"DAS GEHEIME DEUTSCHLAND"

("THE SECRET GERMANY")

After his brief hiatus from lecturing in the summer of
1933, Kantorowicz took up lecturing again at Frankfurt in
the fall.

He began with another Antrittsvorlesung

(inaugural lecture), as though he were starting afresh at

the university.

The fact that after having refused to

lecture for only one semester, Kantorowicz chose to begin

winter semester 1933/34 with a new Antrittsvorlesung
suggests that the Nazi regime of power forced him to assume
a new intellectual posture. "It is true that I only
abandoned teaching for one semester," he stated, "but the
momentous events of the last months justify that the
resumption

of my office as a teacher be grasped as an

opportunity to present myself to my listeners anew.,,112

Politically and intellectually, Kantorowicz was a different
man than he had been when he wrote Frederick the Second in
the mid-1920s.
He had not changed, however, in his view that the
university podium be used not only to instruct his students
academically, but to

shap~

Antrittsvorlesung, he said:
seeks to be a confession

them politically.

Of his

"More than an explanation, this

and why does one carry around

the title of "Professor" if one does not want, in decisive

112 From Kantorowicz's unpublished essay, "Das Geheime
Deutschland" at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, p. 1.
Henceforth in this chapter, page citations will appear
directly in the text.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-89

moments, to have the courage to bear witness." (p. 1)

And

courage it must have taken for Kantorowicz in late 1933, to

deliver this confession before an audience that almost
certainly contained SA and SS students.

But a servile

avoidance of confrontation was not a characteristic trait of

Kantorowicz:

"You must not hope of me that I would cover up

chasms and with a clever turn of phrase avoid difficulties,

when only one thing can serve the Germany of today and the
Germany of tomorrow:

clarity and an unshakable faith in the

eternal figures of this land and their promise." (p. 1)

Kantorowicz extolled a secret Germany which embodied an
anti-Third Reich; it was a counter-Empire, existing on a
transcendental plane, which carried the true mission of
Germany when the external, official government of Hitler
represented a sham perversion of Germany's imperial mission.
Quoting Schiller at the Historiker Tag in 1930, Kantorowicz
had averred a truer, transcendental Germany, as opposed to
what he saw as a decadent Weimar Republic:

"Indem das

politische Reich wankt hat sich das geistige immer fester

und vollkommener gebildet."

(In so far as the political

Empire wavered, the'spiritual Reich grew stronger and

fuller.)113

Now that the Weimar Republic had collapsed,

Kantorowicz turned again to the spiritual Reich, this time

as a foil to a more terrible Nazi regime.

113 Kantorowicz, "Limits, Possibilities and Duties,"

p. 31.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-90

Though his letters of 1933 present a man of amazing

self-confidence and tenacity of purpose, in his inner life
Kantorowicz must have felt betrayed and alone, and somewhat
fearful for his own well-being.

His calls for a new Fuhrer

had helped bring forth a base demagogue in Hitler (although

Hitler's full monstrousness had not yet been revealed), his
intellectual and spiritual mentor George was dying in
Switzerland, the Circle was shattered, and his closest
friend, Uxkull, had succumbed to the Nazi temptation.

In

this state of extreme solitariness, Kantorowicz looked to a

realm of ideals for allegiance and for refuge.

The Secret

Germany provided an intellectual safehouse against the

Nazis.

It could not be conquered by violence:

"The rulers

of the Secret Germany are immune to all weapons," he stated.

(p. 5)

Bitterly antagonistic to a regime which he was

powerless to attack directly, Kantorowicz turned within

himself, within his ideals, for solace:

an "inner

emigration."
"Das geheime Deutschland," according to Kantorowicz,
"is the secret union of the poets and sages, the heroes and
the saints, the sacrificers and the martyrs, who brought
Germany forth and offered themselves to Germany .. the union
which -- although they may appear alien in the meantime
still alone forms the true face of Germany.1f (p. 4)
Kantorowicz was not the first to write of a secret Germany.
Already in the nineteenth century, Julius Langbehn had

tr
Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-91

spoken of Rembrandt, Beethoven and Goethe as the "true

Emperors of the Secret Germany."114

In the first Yearbook

for the Spiritual Movement (1910), Karl Wolfskehl wrote of

the secret Germany as "the carrier of certain German, stilldormant forces, in which the future, most lofty Being of the
nation, is already embodied." 115

Das geheime Deutschland

was an undercurrent, a force which embodied the genuine

Germany, yet was obscured by the visible and tangible
Germany.
Kantorowicz saw das geheime Deutschland as a living
spirit which fused the essential forces (Urmachte) of
Germany's past. These Urmachte manifested themselves in the
lives of great poets, heroes and sages.

These poets, heroes

and sages were Gestalten, figures imbued with a divinity, a

godlike spirit, which led their thoughts and actions to the
very limits of human experience.

To list the leaders of das

geheime Deutschland would be to list the figures about whom

the George Circle wrote:

Plato, Caesar, Frederick, Dante,

Shakespeare, Goethe, Holderlin, Jean Paul, Nietzsche.

Under

these titans in a hierarchically-ordered realm were

"kleinere Sternen" (littler start), such as the writers
Platen or Stifter.

Finally there were the knights of the

114 See Grunewald, pp. 77-80 and Stern, The Politics of

Despair.

~ultural

115 Karl Wolfskehl, "Die Blatter fur die Kunst und die
neuste Literatur," in Jahrbuch fur die Geistige Bewegung
(1910), p. 15.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-92

realm -- members of the George Circle like Kantorowicz

himself, who preserved the secret Germany and would fight to
assert, when the time dictated, das geheime Deutschland in
the practical political life of Germany.116
Das geheime Deutschland was populated mostly by poets.
The George Circle, and German intellectuals of the era in
general, were devoted to the notion that poets could best
instruct for life. 117

Poets rather than statesmen were

Germany's great leaders, they held.

Max Kommerell, a George

disciple, expressed this view most explicitly in Der Dichter

als Fuhrer (1928).

