by Eric-Emmanuel
Schmitt
‘Adolf Hitler: fail.’
The verdict fell like a metal ruler on a child’s hand.
‘Adolf Hitler: fail.’
Iron curtain. That’s it. No entry. Go and look elsewhere. Outside.
Hitler looked around him. Dozens of teenagers stood on tiptoe, their ears crimson and jaws clenched, their underarms damp with apprehension, every muscle braced as they listened while the beadle sifted their lives. No one took any notice of him. None of them had noticed the enormity that had just been uttered, the catastrophe that had just ripped through the great hall in the Fine Art Academy, the explosion that had punctured the universe: Adolf Hitler, fail.
At the sight of
their indifference, Hitler almost began to doubt that he had heard
correctly. The pain of it. An icy dagger is tearing my chest and guts
apart, my blood is seeping out, can’t anyone see? Can’t they see the disaster befalling me? Am I the only one on this earth living this
intensity? Do we live in the same
world?
The beadle had finished reading the results. He folded his paper and smiled into the void. He was a tall, sallow type, sharp as a knife, with stiff arms and legs that looked preposterously long and ungainly as though they did not belong to his body and were only loosely attached. He left the stage and went to join his colleagues, his task accomplished. Nothing in his physical appearance suggested the executioner, but he had all the mentality of one, and he was convinced he had uttered the truth. The sort of imbecile who would take fright at a mouse but who had shown no hesitation in making the calm announcement with not a second thought: ‘Adolf Hitler, fail!’
He had made the same appalling statement the year before. But the year before it had not been so serious, Hitler had not done much work and he was applying for the first time. Today, however, the same sentence had become a death sentence: you could only apply twice.
Hitler could not take his eyes off the beadle, who was now laughing with the Academy’s attendants, huge, thirty-year-old beanpoles in grey shirts, old men to Hitler who was only nineteen. For them, it was an ordinary day, just another day, a day that justified their pay at the end of the month. For Hitler, this day was the last of his childhood, the last day he had still been able to believe that dream and reality would merge.
The great hall of the Academy was slowly emptying out, like a bronze bell shaking out its notes, casting them out into the city. The young people were leaving to fill up Vienna’s cafés where they could celebrate the joy of admission or drown the sorrow of rejection.
Hitler remained alone, motionless, dumbfounded and grey. In an instant, he had caught sight of himself from the outside, like a character in a novel – an orphan whose father had died years before, his mother, the previous winter and who had nothing but a hundred crowns in his pocket, three shirts and a complete edition of Nietzsche in his suitcase. Poverty loomed with the cold: he had just been refused the right to learn a trade. What did he have to show for himself? Nothing: a bony physique, great big feet and tiny little hands; a friend he wouldn’t dare admit his failure to after boasting so much about getting in; a fiancée, Stephanie, whom he often wrote to but who never replied. Hitler saw himself as he was and the sight aroused his pity. It was the last thing he wanted to feel for himself.
The beadles came over to the tearful youth. They invited him to take chocolate with them in the porter’s lodge. The young man offered no resistance and continued to weep silent tears.
Outside, the sun shone joyfully in a searingly blue sky that was blossoming with birds. Through the window, Hitler watched the theatre of nature and could not understand. Not men or nature either, then? Is there no one to share my sufferings?
Hitler drank his chocolate, thanked the beadles politely and left. Their concern was no consolation – like all men’s attitudes, it was general and founded on principles and values not directed at him personally. He wanted nothing more to do with it.
He left the Fine Art Academy and shuffled away head bowed to lose himself in the crowds of Vienna. The city had been glorious, poetic, Baroque, imperial, the theatre of his expectations; now it was shrinking to the narrow frame of his failure. Would he still love it? Would he still love himself?
Such were the events on this 8th October, 1908. A jury of painters, engravers, draughtsmen and architects had decided the young man’s case unwavering: clumsy lines; muddled composition; lack of technique; banal imagination. It had taken no more than a minute and they had had no qualms about announcing their decision. Adolf Hitler had no future.
What would have happened if the Fine Art Academy had decided otherwise? What would have happened if, in that same minute, the jury had accepted Adolf Hitler? That minute would have changed the course of a life, but would also have changed the course of the world. What would have become of the twentieth century without Nazism? Would there have been a Second World War, fifty-five million deaths, six million of them Jews, in a universe where Adolf Hitler had been a painter?
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