It is not uncommon for the end of wars to herald the sentiment that ‘nothing will ever be the same again’. To be sure, wars leave scars both emotional and physical. They leave tales of loss and instincts of vengeance. But in the political theory of Carl Schmitt, war is above all a political act. ‘War is the existential negation of the enemy.’ It leaves concrete changes in the configuration of politics. It draws new lines on maps, and creates new lines of authority of men over other men. No matter how infrequent or limited, warfare is a necessary corollary of Schmitt's understanding of political life. And as such, the observation that war inflicts permanent changes on social life is, for Schmitt, nothing more than an observation that the history of the state rolls on.

Yet, amidst the destruction of Berlin in 1945, Schmitt was preoccupied with a quite distinct and more fearsome sense that ‘nothing will ever be the same again’. Arrested by the Russians in April of 1945, arrested and re-arrested by the Americans, interred and questioned by the Nuremberg prosecutor, Schmitt suddenly became an actor in what was, for him, a more startling moment of change. Nuremberg seemed to cement a process that had preoccupied Schmitt for the past twenty-five years. War was no longer simply an affair of states, to be settled in the moment of defeat or victory. It was also a matter of right and wrong and an issue that implicated individual morality.