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Jebo ti bog isus mater
- Fran Krsto Frankopan, vjerojatno

tutnanje

Jan je "JEGERIST", PUSI KURAC ERENU ZATO STO JE SPUDOVAC. GLUPAVAC ŠAŠAVI CRNAC

IT HAS turned out fortunate for me to-day that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn
to be my birthplace. For that little town is situated just on the frontier between those
two States the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to
which we should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means
should be employed.
German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not indeed on
any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever. No, no. Even if the union were a
matter of economic indifference, and even if it were to be disadvantageous from the
economic standpoint, still it ought to take place. People of the same blood should be in
the same REICH. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy
until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State. When the
territory of the REICH embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them
a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire
foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the
daily bread for the generations to come.
And so this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great task. But in
another regard also it points to a lesson that is applicable to our day. Over a hundred
years ago this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the
whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German
history. At the time of our Fatherland's deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes
Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here
because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to
disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly
responsible for the affair. Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the
latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a director of police
from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example
which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the REICH under
Herr Severing's regime (Note 1).
In this little town on the Inn, haloed by the memory of a German martyr, a town that
was Bavarian by blood but under the rule of the Austrian State, my parents were
domiciled towards the end of the last century. My father was a civil servant who
fulfilled his duties very conscientiously. My mother looked after the household and
lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children. From that period I have not retained
very much in my memory; because after a few years my father had to leave that frontier
town which I had come to love so much and take up a new post farther down the Inn
valley, at Passau, therefore actually in Germany itself.
In those days it was the usual lot of an Austrian civil servant to be transferred
periodically from one post to another. Not long after coming to Passau my father was
transferred to Linz, and while there he retired finally to live on his pension. But this did
not mean that the old gentleman would now rest from his labours.
He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew restless and left home.
When he was barely thirteen years old he buckled on his satchel and set forth from his
native woodland parish. Despite the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from
'experience,' he went to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fiftieth year of the
last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and face the unknown,
with three gulden in his pocket. By when the boy of thirteen was a lad of seventeen and
had passed his apprenticeship examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the
contrary. The persistent economic depression of that period and the constant want and
misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and strive for
'something higher.' As a boy it had seemed to him that the position of the parish priest
in his native village was the highest in the scale of human attainment; but now that the
big city had enlarged his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State
official as the highest of all. With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble had
already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man of seventeen
obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it until he won through. He became a
civil servant. He was about twenty-three years old, I think, when he succeeded in
making himself what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise
he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he was 'somebody.'
He had gained his end. But in the village there was nobody who had remembered him
as a little boy, and the village itself had become strange to him.
Now at last, when he was fifty-six years old, he gave up his active career; but he could
not bear to be idle for a single day. On the outskirts of the small market town of
Lambach in Upper Austria he bought a farm and tilled it himself. Thus, at the end of a
long and hard-working career, he came back to the life which his father had led.
It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own. I spent a good deal of
time scampering about in the open, on the long road from school, and mixing up with
some of the roughest of the boys, which caused my mother many anxious moments. All
this tended to make me something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely
any serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I was certainly
quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my father had followed. I think
that an inborn talent for speaking now began to develop and take shape during the
more or less strenuous arguments which I used to have with my comrades. I had
become a juvenile ringleader who learned well and easily at school but was rather
difficult to manage. In my freetime I practised singing in the choir of the monastery
church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed in a very favourable
position to be emotionally impressed again and again by the magnificent splendour of
ecclesiastical ceremonial. What could be more natural for me than to look upon the
Abbot as representing the highest human ideal worth striving for, just as the position of
the humble village priest had appeared to my father in his own boyhood days? At least,
that was my idea for a while. But the juvenile disputes I had with my father did not lead
him to appreciate his son's oratorical gifts in such a way as to see in them a favourable
promise for such a career, and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I
had in my head at that time. This contradiction in my character made him feel
somewhat anxious.
As a matter of fact, that transitory yearning after such a vocation soon gave way to
hopes that were better suited to my temperament. Browsing through my father's books,
I chanced to come across some publications that dealt with military subjects. One of
these publications was a popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It
consisted of two volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. These
became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic conflict began to
take first place in my mind. And from that time onwards I became more and more
enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or military
affairs.
But this story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for me on other
grounds also. For the first time, and as yet only in quite a vague way, the question
began to present itself: Is there a difference--and if there be, what is it--between the
Germans who fought that war and the other Germans? Why did not Austria also take
part in it? Why did not my father and all the others fight in that struggle? Are we not
the same as the other Germans? Do we not all belong together?
That was the first time that this problem began to agitate my small brain. And from the
replies that were given to the questions which I asked very tentatively, I was forced to
accept the fact, though with a secret envy, that not all Germans had the good luck to
belong to Bismarck's Empire. This was something that I could not understand.
It was decided that I should study. Considering my character as a whole, and especially
my temperament, my father decided that the classical subjects studied at the Lyceum
were not suited to my natural talents. He thought that the REALSCHULE (Note 2)
would suit me better. My obvious talent for drawing confirmed him in that view; for in
his opinion drawing was a subject too much neglected in the Austrian GYMNASIUM.
Probably also the memory of the hard road which he himself had travelled contributed
to make him look upon classical studies as unpractical and accordingly to set little value
on them. At the back of his mind he had the idea that his son also should become an
official of the Government. Indeed he had decided on that career for me. The difficulties
through which he had to struggle in making his own career led him to overestimate
what he had achieved, because this was exclusively the result of his own indefatigable
industry and energy. The characteristic pride of the self-made man urged him towards
the idea that his son should follow the same calling and if possible rise to a higher
position in it. Moreover, this idea was strengthened by the consideration that the results
of his own life's industry had placed him in a position to facilitate his son's
advancement in the same career.
He was simply incapable of imagining that I might reject what had meant everything in
life to him. My father's decision was simple, definite, clear and, in his eyes, it was
something to be taken for granted. A man of such a nature who had become an autocrat
by reason of his own hard struggle for existence, could not think of allowing
'inexperienced' and irresponsible young fellows to choose their own careers. To act in
such a way, where the future of his own son was concerned, would have been a grave
and reprehensible weakness in the exercise of parental authority and responsibility,
something utterly incompatible with his characteristic sense of duty.
And yet it had to be otherwise.
For the first time in my life--I was then eleven years old--I felt myself forced into open
opposition. No matter how hard and determined my father might be about putting his
own plans and opinions into action, his son was no less obstinate in refusing to accept
ideas on which he set little or no value.
I would not become a civil servant.
No amount of persuasion and no amount of 'grave' warnings could break down that
opposition. I would not become a State official, not on any account. All the attempts
which my father made to arouse in me a love or liking for that profession, by picturing
his own career for me, had only the opposite effect. It nauseated me to think that one
day I might be fettered to an office stool, that I could not dispose of my own time but
would be forced to spend the whole of my life filling out forms.
One can imagine what kind of thoughts such a prospect awakened in the mind of a
young fellow who was by no means what is called a 'good boy' in the current sense of
that term. The ridiculously easy school tasks which we were given made it possible for
me to spend far more time in the open air than at home. To-day, when my political
opponents pry into my life with diligent scrutiny, as far back as the days of my
boyhood, so as finally to be able to prove what disreputable tricks this Hitler was
accustomed to in his young days, I thank heaven that I can look back to those happy
days and find the memory of them helpful. The fields and the woods were then the
terrain on which all disputes were fought out.
Even attendance at the REALSCHULE could not alter my way of spending my time. But
I had now another battle to fight.
So long as the paternal plan to make a State functionary contradicted my own
inclinations only in the abstract, the conflict was easy to bear. I could be discreet about
expressing my personal views and thus avoid constantly recurrent disputes. My own
resolution not to become a Government official was sufficient for the time being to put
my mind completely at rest. I held on to that resolution inexorably. But the situation
became more difficult once I had a positive plan of my own which I might present to
my father as a counter-suggestion. This happened when I was twelve years old. How it
came about I cannot exactly say now; but one day it became clear to me that I would be
a painter--I mean an artist. That I had an aptitude for drawing was an admitted fact. It
was even one of the reasons why my father had sent me to the REALSCHULE; but he
had never thought of having that talent developed in such a way that I could take up
painting as a professional career. Quite the contrary. When, as a result of my renewed
refusal to adopt his favourite plan, my father asked me for the first time what I myself
really wished to be, the resolution that I had already formed expressed itself almost
automatically. For a while my father was speechless. "A painter? An artist-painter?" he
exclaimed.
He wondered whether I was in a sound state of mind. He thought that he might not
have caught my words rightly, or that he had misunderstood what I meant. But when I
had explained my ideas to him and he saw how seriously I took them, he opposed them
with that full determination which was characteristic of him. His decision was
exceedingly simple and could not be deflected from its course by any consideration of
what my own natural qualifications really were.
"Artist! Not as long as I live, never." As the son had inherited some of the father's
obstinacy, besides having other qualities of his own, my reply was equally energetic.
But it stated something quite the contrary.
At that our struggle became stalemate. The father would not abandon his 'Never', and I
became all the more consolidated in my 'Nevertheless'.
Naturally the resulting situation was not pleasant. The old gentleman was bitterly
annoyed; and indeed so was I, although I really loved him. My father forbade me to
entertain any hopes of taking up the art of painting as a profession. I went a step further
and declared that I would not study anything else. With such declarations the situation
became still more strained, so that the old gentleman irrevocably decided to assert his
parental authority at all costs. That led me to adopt an attitude of circumspect silence,
but I put my threat into execution. I thought that, once it became clear to my father that
I was making no progress at the REALSCHULE, for weal or for woe, he would be
forced to allow me to follow the happy career I had dreamed of.
I do not know whether I calculated rightly or not. Certainly my failure to make progress
became quite visible in the school. I studied just the subjects that appealed to me,
especially those which I thought might be of advantage to me later on as a painter.
What did not appear to have any importance from this point of view, or what did not
otherwise appeal to me favourably, I completely sabotaged. My school reports of that
time were always in the extremes of good or bad, according to the subject and the
interest it had for me. In one column my qualification read 'very good' or 'excellent'. In
another it read 'average' or even 'below average'. By far my best subjects were
geography and, even more so, general history. These were my two favourite subjects,
and I led the class in them.
When I look back over so many years and try to judge the results of that experience I
find two very significant facts standing out clearly before my mind.
First, I became a nationalist.
Second, I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.
The old Austria was a multi-national State. In those days at least the citizens of the
German Empire, taken through and through, could not understand what that fact
meant in the everyday life of the individuals within such a State. After the magnificent
triumphant march of the victorious armies in the Franco-German War the Germans in
the REICH became steadily more and more estranged from the Germans beyond their
frontiers, partly because they did not deign to appreciate those other Germans at their
true value or simply because they were incapable of doing so.
The Germans of the REICH did not realize that if the Germans in Austria had not been
of the best racial stock they could never have given the stamp of their own character to
an Empire of 52 millions, so definitely that in Germany itself the idea arose--though
quite an erroneous one--that Austria was a German State. That was an error which led
to dire consequences; but all the same it was a magnificent testimony to the character of
the ten million Germans in that East Mark. (Note 3) Only very few of the Germans in
the REICH itself had an idea of the bitter struggle which those Eastern Germans had to
carry on daily for the preservation of their German language, their German schools and
their German character. Only to-day, when a tragic fate has torn several millions of our
kinsfolk away from the REICH and has forced them to live under the rule of the
stranger, dreaming of that common fatherland towards which all their yearnings are
directed and struggling to uphold at least the sacred right of using their mother tongue-
-only now have the wider circles of the German population come to realize what it
means to have to fight for the traditions of one's race. And so at last perhaps there are
people here and there who can assess the greatness of that German spirit which
animated the old East Mark and enabled those people, left entirely dependent on their
own resources, to defend the Empire against the Orient for several centuries and
subsequently to hold fast the frontiers of the German language through a guerilla
warfare of attrition, at a time when the German Empire was sedulously cultivating an
interest for colonies but not for its own flesh and blood before the threshold of its own
door.
What has happened always and everywhere, in every kind of struggle, happened also
in the language fight which was carried on in the old Austria. There were three groups--
the fighters, the hedgers and the traitors. Even in the schools this sifting already began
to take place. And it is worth noting that the struggle for the language was waged
perhaps in its bitterest form around the school; because this was the nursery where the
seeds had to be watered which were to spring up and form the future generation. The
tactical objective of the fight was the winning over of the child, and it was to the child
that the first rallying cry was addressed:
"German youth, do not forget that you are a German," and "Remember, little girl, that
one day you must be a German mother."
Those who know something of the juvenile spirit can understand how youth will
always lend a glad ear to such a rallying cry. Under many forms the young people led
the struggle, fighting in their own way and with their own weapons. They refused to
sing non-German songs. The greater the efforts made to win them away from their
German allegiance, the more they exalted the glory of their German heroes. They
stinted themselves in buying things to eat, so that they might spare their pennies to help
the war chest of their elders. They were incredibly alert in the significance of what the
non-German teachers said and they contradicted in unison. They wore the forbidden
emblems of their own kinsfolk and were happy when penalised for doing so, or even
physically punished. In miniature they were mirrors of loyalty from which the older
people might learn a lesson.
And thus it was that at a comparatively early age I took part in the struggle which the
nationalities were waging against one another in the old Austria. When meetings were
held for the South Mark German League and the School League we wore cornflowers
and black-red-gold colours to express our loyalty. We greeted one another with HEIL!
and instead of the Austrian anthem we sang our own DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES,
despite warnings and penalties. Thus the youth were educated politically at a time
when the citizens of a so-called national State for the most part knew little of their own
nationality except the language. Of course, I did not belong to the hedgers. Within a
little while I had become an ardent 'German National', which has a different meaning
from the party significance attached to that phrase to-day.
I developed very rapidly in the nationalist direction, and by the time I was 15 years old
I had come to understand the distinction between dynastic patriotism and nationalism
based on the concept of folk, or people, my inclination being entirely in favour of the
latter.
Such a preference may not perhaps be clearly intelligible to those who have never taken
the trouble to study the internal conditions that prevailed under the Habsburg
Monarchy.
Among historical studies universal history was the subject almost exclusively taught in
the Austrian schools, for of specific Austrian history there was only very little. The fate
of this State was closely bound up with the existence and development of Germany as a
whole; so a division of history into German history and Austrian history would be
practically inconceivable. And indeed it was only when the German people came to be
divided between two States that this division of German history began to take place.
The insignia (Note 4) of a former imperial sovereignty which were still preserved in
Vienna appeared to act as magical relics rather than as the visible guarantee of an
everlasting bond of union.
When the Habsburg State crumbled to pieces in 1918 the Austrian Germans
instinctively raised an outcry for union with their German fatherland. That was the
voice of a unanimous yearning in the hearts of the whole people for a return to the
unforgotten home of their fathers. But such a general yearning could not be explained
except by attributing the cause of it to the historical training through which the
individual Austrian Germans had passed. Therein lay a spring that never dried up.
Especially in times of distraction and forgetfulness its quiet voice was a reminder of the
past, bidding the people to look out beyond the mere welfare of the moment to a new
future.
The teaching of universal history in what are called the middle schools is still very
unsatisfactory. Few teachers realize that the purpose of teaching history is not the
memorizing of some dates and facts, that the student is not interested in knowing the
exact date of a battle or the birthday of some marshal or other, and not at all--or at least
only very insignificantly--interested in knowing when the crown of his fathers was
placed on the brow of some monarch. These are certainly not looked upon as important
matters.
To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are the causes of those
results which appear before our eyes as historical events. The art of reading and
studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.
Probably my whole future life was determined by the fact that I had a professor of
history who understood, as few others understand, how to make this viewpoint prevail
in teaching and in examining. This teacher was Dr. Leopold Poetsch, of the
REALSCHULE at Linz. He was the ideal personification of the qualities necessary to a
teacher of history in the sense I have mentioned above. An elderly gentleman with a
decisive manner but a kindly heart, he was a very attractive speaker and was able to
inspire us with his own enthusiasm. Even to-day I cannot recall without emotion that
venerable personality whose enthusiastic exposition of history so often made us entirely
forget the present and allow ourselves to be transported as if by magic into the past. He
penetrated through the dim mist of thousands of years and transformed the historical
memory of the dead past into a living reality. When we listened to him we became afire
with enthusiasm and we were sometimes moved even to tears.
It was still more fortunate that this professor was able not only to illustrate the past by
examples from the present but from the past he was also able to draw a lesson for the
present. He understood better than any other the everyday problems that were then
agitating our minds. The national fervour which we felt in our own small way was
utilized by him as an instrument of our education, inasmuch as he often appealed to our
national sense of honour; for in that way he maintained order and held our attention
much more easily than he could have done by any other means. It was because I had
such a professor that history became my favourite subject. As a natural consequence,
but without the conscious connivance of my professor, I then and there became a young
rebel. But who could have studied German history under such a teacher and not
become an enemy of that State whose rulers exercised such a disastrous influence on the
destinies of the German nation? Finally, how could one remain the faithful subject of
the House of Habsburg, whose past history and present conduct proved it to be ready
ever and always to betray the interests of the German people for the sake of paltry
personal interests? Did not we as youngsters fully realize that the House of Habsburg
did not, and could not, have any love for us Germans?
What history taught us about the policy followed by the House of Habsburg was
corroborated by our own everyday experiences. In the north and in the south the poison
of foreign races was eating into the body of our people, and even Vienna was steadily
becoming more and more a non-German city. The 'Imperial House' favoured the Czechs
on every possible occasion. Indeed it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and
inexorable retribution that caused the most deadly enemy of Germanism in Austria, the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to fall by the very bullets which he himself had helped to
cast. Working from above downwards, he was the chief patron of the movement to
make Austria a Slav State.
The burdens laid on the shoulders of the German people were enormous and the
sacrifices of money and blood which they had to make were incredibly heavy.
Yet anybody who was not quite blind must have seen that it was all in vain. What
affected us most bitterly was the consciousness of the fact that this whole system was
morally shielded by the alliance with Germany, whereby the slow extirpation of
Germanism in the old Austrian Monarchy seemed in some way to be more or less
sanctioned by Germany herself. Habsburg hypocrisy, which endeavoured outwardly to
make the people believe that Austria still remained a German State, increased the
feeling of hatred against the Imperial House and at the same time aroused a spirit of
rebellion and contempt.
But in the German Empire itself those who were then its rulers saw nothing of what all
this meant. As if struck blind, they stood beside a corpse and in the very symptoms of
decomposition they believed that they recognized the signs of a renewed vitality. In
that unhappy alliance between the young German Empire and the illusory Austrian
State lay the germ of the World War and also of the final collapse.
In the subsequent pages of this book I shall go to the root of the problem. Suffice it to
say here that in the very early years of my youth I came to certain conclusions which I
have never abandoned. Indeed I became more profoundly convinced of them as the
years passed. They were: That the dissolution of the Austrian Empire is a preliminary
condition for the defence of Germany; further, that national feeling is by no means
identical with dynastic patriotism; finally, and above all, that the House of Habsburg
was destined to bring misfortune to the German nation.
As a logical consequence of these convictions, there arose in me a feeling of intense love
for my German-Austrian home and a profound hatred for the Austrian State.
That kind of historical thinking which was developed in me through my study of
history at school never left me afterwards. World history became more and more an
inexhaustible source for the understanding of contemporary historical events, which
means politics. Therefore I will not "learn" politics but let politics teach me.
A precocious revolutionary in politics I was no less a precocious revolutionary in art. At
that time the provincial capital of Upper Austria had a theatre which, relatively
speaking, was not bad. Almost everything was played there. When I was twelve years
old I saw William Tell performed. That was my first experience of the theatre. Some
months later I attended a performance of LOHENGRIN, the first opera I had ever
heard. I was fascinated at once. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew
no limits. Again and again I was drawn to hear his operas; and to-day I consider it a
great piece of luck that these modest productions in the little provincial city prepared
the way and made it possible for me to appreciate the better productions later on.
But all this helped to intensify my profound aversion for the career that my father had
chosen for me; and this dislike became especially strong as the rough corners of
youthful boorishness became worn off, a process which in my case caused a good deal
of pain. I became more and more convinced that I should never be happy as a State
official. And now that the REALSCHULE had recognized and acknowledged my
aptitude for drawing, my own resolution became all the stronger. Imprecations and
threats had no longer any chance of changing it. I wanted to become a painter and no
power in the world could force me to become a civil servant. The only peculiar feature
of the situation now was that as I grew bigger I became more and more interested in
architecture. I considered this fact as a natural development of my flair for painting and
I rejoiced inwardly that the sphere of my artistic interests was thus enlarged. I had no
notion that one day it would have to be otherwise.
The question of my career was decided much sooner than I could have expected.
When I was in my thirteenth year my father was suddenly taken from us. He was still
in robust health when a stroke of apoplexy painlessly ended his earthly wanderings and
left us all deeply bereaved. His most ardent longing was to be able to help his son to
advance in a career and thus save me from the harsh ordeal that he himself had to go
through. But it appeared to him then as if that longing were all in vain. And yet, though
he himself was not conscious of it, he had sown the seeds of a future which neither of us
foresaw at that time.
At first nothing changed outwardly.
My mother felt it her duty to continue my education in accordance with my father's
wishes, which meant that she would have me study for the civil service. For my own
part I was even more firmly determined than ever before that under no circumstances
would I become an official of the State. The curriculum and teaching methods followed
in the middle school were so far removed from my ideals that I became profoundly
indifferent. Illness suddenly came to my assistance. Within a few weeks it decided my
future and put an end to the long-standing family conflict. My lungs became so
seriously affected that the doctor advised my mother very strongly not under any
circumstances to allow me to take up a career which would necessitate working in an
office. He ordered that I should give up attendance at the REALSCHULE for a year at
least. What I had secretly desired for such a long time, and had persistently fought for,
now became a reality almost at one stroke.
Influenced by my illness, my mother agreed that I should leave the REALSCHULE and
attend the Academy.
Those were happy days, which appeared to me almost as a dream; but they were bound
to remain only a dream. Two years later my mother's death put a brutal end to all my
fine projects. She succumbed to a long and painful illness which from the very
beginning permitted little hope of recovery. Though expected, her death came as a
terrible blow to me. I respected my father, but I loved my mother.
Poverty and stern reality forced me to decide promptly.
The meagre resources of the family had been almost entirely used up through my
mother's severe illness. The allowance which came to me as an orphan was not enough
for the bare necessities of life. Somehow or other I would have to earn my own bread.
With my clothes and linen packed in a valise and with an indomitable resolution in my
heart, I left for Vienna. I hoped to forestall fate, as my father had done fifty years before.
I was determined to become 'something'--but certainly not a civil servant.
[Note 1. In order to understand the reference here, and similar references in later
portions of MEIN KAMPF, the following must be borne in mind:
From 1792 to 1814 the French Revolutionary Armies overran Germany. In 1800 Bavaria
shared in the Austrian defeat at Hohenlinden and the French occupied Munich. In 1805
the Bavarian Elector was made King of Bavaria by Napoleon and stipulated to back up
Napoleon in all his wars with a force of 30,000 men. Thus Bavaria became the absolute
vassal of the French. This was 'TheTime of Germany's Deepest Humiliation', Which is
referred to again and again by Hitler.
In 1806 a pamphlet entitled 'Germany's Deepest Humiliation' was published in South
Germany. Amnng those who helped to circulate the pamphlet was the Nürnberg
bookseller, Johannes Philipp Palm. He was denounced to the French by a Bavarian
police agent. At his trial he refused to disclose thename of the author. By Napoleon's
orders, he was shot at Braunau-on-the-Innon August 26th, 1806. A monument erected
to him on the site of the executionwas one of the first public objects that made an
impression on Hitler asa little boy.
Leo Schlageter's case was in many respects parallel to that of Johannes Palm. Schlageter
was a German theological student who volunteered for service in 1914. He became an
artillery officer and won the Iron Cross of both classes. When the French occupied the
Ruhr in 1923 Schlageter helped to organize the passive resistance on the German side.
He and his companions blew up a railway bridge for the purpose of making the
transport of coal to France more difficult.
Those who took part in the affair were denounced to the French by a German informer.
Schlageter took the whole responsibility on his own shoulders and was condemned to
death, his companions being sentenced to various terms of imprisonment and penal
servitude by the French Court. Schlageter refused to disclose the identity of those who
issued the order to blow up the railway bridge and he would not plead for mercy before
a French Court. He was shot by a French firing-squad on May 26th, 1923. Severing was
at that time German Minister of the Interior. It is said that representations were made,
to himon Schlageter's behalf and that he refused to interfere.
Schlageter has become the chief martyr of the German resistancc to the French
occupation of the Ruhr and also one of the great heroes of the National Socialist
Movement. He had joined the Movement at a very early stage, his card of membership
bearing the number 61.]
[Note 2. Non-classical secondary school. The Lyceum and GYMNASIUM were classical
or semi-classical secondary schools.]
[Note 3. See Translator's Introduction.]
[Note 4. When Francis II had laid down his title as Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empireof the German Nation, which he did at the command of Napoleon, the
Crownand Mace, as the Imperial Insignia, were kept in Vienna. After the German
Empire was refounded, in 1871, under William I, there were many demands tohave the
Insignia transferred to Berlin. But these went unheeded. Hitler had them brought to
Germany after the Austrian Anschluss and displayed at Nuremberg during the Party
Congress in September 1938.]
Chapter 2
Years Of Study And Suffering In Vienna
WHEN MY mother died my fate had already been decided in one respect. During the
last months of her illness I went to Vienna to take the entrance examination for the
Academy of Fine Arts. Armed with a bulky packet of sketches, I felt convinced that I
should pass the examination quite easily. At the REALSCHULE I was by far the best
student in the drawing class, and since that time I had made more than ordinary
progress in the practice of drawing. Therefore I was pleased with myself and was proud
and happy at the prospect of what I considered an assured success.
But there was one misgiving: It seemed to me that I was better qualified for drawing
than for painting, especially in the various branches of architectural drawing. At the
same time my interest in architecture was constantly increasing. And I advanced in this
direction at a still more rapid pace after my first visit to Vienna, which lasted two
weeks. I was not yet sixteen years old. I went to the Hof Museum to study the paintings
in the art gallery there; but the building itself captured almost all my interest, from early
morning until late at night I spent all my time visiting the various public buildings. And
it was the buildings themselves that were always the principal attraction for me. For
hours and hours I could stand in wonderment before the Opera and the Parliament. The
whole Ring Strasse had a magic effect upon me, as if it were a scene from the Thousandand-one-Nights.
And now I was here for the second time in this beautiful city, impatiently waiting to
hear the result of the entrance examination but proudly confident that I had got
through. I was so convinced of my success that when the news that I had failed to pass
was brought to me it struck me like a bolt from the skies. Yet the fact was that I had
failed. I went to see the Rector and asked him to explain the reasons why they refused
to accept me as a student in the general School of Painting, which was part of the
Academy. He said that the sketches which I had brought with me unquestionably
showed that painting was not what I was suited for but that the same sketches gave
clear indications of my aptitude for architectural designing. Therefore the School of
Painting did not come into question for me but rather the School of Architecture, which
also formed part of the Academy. At first it was impossible to understand how this
could be so, seeing that I had never been to a school for architecture and had never
received any instruction in architectural designing.
When I left the Hansen Palace, on the SCHILLER PLATZ, I was quite crestfallen. I felt
out of sorts with myself for the first time in my young life. For what I had heard about
my capabilities now appeared to me as a lightning flash which clearly revealed a
dualism under which I had been suffering for a long time, but hitherto I could give no
clear account whatsoever of the why and wherefore.
Within a few days I myself also knew that I ought to become an architect. But of course
the way was very difficult. I was now forced bitterly to rue my former conduct in
neglecting and despising certain subjects at the REALSCHULE. Before taking up the
courses at the School of Architecture in the Academy it was necessary to attend the
Technical Building School; but a necessary qualification for entrance into this school
was a Leaving Certificate from the Middle School. And this I simply did not have.
According to the human measure of things my dream of following an artistic calling
seemed beyond the limits of possibility.
After the death of my mother I came to Vienna for the third time. This visit was
destined to last several years. Since I had been there before I had recovered my old calm
and resoluteness. The former self-assurance had come back, and I had my eyes steadily
fixed on the goal. I would be an architect. Obstacles are placed across our path in life,
not to be boggled at but to be surmounted. And I was fully determined to surmount
these obstacles, having the picture of my father constantly before my mind, who had
raised himself by his own efforts to the position of a civil servant though he was the
poor son of a village shoemaker. I had a better start, and the possibilities of struggling
through were better. At that time my lot in life seemed to me a harsh one; but to-day I
see in it the wise workings of Providence. The Goddess of Fate clutched me in her
hands and often threatened to smash me; but the will grew stronger as the obstacles
increased, and finally the will triumphed.
I am thankful for that period of my life, because it hardened me and enabled me to be as
tough as I now am. And I am even more thankful because I appreciate the fact that I
was thus saved from the emptiness of a life of ease and that a mother's darling was
taken from tender arms and handed over to Adversity as to a new mother. Though I
then rebelled against it as too hard a fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a world
of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to
fight.
It was during this period that my eyes were opened to two perils, the names of which I
scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of their terrible significance for
the existence of the German people. These two perils were Marxism and Judaism.
For many people the name of Vienna signifies innocent jollity, a festive place for happy
mortals. For me, alas, it is a living memory of the saddest period in my life. Even to-day
the mention of that city arouses only gloomy thoughts in my mind. Five years of
poverty in that Phaecian (Note 5) town. Five years in which, first as a casual labourer
and then as a painter of little trifles, I had to earn my daily bread. And a meagre morsel
indeed it was, not even sufficient to still the hunger which I constantly felt. That hunger
was the faithful guardian which never left me but took part in everything I did. Every
book that I bought meant renewed hunger, and every visit I paid to the opera meant the
intrusion of that inalienabl companion during the following days. I was always
struggling with my unsympathic friend. And yet during that time I learned more than I
had ever learned before. Outside my architectural studies and rare visits to the opera,
for which I had to deny myself food, I had no other pleasure in life except my books.
I read a great deal then, and I pondered deeply over what I read. All the free time after
work was devoted exclusively to study. Thus within a few years I was able to acquire a
stock of knowledge which I find useful even to-day.
But more than that. During those years a view of life and a definite outlook on the
world took shape in my mind. These became the granite basis of my conduct at that
time. Since then I have extended that foundation only very little, and I have changed
nothing in it.
