It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  ‘Is not one of the vital issues of the Farmers’ Movement,’ asked Hellwig, ‘that Communism should renounce the abolition of private ownership? From my close knowledge of the circumstances, and as a responsible official of the Party, I can tell you that this renunciation is possible on the assumption of a reorganisation of private ownership, which can only be carried out by the responsible body of the farmers.’

  ‘But that is a fantastic idea,’ said Ive.

  ‘It is a Marxist idea,’ said Farmer Hellwig, ‘for the farmers’ conditions of life make them into a class, because they separate them fundamentally from other classes. For this reason they must take a fundamental part in the class-war, but they have the advantage over the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of possessing the distinctive peculiarity of being able to make a change of front to preserve their existence as a class. With the same ease with which, without forfeiting any of their essential characteristics, they were able to take part in capitalist development, they will doubtless be able to adapt themselves to socialist forms of production; indeed, they will have to, for their own objects are driving them in that direction. Thus the reorganisation of private ownership among farmers will be conditioned by a change in their own position as a class but not in that of other classes. What the programme of the Communist Party of Germany does is simply to point out to the farmers who their consumers are.’

  ‘The question is,’ said Ive, ‘in how far the control of agricultural production can remain in the hands of the farmer-class—on the assumption that Communism really will recognise such a class.’

  ‘It will remain in their hands, under the control of the Communist Party,’ said Hellwig, ‘and the mere fact that I, Hellwig, a tenant-farmer, can be an official of the Party, ought to show you that it is not only Lenin’s tactics that have a wide scope—’

  Ive looked at him meditatively. ‘I admire you,’ he said, ‘not only for the courage with which you read into the Marxist theories facts and views which do not directly and logically arise out of them, but also for the courage with which you imagine you can set about the practical organisation.’

  Hinnerk said suddenly: ‘D’you know, I liked you better when you were with the farmers.’

  ‘So I did myself,’ said Ive furiously.

  Hellwig motioned to Hinnerk to keep quiet. He leant back in his chair and began to speak.

  Ive looked at the farmer’s hand as it lay on the table, a large, brown, firm hand, which did not once move during the whole discussion, and which caused Ive to exercise severe control over his own soft, white, nervous fingers. Ive listened to his companion’s voice, in which there was no note of complaint or justification, no profession of belief, but simply the calm certainty of a man who has found his own path and certainly has no intention of letting himself be lured on to the ice of dialectic debate, on which arrogant asses like to disport themselves.

  He said that he was just as far removed from the professional zeal of a beefsteak-theoretician as he was from the wild-eyed fanaticism of a long-haired revolutionary, who begins by repudiating every accepted idea and ends, if he’s lucky, by preaching the regeneration of the world through some new erotic theory or through the moral influence of living on roots, or, if he’s unlucky, as one of Mosse’s young men, one day writing a pathetic article about starving children and another day a brilliant account of the latest fashionable ball. So much for the personal side; as for the cause itself, in all political convictions, in the long run, it could only be a question of calculating the parallelogram of forces in order to determine the magnitude of its diagonal.

  ‘A simple calculation, Iversen, in which the component equations are sufficiently well known to reduce the possibility of error to a minimum. Well, then, the present crisis will be regarded by the interested parties—for obvious reasons—merely as a constructive reorganisation of capitalism, and not as a constructive reorganisation of the economic system as a whole.’

  For the sake of argument he was assuming that Ive did not consider himself an interested party. Good. He admitted that it was not only economic considerations that made the farmers wish to change their conditions, but they were the only considerations which at the present moment compelled them to an immediate and unequivocal political decision. But the only movements which were in the end worthy of consideration as determinative representatives of the will to change were National Socialism and Communism. All the manifold activity beneath the surface, which he did not wish to and could not depreciate, must and would join forces with one of these movements, and only in this framework would it be able to take a constructive part in the shaping of the will. Moreover, it was an unquestionable fact that after, and in all probability before, the victory of one of these movements, important elements in the other would have much to say in determining the course of action. Eventually, therefore, it was a question —taking into account the retarding momentum of the influence of the bourgeoisie which could not be destroyed at one blow—not so much of taking up a position at one of the two extreme poles which were opposing each other today, but of shifting the centre of gravity, whose importance should never be underestimated, and which was the only thing worth investigating.

  He continued: ‘When we speak of Communism, we speak perforce of the Russian example, that is, of a national phenomenon of international import. When we speak of the Russian Revolution, we necessarily make a comparison with the French Revolution. This is inevitable the moment we endeavour to take an historical view. For the historical phenomenon is the same, and it is national. One might say that every nation has its day, and it is the day of Russia now. It is a bitter pill, of course, to think that Germany’s future status will be decided in Moscow; her status but not her fate, that would be intolerable. Today her status and her fate are decided in Paris, London, and New York. And even the victory of National Socialism could not change that. We must not attach too much importance to professions of belief. The modern sport of guessing riddles— “Does National Socialism profess Socialism or private capitalism, monopolistic capitalism or State capitalism?”—takes place on a field, on which the only relevant question, namely, “What forms of production will Germany have in future?” can never be answered, and the only thing to do is to assume that, in its final result, National Socialism professes private socialism. For the question is whether, in the future, Germany will be able to decide for herself the nature of her forms of production. At first sight it would seem as though National Socialism has a greater number of possibilities at its disposal, because it leaves more open, but Communism has at its disposal more specific possibilities, and that is what matters. For the house is on fire, and it won’t help matters to send for prospectuses of fire-extinguishing apparatus; and, since the worn-out hoses of our Western neighbour are useless, why not turn to the new buckets of our Eastern neighbour?’

