Unlike Schönerer, whose arrogance and fixation aroused strong opposition and thus condemned him to ineffectiveness, Lueger was conciliatory, skillful, and popular. He merely exploited ideologies; privately, he despised them. His thinking was tactical and pragmatic; accomplishment meant more to him than ideas. In his fifteen years in office the transportation network of Vienna was modernized, the educational system extended, social welfare improved, green belts laid out, and almost a million jobs created. Lueger based his power on the Catholic working class and the petty bourgeoisie: white-collar workers and lower-rank government officials, small shopkeepers, the concierges and lower clergy, all of whom industrialization and changing times threatened with social downgrading or poverty. He, too—in this resembing Schönerer—profited by the widespread feelings of anxiety, but he exploited these feelings only against select and defeatable opponents. Moreover, he did not arouse more anxiety by painting the future in gloomy colors. Instead, he won support with infallibly effective humanitarian platitudes, vividly expressed in his recurrent phrase: “We must do something for the little man!”
But Hitler admired Lueger for more than his Machiavellian qualities. He believed he had discovered a deeper concord between the mayor and himself. Certainly Lueger had things to teach him; but beyond that, Hitler regarded the man as a kindred soul. Like himself the son of simple folk, Lueger had made his way against all obstacles, all slurs and social disparagement. He had prevailed over even the objections of the Emperor, who three times refused to confirm him as mayor, and had won that recognition from society which Hitler, too, was bent on having. While Schönerer scotched his chances by making enemies, Lueger had worked his way up by continuously seeking and cementing alliances with the ruling groups. He had known how—as Hitler in his homage described the well-remembered lesson—“to make use of all existing implements of power, to incline mighty existing institutions in his favor, drawing from these old sources of power the greatest possible profit for his own movement.”
The mass party Lueger formed with the aid of emotional slogans was living proof that anxiety was—as happiness had been a century before—a new idea in Europe, powerful enough to bridge even class interests. For the time being, the idea of a nationalistic socialism took much the same course. The Bohemian and Moravian regions of the Danube Monarchy were rapidly becoming industrialized. In 1904 a congress in Trautenau founded the German Workers’ Party (DAP—Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). Its aim was to defend the interests of the German workers against cheap Czech labor pouring into the factories from the countryside and frequently acting as strikebreakers. This action was one step—there would be others throughout Europe under the most varied auspices—toward meeting a key weakness of Marxist socialism: its inability to overcome national antagonisms and to give concrete reality to its humanitarian slogans. For there was no room within the theory of class struggle for the German worker’s sense of a separate national existence. In fact, the adherents of the new German Workers’ Party were recruited largely from among former members of the Social Democratic Party. They had turned away from their previous political convictions out of concern that the policy of proletarian solidarity would favor only the Czech majority in the region. That policy, as the program of the DAP formulated it, was “misguided and immeasurably harmful to the Germans of Central Europe.”
To these Germans the inseparability of their national and social interests seemed to be an obvious and universal truth, which they opposed to the high-flown and imprecise internationalism of the Marxists. They thought they would find the reconciliation of socialism and nationalism in the idea of a “national community”—Volksgemeinschaft. The program of their party united, in somewhat contradictory fashion, whatever ideas answered their craving for self-defense and self-assertion. The goals of the party were predominantly anticapitalistic, revolutionary-libertarian, and democratic; but from the beginning this was mingled with authoritarian and irrational notions, along with fierce antipathies toward Czechs, Jews, and other so-called “foreign elements.” The early followers of the party were workers from small mines, from the textile industry; there were also some railroad workmen and artisans. They regarded themselves as closer to the German bourgeois types, the pharmacist, the industrialist, the high official, or the businessman than to the unskilled Czech workers. Soon they took to calling themselves National Socialists.
In later life Hitler did not like to recall these forerunners, although his ties with them, especially in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, were for a time very close. The existence of these predecessors obviously cast doubt upon his claim, as leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), to sole authorship of the idea that was to determine the fate of the century. In Mein Kampf he attempted to derive this idea from his comparison between Lueger and Schönerer, and to represent it as his personal synthesis:
If, in addition to its enlightened knowledge of the broad masses the Christian Social Party had had a correct idea of the importance of the racial question, such as the Pan-German movement had achieved; and if, finally, it had itself been nationalistic, or if the Pan-German movement, in addition to its correct knowledge of the aim of the Jewish question, had adopted the practical shrewdness of the Christian Social Party, especially in its attitude toward socialism, there would have resulted a movement which even then in my opinion might have successfully intervened in German destiny.30
Hitler would have it that he refrained from joining either of these parties because of these objections. But it would be more accurate to say that for most of his Vienna years he had no independently thought-out political line. Rather, he was filled with inchoate emotions of hatred and defensiveness of the sort to which Schönerer appealed. Alongside these were vague, upwelling prejudices against Jews and other minorities and an aching desire to be influential in some way. He grasped what was happening in the world around him more by instinct than by reason. So excessively subjective was his interest in public affairs at this time that he cannot really be called political. Rather, he was still being “politicalized.” He himself admitted that at the time he was so filled with his artistic aspirations that he was only “incidentally” interested in politics; it took the “fist of fate” to open his eyes. Proof of this is the tale he tells of himself as a young building worker deeply disliked by his fellows. The anecdote later found its way into all German schoolbooks as a staple item of the Hitler legend. But, for us, the significant detail is this: that when asked to join the union he refused, giving as his reason that he “did not understand the matter.” It would seem that for a long time politics represented to him principally a means for unburdening himself, a way to blame his misfortunes on the world, to explain his own fate as due to a faulty social system, and finally, also, to find specific scapegoats. Significantly, the only organization he joined was the League of Anti-Semites.31