If we now ask ourselves what influence, apart from that of Wagner’s music and the less immediate but still living influence of the Swastika, could have helped the young Adolf to acquire so early the power to transcend space and time in this way, we are immediately led to think of his only childhood love: 
the beautiful Stephanie, with her heavy blond braids wrapped around her head like a soft, shiny crown[1]; Stephanie to whom he never dared to speak because he had ‘not been introduced to her’ [2] but who had become in his eyes ‘the female counterpart of his own person’.[3]
August Kubizek insists on the exclusivity of this very special love: the ‘ideal’ plane on which he always remained. He tells us that the young Adolf, who identified Stephanie with the Elsa of Lohengrin and ‘other heroine figures of the Wagnerian repertoire’[4] didn’t feel the slightest need to talk or hear her, as he was sure that ‘intuition was enough for the mutual understanding of people out of the ordinary’. He was satisfied to watch her pass by from afar; to love her from afar as a vision from another world.
______ 卐 ______
Editor’s note: Is the image I chose for the front cover of The Fair Race finally understood (a girl I met decades ago, and who I talk about in my last book)?
______ 卐 ______
Once, however, on a beautiful Sunday in June, something unforgettable happened. He saw her, as always, at his mother’s side, in a parade of flower floats. She was holding a bouquet of poppies, cornflowers and daisies: the same flowers under which her float disappeared. She was approaching. He had never looked at her so closely, and she had never seemed more beautiful. He was, says Kubizek, ‘delighted with the earth’. [5]
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Editor’s note: From the pen of Spanish Romanticist poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870):
Hoy la tierra y los cielos me sonríen,
Hoy llega al fondo de mi alma el sol,
Hoy la he visto…, la he visto y me ha mirado,
¡Hoy creo en Dios!
Terry Rooney’s translation:
Today heaven and earth smile upon me
Today the sun reaches the depths of my soul
Today I saw her… I saw her and she looked at me,
Today I believe in God!
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Then the girl’s bright eyes rested on him for a moment. She smiled carelessly at him in the festive atmosphere of that sunny Sunday, took a flower from her bouquet and tossed it to him.[6] And the witness to this scene adds that ‘never again’—not even when he saw him again in 1940, in the aftermath of the French campaign, at the height of his glory—did he see Adolf Hitler ‘happier’.
But even then, the future Führer did nothing to get closer to Stephanie. His Platonic love remained like that, ‘weeks, months, years’. Not only did he no longer expect anything from the girl after the gesture I have just recalled, but ‘any initiative she might have taken beyond the rigid framework of convention would have destroyed the image he had of her in his heart’.[7]
When one remembers what role the ‘Lady of his thoughts’ played in the life and spiritual development of the medieval knight—who could also be, though not necessarily, a figure we just caught a glimpse of, even some distant princess, whose beauty and virtues the devoted knight knew only by hearsay—and when we know, moreover, what deep links existed between the Orders of Chivalry and hermetic teaching, that is to say initiatory—one cannot help but connect the dots.
August Kubizek assures us that, at least during the years he lived in Vienna with him, the future Führer didn’t once respond to the solicitations of women, didn’t associate with any of them, didn’t approach any of them although he was ‘bodily and sexually quite normal’.[8] And he tells us that the beloved image of the woman who, in his eyes, ‘embodied the ideal German woman’ would have supported him in this deliberate refusal of any carnal adventure.
It is instructive to note the reason for this refusal, which Kubizek reports in all simplicity misunderstanding the implications of his childhood friend’s words. Adolf Hitler wanted, he tells us, to keep within himself, ‘pure and undiminished’ [9] what he called ‘the flame of Life’, in other words, the vital force. ‘A single moment of inattention, and this sacred flame is extinguished for ever’—at least for a long time—he wrote, showing us the value the future Führer attached to it. He tries, unsuccessfully, to elucidate what it is. He sees in it only the symbol of the ‘holy love’ that awakens between people who have kept themselves pure in body and spirit, and who ‘is worthy of a union destined to give the people a healthy offspring.’ [10] The preservation of this ‘flame’ was to be, he wrote, ‘the most important task’[11] of that ‘ideal state’ which the future founder of the Third German Reich thought of in his lonely hours.
This is undoubtedly true. But there is more to it than that.
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[1] The name Stephanie evokes the idea of a crown (Stephanos, in Greek).
[2] Kubizek, p. 88.
[3] Ibid. (‘die weibliche Entsprechung der eigenen Person’).
[4] Ibid., page 78.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., page 84.
[7] Ibid., page 87.
[8] Ibid., page 276.
[9] page 280.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.