It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  Ive loved this hour of the night, when footsteps resound on the deserted pavements, making a perfect accompaniment to thought, giving it a temerity rising to the point of inspiration. The light sweat which breaks out over the skin lubricates as it were every fibre of the brain, so that the most irreconcilable ideas unite in a perfect pattern. In such hours quick friendships are made which as quickly fade in the crude light of the morrow when nothing remains but an insignificant residuum of embarrassment. Ive looked at the young man at his side. He had asked Dr. Schaffer who he was. But Dr. Schaffer knew no more than that he had turned up one day and had at once quite unaffectedly joined in the discussion, and, since what he had to say was at least the product of original thought, he had always been welcome, and nobody had found it necessary to ask him for further information.

  Walking side by side they realised that it was no longer possible to avoid the rather ridiculous and disconcerting comedy of a belated self-introduction. Pareigat was the son of an elementary school teacher who had been exiled by the shifting of the frontier. At the university he began by studying economics, but passed on, first to philosophy, then to mathematics and physics. He had never taken his final examination in any subject for the simple reason that he could not raise the money for the fees and, even if he could have raised the money, he would not have wished to enter. In any case, the prospects of obtaining a post on academic qualifications were nil. So he stayed on at the University, making the utmost use of its educational facilities, until he was sent down for Communist activities. He was a Communist as a protest, out of defiance, out of sympathy for the Russian experiment, for hundreds of reasons, but not because he shared in the least its materialistic conception of history or accepted its economic doctrine. During his student year he kept his head above water by doing night-duty as a taxi-driver and later, when he needed the night for work, he drove a bookseller’s van through the town. He had no independent means, and he had never had a regular job. His article on the Canadian Electrical Industry, which was published in an economic journal and reprinted in American and English trade-papers, had brought him in altogether eighty marks. This sum enabled him to begin a book on ‘Long-distance Gas Supply,’ and he had been working on this for the last six months. Ive gleaned no idea as to how Pareigat actually lived, and everything pointed to the fact that he himself could not have said how. However, it was obviously not a matter of fundamental importance to him. All that he said about himself seemed to be simple, straightforward and free from any trace of social resentment. He walked beside Ive, his head slightly bent, his face shaded by a wide-brimmed black hat, and his coat, worn through at the elbows and at the sides, was fastened by a single button swinging from a long thread. Ive spoke of Claus Heim, and, without quite knowing why, he laid emphasis on the contrast, which spoke for itself, between the picture of Claus Heim, silent in the midst of violent attacks, and the picture of the nocturnal controversialists whose company they had just left. He went over the evening’s discussion, saying almost angrily that it amazed him that these gentlemen could reconcile what they said with what they were. It did not amaze Pareigat. He said that nowadays everything was reconciled with everything else and spoke of the phenomenon of transference of consciousness.

  Ive found it difficult to follow Pareigat’s train of thought. If he had himself developed any theory from the farmers’ battle and particularly from his own demagogic activities— and it really did seem to him that demagogy was the only means of making a direct attack on democracy in its everyday manifestations—it was the theory that it was dangerous to succumb to the magic of one’s own words. There was no doubt that in this struggle the best and most effective method was the simplest. The opponent and every phenomenon which arose in the course of the day should be labelled, the idea transformed as it were into an image; instead of juggling with abstractions one should bring concrete figures into action. But this could only be accomplished if he himself did not confuse life with one of its manifestations. This fellow Pareigat did not fit into any category. Not that Ive wanted this exactly, but, again and again, at almost every one of the Pareigatian expressions or statements, he caught himself hastily assigning him a suitable place, only to recognise his mistake at the very next sentence. This made him fear that his arguments were bussing fire, although Pareigat always took them up immediately, turning them playfully this way and that and then calmly establishing them on a new basis. It seemed to Ive as though this fellow carelessly made use of the terminology of every movement, yet he got no result by parrying with his own; Pareigat skilfully twisted its meaning and, when Ive defended himself, swooped down on him like a hawk on its prey, and forced him to examine the debated expression for its actual significance. Ive stumbled from one pitfall to another. Nevertheless he enjoyed the discussion. Conversing heatedly they strode through the empty, dim streets, where the facades of the houses rose steep and silent to the narrow strip of sky; they leant over the bare iron railings of bridges, looking down into the black depths intersected by a mesh of shining railway lines; they penetrated the sudden floods of light from isolated street lamps; glided past the immovable figures of policemen in shining helmets, of tired girls emerging ghost-like from dark corners, towards the sooty-red halo surrounding the massive silhouette of the church which stood at the end of the broad street, dark and menacing with upstretched, accusing finger.

  After every digression, after every deviation into the tangled thicket of elastic definition, they returned to the narrow path of the discussion, just as they had returned to the street, as though their progress had been uninterrupted, from the beer-house where Pareigat, leaning against the counter, had ravenously devoured a pickled herring.

