The Existential Enemy and the “Ability to Kill:” Reinhart Koselleck between Heidegger and Carl Schmitt

The Existential Enemy and the “Ability to Kill:” Reinhart Koselleck between Heidegger and Carl Schmitt

By Emmanuel Faye

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Keywords: Reinhart Koselleck, Carl Schmitt, Historical anthropology, Political theory, French Revolution, Enlightenment, Freemasonry, National Socialism

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Carl Schmitt is currently astonishingly popular among many political scientists, constitutional lawyers, and philosophers. The posthumous publication of his post-war diary, the Glossarium, confirmed his persistent and manic anti-Semitism and his conspiratorial view of modernity. Interned for a year in the run-up to the Nuremberg trials—he was suspected of having played an important role in legitimizing the war of extermination in the East through his writings from 1938-1943 on the Großraum Ordnung—he never ceased to present himself as a victim and to challenge the notion of crimes against humanity, which had developed in response to the extreme nature of the Nazi crimes.

It’s hardly surprising that after 1945 Schmitt enjoyed a broad readership among New European Right authors such as Alain de Benoist. Far more surprising is the fact that he has also had a significant and lasting impact on the Far Left, from Chantal Mouffe to Toni Negri, and that some of his close disciples, such as the historian Reinhart Koselleck and the jurist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, have come to be considered “liberal Schmittians.” Liberal thought—in the progressive sense of the term and not in the limited sense of defending the market economy—was characterized by both Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger as the enemy to be destroyed. Indeed, the very idea that there could be such a thing as “Schmittian liberals” is an oxymoron.

Carl Schmitt’s relatively benevolent international reception can be largely explained by an exculpatory mechanism used by Armin Mohler in his thesis on The Conservative Revolution in Germany. As he admits in his correspondence,[2] Mohler sought to rehabilitate former prominent Nazi intellectuals, starting with Carl Schmitt, by linking them to the “Conservative Revolution,” which he presented as an elitist movement opposed to the plebeian and brutal movement of Nazism and Hitlerism.[3] Mohler also sought to suppress public awareness of his efforts in 1942 to join the German Waffen SS corps. In its drive to achieve cultural hegemony, the new European right has reconstituted itself intellectually by deploying Armin Mohler’s strategy, which Alain de Benoist has made adept use of in France. We can also find this “hermeneutics of innocence” today in the writings of Alexander Dugin, who can claim no originality in this respect.[4]

However, over and beyond Dugin, apologists present Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt as profound philosophers whose “spiritual National Socialism” is not to be equated with vulgar Nazism. Heidegger’s Black Notebooks echo this strategic distinction between vulgar Nazism and spiritual Nazism.[5]

With respect to the subject of this study, which focuses on the case of German historian Reinhart Koselleck, it’s remarkable to see how his reputation as a “first rate Aufklärer” stems from a review of his thesis, Kritik und Krise, written by Carl Schmitt himself. This review was published in a particularly noxious journal, Das Philosophisch-Politische Buch, where some of the most outspoken Nazis, such as Karl Epting, former director of the Franco-German Institute in Paris under the Nazi occupation, continued to propagate their ideas after 1945.[6]

Introduction

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union, we could have imagined that the Cold War was behind us and that a Kantian “universal peace” was on the horizon as an attainable reality, at least on our continent. The Yugoslav Wars showed this was not so and today, one year after the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, we have again become very aware of the danger of widespread conflict. This situation seems to lend credence to worldviews that inscribe conflict and war in the very essence of humanity. In this context, it is not surprising that the thought of the historian and historical theorist Reinhart Koselleck is gaining traction, especially in Germany. In 1985, he proposed inscribing the “ability to kill [Totschlagenkönnen]” as the first of the categories that enable the thinking of human history. This radical theoretical move merits examination, at a time when the centenary of this historian is being celebrated in Germany.

Koselleck stated in 2005 that his war experience determined his entire course of studies.[7] At eighteen, he enlisted as a volunteer to fight at the front. He was deployed from the start of August 1941 in Ukraine as an artillery warrant officer in the No. 162 Artillery Regiment of the 6^th Wehrmacht army which was operating near Kiev.[8] The 6^th army ceased taking prisoners from the second week of the conflict. And not only were prisoners of war shot, but also civilians suspected of being partisans. Being identified as a Jew sufficed to place one in this latter category. “The Jews found themselves more or less equated with those who were designated as ‘partisans’ by the Wehrmacht.”[9] Koselleck records that, as his Division advanced towards the Russian town Belgorod, its infantry regiment killed 150 Jews in the village Mirgorod. And he heard of “the massive extermination of Jews at Babi Yar, near Kiev.”[10] Koselleck thus learned very early on, at least by hearsay, about the conditions of the exterminatory war and the Jewish genocide that the Third Reich was carrying out in Eastern Europe.

