The Other Hitler

Extracts from the Congo Diary of Rudolf Schicklgruber


July 27, 1922. Now that I am settled in here and have begun the inoculations, I have decided to start a little diary, as I always promised Mutti I would do. Nothing to report as yet.
July 28, 1922. All quiet in Guenonsville. The pygmies are really perfectly pleasant! Even though they do not know the purpose of the inoculations, they submit to them cheerfully. I suppose they are used to the pricks of jungle thorns.
August 1, 1922. In my spare time I play on my bandonion that Onkel (I refuse to call him Vati!) gave me--Jesu, beleibet meine Freude and so on. I am reading The Psychiatric Study of Jesus by Albert Schweitzer. What a good man! What good men!
August 3, 1922. I have been thinking of Adolf again. Did Mutti love him more than me? After all, he was the elder. I’ll never know, of course. But there was that episode when he dangled me by my heels from the fourth-story window of our apartment in Braunau and threatened to let go. “Rudolf, stop annoying Adolf!” Mutti cried. I wonder what she meant. All I did was quibble about giving him my marble collection.
August 14, 1922. I admit that I find it hard to get used to the pygmies’ moral life. They are so dreadfully free! And the pygmy women with their exposed breasts. Luckily, they are so small, they seem like children.
August 19, 1922. I wonder how Adolf’s Künstlerleben is working out for him? Was he really cut out to be an artist? Sometimes I think hanging out with that artsy bohemian crowd--Kandinsky, Klee, Schlemmer, Buber, and always, always that crazy Rosenzweig--led him astray. They were “modern,” so he wanted be modern as well (never mind Mutti, of course). They wanted to be artists so he wanted to be one too! I have come up with a phrase to describe this: peer pressure.
August 20, 1922. The Belgian officials came today for inspection--three palefaces in pith helmets (they like to imitate the British) with big notebooks. We passed, it seems--if I understood their French. The medical mission will be permitted to continue. Gott sei Dank! God! It would be nothing short of disastrous to stop the inoculations now.
August 22, 1922. The fact is I might easily have strayed onto that path myself. I remember gazing at Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer when I was a boy and thinking I wanted to be a painter too. Indeed, it might have happened if Dr. Freud had not taken me on as a patient. There was no room in his schedule, but he fitted me in between the Wolf Man and lunch. Probably he was taking time out from his lunch hour, the good man. I sometimes used to see the Wolf Man--Sergei was his name--in the waiting room when he emerged from the inner sanctum. “Few people realize it, but the Herr Professor is a lovely piece! Me too!” he once told me with a twinkle in his eye.* I always wondered what he meant. But perhaps I misheard. He was a Russian, after all.
August 30, 1922. In the war, it is true, Adolf took good care of me. When the other men in our unit wanted to string me up by my big toes, he intervened and saw to it that they only strung me up by my thumbs. That wasn’t so good! Sometimes even now I have trouble with the inoculations. But the big toes would surely have been worse!
September 3, 1922. Again, with the Belgians. Now they say we did not pass. New regulations have arrived from Brussels, it seems. So the mission must close. The pygmies are all distraught! And as for me, what future awaits me now? I cannot return to the Fatherland because of Vati (I mean Onkel).
September 4, 1922. I have come to a decision. The only thing to do is forge ahead, deeper into the jungle. To do good to one’s fellow creatures is surely the only consideration. But to who? The pygmies speak of a tribe of friendly apes beyond the volcano called bonobos who have never yet been inoculated! It is to them I must go. I am sure of it. It is also what Adolf would doubtless recommend if he were here. Dear, good Adolf!


*The Wolf Man “confessed the following transferences: Jewish swindler, he would like to use me from behind and shit on my head.” Freud to Sandor Ferenczi, letter dated February 13, 1910, quoted in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998), 287. “Freud . . . called me ‘a piece of psychoanalysis.’”--Sergei Pankejeff, the Wolf Man, quoted in Muriel Gardiner, ed., The Wolf Man and Freud (London, 1972), 150.--Ed.