ABSTRACT
Percy Ernst Schramm, one of the major researchers of the medieval state and the founder of systematic research into the iconography of rulership, was born on 14 October 1894 in Hamburg. A scion of a prominent Hamburg burgher family, which could look back to at least nine generations of leading citizens in the Hanseatic city—Schramm’s father, Max, was mayor—Schramm grew up in elegant, Anglophile (witness his first name) patrician wealth. That idyll was destroyed by World War I, a shock that perhaps made Schramm choose as a motto (now at the head of his unpublished memoirs) the words of T.S. Eliot: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” (Murder in the Cathedral, Act II).
