Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

62 DER FUEHRERschooled him for the world. He copied his pictures from other picturesand studied society in its caricature. In this world of the declassed andfallen, he also encountered the declassed peoples and the fallen races.For this human scum was at the same time the scum of the twelvenations which made Imperial Austria a mouldering heap ofdisintegration; each one in itself a fragment of national revolution withwings of freedom, but within the empire a corrosive poison. Thestubble-bearded drunken human wreck at the next table is a Czech; thecrook who came in yesterday evening and sold us a used razor blade fora new one was a Pole; the fellow over there with bedbugs crawlingdown his neck in broad daylight — an Italian, of course! Unwashedscoundrels, the whole lot of them, these South Slavs and Slovaks; butthe most unwashed and malignant of all are, of course, the thirteenthrace: the Jews.For in this Austria filled with hostile nationalities the Jews, too, are akind of nationality, or stand in the place of one. In the western parts ofthe country, to be sure, they disappear as inconspicuously among thepopulation as in many other countries, and even the suspicious eye ofthe young German patriot, Adolf Hitler, could no longer detect themamong the other inhabitants of his home city of Linz, because 'in thecourse of the centuries their exterior had become Europeanized andhuman'; later he finds this very surprising. But the Jews from the easternPolish section of the country have their own strange culture, clothing,speech; great masses of them had settled in Vienna, and the sight ofthem seems to have pursued the newly arrived artist from Linz like abad dream: 'Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw,the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest ofhumanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of theDanube Canal swarmed with a people which even in their exteriors hadlost all resemblance to Germans.'As a national minority among twelve other national minorities, theJews of Austria had their full part of the seething hatred with whichthese minorities, or at least their radical, intellectual strata, batded withone another. This is something different from the 'Jewish question' as itexists throughout the world. The anti-Semitism of Austria was wilderand bloodthirstier than that of Ger-