Many intellectuals of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth century

Lagarde, Langbehn,

Moeller van den Bruck, Dilthey and even walther Rathenau

were inclined to regard feelings and intuitions, the
province of the poet, as reliable guides for political
conviction and political action.
Das geheime Deutschland was for Ernst Kantorowicz not
an abstraction of the best actions and ideas of Germany's
glorious past.

It was not a utopian dream, but was

116 Das geheime Deutschland was not, as Peter Gay has

asserted, "a club to which new members were elected." This
view confused das geheime Deutschland with the George Circle
itself.
The Circle saw itself as part of das geheime
Deutschland, as prophets of this transcendental realm, but
they did not comprise it.
In any case, members were not
elected to das geheime Deutschland nor to the George Circle.
Mechanisms such as elections and formal membership were
frowned upon by George. See Peter Gay, Weimar Cul ture, (New
York, 1968), p. 48.
117 Lepenies, op. cit., p. 256.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-93

"gegenwartig ... totlich-faktisch und seiend" ("present ...

deadly-factual and existent). (p. 4)

Belief in das geheime

Deutschland required a quasi-religious leap of faith.

The

secret Germany had existed tangibly on earth only fleetingly

in history, during Frederick's reign, for instance.
Kantorowicz wrote to George in the late fall of 1933:

"The

stauffer had raised, yes -- for the only time in German

history -- the secret Germany of that time, i.e., the
'ROMAN,' to the official Germany.,,118

But after Frederick's

death, at the onset of the Interregnum, it again retreated

to a snowy peak, went into hibernation, and drifted into
obscurity.

But for Kantorowicz, it remained the true

legitimate leadership of Germany.

Kantorowicz's depiction of the secret or true Germany
clashed with the National Socialist vision of what Germany
should be.
with

The rulers of the secret Germany were imbued

the light, the clarity and the humanism of the

Mediterranean region, the spirit of Hellas which exudes

beauty, freedom and nobility.

Kantorowicz saw Germany's

great spirits in Greeks, Romans and Italians.

His praise of

these Mediterranean spirits pitted him against the Blut und

Boden chauvinism of the Nazis.

While the new regime pursued

"Deutschtum" as a guiding cultural principle and tried to

purify intellectual life of "non-German" elements,

118 Kantorowicz, letter of November 26, 1933 to George.

QUoted in Grunewald, p. 127.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-94

Kantorowicz told his students that the greatest rulers of

Germany "are actually not indigenous to the nation." (p. 11)
The heroes of das geheime Deutschland were
"uberdeutsch," an untranslatable term meaning roughly more
than-German or beyond-German.

These heroes were vitally

tied to the development of Germany, yet had a universal

significance.

The ancient Greeks, Kantorowicz said,

manifested the most primary forces in western Civilization

the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

In these two forces,

the Greeks laid the foundation of das geheime Deutschland.

From Rome, Germany inherited her mission of Empire.

The

saints of Christendom joined the Greeks and Romans as

guiding forces of the German spirit.
But whereas other nations emerged from the Middle Ages
with national saints, such as France's Saint Louis or
Hungary's Saint Stephen, Kantorowicz explained, the Middle
Ages left Germany no national saints.

Furthermore, just as

the seeds of Dante's Humana Civilitas began to take root in

Germany, Luther cut Germany off from the wellspring of
Western Civilization, from Rome.

For Kantorowicz, Luther's

split from Rome marked the advent of Germany's Sonderweg

(and Kantorowicz truly believed in a Sonderweg), the
beginning of a particularly German national consciousness,
much to the detriment of her pan-European imperial mission.
Luther not only cut Germany's umbilical cord to her Latin
mother, he brought about the split of the Germans themselves

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-95

into two faiths.

Luther's revolt marked for Kantorowicz the

disintegration of the Reich concept and the beginning of

German tragedy.

C.M. Bowra recalls Kantorowicz maintaining

IIthat all the trouble began with Luther.,,119

In Frederick the Second, Kantorowicz had made explicit
the George Circle's view that Germany was crude and barbaric
without the refining Latin touch.

On July 4, 1933, in a

letter to George, he repeated this notion that "Germany

simply became ugly as it became un-mediterranean"
sich entmediterranisierte).120

(als es

Southern spirits rule das

geheime Deutschland, Greeks, Romans and Germans who either

lived before or rejected Luther's Nordic creed, e.g.
Frederick or Holbein, or post-Luther Germans who overcame
the isolation of the North and breathed divine Mediterranean
air -- Goethe, Holderlin, Wincklemann and Nietzsche, for
example.
A provincial German intolerance for the uberdeutsche
figures always existed, said Kantorowicz.

liThe greatest

geniuses were always regarded as un-German because they

resisted all attempts to strike a cheap uniformity that
people at that time cons idered< 'German.'" (p. 1 4)

Goethe

was once seen as foreign, an "enemy of our fatherland, a

priest on a false altar.1I (p. 13)

German history texts

119 Bowra, Memories, p. 124.

120 Kantorowicz, letter of July 4, 1933 to George.
Quoted in Grunewald, p. 122.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-96

complained of Frederick the Second, "'but he wasn't a

German!'"

Holderlin and Nietzsche were alien to the

provincial German spirit, and vehemently approached their

countrymen.
All these leaders of das geheime Deutschland were
uniquely German, not some pan-European "mischmasch," as
Kantorowicz said, but they transcended the narrow,
chauvinistic face of Germanness -- they were German in a
higher universal sense.

Their Germanness manifested itself

in the very non-German universality of their characters.

As

Nietzsche asserted, "to become more German, one must rid

himself of his Germanness.,,121

By showing that these

uberdeutsche figures never conformed to the conventions of

their times, that they were always'scorned as alien by their
unenlightened contemporaries, Kantorowicz hoped to awaken in
his students' minds the realization that the Nazis were not
German patriots, but in fact antithetical to the true
Germany.
Among Kantorowicz's listeners there were undoubtedly
some students who, like him, inwardly despised the Nazis -
students whose moral fiber would not permit them to be swept
up by the wave of chauvinistic jubilation which accompanied
the Nazi advent to power.