On the contrary: I am firmly convinced to-day that, generally speaking, it is in youth
that men lay the essential groundwork of their creative thought, wherever that creative
thought exists. I make a distinction between the wisdom of age--which can only arise
from the greater profundity and foresight that are based on the experiences of a long
life--and the creative genius of youth, which blossoms out in thought and ideas with
inexhaustible fertility, without being able to put these into practice immediately,
because of their very superabundance. These furnish the building materials and plans
for the future; and it is from them that age takes the stones and builds the edifice, unless
the so-called wisdom of the years may have smothered the creative genius of youth.
The life which I had hitherto led at home with my parents differed in little or nothing
from that of all the others. I looked forward without apprehension to the morrow, and
there was no such thing as a social problem to be faced. Those among whom I passed
my young days belonged to the small bourgeois class. Therefore it was a world that had
very little contact with the world of genuine manual labourers. For, though at first this
may appear astonishing, the ditch which separates that class, which is by no means
economically well-off; from the manual labouring class is often deeper than people
think. The reason for this division, which we may almost call enmity, lies in the fear that
dominates a social group which has only just risen above the level of the manual
labourer--a fear lest it may fall back into its old condition or at least be classed with the
labourers. Moreover, there is something repulsive in remembering the cultural
indigence of that lower class and their rough manners with one another; so that people
who are only on the first rung of the social ladder find it unbearable to be forced to have
any contact with the cultural level and standard of living out of which they have
passed.
And so it happens that very often those who belong to what can really be called the
upper classes find it much easier than do the upstarts to descend to and intermingle
with their fellow beings on the lowest social level. For by the word upstart I mean
everyone who has raised himself through his own efforts to a social level higher than
that to which he formerly belonged. In the case of such a person the hard struggle
through which he passes often destroys his normal human sympathy. His own fight for
existence kills his sensibility for the misery of those who have been left behind.
From this point of view fate had been kind to me. Circumstances forced me to return to
that world of poverty and economic insecurity above which my father had raised
himself in his early days; and thus the blinkers of a narrow PETIT BOURGEOIS
education were torn from my eyes. Now for the first time I learned to know men and I
learned to distinguish between empty appearances or brutal manners and the real inner
nature of the people who outwardly appeared thus.
At the beginning of the century Vienna had already taken rank among those cities
where social conditions are iniquitous. Dazzling riches and loathsome destitution were
intermingled in violent contrast. In the centre and in the Inner City one felt the pulsebeat of an Empire which had a population of fifty-two millions, with all the perilous
charm of a State made up of multiple nationalities. The dazzling splendour of the Court
acted like a magnet on the wealth and intelligence of the whole Empire. And this
attraction was further strengthened by the dynastic policy of the Habsburg Monarchy in
centralizing everything in itself and for itself.
This centralizing policy was necessary in order to hold together that hotchpotch of
heterogeneous nationalities. But the result of it was an extraordinary concentration of
higher officials in the city, which was at one and the same time the metropolis and
imperial residence.
But Vienna was not merely the political and intellectual centre of the Danubian
Monarchy; it was also the commercial centre. Besides the horde of military officers of
high rank, State officials, artists and scientists, there was the still vaster horde of
workers. Abject poverty confronted the wealth of the aristocracy and the merchant class
face to face. Thousands of unemployed loitered in front of the palaces on the Ring
Strasse; and below that VIA TRIUMPHALIS of the old Austria the homeless huddled
together in the murk and filth of the canals.
There was hardly any other German city in which the social problem could be studied
better than in Vienna. But here I must utter a warning against the illusion that this
problem can be 'studied' from above downwards. The man who has never been in the
clutches of that crushing viper can never know what its poison is. An attempt to study
it in any other way will result only in superficial talk and sentimental delusions. Both
are harmful. The first because it can never go to the root of the question, the second
because it evades the question entirely. I do not know which is the more nefarious: to
ignore social distress, as do the majority of those who have been favoured by fortune
and those who have risen in the social scale through their own routine labour, or the
equally supercilious and often tactless but always genteel condescension displayed by
people who make a fad of being charitable and who plume themselves on
'sympathising with the people.' Of course such persons sin more than they can imagine
from lack of instinctive understanding. And thus they are astonished to find that the
'social conscience' on which they pride themselves never produces any results, but often
causes their good intentions to be resented; and then they talk of the ingratitude of the
people.
Such persons are slow to learn that here there is no place for merely social activities and
that there can be no expectation of gratitude; for in this connection there is no question
at all of distributing favours but essentially a matter of retributive justice. I was
protected against the temptation to study the social question in the way just mentioned,
for the simple reason that I was forced to live in the midst of poverty-stricken people.
Therefore it was not a question of studying the problem objectively, but rather one of
testing its effects on myself. Though the rabbit came through the ordeal of the
experiment, this must not be taken as evidence of its harmlessness.
When I try to-day to recall the succession of impressions received during that time I
find that I can do so only with approximate completeness. Here I shall describe only the
more essential impressions and those which personally affected me and often staggered
me. And I shall mention the few lessons I then learned from this experience.
At that time it was for the most part not very difficult to find work, because I had to
seek work not as a skilled tradesman but as a so-called extra-hand ready to take any job
that turned up by chance, just for the sake of earning my daily bread.
Thus I found myself in the same situation as all those emigrants who shake the dust of
Europe from their feet, with the cast-iron determination to lay the foundations of a new
existence in the New World and acquire for themselves a new home. Liberated from all
the paralysing prejudices of class and calling, environment and tradition, they enter any
service that opens its doors to them, accepting any work that comes their way, filled
more and more with the idea that honest work never disgraced anybody, no matter
what kind it may be. And so I was resolved to set both feet in what was for me a new
world and push forward on my own road.
I soon found out that there was some kind of work always to be got, but I also learned
that it could just as quickly and easily be lost. The uncertainty of being able to earn a
regular daily livelihood soon appeared to me as the gloomiest feature in this new life
that I had entered.
Although the skilled worker was not so frequently thrown idle on the streets as the
unskilled worker, yet the former was by no means protected against the same fate;
because though he may not have to face hunger as a result of unemployment due to the
lack of demand in the labour market, the lock-out and the strike deprived the skilled
worker of the chance to earn his bread. Here the element of uncertainty in steadily
earning one's daily bread was the bitterest feature of the whole social-economic system
itself.
The country lad who migrates to the big city feels attracted by what has been described
as easy work--which it may be in reality--and few working hours. He is especially
entranced by the magic glimmer spread over the big cities. Accustomed in the country
to earn a steady wage, he has been taught not to quit his former post until a new one is
at least in sight. As there is a great scarcity of agricultural labour, the probability of long
unemployment in the country has been very small. It is a mistake to presume that the
lad who leaves the countryside for the town is not made of such sound material as those
who remain at home to work on the land. On the contrary, experience shows that it is
the more healthy and more vigorous that emigrate, and not the reverse. Among these
emigrants I include not merely those who emigrate to America, but also the servant boy
in the country who decides to leave his native village and migrate to the big city where
he will be a stranger. He is ready to take the risk of an uncertain fate. In most cases he
comes to town with a little money in his pocket and for the first few days he is not
discouraged if he should not have the good fortune to find work. But if he finds a job
and then loses it in a little while, the case is much worse. To find work anew, especially
in winter, is often difficult and indeed sometimes impossible. For the first few weeks
life is still bearable He receives his out-of-work money from his trade union and is thus
enabled to carry on. But when the last of his own money is gone and his trade union
ceases to pay out because of the prolonged unemployment, then comes the real distress.
He now loiters about and is hungry. Often he pawns or sells the last of his belongings.
His clothes begin to get shabby and with the increasing poverty of his outward
appearance he descends to a lower social level and mixes up with a class of human
beings through whom his mind is now poisoned, in addition to his physical misery.
Then he has nowhere to sleep and if that happens in winter, which is very often the
case, he is in dire distress. Finally he gets work. But the old story repeats itself. A second
time the same thing happens. Then a third time; and now it is probably much worse.
Little by little he becomes indifferent to this everlasting insecurity. Finally he grows
used to the repetition. Thus even a man who is normally of industrious habits grows
careless in his whole attitude towards life and gradually becomes an instrument in the
hands of unscrupulous people who exploit him for the sake of their own ignoble aims.
He has been so often thrown out of employment through no fault of his own that he is
now more or less indifferent whether the strike in which he takes part be for the
purpose of securing his economic rights or be aimed at the destruction of the State, the
whole social order and even civilization itself. Though the idea of going on strike may
not be to his natural liking, yet he joins in it out of sheer indifference.
I saw this process exemplified before my eyes in thousands of cases. And the longer I
observed it the greater became my dislike for that mammoth city which greedily
attracts men to its bosom, in order to break them mercilessly in the end. When they
came they still felt themselves in communion with their own people at home; if they
remained that tie was broken.
I was thrown about so much in the life of the metropolis that I experienced the
workings of this fate in my own person and felt the effects of it in my own soul. One
thing stood out clearly before my eyes: It was the sudden changes from work to
idleness and vice versa; so that the constant fluctuations thus caused by earnings and
expenditure finally destroyed the 'sense of thrift for many people and also the habit of
regulating expenditure in an intelligent way. The body appeared to grow accustomed to
the vicissitudes of food and hunger, eating heartily in good times and going hungry in
bad. Indeed hunger shatters all plans for rationing expenditure on a regular scale in
better times when employment is again found. The reason for this is that the
deprivations which the unemployed worker has to endure must be compensated for
psychologically by a persistent mental mirage in which he imagines himself eating
heartily once again. And this dream develops into such a longing that it turns into a
morbid impulse to cast off all self-restraint when work and wages turn up again.
Therefore the moment work is found anew he forgets to regulate the expenditure of his
earnings but spends them to the full without thinking of to-morrow. This leads to
confusion in the little weekly housekeeping budget, because the expenditure is not
rationally planned. When the phenomenon which I have mentioned first happens, the
earnings will last perhaps for five days instead of seven; on subsequent occasions they
will last only for three days; as the habit recurs, the earnings will last scarcely for a day;
and finally they will disappear in one night of feasting.
Often there are wife and children at home. And in many cases it happens that these
become infected by such a way of living, especially if the husband is good to them and
wants to do the best he can for them and loves them in his own way and according to
his own lights. Then the week's earnings are spent in common at home within two or
three days. The family eat and drink together as long as the money lasts and at the end
of the week they hunger together. Then the wife wanders about furtively in the
neighbourhood, borrows a little, and runs up small debts with the shopkeepers in an
effort to pull through the lean days towards the end of the week. They sit down
together to the midday meal with only meagre fare on the table, and often even nothing
to eat. They wait for the coming payday, talking of it and making plans; and while they
are thus hungry they dream of the plenty that is to come. And so the little children
become acquainted with misery in their early years.

IT HAS turned out fortunate for me to-day that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn
to be my birthplace. For that little town is situated just on the frontier between those
two States the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to
which we should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means
should be employed.
German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not indeed on
any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever. No, no. Even if the union were a
matter of economic indifference, and even if it were to be disadvantageous from the
economic standpoint, still it ought to take place. People of the same blood should be in
the same REICH. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy
until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State. When the
territory of the REICH embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them
a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire
foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the
daily bread for the generations to come.
And so this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great task. But in
another regard also it points to a lesson that is applicable to our day. Over a hundred
years ago this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the
whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German
history. At the time of our Fatherland's deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes
Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here
because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to
disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly
responsible for the affair. Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the
latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a director of police
from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example
which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the REICH under
Herr Severing's regime (Note 1).
In this little town on the Inn, haloed by the memory of a German martyr, a town that
was Bavarian by blood but under the rule of the Austrian State, my parents were
domiciled towards the end of the last century. My father was a civil servant who
fulfilled his duties very conscientiously. My mother looked after the household and
lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children. From that period I have not retained
very much in my memory; because after a few years my father had to leave that frontier
town which I had come to love so much and take up a new post farther down the Inn
valley, at Passau, therefore actually in Germany itself.
In those days it was the usual lot of an Austrian civil servant to be transferred
periodically from one post to another. Not long after coming to Passau my father was
transferred to Linz, and while there he retired finally to live on his pension. But this did
not mean that the old gentleman would now rest from his labours.
He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew restless and left home.
When he was barely thirteen years old he buckled on his satchel and set forth from his
native woodland parish. Despite the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from
'experience,' he went to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fiftieth year of the
last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and face the unknown,
with three gulden in his pocket. By when the boy of thirteen was a lad of seventeen and
had passed his apprenticeship examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the
contrary. The persistent economic depression of that period and the constant want and
misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and strive for
'something higher.' As a boy it had seemed to him that the position of the parish priest
in his native village was the highest in the scale of human attainment; but now that the
big city had enlarged his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State
official as the highest of all. With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble had
already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man of seventeen
obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it until he won through. He became a
civil servant. He was about twenty-three years old, I think, when he succeeded in
making himself what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise
he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he was 'somebody.'
He had gained his end. But in the village there was nobody who had remembered him
as a little boy, and the village itself had become strange to him.
Now at last, when he was fifty-six years old, he gave up his active career; but he could
not bear to be idle for a single day. On the outskirts of the small market town of
Lambach in Upper Austria he bought a farm and tilled it himself. Thus, at the end of a
long and hard-working career, he came back to the life which his father had led.
It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own. I spent a good deal of
time scampering about in the open, on the long road from school, and mixing up with
some of the roughest of the boys, which caused my mother many anxious moments. All
this tended to make me something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely
any serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I was certainly
quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my father had followed. I think
that an inborn talent for speaking now began to develop and take shape during the
more or less strenuous arguments which I used to have with my comrades. I had
become a juvenile ringleader who learned well and easily at school but was rather
difficult to manage. In my freetime I practised singing in the choir of the monastery
church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed in a very favourable
position to be emotionally impressed again and again by the magnificent splendour of
ecclesiastical ceremonial. What could be more natural for me than to look upon the
Abbot as representing the highest human ideal worth striving for, just as the position of
the humble village priest had appeared to my father in his own boyhood days? At least,
that was my idea for a while. But the juvenile disputes I had with my father did not lead
him to appreciate his son's oratorical gifts in such a way as to see in them a favourable
promise for such a career, and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I
had in my head at that time. This contradiction in my character made him feel
somewhat anxious.
As a matter of fact, that transitory yearning after such a vocation soon gave way to
hopes that were better suited to my temperament. Browsing through my father's books,
I chanced to come across some publications that dealt with military subjects. One of
these publications was a popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It
consisted of two volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. These
became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic conflict began to
take first place in my mind. And from that time onwards I became more and more
enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or military
affairs.
But this story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for me on other
grounds also. For the first time, and as yet only in quite a vague way, the question
began to present itself: Is there a difference--and if there be, what is it--between the
Germans who fought that war and the other Germans? Why did not Austria also take
part in it? Why did not my father and all the others fight in that struggle? Are we not
the same as the other Germans? Do we not all belong together?
That was the first time that this problem began to agitate my small brain. And from the
replies that were given to the questions which I asked very tentatively, I was forced to
accept the fact, though with a secret envy, that not all Germans had the good luck to
belong to Bismarck's Empire. This was something that I could not understand.
It was decided that I should study. Considering my character as a whole, and especially
my temperament, my father decided that the classical subjects studied at the Lyceum
were not suited to my natural talents. He thought that the REALSCHULE (Note 2)
would suit me better. My obvious talent for drawing confirmed him in that view; for in
his opinion drawing was a subject too much neglected in the Austrian GYMNASIUM.
Probably also the memory of the hard road which he himself had travelled contributed
to make him look upon classical studies as unpractical and accordingly to set little value
on them. At the back of his mind he had the idea that his son also should become an
official of the Government. Indeed he had decided on that career for me. The difficulties
through which he had to struggle in making his own career led him to overestimate
what he had achieved, because this was exclusively the result of his own indefatigable
industry and energy. The characteristic pride of the self-made man urged him towards
the idea that his son should follow the same calling and if possible rise to a higher
position in it. Moreover, this idea was strengthened by the consideration that the results
of his own life's industry had placed him in a position to facilitate his son's
advancement in the same career.
He was simply incapable of imagining that I might reject what had meant everything in
life to him. My father's decision was simple, definite, clear and, in his eyes, it was
something to be taken for granted. A man of such a nature who had become an autocrat
by reason of his own hard struggle for existence, could not think of allowing
'inexperienced' and irresponsible young fellows to choose their own careers. To act in
such a way, where the future of his own son was concerned, would have been a grave
and reprehensible weakness in the exercise of parental authority and responsibility,
something utterly incompatible with his characteristic sense of duty.
And yet it had to be otherwise.
For the first time in my life--I was then eleven years old--I felt myself forced into open
opposition. No matter how hard and determined my father might be about putting his
own plans and opinions into action, his son was no less obstinate in refusing to accept
ideas on which he set little or no value.
I would not become a civil servant.
No amount of persuasion and no amount of 'grave' warnings could break down that
opposition. I would not become a State official, not on any account. All the attempts
which my father made to arouse in me a love or liking for that profession, by picturing
his own career for me, had only the opposite effect. It nauseated me to think that one
day I might be fettered to an office stool, that I could not dispose of my own time but
would be forced to spend the whole of my life filling out forms.
One can imagine what kind of thoughts such a prospect awakened in the mind of a
young fellow who was by no means what is called a 'good boy' in the current sense of
that term. The ridiculously easy school tasks which we were given made it possible for
me to spend far more time in the open air than at home. To-day, when my political
opponents pry into my life with diligent scrutiny, as far back as the days of my
boyhood, so as finally to be able to prove what disreputable tricks this Hitler was
accustomed to in his young days, I thank heaven that I can look back to those happy
days and find the memory of them helpful. The fields and the woods were then the
terrain on which all disputes were fought out.
Even attendance at the REALSCHULE could not alter my way of spending my time. But
I had now another battle to fight.
So long as the paternal plan to make a State functionary contradicted my own
inclinations only in the abstract, the conflict was easy to bear. I could be discreet about
expressing my personal views and thus avoid constantly recurrent disputes. My own
resolution not to become a Government official was sufficient for the time being to put
my mind completely at rest. I held on to that resolution inexorably. But the situation
became more difficult once I had a positive plan of my own which I might present to
my father as a counter-suggestion. This happened when I was twelve years old. How it
came about I cannot exactly say now; but one day it became clear to me that I would be
a painter--I mean an artist. That I had an aptitude for drawing was an admitted fact. It
was even one of the reasons why my father had sent me to the REALSCHULE; but he
had never thought of having that talent developed in such a way that I could take up
painting as a professional career. Quite the contrary. When, as a result of my renewed
refusal to adopt his favourite plan, my father asked me for the first time what I myself
really wished to be, the resolution that I had already formed expressed itself almost
automatically. For a while my father was speechless. "A painter? An artist-painter?" he
exclaimed.
He wondered whether I was in a sound state of mind. He thought that he might not
have caught my words rightly, or that he had misunderstood what I meant. But when I
had explained my ideas to him and he saw how seriously I took them, he opposed them
with that full determination which was characteristic of him. His decision was
exceedingly simple and could not be deflected from its course by any consideration of
what my own natural qualifications really were.
"Artist! Not as long as I live, never." As the son had inherited some of the father's
obstinacy, besides having other qualities of his own, my reply was equally energetic.
But it stated something quite the contrary.
At that our struggle became stalemate. The father would not abandon his 'Never', and I
became all the more consolidated in my 'Nevertheless'.
Naturally the resulting situation was not pleasant. The old gentleman was bitterly
annoyed; and indeed so was I, although I really loved him. My father forbade me to
entertain any hopes of taking up the art of painting as a profession. I went a step further
and declared that I would not study anything else. With such declarations the situation
became still more strained, so that the old gentleman irrevocably decided to assert his
parental authority at all costs. That led me to adopt an attitude of circumspect silence,
but I put my threat into execution. I thought that, once it became clear to my father that
I was making no progress at the REALSCHULE, for weal or for woe, he would be
forced to allow me to follow the happy career I had dreamed of.
I do not know whether I calculated rightly or not. Certainly my failure to make progress
became quite visible in the school. I studied just the subjects that appealed to me,
especially those which I thought might be of advantage to me later on as a painter.
What did not appear to have any importance from this point of view, or what did not
otherwise appeal to me favourably, I completely sabotaged. My school reports of that
time were always in the extremes of good or bad, according to the subject and the
interest it had for me. In one column my qualification read 'very good' or 'excellent'. In
another it read 'average' or even 'below average'. By far my best subjects were
geography and, even more so, general history. These were my two favourite subjects,
and I led the class in them.
When I look back over so many years and try to judge the results of that experience I
find two very significant facts standing out clearly before my mind.
First, I became a nationalist.
Second, I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.
The old Austria was a multi-national State. In those days at least the citizens of the
German Empire, taken through and through, could not understand what that fact
meant in the everyday life of the individuals within such a State. After the magnificent
triumphant march of the victorious armies in the Franco-German War the Germans in
the REICH became steadily more and more estranged from the Germans beyond their
frontiers, partly because they did not deign to appreciate those other Germans at their
true value or simply because they were incapable of doing so.
The Germans of the REICH did not realize that if the Germans in Austria had not been
of the best racial stock they could never have given the stamp of their own character to
an Empire of 52 millions, so definitely that in Germany itself the idea arose--though
quite an erroneous one--that Austria was a German State. That was an error which led
to dire consequences; but all the same it was a magnificent testimony to the character of
the ten million Germans in that East Mark. (Note 3) Only very few of the Germans in
the REICH itself had an idea of the bitter struggle which those Eastern Germans had to
carry on daily for the preservation of their German language, their German schools and
their German character. Only to-day, when a tragic fate has torn several millions of our
kinsfolk away from the REICH and has forced them to live under the rule of the
stranger, dreaming of that common fatherland towards which all their yearnings are
directed and struggling to uphold at least the sacred right of using their mother tongue-
-only now have the wider circles of the German population come to realize what it
means to have to fight for the traditions of one's race. And so at last perhaps there are
people here and there who can assess the greatness of that German spirit which
animated the old East Mark and enabled those people, left entirely dependent on their
own resources, to defend the Empire against the Orient for several centuries and
subsequently to hold fast the frontiers of the German language through a guerilla
warfare of attrition, at a time when the German Empire was sedulously cultivating an
interest for colonies but not for its own flesh and blood before the threshold of its own
door.
What has happened always and everywhere, in every kind of struggle, happened also
in the language fight which was carried on in the old Austria. There were three groups--
the fighters, the hedgers and the traitors. Even in the schools this sifting already began
to take place. And it is worth noting that the struggle for the language was waged
perhaps in its bitterest form around the school; because this was the nursery where the
seeds had to be watered which were to spring up and form the future generation. The
tactical objective of the fight was the winning over of the child, and it was to the child
that the first rallying cry was addressed:
"German youth, do not forget that you are a German," and "Remember, little girl, that
one day you must be a German mother."
Those who know something of the juvenile spirit can understand how youth will
always lend a glad ear to such a rallying cry. Under many forms the young people led
the struggle, fighting in their own way and with their own weapons. They refused to
sing non-German songs. The greater the efforts made to win them away from their
German allegiance, the more they exalted the glory of their German heroes. They
stinted themselves in buying things to eat, so that they might spare their pennies to help
the war chest of their elders. They were incredibly alert in the significance of what the
non-German teachers said and they contradicted in unison. They wore the forbidden
emblems of their own kinsfolk and were happy when penalised for doing so, or even
physically punished. In miniature they were mirrors of loyalty from which the older
people might learn a lesson.
And thus it was that at a comparatively early age I took part in the struggle which the
nationalities were waging against one another in the old Austria. When meetings were
held for the South Mark German League and the School League we wore cornflowers
and black-red-gold colours to express our loyalty. We greeted one another with HEIL!
and instead of the Austrian anthem we sang our own DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES,
despite warnings and penalties. Thus the youth were educated politically at a time
when the citizens of a so-called national State for the most part knew little of their own
nationality except the language. Of course, I did not belong to the hedgers. Within a
little while I had become an ardent 'German National', which has a different meaning
from the party significance attached to that phrase to-day.
I developed very rapidly in the nationalist direction, and by the time I was 15 years old
I had come to understand the distinction between dynastic patriotism and nationalism
based on the concept of folk, or people, my inclination being entirely in favour of the
latter.
Such a preference may not perhaps be clearly intelligible to those who have never taken
the trouble to study the internal conditions that prevailed under the Habsburg
Monarchy.
Among historical studies universal history was the subject almost exclusively taught in
the Austrian schools, for of specific Austrian history there was only very little. The fate
of this State was closely bound up with the existence and development of Germany as a
whole; so a division of history into German history and Austrian history would be
practically inconceivable. And indeed it was only when the German people came to be
divided between two States that this division of German history began to take place.
The insignia (Note 4) of a former imperial sovereignty which were still preserved in
Vienna appeared to act as magical relics rather than as the visible guarantee of an
everlasting bond of union.
When the Habsburg State crumbled to pieces in 1918 the Austrian Germans
instinctively raised an outcry for union with their German fatherland. That was the
voice of a unanimous yearning in the hearts of the whole people for a return to the
unforgotten home of their fathers. But such a general yearning could not be explained
except by attributing the cause of it to the historical training through which the
individual Austrian Germans had passed. Therein lay a spring that never dried up.
Especially in times of distraction and forgetfulness its quiet voice was a reminder of the
past, bidding the people to look out beyond the mere welfare of the moment to a new
future.
The teaching of universal history in what are called the middle schools is still very
unsatisfactory. Few teachers realize that the purpose of teaching history is not the
memorizing of some dates and facts, that the student is not interested in knowing the
exact date of a battle or the birthday of some marshal or other, and not at all--or at least
only very insignificantly--interested in knowing when the crown of his fathers was
placed on the brow of some monarch. These are certainly not looked upon as important
matters.
To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are the causes of those
results which appear before our eyes as historical events. The art of reading and
studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.
Probably my whole future life was determined by the fact that I had a professor of
history who understood, as few others understand, how to make this viewpoint prevail
in teaching and in examining. This teacher was Dr. Leopold Poetsch, of the
REALSCHULE at Linz. He was the ideal personification of the qualities necessary to a
teacher of history in the sense I have mentioned above. An elderly gentleman with a
decisive manner but a kindly heart, he was a very attractive speaker and was able to
inspire us with his own enthusiasm. Even to-day I cannot recall without emotion that
venerable personality whose enthusiastic exposition of history so often made us entirely
forget the present and allow ourselves to be transported as if by magic into the past. He
penetrated through the dim mist of thousands of years and transformed the historical
memory of the dead past into a living reality. When we listened to him we became afire
with enthusiasm and we were sometimes moved even to tears.
It was still more fortunate that this professor was able not only to illustrate the past by
examples from the present but from the past he was also able to draw a lesson for the
present. He understood better than any other the everyday problems that were then
agitating our minds. The national fervour which we felt in our own small way was
utilized by him as an instrument of our education, inasmuch as he often appealed to our
national sense of honour; for in that way he maintained order and held our attention
much more easily than he could have done by any other means. It was because I had
such a professor that history became my favourite subject. As a natural consequence,
but without the conscious connivance of my professor, I then and there became a young
rebel. But who could have studied German history under such a teacher and not
become an enemy of that State whose rulers exercised such a disastrous influence on the
destinies of the German nation? Finally, how could one remain the faithful subject of
the House of Habsburg, whose past history and present conduct proved it to be ready
ever and always to betray the interests of the German people for the sake of paltry
personal interests? Did not we as youngsters fully realize that the House of Habsburg
did not, and could not, have any love for us Germans?
What history taught us about the policy followed by the House of Habsburg was
corroborated by our own everyday experiences. In the north and in the south the poison
of foreign races was eating into the body of our people, and even Vienna was steadily
becoming more and more a non-German city. The 'Imperial House' favoured the Czechs
on every possible occasion. Indeed it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and
inexorable retribution that caused the most deadly enemy of Germanism in Austria, the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to fall by the very bullets which he himself had helped to
cast. Working from above downwards, he was the chief patron of the movement to
make Austria a Slav State.
The burdens laid on the shoulders of the German people were enormous and the
sacrifices of money and blood which they had to make were incredibly heavy.
Yet anybody who was not quite blind must have seen that it was all in vain. What
affected us most bitterly was the consciousness of the fact that this whole system was
morally shielded by the alliance with Germany, whereby the slow extirpation of
Germanism in the old Austrian Monarchy seemed in some way to be more or less
sanctioned by Germany herself. Habsburg hypocrisy, which endeavoured outwardly to
make the people believe that Austria still remained a German State, increased the
feeling of hatred against the Imperial House and at the same time aroused a spirit of
rebellion and contempt.
But in the German Empire itself those who were then its rulers saw nothing of what all
this meant. As if struck blind, they stood beside a corpse and in the very symptoms of
decomposition they believed that they recognized the signs of a renewed vitality. In
that unhappy alliance between the young German Empire and the illusory Austrian
State lay the germ of the World War and also of the final collapse.
In the subsequent pages of this book I shall go to the root of the problem. Suffice it to
say here that in the very early years of my youth I came to certain conclusions which I
have never abandoned. Indeed I became more profoundly convinced of them as the
years passed. They were: That the dissolution of the Austrian Empire is a preliminary
condition for the defence of Germany; further, that national feeling is by no means
identical with dynastic patriotism; finally, and above all, that the House of Habsburg
was destined to bring misfortune to the German nation.
As a logical consequence of these convictions, there arose in me a feeling of intense love
for my German-Austrian home and a profound hatred for the Austrian State.
That kind of historical thinking which was developed in me through my study of
history at school never left me afterwards. World history became more and more an
inexhaustible source for the understanding of contemporary historical events, which
means politics. Therefore I will not "learn" politics but let politics teach me.
A precocious revolutionary in politics I was no less a precocious revolutionary in art. At
that time the provincial capital of Upper Austria had a theatre which, relatively
speaking, was not bad. Almost everything was played there. When I was twelve years
old I saw William Tell performed. That was my first experience of the theatre. Some
months later I attended a performance of LOHENGRIN, the first opera I had ever
heard. I was fascinated at once. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew
no limits. Again and again I was drawn to hear his operas; and to-day I consider it a
great piece of luck that these modest productions in the little provincial city prepared
the way and made it possible for me to appreciate the better productions later on.
But all this helped to intensify my profound aversion for the career that my father had
chosen for me; and this dislike became especially strong as the rough corners of
youthful boorishness became worn off, a process which in my case caused a good deal
of pain. I became more and more convinced that I should never be happy as a State
official. And now that the REALSCHULE had recognized and acknowledged my
aptitude for drawing, my own resolution became all the stronger. Imprecations and
threats had no longer any chance of changing it. I wanted to become a painter and no
power in the world could force me to become a civil servant. The only peculiar feature
of the situation now was that as I grew bigger I became more and more interested in
architecture. I considered this fact as a natural development of my flair for painting and
I rejoiced inwardly that the sphere of my artistic interests was thus enlarged. I had no
notion that one day it would have to be otherwise.
