in Vienna. Vassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, or Paul Klee, who also lived in the Schwabing neighborhood and were opening new dimensions in painting, meant nothing to Hitler. Throughout all the months he lived in Munich he remained the modest postcard copyist who had his visions, his nightmares, and his anxieties, but did not know how to translate them into art. The pedantic brushwork with which he rendered every blade of grass, every stone in a wall, and every roofing tile, shows his intimate craving for wholeness and idealized beauty. But the phantom world of his complexes and aggressions remained completely unexpressed.
The more conscious he became, deep within himself, of his insufficient abilities as an artist and of his general failure, the more he had to find reasons for asserting his own superiority. He thought himself highly developed because he could recognize the “often infinitely primitive views” of his fellow men. It served a similar purpose that he saw all around him only the basest instincts at work: corruption, the scheming for power, ruthlessness, envy, hatred. It was essential for him to blame his tribulations on the world. His racial identification also helped to raise him in his own eyes. It meant that he was different and better than all proletarians, tramps, Jews, and Czechs who had crossed his path.
But fear weighed upon him as oppressively as ever, the fear of sinking to the point of being indistinguishable from the down-and-outs, the antisocial, the proletarians. The “school of life” had taught him to think in terms of catastrophe. Fear was the overwhelming experience of his formative years, and ultimately, as will be seen, the impulse behind the fierce dynamism of his whole life. His apparently consistent views of the world and of people, his harshness and inhumanity, were preponderantly gestures of defense and a compensation for that “frightened manner” which the few witnesses of his early years observed in him. Wherever he looked he saw nothing but symptoms of exhaustion, dissolution, loss and contamination; signs of blood-poisoning, racial submergence, ruin and catastrophe. In this, it is true, he shared the fundamentally pessimistic attitude that was one of the deeper strains of the nineteenth century and cast its shadow over the faith in progress and science which was another aspect of the age. But in the radical extremes to which he carried this feeling, in the thoroughness with which he yielded to these fears, he made them unmistakably his own.
This state of anxiety shows through his explanation of why, after years of drift and daydreaming, he finally left Vienna. His reasons are a strange melange of Pan-Germanism and sentimentality, but he leads off by expressing his hatred for the city:
I was repelled by the conglomeration of races which the capital showed me, repelled by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere, the eternal parasitic fungi of humanity—Jews and more Jews.
To me the giant city seemed the embodiment of racial desecration….
For all these reasons a longing rose stronger and stronger in me, to go at last whither since my childhood secret desires and secret love had drawn me.
I hoped some day to make a name for myself as an architect and thus, on the large or small scale which Fate would allot me, to dedicate my sincere services to the nation.
But finally I wanted to enjoy the happiness of living and working in the place which some day would inevitably bring about the fulfillment of my most ardent and heartfelt wish: the union of my beloved homeland with the common fatherland, the German Reich.47
It is possible that he did have some such yearnings. Other factors of greater or lesser weight conceivably contributed to the decision. He himself later confessed that he had never been able “to learn the Viennese jargon.” He had also decided that the city and Austria as a whole “in the field of cultural and artistic matters… showed all symptoms of degeneration.” Thus there were no opportunities for him as an aspiring architect, and he was simply wasting his time. “The new architecture could achieve no special successes in Austria, if for no other reason because since the completion of the Ring its tasks, in Vienna at least, had become insignificant….”48
But all these reasons were not the decisive ones. What actuated him was once again his repugnance toward normality, his horror of the rules and obligations to which everyone else was subject. In the 1950’s the military records pertaining to Adolf Hitler came to light again; in March, 1938, immediately after the invasion of Austria, he had ordered a feverish search for these papers. The documents make it plain beyond a doubt that in moving to Munich he was determined to escape his military obligations. In order to conceal the facts, he registered with the police in Munich as stateless. In
For a time the Austrian authorities searched for him fruitlessly. On August 22, 1913, a Constable Zauner of Linz, who was conducting the investigation, noted: “Adolf Hietler [sic] appears to be registered with the police neither in this city nor in Urfahr, nor can he be located in other places.” Hitler’s former guardian, Josef Mayrhofer, could provide no information about his whereabouts; and the two sisters, Angela and Paula, when queried about their brother, declared that they had “known nothing about him since 1908.” Inquiries in Vienna, however, disclosed that he had moved to Munich and was registered there at 34 Schleissheimer Strasse. On the afternoon of January 18, 1914, an official of the criminal police suddenly turned up at this address, arrested the wanted man, and the following day took him to the Austrian consulate.
The charge he faced was serious, and Hitler, after having imagined himself quite safe, was in imminent danger of a prison sentence. This was one of those prosaic incidents which, like so many later ones, might have changed the whole direction of his career. For with the disgrace of draft dodging on his record it was scarcely likely that Hitler could have mobilized a following of millions and created his paramilitary forces.
But again, as was to happen repeatedly, chance came to his aid. The Linz authorities had given him so little time to report that it was impossible for him to obey the summons. A postponement afforded him the opportunity to draw up a carefully calculated written statement. In a letter of several pages to the Linz Magistracy, Section II —the most voluminous and important document of his youth—he attempted to justify his conduct. The letter shows that his spelling and command of German were still deficient. Beyond that, it reveals that his life in Munich had remained as irregular and aimless as it was during his Vienna years.
In the summons I am called an artist. Although I am rightly accorded this title, it is nevertheless only conditionally correct. It is true that I earn my living as a free-lance painter, but only, since I am entirely without property (my father was a government official), in order to further my education. I am able to devote only a fraction of my time to earning a living, since I am still training myself as an architectural painter. Therefore my income is a very modest one, just large enough for me to get along.
I submit as evidence of this my tax statement and request you kindly to return this document to me. My income is estimated as 1200 marks, rather too much than too little, and does not mean that I make exactly 100 marks a month. Oh no. My monthly income is extremely variable, but certainly very bad right now, since the art trade sort of goes into its winter sleep around this time in Munich…
The explanation he offered for his conduct was extremely flimsy. He had missed his first notice to report but shortly afterward had reported of his own accord, only to have his documents lost in the bureaucratic channels. In lachrymose accents, full of self-pity and a servile cunning, he attempted to excuse the omission on the grounds of his desperate circumstances during his years in Vienna:
As far as my sin of omission in the autumn of 1909 is concerned, this was a terribly bitter time for me. I was an inexperienced young man, without any financial aid and also too proud to accept any from anyone, let alone to ask for it. Without any support, dependent on myself alone, the few crowns or often coppers I earned from my works were scarcely sufficient to provide me with a bed. For two years I had no other friend but care and need, no other companion but eternally gnawing hunger. I never knew the beautiful word youth. Today, even after five years, I have the mementos in the form of chilblain sores on my fingers, hands and feet. And yet I cannot recall this period without a certain rejoicing, now that I am after all over the worst. In spite of the greatest misery, in the midst of often more than dubious surroundings, I have always preserved my name unsullied, am altogether blameless before the law, and pure before my own conscience….
