It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  Hinnerk laughed.

  ‘Why, a long time ago, actually when the Party was first founded, didn’t you know?’

  Ive had not known.

  ‘You can put me in touch with the Party office then,’ he said, ‘I want to see them about the Farmers’ Movement.’

  ‘Righto,’ said Hinnerk.

  He waved a friendly hand and took his place in the procession which was now hurrying down the street with a rumbling roar.

  ‘Look out, the police!’ Ive called out after Hinnerk, pointing to the corner where he had seen the posse standing. The chain of police was already forming an oblique line across the street. At the sight of them, the straggling crowd split up, pressed themselves against the walls of the houses, so that a space was cleared between the approaching procession and the chain of police, a little way behind which another line formed, this time armed with carbines, and followed slowly. The free space quickly grew smaller. Suddenly the police increased their pace; the constables, tall, lithe, strong men with chin-straps beneath their clean-shaven jaws, manipulated their belts with practical skill to unloose their rubber truncheons. As though at the word of command, they began to run silently; they raised their truncheons; they ran faster; now they had arrived; there were a few seconds of confusion at the head of the procession; Ive stood and watched. The constables raised their arms, they drove like battering-rams against the massed crowds, like giants amongst the slender young men with pale faces, human mountains letting fly their blows, with practised technique and the utmost precision, on the swarming throng, like rocky boulders whirling down into the valley. Nimbly the young men in their threadbare suits, their arms thrust up over their heads in defence against the hail of blows, pushed themselves between the gaitered legs of the uniformed athletes, intending to rush the chain and break it. But the chain was solid. Already the front of the procession was broken up—Hinnerk alone remained, wedged in among the blue-coats, pushing with his clenched fists among the helmeted heads. Ive, seeing this, sprang forward to help him. A blow crashed on his shoulder; he turned, staggered, fell, and pulled himself up again. He saw the swarms, the confusion of moving, black, fighting shadows; Hinnerk had disappeared; a broad wall of strong backs, with shining belts, marching in step, pressed back the seething flood, the confused tangle of raised arms, the raucous medley of cries. Out of the door of a house came a young girl, very slender, in a close-fitting coat, carefully holding a number of parcels in her arms. She looked to the right and to the left, stood hesitating, stepped into the street, made a half-turn in order to cross the road. The second chain of police had arrived at this point. ‘Move on,’ roared a voice; the girl halted and looked round. Ive was standing stupefied in the middle of the road, rubbing his shoulder. The girl, police in front of her and police behind her, hesitated in alarm; then a blow crashed down on her head, she swayed and fell; her parcels were scattered in every direction, a bottle broke with a resounding crash. Ive rushed forward to the prostrate figure, lying in a queer crumpled heap in the dirt of the street. All at once Pareigat was there; he bent down with Ive over the girl.

  ‘Move on,’ snarled a hoarse voice.

  Ive could feel the breath on the nape of his neck. In uncontrollable rage, he flung round and stared up. A police officer stood before him, his shako pulled down over his eyes. Ive saw distinctly the broad, flat face with cold eyes, now blinking in excitement, whitish flesh bulging over the silver-braided collar.

  ‘Brodermann!’ cried Ive suddenly. The officer started, pulled himself together and looked at Ive in confusion.

  ‘Move on,’ he said quietly, turned and followed, almost laggingly, after the advancing body of constables. The girl raised her head and shoulders, supported herself on her bent knee, pulled herself up, and without a word took the parcels which Pareigat had collected. Then with her free hand she awkwardly brushed the dirt from her coat.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she said sharply, when Ive began to speak.

  She then took a few steps, turned again, and said in a low voice:

  ‘Thank you,’ and walked unsteadily away.

  ‘You know that police officer?’ asked Pareigat.

  ‘An army comrade,’ said Ive, looking after the girl.

