Schlageter and Rathenau
One encounters them again in the Ruhr region, a region occupied since January by French and Belgian troops under General Degoutte’s command. This occupation faces unanimous opposition, stretching from workers to master ironworkers. The Freikorps organise a movement of resistance whose symbol would be embodied by Leo Schlageter.
Just like von Salomon, Schlageter had participated in the Kapp putsch and the Silesian conflicts. A member of the Havenstein corps, he had also joined the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei777 ) as early as 1922. In March 1923, he blows up a railway bridge near Calkum, paralysing the traffic organised by the occupiers, and is arrested by the French. On the 26th of May, following a summary judgement, he is executed by firing squad on the Golzheimer heathland, north of Düsseldorf (at the age of twenty-eight). His companions are sent to the isle of Saint-Martin-de-Ré, before being deported to Cayenne.
Ten years later, Schlageter would be declared a national hero, with monuments to his memory erected all over Germany. His grave is nowadays located in Schönau.
Mr Venner specifies:
For a certain time, communists would also celebrate Schlageter, presenting him as a misled hero. At the time, Soviet foreign policy desired an alliance with Germany against Poland, France and the West in general. The idea of an agreement between these two outcast nations, perhaps even that of a German national-Bolshevik revolution, made headway. As a result of their own despair, certain Freikorps combatants surrendered to it. This environment seemed to favour a new communist attack against the Weimar Republic.
In parallel to this, the Freikorps proceed to establish secret tribunals, drawing inspiration from the Holy Vehme, the mysterious institution that arose in Westphalia during the 12th century, at a time when the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was crumbling. (In a chapter of The Outcasts specifically entitled Holy Vehme, von Salomon recounts the — failed — execution of a spy.)
From 1919 to 1922, around 354 political assassination attempts are recorded. On 26th January, 1920, Matthias Erzberger, the Minister of Finance and head of the (Catholic) Centrum778 who ceaselessly demanded the strict implementation of the clauses of the Versailles Treaty, is severely wounded. On 26th August, 1921, he is shot dead by two members of the Organisation Consul, marine lieutenants Heinrich Tillesen and Heinrich Schulz. Upon their arrest, the two ‘outcasts’ proudly claim responsibility for the act.
Next in line is the Rathenau affair, which would mark von Salomon for life.
On 24th June, 1922, Walther Rathenau, the Foreign Affairs Minister in the Second Wirth Cabinet, leaves his Grünewald villa — in the vicinity of Berlin — by car. Another car soon catches up with him. Marine lieutenants Kern and Fischer fire a few revolver shots and throw a grenade at him. Rathenau is killed on the spot.
Rathenau was, however, not a man of the Left. Germanist Edmond Vermeil even classified him among the doctrinaires of the German national revolution, alongside Thomas Mann, Oswald Spengler and von Keyserling.
This multi-faceted humanist and avid reader of both Bergson and Nietzsche dreamt of a ‘kingdom of the soul’ in which mechanised man, the Zweckmensch (a man that only pursues ends that lie outside his own life), would be brought back to his rightful place. He subordinated ‘genuine democracy’ to the establishment of the Volkstaat (a state attuned to the substantial life of the people). He even founded an entire philosophy on a bizarre opposition between a ‘dark and intellectual race of fear’ and a ‘brave, spiritless and dominating blonde race’.
This is what he said:
One must be wary of demonstration-based ideas and only allow oneself to be guided by the inner voice which, despite holding a tone of severity, only ever utters the truth. (Où va le monde?779 Payot, 1922)
Simultaneously, Rathenau confessed that he was fraught with contradictions. Attracted by capitalism at times, by communism at others, and dreaming of both a rational world founded upon economy and an age that would put an end to countries, he never ceased to adopt seemingly contradictory standpoints.
In the eyes of German nationalists, he was, above all else, a symbol of both defeat and the latter’s consequences. A member of the German Democratic Party, he consented to taking charge of the Ministry of Reparations. Having moved on to the Foreign Affairs sphere, he signed the German-Soviet Treaty of Rapallo, through which Germany resumed its diplomatic relations with the USSR and renounced the upholding of its nationals’ rights in relation to Soviet authorities (the very same agreement also inaugurated a collaboration policy between the Reichswehr and the Red Army).
