Mephistophelean irony in Carl Schmitt’s Political Romanticism, The Buribunks and Ex Captivitate Salus

Abstract

In the last years of his life, Max Weber warned of an impending spiritual and intellectual crisis. An ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic machinery was encasing Europe.1 Not summer’s bloom lies before us, he prophesied in lectures delivered during the last days of the Great War, ‘but rather a polar night of icy darkness and harshness’. 2 Goethe was the starting point of Weber’s Cassandralike ruminations. Twice he quotes the same passage from Faust: ‘Reflect, the Devil is old, so become old if you would understand him.’ 3 This reaching out for a religio-literary figure was no mere aberration for, as he wrote elsewhere, ‘anyone who wishes to engage in politics at all … is entering into relations with satanic powers that lurk in every act of violence’. 4 Anton Warde, in tracing the genesis of irony in Goethe’s Faust, contends that Goethe utilised layer upon layer of irony – albeit unconsciously.5 Johannes Anderegg analyses the playwithin-a-play framing role of the Book of Job in Faust, whose ‘intertextual layers provide a varnish of irony’. 6 Ellis Shookman concurs with Warde that irony enabled Goethe to achieve critical distance from the character of Faust, but also notes that ‘Mephistopheles is often called ironic’. 7