When he returned to civilian life in 1947 after two years of internment in Kazakhstan and after having been brought through Auschwitz, Koselleck began multi-disciplinary studies at Heidelberg University. In conjunction with his reading of Kant, he immersed himself in Martin Heidegger’s writings and followed the courses and seminars of a former student of the latter, Franz Josef Brecht, as well as those of Hans Georg Gadamer. Indeed, Koselleck always considered Being and Time to be his “book of initiation.”[11] Koselleck met Heidegger in person at least once, at a colloquium organized by Gadamer in July 1957.[12] But he did not cultivate any personal relations with him, as he did with Schmitt. It was through Heidegger’s texts that Koselleck engaged in an intense confrontation with his thought in the years 1947-1951. Notably, Koselleck’s archives include a typed and annotated copy of the “Letter on Humanism,” dated 1948, with numerous underlinings in red and black pencil.[13]

The Project of a Fundamental Ontology of History founded on Schmittian Categories

Another significant reference point for Koselleck was the sociologist Hans Freyer’s 1948 work Weltgeschichte Europa [World-History Europa], from which he takes, in an unpublished review, the antonyms “domination and submission.” He builds on the concept of historicality and adopts a Heideggerian vocabulary, while distancing himself somewhat from the author of Being and Time.

At Heidelberg, Reinhardt Koselleck, his classmate Hanno Kesting, and Carl Schmitt forged close intellectual and personal relations. Koselleck and Kesting did not reflect on legal theory following their association with Carl Schmitt but were inspired by what the latter liked to call the “global civil war.” Koselleck’s first letter to Schmitt, dated January 1953, reveals his ambition of elaborating a new “ontology of history.” He contrasts this with the “philosophies of history” which, from the Enlightenment to Marxism, were rejected by the Schmittians as utopias. Even though Koselleck’s terminology remained largely Heideggerian in its emphasis on the “finitude of historical man,” his main references remained Schmitt and Freyer. He sought to develop “a form of conceptualization” that responded to the “concrete situation” of our times. In plain terms, a conceptualization capable of thinking though the specific new order that emerged in the aftermath of the German defeat in 1945.

What is this “form of conceptualization” whose contours Koselleck outlines? It involves two pairs of antonyms—“master and slave” and “friend and enemy”—to which Koselleck adds the concepts of sexuality and generation as well as all the “geopolitical questions.” Koselleck sets out his concerns in terms that are both Schmittian—notably, the reference to the “global civil war”—and Heideggerian—as regards the structures of the being of historicality:

The starting point for an ontological analysis of history should […] be the current civil war. With the categories such as those underlying your “Nomos of the Earth,” dear professor, we can in any case show that the dominant global civil war is not an ontic or contingent event that should not be (for the Americans) but an event enrooted in the structures of the being of our historicality, but which, if we respect these structures, does not have to be as it is (for the Russians).[14]

Koselleck’s elaboration of his concepts is of singular historical interest because of how he brings together Heideggerian determinations and Schmittian categories. It is a way of thinking about the political and historical situation in Europe that does not subscribe to the “moralizing” American worldview nor endorse the present reality of continental Europe, where the Soviet Union had extended its domination over half the continent. Opposed to all forms of utopia, the ontologization of territorial structures justifies calling into question the existing world order, at the beginning of the Cold War where the dismembered territory of the old Reich was geopolitically situated at the center of all the tensions.

Koselleck and Conspiracy Theories

In Critique and Crisis, a thesis submitted in 1954 at Heidelberg University after he gave it to Schmitt to read, Koselleck maintains that Enlightenment critique had encouraged the rise of philosophies of history whose utopian tendencies had paved the way for the emergence of totalitarian regimes in the 20^th century.[15] And also in the fifties, his friend Hanno Kesting carried out a similar historico-critical program in an essay with the notable title: Philosophy of History and the Global Civil War. The Interpretations of History, of the French Revolution in the East-West Conflict.[16] Carl Schmitt promoted the two works simultaneously, as can be seen in his correspondence with Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde.[17] The implausibility of Koselleck’s argument must be borne in mind: He claims that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the initiator of the total state, thus exculpating the two main theoreticians of the total state, Carl Schmitt himself and his disciple Ernst Forsthoff, author of the 1933 Totaler Staat [Total State].

In the second chapter of Critique and Crisis, Koselleck puts forward a yet more central thesis that claims that state absolutism, which was the precondition for ending religious civil wars, was destroyed by moral critique in the Enlightenment era. This critique is said to have originated in the secrecy of Masonic lodges. Koselleck credits Germany with having had the awareness to ban the Illuminati in the 18^th century, thus sparing itself a revolution.

