Foreword to Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Memoirs of Hitler’sMost Daring Commando

 Otto Skorzeny was one of the more colourful characters of the Third Reich and became a darling of the Nazi propaganda machine. He is best known for the part he played in the dramatic rescue of Mussolini from incarceration in a hotel in the Abruzzi mountains, but he also took part in a number of other daring special forces operations. Originally published in 1957, this is an account of his war.

Austrian-born like Hitler, Skorzeny experienced the turbulence in that country of the early 1930s. A believer in Anschluss, he joined the Nazi Party in 1930, but says nothing about the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss as a result of an abortive Nazi plot to bring about union with Germany four years later, although it is difficult to believe that he was not in some way involved. When Anschluss did occur in March 1938, Skorzeny’s role in helping to prevent bloodshed came to the attention of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the newly appointed German governor of Austria. But, when war came, he was turned down by the Luftwaffe as being too old to become a pilot and had to content himself as a trainee Waffen-SS engineer officer instead. Skorzeny saw service with the SS Das Reich Division in France, the Balkans and the invasion of Russia before being evacuated sick with colic at the end of 1941.

It was not until spring 1943, after a period of home service, that Skorzeny entered the field that would make him famous. He joined Section 6 of the RSHA, which was its foreign department, covering not just intelligence, but special operations as well. Here he experienced the bureaucratic frustrations and jealousy which characterised so much of the Nazi government system. In the midst of this he turned to studying British special operations, notably those employing commandos, and the activities of SOE, and began to formulate his own concepts. This was helped in that he was allowed to form his own special forces unit, thanks to an extent to the head of the RSHA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, whom Skorzeny had known in Vienna. It was, however, the order to report to Hitler’s field headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia, on 26 July 1943, which radically changed his life.

Skorzeny’s account of the problems in tracking down Mussolini in the aftermath of his arrest and the operation to spring him from the Albergo Campo Imperatore Hotel is fascinating and it was undoubtedly one of the most spectacular feats of the war. While he states that he was able to obtain decorations for all his men, Skorzeny does not allude to the bitterness that General Kurt Student and his paratroopers, who played a vital part, felt at being ignored in the aftermath. Notwithstanding, Skorzeny was now famous in Germany and personally known to Hitler. He did not, however, ignore his engineering background and became involved in special-weapons developments for all three services, including a piloted VI, which brought him into contact with that renowned aviatrix Hanna Reitsch. Few of these projects came to fruition, an indication of the increasing muddle surrounding German weapons procurement.

Skorzeny’s role in the immediate aftermath of the failed attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944 did him no harm in the eyes of the authorities. It is interesting to note his ambivalent attitude towards the plotters, although it is possible to read between the lines that he did consider that they were betraying the fighting man at the front. He was then summoned by Hitler once more to undertake an operation as equally audacious as the rescue of Mussolini. This was to keep Hungary in the war. Skorzeny first kidnapped Admiral Horthy’s son and brought him back to Berlin. When this did not work, Skorzeny then stormed the Budapest citadel in which the Hungarian Regent was residing. Hungary was therefore forced to remain on the German side until overrun by the Russians. No sooner had he completed this than he was given another task, one which was to be his most controversial operation of the war.

Operation Greif, the attempt by Skorzeny’s 150 Panzer Brigade to seize the bridges over the Meuse during the December 1944 Ardennes counter-offensive, has been related many times. His use of men dressed in US Army uniforms was strictly against the laws of war and it was this that caused his appearance as a defendant in a war crimes trial in 1947. Conviction seemed certain until his defence produced an unusual witness, Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas, one of SOE’s most highly decorated agents. Although he had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo and in Buchenwald, Yeo-Thomas stated that the Allies had used similar tactics during the war. On the strength of his testimony, Skorzeny and his fellow defendants were acquitted. Yet, he remained a prisoner while other nations investigated possible war crimes against him.

The last part of Skorzeny’s life, apart from his escape from Darmstadt internment camp in July 1948, which is still the matter of some debate as to whether the Americans or former SS men arranged it, is not covered by this book and is shrouded in a certain amount of mystery. It is known that he spent time in Argentina advising President Peron (some say he became Eva Peron’s lover) and in Egypt, and that he settled in Franco’s Spain, a haven for many former Nazis, where he ran an import-export business. It is, however, generally accepted that he was the prime mover, if not the founder, of ODESSA, the secret organisation dedicated to spiriting those wanted by the Allies for war crimes to South America. Post-war life for Otto Skorzeny was still therefore packed with excitement. Even so, he died peacefully in his bed in Madrid from cancer of the spine on 7 July 1975.

Skorzeny was a larger-than-life if controversial character, who clearly had a zest for life and was a man of much charm. Luck was always on his side and he took full advantage of this. Whatever one might think of him – audacious commando or ruthless and fanatical criminal – his memoirs provide a most entertaining account of a man of action.

CHARLES MESSENGER

Some sort of active agency, some wide-ranging intelligence, seemed both to be following and leading us

 Asking Questions of the Unseen

 Cayce assigned me a task in the middle of the action, insuring that I knew more about each case as it came up for a reading than anyone else in the office. The job was to prepare the questions to be asked Cayce by his wife, at the end of each reading when the steady voice would indicate, "Ready for questions." By comparing the discourses with what was in letters already sent in by each person, often over a period of many months, and not infrequently supplemented by notes on phone calls, it would be possible to study with some care the strengths and weaknesses of his counsel. Making maps and models of the operation would also be natural, looking for what made it go better. For one reading had tersely warned, the norm for his aid was to be "informative, constructive, enlightening, yet practical."

 Before long it became clear which kinds of questions would get helpful replies. The most useful to the inquirer elicited fresh information not supplied in the main body of the reading. Issues could be discarded which experience showed would be covered in any case, and the remaining queries carefully arranged, putting the most pressing first, for none of us could predict how many questions the unconscious man would answer before moving swiftly on to the next reading or terminating the session.

