It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  ‘That would disintegrate the attack,’ said the secretary. ‘That would provide the reserves without which the attack would be disintegrated,’ said Ive.

  ‘What do you demand, of us?’ asked the gentleman.

  ‘We demand of you an attitude consistent with your official aim; that is, we demand that in the affairs of the farmers you recognise the objectives proclaimed by the most militant section of their community.’

  ‘And,’ asked the gentleman, ‘if we do not, if we cannot comply with this demand?’

  ‘Then,’ said Ive, ‘doubts must arise as to your integrity of purpose-doubts which will not allow us to regard you as any better than those whom you profess to be combating.’

  The secretary shot his head forward: ‘Anybody who opposes us. . .’

  ‘Will be shot, I know,’ said Ive in a bored tone, ‘and we are back in the fields of Philippi. . . Don’t talk rubbish, sir, you are addressing Dithmarsch farmers, not Ullstein editors.’

  ‘Moreover,’ said the secretary, ‘binding agreements can only be made by the National Headquarters, Department of Agriculture.’

  ‘I think that settles the matter,’ said Ive, and departed.

  ‘If you want to be treated properly don’t go to bureaucrats,’ said Hinnerk, when Ive told him of the failure of the interview.

  ‘Why don’t you let your bureaucrats go to the devil?’ asked Ive.

  ‘Because we are a party,’ replied Hinnerk.

  ‘And why are you a party?’

  ‘Because we have bureaucrats, but, seriously, bureaucrats are always there, and the middle class is always there; so long as they are on top, let them have their form, the Party. But we are the Movement.’

  ‘Who is “we”?’ asked Ive.

  ‘The young men,’ replied Hinnerk. ‘Come with me to my storm-troop; tough nuts, I can tell you; there are fellows there combed out from every pot-house in the town, sixty percent ex-Communists, expelled grammar-school boys, rusticated students, old ex-service rascals and young Indian princelings; nobody who isn’t down and out counts.’

  ‘A pleasing prospect,’ said Ive, ‘are you official?’

  Hinnerk grinned: ‘To the official all things are official!’

  ‘And what is the Movement doing? It is marching on, I know that,’ said Ive bitterly, ‘and it is all the same to it where its marches lead it, but the bureaucrats know where it is marching, and it isn’t all the same to them; we’ve been through that already.’

  ‘And wasn’t it all right when we went through it before?’ asked Hinnerk. ‘What happens is not just by chance, after all, and the simple fact that people are marching on has always brought things to a climax. Who is to know whether a cause is good or bad? If it is good, it must prove it, and if it is bad, then its odour must be palpably foul. We march for a cause as long as it is good, and if it goes bad, then we don’t march for it any more; do you think we are so entirely without perceptions as to march without any reason?’

  ‘The upshot of all that,’ said Ive, ‘is that a cause is good as long as it can carry you with it. Are you content to be merely baggage?’

  ‘It means that a cause is good so long as we can bear it, and if the baggage hinders over much, we throw it away.’

  ‘But the meaning, the meaning?’ asked Ive.

  Hinnerk replied: ‘The meaning is that we are indispensable. For what Movement can do without its military organisation? Those who thought they had buried us once and for all, are scratching up the earth with bleeding fingers now to get us back again. The young men are needed in every camp and in every camp they are in uniform.’

  ‘And from all the camps they are setting out to give each other bloody heads, so that the bureaucrats can settle their fat backsides more comfortably into their arm-chairs.’

  ‘And if so, why grudge it them? And why shouldn’t we fight each other? It keeps us up to the mark; practice is practice.’

  Hinnerk laughed. ‘Come to my storm-troop,’ he said, pushing Ive forward.

  ‘Why do people hate each other?’ asked Hinnerk, with a troubled expression, ‘because everyone is a renegade to his neighbour. We are all descended from the same Mother Eve, but opinions are opinions, and it doesn’t matter what opinions one holds, so long as one takes the opinions one has seriously and sticks up for them. If I land a Red Front man a blow on the jaw, I don’t do it because he is a Communist, but because he is not one of us, and he probably feels exactly the same as I do.’