Having been informed of Rathenau’s assassination, Chancellor Wirth let out his famous invective:
There he is, the enemy that secretes poison into our people’s wounds! There he is, this enemy! He is part of the Right — of that there is no possible doubt!
Already on the next day, Kern and Fischer are hounded by the police. First one million, then four and a half million marks are offered for their capture. In the end, they find themselves surrounded while in a castle belonging to writer Hans Stein. One of them is killed, and the other commits suicide — ‘Fischer sat on the second bed. Raising his gun, he pressed it against his own temple, against the very same place where Kern had been shot, and squeezed the trigger’.
Ernst von Salomon had supplied the car used by the two officers to carry out the assassination. Following the murder, he had also sought out his companions to provide them with passports. Wanted and, in his turn, arrested, he is sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for ‘active participation’ and to three further years for assault and battery (it is only in 1928 that he would finally be amnestied and released). After three years of ‘incommunicado detention’, he is granted permission to receive a book. He asks for Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, after which he begins to outline his first great book, The Outlaws.
The Success of the ‘Outlaws’
As soon as it is published through Rowohlt in 1929, The Outlaws begins to exert genuine fascination on its contemporary world. Long before reading Malraux’s Man’s Hope, political militants of all stripes discover in it the eternal romanticism of action. In his Notes for Understanding the Century, Drieu la Rochelle780 would mention, with a hint of nostalgia, ‘the combatant of the Great War, once trained in the Sturmtruppen or the aviation and now a fierce member of the Freikorps, the terrorist-assassin of Rathenau, a boy-scout, a Wandervogel that moves from youth centre to youth centre until reaching the other side of Europe, advancing towards unknown salvation’.
Around the 1960s, equally outlawed and abandoned militants or putschists would passionately re-read those pages from which the fraternal faces of the past’s great activists emerge:
We were mad, and well aware of it. We knew that we would be struck down by the wrath of all the peoples that surrounded our foolhardy cohort, ever in a state of unrest. Yet if madness had ever been endowed with method, ours would have been the one. We refused to submit to an era whose daily motto was embodied by submission itself. We said “no” to the Germany of the day because our tongues already bore a “yes” for the one whose coming was at hand. Our madness was thus nothing but prideful obstinacy, an obstinacy whose consequences we were prepared to endure. No man could ever do more than that.
For as long as half a century, von Salomon lived in Rathenau’s shadow. A few weeks before his passing, on the occasion of the assassination’s fiftieth anniversary, radio stations were still asking him the same questions. With his rather drawling voice, Ernst Jünger had been the first to ask him, ‘Why did you lack the courage to admit that Rathenau had been killed because he was Jewish?’. To which von Salomon always responded by saying: ‘Because it is not true’.
Barely out of prison, von Salomon gets back in touch with his companions. He works for various insurance companies and as a ‘free’ stockbroker.
In 1932, he visits France and spends sixteen months in the Basque region, traveling to
Lourdes and Saint-Jean-de-Luz and conversing with Claude Farrère.781 This stay would give birth to a novella fraught with irony and entitled Boche in Frankreich,782 which would later be (partly) annexed to the text of his Questionnaire.
Ernst von Salomon writes:
All the Frenchmen that hear me speak French begin to smile, for my speech is marked by the accent of the French South. I thus speak French more or less in the same manner as my friend, the police commissioner of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, who spent four years in a war prisoner internment camp, speaks German. I swear that I shall never misuse my knowledge of the French language for the purpose of hearing the sacred soil of France scrape against the sole of my marching boots.
At the time, the Weimar Republic was running out of steam. In Berlin, the cabarets were always full, yet there were six million unemployed people. A society in a state of collapse. On 30th January, 1933, Adolf Hitler becomes the country’s chancellor.
‘From Authority to Totality’
Numerous former members of the Freikorps joined the National Socialist Party. As early as 1920, specifies Mr Uwe Lohalm in Völkischer Radikalismus783 (Leibniz, Munich, 1970), the Protection and Defiance Federation (Schutz und Trutzbund) erected a sort of ‘bridge’ between the Freikorps and the NSDAP. Furthermore, the programme espoused by the Wikingbund, a semi-legal emanation of the Organisation Consul, was, from the very outset, modelled in harmony with that of the Hitlerian movement.
