Aby Warburg Jewish and Political Identity_Warburg Institute founder.pdf

mattmpleyAby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft,Judaism and the Politics of Identity

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Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft, Judaism andthe Politics of Identity

Matthew Rampley

In 1991 the Art History Department of the University of Hamburg initiated aresearch project in ‘Political Iconography’ (Forschungsstelle PolitischeIkonographie).1 The project involved reorganising the slide holdings of theDepartment according to social, cultural, and political thematic categories,and quickly led to the publication of texts on the iconology of the political.2

Subjects included postcard as a medium of propaganda, the political functionsof architecture, and images of terror in the wake of the 2001 attacks on theWorld Trade Center.3 The project marked a clear attempt to move beyondthe paradigm of art history, in terms of both its thematic orientationand, more importantly, its inclusion of popular imagery in media that hadtraditionally lain outside the purview of art history. As such it representedan important early example of the developing field of image theory,‘Bildwissenschaft’, within Germany, which emerged at approximately thesame time as visual culture in America and Britain.

Sponsored by the Warburg Foundation (‘Aby-Warburg-Stiftung’), the projectalso made clear its intellectual ancestry through its mobilisation of iconographyas the methodological frame. Based in the Warburg Haus, the site of Warburg’sresearch library before its move to London in 1933, it was part of a widerprocess, in which the Art History Department of Hamburg University hasplayed a leading role, of reviewing Warburg’s legacy for the present. Hence,although, most immediately, it drew attention to the political dimension ofhis work, it raised broader questions about the relation of Warburgian‘Kulturwissenschaft’ to contemporary image studies.

The Hamburg project was a prominent example of the renewed vigour withwhich his legacy has been explored over the past two decades. The Warburg‘Renaissance’ has been evident both in the new German edition of hiswritings and also in the growth of critical studies of his thought.4 Aparticular focus has been the place of Warburg within the landscape ofcontemporary art history and visual culture. One of his most notable recentinterpreters, Georges Didi-Huberman, has employed Warburg as an ally inhis extended critical assault on art history, while for both Didi-Hubermanand Philippe-Alain Michaud, Warburg has taken on great significance as apractitioner of visual studies avant la lettre.5 The contemporaneity of his workhas also been seen in terms of the affinities between his unfinished pictorialatlas Mnemosyne and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, while his attempt, inthe Atlas, to summarise his ideas in pictorial form had, for some, a clearcontemporary resonance in an era of the mass proliferation of the digital image.6

A recent rival interpretation, however, has suggested a different reading. Inhis appraisal of the revived interest in Warburg during the 1990s, OttoWerckmeister mounted a sustained criticism both of its focus, and ofWarburg himself.7 Specifically, Werckmeister highlighted the fact that most

1. See the website at: http://www.warburg-haus.de/texte/forsch.html (accessed 12January 2010).

2. The categories can be accessed online at: http://www.welib.de/ (accessed 1 May 2010), and has alsobeen published as Elisabeth von Hagenow and PetraRoettig (eds), Bildindex zur politischen Ikonographie(Privately Printed: Hamburg, 1996).

3. See Elisabeth von Hagenow, Politik und Bild -Die Postkarte als Medium der Propaganda (PrivatelyPrinted: Hamburg, 1994); Hermann Hipp andErnst Seidl (eds), Architektur als politische Kultur -Philosophia Practica (Dietrich Reimer: Berlin,1996); Michael Beuthner, Joachim Buttler, SandraFrohlich, Irene Neverla and Stephan A. Weichert(eds), Bilder des Terrors - Terror der Bilder?Krisenberichterstattung am und nach dem 11.September (von Halem: Cologne, 2003).

4. The new edition has so far included therepublication of the two-volume collectedwritings of 1932, Die Erneuerung der heidnischenAntike, ed. Horst Bredekamp and Michael Diers(Akademie Verlag: Berlin, 1998); his Memosynepicture atlas Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. MartinWarnke and Claudia Brink (Akademie Verlag:Berlin, 1999); and the diary of the WarburgLibrary, Tagebuch der KulturwissenschaftlichenBibliothek Warburg, ed. Karen Michels andCharlotte Schoell-Glass (Akademie Verlag:Berlin, 2001).

5. Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Image Survivante.Histoire de l’Art et Temps des Fantomes selon AbyWarburg (Minuit: Paris, 2002); Philippe-AlainMichaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion(Zone Books: New York, 2007).

6. On the relation between Warburg and WalterBenjamin see Cornelia Zumbusch, Wissenschaft inBildern. Symbol und Dialektisches Bild in AbyWarburgs Mnemosyne-Atlas und Walter BenjaminsPassagen-Werk (Akademie Verlag: Berlin, 2004).Sabine Flach et al. (eds), Der Bilderatlas im Wechselder Kunste und Medien (Wilhelm Fink: Munich,2005) presented a series of wide-ranging analysesof the Mnemosyne Atlas within the context of visualculture and digital media.

7. Werckmeister, ‘The Turn from Marx toWarburg in West German Art History 1968–1990’, in Andrew Hemmingway (ed.), Marxismand the History of Art. From William Morris to the NewLeft (Pluto: London, 2006), pp. 213–20.

# The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 317–335doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcq033

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attention had been given to Warburg’s anthropological writings; analysis of hiswork on the social and artistic milieu of art occupied a distinctly secondaryplace. For Werckmeister, the ‘rediscovery’ of Warburg in the 1990s, drawingback from deeper engagement with the latter’s work on the social history ofthe image, was symptomatic of a broader disciplinary retreat from the radicalart historical work of the 1970s. In addition, although Warburg had attendedto the social matrix of artistic production, his own understanding was myopicin its inability to grasp larger political, societal, and economic contexts.Instead, he was drawn to the narrowly circumscribed world of the mercantileelite of Florence – ‘the birthplace of the modern culture of self-consciousurban commerce’ – with which he personally identified.8 The limitations ofWarburg’s political understanding were consonant with the ideological tenorof the 1990s.

Werckmeister’s criticisms were primarily an invective against the state ofcontemporary art history. In certain respects, they were also misplaced; theinterest in Warburg’s anthropological writings in part reflected the increasingcentrality of globalism and post-colonial impulses within art history.Nevertheless, Werckmeister was right to highlight an important and largelyunanalysed dimension of Warburg’s work, and also to point out a significantblind spot in much of the contemporary reception of the German thinker.

This article thus considers Warburg’s understanding and engagement withpolitical discourses and ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies. In particular, I consider the following questions: to what extentdid he consider the political ramifications of his Kulturwissenschaft? To whatextent was Warburg’s project politically driven? What were his own politicalattitudes and values? In response to these questions I argue that whileWarburg’s work was highly innovative in many respects, it was informed andshaped by a set of traditional political attitudes that were the consequence ofWarburg’s identity as a member of the cultural elite of Hamburg and as a Jew.

Warburg the Liberal

It is well known that political considerations occupied a prominent place inWarburg’s thinking, and this has been carefully documented, both in hispublished texts and also in his private writings. As Warburg himselfrecognised, ‘The artistic interest of scholars is not free of political, social andpractical undercurrents’, and he noted further that such interests are‘implicit and therefore hav[e] all the greater impact . . . ’.9 These‘undercurrents’ became in manifest in Warburg’s work in a number of ways.On the one hand he was sensitive to the less immediately obvious politicalresonance of aspects of the cultural history of the Renaissance, while, on theother hand, a significant number of his writings examined episodes in whichart was directly drawn into the political drama of the Renaissance.

Thus, he interpreted a mid-fifteenth-century arazzo of the medieval legendsof Alexander the Great (including his ascent with griffins and journey underwater – while conquering Asia) in the context of the fall of Constantinoplein 1453.10 Specifically, Warburg attended to the role of Alexander as atalisman of military and political conquest and rule for both the OttomanSultan Mehmet II and the Burgundian court, serving as an emblem ofpolitical conflict between Europe and Asia.11 One can also interpret hisconcern with the Renaissance recovery of images of death anddismemberment from classical mythology in this context. His essay on‘Durer and Italy’, for example, took Durer’s drawing of the Death of

8. Warburg, cited in Charlotte Schoell-Glass, AbyWarburg und der Antisemitismus (Fischer: Frankfurtam Main, 1998), p. 107.

