The Cold War as Constitutional Crisis: The Theological Politics of Carl J. Friedrich

Udi E. Greenberg

The Hebrew University, Jerusalem

As Germany emerged from the ashes of WWII, the furious debates regarding the

future legal order were deeply locked in the image of the collapsed Weimar

Constitution. Across the Western occupation zones and in the capitals of the West,

formulators of drafts for the new constitution took pains to articulate their thoughts on

the Constitution of 1919.1 In New York and Basel exiled Social Democrats debated

what they considered to be “the most democratic constitution in the world;”2 Alfred

Weber wrote from Heidelberg to the American legal division, explaining how only

the development of emotional ties between the youth and the new emerging

Grundgesetz would save it from the fate of Weimar;3 while the monarchist Erwin

Freiherr and the liberal Theodor Heuss crossed swords in the pages of Der Spiegel,

echoing early debates over the question whether the revolutionary constitution was

‘German’ or ‘Anglo-American’ in essence.4 For years Germans had lived under a

regime that simultaneously enshrined the law and suspended it. Now, visions of the

past and hopes for the future were so intricately associated with judicial structures that

1 For a general overview of the postwar constitutional debates, see Edmund Spevak, Allied Control and German Freedom: American Political Control and Ideological Influences on the Framing of the West German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) (Münster: LIT, 2001); Otmar Jung, Grundgesetz und Volksentscheid: Gründe und Reichweite der Entschedung des Parlamentarischen Rats gegen Formen direkter Demokratie (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994); Wolfgang Benz, Bewegt von der Hoffnung aller Deutschen, zur Geschichte des Grundgesetzes: Entwürfe und Diskussionen 1941-1949 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1979). On the influence of the Weimar experience on the formation of the Grundgesetz, see Friedrich Karl Fromme, Von der Weimarer Verfassung zum Bonner Grundgesetz (1960). 2 Edmund Spevak, Allied Control and German Freedom, 258-260.3 United States National Archives and Records Administration II, College Park Maryland [NA II], RG 260: Records of the United States Occupation Headquarters, World War II, Office of Military Government for Germany [OMGUS], AG 1945-1946, Box 10 File 2/1, Letter Alfred Weber to General Clay, 8 October 1946.4 Erwein Freiherr, “Monarchy aus Einsicht,” Der Spiegel (21 February 1948) 20; Theodor Heuss, “Blick auf 1848,” Der Spiegel (March 13 1948) 20.

even private citizens from Munich, Stuttgart and Hamburg flooded the new authorities

with their draft constitutions and reflections on Germany’s constitutional history.5

In these liminal conditions of intellectual and constitutional uncertainty, few exerted

as much influence as Carl Joachim Friedrich. A native of Germany from a Calvinist

family who moved to Harvard from Heidelberg in 1925, Friedrich became the chief

legal advisor to the American occupation in 1947. From this position he emerged as

the foremost mediator between the American occupation and the new German

political elite, one of the main drafters of the West German Grundgesetz, and one of

the key figures in Germany’s democratization. Upon his return to the United States in

1948 he soon became the preeminent spokesman of the theory of Totalitarianism,

organizing a series of conferences and publications that crystallized the term for use

in the interpretation of modern politics. During the 1950s Friedrich was among the

architects of the early European unification and one of the most prominent

intellectuals of the early Cold War.6 Yet the tremendous success of the Totalitarianism

theory during the early decades of the Cold War was matched only by its rapid fall

from grace in later decades, and with it the disappearance of Friedrich from

intellectual history. Remembered today mostly by specialists in legal history and

scholars of the Cold War, he has vanished entirely from studies of the American

occupation, Germany’s reconstruction and postwar European history such as Konrad

Jarausch’s After Hitler, Tony Judt’s Postwar or Mary Fulbrook’s History of

Germany.7

5 NA II, OMGUS 260, Box XXX File XXX; for a brief discussion of these drafts, see Otmar Jung, Grundgesetz und Volksentscheid.6 A comprehensive biography of Friedrich has yet to be written. For a partial study, see: Hans J. Lietzmann, Politik Wissenschaft im “Zeitalter der Diktaturen”: die Entwiklung der Totalitarismustheorie Carl Joachim Friedrichs (Oplanden: Leske & Budrich, 1999).7 Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans 1945-1995 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006) trans. Brandon Hunziker; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2006); Mary Fulbrook, History of Germany 1918-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

2

Friedrich’s evaporation from the history of modern Germany, accounts of German

émigré intellectuals in the United States, and even the role of the German immigration

in the Cold War, has relegated his thoughts on German history, politics and theology

to almost complete oblivion. Like the rest of his contemporaries, Friedrich dwelled in

length on the lessons to be learned from the Weimar Constitution, and his writings to

his American supervisors are studded with reflections on its place in German history

in general.8 Yet his ideas and historical narrative differed sharply from those of other

returning German advisors and intellectuals. The new West German constitution,

Friedrich claimed, should improve upon its predecessor by fully adopting the concepts

of the forgotten 17th Century Calvinist theologian Johannes Althusius. Althusius, so

the argument went, had proposed a perfect model for republicanism and democracy,

and in fact should be considered the historical father of German and Anglo-Saxon

constitutionalism alike. The Weimar Constitution, according to Friedrich’s narrative,

was part of a long chain of attempts to institutionalize such Calvinist principles, the

full realization of which was essential to constituting a true democratic order in

Germany.

Friedrich's invocation of Calvinist theology and his peculiar advocacy of Althusius’

theories as the root of Anglo-German republicanism would have been worthy of

attention in their own right as a fundamental aspect of the returning German

immigration’s Weltanschauung and the construction of postwar German-American

symbolic ties.9 Yet the origin of these ideas sheds light on an even wider, more crucial

8 NA II, RG 260, AG 1947, Box 129, File B15, Report by Carl J. Friedrich to deputy military governor, 28 January 1947. See also: NA II, RG 260, AG 1945, Box 10, File 2/1, Report by Carl J. Friedrich on constitutional history in Germany. 9 For recent literature on the returning German immigration and the democratization of Germany, see Dieter K. Buse, “The 'Going' of the Third Reich: Recivilizing Germans through Political Education,” German Politics & Society 26(1) (Spring 2008) 29-56; Marjorie Lamberti, “Returning Refugee Political Scientists and America's Democratization Program in Germany after the Second World War,” German Studies Review 31(2) (May 2008) 263-284; Alfons Soellner, “Die Emigration im Kontext - Eine Skizze zur politischen Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Harald Bluhm & Jürgen Gebhardt

3

and more puzzling phenomenon, namely, the troubled afterlife of the Weimar period.

