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.
