It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  ‘The town has taught me nothing,’ said Ive, for all his experience had been in himself, and if the town had any influence it was the influence of pressure. This pressure had shaken his whole being. It seemed to Ive that the real function of the town lay in the fact that it was not in it, but through it, that characteristic sublimation took place, in men, in things, in space, and in time. The town had subjected the whole life of the country to its pressure and Ive realised his duty at the very moment that the town had shown it to be in the country.

  ‘Back to the farmers?’ asked Schaffer. But Ive repudiated the word ‘back.’

  He had set himself the task of worming his way into the inmost core of the town, and in the inmost core he had found the country. He had found the core vegetatively, and he took an animal delight in the realisation that he had reached exactly the same point that he had left when he set out to find it. Exactly the same duty confronted him, only it was more definite. And he recalled that moment in the editorial office of his farmers’ paper when he had realised the spiral process to which every life is subject. The town was life, and he was life, and nothing existed in the world that was not life. Every opinion might give rise to ten new opinions, each one exceptional and completely authoritative; but in their oscillations all things tended to meet; all analogues were living; every thought reacted in all directions; the best formulation was always the first, and at the same time the first was the last. For there is no validity that is not derived from ultimate validity. If you thought in terms of epochs, it could not matter in the least, it was even essential, had a deep spiritual meaning, that, in spite of everything, there were six million unemployed, that Helene put on a sleeveless dress when she went to the newspaper office and crossed her legs when she was talking to Jakobsohn. Didn’t that matter? Was that even essential? Had that a deeper meaning? Were those validities that were derived from an ultimate validity? Didn’t it matter that six million were slowly rotting and decaying, that they were piled one on top of another like lice in a blanket, that they bit and beat each other, scorned and slandered one another, that they cringed and betrayed and did the dirty on one another, that they trampled each other, up and down, and right and left, because each one wanted to snatch the scrap of dry bread from his neighbour’s mouth, and to deprive his tired bottom of its tiny resting-place, and yet they were surrounded by plenty? Was it even essential that the farm should be rattling in a death struggle, the wheat withering and the Treasury-office flourishing, that the farmer should be done for and that property should be rehabilitated, and when it was not rehabilitated it should be turned into small-holdings, while the small-holders could neither live nor die, poor wretches, and Claus Heim was squatting in gaol? Was there a deeper meaning in the fact that the painter slapped his paint on to the canvas in mad despair, and Helene rushed off to dance with Jakobsohn and he rubbed his belly against her belly, and bought the picture and sold it, and the painter had an amazing and extraordinary bit of luck as well; that they were marching along all the high roads, young men with brown faces and broad hands, and their hands were open and empty, strength thrown away for nothing, seed sown for nothing, blood flowing away for nothing, and in the cinema they showed Society learning to dance; that some talked of the crisis and emergency regulations, and the curtailing of the powers of the Reichsbank and others talked of nothing; they waited for the stones to speak, but the stones, too, were silent; that all this should be going on, empty streets, and dark desires, the Press frothing at the mouth, saxophones shrieking, some being subsidised and others without a tram fare in their pockets. . . yes, little man, what now? The Reich buys up bankrupt Gelsenkirchner bonds, not with machine-gun bullets, but with ninety percent profit, and the town takes a deep breath. . . symphony of work, symphony of the labour bureau, a red glow in the sky over the Memorial Church, cars massed in the Augusta-Viktoria-platz, heaven and hell and illuminated advertisements, Hinnerk calling fresh-baked rolls, empty promises, encouragements, disappointments, joy following fear, ecstasy following despair, well, little man, how d’you like it? Not a bit of it.

