Drifting in Vienna
Having moved to Vienna in 1907, his failure to get into Art school came as a major blow. His money from an orphan's pension and borrowed from relatives eventually ran out, and he was forced to take refuge in men's hostels where he lived from 1909 to 1913.
Not sufficiently strong for manual labour - contrary to his claim in his book, Mein Kampf ('My Struggle'), to having been a building worker - he eked out a precarious existence selling his reproductions of famous sights which were hawked by hostel acquaintances.
'Despite his poverty, Hitler engaged actively with his political and intellectual environment...'
Pre-1914 Vienna - the capital of a multi-ethnic empire with a highly sophisticated, mainly Jewish, upper middle class, a deeply conservative and Catholic petty bourgeoisie, and a growing and increasingly radicalised working class - was like a magnifying glass focusing and concentrating the ideas, artistic trends and political forces that were to shape the century into a purer and more extreme form than anywhere else in Europe: ethnic nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, Socialism, psychoanalysis, and modern forms of painting, music, crafts and architecture.
Despite his poverty, Hitler engaged actively with his political and intellectual environment, devouring newspapers and pamphlets, attending the Imperial parliament and witnessing the violent confrontations between the rival ethnic and political groups which paralysed it, rendering it an object of contempt to much of the population, including Hitler himself.
His experiences in Vienna sharpened the Pan German nationalism that he had absorbed in his school days, increasing his contempt for the Habsburg Empire. He also developed a strong hostility towards the Socialist movement, fuelled partly by its internationalism, but also by his unwillingness to identify with the working class and his determination to retain his self-image as a superior being despite his actual inferior social position.
Although Hitler absorbed the racist and anti-Semitic discourses that so shaped the Viennese political and intellectual climate and was to reproduce their arguments and clichés years later, at the time he does not appear to have been hostile to Jews, at any rate on a personal level, since many of his closest associates in the men's hostel, who helped him sell his pictures, were in fact Jews.
Published: 2001-06-11
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