The Mysterious Meeting between Carl Schmitt and Josef Redlich

In 1934, Carl Schmitt, then the crown jurist of the Third Reich, wrote in an essay titled National Socialist Legal Thought about “[a] conversation with a world-famous, world travelled, experienced scholar of more than seventy years of age from the United States [which] belongs to the major experiences and encounters which led me as a jurist to National Socialism.” Schmitt never disclosed the identity of the scholar whom he met. Based on Schmitt’s diaries, I reveal that the scholar was Josef Redlich. Born to a Jewish family in 1869, Redlich was the Fairchild Professor of Comparative Public Law at Harvard Law School at the time he met Schmitt in 1931. According to Schmitt’s 1934 essay, the conversation focused on the indeterminacy of legal norms and on a nihilist understanding of the era. Even after discovering the identity of the scholar to whom Schmitt refers in his essay and analyzing the ideas discussed in their meeting, the story of the encounter between Schmitt and Redlich remains mysterious. For some reason, the ideas of a scholar of Jewish descent, who believed in an Austrian multi-national, federal state, inspired and played a profound role in the formulation of a blatantly antisemitic essay promoting National Socialist legal thought by the crown jurist of the Nazi regime. Schmitt repeated the tale of his meeting with an American scholar—without disclosing his identity—in a lecture he gave in Italian, two year after publishing his essay. Based on an analysis of this obscure lecture, his 1934 essay and various other materials written both by Schmitt and Redlich, I offer three possible explanations for why Schmitt viewed his encounter with Redlich as so influential on his road to National Socialism.