Ernst Kantorowicz was a complex figure whose long
incident-filled life seemed to embody many of the contradictions of
the twentieth century. A Jew from a disputed area between Germany
and Poland who fought on the German side in World War I, he first
achieved academic success with "Frederick II" (1927), a work whose
language, in Gabrielle Spiegel's words, "often came perilously
close to that of the Nazi party" in its desire to see a
reconstituted German nation once again dominant on the world stage.
Forced to emigrate when the Nazis came to power, Kantorowicz later
became embroiled in controversy when, at Berkeley during the
McCarthy era, he refused to sign an oath of allegiance designed to
identify Communist Party sympathizers. Resigning from Berkeley as a
result of the controversy over the loyalty oath, Kantorowicz moved
to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, where he remained
for the rest of his life and where he wrote his masterpiece, "The
King's Two Bodies."
Kantorowicz the historian, however, had no wish to see his own
life become a subject of historical study. When he died in 1963,
his will directed that all his personal papers be destroyed. Why
had a historian so involved in history wished to erase himself from
it? In "Kantorowicz: Stories of a Historian, " Alain Boureau
confronts this question by writing a unique work which is as much a
speculation on the nature of biography as it is a biographical
study. In the absence of personal records, Boureau seeks to get at
the interior life of this enigmatic individual through the recourse
of "parallel lives"--real-life figures and characters from novels
of the time who were faced with similar crises and who shared
aspects of upbringing, training, and circumstance.
This fascinating, nontraditional biography, originally published
in France in 1990, appears for the first time in English,
translated by Stephen G. Nichols and Gabrielle M. Spiegel.
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