Hitler’s biologism was intimately linked to his understanding of history. He knew very little about prehistory but certainly regarded himself as something of a classicist. He was fond of saying that his ‘natural home’ was ancient Greece or Rome, and he had more than a passing acquaintance with Plato. Partly because of this, he considered the races of the East (the old ‘Barbarians’) as inferior. ‘Retrogression’ was a favourite idea of Hitler’s, something he applied to the ‘Habsburg brood,’ who ruled in Vienna but for him were doomed to degeneracy. Similarly, organised religion, Catholicism in particular, was also doomed, owing to its antiscientific stance and its unfortunate interest in the poor (‘weaklings’). For Hitler mankind was divided into three – creators of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture – and only the ‘Aryans’ were capable of creating culture.122 The decline of culture was always due to the same reason: miscegenation. The Germanic tribes had replaced decadent cultures before – in ancient Rome – and could do so again with the decadent West. Here again, the influence of Linz can be detected. For one thing, it helps explain Hitler’s affinity for Hegel. Hegel had argued that Europe was central in history, that Russia and the United States were peripheral. Landlocked Linz reinforced this view. ‘Throughout his life Hitler remained an inland-orientated German, his imagination untouched by the sea…. He was completely rooted within the cultural boundaries of the old Roman Empire.’123 This attitude may just have been crucial, leading Hitler to fatally underestimate the resolve of that periphery – Britain, the United States, and Russia.
If Linz kept Hitler’s thinking in the nineteenth century, Vienna taught him to hate. Werner Maser says, interestingly, that ‘Hitler perhaps hated better than he loved.’124 It was the Vienna Academy that twice rejected him and his efforts to become an art student and an architect. And it was in Vienna that Hitler first encountered widespread anti-Semitism. In Mein Kampf he argued that he did not come across many Jews or any anti-Semitism until he reached Vienna, and that anti-Semitism had a rational basis, ‘the triumph of reason over feeling.’ This is flatly contradicted by August Kubizek, Hitler’s friend from his Vienna years (Mein Kampf is now known to be wrong on several biographical details). According to Kubizek, Adolf’s father was not a broadminded cosmopolitan, as he is portrayed, but an out-and-out anti-Semite and a follower of Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the rabid nationalist we met in chapter 3. Kubizek also says that in 1904, when they first met and Hitler was fifteen and still at school, he was already ‘distinctly anti-Semitic.’125 Research has confirmed that there were fifteen Jews at Hitler’s school, not one, as he says in Mein Kampf
Whether or not Kubizek or Hitler is right about the anti-Semitism in Linz, Vienna, as we have seen, was a sump of vicious anti-Jewish feeling. For a start, Hitler early on encountered a series of pamphlets entitled Ostara, a periodical that was often stamped with a swastika on its cover.126 Founded in 1905 by a wild racist who called himself George Lanz von Liebenfels, this journal at one point claimed a circulation of 100,000 copies. Its editorials revealed its stance openly: ‘The Ostara is the first and only periodical devoted to investigating and cultivating heroic racial characteristics and the law of man in such a way that, by actually applying the discoveries of ethnology, we may through systematic eugenics … preserve the heroic and noble race from destruction by socialist and feminist revolutionaries.’ Lanz von Liebenfels was also the founder of the ‘Order of the New Temple,’ whose membership ‘was restricted to fair-haired, blue-eyed men, all of whom were pledged to marry fair-haired, blue-eyed women.’ Between 1928 and 1930 Ostara reprinted Liebenfels’s 1908 tome Theozoology; or, the Science of Sodom’s Apelings and the Divine Electron: An Introduction to the Earliest and Most Recent World View and a Vindication of Royalty and the Nobility. ‘Sodom’s apelings’ was the appealing label given to dark-skinned ‘inferior races,’ whom Liebenfels regarded as ‘God’s bungled handiwork.’127 But Hitler’s anti-Semitism was also fanned by Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who in turn owed a debt to the German translation of Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. At the 1919 meeting of the Pan-German League, one of the League’s specific aims was identified as combating ‘the disruptive, subversive influence of the Jews – a racial question which has nothing to do with questions of religion.’ As Werner Maser remarks, ‘This manifesto thus marked the launch of biological antisemitism.’128 Certainly, by the time Hitler came to write Mein Kampf, more than five years later, he referred to Jews as ‘parasites,’ ‘bacilli,’ ‘germ-carriers,’ and ‘fungus.’ From then on, from a National Socialist point of view, Jews were deprived of all human attributes.
It is doubtful that Hitler was as well read as his admirers claimed, but he did know some architecture, art, military history, general history, and technology, and also felt at home in music, biology, medicine, and the history of civilisation and religion.129 He was often able to surprise his listeners with his detailed knowledge in a variety of fields. His doctor, for example, was once astonished to discover that the Führer fully grasped the effects of nicotine on the coronary vessels.130 But Hitler was largely self-taught, which had significant consequences. He never had a teacher able to give him a systematic or comprehensive grounding in any field. He was never given any objective, outside viewpoint that might have had an effect on his judgement or on how he weighed evidence. Second, World War I, which began when Hitler was twenty-five, acted as a brake (and a break) in his education. Hitler’s thoughts stopped developing in 1914; thereafter, he was by and large confined to the halfway house of ideas in Pan-Germany described in chapters 2 and 3. Hitler’s achievement showed what could be wrought by a mixture of Rilke’s mysticism, Heidegger’s metaphysics, Werner Sombart’s notion of heroes versus traders, and that hybrid cocktail of social Darwinism, Nietzschean pessimism, and the visceral anti-Semitism that has become all too familiar. It was a mix that could flourish only in a largely landlocked country obsessed with heroes. Traders, especially in maritime nations, or America, whose business was business, learned too much respect for other peoples in the very act of trading. It would be entirely fitting, though not often enough stressed, that Hitler’s brand of thought was so comprehensively defeated by Western rationalism, so much the work of Jews.