Transcription and online/print edition of the diaries of Carl Schmitt during the Second World War

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Philip Manow; Professor Dr. Florian Meinel
• Subject Area: Principles of Law and Jurisprudence
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 432983067

The project will realize a comprehensive digital open-access edition of the diaries of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) from the years of the Second World War (1943-44). Schmitt is the most controversial German legal theorist and political thinker of the 20th century, internationally widely discussed and yet notorious because of his commitment to National Socialism and his anti-Semitism. Compared to the diaries already published (1912 to 1919, 1921 to 1934, and 1947 to 1958), those from 1939 to 1946 are of particular importance. First, they are an important source for the assessment of Schmitt’s attitude to National Socialism after the period of his open engagement in the years 1933 to 1936, that is in a time when Schmitt published only occasionally. As rare egodocuments from the period of “total war”, they can shed light on a biographical phase, which so far is poorly illuminated, also with regard to Schmitt's continued proximity to Berlin Nazi elites such as Johannes Popitz and Hans Frank. Second, these diaries are far more yielding in terms of Schmitt’s scholarly work than those from other times of his life. Large amounts of the text resemble rather a working journal than a conventional diary. The text corpus contains numerous sketches, preliminary considerations and excerpts for Schmitt's most important postwar work, the 1950 "The Nomos of the Earth in International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum”, which was essentially written from 1943 to 1945. In contemporary International Law and in International Relations, in particular in the debates over a reassessment of liberal and colonial international law, this book has recently been widely and controversially discussed. This makes it all the more important to disclose as much as possible the intellectual context of Schmitt’s Nomos-project in the 1940s.Since the diaries are entirely written down in the rare and now extinct form of shorthand Schmitt used (Gabelsberger), the notes will first be transliterated by renowned experts in historical stenography before the main editorial work can be carried out. The texts and comments will finally be published in a hybrid (digital/print) TEI-XML-based open access edition.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Frank M. Bischoff; Professor Dr. Wolfram Pyta