ANSWERS of ERNST VON SALOMON 131 Questions ALLIED MILITARY GOVERNMENT Fragebogen vendu

The Answers of Ernst Von Salomon

Preface by Goronwy Rees

The appearance of a new book by Ernst von Salomon, after an interval of over fifteen years, is an event of considerable literary and political importance. And in his own country, the success of Der Fragebogen has shown that his own countrymen have not failed to recognize its significance.

Since its publication in 1951, over 250,000 Germans have bought Der Fragebogen, despite the fact that some of Germanys most distinguished critics have condemned it violently both on political and moral grounds. It is difficult not to sympathise with such critics. They represent that class of humane and liberal Germans who still dare to believe, even after the disasters of the last fifty years, that Germany may yet redeem the errors of the past. They believe that, with the help of Europe, she can cure herself of her wounds; they believe that she may even help Europe to cure her own; they believe, in short, that to be a German is not necessarily to be a barbarian. To those who cherish such beliefs Der Fragebogen must seem like a calculated blow in the face, and its popularity in Germany a proof that even now their countrymen have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

The future of Europe may well depend on whether, in fact, this is true or not; and one of the strongest reasons for recommending Der Fragebogen to the attention of English and American readers is that it provides alarming evidence of how deep-seated, perhaps ineradicable, certain tendencies are in the German character. However, some explanation may be necessary if these readers are to judge that evidence fairly or grasp its significance fully.

First of all, the very form of the book may offer some obstacle to understanding. It follows, with scrupulous fidelity the form of those questionnaires, the Fragebogen, which the Allied Military Government in Germany issued by the thousand at the end of the last war. The Fragebogen was served on all those Germans who were suspccted of having directed, assisted, or collaborated with the National Socialist regime; its authors entertained the somewhat naive hope that by such means it would be possible to divide the German sheep from the German goats, and to exclude all who bore any responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism from the administration or future government of Germany.

The climate of opinion about Germany and Germans has so changed since those days that it is difficult now to remember the motives which gave rise to the Fragebogen; and it is easy to see that there was a fundamentally false assumption in the idea of conducting a written examination, of 131 questions, of the conscience of a people and, on the basis of the replies, calculating the degree of responsibility of each individual. Such an idea ignored the very nature of political responsibility, and moreover, at one and the same time, it did too great an honour and too great a dishonour to the German people; an honour because it implied that though many were guilty even more were not, and a dishonour because it implied that to be convicted of National Socialism was necessarily to be convicted of guilt.

It has been easy for Salomon to seize upon the naiveté and the falsity of the assumptions underlying the Fragebogen, and by taking that document at its face value to turn the examination into a farce, a procedure admirably adapted to his literary talents. And the effect of his treatment is that the questionnaire recoils upon its authors, and that it is the accusers and not the accused who stand in the dock; one may be quite sure that in his countrymens enjoyment of Der Fragebogen there is a strong clement of the Schadenfreude which is one of their less amiable traits. Moreover, the very frankness of Salomons answers, with their cynical indifference to his own reputation, gives an air of sincerity and conviction to his confessions which a more cautious, or a less skilful, witness would scarcely have achieved. By answering naivete with cynicism, pedantry with mockery, and ignorance with a brutal avowal of unpleasant but undeniable facts he brilliantly succeeds in imposing his own view of the case under enquiry, the case of Ernst von Salomon, so that even his accusers could hardly fail to bring in a verdict of Not Guilty. And since, in his own case, a completely frank statement of the facts leads to acquittal, it is implied that in every other case also, in the case of every other German, however unpromising at first sight, no other verdict could follow so long as the facts are exposed in all their complexity and detail.

It is not merely the case of Ernst von Salomon which is being tried, but the case of the German people; and the implication of Der Fragebogen is that if only the German people would face their accusers with the same cynical indifference, the same contemptuous frankness as von Salomon himself, the proceedings against them would very soon become farcical, as farcical for instance as the proceedings against von Salomon for the attempted murder of Wagner, of which he gives so brilliant an account.

Yet the reader should not be deceived into taking Der Fragebogen at its face value. He should remember, firstly, that he is in the hands of an extremely gifted writer with a wonderful command of narrative, a savage sense of humour, and, beneath and beside his humour, a profound psychological insight into the predicaments of contemporary life. Der Fragebogen is not a proces-verbal. or an interrogation report; nor is it merely an autobiography; it is a carefully and elaborately constructed work of art, composed with enormous literary skill, in which the tone and treatment of each episode are carefully calculated in relation to those of every other, and to the effect of the whole.

And, secondly, the reader should remember that von Salomon is not merely a brilliant writer and an artist; he is also, or was, a man of action, indeed of violent action, and has played a not insignificant part in the recent history of his country. He is indeed an outstanding example of the type of man of action as artist, or artist as man of action, which is one of the most characteristic products of this century, men who can find complete satisfaction neither in art nor in action, and express in both the violence of their frustration.

Now in one sense, certainly, von Salomons career needs no further commentary; for what is Der Fragebogen except an autobiography, an Apologia pro Vita Sua, in which the facts are all there to speak for themselves? Yet many episodes in the book are by no means self-explanatory; they imply a certain background of knowledge which is missing unless the reader is acquainted both with von Salomons previous writings, especially his autobiographical novel, Die Geiichteten [The Outlaws], and with some of the more obscure, and repellent, aspects of recent German history. Some words of explanation and amplification may therefore be helpful.

