The Romantic

THE YOUNG HITLER I KNEW (298 pp.) --August Kubizek--Houghton Mifflin ($4).

The pale young man stood on a hilltop under the night sky, ranting at the stars. He had just seen a performance of Wagner's Rienzi, and like that Roman tribune, vowed the young man, he would rise some day to lead his people. He would leave his mark on history.

Many an impressionable youngster has felt that way at 17. But, fantastically, in this case the midnight daydream came true. The young man's name was Adolf Hitler.

Loving from Afar. The only friend of Hitler's youth was a music-loving upholsterer's son named August Kubizek. For four years (1904-08) he roomed and studied with the young Hitler in the grey Austrian city of Linz and later in Vienna. In Kubizek's unpretentious account of those years, Hitler's hitherto obscure adolescence emerges as a fascinating story.

The child was obviously father to the madman. Hitler had a formidable capacity for divorcing himself from reality. As a youngster, he kept turning out sketches for grand new cities, planned to tear down half of Vienna and, incidentally, to convert its citizens from wine to a soft drink (a feat that the Fuhrer, even at the height of his power, never accomplished). Sometimes, he meant to become a second Wagner, and once he started picking out an opera score on the piano ("I shall compose the music, and you will write it down," he told Kubizek, and so it went for several days and nights, until Hitler abruptly quit). For years he was in love with a girl named Stefanie, but he did not dare speak to her. Like the hero of some romantic novel, he worshiped from afar--but managed to persuade himself that Stefanie was madly in love with him too.

God's Intentions. At 16, Adolf carried an elegant, ivory-tipped, ebony cane, and "put his trousers carefully under the mattress so that the next morning he could rejoice in a faultless crease." He had a strange attraction for women, who forever gave him encouraging glances or even sent inviting notes, but he was an unbending prude. One night he dragged the embarrassed Kubizek off to inspect Vienna's red-light district, and later lectured for hours on the evils of prostitution. Not much better than prostitution, in his opinion, was the cosmopolitanism of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Even then, he ranted about the "Reich of all the Germans,'' the need for racial purity.

Interesting in his own right is Author Kubizek, who reveals more about himself than he intends. Trained as a musician, he wound up only as a small-town civil servant. Kubizek (now 66 and retired) is half irritating and half engaging in his stubborn insistence that, in the midst of a vast historical tragedy, he must remain loyal to the memory of a youthful friendship. He symbolizes the Little Man who goes on forever, while the Hitlers rise and fall. And he has at least enough moral sensivity to say: "For the question, then unknown and unexpressed, which hung above our friendship, I have not to this day found any answer: 'What were God's intentions when he created this man?' "

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