Robert E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 424 pp., $39.95.

 

IN 1954, George F. Kennan was completing his two-volume history Russia Leaves the War at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. One evening he met with Ernst Kantorowicz, a German medievalist who had fled the Nazi regime, to discuss his draft. After serving a gourmet meal, complete with fine wines, Kantorowicz conducted Kennan to the living room, where brandy and coffee awaited them, and declared, “Now, my friend, we will talk about what you have done.” Kantorowicz, Kennan recalled in his memoirs, focused on his literary style and approach, offering “the most searching, useful, and unforgettable criticism. This, I thought, was the mark not just of a great scholar but of a great gentleman.” Who was this colleague that could inspire such reverence in Kennan?

In this, the first full-length biography of Kantorowicz, Robert E. Lerner, a professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University, plunges into the thorny thickets of his life to disentangle fact from fiction. Much of the latter can be traced to the medieval historian Norman F. Cantor. In his 1988 book Twentieth-Century Culture, for example, Cantor defamed him: “Beyond doubt, Kantorowicz was a Nazi.” Lerner will have none of this. He sets Kantorowicz in the context of his time, uniting heroic archival research, including numerous interviews with Kantorowicz’s associates and friends, with discerning judgments to trace his remarkable odyssey. The result is a valuable contribution to modern European and American intellectual history.

As a graduate student at Princeton University, Lerner briefly met Kantorowicz in 1961 at a faculty cocktail party, and recalls that “his presence announced ‘great man.’ I had never seen anyone like this. His natty tailoring, replete with vest-pocket flair, suggested Savile Row, perhaps Beau Brummell.” Always something of a bon vivant, Kantorowicz even wore a suit to cookouts and had affairs with everyone from the Oxford don Maurice Bowra to the Baroness Lucy von Wangenheim. Known as EKa to his chums, he possessed what Kennan called an “ineffable Old World charm,” not to mention a formidable drinking capacity.

But Kantorowicz, who shot and killed Communists after World War I during revolutionary uprisings in Germany, also had an icy core. He never married and upbraided his students when they did, regarding the state of matrimony as incompatible with the rigors of scholarship. After a former pupil published his first book, he caustically wrote to him, “You will get good reviews I now believe, although you have fucked up every single Greek quotation and many of the German book titles—and you cannot tell me this is the fault of the Press.” And Kantorowicz, who venerated the ancient world and viewed modern democracy with skepticism, felt an attraction to the Right. After the war, he became a devout disciple of the German poet and mystic Stefan George, who preached antirationalism and the existence of an occult “Secret Germany,” which would eventually issue in a “New Reich.” He never entirely shook George’s influence: as late as 1954, he confessed in a letter, “There is not a day in which I am not aware that everything that I manage to accomplish is fed by a single source, and that this source continues to bubble even after twenty years.” After he fled Germany in 1938, Kantorowicz became embroiled in fresh controversies over an anti-Communist loyalty oath at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1950s. Lerner interprets Kantorowicz’s actions as a move leftward, but this seems misplaced. At bottom, Kantorowicz was an imperious mandarin who viewed the passions of the vulgar multitude, whether in Germany or the United States, with contempt and disdain.

 

KANTOROWICZ WAS born in West Prussia in the city of Posen (now known as Poznan and located in Poland) in 1895 into an assimilated upper-class Jewish family that embraced German patriotism. Kantorowicz, who was never bar mitzvahed, said towards the end of his life that he was of “Jewish descent, not Jewish belief.” He learned to speak English from a British governess and lived in a ten-room luxury apartment on a street named after the Prussian dynasty, Hohenzollernstrasse. All his life Kantorowicz would display a penchant for consorting with aristocrats—the only two women he considered marrying were both members of the nobility—and as a teenager, he attended the Royal Auguste-Viktoria Gymnasium, a bastion of patriotism that was named after the reigning queen of Prussia and empress of Germany. Intensive study of Latin and Greek, along with one modern language, was compulsory. The set essay for graduation asked, “Can we as Prussians agree with the saying of Virgil, ‘Nulla salus bello’ (there’s no safety in war)?” Upon the outbreak of World War I in July 1914, Kantorowicz quickly enlisted. He joined Posen’s field artillery regiment and his unflinching valor earned him the Iron Cross, second-class, in 1915. After becoming wounded in July 1916 at Verdun, he recovered in a military hospital and was then sent to Turkey, where he got into hot water for enjoying a dalliance with his general’s mistress. He spent the final months of the war on the collapsing western front. Soon, Wilhelmine Germany was no more. As a defeated Germany lurched into chaos, he fought with right-wing militias against domestic uprisings, beginning in his hometown of Posen, where he battled Poles intent on independence. Next, in Berlin, he opposed radical Spartacists before joining the Volkswehr in Munich to crush the Reds. Decades later, when America succumbed to McCarthyite hysteria about the Communist threat, Kantorowicz wrote,

