Mein Kampf (Stackpole Sons)/Volume 1/Chapter 1
Mein Kampf
First Volume:
An Accounting
1. Childhood Home
Today I regard it as a happy change that Fate chose Braunau on the Inn as my birthplace. For this little town is on the frontier of the two German states whose reunion, at least for us younger men, is a life work to be accomplished by every means.
German Austria must come back to the great German mother country, and this not because of any economic considerations. No, no: even if economically the union were a matter of indifference, nay even if it were harmful, it must still take place. Like blood belongs in one common realm.
The German people has no moral right to take part in colonial politics so long as it cannot even unite its own songs in a common state. Only when the boundaries of the Reich include the last German, without affording assurance of supporting him, does the need of the people give a moral right to acquire foreign soil. The plough will be the sword, and the bread of posterity will be watered by the tears of war.
Thus this little frontier city seems to me the symbol of a great task. But in another connection also it rises to warn the present age. More than a hundred years ago this humble place had the privilege of being immortalized in the annals at least of German history as the scene of a tragic catastrophe which shook the whole German nation. It was the day of our Fatherland’s deepest degradation; and here the bookseller Johannes Palm, a citizen of Nuernberg, obdurate “Nationalist” and Francophone, fell for the Germany which he loved passionately even in her misfortune. He had stubbornly refused to name his fellow—or rather chief criminals. Like Leo Schlageter. And, like Schlageter, he was denounced to France by a government representative. An Augsburg police director won this unenviable fame, and thus furnished the prototype of modern German officialdom in the Reich of Mr. Severing.
This little city on the Inn, gilded by the rays of German martyrdom, was Bavarian by blood, Austrian by state. Here my parents lived in the late eighties of the last century, my father a conscientious employee of the state, my mother occupied with the household, and above all devoted to us children with unchanging loving care. I remember but little of that period, because within a few years my father had to leave the little frontier town of which he had become so fond, to go down the Inn and take a new post at Passau—in Germany itself.
But it was the fate of an Austrian customs official in those days to travel often. Soon afterward my father went to Linz, and at length was pensioned there. This was far from meaning rest for the old gentleman. He was the son of a poor, petty cottager, and even in his earliest days had not been happy at home. Not yet thirteen, the small boy strapped up his knapsack, and ran away from his home in the forest district. Despite the advice of “experienced” villagers he had gone to Vienna to learn a trade. This was in the fifties of the past century. It was a hard decision to take the road into the unknown with three crowns to travel on. But by the time the thirteen-year-old was turned seventeen, he had passed his journeyman’s examination, but had not won contentment. Rather the contrary. The long period of distress at that time, of eternal misery and wretchedness, strengthened his determination to give up his trade after all, in order to become something “better.” The poor boy in the village had once thought that the pastor embodied the highest possible summit of human aspiration; this eminence was replaced in the metropolis, which had vastly enlarged his outlook, by the dignity of being a state official. With all the endurance of a man grown old through grief and distress while still half a child, the seventeen-year-old took a grip on his new determination—and became an official. When he was almost twenty-three, I believe, the goal was reached. Now, too, the requirement seemed fulfilled for a vow which the poor boy had once taken, a vow not to go back to his native village until he had become somebody.
Now his goal was reached; but no one in the village remembered the little boy of years before, and he himself found the village had grown strange to him.
When at last he retired at fifty-six, he could never have stood his retirement a single day as a “do-nothing.” He bought property in the neighborhood of the Upper Austrian market town of Lambach, farmed it, and thus completed the circle of a long and hard-working life by going back to the origins of his fathers.
Probably about this time, my first ideals were taking shape. Constant romping around outdoors, the long road to school, and an association with extremely robust boys which sometimes gravely worried my mother all combined to make me anything but a stay-at-home. So, if I had scarcely any serious ideas about my future life work, at any rate my tendency was by no means toward my father’s career. I believe that even then my oratorical gift was being schooled by more or less violent disputes with my playmates. I had become a little ringleader, who learned easily and well at school, but otherwise was fairly hard to handle.
