CHAPTER FOUR

It looks like Adolf Hitler’s autobiography is going to be the story of his intellectual and political development, and how he translated those developments into action. It is not going to be the autobiography of the inner life of the man. Or how the inner life of the man leads, through desire, to the public life of the man.This will almost certainly be one of the issues I will deal with in the manuscript. I have always heard, and I expect to find, that Hitler will emphasize strength of “character” and the power of “will.” I do not believe that these two qualities are independent of desire, but in fact stand upon desire, so it will be interesting to see if he addresses desire itself.

Autobiography does not have to be this or that. The autobiographer works with those materials of his life that most interest him, that he finds most affect him. Why any particular aspect of his life interests him more than any other is often unclear, even to himself. Or, more closely perhaps, it is especially unclear to himself. There is no one right way to tell your story. No one right reason. You write it as you choose to write it, for whatever reasons, and for whatever reasons your reader chooses to judge you by what you have written. There is no one right way, and no one right reason, to judge the autobiographer’s work.

With regard to his childhood, Adolf Hitler is not much of a story teller. He has little interest in discussing his family or his friends. He writes only a few lines about his mother, to the effect that she was a good mother, a good homemaker, and “lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children.” He writes nothing here about his sister, his half sister, half-brother, and indeed, almost nothing of his mother. There is nothing about the rest of his large circle of in-laws, and no individual stories about his boyhood friends. Maybe he will write about them later on. I have never heard anywhere that he does.

It is clear, however, that when Adolf Hitler was in prison working on My Struggle, he felt it important to make clear the outline of his relationship, the conflict, between him and his father, and the causes for it. It is in association with his father in which he first weighs the personal decisions he is to make as a boy and very young man about his life and his career—or, to put it more closely, what became his calling.

Adolf’s father, Alois, was the son of a poor village cobbler. He had an independent character, grew restless at home, and at 13 packed a bag and left his “native woodland parish.” He walked to Vienna with nothing but pocket change, determined to learn a trade. That was in 1850. He probably worked as a manual laborer, Hitler does not say, but four years later passed his apprentice examination as a “craftsman.” But he was not satisfied. He was ambitious. As a young boy he had considered the priesthood, but in Vienna came to see that the “dignity of a State official” was the “highest in the scale of human achievement.” He turned his attention, and his energy, to that goal and when he was about twenty-three years old he “succeeded in making himself what he had resolved to become.”

When the father was fifty-six years old the “old gentleman,” as Hitler refers to him, retired, returned to his village and family, and to keep himself busy bought a little land and began to plough it. Hitler says here that this was the time when “I first began to have ideals of my own.” If I have done the math right, this was about 1893/4. Hitler was five or six years old. Maybe something is wrong with my time line. It occurs to me to note here a small coincidence. My father was born the same year Adolf Hitler was born, 1889.

Hitler writes of a rather idyllic childhood, “scampering around in the open, on the long road from school, and mixing up with some of the roughest of the boys ….” Over the next few years Hitler writes that he put no serious thought to choosing a vocation, but understood that he did not want to be a civil servant like his father. He believes that he became aware early on of “an inborn talent for speaking” during the more or less “strenuous” arguments he would have with his comrades. He became something of a “juvenile ringleader” who learned easily in school but was “rather difficult to manage.” Adolf Hitler being “difficult to manage” was a characteristic that half the world would one day discover for itself.

In his free time Adolf practiced singing in the choir of the monastery church at Lambach. He was emotionally impressed again and again by the “magnificent splendour of the ecclesiastical ceremonial.” He looked upon the Abbot as representing “the highest human ideal worth striving for….”, as his father perhaps had when he himself was a boy. Adolf Hitler does not address the issues of “belief,” or “God,” or any religious sentiments he might have felt. At the same time, he was having “juvenile disputes” with his father. He apparently held up his own end with his already developing oratorical gifts, which convinced his father that Adolf’s disputatious nature would not bode well for a career in the church.

It was about this time, perhaps in Adolf’s ninth or tenth year, that his interests took a sudden turn in a new direction. His father had a small library, and there one day Adolf discovered a popular history of the Franco-German War 1870-71. It consisted of two volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. They became his favorite reading. That “great and heroic conflict began to take first place in my mind.” From that time on, Hitler writes, he became increasingly enthusiastic about “everything that was in any way connected with war or military affairs.”

It was decided that the boy should study. His father, taking into consideration Adolf’s character as a whole, and especially his “temperament,” decided that the classical subjects studied at the Lyceum were not suited to him. He thought the Realschule would suit Adolf better. Adolf understood that his father wanted him to follow his own career as a civil servant, writing, “He was simply incapable of imagining that I might reject what had meant everything in life for him […] and yet it had to be otherwise. For the first time in my life—I was eleven years old—I felt myself forced into open opposition […] I would not become a civil servant.”

