CHAPTER ONE In the parental home
I consider it a happy fate to have been born in the small town of Braunau on the Inn; Braunau, situated right on the border of those two German states, whose merger presents itself to us—at least to us young people—as a vital task well worth achieving at all costs.
German Austria must return to the common heritage of the German homeland, and not for any economic reasons. No, not at all, for even if such a union, considered economically, were indifferent or even harmful, it should nevertheless be carried out. Peoples of the same blood belong to a common homeland. As long as the German people cannot unite their children under a single state, they will lack a morally justified right to pursue colonial policy. Only when the Reich, encompassing the life of the last German, no longer has the possibility of ensuring their subsistence, will the moral justification for acquiring possession of lands abroad arise from the people’s own need. The plow will then be turned into a sword, and from the tears of war will daily bread spring forth for posterity.
The small border town of Braunau seems to me to be the symbol of a great work. In yet another sense, this place stands today as a warning to the future.
When this insignificant town was—more than a hundred years ago—the scene of a tragic event that shook the entire German nation, its name was immortalized at least in the annals of German history. At the time of the most terrible humiliation imposed on our homeland, the Nuremberg bookseller Johannes Philipp Palm, a stubborn “nationalist” and enemy of the French, gave his life there for his beloved Germany. He had steadfastly refused to betray his accomplices, or rather, the real culprits. He died, just like Leo Schlagetter, and like him, Johannes Philip Palm was also denounced to France by an official. A police chief in Augsburg gained the sad reputation of
the complaint and thereby created the type that the new German authorities adopted under the aegis of Mr. Severing.
My parents lived in that small town on the Inn, Bavarian by origin, Austrian by political belief, and ennobled by German martyrdom, around 1890. My father was a loyal and honorable civil servant; my mother, busy with household chores, always showed unwavering and loving concern for her children. My memory of that time holds little, for my father soon had to leave the town that had won his affection to take up a new post in Passau, that is, in Germany.
In those days, the fate of the Austrian customs officer was often “on the pilgrimage”; hence, my father had to move to Linz, where he eventually retired. This certainly must not have been a relief for the old man. My father, the son of a simple and poor peasant, had not been able to resign himself to remaining in his father’s house in his youth. He was not yet thirteen when he packed his satchel and left his homeland. He was going to Vienna, ignoring the advice of experienced villagers, to learn a trade there. This happened in the year 50 of the last century. What a grave decision to set out in search of the unknown armed with only three florins! But when the adolescent turned seventeen, he had already passed his workshop journeyman’s exam to become “something better.” If as a child in the village, the priest seemed to him the expression of the highest human attainment, now—within his sphere, enormously expanded by the great city—he was the civil servant. With the tenacity of a man already aged into adolescence by life’s hardships, the young man clung to his resolve to become a civil servant, and he did. I believe that shortly after turning 23, he achieved his goal.
When he finally retired at the age of 56, he couldn’t have settled for an unemployed life. And so, near the Austrian town of Lambach, he acquired a small farm; he managed it personally, and thus, after a long and laborious life, returned to the original occupation of his ancestors.
It was undoubtedly during this time that I forged my first ideals. My childhood adventures in the open air, the long walk to school, and the camaraderie I maintained with robust boys, which was often a source of deep concern to my mother, could have made me anything but a lazybones.
Although I wasn’t seriously concerned about my future profession at the time, I knew that my sympathies weren’t in any way inclined toward my father’s career. I believe that even then my oratorical talents were exercised in more or less violent altercations with my classmates. I had become a little leader who learned well and easily in school, but who was difficult to deal with.
On my father’s bookshelf, I found various military works, including a popular edition of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. It was a two-volume issue of an illustrated magazine from that period, and I made them my favorite reading. From then on, I became increasingly enthusiastic about anything related to war or military life.
But this must have had significance for me in another sense as well. For the first time—albeit in a vague way—the question arose in my mind as to whether there really was a difference, and if so, what it might be, between the Germans who fought in the war of ’70 and other Germans—the Austrians. I wondered why Austria didn’t also take part in that war alongside Germany? Aren’t we all the same? I asked myself. This problem began to preoccupy my youthful mind. To my cautious questions, I must have heard, with deep admiration, the answer that not every German was fortunate enough to belong to Bismarck’s Reich.
This was inexplicable to me.
*
**
It had been decided that he should study.
For the first time in my life, when I was barely eleven years old, I had to oppose my father. If he was inflexible in his determination to carry out his plans, his son was no less implacable and stubborn in rejecting an idea he disliked little or nothing.
