It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  The Judge said: ‘That is your theory.’

  ‘That is my theory,’ said Ive, ‘and you must admit that I am acting in accordance with it. I demand evidence because I know that you have forgotten how to produce evidence. Not that I consider evidence as conclusive in all circumstances, but I will not play your game. I will not play your cute game with a confession as trump card, relieving you of risk and responsibility. You stand for the law, and I against it.’

  ‘You admit guilt, then?’ asked the Judge quickly.

  ‘I admit nothing whatever,’ said Ive, leaning forward, ‘but at least I expect to be questioned about what I was responsible for. And you are not able to put such questions. That is where I have the advantage, and I am making use of it. Even supposing I made a confession, it might be the result of despair, it might be merely to escape your interrogation. You have had plenty of such instances in your practice! You know as well as I do that every confession, whether it has been extracted by psychological tactics or by force, or whether it has been made voluntarily, immediately encumbers the facts of the case with a flood of irrelevances. You yourself, since you are an enlightened, liberal, humane and patriotic judge with modern ideas,’ Ive rolled out the words with relish, ‘have brought psychology to bear on the case. But the historical task of psychology, namely to crush the conceptions and standards of centuries, has probably been fulfilled by the very result which it has been the means of developing. It negatives itself. I will not speak of the Müllschippes, but you, you and the Public Prosecutor, and Counsel, and experts, what have you left of your own functions, what have you left of the accused, what have you left of the law? The Medical Officer of Health has superseded the Judge, the Commissioner the Public Prosecutor, and in your proceedings the culprit has neither a favourable nor an unfavourable position; he has no position at all.

  The Judge opened his eyes wide.

  ‘You are here in the position of prisoner at the bar,’ he said. ‘All that you can prove,’ said Ive, ‘destroys the evidence; the relation of the culprit to the crime, guilt or innocence, for your psychological method deprives this relationship of its former validity. What the accused has done or not done, anybody else might have done or not done. Therefore you demand a confession. Your method has nullified the proceedings, and the proceedings have made the law ridiculous. I assure you that this delights me.’

  The Judge looked at the bomb and then gave Ive a cautious sidelong glance.

  ‘So you are an anarchist?’ he asked.

  Ive drew himself up a little.

  ‘No,’ he said indifferently, ‘I merely want to reform the criminal code. It is quite simple. You only need to add a rider to Article 51. . .”is punishable with death.” ’

  The Judge meditated for a long time whether he should not ask the medical officer to report on Ive’s mental condition. But he desisted. At the end of the trial he did all in his power to prevent Ive’s release, and he succeeded, although the incriminating evidence was very meagre. He realised that Ive held the key to the whole mystery of the bomb outrages, and Ive realised that he realised it. The Judge had officiated at a number of political trials, and was accustomed to one prisoner incriminating another. Of the hundred and twenty prisoners that Herr Müllschippe had brought up before him, he had to dismiss a hundred (and as a result exposed himself to a good deal of unpleasantness at the Ministry of Internal Affairs) and the material produced by Division I.A. had been by no means adequate. They were not all as silent as the gloomy Claus Heim, but they were on the whole a taciturn set of men, and his adroitly turned surprise questions simply had no effect on these farmers. They had such an odd way of looking at him when he had lured them to the very edge of a trap. He had the feeling all the time that they were secretly laughing at him. At every turn there was a hitch in the proceedings. His superiors were urging speed, for voices were making themselves heard on every side, pointing out that the proceedings were illegal. Actually Dr. Fuchs knew as well as the government that Altona and not Berlin was the competent tribunal; it was only the attack on the Reichstag which could justify the concentration of the trial in the capital, but that was the one crime which was never cleared up. This Iversen, thought the County Court Judge.

  But Iversen had said, ‘Show me a contradiction in my statement, and if you do show me one, then the devil would be in it if I couldn’t make it plausible.’

  Ive not only dragged out all his examinations interminably, but he made them ridiculous. He denied nothing, he admitted nothing; he left everything open.

  ‘You are on the wrong track,’ he said to Dr. Fuchs. ‘The longer you follow it, the further you will get from the right one.’

