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vendredi, 29 mai 2015

Heidegger, Revolution und Querfront

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Heidegger, Revolution und Querfront

 Heideggers Denken [2] ist, das erzähle ich jedem der es hören will (und auch allen anderen), unumgänglich für ein echtes Verständnis unsere Zeit und der Aufgabe unseres Lagers. Mit einer gewissen Genugtuung erlebe ich daher den heimlichen, neuerlichen Aufstieg Heideggers zum „geistigen König“ vieler rechtsintellektueller Kreise, der im Moment stattfindet. Dieser Prozess ist oft „subkutan“ und geht tiefer als etwa Dugins offener Makaraismus.

Ich sehe darin manchmal sogar eine „ideen- und seinsgeschichtliche Notwendigkeit“.Was bedeutet aber dieser Prozess, in dem das Erscheinen der schwarzen Hefte nur als „Katalysator“ wirkte, nun für die „akademische“ Bearbeitung Heideggers? Ich glaube: sie zerfällt.

Was bisher als Bruchlinie und innerer Widerspruch bestand, die „Hassliebe“ zu Heidegger, der fast alle wesentlichen Debatten der neueren Philosophie vorweggenommen hat, den man „auf Knien verachtet“ – wird zum Krater. Ein Krater in den viele, die ihre akademischen Karriere auf dem „Nazi-Philosophen“ aufgebaut haben, nun zu stürzen drohen. Verzweifelt versuchen nun einige, die, warum auch immer, Heidegger als Forschungsschwerpunkt gewählt haben, sich am Rand zu halten. Sie tun das meist, indem sie die „Nützlichkeit“ Heideggers für den Gesamtprozess des Fortschritts, der „Emanzipation“, also der Zerstörung aller Kulturen, Völker, Grenzen und Geschichten beteuern.

Ein entlarvendes Indiz dieser Verzweiflung ist seit kurzem im Webblog der Wochenzeitung Jungle World nachzulesen [3]. Zugegeben: es stellt eine „mutige“ Verzweiflung, eine Flucht nach vorne dar, ausgerechnet im Leib und Magenblättchen der antideutschen Poptifa eine Apologie Heideggers zu verfassen und darin sogar – welch Blasphemie –den Gottvater der Kritischen Theorie  Theodor W. Adorno zu kritisieren.

Trotz meiner Sympathie für diesen Versuch und jedes echte, rein philosophische Interesse muß ich in diesem Text klarstellen: Nein. Heideggers Denken ist für das, was heute unter „Emanzipation“ firmiert, für das Projekt des Menschheitsweltstaates und der „befreiten Gesellschaft“, nicht nur unbrauchbar – es ist sein einziger, wahrer und letzter Feind.

Das ehrliche Interesse Christian Schmidts zeigt sich, wenn er Heidegger gegen die plumpen Verdikte jüngster Zeit, sowie gegen Emmanuel Faye und Adorno in Schutz nimmt. Er erkennt die Wurzel des große Unbehagen über und der Hysterie gegen Heidegger in der Ungeheuerlichkeit: „dass Heidegger ein Nazi war und trotzdem einen bedeutsamen Beitrag zur Philosophie geleistet hat. Nationalsozialismus und Geist dürfen einfach nicht zusammengehen.“

Uns ist dieses „Was nicht sein darf, kann nicht sein“ nur allzu bekannt. Ist man beispielsweise erst einmal als Neurechter „enttarnt“, ist ab sofort von vornherein klar, dass man keinerlei echtes philosophisches Interesse an allen Fragen haben, sondern sie nur für sinistre Ideologien „instrumentalisieren“ kann . Fast die gesamt Sekundärliteratur zu Heidegger durchzieht dieser boshaft-neidische Zug, der seinem Denken immer „Strategien“, bewusste „Wortwahlen“, „Taktiken“ etc. unterstellt. Schmidt ist hier eine angenehme Ausnahme. Dieser verdiene eine „ernsthaftere Analyse, als ihn ein rein philologischer Nachweis nationalsozialistischer Motive“.

In seinem Text gelingt ihm so ein tieferer Aufbruch in Heideggers Denken, doch am Ende, sonst wäre er wohl auch nicht in der Jungle World erschienen, wird das gelockerte Denken wieder fest in das „linke“ Politprojekt eingefügt. Das Leitmotiv dazu ist, wie bei fast der gesamten linken Nietzsche und Heidegger Lektüre, eine seltsame Trennung zwischen „Fragen und Denken“, zwischen Kritik und Anregung, Destruktion und Konstruktion sowie revolutionären und konservativen Momenten. Doch ich greife vor.

„Heidegger war ein Denker der Revolution, des Umbruchs und sogar der Freiheit.“ Er antwortet „auf Fragen, die sich auch linken Konzeptionen einer Überwindung des Kapitalismus stellen.“ , so stellt es Schmidt provokant in einen Raum, den er von Heidegger-Hassern besetzt weiß. Seit den Schwarzen Heften hat sich hier die Sprache sogar verschärft. Heideggers Denken ist „kontaminiert“, „entstellt“, „erledigt“, „unvertretbar“. Es verweise wie das „Winterhilfswerk auf die Gaskammern“ (Scheit/Gruber, 13, 2014). Man scheint nur einen Fußbreit vom Autodafé entfernt. Wie will Schmidt hier dagegen halten?

Er greift Heideggers Konzept der „Zuhandenheit“ auf, das  in seiner „Fundamentalontologie“ in Sein und Zeit als wesentlich für das menschliche Dasein ist. Die uns umgebenden Dinge verstehen wir, indem wir sie gebrauchen, im Vollzug und in ihrem gegenseitigen Verweisungszusammenhang. In dieser „ontischen“ Erfahrung von dem was als Seiendes alltäglich erleb- und persönlich nachvollziehbar ist, muss nach Heidegger jede „große“ philosophische Frage immer neu ansetzen. Es geht um ein Primat der „Erfahrung“, die Offenheit für das Phänomen, in der Heidegger auch seinem eigenen geistigen Ahnherren Husserl treu blieb.

Schmidt sieht diesen Ansatz scheinbar als eine Art Mittel gegen den Verblendungszusammenhang und die Verdinglichung bestimmter sozialer Strukturen und Rollen, sowie politischer und ökonomischer Ordnungen. Wie Nietzsches genealogische Kritik (Foucault hat das auf den Punkt gebracht), so soll Heideggers „ontisch-ontologische“ Kritik also dazu dienen, die Gewordenheit und Veränderbarkeit der Verhältnisse zu erkennen, was einen Bruch ihrer blinde Reproduktion ermöglicht. Damit die „Revolution“ nicht ihre Kinder frisst, damit nicht nur ein König den anderen ersetzt, muss es eine fundamentale Kritik der Verhältnisse geben, zu der Schmidt Heideggers Denken fruchtbar machen will. Das Ausgehen vom Ontischen, vom Vollzug und der Existenz, kann so gefestigte Formen auflockern, die Kokonstitutivität von Mensch und Umwelt, Einzelnem und Gesellschaft erkennbar machen und, frei nach Marx die Verhältnisse „zum Tanzen bringen“. Schmidts Ansatz, den ich hier etwas „ausgemalt“ habe, ist bis hierhin zuzustimmen.

Auch Heideggers NS-Engagement ist als „philosophisch-revolutionärer Akt“ gegen eine alte bürgerlich-metaphysische Geisteswelt durchwegs richtig interpretiert. Dieser Beweggrund zeigt sich gerade in seiner Enttäuschung am bornierten Rassenbiologismus der Nazis.

Schmidts Beschreibung von Heideggers „seinsgeschichtlichem Antisemitismus“ scheint mir hingegen etwas verkürzt. Heideggers Seinsgeschichte, in der Schmidt ihn – gleich Hegel – Völkern bestimmte Rollen zuschreiben sieht, ist meiner Ansicht nach eher seine spätere Revision eines gewissen „Germanozentrismus“, und einer auf das Dasein fokussierten „Ungeschichtlichkeit“. Ich sehe hier, ähnlich wie Peter Trawny, ein tieferes „philosophisches“ Problem in der Grundfrage von Tat und Denken, von „historischer Rolle“ und der Überwindung des Historismus vorliegen, das einer seperaten Betrachtung bedürfte.

Schmidt sieht Heideggers Fazit aus dem NS in einer Art des „antitotalitären“ Fragens, welches am konkret-gesellschaftlichen ansetzt und auch „abwegigen Fragestellungen“ Raum gibt. Damit sei Heideggers Nützlichkeit für eine „befreite Gesellschaft“ vor allem in einer Art Idolatrieverbot zu sehen. Die „Undarstellbarkeit“ der Utopie und der befreiten Gesellschaft, im Hier und Jetzt, wäre so in Heideggers „Warnen und Wehren“, in seinem Hüten des Seins als eine Art blochsches Hoffnungsprinzip, als negative Utopie aufgehoben.

So schön das anmutet: es ist einfach falsch. Ja, Heideggers Denken ist eine Bewahrung des „Anderen“, des Ungedachten, des „Nichts“ als eines offenen, weiten Raums der Möglichkeit. Er ist ein Aufhalter, eine Wächter gegen die imperialistische Vernunft und die totalitäre Aufklärung. Doch das, was in diesem Raum liegt, ist NICHT als „befreite Gesellschaft“ vorgezeichnet, wie Schmidt es trotz aller beteuerter Offenheit voraussetzt. (Und Heideggers Dasein, möchte man gegen Satre ergänzend hinzufügen, ist NICHT die „Menschheit“.)

Heideggers spätes „mystisches“ Denken ist nicht von seinem frühen kritischen Fragen zu trennen. Die revolutionäre „Jemeinigkeit“ des Daseins, die jede Wahrheit in die Relation seiner Lebenspraxis stellt, ist untrennbar mit der Frage nach dem Sein und der Offenheit für jenes Geheimnis verbunden, dessen Alleinbesitz auch der Marxismus ideologisch behauptet. Die Rezeption Nietzsches und Heideggers in der Linken ist hier meist schwerst schizophren und versucht, das „kritisch-emanzipatorische“ aus dem ganzen Rest des Denkens zu destillieren.

Wo Nietzsche als fröhlicher Wissenschaftler genealogisch alle Werte als Prägungen und Setzungen entlarvt und das Hohelied der Vielfalt singt, ist er gut genug. Wo er aber genau dieses Setzen, die Exklusivität und das Sonderrecht bejaht, gar den Polemos und die Tragik preist und als Zarathustra neue Werttafeln verkündet, wird er geflissentlich ignoriert. Heideggers radikale, für mich unüberbietbare Kritik wird ebenso gehört und soll ebenso „fruchtbar“ gemacht werden, wo er aber glasklar gegen jedes sozialistisch-marxistische Fortschritts-Projekt einer Befriedung und „Befreiung“ der Welt spricht – wird er ebenso verleugnet.

Hier mutet besonders seltsam an, dass Schmidt gerade an die Zuhandenheit der Dinge und die Wahrheit als Offenbarkeit des Vorhanden „kommunistisch“ andocken will. Geht Heidegger doch in der Analyse „menschlicher Praxis“ viel tiefer als Marx. Dieser bleibt, egal wie flexibel ihn die geistige Verrenkung neuerer linker Lektüre verbiegt, letztlich an einer Grenze stehen: Es ist der „Humanismus“ und in dessen Gefolge der „Gebrauchswert“ der Dinge für den Menschen und seinen „quälbaren Leib“, die Vernutzung und Anpassung der Natur für seine Bedürfnisse. In Marxens zutiefst modernem Denken lässt sich kein unantastbarer Eigenbereich der Dinge, Menschen, Völker, Kulturen und der Erde aufrechterhalten. „Zwischentöne sind Krampf im Klassenkampf“– so platzt der doofer Agitprop mit der tiefen Wahrheit des ganzen Projekts heraus.

Die „Illusion der Technikeuphorie“ die Schmidt kritisiert, ist in „Sowjetmacht + Elektrifizierung“ nicht nur „collateral damage“, sondern Essenz des marxistischen Projekts. Man will als Abkömmling der Aufklärung den Menschen vom „Naturzwang“ befreien. Den „Menschen“? Was man im Grunde „befreien“ will, ist das Hirngespinst des nackten cartesianischen Subjekts aus allen, wirklichen ethno-kulturell gewachsenen, geschlechtlichen „Hüllen“. Im Namen eines totalen Egalitarismus, indem sich mit allen „Ungleichheiten“ konsequenterweise auch Zeit, Grenzen, Freiheit und Identität auflösen müssen.

Gleichheit und Freiheit sind „dialektisch“, wie bereits Horkheimer wusste. Dabei sind die Linken selbst geistig unfrei. Ihr Denken speist sich noch „von der Flamme Platos“, Paulus, Descartes und Bacons. Sie hängen der Illusion eines „versöhnten Subjekts“ und einer idealen Welt an, die seit Nietzsche und Heidegger unhintergehbar „tot“ ist. Ihr denken ist, wie Gianni Vattimo schreibt, „noch immer in Bezug auf eine mögliche ‚vollkommene‘, letzte, ganzheitliche, Anwesenheit des Seins (auch wenn sie, wie in der negativen Dialektik Adornos, oder im Utopismus Blochs, diese Vollkommenheit lediglich als regluatives Ideal begreift)“, gerichtet. Es „riskiert damit, uns überhaupt nicht zu befreien.“ (Gianni Vattimo,“Jenseits des Subjekts“, S. 34)

Aus ihrer geistigen Ohnmacht und ihrem Versagen, dessen schlechtes Gewissen sich in Amokläufen gegen die „Nazis“, die „Saboteure“ der heilen Welt von Zeit zu Zeit Luft macht, sprießt der Wildwuchs des postmodernen Denkens. (Ein gewisser „Ekel“ vor diesem, sowie ein bestimmter „elitärer Zug“, der sich in besserem Mode/Musik-Geschmack niederschlägt, ist vielleicht das, was antideutschen Linken und Neuen Rechten gemein ist.) Man muss es Leuten wie Schmidt beinhart ins Gesicht sagen: Eure „freie Assoziation der Individuen“ im „Ende der Geschichte“ ist genau das, was sich heute im Gestell einer vernetzten Betonwelt zeigt, in deren wuchernden „Nicht-Orten“ (Augé) die „Nichtmenschen“, Charaktermasken des Kapitals grassieren. Es ist eure Welt! Ihr habt sie erschaffen, nicht wir.

heid83465038146.jpgIhr habt „den Krieg gewonnen“, habt „gesiegt“. Ihr habt alle kulturellen, geistigen und metapolitischen Machtzentren inne – und wohin habt ihr uns gebracht? Eure epochale Ohnmacht gegenüber Positivismus, Kapitalismus, Liberalismus und eure postmodernen Zerfransungen, die Routine gewordene, aktivistische „Gesellschaftskritik“, die keine Sau interessiert – all das beweist: Ihr lebt in einer ideologischen Nische des Empires (Negri & Hardt), werdet von ihm alimentiert und habt euch damit zurecht gefunden. Heidegger gehört euch nicht, weil ihr seine wahre Botschaft und Kritik nicht hören wollt: darin nämlich, worauf sie, über das Kritisierte hinweg, verweist: das Ungedachte. Das Kommende, das oft gerade von dort her kommt, wo das Heute nur Chaos, Wahnsinn, Bosheit und Krankheit sieht.

Es ist vielleicht gar nicht schlecht, wenn die “Schwarzen Hefte“ Heidegger aus einer falschen Eingemeindung „freigesprengt“ haben, selbst wenn darunter die „neutrale“, akademische Bearbeitung seiner Texte leidet. Heideggers Denken ist mit dem politischen und moralischen Betrieb, in den sich das akademischen Philosophieren eingereiht hat, sowieso unvereinbar.

Wer aus Heidegger „tooltips“ zur „befreiten Gesellschaft“ herausliest, zeigt auch, wie man Heidegger nicht lesen sollte. Das Erscheinen eines solchen Artikels in der Jungle World ist aber dennoch positiv zu werten. Wieder sehe ich hierin ein Indiz für eine seltsame, tektonische Plattenverschiebung des Denkens.

Die Verhältnisse geraten aus den Fugen. Doch nicht nur in der „Tiefe“ der Geistesgeschichte: Deutsche Pegidisten feiern mit russischen Nachtwölfen den 8./9. Mai, antideutsche Linke feiern den US-Imperialismus, Rechte und Linke konvertieren zum Islam, und ein Türke ist der lauteste Patriot Deutschlands. Politische Identitäten verfließen.

00:05 Publié dans Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : heidegger, martin heidegger, philosophie, allemagne | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

mardi, 19 mai 2015

Lo Zollverein come strumento economico di unificazione della Germania

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Lo Zollverein come strumento economico di unificazione della Germania

di Domenico Caldaralo

Ex: http://www.geopolitica-rivista.org

Il dibattito storiografico degli ultimi secoli sul ruolo dello Zollverein, ovvero dell’Unione doganale tedesca portata a termine su impulso dello Stato prussiano, è stato orientato a due filoni interpretativi. Un primo, espresso sul finire dell’Ottocento da Heinrich von Treitschke, ha visto nell’Unione doganale il primo passo verso l’unificazione tedesca (tesi sostanzialmente sostenuta anche da John Murphy ai giorni nostri), mentre un secondo, in contrasto con questa ipotesi, risalente alle interpretazioni di Alan John Percival Taylor e Martin Kitchen, ha rinvenuto nelle mosse della Prussia delle motivazioni inizialmente economiche e solo in un secondo tempo politiche, esaltando i risvolti economici. Oggi il dibattito storico-economico sembra enfatizzare piuttosto «i vantaggi fiscali derivanti dalle economie di scala all’interno dell’amministrazione doganale».

La creazione dello Zollverein trova i suoi antecedenti nelle riforme ultimate nel 1818 quando la Prussia stabilì un nuovo regime tariffario, armonizzando la struttura doganale interna ai propri territori che includevano enclave e altri piccoli Stati. Per dieci anni queste riforme avevano garantito benefici finanziari, avevano favorito una più libera circolazione delle merci e consentito di raggiungere l’unione doganale del paese. Portate a termine dal Ministro delle Finanze prussiano Friedrich Von Motz (1825-1830), le riforme di liberalizzazione condotte dal governo prussiano furono alla base della successiva creazione dello Zollverein. Tra gli ispiratori dell’Unione doganale vi fu l’economista Freidrich List. Già nel 1819, intervenuto in qualità di capo dell’Unione dei mercanti al Bundestag tedesco (il parlamento della Confederazione con sede a Francoforte), così si pronunciava:

«Le numerose barriere doganali bloccano il commercio interno e producono gli stessi effetti degli ostacoli che impediscono la libera circolazione del sangue. I mercanti che commerciano tra Amburgo e l’Austria, o Berlino o la Svizzera devono attraversare dieci Stati, devono apprendere dieci tariffe doganali, devono pagare dieci successive quote di transito. Chiunque viva al confine tra tre o quattro Stati è ancora più sfortunato, spendendo i suoi giorni tra ostili esattori fiscali e ufficiali della dogana. È un uomo senza patria».

Dopo la liberalizzazione del mercato prussiano, l’Unione doganale tedesca avrebbe conseguito, stavolta su scala regionale, l’abolizione delle tariffe di transito tra un Paese e l’altro (con una consistente riduzione dei costi di trasporto delle merci) e l’implementazione di una sola tariffa esterna per i non membri. Oltre a consentire una uniformazione progressiva di pesi e misure tra i Paesi che ne sarebbero entrati a far parte e una liberalizzazione dei commerci, avrebbe garantito la riscossione dei dazi esterni e la condivisione delle entrate doganali (in base alla popolazione degli Stati), creando le condizioni per un mercato integrato. Ma la conseguenza più importante doveva essere un impatto evidente e forte sulla crescita economica, sulla convergenza dei prezzi e sull’industrializzazione della Germania (“precondizioni” e successivo take-off o big spurt industriale). Quest’ultima è collocabile cronologicamente in coincidenza con l’implementazione dell’Unione doganale, tra gli anni Trenta e Quaranta e l’inizio della grande depressione del 1873 o al più tardi avvertibile secondo W.W. Rostow dal 1850, processo alla fine del quale il Paese poteva affacciarsi come potenza economica sullo scenario mondiale. David Landes ha così efficacemente sintetizzato l’impatto della creazione dello Zollverein sul commercio in Germania:

«Riguardo alla domanda, l’unificazione interna dei mercati nazionali fu sostanzialmente completata nell’Europa occidentale con la formazione dello Zollverein tedesco: le lunghe file di carri che nel gelo della notte di Capodanno del 1834 aspettavano l’apertura delle barriere doganali erano una prova eloquente delle nuove possibilità che si aprivano insieme ad esse».

L’allargamento dello Zollverein

L’allargamento dell’Unione doganale procedette per assimilazione dei singoli Stati a partire da un embrione di Paesi costituenti un ristretto mercato allargato. Quando nel 1827, senza che si fosse giunti ancora all’inizio formale dell’Unione doganale, l’Assia-Durmstadt strinse accordi tariffari con la Prussia, l’influenza economica di quest’ultima era già una realtà di fatto. L’intesa, poi concretizzatasi nell’unione tariffaria nel 1828, costituì il primo accordo doganale della Prussia con un vasto Stato della Confederazione tedesca, andando a costituire la “zona core” all’interno del futuro Zollverein.

Questo primo nucleo doganale iniziava a minare la stessa filosofia della Confederazione germanica, che era concepita come perpetuazione dello status quo in Germania, mentre una unione doganale condotta da un Paese egemone contribuiva a stravolgere l’ordine uscito dal Congresso di Vienna. Il peso politico, più che commerciale o economico, di questo accordo fu chiaro in quanto non comportava vantaggi sul lato prussiano, quanto su quello dell’Arciducato d’Assia. Tale accordo, tuttavia, rappresentava una sorta di ingresso dell’antico Langraviato nel “sistema politico” della Prussia.

L’anno dell’intesa con l’Assia-Darmstadt fu anche l’anno della reazione alle manovre prussiane di un congruo numero Stati della Germania centrale, che nel settembre 1828 addivennero ad un accordo formale per un’area di commercio alternativa, nata con finalità difensive rispetto a quella messa in atto dalla Prussia. Più che un’area di libero scambio, la Mittledeutcher Handelsverein (siglata inizialmente tra Hannover, Sassonia, Assia-Kassel e le città libere di Brema e Francoforte sul Meno) nasceva come un trattato che impegnava gli Stati aderenti a non prendere parte ad altre unioni doganali prima della fine del 1834, data nella quale l’accordo tra Prussia, Assia e Darmstadt si sarebbe concluso e, inoltre, a non innalzare barriere doganali contro gli Stati membri. Essa era animata sostanzialmente dall’obiettivo di forzare il regno prussiano ad avviare trattative multilaterali con i potenziali Paesi aderenti al proprio blocco.

Egemonie contese

Gli statisti prussiani sospettarono l’Austria di essere dietro i tentativi di sovvertire la propria unione doganale per tramite della Mittledeutcher Handelsverein. Nelle parole rivolte al Ministro degli Affari Esteri dal ministro delle Finanze prussiano Friederich Von Maltzen, l’unione di Stati centrali tedeschi appariva «favorita e promossa dall’Austria». Veniva agitato il sospetto delle macchinazioni del rivale asburgico finalizzate a far deflagrare il progetto di unione doganale allargata. Tale convinzione si fece strada presso le alte sfere dell’amministrazione prussiana e subito ne fu informata la corte: «l’Austria era dietro l’unione doganale della Germania centrale».

Per quanto dietro le iniziative prussiane non vi fosse l’esplicita intenzione di scalzare l’egemonia austriaca all’interno della Confederazione, l’unificazione economica fatta a spese dell’Austria avrebbe consentito alla Prussia di conseguire proprio questo obiettivo. D’altra parte non minore peso avevano i timori, ancora vivi al tempo, di un’invasione francese. La Prussia coltivava l’intenzione di compattare gli Stati minori della Confederazione attorno a sé contro un’eventuale minaccia francese, ma per far questo, doveva ridurre il peso politico dell’Austria, quindi i condizionamenti e le influenze austriache su questi Paesi (specie quelli vicini della Germania meridionale). I Prussiani, dal canto loro, affermavano che la loro politica si esprimeva in conformità alla Legge federale della Confederazione Tedesca (art. 19), che invitava gli Stati tedeschi ad avviare contatti intorno ad una armonizzazione doganale finalizzata a comuni interessi commerciali. L’Austria non poteva che nutrire invece ostilità verso il trattato prussiano con l’Assia-Darmstadt. In un certo senso la Prussia era ricambiata nella propria ostilità verso l’impero austriaco.

Per quanto riguarda la minaccia rappresentata dalla Francia, ben prima della rivoluzione di luglio del 1830, che sembrò riproporre scenari vecchi di almeno trent’anni, i timori per le ambizioni francesi sul Reno erano abbastanza diffusi. Gli uomini di Stato che gettarono le basi per la successiva unione della Germania per mezzo dello Zollverein, apparivano ossessionati dalla paura di una Germania debole e divisa contro un potere monoblocco francese. Friedrich List guardava proprio alla Francia come modello di coesione doganale e unità politica. I burocrati prussiani dell’epoca della Germania post-napoleonica, che lavorarono alacremente per creare l’Unione doganale prussiana, animati da una profonda francofobia, provenivano per la maggior parte dal servizio nell’amministrazione svolta ai tempi dell’impero napoleonico (Motz aveva servito in Vestfalia sotto Girolamo Bonaparte). Gli eventi di luglio avrebbero spinto a mettere da parte le acrimonie con gli Asburgo e a un temporaneo riavvicinamento con l’Austria, al quale appariva disposta la monarchia Hohenzollern (nel 1830, come nel 1866, quando Guglielmo I tentò di evitare la guerra con l’Austria).

L’eversione dell’unione doganale centrale

Riguardo la sfida rappresentata dall’unione doganale centrale, i burocrati prussiani meditarono, al fine di contrastarla, financo la guerra economica e la riconsiderazione dei rapporti con alcuni Stati facenti parte di essa, in particolare l’Hannover (dietro il quale v’era il sostegno inglese) e l’Assia-Kassel. La Prussia considerava tale unione, per citare le parole del diplomatico e uomo di Stato prussiano d’origine danese Albrecht von Bernstorff, alla stregua di un “aggregato di interessi” ostile.

