Read an Excerpt
The Political Discourse of Carl Schmitt
A Mystic of Order
By Montserrat Herrero Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Montserrat Herrero
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-456-0
CHAPTER 1
Biographical Sketch
Who was Carl Schmitt? In the only book in which he talks about his life, Ex Captivitate Salus, Schmitt tells of how, on one occasion, this same question — "Who are you?" — put him in an "existential trance." Despite the difficulty in doing so, he was able to give a definition of himself as a "Christian Epimetheus." He even wished to make this definition his epitaph; however, the inscription on his tomb reads (in Greek): "He met the nomos."
It is very difficult to define a personality as rich and multifaceted as that of Carl Schmitt; however, an outline of his life is certainly a necessary part of understanding his intellectual path. With Schmitt's biographical timeline in focus, one can better understand the development of his thought. This is especially true for someone whose life was continually marked by historical circumstance, politics, and legal science.
One cannot speak of complete discontinuity in Schmitt's biography, but his life and work are certainly capable of some periodization, as he himself claimed. In 1958 he characterized his timeline as follows:
1. Childhood: 1888–1900. In the Catholic Sauerland
2. Adolescence: 1900–1907. Clericalism with a liberal education
3. Young adulthood: 1907–1918. De-Hegelianized Prussianism impregnated by Wilhelmism and neo- Kantianism
4. Adulthood: 1919–1932. De-Prussianized German patriotism in the Weimar liberal democracy, with strong nationalistic reactions (anti-Versailles)
(Influences):
• on 1: An old priest, a good person with memories of the Kulturkampf
• on 2: Convent director and patriotic manufacturers
• on 3: Civil servants and officials (fundamentally decent people)
• on 4: Authentic pluralism and a lot of freedom
The content of this book does not follow or extend this timeline so as not to distort the discursive unity of Schmitt's theoretical contribution, which is the principal aim of the book. Thus, before delving in to the systematic development of Schmitt's thought, this chapter will present a biographical sketch in which Schmitt's work will be presented in faithful chronological order with three criteria in mind, namely, historical circumstance, Schmitt's scholarly production, and his personal situation.
FICTION AND REALITY: 1888–1920
Schmitt was born on July 11, 1888, the same year that William I died, in the Westphalian Sauerland city of Plettenberg to a rural Catholic family. With Frederick III, German liberals had buried their hopes and the new conservatism of William II was imposed, which, twenty-five years later, would result in the First World War. He was born in a time of change and in a region that rejected Catholicism during the diaspora of Catholics from Protestant regions. In this environment, Schmitt formed his first feelings of animosity, which remained throughout his life. Schmitt's position was not merely negative criticism to Protestant Kulturkampf, but rather was expressed in a kind of eulogy to the Catholic Church that explicitly appeared in his early writings Die Sichtbarkeit der Kirche (1917)and Romischer Katholizismus und politische Form (1923).
He was first educated, between 1900 and 1907, at a Catholic school, the Rivius Gymnasium in Attendorn, where he also lived in a Catholic convent that served as his lodging. By this time, he began to show signs of his literary skill and he read everything he could get his hands on. In March of 1907, he passed his high school exams and decided to study philology, for which he moved to Lorraine, where he had relatives who could house him. Once there, his uncle diverted Schmitt from philology and advised him to study law, which brought him to Berlin in 1907, where he found himself standing in from of the Juristische Fakultät sign.
The first months in Berlin proved decisive in his education. He went from a provincial area to the big city, which at first dazzled him, but could not hide the masks and lies. Schmitt described his impressions thusly:
I entered the University reverently: I thought it would be a temple of high spirituality. But the cult that I saw there was absolutely confusing and I was not inspired to join in on it. Their priests were somehow contradictory and particularly busy with themselves. They represented both an armored self and a frenzied self. Within the internal contradiction of their armored frenzy, the ground they walked on became a stage for displaying themselves. The whole era was histrionic and, consequently, the temple felt like a theater. ... I was a dark young man of modest origins. I was neither understood within the dominant social stratum, nor within any opposing current that might arise. I would not formalize a relationship to any party, or any circle, nor did anyone come looking for me. I was, neither for myself nor for others, not interesting enough. Poverty and modesty were my two guardian angels that kept me in the dark, meaning that I remained in the dark and, from there, contemplated a glowing space. ... In any case, to remain in darkness is an advantage. L'obscurité protège mieux.
There, he met Josef Kohler, an eminent jurist, and the great Greek scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, son-in-law to the famous scholar Theodore Mommsen, both of whom completely dazzled him at first. They, and many others, joined in on the stage described above.