For Friedrich, who was born in 1901, the defining years of intellectual development

were those of the Weimar Republic. As a student of Alfred Weber until 1925 and an

interlocutor for Germany’s most important legal scholars during the early thirties,10

Friedrich developed and published his ideas on Althusius and the role of Calvinist

theology already during the last years of the republic, and his postwar political and

theological theories can in many ways be understood as an extension and continuation

of his Weimar thought.

In fact, these early works reflect an important yet often-neglected aspect of Weimar’s

discussions on politics and theology. Scholarship has paid much attention to the role

of theology and eschatology in the works of conservative, revolutionary and radical

political thinkers, yet more moderate, democratic traditions of theological politics

have received far less scrutiny.11 The example of Friedrich, therefore, sheds light both

on the role of theology in republican political thought in the Weimar period, and on

the process whereby ideas from Weimar’s constitutional debates survived dramatic

changes and catastrophic experiences only to reappear in entirely new contexts. As

applied to the new international politics and historical narratives, I will argue, these

old terms helped to define the intellectual world of the early Cold War.

(eds.), Politische Ideen im 20. Jahrhundert: Konzepte und Kritik (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2006) 181-197; Alfons Soellner, “Normative Westernalization? - The impact of Remigrés on the Foundation of Political Thought in Post-War Germany,” Jan-Werner Müller (ed.) German Ideologies since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 40-60.10 Friedrich's surviving correspondence with Richard Thoma, Hans Kelsen, Rudolf Smend and the SPD judicial expert Arnold Brecht, with whom he was especially close, dates mostly from 1933 onward, yet the letters indicate an earlier familiarity. For the exchange with Thoma, see Harvard University Archive, Carl J. Friedrich Papers (HUGFP) 17.6 Box 40 File TUV 1933; with Kelsen: HUGFP 17.31 Box 1 File American Committee for Guidance 1938-1939; with Smend: HUGFP 17.6 Box 37 File S 1932-3; and with Brecht, see for example: HUGFP 17.39.5 Box 1 File B. 11 See for example: Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997); Yotam Hotam, Modern Gnosis and Zionism: The Crisis of Life, Lebensphilosophie, and National Jewish Thought (Magness: Jerusalem, 2007) [Hebrew]; Benjamin D. Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2006); Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heiddeger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: U of California P, 2003).

4

Friedrich’s thought, however – and this constitutes my second argument - was shaped

not only in light of the abstract Weimar Zeitgeist, but also, and more importantly,

through a continuous dialogue with Carl Schmitt. His Cold War theories of

democracy, dictatorship, representation, totalitarianism and theology should be

understood within this dialog and in light of Schmitt’s crucial influence on the young

Weimar intellectual. During the late 1920s and the 1930s, the future agent of

democratization and the arch-conservative thinker not only shared intellectual and

political stands, but developed an intense friendship that at times seemed to have

almost father-son qualities. Friedrich’s writings from this period are crammed with

expressions of admiration for Schmitt’s “epoch-making” writings,12 and in one of his

letters to Schmitt, in which he sought his opinion on a draft of his work, Friedrich

wrote “I care about no-one’s opinions but yours.”13 Schmitt, in return, was supportive

of Friedrich and invested much effort in introducing him to Germany’s judicial elite.

He arranged Friedrich’s guest professorship in Heidelberg in 1933,14 and Friedrich

was designated as translator of Schmitt’s Die Diktatur to English and would introduce

him to the American audience.15 This in itself was not unusual among democratic and

even Socialist intellectuals,16 yet the correspondence and exchange of ideas between

the two men continued after the Nazi rise to power and well into the Cold War. After

a long break, Friedrich resumed their friendship with a letter in 1958, and from that

point on their correspondence shows that the two often met, consulted over academic

12 See for example: Carl J. Friedrich, “Dictatorship in Germany?” Foreign Affairs 9(1) (October 1930) 118-132.13 Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf [HStAD], Nachlass Carl Schmitt RW 265-4422 Letter Friedrich to Schmitt 18 January 1932.14 HStAD RW 265-4425, Letter Carl J. Friedrich to Carl Schmitt, 2 December 1932; RW 265-XXX, Letter Carl Schmitt to Walter Jelinek, 16 June 1932.15 See for example: HUGFP 17.6 Box 37 File S 1932-3, Letter Carl J. Friedrich to Carl Schmitt, 2 December 1932; HUGFP 17.6 Box 37 File S 1932-3, Letter Carl J. Friedrich to Carl Schmitt, 17 January 1933; HUGFP 17.6 Box 37 File S 1931, Letter Carl Schmitt to Carl J. Friedrich, 24 May 1930; HUGFP 17.6 Box 9 File D 1932, Letter Duncker & Humblot to Carl J. Friedrich 24 December 1932.16 See for example, William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1994).

5

matters and exchanged drafts and ideas.17 It seems that Schmitt grew ever more

attached to Friedrich’s work, and letters show that even after he sold his library in

1955 as a result of financial difficulties, not only did he keep Friedrich’s books, but he

also refused to lend them to his students and friends.18

Though seemingly contradictory at first glance, Friedrich's relationship with Schmitt

and his attempt at constructing a democratic, “Calvinist” postwar Germany that would

root out totalitarian sentiments is closely connected. As demonstrated below, these

personal relations were more than merely anecdotal, and served as a basis for an

ongoing exchange of ideas in which both Schmitt and Friedrich borrowed from and

responded to each other. In this sense, the scholarship on Schmitt and his reception

could likewise be enriched by devoting more attention to Friedrich.19 For Friedrich, as

much as it was a confrontation with the Soviet Empire and the creation of the

German-American bond, the Cold War was also a confrontation with the German

reactionary thinker. Thus, even though it attained its greatest influence only decades

later, Friedrich’s thought represents the inner tensions and struggles of one of the

most important, and most neglected, offshoots of the Weimar moment.

1. From Schmitt’s Die Diktatur to Friedrich’s Totalitarian Dictatorship

17 See for example: HStAD RW 265-4426, Letter Carl J. Friedrich to Carl Schmitt, 2 July 1957; RW 265-4428, Letter Carl J. Friedrich to Carl Schmitt, 11 July 1958; RW 579-98, Letter Carl J. Friedrich to Carl Schmitt, 16 June 1959; RW 579-98, Letter Carl Schmitt to Carl J. Friedrich, 24 June 1959; RW 265-4429, Letter Carl J. Friedrich to Carl Schmitt, 6 July 1959.18 See for example: HStAD RW 265-10604 Letter from Marjorie N. Robbins, The Foreign Service of the United States of America, to Carl Schmitt, 18 September 1953; RW 265-12979, Letter Carl Schmitt to Forsthoff, 29 April 1954; RW 265-13105, Letter Carl Schmitt to Dr. Boller, 9 February 1955.19 In Jan-Werner Müller’s recent ambitious study of Schmitt’s reception in Europe and the United States, for example, Friedrich receives but one sentence: Jan Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003) 2.

