Political demonology has traditionally related to the “experience of evil principalities and powers (of a personal kind) in the world,” as the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner explains, but is “not in itself primarily a real revelation.” Demonology allows us to seek out and determine the nature of evil, but, despite whatever satisfactions it may bring, does not concern revelation in itself. Instead, as Rahner argues, a powerful yet not real experience of political evil could form “part of the critical context of the real revelation of the living God in Christ and his power to redeem man.” So for Christian theology, demons—political or otherwise—are made meaningful in the context of Christ’s revelation, which allows this experience of evil to be defined, delimited, and understood.1
Most of the thinkers appearing in this volume are hardly regarded as theologians. Carl Schmitt, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Hans Blumenberg, for example, reflected on and critically intervened in the “demonic” experiences of twentieth-century Germany as political, philosophical, legal thinkers. Richard Faber’s study, however, reconstructs their thought in light of what he sees as its implicit “demonological” dimensions. No matter how unorthodox, implicit, or marginal the theology they imply, Faber is acutely aware of its practical, political significance. Nothing less than the nature of the political order, and therefore also the dynamics of good and evil, is at stake. Is this order dualistic, marked by enmity? If so, who stands opposed to whom? Is it monistic, implying a single leader or “Führer”? Or does it resolve into the pluralism of the many, to the point of competitive oligarchy, or perhaps into late-capitalist, atomistic competition?
For Faber, all political constellations and events—the Roman Empire, Christendom, the French and American revolutions, postwar Europe—are also irreducibly religious constellations. And as such they pervade culture and politics today. As Faber’s multidisciplinary approach recalls and reinterprets these constellations in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung, he uses his objects “like spotlights” to critically illuminate the present.2
Harnack’s Marcion
But what is the role of Marcion here, the second-century arch-heretic? The study of gnosis,3 Faber’s teacher Jacob Taubes once remarked, has primarily referred to the gnosis of late antiquity. “[But] palimpsestically,” he wrote, “it can also be read as the self-localization of the present.”4 And when Adolf von Harnack published his study of Marcion in 1921, it was not merely a work of church history. Understood as instrumental in the very foundation of the Catholic Church—as Harnack’s subtitle, “The Gospel of the Alien God,” suggests—Marcion was a figura to locate liberal Protestant faith after the First World War.5 Like few other figures in the history of the church, Marcion articulated the possibility of dualism—of total otherness—within Christianity itself.6 He taught an altogether new God revealed by Christ, one that negated the old god of the Jews—and with him all creation. At the same time, this new god was nothing but goodness itself, all-merciful love, indeed unspeakably so: “Oh what wonder above wonder, what delight, power, and astonishment it is that nothing can be said about the gospel, nor thought about it, nor can it be compared to anything.”7 Faith sprung from a great Beyond, the altogether New that denied a world in shell shock. As Harnack’s daughter and biographer Agnes von Zahn-Harnack explained,
Marcion preached “the alien God,” i.e., the God that has nothing in common with creation, this miserable, misconceived, and stained creation, and the whole course of earthly events, because he belongs to a wholly different sphere. This was bound to deeply move readers for whom, through war and revolution, the cruelty, the counter-divine meaninglessness of fate, had become a horrific experience. Yet at the same time Marcion taught the coming of the Redeemer, who is perfect love and nothing but love; no more punitive justice, no more legality!8
The unbridgeable division between the old creator and that new, pure god of love implied an irreconcilable fissure—for good or ill.
As Harnack told it, Marcion (ca. 85–160) was a bishop’s son in the Pontus, born into a lively Christian community. His own father excommunicated him, though probably not because he had seduced a virgin. Christianity at the time was still in its formative years, so only severely deviant doctrines would have led to excommunication. Marcion’s unforgiveable teaching of two gods, Harnack argued, must have been quite developed when he left the Pontus for a “propaganda tour” of Asia Minor.9 It was most likely here that he encountered Polycarp, who, as Irenaeus of Lyon writes, said to Marcion, “I recognize you as the first-born of Satan”—indeed, a demon.