9. Warburg, ‘Das Festwesen als vermittelnderAusbildner der gesteigerten Form’, WarburgArchive, vol. III, no. 63.4, p. 80.

10. This tapestry, which Warburg wasinstrumental in bringing to the attention of arthistorians, has been the recent object of criticalanalysis, including examination of Warburg’s roleinterpretation. See Laura Stagno (ed.), Le Impresedi Alessandro Magno in Oriente. Atti della GiornataInternazionale di Studi Genova, 11 Aprile 2005 (ArtiDoria Panphilj: Genua, 2006).

11. ‘Airship and Submarine in the MedievalImagination’, in Warburg, The Renewal of PaganAntiquity, trans. D. Britt (Getty: Los Angeles,1999), pp. 333–38.

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Orpheus as the starting point for an investigation of the visual representation ofthe Orpheus in antiquity and its recurrence in the Renaissance.12 This violentmyth – Orpheus was torn to pieces by frenzied maenads – attested to anaspect of classical culture usually overlooked by art historians. For, Warburgstated, ‘the death of Orpheus was more than a studio motif of purely formalinterest; it stood for the dark mystery play of Dionysian legend . . . ’.13 TheNietzschean formulation was deliberate; Warburg referred explicitly to thephilosopher on various occasions.14 However, it is also clear that the indirectreferent of such texts was modern anti-Semitism, with which Warburgexhibited an enduring preoccupation.15 Specifically, he saw anti-Jewishviolence was as the expression of deep-seated psychic current, and thesporadic outbreak of such aggression in the present continued a primalimpulse evident in the monstrous narratives of ancient Greek and Roman myth.

Alongside such an interest in the less immediately obvious politicalimplications of Renaissance imagery, Warburg also turned frequently to thedirect political use of the image. His long essay on the use of woodcuts, inparticular, the use of astrological imagery, during the German Reformationfocused on the mobilisation of the visual by both the Catholic Church andLuther’s followers for propagandistic and political purposes.16 Warburganalyses, for example, the way that Luther and Philip Melanchthonappropriated various signs and wonders, including the ‘discovery of a hideousfreak said to have been cast up on the banks of the Tiber in 1495 and of themonstrous progeny born to a German cow in Saxony in 1523’ and gavethem ‘a political interpretation that made them into weapons of rawaggression’.17 Astrology was even used in relation to the person of Luther.This included falsifying his date of birth in order to make this seem all themore auspicious: ‘. . . as daemonic a man as Luther was set among the starsin his own lifetime (through a near-totemistic connection between his birthand a pair of planets) in order to ascribe his otherwise unaccountable, evensuperhuman powers to a higher, cosmic cause, dignified by the name of agod’.18

This essay was perhaps the most extended discussion of this subject, and it haslong been recognised that, having been completed in 1918, it was in part also aresponse to the propaganda imagery generated by the First World War.However, an engagement with the political deployment of art was evidentthroughout his intellectual career; one of Warburg’s earliest essays, from1895, was a study of the Intermezzi celebrating the marriage of Grand DukeFerdinand de’ Medici to Christina of Lorraine in 1589, in which visualpageantry was used to celebrate and legitimise a dynastic union.19 Otherexamples included Warburg’s lecture of 1914 on the emergence of classicalrhetoric in fifteenth-century painting, in which he examined the iconographyof Roman militarism and its transformation in the Renaissance.20 Inparticular, Warburg examined the impact of the frieze on the Arch ofConstantine depicting the emperor Trajan slaying a barbarian opponent(Fig. 1), starting with the way in which the figure of Trajan later cameto be seen as Constantine, and the meaning of the narrative of the frieze,namely Trajan on horseback trampling down his enemies, reinterpreted as adepiction of Constantine showing mercy towards them, in line with Christiannotions of kingship.

Finally, in a lecture on Rembrandt delivered in 1926, Warburg discussed theartist’s treatment of the legend of the Oath of Julius Civilis for the Town Hall ofAmsterdam. Civilis had been the leader of a first-century rebellion againstRoman rule in the southern Netherlands. The story, recounted in Tacitus’

12. Warburg, ‘Durer and Italian Antiquity’(1905), in Warburg, The Renewal of PaganAntiquity, pp. 553–58.

13. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity,p. 555.

14. See, for example, Warburg, ‘The Entry ofthe Idealising Classical Style in the Painting of theEarly Renaissance’, trans. M. Rampley inRichard Woodfield (ed.), Art History as CulturalHistory. Warburg’s Project (Gordon+ Breach:Amsterdam, 2000), pp. 7–31.

15. See Schoell-Glass, ‘Aby Warburg und derAntisemitismus’.

16. Warburg, ‘“Pagan-Antique Prophecy inWords and Images in the Age of Luther” (1920)’,in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity,pp. 597–698.



19. Aby Warburg, ‘The Theatrical Costumes forthe Intermedii of 1589’, in Warburg, ‘TheRenewal of Pagan Antiquity’, pp. 349–402.

20. See Warburg, ‘The Entry of the IdealisingClassical Style in the Painting of the EarlyRenaissance’.

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HIstories, had become an important myth for Dutch patriots celebrating theirrecent independence from Habsburg Spain, and Warburg was interested inthe political connotations of that particular classical narrative.21 Moregenerally, as Schoell-Glass has argued, Warburg’s lecture was a deliberaterebuttal of the highly popular and nationalistic and anti-Semitic reading ofRembrandt by Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt as Educator, which had turned theartist into an exemplar of the inward-looking spiritual Germanic racialcharacter.22 Instead, Warburg argued, Rembrandt had appropriated theclassical language of Italian art and transformed it with a new rational matterof factness (‘neue Sachlichkeit’), a phrase quite consciously chosen for itscontemporary connotations in the 1920s.

The recently published diary of the Warburg library, which he and GertrudBing kept from 1926 until his death in 1929, provides an almost continuousrunning commentary on contemporaneous political events.23 His criticalcomments on Mussolini’s resurrection of the Roman symbol of politicalpower, the fasces, provide perhaps the best-known example of such anengagement. Regarding Mussolini as leading Italy towards a ‘schizophrenicmania for power’, Warburg understood fascism as the latest incarnation of a

Fig. 1. Frieze of Trajan conquering the Dacians, Arch of Constantine. Second Century AD. Rome.

21. Aby Warburg, ‘Italian Antiquity in the Timeof Rembrandt’, Warburg Archive, vol. III, p. 97.

22. Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher(Hirschfeld: Leipzig, 1890).

23. See Charlottte Schoell-Glass and KarenMichels, ‘Einleitung’, in Aby Warburg (ed.),Tagebuch der kulturwisenschaftlichen BibliothekWarburg (Akademie Verlag: Berlin, 2001),pp. xxvii–xxxi.


