# Mein Kampf (Stackpole Sons)/Volume 1/Chapter 2

2. Years of Learning and Suffering in Vienna
When my mother died, Fate had already made its decision in one respect.
During the last months of her life I had gone to Vienna to take the entrance examination for the Academy. Armed with a thick bundle of drawings I had set out, convinced I would find the examination mere child’s play. In the realschule I had been far the best draftsman in my class; since then my ability had gone on developing in quite extraordinary fashion, so that my own satisfaction led me to hope proudly and happily for the best.
There was one single fly in the ointment: my talent for painting often seemed to be exceeded by my ability as a draftsman, in almost every department of architecture particularly. And my interest in architecture kept growing. The process had been speeded up since the time when I, a boy not yet sixteen, made my first visit of a fortnight to Vienna. I went to study the art gallery of the Court Museum, but I had eyes almost solely for the museum itself. From early morning until late at night I trotted from one sight to another, but only the buildings really held my attention. I could stand for hours looking at the Opera House, and for hours admire the Parliament buildings; the whole Ringstrasse seemed to me like an enchantment out of the Thousand and One Nights.
Now I was in the beautiful city for the second time, waiting, all afire with impatience and proud confidence, for the result of my entrance examination. I was so sure of success that my rejection struck me like a bolt from the blue. And yet so it was. When I went to call on the head of the Academy, and asked the reasons why I had not been admitted to the School of Painting, he assured me that my drawing showed unmistakably my inaptitude for ​painting, and that my ability obviously was in the field of architecture. There could be no question of the School of Painting, but only of the School of Architecture for me. At first they could not understand that I had never attended an architectural school or had any instruction.
As I left Hansen’s magnificent building on the Schillerplatz, I was at odds with myself for the first time in my young fife. What I had heard about my abilities now seemed with a lightning flash to illuminate a discord from which I had long suffered without being able to explain to myself its why and wherefore. And within a few days I knew I would some day be an architect.
Still the path was enormously hard; what I had been too stubborn to learn in the realschule was now to take its bitter revenge. Admission to the Academy School of Architecture depended on attendance at the Technical School of Architecture, and admission here was based on graduation—the Matura—from an intermediate school. All this I lacked entirely. In all human probability, therefore, my dream of art was now impossible.
When after the death of my mother I made a third journey to Vienna, this time to stay for years, I had regained my calm and determination. My earlier spirit of defiance had returned and I had fixed my eye once and for all on my goal. I would be an architect. Obstacles do not exist to be capitulated to but to be overcome. And overcome those obstacles I would, always with the image of my father before my eyes, who had fought his way up from farm and shoemaker-boy to state official. After all, my soil was richer than his, my battle that much the easier; and what then seemed to me the unkindness of Fate I am now thankful for as the wisdom of Providence. When the Goddess of Trouble embraced me and often threatened to crush me, the will to resistance grew, and at last the will was victorious.
I owe it to that period that I have grown hard, and am able to be hard. And even more than for this I thank it for snatching me from the emptiness of a comfortable life; for pulling mother’s boy out of the featherbeds, and giving him Dame Care as a new mother; for throwing my reluctant self into the world of misery ​and poverty, and making me acquainted with those for whom I was later to fight.
At that time my eyes were opened to two perils whose very names I had scarcely known, and whose awful importance for the German people’s existence I certainly had not understood: Marxism and Jewry.
Vienna, the city so widely considered the very essence of innocent gaiety, the festive home of happy crowds, is to me, unfortunately, but a living reminder of the saddest period in my life. Even today the city calls forth none but gloomy thoughts in me. Five years of misery and wretchedness are to me contained in the name of this Phæacian city. Five years when I had to earn my bread as a laborer, then as a small painter—my truly meager bread, which was never enough even to satisfy my ordinary hunger. In those days hunger was my faithful attendant, the only one that almost never left me, dividing with me share and share alike. Every book I bought roused his interest; one trip to the opera would give me his company for days; it was a never-ending battle with my unsympathetic friend. And still I learned in those days as never before. Except for my architecture, and a rare ticket to the opera, saved at the expense of my stomach, books were my only remaining pleasure.
I read enormously, and that thoroughly. Whatever free time I had left from my job I used to the last minute for study. In a few years I thus laid the foundations of a knowledge which I am still living on today.
But more than this, I formed at that time an image and a concept of the world which have become the rock-ribbed foundation of my present activity. I have had but to learn a little beyond what I then created; there was nothing I had to change.
On the contrary. Today I firmly believe that all creative ideas usually appear in youth, in so far as they exist at all. I distinguish between the wisdom of age, which can be only greater thoroughness and caution forced by a long life’s experiences, and the genius of youth, pouring out thoughts and ideas with ​inexhaustible fertility, but prevented from developing them by their very number. This genius furnishes the building materials and the plans from which a wiser old age picks, dresses, and builds the stones into a structure—so far, that is, as the so-called wisdom of age does not choke the genius of youth.
My life at home had differed little or not at all from that of everyone else. I could await the coming day without a care, and for me no social problem existed. My youth was lived in petty bourgeois circles, that is in a world having but little touch with pure hand-workers. For, strange as it may seem at first glance, the chasm between this level (economically in a far from brilliant position) and that of workers with their hands is often deeper than one thinks. The reason for this (we might almost say) enmity is that a social group which has just recently lifted itself from the ranks of hand-workers fears lest it fall back into the old estate, or at least be counted as one with it. In many cases, besides, there is the repugnant memory of cultural poverty among this lowest class, the frequent roughness of social intercourse, so that no matter how humble one’s position any contact with this outgrown level of life and culture becomes unbearable.
Thus it often happens that a man from the higher levels can more naturally descend to a plane with the last of his fellow-men than seems even thinkable to the “parvenu.”
For after all a parvenu is anyone who fights his way by his own energy from one position in life to a higher one.
But eventually this battle, often very bitter, kills off human sympathy. One’s own painful struggle for existence destroys his feeling for the misery of those left behind.
In this respect Fate took pity on me. By forcing me back into the world of privation and insecurity which my father had once abandoned, it took from my eyes the blinders of a limited petty bourgeois education. Not until now did I learn to know men, and learn to distinguish hollow sham or brutal exterior from its inner nature.
Even by the early years of this century Vienna was among ​the most socially unhealthy of cities. Glittering wealth and revolting poverty alternated abruptly. In the center and in the inner districts one really felt the heart-beat of the empire of fifty-two millions, with all the dangerous magic of this State of nationalities. The Court’s blinding magnificence was like a magnet to the wealth and intelligence of the rest of the State. On top came the extreme centralization of the Hapsburg Monarchy in and of itself.
It offered the only possibility of holding this stew of peoples together. But the result was an extraordinary concentration of high government offices in the capital and Imperial residence.
Vienna was, however, not only the political and intellectual but also the economic capital of the old Danube monarchy. Contrasting with the army of high officers, officials, artists and scholars was a yet larger army of workers—against the wealth of aristocracy and trade a bleeding poverty. Before the palaces of the Ringstrasse lounged thousands of the unemployed, and below this via triumphalis of old Austria the homeless lived in the twilight and slime of the sewers.
There was hardly a German city where the social question could have been better studied than in Vienna. But we must not be misled. This “studying” cannot be done from above. No one who has not himself been in the clutches of this viper can know its venom. Otherwise there is no result but superficial chatter or untruthful sentimentality. Both are harmful the one because it can never reach the heart of the problem, the other because it passes it by. I do not know which is more devastating—to ignore social privation as do most of those favored by fortune or even elevated by their own exertions, or graciously to condescend in a fashion as haughty as it often is tactlessly intrusive, like certain women of fashion in skirts and in trousers who “feel for the people.” In any case these people sin more greatly than their mere intelligence, aided by no instinct, will ever allow them to understand. And for that reason the result of the “social-mindedness” they promote is, to their astonishment, always zero, often actually indignant refusal—which they then regard as proof of the people’s ingratitude.
​Minds of this sort do not readily take in the fact that welfare activity has nothing to do with this, and that it has no claim whatever to gratitude, since it is not distributing bounty, but restoring rights.
I was preserved from learning the social question in this way. It drew me into its magic circle of suffering, and thus seemed not to invite me to “learn,” but to try its strength on me. No credit to it if I, the guinea pig, survived the operation safe and sound.
