respectful courtesy call on Franz Joseph, of course. So much for Western hostility against Austria! (2) It was precisely the swelling of Austrian garrisons at the Russian border that gave idiot hotheads in Paris and St. Petersburg a pretext to heat up the military mood in their countries. That sort of cannon-waving was not policy-it was stupidity.
Franz Joseph listened to the arguments of both men. Then he acted-like Franz Joseph. His government did introduce a bill in parliament that would extend the present conscription law; he did not increase the permanent garrisons by the Russian border.
To the Viennese such news was routine hissing and scuffling in the corridors of power. Politics were not uppermost in the town's mind during that first arctic month of 1914. The very poor kept busy fighting their way through the daily crisis of survival-to stay warm, to stay fed. Others, more fortunate, prepared for the excitement of the carnival.
Of course a number of young men did have to pay attention to military matters. Anticipating the more comprehensive conscription bill (it would harvest 32,000 more recruits annually), General Conrad tightened draft implementation. The long hand of his apparatus reached an Austrian who had already thought himself safely escaped.
Shortly after New Year's, the War Ministry's Conscription Bureau succeeded at last in tracking down the whereabouts of Adolf Hietler [sic]. On the afternoon of January 18, a German detective entered Schleissheimerstrasse 34 in Munich and found on the third floor, in a room sublet by a tailor, the man he wanted. He arrested Hitler for violating the military service regulations of an allied state. The next day the fugitive was brought to the Austrian Consulate where he was ordered to report to the Army Induction Center of his native province, Upper Austria, in Linz.
Whereupon Hitler sat down to write one of his most voluble and mendacious letters. The real reason for evading the Austrian draft had been his revulsion against serving as 'a pure German' in the multiracial Habsburg forces. Yet the petition he now addressed to the Linz Magistracy, Section II, ascribes his failure to register to the monetary and spiritual straits of a loyal, impoverished, high-minded youth with lofty artistic aspirations:
the main reason making it impossible for me to honor your summons is that it has not been possible for me to muster the sum necessary for such a journey at such short notice.
In the summons my profession is specified as 'artist.' Although I have a right to that designa tion, it is nevertheless only conditionally appropriate. While it is true that I am earning my keep as a painter, I do so only since I am entirely without assets (my father was a government official) and therefore require an income to finance my education. I can devote only a fraction of time to financial gain since I am still completing my education as an architectural painter. Therefore my earnings are extremely modest, just sufficient for subsistence purposes. I submit as proof of the above my tax returns and request that you will be good enough to return the same to me. My income is estimated at 1200 marks at the very best, an estimate that is too high rather than too low, and does not mean that I earn 100 marks a month. Oh no. My monthly income is subject to great variation but is very poor at the moment because the art trade sort of suffers winter doldrums at this time in Munich…
Concerning my failure to register for the army in the fall of 1909, I hope you will have the kindness to realize that this was for me an immeasurably bitter time. I was an unexperienced young man without financial support, and too proud to accept subsidies or to ask for them. Without any help, dependent only on my efforts, the few kronen I earned barely sufficed for a room to sleep in. For two years I had no companion other than worry or penury, no comrade except continually gnawing hunger. I have never known the beautiful word 'youth.' Even today, after five years, I retain souvenirs of that time in the form of chilblain sores on my fingers, hands, and feet. And yet I cannot recall the period without a certain satisfaction, since I am now past the worst. Despite my wretchedness and despite the dubious surroundings in which I had to suffer it, I did keep my name free of stain. I have maintained a spotless record in the eye of my conscience and in the eye of the law-except for that one omitted military registration, the necessity for which I was not even aware of.
I beg most humbly that my petition be received in this spirit and sign
most respectfully yours
Adolf Hitler
artist
Here is a picture of deprivation raised by a man who unbeknownst to anyone around him-pocketed the comfortable income from two legacies. In style, his self-portrait to the authorities resembles the stilted landscapes Hitler was selling at the time in Munich (earning a bit of extra money he didn't need since he lived below his means). In emotionality this supplication recalls his rantings in Vienna's Mannerheim. But now he was using a well-calculated Austrian mixture of protocol and pathos, make-believe and baroque deference. It worked.
The Linz magistracy granted his request to appear at the Salzburg Induction Center since that venue was closer to Bavaria and 'the journey therefore more affordable to the petitioner.' And at Salzburg, following a physical examination on February 5, 1914, the Hitler file was closed with the conclusion: 'Unfit for military or auxiliary service; too weak; incapable of bearing arms.'
Safely back in Munich, Hitler continued doodling his way toward destiny. At the same time two young Bosnians joined him in an eerie partnership. The three never met. Hitler stayed in Bavaria. The other two lived in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo; yet during those early months of 1914 they took the first decisive steps toward triggering the first global war without which the man in Munich could never have started the second.
The zealotry of the two in Bosnia ran opposite to that of the one in Bavaria. His obsessive nationalism was German; theirs, Slav. Still, all three had trouble with the Vienna authorities, and all three were art-minded malcontents. Only the Bosnians' esthetics-in contrast to Hitler's-were anything but Victorian.
At twenty-three, the older of the Bosnian pair, Danilo Ilia seems to have been a rather complicated radical, alloying as he did his nationalism with Marxist and anarchist leanings. He supported himself as proofreader for the Serbian-language paper Srpska Rijee in Sarajevo. Tall, attenuated, neurasthenic, he always wore a black tie 'as a constant reminder of death.' His stomach ulcer kept him as conveniently out of General Conrad's army as 'weakness' kept out Hitler. Ilia cultivated unorthodox modern literature. Early in 1914 he spent much of his spare time translating into Serbo-Croatian Maxim Gorki's The Burning Heart, Oscar Wilde's essays on art and criticism, Leonid Andreyev's The Dark Horizon, Mikhail Bakunin's The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State. At the same time others among the Young Bosnians, the secret society of which he was part, translated Kierkegaard, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself.'
Ilia had been introduced to the works of Nietzsche by a fellow Young Bosnian barely eighteen years old named Gavrilo Princip. Princip, a slight youth with a high, furrowed forehead and eyes of a startling pale blue, was taciturn, restless, absorbed in books and given to actions baffling to his family. He had little patience for the banalities of the Commercial High School into which his parents had placed him. Like Ilia, he savored the darker writers. For his nickname he chose 'Gavroche' after Victor Hugo's boy-hero in Les Miserables. Besides Nietzsche, he idolized the most pessimistic of Serb poets, Sima Pandurovic.
But Ilia and Princip did not gloom the day away in literary introspection. Like the other Young Bosnians they wanted to implement the rebel's view of society, as conjured in their favorite literature, with rebellious action. They aimed to free the Serbs of Bosnia from the dead hand of the Church, from stale tradition and primitive custom, from everything that stifled the unfolding of the individual and the emancipation of women. Above all, they wanted to tear away the shackles put on their people by the Austrian Empire. They burned to unite all Slavs now under the Habsburg's yoke and join them with their brethren in Serbia and Montenegro into one free and glorious South Slav state.
'The whole of our society is snoring ungracefully,' a Young Bosnian wrote of the period. 'Only the poets and revolutionaries are awake.' Ilk and Princip were not only ardently awake but incandescently ascetic. Like most of the Young Bosnians, they did not drink or smoke or engage in sex (just like abstemious young Hitler). One member of the group, who had gotten to know Trotsky while a student in Vienna, wrote the Russian in 1914: 'You must believe me when I tell you that all of us follow the rule of abstinence.'
Ilia and Princip observed it passionately. The blood of their young manhood must surge only for the freedom
