Radiances: Unpublished Essays on Gods, Kingship, and Images of the State, Ernst Kantorowicz, Cornell University Press, £26.99

Few academic historians can expect their works to find much of an audience in their own lifetimes, let alone 60 years after their death. Few would dream that their unpublished and unfinished projects would one day arouse interest. Few lead such interesting lives as to warrant a full-length paperback biography. Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz was a rare bird.

Kantorowicz’s scholarly reputation rests on two very different books, one written in Weimar Germany, the other in Eisenhower’s America. The latter, The King’s Two Bodies, is still a staple of undergraduate reading lists, not least because it had the good fortune to be extensively cited by Foucault; the former, a  biography of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, has not aged quite so gracefully. Kantorowicz was not one to wear his learning lightly, or even to formulate his arguments very clearly: when he sent The King’s Two Bodies off to Princeton University Press, he left blank the section of the publisher’s form asking for a statement of its thesis. But he was a scholar of unusual erudition and range, and a writer bursting with energy in English as much as his native German. Hence, Robert Lerner has seen fit to edit and publish several of his writings, which are eagerly awaited by a considerable number of readers.

This collection, under the pretty and apposite title of Radiances, is a companion to Lerner’s biography of Kantorowicz, published by Princeton eight years ago. That book certainly had a thesis. Put simply: Lerner likes Kantorowicz. He is in awe of his learning, impressed by his wit, and smitten by his Old World charms. Although he met Kantorowicz only briefly, when he was a young medievalist at Princeton, he has spent enough time buried in the voluminous correspondence to refer to him casually by his nickname, Eka. He wishes to defend Kantorowicz’s honour, above all against the ‘slander’ that he was deeply enmired in the German radical right in the 1920s – a political ferment that would ultimately take the life of his elderly mother at Theresienstadt, and force him into American exile.

Kantorowicz, as he boasted when refusing to swear the McCarthyite loyalty oath at Berkeley in 1949, had spent some of the interwar years being shot by and shooting at Communists on the streets of Munich and Berlin. He wrote his biography of Frederick II under the influence of the charismatic poet Stefan George. The book has been regarded as essentially fascist, an indictment not much helped by the fact that it bore a swastika on its front cover (it may be said in mitigation that the Nazis did not yet exercise a complete monopoly over that symbol in 1927). It was rumoured that Hitler personally read the book and liked it; these are among the slanders identified and challenged by Lerner. Kantorowicz’s book was widely criticised by the top brass of the German historical profession at the time, especially Albert Brackmann, who saw it as representing the infiltration of George’s prophetic fantasies into the realm of scientific historiography (ironically, Brackmann himself was later among the most enthusiastic academic supporters of the Nazi regime). The book’s flamboyant tone led him and others to suspect that Kantorowicz had simply made things up; but in 1931 he shut them up with a supplementary volume, proving that the book was not quite so devoid of serious research as they had believed.

The enfant terrible of medieval history, Norman Cantor, caused some controversy in the early 1990s by claiming that Kantorowicz’s ‘Nazi credentials’ were ‘impeccable on every count except his race’, and that he would have climbed aboard Hitler’s ‘demonic flying machine’ if only ‘the accident of his birth to a Jewish family’ had not prevented him. And it is true that – although the book celebrates Frederick as a cosmopolitan-minded man, even perhaps a philosemite – it leans towards a shrill, messianic authoritarianism. ‘Just wait, matey’, one reader wrote in a copy at Edinburgh University library; ‘give it a couple of years and you’ll probably like Hitler.’

