18.1.Didi Huberman

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Warburg's Haunted House Georges Didi-Huberman Shane Lillis Common Knowledge, Volume 18, Issue 1, Winter 2012, pp. 50-78 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article Access Provided by UNICAMP Universidade Estadual de Campinas at 01/16/13 7:28PM GMT http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ckn/summary/v018/18.1.didi-huberman.html

Transcript of 18.1.Didi Huberman

Page 1: 18.1.Didi Huberman

Warburg's Haunted House

Georges Didi-HubermanShane Lillis

Common Knowledge, Volume 18, Issue 1, Winter 2012, pp. 50-78 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by UNICAMP Universidade Estadual de Campinas at 01/16/13 7:28PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ckn/summary/v018/18.1.didi-huberman.html

Page 2: 18.1.Didi Huberman

WARBURG’S HAUNTED HOUSE

Georges Didi- Huberman

Translated by Shane Lillis

We could legitimately regard the Mnemosyne Atlas of Aby Warburg as a tool for “sampling,” by means of juxtaposed images, the chaos of history. It would be a matter of producing, through the atlas’s black plates studded with figures of all kinds, transverse- and cross- sections of chaos, en route to finding new ways of thinking about social and cultural temporality. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari give us a language in which to index the philosophical power and audaciousness — the “superior empiricism” — of Warburg’s project: “It is always a matter of defeat-ing chaos by a secant plane that crosses it,” they write, adding that “it is as if one were casting a net, but the fisherman always risks being swept away and finding himself in the open sea.”1 In other words, Warburg’s aptitude for the astra (con-cepts) always brought him in proximity to the monstra (chaos).

Common Knowledge 18:1

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1456881

English translation © 2010 by Shane B. Lillis

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An earlier version of this text appears as part of an essay, “Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science,” published in the cata-log of the exhibition Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back, organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (November 26, 2010 – March 28, 2011) in collaboration with Sammlung Falckenberg of Hamburg and ZKM Museum für Neue Kunst of Karlsruhe.

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 203.

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2. Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Litera-ture, trans. Patrice Edouard Charvet (London: Penguin, 2006), 237.

3. August Sander, Face of Our Time (Munich: Schirmer Mosel, 2008).

4. For “planes of immanence [or consistency],” see Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Urzone, 2001); Deleuze and Félix

Guattari, Mille Plateaux, vol. 2 of Capitalisme et Schizo-phrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1980).

5. Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: Gesammelte Schriften, II – 1, ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink, 2nd rev. ed. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), 21 (pl. 4), 25 (pl. 6), 27 (pl. 7), 29 (pl. 8), 125 (pl. 75), 129 (pl. 77).

6. Cf. Georges Didi- Huberman, La Ressemblance informe ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995), 333 – 83.

Caught in the pincers between his intellectual ambition — which was to forge a Kulturwissenschaft encompassing every human science in one historical discipline — and the intrinsic modesty of his attention to singular cases and the details of philological erudition, Warburg’s project can be understood only in terms of its aims. The Mnemosyne Atlas stands between two horizons that its author evoked or invoked, without ever, or almost ever, naming them. Further back up the line, we find the horizon of the Enlightenment and its Romantic turning point: Goya, or rather Baudelaire speaking about Goya, from the per-spective of his “sampling of chaos” — though it is Goethe, finally, whose notion of affinity opened up ways to rethink the practices of observing, anthologiz-ing, cross- checking, and collecting that would be used in Warburg’s atlas.2 Fur-ther down the line, among Warburg’s contemporaries who were (more or less) unknown to him, we have August Sander with his atlas, Face of Our Time, Walter Benjamin with his “dialectical images,” and Sigmund Freud with his magisterial way of envisaging the power of the monstra.3 All of these, and others as well at that time, sampled chaos and retrieved visual sections from it, in the way that an archaeologist exhumes evidence in packets that are then made visible on what Deleuze has termed planes of consistency (or immanence).4 It was in this spirit that Goya, through the power of his etchings, inscribed Disparates, Caprichos, and Desastres across the pediment of modernity. The Disparates demonstrate the art of sampling the dispars — chaos in space. Warburg does so too (and includes the playful or Witz dimension of chaos) when he risks bringing together, on the same plate, a sarcophagus and an aerial photograph, a dancing nymph and a dying old man, a small bronze coin and a triumphal arch, a bust of a child and a souterrain arranged for sacrifices, a biblical scene and an anatomy lesson, the monument to Hindenburg and an advertisement for toilet paper.5 Warburg’s practice pur-sues the kind of knowledge obtainable through montage — the nonstandard kind recommended, practiced, and theorized in the same period by Benjamin in his Arcades and Georges Bataille in his journal Documents.6

The Mnemosyne Atlas, moreover, could be leafed through as a collection of Caprichos, presented explicitly as a sampling of the chaos in individual psyches and collective imaginations. There are almost as many “monsters of reason” in Warburg’s atlas as there are in Goya’s series: fearsome divinities of the ancient

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7. Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 15 (pl. 1), 19 (pl. 3), 25 (pl. 6), 35 (pl. 22), 55 (pl. 32), 69 (pl. 39), 87 (pl. 47), 103 (pl. 56), 105 (pl. 57).

8. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “Le surréalisme: Le dernier instantané de l’intelligentsia européenne,” trans. Mau-rice de Gandillac, in Oeuvres, II (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 113 – 34.

9. Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 131 – 33.

10. Cf. Charlotte Schoell- Glass, Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus: Kulturwissenschaft als Geistespolitik (Frank-furt: Fischer, 1998), 233 – 46; “Aby Warburg’s Late Com-ments on Symbol and Ritual,” Science in Context 12.4 (1999): 621 – 42; “ ‘Serious Issues’: The Last Plates of War-burg’s Picture Atlas Mnemosyne,” in Art History as Cul-tural History: Warburg’s Projects, ed. Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam: G and B Arts International, 2001), 183 – 208; Wolfram Pichler and Gufrun Swaboda, “Gli spazi di

Oriental religions, titanomachias and psychomachias, female creatures with sev-eral breasts, monstrous serpents, hybrid creatures of the zodiac, deformed beings dancing together, cruel and proliferating metamorphoses, sadistic eroticism, diz-zying falls, grotesque heads, and other multiform personifications of the night-mare of reason.7 Walter Benjamin found that the surrealists took the monstra seriously and that they sought, in their own way — and in the same period — to make out an improbable inventory of the movements of the soul inscribed in movements of desire and of the body.8 The theoretical lesson common to these authors, who are nonetheless very different from one another, is that all knowl-edge of the disparate brings into play the very structure, as well as the montage character, of the images of thought.

And finally, the Mnemosyne Atlas works like a collection of Desastres: the play of the astra and the monstra takes account of the cruelest and most violent aspects of human history. The samples of spatial (or figural) chaos bear witness to a psychic chaos with historical or political incarnations. For knowledge that comes through re- montage always reflects on the de- montage of time in the tragic history of society. I am thinking in particular of the last plates of Mnemos-yne, where Warburg arranged photographic documents of the Lateran Accords, approved by the tyrant Mussolini and Pope Pius XI (fig. 2).9 Of course, in these montages, the salient question is one of cultural survivals. The montages operate like transverse sections in the longue durée of relations between power and image (for example, the throne of Saint Peter visible in Warburg’s plate 79 refers subtly to the effigy of the sovereign already visible in plate 1). But the montages also treat the longue durée of the theologico- political paradigm: Eucharist, which is the principal theme of plate 79, refers, in its own way, to the divinatory livers in plate 1 (figs. 1 – 2). Both are mysterious and mystical props of belief and power.

“Dislocation of the World” and “Tragedy of Culture”There is also the issue, in this symptomatology, of political prophecy. In 1929 Hitler’s Mein Kampf reached record sales in Hamburg, and the last plate in Mne-mosyne displays the signs of a long, as well as recent, history of anti- Semitism, political propaganda, and upheaval.10 Here we are, once again (and despite differences of objects and styles), in the neighborhood of Warburg’s anxious

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Warburg: Topografie storico- culturali, autobiografiche e mediali nell’atlante Mnemosyne,” Quaderni Warburg Ita-lia 1 (2003): 99 – 105, 114 – 21; Georges Didi- Huberman, “L’image brûle,” in Penser par les images: Autour des travaux de Georges Didi- Huberman, ed. Laurent Zimmermann (Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2006), 24 – 38.

11. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomènes et variantes des ‘thèses sur le concept d’histoire,’ ” Écrits français (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 350.

12. Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield, Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles: Ein Bilderbuch (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1929; Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973).

contemporaries — in this case, Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Tucholsky, and John Heartfield. Benjamin’s magisterial “organization of pessimism” through images,11 Tucholsky and Heartfield’s striking political montages in their Bil-derbuch titled Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, published at the same time as Warburg was preparing the last plates of his atlas,12 and Brecht’s several atlases of

Figure 1. Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 1927–29, Warburg Institute Archive,

plate 1. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

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images on the tragedies of contemporary history, composed from a communist point of view, are all strikingly relevant projects.13

It is no coincidence that Brecht, too, invoked a cultural longue dureé — from Homer or Aeschylus to Voltaire or Goethe — in order to substantiate his strik-

Figure 2. Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 1927 – 29,

Warburg Institute Archive, plate 79. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

13. Cf. Georges Didi- Huberman, Quand les images pren-nent position: L’oeil de l’histoire, 1 (Paris: Minuit, 2009).

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14. Bertolt Brecht, “Exercices pour comédiens,” trans. Jean- Marie Valentin, in L’Art du comédien: Écrits sur le théâtre (Paris: L’Arche, 1999), 121; translation modified.

15. Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 11 (pl. B), 17 – 23 (pl. 2 – 6), 37 – 45 (pl. 23 – 26), 49 – 51 (pl. 28 – 30), 77 (pl. 42), 103 (pl. 56).

16. Cf. Salvatore Settis, “Pathos und Ethos, Morphologie und Funktion,” Vorträge aus dem Warburg- Haus 1 (1997): 31 – 73.

17. Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne: Grundbegriffe II (Lon-don: Warburg Institute Archive, 1928 – 29), III.102.3 and III.102.4., 25, 80, etc.

18. Cf. Martin Warnke, “ ‘Der Leidschatz der Menschheit wird humaner Besitz,’ ” Der Menschenrechte des Auges: Über Aby Warburg (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1980), 113 – 86.

ing formula, according to which war, and the “dislocation of the world” or the “world out of joint” (die Welt aus den Fugen), is the bottom- line “subject of art” (das Thema der Kunst):

The dislocation of the world: that is the subject of art. It is impossible to affirm that, without disorder, there would be no art, nor that there could be one: we know of no world that is not disorder. No matter what the universities whisper to us regarding Greek harmony, the world of Aeschylus was full of combat and terror, and so were those of Shake-speare and of Homer, of Dante and of Cervantes, of Voltaire and of Goethe. However pacifistic [art] has been said to be, it speaks of wars, and whenever art makes [a peace treaty] with the world, it is always signed with a world at war.14

A world at war? Should we not read the history of art, first of all, as a history of forms? Warburg’s atlas did not neglect this point of view and indeed can be regarded as a collection of diagrams for visually sorting the world, its infinite variability and formal invention: Disparates of circular forms and frontal walls, fluid movements and tabular arrangements, horizontal confrontations and verti-cal falls. . . .15 But Warburg, the founder of an anthropology of images and an iconology of their “intervals,” referred any formal singularity to the play or con-flict of corporeal, psychological, and cultural movements. Hence the importance of those gestures and Pathosformeln whose constellations are displayed by the atlas like so many Caprichos or psychomachias — those powers of the imagination at the crossroads between madness and reason, pathos and ethos.16 The history of images according to Warburg must be thought of as a tragic story that always comes back to a point between the worst of the monstra and the best of the astra, between suffering and sophrosyne, between dislocation and re- montage, in order to make a transverse- or cross- section in chaos, which is to say — using Warburg’s own term — a “thought space” (Denkraum).

There is, therefore, no form that is not, whether explicitly or implicitly, the response to a war or, in any case, to historical pathos.17 The treasury of forms is always, however cruel this conjunction of words may seem, a “treasury of suf-ferings” (Leidschatz).18 Hence the anxious nature and melancholic roots of the

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19. Cf. Konrad Hoffmann, “Angst und Methode nach Warburg: Erinnerung als Veränderung,” in Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell- Glass (Weinheim: VCH- Acta Humaniora, 1991), 261 – 67; Bernd Villhauer, Aby Warburgs Theorie der Kultur. Detail und Sinnhorizont (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), 112 – 14; Marco Bertozzi, Il detective melanconico e altri saggi filosofici (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2008), 95 – 137.

20. Walter Benjamin, Origine du drame baroque allemand, trans. Sibylle Muller (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 179.

21. Cf. Roland Kany, Mnemosyne als Programme: Geschichte, Erinnerung und die Andacht zum Unbedeutenden im Werk von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin (Tübingen: Max Nie-meyer Verlag, 1987), 179 – 85; Jochen Becker, “Ursprung so wie Zerstörung: Sinnbild und Sinngebung bei War-burg und Benjamin,” in Allegorie und Melancholie, ed. Willem van Reijen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 64 – 89; Marianne Schuller, “Bilder — Schriften zum Gedächtnis: Freud, Warburg, Benjamin: Eine Konstellation,” Inter-nationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 2.1 (1993): 73 – 95; Mat-thew Rampley, “From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’s Theory of Art,” Art Bulletin 79.1 (1997): 41 – 55; Rampley, “Archives of Memory: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas,” in The Optic of Wal-ter Benjamin, vol. 3 De- , dis- , ex- , ed. Alex Coles (London: Black Dog, 1999), 94 – 117; Rampley, The Remembrance

of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 73 – 100; Beatrice Hanssen, “Portrait of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg, Panofsky),” MLN 114.5 (December 1999): 991 – 1013; Adi Efal, “Warburg’s ‘Pathos Formula’ in Psychoanalytic and Benjaminian Contexts,” Assaph, no. 5 (2000): 221 – 38; Villhauer, Aby Warburgs Theorie der Kultur, 87 – 103; Cor-nelia Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern: Symbol und dialek-tisches Bild in Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne- Atlas und Walter Benjamins Passagen- Werk (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004), 31 – 127 and 246 – 81.

22. Cf. Michael Löwy, Juifs hétérodoxes: Messianisme, romantisme, utopie (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2010).

23. Klaus Berger, “Souvenirs sur Aby Warburg,” Trafic, no. 45 (2003): 100.

24. Cf. Kurt Forster, “Aby Warburg’s History of Art: Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images,” Daedalus 105.1 (1976): 169 – 76; Marianne Schuller, “Unterwegs. Zum Gedächtnis: Nach Aby Warburg,” in Denkräume: Zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft, ed. Sylvia Baumgart, Gotlind Birkle, and Menthchild Fend (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1993), 149 – 60; Ulrich Port, “ ‘Kathar-sis des Leidens’: Aby Warburgs ‘Pathosformeln’ und ihre konzeptionellen Hintergründe in Rhetorik, Poetik und Tragödientheorie,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Litera-turwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 73 (1999): 5 – 42.

“nameless science” that Warburg invented.19 Hence too the affinity of his under-taking with that of Benjamin, who wrote of history as the history of universal suffering (Geschichte als Leidensgeschichte der Welt).20 Many aspects of their think-ing would require retrieval and comparison for us to establish the scale and depth of this affinity and to restore Warburg’s work,21 not only to the context of the German “science of the mind,” but also to the offbeat constellation of heterodox Jewish thinkers to which, however discretely, he fully belongs.22

In an apt and moving testimony, Klaus Berger described Warburg as a man who, in spite of his humor and constant punning, saw everything from the per-spective (or on the “plane of consistency”) of pain: “He never said: this is right, this is wrong. He said: this is veiled by suffering.”23 His theory of Pathosformeln was founded on his thinking — perhaps Attic, perhaps Nietzschean — about tragedy; his ideas about memory were aimed at a psychohistorical theory of the conflicts between the monstra and the astra.24 Ernst Cassirer, in his magnificent funeral eulogy for Warburg in 1929, perfectly expressed how his friend sought to understand forms in terms of forces — “configuring energies” — that were in turn seen as “in the center of the storm and of the whirlwind of life itself ”:

He did not firstly cast his eyes upon works of art, but he felt and saw the great configuring energies behind the works. . . . Where others had seen

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25. Ernst Cassirer, “Éloge funèbre du professeur Aby M. Warburg,” in Oeuvres, XII, Écrits sur l’art (Paris: Le Cerf, 1995), 55 – 56.

