Der Fragebogen

by Ernst von Salomon

Used book in good condition, due to its age it could contain normal signs of use

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Germany, German Literature, Politics

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

German writer and Freikorps member.

He was born in Kiel, the son of an army officer. From 1913 he was a cadet in Karlsruhe and Berlin-Lichterfelde; starting in 1919, he joined the Freikorps ("Free-Corps") in the Baltic, where he fought against the Bolsheviks. Later he fought against Polish insurgents in Upper Silesia.

He received a five year prison sentence in 1922 for his part in the assassination of Walther Rathenau — he provided a car for the assassins. In 1927, he received another prison sentence for an attempted feme murder (paramilitary "self-justice"), and was released after a few months - he had not killed the severely wounded victim, Wagner, when he pleaded for his life, which was noted by the court.

After 1933, Salomon said, he did not support Nazism. He earned his living by writing film scripts. His wife, Ille Gotthelft, was Jewish but was protected due to his support. In his autobiography The Answers of Ernst von Salomon he described how both were mistreated by American soldiers when they were arrested, and called "Nazi swine."

Salomon was imprisoned by the Americans as POW from 1945–1946. The 1940 colonial film Carl Peters, which Salomon wrote the screenplay for, was forbidden by British occupation authorities, because of allegedly being "anti-English".

In 1951 he published the book Der Fragebogen ("The Questionnaire"), in which he gave his rather ironic answers to the 131 point questionnaire concerning their activities under Nazism. A famous public discussion of the book took place in the main train station of Cologne, organised by bookseller Gerhard Ludwig.

Salomon died in Stoeckte near Winsen.

Reviews

[Edward]

"Anyone interested in overthrowing democracy desperately needs to read the great memoir of Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen, published in English as The Answers but better translated as The Questionnaire. (The title is a reference to the denazification questionnaires which all Germans seeking any responsible postwar position had to complete.)

"Salomon, who despite his name was not Jewish (though his wife was) was never a Nazi. He was, however, a hardcore nationalist, and not just any hardcore nationalist: he was a member of the notorious post-Freikorps death squad, Organisation Consul, and personally involved in the assassination of Rathenau, for which he served time. (If it's any defense, he was 19, and his role was limited to procuring the getaway car.) He was also a brilliant writer who made a living turning out movie scripts - before, during, and after the Third Reich. A good comparison is Ernst Jünger, also wonderfully readable if a little more abstruse.

"Der Fragebogen is a gloriously-fresh introduction to the world of Weimar, which most of us have encountered only from the liberal side. If you have trouble understanding how Nock could sympathize with the destruction of Weimar while abhorring Hitlerism, von Salomon is your man."

~Moldbug

[David Gross · Rating 1 out of 5]

Summary: We Germans who tried to be patriotic and come to the aid of our nation during the Nazi period by following the law, supporting the military, and doing our various duties while trying to avoid getting any more mixed up in all those atrocities than we really had to… why can’t the world respect us as the really good, honorable people we are, especially the noblemen and officers among us?

Actual quote: “[T]his was precisely the point at which the problem collided with individual conscience. This was every individual’s experience. No matter what route he might have followed to join the movement [Naziism] he was fully informed in advanced concerning [it’s attitude toward] the Jewish question. But in almost no case did this question impinge on the realms of his own problems[!]. Only gradually, but steadily, did the Jewish question seep into the individual’s own field of activity. And each man was at a given moment faced with this decision—how far did the measures periodically ordered (almost always recognised for what they were, but not as steps in a culminating process) affect the carrying out of what he regarded as his own task and duties. I must assume this: that the decision was honestly faced. But even that meant nothing more than the insinuation, into each man’s own sphere, of the foulest sort of corruption of which the conscience can conceive, the corruption that compels the individual to choose the lesser of two evils.”

