Panofsky in Munich, 1967 Christopher S. Wood MLN, Volume 131, Number 5, December 2016 (Comparative Literature Issue) , pp. 1236-1257 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2016.0088 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/650016 Access provided by New York University (19 Apr 2017 23:08 GMT) Panofsky in Munich, 1967 � Christopher S. Wood A prize is supposed to honor the recipient. But often the recipient, just by accepting the prize, honors the prize-bestowing institution. Especially a damaged or disgraced institution, for example the Ger- man university in the twentieth century. Many German professors who had stayed at their posts right through the Nazi years and on into the 1950s and 60s craved personal reconciliation with the Jewish colleagues who had been expelled in 1933. Others sought a more abstract, shared exculpation. It occurred to some that prizes and hon- ors might balm wounds and hasten atonement. Gert von der Osten, General Director of the Museums of the City of Cologne, wrote to the architect Rudolf Hillebrecht on June 20, 1966, about the possibility of electing the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky to the Order Pour le mérite. “The election,” he remarked presumptuously, “would have wide resonance among unreconciled refugees in all intellectual and artistic fields” (“Die Wahl hätte weite Resonanz bei unversöhnten Refugees auf allen geistigen und künstlerischen Gebieten”; Korrespondenz 5: no. 3304). The unforgiven, when speaking of the unreconciled, always manage to strike just the wrong note, as for example when von der Osten asserts in the same letter that Panofsky had not yet returned to Germany, “like so many of the sensitive emigrants, for fear of the shock” (“wie so viele der feinfühligen Emigranten, aus Furcht vor dem Schock”). As if the less sensitive emigrants would not think twice about paying a visit. And what “shock” was von der Osten imagining they would receive? Shock to realize all that they had lost? Von der Osten, born in 1910, had been employed in museums and universities continuously from the year of his doctoral degree, 1933, excepting only his military service. MLN 131 (2016): 1236–1257 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press M L N 1237 Among the most prestigious of honors bestowed by the German state was and is the civilian or “peaceful” version of the Pour le mérite, the Prussian military order established by Frederick the Great in 1742. In 1842 Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia established the Friedensklasse Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste. The first cohort of induct- ees in 1842 included two Jews, the composers Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, as well as William Herschel, the German-English astronomer whose father was Jewish.1 Later the musicians Joseph Joachim (1887) and Anton Rubinstein (1891) were admitted. In 1923 the Order elected two Jews, the painter Max Liebermann and the physicist Albert Einstein. The Order elected the chemist and Nobel laureate Richard Willstätter in 1924, the very year he resigned his professorship at Munich, at the age of 52, on account of the mount- ing anti-Semitism at the university. In 1933 Einstein sent his medal back to the Chancellor of the Order, Max Planck. After the war he was asked if he would rejoin the Order. He declined (Mitglieder 1: xxii). The Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste was suspended by Adolf Hitler, who could not tolerate the Order’s privilege of electing its own members. In 1952 the first president of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland Theodor Heuss revived the Pour le mérite and it has been awarded ever since by the Ministery of the Interior of the BRD and now Germany. There are about forty German living recipients of the order, or “members,” and about forty foreign members, including for example the American historians James Sheehan, Lorraine Daston, Anthony Grafton, and Caroline Bynum, as well as the artist Richard Serra. After the relaunch of the Pour le mérite it proved difficult, apparently, to identify possible Jewish recipients. The physicist Lise Meitner, who had emigrated in 1938 to Sweden and later England, was elected in 1956. Many members of the Order were defensive. Thomas Mann had been elected in 1955, just before his death. In his eulogy of Mann before the Order in 1956, Reinhold Schneider praised the novelist but felt it necessary to concede that Mann’s denunciations of the homeland, which he did after all love, were to many ears possibly injurious or hurtful (verletzend; see Reden und Gedenkworte 34). At least to some members, at any rate, the incompleteness of the roster had become a source of distress by the mid-1960s. In his letter of 1966 von der Osten said that it was “embarrassing” (peinlich) to learn that Pan- ofsky had received honorary doctorates from Rome and Cambridge. 