Tellingly, while Hitler never articulated either his dejection at failing at his artistic ambition, nor his resentment that Kubizek was excelling in his – it was, Kubizek (probably correctly) surmises, these feelings that eventually led Hitler to abruptly terminate the friendship. Circumstances appeared to lower neither Hitler’s high self-esteem, nor Kubizek’s tolerance for his volatile, short-tempered, voluble roommate. Hitler was the dominant force in this duo from start to finish: from the Linz years when his own family, though not affluent, were better-off than Kubizek’s through to the Vienna months when Hitler, rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts, roomed with Kubizek, who had been accepted into the Conservatory. They stayed together for the next few years in an unlikely friendship. The two youths were drawn together by their passion for music. It was at the town opera-house that Hitler met Kubizek: the son of an upholsterer, nine months his senior. Linz is the capital of the Austrian state of Upper Austria, where Hitler spent his later adolescence. Rax and getting stranded on the peak overnight to Hitler being propositioned by women and homosexuals to Kubizek’s being forced to stay up listening, night after night, as Hitler paced their tiny room lecturing on parliamentary inefficacy and the books he was devouring. It is also a beautiful book, combing sections of character analysis with narrative of shared adventures: from climbing Mt.

While Kubizek’s account has been challenged in some particulars, it constitutes an important historical document. Covering 1904-1908 (when Hitler was aged 15-19), this memoir portrays a youth already unmoored from social structures, ambitious, teeming with fantastic and detailed plans, and turning from the arts to politics.

August Kubizek is one of our few sources about Adolf Hitler’s adolescence Kubizek’s memoir of his friendship with the young Hitler constitute the most extensive firsthand account of this formative period of Hitler’s life.

The young hitler i knew