I am naked.
Carl Schmitt1
If 1945 was a turning point in world history, it was especially so for Carl Schmitt’s intellectual, academic, public, and personal trajectory. Global reality had changed in unexpected ways: from a world disputed by three ideologies—fascism, communism, and liberalism—to a post-European Cold War between the last two, which had allied and defeated the first. Undoubtedly Schmitt was considered one of the most prominent intellectuals in the defeated camp. An admirer of Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, an ambitious member of the Nazi Party—which he joined on the same day as Martin Heidegger, just a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933—and a vocal anti-Semite thereafter, Schmitt had seriously contemplated the prospect of becoming a leading voice in national socialist theory.2 He wanted to determine its content and decide its direction.3 He was perceived at the time as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich,” someone who sought to endow the regime with a new legal theory of politics and all the reputation and legitimacy consequent upon it.4 It was a theory he tailored to fit the Führer’s aspirations to become the only source of legality.5
To be sure, Schmitt’s work cannot be reduced to his Nazi period. Ultimately, as it became evident in 1936, it was not as influential with the Nazis as he had wanted it to be. But at the same time it cannot be disconnected from Nazism. Before 1933 he authored seminal works on political theology, dictatorship and the state of emergency, political myth, sovereignty, constitutionalism, and, most importantly, enmity as the defining element of the political. After 1933 he sought to recalibrate his work in the direction of international law and world politics, so as to fit the ideological imperatives of the Nazis and avoid party suspicions. However, what defined Schmitt all along and informed his theoretical explorations was his fierce opposition to liberalism and communism. In the new bipolar world that emerged after the fall of Berlin, his long-standing enemies had won and were in a unique position to determine the new political landscape. As fascism was defeated and his enemies victorious, Schmitt had to rethink himself, his work, and his own political standing and, as his biographer Reinhard Mehring put it, to “attempt to establish one’s identity in the battle for recognition.”6
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This battle was conducted from prison. Schmitt was arrested twice in 1945 and stripped of his prestigious professorship in Berlin, his library was confiscated, and he spent more than one year in two civilian detention camps, being incarcerated and interrogated again by the Allies, in the spring of 1947, at Nuremberg. At the dawn of a new era that seemingly had no space for him, he found himself out of place, defeated, and “naked”—a victim unjustly persecuted, “weak” and “defenseless” inside a cell.7 This was the abrupt context in which he secretly wrote this book and which Jacob Taubes, professor of Jewish studies at the Free University of Berlin and Schmitt’s postwar interlocutor, has described as Schmitt’s “broken confessions.”8
In prison Schmitt, who was designated by the allies in 1947 as a “potential defendant” in war crimes, dedicated most of his time to vindicate his past, his work, and himself against charges that in one way or another made him complicit in and responsible for the crimes of Nazism.9 His prison writings therefore consist of a kind of judicial rhetoric that aims to vindicate its author, staging a public self-defense against wrongful accusations. Suitably, they start on a defensive tone, with Schmitt’s reaction to the German philosopher and pedagogue Eduard Spranger’s “unfathomable” and (in Schmitt’s eyes) improper question: “Who are you?” This question, which Schmitt sees as a reproach and a provocation, hence implicitly as “a serious accusation,” sets the stage for his response in the form of a self-defense but also offers him a reason to plan a philosophical and political intervention.10 It compels him to compose the most intimate of his books.11 “I have spoken of myself here,” he claims, “actually for the first time in my life.”12 Although Schmitt rejected the confessional and apologetic tone of prison prose literature and in general questioned the ideal of self-transparency, he becomes for the first and last time his own main topic, his own object of inquiry from the beginning to the end of the book. Neither before nor after this text did he put himself in this self-reflective visible subject position. In his weakest moment Schmitt attempts to reach his readers through a most personal tone, allowing them to see the author behind the work, the person and not the party member, a professor and a scholar instead of a fanatic ideologue. Never again will he resort to so many self-descriptions, comparisons, analogies, and associations, all centered upon himself. The prison writings are a passionate attempt to repress his writings from the national socialist period, reinvent himself, and rebuild his damaged reputation. This is why this book represents such an evocative and unique statement of Schmitt’s own self-understanding.13
To be sure, there are a few other postwar texts by him that could be considered personal in some way. For instance, in his dialogues on power and space in the 1950s, Schmitt will stage himself as an interlocutor among some fictional characters.14 But in these brief dialogues he still emerges in a mediated form, like a character in a play. By contrast, in the prison writings he speaks directly to the readers, assuming responsibility for his own voice and thus attempting to bypass the narrative limits of representation. In a sense, he wanted this little book to stand directly for his own experience, for his own self. And unlike his private diaries, the writings from the cell were deliberatively composed for an immediate public. Schmitt clearly expected that there was a sympathetic audience out there, open to the unapologetic perspective of a former member of the Nazi Party. Although he conceived of his readership very selectively and in intimate terms, he also wrote for all those who were acquainted with his previous work and aware of his Nazi period, but who could also empathize with his trajectory and potentially become receptive to his pleas. In fact, in the context of a total antifascist victory, this was a text that sought to reach out not only to those who had been defeated in the war but to a much broader audience of bystanders who could rehabilitate Schmitt’s reputation and legacy.
