Carl Schmitt’s Confrontation with the Work of Hannah Arendt: A Debate on Totalitarianism, Power, and Banality of Evil

ABSTRACT Carl Schmitt read The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), and several essays from Hannah Arendt. By utilizing Schmitt’s extensive comments on Arendt and other novel materials, this essay reconstructs a ‘debate in absence’ between Schmitt and Arendt concerning the nature of totalitarianism, political power, and banality of evil. First, I demonstrate how Schmitt became greatly excited about The Origins, which he (mis)read as an exculpatory document that allowed him to draw an absolute distance between himself and the more racist strains of Nazism. Second, I show how and why Schmitt’s understanding of Arendt became more reserved after he read Eichmann in Jerusalem. Beyond offering a novel empirical starting point for comparing Schmitt and Arendt and providing a comparative account of their understandings of Nazi totalitarianism, power, and political responsibility under totalitarian regimes, the article also contributes to the broader discussions surrounding the nature totalitarianism and on the debates around Arendt’s report on Eichmann.


Introduction: Discovering Schmitt's and Arendt's hidden debate
Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt are among the most influential political theorists of the last century and there is today a large number of studies in which their works are compared. 1 The basic empirical starting point for the existing studies is the fact that Arendt sometimes cites Schmitt's works. Although Arendt's occasional appraisals of Schmitt's 'very ingenious theories about the end of democracy and legal government' 2 and her similarly pointy critiques of his thinking have by now become general knowledge, the studies that examine the subject have also established a rather one-sided image of what is, in reality,as I will seek to demonstrate in this articlea much more complex story. With very few exceptions, it has been presumed that Schmitt never read, commented, or analyzed Arendt's works and thus the intellectual relationship between Arendt and Schmitt has been imagined as a monologue in which Arendt's comments on Schmitt either testify to the fact that she uses his ideas for her own purposes or renounces them critically. 3 As I will demonstrate in this essay, Schmitt read and commented extensively on Arendt's works from the 1950s to the 1980s. The article begins by examining the contents of Schmitt's and Arendt's personal libraries and the shared academic connections with whom both corresponded, including such different people as Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Eric Voegelin, Waldemar Gurian, Hans Morgenthau, and the ancient historian Christian Meier. As is shown, both authors owned each other's works and commented on them rather widely.
The subsequent sections move on to analyze Schmitt's comments on Arendt's works in detail. I begin by demonstrating how and why Schmitt was greatly impressed by The Origins of Totalitarianism, praising its substance, and recommending the work to his colleagues and students, including the historian Reinhart Koselleck. I show that by the time Schmitt was reading The Origins in the early 1950s, he had come to a curiously similar (and yet, ultimately, completely different) understanding of Nazi totalitarianism as Arendt in her book. I distinguish three questions of special importance for both Arendt and Schmittquestions that reveal the similarities and differences in understanding the phenomenon of (Nazi-)totalitarianism.
The first of these is the question concerning the rootedness of totalitarianism to European and Western modernity in general and the more specific role of antisemitism in this story. As we will see, Schmitt saw in the author of The Origins a fellow thinker, who was not afraid to touch upon the difficult questions concerning Germany's 'unbewältigte Vergangenheit.' However, while Arendt, by posing the question concerning the connection between the Western tradition and totalitarianism, sought to offer a criticism of the Western tradition of political thought per se while recognizing the absolute particularity of Nazi war crimes, Schmitt was fascinated by Arendt's ideas to the extent that they opened a path for him for relativizing Nazi crimes by portraying them as an integral part of the modern period as such.
Second, I turn to the question whether Nazi totalitarianism should be understood as a 'continentalist' ideology that sought to radically redefine Europe or as a 'global' one that aimed at world domination. 4 It is after Schmitt had realized that Nazism was, in fact, never the kind of continentally bound völkisch ideology he had initially hoped it would be, when he reads Arendt's The Origins that presents the striving for global domination as a fundamental characteristic of all totalitarian ideologies. While Schmitt always supported Nazism as a 'continental' ideology that aimed to recreate a completely new order in Europe that would be free from the infiltrations of foreign ways of thinking, especially nineteenth-century liberalism, during the late 1930s and early 1940s Schmitt began to gradually revise his opinion and started to criticize Nazism, even if apologetically, for what it actually was: A global ideology that created a permanent state of exception and aimed at total world-domination. 5 Third, I analyze the way Schmitt and Arendt understood the role of political power and the (limited) role intellectuals could play within a totalitarian regime like Nazi Germany. Schmitt reflected on the nature of power under totalitarian regimes in autobiographical terms after World War II by arguing that in order to understand the nature of political power one also needed to examine the phenomenon concerning the 'access to the ruler' (Zugang zum Machthaber)something that, under totalitarian rule, was only possible to a very small elite. As is demonstrated, one of the crucial reasons Schmitt liked Arendt's book on totalitarianism was that Arendt also recognized the limited role intellectuals could play within a totalitarian regime, and in doing so, even used Schmitt's career as the cardinal example for describing this fact.
After examining these three questions, I turn to study how Schmitt read and understood Arendt's book on Adolf Eichmanna book that was a continuation and further development of Arendt's theory of totalitarianism. While Schmitt had a very positive understanding of The Origins, when he read Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), he described this as an experience that was exciting (aufregend) in a way that left him 'unwell for several weeks.' 6 Taking my cue from Schmitt's comments on Arendt's trial report, I argue that it was precisely this book that made Schmitt realize the differences in his and Arendt's approach. Eichmann in Jerusalem demonstrated to him that Arendt's arguments could not be used in the kind of apologetic manner he had initially thought.
Schmitt and Arendt not only came to develop diverging understandings of what (Nazi) totalitarianism was about but also deviating opinions about the possibility of political and personal responsibility under totalitarian regimes. Schmitt's insights concerning Arendt and her works also turn out to be very interesting given the fact that the debates around Arendt's work on Eichmann continue even today; what for many still appears as a problematic and even apologetic work, appeared to the old 'crown jurist' of the Third Reich as much more problematic than Arendt's arguments in The Origins. By offering a holistic interpretation of the connections between Schmitt and Arendt and by analyzing in a chronological manner how Schmitt's perception of Arendt changed from the early 1950s all the way into the 1980s, this essay unearths and analyzes the different ways in which Schmitt and Arendt came to understand the phenomena of Nazi totalitarianism, its rootedness to European modernity, the nature of political power, and the role of intellectuals within totalitarian regimes.

