The Grand Inquisitor of Plettenberg: Carl Schmitt and the Specter of Jewish Bolshevism

Abstract: The belated publication of Schmitt's diaries from the years 1912 to 1934 has produced a significant interpretive shift in the way that scholars view the fraught issue of Schmitt's antisemitism. Formerly, commentators often dismissed Schmitt's antisemitism during the Nazi era as "opportunistic" and "insincere." However, because of the antisemitic transgressions that pervade Schmitt's diaries from the pre-Nazi period, the received wisdom has been reversed. Instead, it has become clear that Schmitt's suppression of his antisemitic convictions during the 1910s and 1920s, which allowed for a modus vivendi with a more liberal professional and political culture, was opportunistic. Conversely, with the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Schmitt finally felt free to express his longstanding anti-Jewish animus. This interpretive realignment of Schmitt scholarship suggests that it is worth revisiting Schmitt's formative years in Munich (1915–1922): a period when, in his capacity as a legal advisor to the Bavarian branch of the German General Staff, Schmitt participated in the bloody suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic in April–May 1919. (Reputedly, at one point, Räterepublik troops breached the office where Schmitt was stationed and fatally shot a colleague who was standing next to him.) Postwar Munich was the alembic that spawned the ideologeme "Jewish Bolshevism." (Although many leaders of the Munich Soviet Republic—Gustav Landauer, Eugen Leviné, and Ernst Toller—were Jews, the majority of German Jews firmly rejected this experiment in revolutionary council government). The scholarly monographs that Schmitt published following his release from military service in summer 1919— Dictatorship: From the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to the Proletarian Class Struggle (1921) and Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty (1922)—constituted an intellectual response to the political traumas that he experienced during his posting in revolutionary Munich. For example, Political Theology concludes with an unabashed paean to the idea of counter-revolutionary dictatorship in the work of Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Juan Donoso Cortés. Thereafter, the specter of "Jewish Bolshevism" became a topos that haunted nearly everything that Schmitt thought and wrote.