It is as an illumination of these tenets—noble spirit, discipline and sacrifice—that George’s monumental poem ‘Secret Germany’ should here be quoted in its entirety (and with the reminder that no translation of a poem, and especially of a poem like this, can approximate to the effect of the original):
Let me stand at your verge,
Chasm, and not be dismayed!
Where irrepressible greed has
Trampled down every inch of
Earth from equator to pole and
Shamelessly wielded relentless
Glare and mastery over
Every nook of the world.
Where in the smothering cells of
Hideous houses, madness
Just has found what will poison
All horizons tomorrow:
Even shepherds in yurtas
Even nomads in wastes—
Where no more in a stony
Forest valley the she-wolf
—Rugged nurse!—suckles boy twins,
And neither untrodden islands,
Nor a garden of virgins
Dawn to foster the Great,
There in the sorest of trials
Powers below pondered gravely,
Gracious celestials gave their
Ultimate secret: They altered
Laws over matter and founded
Space—a new space in the old . . .
Once down by the southern
Sea I lay on a boulder,
Wrung as lately my kin
Spirit, when breaking through
Olives, the Spook of Noon
With goaten foot flicked me:
‘Now that your eyes grew discerning,
Go and find in your sacred
Land primordial soil,
Slumbering lap of fill,
And regions as pathless and dark
As the densest of jungles.’
Pinions of sunny dream,
Carry me close to the depth!
They told me of one who from rock-ridden coast
An instant had seen the Olympian gods
In heavens which split with the light of the dawn,
Whereat his soul was flooded with dread.
He shunned the board where his friends were
grouped
And plunged into riotous waters.
In the town where the trivia from everywhere
Are posted on pillars and patches of wall
For people to gape at and hasten on,
No one had eyes for the greater event:
Uncanny through tottering structures and streets
The dangerous prowl of the demon!
In winter he stood in the candle-lit hall,
His shimmering shoulder hidden in folds,
The flame on his cheek in the leaves of a wreath,
The god concealed from the stare of fools,
In clear-scented warmth of the winds of spring,
Set foot on flowering courses.
The Listener who knew every person and thing,
Played ball with the stars in a rapturous reel,
The hunter unhunted, yet here he avowed
With stammering lips, his apostle-like form
Transfixed in the gleam of the opaline globe:
‘This passes my grasp, I am silenced.’
Then forth from the region of order and peace,
Through sulphurous night a tempest unloosed
The clash and the clamour of savage wars,
The smoulder of worlds in the throes of the end.
And crumbling terrains and shadows unleashed
The silver hooves of the chargers.
I came upon him of the pale-golden hair
Who smilingly lavished serene repose
Wherever he went. He was hailed by us all
The darling of Fortune, but late he confessed
His vigour was drained to give strength to a friend,
His life a sequence of offerings.
I loved him who—my blood in his veins—
Had sung the song only less than the best,
Who idly shattered his lute when he failed
To gain a treasure he once divined,
Who merged with anonymous throngs and bowed
A forehead destined for laurels.
Throughout the country, on roads and in squares,
Wherever I was on the watch, I asked
Omniscient Rumour with hundreds of eyes:
‘Have you ever heard of the like?’ And he—
—Though loth to be startled—replied: ‘I heard
Of much—but this is unheard-of!’
Let me mount to your height,
Summit, and not be destroyed!
Who then, who of you brothers
Doubts, unshocked by the warning,
That what you most acclaim, what
Most you value today is
Rank as leaves in the fall-wind,
Doomed to perdition and death!
Only what consecrate earth
Cradles in sheltering sleep
Long in the innermost grooves,
Far from acquisitive hands,
Marvels this day cannot grasp
Are rife with the fate of tomorrow.33
This poem was among the last George wrote. It was composed, and read aloud at a special meeting of his circle, in 1928. The book in which it appeared was published in the same year. During the five years of life remaining to him, George published nothing further. He had effectively said all he had to say; and ‘Secret Germany’, as its very title suggests, stands as his definitive valedictory pronouncement, a kind of testament. There have been suggestions, too, that, for certain members of his circle, the poem was regarded as a sort of coded programme for the future, a blueprint for how to carry on in the ‘Master’s’ absence.
It is, of course, impossible to know whether Stauffenberg himself saw ‘Secret Germany’ in this way. Did he perhaps feel that, in some oblique, symbolic or even ‘occult’ fashion, it had been addressed to him personally? That he later considered it immensely relevant to his circumstances is apparent from his use of its title for his own network of conspirators. And from the perspective of hindsight, the modern reader can discern the poem as being, despite its opacity, eerily apposite.