1See the website of the order as well as the volumes Die Mitglieder des Ordens and 150 Jahre Orden Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste. 1238 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD Many agreed that a most worthy recipient of the Pour le mérite would be Panofsky, “the uncrowned king of art history” in von der Osten’s peculiar phrase, as if the scholar’s mighty achievements over three decades in America awaited ratification from the German professori- ate (Korrespondenz 5: no. 3304). Panofsky had lost his professorship at Hamburg on April 7, 1933, while he was teaching as a Visiting Profes- sor at New York University. Panofsky returned to Germany; returned to New York the following winter; returned once more to Germany; and in the summer of 1934 emigrated, via England, to the United States, first taking a position that had been created for him at New York University and a year later moving to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He became an American citizen in 1940. Panofsky received many American honorary doctorates, memberships in learned societies, and such other prizes and honors as the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America and the National Gallery of Art Medal for outstanding service in the field of art history and educa- tion, which he received in March 1966 at the White House, from the hands of Lady Bird Johnson. Panofsky turned a cold shoulder to Germany, however, and to his ex- colleagues. In April 1946, the University of Hamburg offered Panofsky his old chair in art history; he refused it politely. Panofsky corresponded hardly at all with German colleagues in the 1950s and 60s, and when he did, he often wrote in a casual, somewhat disrespectful tone, and in English. An example is his response to a letter from the curator Christian Altgraf Salm, dated November 19, 1962 (Korrespondenz 5: no. 2909). Salm had written to Panofsky in German. Panofsky’s somewhat offhand letter can be read as passive-aggressive, as if to say: I cannot be bothered to adapt to you by writing in my native language. Panof- sky also wrote to other emigrés in English, for different reasons. His old friend Fritz Saxl, who ran the Warburg Institute in London, was writing to Panofsky in English by 1937 at the latest (Korrespondenz 1: no. 679). When Siegfried Kracauer arrived in New York in May 1941, he wrote to Panofsky requesting a meeting. Panofsky responded in English and Kracauer followed suit; not until August 1942 did the cor- respondence switch back to German. From the start, it would seem, Panofsky corresponded in English with his younger colleague Ernst Gombrich, his only peer among twentieth-century art historians, who had left Vienna in December 1935 to take up a position alongside Saxl at the Warburg (see the letter of November 21, 1949 in Korrespondenz 2: no. 1338). Both Panofsky and Gombrich developed brilliant prose styles in English. Theodor Adorno, by contrast, said in a letter to Max M L N 1239 Horkheimer in 1940 that he was “still of the opinion that we should stick to our language for our sacred texts” (“meine im übrigen nach wie vor, daß wir für unsere heiligen Texte an unserer Sprache festhalten sollte”). Adorno spoke of New York City as his “hiding place” (“Schlupfwinkel”; see Erdle 11)2. Panofsky and Gombrich, meanwhile, handled enforced outsider status by becoming insiders again, elsewhere. Panofsky’s extreme civility even to his enemies betokened a rejection of outsider status, even in symbolic form; so, too, can we interpret his initial slight self-distancing from, or unwillingness to identify himself with, the unemployed refugee Kracauer, whose reputation as an analyst of modern culture had probably not reached Panofsky. In 1966, the atonement-seekers in Germany saw an opening. After the death of his wife Dora Mosse in 1965, Panofsky had remarried. His bride was a young German art historian, and a Gentile: Gerda Soergel, whom he had met at Princeton. In August and September 1966, Pan (so the great man was called by friends and colleagues) and Gerda undertook a European voyage encompassing Naples, Stockholm, and Germany—to visit the in-laws in Cologne. This was Panofsky’s first visit to Germany since 1934. Gert von der Osten and Herbert von Einem, professor at Bonn, learned of the trip, perhaps from Panofsky’s old friend Kurt Bauch, and were emboldened to invite him back to Ger- many the following year. Von der Osten said to Hillebrecht in the letter of June 20, 1966: “The ice is broken (cherchez la femme).” By November 21, 1966, von Einem, writing to the Chancellor of the Order Pour le mérite, had convinced himself that the “phase of [Panofsky’s] reserve towards Germany and German colleagues is over” (“Phase der Zurückhaltung gegenüber Deutschland und deutschen Kollegen überwunden ist”; Korrespondenz 5: no.