Mein Kampf
ible fertility, but prevented from developing them by their very number. This genius furnishes the building materials and the plans from which a wiser old age picks, dresses, and builds the stones into a structure—so far, that is, as the so-called wisdom of age does not choke the genius of youth.
My life at home had differed little or not at all from that of everyone else. I could await the coming day without a care, and for me no social problem existed. My youth was lived in petty bourgeois circles, that is in a world having but little touch with pure hand-workers. For, strange as it may seem at first glance, the chasm between this level (economically in a far from brilliant position) and that of workers with their hands is often deeper than one thinks. The reason for this (we might almost say) enmity is that a social group which has just recently lifted itself from the ranks of hand-workers fears lest it fall back into the old estate, or at least be counted as one with it. In many cases, besides, there is the repugnant memory of cultural poverty among this lowest class, the frequent roughness of social intercourse, so that no matter how humble one’s position any contact with this outgrown level of life and culture becomes unbearable.
Thus it often happens that a man from the higher levels can more naturally descend to a plane with the last of his fellow-men than seems even thinkable to the “parvenu.”
For after all a parvenu is anyone who fights his way by his own energy from one position in life to a higher one.
But eventually this battle, often very bitter, kills off human sympathy. One’s own painful struggle for existence destroys his feeling for the misery of those left behind.
In this respect Fate took pity on me. By forcing me back into the world of privation and insecurity which my father had once abandoned, it took from my eyes the blinders of a limited petty bourgeois education. Not until now did I learn to know men, and learn to distinguish hollow sham or brutal exterior from its inner nature.
Even by the early years of this century Vienna was among
36
