THE GERMANIC REVIEW

Copyright

C 2009 Heldref Publications

Katechon: Carl Schmitt’s Imperial

Theology and the Ruins of the
Future
JULIA HELL

ABSTRACT: The author proposes an imperial genealogy of Schmitt’s

concept of the katechon. Engaging debates about the role of the con-
cept in Schmitt’s political theology, the author reads the katechon as a
scenario of imperial ruin gazing, tracing its emergence in essays about
World War II, which focused on the theme of imperial rise and decline.
With the katechon, Schmitt re-conceptualized Reich/empire/nomos as
the inextricable link between beginning and end.
Keywords: decisionism, empire, Hitler, imperial rise and decline, kat-
echon, nomos, political theology, Reich, Roman empire, ruins, Carl
Schmitt, Speer, Spengler

At this moment war is being waged over the existence of empires. Hitler
(Jochmann, Monologe 183)

At some point it will all be over. Jacob Taubes (62)

C arl Schmitt’s katechon is the most enigmatic concept in the

work of an author whose writing has been described as allu-
sive, if not elusive. Seemingly peripheral, the concept of the kate-
chontic sovereign—referring to political figures or institutions such as
Reich—inevitably takes center stage in debates about the theologi-
cal grounding of Schmitt’s politics, and political concepts, and his
theories of Reich, nomos and history.1 In this article, I propose to sit-
uate the katechon—or, in Schmitt’s own words, “the power that pre-
vents the long-overdue apocalyptic end of times from already happen-
ing now” (“Beschleuniger” 436)—within the context of older imperial

283
284 HELL

discourses and their imagery.2 More precisely, I will argue that the
katechon is part of the imperial imaginaries of Europe’s (post)Roman
empires, haunted by the knowledge that all empires end in ruins. Fo-
cused on questions of imperial beginnings and endings, on the fall of
the British and the rise of the German empire, Schmitt begins to theo-
rize the concept in the early forties in a series of articles on the war, and
in his Land und Meer: Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung—with the
end in sight.3 Close attention to these texts reveals that Schmitt is an
imperial thinker who theorized empire as the inextricable articulation
of beginning and end.4
In the wake of his 1939 lectures on the concept of Reich and Gross-
raum, the katechon touches on central issues in Schmitt’s work: his
attempts to retheorize empire (first as Reich and Grossraum, and then
as nomos), the process of imperial mimesis, and the structure of the im-
perial imaginary, that is, the spatiotemporal imagination that shadows
any imperial project. However, my article is not on Schmitt’s concept
of empire per se. Although I trace the ways in which Schmitt rede-
fined Reich in 1939, I will concentrate on his reinvention of the imperial
imaginary, and the central role that the katechon plays in this reinven-
tion. The katechon represents Schmitt’s version of the scopic scenario
that is part of all imperial imaginaries of Europe’s (post)Roman em-
pires and their obsession with the trope of imperial rise and decline,
that is, the scenario of the imperial ruin gazer. This is a scopic scenario
both because it depicts the imperial subject contemplating the ruins of
empire and because it renders the trope of imperial rise and fall visible.
Schmitt’s katechon invites his contemporaries to imagine the end of
empire, to imagine ruins and ruination as that which will be—sometime
in the future, not now, not yet.5

“KAFFIRS” AND OTHER BARBARIANS

I will start with Schmitt’s interrogations at Nuremberg, a testimony

to the depth of his immersion in imperial thought and images. In April
1947, Robert Kempner, the U.S. prosecutor, asked whether Schmitt
had provided “the intellectual foundations for war crimes, crimes
against humanity and the extension and expansion of Grossraum by
force?” (“The ‘Fourth’” 39).6 After asking a few more pointed questions,
Kempner observed that Schmitt first “got involved with Nazi affairs” and
KATECHON 285

then distanced himself; he concluded his observations with a popular

German saying, “Hiking is the miller’s dream” (“The ‘Fourth’” 41).
Schmitt seized on Kempner’s folkloric association to distance him-
self from the regime and to portray himself as an intellectual driven
above all by his curiosity. “Hiking is the miller’s dream,” Schmitt
echoed Kempner, and explained what the phrase meant to him: “the
satisfaction in the realization that one is experiencing something new”
(“The ‘Fourth’” 41). Schmitt then explained what exactly that satisfy-
ing new experience had been: “Like the satisfaction an ethnologist de-
rives when he sees a new tribe of Kaffirs” (“The ‘Fourth’” 41). Schmitt,
thus, wanted to be seen as a kind of ethnologist who less resembled
Kempner’s quaint German artisan, traveling familiar ground, than a
classical explorer of early modern Europe who ventured into worlds far
away.
To think of Nazis as “Kaffirs” taking over Europe or the Abendland
(to remain within the precious language of the conservative critics of
German fascism) was something that came quite naturally to Schmitt.
Visiting his friend, the reactionary modernist Ernst Jünger, in Paris in
1941, Schmitt compared himself to Benito Cereno, the Spanish captain
of a slave ship in Herman Melville’s novella of the same name who was
held captive by a “Caffre guard of honor” (Melville 46).7 The situation
of the “white captain dominated by black slaves,” Schmitt told Jünger,
was similar to that of conservative intellectuals in Nazi Germany. In the
spirit of this conversation they then strolled to Paris’s anthropological
museum, the Musee de l’Homme, where they spent some time looking
at “skulls and masks” (Jünger, Strahlungen I 265).
Whether Schmitt went native or kept his distance from his German
“Kaffirs” is, of course, the question that hovers over all discussions of
Schmitt.8 I will approach this topic of Schmitt’s collaboration with the
Nazis only indirectly. A closer reading of Schmitt’s essays on the war
and his world historical reflections, Land und Meer , uncovers a crucial
fact: not only does the concept of the katechon as restraining force
change radically, acquiring a positive meaning, but more significantly,
it also emerges in the context of traditional ways of thinking about em-
pires, about their rise and fall.9 Although I basically agree with Raphael
Gross and others that this changing valence points to a (temporary)
dampening of Schmitt’s raum-revolutionary fervor, I think it is more
important to consider that Schmitt takes his readers back to the artic-
ulation of this early Christian concept with the Roman Empire. That is,
Schmitt reads Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, in which Paul
286 HELL

warns his followers that the end of time has not yet come, explaining
that the battle between the Antichrist and the one still restraining
him will precede Christ’s second coming. More significantly, Schmitt
adopted the interpretation that the Carthaginian theologian Tertullian
proposed in the third century. Tertullian, who was probably the son
of a Roman centurion and was definitely a converted pagan, identified
the katechon with the Roman Empire, and Schmitt argued in Politische
Theologie II , represented a “specific-theological decisionism” (90).10
Schmitt, thus, worked with an exegetic variant of the concept that was
closely tied to imperial discourse.

TOWARD AN IMPERIAL GENEALOGY OF THE KATECHON

Much recent Schmitt scholarship has focused on the theological di-

mension of his concept of katechon, sketching different genealogies or
political and philosophical contexts. Andreas Koenen portrays Schmitt
as a radical Catholic conservative whose growing preoccupation with
the Christian concept of katechon in the early forties signifies a re-
turn to his Reich-theological foundations. That is, Koenen anchors the
katechon in the debates among the Weimar Republic’s conservative
Catholic and Protestant agitators for a New Reich.11 Characterizing
Schmitt as a Weimar Reichstheologe, committed to the lineage of
the Roman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, and Third Reich, Koenen
leaves out the modern European empires. Building on Koenen’s work,
Gross sees Schmitt as a radical Catholic anti-Semite and eliminates
the distance that Koenen had established between Schmitt and the
Nazis.12 Instead, Gross makes the katechon the crux of his argument
that anti-Semitism is the founding logic of Schmitt’s political thought.
Gross situates Schmitt in the context of Germany’s radical conserva-
tive movement, whose proponents emphasized modernity’s “shadow
sides” and understood capitalist rationality as inherently Jewish (Gross
189–90). Unlike Koenen, Gross emphasizes the conservative, revo-
lutionary thrust of Schmitt’s thought.13 So does Günter Meuter, who
explores Schmitt’s concept of decisionism (its transcendent founda-
tions or lack thereof) in a discussion of Schmitt as conservative rev-
olutionary. Tracing the “remainder of the transcendental substance”
that sustains Schmitt’s pre-1933 decisionism as much as his post-
1933 “Ordnungsdenken,” or “Order-Thinking,” Meuter comes to the
conclusion that Schmitt’s political theory is best characterized as “kat-
echontic theology,” with the katechon as the point of crystallization of
KATECHON 287

the metaphysical excess that sustains Schmitt’s theorizing (Meuter

214).14 Ruth Groh, too, identifies the “political-theological myth of the
katechon” as the basis of Schmitt’s pre- and post-1933 metaphys-
ical legitimizing of the political order established by the sovereign’s
decision (215).15 Discussing Schmitt as an anti-Judaic Catholic critic
of postreligious modernity, Groh argues that Schmitt’s political the-
ology focuses on the “decisive final battle” against the Antichrist
(215). Schmitt’s “katechontic theology of history” (214), thus, finds
the meaning of history “in enmity and in the struggle against enemies
who are defined politically/theologically” (216).16 Finally, Peter-Uwe
Hohendahl has recently argued that the katechon is yet another sign
of Schmitt’s theological politics and that the emergence of the concept
toward the end of the Nazi era sheds light on the theological dimen-
sion of Schmitt’s earlier writings. Drawing on Koenen’s, Groh’s, and
Meuter’s works, Hohendahl emphasizes the specificity of this theology,
that is, a Marcion theology based on the idea of an irredeemably fallen
world.17
Schmitt’s postwar writings seem to support this focus on the theo-
logical dimension or metaphysical ground of Schmitt’s work. In Glos-
sarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951 (“Glossary: Notes from
the Years 1947–1951”), Schmitt professed his Catholic philosophy of
history in statements that seem to affirm readings that argue for a
strong theological, if not Catholic, dimension of Schmitt’s thought.18
In 1947 he wrote, “To me the katechon represents the only possibil-
ity of understanding history as a Christian and finding it meaningful”
(Glossarium 63). In Der Nomos der Erde he elaborated on this state-
ment, proposing the concept of katechon as a “bridge” between escha-
tology and historical thought: “The belief that a restrainer holds back
the end of the world provides the only bridge between the eschatologi-
cal paralysis of all human events and the tremendous historical power
[Geschichtsmächtigkeit] of the Christian empire of the Germanic kings”
(Nomos 29). In Politische Theologie II , Schmitt then spelled out the im-
plications of this katechontic view for his understanding of time: “The
entire Christian era,” he wrote, “is not a long march” (59). Instead, “[the
Christian era] is a single long period of waiting, a long interim between
two simultaneities, between the coming of the Lord at the time of the
Roman Emperor Augustus and the second coming of the Lord at the
End of Times” (59). This great “interim” is one time horizon but not the
only one: “During this very long interim we see the constant emergence
of countless new worldly interims of longer or shorter duration. These
288 HELL

are In-Between-Times” (59). In Nomos, Schmitt conceptualized these

“Zwischen-Zeiten” (“in-between-times”) as the longue durée of nomoi.
Schmitt writes this eschatological horizon into his world history of Re-
ich/Grossraum and nomos as the articulation of the always-limited time
of specific empires with the time of world history. This is in essence what
Meuter defines as the reactionary modernist’s katechontic theology of
history.
In the following, I propose to understand Schmitt as an imperial
thinker who translated this theology of history into the time of empires.
Schmitt did so by drawing attention to the peculiar way in which im-
perial time had always already been imagined, that is, as limited time:
the end will always come. Taubes presents Schmitt as the apocalyptic
thinker of the right who knew that “time is limited” (“Zeit ist Frist”), and
it is this apocalyptic urgency that characterizes the time of the kate-
chon (Taubes 61). I will, thus, trace a genealogy that takes us onto a
different discursive terrain than the theological one, that is, the terrain
of European imperial thought. To avoid any misunderstandings: I do
not intend to replace one genealogy by another, but instead I suggest
the following. There is no doubt in my mind that Schmitt’s pre-1933
and post-1945 writings have strong theological foundations, but this is
always a theology in the service of politics.19 For example, in Nomos
Schmitt did not glorify the Spanish-Portuguese Empire because it was a
Catholic empire but because he thought that this empire’s katechontic
political theology produced the most effective form of imperial mime-
sis. However, although I agree that Schmitt belongs in the context of
the conservative revolution and that his reactionary stance is shaped by
his theological commitments, I also think that the existing literature has
failed to fully grasp the imperial dimension of Schmitt’s thought.20 In
the densely overdetermined signifier of the katechon, Schmitt’s radical
conservative critique of secular, liberal-capitalist modernity, his en-
gagement with theology and modernity’s lack of foundations converge
with his theory of empire. As I will argue, this convergence resulted in
a radical reconceptualization of the imperial imaginary.
Schmitt was first and foremost a political thinker—and after 1939, he
was above all a theorist of empire. Schmitt himself points us in this di-
rection when he makes use of Tertullian’s identification of the Paulinian
katechon with the Roman Empire.21 The katechon is a function of im-
perial logic, or more precisely, it is the effect of Schmitt’s engagement
with the trope of imperial rise and decline and with the scopic scenario
that is part of all imperial mimesis, namely, the sight of an empire
KATECHON 289