If now I try to reproduce my sensations of that time, I can never do so in any way approaching completeness; only the essential, to me often the most staggering impressions are to be described here, along with the few lessons I could see in them at that time.
I seldom had much difficulty in finding work as such, since I was not a skilled worker, but had to earn my bread as best I could as a so-called helper, and often as a day laborer.
I took the attitude of the men who shake the dust of Europe from their feet in indomitable determination to build a new life and a new home in the New World. Freed of every previous hampering preconception of occupation and estate, of background and tradition, they grasp any means of earning which is offered, go at any job, and gradually arrive at the realization that honest labor is no disgrace, no matter what kind of labor it may be. I too was thus determined to leap with both feet into a world new to me, and to hew my way through.
I soon learned that there is always some kind of work; but I learned just as quickly how easy it is to lose again.
The insecurity of one’s daily bread soon grew to be in my eyes one of the darkest aspects of the new life.
No doubt the skilled worker is turned out on the street less often than the unskilled; but even he does not altogether escape that fate. Instead of losing his livelihood through lack of work, he is locked out, or he strikes.
Here the insecurity of earning a living is reflected catastrophically in the whole economic system.
​The peasant boy who goes to the metropolis—drawn by supposedly or actually easier work and shorter hours, but chiefly by the brilliant light which a great city does give off—is accustomed to a certain amount of security. He has never left one place without having another at least in prospect. Finally, the shortage of farm labor is great, and the probability of continued unemployment therefore very slight. Now it is a mistake to think that the young fellow who goes to the metropolis is naturally made of baser stuff than the one who goes on taking an honest living from the soil. No, quite the contrary—experience shows that emigrant groups are more likely than not to be made up of the healthiest and most energetic individuals. And these “emigrants” include not only the man who goes to America but also the young farm hand who leaves his native village to move to the distant metropolis. He too is prepared for an uncertain fate. Usually he comes to town with some money, so that he need not despair the very first day if ill luck does not bring him work at once. But things are worse if he soon loses a job he has found. Finding a new job is especially difficult, if not impossible, in winter. The first few weeks are still tolerable. He receives unemployment benefits from his union, and makes his way as best he can. But when his last penny is gone, and he has been out of work so long that the union ceases to pay benefits—then comes the real pinch. He wanders hungrily about, perhaps pawns and sells his last possessions; thus his clothes grew fewer and worse, and drag him down externally into surroundings which corrupt him not only physically but spiritually. If on top of this he becomes homeless, and that (as is often the case) in winter, his suffering is really intense. At last he finds some sort of work again. But the game begins all over again. He is hit a second time; the third time it may be yet worse, so that gradually he learns indifference to his perpetual insecurity. At length the repetition becomes a habit.
Thus an otherwise hard-working man’s whole attitude toward life grows slack, and gradually matures him into a tool of those who will merely use him for their own base advantage. He has been unemployed so often through no fault of his own that one ​time more or less of unemployment is unimportant, even though it be a matter not of winning economic rights but of destroying political, social, or cultural values. If he has not become strike-minded, at least he is indifferent to strikes.
I have watched this process a thousand times with my own eyes. The longer I saw the game go on, the greater was my aversion to this city of millions, which first greedily sucked men in, then cruelly wore them to pieces.
When they came they still belonged to their nation; if they stayed, they were lost to it.
I too had been thus flung around by life in the great city; I had had a chance to feel the whole force of such a fate on body and soul. I discovered something else as well; rapid alternation of work and unemployment and the consequent perpetual seesawing of income and expenditure eventually destroyed many people’s sense of thrift and intelligent planning. Apparently the body gradually becomes used to living high in good times and starving in bad. Nay more, hunger destroys all good intentions of sensible planning in better times; it surrounds its victim with a constant mirage of well-fed prosperity. This dream grows to such morbid intensity that there is no more self-control the moment wages allow it. That is why a man who can scarcely get any work whatever stupidly forgets all planning, and instead lives greedily for the moment. In the end his tiny weekly income is upset, since he cannot plan even here; at first it lasts five days instead of seven, then only three, then scarcely a day, to be at last squandered the first evening.
There are likely to be wife and children at home. Often they too are infected by this way of life, particularly if the man is naturally kind to them, and even loves them in his way. Then the week’s pay is jointly dissipated in two or three days at home; they eat and drink as long as the money holds out, and go through the remaining days together on empty stomachs. Then the wife slinks about the neighborhood, borrowing a bit here and there, contracting little debts with the shopkeeper, and trying thus to survive the awful later days of the week. At noon they all sit ​at table on short rations, or perhaps on nothing at all, waiting for the next pay-day, talking of it, making plans; and while they starve they are already dreaming of the good fortune to come.
Thus the children from their earliest days grow familiar with this wretchedness.
But things end badly if the man goes his own way from the beginning, and the wife opposes him for the children’s sake. Then there are quarrels and bad blood, and the more the husband drifts apart from his wife, the nearer he drifts to alcohol. Every Saturday he begins to be drunk; and in self-preservation for herself and the children his wife fights for the few pence she can snatch from him, and those are mostly what she can get on his way from factory to saloon. When at last he comes home himself on Sunday or Monday night, drunk and brutal, but always relieved of his last penny, there are likely to be scenes that would wring tears from a stone.
I saw all this going on in hundreds of cases. At first I was disgusted or indignant; later I came to realize the tragedy of this suffering, to understand its deeper causes. They were the unhappy victims of evil circumstances.
Almost worse in those days were the housing conditions. The housing situation of the Viennese laborer was frightful. I shudder now when I think of those wretched living-caverns, of houses of call and mass dormitories, of those sinister pictures of refuse, disgusting filth and worse.
What was bound happen, what is yet bound to happen, if the flood of slaves set loose from these squalid caves pours down upon the rest of the world, upon its thoughtless fellow-men!
For thoughtless this other world is. Thoughtlessly it lets things drift; no instinct tells it that sooner or later fate will move toward retribution unless mankind placates destiny in time.
Thankful indeed am I to a Providence which sent me to that school. There I could not sabotage what I did not like. It gave me a quick and a thorough upbringing.
If I was not to despair of the people who then surrounded me, I had to learn the distinction between their outer character and ​life, on the one hand, and the causes of their development on the other. Only thus could I bear it all without giving up in despair. Thus it was no longer human beings who rose before me out of unhappiness and misery, out of squalor and physical degradation, but the sad products of sad laws. At the same time my own fight for life, no easier than theirs, preserved me from capitulating with pitiful sentimentality before the degraded products of this development.
No, that is not the way this is to be understood.
Even then I saw that only a two-fold path can lead to the improvement of such conditions:
A deep feeling of social responsibility for the establishing of a better basis for our development, paired with brutal determination in the destruction of incorrigible human excrescences.
Just as Nature concentrates not on preserving what exists but on breeding a new generation to perpetuate the species, so in human life we cannot be so much concerned to improve artificially what exists and is bad (which in the nature of man is a thing 99% impossible) as to assure healthier paths from the very beginning for coming development.
Even during my struggle for existence in Vienna I realized that the task of social activity can never be giddy welfare schemes, as ridiculous as they are useless, but must be the overcoming of fundamental lacks in the organization of our economic and cultural life—lacks bound to lead to perversions of individuals, or at least capable of doing so.
The difficulty of advancing with the final and most brutal weapons against a criminal class hostile to the state consists not least in uncertainty of judgment concerning the inner motives or courses of such phenomena.
This uncertainty is only too well founded in a feeling of personal guilty responsibility for such tragedies of degradation. But uncertainty cripples any serious and firm resolve, and thus helps to render vacillating (and therefore weak and half-done) even the most essential measures of self-preservation.
Only when there comes an age not haunted by the shadow ​of its own guilt will there be both the inward calm and the outward power brutally and ruthlessly to prune the suckers, to uproot the weeds.
As the Austrian state had practically no social legislation or administration of justice at all, its weakness in suppressing even the worst excesses was conspicuous.
I do not know what horrified me most at that time—the economic misery of my companions, their moral coarseness, or the low state of their intellectual development.
How often does our bourgeoisie rise up in righteous indignation when it hears some wretched tramp say he does not care whether he is a German or not, that he is equally happy anywhere so long as he has what he needs to five on!
