CHAPTER FIVE

‘Is this a German?’

In February 1910 Hitler and Hanisch moved into a new home for men at Meldemannstrasse 27, in Vienna’s working-class district of Brigittenau. The shelter was something of a model of social welfare, partly financed by Jewish charities: newly built, clean, with proper beds, and serving three meals a day for 1,000 men. It even had a reading room, with a small library, the scene of vigorous discussion. Here, Adolf would live for more than two years. He had survived the darkest period of his young life with remarkable resilience and, though his lungs were weak and his teeth in bad shape, his health was improving.

When he wasn’t running around the city sketching postcards for Hanisch, Hitler would withdraw to ‘his’ corner of the reading room and quietly read or sketch. When he disagreed with the ambient discussion, he would fly into a rage, leap up and burst into one of his long tirades, about the greatness of Germany, the decadence of Vienna, or whatever subject seized his imagination, chopping his hands in the air and shouting, to the bemusement of his homeless comrades, before he quietened down and returned to his corner.

‘Propaganda, propaganda!’ he yelled on one occasion, in response to his mates’ disapproval of a story about a woman who’d sold hair tonic using false testimonials. ‘You must keep it up until it creates a faith and people no longer know what is imagination and what is reality … Propaganda,’ he cried, is the ‘essence of every religion … whether of heaven or hair tonic.’¹

Of unconfirmed provenance, this outburst none the less chimes with Hitler’s early ideas about the uses of propaganda for mass manipulation and how to exercise it, as he would describe in Mein Kampf: banish the truth through threats or violence, fill the empty space with falsehoods that serve the purpose, and reinforce those falsehoods over and over until the people not only believe them, they want to believe them.

His new companions soon tired of Hitler’s furious interjections and bombastic speeches, and simply ignored him. Understandably, given their meagre circumstances, they failed to see the hard-edged nature of this man, to fathom the formidable will that would propel him from the troughs of Vienna to the highest office in the German Reich. Hitler’s resilience, autodidactic arrogance and the very nature of his thought went largely unnoticed. Unable to keep pace with their strange young companion’s stormy discourse and agile mind, many of them resorted to laughter and mockery.

In 1910, Hanisch, who had successfully sold many of Hitler’s paintings, turned against his younger charge. It infuriated him that Hitler also sold his postcards through Josef Neumann, a Hungarian Jewish copper-polisher who also lived in the men’s home. On one occasion Hitler and Neumann disappeared together for five days. When Hitler accused Hanisch of short-changing him on the sale of a picture of the Viennese Parliament, which the artist claimed was worth 50 crowns, their relationship collapsed. Hitler even testified against Hanisch at the local police station, accusing him of theft, for which his former friend received a week in jail.

As such, it was a fellow German, and not his Jewish colleagues, who defrauded and preyed on Hitler in Vienna. In fact, Neumann shared Hitler’s love of ‘Germany’ and gave his friend an old black overcoat, which became something of a trademark item of clothing around the doss house and preserved his health during the winter of 1910/11.

Young Adolf, it seems, had no recorded sexual adventures or relationships in Vienna. Female guests were strictly forbidden in the men’s home, but that didn’t matter to Hitler. According to his comrades, he shunned female company. While susceptible to feminine beauty, commenting on attractive women from a distance, he displayed, or affected, a marked froideur towards the opposite sex on the few occasions he actually came into contact with them. Yet women seemed to notice him, especially at the opera, where he would loiter with pointed indifference, according to Kubizek, who theorized that women wanted ‘to test this male source of resistance’.²

Many years later, in his 1942 ‘Table Talk’ monologue, Hitler claimed he had encountered ‘many beautiful women in Vienna’ and had taken a special shine to ‘big blonde’ girls.³ Yet he never seemed to get to know any, as Ullrich concludes. He certainly seems to have been afraid of women; and he later described his ideal woman as ‘a cute, cuddly, naïve little thing – tender, sweet and stupid.’⁴ He had a horror of syphilis, and the idea of sexual intercourse affronted his standards of personal hygiene. Now that he could wash and stay clean, he felt only disgust at the memory of the dirty tramp he had become during the worst days in Vienna.

