German lawyer, writer, publicist and literary scholar of Jewish origin, who also published works under the pseudonym Helmuth Campe.
Before 1933 Kantorowicz was the editor of Vossische Zeitung, which opposed the emerging Nazis. He joined the KPD (communist party) in 1931 and had to flee to France in 1933 from the Nazis. He continued to fight against National Socialism (Nazism), published articles in magazines, worked on the Braunbuch in 1933, and became general secretary of the newly formed “Association of German Writers Abroad”. He founded the “German Liberty Library” and fought against the Franco regime in the Spanish Civil War. In 1941 Kantorowicz escaped to the United States from the Nazis.
In 1946 he returned to Germany and founded the Berlin magazine Ost und West. Beiträge zu kulturellen und politischen Fragen der Zeit (East and West: Contributions to cultural and political issues of the time). He joined the SED (socialist party) in the GDR and became a professor of new German literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Here he made a name for himself as an explorer of exile literature and editor of the works of Heinrich Mann (12 vols., 1951–1956).
In August 1957 Kantorowicz fled to the Federal Republic of Germany from impending arrest. He left behind a library of about 3,500 volumes, including 44 books from his summer house in Bansin. They were expropriated in 1957 and handed over to the German State Library. (Until 2010, the stock was stored unprocessed in 62 boxes. Finally, it was developed by the Department of Historical Prints of the Berlin State Library and made accessible to the public).
In 1971, among other autobiographical works, he published his book Exil in Frankreich. Merkwürdigkeiten und Denkwürdigkeiten (Exile in France: Oddities and Memorabilia).
Kantorowicz married three times. He died on 27 March 1979 in Hamburg at age 79.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)