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primal instinct towards self-dissolution.24 Describing a visual presentation onMussolini and fascism he was intending to prepare in 1926, Warburg notedthat ‘it includes a general consideration of the conditions for the culticresponse to the image (the self ’s loss of consciousness of its own boundaries . . .feeling of dominance as cheirocracy, extended and stretched through inorganicmeans’.25

These insights provide an important corrective to the traditional image ofWarburgian Kulturwissenschaft as politically disinterested scholarship; it isnecessary, however, to go beyond registering the mere fact of Warburg’spolitical engagement, in order to consider the kinds of political views suchengagement expressed. How might Warburg’s political understanding becharacterised? An answer to this can be given if his wider activities areconsidered. At first sight, this provides a mixed impression. One the onehand, Warburg played a prominent part in the local politics of Hamburg; heactively contributed to programmes of popular education, supporting theVolksheim (‘People’s Home’) – an institution dedicated to working-classeducation – and, later, the establishment of the University of Hamburg.26

Warburg was also an admirer of Gustav Stresemann, and he saw the WeimarRepublic as a progressive advance over the Reich; he took exception tolingering attempts to retain traces of Prussian militarism, and celebrated theTreaty of Locarno of 1925 as a triumph of diplomacy and ‘Besonnenheit’, or‘reasoned moderation’, over the brute force of arms. Having drafted a stampdesign to celebrate the treaty – its motto Idea vincit was based onStresemann’s own comments – he regarded Stresemann’s death in 1929 as a‘loss with incalculably bleak consequences’.27 On the other hand, however,he had been a strong, and public, supporter of Hugo Lederer’s Memorial toBismarck erected in Hamburg in 1906 (Fig. 2). As Mark Russell hasindicated, this act of support can hardly be counted as the most progressiveintervention by Warburg. The Hamburger Echo, the newspaper of the SocialDemocratic Party in the city, dismissed ‘Bismarckian Caesarism’, labelling it‘the greatest enemy of democracy’. Encountering substantial opposition fromworking class inhabitants, the monument stood, argues Russell, ‘as a giganticsymbol of the unwillingness of Hamburg’s patricians to deal with theexigencies of social change through political processes’.28 While Warburg’schampioning of Stresemann and ‘Besonnenheit’ mark him out asforward-looking, this has to be interpreted with caution. He was guarded inhis attitudes towards modern forms of political life and particularly towardssocial democracy. In his private correspondence, for example, he expressed afear of the uncontrolled crowd of modern life, commenting that ‘to me themasses are tolerable only in a well-ordered state; a mediocre human animalin a controlled situation is bearable, but as an “individual that runs free” [itis] a completely intolerable product of imaginary liberation’.29 While he wascommitted to the notion of enlightened progressive reason, it is clear that hewas convinced that not all were equally able to exercise such reason, hencehis exhortation: ‘Let us not make the same grave political error as that ofsocial democracy, which aims to obtain through the hostile mechanicalpressure of the masses what can only be attained by communal reason’.30

In many respects Warburg’s political views were closely aligned with those ofnineteenth-century German liberalism. As Dietrich Langewiesche has argued,liberalism combined a political vision of the secular ‘de-churched state as aguarantee of the freedom of the individual to live a rational life’ with autopian belief in a civil society led by the educated middle classes(‘Bildungsburgertum’).31 While Warburg chose to maintain the existence of

24. Warburg, ‘Tagebuch derkulturwisenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg’,p. 39.

25. ‘Dazu gehort eine allgemeine Betrachtunguber Voraussetzungen der kultmaßigenBildbetrachtung (Verlust desIchGrenz-Bewußtsein durch das Gerat. . . dasUebermacht Bewußtsein als unorganischgestreckte erweitertete Cheirokratie’, Warburg,Tagebuch der kulturwisenschaftlichen BibliothekWarburg, p. 119.

26. This aspect of Warburg has been discussed byMark Russell in ‘Aby Warburg and the PublicPurposes of Art in Hamburg’, Canadian Journal ofHistory, vol. 39, no. 2, 2004, pp. 297–324.

27. Warburg, ‘Tagebuch’, p. 541. The Tagebuchcontains a detailed commentary on the discussionssurrounding the drafting of the stamp design,specifically in the entry for 21 December 1926,Tagebuch, pp. 23–25. See also Ulrich Raulff, ‘Deraufhaltsame Aufstieg einer Idee. Warburg und dieVernunft in der Republik’, in Raulff, WildeEnergien. Vier Versuche zu Warburg (Wallstein Verlag:Gottingen, 2003), pp. 72–116.

28. See Mark Russell, ‘The Building ofHamburg’s Bismarck Memorial 1898–1906’,The Historical Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, 2004,pp. 133–56.

29. Letter of 27 July 1909, cited in Russell, ‘AbyWarburg and the Public Purposes of Art’, p. 303.

30. Aby Warburg, cited in Diers, Warburg ausBriefen. Kommentare zu den Kopierbuchern der Jahre1905–1918 (VCH: Weinheim, 1991), p. 164.

31. Dietrich Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), p. 199 ff.



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Fig. 2. Hugo Lederer. Bismarck Monument. 1906. Hamburg.


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a private scholar, his self-image was also aligned with the sense of liberalprofessionalism that emerged in second half of the nineteenth century, inwhich acquisition of ‘Bildung’ was central to the process of middle-classemancipation and self-assertion.32 In this context, Warburg’s ideal of ‘reason’had a very specific social and political connotation, which also shaped themeaning of a number of key terms in his thought, including ‘Besonnenheit’and ‘Denkraum’ (‘cognitive space’) a difficult term to translate but onewhich implied the creation of a conceptual space both within the subject, inwhich self-reflection can take place, and also between the subject and its object.33

The secular outlook of liberalism also informed Warburg’s attitudestowards religion. He readily adopted the ideas of writers such as EdwardTylor, Tito Vignoli, Hermann Usener or Friedrich Vischer, who regardedreligious belief as the relic of an evolutionary prior stage of cultural andintellectual development. A notable affinity in this regard can be foundbetween Warburg and Friedrich Vischer, whose essay ‘The Symbol’ provedhighly influential on his thinking.34 Specifically, Vischer had singled outthe doctrine of transubstantiation as an instance of the survival of aprimitive religious consciousness into modernity. As Vischer noted, thesignificance of communion was understood to be founded on a real change(‘Substanzveranderung’) in the nature of the bread and wine beingconsumed, involving a collapse in the distinction between sign and signifiedthat he saw as the characteristic of the ‘dark, unfree’ symbolism of‘primitive’ peoples.35 This notion resurfaced in Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas,the final plate of which juxtaposed photographs of the 1929 Lateran Accordbetween Mussolini and Pope Pius XI and a reproduction of Raphael’s 1514fresco in the Vatican Stanza d’Eliodoro of the miraculous Mass of Bolsena of1263, at which the host was said to have bled Christ’s blood. This choice ofa Catholic legend as the relic of a primitive consciousness was politicallycharged, not least because many bourgeois liberals had supported themarginalisation of the Catholic Church as essential to the development of theGerman state.36

A sharper sense of Warburg’s identification with the politics of liberalismcan be gained if he is viewed within the context of Hamburg. The latter hadlong stood as the paradigm of a successful commercial city that wasessentially self-governing – it was ruled by a Senate and a Citizens’Assembly – and it stood in contrast to the ‘imperial’ cities such as Munich,Dresden, Wurzburg, or Berlin, which were so closely linked to the life,culture, and politics of the court. It consequently had a reputation for beingmore enlightened and democratic than other cities in Germany, and hadenjoyed such an image since the eighteenth century. However, closerinspection revealed a more nuanced picture. Citizenship was not open to all,and was linked to a restrictive property bar; in 1875, of the total populationof some 390,000 only 34,000 were officially enfranchised ‘citizens’(‘Burger’).37 There also existed the separate category of ‘notables’, whodominated the political, social, and cultural institutions of the city, and whostrove hard to restrict the eligibility to membership of the citizen class. Thiswas closely linked to a resistance to universal suffrage; even in the yearsimmediately preceding the First World War, there was an ongoing debate asto the extent of suffrage, or the definition of citizenship and democratisation.Indeed, by 1918, due to the pace of reform that had taken place elsewhereacross the Reich, Hamburg had been left behind as one of the leastdemocratic German cities.

32. Konrad Jarausch, ‘The Decline of LiberalProfessionialism’, in Jarausch and Larry Jones(eds), In Search of Liberal Germany. Studies in theHistory of German Liberalism from 1789 to the Present(Oxford: Berg, 1990) pp. 261–86.

33. The British psychologist Edward Bulloughdescribed a similar concept with the term‘psychical distance’. See Bullough, ‘PsychicalDistance as a Factor in Art and an AestheticPrinciple’, British Journal of Psychology, vol. 5,1912, pp. 87–118.