 Usually there were appropriate questions about puzzling side issues in health, business affairs, or relationships. "Why have I had digestive upsets since I injured my back?" "Why do I have such difficulty with mathematics, when I am a good student?" "How can I guide my daughter, who seems to me so stubborn?" Such concerns, often urgent to the seeker, were likely to get patient replies of a few sentences, if the topic had not already been covered in the reading (as central concerns typically were). Less likely to be answered were questions on the margin of real need. Once people got Cayce on the line, so to speak, quite a few were tempted to get all the information and guidance they could. They inquired about warts, about dreams, about real estate holdings, about psychic experiences, or about marriage prospects. Cayce was not likely to mix radically different kinds of counsel, such as answering vocational questions in a medical reading. "We haven't that" might be his abrupt reply. His response meant that the opening suggestion given him for a particular kind of reading had not put him in touch with some other area of the individual's activity or relationships. Medical counsel was not available in life readings, and vice-versa. Would they seek at their bankers for tailoring aid, he asked?

 Yet if he were feeling expansive in trance on a particular day, or if something touched him in the spirit of the seeker (which could be noted in the tone of his voice), he might offer at least a partial answer on any issue important to the person's welfare. So the challenge was to phrase and rephrase the questions carefully, conveying the best spirit in the letters. And it was necessary to keep my own interests out of the exchange, not slanting questions to elicit explanations I wanted. Several blunt refusals taught me to try harder to be a detached channel of aid.

 It was reassuring that Gertrude would be scanning the typed-up questions as she put them to her husband in his strange state. She would skip those which had already been answered in the body of the reading, and sometimes make up clarifying questions of her own. Her determination to subordinate her own able intellect was impressive, as she sought to stay out of the way and be the "passive" helper which the readings had indicated should be her role. She set aside her emotions, .too, so as not to react to a particularly demanding or officious seeker, represented by letter or occasionally present in person for a reading. A deep dream which she told had depicted her collecting unique shells on the beach, as she loved to do. The reading taken on the dream interpreted it as she suspected: she was being encouraged to see each seeker in appreciative wonder and respect as she did shells. One could readily guess how crucial this woman must have been in Cayce's life and work, and why the readings had grown fuller and clearer after she took on the work of "conductor," which had been handed about to many in the years before their move to Virginia Beach nearly two decades ago.

 Nothing in my work on questions offered any warning of what tumbled from the lips of Cayce on a few days when the pressure was heaviest to serve people in rapid order. Usually Gertrude would read the questions aloud to him, one at a time, and he would methodically repeat each before answering it. But on these days Cayce would come to the question period and simply go right down the typed list, answering each query in order without waiting for his wife to pose it. Then he would instruct her to move on to the next reading, while we would stare at each other in astonishment. There was no way he could see the sheet of queries. His eyes were covered, and the little stack of correspondence in his wife's hands was clearly out of his line of vision in any case. Part of his consciousness seemed to be present with a person in Denver, or Bangor, or Miami, or Seattle, judging by his prompt and detailed reports. But part of his mind was still in the room with us, running over unseen papers in his wife's hand.

 A second task assigned to me was to write out for the entranced man precisely where he would find each individual. For medical aid this meant giving him the exact street address, and sometimes an apartment or office at that location. In the past he had shown that he would, if directed to the wrong place, patiently describe it in full and accurate detail—right down to paint on the walls and stuffing in a mattress—while searching for the person. But when properly guided, he would repeat after his wife the complete address, and then seem to move as though in narrowing orbits by citing out loud the state, then the city, then the street and the building, concluding often with an aside on what he observed at the site before firmly stating, "Yes, we have the body." For a life reading he needed the time and place of birth, which he followed down to the point of a not infrequent aside on how it had been snowing in that locale on the day of the birth, or how the delivery was complicated, or how big the town was and what could be seen of the mountains from there. Then he concluded, "Yes, we have the records." For those who requested it, he would supply the precise hospital and time of birth, providing one more surprising item we could then verify.

 There were colorful complications. An address I supplied for a man in Los Angeles was one we later found to be incorrect. Cayce promptly commented that it was the wrong address, and his wife hesitantly suggested that he try to locate the person anyway. With something like a groan he observed of Los Angeles, "Mighty big place!" After a lengthy pause he found the man in the huge urban tangle, and proceeded to give the reading, full of accurate personal details.

 By contrast, the instructions were a bit too specific on highway directions to a farm in Minnesota, exactly as if Cayce were to drive there from a nearby town and numbered highway. The last leg of a dirt road according to the correspondence was "a mile and a half." Cayce found the state, the town, and the highway as usual, but then corrected the final distance to a mile and two-fifths. When we asked the family of the seeker about the discrepancy, they responded that Cayce was correct, since they had rounded off the distance, as they said, "so he would not be confused." From our perspective he was not easily confused. For a man in New Orleans the unconscious Cayce pronounced the street name in what sounded like French. Leaning toward Gertrude from across the room at Cayce's desk, I hastily repeated twice what I thought was the right pronunciation, which she gave her husband. He stuck with the French version (one we later found was correct for local New Orleans usage) and asked the brisk question, "Who's giving this reading?" Despite his being in trance, we were evidently dealing with a process more than mechanical hypnosis. Some sort of active agency, some wide-ranging intelligence, seemed both to be following and leading us.

 It Kept Us in Mind

 Whatever it was, it kept close track of us.

 Gladys was seated several feet from him, making her notes on a steno pad at a little table. Cayce could not even see her notebook without lifting himself from the couch, much less read her rapid, cryptic inscriptions upside down. Besides, he knew nothing of shorthand. But he did not hesitate, though the occasions were unusual, to correct her spelling, her punctuation, her paragraphing, or her medical terms. Her eyes would flash with surprise and humor when part of his consciousness monitored her careful work, after more than twenty years of serving him. Perfection did not seem to be his goal so much as care on important details. There were a few words which the unconscious man habitually mispronounced and she corrected for him, such as "aggrandizement" for "aggrandizement," and "obogdulla mengata" for "medulla oblongata," or "morstle and petar" for the pharmacist's "mortar and pestle." He did not bother with these. But he did interrupt her when the use of an i for an e, for example, might change the meaning of a medical term, or a comma change the intent of a sentence.