The question of my career was decided much sooner than I could have expected.
When I was in my thirteenth year my father was suddenly taken from us. He was still
in robust health when a stroke of apoplexy painlessly ended his earthly wanderings and
left us all deeply bereaved. His most ardent longing was to be able to help his son to
advance in a career and thus save me from the harsh ordeal that he himself had to go
through. But it appeared to him then as if that longing were all in vain. And yet, though
he himself was not conscious of it, he had sown the seeds of a future which neither of us
foresaw at that time.
At first nothing changed outwardly.
My mother felt it her duty to continue my education in accordance with my father's
wishes, which meant that she would have me study for the civil service. For my own
part I was even more firmly determined than ever before that under no circumstances
would I become an official of the State. The curriculum and teaching methods followed
in the middle school were so far removed from my ideals that I became profoundly
indifferent. Illness suddenly came to my assistance. Within a few weeks it decided my
future and put an end to the long-standing family conflict. My lungs became so
seriously affected that the doctor advised my mother very strongly not under any
circumstances to allow me to take up a career which would necessitate working in an
office. He ordered that I should give up attendance at the REALSCHULE for a year at
least. What I had secretly desired for such a long time, and had persistently fought for,
now became a reality almost at one stroke.
Influenced by my illness, my mother agreed that I should leave the REALSCHULE and
attend the Academy.
Those were happy days, which appeared to me almost as a dream; but they were bound
to remain only a dream. Two years later my mother's death put a brutal end to all my
fine projects. She succumbed to a long and painful illness which from the very
beginning permitted little hope of recovery. Though expected, her death came as a
terrible blow to me. I respected my father, but I loved my mother.
Poverty and stern reality forced me to decide promptly.
The meagre resources of the family had been almost entirely used up through my
mother's severe illness. The allowance which came to me as an orphan was not enough
for the bare necessities of life. Somehow or other I would have to earn my own bread.
With my clothes and linen packed in a valise and with an indomitable resolution in my
heart, I left for Vienna. I hoped to forestall fate, as my father had done fifty years before.
I was determined to become 'something'--but certainly not a civil servant.
[Note 1. In order to understand the reference here, and similar references in later
portions of MEIN KAMPF, the following must be borne in mind:
From 1792 to 1814 the French Revolutionary Armies overran Germany. In 1800 Bavaria
shared in the Austrian defeat at Hohenlinden and the French occupied Munich. In 1805
the Bavarian Elector was made King of Bavaria by Napoleon and stipulated to back up
Napoleon in all his wars with a force of 30,000 men. Thus Bavaria became the absolute
vassal of the French. This was 'TheTime of Germany's Deepest Humiliation', Which is
referred to again and again by Hitler.
In 1806 a pamphlet entitled 'Germany's Deepest Humiliation' was published in South
Germany. Amnng those who helped to circulate the pamphlet was the Nürnberg
bookseller, Johannes Philipp Palm. He was denounced to the French by a Bavarian
police agent. At his trial he refused to disclose thename of the author. By Napoleon's
orders, he was shot at Braunau-on-the-Innon August 26th, 1806. A monument erected
to him on the site of the executionwas one of the first public objects that made an
impression on Hitler asa little boy.
Leo Schlageter's case was in many respects parallel to that of Johannes Palm. Schlageter
was a German theological student who volunteered for service in 1914. He became an
artillery officer and won the Iron Cross of both classes. When the French occupied the
Ruhr in 1923 Schlageter helped to organize the passive resistance on the German side.
He and his companions blew up a railway bridge for the purpose of making the
transport of coal to France more difficult.
Those who took part in the affair were denounced to the French by a German informer.
Schlageter took the whole responsibility on his own shoulders and was condemned to
death, his companions being sentenced to various terms of imprisonment and penal
servitude by the French Court. Schlageter refused to disclose the identity of those who
issued the order to blow up the railway bridge and he would not plead for mercy before
a French Court. He was shot by a French firing-squad on May 26th, 1923. Severing was
at that time German Minister of the Interior. It is said that representations were made,
to himon Schlageter's behalf and that he refused to interfere.
Schlageter has become the chief martyr of the German resistancc to the French
occupation of the Ruhr and also one of the great heroes of the National Socialist
Movement. He had joined the Movement at a very early stage, his card of membership
bearing the number 61.]
[Note 2. Non-classical secondary school. The Lyceum and GYMNASIUM were classical
or semi-classical secondary schools.]
[Note 3. See Translator's Introduction.]
[Note 4. When Francis II had laid down his title as Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empireof the German Nation, which he did at the command of Napoleon, the
Crownand Mace, as the Imperial Insignia, were kept in Vienna. After the German
Empire was refounded, in 1871, under William I, there were many demands tohave the
Insignia transferred to Berlin. But these went unheeded. Hitler had them brought to
Germany after the Austrian Anschluss and displayed at Nuremberg during the Party
Congress in September 1938.]
Chapter 2
Years Of Study And Suffering In Vienna
WHEN MY mother died my fate had already been decided in one respect. During the
last months of her illness I went to Vienna to take the entrance examination for the
Academy of Fine Arts. Armed with a bulky packet of sketches, I felt convinced that I
should pass the examination quite easily. At the REALSCHULE I was by far the best
student in the drawing class, and since that time I had made more than ordinary
progress in the practice of drawing. Therefore I was pleased with myself and was proud
and happy at the prospect of what I considered an assured success.
But there was one misgiving: It seemed to me that I was better qualified for drawing
than for painting, especially in the various branches of architectural drawing. At the
same time my interest in architecture was constantly increasing. And I advanced in this
direction at a still more rapid pace after my first visit to Vienna, which lasted two
weeks. I was not yet sixteen years old. I went to the Hof Museum to study the paintings
in the art gallery there; but the building itself captured almost all my interest, from early
morning until late at night I spent all my time visiting the various public buildings. And
it was the buildings themselves that were always the principal attraction for me. For
hours and hours I could stand in wonderment before the Opera and the Parliament. The
whole Ring Strasse had a magic effect upon me, as if it were a scene from the Thousandand-one-Nights.
And now I was here for the second time in this beautiful city, impatiently waiting to
hear the result of the entrance examination but proudly confident that I had got
through. I was so convinced of my success that when the news that I had failed to pass
was brought to me it struck me like a bolt from the skies. Yet the fact was that I had
failed. I went to see the Rector and asked him to explain the reasons why they refused
to accept me as a student in the general School of Painting, which was part of the
Academy. He said that the sketches which I had brought with me unquestionably
showed that painting was not what I was suited for but that the same sketches gave
clear indications of my aptitude for architectural designing. Therefore the School of
Painting did not come into question for me but rather the School of Architecture, which
also formed part of the Academy. At first it was impossible to understand how this
could be so, seeing that I had never been to a school for architecture and had never
received any instruction in architectural designing.
When I left the Hansen Palace, on the SCHILLER PLATZ, I was quite crestfallen. I felt
out of sorts with myself for the first time in my young life. For what I had heard about
my capabilities now appeared to me as a lightning flash which clearly revealed a
dualism under which I had been suffering for a long time, but hitherto I could give no
clear account whatsoever of the why and wherefore.
Within a few days I myself also knew that I ought to become an architect. But of course
the way was very difficult. I was now forced bitterly to rue my former conduct in
neglecting and despising certain subjects at the REALSCHULE. Before taking up the
courses at the School of Architecture in the Academy it was necessary to attend the
Technical Building School; but a necessary qualification for entrance into this school
was a Leaving Certificate from the Middle School. And this I simply did not have.
According to the human measure of things my dream of following an artistic calling
seemed beyond the limits of possibility.
After the death of my mother I came to Vienna for the third time. This visit was
destined to last several years. Since I had been there before I had recovered my old calm
and resoluteness. The former self-assurance had come back, and I had my eyes steadily
fixed on the goal. I would be an architect. Obstacles are placed across our path in life,
not to be boggled at but to be surmounted. And I was fully determined to surmount
these obstacles, having the picture of my father constantly before my mind, who had
raised himself by his own efforts to the position of a civil servant though he was the
poor son of a village shoemaker. I had a better start, and the possibilities of struggling
through were better. At that time my lot in life seemed to me a harsh one; but to-day I
see in it the wise workings of Providence. The Goddess of Fate clutched me in her
hands and often threatened to smash me; but the will grew stronger as the obstacles
increased, and finally the will triumphed.
I am thankful for that period of my life, because it hardened me and enabled me to be as
tough as I now am. And I am even more thankful because I appreciate the fact that I
was thus saved from the emptiness of a life of ease and that a mother's darling was
taken from tender arms and handed over to Adversity as to a new mother. Though I
then rebelled against it as too hard a fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a world
of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to
fight.
It was during this period that my eyes were opened to two perils, the names of which I
scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of their terrible significance for
the existence of the German people. These two perils were Marxism and Judaism.
For many people the name of Vienna signifies innocent jollity, a festive place for happy
mortals. For me, alas, it is a living memory of the saddest period in my life. Even to-day
the mention of that city arouses only gloomy thoughts in my mind. Five years of
poverty in that Phaecian (Note 5) town. Five years in which, first as a casual labourer
and then as a painter of little trifles, I had to earn my daily bread. And a meagre morsel
indeed it was, not even sufficient to still the hunger which I constantly felt. That hunger
was the faithful guardian which never left me but took part in everything I did. Every
book that I bought meant renewed hunger, and every visit I paid to the opera meant the
intrusion of that inalienabl companion during the following days. I was always
struggling with my unsympathic friend. And yet during that time I learned more than I
had ever learned before. Outside my architectural studies and rare visits to the opera,
for which I had to deny myself food, I had no other pleasure in life except my books.
I read a great deal then, and I pondered deeply over what I read. All the free time after
work was devoted exclusively to study. Thus within a few years I was able to acquire a
stock of knowledge which I find useful even to-day.
But more than that. During those years a view of life and a definite outlook on the
world took shape in my mind. These became the granite basis of my conduct at that
time. Since then I have extended that foundation only very little, and I have changed
nothing in it.
On the contrary: I am firmly convinced to-day that, generally speaking, it is in youth
that men lay the essential groundwork of their creative thought, wherever that creative
thought exists. I make a distinction between the wisdom of age--which can only arise
from the greater profundity and foresight that are based on the experiences of a long
life--and the creative genius of youth, which blossoms out in thought and ideas with
inexhaustible fertility, without being able to put these into practice immediately,
because of their very superabundance. These furnish the building materials and plans
for the future; and it is from them that age takes the stones and builds the edifice, unless
the so-called wisdom of the years may have smothered the creative genius of youth.
The life which I had hitherto led at home with my parents differed in little or nothing
from that of all the others. I looked forward without apprehension to the morrow, and
there was no such thing as a social problem to be faced. Those among whom I passed
my young days belonged to the small bourgeois class. Therefore it was a world that had
very little contact with the world of genuine manual labourers. For, though at first this
may appear astonishing, the ditch which separates that class, which is by no means
economically well-off; from the manual labouring class is often deeper than people
think. The reason for this division, which we may almost call enmity, lies in the fear that
dominates a social group which has only just risen above the level of the manual
labourer--a fear lest it may fall back into its old condition or at least be classed with the
labourers. Moreover, there is something repulsive in remembering the cultural
indigence of that lower class and their rough manners with one another; so that people
who are only on the first rung of the social ladder find it unbearable to be forced to have
any contact with the cultural level and standard of living out of which they have
passed.
And so it happens that very often those who belong to what can really be called the
upper classes find it much easier than do the upstarts to descend to and intermingle
with their fellow beings on the lowest social level. For by the word upstart I mean
everyone who has raised himself through his own efforts to a social level higher than
that to which he formerly belonged. In the case of such a person the hard struggle
through which he passes often destroys his normal human sympathy. His own fight for
existence kills his sensibility for the misery of those who have been left behind.
From this point of view fate had been kind to me. Circumstances forced me to return to
that world of poverty and economic insecurity above which my father had raised
himself in his early days; and thus the blinkers of a narrow PETIT BOURGEOIS
education were torn from my eyes. Now for the first time I learned to know men and I
learned to distinguish between empty appearances or brutal manners and the real inner
nature of the people who outwardly appeared thus.
At the beginning of the century Vienna had already taken rank among those cities
where social conditions are iniquitous. Dazzling riches and loathsome destitution were
intermingled in violent contrast. In the centre and in the Inner City one felt the pulsebeat of an Empire which had a population of fifty-two millions, with all the perilous
charm of a State made up of multiple nationalities. The dazzling splendour of the Court
acted like a magnet on the wealth and intelligence of the whole Empire. And this
attraction was further strengthened by the dynastic policy of the Habsburg Monarchy in
centralizing everything in itself and for itself.
This centralizing policy was necessary in order to hold together that hotchpotch of
heterogeneous nationalities. But the result of it was an extraordinary concentration of
higher officials in the city, which was at one and the same time the metropolis and
imperial residence.
But Vienna was not merely the political and intellectual centre of the Danubian
Monarchy; it was also the commercial centre. Besides the horde of military officers of
high rank, State officials, artists and scientists, there was the still vaster horde of
workers. Abject poverty confronted the wealth of the aristocracy and the merchant class
face to face. Thousands of unemployed loitered in front of the palaces on the Ring
Strasse; and below that VIA TRIUMPHALIS of the old Austria the homeless huddled
together in the murk and filth of the canals.
There was hardly any other German city in which the social problem could be studied
better than in Vienna. But here I must utter a warning against the illusion that this
problem can be 'studied' from above downwards. The man who has never been in the
clutches of that crushing viper can never know what its poison is. An attempt to study
it in any other way will result only in superficial talk and sentimental delusions. Both
are harmful. The first because it can never go to the root of the question, the second
because it evades the question entirely. I do not know which is the more nefarious: to
ignore social distress, as do the majority of those who have been favoured by fortune
and those who have risen in the social scale through their own routine labour, or the
equally supercilious and often tactless but always genteel condescension displayed by
people who make a fad of being charitable and who plume themselves on
'sympathising with the people.' Of course such persons sin more than they can imagine
from lack of instinctive understanding. And thus they are astonished to find that the
'social conscience' on which they pride themselves never produces any results, but often
causes their good intentions to be resented; and then they talk of the ingratitude of the
people.
Such persons are slow to learn that here there is no place for merely social activities and
that there can be no expectation of gratitude; for in this connection there is no question
at all of distributing favours but essentially a matter of retributive justice. I was
protected against the temptation to study the social question in the way just mentioned,
for the simple reason that I was forced to live in the midst of poverty-stricken people.
Therefore it was not a question of studying the problem objectively, but rather one of
testing its effects on myself. Though the rabbit came through the ordeal of the
experiment, this must not be taken as evidence of its harmlessness.
When I try to-day to recall the succession of impressions received during that time I
find that I can do so only with approximate completeness. Here I shall describe only the
more essential impressions and those which personally affected me and often staggered
me. And I shall mention the few lessons I then learned from this experience.
At that time it was for the most part not very difficult to find work, because I had to
seek work not as a skilled tradesman but as a so-called extra-hand ready to take any job
that turned up by chance, just for the sake of earning my daily bread.
Thus I found myself in the same situation as all those emigrants who shake the dust of
Europe from their feet, with the cast-iron determination to lay the foundations of a new
existence in the New World and acquire for themselves a new home. Liberated from all
the paralysing prejudices of class and calling, environment and tradition, they enter any
service that opens its doors to them, accepting any work that comes their way, filled
more and more with the idea that honest work never disgraced anybody, no matter
what kind it may be. And so I was resolved to set both feet in what was for me a new
world and push forward on my own road.
I soon found out that there was some kind of work always to be got, but I also learned
that it could just as quickly and easily be lost. The uncertainty of being able to earn a
regular daily livelihood soon appeared to me as the gloomiest feature in this new life
that I had entered.
Although the skilled worker was not so frequently thrown idle on the streets as the
unskilled worker, yet the former was by no means protected against the same fate;
because though he may not have to face hunger as a result of unemployment due to the
lack of demand in the labour market, the lock-out and the strike deprived the skilled
worker of the chance to earn his bread. Here the element of uncertainty in steadily
earning one's daily bread was the bitterest feature of the whole social-economic system
itself.
The country lad who migrates to the big city feels attracted by what has been described
as easy work--which it may be in reality--and few working hours. He is especially
entranced by the magic glimmer spread over the big cities. Accustomed in the country
to earn a steady wage, he has been taught not to quit his former post until a new one is
at least in sight. As there is a great scarcity of agricultural labour, the probability of long
unemployment in the country has been very small. It is a mistake to presume that the
lad who leaves the countryside for the town is not made of such sound material as those
who remain at home to work on the land. On the contrary, experience shows that it is
the more healthy and more vigorous that emigrate, and not the reverse. Among these
emigrants I include not merely those who emigrate to America, but also the servant boy
in the country who decides to leave his native village and migrate to the big city where
he will be a stranger. He is ready to take the risk of an uncertain fate. In most cases he
comes to town with a little money in his pocket and for the first few days he is not
discouraged if he should not have the good fortune to find work. But if he finds a job
and then loses it in a little while, the case is much worse. To find work anew, especially
in winter, is often difficult and indeed sometimes impossible. For the first few weeks
life is still bearable He receives his out-of-work money from his trade union and is thus
enabled to carry on. But when the last of his own money is gone and his trade union
ceases to pay out because of the prolonged unemployment, then comes the real distress.
He now loiters about and is hungry. Often he pawns or sells the last of his belongings.
His clothes begin to get shabby and with the increasing poverty of his outward
appearance he descends to a lower social level and mixes up with a class of human
beings through whom his mind is now poisoned, in addition to his physical misery.
Then he has nowhere to sleep and if that happens in winter, which is very often the
case, he is in dire distress. Finally he gets work. But the old story repeats itself. A second
time the same thing happens. Then a third time; and now it is probably much worse.
Little by little he becomes indifferent to this everlasting insecurity. Finally he grows
used to the repetition. Thus even a man who is normally of industrious habits grows
careless in his whole attitude towards life and gradually becomes an instrument in the
hands of unscrupulous people who exploit him for the sake of their own ignoble aims.
He has been so often thrown out of employment through no fault of his own that he is
now more or less indifferent whether the strike in which he takes part be for the
purpose of securing his economic rights or be aimed at the destruction of the State, the
whole social order and even civilization itself. Though the idea of going on strike may
not be to his natural liking, yet he joins in it out of sheer indifference.
I saw this process exemplified before my eyes in thousands of cases. And the longer I
observed it the greater became my dislike for that mammoth city which greedily
attracts men to its bosom, in order to break them mercilessly in the end. When they
came they still felt themselves in communion with their own people at home; if they
remained that tie was broken.
I was thrown about so much in the life of the metropolis that I experienced the
workings of this fate in my own person and felt the effects of it in my own soul. One
thing stood out clearly before my eyes: It was the sudden changes from work to
idleness and vice versa; so that the constant fluctuations thus caused by earnings and
expenditure finally destroyed the 'sense of thrift for many people and also the habit of
regulating expenditure in an intelligent way. The body appeared to grow accustomed to
the vicissitudes of food and hunger, eating heartily in good times and going hungry in
bad. Indeed hunger shatters all plans for rationing expenditure on a regular scale in
better times when employment is again found. The reason for this is that the
deprivations which the unemployed worker has to endure must be compensated for
psychologically by a persistent mental mirage in which he imagines himself eating
heartily once again. And this dream develops into such a longing that it turns into a
morbid impulse to cast off all self-restraint when work and wages turn up again.
Therefore the moment work is found anew he forgets to regulate the expenditure of his
earnings but spends them to the full without thinking of to-morrow. This leads to
confusion in the little weekly housekeeping budget, because the expenditure is not
rationally planned. When the phenomenon which I have mentioned first happens, the
earnings will last perhaps for five days instead of seven; on subsequent occasions they
will last only for three days; as the habit recurs, the earnings will last scarcely for a day;
and finally they will disappear in one night of feasting.
Often there are wife and children at home. And in many cases it happens that these
become infected by such a way of living, especially if the husband is good to them and
wants to do the best he can for them and loves them in his own way and according to
his own lights. Then the week's earnings are spent in common at home within two or
three days. The family eat and drink together as long as the money lasts and at the end
of the week they hunger together. Then the wife wanders about furtively in the
neighbourhood, borrows a little, and runs up small debts with the shopkeepers in an
effort to pull through the lean days towards the end of the week. They sit down
together to the midday meal with only meagre fare on the table, and often even nothing
to eat. They wait for the coming payday, talking of it and making plans; and while they
are thus hungry they dream of the plenty that is to come. And so the little children
become acquainted with misery in their early years.

IT HAS turned out fortunate for me to-day that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn
to be my birthplace. For that little town is situated just on the frontier between those
two States the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to
which we should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means
should be employed.
German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not indeed on
any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever. No, no. Even if the union were a
matter of economic indifference, and even if it were to be disadvantageous from the
economic standpoint, still it ought to take place. People of the same blood should be in
the same REICH. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy
until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State. When the
territory of the REICH embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them
a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire
foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the
daily bread for the generations to come.
And so this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great task. But in
another regard also it points to a lesson that is applicable to our day. Over a hundred
years ago this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the
whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German
history. At the time of our Fatherland's deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes
Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here
because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to
disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly
responsible for the affair. Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the
latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a director of police
from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example
which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the REICH under
Herr Severing's regime (Note 1).
In this little town on the Inn, haloed by the memory of a German martyr, a town that
was Bavarian by blood but under the rule of the Austrian State, my parents were
domiciled towards the end of the last century. My father was a civil servant who
fulfilled his duties very conscientiously. My mother looked after the household and
lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children. From that period I have not retained
very much in my memory; because after a few years my father had to leave that frontier
town which I had come to love so much and take up a new post farther down the Inn
valley, at Passau, therefore actually in Germany itself.
In those days it was the usual lot of an Austrian civil servant to be transferred
periodically from one post to another. Not long after coming to Passau my father was
transferred to Linz, and while there he retired finally to live on his pension. But this did
not mean that the old gentleman would now rest from his labours.
He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew restless and left home.
When he was barely thirteen years old he buckled on his satchel and set forth from his
native woodland parish. Despite the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from
'experience,' he went to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fiftieth year of the
last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and face the unknown,
with three gulden in his pocket. By when the boy of thirteen was a lad of seventeen and
had passed his apprenticeship examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the
contrary. The persistent economic depression of that period and the constant want and
misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and strive for
'something higher.' As a boy it had seemed to him that the position of the parish priest
in his native village was the highest in the scale of human attainment; but now that the
big city had enlarged his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State
official as the highest of all. With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble had
already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man of seventeen
obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it until he won through. He became a
civil servant. He was about twenty-three years old, I think, when he succeeded in
making himself what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise
he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he was 'somebody.'
He had gained his end. But in the village there was nobody who had remembered him
as a little boy, and the village itself had become strange to him.
Now at last, when he was fifty-six years old, he gave up his active career; but he could
not bear to be idle for a single day. On the outskirts of the small market town of
Lambach in Upper Austria he bought a farm and tilled it himself. Thus, at the end of a
long and hard-working career, he came back to the life which his father had led.
It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own. I spent a good deal of
time scampering about in the open, on the long road from school, and mixing up with
some of the roughest of the boys, which caused my mother many anxious moments. All
this tended to make me something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely
any serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I was certainly
quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my father had followed. I think
that an inborn talent for speaking now began to develop and take shape during the
more or less strenuous arguments which I used to have with my comrades. I had
become a juvenile ringleader who learned well and easily at school but was rather
difficult to manage. In my freetime I practised singing in the choir of the monastery
church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed in a very favourable
position to be emotionally impressed again and again by the magnificent splendour of
ecclesiastical ceremonial. What could be more natural for me than to look upon the
Abbot as representing the highest human ideal worth striving for, just as the position of
the humble village priest had appeared to my father in his own boyhood days? At least,
that was my idea for a while. But the juvenile disputes I had with my father did not lead
him to appreciate his son's oratorical gifts in such a way as to see in them a favourable
promise for such a career, and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I
had in my head at that time. This contradiction in my character made him feel
somewhat anxious.
As a matter of fact, that transitory yearning after such a vocation soon gave way to
hopes that were better suited to my temperament. Browsing through my father's books,
I chanced to come across some publications that dealt with military subjects. One of
these publications was a popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It
consisted of two volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. These
became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic conflict began to
take first place in my mind. And from that time onwards I became more and more
enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or military
affairs.
But this story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for me on other
grounds also. For the first time, and as yet only in quite a vague way, the question
began to present itself: Is there a difference--and if there be, what is it--between the
Germans who fought that war and the other Germans? Why did not Austria also take
part in it? Why did not my father and all the others fight in that struggle? Are we not
the same as the other Germans? Do we not all belong together?
That was the first time that this problem began to agitate my small brain. And from the
replies that were given to the questions which I asked very tentatively, I was forced to
accept the fact, though with a secret envy, that not all Germans had the good luck to
belong to Bismarck's Empire. This was something that I could not understand.
It was decided that I should study. Considering my character as a whole, and especially
my temperament, my father decided that the classical subjects studied at the Lyceum
were not suited to my natural talents. He thought that the REALSCHULE (Note 2)
would suit me better. My obvious talent for drawing confirmed him in that view; for in
his opinion drawing was a subject too much neglected in the Austrian GYMNASIUM.
Probably also the memory of the hard road which he himself had travelled contributed
to make him look upon classical studies as unpractical and accordingly to set little value
on them. At the back of his mind he had the idea that his son also should become an
official of the Government. Indeed he had decided on that career for me. The difficulties
through which he had to struggle in making his own career led him to overestimate
what he had achieved, because this was exclusively the result of his own indefatigable
industry and energy. The characteristic pride of the self-made man urged him towards
the idea that his son should follow the same calling and if possible rise to a higher
position in it. Moreover, this idea was strengthened by the consideration that the results
of his own life's industry had placed him in a position to facilitate his son's
advancement in the same career.
He was simply incapable of imagining that I might reject what had meant everything in
life to him. My father's decision was simple, definite, clear and, in his eyes, it was
something to be taken for granted. A man of such a nature who had become an autocrat
by reason of his own hard struggle for existence, could not think of allowing
'inexperienced' and irresponsible young fellows to choose their own careers. To act in
such a way, where the future of his own son was concerned, would have been a grave
and reprehensible weakness in the exercise of parental authority and responsibility,
something utterly incompatible with his characteristic sense of duty.
And yet it had to be otherwise.
For the first time in my life--I was then eleven years old--I felt myself forced into open
opposition. No matter how hard and determined my father might be about putting his
own plans and opinions into action, his son was no less obstinate in refusing to accept
ideas on which he set little or no value.
I would not become a civil servant.
No amount of persuasion and no amount of 'grave' warnings could break down that
opposition. I would not become a State official, not on any account. All the attempts
which my father made to arouse in me a love or liking for that profession, by picturing
his own career for me, had only the opposite effect. It nauseated me to think that one
day I might be fettered to an office stool, that I could not dispose of my own time but
would be forced to spend the whole of my life filling out forms.
One can imagine what kind of thoughts such a prospect awakened in the mind of a
young fellow who was by no means what is called a 'good boy' in the current sense of
that term. The ridiculously easy school tasks which we were given made it possible for
me to spend far more time in the open air than at home. To-day, when my political
opponents pry into my life with diligent scrutiny, as far back as the days of my
boyhood, so as finally to be able to prove what disreputable tricks this Hitler was
accustomed to in his young days, I thank heaven that I can look back to those happy
days and find the memory of them helpful. The fields and the woods were then the
terrain on which all disputes were fought out.
Even attendance at the REALSCHULE could not alter my way of spending my time. But
I had now another battle to fight.
So long as the paternal plan to make a State functionary contradicted my own
inclinations only in the abstract, the conflict was easy to bear. I could be discreet about
expressing my personal views and thus avoid constantly recurrent disputes. My own
resolution not to become a Government official was sufficient for the time being to put
my mind completely at rest. I held on to that resolution inexorably. But the situation
became more difficult once I had a positive plan of my own which I might present to
my father as a counter-suggestion. This happened when I was twelve years old. How it
came about I cannot exactly say now; but one day it became clear to me that I would be
a painter--I mean an artist. That I had an aptitude for drawing was an admitted fact. It
was even one of the reasons why my father had sent me to the REALSCHULE; but he
had never thought of having that talent developed in such a way that I could take up
painting as a professional career. Quite the contrary. When, as a result of my renewed
refusal to adopt his favourite plan, my father asked me for the first time what I myself
really wished to be, the resolution that I had already formed expressed itself almost
automatically. For a while my father was speechless. "A painter? An artist-painter?" he
exclaimed.
He wondered whether I was in a sound state of mind. He thought that he might not
have caught my words rightly, or that he had misunderstood what I meant. But when I
had explained my ideas to him and he saw how seriously I took them, he opposed them
with that full determination which was characteristic of him. His decision was
exceedingly simple and could not be deflected from its course by any consideration of
what my own natural qualifications really were.
"Artist! Not as long as I live, never." As the son had inherited some of the father's
obstinacy, besides having other qualities of his own, my reply was equally energetic.
But it stated something quite the contrary.
At that our struggle became stalemate. The father would not abandon his 'Never', and I
became all the more consolidated in my 'Nevertheless'.
Naturally the resulting situation was not pleasant. The old gentleman was bitterly
annoyed; and indeed so was I, although I really loved him. My father forbade me to
entertain any hopes of taking up the art of painting as a profession. I went a step further
and declared that I would not study anything else. With such declarations the situation
became still more strained, so that the old gentleman irrevocably decided to assert his
parental authority at all costs. That led me to adopt an attitude of circumspect silence,
but I put my threat into execution. I thought that, once it became clear to my father that
I was making no progress at the REALSCHULE, for weal or for woe, he would be
forced to allow me to follow the happy career I had dreamed of.
I do not know whether I calculated rightly or not. Certainly my failure to make progress
became quite visible in the school. I studied just the subjects that appealed to me,
especially those which I thought might be of advantage to me later on as a painter.
What did not appear to have any importance from this point of view, or what did not
otherwise appeal to me favourably, I completely sabotaged. My school reports of that
time were always in the extremes of good or bad, according to the subject and the
interest it had for me. In one column my qualification read 'very good' or 'excellent'. In
another it read 'average' or even 'below average'. By far my best subjects were
geography and, even more so, general history. These were my two favourite subjects,
and I led the class in them.
When I look back over so many years and try to judge the results of that experience I
find two very significant facts standing out clearly before my mind.
First, I became a nationalist.
Second, I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.