Reinhard Heydrich himself, the future head of the SiPo,784 was once a member of the Schutz und Trutzbund. His immediate superior, Himmler, formerly belonged to the Einwohnerwehr of Munich. As for Rudolf Hess, he spent some time in the Regensburg Freikorps. On his part, Martin Bormann was the treasurer of the Rossbach working community in 1922. Sepp Dietrich, the organiser of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler,785 came from the Oberland Freikorps, and Constantin Hierl, the head of the Reich’s Labour Service, from the Augsburg Freikorps.
One would, however, be mistaken when only perceiving the Freikorps as a Nazi ‘breeding ground’, for one also encounters, among the volunteers of 1919 and 1921, a considerable number of (rightist) members who opposed the National-Socialist regime.
No sooner had Hitler seized power than he ordered the arrest of Count Arco-Valley, the member of the Thule Society who had assassinated Kurt Eisner. On 30th June, 1934, during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, several former Freikorps leaders are executed — Karl Ernst, Edmund Heines, Oskar Stable, August Schneidhuber, Hans Peter von Heydebreck, Hans Hayn, Fritz von Krausser, and even Werner von Fichte, the great-grandson of the author of Addresses to the German Nation, formerly stationed in the Baltic and Upper Silesian regions. Others still, such as Wilhelm Canaris or Wolf Heinrich Helldorf, would later be among the conspirers of the 20th July, 1944 plot. Already in 1923, Captain Ehrhardt chose to break with Hitler. Openly declaring himself an adversary of Nazism, he was compelled to seek refuge in Switzerland during World War II. In 1938, Friedrich-Wilhelm Heinz, a former member of the O.C., devised an assassination attempt against Hitler, and Gerhardt Rossbach, likewise, only narrowly evaded execution.
As a good North German man himself, Ernst von Salomon shares his countrymen’s defiant attitude towards the ‘beer drinkers’. The ‘Cathedrals of Light’ of Nuremberg hold his attention yet fail to exhilarate him. Just like Ernst Jünger and the supporters of ‘Prussian socialism’, he prefers to keep his distance from a movement that strikes him as excessively plebeian, one that is additionally marked by its southern, Bavarian origin. Rather than revolutionary nationalism, what he professes is a rigid sort of aristocratism. He would thereafter state:
I regarded Hitler’s attempt to shift the decisive weight from the state to the people, and from authority to totality, as a despicable betrayal of the real goal.
His brother, Bruno von Salomon, was meant to go even further. Having participated in the launching of the Aufbruch journal, he would join the Communist Party during the Republic’s final years. His state of mind matched that of a number of German intellectuals who violently broke with the bourgeoisie around 1930 and, taking the view that no vengeful war could ever be waged westward without the backing of the Soviet Union, chose to turn to national-Bolshevik groups (Ernst Niekisch, Karl-Otto Paetel), Strasser’s ‘Nazi Left’ or the Communist Party.
Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, the author’s nephew and a former member of the Freikorps, barely manages to evade his own killing on 30th June, 1934. From 1941 onwards, he would find himself interned in a concentration camp.
In spite of all the offers made to him, Ernst von Salomon refuses to ‘play a role’ under the Third Reich. He decides, instead, to work as a manuscript reader at the Rowohlt publishing house, before becoming a scriptwriter.
At the Writers’ Union presided by former expressionist Hans Johst, the only people that he associates with are Blunck, Ernst Wiechert, Agnes Miegel, Hans Carossa, Emil Strauss, Jünger, Kolbenheyer, and especially Hans Grimm, the man who authored Volk ohne Raum (A People Without Space). Some of his texts (Die Front kehrt heim,786 Putsch, and Die Verschwörer787 ) are then re-edited, particularly by Rudolf Ibel and Walter Machleidt at Moritz-Diesterweg editions.
