Don Quixote and The Public

Afterword by Yuri Notturni: About Carl Schmitt reader and interpreter of Don Quixote

Abstract

The work that we have the honour to present here in its first Italian translation is a short essay published by Carl Schmitt in the first half of the ‘10s in the German Journal Die Rheinlande and titled Don Quixote and the public (1912). A very brief but at the same time dense piece of literary criticism in which the future Kronjurist of the Third Reich, in those years still engaged in his legal practice, offers to the readers a juvenile proof of his vastly and heterogeneous interests, trying to determine which is the proper interpretation of the renowned masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote of the Mancha. A juvenile work, therefore, in which Schmitt, as we will try to highlight in the introduction that accompanies the translation, offers an interpretation of the novel and particularly of its main character focusing on the contraposition between the level of the simple reading and that of erudite valorisation, applying a methodology similar to that he used in the coeval Law and Judgement (1912) that in some ways anticipate the critique of Romanticism that he will develop just a few years later in Political Romanticism (1919).