Book Two the ARTIST

Chapter V – A Well Respected Man 159 Book Two THE ARTIST 160 Chapter V – A Well Respected Man Chapter V - A Well Respected Man 161 A WELL RESPECTED MAN The business of the Civil Service is the orderly management of decline. William Armstrong In the Year of the Lord 1889, the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph celebrated his fifty-ninth birthday and forty-first anniversary of his reign over the vast Empire of Austria and Hungary; when he died, in 1916, he had ruled the state for sixty-eight years. The realm was huge - covering over 180,000 square miles or about 450,000 square kilometres. The emperor's domains stretched, in the east-west axis, from Czernowitz on the Dniester River in today's Ukraine to Vorarlberg on the Swiss border, and, in the north-south axis, from the lower Elbe River near Aussig to Ragusa in the Bosnian Hercegovina, two thirds down the eastern Adriatic coast. Ethnically and thus politically, however, these territories were hopelessly divided. The racial diversity of the Imperial population included Germans in Austria, Hungary and the Sudetenland; Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia; Slovaks to their east; Poles in western Galicia and Ruthenians, Catholic Ukrainians, in the eastern part of it; Magyars in Hungary and Transylvania interspersed with some more Germans and Romanians; Slovenes, Friaulians and Italians south of the Julian Alps; and finally Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Montenegrinos and Serbs in and around the Balkan mountains. All these groups fought incessant but mostly inconclusive battles over appointments, representation and influence in the empire and its court, while a laborious civil administration struggled with the actual governance of the multitudes. The exceptionally long reign of Francis Joseph had much aided the ossification of the Imperial structures, which, given the Habsburgs' reverence for tradition, were conservative, to say the least; pre-modern, and reactionary. Yet on the outside things appeared fit for eternity. Stefan Zweig, one of Vienna's famous sons, describes the peculiar atmosphere of town and country: When I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our almost thousand-years-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanence, and the state itself was the chief guarantor of this stability. The rights which it granted to its citizens were duly confirmed by parliament, the freely elected representatives of the people, and every duty was exactly prescribed. Our currency, the Austrian crown, circulated in bright gold pieces, as assurance of its immutability. Everyone knew how much he possessed or what he was entitled to, what was permitted and what was forbidden. Everything had its norm, its definite measure and weight. He who had a fortune could accurately compute his annual interest. An official or an officer, for example, could confidently look up in the calendar the year he would be advanced in rank, or when he would be pensioned. Each family had its fixed budget, and knew how much could be spent for rent and food, for holidays and entertainment; and what is more, invariably a small sum was carefully laid aside for sickness and the doctor's bills, for the unexpected. 162 Chapter V - A Well Respected Man Whoever owned a house looked upon it as a secure domicile for his children and grandchildren; estates and businesses were handed down from generation to generation. When the babe was still in its cradle, its first mite was put in its little bank, or deposited in the savings' bank, as a "reserve" for the future. In this vast empire everything stood firmly and immovable in its appointed place, and at its head was the aged emperor; and were he to die, one knew (or believed), another would come to take his place, and nothing would change in the well-regulated order. No one thought of wars, of revolutions, or revolts. All that was radical, all violence seemed impossible in an age of reason. This feeling of security was the most eagerly sought-after possession of millions, the common ideal of life. Only the possession of this security made life seem worthwhile, and constant widening circles desired their share of this costly treasure. At first it was only the prosperous who enjoyed this advantage, but gradually the great masses forced their way toward it. The century of security became the golden age of insurance. One's house was insured against fire or theft, one's field against hail and storm, one's person against accident or sickness. Annuities were purchased for one's old age, and a policy was laid in a girl's cradle for her future dowry. Finally even the workers organized, and won standard wages and workman's compensation. Servants saved for old-age