The old Austria was a multi-national State. In those days at least the citizens of the
German Empire, taken through and through, could not understand what that fact
meant in the everyday life of the individuals within such a State. After the magnificent
triumphant march of the victorious armies in the Franco-German War the Germans in
the REICH became steadily more and more estranged from the Germans beyond their
frontiers, partly because they did not deign to appreciate those other Germans at their
true value or simply because they were incapable of doing so.
The Germans of the REICH did not realize that if the Germans in Austria had not been
of the best racial stock they could never have given the stamp of their own character to
an Empire of 52 millions, so definitely that in Germany itself the idea arose--though
quite an erroneous one--that Austria was a German State. That was an error which led
to dire consequences; but all the same it was a magnificent testimony to the character of
the ten million Germans in that East Mark. (Note 3) Only very few of the Germans in
the REICH itself had an idea of the bitter struggle which those Eastern Germans had to
carry on daily for the preservation of their German language, their German schools and
their German character. Only to-day, when a tragic fate has torn several millions of our
kinsfolk away from the REICH and has forced them to live under the rule of the
stranger, dreaming of that common fatherland towards which all their yearnings are
directed and struggling to uphold at least the sacred right of using their mother tongue-
-only now have the wider circles of the German population come to realize what it
means to have to fight for the traditions of one's race. And so at last perhaps there are
people here and there who can assess the greatness of that German spirit which
animated the old East Mark and enabled those people, left entirely dependent on their
own resources, to defend the Empire against the Orient for several centuries and
subsequently to hold fast the frontiers of the German language through a guerilla
warfare of attrition, at a time when the German Empire was sedulously cultivating an
interest for colonies but not for its own flesh and blood before the threshold of its own
door.
What has happened always and everywhere, in every kind of struggle, happened also
in the language fight which was carried on in the old Austria. There were three groups--
the fighters, the hedgers and the traitors. Even in the schools this sifting already began
to take place. And it is worth noting that the struggle for the language was waged
perhaps in its bitterest form around the school; because this was the nursery where the
seeds had to be watered which were to spring up and form the future generation. The
tactical objective of the fight was the winning over of the child, and it was to the child
that the first rallying cry was addressed:
"German youth, do not forget that you are a German," and "Remember, little girl, that
one day you must be a German mother."
Those who know something of the juvenile spirit can understand how youth will
always lend a glad ear to such a rallying cry. Under many forms the young people led
the struggle, fighting in their own way and with their own weapons. They refused to
sing non-German songs. The greater the efforts made to win them away from their
German allegiance, the more they exalted the glory of their German heroes. They
stinted themselves in buying things to eat, so that they might spare their pennies to help
the war chest of their elders. They were incredibly alert in the significance of what the
non-German teachers said and they contradicted in unison. They wore the forbidden
emblems of their own kinsfolk and were happy when penalised for doing so, or even
physically punished. In miniature they were mirrors of loyalty from which the older
people might learn a lesson.
And thus it was that at a comparatively early age I took part in the struggle which the
nationalities were waging against one another in the old Austria. When meetings were
held for the South Mark German League and the School League we wore cornflowers
and black-red-gold colours to express our loyalty. We greeted one another with HEIL!
and instead of the Austrian anthem we sang our own DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES,
despite warnings and penalties. Thus the youth were educated politically at a time
when the citizens of a so-called national State for the most part knew little of their own
nationality except the language. Of course, I did not belong to the hedgers. Within a
little while I had become an ardent 'German National', which has a different meaning
from the party significance attached to that phrase to-day.
I developed very rapidly in the nationalist direction, and by the time I was 15 years old
I had come to understand the distinction between dynastic patriotism and nationalism
based on the concept of folk, or people, my inclination being entirely in favour of the
latter.
Such a preference may not perhaps be clearly intelligible to those who have never taken
the trouble to study the internal conditions that prevailed under the Habsburg
Monarchy.
Among historical studies universal history was the subject almost exclusively taught in
the Austrian schools, for of specific Austrian history there was only very little. The fate
of this State was closely bound up with the existence and development of Germany as a
whole; so a division of history into German history and Austrian history would be
practically inconceivable. And indeed it was only when the German people came to be
divided between two States that this division of German history began to take place.
The insignia (Note 4) of a former imperial sovereignty which were still preserved in
Vienna appeared to act as magical relics rather than as the visible guarantee of an
everlasting bond of union.
When the Habsburg State crumbled to pieces in 1918 the Austrian Germans
instinctively raised an outcry for union with their German fatherland. That was the
voice of a unanimous yearning in the hearts of the whole people for a return to the
unforgotten home of their fathers. But such a general yearning could not be explained
except by attributing the cause of it to the historical training through which the
individual Austrian Germans had passed. Therein lay a spring that never dried up.
Especially in times of distraction and forgetfulness its quiet voice was a reminder of the
past, bidding the people to look out beyond the mere welfare of the moment to a new
future.
The teaching of universal history in what are called the middle schools is still very
unsatisfactory. Few teachers realize that the purpose of teaching history is not the
memorizing of some dates and facts, that the student is not interested in knowing the
exact date of a battle or the birthday of some marshal or other, and not at all--or at least
only very insignificantly--interested in knowing when the crown of his fathers was
placed on the brow of some monarch. These are certainly not looked upon as important
matters.
To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are the causes of those
results which appear before our eyes as historical events. The art of reading and
studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.
Probably my whole future life was determined by the fact that I had a professor of
history who understood, as few others understand, how to make this viewpoint prevail
in teaching and in examining. This teacher was Dr. Leopold Poetsch, of the
REALSCHULE at Linz. He was the ideal personification of the qualities necessary to a
teacher of history in the sense I have mentioned above. An elderly gentleman with a
decisive manner but a kindly heart, he was a very attractive speaker and was able to
inspire us with his own enthusiasm. Even to-day I cannot recall without emotion that
venerable personality whose enthusiastic exposition of history so often made us entirely
forget the present and allow ourselves to be transported as if by magic into the past. He
penetrated through the dim mist of thousands of years and transformed the historical
memory of the dead past into a living reality. When we listened to him we became afire
with enthusiasm and we were sometimes moved even to tears.
It was still more fortunate that this professor was able not only to illustrate the past by
examples from the present but from the past he was also able to draw a lesson for the
present. He understood better than any other the everyday problems that were then
agitating our minds. The national fervour which we felt in our own small way was
utilized by him as an instrument of our education, inasmuch as he often appealed to our
national sense of honour; for in that way he maintained order and held our attention
much more easily than he could have done by any other means. It was because I had
such a professor that history became my favourite subject. As a natural consequence,
but without the conscious connivance of my professor, I then and there became a young
rebel. But who could have studied German history under such a teacher and not
become an enemy of that State whose rulers exercised such a disastrous influence on the
destinies of the German nation? Finally, how could one remain the faithful subject of
the House of Habsburg, whose past history and present conduct proved it to be ready
ever and always to betray the interests of the German people for the sake of paltry
personal interests? Did not we as youngsters fully realize that the House of Habsburg
did not, and could not, have any love for us Germans?
What history taught us about the policy followed by the House of Habsburg was
corroborated by our own everyday experiences. In the north and in the south the poison
of foreign races was eating into the body of our people, and even Vienna was steadily
becoming more and more a non-German city. The 'Imperial House' favoured the Czechs
on every possible occasion. Indeed it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and
inexorable retribution that caused the most deadly enemy of Germanism in Austria, the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to fall by the very bullets which he himself had helped to
cast. Working from above downwards, he was the chief patron of the movement to
make Austria a Slav State.
The burdens laid on the shoulders of the German people were enormous and the
sacrifices of money and blood which they had to make were incredibly heavy.
Yet anybody who was not quite blind must have seen that it was all in vain. What
affected us most bitterly was the consciousness of the fact that this whole system was
morally shielded by the alliance with Germany, whereby the slow extirpation of
Germanism in the old Austrian Monarchy seemed in some way to be more or less
sanctioned by Germany herself. Habsburg hypocrisy, which endeavoured outwardly to
make the people believe that Austria still remained a German State, increased the
feeling of hatred against the Imperial House and at the same time aroused a spirit of
rebellion and contempt.
But in the German Empire itself those who were then its rulers saw nothing of what all
this meant. As if struck blind, they stood beside a corpse and in the very symptoms of
decomposition they believed that they recognized the signs of a renewed vitality. In
that unhappy alliance between the young German Empire and the illusory Austrian
State lay the germ of the World War and also of the final collapse.
In the subsequent pages of this book I shall go to the root of the problem. Suffice it to
say here that in the very early years of my youth I came to certain conclusions which I
have never abandoned. Indeed I became more profoundly convinced of them as the
years passed. They were: That the dissolution of the Austrian Empire is a preliminary
condition for the defence of Germany; further, that national feeling is by no means
identical with dynastic patriotism; finally, and above all, that the House of Habsburg
was destined to bring misfortune to the German nation.
As a logical consequence of these convictions, there arose in me a feeling of intense love
for my German-Austrian home and a profound hatred for the Austrian State.
That kind of historical thinking which was developed in me through my study of
history at school never left me afterwards. World history became more and more an
inexhaustible source for the understanding of contemporary historical events, which
means politics. Therefore I will not "learn" politics but let politics teach me.
A precocious revolutionary in politics I was no less a precocious revolutionary in art. At
that time the provincial capital of Upper Austria had a theatre which, relatively
speaking, was not bad. Almost everything was played there. When I was twelve years
old I saw William Tell performed. That was my first experience of the theatre. Some
months later I attended a performance of LOHENGRIN, the first opera I had ever
heard. I was fascinated at once. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew
no limits. Again and again I was drawn to hear his operas; and to-day I consider it a
great piece of luck that these modest productions in the little provincial city prepared
the way and made it possible for me to appreciate the better productions later on.
But all this helped to intensify my profound aversion for the career that my father had
chosen for me; and this dislike became especially strong as the rough corners of
youthful boorishness became worn off, a process which in my case caused a good deal
of pain. I became more and more convinced that I should never be happy as a State
official. And now that the REALSCHULE had recognized and acknowledged my
aptitude for drawing, my own resolution became all the stronger. Imprecations and
threats had no longer any chance of changing it. I wanted to become a painter and no
power in the world could force me to become a civil servant. The only peculiar feature
of the situation now was that as I grew bigger I became more and more interested in
architecture. I considered this fact as a natural development of my flair for painting and
I rejoiced inwardly that the sphere of my artistic interests was thus enlarged. I had no
notion that one day it would have to be otherwise.
The question of my career was decided much sooner than I could have expected.
When I was in my thirteenth year my father was suddenly taken from us. He was still
in robust health when a stroke of apoplexy painlessly ended his earthly wanderings and
left us all deeply bereaved. His most ardent longing was to be able to help his son to
advance in a career and thus save me from the harsh ordeal that he himself had to go
through. But it appeared to him then as if that longing were all in vain. And yet, though
he himself was not conscious of it, he had sown the seeds of a future which neither of us
foresaw at that time.
At first nothing changed outwardly.
My mother felt it her duty to continue my education in accordance with my father's
wishes, which meant that she would have me study for the civil service. For my own
part I was even more firmly determined than ever before that under no circumstances
would I become an official of the State. The curriculum and teaching methods followed
in the middle school were so far removed from my ideals that I became profoundly
indifferent. Illness suddenly came to my assistance. Within a few weeks it decided my
future and put an end to the long-standing family conflict. My lungs became so
seriously affected that the doctor advised my mother very strongly not under any
circumstances to allow me to take up a career which would necessitate working in an
office. He ordered that I should give up attendance at the REALSCHULE for a year at
least. What I had secretly desired for such a long time, and had persistently fought for,
now became a reality almost at one stroke.
Influenced by my illness, my mother agreed that I should leave the REALSCHULE and
attend the Academy.
Those were happy days, which appeared to me almost as a dream; but they were bound
to remain only a dream. Two years later my mother's death put a brutal end to all my
fine projects. She succumbed to a long and painful illness which from the very
beginning permitted little hope of recovery. Though expected, her death came as a
terrible blow to me. I respected my father, but I loved my mother.
Poverty and stern reality forced me to decide promptly.
The meagre resources of the family had been almost entirely used up through my
mother's severe illness. The allowance which came to me as an orphan was not enough
for the bare necessities of life. Somehow or other I would have to earn my own bread.
With my clothes and linen packed in a valise and with an indomitable resolution in my
heart, I left for Vienna. I hoped to forestall fate, as my father had done fifty years before.
I was determined to become 'something'--but certainly not a civil servant.
[Note 1. In order to understand the reference here, and similar references in later
portions of MEIN KAMPF, the following must be borne in mind:
From 1792 to 1814 the French Revolutionary Armies overran Germany. In 1800 Bavaria
shared in the Austrian defeat at Hohenlinden and the French occupied Munich. In 1805
the Bavarian Elector was made King of Bavaria by Napoleon and stipulated to back up
Napoleon in all his wars with a force of 30,000 men. Thus Bavaria became the absolute
vassal of the French. This was 'TheTime of Germany's Deepest Humiliation', Which is
referred to again and again by Hitler.
In 1806 a pamphlet entitled 'Germany's Deepest Humiliation' was published in South
Germany. Amnng those who helped to circulate the pamphlet was the Nürnberg
bookseller, Johannes Philipp Palm. He was denounced to the French by a Bavarian
police agent. At his trial he refused to disclose thename of the author. By Napoleon's
orders, he was shot at Braunau-on-the-Innon August 26th, 1806. A monument erected
to him on the site of the executionwas one of the first public objects that made an
impression on Hitler asa little boy.
Leo Schlageter's case was in many respects parallel to that of Johannes Palm. Schlageter
was a German theological student who volunteered for service in 1914. He became an
artillery officer and won the Iron Cross of both classes. When the French occupied the
Ruhr in 1923 Schlageter helped to organize the passive resistance on the German side.
He and his companions blew up a railway bridge for the purpose of making the
transport of coal to France more difficult.
Those who took part in the affair were denounced to the French by a German informer.
Schlageter took the whole responsibility on his own shoulders and was condemned to
death, his companions being sentenced to various terms of imprisonment and penal
servitude by the French Court. Schlageter refused to disclose the identity of those who
issued the order to blow up the railway bridge and he would not plead for mercy before
a French Court. He was shot by a French firing-squad on May 26th, 1923. Severing was
at that time German Minister of the Interior. It is said that representations were made,
to himon Schlageter's behalf and that he refused to interfere.
Schlageter has become the chief martyr of the German resistancc to the French
occupation of the Ruhr and also one of the great heroes of the National Socialist
Movement. He had joined the Movement at a very early stage, his card of membership
bearing the number 61.]
[Note 2. Non-classical secondary school. The Lyceum and GYMNASIUM were classical
or semi-classical secondary schools.]
[Note 3. See Translator's Introduction.]
[Note 4. When Francis II had laid down his title as Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empireof the German Nation, which he did at the command of Napoleon, the
Crownand Mace, as the Imperial Insignia, were kept in Vienna. After the German
Empire was refounded, in 1871, under William I, there were many demands tohave the
Insignia transferred to Berlin. But these went unheeded. Hitler had them brought to
Germany after the Austrian Anschluss and displayed at Nuremberg during the Party
Congress in September 1938.]
Chapter 2
Years Of Study And Suffering In Vienna
WHEN MY mother died my fate had already been decided in one respect. During the
last months of her illness I went to Vienna to take the entrance examination for the
Academy of Fine Arts. Armed with a bulky packet of sketches, I felt convinced that I
should pass the examination quite easily. At the REALSCHULE I was by far the best
student in the drawing class, and since that time I had made more than ordinary
progress in the practice of drawing. Therefore I was pleased with myself and was proud
and happy at the prospect of what I considered an assured success.
But there was one misgiving: It seemed to me that I was better qualified for drawing
than for painting, especially in the various branches of architectural drawing. At the
same time my interest in architecture was constantly increasing. And I advanced in this
direction at a still more rapid pace after my first visit to Vienna, which lasted two
weeks. I was not yet sixteen years old. I went to the Hof Museum to study the paintings
in the art gallery there; but the building itself captured almost all my interest, from early
morning until late at night I spent all my time visiting the various public buildings. And
it was the buildings themselves that were always the principal attraction for me. For
hours and hours I could stand in wonderment before the Opera and the Parliament. The
whole Ring Strasse had a magic effect upon me, as if it were a scene from the Thousandand-one-Nights.
And now I was here for the second time in this beautiful city, impatiently waiting to
hear the result of the entrance examination but proudly confident that I had got
through. I was so convinced of my success that when the news that I had failed to pass
was brought to me it struck me like a bolt from the skies. Yet the fact was that I had
failed. I went to see the Rector and asked him to explain the reasons why they refused
to accept me as a student in the general School of Painting, which was part of the
Academy. He said that the sketches which I had brought with me unquestionably
showed that painting was not what I was suited for but that the same sketches gave
clear indications of my aptitude for architectural designing. Therefore the School of
Painting did not come into question for me but rather the School of Architecture, which
also formed part of the Academy. At first it was impossible to understand how this
could be so, seeing that I had never been to a school for architecture and had never
received any instruction in architectural designing.
When I left the Hansen Palace, on the SCHILLER PLATZ, I was quite crestfallen. I felt
out of sorts with myself for the first time in my young life. For what I had heard about
my capabilities now appeared to me as a lightning flash which clearly revealed a
dualism under which I had been suffering for a long time, but hitherto I could give no
clear account whatsoever of the why and wherefore.
Within a few days I myself also knew that I ought to become an architect. But of course
the way was very difficult. I was now forced bitterly to rue my former conduct in
neglecting and despising certain subjects at the REALSCHULE. Before taking up the
courses at the School of Architecture in the Academy it was necessary to attend the
Technical Building School; but a necessary qualification for entrance into this school
was a Leaving Certificate from the Middle School. And this I simply did not have.
According to the human measure of things my dream of following an artistic calling
seemed beyond the limits of possibility.
After the death of my mother I came to Vienna for the third time. This visit was
destined to last several years. Since I had been there before I had recovered my old calm
and resoluteness. The former self-assurance had come back, and I had my eyes steadily
fixed on the goal. I would be an architect. Obstacles are placed across our path in life,
not to be boggled at but to be surmounted. And I was fully determined to surmount
these obstacles, having the picture of my father constantly before my mind, who had
raised himself by his own efforts to the position of a civil servant though he was the
poor son of a village shoemaker. I had a better start, and the possibilities of struggling
through were better. At that time my lot in life seemed to me a harsh one; but to-day I
see in it the wise workings of Providence. The Goddess of Fate clutched me in her
hands and often threatened to smash me; but the will grew stronger as the obstacles
increased, and finally the will triumphed.
I am thankful for that period of my life, because it hardened me and enabled me to be as
tough as I now am. And I am even more thankful because I appreciate the fact that I
was thus saved from the emptiness of a life of ease and that a mother's darling was
taken from tender arms and handed over to Adversity as to a new mother. Though I
then rebelled against it as too hard a fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a world
of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to
fight.
It was during this period that my eyes were opened to two perils, the names of which I
scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of their terrible significance for
the existence of the German people. These two perils were Marxism and Judaism.
For many people the name of Vienna signifies innocent jollity, a festive place for happy
mortals. For me, alas, it is a living memory of the saddest period in my life. Even to-day
the mention of that city arouses only gloomy thoughts in my mind. Five years of
poverty in that Phaecian (Note 5) town. Five years in which, first as a casual labourer
and then as a painter of little trifles, I had to earn my daily bread. And a meagre morsel
indeed it was, not even sufficient to still the hunger which I constantly felt. That hunger
was the faithful guardian which never left me but took part in everything I did. Every
book that I bought meant renewed hunger, and every visit I paid to the opera meant the
intrusion of that inalienabl companion during the following days. I was always
struggling with my unsympathic friend. And yet during that time I learned more than I
had ever learned before. Outside my architectural studies and rare visits to the opera,
for which I had to deny myself food, I had no other pleasure in life except my books.
I read a great deal then, and I pondered deeply over what I read. All the free time after
work was devoted exclusively to study. Thus within a few years I was able to acquire a
stock of knowledge which I find useful even to-day.
But more than that. During those years a view of life and a definite outlook on the
world took shape in my mind. These became the granite basis of my conduct at that
time. Since then I have extended that foundation only very little, and I have changed
nothing in it.
On the contrary: I am firmly convinced to-day that, generally speaking, it is in youth
that men lay the essential groundwork of their creative thought, wherever that creative
thought exists. I make a distinction between the wisdom of age--which can only arise
from the greater profundity and foresight that are based on the experiences of a long
life--and the creative genius of youth, which blossoms out in thought and ideas with
inexhaustible fertility, without being able to put these into practice immediately,
because of their very superabundance. These furnish the building materials and plans
for the future; and it is from them that age takes the stones and builds the edifice, unless
the so-called wisdom of the years may have smothered the creative genius of youth.
The life which I had hitherto led at home with my parents differed in little or nothing
from that of all the others. I looked forward without apprehension to the morrow, and
there was no such thing as a social problem to be faced. Those among whom I passed
my young days belonged to the small bourgeois class. Therefore it was a world that had
very little contact with the world of genuine manual labourers. For, though at first this
may appear astonishing, the ditch which separates that class, which is by no means
economically well-off; from the manual labouring class is often deeper than people
think. The reason for this division, which we may almost call enmity, lies in the fear that
dominates a social group which has only just risen above the level of the manual
labourer--a fear lest it may fall back into its old condition or at least be classed with the
labourers. Moreover, there is something repulsive in remembering the cultural
indigence of that lower class and their rough manners with one another; so that people
who are only on the first rung of the social ladder find it unbearable to be forced to have
any contact with the cultural level and standard of living out of which they have
passed.
And so it happens that very often those who belong to what can really be called the
upper classes find it much easier than do the upstarts to descend to and intermingle
with their fellow beings on the lowest social level. For by the word upstart I mean
everyone who has raised himself through his own efforts to a social level higher than
that to which he formerly belonged. In the case of such a person the hard struggle
through which he passes often destroys his normal human sympathy. His own fight for
existence kills his sensibility for the misery of those who have been left behind.
From this point of view fate had been kind to me. Circumstances forced me to return to
that world of poverty and economic insecurity above which my father had raised
himself in his early days; and thus the blinkers of a narrow PETIT BOURGEOIS
education were torn from my eyes. Now for the first time I learned to know men and I
learned to distinguish between empty appearances or brutal manners and the real inner
nature of the people who outwardly appeared thus.
At the beginning of the century Vienna had already taken rank among those cities
where social conditions are iniquitous. Dazzling riches and loathsome destitution were
intermingled in violent contrast. In the centre and in the Inner City one felt the pulsebeat of an Empire which had a population of fifty-two millions, with all the perilous
charm of a State made up of multiple nationalities. The dazzling splendour of the Court
acted like a magnet on the wealth and intelligence of the whole Empire. And this
attraction was further strengthened by the dynastic policy of the Habsburg Monarchy in
centralizing everything in itself and for itself.
This centralizing policy was necessary in order to hold together that hotchpotch of
heterogeneous nationalities. But the result of it was an extraordinary concentration of
higher officials in the city, which was at one and the same time the metropolis and
imperial residence.
But Vienna was not merely the political and intellectual centre of the Danubian
Monarchy; it was also the commercial centre. Besides the horde of military officers of
high rank, State officials, artists and scientists, there was the still vaster horde of
workers. Abject poverty confronted the wealth of the aristocracy and the merchant class
face to face. Thousands of unemployed loitered in front of the palaces on the Ring
Strasse; and below that VIA TRIUMPHALIS of the old Austria the homeless huddled
together in the murk and filth of the canals.
There was hardly any other German city in which the social problem could be studied
better than in Vienna. But here I must utter a warning against the illusion that this
problem can be 'studied' from above downwards. The man who has never been in the
clutches of that crushing viper can never know what its poison is. An attempt to study
it in any other way will result only in superficial talk and sentimental delusions. Both
are harmful. The first because it can never go to the root of the question, the second
because it evades the question entirely. I do not know which is the more nefarious: to
ignore social distress, as do the majority of those who have been favoured by fortune
and those who have risen in the social scale through their own routine labour, or the
equally supercilious and often tactless but always genteel condescension displayed by
people who make a fad of being charitable and who plume themselves on
'sympathising with the people.' Of course such persons sin more than they can imagine
from lack of instinctive understanding. And thus they are astonished to find that the
'social conscience' on which they pride themselves never produces any results, but often
causes their good intentions to be resented; and then they talk of the ingratitude of the
people.
Such persons are slow to learn that here there is no place for merely social activities and
that there can be no expectation of gratitude; for in this connection there is no question
at all of distributing favours but essentially a matter of retributive justice. I was
protected against the temptation to study the social question in the way just mentioned,
for the simple reason that I was forced to live in the midst of poverty-stricken people.
Therefore it was not a question of studying the problem objectively, but rather one of
testing its effects on myself. Though the rabbit came through the ordeal of the
experiment, this must not be taken as evidence of its harmlessness.
When I try to-day to recall the succession of impressions received during that time I
find that I can do so only with approximate completeness. Here I shall describe only the
more essential impressions and those which personally affected me and often staggered
me. And I shall mention the few lessons I then learned from this experience.
At that time it was for the most part not very difficult to find work, because I had to
seek work not as a skilled tradesman but as a so-called extra-hand ready to take any job
that turned up by chance, just for the sake of earning my daily bread.
Thus I found myself in the same situation as all those emigrants who shake the dust of
Europe from their feet, with the cast-iron determination to lay the foundations of a new
existence in the New World and acquire for themselves a new home. Liberated from all
the paralysing prejudices of class and calling, environment and tradition, they enter any
service that opens its doors to them, accepting any work that comes their way, filled
more and more with the idea that honest work never disgraced anybody, no matter
what kind it may be. And so I was resolved to set both feet in what was for me a new
world and push forward on my own road.
I soon found out that there was some kind of work always to be got, but I also learned
that it could just as quickly and easily be lost. The uncertainty of being able to earn a
regular daily livelihood soon appeared to me as the gloomiest feature in this new life
that I had entered.
Although the skilled worker was not so frequently thrown idle on the streets as the
unskilled worker, yet the former was by no means protected against the same fate;
because though he may not have to face hunger as a result of unemployment due to the
lack of demand in the labour market, the lock-out and the strike deprived the skilled
worker of the chance to earn his bread. Here the element of uncertainty in steadily
earning one's daily bread was the bitterest feature of the whole social-economic system
itself.
The country lad who migrates to the big city feels attracted by what has been described
as easy work--which it may be in reality--and few working hours. He is especially
entranced by the magic glimmer spread over the big cities. Accustomed in the country
to earn a steady wage, he has been taught not to quit his former post until a new one is
at least in sight. As there is a great scarcity of agricultural labour, the probability of long
unemployment in the country has been very small. It is a mistake to presume that the
lad who leaves the countryside for the town is not made of such sound material as those
who remain at home to work on the land. On the contrary, experience shows that it is
the more healthy and more vigorous that emigrate, and not the reverse. Among these
emigrants I include not merely those who emigrate to America, but also the servant boy
in the country who decides to leave his native village and migrate to the big city where
he will be a stranger. He is ready to take the risk of an uncertain fate. In most cases he
comes to town with a little money in his pocket and for the first few days he is not
discouraged if he should not have the good fortune to find work. But if he finds a job
and then loses it in a little while, the case is much worse. To find work anew, especially
in winter, is often difficult and indeed sometimes impossible. For the first few weeks
life is still bearable He receives his out-of-work money from his trade union and is thus
enabled to carry on. But when the last of his own money is gone and his trade union
ceases to pay out because of the prolonged unemployment, then comes the real distress.
He now loiters about and is hungry. Often he pawns or sells the last of his belongings.
His clothes begin to get shabby and with the increasing poverty of his outward
appearance he descends to a lower social level and mixes up with a class of human
beings through whom his mind is now poisoned, in addition to his physical misery.
Then he has nowhere to sleep and if that happens in winter, which is very often the
case, he is in dire distress. Finally he gets work. But the old story repeats itself. A second
time the same thing happens. Then a third time; and now it is probably much worse.
Little by little he becomes indifferent to this everlasting insecurity. Finally he grows
used to the repetition. Thus even a man who is normally of industrious habits grows
careless in his whole attitude towards life and gradually becomes an instrument in the
hands of unscrupulous people who exploit him for the sake of their own ignoble aims.
He has been so often thrown out of employment through no fault of his own that he is
now more or less indifferent whether the strike in which he takes part be for the
purpose of securing his economic rights or be aimed at the destruction of the State, the
whole social order and even civilization itself. Though the idea of going on strike may
not be to his natural liking, yet he joins in it out of sheer indifference.
I saw this process exemplified before my eyes in thousands of cases. And the longer I
observed it the greater became my dislike for that mammoth city which greedily
attracts men to its bosom, in order to break them mercilessly in the end. When they
came they still felt themselves in communion with their own people at home; if they
remained that tie was broken.
I was thrown about so much in the life of the metropolis that I experienced the
workings of this fate in my own person and felt the effects of it in my own soul. One
thing stood out clearly before my eyes: It was the sudden changes from work to
idleness and vice versa; so that the constant fluctuations thus caused by earnings and
expenditure finally destroyed the 'sense of thrift for many people and also the habit of
regulating expenditure in an intelligent way. The body appeared to grow accustomed to
the vicissitudes of food and hunger, eating heartily in good times and going hungry in
bad. Indeed hunger shatters all plans for rationing expenditure on a regular scale in
better times when employment is again found. The reason for this is that the
deprivations which the unemployed worker has to endure must be compensated for
psychologically by a persistent mental mirage in which he imagines himself eating
heartily once again. And this dream develops into such a longing that it turns into a
morbid impulse to cast off all self-restraint when work and wages turn up again.
Therefore the moment work is found anew he forgets to regulate the expenditure of his
earnings but spends them to the full without thinking of to-morrow. This leads to
confusion in the little weekly housekeeping budget, because the expenditure is not
rationally planned. When the phenomenon which I have mentioned first happens, the
earnings will last perhaps for five days instead of seven; on subsequent occasions they
will last only for three days; as the habit recurs, the earnings will last scarcely for a day;
and finally they will disappear in one night of feasting.
Often there are wife and children at home. And in many cases it happens that these
become infected by such a way of living, especially if the husband is good to them and
wants to do the best he can for them and loves them in his own way and according to
his own lights. Then the week's earnings are spent in common at home within two or
three days. The family eat and drink together as long as the money lasts and at the end
of the week they hunger together. Then the wife wanders about furtively in the
neighbourhood, borrows a little, and runs up small debts with the shopkeepers in an
effort to pull through the lean days towards the end of the week. They sit down
together to the midday meal with only meagre fare on the table, and often even nothing
to eat. They wait for the coming payday, talking of it and making plans; and while they
are thus hungry they dream of the plenty that is to come. And so the little children
become acquainted with misery in their early years.