But in the National Socialist

state, their inner conviction that the Nazis were criminal

121 Quoted in Kantorowicz's "Das Geheime Deutschland,"

p. 17.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-97

could find no outward mode of expression.

These students

who refused to succumb to the Nazis, and it was primarily to

them that Kantorowicz addressed "Das geheime Deutschland,"
had to endure extreme loneliness, for in a terroristic state
it was nearly impossible for them to form bonds with like
minded students.

They had to cope with gnawing self-doubt,

wondering if perhaps their hostility to the new regime,

which promised a German renewal, put into question their
loyalty to their fatherland.

They were under tremendous

pressure to conform as they witnessed both an ecstatic sense

of community and comradeship among the Nazi supporters, and
the fearful consequences of non-conformity.
To these students, Kantorowicz hailed das geheime
Deutschland.

It was a transcendental outlet where these

students could pour their anti-Nazi sentiments, a realm of

the mind where solitary resisters to Nazism could make
connections, could find kindred spirits.

To the anti-Nazi

student of late 1933, who lived in utter political

isolation, Kantorowicz sought to provide a sense of
allegiance, an allegiance which the Nazi state police could
not penetrate and smash.

To these students Kantorowicz said

in effect, "You are not alone.

You are scorned by the

tangible Germany of today, as were other great Germans by

the tangible Germany of their time.

But along with them you

form the true Germany, no matter how ugly the official

Germany may become.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

Hold out against the temptation of

-98

National Socialism, and know that rather than Nazi comrades,

you have Frederick, Dante, Goethe and Nietzsche as your
brethren."

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

DEUTSCHES PAPSTTUM
("THE GERMAN PAPACY")
All historians embrace to some degree the notion that
the past can illuminate the present
this intensely.

Kantorowicz believed

He saw historical situations as repeating

themselves, and believed in recurring epochs

(wiederkehrender Epochen).

In 1933 he studied the

Interregnum period because he saw the period as analogous to

his own day -- "since a constructive theme today could only
lead to confusion, I'm lecturing about the 'Destruction of
the Middle Ages,' even about the 'Interregnum,'" he wrote to
George in 1933. 122

Kantorowicz's choice of themes during

his early career seems a barometer of his personal concerns

and convictions.
In his 1933 essay, "Deutsches Papsttum," Kantorowicz
suggested that the two essential and antithetical strains in
the Germans -- the national and the universal -- are to be
found in their medieval chu.rch history.

Unlike other

European nations, most obviously England, Germany never

succeeded in building a national church.

Rather, Protestant

Germany's schism from Rome resulted in the disintegration of

Germany herself.

According to Kantorowicz, Germany's

attempts to establish a national church, to cut itself off

from the universal Roman heritage, led to disaster -- the

122 Kantorowicz, letter of November 28, 1933 to George.

Quoted in Grunewald, p. 127.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-100

ruin of the German Reich.

This, for Kantorowicz, was the

tragedy of German history -- at the height of her imperial

glory and power, Germany sought a new self-definition, a
purely German religion, and in choosing the national strain
over the universal, caused her own downfall.

Kantorowicz

saw this tragedy played out in the Middle Ages, and saw it
repeated in his own time.
In 1935, Southwest Radio in Germany broadcast a reading
of "Deutsches Papsttum."
broadcast are remarkable.

The circumstances of this

The director of Southwest Radio

in Frankfurt, Walter Beumelberg, who was anti-Nazi, offered

the 31 year-old Wolfgang Frommel a managing position at
Southwest Radio.

Wolfgang Frommel (a pseudonym for Lothar

Helbing) was a budding poet and journalist, and belonged to

the wider circle around the poet Stefan George. 123

Although

he was never in the George Circle, Frommel's friends

included many Circle members, such as Kantorowicz, Percy
Gothein, Woldemar von Uxkull (who had by 1935 backed off
from his initial endorsement of the Nazis), Ernst Morwitz
and Ernst Gundolf, the younger brother of Friedrich Gundolf.
(Friedrich Gundolf had died in'1931.)

Frommel accepted the

broadcasting job, provided that he would not be required to

join any party organization.

123 See Arvid Brodersen, "Deutsche Freundschaften," in

bastrum Peregrini, 173-4, (1987), p. 27.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-101

At Southwest Radio, Frommel organized the "Mitternacht

sendugnen" (Midnight Broadcasts) in which German
intellectuals, such as Arnold Bergsrasser, Max Kommerell,
Walter F. otto, Kurt Riezler, Karl Reinhardt, Carlo Schmidt
and Woldemar von Uxkull read lectures on historical or
literary topics. 124

Jewish intellectuals, such as Hans

Joachim Shoeps, Herlint von den Steinen, Bergstrasser, and

Kantorowicz, could not read on the German radio, so their
essays were read over the air under pseudonyms.
Kantorowicz's "Deutsches Papsttum" was broadcast on February
22, 1935, under the pseudonym of Gerd Hermann.
Frommel had begun the Midnight Broadcasts in August
1933, as a series entitled "Vom Schicksal des Deutschen
Geistes" (Of the Fate of the German Spirit).

He assumed

that the broadcasts, taking place on Friday evenings from

midnight until one o'clock, would escape censorship because
of both the late hour and the esoteric subjects of the
lectures -- "The Decline of Sparta," "Frederician
Pessimism," or the "German Papacy," for example.
Ironically, it was the mention of these broadcasts in a
Basel newspaper which tipped off the Gestapo that the
broadcasts were often criticisms of the Nazi regime shrouded
in an academician's lecture. 125

Frommel even succeeded in

124 Grunewald, p. 131.

125 See the notes to "Deutsches Papsttum," in Castrum
Peregrini 12, (1953), p. 68.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-102

publishing the lectures in the collection Vom Schicksal des

Deutschen Geistes, in the publishing house Der Runde in
Berlin in 1935. 126

Kantorowicz's lecture, like others in

the Midnight Broadcast series, was carefully phrased in

order to levy criticisms, behind the veil of humanistic
studies, of the German chauvinism propagated by Hitler's
regime.
Kantorowicz, who was always at ease in using works of
art as historical evidence, begins his essay with a
description of the tombs of the German Emperor Henry II,
(973-1024), and the German Pope, Clement II,
the Bamberg Cathedral.