This lack of “national pride” is deeply deplored, and abhorrence for such sentiments most vigorously expressed.
But how many have really asked themselves the true cause of their own better sentiments? How many realize the vast number of individual reminders of the grandeur of the fatherland, the nation in every field of cultural and art life, which taken together make up a justified pride in belonging to so fortunate a people?
How many people can imagine the extent to which pride of fatherland depends on knowledge of its greatness in all these fields? Have the members of our bourgeoisie considered the laughable extent to which this prerequisite for pride in the fatherland is made available to the “people?”
There is no resorting to the excuse that “it is just the same in other countries,” but that the worker there holds to his nationality “nevertheless.” Even if this were so, it would be no excuse for one’s own shortcomings. But it is not so. For what we call the “chauvinistic” upbringing of, for instance, the French people is nothing more than excessive emphasis on France’s greatness in every department of culture, or as the Frenchman says, of “civilization.” The young Frenchman is simply not trained to objectivity, but to the most subjective attitude imaginable wherever the political or cultural greatness of his fatherland is concerned.
​This education has to be confined to large, general considerations, which, if necessary, must be pounded into the people’s memories and feelings by perpetual repetition.
But with us, in addition to the negative sin of omission, there is positive destruction of what little the individual is lucky enough to learn at school. The rats of political infection gnaw even that little out of the hearts and memories of the great mass of our people, and privation and wretchedness have done their share beforehand.
For instance, imagine this:
In a basement dwelling of two stuffy rooms lives a laborer’s family of seven. Among the five children a boy of let us say, three. This is the age when a child first becomes conscious of impressions. Gifted people carry memories of that period far into old age.
The very smallness and overcrowding of the space produce an unfortunate situation. It is enough in itself often to produce quarrels and bickering. The people are not living with one another, they are squeezed together. Every argument, no matter how trifling, which in a roomy dwelling can be smoothed out simply by separation, here leads to an endless, disgusting quarrel. Among the children this may be tolerable; in such conditions they quarrel constantly, and forget it quickly and completely. But if the battle is fought between the parents, and this almost daily, in ways whose inward coarseness is extreme, the results of such an object lesson are bound to appear in the children, no matter how slowly. What these results must be if the dispute takes the form of father’s brutality to mother, of drunken maltreatment, a person who does not know the life can hardly imagine. By the time he is six the pitiable little boy has a notion of things which must horrify even an adult. Morally infected, physically undernourished, vermin in his poor little scalp, the young “citizen” goes to primary school. With great difficulty and to-do he gets to the point of reading and writing, and that is about all. Studying at home is out of the question. On the contrary. Father and mother talk unprintably, and that to the children, about teachers and school, and are much readier to talk roughly to ​them than to turn their young hopeful over their knees and bring him to reason. And nothing else that the little fellow may hear at home can strengthen his respect for his fellow human beings. Not a good word is said for humanity, no institution is inviolate, from the school teacher to the head of the state. No matter whether it is religion or morals, state or society, everything is vilified and dragged obscenely in the muck. When the boy leaves school at the age of fourteen, it is hard to tell which is greater—his incredible stupidity where knowledge and skill are concerned, or his biting insolence of manner, united with an immorality even at that age which makes one’s hair stand on end.
Even now he holds scarcely anything sacred; he has never met true greatness, but he does know every abyss of life; what position can he possibly occupy in the world which he is about to enter?
The three-year-old child has become a fifteen-year-old despiser of all authority. Aside from filth and uncleanness he has as yet known nothing which might stir him to any high enthusiasm.
Now he goes through the advanced grades of this existence. He begins the same life he has learned about from his father all the years of his childhood. He roves about, comes home heaven knows when, by way of diversion beats the tattered creature who once was his mother, curses God and the world, and finally on some particular ground is sentenced to a prison for juvenile delinquents.
Here he gets a final polish.
His dear fellow-citizens, however, are astonished at this young “citizen’s” lack of “national enthusiasm.”
They see theater and movies, trashy literature and yellow press day by day pouring out poison by the bucket upon the people; and then they are surprised at the low “moral tone,” the “national indifference” of the masses of that people. As if movie trash, cheap journalism and the like would produce the foundations for recognizing the greatness of the fatherland! To say nothing of the early education of the individual.
​I understood soon and thoroughly something I had never even dreamed of:
The question of “nationalizing” a people is among other things primarily a question of creating healthy social conditions in order to make possible the education of the individual. Only when upbringing and school training have taught a man the cultural and economic, but, above all, the political greatness of his own fatherland can and will he acquire an inward pride in the privilege of belonging to such a people. And you can fight only for something you love, love only what you respect, and respect only what you at least know.
When my interest in the social question was awakened, I began to study it with great thoroughness. A world hitherto strange thus opened itself to me.
In 1909 and 1910 my own situation had changed in so far as I no longer needed to earn my daily bread as a laborer. I had begun to work independently as a draftsman and water-colorist in a small way. Hard as this was financially—in truth it hardly sufficed to keep body and soul together—, it was a splendid thing for my chosen profession. Now I was no longer dead tired when I came home from work in the evening, unable to look at a book without dozing off. My new work paralleled my future profession. And as master of my own time I could now plan it better than before. I painted to earn a living, and learned for pleasure.
I also found it possible to round out with the necessary theoretical equipment my object lessons on the social problem. I studied pretty much everything I could lay hold of in the way of books on the subject, and plunged myself in my own thoughts besides.
I think my acquaintances then must have thought me an eccentric.
It was natural that I should at the same time passionately pursue my love of architecture. Along with music, I thought architecture the queen of the arts; under such circumstances it was no “work” to spend time on it, but the height of happiness. I could read or ​draw far into the night; it never tired me. And so my faith was strengthened that my lovely dream of the future would become reality after all, even though it took years. I was firmly convinced that I would make a name as an architect.
The fact that I also took the greatest interest in anything having to do with politics did not seem to me significant. On the contrary, I regarded that as the commonplace duty of all thinking people. Anyone who did not feel that way simply lost all right to criticize or complain.
Here too, then, I read and learned much.
It is true that by “reading” I may mean something different from what the average member of our intelligentsia means.
I know people who “read” enormously, book after book, word for word, and yet whom I would not call well-read. They do have an enormous mass of “knowledge,” but their brain does not succeed in dividing up and cataloguing the material they have acquired. They lack the art of dividing the book into parts valuable and worthless for them, and of keeping the one part in their heads forever, but of not seeing the other part at all, or at any rate not lugging it along as useless ballast.
Reading, after all, is not an end in itself, but a means. In the first place it should help to fill out the framework which inclination and ability give to each individual. Then it may furnish the tools and material which a man needs in his occupation, no matter whether of simple physical providing or of fulfilling a high destiny. In the second place it should give a man a general picture of the world.
But in either case what is read must not simply be stored in the memory in the order of the book or series of books read; the facts, like bits of a mosaic, must have each its proper place in the general image of the world, thus helping to shape this image in the reader’s head. Otherwise there will be a mad confusion of stuff learned, whose worthlessness vies with its effect in making the unhappy possessor conceited. He, of course, seriously believes he is “cultivated,” that he has some understanding of life, possesses some knowledge; whereas in fact each new bit of “ ​cultivation” takes him further away from the world, until not infrequently he ends either in a sanatorium or as a “politician” in parliament.
No man with a mind of this sort can ever fetch out from his jumbled “knowledge” what is appropriate for the needs of a given moment; his intellectual ballast is stowed not by the lines of life, but in the chance order in which he has read the books, and as the contents happen to have landed in his head. If in its daily demands Fate were to remind him of the proper use of what he has learned, it would have also to cite volume and page, or the poor wretch could never in all eternity find what he needed. But since Fate does not do this, these learned gentry are fearfully embarrassed at every critical juncture; they search frantically for analogies, and of course take the wrong prescription with unfailing certainty.
If this were not so, the political achievements of our learned government heroes in highest posts would be incomprehensible, unless we decided to assume base rascality instead of a pathological condition.