At that time, Schmitt drank deeply from the artistic and intellectual currents then in vogue and that interacted in the big city, forming a truly psychedelic scene: Darwinism, romanticism, Nietzscheism, pantheism, expressionism, and cubism. He faced them with a critical attitude in an attempt to separate truth from fiction. Schmitt found new enemies in these currents, which lasted until the end of his days and which were characterized, a few years later, in Schattenrisse (1913), namely, Romantic subjectivism, Darwinism, pantheism, optimistic progressivism, and nihilism. In those early years, and as shown in the previously cited work, Schmitt clearly demonstrated a trend toward literary fiction and play through language and images. Die Buribunken (1918), another of his first writings, resulted from this same inquietude.
In any case, Schmitt spent relatively little time in Berlin. He studied two semesters there, one in Munich, and the last three in Strasbourg, where, in 1910, he presented his dissertation, entitled Über Schuld und Schuldarten: Eine terminologische Untersuchung, under the direction of Professor van Calker. Neo-Kantianism was in the air in the legal field and Schmitt composed his early writings faithful to its assumptions, but gradually began distancing himself from them. In his Strasbourg years, he frequented a circle of expressionist writers where, in 1912, he met Theodor Däubler. Their friendship and conversation inspired the work Theodor Däublers "Nordlicht": Drei Studien über die Elemente, den Geist und die Aktualität des Werkes (1916). Through this poet's writings, Schmitt discovered the world of language, which had fascinated him ever since his father had taught him stenography. Words have a real reference that completely permeates them to the point of becoming a reality themselves. Language, words might say more than what they refer to. Through them, one can create a new world of meanings. Discourse is the place in which reality is born. Until the end of his days, Schmitt was interested in these topics.
After submitting his dissertation, Schmitt worked as an intern until 1915 in the service of the Prussian justice Hugo am Zehnhoff, a lawyer in Dusseldorf, a representative of the "Centrum" party and later the Prussian minister of justice from 1920 to 1927. During those five years, Schmitt published a series of works influenced by the intellectual ground he walked on and in which his position as a jurist was not yet clear: "Der Wahnmonolog und eine Philosophie des Als-ob" (1912), Gesetz und Urteil: Eine Untersuchung zum Problem der Rechtspraxis (1912), "Schopenhauers Rechtsphilosophie außerhalb seines philosophischen Systems" (1913), and "Juristische Fiktionen" (1913). In 1914, he published his habilitation thesis, Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen, in which he distanced himself from the normativism, Kantianism, and rationalism that reigned around him. He did not make a plädoyer for the absolute State, but rather for the absoluteness of law in a strong state. In my opinion, Schmitt does not disclose his real view in this publication.
In January 1915, he passed the Assessorexamen in Berlin. A few months later, he served as an Adjunct Professor (Privatdozent) at the University of Strasbourg until it closed. In February 1915, he married Pawla Dorotic, a marriage that failed since, soon after marrying, he found out that she had hidden her true identity. By 1918 they already lived separately, although they were still legally married. In the end, she left him, taking part of their furniture and library. In 1924, the marriage was declared void under civil law, although, despite his relentless efforts, he never obtained an annulment from the Catholic Church.
From 1915 to 1919, he served in the military, enlisting as a volunteer in the infantry in Munich. He was first a corporal until September 1917, then top noncommissioned officer, and thereafter highest official. During those years, he met luminaries from Bavarian intellectual and artistic circles. In 1917, for example, he met Konrad Weiss, who was a decisive influence in his life and with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. He also initiated a friendship with Georg and Lilly von Schitzler, founders of the Europäische Revue. His relationship with writer Franz Blei is also worth mentioning; in 1920, Blei wrote a series of satires and parodies entitled Das Bestiarium der modernen Literatur. Schmitt's fondness for literature, fiction, and satire was still intact.
From 1919 to 1921, he was lecturer (Dozent) at the Munich Handelshochschule, during which time he attended Max Weber's seminars. Schmitt's years in Munich were influential in the development of his thought and during that time he underwent a change that transformed his taste for fiction, which until then he favored, into a preference for reality; the game turned into seriousness, literary digression into political reflection. The contrast between these worlds is especially apparent in Politische Romantik, published in 1919, which was his last work as a young adult. Some commentators believe that, in this work, Schmitt not only fought the subjectivism of his time, but he also immunized himself against the romanticism that gripped his generation, paralyzing his contemporaries when making decisions, incapacitating them from taking a political stance, and abandoning them to a bourgeois life dedicated solely to aesthetic enjoyment.
Schmitt's thinking was inexorably marked by his contact with the war and by having endured in 1919, just as he left military service, the Government of the Soviet Republic in Munich, which constituted a real state of exception. It can be said that, in Munich, Schmitt's fear of chaos went from being a feeling to being a theory. At this point, the political spirit had taken root in Schmitt, which became obvious in his subsequent publications.
