Hitler

himself at this time first began making those assertions about coming from a good family which in the future unmistakably stamped his style and his manner. The adolescent fop in Linz, as well as the subsequent proletarian in Vienna, would seem to have acquired a tenacious “class consciousness” and a determination to succeed.

Hitler later represented his failure at secondary school as a way of defying his father, who wanted to steer him into the civil service where the father himself had had so successful a career. In after years Hitler told a vivid story about being taken to the main customs office in Linz; his father hoped the visit would fill him with enthusiasm for the profession, while he himself was filled with “repugnance and hatred” and could see the place only as a “government cage” in which “the old men sat crouching on top of one another, as close as monkeys.” But the description of the allegedly prolonged conflict, which Hitler dramatized as a grim struggle between two men of iron will, has since been exposed as pure fantasy.

In fact, we must rather assume that his father paid little attention to his son’s vocational future. Certainly he did not insist upon any one course. That is apparent if only because attendance at the Gymanasium would have been much more to the point for a civil service career, given the structure of the Austrian school system. But what Hitler does describe accurately is the mood of persistent tension that sprang partly from the difference in temperament between father and son, partly from the father’s realizing his long-cherished dream of early retirement—a dream that we may see curiously recurring in the son. When, in the summer of 1895, Alois Hitler retired and was liberated at last from the stringent duties of his vocation, he began living for his leisure and his inclinations. For young Adolf his father’s retirement meant an abrupt reduction in his freedom of movement. Suddenly he was continually running into the powerful figure of his father, who insisted on respect and discipline, and who translated his pride in his own achievement into inflexible demands for obedience. The reasons for the conflict are evidently to be sought in this general situation, rather than in any specific differences of opinion over the son’s uncertain future.

Moreover, the father saw only the beginning of Adolf’s years in the Realschule. For, in January, 1903, he took a first sip from a glass of wine in the Wiesinger tavern in Leonding and fell over to one side. He was carried into an adjoining room, where he died immediately, before a doctor and a priest could be sent for. The liberal Linz Tagespost gave him a lengthy obituary, referring to his progressive ideas, his sturdy cheerfulness, and his energetic civic sense. It praised him as a “friend of song,” an authority on beekeeping, and a temperate family man. By the time his son gave up school out of disgust and capriciousness, Alois Hitler had already been dead for two and a half years. Nor could Adolf’s sickly mother have tried to force the boy into a civil servant’s career.

Although she seems to have held out for a while against her son’s demand that he be allowed to leave school, she soon could find nothing to pit against his self-willed temperament. After losing so many children, her anxiety about the two who remained constantly manifested itself as weakness and indulgence, which her son had quickly learned to exploit. When, in September, 1904, he was promoted only on condition that he leave school, his mother made one last attempt. She sent him to the Realschule in Steyr. But there, too, his work continued to be unsatisfactory. His first report card was so bad that Hitler, as he himself relates, got drunk and used the document for toilet paper; he then had to request a duplicate. When his report for the autumn of 1905 likewise showed no improvement, his mother at last gave in and allowed him to leave school. However, the decision was not entirely her own. For, as Hitler involuntarily confessed in Mein Kampf, he was “aided by a sudden illness.”⁷ There is, however, no evidence for such an illness; the principal reason seems to have been that he had again not been promoted.

Hitler left the school “with an elemental hatred,” and in spite of all his efforts to explain away his failure by references to his artistic vocation, he never entirely recovered from the smart. Free from the demands of schooling, he was now determined to dedicate his life “wholly to art.” He wanted to be a painter. This choice was prompted equally by his talent for sketching and the rather florid notion an official’s son from the provinces must have had of the free and untrammeled artist’s life. Quite early he showed a bent for attitudinizing. A onetime boarder in his mother’s house later described the way the young Adolf would sometimes abruptly begin to draw at meals and with seeming obsessiveness dash down sketches of buildings, archways, or pillars. To be sure, such behavior can be explained as a legitimate way of using art to escape the coercions and confinements of the bourgeois world, and soar instead into realms of the ideal. It is only the manic fervor with which he threw himself into his painting exercises, or into music arid dreams, forgetting and rejecting everything else, that casts a disturbing light on this passion. Arrogantly, the young Adolf declared that he would have none of any definite work, any sordid vocation for the sake of a livelihood.