Historical research has long since debunked the thesis that presents Enlightenment Freemasonry as responsible for the French Revolution. This conspiratorial worldview was born from counter-revolutionary propaganda that, starting from Augustin Barruel, saw “Judeo-Masonry” as the hidden architect of the fall of the Ancien Régime. The National Socialists subsequently took up and radicalized the stigma “Judeo-Masonry.” In his essay on Carl Schmitt and the Jews, Raphael Gross situates Crisis and Critique within the context of literature on the myth of a global Jewish plot but without going more deeply into the issue.[18] Yet Koselleck’s emphasis on the decisive role of the “sociétés de pensée” also meant neglecting the social and economic causes of the French Revolution. It also obscured the plurality of tendencies within the Freemasons themselves. Hence one of the most significant counter-revolutionary thinkers, Joseph de Maistre, was himself an initiate and theoretician of Freemasonry. From Koselleck’s point of view, the central role attributed to the Freemasons is not limited to the 18^th century but tends to be used as an explanatory principle for the supposed drift of the whole of modernity in that it allegedly led to the “global civil war” that is said, in a thoroughly Schmittian fashion, to characterize the Cold War era after the defeat of Nazism in 1945.

This explanation of the course of modernity was developed at the beginning of the 20^th century by Augustin Cochin, whom Koselleck cites as a reliable source, and then by Bernard Faÿ, who is also mentioned several times in Critique and Crisis. The latter, however, was a relentless persecutor of Freemasonry under the Nazi occupation. He had formed a fatal partnership with the Swiss jurist William Gueydan de Roussel, a paid Gestapo agent who translated Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political in 1942.

Koselleck certainly did refrain from making any anti-Semitic references in his doctoral thesis. However, while he does not cite Augustin Barruel, he takes up his thesis that Freemasonry was infiltrated by the Illuminati. In short, he makes the traditional conspiratorial worldview his own, carrying it over from religion to politics by portraying the Freemasons as a danger not to the church but to the sovereignty and the authority of the state. And he manages to present this conspiratorial thesis about the importance of the secret and about Freemasonry as the driving force in the French Revolution in a way that renders it more palatable. This shift from theology to politics nonetheless brings Koselleck into proximity with the National Socialist’s designation of the Freemasons as a political enemy.

Koselleck’s Nazi Sources on Freemasonry

Further, Koselleck relies on National Socialist sources to bolster his polemic against Freemasonry. He refers to Hans Riegelmann’s 1941 work Die europäischen Dynastien in ihrem Verhältnis zur Freimaurerei [The European Dynasties in their Relation to Freemasonry] as providing “a useful overview – apart from [its] partiality.”[19] Koselleck fails to mention that Riegelmann had reissued his work the following year with the SS publishing house, Nordland Verlag, which specialized in anti-Semitic, anti-masonic, and anti-Christian völkisch political propaganda. Starting from the “new spirituality of the essence and racial and völkisch values,” Riegelmann’s aim was to provide a “complete understanding of Freemasonry in all its historical effects throughout the life of peoples and states.” It was “the total prohibition of Freemasonry in Germany” as well as “the seizing and securing of all the essential material from all the lodges” that permitted giving “an overall depiction of Freemasonry’s political actions.” The work was re-issued in the series on the Sources and Presentations of the Masonic Question. Collaborators with Central Office of Reich Security published four volumes between 1939 and 1943, using material the Nazis had confiscated from the lodges as their basis.[20] Books published on this prior to Koselleck include works by Hans Schick, a former priest who turned SS Obersturmführer and a member of the SD,[21] and Adolf Roßberg, whom Koselleck also mentions several times as a key source, especially with regard to the Illuminati.[22] Yet, if these authors had access to Masonic sources seized by the Gestapo and the SD, it was because they themselves were members of the SS and/ or the SD.[23]

Hans Riegelmann was also the author of the 1940 study entitled “Freemasonry and Judaism”[24] which sought to show that “Freemasonry and Judaism are of the same essence.”[25] This is the Nazi thesis of Jewish infiltration of the states, via Freemasonry, with a view to destroying their power. Riegelmann integrates the essentials of his article into his book, especially when he claims that:

What characterizes this “global Freemasonry” from the outset, especially English Freemasonry, is that nowhere else did the Jew appear so early and so strongly as here, and nowhere else did he so completely establish himself and achieve such a dominant position as here. In, with, and through Freemasonry, the Jew was already firmly seated in England, while France (with the comprehensive ‘support’ of English Masonic ‘politics’) had been eliminated – at least for the time being – as a great power by the French Revolution.[26]

What was being played out in 1940 was nothing other than “the great decisive struggle today between the old democracies of Masonic and Western Jewish inspiration and the rising young national-völkisch Führerstaats of the future.”[27]

When Koselleck draws on Nazi sources such as the work of Riegelmann or Roßberg, which he refers to approvingly as based on “previously unavailable sources,”[28] he does not elaborate on the historical and political context in which these two books were conceived and published nor does he express any reservations about Riegelmann’s closely connecting Freemasonry and Judaism. He contributed thereby to the making academically acceptable, at least for a superficial and de-contextualized reading, of a conspiratorial explanation of modernity that had been developed by the National Socialists in particular. We need not take a stance on the value of Freemasonry but only need to take into account, from a purely historical perspective, of the radical and murderous way in which the National Socialists and the governments who actively collaborated with them banned Freemasonry, labelling it together with Judaism as the enemy.[29] We can recall, for example, that “the Vichy Secret Societies Service considered the Freemasons to be legally Jews.”[30]

Consider now the beginning of the paragraph in Critique and Crisis where Koselleck, referring to Hans Riegelmann’s book, writes the following:

Originating in the sign of the Masonic mystery was the social framework of a moral International composed of merchants and travellers, philosophers, sailors, and émigrés – in short, of cosmopolitans allied with the nobility and the officer caste.[31]

This picture of a cosmopolitan International imposing itself as the main political power of the time is structurally close to Riegelmann’s thesis. Of course, in the historian’s remarks the “Jews” and “Judaism [Judentum]” are replaced with “cosmopolitans” and the “moral International.” However, this is extremely loaded terminology, and one that is all the more problematic when we see that Koselleck also refers to as anti-Semitic a work as Schmitt’s Leviathan.[32]

We can thus ask why, less than a decade after the Nazi persecutions, the reception of Koselleck’s thesis on the decisive role of the Freemasons and the Illuminati in the politics of modernity was not more critical. Does not Critique and Crisis deserve to be considered as a sophisticated variant of conspiracy theories? This question becomes all the more pressing when we note that Koselleck supports his arguments using Nazi sources such as Hans Riegelmann and Adolf Roßberg.[33] This does not mean that Koselleck would go so far as to share these authors’ theses but it does means recognizing that he did not do the indispensable work of critically contextualizing his sources, which is essential to the work of both historians and philosophers. Ultimately, his thesis concerning the destruction of politics both by Enlightenment moral critique and “sociétés de pensée” and their use of secrecy, seems less the practice of a historian than of Schmittian-minded essayist taking a stand, in the time of the Cold War, against the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, both of which are accused of enabling the Marxist conception of utopia and contemporary totalitarianisms.[34]

Humanity and Its Enemies

Following his theses on the role of secret societies in the modern era, Koselleck adds the relation of mutual tension between the public and secret space to the pairs of antonyms proposed to Carl Schmitt in January 1953. In doing historical ontology, the historian’s most consistent conceptual endeavor was to multiply the pairs of antonyms forged using the conceptual model of the discrimination between the friend and the enemy that Carl Schmitt had employed in defining the concept of the political. He does so through a formalization of historical temporality and the past-present-future relation, following the example of Heidegger in the second division of Being and Time. In 1979, two decades after the publication of his thesis, Koselleck proposed a first synthesis in a work entitled Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, which brought together a series of lectures and articles. In gauging the spirit of this work, we should bear in mind that the first two texts were contributions to Festschrifts honoring Carl Schmitt and Ernst Forsthoff.

It is in this context that, pursuing his endeavor of formalizing what he thinks are “structures of possible recurrence and repetition,” even historical transcendentals, Koselleck speaks of “asymmetric counterconcepts.”[35] For example, these can be found when a specific group designates itself alone using a universally employed term like “the Church” for a Catholic or “the Party” for a communist.[36] The most radical situation corresponds to the exclusive use of the most encompassing concept, that of humanity, for a specific group. What was previously no more than a general concept thereby becomes a concept of negation.[37] The well-known Schmittian rejection of any reference to humanity in the case of political conflict or war lies behind this claim. As Schmitt explains in his essay on The Concept of the Political, this usage supposedly leads to the abusive criminalization of the enemy, which lies at the origin of the destruction of the European jus publicum and of exterminatory wars.

On his part, Koselleck, strives to show that the de-humanization of the adversary by the polemical introduction of the concept of humanity dates back mainly to the Enlightenment. In seeking to establish this, he employs sophistic reasoning. When discussing the Enlightenment’s socio-economic critique, he cites a claim about “‘factories’ (Fabriken] as places where men were forced ‘to behave as Nichtmenschen, as machines,” which supposedly amounts to a negation of the concept of the human itself.[38] This is obviously not the case. The Enlightenment’s social critique does not negate the concept of the human but warns against dehumanizing working conditions.

The citation is taken from a 1787 work by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, a philanthropic pastor whose school was reputedly financed and sustained by Freemasonry, and even the Illuminati. Koselleck seeks to bolster his polemical theses through such repeated allusions. He also exploits a citation from Marx, taken from the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right[39] before employing Nazi terms to refer to “the Untermensch, who was to be exterminated.”[40] Afterwards he praises Carl Schmitt’s “scientific achievement.” Schmitt is credited with having “formal[ized] the contrast of classes and peoples and deploy[ed] them both functionally ideologically.”[41] Thus the jurist who participated most actively in the labelling and criminalizing of Jewish jurists through a 1936 anti-Semitic colloquium he had organized and through the anti-Semitic allusions in his 1936 essay on The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, which Koselleck cites elsewhere, is characterized as the scholar who worked out the “formal character” of the “conceptual couple ‘friend and foe’”![42]

The National Socialists did not need to use the concept of humanity in criminalizing Judentum. In 1939, for example, Martin Heidegger denounced what he called “world Jewry’s predisposition to planetary criminality.”[43] Putting to work the discriminatory concept of the people’s community was enough to carry out this criminalization. Only comrades of the people were eligible for inclusion in this community according to the racial criteria laid down in the 1935 Nuremberg laws. To ascribe a genealogical responsibility for Nazi exterminatory anti-Semitism to the Enlightenment’s critique of social domination and, in marked contrast, to exempt Carl Schmitt from this, setting him up as the scholar who elucidated the phenomenon through formalization, goes beyond mere sophistry and negates the actual historical reality.

