Hitler by Joachim C. Fest

passionate outbursts. He left Vienna, as he later remarked, “a confirmed anti-Semite, a deadly foe of the whole Marxist world outlook, and pan-German.”
    Like all such self-descriptions, this one has plainly been tailored so that Hitler can pretend to early judgment in political matters. He practiced the same kind of tailoring in writing
Mein Kampf.
In fact, his moving to Munich, rather than Berlin, the capital of the Reich, is rather plain proof of his continuing unpolitical disposition. Or perhaps we should say that he was guided by romantic and artistic impulses far more than political motives. For prewar Munich had the reputation of being a city of the Muses, a charming, humanely sensual, lighthearted center of art and science. The “life style of the painter was regarded here as the most legitimate of all.” 46 This picture of the city stemmed precisely from the contrast it made to noisily modem, proletarian Berlin. The latter city was a Babylon, in which social questions took precedence over aesthetics, ideologies over culture—or, in sum, politics over art. The atmosphere of Munich was more like that of Vienna, which again suggests that Hitler was drawn there by a general feeling rather than by any specific reasons that would have made him choose it in preference to Berlin—if, indeed, he felt confronted with any choice at all. In the
Reich Handbook of German Society
(a kind of
Who’s Who
) for 1931 he explained that he had moved to Munich to find “a wider field for political activity.” He would have found, however, better conditions in the capital of the Reich.
    The same torpor and friendlessness that had marked the years in Vienna continued in Munich. It rather seems as if he spent his youth in a great hollow space. He made no contacts with parties or political factions; and ideologically, too, he remained solitary. Munich was an intellectually restive city, whose whole aura favored human relationships. Here even obsessions were highly thought of, for they betokened originality. Yet even here the young Hitler formed ties with nobody. He could have found his way to those who shared his racist notions, for even the most bizarre variants of
völkisch
ideas had their place in the city. Anti-Semitism also flourished, especially in the economically dislocated petty bourgeoisie. There were also radical leftist movements of widely differing character. It is true that all these tendencies were softened by the climate of Munich and usually expressed in sociable, rhetorical, neighborly forms. In the then suburb of Schwabing anarchists, bohemians, reformers, artists, and various apostles of new principles mingled easily. Pale young geniuses dreamed of an elitist renewal of the world, of redemptions, cataclysmic purgations, and barbarous rejuvenation cures for degenerate mankind.
    At the center of one of the most important of those circles that formed at café tables around individuals or ideas was the poet Stefan George. He had gathered around him a band of highly talented disciples who imitated him in his contempt for bourgeois morality, glorification of youth and of instinct, faith in the superman, and an austere ideal of life as art and the life of the artist. One of his disciples, Alfred Schuler, had rediscovered the forgotten swastika. Ludwig Klages, who for a time was close to George, proclaimed “mind as the antagonist of the soul.”
    Oswald Spengler, at that period, was setting out to proclaim the decline of the West and announcing a line of new Caesars who would, for a time, stem the tide. Lenin had lived at 106 Schleissheimer Strasse, and at number 34 on the same street, only a few blocks away, Adolf Hitler now took a room as a tenant in the apartment of a tailor named Popp.
    The intellectual ferment, like the artistic experimentation of the period, passed Hitler by in Munich as it had in Vienna. Vassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, or Paul Klee, who also lived in the