By Joseph W. Bendersky · Saturday, March 14, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
A few months ago at the German Studies Association Conference, the well-known leftist historian Geoff Eley opened his keynote address with a blistering attack on Theodor Adorno in 1968. In a mocking tone, he repeatedly referred to Adorno as “Teddy,” which elicited the expected sarcastic laughter from the audience. Eley’s purpose was to transform the memory of the 1968 student revolt from that of “failure” to that of the “great hope” for true democracy that was squandered by the SPD and other institutions. And Eley gave the Frankfurt School a prime position among those institutions inhibiting the radical student path to true democracy. As a symbolic example, Eley reiterated how Adorno had had his graduate student Hans-Jürgen Krahl, a prominent SDS leader, arrested and tried for occupying a building. Having stigmatized Adorno—personally, ethically, and politically—Eley then moved to the more substantive issue of Adorno’s split with Marcuse over an array of 1960s domestic and international positions. Basically, Adorno had defended the West German status quo, including Germany’s alignment with the United States’ anti-communist crusade. It was a position reinforced by Adorno’s sincere concern that the student movement might evolve into fascism. In Eley’s account, by July 1968, this fracture culminated in a full-scale “witch hunt” against Marcuse, in which Max Horkheimer now joined. In the mind of Marcuse and Eley, the students represented a new, necessary form, of “militant democracy” of the streets against the stagnant, inherently oppressive, Adorno-Horkheimer form of institutionalized parliamentary democracy.
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By Joseph W. Bendersky · Thursday, July 19, 2007 The following entry discusses matters treated more extensively by the author in “Carl Schmitt’s Path to Nuremberg: A Sixty-Year Reassessment,” which appears in Telos 139. The issue also includes the first publication of a recently discovered transcript of an interrogation of Schmitt on April 11, 1947, by Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Kempner.
The subject of Carl Schmitt and Nuremberg involves all the major aspects of intriguing historical research. It contains prominent personalities, momentous historical episodes, significant impact on longstanding heated (often hostile) interpretive debates, and decades-long documentary discoveries and revelations. The spatial settings of the collapsed Third Reich and a Nuremberg cell are also dramatic. And within these are juxtaposed—in juridical, intellectual, and moral confrontations—Schmitt and returning émigrés serving in official capacities with the American Military Government (OMGUS) or Nuremberg prosecuting teams. On the surface it appears as a black-and-white story of good and evil, the pursuit of justice against, at best, a significant collaborator and, at worst, the person legally culpable for providing the intellectual and legal foundations for Nazi oppressive policies at home and wars of aggression and war crimes abroad. But as is so often the case in history, this particular morality play is complicated by documentary evidence, which categorically shatters such simplistic dichotomies.
From the time Telos first published the main body of Schmitt’s Nuremberg documentation in 1987 to the latest archival revelations from the papers of Robert M. W. Kempner, the Nuremberg prosecutor, and Karl Loewenstein, the OMGUS advisor in Berlin, the basic narrative has been drastically altered. In this respect, both the documentary and interpretive histories of Schmitt and Nuremberg also serve as landmarks in the progress in this field since the time when, in intellectual discourses in the United States, Schmitt was simply dismissed with the indignant comment of “that war criminal.”
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