In this weeks reading of Ian Kershaw’s Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris the question that I wanted to be answered is where and when did Hitler’s radical anti-Semitism start. Through out his life he lived in many places. The most influential place was probably Vienna for him. That is where he spent a lot of his adult live and where he experienced a lot of rejection and hardship. Vienna was probably the place that made him think differently about Jews. At this time he was selling many of his paintings and a lot of Jews bought his work. It was said that he didn’t have a problem with them at the time. We learn a lot about Hitler’s family life and how he and his father did not get along. The author suggests that these factors could be a reason for his irrational, very aggressive behavior. I don’t believe that just because he had rejection in his life and he had a bad family life constitutes a valid reason for the mass killing of a religion and a society. Maybe if Hitler had gotten into the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna things might have turned out differently. He would not have suffered the rejection that he felt twice. Adolf Hitler was deeply influenced by Schönerer and Karl Lueger. He took ideals from both of these men. He incorporated Schönerer’s idea of anti-Semitism and Lueger’s support of the small and lower classes. Hitler like many of his followers was just looking for someone to look up to and feel a sense of belonging. Hitler was drifting aimlessly. He had been rejected twice from a dream of his and now his future was not looking too bright. In Vienna Hitler learned a lot of his information from all the anti-Semitic pamphlets and readings while he was there. That is the place that people believe made him into a Jew hating, crazed human being.
Ian Kershaw definitely gave more than one possibility of when and where Hitler first started on his whole anti semitism belief. But as he said, details are still sketchy because naturally make up things themselves. Hanisch claims that Hitler was not anti semitic during the period he was in Vienna. But I agree with you and think that Hitler's Viennese period is when he had these beliefs.
ReplyDeleteVienna seemed to be a very influential place for "mould[ing]the young Hitler" (30). It was in Vienna where he began buying and reading these antisemitic pamphlets and where he discovered that "Jews were not Germans of special religion, but a people in themselves" (61). It was here that he made a clear distinction between Jewish and German people. Not to mention that, like you said, Schonerer and Lueger, were major influences, since Hitler admired them for their ideas.
Kershaw mentions that it is "difficult to believe that Hitler of all people...had remained unaffected by the poisonous antisemitic atmosphere of the Vienna he knew-one of the most virulently anti-Jewish cities in Europe" (65). This ties into the question of why did no one seem to notice this resentment of Hitler's?
Since it was normal to have these kinds of feelings in Vienna, Hitler's own resentment could have just blended in with everybody else's.
Another theory out there is that since Hitler depended on Jewish people to buy his artwork, it would be stupid not to keep these feelings to himself.
And Kershaw himself seemed to imply that he believed it was Vienna that shaped him because the timeline fits.
I agree that one of the fundamental questions that most people probably wish they knew the answer to is where Hitler’s anti-Semitic philosophy truly began. No doubt it did involve a number of different sources from a number of different places. I think that Hitler’s most formative period very likely could have been while he lived in Vienna. He is known to have been a voracious reader, though almost entirely of right-wing tracts that would enhance the viewpoints he already had rather than challenge his beliefs or expose him to any new ideas. If anything, his reading closed off different avenues of thought to him—something that really is self-defeating because it is the opposite of why people should read books.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that Hitler and his father differed in the orientation of their patriotic support seems extremely likely to have played a large part in his development. How this is possible reflects the finer nuances of geography in Europe that can be sometimes less accessible to Americans who have a far more expansive sense of geography.
Something I wonder about is how politically astute Hitler was as he began to form his anti-Semitic beliefs and articulate them in public. He preached the evils of Bolsheviks, among other things, no doubt in part at least because he knew his beer-hall audiences would be receptive to it. How much of his early anti-Semitism came as a result of his belief that the Jewish population of Germany and of Europe would make a good target for him to attack in order to make a name for himself and carve out a place in the atmosphere of numerous far-right organizations in Munich at the time? He certainly had a genuine hatred for Jews, but there had to be some element of political opportunism in his selection of them as the primary target of his speeches.