It Cannot Be Stormed [antikvár]

EDITOR'S FOREWORD Ernst von Salomon (1902-1972) was one of the most enigmatic individuals who have come to be classified as a part of the Conservative Revolution, a school of thought which flourished in the days of the German Weimar Republic up until the National Socialist Party (N.S.D.A.P.) came to power in 1933. He is today often, when at all, remembered for his 1951 book Der Fragebogen. This lengthy, sarcastic treatise based on the Allied denazification questionnaire prompted Time Magazine to condemn the author's 'moral colour blindness' and 'self-pity mixed with arrogant self-righteousness' as expressions of the prime motors behind Nazism.* There are, however, many other (and less puerile) things to say about von Salomon, his life and his work. After training as a military cadet from the age of eleven, while inadvertently avoiding serving in the First World War on account of his youth, von Salomon joined the Freikorps in 1919 to fight Bolshevism in the Baltics, later combating Polish insurgents in Upper Silesia. His involvement in the paramilitary group grew, until he was arrested in 1922 for providing the car used in the assassination of the German Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau. Later, during the Second World War, this would work to his advantage, as he was excused from military service; upon being asked by the examining officer whether he was a Jew, von Salomon replied 'No, but a murderer.'** From his release in 1927 onwards von Salomon developed his skills as a writer. In Die Geächteten (1930, translated into English as The Outlaws) he drew on his earlier experiences to create a fictionalised account of the Freikorps, and in the following years he published a number of works, including the present one (published as Die Stadt [The City] in 1932). When Hitler came to power, a prospect towards which von Salomon had been ambivalent for years, he turned to writing movie scripts, while living a relatively apolitical life with his Jewish wife until the end of the war. With the fall of the Third Reich he and his wife were imprisoned due to the U.S. policy of automatic arrest of * 'It just happened,' in Time Magazine, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,861117,OO.html. Accessed February 2011. ** Ibid.