Part One: Carl Schmitt: The Mind Behind Modern Fascism

Robert walks Blake Wexler through the life and times of Carl Schmitt, a legal scholar born in Imperial Germany who would come to create the blueprint for how fascist movements could destroy liberal democracy from within.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hey, everybody, welcome to Behind the Bastards, and I know
what you're all saying. Congratulations Robert on finally being appointed
the new Pope of the Catholic Church Pontiffects Maximus. I
was as surprised as anybody. I wake up in the morning,
I see a phone notification that says, you know, Vatican
Conclave appoints new Pope Robert, and then the rest of

(00:28):
the title got cut off.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
But I understood what the rest of it was. Obviously.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
I've been celebrating the last couple of days, have not
really checked in online, but am now going to check
in with my guests for this day, Sophie Lichtormen will
not my guest, but my co host and producer and
our guest for today, Blake Wexler.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Do either of you have a.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Boon to ask now that I am the literal mouth
of God.

Speaker 4 (00:53):
So I got an email saying I was Pontiff wex
and I don't know if that was a typo or
what happened.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
So yes, no, that's a new position I've created specifically
for you.

Speaker 4 (01:04):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yes, you are responsible solely for the spiritual guidance of
all Blakes and all Wexler's. It's a fairly large responsibility.

Speaker 4 (01:14):
Yeah, well there's not a lot of Catholic Wexlers.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Well then you got a lot of work ahead of you,
don't You're my friend, Robert.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
I have a request.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Uh huh?

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Can you heal Lebron and make him thirty?

Speaker 2 (01:30):
I've already done it, Sophie, heay gaze upon it and
know it. Yes, God has already touched him. He has
another forty year career ahead.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Of him, Thank you God.

Speaker 4 (01:39):
I just don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
He's going to be dunking into his sixties.

Speaker 4 (01:44):
Fantastic.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
He's going to be praying for death, begging for anything
but another season with the Lakers.

Speaker 4 (01:50):
We won't let him stop. Yeah, we won't let him stop.
That's the plot of Space Jame three, by the way, begging.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Die.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Yes, that's what God wants, is pope. I know the
other thing I gotta say, Unfortunately, as we learned with
the last Pope, popes are more or less helpless to
stop the world from descending into fascism or the slaughter
of children overseas. It's a bummer. So what really only
random bullshit is what I'm in power to do. And

(02:19):
today The thing that I'm going to do that is
not enough but might be a little useful, is explain
to you the intellectual underpinning of fascism. Right specifically, there's
a guy, a single dude who's probably the only genius
in the history of like fascist like legal philosophy and theory,
who were going to talk about And the basics of

(02:42):
this story is when the Nazis started coming to power,
you had this guy Hitler who was really charismatic, who
was good at drawing in people, and you had, you know,
this movement that was clearly on its way to taking power,
and there was not really much beyond that. There wasn't
a consistent set of beliefs because a lot of early Nazis,
that's why they had the lot of ni idol long knives.
There are a lot of disagreements between them, and there

(03:03):
was this kind of competition for like who is going
to figure out what the political philosophy of fascism is.
And the guy we're talking about the day is the
dude who won that struggle and he's gone on to
influence He's kind of the thinker behind the neo conservative
movement that dominated during the Bush years. He's the thinker
behind you know, Putin's rise to power in a lot

(03:24):
of ways. He's a very influential guy. So, Blake are
you Are you excited to hear about him?

Speaker 4 (03:29):
I'm both dreading it and excited. I can't wait.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Before we close out our cold Open. You want to
plug your pluggables right here at the top.

Speaker 4 (03:39):
Oh my god, I love that. Yeah, that's a fantastic process. Yes,
I am first Wall me names Blake Wexler at Blake
Wexler and all social media. I have a stand up
special called Daddy Long Legs, which is available for free
on YouTube on August. Firth first and Firth I do all.
My My calendar is Colin Firth. He's all over every

(03:59):
single month of my cab. I know that's why I
mispronounced that. But August first, I'm going to be in
Philadelphia doing stand up, and then in late August I'm
going to be in Wilkesbury and then yeah, there'll be
more dates popping up on my social media that aren't
in Pennsylvania. So yeah, you can find me all those places.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Excellent, excellent, All right, everybody, let's come back after the
Cold Open, and we're back all right, Blake, are you
ready to.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
Get into this tale? Are you ready to learn?

Speaker 2 (04:30):
So you're ready to lock in here, Blake, lock in
learn about Nazi jurisprudence.

Speaker 4 (04:35):
I'm a jurisprude, but yeah, no, let's dive it.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
So was this motherfucker? Actually? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (04:43):
So today we're going to talk about Carl Schmidt, and
Carl Schmidt is the He did a lot of things
in terms of like coming up with intellectual underpinnings for
what we call fascism today. The number one thing he
did was figure out how to destroy liberal to democracy.
And this is why I call him a genius. A
lot of fascist thinkers were like dipshits and bigots, and

(05:05):
maybe they had they had certain kinds of cunning. Like
Hitler was very smart at certain things. The man who
had to work a crowd. That's an intelligence, the same
kind of intelligence Donald Trump has, right, Like intelligence isn't
an objective thing that people are good at certain things.
Stephen Miller has certain kinds of evil intelligence for scheming
in certain ways. Karl Schmidt was just an actual genius.

(05:25):
And he was a genius in an evil way and
in a way that was like fucked up. But was
very broad, and the thing that he figured out before
anyone else was how to kill a liberal democracy as
like the far right, as like a member of a
reactionary party. And it's the same playbook. What the playbook
he wrote out in the twenties is exactly what's happened here, right,

(05:47):
So that's that is the degree of mind this guy has.
And so as much of a fucked up weirdo as
he is, he is a legitimately like smart man, which
is unfortunate, righty.

Speaker 3 (05:58):
It's always so.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
Much easier when you can kind of write these guys
off as like freaks, but you just can't with Karl,
with old Schmidty as we will not be calling him.

Speaker 4 (06:07):
It's a little humanizing.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
It's a little humanizing. Good old Schmitty, Yeah, good old Schmidty.
So Schmidty. Karl Schmidt was born on July eleventh, eighteen
eighty eight, which means he comes into the world right
as Germany the state becomes a legal adult and thus
is able to buy scratch off tickets at the gas station.
I'm not sure if Germany ever did that. Maybe we'd
have been better off if they'd gotten really into fucking

(06:30):
paper casino bullshit, but trying to put their energy into
right right, right, Yeah, getting really into the power ball,
right exactly. So one thing right off the bat that
separates him from most future reactionaries is that he never
loves Imperial Germany or the Kaiser.

