Hitler

another account asingle year) the transformation was complete. Hitler highlights, however, a single episode which opened his eyes to ‘the Jewish Question’.
    Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.
    For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form:
    Is this a German?
    Following this encounter, Hitler continued, he started to buy antisemitic pamphlets. He was now able to see that Jews ‘were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves’. Vienna now appeared in a different light. ‘Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.’
    Now, to stay with his own account, his revulsion rapidly grew. The language Hitler uses in these pages of
Mein Kampf
betrays a morbid fear of uncleanliness, dirt, and disease – all of which he associated with Jews. He also quickly formed his newly-found hatred into a conspiracy theory. He now linked the Jews with every evil he perceived: the liberal press, cultural life, prostitution, and – most significant of all – identified them as the leading force in Social Democracy. At this, ‘the scales dropped from my eyes’. Everything connected with Social Democracy – party leaders, Reichsrat deputies, trade union secretaries, and the Marxist press that he devoured with loathing – now seemed to him to be Jewish. But this ‘recognition’, he wrote, gave him great satisfaction. His already existent hatred of Social Democracy, that party’s antinationalism, now fell into place: its leadership was ‘almost exclusively in the hands of a foreign people’. ‘Only now,’ Hitler remarked, ‘did I become thoroughly acquainted with the seducer of our people.’ He had linked Marxism and antisemitism through what he called ‘the Jewish doctrine of Marxism’.
    It is a graphic account. But it is not corroborated by the other sources that cast light on Hitler’s time in Vienna. Indeed, in some respects it is directly at variance with them. It is generally accepted that, for all the problems with the autobiographical parts of
Mein Kampf
, Hitler was indeed converted to manic racial antisemitism while in Vienna. But the available evidence, beyond Hitler’s own words, offers little to confirmthat view. Interpretation rests ultimately on the balance of probabilities.
    Kubizek claimed Hitler was already an antisemite before leaving Linz. In contrast to Hitler’s assertion that his father had ‘cosmopolitan views’ and would have regarded antisemitism as ‘cultural backwardness’, Kubizek stated that Alois’s regular drinking cronies in Leonding were Schönerer supporters and that he himself was certainly therefore anti-Jewish. He pointed also to the openly antisemitic teachers Hitler encountered in the
Realschule
. He allegedly recalled, too, that Adolf had said to him one day, as they passed the small synagogue: ‘That doesn’t belong in Linz.’ For Kubizek, Vienna had made Hitler’s antisemitism more radical. But it had not created it. In his opinion, Hitler had gone to Vienna ‘already as a pronounced antisemite’. Kubizek went on to recount one or two episodes of Hitler’s aversion to Jews during the time they were together in Vienna. He claimed an encounter with a Galician Jew was the caftan story of
Mein Kampf
. But this, and a purported visit to a synagogue in which Hitler took Kubizek along to witness a Jewish wedding, have the appearance of an outright fabrication. Palpably false is Kubizek’s assertion that Hitler joined the Antisemitenbund (Antisemitic League) during the months in 1908 that the friends were together in Vienna. There was no such organization in Austria-Hungary before 1918.
    In fact, Kubizek is generally unconvincing in the passages devoted to the early manifestations of Hitler’s antisemitism. These are among the least trustworthy sections of his account – partly drawing on
Mein Kampf
, partly inventing episodes which were not present in the original draft version of his recollections, and in places demonstrably incorrect. Kubizek was keen to distance himself in his post-war memoirs from the radical views of his friend on the ‘Jewish