This prefaces his discussion of one of his prisoner-of-war camp friends, Hanns Ludin, whom he tried to help escape, but who ended up being hanged for war crimes. Ludin, you see, had helped the Reich carry out its extermination of Jews in the Slovak Republic — but, von Salomon notes, at the time Ludin cried out (to himself) “This is an unspeakably foul blunder!” See, he was good inside. Imagine the lesser of two evils conundrum that was “insinuated into his sphere”: Do I quit the Nazi party and/or my post in the Foreign Office and therefore abandon my party in its time of need, or do I help Hitler perpetuate his reign of butchery? And then they went and hanged the nice fellow, whose only wish was to carry out his “field of activity” without having to get tangled up in this “Jewish question” any more than he had to!

This book became a big deal best-seller when it came out in Germany in 1951. It was a good focus for Germans who were sick of being told that a bit of contrition and self-examination was in order.

[Cloe90 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fast 50 Jahre aus dem Leben des neben Ernst Jünger wohl umstrittensten deutschen Schriftsteller des 20. Jahrhunderts, vom Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges bis hin zur bedingungslosen deutschen Kapitalation am 9. Mai 45 und der drauffolgenden Zeit nach der Stunde Null.

Heruntergebrochen auf die 131 Fragen des Fragebogens zur Entnazifizierung der amerikanischen Militärregierung erzählt Salomon autobiographisch von seiner Zeit im Kadettenkorps, dem Freikorpskampf im Osten, der Mitgliedschaft in der rechtsterroristischen Organisation Consul und seiner daraus resultierenden Haftzeit, dem Bauernkampf in Schleswig-Holstein sowie dem lange Zeit schleppend verlaufenden, aber ab 1930 schier unanufhaltsamen Aufstieg der NSDAP zur Massenpartei und erlebt schließlich das Kriegsende mit seiner jüdischen Lebensgefährtin im Chiemgau. Ebenso widmet sich Salomon umfangreich der Beschreibung seiner vielen Bekanntschaften mit allerhand bedeutenden und ebenso nicht unumstrittenen Persönlichkeiten aus Kultur und Politik, die größtenteils - ebenso wie er! - dem Nationalsozialismus ablehnend gegenüberstanden: Ernst Jünger, Ernst Rohlwolt, Kapitän Erhardt, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, Hans Zehrer, Friedrich Hielscher, Hartmut Plaas oder Hanns Ludin.

Ja, man kann (oder muss?) Salomons Demokratieverachtung, seine "Jugendsünden", seinen Hass auf die amerikanischen "Besatzer", seinen Zynismus sowie das demonstrativ zur Schau gestellte Desinteresse an den NS-Verbrechen und der konsequenten Verweigerung jeglicher Verantwortung daran, ablehnen. Trotz allem, oder gerade deswegen, ist "Der Fragebogen" ein packendes Zeitdokument, eine wilde Achterbahfahrt quer durch fast ein halbes Jahrhundert deutsche und europäische Geschichte.

[Tittirossa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Verboso, pedante, autoassolutorio. A tratti di una pesantezza mortifera, nel suo tentativo di iper-realismo-descrittivo (che può giusto interessare qualche superstite germanico della sua epoca che riconosce persone ormai divenute polvere).
Riesce per 700 lunghissime pienissime dettagliatissime (di niente) pagine a non trasmettere un briciolo di quello che ti aspetteresti di trovare nella pseudo-biografia del più giovane partecipante all’attentato contro Rathenau. L’adesione intellettuale al nazismo viene costantemente negata per ellissi che si allargano e si restringono a seconda del soggetto/oggetto narrato, cosa (il non aver aderito intellettualmente) che gli si potrebbe anche riconoscere, ma che non fa fatto, stante che si è ben guardato dall’affermarlo PRIMA della caduta di Hitler, e si è limitato a vivere da imboscato scrivendo sceneggiature per il cinema. Infatti, i soldati americani che lo arresteranno glielo rinfacceranno con un “porci nazisti”, epiteto di cui VS si risente parecchio e passa altre 200 verbose pedanti autoassolutorie pagine a descrivere le varie peripezie post-liberazione.
Capisco anche il successo che ha avuto, quanto è uscito negli anni ’50, risponde perfettamente alla necessità di lavarsi la coscienza sotto un fiume di parole.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ernst von Salomon’s Der Fragebogen is unique, a product of the refiner’s fire, a work forged in the cataclysm of mid-twentieth-century Europe. But this once-famous, now-obscure book, published only one time in English, and that seventy years ago, still holds within its pages knowledge about both the past and the future. As to the past, from this book we can learn something completely missing from modern discourse—the complex views of 1930s and 1940s German patriots. As to the future, we can learn something more practical—methods to, in a future dispensation, help us flush Left poison completely and permanently from our body politic.