It would seem that he sought elevation through art in a social sense as well. Behind all the whims and decisions of his formative years lay the overpowering desire to be or to become something “higher.” His eccentric passion for art was tangibly related to his notion that art was a pursuit of the “better class of society.” After his father’s death his mother had sold the house in Leonding and moved into an apartment in Linz. Here the sixteen- year-old boy sat idly around. Thanks to his mother’s adequate pension, he was in a position to suspend all plans for the future and to assume that appearance of privileged leisure which counted very heavily in his mind. He would take a daily stroll on the promenade. He regularly attended the local theater, joined the musical club, and became a member of the library run by the Association for Popular Education. An awakening interest in sexual questions impelled him, as he related later, to visit the adult section of a wax museum. And around the same time he saw his first film in a small movie house near the Sudbahnhof. According to the descriptions we have, he was lanky, pallid, shy, and always dressed with extreme care. Usually he sported an ivory-tipped black cane and tried to look like a university student. His father had been driven by social ambition but had achieved what the son regarded as a paltry career. His own goals were pitched far higher. In the dream world that he set up for himself, he cultivated the expectations and the egotism of a genius.

He visibly retreated into this fantasy world after he had for the first time failed to meet a challenge. In his own world he compensated for his early experiences of helplessness vis-a-vis his father and his teachers. There he celebrated his solitary triumphs over defenseless antagonists; and from this secret realm he hurled his first bolts of anathema against the ill-wishers he believed surrounded him. Everyone who knew him at this time later recalled his low-keyed, withdrawn, “anxious” nature. Unoccupied as he was, everything preoccupied him. The world, he decided, must be “changed thoroughly and in all its parts.” Until the late hours of the night, he sat feverishly over clumsy projects for the total rebuilding of the city of Linz. He drew sketches for theaters, mansions, museums, or for that bridge over the Danube which he triumphantly ordered built thirty-five years later on the basis of his own adolescent plans.

He was still incapable of any systematic work. Constantly, he sought new occupations, new stimuli, new goals. For a short while he took piano lessons; then boredom set in and he abandoned them. For a while he had a single boyhood friend, August Kubizek, the son of a Linz decorator, with whom he shared a sentimental passion for music. On August’s birthday he made a present to his friend of a villa in the Italian Renaissance style: a gift out of his large stock of delusions. “It made no difference whether he was talking about something finished or something planned.”⁸ When he bought a lottery ticket, he was at once transported into a future where he occupied the third floor of a fine house on the bank of the Danube. He spent weeks deciding on the decor, choosing furniture and fabrics, making sketches, and unfolding to his friend his plans for a life of leisure and devotion to art. The household would be managed by an “elderly, already somewhat gray-haired but extremely elegant lady.” He could already see her receiving “their guests on the festively illuminated landing,” guests who belonged “to the choice, spirited circle of friends.” The daydream seemed to him already a fact, and when the lottery drawing shattered that dream, he flew into a fit of rage. Significantly, it was not only his own bad luck at which he stormed; he denounced human credulity, the state lottery organization, and finally condemned the cheating government itself.

Quite accurately, he described himself as he was during this period as a “loner.” In a concentrated and obstinate manner, he lived only for himself. Aside from his mother and “Gustl,” who naively admired him and served him as an audience, not another human soul occupies the scene during the most important years of his boyhood. In leaving school, he had effectively left society also. On his daily stroll through the center of the city, he would regularly meet a girl accompanied by her mother, who would be passing the Schmiedtoreck at the same time he was going by. He conceived an interest in this girl, whose name was Stefanie, which quickly developed into an intense romantic feeling that lasted for years. At the same time, he consistently refused to speak to her. There is reason to think that his refusal was based not on normal shyness but on a desire to protect his imaginary