26. Ernst Cassirer, Logique des sciences de la culture (Paris: Le Cerf, 1991), 211 – 12. See also Georg Simmel, “Le con-

cept et la tragédie de la culture,” in La Tragédie de la culture et autres essais (Paris: Éditions Rivages, 1988), 177 – 215.

27. Carl George Heise, Persönliche Erinnerungen an Aby Warburg (New York: Eric M. Warburg, 1947), 42 – 44.

determined and delimited forms, self- contained forms, he saw moving forces; he saw what he called the great Pathosformel that Antiquity had created and left as a lasting patrimony to humanity. . . . But this capacity was not only the gift of the researcher, nor that of the artist. He delved here into his own, most deeply felt experience. In himself, he had expe-rienced and learned what he was capable of grasping and interpreting, from the center of his own being and his own life. “Early on he read the harsh words — he was familiar with suffering, familiar with death.” But from the heart of this suffering there came the force and the incom-parable particularity of the gaze. Rarely has a researcher more deeply dissolved his deepest suffering into a gaze and thereby liberated it. . . . Warburg was not a scientist and a researcher in the impassive sense in which he might have contemplated, from on high, the playing out of life, or delighted aesthetically in the mirror of art. He always remained in the center of the storm and the whirlwind of life itself; he penetrated into its ultimate and deepest tragic problems.25

Cassirer here obviously refers to two crucial and inseparable episodes in War-burg’s life. The “most deeply felt experience” of which Cassirer speaks is War-burg’s madness, which kept him enclosed, howling, and powerless, between the walls of the Kreuzlingen sanatorium. Cassirer was one of the very few to visit Warburg in the asylum (on April 10, 1924) and therefore knew at firsthand the visceral war that Warburg had to wage against his most intimate monstra.

But Cassirer did not forget the historical context in which this conflict took place. That Warburg kept himself “in the center of the storm” meant that his monstra, however deep, were not merely subjective but cultural as well. He might not have had his “visceral war” to wage, had there not been the social, obsidional, and sidereal war that Warburg, between 1914 and 1918, experienced intensely to the point of madness. It is no coincidence that in the midst of World War II, in 1942, Cassirer would devote himself to a study of the “tragedy of culture,” which is a notion, found in Hegel and Goethe as well as in Georg Simmel’s classic essay, that converges naturally with the anthropology of images dear to Warburg.26 Like Cassirer, Carl Georg Heise insisted on Warburg’s “indescribable suffering” in the face of what he called the Weltkatastrophe.27 Warburg carried the war on his shoulders as a pagan Atlas or a Hebraic tzaddik would do: some 9 million dead and 21 million injured — crippled, disfigured — surrounded the historian of the Nachleben in 1918 (fig. 3). It is likely that Warburg grasped, as he always did with the episodes of art history, the events of the war from the perspective of a terrify-

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28. See Enzo Traverso, À feu et à sang: De la guerre civile européenne, 1914 – 1945 (Paris: Stock, 2007), 9 – 21, 35 – 127.

29. Cf. Georges- Henri Soutou, L’Or et le sang: Les buts de guerre économiques de la Première Guerre mondiale (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 33, 104, 120 – 27, 373 – 76, 743 – 44; Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth- Century Odyssey

of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York: Vintage, 1993), 141 – 90; Niall Ferguson, “Max Warburg and German Politics: The Limits of Financial Power in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Wilhelminism and Its Legacy: German Moder-nities, Imperialism, and the Meaning of Reform, 1890 – 1930, ed. Geoff Eley and James Retallack (Oxford: Bergham, 2003), 185 – 201.

ingly long durée, that of a “European civil war” in which the monstra threatened all human life and culture.28 That Warburg should sometimes have imagined that he was responsible for this war should not be interpreted solely in terms of his madness. Warburg, the man of culture, was at the center of a family of bankers who participated directly in the goals of the German economic war while acting, at the same time, on the level of global finance.29

Hence World War I, that tragedy for culture, was equally, in Aby War-burg’s eyes, a tragedy in culture. We can imagine, for example, the upheaval he must have felt at the embrace of the word Kultur by German military pro-paganda, beginning in 1914, in contrast to the word Zivilisation — the former meaning the “eternal values” of Germanic culture, and the latter the Anglo- French world of technological and economic utilitarianism. We can imagine, too, how Warburg, who understood culture in terms of spatial and temporal migra-tions (Wanderungen), would have regarded the aggressive closure of borders, the

Figure 3. Ernst

Friedrich, Krieg dem

Kriege! (Berlin,

Internationales

Kriegsmuseum,

1924), 214

(“Gueule cassée”).

Photo: Georges

Didi- Huberman

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30. Cf. Jürgen Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society, 1914 – 1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Christophe Prochasson, “La guerre en ses cul-tures,” in Histoire culturelle de la Grande Guerre, ed. Jean- Jacques Becker (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), 255 – 71; Prochasson, 1914 – 1918. Retours d’expériences (Paris: Tal-landier, 2008), 51 – 67.

31. See Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kan-sas, 1982); Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, eds., Euro-pean Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914 – 18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Vincenzo Cali, Gustavo Corni, and Giuseppe Ferrandi, eds., Gli intellettuali e la Grande guerra (Bolo-gna: Società Editrice Il Mulino, 2000); Philippe Soulez, ed., Les Philosophes et la guerre de 14 (Saint- Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1988); Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers dur-ing the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1996), 78 – 105; Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie: Les intellectuels et la Première Guerre mondiale, 1910 – 1919 (Paris: La Décou-verte, 1996); Prochasson, 1914 – 1918: Retours d’expériences, 273 – 361; John A. Moses, “Pan- Germanism and the Ger-man Professors, 1914 – 1918,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 15.3 (1969): 45 – 60; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ed., Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Künstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: R. Olden-bourg Verlag, 1996); Peter Jelavich, “German Culture in

the Great War,” in Roshwald and Stites, European Culture in the Great War, 32 – 57; B. Vom Brocke, “La guerra degli intellettuali tedeschi,” in Cali, Corni, and Ferrandi, Gli intellettuali e la Grande guerra, 373 – 409.

32. Pierre Renouvin, La Crise européenne et la Première Guerre mondiale (1904 – 1918) (Paris: Presses Universi-taires de France, 1969), 5 – 130.

33. Paul Valéry, “La crise de l’esprit,” in Oeuvres, I, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 988 – 1000.

34. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “Critique de la violence,” in Oeuvres, I (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 210 – 43; Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, La Dialectique de la raison: Fragments philosophiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 13 – 20; Hannah Arendt, “La crise de la culture: Sa portée sociale et politique,” in La Crise de la culture: Huit exercices de pen-sée politique (1972; Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 253 – 88; Leo Strauss, “La crise de notre temps,” in Nihilisme et politique (2001; Paris: Payot and Rivages, 2004), 81 – 117. Cf. Corine Pelluchon, Leo Strauss: Une autre raison, d’autres Lumières. Essai sur la crise de la rationalité contemporaine (Paris: Vrin, 2005), 7 – 39.

