A Teenager in Vienna

Before beginning the biography on Hitler, I was expecting the story to go rather the same as those of other totalitarians who came before him. Instead I was met with a rather simple account of a boy, a boy who was adored by his mother and beaten into submission by his father. One can take away the psychological implications from this rather easily. We can speculate about how the environment of a young Hitler's home life turned him into the man he became. Kershaw presents this as his "structural" argument, which I believe better suits a man like Hitler, as opposed to the "great-man" theory.
What surprised me most about Hitler's time in Vienna was that it was nothing more than just time. He had developed a life that involved little more effort than that of a homeless person painting pictures along the road for money. The disappointment that came from multiple rejections from art school, clearly a life-long dream of his, seemed to have sent him into auto-pilot. The fact that the opera was one of the few activities that inspired Hitler fits with the rest of his existent. He was a person content to live in a world that wasn't real. It seems as though Wagner was more than just a creator of music to him, but a creator of an ideal existence, a world where pure nationalism and pride are the only things necessary for outward happiness.
The Vienna that Hitler moved into became a sort of backdrop for him to disappear into like a chameleon. The antisemitism that Vienna was known for could have easily been the source for Hitler's own antisemitism. However, it seemed to me that Kershaw was content to not take a final position on the validity of this. Why? Because ultimately, it doesn't matter.
The socio-political climate that Hitler encountered in Vienna may have contributed to the "world-view" he ultimately adopted. However, Hitler's Vienna years can only account for a fraction of his adult life, a fraction that can only concretely illustrate his lack of ambition as well as a pension for leaving Vienna.