Œuvres

by Ernst H. Kantorowicz

Ernst H. Kantorowicz (1895-1968), l'un des plus grands historiens du XXᵉ siècle, publie en 1927 la biographie de Frédéric II de Hohenstaufen (1194-1250). Il y renouvelle le genre dans une tentative aboutie d'histoire "totale" qui associe aussi bien les apports de l'économie, de la culture, que de l'interprétation sociale et psychologique. Frédéric, héros hors du commun, se prête à l'exercice : aussi habile en politique qu'à la chasse, précurseur des princes de la Renaissance, il crée une cour où se rencontrent les plus grands lettrés de la culture chrétienne, juive et musulmane. Passionné par l'astrologie et la divination, architecte à ses heures, il écrit lui-même un traité de fauconnerie. Avec L'Empereur Frédéric II, Kantorowicz ouvre des perspectives complètement nouvelles. Il s'intéresse autant aux "réalités" événementielles qu'à la construction de la symbolique et de l'imaginaire politiques et met en lumière les conditions de formation, dès l'époque médiévale, de l'État moderne, séculier, en lutte contre la papauté. Trente ans plus tard (1957), Kantorowicz donne un second chef-d'oeuvre : Les Deux Corps du Roi. Il y poursuit son enquête sur la généalogie de l'État moderne en tirant, avec une éblouissante érudition, le fil des mutations de la doctrine médiévale de la royauté bicorporelle, et la prolonge par une analyse sur les origines des "religions politiques modernes". Victime des lois de Nuremberg en Allemagne, puis opposant au maccarthysme aux États-Unis, Kantorowicz s'emploie à éclairer la genèse des pathologies politiques du XXe siècle.

1372 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Kantorowicz was born in Posen (Polish: Poznań, then in Prussia) to a wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish family and as a young man was groomed to take over the family business (primarily liquor distilleries). He served as an Officer in the German Army for four years in World War I, he decided not to return to the business world, but went instead to study philosophy at the University of Berlin, at one point also joining a right-wing militia that fought against Polish forces in the Greater Poland Uprising (1918-1919) and helped put down the Spartacist uprising in Berlin.[1] The following year, he moved to the prestigious University of Heidelberg to study history with Karl Hampe and Friedrich Baethgen, two noted medievalists. While in Heidelberg, Kantorowicz became involved with the so-called Georgekreis, a group of artists and intellectuals devoted to the German poet and aesthete Stefan George and who shared an interest in art, literature and Romantic mysticism.

His association with the elitist and culturally conservative Georgekreis inspired Kantorowicz's unorthodox, aesthetic-cultural biography of the great Holy Roman emperor Frederick II published in German in 1927 and English in 1931.[2] Instead of offering a more typical treatment of laws, institutions and important political achievements, the book took a decidedly poetic turn, portraying Frederick as an idealized spiritual, as much as political, leader of the German nation. The work elicited a combination of bewilderment and criticism from the mainstream historical academy. Reviewers complained that it was literary mythmaking and not a work of serious historical scholarship. As a result, Kantorowicz published a hefty companion volume (Ergänzungsband) in 1931 which contained detailed historical documentation for the biography.

Despite the furor over the Frederick book, Kantorowicz received an appointment to an academic chair at the University of Frankfurt. In 1933, Kantorowicz had to resign his university position due to Nazi racial policies. Upon leaving, he took up a teaching position for a short time at Oxford before moving to the University of California, Berkeley in 1939. After a controversy prompted by his reaction to McCarthyism (he refused to take a loyalty oath required of all UC employees), he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Not long after arriving in Princeton, he published his masterpiece, The King's Two Bodies (1957), which explored, in the words of the volume's subtitle, "medieval political theology." In particular, the book traced the ways theologians, historians and canonists in the Middle Ages and early modern period understood the office and person of the king, as well as the idea of the kingdom, in corporeal and organological terms. The figure of the European monarch was a unique product of religious and legal traditions that eventually produced the notion of a "king" as simultaneously a person and an embodiment of the community of the realm. The book remains a classic in the field.

Kantorowicz was the subject of a controversial biographical sketch in the book Inventing the Middle Ages (1991) by the late Canadian medievalist, Norman F. Cantor. Cantor, who knew Kantorowicz at Princeton, suggested that, but for his Jewish heritage, Kantorowicz (at least as a young scholar in the 1920s and 1930s) could be considered a Nazi in terms of his intellectual temperament and cultural values. Cantor compared Kantorowicz with another contemporary German medievalist, Percy Ernst Schramm, who worked on similar topics and was a member of the Nazi Party. Kantorowicz's defenders (particularly his student Robert L. Benson)[3] responded that although as a younger man Kantorowicz embraced the Romantic ultranationalism of the George-Kreis, he had only disdain for Nazism and was a vocal critic of Hitler's regime.

Reviews

[Jacopo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject, Frederic the second, is interesting: the last Roman Emperor reigning over Germany, Italy, part of France. He was also a precursor of the Renaissance and an intellectual.
But the writing is too repetitive to enjoyable at max.