Schmitt's and Arendt's libraries, knowledge of each other's works and shared academic contacts
The contents of Arendt's personal library are today located at Bard College. Arendt owned no less than ten of Schmitt's books: Politische Romantik (1919), Politische Theologie (1922), Verfassungslehre (1928, Legalität und Legitimität (1932), the 1933 edition of Der Begriff des Politischen, Donoso Cortés in gesamteuropäischer Interpretation (1950), Ex Capitivitate Salus (1950), Die Lage der europäischen Rechstwissenschaft (1950), Der Nomos der Erde (1950), and Theorie des Partisanen (1963). 7 Almost all these books contain underlining and marginalia as a sign of serious reading with the exception of Verfassungslehre (1928)a very significant exception, considering the fact that this work is doubtlessly Schmitt's most important book. 8 From the way Arendt uses Schmitt in her works, we can also deduce that she was also familiar with Schmitt's other works. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt cites Schmitt's Nazi era work, Staat, Bewegung, Volk: Die Dreigliederung der politischen Einheit (1933) and in the bibliography to The Origins, she also lists Schmitt's essay 'Totaler Feind, totaler Krieg, totaler Staat' (1937) as well as his essay collection Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924-1954. Materialen zu einer Verfassungslehre (1958 as sources without actually citing these works. 9 Arendt also included Schmitt's most important work on Nazi international law and geopolitics, Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte (1941) in the bibliography of the substantially diverging German version of The Origins, once again without quoting it in the actual text. 10 As a token of Arendt's continued interest to Schmitt's work, she also owned a copy of George Schwab's apologetic introduction to Schmitt's thought, The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt Between 1921, published in 1970 While all of this shows that Arendt had a relatively good grasp of Schmitt's thinking, it also reveals severe gaps in her knowledge. Apart from her apparent non-interest in Schmitt's work on constitutional theory, most noticeably, the great plurality of Schmitt's central Nazi works are missing. Arendt was not familiar with Schmitt's key-role in drafting the Reichstatthaltergesetz that overcame Weimar's federalist model and centralized power in Germany, 12 nor did she own a copy of Schmitt's most important contribution to the legal theory of Nazism, Über die drei Arten des Rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens (1934), in which Schmitt aims to show how Nazi legal thinking overcomes not only all previous forms of normativism but also the kind of Hobbesian decisionism that Schmitt himself had formerly advocated. 13 Arendt also never mentions Schmitt's central work Staatsgefüge und Zusammenbruch des Zweiten Reiches. Der Sieg des Bürgers über den Soldaten (1934) that describes the Weimar system as the last stage in a longer series of anti-German subjugations from which the salvation of Germany was possible only through Adolf Hitler. 14 However, and perhaps most importantly, Arendt never mentions even one of the numerous articles in which Schmitt aimed to conceptualize the entirely new Nazi legal science that would overcome the degenerated world of liberalism in the name of a German racial community. 15 Consequently, Arendt remained completely unaware of Schmitt's most racist and antisemitic writings: Schmitt's detailed and completely affirmative defense of the Nuremberg race laws 16 , the shockingly antisemitic conference on 'Jewishness in legal science' that Schmitt himself organized in 1936 17 and Schmitt's 1938 book on Thomas Hobbes that presents an antisemitic reading of the development of the modern state and its destruction from within by Jewish thinkers like Spinoza and Mendelssohn. 18 How would all of this have affected Arendt's perception of Schmitt, had she been familiar with these and Schmitt's other numerous, profoundly racist writings? We of course cannot answer this question. But there is no doubt that Arendt's lack of knowledge concerning Schmitt's Nazi era writings, and consequently, of his fierce antisemitism and racism, also had a crucial effect on her ability to evaluate Schmitt's attempts in establishing himself within the Nazi party in a balanced manner. 19 Arendt would realize only partially how deeply Schmitt actually believed that Nazism constituted the beginning of an entirely new era of political-legal order and thinking.
While the fact that Arendt owned Schmitt's works and sometimes cited him has been acknowledged, the fact that also Schmitt owned and read Arendt's works remains a virtually unacknowledged fact. Schmitt's library includes the following works from Arendt: Sechs Essays (1948), The Burden of Our Time (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Schmitt also owned the German version of Arendt's trialreport, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen (1964) that Arendt had modified and to which she also included a new afterword. Testifying to Schmitt's interest in Arendt's work on Eichmann, he also owned one of the commentaries on the controversy surrounding Arendt's Eichmann book, written by Friedrich A. Krummacher, entitled Die Kontroverse Hannah Arendt, Eichmann und die Juden (1964). 20 In addition to these works, Schmitt was also familiar with many of Arendt's important later essays, such as her essay on the question of authority in the modern era as well as her well-known essay on Walter Benjamin, which both impressed Schmitt. His library also includes a copy of the Festgabe Arendt edited for Eric Voegelin, published in 1962, which begins with Arendt's own lesser known but important article 'Action and the "Pursuit of Happiness".' 21 Lastly, based on Schmitt's correspondence, we also know that Schmitt was familiar with a 1976 special edition of the German journal Merkur that carried the title 'Hannah Arendt in Memoriam' and was published in 1976 after Arendt's unexpected death the year before. 22 All of Schmitt's references to Arendt are found from texts written during and after 1951. One can say with certainty that Schmitt read at least The Origins, Arendt's Eichmann report, and several essays in great detail. Although it may seem exceptional that Arendt, who as a Jewish person was forced to flee Germany first to France in 1933 after being interrogated by the Gestapo, and then after escaping an internment camp in Gurs, to the United States in 1941, would cite a Nazi like Schmitt, it is not often realized how quickly Schmitt had actually established himself as a popular author already in prewar Germany. For the years between 1921 and 1933, Alain de Benoist's comprehensive bibliography of Schmitt's works and commentaries on them lists no less than 6 full length monographs, 108 articles, 4 contributions in article collections and one academic dissertation devoted to analyzing Schmitt's works. In addition, de Benoist also mentions 88 books that discuss Schmitt's works during this same period (and this figure is surely incomplete). 23 Even within the circles of Arendt's close colleagues, citing Schmitt was not really an exception. For instance, Arendt's teacher Karl Jaspers cited Schmitt's work already in his 1931 work Die geistige Situation der Zeit. 24 Also Arendt's other teacher, Martin Heidegger, commented on Schmitt's works. 25 After joining the Nazis, Schmitt received a copy of Heidegger's Rektoratsrede to which he responded by sending Heidegger the Nazi version of his Der Begriff des Politischen. In his letter to Schmitt, Heidegger notes that he was 'standing in the middle of polemos' in Freiburg where things looked 'very bleak.' Hoping for a meeting in person and for 'decisive collaboration' in reforming the juridical faculty, Heidegger continued that 'the gathering of spiritual forces, which should lead what is to come to the light of day, is becoming ever more urgent,' eventually signing his letter with a 'Heil Hitler!' In his response, Schmitt declared his 'will to all kind of collaboration' and pointed Heidegger to his own Antrittsvorlesung, Reich, Staat, Bund (1933). Referring to Heidegger's admonition about the urgency of gathering the right spiritual forces also Schmitt noted: 'I know, how much is at stake.' Schmitt also praised Heidegger Rektoratsrede as a 'wonderful appeal,' although he immediately continued that he was not sure whether many would be able to understand it, which, however, ultimately 'did not matter.' 26 Another important example is of course Walter Benjamin, Arendt's 'close friend, at least from 1934 or 1935 onward,' as she herself described their relationship in a letter to Hans Paeschke (with whom, as we will see, Schmitt also corresponded), until Benjamin's untimely suicide in 1940. 27 By now, Benjamin's famous letter to Schmitt, in which Benjamin acknowledges the influence Schmitt's theory of sovereignty on his own thinking, has become a widely cited source and also one that Schmitt himself would use later for apologetic and propagandistic purposes. 28 Did Arendt discuss Schmitt with Jaspers, Heidegger or Benjamin?
While we do not know the answer to this question, it seems very likely that Arendt did discuss Schmitt with one of her other friends, Waldemar Gurian, whom Arendt once describes as a disciple 'of the famous professor for constitutional and international law, Carl Schmitt, who later became a Nazi.' 29 Gurian is of course also known as the originator of the famous description of Schmitt as the 'crown jurist of the third Reich.' 30 In Schmitt's own description Gurian 'belonged 1924-1928 in Bonn to a circle of young people, who were close to me. In 1928, full of hate, he distanced himself from me … in 1933 he emigrated and has always zealously gathered and distributed material against me. ' 31 Another interesting shared contact between Schmitt and Arendt was Eric Voegelin, whose early work Rasse und Staat (1933) utilizes Schmitt's ideas 32 ; a book that Voegelin also sent to Schmitt in July 1933. 33 In The Origins, Arendt refers to Voegelin's book as 'the best historical account of race-thinking.' 34 Later, Arendt would come into contact with Voegelin after he had published a critical review of Arendt's totalitarianism book to which Arendt famously responded, criticizing Voegelin's misunderstandings. 35 Despite their diverging opinions on totalitarianism, Arendt befriended Voegelin and edited a Festgabe for him, in whose contributions Schmitt was discussed at length. 36 As a final interesting example one can mention Reinhart Koselleck, who not only remained clearly influenced by Schmitt until very late in his works as their recent correspondence clearly shows, 37 but who also emphasized the crucial role of Arendt's book on totalitarianism for his thinking. 38 Beyond these names, one could also point to numerous contacts from the margins, such as the above-mentioned Hans Paeschke, the political scientist Dolf Sternberger 39 or Kurt Sontheimer, 40 of whom the two latter criticized Schmitt heavily, while having a very positive image of Arendt, or such a neo-conservative as Golo Mann, the son of Thomas Mann, whose writings Schmitt occasionally appreciated 41 , while Arendt always emphasized that she 'obviously did not share' the kind of 'neo-conservatism' that Golo Mann was advocating. 42 What all of the above shows very clearly is that Arendt's references to Schmitt were a normal occurrence much before Schmitt would rise to his current stardom. 43 In the following section I will move on to examine Schmitt's confrontation with Arendt's theory of totalitarianism, which opens up a new way of understanding the connections between Arendt and Schmitt.