  The meeting-place of Hinnerk’s storm-troop, on the north side of the town, was a beerhouse, the entrance to which was at the foot of narrow stone steps without any railings, and whose signboard showed traces of having had stones thrown at it. In front of the door two young fellows were patrolling up and down, and Hinnerk greeted them with raised arm. The beerhouse itself consisted of a vault divided into several rooms, of which only those on the street side got any daylight. It was filled with tables and benches, piled one on top of another as though they were meant to serve as barricades. The counter, a block of solid wood, had a railing round it to protect the glasses. At almost every table young men were writing, smoking, playing cards, or talking, and looking at newspapers. Their faces wore that expression of unconcerned imperturbability which the faces of soldiers might wear in the lull between two battles. The air, the whole tone of the room, with its clouds of smoke, its figures, its atmosphere of pointless activity, at once brought to Ive’s mind the picture of a billet in the Great War, and he was not surprised to hear that many of the young men who had no homes were in the habit of spending the night on the narrow benches of the beerhouse. Every hour the sentries were relieved according to regulations, and the desultory conversation was mostly about duties. Duties were more important than politics, in any case they lay nearer home, for immediate danger was always threatening, whether from the bourgeoisie and their guardians, the police, or from the militant organisations of other factions.

  Outside in the street pedestrians hurried along, tram bells clanged, cars rolled by, but all over the town were scattered the hiding-places, the underground meeting-places of the active section of young people, who were ready, when the time was ripe, to throng the streets of the town, to hoist their banners on public buildings, or to engage in murderous battle in the dark corners and doorways of the town and die like beaten dogs.

  Ive realised that in such a place it would be senseless to ask about the why and wherefore, and if he immediately felt a strong attraction towards the men in this room it was nothing more than the attraction he felt towards the homeless sons of all periods of upheaval.

  Exactly opposite, on the corner of the street, Hinnerk informed him, was the meeting-place of the Communists, which, since the entrance-door was at the top of some steps, was very difficult to attack, but it was easier to clear off after the attack, whereas here the position was reversed; and, pushing chairs and tables into position, Hinnerk demonstrated the last battle, in the course of which the Communists had succeeded in getting into the rooms, but had only been able to escape with heavy losses.

  Day and night the enemy armies were on the watch, ready to fall in furious onslaught upon their opponents, though they were all friends, to seize them by the throat, to hurl them to the ground in the wild battles of the night which were only broken up when the cars of the flying-squad came rushing up. From time to time one or other would change sides, knowing full well that this meant that he could expect no mercy from the faction he had deserted. Hinnerk’s storm-troops had had four deaths within a few months, and very few of the men remained long without a wound. Hinnerk had added several scars to the injured hand he had got in Neumünster, and the student who was sitting at the same table with him and Ive, a broad-shouldered young man with fair hair and blue eyes, did not owe the deep cut on his cheek to a duel.

  ‘What are you studying?’ Ive asked the student, who answered: ‘F.I., Faculty of Idiots, Economics, Social Science.’

  On being asked why, he replied because of
the ninety-nine percent, certainty of scientific error; because of the possibility of immediately recognising as nonsense everything that he had laboriously crammed, even when it presented itself to him in the proud cloak of abstruse learning. What had not only made him wish to be, but had forced him to become a National Socialist was the fact that the Movement was not based on a hard-baked economic doctrine, that the leader had given a meaning to learning in that he had emancipated it merely by providing, through the simple combination of the words National Socialism, the common denominator from which all learning derived.

  But surely the ideas of a nation and socialism had existed for a long time?