THE DISCOVERING OF THE POLITICAL SPIRIT: 1920–1932
Schmitt changed pace and changed his tune. Guided by his discovery of decision, opposed to the "eternal dialogue" of aesthetics' logic, he wrote what would become a central part of his thought: Die Diktatur (1921), Politische Theologie (1922), Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (1923), Der Begriff des Politischen (1927), Verfassungslehre (1928), Der Hüter der Verfassung (1931), and Legalität und Legitimität(1932). At this point, before his National Socialist period, he generally described himself as a decisionist. Certainly his 1912 work, Gesetz und Urteil, had primed his thinking about the centrality of the decision.
These represented difficult times for Schmitt, corresponding to the period in which his marriage had just ended and to the experience of the First World War and the consequent peace with dire consequences for Germany. He was also faced with positioning himself professionally; in 1921 he was appointed Professor of Public Law at the University of Greifswald, where he only remained one year. In 1922, and until 1928, he moved to Bonn, where he joined the University as a regular professor in the School of Law, succeeding Rudolf Smend. They were quiet years in which Schmitt participated fully in university life, including giving classes, discussions, supervision of doctoral theses — in four years, approximately twenty-one — co-director of the Political Science Seminar, and so on. He liked to talk with and advise students and even paid for a few students' doctoral studies. He invited students to his house and sustained a friendship with many of them. Later, while in Berlin, he became famous for his house's motto: "Welcome, good and bad alike." Hugo Ball, founder of Dadaism and Hermann Hesse's first biographer, was among those who frequented his house; there, they struck up a close friendship.
In 1925, he fell in love with the woman he would marry one year later — a Serbian woman named Duschka Todorovic, who was his student in Bonn. According to both his "friends and enemies," his second wife was an exceptional woman. Since he was unable to marry her in the Church, as he would have wished, he remained outside of the Church until her death in 1950, a fact that caused Schmitt true anguish. He returned to the Church after her death. The couple had one daughter, Anima Louise, who was born in 1931.
Despite the stability that he enjoyed in Bonn, his spirit of adventure — of "intellectual adventure," as he described it at the Nuremberg trials — guided him toward the center of interest, toward where ideas were moving and where new streams of thought were forming: "Berlin was his destiny," as his wife once said.
In August 1927, he began making plans to move to Berlin and in April 1928, during the golden era of the Weimar Republic, he began to give classes at a business college (Handelshochschule). Shortly afterward, in 1929, the gross domestic product fell in Germany from 89 to 58 billion marks and unemployment numbers increased by one and a half million to more than three million in one year. The situation became increasingly critical and instability was in the air again. At this time, he forged new friendships. In 1929, for example, he met Johannes Popitz, specialist in tax and financial law, Honorary Professor at the Handelshochschule, and, at the same time, secretary of state in the Ministry of Finance. He taught Schmitt the uniqueness of the State, administration, and the Prussian style, without which, according to Schmitt, his education would have been incomplete. Their friendship lasted until Popitz's execution, as a member of the German Resistance, in February 1945.
Schmitt's friendship with Ernst Jünger also sprang up during these years, a testament to which is found in the letters between them, clearly demonstrating that they shared readings, thoughts, and ideas. At the time, Jünger was the star of the "conservative revolution" in Germany; he was a symbol of the 1914 generation, the generation of the "front." His use of language was a weapon to fight "civil" Weimar society; he was a mixture of "heroic realism" and radical right dashed with socialism. Bendersky notes that their friendship was based on the admiration each had for the other's intellectual power. The dialogue between them went through difficult times, not only for historical reasons, as might be the case regarding the different positions that each took on National Socialism, but also because they had different spirits. Schmitt disliked that Jünger indiscriminately included the content of their conversations and letters in his diary. Schmitt also kept a diary, but most of it is still untouched because it is written in shorthand that is impossible to decipher. Schmitt was incapable of talking about himself, let alone publishing something so personal. He only did so once, in Ex Captivitate Salus, and only by taking sufficient distance from himself.
Schmitt also established contact with Walter Benjamin during this time. Benjamin wrote him a letter motivated by the publication of Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels to thank him for his publications, which greatly influenced his recent writing. Benjamin was fascinated by Schmitt's thought because of its aspiration for integrity and interdisciplinarity. Their positions were far apart, but both had declared war on compromise, parliamentarianism, and political liberalism; both understood that the highest manifestation of the spirit takes place in exception, and both were inclined to think in absolute terms and by starting from theology.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Political Discourse of Carl Schmitt by Montserrat Herrero. Copyright © 2015 Montserrat Herrero. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
