Books Burn Badly

‘A Sacred Feast’

Madrid, 21 March 1962

IT TOOK PLACE in the main auditorium of number 1 Marina Española Square, central headquarters of the only party, known as the National Movement. ‘Large turnout,’ it said in the newspaper reports. In the presence of ministers and numerous representatives of the regime, together with members of the judiciary and ecclesiastical hierarchy, the then director of the Institute of Political Studies, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, welcomed Carl Schmitt as an honorary member. The first time such an award had been made in this centre which was conceived as a factory of ideas during the dictatorship. Created in 1939, after Franco’s victory and Hitler’s rise to power, the Institute always gave Schmitt preferential treatment, as an intellectual, publishing his texts and commentaries on his works.

Who was this German jurist Spain paid tribute to in 1962? He was something more than a jurist. He was once considered the Kronjurist, the Third Reich’s ‘official jurist’. The architect of Nazi legality. The proponent of ‘a state of emergency’, for whom, after Hobbes, ‘auctoritas non veritas facit legem’. Authority, not truth, makes law. The deviser of Decisionism, by which the ‘providential’ nature of absolute power was brought up to date, so that the monarch was now the Caudillo or the Führer. In practice, a futuristic formulation of tyranny for the masses. Unlike other periods, when the mark of a tyrant was his obscene contempt for the law, Schmitt’s great conjuring trick was to transform the tyrant into Supreme Judge, the maker of law, the one who imprints the law with his footsteps.

After the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, Carl Schmitt spent a brief period in the internment camp of Berlin Lichterfelde-Süd and in Nuremberg as a defendant and witness, proceedings he managed to slip away from with customary ease. Regarding this experience, he wrote Ex Captivitate Salus, which contains a single show of repentance in the use of Macrobius’ Latin phrase ‘Non possum scribere in eum qui potest proscribere’. I cannot write against one who has the power to proscribe. An equivocal statement in a master of oblique expression. A surprising device in someone who read Melville and knew the scrivener Bartleby’s response when asked to do something that went against his conscience, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Some were brave enough to say no. In the legal field, the courageous Hans Kelsen, for example, who had an argument with Schmitt about parliamentary democracy and, having been proscribed, branded ‘an enemy’, carried on defending freedom while in exile. Some at least resisted the crushing totalitarian machine in silence. Schmitt did not. On the contrary, his contribution to the rise of Nazism was enthusiastic and systematic during the crucial period 1933–1936. Before that, he had helped to undermine the Weimar Republic by proposing an abuse of presidential power that foreshadowed modern forms of dictatorship.

He had Donoso Cortés, the gleam of the sabre, in mind.

He was helped to join the Nazi party in 1933 by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, later Rector of Freiburg University, who also wanted to descend to Plato’s cave and requisition the projector of ideas. ‘Whoever loves storm and danger should listen to Heidegger!’ he exclaimed on 30 November in Tübingen. Such rhetoric excited Schmitt, who also declared, ‘When Heidegger speaks, the mist disappears from in front of our eyes.’ This may not have been so important. For many, part of Schmitt’s charm resided in his ability to use disguises. With a following wind, however, he would abandon his cryptic style and his prose would advance with perilous determination. On 1 August 1934, the then professor in Berlin wrote in the German jurists’ newspaper, Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, the most daring legal formulation of tyranny in modern times: ‘Only the Führer is called to distinguish between friends and enemies. The Führer heeds the warnings of German history, which gives him the right and the necessary force to bring about a new State and a new order. It is the Führer who defends law against abuse when, at a moment of danger, through the powers invested in him as Supreme Judge, he directly creates Law.’ This was not just an instrumental gift for Hitler’s future. The text served to justify, a posteriori, the executions ordered by the Führer on 30 June that year, during the so-called Night of the Long Knives. Among those eliminated was an old friend of Schmitt’s, the chancellor Schleicher. Later his contributions, which continued to be forthright, were aimed at legitimising the Third Reich’s aggressive expansion. There is an idea that pervades his work, that of war as midwife.