But a person who has mastered the art of right reading can, in reading any book, magazine or pamphlet, spot immediately everything he believes suited for retention, either because it fits his purpose or because it is generally worth knowing. What he has acquired in this way takes its proper place in the image formed by his imagination of the matter in hand; and thus its effect is either to correct or to complete the image—to increase its rightness or its clarity. If now life suddenly presents some question for examination or solution, the memory stored by this way of reading will instantly resort to the already imagined picture as a standard, and will bring out individual bits of information on the subject which have been collected through decades, as a basis for the intellect to clarify or answer the question.
Only thus are there sense and purpose in reading.
A speaker, for instance, who does not thus give his intelligence the materials to back it up will never be able, if contradicted, to fight effectively for his opinion, though it be a thousand times ​true. In every discussion his memory will betray him; he can find reason neither to enforce what he maintains nor to confute his opponent. When the result is merely a matter of personal ridiculousness, as with a speaker, this may not be fatal; but it becomes grave indeed if Fate places one of these incompetent know-alls at the head of a state.
From earliest youth I have taken pains to read rightly, and have been helped in the happiest fashion by memory and understanding. Considered in this light, the Viennese period in particular was fruitful and valuable. The experiences of daily life stimulated me to ever-renewed study of the most varied problems. Being thus at last in a position to support reality with theory, and to test theory by reality, I was saved from either stifling in theories or growing superficial amid reality.
My experience of daily life guided and stimulated me to make a thorough theoretical study of two vital questions, aside from the social question. Who knows when I would have become absorbed in the doctrines and character of Marxism if my life at that time had not simply rubbed my nose in it!
What I knew in my youth of Social Democracy was little indeed, and that most erroneous.
That the Social Democrats were fighting for universal secret suffrage I found pleasing. Even then my reason told me that this must weaken the hated Hapsburg regime. I was convinced that the Danubian state could never be maintained except by sacrificing the German element, but that even at the price of slowly slavicizing the German element there was no guarantee of an empire fitted for survival, since the preservative force of Slavism is highly doubtful. Therefore I greeted with joy any development which I thought would lead to the collapse of this impossible state that condemned to death the Germanity of ten million people. The more the language uproar gnawed at the parliament, the nearer must come the hour of collapse of this Babylonian Empire, and thus the nearer the freedom of my German Austrian people. This was the only way in which union to the old mother country could some day come about.
​And so I found this activity of the Social Democrats not unattractive. I thought it was also rather in their favor than otherwise that they were trying (as I was then innocent and stupid enough to believe) to improve the living conditions of the workman. What most repelled me was their hostile attitude toward the fight for the preservation of Germanity, their pitiful wooing of the Slavic “comrades,” who did indeed accept this courtship in so far as it meant practical concessions, but otherwise maintained an arrogant and haughty reserve, thus giving the importunate beggars their just reward.
At the age of seventeen, then, I was but little acquainted with the word Marxism, while I thought Socialism and Social Democracy were identical ideas. Here too the hand of Fate was necessary to open my eyes to this unheard-of fraud on the people.
So far I had encountered the Social Democratic Party only in my capacity of spectator at a few mass demonstrations, without gaining the least insight into the mentality of its adherents or the nature of its doctrine; now at one blow I was brought in contact with the products of its training and “world-concept.” In the course of a few months I gained something which might have been delayed for decades: an understanding of a pestilence masquerading as social virtue and love of one’s neighbor, a pestilence from which humanity must soon free the earth, lest the earth soon be freed of humanity.
My first encounter with Social Democrats was on a construction job.
It was not altogether pleasing from the very first. My clothes were still in good order, my language was cultivated, my manner reserved. I had so much to do in coping with my own fate that I could trouble myself but little with the world around me. I was looking for work only to avoid starving, and so that I might have thus the possibility of going on educating myself, no matter how slowly. Perhaps I would have paid no attention to my new surroundings if an event had not taken place on the third or fourth day which compelled me at once to adopt some attitude. I was asked to join the organization.
​My knowledge of the trade-union organization at that time was zero. I could have proved neither its usefulness nor its uselessness. As I was told I must join, I refused. I gave as my grounds that I did not understand the situation, but would not be forced to do anything whatever. Perhaps the former was the reason why they did not throw me out at once. They may have hoped they could convert me or wear me down within a few days. In any case they were deeply mistaken. But within a fortnight I had reached the end of my ability, even if I had wanted to go on. In that fortnight I came to know my surroundings better, so that no power in the world could have forced me to join an organization whose members I had seen in such an unfavorable light.
The first few days I was annoyed.
At noon some of the men went to near-by public-houses, while others stayed on the lot, and there consumed a (usually quite pitiful) lunch. These were the married men, whose wives brought them their midday soup in miserable dishes. Toward the end of the week their number kept growing; why, I understood later. Then they would talk politics.
I would drink my bottle of milk and eat my piece of bread somewhere aside, and would cautiously study my new surroundings or ponder my wretched lot. But still I heard more than enough; and it often seemed to me that people sidled up to me deliberately, perhaps with the intention of forcing me to make my attitude clear. In any case, what I heard in this fashion was calculated to irritate me to the extreme. They were against everything—the nation, as an invention of the “capitalistic” (how often had I to hear that word!) classes; the Fatherland, as a tool of the bourgeoisie to exploit the workers; the authority of law, as a means to oppress the proletariat; the schools, as an institution to train up a body of slaves, and of slave-owners as well; religion, as a means of stupefying the people marked for exploitation; morals, as a symbol of stupid, sheep-like patience; and so on. There was simply nothing which they did not drag in the muck of a fearful baseness.
At first I tried to maintain silence. But finally I could do so no ​longer. I began to express my attitude, and began to contradict. Then I realized that this was quite useless until I knew something definite about the points under dispute, so I began to go to the sources from which they drew their supposed wisdom. Book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet had its turn.
On the building lot there were now often heated arguments. I went on struggling, growing day by day better informed than my adversaries were, until one day the means was used which most easily vanquishes reason: terrorism, violence. Some of the spokesmen of the opposition forced me either to leave the job at once or to fly off the scaffolding on my head. As I was alone, and resistance seemed hopeless, I preferred to follow the former advice, richer by one experience.
I left, filled with disgust, but at the same time so agitated that it would have been quite impossible for me to turn my back on the whole affair. No; after the flaming up of the first indignation, my stiff neck once more got the upper hand. I was absolutely determined to find another construction job just the same. My decision was strengthened by the privation which closed me in its heartless embrace a few weeks later, after I had eaten up what little wages I had saved. Now I had to, whether or no. And the game began all over again, only to end as it had before.
I struggled with myself: were these human beings, worthy of belonging to a great people?
It was a painful question. If the answer were yes, the struggle for a national body was really not worth the effort and sacrifice which the best individuals must make; but if the answer were no, our people was poor indeed in human beings.
I was restless and uneasy during those days of brooding and puzzling, as I saw the mass of people who could not be counted among their own nation grow into a menacing horde.
With what new feelings, then, did I watch the endless rows of men marching in a mass demonstration of Viennese workmen that took place one day! For almost two hours I stood with bated breath, watching the enormous human serpent twisting its way past. At last, depressed and uneasy I left the square and walked ​homeward. On the way I saw in a tobacco shop the Workers’ Times, the Arbeiterzeitung, the official organ of the old Austrian Social Democratic Party. It was also available at a cheap café where I often went to read the papers; but I had never succeeded in bringing myself to read the wretched sheet (whose whole tone affected me like intellectual vitriol) for more than two minutes at a time. Now, under the depressing effect of the demonstration, an inner voice pushed me on to buy a copy and read it thoroughly. I did so that evening, fighting down frequent rage at this concentrated essence of lies.
By reading the Social Democratic press daily I could study the inner nature of its train of thought better than from any theoretical literature. What a difference between the glittering phrases in the theoretical writings—freedom, beauty and dignity, the illusory shuffle of words apparently with difficulty expressing profound wisdom, the disgustingly human morality, all written with a brazen front of prophetic certainty,—and the brutal daily press of this doctrine of salvation of a new humanity, hesitating at no vileness, working with every resource of slander and an absolutely stunning virtuosity in lying! The one is intended for stupid gulls of the middle and upper “levels of intelligence,” the other for the masses.
To me, absorption in the literature and press of this doctrine and organization meant finding my way back to my own people.
What had before seemed to me an impassable gulf now created a love greater than ever before.
