Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship

Rating:
Summary: A convincing, fascinating read
Review: Another Hitler book? Aren't there enough already? That's what I thought, til I read this. This is a fascinating story about the Vienna in which Hitler created his vision and plans. This is the Vienna of Adler and Freud, of coffee houses and intellectual debate. But did the young Hitler live in this mileiu from 1908 - 1913? Or was he relegated to Vienna's lower class and working class neighborhoods. What was life like there among the poor, single men? Were there any Jewish professors at the Visual Arts school he attended? (no) With the newly won right to vote, what kind of pan-German politicians caught the attention of the poor masses and of a young Hitler? What books and newspapers would he have read? How did Vienna's architecture influence Hitler's ideas symbolic art? How did Georg Schonerer affect Hitler's later ideas? Is this where he learned about anti-Semitism? A fascinating read that just draws you in.

Rating:
Summary: The key to Mein Kampf
Review: Brigitte Hamann has done a remarkable thing with this book. By examining Vienna during Hitler's formative years, she has unlocked a lot of mystery surrounding the great man himself. While it is true that she uncovered discrepancies in Hitler's description of those years in Mein Kampf, her real contribution is in helping the reader to understand what Hitler was talking about, and why he said the things he said.

Particularly useful is Hamann's analysis of the prominent politicians of the day. She first described these leaders and their political ups and downs. Then, with the testimony of the witnesses who knew Hitler during those years, she deftly draws a picture of the formative influences that helped shape the mature dictator. Hitler was obsessed with politics and he learned what worked and what did not work during those early years in Vienna. Many of his later policies first saw the light of day in the Vienna of his youth. There is a chilling passage about the problem of gypsy pickpockets expected for the 60 Anniversary Parade in honor of Emperor Franz Joseph, in 1908. One solution, seriously presented in Parliament at the time, was to tattoo a number on the forearm of every gypsy.

Hamann also provides an in-depth analysis of the Austro-Hungarian attempt at a multi-ethnic parliamentarism, the chaos and the inefficiency that it brought, and the consequent neglect for the common people. The Pan-German movement, which clearly influenced the young Hitler is clearly explained in considerable detail. At times while reading this book, I had to pause and remind myself that the period under review presaged the rise of Adolf Hitler to power by some 20 years!

Out of the murk emerges Hitler as a young man obsessed by politics, hot tempered, forceful in argument, with poor work habits, odd hours, and a penchant for talk. Hamann's decision to look at the politics that helped him to formulate his world view is brilliant history. This fascinating book is very worthy of your attention.

Rating:
Summary: The key to Mein Kampf
Review: Brigitte Hamann has done a remarkable thing with this book. By examining Vienna during Hitler's formative years, she has unlocked a lot of mystery surrounding the great man himself. While it is true that she uncovered discrepancies in Hitler's description of those years in Mein Kampf, her real contribution is in helping the reader to understand what Hitler was talking about, and why he said the things he said.

Particularly useful is Hamann's analysis of the prominent politicians of the day. She first described these leaders and their political ups and downs. Then, with the testimony of the witnesses who knew Hitler during those years, she deftly draws a picture of the formative influences that helped shape the mature dictator. Hitler was obsessed with politics and he learned what worked and what did not work during those early years in Vienna. Many of his later policies first saw the light of day in the Vienna of his youth. There is a chilling passage about the problem of gypsy pickpockets expected for the 60 Anniversary Parade in honor of Emperor Franz Joseph, in 1908. One solution, seriously presented in Parliament at the time, was to tattoo a number on the forearm of every gypsy.

Hamann also provides an in-depth analysis of the Austro-Hungarian attempt at a multi-ethnic parliamentarism, the chaos and the inefficiency that it brought, and the consequent neglect for the common people. The Pan-German movement, which clearly influenced the young Hitler is clearly explained in considerable detail. At times while reading this book, I had to pause and remind myself that the period under review presaged the rise of Adolf Hitler to power by some 20 years!

Out of the murk emerges Hitler as a young man obsessed by politics, hot tempered, forceful in argument, with poor work habits, odd hours, and a penchant for talk. Hamann's decision to look at the politics that helped him to formulate his world view is brilliant history. This fascinating book is very worthy of your attention.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of information, that is often overlooked...
Review: Hitler's Europe was frightful and real. Was Hitler the incarnation of evil? Hamann is trying to let us all know that a desperate young man created a role for himself and then became its prisoner. The monster. A monster is very powerful. There are lots of wanna-be's, and that's the real trouble. Worse, lots of people try to create scary roles for themselves; that's why this book is so valuable. It may set your teeth on edge to read that as a boy Adolf Hitler was frail, gentle and had Jewish friends. He was so poor he had to borrow shoes to go to a lecture about his fictional hero, an American Indian. He was devoted to his mother - and she to him - and they often went hungry. His way out was acting, which involved self-consciously hypnotic gestures and diction. And catch-phrases. Of course that's not the image the world now has - the super-fiend born directly from hell. But we would all be better off with the truth.

Rating:
Summary: Good book, but the original is better!
Review: I really liked this book as it offered some new facts as opposed to regurgitating the same points already in circulation about Hitler and his youth. Hamann is a great historian of our time, and those of you fluent in German would be well advised to get ahold of this book in the original.

Rating:
Summary: Good book, but the original is better!
Review: I really liked this book as it offered some new facts as opposed to regurgitating the same points already in circulation about Hitler and his youth. Hamann is a great historian of our time, and those of you fluent in German would be well advised to get ahold of this book in the original.

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: 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: 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.