Hitler's Last Hostages Read online

  Hitler wrote to his sister asking for help, and she sent him fifty Kronen; it was enough to buy a coat for twelve Kronen and spend the rest on art supplies.53 Emboldened, he rapidly began painting hundreds of postcards of Vienna’s iconic monuments: St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the city hall, the parliament, and the Scottish Church. In addition to selling postcards in taverns, Hitler created larger works and sold them to framers, who could sell readymade frames more quickly when they contained art. His best customers were two Jewish Austrians: Samuel Morgenstern and Jakob Altenberg. “They were the cheapest items we ever sold. The only ones who showed any interest in them were tourists who were looking for inexpensive souvenirs,” noted the latter’s daughter, Adele Altenberg. Adele was a young girl when Hitler began coming into the store on his own, increasingly without Hanisch. She noticed how Hitler kept his eyes on the floor, refusing to look at her. Once he tried discussing the pan-German movement with her father, who quickly told him to stop such divisive nonsense.

  About two months after he began postcard painting, in summer 1910, Hitler made a new friend at the men’s hostel, Josepf Neumann, a copper cleaner who was eleven years older, single, and Jewish. Hanisch grew jealous of the pair after Neumann and Hitler went on a vacation together for a week. When they came back, Neumann asked Hitler to move with him to Germany. Hitler declined and stayed in Vienna to paint, but to Hanisch’s dismay, Hitler’s artistic output diminished as he missed Neumann’s presence. Hanisch promptly bought his own art supplies and began copying Hitler’s works, placing himself in direct competition with Hitler, causing their friendship to quickly collapse.54

  Hitler was scraping together a living by selling his artworks, but his income was meager. He considered asking his aunt for more money only to discover that she recently had died, at just forty-eight years old.55 Pressing on, Hitler continued for one more year on his own, bickering with Hanisch and sulking around the men’s hostel, ruminating over the possibility of leaving Vienna for Munich not only to continue his artistic “self-education” there but also because his deadline to enroll for compulsory military service in the Austrian army was fast approaching. He wanted to dodge the call-up.

  In the next few months, Hitler befriended Rudolf Häusler at the men’s hostel. Häusler and Hitler met in the reading room and bonded over their similar backgrounds. Both had doting mothers but distant, austere fathers, and it was in the company of Häusler that Hitler moved to Munich.

  After five and a half years in the Austrian capital of high culture, Hitler left Vienna broke and an artistic failure. Yet he would later argue to his supporters that he had moved to Munich because he had accomplished as much as he could in Vienna and was now ready to move to Germany’s center of culture.

  In May 1913, Hitler and Häusler packed their bags and headed to Schwabing in the north of Munich, a place of bohemians, artists, anarchists, and self-proclaimed “intellectual thinkers” who frequented the lively, cheap bars there. The move to Munich, Germany’s cultural capital, as opposed to Berlin, its political capital, was a clear indication that Hitler’s primary focus was culture, not politics. Hitler and Häusler moved into a flat rented from a local tailor. Vladimir Lenin had lived just down the street at Schleißheimer Straße 106 a decade before. While Hitler was there, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and Wassily Kandinsky also lived in the neighborhood. Yet Hitler showed no more interest in getting to know them than he had Vienna’s elite artists. He mainly spent his days alone in bars and cafés or at the Hofbräuhaus, occasionally making sketches and returning home reeking of beer and smoke. Back at the flat, he specialized in being the roommate from hell. He forced poor Häusler to listen to hours-long speeches until 3 or 4 a.m., during which Hitler would become increasingly passionate and even start to spit.56

  Unfortunately for Hitler, by the summer of 1913 his compulsory military service was unavoidable; with tensions rising across the continent, Austria was mobilizing its eligible citizens for training. Begrudgingly, Hitler went from Munich to Salzburg for physical fitness testing. The result for the future Führer, who prized the physical ideal of a strong and muscular male, was humiliating. “Unfit for military and auxiliary service; too weak. Incapable of bearing arms,” read his military inspection report. He returned to Munich to discover that Häusler had moved out while he was gone.