In my free time I had singing lessons at the Canons’ Chapter in Lambach, and thus had ample opportunity to be intoxicated by the solemn pomp of the splendid church festivals. What more natural, then, than that as my father had once looked upon the little village pastor, so now I should think the abbot an ideal to be striven after? At least for a time this was so. But since my father understandably did not think highly enough of his quarrelsome boy’s oratorical talents to draw from them any pleasing conclusion regarding the future of his offspring, he had no feeling for such youthful ideas either. He must have watched anxiously this discord of nature.
And, in fact, my temporary longing for that calling soon disappeared to make way for hopes better suited to my temperament. In rummaging through my father’s library I had come upon various books of a military nature, among them a popular edition of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Two volumes of an illustrated magazine from those years now became my favorite reading. It was not long before the great heroic battle had become my greatest spiritual experience. From then on I was more and more enthusiastic over anything at all connected with war or at least with soldierhood.
In another way, too, this was to be important to me. For the first time, vaguely though it was, the question forced itself upon me whether there was a difference between the Germans who fought these battles and other Germans, and if so, what? Why did not Austria fight in the war, why not my father and all the others?
Were we not the same as all the other Germans?
Did we not all belong together? This problem began to stir my young brain for the first time. With hidden envy I learned, in answer to cautious questions, that not every German was so fortunate as to belong to the Empire of Bismarck.
I could not understand it.
I was to begin my studies.
Judging by my whole character, and even more by my temperament, my father concluded that the humanistic Gymnasium would run counter to my natural bent. He thought a realschule, a non-classical school, would be more suitable. His opinion was confirmed by my noticeable ability in drawing—a subject which he believed was neglected in the Austrian humanistic schools. And perhaps his own hard working life made him think less of classical studies, which he considered impractical. But on principle he intended that, like him, his son of course should, nay must, become a state employee. His hard youth quite naturally made his later attainments seem the greater, since after all they were the product solely of his own iron energy and industry. The pride of the self-made man led him to wish the same, or if possible a higher situation in life for his son—the more so since his own hard work could make the progress of his child so much easier.
The idea of my refusing what had been his whole life was to him quite inconceivable. So my father’s decision was simple, definite and clear, and, in his eyes, a matter of course. Lastly, a lifetime’s struggle for existence had made him domineering, and he would have thought it intolerable to leave the final decision in such matters to a boy whom he thought inexperienced and thus not yet responsible. This would, besides, have seemed to him reprehensible weakness in the exercise of his proper paternal authority and responsibility for his child’s future, and impossible to reconcile with his concept of duty.
And yet all was to end differently.
I was barely eleven. For the first time in my life I was forced into opposition. Hard and determined as my father might be in carrying out plans he had once fixed his mind on, his son was no less stubborn and refractory in refusing an idea which appealed to him little or not at all.
I would not enter the civil service.
Neither pleading nor reasoning with me affected my resistance. I would not be an official, no and again no. Every attempt to arouse my liking for that calling by descriptions of my father’s past life had the contrary effect. I yawned myself sick at the thought of sitting some day in a government office, no master of my own life, but a slave devoting my entire existence to filling out forms of one kind and another.
And what effect must this have had on a boy who was certainly anything but “good” in the ordinary sense? I did my school work with ridiculous ease, and had so much free time left that I was outdoors more than in. When my political opponents scrutinize my life with such loving care today, searching back even into my childhood for the satisfaction of discovering what deviltry this fellow Hitler was already up to in his youth, I thank heaven for providing me through them with a few more memories of that happy time. Field and forest were the battleground on which the ever-recurring differences in opinion were fought out.
Even the attendance at the realschule which followed did little to restrain me.
But now another difference had to be fought out.
So long as my father’s intention to make me into an official clashed only with my general dislike of the career itself, the conflict was quite tolerable. I could withhold my private views, and I did not have to make a continual issue of them. My own fixed determination never to become an official was enough to give me inward calm. This determination I clung to inalterably.
The question was more difficult when a plan of my own arose to oppose that of my father. This happened when I was still only twelve. How it happened I cannot now say, but one day it was clear to me that I would be a painter, an artist. My talent for drawing had been demonstrated, and was in fact one of my father’s reasons for sending me to the realschule; but he would never in the world have thought of giving me professional art training. On the contrary. Finally when I rejected my father’s pet idea once again, he asked me for the first time what I myself wanted to be. I popped out rather suddenly with my decision, which in the meantime had become immovable, and for a moment my father was speechless.