  ‘And in a hundred years’ time we shall find ourselves in exactly the same position again,’ said Ive.

  ‘Sooner than that,’ said Hellwig. ‘But in that respect the League of Nations is about as much good to us as the Holy Alliance. If we were to listen to the upholders of the materialistic interpretation of history, the bourgeois revolution should not have occurred in France, but in the country where the economic and political conditions were more favourable to it, in this country, and the proletarian revolution, not in Russia, but again in this country. But fifty years later we had the miserable imitation of 1840, and the democrats of then are the Nazis of today, and the latter know just as much about the standards of Moscow as the former knew of the standards of Paris. Today we can and must avoid that detour. The more radical the decision the better, and the more primitive forces will be released. The whole coil of political questions which will envelop Germany immediately upon a National Socialist victory, bringing every subject up for discussion again, would disappear automatically with a victory for Communism. For Communism does not bring up subjects for discussion, it is forced to ensure its existence, to act at once and
according to plan, and the simple fact of its existence, of the supremacy of Communism in Germany, establishes the German position unequivocally in the minds and feelings of the whole world. All the problems, which the era of National Socialism will have to attack at once, staking its all on their solution, will have been solved by the mere victory of Communism. It has been proved that for the Western world, that is the declining civilisation, resistance increases in inverse proportion to the degree of danger. Communistic Germany is the greatest danger in the world, National Socialist Germany is the most greatly endangered country of the world. That is just the difference. Maybe the Treaty of Versailles will be torn up under the Swastika; under the Soviet star it is already torn up, and all we have to ask ourselves is whether it is better to be a Russian battle-ground, or, if not a French, then an American colony. There is no third way, for that would presuppose an independent German economic field —and even more than that.’

  ‘Well,’ said Ive, ‘we won’t sit here in the Pschorr-Brauhaus dividing up the world; but the German economic field, let us say, the German economic battle-field of the future, would be Central Europe.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Hellwig, ‘and Central Europe would be readier to join forces with a Soviet Germany than with a Swastika Germany, and, on the most favourable supposition of a purely German solution being attempted, then not only the whole of the Western world, but the Eastern world too, would be prepared, and would have to be prepared, to have a finger in the pie.’

  Ive assented, and sat in deep meditation. He did not attempt to dispute what seemed to be flimsy arguments, because the objections that he could have brought forward had their origin in quite other spheres than those under discussion. Nevertheless he relied on the position he already held, without knowing exactly what its strength was, almost as though he were taking possession of a trench by night, studying its lay-out by the light of a candle-stump, while the threatening rumble of the battle-field mingled with the quiet breathing of the men, ready at any moment either to defend their post with technical skill or to make a sudden attack upon the enemy. Yet he wanted to join issue with Hellwig for he feared the farmer might think, although he showed no signs of it, that he, Ive, had only the same sort of stock objections which he was accustomed to hear. He only needed, for instance, to look around at the various people he came into contact with—officials, party-men, pressmen, the people he saw in the cinemas, in the streets, and in social life—to get a picture of the danger of mass terrorism which was well qualified to give him considerable pleasure; the memory, too, of his experiences in the Baltic provinces roused him to anger not so much because of what had happened as because of the method, which on the one hand had the regrettable result of usually missing its mark, and on the other hand, by its mass production of bleeding flesh through machine-gun fire from behind, even dishonoured death. Nevertheless he thought he might claim that he was able to refine the unexampled crudity of his feelings by his insistence on qualitative discrimination and, as regards the second great objection of the civilised world to Bolshevist barbarity, namely, that it suppressed intellectual freedom, he was making a serious but vain effort to discover anything in the German literature of the last thirty years, whose complete disappearance could have been deplored if it had permitted itself to be suppressed.

  ‘It is a Liberal error,’ he heard Hellwig saying, ‘to believe that the institution of the International proves that Communism disowns the nation. What it does disown is the nation’s permanent organ, the State.’

