The Schmitt–Sander correspondence as a record of intellectual work and marginality
A Correspondence Volume from Schmitt’s Late Circle
Werkstatt-Discorsi is a German-language edition of correspondence between Carl Schmitt and the publicist Hans-Dietrich Sander, edited by Günter Maschke and Erik Lehnert. Its subtitle gives the span 1967–1981. The surviving material consists of 124 letters or postcards written by Schmitt and 222 by Sander. The exchange begins on 22 May 1967, when Sander sends an essay on Armin Mohler’s recommendation, and Schmitt’s final reply is dated 9 August 1978. The later endpoint reflects Sander’s repeated but unsuccessful attempts to resume contact up to 1981.
The Exchange as Intellectual Workshop
The title’s image of a workshop fits the volume’s character. Reinhard Mehring describes the letters as a precise, unadorned exchange that traces the intellectual labor of two thinkers and their reading of the political and cultural situation. Rather than presenting a finished doctrine, the correspondence shows ideas being tested, judgments exchanged, and the ordinary conditions of intellectual production negotiated. It is a documentary record of a working relationship rather than a systematic treatise.
Sander’s Typology of the Intellectual
When the correspondence began, Sander was developing a dissertation project on polemical ideal types of the intellectual. He was trying to describe figures such as the reasoner, the provocateur, the frondeur, the collaborator, the windbag, and the phrasemaker—including the type who follows the changing slogans of the Zeitgeist with a good conscience. The letters preserve this project and the question it implies about Sander’s own place among those types. His dissertation, for which Hans-Joachim Schoeps and Edgar Salin served as examiners, treated Marxist ideology and general art theory. He followed it with a history of GDR literature arguing for the thesis of two German literatures. Mehring identifies this as probably the last dissertation Schmitt supervised intensively at a distance.
Mentorship, Proofreading, and Material Troubles
The correspondence also records the practical side of Sander’s relationship with Schmitt. Sander visited Schmitt in Plettenberg several times and took part in two Ebrach conferences, where he was irritated by the liberal attitude of some participants. He read the proofs of Schmitt’s Political Theology II. The letters follow his financial difficulties, his problems getting articles and books into print, and his attempts to secure scholarships. Sander reported these matters in detail, interpreted his troubles politically, and felt himself excluded in a way that resembled Schmitt’s own sense of marginalization. Lacking an academic position, he feared he might suffer the fate of Marx and Bruno Bauer.
Nationalist Milieu and Marginalization
Sander belonged to the nationalist wing of Schmitt’s students, a group that also included Armin Mohler, Hans-Joachim Arndt, Bernard Willms, and the volume’s co-editor Günter Maschke. He positioned himself to the right of established national authors such as Mohler and expressed sharp hostility toward other figures associated with Schmitt, among them Reinhart Koselleck, Christian Meier, and Marianne Kesting. After he had to leave Die Welt in 1967, he moved to Munich and felt isolated there. The letters document his exclusion from West German intellectual discussion and from newspapers in which he had initially still been able to publish. Mehring notes that Sander’s interpretations of his situation increasingly took on antisemitic traits, including wondering whether he was disliked by Jews. The volume thus records not only professional marginality but also the radicalization of a right-wing intellectual.
The Break of 1978
Schmitt ended the correspondence in the summer of 1978, around his ninetieth birthday; his last reply is dated 9 August 1978. Sander continued trying to restore the connection until 1981 but did not succeed. The volume therefore has a double shape: a dense decade of exchange followed by a documented silence and a series of unsuccessful attempts to reopen it. It preserves both the working correspondence and its abrupt termination.
The Volume’s Documentary Value
Reinhard Mehring treats the book as a precise record of two minds at work and as a document of Sander’s exclusion. For readers of Schmitt, it illuminates his late role as a correspondent and informal supervisor within a particular circle of students and admirers. For readers of Sander, it preserves the self-understanding of a marginal publicist who was embedded in that circle while also being pushed to its edges. The volume’s value lies in this combination: it is at once a workshop record of intellectual exchange and a chronicle of exclusion, political hardening, and broken contact.
The volume was first published in 2008 by Edition Antaios in Schnellroda. The H-Soz-u-Kult review gives 528 pages and ISBN 978-3-935063-28-9; it was reviewed by Reinhard Mehring and published on H-Soz-u-Kult in March 2009. A ZVAB listing identifies a hardcover copy as a first edition (1. Aufl.). Catalog metadata places the work under correspondence, political scientists, and modern philosophers.
Sander Before and Around the Correspondence
Hans-Dietrich Sander was born in 1928. He studied theology, theater studies, and German studies in Berlin. In 1952 he went to the GDR for several years as a dramaturge, and in 1957 he returned to the West. He then worked as a journalist, especially in the feuilleton of Die Welt. In 1967, when he sought contact with Schmitt, Sander was already a profiled publicist and almost 40 years old; Schmitt was almost 80. After Sander had to leave Die Welt in 1967, he wrote for other outlets, some with a right-intellectual profile.
Dissertation Titles and Publication Data
The review names Sander’s dissertation Marxistische Ideologie und allgemeine Kunsttheorie; it was published in Basel in 1970, with a second expanded edition in 1975. The follow-up work is identified as Geschichte der schönen Literatur in der DDR. Ein Grundriss, published in Freiburg in 1972.
Mehring’s Opening Thesis
Mehring begins with the claim that academically “displaced,” free-floating intelligence tends toward radicalism. He cites the Young Hegelians in the Vormärz as an earlier example and says the tendency can still be seen in Sander.
Additional Quoted Detail
Mehring’s review quotes a passage from pp. 216–17 in which Sander refers to Ball’s Bakunin quotation and adds the caveat that everything might be only combinations of his fantasy. The review introduces the quotation as written in June.