IT HAS turned out fortunate for me to-day that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn
to be my birthplace. For that little town is situated just on the frontier between those
two States the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to
which we should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means
should be employed.
German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not indeed on
any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever. No, no. Even if the union were a
matter of economic indifference, and even if it were to be disadvantageous from the
economic standpoint, still it ought to take place. People of the same blood should be in
the same REICH. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy
until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State. When the
territory of the REICH embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them
a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire
foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the
daily bread for the generations to come.
And so this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great task. But in
another regard also it points to a lesson that is applicable to our day. Over a hundred
years ago this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the
whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German
history. At the time of our Fatherland's deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes
Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here
because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to
disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly
responsible for the affair. Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the
latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a director of police
from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example
which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the REICH under
Herr Severing's regime (Note 1).
In this little town on the Inn, haloed by the memory of a German martyr, a town that
was Bavarian by blood but under the rule of the Austrian State, my parents were
domiciled towards the end of the last century. My father was a civil servant who
fulfilled his duties very conscientiously. My mother looked after the household and
lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children. From that period I have not retained
very much in my memory; because after a few years my father had to leave that frontier
town which I had come to love so much and take up a new post farther down the Inn
valley, at Passau, therefore actually in Germany itself.
In those days it was the usual lot of an Austrian civil servant to be transferred
periodically from one post to another. Not long after coming to Passau my father was
transferred to Linz, and while there he retired finally to live on his pension. But this did
not mean that the old gentleman would now rest from his labours.
He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew restless and left home.
When he was barely thirteen years old he buckled on his satchel and set forth from his
native woodland parish. Despite the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from
'experience,' he went to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fiftieth year of the
last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and face the unknown,
with three gulden in his pocket. By when the boy of thirteen was a lad of seventeen and
had passed his apprenticeship examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the
contrary. The persistent economic depression of that period and the constant want and
misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and strive for
'something higher.' As a boy it had seemed to him that the position of the parish priest
in his native village was the highest in the scale of human attainment; but now that the
big city had enlarged his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State
official as the highest of all. With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble had
already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man of seventeen
obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it until he won through. He became a
civil servant. He was about twenty-three years old, I think, when he succeeded in
making himself what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise
he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he was 'somebody.'
He had gained his end. But in the village there was nobody who had remembered him
as a little boy, and the village itself had become strange to him.
Now at last, when he was fifty-six years old, he gave up his active career; but he could
not bear to be idle for a single day. On the outskirts of the small market town of
Lambach in Upper Austria he bought a farm and tilled it himself. Thus, at the end of a
long and hard-working career, he came back to the life which his father had led.
It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own. I spent a good deal of
time scampering about in the open, on the long road from school, and mixing up with
some of the roughest of the boys, which caused my mother many anxious moments. All
this tended to make me something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely
any serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I was certainly
quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my father had followed. I think
that an inborn talent for speaking now began to develop and take shape during the
more or less strenuous arguments which I used to have with my comrades. I had
become a juvenile ringleader who learned well and easily at school but was rather
difficult to manage. In my freetime I practised singing in the choir of the monastery
church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed in a very favourable
position to be emotionally impressed again and again by the magnificent splendour of
ecclesiastical ceremonial. What could be more natural for me than to look upon the
Abbot as representing the highest human ideal worth striving for, just as the position of
the humble village priest had appeared to my father in his own boyhood days? At least,
that was my idea for a while. But the juvenile disputes I had with my father did not lead
him to appreciate his son's oratorical gifts in such a way as to see in them a favourable
promise for such a career, and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I
had in my head at that time. This contradiction in my character made him feel
somewhat anxious.
As a matter of fact, that transitory yearning after such a vocation soon gave way to
hopes that were better suited to my temperament. Browsing through my father's books,
I chanced to come across some publications that dealt with military subjects. One of
these publications was a popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It
consisted of two volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. These
became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic conflict began to
take first place in my mind. And from that time onwards I became more and more
enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or military
affairs.
But this story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for me on other
grounds also. For the first time, and as yet only in quite a vague way, the question
began to present itself: Is there a difference--and if there be, what is it--between the
Germans who fought that war and the other Germans? Why did not Austria also take
part in it? Why did not my father and all the others fight in that struggle? Are we not
the same as the other Germans? Do we not all belong together?
That was the first time that this problem began to agitate my small brain. And from the
replies that were given to the questions which I asked very tentatively, I was forced to
accept the fact, though with a secret envy, that not all Germans had the good luck to
belong to Bismarck's Empire. This was something that I could not understand.
It was decided that I should study. Considering my character as a whole, and especially
my temperament, my father decided that the classical subjects studied at the Lyceum
were not suited to my natural talents. He thought that the REALSCHULE (Note 2)
would suit me better. My obvious talent for drawing confirmed him in that view; for in
his opinion drawing was a subject too much neglected in the Austrian GYMNASIUM.
Probably also the memory of the hard road which he himself had travelled contributed
to make him look upon classical studies as unpractical and accordingly to set little value
on them. At the back of his mind he had the idea that his son also should become an
official of the Government. Indeed he had decided on that career for me. The difficulties
through which he had to struggle in making his own career led him to overestimate
what he had achieved, because this was exclusively the result of his own indefatigable
industry and energy. The characteristic pride of the self-made man urged him towards
the idea that his son should follow the same calling and if possible rise to a higher
position in it. Moreover, this idea was strengthened by the consideration that the results
of his own life's industry had placed him in a position to facilitate his son's
advancement in the same career.
He was simply incapable of imagining that I might reject what had meant everything in
life to him. My father's decision was simple, definite, clear and, in his eyes, it was
something to be taken for granted. A man of such a nature who had become an autocrat
by reason of his own hard struggle for existence, could not think of allowing
'inexperienced' and irresponsible young fellows to choose their own careers. To act in
such a way, where the future of his own son was concerned, would have been a grave
and reprehensible weakness in the exercise of parental authority and responsibility,
something utterly incompatible with his characteristic sense of duty.
And yet it had to be otherwise.
For the first time in my life--I was then eleven years old--I felt myself forced into open
opposition. No matter how hard and determined my father might be about putting his
own plans and opinions into action, his son was no less obstinate in refusing to accept
ideas on which he set little or no value.
I would not become a civil servant.
No amount of persuasion and no amount of 'grave' warnings could break down that
opposition. I would not become a State official, not on any account. All the attempts
which my father made to arouse in me a love or liking for that profession, by picturing
his own career for me, had only the opposite effect. It nauseated me to think that one
day I might be fettered to an office stool, that I could not dispose of my own time but
would be forced to spend the whole of my life filling out forms.
One can imagine what kind of thoughts such a prospect awakened in the mind of a
young fellow who was by no means what is called a 'good boy' in the current sense of
that term. The ridiculously easy school tasks which we were given made it possible for
me to spend far more time in the open air than at home. To-day, when my political
opponents pry into my life with diligent scrutiny, as far back as the days of my
boyhood, so as finally to be able to prove what disreputable tricks this Hitler was
accustomed to in his young days, I thank heaven that I can look back to those happy
days and find the memory of them helpful. The fields and the woods were then the
terrain on which all disputes were fought out.
Even attendance at the REALSCHULE could not alter my way of spending my time. But
I had now another battle to fight.
So long as the paternal plan to make a State functionary contradicted my own
inclinations only in the abstract, the conflict was easy to bear. I could be discreet about
expressing my personal views and thus avoid constantly recurrent disputes. My own
resolution not to become a Government official was sufficient for the time being to put
my mind completely at rest. I held on to that resolution inexorably. But the situation
became more difficult once I had a positive plan of my own which I might present to
my father as a counter-suggestion. This happened when I was twelve years old. How it
came about I cannot exactly say now; but one day it became clear to me that I would be
a painter--I mean an artist. That I had an aptitude for drawing was an admitted fact. It
was even one of the reasons why my father had sent me to the REALSCHULE; but he
had never thought of having that talent developed in such a way that I could take up
painting as a professional career. Quite the contrary. When, as a result of my renewed
refusal to adopt his favourite plan, my father asked me for the first time what I myself
really wished to be, the resolution that I had already formed expressed itself almost
automatically. For a while my father was speechless. "A painter? An artist-painter?" he
exclaimed.
He wondered whether I was in a sound state of mind. He thought that he might not
have caught my words rightly, or that he had misunderstood what I meant. But when I
had explained my ideas to him and he saw how seriously I took them, he opposed them
with that full determination which was characteristic of him. His decision was
exceedingly simple and could not be deflected from its course by any consideration of
what my own natural qualifications really were.
"Artist! Not as long as I live, never." As the son had inherited some of the father's
obstinacy, besides having other qualities of his own, my reply was equally energetic.
But it stated something quite the contrary.
At that our struggle became stalemate. The father would not abandon his 'Never', and I
became all the more consolidated in my 'Nevertheless'.
Naturally the resulting situation was not pleasant. The old gentleman was bitterly
annoyed; and indeed so was I, although I really loved him. My father forbade me to
entertain any hopes of taking up the art of painting as a profession. I went a step further
and declared that I would not study anything else. With such declarations the situation
became still more strained, so that the old gentleman irrevocably decided to assert his
parental authority at all costs. That led me to adopt an attitude of circumspect silence,
but I put my threat into execution. I thought that, once it became clear to my father that
I was making no progress at the REALSCHULE, for weal or for woe, he would be
forced to allow me to follow the happy career I had dreamed of.
I do not know whether I calculated rightly or not. Certainly my failure to make progress
became quite visible in the school. I studied just the subjects that appealed to me,
especially those which I thought might be of advantage to me later on as a painter.
What did not appear to have any importance from this point of view, or what did not
otherwise appeal to me favourably, I completely sabotaged. My school reports of that
time were always in the extremes of good or bad, according to the subject and the
interest it had for me. In one column my qualification read 'very good' or 'excellent'. In
another it read 'average' or even 'below average'. By far my best subjects were
geography and, even more so, general history. These were my two favourite subjects,
and I led the class in them.
When I look back over so many years and try to judge the results of that experience I
find two very significant facts standing out clearly before my mind.
First, I became a nationalist.
Second, I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.
The old Austria was a multi-national State. In those days at least the citizens of the
German Empire, taken through and through, could not understand what that fact
meant in the everyday life of the individuals within such a State. After the magnificent
triumphant march of the victorious armies in the Franco-German War the Germans in
the REICH became steadily more and more estranged from the Germans beyond their
frontiers, partly because they did not deign to appreciate those other Germans at their
true value or simply because they were incapable of doing so.
The Germans of the REICH did not realize that if the Germans in Austria had not been
of the best racial stock they could never have given the stamp of their own character to
an Empire of 52 millions, so definitely that in Germany itself the idea arose--though
quite an erroneous one--that Austria was a German State. That was an error which led
to dire consequences; but all the same it was a magnificent testimony to the character of
the ten million Germans in that East Mark. (Note 3) Only very few of the Germans in
the REICH itself had an idea of the bitter struggle which those Eastern Germans had to
carry on daily for the preservation of their German language, their German schools and
their German character. Only to-day, when a tragic fate has torn several millions of our
kinsfolk away from the REICH and has forced them to live under the rule of the
stranger, dreaming of that common fatherland towards which all their yearnings are
directed and struggling to uphold at least the sacred right of using their mother tongue-
-only now have the wider circles of the German population come to realize what it
means to have to fight for the traditions of one's race. And so at last perhaps there are
people here and there who can assess the greatness of that German spirit which
animated the old East Mark and enabled those people, left entirely dependent on their
own resources, to defend the Empire against the Orient for several centuries and
subsequently to hold fast the frontiers of the German language through a guerilla
warfare of attrition, at a time when the German Empire was sedulously cultivating an
interest for colonies but not for its own flesh and blood before the threshold of its own
door.
What has happened always and everywhere, in every kind of struggle, happened also
in the language fight which was carried on in the old Austria. There were three groups--
the fighters, the hedgers and the traitors. Even in the schools this sifting already began
to take place. And it is worth noting that the struggle for the language was waged
perhaps in its bitterest form around the school; because this was the nursery where the
seeds had to be watered which were to spring up and form the future generation. The
tactical objective of the fight was the winning over of the child, and it was to the child
that the first rallying cry was addressed:
"German youth, do not forget that you are a German," and "Remember, little girl, that
one day you must be a German mother."
Those who know something of the juvenile spirit can understand how youth will
always lend a glad ear to such a rallying cry. Under many forms the young people led
the struggle, fighting in their own way and with their own weapons. They refused to
sing non-German songs. The greater the efforts made to win them away from their
German allegiance, the more they exalted the glory of their German heroes. They
stinted themselves in buying things to eat, so that they might spare their pennies to help
the war chest of their elders. They were incredibly alert in the significance of what the
non-German teachers said and they contradicted in unison. They wore the forbidden
emblems of their own kinsfolk and were happy when penalised for doing so, or even
physically punished. In miniature they were mirrors of loyalty from which the older
people might learn a lesson.
And thus it was that at a comparatively early age I took part in the struggle which the
nationalities were waging against one another in the old Austria. When meetings were
held for the South Mark German League and the School League we wore cornflowers
and black-red-gold colours to express our loyalty. We greeted one another with HEIL!
and instead of the Austrian anthem we sang our own DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES,
despite warnings and penalties. Thus the youth were educated politically at a time
when the citizens of a so-called national State for the most part knew little of their own
nationality except the language. Of course, I did not belong to the hedgers. Within a
little while I had become an ardent 'German National', which has a different meaning
from the party significance attached to that phrase to-day.
I developed very rapidly in the nationalist direction, and by the time I was 15 years old
I had come to understand the distinction between dynastic patriotism and nationalism
based on the concept of folk, or people, my inclination being entirely in favour of the
latter.
Such a preference may not perhaps be clearly intelligible to those who have never taken
the trouble to study the internal conditions that prevailed under the Habsburg
Monarchy.
Among historical studies universal history was the subject almost exclusively taught in
the Austrian schools, for of specific Austrian history there was only very little. The fate
of this State was closely bound up with the existence and development of Germany as a
whole; so a division of history into German history and Austrian history would be
practically inconceivable. And indeed it was only when the German people came to be
divided between two States that this division of German history began to take place.
The insignia (Note 4) of a former imperial sovereignty which were still preserved in
Vienna appeared to act as magical relics rather than as the visible guarantee of an
everlasting bond of union.
When the Habsburg State crumbled to pieces in 1918 the Austrian Germans
instinctively raised an outcry for union with their German fatherland. That was the
voice of a unanimous yearning in the hearts of the whole people for a return to the
unforgotten home of their fathers. But such a general yearning could not be explained
except by attributing the cause of it to the historical training through which the
individual Austrian Germans had passed. Therein lay a spring that never dried up.
Especially in times of distraction and forgetfulness its quiet voice was a reminder of the
past, bidding the people to look out beyond the mere welfare of the moment to a new
future.
The teaching of universal history in what are called the middle schools is still very
unsatisfactory. Few teachers realize that the purpose of teaching history is not the
memorizing of some dates and facts, that the student is not interested in knowing the
exact date of a battle or the birthday of some marshal or other, and not at all--or at least
only very insignificantly--interested in knowing when the crown of his fathers was
placed on the brow of some monarch. These are certainly not looked upon as important
matters.
To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are the causes of those
results which appear before our eyes as historical events. The art of reading and
studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.
Probably my whole future life was determined by the fact that I had a professor of
history who understood, as few others understand, how to make this viewpoint prevail
in teaching and in examining. This teacher was Dr. Leopold Poetsch, of the
REALSCHULE at Linz. He was the ideal personification of the qualities necessary to a
teacher of history in the sense I have mentioned above. An elderly gentleman with a
decisive manner but a kindly heart, he was a very attractive speaker and was able to
inspire us with his own enthusiasm. Even to-day I cannot recall without emotion that
venerable personality whose enthusiastic exposition of history so often made us entirely
forget the present and allow ourselves to be transported as if by magic into the past. He
penetrated through the dim mist of thousands of years and transformed the historical
memory of the dead past into a living reality. When we listened to him we became afire
with enthusiasm and we were sometimes moved even to tears.
It was still more fortunate that this professor was able not only to illustrate the past by
examples from the present but from the past he was also able to draw a lesson for the
present. He understood better than any other the everyday problems that were then
agitating our minds. The national fervour which we felt in our own small way was
utilized by him as an instrument of our education, inasmuch as he often appealed to our
national sense of honour; for in that way he maintained order and held our attention
much more easily than he could have done by any other means. It was because I had
such a professor that history became my favourite subject. As a natural consequence,
but without the conscious connivance of my professor, I then and there became a young
rebel. But who could have studied German history under such a teacher and not
become an enemy of that State whose rulers exercised such a disastrous influence on the
destinies of the German nation? Finally, how could one remain the faithful subject of
the House of Habsburg, whose past history and present conduct proved it to be ready
ever and always to betray the interests of the German people for the sake of paltry
personal interests? Did not we as youngsters fully realize that the House of Habsburg
did not, and could not, have any love for us Germans?
What history taught us about the policy followed by the House of Habsburg was
corroborated by our own everyday experiences. In the north and in the south the poison
of foreign races was eating into the body of our people, and even Vienna was steadily
becoming more and more a non-German city. The 'Imperial House' favoured the Czechs
on every possible occasion. Indeed it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and
inexorable retribution that caused the most deadly enemy of Germanism in Austria, the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to fall by the very bullets which he himself had helped to
cast. Working from above downwards, he was the chief patron of the movement to
make Austria a Slav State.
The burdens laid on the shoulders of the German people were enormous and the
sacrifices of money and blood which they had to make were incredibly heavy.
Yet anybody who was not quite blind must have seen that it was all in vain. What
affected us most bitterly was the consciousness of the fact that this whole system was
morally shielded by the alliance with Germany, whereby the slow extirpation of
Germanism in the old Austrian Monarchy seemed in some way to be more or less
sanctioned by Germany herself. Habsburg hypocrisy, which endeavoured outwardly to
make the people believe that Austria still remained a German State, increased the
feeling of hatred against the Imperial House and at the same time aroused a spirit of
rebellion and contempt.
But in the German Empire itself those who were then its rulers saw nothing of what all
this meant. As if struck blind, they stood beside a corpse and in the very symptoms of
decomposition they believed that they recognized the signs of a renewed vitality. In
that unhappy alliance between the young German Empire and the illusory Austrian
State lay the germ of the World War and also of the final collapse.
In the subsequent pages of this book I shall go to the root of the problem. Suffice it to
say here that in the very early years of my youth I came to certain conclusions which I
have never abandoned. Indeed I became more profoundly convinced of them as the
years passed. They were: That the dissolution of the Austrian Empire is a preliminary
condition for the defence of Germany; further, that national feeling is by no means
identical with dynastic patriotism; finally, and above all, that the House of Habsburg
was destined to bring misfortune to the German nation.
As a logical consequence of these convictions, there arose in me a feeling of intense love
for my German-Austrian home and a profound hatred for the Austrian State.
That kind of historical thinking which was developed in me through my study of
history at school never left me afterwards. World history became more and more an
inexhaustible source for the understanding of contemporary historical events, which
means politics. Therefore I will not "learn" politics but let politics teach me.
A precocious revolutionary in politics I was no less a precocious revolutionary in art. At
that time the provincial capital of Upper Austria had a theatre which, relatively
speaking, was not bad. Almost everything was played there. When I was twelve years
old I saw William Tell performed. That was my first experience of the theatre. Some
months later I attended a performance of LOHENGRIN, the first opera I had ever
heard. I was fascinated at once. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew
no limits. Again and again I was drawn to hear his operas; and to-day I consider it a
great piece of luck that these modest productions in the little provincial city prepared
the way and made it possible for me to appreciate the better productions later on.
But all this helped to intensify my profound aversion for the career that my father had
chosen for me; and this dislike became especially strong as the rough corners of
youthful boorishness became worn off, a process which in my case caused a good deal
of pain. I became more and more convinced that I should never be happy as a State
official. And now that the REALSCHULE had recognized and acknowledged my
aptitude for drawing, my own resolution became all the stronger. Imprecations and
threats had no longer any chance of changing it. I wanted to become a painter and no
power in the world could force me to become a civil servant. The only peculiar feature
of the situation now was that as I grew bigger I became more and more interested in
architecture. I considered this fact as a natural development of my flair for painting and
I rejoiced inwardly that the sphere of my artistic interests was thus enlarged. I had no
notion that one day it would have to be otherwise.
The question of my career was decided much sooner than I could have expected.
When I was in my thirteenth year my father was suddenly taken from us. He was still
in robust health when a stroke of apoplexy painlessly ended his earthly wanderings and
left us all deeply bereaved. His most ardent longing was to be able to help his son to
advance in a career and thus save me from the harsh ordeal that he himself had to go
through. But it appeared to him then as if that longing were all in vain. And yet, though
he himself was not conscious of it, he had sown the seeds of a future which neither of us
foresaw at that time.
At first nothing changed outwardly.
My mother felt it her duty to continue my education in accordance with my father's
wishes, which meant that she would have me study for the civil service. For my own
part I was even more firmly determined than ever before that under no circumstances
would I become an official of the State. The curriculum and teaching methods followed
in the middle school were so far removed from my ideals that I became profoundly
indifferent. Illness suddenly came to my assistance. Within a few weeks it decided my
future and put an end to the long-standing family conflict. My lungs became so
seriously affected that the doctor advised my mother very strongly not under any
circumstances to allow me to take up a career which would necessitate working in an
office. He ordered that I should give up attendance at the REALSCHULE for a year at
least. What I had secretly desired for such a long time, and had persistently fought for,
now became a reality almost at one stroke.
Influenced by my illness, my mother agreed that I should leave the REALSCHULE and
attend the Academy.
Those were happy days, which appeared to me almost as a dream; but they were bound
to remain only a dream. Two years later my mother's death put a brutal end to all my
fine projects. She succumbed to a long and painful illness which from the very
beginning permitted little hope of recovery. Though expected, her death came as a
terrible blow to me. I respected my father, but I loved my mother.
Poverty and stern reality forced me to decide promptly.
The meagre resources of the family had been almost entirely used up through my
mother's severe illness. The allowance which came to me as an orphan was not enough
for the bare necessities of life. Somehow or other I would have to earn my own bread.
With my clothes and linen packed in a valise and with an indomitable resolution in my
heart, I left for Vienna. I hoped to forestall fate, as my father had done fifty years before.
I was determined to become 'something'--but certainly not a civil servant.
[Note 1. In order to understand the reference here, and similar references in later
portions of MEIN KAMPF, the following must be borne in mind:
From 1792 to 1814 the French Revolutionary Armies overran Germany. In 1800 Bavaria
shared in the Austrian defeat at Hohenlinden and the French occupied Munich. In 1805
the Bavarian Elector was made King of Bavaria by Napoleon and stipulated to back up
Napoleon in all his wars with a force of 30,000 men. Thus Bavaria became the absolute
vassal of the French. This was 'TheTime of Germany's Deepest Humiliation', Which is
referred to again and again by Hitler.
In 1806 a pamphlet entitled 'Germany's Deepest Humiliation' was published in South
Germany. Amnng those who helped to circulate the pamphlet was the Nürnberg
bookseller, Johannes Philipp Palm. He was denounced to the French by a Bavarian
police agent. At his trial he refused to disclose thename of the author. By Napoleon's
orders, he was shot at Braunau-on-the-Innon August 26th, 1806. A monument erected
to him on the site of the executionwas one of the first public objects that made an
impression on Hitler asa little boy.
Leo Schlageter's case was in many respects parallel to that of Johannes Palm. Schlageter
was a German theological student who volunteered for service in 1914. He became an
artillery officer and won the Iron Cross of both classes. When the French occupied the
Ruhr in 1923 Schlageter helped to organize the passive resistance on the German side.
He and his companions blew up a railway bridge for the purpose of making the
transport of coal to France more difficult.
Those who took part in the affair were denounced to the French by a German informer.
Schlageter took the whole responsibility on his own shoulders and was condemned to
death, his companions being sentenced to various terms of imprisonment and penal
servitude by the French Court. Schlageter refused to disclose the identity of those who
issued the order to blow up the railway bridge and he would not plead for mercy before
a French Court. He was shot by a French firing-squad on May 26th, 1923. Severing was
at that time German Minister of the Interior. It is said that representations were made,
to himon Schlageter's behalf and that he refused to interfere.
Schlageter has become the chief martyr of the German resistancc to the French
occupation of the Ruhr and also one of the great heroes of the National Socialist
Movement. He had joined the Movement at a very early stage, his card of membership
bearing the number 61.]
[Note 2. Non-classical secondary school. The Lyceum and GYMNASIUM were classical
or semi-classical secondary schools.]
[Note 3. See Translator's Introduction.]
[Note 4. When Francis II had laid down his title as Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empireof the German Nation, which he did at the command of Napoleon, the
Crownand Mace, as the Imperial Insignia, were kept in Vienna. After the German
Empire was refounded, in 1871, under William I, there were many demands tohave the
Insignia transferred to Berlin. But these went unheeded. Hitler had them brought to
Germany after the Austrian Anschluss and displayed at Nuremberg during the Party
Congress in September 1938.]
Chapter 2
Years Of Study And Suffering In Vienna
WHEN MY mother died my fate had already been decided in one respect. During the
last months of her illness I went to Vienna to take the entrance examination for the
Academy of Fine Arts. Armed with a bulky packet of sketches, I felt convinced that I
should pass the examination quite easily. At the REALSCHULE I was by far the best
student in the drawing class, and since that time I had made more than ordinary
progress in the practice of drawing. Therefore I was pleased with myself and was proud
and happy at the prospect of what I considered an assured success.
But there was one misgiving: It seemed to me that I was better qualified for drawing
than for painting, especially in the various branches of architectural drawing. At the
same time my interest in architecture was constantly increasing. And I advanced in this
direction at a still more rapid pace after my first visit to Vienna, which lasted two
weeks. I was not yet sixteen years old. I went to the Hof Museum to study the paintings
in the art gallery there; but the building itself captured almost all my interest, from early
morning until late at night I spent all my time visiting the various public buildings. And
it was the buildings themselves that were always the principal attraction for me. For
hours and hours I could stand in wonderment before the Opera and the Parliament. The
whole Ring Strasse had a magic effect upon me, as if it were a scene from the Thousandand-one-Nights.
And now I was here for the second time in this beautiful city, impatiently waiting to
hear the result of the entrance examination but proudly confident that I had got
through. I was so convinced of my success that when the news that I had failed to pass
was brought to me it struck me like a bolt from the skies. Yet the fact was that I had
failed. I went to see the Rector and asked him to explain the reasons why they refused
to accept me as a student in the general School of Painting, which was part of the
Academy. He said that the sketches which I had brought with me unquestionably
showed that painting was not what I was suited for but that the same sketches gave
clear indications of my aptitude for architectural designing. Therefore the School of
Painting did not come into question for me but rather the School of Architecture, which
also formed part of the Academy. At first it was impossible to understand how this
could be so, seeing that I had never been to a school for architecture and had never
received any instruction in architectural designing.
When I left the Hansen Palace, on the SCHILLER PLATZ, I was quite crestfallen. I felt
out of sorts with myself for the first time in my young life. For what I had heard about
my capabilities now appeared to me as a lightning flash which clearly revealed a
dualism under which I had been suffering for a long time, but hitherto I could give no
clear account whatsoever of the why and wherefore.
Within a few days I myself also knew that I ought to become an architect. But of course
the way was very difficult. I was now forced bitterly to rue my former conduct in
neglecting and despising certain subjects at the REALSCHULE. Before taking up the
courses at the School of Architecture in the Academy it was necessary to attend the
Technical Building School; but a necessary qualification for entrance into this school
was a Leaving Certificate from the Middle School. And this I simply did not have.
According to the human measure of things my dream of following an artistic calling
seemed beyond the limits of possibility.
After the death of my mother I came to Vienna for the third time. This visit was
destined to last several years. Since I had been there before I had recovered my old calm
and resoluteness. The former self-assurance had come back, and I had my eyes steadily
fixed on the goal. I would be an architect. Obstacles are placed across our path in life,
not to be boggled at but to be surmounted. And I was fully determined to surmount
these obstacles, having the picture of my father constantly before my mind, who had
raised himself by his own efforts to the position of a civil servant though he was the
poor son of a village shoemaker. I had a better start, and the possibilities of struggling
through were better. At that time my lot in life seemed to me a harsh one; but to-day I
see in it the wise workings of Providence. The Goddess of Fate clutched me in her
hands and often threatened to smash me; but the will grew stronger as the obstacles
increased, and finally the will triumphed.
I am thankful for that period of my life, because it hardened me and enabled me to be as
tough as I now am. And I am even more thankful because I appreciate the fact that I
was thus saved from the emptiness of a life of ease and that a mother's darling was
taken from tender arms and handed over to Adversity as to a new mother. Though I
then rebelled against it as too hard a fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a world
of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to
fight.
It was during this period that my eyes were opened to two perils, the names of which I
scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of their terrible significance for
the existence of the German people. These two perils were Marxism and Judaism.
For many people the name of Vienna signifies innocent jollity, a festive place for happy
mortals. For me, alas, it is a living memory of the saddest period in my life. Even to-day
the mention of that city arouses only gloomy thoughts in my mind. Five years of
poverty in that Phaecian (Note 5) town. Five years in which, first as a casual labourer
and then as a painter of little trifles, I had to earn my daily bread. And a meagre morsel
indeed it was, not even sufficient to still the hunger which I constantly felt. That hunger
was the faithful guardian which never left me but took part in everything I did. Every
book that I bought meant renewed hunger, and every visit I paid to the opera meant the
intrusion of that inalienabl companion during the following days. I was always
struggling with my unsympathic friend. And yet during that time I learned more than I
had ever learned before. Outside my architectural studies and rare visits to the opera,
for which I had to deny myself food, I had no other pleasure in life except my books.
I read a great deal then, and I pondered deeply over what I read. All the free time after
work was devoted exclusively to study. Thus within a few years I was able to acquire a
stock of knowledge which I find useful even to-day.
But more than that. During those years a view of life and a definite outlook on the
world took shape in my mind. These became the granite basis of my conduct at that
time. Since then I have extended that foundation only very little, and I have changed
nothing in it.
On the contrary: I am firmly convinced to-day that, generally speaking, it is in youth
that men lay the essential groundwork of their creative thought, wherever that creative
thought exists. I make a distinction between the wisdom of age--which can only arise
from the greater profundity and foresight that are based on the experiences of a long
life--and the creative genius of youth, which blossoms out in thought and ideas with
inexhaustible fertility, without being able to put these into practice immediately,
because of their very superabundance. These furnish the building materials and plans
for the future; and it is from them that age takes the stones and builds the edifice, unless
the so-called wisdom of the years may have smothered the creative genius of youth.
