TEENAGE HITLER IN LINZ AND VIENNA (FOURTH RIVER CRUISE MISSIVE)

“I owe it to that period [in Vienna] that I grew hard and am still capable of being hard.”

                                           Adolph Hitler

                                           Mein Kampf (My Struggle)

I have always been fascinated by the life and times of Adolph Hitler (1889-1945), the architect of the Nazi nightmare in Germany and—in my view—the human body who housed the demonic spirit behind the Holocaust and the Final Solution.[1] The question always comes back to me like an unwanted boomerang: how does a single individual of mediocre mental abilities and obsessed with an extremist ideology gain total control of (arguably) one of the most advanced and cultured societies in the history of the world?

What explains the trancelike hold his ranting speeches had over crowds of thousands; what explains this personification of evil?

More to the point of this missive, what role did Hitler’s teenage years in Linz and later in Vienna play in that process?

I started thinking about all this—again—during our recent Viking river cruise (The Grand European Tour, March 12-26, Amsterdam to Budapest), when we participated in a delightful bus and walking tour of Vienna. I knew that Hitler spent many of his formative years in fin de siècle Vienna. Yet, I can only remember our guide mentioning Hitler’s name once, when we walked by the infamous “Hitler’s balcony” where on March 15, 1938, the German Führer proclaimed the Anschluss (the political union with Germany) to a huge crowd of 200,000 people in the Heldenplatz square below. (The balcony is actually a terrace of the new palace wing, the last extension to the Hofburg home of the ruling Habsburg dynasty in central Vienna).  

Hitler had a love-hate relationship with Vienna.

But not so with Linz.

The city of Linz, the site of a Roman fort in the first century (named Lentia because of its location at a strategic bend in the Danube River), was in the early 1900’s a provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The city has a rich cultural and scientific history: most interesting for me is that Johannes Kepler taught mathematics there for several years and where, in the early 17th century, he discovered what we call Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, one of the mainstays of the scientific revolution.

Although Hitler would call Linz his hometown, he only lived there for a short time, 1905-1908 (ages sixteen to eighteen). At the time he was there, Linz had a population of 68,000 (tenth largest city in the western part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).  

Prior to his time in Linz, Hitler was born in the nearby border town of Braunau on the Inn, the product of his father’s third marriage to his mother Klara née Pölzl (23 years younger); Adolf was his mother’s fourth child—but the first to survive. His father was an Austrian customs officer.

From Hitler’s ages of three to six the family moved to Passau (we saw the building where his father worked during our visit to the city). In Passau Hitler picked up his peculiar Bavarian accent which would stay with him through the remainder of his life. Our guide told us about an incident from this period where young Hitler almost drowned and was rescued by another boy. The boy—later the choir director in the city’s church—always questioned whether he did the right thing by saving Hitler.

How would history have changed if Hitler had died in childhood?

My view of history—and my history classes—revolve around “what if’s” like that.

Today, it is difficult to imagine young Adolf climbing the nearby Mount Frain to look at the Danube River, near the old part of the city where he planned to spend his retirement in a building modeled on an upper Austrian farm:

“I climbed these rocks when I was young. On this hilltop, looking over the Danube, I daydreamed. This is where I want to live when I’m old. And: I won’t take anyone along except Miss Braun; Miss Braun and my dog.”[2]

Even at the end, in 1945, with the armies of the Third Reich crumbling on all fronts, sitting in his Berlin Chancellery bunker, Hitler would show his visitors (at all hours of the night) a giant architectural model of the Upper Austrian provincial capital of Linz. The city was the place where he was the happiest; the city of his youth that he intended to make the cultural capital of the Third Reich and the most beautiful city on the Danube.

In Linz, as a teenager, Hitler would sing in the Benedictine Abbey choir, engage in his favorite sport—shooting rats with the family handgun in a nearby cemetery—play wargames with other kids (he took the part of Boers against English colonialists), read the stories of Karl May by candlelight (the author actually stayed in Linz in 1901),[3] and soaked in the ideas of German nationalism from his favorite teacher Dr. Leopold Poetsch. The cultural friction between German students and Czech immigrants made an impact on the teenage Hitler, not so much the small Jewish community in Linz. As Hitler related to Albert Speer much later, he first recognized what he called “the danger of Jewry” in Vienna.