Speaker 4 (06:48):
He is not.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Most of these guys at least have some degree of
like ah back in you know, the good old days
of the Second Reich. He is never that guy. And
he's never that guy because he comes from a marginalized
population within the set at Reich, which is Catholics, right,
which very much are in a lot of ways.

Speaker 4 (07:03):
Right.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
We don't really think about Catholics that way now, but
even in the US it was a big deal when
JFK got elected president, Like there were people who are
like a papist in the White House. He's a Vatican stooge.
And it's much worse in Germany in the late eighteen hundreds, right.
I know, it's hard to imagine like Catholics as like

(07:26):
a marginal lot, but I mean think about like Ireland, right,
Like you know, under the English thumb, right, there's a
lot of oppression of Catholics, even as the Catholic Church
is also doing horrible things in Ireland, right, You know,
shit's complicated. So the fact that he does not like
the Reich at any point in his childhood, it's a
product of both his family religion, as I said, Catholicism,
and of the origin of his family where they come

(07:47):
from geographically, because his family hails from a place called Bossendorff,
which is a small village on the Alfbach river in
the Eifel Mountains. This village is about six kilometers from
the Mosel, which is mos Elle, which is a major
river in Germany, and all his life Schmidt identified primarily
as a Mausoleanian. Right now, that probably means nothing to

(08:08):
most of you listening, and that probably doesn't mean a
whole lot more to the people who have to happen
to be German, right, because things are. It means a
different thing now even than it does to like Germans today. Right,
Coming from this region in the late eighteen hundreds, when
Germany has not been a thing for long, means a
very different thing. This whole part of the country, which
biographer Reinhard Mehring just refers to as the Eiffel, is

(08:31):
sort of on like the southeast point of Germany, and
it's right next to Lorraine, which today is part of France,
but had been taken eighteen years earlier from France after
the Franco Prussian War ended, and was thus part of
Germany at the time that he's born. So the region
he comes into is right next to this traditionally French region,

(08:51):
And as a result, Karl and his family don't consider
themselves like Germans, certainly not in the way that like
Germans will in a couple of decades. They are French Germans,
and they feel both French and German, right, and there's
a tension between a lot of his family does live
in Lorraine, right, and so there's this tension between his
family and the Pan German ideology that suffused the second Riche,

(09:14):
which is very anti French. Because they're not anti French, right,
their relatives are French, they feel kind of French. So
you're both part of this Catholic minority and you're also
like kind of French, so you're just not fully on
board with the whole Kaiser thing. Now, obviously, when I
say these are marginalized people, it's not nearly in the
same way as like even a Jewish person in this
period of time is marginalized, but you don't escape bias either.

(09:39):
Karl was born in a town called Plettenberg, where his
parents had moved right before having him. This was not
far from where he's born, but it was a little
bit nearer to the imperial core of Germany. More to
the point, it means that Karl grows up in a
large town that's developing rapidly because it's industrializing. But he's
a distinct religious minority in that town. As by biographer

(10:00):
Reinhard Mehering writes in Karl Schmidt a biography, this means
belonging to a confessional minority in an intensely evangelical environment,
an environment partly even of Protestant sectarianism. So everyone around
him is like a Lutheran and they don't like Catholics
very much, right, And people are kind of dicks to him, right.

Speaker 4 (10:19):
Those One of the theses I believe is that we Catholics.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, fuck the Pope, which I take offense to now
obviously because.

Speaker 4 (10:28):
Of the Pope. I'm sorry you had to read that.
That's not fair to you in your new position.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah, yeah, it's hurtful, it's hurtful. Yeah. So this was
particularly difficult for Catholics during Karl's early life, because he
is born kind of in the shadow of something that
occurs at the early stages of the German Empire called
the culture komp right and if you remember, you know,
min komf is my struggle, culture camp, culture struggle. It's

(10:53):
not quite culture war, but it basically means that, right,
and what the culture comp is is in the late
eighteen seventies, right after the Reich is born Otto von Bismarck,
who's like he's the architect of Germany, right, he's like
the visier whispering into the ear of the Prussian king,
and his plots and schemes lead to the culmination of

(11:15):
the Franco Prussian War in the creation of Germany. And
Bismarck is kind of dealing with a problem in the
early days of Germany that would later be devil Hitler,
which is that the Catholic Church isn't just a church, right,
not in the way that like, you know, the church
down the street from you probably is, assuming it's not
a Catholic church, you going to First Baptist or whatever,
that's like a church. It's a discreete organization and it

(11:37):
has maybe it's maybe the pastor there is political, maybe
he's not. But the church is just a church. Catholicism
is both a church and a government, right. There's an
actual micro state in the Vatican that they governed, but
also they had governed. They had been almost like the
Christian u in for a long time. They'd had armies
for long points of time, and even in this period,

(12:00):
nearly all social services in Catholic dominated regions of Europe
are run through and by the Church, right, so they
are still, to a degree in this period involved in
governing in a way that impacts people's lives. And Bismarck
doesn't like this because he's trying to centralize power within
a modern state, and the Catholic Church is an alternate

(12:22):
and perhaps opposing power center right. That might wind up
opposing the Kaiser, and that can make things dangerous for
the Kaiser and dangerous for the regime. Part of what
scares Bismarck is that the Pope is infallible, right, and
the Kaiser's just not, you know, like, even though things
are very strict, the Kaiser's kind of close to an
absolute monarch. There's not a widespread belief among Germans that

(12:46):
the Kaiser can't make mistakes, whereas Catholics are obliged to
believe that the pope is infallible and this Bismarck really
doesn't trust this, right.

Speaker 4 (12:56):
That's a hard argument to win, where it really is
just back and forth. Once it's like I believe this,
Oh yeah, well I'm infalliable.

Speaker 3 (13:03):
I'm infalliable.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
And yet what Bismark's saying is both that like, well,
how do you win an argument with a guy who
can't be wrong?

Speaker 3 (13:09):
And also a lot of.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
People just feel like they owe the church because it's
providing them food when they're starving and shit, right, and
that's a complicated thing. So in the early part of
the German Empire, he kind of goes to he goes
on a culture war against the Catholic Church to strip
it of its influence. I want to quote from a
write up in EBSCO by Donald Sullivan here. Bismarck sought

(13:31):
to assert state control over the Church through a series
of laws aimed at reducing its influence and authority. These
measures included government oversight of Catholic seminaries, restrictions on clergy,
and the implementation of civil marriage laws, which removed the
Church's traditional role in marriage. Despite these efforts, the Culture
comp faced considerable resistance from the Catholic community, leading to
public sympathy among some Protestant Germans. And something kind of

(13:53):
like this is going to happen under the Nazis, right,
the Nazis have a little war with the Catholic Church.
The culture comp does not achieve its goals. Bismarck kind
of underestimates, how you know, one thing you got to say,
even if you hate it, the Catholic Church has staying power, right.

