Among the most consequential debates in the history of German letters is the so-called Sybel-Ficker Quarrel, battled out on the eve of the Austro-Prussian War between Heinrich von Sybel, a Protestant historian and liberal member of the Prussian Landtag, and his Austro-Catholic opponent, the Innsbruck history professor Julius von Ficker. Sybel took the first salvo, arguing that the Holy Roman Empire’s persistent meddling in Italian affairs retarded Germany’s national development. Imperial Italienpolitik, by forcing the emperors to grant their vassals extensive concessions in for funding their campaigns, encouraged those centrifugal tendencies that would bedevil German politics for centuries to come while wasting blood and treasure could have been more productively put to use colonising the northeastern marches. Ficker, in an argument tiresomely familiar to anyone who has studied history at a university at any time since the 1980s, rebounded by admonishing Sybel for backdating contemporary concepts of the nation to the Middle Ages — circular reasoning, since Sybel was trying to answer the question of why the emergence of a powerful German state under the Ottonians did not result in the development of a German national consciousness. More persuasively, he argued that the enduring pull of the universal Reichsidee — the „imperial idea“ inherited from Rome — made an interventionist Italian policy a criterion for the emperors’ legitimacy. Sybel’s kleindeutsch position was, somewhat confusedly, identified by its supporters with the medieval Ghibellines, and Ficker’s universal imperialism, with its whiff of Romeishness, with the Guelphs. This exchange of fire went on inconclusively for the first half of the 1860s until the victory of Prussian arms at Königgrätz laid it to rest.
In 1916, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a dilettante historian employed by the German army’s Supreme Command to, in effect, „run their comms“, published a flowery booklet of nationalist bombast titled The Prussian Style. Though he began by reprising Sybel’s old song of Prussia’s colonial vocation in the east, Moeller van den Bruck gravitated towards Ficker’s position, arguing that the Prussian mission was not the mere conquest of Lebensraum as Sybel had written, but the first stage in the Germans’ universal mission civilisatrice — a task which Moeller van den Bruck contra Ficker considered to have been more judiciously pursued in the underdeveloped Brandenburg marches than in the cultivated south. This missionary politics Moeller van den Bruck identified with the Guelphs, both as the historic initiators of the colonisation and as the partisans of the idea of the universal church, although it was indeed an idea, a form, and not the Roman Papacy, that this robustly Protestant historian had in mind. The Guelph name, for Moeller van den Bruck, stood for more than a family or a specific party, but represented an archetype — „the passion for the real […] a manly, practical, entrepreneurial lifestyle“. Guelphism in The Prussian Style reads as a shorthand for „European integration“; the consecration of heathen land, the initiation of benighted races like the Wends and the Slavs into the universal church and the miscegenation of these lesser races with the higher German one, the laying of bricks in the temple of Solomon. In our own time this perennialism finds its home exactly where Moeller van den Bruck sought it: the House of Guelph.
Moeller van den Bruck counterposes Prussian perennialism and materialism to a no less potent predisposition of the soul: the longing for the coming of the Messiah. This „yearning for spheres to which the Prussian may not ascend“, the truly German politics to be realised at the culmination of the Prussian labour of conquest and construction — this, this he calls Ghibellinism. Versus the Ghibelline politics of messianic empire, Guelphish Prussiandom is, as per the title, a mere style; a travelling cloak to be cast off by the Germans when the hour is at hand, like the buried emperor in the Kyffhäuser awakening from his slumber and brushing the mountain boulders covering him. Moeller van den Bruck rejects the universal church’s spiritual authority; in his scheme, ecclesia is the worldly guardian of perennial rite and imperium the incarnation of the transcendent. We may summarise Moeller van den Bruck’s position with the formula that Guelph politics aims towards the right ordering of matter; Ghibellinism the transformation of the world.
Moeller van den Bruck’s mystical blend of Guelph and Ghibelline motifs has an antecedent: Dante Alighieri, whose poetry and politics provided the template for Stefan George and his circle in the winter of the second Reich (although the poet was famously less enthused about the war than Moeller van den Bruck). George’s followers believed the true poet to be a rare occurrence, and his vocation a prophetic one. Dante, the poet-prophet of universal empire, stands in the line of Vergil; a tradition to which only he, the Roman, and perhaps Goethe truly belong. Was George such a poet? Those motifs of sacral imperium, universal salvation, and the poet’s prophetic mission that we know from the great Florentine are all to be reencountered in his ethereal poetry, and not a few in Weimar believed that, like the seer Vergil, George would proclaim the new Reich and redeem the shattered Germany. Until the poet’s word made it flesh, this Reich waited in the realm of the spirit — a topos which has long exercised a power over the German mind.