Adolf had no idea what he did want to be, only that he did not want to become what his father wanted him to become. This was about to change.

“This happened when I was twelve years old. How it came about I cannot exactly say now; but one day it became clear to me that I would be a painter—I mean an artist.” It had long been agreed that Adolf had an aptitude for drawing. One reason his father had chosen the Realschule for him was exactly that. But the old gentleman had not considered the possibility that his son might choose being an artist as a career. When Adolf told him openly that that was exactly what he wanted to do, the old gentleman was speechless. He wondered if Adolf “was in a sound state of mind.”

“A painter? An artist-painter? […] Not as long as I live. Never.”

“At that our struggle became stalemate. The father would not abandon his ‘Never’, and I became all the more consolidated in my ‘Nevertheless.’”

When Adolf’s father forbade him to take up the art of painting as a profession, Adolf said he would study nothing else. Hitler writes that it was an unpleasant situation. Adolf dealt with it openly and secretly both. Among other things, he deliberately did poorly or failed all his classes in school in which he had no personal interest. Geography and history were his two favorite subjects, and in those he excelled. But he was defiant. He defied his father, and he defied those teachers at his school who believed he should study for all his examinations, not just the ones he took an interest in. In Adolf’s childhood defiance of his father, of his teachers—both the familial and social constructs of his young world—perhaps we find one seed of the man who would follow.

And it is here that Adolf Hitler makes an astounding assertion.

“When I look back over so many years and try to judge the results of that experience I find two very significant facts standing out clearly before my mind. First, I became a nationalist. Second, I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.” (P.17)

When Adolf was twelve, then, maybe thirteen years old—the time line is not clear—he had come to understand the “true meaning of history.” Adolf Hitler does not make this assertion as a child, but as an adult recalling his childhood. The wounded veteran of years of warfare, an experienced political organizer, and the acknowledged leader of the rising National Socialist movement—it was a political party but a movement as well—that had the attention of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, a movement that was on the edge of breaking out into the mainstream.

It is understandable that Adolf could have become a nationalist when he was twelve or thirteen years old. He writes in considerable detail about the efforts of the German minority in the Austrian-Habsburg Empire struggling to keep even it’s language alive in what was a predominantly a “Slav” empire—a fact that I had not considered. It is understandable that young boys might very well identify with their “own” people, those who speak the same language, have the same historical traditions, are of the same ethnic background. When I was eleven and twelve years old I was perfectly aware that Mexicans were not “my” people, though unlike Adolf at that age, it meant little, more likely nothing, to me.

When I was twelve, thirteen and fourteen years old there was the “Pacheco” problem in Los Angeles. Radical Mexicans and Mexican-Americans took to wearing outrageous clothes that went against the dress codes of the day. We would hear via the radio and the newspapers about clashes between American sailors and soldiers on one side and Pachucos on the other in downtown Los Angeles. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I didn’t try to find out. Unlike Adolf, when I was that age I had no cultural or political interests. Intellectually, psychologically, I was simply not in his class.

Still, as uninterested and uninformed as I was, if push had come to shove and I had had to choose between the Pachucos and “our” soldiers and sailors, I can not imagine that I would have gone with the Pachucos. It would have been unnatural for me to have gone with them against “my” people—the soldiers and sailors who were overwhelmingly “White,” like me. I have every reason to suppose that Adolf would have approved of that, and that in a similar situation he would have made the same choice. When I was a boy then, my ethnic sensibilities resembled those of the young Adolf Hitler, but without his insight or maturity.

Adolf would have been able to defend his reasons for choosing who he saw as “his” people against those he saw as being among the “others,” while I would not have been able to defend mine. Adolf had waded into the waters of politics and culture by the time he was twelve and thirteen years old, while I remained on the shore, or rather, far inland from the shore, totally oblivious to such matters. Adolf had become interested and involved in mature issues, while I remained a boy in every respect.

But now we come to a very different matter. Adolf Hitler was 34 years old when he wrote that by the age of twelve or perhaps thirteen (keeping in mind that the timeline is not exact), not only that he had become a nationalist, but that “I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.”

My first response to such a statement is, “Give me a break.” But that’s a wisecrack, and My Struggle is a serious book and Adolf Hitler the most significant figure of the 20th Century. He is the most significant figure of the 20th century for the Holocaust Industry anyhow, and the professorial class which still depends on him for its world view. At this moment thought turns to Gibbons, for what reason I do not know, and then it suggests to me that those who have used Adolf Hitler to help fake a history of the 20th Century were able to “grasp the true meaning” of World War II even as it ended.