(:-1047), in

These tombs symbolize for

Kantorowicz the universality of the medieval empire, an

empire which embraced all peoples and races:
The grave of a holy Emperor and a German Pope
symbolizes the medieval world-order in its
fullness, an order which united in its walls the
Frankish horseman and the Galilean Sibyl, the
noble figures of a triumphant ecclesia and the
synagogue laden with sadness.
It is ancient, but

126 Frommel had a fascinating career. He worked as a

radio broadcaster from 1933 until 1937, first at Southwest
Radio, then at the Reichssender in Berlin. Disgusted with
the Nazi regime, he moved to Amsterdam in 1937, where his
house became a safe haven for Jews during the war. He was
in contact with the men behind the July 20th plot to kill
Hitler. After the war, Fromme I , along with Wilhelm Fraenger
and Carl August Klein (who had co-edited the Blatter fur die
Eynst together with George as early as 1892) founded the
journal Castrum Peregrini. The journal devotes itself
primarily to Georgeana -- writings by and concerning George
and Circle -- and to wider humanistic subjects.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-103

it is at the same time a new cult-place, the

Delphi for the few Germans who know of Apollo.127
Those few Germans "who know Apollo" are the members of the
Circle who renounced Hitler, members of das geheime
Deutschland, those Germans who preserved Germany's true
universal mission in that most xenophobic time, 1933.
For Kantorowicz, the spirit and the intellect, not
blood and race, determine one's nationality and culture.
This view is born out in his very vocabulary.

He writes of

Entdeutschung, Verromerung, Verdeutschunq,

Mediterranisierung.

German or Roman characteristics can be

acquired; they are not racially determined, Kantorowicz

implied.

Frederick the Second, for example, was for

Kantorowicz (and in his own mind) a Mediterranean ruler, a

Roman, although his blood was German and Norman.

Likewise,

Kantorowicz considered himself a German, his Jewish ancestry

notwithstanding.
The medieval empire was intextricably linked to the
papacy.

The Emperor and the Pope represent the dual rulers

of the God's universal kingdom, Kantorowicz held.

The Papal

See may be occupied by men of all nations, but it always

remains a Roman papacy.

For Kantorowicz, "Roman was only a

more picturesque word for 'universal,' the total ecumenism,

that encompasses the populated world." (p. 8)

When Clemens

127 Kantorowicz, "Deutsches Papsttum," in Castrum

Peregrini 12 (1953), p. 7. Henceforth in this chapter, page
citations from this article will appear directly in the
text.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-104

I I ascended the Papal Throne in 1047,

the Germans became

"Trager der weltreichsidee," (carriers of the world-empire

idea).

Clemens signalled "the Romanizing of the Germans,

the becoming-universal of the Germans.1I (p. 9)

One need

only to have read the following sentence of Kantorowicz's

with proper nuances, to reveal his implicit criticism of the
chauvinistic Germany of his day:
was 'Roman,' that is to say:
embracing." (p. 7)

IIOnce before, even Germany

universal and world-

Kantorowicz maintained that as Germany's

grandeur increased, Germany became universal and truly

imperial precisely when it dispensed with its narrow view of
Germanness and embraced non-German cultures in a spirit of
cosmopolitanism.

He wished his listeners to infer that

Hi tIer, by purging Germany of its "non-German'l elements, was

not leading the nation to imperial greatness, but to
provincial diminution.
Pope Clemens I I represented for Kantorowicz the tension
between the national and the universal orientation of the
Germans.

He was elected as universal Pope, but oddly

remained a German imperial prince (deutsche Reichsfurst)

during his brief pontificate.

German provincialism stood in

conflict with the universal pull of the Roman Papacy_

Kantorowicz's condemnation of German provincialism is not
limited to his treatment of Clemens I I ; he goes beyond his
historical topic to make a general criticism of the Germans:
No German papacy was possible -- and this because
the Germans themselves only in their rarest

b
Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-105

moments or in their most extraordinary offspring

are at once German and universal, at once German
and European. Manifested not for the last time
are the two constantly recurring German strains -
and you may call them what you will -- their
demonic quality, and confirm the rule,that in
German history there is always a virtue which at
the last moment stands in opposition to imminent
tragedy. (p. 20)
The leaders of das geheime Deutschland -- Frederick,
Goethe, Wincklemann, Nietzsche, George -- are those rare
offspring who are both German and universal, German and
European.

Kantorowicz's belief in the demonic in the

Germans had its antecedents in his portrayal of Frederick

and in the writings of Nietzsche.

Here he sought to point

obliquely at the National Socialists as demonic.

held out the hope for resistance.

Yet he

A virtue, which

Kantorowicz did not name, would at the last moment seek to

save Germany from herself.

As in IIDas Geheime Deutschland,"

Kantorowicz sought to strengthen and reassure potential

resisters to Hitler that they were not traitors to the
fatherland, but in fact the most virtuous of Germans.
Kantorowicz recounted how after Clemens II's death, the
Emperor looked to the left bank of the Rhine, to Burgundy,
for a new Pope.

He chose Bishop Bruno of Toul, who ascended

the Papal Throne as Leo IX.

Leo IX represented a German

Pope for Kantorowicz, but of a different kind than Clemens

II.

Leo was "europaisch aufgeschlossener" (more open to

Europe) (p. 16); he had no position of German prince, and

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-106

placed the universal dictates of the Roman Papacy before

national concerns.
Thus the two strains of medieval German church history
were revealed in Clemens II and Leo IX:

the national,

German-oriented church and the universal Roman church.

