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should note Thomas Molnar’s obser- vation that Schmitt was a Catholic of sorts but certainly not a Christian. The inverse may also apply: Schmitt was in- termittently some kind of a Christian but not a believing Catholic. In Concept of the Political—which interpreted the “political” as the most intense of human relations, characterized by friend-en- emy relations—there is no underlying Catholic theme. Among the outraged critics of this work, as Mehring points out, were Catholic theologians. One surely discerns no Catholic leanings in Schmitt’s praise for Hobbes as “the com- pleter of the Protestant Reformation.” Hobbes, as Schmitt reminds us, was the thinker who characterized papal influ- ence over European sovereign states as “the kingdom of darkness.” It is far from clear that Schmitt found this judgment to be objectionable.
Even more illuminating are the parts of Mehring’s work dealing with Schmitt’s attitude toward his Jewish connections. Attempts to find anti- Semitism in his writings and personal relations before his fateful decision to join the Nazi Party in May 1933 have turned up, as far as I can judge, nothing of consequence. Indeed, the Nazis had every reason to suspect Schmitt of dis- sembling in his anti-Semitic statements after 1933, given his longtime intimate association with Jewish mentors, bene- factors, colleagues, and students.
Leo Strauss may have approached this academic luminary in the hope of obtaining a Rockefeller grant to do re- search in England precisely because Schmitt seemed especially friendly toward Jews. He also warned sternly against the Nazis before they came to power and had called on the German government in 1931 and 1932 to ban Hitler’s party.
After 1933, however, Schmitt went out of his way to inject anti-Semitic remarks into his writings, while uncer- emoniously cutting off relations with his numerous Jewish acquaintances. Although the SS kept surveillance on him, as a suspect party member
married to an ethnic Serb—his sec- ond wife—he nonetheless continued to flatter the regime. He even organized a conference of jurists in 1934 to dis- cuss ways of removing Jewish influence from the German legal profession. De- spite these gestures, Schmitt was upset that his onetime Jewish colleagues and students would not associate with him after the war. In letters and diaries he complained that he was being unfairly targeted for having decided to remain in Germany after 1933.
Schmitt was not the only amoral ca- reerist who ever entered the academic world, but his character flaw was all the more shocking because of his great- ness as a thinker and how he treated longtime friends. As a law student in Strasbourg he had
author provides such a mass of details that one sometimes loses sight of the forest for the trees. The chronological framework may not suffice to bear the crushing weight of all the data assem- bled. The author also shows a tendency to dart back and forth between discus- sions of Schmitt’s writings and his per- sonal and political life. In some chapters the result can be chaotic.
Two, Mehring never explains, cer- tainly not to my satisfaction, why any of Schmitt’s writings made such a pro- found impression on his contempo- raries. Why would his Jewish editor Ludwig Feuchtwanger, who did not share Schmitt’s political views, consider Concept of the Political a conceptual mas- terpiece? Mehring approaches Schmitt’s
been befriended
bythesonofaJew-
ish press magnate
from Hamburg,
Heinrich Eisler.
Heinrich’s son Fritz
was his closest
companion, and Fritz’s soldier’s death near the Marne in September 1914 left Schmitt bereaved. Almost 10 years later he dedicated a book to his fallen com- rade, and in the intervening time Fritz’s brother Georg became Schmitt’s bosom friend, particularly when the latter was between wives.
The elder Eisler had sent Schmitt, while he was an impoverished student and poorly paid legal clerk, regular gifts of money and had entertained him re- peatedly at his sumptuous home in Hamburg. In his diaries Schmitt con- trasted his admiration for the Eisler family, including the mother of Fritz and Georg, with his estimation of his own less generous and less well educat- ed parents. But Schmitt suspended his relation with Georg in 1933, as well as cutting ties with Georg’s sister, who had been his private secretary in Berlin.
There are two problems with Meh- ring’s biography, other than the baffling absence of my writings on Schmitt in the extensive bibliography. One, the
Although Schmitt was a morally flawed genius, one would have liked to find more about his genius and a bit less about the moral defects.
work with painful reservations, as a “problem” in the history of German il- liberalism. He dutifully quotes Schmitt’s liberal and Catholic critics, but he never really explains why his subject’s work bedazzled readers from across the po- litical spectrum. As one of the bedazzled multitude, I would have appreciated a treatment of Schmitt’s work that recog- nized more fully what made it so com- pelling. Although Schmitt was a morally flawed genius, one would have liked to find more in the biography about his genius and perhaps a bit less about the unmistakable moral defects.
But it may be hard for German aca- demics, driven to engage “the burden of German history,” to provide such per- spective in writing about someone like Schmitt. We should therefore take what Mehring offers and attribute the result- ing thematic imbalance to the burden of being a German academic historian.
Paul Gottfried is the author of Leo Strauss and the American Conservative Movement.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 53