34. Vischer, ‘Das Symbol’, in Friedrich Vischer,Kritische Gange, vol. IV (Meyer and Jessen:Munich, 1922), pp. 420–56. First published1887.

35. Vischer, ‘Das Symbol’, p. 425.

36. As late as 1907, the Handbook of the NationalLiberal Party stated that ‘Liberalism fights for theindependence of modern society and itsculture. . . from the one-sided clerical desire torule the world through the Church . . . ’ (cited inLangewiesche, p. 204).

37. See Hans Eckhardt, Privilegien und Parlament.Die Auseinandersetzung um das allgemeine und gleicheWahlrecht in Hamburg (Landeszentrale furPolitische Bildung: Hamburg, 1980), pp. 29–30.



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A similarly hierarchical value system informed its cultural institutions.38 TheHamburg Kunsthalle (Fig. 3), founded in 1869 and expanded considerablyfrom 1886 onwards by its famous director Alfred von Lichtwark, came toplay an important role as an institute of public education. However, althoughLichtwark referred to museums as an ‘expression of democracy’ that ‘stoodopen to the entire population’, this was a restricted understanding ofdemocracy. Specifically, it was based on the contrast between the Kunsthalle,a bourgeois institution, and the princely origins of many of the othermuseums and galleries across Germany.39 Furthermore, while Lichtwark mayhave believed in opening up culture to all, this was still with the caveat thatthe state and its cultural guardians, the bourgeoisie, should remain incontrol. As Lichtwark stated, ‘tradition can’t strike roots in a dynamic massof individuals, it must rely on the enduring principle, the state . . . ’.40 It wasfor the cultivated Burger to define culture and to set up aesthetic andeducational norms for the rest of society; hence, ‘it is a wasted effort toestablish a new cultivated education [‘Bildung’] from the bottom up’.41

Although Warburg was, in other respects, at odds with Lichtwark, this viewof culture was shared by both.

A similar ideology underlay the Volksheim in Hamburg, with which Warburgwas associated and at which he staged an exhibition and delivered a lectureon Durer in 1905.42 Established in 1901 following the model of London’sToynbee Hall founded some 17 years earlier, the Volksheim was intended tobuild bridges with the working classes and to promote a sense of communitythrough self-education and self-discipline.43 Situated in the working classdistrict of Rothenburgsort, with further ‘branches’ set up in Barmbeck andHammerbrook, it organised lectures, classes, and exhibitions, funded both bysubscription from participants and by the financial backing of Hamburg‘notables’, including mayors, a number of senators – including Carl Cohn,the first Jewish senator – Johannes Petersen, the secretary of the Chamberof Commerce, and Aby’s brother Max Warburg. By functioning as a sitewhere the educated bourgeoisie could encounter the working classes, itwould provide the former with some kind of insight into the moral andsocial life of the poor, while helping break down suspicion towards thesocially and economically better-off. Yet as Jennifer Jenkins has asserted,‘democracy was not one of its projects. Ecstatic statements about creatingone community . . . were intertwined with affirmations of the necessity ofsocial hierarchy. A project of liberal patronage, the People’s Home wasdriven by a sense of liberal guilt; after all, the destruction of social harmonywas a sin’.44

If we construct the social and cultural milieu into which Warburg was born,we can begin to understand the political resonance of much of his writing, for inlate nineteenth-century Hamburg the educated middle classes were seen verymuch as the guardians of culture and civic life. There is little in Warburg’swork to suggest that he dissented substantially from this outlook. Hisemphasis on ‘communal reason’ as a bulwark against psychological andcultural regression, when coupled with his unease at the rise of mass politics,suggests that he had very much in mind the community of Bildungsburger whohad governed Hamburg for so long.

This vision underlay Warburg’s approach to the study of the Renaissance. Heturned repeatedly to the achievements of specific prominent families, includingthe Sassetti, the Tornabuoni, the Medici, or the Portinari. Examination ofFrancesco Sassetti’s will, for example, which combined the ‘down-to-earthpractical tenor’ of the successful Renaissance businessman (Warburg speaks of

Fig. 3. Georg Theodor Schirrmacher and

Hermann von der Hude. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

1863–1869.

38. See Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity.Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-SiecleHamburg (Cornell University Press: London andIthaca, 2003).

39. Alfred Lichtwark, ‘Museen alsBildungsstatten’, in Der Deutsche der Zukunft(Bruno Cassirer: Berlin, 1905), p. 91.

40. Alfred Lichtwark, Hamburg: Niedersachsen(Georg Kuhtmann: Dresden, 1897), p. 66.

41. Alfred Lichtwark, ‘Dilettantismus undVolkskunst’, in Lichtwark, Vom Arbeitsfeld desDilettantismus (Bruno Cassirer: Berlin, 1902),p. 23.

42. Aby Warburg, ‘Durer als Spiegel seinerselbst und seiner Zeit – 100 Handzeichnungen’.The manuscript of the lecture is held at theArchive of the Warburg Institute, vol. IV, p. 47.

43. On Toynbee Hall, see Asa Briggs and AnneMacartney, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years(Routledge, Kegan & Paul: London, 1984).

44. Jenkins, ‘Provincial Modernity’, p. 95.


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the ‘egocentric superman in quasi-antique disguise’) with an ‘old-fashionedand backward-looking attitude’ of contemplative medieval religiosity’ ledWarburg to speculate on the wider complexities of the mentality of theFlorentine Quattrocento.45 He approached Domenico Ghirlandaio’s portraitof Lorenzo de’ Medici and his household in his fresco of the Confirmation ofthe Franciscan Order (Fig. 4) in Santa Trinita in a similar way.46 Ghirlandaio’splacement of the Medici family in the foreground of a painting ostensiblydedicated to an historical event from the twelfth century – the approvalof the Franciscan Order by Pope Honorius III in 1223 – signified forWarburg the rise of a pragmatic, commercially oriented bourgeoisie inQuattrocento Florence. Warburg highlighted again the contradictory natureof the ‘citizen of Medicean Florence [who] united the wholly dissimilarcharacters of the idealist – whether medievally Christian or romanticallychivalrous or classically Neoplatonic – and the worldly, practical, paganEtruscan merchant’.47

For Otto Werckmeister, Warburg’s interest is a projection or search forhistorical correspondences, in which these figures counted as antecedents of hisown bourgeois banking background. Thus, ‘ . . . Warburg transformed earlyRenaissance painting from a timeless aesthetic ideal . . . into an unapologeticclass culture of enterprising merchants. That class culture he transfigured intoan unacknowledged ideology of the modern subject . . . ’.48 The FlorentineRenaissance saw not merely the birth of the modern humanist subject, asBurckhardt described it, but more specifically the birth of the modernbourgeois individual, and a central aspect of Warburg’s understanding of the

Fig. 4. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Confirmation of the Franciscan Order by Pope Honorius III. 1482–1485. Florence, Santa Trinita.

45. See Warburg, ‘Francesco Sassetti’s LastInjunctions to His Sons’, in Warburg, ‘TheRenewal of Pagan Antiquity’, pp. 223–62. Thecomments are cited from p. 239.

46. Warburg, ‘The Art of Portraiture and theFlorentine Bourgeoisie’, in Warburg, ‘TheRenewal of Pagan Antiquity’, pp. 185–221.

47. Warburg, ‘The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity’,p. 190. In this essay, Warburg sees FrancescoSassetti as ‘just such a type of the honest andthoughtful bourgeois living in an age oftransition. . . ’ (p. 191).

48. Werckmeister, ‘The Turn from Marx toWarburg in West German Art History 1968–1990’, p. 218.



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cultural politics of the Renaissance was his outline of the particular struggle of thenascent bourgeois class to establish itself.