in ruins. As old as Rome’s victory over its rival empire Carthage, this
story and scenario were revised in the twentieth century by Schmitt
and other theorists of empire. In Schmitt’s texts katechon designates
imperial sovereignty in a number of ways. First, katechon is the very
concept through which Schmitt theorizes imperial mimesis in its proper
and improper forms. Second, katechon is a scopic scenario that trans-
lates eschatological time into the time of empire and imagines the
confrontation with the imperial other—or in Schmitt’s terminology, the
imperial enemy—within and without. Finally, the katechon is Schmitt’s
ruin gazer scenario.
Let me briefly sketch out these points with respect to Schmitt’s final
version of the katechon as he theorized it in Der Nomos der Erde (1950;
“The Nomos of the Earth”) and then in his 1962 Politische Theologie II
before I turn to the central concern of this article, that is, the katechon’s
emergence in Schmitt’s writings between 1939 and 1942, which circle
around the topic of imperial beginnings and endings. In this fully elab-
orated version the katechon after 1945 is more than the restrainer or
imperial sovereign postponing the end—the definition that had emerged
in Schmitt’s earlier texts. In Nomos Schmitt makes the katechon the
central figure, or instance, in his theory of imperial mimesis, that is, the
articulation of imperial ideology or political theology with a particular
territorialized imperial space and time.
Rethinking the notion of imperial successio, Schmitt writes that “[t]he
decisive concept of this continuity was that of the Retainer, of the kat-
echon” (Nomos 29). Replacing the political theology of pagan Rome
with its own Christian version, Schmitt argued, meant that this new Re-
ich represented “the historical power to restrain the appearance of the
Antichrist and the end of the present eon” (Nomos 29). The Christian
Reich, Schmitt continued, “was a power that withholds (qui tenet), as
the apostle Paul said in the second letter to the Thessalonians” (Nomos
29). Far from being a passive figure, the katechon acts by preparing
“the final decisive battle against the eschatological enemy” (Meuter
256).
This translation of pagan into Christian imperial theology rests on
Schmitt’s appropriation of Tertullian’s reading of the katechon as the
Roman Empire, and Schmitt’s idea that any nomos—produced by the
law-founding act of land seizure or Landnahme—combines Ordnung
with Ortung, order and its territorialization around a sacred (pagan or
Christian) center.22 In Politische Theologie II Schmitt explored in depth
the parallel between Rome’s pagan theology and later Christian forms,
290 HELL

all of them centered on Rome.23 The katechon, Schmitt claimed, is

central to any genuine process of imperial mimesis, that is, to any
creative innovation that avoids mere repetition (a theme Schmitt had
discussed in the 1921 with respect to the different forms of dictatorship
modeled on Roman forms).24 In its mature version, the katechon is the
instance that brings about a successful process of imperial mimesis by
maintaining the “identity of space” while changing the content of this
very space (Glossarium 61). Thus, the conquistadores replaced the
Romans’ pagan political theology with their Marian theology, but the
city of Rome remained the center of the empire/nomos. During the
Third Reich, Schmitt’s idea of a successful imperial mimesis involved
the Reich’s political theology of volk centered on Berlin. Although
Schmitt theorized the Third Reich in opposition to the assimilation-
ist Imperium Romanum, Hitler and some Nazi intellectuals claimed the
Roman Empire as their model. This imperial mimesis added an ad-
ditional layer to Schmitt’s theoretical concept of Reich as based on
ethnic particularity, centering the empire’s political theology in Berlin
as a new Rome.25
As I mentioned above, after 1945 Schmitt spelled out his understand-
ing of the time of history as “worldly interims” (“irdische Interims”) or
“in-between-times” (Politische Theologie II 59). This is the time span
in which the katechon acts, and imperial space is space surveyed by
the katechon. Nomos contains Schmitt’s definitive version of the kat-
echon as a scopic scenario that articulates imperial space and time.
The Christian Reich of late antiquity, Schmitt wrote, was essentially
characterized by the fact

that it was not eternal. It always had its own end, and that of the present
eon, in sight. Nevertheless it was capable of being a historical power.
(Nomos 59; italics are mine; translation modified)26

Schmitt, thus, defined the katechon as a kind of ruin-gazer scenario:

the imperial sovereign—empire or emperor—who, with its or his eyes
fixed on the end of time, prepares for a political battle to delay that
very end. This battle is both military and ideological, fought, in the
case of Rome, in the name of the divine Caesars and in the case of the
Spanish-Portuguese Empire in the name of the Virgin Mary, that is, the
Church.27
The scenario of the ruin gazer has a genealogy going back to the
Greco-Roman historian Polybius. Inventing imperial historiography in
an Aristotelian spirit (as “a general history” of a world power, not
an accumulation of unrelated parts), Polybius wanted to understand
KATECHON 291

the causes of Rome’s sudden rise (Polybius 44, 41). His histories,
written in the second century, contained a famous section narrating
Scipio’s victory over Carthage, its brutal razing, and the Roman gen-
eral’s melancholy premonition of his own empire’s eventual fall as he
gazed at what was left of the enemy’s city. One of the first Greco-Roman
authors to narrate a scenario of imperial ruin gazing, Polybius is also
one of the first theorists of imperial cycles of rise and decline.28 Declar-
ing that “[a]ll existing things are subject to decay,” Polybius linked
this “law of nature” to three successive forms of government: monar-
chy, aristocracy, and democracy, all of which are destined to decay
(350).29
While Polybius was intrigued by the efficiency with which Rome
brought “almost the whole of the inhabited world” (41) under its rule,
Zosimus, an admirer of Polybius, set out to chronicle the fall of Rome
in the fifth century (Walbank 35).30 In the eighteenth century a wave
of books was written by authors striving to explain Rome’s fall. Mon-
tesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains
et de leur décadence (1734) adapted Polybius’s natural law to en-
lightenment historiography (with an eye toward the decay of French
absolutism).31 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776–88) famously included the scene of Edward Gibbon contem-
plating the ruins of the Roman Capitol and thinking about the causes of
the empire’s decline. Wondering whether this could happen to modern
Europe’s empires, Gibbon answered with an unequivocal no.32 With
his eyes on the ruins of Palmyra, Volney, a disillusioned Jacobin and
supporter of Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, was equally optimistic.
If we follow the laws of nature (in their enlightenment version), Vol-
ney declares in Les ruines, the cycle of imperial rise and fall will be
broken. Unmoved by the splendor of imperial ruins, Herder cast a dis-
dainful look at Rome’s “pile of stones,” which signified to him nothing
but the brutal oppression of Rome’s subjects (590). On his voyage
with Captain Cook, Georg Forster explored ruins left by the soon-to-
be-colonized peoples in the South Pacific (505–07).
But let me skip ahead to Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des
Abendlandes (1918 and 1921). Reconceptualizing the imperial trope
of rise and decline as the arc from birth to death of the world’s eight
Kulturkreise, or “cultures,” Spengler claimed an analogy between an-
tiquity, or the Greco-Roman Kulturkreis, and what he called the Faus-
tian Abendland (Western Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world).33 More
specifically, this historian of nonsynchronicity drew a parallel between
the development of Greco-Roman Kultur to Roman Zivilisation (and,
292 HELL

thus, from politically motivated conquest to economic imperialism) and

the development of the Abendland, predicting the latter’s inexorable
decay into the depopulated, ravaged landscapes typical of late Rome’s
imperialist civilization. Der Untergang des Abendlandes reaches its
feverish apocalyptic pitch in Spengler’s scenarios of ruination, in which
the author’s gaze slides from the past to the future—from the ruined
capital of the Roman Empire to London, Paris, and Berlin in ruins.
What Spengler has in common with earlier theorists of imperial rise
and decline is the constellation of power that is inscribed in all of
their scenarios: the imperial subject always remains in a position of
(scopic) mastery. Put differently, it is always the European subject who
contemplates ruination. The ruin-gazer scenario, thus, visualizes the
end in ruins, and visually organizes the power constellation between
colonizer and colonized. In its most ironic nineteenth-century version,
that is, Thomas Macaulay’s New Zealander contemplating the ruins of
London, the imperial subject observes the colonized as he contem-
plates a scene of imperial ruin—while Macaulay and his metropolitan
readers look at the Maori looking.34 The scopic structure of this sce-
nario, that is, the constellation of subject and object, look and gaze, is
intriguing: while both the colonizer and the colonized look at the ruins
of empire, the true object of desire in this scenario is the gaze itself, the
scopic mastery exerted over the colonized.35 In the end, the imperial
subject is still the one who is looking.
The sole function of Hitler’s and Speer’s theory of ruin value and
their ruin-gazer scenarios was to fortify the position of the imperial
subject.36 In a faraway future, the Third Reich would crumble into beau-
tiful Roman-style ruins, and the ruin gazers contemplating its remnants
would be Germans, not Jews or Soviets or Poles. In one of his world
historical reflections at the dinner table Hitler compared the Poles to the
Maori (Jochmann, Monologe 173).37 One wonders whether the leader
of the Third Reich, who was set on colonizing the east was familiar
with Daumier’s engraving. Let us return to Schmitt’s katechon. As I
mentioned earlier, according to Meuter, the katechon prepares “the
final decisive battle against the eschatological enemy” (256), and as
we saw above, much of the scholarship on Schmitt’s katechon has
tried to answer the question of who Schmitt thought this eschatolog-
ical enemy, this Antichrist, actually was. The confrontation with the
enemy, whom Schmitt notoriously defined as “the other, the stranger,”
is indeed part of the katechontic scenario (Concept 27).38 As Schmitt
explained time and again, this enemy is not a private but a public
KATECHON 293

enemy; he is dangerous, not “evil” (Concept 27); his very essence is

defined by being “existentially something different and alien” (Concept
27) in a particularly intense way—politics being defined as the inten-
sity of the relation between friend and enemy.39 Gross and Jan-Werner
Müller have analyzed Schmitt’s definition of politics as friend-enemy
constellations with an eye toward the internal other, that is, German
Jews.40 Translated into the language of empires, the katechontic sce-
nario narrates the confrontation with Europe’s others—with the colo-
nized subjects overseas and in the east. Moreover, Schmitt’s scenario
maintains the constellation of power that characterizes ruin-gazer sce-
narios, that is, it keeps the imperial subject in a position of scopic
mastery.
Schmitt’s comparison of Nazis to “caffres” tells us not only about
Schmitt’s need to differentiate himself from other Nazis but also about
the ultimate horizon of his politics and political theory: Europe and
its empires. Schmitt’s ideal was the Spanish-Portuguese Empire and
its imperial theology, which he glorified in Nomos. This golden age of
European empire building was based, Schmitt wrote in 1948, on the
experience of defeat:
The law of the conquest of a new world: It must be preceded by a recon-
quest. An example of historical dialectics: first defeat, then the victory of
the defeated. Only that provides the momentum to go out and conquer
the world. (Glossarium 194)

Imperial beginnings need imperial endings and the subsequent renewal

of the empires’ political theologies—in the confrontations with the em-
pire’s enemies, with Muslims, Jews, and the pagans of the new world.
Defeat intensifies enemy-friend constellations, imperial ideologies, and
the acute awareness that all empires will eventually end. We should,
thus, not be surprised about the belligerent way in which Schmitt cele-
brated his Nomos: “My Nomos of the Earth,” he wrote in August 1950,
“is arriving at just the right moment [because] [t]he time is coming . . .
when the final battle for world dominion will be fought” (Glossarium
309). Imperial defeat is good for the soul.

“WHEN EMPIRES COLLAPSE. . .”: SCHMITT’S THEORY

OF VOLK-REICH-GROSSRAUM

In 1939, after his fall from grace, Schmitt held his famous lecture on
“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumprinzipien” at Kiel University. Addressing
294 HELL

members of the Nationalsozialistischen Rechtswahrer-Bund, (“Na-

tional Socialist Federation of Lawyers”) Schmitt outlined his thinking
about a new spatial world order and the spatial imagination of the
world or “conceptions of planetary space” (“Völkerrechtliche Gross-
raumordnung” 270) that would accompany such an order. Schmitt
wanted to move away from what he saw as “despatialized politicial
ideas” and “designified spaces” by replacing the empty, neo-Kantian
concept of Raum (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 282).
In the wake of the German-Soviet nonaggression pact (which he cel-
ebrated as the sign of a new non-universalist order), Schmitt transferred
the “Great-Space-Thinking” of the Monroe Doctrine to middle and east-
ern European space (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 283). The
lecture was as concerned with the concept of Grossraum as it was with
the re-invention of Reich (and its link to Volk) as the strong core of
any Grossraum. The ultimate goal of the lecture was the “introduction
of our concept of Reich” (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 300).
Schmitt’s intention was revolutionary, that is, still true to the spirit of
decisionism: with the birth of a new “powerful German Reich” as the
“strong and unassailable center of Europe;” its intellectuals needed to
create new words and new concepts (306). Grossraum was one of these
concepts. Schmitt redefined the originally economic concept of Gross-
raum as a political entity.41 In a first step, Schmitt defined Grossraum
as a “realm of human planning, organization, and activity emerging
out of an encompassing contemporary developmental tendency [Leis-
tungsraum]” (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 272). This great
space would be governed by one “great political idea” represented by
the political body in which sovereignty would be located, in this case,
the German Reich (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 306).
Schmitt connected this second concept, Reich, to the political idea
of volk, his new Nazi-inspired version of imperial theology. Celebrating
Hitler’s imperial success in the lecture’s climactic paragraph he wrote
that Völker are “an empirical reality determined by species and ori-
gin, blood and soil” (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 306).42 A
Grossraum, Schmitt argued, cannot exist without Reich as the political
body combining “conscious discipline” and “heightened organisation”
(“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 303). While fulfilling the func-
tion of a strong state as the site of sovereignty, the Reich was more than
an enlarged state and certainly not identical with Grossraum (“Völker-
rechtliche Grossraumordnung” 309). Not all Völker had the capac-
ity to create states, let alone Reiche;43 Germany, on the other hand,
KATECHON 295

