Mein Kampf
the problem. It will suffice here to point out that fundamentally I arrived in my earliest youth at an insight which never left me afterward, but only grew deeper:
That the safety of Germanity first required the destruction of Austria, and that, further, national feeling has nothing to do with dynastic patriotism; above all, the Hapsburg house was fated to bring misery on the German nation.
Even then I drew the inescapable conclusions from this realization—warm love for my German Austrian homeland, profound hatred for the Austrian state.
The way of historical thinking thus taught me in school I did not abandon in the days that followed. More and more world history became my inexhaustible source of understanding for the historical action of the present, that is for politics. In this way I did not mean to “learn” history; history was to teach me.
If I thus soon became a political revolutionary, I became one in the arts no less quickly.
The Upper Austrian capital at that time had a theater which was fairly good. They put on nearly everything. When I was twelve I saw Wilhelm Tell for the first time; a few months later my first opera, Lohengrin. I was captivated. My youthful enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth knew no bounds. Again and again I was drawn to his works, and it seems to me now my special good fortune that the small scale of the provincial performances made possible a later heightening of the impression.
All this—especially once I had got through my hobbledehoy years (a very painful process with me)—confirmed my deep-seated aversion to the calling my father had chosen for me. More and more I came to the conviction that I could never be happy in the civil service. And now that my talent for drawing was recognized at the realschule, my determination was but the more fixed.
Neither prayers nor threats affected me. I was going to be a painter, and not for anything in the world an official. The only curious thing was that as I grew older I took an increasing interest in architecture. At the time I thought this the natural complement
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