It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  Ive had really come to love the town, mainly because of its stimulation, which was a purely intellectual stimulation. So he flung himself into the whirlpool of discussions, delighting in their general ineffectualness, discussions that did not enrich him, that did not even lead him to self-knowledge, hardly acted as a cultural education therefore, but rather made him plunge and rear, so that, in the dizzy leaps from postulate to postulate, all his inflammable susceptibilities were kindled. The recognition of the doubtful value of every point of view did not mislead him into voluntarily abandoning his momentary opinions, and he never knew whether this time he would not sink into the abyss. But he did not sink; for his hours of deepest despair were hours of despair of himself, of fear that he was not worthy of what was happening around him, of grief that he had not been called upon to make a complete sacrifice—herein lay his distress, and from it sprang his will to attain the highest degree of self-restraint, in order to become worthy of the infinitude of which he was a part. This seemed to him to be the attitude of the soldier, ready to die for a fatherland that has not even a just cause of war. To know himself meant for him to learn the meaning of his environment; not only learn, understand. So he set about the task of understanding.

  He found plenty of opportunities for merely filling up the gaps in his knowledge. When he was driven into a corner, as he had been by Brodermann, and was faced with the responsibility of making concrete statements about concrete things, he was fully aware that it was impossible for him to produce anything but generalities, and though he got no consolation from the realisation that other people, placed in the same position, frequently had the same experience, still this fact led him to the discovery of what was probably the one argument which he ought to have flung at Brodermann, namely, that concrete statements must be based on a concrete proposition, and the injustice of the System precluded any high sense of responsibility, which was a decisive reason for abolishing it.

  The longing to have the chance of being prime minister with dictatorial powers was widespread, and anybody who regarded this as childish only showed his complete incapacity to fill the office of prime minister. At that time Germany was made up almost completely of frustrated prime ministers, and we cannot deplore this state of affairs, although we are far from being democrats, since it reminds us of the romantic idea that it is simply a question of economy that there is only one king, and if we were not obliged to be economical we might all be kings. And although we cannot completely identify ourselves with Ive and his views, having long since found an intellectual sanctuary, and, in the consciousness of being useful and worthy members of a commonwealth, which satisfies us and our hopes, can well do without entangling ourselves in such abstruse intellectual adventures, still we can follow with sympathy the path of this young man, which, after he had strayed into every type of misconception and utilised the discovery of his error as a means to knowledge, did at length lead him to that inner forum, which now constitutes the foundation of our existence, and by so doing we find ourselves nearer to Ive’s methods than we might have suspected. For all the discussions in which Ive took part so eagerly were more of the nature of soliloquies, in which no opinion was an opinion, but merely a friction-surface to enable the searching mind to ignite. Thus we possibly have reason to be more astonished than Ive, when we consider what an abundance of common conceptions existed silently, and proceeding from these we can affirm that the results obtained did not represent the synthesis of the discussions, but even when as results they had the appearance of compromise, were throughout complementary to a higher ego, and, therefore, only synthetic as the expression of a universally applicable law which, without reference to the discussion, operated auspiciously for each individual. Let us at least try to understand the fascination of novelty which things, that for us have long since been a secure possession, must have had for Ive; do not let us underestimate the significance of the facts which caused the young people of that period to make indiscriminate use of men, books and events as instruments of sensation, on which they were able to harmonise the compositions of their fermenting personalities, fragments from which the music of a whole epoch was derived, and which surely it is worth recording here. And if we turn our attention to those silently existing conceptions, we become aware how great a disparity there is between our own times and the times when they did not exist, and must acknowledge Ive’s justification in regarding himself as a part of the future—of our present.

  Thus there really have been times—we can establish this fact for ourselves by digging out the documents from the archives—in which, for instance, the Nation not only was not an established and clearly outlined conception, but was even denied as a phenomenon, was regarded as the devilish figment of the imagination of some self-interested Power or another, as an invention to defraud humanity of its most valuable possession. And these were the views of clever, enlightened and influential people, who were able to express them openly in their journals and at their meetings, without immediately being put in their places by a mob, outraged at this terrible insult to the general intelligence, and using the methods customary with an outraged mob. Far from it, they received attention and were believed, and even those to whom we must here give credit for respecting the idea of the Nation, did not do so in the conviction of its actual value, but merely considered it expedient, under the influence of the universal psychosis, to support the ‘figment of the imagination’ as such, or even their own, conception of the Nation—very different from ours—as a necessary element in the subduing of the covetous masses. If we take all this into account, we cannot despise Ive, when he spoke of the Nation or the Reich, for not being in a position to expound with clarity all the distinctive features so permanently associated with these ideas, down to the least important details which are so familiar to us. For anyone who was fortunate enough to experience, as it were intuitively, the conception Nation, was taxed to the utmost to define this conception, and though we, in the satiety of possession, may be in a position to smile at this, we must guard ourselves against smiling at the seriousness which lay behind it.

