Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [193]
This Spanish edition includes an interesting preface Schmitt wrote in Casalonga, a villa on the outskirts of Santiago, in the summer of 1958. Thirteen years after the collapse of the Third Reich, there is in this preface not a hint of regret, not a single allusion to the horrors of the war and the policy of racial extermination known as the Holocaust. The only concentration camp he mentions is the one where he was briefly interned after the war, the only lament is his denunciation of the criminalisation of defeated Germany. At the start of the 1960s, on Compostelan evenings, Carl Schmitt, who was always so critical of American democracy, begins to express unusual interest in a politician by the name of Barry Goldwater, a past collaborator of McCarthy in his so-called ‘witch hunt’ and current senator for Arizona. ‘Watch Goldwater,’ Don Carlos tells his Spanish friends. ‘Goldwater represents an ultra-conservatism that wants to conquer the future.’
Let us go back to Madrid and 1 Marina Española Square in 1962. Manuel Fraga Iribarne praises Carl Schmitt’s way of thinking, ‘more relevant today than ever’, and sums it up perfectly, ‘Politics as a decision, the return of personalised power, an anti-formalist understanding of the Constitution, a superseding of the concept of legality . . . are scaled heights we cannot turn back from.’ In his speech, the director of the Institute and master of ceremonies, who is himself a jurist, does nothing but defend the Kronjurist.
‘The law can be likened to a long-range cannon,’ wrote Manuel Fraga in the Revista General de Legislación y Jurisprudencia in 1944. Now this jurist with a gunner’s vision, who is about to be named Minister of Information under the dictatorship, pins the decoration to the lapel of his ‘revered master’ Schmitt. Adds with emotion that this is ‘a high point of his career’. After the round of applause, Don Carlos, the man on the sidelines, takes centre stage. He is seventy-three, strong and in good health, and knows that the solemn use of language is going to make him grow in stature in front of a devoted audience. Emphasise the ‘power of presence’ his old friend and colleague Ernst Jünger attributed to him. He seems fully aware of what is happening. The unusual fact that somewhere in the world the Third Reich’s leading jurist is being fêted and awarded.
With pleasure, he finally crosses the line he once drew for himself after the collapse of Nazism, that of taking shelter in the crypt of silence. In Spain, he finds his intellectual refuge and, to a large extent, living and triumphant, his model State. The stage on which to point to the defeat of parliamentary democracy. He is even able to take pleasure, when he meets cultivated reactionaries like D’Ors, in the rhetoric of an imaginary redoubt of the Holy Empire. Like his host, he emits not a word of self-criticism, not a hint of doubt or uncertainty. It is he who supplies his own best eulogy. Unlike his fiery predecessor, who is said sometimes to run out of control in his speeches, he talks slowly, enhances certain words to give way to that ‘power of presence’ described by Jünger. Makes use of liturgical gestures. ‘What was that he said?’ ‘A sacred feast.’ Yes, Carl Schmitt, Don Carlos, proclaims that this reunion with his Spanish friends is ‘a sacred feast in the winter of life’. At that moment, exactly at that moment, according to the testimony of the ecstatic Falangist writer Jesús Fueyo, ‘the lights went out’.
The press highlighted the event. Described the tribute to Carl Schmitt in