  But the Judge did not believe this; he was unfortunate in these proceedings, for whenever the truth did emerge he refused to believe it. He stuck obstinately, to individual points, as stubbornly as the farmers themselves, and he made no progress. One by one as they appeared in the Court his witnesses fell down on their evidence; and Police-Comissioner Müllschippe had every reason to refer to justice with an expressive gesture and to throw himself with enthusiasm into a new case.

  Six months after his arrest, although not acquitted, Ive was released, and simultaneously the proceedings were referred to Altona. Claus Heim remained in custody. Claus Heim was to be sentenced, and according to the Explosives Act the minimum sentence was five years’ imprisonment. Old Reimann, who had come to visit his son in prison, waited for Ive at the gates. A tall, motionless figure, his blue cap on his straggling white hair, his stick in his hand, he stood in front of the small iron gate, looking along the shining grey pavement. The point of his stick burrowed into a square of slimy dirty-black earth between the paving-stones, which provided meagre nourishment for a tree whose bare, damp branches made it look as though it had been corroded by acids.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said old Reimann simply, as Ive came out of the gate.

  He relieved him of a few of the ridiculous cardboard boxes, full to bursting point and clumsily tied up, which contained all Ive’s possessions. They walked along beside the tall, gloomy houses, with quiet, deliberate steps as though they were walking on the clinker roads of the Marsh. To Ive, whose eyes were still focused to the grey walls of his cell, the people who pushed by him, the trees, the cars and omnibuses looked like shadows, or the flat figures of a film; to his ear, still under the strain of listening to the significant sounds of the prison house, the noises of the street seemed like a hard, cold rumble through which the hooting of motor horns shot like bright flames. He was not numbed, as he had pictured himself in the long night meditations of his cell, but rather dangerously and excitedly empty, ready to absorb impressions through every pore. He lifted his head and sniffed up the pungent odour of the town and unconsciously fell into the same quick, firm steps as the girl with the clicking heels, who brushed by them, slender and impersonal in her plain grey coat. He looked at his companion, and suddenly in the town; in the chilly light of the early spring sun, the Marsh seemed to him to be distant, strange and remote; the voice of old Reimann, too, sounded distant as, in his characteristic quiet manner, he gave the news of the Movement.

  ‘I have spoken to Hamkens about you,’ he said—for they had had to release Hamkens after a few weeks—‘and we have a job for you. There is nothing more to be done with bombs, I suppose,’ he said, rapping his stick on the pavement. ‘I don’t mean, of course, that they did no good. If you want a big thing, you must risk big things, and I have never in my life been afraid of taking a risk. My lad and Heim and the others aren’t a lot of silly schoolboys who didn’t know what they were doing. It helped, but now it can’t help any more. There is the trial in Neumünster, I’m not anxious about that, and if things don’t go well in Altona, we have it in our power to put the matter right in the long run. In East Prussia things seem to be going ahead now; it is all very promising, and the paper as it is at present answers the purpose.’

  ‘The make-up is shocking,’ said Ive angrily.


  ‘I know,’ said old Reimann, ‘everything is not as it should be and there is a lot of back-biting, but there always is back-biting. But the Movement is sticking it, and now it is a question of who can hold out longest. They have been coming to us with their quack cures and that is the greatest danger, but as long as we are there, Hamkens and the others and I, they won’t be able to corrupt us. We need you, Ive,’ said old Reimann, suddenly digging him with a cardboard box, and Ive said dryly: ‘Claus Heim.’

  Reimann turned his face full on Ive and looked at him with his bright eyes.

  ‘What are you going to do? I have spoken to Claus Heim. He is not a man to run away, and he is not a man to ask for mercy.’

  ‘No, not that,’ said Ive, ‘we must put up a fight for him. What the Communists were able to do for their Max Hölz we should be able to do also.’

  He pulled himself together and said: ‘I am staying in the town.’

  He went on talking rapidly.

