It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  Ive raised his hand. ‘Don’t interrupt me,’ he said. ‘Whether I am an anti-Semite or not is beside the point. In fact, anti-Semitism is never more than a manifestation of secondary importance, and the fact that it is always regarded by each of the parties involved as the problem of the other, and is attributed to the responsibility of the other, leads to the conclusion that it is not a problem at all, but a not always unequivocal phenomenon which must be left to the wisdom of the State authorities to deal with. It seems to me rather useless, after a long period of suspecting one another for being Jews, now to be railing at each other for being avowed Nazis. It is only confusing the issue. And in the end it is an idle speculation as to whether, biologically considered or otherwise, the freckled son of a Pomeranian inspector is of greater value to the nation than a German Jew of high intellectual capacity. The nation establishes standards, it is true, but how can functions be compared? Whether a man fulfils his function well or ill decides his value. When I said “a Jewish claim,” that was of course a criticism of standard. That was how you understood it and how I meant it. The important thing is that functions should be fulfilled according to the standards set by the nation. What the Jewish claim asserts is that the nation can never be the primary authority; it can never determine our rule of life and its structure, the State: it cannot determine the intellectual content of the State, the law. Judaism has taken advantage of the fact that it possesses no territory; it was able to do without the State and it was obliged to make a stand against authority. But we do possess territory and cannot do without the State nor the authority of the State, and, in no circumstances, is the German will-to-rule, in whatever degree, in whatever form, or in whatever direction it may manifest itself, restricted to the intellectual sphere. It is so, and we do not wish to change it. If there is such a thing for us as universal responsibility we must not repudiate it, because the first thing it demands of us is the sacrifice of our individual power. This responsibility must be with ourselves, based on our abundance, not on some more or less voluntary deficiency. For that would be making a bad virtue of a good necessity. If we examine ourselves as to our possession of extreme possibilities, the momentum is always at both poles.’

  ‘The basis of our life is the land, so that our universality can only be realised imperialistically. Why should we hesitate to express what every one is accusing us of? Nations have their beginnings in the heroic period, the highest they can attain. They come to an end with the abstraction of a world philosophy. If at this moment we believe in a German beginning, we shall act without scruple. We will leave the justification of our actions to life, not to theories about life.’

  Ive ceased speaking. Schaffer in his corner of the room did not move. They did not look at each other. Schaffer got up and broke the spell by pouring out a cup of tea for Ive with the utmost cordiality.

  When Ive left the house in the early hours of the morning, Schaffer accompanied him down the stairs and, laying his hand on his shoulder, asked:

  ‘What is “German”?’

  As he shook hands at parting he asked once more:

  ‘What is “German”?’

  XI

  The battle of Neumünster ended with almost complete victory for the farmers. The town, mainly under pressure from the restaurant proprietors and tradespeople, accepted the farmers’ conditions, the flag was returned—with ceremony—the police-superintendent was pensioned off, and negotiations were set on foot for paying compensation to the injured farmers. The burgomaster, left in the lurch by his town and no less by his party, owing to the commotion caused by his strictly upright conduct, out of favour with his superiors and his inferiors, faced the consequences and resigned his position. The victory produced no unseemly rejoicing among the farmers. Not that they thought it had been too dearly bought, on the contrary. But, with the capitulation of the town, the farmers had lost a symbolic goal.

  It was inevitable that the province in spite of its inherent doggedness, should succumb to the suggestive appeal of the fierce National Socialist propaganda, with its flags, uniforms and route marches, its rough plain-spokenness, and its exaction from every individual of a high degree of personal sacrifice and personal work in the service of the Party. Ive felt that it was necessary to resist this influence. The farmers had the same interest as the National Socialists in destroying the System, but Ive did not want to be subverted into changing his view that, in the long run, it was absolutely necessary for the farmers to make a stand against National Socialism; and he could not see what the farmers would gain by having to fight against what would probably be a very hard system instead of against a soft one. True, he anticipated that the stronger opposition would act as a stronger incentive, but in the end the whole thing was a question of time, and the Movement could not afford to lose time. So he faced the bitter truth that some means had to be found to oppose not only the System but the Movement which was showing itself to be the System’s strongest opponent. Unwillingly Ive sought for a compromise; he realised that when it was no longer merely a question of the strength of the Farmers’ Movement—and, as things now were, it was impossible to rely on that—it would almost certainly be a losing game. He was accustomed to see things as clear-cut issues, and the thought that victory was not certain had an oppressing and paralysing effect on him. This reduced his zeal for his negotiations in the town, especially as he was in the position of having nothing to offer but everything to ask. He met with a disappointing reception everywhere, and it was no comfort to him that the farmers’ leaders who had been sent to South, West, and Central Germany were in the same plight. There were ready listeners enough, but their ears had been attuned again and again to other voices, amongst which the voice of reason, that is of complete perplexity, had a prominent place. Ive felt as though he were slithering through soap suds. The ground he trod, the hands he shook, the words he heard were slippery and unfriendly. When he was not dashing his head against trees overgrown with the ivy of smooth phrases in the forest of self-interest, he was getting entangled in thickets of wordy, ineffectual discussion in the intellectual undergrowth of the town. Even in the most barren soil ideas grew in rank profusion, throwing out strange, alluring blossoms, which filled the paths with their overpowering scents, and twisted themselves into a variegated wreath that could serve no better purpose in the end than to be laid in the grave of a dead hope. The climate of the town seemed to encourage a wild and terrific fertility; unsuspected thoughts took form, displaying at first a strength which seemed capable of lifting the whole world off its hinges, only to quail before the task of drawing a cork from a bottle. The simple recognition of the fact that the world was not sick but drunk gave rise to the highest hopes, flung out a vast abundance of deductions, each one of which, when carried to its logical conclusion, led to the indisputable fact that the world was not sick but drunk.

