Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Read online

  on European thought and letters has been considerable. He has come to

  be regarded as an important contributor to aesthetics with a sharp eye for

  the disfiguring effects of modern forms of violence in everyday life. He

  has influenced the thinkers of the New Right in Europe, but in a broader

  sense, along with Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, his work offers a

  challenge to technological modernity and Enlightenment belief in prog-

  ress in general.

  Jünger’s place in the conservative European pantheon is hard to de-

  termine. As a young man he undoubtedly belonged to the generation

  of radicals who rejected the bourgeois state and welcomed the over-

  throw of the European order that had been tenuously reestablished after

  1918. He both foresaw and welcomed some combination of nationalism

  and socialism as a revolutionary solution in the 1920s and early 1930s,

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  C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S

  but just as clearly he rejected the actual party that carried out the coup in

  Germany after 1933. In the wake of two disastrous world wars, he predicted

  that modern technology and the growth of the power of the state would

  lead to planetary integration on a scale never before seen in human af-

  fairs (a phenomenon we today call globalization). In his late posthistorical

  analysis, he predicted the decline and eventual eclipse of temporal and

  geographical particularity as European culture melted away to be replaced

  by a sterile planetary culture and a new cosmopolitan elite lacking specific

  cultural roots. The result, he feared, would be the rise of demagogues and

  tyrants who knew how to manipulate modern technology to play to the

  anxieties of the masses. The only answer for the individual would be to

  retreat to the security of an autonomous self, to become a forest wanderer,

  an Anarch, a concept taken up by later thinkers of the radical Right. His

  life work offers a model for those who accept his cultural pessimism. But

  considering the decline in faith in politics in our own age, particularly

  among the young, the rise of petty tyrants and demagogues, and the cur-

  rent revolt against elites across the globe, his vision may also have been

  prophetic.

  Notes

  1. A list of important biographies of Jünger is included in the bibliography at the

  end of this book. I point, in particular to Amos, Kiesel, Nevin, Noack, Martus,

  Meyer, Mitchell, and Schwilk.

  2. Eliah Bures and Elliot Neaman, introduction to The Adventurous Heart, by Ernst

  Jünger (Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2012), xix.

  3. Stephen E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–

  1990

  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 135.

  4. Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1977). See in

  particular vol. 1:57– 59. and vol. 2, chap. 3.

  5. Armin Mohler and Karlheinz Weissmann, Die Konservative Revolution in

  Deutschland 1918– 1923 (Graz: Ares Verlag, 2005), 115 – 117.

  6. Elliot Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after

  Nazism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 32– 33.

  7. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy,

  (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

  8. Helmuth Kiesel, ed., Stahlgewittern: Historish- kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart:

  Klett- Cotta, 2014).

  9. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Ästhetik des Schreckens: die pessimistische Romantik und Ernst

  Jüngers Frühwerk (Hamburg: Ullstein, 1983).

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  Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

  35

  10. “The Innocence of Becoming” was a title given by the Nazi philosopher Alfred

  Baumler to a collection of Nietzsche’s unpublished works in 1931.

  11. Letter to the Völksicher Beobachter, June 14, 1934, cited in Heimo Schwilk, Ernst

  Jünger: Leben und Werk, 142.

  12. Ernst Jünger, “Über Nationalismus und Judenfrage,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 12

  (September 1930): 843– 845.

  13. Thilo von Throta, “Das endlose dialektische Gespräch,” Völkischer Beobachter

  (October 22, 1932).

  14. Neaman, Dubious Pas t, 122– 126.

  15. Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany, 169.

  16. Helmut Kiesel, Ernst Junger: Die Biographie (Munich: Siedler, 2007), 529.

  17. Ernst Jünger, Sämmtliche Werke 3:270 (May 27, 1944).

  18. Jünger, Sämmtliche Werke 1:3, 494.

  19. Ibid., 493.

  20. Ibid., 582.

  21. Ibid., 609

  22. Ibid., 563.

  23. Ibid., 415.

  24. Ibid., 455.

  25. Both Jünger’s Collected Works, ten volumes in 1964 and eighteen in 1978,

  omitted the nationalist writings from the 1920s and 1930s.

  26. Ernst Jünger to Armin Mohler, unpublished letter, February 17, 1947.

  27. Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization

  of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

  28. Gerd Giesler and Martin Tielke, eds., Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–

  1951 (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot), 280.

  29. Elliot Neaman, introduction to Visit to Godenholm, by Ernst Jünger, trans.

  Annabel Moynihan (Stockholm: Edda, 2015), 5– 7.

  30. Jünger, Sämmtliche Werke 7:257– 259.

  31. Russell A. Berman, introduction to The Forest Passage, by Ernst Jünger, trans.

  Thomas Friese (Candor, NY: Telos, 2013), xiii– xxii.

