One can order Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life Hardcover, to be published
December 27, 2016
by Robert E. Lerner for $39.95 (prime). If the price drops at the time
of publication you will be charged that price. You can find it at,
https://www.amazon.com/Ernst-Kantorowicz-Robert-E-Lerner/dp/069117282X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470600017&sr=1-3&keywords=ernst+kantorowicz
I have been rereading Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages, The
Lives, Works and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth
Century, published in 1993. I read this in 1993 and again in 1999.
Cantor’s biographical sketches of Percy Ernst Schramm and Ernst Hartwig
Kantorowicz take up 39 pages. I was struck each time I read this
chapter by how mildly Cantor handles Kantorowicz a Jewish academic, one
of the remarkable historians that Cantor praises, who was caught up in
the great-man quest much as Heidegger was. Cantor, however has his
critics. The main argument of one criticism I read is that Cantor is
not well liked by other historians. Another listed several things
Cantor left out of his 39-page biographical sketch Schramm and
Kantorowicz as evidence that he was prejudiced against Kantorowicz.
Cantor writes on page 82, “Schramm and Kantorowicz reinforced and
encouraged each other. Both worked in the tradition of German
Geistesgeschichte – ‘spiritual’ (cultural and intellectual) history,
drawing upon the long tradition of Hegelian idealism in German
humanistic circles. But both wanted to put original twists on the old
Geistesgeschichte. The word Geistesgeschichte has no equivalent term in
English. It stands for the dominant tradition in the learned humanities
in Germany from the 1890s until 1933. It means placing in one’s
foreground past ideas, theory, and literary and visual arts and making
these spiritual and intellectual refinements, rather than material and
social forces, the central concern of the historian. Geistesgeschichte
is a manifestation of German philosophical idealism and the assumption
that ideas and learned traditions that perpetuate ideas have a durable
reality and a human value separate from any other aspect of society. . . .”
“The Stefan George circle in which Kantorowicz had moved along with some
of his high aristocratic friends was much tighter than Schramm’s
networks and went beyond vanguard learning. George was a flamboyant
lyric poet and visionary, who gathered around him a group of rich,
well-educated young men (the homosexual tone, whether latent or
explicit, was up-front) to cultivate German national traditions and
explore high horizons of culture and political revival through great
leadership. The leadership principle was strongly prevalent with George
and his disciples. This was one of the intellectual foundations of
nazism, although the George circle, several members were Jewish, would
not in the end be satisfied with the vulgar corporal from Vienna. They
were thinking of apocalyptic figures like the great Staufen emperors of
medieval Germany. Along with poetry, the George group went in for the
writing of romanticized biographies to put models of charismatic
leadership before the beaten, confused, and impoverished postwar German
people so that the Volk would rise again under some Nietzschean and
Wagnerian heroic figure.
“This is how Kantorowicz came to be in Heidelberg. He was assigned
by George to write the biography of the most apocalyptic of medieval
German figures, Emperor Frederick II. He was doing it to satisfy his
master, George, and to stir the German people to national renewal under
some new wonder of the world. This project was sentimental, trendy,
even a little idiosyncratic, but not ridiculous or useless in the German
ambience of the 1920s.
“George’s message was an amalgam of Greek classicism and pristine
Germanic heroism: ‘A people is dead when its gods are dead.’ Out of the
materialism, corruption and disorder of the Weimar era a ‘Secret
Germany’ of cultured supermen will emerge and take over power from the
unaware lumpen masses, George proclaimed. . .
“Whatever we may think of this is colored for us by what happened
in the 1930s. Whether the triumph of nazism was a fulfillment of
George’s vision or a grotesque perversion and betrayal of it has been
debated since the thirties, and there is no resolution to this issue.
To the young Kantorowicz, George was the guru who saw the truth and
foretold the future. If George wanted a biography of Frederick II as
part of his visionary program of German renewal, Kantorowicz would do
what he was told and produce it and write it in accordance with the
leadership principle and the late romantic excitement that George generated.
“What is important for medieval studies is that Kantorowicz read
all the voluminous published sources of Frederick II, mastered all the
modern literature on the Staufen dynasty, and used modern scholarly
research on the medieval empire and papacy. He applied his incredible
linguistic ability and his deep knowledge of the Middle East and the
Orient to put some new angles into the old Staufen story. He then wrote
the most exciting biography of a medieval monarch produced in this
century. It has aged very well. It still has power to stimulate the
mind and stir the blood Its learning and insight are phenomenal. . . .”
Kantorowicz strikes me as an interesting fellow, but I’m going to hold
off ordering Lerner’s biography. I found a short biography of Lerner
saying he studied under Strayer, and Cantor was much more critical of
Strayer than he was Kantorowicz, imo.
Lawrence
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