  Ive was perpetually making new starts in his endeavour to grasp the phenomenon, to pin it down in words. He suffered perpetual setbacks. Again and again he would be stimulated by glorious presentiments, but at every step he was confronted by a new field, full of such an infinite number of possibilities, which were always shifting and re-grouping themselves, complementing each other or even destroying one another, that he might well have despaired instead, as he did, of perpetually deriving new hopes from it. For the fact that there was a purposeful relationship between all things was another conception that he was aware of from the outset, and it was this that held him to his task with such a high sense of responsibility; a single mistake would destroy the divine work of art, and the devil was always at hand to guide the hand of humanity. It was this too that produced the urge to try out every method, and if the empirical method ranked first, at least as a corrective, he did not shrink from regarding his specific experiences as of value; understanding by this not his personal experiences but those things which every one could claim as experience. It is true that in this quest his encounters with people could only be halting-places, and when he found in Novalis the sentence: ‘There are Germans everywhere, Germanness is no more limited to any particular state than Romanness, Greekness, or Britishness; they are universal human characteristics, which only here and there have become remarkable in their universality,’ he was immediately compelled to strip this idea of its psychological garment—since for him psychology had always meant the contradiction not only of philosophy but of all intellectual processes—and wrap it in the cloak of historical reality. At once the old thought assumed a new meaning for him; Nation, Germanness and culture became one to him, and the world fell into an order which might have satisfied and delighted him, if it had not seemed an even too easy process. The power of the present seemed conceivable to him only as a Western culture, the power of the Church as a n
ation in itself, as in Judaism; the deceptive frontiers merged and overlapped, and there seemed no harm in ascribing the characteristic figures to their correct environment, to include Dante and Shakespeare in Germanness, and to transport Thomas Mann with one bound into the West, which was his right sphere, even though he might still live in Munich. Suddenly every problem was solved, all sorts of maxims formed themselves into a complete pattern, the ideas of a national Communism and of a social nationalism disclosed their mysterious origin as a protest of Germanness against the West, every duty seemed to spring spontaneously into place, and actually there was nothing left to do but quickly to outline a new programme and step before the public; but, curiously enough, Ive was not yet satisfied. He did not find it difficult to survey the field of political inferences; the claim of Germany was easily sifted out, the unique claim of a German imperialism, the missionary task, as Schaffer called it; but the thing Ive was concerned with remained hidden behind the mountain, a dark premonition of storm. So the bold structure had to remain in his dreams as in the brilliance of the morning sun; stone was laid upon stone, the temple grew up in architectonic majesty, rich altars rose in severe lines, stained-glass windows caught the light, dispersing its rays in all the colours of heaven through the building, a glorious agglomeration surrounding a small empty space, a sanctuary for the unknown God. Actually every consideration faded—whether the Reich was to be regarded as the static and the Nation as the dynamic element of Germanness; what was the relation of the people to the Reich, that of a biological unity or of a spiritual content; what was the relation of the Nation to the Reich—all faded before the one great question: God.

  This was where Pareigat came in, and Ive felt ashamed, not because he would be obliged to give an adequate answer —who could give an adequate answer?—but because even to be silent would be worse than cowardice or lies—a doubt of the meaning of existence.

  He found Pareigat in the studio. Helene was out, and the painter was standing completely absorbed before a large sheet of paper. So they retired to a corner, and Pareigat swooped down like a bird of prey on to the fact that the Romantic movement had ended with the acceptance of Catholicism. Ive felt that it would only be a weak objection to say that this did not apply to romanticism as a whole, but only to a section of the Romantics; the profession had not been an essential part of the Romantic movement. Still, he could point to the strong pantheistic attitude, and the relation to mysticism, and then to the fact that the romantic and mystical elements in the Catholic middle ages had been essentially German elements. So Ive went straight to the attack, still uncertain of his position, and in great distress because the urge to speak, to explain himself in some way, was stronger than ever.

  Pareigat was a recent convert, but he did not defend his attitude with the ardent zeal which this act of piety usually inspires. He admitted to Ive that it was not so much the means of grace as the Church which offered him the means of grace which had attracted him. Not that he could not have believed with complete surrender, but, and he said, this as though he were speaking to his Confessor, almost imperceptibly within the great unity the principal accent had shifted.