commanded the discipline required for this “new spatial ordering” on

the European continent (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 304).
Having redefined Grossraum in political terms, Schmitt spent consid-
erable time redefining the concept of Reich. Outlining his justification
for the Third Reich as a continental empire, Schmitt told his audience
that he refused to submit to the concepts used by western democra-
cies. Instead, he proposed to translate the concept of empire into the
German context while simultaneously claiming that all political trans-
lations are essentially fraught. The Third Reich, Schmitt wanted his
audience to understand, did not engage in facile mimesis; something
completely new was about to emerge that was more than just an “af-
terimage” (“Die Raumrevolution” 389).
Schmitt approached the issue of genuine imperial mimesis, of cre-
ative innovation as opposed to mere repetition, by discussing the
available terminology—Reich, empire, imperium, and Weltreich, or
“world empire” (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 286). Schmitt
reminded his audience that all efforts to translate Deutsches Reich
would inevitably fail because every genuine political entity has its own
historical specificity. “Our German Reich,” he argued, is “essentially
defined by ethnic homogeneity and is essentially a non-universalistic
legal order on the basis of respect for all other ethnicities” (297). In con-
trast, “imperium” tended to signify a “transvölkisch formation,” which
Schmitt wrote, was seen by many as “universalist” encompassing the
entire world (296). The word Reich, he declared strategically, remained
“untainted” by the negative connotations that imperialism had acquired
since the end of the nineteenth century, that is, meanings of “economic-
capitalist methods of colonization and expansion” (297).
Untainted by the negative connotations of imperialism, Schmitt
maintained, the German Reich with its Grossraum extending into East-
ern Europe would not be governed by economic motives like the British
Empire but by a political logic. The ultimate function of the Reich, he
wrote, is to protect “the sacrality of a non-universalistic, völkisch order
of life that respects other ethnicities” (297).44 In contrast to British and
U.S. imperialism, the German Reich’s Grossraum would be guided by
the idea that the Reich accepted the “cultural and völkisch autonomy”
of its members in the “European Eastern Space [Ostraum]” (292, 294).
This would entail, Schmitt argued, a rearrangement of the space, which
had been considered since the Treaty of Versailles as populated by mi-
norities; the concept would also impinge on what he called, in the jar-
gon of the times, the “Judenproblem,” or Jewish problem (292). Reich
296 HELL

differed not only from Western capitalist imperialism, Schmitt argued,

but also from the late Roman Empire, because “a concept of Reich
defined by ethnic homogeneity that respects all other ethnicities” con-
trasted sharply with the conception of ethnicity that characterized the
“declining Roman imperium” (297). The political logic of the German
Reich imitated the Roman Empire at the time of the Augustan restora-
tion with its reinvention of Italian Romanness—a model that Mussolini
had revived in the twenties.45
Despite his insistence on Reich/Grossraum’s difference from British
empire and Roman imperium, Schmitt’s project of rethinking the spa-
tiopolitical ordering of the world as a constellation of great spaces bears
traces of established ways of thinking about empires and their history.
Schmitt’s reference to the Roman Empire is just one sign of the pres-
ence of this discourse, focused on the trope of imperial rise and fall.
Schmitt started from the premise that the history of international law
is “in reality a history of empires [Reiche]” (“Völkerrechtliche Gross-
raumordnung” 309). While Schmitt approached his new “Grossrau-
mordnung” from the perspective of the Monroe Doctrine, the historical
lineage he set in place in this discussion of the concept of Reich is
one of ancient empires: Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, Rome, and finally
the “Reiche of the ancient Germans” (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumord-
nung” 298).46 Each of these ancient imperial powers was situated in a
specific constellation with “Gegenreichen,” or “counter-empires,” and
was at all times “ready for war and battle” (298); each Reich needed a
“volk which shows itself to be up to this task” (305).
All projects of imperial mimesis have been haunted by the ques-
tion about the causes of an empire’s rise and fall. What was Schmitt’s
answer to this question? Schmitt hovered between isolating two de-
terminants of the current breakdown of the old imperial order: on the
one hand, in Hegelian fashion, he pointed to the internal contradic-
tions of the old order; on the other hand, he underlined the element of
struggle for empire. Quoting one of Friedrich Ratzel’s most Darwinist
statements—(318, “The conquest of space is the defining feature of
all life”)—Schmitt came as close as he ever did to making National
Socialist ideas the very core of his theory: the motor of history is the
struggle among Völker and their empires.47
Finally, Schmitt used the language of “old” and “young” empires
and of imperial breakdown. Schmitt proposed to think of the present
moment as transitional and observed that the contours of the old in-
ternational order linked to the “old Reiche” become most palpably
KATECHON 297

visible “when Reiche collapse and battles are fought over new forms
of order” (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 308). In 1939, the
space of the entire earth was in transition. What did this contemporary
transitional epoch reveal about the previous order? First, the era that
was coming to an end in 1939, Schmitt wrote, was characterized by the
centrality of the British Empire and its particular structure, a global net-
work of territorially scattered and unconnected colonies (308). Second,
two things attract attention at such moments of crystallization: “the rep-
resentation of planetary space that is specific to each system of inter-
national law” and the imagination “of a spatial distribution of the earth”
(308).
While thematizing the question of imperial breakdown, the main topic
of Schmitt’s lecture is the beginning of a new European empire, and the
tone is belligerent. The advent of a strong continental Reich, Schmitt
promised in 1939, would radically change the global order and the
ways in which people visualize that order. The imperial theorist an-
nounced a radical Raumrevolution, or spatial revolution—to use the
term that Schmitt coined in his decisionist imperial fervor. With the
German-Soviet Pact, a new stage in the history of Reiche and their
great spaces had been reached. This new order would protect itself and
Europe’s “Ostraum” against two “spatially foreign” (“fremdräumige”)
Grossräume and their guiding political ideas: “The German Reich is
located in the middle of Europe,” Schmitt wrote, situated between two
equally universalist empires, the “liberal democratic ethnically assimi-
lating West” and the “Bolshevist revolutionary East” (“Völkerrechtliche
Grossraumordnung” 297).
The 1939 lecture was Schmitt’s contribution to the Nazis’ collec-
tive endeavor to redefine Reich for the German context. As a Reich,
he argued, Germany had become the “strong and unassailable cen-
ter of Europe” whose mission was to defend the continent against
“powers foreign to the space and its ethnicity” (“Völkerrechtliche
Grossraumordnung” 306). Schmitt described the future presence of
the Third Reich in the east euphemistically as “radiating into the
Central and East European space” (306). Although Schmitt clearly
hoped that his lecture would position him as the Third Reich’s lead-
ing theorist of empire, his attempt to bring analytical order to the
ongoing discussions on empire and empire building earned him a
second round of attacks from the SS and its racially oriented the-
orists of Lebensraum. Insisting on the racial dimension of Gross-
raum, the Reichsamtsleiter Werner Daitz, for instance, proclaimed
298 HELL

that the Third Reich was about “the economic strengthening of the
European continent as the core space of the white race” (Blindow 67).48
Opposed to the notion of Lebensraum and the idea of “natural” bor-
ders that (like Spengler) he considered mindless empiricism, Schmitt
cleverly redefined Lebensraum and strategically referred to the various
geopoliticians who were en vogue at the time.
Although definitely a “Catholic anti-Semite” of the radical right,
Schmitt was not a National Socialist theorist of Lebensraum and geno-
cide, but a theorist of empire, imperial mimesis, and imperial imaginar-
ies.49 For a while he was, as Müller writes, useful to the Nazis (39).50 He
tried hard to remain useful, but he ended up being replaced and plagia-
rized by SS theorists such as Werner Best. Like other hard-core theorists
of race and Lebensraum, Best was concerned with figuring out what
the Nazi empire would look like. In 1941 Best explicitly presented his
project, “Grundfragen einer deutschen Grossraum-Verwaltung” (“Prin-
ciples of a German Grossraum administration”), as experimental in
the sense that the Third Reich was not the execution of a preexisting
blueprint but a constantly evolving process. Published in Festgabe für
Heinrich Himmler, this essay contains the core of Himmler’s infamous
programmatic Posen speech in 1943, in which the head of the SS re-
flected on the most efficient ways of maintaining an empire in the East,
which included the extermination of all Jews.51 Schmitt’s reactionary
vision of a German continental Reich in the wake of the German-Soviet
Pact, which included the resettlement, ghettoization, or deportation of
Jews, was quickly transformed into a genocidal nightmare adminis-
tered by Himmler’s SS.
Best began his article with an appeal to rethink “all concepts, prin-
ciples and categories with which we have thought about the way we
exercise our ordering power.” This echoed Schmitt’s stance of radical
conceptual innovation. The first step in empire building had already
been taken: “the rapid . . . expansion of the territorial space in which
the German Volk exercises its ordering power directly or indirectly.”
Having created their “new order in this space,” Himmler’s SS theorists
now needed to find the “most effective . . . forms of the creation and
administration of this order.”52 It was not yet possible, however, to pro-
pose a definitive blueprint. The Third Reich’s researchers would have to
think through the new principles of “Grossraum adminstration” with the
help of the Reich’s political praxis. At the end, Best emphasized again
the constant experiment that the Third Reich represented. It was an ex-
perimental work-in-progress, and one that involved a lot of researchers
and theorists. For a while Schmitt was among them.53
KATECHON 299

IMAGINING IMPERIAL SPACE: “[AS] I KEPT TURNING MY EYES

REPEATEDLY BACK TO EARTH” (CICERO 90)

Schmitt defined (German) Reich as a “Verbindung von Grossraum,

Volk und politische[] Idee” (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 297;
“combination of a Grossraum, a Volk, and a political idea”). The Na-
tional Socialist act of Landnahme, or the coming Raumrevolution,
would fundamentally change established ways of thinking and “seeing”
space. For in Schmitt, the act of Landnahme is also an act of what we
might call Bildnahme or “Taking-of-a-Picture.” Schmitt rewrites world
history as both Zeitraum and Seh-Raum, a space surveyed by the im-
perial theorist’s gaze, as a—contingent—sequence of empires/Reiche
or nomoi and their corresponding scopic regimes.54 Schmitt’s utopia
was a well-ordered global space that would be achieved once the earth
had found its “sichere und gerechte Grossraumeinteilung” (“secure and
just distribution of different Grossräume”), and the new order would be
clearly visible in the form of several different “Grossräume” meeting
the observer’s eye as “sharply defined . . . forms” (“Völkerrechtliche
Grossraumordnung” 315). This historiography rested on a particular
perspective that Schmitt outlined in a later essay. “We are talking about
a nomos of the earth,” he wrote in 1955, and then explained what this
meant to him: “I am contemplating the earth,” he began, “the planet
on which we live, as a whole, as a globe, and I am scrutinizing it for
its global division and order” (“Der neue Nomos der Erde,” 518; my
emphasis).55
There exists a famous precedent for this supreme imperial vantage-
point, Cicero’s “The Dream of Scipio.” In this conclusion to Cicero’s
Republic (54–52 B.C.), Scipio Africanus appears to Scipio Aemilianus,
his grandson and the general who destroyed Carthage. In this resurrec-
tional story, the conversation between the elder and the younger Scipio
about glory and the supreme Roman virtue, patriotism, takes place in
heaven in the vicinity of the “Milky Way” (Cicero 89).56 Pointing to the
city of Carthage, Africanus predicts his grandson’s victory in the final
Punic war, the triumphal parade through Rome that followed, and his
embassy to Egypt, Syria, Asia, and Greece.
Scipio Aemilianus is enthralled by what he sees: “When I beheld
the whole universe from that point, everything seemed glorious and
wonderful” (Cicero 89). At the same time, the Roman hero who de-
feated the rival empire in Africa and Spain experiences an affect until
then unknown to him: “[T]he earth itself seemed so small to me that
I felt ashamed of our empire, whose extent was no more than a dot
300 HELL

on its surface” (89). Scipio’s intent yet relativizing gaze at the Roman
Empire has been read as Cicero’s critique of post-Republican Rome.
This cosmic imperial perspective—with its equally cosmic distance
toward empire—structures much of Schmitt’s writings about Reich,
nomos, and the moments of their radical transformation. It sustains
Schmitt’s katechontic ruin-gazer scenarios. As we will see, the cosmic
vantagepoint from which the political theorist analyzes world history
in the late thirties gradually takes on the critical distance that colors
Cicero’s view.57
But let us return to Schmitt’s first reflections on spatial imagination
in “Der Raumbegriff der Rechtswissenschaft,” the concluding section
of his 1939 lecture on Reich and Grossraum (“Völkerrechtliche Gross-
raumordnung” 305). Following in the tracks of Spengler, Schmitt con-
tended that Immanuel Kant’s concept of space as an a priori category
was ahistorical and consequently had to be retheorized.58 This revision
of Kantian concepts constitutes the core of Schmitt’s theory of the im-
perial imaginary as a spatial imaginary. Schmitt added an explicitly
anti-Semitic dimension to his critique of the “Jewish” neo-Kantians’
theories of space, mobilizing the common trope of rootless Jews.59
Jews, Schmitt stated, were unable to grasp the “forms of power” result-
ing from the conquest and cultivation of soil (“Völkerrechtliche Gross-
raumordnung” 317). As a consequence, Jewish intellectuals lacked
the very capacity to imagine space other than as empty or measurable
(“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 318). In contrast, Völker capa-
ble of building empires, Schmitt maintained, are set on the “transcen-
dence of empty space” (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 318).
So what was the non-Jewish theory of space that Schmitt had in
mind? Schmitt started his exploration of contemporary “changes in
spatial images and conceptions” by arguing that neo-Kantian legal
theorists (Rosin, Laband, Jellinek) were heirs to the “conception of
space” that developed over the course of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. This “revolutionary transformation of space,” Schmitt
maintained, transformed lived political space into empty mathemati-
cal or “statistical” space (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 318).
Again following Spengler’s lead, Schmitt linked this new experience of
space to explorations and conquests, to the “discovery of American
and the circumnavigation of the globe,” which changed the “planetary
image of the earth and the world” and with it the reigning concepts
of space (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 318). Abstract scien-
tific space is the effect of a particular form of spatial expansion: more
KATECHON 301

specifically, this way of conceiving space is tied to the emergence of

the British Empire in the sixteenth century, to the “universalism of the
Anglo-Saxon sea-based hegemony that transcends space, is foreign
to the land [landfremd], and is therefore limitless” (“Völkerrechtliche
Grossraumordnung” 320).60
This section on the concept of space is a brief initial sketch of the
ideas Schmitt developed at greater length in his 1942 Land und Meer,
and then in “Raumrevolution: Vom Geist des Abendlandes,” also pub-
lished in 1942 in Deutsche Kolonialzeitung. The latter essay outlines
the history of empires as a history of three major Raumrevolutionen,
or “spatial revolutions,” again following closely Spengler’s analysis of
the world’s eight Kulturkreise and their unique spatial consciousness.
Schmitt opened this Spenglerian text with a question: “What is a spatial
revolution [Raumrevolution]?” “Man,” he replied to his own question,
“has a certain conception from his space that is subject to great histori-
cal transformations” (“Raumrevolution: vom Geist” 219). Thus, all ma-
jor historical transformations bring about a change in the ways in which
people picture space, or changing “Raumbild” (Land 39). Schmitt un-
derscored the revolutionary nature of these changes regarding “spaces
of historical existence” (“Raumrevolution: vom Geist” 219). The more
radical the expansion, the stronger the “thrust of historical forces,”
Schmitt contended, the more all-encompassing the transformation of
spatial concepts (219). If the very structure of the concepts changed,
then, Schmitt stated, we ought to speak of spatial revolutions (219).
Schmitt thus retells world history as a sequence of Raumrevolutionen
by analyzing how different concepts of space were linked to the impe-
rial expansions and imaginaries of their own eras. Schmitt claimed that
world history consisted of three particular moments of Raumrevolution
taking place in the first century A.D. in the Roman Empire, during the
Renaissance, and during his own era. In the first genuine Raumrevo-
lution, “the field of vision” Schmitt wrote, “had expanded toward the
east and west, north and south” as a result of Rome’s exploratory ex-
peditions and its “wars of conquest and civil wars,” especially Julius
Caesar’s expansion into northwestern Europe (“Raumrevolution: vom
Geist” 219). This large space ranging from Spain to Persia, Schmitt
claimed, was now spiritually unified: “Distant territories and peoples. . .
now came into contact,” Schmitt wrote, “and experienced the unity
of a common fate” created by the empire’s political theology (219).
What Schmitt analyzed with the help of Spengler was the emergence
and nature of the Roman Empire’s imperial imaginary as a result of
302 HELL

