It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  But the amazing progress of the National Socialists was attended with much greater excitement. In this there was nothing plain and straightforward, nothing that could be taken for granted; behind every word and every gesture lay a wide field for conjecture, and lurking behind its melodramatic presentation there might just as easily be the warm breath of a newly dawning world, as the cold calculations of beneficent iconoclasts; in any case, there was probably a new attraction in being able to introduce, instead of a youth in horn-rimmed spectacles from Hungary, Poland or Romania, a real live Feme murderer; and if previously ambitions had been centred in not being outdone by anyone in the subtleties of social conscience, the competition now was as to who could declare with justice that his was the truly nationalist point of view.

  When the rumour spread that the painter had broken away from the Communists, the obvious assumption was, and why not, that he had become a nationalist, and nothing could have given more pain than the news that his defection was not of this order. There was nothing to do but to shrug their shoulders regretfully over the fall of this eccentric and drop the subject.

  The painter had suddenly lost his market; not that there was any visible change in his pictures—he had never exhibited his religious subjects—but it was enough to have heard the rumour that the painter had given voice to opinions remote from every bourgeois standard, for him and his art to be considered completely outside the pale. For no matter what political colour the bourgeoisie might assume, they were still the bourgeoisie and remained susceptible to any intellectual arrogance which regarded them as a questionable phenomenon. Any attempt to establish a hierarchical rule of life was bound to rouse their bitterness, for, in that event, what would become, if you please, of Mr. Meyer, third attorney of the Central Assizes? But the Church had long since renounced her high position of task-mistress, and when she considered herself compelled to pay tribute to any form of modernity, it went very hard with her. The tame mechanical mind, the product of Benedictine teaching, seemed to be the utmost the Church could tolerate. Squeezed in between the forces of the secularised world, she had had to surrender her right to take the first step in any department, although she seldom failed to be second in the field.

  Thus the painter found himself completely isolated in an almost hopeless struggle for existence. Ive observed this with a bitterness which sometimes made him regret that his friend had made such an abrupt and irreparable break with his former associates. Certainly, with the general and rapid deterioration of economic conditions, the prospects for art in any direction were meagre. It was this complete break-up of all professional organisation that made Ive feel that it would be a good thing to be at least in some active correlation to one of the rebel groups, whatever the future outcome might be. He had come more and more to despise political theories—and politics after all had become the articulate expression of life. He had no objection on principle, therefore, against an attempt—a temptation which often presented itself to him—to come to terms with Communism, or with any other form of revolt, if such a step had seemed to offer any immediate, or even more distant, prospect of good results. But his encounters with, the more or less approved representatives of the Communist camp were discouraging. He met with friendliness, and it would have been easy to be as thick as thieves. He would have been glad enough of this had it seemed worth while; but the one thing that would have served his purpose was absent: decisive action even in their own affairs, and in the end it made no difference whether he went to Hugenberg or Münzenberg; all they could tell him could have been found in a leading article, and was just about as effective.

  ‘All is not gold that looks like shit,’ said Hinnerk, to whom Ive confided his troubles. ‘You’re always putting the saddle on the wrong horse,’ he said, ‘why don’t you join up with us?’

  ‘With the Nazis?’ asked Ive uncomfortably.

  ‘With the proletariat,’ said Hinnerk, ‘the class-conscious proletariat.’

  ‘Since when have you been a Communist, then?’ asked Ive.

  ‘For a long time,’ said Hinnerk, ‘actually since the Party was founded. Didn’t you know?’

  No. Ive hadn’t known—he opened his eyes wide. ‘Damn it all, on which side will you be, then, if it comes to fighting?’ he asked.

  ‘On the opposite side to the police,’ said Hinnerk. ‘But seriously, if anything is to be decided, it will not be in the Kurfürstendamm, and it doesn’t matter which side you fight on so long as you are on the battlefield at all.’

  ‘Oh, Hinnerk,’ said Ive, ‘is it really as simple as all that?’

  ‘Join up with us,’ said Hinnerk, pushing Ive in front of him. ‘I knew at once that you’d come to no good when I saw you joining the fountain-pen brigade. You’re so blinded with problems you can’t see the simplest things. You’ve become too critical to be able to make a clear-cut decision. But, damn you, haven’t you been playing the clown long enough? And now you’re acting the tragedian as well, going around as crestfallen as a rabbit that can’t find its hole. You must know whether you belong to the bourgeoisie or to the brigade of youth; all your scruples are stuff and nonsense.’

  ‘You forget,’ said Ive gently, ‘that I have not lost my hole, that my brigade is an old and eternal brigade, that I have thrown in my lot with the farmers, that I have no tiling to lose, but everything to find.’

