Mein Kampf
burg police director won this unenviable fame, and thus furnished the prototype of modern German officialdom in the Reich of Mr. Severing.
This little city on the Inn, gilded by the rays of German martyrdom, was Bavarian by blood, Austrian by state. Here my parents lived in the late eighties of the last century, my father a conscientious employee of the state, my mother occupied with the household, and above all devoted to us children with unchanging loving care. I remember but little of that period, because within a few years my father had to leave the little frontier town of which he had become so fond, to go down the Inn and take a new post at Passau—in Germany itself.
But it was the fate of an Austrian customs official in those days to travel often. Soon afterward my father went to Linz, and at length was pensioned there. This was far from meaning rest for the old gentleman. He was the son of a poor, petty cottager, and even in his earliest days had not been happy at home. Not yet thirteen, the small boy strapped up his knapsack, and ran away from his home in the forest district. Despite the advice of “experienced” villagers he had gone to Vienna to learn a trade. This was in the fifties of the past century. It was a hard decision to take the road into the unknown with three crowns to travel on. But by the time the thirteen-year-old was turned seventeen, he had passed his journeyman’s examination, but had not won contentment. Rather the contrary. The long period of distress at that time, of eternal misery and wretchedness, strengthened his determination to give up his trade after all, in order to become something “better.” The poor boy in the village had once thought that the pastor embodied the highest possible summit of human aspiration; this eminence was replaced in the metropolis, which had vastly enlarged his outlook, by the dignity of being a state official. With all the endurance of a man grown old through grief and distress while still half a child, the seventeen-year-old took a grip on his new determination—and became an official. When he was almost twenty-three, I believe, the goal was reached. Now, too, the requirement seemed fulfilled for a vow which the poor
20