  32. Jünger, Sämmtliche Werke 7:375– 480.

  33. On Jünger and Rivarol, see Neaman, Dubious Past, 197– 199.

  34. Ernst Jünger, Siebzig Verweht 4 (Stuttgart: Klett- Cotta, 1995), 382.

  35. On the history of posthistoire in European thought, see Lutz Niethammer,

  Posthistoire: ist die Geschichte zu Ende? (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989).

  36. Jünger, Sämmtliche Werke 2:10.

  37. Jacques le Rider, “Le réalisme magique d’Ernst Jünger,” Le Monde, August

  29, 1982.

  38. Rudolf von Thadden, “Schiefe Allianzen: Warum trafen sich Mitterrand und

  Kohl gerade am 20. Juli mit Ernst Jünger?” Die Zeit 6, August 1993. http:// www.

  zeit.de/ 1993/ 32/ schiefe- allianzen.

  36

  3

  Carl Schmitt and the Politics

  of Identity

  Reinhard Mehring (Translated by Daniel Steuer)

  C A R L S C H M I T T W A S born in 1888 in Plettenberg, Westphalia, Germany,

  and died there in 1985, at the age of ninety- six.1 He was a jurist and pro-

  fessor of public law specializing in constitutional law and international law.

  His career stretched over seven decades, from 1910 to 1982. In the 1920s

  he developed a constitutional theory which declared that the liberal parlia-

  mentary state under the rule of law was outdated, and which he later used

  to justify rule by presidential decree at the end of the Weimar Republic;

  he then went on to provide a justification of National Socialism. Schmitt

  was not only an insightful thinker but also an actor who intervened in

  politics. While as a jurist he avoided strong theological or philosophical

  commitments, in political terms he mobilized the distinction between

  friend and enemy in order to argue for the nationalism and statism of the

  interwa
r years and to defend counterrevolutionary, apocalyptic, and anti-

  Semitic positions. Today, his texts are the subject of debate as the work

  of both a brilliant and a Mephistophelian author. In terms of Germany’s

  twentieth- century academic exports, Schmitt’s work is on a par with that

  of Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, or Jürgen Habermas.

  Life and context

  Schmitt studied jurisprudence in Berlin, Munich, and Strasbourg, and

  completed his doctorate “On Guilt and Types of Guilt” (Über Schuld und

  Schuldarten) by 1910. In the same year, he began legal training at the

  37

  Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Identity

  37

  Upper Regional Court in Düsseldorf, becoming familiar with the practical

  aspects of the work of lawyers and courts. In 1915, a few months after the

  outbreak of the First World War, he passed his second state examination.

  He married Carita Dorotič, who not only pretended to be of aristocratic

  descent but also five years younger than she actually was. This passionate

  relationship continued to trouble Schmitt, particularly when it came to

  his academic life, even after the annulment of their marriage in 1924. His

  second marriage was also marked by various crises.

  In his legal work, Schmitt distinguished between the “State of

  Normality” ( Normalzustand) and the “State of Emergency” or “State of

  Exception” ( Ausnahmezustand). The State of Exception might also be seen

  as the model for long phases of his personal life. Schmitt did not lead

  his life as a staid bourgeois scholar but looked at it through the lens of

  the State of Exception, perceiving all kinds of crises: economic hardship,

  social dependence, relationship and marital crises, political worries, and

  intellectual challenges. One might even speak of a harmony between life

  and work, of a translation of a chaotic life into a theory of the State of

  Exception. In his programmatic 1922 treatise Political Theology ( Politische

  Theologie), Schmitt developed a theory of sovereignty that called for the

  overcoming of the State of Exception and the establishment of a State of

  Normality. In his private life, however, it seems that he still often sought

  the State of Exception.

  The thinker of the State of Exception

  The 1910s was a formative decade for Schmitt. Although he often called

  himself a Catholic, he always rejected mainstream Catholicism, with its ec-

  clesiastical practices, scholastic belief in a “natural law,” and political com-

  mitment to the party of the center ( Zentrumspartei). Instead, Schmitt held

  an apocalyptic religious belief that set him apart from the church and the

  morality of the majority. He was keenly aware of the aesthetic revolution

  of modern art. During his early years in Düsseldorf and Munich, he social-

  ized with literary bohemians and established a friendly relationship with

  the renowned expressionist poet Theodor Däubler. At the time, expres-

  sionism took on the religious and apocalyptic pathos of early Christianity.

  Schmitt was not an enthusiastic follower of the nationalist and militarist

  “ideas of 1914,” and in fact condemned “militarism” in an apocalyptic tone.

  A key experience that led to his rejection of the Great War was the death of

  his closest friend, Fritz Eisler, to whom he dedicated not only his 1916 book

  38

  38

  C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S

  Theodor Däubler’s Northern Lights ( Theodor Däublers Nordlicht) but also his

  magnum opus, Constitutional Theory ( Verfasssungslehre, 1928). Fritz Eisler,

  the son of a rich Hamburg publisher, was Jewish and of Hungarian ex-

  traction. He asked to be naturalized in order to be able to take part in the

  war, and was killed on September 27, 1914 in northern France. Until 1933

  then, Fritz’s younger brother, Georg Eisler, was Schmitt’s closest friend.

