Ernst Kantorowicz, the Jewish Medievalist Whose Book Hitler Loved

In 1927, the young German scholar Ernst Kantorowicz published his groundbreaking biography of Emperor Frederick the Great, who ruled Germany and Sicily in the 13th century. The book, which combined immense erudition with nationalist enthusiasm, earned its author a full professorship at the University of Heidelberg at an unprecedented early stage in his career; Hermann Goering sent an inscribed copy to Mussolini and Hitler told one of his generals that he had read it twice. Kantorowicz himself was involved in right-wing circles from World War I until the Nazis came to power, then left Germany for the United States in 1939 and spent the rest of his career as a professor at Berkeley and Princeton, where he wrote a highly influential study of medieval political thought. Reviewing a recent biography of Kantorowicz by Robert Lerner, Robert E. Norton tells part of this fascinating figure’s story: