Teen Emo Hitler

 

The Young Hitler I Knew, by August Kubizek.  I’ve already covered Mein Kampf, now it’s time to complement that with the memoirs of his Austrian BFF, August Kubizek.  AK was commissioned to write the memoirs by Martin Bormann during WWII, but only finished them after the war, when he was offered a publishing contract.  Over the course of doing so, he read Mein Kampf and referred to it often, though most often to correct instances where Hitler’s recollections don’t match his own.

AK was AH’s only friend in Linz, from 1904 to 1908, when Hitler was 15-19.  Hitler moved to Vienna, AK moved there as well and lived with him.   In 1908 the Austro-Hungarian army summoned AK back to Linz for him to do his training, and without AK’s contribution to his rent, Hitler ended up virtually homeless, too proud to let AK know of his poverty, and the two lost contact with each other.

AK served in the Austrian army during WWI, was wounded, but survived.  Hitler moved to Munich in 1913 to evade conscription in the Austrian army, and as we know actually served with distinction in the Imperial German Army in WWI.  When he started getting publicity through his Nazi Party activities in the 1920s, AK recognized him in the newspaper, but did not try contacting him until 1933, to congratulate him on becoming Chancellor.  Hitler responded, and the two met up again in 1938 when Germany annexed Austria.  They met a few more times during the war.

Part I: Linz.   Both were big opera fans and met at an opera.  At one concert hall in Linz, there were a pair of pillars in the back which could be leaned upon to ease the stress of standing through the entire thing.  AK liked to scope that out – and one time found the pillar already occupied by someone else.  The two struck up a friendship from then on.  AK says even back then, Hitler combed his hair down in front as is so often shown in later photographs. 

AK was the son of an upholsterer, and expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, but his own dream was to be an orchestra conductor.  He finished Realschule (intermediate quality high school) whereas Hitler dropped out, never getting his diploma.  Hitler’s father had died before they met, and his mother died a few years later; AK’s parents only died many years later, and AK enjoyed a stable household this entire time.  Most of their activities together were spent attending operas, hiking in the local wilderness, and generally walking around Linz.  Hitler fancied himself an architect and would regale AK with all his plans to redo the entire city.  At the time Linz was a simple village, and has since become the third largest city in Austria.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler insisted that his anti-semitism developed when he was in Vienna, as there weren’t many Jews in Linz.  However, AK noted that the school teachers in Linz were openly anti-semitic, so very likely Hitler went to Vienna already predisposed to hate Jews.

Part II: Vienna. Hitler moved to Vienna to go to art school, and managed to persuade AK to move there as well, entering music school.  They roomed together, hung out together, and continued to be BFFs there in Vienna. 

Having completed his Realschule, AK was able to enroll at the Conservatory and continue his studies.  He even tutored the daughters of wealthy men from across the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Hitler was not so lucky.  Because he had refused to finish his Realschule in Linz (he was bored with school and arrogantly asserted that he knew everything already) it came back to bite him in the ass when he got to Vienna:  the art school rejected him, advising him that his talents as an artist were slim; his true aptitude (to the extent he had any) was in architecture.  Thus he should go to architecture school, but that required an intermediate degree, which itself required a Realschule diploma.  D’oh!  History might have turned out much differently had Hitler only completed high school in Linz.

So what was Teen Emo Hitler like?  He comes off as highly opinionated and easily offended by literally anything, quick tempered and arrogant.  He was too shy to talk to girls or women, and too proud to sample Vienna’s red light district.  It doesn’t seem as though he was gay – although homosexuals offended him immensely.  Maybe Ernst Roehm wasn’t his “type”. 

His passions were books, German folklore, architecture, and Wagner.   Despite no formal training, Hitler filled their small apartment with tons of sketches of how he planned to redesign Vienna.  The two also caught as many Wagner operas as they could at the main Hof Opera House in Vienna – to the exclusion of Italian operas, or any others.  In fact, Hitler tried to write his own opera, Wieland der Schmied, based on the Wieland legends, an impossible task without any formal music training.  Ironically, AK offered to teach him how to play the piano and music theory, but Hitler was too impatient to learn either, refusing altogether and insisting that his passion and vision were sufficient to the task – which they weren’t.   If the classical composers – including Wagner – needed to know this, how could Hitler get away without knowing this?  Arrogance is not a substitute for talent.

