Ernst von Salomon: An Exceptional Destiny - Interview with Robert Steuckers for the French journal "Écrits de Rome"

Ernst von Salomon: An Exceptional Destiny

Interview with Robert Steuckers for the French journal "Écrits de Rome"

Questions of Louis Furiet 

Ernst von Salomon is usually considered an author of the Conservative Revolution. To which branch of this movement can he be most precisely attached?

Ernst von Salomon and his work are firmly placed in the category of the "national revolutionaries," according to the terminology established by Armin Mohler, or sometimes in that of "soldierly nationalism." Dominique Venner, in his books Baltikum and Un fascisme allemand, as well as in his preface to Histoire proche, for a long time championed and illustrated this "soldierism" which strongly appeals to romantic natures. However, little attention is paid to the positions taken by Ernst von Salomon after the Second World War, especially in the 1960s, when this former radical opponent of the "reparation" policies imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and of all forms of alignment and subordination to Western powers (France, United Kingdom, United States), became an equally staunch activist, hostile to alignment with Washington within the framework of NATO. This anti-American stance led him to express solidarity with certain leftist pacifists, which puzzled Venner, who visited him six months before his premature death in June 1972 (likely due to sleep apnea). 

The logic that animated Ernst von Salomon throughout his tumultuous life was a vehement rejection of Western models, seen as "bourgeois" or "mercantile," lacking that Prussian or Teutonic sense of service, the Kantian sense of duty (where Kant is not perceived in the usual Enlightenment context), and the sense of national continuity (where the ideology of Western democracies is seen as a machine to render people amnesiac). 

In this sense, given the current crisis in Europe, that is now ideologically Westernized even in its Eastern regions, Ernst von Salomon's thought is more contemporary than ever: rejecting the ideological jumble of the ruling parties throughout Europe is a vital necessity; rejecting all subordination to the United States and to the political and anti-diplomatic practices of the United Kingdom and Macron's France is also a vital imperative for all European peoples, without exception.

 

If the other Ernst—Jünger, of course—is well known, von Salomon is much less so: for what reasons? What were the links between the two men?

This question seems a bit futile to me. The main reason for Jünger's broad notoriety lies essentially in the fact that he lived and worked intensely for 26 years longer than Ernst von Salomon. However, other reasons can be invoked besides Jünger's exceptional longevity: Jünger, a few years older, fought in the regular army during the First World War, received the "Pour le Mérite" decoration, and after 1918 was promoted by the cadres of the defeated army, not as an active officer (which he no longer was), but as an off-line military writer. 

Nevertheless, both Ernst Jünger and Ernst von Salomon expressed a strict, very uncompromising nationalism, at least until 1926 for Jünger, and between 1927 (the year he was released from prison) and 1933 for von Salomon, especially in the wake of the great crisis of 1929 and the peasant revolt against the Weimar Republic authorities in Schleswig-Holstein. 

Both didn't want to adhere to a form of nationalism aligned with the electoralist criteria of Weimar parliamentary democracy. The historian of the Freikorps, Hansjoachim W. Koch, cites in this regard Ernst von Salomon (but similar texts can be found by Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich-Georg): to break subordination to the Western powers, any development leading to massification tendencies must be avoided, for these would induce the national movement to seize power using the means of the adversary, that is, by becoming a "party" (adopting the "party-form"), by becoming an "organization" destined for nothing other than presenting itself at elections. Accordingly, Ernst von Salomon (and Ernst Jünger in his own way) believed that "their means must be different." 

For Ernst von Salomon, at the beginning of the 1920s, this meant engaging in the famous "Organisation Consul" (OC), which orchestrated the attack on Minister Walter Rathenau—a man who, by concluding the famous Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 with the young Soviet Union, had created the ideal conditions for escaping the economic grip of the West, which was hostile to all European political forms stemming from other religious or ideological matrices, just as, mutatis mutandis, former Chancellor Schröder did at the beginning of the 2000s by sponsoring the delivery of Russian gas to Germany. 

Therefore, referencing Ernst von Salomon is not only a matter of naïve romanticism, typical of those who dream of playing at being little soldiers, but also of high-level political pragmatism, all the more so since Ernst von Salomon later admitted that the Freikorps campaign in the Baltic States and the Rathenau assassination had been indirectly aided behind the scenes by the British services, eager to expand Lord Curzon's "cordon sanitaire" in Eastern Europe, to close off the Baltic to the Soviets, without having to commit British or Canadian troops.

Can we say that the experience of the Freikorps was the "foundational experience" for von Salomon's thought, as war was for others?

