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extraordinary or even skilled; he was not good at drawing the human figure, and there was nothing particularly unique or eye-catching about his buildings or landscapes.But Hitler was not aware of such things. He was convinced he was a genius, buoyed by his thoughts of fame. He didn’t try to find a job, living instead off some money his aunt had given him. He looked into
everything,
but casually, usually skimming
     the surface rather than going too deep. He liked to read only the first and last chapters of books, for instance, thinking he could grasp their entire meaning that way. But Vienna impressed him with its architecture and music and voluminous museums, and he spent his days surrounding himself with the city’s music and art.
    There was another passion that began in earnest during these years for Hitler though: his love for automobiles. It was the first time that he had been exposed to cars to any real extent, and the first time he could attend an auto race. In Vienna, Adolf began reading motoring publications and keeping up with the latest races and news. It was the beginning of a lifelong self-education in automobiles. In later years, he would spend hours and hours personally interviewing
     potential drivers for his own car, asking them detailed, technical questions that astonished and sometimes even upended the most experienced of them. This was one subject in which Hitler apparently did not skim.
    In different ways, both Adolph Hitler and Ferdinand Porsche had been infected by the spirit of their times, a moment when progress was the name of the game, and when an individual was believed to have some great upward rise connected with fate. Since the eighteenth century, with the onset of the Enlightenment, thought and the power of using one’s thinking to solve great social and individual problems had become increasingly paramount, and in turn, both the cult
     of the individual and the strength of “the masses” were rising. Whereas industry had started in England and come fully of age and power only recently in the German-speaking world, the idea of progress and of using one’s reason to achieve such progress was already well installed in big cities like Vienna. Tied up in that idea was mankind’s “war” against space and time; identification with a group was one way of fighting this war (because it
     made a person feelpart of something larger and “timeless”) and, so it seemed, was celebrity or fame (because it gave one the sense of having a lasting presence in the world, of immortality). This desire for dominance can be traced back in history, to conquerors such as Alexander the Great and Napoleon, but in the 1900s it was becoming characteristic not only of the political world but of the commercial world as well. There was a new emphasis on
     buying and selling, on mass appeal: New forms of media connected more people, increasing audience size and proximity, thus intensifying a product’s, or a person’s, ability to be known and also raising the social desire “to belong.” The automobile was a natural part of this wave: It was for the individual, but it was a way of showing off one’s individuality in a crowd; it was an engine of both economic and social expansion, a way to simultaneously
     “stand apart,”
and
belong to a particular class. Motion itself was a sign of power. As early as 1906, one European newspaper talked of the automobile as the tool that would finally “grant humans their conquest over time and space.” 4
    Hitler came to Vienna with big plans, boasting of all the great things he would do at school. Unfortunately, real life was beginning to fall short of his expectations. As the months passed, his money ran thin, as did his prospects of becoming an artist. His application to the Academy of Fine Arts was rejected. When he later tried applying a second time, he was not even allowed to sit for the exam. He tried the architecture school too, but was told he didn’t have
     the