Lecture | The 'Ugly Jew' Fights Back: the "crown jurist of the Third Reich" and his Wunderkind student

Otto Kischheimer (1905-1965) was Carl Schmitt's (1888 – 1985) former doctoral student and acclaimed "Wunderkind." The two of them often had long heated discussions with only ended in disagreements. After one of these debates, Schmitt noted in his diary, "ugly, this Jew." Based on, so-far unpublished material from various archives, Professor Hubertus Buchstein will give a deeper insight into the complex personal relationship and theoretical exchanges between Kirchheimer and Schmitt, while presenting an overview of Kirchheimer's critical view.

Otto Kirchheimer (1905-1965) was a German jurist of Jewish ancestry and political scientist of the Frankfurt School whose work essentially covered the state and its constitution. Kirchheimer worked as a research analyst at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was a wartime intelligence agency of the United States during World War II, and a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Carl Schmitt (1888 – 1985) was a conservative German jurist and political theorist. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. His work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy and political theology, and remains both influential and controversial due to his close association and juridical-political allegiance with Nazism. He is known as the "crown jurist of the Third Reich"

The Frankfurt School (Frankfurter Schule) is a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt. Founded in the Weimar Republic (1918–33), during the European interwar period (1918–1939), the Frankfurt School comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents who were ill-fitted to the contemporary socio-economic systems (capitalist, fascist, communist) of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theoreticians proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in ostensibly liberal capitalist societies in the 20th century. Critical of capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organisation, the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realising the social development of a society and a nation

“Karl Marx may have discovered profit, but I discovered political profit.” Carl Schmitt's only half-joking remark plays with a persistent problem for political theory since Hegel — the often perplexing similarity of ideological positions on the left and the right. German intellectual history in this century presents an unusually complicated example of such “convergence” in the reception of Schmitt's work by the Frankfurt School. The controversy surrounding Schmitt is not so much about the quality and depth of his work as about its political consequences. An uncomfortable question for intellectual history in general, the case of Schmitt is most problematic for the German left. (EllenKennedy: Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School abstract)

Hubertus Buchstein is with the Department of Political Science at Greifswald University, where he serves as Full Professor and Chair of Political Theory and the History of Political Ideas.