Introduction to the Digital Edition of the Letters of Ernst Kantorowicz
Ernst Kantorowicz was one of the most influential medieval scholars of the 20th century and also a prolific letter writer: he is estimated to have written ca. 1500 letters. With a broad spectrum of addressees, his voluminous correspondence offers a wealth of information on scholarly networks and the intellectual history, while their biographical content reflects the turns of Kantorowicz’s life in the turbulent developments of 20th-century political history.
Biographical Information
Ernst Kantorowicz was born on May 3 1895 in Posen (today Poznań, Poland) to the upper-class family of a wealthy liquor distiller. He developed an interest in the areas of national economics and ancient history and studied these subjects at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg. In Heidelberg, he came into contact with the poet Stefan George and his intellectual circle and was probably inspired by George to write his famous biography of Emperor Frederick II. The book was published in 1927 and immediately made Kantorowicz, then aged 32, a publicly known person. It was translated into several languages and has been printed in new editions to this very day.
Responding to the criticism of established medieval historians, Kantorowicz wrote a supplementary volume on the sources that he had used for his Frederick biography to reveal the scholarly foundations of his book. From 1928 on, he did much of his work on this project in the rooms of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Berlin. As it was published in 1931, the supplementary volume earned him a chair for medieval history in Frankfurt am Main without the normally required formal habilitation.
Never having concealed his Jewish identity, Ernst Kantorowicz was forced into retirement in 1934 and emigrated in 1938 via Oxford to the United States of America. He thereafter taught in Berkeley until 1949 and since 1951 at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. In 1957, 30 years after his ground-breaking Frederick biography, he published his second bestseller: The King’s Two Bodies, a book that had and continues to have a remarkable reception in a wide range of humanities scholarship. „EKa“, as Kantorowicz was affectionately known by his friends, died on September 9 1963.
The Kantorowicz Correspondence
Besides documenting his lifelong and intensive contact with family members, companions, friends and members of the Stefan George circle, Kantorowicz’s correspondence features letters to and from leading medieval scholars, such as the influential MGH chairman Paul Kehr and his successor Friedrich Baethgen, the first post-war MGH president. His letters written from Oxford and the USA after his emigration poignantly portray the fate of an emigré forced to build a new existence in a foreign land and reveal the importance of the ties of mutual assistance between colleagues and friends in the emigrant community. They offer vivid testimony of Kantorowicz’s hesitant fist contacts with German colleagues after the war, his search for old friends, his painful confrontation with the devastation of the Holocaust, to which he lost family members and friends, and the difficulties of building up a new relationship with post-war Germany.
The Project
Projekt phase 1
The project history begins with the impetus of Prof. Dr Dr h.c. Johannes Fried, ordinarius professor for medieval history in Frankfurt am Main, Prof. Dr Dr h.c. Ulrich Raulff, director of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, and Prof. Dr Ernst Osterkamp, professor for Deutsche Literatur at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin and president of the Akademie for Literatur and Sprache, who initiated a project to publish a complete digital edition and a printed edition of selected letters of Ernst Kantorowicz in 2010. The project was largely financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) und ran until 2017, during which time the project team collected and partially transcribed and annotated around 1000 of Kantorowicz's letters.
Projekt phase 2
In 2017, Prof. em. Robert Lerner (Northwestern University/Illinois) published a fundamental Kantorowicz biography that was translated by Thomas Gruber and printed with supplementary material in Germany in 2020. This formed the basis for the resumption of the Kantorowicz letter project by the MGH in 2023. The undertaking was importantly supported by Lerner himself, who gave us access to his collection of Kantorowicz‘ correspondence, and by Dr Eckhart Grünewald (Frankfurt am Main), a well-known authority on Kantorowicz and the George circle (the subject of his 1982 Ph.D.), who contributed material from his private archive.
Acknowledgements
Many persons and institutions have made an important contribution to this project, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank them all.
Without the support of researchers, private persons, and institutions who possess letters to and from Ernst Kantorowicz, the realization of this project would not have been possible. Our special thanks for the contribution of source material go out to:
Archiv des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Rom
Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach
Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin
Leo Baeck Institute, New York
Staatsarchiv Hamburg
Stadtarchiv Soest
Stefan George Archiv, Stuttgart (Dr. Maik Bozza)
Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
Prof. Dr. Robert E. Lerner (Privatarchiv)
Dr. Eckhart Grünewald (Privatarchiv)
Prof. Dr. Christoph Perels
For her permission to publish these private documents, we owe our special thanks to Mrs Ariane Phillips, Kantorowicz’s grandniece, who holds the copyright rights over their use and reproduction!
If the names of rights holders are not listed above, please let us know.