from Fake Emperors to Ernst Kantorowics

On July 7^th, 1285, a sunny day in the city of Wetzlar, a day’s ride north of Frankfurt acrid smoke rises from a mighty pyre built up just outside its walls. The pyre was for an emperor, or at least a man who claimed to be the emperor Fredrick II. This man had shown up in the Rhineland, gathered followers, set up a court and sent letters to prince and cities across the realm. Envoys had come from Italy to find out whether the Stupor Mundi had indeed returned. King Rudolf of Habsburg had to turn up in person at the head of an army to sort things out. Just before the fires were lit the (fake) emperor called on to his followers to proceed to Frankfurt as planned where he would re-appear in three days’ time.

He did not reappear in Frankfurt but in Utrecht, where the imposter was hanged. The next sighting was in Lübeck in 1286, where he was killed again. In 1295 he was again captured and burned at the stake. The myth of the emperor who lives and does not live persisted over the centuries. Sometime in the 15^th or 16the century the myth transfers from Frederick II to Barbarossa who now dwelt in the Khyffhaueser mountain waiting to be called.

Frederick II was relegated to a secondary role amongst the great medieval emperors until in 1927 a hitherto unknown writer, Ernst Kantorowics published his biography of Frederick II. This book became the most intensely discussed and most controversial biographies of a medieval ruler – full stop. Its view of the emperor was suffused with the right-wing ideology of the George Kreis. Hitler allegedly read it twice, it was on Goebbels’ bedside table, but at the same time Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the July plot to assassinate Hitler was a friend of Kantorowics and Admiral Canaris, another key conspirator asked for the book to read before his execution. Its Jewish author disliked the Nazis despite his extreme right-wing views. He fled Germany in 1938 and distanced himself from his most famous work. In the US he got caught in the nets of McCarthyism when he refused to swear an oath to fight communists. A rare case where the biographers biography is almost as fascinating as his subject, well worth exploring..

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 93 – Frederick II’s Afterlife 

On July 7^th, 1285, a sunny day in the city of Wetzlar, a day’s ride north of Frankfurt acrid smoke rises from a mighty pyre built up just outside its walls. The pyre was for an emperor, or at least a man who claimed to be the emperor Fredrick II. This man had shown up in the Rhineland, gathered followers, set up a court and sent letters to prince and cities across the realm. Envoys had come from Italy to find out whether the Stupor Mundi had indeed returned. King Rudolf of Habsburg had to turn up in person at the head of an army to sort things out. Just before the fires were lit the (fake) emperor called on to his followers to proceed to Frankfurt as planned where he would re-appear in three days’ time.

He did not reappear in Frankfurt but in Utrecht, where the imposter was hanged. The next sighting was in Lübeck in 1286, where he was killed again. In 1295 he was again captured and burned at the stake. The myth of the emperor who lives and does not live persisted over the centuries. Sometime in the 15^th or 16the century the myth transfers from Frederick II to Barbarossa who now dwelt in the Khyffhaueser mountain waiting to be called.

Frederick II was relegated to a secondary role amongst the great medieval emperors until in 1927 a hitherto unknown writer, Ernst Kantorowics published his biography of Frederick II. This book became the most intensely discussed and most controversial biographies of a medieval ruler – full stop. Its view of the emperor was suffused with the right-wing ideology of the George Kreis. Hitler allegedly read it twice, it was on Goebbels’ bedside table, but at the same time Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the July plot to assassinate Hitler was a friend of Kantorowics and Admiral Canaris, another key conspirator asked for the book to read before his execution. Its Jewish author disliked the Nazis despite his extreme right-wing views. He fled Germany in 1938 and distanced himself from his most famous work. In the US he got caught in the nets of McCarthyism when he refused to swear an oath to fight communists. A rare case where the biographers biography is almost as fascinating as his subject, well worth exploring..

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When emperor Frederick II died in 1250, many people refused to believe it. For some it was impossible because it failed to match with the predictions of Joachim of Fiore. Others remembered how the popes had announced Frederick’s death many times before only to find him returning on the prow of a ship or at the head of an army. Why would it be true this time around.

So almost immediately stories began to circulate that Frederick II wasn’t dead but hiding from his enemies. Other claimed he had gone on a long pilgrimage to wash himself of his sins. As the Erythraean sybil had pronounced a 1000 years earlier: ‘It will sound also among the peoples: “He lives” and “He does not live”. In 1257 betting shops in Florence were still taking odds that Frederick II was alive.