Nel tentativo di sfilare membri importanti dall’unione rivale, la Prussia perseguiva una strategia di contatti bilaterali, stabilendo trattative esclusive con il Paese candidato a entrare nella propria area commerciale. Era la stessa strategia di contatti seguita con l’Assia Darmstadt nel 1828. Facendo ciò essa rifiutava di avviare negoziazioni multilaterali, esercitando tutto il proprio peso politico ed economico e la propria superiorità in termini di persuasione diplomatica nei riguardi di ogni singolo Stato potenziale aderente. Questa metodologia fu utilizzata per spingere l’Assia-Kassel, incastonata tra i possedimenti prussiani occidentali e orientali, ad abbandonare l’Unione centrale e aderire al blocco prussiano, passaggio che si concretizzò nel 1831, consentendo ai Prussiani di realizzare la saldatura tra province divise territorialmente.

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Il Ministro delle Finanze prussiano, del resto, era ben consapevole del forte legame che univa l’integrazione economica ad una possibile futura unità politica della Germania. Nelle sue memorie Motz sottolineava:

«È una verità politica che importazioni, esportazioni, strumenti di transito sono il risultato delle divisioni politiche (tra gli Stati tedeschi, ndt), e ciò è vero, perciò anche l’inverso è altrettanto vero, cioè che l’unificazione di questi Stati in una unione tariffaria e commerciale può condurre ad una unificazione in un unico e medesimo sistema politico».

Al fine di concretizzare queste aspirazioni, Motz, Bernstorff (che espresse le medesime posizioni in un memorandum, Denkschrift, del 1831) e gli altri statisti prussiani si adoperano per l’ingresso nello Zollverein della Baviera-Wurttemberg, costituitasi unione doganale propria nel 1827-1828, che fu avviato sin dopo il primo ingresso dell’Assia-Durmstadt. Al 1828 risalgono i primi negoziati segreti e nel 1829 avvenne la firma di un importante accordo commerciale che includeva la creazione di una rete di strade. Nel 1833, l’anno prima dell’entrata in funzione dello Zollverein, Baviera, Wurttemberg, Assia-Hesse entrano a far parte dell’Unione doganale prussiana. Le prime due aderirono grazie a laute concessioni, tra cui la possibilità di stringere accordi con Stati stranieri. La Prussia, benché conseguisse l’adesione formale di questi Stati fondamentali sul piano geopolitico, tuttavia incorporava un rischio concreto di futura scissione e di cambio di fronte, soprattutto con riferimento alla Baviera e al Wurttemberg (e che rimarrà vivo fino alla vigilia della guerra franco-prussiana).

L’ingresso della Baviera infatti è importante non tanto per ragioni economiche, quanto politiche e militari. Solo «in alleanza con la Baviera il fianco della Prussia renana dalla bocca della Saar di Bingen può essere adeguatamente difeso contro la Francia», scrive Motz nelle sue memorie. Complici i sommovimenti rivoluzionari del 1830 in Francia e Paesi Bassi, il rischio infatti di un intervento francese a sostegno dei focolai in Sassonia e Assia-Kassel appariva reale dopo le dichiarazioni pronunciate dal diplomatico Hector Mortier in merito al fatto che la Francia non avrebbe potuto ignorare le attività rivoluzionarie lungo il Reno.

L’istituzione formale dello Zollverein

Gli eventi della rivoluzione di luglio spinsero la Prussia ad accelerare il processo di consolidamento dell’Unione doganale, ferma a un formale trattato commerciale con gli Stati meridionali. Dopo due anni di pausa nelle trattative, nel 1831 le negoziazioni furono riaperte dal nuovo Ministro delle Finanze Karl Georg von Maassen (1830-1834). Nel 1833 infine (22 marzo) fu firmato il trattato con cui nasceva lo Zollverein, che sarebbe entrato in vigore il 1° gennaio dell’anno dopo. L’atto successivo dell’allargamento dello Zollverein fu l’intesa raggiunta due mesi dopo con la Sassonia e i principati della Turingia, con i quali furono stipulati trattati che mettevano un punto decisivo alla entrata in funzione dell’Unione doganale. L’adesione della Baviera-Wurttemberg svincolava la Sassonia dalla partecipazione alla Mittledeutcher Handelsverein, che infatti abbandonava in favore dell’altra unione.

Dopo l’istituzione formale, il coinvolgimento del Baden fu il passaggio immediatamente successivo del suo consolidamento. Posto all’intersezione tra Francia, Svizzera e il resto degli Stati tedeschi, il Granducato costituiva una porta d’accesso fondamentale per i commerci, rimasta isolata dopo l’adesione di Baviera e Wuerttemberg. Lo stesso accadde ad altri due importanti Stati assiani, Nassau e la libera città di Francoforte, i cui timori per un completo isolamento dai mercati tedeschi avevano portato a sottoscrivere un accordo commerciale con la Francia nel 1835, però poi annullato a beneficio della partecipazione allo Zollverein nel dicembre dello stesso anno.

In particolare la città di Francoforte subiva esternalità negative dalla adesione di Nassau, perdendo lo sbocco alla regione renana. Il fattore dell’economia esterna riveste una importanza fondamentale nel processo di smottamento degli Stati tedeschi verso l’unificazione commerciale con la Prussia. La Prussia e gli Stati settentrionali detenevano un altro vantaggio competitivo rispetto alle controparti meridionali. Essi, potendo contare sui porti di sblocco aperti ai mercati internazionali, subivano esternalità inferiori rispetto ai mercati meridionali resi asfittici dalla chiusura loro contrapposta dal blocco dello Zollverein. Ciò consentiva agli Stati tedeschi settentrionali (riuniti nella Confederazione tedesca del Nord nel 1866) di ridurre le tariffe di importazione e potenziare le rotte verso il Baltico e il Mare del Nord.

Come reazione allo Zollverein, Hannover e Brunswick, dopo la fine dell’Unione doganale centrale, conclusero una propria unione doganale nel 1834-1835, denominata Steuerverein (Unione fiscale), alla quale prese parte l’Oldenburg nel 1836. Essa ebbe fine quando il Brunswick, per rompere anch’esso l’isolamento, optò per l’adesione allo Zollverein (1842), seguito dall’Hannover (legato in unione personale con l’Inghilterra) e dall’Oldemburg nel 1851 e nel 1852, che contribuirono alla saldatura ulteriore delle province prussiane scollegate. I rimanenti Stati tedeschi non ancora inglobati furono annessi dopo la guerra austro-prussiana del 1866 (Meclemburgo e Lubecca) o cedettero infine alle pressioni della nuova entità imperiale costituita a Versailles nel 1871, come nel caso di Amburgo e Brema (1888).

Il ruolo degli Stati circonvicini

Austria e Francia operarono scarso impegno, dovuto anche a fattori geografici, economici e a blanda volontà politica, nel contrastare la politica di espansione doganale prussiana. La Francia mantenne sempre alte le tariffe doganali impedendo l’ingresso di merci tedesche, ma così facendo contribuiva ad accrescere diseconomie in quegli Stati rimasti esclusi dallo Zollverein e che avrebbero avuto bisogno di mercati di sbocco. Anche l’Austria, sebbene supportasse l’Unione degli Stati centrali, perseguì sempre una politica accomodante verso la Prussia che finì per agevolarne i disegni. Sebbene avesse stabilito un accordo commerciale con lo Zollverein nel 1853, e il Ministro delle Finanze austriaco Karl Ludwig von Bruck (1855-1860), avesse proposto l’adesione dell’impero asburgico nella sua interezza nello Zollverein, tale iniziativa incontrò l’opposizione di alcuni gruppi di interesse nell’impero (produttori di ghisa e cotone), timorosi della politica di basse tariffe praticata dai Prussiani. Un nuovo tentativo di ingresso nel 1865 fu infine anch’esso respinto, ma l’Austria riuscì comunque a ritagliarsi un ruolo di nazione privilegiata negli scambi con l’Unione.

L’Austria, un Paese dalla crescita economica debole alla metà del secolo se paragonata a quella prussiana, aveva già tuttavia conseguito una sorta di unione doganale interna, armonizzando le tariffe tra Austria e Ungheria. Essa però non era pronta ad essere accettata dagli Stati di media grandezza dello Zollverein, che avevano attuato politiche di condivisione delle entrate con la Prussia. Essi erano disposti ad accettare una primazia dell’Austria nel Bundestag, non nello Zollverein.

La Danimarca, soccombente nella guerra con la Prussia nel 1864, il Belgio (separatosi dai Paesi Bassi nel 1830) che non impedì il passaggio del Lussemburgo (sotto la sovranità olandese) nello Zollverein nel 1842, dopo aver tentato esso stesso un’associazione dopo il 1840 (fallita per l’opposizione francese) e la Svizzera, la cui neutralità assoluta era stata sancita a Vienna nel 1815, non compirono alcuno sforzo per contrastare i piani prussiani, se non altro per il loro scarso peso economico e politico.

Conclusioni

L’Unione doganale tedesca servì dunque, immediatamente dopo il conseguimento dell’indipendenza dalla Francia, come strumento della Prussia per affrancarsi dal suo dominio e per legare a sé gli Stati disposti a Nord del Meno, al fine di inibire la minaccia dell’egemonia francese (obiettivo che si pose lo stesso “sistema bismarckiano” di alleanze europeo). L’impatto della politica economica di armonizzazione tra i regimi tariffari, incentivata dalla spinta ad aprirsi a mercati nuovi (o a vie rimaste precluse dalla barriera dello Zollverein) ebbe ricadute inevitabilmente politiche, pesando sull’assetto degli Stati confederali e spingendo a una loro sempre più forte coesione. Infine, una volta estromessa definitivamente l’Austria come potenza gravitante attorno alla Confederazione, formalmente abolita, lo Zollverein esaurì il suo ruolo, venendo inglobato nella neonata struttura federale imperiale.

NOTE:

Domenico Caldaralo è laureando in Scienze storiche e della documentazione storica presso l’Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro”.


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lundi, 18 mai 2015

Nicolás Gómez Dávila – Parteigänger verlorener Sachen

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Veranstaltung:

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Donnerstag, 28. Mai 2015, 19 Uhr: Buchvorstellung

Till Kinzel, Paderborn

Nicolás Gómez Dávila – Parteigänger verlorener Sachen

 

tilldavila.jpgDer Kolumbianer Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) bezeichnete sich selbst als »Reaktionär«. Sein Denken ist ein Gegenentwurf zur Neuzeit und Aufklärung. Gómez Dávila stellt alles auf den Prüfstand, was manchem Zeitgenossen lieb und teuer geworden ist. »Automatismen demontieren« kann daher als ein Motto seines Denkens gelten. Zweifellos gehört der Autor zu den bedeutenden politischen Theologen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Daß sein Werk lange Zeit nur einem kleinen Kreis zugänglich gewesen ist, liegt vor allem daran, daß Gómez Dávila sich nie besonders um die Verbreitung gekümmert hat. In den letzten Jahren erleben seine Werke aber immer größere Beachtung.

 

Das 2003 erstmals erschienene Buch von Till Kinzel ist die bis heute einzige Monographie über den lateinamerikanischen Denker. Nun legt der Autor eine stark erweiterte Auflage seines Buches vor, mit dem er alle Zusammenhänge des Denkens von Gómez Dávila beleuchtet. »Lesen heißt einen Stoß erhalten, einen Schlag spüren, auf ein Hindernis treffen«, so Gómez Dávila in seinem Werk »Notas«. Wer die Gedankenwelt des großen Philosophen begreifen möchte, kommt an dieser Monographie nicht vorbei.

 

Dr. Till Kinzel studierte von 1988 bis 1997 an der Technischen Universität Berlin. 1996 legte er sein Staatsexamen in Alter Geschichte ab. 2001 wurde er mit einer Arbeit zur Platonischen Kulturkritik in Amerika promoviert. 2005 habilitierte er sich für Neuere Englische und Amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft. Er hat an der TU Berlin, der Universität Paderborn und der TU Braunschweig gelehrt.

vendredi, 15 mai 2015

Le national-bolchevisme remis à l’endroit

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Le national-bolchevisme remis à l’endroit

par Georges FELTIN-TRACOL

 

Depuis la chute du Mur de Berlin, le 9 novembre 1989, et la disparition du bloc soviétique en 1990 – 91, le national-bolchevisme soulève un engouement réel au sein de certaines franges des « droites radicales » tant en France qu’en Italie. Collaborateur à la revue socialiste révolutionnaire-européenne Rébellion, Franck Canorel entend replacer cet ensemble d’idées méconnu dans son contexte historique initial.

 

Il ne faut pas se méprendre sur le titre de l’essai quelque peu réducteur. L’ouvrage ne traite pas que de Harro Schulze-Boysen qui, par anti-nazisme militant, collabora au réseau d’espionnage soviétique implanté dans le Reich, baptisé « L’Orchestre rouge ». Franck Canorel veut surtout retracer la généalogie politique du courant national-bolchevik en Allemagne. Il rappelle qu’il résulte du choc conjoint de la révolution bolchevique russe de 1917 et du traumatisme psychologique de l’armistice de 1918. Malgré des tentatives de républiques soviétiques qui échouent rapidement outre-Rhin et « face à l’appétit de la France et de l’Angleterre, certains militants communistes considèrent l’Allemagne comme un pays dominé : il faut donc le libérer. Ce contexte favorise l’émergence à Hambourg d’un courant national-communiste (p. 11) ».

 

En dépit d’une proximité sémantique, national-communisme et national-bolchevisme ne sont pas synonymes, même si Lénine et autres responsables soviétiques condamnent très tôt ce « gauchisme nationaliste ». Activistes à Hambourg et inventeurs du national-communisme, Heinrich Laufenberg et Fritz Wolffheim parviennent à fonder une Ligue des communistes bien vite entravée par les militants du K.P.D. Cette méfiance persistante n’empêche toutefois pas une coordination de facto avec des mouvements nationalistes lors de l’occupation de la Ruhr par les troupes franco-belges si bien que des nationalistes découvrent l’Ostorientierung et en viennent à réclamer une alliance avec l’U.R.S.S. de Staline.

 

L’auteur souligne l’apport intellectuel considérable de deux grands théoriciens. Le premier est le véritable théoricien du national-bolchevisme. En effet, Ernst Niekisch « plaide pour une orientation vers les “ valeurs primitives ” de l’Est, “ le retrait de l’économie mondiale ”, la “ restriction des importations de l’industrie des vainqueurs de Versailles ”, “ la création de barrières tarifaires élevées ”, “ l’emploi des jeunes dans les activités agricoles, la construction des routes, etc. ” et “ un style de vie simple ” (p. 30) ». Le second, au profil plus surprenant puisqu’il s’agit du chef de file des « jeunes-conservateurs », se nomme Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Traducteur de Dostoïevski et attiré par la civilisation russe, Moeller van den Bruck est principalement connu pour son essai politique, Le Troisième Reich (1923) qui aurait pu s’appeler Le troisième point de vue ou La Troisième Voie.

 

« Même si le romantisme qui sous-tend l’Ostorientierung amène nombre d’entre eux à idéaliser l’U.R.S.S. (p. 27) », certains militants nationalistes n’en tirent pas moins des conclusions géopolitiques novatrices en proposant l’entente avec Moscou. C’est dans ce vivier romantique politique qu’émergent bientôt « des nationalistes anti-N.S.D.A.P., qui vomissent la bourgeoisie allemande, [qui] poussent leur engagement jusqu’à prendre fait et cause pour l’U.R.S.S (p. 37) ». leur ouverture d’esprit ne se focalise pas que vers l’Est. Maints d’entre eux s’intéressent aux débats français. Ainsi, Harro Schulze-Boysen se sent-il en affinité avec la revue non-conformiste réaliste française Plans de Philippe Lamour. Par ailleurs, Schulze-Boysen accueille dans ses colonnes les contributions de Niekisch et d’autres futurs opposants nationaux-révolutionnaires à Hitler.

 

Franck Canorel en profite pour rectifier quelques légendes propres à accroître la confusion. La « scission de gauche du N.S.D.A.P. » réalisée par les frères Strasser, rapidement qualifiés de représentants éminents du national-bolchevisme en Allemagne, n’est en rien un départ ordonné et réfléchi de nationaux-bolcheviks : « mysticisme, impérialisme teinté de romantisme chevaleresque, vitalisme, biologisme völkisch : en clair, la “ révolution allemande ” qu’appellent de leurs vœux les strasseriens n’est rien d’autre que la mise en pratique, sous une forme condensée, des idées réactionnaires qui avaient cours au siècle passé en Allemagne (p. 33) ».

 

L’auteur s’afflige en outre de la pauvreté des travaux non allemands traitant de son sujet. « Il s’agit pour la plupart d’ouvrages écrits par des auteurs d’extrême droite qui n’ont manifestement pas creusé leur sujet et se mélangent les pinceaux, associant le national-bolchevisme à des courants politiques qui lui ont été hostiles (p. 47). » Selon lui, le national-bolchevisme est d’abord « un courant inclassable […] Synthèse – dialectique -, non des “ extrêmes ” mais de la tradition (du latin traditio, tradere, de trans “ à travers ” et dure “ donner ”) et du mouvement : reconnaissance, pour chaque peuple, sur le plan anthropologique, de la valeur socialisante de sa culture (habitus, langue, mœurs) : nécessité, sur le plan économique, du socialisme (du latin socius, “ ensemble ”, “ associé ”) (p. 50) ».

 

Dans cette perspective synthétique est aussi évoqué Karl Otto Paetel, responsable de La Nation socialiste et du Groupe des nationalistes sociaux-révolutionnaires. Comme Wolffheim, Paetel est d’origine juive. Il s’enthousiasme en 1932 pour Le Travailleur d’Ernst Jünger, s’oppose à l’influence des frères Strasser et condamne le nazisme officiel. Bref, « si le national-bolchevisme est un aigle bicéphale, un labrys, c’est parce qu’il combat des deux côtés : contre la “ gauche ” et contre la “ droite ”, béquilles du système capitaliste (p. 61) ». Il va de soi que le nazisme réprimera férocement cette opposition originale. Exilé aux États-Unis, Paetel reste fidèle à lui-même, se montre « ardent partisan de la libération des peuples (p. 92) » et soutient, comme Maurice Bardèche dans son célèbre Qu’est-ce que le fascisme ?, Fidel Castro, Nasser et même Ho Chi Minh.

 

Franck Canorel revient enfin sur la floraison francophone des mouvements nationalistes-révolutionnaires dans la décennie 1990 qui, pour lui, trahissent en fait l’idéal national-bolchevik en raison d’un programme économique « habituel », capitaliste de grand-papa. Canorel en conclut que « tout bien pesé, Niekisch, Paetel et Schulze-Boysen sont restés sans descendance directe (p. 99) ». Cette étude remarquable éclaire vraiment une aventure intellectuelle typiquement germanique.

 

Georges Feltin-Tracol

 

• Franck Canorel, Harro Schulze-Boysen. Un national-bolchevik dans « L’Orchestre rouge », Alexipharmaque, coll. « Les Réflexives », 2015, 190 p., 18 € (Alexipharmaque, B.P. 60359, F – 64141 Billère C.E.D.E.X.).

 


 

Article printed from Europe Maxima: http://www.europemaxima.com

 

URL to article: http://www.europemaxima.com/?p=4343

lundi, 11 mai 2015

Carl Schmitt’s War on Liberalism

Carl Schmitt’s War on Liberalism

Reinhard Mehring, trans. Daniel Steuer, Carl Schmitt: A Biography [5] (Polity Press, 2014), 700 pp., $45.00.

csarton403.jpgOVER THE past few years, the conviction that the end of the Cold War inaugurated an era of great-power peace to accompany the inevitable spread of democratic capitalism has been shattered. In Georgia and Ukraine, thousands have died as Washington’s attempt to fence in Russia with NATO allies and affiliates has been answered by Moscow’s determination to rebuild a Eurasian sphere of influence. In East Asia, China’s growing assertiveness has alarmed its neighbors and collided with America’s determination to remain the dominant power in the region. Regime-change efforts sponsored by the United States and its allies in Iraq, Libya and Syria have created power vacuums and bloody regional proxy wars, to the benefit of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

In geoeconomics, too, the Pax Americana and the neoliberal version of capitalism are increasingly contested. China, with the help of India, Russia, Brazil and other countries, has sought to organize alternatives to global economic and development institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, which are still dominated by the Western powers. In different ways, Xi Jinping’s China, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Narendra Modi’s India represent an alternative economic model, in which free markets and state capitalism are blended under strong executive rule.

This moment of crisis for global liberalism coincides with the translation into English of a fresh appraisal of Carl Schmitt, a leading twentieth-century German thinker who, in the course of a long life, was a consistent critic of political and legal liberalism and American hegemony. In Carl Schmitt: A Biography, published in German in 2009 and published in English late last year, Reinhard Mehring, a professor of political science at Heidelberg University of Education, has provided the most thorough study yet of the anfractuosities of the political theorist known to his detractors as “Hitler’s Crown Jurist.”

SCHMITT, WHO was born into a Catholic family in Westphalia in 1888, rose to prominence as a conservative legal academic in the 1920s. His discipline of Staatslehre is much more than narrowly technical “law” or “jurisprudence,” including as it does elements of political philosophy and political science.

Schmitt’s intellectual allies were, by and large, the conservative nationalists of the Weimar Republic, not the more radical Nazis. In his diaries after the Second World War, Schmitt not inaccurately described Hitler as “an entirely empty and unknown individual” who rose “out of the pure lumpenproletariat, from the asylum of a homeless non-education.” However, following Hitler’s seizure of power, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. Thanks to the sponsorship of Hermann Goering, Schmitt was appointed state councilor for Prussia, president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists, editor-in-chief of the German Jurists’ Journal and a professor at the University of Berlin, where he replaced Herman Heller, a Jewish social-democratic legal theorist who had been forced into exile.

At the height of his brief prominence, Schmitt was even received by Mussolini. Schmitt would recall:

I had a longer conversation in private with Mussolini in the Palazzo Venezia on the evening of the Wednesday after Easter. We talked about the relationship between party and state. Mussolini said, with pride and clearly directed against national socialist Germany: “The state is eternal, the party is transient; I am a Hegelian!” I remarked: “Lenin was also a Hegelian, so that I have to allow myself the question: where does Hegel’s world historical spirit reside today? In Rome, in Moscow, or maybe still in Berlin after all?”

Schmitt did not consider the possibility that the world-historical spirit might have taken up residence in Washington, DC.

As Hitler consolidated his tyranny, Schmitt became more abject. He defended Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives on June 30, 1934, and described the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws against Gentile-Jewish intermarriage as “the constitution of freedom,” even though, according to Mehring, in his youth he had briefly hoped to marry a Jewish woman, Helene Bernstein.

Some of Schmitt’s newly adopted “racial” rhetoric was so excessive—he proposed that the word “Jew” be placed next to the names of Jewish authors in footnotes in legal texts—that some hostile expatriates and devout Nazis alike believed they discerned in his writing not the zeal of the convert, but the cynicism of the opportunist. In 1936, the journal of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps, published several articles questioning his true commitment to Nazi ideology. Schmitt’s friendship with Goering and Hans Frank, who was later hanged for his war crimes as governor-general of German-occupied Poland, saved him from the clutches of the SS. He withdrew into recondite scholarship, which included musings on a Monroe Doctrine for Europe that would justify German expansionism and a history of the alleged struggle among maritime and continental great powers. Detained for a time by the Allies after the war, Schmitt explained: “In 1936, I was publicly defamed by the SS. I knew a few things about the legal, semi-legal and illegal means of power employed by the SS and the circles around Himmler, and I had every reason to fear the interests of the new elite.”

In a legal brief for Friedrich Flick, a German industrialist who had collaborated with the Nazis, Schmitt, having used arguments about the limits of positive law to justify the Hitler regime, opportunistically deployed them to justify war-crimes trials (though preferably not for his client): “Here, all arguments of natural sense, of human feeling, of reason, and of justice concur in a practically elemental way to justify a conviction that requires no positivistic norm in any formal sense.” The Allied occupation authorities were unmoved and imprisoned Flick until 1950, but after detaining Schmitt twice, once for more than a year, they decided that he had been too marginal a member of Hitler’s system for prosecution to be worthwhile.

Like the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had also disgraced himself by enthusiastically welcoming the Nazi dictatorship when he became rector of Freiburg University in 1933, Schmitt was banned from teaching in German universities from 1945 to his death in 1985. Schmitt nevertheless managed to gather a small coterie of disciples and exercise some influence on German jurisprudence. He continued to write and also had distinguished visitors, including the philosopher Alexandre Kojève. In his old age in his native Plettenberg, Schmitt named his home “San Casciano” after the Tuscan village where Machiavelli spent his final years in exile. In his intellectual diary, the Glossarium, Schmitt bitterly complained: “How harmless were those who sensed the opportunity for intellectual change at the awakening in Germany in 1933, in comparison to those who took intellectual revenge on Germany in 1945.”

In the decades before his death in 1985, Schmitt interpreted current events in terms of what he described and dreaded as “the legal world revolution”—a world order, promoted by the United States and symbolized by the European Union, in which legalistic concepts like human rights and the rule of law became the only source of political legitimacy. What most liberals view as triumphant progress, Schmitt viewed as the disastrous marginalization of continental European statism as an alternative to the maritime liberalism of the Anglo-American world: “World politics reaches its end and is turned into world police—a dubious kind of progress.”

IF SCHMITT were merely one of many German conservatives of the Weimar era who disgraced themselves by collaborating with the Nazis, he would be of interest only to historians. Instead, Schmitt’s reputation as a major thinker endures, sometimes in surprising quarters. American law professors wrestle with Schmitt’s theories about constitutionalism and power, while the Western Left is impressed by his denunciation of liberal globalism as a mask for Anglo-American and capitalist imperialism. In the late twentieth century, the American journal Telos, a meeting place for heterodox leftists and paleoconservatives, helped further the revival of interest in Schmitt’s thought, along with studies by G. L. Ulmen, Joseph J. Bendersky, Gopal Balakrishnan and many others. Some claim, absurdly, that Schmitt influenced the neoconservative movement by way of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, a respectful critic and correspondent in the 1920s.

This interest is justified, because Schmitt is a classic thinker—perhaps the key thinker—of modern antiliberalism. Antiliberalism can be contrasted with preliberalism as a variety of nonliberalism.

Confronted with Enlightenment liberalism in its various versions, preliberalism finds itself at a disadvantage in the battle for modern public opinion, because appeals to preliberal sources of social authority—divine revelations, local customs and traditions—are unlikely to persuade those who are not already believers. Unable to hold their own in debate with liberals, adherents of preliberal worldviews tend to withdraw into sectarianism, which may be defensive and quietist like that of the Amish, or manifested in millenarian violence, like the Salafist jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

In contrast with preliberalism, modern antiliberalism like Schmitt’s seeks to defeat liberal thought on its own chosen ground of public debate, using its own preferred weapons, rational analysis and secular scholarship. It is modern because it takes for granted the post-Enlightenment intellectual environment of secularism and science. And it is antiliberal because it defines itself against modern liberalism, on point after point. It is a reaction to liberalism that would not exist without liberalism—a Counter-Enlightenment, not an ancien régime.

