for someone unworthy. And you may well be doing a good deed.”
Only a few days later the answer came that Roller was prepared to receive Hitler, and the Linz landlady thanked her mother in a second letter: “You would be rewarded for your pains if you could have seen the young man’s happy face when I had him summoned here…. I gave him your card and let him read Director Roller’s letter! Slowly, word for word, as though he wanted to learn the letter by heart, as if in reverence, with a happy smile on his face, he read the letter quietly to himself. Then, with fervent gratitude, he laid it down in front of me. He asked me whether he might write you to express his thanks.”
Hitler’s own letter, dated two days later, has also been preserved. It is composed in labored imitation of the elaborate style of Imperial Austrian bureaucrats:
Herewith, esteemed and gracious lady, I wish to express my sincerest gratitude for your efforts in obtaining access for me to the great master of stage decoration, Prof. Roller. It was no doubt somewhat overbold of me, Madam, to make such excessive demands upon your kindness, since you after all had to act in behalf of a perfect stranger. All the more, therefore, must I ask you to accept my sincerest thanks for your undertakings, which were accompanied by such success, as well as for the card which you so kindly placed at my disposal. I shall at once make use of this fortunate opportunity. Once again my deepest gratitude. I respectfully kiss your hand.
The recommendation seemed to open the way for him to enter his dream world: the free life of an artist; music and painting combined in the grand pseudo-world of opera. But there is no indication of how the meeting with Roller came out. The sources are silent. Hitler himself never said a word about it. It seems most likely that the famous man advised him to work, to learn, and in the autumn to apply once more for admission to the Academy.
Hitler afterward called the following five years the worst of his life. In some respects they were also the most important. For the crisis of those years formed his character and provided him with those formulas for mastering fate to which he clung forever after. They became, in fact, so calcified within his mind that they account for the impression his life gives, despite his mania for mobility, of utmost rigidity.
Among the persisting elements of the legend that Hitler himself constructed over the carefully obscured trail of his life is the allegation that “necessity and harsh reality” formed the great and unforgettable experience of those years in Vienna: “For me the name of this Phaeacian city represents five years of hardship and misery. Five years in which I was forced to earn a living, first as a day laborer, then as a small painter; a truly meager living which never sufficed to appease even my daily hunger. Hunger was then my faithful bodyguard; he never left me for a moment….”18 However, careful calculation of his income has since shown that during the first period of his stay in Vienna, thanks to his share in his father’s inheritance, his mother’s legacy, the orphan pension, and without counting any earnings of his own, he had at his disposal between eighty and one hundred crowns a month.19 This was the monthly earnings of a junior magistrate at that time.
In the latter half of February August Kubizek came to Vienna, on Hitler’s urging, to study at the Conservatory of Music. Thereafter the two friends lived together in the rear wing of Stumpergasse 29, occupying a “dreary and wretched” room let to them by an old Polish woman named Maria Zakreys. But while Kubizek pursued his studies, Hitler continued the aimless idler’s life he had already become accustomed to. He was master of his own time, as he cockily stressed. Usually it was almost noon before he got up, sauntered in the streets or in the park at Schonbrunn, visited the museums, and at night went to the opera. There, during those years alone, he blissfully heard
He gave himself up to such fantasies with almost maniacal passion. Until the small hours of the morning he would sit over projects to which he brought equal measures of practical incompetence, intolerance, and priggish conceit. “He could not let anything alone,” we are told. Because bricks, he decided, were “an unsolid material for monumental buildings,” he planned to tear down and rebuild the Hofburg. He sketched theaters, castles, exhibition halls; he developed a scheme for a nonalcoholic drink; he looked for substitutes for smoking or drew up plans for the reform of schools. He composed theses attacking landlords and officials, outlines for a “German ideal state,” all of which expressed his grievances, his resentments, and his pedantic visions. Although he had learned nothing and achieved nothing, he rejected all advice and hated instruction. Knowing nothing of composition, he took up an idea Richard Wagner had dropped, and began writing an opera about Wieland the Smith, full of bloody and incestuous nonsense. Despite his uncertain spelling he tried his hand as a dramatist, using themes from Germanic sagas. Occasionally, too, he painted; but the small water colors filled with finicky detail betrayed nothing of the forces raging in him. Incessantly, he talked, planned, raved, possessed by the urge to justify himself, to prove that he had genius. He concealed from his roommate his failure to pass the entrance examination at the Academy. When Kubizek occasionally asked him what he was doing so intensively day after day, he replied, “I am working on a solution to the wretched housing conditions in Vienna and carrying on certain studies to that end.”20
In this behavior, despite all the elements of bizarre overstrain and sheer fantasizing—in fact, partly because of those elements—the later Hitler is already recognizable. He himself later remarked upon the connection between his seemingly confused reformist zeal and his subsequent rise. Similarly, the peculiar combination of lethargy and tension, of phlegmatic calm and wild activity, points to the future pattern. With some uneasiness Kubizek noted the abrupt fits of fury and despair, the variety and intensity of Hitler’s aggressions, and his seemingly unlimited capacity for hate. In Vienna his friend had been “completely out of balance,” he remarked unhappily. States of exaltation alternated frequently with moods of deep depression in which he saw “nothing but injustice, hatred, hostility” and “solitary and alone [railed] against the whole of humanity, which did not understand him, would not accept him, which he felt persecuted and cheated him” and had everywhere set “snares” for him for the sole purpose of preventing his rise.
In September, 1908, Hitler once more made an attempt to enter the painting class at the Academy. The candidates’ list noted that this time he was “not admitted to the test”; the paintings he had submitted did not meet the preliminary requirements for the examination.
This new rejection, even more definite and offensive in its tone, seems to have been one of those “awakening” experiences that determined Hitler’s future. How deeply wounded he was is indicated by his lifelong hatred for schools and academies. He was fond of pointing out that they had misjudged “Bismarck and Wagner also” and rejected Anselm Feuerbach. They were attended only by “pipsqueaks” and aimed at “killing every genius.” At his headquarters thirty-five years later, leader and warlord of the German people, he would launch into furious tirades against his wretched village teachers with their “dirty” appearance, their “filthy collars, unkempt beards and so on.”21 Humiliated and evidently keenly embarrassed, he withdrew from all human contact. Soon his married half-sister, Angela, who lived in Vienna, heard no more from him. His guardian, too, received only a last curt postcard, and at the same time his friendship with Kubizek broke up. At any rate, he utilized Kubizek’s temporary absence from Vienna to move abruptly out of their shared apartment, without leaving so much as a word of explanation. He disappeared into the darkness of flophouses and homes for men. Thirty years passed before Kubizek saw him again.
First, he rented an apartment in the Fifteenth District, Felberstrasse 22, Entrance 16. It was here that he was introduced to the ideas and notions that decisively influenced his future course. He had long explained his failures in terms of his singular character, of precocious genius uncomprehended by the world. By now he needed more specific explanations and more tangible adversaries.
His spontaneous emotions turned against the bourgeois world that had rejected him, although he felt he belonged to it by inclination and origins. The embitterment he harbored toward it henceforth is among the paradoxes of his existence. That bitterness was both nourished and limited by his fear of social upheaval, by the terrors of proletarianization. In