This may be the place in the writing of My Struggle, and it is a very early place—page 17—that Adolf Hitler should have paused to reflect on what he was writing. I don’t want to make too much of it, but to write that as a very young teenager he had come to understand “the true meaning of history” is an astounding and even grandiose statement and I am obligated to not ignore it here. “I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.” It is a statement of great foolishness, great carelessness, and entirely self-serving.

History cannot be “grasped.” It cannot be “understood” because we do not know what it is. You cannot understand a story when you do not know where it began and you have not yet heard the last of it. History is an endless flux of experience. Our story will not be finished until we are finished, and once we are finished we will not grasp anything, much less the true meaning of history.

I do not know the history of my own family. Adolf Hitler did not know the history of his family. The history of every family on earth is lost in an aggregation of complication so immense that it is beyond the ability of our speck-like memory to even attempt to sort it out. I do not know where my family came from, and I have no idea where it will go. It began with the beginning of the race, and it is lost there. Its future is just that, so it does not yet exist. If we cannot know the history of our own family, the idea that we can “grasp” the true meaning of history itself is an exercise in fantasy. It is the place where fantasy and blood embrace one another.

We all make foolish and careless statements. That just comes with the territory—the territory being the millennia over which the species learned how to talk, and then to use talk to fulfill desire. I’m no exception. It matters little with me because I am an insignificant figure in the human landscape. I have not had the energy or abilities to affect society. Adolf Hitler, however, became an immense figure on the landscape for a few years. If it was for good or bad will be argued for a long time to come—not by me I should say—but the immensity of his image cannot be denied, an image that continues to build as it continues to be profitable to those who exploit it most successfully for their own gain.

The first idea, or image—I am not certain which—that occurred to me upon reading Adolf Hitler’s startlingly careless statement that he had understood and grasped the true meaning of history (when he was thirteen—fourteen at the outside?) is that early in his mature career he did appear to understand the dynamics of modern Central European political history, but soon proved that he could not bring himself to understand the dynamics of modern International political history—that is, the political dynamics of the world beyond Central Europe. There, he appears to have miscalculated everything. I understand I am over my head here. I will not try to argue the matter. But that is what thought, acting on its own, suggested to me. I will let it go as it came—which is what George Washington said he would do when he caught that last cold.

To conclude this observation, when Adolf Hitler writes that when he was a boy of twelve or thirteen he “learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history,” he is thirty-four years old, the leader of a growing national movement, a man who, desperately, wants the offices and power to direct a nation of tens of millions of people into great social and military adventures. At the same time he is living in a subjective world where he believes he can grasp the true meaning of that which has no beginning and no end, and resembles, to the extent that it exists at all, very faint and broken pictographs from the disintegrating walls of caves where people lived who were still communicating by grunting and slapping each other on the ass (at this moment thought recalls the story about Herman Goering at table one evening, drinking and laughing, lifting one leg and farting for all to hear—my kind of guy).

Sometimes I have to wonder about thought.

Adolf Hitler was a human being, not a monster. The charge that Hitler was only too human is a charge that the intellectuals allied with the Holocaust Industry, cannot bring themselves to face. It is the same with those who think of Hitler as a great man, rather than a great character who played the starring role in the greatest drama of modern history in the West—they do not want to see him as a mere man.

All through the first pages of My Struggle I see myself in Adolf Hitler, and I see Adolf Hitler in me. I don’t find a monster there (or here), or a hero, though he was to conclude individual acts that can be judged “heroic” by their level of energy, organization, and success they represented. While I am nothing of a leader, I do not follow well either. With regard to following, Adolf Hitler and me share the same distaste.

With regard to wanting to lead others into great danger for their own good, in the name of a great cause, Hitler and I do not resemble each other at all. The desire to lead others originates in the desire to lead others, not in some other desire. Shoot me if I’m wrong.

Adolf-Hitler-as-monster is necessary for the U.S. Congress to morally justify its foreign policies during and following World War II, until this day. As moral justification it is childish and murderous, but then as a people we have never been particularly sensitive to charges of being childish or murderous.

Until we can talk freely about Adolf Hitler as a man, rather than Adolf-Hitler-as-monster, we will not be able to talk freely about Homeland Security, about the War on Terror, or about the U.S. alliance with Israel. Because, finally, U.S. policies regarding all these issues are morally justified by the first great WMD fraud, the accusation that Adolf Hitler used homicidal gassing chambers to intentionally kill millions of innocent, unarmed civilians.

Hitler-as-monster—there’s the ticket. So long as that image stalks our press and other media, so long as it stalks the psyches of our intellectuals and politicians, the U.S. Congress will feel morally justified in furthering its conscious drift toward an imperial state based on—weapons of mass destruction. The matter will not be discussed freely, but justified “morally” by the gas-chamber fantasy, which is now in the process of being institutionalized at the United Nations.

End

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