It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  ‘I was in despair and began to run down the street. Then I saw the boy come running round the corner and I was so pleased, I called out to him and went quickly into the house, and turned round and saw him running towards me. Thank God, I thought, and was just going upstairs; then there were some shots and the boy ran into the house crying: “Quick, quick!” And I didn’t know what I was doing. Then they were crying outside: “Here, here!” And then they shot into the house, again and again into the house. But the door had banged to, and I couldn’t see anything, so I called: “Otto, Otto!” and I couldn’t hear any answer because of the noise of shooting, which was terrible. Then they tore open the door, and there lay my boy. There lay my boy.’

  The whole audience sat with bowed heads. The prosecutor went up to the woman. He asked her if she had found a revolver on the boy. The woman hesitated, and the prosecutor said that she must know that the party did not countenance individual violence. The woman said she knew nothing, except that her brother-in-law, who had arrived on the scene, had kept telling the police:

  ‘No shot was fired from this weapon, the spring is broken.’ And the officer had said he could not give an opinion as to that, and the weapon was confiscated.

  Did she know who the officer was?

  ‘Lieutenant Schweinebacke!’ cried a voice from the hall, and a man stood up. ‘I am her brother-in-law,’ said the man, and the prosecutor told the woman to sit down.

  The chairman stood up and asked if anyone in the hall could bring forward anything in defence of the accused, Lieutenant Schweinebacke, or in defence of the police superintendent. He announced that no one had offered any evidence in defence and called upon the prosecutor to speak.

  The prosecutor came to the front of the platform, his hands in his trouser pockets. The aim of modern policy in the modern State, he said, was, in the words of the Right Honourable Minister of the Interior, to establish popular rule. What the unemployed court had just heard testified to the manner in which the police were setting about the fulfilment of this pleasant duty. Far be it from him to resort to the well-known emotional appeal of which professional suspicion-mongers made such ample and passionate use in the civil courts for the edification of their principals and of a hoodwinked public. Here the naked facts spoke for themselves. He might add that he had had the evidence of each of the witnesses taken down and investigated. He had not succeeded in finding a discrepancy, and he had had to restrict himself to selecting from a large number of similar statements five cases only to bring before the court. He had brought an indictment against Lieutenant Schweinebacke and against the Superintendent of Police, who was responsible, even in civil law, for all the actions of his subordinates. Once more he must emphasise that the class-conscious proletariat repudiated and must always repudiate all individual terrorism, but it could never abrogate its right to bring the enemies of the working-class to justice. He accused Lieutenant Schweinebacke and the Superintendent of Police of murder, and of counter-revolutionary activities. And he proposed that both the accused should be sentenced to death.

  The chairman rose and said: ‘I request those who are in favour of the prosecutor’s proposal to raise their hands.’

  The hands went up in rapid response—Hinnerk’s arm shot up with a mechanical jerk, Farmer Hellwig raised his hand with a smile, and Ive, who felt himself turning red to the roots of his hair, hesitated, and then straightening his elbow stretched his hand high above his head.

  ‘The accused are unanimously sentenced to death,’ said the chairman. ‘There is no appeal against the judgment of the unemployed. The sentence will be carried out on the anniversary of the Social Revolution by the functionaries of Soviet-Germany. The session is adjourned.’

  With a loud scraping of chairs the crowd rose and immediately a hubbub of voices filled the room. The doors were opened. At the entrance there was confusion. The whir of motor cars could be heard. A sharp voice called into the hall:

  ‘Look out, the shock brigade!’ There was a roar of laughter. At the entrance appeared a policeman’s shako. The meeting broke up. Slowly the crowd pushed its way out. Ive, Hinnerk, and Hellwig, jostled by the crowd, made their way forward step by step. Beside them and in front of them a murmur arose; one word was being repeated.

  ‘Schweinebacke, Schweinebacke, Schweinebacke,’ they all said, men and women.

  ‘Schweinebacke,’ murmured Hinnerk, and Ive pushed forward.

  He looked through the entrance over the heads of the crowd. Outside was the brigade, the men lined up, straps under their chins, carbines in their hands. The officer stood apart near the entrance, a tall, rather stout man, with a gleaming silver collar and a broad face.