The language of Moeller van den Bruck and George’s imperialist soteriology would — like many motifs of the so-called Conservative Revolution — later be appropriated by the national socialists, hence the name the Third Reich. While this made invocations of the Reich impolitic in the democratic postwar Germany, the imperial idea remained an undercurrent beneath the bundesrepublican mainstream. Its most visible manifestation was the cult of the anti-Hitler plotter Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a George acolyte who, as a young man, had made pilgrimage to Palermo to lay a wreath bearing the inscription „FROM THE SECRET GERMANY“ at the Staufer emperor Frederick II’s tomb. But it mostly remained in the shadows, and the handful of old conservative battlers still active in the Bundesrepublik shifted their tone down a gear from mystical ecstasy into dry academic theorising on the nature of the state. This occurred largely under the aegis of Carl Schmitt, himself no Georgian, but condemned to exile in his own Reich of the mind after his associations with the bygone regime had left him persona non grata in the postwar German academy.
From Schmitt’s assertion in Political Theology that the elements of the modern state had their origin in secularised theological concepts blossomed an entire literature that merged with the Georgian current and became highly influential in both academia and politics in the young democracy, though it sank into oblivion sometime around the 1980s. Its only remnant today is the so-called Böckenförde Dictum („the liberal secular state rests on foundations that it cannot itself guarantee“), coined by the eponymous constitutional court judge, an SPD member and frequent visitor to Schmitt’s „holiday seminars“ at the monastic brewery in the picturesque Upper Franconian market town of Ebrach. The dictum belongs to the standard repertoire of Berlin bubble jargon, although few today use it as anything other than a lobeian bon mot meaning that „liberalism“ cannot function but on the bedroom of Judaeo-Christian morality. It would take too much ink to reconstruct this school of thought in detail, but the main points are easy to plot.
The George Circle’s historian-in-chief, Ernst Kantorowicz, best-known for his wildly popular 1927 biography of Frederick II, did most of the heavy-lifting in tracing liberalism’s genealogy back to the Middle Ages. Its immediate precursor, the absolutist state, so argued Kantorowicz from his Princeton exile, usurped the person of the king and the entire theologico-political baggage he bore. At roughly the same time, the historian Reinhart Koselleck (who was too young to remember the Conservative Revolution firsthand, but knew its doctrines and, like everyone else, corresponded with Schmitt) picked up the thread in his book Critique and Crisis, in which he argued that the French Revolution had merely substituted the monarch with a civil society constituted in the republic of letters, and that this had not occurred as a revolutionary breach, but as the teleological unfolding of principles embedded in the structures of absolutism. All of this served merely to restate at greater length what Moeller van den Bruck had already intuited in his fantastical wartime sketch, that an „imagined community“ (the idea that „the nation“ and „civil society“ could ever be in opposition had not fully settled in) had inherited by translatio imperii the mantle of sacral kingship.
The mysticism of the Reich in occultation dovetailed with the young Bundesrepublik’s ideology of the Rechtsstaat. The rule of law is the rule of an invisible power. Where does the law exist — that is to say, if it does not claim metaphysical authority like natural law or its bastard child „human rights“ — if not in the moral constitution of the people, revealed in the word? The poet is a lawgiver, the law a kind of poetry. „The more than eighty volumes of decisions by the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe“, wrote the eminent George scholar (and expert on the Bosnian constitution — such is the life of the dark bundesrepublican academic) Wolfgang Graf Vitzthum, „embody one of the great, unifying works of this country; a piece of literature“. George’s poetry, too, wrote Vitzthum, „was for his friends a kind of inviolable ‚legal codex‘“, and this was no mere figure of speech. The „restoration of the consummate majesty of law“ was the first item in the declaration the Stauffenberg group planned to release upon their coup’s success — this language, which attributes to the law a sacral kingship, is self-evidently Georgian.
The „consummate majesty“ of the rule of law flowed naturally into the other great postwar project of the George Circle’s spiritual heirs, European integration. George and Kantorowicz fell into march behind Ficker when it came to the rejection of kleindeutsch nationalism; their „secret Germany“ was a „European Germany“ whose sails were open to the winds blowing north across the Alps. From the very beginning, the romanticism of universal empire had been bound up with the ideology of inalienable rights that would later crystallise as „human rights“. For Ficker (as for Burckhardt), the contest between the empire and the papacy acted as an organic system of checks and balances that afforded those caught between the two temporal powers a degree of protection from the unilateral despotism of one or the other, and the Catholic Centre Party in the Bismarckian Reich, leaning on Ficker’s arguments, had sought from the very foundation of the new state to replicate this blissful state of affairs by adding a catalogue of fundamental rights to the imperial constitution. That law was to be the vehicle of European integration had been foreseen by interwar Catholic philosophers, in particular the influential French „nonconformists“, whose aim (documented extensively by Marco Duranti in his monograph The Conservative Human Rights Revolution — released, quite fittingly, in the year of Brexit) was to recreate the spirit of the old Res publica Christiania through a system of „human rights“ guarantees administered by a supranational tribunal — a vision realised in 1953 with the entry into force of the European Convention on Human Rights. What was not foreseen by the George Circle, more preoccupied with mysticism than with politics, was the tension that would arise between law’s empire and the secularised papacy of the Strasbourg court; a tension that, unlike the open struggle between Reich and Rome, was hidden from view, sequestered from the domain of politics by constitutional design and the extreme reverence with which European politicians since 1945 have treated the law and its priests.
