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Carl Schmitt is one of the most widely read and influential German thinkers of the twentieth century. His fundamental works on friend and enemy, legality and legitimacy, dictatorship, political theology and the concept of the political are read today with great interest by everyone from conservative Catholic theologians to radical political thinkers on the left.
In his private life, however, Schmitt was haunted by the demons of his wild anti-Semitism, his self-destructive and compulsive sexuality and his deep-seated resentment against the complacency of bourgeois life. As a young man from a modest background, full of social envy, he succeeded in making his way to the top of the academic discipline of law in Germany through his exceptional intellectual prowess. And yet he never felt at home in the academic establishment and among those of high social standing.
In his works, Schmitt unmasked the liberal Rechtsstaat as a constitutional façade and reflected on the legitimacy of dictatorship. When the Nazis seized power Schmitt was susceptible to their ideology. He broke with his Jewish friends, joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and lent a helping hand to Hitler, thereby becoming deeply entangled with the regime. Schmitt was irrevocably compromised by his role as the ‘crown jurist’ of the Third Reich. But by 1936 he had already lost his influential position. After the war, he led a secluded life in his home town in the Sauerland and became a key background figure in the intellectual scene of postwar Germany.
Reinhard Mehring’s outstanding biography is the most comprehensive work available on the life and work of Carl Schmitt. Based on thorough research and using new sources that were previously unavailable, Mehring portrays Schmitt as a Shakespearean figure at the centre of the German catastrophe.
- Sales Rank: #1126334 in Books
- Published on: 2014-11-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.30" h x 2.45" w x 6.30" l, 3.06 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 700 pages
Review
"Mehring’s study...lay bare the links between Schmitt’s litigious life and his complicated ideas."
Library Journal
"Reinhard Mehring offers the English speaking world the first comprehensive intellectual biography of the highly controversial legal and political theorist, Carl Schmitt. Based on extensive archival research and a vast amount of unpublished material, Mehring identifies the psychological and emotional motivations that drove the intellectual endeavors of the notorious philosopher of "the political" and "the state of exception." Mehring demonstrates conclusively how Schmitt's struggles with, among other issues, his sexual desire and his obsession with the Jews, generated some of the most important, influential and dangerous political writings of the twentieth century."
John P. McCormick, University of Chicago
"In this fascinating biography, Mehring has used Schmitt’s only recently available diaries and calendar entries to lay bare the obsessions of this brilliant thinker -- often referred to as the Hobbes of the 20th century. Especially revealing are his struggles to shatter “the Jew in him,” which led him to aspire to become Hitler’s “pope” with all that that implied. Politically naïve about Nazism, he was severely attacked by the SS in 1936 and marginalized for, among other reasons, his pre-1933 close association with Jews and his anti-Nazism."
George Schwab, President, National Committee on American Foreign Policy
About the Author
Reinhard Mehring is Professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University of Education
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Not a Biography in the Traditional Sense.
By mirasreviews
"Carl Schmitt: A Biography" ("Carl Schmitt: Aufstieg und Fall") was written by German political scientist Reinhard Mehring after thirty years of study and the recent transcription of Schmitt's diaries. Though Schmitt kept a diary for most of his adult life, most were written in a nearly undecipherable shorthand, and only diaries up to 1933 had been transcribed as of this book's writing. Other personal papers have been preserved, though much of Schmitt's voluminous correspondence with his wife Duska was lost. In his attempt to place Schmitt's academic work in its biographical context, Mehring makes use of these sources, but the slow transcription of the diaries means that more biographical detail will come to light in the future. The translator is Daniel Steuer, who calls this a "quasi-positivist biography" for its effort to lay out the facts of Carl Schmitt's life and work and let the reader draw his or her conclusions. Schmitt was a political and legal theorist whose anti-individualist and anti-legality ideas made him, briefly, the leading state theorist of the National Socialists (Nazis) and have led to renewed interest in Schmitt's ideas in the United States in recent years.
Schmitt's childhood is not accorded much space. Mehring gives a detailed account of his education, during which time Schmitt published his first paper (1910), until the outbreak of World War I. The most detail is offered for the years of the Weimar Republic, during which Schmitt was an academic, because Schmitt produced his most important work in that era and also due to the availability of his diaries to provide biographical detail. Schmitt's decision to join the National Socialist party in 1933 is examined in detail. He became "crown jurist of the Third Reich", for which he has long been remembered, but the years from 1936 until the end of World War II are glossed relatively quickly. After the War, Schmitt was not able to return to academia on account of his role in the National Socialist party, and he was prevented from publishing under his own name until the foundation of the Federal Republic in 1949. He published four monographs in 1950, but his most important work of that decade was about Shakespeare. Though his best work was behind him, Schmitt remained intellectually active and had a following until his death in 1985 at the age of 96.