Koselleck’s language also undergoes a notable evolution. In his first letter to Schmitt, he writes of his intention to constitute a historical ontology “so as to not fall into epistemology’s resignation to the formal,” a polemical allusion to the neo-Kantians and especially to Ernst Cassirer’s concept of symbolic forms and his theorization of the transition from substance to function. Twenty years later, it is no longer a matter of relying on ontology but of formalizing functional oppositions. Koselleck had come to skillfully appropriate his adversary’s terminology just as Heidegger had done the ontological difference, which was taken from Cassirer.[44].

Friend-Enemy: A Real and not a Formal Distinction

Fundamentally, the question comes down to whether, as Koselleck maintains,[45] Schmitt’s conceptualization of the friend-enemy distinction can be considered a formal distinction that is valid in itself, independently of the way in which Schmitt concretized it. The importance of the distinction between friends and enemies in political considerations is not a purely Schmittian invention. It can be found, for example, in Descartes, in his great critical letter on Machiavelli’s politics from September 1646 to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. Descartes writes that we must “distinguish between subjects, friends or allies, and enemies” in giving political maxims to princes. However, the fundamental difference between Descartes and Schmitt is that the former, like Socrates in the first book of the Republic, makes considerations of justice primary. Contrary to this, Schmitt and after him Koselleck follow Thrasymachus and only consider relations of force and domination. Consistent with this, Schmitt identifies the concept of the political with the friend-enemy distinction alone. This is even more apparent in the 1933 edition of his work, issued by the National Socialist publisher Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt in Hamburg, where Schmitt makes this distinction clear from the outset.

How does Schmitt present the friend-enemy distinction? He claims the enemy is “existentially something different and alien.”[46] At the beginning of Chapter III in the 1932/ 1963 edition, he emphasizes that the “friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense.”[47] The theme of his study is not “abstractions nor… normative ideals” but the “inherent reality” and the “real possibility”[48] of the discrimination at issue:

The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.[49]

Carl Schmitt thus conceives the friend-enemy discrimination as a real distinction, which does not take on meaning until it is concretized in an existential fight and war. What is more, in the 1933 edition, the one who is a stranger is designated as “of another race [andersgeartet].”[50] It is only by forcing Schmitt’s text that Koselleck can credit him with the “scientific achievement” of having conceived it as a formal distinction. For Schmitt, it is a matter of showing the permanent and thus constitutive relation between the friend-enemy discrimination and the real possibility of physical death.[51] Insofar as the enemy is not simply an adversary but is seen as an existential threat, putting them to death is ontologically legitimate. The stigmatization of the enemy as the one who must be annihilated thus has no need of the concept of humanity.[52]

The “Ability to Kill”

In his laudatio for Gadamer, Koselleck adds the “ability to kill,” understood as the first condition for the possibility and theorization of history, to the Heideggerian existentials. On his view, the Heideggerian anticipation of death does not suffice to account for the finitude of historical existence, which is thereby understood not only on the individual level but also collectively. Drawing on Karl Löwith’s thesis that emphasizes the Heideggerian Mitsein, Koselleck situates the relation to death at the center of inter-personal relations. It is in this context that he coins the term Totschlagenkönnen. The human being is not solely defined by its having to die but by its power to kill. Thanatopraxis is thus set as the principle of all historical anthropology: “without the ability to kill each other […] the histories with which we are all familiar would not exist.”[53]

This thesis obviously has a provocative and polemical dimension. There is really no great distance between thematization of the ability to kill and that of the duty to kill. Setting Totschlagenkönnen as the principle of anthropology collides head on with the first of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not kill,” but also with a consistent philosophical conception of humanitas. Established as a definitive anthropological category, the “ability to kill,” which is obviously inspired by Schmitt, encourages a whole host of discourses that were echoed in a recent conversation between Michel Houellebecq and Michel Onfray, broadcast live and published in the sovereignist magazine Front Populaire [Popular Front] where the latter made the learned observation that “Civilizations that are not prepared to kill are dead civilizations.”