Only a fool, knowing this enormous work of corruption, could still condemn the victims. The more independent I grew in the next few years, the more my insight into the inner causes of Social Democratic success grew. Now I understood the meaning of the brutal demand that only Red newspapers be subscribed for, only Red meetings be attended, only Red books be read, etc. With sparkling clarity I saw before me the inevitable result of this doctrine of intolerance.
The soul of the great masses is receptive to nothing weak or half-way.
​Like woman, whose spiritual perceptions are determined less by abstract reason than by an indefinable longing for complimentary strength, and who therefore would rather submit to the strong than dominate the weakling, the masses love the ruler more than the petitioner, and inwardly find more satisfaction in a doctrine which tolerates no other beside it than in the allowance of liberalistic freedom. And the masses are seldom able to make much use of such freedom, indeed are likely to feel neglected. They are as little conscious of the impudence with which they are intellectually terrorized as of the outrageous maltreatment of their human liberty; after all, they have no inkling of the whole doctrine’s inward error. They see only the ruthless strength and brutality of its expression, which eventually they always yield to.
If to Social Democracy we oppose a theory more truthful, but equally brutally carried through, the new theory will win, even if after a desperate battle.
In less than two years I had a clear understanding of both the doctrine and the technical methods of the Social Democrats.
I realized the infamous intellectual terrorism that this movement employs, chiefly on the bourgeoisie (which is neither morally nor spiritually a match for such attacks), by laying down a regular barrage of lies and slander against the individual adversary it considers most dangerous, and keeping it up until the nerves of those attacked give way, and they sacrifice the hated figure to have peace and quiet again. But the fools still do not get peace and quiet. The game begins anew, and is repeated until fear of the wild cur becomes a hypnotic paralysis.
Since the Social Democrats well know the value of power from their own experience, their storming is directed mainly at those persons in whose character they scent something of this quality, so rare in any case. Conversely, they praise every weakling on the other side, now cautiously, now loudly, according to the intellectual qualities they see or suspect.
They fear an impotent, weak-willed genius less than a forceful nature, though its intellect be modest. Their highest recommendation goes to weaklings of mind and vigor together.
​They succeed in giving the impression that this is the only way to win peace and quiet, while they go on quietly, cautiously, but unerringly, conquering one position after another—now by quiet extortion, now by actual theft at moments when public attention is on other things, either unwilling to be interrupted or considering the affair too small for a great to-do which would provoke the angry foe anew.
These are tactics planned by exact calculation of every human weakness, whose result is almost mathematically sure success unless the other side can learn to fight poison gas with poison gas.
To weakly natures it can only be said that this is a simple question of survival or non-survival.
To me equally plain was the significance of physical terrorism toward the individual and toward the masses. Here too was exact calculation of psychological effect.
Terrorism on the job, in the factory, in the meeting-hall and at mass demonstrations will always be successful unless equal terrorism opposes it.
Then, indeed, the party screams bloody murder, and—old despiser of state authority that it is—yells for help from that quarter, in most cases, only to gain its end after all in the general confusion. That is to say, it finds some jackass of a high official who, in the silly hope of making the dreaded enemy perhaps more kindly disposed some day, helps to break down the adversary of this universal pestilence.
The impression of such a success on the great mass of both adherents and antagonists can be realized only by a man who knows the soul of a people not from books but from life. While its partisans regard it as a triumph of right for their cause, the beaten opponent usually despairs of success for any future resistance.
The better I learned to know the methods of physical terrorism in particular the more did I beg the pardon of the hundreds of thousands who succumbed to it.
That is the thing for which I am most profoundly grateful to that period of suffering: it alone gave me back my people, and I learned to distinguish the victims from the deceivers.
​The products of this seduction of mankind can be described only as victims. For if in some pictures I have striven to draw the character of these “lowest” strata from the life, it would not be complete without my assurance that in these depths, again, I found light in the shape of often extraordinary self-sacrifice, faithful comradeship, contentment in adversity, and thoroughgoing modesty, especially among what were then the older workmen. Even though these virtues were disappearing more and more in the younger generation through the very influence of the metropolis, there were still many whose good, healthy blood mastered the low vilenesses of life. If in politics these kind, honest people nevertheless joined and helped to fill the ranks of our people’s deadly enemies, it was because they neither could nor did understand the vileness of the new doctrine; because nobody else troubled to pay them any attention; and finally because social conditions were stronger than any will to the contrary. The privation whose victims they were bound sooner or later to be would yet drive them into the Social Democrats’ camp.
Countless times the bourgeoisie in a manner as clumsy as it was immoral, had formed a united front even against demands justified in ordinary humanity, and had done this without so much as profiting or having any expectation of profit by their attitude. Hence even the most decent of workmen was driven from the trade-union organizations into political activity.
Millions of workers were surely inwardly hostile to the Social Democratic Party at first, but their resistance was overcome by the manner, often quite insane, in which the bourgeois parties opposed any demand of a social nature. The simply hidebound obstruction of all attempts to improve working conditions, of safety devices on machines, of prevention of child labor and of protection for women at least during the months when she carries the future comrade of the people beneath her heart—all this helped to drive the masses into the nets of Social Democracy, which gratefully seized upon every case of similar contemptible sentiments. Our political citizenry, our bourgeoisie, can never make good such past sins. For by resisting all attempts to cure ​social ills it sowed hatred, and apparently justified the claim of the deadly enemies of the whole people that the Social Democratic Party alone represented the interests of the working people.
Above all the bourgeoisie in this fashion furnished the moral excuse for the existence of the unions, which have always been the greatest feeders for the political party.
During my Viennese apprentice years I was forced to adopt some attitude, whether I would or no, toward the union question.
As I considered them an inseparable part of the Social Democratic Party in itself, my decision was swift—and wrong.
As a matter of course I unhesitatingly rejected them.
In this infinitely important question, too, Fate itself instructed me. The result was an overturn of my first judgment.
At twenty I had learned to distinguish between the union as a means to defend the employee’s general social rights and to win better living conditions in detail, and the union as a tool of the party promoting the political class struggle.
The fact that the Social Democrats realized the enormous importance of the trade-union movement assured them of this instrument, and thus of success; that the bourgeoisie did not understand, cost it its political position. The bourgeoisie believed they could sweep aside a logical development by an impudent “denial,” only to force it in reality into illogical paths. For it is nonsense and an untruth to say that the union movement is in itself hostile to the fatherland. The contrary is nearer the truth. If union activity envisages and attains the goal of improving the position of a class that belongs to the pillars of the nation, its effect not only is not hostile to state or fatherland, but is “national” in the truest sense of the word. It is helping, after all, to lay the social groundwork without which no generally national education is thinkable. It deserves the highest credit for destroying social cancers by attacking both intellectual and physical bacilli, and thus contributing to the general health of the body of the people.
The question of the unions’ necessity, therefore, is really superfluous.
So long as there are among employers persons with little ​social understanding, even with a faulty sense of justice and propriety, it is not merely the right but the duty of their employees (who after all form a part of our nation) to protect the public interest against the greed or unreasonableness of individuals; for the preservation of honor and faith in a nation is a national interest just as much as the preservation of the people’s health.
Both now are seriously threatened by unworthy enterprisers who do not feel themselves members of the people’s community. The evil effects of their greed or ruthlessness cause grave harm for the future.
To remove the causes of such a development is to do the nation a service, rather than the reverse.
Let no one say that every individual is free to draw his own conclusion from a real or supposed injustice, i. e. decide to go away. No! This is shadow-boxing, and must be regarded as an attempt to divert attention. Either the correction of bad and unsocial processes is in the nation’s interest, or it is not. If so, war must be made upon them with those weapons which give some promise of success. But the individual worker is never in a position to defend himself against the strength of the large enterpriser, since this can never be a question of victory for the juster cause—if the justice of the cause were admitted, the whole dispute would have no excuse, and would not exist—but a question of power. Otherwise people’s sense of justice alone would end the dispute honorably, or rather things would not get to the point of a dispute.
No; if unsocial or unworthy treatment drives people to resist, the struggle can be decided (so long as legal and judicial machinery is not created to meet this difficulty) only by superior strength. But this makes it obvious that the individual person and thus the concentrated force of the enterpriser must be opposed by a group of employees united into a single person, if all hope of victory is not to be abandoned in advance.
Thus union organization may lead to a strengthening of the social idea in its practical effect on daily life, and so to the ​removal of irritations which keep producing dissatisfaction and complaints.
