“Scarcely Wants to Go to Germany”

This chapter details Ernst Kantorowicz's hatred for Nazi Germany. He once told a favorite student in Berkeley, “as far as Germany is concerned they can put a tent over the entire country and turn on the gas.” After war broke out, Kantorowicz wrote mordantly about the aggressive lust of his compatriots: “Europa once more is being raped by a bull.” On the day of Germany's surrender in May 1945 Kantorowicz skipped his regular lecture in his Renaissance class to comment on the event and its significance. He referred to the Nazi regime as a “monstrous obscenity” and pronounced that “the worst grotesquerie of the world saw to it that in Hitler excrement was made flesh.”