Hitler

measures, his platform included sterilization, deportations to the “ape jungle,” and liquidations by forced labor or murder. “Offer sacrifices to Frauja, you sons of the gods!” he wrote. “Up, and sacrifice to him the children of the Schrattlings.” In order to popularize the Aryan idea, he suggested racial beauty contests.

Hitler had missed some of the older issues of the magazine, and this gave him a pretext for visiting Lanz several times. He left an impression of youth, pallor, and modesty.²⁵

The importance of this rather ludicrous founder of an order does not consist in anything he suggested to or did for Hitler but in the symptomatic place he occupied: he was one of the most eloquent spokesmen of a neurotic mood of the age and contributed a specific coloration to the brooding ideological atmosphere, so rife with fantasies, of Vienna at that time. To say this both describes and delimits his influence upon Hitler. One might say that Hitler did not so much absorb the man’s ideology as catch the infection that underlay it.

From this and other influences, such as the newspaper articles and cheap pamphlets that Hitler himself mentioned as early sources of his knowledge, some scholars have concluded that his world view was the product of a perverted subculture opposed to bourgeois culture. And in fact the plebeian hatred for bourgeois mores and bourgeois humanity repeatedly erupts in his ideology. The dilemma, however, consisted in the fact that this culture was in a way permeated by its subculture and had long ago become a blasphemy of everything it was founded on. Or, to put the same thought in a different way, the subculture that Hitler found expressed by Lanz von Liebenfels and others of his ilk in turn-of-the-century Vienna was not the negation of the prevailing system of values but only its rather battered and sordid image. Turn where he might in his craving for ties with the bourgeois world, he came upon the same notions, complexes, and panicky fears that were expressed in the cheap pamphlets, only in a more sublimated and respectable form. He did not have to abandon a single one of the trivial ideas that had helped him to achieve his initial orientation in the world. Everything he had picked up, with reverent astonishment, in the speeches of the most influential politicians of the metropolis, seemed familiar to him. And when he sat in the upper balcony of the Opera House and listened to the works of the most celebrated composer of the era, he encountered only the artistic expression of the familiar vulgarities. Lanz, the Ostara pamphlets, and the trashy tracts merely opened for him the rear entrance into the society he wanted to belong to. But, rear or not, it was an entrance.

The need to legitimize and consolidate this affinity also underlay his first groping efforts to give some ideological shape to his resentments. With the morbidly intensified egotism of one who felt threatened by social debasement, he more and more took over the prejudices, slogans, anxieties, and demands of upper-class Viennese society. Among the elements were both anti-Semitism and those master-race theories that reflected the apprehensions of the German populace of the empire. Two other ingredients were a horror of socialism and what were called “social-Darwinist” notions—all founded upon exacerbated nationalism. These were upper-class ideas, and by adopting them he attempted to raise himself to the level of that class.

In later years Hitler always went to considerable lengths to represent his thought as the fruit of personal struggles. He was supposed to have arrived at his ideas by his own penetrating observation and the labors of his intellect. In order to deny all determining influences he even pretended to have been through a period of wild liberalism. For example, he stressed the “repugnance” that “unfavorable remarks” about Jews had aroused in him during his years in Linz. It is more likely, and various persons have attested to this, that his youthful views were marked by the ideological climate of that provincial city.

Linz at the turn of the century swarmed with nationalistic groups and sects. Moreover, a decidedly nationalistic temper prevailed at the secondary school that Hitler attended. The pupils flaunted in their buttonholes the blue cornflower popular among German racist groups. They gave preference to the colors of the German unity movement, black-red-gold; they greeted one another with the Germanic “Heil!” and sang the tune of the Hapsburg imperial anthem with the text of “Deutschland uber Alles.” They felt themselves part of a nationalistic opposition directed chiefly against the Hapsburg dynasty and even put up some youthful resistance to school religious services and Corpus Christi processions—for they identified with the “Protestant” German Reich.

At the Realschule, the spokesman for these trends was Dr. Leopold Potsch, town councilor and teacher of history. Evidently he had made a deep impression upon young Hitler. His eloquence, and the colored oleos of yesteryear with which he supplemented his lessons, guided the imaginations of his pupils in the desired direction. The pages his pupil devoted to him in Mein Kampf contain a measure of hindsighted exaggeration. But the border dweller’s sense of being menaced, the hatred for the Danube monarchy’s mixture of nations and races, and Hitler’s fundamental anti-Semitic attitudes undoubtedly came to him through his old schoolmaster. It is also probable that Hitler read the largely satiric magazine of the Schonerer movement, Der Scherer, Illustrierte Tiroler Monatsschrift fur Politik und Laune in Kunst und Leben (“Illustrated Tyrolean Monthly for Politics and Entertainment in Art and Life”) which was published in Linz during those years. It had a good deal to say about the decline of morals and the evils of alcoholism, but it specialized in attacks on the Jews, the “papists,” the suffragettes and members of Parliament. As early as the first issue of May, 1899, it carried a picture of the swastika, which was being taken up as the symbol of Germanic, volkisch, (i.e., racial and nationalistic) attitudes. In the magazine, however, it was still described as the “fire whisk” which, according to Germanic myth, had twirled the primal substance at the creation of the universe. Hitler also seems to have read—both during his schooldays and in the following aimless years—the Pan-German and aggressively anti-Semitic sheet Linzer Fliegende Blatter. For it was not only in Vienna that anti-Semitism formed a component of political and social ideology—as the author of Mein Kampf would have had his readers believe. It was just as strong in the provinces.

In Mein Kampf Hitler speaks of an “inner struggle” lasting two years, in the course of which his emotions resisted the inexorable commands of his reason “a thousand times” before he completed his metamorphosis from “a weak-kneed cosmopolitan” to a “fanatical anti-Semite.” In fact, what he calls his “greatest spiritual upheaval” was merely development from a groundless and almost elusive dislike to fixed hostility, from mere mood to ideology. The anti-Semitism of Linz had been of a dreamy sort, tending toward neighborly compromises; now it took on the sharpness of principle. It focused on a well-defined enemy. At the beginning of his stay in Vienna Hitler had sent “respectfully grateful” regards to Dr. Eduard Bloch, his parents’ Jewish family doctor. Dr. Josef Feingold, the lawyer, and Morgenstern, the picture framer, had encouraged the would-be artist by buying his small water colors. Toward Neumann, his Jewish companion at the home for men, Hitler had felt an exaggerated sense of obligation. Now, during the process of change that continued for several years, all these marginal figures of his youth started to recede into the background. Their place was taken by a vision that steadily acquired an almost mythological power, the “apparition in a long caftan and black hair locks” which once struck him “as I was strolling through the Inner City.” He forcefully described how this chance impression “twisted” in his brain and gradually began to become an obsession that dominated all his thinking:

Since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans…. All this could scarcely be called very attractive, but it became positively repulsive when, in addition to their physical uncleanliness, you discovered the moral stains on this “chosen people.”… Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light—a kike!… Gradually I began to hate them.²⁶

We can probably no longer plumb the real cause of this ever-growing hatred, which lasted literally to the last hour of Hitler’s life. One of his dubious cronies of those years attributed the hatred to sexual envy on the part of a dropout from the middle class. This crony has described an incident involving a model, the essence of Germanic femininity, a half-Jewish rival, and an attempt on Hitler’s part to rape the girl while she was posing. The story is as grotesque as it is stupidly plausible.²⁷ The theory that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was connected with pathological sexual fixations is supported by the whole uneven pattern of Hitler’s ideas about sexual relations, which from his boyhood oscillated remarkably between strained idealism and obscure anxiety feelings. It