Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, a northern area in modern day Austria, which was formerly a part of the vast but fragile Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1889. His father, Alois Hitler, was abusive to the young boy, often exacting punishments via physical abuse, whilst his mother, Klara Polz, who was also his Father’s cousin, was very doting and the young Hitler grew very fond of his mother.
Whilst he was often described as a confident young man in his early youth, his personality changed when his younger brother, Edmund, passed away from the measles when Hitler was 11, turning him into a more detached and depressed young teen, who’d often argue with his father and teachers. Only three years later, his father would pass away from a lung hemorrhage. Not long afterwards, his grades started to decline, with him barely passing his final exams.
At the age of 18, he had a sad goodbye to his mother, before moving to Vienna to take an entrance exam to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. After being rejected not once but twice, he had to return home to Linz, after learning that his mother was dying of breast cancer. She passed away at the age of 47, when Hitler was 18. The family doctor, Eduard Bloch, said that he had never seen someone so distraught as Hitler was at his mother’s death.
Aimless, Hitler slept on the streets of Vienna, selling paintings of Vienna’s sights in order to pay for food and alike. Whilst his former roommate in Vienna, August Kubisek, often described Hitler as rather outgoing, despite a general disinterest in pursuing women romantically, passionate in politics and the arts, a fan of the opera and somewhat Catholic in his beliefs, Hitler abruptly left the apartment they lived in shortly after his mother died and left no note indicating where he was going to. Likely because he was going nowhere.
Whilst he was often friendly towards Jewish individuals who expressed their religion in a more subtle way, that attitude began to slowly change over his time on the streets. The Vienna into which Hitler arrived was a city in which antisemitism had become increasingly prominent, although it was very different from the antisemitism that would later define Nazi Germany. For centuries, hostility towards Jews had largely been rooted in religious prejudice. Jews had been accused of rejecting Christianity, blamed for the death of Christ and subjected to restrictions and persecution across Europe. During the nineteenth century, however, these older prejudices increasingly took on a new political and racial character. The development of nationalism and the emergence of new theories about human evolution and heredity encouraged some thinkers to divide humanity into supposedly distinct and hierarchical races. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection did not itself teach racial hierarchy or antisemitism, but ideas derived from or falsely presented as extensions of Darwinism were increasingly applied to human society. So-called Social Darwinists argued that competition between individuals, nations and races was a natural struggle in which supposedly superior groups would prevail over inferior ones.
Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it. Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race.
Friedrich Nietzche writing on the nature of Social Darwinism
This provided antisemites with a new argument. Jews were increasingly portrayed not simply as followers of another religion who could convert to Christianity, but as members of an allegedly distinct and biologically defined race. This distinction was important because it meant that conversion could no longer supposedly make someone ‘less Jewish’. Antisemitism therefore became increasingly associated with theories of blood, heredity and racial nationalism. These ideas were never scientifically valid, but they gave existing prejudices the appearance of modern intellectual legitimacy.
Vienna was particularly fertile ground for this new political antisemitism. The city was the capital of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire and contained a large and increasingly visible Jewish population. Jewish communities had played an important role in Vienna’s commercial, professional, cultural and intellectual life, whilst the rapid growth of the city had also produced social tensions and resentment towards the established political and economic order. Antisemitism could therefore be combined with opposition to liberalism, capitalism, socialism and the multinational character of the Habsburg Empire.
One of the most successful politicians to exploit these tensions was Karl Lueger, leader of the Christian Social Party and mayor of Vienna from 1897 until his death in 1910. Lueger openly used antisemitic rhetoric, blaming Jews for many of the problems facing ordinary Austrians. Yet his politics were more complicated than the racial ideology that would later emerge under Hitler. Lueger was a Catholic conservative and populist who combined antisemitism with support for municipal welfare, public services and the interests of Vienna’s lower middle classes. His antisemitism was therefore both ideological and political: it provided a convenient way of identifying an enemy whilst appealing to voters who felt threatened by economic and social change.
Austrian antisemitism also differed from that found in Germany. Germany certainly had powerful antisemitic movements and organisations, particularly from the 1870s onwards, but antisemitism did not achieve the same level of electoral success there before the First World War. In Austria, and especially in Vienna, it became much more deeply integrated into mainstream populist politics. Lueger was an especially important example. He was so successful that Emperor Franz Joseph repeatedly refused to confirm his election as mayor before eventually accepting the political reality of his popularity. Lueger himself once famously remarked that he decided who was a Jew, reflecting the opportunistic nature of his politics: antisemitism was central to his political appeal, but it was also a flexible tool rather than the consistently racial doctrine that the Nazis would later develop.
For the young Hitler, this political environment was formative. Vienna exposed him to an antisemitism that was not confined to extremist pamphlets or fringe organisations but could be used successfully by a major political movement. Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf that his years in Vienna had transformed his understanding of Jews, claiming that he had gradually come to see them as a political and racial threat. These later recollections must be treated cautiously. Hitler was writing Mein Kampf after the First World War, when he was already a committed antisemite and Nazi politician, and he had an obvious interest in presenting his hatred of Jews as an inevitable discovery rather than a later development.
Once, when passing through the inner City, I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black side-locks. My first thought was: Is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this appearance in Linz. I watched the man stealthily and cautiously; but the longer I gazed at the strange countenance and examined it feature by feature, the more the question shaped itself in my brain: Is this a German?
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
There is evidence that Hitler encountered antisemitic ideas in Vienna, but it is difficult to establish precisely when he personally adopted them. His earlier life included relationships with Jewish acquaintances and no clear evidence that he entered Vienna already committed to the extreme racial antisemitism that would later characterise Nazism. His transformation was gradual and was influenced by the wider political culture around him. Lueger was particularly significant because Hitler later praised him as a master of mass politics. He admired the way Lueger could take popular grievances, identify political enemies and communicate his message directly to ordinary voters.
Hitler also encountered the German nationalist movement in Austria, particularly the ideas of Georg von Schönerer, whose Pan-Germanism was considerably more radical than Lueger’s Catholic populism. Schönerer combined German nationalism with virulent antisemitism and hostility towards the Habsburg monarchy. Hitler would eventually draw from both traditions: from Lueger, the use of populism, propaganda and mass political mobilisation; from Schönerer, a more explicitly racial antisemitism, German nationalism and hostility towards Austria’s multinational political structure.
Vienna therefore did not simply ‘make’ Hitler antisemitic. Rather, it provided him with a political laboratory in which he encountered several ideas that would later become central to Nazism. Older religious hostility towards Jews was being transformed into racial nationalism, antisemitism could be used as a populist political weapon, and politicians such as Lueger demonstrated how successfully such ideas could be incorporated into mass politics. Hitler would later take these influences much further, combining them with German nationalism, Social Darwinist racial theory, conspiracy theories and his own increasingly radical worldview. Having developed these racist sentiments, he came to despise the multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire, so moved to Germany by late 1913. Accused of draft dodging, Hitler wrote a letter to the Austro-Hungarian police, fearing arrest if he didn’t. Admiring his tone, the police let him go and the matter was largely dropped altogether. Only a few months later, war broke out.