  The Eisler family continued to support Schmitt, particularly financially, as

  he was permanently pushed for money.

  In 1915, Schmitt entered military service at the deputy general com-

  mand of the military administration, where he stayed until the summer of

  1919, thus avoiding being called up to the front. He thus experienced the

  Great War and the revolutionary situation following it from the perspec-

  tive of a military jurist in Munich, a political hotspot at the time.

  In 1916, Schmitt submitted “The Value of the State and the Significance

  of the Individual” (Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des

  Einzelnen) for his postdoctoral Habilitation in Strasbourg (then still part

  of Germany). But the key experience and the legal theme that became his

  lifelong interest was the expansion of dictatorial executive powers under

  the conditions of a war regime and the increasing power held by the mil-

  itary. He began to work on the question of dictatorship.2 The transforma-

  tion of the law- governed bourgeois state into a dictatorial and executive

  state governed by decree would remain his central theme for the rest of his

  life. He combined it with a philosophical- historical analysis of the transi-

  tion from the liberal and bourgeois nineteenth century to the “state [ Staat]

  of the twentieth century,” which he characterized as the age of the masses

  and of industrial technology.

  In 1919 Schmitt became a full-

  time lecturer at the Münchner

  Handelshochschule, a higher education institution for business managers

  with an emphasis on economics. At that time, he also took part in Max

  Weber’s seminar. For the winter term of 1921– 22, he moved to Greifswald,

  where he took up a full professorship before moving on to Bonn University

  in the 1922 summer term. Over the following years, he published some

  of the most important writings for which he is famous today. Apart from

  Political Theology and The Concept of the Political ( Der Begriff des Politischen),

  he completed his systematic textbook, Constitutional Theory. During those

  years, he also had important pupils over whom, as a charismatic teacher,

  he exerted great influence.3 Following the theoretical work he did at Bonn,

  he wanted to get closer to the center of political activity, and in 1928 he

  moved to the Berlin Handelshochschule.

  39

  Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Identity

  39

  After its initial revolutionary years and the crisis of hyperinfla-

  tion in 1922– 23, the Weimar Republic had more or less stabilized as a

  law-

  governed bourgeois state and a “parliamentary legislative state”

  ( parlamentarischer Gesetzgebungsstaat). But during the global economic

  crisis of 1929 the Republic was again beset by a whirlwind of crises, and

  as a consequence began to devolve into a system of rule by presidential

  decree rather than by parliament. This made the chancellor dependent

  on the trust of Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, the aged president.

  Schmitt had for some time observed the transition, in times of crisis, from

  a liberal parliamentarism to an executive regime, and from at least 1924

  had argued for an extensive interpretation of dictatorial authority. As a

  juridical apologist for rule
by presidential decree, he became an advocate

  of the Preußenschlag, an intervention by Chancellor Franz von Papen in

  the politics of Prussia to dismiss the Social Democratic government of

  Prussia. Schmitt represented the Reich in the ensuing trial, Prussia v. the

  Reich, probably the most important political trial of the Weimar Republic.

  Schmitt as a political actor

  Schmitt did not publicly declare allegiance to National Socialism before

  January 30, 1933, the date of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. After the

  “enabling law” of March 24, 1933, which gave Hitler unlimited legislative

  power, Schmitt immediately accepted the “legal revolution” of National

  Socialism as valid and legitimate, joined the Nazi Party, and quickly sought

  to gain influence over legal policy.

  Before 1933, Schmitt had moved in varied political circles. He had

  had close contact with Chancellor Franz von Papen and less contact

  with Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, who, as an opponent of Hitler, was

  murdered in 1934. Schmitt can thus be associated not only with National

  Socialism but also with the literary circles of the so- called Conservative

  Revolution, right- wing intellectual circles that pursued the project of a

  transformation of presidential rule into an “authoritarian state” ( autoritären

  Staat). This “authoritarian” project rejected the liberal and parliamen-

  tarian republic of the 1920s, but should not therefore be equated with

  National Socialism.

  The details of Schmitt’s attitudes toward the circles around von Papen,

  Schleicher, and the Nazis are controversial.4 Nonetheless, it is clear that

  while in Berlin from 1928 on, Schmitt became increasingly radical in his

  nationalism, antiliberalism, and anti- Semitism. From 1930 he formed

  4

  0

  40

  C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S

  a lifelong, if at times tense, friendship with Ernst Jünger, who, as the

  spokesperson of the Frontkämpfer (frontline soldiers) and chief repre-

  sentative of a “new nationalism,” regarded the soldier as the prototypical

  figure of the twentieth century. But while Jünger distanced himself po-

  litically from National Socialism in 1933, Schmitt tried to gain influence.