Obviously, the experience of the Freikorps is foundational for Ernst von Salomon because, unlike Ernst Jünger, he did not fight in the ranks of the Imperial German Army during the First World War. In a 1928 article, entitled "Geist des Nationalismus" (cited by his biographer Gregor Fröhlich), Ernst von Salomon wrote that, for any man of quality, personal experiences (incommunicable to anyone else, especially to a mere individual lost in the masses) are always the major criterion for the ability to judge things and events correctly. 

Thus, he rejected the proper bourgeois nationalism of a Thomas Mann (often relevant in some of his observations), because that nationalism is a "contemplative nationalism," far from any visceral experience, bringing the committed man "suffering", as Ernst Jünger also said at the time. This "contemplation" of Mann, for von Salomon, is typical of a writer embedded in "civilization," where verbose discourse prevails over living expressions drawn from cruel experiences and endured suffering. These literati of "Western civilization" have thus turned their backs on the royal road to the real world, and their intellectualism is "spiritual sterility," which, he added, is "betrayal". This intellectualism, he continued, must be rejected in the name of pure, unadulterated action, without pusillanimity or procrastination. 

In this same article, considered crucial for understanding Ernst von Salomon according to Fröhlich, our ex-Freikorps fighter distinguishes "patriotism," of an old kind, prior to 1914, a remnant of the nineteenth century, from "nationalism". Patriotism is the foolishness of the unpolitical man who avoids decision and refuses to make "distinctions" (allowing to designate the enemy, to separate the wheat from the chaff). These positions explain why Ernst von Salomon rejects the national-conservatism of the many veterans' associations and a conservative segment of the German bourgeoisie (who aligned with Hitler's NSDAP in 1933). 

As for the term "nation", for the Ernst von Salomon of 1928, it is not synonymous with a specific "state construction", but expresses a "mystery" in the process of being revealed, without one knowing if it will ever be fully revealed. In this sense, nationalism must be the minority and elite political force that participates in this "mystery's" revelation, which gives it a permanent and fertile dynamism, which is also revolutionary because it admits no fixed form, no sterilizing fixism. What fixes or is already fixed must be brought down, for it is a paralyzing ballast. 

The forward march of such mystical nationalism, according to Ernst von Salomon and Ernst Jünger, must be a constant that never ceases. Germany's defeat in 1918 must not justify the refusal of this inexorable forward march of this young and intrepid nationalism, despite the weight of the masses, devoid of will and quick to accept all betrayals. This nationalism is not opposed to the idea of the state in itself, but fights the state (the institutional jumble) as embodied by the republican politicians who have taken it hostage for personal advantage.

In absence of a systematic thought, von Salomon proposes a "worldview" made up of a number of intuitions. What are the main ones?

For Ernst von Salomon, the central idea of his nationalism starts from the recognition of "Germany's particular path" (the "Sonderweg Deutschlands"). This specificity sets it radically apart from the West (Jacques Pirenne, in Belgium, showed how Central Europe but also Spain, Italy, the Polish-Lithuanian area, and Russia are not the French-absolutist or English-liberal West, and this since the seventeenth century). 

Western liberalism aims to replace the organicity of every state or imperial space with societal constructions and artifices where the economy is no longer embedded in social relations but, on the contrary, social relations are kept captive and anemic in the economic sphere. There is thus an erasure of the political in favor of the economic. This shift towards depoliticization and the all-economic means that the state no longer pursues truly political goals but imposes a technical and rationalist order which, in theory, should bring individual happiness to all and financial prosperity to the materially better-off citizens. In the end, this amounts to robbing individuals and citizens of any meaning in their existence, plunging them into a distressing banality, the antechamber of a probable physical extinction, as our current reality so clearly suggests. 

The maximization of profit, and not the heroism of action, is now at the center of the concerns of a declining humanity, and worse, the promotion of such anti-values becomes the main motive for wars planned by the West (today one would say by its "Deep State") or by westernized polities.

As the very figure of the Warrior, or the Hero—in the sense of Werner Sombart—Ernst von Salomon seems to belong to a forever bygone era. What, in your view, from him and his work, should remain relevant for today?

We have seen what vision Ernst von Salomon had of the political soldier within a state organized by incompetent and despicable politicians. The eras of the Wilhelmine German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and National Socialism are indeed over, as are those of the Third Republic and the interwar period in France, where, moreover, the Fifth Republic is slowly dying. 

