The Young Hitler I Knew

by August Kubizek

Book Overview

August Kubizek conoci? a Adolf Hitler en 1904, mientras que ambos tropezaban por un lugar para ver de pie la ?pera. Su mutua pasi?n por la m?sica crea un fuerte lazo, y en los pr?ximos cuatro a?os se... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1853676942
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Greenhill Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

A Book Like No Other!

To have two teenagers getting so excited about going to the opera that they'll wait in long lines, stand for the performance, and still go after a fatiguing day, may be hard for modern readers to imagine. This book takes you back to that time, to a childhood in Europe before TV and radio. This book is absolutely fascinating. It's in the "read and re-read and re-read" category, and still controversial even today! At the end of WWII in 1945, Kubizek must have been one of the very few people still alive who had known both the teenage Adolf Hitler AND Hitler's mother before she died. Kubizek writes about the funeral setting and arrangements, Hitler's reaction. Though controversial, the dialog and reactions for the most part will "ring true" for students of Hitler and the NSDAP from other first-hand source material. Kubizek tells of almost unbelievable living conditions in a packed, shared room with Hitler and a piano! He writes that he and Adolf once attempted to write an opera together, and that Hitler did play the piano (badly) and had had music lessons. He writes of time before Hitler became a vegetarian. He writes of several very early, pre-WWI, incidents involving Jews. Kubizek credits Hitler, directly, for encouraging him to pursue his musical career. After Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany, Kubizek's accounts of further meetings with him, years after being teenage roomates, makes absolutely gripping reading. One amusing sidelight is the clever way Kubizek managed to turn away pressure from various NSDAP officials during the Third Reich period. Kubizek's is an eyewitness account like no other known. Once you start reading this book, you want more, more, more! (It's really a loss that many more English-speaking historians, researchers, and camera men didn't get to Kubizek before his death!) To Kubizek's credit, the reader has to consider that, when he wrote these reminiscences, after WWII, he had nothing to gain whatsoever in giving a sympathetic portrayal of Hitler, yet he does anyway.

"At that hour it all began!"

A chronicle of the adolescent friendship between the author, August Kubizek, and Adolph Hitler before he was "Hitler", this is one of the most interesting and unique books you will ever read. Included in this amazing work are pictures of letters and postcards sent the author from Hitler during the period of their friendship, which adds a very personal dimension to what you are reading. This book was written almost 50 years after the events occurred, so it is no surprise the author probably got some details mixed up, especially as pertain to plays, operas, etc. that the two frequently attended. There is a simple reason for Kubizek's exclusion of the Stephanie story from a propaganda pamphlet he wrote for the Nazis in the late 1930's: by showing that Hitler was a social misfit and extremely intimidated by women as a youth, the story could have drastically dimished his image as the "man with the iron will", not to mention the effect it could have had on his appeal to women (on which he heavily relied). There is a known portrait Hitler drew of Stephanie.The underlying credibility of this book is not questioned by any serious Hitler scholar, and it is considered to be the best source of information on Hitler's early life. You will be glad you read it.

I can't say enough good things about this book!

So much of what is taken and accepted as "FACT" about Hitler is full of inconsistencies and assumption. It has been my experience that the public will readily swallow whatever they are fed about "The Great Dictator" without giving so much as a second thought as to whether or not it is correct. I wish I could be indifferent to this and take a neutral stance, but I cannot. I have dedicated six years of my life to studying that of Hitler, and it pains me to witness the widespread ignorance displayed by the majority whenever Hitler's name is mentioned. Which is why this book is so important to me. It is by far the best ever written about his young adulthood and, in short, who he really was as a person. For, in order to understand who Hitler was, one must look into his past. During the years the two spent together in Linz and later in Vienna, young Hitler was already developing into what he would later become. For getting a deeper perspective of the true nature of Adolf Hitler, August Kubizek is, in my humble opinion, the most reliable source for insight into this complicated human being. No one knew Hitler more intimately than he did. He was also reunited with his old friend three decades after their ways parted in Vienna, and thus gives valuable insight regarding "Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer". And, as Kubizek remarked, "Hitler didn't change." The words Kubizek uses to describe his young friend convey the image of a deep, passionate, gifted and serious young man who, due to his great obsession with changing the world around him, did not enjoy his youth in any traditional sense. Kubizek did his friend a great service by writing this book. It is required reading for all serious students of Hitler's incredible life, for it is an honest, first-hand account of the young starving artist, open and unbiased, (unlike any other book ever to tackle the subject.) Kubizek was, I am convinced, a good man who had nothing to gain and everything to lose by publishing the truth about Adolf Hitler's character and showing the world his "human" side. The world after the war (and today still) was not interested in the truth. So many were then and still are content to make Hitler into the embodiment of all evil, to reject his humanity. But therein lies the danger.