35. Christophe Didier, Orages de papier: 1914 – 1918 (Paris: Somogy, 2008), 18.

36. For generals works, see Léon Riegel, Guerre et lit-térature: Le bouleversement des consciences dans la littéra-ture romanesque inspirée par la Grande Guerre (littératures française, anglo- saxonne et allemande), 1910 – 30 (Paris:

development of trench warfare, and the immobility of the front lines, which he recorded, sometimes with a fevered anxiety, in his notebooks. The 1914 – 18war was both a Kulturkrieg and a Bilderkrieg, mobilizing entire civil societies but above all the “cultural elites.”30 A great number of intellectuals joined the two fronts of the conflict, more often than not with a patriotic and nationalist energy (to which even Warburg contributed).31 When discussing the “European crisis” that Pierre Renouvin has diagnosed,32 we should mention foremost the “crisis of the mind” to which Paul Valéry pointed in 191933 (and which, in the era of World War II, was even more ruthlessly analyzed by Jewish thinkers of the next generation, such as Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss).34 The scale of this psychomachia may be measured, for instance, by the prodigious quantity of publications, testimonies, reflections, and narratives devoted to the war as it was actually happening. The critic Julius Rab, who pro-duced several anthologies during the war, estimated that there were 50,000 “war poems” sent every morning to the German newspapers during World War I. Toward the end of the first year of the conflict, some two hundred volumes of Kriegslyrik had been published in Germany,35 to say nothing of the war narra-tives produced, in which the entire spectrum of styles, from factual testimony to novels, was to be found in vast quantities.36

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0 The intrinsic content of the psychomachia is difficult to formulate, but, given Warburg’s arguments for a “methodological broadening of boundaries,” we could say that a “parallel war” was being waged in Europe over the “boundaries of thought.”37 Numerous writers and intellectuals sought to reclose boundaries that had already begun to open and to join the fighting in the trenches, where perspectives were entrenched on the historiographical front lines. In his fiction Ernst Jünger, for example, glorifies “immemorial warriors” and justifies combat as an “inner experience” and as the advent of a “new world,” while celebrating the “dark magic” of a “total mobilization” guided by the “spirit of heroism.”38 Even after the war, he argued that the “essential thing is the saving of a particular nomos, a mode of being that affirms itself in culture and that we protect in com-bat.”39 Jünger’s ideas are close to those of Carl Schmitt on sovereignty and on the “nomos of the earth,” which must be defended from any invasion, any contami-nation, and every enemy.40 Likewise Oswald Spengler, in his preface to the first edition of The Decline of the West (dated December 1917), hoped that his “book might not be entirely unworthy of the military sacrifices of Germany.”41

Warburg, on the other hand, extended a hand to intellectual friends in countries at war with Germany, for instance, through the publication of a Rivista

Klincksieck, 1978); Jean Kaempfer, Poétique du récit de guerre (Paris: José Corti, 1998), 211 – 73; Nicolas Beau-pré, Écrire en guerre, écrire la guerre: France, Allemagne, 1914 – 20 (Paris: CNRS, 2006). For works about wartime France, see Jean Vic, La Littérature de guerre: Manuel méthodique et critique des publications de langue française (août 1914 – août 1916) (Paris: Payot, 1918); André Ducasse, La Guerre racontée par les combattants: Anthologie des écrivains du front (1914 – 18) (Paris: Flammarion, 1932); Maurice Rieuneau, Guerre et révolution dans le roman français de 1919 à 1939 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 2000), 11 – 215; Leonard V. Smith, “Le corps et la survie d’une identité dans les écrits de guerre français,” Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales 55.1 (2000): 111 – 33; Bernard Giovanangeli, ed., Écrivains combattants de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Bernard Giovanangeli- Ministère de la Défense, 2004); Prochas-son, 1914 – 1918: Retours d’expériences, 161 – 272. For works about wartime Germany, see Maurice Boucher, Le Roman allemand (1914 – 1933) et la crise de l’esprit: Mythologie des inquiétudes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961); Klaus Vondong, ed., Kriegserlebnis: Der Erste Weltkrieg in der literarischen Gestaltung und symbolischen Deutung der Nationen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980); Hermann Korte, Der Krieg in der Lyrik des Expressionismus: Studien zur Evolution eines literarischen Themas (Bonn: Bou-vier, 1981); Hans- Harald Müller, Der Krieg und die Schrift-steller: Der Kriegsroman der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986).

37. Aby Warburg, “Art italien et astrologie internationale au Palazzo Schifanoia à Ferrare,” Essais florentins (Paris: Klincksieck, 1990), 215. Cf. Georges Didi- Huberman, L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Minuit, 2002), 35 – 50.

38. Ernst Jünger, Orages d’acier: Journal de guerre (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1970), 5 and 31; Jünger, La Guerre comme expérience intérieure (1997; Paris: Christian Bour-gois, 2008); Jünger, Le Boqueteau 125 (2000; Paris: Chris-tian Bourgois, 2008), 8 – 9; Jünger, “Feu et movement” [original title: “Mathématique guerrière”], in Le Boque-teau 125, 195 – 208; Jünger, “La mobilisation totale,” in L’État universel, suivi de La Mobilisation totale (Paris: Galli-mard, 1990), 17; Jünger, Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges (Berlin: Neufeld and Henius Verlag, 1930); Jünger and Edmund Schultz, Die veränderte Welt: Eine Bilderfibel unserer Zeit (Breslau: Wilhelm G. Korn, 1933).

39. Jünger, Le Mur du temps (1963; Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 98.

40. Carl Schmitt, “Théologie politique. Quatre chapitres sur la théorie de la souveraineté,” in Théologie politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 1 – 75; Schmitt, Le Nomos de la Terre dans le droit des gens du Jus Publicum Europaeum (2001; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), 70 – 86 (on nomos) and 256 – 78 (on the Great War).

41. Oswald Spengler, Le Déclin de l’Occident: Esquisse d’une morphologie de l’histoire universelle (1948; Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 11.

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illustrata in 1914 and 1915 (figs. 4 and 5).42 His suffering in the face of the conflict, though, never brought him farther than a defense of deserters and pacifists, and a refusal to participate in war- related activity himself.43 But Warburg’s influ-ence is detectable in the more vehement reflections on the war of, for instance, Karl Kraus — the anti- Jünger par excellence. Kraus depicted the Great War in mythological terms:

What mythological confusion is this? Since when has Mars become the god of commerce and Mercury the god of war? . . . I understand sacri-

42. Aby Warburg, Georg Thilenius, and Giulio Pancon–celli- Calzia, eds., La Guerra del 1914 – 15: Rivista illus-trata dei mesi Novembre Dicembre Gennaio Febbraio (Ham-burg: Broschek, 1915). Cf. A. Spagnolo- Stiff, “L’appello di Aby Warburg a un’intesa italo- tedesca: La guerra del 1914 – 1915. Rivista illustrata,” in Storia dell’arte e politica cul-turale intorno al 1900: La fondazione dell’Istituto Germanico di Storia dell’Arte di Firenze, ed. Max Seidel (Venice: Mar-silio, 1999), 249 – 69; Dorothea McEwan, “Ein Kampf gegen Windmühlen: Warburgs pro- italienische publizis-

tische Initiative,” in Kasten 117: Aby Warburg und der Aber-glaube im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Gottfried Korff (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2007), 135 – 63.

43. Cf. Luc Rasson, Écrire contre la guerre: Littérature et pacifismes, 1916 – 38 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997); André Loez, 14 – 18. Les refus de la guerre, 1914–1918. Une histoire des mutins (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).

Figure 4. La Guerra

del 1914. Rivista

illustrata for the first

three months, August,

September, October

(Hamburg: Broschek,

1914)

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ficing cotton for one’s life. But the other way round? People who adore fetishes will never go so low as to think that the commodity has a soul. . . . Each state is at war with its own culture. Instead of being at war with its own unculture. . . . What is undertaken for the profit of the state is often achieved at the cost of the world.44

By 1909, long before he tied the rise of Nazism to “the Last Days of Mankind,”45

Kraus had shown how the motifs of “progress” and “apocalypse” can combine.46

In opposition to the politics of classing other nations as enemies and closing one’s borders to them, Kraus (among others) embodied a genuine cosmopolitanism of the Warburgian kind. In offering the most rigorous and abundant formulations of cosmopolitan politics, Benjamin publicly defended Kraus and, at the same

44. Karl Kraus, La Nuit venue (Paris: Lebovic, 1986), 105, 109, 123.

45. Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind (New York: Ungar, 1974). Cf. Jacques Bouveresse and Gerald Stieg, eds., Les Guerres de Karl Kraus, special issue of Agone: His-toire, Politique et Sociologie, nos. 35 – 36 (2006); Jacques

Bouveresse, Satire et prophétie: Les voix de Karl Kraus (Mar-seille: Agone, 2007), 39 – 120.

