The German Genius

reading.
    Ernst Kantorowicz had many of the same interests as Schramm and a not dissimilar approach but, being Jewish, his fate was very different. After four years in the army in World War I, he studied philosophy at Berlin. An extreme right-winger, he joined the militia that attempted to put down the Spartacist uprising, and became involved with the Georgekreis , the artists and intellectuals devoted to Stefan George (see 574). This group, elitist and culturally conservative, had a big influence on Kantorowicz’s first important book, a biography of Frederick II, which examined the king’s charisma and spiritual qualities, rather than getting involved in the minutiae of the institutions of his rule.
    By then it was the 1930s and although Kantorowicz had been appointed professor at Frankfurt, he was forced out, moving to Oxford at first, like Cassirer, then on to Berkeley. There he became known for two things, for refusing to sign the oath of loyalty demanded by Senator Joe McCarthy (Kantorowicz resigned from Berkeley and moved to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton), and for his second masterpiece, The King’s Two Bodies , which sought to explain the birth of the modern state as growing out of the medieval conceit that a king possessed two bodies, one that was human and died, and another that was immortal and passed “mystically” from monarch to monarch. 31
    The fourth of this great generation, Norbert Elias, was also Jewish. Like Schramm and Kantorowicz, he also volunteered to fight in World War I, serving as a telegrapher. His interest in the German Zionist movement brought him into touch with the likes of Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, Leo Lowenthal, and Gershom Scholem. 32 He took courses at Heidelberg with both Karl Jaspers and Alfred Weber, later moving to Frankfurt to work under Karl Mannheim and be near the Frankfurt Institute. In 1933 he had to flee Germany before his thesis could be presented; he went first to Paris and then on to Britain in 1935, where he started work on his most important contribution, The Civilising Process. This appeared in 1939 but, because of other events, wasn’t noticed until much later, and for that reason is discussed in Chapter 40. 33
    Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), the youngest of the golden generation, was born in Berlin and studied mathematics, philosophy, and Hebrew at the university there, where he came into contact with Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Gottlob Frege. Sympathetic to Zionism, he immigrated to Palestine in 1923, becoming in time head of the department of Hebrew and Judaica at the National Library of Israel. 34 He was interested in Kabbalah and mysticism, feeling that Judaism had mystical origins and could not be properly understood without that element. 35 He tried to construct a narrative of Jewish belief which concluded that, contrary to what many Jews believed, the ultimate form of their religion was not achieved until relatively recent times, the Middle Ages, when Maimonides attempted a final reconciliation between Jewish thought and Greek thought. This was an important achievement of theological scholarship though by now, back in the Weimar Republic, hardly anyone was listening.

Weimar: “A Problem in Need of a Solution”
     
    O n October 28, 1929, the notorious stock market crash occurred on Wall Street, and U.S. loans to Europe were suspended. In the weeks and months that followed, and despite the misgivings of many, Allied troops withdrew from the Rhineland. In Thuringia Wilhelm Frick was about to become the first Nazi to be appointed minister in a state government, while in Italy Benito Mussolini was clamoring for the revision of the Versailles Treaty. In Britain in 1931 a National Government was formed to help balance the budget, and Japan abandoned the gold standard. There was a widespread feeling of crisis.
    Sigmund Freud, then seventy-three, had more personal reasons to feel pessimistic. In 1924 he had undergone two operations for cancer of the mouth. After the operation he could chew and speak only with difficulty (the prostheses didn’t work properly), but he still refused to stop smoking, probably the cause of the cancer in the first place. 1 At the end of 1929, as Wall Street was crashing, Freud delivered the most telling of his cultural critiques. Totem und Tabu ( Totem and Taboo ) and Die Zukunft einer Illusion ( The Future of an Illusion ) both had mixed receptions, but Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ( Civilization and Its