I approached this book with trepidation, as reviews of the German edition expressed frustration with two aspects of the writing: Endless esoteric references to philosophers, scholars, and legal theorists, and incomprehensible grammar. These problems were not as bad as I feared. In discussing Schmitt's published works, Mehring often makes reference to political philosophers, legal theories, novelists, poets, and even composers. Most I recognized; some would be more familiar to Germans than to Americans. There are repeated references to a few of Shakespeare's well-known plays and to Herman Melville's novella "Benito Cereno", which might be more familiar to an English-speaking audience than a German one. These references are far more numerous in the first third of the book than in subsequent chapters, as the Weimar period was Schmitt's most academically active. It helps to have access to Wikipedia on a mobile device, so that you can look up any reference that you don't recognize without disrupting your concentration. I was frustrated, however, by some terms from legal philosophy whose English equivalent I could not figure out.
There is a great deal of biographical trivia in "Carl Schmitt: A Biography", but I'm not sure how much value it has. In his "Afterword to the English Edition", which would serve better as a foreword, Reinhard Mehring expresses his intention to discuss Schmitt's work "in detail and against its biographical context," which will serve as the book's narrative thread. This book doesn't have a strong narrative, though. Most of it reads like a very long dissertation. The detail that Mehring provides for Schmitt's published works is their theoretical background. He is poor at explaining what the work in question is about and usually makes no attempt to do so. No academic context is ever given: There is no mention of what Schmitt's contemporaries were writing at the time, where the ideas came from in the concrete sense, what influence they had, if any. Bizarrely, the only mention of how Schmitt's work was received is at the beginning of Chapter 17. The lack of introduction or explanation of the major works, which would only require a couple sentences, may assume that the audience is already familiar with the work but does not make for a happy reader.
When I read, in the Afterword, Mehring's intent to place Schmitt's work in biographical context, I was surprised. I was constantly frustrated by the lack of biographical context. I had almost no sense of Schmitt's personality or how it may have informed his work until page 400. The account of Schmitt's life until 1933 is ridiculously detailed, but it is like rapportage: He was here or there and did this and that, without any explanation or apparent relevance. For example, a short paragraph describing Schmitt's activities in October 1930 says that he met two people on separate occasions, an article was published, he met some other people, he attended a funeral, he spoke in front of 1500 people, he wrote a legal opinion and was unhappy with the fee, and he spent an evening with two "gentrified" friends and lamented the decline of their class. Why would anyone bother to write this? Many passages go on for pages in that vein. We are treated to a list of courses he took at university. He had a falling out with the first woman he intended to marry, to which the author dedicates one sentence. Mehring claims that "Schmitt experienced the years after 1912 as a time of dramatic crisis and felt close to suicide and madness," but little evidence is offered.
After the War, Schmitt's inspiration becomes more comprehensible. His writing reflected Germany's defeat, the political re-ordering of Europe, and his own experience at Nuremberg. His view of himself as a victim of discrimination when he was excluded from academia and resentment at his loss of position finally provide some insight into Schmitt's character and the sense of exceptionalism that so influenced his worldview. But I had no idea what was behind his theories until this point. Up to that point, it is as if Schmitt only had an intellectual life, as if his theories originated only from theories. He must have been influenced by something more concrete or at least more personal, but Mehring provides no clue. -Except perhaps in Schmitt's Catholicism, which, along with his sense of exceptionalism, explains pretty much everything. But his Catholicism is mentioned matter-of-factly, without allusion to the Church's authoritarian nature. I realize that Mehring is trying not to write a "psychological biography". But you have to give readers information. Non-Catholics and even Catholics unfamiliar with the Church in the early 20th century will not make the connection.
Schmitt's pervasive sense of exceptionalism begs the question: Was he a narcissist? In someone so accomplished, it is difficult to distinguish between narcissism and simple ambition and arrogance without having a lot more information. Germans always seem shocked and appalled that any normal person could have had anything to do with National Socialism, but Schmitt's dalliance with the party seems to me mundane at its heart. He was an academic theorist who was offered a unique opportunity to influence the real world. National Socialist politicians liked him, at first. Ever the social striver, he was flattered and elated to have an opportunity to shape legal practice under a new government. He was not the last academic to jump at the chance to put theory into practice when a favorable government comes to power, only to be forced to retreat tail-between-legs when things don't go as hoped. It happens a lot. Carl Schmitt's role became scandalous only because National Socialism became notorious. Yes, he should have abandoned the party after June 1934, as Mehring proposes. But ambitious people are often single-minded.
