1. So I have some thoughts on Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Herman Melville, slave revolts, Leo Strauss, allegorical & esoteric reading, & that anonymous New York Times op-ed.
2. The novelist Jünger (1895-1998) & the political theorist Schmitt (1888-1985) were near contemporaries & corresponded from 1930 until Schmitt's death. Both their lives were, of course, inseparable from the nightmare of German history.
3. Jünger was a great German military hero in the First World War, awarded the highest Prussian medal, a position that was solidified by his bestselling 1920 novel In the Storm of Steel, which answered pacifism by celebrating the cold sheen of mechanized war.
4. For Jünger, there was nothing more beautiful than Freikorps solidarity, which naturally attracted him in the Weimar period to far-right paramilitary challengers of liberal democracy, including, briefly, the Nazi Party.
5. Schmitt, a Machiavellian figures in several senses, had a different profile in the 1920s: He was not a Nazi but a conservative trying to figure out how to protect Weimar from extremism. You could say he was "Never Hitler"
6. But like the German conservatives he counselled (notably von Papen) Schmitt's desire to preserve order led him to quickly shift from anti-Nazism to trying to trying to make Nazism work. He became the chief legal theorist of the Third Reich.
7. Once Hitler was in power, the two friends had reversed their politics of the 1920s: Junger, although not a critic of the regime, kept his distance, while Schmitt (lavished with power & position) defended the Night of the Long Knives.
8. Junger, smartly, told Schmitt to quit & leave Germany. Schmitt didn't and in any case quickly lost political power but not before forever tarnishing his own name. By the late 1930s, both were in a kind of limbo, an "internal exile"
9. The two men continued to correspond in the 1930s & 1940s, but (for obvious reasons) couldn't discuss their politics directly. So instead they relied on allegory (which Junger also did for his 1939 covertly anti-Nazi novel On the Marble Cliffs).
10. So instead of talking about Hitler directly, Junger & Schmitt wrote to each other about Hieronymous Bosch, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville & Malraux. But, as Leo Strauss would note, it's best to read between the lines since persecution breeds esoteric writing.
11. Schmitt kept returning to Melville's novella "Benito Cereno" -- about a slave rebellion. The title character (SPOILER ALERT) is a Spanish captain who seems to be the head of his ship but in fact is a prisoner of mutinous slaves who really direct the action.
12. I'll leave aside the grossness of equating revolting slaves to Nazis for another day, but it is very tied to how order-loving German conservatives saw the 1930s: Nazis were an insurgency from below which elites failed to quell.
13. The subtext of Schmitt's letters are clear. "I am Benito Cereno -- when it looks like I was collaborating with the regime I was actually a prisoner with no agency."
14. (Tangentially: the exact relationship between Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss is a subject of intense scholarly controversy, but the two read each others work. Strauss' discovery of esoteric writing came later, but was surely informed by aware of lived reality of tyranny).
15. When I read the anonymous Times op-ed, it called to mind many of the dilemmas faced by Junger & Scmitt, about conservative elites trying to tame racist demagogues, about the need for secret communication, about how quickly the adult in the room can become a prisoner.
16. To wrap up: both Junger and Schmitt overlapped socially with the members of the Officer's Plot, who tried to kill Hitler in 1944 but neither participated in the coup. Junger spent the war administrating Paris, which actually helped his post-war reputation.
17. Post-1945 Schmitt was arrested & jailed for 2 years, stripped of his academic titles, and lived on as a contaminated figure. Junger, much admired not only in Germany but also in France, continued to be a literary hero, hailed by, among others, Mitterrand.