Von Salomon, who lived from 1902 to 1972, was the very model of a Prussian patriot—at least in his own mind, although one cannot always tell how reliable a narrator he is, either here or in his earlier book The Outlaws, about political chaos and violence in and around Germany after World War I. We can, however, take his stated views as representative of the Prussian type as it existed during the first half of the twentieth century. This book, The Questionnaire (Der Fragebogen in German, and published in 1951 in Germany), is an autobiography of von Salomon’s life from 1928 until 1946. Von Salomon, a clever man if there ever was one, framed his autobiography as answers to the questionnaire, composed of 131 expansive questions, forced by the victorious Allies upon millions of Germans known or suspected to be associated in some way with the National Socialists.

While as I say there is much to be learned here, this book is not an easy read. Oh, the translation seems competent enough, although bizarrely the dust jacket and the preface heap obloquy upon the author, so perhaps the translation was also slanted to help discredit the book. You may well ask, then, why would a major American publishing house, Doubleday, in 1955 publish a book whose message, and whose author, they despised? Because this was the bestselling book in Germany for a decade, and could not be ignored.

Yet it’s rough sledding. First, the book is not chronological; because it is framed as answers to questions on various topics, it skips and jumps around in time and place, and more than once views the same events from a different angle—while it usually omits dates. Second, and more importantly, the author assumes vastly greater background knowledge than nearly any American alive today has. People and events completely obscure are referred to as common knowledge, and knowing who they are and what they did is necessary to understand the point the author is making. Many of these people and events don’t even have a stub English-language Wikipedia article; most have German-language articles of some type, and between my own very rough German and translation aids, I can puzzle out the relevant facts. Still, it’s an uphill battle.

This opacity extends to von Salomon himself. For example, a major character throughout the book is his lover Ille, who was Jewish and whom he passed off as his wife (and whom he portrays as slightly dotty and naïve). Wikipedia will tell you her last name was Gotthelft, and she was later married to the film director and screenwriter Paul May. But it’s nearly impossible for the reader to figure out anything else about her, or her history with von Salomon. He never introduces her or explains anything about her. The internet is little help. There is some suggestion she was his mistress and that he was actually married to someone else during the war. When von Salomon died, he was listed in his New York Times obituary as being married to “the former Lena Falk” and having three daughters—but the Hamburg film producer Cassian von Salomon, born in 1956, is also his son, so who was his mother? I just can’t find out. I guess it doesn’t matter, because the book is about von Salomon’s, and by extension all patriotic Germans’, experiences during the war, not his family. Still, the reader doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and wonders what he’s missing.

I emphasize “patriotic German” because the pernicious myth has grown up that citizens of Axis countries during World War II who betrayed their countries to the Allies, in one way or another, were somehow the “true patriots.” This is certainly not generally true, quite the contrary—many, or most, of those people were just Communist traitors deserving of contempt and punishment. But this is actually a complicated matter, because it intersects with the question of legitimate rebellion against tyranny, something I wholeheartedly endorse (subject to certain rules). Or as Ernst Jünger said in a recently-translated 1992 interview, “I know to distinguish between high treason—the agreement with an enemy power during a war—and treason as betrayal of a form of government. This distinction raises delicate problems that have troubled thinkers from Machiavelli to Jacob Burckhardt and caused tragic conflicts for many militaries from Coriolan to Stauffenberg.” Maybe we will return to this topic another day.