  ‘First of all the solicitors must be consulted, then I will work the press; I shall get help wherever I can. Of course, Heim will say that he is innocent, and the worst of it is that they have in him a hostage with which to tempt us. That must not be, and he won’t want that either. It must be worked differently. And then there is another thing. . .’

  ‘One thing leads to another,’ said old Reimann, ‘we know that; I won’t say that we need a lot of friends but the more pressure there is from the other side the quicker we shall gain our ends.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Ive, and explained his plan.

  They spoke quietly, as was their habit, but Ive grew excited, for he realised what the farmers wanted of him, and he realised also that they had feared he might misconstrue them, and so he exerted himself to make it clear to old Reimann, by his attitude and by what he said, that he did understand, and that for him, too, the separation was not really a separation.

  ‘I am not a farmer,’ he said, ‘and you know why I have been on your side; nothing has been changed.’

  ‘There is no change,’ said the farmer at once, and then again, ‘we need you, Ive, and from whatever direction you come to us, when you come, we shall know you, and certainly of all there is to do you have chosen the bitterest portion. I tell you frankly there have been gossip-mongers who have let their tongues rattle about you, and Hamkens even thought it would be better for you to take over a paper in Schleswig, but that’s really all nonsense, you are more useful to us over there as things are at present. You are more useful to us if you are your own master.’

  But the present position was that the Movement had become a kind of organisation, not a registered association with secretary and treasurer, but a kind of organisation, with restricted aims and definite limits, for there was no other way of saving the Movement.

  ‘We miss Claus Heim,’ said old Reimann, ‘but it can’t be helped, everything will come right.’

  They walked on in silence, through noisy, narrow, streets, by crumbling house-fronts and dirty courtyards, over bare, clumsy, rough bridges, under blackened railway arches that shook and groaned when the trains thundered across them. Reimann looked neither to the left nor to the right, he went stolidly on his way.

  ‘Oho,’ he said to a motor car that rushed past him, almost touching his sleeve, and when they stood in front of the house in which he lived—he was staying with one of his sons-in-law, a professor at the University in Berlin—a large new block of flats with rows of straight, flat windows and jutting balconies, he rapped with his stick against one of the cornices.

  ‘Dead,’ he said, ‘cement—not living stone that breathes,’ and he looked at Ive reproachfully. On the following morning they parted.

  It was the first of April, and the porter at the Town Hall thought he was being made a fool of when a young man walked into his lodge and asked for work.

  ‘There’s no work here,’ he said gruffly, and hurried the fellow out of the door; he walked a few steps in front of the gate to look after the retreating figure, then the telephone rang, he was wanted in the building. He went off, and when he came back to his lodge, which in his haste he had omitted to lock, he found a longish packet behind the door. He picked it up, shook it a little, turned it over, and was about to open it when he heard a strange ticking. He started, listened, and put his ear to the side of the box. Suddenly his heart began to beat violently; the blood rushed as though driven by electric currents into his finger-tips and set his whole quaking body aglow. He held his breath and placed the package on the table, seized it again and ran, rushing, the packet in his outstretched arms in front of him, out of the lodge, out of the gate into the street, into the middle of the road. There he laid it down. Five minutes later the flying-squad was on the spot, police cars rattled along, the fire brigade engines ringing their bells and tooting their horns. The street was already thick with people.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked the people as they came up. The police jumped from their cars and unhooked their rubber truncheons.

  ‘A bomb,’ was the cry. The firemen circled round the largish black object that lay there alone in the middle of the square.

  ‘Move on!’ said the police, and barricaded the street so that no one could move on.

  Herr Müllschippe, too, had arrived. Herr Müllschippe waited for the experts.

  ‘A bomb,’ he said to the newspaper men.

  Trams, motor cars put on their brakes. Lieutenant Brodermann of the police force telephoned for reinforcements.

  ‘Stand back!’ was the cry, and a hard black hat collapsed under a blow from a rubber truncheon.

  ‘A bomb!’ shouted the Berliners, and played football with the hat. Then the car of the Assistant Commissioner of Police arrived, on its bonnet the white flag with the police star.

  ‘Stand back!’

