Kafkanien'. Carl Schmitt, Franz Kafka und der moderne Verfassungsstaat

The politically-theological opposites Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) had quite a bit in common: they were both jurists and avant-gardists, they criticized the legal positivist institutional state, and they personalized and demonized bureaucratic rule. Therefore, Schmitt reflected on his judicial experience after 1945 in Kafka notes and viewed the Federal Republic as "Kafkania." Reinhard Mehring discusses the unsettling similarities in the dystopian perception of the modern state as a building block for the political impact history of Kafka and to clarify the legal skepticism in Schmitt's later work.