poison of the foreign races ate into the body of our nationality, and even Vienna was visibly becoming less and less a German city. The Royal House were becoming Czech in every possible way ; and it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and inexorable retribution that caused the most deadly enemy of Germanism in Austria, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, to fall by the very bullets which he had himself helped to mould. And he was the chief patron of the Movement, working from above to make Austria a Slav State !
The germ of the future world war, and indeed of the general collapse, lay in the disastrous connection of the young German Empire with the Austrian shadow State.
In the course of this book I shall have to deal exhaustively with this problem. It is enough to state here that from my earliest youth I was convinced that Austria’s destruction was a necessary condition for the security of the German race, and, moreover, that the feeling of nationality is in no way identical with dynastic patriotism ; also that the House of Habsburg was set upon doing harm to the German race.
Even then I perceived the deductions from this realization : intense love for my German-Austrian home and deep hatred against the Austrian State.
The choice of a profession had to be decided on quicker than I had expected. Poverty and stern reality forced me to make a rapid decision. My family’s small means were nearly exhausted by my mother’s severe illness ; the pension which came to me as an orphan was not enough to live on, so that I was forced to earn my living somehow myself.
With a valise full of clothes and linen I went to Vienna full of determination. I hoped to ward off fate, as my father had succeeded in doing 50 years before. I wanted to become something—but in any case, not an official.