Speaker 4 (14:08):
It's been around for a little bit round.

Speaker 3 (14:10):
They can take a punch, you know.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
And Bismarck, you know, Germany's pretty new and he's thinking
like I'm going to roll over these fuckers. And he's like,
oh no, no, they've got a lot of money in power.

Speaker 4 (14:22):
Shit.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
So by the late eighteen seventies, a lot of the
like harshest measures he'd tried to push through had been repealed.
Some stuff stays like, you know, the Catholic Church does lose.
They are not in control of marriage or of education
even in Catholic regions in the way that they had been.
So it's not a total failure. This conflict has largely
passed by the time Karl is born, and in fact,

(14:45):
the year of his birth is the same year that
Kaiservillehelm the Second takes the throne, which spells the beginning
of the end for Bismarck, so he is not going
to be in power much longer. Catholicism has kind of
outlasted him, but the hostility Catholics had to the Reich
of lingered as a result of this, and Carl's dad
is a Catholic activist right He sits in the local

(15:06):
parish council and he's always fighting for the rights of Catholics.
So before Carl's born, his dad is kind of fighting
Bismarck on this thing. Carl later described his father this way.
Throughout his life, he remained faithful to the Catholic cause
in a diaspora, which was still very hard at the time,
and he really admires his dad for this. He does
not like his mom spoilers for a fascist, but mom

(15:28):
issues issues with women in general.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
Shocking.

Speaker 4 (15:32):
It always starts with the momb, does it.

Speaker 3 (15:34):
It's all of these guys.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, So this explains why, contrary to a lot of
reactionary Germans of his day, Carl's got no nostalgia for
the kaiser Reich because he never feels like a full
citizen of it. Another of Schmidt's biographers, go Paul Balakrishnan,
describes this situation ably in his book The Enemy. Most
poor small town Catholics lived in a world closed off

(15:57):
from a hostel increasingly secular society, a world in which
the local priest was a revered authority in matters of
politics and morality. And that's kind of where Carl is
growing up. He's in this town where he's a minority.
It's very cosmopolitan, but he goes to a Catholic school,
so he is separated from everyone who's not a Catholic,
and he lives in this kind of bubble. He's a

(16:18):
good student, very good student, and he's helped along by
the fact that his father is a stenographer who teaches
him how to write shorthand at an early age. So
Carl's always going to be very good at writing very quickly,
which is a real boon if you're going to be
an intellectual who's trying to like take advantage of shifting
trends when things are moving very quickly, that you can
get shit out quickly.

Speaker 4 (16:39):
Because it is either writing or speaking right, like, you
either have to be a great you know, like speak.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
Yeah, it's one or the two, one or the two.
There's the only ways to reach people, right exactly. There's
no like editing together a TikTok video or whatever. No, no, unfortunately, tragically,
ah to have seen Hitler's TikTok, if only for a minute. No,
we don't need that. We can already see Hitler's TikTok.

Speaker 4 (17:02):
There's a bunch of them now.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
There's a lot of talk.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
So Schmid's family are working class, they're bordering on poor
in most cases. They voted for the Catholic Center Party,
which is, you know, a centrist party. Johann who's his
dad worked at a railway station, and Carl's relatives are
mostly kind of at a similar socioeconomic level. But his
dad's got one brother who gets rich by selling land

(17:26):
to mining concerns, and so he's kind of like supporting
a lot of the family whenever shit's difficult or whenever
a kid has like bills that their family can't afford,
and he and a lot of the rest of the
family pool resources. When they realize how smart Karl is
to invest in his education and the education of one
of his brothers. He's got two other brothers. One of

(17:47):
them is really smart, so Carl and his smart brother
get a lot of money put into them. His smart
brother goes on to become a medical doctor. Carl becomes
a jurist. His other brother is like, I don't know,
he doesn't do anything school related. Yeah, he's just fine.
He doesn't become he doesn't become a howling fascist, I
don't think. So, you know, he's got that going for him.

(18:09):
So we know glaringly little other than this about Carl's
early childhood, which he never discussed at length. He did
speak positively about his dad, but he does not speak
about his mom.

Speaker 4 (18:18):
Well.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
Mehring, who is his best biographer, simply writes, Schmid would
sometimes speak about her in rather negative terms, and boy
boy did he. We'll get to more of that later.
It's tantalizing to want to pull more from these scant details,
but we simply don't have it. He learned to play piano,
We know that he got good marks in school, and
then at age eleven he has an experience that was
familiar to all of the sons of like ambitious families

(18:42):
at this period. Of time anywhere in Europe, which is
that he got shipped off to like a boarding school,
right where you know, time to leave your family behind
and learn how to do whatever it is you're going
to do. And this is the same in Germany as
it is basically everywhere else. So he leaves this town
where he's a member of an outnumbered religious minority for

(19:02):
a closed world in which everyone around him is Catholic
as fuck, and he lives there. You know, a large
portion of the time, his mom wants him to become
a priest, right, she wants him to get into the clergy,
and he's not interested in this at all, and she
never forgives him for this. Right. It's like your mama
wants you to be a doctor or whatever and you
fall into some other career and she's just always kind

(19:24):
of pissed at him. Now, Carl's grades qualify him for
a scholarship. Eventually he leaves this Catholic school for a
prestigious local secular gymnasium in Germany that means high school,
which is confusing. You're not talking about going to work out,
you're talking about high school.

Speaker 3 (19:42):
More or less. This is odd.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
The fact that he gets to leave his Catholic school
and go to this secular school is weird because, as
Balakrishnan writes, Bookish Catholic children were usually singled out as
potential candidates for the priesthood and would not typically have
been exposed to the full course of studies. It's such
a gymnasium. The fact that he was allowed to continue
his studies suggests that his family placed more value on
a secular education than was typical of their kind. Right,

(20:05):
So even though his mom has these goals for him,
he's allowed to go to a secular school when it's
clear that that's what he wants, and that is kind
of interesting. It does show that like they are also modernizing,
they're not completely stuck in the old way things had been.
And this going to this secular school kind of ends
him as a believer, Like he stops believing in God

(20:26):
here there's this has a very humanistic curriculum, and he
doesn't he doesn't fully fall into like German idealism and
all of these kind of like totally secular ideas. There's
always a little bit of like belief in the divine
uh that he that he holds too, that even influences
his ideas on the law, but he stops being a
literal believing Catholic as a result of this education.