Selective affinities: Schmitt's encounter with The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Schmitt became aware of The Origins of Totalitarianism through Nicolaus Sombartan eccentric Berlin intellectual, who would later write an equally eccentric book on Schmitt 44 and whose parents had been Schmitt's friends since the 1920s. 45 In a letter to Sombart from the 8th of September 1951, Schmitt notes his 'admiration' concerning Sombart's 'lectures' on the first part of Arendt's The Origins and also inquires about the publisher of her book from Sombart. 46 On the basis of Schmitt's Glossarium entries we can say that Schmitt then acquired and read Arendt's book on totalitarianism during late 1951 and early 1952 47some months before Arendt would read Schmitt's Der Nomos der Erde, if dated according to her notes in the Denktagebuch. 48 While Arendt's judgment of Schmitt's book was very negative -Arendt criticizes Schmitt's way of placing the source of law to soil, his reduction of legitimacy to the act of land-grabbing and sees his post-war thinking as inherently imperialist, devoid of actual human plurality as such 49 quite interestingly, Schmitt had a very positive impression of The Origins.
In a letter that Schmitt sent to Hans Paeschke, dated 2. December 1951, Schmitt notes that he had recently read The Burden of Our Time 'with excitement.' 50 That Schmitt was greatly impressed by Arendt's book is also testified by his exchange of letters with Ernst Forsthoff, Schmitt's old student, another old Nazi, and also the author of the notorious Nazi era work that was clearly inspired by Schmitt's Weimar era theory of the total state, Der totale Staat (1933). 51 In 1956 Forsthoff asked Schmitt whether he was familiar with Hannah Arendt's work Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (1955), the substantially diverging German version of The Origins, which Forsthoff described as an 'uncommonly intelligent, excitingly interesting book.' 52 To this Schmitt responded with the correct speculation that the book was probably the German translation of the English original that he had already read 'with great attention' five years ago. However, just to be sure, he also asked Forsthoff to send the German version, since 'in the meantime,' Arendt would have most probably 'thought and observed things further,' 53 which was of course the correct observation, also reflected in the changed name of the work, whose original name, which referred to the 'origins' of totalitarianism Arendt had soon deemed to be 'fundamentally false.' 54 One of Schmitt's letters to Armin Mohler, the self-proclaimed 'student of Carl Schmitt' and the author of the well-known work Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1919-1932 (with which Mohler undertook his Promovierung under none other than Karl Jaspers) illustrates how carefully Schmitt read Arendt's book. In this 1954 letter Schmitt makes the observation that Arendt 'should have' added Edouard Manet's famous portrait of Georges Clemenceau to The Origins. 55 What might seem like a completely random remark actually highlights a crucial feature of Arendt's totalitarianism theory that is surprisingly often overlooked. That Arendt's depiction of Clemenceau in The Origins is among the most important parts of the whole work is testified by the fact that Arendt takes the motto for her own republican thinking from Clemenceau. 56 As Arendt puts matters in the German version of The Origins, 'The institution of the concentration camp … . is based on the exact inversion (Umkehrung) of the principle (Grundsatzes) that applies to every healthy political community (gesunden Gemeinwesen) and which was formulated by Clemenceau's great political instinct during the Dreyfus-Affair: "L'affaire d'un seul est l'affaire de tous".' 57 Arendt not only described this maxim formulated by Clemenceau as applicable to 'every healthy political community,' but also referred to it as the 'republican principle of public life' 58 and as the 'maxim of political action' as such. 59 With such a brilliant thinker like Schmitt, who had himself studied in detail the Republican tradition in his early work Die Diktatur (1921) and also in his comprehensive Verfassungslehre (1928) that examined the history, meaning and nature of Western constitutions, there is no reason to assume that Clemenceau's symbolical importance to Arendt would have been lost to him.
But why exactly did Schmitt find Arendt's work on totalitarianism interesting? This question is all the more fascinating, for Schmitt not only made positive remarks about Arendt's book in private letters and diaries, but also cited Arendt's book in support of his own retrospective notes concerning the difference between a total state and a specifically totalitarian movement in two of his post-war essays form the 1950s. 60 I believe it is possible to distinguish three reasons, which explain why Schmitt found Arendt's work so captivating.
First, even if in radically different ways, both Schmitt and Arendt would come to understand the development of totalitarianism in Germany as a generally European phenomenon that was not limited to Germany or it historical particularities, but as Arendt would put it, was rather based on a number of much broader historical 'elements' that then 'crystallized' into something entirely new; the destruction of the European nationstate system, the rise of politically relevant masses, wide-spread loneliness due to the destruction of traditions, the development of global-European imperialism, and so on. As we will see, these narratives clearly resonated with Schmitt's own postwar attempts at locating and explaining the birth of Nazism retrospectively through European history.
The second reason that made Arendt's book interesting for Schmitt was the fact that Arendt portrayed totalitarian ideologies as inherently 'dynamic'as political ideologies that strove toward unquestioned world-rule. This unlimited striving for global conquest was something Schmitt had criticized in Soviet totalitarianism already in the mid-1930s. In his Nazi writings from the 1930s, Schmitt attempted to distinguish Nazism from Soviet Communism precisely by describing it as a non-imperialist and specifically European ideology, rooted to European soil. Arendt's theory of totalitarianism enabled Schmitt to both distinguish his 'own' interpretation of Nazism apologetically from 'official' Nazism and, thus, to explain how and why Hitler and the Nazis had supposedly betrayed him! Third, Schmitt was also highly impressed by Arendt's way of conceptualizing the notion of power within totalitarian regimes. After World War II, one of the central questions of Schmitt's thinking was the notion concerning the 'access to the ruler' (Zugang zum Machthaber)a question that Schmitt had begun to theorize not only in order to explain the mechanics of the historically unprecedented concentration of power into the hands of Hitler in Germany, but also in order to justify and explain how and why his own theories supposedly did not and could not have had any influence within a totalitarian regime (that is, of course, because Schmitt supposedly never acquired such an 'access to the ruler'). Inextricably connected to the question concerning power under totalitarian rule is Arendt's description of intellectuals within a totalitarian regime. Arendt not only used Schmitt as the cardinal example of an intellectual, whose original thinking could have had no place within Nazi ideology, but also offered an explanation as to why Schmitt's Nazi career ended abruptly in late 1936: the more totalitarian a regime becomes, the less place it leaves for any original intellectual life in general. In what follows, I will examine each of these three causes by analyzing Schmitt's comments on Arendt's work and by offering historical context through an examination of Schmitt's Nazi and postwar writings.

