Hitler

ordinary quality. But they were certainly no worse than similar products touted about the beerhalls, often the work of genuine art students seeking to pay their way. Once he had found his feet, Hitler had no difficulty finding buyers. He was able to make a modest living from his painting and exist about as comfortably as he had done in his last years in Vienna. When the Linz authorities caught up with him in 1914, he acknowledged that his income – though irregular and fluctuating – could be put at around 1,200 Marks a year, and told his court photographer Heinrich Hoffmann at a much later date that he could get by on around 80 Marks a month for living costs at that time.
    As in Vienna, Hitler was polite but distant, self-contained, withdrawn, and apparently without friends (other than, in the first months, Häusler). Frau Popp could not recall Hitler having a single visitor in the entire two years of his tenancy. He lived simply and frugally, preparing his paintings during the day and reading at night. According to Hitler’s own account, ‘the study of the political events of the day’, especially foreign policy, preoccupied him during his time in Munich. He also claimed to have immersed himself again in the theoretical literature of Marxism and to have examined thoroughly once more the relation of Marxism to the Jews. There is no obvious reason to doubt his landlady’s witness to the books he brought back with him from the Königliche Hofund Staatsbibliothek (Royal Court and State Library), not far away in Ludwigstraße. In all the millions of recorded words of Hitler, however, there is nothing to indicate that he ever pored over the theoretical writings of Marxism, that he had studied Marx, or Engels, or Lenin (who had been in Munich not long before him), or Trotsky (his contemporary in Vienna). Reading for Hitler, as in Vienna, was not for enlightenment or learning, but to confirm prejudice.
    Most of it was probably done in cafés, where Hitler could continue his habit of devouring the newspapers available to customers. This is where he kept abreast of political developments, and where, at the slightest provocation, he could flare up and treat anyone in proximity to his fiercely held views on whatever preoccupied him at the time. Café and beerhall ‘discussions’ were the nearest Hitler came in his Munich period to political involvement. His statement in
Mein Kampf
that ‘in the years 1913 and 1914, I, for the first time in various circles which today in part faithfully support the National Socialist movement, expressed the conviction that the question of the future of the German nation was the question of destroying Marxism’ elevates coffee-house confrontation into the philosophy of the political prophet.
    Hitler’s captive audiences in the cafés and beerhalls were for most part the closest he came to human contact in his months in Munich, and presumably offered some sort of outlet for his pent-up prejudice and emotions. Contrary to his own depiction of the Munich months as a time of further preparation for what fate would eventually bring him, it was in reality an empty, lonely, and futile period for him. He was in love with Munich; but Munich was not in love with him. And as regards his own future, he had no more idea where he was going than he had done during his years in the Vienna Men’s Home.
    He very nearly ended up in an Austrian prison. Already in August 1913 the Linz police had started inquiries about Hitler’s whereabouts because of his failure to register for military service. Evasion of military service was punishable by a hefty fine. And leaving Austria to avoid it was treated as desertion and carried a jail sentence. By way of his relatives in Linz, the Viennese police, and the Men’s Home in Meldemannstraße, the trail eventually led to Munich, where the police were able to inform their Linz counterparts that Hitler had been registered since 26 May 1913 as living with the Popps at 34 Schleißheimerstraße. Hitler was shaken to the core when an officer of the Munich criminal police turned up on Frau Popp’s doorstep on the afternoon of Sunday, 18 January 1914 with a summons for him to appear two days later in Linz under pain of fine and imprisonment to register for military service, and promptly took him under arrest prior to handing him over to the Austrian authorities. The Munich police had for some reason delayed delivery of the summons for several days before the Sunday,