The fact that this is not so must be blamed very largely on those who have managed to obstruct all legal regulation of social maladjustments, or by their political influence have prevented it.
To just the degree that the political bourgeoisie failed to understand the importance of union organization, or rather did not want to understand it, and actively opposed it, the Social Democrats assumed control of the labor movement in conflict. They were far-sighted enough to lay a firm foundation which has already proved to be their last bulwark on several critical occasions. In the process the inner purpose disappeared, to make way for new aims.
The Social Democrats never thought of holding the movement they had embraced to its original assignment. No, that was not what they had in mind.
Within a few decades their practised hands had turned a means of defending human social rights into an instrument for destroying the national economy. The interests of the workers did not hinder them in the least. Even in politics the use of economic pressure always allows extortions, so long as there is sufficient lack of conscience on one side and sufficient stupid, sheep-like patience on the other. In the present case both requirements are fulfilled.
Even by the turn of the century the union movement had long ceased to serve its original purpose. From year to year it was drawn increasingly into the sphere of Social Democratic politics, until finally it served only as a battering-ram in the class struggle. It was supposed by continual blows to make the whole painfully-developed economic structure tumble, so that the state, bereft of its economic foundations, would more easily suffer the same fate. The representation of the working people’s real interests played less and less part; finally political shrewdness made it seem no longer desirable to relieve the social and ​cultural distress of the great masses at all. Otherwise, after all, there would have been danger that the masses, their desires satisfied, might not be permanently useful as an army with no will of its own.
Intuitively scenting this development, the leaders of the class struggle fell into such a panic that eventually they simply refused to bring about any really beneficial social improvement, nay took a decided stand against it.
They had no need to be embarrassed for an explanation of such seemingly incomprehensible behavior. By constantly increasing their demands, they made any proposed betterment seem so trifling that they could always convince the masses this was but a diabolical attempt at cheaply-bought weakening or even crippling of the workers’ impact by such a ridiculous sop to their most sacred rights. Considering the slight thinking-power of the masses, the Social Democratic success is not surprising.
The bourgeois camp were outraged at these obviously untruthful Social Democratic tactics, but quite without drawing from them the slightest conclusions to guide their own actions. The Social Democrats’ very fear of any real step in raising the working class from its previous abyss of cultural and social misery ought to have led their opponents to make supreme efforts in this direction, thus gradually twisting the weapon from the hands of the conductors of the class struggle.
But this did not happen.
Instead of attacking and capturing the enemy position themselves, they preferred to be squeezed and jostled, finally resorting to quite insufficient palliatives, which remained ineffective because too late, and which were easily rejected because too trifling. Thus everything remained actually just as formerly, only dissatisfaction was greater than before.
Even then the “free trade-union” already hung like a menacing storm-cloud on the political horizon and over the existence of the individual.
It was one of the most fearful of terrorist instruments against ​security and independence of national economy, solidity of the state and freedom of person. It was this above all which turned the idea of democracy into a ridiculous and disgusting cliché, outraging freedom, and imperishably mocking brotherhood in the sentence, “And if you won’t be a comrade too, it means a broken skull for you.”
Thus it was that I came to know these friends of mankind. In the course of years my views on them broadened and deepened; to change I had no need.
The more insight into the outward nature of Social Democracy I gained, the more I longed to grasp the inward core of the doctrine.
The official party literature, indeed, was of but little use here. It is incorrect in proposition and proof when treating with economic questions; in so far as political aims are dealt with, it is untruthful. Besides, I was particularly repelled by the new pettifogging style of expression and the manner of presentation. At an enormous cost in words of vague content and unintelligible meaning, sentences are put together whose intended cleverness matches their senselessness. Only our decadent metropolitan bohemia could possibly feel at home in this intellectual maze, scraping from the Dadaistic literary dung some “spiritual experience,” assisted by the proverbial humbleness of part of our people, who scent the deepest wisdom in what they personally find most incomprehensible.
But, balancing the theoretical untruth and nonsense of this doctrine with its actual outward appearance, I gradually got a clear picture of its inner intent.
At such moments gloomy forebodings and horrid fear crept over me. I saw before me a teaching compounded of egoism and hatred, which according to mathematical law may lead to victory, but is then bound to lead also to the finish of humanity.
During this time I had learned the connection between this doctrine of destruction and the nature of a people which so far had been practically unknown to me.
​Only a knowledge of Jewry offers the key to a grasp of the inward, that is the real, intentions of Social Democracy.
If one knows this people, the veil of misconception about aim and meaning of the party fall from his eyes, and the ape-like face of Marxism rises grinning from the fog and mist of social talk.
Today I find it difficult, if not impossible, to say when the word “Jew” first gave rise to any special thoughts in my mind. I do not remember hearing the word so much as mentioned at home during my father’s lifetime. I think the old gentleman would have considered it uncultivated to emphasize the designation at all. In the course of his life he arrived at more or less cosmopolitan views, which had not only survived along with most extreme nationalist sentiments, but to some extent colored my feelings.
At school too there was nothing to change my inherited conception. I did meet a Jewish boy at the realschule, whom we all treated with caution, but only because his taciturnity led us to somewhat mistrust him, being somewhat the wiser for various experiences. Neither I nor the other boys thought much about this.
Not until I was fourteen or fifteen did I often encounter the word “Jew,” partly in connection with political talks. I felt a faint aversion to it, and could not help an unpleasant feeling which always came over me when I became involved in religious wrangles. But at that time I did not see the question in any other light.
Linz had but few Jews. In the course of centuries they had become outwardly Europeanized, and looked human; in fact I even thought they were Germans. The ridiculousness of this notion was not evident to me because I believed their only distinguishing mark was a different religion. That they should be persecuted on this account, as I supposed, often brought my aversion to hostile comments about them almost to the boiling-point.
​I did not yet dream of the existence of any planned opposition to Jews.
Then I came to Vienna. Burdened by a wealth of new impressions in architecture, oppressed by the difficulty of my own lot, I had at first no eye for the real stratification of the people in the vast city. Although at that time Vienna already had among her two millions nearly two hundred thousand Jews, I did not see them. My eyes and mind were not equal to the rush of so many values and ideas in the first few weeks. Only when calm was gradually restored and I began to see the teeming scene more plainly did I look more closely at my new world, and thus encounter the Jewish question.
I cannot say that the way I made its acquaintance was particularly agreeable. I still saw in the Jew his religious confession alone, and for reasons of human tolerance, therefore, even in this case I maintained my opposition to religious antagonism. The note struck particularly by the Viennese anti-Semitic press seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great people. I was oppressed by the memory of certain happenings in the Middle Ages which I hoped not to see repeated. As the newspapers in question were not generally considered outstanding—I did not then know exactly why—I thought them the product of angry envy rather than the result of a principle, even if a wrong one.
My belief was strengthened by what I considered the infinitely more dignified way in which the really great newspapers answered those attacks, or—this I thought even more laudable—did not even mention them, but greeted them with dead silence.
Eagerly I read the so-called world press (the Neue Freie Presse, the Wiener Tagblatt, etc.), and I was astonished both at the extent of what they offered the reader and at the objectivity of their treatment in detail. I admired their dignified tone; only their high-flown style sometimes did not quite satisfy me, or even displeased me. But I thought this might be implicit in the rush of the cosmopolitan city.
Since at that time I considered Vienna such a city, I thought ​this home-made explanation might be a sufficient excuse. But the way in which these newspapers laid siege to the Court’s favor did repel me more than once. There was scarcely an event at the Hofburg which they did not communicate to the reader in tones of rapt ecstasy or grief-stricken mournfulness. Especially when this to-do dealt with the “wisest Monarch” of all times, it was almost like the coupling of woodcock.
The whole thing seemed to me artificial. To my eye this revealed flaws in liberal democracy. To crawl for the Court’s favor, and in such indecent ways, was to betray the dignity of the nation. This was the first shadow that darkened my intellectual relation to the “great” Viennese press.
