Rating: 
Summary: A Valuable Study
Review: I thought I knew a lot about Adolf Hitler's life, even his youth, until I stumbled upon this book. Hitler's Vienna provides a fascinating glimpse into the social, economic, and political milieu in which young Hitler found himself immersed when he came from the provinces to the capital of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire in order to pursue his dream of a career in art or architecture.
The book is really less about Hitler himself than about the forces which helped to shape his weltanschauung. Though he reportedly not an anti-Semite as a youth, it was in Vienna that Hitler learned the language of anti-semitism and nationalism.
As I engrossed myself in the book, my thoughts often wandered to comparing the identity politics and quota demands of Austro-Hungarian politicians with the increasing ethnic balkanization here in the United States and wondered whether such a man as Hitler could not one day spring from our political landscape.
One of the chief things I learned is that political and ethnic anti-Semitism was already a very potent force among both the more radical German-nationalist followers of Georg Schoenerer as well as among the more mainstream supporters of the enormously popular mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger. There was also a large groundswell of anti-Czech sentiment due to a heavy flow of Czechs into Vienna and to the mistreatment by Czechs of Germans in Sudetenland, a situation that Hitler was later to temporarily rectify.
The most surprising fact about Hitler brought to light is that he had many Jewish friends during his Vienna days. And I had to laugh at the part where he was described by a former fellow boarder at the men's hostel as having arrived wearing shoulder-length hair and wearing nothing but a coat because he didn't have a shirt.
Though the book adds much to what we knew of Hitler, it comes no closer than any other of really getting inside his head to explain his true motivations. After all, hundreds of thousands of Europeans hated Jews and lived through the same hardships that young Hitler did, but only Hitler took that extra step and made the end of Jewry his life's work. Nevertheless, this book is a very valuable study and is an easy and fascinating read that comes highly recommended to all those who yearn to know more about the life and times of Adolf Hitler.
Rating: 
Summary: A great book
Review: Terrible translation. Worse editing. Have you ever read a translation of a paragraph run through Babelfish? Much of this book reads like a word for word translation. I read German pretty well, so I could make sense of the book, but I wonder about someone who doesn't understand German syntax.And the editing was atrocious. Many misspellings. There were some pages where the errors tended to obscure the meaning. Finally, this book was based too much on stretching the connection between Hitler and other people who were active in Vienna at the time. It could have focused on life in Vienna during the critical period. It could have focused entirely on what was known about Hitler's life at the time. Unfortunately, it combined the two. There are large sections where Hitler is connected with another unsavory person solely by the device of saying, "Hitler could have read this person's works." It's easy to smear Hitler because he did so many bad things, but it is still intellectually dishonest to connect 2 people circumstantially just because they lived in the same place at the same time. The highlights of the book were description of life in the Men's Hostel and the lives and fates of Hitler's many Jewish friends.
Rating: 
Summary: Good topic, not a good book
Review: Terrible translation. Worse editing. Have you ever read a translation of a paragraph run through Babelfish? Much of this book reads like a word for word translation. I read German pretty well, so I could make sense of the book, but I wonder about someone who doesn't understand German syntax. And the editing was atrocious. Many misspellings. There were some pages where the errors tended to obscure the meaning. Finally, this book was based too much on stretching the connection between Hitler and other people who were active in Vienna at the time. It could have focused on life in Vienna during the critical period. It could have focused entirely on what was known about Hitler's life at the time. Unfortunately, it combined the two. There are large sections where Hitler is connected with another unsavory person solely by the device of saying, "Hitler could have read this person's works." It's easy to smear Hitler because he did so many bad things, but it is still intellectually dishonest to connect 2 people circumstantially just because they lived in the same place at the same time. The highlights of the book were description of life in the Men's Hostel and the lives and fates of Hitler's many Jewish friends.
Rating:
Summary: How Hitler became a charismatic leader.
Review: This book takes a look not only at Hitler but at the Vienna political landscape that is increasingly becoming familiar to Americans, a multicultural society where ethnic groups formed factions, parties and their own newspapers and came to hate each other based on ethnicity alone. The difference was of course extreme poverty, so the masses were angry and hostile to each other. This portrait of Hitler show an unemployed, pig-headed, stubborn, but politically astute orator practicing his speeches on his fellow hospice cohorts. Without money and barely a roof over his head, in rags, he preferred devouring newspapers and debating political issues. He resisted joining any of the radical parties, including anti-Semitic ones, because none of them suited his needs. What we see is the development of a charismatic leader, one less interested in being a member of a party, but only in leading others. He was not particularly anti-Semitic, he hated the Slavs far more. But he honed his skills in debate in oratory. The culmination of this man leading Germany in a drive for unification, his only real passion, overshadows any other aspects of his life. Not a decisive dictator like Stalin, he waited for events to happen and then made decisions. Absence is any causal reason or history that would suggest he ever wanted to annihilate the Jews. The final solution, whether it was even Hitler's plan in the first place, only came to fruition from the war and the influx of massive numbers of Jews from occupied lands.
Rating:
Summary: Hitler was more than the product of Vienna.
Review: This excellent volume, which suffers from a poor translator, demonstrates that the overwhelmingly anti-semitic atmosphere of Vienna when Hitler lived there did not turn him into an anti-semite. It is surprising how little it seemed to influence him at that time; he seems to have successfully resisted becoming an anti-semite. Thus his war experience and the influence of post-WWI Munich must be seen as more decisive. One needs more concentration on the growth of anti-semitism in Germany and in Bavaria in particular during and shortly after the World War. However unfairly Hitler concluded that the Jews were responsible for all Germany's ills, his reaction must have been somewhat less irrational than has previously been thought. His equation of Jews and Bolshevism was widespread in Europe in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and must not be underestimated in assessing the growth of Fascism and anti-Semitism. Hamann's book makes Hitler both more and less an enigma.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting narrative of Hitler's early years
Review: Though this book is better in the original German (it loses something in the translation), Hamann is a diligent researcher who has unearthed some new facts about Hitler's period in Vienna. She uses primary sources and archive material without merely rehashing what other biographies have written in the past. The Franz Jetzinger book from the 50's is still the standard, definitive version of Hitler's Vienna years, but Hamann does a nice job and weaves in some new material. She also adroitly dismisses some claims from other German authors who have inaccurately written about Hitler's relationship with early roommate, August (Gustl) Kubizek. Thankfully, Hamann doesn't indulge in psychoanalyzing Hitler, which is sort of a deranged cottage industry amongst more recent Hitler biographers. One small criticism is that Hamann veers away from Hitler too frequently. There is a plethora of material about Vienna's political climate in the 1910's, its mayor, the origin of anti-Semitism in the city and other ancillary details. Though all of this is relevant to Hitler, one wishes she would have stayed a bit more on topic. Still, the book is interesting, informative and devoid of errors. If you want to learn more about the young Hitler, this is an acceptable choice.
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