 How he kept us in view also showed when he answered my own unspoken questions. After studying an individual's correspondence, I often wanted to understand how a back injury had affected the person's vision, or why certain foods precipitated a young man's fits, or why a mother and daughter were such strong rivals for the husband/father's attentions. Sitting all the way across the room from him, with my notebook open and my pen scurrying along, I would be trying to abbreviate technical terms and to underline key factors in a disease, a personality, or the structure of a reading. Now and then my thoughts would shoot up with a spontaneous "Why?" when Cayce linked a cold spot on a child's abdomen to epileptic seizures, or traced a woman's mental illness to a fall on the coccyx at the end of her spine, or described a man's deafness as karmic consequences from having "turned a deaf ear" to the pleas of others in a previous lifetime. There were similar questions when a reading suddenly became eloquent, after proceeding as detached discourse. But I said nothing and did not stop writing, only thinking my questions. Yet on occasion, when the entranced man appeared to be in an expansive mood, he would pause, saying, "As to the question being asked . . ."or noting my query in some other way. He might even instruct his secretary to keep aside what briefly followed, as he had done with unspoken questions of his elder son and others before me. Then he would give a little essay on the theory, or explain a chain of medical reactions, or suggest how we should investigate further the laws he had just implied. My breath stopped a moment each time.

 There was little to suggest the limits of his peripheral awareness in trance. For example, how had he known that a small boy cherished by Gladys, T.J., was out on a fishing dock behind Cayce's house and in danger of falling into the little freshwater Lake Holly? What prompted him to interrupt his speaking with a terse "Better go get the boy from the dock," and then wait in silence until Gladys returned?

 More sobering were comments that might be made about the attitudes and priorities of those of us in the room. The voice we listened to was not unkind, but it could be blunt. In the files were warnings to "Do something for yourself!" when people in his immediate circle had grown too fond of getting guidance on everything that came up. "Next thing," he added pungently in another transcript, "you'll be asking whether to blow your nose with your right hand or your left!" And Cayce showed me ruefully that the shortest reading in the files was one given for him: a medical checkup which elicited only the sharp comment that he hadn't done what was given to him last time and promptly terminated. None of us wanted a brush with the shining blade of this counsel.

From: A Seer Out of Season 

Carl Schmitt - Song of the 60-Year-Old

I have lived through destiny pulling on the reins
Victories and defeats, revolutions and restorations,
Inflations and deflations, bombardments,
Defamations, regime changes and burst pipes,
Hunger and cold, camp and solitary confinement.
Through all of this I have passed,
And all has passed through me.

I know the many forms of terror,
Terror from above and terror from below,
Terror on land and terror from the air,
Terror legal and extralegal,
Brown, red, and checkered terror,
And the worst, which no one dares to name.
I know them all and I know their grip.

I know the megaphones of power and of law,
The amplifiers and meaning distorters of the regime,
The blacklists with many names,
And the card files of the persecutors.

What should I now sing? The hymn Placebo?
Should I unproblematically envy the plants and the animals?
Quake in panic in the circle of Panists?
In the bliss of the midge that bobs in?

Three times have I sat in the belly of the fish.
I looked in the eye death at the hands of the hangman.
Yet the word of sybilline poets surrounded me protectively
And a saint from the East redemptively opened the door for me.

Son of this consecration, shiver not—
Hark and suffer!
June 11, 1948

From the Real Enemy to the Absolute Enemy

The theory of war is always about the distinction of enmity, which gives war its meaning and character. Every attempt to contain or limit war must be based on the awareness that, in relation to the concept of war, enmity is the primary concept, and that the distinction between different types of war is preceded by a distinction between different types of enmity. Otherwise, all efforts to maintain or limit war are only a game which cannot withstand the outbreaks of real enmity. After the Napoleonic wars, irregular war was pushed out of the general consciousness of European theologians, philosophers, and jurists. There were indeed friends of peace who saw in the abolition and proscription of the conventional war in the Hague Convention the end of war in general; and there were jurists who considered any doctrine of just war to be eo ipso just, because Saint Thomas Aquinas had already taught such things. No one suspected what the unleashing of irregular warfare would mean. No one considered what the victory of the civilian over the soldier would mean if one day the citizen put on the uniform while the partisan took it off to continue the fight without it.

It was this lack of concrete thinking that first completed the destructive work of the professional revolutionaries. This was a great misfortune, because with those limitations on war, European man had succeeded in something rare: the renunciation of criminalizing the wartime enemy—that is, the relativization of enmity, the negation of absolute enmity. It is really something rare, even incredibly humane, to get people to renounce discrimination and defamation of their enemies.

The partisan now seems to be calling this into question again. His criteria include the extreme intensity of his political commitment. When Guevara says “The partisan is the Jesuit of war,” he is thinking of the unconditional nature of political commitment. The life story of every famous partisan, beginning with the Empecinado, confirms that. In enmity the partisan without rights seeks his justice. In it he finds the meaning of the cause and the meaning of justice, when the shell of protection and obedience which he has hitherto inhabited breaks, or the web of norms of legality from which he could previously expect justice and legal protection is torn apart. Then the conventional game ends. But this cessation of legal protection need not yet be partisanship. Michael Kohlhaas, whom the sense of justice made into a robber and murderer, was not a partisan because he did not become political and fought exclusively for his own violated private law, not against a foreign conqueror and not for a revolutionary cause. In such cases, irregularity is apolitical and becomes purely criminal because it loses its positive connection with a regularity that exists somewhere. This is what distinguishes the partisan from the robber chief, whether noble or ignoble.