The

Germans, according to Kantorowicz, already in the twelfth

century conceived of establishing a new German Rome in Mainz
or Trier, a German Catholic Church independent of Rome.
Indeed Barbarossa, who spoke of such a church, may in this
sense be seen as a precursor to Luther.

But by breaking off

from Rome, Germany would have deprived herself of the very

light which had nourished her.

As Pope Pius II wrote to the

Chancellor of Mainz, the Roman Church "drove the barbarism

from you, so that even the Greeks seem barbarians, while you
must be regarded as complete Latins.

If you wanted to be

truthful, you would admit that Rome and the apostolic seat
brought you the saving religion, and taught you to abandon
pagan-worship and to pray to the true God, the God of
Israel.

That is worth more than gold and silver." (p. 20)

There is a delicious irony in Kantorowicz, a Jew, extolling

through the voice of Pius II "the God of Israel" to the
Germans in 1933.
Kantorowicz believed that Germany would sink into
barbarism without the refining Latin touch.

In "Deutsches

Papsttum," Kantorowicz cited other Germans who foresaw

disaster in a German break from Rome.

The mystic Hildegard

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - ----------------------

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-107

of Bingen, amidst the tremendous rise of Barbarossa's power

grimly foretold of the dissolution of the Imperium.

And

amidst the nationalistic rejoicing following the German

triumph in 1871, two Germans, Burckhardt and Nietzsche,
living in Basel, a German town deeply influenced by the
Latin culture, saw in the German victory the beginning of a
German disaster.
Kantorowicz suggested that German nationalism was
partly a product of German arrogance deriving from

Ge~many's

great power, and at the same time, of a German feeling of

inferiority.

One motive for the Germans' desire to break

from Rome in Barbarossa's time was, according to

Kantorowicz, the fact that "the Germans, despite their
power, felt scorned by the Guelfs.1I (p. 22)

This line

hauntingly suggests the strange dilemma that Germany found

herself in after 1871 -- despite their strength, Germans
were universally scorned, or more exactly, perceived
themselves as scorned.
Kantorowicz saw the German experience in the twentieth
century mirrored in her experience in the High and Late
Middle Ages.

As German imperial power reached its pinnacle

in the Salian and Hohenstaufen dynasties, the pull towards a

more narrowly German church sowed the seeds of disaster.
Kantorowicz drew, implicitly, a parallel with Germany after
1871, when Germany ascended to predominance in Europe.
Bismarck's was not the true European empire, the Romano

I
,

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

But

-108

German empire, but a Nordic empire, born of German civil

war, as Kantorowicz wrote in Frederick the Second.

It was a

Deutsches Reich Preussischen Nation rather than the

Romisches Reich Deutscher Nation for which Kantorowicz
yearned.

Divorced from its Latin roots, this German empire

groped for a national religion, all the while drawing back

from Germany's universal heritage and moving towards a
narrowly Germanic creed.
Hitler's bastard religion, mingling racism and a warped
idea of Deutschtum, was antithetical to everything universal
in the Germans which Kantorowicz sought to extol.

It was

against this chauvinistic quasi-religion, National

Socialism, that Kantorowicz leveled his attack in "Deutsches
Papsttum."

But Hildegard of Bingen's gloomy prophecy of the

disintegration of the Empire, trenchant in her own time, was

refulfilled in this wiederkehrende Epoche, for like Luther,
Hitler in the end achieved no national religion, but in
1945, the division of Germany.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-109-

KANTOROWICZ'S LAST YEARS IN EUROPE, 1934-1938

Just one month after Kantorowicz had given his lecture
on "The Secret Germany," Nazi students organized an
effective boycott of his classes.
on December 11, 1933. 128

He gave his last lecture

That winter Kantorowicz, who was

still entitled to an academic leave of absence, left for

Oxford.

In many ways this marked Kantorowicz's real

emigration, although he did not permanently leave Germany

until late in 1938.

The role he had desired for himself in

German society, that of a scholar vitally involved in the

political fate of the nation, a shaper of a new generation
of Germans who would lead the nation to greatness, would
never be realized.

The ensuing months during which Hitler

consolidated his hold on power, confirmed for Kantorowicz

that the Germany he had grown up in was gone forever, the
Germany he had envisioned in Frederick the Second, an
illusion.
English culture was foreign to him; apart from his
contact as a child with his English governess, whom he had
disliked, he had had little exposure to English ways.

But

he rather quickly developed an affection for Oxford and for

the British.

Sir Maurice Bowra, a lecturer in classics at

New College, Oxford, where during winter 1933-34 Kantorowicz

gave a series of lectures on the secularization of the
Middle Ages, became Kantorowicz's closest friend at Oxford.
128 Grunewald, p.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

128.

-110

His accounts of Kantorowicz during the 1930s add a very

personal facet to a portrait of this man.
He was not like any Germans I had met, and above
all not pompous or dictatorial. He talked English
fluently with many mistakes and bold
improvisations on the principle that most French
words can be used in English if they are
pronounced suitably. Thus he would speak of "my
brother-in-law the medicine," or of physicists as
"physicians." Though he was a professor at
Frankfurt, he was not in the least professorial,
had an excellent sense of humor, and picked up the
atmosphere with extraordinary speed.
I was much
taken by him, and, when we went away together, he
talked about poetry with real perception. When
Tom Boase, of Hertford, took him and myself to
Stratford to see Julius Caesar, Ernst was
fascinated by it, and during the harangues in1~~e
forum muttered, "Dr. Goebbels, Dr. Goebbels."
The Nazis' abuse of Stefan George's art and his notions
of a "New Reich" had not shaken Kantorowicz's affection for
"the master."

He always maintained that he who thought the

beautiful idea could not be held responsible for its abuse

by others. 130

Of Kantorowicz at Oxford, Bowra writes:

At Oxford Ernst still reflected George's teaching.