  All at once Ive understood why Pareigat, who had recently told him of his wish to enter a monastery, had not been able to follow the step he had taken to its logical conclusion, because an even more important conclusion confronted him. In his case what had been a spiritual urge would have become a flight. Not a flight from the world—oh, thought Ive, if only we could once and for all rid ourselves of all the worn-out ideas—not a flight from the world, but a shameful deceiving of God. Ive would have liked to measure swords with Pareigat, but he saw now that this would only be possible in a quite different field. Just as Pareigat, by his conversion, he, by his questioning resistance, had experienced an enrichment, since every action and every step forced him to new decisions, of which each one was a decision bringing him nearer to unity; but this very fact that he felt to be a perpetual benison, a continual gift of grace, removed him from the actual domain of religion, drove him from direct religious experience to the realisation of an intellectual unity, which for him was the intellectual concept of the Reich, just as for Pareigat it was the intellectual concept of the Church. He had no right to become, as it were, an intellectual, any more than Pareigat had the right to become a monk. For that would have been to deprive of its motive force his painful insistence on being admitted to none but intellectual experience. Pareigat had recognised this. He wanted to be capable of being a saint and a martyr, not to be, but to be capable of being. That is to say, it was an intolerable thought to him that the soil of the Church had become barren and no longer bore saints or martyrs. And the idea came to Ive once more that Pareigat did not want to be more popish than the Pope, but was endeavouring to crystallise all his thoughts and actions into the salt which would once more prepare the soil for abundant fecundity. Like Ive, he could only regard Christianity as an individual culture with an imperialistic bent, which was threatened by the prevailing influence of nineteenth-century intellectualism in just the same way as the Reich. It seemed quite natural to Pareigat to acknowledge that the same enemy was threatening both Christianity and the Reich; and it was the direct menace of this enemy that would mould the intellectual consciousness of the victims.

  Pareigat said that he, too, regarded history as a perpetual transformation of immutable matter, the struggle for supremacy between the will to power of the individual, man or State, and the will to power, liberated and alienated from the individual. This meant to say that Liberalism as a Western claim was not a tendency of the times, but a perpetual tendency confined to a particular period. In the end every supremacy was an imposition of foreign elements, and it lay within its scope to complete this process, and it not only lay within its scope but was its right. ‘For,’ said Pareigat, ‘right is the persistent exercise of force, power is the guarantee of right, and supremacy is the authority for power. What we want to discover is from whom the authority comes. For the Church from the revelation of God, and for Liberalism—and since the proclamation of 1789, for the West—from the autocracy of man. And for the Reich?’ asked Pareigat. ‘For the Reich from the autocracy of the Reich. For myself,’ he said, ‘my duty is clear, and must be clear. The Church can never forfeit her supremacy, whatever forms it may assume. She can and must attempt to keep the forms pure, to substitute living and pliant forms for those that have become rigid, to combat every incursion of a foreign will to power, and if it is not possible to hold the fortress against the violent onslaught, she must yield elastically, as torn flesh yields, in order that the wound may be healed. The body of the Church is full of scars, but never since the sword-thrust of the Reformation, which aimed directly at her heart, has she been in such deadly danger as she is today, when the poison is creeping into her impoverished veins. In those days Ignatius Loyola arose, fully armed, to do battle for her eternal security with all the weapons of his day, the sharpest and most perfect weapons, whose efficacy has persisted through the ages. He arose as the General of an Order which for four centuries was the pattern for all Societies which “have an organic yearning for infinite expansion and eternal endurance,” of a spiritual-worldly society, secret or not. Today again the need is there for the formation of a spiritual-worldly society, once more to save the supremacy of the Church, the organ of a militant Christianity, of the rejuvenated and resuscitated Church, to eliminate by its burning zeal the putrefied and the putrefying humours, to stand at all the fronts where the enemy columns are massed, to take up all the tasks which the secular powers have wrested from the Church in their presumptuous arrogance without being able to fulfil them, and out of it all to build up intellectual power equal to the comprehensive task. For the Church can never forfeit her right to determine the structure of society, from foundations to summit, to keep a watch over every phase of life from the first cry to the last breath, and there is no order in the world for which she is not responsible. Every individual who acknowledges her car
ries the responsibility for the fulfilment of the divine mandate, and he who shirks the task may be able as a sinner to ask for the absolution of his Confessor, but as a Catholic he can never ask for his own absolution. The Church has left a breach in her strict laws, and it is the duty of those who call themselves Catholics to fill this breach until not a crack is visible. The Church is faced with the whole tremendous responsibility, and it is hers and hers alone, and if she forfeits that responsibility today, then she has forfeited for ever her supremacy. Only in the moment of greatest danger is the hope of victory renewed by a fresh onslaught, and never were hope and danger as great as they are today. Catholicism has got to make a move, but a move in which it no longer needs to compromise because it realises the weakness of the Church’s supreme position, but a move in which it can stand as the representative of regeneration, conscious of its strength, just as the Society of Jesus was the representative of regeneration and at the same time the organiser of the attacking powers. And since every individual is faced with the task, this task is for every individual the everyday duty of his life. Every individual has to make a choice and establish his position; and if he is a German it is a German position, that is, it is a position in which the highest duty is of first importance. For this, and this only, is the meaning of the Reich: to fulfil the divine mandate, conveyed by the Church in the past, and to be conveyed again today; to fulfil what has already been demanded of us and which we have failed to fulfil.’