Pre-War Struggler

"A. Hitler" read the signature on five competent water colors on exhibition last week in Munich. No namesake, the artist was in fact the same half-starved Austrian man-of-all-work who rose to be Germany's Realmleader.

Political calumny has long since obscured the moderate fact of Adolf Hitler's small talents as a young man. While his parents were still living in little Leonding not far from the Austro-German border, Adolf and his flaxen-haired mother decided he would be a painter or an architect. First obstacle was his besotted, burly father, retired cobbler and customs official. The father died when Adolf was 14. The mother was dying of a cancer. The neighbors thought lonely, daydreaming Adolf was losing his mind in sympathy for his mother's suffering because he spent all his time woodcarving, drawing, painting. Adolf was 18 when his mother died in 1907. The next year he took his drawings to Vienna's great Kunstakademie (Art Institute), applied for a scholarship. He was turned down, generally for "lack of talent," specifically because his drawings were too "architectural." And the orphan, who had assigned all his father's income to his sister, could not afford to take the preliminary courses necessary to become an architect.

For "five years of misery and woe" during which "hunger was my true comrade", he worked in Vienna as common laborer, carpenter, housepainter, picked up a little money decorating Christmas cards. In 1912 he went to Munich and his spirit lifted into the "two happiest years of my life." Though he still had scarcely enough to eat, he did drawings for the newspapers, had them accepted, prowled through the museums, observed the most leisurely, tolerant culture of pre-War Germany. In these fine years he did four of the water colors on view last week in Munich, including well-rendered "architectural" pictures of Munich's Alter Hof (see cut) and of its National Theatre, a country house outside Munich. It all ended in August 1914. Hitler, a humble, alien lover of monarchical Germany, enlisted, not in the Austrian Army, but in the 16th Infantry Regiment of the King of Bavaria.

He took up his water colors just once more, in the trenches at Wytschaete, Belgium, where he had saved the life of his commanding officer. The title of this last gloomy picture of broken masonry, trees, earth, was A Ravine Near Ypres (1914). Four years of War killed off many a better painter but Adolf Hitler survived, to give up art for politics.

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