Author: Ian Kershaw
Category: Nonfiction
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He was not long alone. We can recall that he had persuaded August Kubizek’s parents to let their son join him in Vienna to carry out his studies to become a musician. Kubizek’s father had been most reluctant to let his son go off with someone he regarded as no more than a failure at school and who thought himself above learning a proper trade. But Adolf had prevailed. On 18 February, he sent a postcard to his friend, urging him to come as quickly as possible. ‘Dear Friend,’ he wrote, ‘am anxiously expecting news of your arrival. Write soon so that I can prepare everything for your festive welcome. The whole of Vienna is awaiting you.’ A postscript added: ‘Beg you again, come soon.’ Four days later, Gustl’s tearful parents bade him goodbye, and he left to join his friend in Vienna. Adolf met a tired Kubizek at the station that evening, took him back to Stumpergasse to stay the first night, but, typically, insisted on immediately showing him all the sights of Vienna. How could someone come to Vienna and go to bed without first seeing the Court Opera House? So Gustl was dragged off to view the opera building, St Stephen’s cathedral (which could scarcely be seen through the mist), and the lovely church of St Maria am Gestade. It was after midnight when they returned to Stumpergasse, and later still when an exhausted Kubizek fell asleep with Hitler still haranguing him about the grandeur of Vienna.
The next few months were to be a repeat, on a grander scale, of the lifestyle of the two youths in Linz. An early search for lodgings for Gustl was rapidly given up, and Frau Zakreys persuaded to swap her larger room and move into the cramped little room that Hitler had occupied. Adolf and his friend now occupied the same room, paying double the rent (10 Kronen each) that Hitler had paid for his earlier room. Within the next few days, Kubizek learnt that he had passed the entrance examination and been accepted for study at the Vienna Conservatoire. He rented a grand piano which took up most of the available space in the room, just allowing Hitler the three paces to do his usual stomping backwards and forwards. Apart from the piano, the room was furnished with simple necessities: two beds, a commode, a wardrobe, a washstand, a table, and two chairs.
Kubizek settled down into a regular pattern of music study. What Hitler was up to was less clear to his friend. He stayed in bed in the mornings, was missing when Kubizek came back from the Conservatoire at lunchtimes, hung around the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace on fine afternoons, pored over books, fantasized over grandiose architectural and writing plans, and spent a good deal of time drawing until late into the night. Gustl’s puzzlement about how his friend could combine so much leisure time with studying at the Academy of Fine Arts was ended only after some considerable time. A show of irritation about Kubizek practising his piano scales led to a full-scale row between the two friends about study timetables and ended in Hitler finally admitting in fury that he had been rejected by the Academy. When Gustl asked him what, then, he was going to do, Hitler rounded on him: ‘What now, what now? … Are you starting too: what now?’ The truth was, Hitler had no idea where he was going or what he would do. He was drifting aimlessly.
Kubizek had plainly touched a raw nerve. Adolf had for mercenary reasons not told his family about his failure to enter the Academy. Otherwise, his guardian back in Linz, Josef Mayrhofer, would probably have denied him the 25 Kronen a month he received as his share of the orphans’ pension. And he would have come under even more pressure to find a job. But why did he deceive his friend? For a teenager to fail to pass an extremely tough entrance examination is in itself neither unusual nor shameful. But Adolf evidently could not bear to tell his friend, to whom he had always claimed to be so superior in all matters of artistic judgement, and whose own studies at the Conservatoire had started so promisingly, of his rejection. The blow to his self-esteem had been profound. And the bitterness showed. According to Kubizek, he would fly off the handle at the slightest thing. His loss of self-confidence could flare up in an instant into boundless anger and violent denunciation of all who he thought were persecuting him. The tirades of hate directed at everything and everybody were those of an outsized ego desperately wanting acceptance and unable to come to terms with his personal insignificance, with failure and mediocrity.
Adolf had still not given up hope of entering the Academy. But, typically, he took no steps to ensure that his chances would be better a second time round. Systematic preparation and hard work were as foreign to the young Hitler as they would be to the later dictator. Instead, his time was largely spent in dilettante fashion, as it had been in Linz, devising grandiose schemes shared only with the willing Kubizek – fantasy plans that usually arose from sudden whims and bright ideas and were dropped almost as soon as they had begun.