The 'elements' of totalitarianism
One finds interesting remarks on Arendt from a letter that Schmitt sent to the largely forgotten German jurist and author Winfried Martini in late 1953, when Martini was working on his book Das Ende aller Sicherheit (1954), a work critical of the newly established Bundesrepublik. In hope of receiving comments from a fellow critic of the new German state, Martini had sent the chapters of the book to Schmitt, who is also discussed in Martini's book. In the most interesting part of his response, Schmitt focuses on the first chapter of Martini's work that argues that it was not Hitler's 'own fault' that he came to power; a thesis which, as Schmitt notes in his response, was 'obvious' to him as well. What had enabled Hitler's rise to power was the Versailles treatyan unfair peace against Germany dictated by the allied powers. 61 In this context, Martini's book touched on a topic that in Schmitt's judgment was 'until today [1953] in Germany simply a taboo,' because, as Schmitt continued, Martini 'acknowledges truths about which one rather remains silent.' It is after these statements that Schmitt goes on to write the following sentences concerning Arendt: On this topic I must still ask you, whether you are familiar with the book from Hannah Arendt: Origins of Totalitarianism in the English edition: The Burden of Our Time. For your topic, it is in its entirety and especially to this question of democracy and Jewishness (Judentum) so tremendously important, that I must mention it here and ask you, whether it would be good to cite it. I own it and can loan it to you. 62 Here Schmitt not only refers to Arendt's work as 'tremendously important,' but clearly imagines Arendt as a fellow thinker, who, like Martini and Schmitt himself, was also not afraid to represent unpopular opinions and to argue that the rise of totalitarian movements was not simply an exclusively German thing or, as Schmitt and Martini would have it, 'Hitler's own fault.' Arendt indeed agreed that it was impossible to offer a credible explanation of totalitarianism by relying on explanations based on some kind of German exceptionalism, as represented for instance by the advocates of the German Sonderwegtheory. 63 For Arendt, Nazism was a phenomenon, whose nature could only be understood by looking at the central historical 'elements' that ultimately 'crystallized' into the absolute novelty of totalitarian domination. 64 In any case, like Schmitt, Arendt was always of the opinion that these elements themselves; imperialism, racism, the history of antisemitism, wide-spread loneliness in all of central Europe and the gradual destruction of the Westphalian nation-state system, for instance, were not simply issues concerning Germany but rather broader, European-wide issues. 65 However, despite of sharing the conviction that Nazi totalitarianism could not be conveniently explained by the facile German centric approaches to history, the fact remains that Arendt was worried about the Bundesrepublik for the diametrically opposed reasons than Schmitt or Martini. 66 For Schmitt, West Germany was an updated edition of the feeble Weimar Republic that had been created as a result of what Schmitt saw as a profoundly unjust and anti-German Versailles treaty. Reminiscent of the weak Weimar Republic, for Schmitt West Germany was a 'non-sovereign' or a 'pseudo-sovereign state,' 67 whose true masters were the Allied powers, especially the United States, 'a powerful empire in America, that occupies and dominates us in Europe.' 68 Arendt's opinion about West Germany and of the United States could not have been more different. 69 In an often neglected and yet important foreword to Karl Jaspers's book The Future of Germany (1967) Arendt emphasized precisely how dangerously ignorant these kind of wide-spread cries of a 'second Versailles' actually were. The true danger was not that Germany was now occupied by the United Statesa notion Arendt considered an absurditybut, as Jaspers argued, that West Germany could actually be in danger of backsliding toward a new kind of an authoritarian government. 70 Like Jaspers, Arendt was also 'very much against Adenauer, very much against Germany' 71 and both not least for the reason that 'the West German administration on all levels [was] shot through with former Nazis.' 72 Had Schmitt been aware of Arendt's introduction to Jaspers's analysis of West Germany, he would have probably condemned it as laughable as he did Jaspers as a thinker. While Arendt always appreciated Jaspers and his philosophy of communication, Schmitt described Jaspers as a mere 'intellectual pinup' whose cheap and moralistic philosophy could only strike a chord in the fragile post-Holocaust Germany, whose 'renazification' (Renazifizierung) Jaspers now feared, so Schmitt, precisely because supposedly even Jaspers himself knew that without such a non-existent threat he would immediately lose his artificial intellectual relevance. 73 While Arendt noted that in the postwar era Jaspers and his writings had come to represent the ''humanitas' in Germany,' 74 Schmitt implied that Jaspers was a 'traitor,' and described him, in a contemptuous tone, as an unoriginal 'Kierkegaard-professor,' who 'did not deserve … to open Hegel's shoe straps.' 75 However, since during the early 1950s Schmitt was only familiar with a small portion of Arendt's works, mainly The Origins, these glaring differences of interpretation (or the fact that Arendt was, in reality, Jaspers' former student) were hardly perceptible to Schmitt. 76 This is demonstrated most clearly by the fact that Schmitt, rather astonishingly, also thought that the historical arguments of The Origins would be compatible with his own deeply antisemitic understanding of modern European history.
Even after World War II, Schmitt remained convinced that 'the completely singular, completely abnormal situation and stance of the Jewish people as opposed to all other peoples … cannot be compared to that of any other people.' 77 It is only from this antisemitic perspective that Schmitt's two entries about The Origins in his postwar notebooks are understandable. In a note from early January 1952, Schmitt writes down from Arendt's book the following words that describe the first encounter between the Boers and African natives from the perspective of the European colonialist: … the Boers were never able to forget their first horrible fright before a species of men whom human pride and the sense of human dignity could not allow them to accept as fellow-men. This fright of something like oneself that still under no circumstances ought to be like oneself remained at the basis of slavery and became the basis for a race society. 78 Schmitt comments on this passage with the following words: 'This is indeed the way in which in 1848 the educated European (Br[uno] Bauer) saw the by then emancipated (!) Ghetto-Jew.' 79 Schmitt repeats this very same idea in another entry to his thought-diary: 'To Hannah Arendt: There is nothing more lost than the European Jew outside of the ghetto.' 80 Making a bewildering analogy between the European colonization of Africa and the much longer Jewish presence in Europe, Schmitt is not only justifying his own antisemitism, influenced by Bruno Bauer, but also uses Arendt as a witness to retrospectively portray antisemitism in general as an understandable fact of life. 81 While Arendt's attempts at understanding the history of antisemitism and its different variations in the modern era were always animated by the attempt to understand totalitarianisma phenomenon Arendt wanted to 'destroy' 82 -, Schmitt read Arendt's historical reflections as indirect justifications. While all of this is of course borders on the absurd to anyone actually familiar with Arendt's work on 'the Jewish question' on a broader basis, 83 to an old Nazi like Schmitt, all of this must have seemed at least plausible, since in the postwar years, Arendt was not certainly the only Jewish intellectual who appreciated Schmitt's works. For instance, Jacob Taubes corresponded with Schmitt and published extensively on his works, describing their relationship with the almost untranslatable expression 'gegenstrebige Fügung,' a kind of curious joining together of opposing intentions. 84 Given Arendt's positive remarks on Schmitt in The Origins, which I will analyze below, from the perspective of Schmitt, the idea that also Arendt might have discovered such a 'joining together of opposing intentions' as Taubes had, was indeed not completely laughable.
That Schmitt at least thought that he shared some essential features with Arendt in understanding modern European history is also clear on the basis of the remarks that Schmitt makes about Arendt's essay 'Was ist Autorität?' 85 In a letter to his student, Ernst Forsthoff from February 1956, Schmitt brings up Arendt's 'essay about the connection of religion, tradition and authority' and notes that it is 'very much worth reading.' 86 Once again, this positive judgment is rather easily explainable, since the arguments of Arendt's essay are very similar to those that Schmitt himself had presented in his earlier Weimar era publications. Arendt's 1955 essay ventured to show that 'the famous 'decline of the West' consists primarily in the decline of Roman trinity of religion, tradition and authority'; a trinity that had transformed Greek philosophy into Christian theology under late Roman rule and which had then gradually lost its influence after the general European crisis induced by World War I. 87 Schmitt had already noted something very similar in the famous opening lines of his 1923 book Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form: 'There is an anti-Roman affect.' 88 While Schmitt's early pamphlet still aimed to defend the church as the 'bearer' and 'continuator' of 'the Western tradition' against Soviet Bolshevism, and through this historical interpretation, even attempted tentatively to map out a vision of a Europe unified under the flag of the Church, Schmitt would soon distance himself from the church and come to see that the era of Rome was now inescapably coming to an end, 89 much like Arendt now also declared in her 1955 essay.

Was Nazism a continental or globalist ideology?
In The Origins Arendt maintains that totalitarian regimes are defined by an eternal movement that leads them to necessarily strive for absolute world rule. 90 Quite interestingly, to illustrate how totalitarian movements should be understood in distinction to traditional states, Arendt refers to Schmitt's Nazi era work Staat, Bewegung, Volk (1933) that describes how the liberal-democratic state of Weimar was radically reformed and subdued to primacy of the Nazi movement. 91 Like all Nazi thinking, also Schmitt's concrete order thought took its bearings from the idea that there was no such thing as a 'German state' in its traditional sense under the Nazi rule. Rather, as Schmitt emphasizes in his revolutionary Nazi writings, Nazism created a new form of government, a 'oneparty-state' (Einparteistaat) or a 'Führer-state' (Führerstaat), whose meaning was to be understood against all traditional states. 92 By the time World War II had ended, not least for apologetic reasons, Schmitt had come to agree with Arendt's judgment that Nazism was indeed a 'globalist' ideology that strove toward world rule. To be sure, this was not the way Schmitt himself initially saw Nazism. As Schmitt had envisioned things after joining the party, Nazism was to be a völkisch ideology rooted to the German and European soil and traditions. Even in his defense of the Nuremberg laws and in his openly imperialistic writings on the concept of Grossrauma concept that Schmitt began to develop before the outbreak of the war -Schmitt always argued that Nazism did not strive for world domination, but rather aimed at a regeneration of Europe. This is precisely what changes when Schmitt becomes partially disillusioned with Nazism during World War II and begins to see its revolutionary nature in a different way.
