Old Posen and Young Ernst

This chapter details the family and early life of Ernst Kantorowicz. Born in 1895, Kantorowicz was the youngest of three siblings. His parents believed that teaching him English was essential, based on the presumption that he would be engaged in trade. Thus, they gave him to the care of an English governess until he was twelve, and he learned to speak English well enough to be able to lecture in that language at Oxford in 1934. In the spring of 1901, when he was six, he entered a local municipal “middle-school for youths,” which he attended for three years. From the middle school he proceeded to the Royal Auguste-Viktoria Gymnasium, an all-male school that required the intensive study of Latin and Greek plus one modern language, which in Kantorowicz's case was French.