  Returning to the phenomenon of transference of consciousness, Pareigat said he regarded it as a result of the pretentious attempt, conditioned by the passing generation, of the individual to free himself from the dynamic unity of life, an attempt which had succeeded constructively through the disruption of this unity. Thus all intellectual battles must of necessity take place on some other plane than that of ‘being.’ The character of these battles was indicated mainly by the fact that the problem of ‘meaning’ was removed from the intellectual plane, but not from the spiritual plane, where alone it could be united with the problem of ‘being.’ Consciousness, said Pareigat, had been transferred from the plane of ‘being,’ so that now all orientation must be from a hypothetical line, on which the moving points of interest served to guide the few. Thus the strange phenomenon that capitalists and socialists found themselves in agreement in so many fields and, indeed, united in one front, though at times it might be a somewhat thorny contact, against all assaults of a spiritual nature, only retained importance as a phenomenon.

  ‘All the same,’ interrupted Ive, ‘in all these intellectual battles, leaving out of account, though I admit its truth, the example you cited of capitalists and socialists, the attempt is to transform a conception of life into a reality, or vice versa.’

  ‘That is the very thing,’ said Pareigat, ‘that must of necessity end in disaster.’

  For actually this attempt was not obeying the direct appeal of the personality, but, as it were, that of its reverse side—the fear which expresses itself as a wish for new orientation, a change of position. This wish really belonged to the unconscious rather than to the conscious, and its destructive tendency was obvious and could be demonstrated by the fact that, while it claimed to express the communal spirit, it was splitting it up into innumerable sects and conventicles, political and religious.

  Ive said that he himself, in criticising an attitude, had always considered the decisive criterion to be whether its aim was success or fulfilment, and, from this point of view he did not like the idea of calmly dismissing the tendency they were talking of as unfruitful.

  But Pareigat would not agree to this. Fulfilment, he said; was only one of the sources of success, and the thing to discover was in how far success was at all possible nowadays. Greatness, in n
o matter what sphere, was only tolerable today in the form of eminence, and wherein lay the essence of eminence? Certainly not in the development of one’s own personality, but, on the contrary, in emptying it, making it serve as the container for the greatest possible number of wish-fantasies. Eminence was not self-sufficient, it relied on its reflection; what it accomplished was the means to an end, which has no relation to its own responsibility; it was pure instrumentality, whether it were a question of eminence as boxer, singer, film-star, artist, preacher, administrator, or politician. But even in such cases, the higher degree of the eminent significance had been transferred more and more from the actual doer or leader to the instrument, from the actor to the producer, from the industrialist to the banker, from the statesman to the demagogue, from the man of learning to the writer, an astounding principle of depreciating counter-selection, a principle which was more or less illustrated by the position of a Russian People’s Commissary at its most typical, a position, the essence of which was that its holder could be no more than the bare instrument of a mass will.

  ‘The fact remains,’ said Ive, ‘that in principle this attitude satisfies an imperative claim.’

  ‘The fact remains,’ said Pareigat, ‘that the imperative nature of this claim is open to question, so long as the claim itself is not justifiable. How can the claim be justified? By the mass-will, the justification of which can be called into question at any moment; and how is the mass-will to be justified? By its existence; and how is existence to be justified? By the declaration of the claim. A delightful game, an intellectual perpetuum mobile, which must be continually rediscovered, because without the question of justification no order is conceivable. But the question of justification is the question of existence, the question of existence is a spiritual question, and every justifiable plan must be a spiritual, that is, a hierarchical plan.’

  ‘That is reactionary,’ said Ive quickly, and regretted it immediately.

  ‘It certainly is reactionary,’ said Pareigat, and gave the illustration of the wheels of history, which cannot be turned backwards. And it was futile to want to turn them backwards, for they did it themselves without any help.

  ‘History,’ he said, ‘is the expression of living development, and its periods run the same course of growth, maturity, and age as the span between birth and death. Those who deny this, deny life itself.’

  ‘And indeed they are trying to,’ he said, and Ive was astonished at the wild hatred which he could hear vibrating in his companion’s voice—‘they are trying to argue death away; simply because they cannot deny it as a phenomenon, to deny its importance as the boundary-line and keystone. Does not life reach its highest potentialities in the shadow of death; is not its whole course ennobled by the pain and horror which are sanctified by death?’

  ‘That is the great illusion,’ said Pareigat, coming to a standstill in the circle of light from an arc-lamp and pushing his hat back from his forehead and seizing Ive by the coat—’to want to explain death, to explain it as a simple transmutation of matter, as a material act, to postpone it with their miserable hygiene, to destroy its force as an expiatory fulfilment, to banish it as the seal of a heroic stake, to debase the sacred significance of the plan to sordid security in the name of their cowardice—an optimistic cowardice, and therefore the vilest and most contemptible, which they find it necessary to exalt to the status of a law, because they know that the man who demands dignity in his life will never submit to it.’

  He released his hold of Ive and said in a quiet voice: ‘They exist in a state of “being” which is a denial of “being.” They do not live, they explain until nothing is left but a vacuum containing the slimy web spun by their own brains.’

  ‘But,’ asked Ive, ‘does it not follow from their very insistence on an unconditional life based on their own personality that no imperative association and, therefore, no plan of any kind is possible?’

  Pareigat would not admit this. ‘No,’ he said, ‘since life encloses them within its boundaries, it encloses them completely. Conscious “being” embraces the whole plan, and thus is its most important element. In it and in it alone can the individual be identified with society, with the nation, with thought, for, of necessity, he strives in every direction, he is subject to an immediate urge to complete the synthesis, and thus he is one pole of the plan and between this pole and its opposite alone can develop the only possible, the only noble, the only justifiable organisation.’

  ‘Which?’ asked Ive.

  ‘The Church,’ said Pareigat.

  Ive was silent. He wanted to question further, but he was silent. He felt as though he must throw himself down from a great height to break with the weight of his body the whole confused web of the embarrassing discussion.

  The keen wind whipped their coats about their bodies as they walked on across the square. On the roof of one of the houses they were approaching the blue-white incandescence of an illuminated sign shot up like a stream of oil and flowed with silent mechanical speed along the line of invisible letters and then was extinguished. A car, a black, gliding shadow with dazzling, rapacious eyes, swept round the corner and disappeared.

  Presently Ive asked abruptly: ‘How do you pray?’ Pareigat stood still with one foot in the gutter and one on the pavement. The headlights of a second car shed a flickering light on his face. It was grey, and round the eyes lay deep shadows.

  ‘Must I tell you?’ he asked softly.

  ‘You need not,’ said Ive.

  Pareigat whispered: ‘Then I would rather not.’

  They walked slowly on. They turned into a side street, an alley which branched off obliquely, with a few straggling lamps, whose pale green light encircled and united the disconnected outlines of pavement, houses, and gutter. The people they encountered had different faces from those they had met previously. As before, they were masks, standardised to the same expression of strained, cold absorption, with dead, glittering eyes, but, whereas the features of the others had set after intelligent animation, these were rigid as though in preparation for a gloomy, pointless vigil without intermission or end. They were underground-railway faces, as Ive described them, the others taxi-faces—in both cases alien, another race, the race of the town.

  Ive was seized with a mad longing for the Marsh, blue caps pulled over ruddy, healthy faces, the soft crunching of the earth beneath an easy tread, the warm pungent smell of placid, cud-chewing cattle. Suddenly, empty and exhausted, he put one foot before the other mechanically, then pulled himself together as the thought struck him that his face must have the same expression of deadly boredom to be seen on the wax models in the brightly illuminated windows of the fashionable shops. It was just past midnight. Ive looked apathetically at the long rows of waiting taxis which the darkness enveloped, listened to the distant roar of the town, borne by the wind over the blocks of sleeping houses, to the intermittent wail of saxophones, which issued from the doors and windows of small night clubs, where in front of the shining portals, ornamented with strange emblems in metal, gigantic commissionaires stood in brown, gold-braided uniforms, beside placards on which were depicted in broad, sloppy lines scantily clad ladies in ridiculous dance postures and clownish musicians in dinner-jackets. The distant roar seemed to be increasing, more and more people crossed their path, until they filled the pavement and the road. They dispersed at the shrill hoot of a fire-brigade car which every two seconds unmercifully sounded its signal of grave danger, the sound filling the street to the farthest corner, while the car, a bright red, bloodthirsty eye on its bonnet, rushed by at full speed, leaving the crowd in a vast eddy behind it. All at once the police were there; in a side street, where Ive and Pareigat had been pushed by the on-rushing flood of people, stood the constables, some in close formation round a car from which firemen were still leaping down, some ranged up in front of the houses, and a few posted at the corners of the streets, a surging confusion of shakos, heavy coats, and carbine-barrels. Ive pushed forward. The whole main st
reet was a whirl of movement, a silent confusion of aimlessly marching crowds, who from time to time strove to disentangle themselves. There were far more men than women; a lot of young fellows without hats or coats, looking about them defiantly, came up in small groups, chatting gaily together; as they came to the corner where the police were stationed, they ceased talking and formed a small semi-circle to make room. From the wide-open doors of a dark building with shuttered windows the black crowd streamed, in the mass resembling a swarm of almost identical figures; as they emerged onto the street they formed into a procession, which proceeded slowly in Ive’s direction. Ive could not make out whether they were Communists or National Socialists; in all the numerous demonstrations he saw, there always seemed to be the same young, eager faces, the same thin, under-sized bodies of the generation that had grown up in the starvation period of the war, the same stiff standardised clothes made out of cheap material.

  ‘Germany,’ cried a clear falsetto voice, and the chorus answered with a reverberating shout:

  ‘Awake!’

  Ive stood still, looking for Pareigat, whom he had lost in the crowd. As he looked all round, peering into the faces as they pushed by him, a hand came down with a resounding friendly slap on his shoulder.

  He turned.

  ‘Hinnerk!’ he cried.

  ‘My name is Emil,’ said Hinnerk.

  ‘When did you join the Nazis?’ asked Ive.