Ex Captivitate Salus

Carl Schmitt
I have experienced the tribulations of fate.
Victories and defeats, revolutions and restorations.
Inflations and deflations, bombings,
Defamations, broken regimes and broken pipes,
Hunger and cold, internment and solitary confinement.
Through it all I have passed,
And dirough me it all has passed.

I am acquainted widi the abundant varieties of terror,

The terror from above and the terror from below,
Terror on die land and terror from die air,
Terror legal and extra-legal,
Brown, red and checkered terror,
And worst of all, die terror none dares to name.
I am acquainted widi diem all and know dieir grip.

I know the chanting choirs of power and law,

The shrieking voices and mean falsifiers of die regime,
The black lists widi many names.
And die cardfiles of die persecutors.

What now should I sing? The hymn of placebo?

Should I abandon problems and envy plants and animals?
Tremble in panic in die circle of die paniscs?
Fortunate as die gnat, who dances to his own tune?

Thrice I sat in die belly of die whale.

I confronted suicide at die hand of die executioner.
Yet die sheltering word of die sibylline poets embraced me,
And a holy man from the East opened to me die gates of deliverance.

Child of diis consecration, tremble not —

Harken and endure!

* This poem, under the tide "Gesang des Sechzigjahrigen" [Song of the Sexagena-
rian"], appears at the end of Schmitt's Ex Captivate Salus: Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945-47
(Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1950). Translated by G. L. Ulmen.

-130-