In discussing the geopolitical context (see above), we have emphasized that the interested third party performs an essential function when it provides the connection to the regular, which the irregularity of the partisan requires in order to remain in the realm of the political. The core of the political is not enmity per se, but the distinction between friend and enemy, and presupposes both friend and enemy. The powerful third party interested in the partisan may think and act entirely selfishly; with his interest he is still politically on the side of the partisan. This has functions as political friendship and is a kind of political recognition, even if it does not lead to public and formal recognition as a warring party or as a government. The Empecinado was recognized as a political entity by his people, the regular army, and the great power that was England. He was no Michael Kohlhaas nor Schinderhannes, whose interested third parties were gangs of criminal fences. Salan's political situation, on the other hand, went down in a desperate tragedy, because he became illegal in his own country, and outside, in the realm of geopolitics, not only did he not find an interested third party, but, on the contrary, he encountered the consolidated enemy front of anti-colonialism.

The partisan then has a real enemy, but not an absolute one. This follows from his political character. Another limit of enmity follows from the partisan's tellurian character. He defends a piece of land with which he has an autochthonous relationship. His basic position remains defensive despite the increased agility of his tactics. He behaves exactly as Saint Joan of Arc specified before the ecclesiastical court. She was not a partisan and fought regularly against the English. When she was asked by the ecclesiastical judge the question—a theological trick question—of whether she wanted to claim that God hated the English, she replied: “Whether God loves or hates the English, I do not know; I only know that they must be driven out of France.” This answer would have been given by any normal partisan to the defense of the national soil. With such a fundamentally defensive stance comes the fundamental limitation of enmity. The real enemy is not declared the absolute enemy, nor the ultimate enemy of humanity in general.53Lenin shifted the conceptual focus from war to politics, i.e. to the friend-enemy distinction. This was sensible and, according to Clausewitz, a logical extension of the idea of war as a continuation of politics by other means. Only Lenin, as a professional revolutionary of the world civil war, went even further and turned the real enemy into the absolute enemy. Clausewitz spoke of total war, but still presupposed the regularity of an existing statehood. He could not yet imagine the state as an instrument of a party, and a party that commanded the state at all. With the absolutism of the party, the partisan had also become absolute and was elevated to the bearer of absolute enmity. It is not difficult today to see through the conceptual trick which brought about this change in the concept of the enemy. On the other hand, it is much more difficult today to refute another way of making the enemy absolute, because it seems to be immanent in the present reality of the nuclear age.

Technical-industrial development has increased the weapons of man into pure means of annihilation. This creates a provocative imbalance between protection and obedience: one half of mankind becomes hostage to the rulers of the other half, who is armed with nuclear weapons. Such absolute means of annihilation require absolute enmity if they are not to be absolutely inhuman. After all, it is not the means of annihilation that destroy, but humans that destroy other humans with these means. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes grasped the core of the process as early as the 17th century (de homine IX, 3) and formulated it with great accuracy, although at that time (1659) the weapons were still comparatively harmless. Hobbes says: “Man is more dangerous to another man of whom he believes himself endangered than any animal, just as much as the weapons of man are more dangerous than the so-called natural weapons of animals, for example: teeth, paws, horns or poison.” And the German philosopher Hegel adds: “weapons are the very essence of the fighters themselves.”

In concrete terms this means the supra-conventional weapon supposes supra-conventional man. It does not presuppose him only as a postulate of a distant future; it rather presupposes him as an already existing reality. The ultimate danger, then, does not even lie in the presence of the means of destruction and a premeditated malice in man. It consists in the inescapability of moral compulsion. Men who use these means against other men see themselves as obliged to annihilate their victims and objects, even morally. They must declare the other side as a whole to be criminal and inhuman, to be totally worthless, otherwise they are criminal and inhuman themselves. The logic of value and unworthiness unfolds its entire destructive consequence and forces ever new, ever deeper discrimination, criminalization and devaluation, up to the destruction of all life that is unworthy of life.

In a world in which the partners push each other into the abyss of total devaluation in this way before they physically annihilate each other, new kinds of absolute enmity must arise. The enmity will become so terrible that one may not even speak of enemy or enmity, and both may even be formally ostracized and condemned before the work of annihilation can begin. Annihilation will then become quite abstract and quite absolute. It will no longer be directed at an enemy at all, but only serve the supposedly objective enforcement of the highest values, for which, as we know, no price is too high. It is the denial of real enmity that will clear the way for the work of annihilation of an absolute enemy.

In 1914 the peoples and governments of Europe staggered into the First World War without any real enmity. The real enmity arose only from the war itself, which began as a conventional war of states under European international law and ended with a world civil war of revolutionary class enmity. Who will prevent the unexpected emergence of new types of enmity, in an analogous but still infinitely increased way, the implementation of which will cause unexpected manifestations of a new partisanship?

The theorist can do no more than preserve concepts and call things as they are. The theory of the partisan leads into the concept of the political, into the question of the real enemy and a new nomos of the earth.

[←53] “Such wars (as actually pass for ultimate wars of mankind) are necessarily especially intensive and inhuman because they exceed the political in treating the enemy as a sub-moral and even sub-categorical monster, one who must not only be defended against but definitively annihilated, so that he can no longer even be a demonstrably bounded enemy. The possibility of such wars suggests that it could still happen, depending entirely on the distinction of friend and enemy and the political recognition involved in it” (Der Begriff des Politischen, 37).

From: The Theory of the Partisan 

An Interjection to the Concept of the Political

Carl Schmitt 

Carl Schmitt - Wisdom of the Cell

 

You wish to perceive yourself and (perhaps even more) your real situation? There is a good touchstone for this. Try to notice which of the thousands of definitions of the human being seems immediately clear to you.

I attend to this in my cell, and it becomes immediately clear to me that the human being is naked. At his most naked is the person unclothed before someone clothed, disarmed before someone armed, powerless before someone in power. Adam and Eve already knew all this upon their eviction from the Garden of Eden.