At the age of thirteen, Hitler’s father died (at the age of 65) of pulmonary bleeding while sitting in a tavern. The two were never close: his abusive father was subject to sudden fits of anger, was more comfortable in a tavern than at home, and tried to push Adolf into the life of a bureaucrat.     

Hitler obviously felt most comfortable in the small, homogenous German provincial city of Linz—which he spent with his beloved mother—who exaggerated her son’s artistic abilities, facilitated his many illnesses, and made excuses for his poor study habits. As a result, during these teenage years, Hitler would say he no longer believed in anything—especially the communion—and thought everything should be “blown up.”

It was also in Linz that Hitler discovered his love for the theatre. In our age of instantaneous communication—cellphones, television, streaming platforms, radio, internet, video games and AI—it is almost impossible to describe the psychological impact on young minds of that era resulting from the emotionally-charged music of Richard Wagner or Schiller plays and readings. Indeed, it is hard for us to envision a teenage Hitler endlessly singing phrases and songs from Wagner’s Lohengrfin and Rienza as he walked in the countryside or paced in his room.

Let me give an example. Wagner’s Rienza, der letzte der Tribunen (Rienza, the last of the tribunes),[4] in particular, would exercise a life-long influence on Hitler’s thinking and emotional make-up. The work required a large orchestra, complete with a large section of horns and drums and contained thrilling scenes with large crowds; the ending acts were overpowering and contained roaring shouts of “Heil.” Hitler’s friend at the time—Gustl Kubizek, who he met at the theatre—wrote in his memoirs that Hitler in an almost trancelike condition, walked to the nearby Frein Mountain where the two stayed until the early hours of the morning. They recalled the words that Rienza sang: “doch wählet ihr zum Schützer reich/ der Rechte, die dem Volk erkannt,/ so blicht auf eure Ahnen hin:/ Und nennt mich euren Volkstribun!” (And if you choose me as your protector of the people’s rights, look at your ancestors and call me your people’s tribune). To which the masses reply, “Rienza, Heil! Heil, people’s tribune.”

So what?

Hitler looked upon himself as Rienza incarnate. Indeed, the spirited Rienza overture became the secret anthem of Nazi Germany, well known as the introduction to the Nuremberg party conventions.

One more example. In mid-October 1906, Hitler attended the greatest musical of the era, Franz Lehar’s Merry Widow. The tunes played constantly (by gramophones) in the cafes and bars of Linz. The musical prompted Hitler for a short time to take piano lessons (he always had a problem finishing what he started). But Hitler would remain faithful to his favorite operetta until the end: in 1943-1944, as he overlooked the offensive in Russia from the Wolf Entrenchment deep in East Prussia, he listened endlessly to music from the Merry Widow, complained observers.[5]     

By contrast, Hitler felt adrift in the large sophisticated, intellectual and multicultural city of Vienna.

Hitler’s first visit to Vienna was in May 1906, with the six-hour train trip paid for by his mother so her seventeen-year-old artist-aspiring son could visit the famous imperial art gallery. Young Adolf found the city to be large, tumultuous (over 1,400 automobiles jostled with over 2,000 horse-drawn carriages and cabs in the streets), newly illuminated by electric lights, and the awe-inspiring architecture of the famous Ringstrasse: later, writing in Mein Kampf, Hitler would say “the whole Ring Boulevard seemed to me like an enchantment out of The Thousand-and One Nights.”

Although we don’t know exactly how long young Adolf’s first visit lasted, we know he attended a performance of Wagner’s Tristan conducted by the world-famous court opera director Gustav Mahler. At any rate, the young aspiring artist was hooked after his first visit: he was drawn to the life and pace of Vienna like a moth drawn to a flame.

Two years later, in February 1908, Hitler moved to Vienna with the goal of attending the art academy. His mother Klara had passed away the previous December, the victim of breast cancer and the side effects of iodoform, a treatment regime that paralyzed her throat and made her final days an agonizing experience. Hitler was devastated. He took his mother’s small pension and moved to Vienna where he shared a flat with his childhood friend Gustl Kubizek, who recalled Hitler sleeping until noon, rejecting any notion of getting a job, and displaying no real interest in women.

