Hitler

the
Realschule
in Linz were compounded by the deterioration in relations with his father and the running sore of the disputes over the boy’s future career. For Alois, the virtues of a civil service career could not be gainsaid. But all his attempts to enthuse his son met with adamant rejection. ‘I yawned and grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time,’ wrote Adolf in
Mein Kampf
.
    The more Adolf resisted the idea, the more authoritarian and insistent his father became. Equally stubborn, when asked what he envisaged for his future, Adolf claimed he replied that he wanted to be an artist – a vision which for the dour Austrian civil servant Alois was quite unthinkable. ‘Artist, no, never as long as I live!’, Hitler has him saying. Whether the young Adolf, allegedly at the age of twelve, so plainly stipulated he wanted to be an artist may be doubted. But that there was a conflict with his father arising from his unwillingness to follow a career in the civil service, and that his father found fault with his son’s indolent and purposeless existence, in which drawing appeared to be his main interest, seems certain. Alois had worked his way up through industry, diligence, and effort from humble origins to a position of dignity and respect in the state service. His son, from a more privileged background, saw fit to do no more than dawdle away his time drawing and dreaming, wouldnot apply himself in school, had no career path in view, and scorned the type of career which had meant everything to his father. The dispute amounted, therefore, to more than a rejection of a civil service career. It was a rejection of everything his father had stood for; and with that, a rejection of his father himself.
    Adolf’s adolescence, as he commented in
Mein Kampf
, was ‘very painful’. With the move to the school in Linz, and the start of the rumbling conflict with his father, an important formative phase in his character development had begun. The happy, playful youngster of the primary school days had grown into an idle, resentful, rebellious, sullen, stubborn, and purposeless teenager.
    When, on 3 January 1903, his father collapsed and died over his usual morning glass of wine in the Gasthaus Wiesinger, the conflict of will over Adolf ’s future was over. Alois had left his family in comfortable circumstances. And whatever emotional adjustments were needed for his widow, Klara, it is unlikely that Adolf, now the only ‘man about the house’, grieved over his father. With his father’s death, much of the parental pressure was removed. His mother did her best to persuade Adolf to comply with his father’s wishes. But she shied away from conflict and, however concerned she was about his future, was far too ready to give in to Adolf ’s whims. In any case, his continued poor school performance in itself ruled out any realistic expectation that he would be qualified for a career in the civil service.
    His school record in the following two years remained mediocre. In autumn 1905, at the age of sixteen, he used illness – feigned, or most likely genuine but exaggerated – to persuade his mother that he was not fit to continue school and gladly put his schooling behind him for good with no clear future career path mapped out.
    The time between leaving school in autumn 1905 and his mother’s death at the end of 1907 is passed over almost completely in
Mein Kampf
. In these two years, Adolf lived a life of parasitic idleness – funded, provided for, looked after, and cosseted by a doting mother, with his own room in the comfortable flat in the Humboldtstraße in Linz, which the family had moved into in June 1905. His mother, his aunt Johanna, and his little sister Paula were there to look after all his needs, to wash, clean, and cook for him. His mother even bought him a grand piano, on which he had lessons for four months between October 1906 and January 1907. He spent his time during the days drawing,painting, reading, or writing ‘poetry’; the evenings were for going to the theatre or opera; and the whole time he daydreamed and fantasized about his future as a great artist. He stayed up late into the night and slept long into the mornings. He had no clear aim in view. The indolent lifestyle, the grandiosity of fantasy, the lack of discipline for systematic work – all features of the later Hitler – can be seen in these two years in