It was not out of any religious duty or pangs of conscience that Hitler shunned pre-marital sexual relationships. Rather, it seems he subscribed to conservative notions about masculinity prevalent at the time, which lauded celibacy as a test of male self-control, of stoic self-abnegation. It was a kind of self-love, underscoring his strength of will.

In choosing to abstain from sex, he took a leaf out of the ‘moral code’ of the radical leader Georg Ritter von Schönerer – to remain celibate until the age of twenty-five, to have no sex with ‘lesser’ or ‘impure’ races, and to consume no meat or alcohol. ‘Extended celibacy’ greatly benefited young people, Schönerer claimed. Celibacy ‘quickens the wits, refreshes the memory, inspires the imagination and fortifies the will,’ he wrote – all nonsense of course, peddled by a man with no medical expertise, but widely believed. It enabled Hitler to fashion a virtue out of his abstemiousness and hatred of ‘decadence’: prostitution and homosexuality disgusted him; he even refrained from masturbating, according to Kubizek.⁵

In sum, Schönerer’s masculine code served as a convenient cover for Hitler’s fear of sexual inadequacy, which was hardly unusual in young men of the time. In later years he pursued a few female relationships with gusto, but would not marry his long-standing companion, Eva Braun, until forty hours before they consummated their suicide pact, on 30 April 1945, in the Führer’s Berlin bunker.

If Hitler stayed celibate in Vienna, as seems likely, he would have entered his twenty-fourth year a virgin.⁶ In 1912 he threw his time and surplus energy instead into his political ‘education’, an exercise in defining himself by what he most despised – chiefly Marxism, the Slavs, modern art and the Habsburgs – and dreaming of what he most desired: a world ruled by Germany.

 

Hitler’s faith in ‘Germany’ and the ‘Germans’ had been unassailable since his boyhood. As a member of Austria’s German minority, he had always felt an acute sense of historic displacement, instilled in him by his Pan-German teachers and family, and manifested by a longing to return to the homeland. The ideas of Germany as the saviour of Europe and the German people destined to rule it were well formed in his youth. Prussian military prowess impressed him: the only book he possessed at this time was a history of Prussia’s victory over France in 1870–71.

The greatest champion in his pantheon of German heroes was Count Otto von Bismarck, whose towering achievement was the unification of Germany in 1871. Bismarck was one of the few men Hitler un reservedly admired throughout his life, chiefly for the Iron Chancellor’s ‘blood and iron’ leadership, hatred of social democracy and non-Germans, and policies of Kulturkampf, the supremacy of secular rule over the Catholic Church. All these would find new expression in the most brutal form during Nazi rule.

In the 1900s, the new Germany was making huge strides, announcing to the world the arrival of an economic and cultural force. Yet there was a sinister side to German economic and political success. Pride in the new empire’s achievement bred a fervent, even fanatical patriotism, utterly loyal to the Fatherland. By extension, and with varying intensity in the coming years, this new sensibility excluded non-Germans, or non-Teutonic breeds, to use the racially charged language of the era of Social Darwinism.

According to this thesis, Slavs and Jews were explicitly lesser breeds and had no right to exist in the front rank of nations, of which ‘Deutschland’ was the gleaming showcase. In this sense, the creation of Germany expressed a new racial consciousness, a full-blown ‘German’ consciousness. The drawing together of the reins of Deutschland was the single most arresting political and economic fact in Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century. Hitler absorbed all this in a most virulent form. The disturbed orphan cleaved to Germany as his saviour, his only hope. It is not fanciful to suggest that he projected his longing for his lost mother on to Deutschland, his Teutonic mother country.