In the Weimar Republic, Schmitt was associated with Catholic conservatives. Relations were strained when he divorced his first of two wives, Pawla Dorotic, whom he met when she was a Spanish dancer in a vaudeville theater. The Vatican was not impressed by his request for an annulment, on the grounds that the Munich-born Protestant dancer had lied to him about having an aristocratic pedigree as the daughter of a Croatian baron. Moreover, according to Mehring, Schmitt did not attend church during the Nazi years.

But those who argue for his lifelong affinity with strains of Catholic reactionary politics can make a good case. Notwithstanding his embrace of Nazi racism, Schmitt’s sympathies lay with Latin authoritarianism rather than Teutonic totalitarianism. His only child, his daughter Anima, born to his second wife, married a Spanish law professor belonging to Franco’s Falangist party, and she translated some of Schmitt’s writings into Spanish. In Political Theology, he praised the nineteenth-century Catholic counterrevolutionary thinker Juan Donoso Cortés. In later life, he understood modern world events in terms of apocalyptic imagery borrowed from Christian thought, including the idea of a “katechon,” a figure who, by maintaining order, delays the end of the world. The katechon might be thought of as Schmitt’s answer to Thomas Hobbes’s metaphor of the Leviathan.

BUT SCHMITT did not think that the answers to modern problems could be found in Thomism or a restoration of papal authority. There was no going back to the Middle Ages. Schmitt embraced modern populism and tried to turn it to antidemocratic, illiberal ends. In his Verfassungslehre (Constitutional Theory) of 1928, for example, Schmitt praised the French revolutionary thinker Abbé Sieyès, author of What is the Third Estate?, for distinguishing between the pouvoir constituant and the pouvoir constitué, the maker of constitutional government and the constitutional government that is made.

The idea that constitutions exist at the will—and for the benefit—of the sovereign people or nation was central to the French and American Revolutions and goes back to the social-contract theory of John Locke and his successors. It was stated not only by Sieyès but also by Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As William E. Scheuerman and Renato Cristi point out in their contributions to a 1998 anthology edited by David Dyzenhaus, Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, Schmitt puts an antiliberal spin on the theory of popular sovereignty. Sieyès, like the American Founders, takes it for granted that the exercise of popular sovereignty operates under constraints, even if it is not constrained by constitutions or statutes. Even when acting in revolutionary fashion, by discarding one government and forming another, a sovereign people cannot violate natural law (in the version found in early modern social-contract theory, that is, not the natural law of premodern Scholasticism). Moreover, in a revolutionary interim between governments, the people are expected to act through representative, consultative bodies, such as constitutional conventions. The sovereign people’s natural, extralegal right of revolution is not an excuse for either communal atrocities or the dictatorship of an individual.

By dispensing with these constraints, Schmitt turns the theory of popular sovereignty into a rationale for Caesarist dictatorship. The cryptic first sentence of Political Theology, “Sovereign is he who decides the exception,” shows that the sovereign people have been conflated with the sovereign executive. Social-contract theorists would have written, “Sovereign are they who decide the exception.”

Schmitt does not mean that any malcontent colonel who manages to carry out a putsch is the “sovereign.” Instead, the sovereign is a charismatic leader who saves the people from danger by acting decisively, outside of the law if necessary. Because the paralysis of parliamentary politics can itself pose a danger to the nation, in the view of Schmitt and other antiliberals, the eighteenth-century French and American method of a quasi-parliamentary constitutional convention to represent the sovereign people must seem to be merely the attempted correction of one weak debating society by another.

The decisive leader creates the new order by deeds, not chatter. The Schmittian leader is a plebiscitarian ruler who can have his actions ratified by the acclamation of a grateful people, but he does not act on their instructions. In his Constitutional Theory, Schmitt argued that “the natural form for the direct expression of the popular will is the yea-saying or nay-saying shout of the assembled crowd.” Cristi notes that Schmitt “comes to accept and recognizes the pouvoir consituant of the people only because he has found a way to disarm it.”

THE “FRIEND/ENEMY” distinction is another original concept in Schmitt’s antiliberalism. All political theories that do not advocate for a global government must have some way of determining who belongs in particular polities and who does not. In deciding on the boundaries of new states formed from the partition of dynastic or colonial empires, the standard in international law has been the so-called Latin American doctrine: the borders of newly independent successor states in general should follow the boundaries, however arbitrary, of administrative or political units within the former, larger state.

cs69175327.gifAn alternative approach, the so-called Central European approach, favors redrawing arbitrary political boundaries to create more homogeneous ethnic or linguistic groups. Neither doctrine is inherently illiberal. In his Representative Government, John Stuart Mill thus argued that liberal, representative government is most likely to succeed in countries in which most of the citizens share at least a common language, a thesis that the continuing disintegration of multiethnic states in our time would appear to confirm. In Mill’s words, “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.” Neither approach to defining the citizens of sovereign states equates political independence of one community from another with inherent and unremitting enmity.

In keeping with his decisionist approach to law and politics, Schmitt is not interested in adumbrating general rules like these. The people are more than a collection of human beings in a common territory or sharing various characteristics like language and ethnicity. Rather, for Schmitt, the people must have a mystical solidarity defined by the recognition of common public enemies, who may be external or internal or both. The friend/enemy distinction in a particular context, like the exception or state of emergency in a particular situation, by its nature cannot be identified or limited in advance. Rather, it is the essence of great leadership to grasp, at any given time, which approach to legality or its opposite and which set of public enemies is in the interest of the nation.

Schmitt is sometimes compared to Hobbes as an authoritarian thinker. But the temperaments and mentalities of the two were quite different. The Hobbesian sovereign, while prepared for war and anarchy, prefers peace and quiet. Schmitt’s authoritarianism is histrionic and apocalyptic. What is most extreme is most authentic. The exception is the rule. The emergency is the norm. The nation is constantly on the verge of collapse and threatened by enemies without and within. Parliament is the problem, not the solution. The times demand leaders who can take bold and decisive action, not waste time in idle debate. Quoting Schmitt on parliamentary democracy (“The value of life stems not from reasoning; it emerges in a state of war where men inspirited by myths do battle”), Stephen Holmes observed in 1993, “That is Mussolini, not Hobbes.”

Or worse. The potential for toxic interaction among Schmitt’s ideas about mythicized politics and extralegal power is illustrated by his own short and sordid career as a Nazi apologist. Following the Night of the Long Knives, Schmitt published an article entitled “Der Führer schützt das Recht” (“The Führer protects the law”). In identifying and eliminating enemies of the state, “The Führer protects the law against the worst forms of abuse when, in the moment of danger, he immediately creates law by force of his character as Führer as the supreme legal authority.” In that one sentence, Schmitt collapses executive prerogative, martial law and constituent power into arbitrary, uncontrollable tyranny.

REGIMES THAT resemble Nazi Germany in detail are unlikely to appear again. But antiliberalism in some form, in liberal democracies themselves as well as authoritarian states, will be around as long as liberalism endures, deploying arguments like Schmitt’s as weapons.

Defenders of the liberal constitutional tradition would be well advised to respond to those who are antiliberal thinkers like Schmitt in two ways. To begin with, they need to take seriously the challenges to legality and constitutionalism posed by the hard cases that he dwells on. The reply should be that the tradition of constitutional liberalism within itself has the resources to deal with extreme situations, by means of concepts like the natural right of revolution exercised by constitutional conventions, and executive emergency powers which are adequate in their flexibility without being unconstrained by law or legislative oversight. (Schmitt himself distinguishes “commissarial dictatorship,” or emergency measures to save a constitutional order, from “sovereign dictatorship” that creates a new constitution.)

In addition, constitutional liberals can turn the tables on Schmitt by reversing his assignment of strength and weakness. For Schmitt, as for other antiliberals, pluralistic democracy is weak and dictatorship is strong. But one need only contrast West Germany with East Germany during the Cold War, or South Korea and North Korea today, to contest this image of democratic fragility and authoritarian stability. The United States and United Kingdom survived the abortive Nazi empire and the Soviet Union in part because their looser, more consensual systems, with greater opportunities for self-correction by means of dissent and debate, made it easier for them to avoid or recover from strategic blunders.

At this moment in history, there is no significant intellectual challenge to Western liberalism comparable to fascism or Communism, notwithstanding the mixes of liberalism and nonliberalism in China and Russia and the millenarian violence of the preliberal Salafist jihadist movement. But the public philosophy of liberal, constitutional democracy has always left many people, even in its historic homelands, unsatisfied and in search of an alternative. Outside of fundamentalist religious sects, that alternative in generations ahead is likely to be found in some version of modern, secular, antiliberal thought. The greatest challenge to liberalism in the future may not come from outside of the liberal West but rather from within, in the form of reasoned argument by erudite and articulate intellectuals. Carl Schmitt was a model of the sophisticated modern antiliberal thinker. There will be more to come. 

Michael Lind is a contributing editor at The National Interest, cofounder of the New America Foundation and an ASU New America Future of War fellow.

Links:
[1] http://nationalinterest.org/feature/carl-schmitt%E2%80%99s-war-liberalism-12704
[2] http://nationalinterest.org/profile/michael-lind
[3] http://twitter.com/share
[4] http://nationalinterest.org/issue/may-june-2015
[5] http://www.amazon.com/Carl-Schmitt-Biography-Reinhard-Mehring/dp/0745652247
[6] http://nationalinterest.org/tag/history
[7] http://nationalinterest.org/tag/nazism
[8] http://nationalinterest.org/tag/liberalism
[9] http://nationalinterest.org/topic/politics

dimanche, 10 mai 2015

Jünger o la mística de la violencia

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Jünger o la mística de la violencia
Ex: http://elpais.com
 
Ha sido el gran acontecimiento del otoño editorial en Alemania. Tres años después de su muerte aparecen los artículos 'malditos' de Ernst Jünger, textos escritos durante la República de Weimar que el pensador germano se negó a incluir en sus obras completas. El nacionalismo, el heroísmo, la guerra y la destrucción son sus claves.

Desde la muerte de Ernst Jünger en 1998 no ha transcurrido un solo año sin que saliese al mercado alemán alguna novedad perteneciente a su legado intelectual. Varios especialistas trabajan con ahínco en distintos ámbitos con el fin de publicar todos los escritos que puedan resultar de interés para la comprensión de un escritor tan polémico como longevo. Después de la publicación de varias correspondencias con distintas personalidades de su tiempo, esta vez le ha tocado el turno a sus artículos 'malditos' durante el periodo de Weimar, una publicación esperada, puesto que Ernst Jünger se negó a incluirlos en la edición de sus Obras completas en Klett-Cotta. Esta editorial, sin embargo, ha reunido todos los artículos políticos escritos entre 1919 y 1933, 145 en total, en un volumen separado, excelentemente comentado y anotado por el politólogo Sven Olaf Berggötz.

POLITISCHE PUBLIZISTIK, 1919-1933

Ernst Jünger Sven Olaf Berggötz (editor) Klett-Cotta. Stuttgart, 2001 850 páginas. 98 marcos alemanes

Jünger estaba obsesionado con una revolución, viniese de donde viniese, siempre que fuese nacional

Otro de los alicientes de este volumen es que por fin se ofrecen ordenados cronológicamente los artículos dispersos en varios periódicos o revistas como Arminius, Das Reich, Die Standarte, Der Widerstand o el Völkischer Beobachter, la mayoría de ellos, efímeros órganos de propaganda nacional-revolucionaria, que han servido como arsenal para atribuir a Jünger un claro papel de precursor del nacionalsocialismo o para hacer hincapié en su apología de la violencia. Y no se puede negar que muchos de estos artículos son dinamita, no sólo por su contenido, sino por un estilo fascinante que rompe las limitaciones del panfleto político; no resulta extraño que Jünger se convirtiese en el escritor más solicitado en ese tipo de publicaciones; su prosa limpia y acerada, pero al mismo tiempo de un radicalismo deslumbrante, encontró una entusiástica acogida en numerosos jóvenes, frustrados por la derrota y posterior humillación de Versalles. Tampoco olvidemos que a Jünger le rodeaba el nimbo de su condición de héroe de guerra, era el representante y el símbolo de una generación que lo había sacrificado todo y se creía traicionada por fuerzas oscuras de la retaguardia: la leyenda de la puñalada por la espalda que también Jünger asumió y difundió.

ej8258-1093770.jpgEn estos artículos, que muestran la obsesiva actividad proselitista del autor, no nos encontramos con el Jünger elogiado por Hermann Hesse o H. G. Gadamer, con el ensayista profundo, el novelista imaginativo o el observador preciso, sino con el agitador político que lanza sin ambages su mensaje subversivo. No obstante, en estos escritos también se puede comprobar cierta evolución temática e intelectual. En los primeros textos se ocupa principalmente de la experiencia guerrera, del valor del sacrificio y de la sangre como cemento de una nueva sociedad, a lo que se une un profundo odio a la burguesía y a la República de Weimar. Jünger consideraba que en su generación había surgido un nuevo 'tipo humano', forjado en la guerra de material y de trincheras, a quien, a su vez, correspondía forjar un nuevo mundo: 'Como somos los auténticos, verdaderos e implacables enemigos del burgués, nos divierte su descomposición. Pero nosotros no somos burgueses, somos hijos de guerras y de enfrentamientos civiles...'. Inspirándose en Nietzsche, Spengler y Sorel, y haciendo suyo el pathos del futurismo italiano, Jünger ensalza el odio y la destrucción como elementos creativos: 'La verdadera voluntad de lucha, sin embargo, el odio verdadero, se alegra de todo lo que destruye a su contrario. La destrucción es el único instrumento que parece adecuado en las actuales circunstancias'. En estos pasajes, el escritor adopta un nihilismo heroico que convierte la violencia en un fin en sí mismo, en una experiencia mística del combatiente que debe continuar su lucha en la sociedad civil. En ellos desarrolla una estética pura de la violencia que se mueve en un vacío ético y que, supuestamente, según el autor, debería generar nuevos valores.

Mitrailleurs_allemands_en_1918.jpgEn el terreno ideológico, los artículos reflejan una visión particular y nebulosa que no llega a identificarse con ninguna de las ideologías dominantes. Sus rasgos principales son, en su vertiente negativa, un profundo sentimiento antidemocrático y antipacifista, así como un fuerte rechazo de las instituciones, excluyendo al ejército como encarnación de la idea prusiana. Su odio a la República de Weimar es manifiesto; una República, si bien es cierto, que se ha definido con frecuencia como la 'democracia sin demócratas' y que era el blanco favorito del desprecio de la mayoría de los intelectuales. Aunque Jünger se confiesa nacionalista, en concreto 'nacionalista de la acción', no asocia el concepto con una forma política concreta, más bien se limita a describir vagamente modelos utópicos o retóricos que encontrarán un desarrollo más maduro en su libro El trabajador. Armin Mohler empleó el término 'revolución conservadora' para explicar esta posición política, pero Jünger también se acercó al nacionalismo de izquierdas de un Niekisch e incluso colaboró en su revista Der Widerstand, prohibida con posterioridad por los nacionalsocialistas. La impresión que recibimos es que Jünger estaba obsesionado con una revolución, viniese de donde viniese, siempre que fuese nacional. En sus escritos solía dirigirse a 'los nacionalistas, los soldados del frente y los trabajadores'. Este empeño revolucionario fue el que le acercó al nacionalsocialismo en los primeros años del movimiento: 'La verdadera revolución aún no se ha producido, pero se aproxima irresistiblemente. No es ninguna reacción, sino una revolución auténtica con todos sus rasgos y sus manifestaciones; su idea es la popular, afilada hasta un extremo desconocido; su bandera es la cruz gamada; su forma de expresión, la concentración de la voluntad en un único punto: la dictadura. Sustituirá la palabra por la acción, la tinta por la sangre, la frase por el sacrificio, la pluma por la espada'.

No obstante, en los años treinta se advierte cierto distanciamiento del nacionalsocialismo quizá debido a la influencia de su hermano, F. G. Jünger, y de Niekisch. Jünger rechazó la oferta de Hitler para ocupar un escaño en el Reichstag, y en el año 1933 interrumpió sus colaboraciones, evitando dar el paso hacia el paganismo político nazi, ni siquiera en la forma del colaboracionismo oportunista de Heidegger, Carl Schmitt o Gottfried Benn. La edición de los artículos políticos de Ernst Jünger, de cuyo contenido se deduce claramente su terca resistencia a 'resucitarlos', supone una decisión acertada, sobre todo porque así se dispone de una imagen completa de un escritor controvertido que no dudó en 'maquillar' algunos pasajes escabrosos de su obra temprana; una actitud que despertó rechazo incluso entre sus lectores más afines. Pero también podemos decir que esta obra adquiere una importancia extraordinaria porque explica el comportamiento posterior de una juventud fascinada por la violencia, la cual, por esta causa, fue presa fácil del totalitarismo y víctima de su producto: la guerra total; tampoco tenemos que resaltar mucho su actualidad, pues nos hallamos en una nueva dimensión de la violencia, cuyos portadores asumen hasta sus últimas consecuencias esa visión mística del acto destructivo y del sacrificio que tanto sufrimiento ha traído y traerá a la humanidad.

samedi, 09 mai 2015

André Müller und Ernst Jünger

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André Müller und Ernst Jünger

Tatsächlich eine Liebesgeschichte

Von Jörg Magenau

Ex: http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de

Beitrag hören

Für den "Zeit"-Journalisten André Müller war es ein Lebenstraum, den Schriftsteller Ernst Jünger zu interviewen. Mindestens fünf Mal trafen sich die beiden zwischen 1989 und 1996, drei Gespräche wurden aufgezeichnet. Die Originaltranskripte verraten viel über das väterliche Verhältnis Jüngers zu Müller.

Am Tag vor Ernst Jüngers 100. Geburtstag im März 1995 notierte André Müller:

"Jünger ist ein ganz unanalytischer Mensch, naiv wie ein Kind, unfähig zur Auswahl von Wichtigem, alles notierend auf verzweifelter Suche, in der unbewussten Hoffnung, andere mögen ihn (der sich nicht kennt) finden."

Vermutlich hat er damit Recht. Der Ernst Jünger, den Müller erlebte, ist weit weg vom Weltkriegs-Haudegen der "Stahlgewitter" und dem demokratiefeindlichen Theoretiker des "Arbeiters". Müller entdeckt das Kind im alten Mann. Und der Andere, den er ihm unterstellt, um gefunden zu werden, das könnte dann er selbst, Müller, sein.

André Müller war berühmt für seine Interviews in der "Zeit", die er stets konfrontativ, ja mit einer gewissen Verachtung dem Gesprächspartner gegenüber anlegte. Eigentlich ging es dabei immer nur um ihn selbst und um seinen Nihilismus und um die verzweifelte Suche nach Wahrheit. Nur drei von all seinen zahlreichen Gesprächspartnern hat er wirklich geachtet: Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek und eben Ernst Jünger, den er hartnäckig umwarb, bis er endlich einwilligte. Bei Jünger war es sogar ein Liebesverhältnis, und Müller zögerte nicht, es genau so nach Wilflingen zu schreiben und sich ganz zu offenbaren: "Herr Jünger, ich liebe sie." So gelang es ihm, das Vertrauen des Alten zu gewinnen, der für ihn zu einer Vaterfigur werden sollte.

Originaltranskript mit Floskeln und Nichtigkeiten

Mindestens fünf Mal haben die beiden sich zwischen 1989 und 1996 getroffen. Drei dieser Gespräche wurden auf Tonband aufgezeichnet, doch nur das erste, geführt am Tag vor dem Mauerfall, ist dann stark bearbeitet und gekürzt in der "Zeit" erschienen. Jetzt kann man es zusammen mit den beiden anderen, vom Tag nach der Währungsunion 1990 und von einem Wintertag 1993, in voller Länge als Originaltranskription nachlesen, mit allen Floskeln und Nichtigkeiten, die ein Gespräch ja auch ausmachen. Das ist gerade im Falle Ernst Jüngers wichtig, für den das Gespräch – neben dem Traum – eine offene, neugierige Annäherung an Einsichten gewesen ist.

Herausgeber Christophe Fricker hat diese Dokumente belassen wie sie sind und sich auf Anmerkungen und einleitende, sehr hilfreiche Erläuterungen beschränkt. Dazu bietet der Band den Briefwechsel der beiden Gesprächspartner, Postkarten, und Mitschnitte von Jüngers Anrufen auf Müllers Anrufbeantworter. Herausgekommen ist ein Buch, mit dem man Ernst Jünger tatsächlich – und das ist schon eine Sensation – nahekommen kann, weil er sich in seiner Empfindsamkeit zeigt. Nebenbei erfährt man auch etwas über seine Verhältnisse zu Frauen und davon, dass er im Wald beim Spazierengehen laut schrie.

Es wird viel gelacht

"Gespräche über Schmerz, Tod und Verzweiflung" lautet der Untertitel. Das ist auch nicht falsch, und doch ist die Stimmung zumeist gelöst und heiter, es wird viel gelacht, Jüngers berüchtigtes, stakkatohaft-militärisches "Ha Ha!" durchzieht den Text wie ein grundierender Rhythmus. Müller berichtet, dass er, zunächst irritiert von diesem Lachen, mitzulachen versuchte, damit aber wiederum Jünger irritierte, weshalb er es dann unterließ. Der Tod jedenfalls, das ist bekannt, hat Jünger nicht geschreckt. Auch der Tod wurde von ihm als Freund begrüßt und mit einem Lachen quittiert. Komik entfalten die Gespräche auch deshalb, weil sich Müller sehr viel besser an viele Details aus Jüngers Leben zu erinnern scheint. Auf Ereignisse aus dem 1. Weltkrieg angesprochen, weiß Jünger nicht viel mehr zu sagen als: "Das ist lange her" oder "So, so, aha" oder "Wenn Sie das sagen" oder "Ha, ha." Die Gespräche produzieren bei aller Coolness, die beide zur Schau stellen, eine große Nähe und Wärme. Es ist tatsächlich eine Liebesgeschichte. Das macht dieses Buch zu einem berührenden Leseabenteuer.

Christophe Fricker (Hg.): Ernst Jünger – André Müller. Gespräche über Schmerz, Tod und Verzweiflung
Böhlau Verlag, Köln 2015
234 Seiten, 24,90 Euro

Mehr zum Thema

Kurz und Kritisch - Post von der Front
(Deutschlandradio Kultur, Lesart, 30.08.2014)

Erster Weltkrieg - Patchwork von Autorenstimmen
(Deutschlandradio Kultur, Buchkritik, 04.06.2014)

Erster Weltkrieg - Hunger auf Kampf und Abenteuer
(Deutschlandradio Kultur, Buchkritik, 02.04.2014)

Aus den Feuilletons - Ernst Jüngers sexuelle Eskapaden
(Deutschlandradio Kultur, Kulturpresseschau, 23.03.2014)

jeudi, 07 mai 2015

History and Decadence: Spengler's Cultural Pessimism Today

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History and Decadence: Spengler's Cultural Pessimism Today
Dr. Tomislav Sunic expertly examines the Weltanschauung of Oswald Spengler and its importance for today's times.

by Tomislav Sunic

Ex: http://traditionalbritain.org

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) exerted considerable influence on European conservatism before the Second World War. Although his popularity waned somewhat after the war, his analyses, in the light of the disturbing conditions in the modern polity, again seem to be gaining in popularity. Recent literature dealing with gloomy postmodernist themes suggests that Spengler's prophecies of decadence may now be finding supporters on both sides of the political spectrum. The alienating nature of modern technology and the social and moral decay of large cities today lends new credence to Spengler's vision of the impending collapse of the West. In America and Europe an increasing number of authors perceive in the liberal permissive state a harbinger of 'soft' totalitarianism that my lead decisively to social entropy and conclude in the advent of 'hard' totalitarianism'.

Spengler wrote his major work The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes) against the background of the anticipated German victory in World War I. When the war ended disastrously for the Germans, his predictions that Germany, together with the rest of Europe, was bent for irreversible decline gained a renewed sense of urgency for scores of cultural pessimists. World War I must have deeply shaken the quasi-religious optimism of those who had earlier prophesied that technological intentions and international economic linkages would pave the way for peace and prosperity. Moreover, the war proved that technological inventions could turn out to be a perfect tool for man's alienation and, eventually, his physical annihilation. Inadvertently, while attempting to interpret the cycles of world history, Spengler probably best succeeded in spreading the spirits of cultural despair to his own as well as future generations.

Like Giambattista Vico, who two centuries earlier developed his thesis about the rise and decline of culture, Spengler tried to project a pattern of cultural growth and cultural decay in a certain scientific form: 'the morphology of history'--as he himself and others dub his work--although the term 'biology' seems more appropriate considering Spengler's inclination to view cultures and living organic entities, alternately afflicted with disease and plague or showing signs of vigorous life. Undoubtedly, the organic conception of history was, to a great extent, inspired by the popularity of scientific and pseudoscientific literature, which, in the early twentieth century began to focus attention on racial and genetic paradigms in order to explain the patterns of social decay. Spengler, however, prudently avoids racial determinism in his description of decadence, although his exaltation of historical determinism in his description often brings him close to Marx--albeit in a reversed and hopelessly pessimistic direction. In contrast to many egalitarian thinkers, Spengler's elitism and organicism conceived of human species as of different and opposing peoples, each experiencing its own growth and death, and each struggling for survival. 'Mankind', writes Spengler, should be viewed as either a 'zoological concept or an empty word'. If ever this phantom of mankind vanishes from the circulation of historical forms, 'we shall ten notice an astounding affluence of genuine forms.. Apparently, by form, (Gestalt), Spengler means the resurrection of the classical notion of the nation-state, which, in the early twentieth century, came under fire from the advocates of the globalist and universalist polity. Spengler must be credited, however, with pointing out that the frequently used concept 'world history', in reality encompasses an impressive array of diverse and opposing cultures without common denominator; each culture displays its own forms, pursues its own passions, and grapples with its own life or death. 'There are blossoming and ageing cultures', writes Spengler, 'peoples, languages, truths, gods and landscapes, just as there are young and old oak trees, pines, flowers, boughs, and peta;s--but there is no ageing mankind.'. For Spengler, cultures seem to be growing in sublime futility, with some approaching terminal illness, and others still displaying vigorous signs of life. Before culture emerged, man was an ahistorical creature; but he becomes again ahistorical and, one might add, even hostile to history: 'as soon as some civilisation has developed its full and final form, thus putting a stop to the living development of culture." (2:58; 2:38).

