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  Klara once again became pregnant and on 20 April 1889 her fourth child

  was born and given the name Adolf.

  Prologue: A Nobody 9

  In 1892, the family – Klara, Adolf and his two half siblings – moved to

  Passau, to which Alois Hitler had been reassigned. In 1894 Edmund was

  born7 and Klara and the children stayed in Passau, while Alois spent his last

  year of service in 1894/5 in Linz. On receiving his pension Alois moved

  back to the country, buying a farm in Hafeld near Lambach for his retire-

  ment.8 However, he soon sold it and, after a brief stay in Lambach, in 1898

  moved with his family to a small house in Leonding near Linz.9 By this

  time, the family had undergone further changes. In 1896 a daughter, Paula,

  was born; in the same year, fourteen-year-old, Alois ( junior) had left home

  after a major quarrel with his father and been disinherited.10 In 1900, their

  son, Edmund, died of measles.11

  During the nineteenth century, marriage between relatives, illegitimate

  children, a lack of clarity over fatherhood, large numbers of births, and the

  frequent deaths of children were all characteristic of the lives of the rural

  working class. Alois Hitler succeeded in climbing out of this social class but,

  as far as his family life was concerned, continued to be part of it. Although

  he had achieved a relatively high status as a civil servant, his mind-set did

  not adjust to the ‘orderly’, petty bourgeois norms of his time and, signifi-

  cantly, on his retirement, he once more sought a rural milieu. It appears that

  his life was determined by this tension, a tension that Alois was able to over-

  come through his strong, even brutal, self-confidence. In most of the few

  surviving photographs he is shown in uniform. To his subordinates he was

  evidently a pedantic and strict superior who was not very approachable.

  After his retirement in the village environment of Lambach and Leonding,

  in which Adolf Hitler grew up, his father’s position as a former civil servant

  gave him a superior status. To the villagers he appeared lively and sociable.12

  However, this cheerfulness was mainly evident outside the house; at home

  he was an undisputed paterfamilias with distinctly despotic qualities, who

  frequently beat his children.13 In contrast to Klara, who was a regular

  churchgoer, he was anticlerical, a committed Liberal.

  In 1903 Alois senior suddenly collapsed and died while drinking his

  morning glass of wine in the local pub. Reminiscences of him proved very

  varied. In an obituary in the Linzer Tagespost he was described as a ‘thor-

  oughly progressively-minded man’ and, as such, a good friend of free schools,

  a reference to the fact that he supported Liberal efforts to reform the school

  system.14 He was described as ‘always good-humoured, marked indeed by a

  positively youthful cheerfulness’, a ‘keen singer’.15 Years later, the local peas-

  ant, Josef Mayrhofer, who was appointed Adolf Hitler’s guardian, painted a

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  totally different picture. Alois had been a ‘grumpy, taciturn old man’, ‘a hard-

  line Liberal and like all Liberals of that period a staunch German Nationalist,

  a Pan-German, yet, surprisingly, still loyal to the Emperor’.16

  Adolf Hitler himself later maintained that his relationship with his father

  was the key to the development of his personality. Yet a glance at his family

  history suggests that his relationship with his mother may well have been

  more significant. In Hitler’s family death was very present: Adolf lost a total

  of four siblings, three before his own birth and then, aged eleven, his brother

  Edmund. Three years later, his father died and, finally, his mother, when he

  was seventeen.

  The fact that his mother had lost her first three children before Adolf ’s

  birth and – everything points to this – had little emotional support from her

  husband, must have had a strong impact on her behaviour towards Adolf. We

  do not know how she responded to her fourth child. It is conceivable that

  she came across as an unfeeling mother, who after her painful losses was

  afraid to invest too much emotion in a child who might not survive. He

  would then have experienced her as cool, lacking in feeling, distant, an

  experience that would explain Hitler’s own emotional underdevelopment,

  and also his tendency to try to assert his superiority over others and to seek

  refuge in megalomaniacal ideas of his own greatness. Or, on the other hand,

  his mother may have thoroughly spoiled her fourth child, placed all her

  hopes in the boy, and sought in him a substitute for the lack of a warm rela-

  tionship with her husband. Being brought up as a mother’s boy, as a little

  prince, and a domestic tyrant would be an equally satisfactory explanation

  for why Hitler, even in his early years, became convinced he was someone

  special and how, in the course of his development, his ability to form nor-

  mal human relationships was severely damaged. This would explain the

  conflict with his father, whose very existence Adolf must have seen as a

  threat to his special role in the family. It would also mean that his relation-

  ship with his mother was more one of dependence than of a son’s love for

  his mother. A combination of the ‘dead’ and the spoiling mother is also pos-

  sible: Klara Hitler may, because of her losses, have treated her son during his

  first years with a lack of emotion and then, later on, have attempted to com-

  pensate for her neglect by showing excessive concern for him.17

  The memoirs of Hitler’s boyhood friend, August Kubizek, and his own

  recollections indicate that the spoiling mother is the more likely scenario.

