Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Hitler's Vienna explores the critical, formative years that the young Adolf Hitler spent in Vienna. It is both a cultural and political portrait of the Austrian capital and a biography of Hitler during his years there, from 1906 to 1913. Hitler's was not the modern, artistic "fin-de-siecle Vienna" we associate with Freud, Mahler, and Wittgenstein. Instead, it was a cauldron of fear and ethnic rivalry and a breeding ground for racist political theories. Brigitte Hamann vividly depicts the undercurrent of disturbing ideologies that flowed beneath the glitter of the Hapsburg capital. Drawing on previously untapped sources that range from personal reminiscences to the records of homeless shelters where the unemployed Hitler spent his nights, Hamann gives us the fullest account ever rendered of this period of Hitler's life and shows us how profoundly his years in Vienna influenced his later career.

FROM THE CRITICS

George Steiner - Times Literary Supplement

A prologue to the inhuman....Fascinating and impressive.

Peter Hoffmann - Los Angeles Times Book Review

A rich panorama of Hitler's early career....Careful and revealing.

Michael White - The New Yorker

Hitler's Vienna tries to penetrate the myths of the dictator's formative years as a frustrated painter in Vienna. Hitler, she says, detested the city's cosmopolitanism and restless avant-garde and took great pleasure in relocating its art reasures to other cities when he took power.

Meir Ronnen - Jerusalem Post

Hamann claims that the Hitler of Linz and pre-war Vienna was not yet an antisemite. She believes that antisemitism became a central issue for him when he decided to become a politician and first began addressing audiences in Munich in 1919 in aggresively antisemetic terms. It was then that Hitler, the once weak eccentric who, in his own eyes at least, had become a somebody during the war...began reinventing himself.

Istvan Deak - The New Republic

Hamann is among the few historians who have looked beyond the glamour of Vienna....It was in Vienna that Hilter acquired all the ideas that were to dominate the rest of his life....[She disposes] of many myths regarding the young Hitler...Read all 6 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

A virtuoso piece of research and exposition....Hamann is an author of great flair, as well as being thorough, scholarly, and thoughtful. — Robert Evans