  ‘Come,’ said Hinnerk, ‘all respect to your farmers, but you can’t keep manoeuvring about in the no-man’s-land between the lines, and not a soul knowing which side you belong to. I’ll tell you what is the essential thing: to collect together all the brigades of youth from every camp—and, if there are a few broken heads from time to time, that’s nothing among friends—and, with the united battalions, to drive the bankrupt cut-throats of big business and finance to the devil together with their hangers-on, the corrupt gang of profiteers and lickspittles, and then to set up the one decent law of comradeship. That’s the essential thing; all the rest, my boy, will follow naturally. And you can call that socialism or nationalism, I don’t care a damn which—’

  ‘And win victories over France with the Red Army, and conquer Poland with the White Army. I know,’ said Ive. ‘And make a treaty with Russia and Italy. I know. Just see if that isn’t what happens in a twinkling. Oh, Hinnerk, Napoleon wasn’t such a bad fellow, was he, but stupid, stupid; can’t we make a better job of it?’

  ‘All right,’ said Hinnerk. ‘You talk as though you were already one of Ullstein’s editors. You see if they don’t give you a job on the Green Post. We can’t all be as clever as you.’

  ‘And we can’t all begin kicking up hell and singing the International as though that were the only way to be a nationalist.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Hinnerk, standing still and seizing Ive by the shoulders. ‘Heavens, man, I’d like to give you a good shaking. . .’

  ‘The town is doing that for me all right,’ said Ive despondently, ‘and I only hope you are right. It really does look as though everything that I was doing here was sheer waste. When I weigh things up, the balance may be a little in my own favour, but that’s all. It strikes me we are all marking time a bit—you as well, my dear fellow—and if that isn’t enough to make one weep, it’s enough to make one sick; and I have a great desire to land you one in the jaw, perhaps I should feel better then.’

  ‘Always on the wrong horse,’ said Hinnerk, distressed. ‘Come with me, we’ve got a trial on today. Do you know Farmer Hellwig?’ he asked. ‘He’s been kicking up hell, and enjoying it. He is working for the Communist Farmers’ Union now, and perhaps he can tell you more than such a mental acrobat, or such a low-down idiot as I am.’

  ‘What did you say—a trial?’

  ‘Yes—a trial by the unemployed. Of the System. We often do it. There will be a few death sentences again,’ said Hinnerk, delighted, paying no heed to Ive’s objection that it seemed to him a bit premature.

  Hinnerk strode along beside him laughing and talking, fair, tall and strong. He mov
ed powerfully and easily in his green woollen pull-over, and Ive in his shoddy town clothes, all of them shabby by now, conscious of his own odour of dust, sweat and fatigue, was filled with envy. The town did not seem able to touch Hinnerk. Fundamentally he remained always the same. Only his voice had become rather hoarse from calling his fresh rolls or whatever he happened to be selling. Ive could well believe of this comrade, who was always true to himself and every one else, that he would always be able to hold his own with the forces of the age, simply by adapting himself to them without a trace of intellectual anaemia, and without for a moment forfeiting any essential part of his own personality; whereas Ive who, after all, had the same end in view, perpetually had the feeling that the pavement was slipping from under his feet.

  ‘One wouldn’t mind being a horse-thief with you,’ Ive had said to Hinnerk once.

  And he had replied: ‘Not horses, motor cars.’

  And Ive did not doubt that one day he would say: ‘Not motor cars, aeroplanes!’

  Since the times could do him no harm, he always moved with the times, and his strength lay in the fact that he was always unreservedly ready to do what the immediate moment demanded of him, and indeed it always turned out that the demand of the immediate moment remained the same, changing only in its outward form. Hinnerk’s political opinions were of the most primitive order imaginable, but he had political opinions. Ive had none, but talked bosh, as Hinnerk said, and Ive wondered what possible justification there was for his own arrogance towards his friend. When Hinnerk said ‘class-conscious,’ he no doubt meant the pride of belonging somewhere, and he probably didn’t care where he belonged; he might just as well have said ‘race-conscious.’ In any case, he believed undeviatingly in the great federation of good fellows and he could as easily have been the leader of a Russian workers’ shock brigade as a member of the Fascist militia; he could as well have been the captain of an English Rugby team as an S.A. man in Wedding. There was a wide field for him and his like; he would have been at home anywhere except perhaps in the League for the Rights of Man. Ive did not know where he came from or what his circumstances had been. Hinnerk never mentioned the subject, certainly not because it embarrassed him, but because he attached no importance to it; he was here, and wherever he went he was sure to leave traces of his activities behind him. Further, there was no doubt that he was always ready to take action against all the legal forces of the world, but never against the laws of comradeship, so he could never go wrong, for Hinnerk was never guilty of treachery. If he was ready now to greet the troops of young unemployed men outside the hall in the centre of the town with a hearty ‘Red Front!’ or the Storm Troopers in the North with a ‘Heil!’ the thought was, and always would be, absurd that he could ever be acting as a spy. In fact, though the men came from different quarters they were all of the same brand, and the hatred between them was that of brothers at enmity whose actions, inspired by similar feelings, arc hot, unmerciful, and inevitable, but have none of the alien feelings that make hatred cold and unquenchable. Hinnerk moved among them with an unconcerned assuredness, and Ive’s conscience pricked him sorely; he felt suspicious of himself, not just out of place. Actually I am a dirty dog, he thought, not to act as Hinnerk does. And when he had thus castigated himself he could reassure himself with the thought that all the possibilities of choice were still open to him, so long as no one thing had any impelling influence on him, and until then he must regard the disgraceful condition of freewill which he had naively substituted for time, as an annealing test.