  However, even without knowing the details of this mother–son relationship,

  it is possible (and that is what matters here) to find plausible arguments for

  Prologue: A Nobody 11

  attributing Hitler’s evident lack of feeling in his dealings with others, his

  marked egocentricity, his flight into a fantasy world focused on himself, in

  short, his narcissistic personality, to his family background.

  Adolf Hitler himself emphasized his relationship with Alois, which he

  described as a classic father–son conflict. In Mein Kampf he maintains that,

  whereas as a ten-year-old he had hoped to go to university and so wanted

  to attend the humanist Gymnasium [grammar school], after he had finished

  primary school in 190018 his father had sent him to the Realschule [voca-

  tional school] in order to prepare him for a subordinate career in the civil

  service. He had massively rebelled against this. At the age of twelve he had

  again clashed with his father over his decision to become an artist. Thus his

  poor school results allegedly resulted from his determination to get his way

  with his father.19

  His results in the Realschule were indeed modest. He had to repeat his

  first year and in 1923 his class teacher, Huemer, reminisced that Hitler was

  ‘definitely talented’ (albeit ‘one-sidedly’), but not particularly hard-working,

  and in addition, unbalanced, ‘contrary, high-handed, self-opinionated, and

  irascible’.20 In 1904, evidently as a result o
f another poor report, Adolf

  switched to the Realschule in Steyr, approximately forty kilometres away,

  where he stayed in lodgings. Hitler loathed the place, an attitude he retained

  for the rest of his life.21 In 1905 he once again failed to pass his exams and,

  thereupon, left school for good.22 An illness, which Hitler subsequently, and

  no doubt with much exaggeration, described as a ‘serious lung complaint’,

  seems to have made it easier to get his mother to accept that his school car-

  eer had finally come to an end.23

  Linz

  It was in Linz that Hitler received his first political impressions. They can be

  roughly reconstructed from the few statements he himself made in Mein

  Kampf and from the limited reminiscences of contemporaries. These must

  be set in the context of the political currents determining the political his-

  tory of the city during the first decade of the twentieth century. From all

  this it is clear that Hitler’s early political views were geared to the political–

  social milieu within which his family was situated.

  At the start of the century, Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, was marked

  by artisan traditions, expanding industry, and a lively cultural scene. Between

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  1900 and 1907 the population increased from almost 59,000 to nearly 68,000.24

  Politically, as in the rest of Austria, three political camps had emerged: the

  Christian Socials, the German Nationalists, and the Social Democrats.25

  Against the background of the political mobilization of the masses, all three

  were competing with one another to take over from the previously dominant

  Liberals. In Linz, during the course of the 1890s, the German Nationalists had

  succeeded in winning this competition. Large sections of the population who

  were not tied to the Catholic Church had exchanged their liberal political

  ideals for nationalist ones. This was also true of Alois Hitler, whom Hitler’s

  guardian, Mayrhofer, had described as ‘Liberal’ [i.e. anti-clerical], ‘German

  Nationalist’, and ‘Pan-German’, but also as ‘loyal to the Emperor’.26

  Within the Austro-Hungarian empire the German Nationalists [Deutsch-

  freiheitliche] demanded the leadership role for the German Austrians within

  this multi-ethnic state and emphasized their links with the Germans in

  Bismarck’s Reich. The majority were loyal to the Habsburg monarchy, but

  distinguished themselves from the Liberals and the Christian Socials in

  German Austria through their commitment to their ‘German’ identity. Their

  stance also had an anticlerical slant, for many German Nationalists suspected

  the Catholic Church of trying to strengthen the Slav elements within the

  empire. The Slavs (in Upper Austria and Linz this meant mainly the Czechs)

  were seen as the real threat, as their growing self-confidence and demand for

  equal treatment threatened the Germans’ leadership role. This was being

  played out, in particular, through the so-called ‘language dispute’, which

  came to a head in the years after 1897. These political views found expression

  through the German People’s Party [Deutsche Volkspartei], the dominant

  political force in Linz and Upper Austria.27 Its main newspaper was the

  Linzer Tagespost, already referred to, a daily subscribed to by Hitler’s father and which Hitler himself stated he had ‘read from his earliest youth’. It was not

  of course by chance that the paper printed an obituary of his father.28

  From the 1890s onwards, the German Nationalists in Linz not only suc-

  ceeded in winning votes in elections but also in establishing a well- integrated

  German Nationalist milieu. The gymnastics clubs, very much in the tradition

  of the ‘Father of Gymnastics’, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn,* saw themselves

  * Translators’ note: Friedrich Ludwig (Father) Jahn (1778–1852) established a nationalist gymnastic movement in 1811 to encourage and prepare young men to resist French occupation.