6

As a student of Alfred Weber in Heidelberg, Friedrich came from a tradition of an

elitist, ‘aristocratic’ republicanism and support for strong executive powers.20 In

lectures on the Weimar Constitution that he gave in the United States in 1926, for

example, the role of the president was interpreted as a bulwark against the potential

tyranny of the unrestricted parliament.21 It was from this perspective that he became

fascinated by Schmitt’s theory of dictatorship. In this famous 1921 Die Diktatur,

Schmitt claimed that in a state of emergency the constitutional order offers two kinds

of dictatorship – the commissarial dictator, who derives his power from the

constitution, safeguards it and restores it; and the sovereign dictator, who acts to

create a wholly new order.22 Sovereign dictatorship, Schmitt's historical narrative

asserted, appeared in modern times with the French revolution, with its ideas of

popular sovereignty and rational, technical conduct of society. It therefore reflected

democracy’s inner contradictions and inherent instability: “The people, the nation, the

original power of all state essence,” he wrote, “constitutes ever new organs. From the

infinite, inconceivable abyss of its power arise ever new forms, which it can smash at

any time and in which its power is never definitively delimited.”23 Commissarial

dictatorship, on the other hand, had originated several centuries earlier and echoed

Christian principles of sovereignty. It was therefore not a simple despotism, as

“bourgeois political literature” claimed, but a concrete situation in which the

sovereign suspended law to take concrete measures to restore the legal order.24 Since

the sovereign, as he later claimed, was defined by the right to proclaim a “state of

exception,” the option of dictatorship was inherent to the idea of sovereignty and to

the political order and could be realized in times of instability. 20 Lietzmann, 29-46.21 HUAFP 17.60 Box 8 File “The German Constitution 1919,” lecture in South Carolina 1926.22 Carl Schmitt, Die Diktatur, von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedanken bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1921).23 Ibid., 142.24 Ibid., xii.

7

With the onset of the political and constitutional crisis that beset Germany in 1930, as

is well known, this theory took on crucial importance. Hindenburg’s suspension of

parliamentary rule and its replacement by presidential government made the

interpretation of Article 48 and the limits of presidential dictatorship a matter of

pressing urgency. It was then that Friedrich aligned himself with Carl Schmitt and his

advocacy of the president’s supremacy as “the guardian of the Constitution,” and

initiated the translation of Die Diktatur to English.25 As Carl Schmitt “has shown

convincingly,” Friedrich wrote in 1930, the president encompassed the united will of

the nation, and as such was superior to a “system of proportional representation with

its multiple party groups and the resulting lack of a coherent majority.” The

Constitution, Friedrich claimed, has clearly granted the president the right to steer the

country in times of crisis, and as such he had the final word on all constitutional and

political decision-making. “Germany might well be congratulated,” he concluded,

“for the wisdom of its constitution-makers,” who had enabled the president to declare

a state of exception and the formation of a commissarial dictatorship.26 When the

constitutional crisis reached its peak with chancellor von Papen’s Preussenschlag

against the social-democratic government of Prussia, and Germany’s judicial elite

clashed over the legality of the presidential decree,27 Friedrich continued to support

Hindenburg and congratulated Schmitt on his appearance as the federal government’s

representative in the Supreme Court. Even the Nazi rise to power within the

constitutional framework, despite Friedrich’s hostility to their methods and racist

ideology, did not seem to stir in him any sense of urgency. Like many others, in

25 HUGFP 17.6 Box 37 File S 1931, Letter Carl Schmitt to Carl J. Friedrich, 24 May 1930.26 Carl J. Friedrich, “Dictatorship in Germany?” 130-132; See also Carl J. Friedrich, “The Development of Executive Power in Germany,” American Political Science Review 27 (1933) 203; Carl J. Friedrich, “National Socialism in Germany,” Political Quarterly 1 (1932) 520-530.27 Peter C. Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: the Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1997) 164-170. Dietrich Orlow, Weimar Prussia, 1925-1933: The Illusion of Strength (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, 1991).

8

spring 1933 he still predicted that Hitler too would soon submit himself to the

presidential order and would eventually “calm down.”28

Yet as David Dyzenhaus, Peter Caldwell and others have noted, Schmitt formulated

his theory of dictatorship in a “dual style.”29 His discussion of Article 48, which

presented itself as guidance for the preservation of the constitutional order, in fact

encompassed also its suspension. In his Political Theology he distinguished between a

limited state of siege and an existential threat to the political existence of the state. In

the latter case, Schmitt asserted, the president was to receive full powers and suspend

all legal norms. “The existence of the state,” he wrote, “is undoubted proof of its

superiority over the validity of the legal norm… The state suspends the law in the

exception on the basis of its right of self-preservation.”30 The crisis of the early

thirties, according to Schmitt, presented precisely such a threat. The multiplicity of

social and political organizations that clashed with each other, he claimed, was a

direct result of the multi-party system, which had lost its ability to unite the nation

within one political framework and was leading Germany to the verge of self-

destruction. The option whereby the president would adopt the role of sovereign

dictator and eliminate the liberal-individual component of the constitution was

therefore insinuated in Article 48 itself.

Furthermore, and equally crucial to the development of Friedrich’s work, was

Schmitt’s claim that modern states were forced to take part in the economic process.

Modern states, he claimed in Legality and Legitimacy, faced the choice between being

a “weak total state,” such as the Weimar Republic, in which the economy is controlled

28 Carl J. Friedrich, “The Situation in Germany,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin (1933) 348-351.29 Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty, 208; David Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1997); See also: Ellen Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham: Duke UP, 2004).30 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1985) trans. George Schwab, 12.

9

by interest groups, and a “strong total state,” in which the state would put an end to

social unrest by assuming control over the key economic organs, thereby dissolving

the distinction between society and state.31 The political and legal order that he

foresaw would, therefore, not only dissolve the parliament and abolish individual

rights; it would become a new “total state.”32

For Friedrich, the consequences of Schmitt’s “dual” thinking gradually came to

represent the dangers of modern politics, as well as the core of what would later be

termed totalitarianism. Observing Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, the beginning of

the show trials in Moscow and the declaration of the Nazi Four Year Plan in 1936,

Friedrich began to believe that Europe’s new regimes presented something novel that

could not be explained within the framework of commissarial dictatorship. “[T]he

doings of the Nazis,” he wrote, “make me look like a fool… I am quite frank to own

that I never expected such a violent attack upon the fundamentals of our culture.”33

National Socialism and Communism’s easy slide from limited dictatorship to an

entirely new legal order, according to this view, reflected Schmitt’s assertion that

sovereign dictatorships were locked in the paradox of creating a continually changing

political mechanism, “which it can smash at any time and in which its power is never

definitively delimited.” The inherently unstable character of such regimes due to the

lack of constitutional boundaries, Friedrich warned, gave birth to a predatory,

aggressive impulse that could not be contained within the old international system.