In October, Hitler tried for a second time to gain admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but again was rejected. He fell on hard times as his money ran out: he parted ways with Kubizek, drifted from place to place, pawned all his possessions, suffered periods of depression, and slept on park benches. In December 1909, freezing and half-starved, he moved into a homeless shelter and ate at a soup kitchen ran by nuns. By February, Hitler moved into a home for poor men near a Jewish community and was reduced to odd jobs and selling postcards in the square adjacent to St. Stephen’s Cathedral.

The great city that was the cultural, administrative and economic center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a city of contradictions in the early 1900’s. On one hand, (and in one layer), Vienna was a city of wealthy urban elites and intellectual accomplishments, artistic creativity, and liberalism. From the advent of psychoanalysis to the fantasies of nationalist mass politics, from architecture and city planning to avant-garde literature, painting, and music, fin de siècle Vienna overwhelmed the senses of the young artist-to-be. This was the Vienna of Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannshal, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, and Arnold Schönberg.[6]

On the other hand, there was a dark underbelly to the city; a place where the twenty-one-year-old failing, lazy, bitter and desperately poor artist drank from a dangerous and seething witch’s cauldron brew of fear, racial prejudice, extreme nationalism and antisemitism.[7]

Hitler began to read, among other things, antisemitic tabloids and pamphlets at the newsstands or in the coffee shops. He particularly admired the charismatic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, (1844-1910), an ardent Catholic and outspoken anti-Semite, whose considerable political skills included fiery speeches, effective use of propaganda, and an ability to manipulate institutions such as the Catholic church.

Meanwhile, on the streets of Vienna, Hitler had a chance encounter with an Orthodox Jew, after which he began studying Jews carefully: “the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.” Or as he would say in Mein Kampf: “For me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an anti-Semite.”[8]

Hitler left Vienna at the age of 24 to avoid mandatory military service in the Austrian army, refusing to serve in the multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire he despised. He fled to Munich in Bavaria as war clouds gathered over Europe.

But that is another missive.    

[1] Of course, the conclusion that Hitler may have been possessed is almost universally rejected by the academic and medical communities. In graduate school I read psychohistorian Robert G. L. Waite’s book The Psychopathic God (1977), [Hitler had a schizotypal personality disorder]. For those of you interested in a psychological assessment of Hitler, see psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer’s The Mind of Adolph Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (1971), [based on a report prepared for the O.S.S. which accurately predicted that Hitler would commit suicide in the event of war defeat]. Also worth reading on Wikipedia is the article “Psychopathography of Adolph Hitler” with a comprehensive listing of the various alleged disorders that have been used to explain Hitler’s mental illness (or lack thereof). Among my favorite entries: disorders stemming from Hitler’s confinement at Pasewalk military hospital after he suffered mustard gas poisoning in the closing days of World War I and the possibility he was treated with hypnosis (the doctor allegedly committed suicide later); various disorders connected to his abusive father or indulgent mother; possible post-traumatic syndrome of Hitler during World War I; syphilis; Parkinson’s disease; debilitating drug use and overdose, homosexuality and other sexual deviant behaviors; Asperger syndrome; bipolar disorder; and “dangerous leader” disorder. Also worth reading is Erich Fromm’s Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, (1973), [an attempt to determine the causes of human violence].

[2] Quote from Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man, (Bloomsbury: 2011).

[3] Karl May (1842-1912) was a German author of travel and adventure stories for young people with settings ranging from desert Arabs to battles with the American Indians of the wild West.

[4] The historical Cola di Rienza lived in the 14th century and rose from being the son of a bartender to the people’s tribune who unified a splintered Italy into a powerful republic. In an age of extreme nationalistic fervor, his story became a model of unification and the subject of books and for Wagner, the image of a national hero who saved and liberated the people.

[5] For this section I have relied extensively on Hamann’s account Hitler in Vienna.

[6] See Carl Schorske’s massively influential essay collection in Fin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture.

[7] See, among many others,

[8] Cited in “Hitler is Homeless in Vienna,” The History Place: The Rise of Adolph Hitler, (n.d.)