Would the world be different today? Who knows? I believe we would be a different place, and perhaps have one more dead unhappy artist blaming someone for his failure, but a lot more people alive with very different outlooks.
From Wikipedia:
From 1905 on, Hitler lived a bohemian life in Vienna on an orphan's pension and support from his mother. He was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1907–1908), citing "unfitness for painting", and was told his abilities lay instead in the field of architecture. His memoirs reflect a fascination with the subject:
“The purpose of my trip was to study the picture gallery in the Court Museum, but I had eyes for scarcely anything but the Museum itself. From morning until late at night, I ran from one object of interest to another, but it was always the buildings which held my primary interest.”
Following the school rector's recommendation, he too became convinced this was his path to pursue, yet he lacked the proper academic preparation for architecture school:
“In a few days I myself knew that I should some day become an architect. To be sure, it was an incredibly hard road; for the studies I had neglected out of spite at the Realschule were sorely needed. One could not attend the Academy's architectural school without having attended the building school at the Technic, and the latter required a high-school degree. I had none of all this. The fulfillment of my artistic dream seemed physically impossible.”
On 21 December 1907, Hitler's mother died of breast cancer at age 47. Ordered by a court in Linz, Hitler gave his share of the orphans' benefits to his sister Paula. When he was 21, he inherited money from an aunt. He struggled as a painter in Vienna, copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists. After being rejected a second time by the Academy of Arts, Hitler ran out of money. In 1909, he lived in a shelter for the homeless. By 1910, he had settled into a house for poor working men on Meldemannstraße. Another resident of the house, Reinhold Hanisch, sold Hitler's paintings until the two men had a bitter falling-out.
Hitler often was a guest for dinner in a noble Jewish house, and he interacted well with Jewish merchants who tried to sell his paintings.
Everyone knows that Hitler’s application to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts was twice rejected. It is almost impossible to avoid the temptation to ask oneself what if Hitler had been accepted. We know that Oscar Kokoschka asked himself this tantalizing what if question. In Elias Canetti’s memoir, Party in the Blitz: the English years, Canetti relates the following about Kokoschka:
At the beginning of the War, when I saw him again — two or three years after our first meeting in Prague — I hadn’t been with him for more than half an hour when he made me his monstrous confession. He was to blame for the War, in that Hitler, who had wanted to be a painter, had been driven into politics. Oskar Kokoschka and Hitler were both applying for the same scholarship from the Viennese Academy. Kokoschka was successful, Hitler turned down. If Hitler had been accepted instead of Kokoschka, Hitler would never have wound up in politics; there would have been no National Socialist Party, and no Second World War. In this way, Kokoschka was to blame for the War. He said it almost beseechingly, with far more emphasis than he usually had, and he repeated it several times, in a conversation that had moved on to other matters, he brought it back, and I had the dismaying impression that he was putting himself in Hitler’s place … It was impossible for him to be implicated in history without having some significance, even if it were guilt, a rather dubious guilt at that.
There is another version of this story, less poignant, more in the vein of black humor, that has Kokoschka semi-humorously suggesting that he would have run the world rather differently if Hitler had been accepted at the Vienna Academy and he had gone on to something like Hitler’s political career.
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