Hitler’s Authenticity: A Functionalist Interpretation

a school of architecture, or had any formal instruction in architecture at all. I left Hansen’s imposing building on the Schillerplatz feeling downcast, at odds with myself for the first time in my young life. For it seemed to me that what I had just been told about my abilities suddenly revealed, like a blinding flash of lightning, a conflict within me that I had been struggling with for a long time, without really being able to understand the reasons why. But now, in the space of a few days, I myself knew that I would one day become an architect.24 It is all there, in a faintly embarrassing way: the “difficulty,” laziness, and pitiful indefin-ability of the early years, the failure to find one’s niche, the whole “what-is-it-that-you-really-want?” thing, the feeble-minded vegetating in a state of profound social and psychological bohemianism, the essentially arrogant rejection of any useful and honest activity because one thinks oneself too good for it.33