In Vienna, Hitler’s love of Germany rose as his disgust for the Austrian Parliament and the charade of democracy intensified. He was more receptive to the authoritarian uses of political power, as exemplified by Bismarck, at a time when the Austrian Parliament was struggling to provide adequate living standards, jobs or hope. Local politicians had failed to find a solution to this wretchedness, and periodically tried to divert attention from their failure to popular scapegoats: minorities such as Jews, gypsies, Serbs, Czechs, Italians, Hungarians or Romanians.

All this tended to dismay the German Austrians, most of whom were fiercely opposed to the lacklustre old methods of the Habsburgs. Like Hitler, they wanted rapier blows against external threats and decisive action in the Balkans. In the late nineteenth century the Habsburgs had tried to expand their empire into the Balkan peninsula (chiefly because the landlocked country needed access to the sea), with first the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 and then their annexation in 1908. Yet strong-arm tactics and decisive action ran against the grain of the regime, whose guiding animus was muddling along, not crashing through. The Habsburgs were essentially landlords, after all, not rulers, and played off the empire’s constituent parts in a constant game of divide and conquer. ‘The Habsburg lands were not bound together either by geography or by nationality,’ observed A. J. P. Taylor.⁷

For centuries, the Ottoman Turks had traditionally been the biggest threat to Habsburg rule. That ended in 1912, with the eviction of Turkey from the Balkans in the First Balkan War. The Slavic people then replaced the Muslims as Austria–Hungary’s ‘necessary’ enemy. Vienna cast a covetous eye over the recrudescent Slavs in the peninsula, chiefly the strongest and most threatening, the Russian-backed Serbs. Franz Joseph and his fiercely anti-Slav court – which did not include his nephew and heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who, in one of history’s more bitter ironies, advocated a moderate policy towards the Slavs – were determined to control the Balkan territory vacated by the Turks and, with German support, freeze Russia out of the peninsula.

Young Hitler shared this goal in a most aggressive form. He was violently opposed to the Slavic dominance of the Balkans. He reckoned the Austrian policy of encroaching on the peninsula fell well short of what was required: the annexation of Bosnia–Herzegovina should have initiated a process of complete conquest of Serbia and other Russian-backed strongholds. He despised the bumbling nobility in Austria, and in Germany too. He loathed Franz Ferdinand and his moderate followers. He scorned the dithering Kaiser Wilhelm II. The only aristocratic courtier he admired was the bellicose Count Conrad von Hötzendorf, chief of staff of the Austrian armed forces, who had constantly pressed the Viennese government to crush Serbia.

For Hitler, whose political sensibility was gradually unfolding, only the binding power of a united ‘Germany’, a Pan-Germany, could deliver a coherent solution to the racial shambles of Central Europe and control the Slavs to the south. Hence his strong attachment to the Pan-German demagogues and racial theorists who proliferated in Vienna at the time, some of whose ideas he shared – but did not swallow. Their theories of racial preservation and methods of political manipulation struck him more powerfully than their overt anti-Semitism, which he simply took for granted, it was so widespread.

 

Hitler’s reading habits at this stage of his life in Vienna were un systematic, arbitrary and impulsive. He rarely read literature for enjoyment, as Kubizek observed, with the exception of his lifelong love of Germanic myths and sagas of Teutonic heroism. It is highly unlikely that he had actually read a full-length work of philosophy by Arthur Schopenhauer or Friedrich Nietzsche, despite Kubizek’s claim that their books surrounded him in their flat.⁸ The twenty-one-year-old preferred the popular press and short political pamphlets. In this time before public radio and television, newspapers were immensely powerful. Viennese papers were split between the ‘Jewish press’ and the ‘anti-Jewish press’; the latter peddled Pan-German ideas and racial ‘purity’. Hitler chose the tabloids for his news, chiefly the anti-Semitic rag Deutsches Volksblatt.

He squirrelled away snippets of political, religious and racial theory that reinforced his own views, collecting knowledge rather like a jackdaw collects shiny objects. His mental ‘nest’ was a combobulation of facts, opinions and plain lies that buttressed his emerging personal ‘philosophy’ and its attendant prejudices. He gathered up whatever accorded with this mental excrescence and dismissed the rest, as though he were following a pre-ordained plan.

