Bildwissenschaft: Theories of the Image in German-language Scholarship

Matthew Rampley

In 1997 the art historian Michael Diers published a small volume of essays entitled Schlagbilder. Zur politischen Ikonographie der Gegenwart (‘Picto- rial Slogans. On the Political Iconography of the Present’).1 Employing the neologism ‘Schlagbild’ by analogy with the German term for ‘slogan’ (‘Schlagwort’) the essays purported to examine the role of the image in the formation and dissemination of political discourse. Consciously work- ing with images from a variety of different media, including news pho- tographs, stamps, paintings, cartoons, and advertising, Diers examined topics such as hand gestures in politics (including the famous handshake of Yassir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin), the Wall, or the motif of the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Diers’s principal aim was to highlight the par- allels between images and slogans as metonymic depictions of political ideas and events, in particular, endowing them with an ‘elevated emo- tional value’.2 The term ‘Schlagbild’ was originally coined by in an essay on propaganda during the Reformation, and the mobilization of the term was part of a wider renewal of interest in Warburg’s work led by Martin Warnke, whose student Diers had been.3 Indeed, the political implications of Warburg’s term were first discussed by Warnke nearly twenty years ear- lier, and the groundwork for Diers’s volume was subsequently laid by the establishment, in 1991, of the research project in ‘Political Iconography’ (‘Forschungsstelle Politische Ikonographie’) at the Institute of

1 Michael Diers, Schlagbilder: Zur politischen Ikonographie der Gegenwart ( am Main, 1997). 2 Diers, Schlagbilder, 7. Diers is citing Otto Ladendorf, Historisches Schlagwörterbuch: Ein Versuch (Berlin, 1906). 3 Aby Warburg, ‘Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten’, (1921) in Warburg, Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed. by Dieter Wuttke (Baden Baden, 3rd edn., 1992) 232. English translation: ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther’, in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, CA, 1999) 622. 120 matthew rampley of the University of .4 Initially an archive of visual documenta- tion (today grown to half a million reproductions) in which the slide hold- ings of the Institute were in part reorganized according to social, cultural and political themes, the project also led to the publication of a number of texts on the iconology of politics. Subjects included the postcard as a medium of propaganda, the political functions of architecture, and images of terror in the wake of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre.5 Diers’s volume was a clear illustration of the attempts to translate the revived interest in Aby Warburg in Germany in the 1990s into a frame- work for future research. Warburg significantly extended the scope of tra- ditional art history; under the banner of the history and theory of culture (‘Kulturwissenschaft’) he embraced the study not only of works of high art, but also photography, scientific and astrological imagery, heraldry, photojournalism and stamps. Moreover, as Otto Werckmeister has indi- cated, the interest in his legacy came at a significant moment in German art history. Following the decline of the radical art history of the 1970s, the discipline appeared to have lost direction, and the reassessment of Warburg opened up new possibilities.6 A number of different lines of enquiry were explored; for some commentators, most notably, Georges Didi-Huberman, Warburg provided a basis for a polemical attack on some of the basic epistemological assumptions of traditional art history.7 The ‘rediscovery’ of Warburg constitutes an important chapter in the history of the reception of his work, but it was also a significant episode in a larger process that has taken place in German-language scholarship over the past two decades: the shift beyond an exclusive concern with art towards the wider analysis of images. Although this could be observed across a number of disciplines, including the emergence of media theory (‘Medienwissenschaft’) as a distinct discipline, this chapter is concerned

4 Martin Warnke, ‘Schlagbilder und Bilderfahrzeuge’, in Die Menschenrechte des Auges: Über Aby Warburg, ed. Werner Hofmann, Georg Syamken and Martin Warnke (Frankfurt am Main, 1980) 75–83. 5 See Elisabeth von Hagenow, Politik und Bild: Die Postkarte als Medium der Propaganda (Hamburg, 1994); Hermann Hipp and Ernst Seidl, eds., Architektur als politische Kultur— Philosophia Practica (Berlin, 1996); Michael Beuthner, Joachim Buttler, Sandra Fröhlich, Irene Neverla, and Stephan A. Weichert, eds., Bilder des Terrors—Terror der Bilder? Krisen- berichterstattung am und nach dem 11. September (Cologne, 2003). 6 Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘The Turn from Marx to Warburg in West German Art His- tory 1968–1990’, in Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left, ed. Andrew Hemmingway (London, 2006) 213–20. 7 Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris, 2002).