  ‘Brodermann,’ said Ive in an undertone.

  ‘Schweinebacke,’ said Hinnerk, as though to himself, and brushed past Brodermann.

  ‘Schweinebacke,’ said Hellwig, and passed on. Ive raised his head and looked into the face of Brodermann, who was gazing stonily in front of him. He did not move a muscle, but the contemptuous line round his nose became accentuated.

  ‘Schweinebacke,’ said Ive very loudly, and looked straight at Brodermann. Brodermann turned and looked at him. He shook his head gently, and turned away again, letting the stream of weak revenge wash by him, alone in the midst of the crowd, separated from his brigade.

  XIII

  Ive was not greatly surprised that they, Hinnerk, Hellwig, and himself, at once directed their steps towards one of the large restaurants of the town, to refresh themselves with a meal, a privilege not to be enjoyed by any of the thousand unemployed, whose legal proceedings they had just left, with the exception of the chairman and the prosecutor who had taken their seats in a corner not far from themselves. Ive had long since given up harbouring scruples which could only be labelled with the opprobrious term ‘Liberal.’ Moreover, there they were, and that was the end of it. At the same time his own and Hinnerk’s financial position was such that they only ordered a small glass of beer each, half hoping that Hellwig would pay for it, and fell upon the rolls, while Hellwig pushed the menu-card on one side and ordered a steak.

  ‘Blancmange,’ he said, pointing to the menu, ‘that means they put on the price shamelessly and serve you up a shapeless, flabby mass of pulp, that can only have been made to prevent the needy cornflour industry from having to close its doors and deprive thousands of workers of their daily bread; there’s no swallowing the muck!’

  When the steak came, a piece of meat the size of a saucer, and three small potatoes, embarrassed by their loneliness, Hellwig began to make rapid calculations with his pencil on the back of the menu.

  He cut himself off a piece of meat and said: ‘Not much meat on this cow; according to the latest Berlin schedule, inclusive of freight and loss of weight, sixteen marks the hundredweight, so the farmer gets ex-farm about a hundred and ten marks—for a ten-hundredweight cow, which has taken three years to fatten for the market. There isn’t even a quarter of a pound on my plate; price on the menu one mark sixty. In the shop steak costs one mark sixty a pound. On a high computation, very high, taking the most favourable circumstances, the farmers get sixteen pfennigs a pound. Deducting for the difference between live and dead weight, on a good average, say, fifty percent, then deducting another twenty percent, for bones and the inferior cuts, the retail price is still three times as high as the selling price ex-farm. Between selling price and shop price, per pound, mark you. This is not quite a quarter of a pound and is costing me one mark sixty, twelve hundred percent of what I get for it at home. What do they call that? They call it political economy. I call it a bloody swindle. Last time we met, Herr Iversen, you told me that an ambitious co-operative policy could not be carried through in association with a purely agrarian party, and today I admitted that you were right. And you were right in your prophecy that every agrarian organisation within the capitalist system, so long as it concerned itself merely with the conditions of agricultural production, must of necessity move on capitalistic lines, whether it be
Land League, or Farmers’ Party, or the most extensive agricultural association. What the farmer has to demand in the capitalist, as in every other system, is that his labour shall show a profit. But how is this profit to be guaranteed? Surely only through drawing a line midway between the claims of the producer and the claims of the consumer. I said guaranteed; that means that on either side of this line there must be only a minutely calculated space, just big enough for every natural advance to have an elastic rebound. Thus it is not the law of supply and demand, with speculation and market depressions, which must set the standard, but the exigencies of a common budget. Obviously this is not possible under the capitalist system. For it is not deficiency of consumption that is to blame for the prevailing overproduction, but deficiency in the organisation of distribution, and in the only possible future economic reform the two partners will no longer be called agriculture and industry.’

  ‘But?’ said Ive.

