Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, welcome to Behind the Bastards, and I know
Speaker 2: what you're all saying. Congratulations Robert on finally being appointed
Speaker 2: the new Pope of the Catholic Church Pontiffects Maximus. I
Speaker 2: was as surprised as anybody. I wake up in the morning,
Speaker 2: I see a phone notification that says, you know, Vatican
Speaker 2: Conclave appoints new Pope Robert, and then the rest of
Speaker 2: the title got cut off.
Speaker 3: But I understood what the rest of it was. Obviously.
Speaker 2: I've been celebrating the last couple of days, have not
Speaker 2: really checked in online, but am now going to check
Speaker 2: in with my guests for this day, Sophie Lichtormen will
Speaker 2: not my guest, but my co host and producer and
Speaker 2: our guest for today, Blake Wexler.
Speaker 3: Do either of you have a.
Speaker 2: Boon to ask now that I am the literal mouth
Speaker 2: of God.
Speaker 4: So I got an email saying I was Pontiff wex
Speaker 4: and I don't know if that was a typo or
Speaker 4: what happened.
Speaker 2: So yes, no, that's a new position I've created specifically
Speaker 2: for you.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Yes, you are responsible solely for the spiritual guidance of
Speaker 2: all Blakes and all Wexler's. It's a fairly large responsibility.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well there's not a lot of Catholic Wexlers.
Speaker 2: Well then you got a lot of work ahead of you,
Speaker 2: don't You're my friend, Robert.
Speaker 1: I have a request.
Speaker 3: Uh huh?
Speaker 1: Can you heal Lebron and make him thirty?
Speaker 2: I've already done it, Sophie, heay gaze upon it and
Speaker 2: know it. Yes, God has already touched him. He has
Speaker 2: another forty year career ahead.
Speaker 3: Of him, Thank you God.
Speaker 4: I just don't know.
Speaker 2: He's going to be dunking into his sixties.
Speaker 4: Fantastic.
Speaker 2: He's going to be praying for death, begging for anything
Speaker 2: but another season with the Lakers.
Speaker 4: We won't let him stop. Yeah, we won't let him stop.
Speaker 4: That's the plot of Space Jame three, by the way, begging.
Speaker 1: Die.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's what God wants, is pope. I know the
Speaker 2: other thing I gotta say, Unfortunately, as we learned with
Speaker 2: the last Pope, popes are more or less helpless to
Speaker 2: stop the world from descending into fascism or the slaughter
Speaker 2: of children overseas. It's a bummer. So what really only
Speaker 2: random bullshit is what I'm in power to do. And
Speaker 2: today The thing that I'm going to do that is
Speaker 2: not enough but might be a little useful, is explain
Speaker 2: to you the intellectual underpinning of fascism. Right specifically, there's
Speaker 2: a guy, a single dude who's probably the only genius
Speaker 2: in the history of like fascist like legal philosophy and theory,
Speaker 2: who were going to talk about And the basics of
Speaker 2: this story is when the Nazis started coming to power,
Speaker 2: you had this guy Hitler who was really charismatic, who
Speaker 2: was good at drawing in people, and you had, you know,
Speaker 2: this movement that was clearly on its way to taking power,
Speaker 2: and there was not really much beyond that. There wasn't
Speaker 2: a consistent set of beliefs because a lot of early Nazis,
Speaker 2: that's why they had the lot of ni idol long knives.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of disagreements between them, and there
Speaker 2: was this kind of competition for like who is going
Speaker 2: to figure out what the political philosophy of fascism is.
Speaker 2: And the guy we're talking about the day is the
Speaker 2: dude who won that struggle and he's gone on to
Speaker 2: influence He's kind of the thinker behind the neo conservative
Speaker 2: movement that dominated during the Bush years. He's the thinker
Speaker 2: behind you know, Putin's rise to power in a lot
Speaker 2: of ways. He's a very influential guy. So, Blake are
Speaker 2: you Are you excited to hear about him?
Speaker 4: I'm both dreading it and excited. I can't wait.
Speaker 2: Before we close out our cold Open. You want to
Speaker 2: plug your pluggables right here at the top.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, I love that. Yeah, that's a fantastic process. Yes,
Speaker 4: I am first Wall me names Blake Wexler at Blake
Speaker 4: Wexler and all social media. I have a stand up
Speaker 4: special called Daddy Long Legs, which is available for free
Speaker 4: on YouTube on August. Firth first and Firth I do all.
Speaker 4: My My calendar is Colin Firth. He's all over every
Speaker 4: single month of my cab. I know that's why I
Speaker 4: mispronounced that. But August first, I'm going to be in
Speaker 4: Philadelphia doing stand up, and then in late August I'm
Speaker 4: going to be in Wilkesbury and then yeah, there'll be
Speaker 4: more dates popping up on my social media that aren't
Speaker 4: in Pennsylvania. So yeah, you can find me all those places.
Speaker 2: Excellent, excellent, All right, everybody, let's come back after the
Speaker 2: Cold Open, and we're back all right, Blake, are you
Speaker 2: ready to.
Speaker 3: Get into this tale? Are you ready to learn?
Speaker 2: So you're ready to lock in here, Blake, lock in
Speaker 2: learn about Nazi jurisprudence.
Speaker 4: I'm a jurisprude, but yeah, no, let's dive it.
Speaker 3: So was this motherfucker? Actually? Yeah?
Speaker 2: So today we're going to talk about Carl Schmidt, and
Speaker 2: Carl Schmidt is the He did a lot of things
Speaker 2: in terms of like coming up with intellectual underpinnings for
Speaker 2: what we call fascism today. The number one thing he
Speaker 2: did was figure out how to destroy liberal to democracy.
Speaker 2: And this is why I call him a genius. A
Speaker 2: lot of fascist thinkers were like dipshits and bigots, and
Speaker 2: maybe they had they had certain kinds of cunning. Like
Speaker 2: Hitler was very smart at certain things. The man who
Speaker 2: had to work a crowd. That's an intelligence, the same
Speaker 2: kind of intelligence Donald Trump has, right, Like intelligence isn't
Speaker 2: an objective thing that people are good at certain things.
Speaker 2: Stephen Miller has certain kinds of evil intelligence for scheming
Speaker 2: in certain ways. Karl Schmidt was just an actual genius.
Speaker 2: And he was a genius in an evil way and
Speaker 2: in a way that was like fucked up. But was
Speaker 2: very broad, and the thing that he figured out before
Speaker 2: anyone else was how to kill a liberal democracy as
Speaker 2: like the far right, as like a member of a
Speaker 2: reactionary party. And it's the same playbook. What the playbook
Speaker 2: he wrote out in the twenties is exactly what's happened here, right,
Speaker 2: So that's that is the degree of mind this guy has.
Speaker 2: And so as much of a fucked up weirdo as
Speaker 2: he is, he is a legitimately like smart man, which
Speaker 2: is unfortunate, righty.
Speaker 3: It's always so.
Speaker 2: Much easier when you can kind of write these guys
Speaker 2: off as like freaks, but you just can't with Karl,
Speaker 2: with old Schmidty as we will not be calling him.
Speaker 4: It's a little humanizing.
Speaker 2: It's a little humanizing. Good old Schmitty, Yeah, good old Schmidty.
Speaker 2: So Schmidty. Karl Schmidt was born on July eleventh, eighteen
Speaker 2: eighty eight, which means he comes into the world right
Speaker 2: as Germany the state becomes a legal adult and thus
Speaker 2: is able to buy scratch off tickets at the gas station.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if Germany ever did that. Maybe we'd
Speaker 2: have been better off if they'd gotten really into fucking
Speaker 2: paper casino bullshit, but trying to put their energy into
Speaker 2: right right, right, Yeah, getting really into the power ball,
Speaker 2: right exactly. So one thing right off the bat that
Speaker 2: separates him from most future reactionaries is that he never
Speaker 2: loves Imperial Germany or the Kaiser.
Speaker 4: He is not.