Spengler was convinced, however, that the dynamics of decadence could be fairly well predicted, provided that exact historical data were available. Just as the biology of human beings generates a well-defined life span, resulting ultimately in biological death, so does each culture possess its own ageing 'data', normally lasting no longer than a thousand years-- a period, separating its spring from its eventual historical antithesis, the winter, of civilisation. The estimate of a thousand years before the decline of culture sets in corresponds to Spengler's certitude that, after that period, each society has to face self-destruction. For example, after the fall of Rome, the rebirth of European culture started andes in the ninth century with the Carolingian dynasty. After the painful process of growth, self-assertiveness, and maturation, one thousand years later, in the twentieth century, cultural life in Europe is coming to its definite historical close.

As Spengler and his contemporary successors see it, Western culture now has transformed itself into a decadent civilisation fraught with an advanced form of social, moral and political decay. The First signs of this decay appeared shortly after the Industrial Revolution, when the machine began to replace man, when feelings gave way to ratio. Ever since that ominous event, new forms of social and political conduct have been surfacing in the West--marked by a widespread obsession with endless economic growth and irreversible human betterment--fueled by the belief that the burden of history can finally be removed. The new plutocratic elites, that have now replaced organic aristocracy, have imposed material gain as the only principle worth pursuing, reducing the entire human interaction to an immense economic transaction. And since the masses can never be fully satisfied, argues Spengler, it is understandable that they will seek change in their existing polities even if change may spell the loss of liberty. One might add that this craving for economic affluence will be translated into an incessant decline of the sense of public responsibility and an emerging sense of uprootedness and social anomie, which will ultimately and inevitably lead to the advent of totalitarianism. It would appear, therefore, that the process of decadence can be forestalled, ironically, only by resorting to salutary hard-line regimes.

Using Spengler's apocalyptic predictions, one is tempted to draw a parallel with the modern Western polity, which likewise seems to be undergoing the period of decay and decadence. John Lukacs, who bears the unmistakable imprint of Spenglerian pessimism, views the permissive nature of modern liberal society, as embodied in America, as the first step toward social disintegration. Like Spengler, Lukacs asserts that excessive individualism and rampant materialism increasingly paralyse and render obsolete the sense of civic responsibility. One should probably agree with Lukacs that neither the lifting of censorship, nor the increasing unpopularity of traditional value, nor the curtailing of state authority in contemporary liberal states, seems to have led to a more peaceful environment; instead, a growing sense of despair seems to have triggered a form of neo-barbarism and social vulgarity. 'Already richness and poverty, elegance and sleaziness, sophistication and savagery live together more and more,' writes Lukacs. Indeed, who could have predicted that a society capable of launching rockets to the moon or curing diseases that once ravaged the world could also become a civilisation plagued by social atomisation, crime, and an addiction to escapism? With his apocalyptic predictions, Lukacs similar to Spengler, writes: 'This most crowded of streets of the greatest civilisation; this is now the hellhole of the world.'

Interestingly, neither Spengler nor Lukacs nor other cultural pessimists seems to pay much attention to the obsessive appetite for equality, which seems to play, as several contemporary authors point out, an important role in decadence and the resulting sense of cultural despair. One is inclined to think that the process of decadence in the contemporary West is the result of egalitarian doctrines that promise much but deliver little, creating thus an economic-minded and rootless citizens. Moreover, elevated to the status of modern secular religions, egalitarianism and economism inevitably follow their own dynamics of growth, which is likely conclude, as Claude Polin notes, in the 'terror of all against all' and the ugly resurgence of democratic totalitarianism. Polin writes: 'Undifferentiated man is par excellence a quantitative man; a man who accidentally differs from his neighbours by the quantity of economic goods in his possession; a man subject to statistics; a man who spontaneously reacts in accordance to statistics'. Conceivably, liberal society, if it ever gets gripped by economic duress and hit by vanishing opportunities, will have no option but to tame and harness the restless masses in a Spenglerian 'muscled regime'. 

Spengler and other cultural pessimists seem to be right in pointing out that democratic forms of polity, in their final stage, will be marred by moral and social convulsions, political scandals, and corruption on all social levels. On top of it, as Spengler predicts, the cult of money will reign supreme, because 'through money democracy destroys itself, after money has destroyed the spirit' (2: p.582; 2: p.464). Judging by the modern development of capitalism, Spengler cannot be accused of far-fetched assumptions. This economic civilisation founders on a major contradiction: on the one hand its religion of human rights extends its beneficiary legal tenets to everyone, reassuring every individual of the legitimacy of his earthly appetites; on the other, this same egalitarian civilisation fosters a model of economic Darwinism, ruthlessly trampling under its feet those whose interests do not lie in the economic arena. 

The next step, as Spengler suggest, will be the transition from democracy to salutary Caesarism; substitution of the tyranny of the few for the tyranny of many. The neo-Hobbesian, neo-barbaric state is in the making: 

Instead of the pyres emerges big silence. The dictatorship of party bosses is backed up by the dictatorship of the press. With money, an attempt is made to lure swarms of readers and entire peoples away from the enemy's attention and bring them under one's own thought control. There, they learn only what they must learn, and a higher will shapes their picture of the world. It is no longer needed--as the baroque princes did--to oblige their subordinates into the armed service. Their minds are whipped up through articles, telegrams, pictures, until they demand weapons and force their leaders to a battle to which these wanted to be forced. (2: p.463)

The fundamental issue, however, which Spengler and many other cultural pessimists do not seem to address, is whether Caesarism or totalitarianism represents the antithetical remedy to decadence or, orator, the most extreme form of decadence? Current literature on totalitarianism seems to focus on the unpleasant side effects of the looted state, the absence of human rights, and the pervasive control of the police. By contrast, if liberal democracy is indeed a highly desirable and the least repressive system of all hitherto known in the West--and if, in addition, this liberal democracy claims to be the best custodian of human dignity--one wonders why it relentlessly causes social uprootedness and cultural despair among an increasing number of people? As Claude Polin notes, chances are that, in the short run, democratic totalitarianism will gain the upper hand since the security to provides is more appealing to the masses than is the vague notion of liberty. One might add that the tempo of democratic process in the West leads eventually to chaotic impasse, which necessitates the imposition of a hard-line regime.

Although Spengler does not provide a satisfying answer to the question of Caesarism vs. decadence, he admits that the decadence of the West needs not signify the collapse of all cultures. Rather it appears that the terminal illness of the West may be a new lease on life for other cultures; the death of Europe may result in a stronger Africa or Asia. Like many other cultural pessimists, Spengler acknowledges that the West has grown old, unwilling to fight, with its political and cultural inventory depleted; consequently, it is obliged to cede the reigns of history to those nations that are less exposed to debilitating pacifism and the self-flagellating feelings of guilt that, so to speak, have become the new trademarks of the modern Western citizen. One could imagine a situation where these new virile and victorious nations will barely heed the democratic niceties of their guilt-ridden formser masters, and may likely at some time in the future, impose their own brand of terror that could eclipse the legacy of the European Auschwitz and the Gulag. In view of the turtles vicil and tribal wars all over the decolonized African and Asian continent it seems unlikely that power politics and bellicosity will disappear with the 'Decline of the West'; So far, no proof has been offered that non-European nations can govern more peacefully and generously than their former European masters. 'Pacifism will remain an ideal', Spengler reminds us, 'war a fact. If the white races are resolved never to wage a war again, the coloured will act differently and be rulers of the world'. 

In this statement, Spengler clearly indicts the self-hating 'homo Europeanus' who, having become a victim of his bad conscience, naively thinks that his truths and verities must remain irrefutably turned against him. Spengler strongly attacks this Western false sympathy with the deprived ones--a sympathy that Nietzsche once depicted as a twisted form of egoism and slave moral. 'This is the reason,' writes Spengler, why this 'compassion moral',  in the day-to day sense 'evolved among us with respect, and sometimes strived for by the thinkers, sometimes longed for, has never been realised' (I: p.449; 1: p.350).

This form of political masochism could be well studied particularly among those contemporary Western egalitarians who, with the decline of socialist temptations, substituted for the archetype of the European exploited worker, the iconography of the starving African. Nowhere does this change in political symbolics seem more apparent than in the current Western drive to export Western forms of civilisation to the antipodes of the world. These Westerners, in the last spasm of a guilt-ridden shame, are probably convinced that their historical repentance might also secure their cultural and political longevity. Spengler was aware of these paralysing attitudes among Europeans, and he remarks that, if a modern European recognises his historical vulnerability, he must start thinking beyond his narrow perspective and develop different attitudes towards different political convictions and verities. What do Parsifal or Prometheus have to do with the average Japanese citizen, asks Spengler? 'This is exactly what is lacking in the Western thinker,' continues Spengler, 'and watch precisely should have never lacked in him; insight into historical relativity of his achievements, which are themselves the manifestation of one and unique, and of only one existence" (1: p.31; 1: p.23). On a somewhat different level, one wonders to what extent the much-vaunted dissemination of universal human rights can become a valuable principle for non-Western peoples if Western universalism often signifies blatant disrespect for all cultural particularities. 

Even with their eulogy of universalism, as Serge Latouche has recently noted, Westerners have, nonetheless, secured the most comfortable positions for themselves. Although they have now retreated to the back stage of history, vicariously, through their humanism, they still play the role of the indisputable masters of the non-white-man show. 'The death of the West for itself has not been the end of the West in itself', adds Latouche. One wonders whether such Western attitudes to universalism represent another form of racism, considering the havoc these attitudes have created in traditional Third World communities. Latouche appears correct in remarking that European decadence best manifests itself in its masochistic drive to deny and discard everything that it once stood for, while simultaneously sucking into its orbit of decadence other cultures as well. Yet, although suicidal in its character, the Western message contains mandatory admonishments for all non-European nations. He writes: 

The mission of the West is not to exploit the Third World, no to christianise the pagans, nor to dominate by white presence; it is to liberate men (ands seven more so women) from oppression and misery. In order to counter this self-hatred of the anti-imperialist vision, which concludes in red totalitarianism, one is now compelled to dry the tears of white man, and thereby ensure the success of this westernisation of the world. (p.41)

The decadent West exhibits, as Spengler hints, a travestied culture living on its own past in a society of indifferent nations that, having lost their historical consciousness, feel an urge to become blended into a promiscuous 'global polity'. One wonders what would he say today about the massive immigration of non-Europeans to Europe? This immigration has not improved understanding among races, but has caused more racial and ethnic strife that, very likely, signals a series of new conflicts in the future. But Spengler does not deplore the 'devaluation of all values nor the passing of cultures. In fact, to him decadence is a natural process of senility that concludes in civilisation, because civilisation is decadence. Spengler makes a typically German distinction between culture and civilisation, two terms that are, unfortunately, used synonymously in English. For Spengler civilisation is a product of intellect, of completely rationalised intellect; civilisation means uprootedness and, as such, it develops its ultimate form in the modern megapolis that, at the end of its journey, 'doomed, moves to its final self-destruction' (2: p.127; 2: p. 107). The force of the people has been overshadowed by massification; creativity has given way to 'kitsch' art; genius has been subordinated to the terror reason. He writes:

Culture and civilisation. On the one hand the living corpse of a soul and, on the other, its mummy. This is how the West European existence differs from 1800 and after. The life in its richness and normalcy, whose form has grown up and matured from inside out in one mighty course stretching from the adolescent days of Gothics to Goethe and Napoleon--into that old artificial, deracinated life of our large cities, whose forms are created by intellect. Culture and civilisation. The organism born in countryside, that ends up in petrified mechanism (1: p.453; 1: p.353).

In yet another display of determinism, Spengler contends that one cannot escape historical destiny: 'the first inescapable things that confronts man as an unavoidable destiny, which no though can grasp, and no will can change, is a place and time of one's birth: everybody is born into one people, one religion, one social stays, one stretch of time and one culture.' Man is so much constrained by his historical environment that all attempts at changing one's destiny are hopeless. And, therefore, all flowery postulates about the improvement of mankind, all liberal and socialist philosophising about a glorious future regarding the duties of humanity and the essence of ethics, are of no avail. Spengler sees no other avenue of redemption except by declaring himself a fundamental and resolute pessimist:

Mankind appears to me as a zoological quantity. I see no progress, no goal, no avenue for humanity, except in the heads of the Western progress-Philistines...I cannot see a single mind and even less a unity of endeavours, feelings, and understanding in thsese barren masses people. (Selected Essays, p.73-74; 147). 

The determinist nature of Spengler's pessimism has been criticised recently by Konrad Lorenzz who, while sharing Spengler's culture of despair, refuses the predetermined linearity of decadence. In his capacity of ethologist and as one of the most articulate neo-Darwinists, Lorenz admits the possibility of an interruption of human phylogenesis--yet also contends that new vistas for cultural development always remain open. 'Nothing is more foreign to the evolutionary epistemologist, as well, to the physician,' writes Lorenz, 'than the doctrine of fatalism.' Still, Lorenz does not hesitate to criticise vehemently decadence in modern mass societies that, in his view, have already given birth to pacified and domesticated specimens, unable to pursue cultural endeavours,. Lorenz would certainly find positive renounce with Spengler himself in writing: 

This explains why the pseudodemocratic doctrine that all men are equal, by which is believed that all humans are initially alike and pliable, could be made into a state religion by both the lobbyists for large industry and by the ideologues of communism (p. 179-180).

Despite the criticism of historical determinism that has been levelled against him, Spengler often confuses his reader with Faustian exclamations reminiscent of someone prepared for battle rather than reconciled to a sublime demise. 'No, I am not a pessimist,' writes Spengler in Pessimism, 'for Pessimism means seeing no more duties. I see so many unresolved duties that I fear that time and men will run out to solve them' (p. 75). These words hardly cohere with the cultural despair that earlier he so passionately elaborated. Moreover, he often advocates forces and th toughness of the warrior in order to starve off Europe's disaster. 

One is led to the conclusion that Spengler extols historical pessimism or 'purposeful pessimism' (Zweckpressimismus), as long as it translates his conviction of the irreversible decadence of the European polity; however, once he perceives that cultural and political loopholes are available for moral and social regeneration, he quickly reverts to the eulogy of power politics. Similar characteristics are often to be found among many pets, novelists, and social thinkers whose legacy in spreading cultural pessimism played a significant part in shaping political behaviour among Europrean conservatives prior to World War II. One wonders why they all, like Spengler, bemoan the decadence of the West if this decadence has already been sealed, if the cosmic die has already been cast, and if all efforts of political and cultural rejuvenation appear hopeless? Moreover, in an effort to mend the unmendable, by advocating a Faustian mentality and will to power, these pessimists often seem to emulate the optimism of socialists rather than the ideas of these reconciled to impending social catastrophe.

For Spengler and other cultural pessimists, the sense of decadence is inherently combined with a revulsion against modernity and an abhorrence of rampant economic greed. As recent history a has shown, the political manifestation of such revulsion may lead to less savoury results: the glorification of the will-to-power and the nostalgia of death. At that moment, literary finesse and artistic beauty  may take on a very ominous turn. The recent history of Europe bears witness to how daily cultural pessimism can become a handy tool of modern political titans. Nonetheless, the upcoming disasters have something uplifting for the generations of cultural pessimists who's hypersensitive nature--and disdain for the materialist society--often lapse into political nihilism. This nihilistic streak was boldly stated by Spengler's contemporary Friedrich Sieburg, who reminds us that 'the daily life of democracy with its sad problems is boring but the impending catastrophes are highly interesting.'

Once cannot help thinking that, for Spengler and his likes, in a wider historical context, war and power politics offer a regenerative hope agains thee pervasive feeling of cultural despair. Yet, regardless of the validity of Spengler's visions or nightmares, it does not take much imagination observe in the decadence of the West the last twilight-dream of a democracy already grown weary of itself.

Content on the Traditional Britain Blog and Journal does not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Traditional Britain Group

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985): Brief Biography of the Controversial German Jurist

CarlSchmitt.jpg

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985): Brief Biography of the Controversial German Jurist

by Colm Gillis

Ex: http://carlschmittblog.com

Carl Schmitt was one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century. This is a very brief overview of his remarkable life and career.

Carl Schmitt was born in 1888. Plettenberg, his home town, was a Protestant hamlet, but Schmitt was baptized a Catholic. As was typical for those of Rhenish Catholic stock, Schmitt was possessed of a strong sense of identity. This was combined with an equally strong sense of transnationalism. Circumstances, the Rhenish Catholic outlook, and prevalent sectarianism in Germany at the time, meant that he was exposed to pluralism, religious divisions, political questions, and geopolitics.1

He received first and second-level education in Catholic institutions, acquiring a thorough understanding of the humanities, in particular religion and Greek. At the same time, Schmitt was exposed to materialism.  Familiarity with ideologies like Liberalism bred contempt and Schmitt maintained his religious zeal long after he left behind his formative years.2

After attending Universities in Berlin and then Strassburg, Schmitt received his doctorate in 1910. Following graduation, he honed his legal skills. At Strassburg, Schmitt took a stance against positivistic legal theory. Positivism located legitimacy in the sheer fact of a sovereign government. Analysis of legal rulings was restricted to the intention of the lawgiver. Positivism ruled out the use of, for example, natural law theories, and Schmitt’s Catholic upbringing most likely was what made him averse to such a legal approach.3

At this stage Schmitt’s views on law were informed by the neo-Kantians, who placed a ‘right’ above the state and who saw it as the function of the State to fulfil this right. While professing loyalty to the State and to a perceived right order, Schmitt tended to subordinate the individual, an anti-liberal stance maintained throughout his career.4

Schmitt’s meeting with the barrister and deputy of the Center party, Dr Hugo am Zehnhoff, in 1913 influenced Schmitt profoundly. In particular Schmitt turned away from subjugating law to a set of transcendent norms. Instead concrete circumstances were to provide the basis for law from now on.5

Slide1

Dr Hugo am Zehnhoff

Before the war, he published two books. But his inclinations at this stage were not overly political. This apoliticism was common amongst German intellectuals at the time. Generally, the existing order was accepted as is. It was felt inappropriate for academics to weigh in on practical issues.6

After passing his second law exam in 1915, Schmitt volunteered for the infantry, but suffered a serious back injury. So he served out WWI performing civil duties in Bavaria which were essential to the war effort. Schmitt administered the martial law that existed throughout Bavaria and elsewhere in Germany. He married his first wife, Pawla Dorotić, a Serb whom he later divorced in 1924, at this time. Pawla’s surname was added to his so as to give himself an aristocratic air, an indication of Schmitt’s determination to advance himself.7

Slide1

Hindenburg and Ludendorff formed an effective dictatorship in Germany during WWII

In line with much of Conservative German thought at the time, Schmitt viewed the state – not as a repressive or retrograde force that stifled freedom – but as a bastion of tradition securing order. Dictatorship was mused upon. This, in Schmitt’s mind, was constrained by a legal order and could only act within that legal order. Dictatorship was functional, temporary, and provided a measure of order in emergency situations, but was not to be transformative and break from the structure which preceded it and dictated to it. In other words, it was to be a dictatorship in the mould of classical dictatorship which was extant in the Roman republic.8

As for the purpose of the world war itself, Schmitt displayed his ever-present aloofness. While many thinkers in Germany saw the war in very stark terms, as a struggle to uphold the ‘spirit’ or as a struggle against Enlightenment rationalism, Schmitt opined that the war proved the tragic existence of man in the modern world. Men had lost their souls and corrupted by a glut of knowledge and a dearth of spirituality.9

Strassburg’s loss to the Reich after the war meant that Schmitt had to downgrade to a lectureship at the School of Business Administration in Munich, a post which he achieved with the aid of Moritz Julius Bonn. Bonn would remain a close friend. Despite their political differences, Schmitt and Moritz were companions until the end of Weimar.10

While Schmitt would be forever known as a provocative critic of the Weimar republic, he was always loyal to its institutions from its inception, albeit with reservations. Catholics had their hand strengthened by the Weimar republic. Hence, Schmitt and others were unlikely to overthrow an institution that had favoured them. On the other hand, Versailles was perceived as a humiliation and seemingly even worse for Schmitt, a distortion of law. Antipathies were harboured by Schmitt towards the US on these grounds. America was considered it to be a hypocritical entity who impressed upon people a neutral, liberal international law operating alongside an open economic system, but because the latter had to be guaranteed, the former could not be neutral.11   

Differences between jurists that existed before the onset of war were further exacerbated after the war. Hans Kelsen, the normativist scholar, was Schmitt’s main rival. Those like Schmitt opposed what they saw as an unrealistic objectivism.12

After the war, Schmitt turned his back on neo-Kantian perceptions of right. Instead he interpreted the turmoil of the war and post-war anarchy as proof for his ‘decisionist’ theories. Law and legitimate rule were located in the hands of a clearly defined sovereign. Legal procedure would be kept to a minimum. Justice would be substantive as opposed to merely formal.

Schmitt placed order before the application of law and he increasingly saw many of the assumptions and modus operandi of Liberalism, democracy, and parliamentarianism to be unworkable, subversive, irrational, prone to elitism, and too politically agnostic in the Germany of his day. His criticisms of domestic law mirrored those of international law – too much faith was placed in supposedly neutral theories of law. Sheer ignorance of power structures or realities on the ground was what kept ‘rule-of-law’ theories going.13

Sulla_Glyptothek_Munich_309

Schmitt mused much on dictatorships like the one headed by Sulla, the Roman dictator

Disillusioned with modern politics, he sought refuge in counter-revolution thinkers, notably de Maistre, Bonald, and Donoso Cortés. Schmitt did much to resurrect the reputation of Cortés in particular, an ex-liberal from Spain who produced far-reaching analyses of mid-19th  century European politics. Cortés’ discourse was framed in highly theological language.14

Schmitt distanced himself from ‘conservative revolutionaries,’ however. Conservative revolutionaries held that traditional conservatism needed to utilize modern techniques to save Germany from atheism, Liberalism and Bolshevism. Schmitt considered their opinions too crude. Diversification was key and Schmitt interacted with the left and right and every shade in between, with the possible exception of Liberals, although he never seems to have found an intellectual soul-mate.15

Yet Schmitt concurred with the conservative revolutionaries in one important respect; namely that he found the age to be dead, lacking in vitality, and overly rationalistic. Liberalism and parliamentarianism were increasingly in the cross-hairs and the first pre-emptive strike was his book Political Romanticism (1919), which was released after the war. This was not a template for later Schmittian works, but was symptomatic of an impatience with relentless individualism. One can read many subtexts from this work that would appear in his more celebrated studies.16

Following Political Romanticism, Schmitt’s targets were pinpointed to greater precision. Dictatorship (1921), Political Theology (1922), and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), were three noteworthy books released in the early 1920s. Liberalism’s flawed ontology of mankind was critiqued. Contradictions in Liberalism were exposed. Dangerous phantasms of parliamentarianism were rationally elucidated. Power in the ‘real’ world of politics was discussed. And more. 17

At the same time, Schmitt was aware of the increasing totalitarianism evident in modern politics,  being one of the first to recognize this trend, and even articulating an awareness of the power of modern media. His position was somewhere in between the value-neutral position of Liberalism and the absolute control espoused by Statists. He was acutely aware of the weaknesses of Weimar Germany in the face of ideologies demanding increasing loyalty from their members. In parallel with his fear of totalitarianism was his disgust at the way that private interests were embedding themselves into public institutions. Nevertheless, by 1925, the constitutional lawyer Richard Thoma was accusing Schmitt of authoritarianism, a penchant for the irrational and desiring the hegemony of the Church in Germany.18

Schmitt gained a reputation as a legal theorist who leant strongly on article 48 of the Weimar Constitution during this period. In this article, a provision was made for emergency rule in the event of political breakdown. For Schmitt, as opposed to those like Thoma, law was meaningless without a stable order in place. He took a very realistic perspective, and in fact was not ideologically inclined against democracy or parliament. But he harboured misgivings that the supposed nature of democracy or parliamentarianism, as articulated by his contemporaries, was historically accurate. In any event, the modern forces which Liberalism had unleashed would put paid to whatever the interest-based new order tried to accomplish, Schmitt also surmised.19

Weimar_Constitution

Frontispiece of a booklet of the Weimar Constitution

Schmitt spent the bulk of the 1920s at Bonn, and moved there in 1922 after stints at Berlin and Greifswald, leaving Bonn in 1928. In 1926 he got married to Duschka Todorovitsch, another Slav. In the next several years, two of his most important books, The Concept of the Political (1927, with a new and highly amended edition appearing in 1932) and Constitutional Theory (1928) were published. The former, in particular, marked a ‘turn’ in Schmitt’s thought: he was now less inclined towards the Catholic Church. Already he had been turning to Rosseau and his theories of the identity of people and government.20

Slide1

Schmitt and his wife in the 1920s

Introducing Schmitt’s famous ‘friend-enemy thesis,’ The Concept of the Political was a revolutionary book in political science and philosophy. Continuing in the same vein as earlier works such as Political Theology, Schmitt saw the State as the only body competent to pursue political existence by identifying the friend-enemy distinction. Despite the apparent amorality of the study, many commentators, including his Catholic friend Waldemar Gurion, were impressed by what was undeniably an astute analysis.21

Both the Weimar Republic and Schmitt the intellectual reached the height of their powers in the years immediately before the Wall Street crash. Schmitt would go to Berlin just before the fatal blows were struck against the nascent republic. He now commanded widely-held kudos as a jurist, and the financial crisis would now give him influence as a political adviser.22

Germany was on the precipice at this stage and article 76 of the Weimar constitution particularly disturbed Schmitt. He harboured no illusions about what this provision, which enabled a popularly elected party to do as it pleased with the constitution, signified for those antagonistic towards the State. Schmitt now became close to Johannes Popitz, Franz von Papen, and General Kurt von Schleicher, all of whom represented traditional German values. During the chancellorship of Heinrich Brüning, the Centre party leader, he acted as constitutional advisor to President Paul von Hindenburg. True to his past form, Schmitt provided legal cover for the use of emergency decrees which helped see the republic through the treacherous currents of the early 1930s. Surrounded by practical men, Schmitt and his colleagues were only interested in making Germany a strong and stable country. At this time, he also recognized the need for government to concern itself with economic matters. Schmitt neither sought to repress trade unions nor exalt business interests within the corridors of powers, but advocated the pursuance of an economic policy that was neutral.23

There was more than a touch of Keystone Cops about Schmitt, von Papen, von Schleicher, and other traditional conservatives, as they struggled to manoeuvre and deal with the burgeoning National Socialist movement. One of Schmitt’s treatises, Legality and Legitimacy, was used by supporters of von Papen and von Schleicher to justify the increasingly authoritarian measures required to cope with the turmoil in Germany, which by 1932 had become pervasive. Ill-judged use of Schmitt’s theory handed an initiative to the NSDAP in 1932 during a landmark case in Prussia. In 1932, he also wrote an article in the run-up to elections called The Abuse of Legality, where he repeated his arguments in  Legality and Legitimacy. The most important of his arguments, in this context, was the conviction that the Constitution cannot be used as a weapon against itself.24

