Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life by Robert E Lerner Hamish Robinson
A photograph taken in 1955 shows five individuals arranged like chessmen on the whitewashed terrace of a house on the Greek island of Hydra. Four of these individuals are well known to the literary pages: the critic Cyril Connolly, the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, the wit and warden of Wadham Maurice Bowra – the photographer Joan Leigh Fermor plays chess with the fifth, a sunburnt man of sixty in swimming trunks. Few readers, perhaps, would be able to put a name to the face or significance to the name, and yet this fifth man, the medieval historian Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, wrote two of the most remarkable books of the 20th century.
Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, a 600-page biography of the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperor published in 1927, was the work of a little-known postdoctoral student at Heidelberg. Having seen service on the Western Front and in Turkey, Kantorowicz, born in 1895 into a prosperous and assimilated GermanJewish family in Posen, had volunteered for the anti-communist Freikorps in Berlin and taken part in street-fighting in Munich. Thereafter, he enrolled as a student of economics with a view to serving the family firm – ‘Kantorowicz’ was a well-known brand of liqueurs before the war. However, at Heidelberg, he was inducted into the George-kreis, a circle of acolytes devoted to the charismatic poet Stefan George. Under George’s influence, Kantorowicz’s nationalist fervour was transmuted to ardent belief in a ‘secret Germany’, a spiritual elite awaiting the coming day of a future leader under the austere guidance of the Meister.
This higher, mystical nationalism precluded any involvement in actual politics. As a result, Kantorowicz began to cultivate his own sensibility, and, at George’s suggestion, set to work on the biography, as one of a series on Germanic heroes. As a piece of panegyrical scholarship, the finished work bore much the same relationship to the GeorgeKreis as Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy had borne to the circle at Bayreuth. In spite of its length and the depth of its research, the text included not a single footnote. Instead, the Emperor and his world were painted with a mixture of the
colours of prophecy and legend and those of Nietzsche’s ‘immoralism’.
Historians denounced an uncritical use of sources but readers, including Goering and Himmler, were captivated. Hitler himself apparently professed to have read the book twice. But if Friedrich II is a paean to autocracy, for Kantorowicz himself it was the beginning of a new direction. Stung by criticism, he embarked on a second, back-filling volume of documentation, a labour that drew him deeper and deeper into the technical problems of scholarship and the world of the professional historian, a world George professed to despise, but that Kantorowicz was increasingly to make his own. Moreover, in 1934, although recently appointed professor at Frankfurt on the strength of his book, he was banned from teaching under the Nazi race laws.
The second book, his masterpiece, was written at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton under very different circumstances. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957) is a 500-page tour de force on the conceptualisation of continuity as exhibited in the doctrines and practices of kingship in the post-classical and medieval world.
Starting from the legal fictions of English jurists, echoes of which he traces in the querulous monologues of Richard II, he works back through the writings of theologians and writers on Roman and canon law to show how ideas borrowed from theology allowed for the modelling of human, as opposed to divine, permanence. The book is written with an almost Nabokovian ebullience. Indeed the scholarship is so dense and rich – the
length of the footnotes equals that of the main text – that one critic complained that reading it was like eating jam without bread. It has never been out of print.
The extraordinary story of Kantorowicz’s passage from Posen to Princeton via California is admirably told by Robert E Lerner, and he has undoubtedly written the biography of record. However, one point he does not emphasise is that the kernel of the second book lies in plain view in the first – in the chapter on the Constitutions of Melfi. In spite of his personal journey from Romantic nationalism to a disenchanted liberalism, Kantorowicz’s life as a historian was in fact devoted to the elaboration of a single intuition concerning the birth of the secular state from the example of papal autonomy.