  Everything changed for Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on 28 June 1914, when the fifty-year-old Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his forty-six-year-old wife Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo. Hitler was excited by the prospect of conflict, since it would provide the perfect opportunity for the Aryan race to show its superiority. In Munich on 1 August 1914, Hitler cheered with the roaring crowd as Germany declared war on Serbia. Within days, Russia, France, Belgium, Montenegro, and Great Britain were also embroiled in the conflict. Hitler submitted a petition to fight for Germany on 3 August. Though Hitler had moved to Munich in part to avoid military service in Vienna, at that time there had been no imminent global war. Now he sensed the opportunity not only to experience firsthand what he genuinely believed to be the romantic side of war but also to become a hero and prove the superiority of the pan-German race. Hitler’s zeal was rewarded: the day after he submitted his petition to fight for Germany, he opened a letter to find he had been accepted. That same day British Foreign Secretary Edward Gray looked out his office window in London at dusk and, seeing men lighting the street lamps, declared, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

  CHAPTER II

  ENIGMA OF WAR

  “War freed many an individual from the environment he hated and the slavery of his everyday routine. Beliefs? Ha, ha! In what? In German heavy industry? In the big capitalists? In our glorious generals?”

  —George Grosz

  HALF A YEAR AFTER ADOLF Hitler joined the German army, he was working as a courier in Belgium. Enamored of the structure of the job, the sense of identity that the army gave him, and the solitary nature of his position, he refused to take any leave, a choice that stupefied his supervisors. Many other soldiers were in utter despair; mental breakdowns were common enough that the army did not investigate which were real and which were ruses.

  One man discharged from the army for such alleged mental instability was Wieland Herzfelde, who had served a brief stint as a medical assistant in Flanders before the army discharged him after he attacked his commanding officer. Orphaned when he was young, the working-class veteran was a poet and aspiring art publisher, determined to make his mark on the art world once he found an artist to work with who suited his own gregarious and sarcastic personality.

  In the summer of 1915, while lounging in the art studio of his eccentric friend Ludwig Meidner one afternoon, the two commiserated on the pointlessness of the war and strategized how to organize protests and drum up publicity for a publishing venture that Herzfelde was planning. Unexpectedly, a dapper gentleman with ash-blonde hair, wearing a spotless grey suit, popped his head around the open door; he had eavesdropped on their conversation. Introducing himself as a Dutch entrepreneur, he began casually chitchatting before mentioning his hope that the war would drag on indefinitely and aid his latest entrepreneurial endeavor: collecting shell splinters from battlefields and employing maimed soldiers to paint them with the Iron Cross and emblazon them with slogans like “God Gave Us and Saved Us” and “Every Shot Hit the Spot.” He intended to sell them as paperweights and ash trays; the longer the war dragged on, the more money he would earn.

  A silence fell over the studio as the man strutted out, leaving everyone dumbfounded and wondering what had just happened. “An odd duck,” Herzfelde said to Meidner, adding, “He must belong to us somehow.” Herzfelde surmised correctly that the man had played a prank to illustrate a point about war profiteers.1

  The man was George Grosz, who would soon become one of the most incendiary and famous artists in Germany, with a reputation that would eventually reach the United States. Herzfelde and Grosz
would bond over their nearly identical senses of humor, and Herzfelde would not only become the artist’s publisher but also his closest friend for life.

  While the “Dutch merchant” impression was a prank, it was also part of a coping mechanism for the twenty-two-year-old Grosz, who, like most Germans, was undergoing a crisis of national identity. The army had discharged him in early May on the grounds of physical and mental instability. Grosz’s art was unflinchingly critical; this took an emotional toll on him, however, and he suppressed his fractured personality in role playing, wild parties, and copious quantities of liquor. His friend and fellow artist Meidner was in on the prank against Herzfelde; the trio began attending parties and drinking in bars and burlesque clubs. “Deliberately, we wore unkempt clothes, our hair awry,” Herzfelde would later recall.2