In 1932, von Schleicher tried to outwit the NSDAP. He lifted bans on paramilitary groups aligned with the National Socialist movement, but also tried to woo right-wing voters through innovative economic measures. Strategic support was lent to these tactics by Schmitt. However, these plans backfired. The NSDAP grew in strength and Hitler was underestimated by those like the conservatives, who believed in their own superiority and powers of manipulation. Meanwhile, Schmitt’s ideas were commoditized by those like Hans Zehrer and Horst Grüneberg, editors of Die Tat, who found knives in Schmitt’s writings where there were only scalpels.25

Slide1

Schmitt’s article ‘The Fuehrer protects the right’

One last episode of farce remained before the death of Weimar: Von Schleicher conversed with Hindenburg about banning anti-constitutional parties that were now incapable of being contained in 1933. This conversation was leaked. Schmitt’s name was associated with the backroom shenanigans, and he had an embittered, and personal exchange with Prelate Kaas, leader of the Centre Party, who charged Schmitt with promoting illegality. Schmitt later heard about Hitler’s appointment in a café. Just at this time, he was moving from Berlin to Cologne, a move unrelated to the political trouble. Schmitt’s departure from the capital seemed just as well timed as his arrival.26

True to his form of being able to condense the most momentous of events into a single phrase, Schmitt remarked on January 30 1933 that ‘one can say that Hegel died.’27 Schmitt saw Hitler’s rise to power through the lens of vitality and Kultur. National Socialism had ousted a bureaucracy that had powered the rise of the German state, only to disappear once the work of the bureaucratic State was complete. He joined the NSDAP in May 1933, although it was not a significant gesture, because the purging of the civil service had meant that Schmitt was virtually compelled to join.28

A full professorship in Berlin, a post at the Prussian state council, a nomination to the nascent Akademie für Deutsches Recht, an appointment to the editorial board of the publication of National Socialist legal theorists Das Deutsche Recht, and appointment to the head of higher education instructors of the National-Socialist Federation of German jurists came in quick succession in 1933.29

In 1934 he partly backed that year’s notorious purges in the provocatively titled The Führer Protects the Law. In his opposition to the slaughter of innocents, Schmitt showed his astuteness. He was able to cite both Hitler and Goering, who admitted publicly that mistakes were made in the purges. Schmitt called for a state of normality to be re-imposed, now that the danger to the state had passed. Despite his attempts to quell the bloodshed in Germany, Schmitt’s writings appeared to emigrés as rubberstamping a fanatical government that was out-of-control. His old friend Gurian coined the term ‘Crown Jurist of the Third Reich’ for Schmitt.30

Protestations of emigrés against Schmitt didn’t go unnoticed by the authorities, and their dredging up of Schmitt’s past stance towards the NSDAP stifled, and then reversed, Schmitt’s rise through the ranks. It seemed as if the more Schmitt tried to ingratiate himself – by 1936 he had approved of the Nuremberg laws and also proposed a purging of the law-books of Jewish influence – the more he alienated himself.31

The SS and their publication, Das Schwarze Korps, were the vanguard of ideological purity in the Third Reich. From this platform, they were eventually able to force Schmitt to leave the public bodies he had served in and he retired to academia. Disillusioned, he drew more on the theories of Thomas Hobbes, in particular his theory of obedience being given in return for protection in a 1938 work. Schmitt also explored international law, and would remain a critic of the global order until his death, notably calling for an international system where countries would guard Grossraum, large swathes of territory that powerful States would claim as their backyard as the US had done with the Monroe Doctrine. This should not be confused with racially charged Lebensraum theories.32

In the last phase of the war, Schmitt served in the German equivalent of the Home Guard and was captured by the Soviets. Ironically, the Bolsheviks released him after considering him to be of no value, either because of what he told the Russians or because of his age. Schmitt did not receive the same leniency from the Americans and he spend thirteen months, after his arrest in September 1945, incarcerated, also suffering the ignominy of having his massive library confiscated.  The main accusation levelled against him was that he had provided intellectual cover for the NSDAP Lebensraum policy.33 Chastened by his experiences, Schmitt retreated into what he told his interrogator Robert Kempner was a ‘security of silence’34 and he composed the following lines which served to summate the attitude he adopted after the war

Look at the author most precisely

Who speaks of silence oh so nicely;

For while he’s speaking of quiescence

He outwits his own obsolescence.35

Schmitt did not maintain a strict silence, as the lines suggest, but continued his manner of couching his writings in esotericism, a manner which he adopted during NSDAP rule. After his ordeal at the hands of the Americans, Schmitt retired to a house which was named San Casciano, either after the name of the residence that Machiavelli retired to after he was ousted from power, or after the name of a Christian martyr in the reign of Diocletian who was stabbed to death with a stylo by one of his students.36

Even in his old age, Schmitt divided opinion, but kept producing works of literary quality. The Nomos of the Earth (1950) was Schmitt’s last major work and his key study on international relations. That is not to downgrade the quality of many of his later works, such as Theory of the Partisan (1963), which are still highly relevant in the modern world. He also revised many of his earlier writings so as to keep pace with the new world that had replaced the previous European order that had existed from the 17th century. Theology came back into focus for Schmitt and his Political Theology II (1970) critiqued the classical position adopted by Erik Peterson, in respect of the Church’s position towards politics. Friendships with Jacob Taubes, a Jewish rabbi, and Alexandre Kojève, the outstanding Hegelian philosopher, revived his reputation.37

Schmitt’s downfall somewhat mirrored similar events surrounding Machiavelli. His death in his home town of Plettenberg at the grand age of 97 matched the somewhat similar life-span enjoyed by Hobbes.38 Life for both may have been nasty and brutish, at times, but was definitely not short!

Currently, I am researching a book on Carl Schmitt because I need to know about politics. Any comments or suggested corrections to this post are welcome. I have already authored one book Mysteries of State in the Renaissance. My Amazon page is here.

NOTES

[1] Carl Schmitt’s International Thought: Order and Orientation William Hooker Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2009 pp. xiii; State, Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of Political Unity Carl Schmitt (Simona Draghici (Trans.)) Plutarch Press Corvalis, Or. 2001 pp. ix; The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition) Carl Schmitt (George Schwab (Trans.)) The University of Chicago Press Chicago 2007 pp. 4; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 3-5.

[2]The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition) Carl Schmitt (George Schwab (Trans.)) The University of Chicago Press Chicago 2007 pp. 4; The Challenge of the Exception: Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936 (2nd Ed.) George Schwab Greenwood Press New York Westport, Conn. London 1989 pp. 13; Ibid. pp. 6-7; Dictatorship Carl Schmitt (Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Trans.)) Polity Press Malden, MA Cambridge 2014 pp. xvii.

[3] The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition) Carl Schmitt (George Schwab (Trans.)) The University of Chicago Press Chicago 2007 pp. 4; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 9, 13.

[4] The Challenge of the Exception: Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936 (2nd Ed.) George Schwab Greenwood Press New York Westport, Conn. London 1989 pp. 14; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 10-11.

[5] The Challenge of the Exception: Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936 (2nd Ed.) George Schwab Greenwood Press New York Westport, Conn. London 1989 pp. 13.

[6] Ibid. pp. 14; Carl Schmitt’s International Thought: Order and Orientation William Hooker Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2009 pp. xiii; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 13-15.

[7] Dictatorship Carl Schmitt (Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Trans.)) Polity Press Malden, MA Cambridge 2014 pp. x-xi; The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition) Carl Schmitt (George Schwab (Trans.)) The University of Chicago Press Chicago 2007 pp. 4; Carl Schmitt’s International Thought: Order and Orientation William Hooker Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2009 pp. xiii.

[8] Dictatorship Carl Schmitt (Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Trans.)) Polity Press Malden, MA Cambridge 2014 pp. xi-xii; The Challenge of the Exception: Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936 (2nd Ed.) George Schwab Greenwood Press New York Westport, Conn. London 1989 pp. 14-15; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 18-20.

[9] Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 16-18.

[10] Ibid. pp. 22-23.

[11] The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy Carl Schmitt (Ellen Kennedy (Trans.)) MIT Press Cambridge, Mass. London 2000 pp. xxvii-xxviii; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 28, 53-54; The Geopolitics Of Separation: Response to Teschke’s ‘Decisions and Indecisions’ Gopal Balakrishnan New Left Review Vol. 68 Mar-Apr 2011 pp. 59; The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum Carl Schmitt (G.L. Ulmen (Trans.)) Telos Press New York 2003 pp. 12-19.

[12] State, Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of Political Unity Carl Schmitt (Simona Draghici (Trans.)) Plutarch Press Corvalis, Or. 2001 pp. ix-x; Constitutional Theory Carl Schmitt (Jeffrey Seitzer (Trans.)) Duke University Press Durham London 2008 pp. 3; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 36.

[13] Carl Schmitt’s quest for the political: Theology, decisionism, and the concept of the enemy Maurice A. Auerbach Journal of Political Philosophy Winter 1993-94 Vol. 21 No. 2 pp. 201; Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology John P. McCormick Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1997 pp. 2; State, Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of Political Unity Carl Schmitt (Simona Draghici (Trans.)) Plutarch Press Corvalis, Or. 2001 pp. x-xi; The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition) Carl Schmitt (George Schwab (Trans.)) The University of Chicago Press Chicago 2007 pp. 7, pp. 13; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 37.

[14] Carl Schmitt’s quest for the political: Theology, decisionism, and the concept of the enemy Maurice A. Auerbach Journal of Political Philosophy Winter 1993-94 Vol. 21 No. 2 pp. 203; Carl Schmitt and Donoso Cortés Gary Ulmen Telos 2002 No. 125  pp. 69-79; The Challenge of the Exception: Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936 (2nd Ed.) George Schwab Greenwood Press New York Westport, Conn. London 1989 pp. 22-23.

[15] Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror Richard Wolin Political Theory 1992 Vol. 20 No. 3 pp. 428-429; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 56-62, 135-139. He made his disassociation from conservative revolutionaries quite forceful at times, for instance complaining when his name nearly appeared in the same collection of essays as the Austrian corporatist thinker Prof. Othmar Spann. Schmitt also associated with leftist thinkers like Benjamin and Kirchheimer, both who were indebted to him. Schmitt did attract right wing students who were pessimistic about the German state, but these  were only interested in those parts of his lectures construed as anti-Weimar and the subtlety of Schmitt’s thought was ignored.

[16] Carl Schmitt’s quest for the political: Theology, decisionism, and the concept of the enemy Maurice A. Auerbach Journal of Political Philosophy Winter 1993-94 Vol. 21 No. 2 pp. 206; Political Romanticism Carl Schmitt (Guy Oakes (Trans.)) MIT Press Cambridge, Mass. London 1986. 

[17] The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy Carl Schmitt (Ellen Kennedy (Trans.)) MIT Press Cambridge, Mass. London 2000 pp. xvi.

[18] Ibid. pp. xiv, xli; Carl Schmitt’s quest for the political: Theology, decisionism, and the concept of the enemy Maurice A. Auerbach Journal of Political Philosophy Winter 1993-94 Vol. 21 No. 2 pp. 207; State, Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of Political Unity Carl Schmitt (Simona Draghici (Trans.)) Plutarch Press Corvalis, Or. 2001 pp. viii.

[19] The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy Carl Schmitt (Ellen Kennedy (Trans.)) MIT Press Cambridge, Mass. London 2000 pp. xxvii-xxx; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 72-73; Four Articles: 1931-1938 Carl Schmitt (Simona Draghici (Trans.)) Plutarch Press Corvalis, Or. 1999 pp. x-xi; In his introduction to one of Schmitt’s books, Christopher Dawson writes; To the traditionalist this alliance of liberal humanitarianism with the forces of destruction appears so insane that he is tempted to see in it the influence of political corruption or the sinister action of some hidden hand. It must, however, be recognised that it is no new phenomenon; in fact, it has formed part of the liberal tradition from the beginning. The movement which created the ideals of liberal humanitarianism was also the starting point of the modern revolutionary propaganda which is equally directed against social order and traditional morality and the Christian faith. In The Necessity of Politics: An Essay on the Representative Idea of the Church and Modern Europe Carl Schmitt (E.M. Codd (Trans.)) Sheed & Ward London 1931 pp. 15-16.

[20] State, Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of Political Unity Carl Schmitt (Simona Draghici (Trans.)) Plutarch Press Corvalis, Or. 2001 pp. xi; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 44; The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition) Carl Schmitt (George Schwab (Trans.)) The University of Chicago Press Chicago 2007; Constitutional Theory Carl Schmitt (Jeffrey Seitzer (Trans.)) Duke University Press Durham London 2008; The Challenge of the Exception: Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936 (2nd Ed.) George Schwab Greenwood Press New York Westport, Conn. London 1989 pp. 25-26.

[21] Carl Schmitt’s International Thought: Order and Orientation William Hooker Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2009 pp. 1-5; The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition) Carl Schmitt (George Schwab (Trans.)) The University of Chicago Press Chicago 2007; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 93-94.

[22] Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 85; State, Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of Political Unity Carl Schmitt (Simona Draghici (Trans.)) Plutarch Press Corvalis, Or. 2001 pp. xi.

[23] The Definite and the Dubious: Carl Schmitt’s Influence on Conservative Political and Legal Theory in the US Joseph W. Bendersky Telos 2002  No. 122  pp. 36, 43; Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of Political Unity Carl Schmitt (Simona Draghici (Trans.)) Plutarch Press Corvalis, Or. 2001 pp. viii-xii. It’s significant that Heinrich Muth noted that someone who strove in the manner of Schmitt could not logically have been in league with groups like the NSDAP; The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition) Carl Schmitt (George Schwab (Trans.)) The University of Chicago Press Chicago 2007 pp. 14; Political Romanticism Carl Schmitt (Guy Oakes (Trans.)) MIT Press Cambridge, Mass. London 1986 pp. ix-x; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 114-116, 121-122.

[24] Legality and Legitimacy Carl Schmitt (Jeffrey Seitzer (Trans.)) Duke University Press Durham London 2004 pp. xvi, xx-xxi; State, Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of Political Unity Carl Schmitt (Simona Draghici (Trans.)) Plutarch Press Corvalis, Or. 2001 pp. xi; Constitutional Theory Carl Schmitt (Jeffrey Seitzer (Trans.)) Duke University Press Durham London 2008 pp. 20-23; Political Romanticism Carl Schmitt (Guy Oakes (Trans.)) MIT Press Cambridge, Mass. London 1986 pp. x-xi.

[25] Legality and Legitimacy Carl Schmitt (Jeffrey Seitzer (Trans.)) Duke University Press Durham London 2004 pp. xxi; Constitutional Theory Carl Schmitt (Jeffrey Seitzer (Trans.)) Duke University Press Durham London 2008 pp. 22; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 152-153; The Challenge of the Exception: Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936 (2nd Ed.) George Schwab Greenwood Press New York Westport, Conn. London 1989 pp. vi.

[26] Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 184-189.

[27] Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror Richard Wolin Political Theory 1992 Vol. 20 No. 3 pp. 424.

[28] Ibid. pp. 425; State, Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of Political Unity Carl Schmitt (Simona Draghici (Trans.)) Plutarch Press Corvalis, Or. 2001 pp. xiii.

[29] State, Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of Political Unity Carl Schmitt (Simona Draghici (Trans.)) Plutarch Press Corvalis, Or. 2001 pp. xii.

[30] Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 215-216, 23-224; The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol Carl Schmitt (George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Trans.)) Greenwood Press Westport, Conn. London 1996 pp. xvi.

[31] Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 224-228; For an excellent summary of Schmitt’s true attitudes towards the Jews see New Evidence, Old Contradictions: Carl Schmitt and the Jewish Question Joseph Bendersky Telos 2005 No. 132 pp. 64-82.

[32] The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol Carl Schmitt (George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Trans.)) Greenwood Press Westport, Conn. London 1996 pp. xii-xiii; Carl Schmitt, theorist for the Reich Joseph W. Bendersky Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Guildford 1983 pp. 224-228; The Geopolitics Of Separation: Response to Teschke’s ‘Decisions and Indecisions’ Gopal Balakrishnan New Left Review Vol. 68 Mar-Apr 2011 pp. 68.

[33] Carl Schmitt’s International Thought: Order and Orientation William Hooker Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2009 pp. xiii; Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theory Carl Schmitt (Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Trans.)) Polity Press Cambridge 1970 pp. 1.

[34] Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theory Carl Schmitt (Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Trans.)) Polity Press Cambridge 1970 pp. 1.

[35] Ibid. pp. 1.

[36] Ibid. pp. 2.

[37] Ibid.; Constitutional Theory Carl Schmitt (Jeffrey Seitzer (Trans.)) Duke University Press Durham London 2008 pp. 2; Carl Schmitt’s International Thought: Order and Orientation William Hooker Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2009 pp. 2; The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum Carl Schmitt (G.L. Ulmen (Trans.)) Telos Press New York 2003; The Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political Carl Schmitt (A.C. Goodson (Trans.)) Michigan State University Lansing 2004; Letters of Jacob Taubes & Carl Schmitt Timothy Edwards (Trans.) Accessed from http://www.scribd.com on 25/10/14; Alexandre Kojève-Carl Schmitt Correspondence and Alexandre Kojève, “Colonialism from a European Perpective (Erik de Vries (Trans.)) Interpretation 2001 Vol. 29 No. 1 pp. 91-130.

[38] Carl Schmitt’s International Thought: Order and Orientation William Hooker Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2009 pp. xiii; Hobbes lived until the age of 91, an even more remarkable feat than Schmitt’s longevity!

lundi, 04 mai 2015

Presseschau - Mai 2015

zeitungslesertttttyyy.jpg

Presseschau
Mai 2015
 
 

vendredi, 01 mai 2015

Putin, der Westen und die Ostukraine

Veranstaltung:

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Anmeldungen, wenn nicht anders angegeben, bitte per E-Mail an veranstaltungen@fkbf.de oder per Fax an 030-315 17 37 21.

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Montag, 11. Mai, 19 Uhr: Vortrag mit Diskussion

Thomas Fasbender, Moskau

Freiheit statt Demokratie – Putin, der Westen und die Ostukraine

Eindrucksvoll schildert Thomas Fasbender in seinem Buch „Freiheit statt Demokratie“, wie anders Rußland ist. Anders als die westeuropäischen Vorurteile glauben machen und anders als das westeuropäische Ideal einer zeitgemäßen Demokratie.

Sein Fazit: Rußland will den Weg des Westens nicht gehen, und Rußland wird ihn nicht gehen. Und das beileibe nicht wegen seines Präsidenten. Der russische Mensch hat sein eigenes Verständnis von Freiheit, und das verträgt sich nicht mit der europäischen Verliebtheit in Vernunft- und Gesetzestreue.

thfass.jpgIm Ukraine-Konflikt haben sich zwei geschlossene Logikkreise herausgeschält. Der Westen sieht in der Ukraine den endgültigen Aufbruch zu Freiheit und Demokratie; Rußland sieht eine Putschregierung unter Beteiligung von Faschisten. Der Westen bezeichnet den Anschluß der Krim als völkerrechtswidrige Annexion; Rußland bezeichnet die Unabhängigkeit des Kosovo als völkerrechtswidrige Sezession. Beide Seiten bezeichnen die Argumente der jeweils anderen als haltlos. Das Ganze spielt zudem vor dem Hintergrund des ersten weltanschaulichen Konflikts  in Europa seit dem Ende des Kommunismus. Spätestens 2013 haben sich die russischen Eliten offen von dem säkularen, individualistischen Weltbild der westlichen Demokratien distanziert. Darin werden sie von der überwiegenden Mehrheit der russischen Gesellschaft unterstützt.

Dr. Thomas Fasbender, Publizist und Kaufmann, in Hamburg aufgewachsen, lebt seit 1992 in Moskau. Der promovierte Philosoph ist Journalist, Unternehmer und Blogger. 2014 ist im Manuscriptum Verlag sein Buch „Freiheit statt Demokratie. Rußlands Weg und die Illusionen des Westens“ erschienen.

jeudi, 23 avril 2015

Bij het overlijden van Günter Grass (1927-2015)

Gunter-Grass.jpg

Door: Jean-Pierre Rondas

Grassland

Bij het overlijden van Günter Grass (1927-2015)

Jean-Pierre Rondas neemt afscheid van Günter Grass

GGé.jpgBij me thuis hangt een litho van Günter Grass met een zelfportret als Dummer August, een domme nar of triestige ‘rode’ clown met een zotskap gemaakt van het krantenpapier waarop de Duitse ‘weldenkende’ pers hem als nazi had besmeurd. Gij domme august, zegt het gedicht dat rond zijn kop gekrabbeld staat, komisch toch zoals ge hier nu muilen staat te trekken onder het snelrecht van de rechtvaardigen: Schnellgericht der Gerechten. Had beter kunnen weten.

Deze ‘Gerechten’ waren de mensen die hem in de media hadden belasterd omdat hij in 2006 in een roman (De rokken van de ui) had opgebiecht dat hij zich in 1944 op zeventienjarige leeftijd bij het leger had aangemeld om het vaderland te verdedigen. Hij wou bij de onderzeeërs vertelde hij, maar werd onmiddellijk ingelijfd bij de Waffen-SS. Gelukkig werd hij in april 1945 door de ‘Amis’ gevangengenomen. Wie goed naar de foto’s van toen had gekeken wist dit natuurlijk allemaal. Maar nu vertelde Grass de geschiedenis van zijn indiensttreding voor de eerste keer van naaldje tot draadje, het ‘detail’ van de SS inbegrepen. Het gehuil in de pers der ‘Gerechten’ was enorm. Eindelijk hadden ze hem te pakken, de man die het heel zijn leven had bestaan om anderen te beoordelen. Weliswaar net zoals zijn belasteraars politiek links, maar zoals nu bleek met een duister verleden. Hele boekdelen zijn er verschenen met alleen maar de persknipsels rond deze zaak – druipend van verontwaardiging.

Het punt van zijn tegenstanders was dat hij met een eerdere bekentenis van het ‘SS-detail’ nooit tot het geweten van Duitsland had kunnen uitgroeien. Nu bleek dat hij niet beter was dan de andere Duitsers van die generatie die hij juist vaak hun Lebenslüge had verweten. Deze leugen bestond er dan in dat ze zo laat mogelijk met de hele waarheid op de proppen waren gekomen. Als ‘geweten’ van Duitsland stond Grass trouwens in een lange en respectabele traditie. De namen van Thomas Mann en Heinrich Böll mogen hier volstaan om dit fenomeen op te roepen. Maar deze status liet het hem ook toe om dingen ter sprake te brengen die ‘rechtsere’ auteurs slechts konden vermelden op straffe van eeuwige intellectuele verbanning. Grass was moedig, en schreef over de miljoenen Duitsers die in 1945 uit het Oosten werden verdreven, met als tragisch hoogte- of dieptepunt de keldering van de Gustloff in de Baltische Zee, met duizenden slachtoffers tot gevolg. Ook Duitsers hadden onder de oorlog geleden. Het heeft lang geduurd voor links dat kon toegeven. De ultieme stap was zijn SS-verhaal, met het beschreven gevolg. Einde Geweten van de natie.

gg1.jpgGrass was wel wat tegenstand gewoon, en als meester-spelmaker van de publieke opinie kon hij zijn belagers ook gemakkelijk uiteenspelen. Memorabel is die kaft van Der Spiegel waarop de gevreesde criticus Marcel Reich-Ranicki een roman van Grass letterlijk in tweeën scheurt – hopelijk was het boekwerk al een beetje ‘voorgescheurd’ want in een twee drie kon je de turven van Grass niet zomaar kleinkrijgen: De bot, De rattin, Een gebied zonder eind, De blikken trommel – ik vermeld enkel de ‘dikste’. En telkens won Günter Grass. De bitterheid in de correcte pers werd er niet minder om. Tot ze hem tot prulschrijver degradeerden – precies zoals ze nu doen met de filosoof Peter Sloterdijk.

Grass is zijn leven lang een militant van die goeie ouwe SPD geweest, de socialistische partij van Duitsland. Hij heeft een hyperactieve literair-intellectuele verkiezingscampagne gevoerd voor de beide socialistische bondskanseliers Willy Brandt en Helmut Schmidt. Toch is onlangs uit correspondentie en uit interviews gebleken dat de raspolitici de bemoeienis van de ‘beweger’ Grass niet altijd op prijs hebben gesteld. Hij dacht namelijk op basis van zijn bijdrage een heel belangrijke plaats in de SPD in te kunnen nemen. Zoals we hier te lande kunnen ervaren, weten we dat bewegers en politici heel andere rollen te spelen hebben.

Koele minnaar van de hereniging

Op nog een ander niveau heeft Grass zich heel consequent vergist. Lang voor de val van de Muur (1989) was er al sprake van de hereniging van de ‘beide Duitslanden’, de Bondsrepubliek en de DDR. En al veel langer zag Grass dat niet zitten. In 1983 vertelde hij mij in een interview dat er een Duitse cultuurnatie moest gesticht worden waarbij het aantal politieke staten om het even was. Net zoals die Franse minister na de Eerste Wereldoorlog hield Grass zoveel van Duitsland dat hij er zoveel mogelijk van wilde. Dat zegde hij omwille van dezelfde redenen die deze Fransman aanhaalde: de middenpositie van Duitsland in Europa is nu eenmaal problematisch. Verleid Duitsland dus niet! In die tijd haalde Grass altijd dezelfde voorbeelden aan van de Rheinbund en van het Frankfurter parlement dat in 1848 in de Paulskirche vergaderde – waarbij hij nooit kon kiezen tussen een federaal Grossdeutschland (te groot want met Oostenrijk erbij, maar toch democratisch) dan wel een Kleindeutschland (leuker want klein, maar jammer genoeg met de militaristische Pruisen aan het bewind).

Het komt erop neer dat Grass de hereniging van Duitsland absoluut niet heeft toegejuicht. Toch heeft hij altijd de nationale kwestie ter sprake willen brengen. Met Grass kon je op hartelijke manier luidruchtig van mening verschillen over de natie en het nationalisme. Hij heeft de kwestie niet aan rechts overgelaten, en tegelijkertijd bezat hij de gave zich in de positie van de tegenstander te verplaatsen en zelfs vele elementen van diens redenering over te nemen – anders was er immers geen dialoog. En tot dialoog was Grass altijd bereid. Want zijn grote onderwerp, zijn macro-propositie als het ware, was en bleef Duitsland. Duitslands geschiedenis, Duitslands verwording in het Derde Rijk, en Duitslands wederopstanding vandaag, maar dan kritisch begeleid en met wantrouwen bekeken. Daartoe was hij gerechtigd.