“Raumerweiterung,” or spatial expansion—the ability to think and vi-

sualize the empire as part of the globe (219).61
In The Decline of the West, Spengler celebrated the “Faustian” Abend-
land as driven by the Faustian desire to transgress the limits of space
and time, and thus, by a longing for faraway places both spatially
and temporally.62 Even if readers did not catch Schmitt’s Spengle-
rian subtext in his reflections on antiquity’s Raumrevolution, they must
have done so at the latest when they arrived at the subtitle of the next
section: “The Faustian Experience of Space” (“Raumrevolution: vom
Geist” 220). In this discussion of the world’s second Raumrevolution,
Schmitt announced the study of the “deepest and most consequential
transformation of the planetary world-picture” in history (220). This
transformation changed the very concept of space, “man’s picture of
the entire cosmos” (220).
Yet, the “deepest spatial transformation” was what Schmitt called
“expansion into the cosmos and the imagination of infinite empty
space” (“Raumrevolution: vom Geist” 220)—Spengler’s idea of what
characterized the Faustian soul. Like Spengler, Schmitt unapologeti-
cally celebrates the age of European empire building and European
superiority. Schmitt was convinced that the “cause” of this powerful
“idea of infinite, empty space” could not possibly be traced back to
geographical expansion alone but was the result of a total transforma-
tion of all concepts of space that affected Europeans’ entire existence
(which, like Spengler, he then pursued into the realm of music, archi-
tecture, painting, etc.).
The second Raumrevolution brought about “the rational superiority
of the European,” resulting in the subjection of “non-European peo-
ples” (“Raumrevolution: vom Geist” 221); it left those peoples with the
“dilemma to either adapt to European civilization, or to sink to the level
of a mere colonized people” (221). Schmitt leads his readers from the
Renaissance’s Raumrevolution and Landnahme to the contemporary
world—a world in which the Third Reich dominated Western and East-
ern Europe was in the midst of a third Raumrevolution. In 1942 the
nations east of Germany, Schmitt seemed to think, faced essentially
the same dilemma as the “new world” did in 1492.
While Schmitt mapped out the space in which the katechon is situ-
ated in his lecture and the first part of Raumrevolution, the second part
and his subsequent essays circle around the trope of imperial endings,
adding another element to his scopic scenario. What we can trace in
Schmitt’s texts is a movement from the revolutionary assertion that the
KATECHON 303

British Empire will come to an end and the German Reich will begin to
the seemingly detached analysis of the end of the Third Reich and the
beginning of a new Anglo-American nomos. The trope of rise and fall
belongs to imperial historiography, and the concept of the katechon
with its scenario of postponed ending arises at exactly the moment
when Schmitt is focused on this specific problematic. Schmitt thinks
and imagines these imperial endings in the present in analogy to the
Roman Empire and the Spanish-Portuguese Empire.

IMPERIAL ENDINGS: KATECHON AS A NEGATIVE CONCEPT

At the end of the 1942 Abendland essay (“Raumrevolution: vom

Geist des Abendlandes”), Schmitt turned from his Spenglerian account
of the nature and genesis of imperial imaginaries to the significance
of past and present wars over acts of Landnahme among European
powers. The present moment, Schmitt claimed, revolved around the
translatio imperii Britannici. The end of the British Empire was in sight.
Schmitt argued this story about the end of one empire and the rise
of another by drawing a parallel between the sixteenth and twentieth
centuries, between the Spanish-Portuguese conquista and the Nazis’
expansion in the East. The Spanish-Portuguese Empire functioned here
as example of a young, rising empire.
In 1939, Schmitt had asserted that history was a history of Re-
iche (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 309). In the essay on the
Abendland’s spatial revolutions he now claimed that “world history is
a history of Landnahmen” accompanied by “bloody fratricidal wars”
among “Landnehmer,” or land conquerors (“Raumrevolution: vom
Geist” 221).63 Schmitt now invited his readers to translate the Raum-
revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries into their present
context. The Abendland’s “Shared Christian-European civilization and
order,” Schmitt wrote, was able to persist even in the “bloody wars” of
the sixteenth century (221). How important were these wars, he asked,
when we compare them to the “overwhelming fact that all of Europe
participated in the seizure of land in the new world”? (221). Germany’s
war of aggression was a European war fought in the service of the occi-
dent’s civilizing mission—an idea voiced more hysterically by Goebbels
in 1943.64
Establishing this analogy between conquista and Third Reich,
Schmitt asked his readers to imagine the fall of the British Empire.
304 HELL

While putting the accent on imperial beginnings, Schmitt developed a

line of argument that thematized imperial decline. In “Die Raumrevo-
lution” and “Beschleuniger wider Willen,” Schmitt then further shifted
the emphasis from imperial beginnings to imperial decline, conjuring
images from Europe’s archive of ruin scenarios; in the latter essay he
discussed the katechon for the first time, albeit in pejorative terms.
“Die Raumrevolution” again clarifies what Schmitt thought was at
stake in terms of the translatio imperii from Great Britain to the Third
Reich and the successful form of imperial mimesis that such a process
would require. This essay on World War II as a “Raumordnungskrieg,”
or “space-ordering war,” evoked the imperial ruin scenario through the
use of that most traditional imperial text, Virgil’s Aeneid (“Die Raum-
revolution” 391). What his readers were witnessing at this very moment
was, Schmitt wrote, “the spectacle of a British exodus from Europe”
(391).
This exodus, like the story of Aeneas’s Trojans leaving ravaged Troy,
Schmitt wrote polemically, makes us think about the “succession of
a ‘translatio Imperii Britannici’” (“Die Raumrevolution” 391). It might
well be the German Reich that would assume Great Britain’s place in
Europe, Schmitt implied. Nothing, Schmitt assured the readers of Das
Reich, would prevent the birth of a new “European spatial order” and a
“spatial imagination” informing this new order (“Die Raumrevolution”
391). More than that, reordering the European continent for a genuine
peace would rearrange the entire “space of the earth” and the estab-
lished ways of thinking about it (390). Drawing on “Virgil’s great epic”
(391), Schmitt counted on his readers’ knowledge of the chain of anal-
ogy that Virgil set in place in the Aeneid, in which the imperial ruins of
the Roman past—Troy and Carthage—represent a warning about the
future ruin of the Roman Empire.65 With this allusion, Schmitt provoked
his readers to imagine the sight of London in ruins.
While Schmitt writes at length and with considerable raum-
revolutionary enthusiasm in this essay about the trope of imperial
rise and decline, he does not yet use the concept of the katechon.
It is in “Beschleuniger wider Willen” that Schmitt discussed the kate-
chon’s genesis in Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians. In tune
with his celebration of the Nazis’ imperial project as an “accelerator”
of world history, Schmitt portrayed the United States as a katechon-
tic power, which he defined here as “Verzögerer der Weltgeschichte,”
or “delayer”—only to then turn it into the paradox of the “accelerator
despite itself” (“Beschleuniger” 436).
KATECHON 305

The concept of katechon emerges when Schmitt is focused on the

topic of the end of the British Empire and the question of its suc-
cessor. The concept is squarely located in a nontheological discourse
on rising and falling, young and old empires. Delaying world history,
Schmitt maintained, was the law of all “aging empires” (“Beschleu-
niger” 436, 435). Under the sway of this law, Schmitt wrote, England
had become “a barrier to any reasonable change” and the same applied
now to the United States (436). As successor to the British Empire, the
United States had become entangled in contradictions that undermined
the political function shared by all old empires: to become “Aufhalter
und Verzögerer,” or “restrainers and delayers” (436). The only function
that remained was “Beschleuniger wider Willen” (436). Whereas Great
Britain was “restrainer” and the United States, “accelerator against its
own will,” the Third Reich played the part of “grosser Beweger,” or
“great mover,” in Schmitt’s world historical drama (436).
It is at this point that Schmitt introduced the Paulinian katechon and
the Carthaginian theologian’s linkage of the concept to the Roman
Empire. In antiquity, Schmitt wrote, people believed that a “mysterious
delaying power” existed called “‘kat-echon’ (from the Greek for ‘to hold
down’)” (“Beschleuniger” 436). This mysterious power “prevented the
long-overdue apocalyptic end of times from already happening now.”
It was Tertullian who saw “the old Imperium Romanum as the delayer
which, through its mere existence, ‘held’ [‘hielt’] the eon, causing a
delay of the end” (436). Great Britain’s political existence had been
ruled by this katechontic law governing aging empires since the late-
nineteenth century, and the United States was now subject to the same
logic. Firmly situated on the side of the Beweger , or “young empires,”
Schmitt turned Tertullian’s praise for the “old” Roman Empire into a
curse—only to reverse this evaluation as the end of the Third Reich
came into focus.

WRITING WITH THE END IN SIGHT: KATECHON AS POSITIVE

CONCEPT

At this point, then, Schmitt thought—in a rather Hegelian vein—that

the katechon’s historical meaning resided in resisting the “reasonable”
movement of history, or to put it in Hegelian language, the world spirit.
In Land und Meer , Schmitt introduced the concept of katechon in a
positive light. Before tracing the rise of England as Europe’s dominant
306 HELL

sea-based world power, Schmitt invited his readers “to have a look
at some developments in world history from the point of view of the
struggle between land and sea,” ranging from Greek antiquity to the
“declining Roman Empire” and the beginning of the Arabs’ maritime
reign over the Mediterranean after reconquering Carthage in 698 (Land
11). Schmitt credits the Byzantine Empire with having “held up” against
Islam for “many centuries.” As the “Katechon” or “genuine ‘Aufhalter,’“
or delayer, he wrote, the Eastern Roman Empire prevented Muslims
from settling in Italy (Land 11, 12).
Schmitt concluded Land und Meer by bringing his readers up to
the present. More precisely, he ended with a scenario of ruin gazing,
predicting the end of Europe’s older sea-based nomos—and the end
of the British Empire. What we are witnessing today, Schmitt wrote in
1942, is the “inexorable” growth of a “new nomos of our planet” (Land
63). Many of his contemporaries might not see it this way, Schmitt
conceded:

Many see in [the end of the old nomos] only death and destruction. Some
people think they are experiencing the end of the world. In reality we are
only experiencing the end of the previous relationship between land and
sea. Yet the fear of the new is often as great as the fear of the void, even
if the new represents the overcoming of the void. That is the reason why
some only see meaningless disorder, where in reality a new meaning is
struggling to establish its own order. (Land 63)

This scenario with its story of transition is rather opaque, allowing

multiple readings. We could read it as promising a new beginning,
involving the Third Reich’s victory and the establishment of an air-
based nomos.66 How does the text support such a reading? Schmitt
had opened Land und Meer with a strong decisionist appeal: describ-
ing his own historical moment as one of great historical significance,
Schmitt vehemently argued against any form of historical determinism
(including Spengler’s): “[Man] has the power to conquer his own being
and consciousness historically” (Land 8). The text is heavily invested
in the idea of new beginnings, even at moments of extreme danger: A
human being, Schmitt wrote, “not only knows birth, but the possibility
of rebirth” (8).What would it take, Schmitt asked, to overcome “mis-
ery and danger?” (8). On the one hand, “man” needs “clear-sighted”
objective analysis; on the other hand, he needs to “make a decision to
begin a new form of historical being” and to “act on his own” (8).
KATECHON 307