As always before, so now in Vienna I followed every event in Germany with burning concentration, whether political or cultural matters were in question. In proud admiration I compared the rise of the Reich with the sickness and decline of the Austrian state. But if happenings outside Austria were mostly a source of unalloyed pleasure, the less agreeable events at home often brought worry and gloom. The struggle then being carried on against William II did not have my approval. I saw him not only as the German Emperor, but chiefly as the creator of a German fleet. I was extraordinarily annoyed when the Reichstag forbade the Emperor to speak; the prohibition came, after all, from a place which had no call to object, considering the fact that these parliamentary ganders chattered more nonsense in a single session than a whole dynasty of emperors, including its very weakest members, could produce in centuries.
I was indignant that the heir of the Imperial crown could receive “reprimands” from the shallowest chattering-institution, of any age, in a state where every half-wit not only claimed the right to criticize, but might even be turned loose on the nation as a “lawgiver.” But I was yet more indignant when the very Viennese press which bowed and scraped to the last court charger, and was beside itself at a chance switch of the tail, now expressed misgivings about the German Emperor in an apparently solicitous fashion, but, I thought, with ill-concealed malice. Far be ​it from them to mix into the affairs of the German Empire—no, heaven forfend—, but in laying a friendly finger on these sores they were both doing the duty required by a spirit of mutual alliance and practising journalistic truthfulness, etc. And with that the finger dug deeper into the sore to its heart’s content.
Cases like this made the blood rush to my head. This was what gradually made me begin to regard the great press with more caution.
And I did have to admit that one of the anti-Semitic papers, Das deutsche Volksblatt, behaved with more decency on such an occasion.
Another thing that got on my nerves was the revolting cult of France which the big papers were then propagating. It was enough to make one ashamed of being a German to see the pæans to the “great civilized nation.” More than once this wretched Francophilia made me lay down one of the “world papers.” In fact I began often to turn to the Volksblatt, which I thought much smaller, indeed, but in such matters somewhat cleaner. I disliked the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but I did occasionally read arguments which gave me something to think about.
At any rate such occasions gradually made me acquainted with the man and the movement which then governed Vienna’s destiny—Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Socialist Party.
When I came to Vienna I was hostile to both. In my eyes the man and the movement were “reactionary.” But a sense of common justice forced me to change my opinion by degrees as I had an opportunity to know the man and his work; and gradually my fair estimate grew into unconcealed admiration. Today more than ever I consider the man the greatest German mayor of all times.
But how many of my preconceived views were upset by this change in attitude toward the Christian Socialist movement!
My opinions on anti-Semiticism also slowly succumbed to the whirligig of time, and this was the most difficult change I ever went through. It cost me the severest of all my spiritual ​struggles, and only after a battle of months between understanding and feeling did victory alight on the side of reason. Two years afterward feeling followed understanding, to be from then on its most faithful watchman and guardian.
During the bitter struggle between emotional training and cold reason, the streets of Vienna offered me priceless object-lessons. The time had come when I no longer walked blindly through the vast city as at first; I kept my eyes open, and looked at people as well as buildings.
Once as I chanced to be strolling through the inner City, I suddenly encountered a figure in a long kaftan, with black curls. “Is that a Jew too?” was my first thought.
They did not look like that in Linz. I covertly observed the man, but the longer I stared at that alien face, scrutinizing feature after feature, the more my first question changed form: “Is that a German too?”
As always in such cases, I now tried to resolve my doubts through books. For a few hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life. But unfortunately they all went on the theory that the reader to a certain extent grasped or at least was familiar in principle with the Jewish question. And then their tone was usually such that I felt new doubts owing to the often shallow and unscientific proofs adduced for their statements. I would have relapses of weeks, sometimes of months. The matter seemed to me so monstrous, the accusation so unrestrained that I was plagued by fear of being unjust, and again became timid and uncertain.
Still, even I could no longer well doubt that this was a question not of Germans of a particular persuasion, but of a people in itself. Since I had begun to occupy myself with the question, and to pay attention to the Jew, Vienna had appeared to me in a new light. Wherever I went now I saw Jews, and the more I saw, the more clearly my eye distinguished them from other people. Especially the inner City and the Districts north of the Danube Canal teemed with a people which had not even an outward likeness to the Germans.
​But if I had still doubted, my vacillation would have been ended by the attitude of part of the Jews themselves. A great movement among them, of considerable extent in Vienna, sharply emphasized the special character of Jewry as a people: Zionism.
To outward appearances, indeed, only a part of the Jews approved this attitude while the great majority condemned, nay inwardly rejected such a limitation. But on closer inspection this appearance melted away in an evil fog of purely expedient excuses, not to say lies. For so-called liberal Jewry rejected the Zionists not as non-Jews, but as Jews who were impractical, perhaps dangerous in their public adherence to Judaism. It made no difference to the inner fact of their oneness.
This seeming struggle between Zionist and liberal Jews very soon disgusted me; after all, it was untrue through and through, sometimes actually untruthful, and little in character with the constantly asserted moral elevation and purity of that people.
The moral and purity of that people was a special chapter anyway. That they were no water-lovers one could tell from their mere exterior—often, I am sorry to say, even with eyes closed. Later I was frequently nauseated by the smell of these kaftan-wearers. In addition there were their unclean clothing and scarcely heroic appearance.
All this was not attractive in itself; but one was positively repelled on suddenly discovering, beyond personal uncleanliness, the moral mud-stains of the chosen people.
Nothing had made me so thoughtful in so short a time as my slowly growing insight into the character of the Jews’ activity in certain fields.
Was there any offal, any form of shamelessness whatever, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not have a part?
One had only to cut cautiously into such an abscess to find a Jew-boy like a maggot in rotting flesh, often quite blinded by the sudden light.
In my eyes a great burden of guilt fell upon Jewry when I came to know its activity in the press, in art, literature and the ​theater. All their unctuous asseverations now meant little or nothing. It was enough to look at one of the billboard pillars, and study the names of the originators of the awful movie and theatrical perpetrations which were advertised there in order to be hardened for a long time.
Here they were infecting the people with a pestilence, an intellectual pestilence worse than the Black Death of ancient days. And in what quantities this poison was produced and distributed! Naturally, the lower the intellectual and moral level of these art manufacturers, the more boundless is their fertility; such a fellow flings his offal in the face of humanity rather like a centrifugal machine. Besides, we must remember their unlimited number; remember that for every one Goethe nature plants at least ten thousand of these slimy creatures in the pelt of humanity, and they, disease carriers of the worst sort, poison souls.
It was a fact dreadful but inescapable that the Jew seemed specially chosen by nature in tremendous numbers for this horrible destiny.
Are we to suppose that this is the way in which he is “chosen”?
At that time I began carefully to examine the names of all the producers of these unclean products in the world of art. The result was ever more damaging to my previous attitude toward the Jews. Though my feelings were outraged a thousand times, my reason must still draw its conclusions. That nine-tenths of all the literary filth, artistic trash and theatrical nonsense must be debited to a people constituting scarcely a hundredth of all the country’s inhabitants could not simply be denied; it was a plain fact.
I now began to scrutinize even my beloved “world press” from this standpoint. But the deeper I probed, the more the object of my former adoration shrank. The style grew ever more intolerable, I objected to the content as flat and shallow, the objectivity of treatment now seemed to me rather a lie than honest truth; but the authors were—Jews.
A thousand things which I had once scarcely noticed now struck me as remarkable, while others, which had already given ​me something to think about, I came to grasp and understand.
I now saw the liberal sentiments of this press in a new light; the dignified tone in replying to attacks as well as the silence in answer to them, was now revealed to be a trick as shrewd as it was low. Their enraptured theatrical criticisms always favored a Jewish author, while their disapproval never fell on anyone except a German. The persistence of their quiet sneering at William II showed deliberate method, as did their advocacy of French culture and civilization. The trashy content of the short stories now became an indecency, and in the language I caught sounds of an alien people; but the general sense was so plainly harmful to everything German that it could only be intentional.
But who had an interest in this? Was it all mere chance? Gradually I became uncertain.
My development was speeded by the insights I gained into a series of other matters. This was the general conception of manners and morals which one could see held and openly displayed by a great part of Jewry.
Here again the street offered often truly ugly object-lessons. The relation of Jewry to prostitution and even more to white slavery itself could be studied in Vienna as in probably no other Western European city, with the possible exception of southern French seaport towns. If of an evening one walked the streets and alleys of the Leopoldstadt, at every step one witnessed, willy-nilly, things which remained hidden from the great majority of the German people until the war gave the soldiers on the Eastern front an opportunity, or rather forced them, to see similar happenings.
