It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  ‘That is political romanticism,’ said Ive, standing up. He put his hands on the table, then took them off again, He seemed about to turn away, but then he wheeled round towards Brodermann, and eventually stood leaning against the wall with his arms folded.

  ‘That is political romanticism,’ he said. ‘It is very much the fashion lately to talk of political romanticism the moment anything occurs in German affairs that cannot be turned to immediate practical use. I don’t know whether it is because I am too stupid, or whether it is to be attributed to the state of public enlightenment—I have made enquiries in every direction, but I have always found that the perfectly correct description of a perfectly authentic phenomenon is continually being associated with a point of view, which has no connection whatever with political romanticism in the original and pure sense of the term. I can very well imagine how political romanticism is interpreted, by putting together all that people are thinking and saying and writing about those doctrines and opinions of today which have not yet acquired a conventional status. One has only to turn to the stump orators, party manifestos, or, on a higher level, broadcast discussions, or even to the thick and learned tomes that are filling up the empty spaces on the bookshelves of science. But all these lack something, something which a hundred years of liberal historical study has failed to see, is not capable of seeing, because it is contrary to their hypotheses. The only thing to do, therefore, is no longer to take the hypotheses, assumptions and conclusions of this century as a basis, but to trace back the ideas of romanticism to their source, if I may be permitted to say so. For if we wanted to attack the ideas of the past century on the basis of its own assumptions, we might as well adopt Marxism as our creed, for Marxism by itself is fulfilling this task admirably and with a certain amount of success. Since we do not want to do this, you are quite right to call us romantics. For the ideas of romanticism, which this century is combating, denying and eventually ignoring, and to a degree and in a manner which leads one to suspect that it does not fear that it will be conquered by them, any more than by Marxism, but that it simply does not understand them, lead to something in which neither the Liberal epoch nor the System which, to all appearances, is actually undertaking to liquidate it, have or can have any say, namely, a conception of the State. No doubt this may seem an astonishing statement to those who at the word romanticism immediately picture young men sentimentalising in the moonlight and setting out to search for the blue flower in the maze of politics—although this might well be considered a more praiseworthy undertaking than trying to open an account with the Swiss Bank. But political romanticism is far from being a happy land of tooting horns and vagrant ne’er-dowells. Much rather it is the first comprehensive attempt in German history to sift from its records the elements of the State, to remove from it the flotsam and jetsam of transitory intellectual tides, and from the knowledge thus gained to deduce far-reaching conclusions.’

  ‘Amongst other things the elements of the State,’ he went on, ‘so that we cannot be surprised that today, wherever a similar effort is being made, it is at least worth while to take every essential idea, and to investigate what has already been thought on the subject in romanticism; for in romanticism is to be found every fundamental argument against the Liberal century; it is impossible for us, once we set about the task seriously, whether or no we have made our own assumptions, not to find useful parallels in romanticism. Actually the intellectual situation today is in essence what it was a hundred years ago. Today, as then, German claims are defending themselves against the ascendance of far-reaching iconoclastic ideas whose first beacons were lighted in foreign capitals; today, as then, German youth is striving to find the source of these claims not in the existing political situation, not in the laws of evolution, but in an eternal quality of the nation; today, as then, the authoritative political system stands between the two fronts and the reactionary statesmen are ruling not on principles of romanticism or of democracy, but on principles of enlightened individualistic absolutism supported only by the confidence of the dynasts and there is damned little to choose between that method and the methods of the present Chancellor, no matter who he is or by what means he wins the confidence of the President of the Reich. The one thing that differentiates us from the romanticism of those days is the iron infused into our blood by a hundred years’ experience and a world war, and the resultant certainty that we need not shrink from ways and means which the young men of those days had not the grit to tackle. So much for romanticism,’ said Ive. ‘As for the statement that the System has saved the existence of the Reich, that is simply an objective untruth. It is not the Reich that the System has saved, but itself, under the guise of being a State, and we have no intention of co-operating in the tissue of lies with which the System has distorted the act of its birth into an heroic deed, and is seeking today to justify the consolidation of its power in the eyes of history. If the System came into being because the parliamentary democracy succeeded, in the first years following the collapse, in playing off against each other the forces fighting for possession of the Reich, regardless of whether their intention was to destroy it completely or to reconstruct it in new greatness, and then in the most matter-of-fact way annihilating the exhausted combatants, one after the other, with wise precepts and cold judgments, then possibly that was an achievement that leads the System today to hope that it will succeed in playing off the newly formed forces in the same way again, in order to annihilate the parliamentary democracy which has become an embarrassment; and the defective political instinct which vacantly counts the seats in the Reichstag may be very welcome to the System. But what has this achievement to do with the State? What has the sum of achievement of which the System boasts—and even if its value is called into question, the System may still take the credit for it—what has it to do with the State? If an attempt is being made today to eliminate monopolies, what is happening but a shifting of monopolies from one group of shareholders to another, turning the ramp of individuals into a ramp of the System?’

