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| BOOK REVIEW |

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ERNST KANTOROWICZ: A LIFE

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By Michael D. Bailey

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The Montréal Review, February 2017

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ERNST KANTOROWICZ
A Life

By Robert E. Lerner
Illustrated. 400 pp. Princeton University Press.

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W. H. Auden once remarked that he sometimes avoided unwanted questions about being a poet by telling people instead that he was a medieval historian. He did so because “it freezes conversation.” Ernst Kantorowicz, however, was a medieval historian who could bring conversations to a boil. Highly cultured and urbane, he began life as a far-right nationalist but had to flee his native land and ended up opposing an anti-Communist witch-hunt in his adopted country. Robert Lerner, himself a leading medieval historian, relates this amazing story with both carefully researched detail and engaging verve.

Kantorowicz was born in 1895 in the central-European city of Posen, now Poznań. His name was pronounced in what might be regarded as the more Slavic manner, Kantor-Ovitch, and he was Jewish, but he was also German to the core. His family owned a successful liquor business and he grew up in great comfort. Amusingly, the boy who would become one of the greatest scholars of his generation appears to have been a rather idle student. He was especially lazy in his Latin. He did not study because he did not need to. A secure place in the family business awaited him.

With the outbreak of World War I, his patriotic blood boiled, and he volunteered for duty just six days after Germany declared war on France. He would end up serving on both fronts, would suffer wounds, and would win the Iron Cross, second class. After the war, the German economy was in disarray, and the city of Posen became part of Poland, but the Kantorowicz firm survived and continued to prosper. Young Ernst, meanwhile, continued to fight. In Berlin he took up arms against radical-left Spartacists, and later exchanged fire with Communists in Munich. Politics, however, was not his real interest. He wanted to continue his education, and this brought him to the quiet university town of Heidelberg. He took courses in economics, still with an eye to the family business, but also studied Arabic and eventually wrote a dissertation on “Muslim Artisan Associations.” He obtained his doctorate in 1921 and, with the family firm now securely managed by a relative, decided to pursue an academic career.

It was also in Heidelberg that Kantorowicz fell into the circle of the poet Stefan George. A major cultural figure at the time, George promoted the idea of a highly elite, highly romanticized “Secret Germany” that would rise from the ashes of the nation’s defeat. Under his inspiration, Kantorowicz began to study the life of the medieval German emperor Frederick II. He was drawn, perhaps, not so much to the emperor’s history as his possible future, for legend had made Frederick into a messianic figure, not dead but lying hidden in a mountain, ready to return at the hour of his people’s greatest need.

Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite exploded onto the German historical and cultural scene in 1927. It was a tremendous book, crammed with rich and carefully researched detail but without footnotes and written in an evocative, almost poetic style. It also moved away from purely political history toward what would now be seen as cultural history, incorporating works of art and prophetic legends as well as more traditional historical sources. It was a huge success. The grey old men of German academia were horrified at the lack of proper scholarly citations and the abandonment of restrained scholarly tone, but many younger historians were awe-struck, as was the general reading public. Kantorowicz soon found himself elevated to a full professorship in medieval history at the University of Frankfurt – amazing considering he had written his Ph.D. thesis in an entirely different field and then produced what was in some sense a work of popular history.

Kantorowicz seemed poised for a career of precocious greatness in Germany, but an ill wind was blowing. It was the 1930s, and the Nazis were on the rise, akin to Kantorowicz in their extreme nationalism but despised by him for their barbaric thuggishness. Also, he was a Jew. Agonizing over what course of action to take, he ultimately spoke out. Using the forum provided by his university position, he lectured on what he saw as the true greatness of the German spirit. He avoided criticizing the Nazis directly, but he presented a “countermythology” to their crude racism. In such dark times, even that took courage.

As the decade progressed, it became increasingly clear that Kantorowicz would not be able to remain in his once-beloved Fatherland. He had connections and wealth, but still emigration was precarious, and the story of his escape from Germany in 1938 makes for gripping reading. He landed in America, jobless and essentially broke. A job offer eventually came from the University of California at Berkeley, but it took the form of a series of tenuous temporary appointments. Only after the war, with normalcy returning to university campuses, was an offer of a tenured professorship extended and accepted.

The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology
Ernst H. Kantorowicz

What followed was a halcyon period. Lerner describes how Kantorowicz considered himself to be happily settled “in the land of the lotus-eaters.” He loved the intellectual and cultural life in Berkeley. He loved the students. He had more than a few tolerable colleagues, although one gets the distinct impression that he never troubled himself to engage much in departmental or university affairs. But after only a few happy years, university affairs engaged him with full force. Bowing to political pressure, the California Board of Regents decided in 1949 to require that all faculty members sign a loyalty oath designed to root out any affiliation with Communism. Kantorowicz was incensed; the man who had shot at Communists in Germany in 1919 now stood bravely against the Red Scare in Joe McCarthy’s America. He declared publically that to sign such an oath would be an affront to academic freedom and beneath the dignity of the professoriate. He was fired in late summer 1950.

Kantorowicz’s stature was such that he did not need to fear unemployment. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, seat of such other émigré geniuses as Albert Einstein, offered him a position and there he spent the last dozen years of his life. It was there, too, that he completed his masterwork, The King’s Two Bodies, a study in what Kantorowicz called “political theology.” In this enormously rich book, he offered a detailed and often digressive investigation into the medieval antecedents of what eventually became a codified element in English constitutional theory: the union of the incorporeal and undying authority of the crown with the physical person of the king. The King’s Two Bodies has remained in print for sixty years, and it has informed scholarship in many fields, not just history but also art history, political science, and literary criticism.

In the course of relating Kantorowicz’s life, Lerner stops at various points to assess the importance of all of his major works, from the skyrocket success of Frederick II to the deep resonances emanating from The King’s Two Bodies. Anyone interested in medieval history and the development of medieval scholarship over the course of the twentieth century will want to read this book for those sections alone. Others will enjoy the story of an amazing life expertly told. At times the story is tragic, and at moments it is heroic. It also includes accounts of love affairs, private letters full of chatty gossip, and a bit of tax evasion as stays in European luxury hotels are written off as research expenses. Although hardly a tale of unremitting woe, it carries an inevitable sense of decline – of the sophisticated intellectual life of an old continent shattered by war but given a kind of afterlife in North America through a few remarkable refugee scholars like Ernst Kantorowicz.

In closing his biography, Lerner notes that Kantorowicz, while by no means a humble man, never sought to establish any school of thought based on his works. He supported younger scholars but did not cultivate acolytes. He wanted no funeral and no monument to his passing. Lerner supposes that he would not have wanted a biography either, but he certainly deserves one, and now he has one worthy of him and the life he led.

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Michael D. Bailey is Professor of History at Iowa State University and currently interim director of the Center for Excellence in Arts and Humanities there. His most recent book is Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (Cornell), and Magic: The Basics is forthcoming (from Routledge).

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