The merchant Marcion headed on to Rome, the epicenter from which new ideas would ripple throughout the empire. Here he collated an Evangelion, a version of Luke’s Gospel the early church came to regard as a mutilation (a view recently revised, albeit only on the grounds of historical accuracy).10 Marcion’s Apostolikon was comprised of ten letters of Paul, though now stripped of all Jewish material. The collation served one purpose: to show that the new god of pure love had overthrown the old. The Old Testament was obsolete. Around AD 144, still in Rome, Marcion composed his infamous Antitheses, surviving only within the scathing polemics written against him. As the title suggests, the Antitheses are a sharp juxtaposition of the inferior world-creator and the good God, or rather his Christ.11
The Roman presbyters met Marcion’s Antitheses with hostility. Their “pluralistic tolerance scheme,” as Sebastian Moll has called it, could absorb all diversities—except those questioning that tolerance scheme itself. For founding his “anti-movement” Marcion was once again excommunicated.12 But this time, “with monstrous energy, Marcion suffered the consequence, and began his Reformatory propaganda at the grandest scale,” and his church spread throughout the empire.13 Even a generation later, Tertullian, his fiercest theological opponent, warned, “Marcion’s heretical tradition has filled the whole world” (Adversus Marcionem V, 19). Long after his church had disappeared, “Marcion” signified a taboo, an abyss within the church. As Catholic orthodoxy took shape in response to Marcion, this abyssal logic—a logic of opposition, of antithesis and internal contradiction—persisted, not just as a theological possibility, but as political and cultural possibilities as well.
Modern Marcionism
For Harnack, in his first, prize-winning study of the subject in 1871, Marcion’s absolutized dichotomy between law and gospel prefigured the Reformation’s irreversible breakup of the church.14 Christ stood against a demiurgic creator and his world, a “bad tree” that produced nothing but bad fruit. The new, revealed God set Christ against Yahweh, the gospel against Judaism, and—in Harnack’s analogy—the Reformation against the Roman Catholic Church. Marcion was Luther. This “emphasis on Marcion’s ‘undogmatic way of thinking’” could then be extended into the twentieth century. For one thing, it allowed Harnack to subtly resist “the dogmatism of the Prussian state church.”15 But Harnack also saw in Marcion a genuine dimension of orthodoxy. In a letter to Martin Rade just after the publication of Marcion, Harnack wrote, “. . . it was my intention to pay what is due to Marcion in church history at last . . . The place he deserves should become clear: Between Paul and Augustine he was the most important Christian.”16 For Harnack, dualism and orthodoxy could come together in one Christian heart.
A prolific church historian and editor since his early days in Estonia, Harnack had risen to the highest ranks of the Wilhelmine Reich’s academic elite. A member of the Prussian Academy of Science, he became general director of the Prussian State Library in 1905. Six years later he cofounded the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of the Sciences. The subliminal dualism that fascinated Harnack’s enlightened, liberal Protestantism also echoed in his advocacy of Germany’s foreign policy. In August 1914 he shared in the national enthusiasm of the “August Experience” as Germany declared war against France and Russia. He did not only perceive it as a bellum iustum. He was not shy about attaching the title “Prince of Peace”17 to the sovereign. The whole German populace, he wrote, “gives its last drop of blood [to Your Majesty]; the furor teutonicus breaks loose with all its might, and not a single one will stay behind!” This was a “war of minds,” a Kulturkampf, indeed a clash of civilizations. As one of the signatories of the so-called Manifesto of the Ninety-Three in October 1914, Harnack defended Germany’s invasion of Belgium, the country’s “hard struggle for existence in a struggle which has been forced upon her.”18
