Mein Kampf
painting, and that my ability obviously was in the field of architecture. There could be no question of the School of Painting, but only of the School of Architecture for me. At first they could not understand that I had never attended an architectural school or had any instruction.
As I left Hansen’s magnificent building on the Schillerplatz, I was at odds with myself for the first time in my young fife. What I had heard about my abilities now seemed with a lightning flash to illuminate a discord from which I had long suffered without being able to explain to myself its why and wherefore. And within a few days I knew I would some day be an architect.
Still the path was enormously hard; what I had been too stubborn to learn in the realschule was now to take its bitter revenge. Admission to the Academy School of Architecture depended on attendance at the Technical School of Architecture, and admission here was based on graduation—the Matura—from an intermediate school. All this I lacked entirely. In all human probability, therefore, my dream of art was now impossible.
When after the death of my mother I made a third journey to Vienna, this time to stay for years, I had regained my calm and determination. My earlier spirit of defiance had returned and I had fixed my eye once and for all on my goal. I would be an architect. Obstacles do not exist to be capitulated to but to be overcome. And overcome those obstacles I would, always with the image of my father before my eyes, who had fought his way up from farm and shoemaker-boy to state official. After all, my soil was richer than his, my battle that much the easier; and what then seemed to me the unkindness of Fate I am now thankful for as the wisdom of Providence. When the Goddess of Trouble embraced me and often threatened to crush me, the will to resistance grew, and at last the will was victorious.
I owe it to that period that I have grown hard, and am able to be hard. And even more than for this I thank it for snatching me from the emptiness of a comfortable life; for pulling mother’s boy out of the featherbeds, and giving him Dame Care as a new mother; for throwing my reluctant self into the world of misery
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