For seventy years, very little in English was published about the Questionnaire. I bought this book some years ago, for the purpose of seeing what it could tell me about how I and my compatriots might, after the Left is defeated, root out their evil as the Allies sought out to root out the very similar, but far less successful, evil of National Socialism. A few other old books exist about the Allies’ denazification campaign, but not many. As it happens, however, in 2016, in an unpublished doctoral thesis that has been turned into a book being published later this year, a German scholar, William Mikkel Dack, added a good deal of detail about how the Questionnaire worked in practice, which helps elaborate (but does not contradict) von Salomon’s account. As far as I know, he is the only modern scholar focusing on matters relating to denazification, at least in English. If you want more detail, go to Dack’s work—especially because von Salomon’s book now costs several hundred dollars, in keeping with the explosive rise in used book prices generally. (In that, as in so much else, this is not the future I was promised.)

Who filled out the Questionnaire? It’s very hard to say precisely, because although the completed forms are mostly still available to read in their millions, central administration was haphazard, and different across the different occupied zones. Roughly, the Allies required it of anyone who wanted to work in any job that had any responsibility, public or private. In other words, if you wanted to eat, and your family to eat, in those days of extreme privation and actual starvation, you filled it out—and accurately, for throughout the document are dire threats of punishment for the slightest inaccuracy. (Dack says about twenty million Germans completed the form.) The Allies’ aim, however, wasn’t primarily punishment (though they hoped to, and did, identify some Germans who were then punished), but rather excluding “undesirables,” meaning committed National Socialists, from future positions of influence in the new Germany, while at the same time changing the psychology of the German nation.

Jarringly, to that last point, Dack is explicit that the much of the Allies’ plan for denazification was designed by the Frankfurt School architects of “neo-Marxist Critical Theory,” notably Herbert Marcuse, but also Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer. These were men of the extreme Left, who brought their poison in the 1950s to America, where it has resulted in enormous destruction and now governs all Left political action. Their denazification theories revolved around the supposed false consciousness imposed on the German people by an evil cabal, and, no surprise, their purpose in designing all of denazification, entirely open and explicit, was to ensure the permanent dominance in Germany of the Left. (Their core attitude can be seen in, for example, the Questionnaire’s repeated attempts to encourage and incentivize denunciation of family members, always a favorite tool of the Left, which hates nothing more than the family.)

Von Salomon was a conspirator in the 1922 assassination of Walter von Rathenau, foreign minister in Weimar Germany. He covers this, and the aftermath, including five years in prison, in The Outlaws. This book covers only the time after he got out of prison, although more than once he, with a tone between irony and regret, but never with a tone of apology, mentions the assassination and its aftermath. The main tone that pervades the book is mocking contempt for both the Questionnaire and the Americans, the Allies with whom he had the most contact (he had none, fortunately for him, with the Russians). Apparently this tone was habitual to him; he even quotes his brother, when talking about their family background, as saying “Please spare me your cheap sarcasm for once!”

When released from prison, von Salomon reconnected with his old Freikorps and right-wing, nationalist, comrades, notably Hermann Ehrhardt but also many less-famous men, and traveled in the same circles as Ernst Jünger (who appears a lot in these pages, but never as a main protagonist, just popping in and out), at the intersection of letters and politics. He draws an incisive picture of hard and determined men unsure which way to turn, making plans, dropping plans, wondering what to do, at loose ends about how to spend their talents and achieve their desires in the new Germany. In von Salomon’s telling, which fits with his actions, he and his crowd had little truck with the National Socialists, whom they regarded as gutter upstarts, excessively focused on the Jews and too desirous of popular consent. Of the National Socialists, he quotes one of his closest friends in this period, Hartmut Plaas (shot in 1944 in Ravensbrück for involvement in a plot against Hitler), “A man who breaks windows and sets fire to churches and insults whole groups of human beings gets a taste for that sort of thing and keeps on doing it.” Today’s Right should take note, and realize the Left, already doing all of those things and ever more addicted to them, can only be stopped in the same way as were the National Socialists.

