“Vienna was and remained for me the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life,” wrote Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, summarizing his formative years as a resident of the capital city of the fading Austro-Hungarian Empire. Professional historians disagree with the man’s report about his own experiences. “Hitler’s career cannot be derived, let alone understood, from his situation in Vienna,” wrote Brigitte Hamann in her book Hitler’s Vienna. “This Austrian had a career only in the Weimar Republic.”
Perhaps, in this case, we should trust the man himself. The Vienna of Hitler’s youth was a place of legendary ferment in ideas, politics, and the arts. Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, and Ludwig Wittgenstein frequented the same café. The designers and painters of the Vienna Secession, including Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele, created works of such psychological force and originality that it is doubtful whether anything more “modern” has been created in the century since. Zionism was born in Vienna, as was our modern obsession with gender-bending, the costuming of Ziggy Stardust, the aesthetics of punk rock, enough glass housewares to fill a floor at MOMA, and countless other marvelous inventions and explorations.
Hitler’s Vienna, though, included none of these wonders. For the future German dictator, the imperial capital was a place of personal isolation, social exclusion, homelessness, and starvation. We know very little else about it. Mein Kampf is less an autobiography in any true sense than an instrumental, mythmaking construction intended to speed its author’s rise to power.
