Last Years

This chapter details Ernst Kantorowicz's final years. Kantorowicz died of a ruptured aneurysm in September 1963. Before this, he worked on a succession of recondite articles, attended the annual meetings of the Medieval Academy and the Byzantine Institute at “Oakbarton Dumps,” vacationed on the West Coast and the Virgin Islands, and carried on earnestly with his dining and imbibing. His politics also became more leftward from the postwar years until the time of his death. For a decade and a half he was deeply worried about the possibility of nuclear war, and he held the United States responsible. During the 1950s, he was bitterly hostile to Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. On the day after Kennedy's inauguration, Kantorowicz wrote the he “couldn't be worse than Eisenhower, ” although he did change his mind.

“EKa Is Sick of EKa”

This chapter details Ernst Kantorowicz's obsession about youth and the effects of aging. In 1926 he wrote to Wilhelm Stein that he knew well of the “crisis of the thirty-year-old.” In 1939, he regretted that he was putting on weight as a result of his age (he was forty-four). His continual joking about dying at the age of fifty-six contained an element of memento mori, and when he outlived that year and turned sixty in 1955, his concern with age became a fixation. Just two weeks after his sixtieth birthday he referred to his “senility,” a term he then changed to “senile delinquency.” But this does not mean that he did not have his enjoyments and active engagements. In his later Princeton years until his death at age sixty-eight Kantorowicz led a very comfortable life.

The King’s Two Bodies

This chapter focuses on Ernst Kantorowicz's masterpiece, The King's Two Bodies. The composition of The King's Two Bodies extended from 1945 to 1955, a time when Kantorowicz was at the peak of his scholarly powers. The book was “enthusiastically approved” by Princeton University Press' editorial board in November 1953, went into production in 1956, and announced for appearance in spring 1957. One reason why it took Kantorowicz so long to write the book is that he was learning to use sources that were new to him—legal sources. The book is also long (550 pages, crammed with reduced-font footnotes).

“Land of Lotus-Eaters”

This chapter details events in the four years from June 1945 until June 1949, which were probably the happiest in Ernst Kantorowicz's life. He considered himself to be in a “land of lotus-eaters.” Although he complained that “a janitor earned as much as he did,” he moved into a house of his own and became absorbed in new matters, such as gardening. He went regularly to Carmel for sun and crawfish and to Lake Tahoe for fishing and swimming. He engaged with numerous conversation partners, and he acquired a number of new advanced students for whom he felt affection and in whom he invested much time. Conviviality was unending, as was scholarly work.

Fine Fever

This chapter focuses on with Josefine von Kahler, described as “the most ardent amorous attachment” in Ernst Kantorowicz's life. “Fine” (pronounced “feenah”) was born Josefine Sobotka of Jewish parents in 1889. In 1884, her father had moved with his family from Bohemia to Vienna, where he cofounded a successful malt manufacturing business. Fine married Erich Kahler in November 1912. However, the marriage was not carnal and Erich insisted from the start that they lead independent lives. Kantorowicz met Fine in Berlin in the autumn of 1918 through his sister and brother-in-law. However, after May 1920, the couple saw each other rarely and ended their relationship in 1921.

Old Posen and Young Ernst

This chapter details the family and early life of Ernst Kantorowicz. Born in 1895, Kantorowicz was the youngest of three siblings. His parents believed that teaching him English was essential, based on the presumption that he would be engaged in trade. Thus, they gave him to the care of an English governess until he was twelve, and he learned to speak English well enough to be able to lecture in that language at Oxford in 1934. In the spring of 1901, when he was six, he entered a local municipal “middle-school for youths,” which he attended for three years. From the middle school he proceeded to the Royal Auguste-Viktoria Gymnasium, an all-male school that required the intensive study of Latin and Greek plus one modern language, which in Kantorowicz's case was French.

Afterword

This chapter details events following Ernst Kantorowicz's death in September 1963. He left instructions in his will that he “did not wish to have any kind of funeral,” that he be cremated, and that his ashes be sent to his niece Beate Salz. She was then teaching at the University of Puerto Rico and he had told her that he wanted the ashes to be scattered in a bay off the island of St. John. Kantorowicz's insistence that he wanted no funeral was inherent in his lifelong revulsion for religious ceremonies. However, it was impossible for him to control his posthumous reputation. Medievalists paid tribute to the importance of his work from the time of his death, and the Kantorowicz boom that began in the late 1970s catapulted him into the ranks of the most noted humanistic scholars of the twentieth century.

Advanced Study

This chapter details events in Ernst Kantorowicz's life after being fired from Berkeley. He eventually secured a permanent position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. From the start, Kantorowicz felt very comfortable at the Institute and was widely admired. He did not have to barter “beads and little mirrors” to make new friends. In short order, he became excellent friends with Erwin Panofsky. Kantorowicz and “Pan” were roughly the same age, came from similar wealthy Jewish-German backgrounds, and matched each other as devastatingly witty savants. An even more famous person with whom he gained friendship at the Institute was the director, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

“Scarcely Wants to Go to Germany”

This chapter details Ernst Kantorowicz's hatred for Nazi Germany. He once told a favorite student in Berkeley, “as far as Germany is concerned they can put a tent over the entire country and turn on the gas.” After war broke out, Kantorowicz wrote mordantly about the aggressive lust of his compatriots: “Europa once more is being raped by a bull.” On the day of Germany's surrender in May 1945 Kantorowicz skipped his regular lecture in his Renaissance class to comment on the event and its significance. He referred to the Nazi regime as a “monstrous obscenity” and pronounced that “the worst grotesquerie of the world saw to it that in Hitler excrement was made flesh.”

“Hyperborean Fields”

This chapter continues the discussion of Ernst Kantorowicz's life in Berkeley. Despite the five and a half years of uncertainty about his employment in Berkeley and concurrent dismaying news from Europe, on the whole, Kantorowicz was happy. Contributing to this was the arrival of three German émigrés in Berkeley in successive years: Walter Horn, Manfred Bukofzer, and Leonardo Olschki. Horn, Bukofzer, and Olschki, all with Heidelberg credentials, spoke Kantorowicz's language in both senses of the expression. Horn, born in 1908, studied in Heidelberg before gaining a doctorate in art history in Hamburg under the direction of Erwin Panofsky. Musicologist Bukofzer, born in 1910, studied in Heidelberg and Basel, where he received his doctorate after the Nazi takeover. Olschki, an expert on the medieval literature of Italy, was the one with whom Kantorowicz was closest.