While Schmitt was defeated—defeated as a German, as a jurist, as a European, and as a fascist—as a scholar he stated that he was “in no sense destroyed.”15 He felt he only needed to mount a satisfactory defense and provide an explanation for the role he played in the Third Reich. And he did so in this book. He took this task upon himself and offered his own political explanation in terms of a general theory of obedience that addresses the borderline case of resistance to tyranny by recasting the distinction between norm and exception from two new angles. In the prison writings Schmitt focused again on the exception, a core concept that defined his Weimar work, but this time he began from below, in the concrete context of civil war. Thus, surprisingly, he revisited the state of exception not from the theological heights of a sovereign power that decides to suspend normal order, as he had depicted it in his interwar years, but from the borderline position of a victim of civil war. Strikingly, he now construed his notion of power from the assumed position of the subordinate, the disenfranchised, the outlawed, the excluded, and the rightless.
These figures of exclusion represent extreme situations, Schmitt claimed. They are the new forms of enmity produced in this new age by the criminalization and dehumanization of the enemy. The post-Eurocentric enemy appears in lawless and violent spaces—spaces that confront the citizen with the unpredictable terror unleashed by civil war. In these anomalous and abnormal moments, he explained, the loyal citizen is caught in a situation that is both treacherous and hostile. Confronting a fratricidal battle, he faces the ultimate political question: he “must determine the boundaries of his loyalty himself,” decide whether, when, and how to exchange submission for protection.16 The decision to suspend or discontinue obedience reverts back to individual citizens and their judgment, because they are the ones who have to decide whether the state, especially a totalitarian state, a tyranny, is worse than civil war and the total war of all against all. As in his theory, in his own particular case Schmitt resolved this dilemma by questioning the rationality and expediency of disobedience and by choosing the tyrant over the natural state. The power asymmetry between a totalitarian one-party system and the individual, he said, is so great that resistance becomes impossible and the dissenter is ultimately thrown back into “the claws of the Leviathan itself.”17 Any order is better than disorder.18 This line of argument became a belated justification of his membership of the Nazi Party and of his activities for and within Hitler’s regime. As he explains in this book, accommodation with Nazism was therefore an existential necessity, a lesser evil, and a prudential act of survival under totalitarian domination. He said that victims of such extreme situations, such as himself, resembled closely Herman Melville’s fictional character of Benito Cereno and his tragic adventures. They also evoked the enigmatic figure of a Christian Epimetheus and his Pandora’s box.
Schmitt’s first identification is with a literary character, a victim of deception, violence, and impotence who is taken captive and acts against his will, while the second is with a Christianized Greek mythical figure and his tragic, unintended error, provoked by manipulation but carried out by desire and love. Both figures, the literary and the mythical, are summoned up in the broader context set by the questions of personal responsibility and moral accountability, which are central to the structure of this book. These symbols are complex figures, polysemic and indefinable, and in Schmitt’s writings they can betray a sense a grandeur that is oblivious to other important meanings: oppression, race and gender, and iniquity. But, for Schmitt, this double self-identification as Benito Cereno and the Christian Epimetheus is also his way of answering Spranger’s initial question: “Who are you?”