‘And Cain killed Abel. This is how the history of mankind begins.’ Schmitt’s lapidary statement. During a lecture at Cologne University in 1940, he instructed his students to convert ideas and concepts into ‘pointed weapons’. His whole way of thinking is martial. Including ‘true’ politics, which he considers inseparable from the dialectic friend-enemy. Nor are the numerous images and metaphors inspired by religion disconnected from the idea of a theocratic totalitarianism which would influence his Spanish friends so strongly. It is no coincidence that his greatest affinity was with those who advocated ‘holy intransigence, holy coercion and holy shamelessness’. Schmitt defined himself as ‘a Christian Epimetheus’. Epimetheus ignored his brother Prometheus’ advice and married Pandora, who opened the jar or box and unleashed devastating forces. ‘I am a Catholic not just in accordance with my religion,’ he wrote in 1948, ‘but also in accordance with my historical origins and, if I might say so, with my race.’ The most complete construction of his identity was the character of katechon. A concept taken from Christian apocalyptic writings, in particular the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, one of the most enigmatic texts in the New Testament. There is a power or person (ho katechon) who prevents the arrival of the lawless one (ho anomos) and restrains him. Anyone who assumes that role, as is the case with Schmitt, is performing a sacred, providential mission. Though there is another school of thought, which says the lawless one’s most successful disguise would be to present himself as the katechon.

It is, therefore, no surprise that, at the tribute organised by leaders of Franco’s regime on 21 March 1962, Don Carlos should invoke Providence and define the act as ‘a sacred feast in the winter of life’. What had happened to him, the Kronjurist, the brains of Nazi legality, prior to celebrating the winter of life in Madrid?

A biographical error that is kind to Carl Schmitt has it that he was more or less sidelined at the end of 1936, having been criticised in an SS publication. And yet the all-powerful Göring supported him. He continued to be Professor of Law in Berlin until the end of the war. Nor was he otherwise silent. His activity as a lecturer and propagandist for the Nazi legal model was intense and continued almost until the end of the struggle for conquered or conspiring Europe. At the tribute in 1962, there was a veiled allusion to his visit to Madrid twenty years earlier, in 1942, the moment of greatest German pressure for Spain to throw in its lot with the Axis. It would seem he was then secretary of the German Cultural Institute in Madrid. ‘Representing this centre and the German embassy’ (Arriba, 22 April 1942), he attended a conference that opened with an address by the Italian Fascist Giuliano Mazzoni. Sidelined? So what was the ‘providential’ mission that brought Schmitt to Madrid at that time?

As always, the enemy.

‘I never forget that my personal enemies are also Spain’s enemies,’ he wrote to Francisco J. Conde in a letter dated 15 April 1950. ‘A coincidence that raises my private situation to the sphere of objective spirit.’ Donoso Cortés (1809–1853) is the key to Carl Schmitt’s early relationship with Spain or at least its more reactionary elements. The Marquis of Valdegamas was a happy Extremaduran liberal in his youth. Until, in his own words, he became ‘a pilgrim of the Absolute’. Such an embittered pilgrim, who viewed sinful humans with such contempt, in the end he thought they deserved periodic cleansing. Donoso’s was an orgy of reactionary bad temper which shocked the historian Menéndez Pelayo, a reactionary himself, but a more sober one, who was horrified by some of the marquis’ statements. This one, for example: ‘Jesus Christ did not conquer the world by the holiness of his doctrine or by miracles and prophecies, but in spite of those things.’ Delirious, thought the orthodox Menéndez Pelayo. Later events in Spain, in particular the blessing by bishops of the 1936 war as a Holy Crusade, bear the stamp of this delirium.