It is clear that Stauffenberg felt George’s spirit to be close to him during the spring and summer of 1944, and especially during the final days culminating with the explosion of 20 July. He would quote frequently from ‘The Antichrist’, and also from ‘Verses for the Dead’:
When men of the future are purged of dishonour,
Their shoulders released from the shackles of
bondage.34
He must surely, too, have had constantly in mind the stanzas of ‘Templars’, such as:
And only one of ours can complete
The needed change or do the iron feat
To which they summon us when chaos reigns,
Only to stone and curse us for our pains.35
In the early hours of the morning of 21 July, Stauffenberg and the three men shot with him were hastily buried. Later that day, the bodies were exhumed and cremated, and their ashes were scattered over the fields. There disappeared at the same time two pieces of personal jewellery which Stauffenberg always wore. One was an ancient cross that had come down to him through his wife’s family. The other was a weighty gold ring which he wore on the remaining finger of his left hand. Engraved on it in raised letters were the words: ‘finis initium.’ This ring represented for him his personal covenant with Stefan George. The inscription, which translates as ‘The End and the Beginning’, derives from the last line of a poem George published in 1913, in the volume Der Stern des Bundes (The Star of the Covenant):
I am the One, I am the Two,
I am the womb, I am the sire,
I am the shadow and the true,
I am the faggot and the fire.
I am the bow, I am the shaft,
I am the seer a
nd his prediction,
I am the sheath, I am the haft,
I am abundance and affliction,
I am the victim and the slayer,
I am the symbol and the meaning,
I am the altar and the prayer,
I am the end and a beginning.36
Part Five
HEROISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
13
In the Courtyard of the Bendlerstrasse
In the end one returns to that moment just after midnight, a few minutes into 21 July 1944, in the courtyard of the War Office, in the Bendlerstrasse—the crack of rifle shots and those defiant words: ‘Es lebe unser geheimes Deutschland!’ One returns, as well, to the three or four hours immediately preceding that moment.
By the early evening of 20 July, it was obvious that Hitler was alive, that the conspiracy had failed and that nothing could possibly be gained by further effort. Yet Stauffenberg continued to conduct himself as if success could still be achieved. Even when the situation was clearly hopeless, he proceeded as if it could still be salvaged. When he died, it was not with the disappointment, still less the despair, of a thwarted man. It was with a gesture of undiminished affirmation, even, paradoxically, of triumph. In a public execution, with an audience of spectators and witnesses, such a gesture might be explicable and understandable, but in the privacy of that nocturnal courtyard, for whose benefit was it made?
The so-called ‘work ethic’ introduced by Protestantism emphasises the act—the act that yields tangible results, that culminates in demonstrable and measurable accomplishment. Success is palpable proof of God’s favour and, therefore, a testimony to virtue. The man who succeeds is the virtuous man, and vice versa. Success and virtue are synonymous.
Stauffenberg was raised, trained and shaped according to a different, more subtle, logic—the logic of Stefan George’s syncretic thought with its emphasis on sacrifice, and, before that, the logic of Catholic tradition. If the logic of Protestantism is pragmatic, that of both George and the Catholic Church can be described as essentially poetic. According to poetic logic, the symbolic gesture weighs as heavily as the utilitarian act. Indeed, in the moral and spiritual balance, it may even count for more. It may even, in itself, constitute a redemptive principle, regardless of whether or not it accomplishes anything. Thus, for example, saints and martyrs are revered more often than not for pragmatically futile but poetically resonant gestures. They thereby conform to the figure who performed the supreme such gesture in Western tradition—Jesus himself.
This is not to suggest, of course, that Stauffenberg should be seen as a ‘Christ figure’, or that he ever saw himself as such. Nor is it to suggest that he sought nothing more than the symbolic significance of martyrdom. He was, above all else, a man of action, who wanted the conspiracy to achieve an actual, as well as a symbolic, success. Were that not the case, he could easily enough have ensured the Führer’s death through his own self-immolation, as Axel von dem Bussche and Ewald von Kleist, their uniforms packed with explosive, had been prepared to do. Stauffenberg, however, felt it necessary to keep himself alive, not from a personal desire for self-preservation, but to ensure the conspiracy achieved its goals.
Yet it is clear that poetic logic still figured prominently in his, and in many of the other conspirators’, thinking. According to this logic, the symbolic gesture might still salvage a measure of triumph when the utilitarian act had failed. In the pragmatic sphere of politics and mundane history, the conspiracy might prove futile and accomplish nothing, but in the moral and spiritual sphere, it might, as a symbolic gesture, constitute an accomplishment of an altogether different kind. On behalf of Germany as a whole, it could be an act of atonement, without which there could be no redemption. This calls to mind Henning von Tresckow’s statement that ‘Just as God once promised Abraham that he would spare Sodom if only ten just men could be found in the city, I also have reason to hope that, for our sake, he will not destroy Germany.’1
What, then, kept Stauffenberg functioning as he did until the very end? It was something much loftier than the prosaic propaganda purpose of ‘letting the world know that there were good Germans’. It was the desire to make atonement for Germany, and so redeem everything most valid and laudable in Germanic history and culture—redeem the Hohenstauffen emperors and the achievements of the high Middle Ages, redeem Luther and the Reformation, redeem Goethe and Schiller, Hölderlin and Novalis, Gneisenau and Yorck von Wartenburg and, above all perhaps, redeem Stefan George, whose own work had inadvertently contributed to Germany’s damnation. Like a number of the other conspirators, Stauffenberg viewed his own actions from the standpoint of posterity. He saw himself as taking Germany’s sins upon his own shoulders and dying for them. We are the posterity for whose sake Stauffenberg offered himself in sacrifice. To the extent that we accept and acknowledge his sacrifice, the culmination of the drama in the courtyard of the Bendlerstrasse was not a failure, but an apotheosis.