In de praktijk (maar minder in theorie) had Grass op zijn eentje lang voor de val van de Muur Duitsland herenigd. Hij deed dat op twee manieren. Ten eerste waren er zijn pogingen om zijn collega’s uit het verstikkende regime van de DDR weg te verleiden. Hij was de grote inspirator van onder meer het Haager Treffen (in Den Haag): een ontmoeting van West-Duitse auteurs met hun DDR-collega’s, met Stefan Heym, Hermann Kant, Christa Wolf, Stefan Hermlin, Günter de Bruyn en vele anderen die ik daar heb leren kennen. Dit heeft onmiskenbaar bijgedragen tot de val van het regime. En ten tweede waren het zijn geschriften die Duitsland mentaal herenigden, bijvoorbeeld door het juweeltje van Das Treffen in Telgte, of met zijn adagium van die andere Wahrheit die niet A of Niet-A is. Na de val van de Muur heeft hij zijn terughoudendheid tegenover de hereniging laten varen in de schitterende, maar jammer genoeg minder bekende roman Ein weites Feld (Een gebied zonder eind) waarin het de spionage is die het continuüm vormt tussen alle historische Duitslanden die er geweest zijn, van Metternich tot de Stasi, van Fontane tot Hans-Joachim Schädlich.

Oskar Matzerath

gg3.jpgEn dan, natuurlijk, zijn ‘echte’, grote, originele, onnavolgbare debuut: De blikken trommel. Die Blechtrommel is evident een oorlogsroman. Het is juist dat de immer klein blijvende Oskar Matzerath op den duur als ‘pseudo-dwerg’ bij een variétégroep belandt die de soldaten aan het front en aan de Atlantikwall wat amusement moest brengen. Maar de beschreven gebeurtenissen en oorlogshandelingen kunnen niet verder staan van wat bijvoorbeeld een Jonathan Littell evoceert in De welwillenden. Daarin komen slechts gruwelen voor, begeleid door de analyse van de psyche van hen die de gruwelen beramen. Met De blikken trommel konden de Duitsers leven: geschreven van binnenuit, en dus met als stof datgene wat de mensen toentertijd redelijkerwijze konden weten – mensen die immers over geen ooievaarsblik beschikken maar slechts over de beperkte blik van de spelers op de kleine rechthoek waar ze handelen. In vergelijking met wat Reemtsma’s Wehrmacht-tentoonstellingen te zien gaven gebeurt er in De blikken trommel niets. Precies daardoor heeft deze roman bijgedragen tot Auseinandersetzung en Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

De blikken trommel is een boek dat wemelt van beelden en fantasieën, van ware leugens en gelogen waarheid. Wie Volker Schlöndorffs film gezien heeft weet wat ik bedoel. De grootmoeder zit ergens in de Kaschuben (de streek ronds Grass geboortestad Danzig) op een aardappelveld rauwe aardappelen te roosteren op een smeulend vuurtje. Ze draagt drie rokken, en met het verhaal van de wekelijkse verwisseling van deze rokken begint Grass zijn roman. Daar loopt in de verte een figuurtje weg voor zijn Pruisische achtervolgers. Tot hij cirkels begint te trekken rond de grootmoeder, almaar nauwer. En zich onder haar rokken verstopt. En zo werd Oskars vader verwekt.

Tenminste, zo trommelt het kinds blijvend kind Oskar dit verhaal op. Op een blikken trommel die ook Grass’ motieventrommel is gebleven tot het einde van zijn leven. Grass ‘begeleidt’ me nu al veertig jaar. Ik ben er hem dankbaar om. Moge hij, clown of niet, blijven leven in Grassland! Want daar vertelt hij alle ‘rechtvaardigen’ gewoon omver.

mercredi, 22 avril 2015

Duits te ‘elitair’ voor Franse onderwijsminister

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Door: Dirk Rochtus

Ex: http://www.doorbraak.be

Duits te ‘elitair’ voor Franse onderwijsminister

Ooit waren Frankrijk en Duitsland erfvijanden. Beide landen voerden tussen 1870 en 1940 drie oorlogen met elkaar. Na de Tweede Wereldoorlog streefden ze verzoening na. Met het bilaterale Élysée Verdrag van 1963 beklonken Frankrijk en de Bondsrepubliek Duitsland hun vriendschap, l'amitié franco-allemande, 'die deutsch-französische Freundschaft'. Sindsdien plegen de Franse president en de Duitse bondskanselier regelmatig overleg, ook vanuit het besef dat de Frans-Duitse locomotief de Europese trein trekt.

Een van de steunpilaren van die veel bezworen vriendschap vormt het onderwijs van het Duits aan Franse en van het Frans aan Duitse scholen. Duitsers zijn over het algemeen francofiel en de politieke klasse in de Bondsrepubliek spaart kosten noch moeite om het Frans te promoten in eigen land. Sommige politici gaan daarin heel ver. De deelstaatregering van Saarland bijvoorbeeld – een stukje Duitsland dat aan Frankrijk grenst – wil tegen 2043 van het eigen Bundesland zelfs een tweetalig gebied maken. Iedereen die na 2013 in het Saarland geboren wordt, zou eigenlijk met het Frans als tweede taal moeten opgroeien. In de helft van de kindercrèches gaan Franstalige verzorgsters aan de slag, vanaf het eerste leerjaar komt er onderwijs van het Frans, er worden tweetalige beroepsscholen opgericht en de kennis van het Frans wordt verplicht voor wie in de administratie van de deelstaat wil werken.

Burgerij

De liefde lijkt in Frankrijk niet zo wederkerig te zijn. Zeker niet als mevrouw Nayat Vallaud-Belkacem, de 37-jarige socialistische Franse minister van Onderwijs, haar zin krijgt. Tot de 10e klas genieten alle Franse leerlingen gemeenschappelijk onderwijs in de Collèges. Op het ogenblik bestaan er op het niveau van de 6de tot de 10e klas ook tweetalige klassen waarin Duits en Engels intensief worden onderwezen (samen 12 uur per week). Leerlingen in die tweetalige klassen krijgen wel vijf uur Duits per week. Sinds de invoering van de tweetalige klassen in 2003 was het aantal Franse leerlingen dat Duits studeert geklommen tot 15 procent van het totaal. Minister Vallaud-Belkacem wil nu de tweetalige klassen afschaffen. Ze vindt dat er veel te veel tijd wordt besteed aan het Duits wat tot 'sociale segregatie' leidt. Duits zou immers volgens haar erg geliefd zijn bij ouders uit de Franse burgerij die daarmee willen dat hun kinderen zich zouden onderscheiden van andere. Met andere woorden: Duits zou 'elitair' zijn, en om diezelfde reden heeft Vallaud-Belkacem ook de strijd geopend tegen Latijn en Grieks. Als de tweetalige klassen worden afgeschaft, zullen leerlingen hoogstens nog twee uur Duits per week kunnen leren, te weinig om de taal van Goethe en Hölderlin onder de knie te krijgen, en dan zou het wel eens kunnen dat vele Franse jongeren kiezen voor het als gemakkelijker geldende Spaans.

Protest

De vereniging van leraars Duits in Frankrijk (ADEAF) ziet in de plannen van de minister het 'geprogrammeerde einde van het onderwijs Duits' en richt zich in een petitie tot president François Hollande om er tegen te protesteren. Pierre-Yves Le Borgn', partijgenoot van de minister en voorzitter van de Frans-Duitse Vriendschapsgroep in het Franse parlement, beschouwt de onderwijshervorming als een gevaar voor de Frans-Duitse Vriendschap. Zonder kennis van de taal van de andere verwatert de communicatie en gaat het begrip voor de manier waarop de andere denkt verloren. Maar daar staat de minister niet bij stil in haar strijd tegen alles wat te 'moeilijk' zou zijn en dus als 'elitair' moet worden weggevaagd.

dimanche, 19 avril 2015

David Engels: Auf dem Weg ins Imperium

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Veranstaltung:


Sämtliche Veranstaltungen finden in der Bibliothek des Konservatismus, Fasanenstraße 4, 10623 Berlin (Charlottenburg) statt. Anmeldung erforderlich.

Anmeldungen, wenn nicht anders angegeben, bitte per E-Mail an veranstaltungen@fkbf.de oder per Fax an 030-315 17 37 21.

Es werden keine individuellen Anmeldebestätigungen versandt. Sofern Sie keine gegenteilige Nachricht von uns erhalten, gilt Ihre Anmeldung als bestätigt.

Montag, 27. April 2015, 19 Uhr: Buchvorstellung

David Engels, Brüssel

Auf dem Weg ins Imperium – Die Krise der Europäischen Union und der Untergang der römischen Republik

Steht die Europäische Union vor einem ähnlich spektakulären Systemwechsel wie einst die späte Römische Republik? Die umfassenden Forschungsergebnisse des Historikers David Engels bestätigen offenbar Oswald Spenglers Studie „Der Untergang des Abendlandes“ und ermöglichen ein neues Verständnis für die komplexen Probleme unserer Zeit. Anhand von zwölf Indikatoren vergleicht er verschiedene Aspekte der Identitätskonstruktion der EU mit Krisensymptomen der ausgehenden Römischen Republik und zieht dabei beunruhigende Parallelen: Der Wandel von einer von Werteverlust, Dauerkrise, Reformstau und politischem Immobilismus gekennzeichneten Republik zu einem autoritären Imperium zeichnet sich heute auch in der EU ab. Immigrationsproblematik und Bevölkerungsrückgang, Materialismus und Globalisierung, Werteverlust und Fundamentalismus, Technokratie und Politikverdrossenheit, der Verlust von Freiheit und Demokratie, all diese scheinbar so modernen Probleme brachten bereits vor 2000 Jahren die Römische Republik ins Wanken. Die europäische Demokratie steht scheinbar am Abgrund. Entscheidend für das politische Überleben der Europäischen Union, so Engels Analyse, ist die Rückbesinnung auf die ureigene europäische Identität mit ihrer kulturellen Tradition, jenseits abstrakter Gleichmacherei.

Prof. Dr. David Engels, Jahrgang 1979, ist seit 2008 Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Römische Geschichte an der Universität Brüssel (ULB) und seit 2012 Direktor der altertumswissenschaftlichen Zeitschrift Latomus. 2013 veröffentlichte er in Paris das Buch 'Le déclin', das in Frankreich für eine lebhafte Debatte über die Frage sorgte, ob auch die Europäische Union, genau wie die spätrömische Republik, einer Zeit der Bürgerkriege und der Transformation in ein autoritäres Regime entgegengehen wird.

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lundi, 06 avril 2015

Presseschau - April 2015 (3)

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Presseschau - April 2015 (3)
 
EINWANDERUNG / MULTIKULTURELLE GESELLSCHAFT
 
Einwanderung
Integrationsminister: Illegale Ausländer sollen bleiben dürfen
 
(dazu)
Meinung
Legal? Illegal? Alles egal…
von Michael Paulwitz
 
Die Kosten der Einwanderung (I)
 
Die Kosten der Einwanderung (II)
 
Warum die 15 Millionen neuen „Fachkräfte“ zu Hause bleiben können
 
Zara und die verkehrte Welt der Rassismus-Sucher
 
Dresden
Streit um Asylcamp vor Semperoper
 
Kommentar zum Dresdner Asylcamp
Frechheit darf nicht belohnt werden
von Felix Krautkrämer
 
Protest vor der Semperoper
Dresdner Asylcamp sorgt weiter für Ärger
 
Thüringen
Abgeordnete sollen Asylbewerbern weichen
 
Umstrittener Pfarrer-Vorschlag: Prostituierte für Asylbewerber
 
Pfarrer-Vorschlag - So diskutieren unsere User
Prostituierte für Asylbewerber? "Makaber und geschmacklos"
 
Das leichte Spiel mit den "dummen" weißen Mädchen
Fast 1400 Mädchen wurden im britischen Rotherham missbraucht. Nun nimmt der Sexskandal neue Dimensionen an: Die Gang wurde offenbar von Polizisten und Stadträten gedeckt, die selbst Kunden waren.
 
Kindesmißbrauch
Der englische Patient
 
(dazu ein Kommentar)
Politische Korrektheit
Wenn Täter nicht ins Weltbild passen
von Felix Krautkrämer
 
Kommentar zum Kopftuchurteil
Neutralität als Selbstabschaffung
von Michael Paulwitz
 
Britischer Supermarkt zensiert "Jesus Christus"
 
(Bayerischer Ort schafft Namen "Josef" ab)
Sei kein Depp, Sepp!
 
Neu-Ulm
Hetzparolen von muslimischen Grundschülern
Mit schlimmsten Hetzparolen gegen „Ungläubige“ sind muslimische Schüler einer Grundschule in Neu-Ulm aufgefallen.
 
„Sind ein multi-kultureller Club“
Türkischer SC distanziert sich von Facebook-Einträgen
 
Türkin muß Kabelanschluß selbst zahlen
 
Cinar: Straffällige Migranten nicht ausweisen
 
(Hussein M. und sein kurdisch-libanesischer Familienclan)
Polizei fasst mutmaßlichen KaDeWe-Räuber
 
(ob das eine Bande blonder Schweden war?)
Schießerei in Göteborg
Einer der Getöteten war Bandenmitglied
 
Innsbruck: Nordafrikaner “bereichern” Buslinien
 
Türken-Randale bei Basketballspiel in Berlin
 
KULTUR / UMWELT / ZEITGEIST / SONSTIGES
 
3D gedruckte Häuser - FUTUREMAG – ARTE
 
Bismarck aus dem 3D-Drucker
 
Dämmwahn
Mieterprotest in Pankow
Rettet die Fassade
 
City-Outlets in den Zentren
Chancen für die Innenstädte
 
Gewerbegebiete
Beton statt Natur
Flächenverbrauch - das klingt für viele erst einmal nach einem eher abstrakten Phänomen. Doch wer durch Bayerns Dörfer fährt, erkennt immer mehr, dass das Wachstum an den Ortsrändern nicht nur die Landschaft zerstört, sondern auch die Dörfer selbst. Intakte Ortschaften, über Jahrhunderte gewachsen, sterben aus ihrer Mitte heraus förmlich ab.
 
Wie sich junge Familien mit dem Eigenheim ruinieren
Junge Familien zieht es noch immer ins eigene Häuschen aufs Land. Doch das Vororthaus im Grünen könnte sich bald rächen. Denn es wird in vielen Fällen zu einem finanziellen Risiko.
 
(Kunterbunte Stillosigkeit in deutschen Dörfern)
Neubaugebiet in Roggenburg
Lach- und Dachgeschichten
 
Wohnungsbau
Es ist zum Klotzen
Hamburg baut viele neue Wohnungen – großartig. Doch warum sehen die meisten so aus, dass man sie gleich wieder abreißen möchte? von Hanno Rauterberg
 
Lübeck baut Gründungsviertel neu | Kulturjournal | NDR
 
Traditionelle Architektur
David M. Schwarz
 
(Auweia)
Dieser Würfel soll Europas Wahrzeichen werden
Bisher fehlte der EU eine identitätsstiftende Architektur. Ein eigenes Weißes Haus, ein europäischer Kreml. Das Brüsseler Ratsgebäude mit seinen recycelten Fensterrahmen soll die Leerstelle füllen.
 
So sah das Zentrum des Römischen Imperiums aus
Über 500 Jahre hinweg wurde die Welt vom Forum Romanum aus regiert. Berliner Altertumsforscher rekonstruieren die verschiedenen Bauphasen digital und liefern neue, verblüffende Perspektiven.
 
(Hier bekommt die "Kunst" ihren Platz zugewiesen…)
Singapur
Keine Gnade für deutsche Graffit-Vandalen
 
Antrag
FDP: Englisch soll Amtssprache in Düsseldorf werden
 
Deutsch wird abgeschafft
Verenglischte Grundschule
von Thomas Paulwitz
 
(Zur Indoktrination in der Schule)
Das war’s: Diesmal mit Fragen zu Kunst, Geschichte und Religion
 
Manfred Kleine-Hartlage: Die Sprache der BRD – eine Rezension
 
Manfred Kleine-Hartlage
Die Sprache der BRD. 131 Unwörter und ihre politische Bedeutung
 
Keine Demokratie ohne Demokratisierung der Medien!
Interview mit Eckart Spoo
(Sorge um Pressefreiheit)
Die Tragödie und die Meute
von Henning Hoffgaard
 
Familie und Homosexualität
Empörung über Dolce und Gabbana
 
Kritik: Coca-Cola verharmlost mit Fanta-Spot Nazizeit
 
Michel Houellebecq: Gedanken über Verfall und Erneuerung Europas
 
(Kapitalismuskritik)
Die Joker-Strategien: Terror und Agonie
 
„Es ist keine Verschwörungstheorie“
Xavier Naidoo: Deutschland ist nicht souverän
 
Ein Gloria auf die Grenze
 
Irrsinn: Grüne fordern Einreiseverbot für ZUERST!-Referenten Alexander Dugin
 
Wie die fünf Weltreligionen mit dem Tod umgehen
 
Mager oder Molly?
 
Ein Fall für Greenpeace: Windräder produzieren Atommüll
 
Wie knapp sind unsere Metall-Rohstoffe?
Forscher ermitteln Versorgungsrisiko für 62 wichtige Elemente
 
Bottled Life - Nestlés Geschäfte mit Wasser
 
Optik
Azurblau aus Lomazzo
Mit neuartigen Lichtquellen holt ein italienischer Physiker das Blaue vom Himmel herunter. von Burkhard Straßmann
 
Sparta
Stadt der Krieger - Doku deutsch über die Spartaner 1.Folge Teil 1
 

dimanche, 05 avril 2015

Pressechau - April 2015 (2)

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Pressechau - April 2015 (2)
 
INNENPOLITISCHES / GESELLSCHAFT / VERGANGENHEITSPOLITIK
 
Kinderpornographie: Prozeß gegen Edathy eingestellt
 
(Ob Augstein auch so rechtsstaatlich argumentiert, wenn es mal wieder gegen "Rechtsradikale" geht?)
Reaktionen auf Edathy-Urteil: Das ungesunde Volksempfinden
Eine Kolumne von Jakob Augstein
Im Kinderporno-Skandal bleibt der SPD-Politiker Edathy straffrei. Die Volksseele kocht. Das Netz ist plötzlich voller Rechtsexperten. Und auch Til Schweiger hat eine Meinung. Zum Glück sind Facebook und Co. nicht der Rechtsstaat.
 
Bei der AfD bin ich strategisch unerwünscht – oder nicht ich. Sondern überhaupt.
 
Die „Erfurter Resolution“ der AfD – eine rasche Bewertung
 
„Erfurter Resolution“
Streit in AfD: Henkel warnt vor „völkischem Gedankengut“
 
Erfurter Resolution: Henkel bläst zur Jagd, der Rest schweigt
 
Spannungen in Thüringer AfD-Landtagsfraktion
 
Der Typ Bernd Lucke oder Es gibt keine Alternative im Etablierten
 
Nicht weltoffen genug
Grüne schimpfen über „Erasmus“-Stiftung der AfD
 
Bundestag beschließt Frauenquote
 
Verfassungsschutz: Thüringen schafft V-Leute ab
 
Geldsegen
Kirchen verbuchen Steuereinnahmen auf Rekordniveau
 
Sudetendeutsche verzichten auf Entschädigung
 
70 Jahre Kriegsende
Richtige Entscheidung, falscher Grund
 
Hindenburg bleibt Berliner Ehrenbürger
 
LINKE / KAMPF GEGEN RECHTS / ANTIFASCHISMUS / RECHTE
 
Als PEGIDA-Versteher bei der Lega Nord in Rom – ein Bericht
 
Der zweite Atem der Pegida
 
Grusswort von Heidi Mund
PEGIDA Frankfurt Rhein-Main
 
Mobilisierungsvideo: PEGIDA Abendspaziergang am 09.03.2015 in Dresden – Timelapse
 
Demonstration in Dresden
Pegida wächst wieder
 
Ausschnitt aus der Rede Götz Kubitscheks
"Und dann gehen wir hier vom Neumarkt zum PEGIDA-Platz - über die Bachmann-Straße."
 
Pegida-Kundgebung in Frankfurt Pegida: Heftige Krawalle in Frankfurt
Von Christian Scheh
Erstmals bestanden die Pegida-Islamkritiker darauf, ihren Umzug durch die Innenstadt zu machen. Kurz darauf kam es zu heftigen Auseinandersetzungen in Frankfurt.
 
Pegida in Frankfurt
Sechs Verletzte durch Krawalle bei Pegida-Demo
Lange blieb es rund um die sechste Pegida-Kundgebung am Montagabend ruhig. Doch als die Islamkritiker auf ihren Umzug durch die Innenstadt bestanden, eskalierte die Lage.
 
Demonstrationen in Wuppertal
Pegida erhebt schwere Vorwürfe gegen die Polizei
 
Nach linken Protesten
Staatssekretär sagt Gespräch mit Pegida ab
 
Tröglitz
"Da müssen alle Alarmglocken schrillen" 
Nazis treiben Bürgermeister aus dem Amt
 
Bürgermeister-Rücktritt aus AngstTrotz
NPD-Umzug: Tröglitz nimmt Flüchtlinge auf
 
Wenn Wutbürger und Neonazis das Kommando übernehmen: Der Fall Tröglitz
 
(Zu den wahren Hintergründen des Rücktritts)
Tröglitz, die Pegida und eine Schaufel Sand
 
(Bei den bedrohlicheren Attacken der linken Gegenseite findet hingegen mal wieder kein großer Protest von etablierter Presse und Politik statt…)
Linksextremismus
Morddrohungen gegen Bürgermeisterkandidat
 
Linksextremismus-Äußerung von Gysi stoßen auf heftige Kritik
 
Polizeigewerkschaft empört über Linken-Fraktionschef Gysi
 
Extremismus
Eine asymmetrische Ächtung
von Dieter Stein
 
Aufgeschnappt
Wie Borussia Dortmund linke Gewalt verharmlost
von Matthias Bäkermann
 
Blockupy
Der falsche Protest, die falsche Adresse
Anmerkungen zu den Aktionen gegen die EZB in Frankfurt
 
Blockupy-Organisator zeigt "großes Verständnis" für Wut und Empörung
 
Frankfurt am Main: Krawalle bei Blockupy-Protesten rund um die EZB
 
Die Saat der linken Gewalt ist explodiert
Frankfurt in Geiselhaft von politisch motivierten Kriminellen
 
Politisches Versagen an Frankfurts „Schwarzen Mittwoch“
Der Linksterror war langfristig geplant und programmiert
 
Blockupy-Ausschreitungen
Randalierer zerstören Makler-Geschäft
Bereits vor den Ausschreitungen rund um die Blockupy-Proteste haben Randalierer Geschäfte angegriffen. So wurden im Westend die Geschäftsräume des Makler-Unternehmens Von Poll Immobilien zerstört.
 
„Blockupy“-Krawalle
Frankfurt: Zahl der verletzten Polizisten auf 150 gestiegen
 
Polizei rechnet mit Blockupy ab
 
Linksextremer Terror
Der Feind steht links
von Michael Paulwitz
 
(Zu Blockupy)
Sozialisten gegen sich selbst
 
Chaos in Frankfurt: Blockupy von Sinnen
von Tomasz M. Froelich
Die intellektuelle Substanz der Kapitalismuskritik ist bescheiden
 
(Zur Blockupy-Berichterstattung und Verharmlosung der Linken sowie zur  Kapitalismuskritik)
Blockupy & Pegida, vereint euch!
 
Die Aufwiegler sitzen in den Redaktionsstuben
 
Italienischer Blockupy-Demonstrant in Haft
Aktivisten sprechen von Menschenrechtsverletzung
 
„Blockupy“ und die Frankfurter Hetzmasse am Montag
Eine Rede in der Römer-Debatte um die Ereignisse am 18. März 2015
 
Linksextreme als Nichtregierungsorganisation
 
Von der JF zur WfD oder: Post von Lichtmesz
 
(Demagogischer Artikel von Welt-Feuilletonredakteur Matthias Heine)
Wer Gutmensch sagt, verdient sich seinen Shitstorm
Der lange Weg nach rechts: Vom alten mährischen Familiennamen ist Gutmensch zum Hasswort der Gegenwart geworden. Benutzen kann man es nicht mehr. Manche haben das allerdings noch nicht mitbekommen.
 
(ähnliche Tonlage)
Deutschland
Am Arsch der Welt
Das Abendland ist ein deutscher Sonderweg von Kultur, Geist, Stolz, Volk und Weinerlichkeit. Warum dieses Geisterreich der Gefühle nicht totzukriegen ist. Eine Polemik von David Hugendick
 
(Eine Antwort auf Matthias Heine)
Haßwörter und Pesthauch
 
AfD-Vize Gauland besucht Hamburgs rechte SWG
 
Vortrag bei umstrittener SWG
AfD zu Besuch bei Hamburgs Rechten
 
Freimaurer distanzieren sich von rechter SWG
 
(Der nächste plötzlich verstorbene Zeuge)
NSU-Morde
Tote Zeugin: Keine Hinweise auf Fremdeinwirken
 

samedi, 04 avril 2015

Presseschau - April 2015 (Aussenpolitisches)

actualité, affaires européennes, europe, allemagne, presse, medias, journaux

Presseschau - April 2015
AUßENPOLITISCHES
Die Milliarden fließen
EZB startet neue Geldschwemme
 
S.P.O.N. - Im Zweifel links: Hurra! Geld für Reiche!
Eine Kolumne von Jakob Augstein
Jetzt explodiert die Billionen-Bombe: Europas Zentralbank flutet den Kontinent mit Geld. Wer profitiert davon? Nur die Banken und Investoren. Nicht die Bürger.
 
(Beginnendes Bargeldverbot)
Kampf gegen Terrorismus
Frankreich will Bargeldgeschäfte begrenzen
Zwei Monate nach den Anschlägen in Paris kündigt Frankreich weitere Anti-Terror-Maßnahmen an: Um Terroristen die Finanzierung zu erschweren, wird der Bargeldverkehr drastisch eingeschränkt und große Geldflüsse überwacht.
 
Frankreich schränkt Verwendung von Bargeld drastisch ein
 
Sicher geglaubte Erholung wackelt
Euro-Rettungsfonds-Chef fürchtet endgültigen Absturz Griechenlands
 
Justizminister will deutsche Immobilien pfänden
Auf der Suche nach Geld prüft Griechenland Reparationsforderungen an Deutschland. Justizminister Paraskevopoulos bringt die Pfändung von deutschem Eigentum ins Spiel. Berlin reagierte umgehend darauf.
 