  He continued: ‘It would be better if the System could not even boast of an achievement, for then what justification would it have? What justification has a factory-owner but his achievements? But the State cannot be managed like a factory; it would be fundamentally destroyed. That is a conception of romanticism, and to prove the correctness of this conception there is no need to seek proofs in the last century, they are in front of our eyes, and nobody is more aware of them than the System. Otherwise, what need would it have to be appealing in all directions for confidence, and bitterly bewailing that everyone is trying to stand on one side? Why otherwise is the System looking everywhere for its authority and is only able to find it among the men it would like to get rid of? Why the devil is there this anxiety to stand aside, why does German youth consider it a crime to stretch out so much as a little finger to the System, why is there this searching and feeling for distant and unknown and all-embracing and binding principles? Because without them it is not worth making a decision; because in every action it is essential to have an answer to the question of the reason why, and the System has not been able to answer this question any more than the whole of the past century was able to answer it; because at last the certainty has awakened in us again, that every action and every attitude must rest on the unity of a great reason, that every political idea must arise from this unity if it is to be of any value to us, and the State must be nothing else than the willing instrument to fulfil it.

  ‘I do not want to bring God into the debate,’ said Ive, and then regretted it, but he continued, ‘although it is hardly to be avoided, at least, if we want to investigate the question of the source of any authority. What, for instance, is a marriage if it loses its sacramental character? Happy possibly, but not a marriage, simply a bourgeois arrangement which, after being deprived of all its legal and hereditary rights, can be turned by Communism consistently and frivolously into a proletarian arrangement or repudiated altogether. What is a State
if all its members do not serve a higher unity, if it has not arisen from the will to this unity? Comfortable possibly, but no longer a State, merely a bourgeois arrangement for the protection of a privileged society, which Communism is justified in striving to destroy, for Communism has no use for the State and has never pretended to have a conception of the State which justified it in wanting it. I should like to know,’ said Ive, ‘how the System justifies its existence in the face of Communism, in the face of National Socialism. Merely by its indispensability? Well, it is just this indispensability which is being questioned. By its wonderful devotion to an achievement? Well, it is this very devotion to an achievement that the forces which are opposed to the System are combating. And if it be true that it is the objective power of facts which dictates the tasks of the future, all the more reason why they should be undertaken by anyone, and not only by the representatives of the System. But we want a State and not a System. We want a society which will consciously organise itself into a great national community, and not a heap of individuals thrown together more or less by chance, held together only by the frontiers dictated by foreign Powers and by the political squaring of the circle of a universal reciprocity of interests. We want authority, but not the authority of decaying bank managers and economists, nor the authority of timid government officials, who get cold feet at every measure, nor the authority of putrescent senatorial presidents and ministerial directors, nor that of the bigwigs who attended the last Reinhardt premiere, and make us heave if we merely see their faces in the illustrated papers, but the authority of men whom we know to be at one with our aims. We want a plan, a unified and complete economic plan, not the extension of public economic activity from the most diverse and arbitrary points of view brought about by force of circumstances instead of by spontaneous impulse and excused on the ground of obstructions, which exist only in the System itself—but a fusion of all economic principles by co-related measures, beginning with the soil and covering transport, raw material and eventually man, all of which already contain within themselves the urge to spontaneous cohesion. The System boasts that it has already produced a perfect organisation. It has organised nothing except starvation and itself, and those badly. Wherever natural forms of production and society have been developed, they have been developed in opposition to the System. That is true, and whoever denies it is either a liar or blind. If today German Youth is removing the frontier posts in Innsbruck and the Bavarian forest, it can wait for whatever happens will be bearable, but what will be quite unbearable is that you, Lieutenant Brodermann, will be standing with your detachment not in Wedding but in Innsbruck; or the Bavarian forest, to set up the frontier posts again. For whose benefit? For the benefit of the Reich? For the sake of a principle of State? For the sake of the System which can tolerate no change, and which engenders the mistrust of those by grace of whom and in subservience to whom it alone lives or can live. It is not by chance that for ten years it has acted on the watchwords of others, and the only time it produced a watchword of its own, it dared to do so because it was a question of saving American capital with French money. It is not by chance that it sows tariff unions and reaps the Danube Conference, not by chance that with one hand it guarantees protection of the currency and with the other not only knocks on the head the economy which was moving towards freedom, but the whole economy based on a protected currency. It is true that the System cannot act otherwise, and for the reason that it cannot act otherwise it is not a State, but the thing that it is justly described as, a System, and the greatest of its achievements would be quietly to resign.’

