Hitler

is supported likewise by the language and argumentation of his own account wherever the figure of a Jew enters the story. The scent of obscenity, which can be detected in all the pages of Mein Kampf in which he attempts to deal with his repugnance for Jews, is surely not an accidental and superficial characteristic. Nor is it merely an echo of the trashy pamphlets and periodicals to which he owed the unforgotten “illuminations” of his youth. Rather, in that obscenity his own personality and the inner nature of his resentment is revealed.

After the war a member of the dictator’s entourage published an extensive list of the women in Adolf Hitler’s life. Characteristically, the beautiful Jewish girl from a wealthy family figures in the list. It is far more likely that he had no “actual encounter with the girl,” either in Linz or in Vienna. Or, if so, the affair would have been lacking the kind of passion that might have liberated the young man from his theatrical egocentrism.

Contrasting with this lack is a significant dream, the—in his own words—“nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds and thousands of girls by repulsive, bandy-legged Jew bastards.” Lanz, too, had been tormented by the recurrent bugbear of blonde noblewomen in the arms of dark, hairy seducers. His race theory was permeated by sexual-envy complexes and deep-seated antifemale emotions; woman, he maintained, had brought sin into the world, and her susceptibility to the lecherous wiles of bestial submen was the chief cause for the infection of Nordic blood. The same obsession, expressing the toils of a delayed and inhibited masculinity, emerges in a similar vision of Hitler’s: “With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.” In both cases we have the fetid, insipid imagery of the sex-starved daydreamer; and it may well be that the peculiarly nasty vapors that rise from large tracts of National Socialist ideology derive from the phenomenon of repressed sexuality within the bourgeois world.²⁸

Kubizek, Hitler’s boyhood friend, and other companions from the dim twilight of underground Vienna, have pointed out that Hitler had early on fallen out with everybody, that his hatred lashed out in all directions. It is conceivable, therefore, that his anti-Semitism was merely the concentrated form of his hitherto general and undirected hatred, which finally found its object in the Jews. In Mein Kampf Hitler argued that the masses must never be shown more than one enemy, because to be aware of several enemies would only arouse doubts. This principle, a number of writers have pointed out, applied to him even more than to the masses. He always concentrated his feelings with undivided intensity upon a single phenomenon as the presumptive cause of the evils in the world. And that phenomenon was always a specifically imaginable figure, never any elusive cluster of causes.

Perhaps we may never be able to trace Hitler’s overwhelming Jewish phobia down to its roots. But on the whole we may say that an ambitious and desperate loner was finding a formula for politicizing his personal problems. For he saw himself bit by bit going downhill and was forced to fend off his terror of being declassed. The apparition of the Jew helped to support his self-esteem; he could draw the conclusion that he had the laws of history and of nature on his side. Hitler’s own account, incidentally, sustains the view that he became a full-fledged anti-Semite at the time he had used up his inheritance. Although he never suffered the utter destitution he later described, he was under some financial pressure, and at any rate had socially fallen much lower than he could bear, given his dreams of being an artist, a genius, the object of public adulation.

Vienna, the German bourgeois Vienna of the turn of the century, may be regarded as under the aegis of three men. Politically, it was the city of Georg Ritter von Schonerer and Karl Lueger. But in that peculiarly iridescent area where politics and art meet—that border region that so significantly determined Hitler’s career—the overwhelmingly dominant figure was Richard Wagner. Ideologically, these three were the key personalities of his formative years.

We are told that in Vienna Hitler appeared as a disciple of Georg von Schonerer, that he had framed mottos by this man hanging over his bed: Ohne Juda, ohne Rom/ wird gebaut Germaniens Dom. Heil! [2] And: Wir schauen frei und offen, wir schauen unverwandt,/ wir schauen froh hinuber ins deutsche Vaterland. Heil! [3]