Translating "Carl Schmitt: A Biography", whose text runs 548 pages with notes another 150 pages, is a monumental task, requiring not only translation skills and perseverance but an expansive knowledge of 20th century German history. Daniel Steuer's work is impressive, and his footnotes liberal. German readers complained of incomprehensible sentences and questionable grammatical structures. Steuer mentions that the original text contained a lot of very short sentences, which he has sometimes combined for smoother reading. The prose has a choppy, unpolished quality in places. It bothered me more early in the book; I got used to it. But it was not difficult to read. For that, I thank Steuer. There are some questionable word choices, unfortunate adverbs, and sentences that could have been better-phrased. I think it's a question of how much liberty a translator is willing to take or should take. Reinhard Mehring is no stylist. He lists -not in paragraph form- 42 reasons Schmitt may have had for joining the National Socialists. My impression is that Steuer improved readability but let some eccentricities stand.
This is not a biography in the traditional sense, perhaps because Reinhard Mehring is not a biographer. "Carl Schmitt: A Biography" was clearly written for an academic audience with a background in Schmitt's theories and in German history of the Weimar and World War II eras. It attempts to place Schmitt's work in biographical context only in the chronological sense. It is striking for its catalog of superfluous detail and near-complete absence of the sort of information we would need to grasp Carl Schmitt, to understand his point of view, why he thought as he did, or even how he thought beyond his published works. Some of the omissions assume prior knowledge, like the lack of explanation of his job as a legal trainee and other aspects of the German legal system. But the absence of explanation of what Schmitt did as "crown jurist of the Third Reich", beyond giving speeches, or why he fell out of favor after 1936, why he had enemies within the National Socialists, who they were, or how they were able to oust him from their bureaucratic apparatus is a glaring omission in a biography of a man the course of whose life was dramatically altered by his associations during the War.
Perhaps the book's intended audience already knows the answers to those critical questions. That's why I say this is not a biography in the traditional sense. Perhaps Mehring's stated intent to place Schmitt's work in context should be interpreted as filling in biographical details around the published works, no matter how obscure or trivial, in the way you might fill in blank spaces on a canvas. The crux of the matter, the man and his experiences, are mostly omitted, because the intended audience already has that part of the picture. Do they? I couldn't say. Any analysis of Schmitt's character is reserved for his reactions after the War. Mehring admits that this book has no over-arching theme. He leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions but unfortunately provides inadequate material with which to do so. It is written in the vein of "the contextualization and historicization of Schmitt as a political actor." It places Schmitt in historical context, with which you need already be familiar, but I didn't learn much about Schmitt as a political actor. I assume that scholars of Schmitt will find this book useful in filling in some gaps. I am not a Schmitt scholar, so I must review the book as a biography, hence my tepid star rating.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Carl Schmitt; a German jurist, from a Prussian heritage, theologian and legal theorist
By Sussman
This is biography of Carl Schmitt; a German jurist, from a Prussian heritage, theologian and legal theorist (1888–1985). A person who significantly influenced Western political and legal thinking in the last century. Carl Schmitt and his writings continue to pose serious questions, even in the present 21st century. For any debate on liberalism and governmental democracy, specifically at a time in both in the United States and in the European Union, where the analysis of constitutional law is experiencing extensive change. Yet his life and work have also stimulated significantly by critical debate. While his discourse/concepts have been used and dispersed by prominent academics on both sides of the political spectrum. However, his active labours to eradicate Jewish influence from German law being one of the more disturbing of his actions. This therefore, has cast a cloud over his life and legacy. Still, his many supporters have generally been successful in rehabilitating his character/image in claiming that Schmitt's was an "anti-Semite of chance," i.e. just a fleeting affliction, to advance his standing with the Nazis and their various organelles.
In Reinhard Mehring’s biography there is meticulous attention to detail. The author brings to the fore, Schmidt's work using new sources that were formerly unavailable on the life and work of this individual. This tome is truly a grand undertaking, which not only looks at the public side of the Schmitt but also his at times troubled private life. This book is aimed at various audiences from academics to the lay person and can be treated very much as a reference source on this enigmatic individual.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
especially his sexuality (so post moderns lit crit types might love it)), but it also addresses his works and ...
By Clifford Angell Bates
Over the past four days I have been digesting Reinhard Mehring's Carl Schmitt: A Biography. It over 700 pages long... and while it pull no punches, it also does not seek to act as prosecutor. It is very detailed. I had two quick reading, and now I am going very slowly over it. Why? Because it not only give rather very detailed events in his life (both public and private--and the private here is very very detailed, especially his sexuality (so post moderns lit crit types might love it)), but it also addresses his works and connect them both to the historical contexts of what is happening but also the intellectual milieu Schmitt is reacting to. It shows all the ties of Schmitt to many many thinkers of the period.
The biography offers a useful correction to understanding Schmitt's writings for English authors who really don't have access too important segments that help constitute the whole whole of his thought. Schmitt never wrote a single unifying work as Hobbes did in his Leviathan--even if some think Concept of the Political serves such a unifying role--the biography suggests otherwise. Thus I think the translation of this biography will be very useful for seeing Schmitt in a much different light.
Generally I would strongly recommend this. But there remains lots of small errors that more professional proof reading should have corrected. Yet still this does not mar this wonderful work.
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