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  • G. van der Heide
    Oct 15 12:16 PM
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    Below some vivid passages from the novel by Ernst von Salomon on the experience of the German Freikorps, using the English translation of Ian F. D. Morrow, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1931.


    For a short treatise on the subject of the Freikorps we refer to https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=1-scott-the-origins-of-the-freikorps&site=15



    A valuable historical document, the Stahlhelm Manifesto, can be found online at http://spoknippet.blogspot.be/2004/11/excerpt-berlin-stahlhelm-manifesto.html. Apparently this same organisation was financed by the Berlin Herrenklub, for which J. Evola was repeatedly invited to hold lectures.


    What follows are the selected excerpts:



    The soldiers marched quickly, in close formation. They had stony, expressionless faces. They looked neither to right nor left, but straight ahead, fixedly, as though magnetised by some terrible goal, as though they were gazing from dug-outs and trenches over a wounded world. Not a word was spoken by those haggard-faced men. Just once, when someone sprang forward and almost imploringly offered a little box to the soldiers, the lieutenant waved him aside impatiently, saying: ‘For goodness’ sake don’t do that. A whole division is following on.’


    [...]


    One platoon passed, the ranks close, a second, a third. Then a space. More space. Could this be a whole company? Three platoons? God! how terrible these men looked! – gaunt, immobile faces under shrapnel helmets, wasted limbs, ragged, dusty uniforms... Did they still carry terrible visions of battle in their minds, as they carried the dust of the mangled earth on their garments? The strain was almost unbearable. They marched as though they were envoys of the deadliest, loneliest, iciest cold. Yet they had come home; here was warmth and happiness; why were they so silent? Why did they not shout and cheer; why did they not laugh?


    [...]


    Not a flag, not a sign of victory. The baggage waggons were already coming in sight. So this was a whole regiment!


    As I beheld these fiercely determined faces, set as though carved in wood, these eyes which looked frigidly past the crowd, coldly, malevolently, inimically – yes inimically – I knew, I realised, I felt numbly – that everything was absolutely and completely different from what I and all of us here had imagined. It must have been different all through these past years. Then what did we know? What did we know of these men, of the front line, of our soldiers? Nothing, nothing, nothing. God! This was terrible. Was nothing true that we had been told? We had been cheated: these were not our boys, our heroes, our defenders – these were men who had no part or lot among those who were gathered here in the streets. They were of another race, they obeyed other laws. Suddenly everything for which I had hoped, by which I had been inspired, seemed to me shallow and empty.


    [...]


    Suddenly I realised that these were no workmen, farmers, students, they were not labourers, clerks, shopkeepers or officials. They were soldiers: they were men who had heard the call. Here were no mummers, no conscripts. They had a vocation, they came of their own free will, and their home was in the war-zone. Home – Country – People – Nation – they were imposing words when we said them, but they were shams. That was why these men would have nothing to do with us.
    They were the Nation. What we had blazoned about the world they understood in a deeper sense – it was that which had urged them to do what we smugly called their duty. Their faith was not in words, it was in themselves, and they never talked about it. War had taken hold of them and would never let them go. They would never really belong to us and to their homes again. This attempted fusion of them with the peaceful, ordered life of ordinary citizens was a ridiculous adulteration which could never succeed. The war was over, but the armies were still in being. The mob was fermenting, unwieldy, with thousands of little hopes and desires, size its only might, but the soldiers would work for revolution – a different revolution – whether they wanted to or not, urged on by powers which we could not realise. War had provided no solution; soldiers were still needed.


    (Taken from the Third Chapter: Homecoming)


    Slowly, some twenty men assembled. They recognized each other by a look, a word, a smile. They knew they belonged together.


    But they were not loyal to the government. By God, they were not loyal to the government, anything but that. They could not respect the man and the orders they had obeyed up to then, and the order they had created seemed to them no longer to make sense.