Speaker 2: Most of these guys at least have some degree of
Speaker 2: like ah back in you know, the good old days
Speaker 2: of the Second Reich. He is never that guy. And
Speaker 2: he's never that guy because he comes from a marginalized
Speaker 2: population within the set at Reich, which is Catholics, right,
Speaker 2: which very much are in a lot of ways.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: We don't really think about Catholics that way now, but
Speaker 2: even in the US it was a big deal when
Speaker 2: JFK got elected president, Like there were people who are
Speaker 2: like a papist in the White House. He's a Vatican stooge.
Speaker 2: And it's much worse in Germany in the late eighteen hundreds, right.
Speaker 2: I know, it's hard to imagine like Catholics as like
Speaker 2: a marginal lot, but I mean think about like Ireland, right,
Speaker 2: Like you know, under the English thumb, right, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of oppression of Catholics, even as the Catholic Church
Speaker 2: is also doing horrible things in Ireland, right, You know,
Speaker 2: shit's complicated. So the fact that he does not like
Speaker 2: the Reich at any point in his childhood, it's a
Speaker 2: product of both his family religion, as I said, Catholicism,
Speaker 2: and of the origin of his family where they come
Speaker 2: from geographically, because his family hails from a place called Bossendorff,
Speaker 2: which is a small village on the Alfbach river in
Speaker 2: the Eifel Mountains. This village is about six kilometers from
Speaker 2: the Mosel, which is mos Elle, which is a major
Speaker 2: river in Germany, and all his life Schmidt identified primarily
Speaker 2: as a Mausoleanian. Right now, that probably means nothing to
Speaker 2: most of you listening, and that probably doesn't mean a
Speaker 2: whole lot more to the people who have to happen
Speaker 2: to be German, right, because things are. It means a
Speaker 2: different thing now even than it does to like Germans today. Right,
Speaker 2: Coming from this region in the late eighteen hundreds, when
Speaker 2: Germany has not been a thing for long, means a
Speaker 2: very different thing. This whole part of the country, which
Speaker 2: biographer Reinhard Mehring just refers to as the Eiffel, is
Speaker 2: sort of on like the southeast point of Germany, and
Speaker 2: it's right next to Lorraine, which today is part of France,
Speaker 2: but had been taken eighteen years earlier from France after
Speaker 2: the Franco Prussian War ended, and was thus part of
Speaker 2: Germany at the time that he's born. So the region
Speaker 2: he comes into is right next to this traditionally French region,
Speaker 2: And as a result, Karl and his family don't consider
Speaker 2: themselves like Germans, certainly not in the way that like
Speaker 2: Germans will in a couple of decades. They are French Germans,
Speaker 2: and they feel both French and German, right, and there's
Speaker 2: a tension between a lot of his family does live
Speaker 2: in Lorraine, right, and so there's this tension between his
Speaker 2: family and the Pan German ideology that suffused the second Riche,
Speaker 2: which is very anti French. Because they're not anti French, right,
Speaker 2: their relatives are French, they feel kind of French. So
Speaker 2: you're both part of this Catholic minority and you're also
Speaker 2: like kind of French, so you're just not fully on
Speaker 2: board with the whole Kaiser thing. Now, obviously, when I
Speaker 2: say these are marginalized people, it's not nearly in the
Speaker 2: same way as like even a Jewish person in this
Speaker 2: period of time is marginalized, but you don't escape bias either.
Speaker 2: Karl was born in a town called Plettenberg, where his
Speaker 2: parents had moved right before having him. This was not
Speaker 2: far from where he's born, but it was a little
Speaker 2: bit nearer to the imperial core of Germany. More to
Speaker 2: the point, it means that Karl grows up in a
Speaker 2: large town that's developing rapidly because it's industrializing. But he's
Speaker 2: a distinct religious minority in that town. As by biographer
Speaker 2: Reinhard Mehering writes in Karl Schmidt a biography, this means
Speaker 2: belonging to a confessional minority in an intensely evangelical environment,
Speaker 2: an environment partly even of Protestant sectarianism. So everyone around
Speaker 2: him is like a Lutheran and they don't like Catholics
Speaker 2: very much, right, And people are kind of dicks to him, right.
Speaker 4: Those One of the theses I believe is that we Catholics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fuck the Pope, which I take offense to now
Speaker 2: obviously because.
Speaker 4: Of the Pope. I'm sorry you had to read that.
Speaker 4: That's not fair to you in your new position.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's hurtful, it's hurtful. Yeah. So this was
Speaker 2: particularly difficult for Catholics during Karl's early life, because he
Speaker 2: is born kind of in the shadow of something that
Speaker 2: occurs at the early stages of the German Empire called
Speaker 2: the culture komp right and if you remember, you know,
Speaker 2: min komf is my struggle, culture camp, culture struggle. It's
Speaker 2: not quite culture war, but it basically means that, right,
Speaker 2: and what the culture comp is is in the late
Speaker 2: eighteen seventies, right after the Reich is born Otto von Bismarck,
Speaker 2: who's like he's the architect of Germany, right, he's like
Speaker 2: the visier whispering into the ear of the Prussian king,
Speaker 2: and his plots and schemes lead to the culmination of
Speaker 2: the Franco Prussian War in the creation of Germany. And
Speaker 2: Bismarck is kind of dealing with a problem in the
Speaker 2: early days of Germany that would later be devil Hitler,
Speaker 2: which is that the Catholic Church isn't just a church, right,
Speaker 2: not in the way that like, you know, the church
Speaker 2: down the street from you probably is, assuming it's not
Speaker 2: a Catholic church, you going to First Baptist or whatever,
Speaker 2: that's like a church. It's a discreete organization and it
Speaker 2: has maybe it's maybe the pastor there is political, maybe
Speaker 2: he's not. But the church is just a church. Catholicism
Speaker 2: is both a church and a government, right. There's an
Speaker 2: actual micro state in the Vatican that they governed, but
Speaker 2: also they had governed. They had been almost like the
Speaker 2: Christian u in for a long time. They'd had armies
Speaker 2: for long points of time, and even in this period,
Speaker 2: nearly all social services in Catholic dominated regions of Europe
Speaker 2: are run through and by the Church, right, so they
Speaker 2: are still, to a degree in this period involved in
Speaker 2: governing in a way that impacts people's lives. And Bismarck
Speaker 2: doesn't like this because he's trying to centralize power within
Speaker 2: a modern state, and the Catholic Church is an alternate
Speaker 2: and perhaps opposing power center right. That might wind up
Speaker 2: opposing the Kaiser, and that can make things dangerous for
Speaker 2: the Kaiser and dangerous for the regime. Part of what
Speaker 2: scares Bismarck is that the Pope is infallible, right, and
Speaker 2: the Kaiser's just not, you know, like, even though things
Speaker 2: are very strict, the Kaiser's kind of close to an
Speaker 2: absolute monarch. There's not a widespread belief among Germans that
Speaker 2: the Kaiser can't make mistakes, whereas Catholics are obliged to
Speaker 2: believe that the pope is infallible and this Bismarck really
Speaker 2: doesn't trust this, right.
Speaker 4: That's a hard argument to win, where it really is
Speaker 4: just back and forth. Once it's like I believe this,
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, well I'm infalliable.
Speaker 3: I'm infalliable.
Speaker 2: And yet what Bismark's saying is both that like, well,
Speaker 2: how do you win an argument with a guy who
Speaker 2: can't be wrong?
Speaker 3: And also a lot of.
Speaker 2: People just feel like they owe the church because it's
Speaker 2: providing them food when they're starving and shit, right, and
Speaker 2: that's a complicated thing. So in the early part of
Speaker 2: the German Empire, he kind of goes to he goes
Speaker 2: on a culture war against the Catholic Church to strip
Speaker 2: it of its influence. I want to quote from a
Speaker 2: write up in EBSCO by Donald Sullivan here. Bismarck sought
Speaker 2: to assert state control over the Church through a series
Speaker 2: of laws aimed at reducing its influence and authority. These
Speaker 2: measures included government oversight of Catholic seminaries, restrictions on clergy,
Speaker 2: and the implementation of civil marriage laws, which removed the
Speaker 2: Church's traditional role in marriage. Despite these efforts, the Culture
Speaker 2: comp faced considerable resistance from the Catholic community, leading to
Speaker 2: public sympathy among some Protestant Germans. And something kind of
Speaker 2: like this is going to happen under the Nazis, right,
Speaker 2: the Nazis have a little war with the Catholic Church.