Photos of Hitler.  By now we’re familiar with Hitler’s baby picture, and his school picture showing him as a very young, but very arrogant boy.  AK says that back then, cameras were very expensive, and portable cameras nonexistent.  If you wanted a picture you had to go to a portrait studio, which is why his baby picture and school pictures are the only ones of him in his youth – no pictures exist of him as a teenager or from his Vienna years.  After that, his wartime photos in the Imperial German Army in WWI would be the next photographs of him before the Nazi Party era began.  

Reunion.  As noted, they only managed to meet up again in 1938.  By then Hitler was extremely important and very busy.  But here’s where it gets strange.  By now we know of Hitler as the Fuhrer, the dictator of Germany, who threw Europe into its second world war and orchestrated the massacre of 10 million innocent people, 6 million of them Jews – not counting the millions of civilian casualties in the war itself outside the camps.  But when the two reunited, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for him.  In all those years growing up, AK was not only his best friend, but his only friend.  And despite being surrounded and busy, Hitler made time for “Gustl”.   The highlight of their reunion was the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth.

According to AK, when they met up during the war, Hitler moaned that the war was stressing him out and that he never meant it to happen.  Who put a gun to his head and made him invade Poland?  Denmark?  Norway?  Holland?  Belgium?  France?  Yugoslavia?  Greece?  Russia?  You get the picture. 

The other bizarre thing is this.  Although AK started the memoirs during the war itself, he finished them after WWII.  By that time the full scope of Nazi horrors had become common knowledge.  AK himself had been locked up briefly and extensively interrogated by Allied intelligence officers, who no doubt filled him in about what was really going on all that time.  Yet he brushes it away summarily by insisting, “Hitler was my friend.” 

Smack Him Around.  When I finished this, I felt a strong compulsion to smack Hitler on the side of the head and try to talk sense into him – notwithstanding my poor German and lack of time travel power.  Depending on what phase in his life my hypothetical attacks occurred (though simply killing him might be more convenient) this is what I’d say…

Linz.  “All these other clowns somehow managed to finish realschule, but you’re ‘special’?  You don’t need it?  Get a clue.  People aren’t going to be impressed that you failed to finish it off, they’ll call you either lazy or stupid.”  [Hitler: “or ‘Chancellor.’”]

Vienna. “You have no training in a musical instrument or in music theory, yet you think you can write an opera?  Please.  All the classical composers played instruments and could write their own compositions in sheet music for everyone else to play.  If you could only learn those basic tools, they would allow you to realize whatever potential you might have.”

WWI.  “If Germany loses this war, it won’t be Jews behind it.  It will be that mammoth juggernaut across the Atlantic which can throw millions of eager soldiers at us, who aren’t bludgeoned by years of trench warfare.  These Americans will crush us.  The Jews have nothing to do with it.”  [At some level I think some of the Nazis knew this; I’m not sure Hitler himself did.  But even during WWII the Germans had no real ability to retaliate against the US.  If they admitted it was America that doomed the Kaiser to failure, that would take one huge chunk out of their platform.  Well, too bad.]

WWII (1942 onward).  “You think the Ami’s are soft, and the Russians are Untermensch.  Well, the Russians can build T34s, PPSh’s, and their more clever generals like Zhukov can learn from Guderian and adopt the same tactics and strategies we use.  And these ‘soft’ Americans are clever enough to put their women – who would otherwise be idle and useless with their husbands off at war, not to mention all the single women in the US – to good use in factories.  Every American woman riveting a B17 at home frees up an American man to pick up a Garand or an M1 Carbine and shoot at Germans or Japanese soldiers.   Here’s a country protected by thousands of miles of ocean, who your best V2 rockets can’t hit, who can fight two opponents at once.  It’s a country with vast industrial capacity and which understands and has mastered logistics. 

“Of course, in your idiotic anti-semitism, you threw away one of Germany’s strongest assets, its Jews.  But that train has gone to Auschwitz – or to the Manhattan Project.

“Your biggest conceit is assuming that because Germany is good at war, that no one else is.  Yes, your generals and officers are excellent, your soldiers brave.  Your MG42 and FW190 are excellent weapons.  Your U-boats are competitive on the oceans.   But you ignore the many assets and skills of our enemies.  Your arrogance and hubris will drive Germany to ruin, and it won’t be Germany’s fault, it will be yours.”

Mein Kampf

[I had actually written this back in 2006, but as one of my earliest blogs on a prior site it did not make the transition to Blogger, the current site.   In its prior format I also reviewed Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist, which I’ll leave aside for now.  Both were dull books which I only finished by sheer determination.]

