Ernst Kantorowicz: On the Limits, Possibilities, and Tasks of Representing Medieval History.

Delivered at the Historians’ Conference in Halle, April 24, 1930, in response to German academic attacks on Kantorowicz’ biography of Frederick II.

Positivistic historical research (Geschichtsforschung) is guilty of overstepping into the realm of art when it attempts to force historical writing (Geschichtsschreibung) under its working rules. However, one will find it far more concerning when it specifies its position to say that “one can write history neither as a George-disciple, nor as a Catholic or Protestant or as a Marxist, but only as a truth-seeking human.” For here positivism no longer contents itself with merely determining the method of historical writing, but extends its overreach also to the character of the historical writer, believing it has the right to define that character’s formation according to rules deemed useful and serviceable for research. I do not wish to criticize the lack of freedom from presuppositions revealed here, insofar as the positivist expressing himself in this way believes he can detect truths only from his imaginary rocher de bronce and from no other point de vue. For quite apart from that, this attitude implies the following: even as a People’s Party member or Democrat, as a Center Party member or German Nationalist, one cannot write history, provided that an honest conviction and not mere utility is associated with it. Similarly: even as an Englishman or Frenchman, Italian or Russian, if one understands this as more than just accidental citizenship, one cannot write history. One cannot write it at all as someone who, besides their knowledge, also believes in something and who is, what they are, completely with the commitment of their whole person and their innermost conviction..., rather one can only write history as someone who, doubting, believes in nothing while seeking truth. When precisely the sober positivist thus runs the risk of becoming romantic today by believing he can find the Blue Flower of truth without presuppositions and without engaging the whole of man – regardless of the fact that truth does not lie in the facts and things, but in the man who questions the facts and things, and regardless of Goethe’s words: “Is truth then an onion, from which one merely peels the layers? What you haven’t put into it, you’ll never pull out –”, that’s his own business. Far worse is that hereby – theoretically at least – a human type is demanded as historical writer for whom conviction, party, nationality represent merely scientific contamination, staining, and burden, ineradicable evils from which only non-scientific influences enter into historical writing – a colourless, indifferent type, therefore, who really represents only a kind of historical reporter who can do justice to every theme from the standpoint of every party, every nationality, every worldview – a highly suspect type, which however seems superfluous to specifically demand today, since there is truly no shortage of it in cosmopolitan Ullstein-Germany.

Again, it is the fateful equation of historical research and historical writing that creates such a distorted picture. For as true as it is that material-collecting and organizing or fact-establishing research does not require and therefore frees the political, philosophical, and poetic dimensions of the man from its purposes, so surely does historical writing need the whole, active man, who follows the idea of truth to the ultimate limits of knowledge while also serving art—which in turn is always devoted to an ultimate, a belief. The historical writer thus truly carries within himself that tension which the researcher avoids by renouncing or abstaining. However, the fact that historical research avoids this tension reveals its deep essential kinship with historical belle-lettres, as the writer in turn renounces truth in favour of a pamphleteering which he calls art. However: free artistry and free scholarship are already visibly walking hand in hand today, just as one already rightly understands historical research and historical belle-lettres as reciprocal concepts despite their enmity.

But that true historical writing is possible only through the engagement of the whole man is shown by those five decades of great German historiography of the previous century – that era in which the spirit of the German nation manifested itself most purely in historiography, as it had previously done in philosophy, thereafter in the natural sciences, and today in poetry. For at that time, historical writing not only demanded the whole person, but could also embrace and incorporate them - not just the scholar, but also the philosopher, politician, and poet who those historians were. And that certainly was no hindrance. For, as Humboldt said, “the more purely the historian lets his humanness prevail, the more completely he fulfils the task of his profession” – which conversely means that a totality is only recognised and made present where one has invested one’s whole being. And this is precisely what art requires.

Certainly, that era of German historiography marks – as has been very aptly noted – the memorable moment when the national movement passed through scholarship, the moment when the national movement received its impetus primarily from the representatives of scholarship – and especially historical scholarship. And with that we come to another moment through which historical research and historical belle-lettres differ from the art of historical writing. For the forum to which historical research and historical belle-lettres turn is international in both cases – whereby research, as a scientific activity almost detached from the inner rootedness of the researcher’s personality, addresses itself – often still in Latin – to the scholarship of the whole world, while historical belle-lettres, quite similar to movies, appearing simultaneously in all common world languages, speaks to the international masses and the international semi-educated mob ... possible only because both methods are analytical: material analysis in the case of research, human and psychological analysis in the case of historical belle-lettres. Historical writing alone stands opposed to these two cosmopolitan tendencies, holding them in balance. For historical writing, by its nature and as art, belongs entirely to national literature, is conceived and understood from the German standpoint, regardless of whether the material itself concerns national history or not (think only of Ranke or Mommsen) and addresses itself to the always small number of the truly educated and spiritual leaders of the nation, from whose soil it has grown and whose impulses it returns in this way – thereby affecting teachers and educators through the branched organism of universities and schools, who are poorly served both by unreadable yearbooks of German history intended as reference works and by mere textbooks. That medieval history in particular, which certainly lacked both the humanistic forum of ancient history and the political forum of modern history within Germany and which therefore very quickly lost touch with the times after the founding of the Reich, has completely failed in the field of historical writing for generations – apart from the outsider Gregorovius and precious few other exceptions – that it has completely withdrawn from national tasks and duties since Giesebrecht’s days, whose History of the Imperial Era began to appear in 1855, is today a generally known fact, and it is entirely questionable whether this complete neglect of such an important area of national history was worth the price, despite Germany’s enhanced reputation in international academic circles.

