Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Thus more and more I began to lead a double life; reason and reality told me to complete a
school as bitter as it was beneficial in Austria, but my heart dwelt elsewhere.
An oppressive discontent had seized possession of me, the more I recognized the inner
hollowness of this state and the impossibility of saving it, and felt that in all things it could
be nothing but the misfortune of the German people.
I was convinced that this state inevitably oppressed and handicapped any really great
German as, conversely, it would help every un-German figure.
I was repelled by the conglomeration of races which the capital showed me, repelled by this
whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and
everywhere, the eternal mushroom of humanity-Jews and more Jews.
To me the giant city seemed the embodiment of racial desecration.
The German of my youth was the dialect of Lower Bavaria, I could neither forget it nor learn
the Viennese jargon. The longer I lived in this city, the more my hatred grew for the foreign
mixture of peoples which had begun to corrode this old site of German culture.
The idea that this state could be maintained much longer seemed to me positively ridiculous.
Austria was then like an old mosaic; the cement, binding the various little stones together,
had grown old and begun to crumble; as long as the work of art is not touched, it can
continue to give a show of existence, but as soon as it receives a blow, it breaks into a
thousand fragments. The question was only when the blow would come.
Since my heart had never beaten for an Austrian monarchy, but only for a German Reich,
the hour of this state's downfall could only seem to me the beginning of the redemption of the
German nation.
For all these reasons a longing rose stronger and stronger in me, to go at last whither since
my childhood secret desires and secret love had drawn me.
I hoped some day to make a name for myself as an architect and thus, on the large or small
scale which Fate would allot me, to dedicate my sincere services to the nation.
But finally I wanted to enjoy the happiness of living and working in the place which some day
would inevitably bring about the fulfillment of my most ardent and heartfelt wish: the union
of my beloved homeland with the common fatherland, the German Reich.
Even today many would be unable to comprehend the greatness of such a longing, but I
address myself to those to whom Fate has either hitherto denied this, or from whom in harsh
cruelty it has taken it away; I address myself to all those who, detached from their mother
country, have to fight even for the holy treasure of their language, who are persecuted and
tortured for their loyalty to the fatherland, and who now, with poignant emotion, long for the
hour which will permit them to return to the heart of their faithful mother; I address myself
to all these, and I know that they will understand me !
Only he who has felt in his own skin what it means to be a German, deprived of the right to
belong to his cherished fatherland, can measure the deep longing which burns at all times in
the hearts of children separated from their mother country. It torments those whom it fills
and denies them contentment and happiness until the gates of their father's house open, and
in the common Reich, common blood gains peace and tranquillity.
Yet Vienna was and remained for me the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life. I
had set foot in this town while still half a boy and I left it a man, grown quiet and grave. In it
I obtained the foundations for a philosophy in general and a political view in particular which
later I only needed to supplement in detail, but which never left me. But not until today have
I been able to estimate at their full value those years of study.
That is why I have dealt with this period at some length, because it gave me my first visual
instruction in precisely those questions which belonged to the foundations of a party which,
arising from smallest beginnings, after scarcely five years is beginning to develop into a great
mass movement. I do not know what my attitude toward the Jews, Social Democracy, or
rather Marxism as a whole, the social question, etc., would be today if at such an early time