  ‘But farmers and workers,’ said Hellwig. ‘For today industry is forced by the taxation policy of the agrarian organisations to lower its workers’ wages, and thus to decrease the consumption of agrarian products, which in its turn leads to higher taxation on the part of agriculture. To escape from this vicious circle would really require a series of events based on a postulate of bloodshed beginning with the complete abolition of the private middleman, i.e. the elimination of the numerous money-making processes with their unnecessary raising of prices, and the restriction of the multitudinous transferences of goods to, at the most, two, from the grower to the co-operative pool and from the pool to the retail distributor, and ending with the monopoly of export trade.’

  ‘The postulate,’ said Ive, ‘would be the victory of Communism.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Hellwig. ‘Believe me,’ he said, with sudden violence, ‘my path to Communism was not paved with illusions, and I did not set out on it with an exaggerated envy of or hatred for the braggarts of the Land League. I am a small farmer, it is true, but I own my farm. I go in for retail produce and do very little wholesale business, it is true, but I own my farm. I have my farm down there, and my father had it before me, and my great-grandfather. My Lower Saxon blood dates back for centuries and, if I understand anything, I understand the doggedness with which the Herr von Itzenplitz auf Itzensitz defends his three thousand acres by every possible means, and his three hundred acres of forest-land and his herds of deer. I am not a firebrand, either professionally or emotionally, nor in the criminally frivolous spirit of the literary rodomontades of the coffee-houses—I am a tenant-farmer—a German, and always wish to be so, and I have a damned hard row to hoe, and I carry on my back a load of responsibilities which weighs me down at every step more heavily than a two-hundredweight sack of provender. And it is for that reason that I have to look about me and notice every stone beneath my feet; and if illusions come flying my way, be they but a featherweight, I cannot carry them, I have to examine everything and I have done so. I have looked about me and I know what the odds are, on our side and the other, and I know what my own stake is. Nobody is going to give me anything for the sake of my beautiful eyes, and as far as the National Association of German Industry is concerned I could rot on my dung-heap if it were not that I had to buy machinery and potash; and if it weren’t that the miner Kacszmareck makes his scrambled eggs with my eggs and eats my ham his fate wouldn’t matter a toss to me, and that’s as it should be. That’s how things are today, and it’s quite right, for it may force me to throw the whole ballast of false prejudices where it belongs, into the dung-pit, and, whenever I encounter a man or an opinion, to sift every theory and phrase to find the underlying motive of self-interest. I defend my farm, as my comrades in Holstein and Oldenburg defend theirs, but the farmer cannot and must not be content to protect what is endangered; capitalism too attempts that and loses through its short-sightedness. If we stay on our farms now, with our rifle-butts on the ground, we shall have to stay on the farm for ever with a pistol to our heads. If, now that the time is uniquely favourable, we do not march forward and take the position which is ours by right, then we shall never be able to take it. We have to seize the opportunities that offer and select the one most advantageous for the future. There is still time, and now is the moment to march forward, to secure the hinterland and reconnoitre the field in front of us; we know who is the opponent of today, and we know that the friend of today may be the opponent of tomorrow, so that with his help today we must make ourselves so strong that he won’t want to attack us tomorrow. I have been through the whole Kirchweih[1] on the quest, beating them all up, as you are still doing, Herr Iversen. I know what is needful for us farmers and for the others, now more than ever, if our need is to be relieved, and, weighing all the pros and cons, I saw where our opportunities lie. I do not know whether Communism will be victorious in Germany, although many signs point to it, but I do know that it is only in Communism, as it would develop with us and through our work, that the possibilities of a radical salvation for the farmers are to be found.’