As a religious-philosophical constellation, Marcionism entailed a remarkable dialectic of liberalism19 and anti-Judaism. Harnack concluded that “[to] discard the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake that the great Church was right to reject; to hold on to it in the sixteenth century was a fate the Reformation could not yet escape; but to keep on conserving it as a canonical work in Protestantism since the nineteenth century is the result of a religious and ecclesial paralysis.”20 This last consequence darkly foreshadowed statements such as Cardinal Faulhaber’s in 1933 that a “Christianity which still clings to the Old Testament is a Jewish religion, irreconcilable with the spirit of the German people.” Harnack’s theological influence waned during the 1920s, so the later rise of anti-Semitism cannot be laid at his feet. In 1924, in fact, he had warned, “One ought not to imagine that the ravages of our time can be healed with parades, swastikas, and steel-helmets.”21 It would be difficult and anachronistic to draw a straight line from his study of Marcion to the völkisch German Church of the Nazi era.22 Nonetheless, Harnack’s challenge, Marcion’s question—what to do with the Old Testament, and therefore with the world and with the political—continues to blight liberal Protestantism to this day.23
Richard Faber’s Project
The key date for Political Demonology is 1968, the height of the German postwar generation’s autopsy of their parents’ totalitarianism. As a child of this “protest generation,” Richard Faber has pursued two interrelated lines of enquiry: the dissection of fascism and the unmasking of theocracy in its various forms and intellectual trajectories. Fascism and theocracy are, for Faber, conceptually inseparable. Whenever it invokes unity or the whole, the amalgamation of politics and religion can always only birth immanent, ultimately collectivist institutions.24 But such institutions necessarily also produce a historical, logical excess: the survivors of totalitarianism, the militant resistance, the traumatized, the melancholics—and not least: religio-political heretics. It was also in 1968 that a Marcionite constellation seemed to have re-emerged in West Germany. On the one hand stood the activists inspired by the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno, who spoke from the self-defeating movement of critique, the only negative truth left to utter in this “damaged life.”25 On the other hand stood the establishment with its various ties to the fascist era, but also to anti-revolutionary traditions, conservative stability, and at times monarchist ideas of order.
Theocracy—Imperialism—Fascism
This German constellation forms the background to Faber’s critical fascination with Carl Schmitt, whom he has aptly called “the theologian of jurisprudence and the jurist of theology.”26 Faber argues that Schmitt’s Prussian heritage had far less of an influence on his political theology than did his Roman Catholicism.27 Yet Schmitt was a Roman before he was a Catholic. The Roman emperors served as a lens for his political Catholicism, not vice versa: as the divinely guaranteed juridical form; a singular divine leader holding back the dissolutions of republican anarchy, or indeed any threats associated with divided power.28 In other words, what is at stake is not whether Schmitt was a theologian or not, but rather: Which theo-political order did he proclaim? Schmitt knew Harnack’s study of Marcion well and revived the theological heritage once again as a lever to distribute the powers of the present. In Schmitt’s reading, a pagan but effective monotheism governed the imperial cult of Augustus, then found a seamless continuation in the Christianization of the Roman Empire (which Faber for his part interprets as the imperialization and paganization of Christianity). Finally, the katechontic constellation returns in the strictly “monotheistic” order of a Führer, as Faber frequently emphasizes. As late as 1970 in Political Theology II, Schmitt explained—with reference to the imperial theologian Eusebius and the rebellious monks in the Eastern Roman Empire—that the static nature of monotheism simultaneously implies stasis and therefore upheaval. The in-breaking messianic harbors the dissolution of “all that stands and all the estates,” to translate Marx correctly here. Political Christology for Schmitt, in Faber’s reading, thus implied routing out dissent—political demonology.
