Hitler

Some two weeks later, on February 5, 1914, Hitler appeared before the draft board in Salzburg. The record of his physical examination, which the candidate had to sign, and which bears his signature, read: “Unfit for military and auxiliary service; too weak. Incapable of bearing arms.”⁴⁹ He immediately returned to Munich.

By all indications, Hitler was not altogether unhappy in Munich. He later spoke of the “heartfelt love” this city had inspired in him from his first moment there. This was a phrase that did not normally occur in his vocabulary. He applied it above all to “the wonderful marriage of rustic strength and fine artistic mood, this unique line from the Hofbrauhaus to the Odeon, from the October Fest to the Pinakothek.” Significantly, he does not adduce any political motive to explain his affection. He continued to be solitary, holing up on Schleissheimer Strasse; but he seems to have been as unaware as ever of his lack of human relationships. Actually, he did form a rather tenuous connection with his landlord, the tailor Popp, and with the latter’s neighbors and friends, and engaged in a certain amount of socializing and political discussion with them. For the rest, he evidently found in the Schwabing taverns—where origins and status counted for nothing and everyone was socially acceptable—the kind of human contact that was the only kind he could stand because it afforded him closeness and strangeness simultaneously: the loose, chance acquaintanceships over a glass of beer, easily formed and easily lost. These were those “small circles” he later spoke of, where he was considered “educated.” Here, for the first time, he apparently encountered more agreement than disagreement when he expatiated on the shakiness of the Dual Monarchy, the dire potentialities of the German-Austrian Alliance, the antiGerman, pro-Slavic policy of the Hapsburgs, the Jews, or the salvation of the nation. In a milieu that favored outsiders and assumed that eccentric opinions and manners were a sign of genius, such views did not seem peculiar. If a question excited him, he frequently began to shout; but what he said, no matter how excessively he behaved, struck his listeners as consistent. He also liked to predict political developments in prophetic tones.

Later, he declared that by this time he had given up all plans to become a painter and that he painted only enough to earn a living so that he would be able to pursue his studies. For hours he sat over the newspapers in cafes or in the Hofbrauhaus, brooding, sallow, easily irritated. Sometimes, amid the fumes of beer, he dashed down vignettes of the scene around him, or a rendering of an interior in the sketch pad he carried with him. Josef Greiner claims to have met him in Munich at that time and to have asked what he had in mind to do in the future. Hitler answered, Greiner says, “that there would be a war shortly in any case so that it did not matter whether or not he had a profession beforehand, because in the army a corporation director was no more important than a dog barber.”

Hitler’s premonition—if Greiner has reported it accurately—was not mistaken. In Mein Kampf Hitler has impressively described the earthquake atmosphere of the prewar years, the intangible, almost unendurable feeling of tension on the verge of discharge. It is surely not accidental that these sentences stand out as among the most successful passages in the book, as writing:

As early as my Vienna period, the Balkans were immersed in that livid sultriness which customarily announces the hurricane, and from time to time a beam of brighter light flared up, only to vanish again in the spectral darkness. But then came the Balkan War and with it the first gust of wind swept across a Europe grown nervous. The time which now followed lay on the chests of men like a heavy nightmare, sultry as feverish tropic heat, so that due to constant anxiety the sense of the approaching catastrophe turned at last to longing: let Heaven at last give free rein to the fate which could no longer be thwarted. And then the first mighty lightning flash struck the earth; the storm was unleashed and with the thunder of Heaven there mingled the roar of the World War batteries.⁵⁰

By chance a photograph has been preserved in which Adolf Hitler can be seen in the cheering crowd on the Odeonsplatz in Munich when the state of war was proclaimed on August 1, 1914. His face is plainly recognizable: the half-open mouth, the burning eyes, which at last have a goal and see a future. For this day liberated him from all the embarrassments, the perplexities, and the loneliness of failure. Describing his own emotions in Mein Kampf, he wrote:

To me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart.

Virtually the whole era shared this emotion; seldom had Europe seemed more unified than it was in the martial frenzy of those August days in 1914. One did not have to be an artistic wastrel with no prospects to regard the day on which the war “broke out and swept away the ‘peace’…” as “beautiful for a sacred moment” and even to feel that it satisfied an “ethical yearning.”⁵¹ The whole European world, including Germany, was suffering from profound ennui. The war seemed an opportunity to escape from the miseries of normality. Here again we may see Hitler’s intense attunement to his time. He shared its needs and longings, but more sharply, more radically; whereas his contemporaries felt mere discontent, he felt desperation. He hoped that the war would overturn all relationships, all starting points. And wherever the resort to arms was cheered, people sensed, at bottom, that an age was at last coming to its end and a new one was in the making. Fin de siecle—that was the formula in which the bourgeois age, with more than a touch of melancholy complacency, summed up this mood of farewell. In keeping with the romanticizing tendencies of the age, the war was viewed as a purification process, the great hope of liberation from mediocrity, weariness with life, and self- disgust. And so the war was hailed in “sacred hymns”; it was described as “the orgasm of universal life,” creating chaos and fructifying it so that the new might be born.⁵² When Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Minister, declared at the outbreak of the war that the lights were going out all over Europe, he was sorrowing at the end of civilization as he knew it. But there were many who exulted at this end.

Photographs taken during those early days of August, 1914, have preserved the hectic air of festivity, the gay expectancy, with which Europe entered the phase of its decline: mobilizing soldiers pelted with flowers, cheering crowds on the sidewalks, ladies in bright summer dresses on the balconies. It was as though fate were mixing the cards afresh in a game that had grown monotonous. The nations of Europe hailed victories they would never win.

In Germany those days brought an unparalleled sense of community experience, almost religious in its nature. The expression of it, struck up spontaneously in the streets and squares, was the song “Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles,” which had been written by a long-controversial, liberal revolutionary of 1848 and only now became the real national anthem. On the evening of August 1 Kaiser Wilhelm II proclaimed to tens of thousands assembled in the palace square in Berlin that he no longer recognized “parties or denominations” but “only German brothers.” Those were undoubtedly the most popular words he ever spoke. In a traditionally deeply divided nation that statement swept away, for one unforgettable moment, a multitude of barriers. German unity, attained barely fifty years before, seemed only now to have become a reality.

This feeling of unity was an illusion. The old contradictions survived behind the image of a nation reconciled. A welter of motives underlay the surge of rejoicing: personal and patriotic wishful thinking, revolutionary impulses, antisocial rebellions, dreams of hegemony, and, always, the yearning of adventurous spirits to break out of the routine of the bourgeois order. But for that one sublime moment it all combined into a storm of selfsacrifice on behalf of the threatened fatherland.

Hitler’s own feelings had their quota of spurious elements: “Thus my heart, like that of a million others, overflowed with proud joy….” he wrote and attributed his enthusiasm to the fact that he would now have a chance to prove by deeds the strength of his nationalistic convictions. On August 3 he addressed a petition directly to the King of Bavaria requesting permission, in spite of his Austrian citizenship, to volunteer for a Bavarian regiment. The contradiction between his draft evasion and this step is not a real one. For peacetime military service would have subjected him to a coercion he regarded as pointless. The war, on the other hand, meant liberation from the conflicts and miseries of his chaotic emotions, from the aimless emptiness of his life. In his boyhood two popular books about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had fired his enthusiasm for the powerful German army. Now he was entering that army with its nimbus of childhood reading. The past few days had vouchsafed him these feelings of belonging and union with his fellow men that he had lacked for so long. Now, for the first time in his life, he saw his chance to share in the prestige of a great and feared institution.

The very day after he had submitted the petition, the answer arrived. “With trembling hands I opened the