The life which I had hitherto led at home with my parents differed in little or nothing
from that of all the others. I looked forward without apprehension to the morrow, and
there was no such thing as a social problem to be faced. Those among whom I passed
my young days belonged to the small bourgeois class. Therefore it was a world that had
very little contact with the world of genuine manual labourers. For, though at first this
may appear astonishing, the ditch which separates that class, which is by no means
economically well-off; from the manual labouring class is often deeper than people
think. The reason for this division, which we may almost call enmity, lies in the fear that
dominates a social group which has only just risen above the level of the manual
labourer--a fear lest it may fall back into its old condition or at least be classed with the
labourers. Moreover, there is something repulsive in remembering the cultural
indigence of that lower class and their rough manners with one another; so that people
who are only on the first rung of the social ladder find it unbearable to be forced to have
any contact with the cultural level and standard of living out of which they have
passed.
And so it happens that very often those who belong to what can really be called the
upper classes find it much easier than do the upstarts to descend to and intermingle
with their fellow beings on the lowest social level. For by the word upstart I mean
everyone who has raised himself through his own efforts to a social level higher than
that to which he formerly belonged. In the case of such a person the hard struggle
through which he passes often destroys his normal human sympathy. His own fight for
existence kills his sensibility for the misery of those who have been left behind.
From this point of view fate had been kind to me. Circumstances forced me to return to
that world of poverty and economic insecurity above which my father had raised
himself in his early days; and thus the blinkers of a narrow PETIT BOURGEOIS
education were torn from my eyes. Now for the first time I learned to know men and I
learned to distinguish between empty appearances or brutal manners and the real inner
nature of the people who outwardly appeared thus.
At the beginning of the century Vienna had already taken rank among those cities
where social conditions are iniquitous. Dazzling riches and loathsome destitution were
intermingled in violent contrast. In the centre and in the Inner City one felt the pulsebeat of an Empire which had a population of fifty-two millions, with all the perilous
charm of a State made up of multiple nationalities. The dazzling splendour of the Court
acted like a magnet on the wealth and intelligence of the whole Empire. And this
attraction was further strengthened by the dynastic policy of the Habsburg Monarchy in
centralizing everything in itself and for itself.
This centralizing policy was necessary in order to hold together that hotchpotch of
heterogeneous nationalities. But the result of it was an extraordinary concentration of
higher officials in the city, which was at one and the same time the metropolis and
imperial residence.
But Vienna was not merely the political and intellectual centre of the Danubian
Monarchy; it was also the commercial centre. Besides the horde of military officers of
high rank, State officials, artists and scientists, there was the still vaster horde of
workers. Abject poverty confronted the wealth of the aristocracy and the merchant class
face to face. Thousands of unemployed loitered in front of the palaces on the Ring
Strasse; and below that VIA TRIUMPHALIS of the old Austria the homeless huddled
together in the murk and filth of the canals.
There was hardly any other German city in which the social problem could be studied
better than in Vienna. But here I must utter a warning against the illusion that this
problem can be 'studied' from above downwards. The man who has never been in the
clutches of that crushing viper can never know what its poison is. An attempt to study
it in any other way will result only in superficial talk and sentimental delusions. Both
are harmful. The first because it can never go to the root of the question, the second
because it evades the question entirely. I do not know which is the more nefarious: to
ignore social distress, as do the majority of those who have been favoured by fortune
and those who have risen in the social scale through their own routine labour, or the
equally supercilious and often tactless but always genteel condescension displayed by
people who make a fad of being charitable and who plume themselves on
'sympathising with the people.' Of course such persons sin more than they can imagine
from lack of instinctive understanding. And thus they are astonished to find that the
'social conscience' on which they pride themselves never produces any results, but often
causes their good intentions to be resented; and then they talk of the ingratitude of the
people.
Such persons are slow to learn that here there is no place for merely social activities and
that there can be no expectation of gratitude; for in this connection there is no question
at all of distributing favours but essentially a matter of retributive justice. I was
protected against the temptation to study the social question in the way just mentioned,
for the simple reason that I was forced to live in the midst of poverty-stricken people.
Therefore it was not a question of studying the problem objectively, but rather one of
testing its effects on myself. Though the rabbit came through the ordeal of the
experiment, this must not be taken as evidence of its harmlessness.
When I try to-day to recall the succession of impressions received during that time I
find that I can do so only with approximate completeness. Here I shall describe only the
more essential impressions and those which personally affected me and often staggered
me. And I shall mention the few lessons I then learned from this experience.
At that time it was for the most part not very difficult to find work, because I had to
seek work not as a skilled tradesman but as a so-called extra-hand ready to take any job
that turned up by chance, just for the sake of earning my daily bread.
Thus I found myself in the same situation as all those emigrants who shake the dust of
Europe from their feet, with the cast-iron determination to lay the foundations of a new
existence in the New World and acquire for themselves a new home. Liberated from all
the paralysing prejudices of class and calling, environment and tradition, they enter any
service that opens its doors to them, accepting any work that comes their way, filled
more and more with the idea that honest work never disgraced anybody, no matter
what kind it may be. And so I was resolved to set both feet in what was for me a new
world and push forward on my own road.
I soon found out that there was some kind of work always to be got, but I also learned
that it could just as quickly and easily be lost. The uncertainty of being able to earn a
regular daily livelihood soon appeared to me as the gloomiest feature in this new life
that I had entered.
Although the skilled worker was not so frequently thrown idle on the streets as the
unskilled worker, yet the former was by no means protected against the same fate;
because though he may not have to face hunger as a result of unemployment due to the
lack of demand in the labour market, the lock-out and the strike deprived the skilled
worker of the chance to earn his bread. Here the element of uncertainty in steadily
earning one's daily bread was the bitterest feature of the whole social-economic system
itself.
The country lad who migrates to the big city feels attracted by what has been described
as easy work--which it may be in reality--and few working hours. He is especially
entranced by the magic glimmer spread over the big cities. Accustomed in the country
to earn a steady wage, he has been taught not to quit his former post until a new one is
at least in sight. As there is a great scarcity of agricultural labour, the probability of long
unemployment in the country has been very small. It is a mistake to presume that the
lad who leaves the countryside for the town is not made of such sound material as those
who remain at home to work on the land. On the contrary, experience shows that it is
the more healthy and more vigorous that emigrate, and not the reverse. Among these
emigrants I include not merely those who emigrate to America, but also the servant boy
in the country who decides to leave his native village and migrate to the big city where
he will be a stranger. He is ready to take the risk of an uncertain fate. In most cases he
comes to town with a little money in his pocket and for the first few days he is not
discouraged if he should not have the good fortune to find work. But if he finds a job
and then loses it in a little while, the case is much worse. To find work anew, especially
in winter, is often difficult and indeed sometimes impossible. For the first few weeks
life is still bearable He receives his out-of-work money from his trade union and is thus
enabled to carry on. But when the last of his own money is gone and his trade union
ceases to pay out because of the prolonged unemployment, then comes the real distress.
He now loiters about and is hungry. Often he pawns or sells the last of his belongings.
His clothes begin to get shabby and with the increasing poverty of his outward
appearance he descends to a lower social level and mixes up with a class of human
beings through whom his mind is now poisoned, in addition to his physical misery.
Then he has nowhere to sleep and if that happens in winter, which is very often the
case, he is in dire distress. Finally he gets work. But the old story repeats itself. A second
time the same thing happens. Then a third time; and now it is probably much worse.
Little by little he becomes indifferent to this everlasting insecurity. Finally he grows
used to the repetition. Thus even a man who is normally of industrious habits grows
careless in his whole attitude towards life and gradually becomes an instrument in the
hands of unscrupulous people who exploit him for the sake of their own ignoble aims.
He has been so often thrown out of employment through no fault of his own that he is
now more or less indifferent whether the strike in which he takes part be for the
purpose of securing his economic rights or be aimed at the destruction of the State, the
whole social order and even civilization itself. Though the idea of going on strike may
not be to his natural liking, yet he joins in it out of sheer indifference.
I saw this process exemplified before my eyes in thousands of cases. And the longer I
observed it the greater became my dislike for that mammoth city which greedily
attracts men to its bosom, in order to break them mercilessly in the end. When they
came they still felt themselves in communion with their own people at home; if they
remained that tie was broken.
I was thrown about so much in the life of the metropolis that I experienced the
workings of this fate in my own person and felt the effects of it in my own soul. One
thing stood out clearly before my eyes: It was the sudden changes from work to
idleness and vice versa; so that the constant fluctuations thus caused by earnings and
expenditure finally destroyed the 'sense of thrift for many people and also the habit of
regulating expenditure in an intelligent way. The body appeared to grow accustomed to
the vicissitudes of food and hunger, eating heartily in good times and going hungry in
bad. Indeed hunger shatters all plans for rationing expenditure on a regular scale in
better times when employment is again found. The reason for this is that the
deprivations which the unemployed worker has to endure must be compensated for
psychologically by a persistent mental mirage in which he imagines himself eating
heartily once again. And this dream develops into such a longing that it turns into a
morbid impulse to cast off all self-restraint when work and wages turn up again.
Therefore the moment work is found anew he forgets to regulate the expenditure of his
earnings but spends them to the full without thinking of to-morrow. This leads to
confusion in the little weekly housekeeping budget, because the expenditure is not
rationally planned. When the phenomenon which I have mentioned first happens, the
earnings will last perhaps for five days instead of seven; on subsequent occasions they
will last only for three days; as the habit recurs, the earnings will last scarcely for a day;
and finally they will disappear in one night of feasting.
Often there are wife and children at home. And in many cases it happens that these
become infected by such a way of living, especially if the husband is good to them and
wants to do the best he can for them and loves them in his own way and according to
his own lights. Then the week's earnings are spent in common at home within two or
three days. The family eat and drink together as long as the money lasts and at the end
of the week they hunger together. Then the wife wanders about furtively in the
neighbourhood, borrows a little, and runs up small debts with the shopkeepers in an
effort to pull through the lean days towards the end of the week. They sit down
together to the midday meal with only meagre fare on the table, and often even nothing
to eat. They wait for the coming payday, talking of it and making plans; and while they
are thus hungry they dream of the plenty that is to come. And so the little children
become acquainted with misery in their early years.

IT HAS turned out fortunate for me to-day that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn
to be my birthplace. For that little town is situated just on the frontier between those
two States the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to
which we should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means
should be employed.
German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not indeed on
any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever. No, no. Even if the union were a
matter of economic indifference, and even if it were to be disadvantageous from the
economic standpoint, still it ought to take place. People of the same blood should be in
the same REICH. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy
until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State. When the
territory of the REICH embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them
a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire
foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the
daily bread for the generations to come.
And so this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great task. But in
another regard also it points to a lesson that is applicable to our day. Over a hundred
years ago this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the
whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German
history. At the time of our Fatherland's deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes
Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here
because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to
disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly
responsible for the affair. Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the
latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a director of police
from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example
which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the REICH under
Herr Severing's regime (Note 1).
In this little town on the Inn, haloed by the memory of a German martyr, a town that
was Bavarian by blood but under the rule of the Austrian State, my parents were
domiciled towards the end of the last century. My father was a civil servant who
fulfilled his duties very conscientiously. My mother looked after the household and
lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children. From that period I have not retained
very much in my memory; because after a few years my father had to leave that frontier
town which I had come to love so much and take up a new post farther down the Inn
valley, at Passau, therefore actually in Germany itself.
In those days it was the usual lot of an Austrian civil servant to be transferred
periodically from one post to another. Not long after coming to Passau my father was
transferred to Linz, and while there he retired finally to live on his pension. But this did
not mean that the old gentleman would now rest from his labours.
He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew restless and left home.
When he was barely thirteen years old he buckled on his satchel and set forth from his
native woodland parish. Despite the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from
'experience,' he went to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fiftieth year of the
last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and face the unknown,
with three gulden in his pocket. By when the boy of thirteen was a lad of seventeen and
had passed his apprenticeship examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the
contrary. The persistent economic depression of that period and the constant want and
misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and strive for
'something higher.' As a boy it had seemed to him that the position of the parish priest
in his native village was the highest in the scale of human attainment; but now that the
big city had enlarged his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State
official as the highest of all. With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble had
already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man of seventeen
obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it until he won through. He became a
civil servant. He was about twenty-three years old, I think, when he succeeded in
making himself what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise
he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he was 'somebody.'
He had gained his end. But in the village there was nobody who had remembered him
as a little boy, and the village itself had become strange to him.
Now at last, when he was fifty-six years old, he gave up his active career; but he could
not bear to be idle for a single day. On the outskirts of the small market town of
Lambach in Upper Austria he bought a farm and tilled it himself. Thus, at the end of a
long and hard-working career, he came back to the life which his father had led.
It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own. I spent a good deal of
time scampering about in the open, on the long road from school, and mixing up with
some of the roughest of the boys, which caused my mother many anxious moments. All
this tended to make me something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely
any serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I was certainly
quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my father had followed. I think
that an inborn talent for speaking now began to develop and take shape during the
more or less strenuous arguments which I used to have with my comrades. I had
become a juvenile ringleader who learned well and easily at school but was rather
difficult to manage. In my freetime I practised singing in the choir of the monastery
church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed in a very favourable
position to be emotionally impressed again and again by the magnificent splendour of
ecclesiastical ceremonial. What could be more natural for me than to look upon the
Abbot as representing the highest human ideal worth striving for, just as the position of
the humble village priest had appeared to my father in his own boyhood days? At least,
that was my idea for a while. But the juvenile disputes I had with my father did not lead
him to appreciate his son's oratorical gifts in such a way as to see in them a favourable
promise for such a career, and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I
had in my head at that time. This contradiction in my character made him feel
somewhat anxious.
As a matter of fact, that transitory yearning after such a vocation soon gave way to
hopes that were better suited to my temperament. Browsing through my father's books,
I chanced to come across some publications that dealt with military subjects. One of
these publications was a popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It
consisted of two volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. These
became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic conflict began to
take first place in my mind. And from that time onwards I became more and more
enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or military
affairs.
But this story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for me on other
grounds also. For the first time, and as yet only in quite a vague way, the question
began to present itself: Is there a difference--and if there be, what is it--between the
Germans who fought that war and the other Germans? Why did not Austria also take
part in it? Why did not my father and all the others fight in that struggle? Are we not
the same as the other Germans? Do we not all belong together?
That was the first time that this problem began to agitate my small brain. And from the
replies that were given to the questions which I asked very tentatively, I was forced to
accept the fact, though with a secret envy, that not all Germans had the good luck to
belong to Bismarck's Empire. This was something that I could not understand.
It was decided that I should study. Considering my character as a whole, and especially
my temperament, my father decided that the classical subjects studied at the Lyceum
were not suited to my natural talents. He thought that the REALSCHULE (Note 2)
would suit me better. My obvious talent for drawing confirmed him in that view; for in
his opinion drawing was a subject too much neglected in the Austrian GYMNASIUM.
Probably also the memory of the hard road which he himself had travelled contributed
to make him look upon classical studies as unpractical and accordingly to set little value
on them. At the back of his mind he had the idea that his son also should become an
official of the Government. Indeed he had decided on that career for me. The difficulties
through which he had to struggle in making his own career led him to overestimate
what he had achieved, because this was exclusively the result of his own indefatigable
industry and energy. The characteristic pride of the self-made man urged him towards
the idea that his son should follow the same calling and if possible rise to a higher
position in it. Moreover, this idea was strengthened by the consideration that the results
of his own life's industry had placed him in a position to facilitate his son's
advancement in the same career.
He was simply incapable of imagining that I might reject what had meant everything in
life to him. My father's decision was simple, definite, clear and, in his eyes, it was
something to be taken for granted. A man of such a nature who had become an autocrat
by reason of his own hard struggle for existence, could not think of allowing
'inexperienced' and irresponsible young fellows to choose their own careers. To act in
such a way, where the future of his own son was concerned, would have been a grave
and reprehensible weakness in the exercise of parental authority and responsibility,
something utterly incompatible with his characteristic sense of duty.
And yet it had to be otherwise.
For the first time in my life--I was then eleven years old--I felt myself forced into open
opposition. No matter how hard and determined my father might be about putting his
own plans and opinions into action, his son was no less obstinate in refusing to accept
ideas on which he set little or no value.
I would not become a civil servant.
No amount of persuasion and no amount of 'grave' warnings could break down that
opposition. I would not become a State official, not on any account. All the attempts
which my father made to arouse in me a love or liking for that profession, by picturing
his own career for me, had only the opposite effect. It nauseated me to think that one
day I might be fettered to an office stool, that I could not dispose of my own time but
would be forced to spend the whole of my life filling out forms.
One can imagine what kind of thoughts such a prospect awakened in the mind of a
young fellow who was by no means what is called a 'good boy' in the current sense of
that term. The ridiculously easy school tasks which we were given made it possible for
me to spend far more time in the open air than at home. To-day, when my political
opponents pry into my life with diligent scrutiny, as far back as the days of my
boyhood, so as finally to be able to prove what disreputable tricks this Hitler was
accustomed to in his young days, I thank heaven that I can look back to those happy
days and find the memory of them helpful. The fields and the woods were then the
terrain on which all disputes were fought out.
Even attendance at the REALSCHULE could not alter my way of spending my time. But
I had now another battle to fight.
So long as the paternal plan to make a State functionary contradicted my own
inclinations only in the abstract, the conflict was easy to bear. I could be discreet about
expressing my personal views and thus avoid constantly recurrent disputes. My own
resolution not to become a Government official was sufficient for the time being to put
my mind completely at rest. I held on to that resolution inexorably. But the situation
became more difficult once I had a positive plan of my own which I might present to
my father as a counter-suggestion. This happened when I was twelve years old. How it
came about I cannot exactly say now; but one day it became clear to me that I would be
a painter--I mean an artist. That I had an aptitude for drawing was an admitted fact. It
was even one of the reasons why my father had sent me to the REALSCHULE; but he
had never thought of having that talent developed in such a way that I could take up
painting as a professional career. Quite the contrary. When, as a result of my renewed
refusal to adopt his favourite plan, my father asked me for the first time what I myself
really wished to be, the resolution that I had already formed expressed itself almost
automatically. For a while my father was speechless. "A painter? An artist-painter?" he
exclaimed.
He wondered whether I was in a sound state of mind. He thought that he might not
have caught my words rightly, or that he had misunderstood what I meant. But when I
had explained my ideas to him and he saw how seriously I took them, he opposed them
with that full determination which was characteristic of him. His decision was
exceedingly simple and could not be deflected from its course by any consideration of
what my own natural qualifications really were.
"Artist! Not as long as I live, never." As the son had inherited some of the father's
obstinacy, besides having other qualities of his own, my reply was equally energetic.
But it stated something quite the contrary.
At that our struggle became stalemate. The father would not abandon his 'Never', and I
became all the more consolidated in my 'Nevertheless'.
Naturally the resulting situation was not pleasant. The old gentleman was bitterly
annoyed; and indeed so was I, although I really loved him. My father forbade me to
entertain any hopes of taking up the art of painting as a profession. I went a step further
and declared that I would not study anything else. With such declarations the situation
became still more strained, so that the old gentleman irrevocably decided to assert his
parental authority at all costs. That led me to adopt an attitude of circumspect silence,
but I put my threat into execution. I thought that, once it became clear to my father that
I was making no progress at the REALSCHULE, for weal or for woe, he would be
forced to allow me to follow the happy career I had dreamed of.
I do not know whether I calculated rightly or not. Certainly my failure to make progress
became quite visible in the school. I studied just the subjects that appealed to me,
especially those which I thought might be of advantage to me later on as a painter.
What did not appear to have any importance from this point of view, or what did not
otherwise appeal to me favourably, I completely sabotaged. My school reports of that
time were always in the extremes of good or bad, according to the subject and the
interest it had for me. In one column my qualification read 'very good' or 'excellent'. In
another it read 'average' or even 'below average'. By far my best subjects were
geography and, even more so, general history. These were my two favourite subjects,
and I led the class in them.
When I look back over so many years and try to judge the results of that experience I
find two very significant facts standing out clearly before my mind.
First, I became a nationalist.
Second, I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.
The old Austria was a multi-national State. In those days at least the citizens of the
German Empire, taken through and through, could not understand what that fact
meant in the everyday life of the individuals within such a State. After the magnificent
triumphant march of the victorious armies in the Franco-German War the Germans in
the REICH became steadily more and more estranged from the Germans beyond their
frontiers, partly because they did not deign to appreciate those other Germans at their
true value or simply because they were incapable of doing so.
The Germans of the REICH did not realize that if the Germans in Austria had not been
of the best racial stock they could never have given the stamp of their own character to
an Empire of 52 millions, so definitely that in Germany itself the idea arose--though
quite an erroneous one--that Austria was a German State. That was an error which led
to dire consequences; but all the same it was a magnificent testimony to the character of
the ten million Germans in that East Mark. (Note 3) Only very few of the Germans in
the REICH itself had an idea of the bitter struggle which those Eastern Germans had to
carry on daily for the preservation of their German language, their German schools and
their German character. Only to-day, when a tragic fate has torn several millions of our
kinsfolk away from the REICH and has forced them to live under the rule of the
stranger, dreaming of that common fatherland towards which all their yearnings are
directed and struggling to uphold at least the sacred right of using their mother tongue-
-only now have the wider circles of the German population come to realize what it
means to have to fight for the traditions of one's race. And so at last perhaps there are
people here and there who can assess the greatness of that German spirit which
animated the old East Mark and enabled those people, left entirely dependent on their
own resources, to defend the Empire against the Orient for several centuries and
subsequently to hold fast the frontiers of the German language through a guerilla
warfare of attrition, at a time when the German Empire was sedulously cultivating an
interest for colonies but not for its own flesh and blood before the threshold of its own
door.
What has happened always and everywhere, in every kind of struggle, happened also
in the language fight which was carried on in the old Austria. There were three groups--
the fighters, the hedgers and the traitors. Even in the schools this sifting already began
to take place. And it is worth noting that the struggle for the language was waged
perhaps in its bitterest form around the school; because this was the nursery where the
seeds had to be watered which were to spring up and form the future generation. The
tactical objective of the fight was the winning over of the child, and it was to the child
that the first rallying cry was addressed:
"German youth, do not forget that you are a German," and "Remember, little girl, that
one day you must be a German mother."
Those who know something of the juvenile spirit can understand how youth will
always lend a glad ear to such a rallying cry. Under many forms the young people led
the struggle, fighting in their own way and with their own weapons. They refused to
sing non-German songs. The greater the efforts made to win them away from their
German allegiance, the more they exalted the glory of their German heroes. They
stinted themselves in buying things to eat, so that they might spare their pennies to help
the war chest of their elders. They were incredibly alert in the significance of what the
non-German teachers said and they contradicted in unison. They wore the forbidden
emblems of their own kinsfolk and were happy when penalised for doing so, or even
physically punished. In miniature they were mirrors of loyalty from which the older
people might learn a lesson.
And thus it was that at a comparatively early age I took part in the struggle which the
nationalities were waging against one another in the old Austria. When meetings were
held for the South Mark German League and the School League we wore cornflowers
and black-red-gold colours to express our loyalty. We greeted one another with HEIL!
and instead of the Austrian anthem we sang our own DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES,
despite warnings and penalties. Thus the youth were educated politically at a time
when the citizens of a so-called national State for the most part knew little of their own
nationality except the language. Of course, I did not belong to the hedgers. Within a
little while I had become an ardent 'German National', which has a different meaning
from the party significance attached to that phrase to-day.
I developed very rapidly in the nationalist direction, and by the time I was 15 years old
I had come to understand the distinction between dynastic patriotism and nationalism
based on the concept of folk, or people, my inclination being entirely in favour of the
latter.
Such a preference may not perhaps be clearly intelligible to those who have never taken
the trouble to study the internal conditions that prevailed under the Habsburg
Monarchy.
Among historical studies universal history was the subject almost exclusively taught in
the Austrian schools, for of specific Austrian history there was only very little. The fate
of this State was closely bound up with the existence and development of Germany as a
whole; so a division of history into German history and Austrian history would be
practically inconceivable. And indeed it was only when the German people came to be
divided between two States that this division of German history began to take place.
The insignia (Note 4) of a former imperial sovereignty which were still preserved in
Vienna appeared to act as magical relics rather than as the visible guarantee of an
everlasting bond of union.
When the Habsburg State crumbled to pieces in 1918 the Austrian Germans
instinctively raised an outcry for union with their German fatherland. That was the
voice of a unanimous yearning in the hearts of the whole people for a return to the
unforgotten home of their fathers. But such a general yearning could not be explained
except by attributing the cause of it to the historical training through which the
individual Austrian Germans had passed. Therein lay a spring that never dried up.
Especially in times of distraction and forgetfulness its quiet voice was a reminder of the
past, bidding the people to look out beyond the mere welfare of the moment to a new
future.
The teaching of universal history in what are called the middle schools is still very
unsatisfactory. Few teachers realize that the purpose of teaching history is not the
memorizing of some dates and facts, that the student is not interested in knowing the
exact date of a battle or the birthday of some marshal or other, and not at all--or at least
only very insignificantly--interested in knowing when the crown of his fathers was
placed on the brow of some monarch. These are certainly not looked upon as important
matters.
To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are the causes of those
results which appear before our eyes as historical events. The art of reading and
studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.
Probably my whole future life was determined by the fact that I had a professor of
history who understood, as few others understand, how to make this viewpoint prevail
in teaching and in examining. This teacher was Dr. Leopold Poetsch, of the
REALSCHULE at Linz. He was the ideal personification of the qualities necessary to a
teacher of history in the sense I have mentioned above. An elderly gentleman with a
decisive manner but a kindly heart, he was a very attractive speaker and was able to
inspire us with his own enthusiasm. Even to-day I cannot recall without emotion that
venerable personality whose enthusiastic exposition of history so often made us entirely
forget the present and allow ourselves to be transported as if by magic into the past. He
penetrated through the dim mist of thousands of years and transformed the historical
memory of the dead past into a living reality. When we listened to him we became afire
with enthusiasm and we were sometimes moved even to tears.
It was still more fortunate that this professor was able not only to illustrate the past by
examples from the present but from the past he was also able to draw a lesson for the
present. He understood better than any other the everyday problems that were then
agitating our minds. The national fervour which we felt in our own small way was
utilized by him as an instrument of our education, inasmuch as he often appealed to our
national sense of honour; for in that way he maintained order and held our attention
much more easily than he could have done by any other means. It was because I had
such a professor that history became my favourite subject. As a natural consequence,
but without the conscious connivance of my professor, I then and there became a young
rebel. But who could have studied German history under such a teacher and not
become an enemy of that State whose rulers exercised such a disastrous influence on the
destinies of the German nation? Finally, how could one remain the faithful subject of
the House of Habsburg, whose past history and present conduct proved it to be ready
ever and always to betray the interests of the German people for the sake of paltry
personal interests? Did not we as youngsters fully realize that the House of Habsburg
did not, and could not, have any love for us Germans?
What history taught us about the policy followed by the House of Habsburg was
corroborated by our own everyday experiences. In the north and in the south the poison
of foreign races was eating into the body of our people, and even Vienna was steadily
becoming more and more a non-German city. The 'Imperial House' favoured the Czechs
on every possible occasion. Indeed it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and
inexorable retribution that caused the most deadly enemy of Germanism in Austria, the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to fall by the very bullets which he himself had helped to
cast. Working from above downwards, he was the chief patron of the movement to
make Austria a Slav State.
The burdens laid on the shoulders of the German people were enormous and the
sacrifices of money and blood which they had to make were incredibly heavy.
Yet anybody who was not quite blind must have seen that it was all in vain. What
affected us most bitterly was the consciousness of the fact that this whole system was
morally shielded by the alliance with Germany, whereby the slow extirpation of
Germanism in the old Austrian Monarchy seemed in some way to be more or less
sanctioned by Germany herself. Habsburg hypocrisy, which endeavoured outwardly to
make the people believe that Austria still remained a German State, increased the
feeling of hatred against the Imperial House and at the same time aroused a spirit of
rebellion and contempt.
But in the German Empire itself those who were then its rulers saw nothing of what all
this meant. As if struck blind, they stood beside a corpse and in the very symptoms of
decomposition they believed that they recognized the signs of a renewed vitality. In
that unhappy alliance between the young German Empire and the illusory Austrian
State lay the germ of the World War and also of the final collapse.
In the subsequent pages of this book I shall go to the root of the problem. Suffice it to
say here that in the very early years of my youth I came to certain conclusions which I
have never abandoned. Indeed I became more profoundly convinced of them as the
years passed. They were: That the dissolution of the Austrian Empire is a preliminary
condition for the defence of Germany; further, that national feeling is by no means
identical with dynastic patriotism; finally, and above all, that the House of Habsburg
was destined to bring misfortune to the German nation.
As a logical consequence of these convictions, there arose in me a feeling of intense love
for my German-Austrian home and a profound hatred for the Austrian State.
That kind of historical thinking which was developed in me through my study of
history at school never left me afterwards. World history became more and more an
inexhaustible source for the understanding of contemporary historical events, which
means politics. Therefore I will not "learn" politics but let politics teach me.
A precocious revolutionary in politics I was no less a precocious revolutionary in art. At
that time the provincial capital of Upper Austria had a theatre which, relatively
speaking, was not bad. Almost everything was played there. When I was twelve years
old I saw William Tell performed. That was my first experience of the theatre. Some
months later I attended a performance of LOHENGRIN, the first opera I had ever
heard. I was fascinated at once. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew
no limits. Again and again I was drawn to hear his operas; and to-day I consider it a
great piece of luck that these modest productions in the little provincial city prepared
the way and made it possible for me to appreciate the better productions later on.
But all this helped to intensify my profound aversion for the career that my father had
chosen for me; and this dislike became especially strong as the rough corners of
youthful boorishness became worn off, a process which in my case caused a good deal
of pain. I became more and more convinced that I should never be happy as a State
official. And now that the REALSCHULE had recognized and acknowledged my
aptitude for drawing, my own resolution became all the stronger. Imprecations and
threats had no longer any chance of changing it. I wanted to become a painter and no
power in the world could force me to become a civil servant. The only peculiar feature
of the situation now was that as I grew bigger I became more and more interested in
architecture. I considered this fact as a natural development of my flair for painting and
I rejoiced inwardly that the sphere of my artistic interests was thus enlarged. I had no
notion that one day it would have to be otherwise.