I didn’t want to become a civil servant!
Even today, I can’t explain how one day I realized I had a calling for painting. My talent for drawing was so undeniable that it was one of the reasons my father enrolled me in secondary school; but never with the intention of giving me professional training in that field.
My school certificates from that time recorded extreme grades, depending on my subject of interest. My best grades were in geography and even better in world history; in these favorite subjects, I was the top performer in my class.
When I now, after so many years have passed, look back on that time, two facts stand out as the most important: 1. I BECAME A NATIONALIST.
2nd I LEARNED TO UNDERSTAND AND APPRECIATE HISTORY IN
HIS
TRUE SENSE.
Former Austria was a state of diverse nationalities.
In reality – at least at that time – a German subject of the
Reich didn’t grasp the significance this fact had for the everyday life of the individual under the aegis of such a state. Since it was the Austro-German element, the degenerated Habsburg dynasty was easily confused with the healthy core of the people itself.
Most people didn’t realize that if there hadn’t been a pure-blooded German core in Austria, Germanism would never have had the strength to imprint its mark on a state of 52 million inhabitants of diverse origins, and this to such an extent that even in Germany the mistaken notion that Austria was a German state arose. An absurdity with grave consequences, but at the same time a shining testimony to the 10 million Germans living in the Eastern March. In Germany, only very few knew about the eternal struggle for the language, for the German school, and for the German character. As in every struggle (everywhere and at all times), so too in the struggle for language that existed in the old Austria, there were three sides: the belligerents, the indifferent, and the traitors. Of course, I wasn’t among the indifferent at the time, and I must have soon become a fanatical German nationalist.
This evolution in my way of feeling made very rapid progress, so that already at the age of fifteen I was able to understand the difference between dynastic “patriotism” and popular “nationalism” and from that moment on only the latter existed for me.
Didn’t we already know from our adolescence that the Austrian state had no affection and could not have any affection for us Germans? Daily experience confirmed the historical reality of the Habsburg action.
North and South, the poison of foreign races eroded the very organism of our nationality, and even Vienna itself was visibly becoming more and more an anti-German center. The House of Habsburg strove by every means toward Chekization, and it was the hand of the goddess of eternal Justice and the inexorable law of compensation that caused the most bitter enemy of Germanism in Austria, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to fall precisely under the lead he himself helped to melt. Franz Ferdinand was nothing less than the symbol of the tendency exercised from the top of his command to achieve the Slavicization of Austria.
The unfortunate alliance of the young German Empire with the illusory Austrian state laid the seeds of world war and also of ruin.
Throughout this book, I will have to deal with the problem in detail. For now, it will suffice to state that already in my early youth I had arrived at a conviction that I never discarded afterwards and that in fact deepened with time: it was the conviction that the security inherent in the life of Germanism supposed the destruction of Austria and that, furthermore, the national feeling did not coincide in any way with dynastic patriotism, finally, that the House of Habsburg was predestined to bring about the misfortune of the German nation.
Even then I drew the consequences of that experience: a burning love for my Austro-German homeland and profound hatred for the Austrian state.
*
**
The question of my future profession had to be resolved sooner than I expected.
At the age of 13, I suddenly lost my father. A stroke cut short the still-vigorous man’s life, leaving us in the deepest grief.
At first nothing changed externally.
My mother, following my late father’s wishes, felt obliged to encourage my education, that is, my preparation for a career in
civil servant. I was personally determined, then more than ever, not to pursue that career under any circumstances.
And then an illness came to my aid. My mother, under the impression of the ailment that afflicted me, finally arranged for me to leave school and enroll in an academy.
Happy days those were, which seemed like a beautiful dream to me. Indeed, they must have been nothing more than a dream, for two years later, my mother’s death put an abrupt end to my cherished plans.
This bitter outcome brought to a close a long and painful period of illness that from the beginning had offered little hope of recovery; nevertheless, the blow affected me deeply. I venerated my father, but I had adored my mother.
Poverty and harsh reality forced me to take a quick decision. The meager resources left by my father were largely exhausted during my mother’s serious illness, and the orphan’s pension I was entitled to wasn’t even enough to support myself; I was therefore forced to earn my daily bread by any means necessary.
With a suitcase of clothes in my hand and an unwavering will in my heart, I set off for Vienna. I hoped to obtain from Fate what my father had been able to obtain 50 years earlier; I, too, wanted to become “something,” but by no means a civil servant.