Indeed, in 1938 he clearly stated that foreign policy was determined not by a country's

power or economic interests, but by its constitutional structure. As a projection of

31 Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy (Durham & London: Duke UP, 2004) trans. Jeffrey Seitzer 85-94.32 Carl Schmitt, ‘Weiterentwicklung der totalen Staats in Deutschland,’ Verfassungrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924-1954: Materialien zu einer Verfassungslehre (Berlin, 1958 [February 1933]), esp. 359-360.33 Quoted in Lietzmann, p. 257, ff. 563.

10

their inner principles, Friedrich claimed, Western powers by their very nature sought

to shape the globe in their own constitutional form, that is, as a system of checks and

balances between world powers. Fascist, Nazi and Communist aggression, on the

other hand, was inherent to their perverse anti-constitutional character. What the

world was facing, he warned his American readers in 1938, was an inevitable clash

that could be only understood as a “global civil war.”34 These disparate kinds of

constitutional and unconstitutional order could not coexist, and their collision was

bound to end in a war of total annihilation that could only be compared to the

European wars of religion.35

Though this aspect cannot not be further developed here, it is interesting to note that

Schmitt responded by adopting and then turning both of Friedrich’s analogies against

the Americans. After WWII Schmitt claimed that it was the American “space-less

universalism” (raumlos Universalismus) that marked the transformation of both world

wars from limited, “normal” political conflicts to a “global civil war.” In fact, the

entire historical narrative that he developed in his 1950 Nomos of the Earth was based

on the analogy of American intervention as the reincarnation of the wars of religion.36

Giorgio Agamben’s attribution of the notion of “global civil war” to Schmitt’s

postwar thought, therefore, missed the historical roots of its polemic interlocutor.37

As clouds were gathering above Europe’s sky, the inability to demarcate the borders

between the two kinds of dictatorship in a state of exception became, in Friedrich’s

eyes, the most acute political issue of modern politics. Since the commissarial type

encompassed the sovereign dictatorship, he claimed in his 1937 Constitutional

34 Carl J. Friedrich, Foreign Policy in the Making: the Search for a New Balance of Power (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938) 223 ff.35 Ibid., 48, 236 ff..36 Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth: the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003) trans G. L. Ulmen.37 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005) trans. Kevin Attell, 3.

11

Government and Politics, “there are no ultimate institutional safeguards available for

insuring that emergency powers be used for the purpose of preserving the

Constitution.” Since the most destructive danger faced by constitutional orders was

inherent in the emergency situation envisaged by the constitutions themselves, “[on]ly

the people’s own determination to see them so used can make sure [they will protect

the Constitution]… We must conclude, therefore, that all in all the quasi-dictatorial

provisions of modern constitutional systems... [such as] constitutional emergency

powers, fail to conform to… the political implications of even a temporary

concentration of powers. Consequently, we must conclude that all these

[constitutional] systems are liable to be transformed into absolutist schemes, if

conditions become… favorable to it… Constitutional government,” he sadly

concluded, “is weak.”38

As inherent to the constitutional order, the limitation of emergency powers and

dictatorships remained a problem also after the victory over Nazism. While consulting

General Clay in 1947 and 1948 and working on the drafts of the Grundgesetz,

Friedrich characterized the difference between the American and the Soviet

occupations of Germany as the difference between constitutional and sovereign

dictatorships.39 His insistence on a rapid transfer of power to the Germans, for

example, stemmed from the conviction that the limitation of the emergency situation

in time was the key mechanism in preventing American rule from deteriorating into

non-constitutional dictatorship. According to this conceptual framework, the Soviet

occupation was indeed a mere continuation of the Third Reich.

38 Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Politics: Nature and Development (New York: Harper, 1937) 220.39 Carl J. Friedrich, “Organizational Evolution in Germany 1945-1947,” in Carl J. Friedrich (ed.) American Experiences in Military Government in World War II (New York: Rinehart, 1948) 197-210.

12

The most famous and most complete reformulation of Schmitt’s theory, however,

appeared in 1953, with the theory with which - despite his objections - Friedrich

remained associated and which brought him to the forefront of the intellectual Cold

War, namely, the theory of totalitarianism. An umbrella term for many different and

at times contradictory theories, which amalgamated the work of diverse thinkers such

as Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Hayek and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the

theory of totalitarianism has often been dismissed as simplistic Cold War polemic. It

has often, as in the work of Abbott Gleason and William David Jones, been reduced

to the mere coupling of Nazism and Communism as a single phenomenon.40 The

unique terminology that comprised Friedrich’s theory, as well as its historical roots,

has thus sometimes been blurred and lost.

Yet as Hans Lietzmann has noted, totalitarianism for Friedrich had a very distinctive

characteristic.41 It was defined neither as totalist ideology, nor as the sacralization of

politics, nor, as Hannah Arendt put it, the destruction of all traditional ties.42

According to Frierich's model, the transition of the state of emergency into a

permanent condition and the slide from commissarial into a sovereign dictatorship

gave birth to the new pathological regime only through the government’s economic

control, that is, once society had been completely absorbed by the state.43 It is only in

this light that one can understand his claim that it was the year 1936, with the Nazi

Four Year Plan, and not an earlier date, that marked Germany’s transformation into

totalitarianism. It was, therefore, only once the “weak total state,” to use Schmitt’s

formulations from 1932, has become a “strong total state,” that totalitarianism

40 William David Jones, The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999); Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: the Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford UP, 1995).41 See Lietzmann, 137-139.42 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 1951).43 Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigeniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1956).

13

emerges. Thus, although Friedrich maintained close personal ties and friendships with

other spokesmen of the theory of totalitarianism such as Hannah Arendt and Jacob

Talmon, the differences in their intellectual background left his definitions of the

phenomenon clearly distinct from theirs.44

What is more important, for Friedrich “totalitarianism” was not at all, as is often

claimed, a term coined to join together the enemies of the West. What evaded many

scholars’ attention was Friedrich’s notion that this concept marked the constant

danger inherent in the constitutional order, against which the West was struggling. It

stemmed from the belief that the Western constitutional regimes themselves, with the

commissarial dictatorship inherent to their concept of sovereignty, were permanently

endangered by the potential slide into a “strong total state.” From the late thirties and

into the forties, Friedrich therefore initiated a flood of publications, lectures and

political rallies throughout the East Coast aimed at strengthening the American

people’s “spirit of democracy” in the face of democracy’s inner threats.45 As revealed

by pamphlets he composed for the Council for Democracy, a group of intellectuals

that had formed in Boston, Friedrich believed that the United States under Roosevelt

was facing dangers similar to those of Weimar that could facilitate its transformation

into a totalitarian regime.46 It was this fear that drew him after the war to the young