  But it was not until the pronouncement of their combination that the conceptions of nation and socialism had opened up such breathless vistas; just as the watchwords of the French Revolution, though they had existed as conceptions and ideals for centuries, had only become effective on their pronouncement, and then had changed the face of the world. What prospects had learning to offer the individual since the war? The meagre prospect of picking up some wretched job.

  ‘But we are not studying in order to pick up a job, in any case’ — the student made a movement which accentuated the scar on his cheek—‘and perhaps we shan’t be asked in future: “Which Students’ Corps did you belong to?” but: “With which S.A.[1] troop did you serve?” I am an S.A. man,’ he said, ‘because I belong to the Movement, and I belong to the Movement because I am a student.’

  ‘How does the Movement,’ asked Ive, ‘justify its claim to power?’

  ‘Through the fact of its existence as a movement,’ said the student, ‘for the effective principle of every movement lies in its continually renewed act of self-creation. We make no claims on the nation or on socialism, but we are nationalists and socialists, and the fact of having the power in our hands is a guarantee for socialism and for the nation.’

  ‘You do not, then,’ said Ive, bending forward, ‘conceive of the nation as a statistical constant, as it were, and you do not conceive of socialism as a plan?’

  ‘I conceive of the nation as a perpetual act of volition of the people,’ said the student, ‘and I conceive of socialism as the economic form which, being in any case most strongly bound up with the State, endows this act of volition with the greatest possible motive-force—that is, it is based on a plan, but a plan elastic enough always to adapt itself to the changing requirements of the nation. Private property. . .‘

  ‘. . .must be abolished,’ cried an S.A. man from three tables away, and every one laughed. . .

  ‘. . .exists even now merely as a juristic idea,’ said the student, ‘whose usufruct is exercised in a sense contrary to the service of the nation; we shall not abolish private property, but we shall control its usufruct.’

  His whole face lit up with pleasure.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ive, hesitatingly, ‘in how far what you say expresses the aims of your Party, and I don’t know whether it will not come to the same thing in the end as Communism is forced to do, and indeed every form of State power will be forced to do, if it is not willing to abnegate itself; but, at any rate, you must be aware that your language will be open to misconception, if, for example, in your propaganda, which strangely enough, though it is one of the political tools of democracy, you cannot do without, you use terms like socialism, which, in the minds of the public to which you are appealing, already have a set meaning, and that in the sense in which it is used in the programme of your opponents. I could accept the possibility of using misconceptions as instruments to confuse the issue, but can you venture to do this without this instrument turning against yourselves?’

  ‘We can,’ said the student, ‘we can, if that were our intention, which is not the case. We are in a more fortunate position than that. The ideas of a complete age have had all the meaning wrung out of them and are now open to any interpretation. We have been lucky enough,’ he said, ‘to discover that, as soon as the peak of an epoch has been passed, every idea, even if it has been conceived in the spirit of the epoch, turns against it. For the past thirty years every dogma has contributed to the decay of the epoch, undermining its characteristic structure; and the critical break in the rhythm has now been reached, for today for the first time it is possible to think without prejudice, take ideas dispassionately, just as they present themselves, and exploit them. We have already left the last period behind us, the period of senile reflection, and it is no longer the dogma which concerns us but the facts on which it is based, and facts are no longer important as the result of scientific research but as a weapon to be used against it.

  Practically speaking, today every really national act is a socialistic act and every really socialistic act is a national act; and the thing that differentiates us from our opponents, who are also socialists and also nationalists, is our knowledge of the relations of ideas and the expression of this knowledge in a clear, reasonable, simple sequence unclouded by dusty theories; we are fighting as members of the proletariat—for the German people has become a proletariat—against exploitation by capital, for capital has become foreign capital; and anyone who doesn’t fight with us can no longer be considered a member of the proletariat, can no longer be considered a German.’

  ‘Heil!’ cried an S.A. man from three tables away, and every one laughed. Even the student laughed. But Ive did not laugh.