We know that it was not uncommon among Nazis to strike this kind
of heroic pose. Karl Haushofer, a political geographer and student of
Ratzel’s, invented one of the more dramatic scenarios in his 1934
Weltpolitik von heute (World Politics of Today), a manual of impe-
rial politics. The ability to imagine one’s own place “in a large space”
(which Haushofer thought the Romans had mastered so well) had to
be practiced.67 Once a month, every German ought to imagine her
exact position within a global world—while keeping her eye on Ger-
many’s long-term geopolitical goals.68 The Third Reich’s “struggle for
existence” required all Germans to have a “clear overview over the
events of world politics” and to keep “immediate and long-term goals”
in sight at all times (Haushofer 259, 257). Haushofer’s reflections pre-
dictably included an astonishingly melodramatic ruin-gazer scenario:
Germans, he proclaimed, had no choice but to face up to the “deadly
abyss” of world politics (260). Quoting Horace—“Si fractus illabatur
orbis/impavidum ferient ruinae”—Haushofer promised that his “world-
political self-education” would allow Germans to perish “knowingly”
(259).69 Not all Germans, however, would reach such an “elevated
point of view” (257). That elevated point of view, Haushofer wrote,
required men of action.
In this grandiose conclusion to his Weltpolitik, Haushofer, an avid
reader of Spengler, turned the latter’s heroic nihilism into fascist deci-
sionism. Schmitt’s conclusion to Land und Meer , published eight years
later in 1942, does not sound all that different. Using the Spenglerian
trope of the fear of the void and the “Faustian” desire to overcome in-
finite space, Schmitt promised that a new world would arise out of the
ruins of the old (based on the control of the heavens rather than land
or sea). Schmitt let his readers hope that Germany might become the
empire leading this new nomos, with the air force as its “Raumwaffe,”
or “space weapon” (Land 74).70
The authorship that Schmitt created in Land und Meer seems to ce-
ment this reading, because it extends the raum-revolutionary analogy
between the Spanish-Portuguese and German Landnahmen. Schmitt
framed the text as a story about the “Jewish myth” of Leviathan and Be-
hemoth that he told to his daughter, Anima, adding: “This is how Jews
interpret world history” (Land 10). Readers did not find it too hard to
decipher Schmitt’s parable in 1942: Leviathan was Great Britain, the
country that had made the “decision for the . . . sea” in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries (13, 26). Behemoth stood for Germany,
the land-based continental power. According to Schmitt, “the Jews”
308 HELL

thought of themselves as the detached observers of this mythical battle

(10). Schmitt singled out Isaak Abravanel, who lived “in the era of the
great discoveries” (11), as the most likely author of the tale. As trea-
surer to the Portuguese and then the Castilian king, Abravanel, Schmitt
added, knew “the world . . . and knew what he was talking about” (11).
Schmitt implied that he, too, occupied a position close to power at a
time of imperial Landnahmen, and therefore knew what he was talking
about, like his Portuguese predecessor.71 By setting up his world history
as an alternative story to the Jewish-cabbalistic tale of Abravanel, the
voice that Schmitt invented in this text is the voice of the non-Jewish
imperial world historian (Land 10).72 “This is how Non-Jews interpret
world history”—such could be the epigraph of Land und Meer .73
But does Schmitt’s concluding passage really tell this revolutionary
decisionist story? Or is this a story about katechontic power? It is pos-
sible to read Schmitt’s passage (“Many see in the end of the old nomos
only death and destruction. Some people think they are experiencing
the end of the world”) as a paraphrase of Paul’s story of the Thessalo-
nians’ mistaken expectation of the end. Moreover, we could read this
paraphrase as an invitation to recall Schmitt’s earlier discussion of the
Byzantine empire as katechon and add Tertullian’s story of katechontic
empires preventing their own end. If we do so, we are dealing with a
text analyzing the Third Reich as an empire and acting under the kat-
echontic law to postpone its own end. And, I would add, we are also
dealing with an imperial theorist who writes with his eyes on the empire
in ruins.
This is the gaze of the katechontic imperial theorist who knows that
all empires will eventually come to an end. Let us not forget that in 1941
Schmitt was confronted with the most vivid scenes of imperial ruin when
he read Melville’s novella. In this story about the encounter of two em-
pires, one falling and the other rising, Melville portrayed the Castilian
ship as ruin, a “relic of faded grandeur” (7) that still carried signs of a
once-powerful empire. The text’s evocative visualization of this imperial
end in ruins must have struck Schmitt with some force. The decaying
Spanish-Portuguese ship—once a “very fine vessel,” which “still, under
the decline of masters, preserved signs of former state” (6)—is seen
through the eyes of Delano, the “blunt-thinking” (22) American cap-
tain, turning him into the archetypical ruin gazer. As the ship appears
on the horizon, Delano takes note of its decayed state: the ship’s tops
are “in sad disrepair,” hanging “overhead like three ruinous aviaries. . .
battered and moldy” (7); to Delano “the castellated forecastle” looks
KATECHON 309

like “some ancient turret, long ago taken by assault and then left to
decay” (7). The quarter galleries’ balustrades are overgrown with “sea-
moss” (7). The Castilian code of arms has been supplemented by a
“rudely painted” inscription reading: “‘Seguid vuestro jefe’“ (“Follow
your leader”) (8).
So how should we read Schmitt’s concluding passage? While
Schmitt’s anti-Abravanelian authorship supports the heroic read-
ing, equating two imperial beginnings—the Spanish-Portuguese and
German Landnahmen—the connection to the Spanish-Portuguese
Empire simultaneously directs our attention to a katechontic scenario
announcing the end in ruins. These two different readings are not al-
ternatives; they signal a basic tension in the text. Schmitt was either
unaware of this tension, or more likely, he maintained it deliberately.
As he did so often, Schmitt was hedging his bets.

CONCLUSION: “FORGET ABOUT THE PAST. THE END HAS JUST

BEGUN” (TERMINATOR SALVATION 2009)

What is left much less vague is the authorial position that Schmitt
constructed in his text. At the end of Land und Meer , Schmitt’s author-
ship soars to Ciceronian heights: the vantagepoint from which the world
historian writes the concluding passage is literally “air-based,” akin to
the imperial perspective of “Scipio’s Dream.” This vantagepoint sig-
naled the detached world historian’s gaze down on the empire he once
helped to theorize—a deliberate strategic gesture on Schmitt’s part,
and one that would provide the foundation for his work after 1945. (Re-
call Schmitt’s excitement about Nomos arriving in time for the struggle
over world hegemony). In other words, Schmitt was getting ready to
position himself as the katechontic theorist not of Reich or Grossraum
but of nomos—a theorist still animated by the same conservative revo-
lutionary spirit he so admired in the Spanish-Portuguese conquistadors
and their successors, Salazar and Franco.74
Against the background of recent scholarship that reads the kate-
chon as a symptom of the theological foundations of Schmitt’s cri-
tique of secular modernity, I began this article arguing that Schmitt’s
concept of the katechon needs a deeper genealogy. Most of his crit-
ics locate Schmitt in the context of the conservative revolution with
its political-cultural critique of modernity and hopes for a new Re-
ich. However, Schmitt’s concepts of Reich, Grossraum, and nomos
310 HELL

represent attempts to theorize empire beyond the narrow, domestic

notion of Reich. Furthermore, the discursive formation that we call the
conservative revolution had a strong imperial dimension that we miss if
we keep working with the narrow concept of Reich that informs existing
scholarship.75 Like Schmitt, Spengler, one of the founders of the con-
servative revolution, was a theorist of empire.76
The katechon is symptomatic of Schmitt’s engagement with this
wider context of European imperial thought and its imperial imaginary
as Seh- and Zeitraum. More than that, the katechontic scenario repre-
sents a radical reconceptualization of the imperial imaginary, forcing
into the foreground the knowledge that drives all ruin-gazer scenar-
ios: that time is running out. Contemplating the end of the British and
then German Empires, Schmitt began to theorize the time of the im-
perial imaginary as the time of the exception. Situated in the nomotic
Zwischen-Zeit, that is, the space of time between imperial beginnings
and imperial endings, the katechon acts when the end of times is near.
All previous ruin-gazer scenarios visualized the time of empires as lim-
ited, but Schmitt intensified this temporal imagination into the apoc-
alyptic urgency of the katechon.77 Far from having abandoned de-
cisionism in favor of Ordnungsdenken, Schmitt reconceptualized the
decisionist act as central to his katechontic theory of empire. In 1934,
at the very moment when Schmitt supposedly renounced decisionism,
he wrote that in Hobbes the logical structure of decisionism becomes
most apparent because “pure decisionism presupposes disorder”; for
order to be restored, “it is not important what is decided but only that
a decision is made.”78 The katechon is the restrainer—alert and always
ready to act.
This decisionist katechon is Schmitt’s post-Spenglerian response
to the ruin scenarios of the conservative revolution’s first imperial
thinker.79 As the imperial sovereign who acts with an eye toward the
end (or more precisely, who strategically prepares for the final battle
that will bring about the end, thus postponing it by stabilizing worldly
affairs for the time being), the katechon is Schmitt’s response to the
urgent question that has haunted all post-Roman empires: when (and
how) to act in order to prevent imperial decline. Hans Freyer, author of
Revolution von rechts (1931; “Revolution from the Right”), theorist of
Reich and Volk, and a close friend of Schmitt, summarized this post-
Spenglerian politics of empire once more in the spring of 1945: “Decline
always happens if it is not warded off by action” (Weltgeschichte 45).80
KATECHON 311

To conclude, we are not dealing with a theological politics, or a theory

of empire based on a katechontic theology of history, but instead with
an imperial theology with a strong decisionist thrust. Let me briefly re-
turn to the discussion of decisionism and the question of its theological
foundations. Mehring reads Schmitt’s wartime essays and Land und
Meer as pivotal texts in which Schmitt’s political theology turned into
a theology of history (Mehring, “Karl” 234).81 The reason for this shift
is twofold: first, confronted with the coming defeat of the Third Reich,
Schmitt abandoned the concept of Reich, turning to world-historical
reflections and raising the question of the katechon. Under these con-
ditions, Schmitt was no longer able to identify the katechontic function
of restrainer with any real, existing political order. Second, Mehring de-
fines theology of history as grounded in the idea that the katechon con-
ceives of the end as “historically meaningful” (Mehring, “Karl” 234).
In contrast, I have proposed that we understand Schmitt’s katechon as
a reconceptualization of the trope of imperial decline, a reconceptual-
ization that does not require the idea of a meaningful ending—merely
the understanding that empires do eventually come to an end.82 What
it does require is a decisionist concept of sovereignty, that is, the kate-
chon. Imperial legitimacy is founded on the power to delay the empire’s
end. In sum, we are not dealing with a theological politics of empire that
has eschatology as its very substance, but a form of imperial theology,
that is, a politics of empire that feeds on the remnants of eschatological
history and their abandoned meanings.
University of Michigan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank George Steinmentz, Andreas Gailus, and Johannes von
Moltke for their comments on an earlier version of the article.

NOTES

1. That is, when critics ask whether Schmitt proposes a structural analogy
between political and theological concepts or whether the concepts’ theologi-
cal shadow functions as their foundation, they inevitably arrive at a discussion
of the katechon and its theological genealogy. Hans Blumenberg, for instance,
312 HELL

confronted Schmitt with his own exegesis of Paul’s second letter to the Thes-
salonians, the very source of the concept. See Blumenberg’s letter to Schmitt
qtd. in Linder 401.
2. “[D]ie Macht, die verhindert, daß das längst fällige apokalyptische Ende
der Zeiten jetzt schon eintrat.”
3. I will work with the 1942 version of the text; therefore, all translations of it
are mine. The 1997 English version Land and Sea: World-Historical Reflections,
trans. and with a foreword by Simona Draghici (Washington, DC: Plutarch,
1997) is based on Schmitt’s revised 1954 version.
4. Scholarship on Schmitt and empire is vast and ranges from a left-
wing perspective (see, for instance, William Rasch; Chantal Mouffe; Fredric
Jameson) to the critique of this literature (Carl Melchers) to the paranoid pre-
diction that the next (postmodern) nomos will be Al Qaeda’s (La Grange). For
a useful discussion of Grossraum and empire, see Jan-Werner Müller and the
essays by Oliver Eberl and Reinhard Mehring in Voigt. Scholars of empire tend
to dismiss Schmitt’s concept of the katechon as marginal to his theory. Yet, if
we ignore the katechon, we miss the fact that Schmitt is an imperial thinker
who theorizes empire as the inextricable articulation of beginning and end. One
of the exceptions is Fletcher, who argues that political theology is characteristic
of all empires. Kalyvas addresses the topic of new beginnings in Schmitt in an
astonishingly facile manner. Dismissing scholarship that locates Schmitt in the
context of the conservative revolution, Kalyvas’s discussion of the foundations
of those new beginnings in the name of the people never thoroughly explores
what the concept of “the people” means in Schmitt.
5. This article is, thus, less concerned with Schmitt’s theory of empire than
his conceptualization of the imperial imaginary.
6. On the background of the interrogations, see Bendersky.
7. Jünger reported the conversation in Strahlungen I 265. Having taken
over the ship, the mutinous slaves forced Cereno to act the part of sovereign
commander when they encountered an American merchant ship. See also
Schmitt on Cereno in Ex Captivitate 21–22.
8. Scholars such as Jacob Taubes, Joseph W. Bendersky, George Schwab,
and Helmut Quaritsch argue that Schmitt became increasingly disillusioned
with the Nazi leadership. I agree with Meuter’s critique of their reading of
Schmitt’s supposed silence. Their apology is based on the premise that Schmitt
was a convinced Hobbesian committed to the idea that protection demanded
subjection. Meuter argues that the silence of Schmitt after 1936 is pure myth
and devalues the Hobbesian argument. There was no progressive distantiation
on Schmitt’s part, but rather, “Abwendung des Nationalsozialismus von ihm”
(Meuter 246, 245). (See his summary of Schmitt’s “verbale Ausschreitun-
gen” after 1933, that is, Schmitt’s justification of the Röhm-Putsch, his anti-
Semitic remarks in “Die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft im Kampf gegen den
jüdischen Geist”—especially Schmitt’s infamous sentence: “Indem ich mich
des Juden erwehre, kämpfe ich für das Werk des Herrn” (qtd. in Meuter
246)—and his attacks against emigrants (246). Meuter writes, and here I agree
with him, that Nachgeborene could comprehend Schmitt’s accommodation in
silence (“[es] ware gar zu billig . . . einen Mann zu richten, der nicht den Mut
KATECHON 313

