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Those seeking such illumination should place at the top of their reading list Brigitte Hamann's book, Hitler's Vienna, and Ian Kershaw's magisterial two-volume biography, Hitler. These two excellent works provide insight into the background, ideas, and context that made Hitler possible. Both provide a detailed portrait of Hitler's political, social, and intellectual milieu.
Since she focuses primarily on Hitler's formative years as an 18- to 24-year-old in Vienna (1908-1913), Hamann's work examines how and to what extent the Viennese environment shaped Hitler's world-view and political program. She deftly weaves together Hitler's biography with a history of Vienna during his stay there, but always with an eye on the city as Hitler experienced it. The Vienna she portrays is quite different from the modernist capital described in Carl Schorske's path-breaking cultural history, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Hamann is fully aware of the importance of modernism in Viennese culture, but she rightly argues from the outset that this was not Hitler's milieu. Hitler wasn't moved—except maybe to disgust—at the work of Freud or modernist artists. But he did eagerly follow political developments in the Viennese press, and Hamann's work shows in detail how Hitler perceived the political process and parties in Vienna.
One gains, for in stance, considerable insight into Hitler's contempt for the parliamentary system from Hamann's engaging description of the Austrian parliament, which Hitler visited repeatedly during his first year or two in Vienna. The Austrian parliament was often paralyzed by ethnic rivalries, which regularly produced filibusters (in a variety of languages from the multiethnic empire, but with no translators), as well as raucous and outrageous use of noisemakers to kill debate on contentious bills. All too often, ethnic hostilities spilled over into fisticuffs on the floor of parliament.
Hamann and Kershaw both argue that Hitler had a consistent world-view. At the center of that world-view was the notion that history consists of a Darwinian struggle for existence between races, of which the Aryan (i.e., Germanic) race was of supreme importance, the only race cap able of creating advanced culture. For Hitler, human progress depended on two factors: 1) strengthening the Aryan race through eugenics measures; and 2) winning the struggle against the non-Aryan races (necessitating a strong military). Hamann astutely observes that for Hitler, "the individual has no value other than being part of a people and a race and to help secure their survival in the battle against other peoples and races."
Hamann provides numerous examples to show how pervasive Aryan racism and eugenics were in the Viennese press. Be cause these ideas were so widespread, it's impossible to point to any one racial thinker, such as Adolf Lanz von Liebenfels, as The Man Who Gave Hitler His Ideas, as Wilfried Daim has argued. Hamann's approach is commonsensical, admitting that Hitler likely read Lanz's periodical, Ostara, but asserting that Hitler's Aryan racism bears even more the stamp of Guido von List, the mystical writer who first introduced the swastika into Aryan racist circles. The leader of the intensely nationalistic Pan-German movement in Austria, Georg von Schönerer, also strongly influenced Hitler, who adopted the Heil greeting from him. Schönerer not only embraced racial anti-Semitism but also promoted eugenics.
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