46. Karl Kraus, “Le progrès,” in La Littérature démolie (1990; Paris: Payot and Rivages, 1993), 137 – 46; Kraus, “Apocalypse,” in La Littérature démolie, 147 – 64.

Figure 5. La Guerra

del 1914 – 15. Rivista

illustrata for the

months of November,

December, January,

February (Hamburg:

Broschek, 1915)

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3time, exposed the fascist component of Jünger’s writing, its “glorification of war [made as] an unbridled transposition of the theses of art for art’s sake.”47

The author of “One- Way Street” did not confuse the scale of the Euro-pean psychomachia with its actual content: he was able to diagnose a crisis of narrative corresponding to the crisis of history. Positivist historicity was not an epistemic model through which the present could any longer be deciphered and understood. In “Experience and Poverty,” Benjamin dared to say, contradicting the patriotic and heroic proprieties — that in 1918 “people returned from the front . . . not richer but poorer in communicable experience.”48 In “The Crisis of the Novel,” he suggested, following the example of Alfred Döblin, that we can see in documentary montage an alternative to the dead ends of traditional narrative, including the war narrative of epic ambitions.49 Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” invokes immemorial survivals in the popular art of storytelling.50 These survivals he understands as a means of calling upon Mnemosyne across the tragedies of culture, in facing which Clio could only become sick — sick (accord-ing to Charles Péguy in 1917) of modern “barbarities.”51

Warburg Facing the War: Notizkästen 115 – 118World War I left no one the opportunity to remain indifferent or unscathed. Some were plunged into the heart of combat. The ethnologist Robert Hertz, student and friend of Marcel Mauss, died at the front in the Meuse in April 1915, not without having left behind while on duty traces of his enlightened thinking.52

One of the two great founders of the Annales school, Lucien Febvre, fought on the fronts of Ourcq, in Reims and Douaumont: he was the initiator and theoretician of a method of combat called “crossfiring,” but meanwhile he never stopped fill-ing notebooks, making maps of the front lines, drawing what he saw around him, collecting photographs (fig. 6).53 He never really integrated this experience of the war into his later analyses except, perhaps not accidentally, in his text entitled

47. Walter Benjamin, “Théories du fascisme allemand. À propos de l’ouvrage collectif Guerre et guerriers publié sous la direction d’Ernst Jünger,” Oeuvres, II (Paris: Gal-limard, 2000), 198 – 215; Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” Oeuvres, II (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 228 – 73. Cf. Michel Vanoost-huyse, Fascisme et littérature pure: La fabrique d’Ernst Jünger (Marseille: Agone, 2005).

48. Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” (1933), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 731.

49. Benjamin, “La crise du roman: À propos de Berlin Alexanderplatz de Döblin,” in Oeuvres, II, 189 – 97, 192.

50. Benjamin, “Le conteur: Réflexions sur l’œuvre de Nicolas Leskov,” in Oeuvres, III (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 114 – 51.

51. Charles Péguy, Clio (1932; Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 17.

52. Robert Hertz, Un ethnologue dans les tranchées, août 1914 – avril 1915: Lettres à sa femme Alice, ed. Alexandre Riley and Philippe Besnard (Paris: CNRS, 2002).

53. Cf. Henri Febvre, “Lucien Febvre, mon père,” post-face to Lucien Febvre, Vivre l’histoire, ed. Brigitte Mazon (Paris: Robert Laffont- Armand Colin, 2009), 993. I wish to thank Henri Febvre and Brigitte Mazon for giving me access to these documents.

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“Living through History” of 1943.54 Marc Bloch, Annales’s other founder, elabo-rated on his experience in the trenches by accumulating plans, lists, reports of operations, stories, drawings of friends, and photographs of devastated nature (figs. 7 and 8).55 After World War I, he would publish “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre” (1921) and, after World War II, “Critique historique et critique du témoignage” (1950).56 Bloch’s analyses are parallel to those of Warburg, whose work Bloch undoubtedly did not know. The parallels between the attitudes of Bloch and Warburg to the war have been well analyzed by Ulrich Raulff.57 It would be worth extending this analysis to questions of method; for example, their shared comparativism and their mutual interest in the historical content of images.58 As Reinhart Koselleck has shown, any “muta-

54. Lucien Febvre, “Vivre l’histoire,” in Vivre l’histoire, 21 – 35.

55. Marc Bloch, “Écrits et photographies de guerre,” in L’Histoire, la Guerre, la Résistance, ed. Annette Becker and Étienne Bloch (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 111 – 292. I wish to thank Yves Bloch for giving me access to his note-books.

56. Bloch, “Critique historique et critique du témoi-gnage,” in L’Histoire, la Guerre, la Résistance, 97 – 107. Bloch, “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre,” in L’Histoire, la Guerre, la Résistance, 293 – 316.

57. Ulrich Raulff, “Parallel gelesen: Die Schriften von Aby Warburg und Marc Bloch zwischen 1914 und 1924,” in Bredekamp et al., Aby Warburg, 167 – 78.

58. Cf. Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des socié-tés européennes,” in L’Histoire, la Guerre, la Résistance, 347 – 80; Bloch, “Photographies aériennes, musées, arts populaires,” in L’Histoire, la Guerre, la Résistance, 393 – 406. Bloch, “Projet d’un enseignement d’histoire comparée des sociétés européennes: Candidature au Collège de France,” in L’Histoire, la Guerre, la Résistance, 443 – 50.

Figure 6. Lucien Febvre, Carnet de guerre, 1914 – 18. Ink and colored pencils on

paper, 16 x 25 cm. Collection Henri Febvre. Photo: DR

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Figure 7. Marc Bloch, Carnet de guerre, 1914 – 18. Photographs pasted on cardboard,

23 x 20 cm. Collection Yves Bloch. Photo: Georges Didi- Huberman

Figure 8. Marc Bloch, Carnet de guerre, 1914 – 18. Photographs pasted on cardboard,

23 x 20 cm. Collection Yves Bloch. Photo: Georges Didi- Huberman

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6 tion of experience” implies a “change of method” in the work of a historian.59 Of course, my own hypothesis regarding Warburg is that this change, which was of epistemological significance, was embodied in the Mnemosyne Atlas and in the theoretical orientation that its compilation brought to light.

It was as a man of the Enlightenment that Aby Warburg first of all wanted to respond to the irrational fury of the world conflict. While the family bank nat-urally participated in the German war effort, he himself had to attend painfully to the “Jewish census” ( Judenzählung) ordered in October 1916 by army officers who wanted to expose the so- called underrepresentation of Jewish combatants on the front.60 Warburg thought, however, that the astra could fight efficiently with the monstra on the ground of ideas and so devoted much energy to founding, with the ethnologist Georg Thilenius and the linguist Giulio Panconcelli- Calzia, the Rivista illustrata already mentioned, in order to maintain the European intel-lectual tissue so as, notably, not to cut German intellectuals off from their Ital-ian colleagues.61 We can read, for example, in the Rivista a note by the director of the Berlin museums, Wilhelm von Bode, on the duty of protecting works of art in enemy territory, along with a factual account of religious persecutions on the Russian front.62 Faced with a war that he considered, on an anthropological and even metaphysical level, an Urkatastrophe, Warburg pursued his work as a struggle against certain ideas (those that set man against man, that seek to close borders or dig trenches) and, on the other hand, as a struggle on behalf of other ideas (those that open borders, that recognize the porosity of cultures and trace the perpetual “migrations” of intellect). He was enthusiastic about the idea of a League of Nations and about efforts toward the reconciliation of Germany and France. When, in 1926, Aristide Briand and Adolf Stresemann received the Nobel Prize for Peace in the name of that difficult reconciliation, Warburg undertook the publication of a postage stamp — a cross- border image — with a significant motto: Idea vincit.63 This formulation appears as well in his manuscript for the

59. Reinhart Koselleck, “Mutation de l’expérience et changement de méthode: Esquisse historico- anthro-pologi que,” in L’Expérience de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 201 – 47.

60. Cf. Chernow, Warburgs, 141 – 90; Schoell- Glass, Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus, 119 – 53; Mark A. Rus-sell, Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and the Public Purposes of Art in Hamburg, 1896 – 1918 (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 180 – 219.