One of the most consistent features of Schmitt's Nazi era writings is his way of comparing Nazi Germany with Fascist Italy and Communist Russia. Although Schmitt had argued already in the Weimar era that both fascist Italy and Communist Russia were states that had exploded the traditional notion of the state 93it is in order to illustrate this fact and then to portray the weak Weimar Republic in a negative light in comparison to fascist Italy, in particular, that Schmitt initially developed his theory of the total state -, it is only after Schmitt joins the Nazis that Schmitt now also begins to portray the new Germany in similar terms.
Analyzing the differences between the three new 'one party states' in fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union, Schmitt points to the 'great differences between these three organizational forms of the party, three different forms of the state, as well as the three different relationships between the party and the state.' 94 To elaborate these crucial differences Schmitt offers a simplified schematization that he then goes on to specify in greater detail: The fascist state is a one-party state defined by a primacy of the state over the party and the complete subordination of the party to the state; the soviet communist state, vice versa, is a one party state defined by the primacy of the party over the state and a complete subordination of the state to the party; the German national socialist state is a one party state that lies somewhere in between. 95 Augmenting this preliminary scheme, Schmitt emphasizes that the 'essence' of the national socialist state is the NSDAP; not the state, but the party was the essential factor in the 'German rebirth' (rinascita tedesca). 96 Schmitt confirms and augments this same schematization in many of his Nazi era writings; while Italian fascism is an ideology centred on the idea of a strong state, Soviet Communism destroys the state and subdues all power to the dynamic party. Nazi Germany stands between both; in relation to fascist Italy, Nazi Germany's worldview is openly racist and the machinery of the state is subdued to the party; in difference to Soviet Communism, Nazism does not, however, fully destroy the state and attempt a world revolution, but rather aims to regenerate Europe as the community of Aryan peoples. 97 It is precisely in this sense that Schmitt aimed to portray Nazism as an ideology that would supposedly unify the best European traditions into an entirely new kind of a whole: There are good and bad word combinations. An example of a good combination of words is the word national socialism; for it answers both great questions of the last century, the national and the social question, and overcomes the reactionary as well as the internationalist separations of the national and of the socialistic. 98 However, these kinds of idealistic projections would soon prove to be everything else but reality. Like virtually almost all Nazi intellectuals, also Schmitt projected his own visions and hopes onto Nazism in its early stages; and like many other Nazi intellectuals, also Schmitt would become disappointed with the development of the regime by the time he was ousted from his most important party positions in December 1936. 99 It is in this sense that Schmitt would criticize Nazism for being an ideology that consisted of a self-contradictory 'mixing-jug' of different ideologies and ideas. 100 As Arendt would argue in her theory of totalitarianism, Nazism, like all totalitarian ideologies, were not interested in regenerating traditions, but were rather focused on destroying them. Nazism had 'no traditional basis at all' and it constituted a 'radical negation of any tradition'; it was defined by an 'utter emptiness' that was barely disguised 'with the smokescreen of learned interpretations.' 101 Forming an interesting contrast with Schmitt, Arendt saw that this radical attempt to falsify history and to replace historical facts with Nazi falsifications was symbolically present in the name of the Nazi party itself: 'the very name of the Nazi movement stole the political concepts of all other parties and pretended implicitly to incorporate them all.' 102 When Schmitt added 'das Völkische' as a new category of political antagonisms to his 1933 Nazi version of Der Begriff des Politischen alongside the economic, the aesthetic and the moral spheres of human life, 103 he offered support for the 'racial politics' of the Nazis that was not simply one of the potential modes of politics, but rather an entirely novel and radically reductive way of thinking about human existence that, once its basic racist premises were be accepted, would immediately override all other 'imageries' of legitimacy as superfluous and abstract. 104 It is only after his fall within the Nazi partywhich should not be confused with a disillusionment with Nazism that takes places only much later (and only partially) after the war had turned against Germany 105that Schmitt gradually began to see that instead of stability, Nazism would realize a lawless and permanent state of exception. 106 This realization is clearly visible in Schmitt's 1938 article 'Völkerrechtliche Neutralität und völkische Totalität' that makes the astonishing claim that a new kind of balanced international law could be created by dividing different peoples into distinct racially homogeneous entities. Trying to convert the per definition discriminatory notion of race into a pluralistic principle of world politics, Schmitt now not only made the bewildering argument that Nazism was, in fact, grounded 'on the respect of the uniqueness (Eigenart) and limits of other peoples,' 107 but also argued explicitly that in distinction to world-revolutionary Communism, Nazism was somehow naturally bound to the European soil and thus could not aim for world-domination. 108 While Schmitt's geopolitical thinking and Grossraum-theory have been today analyzed in numerous studies, 109 it is often overlooked how deeply self-contradictory Schmitt's vision of a multipolar world-order based on a fundamentally oxymoronic 'racial pluralism' actually is.
As Arendt saw it, once the images of nature and history were taken as seriously as Hitler and Stalin meant them, 110 entirely new kinds of political entities were bornentities with which, for the first time in world-history, 'coexistence is not possible.' 111 The only road that remained open for a politics based on a radical ontological negation of human plurality in the utmost abstract names of 'nature' and 'history' was the inherently violent striving for total world-domination. 112 Arendt knew that there is no such a thing as 'racial pluralism' if the notion of race was understood the way Nazis did. To Arendt it was obvious that once a political entity would be established on a racial basis, the 'image' of race would immediately cease to be a mere 'image' and turn into a principle of unhindered ideological movement and terror. 113 This is what Arendt means when she writes that the notion of race opens an 'escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could no longer exist' 114 and when she maintains that 'race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origins of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.' 115 Schmitt would come to realize all of this only during World War II and during the postwar era. During 1942 and 1943 Schmitt attempts to redefine himself as an author. The German failure on the Eastern front forces him to see that a European Grossraum dominated by a German empire was but a momentary fantasy. As Schmitt would later confess in his Glossarium, he had seen in the Nazi movement an 'attempt to liquidate the civil war on the level of total technicity.' 116 However, by 1943, it was now clear that the civil war of Weimar era domestic politics had not been replaced by a stable order, but had rather been transformed, in Schmittian terminology, into a global civil war of destruction initiated by the Nazis themselves. What was the reason the German Reich had failed? Schmitt would offer the following thoughts in his Glossarium: The essential connection of the Monroe-Doctrine and its concept of neutrality. Hitler's foolishness: Not only to begin a discriminating war against the East, but first and foremost the self-contradiction: In the case of Locarno he said in 1936 that an alliance with the Soviet Union destroys the Locarno-pact, which was entirely true because of the explosive effect of any contact with the Soviet Union. But when he attacks the Soviet Union in 1941 and overruns them with war, should this perhaps not have any explosive effect on the entire world? The essential connection between Monroe-doctrine and its concept of neutrality! 117 Astonishingly, Schmitt was now making the argument that there was really nothing wrong with the Grossraum idea and with the doctrine that saw the new core of politics in enlarged spheres of influenceon the contrary, the problem was to be located in Hitler's 'foolishness' and in his inability to apply the principles of this new global order in a coherent manner. 118 Hitler had betrayed Carl Schmitt with his 'foolish' attempt at waging a two-front war; a non-discriminatory war in the West and a discriminatory one in the east. 119 Just as Schmitt would claim that the United States had betrayed its own concept of the Monroe-Doctrine 120 , which in Schmitt's Grossraumthinking functioned as the paradigmatic historical example for creating a new balanced law of nations, in his postwar writings Schmitt would criticize Hitler for a very similar betrayal toward the initial promise of Nazism as a new ideology for Europe. 121 Making astonishing arguments, Schmitt would blame liberalism for the evils of Nazism, by claiming that 'Hitler is the most horrendous result of German Anglophilia' 122 and that 'Hitler's ultimate political goal was the Anschluss into the British world empire.' 123 By portraying Western liberalism not only as ontologically similar to Nazism and Communism, but as the very cause that had initially stirred up the latter two, Schmitt could portray both his own involvement to the Nazi project and even Nazism as such, as such European phenomena that were supposedly caused by the ideology of its opponents. 124

'The access to the ruler' and the role of intellectuals under totalitarian rule
One of the central questions that occupied Schmitt after World War II was the question concerning the 'access to the ruler.' Schmitt analyzed this question in an essay from 1947 and in his book Das Gespräch über die Macht und den Zugang zum Machthaber (1954), which treats this question in the form of an imaginary dialogue. 125 In these works, Schmitt aimed to explain the nature of political power by relying on his most important decicionist predecessor, Thomas Hobbes, and explored the nature of political power in terms of the possibilities of influencing the sovereign. As Schmitt explains in his 1954 book, all positions of power and those who occupy them are always, at least to some extent, defined by indirect influences and powers; by the ears that whisper to them and by the corridors that lead to these positions of power. 126 The more power is concentrated to a single location, the more central this question concerning the access to the ruler becomes. 127 Exploring these questions was also Schmitt's way of implicitly explaining his own failure to achieve a permanent position of power within the Nazi apparatus. In his early Nazi era book Staat, Bewegung, Volk (1933), Schmitt had hopefully suggested that the new institution of the Preussischer Staatsrat, spearheaded by Hermann Göring, could gain access to the ear of the Führer. 128 However, although Schmitt would keep his title until the end of the Nazi regime, this institution never acquired the kind of status Schmitt had initially hoped for. It was precisely Schmitt's own inability to reach the Führer that he was now examining in implicit terms in his 1954 book.
