Learning and Suffering in Vienna
and poverty, and making me acquainted with those for whom I was later to fight.
At that time my eyes were opened to two perils whose very names I had scarcely known, and whose awful importance for the German people’s existence I certainly had not understood: Marxism and Jewry.
Vienna, the city so widely considered the very essence of innocent gaiety, the festive home of happy crowds, is to me, unfortunately, but a living reminder of the saddest period in my life. Even today the city calls forth none but gloomy thoughts in me. Five years of misery and wretchedness are to me contained in the name of this Phæacian city. Five years when I had to earn my bread as a laborer, then as a small painter—my truly meager bread, which was never enough even to satisfy my ordinary hunger. In those days hunger was my faithful attendant, the only one that almost never left me, dividing with me share and share alike. Every book I bought roused his interest; one trip to the opera would give me his company for days; it was a never-ending battle with my unsympathetic friend. And still I learned in those days as never before. Except for my architecture, and a rare ticket to the opera, saved at the expense of my stomach, books were my only remaining pleasure.
I read enormously, and that thoroughly. Whatever free time I had left from my job I used to the last minute for study. In a few years I thus laid the foundations of a knowledge which I am still living on today.
But more than this, I formed at that time an image and a concept of the world which have become the rock-ribbed foundation of my present activity. I have had but to learn a little beyond what I then created; there was nothing I had to change.
On the contrary. Today I firmly believe that all creative ideas usually appear in youth, in so far as they exist at all. I distinguish between the wisdom of age, which can be only greater thoroughness and caution forced by a long life’s experiences, and the genius of youth, pouring out thoughts and ideas with inexhaust-
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