Background
Walther Rathenau. Ernst von Salomon was born in Kiel on 25 September 1902, the scion of an old Huguenot family.
Walther Rathenau. Ernst von Salomon was born in Kiel on 25 September 1902, the scion of an old Huguenot family.
At the time of the Armistice in 1918, von Salomon was still in the senior class of the Royal Prussian cadet school.
Shortly after the war, he joined the Freikorps, participating in the fighting in the Baltic and in Upper Silesia. He was also involved in the Kapp putsch of 1920 and in nearly all the counter-revolutionary movements which aimed to destroy the hated Weimar Republic, to wipe out the ‘shame’ of the Versailles Treaty and restore the monarchy. His first novel Die Geächteten (The Outlaws).
Von Salomon's taste for lawlessness and violence, as well as his unregenerate nationalism, led him to participate in the murder of the Jewish- born Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, on 24 June 1922, for which he was sentenced to five years' penal servitude.
The völkisch desperado was released from prison as a result of President von Hindenburg’s general amnesty in 1928 and reverted to his favourite pursuit of putsching, participating in the bomb-throwing peasants’ movement in Schleswig-Holstein. After a few more months in prison where he wrote his first best-selling novel. Die Geächteten (1930), von Salomon soon became a favourite of the literary salons, writing Die Stadt (The City) in 1932, followed by a characteristic idealization of Prussianism, Die Kadetten (1933).
Like other Edelfaschisten (noble-minded fascists) such as Jünger and Niekisch, von Salomon was a significant forerunner of the Third Reich by virtue of his moral colour-blindness, self-righteous arrogance and irrational nihilism, but was somewhat shocked by the results of the ‘National Revolution’.
Under the Third Reich, von Salomon’s writing was mainly apolitical and he concentrated on a highly successful and well-paid career as a top-level film writer for UFA, the German film company.
After the war von Salomon was arrested by the American occupation authorities and interned until September 1946, when he was released since nothing incriminating could be found against him.
In 1951 he published a massive 800-page best-seller - it sold more than 250,0copies in West Germany entitled Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire). The autobiography of a nihilistic, conservative revolutionary who had become a fellowtraveller during the Third Reich,
The success of the book proved that it had evoked a responsive chord in the German national psychology with its amoral indifference to the crimes committed under the Third Reich, its eulogy of Prussian authoritarianism and its contempt for the ‘stupid conquerors’. Von Salomon continued to be a popular and successful author in post-war Germany.
He died at his home near Hamburg in August 1972, shortly before his seventieth birthday.
(dealt mainly with the Freikorps struggle to gain the Balt...)
1930(A bitter, cynical, personal testament which exposed the a...)
1951Die Stadt
1932Though he had stirred the hatreds on which National
Socialism thrived, he never joined the Nazi Party, despising the democracy of the masses’ and continuing to prefer his Prussian ideal of a hierarchical, authoritarian State. Von Salomon subsequently claimed that he had been appalled by the brutality of the Rohm Blood Purge of 1934, by the Crystal Night anti-Jewish pogrom and the moral bankruptcy of the Nazi régime. This did not, however, prevent him from being accorded a place in the Nazi Academy of Arts and his books from being recommended by the régime as ‘national documents’ which portrayed the struggle for the rebirth of a nation.
Complaining angrily about his ‘sadistic’ treatment in a post-war American internment camp, he whitewashed the German conscience with his claim that the Americans behaved no less brutally than the Nazis.
The moral pretensions of the West were contemptible in the eyes of this unrepentant nationalist for whom the term ‘democracy’ remained meaningless and hypocritical. With shocking candour, devastating sarcasm and ridicule, von Salomon made the post-war screening of Nazis seem almost as barbaric and inhuman as Dachau and Buchenwald.