These rhymed maxims gave the gist of von Schonerer’s program. His Pan-German movement, unlike the association of the same name in Germany, did not pursue expansionist imperialistic goals but worked instead for the union of all Germans in one national state. In marked contrast to the Pan-German Association of Germany, it was for giving up the non-German lands of the Danube Monarchy. In general it opposed the existence of the multinational state. The founder and leader of this movement, Georg von Schonerer was a landowner of the frontier Waldviertel, which was also the native soil of Hitler’s family. He had begun his career as a radical democrat, but subsequently more and more subordinated ideas of political and social reform to extreme nationalism. Obsessed by fears of drowning in a sea of foreignness, he saw deadly threats to his Germanism all around him: from the Jews and equally from Roman Catholicism, from Slavs and Socialists, from the Hapsburg monarchy and every type of internationalism. He signed his letters “with German greetings”; he launched all sorts of proposals for reviving ancient Germanic customs; he recommended that German chronology begin with 113 B.C., date of the Battle of Noreia at which the Cimbri and the Teutons won a decisive victory over the Roman legions.

Schonerer was a difficult personality, deeply embittered, rigid in his principles. He organized the Away- from-Rome Movement, incurring the hostility of the Catholic Church. He was the first to give European hatred for the Jews, hitherto mostly religious and economic in its motivations, the twist that turned it into formal anti- Semitism with a political, social, and above all, biological basis. A demagogue with a keen sense for the effectiveness of primitive emotions, he led a general fight against the trend toward Jewish assimilation. “Religion’s only a disguise, in the blood the foulness lies,” ran one of his slogans. In the monomania with which he regarded the Jews as agents of all the evils and troubles of the world, and in the radicality of his declaration of war on them, he can be recognized as Hitler’s forerunner. Within the tepid and tolerant atmosphere of old Austria, he was the first to demonstrate the possibilities inherent in organizing racial and national fears. Anxiously, he saw the day coming when the German minority would be overwhelmed and “slaughtered.” To ward off that day, he demanded special anti-Jewish laws. His followers wore on their watch chains the insigne of the anti-Semite: a hanged Jew. There were some who spoke up in the Parliament at Vienna, calling for bounties to be awarded for every murdered Jew, either as a set payment or a portion of the victim’s property.

Dr. Karl Lueger, the other spokesman for petty bourgeois anti-Semitism, evidently made an even more lasting impression upon Hitler. Lueger was the mayor of Vienna and the eloquent leader of the Christian Social Party. In Mein Kampf Hitler expressed his unequivocal admiration for Lueger, hailing him as “truly gifted,” “the greatest German mayor of all times,” and “the last great German to be born in… the Ostmark.”²⁹ It is true that Hitler sharply criticized his program, especially his casual and opportunistic anti-Semitism and his faith in the multinational state. But Lueger’s demagogic talent impressed him all the more, as did the mayor’s adeptness at making use, for his own purposes, of the prevailing socialistic, Christian, and anti-Jewish impulses of the people.

Unlike Schonerer, whose arrogance and fixation aroused strong opposition and thus condemned him to ineffectiveness, Lueger was conciliatory, skillful, and popular. He merely exploited ideologies; privately, he despised them. His thinking was tactical and pragmatic; accomplishment meant more to him than ideas. In his fifteen years in office the transportation network of Vienna was modernized, the educational system extended, social welfare improved, green belts laid out, and almost a million jobs created. Lueger based his power on the Catholic working class and the petty bourgeoisie: white-collar workers and lower-rank government officials, small shopkeepers, the concierges and lower clergy, all of whom industrialization and changing times threatened with social downgrading or poverty. He, too—in this resembing Schonerer—profited by the widespread feelings of anxiety, but he exploited these feelings only against select and defeatable opponents. Moreover, he did not arouse more anxiety by painting the future in gloomy colors. Instead, he won support with infallibly effective humanitarian platitudes, vividly expressed in his recurrent phrase: “We must do something for the little man!”

But Hitler admired Lueger for more than his Machiavellian qualities. He believed he had discovered a deeper concord between the mayor and himself. Certainly Lueger had things to teach him; but beyond that, Hitler regarded the man as a kindred soul. Like himself the son of simple folk, Lueger had made his way against all obstacles, all slurs and social disparagement. He had prevailed over even the objections of the Emperor, who three times refused to confirm him as mayor, and had won that recognition from society which Hitler, too, was