Ernst von Salomon was born in Kiel in 1902, of a family of Huguenot extraction, and was educated as a cadet in the Royal Military Academies at Karlsruhe and Berlin-Lichterfelde. He was still a cadet at the dale of the Armistice in 1918, which at one blow destroyed the hopes, ideals, and ambitions of all those, who, like him, could conceive no other future than as an officer in the Imperial German Army. In his novel, The Outlaws, he has described the feeling of bitterness, despair, and savage resentment with which he watched the march back to Germany of the field-grey armies; and it was under the influence of such emotions, combined with a determination to save what could be saved from the German defeat, that he enlisted in one of the volunteer units that were being raised to defend Germanys Eastern frontiers.

As a member of a Freikorps, a volunteer company, von Salomon took part in the street fighting against the Russians, Letts, and Esthonians in the Baltic States, and against the Poles in Upper Silesia. In the course of these campaigns the Freikorps developed a peculiar and special esprit de corps, based partly on the traditions of the specialised shock troops, the Sturm-bataillone, of the 1914-18 war, and partly on the desperate conditions under which they fought. They despised the ordinary forms of military discipline, but were held together by the consciousness of having rejected the normal conventions of civilized life and by obedience to their chosen leaders, and to no one else. The fighting in which they took part was characterised by extreme ruthlessness and savagery; they fought in a kind of ecstasy compounded of a patriotism which was akin to nihilism and of a conscious barbarism. Two sentences from The Outlaws are worth quoting: "We were a band of fighters drunk with all the passions of the world; full of lust, exultant in action. What we wanted we did not know. And what we knew we did not want! War and adventure, excitement and destruction. An indefinable, surging force welled up from every part of our being and played us onward." And: "Anyone who judges the Freikorps fighters by the standards of the civilization it was their task to help to destroy is utilizing the standards of the enemy."

In the summer of 1920 the Freikorps were dissolved by the Ebert government. Some of its formations entered directly into the Rcichswehr; others continued to enjoy a semi-legal existence; others turned to subversive activities, and especially to the assassination of the leading politicians of the Weimar regime. It is estimated that between 1919 and 1923, 354 political murders were carried out in the name of German patriotism.

Of these murders, perhaps none attracted wider attention than the assassination of the German Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, on June 24, 1922. For his part in the murder von Salomon was sentenced to five years imprisonment. On his release, he helped to organize, with the support of the revolutionary nationalists of the German right, the peasant revolts in Schleswig-Holstein; this was his last direct adventure in politics. In 1930 he had written his first novel, The Outlaws, and this was followed by two further novels, Die Stadt, and Die Kadetten. He also wrote a valuable account of the Freikorps movement in Nahe Geschichte, Ein Uberblick, and edited a collection of essays, Das Buch vom Deutschen Freikorpskiimpfer, which is one of the most valuable documentary sources for its history. In the Third Reich his writings received official approval as "documents of the struggle for the rebirth of the Nation." Salomon, however, had by now retired from politics, become a script writer for the German film company, UFA, and as such survived the war. In 1945 he was arrested, "in error," by the Allied Military Government and interned until 1946 in an American camp.

It has been necessary to insist, at some length, on Salomons relations with the Freikorps movement for several reasons, each of which throws some light on Der Fragebogen. For there is some reserve in the Fragebogen about Salomons part in the Freikorps, partly no doubt because he has written at length about it in his earlier books. But one cannot help suspecting that this discretion is also partly due to the fact that any undue emphasis on his identification with the Freikorps, both as a soldier and an assassin, as a writer, propagandist, and historian, would make a serious breach in Salomons rebuttal of the charge of sharing in the guilt of National Socialism. For historically the direct influence of the Freikorps on the National Socialist movement is too well attested to need further proof; jt was largely responsible for supplying it with an ideology, .a spiritual outlook, with a political and tactical technique, and to a very significant extent with its personnel. The number of Freikorpskampfer who played a prominent part in the National Socialist regime is sufficient evidence of this.

The truth is that for a person of Salomons past and beliefs to dissociate himself, as he does in this book, from all responsibility for the triumph, and the crimes, of National Socialism, is a piece of effrontery which only so brilliant a writer could have attempted with success.

Yet such criticisms hardly diminish, they may even increase, the value and the interest of Der Fragebogen, if not as a work of literature, as a historical document. For they raise the question why Salomon should have chosen, for all his parade of cynical frankness, to evade rather than answer the fundamental question to which the Fragebogen was so naively directed; the question of responsibility. They raise the question also why, in practising this evasion, Salomon should have done so much violence to his past self; for upon the image of himself which he created in his earlier works, the image of an adolescent who, despite or perhaps because of, the overpowering tumult of his feelings, the savagery and ferocity and the hatred of everything we know as civilization, still retains something which is touching and innocent, Salomon has now superimposed, as in a double exposure, the new image of a detached dilettante, the Lebensmann who enjoys the good things of this world, the gay seducer, bohemian, and gourmet, too refined for the brutalities of politics but still retaining an old-fashioned faith in the Prussian verities and virtues which he has done as much as anyone to destroy. One admires the trick. One is almost blinded by the brilliance with which it is done and one does not understand, because one is not meant to understand, how that child became this man; until one realizes with dismay that now, just as then, Salomon retains that supreme virtue of a writer which is founded on a deep sympathy with some of the most secret and profound instincts of his people. And just as in The Outlaws he reflected the terrible and convulsive efforts of a mortally wounded organism to survive its own death blow, so in Der Fragebogen what is revealed is that even more terrible moment when, all passion spent, the final compromise is made with the corruption and decay which arc death itself.

Such forebodings may seem out of place at a time when Germany appears to be enjoying a renaissance of political and economic power, shortly perhaps to be transformed once again into military power. Yet for those who read his earlier books as they should be read, von Salomon has previously given such accurate warnings of what was to come as to make them read Der Fragebogen with anxious attention. He has the wonderful eye of the artist which sees the truth whether he wills it or no; but perhaps we must find the significance of Der Fragebogen on a deeper level of truth than von Salomon would wish.

Goronwy Rees

January 1954