“A painter? An artist?”
He doubted my sanity, and thought he had not understood correctly. But when I explained it to him, and he felt the seriousness of my determination, he turned against it with all his characteristic decisiveness. His decision here was very simple; consideration of any talents I might have simply did not enter into the question.
“An artist—no; never so long as I live.” But since his son had inherited, among various other qualities, a stubbornness like his own, his answer was just as stubborn. Only of contrary significance, naturally.
Both sides stuck to their guns. My father held to his “never,” and I redoubled my “nevertheless.”
The results, indeed, were not altogether pleasant. The old gentleman was embittered, and, much though I loved him, so was I. My father forbade me ever to hope to study painting. I went a step further, and declared that then I would learn nothing more at all. Of course I came off second best with such “declarations,” since the old gentleman began ruthlessly to assert his authority. So I kept silence in the future, but I carried out my threat. I thought, when once my father saw my lack of progress in the realschule, that he would have willy-nilly to let me pursue the happiness I dreamed of.
I do not know whether my calculation would have proved correct. The only thing sure for the moment was my obvious failure in school. Whatever I enjoyed, I learned—principally things I thought I should need later as a painter. Whatever I thought unimportant in that connection, or whatever failed to attract me, I sabotaged altogether. My report cards at that time were always in extremes. Beside “Good” and “Excellent” were “Passing,” and even “Below passing.” By far my best performances were in geography, and particularly in world history—the two favorite subjects in which I excelled.
When I examine the results of that time now, so many years later, I see two outstanding facts as particularly significant:
First, I became a nationalist. Second, I learned to understand the meaning of history.
Old Austria was a “State of nationalities.”
A subject of the German Reich could not—at least then—really grasp the meaning of this fact in terms of individual daily life. After the wonderful triumphal march of the army of heroes in the Franco-Prussian War, the Reich Germans had gradually become estranged from Germanity elsewhere, and, in fact, sometimes proved unable to value it properly, or were no longer acquainted with it. In reference to the German Austrians, particularly, they all too easily confused the decayed Imperial dynasty with the basically sound and healthy people.
They did not understand that if the German in Austria had not been really of the best blood he would never have had the force to put his stamp on a state of 52 millions in such a manner that the mistaken notion could take root (especially in Germany) that Austria was a German state. This was nonsense with the gravest consequences, but still a brilliant tribute to the ten million Germans in Ostmark (Austria). Very few in the Reich had any idea of the constant implacable struggle for German language, German schools, and German character. Today this sad compulsion has been put upon millions of our people from Germany itself, who dream under foreign rule of the common Fatherland, and in their longing for it try at least to preserve the sacred right to their mother tongue. Now at last people begin to realize in greater numbers what it means to have to fight for one’s nationality. And now perhaps a few here and there can appreciate the greatness of the German population in Ostmark which wholly on its own resources, shielded the Reich on the east for centuries, then waged an exhausting guerrilla warfare to maintain the German language frontier in an age when the Reich cared for colonies, but not for its own flesh and blood before its doors.
As always in every combat, there were three groups in the language struggle of old Austria: the fighters, the lukewarm, and the traitors.
Even in school the sifting process began. The most remarkable thing about the language battle, perhaps, is that its waves beat hardest upon the schools, the nursery of coming generations. The war is waged over the child, and the first war-cry of the struggle is addressed to the child: “German boy, do not forget that you are a German,” and “Girl, remember that you are to be a German mother.”
Anyone who understands the soul of youth will realize that young people are the very ones to receive this battle-cry most joyfully. In a hundred ways they carry on the struggle, in their own fashion and with their own weapons. They refuse to sing un-German songs; they are the more wildly enthusiastic over the grandeur of German heroes, the more anyone attempts to suppress it in them; they go hungry to gather pennies for the war-chest of their elders; they have an incredibly sensitive ear for an un-German teacher, and are as refractory as they are acute; they wear the forbidden badges of their own nation, and are happy to be punished or even beaten for it. In other words they are a faithful image in miniature of their elders, except that their feeling is often better and more straightforward.