  Farmer Hellwig, to whom Hinnerk introduced him, came from the Hanover district. He was a youngish man of medium height with a thin, bronzed face and expectant, eager eyes. Ive remembered that he had met him before in connection with the formation of the Farmers’ Party. At that time Hellwig had wanted the Party to be regarded as a counter-organisation to the Land League, had wanted above all that the political centre of gravity should be shifted to the farming community and was busy with plans aiming at a close affiliation between the agricultural producers’ associations and the working-class consumers’ associations. Ive had made no secret of his own doubts about these plans, less because he did not want to see the hegemony of the Land League interfered with than because it seemed to him that the Party form left no room for the development of the farmers’ autonomy. The subsequent history of the Party had proved Ive to be right, and Hellwig smilingly admitted this as he pushed his way with Ive and Hinnerk between the rows of chairs and tables.

  The hall, usually used for social festivities, was packed. About a thousand unemployed men and women were sitting and standing in crowded groups, but not in that state of gloomy expectation which is usually the atmosphere at a political meeting. They had the appearance of people defiantly prepared to fulfil a self-imposed duty. On the platform, on the narrow side of the hall opposite the entrance, beneath the red flag with the hammer and sickle, were three tables. The middle one faced the hall, the other two were at right-angles to it on either side. As several persons began to take their places at these tables, the voices in the hall were silenced and every face was turned towards the platform. Four men and one woman seated themselves at one of the side-tables, and one man at each of the other tables. The man in the middle stood up and said: ‘I declare the Court of the Proletarian Unemployed open. The prosecutor will open the proceedings.’

  The prosecutor, his hands in his trouser-pockets, stepped forward to the edge of the platform. He said: ‘One of the most monstrous crimes of the capitalist System against the working-class, and therefore against human development, is the completely successful attempt to put the instruments of power of the State into the hands of the possessing class. In the present state of proletarian enlightenment, anyone who takes part in this attempt cannot fail to realise the nature of his action. The working-class population confronts the weapon of class justice with the weapon of its own justice. It passes judgment on the misdemeanants and the sentences will be carried out by the executive bodies of Soviet-Germany. I call upon Witness No. 1 to give evidence.’ The prosecutor sat down and a man from one of the side tables faced the audience.

  ‘Comrades,’ he said, ‘I am a skilled iron-worker and have been out of work for two and a half years. I am thirty-nine years of age; I served in the War; I am a married man with three children.’ He spoke like a man who is accustomed to legal proceedings, but his statement had a spontaneous ring about it. He said that he had a little home, but he added that he was not for that reason to be classified as a property-owner. A week previously, on the very day, as he had learned later, that some provision shops had been plundered—and then corrected himself: attacked—he had been waiting at his usual tramstop with his tools, which he could not leave at home or they would have been stolen. He had noticed that there was a commotion in the neighbouring streets, but he had paid no attention to it. Then some policemen had arrived, walking slowly as usual. There had been an officer with them whom he knew by sight, but the officer had stood a little apart. Two policemen had walked past him, and one of them had said to him:

  ‘Move on.’

  He had turned round and replied:

  ‘I am waiting for the tram.’

  At this moment the policeman had attacked him with his rubber truncheon, bringing it down with full force on his head—he pointed to the spot—and he had immediately fallen down, everything swimming before his eyes.

  The prosecutor asked whether he had not perhaps said rather more than: ‘I am waiting for the tram?’

  No, he was sure he had said no more than that.

  Had he perhaps made a gesture with his tools which the policeman might have misconstrued as a threat?

  No, he was holding his pick and shovel over his shoulder, and on the end of the pick was hanging a bundle of seed potatoes.