  Ive was lost in this enchanted garden which, after all, he had only entered reluctantly; it was his reluctance which led him astray. He saw so much serious endeavour, so much devout confidence, that he did not dare think that the whole struggling effort was for nothing; he gave heed to wrinkled brows and assurances, which might be true or false, that events were uncontrollable; that, so far as the ultimate success of their cause was concerned, this hardly mattered so long as they had courage—and they had courage. But the fact that they imposed no obligations, that they inspired no virtues, that they laid down no specific laws enjoining a definite and immutable attitude, made them ineffectual. Many of the ideas were in themselves rigid, but they displayed tolerance towards those who asserted that it was possible to be a Communist and have a banking account, or to be a Jew or a police-sergeant and at the same time an adherent of National Socialism. Since the ideas appeared to be self-sufficient, the position one took up hardly mattered. Nothing much really seemed to matter. Ive realised this in regard to himself. Like nearly all those with whom he was living now, he was striving for a rigid scheme, for a more and more exclusive organisation, which wo
uld keep every individual at his post, but he was also in favour of the utmost personal freedom. Since he could only think in alternatives, he professed himself on the opposite side of what he was really aiming at, simply because his aim had not yet presented itself in an acceptable form. He could not make up his mind to look for some useful and remunerative occupation. Schaffer had offered to give him introductions— because he was certain that he would only be able to work half-heartedly. He did not join Hinnerk’s troop, because he felt himself too much of a soldier to be that kind of a soldier. He joined no party, because even where there were prospects of being more useful to his farmers, he would not be working for his farmers alone. A discontented creature, born of discontented times, he rushed from one problematic theory to another, and here too he had to be on his guard against letting his problematic theory assume the nature of a problem. The complete shattering of the general line of thought, the disintegration of the daily growing army of people, who, flung down from their positions of security, huddled together in masses, whose similarity of party-label could deceive no one as to their lack of cohesion—the colour of this picture, a deadly grey generated from the vibrating whirlpool of black and white; all this led Ive to place the final denouement in a remoter and remoter future, while the moment of disruption seemed to approach nearer and nearer.

  The more Ive lost touch with the farmers the more difficult he found it to orientate himself in any particular direction. His life and his actions were all makeshifts. On all sides people talked of values—never more—and yet no values were respected. Everything he encountered lent itself to hundreds of interpretations, with the result that it had no meaning at all. He realised to the full how justified was the condescending reproach made against him and his like by wise and sober people with enlightened ideas: that it was a sign of immaturity to construct a valid and durable vision of the world out of the imponderabilities and intangibilities for which he was searching, and which he was turning to account while still barely convinced that he had found them —a sign, so to speak, of a fixation in puberty. Ive was even more severe with himself, repeatedly anathematising all his furious, and occasionally futile, attempts to arrive at a clear and well-founded point of view; at the same time contesting with the wise and sober people the possibility, on their side, of constructing round the dried-up axle-tree of their statistics the glorious structure within whose walls it would alone be possible to live to any purpose. It is true no one denied the great, the infinite synthesis, and it must, therefore, be possible from every point of view to reach it, to arrive at the laws of totality. It was only a question of the way, as people were always fraternally assuring each other, with the result that, in the privacy of his chamber, each one felt that he was the saviour, only to be laughed to scorn when he announced his claim. The fact was that great figures were no longer tolerated. Even the most despised epochs of history were richer than this period in great figures, men around whom the battle raged, who personified a world, for good or ill, lighthouses of the intellectual voyage, ironclad breasts, in whom the blood of their era seethed and boiled, stern minds who, whether in cruel scorn or in deadly earnest acted, even in their decline, as the motive-forces of reality—figures who could be likened to machines roaring at full capacity: but in these days machines could be likened to nothing but themselves. Yet in the world-war, so it was said, flung together by machines and material, men experienced once again the dawn of an era, the passionate certainty of a new destiny. And twelve years after its end the world-war survived in thousands of tons of printed papers, in monuments erected to the memory of millions of unknown soldiers, in the solemn declarations of a hundred and twenty-five black-coated prime ministers, whom nobody took seriously; whilst in the streets of the town brutal guerilla warfare raged, warfare between those who, though fundamentally in agreement, were engaged in a mutual massacre. No great world figure was taken to the scaffold or led out to be shot: because there were no great figures worth martyrdom—who could deny it? Great figures might have ignited the pulverised mass of the world, might have set the gaseous vapours, which hung heavily over the countries, ablaze, to burst in tearing explosions—figures, yes, but not the ghosts and masks which glided unobtrusively through the streets, heroes of the Ufa news-reel, or to be heard from 3.30 to 4.15 on wave-length 1634.9.

