Abstract
Walter Benjamin's esteem for Carl Schmitt is one of the most irritating incidents in the intellectual history of the Weimar Republic. It arouses astonishment to this day, connecting as it does Benjamin, a victim of Nazism, to Schmitt, who, with his distinction between friend and enemy, developed a Manichean definition of the political and took a public stance in support of National Socialism in the years after the Machtergreifung.' Yet this bizarre relationship, which for decades was repressed as inconceivable or dismissed as a mere chance episode, was no isolated incident. Although he was forbidden to teach after 1945 and his reputation remained tainted, Schmitt served as a kind of oracle for countless intellectuals and politicians in Germany and elsewhere before his death in 1985.2 It was even suggested that he has more 'pupils' at universities in Ger-
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