Carl Schmitt, the legal theorist and political philosopher, whose critique of liberalism in the last days of the Weimar Republic continues to draw the attention of neoconservatives and postmodernists alike, has been called “an apocalyptic of the Counter-revolution.” Schmitt’s controversial essay The Concept of the Political (1932) presents the “political” as predicated on a friend-and-enemy relationship between and within states, the ultimate manifestation of which is the willingness to die and kill in a war against a recognized collective enemy. Without this relationship, argues Schmitt, politics, and therefore the state, will lose its meaning and wither away, thereby depriving human existence of the seriousness and commitment that ultimately makes it human.
Schmitt, of course, both reflected and influenced a general intellectual trend in Germany on the eve of Hitler’s seizure of power. Other legal minds, such as future top SS official Werner Best, spoke at the time of the need to “exterminate the enemy without hating him.” For them the definition and eradication of an enemy was a crucial precondition for accomplishing the historical task of reasserting the nation’s collective identity and purging it of everything that polluted and undermined it. Best and his comrades meant precisely what they said; they abhorred rhetoric and advocated ruthless action. Once in power they launched Germany on a campaign aimed at isolating and destroying its perceived enemies, both domestic and foreign. The Third Reich’s politics were thus propelled by the very dynamic outlined by Schmitt, eventually hurling it into a moral and existential abyss. According to the logic of this argument, nations such as France, which had failed to agree on a collectivity of enemies (and friends), were doomed to degenerate to the status of a nonstate, since their inability to conduct adversarial politics deprived them of their viability as political entities. Similarly, the Jews’ perceived inability to recognize the centrality of the enemy-and-friend relationship, prevented them from realizing the “political”; by the time they finally identified the enemy, they no longer existed as a people. Yet even as they were being destroyed, the Jews fulfilled an important task for the Germans, since by constituting the ideal domestic and foreign enemy, they enabled Germany to unite without actually posing any existential threat to it. Vis-a-vis the Jews, to use Schmitt’s terminology, the Germans could embody all that was “dangerous” in man, that is, man’s noble willingness to kill and die, without in fact putting their lives on the line. Indeed, although he does not mention them even once in this essay, one gets the distinct impression that, had the Jews not existed, Schmitt would have had to invent them.
As Leo Strauss pointed out in his brilliant critique of Schmitt’s essay, the “political” is much more about enemies than friends, since the latter are primarily defined as those who do not belong to the former. Thus while “Aryans” were defined as non-Jews, the numerous assimilated and converted Jews of Europe were forced by the Nazis to regain the Jewish identity they had relinquished, often just before being murdered for what they believed they no longer were (fig. 8). Bauchwitz, a labor camp inmate from Stettin, was baptized as a child. When the camp commandant decided to hang him, he requested to be executed by firing squad, in recognition of his service as a German officer in World War I, for which he received the Iron Cross, First Class. The commandant responded, “For me you are a stinking Jew and will be hanged as such.” As Bauchwitz stood on the gallows, he called to the inmates, “Since I will die as a Jew, I ask you Jews to say Kaddish after me.” Marc Bloch, a wholly secular French patriot who served as an officer at the front in World War I and was executed by the Germans as a Resistance leader in June 1944, wrote in his testament: ard’s denial. I am prepared, therefore, if necessary, to affirm here, in the face of death, that I was born a Jew: that I have never denied it, nor ever been tempted to do so. In a world assailed by the most appalling barbarism, is not that generous tradition of the Hebrew prophets, which Christianity at its highest and noblest took over and expanded, one of the best justifications we have for living, believing, and fighting? A stranger to all credal dogmas, as to all pretended community of life and spirit based on race, I have, throughout my life, felt that I was above all, and quite simply, a Frenchman. ... I have never found that the fact of being a Jew at all hindered these sentiments.
FIGURE 8. Fragments of identity. The secret synagogue in the ghetto of Terezin (Theresienstadt), Czech Republic. “Know before whom you stand.” Other Hebrew inscriptions call upon God to “relent from Thy wrath” and declare that “He has not yet forgotten us.”
Bloch was glorified in postwar France, which defined its identity in opposition to those it conceptualized as its domestic enemies, namely, Vichy and the collaborationists, who had previously claimed to rejuvenate the nation by identifying the Jews as the enemy in its midst.
If, drawing on Schmitt’s concept of the “political,” it was the Jews who made politics possible, then their extermination was the logical outcome of maintaining the “political.” Neither Schmitt, nor his friend Ernst Junger and the older Martin Heidegger—among the brightest minds to have remained in the Third Reich whose very (at least initially strongly approving) presence greatly contributed to the legitimization of Nazism—ever broached the subject of the Holocaust after the war. Yet Schmitt’s theoretical construct can be seen not only as a rejection of liberalism and as paving the way for an intellectual adoption of the Nazi worldview but also as anchored in an unspoken (in this essay) antisemitism, since it is precisely the Jews who must “by definition” serve as the enemy in a politics based on an enemy-and-friend relationship. Moreover, the Jews’ lamentable—albeit, in the context of the period, hardly surprising—tendency to support liberalism, made it seem all the easier to identify them as the enemy. As Strauss remarked, Schmitt’s insistence on logic and on describing “things as they really are,” in fact conceals a concept of morality and aesthetics that views war and destruction as an instance of glory and heroism, and hence as a crucial component of human existence, a necessary or even inevitable return to a state of nature that Schmitt erroneously associates with Hobbes’s view of humanity. In this sense Schmitt’s simple logic is akin to Hitler’s, since it postulates that might is right (and moral) and weakness must be uprooted (since it is immoral). Yet unlike some of Nazism’s less sophisticated adherents (figs. 9 and 10), Schmitt’s aesthetics is merely intellectual; he seems uninterested in observing the reality of murder and destruction dictated by his ideas. His is only the satisfaction of a logical argument brought to its ultimate conclusion: conflict and annihilation as an immanent and necessary element of politics.
FIGURE 9. Mirrors of inhumanity. Bathtub of the commander of the Majdanek crematorium, facing the ovens.
FIGURE 10. Mirrors of inhumanity. The swimming pool of the German guards in the Little Fortress in Terezin (Theresienstadt), Czech Republic, located next to the path leading to the execution wall.
Schmitt both anticipated and justified the reliance of politics in the modern state on an enemy-and-friend relationship. This was a view of human existence fed by apocalyptic visions and utopian schemes; it expected and called for conflict, but the destruction it brought about was more than it bargained for. Curiously, it is among the victims of the apocalypse—men and women who in some cases shared the utopian visions that facilitated it—that we occasionally find not only a rejection of the friend-and-enemy view of the world but even a capacity, born of suffering, to perceive the humanity of the murderers and to grasp the potential for evil even among the victims. Such perceptions were barred to Schmitt, as to many other Europeans, not because of any intellectual deficiency, but because his urge to bring matters to their most extreme conclusion was accompanied by a remarkable lack of imagination, or perhaps a remarkable facility to repress his imaginative faculties, so that, even when forced to confront the consequences of his ideas, he would look the other way and deny their reality. For his attack on humanism could only result in providing an intellectual validation for the dehumanization of others, a warrant for genocide. It is, perhaps, the cunning of history, that the rehumanization of the world, however limited in scope and duration, was taken up by some of the few who had escaped the exterminatory logic that consigned them to oblivion.