  Ten thousand go to hear Hitler in the Sport-palace, ten thousand go to hear Thalmann in the Sport-palace, ten thousand go to hear Lobe in the Sport-palace, ten thousand watch the six-day races in the Sport-palace; the horsemen of the Apocalypse gallop through the town; hunger, lies, and treachery; they cackle in Geneva, they cackle in Lausanne, they cackle in the Reichstag, you too have cackled, Ive, but Claus Heim did not cackle; the farmers vote for Nazis, and the proletariat votes for Communists, it’s the only way they can vote, and the only thing they can do is to vote; wages are reduced, the enemy is reduced, you yourself are reduced; how can I manage with 150 a month, how can I manage with 100 a month, how can I manage with 50 a month, how can I manage with nothing? It just goes on. They cackle in the Landtag, they cackle in drawing-rooms, they cackle on pay-day, you too have cackled, Schaffer, and you have cackled, Hellwig, and you have cackled, Pareigat. It began with the failure of the Vienna Credit Bank, it began with the stabbing, it began with the world war, it began with the dismissal of Bismarck, it began with the French Revolution, it began with the Reformation, it began with Adam and Eve, when, by all the powers of heaven and hell, is it going to end? Give us back our colonies; we can’t pay and we won’t pay; the corridor is a disgrace to civilisation; annexation is forbidden; the Russian five-year plan; the American repudiation of debts; events in Manchuria; Memel has given itself to Lithuania, and your wife, brother, will give herself to anyone with money. But Brodermann is still there to preserve peace and order. For, thinking in terms of epochs, all validities are derived from one validity. Well then, it is a validity, that here and there a man should stand up, that you should stand up, Ive; that every one should stand up and say: Finis. And say: here now and with me a new epoch is beginning. And set to work where he feels the need is greatest and knows what he has to do. What has Ive to do?

  ‘What I did, before I came to the town, Schaffer, just that, and with the new knowledge of how necessary it is. Is it the town that taught me that? It was the town that confirmed that. For the town, which has to be, showed what must not be.’

  And he realised with gratitude how and why he had lived in the town. And if it was an infinitely tangled and confused web through which he had worked his way, searching and questioning and thinking and talking until he reached the few simple and clear certainties, from these certainties he saw again an infinitely tangled and confused web that he, by his actions, had to create.

  ‘Set to work,’ he said, and made a movement with his two hands as though he were lifting a plough from the furrow, although he had no intention of working on the land when he went to the farmers. Ive was not a farmer. Ive was a soldier; not a militiaman engaged for twelve years, of strictly neutral politics, and provided with a ration-ticket; not a storm-trooper, with black tab on his coat and a two-coloured cord on the edge of his collar, presenting colours, and fighting with the Communists, in brown trousers which are stripped off in the police-station; but a soldier in the small, scattered, anonymous, ever-ready army of the Revolution. Was this really so? Certainly, and here we are not making the Revolution, we are the Revolution. Is there never, then, to be peace and quiet in our poor, beloved fatherland? No, by God, there shall not be peace and quiet in our poor, beloved fatherland. Is, then, brute force. . .? Exactly, and those who wield it must not succumb to it. Then is the Terror, is chaos. . .? Precisely, and those who exercise the Terror and create chaos must not have it within themselves. Does the nation want this? Nobody knows what the nation wants, or what she will want, but we want the nation. And who are we? We are those who want nothing but the nation, who wanted nothing else in the trenches, or among the workers or with the farmers; wanted nothing else but the nation on the wide stretches of the Marsh, and wanted nothing else in the confusion of the town. We are those who recognise no law and no obligations but the law and obligations of the nation, the will of the people. We are our own will towards the
Reich, we are those who are ready to do away with enticement and temptation, with the whole mess of position and consequence and promotion, the whole slime of craft and humiliation, and of filth hidden behind high phrases about duty and responsibility, all the rotten talk of ‘live and let live.’ Do the people want it? No one knows what the people want, the people themselves do not know what they want, but it is what we want. And if what is to come proves to be bitterer than four years of war and fifteen years of the consequences of war, all honour to us that we have been prepared to face it, and if it should prove to be not bitterer, then once more honour to us that we have been prepared to face it. To hell with the past. Now we are no longer brandishing programmes; now we have no quack cures for sale, but wherever there is strength we will add our strength to it, and where there is none we will take away even that that there is. The farmers still have strength and the workers still have strength, for the former have everything to lose that is worth while, and the latter have nothing to lose that is worth while. But we have nothing to lose but our faith in the Reich and nothing to gain but the nation, and if we are called, it lies with us whether we are chosen also. We live in a period of decisions, of movements which give rise to new decisions every moment, the Reich is as open as a field, ready to receive every seed, and it is for us to see that Satan does not come and sow tares and thistles, it is for us to see that every decision is directed towards the Reich; whatever the world gives to the Reich it will transform and give back to the world. Not that its influence reaches to every corner of the earth, and is of importance, but that every influence finds in us its purifying meaning and we have the will to act within it. This means that we are passing from the sphere of protest into the sphere of construction. Every form of protest, whatever disguise it may assume, be it ballot-paper or a pair of brown trousers, exists outside the actual region of decision; the highest duty of every system can only be to accumulate temporal phenomena, and not to provide a valid objective point. The danger of this lies in the fact that, through systems, a movement that is not yet defined, is transformed into a state of affairs that is not yet equal to its task.