So the total, even totalitarian religious-political “wholes” of Western modernity find their original image in the Roman Empire, this ancient prototype of “Euro-American empire.” Rome is the mother of the Occident and its ideology: “Whoever says Occident is searching for the inheritance deed of the Roman Empire.”29 It is also no coincidence, Faber points out, that the novus ordo seclorum announced on the Great Seal of the U.S. draws on the imperial Roman poet Vergil’s fourth Eclogue. An essential line of enquiry into the study of political religion thus also has to examine the modern reception of Roman antiquity.30
Distinctions need to be made here as well, Faber has argued: a Neo-Kantian, liberating humanism can be harnessed to an emancipatory project, unlike what he calls a Caesarist, aristocratic, effectively anti-humanist humanism. (The nineteenth-century bourgeois middle class reading Greek and Latin could very well produce a Heinrich Himmler, after all.) Notably, this anti-humanist tradition continues well into the postmodern era: for example, in Foucault’s idea of the subject that truly becomes himself only by virtue of his own disappearance.31
The “Demonic” and Revolutionary Hope
Interpreting Christ as a political revolutionary has always been a heady possibility, as old as the gospels themselves. In the modern age of revolutions, Christ the revolutionary reappeared. Whether as a sans-culotte, as the Promethean thought of the Enlightenment, or as the silent force of subversion in Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor”—such insurgents challenged both material politics and a particular notion of orthodox, Trinitarian Christianity, subjecting them to a logic of opposition between Two. In its most radical expression, this insurgency becomes an exodus from religion itself, as Faber reconstructs it in Ernst Bloch (see Part II of this volume). Bloch’s chief argument is one of immanence—of utopia within the material world. His utopia places human non-finitude and human material reality at the center. In the very loss of the transcendent possibilities offered by traditional religion, the non-finality of the human allows us to nonetheless hope for a Marcionite Other, a “transcending without transcendence.” Christianity contains within itself the means of its own overcoming: it extends the Exodus, its earthly demand for justice for the poor and oppressed, its anti-authoritarianism. A non-transcendent Christianity that has such “atheism” within it is heretical, of course, and Bloch embraces this fact. (“The best thing about religion is that it creates heretics,” he writes.) But Christianity is required nonetheless. It saves atheism from becoming a brute materialism (Klotzmaterialismus), nihilism, and despondent boredom.
Reading the New Testament alongside Marx, Bloch accepted the “metaphysical anti-Semitism” his anti-theocratic quest implied. An underlying current of the ongoing debate around the figure of Marcion thus also concerns the religio-political interpretation of Israel. Another dualist Either/Or can emerge here: either one has to embrace a “theocratic” connection of Judaism and nationalism, or an exodus to the point of atheism, albeit with Haredi Judaism as a (negativized) possibility. The emphatic Israeli then paradoxically finds himself without a home. Jewish contemporaries such as Will Self and Shlomo Sand engage in this debate. An Israeli with a universalist horizon, Sand scourges Judaism as much as nationalism, which he thinks are inextricably, inescapably intertwined—to the detriment of peace in Israel. But neither does he give a break to secular Judaism. And in denying that such a thing exists, the atheist Sand even more emphatically embraces a deeply orthodox notion of Judaism.32
A curious dialectic also underlies the coherence of Faber’s essays in this volume. Marcion(ism)’s dualistic mode of existence leaves the Old and New as open, interchangeable, though always inimical spaces. Judaism could stand for the Old, indeed all worldly existence, to be abandoned, ascetically or violently; it could be the dangerous “New” flying the flags of revolution. “Judaeo-Christianity” could threaten an anti-Marcionite paganism; Jesus could be the Jewish insurgent against a Jewish establishment aligned with Roman imperialism. In this sense Schmitt always argued that the “right” and “left” are two sides of the same coin. But while Jacob Taubes pressed Schmitt on his connection with Walter Benjamin,33 Faber for his part has emphasized their significant distance: “Schmitt was a Christologist in the sense of Th. Hobbes: ‘Jesus is the Christ,’ i.e.: the Messiah is (and has long been) here; hence every messianism (no matter which form) is heresy/revolution, which must be fought. Benjamin, in contrast, was a messianic par excellence, the very opposite of a ‘katechontic.’ His ‘Antichrist’ is not to be restrained, but rather to be fought and vanquished—for the sake of the Messiah . . .”34
The first chapter of Political Demonology, a study of the Jewish literary critic Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), perhaps surprises with its reference to Marcionism. Auerbach, as Faber admits, mentions Harnack, but never Marcion. What counts is rather the constellation, the ache and longing for something alien, unreachable—a god, a home—that imbues Auerbach’s work with existential intensity. For the Jewish Auerbach, to put it “christologically,” the divine is incarnate in historical and above all literary reality. In this religious intensity, literary reality combines the tragic and the comic, the most quotidian and the sublime. It is a living reality throughout the ages, and hence includes biblical as well as “profane” literature. As Arthur Krystal puts it, “For Auerbach, a philologist by training, but a historian-philosopher by temperament, literature is always bounded by the writer’s sense of reality, which, at its deepest level, depicts everyday life in all its seriousness.”35 Although monumental in its own right, Auerbach’s work was also a spotlight on his political context. In 1938 he writes to Traugott Fuchs with a view to fascist Germany:
The challenge is not to grasp and digest all the evil that’s happening—that’s not too difficult—but much more to find a point of departure for those historical forces that can be set against it . . . To seek for them in myself, to track them down in the world, completely absorbs me. The old forces of resistance—churches, democracies, education, economic laws—are useful and effective only if they are renewed and activated through a new force not yet visible to me.