Speaker 2: The culture comp does not achieve its goals. Bismarck kind
Speaker 2: of underestimates, how you know, one thing you got to say,
Speaker 2: even if you hate it, the Catholic Church has staying power, right.
Speaker 4: It's been around for a little bit round.
Speaker 3: They can take a punch, you know.
Speaker 2: And Bismarck, you know, Germany's pretty new and he's thinking
Speaker 2: like I'm going to roll over these fuckers. And he's like,
Speaker 2: oh no, no, they've got a lot of money in power.
Speaker 4: Shit.
Speaker 2: So by the late eighteen seventies, a lot of the
Speaker 2: like harshest measures he'd tried to push through had been repealed.
Speaker 2: Some stuff stays like, you know, the Catholic Church does lose.
Speaker 2: They are not in control of marriage or of education
Speaker 2: even in Catholic regions in the way that they had been.
Speaker 2: So it's not a total failure. This conflict has largely
Speaker 2: passed by the time Karl is born, and in fact,
Speaker 2: the year of his birth is the same year that
Speaker 2: Kaiservillehelm the Second takes the throne, which spells the beginning
Speaker 2: of the end for Bismarck, so he is not going
Speaker 2: to be in power much longer. Catholicism has kind of
Speaker 2: outlasted him, but the hostility Catholics had to the Reich
Speaker 2: of lingered as a result of this, and Carl's dad
Speaker 2: is a Catholic activist right He sits in the local
Speaker 2: parish council and he's always fighting for the rights of Catholics.
Speaker 2: So before Carl's born, his dad is kind of fighting
Speaker 2: Bismarck on this thing. Carl later described his father this way.
Speaker 2: Throughout his life, he remained faithful to the Catholic cause
Speaker 2: in a diaspora, which was still very hard at the time,
Speaker 2: and he really admires his dad for this. He does
Speaker 2: not like his mom spoilers for a fascist, but mom
Speaker 2: issues issues with women in general.
Speaker 3: Shocking.
Speaker 4: It always starts with the momb, does it.
Speaker 3: It's all of these guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So this explains why, contrary to a lot of
Speaker 2: reactionary Germans of his day, Carl's got no nostalgia for
Speaker 2: the kaiser Reich because he never feels like a full
Speaker 2: citizen of it. Another of Schmidt's biographers, go Paul Balakrishnan,
Speaker 2: describes this situation ably in his book The Enemy. Most
Speaker 2: poor small town Catholics lived in a world closed off
Speaker 2: from a hostel increasingly secular society, a world in which
Speaker 2: the local priest was a revered authority in matters of
Speaker 2: politics and morality. And that's kind of where Carl is
Speaker 2: growing up. He's in this town where he's a minority.
Speaker 2: It's very cosmopolitan, but he goes to a Catholic school,
Speaker 2: so he is separated from everyone who's not a Catholic,
Speaker 2: and he lives in this kind of bubble. He's a
Speaker 2: good student, very good student, and he's helped along by
Speaker 2: the fact that his father is a stenographer who teaches
Speaker 2: him how to write shorthand at an early age. So
Speaker 2: Carl's always going to be very good at writing very quickly,
Speaker 2: which is a real boon if you're going to be
Speaker 2: an intellectual who's trying to like take advantage of shifting
Speaker 2: trends when things are moving very quickly, that you can
Speaker 2: get shit out quickly.
Speaker 4: Because it is either writing or speaking right, like, you
Speaker 4: either have to be a great you know, like speak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one or the two, one or the two.
Speaker 2: There's the only ways to reach people, right exactly. There's
Speaker 2: no like editing together a TikTok video or whatever. No, no, unfortunately, tragically,
Speaker 2: ah to have seen Hitler's TikTok, if only for a minute. No,
Speaker 2: we don't need that. We can already see Hitler's TikTok.
Speaker 4: There's a bunch of them now.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of talk.
Speaker 2: So Schmid's family are working class, they're bordering on poor
Speaker 2: in most cases. They voted for the Catholic Center Party,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, a centrist party. Johann who's his
Speaker 2: dad worked at a railway station, and Carl's relatives are
Speaker 2: mostly kind of at a similar socioeconomic level. But his
Speaker 2: dad's got one brother who gets rich by selling land
Speaker 2: to mining concerns, and so he's kind of like supporting
Speaker 2: a lot of the family whenever shit's difficult or whenever
Speaker 2: a kid has like bills that their family can't afford,
Speaker 2: and he and a lot of the rest of the
Speaker 2: family pool resources. When they realize how smart Karl is
Speaker 2: to invest in his education and the education of one
Speaker 2: of his brothers. He's got two other brothers. One of
Speaker 2: them is really smart, so Carl and his smart brother
Speaker 2: get a lot of money put into them. His smart
Speaker 2: brother goes on to become a medical doctor. Carl becomes
Speaker 2: a jurist. His other brother is like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: he doesn't do anything school related. Yeah, he's just fine.
Speaker 2: He doesn't become he doesn't become a howling fascist, I
Speaker 2: don't think. So, you know, he's got that going for him.
Speaker 2: So we know glaringly little other than this about Carl's
Speaker 2: early childhood, which he never discussed at length. He did
Speaker 2: speak positively about his dad, but he does not speak
Speaker 2: about his mom.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: Mehring, who is his best biographer, simply writes, Schmid would
Speaker 2: sometimes speak about her in rather negative terms, and boy
Speaker 2: boy did he. We'll get to more of that later.
Speaker 2: It's tantalizing to want to pull more from these scant details,
Speaker 2: but we simply don't have it. He learned to play piano,
Speaker 2: We know that he got good marks in school, and
Speaker 2: then at age eleven he has an experience that was
Speaker 2: familiar to all of the sons of like ambitious families
Speaker 2: at this period. Of time anywhere in Europe, which is
Speaker 2: that he got shipped off to like a boarding school,
Speaker 2: right where you know, time to leave your family behind
Speaker 2: and learn how to do whatever it is you're going
Speaker 2: to do. And this is the same in Germany as
Speaker 2: it is basically everywhere else. So he leaves this town
Speaker 2: where he's a member of an outnumbered religious minority for
Speaker 2: a closed world in which everyone around him is Catholic
Speaker 2: as fuck, and he lives there. You know, a large
Speaker 2: portion of the time, his mom wants him to become
Speaker 2: a priest, right, she wants him to get into the clergy,
Speaker 2: and he's not interested in this at all, and she
Speaker 2: never forgives him for this. Right. It's like your mama
Speaker 2: wants you to be a doctor or whatever and you
Speaker 2: fall into some other career and she's just always kind
Speaker 2: of pissed at him. Now, Carl's grades qualify him for
Speaker 2: a scholarship. Eventually he leaves this Catholic school for a
Speaker 2: prestigious local secular gymnasium in Germany that means high school,
Speaker 2: which is confusing. You're not talking about going to work out,
Speaker 2: you're talking about high school.
Speaker 3: More or less. This is odd.
Speaker 2: The fact that he gets to leave his Catholic school
Speaker 2: and go to this secular school is weird because, as
Speaker 2: Balakrishnan writes, Bookish Catholic children were usually singled out as
Speaker 2: potential candidates for the priesthood and would not typically have
Speaker 2: been exposed to the full course of studies. It's such
Speaker 2: a gymnasium. The fact that he was allowed to continue
Speaker 2: his studies suggests that his family placed more value on
Speaker 2: a secular education than was typical of their kind. Right,
Speaker 2: So even though his mom has these goals for him,
Speaker 2: he's allowed to go to a secular school when it's
Speaker 2: clear that that's what he wants, and that is kind
Speaker 2: of interesting. It does show that like they are also modernizing,
Speaker 2: they're not completely stuck in the old way things had been.
