After German defeat in 1918, territorial claims to the Baltics became little more than an idealistic dream. The German state, being an inept and incompetent socialist republic, could barely maintain control of its main western territory let alone defend an eastern colony. Allied powers imposed strict restrictions on German military operations and capabilities. Groups of German men had begun to organize themselves into paramilitary groups. These factions of volunteer forces with no discernable loyalties were known as Freikorps regiments. The vast majority of these men were veterans of the German military coming to terms with the shame of defeat and the degradation of their country.
Walter von Meden, leader of the Meden Freikorps, recalls the atmosphere of the march back home on the 13th of November 1918 after the ceasefire: “Everyone had their own thoughts, those of shame, defiance, and also those of distrust; even the mules trotted behind the light artillery with their ears folded.” The Freikorps initially provided them the opportunity to continue the fight as a way to deal with the loss and betrayal they felt. For the younger recruits war was the only thing they’d come to know. The prospect of a peaceful normalcy in defeat would become an internal psychological crisis. There could be no return to peace for these men.
During the fall of 1918 Soviet forces began a major advance in the Baltics, their rapid success forced allied powers to give the Weimar Republic some liberty in defending the region. On December 29th 1918 Minister Plenipotentiary to the Baltics August Winning negotiated a deal with the Latvian government which would allow German forces to fight Bolshevism in the Baltics. Days later on January 4th 1919 Defense Minister Gustav Noske, knowing that the governmental Baltic Landeswehr could not defend the region alone, approved the use of these volunteer forces. The Baltic adventure begins.
German Freikorps were now fighting in the Baltics, “nominally invited by the Latvian state and with the tacit acceptance of the victorious allies as a bulwark against the Bolsheviks.”1 While officially the Freikorps were fighting to keep Bolshevism in Asia, the personal motives for Freikorps fighters varied greatly. The Baltics was a lawless land abundant in freedom. This would make the greater Baltic conflict notoriously bloody, there was no one to say “no”. “This violence must be read as a key component of Freikorps creativity. The form of the territorial boundaries of Germany, the nature of its state, and the constitution of its people were all up for grabs in 1919, the year of the Freikorps’ Baltic adventure. Violence was both a symptom and constitutive element of this chaos.”2
As part of the original agreement devised by Winning and the Latvian government, German soldiers were to be eligible for Latvian citizenship after 4 weeks of service, “Ultimately, this evoked a ‘Baltic fever’”.3 Recruitment centers throughout the country began advertising lofty dreams of colonization to anyone who was willing to fight. While never specified in the agreement, recruitment centers told young men that after their service they would receive houses, property, and food. One soldier recalls:
“One point convinced many to go to the Baltics. The Latvian government had promised every German soldier who took part in expelling the Bolsheviks up to 80 Morgen of land to settle on. Settlement organizations that provided information both orally and in writing were represented in every formation and worked according to uniform directives of the General Commando. . . . the work took place in view of the goal of settling in Kurland.”4
This promise of land for settlement invokes in man the dream of reflecting oneself onto the world, it is the the desire to conquer space. To bring physical space under your control is one dimension of the quest for space but I also mean the BAPist conception of self-mastery. In fact they are directly correlated. You cannot master yourself without controlling the land around you. Columbus' greatness is found in his effort to subdue and conquer the Americas, thus conquering space in the Americas and mastering his innate ability as conqueror. The Freikorps greatness is found in their effort to conquer and protect the Baltics from Bolshevism through their personal self mastery.