  Meidner viewed the war as a disaster from the outset. Over several years, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz had advocated a modernization and expansion of German naval power to rival the United Kingdom, further aggravating the pan-European arms race, with which few Germans had concerned themselves. Meidner, however, had paid attention and painted his Apocalyptic Landscape, which showed with gloppy paint and wide brushstrokes a typical German city exploding with blue fire, the sun slinking into the mountains, the ground swirling like lava and evoking the darker works of Vincent van Gogh created weeks before the Dutchman shot himself. “I trembled, all that high summer through, in front of canvases that seethed with the fuming anguish of earth, in every patch of color, in every scrap of cloud and in every cascading stream,” Meidner wrote of the works he created between 1912 and 1916. “I could see nothing but a thousand skeletons jigging in a row.”3

  Unlike Meidner, Grosz had not seen the skeletons coming. Grosz, like Hitler, had romanticized war since childhood and volunteered for the army in November 1914 out of a sense of patriotic duty. The two shared numerous childhood similarities: hard-drinking fathers who died early, abysmal school records resulting in expulsion, an admiration of militarism, and a desire to paint battle scenes. Yet these similar backgrounds would result in wildly divergent views on German culture.

  Born in Berlin on 26 July 1893, Grosz lived above a restaurant run by his parents until he was five and the family moved to Stolp, a small town in Pomerania, 250 miles northeast of Berlin on the Baltic Sea. Grosz and his father had a happy relationship, and the two spent time drawing soldiers and horses together, bonding over both creative pastimes and national pride. Yet Karl Grosz died when George was six years old, and Karl’s widow Marie moved her family back to Berlin, where she worked as a seamstress. Though struggling after the death of her husband, Marie would take Grosz and his sister to Aschinger’s, a beer saloon at Oranienburger Tor, as a treat; the children delighted in sitting near the crystal and mirrored pavilion where they ate wurst, while waitresses in white checkered outfits bustled around them.4

  Living in Berlin, Grosz scuffled with schoolyard bullies, rousing an awareness of the violence latent within humans and animals.5 This leitmotif entered Grosz’s art after he started seriously drawing at age nine; he created a bloody hunting scene, which the owner of an art supply shop framed and sold to a farmer, earning the aspiring artist his first commission: four marks and eighty-five pfennigs. The little victory encouraged him to press on. He began at this early age to develop the sardonic humor that would become the hallmark of his adult work. He incorporated the dark wit found in the caricatures of nineteenth-century illustrator and author Wilhelm Busch, who wrote the best-selling Max und Moritz children’s book about a pair of naughty boys whose bodies get ground to bits and fed to ducks.6

  Grosz’s grades at school were abominable, and he was prone to conflicts with his teachers, typically met with corporal punishment. The head teacher changed the name of his class whip based on the student who had been its latest victim; it was usually named “Grosz.”7 After his expulsion from school, Grosz began to focus on becoming a famous artist, determined to acquire fame through hard work and rigorous self-criticism and by earning the respect of experienced artists. He sought inspiration for his art by biking around Stolp and soon discovered a new hobby triggered by his nascent libido: peeking into portly women’s windows to check out their breasts—the more voluminous their bosoms the better. It awakened in him a lifelong fascination with female sexuality that was unique among German artists: Grosz’s depictions of women from various walks of life did not deride them for their erotic drives and preferences.

  Grosz challenged himself by precisely copying the works of Old Masters and popular German artists in order to understand their composition and, crucially, in order to craft his own style and learn to break the rules so rigorously instilled in and followed by traditional German artists. Dreaming of adventures in a metropolis, Grosz readied his application for the revered Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. “This prize always hovered before me like the Holy Grail,” he wrote of his chances for artistic fame.8 After traipsing through freshly fallen leaves as a mist spread across Dresden’s Elbe River on the testing day, Grosz and the other candidates entered an exam room with a large skylight through which streamed cold German sun. They looked nervously at one corner, where a few antique statues stood like sentinels against the wall, one raising a dusty arm in greeting. Some hopefuls brandished expensive paint boxes, while others sharpened cheap charcoal pencils; the academy required the applicants to complete the same test using whatever materials they could afford to bring.

