Hitler

bent on having. While Schonerer scotched his chances by making enemies, Lueger had worked his way up by continuously seeking and cementing alliances with the ruling groups. He had known how—as Hitler in his homage described the well-remembered lesson—“to make use of all existing implements of power, to incline mighty existing institutions in his favor, drawing from these old sources of power the greatest possible profit for his own movement.”

The mass party Lueger formed with the aid of emotional slogans was living proof that anxiety was—as happiness had been a century before—a new idea in Europe, powerful enough to bridge even class interests. For the time being, the idea of a nationalistic socialism took much the same course. The Bohemian and Moravian regions of the Danube Monarchy were rapidly becoming industrialized. In 1904 a congress in Trautenau founded the German Workers’ Party (DAP—Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). Its aim was to defend the interests of the German workers against cheap Czech labor pouring into the factories from the countryside and frequently acting as strikebreakers. This action was one step—there would be others throughout Europe under the most varied auspices—toward meeting a key weakness of Marxist socialism: its inability to overcome national antagonisms and to give concrete reality to its humanitarian slogans. For there was no room within the theory of class struggle for the German worker’s sense of a separate national existence. In fact, the adherents of the new German Workers’ Party were recruited largely from among former members of the Social Democratic Party. They had turned away from their previous political convictions out of concern that the policy of proletarian solidarity would favor only the Czech majority in the region. That policy, as the program of the DAP formulated it, was “misguided and immeasurably harmful to the Germans of Central Europe.”

To these Germans the inseparability of their national and social interests seemed to be an obvious and universal truth, which they opposed to the high-flown and imprecise internationalism of the Marxists. They thought they would find the reconciliation of socialism and nationalism in the idea of a “national community”— Volksgemeinschaft. The program of their party united, in somewhat contradictory fashion, whatever ideas answered their craving for self-defense and self-assertion. The goals of the party were predominantly anticapitalistic, revolutionary-libertarian, and democratic; but from the beginning this was mingled with authoritarian and irrational notions, along with fierce antipathies toward Czechs, Jews, and other so-called “foreign elements.” The early followers of the party were workers from small mines, from the textile industry; there were also some railroad workmen and artisans. They regarded themselves as closer to the German bourgeois types, the pharmacist, the industrialist, the high official, or the businessman than to the unskilled Czech workers. Soon they took to calling themselves National Socialists.

In later life Hitler did not like to recall these forerunners, although his ties with them, especially in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, were for a time very close. The existence of these predecessors obviously cast doubt upon his claim, as leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), to sole authorship of the idea that was to determine the fate of the century. In Mein Kampf he attempted to derive this idea from his comparison between Lueger and Schonerer, and to represent it as his personal synthesis:

If, in addition to its enlightened knowledge of the broad masses the Christian Social Party had had a correct idea of the importance of the racial question, such as the Pan-German movement had achieved; and if, finally, it had itself been nationalistic, or if the Pan-German movement, in addition to its correct knowledge of the aim of the Jewish question, had adopted the practical shrewdness of the Christian Social Party, especially in its attitude toward socialism, there would have resulted a movement which even then in my opinion might have successfully intervened in German destiny.³⁰

Hitler would have it that he refrained from joining either of these parties because of these objections. But it would be more accurate to say that for most of his Vienna years he had no independently thought-out political line. Rather, he was filled with inchoate emotions of hatred and defensiveness of the sort to which Schonerer appealed. Alongside these were vague, upwelling prejudices against Jews and other minorities and an aching desire to be influential in some way. He grasped what was happening in the world around him more by instinct than by reason. So excessively subjective was his interest in public affairs at this time that he cannot really be called political. Rather, he was still being “politicalized.” He himself admitted that at the time he was so filled with his artistic aspirations that he was only “incidentally” interested in politics; it took the “fist of fate” to open his eyes. Proof of this is the tale he tells of himself as a young building worker deeply disliked by his fellows. The anecdote later found its way into all German schoolbooks as a staple item of the Hitler legend. But, for us, the significant detail is this: that when asked to join the union he refused, giving as his reason that he “did not understand the matter.” It would seem that for a long time politics represented to him principally a means for unburdening himself, a way to blame his misfortunes on the world, to explain his own fate as due to a faulty social system, and finally, also, to find specific scapegoats. Significantly, the only organization he joined was the League of Anti- Semites.³¹

Hitler soon gave up the apartment on Felberstrasse that he had taken after parting from Kubizek. Up to November, 1909, he changed his residence several times. Once he listed his occupation as “writer.” There is some indication that he wanted to avoid registering for military service and hoped by moving around to throw the authorities off his track. But it may also be that this constant moving reflected both his heritage from his father and the neurasthenia and aimlessness of his life. Those who knew him during this period have described him as pale, with sunken cheeks, hair brushed low over his forehead, his movements jerky. He himself later declared that at that stage of his life he had been extremely shy and would not have ventured to approach a great man or to speak out in the presence of five persons.

He lived on his orphan’s pension, which he continued to draw by fraudulently asserting that he was attending the Academy. His inheritance from his father, however, as well as his share in the sale of his parents’ home—which for so long had provided him with the means for a carefree and untrammeled existence—appear to have been used up by the end of 1909. At any rate, he gave up the room on Simon Denk Gasse which he had sublet from September to November. Konrad Heiden, the author of the first important biography of Hitler, relates that at this time Hitler “sank into bitterest misery” and spent a few nights without shelter, sleeping on park benches and in cafes, until the advanced season forced him to seek shelter. November, 1908, was unusually cold; there was much rain, often mixed with snow.³² Sometime during this month Hitler queued up in front of the home for men in Meidling, a Vienna suburb. Here he met a vagabond named Reinhold Hanisch, who in an account he wrote in later years described how “after long wanderings on the roads of Germany and Austria I came to the Refuge for the Homeless in Meidling. On the wire cot to my left was a gaunt young man whose feet were quite sore from tramping the streets. Since I still had some bread that peasants had given me, I shared it with him. At that time I spoke a heavy Berlin dialect; he was enthusiastic about Germany. I had passed through his home town of Braunau on the Inn, so I could easily follow his stories.”

For about seven months, until the summer of 1910, Hitler and Hanisch spent their time together in close friendship and joint business affairs. To be sure, this witness is not much more credible than all the others from this early phase of Hitler’s life. Nevertheless, there are bits of Hanisch’s story which ring true: that Hitler had the tendency to sit idly brooding, and that nothing would persuade him to go job hunting with his pal Hanisch. The contradiction between Hitler’s longing for middle-class respectability and his real situation certainly never appeared more plainly than during those weeks in the flophouse, surrounded by broken-down derelicts, befriended by no one but the crudely cunning Reinhold Hanisch. In 1938, when he could do so, he had Hanisch tracked down and killed. At the height of his career, still needing to drown out the humiliating memory of those years, he insisted: “But in imagination I lived in palaces!”

The enterprising Hanisch, wise in the ways of the world, familiar with all the miseries and shifts open to his class, one day asked Hitler his occupation. Hitler replied that he was a painter. Assuming that Hitler meant a house painter, Hanisch said that he certainly should be able to earn money at such a trade. And, despite all our suspicions of Hanisch’s reliability, we cannot help recognizing the young Hitler in the phrases that follow: “He was insulted and replied that he was not that kind of painter, but an academician and an artist.” The two men eventually went into partnership—the idea seems to have come from Hanisch. Shortly before Christmas they moved into a kind of hostel, the home for men on Meldemann Strasse, in the Twentieth District of Vienna. By day, when regulations forbade staying in the tiny bedrooms, Hitler sat in the reading room perusing the newspapers or