He also succumbed to the music of Richard Wagner and often went to the opera night after night. The charged emotionality of this music seemed to have served him as a means for self-hypnosis, while he found in its lush air of bourgeois luxury the necessary ingredients for escapist fantasy. Significantly, at this period he loved the kind of painting that corresponded to this music: the luscious pomp of Rubens and, among the moderns, Hans Makart. Kubizek has described Hitler’s powerful reaction to a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi, which they attended together. Overwhelmed by the resplendent, dramatic musicality of the work, Hitler was also stirred by the fate of the late medieval rebel and tribune of the people, Cola di Rienzi, alienated from his fellow men and destroyed by their incomprehension. After the opera the two young men went on the Freinberg. There, with nocturnal Linz lying in darkness below them, Hitler began to orate. “Words burst from him like a backed-up flood breaking through crumbling dams. In grandiose, compelling images, he sketched for me his future and that of his people.” When these boyhood friends met again thirty years later in Bayreuth, Hitler remarked: “It began at that hour!”10
In May, 1905, Adolf Hitler went to Vienna for the first time. He stayed two weeks and was dazzled by the brilliance of the capital, by the splendor of Ringstrasse, which affected him “like magic from the Arabian Nights,” by the museums and, as he wrote on a postcard, by the “mighty majesty” of the Opera. He went to the Burgtheater and attended performances of Tristan and The Flying Dutchman. “When the mighty waves of sound flooded through the room and the whine of the wind gave way before the fearful rush of billows of music, one feels sublimity,” he wrote to Kubizek.
It is unclear, however, why after his return to Linz he waited for a year and a half before once more setting out for the city to apply for a place in the Academy of Fine Arts. His mother’s qualms may have played a part, but there would also have been his own unwillingness to take a step that would end his existence of ideal drifting and once again subject him to the routines of schooling. In fact, Hitler repeatedly called the years in Linz the happiest time of his life, “a lovely dream.” Only the memory of his failure at school somewhat darkened its brightness.
In Mein Kampf Hitler described how his father once set out for the city vowing “not to return to his beloved native village until he had made something of himself.”11 With a similar resolve, Hitler left Linz in September, 1907. And however far he diverged from his youthful fantasies, the central craving remained alive: to see the city lying at his feet in fear, shame, and admiration, to transform the “lovely dream” of the past into present reality. During the war he frequently spoke, wearily and impatiently, of his plan to retire to Linz in his old age, to build a museum there, listen to music, read, write, pursue his thoughts. All this was nothing but the ancient daydream of the lordly house with the “extremely elegant lady” and the “spirited circle of friends,” still capable of stirring him after all the intervening years. In March, 1945, when the Red Army was at the gates of Berlin, he had the plans for the rebuilding of Linz brought to him in the bunker under the chancellory and for a long time stood dreamily over them.12
The Shattered Dream
You idiot! If I had never in my life been a visionary, where would you be, where would we all be today?
Vienna at the turn of the century was the metropolis of a European empire, the scintillating imperial city embodying the glory and heritage of centuries. Brilliant, self-assured, prosperous, it governed an empire that extended into what is now Russia and deep into the Balkans. Fifty million people, members of more than ten different nations and races, were ruled from Vienna and held together as a unit: Germans, Magyars, Poles, Jews, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians, and Ruthenians. Such was the “genius of this city” that it was able to modulate all the discords of the far-flung empire, to balance its tensions and make them fruitful.
At that point, the empire still seemed destined for permanence. Emperor Franz Joseph, who had celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his reign in 1898, had become virtually a symbol of the state itself, of its dignity, its continuity, and its anachronisms. The position of the high nobility likewise seemed unshakable. Skeptical, haughty, and weighed down by traditions, it dominated the country politically and socially. The bourgeoisie had attained wealth but no significant influence. Universal suffrage did not yet exist. But industry and commerce were expanding feverishly, and the petty bourgeoisie and working class were being increasingly courted by parties and demagogues.
Nevertheless, for all its contemporaneity and show, Vienna was already a “world of yesterday”—full of scruples, decrepitude, and deep-seated doubts about itself. As the twentieth century began, the brilliance displayed in its theaters, its bourgeois mansions and green boulevards was overhung by this eschatological mood. Amid all the lavish festivals the city celebrated in fact and fiction there was palpable awareness that the age had lost its vital force, that only a lovely semblance still survived. Weariness, defeats, anxieties, the more and more embittered quarrels among the nations of the empire, and the shortsightedness of the ruling groups were eroding the unwieldy structure. Nowhere else in old Europe was the atmosphere of termination and exhaustion so palpable. The end of the bourgeois era was nowhere experienced so resplendently and so elegantly as in Vienna.
By the end of the nineteenth century the inner contradictions of the multinational state were emerging with increasing sharpness. For generations that state had been ruled with highhanded indolence. Problems were evaded, crises ignored. The point was to keep all the nationalities “in equal, well-tempered dissatisfaction.” That was how the onetime Premier Count Eduard Taafe ironically defined the art of rule in Austria, and on the whole it was not unsuccessful.
But the precarious equilibrium of the empire had been visibly shaken after 1867, when Hungary wrested special rights for herself in the famous Ausgleich. Soon it was being said that the Dual Monarchy was nothing but a pot cracked in many places and held together by a piece of old wire. For the Czechs demanded that their language be given equal status with German. Conflicts erupted in Croatia and Slovenia. And in the year of Hitler’s birth Crown Prince Rudolf escaped from a net of political and personal entanglements by his suicide in Mayerling. In Lemberg (Lvov), at the beginning of the century, the Governor of Galicia was assassinated in the street. The number of military draft evaders rose from year to year. At Vienna University there were student demonstrations by national minorities. Columns of workers staged enormous parades down the Ring under bedraggled red banners. From all these symptoms of unrest and weakness it was easy to predict that Austria was on the point of falling apart. It could be expected that the denouement would come when the old Emperor died. In 1905 it was rumored in the German and Russian newspapers that there had been feelers between Berlin and St. Petersburg concerning the future of the Dual Monarchy. Supposedly, inquiries had been made whether it would not be well to agree beforehand on what parts of territory neighbors and other interested parties might count when the empire collapsed. The rumors became so rife that on November 29, 1905, the Foreign Office in Berlin felt compelled to arrange a special meeting with the Austrian ambassador and reassure him.