Quite interestingly, after the book was published in 1954, Schmitt sent a copy of this work to both Reinhart Koselleck and Nicolaus Sombart by drawing a motto from Hannah Arendt's book on totalitarianism. In his letter to Koselleck from the 7th of October 1954, Schmitt wrote a dedication in which he utilized a quote from both Arendt ('Real power begins where secrecy begins') and from his own Verfassungslehre (1928); 'The secret diplomacy of public rulers (Machthaber) is a harmless game in comparison to the public diplomacy of secret rulers (Machthaber).' 129 Schmitt cited these very same passages when he sent this same book to Nicolaus Sombart on the 30th of November 1954, but now also added a few other key-lines, including the following words from Hobbes: 'Science is but a small power.' 130 As Schmitt elaborated to Sombart, all of these sentences were keys not only to unlocking the Arcanum of power, but also crucial hints at understanding Schmitt's own faith as the German 'Benito Cereno'; as the man, who, to the outside world, seemed to be the 'Crown jurist' of the Third Reich, but who, in reality, had been supposedly subdued by the Nazi machinery and had become powerless within a system that had monopolized power to Hitler. 131 This clearly demonstrates how Schmitt read Arendt's book as an elaboration of his own failed Nazi career. In The Origins, Arendt argues that 'totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.' 132 She continues that the 'most interesting is the example of the jurist Carl Schmitt,' who became a truly 'convinced Nazi' only after joining the Nazis. 133 Although Schmitt 'tried as hard as he possibly could to make it right by the Nazis,' he never succeeded. 134 Instead, Schmitt was soon 'replaced' by such real Nazis as Hans Frank, Gottfriend Neesse, Reinahrd Höhn, Theodor Maunz and Werner Best. 135 Arendt not only calls Schmitt a 'first rate talent' and notes that Schmitt's 'very ingenious theories about the end of democracy and legal government still make arresting reading,' 136 but also praises Schmitt's 'magnificent formulation[s]' and calls him 'undoubtedly the most important man in Germany in the field of constitutional and international law.' 137 Arendt also used Schmitt's Politische Romantik (1919) to describe 'the romantic attitude in Germany' during the last two centuries 138 , and in doing so called Schmitt's book as 'the best work' on the subject, 139 while also praising his 'magnificent formulation [s].' 140 In this way, while acknowledging that Schmitt indeed was a fully convinced Nazi, she nevertheless made a rather clear-cut distinction between real Nazis and 'outstanding scholars' like Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, whose ideas were too original for the more radical brands of Nazism. 141 For Arendt, the political problem was that Nazi ideology had not merely gained political power but had also managed to gather broad political support in Germany despite of its obvious 'abysmal lack of quality,' 'complete lack profundity' and what Arendt also referred to as the 'thoughtless inferiority of the so called [Nazi] ideals.' 142 What totalitarian domination sought to realize, in her reading, was an eternally dynamic form of government in which everyone is 'condemned to the surface'it is precisely this 'superficiality' that is 'organized in totalitarian domination.' 143 It is for this reason that the ideal totalitarian subject was not the convinced Nazi, but rather a person, who is no longer able to differentiate between reality and ideology, between facts and lies, as Arendt emphasized in The Origins, 144 for only this kind of a nobody may be 'swept away' again and again by the endlessly shifting tides of totalitarian ideology. 145 It was for this reason that Hitler was never interested in what the likes of actual intellectuals like Schmitt and Heidegger had to say: 'the Nazis had their own ideas,' as Arendt would put it rather succinctly in one of her essays after the war. 146 Could even Schmitt himself have formulated these things any better? The fact that these ideas were promoted by a prominent Jewish intellectual, who had been forced to escape Nazi Germany in 1933, must have made these arguments all the more appealing to Schmitt. Moreover, the distinction between 'real Nazis' and 'outstanding intellectuals' was at the very heart of Schmitt's own apologetic stylizations of his own Nazi past. After the war, Schmitt repeated on several occasions that he had always wanted to give the word national socialism his 'own meaning.' 147 He would also claim that his own ideas were not biologically racist unlike those of more radical Nazis. 148 To back up this claim Schmitt would make the factually correct claim that the early Nazi movement was something or at least seemed to be something essentially different from its later murderous incarnation. 149 In one of his Glossarium entries Schmitt argued that those intellectuals who in 1933 'sensed the spiritual morning air' were harmless in comparison to those 'who in 1945 take their spiritual revenge upon Germany, because they did not sense anything and supposedly have seen everything in advance.' 150 Schmitt also noted on numerous occasions that he felt himself 'spiritually superior (geistig überlegen)' 151 in relation to Hitler and what he once described as Hitler's 'aseptic-empty purity of his ideas concerning the Führer, charisma, genius and race.' 152 Indeed, in his postwar notebooks, Schmitt would describe Nazi ideology in a way that came surprisingly close to Arendt's later descriptions concerning banality of evil both in terms of content and in describing his own actions within the regime: 'My mistake was the good-heartedness of my adjustments (Gutmütigkeit meiner Anpassungen), my inability to hold human beings as dumb and ordinary, as they prove themselves to be on a daily basis.' 153 Most astonishingly, and without knowing this himself, just like Arendt would later describe Heidegger's affinity with Nazism through a comparison with Plato, who had also offered his services to the Tyrant Dion in Sicily 154 , Schmitt would write in his postwar diaries: 'In the years 1933-36, I valued myself and my ideas less than Plato valued himself and his ideas with his trips to Sicily.' 155 There was indeed something to this defense. As Arendt always argued, Nazi Germany became totalitarian in the specific sense of the word only gradually, and Arendt herself pointed to different turning points in this process of acceleration and totalization, naming the years 1938, 1939 and even 1942 as crucial turning points. 156 Arendt always argued that 'Hitler used his war consciously to develop and, as it were, to perfect totalitarian government.' 157 Hitler's well-known and particular hatred of lawyers was certainly not an accident. As has also been noted by the eminent legal historian Michael Stolleis, this process of gradual radicalization of the regime corresponded with the growing meaninglessness of intellectuals and lawyers within the regime, which became clearly visible already by 1938. 158 And, as Arendt knew, by that time [a] whole school of legal theorists in Nazi Germany tried their best to prove that the very concept of law was so directly in conflict with the political content of a movement as such that even the most revolutionary new legislation would eventually prove to be a hindrance to the movement. 159 Fearing for precisely this kind of a permanent state of exception described by Arendt, by 1936 Schmitt would criticize the more radical elements of Nazi jurisprudence before his ousting. 160 It is for all these reasons that Schmitt must have found Arendt's book on totalitarianism as appealing as he did. For Arendt's book not only offered a logical reasoning as to why intellectuals like Schmitt could not have influenced practical politics under a totalitarian regime, but also explicitly argued that totalitarian rule, in its more specific and historically particular sense, did not begin in Germany in 1933, when Hitler rose to power, but rather only gradually in the late 1930s. Thus, Schmitt could easily read the book as a complex apologetic reasoning for his own actions from 1933 to 1936 and as an explanation as to why the Nazi regime never truly became the Germany he had hoped to see, but rather a degenerated totalitarian political entity he had hoped to resist. Since Arendt's book uses the failure of Schmitt's career within the Nazi party as the cardinal example of the impossibility of any true intellectual life under totalitarian governments in general, The Origins seemed to be a perfect fit for Schmitt's apologetic attempts of downplaying his own career and role within the Nazi party. In his self-exculpatory reading of Arendt, Schmitt could assert that he was never a 'globalist' Nazi and also emphasize that he had been a high caliber intellectual long before joining the Nazissomething that the Nazis, and Hitler in particular, categorically despised.