The latent tension between the rule of a hieratic judiciary and the promise of law’s messianic kingship was picked up in a 1984 essay titled The Constitution as Fatherland. This remarkable document appeared in a volume edited by Armin Mohler, the preeminent scholar of the Conservative Revolution, doyen of the postwar European Right, and the sort of consigliere to Bonn brokers whose like has disappeared in Friedrich Merz’s kingdom of banality. Its author was Josef Isensee, law professor at the University of Bonn and legal advisor to the CDU. Isensee’s tone is melancholic and detached as he sketches a potted intellectual genealogy of the Reich of the spirit as the recurrent answer given down the centuries by German thinkers to the nation’s disunity and impuissance. The Basic Law was the latest answer to the Germans’ centuries-long search for spiritual unity and validated George’s vision that this unity would be achieved through literature; not poetry, but the constitutional text and the jurisprudence of the constitutional court. The consummate majesty of the law means the disappearance of politics: „An old warning against constitutional court jurisprudence holds that this will lead to the juridification of politics“, wrote Isensee. „This has been proven true. But the experience of the Bundesrepublik also validates the scepticism as to whether this would at all be a bad thing“. If we are to believe Isensee (and there is no reason why we should not), there is no politics in the Bundesrepublik, simply the interpretation of the constitution and the extension of the text’s dominion over the real.
Isensee is not altogether at ease with the law’s consummate majesty. He warns that the „Lutheran tendencies“ of „building with neither tradition nor institutions on the pure, written word“ risk destabilising the state by subordinating the nitty-gritty reality of human institutions to the unbending logic of the idea. This constitutional „Protestantism“ culminated in 1968; when the contradiction between the Basic Law’s seemingly unrealised promise of „democracy, freedom, equality, and social justice“ and the cynical pragmatism of the ex-nazis who ran the CDU spurred a generation that had grown up knowing nothing but to constitutional to „revolution against everything stately in the constitutional state“. Against these excesses, Isensee appeals to the constitution’s „Catholic“ element: the presence of a supreme authority in all disputes over constitutional doctrine, the court in Karlsruhe.
Isensee’s plea for the reassertion of the state in the form of an activist judiciary found itself on ground well-trodden by the Conservative Revolution. This was, after all, no less than what Carl Schmitt had spent his entire career defending: the rule of an elite bureaucratic corps steeped in the tradition of European jurisprudence; a secular legacy, as Schmitt famously asserted, of the Roman Church. For Isensee, Karlsruhe had become the leviathan fusing technocracy and the popular will that Schmitt had dreamed of in Hindenburg’s presidential dictatorship. „The popular legitimacy of the constitution“, he writes, allows the jurist to impose „valuations that seem alien to the ordinary citizen or even the politician“. The sole example of this Isensee cites is the 1973 „Arab Case“, in which the court struck down a Bavarian administrative court’s attempt to deport two Palestinian students as a violation of their constitutional rights. The Arab Case was well-known to Isensee, since it was he who, at the Conference of Constitutional Lawyers in Mannheim a few months later, delivered what became the standard interpretation thereof in German constitutional jurisprudence. Isensee argued that the Basic Law’s commitment to „human rights“ had erased the old legal distinction between the rights of citizens and the special legal status pertaining to resident aliens (Gastrecht, i.e. „guest rights“) — no longer could the government deport foreigners at will, but had to afford all within „the territory of the constitution“ the same fundamental rights distinct from political rights. Isensee justifies these assertions with extensive reference to Schmitt, and the main current of his argument is clearly inspired by George’s Reichsgedanke. „The broken nation of the constitution, in drawing on the universalism of human rights, strives to find her spiritual unity and consciousness of self. Universal rights man the redoubt of national rights […] the foreigner’s individual rights no longer live at the mercy of their analogous character to the rights of Germans, but rather every privilege enjoyed by the citizen must justify itself before the precept of legal equality“. The melancholy in Isensee’s words is stirring. Their consequences, today, are obvious.
In 2007, a group of Isensee’s former students presented their old professor with a festschrift titled The State in the Word. Graf Vitzthum contributed an essay on the Stauffenbergs and their relationship with Stefan George. George’s „Secret Germany“ was a „non-imperial Germany in Europe — the opposite of the Nazi Großdeutschland,“ wrote Vitzthum, „From the perspective of the Brothers Stauffenberg this nationalist and racist Germany stood in the way of George’s secret European Germany“. The European Union, Germany’s anti-imperialist, anti-racist empire — the incarnation of the secret Germany and the final victory of the Conservative Revolution. Heinrich von Sybel, you had your day in the sun! But in the end, it was that sly old Guelph dog Ficker who took home the laurels.
Cracking piece on Germany's universalism. Maurice Cowling spotted it parenthetically years ago.
Hesperien!