Speaker 4 (20:48):
Right.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
One of his best friends in this period is another Karl,
last name Kluksen, whose father owned a big department store
in town. And Kluchsen is an artsy kid, and so
he kind of inducts Schmidt into the world of what
we'd call like theater kids and art kids. That's that's
who Carl's hanging out with. Is like the theater kids
and like the musicians, the artists. These kids who are

(21:10):
gonna be like bohemians in the Weimar era, doing Hella
drugs and eventually getting purged by the Nazis. This is
his social circle as a teenager, right, That's.

Speaker 4 (21:19):
What turns them into a Nazi. He's like, I can't
deal with these people are bugging the hell out of me.
We gotta kill all of them.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
There actually is a there's a degree to which that's true.
He's theater kids. God damn it.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
Sorry, relatable.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
No, it's actually where he does seem to be going
down a different path at one point because during his
last year in secondary school, he starts reading a guy
named Max Sterner and all the anarchists in the arguments
in the Audiencer's going, oh what, because Sterner is like,
he's a very influential anarchist thinker, although calling him that
even is like it's a very big simplification of what

(21:57):
he believed. He's the father of a school of thought
called egoism, which I shouldn't even try to explain here,
because any discussion of this man sparks furious arguments about
the thirty or so people who know he existed. That's
a bit of an exaggeration, but it's enough for you
to know that Sterner is about as fringe and radical
a thinker as Germany ever produces, right, And especially the

(22:20):
fact that he's reading Sterner at this period of time
means that this is a kid who is drawn to
radical ideas and dangerously radical ideas. Like you can get
in some shit for reading Sterner in public school at
this point in time, right, So he is very drawn
to like forbidden intellectual topics in a lot of ways. Now,
one reason Schmidt is interested in Sterner is that his

(22:41):
writings had contributed to what was called the Vormars, which
is a period of what scholar Lawrence Stepplvick describes as
intellectual fermentation. This is happening in the early eighteen hundreds,
and Sterner is one of these thinkers who's like radical
ideas contribute to this boiling over of intellectual like discontent
with the system that contributes to a failed revolution in

(23:04):
Germany in eighteen forty eight, and in eighteen forty eight,
there's a shitload all over Europe. There's a bunch of
failed revolutions. Sterner is a big part of what that
period of time, and so that's part of Weischmidt is
interested in him. He's also interested because Sterner is a Hegelian,
in other words, an intellectual follower of a guy named
Friedrich Hegel. Philosophy is not my strong suit, but from

(23:25):
Hegel we get this important concept called the Hegelian dialectic.
A dialectic is just a method of philosophical argument that
involves two opposing sides having an intellectual clash. And Hegel's
particular style of dialectic broadened the concept of opposing sides
from like Plato, literally depicting arguments between like famous dudes
who embody different attitudes to and I'm going to quote

(23:47):
from the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy. Here different definitions of
consciousness and of the object that consciousness is aware of
or claims to know. As in Plato's dialogues, a contradictory
process between opposing sides and Hegel's dialectic leads to a
linear evolution or development from less sophisticated definitions or views
to more sophisticated ones later. The dialectical process thus constitutes

(24:08):
Hegel's method for arguing against the earlier less sophisticated definitions reviews,
and for more sophisticated ones later. Now that doesn't seem
and I know this is this is not what people
come here for. That doesn't seem like it's anything that
could piss someone off. Right, This seems very like who
could be angry about this basic idea?

Speaker 4 (24:26):
Right?

Speaker 2 (24:27):
So many people get pissed off about this. Up to
the present day, reactionaries fucking hate Hegel and Hegelian dialectics
because Hegel is like this very scientific and progressive figure
whose philosophy advocates for like a continual advancement in understanding.

Speaker 4 (24:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
So, in other words, we are working to better ideas
and better understandings of things, And that's not conservatism. Right,
that's like the opposite of a reactionary idea. And the
Nazis are going to consider Hegel like a devil, like
he is he is Satan himself, right, They're so angry.

Speaker 4 (25:05):
They don't like, let's hear all sides Out's not let's
give everybody an equal floor to speak. It's not.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
You read that last dense paragraph to like, what are
these Nazis? And they're they're reaching for I mean literally,
there's a like I think it's a Goerring quote where
it's like, I'm going to reach for my gun when
I hear shit like that.

Speaker 4 (25:24):
Amazing.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
So the Nazis don't like this guy. As George Lucix
would explain in a nineteen forty three essay, Hegel's scientific
dialectic is unbearable to them because their worldview season it
almost in the same words as the old Friedrich Schlingel,
who became a reactionary a Satanic principle, the principle of evil,
of the anti German, of the anti racial. So at

(25:45):
the time Schmid is in school, Hegel is controversial for
these reasons, like, you know, reactionary. This is a fairly
reactionary state, and so they don't like this guy whose
thoughts play a significant role in a revolution that had
occurred not all that long ago. But there's other reasons
why they're unhappy with this, right, because after Hegel dies
in eighteen thirty one, his philosophic school splits into two

(26:08):
opposing sides. There's young Hegelians and there's old Hegelians. And
young Hegelians tend to be young people who were convinced
of Hegel's logic but also convinced that it led inevitably
to a rational argument for socialist revolution against both the
Prussian monarchy and against evangelical Lutheranism. Right, and that's not
going to be super popular with the state. Right that

(26:29):
there's like a chunk of this guy's followers who, in
the period of time that Schmidt is reading all this stuff,
are like, we have to overthrow the government. This is
radical literature, right. As Laurence Steppovich writes in an article
for the Journal of Modern Judaism, the Young Hegelian school
suddenly came into being in eighteen thirty five with a
brilliant theological study, the Life of Jesus Christ critically examined.

(26:51):
It was written by a young and little known theologian
David Friedrich Strauss, who candidly into the shocked embarrassment of
the old Hegelians, declared that his work was inspired by
Hegel's philosophy. His reduction of the miracles related to the
life of Jesus into a collection of mythic tales based
upon Old Testament expectations simply destroyed the claim that Hegalienism
and Orthodox evangelical doctrine were compatible. As the Prussian monarchy

(27:14):
was supportive of and supported by the Orthodox Church, Strauss's
work was even more disturbing than might be expected from
a Biblical study. And this is relevant to us because,
like Sterner is like the marijuana that gets him dropping acid,
which is reading David Friedrich Strauss. This doesn't sound all
that like dangerous or even extreme, but in his time,

(27:34):
this is if you get, like if you're a kid
in high school who gets caught with a copy of
the zine why Break Windows, which is like an anarchist
essay about like why it's not just moral but like
an astatic act to shatter windows, or something like a
beginner's guide to targeted property destruction. Both of what you
can find on crime thinks website. If you're caught with
those in high school now, you can get in trouble, right, right,

(27:57):
And it's important you look at this book about Jesus
that Carl's going to get caught reading this in school.
The authorities of his time see this as the same
as they would see those scenes today.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
Right.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
This is that radical, right, That's very much how they
view it, even though it seems it doesn't seem that
way to us. Right, So he is he is reading
like the radical like anti state revolutionary theory. That's that's
very much like you know, how this is looked at
at the time. So while Schmidt is being a big nerd,
the people he's hanging out with are kind of like

(28:30):
the punks and anarchist radicals of their day.

