"Two things made the German experience unique. The first was Hitler himself, who was in many ways more bizarre than Chaplin knew. An art-school reject who had once scraped a living by selling kitschy picture postcards; an Austrian draft-dodger who had ended up a decorated Bavarian corporal; a lazy mediocrity who rose late and enjoyed both Wagner's operas and Karl May's cowboy yarns - here indeed was an unlikely heir to the legacy of Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck. In Munich in the early 1920s he could be seen attending the soirées of a Romanian princess 'in his gangster hat and trenchcoat over his dinner jacket, touting a pistol and carrying as usual his dog-whip'. It is not altogether surprising that President Hindenburg assumed he was Bohemian. Others thought he looked more like 'a man trying to seduce the cook', or perhaps a renegade tram conductor. If it had not been for the advice of his publisher Max Amann, he would have called his first book Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice instead of the distinctly catchier My Struggle. The longer title captures something of Hitler's shrill and vituperative personality. As for his sexuality, about which there has long been speculation on the basis of circumstantial or tainted evidence, he may have had none. Hitler hated. He did not love."