It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  From the dregs of the gutter whose faces, distorted with the crazy fear of brutality, bore witness and gave warning, the eye turned to the bleeding, martyred Christ upon the Cross. But this was not the figure of a patient sufferer, the only one that the faithful seemed able to tolerate now, not the gentle, pale countenance that hangs over the poor-boxes in the church, or gazes in mild protest from the embroidered hangings of the altars, not that anaemic Saviour who, if he were to come to earth again now, would not be led before any high tribunal, before a Pontius Pilate, but before Dr. Sauerbogen, Officer of Health; would not be condemned to death on the cross, but would be housed for life in the Buch Sanatorium. This was the terrible face of one in the last torturing agony, who, with full understanding of the world, and full knowledge of the will of God, realises that more is being rent in him than muscles and sinews, full of an even deeper pain than that which is forcing open his dying eyes, and drawing blood and sweat in viscous drops from his greenish, sagging skin.

  Ive stood in front of this picture, struck dumb as in the breathless interval between lightning flash and thunderclap. Once again it was not so much the power of the picture which put him on the defensive, but the seemingly irresistible urge which had led to just this final sublimation. To Pareigat it seemed quite natural. To him it was a confirmation of his own intellectual processes and, whether it was the experience of objective ‘being’ which led through ontology to this result, or whether it was the experience of the devil through the unruly flesh—it was only a difference of medium; but Ive felt that he did not possess a single theory which seemed to fit in with this. Therefore he shrank from the sudden solution, which denoted a retrogression for him and, even if this retrogression was a new beginning, it was one which demanded a new situation. This situation had yet to be created, and it was only possible to create it against the opposition not only of the historically founded world, but also against the opposition of the Church, itself historically founded in this world. Not that the task—and that was his first consideration—would have taxed him too greatly, but it extended over too great an expanse of time for him and he had not a moment to spare. He realised vaguely that this was no valid reason for shirking; he knew that this solution, even though it had presented itself as the only answer to the most powerful spiritual demand, could at this moment be no more than a personal solution and that his shrinking from a personal solution, for the very reason that it was so firmly rooted in his character, was eventually of a strongly egotistical nature, and arose from an arrogance which would break down under this solution—but this arrogance was his most characteristic strength. He knew, too, that, even though his ears might be open to every appeal, they could not listen to this appeal, which was resounding so loudly through his being, because its voice was already cracked; he knew that he could not follow this challenge, because he bore within him the heritage of a perpetual protest, which, even when subjugated to the laws of the ordering power, had never forgotten its own unfulfilled, all-embracing claim to recognition, and was now, after all the assaults, preparing itself for the last assault, he knew that the one thing that would be shirking would be to repudiate his obligations towards this heritage. He realised this vaguely, and he was filled with a fantastic fear that, since the violence of the artistic creed demanded of him a clear ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ his ‘No’ would make a deep gulf between him and the noble, vitalising delight in a newly-born emotion which was fuller and purer than any he had ever experienced. So, spurred on by dreams of an intimate union, he tried to make a sacrifice of his ‘No’ and to avoid the shame of only being able to offer a vague, stammering justification of it; tried to enter the world of his friends, to enrich himself and them and at last to find the bridge which meant not only a personal union but also—far beneath the surface of visible endeavour, though on this plane indeed the results were clear and beneficent—a rapprochement between the opposing kingdoms. This was all the easier for him since Helene and the painter, themselves dynamic characters like Ive, like him too were standing in the light of a new adventure, so that the field which but now they had seen swathed in darkness was illumined by the dazzling beacons of an almost inexhaustible number of possibilities, every one of which had to be explored because every one promised to provide an essential part of fulfilment. Thus it seemed to Ive that it could not matter from what base the attack was launched, provided he was able to enter upon it armed with the weapons of his own reservations. In actual fact, they had very much in common. When their paths seemed about to diverge they forced themselves, in bitter discussions lasting all through the night, to formulate their aims precisely, weighing every admission and rejection and, if Ive followed his friends, it was not that their influence was so strong that he was obliged to follow them, but because he felt he could no longer do without the benison of their austere strength. Daily he was forced to find himself anew; he was so much enriched that he sometimes discovered himself indulging in the cold, malignant delight of the growing certainty that at last he would be able to measure swords with them, and he was horrified at the treachery that lurks, like an animal ready to spring, in every surrender that is not spontaneous. But to scare away this enemy he needed the presence of Helene more and more, and he gradually found himself in an entanglement which he could not bring himself to give up for fear of what he might lose besides. For the one means of relieving oneself of a burden, the confessional, which was open to the artist, was not open to him. Nor was it open to Helene.