While hardly anyone has seriously argued that The Origin of Totalitarianism would be an apologetic book, this argument has been made numerous times in relation to Arendt's trial report on Adolf Eichmann. Quite interestingly, Schmitt would see things in a different manner. While Arendt's The Origins appeared to him as a book that was 'tremendously important' and included many similar historical insights that Schmitt himself had argued for in his writings and diaries, when Schmitt came to read Arendt's book on Eichmann, he would realize how different kind of a thinker Arendt actually wasand, in particular, how differently she had actually understood the questions concerning power and political responsibility under a totalitarian regime.
4. In conclusion: on Schmitt's encounter with Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) Two recent studies by Sinja Graf and Niklas Plaetzer utilize archival evidence to investigate in detail the way Schmitt read Arendt's book on Eichmann. While Graf focuses on offering a careful analysis of Schmitt's and Arendt's different arguments from the perspective of legal theory, Plaetzer offers a meticulous historical reconstruction of Schmitt's self-serving, sexist, and antisemitic encounter with Arendt. 161 In this concluding section my aim is to augment this previous research, especially Plaetzer's insightful reading, by showing how Schmitt's arguments developed through his earlier encounters with Arendt. I focus especially on the question concerning the radically diverging ways in which Schmitt and Arendt understood the responsibility of intellectuals under a totalitarian regime.
Schmitt likely became aware of Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) when one of his own neo-conservative students, Hans Joachim Arndt informed him about the details of Arendt's articles in the New Yorker in a letter dated to the 14. August 1961. 162 Writing to Forsthoff, Schmitt describes his experience of reading Arendt's book as follows: The problem of value and value philosophy has still not become sufficiently commonly known. When I read Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem," I almost wrote something about the matter. The book is exciting [or: upsetting] in a way that it made me unwell for some weeks (derartig aufregend, dass ich einige Wochen davon krank war); not, because a poison syringe would appear against me in it (the assistant of the defense attorney Servatius, a Dr. Dieter Wechtenbruch, whom I do not know and from whom I have never heard before, is described as a "disciple of Carl Schmitt" on page 129), but because once again my legal report (Gutachten) from August 1945 … came to my mind, especially its conclusion. But I will rather remain silent. 163 The first thing that strikes out from this passage is the fact that in distinction to Schmitt's positive judgments about The Origins, now Schmitt tells us that because Arendt's book was derartig aufregend, 'upsetting/exciting in such a way,' he had been 'unwell for some weeks' after having read it. Second, Schmitt continues to explain that this was not so because a poisonous syringe would have been poised against him, nor was it because Arendt had falsely described the assistant of Servatius as Schmitt's disciple 164 , but rather because he came to think about his own Gutachten from 1945, 'especially its closing remarks.' Further, Schmitt connects all this to the 'problem of value and value philosophy'something that he had analyzed in detail in his book Die Tyrannei der Werte.
To examine how Schmitt arrives at such a reading, we must look into the passage of Schmitt's Gutachen (the work in question is entitled Das internationalrechtliche Verbrechen des Angriffkrieges und der Grundsatz 'Nullum Crimen, nulla poena sine lege') and his analysis of value philosophy and Nazism to which Schmitt is referring. Both in his Gutachten and in his interrogations in Nuremberg, Schmitt recognized the unprecedented nature of National Socialism. In Nuremberg Schmitt referred to the 'fundamental abnormity' of Hitler's regime and called it 'unprecedented and incomparable' 165 ; in his Gutachten, Schmitt, similarly wrote about the 'abnormity and monstrosity of their actions' and called them 'unique.' 166 Like Arendt, Schmitt now also admitted that the closest parallel to Hitler's regime was, in fact, Soviet Communism instead of Italian fascism. 167 He also condemned the atrocities committed by the Nazis and the SS in particular. 168 Schmitt's refers to the question concerning value philosophy for these very same reasons. In one of his Nazi texts, Schmitt had attacked liberalism and its humanitarian-global vocabulary centred around the notion of the Rechtsstaat ('rule of law') precisely for the reason that 'by destroying the concrete order' liberalism and the notion of rule of law place themselves as an 'absolute 'value'.' 169 However, when Schmitt began to recognize that Nazism was not a continentalist ideology, but rather one that strove toward unlimited global domination, he would begin to see things differently. In his postwar book Die Tyrannei der Werte, Schmitt now argued that Nazism was, in fact, nothing less than the most radical version of both Western 'value philosophy' and also a direct offspring of liberalism. 170 Offering a seemingly critical treatment of Nazism in this postwar work, Schmitt actually radically relativized Nazi crimes by claiming that they were metaphysically similar to modern Western liberalisma strategy also notably utilized by Heidegger. Schmitt would continue to belittle Nazi war crimes and compare them with the Allied treatment of Germans, just as he would continue to write deeply antisemitic remarks and interpretations of Western history. While Arendt was always of the opinion that 'the Nazi Holocaust has made all subsequent horrors pale by comparison,' 171 noting that there are 'no parallels' to life in Auschwitz, 172 Schmitt would engage in levelling arguments by comparing the 'the six million murdered Jews' with the 'twelve million persecuted (verfolgte) Germans.' 173 The primary reason Schmitt theorized the question concerning the 'access to the ruler' in the postwar era was precisely because he attempted to show that (1) because he had never acquired a very significant position of power close to Hitler, logically, (2) he could not be held responsible for anything very significant. All of this is of course another way of implying that only a very small number of elite Nazis should be held responsible for the Nazi crimes in the first place. 174 It was also precisely to this extent that Schmitt thought he was utilizing an author, who shared his thoughts, when he on numerous occasions misleadingly cited Arendt's words 'real power begins where secrecy begins.' 175 In a diametrical opposition to Schmitt, in her report on Eichmann, Arendt cited the following words from the official judgment: 'In general the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands.' 176 Unlike Schmitt argued, no appeal to secrecy or to the unforeseen concentration of power could ever be used as an argument to ground the innocence of Nazi intellectuals. On the contrary, it was precisely because they lacked concrete influence that the Nazi intellectuals had a greater realm of freedom in deciding whether they would support the murderous government of Adolf Hitler. What Schmitt so conveniently forgot was the disturbing fact that his own publications were direct political acts according to his very own standards, for Schmitt constantly praised the new regime as one that politicized all aspects of human life in an unforeseen manner, including legal science itself. As Arendt put this fact in succinct terms: 'Politics is not like the nursery, in politics obedience and support are the same.' 177 In relation to Schmitt (and Heidegger), this meant of course: Instead of choosing silence or emigration, these men openly and willingly chose to support the Nazis through their actions and writings, which, as both noted, were themselves political actions in a totalitarian reality.