  The national principle, in the significance which we attach to it today, was, in practice—as has been proved recently in China, for example—recognised positively by Communism. But even if this were not so, the most critical observer of the development of the Soviet Union could not dispute that all its measures, both political and economic, if they had from the outset been subordinated to national aims, could not have been better chosen or more effectively carried out. What applied to Soviet Russia under this heading must in all circumstances apply to Soviet Germany. In fact, Communism would be attacking itself if it departed from its fundamental principles, but it would equally be an act of self-aggression if, in the realisation of these principles, it disregarded the free will of its material. The completely different political and economic conditions in Germany were enough to guarantee at least the decentralisation of the administration from Moscow during the period of organised transition, just as the intrinsic strength of the people, translated into the forms of modernity, the existence of which was being put to the test, would guarantee the continuance of German history. This point of view might be objectionable to the economic pharisees, and the chorus of senile intellectuals might break into lamentations about reformist doctrines; but if this were reform, it was reform with a difference, not the reform of Kautsky, but of Stalin dissociated from Trotsky. From a certain point onwards after the zero hour of the revolution, revolutionary measures and opinions might, and must have, a counter-revolutionary character, and vice versa. The Russian example was certainly illuminating, but it would only bear fruit when it ceased to be regarded in the manner prevalent in the Western world, whereby everybody drew an abstract general line based on his own private conceptions, called ‘socialism,’ and greeted every deviation from that line either with completely unjustified spiteful pleasure and wild howls of triumph, or with bleeding hearts and more or less contorted lucubrations. There was, however, no such thing as an abstract line of socialism, but rather sturdy realities—exigencies, which must and would be reconciled with certain principles, derived from the general progress, for the advancement of a distant goal—a goal set by a point of view which had been developed and hardened by fiery trials and had therefore become organic.

  ‘Now,’ said Farmer Hellwig, ‘if we turn away from the international accompaniment of the Russian “experiment,” we have yet to prove that the Russian claim to be the representative of world revolution was not made at random and cannot be forfeited at random. The whole Russian position rests on it. If it had been a question in Russia of simply “introducing socialism,” not, of course, as it is still conceived in the childish imagination of a number of bourgeois pedants, by merely abolishing differences of income and making a just distribution of existing products, but by introducing a really new machinery of production and raising the standard of life of the whole population to a higher level, in short by creating the “Communist paradise” of which the pioneers, and not only the pioneers, of the Labour movement dreamed—if this had been the only question, this could have been accomplished, in spite of the terrible upheaval of war and civil war, simply by the amazing possibilities of enhancing the productivity of the soil and increasing the extent of land under cultivation, which even today only amounts to about ten percent of Soviet soil, always linked of course with the adequate maintenance of the industrial apparatus in its development towards the necessary degree of efficiency, without uprooting the farmer-class from its more or less individualistic method of production in the violent way in which it has actually happened. And the Russian problem would not be a problem for the world if, today, ten years after the complete annihilation of the armies of intervention, the peaceful, disciplined and contented population of the Russian Empire, with their autocratic or non-autocratic economy, were meditatively contemplating the gentle gambolling of the lambs in the meadows of the Steppes. It is the world-revolutionary claim, which is conditioned not only by the position but by the opposition of the Russian phenomenon, which produces the danger of a new war of intervention, and, moreover, heightens the danger of all the interminable conflicts. To meet this danger the most extensive preparations are necessary, the “total mobilisation” of which Ernst Jünger speaks. And in fact this necessity is turning the whole of Russian life into a preparation for a war, which will not be carried out with weapons alone, and which is transforming the life of the nation itself into a heroic act, from the first spark of resolution in a man’s brain to industrialise the land to the l
ast stroke of the hammer; from the first deliberate sexual act of the enlightened young comrade to the executions of the Ogpu! It was the hectic tempo of industrialisation that first made necessary the increase of the means of subsistence by the revolutionising of agriculture.’

  ‘The Kulak Hellwig,’ said Ive.

  ‘The diplomatist-landowner and tenant-farmer Hellwig,’ said his companion, ‘has at his disposal open ears and eyes, and has spent two years in Russia. I speak Russian, Iversen, and I was a prisoner of war in Russia. I know the conditions of the peasants over there, both before and after the Revolution, as far as it is possible for a prisoner of war, with his wits about him, to get to know them, and I know the conditions of the peasants there today as far as it is possible for a stranger to get to know them. What I know best of all is the position of the farmers in Germany. And that is the essential thing. In Russia the test is what is good for Russia, and here what is good for us. What then was the position of things “there? The revolution on the land was an agrarian revolution only because of the fat booty which tempted the poorer peasants. For the rest it was more or less a rebellion against despotism and incompetence, and it pursued its course by the same natural law that makes a stone roll down a mountain-side. The revolution gave the peasants land, more land than they could or wanted to swallow, and those who could and did want to swallow, afterwards the “kulaks,” were hardly regarded by the peasants as “exploiters.” The individualistic manner of production with its primitive labour methods, if the land was sufficiently redistributed, was enough to enable Russia to return slowly to its position as a great Power, but it was not enough to make Russia a World Power. For the process of industrialisation requires men, and the country districts provided them, and an indiscriminate colonisation of the country districts would have secured the means of subsistence, but it would not have set on foot industrialisation or achieved a surplus of exports. So that intensive, not extensive, agriculture is the watchword, modernisation, collectivism, corn factories. All that is clear and simple, and one is ashamed of having to explain it again and again.’