As time went by and the natural lifespan of the emperor would have been spent, even if he had survived the illness in 1250, these tales of the emperor drifted into the realm of mythology.

As we discussed in the last two episodes the two great institutions of the Middle Ages, the empire and the papacy collapsed in the 5 decades following Frederick’s death. The disappearance of these coordination mechanisms led to a period of extensive warfare and feuding, even beyond the endless wars we saw so far. Constant violence affected in particular the people in the countryside, whilst in the cities factional infighting continued and the gap between rich and poor expanded. Moreover the great econ I’d Boom that had fuelled the last 300 years had come to an end. And that is before talk about the Black Death.

For the common people Frederick II, the most autocratic ruler of the High Middle Ages became a symbol of a lost order, a protector of the vulnerable. Legends emerged that he had not died but had ridden in full armour into the burning crater of Mount Aetna, where he still lives, waiting for the right time to free the people.

These stories gained ever more currency after the burning of the false Frederick in Wetzlar that I mentioned at the top of the episode. When his remaining followers dug through the ash of the pyre they found no bones, a clear sign that the almighty had rescued Frederick from the flames. He was clearly still around.

In the 14^th century the story coalesces with a number of medieval prophecies, some we have heard before. Here is how Oswald der Schreiber summarises the prophecy:

(quote) “In all countries a hard time sets in. A feud flares up between the two heads of Christendom, a fierce struggle begins. Many a mother must mourn her child, men and women alike must suffer. Rapine and arson go hand in hand, everyone is at everyone else’s throat, everyone harms everyone else in his person and his belongings, there is nobody but has cause to lament. But when suffering reaches such a pitch that nobody can ally it, then there appears by God’s will the emperor Frederick, so noble and so gentle….full of courage, men and women at once stream to together for the journey overseas. The Kingdom of God is promised to them. They come in crowds, each hurrying ahead of the other…

Peace reigns in all the land, fortresses threaten no longer, and there is no need to fear force any more. Nobody opposes the crusade to the withered tree. When the emperor hangs his shield upon it, the tree puts forth leaf and blossom. The Holy Sepulchre is freed, from now on no sword need to be drawn on its behalf.

The noble emperor restores the law for all men. All heathen realms do homage to the emperor. He overthrows the power of the Jews, though not by force of arms; their might is broken for ever and they submit without struggle. Of the domination of the clergy almost nothing remains. The High-Born prince dissolves the monasteries altogether, he gives the nuns to be wedded; I tell you they need to grow wine and corn for us.” (unquote)

The writers of these days following the black death are more than a hundred years removed from the day Frederick II had died. In a world where books are handwritten manuscripts and news are word of mouth, the prophets are getting their Fredericks mixed up. Initially the emperor people hoped for was clearly Frederick II but now it is just Frederick. Soon all these myths get transferred to the person of his grandfather. The Aetna is replaced by the Kyffhaeuser and the clean-shaven Frederick II with the bearded Barbarossa.

For almost 500 years Frederick II disappears from the peoples’ minds. As the romantic poets of the early 19^th century dream of the splendour of the medieval empire, Frederick II barely gets a mention.

That does not even change much in the late 19^th century. There is a lot of scholarly work done on Frederick II, but he does not feature in the famous debate between Heinrich von Sybel and Julius Ficker. Giesebrechts’s 6 volumes “Geschichte der Kaiserzeit”, the works that graced most German middle class households ends with the death of Barbarossa.

The problem with Frederick II was that he did not quite fit the Prussian demand on the medieval empire. Frederick II may be shaped into an enlightenment absolute monarch, anticlerical and tolerant on religion, a sort of forerunner of his namesake Frederick the Great. But his policy stance in Germany disqualified him. He had sacrificed centralised imperial power for wars in Italy, aiding the fragmentation and subsequent weakness of the Holy Roman Empire. So he was out for the protestant Prussians.

The Austrians also had little enthusiasm for Frederick II. They did like his supranational approach but could not embrace his lukewarm Catholicism and conflict with the papacy.

