Hitler

youngsters. Most of these youngsters graduated from the Karl May adventures and the childhood fantasies they fostered as they grew up. For Adolf, however, the fascination with Karl May never faded. As Reich Chancellor, he still read the May stories, recommending them, too, to his generals, whom he accused of lacking imagination.
    Adolf later referred to ‘this happy time’, when ‘school work was ridiculously easy, leaving me so much free time that the sun saw more of me than my room’, when ‘meadows and woods were then the battleground on which the ever-present “antagonisms” ’ – the growing conflict with his father – ‘came to a head’.
    In 1900, however, the carefree days were drawing to a close. And just around the time when important decisions had to be made about Adolf ’sfuture, and the secondary education path he should follow, the Hitler family was once more plunged into distress with the death, through measles, of Adolf ’s little brother Edmund on 2 February 1900. With Alois’s elder son, Alois Jr, already spiting his father and living away from home, any careerist ambitions for his offspring now rested upon Adolf. They were to lead to tension between father and son in the remaining years of Alois’s life.
    Adolf began his secondary schooling on 17 September 1900. His father had opted for the
Realschule
rather than the Gymnasium, that is, for a school which attached less weight to the traditional classical and humanistic studies but was still seen as a preparation for higher education, with an emphasis upon more ‘modern’ subjects, including science and technical studies. According to Adolf, his father was influenced by the aptitude his son already showed for drawing, together with a disdain for the impracticality of humanistic studies deriving from his own hard way to career advancement. It was not the typical route for a would-be civil servant – the career which Alois had in mind for his son. But, then, Alois himself had made a good career in the service of the Austrian state with hardly any formal education at all to speak of.
    The transition to secondary school was a hard one for young Adolf. He had to trek every day from his home in Leonding to school in Linz, a journey of over an hour each way, leaving him little or no time for developing out-of-school friendships. While he was still a big fish in a little pond among the village boys in Leonding, his classmates in his new school took no special notice of him. He had no close friends at school; nor did he seek any. And the attention he had received from his village teacher was now replaced by the more impersonal treatment of a number of teachers responsible for individual subjects. The minimum effort with which Adolf had mastered the demands of the primary school now no longer sufficed. His school work, which had been so good in primary school, suffered from the outset. And his behaviour betrayed clear signs of immaturity. Adolf’s school record, down to the time he left in autumn 1905, hovered between poor and mediocre.
    In a letter to Hitler’s defence counsel on 12 December 1923, following the failed putsch attempt in Munich, his former class teacher, Dr Eduard Huemer, recalled Adolf as a thin, pale youth commuting between Linz and Leonding, a boy not making full use of his talent, lacking in application, and unable to accommodate himself to school discipline.He characterized him as stubborn, high-handed, dogmatic, and hot-tempered. Strictures from his teachers were received with a scarcely concealed insolence. With his classmates he was domineering, and a leading figure in the sort of immature pranks which Huemer attributed to too great an addiction to Karl May’s Indian stories together with a tendency to waste time furthered by the daily trip from Leonding and back.
    There can be little doubting that Hitler’s attitude towards his school and teachers (with one exception) was scathingly negative. He left school ‘with an elemental hatred’ towards it, and later mocked and derided his schooling and teachers. Only his history teacher, Dr Leopold Pötsch, was singled out for praise in
Mein Kampf
for firing Hitler’s interest through vivid narratives and tales of heroism from the German past, stirring in him the strongly emotional German-nationalist, anti-Habsburg feelings (which were in any case widely prevalent in his school, as in Linz generally).
    The problems of adjustment that Adolf encountered in