The Reichstag Fire, or rather the way the National Socialists took advantage of it (not dissimilar to the way our own Regime has tried to take advantage of the Electoral Justice Protest, though vastly less competently and with much less success), followed by the Röhm Purge and Kristallnacht, mostly put an end to all this intellectual ferment. Like Jünger, von Salomon, despite his connections with those disliked by the regime, managed to never receive its full ire—as with Jünger, his fame as a right-wing figure gave him some cover. 1930s and 1940s Germany was not totalitarian in the sense of the Soviet Union, with complete control over all of life combined with random terror, but anyone with political leanings not in tune with the regime was eventually in danger if he did not keep his opinions to himself. This caused even von Salomon to focus on work, rather than politics. He worked for a year in Vienna for Othmar Spann, whom he uses as an example of one of very many smart men who could not see that National Socialism was going to triumph, and soon. “ ‘No, no,’ cried Spann. ‘They could never govern a country. What’s their policy, their scientific doctrine? What is it? It just doesn’t exist. The stuff [Alfred] Rosenberg writes, it’s . . . it’s rubbish!’ I said that what Rosenberg wrote was undoubtedly rubbish, but I added that would affect the National Socialists as little as their lack of scientific doctrine.”

This attitude, that the National Socialists could never win power, was very common on the German Right; Ehrhardt had similar opinions. But they were all proved wrong, and von Salomon was proved correct. Noting that the “nationalist right,” meaning those not National Socialist but rather traditionalist, was both indecisive and failed to understand both economics and culture, “money and mind,” he concludes: “Problems of this sort certainly never bothered Hitler. He did not fear money or mind; he simply despised them. This undoubtedly gave him a great advantage over the national movement. Nor was he the sort of man who went fishing in the Rubicon.” Instead, as everybody knows, using democratic/totalitarian methods, rather than the hierarchical/authoritarian methods von Salomon saw as the right path, Hitler swept to power.

As the National Socialists rose and then the war began, von Salomon was always facing potential complications and unpleasantness resulting from his Jewish connections. These did not include being killed; it was only very late in the war that German Jews, as Jews, were shipped to death camps. It was more the possibility of ever-escalating humiliations to person and property. (All this is very well covered, in much more detail, in Victor Klemperer’s famous diaries.) Von Salomon was not Jewish, and had no Jewish ancestors, but his name sounded very Jewish to the average German. However, he was famous enough that everyone knew him, or realized who he was when he pointed it out, so that was more of an inconvenience than anything. His girlfriend Ille, however, faced more problems; avoiding being identified as a Jew became more and more important as the war ground on. Perhaps her association with von Salomon insulated her, but he never says, exactly. Mostly, her problems appear through her reporting back to von Salomon how she sees other Jews abused by official functionaries of various types.

He wasn’t rich, nor was he good at getting rich. So he made ends meet by publishing several books (including The Outlaws). He wriggled out of attempts to get him to join the NSDAP. He involved himself in (and wrote a book about) the Peasant’s Movement in Schleswig-Holstein, a movement not dissimilar to the recent populist protests such as the Freedom Convoy in Canada or the Yellow Vests in France (though with more bombs). He then took up screenwriting, which he perceived as largely neutral territory, not totally politically controlled, and populated by those not eager to toady to the National Socialists. In his spare time, with a group of friends, he collected vast reams of data about the postwar right wing, until one day he was directly threatened that he had to turn over the data to National Socialist control (the implication being that the National Socialists found this information likely to tarnish their self-curated origin story), and immediately did so, then went to live in the Bavarian countryside, where he was during much of the war and at the war’s end.

