The Things You Learn Reading By Mein Kampf

as a boy, Adolph Hitler thought about joining the clergy. this interest by replaced by an interest in the military:

As it happened, my temporary aspiration for this profession was in any case soon to vanish, making place for hopes more suited to my temperament. Rummaging through my father's library, I had come across various books of a military nature, among them a popular edition of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It consisted of two issues of an illustrated periodical from those years, which now became my favorite reading matter. It was not long before the great heroic struggle had become my greatest inner experience. From then on I became more and more enthusiastic about everything that was in any was connected with war or, for that matter, with soldiering (6).

he viewed the middle class office job with trepidation because it represented loss of liberty and opportunity for glory:

I did not want to be a civil servant, no, and again no. All attempts on my father's part to inspire me with love or pleasure in this profession by stories from his own life accomplished the exact opposite. I yawned and grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time and being compelled to force the content of a whole life into blanks that had to be filled out (8).

Hitler, Adolph. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971.