The question of my career was decided much sooner than I could have expected.
When I was in my thirteenth year my father was suddenly taken from us. He was still
in robust health when a stroke of apoplexy painlessly ended his earthly wanderings and
left us all deeply bereaved. His most ardent longing was to be able to help his son to
advance in a career and thus save me from the harsh ordeal that he himself had to go
through. But it appeared to him then as if that longing were all in vain. And yet, though
he himself was not conscious of it, he had sown the seeds of a future which neither of us
foresaw at that time.
At first nothing changed outwardly.
My mother felt it her duty to continue my education in accordance with my father's
wishes, which meant that she would have me study for the civil service. For my own
part I was even more firmly determined than ever before that under no circumstances
would I become an official of the State. The curriculum and teaching methods followed
in the middle school were so far removed from my ideals that I became profoundly
indifferent. Illness suddenly came to my assistance. Within a few weeks it decided my
future and put an end to the long-standing family conflict. My lungs became so
seriously affected that the doctor advised my mother very strongly not under any
circumstances to allow me to take up a career which would necessitate working in an
office. He ordered that I should give up attendance at the REALSCHULE for a year at
least. What I had secretly desired for such a long time, and had persistently fought for,
now became a reality almost at one stroke.
Influenced by my illness, my mother agreed that I should leave the REALSCHULE and
attend the Academy.
Those were happy days, which appeared to me almost as a dream; but they were bound
to remain only a dream. Two years later my mother's death put a brutal end to all my
fine projects. She succumbed to a long and painful illness which from the very
beginning permitted little hope of recovery. Though expected, her death came as a
terrible blow to me. I respected my father, but I loved my mother.
Poverty and stern reality forced me to decide promptly.
The meagre resources of the family had been almost entirely used up through my
mother's severe illness. The allowance which came to me as an orphan was not enough
for the bare necessities of life. Somehow or other I would have to earn my own bread.
With my clothes and linen packed in a valise and with an indomitable resolution in my
heart, I left for Vienna. I hoped to forestall fate, as my father had done fifty years before.
I was determined to become 'something'--but certainly not a civil servant.
[Note 1. In order to understand the reference here, and similar references in later
portions of MEIN KAMPF, the following must be borne in mind:
From 1792 to 1814 the French Revolutionary Armies overran Germany. In 1800 Bavaria
shared in the Austrian defeat at Hohenlinden and the French occupied Munich. In 1805
the Bavarian Elector was made King of Bavaria by Napoleon and stipulated to back up
Napoleon in all his wars with a force of 30,000 men. Thus Bavaria became the absolute
vassal of the French. This was 'TheTime of Germany's Deepest Humiliation', Which is
referred to again and again by Hitler.
In 1806 a pamphlet entitled 'Germany's Deepest Humiliation' was published in South
Germany. Amnng those who helped to circulate the pamphlet was the Nürnberg
bookseller, Johannes Philipp Palm. He was denounced to the French by a Bavarian
police agent. At his trial he refused to disclose thename of the author. By Napoleon's
orders, he was shot at Braunau-on-the-Innon August 26th, 1806. A monument erected
to him on the site of the executionwas one of the first public objects that made an
impression on Hitler asa little boy.
Leo Schlageter's case was in many respects parallel to that of Johannes Palm. Schlageter
was a German theological student who volunteered for service in 1914. He became an
artillery officer and won the Iron Cross of both classes. When the French occupied the
Ruhr in 1923 Schlageter helped to organize the passive resistance on the German side.
He and his companions blew up a railway bridge for the purpose of making the
transport of coal to France more difficult.
Those who took part in the affair were denounced to the French by a German informer.
Schlageter took the whole responsibility on his own shoulders and was condemned to
death, his companions being sentenced to various terms of imprisonment and penal
servitude by the French Court. Schlageter refused to disclose the identity of those who
issued the order to blow up the railway bridge and he would not plead for mercy before
a French Court. He was shot by a French firing-squad on May 26th, 1923. Severing was
at that time German Minister of the Interior. It is said that representations were made,
to himon Schlageter's behalf and that he refused to interfere.
Schlageter has become the chief martyr of the German resistancc to the French
occupation of the Ruhr and also one of the great heroes of the National Socialist
Movement. He had joined the Movement at a very early stage, his card of membership
bearing the number 61.]
[Note 2. Non-classical secondary school. The Lyceum and GYMNASIUM were classical
or semi-classical secondary schools.]
[Note 3. See Translator's Introduction.]
[Note 4. When Francis II had laid down his title as Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empireof the German Nation, which he did at the command of Napoleon, the
Crownand Mace, as the Imperial Insignia, were kept in Vienna. After the German
Empire was refounded, in 1871, under William I, there were many demands tohave the
Insignia transferred to Berlin. But these went unheeded. Hitler had them brought to
Germany after the Austrian Anschluss and displayed at Nuremberg during the Party
Congress in September 1938.]
Chapter 2
Years Of Study And Suffering In Vienna
WHEN MY mother died my fate had already been decided in one respect. During the
last months of her illness I went to Vienna to take the entrance examination for the
Academy of Fine Arts. Armed with a bulky packet of sketches, I felt convinced that I
should pass the examination quite easily. At the REALSCHULE I was by far the best
student in the drawing class, and since that time I had made more than ordinary
progress in the practice of drawing. Therefore I was pleased with myself and was proud
and happy at the prospect of what I considered an assured success.
But there was one misgiving: It seemed to me that I was better qualified for drawing
than for painting, especially in the various branches of architectural drawing. At the
same time my interest in architecture was constantly increasing. And I advanced in this
direction at a still more rapid pace after my first visit to Vienna, which lasted two
weeks. I was not yet sixteen years old. I went to the Hof Museum to study the paintings
in the art gallery there; but the building itself captured almost all my interest, from early
morning until late at night I spent all my time visiting the various public buildings. And
it was the buildings themselves that were always the principal attraction for me. For
hours and hours I could stand in wonderment before the Opera and the Parliament. The
whole Ring Strasse had a magic effect upon me, as if it were a scene from the Thousandand-one-Nights.
And now I was here for the second time in this beautiful city, impatiently waiting to
hear the result of the entrance examination but proudly confident that I had got
through. I was so convinced of my success that when the news that I had failed to pass
was brought to me it struck me like a bolt from the skies. Yet the fact was that I had
failed. I went to see the Rector and asked him to explain the reasons why they refused
to accept me as a student in the general School of Painting, which was part of the
Academy. He said that the sketches which I had brought with me unquestionably
showed that painting was not what I was suited for but that the same sketches gave
clear indications of my aptitude for architectural designing. Therefore the School of
Painting did not come into question for me but rather the School of Architecture, which
also formed part of the Academy. At first it was impossible to understand how this
could be so, seeing that I had never been to a school for architecture and had never
received any instruction in architectural designing.
When I left the Hansen Palace, on the SCHILLER PLATZ, I was quite crestfallen. I felt
out of sorts with myself for the first time in my young life. For what I had heard about
my capabilities now appeared to me as a lightning flash which clearly revealed a
dualism under which I had been suffering for a long time, but hitherto I could give no
clear account whatsoever of the why and wherefore.
Within a few days I myself also knew that I ought to become an architect. But of course
the way was very difficult. I was now forced bitterly to rue my former conduct in
neglecting and despising certain subjects at the REALSCHULE. Before taking up the
courses at the School of Architecture in the Academy it was necessary to attend the
Technical Building School; but a necessary qualification for entrance into this school
was a Leaving Certificate from the Middle School. And this I simply did not have.
According to the human measure of things my dream of following an artistic calling
seemed beyond the limits of possibility.
After the death of my mother I came to Vienna for the third time. This visit was
destined to last several years. Since I had been there before I had recovered my old calm
and resoluteness. The former self-assurance had come back, and I had my eyes steadily
fixed on the goal. I would be an architect. Obstacles are placed across our path in life,
not to be boggled at but to be surmounted. And I was fully determined to surmount
these obstacles, having the picture of my father constantly before my mind, who had
raised himself by his own efforts to the position of a civil servant though he was the
poor son of a village shoemaker. I had a better start, and the possibilities of struggling
through were better. At that time my lot in life seemed to me a harsh one; but to-day I
see in it the wise workings of Providence. The Goddess of Fate clutched me in her
hands and often threatened to smash me; but the will grew stronger as the obstacles
increased, and finally the will triumphed.
I am thankful for that period of my life, because it hardened me and enabled me to be as
tough as I now am. And I am even more thankful because I appreciate the fact that I
was thus saved from the emptiness of a life of ease and that a mother's darling was
taken from tender arms and handed over to Adversity as to a new mother. Though I
then rebelled against it as too hard a fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a world
of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to
fight.
It was during this period that my eyes were opened to two perils, the names of which I
scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of their terrible significance for
the existence of the German people. These two perils were Marxism and Judaism.
For many people the name of Vienna signifies innocent jollity, a festive place for happy
mortals. For me, alas, it is a living memory of the saddest period in my life. Even to-day
the mention of that city arouses only gloomy thoughts in my mind. Five years of
poverty in that Phaecian (Note 5) town. Five years in which, first as a casual labourer
and then as a painter of little trifles, I had to earn my daily bread. And a meagre morsel
indeed it was, not even sufficient to still the hunger which I constantly felt. That hunger
was the faithful guardian which never left me but took part in everything I did. Every
book that I bought meant renewed hunger, and every visit I paid to the opera meant the
intrusion of that inalienabl companion during the following days. I was always
struggling with my unsympathic friend. And yet during that time I learned more than I
had ever learned before. Outside my architectural studies and rare visits to the opera,
for which I had to deny myself food, I had no other pleasure in life except my books.
I read a great deal then, and I pondered deeply over what I read. All the free time after
work was devoted exclusively to study. Thus within a few years I was able to acquire a
stock of knowledge which I find useful even to-day.
But more than that. During those years a view of life and a definite outlook on the
world took shape in my mind. These became the granite basis of my conduct at that
time. Since then I have extended that foundation only very little, and I have changed
nothing in it.
On the contrary: I am firmly convinced to-day that, generally speaking, it is in youth
that men lay the essential groundwork of their creative thought, wherever that creative
thought exists. I make a distinction between the wisdom of age--which can only arise
from the greater profundity and foresight that are based on the experiences of a long
life--and the creative genius of youth, which blossoms out in thought and ideas with
inexhaustible fertility, without being able to put these into practice immediately,
because of their very superabundance. These furnish the building materials and plans
for the future; and it is from them that age takes the stones and builds the edifice, unless
the so-called wisdom of the years may have smothered the creative genius of youth.
The life which I had hitherto led at home with my parents differed in little or nothing
from that of all the others. I looked forward without apprehension to the morrow, and
there was no such thing as a social problem to be faced. Those among whom I passed
my young days belonged to the small bourgeois class. Therefore it was a world that had
very little contact with the world of genuine manual labourers. For, though at first this
may appear astonishing, the ditch which separates that class, which is by no means
economically well-off; from the manual labouring class is often deeper than people
think. The reason for this division, which we may almost call enmity, lies in the fear that
dominates a social group which has only just risen above the level of the manual
labourer--a fear lest it may fall back into its old condition or at least be classed with the
labourers. Moreover, there is something repulsive in remembering the cultural
indigence of that lower class and their rough manners with one another; so that people
who are only on the first rung of the social ladder find it unbearable to be forced to have
any contact with the cultural level and standard of living out of which they have
passed.
And so it happens that very often those who belong to what can really be called the
upper classes find it much easier than do the upstarts to descend to and intermingle
with their fellow beings on the lowest social level. For by the word upstart I mean
everyone who has raised himself through his own efforts to a social level higher than
that to which he formerly belonged. In the case of such a person the hard struggle
through which he passes often destroys his normal human sympathy. His own fight for
existence kills his sensibility for the misery of those who have been left behind.
From this point of view fate had been kind to me. Circumstances forced me to return to
that world of poverty and economic insecurity above which my father had raised
himself in his early days; and thus the blinkers of a narrow PETIT BOURGEOIS
education were torn from my eyes. Now for the first time I learned to know men and I
learned to distinguish between empty appearances or brutal manners and the real inner
nature of the people who outwardly appeared thus.
At the beginning of the century Vienna had already taken rank among those cities
where social conditions are iniquitous. Dazzling riches and loathsome destitution were
intermingled in violent contrast. In the centre and in the Inner City one felt the pulsebeat of an Empire which had a population of fifty-two millions, with all the perilous
charm of a State made up of multiple nationalities. The dazzling splendour of the Court
acted like a magnet on the wealth and intelligence of the whole Empire. And this
attraction was further strengthened by the dynastic policy of the Habsburg Monarchy in
centralizing everything in itself and for itself.
This centralizing policy was necessary in order to hold together that hotchpotch of
heterogeneous nationalities. But the result of it was an extraordinary concentration of
higher officials in the city, which was at one and the same time the metropolis and
imperial residence.
But Vienna was not merely the political and intellectual centre of the Danubian
Monarchy; it was also the commercial centre. Besides the horde of military officers of
high rank, State officials, artists and scientists, there was the still vaster horde of
workers. Abject poverty confronted the wealth of the aristocracy and the merchant class
face to face. Thousands of unemployed loitered in front of the palaces on the Ring
Strasse; and below that VIA TRIUMPHALIS of the old Austria the homeless huddled
together in the murk and filth of the canals.
There was hardly any other German city in which the social problem could be studied
better than in Vienna. But here I must utter a warning against the illusion that this
problem can be 'studied' from above downwards. The man who has never been in the
clutches of that crushing viper can never know what its poison is. An attempt to study
it in any other way will result only in superficial talk and sentimental delusions. Both
are harmful. The first because it can never go to the root of the question, the second
because it evades the question entirely. I do not know which is the more nefarious: to
ignore social distress, as do the majority of those who have been favoured by fortune
and those who have risen in the social scale through their own routine labour, or the
equally supercilious and often tactless but always genteel condescension displayed by
people who make a fad of being charitable and who plume themselves on
'sympathising with the people.' Of course such persons sin more than they can imagine
from lack of instinctive understanding. And thus they are astonished to find that the
'social conscience' on which they pride themselves never produces any results, but often
causes their good intentions to be resented; and then they talk of the ingratitude of the
people.
Such persons are slow to learn that here there is no place for merely social activities and
that there can be no expectation of gratitude; for in this connection there is no question
at all of distributing favours but essentially a matter of retributive justice. I was
protected against the temptation to study the social question in the way just mentioned,
for the simple reason that I was forced to live in the midst of poverty-stricken people.
Therefore it was not a question of studying the problem objectively, but rather one of
testing its effects on myself. Though the rabbit came through the ordeal of the
experiment, this must not be taken as evidence of its harmlessness.
When I try to-day to recall the succession of impressions received during that time I
find that I can do so only with approximate completeness. Here I shall describe only the
more essential impressions and those which personally affected me and often staggered
me. And I shall mention the few lessons I then learned from this experience.
At that time it was for the most part not very difficult to find work, because I had to
seek work not as a skilled tradesman but as a so-called extra-hand ready to take any job
that turned up by chance, just for the sake of earning my daily bread.
Thus I found myself in the same situation as all those emigrants who shake the dust of
Europe from their feet, with the cast-iron determination to lay the foundations of a new
existence in the New World and acquire for themselves a new home. Liberated from all
the paralysing prejudices of class and calling, environment and tradition, they enter any
service that opens its doors to them, accepting any work that comes their way, filled
more and more with the idea that honest work never disgraced anybody, no matter
what kind it may be. And so I was resolved to set both feet in what was for me a new
world and push forward on my own road.
I soon found out that there was some kind of work always to be got, but I also learned
that it could just as quickly and easily be lost. The uncertainty of being able to earn a
regular daily livelihood soon appeared to me as the gloomiest feature in this new life
that I had entered.
Although the skilled worker was not so frequently thrown idle on the streets as the
unskilled worker, yet the former was by no means protected against the same fate;
because though he may not have to face hunger as a result of unemployment due to the
lack of demand in the labour market, the lock-out and the strike deprived the skilled
worker of the chance to earn his bread. Here the element of uncertainty in steadily
earning one's daily bread was the bitterest feature of the whole social-economic system
itself.
The country lad who migrates to the big city feels attracted by what has been described
as easy work--which it may be in reality--and few working hours. He is especially
entranced by the magic glimmer spread over the big cities. Accustomed in the country
to earn a steady wage, he has been taught not to quit his former post until a new one is
at least in sight. As there is a great scarcity of agricultural labour, the probability of long
unemployment in the country has been very small. It is a mistake to presume that the
lad who leaves the countryside for the town is not made of such sound material as those
who remain at home to work on the land. On the contrary, experience shows that it is
the more healthy and more vigorous that emigrate, and not the reverse. Among these
emigrants I include not merely those who emigrate to America, but also the servant boy
in the country who decides to leave his native village and migrate to the big city where
he will be a stranger. He is ready to take the risk of an uncertain fate. In most cases he
comes to town with a little money in his pocket and for the first few days he is not
discouraged if he should not have the good fortune to find work. But if he finds a job
and then loses it in a little while, the case is much worse. To find work anew, especially
in winter, is often difficult and indeed sometimes impossible. For the first few weeks
life is still bearable He receives his out-of-work money from his trade union and is thus
enabled to carry on. But when the last of his own money is gone and his trade union
ceases to pay out because of the prolonged unemployment, then comes the real distress.
He now loiters about and is hungry. Often he pawns or sells the last of his belongings.
His clothes begin to get shabby and with the increasing poverty of his outward
appearance he descends to a lower social level and mixes up with a class of human
beings through whom his mind is now poisoned, in addition to his physical misery.
Then he has nowhere to sleep and if that happens in winter, which is very often the
case, he is in dire distress. Finally he gets work. But the old story repeats itself. A second
time the same thing happens. Then a third time; and now it is probably much worse.
Little by little he becomes indifferent to this everlasting insecurity. Finally he grows
used to the repetition. Thus even a man who is normally of industrious habits grows
careless in his whole attitude towards life and gradually becomes an instrument in the
hands of unscrupulous people who exploit him for the sake of their own ignoble aims.
He has been so often thrown out of employment through no fault of his own that he is
now more or less indifferent whether the strike in which he takes part be for the
purpose of securing his economic rights or be aimed at the destruction of the State, the
whole social order and even civilization itself. Though the idea of going on strike may
not be to his natural liking, yet he joins in it out of sheer indifference.
I saw this process exemplified before my eyes in thousands of cases. And the longer I
observed it the greater became my dislike for that mammoth city which greedily
attracts men to its bosom, in order to break them mercilessly in the end. When they
came they still felt themselves in communion with their own people at home; if they
remained that tie was broken.
I was thrown about so much in the life of the metropolis that I experienced the
workings of this fate in my own person and felt the effects of it in my own soul. One
thing stood out clearly before my eyes: It was the sudden changes from work to
idleness and vice versa; so that the constant fluctuations thus caused by earnings and
expenditure finally destroyed the 'sense of thrift for many people and also the habit of
regulating expenditure in an intelligent way. The body appeared to grow accustomed to
the vicissitudes of food and hunger, eating heartily in good times and going hungry in
bad. Indeed hunger shatters all plans for rationing expenditure on a regular scale in
better times when employment is again found. The reason for this is that the
deprivations which the unemployed worker has to endure must be compensated for
psychologically by a persistent mental mirage in which he imagines himself eating
heartily once again. And this dream develops into such a longing that it turns into a
morbid impulse to cast off all self-restraint when work and wages turn up again.
Therefore the moment work is found anew he forgets to regulate the expenditure of his
earnings but spends them to the full without thinking of to-morrow. This leads to
confusion in the little weekly housekeeping budget, because the expenditure is not
rationally planned. When the phenomenon which I have mentioned first happens, the
earnings will last perhaps for five days instead of seven; on subsequent occasions they
will last only for three days; as the habit recurs, the earnings will last scarcely for a day;
and finally they will disappear in one night of feasting.
Often there are wife and children at home. And in many cases it happens that these
become infected by such a way of living, especially if the husband is good to them and
wants to do the best he can for them and loves them in his own way and according to
his own lights. Then the week's earnings are spent in common at home within two or
three days. The family eat and drink together as long as the money lasts and at the end
of the week they hunger together. Then the wife wanders about furtively in the
neighbourhood, borrows a little, and runs up small debts with the shopkeepers in an
effort to pull through the lean days towards the end of the week. They sit down
together to the midday meal with only meagre fare on the table, and often even nothing
to eat. They wait for the coming payday, talking of it and making plans; and while they
are thus hungry they dream of the plenty that is to come. And so the little children
become acquainted with misery in their early years.

IT HAS turned out fortunate for me to-day that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn
to be my birthplace. For that little town is situated just on the frontier between those
two States the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to
which we should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means
should be employed.
German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not indeed on
any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever. No, no. Even if the union were a
matter of economic indifference, and even if it were to be disadvantageous from the
economic standpoint, still it ought to take place. People of the same blood should be in
the same REICH. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy
until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State. When the
territory of the REICH embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them
a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire
foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the
daily bread for the generations to come.
And so this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great task. But in
another regard also it points to a lesson that is applicable to our day. Over a hundred
years ago this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the
whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German
history. At the time of our Fatherland's deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes
Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here
because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to
disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly
responsible for the affair. Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the
latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a director of police
from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example
which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the REICH under
Herr Severing's regime (Note 1).
In this little town on the Inn, haloed by the memory of a German martyr, a town that
was Bavarian by blood but under the rule of the Austrian State, my parents were
domiciled towards the end of the last century. My father was a civil servant who
fulfilled his duties very conscientiously. My mother looked after the household and
lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children. From that period I have not retained
very much in my memory; because after a few years my father had to leave that frontier
town which I had come to love so much and take up a new post farther down the Inn
valley, at Passau, therefore actually in Germany itself.
In those days it was the usual lot of an Austrian civil servant to be transferred
periodically from one post to another. Not long after coming to Passau my father was
transferred to Linz, and while there he retired finally to live on his pension. But this did
not mean that the old gentleman would now rest from his labours.
He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew restless and left home.
When he was barely thirteen years old he buckled on his satchel and set forth from his
native woodland parish. Despite the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from
'experience,' he went to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fiftieth year of the
last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and face the unknown,
with three gulden in his pocket. By when the boy of thirteen was a lad of seventeen and
had passed his apprenticeship examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the
contrary. The persistent economic depression of that period and the constant want and
misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and strive for
'something higher.' As a boy it had seemed to him that the position of the parish priest
in his native village was the highest in the scale of human attainment; but now that the
big city had enlarged his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State
official as the highest of all. With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble had
already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man of seventeen
obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it until he won through. He became a
civil servant. He was about twenty-three years old, I think, when he succeeded in
making himself what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise
he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he was 'somebody.'
He had gained his end. But in the village there was nobody who had remembered him
as a little boy, and the village itself had become strange to him.
Now at last, when he was fifty-six years old, he gave up his active career; but he could
not bear to be idle for a single day. On the outskirts of the small market town of
Lambach in Upper Austria he bought a farm and tilled it himself. Thus, at the end of a
long and hard-working career, he came back to the life which his father had led.
It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own. I spent a good deal of
time scampering about in the open, on the long road from school, and mixing up with
some of the roughest of the boys, which caused my mother many anxious moments. All
this tended to make me something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely
any serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I was certainly
quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my father had followed. I think
that an inborn talent for speaking now began to develop and take shape during the
more or less strenuous arguments which I used to have with my comrades. I had
become a juvenile ringleader who learned well and easily at school but was rather
difficult to manage. In my freetime I practised singing in the choir of the monastery
church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed in a very favourable
position to be emotionally impressed again and again by the magnificent splendour of
ecclesiastical ceremonial. What could be more natural for me than to look upon the
Abbot as representing the highest human ideal worth striving for, just as the position of
the humble village priest had appeared to my father in his own boyhood days? At least,
that was my idea for a while. But the juvenile disputes I had with my father did not lead
him to appreciate his son's oratorical gifts in such a way as to see in them a favourable
promise for such a career, and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I
had in my head at that time. This contradiction in my character made him feel
somewhat anxious.
As a matter of fact, that transitory yearning after such a vocation soon gave way to
hopes that were better suited to my temperament. Browsing through my father's books,
I chanced to come across some publications that dealt with military subjects. One of
these publications was a popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It
consisted of two volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. These
became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic conflict began to
take first place in my mind. And from that time onwards I became more and more
enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or military
affairs.
But this story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for me on other
grounds also. For the first time, and as yet only in quite a vague way, the question
began to present itself: Is there a difference--and if there be, what is it--between the
Germans who fought that war and the other Germans? Why did not Austria also take
part in it? Why did not my father and all the others fight in that struggle? Are we not
the same as the other Germans? Do we not all belong together?
That was the first time that this problem began to agitate my small brain. And from the
replies that were given to the questions which I asked very tentatively, I was forced to
accept the fact, though with a secret envy, that not all Germans had the good luck to
belong to Bismarck's Empire. This was something that I could not understand.
It was decided that I should study. Considering my character as a whole, and especially
my temperament, my father decided that the classical subjects studied at the Lyceum
were not suited to my natural talents. He thought that the REALSCHULE (Note 2)
would suit me better. My obvious talent for drawing confirmed him in that view; for in
his opinion drawing was a subject too much neglected in the Austrian GYMNASIUM.
Probably also the memory of the hard road which he himself had travelled contributed
to make him look upon classical studies as unpractical and accordingly to set little value
on them. At the back of his mind he had the idea that his son also should become an
official of the Government. Indeed he had decided on that career for me. The difficulties
through which he had to struggle in making his own career led him to overestimate
what he had achieved, because this was exclusively the result of his own indefatigable
industry and energy. The characteristic pride of the self-made man urged him towards
the idea that his son should follow the same calling and if possible rise to a higher
position in it. Moreover, this idea was strengthened by the consideration that the results
of his own life's industry had placed him in a position to facilitate his son's
advancement in the same career.
He was simply incapable of imagining that I might reject what had meant everything in
life to him. My father's decision was simple, definite, clear and, in his eyes, it was
something to be taken for granted. A man of such a nature who had become an autocrat
by reason of his own hard struggle for existence, could not think of allowing
'inexperienced' and irresponsible young fellows to choose their own careers. To act in
such a way, where the future of his own son was concerned, would have been a grave
and reprehensible weakness in the exercise of parental authority and responsibility,
something utterly incompatible with his characteristic sense of duty.
And yet it had to be otherwise.
For the first time in my life--I was then eleven years old--I felt myself forced into open
opposition. No matter how hard and determined my father might be about putting his
own plans and opinions into action, his son was no less obstinate in refusing to accept
ideas on which he set little or no value.
I would not become a civil servant.
No amount of persuasion and no amount of 'grave' warnings could break down that
opposition. I would not become a State official, not on any account. All the attempts
which my father made to arouse in me a love or liking for that profession, by picturing
his own career for me, had only the opposite effect. It nauseated me to think that one
day I might be fettered to an office stool, that I could not dispose of my own time but
would be forced to spend the whole of my life filling out forms.
One can imagine what kind of thoughts such a prospect awakened in the mind of a
young fellow who was by no means what is called a 'good boy' in the current sense of
that term. The ridiculously easy school tasks which we were given made it possible for
me to spend far more time in the open air than at home. To-day, when my political
opponents pry into my life with diligent scrutiny, as far back as the days of my
boyhood, so as finally to be able to prove what disreputable tricks this Hitler was
accustomed to in his young days, I thank heaven that I can look back to those happy
days and find the memory of them helpful. The fields and the woods were then the
terrain on which all disputes were fought out.
Even attendance at the REALSCHULE could not alter my way of spending my time. But
I had now another battle to fight.
So long as the paternal plan to make a State functionary contradicted my own
inclinations only in the abstract, the conflict was easy to bear. I could be discreet about
expressing my personal views and thus avoid constantly recurrent disputes. My own
resolution not to become a Government official was sufficient for the time being to put
my mind completely at rest. I held on to that resolution inexorably. But the situation
became more difficult once I had a positive plan of my own which I might present to
my father as a counter-suggestion. This happened when I was twelve years old. How it
came about I cannot exactly say now; but one day it became clear to me that I would be
a painter--I mean an artist. That I had an aptitude for drawing was an admitted fact. It
was even one of the reasons why my father had sent me to the REALSCHULE; but he
had never thought of having that talent developed in such a way that I could take up
painting as a professional career. Quite the contrary. When, as a result of my renewed
refusal to adopt his favourite plan, my father asked me for the first time what I myself
really wished to be, the resolution that I had already formed expressed itself almost
automatically. For a while my father was speechless. "A painter? An artist-painter?" he
exclaimed.
He wondered whether I was in a sound state of mind. He thought that he might not
have caught my words rightly, or that he had misunderstood what I meant. But when I
had explained my ideas to him and he saw how seriously I took them, he opposed them
with that full determination which was characteristic of him. His decision was
exceedingly simple and could not be deflected from its course by any consideration of
what my own natural qualifications really were.
"Artist! Not as long as I live, never." As the son had inherited some of the father's
obstinacy, besides having other qualities of his own, my reply was equally energetic.
But it stated something quite the contrary.
At that our struggle became stalemate. The father would not abandon his 'Never', and I
became all the more consolidated in my 'Nevertheless'.
Naturally the resulting situation was not pleasant. The old gentleman was bitterly
annoyed; and indeed so was I, although I really loved him. My father forbade me to
entertain any hopes of taking up the art of painting as a profession. I went a step further
and declared that I would not study anything else. With such declarations the situation
became still more strained, so that the old gentleman irrevocably decided to assert his
parental authority at all costs. That led me to adopt an attitude of circumspect silence,
but I put my threat into execution. I thought that, once it became clear to my father that
I was making no progress at the REALSCHULE, for weal or for woe, he would be
forced to allow me to follow the happy career I had dreamed of.
I do not know whether I calculated rightly or not. Certainly my failure to make progress
became quite visible in the school. I studied just the subjects that appealed to me,
especially those which I thought might be of advantage to me later on as a painter.
What did not appear to have any importance from this point of view, or what did not
otherwise appeal to me favourably, I completely sabotaged. My school reports of that
time were always in the extremes of good or bad, according to the subject and the
interest it had for me. In one column my qualification read 'very good' or 'excellent'. In
another it read 'average' or even 'below average'. By far my best subjects were
geography and, even more so, general history. These were my two favourite subjects,
and I led the class in them.
When I look back over so many years and try to judge the results of that experience I
find two very significant facts standing out clearly before my mind.
First, I became a nationalist.
Second, I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.