61. Warburg, Thilenius, and Panconcelli- Calzia, La Guerra del 1914. Cf. Spagnolo- Stiff, “L’appello di Aby Warburg”; Dorothea McEwan, “Idea Vincit. La volante e vottoriosa idea: Una commissione artistica di Aby War-burg,” in Lo sguardo di Giano: Aby Warburg fra tempo e memoria, ed. Claudia Cierivia and Pietro Montani (Turin-

Racconigi: Aragno, 2004), 345 – 76; Paolo Sanvito, “War-burg, l’antagonismo Italia- Germania e la Guerra: Analisi di un cortocircuito politico e interiore,” in Aby Warburg e la cultura italiana: Fra sopravvivenze e prospettive di ricerca, ed. Cierivia and Micol Forti (Rome: Sapienza Università di Roma- Mondadori Università, 2009), 51 – 62.

62. Warburg, Thilenius, and Panconcelli- Calzia, “La Guerra del 1914, 16, 22 – 23.

63. Cf. Ulrich Raulff, “Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg einer Idee ‘Idea Vincit’: Warburg, Stresemann und die Brief-marke,” Vorträge aus dem Warburg- Haus 6 (2002): 125 – 62; McEwan, “Idea Vincit,” 345 – 76.

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7Grundbegriffe: “The idea overcomes — everything is possible” (Idea vincit — alles ist möglich).64

But the founder of modern iconology knew that any cultural psycho-machia will be embodied in polarized images that, successively, translate and betray ideas, make them in turn accessible and incomprehensible, simplified or placed in mises en abymes. Thus Warburg’s battle of ideas was accompanied by a battle of images: a struggle against certain images (propaganda, lies, anti-Semitism) in favor of others (survivals, comparisons, deconstructions of ideol-ogy). This struggle presupposed, in Warburg’s mind, collecting documentation on the war, and the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek began to accumulate an extensive collection of the kind at the very start of the hostilities. If we bear in mind the private or familial character of the research institution that Warburg founded, the amount of material it amassed regarding the war is considerable. At least fifteen hundred such works were acquired by the Library between 1914 and 1918, and innumerable photographs — around 5,000, according to the cata-log, though many have been lost, probably during the transfer of the Library to London in 1933. Today one can consult some 1,445 war- related items, distributed in three catalogs. There are press photographs, images bought for use by the German army, postcards, postage stamps. . . . Even if reduced to a third of its original quantity, and even if Warburg seems to have given up organizing it into an atlas, this iconographic documentation gives one an impression like that given by the plates of Mnemosyne: both are brilliantly organized disorders, profusions of images in which extraordinary affinities appear, sending us back to the most fundamental motifs of the Warburgian Kulturwissenschaft.

We are confronted in these images with monuments of a longue durée, collapsed under bombs, and with Doric columns speckled with the impact of machine- gun bullets (fig. 9). There are aerial perspectives, most of a lunar or pre-historic appearance, suggesting that destruction leads to archaeology (fig. 10). On the ground, the front is overrun with barbed wire and the vegetation devastated, as if in an exaggeratedly blackened engraving, a ghostly landscape in the manner of Hercules Segers, or the remains of an apocalypse drawn by an Expressionist painter (fig. 11). Everywhere the stigmata of the Urkatastrophe, but everywhere, equally, we find signs of the devastation’s technological management, as in docu-ments where the military demands that the war be reproducible in photographic or cinematographic images (fig. 12). In this nightmare collection, aerial explo-sions, the terrifying new technology of this war, disseminate pretty little white clouds in the sky, similar to those that art historians are accustomed to seeing in paintings of the Italian Primitives (fig. 13). The image of a dirigible hit by a

64. Warburg, Mnemosyne. Grundbegriffe II, 1 (dated July 6, 1929).

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Figure 10. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 – 18, Warburg Institute Archive,

T 4156. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

Figure 9. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 – 18, Warburg Institute Archive,

A 2611. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

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Figure 11. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 – 18, Warburg Institute Archive,

T 3421. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

Figure 12. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 – 18, Warburg Institute Archive,

T 3597. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

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0 fighter plane has both the implacable appearance of a technological document and the pathos of a mythological fall, somewhere between the chariot of Phaeton and the plunging of the damned into hell (fig. 14). The image of a horse bizarrely suspended above the sea has the involuntary splendor of a shot by Sergei Eisen-stein (fig. 15). But batches of canes stacked in a carver’s workshop remind us of how the war crippled, disfigured, and reduced men (fig. 16).

Elsewhere appear, one after another, in an apparent jumble, military parades, the gestural language of maritime signaling, Hagia Sophia at Constan-tinople occupied by the German army, the searchlights of antiaircraft defenses at night, villages in ruins, mock- ups for battlefield strategy, catalogs for paper cloth-ing, carcasses of tanks, women weeping farewells for departing sailors, church altars covered in military commemorative plaques, ships exploding, the equip-ment on gun turrets, the funeral of a Jew (killed in combat?), naval shipyards in full activity, bombs left on a beach, houses destroyed from the inside, bridges bro-ken in two, monuments to the dead, army libraries, the meeting of the very latest submarine and a sailing ship from a previous century, the reprocessing of trash, subterranean vehicles, an elephant from a zoo requisitioned for the war effort, wide- open coffins, dismantled pylons, an orchestra at the front, field ambulances, a blockhouse in the forest, breadmaking in a time of shortage, rations tickets, misery in the streets, a row of flayed cattle in an abattoir, a makeshift military cemetery, soldiers occupying a shtetl in central Europe, an Orthodox Easter pro-cession on the Eastern front. . . .

It is clear that, in Warburg’s eyes, this iconographic cacophony meant as much as the gestural disorder of an attack of hysteria would have meant in the eyes of Freud. This visual kaleidoscope was for Warburg a collection of symptoms, working outside, crossing surfaces, swarming in depths. Given the necessity of interpreting the symptoms in all their manifestations, Warburg established, at the heart of his Library, a set of tools for archiving and classify-ing into files the innumerable motifs of this great modern psychomachia. His Kriegskartothek comprised, in 1918, seventy- two boxes, holding 90,000 files.65

What remains today, in the London archive, are three boxes of files (Notizkäs-ten), numbered 115, 117, and 118, that bear witness to the intense methodological enterprise — the historical, archaeological, philosophical, and philological work — carried out by Warburg and his collaborators on the iconographic materials that he collected. Claudia Wedepohl went through these boxes in 2002. Kasten 115 is titled “War and Culture” (Krieg und Kultur): it comprises a list of objects (med-als, postcards, war museums), as well as theoretical tools necessary for the list’s

65. Cf. Gottfried Korff, “Einleitung,” in Korff, Kasten 117, 11; P. J. Schwartz, “Aby Warburgs Kriegskartothek: Vorbericht einer Rekonstruktion,” in Korff, Kasten 117, 39 – 69.

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Figure 13. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 – 18, Warburg Institute Archive,

T 4632. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

Figure 14. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 – 18, Warburg Institute Archive,

T 4809. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

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Figure 15. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 – 18, Warburg Institute Archive,

A 193. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

Figure 16. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 – 18, Warburg Institute Archive,

A 383. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

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3interpretation (the sociology of Max Weber, for example). Kasten 117 is devoted more particularly to the “superstitions of war” (Aberglaube im Krieg) and gathers all kinds of material, both historical and ethnological, and has already been the subject of a conference (fig. 17).66 Kasten 118 is entitled “War and Art” (Krieg und Kunst) and covers a considerable field, from propaganda images to the futurist manifestos of F. W. Marinetti. A diary consisting of 134 pages on metal rings, completes this apparatus by establishing the basis for an index in which the vari-ous writings reveal their collective engagement in and around Warburg’s project. The entries of this index range from the “Prehistory” of the war to the different geographical sectors of its occurrence, and from “Religion” to “Techniques of Hygiene,” “Poetry,” “Ethics,” “Munitions Factories,” “War Literature,” “Celes-tial Figures,” and “Cinema.”67