As Krystal further notes, “[that] new force never emerged, and Auerbach could never take solace in the future.” He remained an exile in more than one sense, “a Jew outside of Judaism and a German ousted from Germany.” Apart from the bond of friendship between Auerbach and Ernst Bloch, this background further adds to the “neo-marcionite” dimension Faber explores in his first chapter.
Auerbach’s fate as an exile in the U.S. is then echoed in the Excursuses, two earlier publications Faber has included in this volume with a view to an American audience. The first is a rejection of the “poly-theological” solution to theodicy suggested by Hans Blumenberg and others against Carl Schmitt; Faber defends once again a Blochian, utopian-revolutionary position. This chapter in particular participates in contemporary debates, as it asks us to critically examine whether the argument for pluralism is actually a mask to promote oligarchic and plutocratic interests.
The second Excursus retraces the Marcionite dimension in Herman Melville as it moved between revolutionary hope and its disappointment in the face of reality; of particular note will be its introductory poem “The Cock” by Christian Morgenstern, translated into English here for the first time.
Hope Fulfilled?
Just as the Burning Man Festival is now the playground of billionaires, the subversive impulse of the 1960s was absorbed by the establishment. Today, for many, the socialist revolution in the West seems frozen in time, like a prehistoric insect encapsulated in amber. Dialectically, of course, this potential is resurfacing elsewhere. But for his part Faber finds a path for the fulfillment of revolutionary Marcionite hopes beyond the Marcionite-theocratic dialectic in the figure of the cosmopolitan humanist. In this respect he has revisited many key figures in the tradition: Dante Alighieri, the proto-humanist and tragic exile from Florence; Erasmus of Rotterdam; Thomas Mann; the humanist historian Friedrich Heer; and even across the Atlantic, Susan Sontag, who was, like Faber, a student of Jacob Taubes.36 For her part Sontag was a great connoisseur of gnosis. This impulse culminated in aesthetic fascination—though perpetually struggling against fascist aesthetics. Faber keenly admires her “universalist” perspective: anti-gnostic, but not submitting to the theocratic.37 And it was from her enlightened cosmopolitan perspective that Sontag always championed a better, a true America: it could be the heir of a true, enlightened, humanist Europe—again an unabashedly utopian project.
A Note on Method and Translation
Political Demonology is an homage to Harnack, but its academic method is deeply indebted to Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. Faber interprets his material through meticulous collection and collation, through association, parenthesis, and paradox. He creates a mosaic of heavily punctuated cross-references, self-quotations, and repetitions, even collages within collages. At times his own voice seems to disappear in this process. Indeed, as one critic wrote, “with the author no more than a conférencier, who only leads over from one quotation to another, the file card box itself seems to speak.”38 Faber consciously seeks to shatter the dogmatic edifice academic truth-claims often make. Its quotation-shards then serve to reconstruct a more brittle, more accurate representation of absolute truth: as the very denial to represent what cannot be represented.39 This is no less morally authoritative and urgent; quite the opposite. It is also an invitation to join Faber to “write further” and participate in the contested cultural narratives that have been alive throughout the centuries.