Speaker 2: And this going to this secular school kind of ends
Speaker 2: him as a believer, Like he stops believing in God
Speaker 2: here there's this has a very humanistic curriculum, and he
Speaker 2: doesn't he doesn't fully fall into like German idealism and
Speaker 2: all of these kind of like totally secular ideas. There's
Speaker 2: always a little bit of like belief in the divine
Speaker 2: uh that he that he holds too, that even influences
Speaker 2: his ideas on the law, but he stops being a
Speaker 2: literal believing Catholic as a result of this education.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: One of his best friends in this period is another Karl,
Speaker 2: last name Kluksen, whose father owned a big department store
Speaker 2: in town. And Kluchsen is an artsy kid, and so
Speaker 2: he kind of inducts Schmidt into the world of what
Speaker 2: we'd call like theater kids and art kids. That's that's
Speaker 2: who Carl's hanging out with. Is like the theater kids
Speaker 2: and like the musicians, the artists. These kids who are
Speaker 2: gonna be like bohemians in the Weimar era, doing Hella
Speaker 2: drugs and eventually getting purged by the Nazis. This is
Speaker 2: his social circle as a teenager, right, That's.
Speaker 4: What turns them into a Nazi. He's like, I can't
Speaker 4: deal with these people are bugging the hell out of me.
Speaker 4: We gotta kill all of them.
Speaker 2: There actually is a there's a degree to which that's true.
Speaker 2: He's theater kids. God damn it.
Speaker 3: Sorry, relatable.
Speaker 2: No, it's actually where he does seem to be going
Speaker 2: down a different path at one point because during his
Speaker 2: last year in secondary school, he starts reading a guy
Speaker 2: named Max Sterner and all the anarchists in the arguments
Speaker 2: in the Audiencer's going, oh what, because Sterner is like,
Speaker 2: he's a very influential anarchist thinker, although calling him that
Speaker 2: even is like it's a very big simplification of what
Speaker 2: he believed. He's the father of a school of thought
Speaker 2: called egoism, which I shouldn't even try to explain here,
Speaker 2: because any discussion of this man sparks furious arguments about
Speaker 2: the thirty or so people who know he existed. That's
Speaker 2: a bit of an exaggeration, but it's enough for you
Speaker 2: to know that Sterner is about as fringe and radical
Speaker 2: a thinker as Germany ever produces, right, And especially the
Speaker 2: fact that he's reading Sterner at this period of time
Speaker 2: means that this is a kid who is drawn to
Speaker 2: radical ideas and dangerously radical ideas. Like you can get
Speaker 2: in some shit for reading Sterner in public school at
Speaker 2: this point in time, right, So he is very drawn
Speaker 2: to like forbidden intellectual topics in a lot of ways. Now,
Speaker 2: one reason Schmidt is interested in Sterner is that his
Speaker 2: writings had contributed to what was called the Vormars, which
Speaker 2: is a period of what scholar Lawrence Stepplvick describes as
Speaker 2: intellectual fermentation. This is happening in the early eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: and Sterner is one of these thinkers who's like radical
Speaker 2: ideas contribute to this boiling over of intellectual like discontent
Speaker 2: with the system that contributes to a failed revolution in
Speaker 2: Germany in eighteen forty eight, and in eighteen forty eight,
Speaker 2: there's a shitload all over Europe. There's a bunch of
Speaker 2: failed revolutions. Sterner is a big part of what that
Speaker 2: period of time, and so that's part of Weischmidt is
Speaker 2: interested in him. He's also interested because Sterner is a Hegelian,
Speaker 2: in other words, an intellectual follower of a guy named
Speaker 2: Friedrich Hegel. Philosophy is not my strong suit, but from
Speaker 2: Hegel we get this important concept called the Hegelian dialectic.
Speaker 2: A dialectic is just a method of philosophical argument that
Speaker 2: involves two opposing sides having an intellectual clash. And Hegel's
Speaker 2: particular style of dialectic broadened the concept of opposing sides
Speaker 2: from like Plato, literally depicting arguments between like famous dudes
Speaker 2: who embody different attitudes to and I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: from the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy. Here different definitions of
Speaker 2: consciousness and of the object that consciousness is aware of
Speaker 2: or claims to know. As in Plato's dialogues, a contradictory
Speaker 2: process between opposing sides and Hegel's dialectic leads to a
Speaker 2: linear evolution or development from less sophisticated definitions or views
Speaker 2: to more sophisticated ones later. The dialectical process thus constitutes
Speaker 2: Hegel's method for arguing against the earlier less sophisticated definitions reviews,
Speaker 2: and for more sophisticated ones later. Now that doesn't seem
Speaker 2: and I know this is this is not what people
Speaker 2: come here for. That doesn't seem like it's anything that
Speaker 2: could piss someone off. Right, This seems very like who
Speaker 2: could be angry about this basic idea?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: So many people get pissed off about this. Up to
Speaker 2: the present day, reactionaries fucking hate Hegel and Hegelian dialectics
Speaker 2: because Hegel is like this very scientific and progressive figure
Speaker 2: whose philosophy advocates for like a continual advancement in understanding.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: So, in other words, we are working to better ideas
Speaker 2: and better understandings of things, And that's not conservatism. Right,
Speaker 2: that's like the opposite of a reactionary idea. And the
Speaker 2: Nazis are going to consider Hegel like a devil, like
Speaker 2: he is he is Satan himself, right, They're so angry.
Speaker 4: They don't like, let's hear all sides Out's not let's
Speaker 4: give everybody an equal floor to speak. It's not.
Speaker 2: You read that last dense paragraph to like, what are
Speaker 2: these Nazis? And they're they're reaching for I mean literally,
Speaker 2: there's a like I think it's a Goerring quote where
Speaker 2: it's like, I'm going to reach for my gun when
Speaker 2: I hear shit like that.
Speaker 4: Amazing.
Speaker 2: So the Nazis don't like this guy. As George Lucix
Speaker 2: would explain in a nineteen forty three essay, Hegel's scientific
Speaker 2: dialectic is unbearable to them because their worldview season it
Speaker 2: almost in the same words as the old Friedrich Schlingel,
Speaker 2: who became a reactionary a Satanic principle, the principle of evil,
Speaker 2: of the anti German, of the anti racial. So at
Speaker 2: the time Schmid is in school, Hegel is controversial for
Speaker 2: these reasons, like, you know, reactionary. This is a fairly
Speaker 2: reactionary state, and so they don't like this guy whose
Speaker 2: thoughts play a significant role in a revolution that had
Speaker 2: occurred not all that long ago. But there's other reasons
Speaker 2: why they're unhappy with this, right, because after Hegel dies
Speaker 2: in eighteen thirty one, his philosophic school splits into two
Speaker 2: opposing sides. There's young Hegelians and there's old Hegelians. And
Speaker 2: young Hegelians tend to be young people who were convinced
Speaker 2: of Hegel's logic but also convinced that it led inevitably
Speaker 2: to a rational argument for socialist revolution against both the
Speaker 2: Prussian monarchy and against evangelical Lutheranism. Right, and that's not
Speaker 2: going to be super popular with the state. Right that
Speaker 2: there's like a chunk of this guy's followers who, in
Speaker 2: the period of time that Schmidt is reading all this stuff,
Speaker 2: are like, we have to overthrow the government. This is
Speaker 2: radical literature, right. As Laurence Steppovich writes in an article
Speaker 2: for the Journal of Modern Judaism, the Young Hegelian school
Speaker 2: suddenly came into being in eighteen thirty five with a
Speaker 2: brilliant theological study, the Life of Jesus Christ critically examined.
Speaker 2: It was written by a young and little known theologian
Speaker 2: David Friedrich Strauss, who candidly into the shocked embarrassment of
Speaker 2: the old Hegelians, declared that his work was inspired by
Speaker 2: Hegel's philosophy. His reduction of the miracles related to the
Speaker 2: life of Jesus into a collection of mythic tales based
Speaker 2: upon Old Testament expectations simply destroyed the claim that Hegalienism
Speaker 2: and Orthodox evangelical doctrine were compatible. As the Prussian monarchy
Speaker 2: was supportive of and supported by the Orthodox Church, Strauss's
Speaker 2: work was even more disturbing than might be expected from
Speaker 2: a Biblical study. And this is relevant to us because,
Speaker 2: like Sterner is like the marijuana that gets him dropping acid,
Speaker 2: which is reading David Friedrich Strauss. This doesn't sound all
Speaker 2: that like dangerous or even extreme, but in his time,
Speaker 2: this is if you get, like if you're a kid
Speaker 2: in high school who gets caught with a copy of
Speaker 2: the zine why Break Windows, which is like an anarchist
Speaker 2: essay about like why it's not just moral but like
Speaker 2: an astatic act to shatter windows, or something like a
Speaker 2: beginner's guide to targeted property destruction. Both of what you
Speaker 2: can find on crime thinks website. If you're caught with
Speaker 2: those in high school now, you can get in trouble, right, right,
Speaker 2: And it's important you look at this book about Jesus
Speaker 2: that Carl's going to get caught reading this in school.