Apart from architecture, Hitler’s main passion, as it had been in Linz, was music. Particular favourites, certainly in later years, were Beethoven, Bruckner, Liszt, and Brahms. He greatly enjoyed, too, the operettas of Johann Strauß and Franz Lehár. Wagner was, of course, the non plus ultra. Adolf and Gustl were at the opera most nights, paying their 2 Kronen to gain the standing place that they had often queued for hours to obtain. They saw operas by Mozart, Beethoven, and the Italian masters Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini as well as the main works of Verdi and Puccini. But for Hitler only German music counted. He could not join in the enthusiasm for Verdi or Puccini operas, playing to packed houses in Vienna. Adolf’s passion for Wagner, as in Linz, knew no bounds. Now he and his friend were able to see all Wagner’s operas performed at one of the best opera houses in Europe. In the short time they were together, Kubizek reckoned they saw Lohengrin ten times. ‘For him,’ remarked Kubizek, ‘a second-rate Wagner was a hundred times better than a first-class Verdi.’ Kubizek was of a different mind; but to no avail. Adolf would not rest until his friend agreed to forget about going to see Verdi at the Court Opera and accompany him to a Wagner performance at the less highbrow Popular Opera House. ‘When it was a matter of a Wagner performance, Adolf would stand no contradiction.’
‘When I hear Wagner,’ Hitler himself much later recounted, ‘it seems to me that I hear rhythms of a bygone world.’ It was a world of Germanic myth, of great drama and wondrous spectacle, of gods and heroes, of titanic struggle and redemption, of victory and of death. It was a world where the heroes were outsiders who challenged the old order, like Rienzi, Tannhäuser, Stolzing, and Siegfried; or chaste saviours like Lohengrin and Parsifal. Betrayal, sacrifice, redemption, and heroic death were Wagnerian themes which would also preoccupy Hitler down to the Götterdämmerung of his regime in 1945. And it was a world created with grandiose vision by an artist of genius, an outsider and revolutionary, all-or-nothing refuser of compromise, challenger of the existing order, dismissive of the need to bow to the bourgeois ethic of working for a living, surmounting rejection and persecution, overcoming adversity to attain greatness. It was little wonder that the fantasist and drop-out, the rejected and unrecognized artistic genius in the dingy room in the Stumpergasse, could find his idol in the master of Bayreuth. Hitler, the nonentity, the mediocrity, the failure, wanted to live like a Wagnerian hero. He wanted to become himself a new Wagner – the philosopher-king, the genius, the supreme artist. In Hitler’s mounting identity crisis following his rejection at the Academy of Arts, Wagner was for Hitler the artistic giant he had dreamed of becoming but knew he could never emulate, the incarnation of the triumph of aesthetics and the supremacy of art.
II
The strange coexistence of the young Hitler and Kubizek continued into midsummer 1908. During those months, almost the only other person apart from his friend with whom Hitler had regular contact was his landlady, Frau Zakreys. Nor did Kubizek and Hitler have any joint acquaintances. Adolf regarded his friendship with Gustl as exclusive, allowing him no other friendships. When Gustl brought a young woman, one of a small number of his music pupils, back to his room, Hitler, thinking she was a girlfriend, was beside himself with rage. Kubizek’s explanation that it was simply a matter of coaching a pupil in musical harmony merely provoked a tirade about the pointlessness of women studying. In
Kubizek’s view, Hitler was outrightly misogynist. He pointed out Hitler’s satisfaction that women were not permitted in the stalls of the opera. Apart from his distant admiration for Stefanie in Linz, Kubizek knew of Hitler having no relations with any woman during the years of their acquaintance in both Linz and Vienna. This would not alter during his remaining years in the Austrian capital. None of the accounts of Hitler’s time in the Men’s Home gives a hint of any women in his life. When his circle of acquaintances got round to discussing women – and, doubtless, their own former girlfriends and sexual experiences – the best Hitler could come up with was a veiled reference to Stefanie, who had been his ‘first love’, though ‘she never knew it, because he never told her’. The impression left with Reinhold Hanisch, an acquaintance from that time, was that ‘Hitler had very little respect for the female sex, but very austere ideas about relations between men and women. He often said that, if men only wanted to, they could adopt a strictly moral way of living.’ This was entirely in line with the moral code preached by the Austrian pan-German movement associated with Georg Ritter von Schönerer, whose radical brand of German nationalism and racial antisemitism Hitler had admired since his Linz days. Celibacy until the twenty-fifth year, the code advocated, was healthy, advantageous to strength of will, and the basis of physical or mental high achievement. The cultivation of corresponding dietary habits was advised. Eating meat and drinking alcohol – seen as stimulants to sexual activity – were to be avoided. And upholding the strength and purity of the Germanic race meant keeping free of the moral decadence and danger of infection which accompanied consorting with prostitutes, who should be left to clients of ‘inferior’ races. Here was ideological justification enough for Hitler’s chaste lifestyle and prudish morals. But, in any case, certainly in the time in Vienna after he parted company with Kubizek, Hitler was no ‘catch’ for women.