The question immediately arises: On whom must the definition of the human be modeled, on the naked or on the dressed person? On the disarmed or on the armed? On the powerless or on the powerful? And which of the two is closer to paradise? In the paradises of this world today people move about in clothes. It is immediately clear to me that I am naked.

“Now you stand naked, naked as at birth, in desolate expanses.”1 In the desolate expanses of a narrow cell. The articles of clothing left for me confirm only the objective nakedness.

They even underline it in a highly ironic and uncomfortably emphatic way. You see yourself thrown back upon your self and upon your last reserves. What are my last reserves? A remainder of physical force. This is of course easy to extinguish. Nevertheless, at the moment it is still here. I see clearly in an instant:

I inherited
only my own body,
and that I waste away as I live.2

This line is sung by Richard Wagner’s Siegfried in a wonderful, rising and falling interval. A bubbling, physical feeling of happiness seems to be captured here. No later musician or lyricist expressed so much physical joy. The force of this artistic expression still obviously rides the waves ridden by the Revolution of 1848 in Germany. The musical interval comes from Richard Wagner. The line itself, though, can be traced to Max Stirner.3 With this we approach a paradise in which something of paradisiacal nakedness shines forth.

* * *

I have known Max Stirner since Unterprima [the eighth year of German secondary school]. It is thanks to this acquaintanceship that I was prepared for some of what I have encountered to this day, which might otherwise have surprised me. Whoever knows the depths of the European train of thought between 1830 and 1848 is prepared for most of what rings loud in the world today. Since 1848 the rubble field left by the self-decomposition of German theology and idealistic philosophy has changed into a force field of theogonic and cosmogonic approaches. What explodes today was prepared before 1848. The fire that burns today was laid at that time. There are certain uranium mines in the history of ideas. Among them are the Presocratics, a few fathers of the church, and also a few writings from the period before 1848. Poor Max definitely belongs here.

Taken as a whole, he is awful, loutish, pretentious, self-important [renommistisch], a Pennalist,4 a degenerate student, a lump [Knote], an egomaniac, clearly a serious psychopath. He crows in a loud, unpleasant voice: I am Me, I care about nothing but Myself [Mir geht nichts über Mich].
His verbal sophisms are unbearable. The hep cat [Zazou] of his cigar-smoking, basement-bar bohemian lifestyle [Stammtisch-Bohème] is disgusting. But Max knows something very important. He knows that the I is no object of thought. And so he came up with the most beautiful, in any case the most German book title in the whole of German literature: Der Einzige und sein Eigentum [The Ego and Its Own].5 At this moment, Max is the only person who visits me in my cell. This touches me deeply, as he is such a rabid egoist.

He expressed his ultimate motivation in a letter in which he says: then we will become once again like the animals in the woods and the flowers of the field. This is the real yearning of this egomaniac. This is the new paradise. This is nature and the natural law, the suspension of self-alienation and of self-externalization in a problem-free corporeality [Leibhaftigkeit]: the Adamitic happiness of the garden of earthly delights, which Hieronymous Bosch cast in white nakedness upon a panel;6 also the animals in the woods and the flowers of the field; the flight of the midge in sunshine; the completely natural nature and the natural law of the deepest spheres of telluric existence; the utterly unencumbered twittering of Rossini’s thieving magpie;7 the pure identitfication with oneself in the pleasurable feeling of a blissfully accelerated bloodstream. Pan awakens and appears in the earth-conscious circle [erdbewußten Kreis].8 Max is one of the first Panists who later peopled the field of German literature and the paradises of its deproblematization.

But this poor Pan was not equal to the challenge of modern natural science. Today his happiness is not even an illusion any longer. It is the pleasure of the poor holidaymaker escaped from the big city into the countryside, the fleeting awakening of cheerful feelings in the holiday child—or, for that matter, the blissful feeling of a poetry award winner. Their desire is no longer for eternity. It moves within the frame of a right to vacation. It still naturally creates an appetite for more, but submits itself, in resignation, to the fact that the vacation cannot be eternal. This poor ego can only wed itself to its echo; and in this infertile, self-indulgent marriage it is no longer lonely [vereinsamt] but by now organizationally appropriated [vereinnahmt]. Planning has appropriated it long ago.

The plan appears and Pan stops smirking. Pan sinks, the plan appears on the scene [der Plan tritt aufden Plan]. A nice example of the immanent oracular character of our German language.

* * *

New paradises beckon now: this time the paradises of a thoroughly planned world, with all the glories of unchained forces of production and a power of consumption increased to infinity, as well as with generously extended leisure time, endowed with the appropriate recreational activities. It is the paradise of a technicized earth and its thoroughly organized humanity. The natural barrier falls; the limits of society capture us in its place. They not only capture us, they change us. The matter is not one of recognizing the world and the human being any more, but rather of changing them.

For 10 years we have occasionally seen how quickly the artificial paradises of technology change into real hells. We learned this lesson especially clearly in the cold winter of 1946/7 in Berlin, as burst pipes destroyed the wastewater system and the downside of paradise became visible. But these are disruptions that can be avoided. Also, they impact just the vanquished. One only needs to find and isolate the source of the trouble, the disrupter, and the problem is solved. We will find the disrupter. The disrupter is the guilty party and the guilty party is the disrupter. Who this is in each concrete case will be communicated to us by the responsible agencies. We will nevertheless reach the goal of technology.

We? Fifty years ago our progressive grandparents told us: in 50 years we will fly. In fact flight is a reality today.

But neither our long-deceased grandparents nor we, their grandchildren, may fly. Not we, but others fly. This we of our progressive grandparents had something touching about it. It rested on a naïve identification with the masters of the world, who would be supported by technical means in 50 years’ time and whose wishes the unleashed productive forces would fulfill. All myths of progress are based upon such identifications, that is, upon the childlike assumption that one will be among the gods of the new paradise. In reality, however, the selection process is very rigorous, and the new elites take care to keep a sharper watch than the old. We should thus pause before growing enthusiastic about the new paradise. One cannot reasonably say more today.

