03_Kaplan11_C02_p017-046.pdf

Chapter 2 Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar Political Theology and its Critics Michael Hollerich Considering Catholicism’s historic hostility towards everything associated with the word liberalism, it may seem redundant to speak of “Catholic anti-liberalism.” But in Weimar Germany anti-liberalism took many forms, particularly where politics was concerned. The present paper is limited to examining the political-theological views of two conservative Catholic intellectuals, Erik Peterson and Alois Dempf, lifelong friends and mutual admirers, and for a time university colleagues at Bonn (Dempf from 1926 to 1937 and Peterson from 1924 to 1929).1 They had numerous scholarly friends in common, none more influential than Carl Schmitt, also their colleague at Bonn (1922–1928). In Dempf’s case the Schmitt connection was mainly through Werner Becker, a student of Schmitt’s.2 Peterson’s bond was much closer. For several years he and Schmitt were intimate friends whose ideas exercised such a strong reciprocal influence that Peterson’s biographer spoke of them as separated by a permeable intellectual membrane.3 This paper is thus somewhat triangular in character, though Schmitt himself serves mainly as a foil.4 In both Peterson’s and Dempf’s cases, we will meet men of exceptional scholarly integrity and talent who harbored reservations about the Republic but stood resolutely against the Nazis. We will begin with the historiographical context; then move to a review of Peterson’s and Schmitt’s disagreement on political theology; and finally, and at greater length, consider the complex legacy of Alois Dempf, sometimes regarded as a progenitor of the Catholic Reichstheologie—a paternity that has been hotly denied—which flourished briefly during the transitional years from the Republic to the Third Reich. The modest goal of this paper is merely to document some ways in which ardently anti-liberal Catholic thinkers could yet come to a principled 17 18 Chapter 2 opposition to the National Socialist version of anti-liberalism. That the two chosen here could work out their ideas in opposition to arguably the most prominent Catholic anti-liberal of their generation, a man whom they knew personally and whose ideas in varying degree nevertheless impressed them, deepens our grasp both of the vitality and variety that marked Catholic intellectual life of the time but also our appreciation of the dilemmas—political and theological—which inherited Catholic categories and language were not well equipped to resolve. The issues that preoccupied the principals are not just historical. They are with us still, even if the terms and the circumstances have changed. In Germany, as I discovered some years ago while preparing an English edition of several of Peterson’s publications, scholarly debate about the Catholic anti-liberals has often been embittered and slanted by contemporary theological and political disagreement. Also, the Catholic Church is still the Catholic Church, still unwilling to settle down as one denomination among many. And as every presidential election reminds us, American democracy is riven with issues that do not seem readily resolvable at the political level but entail disagreements that are virtually metaphysical and that raise questions about the legitimacy of our regime. At the same time the attacks of 2001 and the wars that followed have forced us to consider the security requirements of democracy and also to ponder a possible clash of civilizations—as a result of which Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction has assumed disturbing relevance. And now we may be headed for another crisis, this one economic, which may make the 1930s seem not as long ago as we had thought. HistoriogrApHiCAL Context: tHe DebAte over tHe Affinity tHesis böckenförde and the Catholic occlusion of “the political” in 1933 It was almost 50 years ago that Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, then a young legal scholar at the beginning of a long and distinguished career, published an article in the Catholic journal Hochland that, as Walter Dirks said, stirred up a real hornets’ nest.5 By 1960 German Catholics were just beginning the unsettling work of reconstructing Catholic involvement in the events that brought Hitler to power in 1933. Rudolf Morsey’s and Erich Matthias’ landmark collection Das Ende der Parteien appeared that year. Böckenförde’s article was devoted to explaining German Catholicism’s abrupt acquiescence in the new order.6 He argued that it was necessary to Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 19 posit some kind of felt affinity between Catholicism and National Socialism if we were to understand most fully the speed and enthusiasm which animated at least some Catholics. This Afffinität-These inspired immediate and heated opposition for reasons that had as much to do with the politics of post-war Germany as with 1933. The American Catholic journal Cross Currents rushed an English translation into print, along with excerpts of a response by one of Böckenförde’s critics.7 Böckenförde, who became one of West Germany’s most prominent Catholic public intellectuals, was doubly damned in the eyes of some of his Catholic critics; not only was he a member of the SPD rather than the Christian Democrats, but he had been a student of Carl Schmitt. Böckenförde contended that it was inadequate, and certainly not his intention, to impute opportunism or cowardice to the Catholic leadership. There were characteristic Catholic habits and values that disposed some Catholics to embrace National Socialism once they had reassured themselves that the new regime would not give the anti-clerical side of the movement its head. These included such things as the defense of traditional morality; the place of religion in public life; the “organic” understanding of the social and political orders, which seemed to give more respect to community, localism, and tradition; the prominence of the principle of authority; the rejection of parliamentarism; the anti-Bolshevism; the (apparent) respect for natural law; and behind all of these, the antiliberalism. Böckenförde drew special attention to the way that the Catholic ecclesiastical leadership seemed set above all on securing the “ecclesiasticalcultural” goods of the freedom and rights of the church and the family, especially where education was concerned—the “particular goods” (bona particularia) dictated by the natural law. The larger political question of the transition from the Republic to the National Socialist dictatorship then appeared secondary—properly so, in his reading of the natural law tradition as expounded by modern popes, since the precise shape of government was a thing indifferent on which the church had no competence to speak. The historic mission of the Center Party was consistent with this approach. As a weltanschauliche party, its fundamental reason for being had always been to secure those goods. Everything else scaled down from there. For the Center Party, as a party based on a total Weltanschauung, the unconditional thing was not the political per se but the comprehensive worldview, which found its concrete embodiment in ecclesiastical and cultural-political goals. By comparison, the political per se was of only relative importance. At the same time the party, as a Catholic party, like Catholics themselves was always under the suspicion of not being reliably nationalist. That was 20 Chapter 2 its vulnerable spot. As a result, once the ecclesiastical and cultural-political concerns were secured, [the party] wanted to be strongly nationalist and not to fall short of other groups in their outlook on the nation. This ‘national attitude’ arose not from political considerations but more from an unwitting compensation. In that way [the party] became susceptible to nationalist slogans and at risk of losing sight of the truly political exigencies emanating from that source. The crux of the party’s dilemma lay not in the fact that its worldview and cultural-political concerns were too slight but that they were too strong [emphasis added]. That was and is a specifically Catholic problematic.8 Catholic nostalgia and the vision of the reich His analysis was the point of departure for the dissertation that became Klaus Breuning’s Die Vision des Reiches: Katholizismus zwischen Democratie und Diktatur 1929–1934, still a landmark study, which focused specifically on the role that a political-theological Reichsideologie had played in stimulating and legitimating this early Catholic collaboration.9 Breuning surveyed a wealth of publications by conservative churchmen, intellectuals, publicists, and creative writers from the 1920s and early 1930s, Austrian as well as German, and interviewed a number of those who were still alive in the1960s. The oral documentation enriched his book, and it is to his credit that so many seem to have been willing to talk candidly with him.10 One of Breuning’s subjects—although he does not seem to have interviewed him—was Alois Dempf, whom he grouped with the Reich theologians. Breuning treated him with marked respect as a serious thinker and scholar who was more fastidious about making connections between past and present than many of those who read his books and articles. He acknowledged that Dempf rejected past Reich theological conceptions as a sufficient basis for answering contemporary political questions.11 Nevertheless, Dempf’s very inclusion in the book seems to have been sufficient to inspire friends and admirers to dedicate a memorial volume to defending his scholarly legacy after his death in 1981. The editors were Vincent Berning, whose father, August Berning, had been a prominent Catholic layman in the Weimar era, and Hans Maier, the distinguished Catholic political scientist and author of many books and articles.12 Berning contributed a good deal of the writing in the book, including a rather peevish rebuttal of Breuning’s interpretation of Dempf, and indeed of German “left Catholicism” in general.13 The Berning/Maier volume has been a valuable resource for this paper. Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 21 An Anti-Liberal inventory What did “anti-liberalism” mean to conservative Catholic political-theological thinking? The following elements crop up repeatedly in Breuning’s survey: •฀ Hostility to the principles of 1789, which were regarded as a vanguard in the de-Christianization of western political and social life. A favorite philosophical whipping boy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. •฀ A suspicion of democratic political forms, insofar as democracy was understood (a) in terms of the (American-style) separation of church and state, America being regarded with almost as much horror as Bolshevism; and (b) strict majoritarianism as an instrument for determining the common good. Opposition to the Weimar Constitution routinely began with Article 1’s derivation of sovereignty from the people, not from God. •฀ Frequently condemned in the same breath as the majoritarian principle was the individualism of modern society, to which “atomistic” was an almost automatic adjective. Democratic political forms, urbanization, industrialization, all conspired to pry persons loose from inherited communal social structures and roles. •฀ “Organic” vs. “mechanistic.” Another pair of modifiers that show up with regularity in the literature. The former, rooted in nineteenth-century romanticism, reflected nostalgic admiration for traditional German political structures. It had a special affinity for corporatist political models and for appeals to natural law. “Mechanistic” was its companion boo-word and can usually be found in disparaging references to French or Anglo-Saxon democratic models. Here, as elsewhere in this list, a major influence is the “universalist” system of the Austrian social philosopher Othmar Spann.14 •฀ A preference for a clear definition of authority; the Nazi “leadership principle” answered to an already existing deep need in society—it did not invent it—even though Catholicism’s hierarchical principle, with its graduated structure and legal precision, did not fit seamlessly with Nazi-style populist and charismatic authority. •฀ A powerful nostalgic attraction to the medieval ideal of a Christian empire, “the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation,” and its Hapsburg shadow. This is the visionary Reich that is the subject of Breuning’s book. It is important to note the inter-nationalism of that empire, or at least its multi-national character, which was seen as an appealing antidote to modern nationalism. Catholic anti-liberalism was not necessarily nationalistic. •฀ Closely related, however, and capable of grave nationalistic exploitation, was the idea of a special German Sendung in Europe, born of its central location and its imperial Christian heritage.15 22 Chapter 2 Carl schmitt Throughout the 1920s, Catholic anti-liberalism received major inspiration from the writings of Carl Schmitt, beginning with the twin treatises Roman Catholicism and Political Form and Political Theology.16 The former developed the idea of “representation” and the Catholic Church’s character as a Machtform. The latter reintroduced the category of “political theology” to modern discourse and advanced the thesis that “all modern concepts of the state and of sovereignty are secularized theological concepts.” Insisting that his purpose was strictly scholarly, Schmitt argued that there was an affinity between conceptions of sovereignty and government, and metaphysical and theological doctrines of the unity of being. The two treatises appeared within a year of one another, and, despite the enthusiastic praise that greeted them,17 it became apparent that their arguments did not sit all that easily with one another. This was but the first of several indications that Schmitt, whose gift for brilliant and arresting dicta had made him a hot commodity among Catholic intellectuals and publicists, would prove to be an ambiguous voice.18 Eventually some of his erstwhile protégés and friends would come to suspect him of malign intent and would turn against him, most famously and damagingly, the Russian Jewish convert to Catholicism, Waldemar Gurian, who became Schmitt’s tormentor-in-chief from his exile in Switzerland.19 tHe Anti-poLitiCAL poLitiCAL tHeoLogiAn: erik peterson is a Christian political theology possible? A more complicated case involves Schmitt’s friend Erik Peterson (1890–1960), a patristics scholar and church historian whose disenchantment with mainline Protestantism and with modernity in general led him to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1929.20 Schmitt was his sponsor, the two having become close friends during the years when they were both on the faculty at Bonn. Their intellectual interests overlapped in several areas of law and theology and touched on a host of topics: eschatology and apocalyptic as horizons of theology and politics; secularization and its causes and consequences; the crisis of legitimation in modern politics; the role of acclamation in ancient polities, civil and ecclesiastical; the friend-enemy distinction; decisionist theories of law and of dogmatic definition; and the role of representation and Öffentlichkeit in church and government. They were also in agreement about what they disliked, Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 23 which included virtually everything having to do with liberalism in religion and politics.21 Here, for example, is Peterson’s bitter description of the Declaration of the Rights of Man as a usurpation of the claims of the Son of Man: The man, who here demands his rights, is not only the man who murdered the king, nobility, and clergy and organized the levée en masse, but who thereby knows himself free from all sin—as only the Son of Man is, yet without, like him, taking the sins of the world on himself—and from this sinlessness he now preaches liberté, egalité and fraternité in the name of a humanity soaked with blood and tears.22 The concept of “political theology” was the most dramatic arena of their interaction. The influence went in a fairly straightforward way from Schmitt to Peterson, although in Peterson’s early writings, such as his university lectures at Göttingen, he had already demonstrated the preoccupation with the political dimension of theology, liturgy, and church government that would mark much of his work. Peterson himself acknowledged the debt in the final footnote he attached to a learned monograph that appeared in 1935 under the title Monotheismus als politisches Problem: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Theologie im Imperium Romanum: “To my knowledge, the concept of ‘political theology’ has been introduced into the literature by Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie (Munich, 1922). His brief arguments at that time were not made systematically. Here we have tried to show by a concrete example the theological impossibility of a ‘political theology.’”23 The monotheism book argued that there was an ideological affinity between ancient concepts of monarchical government and monotheistic belief systems and that Christianity itself for a while flirted with such a correlation as a way of legitimating itself in the Roman Empire. In a sweeping verdict that has invited criticism ever since, Peterson denied that there could be “any such thing as a Christian political theology”: a pagan or a Jewish one, perhaps, but not a Christian one. With the passage of time, it became clear that Schmitt was deeply unhappy with Peterson’s apodictic rejection of political theology as an inescapably heretical enterprise, and the dispute appears to have played a role—at least in Schmitt’s eyes—in the atrophying of the friendship. This did not really become clear until a decade after Peterson’s death in 1960, when Schmitt, galvanized by the upsurge in interest in political theology in Germany in the ’60s—albeit from a left-wing perspective rather than his own conservative orientation—published a book-length refutation of Peterson’s repudiation, provocatively entitling it Politische Theologie II: die Legende von der Erledigung jeder Politischen Theologie.24 24 Chapter 2 Peterson published his little treatise while living as a quasi-exile in Rome, where he had moved after resigning his university teaching position following his conversion. But much of the research on which it was based had appeared in a Hochland article in 1933. On that occasion he had been more forthcoming about his purpose and his adoption of the category of “political theology” as he found it formulated by Carl Schmitt: The following considerations belong to a domain that a contemporary German legal scholar, Carl Schmitt, has described as political theology. By its nature political theology is not perhaps an element of theology per se, but rather of political thought. In the measure that political life is detached from the gods of the polis, the need originates to harmonize a theory, be it of philosophical or theological type, with the political life of the city. Like political utopia, political theology is, apparently by some inherent necessity, an ever recurring phenomenon, to be sure regarded by the theologian with misgiving and recognized as generally having a heretical cast, but constantly presented by political thinkers with ever-new confidence. Political theology is not just a product of modernity. Not de Maistre or Donoso Cortes, not Bossuet or Rousseau, were the creators of a political theology. No; ancient Christianity, that is, the Christianity that existed in the Roman Empire, had already felt the need for a political theology. Because this political theology of ancient Christianity is all but unknown—the theologians attributed to the history of doctrine and to exegesis what is in truth only political theory—it seemed to us a timely exercise to study the political theology of Christian antiquity on the precise point where it had, as it were, its center: on ancient Christianity’s judgment of Augustus and of his historic accomplishment.25 Even this was less than full disclosure. In 1933 “political theology” was all the rage, with countless essays and articles appearing under that heading— see Klaus Scholder’s chapter on “the summer of political theology” in his history of the Christian churches in the Third Reich. Most of these efforts seem to have come from Protestant sources. But Catholic examples were not lacking.26 Some Catholic versions favored the Thomistic language of nature and grace. Others, like Karl Adam, explicitly avoided such scholastic metaphysical terminology. But Peterson’s most immediate target was the effort by certain Catholic conservatives to resuscitate medieval ideals of a Catholic empire in order to build a bridge to the new National Socialist regime and its national renewal. This Catholic Reichstheologie was another, more historically oriented expression of political theology. And Peterson attacked it with historical weapons. His critical intentions did not escape his readers, as Alois Dempf noted years later in his obituary for Peterson.27 But the obituary, which correctly described Peterson as having attacked “a new Arianism,” implied Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 25 that the target was Protestant practitioners of political theology and made no mention of its Catholic exponents—a surprising omission, since, as Dempf surely knew and as we know from a letter of Peterson’s, it was