Joseph W. Bendersky

Carl Schmitt at Nuremberg

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 Schmitts 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.

The Disappearance of Blonds: Immigration, Race and the Reemergence of “Thinking White”

I listened in amazement as the man related a disturbing tale of his recent trip to New York. Indeed, I hardly recognized the city and its people I thought I knew so well. Yet, what he said sounded so eerily familiar. Above all, it was his specific emphasis on “blondness” and his self-conscious identity of its centrality that particularly captured my attention and shook my historical memory. Although this average well educated professional from another part of the country had taken his family on a tour to experience the wonders of the Big Apple, upon their arrival they sensed immediately not only alienation and otherness but outright danger that apparently overwhelmed everything else.

Schmitt and Hobbes

Given the proliferation of publications on Carl Schmitt, it is difficult to remember that not so long ago he was an intellectual pariah. Considering the growing number of scholars currently sustaining the “Schmitt boom,” it is likewise easy to forget that for many years George Schwab was the lone voice in Schmitt scholarship in the US. Against enormous criticism (and occasional personal ostracism), Schwab insisted that Schmitts ideas were essential for political theory. Schwab not only wrote the first book on Schmitt in English but also provided the first English translation of one Schmitts main works. No matter what one may think of Schmitt, Schwab is owed a debt of gratitude for his persistence.

On the Road to Damascus: The Telos Engagement with Carl Schmitt

We must recognize there is always a threat, always an enemy.… Because there is no such thing as universal peace.… The central function of government is the creation and enforcement of security. —Jon Meacham, “A Case for Optimistic Stoicism”1 Toward the very end of his life, Carl Schmitt was confident that a major discussion of his work was about to begin, lamenting that he would not live to experience it. In 1983, that wishful expectation appeared as overly optimistic as it was improbable that such a discourse would be significantly inspired and accelerated by a leftist intellectual forum in the…

Victimized Memory and Gendered Reality among the Ruins

In 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…

Love, Law, and War: Carl Schmitt's Angst

For decades an array of scholars read Carl Schmitts 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 Schmitts papers over the past decade definitely widened the evidentiary basis for such…

Carl Schmitt as Occasio

Since the 1950s, the phrase “Carl Schmitt: Nein und Ja” was frequently invoked to depict the general outlines of debate over this enigmatic thinker. His interpreters could be broadly divided into those who considered him a brilliant, though perhaps personally flawed, political and legal theorist, and those who condemned him and his works as insidious or inherently dangerous. But the traditional “Nein und Ja” no longer suffices to describe either the tone or the substance of the discussion on Schmitt. In recent years, a significant new dimension has become quite discernible. Instead of being the subject of study and analysis for purposes of either understanding or condemnation, Schmitt and his ideas are increasingly becoming the malleable raw material for advancing the personal, political, or ideological agendas of various writers.