Perhaps in 50 or 100 years humans will be free of misery; those who live today, in any case. The others will no longer interest themselves in our current misery. For this reason we do not intend either to chase after them or to run ahead of them. I am only interested for the moment in whether the human being in the new paradise of technology is naked or clothed. The clothing industry will probably undergo such an upswing and unleash such productive forces that we will be able to afford new, fantastic costumes daily. Charles Fourier may paint this in detail. The prophesy of Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue, that the wool of lambs will grow in the most beautiful purple all by itself,9 then, seems old-fashioned and indeed reactionary. But perhaps our dream of fantastic quantities of incessantly new clothing is itself old-fashioned and reactionary. Perhaps there will be no clothes and costumes at all. Technology will advance so far that we will be able to wrap ourselves in envelopes of light and warmth.

Wonderful. Yet there is more. We will transform even the material of our body into radiation. This is, then, the technically transfigured body, just as our pilots are the technically perfected angels. We—that is, then, only the select few of the new paradise, of course: the new elite.

Hence they are neither naked nor clothed. The distinction loses its sense in a new stage of being [Daseinstufe]. They are no longer humans at all; they are the entirely other. A few theologians today say that God would be the entirely other. But what is entirely other is entirely unpredictable. Why should the new man not be the entirely other? The human being, as we know it, is something that has to be overcome. Why should it not be overcome in this way? It will then be no longer procreated, no longer conceived, and no longer born. Th en Aldous Huxley’s brave new world,10 with its consistent, highly scientific planning of offspring, becomes obsolete as well; and so does our question about the definition of the human being. Everything, then, is just radiation.

Am I on this earth for the purpose of working so that technology may transform us into radiation? If so, under whose authority should I place myself in order to take up the work? For I have long ceased to exist for myself, alone and in isolation; I have long been organizationally appropriated.

These are questions it is no longer permissible even to ask. You have nothing more to ask, rather only answer the questions posed to you. Not we, but others formulate the questionnaires that call you and your questions into question. Understand at last what this means. It is tasteless of you to use the luxury of solitary confinement to indulge in the illusion that you are only isolated and not thoroughly appropriated by now.

Do you want to succumb once again to deception?

* * *

Self-delusion is inherent to loneliness. The solitary person thinks with himself and talks to himself, and in talking to ourselves, as we know, we are talking to a dangerous flatterer. The moralists were right to consider autobiography a sign of vanity. Yet vanity would still be the most harmless and endearing of the motives under consideration here. The saints write no autobiographies. At the deepest core of the cell lie the internal dialogue and the self-delusion.

Terrible is the fear of Descartes, who philosophizes at the stove in his lonely room and thinks only of escaping the evil, deceptive spirit, spiritus malignus, against whose tricks we are never secure—and least of all when we feel secure. In fear of deception, Descartes becomes a masked man, l’homme au masque. He is no longer naked, but no longer clothed either. He is masked. Larvatus prodeo [“I advance wearing a mask”]. Fear is all the more terrible as it becomes the source of ever new deceptions. Whoever thinks of escaping the deception runs headlong into it. Deception of feeling and of the understanding, deception of the fl esh and of the mind, deception of vice and of virtue, deception of man and woman.

I always succumb to deception again and again. I have escaped it again and again. I will also succeed with the final leap. Come, beloved death.

* * *

Death can betray us as well. Both death as a leap into the realm of freedom and the heath/ens’ soft death. All deception is and remains self-deception. The self-armoring of Max Stirner is the highest self-deception. It is for this reason that his mixture of harmlessness and cunning, of honest challenge and deceitful swindle is so ugly. Like any egomaniac, he sees the enemy in the not-I. Thus the whole world becomes his enemy, and he imagines that it would have to fall for him if, remaining free, he were to offer it the brotherly kiss. In this way he hides from the dialectical power of ego splitting and seeks to elude the enemy by means of deception. But the enemy is an objective power. He will not escape it, and the real enemy will not let itself be deceived.

Who is my enemy, then? Is my enemy the person who feeds me here, in the cell? He even clothes and shelters me. The cell is the clothing he donates. I ask myself, then: Who can my enemy be? To be sure, I do it in such a way as to be able to acknowledge him as enemy, and in fact it must be acknowledged that he acknowledges me as enemy. In this mutual acknowledgment of acknowledgment lies the greatness of the concept. It is not very appropriate for an age of the masses with pseudo-theological enemy myths. What is more, the theologians tend to define the enemy as something that must be destroyed. But I am a jurist, not a theologian.

Whom in the world can I acknowledge as my enemy? Clearly only him who can call me into question. By recognizing him as enemy I acknowledge that he can call me into question. And who can really call me into question? Only I myself. Or my brother. The other proves to be my brother, and the brother proves to be my enemy. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Thus begins the history of humankind. This is what the father of all things looks like. This is the dialectical tension that keeps world history moving, and world history has not yet ended. Take care, then, and do not speak lightly of the enemy.

One categorizes oneself through one’s enemy. One grades oneself through what one recognizes as hostility. The destroyers, who justify themselves by claiming that the destroyers must be destroyed, are of course bad. But all destruction is only self-destruction. The enemy, by contrast, is the other. Remember the great sentences of the philosopher: the relation in the other to itself, that is the real infiity. The negation of the negation, says the philosopher, is no neutralization, rather the real infinite depends upon it. But the real infinite is the basic concept of his philosophy.

“The enemy is our own question as form.”11

Woe to him who has no friend, for his enemy will sit in judgment upon him.

Woe to him who has no enemy, for I will be his enemy on Judgment Day.