  On the day that Ive had seen Helene sitting so depressed in front of her easel, the Church had refused to receive her and to allow her to make her first Communion. It was she who had removed the sheltering glass case from the artist, and had thus prepared him for his abundant and fruitful development; with the flame of her pure will she had melted down their common stock of opinions and conceptions to the indestructible core of a faith which had suddenly revealed itself to their delighted perceptions as the one all-embracing faith—Catholicism. Yet on her the door was to be closed, the door to which she had found the way for herself and the painter. For him, a baptized Catholic, the painful period of preparation, into which she had thrown herself with wholehearted devotion, could be crowned by the simple act of confession; the simple act asked of her was to renounce the reward of the task in the fulfilment of which she had seen the whole meaning of her life.

  At the last moment the barrier had been raised; half an hour before her reception, the fact that she had almost forgotten, and from which she had mercilessly tried to purge herself—her previous marriage and divorce—stood as an obstacle in her path. Her marriage to the painter was not valid according to the strict law of the Church. She respected the law of the Church, how could she have done otherwise?

  Ive could not understand. He could not understand the strange submission with which she accepted that which, in one way or another, would destroy her.

  She had found her way alone; no priest had guided her; no means of grace had given her strength; no word of intercession had been said for her. And the reply of the Church was: non possumus. The reply came through the lips of a young chaplain, a smiling boy, who confronted her and defended the glorious and powerful structure in which no rifts could be made; and Helene acknowledged this. Her first marriage was no longer valid to her, but in the eyes of the Church it was. She had never been married in a church, but once in its history the Church had given way and recognised marriage by the law of nature as marriage, and in the result this seeming inconsistency had tightened the bonds, enlarged its sphere, and lent a greater invisible strength to its enveloping power; and Helene acknowledged this. Her Catholicism was of an essentially different character from the musty, old women’s consolation preached from the pulpits, of an entirely different character, too, from that of all the worldly-wise associations, congregations, guilds and parties, and of a different character again from that of enlightened youth who began by enthusiastic aspirations and demands for reform, then, mildly subjecting itself to discip
line and guidance, settled down to the task of throwing new light upon the liturgy. Hers was a militant Catholicism, imposing rigid rules upon herself, and the world almost medieval in its uncompromising exactions, subjecting every smallest action to its binding laws, a lonely individual Catholicism, whose eager questioning the priests could only counter with dogma from which they derived authority for their prohibitions or reassurances; since they were rendered somewhat helpless by this onslaught of burning, stormy faith, before which Benedictine, Jesuit, and most certainly modern methods, arguments and definitions had to give way. Yet it was a faith which undoubtedly arose from a sincere need intolerant of any substitute. Indeed, so great was this need that Helene felt she could not bear to be excluded from participation in the sacraments. Once she had realised the significance of the Rule, which seemed to her to be the only one conceivable and indeed essential, she wanted to take a full share in it, to be, as it were, at the focal point of the rays, in the midst of the heavenly fire, in absolute enjoyment of the daily, eternal miracle of transubstantiation, which became possible and endurable only through this Rule. For her the Church was no longer a sanctuary but the holy land of her fathers, exclusion from which meant the Ahasuerian torment of banishment, which sees its love flung into the Void. Thus she could only regard as a horror every form of Christian culture, which out of the single phenomenon of the Reformation established a permanent act of apostasy, tearing the living flesh from the indivisible Church; by its attack on the whole sanctity of the altar menaced the very foundations of the Rule, and confined all the deeper emotions of faith within the frigid limitations of literal expositions, and so in its very cradle nourished the serpents which were later to poison the whole world with their venom. She could only regard as an abomination that cold, intellectual quibbling, which spreads itself in admiration of the wonderful power, organised to the very last pillar, without completely acknowledging it, but rather looking down with smiling condescension from the high watch-tower of modern objectivity, claiming to be more popish than the Pope. She regarded as an offence that stupid narrow-mindedness which has established itself within the Church itself, and has gradually filled the dome to its highest arches with its befogging vapours.