He was liable to talk about a thing called "secret
Germany," which, though meaningful enough in
German, lacked real substance in English. More
importantly he had a real love for Greek poetry
and Greek art, and for some parts of English
poetry about which he wished to know more. Modern
movements hardly touched him, and he saw nothing
in Rilke, whose large vogue in England had already
begun. George had also taught him something about
France, but outside the Middle Ages and some poets
of the nineteenth century, it did not appeal to
him, perhaps because his knowledge of the language
was faulty.
He shared other of George's tastes,
for good food and good drink, for everything

129 Bowra, Memories, p. 286.

130 This was related to me by William Chaney.

>

S&L

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

= ..

-111

Italian, for the cinema but not for the theatre,

for bold ideas which made familiar facts less
dull, and for pungent gossip. Like George, he
liked male society, but unlike him, was much
attached to a few women friends, and on this ~~tnt
the Master had not been too pleased with him.
Kantorowicz returned to Germany in July 1934.

Though

he adapted well to life in England, he did not feel

compelled in 1934 to take up permanent residence there.

He

undoubtedly knew that his teaching days at Frankfurt were

over.

Yet he applied to have his academic leave extended

until the end of summer semester, 1935, in order that he

pursue his scholarship in Oxford, London and Rome. 132

His

request was granted; but the following month, on August 20,

1934, the Nazi authorities issued a law requiring all
university professors to take an oath of loyalty to Adolf
Hitler.

Kantorowicz abhorred the thought and used the

occasion to retire from the university.

He wrote to the

university rector:
Since for the foreseeable future I will be
prevented from lecturing and therefore unable to
perform the duties of my office in the desired
manner, and since this state of uncertainty, which
a leave of absence would only extend, cannot be in
the interests of the philosophical faculty, I now
ask to join the ranks of the retired professors of
the University of Frankfurt and to become a
professor emeritus1~3fore the beginning of winter
semester, 1934/35.

131 Bowra, Memories, p. 290.

132 Grunewald, p. 141.

133 Kantorowicz, letter of October 14, 1934.

Grunewald, p. 139.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

Quoted in

-111

Italian, for the cinema but not for the theatre,

for bold ideas which made familiar facts less
dull, and for pungent gossip. Like George, he
liked male society, but unlike him, was much
attached to a few women friends, and on this ~~tnt
the Master had not been too pleased with him.
Kantorowicz returned to Germany in July 1934.

Though

he adapted well to life in England, he did not feel

compelled in 1934 to take up permanent residence there.

He

undoubtedly knew that his teaching days at Frankfurt were

over.

Yet he applied to have his academic leave extended

until the end of summer semester, 1935, in order that he

pursue his scholarship in Oxford, London and Rome. 132

His

request was granted; but the following month, on August 20,

1934, the Nazi authorities issued a law requiring all
university professors to take an oath of loyalty to Adolf
Hitler.

Kantorowicz abhorred the thought and used the

occasion to retire from the university.

He wrote to the

university rector:
Since for the foreseeable future I will be
prevented from lecturing and therefore unable to
perform the duties of my office in the desired
manner, and since this state of uncertainty, which
a leave of absence would only extend, cannot be in
the interests of the philosophical faculty, I now
ask to join the ranks of the retired professors of
the University of Frankfurt and to become a
professor emeritus1~3fore the beginning of winter
semester, 1934/35.

131 Bowra, Memories, p. 290.

132 Grlinewald, p. 141.

133 Kantorowicz, letter of October 14, 1934.

Grunewald, p. 139.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

Quoted in

-112

Kantorowicz succeeded in having himself named professor

emeritus, and regularly received a small pension as such.
Astonishingly, he continued to receive this pension even
after he went into exile. 134
Barring the fall of Hitler's regime, Kantorowicz knew
that it would be difficult to do any work in Germany, but
the hostility he met from a Nazified general populace took
him by surprise.

Kantorowicz was an unmistakably Jewish

name and Kantorowicz had a very Jewish face, thus he likely

met malice from Germans merely because of his looks, or from
strangers to whom he had to provide, for whatever reason,
his name.

Bowra, who visited Kantorowicz in Germany several

times during the 1930s, writes, "He suffered deeply from

finding out that as a Jew he was thought different from
other Germans, and once or twice he had awkward scenes in
restaurants when the waiters were offensive to him and the
only thing to do was leave at once." 135

For a proud, upper

class man like Kantorowicz, such personal insults to his

honor stung more than the anti-Semitic laws issued by the
government.
Kantorowicz stayed in Heidelberg after his return to
Germany with the Baroness Lucy Wangenheim, the half-sister
of his old friend, Woldemar von Uxkull-Gyllenband.

In late

1934 or early 1935, Kantorowicz moved to Berlin, for, as

134 Grunewald, pp. 139-40.

135 Bowra, Memories, p. 294.

---~-.---.--~~--~~-----~~~

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-113

this stormbird himself once said:

"When there is a storm

one must go to the eye of it." 136

In Berlin, Kantorowicz

read a great deal, and was still permitted to work at the

Monumenta Germanaie Historica, since the director of this
institution, Paul Kehr, was a close friend of his.

As a

Jew, however, he could not hope to publish in Germany, and

perhaps for this reason, as well as because of restrictions
placed on him by other research institutions in Germany, his
work on the Interregnum fell by the wayside.
of these years in Berlin:

Bowra writes

"He was beginning to move away

from the doctrines which he had learned from Stefan George,

and regarded his own ultra-patriotic activities in 1919 as
an aberration.

He was even capable of doubts about his old

hero Frederick II, but decided that brutality based on

metaphysics was better than brutality for its own sake. 137
Perhaps 1934 marks a watershed in Ernst Kantorowicz's
life, more so than his receipt of Woldemar von Uxkull's pro
Nazi speech, as Edgar Salin has suggested.

Out of necessity

Kantorowicz was forced to assume a low profile, to retreat

into his private life, to abandon the activism which had
characterized his earlier career.

As was earlier the case,

Kantorowicz's scholarly work at this time reflected his

contemporary concerns.