He may have not been embraced by the Germans, but he became a hero of the Italian Risorgimento. The things that disqualified him in the eyes of the Prussians and Austrians were exactly the things the Italians looked for. Fredericks reforms in the Kingdom of Sicily, his focus on justice and independent courts struck a chord with Italian writers in the late 18^th and early 19^th century, as did his opposition to the papacy. As Garibaldi and the House of Savoy embarked on Italian reunification, Frederick’s reign was painted as a the last previous attempt to unify Italy under one ruler and to break the worldly power of the pope. Frederick’s court of poets was celebrated for the first flowering of the Italian language in literature and art. As late as 1978 Italian schoolbooks stated that Frederick II aim was to unify the three Italies, the South, the Papal States and the Northern Italian Communes into one polity under his enlightened absolutist rule.

There is a story in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s diaries about his journey to Italy in the 1790s. He gets into a conversation with some locals who praise Frederick II and his enlightened absolutism. Goethe notes in his diary that he did not have the heart to tell them the Frederick II had just died the previous year. The great poet thinks they are talking about Frederick II the Great of Prussia – who else could they have meant? The Frederick II they and we talk about did not feature anywhere in Goethe’s consciousness. When Goethe comes to Palermo, neither the cathedral nor the imperial tombs gets mentioned at all.

So Frederick was left well alone as far as the Germans were concerned. When he appeared then not as a German, but as a European figure. Jacob Burkhardt the great Swiss historian described him as the first modern man, which was not meant as a compliment. Nietzsche lists him as one of the greatest figures in history, alongside Caesar, Alcibiades and Leonardo da Vinci men so far above their contemporaries, they are incomprehensible and beyond the judgement of mere men. But despite his admiration for the last Hohenstaufen emperor Nietzsche did not produce any major work or treatise to raise his profile.

That job was left to the George Kreis, a circle of young, exclusively male intellectuals around the poet Stefan George.

George was born in 1868. A precocious child of a lower middle-class family he had literary ambitions even as a teenager. He taught himself Norwegian because he wanted to read Ibsen in the original and did the same for Italian to be able to read his favourite renaissance poets, in particular Dante.

He thoroughly disliked the Germany of Kaiser Bill. The way he saw it, literary production was either celebrating the boorish nationalism of gunboat diplomacy and the search of a place in the sun, or it got bogged down in the gritty realism of the social divisions of the time. In his disgust he went travelling to England, Switzerland and France. In Paris he encountered the French symbolist poets, Verlaine and Mallarme who had a huge influence on him. Symbolists believed that poetry should be released from rigid conventions. They applied free highly personalised metaphors and images to create subjective feelings and intuitions in the reader. They had the idealised conviction that beyond the material world there was another plane of reality that could only be glimpsed through the responses to art.

What on god’s green earth am I talking about? What has French symbolist poetry got to do with a medieval emperor and German history. Bear with me, it hopefully will make sense in a moment.

Here we go, our poet Stefan George is coming back to Germany, head full of Fleurs du Mal and Aestheticism. He divides his time between Berlin, Munich and Heidelberg, founded a literary school of his own, the George Kreis, held together by the force of his personality. The George Kreis becomes a major force in the early 20^th century and several leading intellectuals were members or associated with it. They were aesthetes who replicated the world of ancient Greek philosophy, including the concept of sexual relationship between an older mentor and his youthful disciple. In 1904 George goes full Hadrian and declares that one of the youths he so desired, Maximilian Kronberger who had died aged 16 was a god and he wrote a whole cycle of poems to his glorification. Just to clarify, though George is clearly showing signs of paedophilia, there is no indication he ever acted on his impulses.

What the George Kreis actually believed, apart from the idea that Stefan George was der Meister, the master whose word was final and to be obeyed, is hard to grasp. The whole concept of Aestheticism was the idea that art operates on a different level to reality. The job of art was to generate an emotional sensation that transport the reader into a different realm of consciousness. This alternative reality was distinctly elitist and populated by literary and artistic geniuses. The George Kreis had no truck with the great unwashed and was unabashedly authoritarian.

Which brings me to the one vaguely political and highly controversial concept the George Kreis endorsed, the idea of a Secret Germany. This the “geheimes Deutschland” was some sort of egalitarian brotherhood of superior beings, past and present that represent the true Germany.