Probably, he was frightened of women – certainly of their sexuality. Hitler later described his own ideal woman as ‘a cute, cuddly, naïve little thing – tender, sweet, and stupid’. His assertion that a woman ‘would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling’ may well have been a compensatory projection of his own sexual complexes.
Kubizek was adamant that Hitler was sexually normal (though on the basis of his own account it is difficult to see how he was in a position to judge). This was also the view of doctors who at a much later date thoroughly examined him. Biologically, it may well have been so. Claims that sexual deviance arising from the absence of a testicle were the root of Hitler’s personality disorder rest on a combination of psychological speculation and dubious evidence provided by a Russian autopsy after the alleged capture of the burnt remains of his body in Berlin. And stories about his Vienna time such as that of his alleged obsession with and attempted rape of a model engaged to a half-Jew, and his resort to prostitutes, derive from a single source – the self-serving supposed recollections of Josef Greiner, who may have known Hitler briefly in Vienna – with no credence and which can be regarded as baseless. However, Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and repressed sexual development.
Hitler’s prudishness, shored up by Schönerian principles, was to a degree merely in line with middle-class outward standards of morality in the Vienna of his time. These standards had been challenged by the openly erotic art of Gustav Klimt and literature of Arthur Schnitzler. But the solid bourgeois puritanism prevailed – at least as a thin veneer covering the seamier side of a city teeming with vice and prostitution. Where decency demanded that women were scarcely allowed even to show an ankle, Hitler’s embarrassment – and the rapidity with which he fled with his friend – when a prospective landlady during the search for a room for Kubizek let her silk dressing-gown fall open to reveal that she was wearing nothing but a pair of knickers was understandable. But his prudishness went far beyond this. It amounted, according to Kubizek’s account, to a deep disgust and repugnance at sexual activity. Hitler avoided contact with women, meeting with cold indifference during visits to the opera alleged attempts by young women, probably seeing him as something of an oddity, to flirt with or tease him. He was repelled by homosexuality. He refrained from masturbation. Prostitution horrified, but fascinated, him. He associated it with venereal disease, which petrified him. Following a visit to the theatre one evening to see Frank Wedekind’s play Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), which dealt with sexual problems of youth, Hitler suddenly took Kubizek’s arm and led him into Spittelberggasse to see at first hand the red-light district, or ‘sink of iniquity’ as he called it. Adolf took his friend not once, but twice, along the row of lit windows behind which scantily clad women advertised their wares and touted for custom. His voyeurism was then cloaked in middle-class self-righteousness by the lecture he proceeded to give Kubizek on the evils of prostitution. Later, in Mein Kampf, he was to link the Jews – echoing a commonplace current among antisemites of his Vienna years – with prostitution. But if this association was present in his mind in 1908, Kubizek did not record it.
Though seemingly repelled by sex, Hitler was at the same time plainly fascinated by it. He discussed sexual matters quite often in lengthy talks late at night with Gustl, regaling him, wrote Kubizek, on the need for sexual purity to protect what he grandly called the ‘flame of life’; explaining to his naïve friend, following a brief encounter with a businessman who invited them to a meal, about homosexuality; and ranting about prostitution and moral decadence. Hitler’s disturbed sexuality, his recoiling from physical contact, his fear of women, his inability to forge genuine friendship and emptiness in human relations, presumably had their roots in childhood experiences of a troubled family life. Attempts to explain them will inevitably remain speculative. Later rumours of Hitler’s sexual perversions are similarly based on dubious evidence. Conjecture – and there has been much of it – that sexual repression later gave way to sordid sado-masochistic practices rests, whatever the suspicions, on little more than a combination of rumour, hearsay, surmise, and innuendo, often spiced up by Hitler’s political enemies. And even if the alleged repulsive perversions really were his private proclivities, how exactly they would help explain the rapid descent of the complex and sophisticated German state into gross inhumanity after 1933 is not readily self-evident.