My political record will stand the test of every investigation. I have volunteered twice to fight actively, with rifle and gun, the left-wing radicals in Germany; but I know also that by joining the white battalions I have prepared, if indirectly and against my intention, the road leading to National-Socialism and to its rise to power.

Towards the end of 1919, Kantorowicz’s fighting days came to an end, and a lifetime of intellectual disputes began. He enrolled at Heidelberg University, which he had visited as a teenager. There, his sister Soscha was a member of an impressive group of young intellectuals that included Friedrich Gundolf. Gundolf, a charter member of the Stefan George circle, earned renown for a brilliantly insightful book on Goethe that related his life and work, rather than examining the latter in isolation. Gundolf gave a series of well-attended lectures in Heidelberg devoted to the German Romantics. A young Joseph Goebbels, then intent on a career in literary studies, was among the enthusiastic listeners. Later, the Nazi propaganda minister would consign Gundolf’s work to the flames. Gundolf’s mission was to explain how a new era of poetry had revivified sagging German spirits during the Napoleonic era. According to Lerner, “The implication was that the contemporary poetry of Stefan George, Gundolf’s master who often stayed in Heidelberg, would be the means for a second German awakening.” Indeed, Gundolf addressed George as Meister and in an article called “Allegiance and Discipleship” called for subordination to a führer.

George, with his regal bearing, emphasis on returning to the Greeks as a source for wisdom and cultural identity, and impassioned belief in a rebirth of the German nation, was able to exert a magnetic spell on an elite group of young Germans. Ever since Winckelmann in the eighteenth century, Germans, ranging from Schiller and Goethe down to George, had been captivated by the vision of ancient Greece as a transcendent model for a new and modern Germany. George, who lived out of a suitcase, liked to hold court in Berlin, Marburg and Heidelberg, where his lieutenants recruited handsome and aristocratic youths. One such gathering took place near Heidelberg in a villa where George conducted a kind of platonic Symposium and had two of his more physically impressive followers disrobe as models for a sculptor before the other members of his circle.

At Heidelberg, the twenty-five-year-old Kantorowicz joined the George cult. He became the lover of one of George’s followers, the wealthy young Count Woldemar Uxkull, a descendant of German Baltic nobility back to the thirteenth century. Kantorowicz adopted a new form of script developed by George in which letters such as e and t were radically altered. In corresponding with him, Kantorowicz addressed the old man as D.M.—short for der Meister. Indeed, he referred to himself as George’s servant.

The depth of Kantorowicz’s devotion to the prophet and his cause can also be detected in his decision to embark upon a biography of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who vastly expanded the territory ruled by the first German Reich and who died in 1250. In his lugubrious poem “The Grave in Speier,” George had elevated Friedrich II above Frederick the Great in the German dynastic pantheon. Now George suggested that Kantorowicz tackle the monumental task that German historians had shied away from. To the shock and consternation of much of the German historical Zunft, or guild, Kantorowicz succeeded. Kantorowicz’s nationalistic biography, which appeared in 1927 and featured a swastika signet on the cover, was an immediate sensation. Allegedly, Hermann Goering later presented the book with a personal inscription to Mussolini, and Hitler read it twice.

