The Abuse Scandals – 5

Gert Krell

I fully agree with what you write. There is no excuse, philosophical, ethical, pedagogical or political, for the poisonous educational tradition of “For Your Own Good,” nor for neglect, neither in the family nor at school. But the connection between education and mass murder is more complicated. I have now read Brigitte Hamann’s excellent book “Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship,” first published in German in 1996. Dr. Hamann has done original research on Hitler’s early years in Vienna until 1913, when he moved to Munich at the age of 24.

Hamann’s book not only shows that Alice Miller was empirically wrong to some extent in her own brief study of Hitler’s family background, but also that you have to address the cultural and political situation, if you want to explain how H. became what he was; in Vienna and later in Germany, of course. What I found most ironically disturbing: as a very young man, H. was only mildly anti-Semitic at most, probably not at all. His authoritarian and conservative father was clearly against anti-Semitism. The Jewish family physician, Dr. Bloch, liked Adolf as a boy and as an adolescent and considered his love for his mother exemplary. When H. was “down and out” in Vienna, and that was almost all of his time there, he had good and friendly business connections (very small business, at or below the existential minimum) with Jews, which he esteemed.

H. always had strong and somewhat manic political views and was always intolerant of other opinions, and he had strong inhibitions and was definitely femiphobic. So he was a bit strange, but he was no psychopath. To put it differently: his political and ideological environment was at least as “psychopathic” as he was. To be sure, Vienna was one of the early global cities and had a very modern multicultural side, where science and the arts flourished. Yet in her book, Brigitte Hamann deals with the other, the “dark side” of the city: the side of prejudice, anti-intellectualism, anti-modernism, and (racial) ethnocentrism, the side of the cranks who invented the strangest theories of the world’s origins or of the history of the “Aryan race”. It was mostly this side in which H. developed his world views. Certainly, World War I and the revolutionary upheavals towards and after its end were highly relevant formative experiences as well.

The political side of Vienna (and Austria-Hungary) before the Great War was one of permanent crisis:
– fast growth and industrialisation, large migrations, wide-spread poverty and other huge social problems, class war, and a political process almost completely stalled by competing nationalisms
– a (militarist) conservative-clerical elite who were anti-Semitic to a large extent (not the monarchy), with Dr. Karl Lueger, Vienna’s mayor, as a new type of Christian-Social popular tribune and one of Hitler’s most important “teachers”
– banal chauvinism and anti-Semitism of the masses, particularly the “Kleinbürger” (petty bourgeoisie), and the dilemma of the Jews between assimilation, new mass migration from Eastern Europe, and Zionism (it is often said that Theodor Herzl became a Zionist because of the Dreyfus affair in France; that is only part of the story, however: Vienna’s politics and its strong anti-Semitism were at least as important)
– several radical right-wing anti-Austrian and pro-German nationalist groups who were mostly even more racist and anti-Semitic than the Christian-Social conservatives

The dwindling Liberals and the growing Social Democrats were the only more rational and basically humanistic forces. It is very saddening to see how attractive radical nationalism and even racism were not only to the far right but in slightly moderated form also to large parts of the common men and women and to parts of the elite. It seemed so attractive at the time that even some Jews accepted it – Otto Weininger being the most obvious and tragic case: he became an ardent pro-Aryan anti-Semite and committed suicide. You can find traces of it even in early Zionism.

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