Richard Nixon and his Committee for anti-American Activities in 1948,47 and that

44 Though this has not received much attention from Arendt scholars, the correspondence between the two reveals close and friendly relations that went beyond the professional and intellectual spheres. See for example: HUGFP 17.60 Box 22 File B, Letter Hannah Arendt to Carl J. Friedrich August 6 1954, and Letter Friedrich to Arendt, 8 August 1954. Following his visit to Jerusalem in 1946, Friedrich became close to the historian Jacob Talmon and thought highly of his theory of “totalitarian democracy.” Talmon was in Harvard when Friedrich developed his theory of totalitarianism and the two remained in touch throughout the fifties and sixties. For their correspondence, see, for example HUGFP 17.14 Box 27 File Talmon.45 For a report on some of these activities, see: Carl J. Friedrich, The Poison in Our System (New York: Council for Democracy, 1942). See also: HUGFP 17.24 Box 7 File Rally 1942. 46 HUGFP 17.24 Box 5 File Council for Democracy Memo; HUGFP 17.24 Box 7 File The New World – The New World Pamphlet 1942.47 HUGFP 17.39.5 Box 1 File Correspondence G, Letter Carl J. Friedrich to Richard Nixon, 11 May 1948.

14

guided the long and continuous relationship with his most famous student, Henry

Kissinger.48 The struggle against Nazism and later Communism, that is, was for

Friedrich at the same time aimed at saving the constitutional regime from itself.

Totalitarianism, therefore, was to be read according to Friedrich within the tradition of

Western political theory. Thus if, as Schmitt claimed, all concepts of modern political

thought were secularized theological terms, then totalitarianism too was to be

understood within the Western and Christian framework. Thus, at the famous

conference on the totalitarian phenomenon that Friedrich convened at Harvard in

1953, which brought together scholars and politicians such as Hannah Arendt, George

Kennan, Arnold Toynbee, Erik Erikson and, though only as a listener, Isaiah Berlin,

one finds his repeated reminders that totalitarianism should be regarded not as part of

the German, Russian or Chinese traditions, but as a European phenomenon based on

Christian ideas.49 The fact that totalitarian regimes could have developed in China and

Russia, according to this view, was to be understood as an import of Western ideas by

these countries’ political elites. It was only through their agency that nations could

reach the stage of “strong total states” and enter into a permanent state of exception.

The struggle between the United States and the Soviet Empire, therefore, was to be

perceived through the concepts of Schmitt’s theories, and the Cold War was to be

observed through the experience of the late Weimar and early Nazi constitutional

crisis.

48 Kissinger was not only Friedrich’s student, but also the young editor of his joint book with Brzezinski on totalitarianism. The two remained in touch throughout Kissinger’s academic and political career, and Friedrich collected press clippings of Kissinger’s remarks on totalitarianism. For their correspondence on Friedrich’s book, see: HUGFP 17.12 Box 9 File Common Man; for other correspondence, see: HUGFP 17.14 Box 18 File Kissinger, Henry; HUGFP 17.60 Box 22 File K.49 See for example: HUGFP 17.16 Box 8 File Totalitarian Conference Discussions, Sixth Panel Discussion, p. 6. See also Carl J. Friedrich “The Unique Character of Totalitarian Society,” idem. (ed.) Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1954) 47-60.

15

2. Friedrich’s Theological Politics and Weimar’s Political Theology

Although the transformation in Friedrich’s thought evolved within the framework of

Schmitt’s concepts, his fierce hostility to totalitarianism’s “perverse” legal and

political nature seems to be at odds with the warm relations he resumed in 1958 with

its most vocal and dangerous advocate. Furthermore, on the less personal and more

intellectual level, this transformation can hardly explain Friedrich’s recourse to

Calvinist theology and political philosophy as the model for Germany’s postwar

reconstruction, and as the origin of the West’s political thought in general. These

seemingly contradictory components appear far more coherent when observed as part

of an ambitious attempt at formulating an alternative theory of democracy that would

not be based on the liberal, individual ideas of the Enlightenment. Like many others,

Friedrich believed that such an alternative source of political legitimacy could only be

found in theology, or more precisely, in the clarification of the relations between

theology and political theory.50 Yet his suggestion was radically different to those

generally associated with the term “political theology.” Though overshadowed by

scholarship’s attention to his theory of totalitarianism, this aspect of his work was

valued far more by Friedrich himself. As in the case of his thoughts on totalitarianism,

the roots of Friedrich's specific version of political-theological theory are to be found

in Schmitt’s early-Weimar writings.

The main weaknesses of republican political theory, according to Friedrich, were

most clearly identified in Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form. In this

polemical essay written in 1923, which Friedrich enthusiastically called “a brilliant

piece,”51 Schmitt claimed that a coherent, functioning political regime could not base 50 For recent literature on this topic, see: Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds.) Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham UP, 2006); Nitzan Lebovic (ed.), special issue on Political Theology, New German Critique 105 (Forthcoming, fall 2008). 51 Quoted in Lietzmann, p. 245 ff 533.

16

itself on Enlightenment’s rationality without reliance upon pre-modern,

transcendental sources of authority. Though such sources did not necessarily have to

be theological, since “the nation,” too, could function as such a source, they did of

necessity require a transcendental quality and an aura of “dignity.” Such objects and

the political systems that give them a tangible form, Schmitt claimed, need to have

reciprocal relations analogous to those between God and the Catholic priest, in the

sense that the priest, through the religious ritual, renders the divinity present. The

basic difference between modern political regimes, Schmitt therefore concluded, was

their ability or inability to represent, that is, to impart material reality to

transcendental objects such as “the nation.”52

Liberalism and Bolshevism, according to Schmitt, were twin soulless, technological-

economic systems, which observed all objects as equally materialistic, and therefore

could represent nothing beyond them. As he later wrote in Constitutional Theory,

“[s]omething dead, something inferior or valueless, something lowly, cannot be

represented.”53 Parliamentarianism, with its internal quarrels and divisions, could not

conjure up the undivided, transcendental nation. Thus, the only political system that

could reproduce the Catholic model and its “theological” authority was some type of a

plebiscite dictatorship. By contrast to Calvinist individualism and materialism, which

Schmitt identified as the Godfather of modern economics, the destroyer of the

Political and Catholicism's “real opponent,”54 only the Catholic Church and its secular

equivalent, the presidential dictatorship, could offer a viable political model.

52 Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996) trans. G.L. Ulmen. On the relation between Schmitt’s theory of representation and his support of presidential dictatorship, see Duncan Kelly, “Carl Schmitt's Political Theory of Representation,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65(1) (January 2004), 113-134; John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 157-205.53 Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2008) trans. Jeffrey Seitzer, 243.54 Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 87.

