Mein Kampf
struggles, and only after a battle of months between understanding and feeling did victory alight on the side of reason. Two years afterward feeling followed understanding, to be from then on its most faithful watchman and guardian.
During the bitter struggle between emotional training and cold reason, the streets of Vienna offered me priceless object-lessons. The time had come when I no longer walked blindly through the vast city as at first; I kept my eyes open, and looked at people as well as buildings.
Once as I chanced to be strolling through the inner City, I suddenly encountered a figure in a long kaftan, with black curls. “Is that a Jew too?” was my first thought.
They did not look like that in Linz. I covertly observed the man, but the longer I stared at that alien face, scrutinizing feature after feature, the more my first question changed form: “Is that a German too?”
As always in such cases, I now tried to resolve my doubts through books. For a few hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life. But unfortunately they all went on the theory that the reader to a certain extent grasped or at least was familiar in principle with the Jewish question. And then their tone was usually such that I felt new doubts owing to the often shallow and unscientific proofs adduced for their statements. I would have relapses of weeks, sometimes of months. The matter seemed to me so monstrous, the accusation so unrestrained that I was plagued by fear of being unjust, and again became timid and uncertain.
Still, even I could no longer well doubt that this was a question not of Germans of a particular persuasion, but of a people in itself. Since I had begun to occupy myself with the question, and to pay attention to the Jew, Vienna had appeared to me in a new light. Wherever I went now I saw Jews, and the more I saw, the more clearly my eye distinguished them from other people. Especially the inner City and the Districts north of the Danube Canal teemed with a people which had not even an outward likeness to the Germans.
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