Hitler’s Vienna

"Brigitte Hamann was a contemporary Austrian academic who went to great lengths to study his life. It’s quite tricky because Hitler provided his own account in Mein Kampf , which includes an account of his childhood and his time in both Vienna and Munich before and after WWI , so you appear to know. She used an incredible amount of legwork to separate the reality from the mythology. He constructed his whole life, his odyssey, as a form of political mythology. “He was somebody who never did a day’s work in his life and loafed around, going on a downward trajectory and lived in doss houses before WWI.” Well, for example, he says he conceived his hatred of Jews when he arrived in Vienna from his home town. The reality was that he was selling his painted picture postcards to Jewish commercial art dealers, who were selling them for him. In the book he says that the people he particularly detests are the eastern Jews from Poland, Orthodox Jews, many of whom were living in Vienna. But there he is having actually quite normal relations with Jewish picture dealers. No, no! I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s a bit more complicated. He stereotypes them by saying they’re wandering about the streets in their beards reeking of garlic, but actually most Jews in Vienna were highly assimilated and he was dealing with them. Just his bizarre lifestyle, really. He was somebody who never did a day’s work in his life and loafed around, going on a downward trajectory and lived in doss houses before WWI. He didn’t go to Germany until shortly before the war. Ironically, he was Austrian and didn’t become a German citizen until 1932… Did you know that? But he didn’t get citizenship until 1932, which means that, given his political agitations in the 1920s, he could quite legitimately have been deported if anybody had been minded to deport him. He was trying to avoid serving in the Austro-Hungarian armed forces. He got his papers and fled to Germany. Well, it’s more complicated than that. It was quite an extended family with a lot of changes of names and peculiarities. He just didn’t have any money, he didn’t work – and there was no social security net, so he went down. By going to Germany. He claimed that Austria-Hungary was a kind of multi-cultural mishmash that he wouldn’t have wanted to fight for anyway. Whereas, of course, Germany was a different proposition because he was an ultra-German nationalist, so he served as a runner in the WWI on the Western Front. Well, he did get decorated for bravery. One author said the real men in the trenches at the front would have been vaguely contemptuous of him, running backwards and forwards between the command posts where he got given the written orders to take up to the front for the officers to execute. I find that a bit of a spurious distinction though. I mean, there would have been bullets flying around and shells, whether you were a runner or not. I think on one occasion one of the command bunkers he was running for was obliterated by a shell, killing everybody in it. Well, a lot of people had post-traumatic shock and went on to leave unexceptional lives in the post-war period. He was gassed and blinded, which he again dramatises, waking up blinded and gassed and facing Germany’s unconditional surrender. It’s very bizarre – you can see what they were on about in the sense that German armies were way into Eastern Europe on one front and right out in France and Belgium on the other and they hadn’t actually been militarily defeated. They would have been crushed to pieces if it had gone on any longer, but if you were a German soldier you’d have found it all quite mysterious. Of course, Hitler then blamed it on internal subversion. She certainly makes it vivid. His obsession with Wagner operas, for example. He went to see Parsifal 70 times or something."