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Hitler's Vienna explores the critical years that the young Adolf Hitler spent in Vienna, the city that in so many ways furnished the future dictator's education. It is both a cultural and political portrait of the Austrian capital and a biography of Hitler during his years there, from 1906 until his departure for Munich in 1913 at the age of twenty-four. Hitler's was not the modern, artistic "fin-de-siecle Vienna" we associate with Freud, Mahler, Schnitzler, and Wittgenstein. Instead, it was a cauldron of fear and ethnic rivalry, a metropolis teeming with "little people" who rejected Viennese modernity as too international, too libertine, and too Jewish. It was a breeding ground for racist political theories, where one leading member of parliament said, to the cheers of his colleagues, "I would like to see all Jews ground to artificial fertilizer." Brigitte Hamann vividly depicts the undercurrent of disturbing ideologies that flowed beneath the glitter of the Hapsburg capital. Against this background, Hamann tells the story of the moody, curious, intense, painfully shy young man from the provinces, Adolf Hitler. Drawing on previously untapped sources that range from personal reminiscences to the records of homeless shelters where the unemployed Hitler spent his nights, Hamann gives us the fullest account ever rendered of this period of Hitler's life and shows us how profoundly his years in Vienna influenced his later career. Hitler's Vienna is a major addition to present Hitler scholarship.… (more)
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Hamann excels in presenting the different toxic ingredients that exploded the Habsburg Empire: The fight between different nationalities, between different religions, between different classes, between old and new, between insiders and outsiders. Hitler saw and learned how a minority could convince a passive majority of its position by demonizing a group of helpless outsiders as the other. Vienna's mayor Karl Lueger was a master of this toxic game. Hamann also highlights the toxic ideas of the newspapers Hitler consumed en masse, constituting a similar echo chamber as Fox News and talk radio today. Hitler learned from the failure of some Viennese precursors to temper some of his messages to gain wider acceptance. Hitler's antisemitism, even after the lecture of this book, remains a puzzle to me. The Jews he met and associated with in Vienna not only treated him kindly, he often sought their company and did not utter antisemitic rants. He might have held on to Karl Lueger's paradoxical saying "I determine who is Jewish." of liking or not dis-liking individual Jews but hating Jews as a group or concept of the other. I guess it was only the economic collapse after WWI which mushroomed Hitler's antisemitism. Given his German nationalistic and anti-clerical Catholic background he already brought to Vienna, I see few opportunities that could have lifted him out of his misery. Given his limited artistic talent, becoming a successful painter was hardly an option. He should really have tried his luck in advertising.
Highly recommended.