For them the sabre-rattling nationalism of the Wilhelmine society had nothing to do with the true Germany. Hence George and his acolytes were deeply opposed to the first World War as they feared a moral and military catastrophe, pretty much the one that materialised.

After the war, the circle expanded further as young men coming back from the front into a world of street fighting, rumours of a stab in the back and hyperinflation searched for an escape into this imaginary Secret Germany. One of their best known members was Friedrich Gundolf, a historian and literary critic, His main work, a biography of Goethe has all the hallmarks of the George Kreis. Rather than sticking close to the banal realities of the great poet’s life, Gundolf aimed to provide the reader with an emotional experience of Goethe and his works.

And this same concept, telling history not just “as it was” but also “as it felt” went for the other great biographical work coming out of the George Kreis, the biography of Frederick II by Ernst Kantorowicz, a work that will catapult the emperor from obscure subject of historical seminars to household name.

Ernst Kantorowicz or Eka as he wanted to be called had joined the George Kreis in 1920 when he was 25 years old. Not much in his past qualified him to write a seminal work of history.

He was born the son a wealthy Jewish family form Poznan. Poznan was and is an important Polish city and home to the graves of ancient polish rulers, including Boleslav the Brave. But at the time of his birth it had been part of Prussia for a hundred years following the division of Poland in 1793.

Young Ernst grew up as a fully assimilated member of the German-speaking elite in this majority Polish town. Eka attended the leading grammar school in Poznan together with the scions of Prussian officers and other members of the local upper classes. His family was lukewarm in the practice of their religion and some of the cousins had completely abandoned Jewish practices, without converting though. In his mind he was first and foremost German and then Jewish.

Like many members of his class across Europe, he volunteered within five days of the outbreak of World War I, aged just 19. He spent almost three years at the western front, gained an iron cross for bravery and was wounded twice. When he returned in 1918, Germany was in chaos. His hometown, Poznan was returned to the newly recreated state of Poland. There was resistance from the German inhabitants of Poznan, a military resistance Ernst Kantorowicz joined.

When the militia collapsed, Kantorowicz came to Berlin, where the November revolution were in full swing. Two republics had been declared in parallel, one was  the Weimar Republic and the other a Communist Republic declared by the Spartacists. There was open street fighting between the Spartacists and the ultra-right wing Freikorps. The fighting ends after the Freikorps murder of the Spartacist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Eka joined the Freikorps though his exact role is a bit vague. The next year we find him in Munich again joining a Freikorp that is overthrowing a left wing government in the state of Bavaria.

Most of Ernst Kantorowicz biography is not unusual. Jewish organisations had called upon their members to volunteer for the war, and they joined in disproportionally high numbers. Despite an ever intensifying antisemitism within the army, 21,000 Jewish soldiers were promoted to officer or petty officer. Ernst Kantorowicz was one of 18,000 Jewish soldiers who received the Iron Cross.  

Whether there were many jews in the Freikorps in the immediate aftermath of the war is not well researched so we cannot say how unusual this was. But again, his upbringing was that of an upper middle-class German who was nationalist, monarchist and firmly opposed to socialism.

Once things settle down, Eka goes to university in Heidelberg, mainly to study economics. His plan at that point is to join the family firm upon graduation. Whist in Heidelberg he is initiated into the George Kreis. He had met Friedrich Gundolf before through his sister who had married Arthur Salz another member of the George Kreis. He takes part in the esoteric discussions and falls very much under the spell of the Meister, even adopting his distinctive handwriting style. But academically he is nothing to write home about. He moved a bit off economics and writes his phd on economic history, though his dissertation broadly considered a bit “Meh”.

Which is why it is so surprising that Stefan George encourages him to write a biography of Frederick II, one of the select historic figures that populated the Pantheon of greats in his Secret Germany. Kantorowicz is not a historian at this point. He has not written any prose of note. And it is not that George did not have other great intellectuals he could have taken his idea to. But no, it is Ernst Kantorowicz he asks.

And Kantorowicz delivers. It takes him 3 years from what must have been a standing start given no material prior knowledge of the subject. And no precedents to follow. No one had ever published a full biography of Frederick II before his work comes out in 1927.