On 8th September, 1935, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle is in Berlin. He writes the following to a friend:
Yesterday, I spent the evening with the German writer that I like most — Ernst von Salomon, who spent years in prison for having taken part in Rathenau’s murder. He spoke to me with both elegance and power. How beautiful it is to see a man rise above the events! He has done everything to establish this regime, yet he rejects all the resulting honours: a true aristocrat by any means. We got on marvellously well with one another.
Thirty years later, National Socialism was but an indistinct memory in von Salomon’s mind. In a conversation that took place shortly before his passing, he did celebrate the Waffen-SS’s military exploits, but added:
Those men were valiant; they thus had nothing to do with Nazism.
In The Questionnaire, the former Cadet Guard acknowledges both his incapability to form an opinion of this bizarre ‘Austrian corporal’ who had come to collect twenty centuries’ worth of history in the space of two decades (the struggle for power, the imperium, the twilight of the gods) and his inability to scrutinise this ‘Führer who arose from the shadows’ and ‘will never find his own place in history’.
We are now in 1945, at the time of the purge. Ernst von Salomon is once again arrested — by the Americans this time. He is accused of having belonged to the Volkssturm, in which all non-mobilisable ‘territorials’ had been enrolled, then mistakenly imprisoned and subsequently released.
At the time, the Allies had created no fewer than 262 denazification commissions. So as to accurately determine the responsibilities borne by each of the seven million members of the Nazi Party, they organised the distribution of twelve million copies of a printout containing 125 detailed questions. Such was the famed ‘questionnaire’. Providing the necessary answers allowed the respondent to obtain a ration card and a work permit.
Unexpectedly, von Salomon fills in his printout and turns it into the content of a thick, lengthy and verbose book. In the latter, he outlines his own past again, displaying an almost amused kind of detachment that would scandalise some of his readers (after his death, the German weekly Der Spiegel would also denounce the book’s ‘stiffness’ and insufficient humility).
Translated into French in 1953, The Questionnaire enjoyed tremendous success in Germany itself, with a total of 60,000 copies sold in the space of six months. There are some in whose eyes the book constitutes a sort of deliverance, just like Virgil Gheorgiu’s788 Twenty-Fifth Hour.
The Peasant Revolt of Early 1929
After his Questionnaire, von Salomon publishes Die Stadt,789 his sole genuine novel alongside Die Schöne Wilhelmine790 (Corrêa, 1965).
As if it were a window, the book opens to a view of the Schleswig-Holstein regions located to the north of the Elbe, with their dunes, dykes, and mea
dows reclaimed from the sea. It is a landscape where polders abound, just like in Friesland and the Netherlands; a rural land where the uplands — the plateau (Geest) — contrast with the Marschen.791
Farms are what dominates the area. The brick buildings, with their immense thatched roofs, tiny windows and a door that holds virtually all of the façade, rise amidst the narrow rectangular pastures separated by draining trenches. Grass abounds on the rich soil and is regularly mowed by cattle. More often than not, the stables and the dwellings are united under the same vast roof, and the warm and overpowering smell of tethered animals invades the entire house.
History crops up again, acting as a backdrop. Under the Weimar Republic, the indebted petty peasantry finds itself unable to pay taxes and, most of all, the enormous annual interest rates (1.5 billion marks). The prices of industrial products rise on a regular basis, whereas those of agricultural goods never cease to diminish. At the beginning of 1929, revolution is already brewing. A group of peasants led by a man named Klaus Heim advocates a tax strike. Heim is a ‘stocky man, as strong as any one of his oxen, with greyish blond hairs on his square, red face’.
‘What shall we do?’, the peasants ask Klaus Heim, the first among equals. To which Heim responds: ‘It is you who must help yourselves’.
The National Socialists make the most of the peasants’ revolt and settle into the North of the country. Von Salomon reminds us that this had not been a smooth process.
On 7th March, 1929, in the small village of Wöhrden, the communists attack a ‘brown shirt’ procession, leaving two people dead and twenty-three injured. 6,000 people attend the funerals, including Hitler himself, accompanied by SA792 leaders and Gauleiter793 Lohse. The following week, 500 peasants join the NSDAP. During the elections of July 1932, the Nazi Party claims 76% of all votes in the south of the Dithmarschen and 95% to the north.
Controversies and Viewpoints Page 32