It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  He continued: ‘Of course, it was not in the columns of the daily press that I made this discovery, but in obedience to the call of a future, which, while marking off an epoch, reveals the germ of historical development. The very first movements of a nation indicate its destiny; whether it recognise or reject it, it will have a history, or changing conditions of existence. Let us do away at last with the stale ideas which have been confusing people’s minds since the French Revolution, and allowing every village community of Europe to set up “national claims,” without ever having given the world a single constructive idea. A people justifies its claims as a nation when it proclaims its universal obligations—obligations which are fulfilled in the heroic figures of history. War and murder, and pestilence and insurrection have existed at all times and among all peoples; but the criterion of a hero lies in his ability to fulfil a task which, though the people know nothing of it, is the very essence of the nation. Jeanne d’Arc is the French national saint and heroine; for, long before the events of the French Revolution which made of her people a nation, she was striving to fulfil its mission. Hers was a divine mission, of course; she fulfilled the vows of the most Christian daughter of the Church, and the Church could not do otherwise than proclaim her a saint, thereby acknowledging the national claims of her most Christian daughter. Just as she can and will acknowledge every national claim if it is expressed in terms of Christianity. Just as she recognised the German claim in the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. But that is just it: the universal responsibility was not laid down by the German People, but by the Church; the nation as mediator, not as prime-mover. When it wanted to be prime-mover, it was in a position of protest, and in its most violent protest, in the Reformation, so far the most national manifestation in German history, it attacked the foundations of the Church, the foundations of the Holy Roman Empire, for the sake of the German nation. And I regard it as a sign that at that moment the closest bond was formed with those people who alone by their inexorable exclusiveness preserved their national claim in its purity: with the Jewish people. I refer to the translation of the Bible. By deliberately incorporating in its own culture the one universal document of the world it established its own universal responsibility against the claims of the Church. Nothing is more natural than that it should be for German culture only that this event preserved its deeper religious significance; that for all the peoples who were caught up in the whirlpool of this event the consequences were mainly other than religious; that Gustavus Adolphus fought and fell in Germany; that Cromwell, in obedience to the Puritan command to propagate the Gospel, was obliged to turn immediately to the imperialistic ambitions which found a barrier everywhere where the Church had already established her political sway; that the Gospel of the Rights of Man, the last powerful missionary idea of a nation, directed the whole impetus of the French people against the Roman Empire of the German nation, and reduced it to ruins; but never ceased and never dared cease to direct it against the German nation, and in all the churches of France the tricolour hangs with a golden cross on its white ground. Every nation extends as far as its power extends. Does not Fascist Italy claim to be the heir to the Roman Empire and, therefore, today the head of the Latin peoples, and tomorrow the proudest son of the Church? And is not the missionary idea of the Russian people world revolution, and has it not its irredentist armies in every country of the world? The principle of nationality is always the same; only the nations vary; part of a whole, they suffer all the processes dictated by life, they come into being and grow, subject to eternal world-laws; they gather in and dispense and hand down, they change and fulfil themselves and pass away, and the traces of their spirit are indelible. When a period is pregnant the world awaits the birth of a new idea. The present time is pregnant; and the world is waiting. There is only one idea that can be brought forth, destined to bring a new order, to give its character to the coming centuries, possibly to the next thousand years. And it will be a German idea.’

  Schaffer continued: ‘I regard it as a sign that in every province of German life there are signs of a change of heart, but only in German life. India and China are fighting—for their national freedom. And what do they announce as their aim? What do the theses of Sun Yat Sen and the Indian Congress mean? What does Gandhi dream of and what does the Chinese student talk about? The self-determination of the nations, a new order on the lines of Western democracy. The Russians speak of a new sense of life and point to the powerful, dazzling, economic plan which is changing the face of a portion of the world. The complete shifting of values, stressing the economic basis of life, may signify to the Russians the dawn of a new era. But America achieved the shift long ago, and is writhing in the wheels of its mechanism, whilst the same ambition which created this mechanism is changing the country of the Soviets into a paradise of iron and concrete, of tractors and boring machines and Americanising its people. I regard it as a sign that today, for the first time, we Germans are no longer contesting the claim of France to be marching at the head of civilised nations, but we are contesting the claims of civilisation to be a redeeming force! That we, the most highly developed industrial nation of the world, the possessors of the greatest number of technical inventions, have begun to attack the foundations of this development, to turn mind against one of its forms. I regard it as a sign that we are daring to think in other than utilitarian terms, to seek for other standards, to replace technical conceptions with metaphysical conceptions, to direct intellectual forces to the sphere of the spirit. All over the world men are racking their brains for a solution. But if there is a solution at all, one thing is certain, no solution can suffice unless it come from the spiritual sphere. If it is possible at all, then it is possible to us to wage the world’s wars, to taste the blood of battle, to pass through that purification which alone gives the right to speak for the whole world. It is not by chance that the capitalist era was made éclatant by German prestige; that it is only in the German sociological structure that you find an era spreading over four centuries, that it is only in German consciousness that Western history is conceived merely as an act of preparation. It is not by chance that not one of us, if he wishes to act responsibly towards himself, can resist the necessity of acting with universal responsibility, that freedom of action has been taken from us; vocation is not a matter of chance, but a command. The world is in a state of unrest and expectation. The world is thrown open before us; let us throw ourselves open to the world.’