While Schmitt distinguished 'real intellectuals' like himself and Heidegger from 'true' Nazism precisely in order to avoid responsibility, Arendt, in fact, criticized these men for the fact that they ignored 'the reality in the Gestapo cellars and [the reality] in the torture hells of concentration camps'; that they had only seen these horrid realities, as Arendt puts it metaphorically, from the point of view of 'more meaningful regions.' 178 Both Heidegger and Schmitt were very willing to forget the very real forms of torture and murder and to interpret the actions of the Nazisand also, later, their own actionsfrom the point of view of a supposedly more meaningful region of metaphysics. Or to put matters in the fitting word of Stolleis, both offered a 'philosophical exaltation of the brutal reality' created by the new regime. 179 As Arendt would note, obviously referring to Heidegger and Schmitt and other such 'prominent' intellectuals: The worst thing was that some people really believed in Nazism! For a short time, many for a very short time. But that means that they made up ideas about Hitler, in part terrifically interesting things! Completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things! Things far above the ordinary level! I found that grotesque. Today I would say that they were trapped by their own ideas. 180 Just as Arendt would famously refer to the 'grotesque silliness' of Adolf Eichmann's last words in her report, 181 she would describe the legitimizations of Nazism by intellectuals like Schmitt and Heidegger as 'grotesque.' 182 To explain why Schmitt felt 'unwell' after reading Arendt's report, it is illuminating to examine the controversy that erupted around Rolf Hochhut's play The Deputy, which described how Pope Pius XII failed to act against the Holocaust. While Arendt both personally and academically supported Hochhut, 183 Schmitt bemoaned in a letter to Mohler that in Germany the 'Würstchen Hochhut' makes himself artificially important with 'unreal' claims and even receives literature prizes for such efforts! 184 Here the very same condescending tone is present as in Schmitt's notes about Jaspers, who also supported Hochhut.
By the 1970s, Schmitt had come to realize that Arendt was, in fact, the student of Karl Jaspers, the professor Schmitt continuously despised in his postwar diaries and letters, 185 whose reflections were far from being sympathetic to his own apologetic ideas concerning the Nazi careers of people like Schmitt. In a letter from 1978, Schmitt refers to Arendt, by citing Jacob Taubes, rather condescendingly (and falsely), as one of those Jewish intellectuals, who 'did not know a single word of Hebrew.' 186 Although one might legitimately speculate that Schmitt continued to respect the quality of Arendt's works to some extent, as is shown by Schmitt's letters to Christian Meier and his notes about Arendt's essay on Walter Benjamin, 187 there is no doubt that he had also come to realize that one could simply not read Arendt's works in support of his own understanding of himself as the 'German Benito Cereno.' 188 All of this demonstrates that while Schmitt indeed found Arendt's ideas intellectually intriguing since they pertained to questions he himself had analyzed in his own worksthe uniqueness of totalitarianism, the role of intellectuals under Nazism as well as the questions concerning political power and responsibility under totalitarian conditions -, Schmitt utilized and read Arendt's main works in a highly strategic manner to support his own relativizing and deeply racist narratives of the faith of Germany and of his own role within this story. What would have happened if Schmitt had indeed realized his intention to write 'something' about Arendt's Eichmann book? If there had been anything that could have made the greatly heated debates around Arendt's book even more explosive, then surely the idea of the old 'crown-jurist' of the Third Reich commenting on the matter would have been one of the best imaginable candidates. 189 For even though Arendt's book on Eichmann has been criticized radically even in recent years, 190 what Schmitt understood, at least to some extent, was, as Arendt herself once put it to Joachim Fest: If one actually reads the book on Eichmann carefully, 'the anti-Semites cannot do anything with it.' 191

Notes
Schmitt was certainly not 'replaced' by Hans Frank, who was Schmitt's Nazi mentor and closest superior colleague until 1936, but who also defended Schmitt against the attacks of the SS, which nevertheless eventually lead to Schmitt's downfall in December 1936 (cf., Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt, 651-764;Mehring, Carl Schmitt, 373, 378-80;Blasius, Carl Schmitt, 153-80). Merhing speculates that the reason Schmitt destroyed his own diaries from 1935 to 1939 was not that he feared for his life after the Röhm Putsch of 1934, as Schmitt himself claimed, but rather that these diaries would have demonstrated a close relationship with the murderous Hans Frank (Mehring,Carl Schmitt,669n3). Schmitt's existing diaries also testify to the close relationship with Frank (and his wife with whom Schmitt was rumored to have had an affair) (Schmitt, Tagebücher 1930-1934. Höhn was, at least initially, Schmitt's own protégé before becoming an informant for the Sicherheitsdienst that worked against Schmitt by early 1936. Despite of this, Schmitt not only cited Höhn highly positively in his own Nazi works (e.g. Schmitt, "Die geschichtliche Lage der deutschen Rechtswissenschaft": 18), but even claimed after the war that Höhn had had the potential to become a 'very good scholar' (Bendersky, Theorist for the Reich, 233). Also Höhn experienced a downfall within the Nazi system during 1938 (Ingrao,Believe and Destroy,30,58,292 endnote 97). Maunz's Nazi writings were also very heavily influenced by Schmitt's ideas (Stolleis,Recht im Unrecht,308 (1946), which failed to distinguish between those who had always been Nazis and those who became Nazis in 1933. In relation to Schmitt, there is some truth to this. While in his Nazi publications Schmitt's praised Hans Frank as the leader of the German jurists, in his diaries he noted already in 1934 his disgust for Hans Frank's 'Schwindel,' and also notes listening to a 'painful' speech by Frank about the Rechtstaat (Schmitt, Tagebücher 1930-1934. The latter remark is clearly related to the debate concerning the use of the word Rechtsstaat ('rule of law'). While Schmitt initially favored the more radical approach of eliminating this whole notion from the Nazi juridical vocabulary, he was soon forced to accept Frank's position on the matter, which meant that one would utilize the term in the Nazi sense and speak about 'Adolf Hitler's rule of law' (cf., Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts, 330-8; Mehring, Carl Schmitt, 350-5; Meierhenrich, The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat, . 142. Arendt, Ich Will Verstehen, 42-3. Stolleis diagnoses something very similar by noting that there has probably never been another period during which so much of 'pathetic nonsense' has been written as in the early years of the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1935 (Stolleis,Recht im Unrecht,66). Stolleis also refers to Arendt's 'often misunderstood' thesis concerning the banality of evil, which has been verified 'time and again' (Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts, 404). The scandalous career of the Nazi legal theorist Theodor Maunz, who would adapt himself to any and all thought-systems that surrounded him, offers an interesting lesson concerning banality of evil (see Stolleis,Recht im Unrecht,. 143. Arendt,Denktagebuch,332. 144. Arendt,The Origins,474. 145. Arendt,Responsibility and Judgment,95;cf.,100,105. While in The Origins, Arendt emphasized the rigoristic-logical nature of ideologies, as she herself noted to Mary McCarthy, the Eichmann trial led her to realize that she had likely 'overrated' 'the impact of ideology upon the individual'. With the Eichmann trial Arendt began to emphasize the 'curious loss of ideological content' and the replacement of ideological substance by 'the movement itself,' especially among the totalitarian elites (Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, Greek Polis will continue to remain at the basis of our political existence, namely at the bottom of the sea, as long as we continue to use the word "politics"'. (Christian Meier, "Zu Carl Schmitts Begriffsbildung," 543; the passage Schmitt cites can be found in Arendt, Menschen in finsteren Zeiten, 256-57). As Meier reveals in his article, he also exchanged letters with Arendt on one occasion. Schmitt mentioned this special edition to Armin Mohler (Mohler,Carl Schmitt,390) (Mehring,Carl Schmitt,536). 188. Although I agree with Plaetzer on the fact that Schmitt's readings of Arendt were self-serving and apologetic, I also believe that the reason Schmitt felt 'unwell' for weeks after reading Eichmann in Jerusalem also reflects the fact that Schmitt was now forced to confront his own previous one-sided reading of Arendt in a novel manner. Coming closer to Sinja Graf's reading, I maintain that Schmitt indeed did engage seriously with Arendt's concept of totalitarianism. This is especially clear with the question concerning the responsibility of intellectuals under totalitarian regimesit was, above all, this question that seemed like a personal accusation to Schmitt. The other side of this coin is the fact that Arendt's seemingly dubious contrast between 'outstanding intellectuals' like Schmitt and Heidegger and 'real Nazis' in The Origins can only be understood if it is read in the light of her book on Eichmann. 189. On Arendt and the Eichmann trial see for instance Bernstein