aufbrachte, sich für andere totschlagen zu lassen,” 247) had Schmitt remained
silent (and had he worked out a convincing theory of the right to resist). Meuter
also rejects the apology that Schmitt’s anti-Semitic attacks and expressions
of loyality were “Konvertiten-Bekenntnisse” (246). Gross has made this point
in great detail more recently. What Meuter wants to achieve with his denial
of Schmitt’s eventual distance from the National Socialist regime is to move
Schmitt scholarship away from the trajectory of Schmitt’s National Socialist
history established by Taubes: “adulation, ‘decipere’/deceive, and finally dis-
tanciation” (244). This story is, I agree, the result of Schmitt’s own postwar
mythology.
9. The essays are “Beschleuniger wider Willen, oder: Problematik der
westlichen Hemisphare” (“Accelerator Despite Itself, or The Problematic of
the Western Hemisphere”), originally published in Das Reich in April 1942;
“Die Raumrevolution: durch den totalen Krieg zu einem totalen Frieden” (“The
Spatial Revolution: Through Total War to a Total Peace”), originally published
in Das Reich in Sept. 1940; and “Raumrevolution: vom Geist des Abendlan-
des” (“Spatial Revolution: About the Spirit of the Occident”). Unless otherwise
noted, all translations are mine.
10. All translations are mine. “Es gibt noch eine andere, höhere
Notwendigkeit für uns Christen, für die Kaiser zu beten, ebenso für den festen
Bestand des Reiches und die römischen Dinge: wir wissen, daß die gewaltige
Katastrophe, die dem Erdkreis droht, ja daß das Ende der Welt, das entset-
zliche Drangsale heraufbeschwört, nur durch die Frist aufgehalten (!) wird, die
dem Imperium Romanum gewährt ist. Daher wollen wir dies nicht auf die Probe
stellen, und indem wir um Aufschub beten, förden wir die Dauer Roms” (Ter-
tullian qtd. in Bertold 288). See also Blindow on the katechon exegesis from
Paul and Tertullian to the conservative religious authors of the Weimar Republic
(144–60) and the extensive footnote on the theological origin of the katechon
in Meuter 255. Rasch reads Paul’s letter with respect to the problem of “our con-
temporary Roman Empire—the United States” and universalism (Sovereignty
129).
11. Koenen correctly points to the conservative revolution’s debt to Oswald
Spengler’s lament about the decline of the Abendland (42).
12. Koenen argues that as a Catholic, Schmitt’s loyalties lay with those
committed to saving the Christian Abendland, not the Nazis. See his chapter
on the “kaiertreuen Ghibelline,” esp. 577–98.
13. The katechon appears in Schmitt’s writings in the winter of 1941–42,
when Schmitt turns from an offensive politics of Grossraum to a defensive
stance once the Wehrmacht runs into its first difficulties on the eastern front
(Gross 2007, 295). The concept was already part of Schmitt’s idea of Reich
and its connection to an “eschatological tradition” that comprehends Reich as
katechon. (Gross 294). In 1942 the katechon becomes the conservative in-
stance acting as “Aufhalter,” or delayer, against the allies, whom Schmitt char-
acterized as liberal-capitalist “accelerators” (Gross 296). The katechon cannot
be separated from its counterfigure, the Antichrist. Pointing to Schmitt’s view of
modernity as secularization (as depolitization and its ever-increasing “acceler-
ation,” Gross 314) and to Schmitt’s friend-enemy constellation, Gross argues
314 HELL

that the katechon is in its very essence an anti-Semitic construct based on a

Christian “view of history”: it is the figure of the assimilated Jew as the internal
enemy—the enemy as the other, not the stranger, and as the “accelerator,”
with whom Schmitt’s katechon, the “Aufhalter,” is locked in struggle (on the
enemy as other, see Gross 305ff.). The katechon’s office is, thus, as much to
unmask the internal enemy—the “invisible” assimilated Jew—as it is to com-
bat him (Gross 288–89; see Gross on Schmitt’s myth of the struggle between
Leviathan and Behemoth in Land und Meer ).
14. “Ordnungsdenken” is thinking committed to the maintenance of (po-
litical) order. In Pathetisches Denken (1989), Reinhard Mehring had already
introduced the concept of theology of history in his discussion of Schmitt’s
attempt to counter Marxist-Hegelian philosophies of history with his “political-
theological double perspective” (213).
15. Like Hitler, Groh writes, Schmitt lent Rosenberg’s naturalist myth of race
“the metaphysical aura of traditional Christian anti-Judaism” (110).
16. Groh argues that Schmitt never abandoned decisionism. She elabo-
rates on Meuter’s previous reflections on the “entanglement of decisionism
and Order-Thinking” (Groh 221). In his preface to the 1934 edition of Politis-
che Theologie, Schmitt had announced his transformation from decisionist to
institutional thinker invested in a politics of order, not in a decisionist rupture
outside of law. Decisionism, he wrote, missed “the stable, essential being inher-
ent in every great political movement” (qtd. in Groh 218). Groh demonstrates
how Schmitt’s völkisch-national myth (a revision of Georges Sorel’s myth of
class struggle) captures “the stable, essential being” of the Nazi movement,
providing the new sovereign’s decisionist measures (and what Schmitt now
called “konkrete Ordnung,” or “concrete order” [Groh 22]) with a metaphysi-
cal foundation—that is, with the articulation of nation/Volk (or “Artgleichheit,”
“species similarity,” as Schmitt put it in his 1933 essay “Staat, Bewegung,
Volk” (qtd. in Groh 218), which, Groh argues, was compatible with the Nazis’
myth of race (Groh 104–10). The public conversion of the decisionist is only a
“seeming transcendence” of decisionism (Groh 221). Groh’s analysis is based
on the premise that the katechon as sign of a theology of history is (1) present
in Schmitt’s theory from the very beginning and (2) re-articulated with different
myths: Thus, after the Nazis’ seizure of power, Schmitt replaced the national
myth, or the “substantive theology” of his katechontic theology of history, with
the new state’s “concrete order” (Groh 222) sustained by the new myth of
Artgleichheit.
17. On the topic of Marcion theology, see Schmitt’s entry in Glossar-
ium: “Was in der Welt ist, ist des Teufels” (172, “Everything in the world
is the devil’s”) and 291. Like Koenen, Hohendahl traces a return to theol-
ogy in Schmitt’s work after 1945. These critics all emphasize the continu-
ity of Schmitt’s thinking (regarding religious aspects, decisionism, and anti-
Semitism). Müller reads the increasing importance of the katechon as part of
Schmitt’s “flight into religion” (46), which as I will argue tells only part of the
story. Müller reads Schmitt’s lecture on Grossraum as a contribution to the Nazi
empire, but then drops the imperial lens.
KATECHON 315

18. All translations of Glossarium are mine. Much of this text is inspired
by Karl Löwith’s book Geschichte und Heilsgeschichte (“Meaning in History”),
1949. See Schmitt’s 1950 review, in which he asked “whether eschatological
belief and historical consciousness are compatible” (“Drei Stufen” 930).
19. Two questions are at stake in these debates: (1) the theological dimen-
sion of Schmitt’s critique of modernity (and of his philosophy of history) and
(2) his particular reading of the katechon. In a series of texts (ranging from his
reactionary cultural critique of modernity Theodor Däubler’s Nordlicht to Be-
griff des Politischen and Politische Theologie, in the 1920s to “Das Zeitalter der
Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen” (1929) and “Neutralität und Neutral-
isierungen” (1939), Schmitt focused on the analysis of postreligious modernity
(emphasizing secularization resulting in the lack of political legitimacy) and on
the critique of liberal-capitalist modernity (emphasizing the neutralization of
the political by the privileging of an economic logic). Schmitt countered these
tendencies by re-articulating politics with theology. The question, then, is the
nature of this articulation. Debates about Politische Theologie clarify what is at
stake: deeply ambiguous, the text can be read as arguing the need for theolog-
ical groundings or as a “mere” diagnosis of the divorce of the theo-symbolic
from the political. Concentrating on Politische Theologie (I and II) and singling
out Schmitt’s concept of the katechon, Hans Blumenberg arrived at the con-
clusion that Schmitt advocated a theological politics, not a political theology.
As I mentioned earlier, Schmitt had posed the question “whether eschatologi-
cal faith is compatible with historical consciousness.” Blumenberg denied this
“simultaneity of history and eschatology,” reading the katechon as a “inverting
of the eschatological promise into the promise of the delay of the eschata,”
that is, as a primarily political, not theological, concept (Blumenberg qtd. in
Linder 401). Groh touches on the same issue when she identifies a paradox
in Schmitt’s Tertullian concept of the katechon. “Schmitt’s intellectual prede-
cessor” (214) had appealed to Christians to pray for the anti-Christian state,
because it was the guarantor of order. That is, identifying katechon and the
Roman Empire like Paul, he argued against the idea of an imminent end of
time and for a politics in the service of the church. Schmitt then concurred:
the “expectation of the imminent end” robs history of its meaning and pro-
duces “eschatological paralysis” (Schmitt qtd. in Groh 215). Theological poli-
tics, politics of the Church, is what matters. Schmitt’s political theology, Groh
writes, calls the attention to the “decisive final battle” against the Antichrist,
and thus, results in a paradox: the political-theological myth of the katechon
“de-eschatologizes” earthly time, “postponing the parousia and thereby length-
ening it”; at the same time, this de-eschatolization of earthly time happens in an
eschatological perspective, because the “period of earthly existence will come
to an end when Jesus returns” (215). This paradox, Groh writes, is summed
up in Schmitt’s letter to Pierre Linn in 1939: “The world will not be all right
until Christ returns” (Groh 216). And yet, establishing order in this world is
all that politics is about. Although it seems indisputable that the theological
foundation of Schmitt’s politics and political theory are strong, the question
remains whether they were so at all times. For instance, does the absence of
theological themes in 1933–45 mean that Schmitt was acting strategically or
316 HELL

that theology faded into the background? As we have seen, Groh and Gross,
for instance, argue for the continuity of theological foundations. Hohendahl
for instance presents Politische Theologie and Politische Theologie II as polar
opposites with the former advancing a secularized concept of politics and the
latter a return to theology (24). This means a return to Schmitt’s essay on
Nordlicht, where he wrote, “They wanted heaven on earth, heaven as the result
of commerce and industry . . . They did not want a God of love and grace. They
had ‘made’ so much astonishing stuff, so why shouldn’t they also try to ‘make’
heaven on earth? After all, the most important and last things had already
been secularized. Law had become power; loyalty had become calculability
. . . earth seems to have become a creaking machine.” In this text, Schmitt
used Däubler’s concept of Antichrist: “The Antichrist appears . . . and changes
the face of the earth and exploits nature . . . for the satisfaction of all artificial
needs and for comfort . . . this is the dawning of the age of security” (Theodor
66). This early manifesto of radical Kulturkritik thus thematized what Schmitt
called so disdainfully modernity’s “Leib-haftigheit” (“corporeality”) in Politis-
che Theologie. Weigel points to the profound oscillation between the political
and theological in Politische Theologie II as well as in Schmitt’s work as a whole
(101). It is this oscillation at the core of Schmitt’s thought that makes the topic
so tricky. See also the essay by Weineck.
20. Although Koenen traces Schmitt’s Reichstheologie (using Erik Peterson’s
1933 critique of Schmitt’s political theology, Der Monotheismus als politisches
Problem: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Theologie im Imperium
Romanum) to the connection between Roman imperium and eschatology,
he remains committed to the narrow domestic notion of German Reich. See
Koenen 578–79.
21. Besides Tertullian, Schmitt celebrated Eusebius of Caesarea, “panegyrist
of Constantine and glorifier of the Roman Empire” (Politische Theologie II 81,
63). Countering Peterson’s 1934 attack (which compared Schmitt to Eusebius,
calling him Hitler’s court theologian), Schmitt revalorized Eusebius’s political
theology for having praised Augustus’s attempts to overcome civil war and
establish a reign of peace (Schmitt, Politische Theologie II 63–64). Schmitt
summarizes Peterson’s main point in Politische Theologie II , 12–22.
22. In Nomos, Ulmen translates Landnahme as “land-appropriation;” the
literal meaning is the taking of land, but I prefer to use “land seizure.”
23. See Schmitt’s discussion of the “loyality-religion of the time of the emper-
ors” and Virgil’s contribution to Augustus’s restoration of “Italian-pagan piety”
in Politische Theologie II 40. Imperial continuity—or successful mimesis—has
more to do with “concrete territorialization in Rome” than norms or general
ideas (Nomos 29).
24. See Schmitt, Die Diktatur 5.
25. This involved the work of classicists like Joseph Vogt who wrote about
the Roman Empire and acts of imperial mimesis such as Hitler’s journey to
Rome in 1938. On this topic, see my “Imperial Ruin Gazers.” (Schmitt himself
traveled to Rome, proudly reporting his conversations with Mussolini about
Hegel.) Faber collapses Schmitt’s “Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” too
quickly into an imperial mimesis of Rome (174–75).
KATECHON 317