Speaker 2: The authorities of his time see this as the same
Speaker 2: as they would see those scenes today.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This is that radical, right, That's very much how they
Speaker 2: view it, even though it seems it doesn't seem that
Speaker 2: way to us. Right, So he is he is reading
Speaker 2: like the radical like anti state revolutionary theory. That's that's
Speaker 2: very much like you know, how this is looked at
Speaker 2: at the time. So while Schmidt is being a big nerd,
Speaker 2: the people he's hanging out with are kind of like
Speaker 2: the punks and anarchist radicals of their day.
Speaker 3: Now they're not.
Speaker 2: Most of them are actually more like socialists or social democrats,
Speaker 2: but given that they live under the Kaiser, that's a
Speaker 2: similar level of like, you know, radicalism, you.
Speaker 3: Know, and Strauss you should do that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, sure, why not. Here's fucking ad.
Speaker 3: So we're back.
Speaker 2: So he gets caught reading Strauss in school, He gets
Speaker 2: caught reading this book about Jesus in school, and he
Speaker 2: gets in trouble. He gets like detention, he's putting the
Speaker 2: fucking breakfast club for his like radical reading.
Speaker 3: And yeah, this.
Speaker 2: Is not the only thing he gets punished for when
Speaker 2: he's in his last year of high school. According to
Speaker 2: Ryan hard Mehring quote on August third, nineteen oh six,
Speaker 2: Schmid was punished together with twelve of his peers, with
Speaker 2: one hour of after school detention for breaking the rules
Speaker 2: and visiting a public house. Presumably this was the reason
Speaker 2: he had to leave the seminary in September. Thus, in
Speaker 2: the last months before his final examination, he had to
Speaker 2: commute as a train farer. So he's also he's kind
Speaker 2: of a wild kid. He's like reading you know, revolutionary
Speaker 2: literature and like breaking the rules to get fucking wasted
Speaker 2: with his friends. And he gets kicked out a seminary
Speaker 2: for being too cool actually, which is guy, this is
Speaker 2: the only top the case. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's hopping trains.
Speaker 2: I mean he probably pays. He's not that cool. So
Speaker 2: as Dolan academic, as this guy appears, he is like
Speaker 2: pretty radical in this period of time. That said, his
Speaker 2: grades remain excellent. Our boy graduates and he gets accepted
Speaker 2: to the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, which is
Speaker 2: also just called the University of Berlin, and you know,
Speaker 2: Yale and like Harvard existed back then. This is the
Speaker 2: top college. A lot of people would argue the best
Speaker 2: college in the world of its day. Right, this is
Speaker 2: the most because Germany's education system is the best. These
Speaker 2: are the Germany is the first country to figure out
Speaker 2: modern universities, and almost anyone would agree this is about
Speaker 2: the best place you could end up as a young
Speaker 2: intellectual in this period of time.
Speaker 4: Robert was this the first time that he was moving
Speaker 4: into a city as well, Like, yes, this is the
Speaker 4: first time he was like Metro.
Speaker 2: A really big city, right, as opposed to like kind
Speaker 2: of a you know, the smaller these large towns and whatnot.
Speaker 2: Now he's in Berlin, right, which is a different level
Speaker 2: of city, and he finds himself drawn to it and
Speaker 2: kind of repulsed by it, right, which we'll talk about
Speaker 2: in a second. But he's a very good student. He
Speaker 2: initially wants to get his degree in philology, which is
Speaker 2: the study of the structure and development of language. But
Speaker 2: he's being supported by his rich uncle who lives nearby,
Speaker 2: and like he'll crash with him during the holidays and
Speaker 2: is his main source of support. And his rich uncle's like,
Speaker 2: you know, philology, the fuck is that shit? No, you're
Speaker 2: getting a law degree. You're gonna have a couple lawyer
Speaker 2: and make money. So he's doing this in Berlin, which
Speaker 2: is again a very different environment than one he's raised in,
Speaker 2: and the different biographers I've read give divergent descriptions, somewhat
Speaker 2: divergent descriptions. Now he felt about it. Balachrishnan describes him
Speaker 2: as deeply ambivalent to the diversity of the metropolis, noting
Speaker 2: that in the popular imagination, urban areas in Germany were
Speaker 2: seen as in some way Jewish as well, and this
Speaker 2: all helped harden his identity as an outsider. Balakrishnan concludes
Speaker 2: that Carl found city life both fascinating and disturbing. And
Speaker 2: here's how Karl himself describes his feelings at the time.
Speaker 2: I was an obscure young man of modest descent. Neither
Speaker 2: the ruling strata nor the opposition included me. That meant
Speaker 2: I ding entirely in the dark. Out of darkness, looked
Speaker 2: into a brightly lit room. The feeling of sadness which
Speaker 2: filled me made me more distant and awoke in some
Speaker 2: other's mistrust and antipathy the ruling strata experienced anybody who
Speaker 2: was not thrilled to be involved with them as heterogeneous.
Speaker 2: It put before him the choice to adapt or withdraw.
Speaker 2: So I remained outside. And this is you know, he's
Speaker 2: not part of the opposition, he's not part of the
Speaker 2: ruling class, and so he can see them all better,
Speaker 2: more accurately than they see themselves, you know, as a
Speaker 2: result of this position that he has, which is often
Speaker 2: the case. That's why a lot of our greatest artists
Speaker 2: are outsiders, you know, in one way or another. Right,
Speaker 2: and Carl is going to have perspective that gives him
Speaker 2: a degree of vision that other people lack.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's how I feel about New York. I've written
Speaker 4: a very similar thing about New York City. So yeah,
Speaker 4: in the same page, right, So.
Speaker 2: Marrying's more recent biography paints a picture that conflicts with
Speaker 2: a few aspects of this. For one thing, while a
Speaker 2: Krishnan kind of transposes Schmidt's anti semitism that comes later
Speaker 2: into this assumption that maybe he was repelled by the
Speaker 2: city as a result of it in this period of time,
Speaker 2: and there's reason to doubt that, but Mahoring paints a
Speaker 2: picture of a young man who is enthralled by his surroundings.
Speaker 2: He describes university as a temple of higher intellectuality, and
Speaker 2: he finds himself almost religiously obsessed with legal study, particularly
Speaker 2: the Roman origins of Western justice systems. And he likes
Speaker 2: his Roman law classes because he's a Latin nerd so like,
Speaker 2: that's the degree of fucking DWEP. This guy is but
Speaker 2: very smart, and he maintains a sense of superiority towards
Speaker 2: his peers. Right, he feels because he's smarter than them
Speaker 2: and because his interests are so much more esoteric, that
Speaker 2: he's like a better person. That quote I read earlier
Speaker 2: of how Carl viewed himself came from a memoir he
Speaker 2: wrote about his college years, where most of the book
Speaker 2: is him insulting two of his friends, who like shit,
Speaker 2: talks constantly about like being less intelligent than he is.
Speaker 2: And the purpose of that passage where he's talking about
Speaker 2: him being an outsider is like, look at how much
Speaker 2: smarter I was than all these dopes.
Speaker 3: I went to school with.
Speaker 4: Like the Michael Jordan Hall of Fame speech, but with right,
Speaker 4: the creator of fascists, right right? Yes, what are these petty?
Speaker 4: You know? Yeah?
Speaker 2: He is so petty. Per marrying quote, Schmidt claims to
Speaker 2: have had early on a distance from the myths of
Speaker 2: the German Reich under Bismarck and from the national liberal
Speaker 2: atmosphere at Berlin University. He felt his whole life as
Speaker 2: if he were intellectually superior and a social climber and outsider,
Speaker 2: an underdog who does not belong and has not shown
Speaker 2: enough respect, and who in response looks down on the
Speaker 2: bourgeoisie world around him. So this is part of why
Speaker 2: he continues to socialize with artists and creative types. Right is,
Speaker 2: these are other people who are kind of on the
Speaker 2: outside looking in, who he maybe feels a sense of
Speaker 2: kinship with. He spends his nights out with other people
Speaker 2: who see themselves that way and feel like we're turning
Speaker 2: a lins on society and we're thus smarter than everyone else.