In a fake and gay world, everything has a minimum of 40 levels of irony and obfuscation. Most of what we now perceive in the world has been passed through smoke and mirrors. So if you want to understand man’s natural desires you have to strip him of his manners; this is why I’ve always enjoyed a Rousseauean interpretation of natural man. One particularly important observation Rousseau made concerns the ability of natural man:
“The body being the only instrument that savage man is acquainted with, he employs it to different uses, of which ours, for want of practice, are incapable; and we may thank our industry for the loss of that strength and agility, which necessity obliges him to acquire. Had he a hatchet, would his hand so easily snap off from an oak so stout a branch? Had he a sling, would it dart a stone to so great a distance? Had he a ladder, would he run so nimbly up a tree? Had he a horse, would he with such swiftness shoot along the plain?”5
In this instance natural man, stripped of his creations, has mastered his inborn abilities to manipulate space. Natural man sought mastery of space in a way that was particular to him. With this mastery came the development of all of his faculties. Through mastering his space he became strong. When he no longer needs to conquer his space he loses his abilities. The state, and particularly urbanization, can be thought of as analogous to hatchets, slings, and ladders. They may make life “easier”, but they drain man of his natural faculties. The urban state constricts which actions are permissible and which aren’t. This may seem fine but the body seeks homeostasis; too many chains causes man to grow restless. This sentiment was common among Freikorps volunteers, “There were many who were attracted by the lack of order and rules in the Baltics. Some were criminals who felt they could escape punishment by fighting in the Baltics.”6
Beyond the desire to leave bourgeois society, which most of the men had already mentally departed from as a result of their participation in the Great War, the Baltics took a much more “existential” meaning for a lot of the volunteers. Franz Nord, a volunteer soldier, wrote “it was this feeling and insight which made the Baltic seem like a magical eye in the midst of the storm of the first post-war years, a new German field of influence, which could replace that lost home . . .”7
The Baltics also provided an opportunity for those who may have been born too late to fight in the Great War to participate in the broader conflict which had been stained by a humiliating defeat. Additionally, the Baltics were seen by veterans who could not or would not reintegrate into civilian life as a new opportunity to at the very least extend their free years. Erich Balla, a commander for the Iron Brigade, the largest and most notorious Freikorps group wrote, “What a relief from dull hopelessness and the hand of fate it was to him, when one day he read in the newspaper that German troops in the Baltic were still fighting Bolshevism and that volunteers with front-line experience were being sought. Once again, there was a task; there was a goal worth living for!”8
The feeling of basking under a foreign sun, breathing a foreign air is vitalizing. To some extent you experience this when you leave the smog filled air of the city for the sweetness of the country, imagine that high multiplied 10 fold. Political affairs mattered little to these men yet they could tell their empire no longer existed in any meaningful way. The Baltics were an opportunity for them to create a place for them upon which they could reflect themselves. One soldier recalls, “I thrust my Finger into the rich earth, which seemed to pull me in. We had conquered this ground. Now it challenged us; suddenly, it had become a committing symbol.”9 The opportunity to create something from nothing rarely presents itself, even at that time. The men who made their way to the Baltics would witness the landscape calling them to adventure. The land seemed mysterious and certainly dangerous. The cold winter nights posed a constant threat to life, “the landscape was subjected to the terrors of the season: brief days, hunger, unfamiliar rules of warfare. Then the landscape was most fantastic, as ‘black nights, in which wind and ice create ghostly noises, slowly drag away the hours.’”10
But this was the point, wasn’t it? Taming the untamable? Mastering the landscape? Mastering this land would soon become a obsession for many. The notorious Ernst von Salomon remarked that the Baltikum was a sort of lovely back drop for a violent adventure11
“I still knew quite exactly, how this smell had then seemed for me to unite everything in itself, the hope and danger which had moved me in Kurland. I was transported by the dangerous foreignness of this land, to which I stood in a peculiar relationship. Precisely the feeling, in this lovely landscape always in fact to be standing on swaying swamp-ground, which unceasingly sent up its bubbles, had given the war up here the moving, constantly changing character, which may have already communicated to the Teutonic Knights that roving restlessness which always drove them out of their secure castles anew to daring expeditions.”
Romanticizing the Baltics as an opportunity for personal fulfillment and adventure caused many to view the Freikorps soldiers as indifferent mercenaries and indeed many began to wear this intended insult with as a proud title. However, there were true believers…
Sammartino, Annemarie H. The Impossible Border: Germany and the East
Sammartino, 46.
Böhler, Konrád, and Kučera, In the Shadow of the Great War.
Sammartino, The Impossible Border.
Rousseau, A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind.
Sammartino, The Impossible Border.
Böhler, Konrád, and Kučera
Böhler, Konrád, and Kučera
Liulevicius, “War Land on the Eastern Front.”
Liulevicius,
Liulevicius.