Another striking dimension of the prison writings is how Schmitt regarded them as a portal to a deeper existential, historical, and political truth. This was the “wisdom of the cell.” Thus, while his challenging personal situation was as wretched as he perceived it, he also treated it as offering him a privileged epistemic position. He conceived of his imprisonment as providing a space of solitary illumination, an objective standpoint—to both himself and the globe. It is not only that his experience of internment and interrogation and his overall construction of it through the trope of suffering achieve his desired outcome of personal redemption. There is more to it than that. Clearly Schmitt understood his internment as a form of political persecution and, more generally, as a concrete symptom of the spatial disorder, global civil wars, and international anomy he was describing and denouncing in his more academic writings.19 The act of observation was now mediated and amplified by what he thought was an actual manifestation of the criminalization of war and the dehumanization of the enemy, two processes immanent in the revival of the just war doctrine that had occurred in the aftermath of the collapse of the European international order. “For in some respects,” he claimed, “the kind of civil war carried out in the confessional wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and on colonial soil is repeating itself.”20 He thus appears as the paradigmatic victim of this collapse and of the ruins it left behind. From such a standpoint he thought that he could see things better than the rest. For Schmitt, the act of witnessing defeat in civil war from his cell meant adopting an overpowering position vis-à-vis those who were not in prison. The cell gave him almost a monopoly of knowledge. As he asserted, “I am today… the only teacher of law on this earth who has recorded and experienced the problem of just war, including unfortunately civil war, in all of its depth and causes.”21 This certainty of being the subject who knows, “the last knowing representative of ius publicum Europaeum,” led him to articulate a view that could in principle represent all those who—victims of civil war, like him—were without guilt, and even unfairly treated.22 In short, he saw the imprisonment as a way to illuminate himself, his changing times, Germany, and Europe.
Schmitt’s prison writings present a counternarrative to the narrative of the war victors, and this fact is echoed in his counterquestion to Spranger. He turns the question “Who are you?” against his various interrogators. He acknowledges that history is generally written by those who win; and he sets his carceral reflections against the dominant discourse that was emerging in the postwar context of the Bonn republic. Without even mentioning the massive war crimes that later came to define the Holocaust and to mark its history, Schmitt complains about the circumstances of the allied occupation, which he depicts as characterized by “concentrations camps,” “deprivation of rights,” and “mass internments” in which Americans and Russians had “defamed entire categories of the German population.”23 In 1958 he wrote, in the prologue to the Spanish edition of this book: “I was in such a camp under automatic arrest in 1945/6.”24 As a witness, he saw no logic to the juridical proceedings against Nazism and even denounced them as “the logical result of the criminalization of an entire people and the completion of the infamous Morgenthau Plan.”25 In this picture, where bystanders and perpetrators were turned into victims, there was no place for the real victims of the war. He characterized the famous Nuremberg judicial process as fully devoid of justice. He represented the postwar trials and his personal interment and interrogation as the result of the world-historical shift to the just war doctrine, its return and reinvention in the humanitarian campaigns waged by the United States and its allies. He says instead very little about the Nazi dictatorship and, although he engages tentatively in a critical if brief analysis of its effects, he ignores for instance how Hitler’s wars, especially those carried out in the East, were conducted as total wars, in the name of a total ideology that aimed at total domination.
