150
PARTISAN Il..EVIEW
argument against the theater as a haven for social undesirables. As it turned
out, Hitler was a forerunner of Helms in his rampage against degenerate
artists. Ironically enough, Vienna's pan- Cerman revisionists of history alltic–
ipated some of the more extreme strategies in our contemporary culture
wars.
In her highly informative (though not yet translated) book
Hitler:,· [ViCII,
German historian Brigitte Hamman tells of young Hitler's first visit to
Vienna, in 19()7, armed with an invit;uion to look up his idol , Alfi-ed Roller,
who was Mahler's and later R.einhardt's set designer. R.oller would gladly
discuss Hitler's professional training options with hinl. The connection was
made through the Hitler family's landlady in Linz.
As an ardent Wagner fan and a regubr at the court opera's standing
room during Mahler's embattled final season, 19()7- 19()l-), Hitler greatly
admired
I~oller's
pioneering desigllS for the conductor's seminal Wagner
productions. The young would-be artist set out three times to see the
revered master. Terrified of rejection, he turned back every time and finally
des troyed th e letter.
There was little else the young man frol1l the provinces had in cOl1lmon
with his then forty-four year old role Illodel , who was instrunlental in the
creation of the artistic Iandscapc
ofjill-ric-siMc
Vienna.
Hitler's Vienna was not Wittgenstein's Vienna , although their paths
crossed or almost did as pupils at the
l<eo/sc/l11/e
in Linz. For very differellt
reasons, both were deeply affected by onc of the l1lost problematic cult fig–
ures in
jill-ric-siMI'
Vienna, Otto Weininger, whose dissertation
Sex IIllri
C/Illrarfcr
continues to fascinate thinkers and wri tns for its tortured brilliance
and because of his carefully staged suicide at the ;lgC of :23 in the house
where Beethoven died. The fourtecn-year-old Wittgenstein attended
Weininger's funeral in Vienna in 1
<)()].
SOllle twenty years later Hitler appro–
priated Weininger 's self-destructive ;l11ti -Se l1litisl1l In his political
propaganda.
One could even say that both Hitler and Wittgenstein were driven by
what Ray Monk call ed
The
0111)'
or
em
ills
in the ti
tI
e of his defini tive biog–
raphy of Wittgenstein. The obsessive aspir;ltion to genius is a well-known
hallmark of
theji/l-ric-sih!e
l1lystique. Its legacy colltinues
to
torture Austria's
aspiring artists and intellectuals.
For the young Hitler, as for most would-bc artists, it was a vague utopi–
an notion, born of the romantic glorification of the inspired olltsider which
was particularly seductive to the ill-adjusted, the failures, the disenfi-anchised
and the meek. As is well known, all evidence in the young Hitler's biogra–
phy points
to
such a person.
Hamman's eminently readable, painstakingly researched book covers the
period between 1907 and 1913, the years Hi
tI
er lived in Vienna. He spent