  He ceased speaking and polished off the last potato. Hinnerk looked at Ive expectantly. The din of knives and forks rattling on the plates jarred on Ive’s ears. He realised that he ought to say something, but suddenly his courage had forsaken him. How strange it is, he thought; here are we three, sitting in the middle of the town, talking, talking, talking about the farmers, who at this very moment, far away out there in their farms, are lying dog-tired in their huge feather-beds listening through the walls to the muffled clanking of the cattle pulling at their chains. Here are we three sitting, talking about the farmers, all three terribly alone in our sense of responsibility, a sense of responsibility with which no one credits us, seeing us sitting here, while the waiter in his white coat looks furious because we are taking up the room of more profitable guests. What the devil do the farmers matter to me? thought Ive. I’ve only one mark fifty left in my pocket. And what do they matter to Hinnerk, who is sitting there frowning and saying nothing, sipping his wretched glass of beer and in an hour’s time will be going off to sell his rolls at the Kadewe? And what do they matter to Hellwig, to whom they have twice given a drubbing when he was speaking at the farmers’ meetings? What does all this matter to us, slowly burning ourselves to ashes, while the cart goes rumbling on, regardless of us? Responsibility, thought Ive, responsibility, and not one of these dirty dogs questions us as to our responsibility. Where did I say that before? he asked himself. I should like to be questioned about what I am responsible for. Oh, I know, to Judge Fuchs, at the preliminary examination, when I was talking to him, and Claus Heim refused to speak. Claus Heim.

  Ive recollected himself with a start and said: ‘Perhaps you are right.’

  Farmer Hellwig stretched out his hand slowly and laid it on the middle of the table.

  ‘Why don’t you join up with us?’ he asked quietly.

  Suddenly Ive was seized with a wild, frantic terror whose darting flames set his throat and eyes tingling with the envenomed torture of this ridiculous, stupendous, serious question. That’s what will happen; we shall once more be cheated of ourselves—a hundred years lost through shamefully succumbing to the lure of the West, and now another hundred years in succumbing to the call of the East—will that happen? And if. . . Ive stared at the grimy tablecloth, and for a moment the absurdity of the situation struck him, but this sensation was immediately overpowered by the onslaught of terror—and if—what shall we have lost or gained? Lost, almost everything; gained, almost nothing. Gained the unity of little Germany and the certainty of a new beginning. Is that all? Gained everything that has been thought in condemnation of the age from Novalis and Holderlin, through Goethe to Nietzsche. That is all. Isn’t that enough? It is not enough. Assuredly it is not enough, if we measure it by the hope that enables us to live, and by the power that we feel within us. And now that God’s, mantle is hovering over us again once more, not to be able to catch it by the hem, out of stupidity, indolence, cowardice; our actions stultified, becau
se we are vitiated and debauched, rotten to the core. Once more to have to renounce for a hundred years, because of a hundred mistakes, with the goal before our eyes and in our glowing hearts, the message that our clumsy tongues are striving to utter at our very lips, and to have to sink again and, who knows, if not for ever? And here we are snapping and snarling at the age, like a greedy dog after a bone that has been snatched from him? We must begin again, perpetually begin again; live— like Kleist, that’s it, thought Ive, putting his hand to his throat—live like Kleist, and that will mean, must mean, to die like Kleist!

  ‘Join up with us,’ said Farmer Hellwig.

  Ive sat upright. He stretched his hand out over the table, bent forward and said: ‘I will tell you exactly what it is that above all estranges me from your Party. It is the Party’s principle of internationalism.’

  Ive waited expectantly for an answer, but Hellwig said nothing, he did not even move his hand. He turned a little paler and looked straight at Ive. After a short, expressive pause, Ive continued cautiously:

  ‘This principle has prevented you—the Party— from giving to the different conditions of agricultural production in individual countries that degree of consideration which, for instance, gave such a virile mobility to Lenin’s tactics. The Party is attempting, by its propaganda, to introduce into the Farmers’ Movement elements which are alien to the character of the Movement, and is, in effect, working towards a rupture which is entirely opposed to the interests of the aim which we both have before us at the moment—the destruction of the System. Of course, no one can expect the Party to abandon a principle which it considers of vital importance, but it is to be expected that, in the exercise of this principle, it will use methods which will permit the farmers to co-operate with it provisionally, that is to say methods which do not endanger the vital issues of the Movement. And it is to be expected, because undoubtedly —to use the terminology of Communism—the agricultural sector of the Party can only advance from the stage of theoretical resolutions to the stage of practical revolutionary action by close affiliation with the most militant sector of the German farmer-class. That is so and this fact is sufficient to put the Farmers’ Movement in a position from which it can emphatically state its conditions.’