Other commentators have also seen in Warburg’s concern with the Medici asearch for self-legitimation and confirmation of the political role he believedshould accrue to his class.49 This is true to a certain degree, except thatWarburg was not simply projecting his own individual circumstances andsense of politics onto the past; rather, his approach was driven by hissubscription to the wider liberal ideology that the mercantile bourgeoisieshould take a leading role in the cultural, and not merely the political life ofthe state. Indeed, as other commentators have argued, the belief in thenecessary interconnection of cultural and economic life persisted throughoutthe nineteenth century and only came to be questioned in the decade beforethe First World War.50 Warburg himself was acutely aware of the symbiosisof the two, and of the powerful role they played in his personal situation; hereferred openly to the dependence of his research enterprise on the supportof the Warburg bank, and this was not merely seen as a necessary evil.51 In aletter to his brother Max he stated that it was his wish ‘that a politicallysuccessful and peaceable community can arise on the basis of the freecommercial culture of the bourgeoisie, [whose aim and duty is] to enhanceand maintain the ability and desire for work of everyone according totheir intellectual and material capacities’.52 Warburg clearly endorsed theintertwining of bourgeois enterprise and learning, and in so doing hearticulated a central trope of liberal thinking of the time.

Warburg the Jew

Thus far the argument has deliberately skirted around Warburg’s Jewishidentity. This has been the topic of a considerable literature; given his statusas a prominent representative of the German–Jewish intellectual communityof the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this is hardlysurprising.53 The basic facts of Warburg’s personal background have thusbeen exhaustively examined, and their link to his concern with anti-Semitismacknowledged; his understanding of the politics and meaning of anti-Semitismhas, however, barely been explored. In order to pursue this issue, it is worthconsidering, first, how Warburg responded to his own identity as a Jew.

In his biography of Warburg, Ernst Gombrich tended to minimise Warburg’sJewish origins, or rather, he cast Warburg as a strong proponent ofEnlightenment, a commitment that involved an unambiguous rejection ofhis Jewish heritage.54 Almost as soon as it was published, this view was seenas problematic.55 It diverged significantly from the account by Warburg’sstudent Gertrud Bing, for example, for whom Warburg, although a Germanpatriot, remained ambivalent about his Jewish identity.56 On the one hand,certain episodes, from his decision in 1887 no longer to submit toorthodox strictures on kosher food, to his refusal in the 1920s to associatehis library with Jewish organisations in Hamburg – in 1928 he rejected arequest for the library to host the inaugural meeting of the ‘Akademie furdie Wissenschaft vom Judenthum’ – suggest a self-conscious distancingfrom his background. On the other hand, he carefully documented aspects ofcontemporary Jewish culture and experience; this ranged from notingepisodes of anti-Semitic violence to collect images of the Jews in EasternEurope encountered by advancing German troops during the First WorldWar.57 These all suggest a much more complex attitude on Warburg’s part.

49. Felix Gilbert argues that such historicalantecedents ‘helped to strengthen his convictionthat he had a right to belong to the ruling group ofthe empire’. Gilbert, ‘From Art History to theHistory of Civilization’, Journal of Modern History,vol. 44, 1972, p. 390.

50. Wolfgang Mommsen, ‘Kultur als Instrumentder Legitimierung burgerlicher Hegemonie imNationalstaat’, in Burgerliche Kultur und politischeOrdnung. Kunstler, Schriftstellen und Intellektuelle inder deustchen Geschichte 1830–1933 (Fischer:Frankfurt am Main, 2000), p. 59–75.

51. As he stated in a letter to his brother Max (3June 1900), ‘I am really a fool for not insistingeven more that we should demonstrate, by ourexample, that capitalism is also capable ofintellectual achievements of a scope which wouldnot otherwise be possible’. Cited in Gombrich,‘Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography’,p. 130.

52. Warburg, Letter to Max Warburg, cited inDiers, ‘Aby Warburg aus Briefen’, p. 163.

53. See Charlotte Schoell-Glass, ‘Aby Warburgund der Antisemitismus’. See also Schoell-Glass,‘Aby Warburg: Forced Identity and “CulturalScience”’, in Catherine Soussloff (ed.), JewishIdentity in Modern Art History (University ofCalifornia Press: Berkeley, 1999), pp. 218–30.

54. Sir Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg. AnIntellectual Biography (Phaidon: London, 1986).

55. See Hans Liebeschutz, ‘Aby Warburg(1866–1929) as Interpreter of Civilisation’, inPublications of the Leo Baeck Institute. Year Book,vol. 20, 1971, pp. 27–33.

56. Bing, ‘Aby M. Warburg’ [1958] in DieterWuttke (ed.), Aby Warburg. Ausgewahlte Schriftenund Wurdigungen (Valentin Koerner: Baden Baden,1992), p. 463.

57. Warburg’s experiences in Strasbourg arerecounted in Bernd Roeck, Der junge Aby Warburg(C. H. Beck: Munich, 1997), pp. 65–79. On hisresponse to the request by the Akademie, see theTagebuch der kulturwissenschaftlichen BibliothekWarburg, entry for 21 January 1928. On theimages of the Eastern European Jews, see MichaelSteinberg, ‘Aby Warburg’s Kreuzlingen Lecture:A Reading’, in Aby M. Warburg, Images from theRegions of the Pueblo Indians of North America,(Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1995),pp. 59–109.


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Warburg may have sought to distance himself from certain aspects ofJewish orthodoxy, yet he could also never forget or be allowed to forgethis own identity; he was constantly reminded of this by anti-Semitic studentsat the University of Strasbourg. Nor did he straightforwardly dismiss it. In amuch-cited early letter to his mother of 1887, in which he defended hisdecision not to restrict himself solely to kosher food he argued:

I am by no means ashamed of being a Jew. On the contrary, I attempt to show toothers that representatives of my kind are well suited to using their talents in order tofit in as useful members into the development of culture and the state.58

This desire to gain acceptance by demonstrating the capacity of Jews to make a‘useful’ contribution to German society was repeated in a letter to his motherwritten two years later, in 1889, in which he expressed the hope that despite his‘markedly oriental’ appearance he and his descendants would be able to becomefully assimilated into German society.59 During the 1914–1918 war, Warburgcame to see real danger in the gradual emergence of anti-Semitism in Germansociety and he sought to emphasise the value of German Jews to the war effortas a means of combatting it.60

In making such a profession of ‘usefulness’ Warburg was, on the one hand,giving in to the demands of wider civil society, in which Jews were expected todemonstrate the extent of their assimilation. On the other hand, the urge toassimilate stemmed from Warburg’s own ambivalence about his Jewishidentity and also his sense of being a German. The liberal political traditionto which he owed so much was fiercely patriotic, indeed had been a drivingforce towards German unification, and Warburg’s identification with liberalnotions of citizenship included a commitment to national identity that wascommon amongst liberal Jews of his generation. This sense of belongingto German culture was strengthened for many by the specific encounterin the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of German Jews withthose from Eastern Europe fleeing the pogroms in Tsarist Russia from the1880s onwards. Such contacts posed profound difficulties for German Jews,who found little affinity with the culture of the ‘Ostjuden’, as they werepejoratively termed.

William Hagen has demonstrated how far German Jews perceivedthemselves to be from these so-called Ostjuden in his account of the 1917conference of the liberal Central Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith(Central-Verein deutscher Staatsburger judischen Glaubens).61 As one speakerdeclared of Jewish immigrants from Łodz, then in Russia: ‘These gentlemenbrought with them from over there their customs and practices inunadulterated form, and if subsequently they didn’t all prove harmful, still avery large number of them have done their bit to greatly undermine thereputation of the German Jews . . . ’.62 This was a common sentiment, andthere was a widespread fear that the putative backwardness of the ‘Ostjuden’might threaten the position attained by the Jewish population of Germany.Early twentieth-century liberal German Jewish opinion sought to extend tosuch immigrants, and more generally to Jews in Central Europe, thecivilising cloak of German culture and language, with a concomitantdisplacement of Yiddish and other signs of their backwardness.63 A Germanpatriot, Warburg, conformed to this model of liberal bourgeois Jewishthinking, for which immersion in German culture was an essential factor ofidentity formation.