  VIII

  The defendants in the big bomb-case in Altona had decided to follow the example of Claus Heim, and to refuse to make any statement in their examination. So the proceedings dragged on, day after day, with nothing but the monotonous reading of thousands of affidavits. Police-Commissioner Müllschippe rattled out his answers when questioned on oath; County Court Judge Fuchs was promoted to an Administrative Court, which not only meant an increase of salary, but the pleasant prospect of not having to take any further part in political cases; Hinnerk sat in the body of the Court and was surprised to notice how often ‘a certain unknown person’ cropped up in the affidavits. But Claus Heim was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. This sentence, if it did not do much to further the Movement, gave it great moral support. In silence Claus Heim had taken his place in the dock, and silent, morose, without turning his head, he returned to his cell.

  Ive, who had been acquitted, was allowed to speak to him again. The farmer of St. Annen Klosterfeld realised what he had brought upon himself. Ive told him of his attempts to stir up the nationalists to take action on his behalf; and of the somewhat discouraging results of his efforts. Heim asked Ive not to deviate a hair’s breadth from the demands of the Movement on his account, and to keep any action on his behalf free from the interference of sentimental fools. On no account, he declared, did he wish to be released even a day sooner than any of the other farmers who had been sentenced. Ive decided that he had better not even mention the question of an appeal.

  He was very depressed when he left the lonely man; he had not been able to hide from him that on his journey through the province before the trial he had found many weak spots in the Movement. The main body of the farmers was standing its ground uncompromisingly. The Land League and the other associations of the Green Front, which was only superficially a united front, at the conference tables in the town and in the official press, and not always there, responded to the impetus of the Movement, by adopting the watchwords of the militant farmers, and attempted to bring their local organisations into line with the emergency committees and sometimes even excelled them in the severity of their demands and in their bombastic announcements of tactics. But their actual functions were carried out not by the tenant farmers, not even by working farmers, but by industrious quick-witted business men and syndicates, by gentlemen in offices who did not possess a yard of land or a blade of grass, by pensioned officers and officials, and they were quite content to remain, as old Reimann expressed it, with their fingers in the Movement and their arses in the System.

  That was just it: where did the System begin and where did the Movement end? There were all sorts of temptations; the Government tried once more to set the Beelzebub of credit to drive out the devil of debt. Every farmer realised that that would do no good in the long run, but it was difficult to resist, since it helped them to get over the hardships of the present moment. For misery was increasing in the country; prices of farm produce were steadily declining; one minute it was produce as much as possible, another, produce as cheaply as possible, one moment a wheat tax and the next a reduction in forage prices, still prices declined and a decrease of trade returns led to an increase in trade costs, and if business increased and with it taxes, then prices fell and with them purchasing power.

  It was not much comfort to the farmers to know that they were not the only ones in this plight, that industry was in the same plight, and industry in other countries also, and the farmers of the whole world. There were clever people who set about to prove to the farmers in their newspapers that from the economic point of view their existence was no longer justified, which did not increase the farmers’ love of the newspapers nor of economics (they had never had much opinion of the clever people). But every calculation,
on whatever it was based, only went to prove what they had known from the outset, that their battle was a life-and-death struggle. There might be a crisis, but they wanted to live, to live fully, and any one who put obstacles in the way of this desire was an enemy. The System was the enemy, and within it the Government, which, involved in the same network, tossed to and fro by the same whirlpool, did the only thing it could do, and for this very reason was intolerable; that is to say, it used the formalities of the law and a perfectly disciplined police force to preserve the status quo and left no way open—open for what?—For chaos? But it was the farmers alone who could find the way out of chaos, and it was from them therefore that the new order must originate. The new order? But it was not a question of new order or old order, but of any order at all. So the farmers were striving for an economic autocracy; not because they considered this to be the only panacea, but because they saw that it was inevitably approaching in every country, and they regarded this development as good, because this retrogression was a progression towards the natural basis of production—the farmers had already begun this retrogressive progress, it was the farming-community not the System, which was in sympathy with the tendencies of the times. There might be a crisis, they had to go through a zero-hour in order to grasp the meaning of the order. They had to be prepared for this moment, and they had to have a longsighted policy to carry them still further. It was useless to encounter the forces which were leading to it with ridiculous specifics, as the System was doing.