Hitler considered this approach an intellectual strength, as he later told the readers of Mein Kampf: The ‘art’ of proper reading, he explained, lay in ‘sifting what is valuable for them in a book from that which is without value, of retaining the one forever, and, if possible, not even seeing the rest, but in any case not dragging it around with them as useless ballast.’⁹ Or, in another translation, ‘The art of reading and studying consists in remembering the essential and forgetting what is not essential.’¹⁰

‘Essential facts’ and ‘useless ballast’ meant whatever Hitler chose them to mean. Reading, for him, meant seizing on information that reinforced his prejudices and facilitated his ‘life’s work’. Hard evidence that contradicted his ideas he simply rejected or ignored as useless. He had no use for proper context, for weighing pros and cons, far less a dialectical or hypothetical approach to the pursuit of truth. He had no truck with ‘experts’ and ‘intellectuals’, of course. He drew on tabloid rants, rabid political rhetoric and smatterings of philosophy to feed his Weltanschauung, his ‘philosophy of life’. His excellent memory harvested quotes and fragments that made his unschooled companions think of him as a philosopher tramp, a wayward intellectual.¹¹

At this time, his mind was greatly exercised by themes of German greatness, the rise of the Fatherland and the German people’s right to rule, which fed his ever-strengthening Pan-German world view. His sympathies at the time were ‘fully and exclusively with the Pan-Germanic movement,’ he later plausibly claimed. It was now that the concept of an ‘Aryan’ race started to impinge on Hitler’s mind: it seemed an ancient people of Indo-Iranian origin and mythical powers of mind and physique were the forebears of the tall, blonde Nordic champion who animated far-right literature. We should not make too much of the influence of these mythical Übermenschen on his mind at the time, however: in Vienna, Hitler was nowhere near formulating the ‘theory of race’ that would drive the Nazi Party to genocide. Yet he was undoubtedly receptive to any ideas that cemented notions of German supremacy.

In pre-war Vienna, such ideas proliferated. Hitler attended talks and read pamphlets on German racial supremacy by an array of soap-box speakers, incendiary Pan-Germans, racial theorists and pseudo-scientists. They included Guido von List, the charlatan ‘visionary’ and mystical Pan-German who urged the ‘demixing’ (i.e. cleansing) of the population and who described the swastika as the sign of the ‘invincible’ and ‘strong one from above’; Josef Adolf Lanz von Liebenfels, a former monk and publisher of Ostara, a journal devoted to cultivating the ‘Master Race’, who adopted the swastika as the symbol of his ‘racially pure’ society of New Templars and proposed ‘pure-breeding’ colonies to protect pristine Aryan blood from inferior races (ironically, Liebenfels himself was partly Jewish); Hans Goldzier, a self-taught ‘scientist’ who branded Newton’s theory of gravity ‘false’ and who peddled an especially crude form of Social Darwinism; the Pan-German Franz Stein, whose contempt for Parliament would teach Hitler a lesson in how to undermine democracy; Karl Hermann Wolf, leader of the ‘Free German’, the most radical of the Pan-German parties; and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the English author turned German citizen, whose massive work of pseudo-scientific history, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, conceived of all human history as a racial struggle between the Nordic, Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon peoples and the rest, singling out the Jews as a parasitic growth on the Aryan achievement – he likened the Gothic tribes who pounded Rome to dust to modern Prussians.

Two intriguing influences on Hitler’s young mind were Jewish-born ‘intellectuals’ who had rejected their religion, and whom he most likely read about in newspapers: Arthur Trebitsch, an Austrian author and paranoid ‘racial theorist’, who, despite being the son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist, turned against Judaism and persuaded himself of an ‘international Jewish world conspiracy’ against the German people, fearing that the Jews were trying ‘to poison him with electric rays’;¹² and Otto Weininger, a precociously gifted academic and Christian convert who, perhaps overcompensating for his failure to eradicate his ‘inner Jew’, damned the Chosen People as a ‘race’ of ‘Mongrels’ and ‘Negroes’, thus rendering his conversion pointless: if the Jews were a race, as he implied, then he would always be a Jew. Unable to find a way out of this self-eliminating logic, Weininger dutifully killed himself. He was twenty-three. (The Nazis would later use his case against the pleas of Jews who had converted to Christianity: your ‘race’, not your religion, would ultimately determine whether you lived or died.)

