Excerpt

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) is known as the most consequential German legal and political mind of the twentieth century.¹ Many crimes of the Nazi regime found support in his conceptual justifications, and Schmitt is called the “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich with good reason. Historians, political scientists, and sociologists must grapple with the author in order to understand the course of totalitarianism in modernity. Whether literary historians should do so is far less settled, though he was fascinated by their object of study. His writings on literary topics are said to reveal much about Schmitt’s person, politics, and period, but little about literature itself.² This explains why his “Don Quijote und das Publikum” (“Don Quixote and the Public”), published in the arts and cultural journal Die Rheinlande in 1912, was almost unknown in literary studies for a century.³ Schmitt’s text on the novel by Miguel de Cervantes has not been reprinted, and until recently it had not been translated from the original German. Size has a role too. At under two thousand words, the text has probably escaped notice due to its small scale.⁴ Recent English and Italian translations in major humanistic journals may signal the end of its obscurity though.⁵ “Don Quixote and the Public” is at the door of literary studies. The question now is not whether to respond, but how.