his Catholic co-religionists who were his primary target: “I wanted to take a poke at the Reichstheologie.”28 Carl schmitt’s objections: Quis iudicabit? In Politische Theologie II Carl Schmitt raised two fundamental objections against Peterson’s rejection of political theology.29 First, he accused Peterson of holding the illusion that there was some sort of pure domain or refuge where theology could exist on its own, apart from contact with the political realm: “Peterson’s argumentation proceeds via a distinction between the pure (theological) and the impure (political), in an abstract and absolute disjunction, in whose unfolding he can bypass every concrete, spiritual-secular, mixed actuality of concrete historical events.”30 The illusion was reprehensible. Not only did it deny the state the religious legitimation that Schmitt believed it needed, it also contributed to the advance of secularization by seeming to remove God from the public sphere in which human beings actually lived. To this criticism Peterson might respond by saying that he had been misunderstood. His rejection of political theology by no means implied a rejection of the Christian state or of the belief that God continued to act in history. What he opposed was not the conversion of Constantine or of the Roman Empire—in fact he considered the Christianization of the empire as divinely willed, as unpublished lecture notes consistently say.31 The universalism of “empire” as a political form was preferable to the modern liberal nationstate.32 Far from wishing the state to be neutral, Peterson believed that an allegedly neutral public space was simply a vacuum waiting to be filled by the demons!33 Schmitt’s second and even more basic criticism was that Peterson was guilty of overreaching in his claim to establish the boundary between what was political and what was not. For Schmitt, the crucial issue was who decides the answer to that question; the definition of what was “political” was always and unavoidably a political decision. That was the thesis that he had asserted in his 1927 classic treatise The Concept of the Political. As he wrote in the introduction to the second edition of Political Theology, which appeared right after Hitler came to power, “We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is un-political is always a political decision, regardless of 26 Chapter 2 who decides and what reasons are advanced. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an un-political theology.”34 This was especially true at that time, according to Schmitt, because the historic institutions of “church” and “state” had lost their status as “substances” with their own recognized spheres and competencies.35 Secularization had progressively reduced the church to being merely a free religious association, thus denying the “representative” power Catholicism had historically claimed. For its part the state had lost the monopoly of “the political,” because in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it had been “neutralized” by the forces of society. The “political” was no longer a distinct sphere but a formal criterion for measuring the intensity of social relations. Drawing on the “friend-enemy” distinction that he had first formulated in The Concept of the Political,36 Schmitt wrote: “Today the only intellectually defensible criterion [of the political] is the degree of intensity of an association or a dissociation, that is, the distinction between friend and enemy.”37 Any number of social actors could try to commandeer the right to make that distinction—corporations, unions, the masses, the intelligentsia, and also churches. In posing what he called “the great Thomas Hobbes question,” Schmitt wrote, Until the last day the Augustinian doctrine of the two separate kingdoms will constantly stand anew before this twofold, permanently open question: Quis iudicabit? Quis interpretabitur? Who decides in concreto for the human being acting in his creaturely independence just what is religious and what is secular, and how they are to be related in the res mixtae that now characterize, in the interim between the Lord’s first and second coming, the entire earthly existence of this religious-secular, spiritual-temporal double being called Humanity?38 Borrowing from traditional Catholic terminology coined by Robert Bellarmine, Schmitt called these other social actors “indirect powers” and blamed their successful co-optation of what was properly the state’s for the weakened condition of the modern state. He developed the case against such indirect powers in his 1938 book on Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. There he expressed respect for Hobbes’ fundamental concern for the state and for the security the state provided. Was Schmitt speaking for himself in the following account of Hobbes’ critique of the “Judeo-Christian” splitting of the state’s original unity? The Jewish scholar Leo Strauss . . . remarks in this context that Hobbes regarded Jews as the originators of the revolutionary state-destroying distinction of the original political unity. The distinction between the secular and the spiritual power was, according to Hobbes, alien to the heathens because to them religion was a part of politics; the Jews brought about unity from the side of religion. Only the Roman papal church and the power-thirsty Presbyterian churches or sects Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 27 thrive on the state-destroying separation of the spiritual and the secular power. Superstition and misuse of alien beliefs in spirits arising from fear and illusion have destroyed the original and natural heathen unity of politics and religion.39 In his post-war diary, Schmitt said that Hobbes’ marginalization of religion had the effect of “rendering harmless the impact of Christ in the social and political sphere; [and] of de-anarchizing Christianity while leaving it a certain legitimizing function in the background.”40 There is debate among scholars about just how to read the Hobbes book. One question is whether Schmitt was actually aiming a (self-interested) protest at the increasing brutality of Nazi rule. That may be the case, as Erik Peterson realized. But Peterson insisted that the book should also be understood straight up, as it was written. He did not hesitate to object fiercely to Schmitt’s denial of the indirect power (potestas indirecta) to the church. “The typically Jewish-Christian ‘splitting of political unity’ appears to me to go back to the words of Jesus, in which case the polemic against the potestas indirecta only has a meaning if one has renounced being a Christian and has opted for paganism.”41 In this blunt judgment Peterson expressed what really divided him from Schmitt in the matter of political theology: the nature of the church and indeed of Christianity itself. For Peterson the church was a public and an eschatological reality, not the Kingdom of God as such, but the ekklêsia, the “assembly,” of the heavenly city, to which something of the political would always inhere: It is true that . . . a certain ambiguity attaches to the Church. She is not in a univocal sense a religious-political entity such as was the messianic Kingdom of the Jews. But she is also not a purely spiritual entity, in which such concepts as politics and sovereignty may not, as such, appear, as though she were restricted to ‘service.’ The ambiguity that attaches to the Church must be explained in terms of the blend of Kingdom and Church.42 Such a conception of the church was completely at odds with the unity of the state as conceived by Carl Schmitt. 28 Chapter 2 tHe Anti-ReiChsTheologie pHiLosopHer of tHe CHristiAn stAte: ALois Dempf Heim ins reich? Alois Dempf (1891–1982) was an immensely learned and productive philosopher and historian, with 26 books to his credit and 170 articles and reviews. He defies easy characterization. Of his principled opposition to “liberalism” there can be no doubt. Yet he became a reluctant defender of the republic— with qualifications to be noted—and a resolute opponent of National Socialism and the Hitler dictatorship. In 1931, at a critical juncture in the republic’s history, he published an important article defending Catholicism’s rapprochement with parliamentary democracy.43 He was so critical of the signing of the Concordat that he traveled to Rome to lobby against it. A year later he wrote, “its [the Concordat’s] only immediate effect was a strengthening of the new system and a confusion of the Catholic conscience.”44 He contributed to a volume of papers called Studien zum Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts, having been persuaded to do so by Erik Peterson and Karl Barth, which was secretly printed in 1934 as a response to Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century.45 His opposition to the Third Reich was public enough that the government blocked two invitations to him to become an Ordinarius at Bonn (1934 and 1935) and at Breslau (1936), hence his acceptance of a call to Vienna in 1937, only to be forced to retire after the Anschluss a year later. The most forceful evidence of his opposition is a tract called “The Crisis of Faith of German Catholics,” published in 1934 under the pseudonym Michael Schäffler, with the assistance of Karl Barth, who smuggled the manuscript out of Germany and had it printed in Switzerland.46 Alois Dempf’s magnum opus, Sacrum Imperium (1929), a dense and learned study of medieval philosophy of history and of government, became willy-nilly an inspiration to conservative adherents of the Reichstheologie.47 He himself was acquainted with many of them, including the discussion group “Kreuz und Adler” associated with Franz von Papen.48 He was a prominent member of the Katholischer Akademikerverband, which organized annual conferences at the Benedictine abbey of Maria Laach. At the celebrated conference held in July 1933—the theme was “Idee und Aufbau des Reiches”—right after the signing of the Concordat, Dempf is reported to have asked what could be done to give more publicity to the idea of the “Reich.”49 As a defender of the values and the achievement of the medieval Reich, he was also an ardent Großdeutscher, as he declared in his contribution to a 1927 festschrift in honor of Karl Muth, the founder and editor of Hochland.50 Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 29 The Holy Roman Empire was transferred to Charlemagne and to the Saxon emperors as the tradition of a concrete international legal order. There had to be one leading people among allied peoples. That was not a Roman but a Christian and a German idea: Christian after the model of the translatio, the transfer of the salvation-historical mission (Sendung) from the Jewish to other peoples, who would bring the fruits