Speaker 3 (28:32):
Now they're not.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Most of them are actually more like socialists or social democrats,
but given that they live under the Kaiser, that's a
similar level of like, you know, radicalism, you.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
Know, and Strauss you should do that?

Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yeah, okay, sure, why not. Here's fucking ad.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
So we're back.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
So he gets caught reading Strauss in school, He gets
caught reading this book about Jesus in school, and he
gets in trouble. He gets like detention, he's putting the
fucking breakfast club for his like radical reading.

Speaker 3 (29:11):
And yeah, this.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
Is not the only thing he gets punished for when
he's in his last year of high school. According to
Ryan hard Mehring quote on August third, nineteen oh six,
Schmid was punished together with twelve of his peers, with
one hour of after school detention for breaking the rules
and visiting a public house. Presumably this was the reason
he had to leave the seminary in September. Thus, in
the last months before his final examination, he had to

(29:32):
commute as a train farer. So he's also he's kind
of a wild kid. He's like reading you know, revolutionary
literature and like breaking the rules to get fucking wasted
with his friends. And he gets kicked out a seminary
for being too cool actually, which is guy, this is
the only top the case. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's hopping trains.

(29:54):
I mean he probably pays. He's not that cool. So
as Dolan academic, as this guy appears, he is like
pretty radical in this period of time. That said, his
grades remain excellent. Our boy graduates and he gets accepted
to the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, which is
also just called the University of Berlin, and you know,
Yale and like Harvard existed back then. This is the

(30:17):
top college. A lot of people would argue the best
college in the world of its day. Right, this is
the most because Germany's education system is the best. These
are the Germany is the first country to figure out
modern universities, and almost anyone would agree this is about
the best place you could end up as a young
intellectual in this period of time.

Speaker 4 (30:36):
Robert was this the first time that he was moving
into a city as well, Like, yes, this is the
first time he was like Metro.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
A really big city, right, as opposed to like kind
of a you know, the smaller these large towns and whatnot.
Now he's in Berlin, right, which is a different level
of city, and he finds himself drawn to it and
kind of repulsed by it, right, which we'll talk about
in a second. But he's a very good student. He
initially wants to get his degree in philology, which is
the study of the structure and development of language. But

(31:03):
he's being supported by his rich uncle who lives nearby,
and like he'll crash with him during the holidays and
is his main source of support. And his rich uncle's like,
you know, philology, the fuck is that shit? No, you're
getting a law degree. You're gonna have a couple lawyer
and make money. So he's doing this in Berlin, which
is again a very different environment than one he's raised in,

(31:26):
and the different biographers I've read give divergent descriptions, somewhat
divergent descriptions. Now he felt about it. Balachrishnan describes him
as deeply ambivalent to the diversity of the metropolis, noting
that in the popular imagination, urban areas in Germany were
seen as in some way Jewish as well, and this
all helped harden his identity as an outsider. Balakrishnan concludes

(31:47):
that Carl found city life both fascinating and disturbing. And
here's how Karl himself describes his feelings at the time.
I was an obscure young man of modest descent. Neither
the ruling strata nor the opposition included me. That meant
I ding entirely in the dark. Out of darkness, looked
into a brightly lit room. The feeling of sadness which
filled me made me more distant and awoke in some

(32:08):
other's mistrust and antipathy the ruling strata experienced anybody who
was not thrilled to be involved with them as heterogeneous.
It put before him the choice to adapt or withdraw.
So I remained outside. And this is you know, he's
not part of the opposition, he's not part of the
ruling class, and so he can see them all better,
more accurately than they see themselves, you know, as a

(32:29):
result of this position that he has, which is often
the case. That's why a lot of our greatest artists
are outsiders, you know, in one way or another. Right,
and Carl is going to have perspective that gives him
a degree of vision that other people lack.

Speaker 4 (32:44):
Yeah, that's how I feel about New York. I've written
a very similar thing about New York City. So yeah,
in the same page, right, So.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
Marrying's more recent biography paints a picture that conflicts with
a few aspects of this. For one thing, while a
Krishnan kind of transposes Schmidt's anti semitism that comes later
into this assumption that maybe he was repelled by the
city as a result of it in this period of time,
and there's reason to doubt that, but Mahoring paints a
picture of a young man who is enthralled by his surroundings.
He describes university as a temple of higher intellectuality, and

(33:14):
he finds himself almost religiously obsessed with legal study, particularly
the Roman origins of Western justice systems. And he likes
his Roman law classes because he's a Latin nerd so like,
that's the degree of fucking DWEP. This guy is but
very smart, and he maintains a sense of superiority towards
his peers. Right, he feels because he's smarter than them

(33:37):
and because his interests are so much more esoteric, that
he's like a better person. That quote I read earlier
of how Carl viewed himself came from a memoir he
wrote about his college years, where most of the book
is him insulting two of his friends, who like shit,
talks constantly about like being less intelligent than he is.
And the purpose of that passage where he's talking about

(33:57):
him being an outsider is like, look at how much
smarter I was than all these dopes.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
I went to school with.

Speaker 4 (34:02):
Like the Michael Jordan Hall of Fame speech, but with right,
the creator of fascists, right right? Yes, what are these petty?
You know? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (34:11):
He is so petty. Per marrying quote, Schmidt claims to
have had early on a distance from the myths of
the German Reich under Bismarck and from the national liberal
atmosphere at Berlin University. He felt his whole life as
if he were intellectually superior and a social climber and outsider,
an underdog who does not belong and has not shown
enough respect, and who in response looks down on the
bourgeoisie world around him. So this is part of why

(34:35):
he continues to socialize with artists and creative types. Right is,
these are other people who are kind of on the
outside looking in, who he maybe feels a sense of
kinship with. He spends his nights out with other people
who see themselves that way and feel like we're turning
a lins on society and we're thus smarter than everyone else.
Schmidt doesn't quite settle into Berlin yet. He moves to

(34:56):
college in Munich the next year, and then he goes
to Strasbourg the year after, And these are all bigger
cities than he had lived in before marrying. Suspects he
moves around so much for financial reasons we don't really know.
In any case, he falls in love with Strasburg and
that's where he'll stay for the rest of his education.
And it's where he meets his mentor, a guy named
Fritz von Kalker, who becomes his doctoral supervisor. Von Kalker

(35:18):
is a criminal law professor with a particular interest in
how morality impacts punishment under the law, right, what is
moral in terms of a punishment, and how is the
morality of a society of a society even how does
it relate to how they punish people?