I, too, had opportunity to share in the struggle for nationality in old Austria while I was still quite small. Money was collected for Südmark by school associations; cornflower and black-red-gold badges proclaimed our sentiments; “Heil” was our greeting, and instead of the Imperial anthem we would sing Deutschland über alles despite warnings and punishments. All this trained young people politically at a time when citizens of a so-called national state still knew very little more about their own national characteristics than their language. That I was not among the lukewarm, even in those days, will be understood. I was soon a fanatical German Nationalist—naturally not the same thing as the present party of that name.
My development in that direction was very rapid, so that by the time I was fifteen I realized the difference between dynastic “patriotism” and the “nationalism” of the people; and for me even then only the latter existed.
Anyone who has not taken the trouble to study internal conditions in the Hapsburg Monarchy may find such a development puzzling. But in Austrian schools, instruction in world history was bound to sow the seed of this feeling, for there is after all scarcely any specifically Austrian history worth mentioning. The fate of that State is so completely bound up with the life and growth of Germanity as a whole that it is unthinkable (for instance) to divide history into German and Austrian history. Nay more, when at last Germany began to split into two spheres of authority, this very separation was German history.
The insignia of a former Imperial splendor, preserved at Vienna, seem to go on exercising their spell as a pledge of everlasting common life.
The elemental cry of the German Austrian people for union with their German mother country in the days of the Hapsburg state’s collapse was but the product of an ache slumbering deep in the people’s heart—a longing for this return to the unforgotten home of their fathers. But there would be no explaining this if the historical training of the individual German Austrian had not caused such a general nostalgia. In that training is a fountain that never runs dry, a silent reminder in times of forgetfulness, through momentary prosperity, whispering of a new future by recalling the past.
True, the teaching of world history in the so-called intermediate schools even today is in a sad state. Few teachers realize that the special object of historical teaching is never to memorize and rattle off historical dates and events; that it is not important for a boy to know exactly when some battle was fought, some general born, or when some (usually insignificant) monarch was crowned with the diadem of his ancestors. No, God knows, that is hardly what counts.
To “learn” history means to seek and discover the forces which cause the effects we observe as historical events.
The art of reading and of learning, here as always, consists of remembering essentials, forgetting non-essentials.
Quite likely my whole later life was decided by my good fortune in having a teacher in history, of all subjects, who was almost unique in his ability to teach and give examinations on that principle. My professor, Dr. Leopold Pötsch of the Linz realschule, was the very embodiment of this idea. He was an old gentleman, kindly but decided in manner, whose brilliant eloquence not merely fascinated us, but absolutely carried us away. I am still touched when I think of this grey-haired man, whose fiery descriptions often made us forget the present, conjuring us back into vanished days, and taking dry historical memories from the mists of centuries to make living reality. In his class we were often red-hot with enthusiasm, sometimes even moved to tears.
My luck was the greater in that this teacher was able not only to illuminate the past by the light of the present, but to draw conclusions for the present from the past. More than anyone else, he gave us an understanding of the current problems which absorbed us at the time. Our little national fanaticism served him as a means to educate us; an appeal to our sense of national honor would bring us hobbledehoys to order more quickly than anything else ever could.
This teacher made history my favorite subject. I became even then, no doubt without his wishing it, a young revolutionary.
And indeed who could study German history under such a teacher without becoming an enemy of the State whose ruling house had so catastrophically influenced the destiny of the nation?
Who, finally, could still preserve his allegiance to the emperors of a dynasty which had betrayed the interests of the German people again and again for its own petty advantage?
Did we not know even as boys that this Austrian state had no love for us as Germans, indeed could have none?
Historical insight into the work of the Hapsburgs was strengthened by daily experience. In the north and in the south the poison of foreign peoples ate into the body of our nation, and even Vienna was obviously becoming more and more an un-German city. The House of the Archdukes favored Czechs wherever possible; it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and implacable retribution that overthrew the deadliest enemy of Austrian Germanity, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, by the very bullets he had helped to cast. After all, he was the patron and protector of the attempt to slavicize Austria from above.