of the Gospel, German after the model of the Dux, after the charismatic and favored Leader among his comrades.51 Nevertheless, as loaded as this language is (though remember that it was written in 1926, when the republic was stabilizing and the Nazis were just a fringe group), Dempf was not a revanchist or an expansionist. The goals he advocated were political and diplomatic in nature, meaning a stabile international order on the one hand, and a state structure that could govern effectively in modern conditions: With the new political project, Großdeutschland, the peculiar political talents of the traditional German ethnic groups will again become fruitful, for that is all that will help in the new European situation; also needed here is a new Reichsbewußtsein, an awareness of the ancient Reich tradition, and both taken together will yield a real großdeutsche historical outlook . . . [But] a new Reich can no longer be a Wilhelmine, no longer a Ghibelline Reich; it must transcend the imperialist Reich-idea of the Hohenstaufen and the Hohenzollern, the romanticism and renaissance of the pagan-Roman style of rulership, of its Caesarism and the divinization of the state. Instead it must turn in the direction of the political, not the militaristic Reich idea. “Reich” in the German and western sense means political leadership over people who are free and equal, a league of those voluntarily disposed to the Reich, [and] an international legal order. In the [modern] world of politically mature citizens and workers and the new class associations, there is no longer a [truly] sovereign state: the state itself is threatened by the economy and the organizations if it does not demonstrate its political capacity to govern well and set overall goals, if it does not show that it is the strong and authoritative representative of the bonum commune, the common good of the whole people. One may wish to avoid the name of ‘Reich’ because of the danger of romantic associations. But in order to save the political realm from the trusts, and to arouse devotion to the state by all members of the people, more has to be shown than mere good-government ends: rather, what is necessary is a higher idea of the state, one which morally obliges all state citizens to serve the state—the state of national comrades (Volksgenossenstaat) as a community for everyone, and not the privileged state of a ruling class; the state composed of all the German national groups and this people’s state among the nations, which lives for itself alone and with the others, and not by and over the others.52 This long quotation highlights central themes in Dempf’s thinking: 30 Chapter 2 •฀ The Reich as a political form is a divinely willed development and part of the Christian dispensation. •฀ Germany—though not just Germany?53—has a special divine mission that should be understood on the analogy of the election of Israel. •฀ At the same time, the translatio is distinctly political, though Dempf describes it as heilsgeschichtlich; Dempf’s usage of the Latin word, as he well knew, implied the genitive imperii, the phrase that came into usage at the time of the papacy’s recreation of the imperial title in the West—despite the existence of an eastern claimant. Apparently Israel was superseded not only by the true Israel the Church, but the (now Christian) Roman Empire succeeded to Jewish political prerogatives.54 •฀ The militarism of Bismarck’s Reich is rejected. •฀ The vision of the Reich is both nationalist—a unification of the several Germanic Stämme—and internationalist, perhaps even an alternative or supplement to the League of Nations, at least for Central Europe. •฀ Is there an assumption here that unity is based on blood?55 •฀ The state is prior to the economy! This is a constant in Dempf’s thinking (see below). Following many predecessors—papal teaching and also Carl Schmitt among them—Dempf sees the modern state as in danger of being swallowed by the economic imperatives of modern capitalism. Carl Schmitt called this “economism.” •฀ The state is also prior to all class divisions and cannot be allowed to become the creature or instrument of a ruling class. This catalogue previews many of the presuppositions underlying Sacrum Imperium. That work is based on a mélange of social, philosophical, historical, political, and theological ideas, shaped into a mold into which Dempf poured his personal construal of 1,500 years of ancient and medieval history. An adequate characterization of it is beyond the scope of this paper.56 Suffice to say that it begins with four programmatic chapters that lay out Dempf’s fundamental categories and interpretive typologies: Zeit- and Reichsbewußstein, Öffentlichkeit, Volkspersönlichkeit, and Geschichtliche Wirklichkeit. The red thread that runs through these chapters is the deep concern to identify the leading public forces and agents in an epoch that have given it historical shape and meaning, hence the focus on Öffentlichkeit, “the chief element of community: What is not public does not belong to history or to community—at most, to society. If one could grasp the entire Öffentlichkeit of an age—as is in principle possible since the appearance of Christianity—then one could also grasp the entire content of an age [emphasis added].”57 The “major” form of Öffentlichkeit was the state,58 but the Catholic Church is named in the first instance as its most Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 31 clearly articulated form.59 The distinction between Gemeinschaft and mere Gesellschaft had long been conventional, and Dempf took it for granted; the former was the arena of the history that mattered, the latter was not. A mere majority was inadequate to establish a morally binding law upon all in the community. Coercion was the crudest way to impose a unified will, and that, he says, was the preferred choice of the “positivist” philosophy of the state. The weakest such method of creating a unified will, a creation of the Enlightenment, is via discussion, “in a parliament of the cleverest.”60 Monarchical theory identified the king as the one who could express the unified will of a community, either as the one elected by a popular assembly or, what is historically more common, by virtue of his charismatic endowment, established in war or as a divine gift. Carl schmitt, Again: from friend to enemy Dempf’s concern, in short, was for legitimacy, a preoccupation of many of his contemporaries. Indeed the whole discussion of Öffentlichkeit has Schmitt in the background.61 That is clear in Dempf’s starting point, which is the contemporary realization of the “abiding structural elements of conceptions of the world, which [have now become] visible on a higher level, the analogies based on conceptions of the divine and conceptions of community, of artistic style and styles of government” (all emphases added).62 That, as we saw in the previous section on Erik Peterson, was one of Schmitt’s fundamental theses. Also in the background, though as foils with which to do battle, are Oswald Spengler and Max Scheler and their theories of cultural decadence, with which Dempf vigorously disagreed. As he noted in the introduction to the republication of his book after the war, he intended it to be an anti-Spengler and anti-Scheler polemic, and declared his reliance on Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber.63 The connections with Schmitt and with the Catholic right in general were rich and varied. Dempf was involved from the start with the new journal Das Abendland, founded in 1925 by Dempf’s friend and mentor Hermann Platz,64 at first as an editor and after 1929 as a co-publisher. The new journal’s critical stance on political parties, the party-state, and parliamentarism, was not only compatible with Schmitt’s ideas but partially based on them.65 Already in the early 1920s, Dempf had warned, in the pages of Hochland, of the risk of the Catholic party movement slipping into mere “formal-democratic party business,” for “Christian democracy” only existed in “dedication to the true interests of the individual and the community” and not in the sense of “plutocratic or party-political lust for power.”66 As an editor at Abendland, Dempf tried on several occasions to get Schmitt to contribute to the journal. 32 Chapter 2 In a 1925 letter to Schmitt, soliciting his involvement, he said that the name Abendland committed the journal to “the rejection of the humanitarianliberal majority-ideology” and to the emphasis of the “authoritarian theonomous sanction and norm for a league embracing the Christian peoples.” Only Christian morality could prevent the threatening dissolution of the “ethic of the national idea” into “liberal internationalism” and its “statist” hardening in Fascism.67 But significant differences separated Dempf and Schmitt where the power and nature of the modern state were concerned. As that critical allusion to the “statist” hardening of fascism might have predicted, Dempf was not going to keep company with Schmitt after he gravitated towards Mussolini’s response to the threatened dissolution of “the national idea.” The proof of that is Dempf’s pseudonymous 1934 tract, which contains scornful denunciations of Schmitt and also of the deluded adherents of the Reichstheologie. Dempf did concede that National Socialism was more frontally opposed to Catholicism than Italian Fascism, because it was based on a total Weltanschauung that brooked no alternative, as contrasted with the “total state” of Italian Fascism. But the latter was also unacceptable. Of Carl Schmitt’s theory of the total state, he went on to say: There was—and still is—a theory in the Third Reich about [the total state], namely, that belonging to the Crown Jurist68 of the new regime, Carl Schmitt. It was not quite so drastic and explicit. In its essentials it held that the total state had an unconditional primacy over every other state entity, without any division of powers, indeed it was the unimpeachable decision-making agent. As a contrasting position to the pluralism and anonymous babble of voices in the age of parliamentary hegemony, for many people at least, this theory was enticing enough. In the meantime of course it has been suspended by its own inventor— not, however, because of a juristic insight that in such an authoritarian state it is not the professor of state law but the Leader who defines what the state (his alleged organ) is. No; on the contrary, it has been superseded by the still more radical theory of the “total movement.” But these theories lag far behind the fertile reality of the modern total industrial-state. Hence runs the formula quite simply: The state is total, when all the citizens of the state are economically dependent on it . . .69 That turned the tables on Schmitt, whose