Robert walks Blake Wexler through the life and times of Carl Schmitt, a legal scholar born in Imperial Germany who would come to create the blueprint for how fascist movements could destroy liberal democracy from within. (2 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who is Carl Schmitt and why is he significant?
I'm both dreading it and excited. I can't wait.
Before we close out our cold open, you want to plug your pluggables right here at the top?
Oh, my God. I love that. Yeah, that's a fantastic process.
Yes.
I am. First of all, my name is Blake Wexler at Blake Wexler and all social media. I have a stand up special called Daddy Long Legs, which is available for free on YouTube on August 1st, 1st and 1st. I do all my calendar is Colin Firth. He's all over every single month of my calendar. That's why I mispronounced that. But August 1st, I'm going to be in Philadelphia doing stand up.
And then in late August, I'm going to be in Wilkes-Barre and And then, uh, yeah, there'll be more dates popping up on my social media that aren't in Pennsylvania. So yeah, you can find me all those places.
Excellent. Excellent. All right, everybody. Let's, uh, come back after the cold open.
You're listening to an I heart podcast.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
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Chapter 2: What was Carl Schmitt's early life like?
And it's right next to Lorraine, which today is part of France, but had been taken 18 years earlier from France after the Franco-Prussian War ended and was thus part of Germany at the time that he's born. So the region he comes into is right next to this traditionally French region.
And as a result, Carl and his family don't consider themselves like Germans, certainly not in the way that like Germans will in a couple of decades. They are French Germans and they feel both French and German. Right. Right. And there's a tension between – a lot of his family does live in Lorraine, right?
And so there's this tension between his family and the pan-German ideology that suffused the Second Reich, which is very anti-French because they're not anti-French, right? Their relatives are French. They feel kind of French. So you're both part of this Catholic minority and you're also like kind of French. So you're just not fully on board with the whole Kaiser thing. Now, obviously –
When I say these are marginalized people, it's not nearly in the same way as like even a Jewish person in this period of time is marginalized. But you don't escape bias either. Karl was born in a town called Plettenberg, where his parents had moved right before having him. This was not far from where he's born, but it was a little bit nearer to the imperial core of Germany.
More to the point, it means that Karl grows up in a large town that's developing rapidly because it's industrializing, but he's a distinct religious minority in that town. As biographer Reinhard Mering writes in Carl Schmitt, A Biography, this means belonging to a confessional minority in an intensely evangelical environment, an environment partly even of Protestant sectarianism.
So everyone around him is like a Lutheran, and they don't like Catholics very much, right?
People are kind of dicks to him, right?
That was one of the theses, I believe, is that we don't like Catholics.
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How did the Kulturkampf affect Carl Schmitt's views?
Bismarck, you know, Germany's pretty new. And he's thinking, like, I'm going to roll over these fuckers. And he's like, oh, no, no. They've got a lot of money and power. Shit. So by the late 1870s, a lot of the, like, harshest measures he tried to push through had been repealed. Some stuff stays, like, you know, the Catholic Church does lose.
They are not in control of marriage or of education, even in Catholic regions, in the way that they had been. So it's not a total failure. This conflict has largely passed by the time Karl is born. And in fact, the year of his birth is the same year that Kaiser Wilhelm II takes the throne, which spells the beginning of the end for Bismarck. So he is not going to be in power much longer.
Catholicism has kind of outlasted him. But the hostility Catholics had to the Reich kind of lingered as a result of this. And Carl's dad is a Catholic activist, right? He sits in the local parish council, and he's always fighting for the rights of Catholics. So before Carl's born, his dad is kind of fighting Bismarck on this thing. Carl later described his father this way.
Throughout his life, he remained faithful to the Catholic cause in a diaspora, which was still very hard at the time. And he really admires his dad for this. He does not like his mom. Spoilers for a fascist, but... Mom issues. Issues with women in general. Shocking.
It always starts with the mom, doesn't it? It's always the mom.
For all of these guys, yeah.
So this explains why, contrary to a lot of reactionary Germans of his day, Karl's got no nostalgia for the Kaiserreich, because he never feels like a full citizen of it. Another of Schmidt's biographers, Gopal Balakrishnan, describes the situation ably in his book, The Enemy.
Most poor small-town Catholics lived in a world closed off from a hostile, increasingly secular society, a world in which the local priest was a revered authority in matters of politics and morality. And that's kind of where Carl is growing up. He's in this town where he's a minority. It's very cosmopolitan, but he goes to a Catholic school.