insurance and paid in advance into a burial fund for their own interment. Only the man who could look into the future without worry could thoroughly enjoy the present. (1) This peaceful state of bliss, however, did not necessarily embrace the whole empire, as the remark on anarchists and the like in the preceding chapter should have made clear. Neither was the status of the rural poor much to write home about. Yet law and order were generally held in high regard for the safety and continuity of society they implied. Into this world of order, a son, whom she named Alois, was born, on the morning of June 7, 1837, out of wedlock, to the peasant maid Maria Anna Schicklgruber in the hamlet of Strones in the Austrian Waldviertel. The Waldviertel, which literally translates as the "Wooden Quarter" or "Forest Quarter", was one of the Austrian monarchy's backwaters, a hilly "country of peasant villages and small farms, and though only some fifty miles from Vienna it has a somewhat remote and impoverished air, as if the main currents of Austrian life had passed it by." (2) It is located slightly northeast of Linz, respectively northwest of Vienna, between the Danube and the Czech border in the direction of Brno. It is a borderland and has seen its shares of marauding armies over the centuries. German tribes on the way to the treasures and temptations of the Roman Empire had crossed through the land which the Romans called "Noricum", followed by the Huns, various tribes of Goths, the Hungarians and finally the Turks. It saw armies in the Thirty-Years-War and the Napoleonic wars; only after the Congress of Vienna a century of peace graced its gently rolling hills. The name "Hitler", variably spelled "Hidler", "Hiedler", "Hüttler", "Hietler", "Hytler" or "Hittler" was one of the more common names in the district. It is documented as early as 1435, when the Abbot of the Herzogenburg monastery drew up a deed granting to Hannsen Hydler and his wife property near Raabs, on the Thaya River. (3) The etymology of the name indicates a possible derivation from the German word "Heide" [in English "heather", relating to a meadow, ¶], of which the Waldviertel was full. All of Alois' life occurred within a radius of one hundred miles of Linz, then as now the capital of the province OBERÖSTERREICH, Upper Austria. Little is known about Adolf Hitler's paternal grandmother Maria Schicklgruber. The tiny village of Strones where she lived was far too small to be a parish of its own, and thus baby Alois had to be registered in the slightly bigger village of Döllersheim, a couple of miles to the northwest. It was generally known that the baby was born out of wedlock and therefore was, strictly speaking, "illegitimate". Many theories have been spun and explanations offered in which this circumstance supposedly played the one or other role in Alois Hitler's life or in that of his son Adolf, and they are all bunkum. The reality of the Waldviertel dictated that "legitimacy" was a concept the peasants simply could not afford to pay heed to, and which occasioned no advantages in their daily lives. "Illegitimacy" might have been a significant problem for the heir of a throne or the prospective owner of land, a shop or business, but not to farmhands and sharecroppers. It was a common occurrence, and there is not the slightest indication that Alois ever suffered from an imagined stigma attached to it. There were no empires to bestow on Alois, and his son took them regardless of a court's permission. Chapter V - A Well Respected Man 163 Another disparaging theory was circulated in the early 1930s regarding Adolf Hitler's parental grandfather. Alois, the rumours held, was the illegitimate son of a wealthy Jewish merchant from Linz named Frankenberger or Frankenreither, who had seduced Maria, who was working as a maid in his household - in a variation of the theme, the merchant's son was the debaucher, and his father paid for the girl's discretion. Such a story, if true, would naturally be a feast for Hitler's political enemies. After a few Austrian newspapers had come up with it during the German general election campaign of 1930, the allegations resurfaced when Hitler ran for German president against Hindenburg in 1932. At length, Hitler dispatched his legal counsellor Hans Frank to investigate. The lawyer was told that the nineteen-year-old son of a Mr. Frankenberger from Linz was the culprit, whose father had allegedly paid alimonies to Fräulein Schicklgruber for fourteen years; a variance of the story had Mr. Frankenberger and his lecherous son in Graz, not Linz. There was, however, not a shred of evidence available in either town, no trace of payments, and hence the story slowly died.

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