earlier writings had deplored the state’s vulnerability to economic systems and imperatives and the usurpation of politics by economics. Later in the same tract, Dempf spoke even more forcefully against Schmitt for having made common cause with the Nazified Catholics known as the “Katholisch-Deutsche:”70 Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 33 To be sure, they have a very enthusiastic but, alas, ever ambivalent leader, the inspired creator of the new constitution himself, Carl Schmitt, who precisely in [the pages of] Deutsches Volkstum, [the publication of] Wilhelm Stapel, another hater of Catholics, has already declared the death of the Church, because she does not recognize her enemy. The “anti-Roman affect”71 that he had long ago recognized and named has thus played a trick on him. Furthermore, because the great flexibility of this “theological political savant” has already pushed him from his own theory of the “total state” to professing that of the “total movement,” we can probably expect that he will soon be switching from his “katholisches Deutschtum”—once its failure has been demonstrated—to his next theme!72 Scathing condemnations were issued as well against the Catholics gathered around Franz von Papen (“with their tragic-comic naivete”), who had advocated for the speedy signing of the Concordat with Hitler; against other Catholic nobility who had railed against the compromises of the Center Party and of political Catholicism; and against his own organization, the Katholischer Akademikerverband, for having caved in during the summer of 1933 and offered itself to Papen’s cause; and finally against “the tiny bunch of the new Reichstheologen.” This last needs to be quoted, since it speaks directly to the exploitation of Dempf’s own work: Since Herr von Papen had made the sacrum imperium into an ideology during his short tenure as chancellor, there began a veritable flood of newspaper and journal articles on the “Holy Reich,” which has continued without essential changes since the inception of the Third Reich. Granted that there has recently been a noticeable slowdown, not so much because Rosenberg is jealously guarding the exclusivity of the Third Reich’s doctrine (and thus is challenging the Second Reich and so, implicitly, everything Roman in the first Reich), but above all precisely because such an opportunistic Reichstheologie is unable truly to distinguish itself in the generalized convergence of Reich ideologies and to assert something that is distinctively its own.73 Thus far the scholar who owned the patent on sacrum imperium, and his denunciation of the political misuse of his ideas. There is no reason to doubt that Dempf’s outrage was real or to think that he had second thoughts about where his researches had taken him. The proof of that, if it were needed, is the book’s dedication to none other than Dom Luigi Sturzo, the godfather of the first Catholic political party in Italy. Sturzo’s Partito Popolare Italiano had fallen victim to Mussolini’s ambition to create a total state and to the negotiations over the Lateran treaties. Sturzo himself had already gone into exile in England and thence to the United States until after the Second World War. At some point, it is not clear exactly when, he and Dempf became friends, despite the 34 Chapter 2 twenty-year age difference.74 Already in 1926 Dempf and his wife translated one of Sturzo’s books against fascism into German and published it in Munich. It was the fate of Sturzo’s party in the Lateran treaty negotiations that, according to the account published by Dempf’s daughter, stirred him to act when the Vatican was negotiating a similar agreement with Hitler four years later.75 We are thus dealing with a scholar who was emphatically anti-liberal but also open to Catholic party political activity, while having reservations about democracy. He fits every one of the markers of Catholic anti-liberalism listed at the beginning of this paper. In the spectrum of opinion in his own time, he belongs to the left of the reactionaries and would-be monarchists whom he savaged in the 1934 tract. But he does not seem entirely comfortable with the professional politicians of the Center Party, even though Heinrich Brüning was an admired friend.76 His social philosophy would place him in the company of thinkers and writers like the Jesuit theologian Gustav Gundlach, although he did not match Gundlach’s passionate support for the republic. Fortunately Dempf left us a clear and articulate statement of his view of democracy and of political Catholicism from the very time when the republic was at the tipping point of its fortunes, in the middle of Brüning’s two-year tenure as chancellor. “Demokratie und Partei im politischen Katholizismus” was written in 1931 for a collection of papers, by an international team of scholars, on the current state of European (and American) democracy. His contribution was a bold defense of parliamentary democracy, written in an intensely charged political climate. The rest of this paper will be devoted to an examination of the article, which, for all its undoubted courage, also reveals an ambivalence toward democracy, which was not peculiar to Dempf but was shared with many of his Catholic contemporaries. A brief for DemoCrACy in its time of triAL Democracy without political and economic Liberalism? The article is a historically structured case for the compatibility of Catholic teaching and practice with democracy. Its persuasiveness depends in part on how democracy is defined. Dempf identifies three different species as seen from a Catholic perspective. “Pure popular sovereignty, dogmatic democratism,” also known as “liberal democracy” or “formal democracy,” which he regards as more or less uniformly rejected by Catholicism77; “Christian democracy,” which he sees as currently caught in the midst of the crisis of parliamentarism; and what he calls “the universal ideal of a Volkstaat,” which in the Catholic world he believed to have a great future. Behind this typology, he says, is Leo XIII’s teaching on the state, which came down to this fundamental thesis: So Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 35 long as certain pastoral standards are met, the Catholic Church is indifferent to the particular political form taken by any given state, which basically means at a minimum the keeping of public order, and allowing religious and moral freedom, by which criteria, Dempf says, only Bolshevism fails the test.78 This is a curious typology. The first category, the one he regards as basically unacceptable, is the only one that we Americans would be likely to recognize. But it fails the test because it is guilty of liberalism’s original sin, the partitioning of human life into autonomous categories.79 This for us of course is the very precondition of freedom but not for a “positive religion” such as Catholicism. “Western democracy,” he says, “is accordingly in concreto a mixture of laicist worldview and free economic, even plutocratic bourgeois ideology, to which Catholic social-ethical doctrine has two objections [actually there are three; v. infra],” the first being the separation just mentioned, which denies the Catholic perception of the unity of human life and the correct hierarchical rank-ordering of values, including the priestly order. A second defect is the priority given to the economic sphere in western democracy, whose canonization/privileging of free economic activity leads to the domination of a single class. But Catholicism denies as a matter of social justice that the economy can serve a single class, though it recognizes that, as with the form of the state, it cannot dictate what the best form of economic system ought to be, provided that it is congruent with the dictates of the natural law— meaning that it must serve all classes and the common good, meaning too that economics must be secondary in rank to the state, not the other way around. The third defect in western democracy is “parliamentarism.” The problem is not with the elective or representational principle, since these were well known in the Christian Middle Ages, and even certain forms of popular sovereignty, as these were known in natural law form to early modern Catholic moral theologians like Suarez. The difficulty is with the absolute form that the doctrine of popular sovereignty took, beginning with the French Revolution: “The Declaration of the Rights of Man from 1789 was more than political praxis; they were and were meant to be a new doctrine of the state and of democracy. Article III: ‘The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation’; Article IV: ‘the law is the expression of the general will’ . . . [these] were a new state doctrine, specifically the state doctrine of Rousseau, which at least in the new absolutism of its democratic form of the state, was unacceptable to Catholicism.”80 The principle of popular sovereignty, in this absolute form, was incompatible with the majesty of God, from whom all authority comes; “the people” are just its executive, not its source. That “all power (Gewalt) comes from the people” was the regrettable first article of the Weimar Constitution, and only an interpretive sleight of hand made it possible for Catholics to accept it.81 Likewise, the theory that the general will was the 36 Chapter 2 foundation of the law left no place for the obligation to secure the common good and social justice. And Article X, which recognized the free spoken and written expression of opinion as a most valuable human right, must lead to indifference—the heresy of Indifferentism in religious matters.82 Democratic practice, not Democratic ideology Not a promising beginning as an apology for democracy! Dempf rescues his case by making a distinction between democracy in the absolute form in which it has thus far been portrayed and the practical means by which it was at times implemented: “The means of democracy became more important than the class-utopia [sc. bourgeois utopia] and the absolutism of the form of the state.”83 The actual history of democracy, he means, often proved less threatening than the theory, beginning with the exemplary political experience in England after 1688 and the Glorious Revolution. There, and again in nineteenth-century Europe, what actually emerged was a type of two-party system, liberals versus conservatives, either sharing power simultaneously or ruling sequentially. Living at times under governmental systems marked by limitation and conflict, Catholics, he argues, learned by degrees and through experience how to participate in public life by organizing themselves as protest groups, clubs, and eventually as actual parties. In Germany, Bismarck’s Kulturkampf compelled Catholics to organize the first Catholic political