Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship

Summary

Title: Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship
Author: Brigitte Hamann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195140532

Pro:
•  Many original quotes
•  Exploration of people and culture
•  Clear connections drawn

Con:
•  None

Description:
•  Covers Viennese culture in late 19th/early 20th centuries
•  Provides needed background to Hitler’s development
•  Political and Religious factors explored

Book Review

Normally, the Vienna of this time period is regarded as a cultural center where great works of art, science and literature were being developed. It was a crossroads of culture and politics, full of life and beauty. But there was also a darker side to Vienna, occupied by racial and ethnic rivalries. It was a cauldron of fear and hate, where modernity itself was challenged as being too libertine and definitely much too Jewish.

Vienna was home to many hostels where disadvantaged men came together in a breeding ground for pseudoscientific theories about history, race and politics. Any sense of superiority and accomplishment they could develop was largely achieved through racial and national affiliation — it was “better” to be German than to be Jewish or Czech, for example:

“The zeitgeist was saturated with terms like ‘master race’ and ‘inferior race.’ In order to corroborate race theories scientifically, many ‘researchers’ went haywire, measuring and comparing skulls and extremities, establishing alleged racial differences in the blood, in the electric resistance, and in the breath, which was supposed to express some kind of primal personal power. Racial hierarchies were constructed. Everything, even differences in the evolutionary levels of the Austro-Hungary’s various nationalities, were explained by way of ‘race’. [...] All race theoreticians rejected the fundamental principles of legal equality and democracy: the ‘slave peoples’ were not considered worthy of the same rights as the ‘master peoples.’”

For these people, generally lacking jobs or training or much of a future, that was the best they could muster. And Hitler was no idle spectator of such talk — Hamann is able to demonstrate that he studied such ideas with great interest and intensity.

Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship

Why the hostility towards minorities? There were a number of reasons for this. First were the increasing waves of immigrants from the East, in particular Jews fleeing Russian pogroms. Second was the development of equal suffrage for all ethnic groups in the empire, including Jews. Third was the higher birth rates among non-German ethnic groups, leading to ever decreasing numbers of Germans in traditionally Germanic cities and lands.

And it was here that Hitler received his most important instructions in politics and culture. From people like Karl Lueger he learned how to control crowds with stirring emotional speeches, and how attacking an isolated minority could be used to increase people’s sense of self-worth. From others, like Georg Schöner, he learned the values of nationalism and pan-Germanism, and how “German unification” needed to include all traditionally Germanic areas.

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