August Kubizek

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August Kubizek, 1907
August Kubizek, 1907

August (Gustl) Kubizek (3 August 1888 Linz – 1956) was a close friend of and later shared a room in Vienna with Adolf Hitler. After leaving school he apprenticed as an interior decorator in his father's business, but his true passion was for music [1] (p. 2 & p.31) and he went on to study music at the Vienna Conservatory. Hitler broke off the friendship some time after he was twice denied entrance into Vienna's art academy. Kubizek then became conductor of the orchestra of the Austrian town of Marburg on the Drau in 1914. This town became Maribor in Slovenia in 1918.

From late 1914-1918 Kubizek served as a reservist of the Austro-Hungarian Infantry Regiment No. 2. Upon demobilisation in November 1918 Kubizek accepted a position as an official in the municipal council of Eferding in Upper Austria and music became his hobby.

In 1938 the Nazis commissioned Kubizek to write about his youth with Hitler. He produced two short booklets called Reminiscences. In 1953 Kubizek used these as the basis for a book titled Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund (published in English as: The Young Hitler I Knew). Viennese author and historian Brigitte Hamann [2] claimed parts of the book had been fabricated and other scholars such as University of Bremen professor and historian Lothar Machtan have also questioned the book's accuracy and called it a whitewash. The book contains day-by-day direct quotes by both young Hitler and Kubizek, even though the book was written some 50 years after such conversations. While undoubtedly Kubizek "filled in the blanks" for many of his quotes, the account is still a fascinating look into the life of a young Hitler.

According to a theory by Machtan, which he explained in his book The Hidden Hitler, August Kubizek had a homosexual relationship with Hitler. (This theory is not supported by Ian Kershaw, who has produced the most extensively researched popular biography of Hitler, two volumes entitled Hubris 1889-1936 and Nemesis 1936-1945.) Both Brigitte Hamann and Machtan wrote that after meeting Hitler during the latter part of 1905, the two quickly became close friends and lived together, sharing a small room they rented on the Stumpergasse in Vienna. In Young Hitler, the Story of Our Friendship, Kubizek wrote that during their time together Hitler "always rejected the coquettish advances of girls or women. Women and girls took an interest in him in Linz as well as Vienna, but he always evaded their endeavors." Kubizek also wrote that Hitler had a great love for a girl named "Stefanie" and wrote her countless love poems but never sent them. Instead, Kubizek says Hitler read his poem "Hymn to the Beloved" to him. Machtan stated that while the Stefanie girl definitely existed, some of Kubizek's 1953 writing was a deliberate "heterosexualizing" of Hitler in retrospect (p. 43); Hitler biographer John Toland noted that years later, when Stefanie learned she had been the object of Hitler's affection, she was stunned.

Machtan's book quotes Kubizek's own writings about Hitler. Kubizek wrote that he and Hitler had swiftly "become transformed into a profound, romantically transfigured friendship" and Kubizek also wrote that Hitler watched jealously over him and that Hitler said "because I cannot endure it when you consort and converse with other young people." He could never bear the idea that Kubizek "was interested in other people ..." (p. 37) Of course, Hitler's possessive nature towards any and everything is well known, and does not necessitate a homosexual undertone.

Such was the intimacy of Kubizek and Hitler that according to William L. Shirer in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (p. 14), in a letter dated August 4, 1933, six months after he became Chancellor of Germany, Hitler wrote his boyhood friend: "I should be very glad . . . to revive once more with you those memories of the best years of my life." They subsequently met on several occasions. The two attended a Bayreuth festival together, and Hitler later offered Kubizek the conductorship of an orchestra, but otherwise the pair had little contact during Hitler's ruling years. Kubizek saw Hitler personally for the last time on July 23, 1940. As late as 1944, Hitler sent Kubizek's elderly mother a food basket on the occasion of her birthday. In the epilogue of his book, Kubizek writes, "Even though I, a fundamentally unpolitical individual, had always kept aloof from the political events of the period which ended forever in 1945, nevertheless no power on earth could compel me to deny my friendship with Adolf Hitler."

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Machtan,Lothar. The Hidden Hitler. 2001. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04308-9.
  2. ^ Hamann, Brigitte Hitler's Vienna : A Dictator's Apprenticeship. 1999. Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-514053-2
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