His article "Die Widerkehr Gelehrte

Anchorese in Mittelatter" (liThe Return of Learned Anchorites

136 This was related to me by William Chaney.

137
Bowra, p. 294.

".IJI1HLJiJJJQik 4JeUJd .... .M1LUkkXLlijiU4ik St.~k au

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-114

in the Middle Ages"), written in the mid-1930s, dealt with

the medieval revival of the tradition of the secluded
scholarly life.

Kantorowicz saw a parallel between the

retreat of the sages into solitude during the High Middle

Ages, and his own inner emigration during the 1930s.
Loneliness is alien to the wise -- but certainly
not always external retreat from the world. He
who lives isolated is, according to Aristotle,
less than a man: an animal, or, more than a man:
a god.
It would have been hubris in Aristotle's
time to separate oneself from other men. And the
ability to find men among men, not to seek
isolation served the most radiant and godly of the
Hellenistic sages.
!1we~ das Tiefste gedacht,
liebt das Lebendigste."
With a few exceptions, the opportunity to meet the
most vital thinkers in the Palastra or Agora was
denied the Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages:
the true life had retreated to other worlds, and
the sage who philosophized at symposia and joked
through the night would not longer have been
considered a sage. The sage was r~g devout
ascetic, who renounced the world.
Like the secluded scholars of the Middle Ages, Kantorowicz
had abandoned the public stage.

Rather he was forced to the

very fringes of society, to a solitary life of the mind.

History comforted him in his loneliness.

As he had in "Das

Geheime Deutschland," Kantorowicz saw a kinship between his

* From Holderlin's poem Socrates und Alcibiades.

Holderlin, an eighteenth-century German poet profoundly
shaped by the example of Ancient Greece was deeply admired
by the George Circle. Stefan George has rightly received
much of the credit for reviving in this century an interest
in Holderlin's poetry.
138 Ernst Kantorowicz, "Die Wiederkehr gelehrter
Anchorese in Mittelalter," in Ernst Kantorowicz, Selected
Studies, (Locust Valley, NY, 1965), p. 339.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-115

contemporary trials and tribulations and those suffered by

his heroes of the past.

By examining the inner emigration

of Abelard and Petrarch, he sought to understand his own

experience and to make it more bearable.
By 1937, Kantorowicz was exploring the possibilities of
leaving Germany.

He succeeded in having a long article on

Frederick II's closest advisor, IIPetrus di Vine a in England"

(1938), published in Vienna, and he also gave several
lectures in Austria that year.

Kantorowicz had made use of

his opportunity to travel during the years 1934-37 by going

to archives and libraries in Brussels, Paris, Venice and
Mantua to collect documents for a study of the Dukes of
Burgundy.

His friend Count Albrecht von Bernstorff had

secured some financial support for Kantorowicz to do his

research on the Burgundians.
But by 1938 it must have been obvious to Kantorowicz
that his career could go nowhere in Nazi Germany, and the
Nazi authorities that year revoked his freedom to travel
abroad.

"Since 1938 things altered:

now I can neither

travel abroad nor can I use the archives of this country.

So, for the moment, I have also put aside the work on the
Dukes of Burgundy," Kantorowicz wrote in his curriculum
vitae of July 29, 1938, which was written in English and
sent to universities in America, including Smith, Yale,
Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and the
University of California-Berkeley.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

"The slight chance of

-116

publishing books or papers in the German language has

vanished almost completely since Vienna, where I published a
paper on 'Petrus di Vinea in England' as late as January
1938, became German by the 'Anschluss.'

Unfortunately,

therefore, I have no possibilities of working productively

at present. 139
Kantorowicz's friend and colleague, Theodor Mommsen,
whom he had met at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica had
already emigrated to the United states in 1937.

During 1937

and 1938, Mommsen wrote to Kantorowicz in Berlin several

times, describing his experience as an emigr~ and suggesting
possibilities for Kantorowicz's emigration.

The letters

provide insight into Kantorowicz's personal concerns, and

those of the German emigre scholar in general.

Mommsen

wrote, "I feel well and think I'll be able to maintain good
spirits for the time to come.

That doesn't mean 'at home;'

I doubt the possibility of a 'second homeland.,11140

America

had long embodied for the George Circle the ills of the
twentieth century -- materialism, greed and standardization.
It was the most modern country in the world and for the
Circle the ugliest.

Mommsen perhaps bore this in mind when

139 Kantorowicz's curriculum vitae of July 29, 1938.

937.

140 Letter of Theodor Mommsen to Kantorowicz, July 13,

Located at the Leo Baeck Archive.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-117

he wrote to Kantorowicz "I don't know if I should advise

someone like you to a permanent emigration.,,141
Kantorowicz continued to live in Berlin, and as Bowra
writes, "seemed to take little notice of the storms around
him." 142

Mommsen was trying to line up lecture engagements

in America for Kantorowicz.

If Kantorowicz could give

lectures and establish a reputation for himself in the

United states, his chances of finding a teaching post at an
American university would improve . . Mommsen was clearly
aware, however, that Kantorowicz might well desire to remain
and weather the storm of the Nazi years.
Yale:

He wrote from

"If you write to me that you don't want to leave

casually, as long as you still have the possibility of work

and the bare necessities in Europe, I naturally understand
that.,,143

Mommsen recognized that America was indeed

different from anything that Kantorowicz had experienced in

Europe.