  If the Reich is eternal in its power, then history represents the mutation of its forms, and our task today is to seek the form which corresponds best to its intrinsic character. That National Socialism is as little able to provide this form as any other system based on out-of-date or mistaken principles has been proved by the course of its development: the essential thing is to reckon up not the possibilities it has left open, but those it has shut off. No doubt. National Socialism has fulfilled a historical mission, it has led the democracy ad absurdum; no doubt, too, with the fulfilment of this mission its power is no longer justified. The positive of the Revolution has not yet been established, which means that the German Revolution has not yet been established. Do not let us fail to realise that in so far as it is aiming at new forms, its elements are to be found in the bourgeoisie. With us, as with the rest of the world, the important thing is to break the supremacy of the bourgeoisie. With us, even more than with the rest of the world, it is plain that the supremacy of the bourgeoisie, in the form it has assumed, is not German, but Western, so that the Revolution against the bourgeoisie is a German Revolution. And this being so, the most urgent task is the abolition of a state of affairs that has become intolerable, since it no longer even rouses the fertile strength of opposition; and because when the moment comes that we are imbued with the necessity of action it can only be the German Revolution for which we should work; the task lies in the hands of the revolutionaries and in no one else’s; in the hands of those who have already perfected the revolution in themselves—and not before; for what is the good of being armed to the teeth if we are not armed to the heart? Indeed, it does not matter from what point the advance is made provided it is not situated in a vacuum. The masses have no impetus in themselves, and when, in the consciousness of their position, they decide to organise a revolution, they organise a bureaucracy. It is the few that give them the strength they lack. For these the important thing is not to have a point of view, but to be in a strong position and each one of them must seek the field of action that is ready to support him and from which he can act.

  ‘For me it is with the farmers,’ said Ive, ‘as I have found before.’

