Ernst Kantorowicz (1895–1963) led an extraordinarily biography-worthy life—and not just in comparison to academic medievalists, a crowd that is generally anecdote-worthy at best. Born to a wealthy Jewish family of liqueur manufacturers in Posen, his comfortable youth was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After being wounded on the Western Front, he turned up in Istanbul, where he served as a liaison to an Ottoman general—until a liaison with the general's mistress necessitated his swift departure. He fought against the Polish nationalist uprising in his hometown and then volunteered for battles against Spartacists in Berlin and Communists in Munich. While studying at Heidelberg, between affairs with men and women alike and much hobnobbing with aristocrats, he joined the inner circle of the nationalist/idealist Stefan George cult; under the influence of the Meister, he wrote a stylish and methodologically radical biography of the German emperor Frederick II (d. 1250), which made him famous and earned him election, without the usual credentials, to a professorship at Frankfurt in 1932.

The unabashedly pro-authoritarian slant of his swastika-emblazoned book notwithstanding, his position became untenable the following year when the Nazis came to power: he spoke out against them, in his way (discussed later), but had to stop teaching, although he did not finally flee Germany until a week after Kristallnacht. Connections—including Justice Felix Frankfurter—got him into the United States and landed him a position at Berkeley in 1939, which turned into a tenured professorship in 1945. Four years later, he was at the center of a controversy surrounding the anti-Communist loyalty oath imposed by the state of California on university employees: someone who could claim both to have refused to swear an oath to Adolf Hitler and to have fought Communists in the streets of Germany was not about to yield to the pressure, and this cost him his job. He landed on his feet at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he served on the faculty until his death, completing during those years one of the last century's most admired works on medieval history, The King's Two Bodies (1957).

Robert Lerner's deeply researched account draws on scholarly sources (including typewritten Berkeley lectures), personal correspondence (including a cache of 114 love letters exchanged with Josefine von Kahler), and official documents (including a delousification certificate from 1917), supplemented by many interviews with those who knew Kantorowicz, to capture not just a personality but the nature of the worlds and times in which he lived: the Weimar bourgeoisie; German academia and high society in the 1920s; prewar Frankfurt, Berlin, and Oxford; Berkeley in the 1940s; Princeton in the 1950s and early 1960s. One senses Lerner's sheer delight in working with what is, for a medieval historian (Lerner is a distinguished specialist in late medieval religious and cultural history), an unthinkable amount of evidence. Juicy details pile up like Kantorowicz's famous footnotes: “EKa” (as he asked to be called) using the toilet in the Reichskanzlei during the rioting in Berlin in 1919; EKa's poor grades in school and his 104-page doctoral dissertation on Islamic economic history based on French and German secondary sources (“To say that [it] equals a good American undergraduate senior thesis probably would be giving it too much credit” [65]); EKa's introduction by Isaiah Berlin to his longtime friend and sometime lover Maurice Bowra; EKa and Marc Bloch alone with a bottle of whiskey; EKa arranging for false documentation for his US visa application; his use of a handwriting style dictated by George; his hatred of classical music; his affected speech used as an example of the Chinese third tone (“the story is told…” [228], unusually here without attribution).

Lerner addresses Kantorowicz's dazzlingly erudite articles throughout the book, but devotes separate chapters to insightful readings of the main scholarly works: Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (1927), including the Ergänzungsband (1931; the biography originally appeared without footnotes); Laudes regiae (1946), a study of liturgical acclamations of medieval rulers; and, of course, The King's Two Bodies, an examination of the theme of a body natural and body politic combined in the royal person, an interdisciplinary tour-de-force that remains a seminal study of “political theology.” Lerner exposes unexpected scholarly influences (including a Heidelberg seminar with the ancient historian Alfred von Domaszewski, and a reading of Charles Homer Haskins's Studies in the History of Medieval Science [1924]), as well as the ways in which elements of Kantorowicz's biography fed his academic interests: service in Istanbul led to an attraction to Orientalistik (the topic of his dissertation) and Byzantium, for example; Oxford introduced him to the English sources that figure so prominently in his later works.

Lerner is at pains to defend Kantorowicz against charges that “he would have been a Nazi had he not been Jewish” (159): the idealist George circle is often depicted as prefiguring the rise of Hitler, and members of the circle did indeed welcome him; Kantorowicz seems to have remained happily in Germany for far too long; and so on. In this Lerner succeeds, although, in retrospect, Kantorowicz's anti-Nazi sentiment—a sentiment expressed as elitist revulsion against the movement's supporters rather than as a vocal rejection of the antisemitism that affected him personally, and a sentiment that, in April 1933, still left room for, in Kantorowicz's own words, a “fundamentally positive view toward a nationally governed Reich” (160)—comes across as less than fully admirable. Lerner reads Kantorowicz's November 1933 lecture on Das Geheime Deutschland as courageously presenting a counter-mythology to Nazism, arguing that “no German professor other than Ernst Kantorowicz spoke publicly in opposition to Nazi ideology through the duration of the Third Reich” (171). This allusive academic performance was nevertheless perhaps more subtle than the moment demanded.

Ernst Kantorowicz is certainly a puzzle, from scholarly, political, moral, and personal points of view. He started out as a right-wing nationalist and ended up as a left-wing standard-bearer for academic freedom. He began by writing history in a highly rhetorical and ideological vein but finished his career as the master of the page overrun by footnotes. He combined “contempt for authority” with a “penchant for socializing with the upper class” (21). He expressed a distaste for Bonzesis (“bigshot-ness”), but avidly embraced aspects of that life and believed strongly in the elite status of the professoriate. He could be charming and witty and generous, but, at the same time (as the closing chapters reveal), deeply misogynist and outright cruel on occasion, even to friends and students. This is not a book that inspires affection for its subject. But that is not the biographer's fault.

Lerner's only real false step is his claim that Kantorowicz “remains one of the most influential of all medieval historians, perhaps the most influential”—even with the concession that Haskins, Bloch, Henri Pirenne, R.W. Southern, and Joseph Strayer “might count as equally great” (1). Despite the Foucault-inspired publishing success of The King's Two Bodies beginning in the 1970s, this claim about influence is simply not true, whether in terms of carving out a new field of study (even in the fields with which Kantorowicz is most closely associated, the work of Percy Ernst Schramm—actually a member of the Nazi party—better deserves that claim), of training a generation of students (he had precious few, however loyal), or of positing a thesis that dominated the historiography (his greatest work famously has no real argument and is sui generis). That hardly diminishes the (often guilty) pleasure and knowledge that both medieval historians and scholars of the twentieth century will gain from spending time with “EKa.”