However, it is worth recalling what Ernst von Salomon's ideas were between 1945 and 1972, the year of his death. Under the Weimar Republic, his positions were decidedly anti-Western and anti-liberal. In the new Federal Republic, proclaimed in 1949 and whose tutelary figure was Konrad Adenauer, champion of subordination to the structures of the Atlantic world and promoter of Franco-German reconciliation, Ernst von Salomon was considered a crypto-communist or even an agent of the GDR. To this he replied in the columns of the neo-nationalist weekly Deutsche National-Zeitung (no. 20, 1954): “How could I be a communist? Simply because I can't stand the Americans? I would like, if the fancy took me, to travel from Cologne to Wuppertal, from... to Posen (now Poznań) without ever being hindered or blocked by any ideology or practice brought by the occupiers…” 

The rejection is therefore twofold: rejection of the ideology brought by America and of the abstruse schemes of Soviet communism. Philosophically speaking, Ernst von Salomon never adhered to dogmatic communism, but he also, from the late 1950s, ceased to belong to what should be called the "right" (especially if it coincided with the Christian democracy knowingly subjugated to the United States). 

Ernst von Salomon then proposed a particular reading of the great theorists of the international left in vogue: Mao, Marcuse, and especially Gramsci. The idea of a "Salomonian Gramscism" should especially intrigue us. Von Salomon's reading of Gramsci, recalls Fröhlich (p. 365), led to a self-critique of his own activist path, a time when he had not understood that political and institutional hegemony is prepared through the cultural struggle ("the long march through the institutions" to better subvert them). For Ernst von Salomon, it was a matter, by means of a metapolitical action inspired by Gramsci, of restoring in Germany a proper national sentiment, which had to begin with the emergence of a "solidarity among all the declassed" (who thus constituted a new category, logical continuation of the "accursed", the "Geächteten"). This gathering of the "declassed" had to be organized in the face of the cultural domination imposed by the Western powers (a point of view he shared with Wolfgang Venohr and Armin Mohler, with whom he corresponded). This solidarity among the declassed had to be both "revolutionary" and "conservative" and, in this sense, "Prussian," beyond the state forms that Prussia may have taken in German history: the Prussian spirit, according to von Salomon and Venohr, goes beyond such forms, which inevitably one day freeze and are, therefore, necessarily transitory. 

In the framework of these new positions, both Gramscian and revolutionary-conservative, Ernst von Salomon, for the first time in his life in 1961, called for voting for a party, the Deutsche Friedensunion (DFU), a small party advocating a transversal strategy bringing together communists, socialists, neutralists, and nationalists, who were all to unite their efforts against the integration of the FRG into the Western, Atlanticist, and pro-American structures and work toward the reunification of the two German republics from a position hostile to the United States. However, this enthusiasm (which is not entirely extinct in Germany today) would prove short-lived, as the authorities of the GDR, representing a frozen, if not caricatured and very unattractive communism, decided in August 1961 to build the Berlin Wall. The DFU circles then withered in endless, Marxist-tinged ideological discussions, all marked by sterility and lacking political punch. 

Ernst von Salomon would leave this circle of chatterboxes, who in any case only garnered 1.9% in the September 1961 elections. In another area, the evolution of military technology, with the atomic bomb and intercontinental missiles, ruined Ernst von Salomon's soldierly perspective: the limits of a nation no longer extend to the geographical points where the forces of its men as soldiers take them. Soldiers are therefore no longer the bearers of the Nation. 

We have entered the era of the omnipotence of technology, driven by a destructive rage (Ernst Jünger would express similar reflections). Von Salomon writes: "The degeneration of the phenomenon of war concerns primarily not the ordinary man, not the people, but the warrior himself. This degeneration devalues his mission, takes away his honor, confiscates all those virtues for whose preservation the soldier fought" (Interview for ORTF, July 2, 1972). 

The ex-warrior Ernst von Salomon becomes hostile to war, not because it is an immoral anthropological constant, but hostile to any "just war" in the sense given by the Americans. This ius ad bellum, constantly evoked by Washington, serves only to promote the claims to universality of liberalism, which demands the unconditional submission of those labeled as "enemies," with whom peace is never made, but from whom a complete transformation is required by forced adaptation to the standards of the West. Peace, once conceived as the horizon of every conflict, in the context of generalized Americanization, can never again be reached. Without the prospect of peace, the sacrifice of the soldier on the battlefield is now meaningless. 

Westernization is thus a process that perpetuates a meaningless state of war, since Western liberalism deprives people of all meaning in their existence. It could hardly be more relevant given the evolution of NATO and the war against Iran.