I started this in junior high, picked it up sometime in college (and got no further) and finally picked it up a third time years out of law school and finally finished it.  The problem is that the first half of the book is autobiographical and extremely dull.  The second half is where it starts to finally get interesting.  As most German speakers & writers are dense and verbose, and Hitler is no exception, I naturally had to read an English translation.

Mind you, Hitler held no political office before taking power in 1933 and had little in the way of education in 1914 before joining the Imperial German Army.  Reading his own words, you get the benefit of a one-sided conversation with Hitler himself (though most accounts indicate that his tendency was to dominate conversations anyway and not pay much attention to what anyone was trying to tell him).  

My own politics, restated yet again, are libertarian, and thus I have no inherent sympathy for national socialism, per se, or any doctrine advocating a totalitarian dictatorship.   By the time I read it completely I had developed my sympathies for libertarianism and read Atlas Shrugged multiple times.  The symbolism of Nazism, its swastikas, sigrunes and totenkopfs, are all well and fine, but fall well short of the critical mass necessary to convince anyone to actually embrace the ideology itself.

Having said all that, how would I summarize Mein Kampf, for those of us unlikely to elicit anywhere near the excessive patience required to digest the whole damn thing? Aside from hating Jews and France, did he have anything else of interest to say?

Actually, yes…

1.         Hitler loved England and had phenomenal admiration for Great Britain.  Britain, as a sea power with its Royal Navy and farflung overseas empire, was not necessarily at odds with Germany.  He actually criticized the Kaiser for trying to compete with Britain on the seas and with colonies abroad, a strategy which turned out poorly during WWI; did Germany truly derive any benefit from its empire? Discuss.  Hitler’s peace offering to Churchill in June 1940 was likely sincere, especially since he had that quest for lebensraum in the East to pursue and could use a few more divisions in that direction instead of guarding against an Allied invasion of Europe.

2.         Of course, Hitler hated France.  As a land power, France was a threat and a competitor to Germany in Europe.  Moreover, the French could at least be proud of Napoleon and his brief empire.   There would be no chance of peace with France if Hitler was running things.  And as we well know, Hitler defeated France and took that brief tour of Paris. 

3.         Growing up in Austria-Hungary, and in Vienna in particular, Hitler witnessed firsthand the chaos of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its parliament, hopelessly deadlocked with a multitude of different nationalities speaking different languages and at cross purposes.  Mind you, our own Founding Fathers felt that such an environment would prevent “tyranny of the majority” as no one group could dominate the rest.   Of course, Hitler had no background in US history, nor did he read any Marxist literature.   I guess his time in prison was spent dictating to Rudolf Hess instead of reading anything useful besides the newspaper.  If he had little patience to listen to anyone besides himself, what chance was there that he would have the patience to read what anyone else had to argue – especially anything resembling an opposing viewpoint.  He certainly wasn’t about to read the Federalist or Anti-Federalist papers or anything by an advocate of democracy and freedom.

4.         The flip side of this is that Hitler was convinced that the arduous process of taking power would ensure, in a Darwinian sense, that only the best and fittest would succeed at becoming dictator.   By that time (1924-25) Mussolini was in power in Italy, but Stalin had yet to consolidate power in Russia after Lenin’s death in 1924.  No bad dictators?  Enlightened despots?  We’ll see, won’t we?

5.         Hitler also predicted that the US would eclipse Great Britain as a world power.   Certainly true, and so far as I can tell, very much ahead of the curve in making this prediction.  And with the US successfully taking on Nazi Germany in France, Belgium, and Germany itself, AND island hopping through the Pacific against the Japanese at the same time, and finally building not one, but TWO atomic bombs AND successfully dropping them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely the US proved him right on this issue – to his detriment and at his expense, along with Japan’s. 

As noted in my prior blog on Trump, I don’t know any Nazis personally, nor am I aware of anyone who read this book and emerged as a Nazi as a result.  He certainly didn’t persuade me, either of national socialism or of anti-semitism, which strikes me as gratuitous hate for its own sake.  For that matter, I never bothered to even attempt to read Das Kapital, and on that side of the spectrum, the Communist Manifesto is succinct enough for its stated purpose.   Atlas Shrugged, as long, verbose, and overindulgent as it may have been, did succeed at converting me to the libertarian cause.  My understanding is that Mein Kampf was liberally distributed in Nazi Germany but few bothered to actually read it. 

Anyhow.  There you go, the most interesting parts of this dull book condensed for the rest of us.  You’re welcome.  :D