Childhood Home
inite and clear, and, in his eyes, a matter of course. Lastly, a lifetime’s struggle for existence had made him domineering, and he would have thought it intolerable to leave the final decision in such matters to a boy whom he thought inexperienced and thus not yet responsible. This would, besides, have seemed to him reprehensible weakness in the exercise of his proper paternal authority and responsibility for his child’s future, and impossible to reconcile with his concept of duty.
And yet all was to end differently.
I was barely eleven. For the first time in my life I was forced into opposition. Hard and determined as my father might be in carrying out plans he had once fixed his mind on, his son was no less stubborn and refractory in refusing an idea which appealed to him little or not at all.
I would not enter the civil service.
Neither pleading nor reasoning with me affected my resistance. I would not be an official, no and again no. Every attempt to arouse my liking for that calling by descriptions of my father’s past life had the contrary effect. I yawned myself sick at the thought of sitting some day in a government office, no master of my own life, but a slave devoting my entire existence to filling out forms of one kind and another.
And what effect must this have had on a boy who was certainly anything but “good” in the ordinary sense? I did my school work with ridiculous ease, and had so much free time left that I was outdoors more than in. When my political opponents scrutinize my life with such loving care today, searching back even into my childhood for the satisfaction of discovering what deviltry this fellow Hitler was already up to in his youth, I thank heaven for providing me through them with a few more memories of that happy time. Field and forest were the battleground on which the ever-recurring differences in opinion were fought out.
Even the attendance at the realschule which followed did little to restrain me.
But now another difference had to be fought out.
So long as my father’s intention to make me into an official
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