And when it comes out it creates a massive splash. The first thing that reviewers note is that there were no footnotes, none at all. And then there was the language. You heard me quoting some of his writing in previous episodes, but let me just take this example talking about the sixth crusade:

Quote “With full imperial panoply and accompanied by his retinue and friends, the banned and hence no longer in the community of the faithful emperor entered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre…Here, without the intermediary of the church, without bishop, without coronation mass, Frederick II, proud and unabashed, reached for the royal crown of holy Jerusalem . Striding to the altar of the Sepulchre he took the crown and placed it upon his head” (end quote)

The book is full of such vivid descriptions of personalities and of events. It was what the George Kreis strived for, telling it “as it felt” and thereby transporting the reader into another level where he could glimpse an image of a higher truth. Stefan George, whatever you think about him, was a master of the German language. He at times lived in Kantorowicz flat, had heavily edited the book and many phrases and sentences can be traced to his style, a style very different to historical scholarship.

The more controversial thing that many readers loved was the brazen celebration of Fredericks authoritarian rule. When Kantorowicz says that “he had reigned, ruled and raged in Italy for over a decade”, that was not a criticism. Neither was he disapproving when he titles the section about the restructuring of his kingdom as “The tyrant of Sicily”.

Kantorowicz was on the extreme right politically and he believed that a state should be ruled by an elite. Democracy, the rule of the people where his valet had the same vote as himself had no appeal to him. He celebrates Frederick as “the most intolerant emperor the West had ever produced”.

And this appealed to the large section of society who saw the Weimar Republic as a failed experiment, put in place by the allies and treasonous politicians who had signed the capitulation in 1918. There were many, the Nazis, the communists and many inbetween who saw dictatorship as the only chance for the country to get out of the position of political and economic weakness.

The section this book is criticised for most is the very last paragraph, where Kantorowicz summarises Frederick II and his significance as follows: (quote)

“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 can renew the “Empire.” …. The greatest Frederick is not yet redeemed, him his people knew not and sufficed not. “Lives and lives not,” the Sibyl’s word is not for the Emperor, but for the German People”. (unquote)

No doubt what Kantorowicz puts out here is the hope for a new emperor, who leads the Volk back to its rightful place. And that is why Norbert Cantor, one of the foremost medievalists said of Kantorowicz, that had he not been Jewish, he would have become a Nazi. Indeed the biography of Frederick II was very popular with the Nazis, Hitler is said to have read it twice, it was always on Goebbels bedside table. Mussolini received a copy as a gift.

Before I go into the discussion of whether or not one could or should read and quote Kantorowicz, let me quickly bring you the tale of his life after the publication of the book.

The biography of Frederick II became an absolute bestseller. It was the most intensely discussed history book of its time, in large part because it was as much about the current state of Germany as it was about medieval times. And it ran into strong opposition amongst academic historians. They regarded the style as unprofessional. The established way historical scholarship was to be presented was to “tell the story as it was” as Leopold von Ranke had stipulated. Every event described had to be proven by sources and where there were no sources, it had to be left open. There was no room to imagine events. They also objected to Kantorowicz use of liturgical texts and prophecies to help the reader to get into the mindset of the times.

So Kantorowicz spent the next few years writing the appendix to his biography, an incredibly detailed set of references for the main book. This appendix is still seen today as an impressive work of scholarship and an important guide for anyone diving into the details of Frederick IIs time. It did however not always prove the veracity of some of his more lurid descriptions, including the one about the coronation in Jerusalem I quoted before.

In 1932, once the appendix was published and his academic credentials confirmed did he become a professor at the university of Frankfurt, still very young at only 37.

 This did not last long as he was sent on leave shortly after the Nazis took power in 1933. He would have been dismissed under the new race laws for being Jewish, was it not for a clause in the law protecting Jews who had received the Iron Cross or similar commendations. Still he was not allowed to teach, though he did manage to hold one seminar in 1935 talking about the Secret Germany of Stefan George and that it had nothing in common with the “current political system”. He did not dare to name the NSDAP and Hitler by name, but still this was one of the few and some say only lecture at any German university criticising the Nazis after they had taken power.

In 1938, shortly after the Reichskristallnacht he fled first to England and then to the US. Attempts to rescue his mother and sister failed largely due to the lack of funds needed to meet Swiss visa criteria. They perished in Theresienstadt.

He settles in the US, first as a professor at Berkely and then at Princeton. After the war he writes to his cousin that “Germany is now as foreign to me as ancient Greece” and that he “wishes to have nothing more to do with the place”.