If we can speak of a clear Schmittian inspiration here, it is because after the “ability to die” and “the ability to kill,” the second pair of antonyms are nothing other than the friend-enemy distinction. Koselleck is coy enough to only mention Schmitt’s name late in his article—alongside Plato! —even though he makes implicit reference to him throughout and relates him to the same “political context” as Being and Time. In reality, not only does Koselleck take up Schmitt’s conception of the political, but also, as we have seen, he borrows his critique of the use of the notion of humanity in war. After 1945, this critique had provided Schmitt with a way of discrediting the allies’ war effort and their legal actions at Nuremberg. And Koselleck does speak of “modern units of action [that] constituted themselves in the name of humanity and fought their opponents as unhumans.”[54] The tacit presupposition, but one already made explicit by Schmitt, is that to criminalize the enemy in the name of humanity is to dehumanize him and justify his extermination.

This argument contains a deliberate obfuscation, if not obvious sophistry. We must distinguish between two procedures. On the one hand, there is that of the National Socialists, which consists in labelling a group of people as “existential enemies.” This is what Hitler and the National Socialists did to the Jews. This kind of discrimination prepares for and justifies genocidal actions. On the other hand, there is the juridical procedure that consists in bringing those responsible for such actions to justice. This is completely different to the first procedure. The National Socialist leaders were indicted and many of them were condemned to death for the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide that took place under their orders and for which they were responsible. This was a juridical procedure and some of the accused were given lighter sentences, such as Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer, or even acquitted, like Hjalmar Schacht and Franz von Papen. Not to speak of Carl Schmitt himself, who was not even charged. The obfuscation that Schmitt created and Koselleck maintained tends towards exculpating the National Socialists of their intentions and their genocidal actions and it aims at discrediting the principles of international law established at Nuremberg.

Koselleck gives six examples of historical friend-enemy oppositions but remains silent concerning the Nazi opposition between the Aryans and Jews mentioned in the 1978 text that was discussed above and which represents the culmination of the modern dehumanization of the adversary. This thus uproots the friend-enemy distinction from the context in which Schmitt conceived it so as to try and present it as a purely formal pair of categories.

To do this Koselleck needs to take recourse to Kant. He re-interprets the Schmittian notion of the “real possibility” of physical death as the “condition of the possibility” not of experience as conceived by the understanding but as Dasein lives it historically. This radicalizes the hermeneutic violence that Heidegger employs in Being and Time when he claims to displace the Kantian analytic of cognition of nature into the fundamental constitution of historicality.

Is it philosophically coherent to transpose the transcendental, pure concepts of the understanding (Kant) to historical existence (Koselleck)? And can we even talk about a deduction of concepts here? For Koselleck lists rather than deduces his historical categories, much as Heidegger did before him with the existentials in Being and Time. And whereas Heidegger remained aware of the fact that the existentials are to be “sharply distinguished” from the categories,[55] Koselleck loses sight of this distinction entirely. He employs, without so much as raising an eyebrow, a Kantian vocabulary in a context that is entirely alien to it and does not hesitate to present his antinomic concepts as constituting a new “table of the categories.” Yet in the Critique of Pure Reason, the transcendental categories are not the categories of being or existence but of thought. Koselleck’s Kantianism thus seems instrumental. It provides a terminological cover for rendering radically Schmittian positions acceptable. It de-politicizes the friend-enemy distinction in order to set it up, in all its murderous violence, as a formal structure of all possible history.

Conclusions

The ability to kill does not constitute a category distinct from Schmitt’s conceptualization of the friend-enemy distinction. It only makes the Schmittian conception of the existential enemy more explicit. When the enemy is designated the one who threats our very existence, putting them to death becomes legitimate. And as regards what Koselleck calls the formalization of the categories of history, is this not, above all else, a way of shielding these categories from critique by masking their political potential? Moreover, if the friend-enemy distinction were merely formal, it would have ended with the new-found peace. But is it not perpetuated with the victor-defeated distinction, which Koselleck adheres to even in historical research when he claims that the gains in historical intelligibility always come from the defeated?[56]

The currently dominant interpretation of this historian’s evolution is that from the 1970s onwards and especially with the development of his Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Koselleck progressively distanced himself from his initial intellectual affiliation with Carl Schmitt. His 1985 discussion of the “ability to kill” and of the Schmittian concept of the political calls us to reconsider this interpretation.

Moreover, Koselleck’s ontology merits a fundamental critique. It only takes a bullet to kill a man. Knowing how to shape and educate a human being is another challenge altogether, and one in which the future of civilizations is at stake.

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[1] Reinhart Koselleck, “Historik and Hermeneutics,” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2018). 45.

[2] In a letter from June 1949 to his friend Hans Fleig, to whom he dedicated his thesis on the Conservative Revolution, Mohler recounts how his thesis supervisor, Karl Jaspers, said to him: “Your work is a large-scale denazification of these authors [whom Mohler classifies as ‘conservative revolutionaries’] that is captivating and will be read with avidity in Germany today.” in: Volker Weiß, Die Autoritäre Revolte. Die Neue Rechte und der Untergand des Abendlandes (Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, Second edition 2020), 46-47.