  To Professor Robert Sterl, a middle-aged native of Dresden with a radish-colored face, innate talent mattered more than the economic backgrounds of the students. Watching Sterl, Grosz considered him the kind of man with whom he could split a bottle of red wine over an amicable chat. Grosz’s laborious studies over the preceding months bore fruit during the entrance exam as the young applicant showed off a technique that was unique but still rooted in tradition. His lines appeared flat and dense, indicative of a newer style, but also proportional, something traditionalists admired. As Sterl curtly complimented him, Grosz’s adrenaline spiked. “So! I was going to pass!” he thought.9 Indeed he did, matriculating in 1909.

  Grosz fit in well with the other students, particularly a boy who introduced him to the art of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. Munch’s 1893 The Scream made an impression on Grosz, with its eerie orange and blue hues and the main figure’s unalloyed expression of angst, but Grosz was also quite taken with Munch’s lithographs, not only for their impeccable craftsmanship but also for Munch’s almost mystical portrayal of female sexuality and emotions.10 In Munch’s black-and-cream 1896 work On the Waves of Love, a woman with a serene expression floats in water, her long, unbound curly hair mixing with the waves. In the 1895 lithograph The Alley, Munch portrays a prostitute with the symbols typically used for a Venus or the Madonna; floating in the air, the woman hovers among the men nude, with a tranquil, almost holy countenance.

  Grosz and his classmates engaged in various antics, including lively food fights.11 In class, however, the students labored to create art that meticulously mimicked real life, a style that hardly resembled that of the mystically minded Munch. Grosz considered the realist exercises pedantic and pointless. “If we were painting the head of a model, then every hair of the eyebrow had to be counted,” noted Grosz. “Our crayons, numbering one to five, had to be sharply pointed—truly a symbol of order and discipline.”12 Just as the artist Oskar Kokoschka had noted of his art academy—the very one that had rejected Hitler months before—the regimented nature of the Dresden school was at odds with the zeitgeist engulfing its students outside the classroom.

  The young Grosz respected the traditional subject matter of the Old Masters: biblical allegories, battle scenes, and calming landscapes. He worried that artists of his generation would neglect proper artistic techniques: “One of the fashionable bywords of the day was ‘individuality.’ It was preposterous! Everyone thrust his head back and painted without looking in order to titillate a ‘deeper’ individuality, to encourage the expression of t
he unconscious. Many of us just took the thick paint into our mouths and spat it onto the canvas.”13

  Grosz decided that in order to break with tradition, he first had to understand it. He approached tenured professor Raphael Wehle, regarded by other students as a loner and defender of the archaic style. At first Wehle refused to see Grosz, convinced it was a prank. Yet Grosz convinced Wehle of his sincerity and valiantly attempted to master the fastidious traditional techniques, such as the particularly German practice of cramming three hundred detailed figures into biblical scenes.

  At this point in western Europe, artwork created by students at prestigious academies like Dresden’s were considered demonstrations of nationalism—a way literally to illustrate an almost sacred national pride. When he broke with tradition, Grosz believed he was doing something exhilarating yet bordering on sacrilegious. It made him melancholy: “The noble, classic, religious ideals were just not in me because they were not of my time.”14

  The risk catalyzed an epiphany, however terrifying. “Yes, real life was not just made of plaster casts,” Grosz exclaimed, referencing the plaster models that Wehle had him use to portray the hundreds of figures in traditionally crowded biblical scenes. “Life was more like a rag completely smeared with a riot of color.”15 Hesitantly, Grosz stopped trying to paint in the style that Professor Wehle taught in his dusty studio and went out into the city to observe life itself. He began depicting rising class disparity; in an untitled work, he showed a tubby, moneyed man with his ostentatiously dressed female companion, trailed by a peg-legged beggar on crutches holding a frayed cap that contrasted with the garish plumage of the lady’s hat.