He gently apprised Kantorowicz of what he might

expect, offering his views of the advantages and drawbacks

of life in America:
People here are more open, or simply more curious:
that makes things much easier. There is no firm
'Bildungsideal,' this, and the lack of (or
different sort of) a feeling of tradition might
bother a European at first, but at the same time
it helps him. The basic character of this country

141 Ibid.
142 Bowra, Memories, p. 303.
143 Mommsen to Kantorowicz, May 8, 1938.
Archive.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

Leo Baeck

-118

and its people is democratic; what that means

first became clear to me when I moved here .... l
might emphasize the standardization of all things
in daily life -- from apartments, to food, to
clothing, etc. especially even in recreation.
What is especially missed here are "the little
joys of life," like 9~~ finds in older more
individual cultures.
Later Mommsen wrote:
This country is not only a democracy in the
political sense, rather its entire societal
structure and ideal of education is democratic
so democratic that it's hard to imagine from the
outside. But at the same time one can lead his
own life and is fully respected.
I think that you
would be comfortable living here permanently -
more so than many Germans, who come over here with
a terrible academician's attitude (Bonzen!) and
have made up their minds to show t9~ people here
for once what German "science" is.
5
Kantorowicz was truly elitist and strove for aristocratic
norms of life, and one might superficially conclude that he
would find the extremely democratic American way of life
disagreeable.

But Kantorowicz was so cosmopolitan in his

nature and noble in his bearing that his adaptation to life

in the United states would be relatively easy.
By late that summer, he had evidently decided to
emigrate, since he applied for a travelling pass at the
Berlin police headquarters.

To his dismay, Kantorowicz

discovered that the police had decided to withhold his

passport, making him a virtual prisoner within Nazi Germany.
Anxious to arrive in either Britain or America in time to

144 Mommsen to Kantorowicz, July 13, 1937.

145 Mommsen to Kantorowicz, May 8, 1938.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-119

deliver lectures during the winter of 1938-39, Kantorowicz

wrote in frustration to the Berlin police authorities
demanding his passport:
Against my person there can hardly be dark and
suspicious thoughts, since I, as a professor
emeritus, still have the status of an official,
and since I, as a soldier at the front and fighter
against Spartacus and the Republic of Councils in
1919, still receive my full salary. Apart from
this, political activity has not interested me -
therefore that which is granted to others
relativet~6expeditiouSly should not be withheld
from me.
The window of escape was quickly closing for
Kantorowicz, the Nazi terror against Jews intensifying.
when the Kristallnacht, a pogrom orchestrated by the SS,
broke out

o~

November 9, 1938, Kantorowicz found himself in

imminent danger.

Fortunately

the heroic actions of his

friend Count von Bernstorff protected him from arrest and

physical harm.

Bernstorff knew that something was in the

offing and brought Kantorowicz to his Mecklenburg estate.

Kantorowicz later described the course of events:
On November 8, Albrech Bernstorff and Helmut
Kupper were to dine at my apartment. Early in the
morning of the 8th, I got a call from Bernstorff
while I was in the bathroom: we would have to put
off the dinner at my place; instead, I was to put
together my bare necessities and go to
Bernstorff's, in order eventually to leave for
Stintenburg (Bernstorff's estate).
I understood
the gist, although I only later found out about
the events of that night: the synagogues were
burned, Jewish stores plundered, and individual
Jews were randomly arrested. Bernstorff had
wanted to save me from arrest, or worse.

146 Kantorowicz to the Berlin Polizeiprasidium,

October 16, 1938. Located at the Leo Baeck Archive.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-120

Thankfully I moved in with him, in order to stay

hidden fOf4~ week or more, until the danger to me
subsided.
Kantorowicz was temporarily safe, but still without a
passport and trapped within Nazi Germany.

Two contradictory

stories account for how Kantorowicz finally obtained his

passport and escaped from Germany.

The first was related by

Kantorowicz to William Chaney, a student of his in Berkeley

during the 1940s:
The story he told me was that when he could not
get his passport, he was helped by ~he son (a very
nasty boy, but useful on occasion") of Count Wolf
von Helldorf, the Nazi Chief of Police in Berlin.
The son saw his father about it, and Count von
Helldorf asked ~~e Gestapo if they were holding up
EKa's passport.
"No," they replied, after
checking, "but because we aren't, we'd be very
interested to find out who is." They discovered
it was Dr. Erhard Milch,~rthe Nazit~fh.hrs-
i2'dnlsterium. When asked why, he said, "It's exactly
people like this who make the worst propaganda
against us when they get out." The Gestapo chief
-- "not Himmler," EKa said to me, "but the person
directly under him"+ -- then shouted over the
phone, "It's exactly people like you who make the
worst propaganda against us by not letting people
out! Kantorowicz will have his passport in 24
hours or else! EKa got his passport in 24 hours
and got out.
I assume it was Helldorf or

147 Ernst Kantorowicz, "Der Gastfreund," in Albrecht

Bernstorff zum Gedachtnis. Quoted in Grunewald, p. 147.

* The young He]dorf had been a student in one of

Kantorowicz's seminars in Frankfurt.
**
~.K.

Eka -- The German pronunciation of his initials,

was what friends in America called Kantorowicz.

+ Hermann Muller was head of the Gestapo in 1938.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz

-121

HeI19~8f's

son who reported the exact words to

EKa.
Sir C.M. Bowra, who met Kantorowicz upon his arrival in
England recounts a different sequence of events.

According

to Bowra, the publisher Helmut Kupper hatched an ingenious

plot contrived to get Kantorowicz out of the country:
One of Ernst's closest friends was a gentle,
modest young man (Helmut Kupper) who had been a
member of the George Circle and married a woman
rather older than himself. Though her husband was
entirely anti-Nazi, she herself not only was a
friend of Frau Goring but was having an affair
with one of Goring's adjutants. Here lay a hope.
The husband went to the adjutant and said that
hitherto he had never complained about his wife's
relations with him, but now he asked for something
in return. When the adjutant asked what it was,
he was told that it was a passport for Professor
Ernst Kantorowicz. He agreed at once, an94~
passport was produced within a few hours.
Grunewald accepts Bowra's account in his study of
Kantorowicz. 150

Kantorowicz never mentioned this story to

William Chaney, although he did once remark that Frau Goring

helped him to get out of Germany "indirectly.,,151

148 This was related to me in writing by William Chaney

in April, 1988.
149 Bowra, Memories, p. 304.
150 See Grunewald, p. 148.
151 Related to me by William Chaney in April, 1988.

Vanden Heuvel, 1989: Kantorowicz