Toward a Critical Anthropology of the WarThe project in cultural history and iconology that Warburg undertook on the Great War belongs to those “paper storms” that, beginning in 1914, were unleashed around the European intellectual world. His undertaking belongs, more specifically, to the German phenomenon of Kriegssammlungen, “war collec-tions,” which flourished on a large scale; notably, at the Kaiserliche Universitäts und Landesbibliothek of Strasbourg (which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become a model for Warburg’s future Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek), the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the Deutsche Bücherei of Leipzig, and the univer-sity library of Jena. There were also the extraordinary private collections of The-odor Bergmann in Fürth and of Richard Franck in Berlin and Stuttgart, the latter a veritable institution, employing no fewer than twenty- four people full time and in 1921 holding about 45,000 works (plus 2,150 periodical titles).68 A work by Albert Buddecke on the German Kriegssammlungen, which appeared in 1917, already listed 217 collections, public and private, devoted to the Great War.69

But what radically differentiates the Warburgian project from all of these collections, often put on show in public exhibitions for patriotic ends, is of course its critical content.70 Warburg opened the way to a genuine political iconology

66. Korff, Kasten 117.

67. London, Warburg Institute Archive, IV.64.1.

68. Cf. Didier, Orages de Papier, 16 – 27.

69. Albert Buddecke, Die Kriegssammlungen: Ein Nach-weis ihrer Einrichtung und ihres Bestandes (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1917). Cf. Anke te Heesen, “Schnitt 1915: Zeitungsausschnittsammlungen im Ersten Welt-krieg,” in Korff, Kasten 117, 71 – 85; Alexandra Kaiser, “ ‘ . . . das Material zu sammeln, das dieser Krieg in solcher Fülle schuf wie keiner vorher’: Kriegssammlungen und

Kriegssammler im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Korff, Kasten 117, 87 – 115.

70. Cf. Susanne Brandt, Vom Kriegsschauplatz zum Gedächtnisraum: Die Westfront 1914 – 49 (Baden- Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2000) and “Exposer la Grande Guerre: La Première Guerre mondiale représen-tée dans les expositions en Allemagne de 1914 à nos jours,” in Becker, Histoire culturelle de la Grande Guerre, 139 – 55; Christine Beil, Der augestellte Krieg: Präsentationen des Ersten Weltkrieges 1914 – 1939 (Tübingen: Tübinger Ver-einigung für Volkskunde, 2005).

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and, consequently, to all of the historical and anthropological analyses (which flourish today) of images produced in the time of the Great War.71 His war col-lection was guided, indeed, by anthropological concerns, which explains his early transcendence of the then- established hierarchy, in which works of art rank well above other images in a crowded visual field. The works of “war art” acquired by

71. Cf. Bodo von Dewitz, “Zur Geschichte der Kriegspho-tographie des Ersten Weltkrieges,” in Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Bilder des Ersten Weltkrieges, ed. Rainer Rother (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum- Ars Nicolai, 1994), 163 – 76; Thomas Noll, “Sinnbild und Erzählung: Zur Ikonographie des Krieges in den Zeitschriftenil-lustrationen 1914 bis 1918,” in Rother, Die letzten Tage, 259 – 72; Alain Sayag, “ ‘Wir sagten Adieu einer ganzen Epoche’ (Apollinaire). Französische Kriegsphotographie,” in Rother, Die letzten Tage, 187 – 96; Dieter Vorsteher, “Bilder für den Sieg: Das Plakat im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Rother, Die letzten Tage, 149 – 62; Marie- Monique Huss, Histoires de famille: Cartes postales et culture de guerre (Paris:

Noêsis, 2000); Jean- Marie Linsolas, “La photographie et la guerre: Un miroir du vrai?” in Vrai et faux dans la Grande Guerre, ed. Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), 96 – 111; Ger-hard Paul, Bilder des Krieges, Krieg der Bilder: Die Visual-isierung des modernen Krieges (Paderborn- Munich: Ferdi-nand Schöningh- Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004), 103 – 71; Paul, Visual History: Ein Studienbuch (Göttingen: Vanden-hoeck and Ruprecht, 2006); Stepháne Audoin- Rouzeau, Combattre: Une anthropologie historique de la guerre moderne (XIXe – XXIe siècle) (Paris: Le Seuil, 2008), 99 – 145.

Figure 17. Aby Warburg,

Kasten 117, 1914 – 18,

Warburg Institute Archive.

Photo: The Warburg Institute,

London

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5the Library in Hamburg between 1914 and 1918 are outstanding for their medi-ocrity.72 A psychomachia, unlike the events treated by art history, is not suscep-tible to temporal or other limits that a careful methodology might impose, and it instead will launch a vast anthropology of images and an analysis of the beliefs that they reconfigure and ceaselessly retransform. Kasten 117 was the object of specialist attention because its subject, the “superstitions of war,” entered directly into such an anthropological design. It is clear, for example, that fundamental motifs of the Mnemosyne project — like the “unsettling duality” of triumph and martyrdom, or the crucial notion of “demonization”73 — were already at work in Warburg’s Kriegskartothek.74 It is not by chance that the disastrous anthropomor-phisms that Bataille and his friends examined in the journal Documents between 1929 and 1930 should have ended up — under the influence of Marcel Mauss’s work — as the theme of a Collège de sociologie whose discussions, between 1937 and 1939,75 drafted an anthropology of war that Ernst Kantorowicz, Georges Dumézil, and Franco Cardini would later ground historically.76

Much recent historiography of the Great War has adopted this anthropo-logical viewpoint.77 Some historians have written of the war from the perspective of myth,78 but by now most have at least taken account of the difficulties intrinsic to distinguishing what are beliefs or rumors from what are facts or testimonies, notably on the controversial question of “German atrocities.”79 The historian can legitimately try to distinguish true from false in this generalized “system of uncertainty,” constantly interweaving its competing discourses; but the

72. Cf. Kriegsbilder, 1, ed. Garde- Reserve- Division (Selbst-ver, 1917); Konrad Escher, Kunst, Krieg und Krieger: Zur Geschichte der Kriegsdarstellungen (Zurich: Rascher, 1917); War Pictures, ed. Imperial War Museum (London: Walter Judd, 1919).

73. Warburg, intro. to “Mnémosyne,” 39 – 40.

74. Cf. Ralph Winkle, “Masse und Magie. Anmerkungen zu einem Interpretament der Aberglaubensforschung während des Ersten Weltkriegs,” in Korff, Kasten 117, 261 – 99.

75. Cf. Georges Bataille, La Sociologie sacrée du monde con-temporain, ed. Simonetta Falasca Zamponi (Paris: Éditions Lignes and Manifestes, 2004); Roger Caillois, Quatre essais de sociologie contemporaine (Paris: Olivier Perrin, 1951), 75 – 153; Didi- Huberman, Ressemblance informe, 31 – 164; Denis Hollier, ed., Le Collège de sociologie, 1937 – 1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 403 – 59, 494 – 501, and 607 – 40.

76. Cf. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Mourir pour la patrie (Pro Patria Mori) dans la pensée politique médiévale,” in Mourir pour la patrie et autres textes (Paris: Presses Univer-sitaires de France, 1984), 105 – 41; Georges Dumézil, Heur et malheur du guerrier: Aspects mythiques de la fonction guer-

rière chez les Indo- Européens (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969) (republished Paris: Flammarion, 1996); France Cardini, La Culture de la guerre, Xe – XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).

77. Cf. Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, Penser la Grande Guerre: Un essai d’historiographie (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 209 – 33; Becker, Histoire culturelle de la Grande Guerre; Audoin- Rouzeau, Combattre.

78. Cf. Mario Isnenghi, Il mito della grande guerra (1989; Bologne: Società Editrice Il Mulino, 1997), 179 – 260.

79. Cf. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atroci-ties, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-versity Press, 2001); Olivier Forcade, “Information, cen-sure et propagande,” in Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre 1914 – 1918: Histoire et culture, ed. Stéphane Audoin- Rouzeau and Jean- Jacques Becker (Paris: Bayard, 2004), 451 – 64; Prochasson, 1914 – 1918: Retours d’expériences, 13 – 14 and 69 – 121.

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80. Cf. Prochasson and Rasmussen, Vrai et faux, 9 – 32.

