48 Habermas: An intellectual biography
to politics and the constitution. Schmitt’s permanent loss of his aca-
demic chair made him a significant exception to the rule.^93 Through
a network of informal seminars held over several decades in Ebrach,
Schmitt continued to exercise a wide influence within the profes-
sion and on a host of other academic disciplines after 1945.^94 Two of
his doctoral students – Werner Weber and Ernst Forsthoff – were
Nazi Party members who retained their positions during the Third
Reich. After the war, both escaped their denazification proceedings
unscathed and continued their careers uninterrupted.^95 Forsthoff
took the Berlin chair evacuated when Hermann Heller was driven
out in 1933. The most important postwar center of the Schmitt
school was in Heidelberg: Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenforde, Helmut
Quaritsch, Günther Krauss, Joseph H. Kaiser, Herbert Krüger, Rolf
Stödter, and Roman Schnur all were based there. The Schmittians
created a mouthpiece for their views in a journal founded in 1962,
Der Staat.^96
In a decade in which a great number of political parties in Europe
included the word “social” in their names, Forsthoff and Werner
Weber brought an anachronistic, pathos-drenched concern for the
fate of “the political.” They resumed the Schmittian discourse in
Weimar that treated the President of the Reich as the real “guardian
of the constitution.” Forsthoff and Weber clung to the Schmittian
view of the executive and civil service as a neutral force “above”
society that represented the general will.^97 In 1954, Forsthoff wrote
that in Weimar the state was “neutral” and above all social interests;
since then, the civil service had been “decimated” by the Americans
and the presidency weakened by the Parliamentary Council. In
1992, Habermas summarized his critique of this Schmittian tradi-
tion: “The idea that the state as pouvoir neutre rises above the plu-
ralism of civil society was always ideological.”^98 For Habermas, the
Schmittians are the statists par excellence.(^93) Ingeborg Maus, “Gesetzesbindung der Justiz und die Struktur der nation-
alsozialistischen Rechtsnormen,” in Recht und Justiz im ‘Dritten Reich, eds.
Ralf Dreier and Wolfgang Sellert (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 82.
(^94) Dirk von Laak, Gespräche in der Sicherheit des Schweigens – Carl Schmitt in der
Geistesgeschichte der frühen Bundesrepublik (Berlin: Akademie, 1993 ).
(^95) Steven Remy, The Heidelberg Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002 ), Chap. 3.
(^96) See Günther, Denken, 126.
(^97) Forsthoff, “Verfassungsprobleme,” 150.
(^98) Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 175.