Mein Kampf
clashed only with my general dislike of the career itself, the conflict was quite tolerable. I could withhold my private views, and I did not have to make a continual issue of them. My own fixed determination never to become an official was enough to give me inward calm. This determination I clung to inalterably.
The question was more difficult when a plan of my own arose to oppose that of my father. This happened when I was still only twelve. How it happened I cannot now say, but one day it was clear to me that I would be a painter, an artist. My talent for drawing had been demonstrated, and was in fact one of my father’s reasons for sending me to the realschule; but he would never in the world have thought of giving me professional art training. On the contrary. Finally when I rejected my father’s pet idea once again, he asked me for the first time what I myself wanted to be. I popped out rather suddenly with my decision, which in the meantime had become immovable, and for a moment my father was speechless.
“A painter? An artist?”
He doubted my sanity, and thought he had not understood correctly. But when I explained it to him, and he felt the seriousness of my determination, he turned against it with all his characteristic decisiveness. His decision here was very simple; consideration of any talents I might have simply did not enter into the question.
“An artist—no; never so long as I live.” But since his son had inherited, among various other qualities, a stubbornness like his own, his answer was just as stubborn. Only of contrary significance, naturally.
Both sides stuck to their guns. My father held to his “never,” and I redoubled my “nevertheless.”
The results, indeed, were not altogether pleasant. The old gentleman was embittered, and, much though I loved him, so was I. My father forbade me ever to hope to study painting. I went a step further, and declared that then I would learn nothing more at all. Of course I came off second best with such “declarations,” since the old gentleman began ruthlessly to assert his
24