As always, much gets lost in translation. Most noteworthy is the word Reich, upon which the divergent implications in the text hangs: it is used for Empire, the Third Reich, and the Kingdom (of God). Many particles used in the German had to be left untranslated so as to make the text more accessible. Nonetheless, wherever possible we have tried to convey the density and complexity of Faber’s original. Wherever he has inserted words into his quotations, we put them in square brackets without further reference; any German words in square brackets are those of the original. Translators’ footnotes are marked with an asterisk.
Our thanks go to Alexander Breton for his help with the French sections, and to the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford for supporting the Political Demonology Working Group in Trinity Term 2016. We are particularly grateful to the Kunststiftung Sachsen-Anhalt (Germany), who granted a work stipend to Therese Feiler for this project in 2015; and last but not least we thank Richard Faber for his helpful comments and additional materials.
T.F. and M.M.
Oxford, Michaelmas 2017
1. Karl Rahner, “Demonology,” Encyclopedia of Theology (London: Burns & Oates, 1975), 333–34.
2. Christine Holste, “Einleitung,” in A propos: kulturwissenschaftliche Miszellen von und für Richard Faber, edited by Christine Holste and Barbara von Reibnitz (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), 15.
3. NB: Marcion grounds his thoughts fully in emergent the New Testament, but shares the characteristic gnostic dualism and certainly had ties with the Syrian Gnostic Cerdo, cf. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion, Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott: Eine Monographie zur Geschichte der Grundlegung der Katholischen Kirche (Leipzig: Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1921), 26; Barbara Aland, Die Gnosis (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2014).
4. Jacob Taubes, “Einleitung: Das stählerne Gehäuse und der Exodus daraus oder ein Streit um Marcion, einst und heute,” in Gnosis und Politik, edited by Jacob Taubes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984), 9.
5. Harnack, Marcion, 28; Wolfram Kinzig, Harnack, Marcion und das Judentum (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlags-Anstalt, 2004), 109.
6. The evaluation of this “within” is currently shifting, giving Marcion a constructive role beyond the dialectical negative, e.g., Jürgen Regul, “Die Bedeutung Marcions aus der Sicht heutiger kirchlicher Praxis,” in Marcion und seine kirchengeschichtliche Wirkung/Marcion and His Impact on Church History, edited by Martin Meiser (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 293–312.
7. Harnack, Marcion, 158.
8. Cited in Karl-Heinz Menke, Spielarten des Marcionismus in der Geistesgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2011), 10. This work was partly inspired by the present volume.
9. Harnack, Marcion, 22.
10. Dieter T. Roth, The Text of Marcion’s Gospel (Boston: Brill, 2015), 7–45.
11. Harnack, Marcion, 24, 69.
12. Sebastian Moll, The Arch-Heretic Marcion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 44, 125.
13. Harnack, Marcion, 25.
14. Adolf von Harnack, Die Dorpater Preisschrift: Der erste Reformator, edited by Friedemann Steck (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003); cf. Kinzig, Harnack, 107, 145.
15. Kinzig, Harnack, 145.
16. Harnack to Rade, 28.12.1920 [original emphasis], cited in Kinzig, Harnack, 74.
17. Christian Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack und die deutsche Politik 1890–1930 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 379.
18. Professors of Germany, “To the Civilized World,” The North American Review 210, No. 765 (August 1919), 284–87, 284. Harnack later claimed he had supported the document without knowing its exact wording. See Nottmeier, Harnack und die deutsche Politik, 390.
19. According to Martin Rumscheidt, Harnack’s liberalism was liberal in the deepest sense: a theology committed to the freedom of thought, confident in the human spirit, believing in the power of reason in search for objective truth. And an “inseparable component of that freedom for both [Harnack and Bonhoeffer] was a clear grasp of social and political freedom.” Martin Rumscheidt, “The Significance of Adolf von Harnack and Reinhold Seeberg for Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” in Bonhoeffer’s Intellectual Formation: Theology and Philosophy in His Thought, edited by Peter Frick (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), 201–24, 212.