26. “[D]aß es kein ewiges Reich ist, sondern sein eigenes Ende und das Ende
des gegenwärtigen Aeon im Auge behält und trotzdem einer geschichtlichen
Macht fähig ist” (Der Nomos 29).
27. On the conquistadors’ Marian theology, see Der Nomos 69–96.
28. Joseph Vogt, one of the Third Reich’s preeminent classicists and a friend
of Schmitt’s, studied the Romans’ “Verfallsidee” or “idea of decline” (Vom Re-
ichsgedanken 28) and faulted Roman conceptions of history for the empire’s
decline. The idea of cycles led to stasis, not bold political acts (73) amounting
to a “Flucht aus der Geschichte” (“escape from history”)] (73).
29. According to Polybius, decay rules the sequence and each form of “con-
stitution” because each form “possesses its own inherent . . . vice” (310).
Thus, each constitution will degenerate “into the debased form of itself”
(310).
30. I will discuss Cicero’s critical gaze at postrepublican Rome, “The Dream
of Scipio,” later. Münkler discusses cyclical theories (136–39).
31. Montesquieu drew parallels between Roman decadence and the deca-
dence of the French court using Polybius’s ideas about the seeds of decay at
the heart of any monarchy.
32. See Gibbon’s coda to his third volume, “General Observations on the
Fall of the Roman Empire in the West” (508–16).
33. I will use the German edition of Der Untergang; all translations are mine.
I adhere to the English translation by using “culture(s)” for Kulturkreis and
“Culture” for Kultur .
34. On Macaulay’s ruin gazer, see my “Anselm.”
35. The Maori is both the subject of the look and an object in the field of
vision. The onlooker desires the gaze, which constitutes this doubled act of
looking inscribed into the scene: looking with the subject and looking at the
subject looking.
36. See my “Imperial.”
37. Hitler, in Jochmann, Monologe 173. Distancing himself from Himmler’s
idealization of the German tribes and their resistance against the Romans, Hitler
located the Nazis on the side of the colonizers, not the colonized. It is in this
context that Hitler’s labored analogy of Poles and Maori appears. In 1941, he
explained, “For Romans, being stationed in Germany was like being stationed
in Poland is for us Germans” (Monologe 173). He dismissively compared the
Germanic tribes’ resistance against the Romans to the Maori’s struggle against
the British Empire. The tribes were at the time as uncultured as he believed
the Maori were—and by implication as the Poles were. “Sie waren auf keiner
höeheren Kulturstufe wie (heute) die ‘Maori’ (Neuseeländer, Negerstamm)”
(173). Monologe 62, 63.
38. See also Gross 305.
39. The friend-enemy constellation reaches its highest intensity in war. Since
the enemy is someone who “intends to negate his opponent’s way of life,” he
“must be repulsed or fought” (Concept 27).
40. More precisely, assimilated Jews. See Gross and Müller on Schmitt’s
language of masks, veiling, and unveiling.
318 HELL

41. Schmitt acknowledged his debt to Friedrich Naumann, geopoliticians

(Friedrich Ratzel, Karl and Albrecht Haushofer), and two of the SS’s leading
theorists of Grossraum, the jurist Reinhard Höhn and Werner Best (also a legal
scholar and police chief), who were responsible for his marginalization in 1936,
when Schmitt resigned from all university posts but was protected by Hermann
Göring and Hans Frank (Noack 197).
42. This recourse to the Nazis’ discourse on völkisch-ness was not another
instance of mere “Mimicry” (Noack 208), but as Groh argues a displacement
from the concept of nation (that anchored his (decisionist) politics in the twen-
ties) to that of volk (104–14). What Schmitt had to say about the myth of
the nation that was born in World War I he could have said about volk in
1939: “Great enthusiasm, great moral decisions, and great myth are born from
the depth of true life instincts, not from raisonnement or utilitarian consider-
ations. Drawing on the unmediated powers of intuition, an enthusiastic mass
creates the mythic image that propels it forward and gives it the power to
become a martry and the courage to use violence”(from Schmitt, “Die geistes-
geschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus,” qtd. in Maschke 219).
On Schmitt’s reception of Sorel’s concept of political myth, see also Maschke
218; Breuer 37. On Nietzsche, Spengler and Sorel as influences on the con-
servative revolution (and Schmitt as “clerico-fascist”), see Wolin 430–35 and
437.
43. Schmitt’s example, in a quick aside justifying Italian colonialism, was
Abyssinia (“Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung” 303).
44. See Faber 175 on the hard core of Schmitt’s “organicist fog,” the imperial
law formulated in Virgil’s Aeneid to subject others to the empire’s rule.
45. The Völker within the borders of this new Reich would exchange subjec-
tion for protection, or “Schutzrecht,” and the guarantee of cultural and völkisch
autonomy (Schmitt, Grossraumordnung 294). Schmitt had spelled this out
when discussing dictatorship, whose function consisted in protecting the im-
perium. See Schmitt, Die Diktatur . Vogt made this point in his essays on the
Roman Empire.
46. On the Monroe Doctrine, see 297–98. In 1951, Schmitt published reflec-
tions on “Raum und Rom.”
47. “Raumbewältigung [ist] das Merkmal allen Lebens.” This is a lineage
that includes, among many others, theorists like M. A. de Gobineau (who in his
Essai sur l’inegalite des races humaines (1853) theorized the “chute des civili-
sations” (1), most prominently Rome; Ludwig Gumplowicz, Der Rassenkampf:
Soziologische Untersuchungen (Innsbruck, 1883), and Spengler’s Der Unter-
gang des Abendlandes (1918 and 1921), whose concept of race permanently
oscillates between culture and biology.
48. Daitz did congratulate Schmitt on his lecture (Blindow 66). Blindow
provides an excellent genealogy regarding geopolitics and “idea of Central
Europe” (62ff.). Stefan Breuer presents the more outlandish imperial projects
of thinkers associated with the conservative revolution (whom he aptly calls
“Spiesser in Lowenhäuten” (“petty bourgeois in war paint”), Breuer 115). In
particular, see Wilhelm Stapel’s ideas about an “Imperium Teutonicum” in the
East with Germany as “imperial Volk” (Breuer 110).
KATECHON 319

49. Schmitt was not in favor of the “war of annihilation” in the east that the
Nazis conducted after 1941 (Mehring, “‘Raumrevolution’“108).
50. Faber wrongly eliminates the distance between Schmitt and the racial
theorists of Grossraum. See Faber 175.
51. It is the section on the mass murder of Jews that has attracted the
attention of historians and literary scholars. See LaCapra’s discussion of the
section as expressing a concept of the “negative sublime” (27ff.).
52. While Best defines “Grossraum as part of spatial ordering defined by
“völkisch-organic worldview,” quoting Fichte, it quickly becomes obvious that
this is a biological reading of völkisch; there are “racially and culturally foreign
Völker ” (45).
53. See also the introduction to Planung und Aufbau im Osten, in which SS-
Oberführer Konrad Meyer expressed the hope that “a rational general plan will
emerge from the many different plans.” Although some “clarification” had been
achieved regarding this plan to Germanize the “reconquered East,” the plans
contained in the document should absolutely not be understood as “something
finished” (n.p.). There is now a vast literature on the Generalplan Ost and Os-
tforschung. See Gutenberger for a thorough account.See also Mazower; and
essays by George Steinmetz; Kundrus; Eley; and Lower in Eley. On the cen-
trality of native policy to colonial/imperial projects, see Steinmetz, The Devil’s.
54. Schmitt, “Raum und Rom” 492.
55. In this essay he treated nomos as “an act of seizing land that founds
a new order, as an act of seizing, distributing, and exploiting.” He followed
the etymology back to the Book of Daniel with its story about the four great
empires of the world.
56. That is, the space where all Roman ancestors dwell.
57. This is but one strand that feeds into this construction of the theorist’s
standpoint; Jakob Burckhardt’s perspective in The Civilization of the Renais-
sance in Italy (1860) is another. I would like to thank Helmut Puff for alerting
me to this parallel.
58. On the historical nature of Kant’s concepts, see Spengler, Der Untergang
31 and 219–22 in the chapter on the problem of space..
59. Schmitt, “Die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft im Kampf gegen den jüdis-
chen Geist” qtd. in Taubes 8. See also “The ‘Fourth’” 93.
60. In Germany, Schmitt claimed, attempts were already made to overcome
universalist ways of thinking about space in the nineteenth century. Schmitt
referred to Friedrich Ratzel, the author of Anthropogeographie (1882), who
understood that “[t]he conquest of space is the defining feature of all life”
(Grossraumordnung, 318).
61. Quoting Seneca’s prophesy (“Der heisse Indus und der kalte Araxes
berühren sich/Perser trinken aus Elbe und Rhein / Thetis wird neue Welten
(novos orbes) enthüllen / und Thule wird nicht mehr die äusserste Grenze der
Erde sein”), Schmitt provides what amounts to a definition of the imperial
imaginary, in which “Our chronology. . . truly marked the beginning of a new
era [and]was connected to the consciousness not only of the fullness of time
but also of the fullness of the planet and of the planetary horizon” (219). This
is an imaginary in which concepts of space and time are “filled” with imperial
320 HELL

meaning. In 1492, Schmitt reminded his readers, Seneca’s notion of novus

orbis was immediately applied to the “newly discovered America” (220).
62. In Spengler, this is a desire characteristic of Faustian Kultur; see Der
Untergang 227. This desire leads in the next stage, civilization, into expansion
without any boundaries. It is also a desire for faraway places—and for ruins
(328).
63. In Land und Meer , the formula is: “World history is a history of the
struggle of sea-based powers against land-based powers, and of land-based
powers against sea-based powers” (9).
64. See Goebbels’ Spenglerian speech calling for total war against
the Jewish-Bolshevist East in the name of the Abendland. For Schmitt,
Europe—”our old and sacred soil” (Müller 57)—constitutes the “substance”
between two orders lacking substance: “A plurality of concrete, meaningful
Greater Spaces faces the global unity of a planetary imperialism, be it capital-
ist or Bolshevist” (“Die letzte” 447).
65. Virgil begins with the story of the construction of Carthage; the city’s
destruction is a prophesy making the epic’s structure an anticipation of the
past.
66. Land und Meer is the story of sea-, land-, and air-based empires, or
nomoi, with a strong dose of technological determinism. It has been read as
Schmitt’s version of the communist manifesto. See Melchers.
67. Vogt, Vom Reichsgedanken 38.
68. See also 20ff. Translations are mine. Or, in Hitler’s words: “The German
has to acquire a sensibility for gigantic spaces” (Monologe 63).
69. Translation: “Even if the entire globe should crumble, the fragments will
hit him unafraid.”
70. This is, among other things, an allusion to the Nazi leadership’s hope
invested in new jet planes and bombers.
71. We find a similar structure in Nomos, in which Schmitt justifies the
Spanish-Portuguese Landnahme with the lectures of the Catholic theologian
Francisco de Vitoria. However, in this deeply identificatory reading, the Spanish
theorist stands for the humanism of the Christians (and their understanding of
the colonized as non-Christian others) whereas Renaissance humanists repre-
sent a secular position that results in the dehumanization of the other. Written
in the wake of the Holocaust, this represents a curious apology for Catholicism
and its treatment of the other by someone whose diaries after 1945 are replete
with anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic entries. See also Mehring on Schmitt’s idea
that racism is the endpoint of humanism (Mehring, Pathetisches 225).
72. Schmitt revised this passage in the 1951 edition, leaving out the “canni-
balistic” side of the story and adding a reference to Heinrich Heine. See Land
8.
73. The 500 anniversary of Abravanel was in 1937, which prompted a series
of articles, among them one by Leo Strauss. See Gross 276. While Gross un-
derstands Schmitt’s use of this historical figure as yet another sign of Schmitt’s
anti-Semitism, he thinks that it is a random choice lacking any greater sig-
nificance. Gross misses Abravanel’s significance because he does not discuss
Schmitt as a tinker of empire but of Reich in the narrower sense.
KATECHON 321

74. On Spain as Schmitt’s “politische Heimat” and his admiration for Franco
Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, see Mehring, “‘Raumrevolution’“ 112, and Müller
248.
75. Nebel, a friend of Jünger’s and Schmitt’s, published “Der weisse Mann
und die Tropen” (1941), in which he argued that colonizing Africa would save
the Abendland from decline. He believed contact with the warrior mentality
of black Africans would renew “genuine masterdom,” which civilization had
destroyed by constituting a “white mass” (140). The essay resonates strongly
with Spengler’s analysis in Jahre der Entscheidung (1933).
76. As we have seen, Schmitt was influenced by Spengler’s rethinking of
space, but their affinity goes deeper. The first example concerns Spengler’s
articulation of Kultur , politics, conquest, and Zivilisation, economics, and im-
perialism. Schmitt’s 1916 political-aesthetic manifesto on Nordlicht, revolves
around the same issues raised by Spengler’s critique of modernity as decayed
Kultur or liberal-capitalist Zivilisation. Schmitt’s conservative critique of sec-
ular modernity spans his entire oeuvre, ranging from this early manifesto to
his Nomos der Erde. In this history of empires, Schmitt portrays the Spanish-
Portuguese conquista in a Spenglerian vein as an age of conquest dominated
by the theopolitical logic of Kultur , not an era of imperialism (which Spengler
theorized as the endpoint of a Zivilisation dominated by the utilitarian logic of
economics). Schmitt admired “Spengler’s genius,” but criticized his Untergang
as metaphysical (Glossarium 126).
77. This is not an ontological argument about the nature of empires as states
of exception analogous to Agamben’s argument about modernity (in his State
of Exception); instead, it is an argument about the temporality of the imperial
imaginary.
78. Schmitt, “Über die drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens,”
qtd. in Groh 217.
79. More precisely, Schmitt rethought Spengler’s Caesarism as katechon.
Like many of his contemporaries, Schmitt was fascinated by Spengler’s (anti-
Semitic) critique of modernity and critical of his pessimism. Schmitt countered
Spengler’s iron morphological logic of history by emphasizing political action
(as decisionism, Raumrevolution, and the founding act of Landnahme). In
doing so, Schmitt worked on the tension between Spengler’s morphological
determinism and his political voluntarism, that is, the utterly nihilist celebration
of Caesarism. Spengler analyzed Caesarism as a symptom of civilizational
decay, yet advocated it as the last resort to postpone the Abendland’s decline,
whereas Schmitt invented the katechon. In contrast to the Caesarist dictator,
who represents a degenerate form of imperial sovereignty, Schmitt’s katechon
retains the possibility of culture’s genuine politics.
80. “Der Verfall kommt immer von selbst, wenn er nicht durch Taten abge-
fangen wird.” Freyer’s Weltgeschichte Europas contains a section on Reich
and church as “haltende Mächte” (379–401). According to Mehring, Schmitt
got the concept of katechon from Freyer (Mehring, Pathetisches 217). In 1934
Freyer stated that the belief in the power of new beginnings unifies the “genuine
revolutionary” and the “genuine conservative” (qtd. in Koenen 793).
322 HELL

81. In Pathetisches Denken, Mehring wrote about Schmitt’s transition from a

“ungeduldige zu einer erwartungsvollen Eschatologik,” thus, a transition from
political theology to a theology of history that involved Schmitt’s withdrawal
from politics (217). There was no withdrawal from politics. Similarly in “Raum-
revolution als Rechtsproblem” Mehring claims that Schmitt distanced himself
from the Third Reich and his own concept of Reich with Land und Meer in
1942 (109). Text and authorship are literary with Schmitt’s “moral” perspec-
tive grounded in the “authenticity of eye witness” (109 and 110). As I argued,
the text is much more ambivalent.
82. In this sense, the Third Reich kept functioning as katechon in Schmitt’s
writings during the Nazi period—however ambivalently.