  The expert approached, his coat flying open. For a while silence reigned in the Square. All eyes were turned on the man who was bending over the object. Then the man stood upright again. A happy murmur of relief passed through the rows of people.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said the Police-Commissioner to the reporters, ‘the examination of the police expert, who has just rendered the bomb innocuous, has proved without a doubt that the explosive is made up of the same constituents as those used for the bombs in the outrages in Schleswig-Holstein.’

  The reporters wrote rapidly, and the newspapers printed the news with startling headlines.

  The civil expert came too late. The crowd had long since dispersed; the police and the fire-brigade had driven off. So Herr Müllschippe telephoned to the Ministry of the Interior when the civil expert declared that the explosive material in the bomb consisted of garden soil, nothing but black rich garden soil which it would be difficult to prove as being of Schleswig-Holstein origin.

  On the following evening Ive read the correction, printed in small type, as he stood in front of the kiosk where he had bought his paper. The vendor of rolls, who was crying his wares in a hoarse voice beside him, tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

  ‘Hinnerk!’ exclaimed Ive in astonishment.

  ‘Emil is my name,’ said Hinnerk.

  He pointed to the report in the paper.

  ‘That’ll teach them to forget about bombs,’ he said. ‘That’s the way of the world; from the sublime to the ridiculous, from dynamite to garden soil.’

  V

  Ive came to the town to conquer it. This happened in those remarkable years which have left little trace of their character in our memories. Not that it was a time of peace; violent convulsions shook the world, throwing the nations into confusion. Nor indeed was there any lack of effort to make things tolerable. Serious and responsible men were unceasingly active in the interests of public welfare. But although everyone realised the insupportable state of affairs, although every one was directly affected by it, and therefore strove in his own way to change it, it seemed as though every endeavour was doomed to failure. We were living in a whirl of industry and stimulating activity; every short day was f
illed with events and yet it passed without impressing its importance on our consciousness. Looking back we can recall how pointless all this activity seemed to us, how it only increased our anxiety. No event, no personality stood out to give a name to this period. We can only regard it as one of those lulls which occur in history between two epochs. Yet it would be a mistake to speak lightly of those years. With all their tumult they were mute, with all their variety they registered no images, but the very lack of positive manifestations led men to probe beneath the surface, which offered so bare an answer to their questionings, and to seek deeper issues—issues which lay hidden like the unconscious potions masked by the death-like features of a sleeper tortured by wild dreams. When the sleeper awakes he knows nothing of the work which was fulfilled in his rigid body, of the vibrations whose lightest movement was registered in his quivering brain and transformed into nightmare. So hidden in the dream-world lay the presage of what the day had in store for us, and those who had the courage to search discovered the possibilities awaiting them, and found the chambers thrown open which despair had so carefully closed on them. And the paramount reason which makes us inclined to regard even these years of unrest as significant is the fact that in them, all at once, so many were driven by their dissatisfaction to tear down the bars from every bolted door.

  Once we are clear in our minds that everything that happened during that time was necessary, we must not seek the explanation by turning our minds to the leading spirits, to the prominent men who, with flourish of trumpets, were perpetually unfolding before our eyes the immense scroll of propaganda, nor yet to those who observed the trend of events with cold detachment and accurately reported what they saw, which was merely the surface, nor to all those who were considered the representatives of their age, and, indeed, were worthy representatives of that age; we must turn rather to those whom we met in our daily life, the men who held no office, and had no opinions, but who set out to find both, and to discover moreover what it was that alone could make office and opinion worthy of pursuit. It was they who prepared the way, and they prepared the way because they fulfilled in themselves what the period demanded of them. They were able to do this because, with the receptiveness of dreamers, they were influenced by every swing of the pendulum, their minds were open to every intellectual reaction, they plunged forward and upward, and, strong in the assurance of being indomitable they possessed themselves of that intrinsic quality which is the germ of life itself and by which alone it can be measured and judged. At the time it appeared to us that these men were more menaced than menacing. Certainly they did not know how to adjust themselves, to make use of all the salutary guarantees which an order-loving society had prudently created for the preservation of their well-being.