From all these fractal recollections, eventually, the reader gets a flavor of what life was like for von Salomon, and by extension for German men of his class and politics, from 1930 on. The creeping power of the National Socialists was annoying to von Salomon, not only for personal but also for professional reasons. As to the professional controls, on writing (and, later, screenwriting), “It all seemed quite harmless to begin with. The first measures they took were so stupid and so naïve, that it was child’s play to get around them. But day by day they tightened the net.” The same was true across all aspects of society, and the reader’s mind again immediately sees the parallels to today’s Left—witness, for example, the British state’s recent arrest of a woman silently praying on the street in Birmingham, something inconceivable, even in totalitarian Britain, only a few years ago.

But von Salomon’s biggest objection to the National Socialists was philosophical, not practical or even personal. In his mind the state was everything, preceding the people, and the National Socialists regarded themselves as superior to the state. “From the very beginning I had always regarded the sole object of the great nationalist movement that grew out of the collapse of 1918 as being the renewal of the concept of the state, a rebirth that had to be revolutionary in its methods but conservative in its nature. So logically—and even before the turning point marked by the emergence of Adolf Hitler within the nationalist movement—I was bound to regard any attempt to switch the nationalist accent from the state to the people, from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, as a disgraceful and absurd betrayal of our true aims.” Von Salomon rejected National Socialism because “[Hitler] let himself be summoned by the people . . . he proclaimed the popular ideal by means of which he would create the reality of the state. Instead of vice versa.” Hitler’s obsession with race was part and parcel of this exaltation of popular will over the will of the state, which is mostly why von Salomon thought little of it.

At no point, however, was he interested in sacrificing himself to undermine the National Socialist government. In von Salomon’s telling, those with whom he associated, and an ever-increasing number of Germans, viewed the only possibility as winning the war and then “getting rid of” the National Socialists. This is interesting because today, nobody ever mentions this possibility. We are told the postwar future, had Germany won, would have been the world of The Man in the High Castle—a globe-spanning totalitarian empire embodying the worst aspects of National Socialism, forever. Maybe. But it’s also, if you try and squint a little, easy to imagine National Socialism ending, or mutating, into some kind of merely authoritarian and hierarchical system, along the lines of von Salomon’s desires, and as a result today’s Europe, and today’s West, being a vastly better place than it is today, a culture and civilization with a future, rather than one hurtling into a brick wall.

The latter half of the book is concerned with . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Fatih Dogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

hep kurbanların gözünden dinlediğimiz bir savaşı fail diyebileceğimiz birinin birinci el tanıklığıyla dinlemek epey ilginç bir edebiyat deneyimi. nazilere sempati duyan, ama hitler’e bağlılık metnini imzalamayan belki de almanya’yı faşizm cenderesine sokan rathenau cinayetine doğrudan yardım eden birinin ağzından zafer ve çaresizlik yıllarının güncesi. epey iyi bir metin.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ernst von Salomon's memoires from during Weimar Germany until his internment in Allied prison camps. Interesting views and events.

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Der Fragebogen" (The Questionnaire) is a memoir written by the German writer and right-wing activist Ernst von Salomon, and published in 1951. The book is a firsthand account of von Salomon's experiences during the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era in Germany.

The title "Der Fragebogen" refers to the questionnaire that von Salomon was required to fill out after his arrest by the Allied authorities following World War II. The questionnaire was used to determine the political affiliations of former Nazis and other right-wing activists.

In his memoir, von Salomon provides a vivid and often controversial account of his life and times, from his participation in right-wing paramilitary groups during the Weimar Republic, to his eventual disillusionment with the Nazi regime and his arrest by the Allies.

The book was controversial when it was published, and sparked debates about the nature of right-wing politics in Germany and the legacy of the Nazi era. Some criticized von Salomon's account as self-serving and overly sympathetic to the right-wing movements he participated in, while others praised his willingness to confront the complex and often uncomfortable truths about Germany's past. Today, "Der Fragebogen" remains an important work in the study of modern German history and the legacy of the Nazi era.

GPT