  Banned during the period of Reaction, the movement was revived in the 1860s as part of the campaign for German unification and over the following century became widespread throughout the German-speaking world.

  Prologue: A Nobody 13

  as ‘centres for fostering German national consciousness and patriotic-mind-

  edness’29 and were sympathetic to the German Nationalists.30 The same was

  true of the General German Language Society [Allgemeiner Deutscher

  Sprachverein], which opposed the ‘foreign infiltration’ of the German lan-

  guage, and of the German School Association [Deutscher Schulverein], and

  the Association for the Defence of the Eastern Marches [Schutzverein

  Ostmark]. The latter, like other ‘defence associations’ with local branches in

  Linz, advocated strengthening the German element in the border provinces

  of Austria that were allegedly being threatened by alien ‘ethnic groups’. Year

  after year, and with increasing enthusiasm, big festivals were staged, for

  example at the summer solstice, or to celebrate some jubilee, at which

  ‘German’ or, as the various announcements put it, ‘Germanic’ or ‘ethnic

  German’ [ völkisch] customs and consciousness were cultivated and invoked.31

  Thus, in reporting the ‘Yule Festival’ of the Jahn Gymnastics Club, the Linzer

  Tagespost considered it an ‘exceptionally gratifying sign of the times’ that

  ‘ethnic German festivals, which are calculated to rekindle national feelings

  and sensibilities, are being attended, in particular by the upper classes of our

  city, with such enthusiasm and in such numbers’.32 Moreover, the German

  Nationalist associations were subsidized by the local council and, during the

  years after 1900, Linz often hosted supra-regional festivals of German

  Nationalist associations.33

  The struggle against the allegedly increasing influence of the Czechs in

  Upper Austria, against ‘Slavisization’, was a standard topic in Linz. It was a

  classic case of a problem that was created by being discussed, a ‘minority

  problem without a minority’.34 In 1900 there were hardly more than 3,500

  Czech speakers in Upper Austria. By 1910 that number had reduced to

  2,000, a little more than 0.2 per cent of the population. Around half of this

  minority lived in Linz.35 Nevertheless, from 1898 onwards, the German

  Nationalists used their presence in the Landtag [regional parliament] to

  keep pressing for German to be made the sole official language and lan-

  guage of instruction in Upper Austria. This provided a welcome opportun-

  ity to campaign in parliament and in the public sphere against the alleged

  threat of foreign influence. In 1909 this demand, which, given the small

  number of Czechs in Upper Austria, was a piece of pure demagogy, was

  finally met, as it was in the monarchy’s other German ‘crown lands’, by the

  passage of a provincial law.36 The Linzer Tagespost reported regularly on

  German–Czech disputes, most of which occurred in Bohemia or Vienna.

  However, alleged manifestations of Czech nationalism in Upper Austria

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  were kept under suspicious review and dubbed Czech ‘presumption’ or

  ‘cheek’.37 When, in 1903, a celebration was going to be held in a church to

 
mark fifty years of services in the Czech language, the Linz city council

  passed a unanimous resolution condemning this ‘Czech nationalist demon-

  stration’, urging local businesses in future only to employ ‘German assistants

  and apprentices’. The regional parliament also discussed the matter at

  length.38 In 1904, a concert by the Czech violinist, Jan Kubelik, was pre-

  vented by riots; the world-famous musician had to flee the city down side

  streets. This was in response to demonstrations by Czech nationalists in

  Budweis and Prague and was reported with satisfaction by the Tagespost.39

  The Pan-Germans should also be included in the German Nationalist

  camp, viewed in a broader sense. They too believed in intimate national soli-

  darity between the Austrian Germans and the Germans ‘in the Reich’.

  However, in contrast to the majority of the German Nationalists, who

  aimed at acquiring dominance within the Habsburg empire, the Pan-

  German supporters of Georg von Schönerer wished to follow the opposite

  path. They wanted to dissolve the empire, with the unambiguously Slav

  parts being given their independence and the German parts uniting with

  the Reich. In addition, they were committed to a racial form of anti-

  Semitism and a marked anti-clericalism. After the turn of the century this

  developed into the ‘Away from Rome’ movement, a mass conversion to

  Protestantism, which was seen as the Germans’ national religion.40 However,

  in Linz the Pan-Germans were only a marginal group. Indeed, during the

  first decade of the new century, the years when Hitler was exposed to his

  first political impressions, the leaders of the German Nationalists distanced

  themselves from the Pan-Germans, forming an alliance with the Liberals,

  whom they could largely dominate. It was only after this constellation had

  suffered a heavy defeat in the Reichstag [imperial parliament] elections of

  1911 that the Pan-Germans were integrated more closely into the German

  Nationalist camp.

  The new political constellation after the turn of the century prompted

  the German Nationalists to refrain from the use of anti-Semitic slogans in

  the public sphere in order not to damage their relationship with the Liberals.

  They did, however, introduce the so-called Aryan clause, excluding Jews