  The Government was ready to step in with subsidies, whether it be in the form of a moratorium, credit facilities or reduction of taxes. This began in East Prussia and the other Eastern frontier districts, and actually it was there that the System itself was exposed to the most direct danger. The importation of foreign capital into industry, into municipal affairs, seemed bearable, almost to be welcomed, for the thirty milliard marks of foreign capital, which was the amount the Reichsbank estimated to have been invested in Germany, came in in a quiet and friendly way and silently mounted up. The transaction was welcomed as a benefit, indeed had been called in as a remedy. If the political reparation debts were fraught with a feeling of humiliation and degradation, a feeling that they had been incurred under duress, in short were tribute, the private debts, to which the political debts had given rise, were a voluntary responsibility. Moreover, with so many foreign interests at stake, guarantees must have been given, and in guaranteeing the security of foreign capital the System guaranteed itself.

  But in the East it was a different matter; agriculture was in a different position.

  ‘What is the position in the East?’ wrote Ive. ‘To all the other menaces has been added that of an arbitrarily drawn boundary line. The farmers of Northern Schleswig know what it is to lose the inland provinces, to have to seek new markets for their farm-produce, and the Danes may well gaze with sorrow at the grass which is sprouting up so gaily between the stones of the market-place in Tondern. But East Prussia is alienated from the Reich; Upper Silesia, the Grenzmark and the agricultural district of Further Pomerania are even more thoroughly divided up than the Nordmark. Statistics prove that East Prussia, the whole of East Germany, is denuded, that our provinces in that district are on the way to becoming an area without population. How is this happening? There are landowners who can no longer keep their farms, there are landed proprietors who can no longer keep their property, who own, perhaps, two properties and are obliged to sell one in order to keep the other, and naturally they try to get rid of the property which is most endangered, which is near the frontier. Where are the purchasers? Where are even tenants to be found? Who wants to buy or to rent an undertaking that he knows to be unprofitable? The Government refuses to buy; it is already overburdened with estates. To parcel out the land in small holdings is impossible, for small holdings involve buildings, and buildings require the investment of capital, and there is no capital. Then a German Land Acquisition Society is advertised in Kattowitz, and an Association of Estate Purchasers in Danzig with attractive offers. The landowner makes inquiries; the results of his inquiries sound satisfactory; the societies seem to be well established and have extensive connections; nothing is discovered against them, in Kattowitz, Danzig or Berlin. Soon there are new masters on the estates. But the estate is always changing hands, and sooner or later there appears in the Estate Register a name full of consonants ending in sky. The new owner avoids any neighbourly intercourse; he seems to be a quiet, thoughtful, active man; there is a new impetus to business, expensive innovations are introduced. No one knows where the man gets his capital, but he has it. For capital is necessary for the ambitious afforestation schemes, the installation of a saw-mill, a cement works, saw-mill. And workmen are required, and the workmen who come are Polish workmen, with large families of children, who need a Polish school and a Polish schoolmaster; and one after another they come, and a Polish baker turns up in the village—the German baker cannot stand out against the competition and disappears—and a Polish butcher. The majority of the members of the District Council are Polish, and the Polish landowner is a patron of the German Church.

  This is not an isolated case. It is like this all over the East. German opposition is strong, but Polish capital, very carefully laid out, is stronger. What is the Government doing about it? Is it turning a blind eye? Most certainly not. It is turning a particularly keen-sighted eye. For there is one thing that they must not allow to become an accomplished fact: loss of German land while they are in power. For that would mean the secret would be out, the bitter truth that had long been hidden would be proclaimed to the whole world, that the terrible fiction that there still is anything in Germany that belongs to the Germans is, indeed, no more than a fiction!’