The burdens laid upon the German people were enormous, unheard-of its sacrifices in taxes and blood; and yet anyone not altogether blind must have realized it would be all in vain. What hurt us most was the fact that the whole system was morally screened by the alliance with Germany; thus the gradual extirpation of Germanity in the old monarchy was to a certain extent sanctioned by Germany itself. Hapsburg hypocrisy, giving the outside world the impression that Austria was still a German state, fanned hatred for that house into blazing indignation and contempt.
Only in Germany itself the elected members of the government even then saw none of all this. As if smitten with blindness they walked beside a corpse, even thinking they discovered in the symptoms of decay signs of “new” life.
In the fatal alliance of the young German Empire with the Austrian sham state lay the seeds of the World War, but also of the collapse.
In the course of this book I shall have to deal at length with the problem. It will suffice here to point out that fundamentally I arrived in my earliest youth at an insight which never left me afterward, but only grew deeper:
That the safety of Germanity first required the destruction of Austria, and that, further, national feeling has nothing to do with dynastic patriotism; above all, the Hapsburg house was fated to bring misery on the German nation.
Even then I drew the inescapable conclusions from this realization—warm love for my German Austrian homeland, profound hatred for the Austrian state.
The way of historical thinking thus taught me in school I did not abandon in the days that followed. More and more world history became my inexhaustible source of understanding for the historical action of the present, that is for politics. In this way I did not mean to “learn” history; history was to teach me.
If I thus soon became a political revolutionary, I became one in the arts no less quickly.
The Upper Austrian capital at that time had a theater which was fairly good. They put on nearly everything. When I was twelve I saw Wilhelm Tell for the first time; a few months later my first opera, Lohengrin. I was captivated. My youthful enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth knew no bounds. Again and again I was drawn to his works, and it seems to me now my special good fortune that the small scale of the provincial performances made possible a later heightening of the impression.
All this—especially once I had got through my hobbledehoy years (a very painful process with me)—confirmed my deep-seated aversion to the calling my father had chosen for me. More and more I came to the conviction that I could never be happy in the civil service. And now that my talent for drawing was recognized at the realschule, my determination was but the more fixed.
Neither prayers nor threats affected me. I was going to be a painter, and not for anything in the world an official. The only curious thing was that as I grew older I took an increasing interest in architecture. At the time I thought this the natural complement to my aptitude for painting, and was merely pleased at the expansion of my artistic interest.
That it was all to turn out differently I never dreamed.
Yet the question of my calling was to be decided sooner than I could have expected.
When I was thirteen I lost my father suddenly. An apopletic stroke felled the vigorous old gentleman, painlessly terminating his earthly career, and plunging us all in deepest grief. That for which he longed most, to give his child a livelihood and spare him his own bitter struggle, must have seemed unfulfilled. But he had sown the seeds, if quite unconsciously, for a future which neither he nor I would then have understood.
For the moment there was no outward change. My mother felt obliged to continue my education according to my father’s wishes, to have me study for a civil position. I myself was more determined than ever not to become an official under any circumstances. In just the degree, then, that the intermediate school departed from my standard in subject and treatment, I grew more indifferent. Suddenly an illness came to my assistance, deciding within a few weeks my future and the constant subject of dispute at home. I had serious lung trouble, and the doctor urgently advised my mother against putting me into an office for any reason whatever. My attendance at the realschule, likewise, must be interrupted for at least a year. What I had secretly pined for so long, what I had always fought for had now through this event, become reality almost of its own accord.
Under pressure of my illness, my mother at last agreed to take me out of the realschule, and to let me go to the Academy. The happy days seemed to me almost like a beautiful dream; and a dream they were to remain. Two years later my mother’s death put a sudden end to all my fine plans.
Her death was the termination of a long, painful illness, which from the first had left little room for hope. Yet the blow, especially to me, was fearful. I had honored my father, but I had loved my mother.
Need and hard reality now forced me to a quick decision. My father’s small means had been largely used up by my mother’s grave illness; my orphan’s pension was not enough even to live on; and so I was compelled to earn my own bread somehow. With a bag of clothes and linen in my hand, in my heart an indomitable will, I set off for Vienna. What my father had accomplished fifty years before, I, too, hoped to wrest from fate; I, too, would be “something,” but never an official.