Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators (review)

Book Reviews 135 election of July 1932, especially in Frankfurt, but was reversed in the November 1932 election when the Center seemed to be negotiating with the Nazis. A steady tum towards the SPD among Jewish voters was general in all the areas studied, though the degree varied. Liepach fmds that Jews were more likely to abstain from voting between 1924 and 1928 than in the crucial elections at the end of the Weimar Republic. With his careful use of multivariant regressions, and his attempt to exclude "false positives" based on other factors such as social class, occupation, or Catholic population, Liepach zeroes in as much as is possible on the influence ofthe Jewish vote. What is missing for the lay reader is an estimate of what percent of the Jewish voters did in fact vote SPD, Center, or DDP in a particular year. The absence of such figures makes it impossible to see how Liepach's results compare to the estimates made by earlier scholars which he condemns as speculative. One would also wish that Liepach had written a more extensive concluding section looking into the wider implications of his study. There are a few errors of detail in what is generally a carefully worked out investigation. One of the most bothersome is the tendency of the author to assume an identity between "liberalism" in the context of the Jewish community (i.e., opposition to Zionism and Orthodoxy) and liberalism in German politics (i.e., support for the DDP or the DVP-German People's Party). The similar terminology does not necessarily mean similar patterns. This question might have been clarified by trying to compare districts with many Orthodox Jews (rural Oberhessen and the East End of Frankfurt) with areas ofliberal Jews (Rheinhessen and the West End ofFrankfurt). This could also test hypotheses about a presumed affinity for the Center Party and an avoidance of the SPD by Orthodox Jews. One can also regret the absence of any study of the important Bavarian Jewish electorate in this work. Despite these minor criticisms this book is a serious and solid piece of research which will place Jewish voting patterns on the same level of sophisticated study as more general German patterns. It is sometimes hard going for the general reader, but is a most worthwhile addition to our knowledge of the subject. Steven Lowenstein University of Judaism, Los Angeles Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators, by Brigitte Hamann. Munich: Piper, 1996. 652 pp. DM 58. Assessing the role ofHitler's Viennese period in shaping his words and deeds remains a problem for scholars. Should historians accept the FUhrer's claim that Vienna was "the 136 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No.1 hardest, though most thorough, school" of his life when it appears in a book dedicated to the art of deception? This is precisely the question that Brigitte Hamann attempts to answer in Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators. As its title suggests, Hamann takes Hitler's claims seriously without accepting them entirely. And while it is hard to argue that she has given us a radically new picture of the future dictator and his city during the years from 1907 to 1913, she has certainly provided us with a far clearer one. Drawing from at least 15 major archives, as well as numerous provincial and local sources, Hamann paints an unforgettable portrait of the capital of a decaying empire, a city exploding with the intellectual energy generated by social crisis. Hitler's Viennese "school" was a subterranean academy inhabited by the likes of Lanz von Liebensfels, Otto Weininger, and Guido von List, which sought to construct a German alternative to the all too cosmopolitan culture of Freud, Mahler, and Wittgenstein (p. 7). Hamann organizes her tour through this intellectual demimonde by theme. Chapters explore the role offactors such as multinationalism, government, class, race, and gender in the formation of Hitler's Vienna and thus Hitler himself. The author's emphasis on problem over narrative allows her to move back and forth in time, showing how even the most crankish opinions ofHitler's Vienna days were sometimes translated into iron laws during the Third Reich. Hamann's treatment of the "Jewish...