  Ive was amazed at the energy with which the Government by virtue of its East Prussia Relief Act sprang to the help of the threatened provinces. For years past millions had been pumped into the Danaïdean sieve. Now the law was to be developed into a general Eastern Province Relief Act, and, although Ive was aware of the danger, it could not be averted by the Movement. For every individual farmer in turn was faced with the question, which was dangerous because it was tempting. Schleswig-Holstein was a distressed area and the System offered relief, but did it not offer this relief in order to save itself? Ive wanted to say: ‘Don’t accept,’ and so did old Reimann, and Hamkens, and all the old brigade. But ought they to say that? The Unions urged acceptance and made preparations, for eventually the administration of the subsidies was delegated to them and the Board of Agriculture. But the decision for the individual farmer boiled itself down to this: If I do not accept, another will, we all have need of it and are we to go bankrupt before the zero-hour has arrived?

  ‘The East must not go bankrupt,’ said Ive, ‘System or no System, but do you want to accept with one hand and attack with the other? Think of Claus Heim!’

  ‘Claus Heim would say: “Take what you can get,”’ said the farmers. (But Claus Heim had said to Ive, ‘I cannot decide from here, but I should probably not accept myself.’)

  ‘Everyone must decide for himself,’ said old Reimann finally, and the farmers, not all, but many of them, and particularly those, of course, who were in need of the subsidy said: ‘For many a long day the System has got nothing out of us, but we have to pay our private debts with our very blood. The System must help us to get out of the debts to which it has driven us, or are we, too, to refuse to recognise private debts? We might as well become Bolsheviks at once — we should be rid of our debts, but of our farms as well.’

  And Ive returned to the town, in a state of despair and agitation. Every question and every consideration struck him painfully, like the lash of a whip. He felt the whole question so intensely that he seemed to be on fire. Every force within him seemed to have condensed and become fused into his being, giving him a feeling of deep depression.

  IX

  Ive’s interview with the Secretary of the National Socialist Party led to nothing. The Secretary, a
youngish ex-officer, said to him immediately:

  ‘Why are you not a member of the Party?’

  ‘I will tell you frankly,’ said Ive, ‘what is the main thing that keeps me out of your Party; it is the officialdom of the Party.’

  The Secretary made a gesture with his hand, and Ive waited expectantly for what he had to say, but he said nothing.

  ‘It was this officialdom,’ continued Ive after a moment’s silence, ‘that made your leader offer a reward in connection with the bomb outrages to any of your adherents who could produce evidence to prove that the outrages did not originate in your Party. This action of your leader has not unappreciably assisted in the discovery of the plot and the arrest of our leader. I have come to you to ask you if the Party is prepared to co-operate in our propaganda-crusade for the liberation of Claus Heim and the other sentenced farmers,’

  ‘What do you suggest?’ asked the gentleman in a curt tone, which he considered extremely military.

  Ive explained that the Farmers’ Movement had never opposed the National Socialist propaganda work in the province, and that there was no intention of changing this attitude in the future, but that this undoubtedly depended on the attitude adopted by the Party in the vital questions of the Movement. He could very well imagine that there might be extensive co-operation.

  ‘And since it has a programme,’ said Ive after a short pause, ‘it naturally expects adherence to its programme.’

  ‘The programme of the Party,’ said the gentleman, ‘undoubtedly aims at class organisation.’

  ‘The programme of the Party,’ said Ive, ‘can only in the event of victory. . .’

  ‘We shall be victorious,’ interrupted the secretary, and Ive assured him politely that he had no doubt of this. But he had doubts as to whether, after their victory, class organisation could, as it were, be constitutionally effected in, say, the form of § (1) The Third Reich is a class organisation; § (2) This regulation comes into force immediately. It was much more important to get a foothold where the germs of this organisation already existed and were developing, and to carry out the attack from that point.