  Schaffer was silent. He did not look at Ive. And Ive did not look at him. Ive could not doubt the sincerity of this confession, but this very sincerity led him to assume that Schaffer’s credo was without any actual centre of gravity, or at least without any consciousness of a centre of gravity. He said: ‘”Let us throw ourselves open to the world.” What does that mean but “let us leave the German question open?”’

  He hesitated, then continued: ‘Whatever our task may be, it is essential that first of all we should fight for our existence.’

  Schaffer said: ‘It is essential that first of all we should arrive at a conviction through which our existence is justified. To throw ourselves open to the world means that we must solve the German problem for the sake of the world. I could not call myself a German if I regarded the matter in any other light. And this is the way in which we must solve the German problem, everything points to it—don’t interrupt me—by German socialism. That is by a metaphysical socialism, not like Russian socialism which only embraces a part of reality, and forces men within the bounds of the part—but the whole of reality, with God as the highest reality within it. And this highest reality expresses itself through a law which, in the first place, demands of man an unequivocal attitude towards his fellows, that is, through an ethical injunction, the one which has always raised Judaism above its environment, the one which can raise the German nation to stand alone above its fellows.’

  Ive said: ‘I knew it. And here is the mistake. I am in the extraordinary position in regard to
you of having to defend National Socialism. Merely by its existence it has forced people to recognise a German socialism, if not in principle, at any rate as a possibility. The error lies alone in the overemphasis of the fact that this is not socialism. That is what makes me anxious: the concealment of the knowledge that every form of equalisation—and every socialistic theory, however it may be constructed, must, when applied to mankind, be based on some such principle—is contrary to: the intrinsic German character. The propaganda of the Movement with its slogan of National Socialism, whether it be meant seriously or not, or whether it change according to circumstances or not, could actually be effective anywhere. Even where property is in question, and particularly there, the slogan penetrates without fear, to the upper and lower, middle classes, to the entrepreneur class, even to the manufacturing class. For even in the case of the most radical realisation of the slogan, as things stand today and as they will even more unequivocally stand tomorrow, all that will happen is that a de facto state of affairs will be turned into a de jure state of affairs. For every form of property has long since been bankrupt. But what is the reason that the Movement is forced, forced in order to have success, to avoid even the suggestion of socialism in that class where, although the actual conditions of property are exactly the same and where, if not the most violent and most ardent, certainly the most spontaneous national feelings are to be found—in the country, among the farmers? Because the most spontaneous feeling is not based on intellectual conceptions. Because it requires no ethical injunction to make it what it is. War, murder and insurrection have existed in all times among all peoples; but eventually it was always a question of land. It is at frontiers that the feelings are inflamed which cause a nation to make its stake, and in changes of frontier the course of history can be read. Why is it that since the Destruction of Jerusalem Judaism has been nothing but a theme of history? And why is it that Zionism, the beginning of the Jewish Renaissance, turns to Palestine, the country that is the holy land of Judaism, that since the days of Moses, the first nationalist, has been the promised land, Canaan? The history of Judaism since the Destruction is an intellectual history, it is true, and it is only an intellectual history, and it is fundamentally always the same intellectual history, the history of the preservation of its intellectual content. Actually Judaism has developed in itself all the elements of a nation except one. Judaism has at its service the complete sum of experience in its positive national sense, faith, race, history and culture, from the revelation of its destiny as the chosen people to the missionary idea of the redemption of the world through an ethical injunction; from the struggle for an order to the justification of this order by the transmuting, but in itself immutable, law. So strong is the Jewish conception of nationality that until it was faced with its greatest danger—Liberalism, it was able to do without any State organisation. And it has had to do without any State organisation because the Jewish nation has no country. But one fact is certain. What happened to the Jewish people as such was not merely by chance, and the sources of it were beyond their reach. If there is an ethical injunction which is capable of elevating Judaism in the eyes of the world, it is the law of justice. I know it is an Old Testament law set up at a time when Judaism could not only make demands, but could give guarantees. God, the highest reality, set up this claim for this people and no other. And it was this people and no other which was chosen to fulfil it. I don’t know how the Jews interpret their dispersal—as a punishment or as a trial. But I do know that it is only through the dispersal that the Jewish missionary idea has gained its terrible weight. And this is the mad temptation to which the German nation threatens to succumb today: in its state of despair, deprived of country, its existence imperilled, and conquered at every point except in its essence, to set up a claim for justice! A temptation, because this claim is not urgent in our case. For us justice has never been of the kind that demands from mankind an unconditional attitude towards his fellow-men. If Judaism can excuse itself for having listened to the siren-voice of Liberalism, proclaiming the rights of man, because the voice was so like that