But Kantorowicz did not like Hitler. One of Lerner’s most powerful arguments in Kantorowicz’s defence is that he was one of the only German professors who spoke publicly against Hitler after 1933. Certainly, after fleeing Germany in 1938, he purged himself of whatever nationalist ideas he might once have possessed. Perhaps he even went too far in this respect. ‘As far as Germany is concerned’, he once said darkly, ‘they can put a tent over the entire country and turn on the gas.’ It was the experience of Hitler, more than anything, that moved him, in Lerner’s phrase, ‘from the right of Hindenburg to the left of Kennedy’. The experience of Hitler, too, sobered him up. The King’s Two Bodies is much less given to the spasms of self-serious prophecy that afflict Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite; and it can be read as a straightforward endorsement of liberal constitutionalism against the absolutist tendencies of medieval ‘political theology’.

As with his first book, The King’s Two Bodies had its critics: Beryl Smalley likened reading it to ‘a diet of jam without bread’. The essays collected in Radiances strike a good jam-to-bread ratio. The pieces can be said to share a theme, if not a thesis: it is one of continuity. There is a sustained focus on the particular as well as the general: one of the essays, ‘Roma and the Coal’, is a close reading of a medieval poem, resolving ultimately the metaphorical meaning of a single word. There, Kantorowicz traces that word – carbo, coal, as a metaphor for the eucharist – from the Hebrew Isaiah to the 10th-century poet of Ottonian Germany; and this line went not, as one might expect, through the Vulgate, which translated the relevant term differently, but rather through the Coptic and Syriac liturgies of the Christian east. There is in the first essay, ‘Synthronos’, the continuity of ideas about throne-sharing between kings and gods, running from Abrahamic to pagan and back again. The continuities between pagan and Christian Rome are assiduously traced in ‘Roman Coins and Christian Rites’. Even something as trivial as the postage stamp, in Kantorowicz’s hands, ‘continue a tradition which has been started by the Roman Empire’.

There is a certain irony in finding this emphasis on continuity in one so determined to diminish the continuities of his own life. When giving lectures to American troops during the war on the modern history of Germany, Kantorowicz was anxious to disavow his earlier propensity to mysticism and prophecy, even putting some distance between himself and Stefan George. After the war he once was asked about his biography of Frederick II. He replied, in his dramatic fashion, that ‘the man who wrote that book is dead’.

It is safe to say that most people who pick up this book will be more interested in Kantorowicz himself than they are in the intricacies of Ottonian verse, the iconography of throne-sharing, Syriac liturgy, or indeed postage stamps. Confessional or autobiographical readings may prove difficult to resist. When, just after the war, Kantorowicz describes how Charles the Bold drifted from late-medieval dreams of ‘chivalry and crusading exploits’ to the higher thoughts of the Italian Renaissance – when he says that the Duke of Burgundy escaped ‘fairyland’ – it is hard to put out of mind the intellectual and psychological transformation he himself underwent between Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite and The King’s Two Bodies.

In a piece written against the backdrop of war in 1943, and published here for the first time, Kantorowicz articulated his new historiographical creed. The humanities, he declared, were developed as an ‘antidote against medieval theology’; their task in the 20th century was to serve as an ‘antidote to political theology’, which held up the state as the highest good and which sought, as in Nazi Germany, to establish a ‘uniform type of man’ and a ‘uniform pattern of human society’. History had to be sober, and it had to be liberal; it had to embrace and defend the individual and the particular against the totalising universal.

For all his slander against the pre-war Kantorowicz, Cantor thought something was lost in the historian’s transformation. He lamented that, once in America, Kantorowicz felt he had to be ‘as dull as everyone else in the profession’; he did not succeed at that, ‘but it was not for lack of trying’. The King’s Two Bodies is not a dull book, and neither are these essays – even if they are, as Cantor said of Kantorowicz’s American work, full of ‘very long, show-off canon law footnotes’ (Kantorowicz once described the composition of footnotes as one of his life’s greatest pleasures). Still, Cantor was on to something when he wrote of Kantorowicz that ‘We need the inspiration of a disturbed ambience, as well as deep learning, to write such great history.’ Kantorowicz needed a disturbed ambience to escape his youthful ‘fairyland’, and the essays collected in Radiances are the fruits of its inspiration.