party. Even before that German Catholics had organized protests and political initiatives against policies of the Prussian government. Inspired by their example, Dempf says, Pope Leo XIII—the “democratic pope” in his telling— adopted his ralliement policy, which urged French Catholics to cooperate with the Third Republic. Dempf makes two points about such tentative Catholic experiments with political activity. First, they generally took on a notably conservative rather than liberal tone, because they were more often responding to pressure exerted by liberal regimes (he cites the south German states as nineteenthcentury examples; he could have cited Cavour’s Piedmont and other regimes as well). A “radicalized” liberalism from the mid-nineteenth century provoked Pius IX to issue the Syllabus of Errors (1864), the famous papal broadside against modernity, which nonetheless did not condemn democracy per se but only “laicist” and “rationalist” excesses. Second, as a reaction to bourgeois dominance, the newly awakened Catholic political activity, with its strong commitment to the common good as opposed to the dominance of a single class, evinced a special identification with the oppressed, the working class, and the lower-middle classes: Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 37 As it was hard for Catholicism to have much in common with the immanentist weltanschauung of the haute bourgeoisie, with its irreligious obsession with the securities of life, with its relation to work, to the earning of interest, to progress, and to success in a self-satisfied world that felt no need of salvation—so much easier was it to identify with the poor and oppressed, and also to sympathize with the Mittelstand and the petit-bourgeois . . . just as the ancient [Christian] social philosophy had done.84 Catholic political activity thus showed from the beginning a Christian-social (Christlich-sozial) orientation that it has never lost, and which became a hallmark of the Center Party. Catholics and parliamentary Democracy today (1931) A third feature of emergent political Catholicism—in Germany, at least, though not in France—was the Center Party’s character as in the first instance a Weltanschauung party. It existed above all to protect religion and the rights and freedom of the church. Politics in the narrower sense was secondary, and the securing of economic advantages and other benefits even less a priority. So it was in its founding, at any rate, and it has never wholly lost this character. By nature the party was meant to include all classes and hence to be a good arbiter of competing interests, thus serving the social good of harmony rather than class conflict.85 Since the establishment of the republic, the political tasks have perhaps unavoidably assumed more importance, with both good and bad results. On the down side, the party has risked becoming just one more competitor for the state’s resources, another collection of interest groups. But with the onset of the world economic crisis, the social justice ethic of the party’s Catholic legacy has assumed even more importance than previously, now that the left-wing parties, the Socialists and the Communists, are playing the class warfare card even more fiercely. In assessing the situation in Europe, Dempf was guarded. Hitler and National Socialism were nowhere named in the essay, the catchall category “fascism” doing duty both for Italy and Germany.86 One possibility he foresaw was Catholic withdrawal from organized political involvement and restriction to purely pastoral and educational activity, in return for formal guarantees of freedom and support from government. Its public presence would take the form of shaping the values and behavior of individual Catholics, including those in public office. The church would practice neutrality where class conflict was concerned, just as it maintained neutrality in conflict between states. That was the pattern already modeled in Italy by the Lateran treaties, with the church’s public face being limited to Catholic Action, the instrument favored 38 Chapter 2 by Pius XI (and also by the German hierarchy87), in part because it was more explicitly under the control of the hierarchy. Where Catholic political parties survived, as in Germany, Dempf saw them playing an important and ongoing role. They had nothing in common with the radical parties of left or right, and he explicitly denied that an authoritarian form of the state was somehow Catholicism’s natural partner. Far from two authoritarian systems being allies, he said, historical precedent suggested they were more likely to become competitors (he was no doubt also thinking of current tensions between Mussolini and Pius XI). A politically selfaware Catholicism could only find a suitable field of action among parties of the middle, committed to parliamentary rule. Assuming that the traditional cultural-political ends no longer needed securing, what was left to a Catholic party would be precisely those second and third order issues that still benefited from being shaped by Catholicism’s social teaching. They would speak for the Catholic population as a whole and would be guided by “their own ideal of a Volkstaat, built on the basis of the Christian universalism of social justice. Thus they would become the guarantors of a stabile democratic state, of a Volksgemeinschaft organized by estates, of a harmonious welfare democracy with special regard for the weak classes and of a people’s democracy, which promotes the congruence of ethnic and state borders, and the equal treatment of all peoples.”88 some Critical reflections and Questions To summarize: Can we say that Dempf endorsed democracy? Indeed he did, and at a time when its condition in many European lands, including his own, was dire. But what kind of democracy was he endorsing? Parliamentary democracy, certainly, notwithstanding Catholicism’s historic misgivings, and a multi-party system as well. Nevertheless, questions remain. What, for example, is this Volkstaat that is mentioned both at the beginning and the very end? Dempf presents it from a Catholic perspective as superior to “western” or “formal” democracy. Is it a state with a homogeneous population, a state of a single Volk? There are places in Sacrum Imperium where he appears to accept that “blood” is a constitutive feature of a people’s identity. From what I can see, these passages reflect nothing more than widespread contemporary ideas about how ethnic identity has a heritable dimension. They do not seem deterministic (as though inheritance were decisive in determining behavior or that it should rigidly limit citizenship) or chauvinistic (as though one racial grouping had an innate right to rule over others). Dempf was too convinced of the superiority of the spiritual to the physical to find biological racism plausible. Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 39 A related question is the place of Jews in this Catholic version of democracy. In Sacrum Imperium I could find scant mention of Jews or Judaism after the ancient period. To see them more or less ignored in any serious account of 1,000 years of Christian political, religious, and cultural history is troubling. The only time they showed up in other work of Dempf’s that I have read is a throw-away reference to “Jewish bank capital” in “Demokratie und Partei”— in a sentence mentioning the origin of the Austrian Christian-Social Party under the (notoriously anti-Semitic) mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger!89 By our standards of democracy, the status of Jews and Judaism in this period would be a true democratic litmus test. It seems exceedingly unlikely that Dempf was a racial anti-Semite. The anonymous 1934 tract scornfully lists belief in the Nordic race as one of the creedal elements in a virtual Nazi Ersatzreligion.90 But would he have been willing to accept legal impositions on Jews in a Christian state? The frequent references to “estates” bring to mind the occupational corporations or estates that are associated with European fascist regimes in the 1930s. Estates were also, of course, a marked feature of Catholic social thought of that era, notably in the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII, 1891) and Quadragesimo Anno, promulgated by Pius XI in 1931, the same year in which Dempf wrote his democracy and party article. The general idea, as sketched out by the popes, was to recommend that employees and employers join in guild-like structures that would then have an independent relationship to the political authorities. The two virtues of such an arrangement, it was alleged, were the promotion of social harmony rather than conflict and the decentralizing of the state’s authority by a measure of self-government at more local levels. Quadragesimo Anno used the word subsidiarity to describe this functional decentralization. Among the sources for such ideas in the encyclical were German Catholic theologians and social thinkers such as Gustav Gundlach and Oswald Nell-Breuning. Dempf was well acquainted with these circles and their ideas.91 But he was also influenced, in some measure, by the universalist and corporatist ideas of the Austrian social philosopher Othmar Spann (1878–1950).92 Considering the ubiquity of Spann’s impact on that generation, he could hardly have avoided it.93 Fundamental themes in Spann’s thought occur everywhere in Dempf’s writing: the emphasis on totality and the universal, the priority of the whole to the parts, the organic relations between the two, the organization of society into estates, the hierarchical ordering of the estates, the rule of the best rather than the merely quantitative majority, the decentralization of political and economic functions, and so on. In his widely read book Der wahre Staat (1920), Spann justified the hierarchical structure of the state: 40 Chapter 2 If now the groups of the community, meaning the estates, are ordered to one another in a purely spiritual way because of their substantive connections . . . and are therefore distinguished ultimately according to their value, if they thus form a pyramid of values, then the question of the best political formation of the estates, and that means the question of the best form of the state, has already been essentially answered: the best form of the state is that which brings the best into positions of rule.94 Nailing down Spann’s influence on Dempf is not the task of this paper. But it bears mentioning here because of the unhappy political legacy of Spann’s corporatist ideas, which were explicitly appealed to by Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss when he implemented his party’s vision of a German Christian Austria based on estates, and Quadragesimo Anno became official ideology.95 