Ernst Kantorowicz' Rhetoric of the Sublime.

Article by Ptolemy Barnes. Edited by Claire Stratton. Additional Research by Lisa Wall.

Come January, I, woefully isolated from the student milieu and having used up the past semester’s loan, plug my time with long spells in the library. During one such session I was reading up on the turgid debates over the origins of nationalism, struggling to find something of interest in the broadsides cyclically exchanged between Modernists, Early Modernists, Marxists, Constructivists (read: “imagined” / “invented”), those taking a functionalist perspective, and those not. However, an article by an early twentieth-century German historian, one Ernst Kantorowicz (1895 – 1963), held my attention. ‘Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought’, in which the author reconstructs the process that forged a transcendental nationalism in the crucible of the Christian East. Beyond an attraction to Kantorowicz’ argument (one that seems to anticipate Benedict Anderson’s later theory of nationalism), I was struck by the way that through using a certain style of description he had succeeded in imagining the Medieval world as what, for its inhabitants, it plausibly was. This was a world for which the paradigm of thought was organological; within which the presence of the divine as a material fact, rather than as a source of mystification, was insisted upon. In other words, it was Kantorowicz’ rhetoric that was initially so arresting.

Delving into Kantorowicz’ bibliography I found evidence in his controversial bio-epic Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (English translation “Frederick the Second” published in 1931) of this rhetorical style extended into an historical vision. As a literary character, Kantorowicz’ protagonist is cast in the high-mimetic mode – he is the hero of romance, the force of virtue destined to triumph over adversity. Notable in relation to Friedrich is Kantorowicz’ penchant for the grand structuring antinomy. Consider the description of the thirteenth-century emperor: he is both the universal renaissance rationalist and the Sturm und Drang bearer of Germanic culture. He is both ‘the future Saviour foretold by prophets, the time-fulfilling Caesar’ but also ‘the future Scourge of the World, the Anti-Christ who was to bring confusion in his train.’ 

This sublime spectacle, however, exceeds Friedrich himself and is more properly understood as an ahistoric force on the metaphysical plane. Here is the book’s finale, in which Kantorowicz appears to prophesize a second coming: 

‘The weary Lord of the Last Day has naught to say to the fiery Lord of the Beginning, the seducer, the deceiver, the radiant, the merry, the ever-young, the stern and mighty judge, the scholar, the sage who leads his armed warriors to the Muses’ dance and song, he who slumbers not nor sleeps but ponders how he renew the “Empire.”‘

Reaction against Kantorowicz’ idiosyncracies initially came from Albert Brackmann, an historian of unimpeachably historicist credentials: ‘one can write history neither as a pupil of George [Stefan Georg, the leader of Kantorowicz’ intellectual circle] nor as a Catholic nor as a Protestant nor as a Marxist, but only as an individual in search of truth.’ However, in all respects but style Kantorowicz pursued a ruthlessly historicist method and seemed determined to prove this, publishing a volume supplementary to Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, containing extensive further notes and discussion of primary and secondary material.

I want to argue that this confrontation can be understood in terms of conflicting “politics of interpretation”, to which Kantorowicz’ personal solution was a “rhetoric of the sublime”. The key political question of historical representation is this: what should the past look like under the historian’s description? Clearly, Brackmann felt emboldened to claim an authority vis-á-vis Kantorowicz’ work on the basis that a “proper” historical account should occlude myths and heroes. For evidence of Kantorowicz’ views we can look to the interesting digression that terminates ‘”Pro Patria Mori”‘:

‘The disenchantment of the world has progressed rapidly, and the ancient ethical values, miserably abused and exploited in every quarter, are about to dissolve like smoke. Cold efficiency during and after the Second World War, together with the individual’s fear of being trapped by so-called “illusions” instead of professing “realistic views,” has done away with the traditional “superstructures,” religious as well as ideological, to the effect that human lives no longer are sacrificed but “liquidated.” We are about to demand a soldier’s death without any reconciling emotional equivalent for the lost life. If the soldier’s death in action-not to mention the citizen’s death in bomb-struck cities-is deprived of any idea encompassing humanitas, be it God or king or patria, it will be deprived also of the ennobling idea of self-sacrifice. It becomes a cold-blooded slaughter or, what is worse, assumes the value and significance of a political traffic accident on a bank holiday.

Kantorowicz defended himself against Brackmann’s criticisms, opposing (in his words) an ‘imagination créatrice’ réalisme destructeur.’ His politics of interpretation led him to describe the stuff of myth into the historical panorama, understanding that the kind of disciplinary practices inaugurated in the Nineteenth Century, the paragon of which is said to be Leopold von Ranke, are reductive of the sublime content proper to an aesthetically balanced historical account.

Later objections saw an association between Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite and fascist historical consciousness, one which also employed a “rhetoric of the sublime” in its understanding of German history. The implication of this is that the sublime as an aesthetic ideal necessarily gives rise to a totalitarian and barbaric politics. Events belie the assumption however; while Kantorowicz showed disdain for national socialism, eventually leaving Germany, the historicist Brackmann embraced the Nazi government and its anti-semitic policies.

Both the criticisms of malpractice and ideological distortion operate by collapsing together an aesthetic disposition with ahistoricality and fascist politics. The value of reading Kantorowicz’s work against such dyslexic norms is that we experience an opening up of the kinds of realities that can be conceived of, while staying true to standards of evidence.

*****

Albert Brackmann (21 June 1871 – 17 March 1952)

Considered an important German historian

Involved in the Ostforschung, a multidiciplined organization, with the purpose of directing research on Eastern Europe.

Aged 27 he became a member of MGH, the main German source publication for medieval documents.

A professor of history at three universities: Konigsberg in 1913, Marburg in 1920 and Berlin in 1922.

Specialised in the Holy Roman Empire and Papacy. Then later in his career he directed his attentions towards the history of the Germans in Eastern Europe.

Benedict Anderson (August 26 1936)

Best known for his book Imagined Communities, in which he provides an explanation for the existence of nationalism.

Nationalism ‘‘is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members...yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’’. (Anderson 1991: 6; original emphasis)

Anderson also emphasises the introduction of print technology as the main driving force for nationalism. ‘‘the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation’’ (Anderson, 1991: 46).

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