His taste in painting was-and remained-philistine. The young Hitler was wild for Wagnerian opera, stately architecture, and inventive graphic art and design. Hitler studied the spellbinding oratorical style of the city's widely beloved populist, anti-Semitic mayor, Karl Lueger. He proved, however, an apt pupil of the city's rampant strains of anti-Semitism, which exploited popular resentment of the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie that had arisen under Franz Josef I, the conservative but clement-and, effectively, the last-Hapsburg emperor. Although he was fanatically pan-German-caught up in visions of an expanded Germany, which would incorporate Austria-he had laudatory things to say about Jews at the time. Jews were among his companions and patrons. With help from a friend, he earned a meager living drawing postcard views of Vienna and selling them to tourists. Intent on becoming an artist, he twice failed the art academy's admission test his drawing skills were declared "unsatisfactory." A thin, sallow youth, he wasn't cut out for physical labor. He often slept in a squalid homeless shelter, if not under a bridge. He walked the same streets as Freud, Gustav Mahler, and Egon Schiele, but he did so as one of the city's faceless, teeming poor. Hitler was eighteen years old when, in 1908, he moved from Linz and took up residence in Vienna. Cosmopolitan Vienna incubated his peculiar genius as well as his hideous ideas. Adolf Hitler was an artist-a modern artist, at that-and Nazism was a movement shaped by his aesthetic sensibility.
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