Carl Schmitt’s Shakespearean Life: Between Hamlet and Othello in Weimar Germany

There have been many Shakespeare scholars, critics, and admirers throughout history. Such undying popularity, and engagement, is a testament to the profound and timeless nature of Shakespeare’s plays and their articulation in a language defined not only by lucid complexity, but one that is apt to attract and overawe even those who fail to understand it completely.

The story we are going to tell here, however, is not that of an obsessive scholar or and obsessed admirer of Shakespeare. Carl Schmitt, the controversial German philosopher and jurist, had an obsession with Shakespeare that came close to an almost religious devotion. Shakespeare provided him with comfort and inspiration, not just in the midst of the chaos of Weimar Germany, but in his personal life. Shakespeare remained a reliable supplier of ideas for his philosophical writings and his aesthetic musings for most of his life. Above all, he lived and breathed Shakespeare, especially in his youth, and it was through his characters and themes that he interpreted, in aesthetic terms, Weimar politics, the post-World War I world, his own place in that world and society as well as his relationships with women.

Schmitt’s obsession with Shakespeare is not readily obvious, for he only produced one, comparatively short, text on a Shakespearean subject: namely, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Irruption of Time into the Play. However, his diaries, most of whose contents appear illegible and impenetrable, are replete with not just references to Shakespeare’s plays, but interpretations of current events, philosophical concepts, and his own rather turbulent love life, in Shakespearean terms. For example:

Othello: the fate of man: he murders the civilization which adopted him out of mercy, out of loneliness; then he murders himself…but that’s not it, for Ludendorff’s Germany had nothing noble such as Othello always retains; he went the way of suicide.

Hamlet, to whom Schmitt dedicated an entire formal text, is not as present in Schmitt’s diaries as Othello, with whom he felt he had the strongest identification, first and foremost, as the misunderstood, besmirched, heartbroken lover and true outsider. To his Australian lover, Katheleen Murray, he writes, with manifest intensity, that:

Othello haunts me… after my lecture I couldn’t help but read Othello. Each word was still alive and I felt no difference between the English and the German text. I trembled as in the theatre that day and thought I was sitting next to you; I reached for your hand. Listen: That handkerchief did an Egyptian to my mother give, she was a charmer. There’s magic in the web of it… and the terrible line: when I love thee not, Chaos is come again, where shall Othello go?…It is all still alive. What is time. Worse than you, I have no sense of time. Anyone who can be so lonely has no sense of time. Time is a social convention. I am lonely without you. Loneliness used to be my friend. She gave me intensity and acuity. Now she came to me draped like a black funeral horse…Suddenly she is silent. Othello comes and everything disappears. Blue haze before his great pain, his black tragedy.

It must be borne in mind that these intense words should not be seen in isolation. Murray, whose thesis Schmitt more or less wrote for her, left him soon after the conclusion of what appears to have been a short, passionate affair, and did not respond to his many letters. He had previously been married to a dancer who pretended to be a countess, and who also betrayed him.

However, the author of concepts such as the “state of exception,” the “friend-enemy” distinction and the “theory of the partisan,” the man who came to be pejoratively known as the “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich” did not merely identify with Othello due his failings in his romantic life. Othello was a convenient choice, for though an outsider, he possessed admirable qualities and a certain nobility, thus rendering his perceived foreignness the consequence of injustice, prejudice, and ignorance by society, and not of any intrinsic moral or other failings. Schmitt was content to justify his own choices through Othello in this way, at least to himself. Hiding under the cloak of Othello’s nobility, Schmitt used language and exhibited sentiments, far closer to those of Mercutio’s and Iago’s vindictiveness and jealousy.  Othello, as per the Ludendorff example, also served as a metaphor for Germany’s lost nobility. Othello’s virtues were no more.

 Othello only fell out of favour after the Second World War, when Schmitt was being held in custody by the Allies to establish whether he should be tried in the Nuremberg trials, when he was replaced by Meliville’s Benito Cereno. Schmitt no longer saw himself as the Moor and the outsider, but as the captive captain of his own ship, who did his best under the circumstances, but clearly under duress. This interpretation of his conduct during the period of the Third Reich worked, for he was not charged with any crimes and lived in peace, though also in disgrace and obscurity, well into his 90s.

Paradoxically, Schmitt identified himself – and Weimar Germany – with Othello and Hamlet simultaneously.   

If Othello was a noble outsider, the symbol of lost German virtue, Hamlet was the symbol of indecision and self-doubt. Schmitt says as much about himself in his diaries – thinking of starting a new career, to becoming a soldier, to then contemplating suicide, he was a man plagued with self-doubt. This may come as a surprise from the man who placed such importance on decision-making, and the removal of all that stood in its way. For Schmitt, the Weimar parliamentary system, as well as liberalism in general, existed to prevaricate, to postpone and prevent decisions from ever being made. Thus, he claimed, by refusing to ever make a political decision by hiding behind procedural language, liberal parliamentarism detaches itself from reality, releasing and unleashing politics on the streets, where decisions are made by mobs or radical groups, and where procedures tend to be far less polite and high-minded. Though adopting an anti-Hamlet position philosophically and politically, his personal life, especially his love life, as we have seen, were characterised by confusion and indecision.

Just as in the case of Othello and Cereno, Hamlet too provided Schmitt with a potent philosophy to explain his helplessness to determine the course of his life:

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath seal’d thee for herself. For thou hast been
As one, in suff’ring all, that suffers nothing;
A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled
That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please. 

Schmitt’s own analysis of Hamlet offers a historical interpretation of Hamlet’s indecision to do with the English Court at the time, and the taboo of calling a potential reigning Queen a murder, even obliquely, through a play. Furthermore, Hamlet can also be understood as an incarnation of James I. Though interesting and profound, this analysis is not the one adopted by Schmitt in a personal capacity, where his Hamlet is the one of the mainstream interpretation: an indecisive, confused figure whose motives remain occluded.

Carl Schmitt’s life through Shakespeare raises pertinent questions about context, time, the contrast between private and public. In Schmitt, we see a man of a confused, uncertain time, seeking succor, guidance, and identity in Shakespeare. If there was an irruption of time into the play of Hamlet, as Schmitt argued, the plays of Hamlet and Othello entered Schmitt’s life, and provided him with explanations of his predicament that he found irresistible.

Ultimately, Schmitt’s engagement with Shakespeare transformed his own life into a metaphor of the duality and confusion of man in the modern era. In a way, modernity’s alienating nature has made us all confused outsiders, languishing between the noble Moor and the Danish prince. We, too, may well be in the midst of this Shakespearean tension.

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