81. Waldemar Deonna, “La recrudescence des superstitions en temps de guerre et les statues à clous,” L’Anthropologie 27 (1916): 243 – 68. Yves de La Brière, Le destin de l’Empire alle-mand et les oracles prophétiques (Paris: Beauchesne, 1916).

82. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Contributions à l’étude des Superstitions de guerre,” in Oeuvres en prose complètes, II, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michael Décaudin (Paris: Gal-limard, 1993), 492; Lucience Roure, “Superstitions du front de guerre,” Études 153 (1917): 708 – 32.

83. Albert Dauzat, Légendes, prophéties et superstitions de la Guerre (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1918), 7.

anthropologist — or the archaeologist of discourses, à la Michel Foucault — will situate any critique of language and images on another level.80 Warburg char-acterized that level as Kulturwissenschaft — and just as one must not confuse the Kriegskartothek of Warburg with the patriotic Kriegssammlungen that were its contemporaries, so one must dissociate the problems posed by Kasten 117 from the positivist issues raised in historical writings of the period that classed the “superstitions of war” as simply “errors.” Examples of this distinction abound. Contrast Waldemar Deonna’s article of 1916, “The Increase of Superstitions in Times of War,” with Yves de la Brière’s critique, written in the same year, of pro-phetic oracles that proliferated from the beginning of the conflict.81 Or again, contrast Lucien Roure’s 1917 “Superstitions du front de guerre” with Guillaume Apollinaire’s more cheerful and far less accusatory “Superstitions de guerre,” also of 1917.82

In 1918, Albert Dauzat devoted a book to the “legends and superstitions of war,” in which the positivist viewpoint, deriving straight from Auguste Comte or Gustave Le Bon, is clearly stated:

All troubled periods, and in particular in wartime, by increasing the general anxiety and credulousness, give birth to a great number of false rumors that, since they correspond to the general state of mind, are quick to be accepted by the simple minds of the masses. Acting on weak and sensitive brains, these rumors provoke hallucinations, even pro-phetic visions. Finally, as dangers multiply, the rumors tend to waken and develop ancestral superstitions. Despite the advanced state of our civilization, the global conflict could not escape this law. To the curi-ous observer it has offered an abundant and picturesque selection of the most varied facts, of which we would not have suspected, five years ago, the possible — and fast, as well as multiple — appearance around us.83

Against this simplistic viewpoint (which is an “evolutionist” perspective, in the trivial sense of the term), the Warburgian analysis of the Nachleben rendered pos-sible an understanding, at a much more fundamental level, of the anachronistic coexistence of a hypermodern war with so many archaisms of social behavior. The psychohistorical viewpoint associated with the Nachleben made such para-doxes of temporality intelligible, with Warburg showing himself in 1916 – 17 to be once again close to Freud’s analyses, in this case defining the indissoluble

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7relations between psychical “evolution” and “regression.”84 In 1925 Walter Ben-jamin would rethink how a war so technologically novel brought on a psychotic state in which chemical weaponry — clouds of gas — came to seem like ghosts, as unfathomable as they were ruthless.85

Warburg, who defined the history of images as a “history of ghosts for grown- ups,” thus approached the Great War not only as a struggle against and in defense of certain ideas, but also as a struggle with ghosts — a struggle in which the whole of European civilization was engaged, whether consciously or not.86

His analysis of “war superstitions” doubtless led to his revising his ideas about the Nachleben at work in the psychomachia of his time.87 We should not be sur-prised to find in the files of Kasten 117 analyses of wartime spiritualist phenom-ena (apparitions of the dead) and mystical phenomena (the symmetrical cases of Barbara Weigand in Germany and Claire Ferchaud in France) that have since been studied in detail by historians.88 Warburg situated these phenomena in an anthropology or psychohistory in order to verify the “survivals” at work in each cultural symptom as it was added to the Kasten 117 collection. Hence it is essential to recall the coexistence of this Kriegskartothek with Warburg’s research, in the same years, on the religious and political imagery of another period of schism and cultural crisis — the Reformation, haunted as it was by chimerical beings, pope- donkeys, monk- calves, and other monstrous sows of Lutheran propaganda.89 But as Nietzsche had done in his time, and as Bataille would soon do as well, Warburg played dangerously with the conflagration he was investigating. Arranging and rearranging on his worktable the images of his Kriegskartothek, was Warburg not making himself the soothsayer or haruspex of the psychomachia that enfolded and passed through him? Like the first plate of Mnemosyne, relating to divination (fig. 1), so the last plate, relating to contemporary history (fig. 2), appears to be an exercise in political divination or presentiment.

84. Sigmund Freud, Conférences d’introduction à la psycha-nalyse (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 431 – 53.

85. Walter Benjamin, “Les armes de demain: Batailles au chloracétophénol, au chlorure de diphénylarsine et au sul-fure d’éthyle dichloré,” in Romantisme et critique de la civili-sation (Paris: Payot, 2010), 107 – 11.

86. Warburg, Mnemosyne. Grundbegriffe II, 3 (dated July 2, 1929).

87. Cf. Gottfried Korff, “Im Zeichen des Saturn: Vor-läufige Notizen zu Warburgs Aberglaubensforschung im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Korff, Kasten 117, 181 – 213.

88. Claudia Schlager, “Seherinnen und Seismographen: Ausschnitthaftes zur Trouvaille ‘Barbara Weigand’ aus Aby Warburgs Kriegskartothek,” in Korff, Kasten 117, 215 – 43. Cf. Annette Becker, La Guerre et la foi: De la mort

à la mémoire, 1914 – 1930 (Paris: Armand- Colin, 1994), 15 – 55 and 103 – 38; Jay Winter, Entre deuil et mémoire: La Grande Guerre dans l’histoire culturelle de l’Europe, trans. Christophe Jaquet (Paris: Armand Colin, 2008), 25 – 38, 67 – 91. On Claire Ferchaud: Ferchaud, Notes auto-biographiques, II. Mission nationale (Paris: Librairie Pierre Téqui, 1974); Claude Mouton, Au plus fort de la tourmente: Claire Ferchaud (1978; Montsurs: Éditions Résiac, 1983).

89. Aby Warburg, “La divination païenne et antique dans les écrits et les images à l’époque de Luther,” Essais flo-rentins (Paris: Klincksieck, 1990), 245 – 94. Cf. Claudia Wedepohl, “ ‘Agitationsmittel für die Bearbeitung der Ungelehrten’: Warburgs Reformationsstudien zwischen Kriegsbeobachtung historisch- kritischer Forschung und Verfolgungswahn,” in Korff, Kasten 117, 325 – 68.

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90. Émile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo- européennes, 2 vols. (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 2:276.

91. Benveniste, Vocabulaire, 2:276 – 79.

We might say, then, that Warburg’s atlas (and his own role as a modern Atlas) came about to show, despite the dangers inherent in the realization, that the varied meanings of the Latin word superstes all point in the same direction. The word means “survivor” and “testimony” but also “superstition.” Emile Benveniste showed that superstes signifies, foremost, “the one who remains,” not above but beyond or after some occurrence. Superstes involves specifically the act of “surviv-ing,” of “getting over,” as we say of someone who “survived an ordeal” or “got over a bereavement” and thus has “been a witness” to it.90 The superstes assumes the suprestitio as “the property of being present” as a witness to an event from which he or she is far away in space and time. Hence the superstes is the soothsayer of a history (whether past, present, or future) in which he or she did not physically participate. This capacity for presence is fascinating and worrisome at the same time. Does it not characterize the poetics of all great historians? Whatever the case, we know that it is the capacity for presence that brought the Romans — for whom divination was an exogenous, alien practice: a “Babylonian” or “Etruscan” practice — to distinguish the dangerous supertitio from their own official religio.91

By approaching the extremes of the Great War’s cultural phenomena, Warburg withdrew to an area of thought above questions of truth and falsity, and far away from any religion. His Kriegskartothek in this way differs radically from the Ger-man Kriegssammlungen and from the epic narratives of Jünger, with their patriotic and bellicose religion. Still, it must be said that Warburg came unsettlingly close to his objects of study — the images that he regarded as so many busy ghosts. His Library remains haunted to this day, and tampering with it is inadvisable.