In Vienna, he was also exposed to the bastardized theory of Social Darwinism, widely believed in Europe, which argued that ‘natural selection’ could be fast-tracked and applied to a living society, in which the ‘fittest’ race ruled. Stripped of its pseudo-scientific jargon, the idea merely unloosed the law of the jungle on civilized Europe. To Hitler, it made perfect sense, because it buttressed his belief in the Aryans as the ‘fittest’ race.

Such notions of racial purity and German power were all part of a common discourse in pre-war Vienna – and, indeed, throughout Europe – in which racist feelings were always on the conversational menu. In this milieu, to feel disdainful towards the Jews or ‘lesser breeds’ – Slavs, Poles and so on – was ‘normal’, a default mode of thought. And none of the Pan-German, racial supremacists Hitler associated with, read or listened to during his time in Vienna dismissed these ideas as stupid, bigoted or uncivilized, because they all shared them.

 

In Mein Kampf Hitler claims that he left Vienna feeling a violent hatred of the Jewish people and that his racial programme was already fully formed.¹³ In Vienna, he insists, ‘I underwent the greatest internal upheaval I have ever experienced. I went from cosmopolitan weakling to fanatic anti-Semite.’¹⁴ That was sheer confabulation. In Vienna, and later in Munich, Hitler in fact displayed no systemic hatred of Jews or other minorities, despite his exposure to a gallery of racist influences and thinkers. Their ideas merely reinforced his belief in Germans as the Master Race, but did not at this stage lead him to a specific and acute hatred of singular ‘races’.

His ‘anti-Semitism’ during this period amounted to little more than the general hostility of the city, where such views were mainstream: like most people, he simply bundled up the Jews with what were popularly dismissed as the ethnic detritus in Vienna’s melting pot. ‘Hitler did not experience an anti-Semitic epiphany in Vienna,’ concludes Volker Ullrich. The truth, as he and others remind us, was far murkier.¹⁵ It is none the less true that the seeds had been sown and lay dormant in his mind, to emerge years later, fertilized by his intense experience of the Great War and its aftermath.

Indeed, Hitler’s experiences of Vienna’s Jews tell a different, far messier story. His first encounter with orthodox Jews, in their traditional black kaftans, broad hats, beards and tzitzit tassels, provoked a morbid curiosity, not a murderous hatred, as he recounted in Mein Kampf:

Once, as I was strolling through the inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan [sic] and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?¹⁶

He claimed this experience drove him to ‘study’ the Jewish people and the Zionist political movement: ‘For a few hellers [half a pfennig] I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life.’ And soon, it seemed, there was nowhere he could turn without bumping into another man in a black kaftan. ‘I suddenly encountered him in a place where I would least have expected to find him. When I recognized the Jew as the leader of Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion.’¹⁷ The face of his true enemy had been revealed, he later claimed: the Jews were a ‘spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death’.¹⁸

This is another ex post facto fabrication. Hitler did not experience a sudden ‘conversion’ to violent anti-Semitism, either in Vienna or elsewhere. As we shall see, it would be a gradual process, combining political opportunism and genuine hatred. He contrived this apparent psychological upheaval many years later, to enhance his political ambitions and to establish the ‘continuum’ of a man of destiny. In fact, his actual first encounter with Jews in Vienna had little purchase on his thoughts. He simply let the matter slide. To him, ‘the Jews’ were another passing curiosity, a social carbuncle like the abundance of ‘aliens’, poverty and prostitution.

