The German Genius

end the war. 51
    T HE C ONCEPT OF THE P OLITICAL
     
    Carl Schmitt has been widely acclaimed as being “among the two or three most original political theorists of the twentieth century,” yet his public enthusiasm for the Nazis, his anti-Semitism, and his “obdurate refusal” to recant after 1945 has put him in the same doghouse as Martin Heidegger.
    Born in 1888, in Plettenberg, Westphalia, the son of a small businessman, Schmitt, like Heidegger, grew up in a provincial Catholic home. As a student, he tried his hand at satire—he was famously set against all aspects of modern culture. By 1914 he was a civil servant and did not volunteer until 1915, securing a desk job, though he later reminisced about falling from his horse—an episode never corroborated. Despite his hatred of modern culture, Schmitt much enjoyed the artistic Schwabing area of Munich, mixing with Expressionist painters and Dada artists and corresponding with Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII. He trained in the law and attended Max Weber’s lectures, but when revolution broke out in Munich in the wake of World War I, he abandoned both the bohemian life and the church and turned to teaching.
    He now began his more formal, more systematic criticisms of democracy. Human history, Schmitt insisted, originated with Cain and Abel, not with Adam and Eve. Politics, for Schmitt, is located in concrete power struggles rather than abstract ideas. He had a love of conflict, and in 1932, when there was a reactionary coup d’état in Prussia, Schmitt defended the coup as a counsel in court, attracting the admiration of Göring, who thereafter became his protector. 52 Schmitt joined the Nazi Party as April turned into May 1933 and supported the notorious book burning of May 10. This support is generally taken as helping Hitler’s bid for respectability.
    In Der Begriff des Politischen ( The Concept of the Political ), published in 1932, Schmitt provides an amalgam of Heidegger and Nietzsche and pits liberalism, on one side, against extreme right and left on the other. Schmitt’s essential point is that we achieve our political identity through conflict, intense conflict, even fatal conflict. The experiences of “we” and “our” (reminiscent of Spengler) are central to politics (a celebration of the “whole” again), and its clearest defining process is by struggle, by fighting for what “we” believe in. Liberalism and democracy can never do this because compromise is the defining factor of liberal democracies and their product is always shifting. Because of this, Schmitt thought that people in liberal democracies never know who they truly are and can never take full responsibility for their lives. Political resolution, he thought, cannot be brought about by reason, only by “blood and soil.” Furthermore, he thought it was dangerous to base political aims on some ideological abstraction with a claim to universal moral principles. That never works because it is always overtaken by events.
    Schmitt was a controversial figure in the 1930s and is still so. He was captured by the Americans in 1945, interned for more than a year, and never had another university job. But he was visited by, and/or praised by such varied luminaries as Ernst Jünger, Alexandre Kojève, Walter Benjamin, and various members of the Frankfurt school. Leo Strauss, a fellow political theorist and, like Schmitt, a friend of Martin Heidegger, renewed the focus on Schmitt in postwar America, where he was an exile. We shall meet Strauss, who was Jewish, again in Chapter 39. 53
    “S CIENTIFIC” N OTIONS OF “G ERMANNESS”
     
    Götz Aly and Susanne Heim have identified what they claim is a new science, a new academic speciality, which emerged in Germany in the late 1930s, and all thanks to the Nazis: demographic economics. This was based, they say, on the development of a new concept among town planners, geographers, economists, and demographers and was applied particularly to areas of eastern and southeastern Europe. That concept was “rural overpopulation,” held to account for low productivity and a lack of purchasing power. It applied especially in Poland. 54
    The concept was developed, say Aly and Heim, primarily by the Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit or RKW (Reich Board for Industrial Rationalization), a large, thorough outfit that, as an example, commissioned no fewer than 1,600 secret reports from the Kiel Institute of World Economic Studies as an aid to