Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
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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.