Thinking Small (7 page)

In 1903, when Hitler was fourteen years old, his father died suddenly. Hitler showed little remorse over his father’s death, but his health temporarily declined and he used his persistent flu-like sickness, alongside his new position as the only male in the house, to convince his mother that he should drop out of high school. For the following two years, he stayed home, doted on by his mother, sister, and aunt, spending his days reading and drawing. In the
evenings, he attended Wagner operas with his friend August Kubizek, fantasizing and pontificating about architecture and music and art. Eventually, Hitler set off to Vienna with the expectation that he would study at the prestigious art academy there, and convinced Kubizek to follow him. But Hitler did not have the help of any well-connected friends. Nor did he have the “sixth sense” or the talent for his subject that Porsche had. While Hitler’s drawings were
better than average, they were not extraordinary or even skilled; he was not good at drawing the human figure, and there was nothing particularly unique or eye-catching about his buildings or landscapes.
But Hitler was not aware of such things. He was convinced he was a genius, buoyed by his thoughts of fame. He didn’t try to find a job, living instead off some money his aunt had given him. He looked into
everything,
but casually, usually skimming
the surface rather than going too deep. He liked to read only the first and last chapters of books, for instance, thinking he could grasp their entire meaning that way. But Vienna impressed him with its architecture and music and voluminous museums, and he spent his days surrounding himself with the city’s music and art.

There was another passion that began in earnest during these years for Hitler though: his love for automobiles. It was the first time that he had been exposed to cars to any real extent, and the first time he could attend an auto race. In Vienna, Adolf began reading motoring publications and keeping up with the latest races and news. It was the beginning of a lifelong self-education in automobiles. In later years, he would spend hours and hours personally interviewing
potential drivers for his own car, asking them detailed, technical questions that astonished and sometimes even upended the most experienced of them. This was one subject in which Hitler apparently did not skim.

In different ways, both Adolph Hitler and Ferdinand Porsche had been infected by the spirit of their times, a moment when progress was the name of the game, and when an individual was believed to have some great upward rise connected with fate. Since the eighteenth century, with the onset of the Enlightenment, thought and the power of using one’s thinking to solve great social and individual problems had become increasingly paramount, and in turn, both the cult
of the individual and the strength of “the masses” were rising. Whereas industry had started in England and come fully of age and power only recently in the German-speaking world, the idea of progress and of using one’s reason to achieve such progress was already well installed in big cities like Vienna. Tied up in that idea was mankind’s “war” against space and time; identification with a group was one way of fighting this war (because it
made a person feel
part of something larger and “timeless”) and, so it seemed, was celebrity or fame (because it gave one the sense of having a lasting presence in the world, of immortality). This desire for dominance can be traced back in history, to conquerors such as Alexander the Great and Napoleon, but in the 1900s it was becoming characteristic not only of the political world but of the commercial world as well. There was a new emphasis on
buying and selling, on mass appeal: New forms of media connected more people, increasing audience size and proximity, thus intensifying a product’s, or a person’s, ability to be known and also raising the social desire “to belong.” The automobile was a natural part of this wave: It was for the individual, but it was a way of showing off one’s individuality in a crowd; it was an engine of both economic and social expansion, a way to simultaneously
“stand apart,”
and
belong to a particular class. Motion itself was a sign of power. As early as 1906, one European newspaper talked of the automobile as the tool that would finally “grant humans their conquest over time and space.”
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Hitler came to Vienna with big plans, boasting of all the great things he would do at school. Unfortunately, real life was beginning to fall short of his expectations. As the months passed, his money ran thin, as did his prospects of becoming an artist. His application to the Academy of Fine Arts was rejected. When he later tried applying a second time, he was not even allowed to sit for the exam. He tried the architecture school too, but was told he didn’t have
the proper credentials because he had not finished high school. The success that had come naturally to Porsche was what Hitler now strove to patch together after skimming everything he encountered or found. And whereas Porsche never cared much for fame, and certainly had never gone in search of it, it was the attention itself, the very quality of
being known,
for which Hitler longed. He would later write in his autobiography that Vienna was the first time in his life that he
felt “at odds with himself.”
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He no longer felt he was in control.

