending flight. He spoke of his loneliness, bronchitis and the bed bugs, and claimed that he was ‘writing a lot’. In October, the letters stopped coming.
Hitler’s shame at rejection and looming penury probably explained his disappearance. In September he had again applied to and been rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts, deepening his sense of personal failure. At the same time, Kubizek was progressing in his musical studies, arousing his friend’s bitter resentment. (After Hitler’s flight, Kubizek would not see him again until 1938 when, to his amazement, Hitler visited Linz as chancellor. In the meantime, Kubizek had pursued a career as a musician and become conductor of the Marburg orchestra before the Great War. Wounded on the Eastern Front in 1915, he later worked as a council official in Eferding, Upper Austria.)
Adding to Hitler’s woes were acute financial difficulties. He had almost exhausted his mother’s funds. Poverty beckoned.
He now entered, as he later portrayed it, the nadir of his life, a Stygian realm of stinking hunger and despair. In November, when he left Frau Zakreys, he moved to a cheaper room at Felberstrasse 22, in the Fünfhaus district of Vienna, an impoverished inner-city area, where he stayed until 20 August 1909, followed by a month in another, cheaper room at Sechshauserstrasse 58 (in the same district). He then disappeared from view and probably spent two months – mid-September until November – living on the streets, sleeping rough and scrounging among the city’s poor and most desperate. He ‘sank into the bitterest misery,’ writes his first biographer, Konrad Heiden.19 He slept on park benches and in cafés, until the onset of winter forced him to find shelter.
Hitler failed or refused to find work as an ordinary labourer. The man who would seduce Germany with the idea of ‘national socialism’ felt no affinity for the unions. In Mein Kampf he would claim a brush with the city’s working class during a short-lived job as a construction worker (the facts of which are unconfirmed), which he presents as an experience that reinforced his disgust for unionized labour. He sat by them, not with them, on the building site and ‘drank my bottle of milk and ate my piece of bread somewhere off to one side, and cautiously studied my new associates.’ His fellow workers, Hitler wrote, ‘rejected everything’ and ‘infuriated me to the extreme’. They dismissed the state as an invention of the ‘capitalistic’ classes, and the Fatherland as ‘an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the working class’. To them, the authority of the law was merely ‘a means for oppressing the proletariat’; school, ‘an institution for breeding slaves and slaveholders’; religion, ‘a means for stultifying the people and making them easier to exploit’; and morality, ‘a symptom of stupid, sheeplike patience …’ As they familiarized themselves with the views of this strange new labourer, Hitler’s fellow workers grew so angry they threatened to throw him off the scaffolding – or so he later claimed in Mein Kampf, a story of dubious merit made up or exaggerated to enhance his anti-Marxist credentials.20
Indeed, it would be wrong to conclude that his loathing for Marxism originated on building sites or in other menial jobs around Vienna. Like so much else in his autobiography, as we shall see, Hitler was, at worst, indulging in pure fabrication or, at best, projecting backwards emotions that emerged several years later in Bavaria in the aftermath of the war.21
Hitler’s circumstances struck rock-bottom in late 1909. In November we find him, aged twenty, queuing up at a shelter for homeless men in the poor district of Meidling. Witnesses recount a dirty, dishevelled tramp, unrecognizable from the debonair dandy of Linz. He wore an unruly beard and long hair to his shoulders, and the soles of his shoes had been worn through and replaced by paper. His shirt was ‘notoriously dirty’ even among the destitute: ‘he was once in danger of expulsion from the Hostel as too unkempt,’ observed witnesses, who remembered him as ‘shy, never looking a person in the eye. The sole exception was during ecstasies when he talked politics.’22 His volatile character and fierce argumentativeness drew mockery, not respect. The hostel director described him as ‘the oddest resident’ and his fellows in the shelter laughed at and impersonated their strange, combustible companion. Some residents respected him, most laughed at him and ‘many considered him a fanatic’: ‘He brooked no contradiction but lost control and showered abuse on any who attempted discussion. He was incapable of reasonable debate, as he was of ordinary companionship. If he could not dominate an argument, his wrath would be followed by sullen silence. His irritability and hatreds caused the atmosphere around him to be uncomfortable, even hostile.’23
A vagrant called Reinhold Hanisch, who slept in the adjoining bed to Hitler, recalled how he first set eyes on a gaunt young man, dead tired, whose feet were bleeding and sore from tramping the streets:
For several days he had been living on benches in the park where his sleep was often disturbed by policemen … His blue-checked suit had turned lilac, from the rain … We gave him our bread because he had nothing to eat. An old beggar standing nearby advised him to go to the convent in the Gumpendorferstrasse; there every morning between nine and ten soup was given to the poor. We said this was ‘calling on Kathie’ probably because the name of the Mother Superior was Katherine. My neighbour’s name was Adolf Hitler.
He was awkward. The Asylum [shelter] meant to him an entirely new world where he could not find his way, but we all advised him as best we could and our good humour raised his spirits a little … He told us that he was a painter, an artist, and had read quite a lot … he had come to Vienna in the hope of earning a living here, since he had already devoted much time to painting in Linz, but had been bitterly disappointed in his hopes. His landlady had dispossessed him and he had found himself on the street without shelter.24
Hitler was now broke, Hanisch recalled. ‘One night in his great distress he begged a drunk gentleman for a few pennies but the drunk man raised his cane and insulted him. Hitler was very bitter about this, but I made fun of him saying, “Look here, don’t you know you should never approach a drunk”.’25
Hitler had been reduced to a beggar, preying on misfits and drunks, the furthest one could imagine from a future leader of Germany. One witness, who called himself ‘Anonymous’ and who met Hitler that spring, described him:
The upper half of his body was covered almost down to his knees by a bicycle coat of indeterminate colour, perhaps grey or yellow. He had an old, grey, soft hat whose ribbon was missing … In response to my question of why he never took off his coat, even though he was sitting in a well-heated room, he confessed with embarrassment that unfortunately he didn’t have a shirt either. The elbows in his coat and the bottom of his pants were one single hole as well.26
Some of these testimonials were biased or exaggerated, or told many years later, when Hitler’s early associates had a political or financial incentive to twist or embellish their stories (Kubizek was an exception). None the less, Hanisch conveyed a fair impression of Hitler’s incendiary, somewhat pathetic, character in Vienna, one that conforms with others’ recollections – so much so that, as Führer, Hitler would go to murderous lengths to suppress any account of his ‘lost’ years, and in 1936 ordered Hanisch hunted down and killed (he would die in captivity in Vienna in February 1937, allegedly of a heart attack).
In 1909, however, they struck up a working relationship. As a veteran conman, Hanisch easily insinuated himself into Hitler’s miserable life. On learning that his new friend was a visual artist – not a housepainter, as he had first supposed – he persuaded him to paint a series of postcards that he, Hanisch, would sell to tourists. They’d split the profits. Having little else to do, Hitler agreed and borrowed money from his aunt to buy paints and brushes.
He spent his days roaming the city, painting postcards of buildings and monuments and street scenes, which his new agent hawked to visitors. If technically accomplished, his pictures struck later observers as curiously soulless, though perhaps this was a case of reading the artist’s murderous future into a collection of innocuous images. The partnership prospered and in time Adolf won commissions from local advertisers, sketching posters for consumer products such as hair tonic, mattress stuffing, soap and an antiperspirant powder called ‘Teddy’.27