The old Austria was a multi-national State. In those days at least the citizens of the
German Empire, taken through and through, could not understand what that fact
meant in the everyday life of the individuals within such a State. After the magnificent
triumphant march of the victorious armies in the Franco-German War the Germans in
the REICH became steadily more and more estranged from the Germans beyond their
frontiers, partly because they did not deign to appreciate those other Germans at their
true value or simply because they were incapable of doing so.
The Germans of the REICH did not realize that if the Germans in Austria had not been
of the best racial stock they could never have given the stamp of their own character to
an Empire of 52 millions, so definitely that in Germany itself the idea arose--though
quite an erroneous one--that Austria was a German State. That was an error which led
to dire consequences; but all the same it was a magnificent testimony to the character of
the ten million Germans in that East Mark. (Note 3) Only very few of the Germans in
the REICH itself had an idea of the bitter struggle which those Eastern Germans had to
carry on daily for the preservation of their German language, their German schools and
their German character. Only to-day, when a tragic fate has torn several millions of our
kinsfolk away from the REICH and has forced them to live under the rule of the
stranger, dreaming of that common fatherland towards which all their yearnings are
directed and struggling to uphold at least the sacred right of using their mother tongue-
-only now have the wider circles of the German population come to realize what it
means to have to fight for the traditions of one's race. And so at last perhaps there are
people here and there who can assess the greatness of that German spirit which
animated the old East Mark and enabled those people, left entirely dependent on their
own resources, to defend the Empire against the Orient for several centuries and
subsequently to hold fast the frontiers of the German language through a guerilla
warfare of attrition, at a time when the German Empire was sedulously cultivating an
interest for colonies but not for its own flesh and blood before the threshold of its own
door.
What has happened always and everywhere, in every kind of struggle, happened also
in the language fight which was carried on in the old Austria. There were three groups--
the fighters, the hedgers and the traitors. Even in the schools this sifting already began
to take place. And it is worth noting that the struggle for the language was waged
perhaps in its bitterest form around the school; because this was the nursery where the
seeds had to be watered which were to spring up and form the future generation. The
tactical objective of the fight was the winning over of the child, and it was to the child
that the first rallying cry was addressed:
"German youth, do not forget that you are a German," and "Remember, little girl, that
one day you must be a German mother."
Those who know something of the juvenile spirit can understand how youth will
always lend a glad ear to such a rallying cry. Under many forms the young people led
the struggle, fighting in their own way and with their own weapons. They refused to
sing non-German songs. The greater the efforts made to win them away from their
German allegiance, the more they exalted the glory of their German heroes. They
stinted themselves in buying things to eat, so that they might spare their pennies to help
the war chest of their elders. They were incredibly alert in the significance of what the
non-German teachers said and they contradicted in unison. They wore the forbidden
emblems of their own kinsfolk and were happy when penalised for doing so, or even
physically punished. In miniature they were mirrors of loyalty from which the older
people might learn a lesson.
And thus it was that at a comparatively early age I took part in the struggle which the
nationalities were waging against one another in the old Austria. When meetings were
held for the South Mark German League and the School League we wore cornflowers
and black-red-gold colours to express our loyalty. We greeted one another with HEIL!
and instead of the Austrian anthem we sang our own DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES,
despite warnings and penalties. Thus the youth were educated politically at a time
when the citizens of a so-called national State for the most part knew little of their own
nationality except the language. Of course, I did not belong to the hedgers. Within a
little while I had become an ardent 'German National', which has a different meaning
from the party significance attached to that phrase to-day.
I developed very rapidly in the nationalist direction, and by the time I was 15 years old
I had come to understand the distinction between dynastic patriotism and nationalism
based on the concept of folk, or people, my inclination being entirely in favour of the
latter.
Such a preference may not perhaps be clearly intelligible to those who have never taken
the trouble to study the internal conditions that prevailed under the Habsburg
Monarchy.
Among historical studies universal history was the subject almost exclusively taught in
the Austrian schools, for of specific Austrian history there was only very little. The fate
of this State was closely bound up with the existence and development of Germany as a
whole; so a division of history into German history and Austrian history would be
practically inconceivable. And indeed it was only when the German people came to be
divided between two States that this division of German history began to take place.
The insignia (Note 4) of a former imperial sovereignty which were still preserved in
Vienna appeared to act as magical relics rather than as the visible guarantee of an
everlasting bond of union.
When the Habsburg State crumbled to pieces in 1918 the Austrian Germans
instinctively raised an outcry for union with their German fatherland. That was the
voice of a unanimous yearning in the hearts of the whole people for a return to the
unforgotten home of their fathers. But such a general yearning could not be explained
except by attributing the cause of it to the historical training through which the
individual Austrian Germans had passed. Therein lay a spring that never dried up.
Especially in times of distraction and forgetfulness its quiet voice was a reminder of the
past, bidding the people to look out beyond the mere welfare of the moment to a new
future.
The teaching of universal history in what are called the middle schools is still very
unsatisfactory. Few teachers realize that the purpose of teaching history is not the
memorizing of some dates and facts, that the student is not interested in knowing the
exact date of a battle or the birthday of some marshal or other, and not at all--or at least
only very insignificantly--interested in knowing when the crown of his fathers was
placed on the brow of some monarch. These are certainly not looked upon as important
matters.
To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are the causes of those
results which appear before our eyes as historical events. The art of reading and
studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.
Probably my whole future life was determined by the fact that I had a professor of
history who understood, as few others understand, how to make this viewpoint prevail
in teaching and in examining. This teacher was Dr. Leopold Poetsch, of the
REALSCHULE at Linz. He was the ideal personification of the qualities necessary to a
teacher of history in the sense I have mentioned above. An elderly gentleman with a
decisive manner but a kindly heart, he was a very attractive speaker and was able to
inspire us with his own enthusiasm. Even to-day I cannot recall without emotion that
venerable personality whose enthusiastic exposition of history so often made us entirely
forget the present and allow ourselves to be transported as if by magic into the past. He
penetrated through the dim mist of thousands of years and transformed the historical
memory of the dead past into a living reality. When we listened to him we became afire
with enthusiasm and we were sometimes moved even to tears.
It was still more fortunate that this professor was able not only to illustrate the past by
examples from the present but from the past he was also able to draw a lesson for the
present. He understood better than any other the everyday problems that were then
agitating our minds. The national fervour which we felt in our own small way was
utilized by him as an instrument of our education, inasmuch as he often appealed to our
national sense of honour; for in that way he maintained order and held our attention
much more easily than he could have done by any other means. It was because I had
such a professor that history became my favourite subject. As a natural consequence,
but without the conscious connivance of my professor, I then and there became a young
rebel. But who could have studied German history under such a teacher and not
become an enemy of that State whose rulers exercised such a disastrous influence on the
destinies of the German nation? Finally, how could one remain the faithful subject of
the House of Habsburg, whose past history and present conduct proved it to be ready
ever and always to betray the interests of the German people for the sake of paltry
personal interests? Did not we as youngsters fully realize that the House of Habsburg
did not, and could not, have any love for us Germans?
What history taught us about the policy followed by the House of Habsburg was
corroborated by our own everyday experiences. In the north and in the south the poison
of foreign races was eating into the body of our people, and even Vienna was steadily
becoming more and more a non-German city. The 'Imperial House' favoured the Czechs
on every possible occasion. Indeed it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and
inexorable retribution that caused the most deadly enemy of Germanism in Austria, the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to fall by the very bullets which he himself had helped to
cast. Working from above downwards, he was the chief patron of the movement to
make Austria a Slav State.
The burdens laid on the shoulders of the German people were enormous and the
sacrifices of money and blood which they had to make were incredibly heavy.
Yet anybody who was not quite blind must have seen that it was all in vain. What
affected us most bitterly was the consciousness of the fact that this whole system was
morally shielded by the alliance with Germany, whereby the slow extirpation of
Germanism in the old Austrian Monarchy seemed in some way to be more or less
sanctioned by Germany herself. Habsburg hypocrisy, which endeavoured outwardly to
make the people believe that Austria still remained a German State, increased the
feeling of hatred against the Imperial House and at the same time aroused a spirit of
rebellion and contempt.
But in the German Empire itself those who were then its rulers saw nothing of what all
this meant. As if struck blind, they stood beside a corpse and in the very symptoms of
decomposition they believed that they recognized the signs of a renewed vitality. In
that unhappy alliance between the young German Empire and the illusory Austrian
State lay the germ of the World War and also of the final collapse.
In the subsequent pages of this book I shall go to the root of the problem. Suffice it to
say here that in the very early years of my youth I came to certain conclusions which I
have never abandoned. Indeed I became more profoundly convinced of them as the
years passed. They were: That the dissolution of the Austrian Empire is a preliminary
condition for the defence of Germany; further, that national feeling is by no means
identical with dynastic patriotism; finally, and above all, that the House of Habsburg
was destined to bring misfortune to the German nation.
As a logical consequence of these convictions, there arose in me a feeling of intense love
for my German-Austrian home and a profound hatred for the Austrian State.
That kind of historical thinking which was developed in me through my study of
history at school never left me afterwards. World history became more and more an
inexhaustible source for the understanding of contemporary historical events, which
means politics. Therefore I will not "learn" politics but let politics teach me.
A precocious revolutionary in politics I was no less a precocious revolutionary in art. At
that time the provincial capital of Upper Austria had a theatre which, relatively
speaking, was not bad. Almost everything was played there. When I was twelve years
old I saw William Tell performed. That was my first experience of the theatre. Some
months later I attended a performance of LOHENGRIN, the first opera I had ever
heard. I was fascinated at once. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew
no limits. Again and again I was drawn to hear his operas; and to-day I consider it a
great piece of luck that these modest productions in the little provincial city prepared
the way and made it possible for me to appreciate the better productions later on.
But all this helped to intensify my profound aversion for the career that my father had
chosen for me; and this dislike became especially strong as the rough corners of
youthful boorishness became worn off, a process which in my case caused a good deal
of pain. I became more and more convinced that I should never be happy as a State
official. And now that the REALSCHULE had recognized and acknowledged my
aptitude for drawing, my own resolution became all the stronger. Imprecations and
threats had no longer any chance of changing it. I wanted to become a painter and no
power in the world could force me to become a civil servant. The only peculiar feature
of the situation now was that as I grew bigger I became more and more interested in
architecture. I considered this fact as a natural development of my flair for painting and
I rejoiced inwardly that the sphere of my artistic interests was thus enlarged. I had no
notion that one day it would have to be otherwise.
The question of my career was decided much sooner than I could have expected.
When I was in my thirteenth year my father was suddenly taken from us. He was still
in robust health when a stroke of apoplexy painlessly ended his earthly wanderings and
left us all deeply bereaved. His most ardent longing was to be able to help his son to
advance in a career and thus save me from the harsh ordeal that he himself had to go
through. But it appeared to him then as if that longing were all in vain. And yet, though
he himself was not conscious of it, he had sown the seeds of a future which neither of us
foresaw at that time.
At first nothing changed outwardly.
My mother felt it her duty to continue my education in accordance with my father's
wishes, which meant that she would have me study for the civil service. For my own
part I was even more firmly determined than ever before that under no circumstances
would I become an official of the State. The curriculum and teaching methods followed
in the middle school were so far removed from my ideals that I became profoundly
indifferent. Illness suddenly came to my assistance. Within a few weeks it decided my
future and put an end to the long-standing family conflict. My lungs became so
seriously affected that the doctor advised my mother very strongly not under any
circumstances to allow me to take up a career which would necessitate working in an
office. He ordered that I should give up attendance at the REALSCHULE for a year at
least. What I had secretly desired for such a long time, and had persistently fought for,
now became a reality almost at one stroke.
Influenced by my illness, my mother agreed that I should leave the REALSCHULE and
attend the Academy.
Those were happy days, which appeared to me almost as a dream; but they were bound
to remain only a dream. Two years later my mother's death put a brutal end to all my
fine projects. She succumbed to a long and painful illness which from the very
beginning permitted little hope of recovery. Though expected, her death came as a
terrible blow to me. I respected my father, but I loved my mother.
Poverty and stern reality forced me to decide promptly.
The meagre resources of the family had been almost entirely used up through my
mother's severe illness. The allowance which came to me as an orphan was not enough
for the bare necessities of life. Somehow or other I would have to earn my own bread.
With my clothes and linen packed in a valise and with an indomitable resolution in my
heart, I left for Vienna. I hoped to forestall fate, as my father had done fifty years before.
I was determined to become 'something'--but certainly not a civil servant.
[Note 1. In order to understand the reference here, and similar references in later
portions of MEIN KAMPF, the following must be borne in mind:
From 1792 to 1814 the French Revolutionary Armies overran Germany. In 1800 Bavaria
shared in the Austrian defeat at Hohenlinden and the French occupied Munich. In 1805
the Bavarian Elector was made King of Bavaria by Napoleon and stipulated to back up
Napoleon in all his wars with a force of 30,000 men. Thus Bavaria became the absolute
vassal of the French. This was 'TheTime of Germany's Deepest Humiliation', Which is
referred to again and again by Hitler.
In 1806 a pamphlet entitled 'Germany's Deepest Humiliation' was published in South
Germany. Amnng those who helped to circulate the pamphlet was the Nürnberg
bookseller, Johannes Philipp Palm. He was denounced to the French by a Bavarian
police agent. At his trial he refused to disclose thename of the author. By Napoleon's
orders, he was shot at Braunau-on-the-Innon August 26th, 1806. A monument erected
to him on the site of the executionwas one of the first public objects that made an
impression on Hitler asa little boy.
Leo Schlageter's case was in many respects parallel to that of Johannes Palm. Schlageter
was a German theological student who volunteered for service in 1914. He became an
artillery officer and won the Iron Cross of both classes. When the French occupied the
Ruhr in 1923 Schlageter helped to organize the passive resistance on the German side.
He and his companions blew up a railway bridge for the purpose of making the
transport of coal to France more difficult.
Those who took part in the affair were denounced to the French by a German informer.
Schlageter took the whole responsibility on his own shoulders and was condemned to
death, his companions being sentenced to various terms of imprisonment and penal
servitude by the French Court. Schlageter refused to disclose the identity of those who
issued the order to blow up the railway bridge and he would not plead for mercy before
a French Court. He was shot by a French firing-squad on May 26th, 1923. Severing was
at that time German Minister of the Interior. It is said that representations were made,
to himon Schlageter's behalf and that he refused to interfere.
Schlageter has become the chief martyr of the German resistancc to the French
occupation of the Ruhr and also one of the great heroes of the National Socialist
Movement. He had joined the Movement at a very early stage, his card of membership
bearing the number 61.]
[Note 2. Non-classical secondary school. The Lyceum and GYMNASIUM were classical
or semi-classical secondary schools.]
[Note 3. See Translator's Introduction.]
[Note 4. When Francis II had laid down his title as Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empireof the German Nation, which he did at the command of Napoleon, the
Crownand Mace, as the Imperial Insignia, were kept in Vienna. After the German
Empire was refounded, in 1871, under William I, there were many demands tohave the
Insignia transferred to Berlin. But these went unheeded. Hitler had them brought to
Germany after the Austrian Anschluss and displayed at Nuremberg during the Party
Congress in September 1938.]
Chapter 2
Years Of Study And Suffering In Vienna
WHEN MY mother died my fate had already been decided in one respect. During the
last months of her illness I went to Vienna to take the entrance examination for the
Academy of Fine Arts. Armed with a bulky packet of sketches, I felt convinced that I
should pass the examination quite easily. At the REALSCHULE I was by far the best
student in the drawing class, and since that time I had made more than ordinary
progress in the practice of drawing. Therefore I was pleased with myself and was proud
and happy at the prospect of what I considered an assured success.
But there was one misgiving: It seemed to me that I was better qualified for drawing
than for painting, especially in the various branches of architectural drawing. At the
same time my interest in architecture was constantly increasing. And I advanced in this
direction at a still more rapid pace after my first visit to Vienna, which lasted two
weeks. I was not yet sixteen years old. I went to the Hof Museum to study the paintings
in the art gallery there; but the building itself captured almost all my interest, from early
morning until late at night I spent all my time visiting the various public buildings. And
it was the buildings themselves that were always the principal attraction for me. For
hours and hours I could stand in wonderment before the Opera and the Parliament. The
whole Ring Strasse had a magic effect upon me, as if it were a scene from the Thousandand-one-Nights.
And now I was here for the second time in this beautiful city, impatiently waiting to
hear the result of the entrance examination but proudly confident that I had got
through. I was so convinced of my success that when the news that I had failed to pass
was brought to me it struck me like a bolt from the skies. Yet the fact was that I had
failed. I went to see the Rector and asked him to explain the reasons why they refused
to accept me as a student in the general School of Painting, which was part of the
Academy. He said that the sketches which I had brought with me unquestionably
showed that painting was not what I was suited for but that the same sketches gave
clear indications of my aptitude for architectural designing. Therefore the School of
Painting did not come into question for me but rather the School of Architecture, which
also formed part of the Academy. At first it was impossible to understand how this
could be so, seeing that I had never been to a school for architecture and had never
received any instruction in architectural designing.
When I left the Hansen Palace, on the SCHILLER PLATZ, I was quite crestfallen. I felt
out of sorts with myself for the first time in my young life. For what I had heard about
my capabilities now appeared to me as a lightning flash which clearly revealed a
dualism under which I had been suffering for a long time, but hitherto I could give no
clear account whatsoever of the why and wherefore.
Within a few days I myself also knew that I ought to become an architect. But of course
the way was very difficult. I was now forced bitterly to rue my former conduct in
neglecting and despising certain subjects at the REALSCHULE. Before taking up the
courses at the School of Architecture in the Academy it was necessary to attend the
Technical Building School; but a necessary qualification for entrance into this school
was a Leaving Certificate from the Middle School. And this I simply did not have.
According to the human measure of things my dream of following an artistic calling
seemed beyond the limits of possibility.
After the death of my mother I came to Vienna for the third time. This visit was
destined to last several years. Since I had been there before I had recovered my old calm
and resoluteness. The former self-assurance had come back, and I had my eyes steadily
fixed on the goal. I would be an architect. Obstacles are placed across our path in life,
not to be boggled at but to be surmounted. And I was fully determined to surmount
these obstacles, having the picture of my father constantly before my mind, who had
raised himself by his own efforts to the position of a civil servant though he was the
poor son of a village shoemaker. I had a better start, and the possibilities of struggling
through were better. At that time my lot in life seemed to me a harsh one; but to-day I
see in it the wise workings of Providence. The Goddess of Fate clutched me in her
hands and often threatened to smash me; but the will grew stronger as the obstacles
increased, and finally the will triumphed.
I am thankful for that period of my life, because it hardened me and enabled me to be as
tough as I now am. And I am even more thankful because I appreciate the fact that I
was thus saved from the emptiness of a life of ease and that a mother's darling was
taken from tender arms and handed over to Adversity as to a new mother. Though I
then rebelled against it as too hard a fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a world
of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to
fight.
It was during this period that my eyes were opened to two perils, the names of which I
scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of their terrible significance for
the existence of the German people. These two perils were Marxism and Judaism.
For many people the name of Vienna signifies innocent jollity, a festive place for happy
mortals. For me, alas, it is a living memory of the saddest period in my life. Even to-day
the mention of that city arouses only gloomy thoughts in my mind. Five years of
poverty in that Phaecian (Note 5) town. Five years in which, first as a casual labourer
and then as a painter of little trifles, I had to earn my daily bread. And a meagre morsel
indeed it was, not even sufficient to still the hunger which I constantly felt. That hunger
was the faithful guardian which never left me but took part in everything I did. Every
book that I bought meant renewed hunger, and every visit I paid to the opera meant the
intrusion of that inalienabl companion during the following days. I was always
struggling with my unsympathic friend. And yet during that time I learned more than I
had ever learned before. Outside my architectural studies and rare visits to the opera,
for which I had to deny myself food, I had no other pleasure in life except my books.
I read a great deal then, and I pondered deeply over what I read. All the free time after
work was devoted exclusively to study. Thus within a few years I was able to acquire a
stock of knowledge which I find useful even to-day.
But more than that. During those years a view of life and a definite outlook on the
world took shape in my mind. These became the granite basis of my conduct at that
time. Since then I have extended that foundation only very little, and I have changed
nothing in it.
On the contrary: I am firmly convinced to-day that, generally speaking, it is in youth
that men lay the essential groundwork of their creative thought, wherever that creative
thought exists. I make a distinction between the wisdom of age--which can only arise
from the greater profundity and foresight that are based on the experiences of a long
life--and the creative genius of youth, which blossoms out in thought and ideas with
inexhaustible fertility, without being able to put these into practice immediately,
because of their very superabundance. These furnish the building materials and plans
for the future; and it is from them that age takes the stones and builds the edifice, unless
the so-called wisdom of the years may have smothered the creative genius of youth.
The life which I had hitherto led at home with my parents differed in little or nothing
from that of all the others. I looked forward without apprehension to the morrow, and
there was no such thing as a social problem to be faced. Those among whom I passed
my young days belonged to the small bourgeois class. Therefore it was a world that had
very little contact with the world of genuine manual labourers. For, though at first this
may appear astonishing, the ditch which separates that class, which is by no means
economically well-off; from the manual labouring class is often deeper than people
think. The reason for this division, which we may almost call enmity, lies in the fear that
dominates a social group which has only just risen above the level of the manual
labourer--a fear lest it may fall back into its old condition or at least be classed with the
labourers. Moreover, there is something repulsive in remembering the cultural
indigence of that lower class and their rough manners with one another; so that people
who are only on the first rung of the social ladder find it unbearable to be forced to have
any contact with the cultural level and standard of living out of which they have
passed.
And so it happens that very often those who belong to what can really be called the
upper classes find it much easier than do the upstarts to descend to and intermingle
with their fellow beings on the lowest social level. For by the word upstart I mean
everyone who has raised himself through his own efforts to a social level higher than
that to which he formerly belonged. In the case of such a person the hard struggle
through which he passes often destroys his normal human sympathy. His own fight for
existence kills his sensibility for the misery of those who have been left behind.
From this point of view fate had been kind to me. Circumstances forced me to return to
that world of poverty and economic insecurity above which my father had raised
himself in his early days; and thus the blinkers of a narrow PETIT BOURGEOIS
education were torn from my eyes. Now for the first time I learned to know men and I
learned to distinguish between empty appearances or brutal manners and the real inner
nature of the people who outwardly appeared thus.
At the beginning of the century Vienna had already taken rank among those cities
where social conditions are iniquitous. Dazzling riches and loathsome destitution were
intermingled in violent contrast. In the centre and in the Inner City one felt the pulsebeat of an Empire which had a population of fifty-two millions, with all the perilous
charm of a State made up of multiple nationalities. The dazzling splendour of the Court
acted like a magnet on the wealth and intelligence of the whole Empire. And this
attraction was further strengthened by the dynastic policy of the Habsburg Monarchy in
centralizing everything in itself and for itself.
This centralizing policy was necessary in order to hold together that hotchpotch of
heterogeneous nationalities. But the result of it was an extraordinary concentration of
higher officials in the city, which was at one and the same time the metropolis and
imperial residence.
But Vienna was not merely the political and intellectual centre of the Danubian
Monarchy; it was also the commercial centre. Besides the horde of military officers of
high rank, State officials, artists and scientists, there was the still vaster horde of
workers. Abject poverty confronted the wealth of the aristocracy and the merchant class
face to face. Thousands of unemployed loitered in front of the palaces on the Ring
Strasse; and below that VIA TRIUMPHALIS of the old Austria the homeless huddled
together in the murk and filth of the canals.
There was hardly any other German city in which the social problem could be studied
better than in Vienna. But here I must utter a warning against the illusion that this
problem can be 'studied' from above downwards. The man who has never been in the
clutches of that crushing viper can never know what its poison is. An attempt to study
it in any other way will result only in superficial talk and sentimental delusions. Both
are harmful. The first because it can never go to the root of the question, the second
because it evades the question entirely. I do not know which is the more nefarious: to
ignore social distress, as do the majority of those who have been favoured by fortune
and those who have risen in the social scale through their own routine labour, or the
equally supercilious and often tactless but always genteel condescension displayed by
people who make a fad of being charitable and who plume themselves on
'sympathising with the people.' Of course such persons sin more than they can imagine
from lack of instinctive understanding. And thus they are astonished to find that the
'social conscience' on which they pride themselves never produces any results, but often
causes their good intentions to be resented; and then they talk of the ingratitude of the
people.
Such persons are slow to learn that here there is no place for merely social activities and
that there can be no expectation of gratitude; for in this connection there is no question
at all of distributing favours but essentially a matter of retributive justice. I was
protected against the temptation to study the social question in the way just mentioned,
for the simple reason that I was forced to live in the midst of poverty-stricken people.
Therefore it was not a question of studying the problem objectively, but rather one of
testing its effects on myself. Though the rabbit came through the ordeal of the
experiment, this must not be taken as evidence of its harmlessness.
When I try to-day to recall the succession of impressions received during that time I
find that I can do so only with approximate completeness. Here I shall describe only the
more essential impressions and those which personally affected me and often staggered
me. And I shall mention the few lessons I then learned from this experience.
At that time it was for the most part not very difficult to find work, because I had to
seek work not as a skilled tradesman but as a so-called extra-hand ready to take any job
that turned up by chance, just for the sake of earning my daily bread.
Thus I found myself in the same situation as all those emigrants who shake the dust of
Europe from their feet, with the cast-iron determination to lay the foundations of a new
existence in the New World and acquire for themselves a new home. Liberated from all
the paralysing prejudices of class and calling, environment and tradition, they enter any
service that opens its doors to them, accepting any work that comes their way, filled
more and more with the idea that honest work never disgraced anybody, no matter
what kind it may be. And so I was resolved to set both feet in what was for me a new
world and push forward on my own road.
I soon found out that there was some kind of work always to be got, but I also learned
that it could just as quickly and easily be lost. The uncertainty of being able to earn a
regular daily livelihood soon appeared to me as the gloomiest feature in this new life
that I had entered.
Although the skilled worker was not so frequently thrown idle on the streets as the
unskilled worker, yet the former was by no means protected against the same fate;
because though he may not have to face hunger as a result of unemployment due to the
lack of demand in the labour market, the lock-out and the strike deprived the skilled
worker of the chance to earn his bread. Here the element of uncertainty in steadily
earning one's daily bread was the bitterest feature of the whole social-economic system
itself.
The country lad who migrates to the big city feels attracted by what has been described
as easy work--which it may be in reality--and few working hours. He is especially
entranced by the magic glimmer spread over the big cities. Accustomed in the country
to earn a steady wage, he has been taught not to quit his former post until a new one is
at least in sight. As there is a great scarcity of agricultural labour, the probability of long
unemployment in the country has been very small. It is a mistake to presume that the
lad who leaves the countryside for the town is not made of such sound material as those
who remain at home to work on the land. On the contrary, experience shows that it is
the more healthy and more vigorous that emigrate, and not the reverse. Among these
emigrants I include not merely those who emigrate to America, but also the servant boy
in the country who decides to leave his native village and migrate to the big city where
he will be a stranger. He is ready to take the risk of an uncertain fate. In most cases he
comes to town with a little money in his pocket and for the first few days he is not
discouraged if he should not have the good fortune to find work. But if he finds a job
and then loses it in a little while, the case is much worse. To find work anew, especially
in winter, is often difficult and indeed sometimes impossible. For the first few weeks
life is still bearable He receives his out-of-work money from his trade union and is thus
enabled to carry on. But when the last of his own money is gone and his trade union
ceases to pay out because of the prolonged unemployment, then comes the real distress.
He now loiters about and is hungry. Often he pawns or sells the last of his belongings.
His clothes begin to get shabby and with the increasing poverty of his outward
appearance he descends to a lower social level and mixes up with a class of human
beings through whom his mind is now poisoned, in addition to his physical misery.
Then he has nowhere to sleep and if that happens in winter, which is very often the
case, he is in dire distress. Finally he gets work. But the old story repeats itself. A second
time the same thing happens. Then a third time; and now it is probably much worse.
Little by little he becomes indifferent to this everlasting insecurity. Finally he grows
used to the repetition. Thus even a man who is normally of industrious habits grows
careless in his whole attitude towards life and gradually becomes an instrument in the
hands of unscrupulous people who exploit him for the sake of their own ignoble aims.
He has been so often thrown out of employment through no fault of his own that he is
now more or less indifferent whether the strike in which he takes part be for the
purpose of securing his economic rights or be aimed at the destruction of the State, the
whole social order and even civilization itself. Though the idea of going on strike may
not be to his natural liking, yet he joins in it out of sheer indifference.
I saw this process exemplified before my eyes in thousands of cases. And the longer I
observed it the greater became my dislike for that mammoth city which greedily
attracts men to its bosom, in order to break them mercilessly in the end. When they
came they still felt themselves in communion with their own people at home; if they
remained that tie was broken.
I was thrown about so much in the life of the metropolis that I experienced the
workings of this fate in my own person and felt the effects of it in my own soul. One
thing stood out clearly before my eyes: It was the sudden changes from work to
idleness and vice versa; so that the constant fluctuations thus caused by earnings and
expenditure finally destroyed the 'sense of thrift for many people and also the habit of
regulating expenditure in an intelligent way. The body appeared to grow accustomed to
the vicissitudes of food and hunger, eating heartily in good times and going hungry in
bad. Indeed hunger shatters all plans for rationing expenditure on a regular scale in
better times when employment is again found. The reason for this is that the
deprivations which the unemployed worker has to endure must be compensated for
psychologically by a persistent mental mirage in which he imagines himself eating
heartily once again. And this dream develops into such a longing that it turns into a
morbid impulse to cast off all self-restraint when work and wages turn up again.
Therefore the moment work is found anew he forgets to regulate the expenditure of his
earnings but spends them to the full without thinking of to-morrow. This leads to
confusion in the little weekly housekeeping budget, because the expenditure is not
rationally planned. When the phenomenon which I have mentioned first happens, the
earnings will last perhaps for five days instead of seven; on subsequent occasions they
will last only for three days; as the habit recurs, the earnings will last scarcely for a day;
and finally they will disappear in one night of feasting.
Often there are wife and children at home. And in many cases it happens that these
become infected by such a way of living, especially if the husband is good to them and
wants to do the best he can for them and loves them in his own way and according to
his own lights. Then the week's earnings are spent in common at home within two or
three days. The family eat and drink together as long as the money lasts and at the end
of the week they hunger together. Then the wife wanders about furtively in the
neighbourhood, borrows a little, and runs up small debts with the shopkeepers in an
effort to pull through the lean days towards the end of the week. They sit down
together to the midday meal with only meagre fare on the table, and often even nothing
to eat. They wait for the coming payday, talking of it and making plans; and while they
are thus hungry they dream of the plenty that is to come. And so the little children
become acquainted with misery in their early years.