Unlike Jünger, Spengler and Ernst von Salomon, several renowned intellectuals belonging to the same hard-to-define movement of the Conservative Revolution had initially hoped that the new chancellor would be the providential actor that would bring about their country’s national recovery. I am thinking of the jurist Carl Schmitt, the writer Gottfried Benn and the philosopher Martin Heidegger.
Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was, for a long time, part of the circle of Jünger’s close friends. They had met at the beginning of 1930 and the mutual appeal exerted by these two superior yet different minds had been so great that Jünger would often speak of his ‘unfathomable friend’ and his ‘invigorating’158 company. What had also brought them closer before 1933 was their shared distrust of Western democracies. On the other hand, the two men would have divergent standpoints as soon as Hitler had risen to power.
The great jurist had published his major works at the time of the Weimar Republic: his criticism of political romanticism (1919); his book on dictatorship (1921); and his studies on political theology (1922), on the political form of the Roman Catholic Church (1923), on the notion of the political (1928), and on the concepts of legality and legitimacy (1932). Remaining rather on the fringes of the Conservative Revolution, he was hostile to any and all organismic thought and even rejected an entire part of the German political tradition in order to draw inspiration from Italian (Machiavelli), French (Joseph de Maistre), Spanish (Donoso Cortès) and English (Thomas Hobbes) authors. His Christian faith, which Jünger did not share, and his counter-revolutionary Roman Catholicism served as a basis for his philosophy of the State. He criticised liberalism, as well as the economic and moral doctrine of individualism, which he deemed incompatible with genuine democracy owing to the fact that the latter presupposes a political homogeneity of citizens and a similarity of views between the governing and the governed. In July 1932, he called for a vote against the NSDAP headed by Hitler, whom he considered dangerous due to his ideological and political immaturity. Supporting Chancellor von Papen, he even spoke out in favour of the Reichswehr-based national dictatorship project, arguing for a ban on both the Nazi Party and the Communist Party for being in breach of the Weimar Constitution159 .
Following in von Papen’s footsteps, however, he would align himself with the new power from the beginning of 1933. On 1 May 1933, he would even join the NSDAP, whose ban he had called for shortly before. With regard to this reversal, the question remains open as to the role of Schmitt’s opportunism and career concerns, which may or may not account for this. Appointed to the Prussian State Council in 1933, he also became the head of the National Socialist Association of German Jurists. His ambition was, in fact, to become the official jurist of the new Reich. Philosophically, he hoped to promote the idea of the State (the ‘total’ State, as he himself wrote) at the expense of the notion of Party. His theory was that there is no totalitarian state as such, only a totalitarian party whose ambitions are to be limited by the State.160 At the same time, he firmly upheld the distinction, a fundamental one in his eyes, between what is political and what is not; between the public sphere and the private sphere.
These conceptions would be rejected by the Nazis, who would regard them as a surrendering of the prerogatives enjoyed by the Party and its leader in favour of the State, all the more so since Schmitt was also opposed to any biological racism that contradicted his own philosophy of history. For this reason, he would be targeted by ever-increasing criticism from 1934 onwards. In 1936, he is forced to resign from his official functions, before being subjected to a public trial by the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps,161 in two front-page articles published in December 1936.162 Realising that he had deceived himself, he confines himself to his academic work, adding to the number of those who had embraced ‘internal emigration’, to which Ernst Jünger had long preceded him. This would not stop him, however, from being arrested by the American police in 1945. He would thereafter be imprisoned in Nuremberg until May 1947. In the meantime, he had been expelled from university and was without pension, depending on a few friends to survive. Plummeting into the blackest bitterness, he would thus indulge, on the pages of his own Journal (Glossarium), in venomous attacks against his friend Jünger, reproaching him for his apparent detachment and his gradual return to grace.
Dominique Venner
Ernst Jünger - A Different European Destiny
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