" Waldganger, " Traitor, Partisan: Figures of Political Irregularity in West German Postwar Thought

In 1962 Carl Schmitt had a dream. In a global political situation characterized by a high-risk, though immobilizing, stalemate between the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, Schmitt dreamt of a figure capable of reanimating the frozen Cold War world. In a world which had drawn an insurmountable frontier between East and West, thereby splitting Germany in half, Schmitt dreamt of a warrior without frontiers or front lines. At the very moment when—with more pragmatism than enthusiasm—West Germany rallied round the United States and Western Europe, Germany's wartime enemies (the GDR meanwhile accommodating itself as the other, Eastern enemy's satellite), Schmitt dreamt of a figure who knew unambiguously who his friend and enemy "really" were. TheTheory of the Partisan, first given as two lectures in Franco's Spain in the spring of 1962, barely a year after the construction of the Berlin Wall, is a Cold War text. It is deeply embedded in a political debate among German intellectuals of the fifties and early sixties, a debate centered on the possibility of regaining a position of autonomy beyond the binarism of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. conflict. The Cold War structure of enmity is the unspoken question to which the Theory of the Partisan tries to find an answer, even if Schmitt doesn't seem to be sure whether the partisan is the symptom of or the solution to Cold War politics, and thus presents him in a highly ambivalent manner. His image vacillates between an object of nostalgic yearning—the nineteenth century's heroic defender of his fatherland—and a symptom of political disarray, if not of pure terror: the secret agent, traitor, saboteur, and globally operating terrorist. In this ambivalence, Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan reflects and continues a broader discourse in postwar Germany, one focusing on figures that transgress or blur the simplistic structure of Cold War enmity, such as the defector, the resistance fighter, the traitor, and the lone fighter [Einzelkämpfer]. The partisan radiates the glamour—and the danger—of total political autonomy, of résistance, or, as Carl Schmitt puts it, of political "irregularity."

It is in this context, one especially indicated in and through the writings of Ernst Jünger, the conservative German American journalist Margret Boveri, and the liberal author and politician Rolf Schroers, all broadly cited in TheTheory of the Partisan, that I would like to situate Schmitt's specific modeling of his figure. What links Schmitt to these three authors beyond personal friendships (with Jünger and Boveri), or extensive quotations in the case of Schroers, whose book Der Partisan (1961) was published only one year before Schmitt's talks on the partisan, is a common interest in figures of political irregularity. In their political diagnosis of Germany of the fifties and early sixties, all four share the impression of a deep political crisis that can only be grasped in the form of a symptomatic human figure, a Gestalt. Schroers's book on the partisan, which would profoundly inspire Schmitt's theory, names this common approach in its subtitle: Ein Beitrag zur politischen Anthropologie (A Study in Political Anthropology). As much as that of Schroers, Schmitt's partisan is a "study in political anthropology." Taking an "anthropological" approach to political diagnosis means to analyze political situations in terms of Gestalten, the figures that they give birth to, to analyze conflicts in terms of human tactics and strategies. Schmitt's famous quotation of Theodor Däubler, "Der Feind ist unsere eigene Frage als Gestalt" [The enemy is our own question as Gestalt] (Schmitt 1995, 87),¹ precisely marks the intrinsic structure of political thought in terms of Gestalt; it is an anthropomorphism of political analysis, the translation of an abstract "question" or situation into a human figure. This...