58. Warburg, Letter of 26 January 1887, cited inSchoell-Glass, ‘Aby Warburg und derAntisemitismus’, p. 253.

59. Warburg, Letter of 25 November 1889, inSchoell-Glass, ‘Aby Warburg und derAntisemitismus’, p. 255.

60. Warburg, Notes on the Serpent RitualLecture, cited in Steinberg, ‘Aby Warburg’sKreuzlingen Lecture: A Reading’, p. 87.

61. William Hagen, ‘Murder in the East.German-Jewish Liberal Reactions to Anti-JewishViolence in Poland and other East EuropeanLands’, Central European History, vol. 34, no. 1,2001, pp. 1–30.

62. Cited in Hagen, ‘Murder in the East’, p. 6.

63. For an extended discussion of this theme, seeSteven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. The EastEuropean Jew in German and German JewishConsciousness 1800–1923 (University of WisconsinPress: Madison, 1982).



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Indeed, Warburg’s own self-understanding can be seen as structurally linked tothe wider social position of German Jews. There has been an enormousliterature on the question of the social interaction of Jews with Germans, andpositions have ranged from stressing the considerable degree of personal andformal social interaction, on the one hand, to the allegation of a completeabsence of meaningful dialogue, on the other hand. Hence, authors such asGershom Scholem remained trenchant critics of the idea of any actual orpossible degree of social integration or dialogue, whereas other observershave carefully documented the complex interactions between Jews andnon-Jews in Germany, including the increasing numbers of Jews whomarried ‘out’, of which Warburg was, of course, a notable instance.64

However, even the most optimistic assessments have recognised therenunciation of Jewish identity required in order to gain social acceptance;Warburg’s own marriage to the sculptor Mary Hertz was only possible afterovercoming sustained opposition from both his and her parents. One of themost powerful depictions of this situation remains that of Hannah Arendt,who emphasised the conflicting imperatives Jews were required to satisfy. AsArendt argues, they were compelled to be both Jewish and non-Jewish, thesame and yet distinct:

Conforming to a society which discriminated against ‘ordinary’ Jews . . . Jews had todifferentiate themselves clearly from the ‘Jew in general’ and just as clearly to indicatethat they were Jews; under no circumstances were they allowed simply to disappearamong their neighbours . . . This amounted to a feeling of being different from othermen in the street because they were Jews, and different from other Jews at homebecause they were not like ‘ordinary Jews’.65

Even in liberal circles, acceptance was often only gained through a self-exoticisation; it was precisely their cultural difference that made Jewsattractive in certain quarters. Under such circumstances, states Arendt, onewas frequently faced with the choice of becoming either a parvenu in orderto gain wider social acceptance, or a pariah and remain socially excluded.Many attempted to navigate a course between these two extremes, failing toreconcile the irreconcilable. The consequence was that ‘Jews feltsimultaneously the pariah’s regret at not having become the parvenu, and theparvenu’s bad conscience at having betrayed his people’.66

If we use Arendt’s analysis as a framework for approaching Warburg, otheraspects of his work begin to become a little more comprehensible. DavidFreedberg has noted the apparent paradox that while he was intenselyengaged with contemporary anti-Semitism – its status as a moderncounter-part to the primitive violence of ancient myth – Warburg seemedremarkably uninterested in Jewish symbolic images. Only in his ‘Lecture onthe Serpent Ritual’, in which the Biblical myth of Moses and the brazenserpent, St Paul’s apparent imperviousness to viper bites, and Old Testamentidolatry are mentioned, are Jewish and Biblical mythology or culturediscussed in any depth.67 Freedberg reads this as a case of repressed origins,in which Warburg’s dedication to the artistic culture of Renaissance Italyfunctions as a kind of displacement activity.68 Indeed, in this respect parallelscan be drawn with Warburg’s contemporary Bernard Berenson (1865–1959),whose self-invention as a cosmopolitan aesthete and Renaissance art historianwas achieved through a deliberate repression of his own origins as theLithuanian Jew Bernhard Valvrojensky.69 Following Arendt, however,Warburg’s simultaneous affirmation and disavowal of a concern with Jewish

64. Scholem, ‘Jews and Germans’, in On Jews andJudaism in Crisis. Selected Essays (Shocken Books:New York, 1976), pp. 71–92. Marion Kaplan(ed.), Jewish Daily Life in Germany 1618–1945(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2005). Seealso George Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism(Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1985)and Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State. ThePolitical History of a Minority 1848–1933(Blackwell: Oxford, 1992).

65. Hannah Arendt, in Peter Baehr (ed.), ThePortable Hannah Arendt (Viking: London, 2000),pp. 85–6.

66. Arendt in Baehr (ed.), ‘The Portable HannahArendt’, p. 87.

67. Warburg, Images from the Region of the PuebloIndians of North America, p. 45. In his essay ‘Durerand Italian Antiquity’, Warburg briefly mentionsCastagno’s shield of David (in Warburg, ‘TheRenewal of Pagan Antiquity’, p. 557) and in his1905 essay ‘On Imprese Amorose in the EarliestFlorentine Engravings’, he also mentioned – inpassing – Salome and the legend of Judith andHolofernes (‘The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity’,p. 174).

68. David Freedberg, ‘The Kachinas of Oraibi:Ethnography, Photography and Iconoclash’,lecture delivered at the University of Karlsruhe,12 July 2002. See also Freedberg, ‘Pathos aOraibi: Cio che Warburg non vide’, in ClaudiaCieri Via and Pietro Montani (eds), Lo Sguardo diGiano, Aby Warburg fra tempo e memoria (Aragno:Turin, 2004), pp. 569–611. An English version,‘Pathos at Oraibi: What Warburg Did not See’, isavailable online at: http://columbiauniversity.org/cu/arthistory/pdf/dept_freedberg_pathos_at_oraibi.pdf (accessed12 January 2010).

69. Berenson’s attitude towards his Jewishidentity was discussed critically by MeyerSchapiro in ‘Mr. Berenson’s Values’, (1961) inTheory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society(George Brazillier: New York, 1998), pp. 209–25. For an analysis of Schapiro, see DonaldKuspit, ‘Meyer Schapiro’s Jewish Unconscious’,in Catherine Soussloff (ed.), Jewish Identity inModern Art History (University of California Press:Berkeley, CA, 1999), pp. 200–17. On Berensonsee also, Ernst Samuels, Bernard Berenson.The Making of a Connoisseur (Belknap Press:Cambridge, MA, 1979).


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culture can also be seen as playing out the wider contradictory identitiesdemanded of ‘emancipated’ Jews.

On the one hand, Warburg’s lack of engagement with his own culturalorigins precisely with regard to the question of art was in conformity withcontemporary art historical norms. Indeed, he reproduced a wider tendencyby Jewish scholars in particular to avoid Jewish art. As Margaret Olin hasargued, it was a matter of no small concern to contemporary commentatorsthat most of the few studies on Jewish art were undertaken by non-Jews.70

However, Warburg’s reluctance to consider Jewish culture in depth may alsobe linked to the situation of emancipated liberal Jews of the nineteenthcentury, who sought integration into German society through immersion inuniversal humanistic Bildung. This shared attitude also explains the affinitieshe found with Ernst Cassirer in his later years.

As one of the last, and most powerful, representatives of Neo-Kantianthinking, Cassirer was heir to a liberal philosophical tradition that sought toaddress the social and political problems of Germany and the Reich byrecourse to Kantian notions of reason and moral freedom. To cite onecommentator: ‘the neo-Kantians expressed the tentative and unsuccessfulefforts of a segment of the upper bourgeoisie to make peace with theproletariat and to retain an attitude of cultural community with the West’.71

Drawing on Kant’s political ideal of a community of self-legislating moralwills, thinkers such as Friedrich Lange (1828–1875), Hermann Cohen(1842–1918), or Paul Natorp (1854–1924) attempted to construct aleft-liberal social and political philosophy with the ethical subject at itsheart.72 Social order was thus centred either on individual moral imperativesor on a community of rational, ethical beings. However, Cassirer and otherneo-Kantian thinkers, not least Cohen or the aesthetician Max Dessoir(1867–1947), were Jewish.73 The commitment of Cassirer, Cohen andothers to Kantian ideas of community, moral autonomy and rationality wereconsequently consistent with the outlook of the liberal middle classes, butthey can also be interpreted as part of the process of internalising bourgeoisGerman cultural values.