In fact, two of his close friends at the time were Jews, according to Brigitte Hamann’s forensic research for her book Hitler’s Vienna: Josef Neumann, the Hungarian Jewish copper-polisher with whom he went into business, and Simon Robinson, a one-eyed locksmith. And Jews were among the biggest buyers of Hitler’s postcards, which Siegfried Loffner, a Jewish friend of Neumann’s, and two Jewish picture framers, Jakob Altenberg and Samuel Morgenstern, promoted and sold to their communities. Hitler avoided falling back into absolute poverty thanks to their help.

In the hostel’s reading room, Hitler was sometimes heard defending the Jewish people, praising their charity and citing examples of great Jewish musicians and artists, according to Hanisch.¹⁹ Of course, Hanisch was writing in the early 1930s after he had fallen out with Hitler and was trying to discredit his old business pal.²⁰ His statements cannot be completely dismissed, when set against other witnesses whose observations were also sometimes biased, self-serving or politically motivated; yet taken together they build a coherent, if limited, portrait of their disturbed and embittered young comrade. ‘In those days Hitler was by no means a Jew hater,’ Hanisch wrote in an article posthumously published in the New Republic in 1939. ‘He became one afterward. He used to say even then that the end sanctions the means, and so he incorporated anti-Semitism into his program as a powerful slogan.’²¹

In fact, Hitler often spoke admiringly of the Jewish people, claimed Hanisch, with whom he discussed the subject on their evening walks:

[H]e admired the Jews most for their resistance to all persecutions. He remarked of Rothschild that he might have had the right of admission to court but refused it because it would have meant changing his religion. Hitler thought that was decent, and that all Jews should behave likewise. During our evening walk we discussed Moses and the Ten Commandments. Hitler thought it possible that Moses had taken over the commandments from other nations, but if they were the Jews’ own they had produced as a nation one of the most marvelous things in history, since our whole civilization was based on the Ten Commandments.²²

Other accounts bear witness to Hitler’s admiration for Jewish resilience, and their ability to survive and retain their faith despite centuries of oppression. According to ‘Anonymous’, the doss-house comrade whose identity is unknown but whose remarks have been treated as credible, Hitler ‘got along well with Jews. Once he said they were a clever people who stuck together better than the Germans.’²³ Indeed, Hitler’s later murderous hatred of the Jewish people arose in part from his fear that this ‘pure’ and successful ‘race’ posed a serious threat to his Aryan fantasy.

In summary, Hitler displayed no signs of vicious anti-Semitism or ‘racial’ hatred towards the Jews in Vienna. He himself stated in Mein Kampf that he barely registered the city’s Jews at first, and when he did, he studied them as if they were a passing oddity: ‘Notwithstanding that Vienna in those days counted nearly two hundred thousand Jews among its two million inhabitants, I did not see them … For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others.’ He considered the vicious tone of the city’s anti-Semitic press ‘unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation’.²⁴

Years later, his youthful companions, the homeless, the unemployed, street hawkers, ‘agents’ and students – including Hanisch, the source known as ‘Anonymous’, fellow hostel-dwellers Karl Honisch and Rudolf Häusler, and of course Kubizek – verified this. Hitler’s associates in the men’s shelter were thus astonished to learn that their earnest, prudish companion, who never drank, took no interest in girls and never seemed to enjoy himself, was the same violent Jew-hater who was elected Reich Chancellor. They had seen nothing in what Hitler did or said between 1908 and 1914 that marked him out as a future leader of Germany, conqueror of Europe and exterminator of the Jews.

 

Two Viennese politicians made a deeper impact on Hitler than the hell-raisers and soap-box theorists, and powerfully influenced his later political career: the ferocious anti-Semite Georg Ritter von Schönerer and the city’s mayor, Dr Karl Lueger. Schönerer and Lueger were his touchstones, both of whom he would portray in Mein Kampf as admirable failures.

