From The Adorations:

He looked at the black-bordered picture of the dead Archduke, for whom he felt no pity (an increasingly alien emotion)—indeed, the anticipation of what was already rumored (mobilizations, ambassadors recalled, Austrian troops shelling Belgrade) tingled in his veins like champagne—yet, nostalgically, he recalled that day when he and Stefanie and the Archducal couple had, in Linz, come together, under the guidance of Fate.

“Schweinerei.”

But Franz Ferdinand had been not only a Habsburg but a rumored pacifist, a liberal, someone with decided parliamentarian leanings, a dreamer of French and British dreams, a lover of constitutions and The Vote. Good riddance, then, doubly so. Good riddance to the whole pox-ridden ignorant lot, if the rumors of war were borne out by events...and they had to be, he felt it, it was as plain as the sun in the sky, even that fatuous clown the Kaiser had let slip a comment the other day, something about “inevitable corrections in the balance of power.” That was clear enough. And now Austria was invading Serbia.

Hitler went on his way with a backward glance at the nameplate next to the shop door: Hoffmann, Photographer, Sessions By Appointment, and promptly he made mental plans for a self-portfolio of photographs, himself captured on many reels, or plates: exaltation, deep thought, provocation, nobility, inspiration, dynamism. And yet, photography was an inferior art, a pale imitation of what could be done with brush and palette; oh, you could count on achieving an effect, all right, usually instantly, no thought required, much like play-acting, or the operetta, or ballet, those Viennese distractions, pastimes for the lower classes, inferior arts, all of them, and not surprisingly the pretty exclusive domain of Jews and Moravians and Slavs and other misbegotten groups (this was Adolf trying out his newly-minted contempt for entire races rather than individuals, an experiment that made him feel bold, fresh and reinvigorated, as if a great broom had made a cleansing sweep through the cobwebby obfuscations and parliamentary rationalizations of the mind)...speaking of Jews, one was waiting for him now, that rich Steinberger fellow who’d promised him a commission. Well, his money was as good as anybody else’s, never forget that, said Adolf to himself. The Munich Adolf, like the Vienna one, was a hand-to-mouth freelance artist, a purveyor of kitsch on request, a mad but sober Bohemian, a slow-simmering ideologue. In Munich, however, there was no Heim fur Maenner, no Yiddischer Cerberus at the front door. Young Herr Hitler was lodging with a family, the Schroders, in North Schwabing, good German folk, proud and pure and far blonder than Adolf. Thank God (in Whom Adolf believed only as in a kind of celestial aide-de-camp arranging his, Adolf’s, future appointments with Destiny) he’d moved out of Vienna, that Babylon of the races, to Germany, land of his heart, land of his blood, land of Hermann’s Teutoburg, altar of his fate...

But the Jew would have to wait. There was that rally at three o’clock in the Odeonsplatz. Momentous events were occurring, the fate of nations hung in the balance, the upper air was vibrating like a taut violin string under the bow of Fate, mighty armies were gathering, the world was teetering on the brink, nothing would ever be the same again.

For the first time in his life Adolf Hitler exulted in the simple fact of being alive.