For Carl Schmitt, the synarchist Joseph de Maistre, the traditionalist Louis de Bonald and the Catholic fundamentalist Donoso were the doctrinal trinity on which to build the ‘new order’. The new version of the Holy Empire. Donoso Cortés wrote the only great speech nineteenth-century Spanish fundamentalism managed to export with a degree of success to the rest of Europe. Not surprising. The so-called Speech on Dictatorship, delivered on 4 January 1849 in the Congress of Deputies, must rank as one of the most horrifying interventions ever to have been pronounced in a parliamentary chamber. The conservative majority’s whoops and applause are a vibrant part of the speech. Donoso does not hesitate to define dictatorship as a divine act, an order of Providence. The impact of the speech, whose content was nothing new, the reverberations it caused in conservative Europe, have something to do with its direct, apodictic style and intimidatory ending. It is probably the first Fascist discourse in the modern sense. Already, by the 1920s, it had captivated Schmitt, who was born in 1888 in Plettenberg, Westphalia, in a very conservative Catholic environment. In 1929, the German jurist and professor appeared in Madrid for the first time to deliver a lecture. What does he talk about? He reintroduces the Spanish to Donoso Cortés! Obviously ‘it is a question of choosing between the dictatorship that comes from below and the dictatorship that comes from above. I choose the one that comes from above, because it comes from cleaner, more serene regions. It is a question, finally, of choosing between the dagger and the sabre. I choose the dictatorship of the sabre, because it is nobler.’ (Bravo! Bravo!) An interest in the history of Spain has other useful reference points, such as the expulsion of the Jews under the Catholic Monarchs.

Such is the curious circle drawn by history. ‘Decisionism’ and a love of tyranny according to Schmitt, the demiurge who inspired Franco’s jurists to turn their illegitimate new regime into a ‘creatio a Deo’ (‘Franco, Caudillo of Spain by the grace of God’), were themselves inspired by a nineteenth-century Spanish reactionary’s crazy ideology. Apart from shared ideals, here he finds the one quality that should characterise a Führer, Duce or Caudillo: ‘ferocity of speech’. Although he was a liberal in his youth, Donoso’s attacks on liberalism are expressed with extreme ferocity, which leads him to describe dictatorship as the form of government that corresponds to the divine, natural law.

There is one feature of political liberalism that is the focus of all his contempt and revulsion. Liberalism is. . frivolous. Frivolous! My God! This is a mark left by Donoso on Schmitt, which the latter emphasises early on in his criticism of the liberal system and parliamentary democracies. Frivolity. This is the terrible sin, like relativism in religion, according to Syllabus. In 1934, a hybrid of Donoso and Schmitt, Eugenio Montes, first intellectual figurehead opposed to the Republic and then thurible for Franco’s dictatorship, published his ‘Speech to Spanish Catholicism’, much vaunted by the right, in which he makes it clear there are to be no concessions regarding the form of government: ‘All relativism is anti-Catholic per se. Turning relativity into an ideal norm or code of conduct is like yielding your soul to the devil.’ Why does absolutism direct all its anger towards the scatterbrained idea of frivolity, making it the worst possible insult? Liberal ‘frivolity’ would have politics as a neutral field in an attempt to avoid confrontation. But ‘serious’ politics for the Donosos of yesterday and today is precisely that: confrontation with the enemy. And if there is no enemy, you just have to wait. One will turn up.

‘It is a significant coincidence that a genuine interest in research has always led me to Spain,’ says Don Carlos on 21 March 1962 before Franco’s elites. And of course he talks about the war, ‘In this almost providential coincidence, I see further proof that Spain’s war of national liberation is a touchstone.’ They understand each other. But such recognition was nothing out of the ordinary. In 1952, Arbor, a magazine dependent on the Council for Scientific Research and an important means of expression for Francoist intellectuals, published the essay ‘Carl Schmitt in Compostela’ written by Álvaro D’Ors, a leading member of Opus Dei and a professor in the Faculty of Law in Santiago. Which is where, in 1960, Porto y Cía published a Spanish version of Ex Captivitate Salus, a book that was well received, having been translated by his only daughter, Anima, married to a Professor of the History of Law, Alfonso Otero, whom she met in Germany.