20. Harnack, Marcion, 249.
21. Cited in Rumscheidt, “The Significance of Adolf von Harnack,” 212.
22. Kinzig, Harnack, 109, 144.
23. Cf. the scandal around the Old Testament scholar Notger Slenczka in 2015, see e.g., Reinhard Bingener, “Der Gott des Gemetzels,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21.04.2015, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/berlin-professor-fordert-abschaffung-des-alten-testaments-13549027.html#lesermeinungen; and the charge of Marcionism against the former German Evangelical-Lutheran bishop Margot Käßmann in 2016: Hannes Stein, “Käßmanns Pazifismus ist vor allem eines—nicht christlich,” Die Welt, 31.03.2016, http://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article153862512/Kaessmanns-Pazifismus-ist-vor-allem-eines-nicht-christlich.html.
24. See, especially, Richard Faber, Wir sind Eins: Über politisch-religiöse Ganzheitsvorstellungen europäischer Faschismen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005).
25. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005).
26. Richard Faber, Lateinischer Faschismus: Über Carl Schmitt den Römer und Katholiken (Berlin: Philo, 2001).
27. Even though by no means in the majority, Faber’s own alternative leftwing Catholicism during the 1960s highlights the unabated religious and theological dimension of postwar political discourse in Germany.
28. Schmitt, for his part, criticized Faber’s “anti-Roman affect.” Faber, Lateinischer Faschismus, 12 n. 17.
29. Reinhold Schneider cited in Richard Faber, Abendland: Ein politischer Kampfbegriff, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Philo, 2002), 96.
30. Antike heute, edited by Richard Faber and Bernhard Kytzler (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1992); there also Faber, “Vergil nach Auschwitz. Zum 100. Geburtstag von Ludwig Strauß,” 197–215.
31. Richard Faber, “Humanistische und faschistische Welt. Über Ludwig Curtius (1874–1954),” in Streit um den Humanismus, edited by Richard Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), 17–18.
32. Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped Being a Jew (London: Verso, 2014); Will Self, “How I Stopped Being a Jew by Shlomo Sand; and Unchosen: The Memoirs of a Philo-Semite by Julie Burchill—review,” The Guardian, 06 Nov 2014; similarly Yascha Mounk, Echt, du bist Jude?—Fremd im eigenen Land (Zürich: Kein & Aber, 2015). For a veritable Marxist-atheist resurrection, see Will Self’s “The North London Book of the Dead” in the short story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity (London: Bloomsbury, 1991). Will Self’s exploration of Bristol’s labyrinthine concrete landscapes significantly echoes Walter Benjamin. In twentieth-century Germany Faber observed a similar constellation through the “antipodes” Hans-Joachim Schoeps and Jacob Taubes. See Richard Faber, Deutschbewusstes Judentum und jüdischbewusstes Deutschtum—Der Historische und Politische Theologe Hans-Joachim Schoeps (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008).
33. Jacob Taubes—Carl Schmitt: Briefwechsel mit Materialien, edited by Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, Thorsten Palzhoff and Martin Treml (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), 29.
34. Personal message to the translators.
35. Arthur Krystal, “The Book of Books: Erich Auerbach and the Making of ‘Mimesis,’” The New Yorker, December 9, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-book-of-books.
36. Faber, Avancierte Ästhetin und politische Moralistin: Die universelle Intellektuelle Susan Sontag (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006).
37. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975.
38. Michael Wetzel, “Der von Göttern du stammst: Richard Faber weiß, wo es mit Goethe endet,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezension-sachbuch-der-von-goettern-du-stammst-11307169-p2.html
39. Richard Faber, Der Collage–Essay. Eine wissenschaftliche Darstellungsform. Hommage à Walter Benjamin (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1979).