Hitler was to describe his life in Vienna as one of hardship and misery, hunger and poverty. This was notably economical with the truth as regards the months he spent in Stumpergasse in 1908 (though it was accurate enough as a portrayal of his condition in the autumn and winter of 1909–10). Even more misleading was his comment in Mein Kampf that ‘the orphan’s pension to which I was entitled was not enough for me even to live on, and so I was faced with the problem of somehow making my own living’. As we have noted, the loan from his aunt, his share of his mother’s legacy, and his monthly orphan’s pension certainly gave him sufficient to live comfortably – perhaps even equivalent to that of a young teacher over a year or so at least. And his appearance, when he put on his fineries for an evening at the opera, was anything but that of a down-and-out. When Kubizek first saw him on their reunion at the Westbahnhof in February 1908, young Adolf was wearing a good-quality overcoat, and dark hat. He was carrying the walking-stick with the ivory handle that he had had in Linz, and ‘appeared almost elegant’. As for working, in those first months of 1908, as we have noted, Hitler certainly did nothing whatsoever about making his own living, or taking any steps to ensure that he was on the right track to do so.
If he had a reasonable income during his time with Kubizek, Hitler nevertheless scarcely led a life of wild extravagance. His living conditions were unenviable. The sixth district of Vienna, close to the Westbahnhof, where Stumpergasse was situated, was an unattractive part of the city, with its dismal, unlit streets and scruffy tenement blocks overhung with smoke and soot surrounding dark inner courtyards. Kubizek himself was appalled at some of the accommodation on vi
ew when he was looking for a room the day after he had arrived in Vienna. And the lodging he and Adolf came to share was a miserable room that stank constantly of paraffin, with crumbling plaster peeling off dank walls, and bug-ridden beds and furniture. The lifestyle was frugal. Little was spent on eating and drinking. Adolf was not a vegetarian at that time, but his main daily fare usually consisted only of bread and butter, sweet flour puddings, and often in the afternoons a piece of poppy- or nut-cake. Sometimes he went without food altogether. When Gustl’s mother sent a food parcel every fortnight, it was like a feast. Adolf drank milk as a rule, or sometimes fruit-juice, but no alcohol. Nor did he smoke. The one luxury was the opera. How much he spent on the almost daily visits to an opera or a concert can only be guessed. But at 2 Kronen for a standing place – it infuriated Hitler that young officers more interested in the social occasion than the music had to pay only 10 Heller, a twentieth of the sum – regular attendance over some months would certainly begin to eat away at whatever savings he had. Hitler himself remarked, over three decades later: ‘I was so poor, during the Viennese period of my life, that I had to restrict myself to only the very best performances. This explains that already at that time I heard Tristan thirty or forty times, and always from the best companies.’ By the summer of 1908, he must have made big inroads into the money he had inherited. But he presumably still had some of his savings left, as well as the orphan’s pension that Kubizek presumed was his only income, which would allow him to last out for a further year.
Though Kubizek was unaware of it, by summer the time he was spending with his friend in Vienna was drawing to a close. By early July 1908, Gustl had passed his examinations at the Conservatoire and term had ended. He was going back to Linz to stay with his parents until autumn. He arranged to send Frau Zakreys the rent every month to guarantee retention of the room, and Adolf, again saying how little he was looking forward to remaining alone in the room, accompanied him to the Westbahnhof to see him off. They were not to meet again until the Anschluß in 1938. Adolf did send Gustl a number of postcards during the summer, one from the Waldviertel, where he had gone without enthusiasm to spend some time with his family – the last occasion he would see his relatives for many years. Nothing suggested to Kubizek that he would not be rejoining his friend in the autumn. But when he left the train at the Westbahnhof on his return in November, Hitler was nowhere to be seen. Some time in the late summer or autumn, he had moved out of Stumpergasse. Frau Zakreys told Kubizek that he had left his lodgings without giving any forwarding address. By 18 November he was registered with the police as a ‘student’ living at new lodgings in room 16 of Felberstraße 22, close by the Westbahnhof, and a more airy room – presumably costing more – than that he had occupied in Stumpergasse.