Speaker 2: Schmidt doesn't quite settle into Berlin yet. He moves to
Speaker 2: college in Munich the next year, and then he goes
Speaker 2: to Strasbourg the year after, And these are all bigger
Speaker 2: cities than he had lived in before marrying. Suspects he
Speaker 2: moves around so much for financial reasons we don't really know.
Speaker 2: In any case, he falls in love with Strasburg and
Speaker 2: that's where he'll stay for the rest of his education.
Speaker 2: And it's where he meets his mentor, a guy named
Speaker 2: Fritz von Kalker, who becomes his doctoral supervisor. Von Kalker
Speaker 2: is a criminal law professor with a particular interest in
Speaker 2: how morality impacts punishment under the law, right, what is
Speaker 2: moral in terms of a punishment, and how is the
Speaker 2: morality of a society of a society even how does
Speaker 2: it relate to how they punish people?
Speaker 1: This this is his Roy Kohne.
Speaker 3: This is his Roy Cohne.
Speaker 1: Kind of yes, okay, so far he sounds like not
Speaker 1: a very chill guy.
Speaker 4: He's not.
Speaker 3: He's a very intense intellectual.
Speaker 2: And Fritz is the most important person in Carl's early
Speaker 2: life because he really takes this kid under his wing.
Speaker 2: He supports him getting his doctorate, he finds him work
Speaker 2: in various positions for the university, and he will continue
Speaker 2: to go to bat for this guy, which is interesting
Speaker 2: because later in Karl will pretend this dude never existed.
Speaker 2: He keeps no cops of this guy's work in his library. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a little bit like that, right, And this is
Speaker 2: you know, he keeps basically every other letter he gets
Speaker 2: in his life, but he throws out most of the
Speaker 2: ones to van Kalker, which is interesting because von Kalker
Speaker 2: literally saves his life at a later point.
Speaker 4: Here.
Speaker 2: Now, another key person in Karl's young life who he
Speaker 2: will later jettison as an adult is Fritz Eisler.
Speaker 3: Fritz is a lot of Fritz. It's Germany.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what we signed up for. We signed up
Speaker 4: for this. The moment you chose this guy, we're gonna
Speaker 4: have a million Fritz.
Speaker 2: There were gonna be a shitload of Fritz's.
Speaker 3: None of them can's. God, damn, it's too late.
Speaker 4: There's no turn back.
Speaker 3: We'll call this guy Eisler.
Speaker 2: Right, and Eisler he meets because they're both working for
Speaker 2: von Kalker, is like assistants, and Eisler becomes his best
Speaker 2: friend during the five terms he spends in Strasburg getting
Speaker 2: his doctorate. And this is noteworthy because Eisler is Jewish, right,
Speaker 2: and contrary to how Bala Krishnan depicts him as a
Speaker 2: young man, is uneasy with the city because of its
Speaker 2: ineffable Jewishness. His best friend in his favorite city is
Speaker 2: a young jew from a prominent family. And Eisler is
Speaker 2: not only Jewish, he is a Hungarian national who, despite
Speaker 2: being a Hungarian national, identifies as German, and this whole
Speaker 2: period is trying to get legal status in Germany. He
Speaker 2: is trying to get German citizenship, and he wants. Eisler's
Speaker 2: whole goal in life is a social acceptance as a
Speaker 2: citizen of the German Reich. And this is a difficult
Speaker 2: battle for even a rich young Jewish Man because nearly
Speaker 2: everybody's incredibly racist, right, So it's interesting that Schmidt isn't
Speaker 2: in this period right at least not towards Eisler, that
Speaker 2: he's willing to because Schmidt expresses a degree of like
Speaker 2: bigotry as well, but never not towards Eisler in this period,
Speaker 2: which is interesting. It shows that he's got this degree
Speaker 2: of ability to kind of look past that. So the
Speaker 2: two became buds in nineteen oh eight. They get their
Speaker 2: doctorates in like nineteen ten. Merriing writes that quote through Eisler,
Speaker 2: Schmidt for the first time came into more intense contact
Speaker 2: with Jewish people and with judaism, and the difference in
Speaker 2: the theses that these guys pick for their doctorate is
Speaker 2: interesting to me. Eisler goes for this very standard topic,
Speaker 2: like he's analyzing a bunch of defamation lawsuits and is like,
Speaker 2: what what are the ones that succeed all have in common?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: Pretty normal law?
Speaker 4: Your stuff? Right?
Speaker 2: Schmidt picks a much more philosophical and a very catholic topic.
Speaker 2: His paper is titled on Guilt and Types of Guilt, which,
Speaker 2: again super catholic, but also god, you know, Isler's doing
Speaker 2: this nuts and bolts. Okay, if you're arguing for a
Speaker 2: defamation case, what's what you know? Statistically? What what is
Speaker 2: likelier to work for you? Marrying is wondering what does
Speaker 2: it mean to be guilty?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 4: Guilt and types of guilt? Why is my mom a
Speaker 4: piece of shit? Shit? She was?
Speaker 1: She was?
Speaker 3: She ever? Stop giving me crap?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Now.
Speaker 2: The actual content of his piece is an argument that
Speaker 2: the law fundamentally hinges on an arbitrary, free floating element.
Speaker 2: No matter how much the law may claim to be
Speaker 2: an objective thing, it always relies to some extent on
Speaker 2: the ability of a judge to determine a sentence. In
Speaker 2: other words, you can have whole reams of law, books
Speaker 2: and legislature that can give the appearance of a mechanistic
Speaker 2: system that functions based on objective measures, but the law
Speaker 2: is always at its core reliant on the discretion and
Speaker 2: decisions of individuals. Right, And that's a very important realization. Now,
Speaker 2: this is in keeping with a major trend in German
Speaker 2: jurisprudence at the time, which is called the free law movement,
Speaker 2: which stands in opposition to legal positivism, which is a
Speaker 2: trend that had swept through in the eighteen seventies with
Speaker 2: the goal of like, we don't want to talk about
Speaker 2: natural law, about like the natural rights of man and stuff.
Speaker 2: We want to talk about like what are we saying
Speaker 2: are people's rights? What are we saying is legal and illegal?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: So there's a struggle between people who want this absolute
Speaker 2: code that handles how things should be adjudicated in every
Speaker 2: situation versus people who are like, now, the creative power
Speaker 2: of a judged to interpret justice matters. Right, And Schmidt
Speaker 2: simultaneously recognizes there's this arbitrary core to the legal code,
Speaker 2: but he also starts to value what he described as
Speaker 2: higher law. This sort of like maybe even divine natural justice,
Speaker 2: that the law is always moving closer to representing. And
Speaker 2: he writes about guilt not as an internal thing, but
Speaker 2: as a legal category. In other words, he concludes that
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter if you've done what the state accuses
Speaker 2: you of.
Speaker 3: Guilt is a legal.
Speaker 2: Status, and moral norms are bound by the law, not
Speaker 2: the other way around. You can kind of see how
Speaker 2: a man making conclusions like this might wind up as
Speaker 2: a fascist. Right, guilt is a category. What you did
Speaker 2: is immaterial.
Speaker 4: Guilt's the marijuana of the fascism assage.
Speaker 2: Right right, yes, yes, to continue using the gateway drug metaphor.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: So, when he's not writing wonky legal arguments, he and
Speaker 2: his friend Eisler attempted to start a satire magazine. And god,
Speaker 2: this must have been fucking unreadable because they're they're doing this.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, just imagine, like your most up their
Speaker 2: own asshole friends in college. They make a satire magazine
Speaker 2: that's mostly about Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Walter Rathanol, like
Speaker 2: all these German intellectuals that they have issues with that
Speaker 2: they're just like making fun as like teenagers making fun
Speaker 2: of these like these great intellectuals that are part of
Speaker 2: like German culture, and that's the it seems to be
Speaker 2: the whole reason for this magazine. Seems to be that
Speaker 2: all these guys are respected contributors to German culture, and
Speaker 2: Schmidt wants to take them down a peg to prove
Speaker 2: he's not like everyone else. And I wonder maybe Eisler,
Speaker 2: as a Hungarian and as a Jew, maybe feels a
Speaker 2: similar need right where like these guys aren't any better
Speaker 2: than I am. Like, yeah, let's let's let's fucking puncture
Speaker 2: them a little bit.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: They hope that this would sell and make the money. Again,
Speaker 2: they are delusional. This is not like the satire magazine
Speaker 2: is not going to take off.