Speaker 1 (35:33):
This this is his Roy Kohne.

Speaker 3 (35:35):
This is his Roy Cohne.

Speaker 1 (35:36):
Kind of yes, okay, so far he sounds like not
a very chill guy.

Speaker 4 (35:41):
He's not.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
He's a very intense intellectual.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
And Fritz is the most important person in Carl's early
life because he really takes this kid under his wing.
He supports him getting his doctorate, he finds him work
in various positions for the university, and he will continue
to go to bat for this guy, which is interesting
because later in Karl will pretend this dude never existed.
He keeps no cops of this guy's work in his library. Yeah,

(36:06):
it's a little bit like that, right, And this is
you know, he keeps basically every other letter he gets
in his life, but he throws out most of the
ones to van Kalker, which is interesting because von Kalker
literally saves his life at a later point.

Speaker 4 (36:18):
Here.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
Now, another key person in Karl's young life who he
will later jettison as an adult is Fritz Eisler.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
Fritz is a lot of Fritz. It's Germany.

Speaker 4 (36:29):
Yeah, that's what we signed up for. We signed up
for this. The moment you chose this guy, we're gonna
have a million Fritz.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
There were gonna be a shitload of Fritz's.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
None of them can's. God, damn, it's too late.

Speaker 4 (36:39):
There's no turn back.

Speaker 3 (36:41):
We'll call this guy Eisler.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Right, and Eisler he meets because they're both working for
von Kalker, is like assistants, and Eisler becomes his best
friend during the five terms he spends in Strasburg getting
his doctorate. And this is noteworthy because Eisler is Jewish, right,
and contrary to how Bala Krishnan depicts him as a
young man, is uneasy with the city because of its
ineffable Jewishness. His best friend in his favorite city is

(37:04):
a young jew from a prominent family. And Eisler is
not only Jewish, he is a Hungarian national who, despite
being a Hungarian national, identifies as German, and this whole
period is trying to get legal status in Germany. He
is trying to get German citizenship, and he wants. Eisler's
whole goal in life is a social acceptance as a

(37:25):
citizen of the German Reich. And this is a difficult
battle for even a rich young Jewish Man because nearly
everybody's incredibly racist, right, So it's interesting that Schmidt isn't
in this period right at least not towards Eisler, that
he's willing to because Schmidt expresses a degree of like
bigotry as well, but never not towards Eisler in this period,

(37:47):
which is interesting. It shows that he's got this degree
of ability to kind of look past that. So the
two became buds in nineteen oh eight. They get their
doctorates in like nineteen ten. Merriing writes that quote through Eisler,
Schmidt for the first time came into more intense contact
with Jewish people and with judaism, and the difference in
the theses that these guys pick for their doctorate is

(38:09):
interesting to me. Eisler goes for this very standard topic,
like he's analyzing a bunch of defamation lawsuits and is like,
what what are the ones that succeed all have in common?

Speaker 4 (38:18):
Right?

Speaker 3 (38:18):
Pretty normal law?

Speaker 4 (38:19):
Your stuff? Right?

Speaker 2 (38:21):
Schmidt picks a much more philosophical and a very catholic topic.
His paper is titled on Guilt and Types of Guilt, which,
again super catholic, but also god, you know, Isler's doing
this nuts and bolts. Okay, if you're arguing for a
defamation case, what's what you know? Statistically? What what is
likelier to work for you? Marrying is wondering what does

(38:43):
it mean to be guilty?

Speaker 3 (38:45):
Right?

Speaker 1 (38:46):
You know?

Speaker 4 (38:48):
Guilt and types of guilt? Why is my mom a
piece of shit? Shit? She was?

Speaker 1 (38:52):
She was?

Speaker 3 (38:53):
She ever? Stop giving me crap?

Speaker 4 (38:54):
Yeah? Now.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
The actual content of his piece is an argument that
the law fundamentally hinges on an arbitrary, free floating element.
No matter how much the law may claim to be
an objective thing, it always relies to some extent on
the ability of a judge to determine a sentence. In
other words, you can have whole reams of law, books
and legislature that can give the appearance of a mechanistic

(39:18):
system that functions based on objective measures, but the law
is always at its core reliant on the discretion and
decisions of individuals. Right, And that's a very important realization. Now,
this is in keeping with a major trend in German
jurisprudence at the time, which is called the free law movement,
which stands in opposition to legal positivism, which is a
trend that had swept through in the eighteen seventies with

(39:39):
the goal of like, we don't want to talk about
natural law, about like the natural rights of man and stuff.
We want to talk about like what are we saying
are people's rights? What are we saying is legal and illegal?

Speaker 4 (39:50):
Right?

Speaker 2 (39:50):
So there's a struggle between people who want this absolute
code that handles how things should be adjudicated in every
situation versus people who are like, now, the creative power
of a judged to interpret justice matters. Right, And Schmidt
simultaneously recognizes there's this arbitrary core to the legal code,
but he also starts to value what he described as
higher law. This sort of like maybe even divine natural justice,

(40:14):
that the law is always moving closer to representing. And
he writes about guilt not as an internal thing, but
as a legal category. In other words, he concludes that
it doesn't matter if you've done what the state accuses
you of.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
Guilt is a legal.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
Status, and moral norms are bound by the law, not
the other way around. You can kind of see how
a man making conclusions like this might wind up as
a fascist. Right, guilt is a category. What you did
is immaterial.

Speaker 4 (40:42):
Guilt's the marijuana of the fascism assage.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
Right right, yes, yes, to continue using the gateway drug metaphor.

Speaker 4 (40:50):
Right.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
So, when he's not writing wonky legal arguments, he and
his friend Eisler attempted to start a satire magazine. And god,
this must have been fucking unreadable because they're they're doing this.
Oh my god, just imagine, like your most up their
own asshole friends in college. They make a satire magazine
that's mostly about Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Walter Rathanol, like

(41:13):
all these German intellectuals that they have issues with that
they're just like making fun as like teenagers making fun
of these like these great intellectuals that are part of
like German culture, and that's the it seems to be
the whole reason for this magazine. Seems to be that
all these guys are respected contributors to German culture, and
Schmidt wants to take them down a peg to prove

(41:34):
he's not like everyone else. And I wonder maybe Eisler,
as a Hungarian and as a Jew, maybe feels a
similar need right where like these guys aren't any better
than I am. Like, yeah, let's let's let's fucking puncture
them a little bit.