17

If democracy was to gain legitimacy and be freed from formless, individualistic,

liberal principles, Friedrich claimed during Weimar’s final years, it would have to be

shown to rely on non-individualistic and transcendental sources of authority. “Pure”

theory of law, such as that of Hans Kelsen, or the rational enshrining of individual

rights, could not provide a response to Schmitt’s challenge. The key to such new

legitimacy, Friedrich maintained, was to be found in Calvinist political thought.

According to this claim, both Schmitt and Max Weber had been wrong to associate

the Calvinist spirit with the birth of the economic-individualistic modern world. The

implications of Calvin’s revolution could not be limited to the indirect creation of

capitalistic materialism, the profit motive and, as Schmitt saw it, the catastrophic

blending of politics and economy. Weber’s famous theory, according to Friedrich, in

fact embodied dangerous consequences as it drew historical and theoretical attention

to the economic derivatives of Calvinism, thereby creating unnecessary dichotomies

and eclipsing its potential to serve as a model for political organization.

The most promising political model was to be found, as Friedrich saw it, in the early

17th Century thinker Johannes Althusius and his monumental book Politica Methodice

Digesta, which Friedrich sought to revive from oblivion and republished in 1932.55

Politica, he believed, suggested an alternative model to republicanism that would still

conform to Schmitt’s definition of the Political. In Althusius’ work, Friedrich

claimed, which was even more important than that left by Hobbes and Lock, politics

was for the first time discussed as a field in itself, with its own logic and terminology.

Centuries before Schmitt, Althusius identified the tendency to blend political

discourse with economic, aesthetic and other terminologies, and sought to cleanse the

55 Johannes Althusius, Politica Methodice Digesta, Reprinted from the Third Edition of 1614 (Harvard: Harvard UP, 1932). For more recent assessments of Althusius’ theory, see for example: Thomas O. Hueglin, Early Modern Concepts for a Late Modern World: Althusius on Community and Federalism (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1999).

18

political in order to enable the construction of a just political order. “[E]conomics and

politics,” Althusius warned confused readers, “differ greatly as to subject and end.”56

This Calvinistic order, Friedrich explained, took the family and the small community

as its basic units, and its political life was to be organized in a series of social layers

within expanding groups.57 A collection of families was to form the council of the

village, which in its turn would be represented in the council of the province. A

collection of provinces, in its turn, was to form a commonwealth, and so forth up to

the council of the empire, which would constitute a union of Länder and free cities.

Political representation, however, was not to be based in Althusius’ model on simple

homogeneity. Each council would comprise heterogeneous and flexible combinations

of groups; the city council, for example, would be composed not only of families, but

would include also representatives of the guilds and other organizations; the council

of the empire would be composed of representatives of cities, provinces and other

groups. The only associations that contained the inherent quality of piety were those

of the family and the small community, and it was only within their boundaries that a

truly Christian community could be preserved. It was only they, and not the king, who

had the authority to make the supreme political decision and, like God, had

constituting power (potestas constituta). The king, like any individual, was potentially

impious, and the communities represented on the council would thus always have the

right to replace him and guarantee the pious order. Yet this was not to say that power

relations within the communities were to be conducted on a basis of equality, which

created only “disorder and disturbance.” The basic principle for the establishment of

what Althusius saw as just political relations would be “fairness (aequabilitas)”

56 Johannes Althusius, The Politics of Johannes Althusius (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964) trans. Frederick S. Craney, 27.57 Carl J. Friedrich, “Johannes Althusius and his time,” in Althusius, Politica, XXX.

19

among the different groups within the community, “when right, liberty and honor are

extended to each citizen according to the order and distinction of his worth and

status.”58

The importance of Althusius’ model, according to Friedrich, was two-fold. First, it

suggested a republican model of representation that was based on non-individualistic

principles, and could therefore conform to Schmitt’s views on politics as anti-

individualistic in essence. Not only was the individual not the basic unit in this model,

but he in fact “disappeared” within it, Friedrich wrote, and gained importance only

through his participation in groups. His political activity was carried out “not as an

individual, but only as a representative (Repräsentant) of the sub-consociatio to which

he belongs, as pater familias or head of the guild (Gildmeister) for example.”59 Each

group was thus to be represented at several levels and in different ways, which were

always open to negotiation and change. The family, for example, was to be

represented in the village, and again in the guild or the province. This political

layering enabled parallel and simultaneous representation for groups and

organizations at all levels.

Friedrich therefore differed considerably from other individualist, anti-totalitarian

thinkers such as Hayek or Arendt. As for Schmitt, Friedrich insisted that the

individual could not be a constituting unit as far as political participation was

concerned. He or she became important only as a member of an assembly,60 and the

importance of Althusius’ Calvinist model lay in its reliance not only on the state, but

on a series of crisscrossing and heterogeneous groups that formed the institutions of

58 Althusius, The Politics, 44.59 Carl J. Friedrich, Johannes Althusius und seine Werk im Rahmen der Entwicklung der Theorie von der Politik (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1975) 120-121.60 See this notion also in Carl J. Friedrich, The New Belief in the Common Man (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1942)

20

the political sphere. In fact, in his Constitutional Government he claimed that real

political representation was born for the first time during the Reformation on German

soil.61 Thus, even though Althusius received some scholarly attention during the

Weimar period in the works of Otto von Gierke and others,62 with Friedrich it was the

first time – and probably the last – that his works were both to be understood as the

historical origin of constitutional democracy and to serve as the model for modern

political organization. Multi-layered Democracy, composed of closely-knit complex

groupings, offered a representative alternative to Schmitt’s “Catholic” dictatorship.

Second, and more important, Althusius offered for Friedrich a model for democratic

order that was based not on the secular doctrines of the Enlightenment, but on a

religious Bund. In fact, he claimed, all the principles of constitutional and democratic

order were based on Christian concepts.63 Althusius, Friedrich asserted, had shown

how not only the nation or the Church, but first and foremost communities of

changing sizes, were invested with the divine right to produce law and rule

themselves, and give form to their transcendental qualities. Thus the inner divides and

tensions so characteristic of the republican regime were not to be regarded as

materialistic forces contradicting the “theological” coherence of the nation, the result

of what Weber saw as the secularizing “disenchantment” of modernization. Like

Schmitt’s plebiscite dictatorship, they were a type of secularized political form that

preserved the “dignity” and quality of the religious period. Catholic dogma, therefore,

should not serve as the only model for political form. The religious roots of the

republican phenomenon had been exposed, and Schmitt’s attack on republicanism

61 Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Politics: Nature and Development, 258-259.62 Otto von Gierke, Johannes Althusius und die Entwicklung der naturrechtlichen Staatstheorien (Breslau: Verlag von M. & H. Marcus, 1929). Schmitt also mentions Althusius briefly in Constitutional Theory, 126.63 Carl J. Friedrich, Transcendent Justice: The Religious Dimension of Constitutionalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1964); see also: Carl J. Friedrich, “Preface,” in Althusius, The Politics, viii.