So he is separated from everyone who's not a Catholic, and he lives in this kind of bubble. He's a good student, very good student, and he's helped along by the fact that his father is a stenographer who teaches him how to write shorthand at an early age. So Carl's always going to be very good at writing very quickly.
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Chapter 4: What were the main ideas behind Carl Schmitt's legal philosophy?
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley Season 2. Jeremy.
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Chapter 5: How did Carl Schmitt's background shape his ideologies?
Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
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Hi, listeners. I'm Melissa Jeltsin, host of What Happened to Talena Zar. It's the story of a woman who disappears in the early days of COVID lockdowns and the group of online sleuths who try to find her.
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I kept just kind of asking everybody, anyone else think this is strange?
You'll notice that about me. I don't lurk. I'm out there. I'm an action kind of girl.
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I have a question for you, and I want you to be honest with me. How are you? It's a really hard question to ask. It's a harder one to answer, but taking care of our mental well-being has never been more important.
All of May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and on the Psychology of Your 20s podcast, we are taking a vulnerable look at why mental health is so hard to talk about, and all the science and psychology behind some of life's hardest moments and transitions.
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Chapter 6: What role did Carl Schmitt play in the rise of fascism?
What are these petty, you know?
Yeah. He is so petty. Per Mering, quote, Schmitt claims to have had early on a distance from the myths of the German Reich under Bismarck and from the national liberal atmosphere at Berlin University.
He felt his whole life as if he were intellectually superior and a social climber, an outsider, an underdog who does not belong and has not shown enough respect and who, in response, looks down on the bourgeoisie world around him.
So this is part of why he continues to socialize with artists and creative types, right, is these are other people who are kind of on the outside looking in who he maybe feels a sense of kinship with. He spends his nights out with other people who see themselves that way and feel like we're turning a lens on society and we're thus smarter than everyone else.
Schmidt doesn't quite settle into Berlin yet. He moves to college in Munich the next year, and then he goes to Strasbourg the year after that. And these are all bigger cities than he had lived in before. Mehring suspects he moves around so much for financial reasons. We don't really know. In any case, he falls in love with Strasbourg, and that's where he'll stay for the rest of his education.
And it's where he meets his mentor, a guy named Fritz von Kalker, who becomes his doctoral supervisor. Von Kalker is a criminal law professor with a particular interest in how morality impacts punishment under the law, right? What is moral in terms of a punishment and how is the morality of a society even? How does it relate to how they punish people?
This is Roy Cohn.
This is his Roy Cohn kind of. Yes.
Okay. So far, he sounds like not a very chill guy.
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Chapter 7: How did Carl Schmitt's ideas influence modern politics?
Pretty normal lawyer stuff, right? Schmidt picks a much more philosophical and a very Catholic topic. His paper is titled On Guilt and Types of Guilt, which, again, super Catholic. Yeah. Good God. But also, you know, Eisler's doing this nuts and bolts. Okay, if you're arguing for a defamation case, what's, you know, statistically, what is likelier to work for you?
Mering is wondering, what does it mean to be guilty, right? You know?
Guilt and types of guilt. And why is my mom a piece of shit?
Is my mom a piece of shit? Will she ever stop giving me crap? Yeah? Yeah.
Now, the actual content of his piece is an argument that the law fundamentally hinges on an arbitrary free-floating element. No matter how much the law may claim to be an objective thing, it always relies to some extent on the ability of a judge to determine a sentence.
In other words, you can have whole reams of law books and legislature that can give the appearance of a mechanistic system that functions based on objective measures. But the law is always at its core reliant on the discretion and decisions of individuals. Right. And that's a very important realization.
Now, this is in keeping with a major trend in German jurisprudence at the time, which is called the free law movement, which stands in opposition to legal positivism, which is a trend that had swept through in the 1870s with the goal of like, we don't want to talk about natural law, about like the natural rights of man and stuff. We want to talk about, like, what are we saying are people's rights?
What are we saying is legal and illegal, right? So there's a struggle between people who want this absolute code that handles how things should be adjudicated in every situation versus people who are like, no, the creative power of a judge to interpret justice matters, right? And Schmitt simultaneously recognizes there's this arbitrary core to the legal code.
But he also starts to value what he described as higher law, this sort of like maybe even divine natural justice that the law is always moving closer to representing. And he writes about guilt not as an internal thing, but as a legal category. In other words, he concludes that it doesn't matter if you've done what the state accuses you of.
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