Speaker 3 (41:46):
Now.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
They hope that this would sell and make the money. Again,
they are delusional. This is not like the satire magazine
is not going to take off.

Speaker 4 (41:56):
There's no era, absolutely not.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
It's mad magazine. But it's all about Nietzsche. Like okay, maybe.

Speaker 3 (42:05):
Cal him down.

Speaker 4 (42:06):
Yeah, maybe just read that yourself. Maybe just read that
in your own home.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
Yeah, that might just be for you and your friend Eisler. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
So, because they can't make money off of this, and
Schmidt is struggling, is basically is going to spend like
the first almost decade of his adulthood as an intern unpaid,
because that's what being an academic means in this period
of time, so you have to have support from someone.
And Eisler begs his family like, hey, this this friend
of mine is brilliant and he's a good guy. He's
not a racist. We've got money, dad, will you give

(42:39):
money to this guy?

Speaker 4 (42:40):
Right?

Speaker 2 (42:41):
And as a matter of fact, for like most of
his twenties up until World War One, the Eislers will
be Schmidt's primary source of financial support. This Jewish family
really keeps this kid from starving, you know which, given
what he's going to do to Jewish people later, is
just an extra level of fuck. In letters to his sister,

(43:02):
Carl's sister, who became a teacher in Portugal during this period,
Carl showed an obsession and a frustration with his relative poverty,
writing that neither of them, either he or his sister,
had been careful enough in choosing their parents, and complaining
that rich people were conceded so both like, fuck my
mom and dad for not making us rich and also
fuck rich people.

Speaker 4 (43:20):
Fuck rich people, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
One letter he sent her on the subject included this
interesting line, this is what makes our time so dreadful
that the individual person, what he is and what he
can do never matters, only the role that he can
play in society. You know, it's an interesting, interesting issue. Yeah,
I think it's not an uncommon thing to feel during
this period of time, Right, I'm no one cares about

(43:44):
who I am, just like what I can do, how
much money I can make. And that's like, it's kind
of fuck that society works that way.

Speaker 4 (43:51):
And it's that type of humor that made that satire table.

Speaker 2 (43:54):
That made his magazine really take off. National Lampoon acquired
it for three million dollars. Yeah, now that's a very
like wow, easy to identify with sentence. Here's the one
that's less easy to identify with. So he warns his
sister in the same letter to be careful with men. Quote,
don't trust these Portuguese happy go lucky win bags an inch,

(44:15):
don't even begin anything with them.

Speaker 4 (44:19):
Same sentence, by the way.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
There was same sentence, same sentence.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
There's a semicin, Oh, society judges us on all these
bullshit things. Don't ever trust a Portuguese man while we're
at it, these fucking Portuguese wind bags. So, after a
brief period working for his brother as a lawyer's assistant,
he continued to squeak By as an academic lecturing and
getting bits of work off the strength of his now

(44:44):
published thesis. In his free time, he flirted and seems
to have gone after women compulsively. Merrying describes this as
like his in his own mind. His original sin is
that this guy just can't stop trying to fuck, Like
he is really horny and a bad judgment and is
constantly screwing around. He may have actually been kind of

(45:05):
a player at one point. It's a little hard to tell.
But like his earliest serious fling that we have evidence
with is this pair of Jewish sisters, the Bernsteins, who
he's like in a love triangle with. He's like, and
it's unclear given the time, is he just flirting with
both of them or are they actually like go in
at it right? But he wants to marry one of them, Helene,

(45:26):
But he's also kind of stringing the other along like
he's gotta he's got a he's got a triangle with
these two sisters.

Speaker 4 (45:33):
Yeah, I don't know. This sounds like Portuguese wind bag
behavior to me.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
It's like a Portuguese wind's like a Portuguese win. Now
he tries to marry Helene. And again this is these
these sisters are Jewish, so the fact that he wants
to marry this woman at one point is really interesting,
again given what he's going to become. But her family
won't let him because he has no money, and like,
this is not just you know, U, this is a

(45:57):
thing any German father pretty much would have had set
at the time. It's like, well, you're an academic, maybe
you'll have a career, but right now you literally don't
have income. So no, you can't marry my daughter. You
have no way of supporting her.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
Right.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
This is not a thing that just would have happened
because of like the religion of her father. This was
a totally normal thing at the time. And this is
something that's driving him crazy that he can't get married, right,
He has nothing coming in and he starts to get
increasingly angry at society, which we see in his letters
to his sister quote every person is vehemently egotistic, and

(46:31):
it is a miracle they do not murder and poison
each other, but inquire about the weather instead. So he's
become very black pilled at this point in time. He
can't get married. He seems locked out at this point
from and so close to being where he needs to
be right, but he just can't cross that border because
he was born poor.

Speaker 4 (46:52):
It is interesting that he chooses his sister to confide into,
you know, like, I wonder why, Yeah, that was.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
He hates his younger sister. His older sister who's in Portugal,
he seems to really trust, and maybe she's the only
member of his family that he can trust. It kind
of does seem that way.

Speaker 4 (47:08):
A mother figure.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, maybe a little bit of a maybe, or at
least someone how yeah, how he would have liked to
have felt about.

Speaker 4 (47:13):
His mother, his chosen mother.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
Yeah, speaking of poisoning and murdering each other. Well, uh,
don't do that.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
Listen to ads. Okay, we're back.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
So obviously this is nineteen twelve. World War One is
right around the horizon, but Carl doesn't know that yet,
and he is much more concerned with matters of the
heart than the fact that everything is about to get
really fucked up for everybody in his world. He had
been banned from the Bernstein House after continuing to pursue
Helena after her parents said no. So he is he

(47:49):
is that kind of suitor, like he will not give
up and eventually her dad's like, motherfucker, I'm calling the
cops if you come back here again. The good news
for him is that within weeks of this, he meets
a Spanish dancer at a cabaret. She calls herself Kri
and when they strike up a relationship, she tells him
her full name is Pauline Carita Maria Isabella von Doretik. Now,

(48:11):
if you know German vaughan means someone is a noble, right,
Like that's a marker that you are of the nobility.
And this woman is claiming to be the daughter of
a noble family. And so as soon as he's like
got the interests of this dancer who's like got noble blood,
he drops all interest in these sisters he's been pursuing,

(48:33):
and he writes to her, his sister, I now have
a delightful friendship with a Spanish dancer. Now Carrie is
not Spanish, she is also not a noble woman. Every
aspect of Carrie's life was fake. She claimed to be
the daughter of a Croatian lord who had died, which
had forced her to travel to Munich to live with
a cruel aunt, which was basically a Disney fable. She

(48:56):
also claimed that she'd been born a week after Karl,
when in reality she was five years older than him.
She was the illegitimate daughter of a Viennese woman and
a Croatian plumber. And for all of his brains, Carl
never catches her in her life like not or at
least at this point right, he buys in all of
her stories of royal life, everything she says about herself.