Speaker 4: There's no era, absolutely not.
Speaker 2: It's mad magazine. But it's all about Nietzsche. Like okay, maybe.
Speaker 3: Cal him down.
Speaker 4: Yeah, maybe just read that yourself. Maybe just read that
Speaker 4: in your own home.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that might just be for you and your friend Eisler. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, because they can't make money off of this, and
Speaker 2: Schmidt is struggling, is basically is going to spend like
Speaker 2: the first almost decade of his adulthood as an intern unpaid,
Speaker 2: because that's what being an academic means in this period
Speaker 2: of time, so you have to have support from someone.
Speaker 2: And Eisler begs his family like, hey, this this friend
Speaker 2: of mine is brilliant and he's a good guy. He's
Speaker 2: not a racist. We've got money, dad, will you give
Speaker 2: money to this guy?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: And as a matter of fact, for like most of
Speaker 2: his twenties up until World War One, the Eislers will
Speaker 2: be Schmidt's primary source of financial support. This Jewish family
Speaker 2: really keeps this kid from starving, you know which, given
Speaker 2: what he's going to do to Jewish people later, is
Speaker 2: just an extra level of fuck. In letters to his sister,
Speaker 2: Carl's sister, who became a teacher in Portugal during this period,
Speaker 2: Carl showed an obsession and a frustration with his relative poverty,
Speaker 2: writing that neither of them, either he or his sister,
Speaker 2: had been careful enough in choosing their parents, and complaining
Speaker 2: that rich people were conceded so both like, fuck my
Speaker 2: mom and dad for not making us rich and also
Speaker 2: fuck rich people.
Speaker 4: Fuck rich people, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: One letter he sent her on the subject included this
Speaker 2: interesting line, this is what makes our time so dreadful
Speaker 2: that the individual person, what he is and what he
Speaker 2: can do never matters, only the role that he can
Speaker 2: play in society. You know, it's an interesting, interesting issue. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think it's not an uncommon thing to feel during
Speaker 2: this period of time, Right, I'm no one cares about
Speaker 2: who I am, just like what I can do, how
Speaker 2: much money I can make. And that's like, it's kind
Speaker 2: of fuck that society works that way.
Speaker 4: And it's that type of humor that made that satire table.
Speaker 2: That made his magazine really take off. National Lampoon acquired
Speaker 2: it for three million dollars. Yeah, now that's a very
Speaker 2: like wow, easy to identify with sentence. Here's the one
Speaker 2: that's less easy to identify with. So he warns his
Speaker 2: sister in the same letter to be careful with men. Quote,
Speaker 2: don't trust these Portuguese happy go lucky win bags an inch,
Speaker 2: don't even begin anything with them.
Speaker 4: Same sentence, by the way.
Speaker 3: There was same sentence, same sentence.
Speaker 2: There's a semicin, Oh, society judges us on all these
Speaker 2: bullshit things. Don't ever trust a Portuguese man while we're
Speaker 2: at it, these fucking Portuguese wind bags. So, after a
Speaker 2: brief period working for his brother as a lawyer's assistant,
Speaker 2: he continued to squeak By as an academic lecturing and
Speaker 2: getting bits of work off the strength of his now
Speaker 2: published thesis. In his free time, he flirted and seems
Speaker 2: to have gone after women compulsively. Merrying describes this as
Speaker 2: like his in his own mind. His original sin is
Speaker 2: that this guy just can't stop trying to fuck, Like
Speaker 2: he is really horny and a bad judgment and is
Speaker 2: constantly screwing around. He may have actually been kind of
Speaker 2: a player at one point. It's a little hard to tell.
Speaker 2: But like his earliest serious fling that we have evidence
Speaker 2: with is this pair of Jewish sisters, the Bernsteins, who
Speaker 2: he's like in a love triangle with. He's like, and
Speaker 2: it's unclear given the time, is he just flirting with
Speaker 2: both of them or are they actually like go in
Speaker 2: at it right? But he wants to marry one of them, Helene,
Speaker 2: But he's also kind of stringing the other along like
Speaker 2: he's gotta he's got a he's got a triangle with
Speaker 2: these two sisters.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know. This sounds like Portuguese wind bag
Speaker 4: behavior to me.
Speaker 2: It's like a Portuguese wind's like a Portuguese win. Now
Speaker 2: he tries to marry Helene. And again this is these
Speaker 2: these sisters are Jewish, so the fact that he wants
Speaker 2: to marry this woman at one point is really interesting,
Speaker 2: again given what he's going to become. But her family
Speaker 2: won't let him because he has no money, and like,
Speaker 2: this is not just you know, U, this is a
Speaker 2: thing any German father pretty much would have had set
Speaker 2: at the time. It's like, well, you're an academic, maybe
Speaker 2: you'll have a career, but right now you literally don't
Speaker 2: have income. So no, you can't marry my daughter. You
Speaker 2: have no way of supporting her.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: This is not a thing that just would have happened
Speaker 2: because of like the religion of her father. This was
Speaker 2: a totally normal thing at the time. And this is
Speaker 2: something that's driving him crazy that he can't get married, right,
Speaker 2: He has nothing coming in and he starts to get
Speaker 2: increasingly angry at society, which we see in his letters
Speaker 2: to his sister quote every person is vehemently egotistic, and
Speaker 2: it is a miracle they do not murder and poison
Speaker 2: each other, but inquire about the weather instead. So he's
Speaker 2: become very black pilled at this point in time. He
Speaker 2: can't get married. He seems locked out at this point
Speaker 2: from and so close to being where he needs to
Speaker 2: be right, but he just can't cross that border because
Speaker 2: he was born poor.
Speaker 4: It is interesting that he chooses his sister to confide into,
Speaker 4: you know, like, I wonder why, Yeah, that was.
Speaker 2: He hates his younger sister. His older sister who's in Portugal,
Speaker 2: he seems to really trust, and maybe she's the only
Speaker 2: member of his family that he can trust. It kind
Speaker 2: of does seem that way.
Speaker 4: A mother figure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe a little bit of a maybe, or at
Speaker 2: least someone how yeah, how he would have liked to
Speaker 2: have felt about.
Speaker 4: His mother, his chosen mother.
Speaker 2: Yeah, speaking of poisoning and murdering each other. Well, uh,
Speaker 2: don't do that.
Speaker 3: Listen to ads. Okay, we're back.
Speaker 2: So obviously this is nineteen twelve. World War One is
Speaker 2: right around the horizon, but Carl doesn't know that yet,
Speaker 2: and he is much more concerned with matters of the
Speaker 2: heart than the fact that everything is about to get
Speaker 2: really fucked up for everybody in his world. He had
Speaker 2: been banned from the Bernstein House after continuing to pursue
Speaker 2: Helena after her parents said no. So he is he
Speaker 2: is that kind of suitor, like he will not give
Speaker 2: up and eventually her dad's like, motherfucker, I'm calling the
Speaker 2: cops if you come back here again. The good news
Speaker 2: for him is that within weeks of this, he meets
Speaker 2: a Spanish dancer at a cabaret. She calls herself Kri
Speaker 2: and when they strike up a relationship, she tells him
Speaker 2: her full name is Pauline Carita Maria Isabella von Doretik. Now,
Speaker 2: if you know German vaughan means someone is a noble, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's a marker that you are of the nobility.