  He continued: ‘The Reich will not be the farmers’ country, but by its daily demands the country transforms the mystic consciousness into a reality. And it is this reality that constitutes society; the farming community contains the only natural form of organised society, and, therefore, so long as we are seeking these forms, it must be a stimulus and a pattern. I know what you are going to say, Schaffer,’ said Ive, ‘but economic planning alone is not enough, although there is certainly no harm in it, and vital interests do not exist except in the brains of the syndics. We have not yet been cheated out of that which gives a meaning to life, and we are not disposed to let ourselves be cheated out of it as we have been cheated out of everything else we can be cheated out of. The important thing remains, and cannot be argued about, and it is well for us that it cannot be argued about. For our fate does not lie in round-table conferences, nor in the Workers’ Committee of the Reichstag, nor in the Governing Board of the General Electrical Company, but in our own breasts, in the breasts of men who not only know what they want, but know how to accomplish it. You want to know what there is to do, for you and for me? You can’t see the forest of flags for the flags? Shall I fetch the system and scheme of a Reich out of my dispatch-case? Shall I sketch you a plan straight away, here on the corner of Joachimsthaler and Kurfürstendamn, beginning with the farm, and through community of distress to the Province? Beginning with the Association through the League to the Board of Agriculture? Beginning with the farmer’s current account through the accumulations of financial establishments to the State budget? From the economic calculation of trade through the authority of political economy and to the so-to-speak centralised federalisation of economy, of countries and of associations? Shall I enumerate to you the articles of the Constitution, describe the structure of the State organisation, the nature of tariff agreements, of monopolies, of financial policy, of budgetary measures, of reciprocal credits? You know that it is not necessary to do that now, but that it is necessary to remove all obstacles and difficulties inherent in the structure of economy and society and which obstruct any planned economy, and that it is necessary to do that as soon as possible; that it is necessary to go from man to man, and from farm to farm, and prepare them to serve the nation, and to make them proof against the tales of hundreds and thousands of time-servers; that it is necessary for us who are armed to the heart to arm ourselves to the teeth. I am going to the farmers, Schaffer, not because I long for the fresh air of the Marsh, but because I know that the greatest strength of the country is to be found in them; because I know that this is the only strength that can be mobilised now and at once, and that the dunderheads are coming from every direction, with it all worked out in millions of rustling documents, to open the dams carefully and set the idle mills running again; because I know that the town is a function of the country and not its chief shareholder; because I know that if the farmer does not rise up in the country at once, the day will come when we shall not be able to rise up and march together for the sake of the Reich, but will be battering each other’s heads for a scrap of land, for a tiny corner of the poor, exhausted, despised soil of the farmers.’

  XVIII

  The commissionaire of the Kadewe untied the last dog from the railing, a miserable little breathing atom with a wrinkled face and weak legs, and handed him obsequiously to the lady from the grand car.

  ‘Get out of the way there,’ he said to Hinnerk, who was standing straddle-legged over his basket right in front of the door of the car.

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ said Hinnerk, and the two glared at each other. The commissionaire touched his cap, pocketed his tip and turned his back haughtily on Hinnerk to close the doors.

  �
�Fresh baked rolls,’ cried Hinnerk, looking right and left, his basket of hygienically wrapped bread on his arm. The basket was still half full. . . The big lamp in the entrance of the block of offices went out. The employees came out.

  ‘Fresh baked. . . Off you go, my girl, to the underground. Fresh baked. . . Tuppence, sir. Fresh. . . there’s that fellow over there again!’

  The fellow was there again, a young man like Hinnerk, in a white apron, cap pulled over his eyes, and a basket of rolls.

  ‘Get out of the way there,’ said Hinnerk. ‘This is my corner, clear out with all your truck.’

  ‘What am I to do, then?’ said the other, ‘the comrade over there. . .’

  ‘Never mind that,’ said Hinnerk. ‘This is my corner, off you go.’

  But the other fellow did not go, and Hinnerk put his rolls in the basket and went over to arrange matters.

  ‘Look out, police,’ said a voice behind him.

  ‘What do I care about police,’ said Hinnerk turning round. ‘Oh, it’s you, Ive.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ive, ‘leave him alone. Since when have you adopted capitalist methods?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Hinnerk, ‘there must be order, otherwise we might as well all pack up.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said Ive. ‘Listen, Hinnerk,’ he continued, laying his hand on his friend’s arm, ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

  ‘What have you to tell me?’ asked Hinnerk, but Ive only smiled. For a moment they looked at each other seriously.

  ‘There must be order,’ said Ive at last, ‘that is probably what Warder Seifenstiebel says when he goes to Claus Heim’s cell and tells him to clean out his pail with sand.’