For Schmitt, dissociating himself from Hitler meant associating his fate as one of those defeated to the fate of Europe.26 Both Schmitt and Europe had lost; thus they ran the risk of having to surrender their legacy and reputation. Here Schmitt somehow imagined his position as being at odds with the emerging postcolonial configuration of the old continent, with its relativization and decentering.27 This allowed him to reinvent himself as the last representative of a vanishing Europe in a new technical age ruled by two non-European universalist powers: the United States and the Soviet Union.28 But, if the future was lost to the Europeans, and even if being right meant being in the dark, what was the meaning of writing on his personal experiences? Such writing was meaningful to him, because he transmuted and elevated them into political knowledge with a critical twist, as he sought to come to terms with the postwar situation in a volatile moment of change, during exceptional times. By inventing an intellectual place for illiberalism, Schmitt sought to reaffirm his own trajectory together with that of Europe. It is interesting to note that, during the same period, Karl Jaspers, perhaps one of the most renowned philosophers and public intellectuals at the time and a witness to the catastrophe, publicly asked about the collective guilt of Germans and their political and historical responsibility. He will later go on to claim that a critique of the Nazi past was needed for a new democracy.29 Schmitt took the opposite direction. In this sense, the prison writings anticipated more recent populist attempts to absolve the Germans of any guilt for the crimes committed by the Nazis and can be seen as a foundational text for those who desire a new antiliberalism, postfascist and authoritarian.
Besides an attempt at self-vindication and notwithstanding its unapologetic stance, Schmitt blended prophecy and realism in order to diagnose and denounce the ills that plagued the old continent in the post-Eurocentric global age of the emerging Cold War. This was a new world, which grew from the ruins of the international interstate order and lacked balance and orientation, governed and decided upon by Schmitt’s two political enemies: liberalism and communism, the West and the East. He thought he was witnessing a poststatist age of global disorder and spatial chaos, of conflict and anomy—an “intermediary” stage in world history situated between the old international interstate order and a coming new nomos of the earth. In other words, this was a transitional stage without territorial distinctions and spatial divisions. Lacking free colonial soil while the universalization of the principle of sovereign statehood was underway, the globe was left defenseless against civil wars, absolute enemies, and motorized partisans.30 Schmitt described elsewhere this postcolonial transitional period situated in an indistinct zone between peace and war—the one he experienced from his cell—as the age of global civil wars, the “epoch of total war, of wars of extermination, and of the partisans.”31
For Schmitt, his time in prison, the time of this text, were times of civil war on a global scale. The prison writings reflect and respond to this abnormal and extreme situation and provide the broader political and historical context of Schmitt’s postwar political and legal theory. They also give a preliminary but solid account of the theoretical development of Schmitt’s key concepts, such as “civil war” and “the enemy.” An exception once again animates his work. And, if there is a common theme that runs through this short text, this is the theme of civil war as an exception that is becoming a norm. Hence, like his “brothers” Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes—both thinkers of the state and both “entirely formed by civil wars”—Schmitt saw himself as writing about politics and law during civil wars.32 In a way, all three formulated their political ideas with and against the question of civil war. But, unlike the French and the English, the German introduced a global dimension in his later explorations and abandoned the state as the central organizational principle of political and legal reasoning. His civil wars are global and define the concrete political reality, the spirit of his historical times, and Schmitt’s own fate.
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This book appeared the same year as The Nomos of the Earth, The Plight of European Jurisprudence, and A Pan-European Interpretation of Donoso Cortés.33 All are important works in their own right, written in the first half of the 1940s—with the exception of the prison writings; all seem to signal a belated intellectual and public comeback and to announce Schmitt’s definitive return to postwar Germany. This publishing event resulted in an intellectually active and vibrant decade that eventually culminated in Theory of the Partisan in 1963 and Political Theology II in 1970—his last two major books. The prison writings thus announce this new and last period in Schmitt’s controversial life and remain a key text for understanding his widely influential thinking and for pondering over its overall significance and present relevance. But, if this book starts with a personal call—a demand for radical self-interrogation—it turns quickly into an unapologetic albeit erudite self-justification that reasserts its unity of meaning and purpose by deploying a suspicious dialectical resolution between loss and recuperation, suffering and redemption. The prison writings conclude with Schmitt’s auspicious vision of “the rich fruit from which meaning springs by right” and the expectant realization that he is not after all “naked but rather clothed and on the way to a house.”34 Clothed and free, indeed, the text ends with the hopeful anticipation of his release from detention on May 13, 1947.35
January 2017