The academy says yes

Vienna, October 1907. The Academy of Fine Arts holds its entrance examination: 113 candidates, two days of set drawings, and a jury that will admit only twenty-eight. Among the refused is an eighteen-year-old from Linz named Adolf Hitler, his sample drawings judged deficient, too few heads. The rector, looking at his careful buildings and empty figures, tells him his talent is for architecture. He applies again the next October and is not even admitted to the test. His mother dies that December. He sinks into six aimless Vienna years, a postcard painter in a men's home, nursing grievances in a city marinated in them, until the war of 1914 gives him a uniform and history gives him his opening.

In the timeline recorded here, the jury's afternoon runs differently by one voice. A landscape professor lingers over the portfolio of buildings, the courtyards ruled straight, the facades patient and dead, and argues that the school has room for one draughtsman among its dreamers. It is a small argument, made between coffee and the next portfolio, and it prevails as small arguments sometimes do. The list of twenty-eight becomes a list of twenty-nine. The letter that goes to Linz that week says admitted. The applicant reads it twice in the stairwell, and his paintbox goes with him to class in the Schillerplatz that winter.