Hitler

glorification of blood and instinct. Oversimplified interpretations of Nietzsche’s sermons about the strength and radiant amorality of the superman also formed part of this stock of ideas. It is worth noting, however, that it was Nietzsche who remarked that the nineteenth century took over from Schopenhauer not his desire for clarity and rationality, or his doctrine of the intellectual nature of intuition, but—“determined to be barbarously fascinated and seduced”—his unprovable doctrine of the will, his denial of the individual, his ravings about genius, his hatred of the Jews, and his hostility to science.

Once again Richard Wagner enters the picture—Nietzsche used the example of Wagner to illustrate this misunderstanding of Schopenhauer. For the Master of Bayreuth was not only Hitler’s great exemplar; he was also the young man’s ideological mentor. Wagner’s political writings were Hitler’s favorite reading, and the sprawling pomposity of his style unmistakably influenced Hitler’s own grammar and syntax. Those political writings, together with the operas, form the entire framework for Hitler’s ideology: Darwinism and anti-Semitism (“I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in man”), the adoration of barbarism and Germanic might, the mystique of blood purification expressed in Parzifal, and the general histrionic view in which good and evil, purity and corruption, rulers and the ruled, stand opposed in black and white contrasts. The curse of gold, the inferior race grubbing underground, the conflict between Siegfried and Hagen, the tragic genius of Wotan—this strange brew compounded of bloody vapors, dragon slaying, mania for domination, treachery, sexuality, elitism, paganism, and ultimately salvation and tolling bells on a theatrical Good Friday were the perfect ideological match for Hitler’s anxieties and needs. Here he found the “granite foundations” for his view of the world.

Hitler called the Vienna years “the hardest, though most thorough school of my life”; when he left it, he declared, he had “grown quiet and serious.” He hated the city ever after for the rejection and insults he had suffered there—in this, too, resembling his model, Richard Wagner, who never overcame his grudge against Paris for the disappointments of his youth and had visions of the city going down to destruction in smoke and flames.⁴⁴ It is not far-fetched tn suspect that Hitler’s subsequent plans for turning Linz into a cultural metropolis on the Danube were inspired by resentment toward Vienna. Although he may not have gone so far as to wish the city burned to the ground, the fact is that in December, 1944, he refused a request for additional antiaircraft units for the city, remarking that Vienna might just as well find out what bomb warfare was like.

His uncertainty about his future increasingly depressed him. At the end of 1910 and the beginning of 1911 he appears to have received a considerable sum of money from his aunt, Johanna Polzl. But these additional funds produced in him no initiative, no effort to make a serious new beginning. He continued to drift aimlessly: “So the weeks passed by.” He still pretended that he was a student, painter, or writer. He went on cherishing vague hopes of a career in architecture. But he did nothing to make a reality of any of these pretensions. Only his dreams were ambitious, directed toward a great destiny. The persistence with which he continued to dream in the face of the actual conditions of his life, confers upon this period a striking note of inner consistency. He avoided being pinned down by anything, persisted in keeping all his relationships tentative. His refusal to enter the union saved him from being identified as a member of the proletariat and allowed him to hang on to his claim to middle-class status. Similarly, as long as he remained in the home for men and did nothing in particular, he could believe his own promise of genius and future fame.

His principal fear was that the circumstances of the times might block his dream. He was afraid of an uneventful era. Even as a boy, he later declared, he had “indulged in angry thoughts concerning my earthly pilgrimage, which… had begun too late” and had “regarded the period ‘of law and order’ ahead… as a mean and undeserved trick of fate.”⁴⁵ This much he sensed: that only a chaotic future and social upheaval could close the gap that separated him from reality. Wedded to his dreams, he was one of those who would prefer a life of disaster to a life of disillusionment.

The Flight to Munich

I had to get out into the great Reich, the land of my dreams and my longing.

Adolf Hitler

On May 24, 1913, Hitler left Vienna and moved to Munich. He was twenty-four years old, a despondent young man who gazed out upon an uncomprehending world with a mixture of yearning and bitterness. The disappointments of the preceding years had reinforced the brooding, withdrawn strain in his nature. He left no friends behind. In keeping with his antirealistic temperament, he tended to feel closest to those who were beyond reach: Richard Wagner, Ritter von Schonerer, Lueger. That “foundation” of his “personal views,” acquired “under the pressure of fate,” consisted of an assortment of prejudices which from time to time, after periods of vague brooding, were discharged in passionate outbursts. He left Vienna, as he later remarked, “a confirmed anti- Semite, a deadly foe of the whole Marxist world outlook, and pan-German.”

Like all such self-descriptions, this one has plainly been tailored so that Hitler can pretend to early judgment in political matters. He practiced the same kind of tailoring in writing Mein Kampf. In fact, his moving to Munich, rather than Berlin, the capital of the Reich, is rather plain proof of his continuing unpolitical disposition. Or perhaps we should say that he was guided by romantic and artistic impulses far more than political motives. For prewar Munich had the reputation of being a city of the Muses, a charming, humanely sensual, lighthearted center of art and science. The “life style of the painter was regarded here as the most legitimate of all.”⁴⁶ This picture of the city stemmed precisely from the contrast it made to noisily modem, proletarian Berlin. The latter city was a Babylon, in which social questions took precedence over aesthetics, ideologies over culture—or, in sum, politics over art. The atmosphere of Munich was more like that of Vienna, which again suggests that Hitler was drawn there by a general feeling rather than by any specific reasons that would have made him choose it in preference to Berlin—if, indeed, he felt confronted with any choice at all. In the Reich Handbook of German Society (a kind of Who’s Who) for 1931 he explained that he had moved to Munich to find “a wider field for political activity.” He would have found, however, better conditions in the capital of the Reich.

The same torpor and friendlessness that had marked the years in Vienna continued in Munich. It rather seems as if he spent his youth in a great hollow space. He made no contacts with parties or political factions; and ideologically, too, he remained solitary. Munich was an intellectually restive city, whose whole aura favored human relationships. Here even obsessions were highly thought of, for they betokened originality. Yet even here the young Hitler formed ties with nobody. He could have found his way to those who shared his racist notions, for even the most bizarre variants of volkisch ideas had their place in the city. Anti-Semitism also flourished, especially in the economically dislocated petty bourgeoisie. There were also radical leftist movements of widely differing character. It is true that all these tendencies were softened by the climate of Munich and usually expressed in sociable, rhetorical, neighborly forms. In the then suburb of Schwabing anarchists, bohemians, reformers, artists, and various apostles of new principles mingled easily. Pale young geniuses dreamed of an elitist renewal of the world, of redemptions, cataclysmic purgations, and barbarous rejuvenation cures for degenerate mankind.

At the center of one of the most important of those circles that formed at cafe tables around individuals or ideas was the poet Stefan George. He had gathered around him a band of highly talented disciples who imitated him in his contempt for bourgeois morality, glorification of youth and of instinct, faith in the superman, and an austere ideal of life as art and the life of the artist. One of his disciples, Alfred Schuler, had rediscovered the forgotten swastika. Ludwig Klages, who for a time was close to George, proclaimed “mind as the antagonist of the soul.”

Oswald Spengler, at that period, was setting out to proclaim the decline of the West and announcing a line of new Caesars who would, for a time, stem the tide. Lenin had lived at 106 Schleissheimer Strasse, and at number 34 on the same street, only a few blocks away, Adolf Hitler now took a room as a tenant in the apartment of a tailor named Popp.

The intellectual ferment, like the artistic experimentation of the period, passed Hitler by in Munich as it had