Speaker 2: And this woman is claiming to be the daughter of
Speaker 2: a noble family. And so as soon as he's like
Speaker 2: got the interests of this dancer who's like got noble blood,
Speaker 2: he drops all interest in these sisters he's been pursuing,
Speaker 2: and he writes to her, his sister, I now have
Speaker 2: a delightful friendship with a Spanish dancer. Now Carrie is
Speaker 2: not Spanish, she is also not a noble woman. Every
Speaker 2: aspect of Carrie's life was fake. She claimed to be
Speaker 2: the daughter of a Croatian lord who had died, which
Speaker 2: had forced her to travel to Munich to live with
Speaker 2: a cruel aunt, which was basically a Disney fable. She
Speaker 2: also claimed that she'd been born a week after Karl,
Speaker 2: when in reality she was five years older than him.
Speaker 2: She was the illegitimate daughter of a Viennese woman and
Speaker 2: a Croatian plumber. And for all of his brains, Carl
Speaker 2: never catches her in her life like not or at
Speaker 2: least at this point right, he buys in all of
Speaker 2: her stories of royal life, everything she says about herself.
Speaker 2: He has completely fallen for this woman and all of
Speaker 2: his colleagues because again he's a doctor. At this point right,
Speaker 2: all of his colleagues are like, man, this chick is
Speaker 2: not She's lying to you, for one, but this is bullshit.
Speaker 4: Like there's no Spanish accent here.
Speaker 2: She doesn't sound Spanish. That's not a Spanish name. Why,
Speaker 2: Like this family doesn't exist. She has a Croatian accent.
Speaker 2: His mentors gently warned him against getting with what they
Speaker 2: called a tingle tangle girl. And this is a term
Speaker 2: at the time it refers to like the kind of
Speaker 2: clangy sort of like bits of like jewelry that dancers
Speaker 2: at burlesque's and whatnot would wear. It means that they're
Speaker 2: calling her a stripper, right, or they're calling her outright
Speaker 2: a whore. That's what a tingle tangle means at this
Speaker 2: period of time, right, Like, man, you have fallen for
Speaker 2: this stripper and she is lying about her past. That's
Speaker 2: what his friends are saying. Right, That's that's the equivalent
Speaker 2: in modern terms, right. But he doesn't care. He's in
Speaker 2: love with this woman. He believes her, and he believes
Speaker 2: her even though they can get married because her dad's dead.
Speaker 2: There's no one to stop them. He doesn't need to
Speaker 2: ask permission. But they can't get married because every time
Speaker 2: they try to go to a judge, the judge's like, oh, okay, well,
Speaker 2: where's this woman's papers, you know, to show where her
Speaker 2: citizenship is and that she is who she and she
Speaker 2: never has them. And occasionally she'll have papers, but they'll
Speaker 2: be like, well, these are obviously fake. And Carl doesn't like,
Speaker 2: doesn't think anything's weird.
Speaker 3: He loses them all the time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, with them, they're.
Speaker 2: So he spends the last years before World War One
Speaker 2: fighting constantly with their local magistrates to get her naturalized
Speaker 2: so that they can get married. And because he's so
Speaker 2: crazy in love, he switches in this last year or
Speaker 2: so before the war from writing about law to writing
Speaker 2: about love, particularly the morality of love. I'm going to
Speaker 2: quote from Merhring's book again here from October twelfth. The
Speaker 2: diary contains a passionate love letters and an ecstatic philosophy
Speaker 2: of love that aims to base love on permanence and
Speaker 2: enforce faithfulness by idealizing love as devotion to an idea.
Speaker 2: Schmidt wanted to conceive his love from the perspective of eternity,
Speaker 2: a perspective in which kri then had no predecessor and
Speaker 2: no successor. Right, he can't he can't let himself a
Speaker 2: man again. This woman is an exotic dancer. She has
Speaker 2: a relationship history prior to him. She's trying to build
Speaker 2: this cosmology in which there's never been a before. Right,
Speaker 2: because then that's he just is not secure enough in
Speaker 2: that idea.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: This happens all the time, like this is very constantly, constantly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like a very common thing.
Speaker 4: I fear my wife has never seen a man before.
Speaker 4: She still has it to be a POOLI yes, never
Speaker 4: never talk about myself, let's start now.
Speaker 2: But it is it is interesting that he he has
Speaker 2: to intellectualize this the way he does. His attitudes about
Speaker 2: the law right where he's like building this this almost
Speaker 2: like natural law attitude about how love works in order
Speaker 2: to avoid being insecure. It's gonna give you an idea
Speaker 2: of how of how good he will be at twisting
Speaker 2: based on his own kind of feelings, his understanding of
Speaker 2: like the law, and these things that are supposed to
Speaker 2: be objective but that really are not. He starts writing
Speaker 2: that his past pursuit of the Bernstein sisters was a mistake,
Speaker 2: but obviously it's their mistake, not him. He writes that
Speaker 2: he had been quote painfully ambushed by a vain, common, ugly,
Speaker 2: and arrogant virago who is now in possession of love
Speaker 2: letters from me. She has foisted herself on me as
Speaker 2: an address. See thus I spit her out as a
Speaker 2: whole person. I have no more to do with her.
Speaker 2: I wash my hands clean. I took excrement for gold
Speaker 2: without letting slip from my fingers, the pure gold that
Speaker 2: I now hold in my hands. And he's like, it's
Speaker 2: her like, because again, the fact that he had been
Speaker 2: in love with this woman and had written her letters
Speaker 2: means that this relationship he's in, even his side of it,
Speaker 2: isn't as peer as he wants to pretend and it's
Speaker 2: her fault. Right, she ambushed me, she forced me to
Speaker 2: write her letters.
Speaker 4: You tricked me.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Meanwhile, the honest person that he's currently with, that's not
Speaker 4: a trick at all.
Speaker 2: But now that's not a trick at all. Well, here's
Speaker 2: the fact, Like, yeah, man, shit changes people feel different
Speaker 2: ways about people over time. That's fine, Like you could
Speaker 2: just accept.
Speaker 4: That some shit shit, some shit's gold.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, right, anyway, this is where we're going to
Speaker 2: leave Karl on the eve of World War one, Right,
Speaker 2: this guy who is starting to become the thinker who's
Speaker 2: going to define a lot of what becomes Nazist jurisprudence.
Speaker 2: He's also real big issues with women, right, Yeah, so
Speaker 2: how we feel.
Speaker 4: In Blake, what's a German for? In cell is what
Speaker 4: is what is?
Speaker 2: Except he's kind of getting late, like yeah, it is
Speaker 2: like he's not I don't know, I don't know where
Speaker 2: we land on this guy, but he isn't you know,
Speaker 2: I that flew by.
Speaker 4: It is really interesting to get because it's almost like
Speaker 4: seeing the first piece of shit, like the modern piece
Speaker 4: of shit that we have now. Yeah, it is interesting
Speaker 4: seeing the building blocks of how it came together, you know,
Speaker 4: especially knowing what he turns into. There are so many
Speaker 4: clues of oh, look he wants to this is how
Speaker 4: he's breaking down this establishment, and that establishment is trying
Speaker 4: to date these Jewish histories. He broke down that democracy,
Speaker 4: you know, and it's interesting to see how he wants
Speaker 4: to do it going forward. But yeah, this is this
Speaker 4: is fascinating so far.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well that is what we're going to be
Speaker 2: continuing from next time.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 2: Uh so, Blake, you want to plug your plugables here?
Speaker 4: I would love to plug some pluggables. So I am
Speaker 4: going to be in Philadelphia August first, doing stand up there.
Speaker 4: I'm going to be in Wilkes Barry at the end
Speaker 4: of August, and I also have a comedy special called
Speaker 4: Blake Wexlort Daddy Long Legs, And depending on when this
Speaker 4: comes out, I'm biking in this thing called the Eagles
Speaker 4: Autism Challenge. It raises money for autism research autism awareness,
Speaker 4: So there's donation links. I know times are tough, but
Speaker 4: if you could spare anything, that link is in my
Speaker 4: bio on at Blake Wexler on all social media.
Speaker 2: Amazing all right, check that out and yeah, don't become
Speaker 2: a jurist. No, don't do that. It turns out the
Speaker 2: laws are just what people in power decide they want
Speaker 2: them to be, and you shouldn't have that much faith
Speaker 2: in the law meaning anything objective because look at just
Speaker 2: read the news for ten minutes, you'll see why. Anyway,
Speaker 2: don't even need the full ten goodbye.
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