Ernst Kantorowicz

Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz (May 3, 1895 – September 9, 1963) was a German-American historian of medieval political and intellectual history and art, known for his 1927 book Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite on Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and The King's Two Bodies (1957) on medieval and early modern ideologies of monarchy and the state.

Kantorowicz was born in Posen (then part of Prussia) to a wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish family and as a young man was groomed to take over his family's prosperous liquor distillery business. He served as an officer in the German Army for four years in World War I. He decided not to return to the business world, but went instead to study philosophy at the University of Berlin, at one point also joining a right-wing militia that fought against Polish forces in the Greater Poland Uprising (1918–1919) and helped put down the Spartacist uprising in Berlin. The following year, he moved to the prestigious University of Heidelberg to study history with Karl Hampe and Friedrich Baethgen, two noted medievalists. While in Heidelberg, Kantorowicz became involved with the so-called Georgekreis, a group of artists and intellectuals devoted to the German poet and aesthete Stefan George who shared an interest in art, literature, and Romantic mysticism.

His association with the elitist and culturally conservative Georgekreis inspired Kantorowicz's unorthodox biography of the great Holy Roman emperor Frederick II published in German in 1927 and English in 1931. Instead of offering a more typical treatment of laws, institutions, and important political achievements, the book struck a decidedly panegyrical tone, portraying Frederick as a tragic hero and the idealized embodiment of the German nation. The work elicited a combination of bewilderment and criticism from the mainstream historical academy. Reviewers complained that it was literary mythmaking and not a work of serious historical scholarship. As a result, Kantorowicz published a hefty companion volume (Ergänzungsband) in 1931 which contained detailed historical documentation for the biography.

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