This Spanish edition includes an interesting preface Schmitt wrote in Casalonga, a villa on the outskirts of Santiago, in the summer of 1958. Thirteen years after the collapse of the Third Reich, there is in this preface not a hint of regret, not a single allusion to the horrors of the war and the policy of racial extermination known as the Holocaust. The only concentration camp he mentions is the one where he was briefly interned after the war, the only lament is his denunciation of the criminalisation of defeated Germany. At the start of the 1960s, on Compostelan evenings, Carl Schmitt, who was always so critical of American democracy, begins to express unusual interest in a politician by the name of Barry Goldwater, a past collaborator of McCarthy in his so-called ‘witch hunt’ and current senator for Arizona. ‘Watch Goldwater,’ Don Carlos tells his Spanish friends. ‘Goldwater represents an ultra-conservatism that wants to conquer the future.’

Let us go back to Madrid and 1 Marina Española Square in 1962. Manuel Fraga Iribarne praises Carl Schmitt’s way of thinking, ‘more relevant today than ever’, and sums it up perfectly, ‘Politics as a decision, the return of personalised power, an anti-formalist understanding of the Constitution, a superseding of the concept of legality. . are scaled heights we cannot turn back from.’ In his speech, the director of the Institute and master of ceremonies, who is himself a jurist, does nothing but defend the Kronjurist.

‘The law can be likened to a long-range cannon,’ wrote Manuel Fraga in the Revista General de Legislación y Jurisprudencia in 1944. Now this jurist with a gunner’s vision, who is about to be named Minister of Information under the dictatorship, pins the decoration to the lapel of his ‘revered master’ Schmitt. Adds with emotion that this is ‘a high point of his career’. After the round of applause, Don Carlos, the man on the sidelines, takes centre stage. He is seventy-three, strong and in good health, and knows that the solemn use of language is going to make him grow in stature in front of a devoted audience. Emphasise the ‘power of presence’ his old friend and colleague Ernst Jünger attributed to him. He seems fully aware of what is happening. The unusual fact that somewhere in the world the Third Reich’s leading jurist is being fêted and awarded.

With pleasure, he finally crosses the line he once drew for himself after the collapse of Nazism, that of taking shelter in the crypt of silence. In Spain, he finds his intellectual refuge and, to a large extent, living and triumphant, his model State. The stage on which to point to the defeat of parliamentary democracy. He is even able to take pleasure, when he meets cultivated reactionaries like D’Ors, in the rhetoric of an imaginary redoubt of the Holy Empire. Like his host, he emits not a word of self-criticism, not a hint of doubt or uncertainty. It is he who supplies his own best eulogy. Unlike his fiery predecessor, who is said sometimes to run out of control in his speeches, he talks slowly, enhances certain words to give way to that ‘power of presence’ described by Jünger. Makes use of liturgical gestures. ‘What was that he said?’ ‘A sacred feast.’ Yes, Carl Schmitt, Don Carlos, proclaims that this reunion with his Spanish friends is ‘a sacred feast in the winter of life’. At that moment, exactly at that moment, according to the testimony of the ecstatic Falangist writer Jesús Fueyo, ‘the lights went out’.

The press highlighted the event. Described the tribute to Carl Schmitt in large letters. Various media reproduced an interview first published in Arriba ‘on account of its great interest’, a euphemism, no doubt, for what was known as ‘obligatory insertion’. ‘It is possible that all European countries will have to justify themselves before Spain,’ said Schmitt. But no medium, no newspaper, reported the blackout. Nobody explained that, when the hierarch was pinning a badge to the chest of Don Carlos, the auditorium in the headquarters of the National Movement went dark. Completely dark.

From A Dramatic History of Culture by Héctor Ríos, unpublished.