[3] According to Armin Mohler, the “Conservative Revolutionaries” were to Hitler what the Trotskyites were to Stalin (Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland. 1918-1932. Grundriß ihrer Weltanschauungen, (Stuttgart, Friedrich Vorwerk Verlag, 1950), 12-13).

[4] See Emmanuel Faye, “Heidegger, Völkisch but Not Nazi? A Manipulation by Alexander Dugin,” in From Heidegger to Dugin and Back, ed. Marlène Laruelle (Illiberalism Studies Program, 2022), https://www.illiberalism.org/from-heidegger-to-dugin-and-back/.

[5] At a symposium organized on the Black Notebooks at Moscow’s Lomonossov University in 2015, together with Marlène Laruelle, Richard Wolin, and Sidonie Kellerer, we met a Russian colleague, Egor Falev, author of a thesis on Heidegger, who used this distinction to exonerate Heidegger from his commitment to National Socialism (see Emmanuel Faye, Arendt et Heidegger. La destruction dans la pensée, (Paris, Albin Michel, 2020), 569-570.

[6] See Sidonie Kellerer, “Reinhart Koselleck. Aufklärer der Aufklärung oder Stratege kultureller Hegemonie? Ein kritischer Kommentar zu ‘Kritik und Krise,’” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 71, no. 5 (2023): 696‑720, https://doi.org/10.1515/dzph-2023-0054.

[7] “Ich war weder Opfer noch befreit. Der Historiquer Reinhart Koselleck über die Errinerung an den Krieg, sein Ende und seine Toten,” Berliner Zeitung, 7th May 2005.

[8] Reinhart Koselleck, Geronnene Lava, Texte zum politischen Totenkult und Errinerung, (Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2023), 336.

[9] Berndt Boll and Hans Safrian, “Auf dem Weg nach Stalingrad. Die 6. Armee 1941/42”, Vernichtungskrieg.Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, (Hamburg, Hanburger Edition, 1995), 267.

[10] Reinhart Koselleck, Geronnene Lava, op. cit., 336; see also Reinhart Koselleck-Carsten Dutt, Erfahrene Geschichte. Zwei Gespräche, (Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013), 21-22.

[11] Reinhart Koselleck-Carl Schmitt, Der Briefwechsel 1953-1983 und weitere Materialien, (Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2019), 15.

[12] Steffen Kluck and Richard Pohle, “Koselleck, Heidegger und die Strukturen geschichtlicher Situationen,” Reinhart Koselleck als Historiker. Zu den Bedingungen möglicher Geschichten, ed. Manfred Hettling and Wolfgang Schieder, (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021), n. 15, 62.

[13] Consulted at the Koselleck archives during a research stay at the DLA in Marbach in October – November 2013.

[14] Reinhart Koselleck-Carl Schmitt, Der Briefwechsel 1953-1983…, op. cit., 12.

[15] There are three versions of Critique and Crisis: the thesis submitted in 1954, the work published with the Alber Verlag in 1959, and the revised 1973 Suhrkamp version which contains many more annotations.

[16] Hanno Kesting, Geschichtsphilosophie und Weltbürgerkrieg. Deutungen des Geschichte von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Ost-West Konflikt, (Heidelberg, Karl Winter, 1959).

[17] Welch gütiges Schicksal. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde/Carl Schmitt: Briefwechsel 1953–1984, ed. Reinhard Mehring, (Baden-Baden, Nomos, 2022), 203.

[18] Rafael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The ‘Jewish Question,’ the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory, translated by Joel Golb, forward by Peter C. Caldwell (USA: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 101.

[19] R. Koselleck, Kritik und Krise, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1973, n.82, 187 and bibliography, 243; Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000), bibliography, 198. The English translation does not contain this reference to Riegelmann.

[20] Hans Riegelmann, Die europäischen Dynastien in ihrem Verhältnis zur Freimaurerei. Quellen und Darstellungen zur Freimaurerfrage. (Bd. 3, Magdeburg und Berlin, Nordland Verlag, 1943).

[21] Hans Schick, Das ältere Rosenkreuzertum: ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Freimaurerei. Quellen und Darstellungen zur Freimaurerfrage, (Bd. 1, Nordland Verlag, 1939).

[22] Adolf Roßberg, Freimaurerei und Politik im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution.Quellen und Darstellungen zur Freimaurerfrage, (Bd. 2, Nordland Verlag, 1942). Koselleck does not indicate in his bibliography that this book was part of a series published by the SS.

[23] In a work cited by Koselleck, Riegelmann mentions as among his main references, along with Bernard Fäy, a book by Dieter Schwarz, prefaced by Reinhard Heydrich, on Freemasonry. This was really a collective pseudonym under the SS preferred to publish some of their combative writings.

[24] Hans Riegelmann, “Freimaurerei und Judentum”, Zeitschrift für Politik, (Bd. 30, 1940), 364-389.

[25] Ibid., 387.

