Ernst H. Kantorowicz (1895–1963)

Ernst H. Kantorowicz was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Posen, Prussia (present-day Poznań, Poland). As a young man, he was expected to take over the family liquor distillery business. During World War I, he volunteered for the German Army and served for four years. After the war, he went to the University of Berlin to study economics, and fought with the Freikorps against the Spartacist uprising in 1919. At the University of Heidelberg, he continued taking economics courses while developing a broader interest in history, Islamic Studies, and geography. He was a member of the conservative literary group around poet Stefan George known as the George-Kreis (George Circle). In 1921, he completed a doctorate in history with a dissertation on Islamic economic history. Kantorowicz's interests soon turned to the Middle Ages in Europe. He wrote a sweeping but unusual biography of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II published in 1927 (English translation, 1931). He became a professor of medieval history at the University of Frankfurt in 1930. After the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, he took a leave of absence to protest anti-Semitic regulations, and was dismissed from his position in 1934. He departed for the UK in 1938 following the Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht, and went to the USA the following year. Kantorowicz accepted a lectureship at the University of California, Berkeley in 1939. In 1950, he resigned in protest when the UC Regents demanded that all faculty sign a loyalty oath disavowing affiliation with any politically subversive movements, which he considered a blatant infringement on academic freedom and freedom of conscience. Other émigré German historians urged J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, to appoint Kantorowicz to the Historical Studies faculty. He moved to Princeton in 1951 and remained there for the rest of his life. In 1957, Kantorowicz published the work that made his reputation, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. It remains a classic work in the field that has guided generations of scholars. He was elected a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.