(49:17):
He has completely fallen for this woman and all of
his colleagues because again he's a doctor. At this point right,
all of his colleagues are like, man, this chick is
not She's lying to you, for one, but this is bullshit.

Speaker 4 (49:30):
Like there's no Spanish accent here.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
She doesn't sound Spanish. That's not a Spanish name. Why,
Like this family doesn't exist. She has a Croatian accent.
His mentors gently warned him against getting with what they
called a tingle tangle girl. And this is a term
at the time it refers to like the kind of
clangy sort of like bits of like jewelry that dancers

(49:55):
at burlesque's and whatnot would wear. It means that they're
calling her a stripper, right, or they're calling her outright
a whore. That's what a tingle tangle means at this
period of time, right, Like, man, you have fallen for
this stripper and she is lying about her past. That's
what his friends are saying. Right, That's that's the equivalent
in modern terms, right. But he doesn't care. He's in
love with this woman. He believes her, and he believes

(50:17):
her even though they can get married because her dad's dead.
There's no one to stop them. He doesn't need to
ask permission. But they can't get married because every time
they try to go to a judge, the judge's like, oh, okay, well,
where's this woman's papers, you know, to show where her
citizenship is and that she is who she and she
never has them. And occasionally she'll have papers, but they'll
be like, well, these are obviously fake. And Carl doesn't like,

(50:41):
doesn't think anything's weird.

Speaker 3 (50:42):
He loses them all the time.

Speaker 4 (50:46):
Yeah, with them, they're.

Speaker 2 (50:51):
So he spends the last years before World War One
fighting constantly with their local magistrates to get her naturalized
so that they can get married. And because he's so
crazy in love, he switches in this last year or
so before the war from writing about law to writing
about love, particularly the morality of love. I'm going to
quote from Merhring's book again here from October twelfth. The

(51:12):
diary contains a passionate love letters and an ecstatic philosophy
of love that aims to base love on permanence and
enforce faithfulness by idealizing love as devotion to an idea.
Schmidt wanted to conceive his love from the perspective of eternity,
a perspective in which kri then had no predecessor and
no successor. Right, he can't he can't let himself a

(51:33):
man again. This woman is an exotic dancer. She has
a relationship history prior to him. She's trying to build
this cosmology in which there's never been a before. Right,
because then that's he just is not secure enough in
that idea.

Speaker 4 (51:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
This happens all the time, like this is very constantly, constantly.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
Yeah, it's like a very common thing.

Speaker 4 (51:52):
I fear my wife has never seen a man before.
She still has it to be a POOLI yes, never
never talk about myself, let's start now.

Speaker 2 (52:02):
But it is it is interesting that he he has
to intellectualize this the way he does. His attitudes about
the law right where he's like building this this almost
like natural law attitude about how love works in order
to avoid being insecure. It's gonna give you an idea
of how of how good he will be at twisting
based on his own kind of feelings, his understanding of

(52:24):
like the law, and these things that are supposed to
be objective but that really are not. He starts writing
that his past pursuit of the Bernstein sisters was a mistake,
but obviously it's their mistake, not him. He writes that
he had been quote painfully ambushed by a vain, common, ugly,
and arrogant virago who is now in possession of love
letters from me. She has foisted herself on me as

(52:46):
an address. See thus I spit her out as a
whole person. I have no more to do with her.
I wash my hands clean. I took excrement for gold
without letting slip from my fingers, the pure gold that
I now hold in my hands. And he's like, it's
her like, because again, the fact that he had been
in love with this woman and had written her letters
means that this relationship he's in, even his side of it,

(53:08):
isn't as peer as he wants to pretend and it's
her fault. Right, she ambushed me, she forced me to
write her letters.

Speaker 4 (53:14):
You tricked me.

Speaker 3 (53:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (53:15):
Meanwhile, the honest person that he's currently with, that's not
a trick at all.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
But now that's not a trick at all. Well, here's
the fact, Like, yeah, man, shit changes people feel different
ways about people over time. That's fine, Like you could
just accept.

Speaker 4 (53:29):
That some shit shit, some shit's gold.

Speaker 2 (53:32):
Yeah yeah, right, anyway, this is where we're going to
leave Karl on the eve of World War one, Right,
this guy who is starting to become the thinker who's
going to define a lot of what becomes Nazist jurisprudence.
He's also real big issues with women, right, Yeah, so

(53:56):
how we feel.

Speaker 4 (53:56):
In Blake, what's a German for? In cell is what
is what is?

Speaker 2 (54:01):
Except he's kind of getting late, like yeah, it is
like he's not I don't know, I don't know where
we land on this guy, but he isn't you know,
I that flew by.

Speaker 4 (54:12):
It is really interesting to get because it's almost like
seeing the first piece of shit, like the modern piece
of shit that we have now. Yeah, it is interesting
seeing the building blocks of how it came together, you know,
especially knowing what he turns into. There are so many
clues of oh, look he wants to this is how
he's breaking down this establishment, and that establishment is trying

(54:36):
to date these Jewish histories. He broke down that democracy,
you know, and it's interesting to see how he wants
to do it going forward. But yeah, this is this
is fascinating so far.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
Yeah, yeah, well that is what we're going to be
continuing from next time.

Speaker 4 (54:53):
All right.

Speaker 2 (54:54):
Uh so, Blake, you want to plug your plugables here?

Speaker 4 (54:56):
I would love to plug some pluggables. So I am
going to be in Philadelphia August first, doing stand up there.
I'm going to be in Wilkes Barry at the end
of August, and I also have a comedy special called
Blake Wexlort Daddy Long Legs, And depending on when this
comes out, I'm biking in this thing called the Eagles
Autism Challenge. It raises money for autism research autism awareness,

(55:17):
So there's donation links. I know times are tough, but
if you could spare anything, that link is in my
bio on at Blake Wexler on all social media.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
Amazing all right, check that out and yeah, don't become
a jurist. No, don't do that. It turns out the
laws are just what people in power decide they want
them to be, and you shouldn't have that much faith
in the law meaning anything objective because look at just
read the news for ten minutes, you'll see why. Anyway,

(55:47):
don't even need the full ten goodbye.

Speaker 1 (55:53):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zone Media, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
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Speaker 3 (56:11):
Subscribe to our

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards