Meanwhile, reputedly through Greiner’s mediation, he produced a poster advertising a hair tonic, another poster for a bed-feathers shop, another for an antiperspirant sold under the brand name “Teddy.” A copy of this last poster, with Hitler’s signature in a corner, has been found. It shows two rather stiff, clumsily drawn figures of letter carriers; one has sat down in exhaustion wringing heavy blue drops of sweat out of his sock; the other is informing his “dear brother” that 10,000 steps a day are “a pleasure with Teddy powder.” In another poster that has come down to us the tower of St. Stephan’s cathedral rises majestically above a mountain of soap. What Hitler himself considered noteworthy about this period of his life was that he was at last master of his own time. During the long hours he spent over the newspapers in cheap little cafes, he read by preference the anti-Semitic Deutsches Volksblatt.
If we were to define the characteristic quality of that period in the life of this eccentric, solitary twenty-year-old (Hitler, too, spoke of himself as having been “eccentric” at this time),34 we should have to stress the essentially unpolitical nature of his interests. Richard Wagner was his idol during those years, not only “in music.” In fact, Hitler saw Wagner’s early disappointments, lack of recognition, and obstinate faith in his own vocation, a “life flowing into the glory of world fame,”35 as a prototype of his own destiny. Hitler was not the only victim to be seduced by that romantic concept of genius whose merits and failings Richard Wagner embodied. Because of Wagner a whole generation was confused, misguided, and alienated from the bourgeois world.
The boy who fled the disciplines of school and then fell prey to the delusive promises of the big city found his idol in the Master of Bayreuth. Many young men of his generation followed the same course, and with similarly exalted expectations. It was a way with great appeal to gifted “outsiders” who otherwise would have no choice but to sink into mediocrity. It may surprise us to find that this unprepossessing son of a Linz customs official represents so typical a phenomenon. With the turn of the century legions of these sons of the nineteenth-century middle class made their appearance. In 1906 Hermann Hesse, in Under the Wheel, vividly described the sufferings of one such youth under contemporary conditions and gave a dismal forecast of his future. Robert Musil, in Young Torless, and Frank Wedekind, in The Awakening of Spring, were among the many writers who dealt with the same theme. Whether these heroes sought escape from the toils of the world or went down to destruction, all of them opposed to the bourgeois world a wild enthusiasm for the arts. They despised their fathers’ mean accomplishments and felt only contempt for their values. By contrast, an artist’s existence was noble, precisely because it was socially unfruitful. Everything that stood for order, duty, endurance, they dismissed as “bourgeois.” The bourgeois mentality, they maintained, promoted efficiency but did not tolerate the extraordinary. The tremendous intensifications of true culture, on the other hand, the glories of the “spirit,” could be achieved only in isolation, in extreme human and social aloofness. The artist, the genius, the complex personality in general, was bound to be utterly out of place in the bourgeois world. His true locale was far out on the fringes of society, where the morgue for suicides and the pantheon for immortals were both situated—as Henri Murger, the first analyst of this type bathetically observed. Though the lodginghouses to which Hitler betook himself were squalid, though his notion of being an artist was ridiculously highflown; though no one so far had acknowledged his talent; though his actual life in the home for men was marked by deceit, parasitism, and asociality—all this could be secretly justified in terms of the prevailing concept of genius. And Richard Wagner was the supreme example of the validity of that concept.
Hitler himself, in fact, later declared that with the exception of Richard Wagner he had “no forerunners,” and by Wagner he meant not only the composer, but Wagner the personality, “the greatest prophetic figure the German people has had.” One of his favorite ideas, to which he returned frequently, concerned Wagner’s towering importance “for the development of German man.” He admired the courage and energy with which Wagner exerted political influence “without really wishing to be political,” and on one occasion admitted that a “literally hysterical excitement” overcame him when he recognized his own psychological kinship with this great man.36
The parallels are, in fact, not at all hard to detect. The points of contact between the two temperaments—all the more marked because the young postcard painter consciously modeled himself after his hero—produce a curious sense of family resemblance, which Thomas Mann first pointed out in his disturbing essay Brother Hitler. In 1938, when Hitler was at the height of his peacetime triumphs, Mann wrote:
Must we not, even against our will, recognize in this phenomenon an aspect of the artist’s character? We are ashamed to admit it, but the whole pattern is there: the recalcitrance, sluggishness and miserable indefiniteness of his youth; the dimness of purpose, the what-do-you-really-want-to-be, the vegetating like a semi-idiot in the lowest social and psychological bohemianism, the arrogant rejection of any sensible and honorable occupation because of the basic feeling that he is too good for that sort of thing. On what is this feeling based? On a vague sense of being reserved for something entirely indefinable. To name it, if it could be named, would make people burst out laughing. Along with that, the uneasy conscience, the sense of guilt, the rage at the world, the revolutionary instinct, the subconscious storing up of explosive cravings for compensation, the churning determination to justify oneself, to prove oneself…. It is a thoroughly embarrassing kinship. Still and all, I would not want to close my eyes to it.37
But there are other striking parallels between Hitler and Wagner: the uncertainty about ancestry, the failure at school, the flight from military service, the morbid hatred of Jews, even the vegetarianism, which in Wagner ultimately developed into the ludicrous delusion that humanity must be saved by vegetarian diet. Also common to both was the violent quality of their moods: the abrupt alternation of depressions and exaltations, triumphs and disasters. In many of Richard Wagner’s operas the theme is the classic conflict between the outsider, subject only to his own laws, and a rigid social order governed by tradition. In Rienzi or Lohengrin or Tannhäuser, Hitler, the rejected Academy candidate sitting over his water colors in the reading room of the home for men, recognized magnified aspects of his own confrontation with the world. Both Wagner and Hitler, moreover, possessed a furious will to power, a basically despotic tendency. All of Richard Wagner’s art has never been able to conceal to what extent its underlying urge was the boundless need to dominate. From this impulse sprang the taste for massive effects, for pomposity, for overwhelming hugeness. Wagner’s first major composition after Rienzi was a choral work for 1,200 male voices and an orchestra of one hundred. This blatant reliance on mass effects, employed to cover up basic weaknesses, this medley of pagan, ritual and music-hall elements anticipated the era of mass hypnosis. The style of public ceremonies in the Third Reich is inconceivable without this operatic tradition, without the essentially demagogical art of Richard Wagner.