In The Home Of My Parents

The story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for me.

I asked: Is there a difference between the Germans who fought that war and the other Germans? Why did not Austria also take part in it?

Why did not my father and all the others fight in that struggle? Are we not the same as the other Germans? Do we not all belong together?

That was the first time that this problem began to agitate my small brain.

I realized that not all Germans had the good luck to belong to Bismarck’s Empire.

This was something that I could not understand.

It was decided that I should study.

My father decided that the classical subjects at the Lyceum were not suited to my natural talents.

He thought that the REALSCHULE (Note 2) would suit me better.

My obvious talent for drawing confirmed him in that view. He thought that drawing was a subject too much neglected in the Austrian GYMNASIUM.

Probably also the memory of the hard road which he himself had travelled contributed to make him look upon classical studies as unpractical and accordingly to set little value on them.

At the back of his mind he had the idea that his son also should become an official of the Government. Indeed he had decided on that career for me.

The difficulties through which he had to struggle in making his own career led him to overestimate what he had achieved, because this was exclusively the result of his own indefatigable industry and energy.

The characteristic pride of the self-made man urged him towards the idea that his son should follow the same calling and if possible rise to a higher position in it.

Moreover, this idea was strengthened by the consideration that the results of his own life’s industry had placed him in a position to facilitate his son’s advancement in the same career.

He was simply incapable of imagining that I might reject what had meant everything in life to him. My father’s decision was simple, definite, clear and, in his eyes, it was something to be taken for granted.

A man of such a nature who had become an autocrat by reason of his own hard struggle for existence, could not think of allowing ‘inexperienced’ and irresponsible young fellows to choose their own careers.

To act in such a way, where the future of his own son was concerned, would have been a grave and reprehensible weakness in the exercise of parental authority and responsibility, something utterly incompatible with his characteristic sense of duty.

And yet it had to be otherwise.

For the first time in my life–I was then eleven years old–I felt myself forced into open opposition.

No matter how hard and determined my father might be about putting his own plans and opinions into action, his son was no less obstinate in refusing to accept ideas on which he set little or no value.

I would not become a civil servant.

No amount of persuasion and no amount of ‘grave’ warnings could break down that opposition. I would not become a State official, not on any account.

All the attempts which my father made to arouse in me a love or liking for that profession, by picturing his own career for me, had only the opposite effect. It nauseated me to think that one day I might be fettered to an office stool, that I could not dispose of my own time but would be forced to spend the whole of my life filling out forms.

One can imagine what kind of thoughts such a prospect awakened in the mind of a young fellow who was by no means what is called a ‘good boy’ in the current sense of that term. The ridiculously easy school tasks which we were given made it possible for me to spend far more time in the open air than at home.

Today, when my political opponents pry into my life with diligent scrutiny, as far back as the days of my boyhood, so as finally to be able to prove what disreputable tricks this Hitler was accustomed to in his young days, I thank heaven that I can look back to those happy days and find the memory of them helpful.

The fields and the woods were then the terrain on which all disputes were fought out.

Even attendance at the REALSCHULE could not alter my way of spending my time. But I had now another battle to fight.

So long as the paternal plan to make a State functionary contradicted my own inclinations only in the abstract, the conflict was easy to bear. I could be discreet about expressing my personal views and thus avoid constantly recurrent disputes.

My own resolution not to become a Government official was sufficient for the time being to put my mind completely at rest. I held on to that resolution inexorably. But the situation became more difficult once I had a positive plan of my own which I might present to my father as a counter-suggestion.

This happened when I was twelve years old. How it came about I cannot exactly say now; but one day it became clear to me that I would be a painter–I mean an artist.

That I had an aptitude for drawing was an admitted fact. It was even one of the reasons why my father had sent me to the REALSCHULE; but he had never thought of having that talent developed in such a way that I could take up painting as a professional career.

Quite the contrary. When, as a result of my renewed refusal to adopt his favourite plan, my father asked me for the first time what I myself really wished to be, the resolution that I had already formed expressed itself almost automatically.

For a while my father was speechless. “A painter? An artist-painter?” he exclaimed.

He wondered whether I was in a sound state of mind. He thought that he might not have caught my words rightly, or that he had misunderstood what I meant.

But when I had explained my ideas to him and he saw how seriously I took them, he opposed them with that full determination which was characteristic of him. His decision was exceedingly simple and could not be deflected from its course by any consideration of what my own natural qualifications really were.

“Artist! Not as long as I live, never.” As the son had inherited some of the father’s obstinacy, besides having other qualities of his own, my reply was equally energetic. But it stated something quite the contrary.

At that our struggle became stalemate. The father would not abandon his ‘Never’, and I became all the more consolidated in my ‘Nevertheless’.

Naturally the resulting situation was not pleasant. The old gentleman was bitterly annoyed; and indeed so was I, although I really loved him.

My father forbade me to entertain any hopes of taking up the art of painting as a profession. I went a step further and declared that I would not study anything else. With such declarations the situation became still more strained, so that the old gentleman irrevocably decided to assert his parental authority at all costs. That led me to adopt an attitude of circumspect silence, but I put my threat into execution.