SPD und Grüne für Reparationszahlungen an Griechenland
 
Kredite aus Steuergeldern: Saatgut-Konzerne kaufen Land in der Ukraine
 
Finanzielles Desaster
So pleite ist der normale Amerikaner
 
Vereinigte Schulden von Amerika: Neue Horrorzahlen
 
(Video)
Macht ohne Kontrolle
Die Troika
 
(Vorläufer war dieser Film; Video)
Staatsgeheimnis Bankenrettung ARTE
 
AGORÁ - Von der Demokratie zum Markt: Dokumentarfilm von Yórgos Avgerópoulos
 
Griechen-Minister zeigt Deutschen Mittelfinger
 
Spanien im Wahljahr
Links? Rechts? Überholte Kategorien
Keiner fragt, woher jemand kommt: Die linke Gruppierung Podemos hat in Spanien großen Zulauf und räumt in allen Umfragen ab. Ein Profil der Bewegung.
 
Island: Von der Rekordverschuldung in sieben Jahren zur Erholung
In Island fand ein einzigartiges politisches Experiment statt: Vier Jahre lang regierten Anarchisten die Hauptstadt Reykjavik. Und diese Amateure haben Erstaunliches vollbracht.
 
Orbán sieht zunehmende Konflikte mit den USA
 
(Statt Gottesbezug lieber Demokratie und Vielfalt…)
Neue Hymne für die Schweiz
Freiheit, Frieden, Alpenfirn
 
Schluss mit Morgenrot – Vorschläge für eine neue Schweizer Hymne
 
Ninive
IS zerstört Kulturerbe: Barbarei in Serie
 
IS zerstört einzigartiges Kulturerbe in Nimrud
 
IS zerstört mit Bulldozern Weltkulturerbe im Nordirak
 
Hatra
Irak
IS sprengt Jahrtausende alte Stadt
Die Barbarei geht weiter: Nach der Zerstörung unwiederbringlicher Kulturgüter im irakischen Mossul und in Nimrud machten IS-Milizen nun Jahrtausende alte Ruinen dem Erdboden gleich.
 
ISIS-Milizen zerstören im Irak noch mehr Moscheen und Schreine
 
Rebellen warnen vor "großem Krieg"
Saudi-Arabien greift Ziele im Jemen an
Der Krieg im Jemen eskaliert: Erstmals attackieren Einheiten aus Saudi-Arabien und verbündeten Staaten strategische Stellungen der Huthi-Rebellen im Jemen. Die USA und Ägypten unterstützen die Offensive, sind aber angeblich nicht direkt daran beteiligt.
 
Pharaonische Pläne für Ägyptens Hauptstadt
Die ägyptische Regierung will östlich von Kairo eine Planstadt für fünf Millionen Menschen errichten lassen. Das Projekt soll 80 Milliarden Dollar kosten. Die alte Hauptstadt platzt aus allen Nähten.
 
Zwölf Jahre Bauzeit: Ägypten plant neue Hauptstadt

jeudi, 02 avril 2015

Buchpräsentation: Barbey d'Aurevilly

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Buchpräsentation:

Barbey d'Aurevilly

»Der Chevalier des Touches«

09.04.2015

20:00

Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus

Ist er es, oder ist es ein Gespenst? Der verwirrte alte Mann, der an einem windigen Abend auf dem Kapuzinerplatz in Valognes steht, weckt die Erinnerungen an einen großen Coup des Widerstands gegen die Revolution: die Befreiung des zum Tode verurteilten Chevalier Des Touches 1799. Die Ereignisse liegen drei Jahrzehnte zurück und man wähnte den Chevalier längst tot. Aufgeschreckt durch seine vermeintliche Wiederkehr, erzählen sich in einem Salon bei knisterndem Feuer ein paar Landadlige, die schon bessere Zeiten gesehen haben, seine abenteuerliche Geschichte. Unter ihnen die taube Aimée de Spens, die darin eine zentrale und einigermaßen pikante Rolle spielt und nicht ahnt, dass man von ihr spricht.

Ralph Schock im Gespräch mit dem Mitübersetzer und Herausgeber Gernot Krämer.
Lesung von Martin Langenbeck.

Nähere Information finden Sie hier.
Veranstaltungsort:
Chaussestraße 125
10115 Berlin-Mitte


Jules Barbey d`Aurevilly

mercredi, 01 avril 2015

Germanwings-Absturz: Kriegsakt gegen Deutschland?

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Germanwings-Absturz: Kriegsakt gegen Deutschland?

Daniel Prinz

Ich habe ganz stark den Eindruck, dass wir alle von den Behörden und den Mainstreammedien gehörig an der Nase herumgeführt werden, was die Ursache und die wahren Hintergründe des Germanwings Absturzes betreffen. Die großen Medien bedienen sich dabei einer besonderen Taktik: Während bestimmte Fakten nicht hinterfragt werden (z.B. der Verlust der Speicherkarte des Datenschreibers oder die Rolle der gesichteten Mirage-Kampfjets), werden uns andere Brotkrümel in homöopathischer Dosis verabreicht, die uns wohl unterbewusst zu einer bestimmten Schlussfolgerung führen und auf ein bestimmtes Endergebnis hin programmieren sollen.

Was momentan abläuft, sehe ich daher als Massenpsychologie vom Feinsten. Das ist eine ungeheuerliche Behauptung, meinen Sie? Warten Sie es ab!

Zahlreiche Ungereimtheiten und Vertuschungen

Mein Autorenkollege Gerhard Wisnewski blickte in seinem jüngsten Artikel in die richtige Richtung und stellte genau die richtigen Fragen. Ich hinterfrage grundsätzlich immer alles, und mein Gefühl sagt mir, dass wir weder von der Regierung noch von den Medien jemals die absolute Wahrheit über die wirklichen Ursachen des Germanwings-Absturzes erfahren werden, bestenfalls nur Halbwahrheiten. Wie ich darauf komme?

Nun, beispielsweise behauptet der französische Staatsanwalt Brice Robin, er habe den Tonaufzeichnungen zufolge ein »menschliches Atmen im Inneren des Cockpits« entnehmen können. Bis zum Aufprall sei die ganze Zeit über das »ruhige und regelmäßige Atmen«des Co-Piloten zu hören. Diese Aussagen halte ich für sehr fragwürdig. Wieso? Aus folgendem Grund: Wenn sich ein Flugzeug gerade im Absturz befindet, so wird der Puls eines auch noch so »abgebrühten« Menschen recht hoch sein, und damit einhergehend wird die Frequenz der Atmung alles andere sein, nur nicht »ruhig und regelmäßig« wie in einer entspannten Ruhephase.

Weiterlesen;

http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/enthuellungen/daniel-prinz/germanwings-absturz-kriegsakt-gegen-deutschland-.html

mercredi, 25 mars 2015

Bismarck’s system of continental alliances

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Bismarck’s system of continental alliances

By Srdja TRIFKOVIC (USA)
Ex: http://orientalreview.org

In an interview for the German news magazine Zuerst! (April 2015) Srdja Trifkovic considers the significance of Otto von Bismarck’s legacy, 200 years after his birth.

Dr. Trifkovic, how would Bismarck react if he could see today’s map of Europe?

Trifkovic: He would be initially shocked that the German eastern border now runs along the Oder and Neisse rivers. Otto von Bismarck was a true Prussian. In his view, cities such as Königsberg, Danzig or Breslau were more properly “German” than those in the Rhineland. His first impression therefore would be that Germany has “shifted” to the West, and that an important social and cultural aspect of his Germany has been lost. Once he’d overcome this initial shock, he would look at the map of Europe again in more detail. The considerable distance between Germany and Russia would probably amaze him. What in Bismarck’s time was the border between Germany and Russia is now a “Greater Poland” which did not exist at his time. And former provinces of the Russian Empire are now independent states: the three Baltic republics, Belarus and Ukraine. Bismarck would probably see this as an unwelcome “buffer zone” between Germany and Russia. He had always placed a great emphasis on a strong German-Russian alliance and would no doubt wonder how all this could happen. He would probably consider how to bring back to life such a continental partnership today. That would be a diplomatic challenge worthy of him: how to forge an alliance between Berlin and Moscow without the agitated smaller states in-between throwing their spanners into the works.

What would he advise Angela Merkel?

Trifkovic: He would probably tell her that even if you cannot have a close alliance with Russia, at least you should seek a better balance, i.e. more equidistant relations with Washington on the one hand and Moscow on the other. The concept of the Three Emperors’ League of 1881 is hardly possible today, but there are other options.

Security and the war in Ukraine would focus Bismarck’s attention…

Trifkovic: Merkel has adopted a very biased position on Ukraine, which Bismarck would have never done. He was always trying to cover his country from all flanks. In Ukraine we can clearly observe a crisis scenario made in Washington. Bismarck’s policy in the case of modern Ukraine would be for Berlin to act as a trusted and neutral arbiter of European politics, and not just as a trans-Atlantic outpost.

You said earlier that Germany since the time of Bismarck has shifted to the west. Do you mean this not only geographically?

Trifkovic: Even as a young man, as the Prussian envoy to the Bundestag in Frankfurt, Bismarck detested the predominantly western German liberals. At the same time, he later endeavored to ensure that Catholic Austria would be kept away from the nascent German Empire. Even at an early age we could discern Bismarck’s idea of Germany: a continental central power without strong Catholic elements and liberal ideas. He also knew that such a central European power must always be wary of the possibility of encirclement. Bismarck knew that he had to prevent France and Russia becoming partners.

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At all times the rapport with Russia appeared more important than that with France…

Trifkovic: Here is an oddity in Bismarck’s policy. After the 1870-71 war against France, the newly created German Empire annexed Alsace and Lorraine and thus ensured that there would be permanent tensions with a revanchist France. In real-political terms it should have been clear that any benefits of Alsace-Lorraine’s annexation would be outweighed by the disadvantages. French irredentism made her permanently inimical to Germany. No political overture to Paris was possible. The entire policy of the Third French Republic (1870-1940) was subsequently characterized by deep anti-German resentment.

As an American with Serb roots, you know East and West alike. Are there some differences in their approach to Otto von Bismarck?

Trifkovic: Apart from a few individuals in the scientific community, I am sorry to say that Otto von Bismarck is not adequately evaluated either in the West or in the East. On both sides, you will often encounter a flawed caricature of Bismarck as a bloodthirsty warmonger and nationalist who was ruthlessly pursuing Germany’s unification and whose path was paved with corpses. Nothing is further from the truth. The three wars that preceded unification were limited armed conflicts with clear and limited aims. Bismarck ended two of those wars without unnecessarily humiliating the defeated foe; France was an exception. The war against Austria in 1866 in particular showed that Bismarck’s only concern was to secure Prussia’s supremacy in German affairs. Only a few years later he concluded an alliance with Austria-Hungary. Let me repeat: Bismarck was not a brutal warmonger; he was a brilliant political realist who quickly grasped his advantages and his opponents’ weaknesses. Therein lies an irony that today’s moralists find difficult to explain: Bismarck was a cold calculator and his decisions were rarely subjected to ethical criteria – but the result of his Realpolitik was a relatively stable German state which under Bismarck’s chancellorship managed Europe’s adjustment to its rise without armed conflicts. Between 1871 and 1890, the German Empire was on the whole a stabilizing factor in Europe. During the Berlin Congress to end the Balkan crisis in 1878, Bismarck effectively presented himself as an honest broker, respected by all of Europe. However, with Bismarck’s departure in 1890, this period of the relaxation of European tensions and Germany’s stabilizing influence was over.

What changed after 1890 for Europe?

Trifkovic: After Bismarck there was no longer a steadfastly reliable Chancellor and the German policy lost its sureness of touch. Suddenly the neurotic spirit of the young Emperor, Wilhelm II, started prevailing, a feverish “we have-to-do-something” atmosphere. The massive naval program was initiated, while the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia was not renewed – and it was the cornerstone of Bismarck’s scenario to prevent a war in Europe. Initially the Czarist Empire urged the renewal of the bilateral agreement with Berlin. The Kaiser took the view that the Reich could be better protected by its own military buildup than through alliances. And suddenly, Bismarck’s nightmare came true. Since Russia abruptly found herself with no international allies, and the German-Russian relations cooled more and more, it approached France and arranged the military convention of 1892. In 1894 a firm alliance was signed. It was not ideological. The liberal, Masonic, secular and republican France was allied with the Orthodox Christian, deeply conservative, autocratic Russian Empire. And Germany was in the middle. Bismarck always dreaded this sort of two-front alliance, which laid the foundations of the blocs of belligerent powers in World War I. You can see some current parallels in the policy shift of 1890.

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In what way?

Trifkovic: The often neurotic policy of Berlin after Bismarck’s dismissal reminds one of the aggressive style of the likes of Victoria Nuland and John McCain today. Looking at Germany from 1890 to 1914, one sees striking parallels with today’s U.S. neoconservatives. The obsession with Russia as the enemy is one similarity. After Bismarck’s dismissal, Russia was depicted in the media of the German Empire in darkest colors, as backward, aggressive and dangerous. If we take today’s Western mainstream media – including those in Germany – this image has just been reinforced: the dangerous, backward, and aggressive Putin Empire.

Bismarck was not a German Neocon?

Trifkovic: (laughs) No, he was the exact opposite! He was not a dreamer, nor an ideologue. He did not want to go out into the world to bring Germanic blessings to others, if necessary by the force of arms. Bismarck was always a down-to-earth Prussian landowner. While Britain as a naval power opened up trading posts and founded colonies all over the world, and British garrisons were stationed all over in India or Africa, Bismarck’s Germany was created as a classic land-based continental power. I would even suggest that Bismarck himself had an aversion to the sea. Very reluctantly he was persuaded in the 1880’s to agree to the acquisition of the first protectorates for the German Reich. On the whole, Germany’s colonial program was economically questionable. What Germany was left with in the 1880’s was what the other major colonial powers had left behind, especially the United Kingdom. Bismarck knew that, and he saw that all the important straits and strategic points, such as the Cape of Good Hope, were under British control. In Germany the colonial question was mostly about “prestige” and “credibility” – and Bismarck the master politician had no time at all for such reasoning.

Bismarck also had a clear position on the Balkans. In 1876, he said in a speech that the German Empire in the Balkans had no interest “which would be worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” This seems to have changed, however: Today German soldiers are in Kosovo, the Federal Republic of Germany was the first country to recognize the independence of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1991…

Trifkovic: Otto von Bismarck was always weary of tying Germany’s fate to that of Austria-Hungary. His decision to steer clear of the conflicts in the Balkans was sound. After Bismarck’s dismissal Germany saw the rise of anti-Russian and anti-Serbian propagandistic discourse which emulated that in Vienna. Incidentally, there is another quote by Bismarck which was truly prophetic. “Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal,” he warned. “A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all. I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where. Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off.” In relation to Serbia there are parallels to the current situation in Europe. In 1903 a dynastic change in Belgrade ended Austria-Hungary’s previous decisive influence in the small neighboring country. The house of Karadjordjevic oriented Serbia to the great Slav brother, to Russia. Vienna tried to stop that by subjecting Serbia to economic and political pressure. But out of this so-called “tariff war” Serbia actually emerged strengthened. We recognize the parallels to Russia today: one can compare the Vienna tariff war against Belgrade with the sanctions against Russia. Sanctions force a country to diversify its economy, thus making it more resistant. In Serbia it worked well a hundred years ago, in Russia it may work now. When Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, there was a serious emergency and only Germany taking sides with Vienna ended the Bosnian crisis. In the end Germany picked up the tab: After the outbreak of World War I Austrian-Hungarian troops failed to defeat Serbia. They needed military assistance from Germany. Prussian Field Marshal August von Mackensen finally defeated Serbia, and proved to be a truly chivalrous opponent: “In the Serbs I have encountered the bravest soldiers of the Balkans,” he wrote in his diary. Later, in 1916, Mackensen erected a monument to the fallen Serbs in Belgrade with the inscription “Here lie the Serbian heroes.”

When we in Germany think of Bismarck today, we come back time and over again to the relationship with Russia … [Trifkovic: Indeed!] … Is it possible to summarize the relations as follows: If Germany and Russia get along, it is a blessing for Europe; if we go to war, the whole continent lies in ruins?

Trifkovic:  The only ones who are chronically terrified of a German-Russian understanding are invariably the maritime powers. In the 19th century the British tried to prevent the rise of an emerging superpower on the continent, such as a German-Russian alliance. Looking at the British Empire and its naval bases, one is struck by how the Eurasian heartland was effectively surrounded. Halford Mackinder formulated it memorably: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.” Dutch-American geo-strategist Nicholas J. Spykman developed Mackinder’s theory further. It is the “Rimland” – which surrounds the heartland – that is the key to controlling the land mass. Spykman is considered as a forerunner of the U.S. containment policy after the war.

Spykman was focused especially on the communist Soviet Union, not so much on Germany…

Trifkovic: He was concerned with controlling the “Heartland” quite independently of the dominant land power’s ideology. Spykman wrote in early 1943 that the Soviet Union from the Urals to the North Sea, from an American perspective, was no less unpleasant than Germany from the North Sea to the Urals. A continental power in Eurasia had to be curtailed or at least fragmented – that is exactly the continuity of the global maritime power’s strategy to this day.

On sanctions against Russia, and U.S.-EU disputes, Germany is in the middle. What would Chancellor Bismarck do today?

Trifkovic: He would swiftly end the sanctions regime against Russia because he’d see that Germany was paying a steep price for no tangible benefit. He would also seek to reduce the excessive U.S. influence on German policymaking. But Europe does not necessarily need a new Bismarck: as recently as 50 years ago we had several European politicians of stature and integrity. People like Charles de Gaulle or Konrad Adenauer had more character and substance than any of the current EU politicians. Europe in its current situation is in great need of them.

Source: Chronicles

Het einde van (de) geschiedenis

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Door: Dirk Rochtus

Ex: http://www.doorbraak.be

Het einde van (de) geschiedenis

Nee, dit is niet Fukuyama revisited. Dit gaat over linkse plannen om het vak geschiedenis af te schaffen.

Leraars geschiedenis in Duitsland maken zich zorgen. De regering van de Oost-Duitse deelstaat Brandenburg wil namelijk het vak geschiedenis in zijn huidige vorm afschaffen. De vakken geschiedenis, aardrijkskunde en politieke vorming zouden moeten versmelten tot het vak 'Gesellschaftslehre' (maatschappijleer). Ook fysica, chemie en biologie zouden onder de gemeenzame noemer 'Naturwissenschaften' vallen. De regering, die bestaat uit SPD (sociaaldemocraten) en 'Die Linke' (radicaal-links), meent dat het onderwijs meer moet worden afgestemd op de leefwereld van de scholieren. In plaats van in vakjes te denken moet er een overkoepelende leerinhoud komen, in plaats van een chronologische aanpak van het geschiedenisonderwijs moet er rond thema's gewerkt worden. De leraar zou bepaalde thema's kunnen uitdiepen in functie van de situatie in de klas en de competenties van de leerlingen.

De bedoeling is om de hervorming vanaf het schooljaar 2016-'17 te laten ingaan in Brandenburg. Volgens de christendemocratische oppositie (CDU) doelt het plan van de rood-rode regering erop het tekort aan leerkrachten 'statistisch' weg te cijferen. Als een leerkracht biologie immers ook onderwijs geeft in vakken waarvoor hij of zij niet opgeleid is, lost dat probleem zich immers vanzelf op, merkt de CDU in deze deelstaat schamper op. Maar het verzet tegen de hervormingen stoelt natuurlijk op een nog veel fundamentelere bezorgdheid. Als de chronologie uit het geschiedenisonderwijs wordt gebannen, bestaat het gevaar dat de leerling geen overzicht meer heeft en geen verbanden meer zal kunnen leggen. Een puur chronologische benadering van de geschiedenis kan tot datafetisjisme, een puur thematische tot een onderwijs à la carte leiden. De ideale aanpak is een evenwichtige koppeling van chronologie en thematiek. Het is ook een goede zaak dat er dwarsverbindingen worden gelegd tussen geschiedenis, aardrijkskunde en politieke vorming, maar al die vakken in één pot gooien heft de consistentie op die elk van hen eigen is.

Plannen zoals die van de rood-rode regering in Brandenburg hoeven niet te verwonderen. Ze passen in een tijdgeest waarin het geheugen niet meer 'getergd' mag worden met feitenkennis, waarin discuteren over thema's leuk is, en meer algemeen geschiedenisonderwijs als saai en irrelevant wordt beschouwd. Maar wanneer de geschiedenis niet meer gekend is, zal het woord van Karl Marx in de praktijk nog bewaarheid worden, namelijk dat ze zich herhaalt 'das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce' (uit: Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, 1852). Overigens, Louis Bonaparte wie?

Berlín se distancia de Washington sobre Ucrania

Por Diana Rojas

Ex: http://www.elespiadigital.com

El gobierno alemán está mostrando su creciente indignación por lo que considera como “una peligrosa propaganda” norteamericana para sabotear el cese el fuego en Ucrania. Los alemanes y otros europeos están preocupados por los intentos de, entre otros, el comandante supremo aliado de la OTAN en Europa, Philip Breadlove,  y la secretaria adjunta del Departamento de Estado para Europa, Victoria Nuland, para exagerar la implicación rusa en el conflicto.

Responsables alemanes manifiestan, según el periódico norteamericano McClatchy, que los informes norteamericanos sobre la situación en Ucrania son totalmente inexactos o alegaciones sin confirmar. Cuando Breadlove afirmó que unos 40.000 soldados rusos se hallaban en la frontera preparando una invasión, fuentes de inteligencia europeas afirmaron que el número era de 20.000 y que no existía una intención de invadir.

Responsables europeos han rechazado también las afirmaciones de que unos 50 tanques rusos habían cruzado la frontera y señalaron que se trataba de un puñado de vehículos blindados y probablemente no militares en su origen.

Los informes alemanes señalan también una amplia diferencia en el número de rusos implicados en el conflicto del Donbass. Ellos estiman esta participación en unos 600, muy lejos de las cifras que ofrecen los comandantes norteamericanos de la OTAN y que rondan entre los 12.000 y los 20.000.

Sabotear esfuerzos de mediación alemanes

La revista alemana Der Spiegel se preguntó recientemente: “¿Quieren los norteamericanos sabotear los intentos de mediación europeos liderados por la canciller Merkel?” Esto en referencia al encuentro de Minsk entre Angela Merkel y el presidente francés, François Hollande, con el presidente ucraniano, Petro Porochenko, y su homólogo ruso, Vladimir Putin, para buscar un alto el fuego.

Esta disputa se produce en un momento en el que EEUU se dispone a enviar 75 millones de dólares en ayuda no letal a Ucrania, incluyendo 30 vehículos Humvee blindados y hasta 200 no blindados.

En las últimas semanas, la canciller alemana, Angela Merkel, parece frustrada con las propuestas que emanan del Congreso de EEUU y de partes de la Administración Obama para enviar armas a Ucrania, señalando que esto podría frustrar la oportunidad de hallar una solución diplomática y escalar la crisis.

Los responsables alemanes han advertido también que tras las visitas de políticos o militares estadounidenses a Kiev, los dirigentes ucranianos parecen más belicosos y optimistas sobre las perspectivas de que su Ejército pueda ganar el conflicto en el campo de batalla. “Nosotros tenemos luego que llevar a los ucranianos de vuelta a la mesa de negociaciones”, dijo un funcionario alemán.

Bob Lo, un experto sobre Rusia de la Chatham House de Londres, dijo que la disputa no es tanto sobre números sino sobre la forma en que el conflicto de Ucrania debe ser resuelto. Algunos responsables norteamericanos creen que sin una amenaza militar creíble las negociaciones de paz no tendrán éxito, mientras que los alemanes consideran que una amenaza de este tipo sólo serviría para escalar el conflicto.

Divergencia de intereses

Según el analista de la CIA Raymond McGovern se trata de la primera disputa seria entre Washington y Berlín desde la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Él señala que Alemania es capaz de enfrentarse políticamente a EEUU y tomar decisiones independientes por primera vez desde hace 70 años.

“Los alemanes han pasado de la adolescencia a la edad adulta y están dispuestos por primera vez en 70 años a hacer frente a EEUU y decirle: Nuestros intereses no coinciden con los vuestros. No queremos una guerra en Europa Central y tenemos la intención de evitarla”, indicó McGovern.

En realidad, esto demuestra la diferencia de intereses entre ambos países. La mitad del PIB alemán procede de las exportaciones y de ellas sólo el 40% va destinado ahora a la UE. Alemania busca y necesita los mercados de Asia, incluyendo países como Rusia, China e Irán, a los que ve como socios potenciales y no como rivales estratégicos, como hace EEUU.

Irritación norteamericana

Según Lo, numerosos funcionarios norteamericanos están insatisfechos de la política de Berlín y trabajan para hacer fracasar las iniciativas alemanes.

El ex director de la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional (NSA), Michael Hayden, declaró el 11 de marzo que la agencia nunca renunciará a espiar a los dirigentes alemanes sean cuales sean las consecuencias políticas. Hayden señala que la canciller alemana defiende ante todo los intereses alemanes y busca evitar una agravación de la situación en Ucrania, lo que Hayden parece lamentar.

Las revelaciones del ex agente de la CIA, Edward Snowden, sobre la actividad de los servicios secretos estadounidenses en Alemania provocaron un escándalo diplomático en el verano de 2013. La revista Der Spiegel señaló entonces que la NSA vigilaba 500 millones de conexiones telefónicas y de Internet en Alemania. En octubre de 2013, los medios anunciaron que Merkel estaba entre los espiados por los servicios de inteligencia estadounidenses. La canciller alemana ordenó entonces al servicio de inteligencia alemán BND y al Ministerio de Defensa reducir su cooperación con los estadounidenses.

mardi, 24 mars 2015

Exdirector de la CIA: "Se ha producido la mayor ruptura entre Alemania y EE.UU. desde la II Guerra Mundial"

Exdirector de la CIA: "Se ha producido la mayor ruptura entre Alemania y EE.UU. desde la II Guerra Mundial"

 

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Figuras como el exdirector de la CIA Michael Hayden no ocultan su malestar e intentan que Berlín rectifique su posición sobre el conflicto ucraniano porque los alemanes están actuando como adultos y no como siervos subordinados a la alianza de los 'cinco ojos' (EE.UU., Reino Unido, Canadá, Australia y Nueva Zelanda), sostiene el exoficial de la CIA Ray McGovern.