WORKS CITED

Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception.Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 2005. Print.
Bendersky, Joseph W. “Carl Schmitt’s Path to Nuremberg: A Sixty-Year
Assessment.” Telos 139 (2007): 6–34. Print.
Bertold, Lutz. “Wer halt zur Zeit den Satan auf? Zur Selbstglossierung Carl
Schmitts.” Leviathan. Zeitschrift fur Sozialwissenschaft 21 (1993): 285–99.
Print.
Best, Werner. “Grundfragen einer deutschen Grossraum-Verwaltung.” Festgabe
für Heinrich Himmler. Darmstadt: L. S. Wittich Verlag, 1941. 33–60. Print.
Blindow, Felix. Carl Schmitts Reichsordnung: Strategie für einen europäischen
Grossraum. Berlin: Akademieverlag, 1997. Print.
Breuer, Stefan. Anatomie der konservativen Revolution. Darmstadt: Wis-
senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982. Print.
Cicero. The Republic and the Laws. Trans. Niall Rudd. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2008. Print.
Eley, Geoffrey Howard. “Empire by Land or Sea? Germany’s Imperial Imagi-
nary, 1840–1945.” German Cultures of Colonialism: Race, Nation, and Glob-
alization. Ed. Geoff Eley and Bradley Naranch. Durham: Duke UP, forthcom-
ing. Print.
Faber, Richard. Abendland, ein politischer Kampfbegriff. Berlin/Wien: PHILO,
2002. Print.
Fletcher, Paul. “The Political Theology of the Empire to Come.” Cambridge
Review of International Affairs 1.7 (2004): 49–61. Print.
Forster, Georg. Reise um die Welt. Ed. Gerhard Steiner. Frankfurt: Insel
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983. Print.
Freyer, Hans. Revolution von rechts. Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1931.
Print.
———. Weltgeschichte Europas. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1954.
Print.
Furber, David, and Wendy Lower. “Colonialism and Genocide in Nazi-Occupied
Poland.” Empire, Colony, and Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subal-
tern Resistance in World History. Ed. A. Dirk Moses. New York: Berghahn,
2009. 372–402. Print.
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Vol.
2. London: Penguin, 1994. Print.
KATECHON 323

Gobineau, M. Pr. de. Essai sur l’inequalité des races humaines. Paris: Firmin
Didot Frères, 1853.
Goebbels, Joseph. Rede über den totalen Krieg im Berliner Sportpalast vom
18.02.1943. <http://www.nationalsozialismus.de/dokumente/texte/joseph-
goebbels-rede-ueber-den-totalen-kreig-im-berliner-sportpalast-vom-18-02-
1943-volltext.html> Web. 11 Oct. 2009.
Groh, Ruth. Arbeit an der Heillosigkeit der Welt: Zur politisch-theologischen
Mythologie und Anthropologie Carl Schmitts. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1998. Print.
Gross, Raphael. Carl Schmitt and the Jews. The ‘Jewish Question,’ the Holo-
caust, and German Legal Theory. Trans. Joel Golb. Madison: U of Wisconsin
P, 2007. Print.
Gutenberger, Jörg. Volk, Raum, und Sozialstruktkur: Sozialstruktur und Sozial-
raumforschung im “Dritten Reich.” Munster: LIT Verlag, 1994. Print.
Haushofer, Karl. Weltpolitik von heute. Berlin: Zeitgeschichte Verlag, 1934.
Print.
Hell, Julia. “Anselm Kiefer’s Twin Towers and the Trope of Imperial Decline.”
The Germanic Review 84.1 (2009): 84–93. Print.
———. “Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why Did Scipio Weep?” Ruins of Moder-
nity.Ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schoenle. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.
Print.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit.
Wiesbaden: Fourier Verlag, 1985. Print.
Himmler, Heinrich. “Posener Rede vom 04.10.1943 (Volltext).” Na-
tionalsozialismus.de Literatur, Dokumente, Enzyklopädie. Nationalsozial-
ismus.de, 2009. Web. <http://www.nationalsozialismus.de/dokumente/
texte/heinrich-himmler-posener-rede-vom-04-10-1943-volltext.html>. Web.
11 Oct. 2009.
Hohendahl, Peter-Uwe. “Political Theology Revisited: Carl Schmitt’s Postwar
Reassessment.” Konturen, 1 (2008): 1–28.
Jochmann, Werner, ed. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941–1944. Die
Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims. Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 1980.
Print.
Jünger, Ernst. Strahlungen I. Samtliche Werke. Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Klett Verlag,
1979. Print.
Kalyvas, Andreas. Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber,
Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.
Koenen, Andreas. Der Fall Carl Schmitt. Sein Aufstieg zum “Kronjuristen
des Dritten Reiches.” Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995.
Print.
Kundrus, Birte. “Colonialism, Imperialism, National Socialism? How Imperial
was the Third Reich?” German Cultures of Colonialism: Race, Nation, and
Globalization. Ed. Geoff Eley and Bradley Naranch. Durham: Duke UP, forth-
coming. Print.
LaCapra, Dominick. “History and Memory: In the Shadow of the Holocaust.”
History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. 8–72. Print.
La Grange Klitsche, Teodoro de. “On the Postmodern Nomos.” Telos 125:
140–51. Print.
Linder, Christian. Der Bahnhof von Finnentrop: Eine Reise in Carl Schmitt Land.
Berlin: Matthes and Seitz, 2008. Print.
Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957. Print.
324 HELL

Maschke, Günter. “Die Zweideutigkeit der Entscheidung—Thomas Hobbes und

Juan Donoso Cortes im Werk Carl Schmitts.” Quartisch, Complexio Opposi-
torum 193–221. Print.
Mazower, Mark. Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Pen-
guin, 2008. Print.
Mehring, Reinhard. “Karl Löwith, Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes und das Ende der
Geschichte.” Zeitschrift fur Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 48.3 (1996):
231–48. Print.
———. Pathetisches Denken. Carl Schmitts Denkweg am Leitfaden Hegels:
Katholische Grundstellung und antimarxistische Hegelstrategie. Berlin:
Duncker and Humblot, 1989. Print.
———. “‘Raumrevolution’ als Rechtsproblem. Zum politischen Kontext und
Wandel von Carl Schmitts Grossraumdenken.” Grossraum-Denken. Carl
Schmitts Kategorie der Grossraumordnung. Ed. Rudiger Voigt. Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008. 99–118. Print.
Melchers, Carl. Carl Schmitt als ‘Imperialismustheoretiker’. Zur Renaissance der
Vorstellung von der imperialen Souveränität der vereinigten Staaten. Saar-
brucken: VDM Verlag Dr. Muller, 2008. Print.
Melville, Herman. Benito Cereno. Brooklyn: Melville, 2008. Print.
Meuter, Günter. Der Katechon: Zu Carl Schmitts fundamentalistischer Kritik der
Zeit. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1994. Print.
Montesquieu. Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Ro-
mains et de leur décadence. 1734. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968.
Print.
Müller, Jan-Werner. A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European
Thought. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Print.
Münkler, Herfried. Imperien: Die Logik der Weltherrschaft–vom Alten Rom bis
zu den Vereinigten Staaten. Berlin: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005. Print.
Nebel, Gerhard. “Der weisse Mann und die Tropen.” Neue Rundschau (1941):
132–41. Print.
Niethammer, Lutz. “Die polemische Anstrengung des Begriffs. Über die exem-
plarische Faszination Carl Schmitts.” Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwis-
senschaften. Vol. 2. Ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Otto Gerhard Oexle. Göttin-
gen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 2004. 41–82. Print.
Noack, Paul. Carl Schmitt. Eine Biographie. Berlin/Frankfurt: Propyläen Verlag,
1993. Print.
Norris, Andrew. “Carl Schmitt’s Political Metaphysics: On the Secularization of
‘the Outermost Sphere.’“ Theory & Event 4.1 (2000): 1–33.
Planung und Aufbau im Osten. Erläuterungen und Skizzen zum ländlichen
Aufbau in den neuen Ostgebieten. Berlin: Deutsche Landbuchhandlung,
1942. Print.
Polybius. The Rise of the Roman Empire. Trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert. Selected by
F. W. Walbank. London: Penguin, 1979. Print.
Quartisch, Helmut, ed. Complexio Oppositorum–Über Carl Schmitt. Berlin:
Dunckler and Humblot, 1988. 233–51. Print.
Rasch, William. Sovereignty and Its Discontents. London: Birkbeck Law Press,
2004.
Ratzel, Friedrich. Anthropogeographie. Stuttgart: Verlag Engelhorn, 1883.
Print.
Schmitt, Carl. Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und
drei Corollarien. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2002.
KATECHON 325

———. “Beschleuniger wider Willen, oder: Problematik der westlichen

Hemisphare.” 1942. Schmitt, Staat, Grossraum, Nomos 431–36.
Print.
———. The Concept of the Political. Trans. by George Schwab. New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP, 1976. Print.
———. Die Diktatur. Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitäts-
gedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf. Berlin: Duncker and Hum-
blot, 1994. Print.
———. “Die letzte globale Linie.” 1943. Schmitt, Staat, Grossraum, Nomos
441–48. Print.
———. “Drei Stufen historischer Sinngebung.” Universitas, 5 (1950): 927–31.
Print.
———. Ex Captivitate Salus. Erfahrungen der Zeıt 1945/47. Cologne: Greven
Verlag, 1947. Print.
———. “The ‘Fourth’ (Second) Interrogation of Carl Schmitt at Nuremberg.”
Telos 139 (2007): 35–43. Print.
———. Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951.Ed. Eberhard Frei-
herr von Medem. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1991. Print.
———. Land und Meer: Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung. Leipzig: Reclam
Verlag, 1942. Print.
———. “Neutralität und Neutralisierungen.” 1939. Positionen und Begriffe.
Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1994. 309–34. Print.
———. Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum.
Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1997. Print.
———. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Eu-
ropaeum. Trans. G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos, 2003. Print.
———. Political Theology: Four Chapters of the Concept of SovereigntyTrans.
George Schwab. Cambridge: MIT, 1988. Print.
———. Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder Politischen
Theologie. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1996. Print.
———. “Die Raumrevolution: durch den totalen Krieg zu einem totalen
Frieden.” 1940. Schmitt, Staat, Grossraum, Nomos 388–91. Print.
———. “Raumrevolution: vom Geist des Abendlandes.” Deutsche Kolo-
nialzeitung 12 (1942): 219–21. Print.
———. “Raum und Rom–Zur Phonetik des Wortes Raum.” 1951. Schmitt, Staat,
Grossraum, Nomos, 491–94. Print.
———. Staat, Grossraum, Nomos. Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916–1969.Ed.
Günter Maschke. Berlin: Dunckler and Humblot, 1995. Print.
———. Theodor Däublers Nordlicht. Drei Studien über die Elemente, den Geist
und die Aktualitaät des Werkes. Munich: Georg Müller, 1916. Print.
———. “Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raum-
fremde Mächte. Ein Beitrag zum Reichsbegriff im Völkerrecht.” 1939.
Schmitt, Staat, Grossraum, Nomos 269–320. Print.
———. “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen.” 1929. Po-
sitionen und Begriffe. Berlin: Dunckler und Humblot, 1994. 138–50. Print.
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Vols. 1 and 2. Trans. Charles Francis
Atkinson. New York: Knopf, 1957. Print.
———. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Welt-
geschichte. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 2003.
Steinmetz, George. The Devil’s Handwriting. Precoloniality and the German
Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa.. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2007. Print.
326 HELL

———. “Scientific Autonomy, German Sociologists, and Empire, 1880–1945.”

German Cultures of Colonialism: Race, Nation, and Globalization.Ed. Geoff
Eley and Bradley Naranch. Durham: Duke UP, forthcoming. Print.
Taubes, Jacob. Ad Carl Schmitt. Gegenstrebige Fügung. Berlin: Merve Verlag,
1987. Print.
Terminator Salvation. Dir. Joseph McGinty Nichol. 2009. Film.
Tielke, Martin. Der stille Bürgerkrieg. Ernst Jünger und Carl Schmitt im Dritten
Reich. Berlin: Landt Verlag, 2007. Print.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Print.
Vogt, Joseph. Orbis Romanus. Zur Terminologie des römischen Imperialismus.
Tübingen: Mohr, 1929. Print.
———. Vom Reichsgedanken der Römer. Leipzig: Koehler and Amelang, 1942.
Print.
Voigt, Rüdiger, ed. Grossraum-Denken. Carl Schmitts Kategorie der Grossrau-
mordnung. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008. Print.
Volney, Francois de. Les ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des em-
pires.Ed. Jean Tulard. Paris: Slatkine, 1979. Print.
Walbank, F. W. Introduction. The Rise of the Roman Empire. By Polybius. Trans.
Ian Scott-Kilvert. London: Penguin, 1979. Print.
Weigel, Sigrid. “The Sovereign, the Martyr and ‘Just War’ beyond the Dilemma
of Political Theology, Discussed via Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin.”
Globalization, Political Violence and Translation. Ed. Esperanza Bielse and
Christopher W. Hughes. London: Macmillan, 2009. 88–113. Print.
Weineck, Silke. “Invisible Person: Schmitt and the Master Trope of Power.” The
Germanic Review 84.3 (2009): 199–221. Print.
Wolin, Richard. “Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the
Aesthetics of Horror.” Political Theory 20.3 (1992): 424–47. Print.