Kantorowicz adapted the sweeping and mystical language of the George circle to history with copious literary allusions to Dante and Wolfram von Eschenbach, as well as references to classical Latin literature and mythology. He demonstrated a mastery of a wide range of sources and flew in the teeth of the rather desiccated German historical profession’s emphasis on objectivity, pure and simple. His aim was different: to visualize the medieval era, to perform an imaginative Warburgian leap that would bring it to life. In 1930, at the University of Halle, the enfant terrible defended his work in a special session before over one hundred historians. Defending his dramatic approach to the past, and dressed to the nines, he dilated upon, among other things, his “fanatical belief in today’s threatened Nation.”

There can be no doubting that Kantorowicz was writing about the past with an eye on the present. He depicted Frederick as a tragic hero, likening him to Caesar and Napoleon. The biography also celebrated authoritarianism, hailing Frederick as a ruthless and intolerant ruler who founded a secular tyranny in Sicily and engaged in ethnic cleansing of Muslims. The tome concluded with the portentous statement, “The greatest Frederick—he who his Volk neither grasped nor gratified—until today is not redeemed. ‘He lives and lives not’ . . the Sibyl’s saying applies no longer for the Kaiser but for the Kaiser’s Volk.” The Volk, in other words, needed to be unshackled from Weimar and Versailles—the whole rotten democratic edifice that Britain, France and the United States had imposed upon a Germany shorn of its Kaiser and its best traditions. “He was addressing,” Lerner writes, “numerous readers who shared his deeply antirepublican, anti-Enlightenment, and revanchist sentiments.”

This was dreadful stuff, but Kantorowicz’s bold insights and indefatigable researches meant that his larger accomplishment was not obscured by his nationalistic bluster or sheer pleasure in provoking outrage. On the contrary, his talents were recognized by Kurt Riezler, a former adviser to World War I chancellor Bethmann von Hollwegg and a passionate Hellenist, and Karl Reinhardt, an eminent classicist. Both helped Kantorowicz secure a post as a professor at Frankfurt University in 1932, a remarkable feat since Kantorowicz had not written the standard Habilitationsschrift, or second monograph, usually required for promotion to full professor. After only one semester, however, his status as a professor came into jeopardy. George had called upon his followers to remain aloof from daily politics, but for all his nationalistic effusions, Kantorowicz was hardly blind to the fateful course that German events were taking. Lerner notes that when Ernst Robert Curtius sent him his book German Spirit in Danger, Kantorowicz responded that not just the spirit but also the very soul of Germany was imperiled. In a letter to George on December 29, 1931, Kantorowicz noted that he had been “swimming against the current.” Now, it had reversed itself and he would have to navigate a “teeming mass of rabble, corpses, and vomit” if he wanted to swim against the current once more. For the moment, he chose to sit on the riverbank.

 

ONCE THE Nazis were installed in power by a conservative cabal in January 1933, they moved quickly to take over the German educational system. At Frankfurt University in April, two SS men arrested Riezler. He was forced to resign his curatorship. The university senate met concurrently to discuss the best method for extruding Jewish faculty and asked Kantorowicz to take a permanent leave of absence. On April 7, the regime issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which stated that all professors “not of Aryan descent” were to be terminated, but granted an exemption for those who had fought in World War I. Kantorowicz refused to take it, which would have required the grotesque act of signing a Nazi loyalty oath. Instead, he requested and received a leave of absence for the summer only, emphasizing in his letter to the authorities “the dignity of the University Professor, founded solely on inner truth.” In the fall, however, he delivered an anti-Nazi lecture entitled “The Secret Germany” before an overflowing crowd. In it Kantorowicz did not explicitly allude to the Nazis but held up the prospect of a secret Germany becoming the true Germany. He indicated that fidelity to the gods of Hellas rather than biological succession was truly ennobling. He also noted that Nietzsche declared, “In order to be more German, one must de-Germanize oneself.” Lerner nicely contrasts Kantorowicz’s subversive lecture with Martin Heidegger’s address on November 3, 1933 to University of Freiburg students, in which the philosopher maintained, “Not theorems and ‘Ideas’ are the rules of your Being, the führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and law.” Lerner’s verdict: “No German professor other than Ernst Kantorowicz spoke publicly in opposition to Nazi ideology throughout the duration of the Third Reich.”