Church leadership in Rome held high hopes that versions of corporatism could become an unexpected and heaven-sent opportunity to reverse the course of secularization, as Gerhard Besier has argued in his recent study of papal diplomacy at this time.96 Prior to that, the Austrian priest Ignaz Seipel (1876–1932), chancellor from 1922 to 1924 and again in 1926–29, laid the groundwork for such an effort. Dempf was acquainted with Seipel because of his involvement with Abendland.97 Austria offered Dempf refuge when the Nazi government blocked his academic career in Germany. His invitation in 1937 to a position in Vienna was “a gift from heaven,” according to his daughter’s account, even though he was forcibly retired a year later after the Anschluss, and the family had to live on his pension for the duration of the war years. His daughter explained the job offer as having been supported by some faculty who were “misled” by the title of Sacrum Imperium. She insisted that her father had no truck with the “philo-fascism of the Viennese Grossdeutsche” whom he encountered.98 Dempf’s hostility to fascism is undoubted, as we have seen. Nevertheless, his advocates have felt it necessary to show that his support for estates and occupational groupings (berufsständische Ordnung) did not mean that he envisioned the full incorporation of the estates into the state, in lieu of an elected parliament.99 They are probably right. It is difficult to imagine him being enthusiastic about the one party authoritarian Ständestaat, however Catholic in name and doctrine, set up by Dollfuss in 1933.100 Nevertheless, it remains that Dempf’s construal of parliamentary democracy does not measure up to what we recognize as appropriate for such a regime. Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 41 notes 1. Dempf also got to know Karl Barth at Bonn; Peterson and Barth had been colleagues earlier at Göttingen. 2. Felicitas Hagen-Dempf, “Alois Dempf—ein Lebensbild,” in Alois Dempf 1891–1982: Philosoph, Kulturtheoretiker, Prophet gegen den Nationalsozialismus, eds. Vincent Berning and Hans Maier (Weissenhorn: Anton H. Konrad Verlag, 1992), 7–24. Biographical details in this paper are taken from this essay by his daughter and from other contributions to the Berning and Maier collection. 3. Barbara Nichtweiß, “Apokalyptische Verfassungslehren: Carl Schmitt im Horizont der Theologie Erik Petersons,” in Die eigentlich katholische Verschärfung . . . : Konfession, Theologie und Politik im Werk Carl Schmitts, ed. Bernd Wacker (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1994), 37–64, at 41. In this article she discusses the mutuality of the relationship (40–43), focusing especially on their similarities and their differences from an eschatological perspective. In preparing it she was able to use unpublished materials from Turin that had not been evaluated at the time she wrote her biography of Peterson, which contains a detailed discussion of Peterson’s and Schmitt’s intellectual and personal interaction. See: Barbara Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson: Neue Sicht auf Leben und Werk (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 1992), 737–762. 4. As originally envisioned, this paper was to have included the Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara. Space limitations prevented that. For comparative purposes it would have been interesting to consider the Jesuit theologian Gustav Gundlach, and perhaps Waldemar Gurian as well. 5. Walter Dirks, “Forward,” in Klaus Breuning, Die Vision des Reiches. Deutscher Katholizismus zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur 1929–1934 (Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1969), 10. 6. The essay first appeared as “Der deutsche Katholizismus im Jahre 1933: Eine kritische Betrachtung,” Hochland 53 (1961): 215–239, and has been reprinted often; see e.g. Die katholische Schuld? Katholizismus im Dritten Reich—Zwischen Arrangement und Widerstand, Rainer Bendel, ed. (Münster, Hamburg, London: LIT Verlag, 2002), 171–199, and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Schriften zu Staat—Gesellschaft—Kirche, vol. 1: Der deutsche Katholizismus im Jahre 1933: Kirche und demokratisches Ethos (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 1988), 39–69, a volume which also contains Böckenförde’s first response to his critics (71–104), a further response five years later (105–120), and a retrospective on the controversy by Karl-Egon Lönne (121–150). 7. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “German Catholicism in 1933,” Cross Currents 11 (1961): 283–303. 8. Böckenförde, Der deutsche Katholizismus, 83–84. This judgment illustrates what he learned from Carl Schmitt about the fundamental nature of “the political.” 9. Breuning, Vision des Reiches, 15–18. 10. In a recent article on theologian Michael Schmaus, Elisabeth Gössmann has praised Breuning, who died in 2002, for being frank yet fair-minded in his treatment of the theologians and publicists of that era. She recalls having witnessed Breuning’s pre-publication interview with Schmaus (who is treated on 193–194 of Die Vision des Reiches), the 42 Chapter 2 author of a—later much criticized—1933 article on the harmonizing possibilities between Catholicism and National Socialism: Elisabeth Gössmann, “Katholische Theologie unter der Anklage des Nationalsozialismus,” Münchener theologische Zeitschrift 55 (2004): 151–167, 151–152, 155. 11. Breuning, Vision des Reiches, 75. 12. Including a good article on Erik Peterson, published at the same time that the Dempf volume was being prepared: Hans Maier, “Erik Peterson und das Problem der politischen Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Politik 38 (1991): 33–46. Also, Hans Maier, “Erik Peterson und der Nationalsozialismus,” in Vom Ende der Zeit: Geschichtstheologie und Eschatologie bei Erik Peterson, ed. Barbara Nichtweiß (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001), 240–253. 13. See: Berning, “Exkurs,” in Alois Dempf, 253–267. 14. Berning, “Exkurs,” in Alois Dempf, 253–267. 15. Breuning, Vision des Reiches, 308–310, esp. 310. 16. For a brief overview of Schmitt’s political theology, see my article in The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, ed. William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Scott (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 107–122. 17. Andreas Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt: Sein Aufstieg zum “Kronjuristen des Dritten Reiches” (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 36–37, reviews his early reception. Years afterwards, Erich Przywara cited Roman Catholicism and Political Form as marking Schmitt out as a Catholic thinker of the first rank and as the Catholic jurist and legal scholar (cited ibid.). On Schmitt’s reception by his fellow Catholics, see the survey of Karl-Egon Lönne, “Carl Schmitt und der Katholizismus der Weimarer Republik,” in Die eigentlich katholische Verschärfung, 11–35, and the comprehensive study by Manfred Dahlheimer, Carl Schmitt und der deutsche Katholizismus 1888–1936 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1998), especially the detailed reviews of contemporary Catholic responses to Schmitt’s doctrine of the total state and the friend-enemy distinction (287–396). 18. Testimonies to contemporary Catholic admiration for Schmitt as a “master of pregnant conceptual formation” (Karl Eschweiler) are usefully collected by Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt, 57 n. 164. 19. On Gurian and Schmitt, see Heinz Hürten, Waldemar Gurian (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald, 1972), 12–14, 119–120, 127–128, 133–135, and Heinz Hürten, ed., Deutsche Briefe 1934–1938: ein Blatt der katholischen Emigration (2 vols.; Mainz: MatthiasGrünewald Verlag, 1969), 2: 107f., 223, 405, 498f. 20. Barbara Nichtweiß’ magnificent intellectual biography is the standard resource on Peterson (n. 3 above). For a preliminary account in English—written before I had access to her book—see my article “Erik Peterson’s Correspondence with Adolf von Harnack: Retrieving a Neglected Critique of Church, Theology, and Secularization in Weimar Germany,” Pro Ecclesia 2 (1993): 305–44. 21. Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson, 727–762. 22. From his unpublished manuscript “The Liberal Nation-State of the 19th Century and Theology,” cited in Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson, 807. The MS. has now been published: cf. Erik Peterson, Offenbarung des Johannes und politisch-theologische Texte, Barbara Nichtweiß, ed., vol. 4 of Erik Peterson, Ausgewählte Schriften (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 2004), 244. I thank Dr. Nichtweiß for making this publication available to me. Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 43 23. Erik Peterson, Monotheismus als politisches Problem, reprinted in Erik Peterson, Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Barbara Nichtweiß et al., vol. 1: Theologische Traktate (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1994), 81 n. 168. 24. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II: die Legende von der Erledigung jeder Politischen Theologie. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970). 25. Erik Peterson, “Kaiser Augustus im Urteil des antiken Christentums,” Hochland 30 (1933): 289, reprinted in Der Fürst dieser Welt. Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, 2nd rev. ed. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag/Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1985), in Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie, ed. Jacob Taubes (3 vols.; Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag/Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1983–87), 1:174–180, 174. 26. E.g. Karl Eschweiler, “Politische Theologie,” Religiöse Besinnungen 4 (1932): 72–88. 27. Alois Dempf, “Erik Petersons Rolle in der Geisteswissenschaft,” Neues Hochland 54 (1961–62): 24–31, 29. 28. From a copy or draft of a letter to one Philipp Dessauer and probably to be dated to 1935/36. The complete text of the letter has recently been published in Peterson, Offenbarung des Johannes und politisch-theologische Texte, ed. Nichtweiß, 247–248 (again, my thanks to Dr. Nichtweiß for this information). 29. I have treated this topic at length in an unpublished manuscript that will be the introduction to an English language edition of the monotheism book. 30. Politische Theologie II, 82. 31. Nichtweiß, “Apokalyptische Verfassungslehren,” 46 n. 45. 32. Letter to Philipp Dessauer, in Peterson, Offenbarung des Johannes und politisch-theologische Texte, ed. Nichtweiß, 247. 33. Based on a statement to this effect from a lecture on the Gospel of Luke, cited Peterson, Offenbarung des Johannes, 247. 