  Brodermann shrugged his shoulders. Schaffer was not pleased with Ive, but since he was accustomed to think in centuries, and in the present century he was only concerned with the coming century, the question of the System was no longer a problem for him. He objected to leading articles, and, this being a question which really only lent itself to discussion in leading articles or with armoured cars, he preferred to ignore it altogether. However, he made a few mental notes of subjects of discussion for subsequent evenings arising out of what Ive had been saying—‘Nature of the State from the romantic point of view,’ ‘A Planned Economy —on what form of society should it be based,’ ‘Autocracy and Decentralisation of Financial Resources and the Position of the Reichsbank’—subjects which seemed to him of sufficient interest to merit discussion within or without the System.

  Ive continued: ‘Regard us, if you like, as idiots and criminals; regard us, if you like, as people who have nothing else to do but dream dreams, with our heads in the clouds, but you see nothing, and you need to see nothing, of what is going on beneath the surface. What is being accomplished, on principles which are our principles, and in a direction which we realise to be our direction, and in work in which, even when we sit idly talking, we are taking our full share, has a different kind of anonymity from that of the System, from that of a loud-speaker with no electric current. The time is past for attaching any value to profitable results, and those who think they can’t get on without them are already in league with the devil. I will tell you why we cannot enter the System, to co-operate with it, because we know that it is impossible to tell lies and compromise oneself for ten years without being corrupted. The whole question is one of order, and it is not we, but the System which has to decide whether it will change itself fundamentally, whether it is prepared to free itself from all its Liberal, parliamentary and Western associations, in order ultimately to become, what it professes to be, a State, or—’

  ‘Or?’ asked Brodermann.

  ‘Or,’ said Ive, ‘when the time is ripe, to be smashed.’

  ‘Well, good luck to you,’ said Brodermann.

  XV

  Ive knew that Pareigat was more likely than anybody to challenge him to take up a definite position. He did not avoid him, for after all he had himself with his defence of romanticism deliberately provided the peg on which the explanation must hang. Actually the rather non-committal adherence to romanticism which he professed corresponded to his rather non-committal conception of the idea and was due to his desire not to shirk responsibility, since after all he might have invalidated the reproach by a flat disavowal. He had turned to romanticism much in the same way that the generation ten years behind him had turned to football; he found it in his direct path as a means of distraction, which at first satisfied his intellectual requirements just as sport satisfied the physical requirements of his juniors. He was aware, therefore, that his confession of romanticism had about as much bearing on himself and on the tasks still before him as the official statement that football increases national efficiency. For, just as the pleasant Sunday afternoon exertion could only, by a general concentration of feet on the ball, at most lead to an eventual loudly acclaimed victory for the home team, a representative victory; so too his preoccupation with romanticism, even if he applied himself to it with his characteristic enthusiasm, could only lead in the end to a standpoint comprehensive perhaps and theoretically important, but, regarded all in all, no more than a representative philosophy. For he had sorrowfully to admit that though he might become familiar with the intellectual world of romanticism, with the exciting discoveries it had to offer, he could never live in it as he longed to live. In the bold theses of the Romantic School which revealed a deeper logic than had been possible for the last hundred years, as well as in the suggestions and fragments of romanticism, he discovered references and opinions which had lost none of their force, and was able to formulate maxims for which he had long been seeking, conscious that they must lie hidden somewhere within himself, to follow lines of thought which bore almost directly on the needs of the times; yet there always remained something which he found it difficult to accept. This something lay, however, in a quite different quarter from that in which those who described him and his like as romantics, were wont to seek for arguments.

  He was not disturbed by the lack of the hard perception, which the machine age alleged to be necessary, probably to ena
ble it the better to blunt it—this was easily compensated for by a greater sharpness of perception, by a scalpel-like sharpness which made it possible to cut out with accuracy from the chaos of ideas the fertile or unfertile germ; and to attain this attitude again seemed to Ive a task well worth endeavour. What did disturb him, as he admitted to himself, was the attempt of romanticism, which the whole nature of the Movement made inevitable, determinedly to confine all the organic strength which lay at its disposal within limits, within German limits, to create order more or less as an end in itself, whereas Ive preferred to regard perfection of order as a means, not perhaps of snatching from Heaven its ultimate mysteries, but certainly of driving the last non-German Power from the earth. And when he looked around him, he had no reason to despair. The things that were stirring in the times showed him to be right, and anything that did not show him to be right he could easily have proved to be something that was not stirring, or could have attributed it to the influences of another age. He found himself in complete harmony with the present, and he found the present pleasant; both of which facts might have astonished anyone who knew him and knew how he lived.