21

could be overcome. It was in this spirit, in a letter from 1931 to thank Schmitt for the

copy of der Hütter der Verfassung, that Friedrich promised to send his soon-to-be-

published book on Althusius “as a response to your ideas.”64

Yet one should understand Friedrich’s writings on theological politics also against the

background of wider debates on the nature of the relations between theology and

politics that took place during the Weimar period, and that in their turn echoed even

earlier theological-intellectual traditions.65 The attempts at finding a theological

source for political legitimacy or action, as well as the interpretation of modern

politics as based on theological concepts, stretched from Right to Left, and included

political theorists and theologians alike. In Göttingen, for example, theologian

Emanuel Hirsch linked Christian faith to nationalistic and anti-democratic, and

eventually Nazi politics,66 while in Münster and Bonn Karl Barth developed a more

complex “dialectical theology” that supported a type of Vernunftrepublikanismus.67

This tendency gained ground also among Jewish intellectuals, such as Alexander

Altmann and Hans Jonas, who like Schmitt and Friedrich believed that all concepts of

modern politics were founded on an earlier, theological infrastructure.68

In the context of political-theological debates, Friedrich found the core of his

historical narrative in the work of the Heidelberg theologian Ernst Troeltsch.

Troeltsch, who during the early Weimar years was among the prominent activists of

64 HStAD, RW 265-4420 Letter Carl J. Friedrich to Schmitt, 2 August 1931.65 Alf Christophersen, Kairos: Protestantische Zeitdeutungskämpfe in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).66 See for example: Emmanuel Hirsch, “Demokratie und Christentum,“ Der Geisteskampf der Gegenwart 54 (1918) 57-60. On Hirsch, see: J. Stroup, “Political Theology and Secularization Theory in Germany, 1918-1939: Emanuel Hirsch as a Phenomenon of His Time,” The Harvard Theological Review 80(3) (1987): 321-368.67 Rudy Koshar, “Where is Karl Barth in Modern European History?” Modern Intellectual History 5, 2 (August, 2008): 333-62.68 Alexander Altmann, Was ist jüdische Theologie?: Beiträge zur jüd. Neuorientierung (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag Israelit u. Hermon, 1933); Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Tübingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1934), which was Jonas’ dissertation from 1928.

22

the liberal-democratic DDP, developed his own interpretation of history most fully in

his magisterial 1912 The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. In this famous

1,000 page-long study, from which Friedrich quoted frequently throughout the years,

Troeltsch claimed to have identified an underlying link between Lutheranism and the

development of Prussia's conservative, reactionary and militaristic political structure,

in contrast to the influence of the Calvinistic spirit on the birth of democratic,

bourgeois ideologies. Even though modern European civilization was “entirely

unconscious of its original connection with Calvinism,” Troeltsch claimed, it was this

creed that in a specific historical context had created the model for modern society.

“In its close connection with English and American racial peculiarities and

institutions,” Troeltsch wrote, “it has merged with and to some extent produced that

political and social way of life which may be described as ‘Americanism’.” In light of

the all-encompassing process of Americanization, therefore, “[p]resent day Calvinism

feels itself to be the only Christian ecclesiastical body which is in agreement with the

modern democratic and capitalistic development, and, moreover, the only one which

is suited to it.”69 Unlike Weber, Friedrich contended, Troeltsch correctly showed that

the process of modernization did not necessarily exclude religion from modern

politics, and that democracy – and not only Capitalism - still evoked its earlier,

theological origins. Indeed, many of Friedrich’s narratives can be traced back to their

primal articulations in Troeltsch’s study of theology and politics.

Though Friedrich’s works – in many ways like those of Troeltsch - remained only on

the margins of Weimar’s intellectual debates, they represent a crucial attempt at

developing a theological source of legitimacy for the republican and democratic

political system. By so doing Friedrich sought to go beyond the

69 Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (New York: Harper & Row, 1960) trans. Olive Wyon, quotes from 578 and 577.

23

Vernunftrepublikanismus that characterized the attitude of most moderate,

democratic-leaning theologians and believers, and replace it by a deeply Christian

commitment to the republican order. While scholarship on political theology, as

mentioned, has often focused on the radical, revolutionary, anti-democratic or

conservative explorations of the relations between politics and thrology, the example

of Friedrich presents a different offshoot of Weimar’s intellectual life. Yet there is no

doubt that it was indeed only in the post-WWII period that Friedrich’s Calvinist

answers to Schmitt “Catholic” theory attained their strongest influence and effect. His

republications of Althusius’ writings and their interpretations and teachings continued

well into the forties and up to the seventies,70 and in fact, one of his first actions upon

his return to Heidelberg after the war was the formation of the “Johannes-Althusius-

Gesselschaft.”71 As the mediator between general Clay and the Protestant churches in

Germany in the late forties,72 a political activist in Calvinist theological organization

in the fifties,73 and through his enduring close ties to Reinhold Niebuhr,74 Friedrich

sought to put into practice the political potential he believed to have found in

Althusius. Unlike his views on the dangers of dictatorship, the theory of Christian

70 See notes 56, 60. Friedrich correspondence documents also failed attempts at publication of a translation of Althusius and works on his theories: HUGFP 17.6 Box 2 File Althusius Publicity, correspondence with Harvard University Press ; HUGFP 17.6 File Freyd's translation of Von Gierke's Althusius, correspondence, 1933-1934; HUGFP 17.12 Box 2 File Althusius Translation 1943-1944; 71 HUGFP 17.60 Box 1, File Althusius, Letter U. Scheuner to Carl J. Friedrich, 24 February 1966; See also: HUGFP 17.14 Box 1 File Althusius-Gesellschaft, 1968-1974; HUGFP 17.14 Box 1 File Althusius, 1972-1975.72 Friedrich recalled how, after both men had completed their service in Germany, he had urged General Clay to regard the Protestant churches in Germany as the most central agent of democratization: HUGFP 17.6 Box 8 File C2 Letter Carl J. Friedrich to General Clay, 15 November 1950.73 See for example his deep involvement in the composition of the Statement of Theologians and Christian leaders in support of Roosevelt's policies in 1944: HUGFP 17.6 Box 8 File Commission on a Just Freedom, Memorandum II. 74 The two cooperated on many organizations and committees. See for example: HUGFP 17.24 Box 11 File Union for Democratic Action, Letter Carl J. Friedrich to Reinhold Niebuhr, August 9 1941; HUGFP 17.24 Box 11 File Union for Democratic Action, Joint Letter to the President of the United States, August 4 1941; HUGFP 17.16 Box 2 File C Letter Reinhold Niehbur to Carl J. Friedrich, 15 April 1944.