By the time Hitler arrived in Vienna, Schönerer, the once-popular leader of the Pan-German movement, was a near-spent force, a fuming anti-Catholic, anti-Habsburg, anti-Liberal and fierce anti-Semite, defined merely by what he despised. Though Schönerer’s political career was over, his ideas proliferated and any number of upstart demagogues waved the baton of Schönererism, or aspects of it. Schönerer had routinely called for the elimination of the Jewish influence in all areas of public life. His extremism and eccentricity – he anointed himself ‘Führer’ and insisted on the ‘Heil’ greeting – failed to appeal to anyone beyond his immediate, dwindling circle, and he received a humiliating 20 votes in the 1911 elections. Schönerer’s chief mistakes, Hitler later decided, were to ignore the importance of mass appeal and to confuse and divide his followers by offering no fixed group on whom to focus their hatred. And plainly Schönerer’s ‘Away from Rome’ programme alienated Vienna’s large Catholic community.

Years later, as Führer, Hitler would act on these ‘lessons’ by mobilizing a powerful propaganda machine, softening his anti-Catholicism when expedient, and turning the full wrath of the Nazis on a single target. At this point, however, he possessed a ragbag of incoherent ideas about race and politics, which were gradually turning into something sharp and unyielding.

Dr Lueger, Vienna’s mayor from 1897 until 1910, leader of the Christian Social Party and so-called ‘Lord of Vienna’, had a profound, practical influence on the young Hitler. No doubt Lueger was a fine lawyer and a good mayor, in the traditional sense: he built hospitals, schools and churches; he overhauled the transport network and water supply (all of which impressed Hitler’s sense of civic pride and municipal duty). The mayor was also a fully fledged Pan-German, who sought to preserve the city’s German-ness in a sea of racial chaos.

Lueger’s extraordinary oratory, coupled with his simple slogans, moved and impressed Hitler. ‘Vienna is German and must remain German!’ Lueger was fond of declaring, in the face of a huge influx to the city of Slavs, arriving to look for work and to escape the troubles in the Balkans. Or: ‘Greater Vienna must not turn into Greater Jerusalem!’ When attacked in the media for refusing to extend full suffrage to Vienna’s Jews, which would have empowered the Jewish-led Social Democrats, Lueger simply condemned the ‘Jewish Press’, which delighted his followers and cemented his ascendancy.²⁵

The mayor used the Jewish scapegoat to devastating effect. ‘Lueger knew how to focus all his voters’ negative images in one powerful movement: anti-Semitism,’ writes Brigitte Hamann. ‘He reduced everything that was contrary to the simple formula: the Jew is to blame.’²⁶ He declared that he was fighting to defend Christianity against ‘a new Palestine’ and regularly invoked the old Catholic hatred of these ‘Christ killers’. His racist harangues dredged the swamp of anti-Semitic cliché. He rallied his constituents against the ‘press Jews’ and ‘ink Jews’ (intellectuals), ‘stock exchange Jews’ and ‘beggar Jews’ (Eastern immigrants).²⁷ He turned Jew-hating into a show, a game of outrage, to score political points. ‘Beheaded! is what I said,’ he shouted, when accused of saying that it was a matter of indifference to him whether the Jews were hung or shot.²⁸

Lueger’s outbursts were archly timed (around elections) and pointedly applied, suggesting his anti-Jewish stance was little more than political posturing. Certainly he knew how to exploit the bigotry of this viciously prejudiced city. He chose the Jews ‘as a kind of political glue to unite prince and peasant, scholar and servant, in a classless social movement,’ concluded the scholar Ewart Turner.²⁹

For Lueger, this was all a political game. He never went ‘too far’: he had powerful Jewish friends and never threatened Jewish businesses. His anti-Semitism was clearly designed to shore up his support among Catholics and workers. From Lueger, Hitler received an absorbing tutorial in the art of political persuasion and the power of oratory and propaganda. Later, he would ominously dismiss the mayor’s anti-Semitism as a half-hearted sham.