I thought that, once it became clear to my father that I was making no progress at the REALSCHULE, for weal or for woe, he would be forced to allow me to follow the happy career I had dreamed of.

I do not know whether I calculated rightly or not. Certainly my failure to make progress became quite visible in the school. I studied just the subjects that appealed to me, especially those which I thought might be of advantage to me later on as a painter.

What did not appear to have any importance from this point of view, or what did not otherwise appeal to me favourably, I completely sabotaged.

My school reports of that time were always in the extremes of good or bad, according to the subject and the interest it had for me. In one column my qualification read ‘very good’ or ’excellent’. In another it read ‘average’ or even ‘below average’. By far my best subjects were geography and, even more so, general history. These were my two favourite subjects, and I led the class in them.

When I look back over so many years and try to judge the results of that experience I find two very significant facts standing out clearly before my mind.

First, I became a nationalist.

Second, I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.

The old Austria was a multi-national State. In those days at least the citizens of the German Empire, taken through and through, could not understand what that fact meant in the everyday life of the individuals within such a State. After the magnificent triumphant march of the victorious armies in the Franco-German War the Germans in the REICH became steadily more and more estranged from the Germans beyond their frontiers, partly because they did not deign to appreciate those other Germans at their true value or simply because they were incapable of doing so.

The Germans of the REICH did not realize that if the Germans in Austria had not been of the best racial stock they could never have given the stamp of their own character to an Empire of 52 millions, so definitely that in Germany itself the idea arose–though quite an erroneous one–that Austria was a German State.

That was an error which led to dire consequences; but all the same it was a magnificent testimony to the character of the ten million Germans in that East Mark. (Note 3)

Only very few of the Germans in the REICH itself had an idea of the bitter struggle which those Eastern Germans had to carry on daily for the preservation of their German language, their German schools and their German character.

Only to-day, when a tragic fate has torn several millions of our kinsfolk away from the REICH and has forced them to live under the rule of the stranger, dreaming of that common fatherland towards which all their yearnings are directed and struggling to uphold at least the sacred right of using their mother tongue–only now have the wider circles of the German population come to realize what it means to have to fight for the traditions of one’s race. And so at last perhaps there are people here and there who can assess the greatness of that German spirit which animated the old East Mark and enabled those people, left entirely dependent on their own resources, to defend the Empire against the Orient for several centuries and subsequently to hold fast the frontiers of the German language through a guerilla warfare of attrition, at a time when the German Empire was sedulously cultivating an interest for colonies but not for its own flesh and blood before the threshold of its own door.

What has happened always and everywhere, in every kind of struggle, happened also in the language fight which was carried on in the old Austria.

There were three groups–the fighters, the hedgers and the traitors. Even in the schools this sifting already began to take place. And it is worth noting that the struggle for the language was waged perhaps in its bitterest form around the school; because this was the nursery where the seeds had to be watered which were to spring up and form the future generation.

The tactical objective of the fight was the winning over of the child, and it was to the child that the first rallying cry was addressed:

“German youth, do not forget that you are a German,” and “Remember, little girl, that one day you must be a German mother.”

Those who know something of the juvenile spirit can understand how youth will always lend a glad ear to such a rallying cry. Under many forms the young people led the struggle, fighting in their own way and with their own weapons. They refused to sing non-German songs.

The greater the efforts made to win them away from their German allegiance, the more they exalted the glory of their German heroes.

They stinted themselves in buying things to eat, so that they might spare their pennies to help the war chest of their elders. They were incredibly alert in the significance of what the non-German teachers said and they contradicted in unison. They wore the forbidden emblems of their own kinsfolk and were happy when penalised for doing so, or even physically punished. In miniature they were mirrors of loyalty from which the older people might learn a lesson.

And thus it was that at a comparatively early age I took part in the struggle which the nationalities were waging against one another in the old Austria. When meetings were held for the South Mark German League and the School League we wore cornflowers and black-red-gold colours to express our loyalty. We greeted one another with HEIL! and instead of the Austrian anthem we sang our own DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES, despite warnings and penalties. Thus the youth were educated politically at a time when the citizens of a so-called national State for the most part knew little of their own nationality except the language. Of course, I did not belong to the hedgers. Within a little while I had become an ardent ‘German National’, which has a different meaning from the party significance attached to that phrase to-day.

I developed very rapidly in the nationalist direction, and by the time I was 15 years old I had come to understand the distinction between dynastic patriotism and nationalism based on the concept of folk, or people, my inclination being entirely in favour of the latter.

Such a preference may not perhaps be clearly intelligible to those who have never taken the trouble to study the internal conditions that prevailed under the Habsburg Monarchy.

Among historical studies universal history was the subject almost exclusively taught in the Austrian schools, for of specific Austrian history there was only very little. The fate of this State was closely bound up with the existence and development of Germany as a whole; so a division of history into German history and Austrian history would be practically inconceivable.

And indeed it was only when the German people came to be divided between two States that this division of German history began to take place.

The insignia (Note 4) of a former imperial sovereignty which were still preserved in Vienna appeared to act as magical relics rather than as the visible guarantee of an everlasting bond of union.