24

republicanism did not undergo reformulation in the face of the political catastrophe in

Europe, and it exhibits an almost linear continuation into the postwar era.

In view of Friedrich’s deep religious impulse, it is not surprising that his most lasting

contribution to the American political discourse was the conceptualization of the

United States’ struggle with its enemies in religious terms, as the fight for an

emerging “Judeo-Christian” culture. “Though this combination may seem paradoxical

for many readers,” Friedrich wrote upon the United States’ entry to WWII, the term

“Judeo-Christian” was the real essence of the Western democratic way of life for the

protection of which the Americans were now called upon to fight. The Nazi

persecution of the Jews, Friedrich claimed, was undermining Christianity itself and

was to be understood as an attack on the core of Western “world culture.”75 Like

Niebuhr, Friedrich pointed to a deep affinity between the two religions, “which share

a recognition of the dignity of man [and which] will discover a common foundation in

the ethical standards of a new humanism. Such a universal basis,” he explained, “may

readily be shared by the Jewish people, whose great prophets first raised the cry for a

universal religion.”76 The idea of “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which appeared in

theological circles during the 1930s,77 was brought with the war to the center of the

political discourse and became the meta-concept marking both Jewish integration into

American society and the West’s global war against its pagan, and later during the

Cold War its Communist-materialist enemies.78 The concept helped to accommodate

changing conditions in historical narratives and to present new realities as part of an

75 Carl J. Friedrich, “Anti-Semitism: Challenge to Christian Culture,” Isaque Graeber and Steuart Britt (eds.) Jews in a Gentile World: The Problem of Anti-Semitism (New York: McMillan, 1942) 1-18.76 Ibid., 15.77 Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian tradition in America,” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 1984) 65-85.78 Deborah Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard UP, 2004).

25

imaginary long-standing tradition.79 But at the deepest level, as during Weimar’s last

years, it pointed to democracy’s religious qualities and thus invested it with

transcendental values. Once again, what was originally formulated as a response to

Schmitt’s attacks on “soulless” liberal democracy and his advocacy of “Catholic”

dictatorship merged with American wartime terminology and was incorporated into

narratives that were to last for decades into the Cold War.

3. Conclusion: Weimar and the Construction of the German-American “West”

Observing the Cold War through the concepts and ideas of the Weimar period

allowed Friedrich to interpret new conditions and realities in familiar terms. If both

Germany and the United States were facing the same challenges so inherent to the

constitutional era, and if both, as he claimed, despite all their differences, had their

roots in the theories of Althusius, their histories and traditions could be interpreted as

parts of a single conceptual context and one unified narrative. And indeed, Friedrich

actively participated in the construction of such symbolic ties. As a member of the

organizing committee of the centennial celebrations of the events of 1848, he initiated

publications on the “Forty-Eighters” who had immigrated to the United States,

emphasizing their contribution to the strengthening of democracy in the United States

and their participation in the Civil War.80 In a series of lectures in Germany, on the

other hand, he urged his audience to observe the American occupation as a return to

the German ideals of 1848.81 Such narratives were frequently met with anger and

79 Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007) especially 59-65.80 For the correspondence regarding the publication, see HUGFP 17.6 Box 34 File YZ 1947-1949 correspondence between A.E. Zucker and Carl J. Friedrich. 81 HUGFP 17.39.5 Box 2 File 100 Year Celebration, ‘Die Lehre von 1848’; HUGFP 17.39.5 Box 2 File Lectures Germany, ‘The Lasting Value of Constitutionalism.’

26

hostility, and Friedrich’s lectures in Heidelberg were often the target of conservatives

and refugees from the east, who called for the dismissal of “the traitor.”82 Friedrich’s

perspective on modern German history can also explain why, in contrast to the

majority of the returning German refugees and the political leaders of the young West

German democracy,83 he observed the Weimar Constitution not as a complete failure,

but as a positive historical model.

The continuation of ideas and intellectual frameworks through dramatic historical

changes and turmoil reinforces Daniel Rodger’s and Volker Berghahn’s arguments,

according to which American policies in occupied Germany cannot be understood

merely from the perspective of the emerging Cold War, or even earlier American

ideas of ‘democratization.’ They gain their full meaning when read as part of a long

tradition of transatlantic exchange of ideas and people, which emerged during the

progressive era and in many respects only intensified in the period that is usually

associated with isolation and the severing of such ties, that is, the interwar years.84 It

is hard to think of a more symbolic representative of this reproduction of experiences,

institutions and ideas between the two periods than Friedrich. His involvement in the

foundation of the student exchange program between Germany and the United State

after the war, for example, is often mentioned as one of the most important American

initiatives.85 It is less well known, however, that these DAAD programs, as they were

named, were founded by Friedrich already in 1925, upon his first visit to the US.

Likewise, his initiatives to link modern art with public housing projects and state-82 Universitätsarchiv der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Personalakte Carl J. Friedrich der juristischen Fakultät, File PA 3818.83 See notes 1 and 9. 84 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1998); Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001).85 See Jarausch, After Hitler, 105-111; Oliver M. A. Schmidt, “A Civil Empire by Co-Optation: German-American Exchange Programs as Cultural Diplomacy” (Diss, Harvard U, 1999); Annette Puckhaber, “German Student Exchange Programs in the United States 1946-1952,” GHI Bulletin 30 (2002) 123-141.

27

organized welfare, through which he invited modernist architects to take part in the

reconstruction of Germany’s ruined cities in 1948,86 are best understood as a

continuation of Weimar’s most celebrated welfare achievement, which in many

variations was adopted throughout the US and then exported back to Europe.87

Postwar American-German relations, then, were composed of a complex interaction,

adoption and exchange of ideas and symbols that had their roots decades earlier in the

Weimar Republic and even before.

It was against this background that Weimar itself, as a category, became part of the

long German-American struggle to constitute an order based on principles of

republicanism, Calvinism and representation, a struggle that for Friedrich began with

Althusius and continued into the fifties and the sixties. The Cold War, that is, was

conceptualized both through ‘Weimaric’ terminology and as a reincarnation of

Weimar’s achievements and dangers. This conceptual and symbolic continuity

demonstrates how the Cold War was not merely a conflict between polarized

opponents, but also served as a receptacle for heterogeneous and at times

contradictory narratives of earlier eras. It absorbed such concepts and memories and

included them in the postwar transatlantic exchange of ideas. The dominance of

German-speaking immigrants such as Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper,

Hans Kohn, Hans Morgenthau and many others in formulating the intellectual

theories of the Cold War only serves to further illustrate this point. In this sense, it

was only with the fading away of this generation and in the twilight of the Cold War

that the ‘Weimar Moment’ really came to an end.

86 See for example his letters to the architects Catharine Bauer, Walter Gropius and others during 1948: HUGFP 17.39.5 Box 1 File Correspondence (out).87 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 112-159.

28