    They were troublemakers in their companies. The war had not yet discharged them. The war had formed them, it had let their most secret passions break through the crust like sparks, it had given their lives a meaning and hallowed their engagement. They were the unruly and the untamed, outcasts from the world of civil norms, stragglers who re-grouped themselves in small bunches in order to seek their own front line. There were many banners around which they could gather-which waved most proudly in the wind. There were still many castles left to storm, many enemy bands were still camped in the fields. They were the Landsknechte - but where was the land which they served? They had recognized the greatest swindle of this peace, they did not want to take part in it. They did not want to participate in the wholesome order, which was praised to them in a slimy way. They had remained under arms according to an infallible instinct. They shot things up all over because the banging was fun, they marched through the lad hither and thither because the smell of tart adventure waved to them everywhere. And yet each of them sought something else and gave different reasons for their search, for the word had not yet been given to them. They sensed the word, yes, they even spoke it out loud and were ashamed of its washed-out sound; they turned it over, tested it in secret fear, and left it out of the interplay of manifold conversations, and yet it stood over them. The word stood wrapped in deep gloom, weather-beaten, beckoning, full of secrets, becoming magical powers, felt and not yet recognized, loved and not yet bidden to them. And the word was Germany.


    Where was Germany? In Weimar? In Berlin? Once it had been on the front line, but the front fell apart. Then it was supposed to be at home, but home deceived. It was sung in song and speech, but the note was false. They spoke of fatherland and motherland, but even the niggers had that. Where was Germany? Was it in the people? But they cried for bread and voted for the far-bellied ones. Was it in the state' But the state sought its form garrulously and found it in renunciation.


    Germany burned darkly in daring brains. Germany was there where it was being fought for, it showed itself where armored hands reached out for its very existence, it beamed dazzlingly where those possessed of its spirit dared the final sacrifice for the sake of Germany. Germany was on the border. The articles of the Treaty of Versailles told us where Germany was.


    We had been recruited for the border. Orders held us in Weimar. We protected rustling constructions of paragraphs, and the border burned. We lay in maggoty quarters, but French columns marched in the Rhineland. We shot it out with daring sailors, but in the east the Poles lay waste with fire and sword. We drilled and formed honor guards for umbrellas and soft felt hats, but for the first time in the Baltic, German battalions formed tor an advance.



    On April 1, 1919, Bismarck's birthday - the right-wing parties held patriotic celebrations - we left Weimar and our unit without resignation or orders, twenty-eight men. Lieutenant Kay at the head, went to the Baltic.


    (Alternatively taken from the translation included in: Kaes, Anton. Jay, Martin, Dimendberg, Edward. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. University of California Press, 1994. p. 24, 25)


    From the very beginning we felt the urgency of the influence which had driven us into this country, to this distant spot, over whose now deserted battlefields only occasional shots were fired. We felt its potency, even at the time when we still subscribed to accepted rules; when we still clung to those things which led our feet along the traditional ways; when we still had faith and in the consciousness of that faith thought ourselves sure of happiness. We recognized no problems. The world was ours to use. Our fathers had laboured at it and moulded it and had been proudly satisfied. We were meant to enter on a rich inheritance, to carry on faithfully the order of things as they had been handed down to us.


    We had been taught what was our duty and what were the privileges we were to cherish. We shunned no trial; and the generation which went to war in the passionate days of 1914 believed that the coming storms would clear the air, and that all was predestined to give us a fuller realisation of our capacities and of the unchanging soul of Germany. No secret was made of our victories – everyone was intoxicated with glory and valour, the whole nation formed one long triumphal procession.


    All at once our illusions were rudely dispelled. Suddenly grim, mysterious apparitions attacked the walls of our glorious realm, and found many weak spots: in some places the delusive plaster fell off, and in others the decayed stones crumbled away. The army was paralysed, it was engulfed in filth, in mud, in fire; a ghostly finger traced the boundaries of our land in blood. We had expected to dominate war and it had dominated us.


