Hitler: A Short Biography. A. Wilson N.

four years later, Hitler had never in his life looked for paid work. He had assumed that he would be able to live on savings. He would study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and maybe become a great architectural artist, perhaps an architect who would rebuild Linz, the provincial city where he had attended the Realschule and not done especially well. A fellow pupil was another oddball, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but there is no evidence that they even spoke to one another at school. Wittgenstein was not noted, at any period of life, for his easy manners, and Hitler, until he had completed military service, appears to have been paralysed with shyness and silence in most circumstances.

      Wittgenstein at different times of his life had paid work – as a village schoolmaster, as a lab assistant in a London hospital, and as a don at Cambridge. Hitler never had any paid employment, so far as one can make out, except when manual work was forced upon him as a temporary necessity when he was living in men’s hostels and dosshouses on the outskirts of Vienna. In fact, he had not done well enough at school to get a good job. He failed to get into the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and gradually slithered downhill from the position of comfort and prosperity into which he had been born to one of penniless indigence. He lived among the homeless in men’s hostels, tried to sell his (usually postcard-size) architectural paintings. When this was happening, Europe was not going through a phase of unemployment, such as plagued the 1920s and 1930s. He could have taken a job as a waiter or a clerk or done something in exchange for pay, the way that almost everyone in the world is expected to do. Never once did he do so. Nor, as far as history throws any light on the matter, did he ever consider it necessary to pay his own way. The flats he lived in when he became successful, the cars he drove, the clothes he wore were all supplied by other people. Even his beloved dogs, Prinz, Muckl, Wolf and Blondi, were gifts. He was a domestic incompetent. When his niece killed herself he needed to import housemaids immediately into his Munich apartment.

      Hitler’s indolence was to remain one of his most mysterious characteristics. Many would assume that a man who, in his heyday, strutted about in uniforms, and who presided over a militaristic dictatorship, who expected not merely his intimates but everyone in the country to click their heels and salute at the mere mention of his name, would have been up in the morning early, taking cold baths and performing Swedish exercises. By contrast, like many depressives, he kept strange hours, and spent most of his days on this planet sitting around doing nothing much, dreaming his terrible dreams, and talking interminable nonsense. In this he was extraordinarily unlike the archetypical Germans who looked to him in the 1920s and 1930s as their saviour. They were hard-working, home-loving people who, by the end of the 1920s, had received two catastrophic buffets from fate. The first was their country’s defeat in the First World War, and the second – a direct consequence of the first calamity – was financial ruin. Hitler’s own ‘struggle’ had in fact been entirely of his own making, and was due to simple laziness. There had been nothing to stop him, as a young man, giving up his unrealistic plans to become an artist and taking a job in an office. But he could not bring himself to get out of bed in the mornings. Hence his own slide into poverty. But he made his ruin into a personal myth with which a whole bankrupted nation was able to identify. All those hard-worked clerks and small businessmen and waiters and factory workers who voted for Hitler – while they were still allowed to vote – and who saw him as their national saviour, were quite, quite different from Hitler. Their ruin had not been as a result of idleness, or dreaminess. It had been caused by their militaristic Kaiser and his right-wing government leading them into a disastrous and costly war. For this war, the German people were made, by international treaty, quite literally to pay. Whenever there was a chance of economic recovery in the 1920s, Germany had to face the reparations demanded by France. Had the Germans been able to mine the coal in the Ruhr or exploit the great steelworks of that industrial region, there would have been some chance of a post-war economic recovery. But this industrial heartland had been occupied by the French in 1923. So in this impossible situation, the German people found themselves seduced by a political movement which appeared to offer them a solution, led by a man whose own life-journey, as set to the weird opera which must have played itself continually inside his head, matched their own national crisis.

      Many books not written in German playfully use the German word for Leader – Führer – to refer to him. It has become a sort of nickname: the Führer. But although the Leader appeared quite literally as a saviour to the unemployed Germans whom he restored to labour, to the homeowners and rentiers whose lifetime investments he appeared to make safe, he was far from being a typical German. He was indeed not a German at all and only received German citizenship in 1932, shortly before becoming Chancellor. The fact that he found himself in Munich in May 1913, as an indigent, penniless artist and layabout, was owing to the fact that he was a draft dodger from the Austro-Hungarian army.

      From 1910 – when Hitler was twenty to twenty-one – the Austrian authorities had been pursuing him to do his national service in the Imperial army. When they came after him, he denied that he had left Vienna to avoid the army. It was poverty, he claimed, which prevented him from coming to Salzburg in order to plead ill health. After a long exchange of letters he did eventually go to Salzburg, a comparatively short journey by train from Munich, and submit to a medical examination, and it was agreed that the underfed, gloomy young man was too weak to bear arms and should be pronounced unfit for military service.

      And herein lies the peculiar mystery of the Hitler phenomenon. Hitler was almost without any skills at all. He had very little energy, a modest education, no obvious ‘leadership’ qualities, and in many respects almost no interest in politics. In party politics he had no interest whatsoever. Nor, when in power, was he a ‘micromanager’. He was a peculiar combination of absolute controller and idler. There was scarcely any area of government business or military organization over which he did not wish to exercise personal control; but the day-to-day business either of civil or military administration was often something to which he appeared to demonstrate airy indifference. The tantrum was used as a workable substitute for practical common sense. Presumably he had known since childhood that most people will do anything to avoid a scene, so that a willingness to make scenes, explosive scenes, over the most trivial of upsets, or for no observable reason at all, would give him power over almost anyone with whom he came into contact – party apparatchiks, generals, foreign heads of state.

      For twelve years, this man who had no obvious talent for anything except public speaking, the manipulation of crowds, and the manipulation of individuals through emotional bullying, dominated European history. For the first six of those years, he performed what appeared to be an economic miracle: he led his country out of the gravest economic crisis ever to face a developed economy in the Western world, and he gave it full employment and apparent prosperity. He then proceeded to invade, annex or conquer Austria, the greater part of Czechoslovakia and the disputed German lands which had been appropriated by the French. All this was accomplished with astonishingly little loss of life. No wonder he was regarded, in the period 1933–9, as a hero. The British Prime Minister who had presided over victory in the First World War, the Liberal leader David Lloyd George, was overwhelmed when he visited Hitler’s Germany in 1936. Lloyd George’s daughter mockingly exclaimed ‘Heil Hitler!’ ‘Certainly Heil Hitler!’ replied Lloyd George in all seriousness, ‘I say it because he is a really great man.’ On his return to England, Lloyd George wrote an article for Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express (then a newspaper which was taken seriously), describing Hitler as a born leader of men, trusted by the old, idolized by the young, who had lifted his country from the depths.

      Anyone meeting Hitler twenty years before, however, and staring into the face of that pale, lonely youth, would have agreed that he was not fit either for military life or for anything else of a very practical bent. His Munich landlady in 1913–14, Frau Popp, a tailor’s wife, afterwards described her lodger as quiet, who spent much of his time painting his postcards – characterless little architectural studies which leave no impression at all. He was also, she remembered, a voracious reader. She does not tell us what he was reading. Hitler’s later conversation suggests retentive, rather than wide, reading. He could quote whole pages of the gloomy philosopher Schopenhauer, who had been of such profound influence over Hitler’s hero, Richard Wagner. He probably read Wagner’s libretti as poetry. He read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote. His favourite author, however, was Karl May. Even as Reich Chancellor Hitler would still