If there is merely a failure here, which is never too late to remedy, then the great danger lies in another place: for alongside the neglect of national duties and the loss of connection to the times comes the questioning of the national moment itself as an impulse for historical writing, by which of course neither nationalistic bluster nor patriotic whitewashing is meant. What I mean is the fragmentation of the sense of nationality and the sense of truth. I already pointed out that the positivistic position in actuality also ruled out writing history as a German – insofar as this involves a real belief in something like a German mission, in Germany at all – and closely related to this scientific ideal is the philosopher who declares: “A researcher who expresses a thought ..., because he considers it appropriate to or useful for the spirit of his nation, violates the highest principle of all science: to serve truth and truth alone.” What would the great German historians of the previous century have said to this formulation, to this hostile opposition of the sense of nationality and the sense of truth? – they who all, whatever subject matter they chose, worked into the nation as historians and that meant then as man and above all: were altogether carried by the overwhelming, even fanatical belief in the nation, which, even then, although not nearly as much as today, was under threat! That even then world citizenship and nation-state stood opposed to each other or better: held the balance, until – in contrast to today – the national idea prevailed, is generally known. But what has the sublime sweep of German universalism of those days to do with today’s record-seeking flattest internationality, or the hard, sober nation-state idea with the crude helplessness of nationalistic chauvinism? And where above all was the tormenting and paralysing discrepancy between service to truth and service to the nation, since truth could only lie in the nation as otherwise in the individual person – “what you haven’t put into it, you’ll never pull out”! But the worst was that precisely this discrepancy between truth and nation became easy for historical belle-lettres to exploit for their purposes, which apparently considered it their task to distort the honour of the nation in the name of truth and to surrender its dignity to the mockery of the masses in the world market ... but such supposedly objective, disinterested neutrality has encouraged the tendency that not only permitted but actually sanctioned the break between sense of truth and sense of nationality under the motto: “fiat veritas, pereat vita” [let truth prevail, though life perish], until finally something higher came into danger than mere scientific truth: the truth of the nation itself, endangered by doubt in the nation.

On this ground, the growth of historical science could flourish, but not historical writing, because for historical writing as an art, only faith—not doubt—could set the tasks and provide the self-assurance of a firm standpoint from which to approach the tasks that constantly evolve. It was the patriotism directed inward, toward the question of German unification, that made the young Ranke declare: “We have a great German task to solve, we have to develop the truly German state as it corresponds to the Genius of the Nation.” And it was the more expansive German patriotism of the time after the founding of the Reich when Ranke wrote: “The universal prospect for Germany and the world has prompted me to dedicate my last energies to a work on world history.” Of course, in the hopelessness after the collapse, when doubt prevailed and faith in the inner truth of the nation was shaken everywhere, historical writing would have lacked the final impulse – perhaps apart from refuting the war-guilt lie – had not a new goal become visible once again from within in what seemed a completely irrational belief in a great task yet to be solved within Germany itself and among the Germans themselves. Here one might remember the words that Schiller wrote down in a similar situation after the unfortunate Peace of Lunéville: “While the political Reich wavers, the spiritual has formed ever more firmly and perfectly” – to then conclude with the confession of faith: “Every people has its day in history, but the day of the Germans is the harvest of all time.”

And with that, gentlemen, I can finally also answer the question put to me about the scientific value of the historical works from the George School. Only insofar as they serve this belief in the Day of the Germans, in the Genius of the Nation, do they have value. This belief is, of course, not a dogma taken from science but from poetry, which governs and determines all works of this school and which has hardly ever been recognised by otherwise such analytically precise scholarship. For not, as one would like to believe, an aesthetic or phenomenological or other dogma rules here, but it is solely the dogma of the worthy future of the nation and its honour, which drives these works, for which they commit themselves completely and selflessly, indifferent to fame and without ambition – sometimes with a more fortunate, sometimes perhaps with a less fortunate hand – and above all: only through this belief in the more genuine Germany did those works perhaps also become art. However: to the “fiat veritas, pereat vita” [let truth prevail, though life perish] of a late Stoa, the George School opposed a “fiat veritas in vita,” [let truth prevail in life] and if one believes one must keep this attitude away from scholarship, if one even considers it detrimental and dangerous to scholarship, more dangerous still than consciously or unconsciously writing world history with the attitude and in the attitude of daily newspaper publishers, then it remains now uncontested to draw the final line of separation here and thereby clarify the situation. For indeed: only where scholarship is willing to bridge the gulf between truth and nation can the George School equate its goals with those of scholarship and serve scholarship with its usual dedication, and unambiguously, with full consciousness and innermost justification, put the motto of the Monumenta on its banners: Sanctus amor patriae dat animum [holy love of the fatherland gives life].