Jewish art culture played a fairly minor role as a topic of direct scholarlyinvestigation for Warburg, but his Jewish identity nevertheless informed it inother ways. A fundamental aspect of his analysis of the Renaissance revolvedaround the question of split identities. As noted earlier, his analysis of thewill of Francesco Sassetti, or his observations on the contradictory presenceof pious faith and mundane self-assertion in Ghirlandaio’s images of theMedici led him to stress the contradictory mentality of the period. It ispossible to see in Warburg’s interest in these inner conflicts, and in hisfascination with the opposition of pagan and Christian ‘mentalities’, and withtheir uneasy co-existence, a link to his own experience of being a GermanJew. It has been widely recognised that Warburg saw in the Renaissance ananticipation of many of the key social and cultural issues of his own time; theRenaissance was a moment of conflicting cultural imperatives. What caughthis interest was the question of how individuals – artists, donors, patrons –negotiated these differing demands. In this way, too, the Renaissancepre-figured modernity, in particular, in relation to the position of theGerman Jew. As with the wider question of Warburg’s political interests thecrucial issue here, however, is not the mere fact that the Renaissance took onthis significance, but rather, the interpretative frame Warburg used to makesense of it. In keeping with Warburg’s broader attitudes, the dilemmas of

70. Margaret Olin, ‘Early Christian Synagogues’and ‘Jewish Art Historians’. The Discovery of theSynagoguge of Dura-Europos’, Marburger Jahrbuchfur Kunstwissenschaft, vol. 27, 2000, pp. 7–28.There were some exceptions, such as ErnstCohn-Wiener, author of Die judische Kunst. IhreGeschichte von den Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart(Wasservogel: Berlin, 1929), or RahelWischnitzer-Bernstein, who published Symboleund Gestalten der judischen Kunst (Scholem: Berlin,1935).

71. Thomas Willey, Back to Kant. The Revival ofKantianism in German Social and Historical Thought,1860–1914 (Wayne State University Press:Detroit, 1978), p. 23.

72. Key texts included: Lange, Die Arbeiterfrage.Ihre Bedeutung fur Gegenwart und Zukunft(Bleuler-Hausheer & Co: Winterthur, 1870);Natorp, Sozialpadagogik. Theorie derWillenserziehung auf der Grundlage der Gemeinschaft(Frommann: Stuttgart, 1899); Cohen, Ethik desWillens (Bruno Cassirer: Berlin, 1907).

73. Cohen frequently wrote on Jewish thought,culture and identity, specifically, its place withinGermany. See Cohen, Deutschtum und Judentum mitgrundlegenden Betrachtungen uber Staat undInternationalismus (Topelmann: Giessen, 1915) andReligion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums(Fock: Leipzig, 1919).



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Jewishness were viewed through the lens of the liberal ideology of theemancipated bourgeois.

Competing Visions: Politics and Myth

Warburg’s social, political, and cultural understanding reflected both hisposition as the son of a wealthy banking family in the mercantile city ofHamburg, and also the wider attitudes of assimilated Jews across Germany.His grasp of political events also suffered severe limitations; a sense of thiscan be gained when his response to the question of anti-Semitism isexamined in greater depth and, in particular, when it is considered incomparison with other attempts to interpret its meaning and origin.

Warburg viewed anti-Semitic violence within the broader framework of histheory of culture as the eruption of a primitive Dionysian impulse. Threeparticular contemporary episodes drew his attention in this context. The firstwas the discovery of a dismembered corpse of a nineteen-year-old man,Ernst Winter, in the Prussian town of Konitz (now Chojnice in Poland) inMarch 1900. The corpse appeared to have been expertly butchered, and theBerlin-based anti-Semitic newspaper the Staatsburgezeitung (‘The Citizen’sPaper’) suggested that it had been a ritual act. It was thereby drawing on awell-established myth that associated Jews with secret ritual murder, and themere suggestion of Jewish guilt by the paper led to an outbreak ofanti-Jewish violence in Konitz and neighbouring towns in West Prussia.74

The theme of ritual murder reappeared in a trial for ritual murder heldin Kiev in 1913, reports of which Warburg also collected.75 A third episodewas the recounting in the Frankfurter Zeitung in December 1905 of themurder of a female teacher by Cossacks in Stavropol, in the Caucasus, onaccount of her alleged revolutionary disposition, which the Cossacks saw asbetraying Jewish sympathies. This event was followed by wider anti-Jewishpogroms across Russia in the same year. In response to the murder of theteacher Warburg noted: ‘Death of Orpheus: Return of the eternallyunchanging beast, genus: homo sapiens’.76 In many respects, this wascommensurate with his wider theory of culture; his concern with thesurvival of violent pagan mythic archetypes in the Renaissance guided hisapproach to the present. As noted earlier, he implied an equivalence betweenthe rise of Italian fascism and the ongoing power of Catholic ritual. Hisproject of a historical cultural psychology revolved around the persistenceand transformation of primitive archetypes. Particular attention was paid tomythic images of violence, such as the death of Orpheus, the murder ofLaocoon and his sons, the feats of Hercules, or the influence of balefulastrological deities such as Saturn. The mythic representation of such primalviolence provided Warburg with a framework for interpreting both the pastand the present. However, his concern with myth not only formed a centralscholarly preoccupation, it also came to shape how he viewed history.

Sven Lutticken has recently explored Warburg’s interest in mythic thinkingin terms of his enthusiasm for the paintings of Arnold Bocklin and thelatter’s ability to construct new mythic figures fit for the present.77 AsLutticken states, Bocklin was taken up at the turn of the century bynationalistic critics as a standard-bearer of modern German art (in oppositionto French modernism), and following Julius Meier-Graefe’s attack on him inDer Fall Bocklin (‘The Bocklin Case’, 1905), which outlined Bocklin’s defectsin comparison with Manet, raised the political stakes of support for eitherpainter.78 Having written on Bocklin before publication of Meier-Graefe’s

74. On this episode see Schoell-Glass, ‘AbyWarburg und der Antisemitismus’, p. 94 ff.

75. There are two boxes in the archive of theWarburg Institute (IV §§68 and 69) entitled‘Judenfragen’ which contain newspaper cuttingsrelating to both the Konitz murder and the ‘ritual’murder in the Ukraine.

76. Cited in Schoell-Glass, ‘Aby Warburg undder Antisemitismus’, pp. 88–9.

77. Sven Lutticken, ‘“Keep Your Distance.” AbyWarburg on Myth and Modern Art’, Oxford ArtJournal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2005, pp. 45–59.

78. Alfred Julius Meier-Graefe, Der Fall Bocklinund die Lehre von den Einheiten (Julius Hoffmann:Stuttgart, 1905).


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text, Warburg did not become involved in this particular debate. In any case hewas more interested in the Swiss artist’s use of the ‘mythopoetic power of theimage’. and in particular, in his reactivation of classical myth.79 To citeLutticken: ‘In Warburg’s view, Bocklin’s tableaux seem to have beenconvincing confrontations with the darker side of Antiquity, the artistsuccessfully working through impulses that might prove dangerous in lesserhands by imposing aesthetic unity on them’.80

This was a recurrent theme in Warburg’s writings, although he was mostoften concerned with the Renaissance reactivation (and transfiguration) ofsuch Dionysian antiquity. Such an aesthetic reworking of ancient myth wasalso vital as a means to countering the disruptive social and cultural effects ofmodern technology, an idea he put forward most directly at the conclusionof his lecture on the s ritual of the Pueblo Indians.81 Warburg’s approach canalso be placed, however, within the context of a wider fascination with myththat originated in the aesthetics of German Romanticism. The firstexpression of such a fascination was in the calls for a new mythology byFriedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling, which would displace discreditedforms of religious life and could also serve as the foundation of a new socialand political order.82 A secular version of such a concern with myth alsoevolved in the comparative mythographic studies of writers such as FriedrichCreuzer, Karl Otfried Muller or, later, Warburg’s teacher HermannUsener.83 Such works sought parallels between ancient Greek myths andthose in Sanskrit epics, or the mythologies of other Indo-European culturessuch as the Celts or the Germans.