From one point of view, the events of 20 July and the circumstances surrounding them offer just another story of twentieth-century political conspiracy, and a failed conspiracy at that. It may have been well-intentioned, even noble and exalted, but it was also bungled. It did not significantly alter the course of events, and is therefore little more than a footnote to history. Yet what if one shifts one’s perspective and points of emphasis? What if one transfers one’s focus from the conspiracy itself to Stauffenburg and the men like him? What if one concentrates not on the plot of 20 July, nor even on the war as a whole, but on the vista stretching back at least to 1933? Such a vista would include Stauffenberg organising an honour guard at Stefan George’s bier to prevent the dead poet’s body from being taken back to Germany and used as a pretence for an official state ceremony. It would also include Stauffenberg daring to walk out in the middle of a lecture by Julius Streicher. It would include his humane efforts, during the invasion of Czechoslovakia, to keep the local population supplied with food and other vital resources. It would include his calling an officer to account for the indiscriminate shooting of two peasant women in Poland. It would include his ongoing personal crusade against the SS and everything they represented. It would include his rigorous adherence to a code of honour, chivalry and decency amid circumstances that militated violently against such virtues. It would include the recognition of responsibility implicit in his statement while convalescing in hospital from his wounds: ‘Since the generals have so far done nothing, it is time for the colonels to act.’2
The story that then emerges from this book is not just the story of a failed conspiracy. It is the story of a unique, distinctive and extraordinary man who mirrored in himself Germany’s collective identity crisis, and effected his own reconciliation between the martial nationalism of his ancestor, Gneisenau, and Goethe’s ideal of dedication to culture and the spirit. It is the story of a figure who bridges the great modern gulf between ‘the man of thought’ and ‘the man of action’. It is the story, in short, of an heroic figure—and, even more, of a specifically twentieth-century heroic figure. To that extent, his story transcends the historical context of the Third Reich. It applies equally to Germany, and to all of us, today.
Before the advent of self-awareness, self-consciousness and self-alienation, action alone was sufficient to determine and define heroism. Homer may single out Odysseus by virtue of his resourceful intelligence and capacity for ‘strategic thought’. Thucydides may cite Pericles’ funeral oration to the Athenians at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War:
We were capable at the same time of taking risks and of estimating them beforehand. Others are brave out of ignorance; and, when they stop to think, they begin to fear. But the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and of what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come.3
Despite such homages to intelligence, however, the hero of antiquity was exemplified by such figures as Achilles in The Iliad, or Cuc
hulain in the Irish sagas of the Red Branch of Ulster. They are indeed ‘brave out of ignorance’. Their bravery amounts to little more than an insensate berserker rage, an embarrassingly infantile temper tantrum. Except for a certain rudimentary tactical cunning, both Achilles and Cuchulain are consummate dolts. But in their own eras and milieux, bravery and martial prowess are alone sufficient to confer heroic status. They are, in effect, virtues in themselves, and even extolled as the highest virtues. They exist in a kind of vacuum, utterly divorced from any moral context or hierarchy of values. Even politics are of peripheral importance, and war is reduced to the level of two boxers in a ring.
As civilisation, culture and consciousness evolve, the intelligence informing Pericles’ oration becomes more meaningful and relevant. There arises, too, the desire for what might be called a ‘strategic’ context, an acknowledgement not just of bravery alone and for its own sake, but also of its implications and ramifications, its repercussions, consequences and effects. Even more significantly, there arises, too, the desire for a moral context.
We recognise today, for example, that simple bravery is in itself a questionable virtue. It can often stem from, and be equated with, sheer arrant stupidity. It can also stem from, and be equated with, something manifestly reprehensible, wicked or evil. If bravery is a virtue at all, it can only too easily be negated by the absence of other virtues—by the absence of a moral context, or by the cynical expediency which allows ends to justify means. Many of the SS were unquestionably brave. So, too, no doubt, were certain members of the Provisional IRA. But that does not render them any the less morally bankrupt, contemptible and repellent. To the modern mind, bravery in itself can no longer automatically validate, justify and redeem itself, the man who displays it or the cause on behalf of which he does so.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 32