  ‘In the end then,’ said Ive, ‘you ask of the individual nothing more than a single intellectual decision—with all the consequences, of course. Intellect,’ he said unhappily. . .

  ‘Intellect is a disease,’ said Hinnerk suddenly, getting up and walking round the table to where Ive was sitting. ‘Have you joined the mental acrobats?’ he asked softly. ‘My dear fellow,’ he added, ‘don’t crack your skull. Intellect is a disease, a useless mucous secretion; no matter how much you may try to tone up the membrane, the sequel is general debility. Do you imagine that I have never been to bed with the harlot? Everybody steps in muck some time or another, but a decent man draws his foot away. The clever fellows with their intellects have had the whole apparatus in their own hands for twelve years. They have talked and written and split hairs and cried woe to us silly idiots, and where have they landed themselves with all their intellect? In the gutter. They are still slaving away and the whole cartload has gone astray and they won’t be able to save ten thousand clever books out of the morass. It makes me want to vomit even to hear the word. With all their intellect they haven’t produced a single decent man, but they have driven many a decent man mad with their intellect. Intellect is the beginning of betrayal. Look out for yourself, Ive. Have a drink.’

  ‘Here’s to you,’ said Ive, lifting his glass. ‘Comrades shot by the red front and the reaction, march in spirit within our ranks,’[2] he said, lifting his glass again. ‘Here’s to you, Hinnerk, sit down here.’

  Hinnerk sat down. ‘Well, well,’ he said, and took his notebook out of his pocket.

  ‘Sunday morning at seven o’clock,’ he announced, ‘we assemble for the propaganda tour. Meeting place Pankow, at the committee-room. Come here, Schneider, you have to collect the pamphlets at the district office. Schanzek, you’ve to bring the flag. In your working clothes. And leave your guns at home. Hermann—you’re in arrears with your S.A. insurance; 1 mark 54, on Sunday! Ive, you must come with us,’ he said, and Ive promised he would be there.

  They sat on together till morning, drinking and throwing their cigarette ends on the floor, and Ive felt he would very much like to join the S.A. But Hinnerk did not press him, and Ive did not suggest it. But he turned up punctually at the rendezvous to take part in the propaganda tour with Hinnerk’s storm-troop. This was a week before the election which created such a sensation, and which produced such an astounding increase of National Socialist votes. The swastika flag was hoisted on the lorry into which the forty S.A. men were tightly packed. Hinnerk gave the last directions; Ive climbed up in front beside the driver with the student, who spread a map out on his k
nees. The lorry set off with a clatter, and the men began to sing their campaign songs. The streets were still empty, but windows were opened, and customers came out of the barbers’ shops to look after the lorry. Just as the ‘Deutschlandlied’ was pealing out in quick time, the lorry passed a group of constables, who had collected at a corner of the street. The singing ceased, but at the word of command they shouted in chorus:

  ‘Police! Join in!’

  The constables stood unmoved, looking straight in front of them.

  ‘Germany!’ cried Hinnerk.

  ‘Awake!’ answered the chorus.

  But the police apparently did not wish to represent Germany; not a feature moved in their set faces. Gradually the road widened as they neared the open country; the houses were low, with little gardens between them. In the bright, clear light of the September morning the lorry rolled into the forest. Ive looked at the low brushwood at the side of the road, at the tall, straight-trunked trees with their reddish bark, surmounted by a tuft of foliage, at the patches of fine yellow sand between the greyish-green and brown of the scattered pine needles. At a bend of the road the lorry halted; the men jumped down; they flung their civilian clothes into the ditch, while out of rustling paper parcels tumbled brown shirts; straight, naked legs were pushed into the uniform trousers; ties were pulled on and belts clasped round the suddenly attenuated figures; red armlets with the black swastika on a white ground emblazoned their sleeves.

  ‘The police,’ said Hinnerk, ‘are strange creatures; they only appear singly, and the arm of the law is paralysed in the open country; in the Third Reich that will have to be changed.’