Warburg’s tracing of the migration of symbolic images through time andspace was an extension of the philological interests of the mythographers.Where Usener or Muller search for semantic, morphological, or logicalconstants and variations in the inherited stock of Indo-European myths,Warburg examined the recurrence or transformation of the mythic imagesof classical antiquity. He did not see in myth the basis for a new religion,but he nevertheless saw it as having a crucial social function in that mythcounted as a step on the path away from immersion in immediateperception and towards symbolisation, and hence the sublimation of rawemotional experience. This focus was strengthened when he met Cassirer,and their shared interest in myth found material expression in the fact thatthe first volume of the Studien der Bibliothek Warburg was an analysis byCassirer of mythical concepts.84

Interpreting contemporary events in the light of mythic archetypes produceda poetic, tragic vision; violence represented the return of ancient primalimpulses. An instructive instance of his understanding was his response to aseries of spalliera paintings by Botticelli of the Wedding-Feast of Nastagiodegli Onesti, recounted in the Decameron, in which a rejected lover had tornout the heart of his beloved. Regarding this as an example of the penetrationof the ‘thin Christian Catholic veneer’ by a ‘demonic undercurrent’,Warburg added: ‘Something similar actually happened. At the Colonna-Baglioni ‘blood wedding’ of 1500 Filippo di Braccio ripped Astorre Baglioni’sheart out of his chest and tore it to pieces with his own teeth’.85 There wasthus a continuum of mythic legend and historical events which he saw asrecurring in his own times. However, this reading of the present in terms ofarchetypes prevented Warburg from analysing their more specific nature orproximate causes. It was sustainable only by excluding the massive social,economic, and political differences that separated the varying events.

79. Warburg, ‘Bocklins Heimgang 18. Januar1901’, cited in Lutticken, ‘“Keep Your Distance.”Aby Warburg on Myth and Modern Art’, p. 52.

80. Lutticken, ‘“Keep Your Distance.” AbyWarburg on Myth and Modern Art,’ p. 56.

81. Warburg, ‘Images from the Regions of thePueblo Indians of North America’, p. 50 ff.

82. On myth in nineteenth-century Germanintellectual life, see Wolff-Daniel Hartwich, Diedeutsche Mythologie. Die Erfindung einer Kunstreligion(Philo: Berlin and Vienna, 2000); GeorgeWilliamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany.Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism toNietzsche (Chicago University Press: Chicago,2004).

83. Creuzer was the author of Die Symbolik undMythologie der alten Volker, besonders der Griechen(Heyer und Leske: Darmstadt and Leipzig, 1819).Karl Muller’s Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichenMythologie (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft:Darmstadt, 1970) was first published in 1825.Usener was the author of Gotternamen (FriedrichCohen: Bonn, 1896).

84. Ernst Cassirer, Die Begriffsform im mythischenDenken (Teubner: Leipzig, 1922). Cassirerpublished a further work on myth under theauspices of the Warburg library, Sprache undMythos: ein Beitrag zum Problem der Gotternamen(Teubner: Leipzig, 1925).

85. Cited in Schoell-Glass, ‘Aby Warburg undder Antisemitismus’, p. 105.



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Closer attention to the question of the response to anti-Semitism highlightsthe shortcomings of Warburg’s approach, for it contrasted with other attemptsto explain anti-Semitic violence. It was a matter of no small concern in liberalJewish circles in the immediate aftermath of the First World War that theestablishment of new states in central and eastern Europe was accompaniedby a marked rise in outbreaks of anti-Semitism. The Allgemeine Zeitung desJudentums im deutschen Reich (‘General Paper of the Jewry in the GermanEmpire’), the monthly publication of the Central Union of German Citizensof Jewish Faith, reported numerous outbreaks in Poland, Russia, andRomania. However, the accounts were emphatic that this was a modernphenomenon to be seen as the consequence of recent developments,including the re-assertion of repressed national identities. As William Hagenstates: ‘ . . . in German-Jewish liberal eyes, the primary danger facing thePolish and other eastern Jews was not so much sporadic physical assault,costly though this was. It was, rather, the threat of ruthless anti-Semiticideologies of Christian middle-class formation guiding the policy of extremenationalist governments in the new postwar states . . . ’.86 Subsequentscholarship has tended to support this latter view, but what is of greaterinterest are the grounds for such a difference of opinion on Warburg’s part.For in contrast to Warburg’s mythic interpretation, the correspondents ofthe Allgemeine Zeitung saw anti-Semitism as linked to a complex range ofcontemporary social and political factors.

Many of his Jewish contemporaries saw the conditions for the rise andexercise of anti-Semitic violence in the absence of legal and constitutionalframeworks safeguarding their co-religionists in Poland, Russia, and Romania.Warburg, in contrast, had little to say about its specifically modernappearance. Nor indeed was he able to provide much of a solution, otherthan by the formation of a beneficent visual imagery that might sustain somekind of alternative regime of visual representation. Here too the limits of hispolitical horizons become apparent. While he celebrated the work of artistssuch as Rembrandt, Bocklin, or Botticelli for countering the most primitiveimpulses sustaining classical imagery, his own choice of motto to celebratethe Treaty of Locarno – idea vincit – couched in the antiquated language ofbourgeois humanist learning, could hardly have been more inappropriate as ameans to inspire wide-scale adherence to the progressive ideals ofStresemann and the new mass democracy of the Weimar Republic.

Conclusion

In his famous study of Weimar Germany, Peter Gay identified Aby Warburg asan exemplar of the intellectual culture of the 1920s.87 A closer analysisindicates, however, that much of Warburg’s thought was founded on a set ofbeliefs and values that were rooted in the ideology of the Wilhelmine liberalbourgeoisie. This becomes particularly evident when his political views andhis understanding of cultural politics are scrutinised; specifically, Warburgheld to the utopian image of a community based on Bildung and measuredreason (‘Besonnenheit’). Affirming the happy coexistence of commerce andculture, he implicitly saw his own class as occupying a leading role, a viewthat motivated his scholarly interest in the economic elite of RenaissanceFlorence.

An important question to ask in response to such observations might be: whyshould this be a matter of such concern? Ultimately, because recent decadeshave witnessed a mythification of Warburg, which treats him as providing a

86. Hagen, ‘Murder in the East’, p. 19.

87. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture. The Outsider asInsider (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1992),pp. 32–35.


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model for a renewed kind of visual theory that would renew or even replace thediscipline of art history.88 In contrast, this discussion suggests that beforeappropriating him in the service of contemporary debates, it is necessary tocome to terms with the historical situatedness of his ideas, and with theirsocial and ideological connotations. The analysis undertaken here raisesimportant questions as to the ability of Warburgian Kulturwissenschaft tomount the kind of challenge with which it is often credited. It may notultimately put into doubt his relevance for the present, but it does highlightthe need for a more critical approach to this work. Only then can we identifya Warburg who might still speak to us today.

88. The key proselytiser in this regard has beenGeorges Didi-Huberman. See his ‘ArtisticSurvival. Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcismof Impure Time’, Common Knowledge, vol. 9, no.2, 2003, pp. 273–85.



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Aby Warburg Jewish and Political Identity_Warburg Institute founder.pdf

Documents

Transcript of Aby Warburg Jewish and Political Identity_Warburg Institute founder.pdf