 | | Not Recommended | by Meinkampf5
76.4 hours on record |
| | Posted 17 hours ago | Last Played 17 hours ago |
He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew
restless and left home. When he was barely thirteen years old he buckled
on his satchel and set forth from his native woodland parish. Despite
the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from 'experience,' he went
to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fiftieth year of the
last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and
face the unknown, with three gulden in his pocket. By when the boy of
thirteen was a lad of seventeen and had passed his apprenticeship
examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the contrary. The
persisten t economic depression of that period and the constant want and
misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and
strive for 'something higher.' As a boy it had seemed to him that the
position of the parish priest in his native village was the highest in
the scale of human attainment; but now that the big city had enlarged
his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State official
as the highest of all. With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble
had already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man
of seventeen obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it
until he won through. He became a civil servant. He was about
twenty- three years old, I think, when he succeeded in making himself
what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise
he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he
was 'somebody.'
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He had gained his end. But in the village there was nobody who had
remembere d him as a little boy, and the village itself had become
strang e to him.
Now at last, when he was fifty-six years old, he gave up his active
career ; but he could not bear to be idle for a single day. On the
outskirts of the small market town of Lambach in Upper Austria he bought
a farm and tilled it himself. Thus, at the end of a long and
hard-work ing career, he came back to the life which his father had led.
It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own. I
spent a good deal of time scampering about in the open, on the long road
from school, and mixing up with some of the roughest of the boys, which
caused my mother many anxious moments. All this tended to make me
something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely any
serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I
was certainly quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my
father had followed. I think that an inborn talent for speaking now
began to develop and take shape during the more or less strenuous
arg uments which I used to have with my comrades. I had become a juvenile
ring leader who learned well and easily at school but was rather
diffic ult to manage. In my freetime I practised singing in the choir of
the monastery church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed
in a very favourable position to be emotionally impressed again and
again by the magnificent splendour of ecclesiastical ceremonial. What
could be more natural for me than to look upon the Abbot as representing
the highest human ideal worth striving for, just as the position of the
humble village priest had appeared to my father in his own boyhood days?
At least, that was my idea for a while. But the juvenile disputes I had
with my father did not lead him to appreciate his son's oratorical gifts
in such a way as to see in them a favourable promise for such a career,
and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I had in my
head at that time. This contradiction in my character made him feel
somewhat anxious.
As a matter of fact, that transitory yearning after such a vocation soon
gave way to hopes that were better suited to my temperament. Browsing
thro ugh my father's books, I chanced to come across some publications
that dealt with military subjects. One of these publications was a
popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It consisted of two
volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. These
became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic
confli ct began to take first place in my mind. And from that time
onwards I became more and more enthusiastic about everything that was in
any way connected with war or military affairs.
But this story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for
me on other grounds also. For the first time, and as yet only in quite a
vague way, the question began to present itself: Is there a
difference- -and if there be, what is it--between the Germans who fought
that war and the other Germans? Why did not Austria also take part in
it? Why did not my father and all the others fight in that struggle? Are
we not the same as the other Germans? Do we not all belong together?
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