Download e-book for kindle: Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life by Robert E. Lerner

This is the 1st entire biography of Ernst Kantorowicz (1895–1963), an influential and debatable German-American highbrow whose colourful and dramatic lifestyles intersected with some of the nice occasions and thinkers of his time. A medieval historian whose rules exerted a power some distance past his box, he's most famed for 2 books—a notoriously nationalistic 1927 biography of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and The King's Bodies (1957), a vintage learn of medieval politics.

Born right into a prosperous Prussian-Jewish kinfolk, Kantorowicz fought at the Western entrance in international battle I, was once wounded at Verdun, and earned an Iron go; later, he earned an Iron Crescent for carrier in Anatolia sooner than an affair with a general’s mistress ended in Kantorowicz being despatched domestic. After the conflict, he fought opposed to Poles in his local Posen, Spartacists in Berlin, and communists in Munich. An ardent German nationalist through the Weimar interval, Kantorowicz grew to become a member of the elitist Stefan George circle, which nurtured a cult of the "Secret Germany." but as a professor in Frankfurt after the Nazis got here to strength, Kantorowicz bravely spoke out opposed to the regime earlier than an overflowing crowd. Narrowly averting arrest after Kristallnacht, he fled to England after which the us, the place he joined the college at Berkeley, in basic terms to be fired in 1950 for refusing to signal an anticommunist “loyalty oath.” From there, he “fell up the ladder” to Princeton’s Institute for complex research, the place he stayed until eventually his death.

Drawing on many new assets, together with quite a few interviews and unpublished letters, Robert E. Lerner tells the tale of an immense highbrow whose lifestyles and occasions have been as attention-grabbing as his work.