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By Root 637 0

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