Adolf lied to his mother about getting into art school. He told
her the city was embracing him with open arms, that he’d been accepted into the prestigious university and all was well. It’s hard to imagine she believed him. Perhaps, as mothers often do, she was able to see through his ruse. These were difficult years for her too; the loss of her husband and the absence of her son weighed heavily on her. Adolf had known his mother was
sick before he’d left for Vienna, but he’d gone ahead with his plans. When word came that Klara’s condition had dramatically deteriorated, however, Adolf went back to Linz to take care of her, showing more care and responsibility than he ever had in his life, and perhaps ever would again. When his mother died, he sobbed uncontrollably, “prostrate with grief”
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as Klara’s doctor would later attest. Hitler was eighteen at the time. He grieved for weeks before resolving himself and leaving for the anonymous big city again. Back in Vienna, he was alone in a new way. He had little money, no job and no motivation to find one. After his second rejection from art school, he cut off contact with his childhood friend Kubizek, failing to return to the apartment they shared. Aside from his sister, whom he
sometimes went to for financial help, Hitler no longer had any ties to his former life.

Meanwhile, Ferdinand Porsche had grown used to the big city of Vienna and his new status there. He had fallen in love with a girl named Aloisia Kaes
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; electricity sparked between them, but of a whole different kind. The daughter of Bohemian artisans, Aloisia was independent and smart; a bookkeeper in the shop where Porsche worked, she was a workingwoman at a
time when many women would not consider such a thing. She was also tough, a fortunate characteristic for someone who would share life with a man as obsessed (and sometimes, simply selfish) as Ferdinand Porsche, and she too enjoyed cars. Later, Aloisia would unabashedly ride with Ferdinand during the Prince Henry trials, a famous motor race where it was certainly an unusual sight to see a woman in one of the competing cars! She also liked taking his vehicles into the country with him
to visit his family, all of whom were still living in Maffersdorf.
The first such trip they took was right after Ferdinand’s success at the Paris Exhibition; they drove his winning car home to his village. When Aloisia met his mother and father, Ferdinand introduced her as his fiancée. The two were married in 1903, and a year later, they welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Louise, a little girl who wouldn’t take long to get behind
the wheel; in childhood, she was sometimes seen sitting at the wheel on their way to school!

In the same year Ferdinand Porsche and Aloisia were married, a Viennese paper did an article about Ferdinand, who was now becoming simply known as “Porsche,” calling him “a tireless creator and worker.” “To dream and to act,” the journalist said, “that is the essence of people like Porsche.” He was not even thirty, and already he had changed the automotive landscape of his country. It all seemed to arrive at
once—marriage, family, and then, in 1906, a job as chief designer at Austria-Hungary’s primary car company, Austro-Daimler. Porsche was an elite automotive man now, his name well known. Versions of
“the Porsche system” were being used all over the city: Even the Vienna fire brigade decided to become motorized by using hub-mounted electric motors he had designed.

Ferdinand Porsche had just the kind of talent that the future would need. In these early years of the 1900s—a time when Germany and Austria were still empires, and when Europe and America had no concept of what it would be like to fight a world war—all the main car companies we know of today were taking their first steps. Thanks to new inventions such as the telephone, ideas were spreading more quickly, and that meant the race to advance technologically
was speeding up too. Automakers were constantly observing one another, and a sense of competition had set in. Individual, motorized mobility was getting closer. But there was still so far to go.

Around the same time Porsche was starting his new job and his new family, Henry Ford, with the help of two Hungarian immigrant designers, was beginning to design a car called the Model T. This vehicle would later be known as the world’s first car for the masses. But the gap of time between the invention of that car and the motorization of the United States was a matter of decades. Horses and carriages still felt inevitable, and most people still died in the very
same towns where they’d been born, rarely traveling farther than a radius of twelve miles. The primary reason was an economic one: In the early 1900s, the average American made about five hundred dollars a year. That meant automobiles, which ranged in price from $650 to $6,000, were beyond most people’s budget. (Later, car companies would invent credit systems, and the sales of cars would soar.) While in retrospect we can talk about 1908 as the birth of Ford’s
Model T, the time when “the people” got a car, in fact, all Ford had that year was “a wonderful car—one, single, wonderful car.”
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As author and historian Douglas Brinkley points out: “At the time, Ford himself wondered aloud whether his company would ever build even a tenth Model T.”
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