Volume I
A Retrospect
Chapter 1
In The Home Of My Parents
IT HAS turned out fortunate for me to-day that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn
to be my birthplace. For that little town is situated just on the frontier between those
two States the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to
which we should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means
should be employed.
German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not indeed on
any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever. No, no. Even if the union were a
matter of economic indifference, and even if it were to be disadvantageous from the
economic standpoint, still it ought to take place. People of the same blood should be in
the same REICH. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy
until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State. When the
territory of the REICH embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them
a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire
foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the
daily bread for the generations to come.
And so this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great task. But in
another regard also it points to a lesson that is applicable to our day. Over a hundred
years ago this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the
whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German
history. At the time of our Fatherland's deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes
Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here
because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to
disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly
responsible for the affair. Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the
latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a director of police
from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example
which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the REICH under
Herr Severing's regime (Note 1).
In this little town on the Inn, haloed by the memory of a German martyr, a town that
was Bavarian by blood but under the rule of the Austrian State, my parents were domiciled towards the end of the last century. My father was a civil servant who
fulfilled his duties very conscientiously. My mother looked after the household and
lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children. From that period I have not retained
very much in my memory; because after a few years my father had to leave that frontier
town which I had come to love so much and take up a new post farther down the Inn
valley, at Passau, therefore actually in Germany itself.
In those days it was the usual lot of an Austrian civil servant to be transferred
periodically from one post to another. Not long after coming to Passau my father was
transferred to Linz, and while there he retired finally to live on his pension. But this did
not mean that the old gentleman would now rest from his labours.
He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew restless and left home.
When he was barely thirteen years old he buckled on his satchel and set forth from his
native woodland parish. Despite the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from
'experience,' he went to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fiftieth year of the
last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and face the unknown,
with three gulden in his pocket. By when the boy of thirteen was a lad of seventeen and
had passed his apprenticeship examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the
contrary. The persistent economic depression of that period and the constant want and
misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and strive for
'something higher.' As a boy it had seemed to him that the position of the parish priest
in his native village was the highest in the scale of human attainment; but now that the
big city had enlarged his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State
official as the highest of all. With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble had
already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man of seventeen
obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it until he won through. He became a
civil servant. He was about twenty-three years old, I think, when he succeeded in
making himself what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise
he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he was 'somebody.'
He had gained his end. But in the village there was nobody who had remembered him
as a little boy, and the village itself had become strange to him.
Now at last, when he was fifty-six years old, he gave up his active career; but he could
not bear to be idle for a single day. On the outskirts of the small market town of
Lambach in Upper Austria he bought a farm and tilled it himself. Thus, at the end of a
long and hard-working career, he came back to the life which his father had led.
It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own. I spent a good deal of
time scampering about in the open, on the long road from school, and mixing up with
some of the roughest of the boys, which caused my mother many anxious moments. All
this tended to make me something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely
any serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I was certainly
quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my father had followed. I think
that an inborn talent for speaking now began to develop and take shape during the
more or less strenuous arguments which I used to have with my comrades. I had
become a juvenile ringleader who learned well and easily at school but was rather
difficult to manage. In my freetime I practised singing in the choir of the monastery
church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed in a very favourable
position to be emotionally impressed again and again by the magnificent splendour of
ecclesiastical ceremonial. What could be more natural for me than to look upon the
Abbot as representing the highest human ideal worth striving for, just as the position of
the humble village priest had appeared to my father in his own boyhood days? At least,
that was my idea for a while. But the juvenile disputes I had with my father did not lead
him to appreciate his son's oratorical gifts in such a way as to see in them a favourable
promise for such a career, and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I
had in my head at that time. This contradiction in my character made him feel
somewhat anxious.
As a matter of fact, that transitory yearning after such a vocation soon gave way to
hopes that were better suited to my temperament. Browsing through my father's books,
I chanced to come across some publications that dealt with military subjects. One of
these publications was a popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It
consisted of two volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. These
became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic conflict began to
take first place in my mind. And from that time onwards I became more and more
enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or military
affairs.
But this story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for me on other
grounds also. For the first time, and as yet only in quite a vague way, the question
began to present itself: Is there a difference--and if there be, what is it--between the
Germans who fought that war and the other G