About this place
The sober five storey building at Steingasse 6 was the Kaiser Franz Joseph State Realschule of Linz from 1851 until 1909, founded on the initiative of Linz citizens and the writer Adalbert Stifter, who wrote its first curriculum as provincial school inspector. Adolf Hitler entered the school in September 1900 at the age of eleven, walking in daily from Leonding. He failed mathematics and natural history in his first year, repeated the class, and in 1904 was allowed to pass only on condition that he leave; he finished at Steyr and dropped out a year later. His form teacher Eduard Huemer remembered a pale, argumentative boy with talent but no discipline, while the history teacher Leopold Poetsch, a fervent pan German nationalist, was later praised by Hitler in Mein Kampf as the man who made him a young revolutionary. In 1903 Ludwig Wittgenstein enrolled here too, two grades apart from Hitler, with no evidence that they ever met. The building later served as Upper Austria's first vocational school, received its New Objectivity facade in 1927, and is today a listed monument housing a hotel inside the Promenaden Galerien.
Key facts
- 1851 year — The Realschule opened in this building on the initiative of the writer Adalbert Stifter, who drew up its curriculum
- 1 hour — Length of young Hitler's daily walk to school from the family home in Leonding, each way
- 1909 year — The school moved to its new building in Fadingerstrasse, where it still operates as a Gymnasium today
📍 Steingasse 5, 4020, Linz