When I first recognized the Jew as the manager, icily calm and shamelessly businesslike, of this outrageous trade in vice of the offscourings of the metropolis, it sent a chill down my spine.
But then I blazed. Now I no longer evaded discussing the Jewish question—no, now I sought it. But having learned to find the Jew in every quarter of cultural and artistic life in its various expressions, I suddenly encountered him in a spot where I would least have expected him.
​When I recognized the Jew as the leader of Social Democracy, the scales began to fall from my eyes. With this a long spiritual struggle came to an end.
Even in daily contact with my fellow-workmen I was struck by the extraordinary chameleon power by which they took several attitudes toward a single question, often within a few days, sometimes even within a few hours. I could scarcely understand how people who, taken singly, still held reasonable views could suddenly lose them the moment they came under the spell of the masses. Often it was enough to drive one to despair. I would argue for hours, and finally believe that this time at last I had broken the ice or cleared away some piece of nonsense, and would be feeling heartily glad of my success; and then the next day I would be grieved to find that I had to begin all over again. It had all been futile. The madness of their opinions seemed always to swing back again like a perpetual pendulum.
I could understand everything; that they were dissatisfied with their lot, cursed Fate, which often dealt them such hard knocks; hated the business men, who seemed to them the heartless tools of this Fate; railed at government offices, which in their eyes had no feeling for the workers’ situation; that they demonstrated against food prices, and marched through the streets in support of their demands—all this one could still understand without referring to reason. But what I could not understand was the boundless hatred they felt for their own people, the way they despised its grandeur, defiled its history, and dragged great men in the gutter.
This struggle against their own kind, their own nest, their own homeland, was as senseless as it was incomprehensible. It was unnatural.
They could be temporarily cured of this vice, but only for days, for weeks at most. If later one met a supposed convert, he had fallen back into his old self. His unnatural tendencies would have him again in their grip.
That the Social Democratic press was conducted predominantly by Jews I gradually came to realize; but I attached no ​particular importance to this circumstance, since after all the situation was the same at the other newspapers. Only one thing was perhaps remarkable; there was not one paper where Jews worked which could have been called really national in line with my conception and training.
I forced myself to try to read this sort of Marxist journalism, but the more I did so the more boundless my aversion grew; so I now sought closer acquaintance with the manufacturers of these concentrated rascalities.
From the editor on down, they were all Jews. I got hold of every Social Democratic pamphlet I could, and looked up the author’s name: Jews. I noticed the names of almost all the leaders; by far the most of them were also members of the “chosen people,” whether they were representatives in the government or secretaries of the unions, chairmen of organizations or street agitators. The same uncanny picture was forever repeated. I shall never forget the names of Austerlitz, David, Adler, Ellenbogen, etc.
One thing was plain to me now: the leadership of the party with whose petty representatives I had had to fight my most violent battles for months was almost exclusively in the hands of an alien people (for already I had the happy satisfaction of knowing definitely that the Jew was no German).
Now for the first time I became thoroughly familiar with the corrupter of our people.
One year of my life in Vienna had been enough to convince me that no worker is too hidebound to yield to greater knowledge and superior enlightenment. I had gradually become an authority on their own doctrine, which I used as a weapon in the battle for my convictions. Almost always success was on my side.
The great mass of people could be saved, even if only by the utmost sacrifice of time and patience. But no Jew could ever be freed from his opinion.
In those days I was still childish enough to try to explain to them the madness of their doctrines; in my own little circle I ​talked my tongue sore and my throat hoarse, and thought I must surely succeed in convincing them of the ruinousness of their Marxist madness; but I produced the very opposite result. Growing insight into the destructive effect of Social Democratic theories and their accomplishment seemed only to increase these people’s determination.
The more disputes I had with them, the better acquainted I became with their dialectics. First they would count on the stupidity of their adversaries, and then, if there was no way out, they pretended stupidity themselves. If all else failed, then they claimed they did not understand correctly, or, being challenged, instantly jumped to another subject, and talked truisms; but if these were agreed to they at once applied them to entirely different matters, and then in turn, being caught again, they would dodge and have no exact knowledge. No matter where you seized one of these apostles, your hand grasped slimy ooze, which poured in separate streams through the fingers, only to unite again the next moment. But if you really gave a man such a shattering defeat that, observed by others, he could do nothing but agree, and if you thought this at least one step forward, how great was your surprise the following day! The Jew had not the slightest memory of yesterday, and went on repeating his old mischievous nonsense as if nothing at all had happened. Being indignantly taxed with this he would pretend astonishment, and could remember nothing at all except the truth of his statements, which after all had been proved the day before.
I was often simply paralyzed. One did not know which to admire more—their fluency or their artistry in lying.
Gradually I began to hate them.
This all had one good result: my love for my own people was bound to grow in just the degree that I got sight of the real props or at least the propagators of Social Democracy. After all, considering the diabolical adroitness of these seducers, who could condemn the wretched victims? How great, indeed, was my own difficulty in mastering the dialectical mendacity of this race! And how futile was such a success with people who twisted the truth ​in one’s mouth, and flatly denied a sentence just spoken, only to claim it for themselves the next moment!
No. The better I became acquainted with the Jew, the more I felt obliged to forgive the worker.
I now felt that the chief guilt belonged not to him, but to all those who thought it not worth the trouble to take pity on him, and with iron justice give to the son of the people what was his, and nail the seducer and corrupter to the wall.
Stimulated by the experience of daily life I now began to search for the sources of the Marxist doctrine itself. I had come to understand its effect in detail; its success daily struck any attentive eye, and with a little imagination I could depict its results. The only remaining question was whether the founders had foreseen the results of their creation in its final form, or whether they themselves were victims of error. I felt that both answers were possible.
On the one hand it was the duty of every thinking person to force his way into the front ranks of the accursed movement, thus perhaps to prevent it from going to extremes; on the other hand, however, the actual creators of this national disease must have been true devils. Only in the brain of a monster—not of a human being—could the plan take shape for an organization the eventual result of whose activity must be the collapse of human civilization and the desolation of the world.
In this case the last hope was battle, battle by every weapon which the human mind, understanding and will could grasp, no matter to whom Fate then gave its blessing.
I therefore began now to familiarize myself with the founders of this doctrine, in order thus to study the foundations of the movement. The fact that I got results sooner than perhaps even I had dared to hope I owed to my new, if not yet profound, knowledge of the Jewish question. That alone allowed me to compare its realities with the theoretical shuffling of the founding apostles of Social Democracy, since it had taught me to understand the language of the Jewish people, who talk to conceal their thoughts, or at least to veil them. Their real purpose is often not on the page, but sleeping snugly between the lines.
​This was the time of the greatest upheaval which my spirit ever went through. I had turned from a weakly cosmopolitan into a fanatical anti-Semite.
Only once more—the last time—uneasy and oppressive thoughts came to me in my profound anxiety.
I had scrutinized the work of the Jewish people through long periods of human history, and suddenly I was struck by the alarming question whether, for reasons unknown to us pitiable human beings, inscrutable Fate had not inalterably determined upon the final victory of this little people. It is a people which lives for this earth alone; could they have been promised the earth as their reward?
Have we an objective right to fight for self-preservation, or has even this only a subjective basis in ourselves?
I buried myself in the teachings of Marxism, and thus gave calm, clear consideration to the work of the Jewish people; and Fate itself gave me my answer.
The Jewish doctrine of Marxism denies the aristocratic principle of Nature, and sets mass and dead weight of numbers in place of the eternal privilege of strength and power. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, disputes the significance of nation and race, and so deprives mankind of the essentials of its survival and civilization. Marxism as a foundation of the universe would be the end of any order conceivable to man. And as the result of applying such a law in this greatest recognizable organism could only be chaos, so on earth would their own destruction be the only result for the inhabitants of this planet. If by help of his Marxist faith the Jew conquers the peoples of this world, his crown will be the burial wreath of mankind; our planet will again move uninhabited through the ether, as it did millions of years ago.
Eternal Nature takes implacable revenge for violation of her commandments.
Thus I believe I am acting today in the spirit of the Almighty Creator: by resisting the Jew I am fighting for the Lord’s work.