While these politicians and radicals informed Hitler’s early thinking, they did not dominate it (none of them had met the strange young man who lingered at their meetings and devoured their pamphlets). Hitler decided early on that he would be nobody’s disciple. He neither joined their parties nor agreed with everything they said. He studied their policies. He read their work, heard them speak, and extracted the elements that appealed to him or conditioned his inchoate prejudices. Though he openly admired them, none was a ‘role model’ or mentor. Rather, they offered Hitler morsels that he would absorb now and use later. He scavenged at the entrails of others’ political ideas.

A vital ingredient distinguished Hitler’s emerging Pan-German vision from the rest: the control of the masses. Only a mass movement would catapult Germany to power. So long as bourgeois moderation infected the German Austrian population in Vienna, little could be achieved, he later argued. Intellectual dilettantes and meek parliamentarians would be useless in the coming ‘revolutionary struggle’:

[T]he broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. And all great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses; they are not the lemonade-like outpourings of literary aesthetes and drawing room heroes. Only a storm of hot passion can turn the destinies of peoples, and he alone can arouse passion who bears it within himself.’³⁰

On the contrary, rousing words that fell on the sawdust of a beer hall were not enough to sustain a lasting revolution. A mass uprising and revolution needed morally powerful ideas to sustain it, not just an inspiring speaker – ideas such as those of the brilliant, lawyerly, ‘intellectual revolutionaries’ Danton, Robespierre or Marx (whom Hitler could admire for the strength of his beliefs, even though he deplored his politics). Such ideas were lacking in what was, at this stage, Hitler’s mass-driven fantasy.

 

Hitler later claimed his Vienna years formed the ‘granite foundation’ of his political struggle against Marxism and world Jewry. Clearly, this statement in Mein Kampf was a deliberate lie, an attempt to validate retrospectively his life as a heroic continuum from impoverished artist to political thinker to revolutionary leader. Like so much of his memoir, it served his personal mythology: to re-create his past as the self-realization of a born leader.

The reality was far from it. Hitler left Vienna in 1913 with no political ambitions, no plans, no job and little hope. He had some money, having now come into his father’s inheritance. And he had picked up a rag-tag collection of ideas and theories about race and Social Darwinism. What Hitler learned in Vienna, observed historian and biographer Werner Maser, was ‘that life is but a continuous, bitter struggle between the weak and the strong, that in that struggle the stronger and abler will always win, and that life is not ruled by principles of humanity but by victory and defeat’.³¹

There was nothing new or unusual in this. Before the First World War, millions of Europeans shared Hitler’s notion of the survival of the fittest. Racial cleansing through Francis Galton’s concept of ‘eugenics’ – inter-breeding to produce a ‘superior’ race in tandem with the forced sterilization of the ‘inferior’ – was popular right across the political spectrum. Nice liberals and cosy clergymen were among the strongest supporters of eugenics. There was something ominous, however, in Hitler’s notion of racial ‘purity’ that distinguished it from the mainstream: in his world view, only German power had the strength and vision to procreate an Aryan Master Race: ‘German’ and ‘Aryan’ were mutually reinforcing, indivisible. The seeds of these ideas were planted in Hitler in Vienna; the full-grown beast would not emerge until much later, after a world war had poisoned the political soil.

What Hitler’s personality was yet to project, though a form of it smouldered within him, was that defining feature of his mature character: hatred, pure, unalloyed hatred, of an intensity that only some cataclysmic intervention in the course of his life could have forged and nurtured, such that he would shout at a crowd in 1921: ‘There is only defiance and hate, hate and again hate!’ Life taught only one lesson, he yelled: ‘to hate and to be hard … a lesson devoid of love’.³² This, though, was not a lesson he learned in Vienna.

His journey now took him to Munich, to where he dragged this baggage of ideas about German greatness, Habsburg weakness and Aryan supremacy, as well as his fear and loathing of the ‘giant human dragon’ of socialism. Bavaria would deepen and entrench these feelings into something more dangerous, more monolithic. Yet it would take a war of unprecedented scale and horror for Hitler’s full-blown Weltanschauung (philosophy of life) to step forth. And before that, he would find, for the first time in his life, an anchorage, a sense of belonging and the closest thing to a home, in his beloved regiment.