"La ruptura más significativa desde la Segunda Guerra Mundial entre Alemania y EE.UU. acaba de ocurrir", ha declarado el exoficial de la CIA Ray McGovern a RT. "Por primera vez en 70 años, los alemanes están saliendo de la adolescencia para entrar a la edad adulta; están dispuestos a hacer frente a EE.UU. y decirles 'mira, nuestros intereses no son los mismos que los vuestros, no queremos una guerra en Europa Central y vamos a evitarlo'", ha afirmado McGovern.

Asimismo, el exoficial ha revelado que el exdirector de la CIA está "muy instatisfecho estos días, especialmente con la actuación de la canciller alemana Angela Merkel porque ya no está actuando obedientemente al considerar en primer lugar los intereses de Alemania e impedir que empeore la situación en Ucrania".

"Hayden trata de decirle a Merkel y a todos los demás que están fuera de la alianza de los 'cinco ojos', que son ciudadanos secundarios y seguirán siéndolo mientras no obedezcan igual que lo hacen los otros cuatro (Reino Unido, Canadá, Australia y Nueva Zelanda)", ha advertido McGovern.

Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner’s Work and Thought

entretien,gerd-klaus kaltenbrunner,allemagne,autriche,conservatisme,conservatisme allemand,conservatisme autrichien

Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner’s Work and Thought
 
An Interview with Martin J. Grannenfeld

by The Editor

Ex: http://traditionalbritain.org

Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner (1939-2011) was an Austrian Catholic Traditionalist philosopher who was influential among conservatives and traditionalists in the Germanophone world. He is particularly well-known for his extensive corpus of works dealing with conservative, traditionalist, and religious theories and portraits of numerous thinkers involved in these philosophies.

by Lucian Tudor

Introductory Note: Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner (1939-2011) was an Austrian Catholic Traditionalist philosopher who was influential among conservatives and traditionalists in the Germanophone world. He is particularly well-known for his extensive corpus of works dealing with conservative, traditionalist, and religious theories and portraits of numerous thinkers involved in these philosophies. However, his works and thought are, unfortunately, not well- known in the Anglophone world. In order to help introduce Kaltenbrunner to the English- speaking world and to encourage further studies and translations, we have chosen to interview Martin Johannes Grannenfeld – a German Catholic Conservative and editor of the website Geistbraus – who is among those who have studied Kaltenbrunner’s works in depth and has been inspired by them.

Lucian Tudor: How did you first become acquainted with Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner and his work?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: It happened by mere chance. Around 2003, I read about the mythological figure of Prester John, a mighty oriental Christian priest-king during the Middle Ages, who was prepared to help the crusaders with a great army. I was somewhat fascinated by this figure, thus I looked for literature about him – and in the Bavarian State Library in Munich I found a book named Johannes ist sein Name. Priesterkönig, Gralshüter, Traumgestalt by an author I didn't know then – Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner. From the very first sentence I was thrilled. Unlike many other scholars, Kaltenbrunner didn't demystify the legend. Quite on the contrary, he revealed its metahistorical core, and outlined a fascinating, rich, and deeply symbolic cosmos of ways to see our world and the beyond. I understood immediately that I had found an author whose writings were different from everything I had read before, and who would certainly keep me occupied for quite a while.

Lucian Tudor: Kaltenbrunner has written extensive studies on Dionysius the Areopagite, Prester John, and Anne Catherine Emmerich. Can you tell us about these figures and what you found most significant about them in Kaltenbrunner’s books on them?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner wrote two large books about Dionysius and Prester John. His work about Anne Catherine Emmerich is much shorter and less complex. He intended to write another extensive study about Melchizedek, the mysterious priest-king from the Old Testament, but there exist only drafts of this work.

His book about Prester John was written in 1989 and published in 1993. Its first sentence, “Prester John has never lived and is nonetheless one of the most influential figures of the Middle Ages,” can be regarded as a motto: the mystical, invisible world can be more real than the visible everyday life. Subsequently Kaltenbrunner drafted a complex picture of this metahistorical

“John” – comprising not only Prester John himself, but also his spiritual ancestors John the Evangelist, his disciple John the Presbyter, and the esoteric school of “Johannides” – which is not primarily meant as a historical fact, but rather as a “Johannide,” i.e. a mythologic-symbolic way of thinking. In the second half of his book, Kaltenbrunner linked Prester John with the other great myth of the High Middle Ages: the Holy Grail – and interpreted some of the Grail epics against the background of the Johannide philosophy.

The other book, Dionysius vom Areopag. Das Unergründliche, die Engel und das Eine, was published in 1996. It is even more voluminous, comprising more than 1000 pages. Like the book about John, it focuses on one figure – Dionysius the Areopagite – and draws a specific theology out of this encounter. Like John, the figure “Dionysius” is composed from several single persons by the same name: a) Dionysius the Areopagite from the Bible, b) the author of the famous writings, c) the bishop of Paris from the 3rd century, d) the Greek God Dionysos, to whom the name Dionysius is dedicated. Starting with multifarious reflections on the Greek and Christian spiritual background of these figures, Kaltenbrunner finally sketches – inspired by Dionysius’ negative theology – a great picture of a hierarchical world, which comprises everything from the ugliest scarab up to the nine spheres of angels, and above all, the inexpressible and incomprehensible God – the “One,” as Dionysius calls Him.

Lucian Tudor: From your reading, what are the most important principles of Kaltenbrunner’s religious philosophy?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: 1. The Invisible is real. 2. History is full of symbolic meaning. 3. Legends, myths and tradition are important keys to the Eternal. 4. The esoteric core of all religions converges.

How does Kaltenbrunner believe we should understand the Sacred and the mystical experience?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner is strongly influenced by negative theology and Platonism. God only discloses Himself through the hierarchy – the great Jacob’s Ladder where the angels descend and ascend, and our knowledge of the Eternal with them. We can ascend the Ladder, but we can never reach God: the inner core of His essence is beyond our thinking and our language. Kaltenbrunner insists that Buddha, Lao-Tse, Shankara, and Meister Eckhart would have been able to communicate, because they were very far in their hierarchical way of understanding the divine mysteries.

Lucian Tudor: Kaltenbrunner appears to have been very knowledgeable about a variety of religious beliefs and sects; what led him, in particular, to Catholic religiosity?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner, born 1939 in Vienna, was raised as a Catholic. However, after he grew up, his belief took a back seat, and his interest in politics, history and culture became more important. Catholic thinkers like Franz von Baader remained important for him, but it was only in the mid-nineties – after the publication of his Johannes and before his Dionysius – that he rediscovered his faith. Father Georg Alois Oblinger, a Catholic priest who accompanied Kaltenbrunner during his last years, told that one day, while strolling in his garden,

Kaltenbrunner suddenly understood that God really existed. He had always had sympathy for the Catholic Church (at least in its traditional form, since he didn’t like the modern liturgy and the Popes Paul VI and John Paul II) – but he had looked to it simply in a cultural way, not in the way of a believer. His Dionysius is a striking testimony of his newly discovered faith: For example (inspired by the Old Testament story of Balaam’s donkey), he asks in all naivety if some sudden, irritated movement of our domestic animals might be caused by sudden encounters with angels, invisible for humans...?

Lucian Tudor: We often encounter nowadays people who ask for "scientific proof" that God and the supernatural exist. How does Kaltenbrunner address this kind of mentality?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: Mostly he ignores it. His Dionysius, the only major book he wrote after he became a believer himself, is obviously addressed towards an empathic, traditionalist reader. Kaltenbrunner’s concern was not primarily apologetics, but the conveyance of his spiritual insights to like-minded persons.

Lucian Tudor: Kaltenbrunner discussed in his works a vast variety of philosophers with differing viewpoints, some of them not even Christian. How did he reconcile his Catholic beliefs with his interest in the works of “Pagan” intellectuals such as Ludwig Klages and Julius Evola?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner had an exceptional knowledge of Occidental thinkers, writers, and artists – some famous, some less known, some virtually forgotten. He wrote several hundred essay-portraits about them, most of which have been collected in his six “Europe” volumes, consisting of two series: Europa. Seine geistigen Quellen in Portraits aus zwei Jahrtausenden (three volumes, 1981-85) and Vom Geist Europas (three volumes, 1987-92). Kaltenbrunner had always pled for an “inspired Christianity” (“geistdurchwehtes Christentum”) without any ideological blinders. This explains why even after his rediscovery of faith he continued to be interested in all the different thinkers he had known and portrayed before. However, Julius Evola and the “Traditionalist” school founded by Rene Guenon held an exceptional position in Kaltenbrunner’s philosophy. Their concept of Integral Tradition, the Sacred, kingship, and priesthood was very close to Kaltenbrunner’s own views. Leopold Ziegler, the Catholic exponent of the Traditionalist school, was especially influential to Kaltenbrunner. His book about Prester John can in fact be read as a transformation of Guenon’s and Evola’s philosophy into the spiritual cosmos of Christianity.

Lucian Tudor: What are essential principles of Kaltenbrunner’s theory of Conservatism?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner pointed out that conservatism cannot be a synonym for intellectual idleness. Referring to a poem by Goethe on breathing in and breathing out, he described conservatism as a sophisticated balance between things that stay and things that change. He thought that the real conservative has to be un-conservative in some matters, open to new solutions in order to prevent destruction of human culture and society as a whole. For example, nowadays, with war and poverty being absent from Europe, the contemporary conservative has to develop new ways of struggle, battle, heroism, and asceticism.

Lucian Tudor: How does Kaltenbrunner understand Tradition, specifically, and how does he believe that traditional values can be revived in the modern world?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: The concept of “Tradition” became important for Kaltenbrunner in the 80’s. As mentioned before, he got more and more influenced by Integral Traditionalism as taught by Guenon and his followers. Parallel to the shift from “conservatism” to “traditionalism,” Kaltenbrunner’s concern in changing today's world declined. He focused more and more on the single, remote individual, who preserves Tradition during the “spiritual winter” – a human network scattered through space and time, but unified in spirit. During the last fifteen years of his life, he took the most radical consequence of this world-view, becoming a hermit, living on his own in the countryside, without a telephone, without even a door bell, just with his books and his large garden.

Lucian Tudor: Traditionalists are often associated with a "cyclical" view of history in which the world goes through lengthy stages, beginning with a Golden Age and ending in a Dark Age. This is opposed to the "linear" and "progressive" views of history, although there are arguably other perspectives. Considering his Traditionalist influences, could you tell us if Kaltenbrunner held the cyclical view of history or did he offer another view?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner certainly never held the cyclical view in a strictly “pagan” or “Indian” sense that after a huge fire everything starts again. Nevertheless, Kaltenbrunner was a cultural pessimist – his favourite centuries lay a long time in the past: the Greek antiquity, the High Middle Ages, the Baroque Period or the days of Goethe. Unlike Guénon and Evola, however, he was not very interested in speculation about a prehistoric “Golden Age.” As a literary person, an era without written documents did not concern him too much – with the only exception of the first chapters of Genesis, especially about the Nephilim and Melchizedek, with whom he dealt in his Dionysius.

Lucian Tudor: What are the fundaments of Kaltenbrunner’s theory of culture?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner never sketched an explicit theory of culture. Culture meant for him rather a never-ending dialogue with thinkers and poets from all times. He did not approach thinkers from a modern, patronizing, “enlightened” position, but as equals, at eye level, no matter how ancient and strange they may be. In the beginning of his Dionysius he even wrote a personal letter to his hero. Kaltenbrunner is certainly more attracted by non-mainstream authors, individuals, and often forgotten thinkers, but he also adored well-known and famous writers like Goethe, Novalis, and Angelus Silesius.

Lucian Tudor: What did Kaltenbrunner say about social ethics, the individual’s role, and holism?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: A common topos in Kaltenbrunner’s philosophy is, as abovementioned, the remote individual preserving knowledge for the society. Kaltenbrunner often mentioned that the world as a whole is threatened by nuclear, ecological, and spiritual destruction, and that the effort of an elite is required to prevent or at least attenuate the upcoming catastrophe. Hence his sympathy for ascetics, hermits, mystics, monks, thinkers and writers in general. Particularly, the ecological concern is quite special for Kaltenbrunner and distinguishes him from many fellow conservatives, who abandoned environmental issues after the political left took possession of this complex in the late 80s. In his last years, living in harmony with nature became more and more important for Kaltenbrunner – he grew ecological food in his own garden and did not even possess a car. But all this was not condensed into a theory (he did not longer write texts during his last 15 years), but mere practical exercise.

Lucian Tudor: What did Kaltenbrunner conclude about the problem of secret societies and conspiracy theories?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: Frankly speaking, Kaltenbrunner did not see secret societies as a “problem” at all, but as an important means for the conservation of ideas rejected by the mainstream. He wrote a short text on the matter in 1986, entitled “Geheimgesellschaften als exemplarische Eliten” (“Secret Societies as Exemplary Elites”), which was included into the second edition of his book Elite. Erziehung für den Ernstfall. In this sketch, he did not only describe Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, the Illuminati, etc., but also secret societies which managed to grow large and usurp a whole state – like the Bolsheviks in Russia, or formerly the Jesuits in Paraguay. However, he pointed out that this can be a possible escape from the typical loyalty conflict between the secret society and the state which every member has to face; his true sympathies lie without any doubt with the small, hidden groups without any political power. Kaltenbrunner’s text about secret societies could be regarded as a link between his earlier “conservative” and his later “traditional” views: getting less and less interested in changing the world in respect to the political, and more and more concerned about its spiritual renewal.

Lucian Tudor: Can you please summarize Kaltenbrunner’s position on political forms (monarchy, republic, democracy, etc.)? What political form did he see as ideal and did he believe that political corruption could be minimized in a certain system?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: In his heart of hearts, Kaltenbrunner was an aristocrat. Although he was sceptical about a restoration of the traditional nobility, he felt the necessity of a skilled elite in government, culture, and warfare. He did not directly reject democracy, but warned of the mediocrity which often accompanies it. In his early works, no specific sympathy for republic or monarchy is visible – aristocratic republics like Venice are approved by him as well. In the 80s, however, culminating in his Johannes, he is more and more absorbed by the idea of a universal Christian monarchy, with a supra-national emperor exercising spiritual-metapolitical leadership over the occidental Christianity – like it used to be in the best times of the Middle Ages, e.g. under the rule of Frederick Barbarossa or Emperor Charles IV.

Lucian Tudor: We are aware that very little of Kaltenbrunner's work is available in English and he is not well-known in the Anglophone world. In your opinion, what is the best starting point from Kaltenbrunner's works? Also, what would you suggest is the best book to translate first out of works?

Martin J. Grannenfeld: I would suggest the same book which happened to be my first one:

Johannes ist sein Name – Kaltenbrunner’s great essay about Prester John. This is in my opinion his best written and most inspiring book, comprising everything that makes Kaltenbrunner so unique. It is shorter, more concise and also more optimistic than his later opus magnum Dionysius vom Areopag, and yet more intriguing and unconventional than his earlier political and cultural writings. I really hope that one day an English translation of this work (and of other works by Kaltenbrunner) will be available! This will be a big step to make this great thinker of our time better known.

Lucian Tudor: Thank you very much for the interview.

Content on the Traditional Britain Blog and Journal does not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Traditional Britain Group

jeudi, 19 mars 2015

Entretien avec David Cumin sur Carl Schmitt

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Entretien avec David Cumin: «Carl Schmitt est un catholique prussien, un Prussien catholique»

Maître de conférences (HDR) à l’Université Jean Moulin-Lyon III, Faculté de Droit, et membre du CLESID, David Cumin est un spécialiste reconnu de l’œuvre de Carl Schmitt dont il a publié une Biographie politique et intellectuelle en 2005Nous revenons ici sur l’actualité et la réalité d’une pensée controversée.

cscu51095HRWDSL._UY250_.jpgPHILITT : Dans votre biographie politique et intellectuelle de Carl Schmitt, vous relativisez sans occulter le rôle qu’il a joué dans l’administration du IIIe Reich. Pourquoi réduit-on l’œuvre de Schmitt à cet épisode, et pourquoi est-ce, selon vous, une erreur ?

David Cumin : J’ai été le premier en France, dans ma thèse soutenue en 1996 à démontrer l’engagement de Carl Schmitt dans le IIIe Reich. Autrefois, cet engagement était plus ou moins occulté, négligé voire oublié. Et c’est en 1994 à la bibliothèque universitaire de Strasbourg que j’ai exhumé tous les textes de Carl Schmitt juriste et politiste de la période qui s’étend de 1933 à 1945. Personne ne l’avait fait depuis la Libération, et c’est en lisant, traduisant, analysant ces textes que j’ai pu avérer ce fait là.

Son engagement a été très fort, mais on ne peut pas réduire la production intellectuelle de Schmitt aux années 1939-1945. Il a écrit avant et après cette période, et il y a des points de ruptures certes, mais aussi une vraie continuité sur certains sujets. Par exemple après 1933, par opportunisme, il intègre la doctrine raciale dans sa conception du droit et de la politique, mais de façon superficielle et controversée. Controversée par les nationaux-socialistes eux-mêmes ! On lui reprochera, à la suite d’une enquête de la SS en 1936, d’être un vrai catholique et un faux antisémite. Dès lors, sa carrière est bloquée. Il aurait peut-être apprécié d’être le juriste du IIIe Reich, mais il n’y est pas parvenu, parce que sa conception raciale était superficielle. Le véritable juriste du IIIe Reich était un rival de Schmitt : Reinhard Höhn.

Si on réduit le personnage et son œuvre à cette période c’est évidemment pour des raisons polémiques, pour les discréditer. Et pourtant, nombreux sont les critiques de Schmitt qui ne connaissent pas ses écrits de la période 1939-1945, qui n’ont toujours pas été traduits pour nombre d’entre eux. Il y a d’ailleurs des textes de cette période qui n’ont rien d’antisémites ou de raciaux, notamment sur le concept discriminatoire de guerre qui reste un texte majeur de droit international.

PHILITT : Voyez-vous une contradiction entre l’héritage intellectuel des grands penseurs politiques classiques (Hobbes, Thucydide, Machiavel, Bodin) porté par Carl Schmitt d’une part, sa catholicité d’autre part, et son adhésion au NSDAP (Parti national-socialiste des travailleurs allemands) ?

David Cumin : Effectivement, Schmitt est un classique, imprégné de culture française, latine, catholique. Il a pour références Bonald, Maistre, Cortès… C’est un Européen catholique ! Mais en même temps il est un nationaliste allemand. Et il se trouve qu’il a, en 1933, les mêmes ennemis qu’Hitler. Il est contre Weimar, contre Versailles et contre le communisme. Or, c’est à ce moment qu’il arrive au sommet de sa carrière, mais il doit concilier sa culture classique et sa catholicité avec son adhésion au NSDAP. Même si ce dernier n’est pas anticatholique dès 1933 puisqu’un Concordat relativement favorable à l’Église catholique est signé, le problème se pose plus tard, et se cristallise autour du problème de l’embrigadement de la jeunesse. Cette lutte contre l’Église met Schmitt dans une situation inconfortable, mais il la surmonte : depuis toujours il a connu la difficulté d’être à la fois catholique et prussien de naissance. En 1938 dans un livre sur Hobbes il formule une critique de l’Église qu’il accuse d’avoir une influence indirecte ou cachée, lui qui faisait l’éloge d’une autorité visible. Mais définitivement, Schmitt est un paradoxe ! Tout en étant catholique, il a divorcé. Ses deux épouses étaient des orthodoxes serbes, autre paradoxe… Mais ce qui est absolument essentiel chez Schmitt, c’est l’ennemi. Pour lui l’ennemi primait sur tout, il disait :  « l’ennemi est la figure de notre propre question ».

PHILITT : Faut-il donc considérer la pensée de Schmitt, et celle de la Révolution conservatrice allemande de manière globale, comme un réel moteur du NSDAP ou comme une simple caution intellectuelle ? 

David Cumin : Ce n’est pas un moteur, ce n’est pas non plus une caution. C’est davantage une connivence. Le NSDAP est un parti de masse, un parti de combat, mais qui n’a pas de réelles idées neuves. Toute la production intellectuelle est due à la Révolution conservatrice allemande, pour autant beaucoup d’auteurs sont distants : Ernst Jünger se distingue immédiatement, Martin Heidegger s’engage mais sera vite déçu. Carl Schmitt est peut-être celui qui s’est le plus engagé, mais comme nous l’avons dit dès 1936 sa carrière est bloquée. Et n’oublions pas que le NSDAP est composé, tout comme la Révolution conservatrice allemande, de différents courants. Par exemple certains sont catholiques, d’autres se réclament du paganisme etc…

Mais il y a tout au plus des passerelles, des connivences, le principal point commun étant le nationalisme et l’ennemi : Weimar, Versailles, le libéralisme et le communisme. D’ailleurs, le NSDAP méprisait les intellectuels, et plus particulièrement les juristes. Encore un problème pour Schmitt, donc.

PHILITT : Une erreur du NSDAP n’est-elle pas d’avoir voulu bâtir une notion d’État stable et pérenne sur des idées (celles de la Révolution Conservatrice Allemande) nées d’une situation d’urgence et d’instabilité, celle de l’entre-deux guerres ?

David Cumin : Effectivement, des deux côtés il y a une pensée de l’urgence, de l’exception, de la crise, de la guerre civile. Les partis communistes, socialistes, le NSDAP, ont tous à l’époque leurs formations de combats. Mais attention sur la question de l’État. Si la plupart des conservateurs, comme Schmitt, mettent au départ l’accent sur l’État, le NSDAP lui met le Volk, le Peuple, la race, au centre. Et après 1933, Schmitt va désétatiser sa pensée : il théorise la constitution hitlérienne selon le triptyque État – Mouvement – Peuple. L’État n’est plus qu’un appareil administratif, judiciaire et militaire. C’est donc le parti qui assume la direction politique, et la légitimité est tirée de la race, du peuple. L’État est en quelque sorte déchu, et le Peuple est réellement au centre. Schmitt pense alors le grand espace, qui reste une pensée valable au lendemain de la guerre ! Dans le contexte du conflit Est-Ouest, ce n’est pas l’État qui est au centre mais c’est bien cette logique des grands espaces qui domine.

PHILITT : Toujours s’agissant du contexte historique, l’appellation de Révolution conservatrice allemande est-elle justifiée ? Les penseurs de ce mouvement intellectuel peuvent-ils réellement être rangés dans le triptyque réaction/conservatisme/progressisme ou faut-il considérer ce mouvement comme spécifique à une époque donnée et ancrée dans celle-ci ?

David Cumin : C’est un moment spécifique à une époque, en effet, et l’expression me semble très judicieuse. Armin Mohler, qui fut secrétaire d’Ernst Jünger, a écrit La Révolution conservatrice allemande en 1950, traduit en France une quarantaine d’années plus tard. C’est donc lui qui a forgé l’étiquette, qui me semble très appropriée. Ce sont des conservateurs, qui défendent les valeurs traditionnelles, mais ils sont révolutionnaires dans la mesure où ils luttent contre la modernité imposée à l’Allemagne (le libéralisme, le communisme). Ils sont révolutionnaires à des fins conservatrices. Ils admettent la modernité technique, qui les fascine, mais veulent la subordonner aux valeurs éternelles. Leurs valeurs ne sont pas modernes. Et ce qui est intéressant, c’est qu’ils s’approprient les concepts modernes de socialisme, de démocratie, de progrès notamment, pour les retourner contre leurs ennemis idéologiques. Par exemple la démocratie pour Schmitt n’est pas définie comme le régime des partis, la séparation des pouvoirs, mais un Peuple cohérent qui désigne son chef.

PHILITT : Vous êtes professeur et auteur d’ouvrages sur l’Histoire de la guerre et le droit de la guerre et de la paix. Avec le recul, pensez-vous que les travaux de Schmitt (sur la figure du partisan, sur le nomos de la terre, par exemple) restent des clés de lectures valides et pertinentes après les bouleversements récents de ces deux domaines ?

hg2677565573.jpgDavid Cumin : Absolument, Le Nomos de la terre et L’Évolution vers un concept discriminatoire de guerre restent deux ouvrages tout à fait incontournables. Le Nomos de la terre est absolument fondamental en droit international, en droit de la guerre. De même que la théorie du partisan, qui pourrait être améliorée, amendée, actualisée, mais demeure incontournable. On peut d’ailleurs regretter que ce ne soit que très récemment que les spécialistes français en droit international se soient intéressés à Schmitt. Pourtant il y a toujours eu chez lui ces deux piliers : droit constitutionnel et droit international. Par exemple, ses écrits sur la Société des Nations sont tout à fait transposables à l’ONU et donc tout à fait d’actualité.

PHILITT : Peut-on considérer qu’il y a aujourd’hui des continuateurs de la pensée de Carl Schmitt ? 

David Cumin : Schmitt a inspiré beaucoup d’auteurs, dans toute l’Europe. Il a été beaucoup cité mais aussi beaucoup pillé… Très critiqué également notamment par l’École de Francfort et Habermas qui a développé son œuvre avec et contre Schmitt. Un ouvrage britannique, Schmitt, un esprit dangereux, montrait bien toute l’influence de Schmitt dans le monde occidental et dans tous les domaines. Le GRECE et la Nouvelle Droite se sont réclamés de Schmitt, mais dans une perspective plus idéologique.

Dans un registre plus scientifique, en science politique, Julien Freund a revendiqué deux maîtres : Raymond Aron et Carl Schmitt. Il en a été un continuateur. Pierre-André Taguieff a été inspiré par Schmitt également, et plus récemment Tristan Storme. Schmitt a influencé énormément d’auteurs à droite comme à gauche. Giorgio Agamben, Toni Negri, la revue Telos aux États-Unis située à gauche sont fortement imprégnés de l’œuvre de Carl Schmitt. On peut difficilement imaginer travailler sur le droit international sans prendre en considération l’œuvre de Carl Schmitt.

PHILITT : Finalement, comment résumeriez-vous la pensée de Carl Schmitt ? 

David Cumin : Tout le paradoxe de l’existence et de l’œuvre publiée de Schmitt se résume ainsi : Carl Schmitt est un catholique prussien, un Prussien catholique. Sa catholicité expliquant son rapport à l’Église qui est pour lui le modèle de l’institution. Son origine prussienne expliquant son rapport à l’État, et surtout à l’armée. Il avait donc ces deux institutions, masculines, pour références, qui fondent le parallèle entre la transcendance et l’exception. Les polémistes disent « Schmitt le nazi », ce qui correspond à une période de sa vie, où il n’était pas forcément triomphant. Je préfère parler du « Prussien catholique », qui met en exergue le paradoxe de son existence et de son œuvre toutes entières.