* * *
This is the wisdom of the cell. I lose my time and win my space. Suddenly the calm that holds the meaning of the words overcomes [übereilt] me. Space [Raum] and Rome [Rom] are the same word. Wonderful are the spatial force [Raumkraft] and the germinal force [Keimkraft] of the German language.It has brought about the rhyme between word and place.It has even preserved the spatial sense of the word rhyme [Reim] and allowed its poets the dark play between rhyme [Reim] and home [Heimat].

In rhyme the word seeks the filial sound of its meaning. The German rhyme is not the beacon [Leuchtfeuer] of the rhymes of Victor Hugo. It is echo, clothing, and decoration and at the same time a divining rod for the location of meaning. Now I am seized by the word of sybilline poets, my dissimilar friends Theodor Däubler and Konrad Weiß. The dark play of their rhymes becomes meaning and appeal.

I listen for their word, I listen and suffer and understand that I am not naked but rather clothed, and on the way to a house. I see the defenseless, rich fruit of the years, the defenseless rich fruit from which meaning springs by right [aus der dem Recht der Sinn erwächst].12

Echo grows before each word;
like a storm from the open place
it hammers through our gate.

13 April 1947

1 Translator’s note: Th eodor Däubler, “Perseus,” in idem, Der sternenhelle Weg [The Starlit Way], ed. Harald Kass. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag (available online at http://www.gedichte.eu/ex/daeubler/der-sternehelle-weg/der-nachtwandler.php).

2 Translator’s note: Richard Wagner (1985 [1876]), Twilight of the Gods [Götterdämmerung], trans. A. Porter. London: Calder Publishers, Act I, Scene 1, line 2. This translation of the opera’s text can be found at http://www.rwagner.net/libretti/ gotterd/e-gott-a1s2.html.

3 Translator’s note: Stefan Pegatzky suggests that the line from Wagner’s opera paraphrases a passage from Max Stirner; see Stefan Pegatzky (2002), Das poröse Ich: Leiblichkeit und Aesthetik von Arthur Schopenhauer zu Th omas Mann [The Porous I: Corporality and Aesthetics from Arthur Schopenhauer to Th omas Mann]. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, p. 188, n. 425. See also Max Stirner (2016 [1844]), The Ego and Its Own. N.p.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, p. 257.

4 Translator’s note: Pennalism denotes a hierarchical relation of service between newly matriculated and older members of regional student fraternities (Landsmannschaften), largely at Protestant universities, especially in the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries.

5 Translator’s note: See above, n. 3.

6 Translator’s note: The Garden of Earthly Delights is the title later  given to a triptych painted by Hieronymous Bosch between 1490 and 1510, which is now housed at the Prado in Madrid.

7 Translator’s note: This is a reference to the eponymous character in Gioacchino Rossini’s opera La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie), first performed in Milan in 1817.

8 Translator’s note: “Earth-conscious” [erdbewußt] is an allusion to Däubler’s Northern Lights, which contains lines such as “Die alle Erdenbrunst in das Bewußtsein leitet.” See Theodor Däubler (2013 [1910]), Das Nordlicht (Florentiner Ausgabe). N.p.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. The full text of this epic poem is available at http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/das-nordlicht-2075/1 (Text im Projekt Gutenberg).

9 Translator’s note: Virgil (2009), Th e Eclogues and the Georgics, trans. C. Day Lewis. Oxford: Oxford Classics, p. 19. Th e  Notes to pages 68–74 89 Fourth Eclogue is famous for the interpretations it had generated over the identity of its subject—a savior and future ruler of the world, whose birth this poem celebrates.

10 Translator’s note: Aldous Huxley (2007 [1932]), Brave New World. New York: Vintage.

11 Translator’s note: From Theodor Däubler (1916), Hymne an Italien [Hymn to Italy]. Munich: Georg Müller.

12 Translator’s note: Paraphrase of a line from the opening stanzas of Konrad Weiß’s The Christian Epimetheus. The translation above, “from which meaning springs by right,” is at odds with that given by Jacques de Ville: “upon which the law of meaning grows”; see Jacques de Ville (2016), “Schmitt’s Weisheit der Zelle: Rethinking the Concept of the Political,” in Law, Memory and Violence: Uncovering the Counter-Archive, ed. Stewart Motha and Honni von Rijswijk. Abingdon: Routledge, p. 228. De Ville’s translation, probably suggested by word order, runs against the syntax of cases (dem Recht, dative and der Sinn, nominative).

13 Translator’s note: Konrad Weiß (1933), Der christliche Epimetheus. Berlin: Edwin Runge (available at http://www.seiten-der-dichtung.de/konradweiss/dce.html).

From: Ex Captivitate Salus Experiences, 1945–47 Carl Schmitt Edited by Andreas Kalyvas and Federico Finchelstein Translated by Matthew Hannah 

Our possessions are the dross of our future death. Only the soul should matter

 When typhoid fever struck Susan and Austin’s lastborn child on October 5, 1883, their house collapsed into the invisible province where its true foundations lay. Austin wandered half-mad through the rubble of his soul, disgusted by his erstwhile rage to live. He once had the powerful jaw of a wild beast: the risk was great if one tried to wrench one’s hunk of meat from him. Now the marble blow of death had obliged him to drop his imaginary prey.

Emily and the dying child had more than a usual complicity. Gilbert was Emily’s double. They had the same crucifying sensibility. When one of his friends moved away from Amherst, the boy could not bear to see his portrait; to suffer less from his friend’s absence, he asked that the picture be turned to face the wall. Life was an uninterrupted flow of wrenching loss, causing aunt and nephew to know the same trembling, the overwhelming grace of never getting used to anything.

Little Gilbert, in a photograph taken when he was alive, seems painfully intelligent. He has a girl’s long blond hair. He is seated on an armchair that has been draped with a slipcover of the kind one finds in houses deserted by their owners. His hands are slightly tense. Our hands do not know how to hold onto anything on this earth. Our possessions are the dross of our future death. Only the soul should matter. Little Gilbert’s would never be older than eight years of age.