of its own prophets, what excuse is there for us? If Judaism succumbed to the dangerous illusion of setting up the law of man instead of the law of God for which it was seeking, how much greater is the danger for us, since it is not our forms which are being attacked, but our very essence. If we are venturing to search not for ideas, but for events, not for ends but for means, in short, not for abstractions, but for the original and essential factors, it is clear that it has never been with a view to equalisation, but to organisation. This power is so strong that even Protestantism, a religious form of democracy, set itself up in the form of an evangelical theocracy. We may take it as a sign that even in the widest public consciousness our whole history has only been considered as a preparation; in the long run none of our desires has had a lasting fulfilment. Perpetual hope goes hand-in-hand with perpetual danger, and the stronger a faith the greater its temptations. Whatever we have accepted, we have always accepted it in our own sense. It is when we speak in strange tongues, expressing accepted ideas, that we are incomprehensible. It is not that we are different, but that we are different and yet want to be as others, which makes us, so it seems to me, incomprehensible, and worse still, gives us the appearance of insincerity. We are struggling for a socialism that in effect is no longer anywhere accepted as socialism. We call ourselves a nation and do not recognise a nation’s perpetual responsibility, since we have no regard for treaties, which though they may have been signed in different circumstances and by governments, which have disappeared, none the less were signed in the name of the nation. We boast of living in the age of Liberalism; we accept its forms, are ready to adopt its institutions, and can anyone deny that we are incapable, under this banner, of attaining that state of equality, at a happy average cultural level, for which the French nation strove, and achieved with complete naturalness. Viewed from this level and taken all in all, our whole standard of life is, indeed, one of barbarism; our literature is a cacography; our discipline, based on the idea of a recruit clicking his heels before his superior officer, is a horror. The discussion that we two are carrying on at this moment is the height of folly, and all we hear on every side, be it shouted or whispered, points to chaos, to the decay of Western civilisation. I think that this should be enough for us, if we only have the courage to draw the conclusions. We declaim against the corruption from the West, from Rome, from the East, but it must surely be deeply rooted in ourselves, since everything we are capable of saying is no more than argumentation, and in any case our polemics are directed against ourselves. We set ourselves against the economic entanglement, which has made us bankrupt, and are not prepared to set ourselves against the intellectual entanglement, which has made us intellectually bankrupt, in spite of the fact that on every side the thin flow of universal literary diarrhoea is proclaimed as the product of the highest culture? We cannot go in for politics because we are not a nation, and we are not a nation because we do not possess the attributes of a nation; one of these attributes, and at this juncture the most important, is the integrity of the land. Of the land, the tangible, solid earth, Dr. Schaffer, with which you as well as I have lost all direct relationship, a relationship which the whole world is trying, not without success, to commercialise out of existence for those who still possess it, a relationship which, in truth, carries with it consequences of greater material, metaphysical and ethical significance than we are capable of imagining. For we live on the pavements and our love of nature, considered practically, can never develop beyond the futile endeavour to milk an ox. Until the integrity of the land has been attained, secured for all time, by whatever means you like, any attempt to proclaim universal responsibility can only be designated as transcendental prostitution! What German history will look like in the future I don’t know; but this I do know, that we must not rest a second, that we must make every effort to be able once more to take our place in history as a nation. It is the land which is
issuing this command, the land weighed down with unfulfilled history, it is the latent, unexhausted strength of the land which is driving us on. We Germans cannot live in disintegration, and wherever Germans live in disintegration, any attempt to obtain arbitrary power by the preservation of individuality has always been doomed to failure. A spiritual Jerusalem might be enough for the Jews, but a spiritual Germany is not enough for the Germans. The strongest German tribe, beyond the frontiers of Germany, the Baltic tribe, lost its power after seven hundred years, when the German Reich lost its power. And the power of the Baltic people was based on the possession of land. Wherever Germans settle in foreign countries they are drawn to the land; and where they have settled in towns they have lost their power more quickly, more absolutely, and have given themselves more quickly and more absolutely to the service of the foreign nation. Bismarck knew what he was about when he demanded the ear and the blade as a symbol of his chancellorship. And we, who possess neither ear nor blade, and never shall, we who live in the disintegration of the towns—shall we not, in God’s name or the devil’s, develop an even stronger sense of the land? Does not the Jew in foreign countries, the Catholic of the Diaspora, feel the more strongly the need of intellectual anchorage? And we in the towns feel the need of anchorage, intellectual, if you like, or spiritual, or moral, in the land. It is not the relationship of man to man which is important for us, but the relationship which he sets up for himself to the land, to the community, which is united to and through the land, no matter in what way. That is the only claim which holds good for us in all circumstances when we speak of the nation. It is a German, not a Jewish claim.’