34. Schmitt, Political Theology (2nd edition), 2. 35. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 24–26, 105–108. 36. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. and intro. George Schwab, foreword by Tracy Strong (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. 26–37. 37. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 25. 38. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 107. 39. Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1996), 10. 40. Glossarium 243, cited in Nichtweiß, “Apokalyptische Verfassungslehren,” 46 n. 49. 41. For this and the quotations from Peterson’s letter to Schmitt, cf. Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson, 734–735 and n. 119. She says that to her knowledge this was the most direct and forceful criticism of Schmitt’s thinking Peterson ever made (735). 42. Erik Peterson, Die Kirche, in Theologische Traktate, 254. 43. Alois Dempf, “Demokratie and Partei im politischen Katholizismus,” in Demokratie und Partei, ed. Peter Richard Rohden (Vienna: Verlag L.W. Seidel & Sohn, 1932), 293–331. 44 Chapter 2 44. “Michael Schäffler” (pseudonym), Die Glaubensnot der deutschen Katholiken (Zurich, 1934), reprinted in Alois Dempf, 196–242, at 216. 45. The volume is notable for its ecumenical character, quite unusual at that time, and also for its republication of the scholarly exposure of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery of the Tsarist secret police (cf. Felicity Hagen-Dempf, “Alois Dempf—ein Lebensbild,” 12–14). 46. Ludwig Schmugge, “Alois Dempfs Sacrum Imperium und seine Wirkung auf die Mediävistik,” in Alois Dempf, 136–155 (at 153 n. 4), spoke of doing more research on Dempf’s anti-fascist engagement, but no further publications are listed on his home page. 47. On historical writing in this period and its rootedness in current events, see: Robert Gerwarth, “The Past in Weimar History,” Journal of Contemporary History 15 (2006): 1–22. On Catholic historiography, see Oded Heilbronner, “The Place of Catholic Historians and Catholic Historiography in Nazi Germany,” History 88 (2003): 280–292. 48. In the October 1931 issue of Hochland, Dempf had alluded to an interpretation of the symbols of the eagle and the cross in Dante’s Divine Comedy, according to which Dante was asserting that the ills of Italy and of the world would not be healed until Reich and church, symbolized by the eagle and the cross, could be harmonized (“die beide heilsnotwendig [emphasis added] sind für die richtige Weltordnung”); “Das dritte Reich: Schicksale einer Idee,” Hochland 29 (1931/32): 36–48, 158–171, at 43. Albert Mirgeler, who became a prominent “Reich theologian,” had the year before drawn attention to this interpretation and had applied it to conservative Catholic hopes for a political-religious renewal (Breuning, Vision des Reiches, 226–227). Breuning argues that Mirgeler was very likely the person responsible for the name adopted by the Papen group when it was formed in April 1933. Dempf gave it no such contemporary application in his article. 49. Breuning, Vision des Reiches, 211. 50. Alois Dempf, “Der großdeutsche Gedanke,” in Wiederbegegnung von Kirche und Kultur in Deutschland: Eine Gabe für Karl Muth, ed. Max Ettlinger, Philipp Funk, and Friedrich Fuchs (Munich: Verlag Josef Kösel and Friedrich Pustet, 1927), 207–17. 51. Dempf, “Der großdeutsche Gedanke,” 207. 52. Dempf, “Der großdeutsche Gedanke,” 213–14. 53. A typology of the “the three great western nations,” based on a conventional late medieval tripartite division of cultural labor, would credit Italy with the sacerdotium, France with the magisterium (the universities, not the ecclesiastical magisterium), and Germany with the imperium (Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 48). 54. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 74. 55. Discussed below. But cf. language such as the following, from Sacrum Imperium: “bodily and racial dispositions” (40), “the instinctual drive structure of a people, the racial profile and racial mixings” (47), “the whole Volkspersönlichkeit, with its racial and instinctual givens” (50), “blood communities and geo-political landscapes” (51), etc. It is important to note that none of the passages from which these phrases are lifted expresses racist judgments. What they show is simply that such language was, for Dempf, a given, as of course it was for many, if not most, of his contemporaries. 56. Short characterization by Vincent Berning, “Alois Dempf,” 100–105. Ludwig Schmugge, “Alois Dempfs Sacrum Imperium,” 136–155, reviews its reception history. He Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar 45 concedes that the book has not found a warm reception among professional medievalists (138). 57. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 21–22. 58. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 26. 59. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 22. 60. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 27. 61. On Schmitt and Öffentlichkeit, cf. notices collected in Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt, 56 n. 163. 62. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 21. Schmitt is not cited here, but he probably should have been. 63. As cited in Schmugge, “Alois Dempfs Sacrum Imperium, 139. See comments of Berning, “Alois Dempf,” 85–88. 64. On the origin and character of the friendship: Berning, “Alois Dempf,” 76–79. 65. So the opinion of Andreas Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt, 43–45. This is not how Berning characterizes Abendland (“Alois Dempf,” 96–97). See: Hans Manfred Bock, “Der Abendland-Kreis und das Wirken von Hermann Platz im katholischen Milieu der Weimarer Republik,” in Michel Grunewald and Uwe Puschner, eds., Das katholische Intellektuellen-Milieu, seine Presse und seine Netzwerke, 1871–1963 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 337–362. Bock points to the last part of the1920s, when Werner Beck, a Schmitt protégé, was editor (1927–28), as the time when Koenen’s characterization about the Schmittian orientation is most accurate (353–354). 66. Cited in: Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt, 45 n. 117. 67. In a letter to Schmitt dated December 28, 1925, as summarized and quoted in Koenen, 50 n. 139. 68. Gurian’s coinage was already in circulation! 69. Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt, 218–219. 70. Reference is to the Arbeitsgemeinschaft katholischer Deutscher, founded in October 1933 (and dissolved a year later) by members of the former Kreuz und Adler working group, as an explicitly National Socialist entity (Breuning, Vision des Reiches, 235–238; Klaus Breuning added a rich selection of documents from both groups as an appendix to his book, cf. 326–344). 71. The opening sentence of Roman Catholicism and Political Form had become a virtual catch word among Catholics, savored because it fed their ressentiment: “There is an anti-Roman affect.” 72. Breuning, Vision des Reiches, 239. 73. Breuning, Vision des Reiches, 232–33. 74. For the following details, Schmugge, “Alois Dempfs Sacrum Imperium,” 136–137. 75. Felicitas Hagen-Dempf, “Alois Dempf—ein Lebensbild,” 7–24, 11–12. 76. See the 1970 letter to the Rheinischer Merkur written after Brüning’s death (repinted in Alois Dempf, 193–195). 77. The decision of the French Revolution to date its constitution as the beginning of a new era betrays “the pseudo-religious pathos of democracy of the western type that is still with us” (Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 7–8). 78. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 294. 46 Chapter 2 79. Dempf, “Demokratie und Partei im politischen Katholizismus,” 307–308. 80. Dempf, “Demokratie und Partei,” 308. It was this passage that Klaus Breuning singled out to document Dempf’s anti-republicanism (Vision des Reiches, 23, also cf. 75). “Anti-liberalism” would seem a more accurate word. 81. “It is the measure of every theory of law and of the state whether and how they grasp the sovereignty of God” (Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 31). 82. Dempf, “Demokratie und Partei,” 309. 83. Dempf, “Demokratie und Partei,” 310. 84. Dempf, “Demokratie und Partei,” 311–12. 85. Dempf, “Demokratie und Partei,” 317–18. 86. Dempf, “Demokratie und Partei,” 330–331. 87. Heinz Hürten, Deutsche Katholiken 1918–1945 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1992), 130–136. 88. Dempf, “Demokratie und Partei,” 331. 89. The sentence bears quoting: “Only in Austria did an actual party immediately come into being from this movement: the ‘Christian-Social Party,’ which—corresponding to the party system as it existed at that time—first dominated the Vienna city parliament under Lueger’s leadership, then became a Mittelstand party with a front alliance against the haute bourgeoisie and Jewish bank capital, and only after the war developed from a Volkspartei in the sense of the middle and lower Volk and into a universal Volkspartei in the sense of the total Volksgemeinschaft.” (323) 90. Dempf/“Schäffler,” Glaubensnot, 225. 91. Berning, “Alois Dempf,” 110–114. 92. See the account in Tomas J. F. Riha, “Spann’s Universalism: The Foundation of the Neo-romantic Theory of the Corporative State,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 31 (1985): 255–268, and in Breuning, Vision des Reiches, 35–38. 93. Riha, “Spann’s Universalism,” 261. 94. Othmar Spann, Der wahre Staat, 204, cited in Breuning, Vision des Reiches, 36. 95. Riha, “Othmar Spann’s Universalism,” 261. On the question of the character of the Dollfuss regime, see Robert Pyrah, “Enacting Encyclicals? Cultural Politics and ‘Clerical Fascism’ in Austria, 1933–1938,” in Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe, eds., Matthew Feldman, Marius Turda, with Tudor Georgescu (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 157–170. Pyrah offers arguments against seeing the Dollfuss regime as fully fascist, but he doesn’t doubt that it intended an authoritarian restoration of the Catholic Church’s moral, social, and cultural influence. 96. Gerhard Besier, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, trans. W. R. Ward (Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K., and New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 79–91, esp. 81–82 and 89–91 on the career of Ignaz Seipel. 97. Berning, “Alois Dempf,” 96–97. 98. Hagen-Dempf, “Alois Dempf—ein Lebensbild,” 16. 99. Berning, “Exkurs,” in Alois Dempf, 261–264. 100. In support of this interpretation, cf. the letter that Dempf published in the Rheinischer Merkur (May 8, 1970) after Brüning’s death, in which he explicitly contrasted “a solidaristic, mutually co-responsible berufsständische social teaching” with “totalitarian state-syndicalism” (cited in: Alois Dempf, 194–195).