From his bedroom window, Adolf could see the cemetery. In the year 1900 Adolf’s dad send him to the technical high school in the city of Linz. Hitler, the country boy, was lost in the city and its big school. City kids also looked down on country kids who went to the school. He was very
lonely and extremely unhappy. There was a history teacher at school, who touched Hitler's imagination with exciting tales of the glory of German figures such as Bismark and Frederick The Great. For young Hitler, German Nationalism quickly became an obsession. In January, 1903, Hitler's father died suddenly of a lung hemorrhage, leaving his thirteen year old son as head of the Hitler household.
Hitler got worse in school. His grades weren’t that good anymore. It was only Hitler's history teacher and his tales of heroic Germans from bygone eras who kept his interest and earned his respect. But Hitler could not bring himself to take the final exam for his diploma. He left school at age sixteen never to return. From now on he would be self taught, continuing his heavy reading habits and interpreting what he read on his own, living in his own dreamy reality and creating his own sense of truth.
He spent his time wandering around the city of Linz, Austria, visiting museums, attending the opera, and sitting by the Danube River dreaming of becoming a great artist. Young Hitler did not have a girlfriend. Hitler's view of the world, also based in fantasy, began to significantly take shape. He borrowed large numbers of books from the library on German
history and Nordic mythology. By now Hitler also had strong pride in the German race and all things German along with a strong dislike of the Hapsburg Monarchy and the non-Germanic races in the multicultural Austro-Hungarian empire which had ruled Austria
and surrounding countries for centuries. He decided to attend the prestigious Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. In October,




1907, at age eighteen, he withdrew his inheritance money from the bank and went to live and study in Vienna. Hitler's mother was by now suffering from breast cancer and had been unsuccessfully operated on in January. But Hitler's driving ambition to be a great artist overcame his reluctance to leave her. He took the test and waited for the result, quite sure he would get in. But failure struck him like a bolt of lightning. His test drawings were judged unsatisfactory and he was not admitted. Hitler was badly shaken by this rejection.