“Open the door, open the door, they’re waiting for me!” raved the child, in a language that seemed to have been borrowed from one of his aunt’s poems. He was more richly accompanied in his dying than Louis XIV, whose servants bellowed the king’s name to stop the courtiers’ cackling as he approached. An angel in ethereal livery announced the child’s goodness to the invisible, opening the doors of heaven to him one by one until he reached the golden room. The body drained of its soul is nothing more than a rag doll. The useless, reassuring bustle of mourning began. Emily felt nauseous at the smell of disinfectant and returned to her home at three o’clock in the morning; she was sick, could not return to the funeral wake, and stayed in bed, her head engulfed by a burning migraine.

Two weeks after the funeral the Amherst Record, the local newspaper, painted the portrait of a little saint on a bicycle who went up to all those he met as he rode through the village and spoke to them with the utmost gravity. “The best in people he brought to the surface” the newspaper tells us; those he met were able to air out their Sunday soul, the one that almost never leaves the house.

All saints have some secret sin. This child loved to steal roses from his aunt’s garden. One day Emily came upon his footprints in a border; from God she borrowed humor and from her father the demeanor of a man of law. She went discreetly to find the child’s boots, polished them, put them upon a silver platter, filled them with fresh flowers, and had them carried over to the rose thief in the house next door, along with her calling card.

As he died Gilbert clung to Emily’s soul—the way one clings to a tablecloth to slow one’s fall, pulling everything off the table. All Emily’s joy fell to the floor.

“Each of us takes heaven into our body or removes it, for each of us possesses the talent for living.” But talent is nothing more than courage. Henceforth everything would be wrenched from an encroaching silence. In speaking of her mother, Emily said that on dying she “slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called ‘the infinite.’” This drift entered Emily’s room in her lifetime; her handwriting became more and more airy, streaked with emptiness. Words were split ever farther apart by this whiteness, then the letters between the words. Judge Lord’s death a few months after little Gilbert’s perfected the void. By wrenching from her those she loved, God left in Emily’s soul a poison that she neither wanted nor knew how to expel. Depression set in, a kidney ailment. The lady in white turned to face the darkest night, “sitting,” said Susan, “in the light of her own fire.” She removed heaven from her body.

From The Lady in White

(La dame blanche)

Christian Bobin

Translated by Alison Anderson

Relying on bottled oxygen as an aid to ascent

 Relying on bottled oxygen as an aid to ascent is a practice that’s sparked acrimonious debate ever since the British first took experimental oxygen rigs to Everest in 1921. (Skeptical Sherpas promptly dubbed the unwieldy canisters “English Air.”) Initially, the foremost critic of bottled gas was George Leigh Mallory, who protested that using it was “unsporting, and therefore un-British.” But it soon became apparent that in the so-called Death Zone above 25,000 feet, without supplemental oxygen the body is vastly more vulnerable to HAPE and HACE, hypothermia, frostbite, and a host of other mortal perils. By 1924, when he returned for his third expedition to the mountain, Mallory had become convinced that the summit would never be reached without gas, and he resigned himself to using it.

Experiments conducted in decompression chambers had by then demonstrated that a human plucked from sea level and dropped on the summit of Everest, where the air holds only a third as much oxygen, would lose consciousness within minutes and die soon thereafter. But a number of idealistic mountaineers continued to insist that a gifted athlete blessed with rare physiological attributes could, after a lengthy period of acclimatization, climb the peak without bottled oxygen. Taking this line of reasoning to its logical extreme, the purists argued that using gas was therefore cheating.

In the 1970s, the famed Tyrolean alpinist Reinhold Messner emerged as the leading proponent of gasless climbing, declaring that he would ascend Everest “by fair means” or not at all. Shortly thereafter he and his longtime partner, the Austrian Peter Habeler, astounded the world climbing community by making good on the boast: at 1:00 P.M. on May 8, 1978, they ascended to the summit via the South Col and Southeast Ridge route without using supplemental oxygen. It was hailed by climbers in some circles as the first true ascent of Everest.

Messner and Habeler’s historic deed was not greeted with hosannas in all quarters, however, especially among the Sherpas. Most of them simply refused to believe that Westerners were capable of such an achievement, which had eluded even the strongest Sherpas. Speculation was rampant that Messner and Habeler had sucked oxygen from miniature cylinders hidden in their clothing. Tenzing Norgay and other eminent Sherpas signed a petition demanding that the government of Nepal conduct an official inquiry of the purported ascent.

But the evidence verifying the oxygenless climb was irrefutable. Two years later Messner silenced all doubters, moreover, by traveling to the Tibetan side of Everest and making another ascent sans gas—this time entirely alone, without the support of Sherpas or anybody else. When he reached the summit at 3:00 P.M. on August 20, 1980, climbing through thick clouds and falling snow, Messner said, “I was in continual agony; I have never in my whole life been so tired.” In The Crystal Horizon, his book about the ascent, he describes struggling up the final meters to the top:

When I rest I feel utterly lifeless except that my throat burns when I draw breath.… I can scarcely go on. No despair, no happiness, no anxiety. I have not lost the mastery of my feelings, there are actually no more feelings. I consist only of will. After each few metres this too fizzles out in unending tiredness. Then I think nothing. I let myself fall, just lie there. For an indefinite time I remain completely irresolute. Then I make a few steps again.

Upon Messner’s return to civilization, his ascent was widely lauded as the greatest mountaineering feat of all time.

After Messner and Habeler proved that Everest could be climbed without gas, a cadre of ambitious mountaineers agreed that it should be climbed without gas. Henceforth, if one aspired to be considered a member of the Himalayan elite, eschewing bottled oxygen was mandatory. By 1996 some sixty men and women had reached the summit without it—five of whom didn’t make it back down alive.

From: Jon Krakauer’s

INTO THIN AIR