Ernst Fraenkel was born into a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany on December 26, 1898. Having served in the German Army during World War I, he thereby avoided the anti-Semitic persecutions of the mid-1930s.  But in 1938, Fraenkel, seeing the writing on the wall, emigrated to England and then, in 1939, to the United States.  His intellectual journey is significant for today.
In 1941, a manuscript he had written while in Germany, entitledÂ
The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, was published by Oxford University Press. The book is visceral.  It was written on the increasingly ugly tarmac of the Third Reich. And its thesis suggests a haunting parallel to what we see in the contemporary American crisis.Â