Carl Schmitt was arrested by the Russians in Berlin in April 1945, interrogated and released. In September 1945 he was arrested by the Americans and held in internment camps until March 1947, when he was brought to Nuremberg as a potential defendant in the War Crimes Trials. Although he was released in a matter of weeks without being charged, this episode has created further suspicion about Schmitt's role in the Third Reich. Without oversimplifying the complexity of the question, since everything (...) about this enigmatic jurist and political thinker defies simple or even concise explanation, the decision to interrogate him at Nuremberg was largely due to the infamous reputation he had acquired abroad. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt has been depicted long and inaccurately as one of Weimar's foremost conservative revolutionaries. In the early literature he was not merely categorized as a thinker belonging to that “motley” group of writers associated with the conservative revolution; he was identified directly with neo-romanticism, irrationalism, völkisch thinking, and the call for a vague “national revolution.” He was associated with Oswald Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck, and Ernst Jünger. Even George Mosse described Schmitt as a leading “spokesman for the general (...) consensus of ‘German revolutionaries', “ whose movement was founded upon völkisch ideology. Mosse went so far as to assert that Schmitt viewed die Volk in racial terms, diat he was nothing less man an advocate of die dieory of me “Aryan race” as the “common denominator.”. (shrink)

ExcerptGeorge David Schwab, Odyssey of a Child Survivor: From Latvia through the Camps to the United States, 2021. Pp. 299.*.

Dyzenhaus' work can best be described as advocacy scholarship. Both the spirit and content of this book reflect its author's passionate commitment and argumentative approach. It is part scholarly analysis and part political prescription, synthesized in such a way that occasionally it is difficult to distinguish one from the other. Dyzenhaus embraces Gramsci's position that “philosophies of law and politics are . . . elaborations and justification of packages of political commitments” (p. 5). He also adopts the “integrative jurisprudence” of (...) Harold J. Berman that connects “politics, morality and history” by having his “arguments move between exposition of the particular…. (shrink)

2007 marks the sixtieth anniversary of Carl Schmitt's interrogations at Nuremberg. It has also been twenty years since Telos published the transcripts of what was presumed to be the complete three interrogations of him conducted by the prosecutor Robert M. W. Kempner in April 1947.1 Through the vicissitudes of research, these historical and scholarly milestones have coincided with the discovery of new archival documentation on Schmitt and Nuremberg. Among the most surprising of these new discoveries is the transcript of a (...) “fourth” interrogation of Schmitt that occurred on April 11, 1947, which apparently even Kempner had forgotten.2 The uncovering of…. (shrink)

ExcerptA keynote speaker at the German Studies Association Conference in October 2013 was the renowned historian David Blackbourn, who—together with Geoff Eley—had originally made his reputation by challenging the well-entrenched Sonderweg interpretation of the course of modern German historical development. His keynote address, however, had the far less intellectually lofty, and certainly more humorous, title “Honey, I Shrunk German History.”1.

For decades an array of scholars read Carl Schmitt's publications not only to understand his concepts and arguments but also to extrapolate from them the essence of his character and motivation. What was thereby surmised about the man was then, in turn, utilized in interpreting those very works. The result has been a half-century of diametrically opposed perspectives and claims whose contradictory nature greatly exceeded anything found among the scholarship of comparable controversial figures, such as Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger. (...) The gradual availability of parts of Schmitt's papers over the past decade definitely widened the evidentiary basis for such…. (shrink)

ExcerptIn its conceptualization, research, and nuanced analyses, this book goes far beyond being merely yet another monographic contribution to the extensive literature on postwar Germany and Jewish Holocaust survivors. Focusing on the “interactions, encounters, and confrontations” (5) among Jewish survivors and refugees, defeated Germans, and occupying forces, Atina Grossmann provides a gender-oriented social history replete with contradictions, struggling memories and narratives, and “overlapping and fluid identities.” In doing so, she explicitly challenges what she perceives as an “undifferentiated” history distorted by (...) the inception of the Cold War and a predominant “Zionist-inspired narrative” (5) as well as by those studies emphasizing…. (shrink)