[26] Hans Riegelmann, Die europäischen Dynastien in ihrem Verhältnis zur Freimaurerei, reissued in 1985 by the anti-Semitic and völkisch conspiracy theorist Roland Bohlinger, 21.

[27] Hans Riegelmann, “Freimaurerei und Judentum”, art. cit., 374.

[28] Critique and Crisis, 70.

[29] The most well-known example of this Nazi political attack is the work of Alfred Rosenberg, who extends the amalgamation to include the Jesuits and Christians: Das Verbrechen der Freimaurerei, Judentum, Jesuitismus, Deutsches Christentum, J.F. Lehmann, (Munich, 1921). Riegelmann cites it as a reference.

[30] Un agent de la Bibliothèque nationale et de la Gestapo: William Gueydan ‘de’ Roussel (1940-1944), texts collected and presented by Lucien Sabah, with a preface by Jacques Valette, (Paris, Klincksieck, 2000), 39, n.132.

[31] Reinhart Koselleck, Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise, (Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1973), 64; Critique and Crisis, op. cit., 79. The reference to Riegelmann is not contained in the English translation.

[32] Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise, op cit., p. 166, n. 65 and 70 and bibliography, 243. These references are not contained in the English translation of this work. For a critique of Schmitt’s fundamental anti-Semitism in his 1938 Leviathan, see Yves-Charles Zarka, “Le mythe contre la raison: Carl Schmitt ou la triple trahison de Hobbes,” in Carl Schmitt ou le mythe du politique, under the editorship of Y.-C. Zarka, (Paris, PUF, 2009), 47-70.

[33] Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann notes that in the French edition of Critique and Crisis, Jérome Lindon prudently removed the praise of Bernard Fäy—which was retained in the Suhrkampf edition—but he does not say anything about the approving references to Hans Riegelmann and Adolf Roßberg’s works. This silence is surprising for a historian of Freemasonry like Hoffman (Der Riss in der Zeit, op. cit., 272-273).

[34] On the critique of the historians, see especially Hans Erich Bödeker, “Aufklärung über Aufklärung? Reinhart Koselleck Interpretation der Aufklärung,” in Zwischen Sprache und Geschichte. Zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks, ed. Carsten Dutt and Reinhard Laube, (Marbacher Schriften Neue Folge. 9, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2013), 152-153. Alexandre Escudier’s semi-critical analysis, which is illuminating and well-informed on many points, strives to put distance between Schmitt and Koselleck by aligning the latter with Hobbes. However, he almost entirely avoids the central thesis of Critique and Crisis on the role of Freemasonry and the Illuminati, reducing it to a “Cochinian overload.” (A. Escudier, “Un ‘premier’ Koselleck néo-hobbésien ? De Kritik und Krise à l’‘ontologie historique’ et retour”, in Die Vergangenheit im Begriff. Von der Erfahrung der Geschichte zur Geschichtstheorie bei Reinhart Koselleck, ed. Jeffrey Barash, Christophe Bouton, Servanne Jollivet, (Fribourg, Karl Alber, 2021), 200-220.

[35] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (USA: Columbia University Press, 2004) Third Part, chapter 10, 219, 155.

[36] Ibidem, 156.

[37] Ibid., 191.

[38] Ibid., 185.

[39] Ibid., 198, n.116.

[40] Ibid., 190.

[41] Ibid. 191.

[42] Ibid., 191.

[43] Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, GA 69, revised and supplemented edition, (Frankfurt a. M., Klostermann, 2022), 78—a phrase suppressed by the editor, Peter Trawny and then restored in the new edition of the volume.

[44] See Emmanuel Faye, “Das Sein als Mythos oder als Begriff: Heidegger und Cassirer,” “Sein und Zeit” neu verhandelt. Untersuchungen zu Heideggers Hauptwerk, ed. Marion Heinz, Tobias Bender, (Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2019), 67-112.

[45] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, op. cit., 191.

[46] Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, (Hamburg, Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933), 8. English translation: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, translation by George Schwab (USA: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 27.

[47] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 1972, 27.

[48] Ibid., 28.

[49] Ibid., 33.

[50] See Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger : The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, trans Michael B. Smith (USA: Yale University Press, 2009), 2005, 159.

[51] On this point, see Yves-Charles Zarka, Un détail nazi dans la pensée de Carl Schmitt, (Paris, PUF, 2005), 36.

[52] This is can be seen in the 1942 preface to the French edition of Begriff des Politischen where the translator, William Gueydan de Roussel links Schmitt’s “political formulation” to the designation of the enemy using the images of “parasites” and “criminals” in the form of secret societies and the Freemasons. In the language of the time, “parasites” was a scarcely veiled term for the Jews.

[53] Reinhart Koselleck, “Historik and Hermeneutics,” op. cit., 46.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, § 9, 44 of the original German 1927 edition. Translation from: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Cornwall: Blackwell, 2000), H. 44-5.

[56] See Emmanuel Faye “Destruction de la pensée critique,” Illusio n°20, 2022-2023, 101-119: 114.