But he will bring Germany back one more time. In 1949 the university of Berkely in order to pre-empt an intervention by the House Unamerican Activities Committee asks its staff to amend their oaths of office. We are in the middle of McCarthy’s witch hunt when many intellectuals, often Europeans, lose their right to work and fall into poverty. The oath the university proposes as a pre-emptive measure to keep the zealots out of campus was comparatively mild: (quote) “I do not believe in and am not a member of, nor do I support any party or organisation that believes in, advocates or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government by force or by any unconstitutional means”. (unquote)

When this gets discussed in the senate of the University, Kantorowicz, the man who had fought the communists in the streets of Berlin in 1919 rose up and declared his refusal to sign this oath. He said referring to the process of Hitler taking control of the state: (quote) “This is the way it begins. The first oath is so gentle that one can scarcely notice anything at which to take exception. The next oath is stronger! The time to resist is at the beginning; the oath to refuse to take is the first oath”. (end quote)

His refusal to take the oath cost him his job, something he could ill afford as his fortune had been lost and only his taste for expensive suits and food was left. He fought his case through the courts and won, though by that time he had been lucky enough to already have moved on to Princeton.

If you have listened to this point, first up, thank you. This was probably not what you expected and what the podcast had been about so far. And now I guess you are wondering two things, a) why did Dirk find this story so important and b) why did he use such a controversial source in the podcast.

Let’s start with a). What makes this an important story is that I sometimes feel the way people look at the interwar period is one where there is black and white. Protagonists are painted either as Nazis and their sympathisers and enablers or as victims or as resistance fighters. The reality was a lot more shades of grey or brown.

In the 1920s Kantorowicz was as far right as you could get. As he said himself, to the right of him is only the wall. He was authoritarian, elitist and antidemocratic. But was he a Nazi or at least an enabler? You sure can argue that his glorification of authoritarian rule and his longing for a messianic redeemer had contributed in a small way to the acceptance of Nazi ideology.

Was he a victim? Certainly, though he escaped the worst of the suffering

Was he a resistance fighter?, well in a small way he was. His lecture in 1935 was an audacious act of resistance in a brutal dictatorship. The biography of Fredrick II and the ideas of the George Kreis influence the July plotter around Claus Schenck von Staufffenberg who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944.

He was all of the above, villain, victim and resistance fighter. Most Germans in the 1920s could not imagine where their exaggerated nationalism and anti democratic stance would lead. Once he had seen what happens when ideologues take over, he knew he had no more excuses and that  resistance was not optional.

And that gets me to b), why I quote him extensively. And the answer is because he is an amazing writer. He is able to conjure up the whole scenario before your eyes in a way only the best writers can. And I am with him when it comes to his approach to history writing – yes it is important to stick to the facts and I do my best to do that. But he did not write a piece of scholarship but a piece of historical writing. And for that it is important to create the stage on which the listener and reader can experience the events taking place, what people think and feel when they see the emperor speak. There is not much information about that and sometimes one has to conjure this up from sources about similar events. In the end this is what compelling history writing is, bringing the events of the past to life and Kantorowicz does that incredibly well.

But one has to use his writing carefully. He is thea fugu, the Japanese blowfish of history writers, incredibly delicious once you carefully remove the poisonous inner organs.

And finally there is also a personal component. When Levi Roach told me the story of Ernst Kantorowicz in the interview he kindly gave me some weeks ago I went back to my uncle to ask whether he knew the book. It turns out my grandfather had read it in the 1920s and it left such an impression that he took his sons to Puglia in the 1950s on some memorable trip. 40 years ago my father did the same with my brother and me, an experience that I have never forgotten and left me with an enduring fascination with Frederick II, “the seducer, the deceiver, the radiant, the merry, the ever-young, the stern and mighty judge, the scholar, the sage.”

That is now really the end of Season 3. All that is left to do is Q&A probably the week after next. You have sent a lot of questions and some do require a bit of research so maybe patience is required.  

After that there may be a bit of a break as I am ploughing through the materials for next season. I started some weeks ago but did not get anywhere near to the level wanted to get to. We will see how long this takes, but hopefully not too long.

Thanks a lot for listening, for your continued support in particular from the patrons and your understanding. Speak to you all soon!