  To Ive it seemed that the danger Helene was running was of becoming a horror, an abomination and an offence to herself. For, whatever she might do, the results counteracted each other; the mere possibility of being admitted to the sacraments not only separated her from her husband, but must of necessity destroy the sacred impulse which had driven her to knock at the door of the Church asking admittance for him as well as for herself, must, by its destruction of her work, at the same time destroy the Catholic spirit of her marriage. The priests whom she visited, who came smiling to the studio—and looked at the painter’s pictures in silence—probably realised this with sympathetic regret, and anxious to console, directed Helene to the infinite mercy of Heaven, since the Church could not intercede for her, assigning to her the task, already self-appointed, of carrying the torch of her faith into the outer darkness and handing it on to those who sought the guidance of her light. The strength for this she was to find in prayer.

  Helene, whose daily life was made up of the soul-destroying hack work, with which she had burdened herself in order to provide the bare necessities of life, managed to find time in a day in which every minute had its task, between art-dealers and film-studios, between cooking and washing and typing, to visit the bare parish church which stood in the ugly quarter of the town surrounded by grey houses with crumbling facades and poverty-stricken cellars and shops. Ive frequently went with her. There she prostrated herself, rather than knelt, on the cold and dirty stone floor, while Ive stood behind her. At first he was oppressed by the almost audible silence, and by shame at having only hypocritically dipped his fingers in the holy water. Then he was overcome by warm, sorrowful sympathy for the kneeling girl, and finally with eyes fixed in concentrated reasoning with himself he would fall into an empty trance.

  He examined himself and found that nothing that had the remotest resemblance to devotion could move him. He forced himself to pray, and was alarmed at the meaningless repetition of a formula which, in spite of the sonorous cadence of the words, touched no chord in him. He tortured himself with contemplation of the Catholic Rule, which he could appreciate intellectually, and the objections to which could so easily be explained away, and which could remove the picture of the lacerated world to a dazzling perspective; and yet he felt that almost before he was aware of them, the refreshing waters had dispersed and anything that reached him only dropped into emptiness. No power seized him and forced him to his knees on the stone flags, no divine presence made him bow his head. The fear grew in him that he was an outcast, that the sense of holiness, all religious feelings were withered in him and that, therefore, his search for the meaning of things was merely a cowardly flight from reality, from the persistent demands of everyday; that, therefore he had no right to any other creed than that which the canaille daily spewed out in stinking spurts. But he was saved by the conviction that he was capable of fulfilling his pledge; that other bells rang in his ears with a message of certain hope; that there was in him the vision of another kingdom, pointing the way and importuning for fulfilment. And he told himself, so long as the vision continued to drive him forward to prostrate himself in the dust, as Helene did in the fervour of her faith, for him could only be the outward and visible sign that he was beginning to yield to a terrible mistake. He was almost pleased that the net of temptation was so widely meshed; that it lacked the final appeal that sets the heart aflame. He had heard this appeal in the past; it had burnt its way into his heart when he was on sentry-duty in the war; in the narrow streets of the Ruhr district it had sounded above the shrill note of the clarion; it had come to him from the farms of the Marsh and from the cellars of the town. But now he could hear nothing but the murmur of prayer, the sound of which filled him with shame, as though he had intruded into another’s quiet and private sanctuary. But he said nothing of all this to Helene as yet, and when they stepped out of the dim nave of the church into the; bright light of the square he did not dare to look at her.

