12 Habermas: An intellectual biography
Germans were alienated by the different tone struck by such influ-
ential “preachers of atonement” as the philosopher Karl Jaspers.^42
Banned from teaching on account of his Nazi Party membership and
writings, Schmitt refused to participate in the official denazification
procedures, was exiled to Plettenberg, and was never permitted to
return to the university. This exclusion heightened Schmitt’s appeal
because, in Habermas’s words “... there came into being an aura
of something conspiratorial and initiatory around him.”^43 Schmitt’s
student, Ernst Forsthoff (1902–74), established a regular summer
course at Ebrach in which Schmitt’s contemporaries, Hans Barion,
Arnold Gehlen, Werner Conze, and Franz Wieacker, participated,
as did interested students.^44 Meanwhile, categorized by the Allies as
mere “Mitläufer” (fellow travelers), Schmitt’s Weimar-era students
received only slaps on the wrist and managed to become leading
figures in West German legal scholarship. Intellectually active until
his death in 1985, Schmitt was able to keep his arguments actively
circulating in the West German intellectual field.
In 1949, Walter Dirks, a publicist behind the notion of the
restorative character of the Bonn Republic, wrote that the attain-
ment of the Basic Law was no cause for celebration.^45 By contrast,
Habermas remembers the Allied occupation as a time in which
“... [W]e learned that the Rechtsstaat in its French or American or
English form is a historic achievement. This is an important bio-
graphical difference between those who experienced what a half-
hearted bourgeois republic like the Weimar Republic can lead to,
and those whose political consciousness was formed at a later date.”^46
It was well known that Konrad Adenauer had invited ex-Nazis to
enter his cabinet, as evidenced by his appointment of Nuremberg
laws commentator Hans Globke (1898–1973) as his personal sec-
retary and Hans-Christoph Seebohm (1903–67), a member of the
small postwar nationalist German Conservative Party, as Minister
of Transportation. Habermas has recounted the story of how he
was disgusted to hear “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles” sung(^42) Habermas, “Carl Schmitt in the Political-Intellectual History of the Federal
Republic,” in A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, trans. by Steven Rendall,
intro. by Peter Uwe Hohendahl, 108; orig. Die Zeit (December 3, 1993).
(^43) Ibid., 110.
(^44) See Dirk van Laak, Gespräche in der Sicherheit des Schweigens – Carl Schmitt in
der Geistesgeschichte der frühen Bundesrepublik (Berlin: Akademie, 1993 ).
(^45) Moses, Intellectuals, 46.
(^46) Dews, Autonomy and Solidarity, 75 (orig. March 23, 1979).