  To Ive his environment seemed so unreal, he himself seemed so unreal, that often he found himself standing in front of his mirror at midnight in astonishment, feeling his face and his limbs, terrified by the certainty that he really was still there, flesh and muscles, bones and sinews, blood and brain, and not a shadow, although he looked rather blue, not a ghost that would fade away, although he felt like one. In his mind rose memories of moments at the front when, after days and weeks of painful preparation, suddenly the enemy sprang up from the deserted battlefield, men came into view out of the clouds of gas, out of the shadows of the convulsed earth—terrible moments in which all consciousness of time was destroyed, when shattering currents surged through the tensed body, shaking it from head to foot with powerful excitement, when the heart thundered against its walls, until burning expectation was quelled into petrifying reality. He sought for a reflection of that experience in the streets of the town. He sought friend or foe—no matter which—so long as it was a piece of living reality on which his fluttering passion could break and take form, a personality in the midst of the carnival procession of busy, noisy modern men and women, pale underground-railway faces, repressed emotions and fleshless thoughts—an image, arresting, rising up out of the grey town, a guide, silent and challenging, heroic, reassuring by its presence—a human being. He felt, indeed, that this desire was too personal; he asked himself whether he was not trying to escape, whether this was not a sign of treachery, of failure at the test, but he was at such a pitch that he could not face the answer.

  When he carried his mind back to the time of his arrest, nothing stood out clearly except the picture of Claus Heim, unbending, in the dim light of his bare cell, and that of a slender figure lying on the ground in the dirty dark street, with a rubber truncheon whirling threateningly over it. Ive did not know who the girl was, but Pareigat had made enquiries and had found her. He came to Ive and told him that she would like him to go and see her. The girl—Ive called her Helene because, as Pareigat said, he saw her in every woman he met—lived in an attic studio with a painter. Helene, who was nearly thirty, came of a well-to-do family. Her father, a distinguished scholar, a pupil of Haeckel and a friend of Ostwald, had died young. Her mother, unequal to managing the family estate, had lost everything except a little house in the country. At sixteen Helene ran away. She eloped with a young man two years older than herself, whom she married. Later on Ive saw a photograph of Helene in her infancy which moved him greatly. She was two years old and was squatting on a chamber-pot—a favourite photographic pose for children in those days, and not only in those days—but she was not squatting as children of that age usually do on such occasions, smiling contentedly in anticipation of fulfilling the salutary function. She was eager, bending forward, her baby forehead puckered, with a dangerous, alert seriousness, obviously determined not to be content with the pose, but actually to do what the photographer certainly was not expecting her to do. This was a child who tolerated no kind of deception, and one could picture her tearing about the garden, long-legged and nimble, filling the house with rapid movement and impatient cries; when she loved, really loving, and when she hated, hating with a wild finality of hatred. The narrow span between hope and danger in which every really young life struggles along, threatened in her case to be snapped at the slightest test. If it be true that all the possibilities of life lie between the two extremes of crime and sanctity, in her case they were only at the poles. She had none of the small secret pleasure in innocent games, in half-dreams, half-experiments. For her a dream was a complete reality, or reality a complete dream, and only in full development could she find security and sanctuary.

  Undou
btedly it was Helene who drove her playmate to leave the narrow confines of a garden with her, tore the laggard from his home with stinging words, demanding absolute courage when his half-bold boyish passion kept him hesitant; just as it was she who ended the relationship as soon as she realised it had become untenable.

  She was expecting a child by the man whom she could no longer love, whom she could no longer respect, from whom she felt estranged; bound to him only by a memory, which she accepted and acknowledged, but no longer bound by the ardent force which had created the child that was growing within her. So she got rid of it. She did not put herself into the hands of a doctor. In black despair, though fully aware of what she was doing, she went to a woman, whose action, denuded of the hygienic magic of a professional operation, could in no way gloss over the enormity of the crime. She willingly exposed herself to the danger of death, with the desire to destroy in herself something more than the child. In token of this destruction, yielding to a pitiless anarchy, she drove herself on; an insatiable empiricist, content in the strong conviction that she could not fall, but always submitting this conviction to fresh tests of strength; sullied, but purified by excess of pain; she never gave way and could not tolerate the thought of giving way; armed with an unquenchable pride, she set about living where she could live independently. Thus she was never corruptible, embarrassingly exacting, searching beyond and through every circumstance, never forgetting for a moment, in misery or in triumph, that somewhere at her command the complete, the only and the real task was waiting for her. After a wild period of unrest, she found it; she met the painter.