In 1938, after hiding out in the Berlin apartment of his good friend Count Bernstorff during Reichskristallnacht, Kantorowicz decided to emigrate. His passport had been confiscated. After pulling strings in the Gestapo with the aid of a former student—who happened to be the son of Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, the head of the Berlin police—he retrieved it and traveled to England for a month or so before emigrating to the United States. Upon leaving Germany, he quoted Wordsworth in a letter to Curtius: “Men are we and must grieve when even the shadow of that which once was great is passed away.”

In the United States, Kantorowicz’s former ardor for Germany turned into hatred. After an abortive attempt to cross the border into Switzerland, his eighty-year-old mother Gertrud was sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she died in February 1943. “As far as Germany is concerned,” he told one student at Berkeley, “they can put a tent over the entire country and turn on the gas.” But Lerner observes that he never felt fully at home in America; rather, he was “acutely aware of his own deracination—his ‘own unreality.’” It only intensified as the Cold War began. He dismissed American anti-Communism as hopelessly parochial: “In this country the hovering problems,” he said, “are treated with the much too simple and diplomatically impossible formula of ‘for or against Russia.’ Nothing good can come of that.” When J. Robert Oppenheimer was vilified as a Communist agent, Kantorowicz sardonically wrote in a letter in 1954, “I’m once again fully at home, whatever home means—Hitler Deutschland, Nazi California, or Stahlhelm-Soviet USA.”

Indeed, in 1949, Kantorowicz had stood up in the faculty senate to denounce a proposed loyalty oath. It was, he said, reminiscent of Nazi attempts to impose ideological conformity upon the populace. To a rapt audience, he declared,

History shows that it never pays to yield to the impact of momentary hysteria, or to jeopardize, for the sake of temporary or temporal advantages, the permanent or external values. . . . The new oath, if really enforced, will endanger certain genuine values the grandeur of which is not in proportion with the alleged advantages. . . . It is a typical expedient of demagogues to bring the most loyal citizens, and only the loyal ones, into a conflict of conscience by branding non conformists as un-Athenian, un-English, un-German.

Kantorowicz was fired in 1950. His academic accomplishments and his courage at Berkeley, however, prompted the Institute for Advanced Study to offer him a post. Theodor Mommsen, who had helped Kantorowicz emigrate in 1938, and the distinguished art historian Erwin Panofsky, who was a member of the institute’s School of Historical Studies, were instrumental in helping him obtain the appointment. Panofsky, in his supporting statement, paid tribute to Kantorowicz’s fecund imagination, observing that he “recommends himself to us by the quality of mind, easier to sense than to define, which enlivens whatever it touches.” In 1957, Kantorowicz published his masterpiece, The King’s Two Bodies. It was, in a way, the obverse of his study of Frederick II. Now, he sought to demystify power in the medieval era. Virgil’s declaration to Dante, “I crown and mitre you over yourself,” perhaps best captures his humanistic approach.

He drew on a dizzying array of sources—art literature, numismatics, theology, ecclesiology, Roman law, canon law and English common law—to elucidate the development of the theory of kingship and the early modern state. Kantorowicz examined different versions of medieval political theology that explained the body politic and the body natural, partly by focusing on Shakespeare’s Richard II. According to Lerner, “Kantorowicz explains that because England was endowed with a unique parliamentary system, it was only there that the fiction of the king never dying in the capacity of his ‘body politic’ was able to take shape.” Several thousand footnotes supplemented the text for those intrepid enough to venture further into the recesses of medieval theology.

After the publication of The King’s Two Bodies, Kantorowicz wrote a series of essays on recondite subjects. He had no desire for posthumous fame, indicating that, as one student put it, he simply had a “desire for peace and to be left alone.” But this rogue male’s turbulent life and striking scholarship ensured that he played more than a walk-on role on the intellectual stage of the past century. After Kantorowicz fled Germany, he found refuge in the United States, but never felt fully at ease in the land of the free and the home of the brave, where he viewed anti-Communist fervor with repugnance. Before, he had sought to fuse the past with modernity. Now, he could only seek sanctuary in the former. “Fair world, where are you?” Schiller asked in his poem “The Gods of Greece.” It was a question that Kantorowicz may have pondered as well. If he had a religion, a cousin of his observed, it was that “he hankered after the Greek gods.”

 

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest.

Image: Alchetron