  XII

  The attitude of the public towards the painter showed plainly that Communism had become the fashion. The chief characteristic of the élite among the agitated elements in the town—referred to by the newspapers as the intelligentsia— was their capacity to accept any theory which had any bearing on their own particular activities, even if it was directed against themselves—which, of course, destroyed its original purpose. But they were incapable of accepting any point of view based on hypotheses alien to their own conceptions; indeed, they could hardly understand it so they ignored it. They ignored it even in the departments of life on which they depended for their existence: the powerful labour organisation of the town remained anonymous; the neighbouring country district, which catered for the town, remained anonymous, its principle of life an equation made up of unknown quantities. Indeed, it might often have been supposed that the town actually consisted of nothing but the Movement, that it had neither tradition nor any permanent cultural standard applicable to the present day. On the other hand, it seemed probable that it had a future of abundant promise, and that in its function, at any rate, it was completely independent of the aspirations of Klein-Dittersbach bei Bohlau. But when these aspirations began to be fomented, and their vile odours assailed the nostrils of the town, and were visibly smouldering within its borders, the town became transformed, as it were, into a great fortress of mourning against which the lamentations resounded hideously, whilst the only qualified spiritual guardians, as helpless as though confronted by a convulsion of nature, deserted their posts until the storm seemed to have abated, and then climbed up happily again to their old vantage points, and continued in the same old strain— a triumph of vitality, if nothing else.

  The élite of the town was very modern, but the town itself was by no means modern, merely old and ug
ly and traditionally sound, like a mighty building of blackened grey stone, within which there was an activity as incessant as the electric current in the illuminated sign attached to its facade. Every one could see the illuminated sign; and the widespread sooty-red glow in the sky, shining over the centre of the town at night, might well make men’s hearts swell with pride. But it required a very special incentive to make them penetrate into the hard and dusty activity within the building—for instance, to provide the symphony of self adulation with an industrious, rumbling bass. Indeed, it seemed as though some acquaintance with events beneath the surface was actually indispensable. It served, so to speak, as the fundamental and natural basis for their ideas, provided the material for dealing with social, economic and technical problems—indeed, by degrees the value of a thesis came to depend upon the quantity of material in it. A reporting style became the artistic ambition of every professional writer. Bare facts were as far as possible to speak for themselves. Thus the opinion of the man in the street was worth probing. The mere act of visiting a goods station, a market-place or a public-house provided their simple minds with a gratifying fund of new ideas. Reporters of every degree, up to members of the Academy of Poetry, found that they could learn about life, in its depths and heights, in a conveniently concentrated form by visiting the police courts, or by spending half an hour at a Labour Exchange, in an iron foundry or a doss-house; and they never forgot in the midst of their stylised prose from time to time to break into the idiom of the people, not so much with the idea of giving local colour, as in order to demonstrate that they actually had penetrated into the quarters of misery and grinding toil, excursions which undoubtedly bore the character of somewhat dangerous sallies. It was absolutely necessary to pay several visits to the district behind the police court in order to be able to talk about things at all, and the exultant satisfaction of having done their duty amply compensated for the painful shame they felt, after spending a gay evening in full regalia, at a chance encounter with the sinister tin-can battalions of labour. These useful exertions produced a comfortable atmosphere of tolerance towards every kind of social conviction. There was no circle in which Radicalism gave offence; it even guaranteed a modest livelihood; it had become a social quality, almost a necessity, and some well-known Communist or another was always to be met in the most exclusive salons, provided that his red was not too deep-dyed, and was displayed in conjunction with dirty fingernails. Nevertheless, there were many indications that the emblem of the hammer and sickle would soon be outshone by the newly rising Swastika. For, when all was said and done, the resonance of revolutionary declamations was due merely to the general readiness to be disconcerted by no form of truth, and this praiseworthy tendency in no wise meant that one need suppress a slight yawn when listening to the fearless exposition of stale facts or the determined demonstration of rather worn-out arguments; nor did it mean that the reaction to biting criticisms of social injustices in bourgeois society, or to gloomy prophecies delivered with noble earnestness need be anything more than a gentle and, on the whole, not unpleasant titillation. Thus even the unveiled threat of sometime or another abolishing private property no longer held any terror, for everyone knew that capitalism itself was slowly but surely accomplishing this task, and even the bold cry: ‘First fill your bellies and then moralise,’ did not so much arouse interest as the proclamation of an amazing new doctrine, but gained its sensational importance from the crude and brutal expression of what was common knowledge, and from the uncertainty as to who exactly it was who was going to be fleeced.