    (From the Eight Chapter: Mutiny)



    The ‘Activists,’ who had collected in Upper Silesia, thenceforward separated and were able by co-operation to give greater power and greater importance to the isolated exploits of their members. In the months following, a tough invisible net was formed, of which the individual threads reacted whenever the signal was given at any point. This happened without any compulsion whatsoever, without any association, plan or programme – simply by the action of a spontaneous and natural community of interests. Every association, every Party, every profession contained some of our men. They played into each other’s hands, shared information, warned one another, gave useful tips and worked in the thrilling knowledge that the same thoughts and ideas, the same aims, the same situations, were arising in a hundred different places at the same time. They were bound by fetters far stronger than any vows and rules could be. They behaved as men of a single race – felt the same enthusiasms and the same doubts – and were glad to find that they all had the same conflicts and found the same solutions. They forced themselves to the inexorable conclusion that it was not enough to offer their lives: they must offer what was more than life – their honour and their conscience.


    One event followed another. We lived double lives. What we earned by our hated, though necessary, toil during the day, enabled us to have our free times and to carry on our real work at nights. We went from one excitement to another. We heard of each other during hasty meetings. Gabriel and his men snuffed out the beginning of a Separatist movement in the Pfalz through sheer bloody terrorism, though of course it was impossible to smash the well-organised French machinery. The Elberfeld men, spied on by suspicious Communists, by Separatists and the French as well as by the German authorities, and always alive to the danger, which had threatened for years, of a French occupation of the Ruhr, laid the foundations of an unremitting resistance, supported by Schlageter and his men, who had changed their base of operations from Upper Silesia to the Bolshevised towns of the Ruhr. In the frontier States, in the eastern Provinces, in Brandenburg, Schultz was creating a hidden army of defence – the black Reichswehr. In Munich, our men were engaged in a wearisome war with mawkish patriots. They had their fingers in every pie – they investigated all grades of politics, without finding that it aroused any sentiment in them beyond one of disgust. They found time to make an end of the French-inspired machinations of the Bavarian Separatists; they made enquiries in Austria, conducted researches in Hungary and Turkey, and fed the sources of Southern Tyrolese unrest. When Kern was on the move, we inferred his stopping places by the news which filtered through from all sides – news of gunrunning in East Prussia; of the police being led astray in their search for the murderers of Erzberger; of the enlistment of six thousand Dithmarsch peasants; of the capture of a Separatist leader near Cologne; of the organisation of German Bohemians; of somewhat coercive conversations with Reichswehr commanders; of men rescued from prison in the occupied area.


    Thus Kern became in a short time one of the leaders among the Activists. Whether it was a case of gunrunning in Danzig or a bomb outrage in Hamburg, he was called in to direct operations. Very soon he was surrounded with a halo of legends. He always had at least three new plans simmering in his mind and one in his pocket ready to be carried out; he was always on the move and brought fresh air with him; he glowed with an inner fire, whose intensity suffered no lukewarmness in its neighbourhood. This broadly-built man of middle height, with his open countenance and dark eyes, radiated strength, both physical and mental. He was as unsparing in his demands on others as he was on himself. He was always prepared to defend passionately any idea that seemed to him to have value, until he proved it to be worthless, when he lost no time in throwing it overboard. Nothing gave him greater élan than the premonition he had of his early death.


    Our group meanwhile was becoming well-known and even popular in the town. Each weekend saw us at Mainz or in the Taunus mountains or at the bridgeheads. The number of those who were posted as deserters in the roll of the army of occupation in the Rhineland grew apace, and the Intelligence Bureau in Mainz kept an even stricter watch on us than before. Very soon spies turned up in our most secret coverts and announced themselves as loyalists, which roused our suspicions from the very outset. Very soon anyone turned to us who had a blood-feud, or who wanted help for some private activities, or who was in possession of information on which the German authorities could not act. Very soon the authorities themselves came to us. At times we were the ball and at other times we directed the game.


    (From the Seventeenth Chapter: O.C.)

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