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. 3348).3 Letters were written, members of the Order were lobbied. Panofsky’s summer of 1967 began to fall into place: in Cologne he would lecture at the museum; in Bonn he would receive an honorary doctorate; in Freiburg, where he had received his original doctorate in 1914, he would be named honorary senator of the university. And finally in a last-minute scramble the election to the Order Pour le mérite went through and the award ceremony was fixed for July 26 at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.
2See also, in the same volume (55–79), the essay by Sigrid Weigel on Hannah Arendt, who in 1955 translated her own Origins of Totalitarianism from English into German and whose reflections on her linguistic predicament are as complicated as Adorno’s. 3Note that Panofsky had accepted an honorary doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1962, in absentia. 1240 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD
Panofsky’s former student Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich, director of the Zentralinstitut and one of the few German colleagues Panofsky trusted, wanted the award ceremony to coincide with the observance of the research center’s twentieth anniversary. On June 27 Panofsky received a letter from Percy Ernst Schramm, the Chancellor of the Order, formally offering him the Pour le mérite (Korrespondenz 4: no. 3430). Schramm was a German colleague whom Panofsky did not trust, however, and Schramm’s involvement in the award ceremony cast a shadow over the affair. Schramm was an historian, a medievalist, who had worked closely with Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, and Panofsky in the 1920s (Thimme 100-7). In January 1933, Panofsky and Schramm took the same boat to New York: Panofsky to take up his annual visiting professorship at NYU, Schramm heading for a period of research at Princeton (Korrespondenz 1: 342). But the friendship, such as it was, did not outlast the telegram of April 1933 informing Panofsky of his dismissal from his professorship “but sealed with a strip of green paper which bore the inscription: ‘Cordial Easter Greetings, Western Union’” (“Three Decades” 321). Schramm tried nevertheless to offer Panofsky friendly advice, in his hotel room in New York, on “what to do next;” an episode that Schramm was inspired to recollect publicly, in Panofsky’s presence, in his laudatio on the occasion of the award of the Pour le mérite thirty-four years later (Thimme 336-7; 533). In an interesting letter of August 1945 to Meyer Schapiro, Panofsky rated the relative “reliability” of various German colleagues. Here he relegated Schramm to a middle rung on the ladder of turpitude, as a “half-hearted opportunistic Nazi” (Korrespondenz 2: no. 1027). Schramm went on to write the standard book on political insignia and symbols in the middle ages, but also the definitive account of Adolf Hitler as a military leader. This alone was sufficient to discourage any emigré from sharing Schramm’s reverie of restoring the amicable mood of the Warburg Library in the 1920s. Schramm seems genuinely to have experienced something like regret. Less brazen perhaps but no less obtuse than many others, he reminded Panofsky in his hopeful letter of June 27 that they had known each other for decades. Panofsky responded on June 29 as always with refined precision—and scrupling to lean on his moral advantage—that he was happy to receive the Order from a Hamburger whose father he had always remembered well, so allowing his compliment to skip a generation (Korrespondenz 5: nos. 3430, 3433). It would seem that the ex-Nazis needed to bestow the prize more urgently than Panofsky needed to receive it. Why would he want it? M L N 1241
A prize does not have quite the same meaning if the granting institu- tion is needy. A prize, properly, comes wrapped in the fiction that it is a gift, gratuitous, that it is handed down from a sovereign authority like an act of grace. The ex-Nazis, excluded from grace, if anything needy of grace, were in no position to offer it. Panofsky, as much as anyone, craved recognition. He developed in his correspondence a repertoire of charming topoi of modesty in order to mask a certain native vanity. He was pleased by the offer of the Pour le mérite but sorely troubled by the likelihood that he would have to receive the medal directly from the hands of Schramm. When the possibility of the Pour le mérite was privately broached by Herbert von Einem in August and September of 1966, according to Gerda Panofsky, Pan hesitated. He had misgivings because the Order had elected the anti-Semite T.S. Eliot in 1959 but above all because he was unwilling to have any dealings with Schramm. He also surely knew his interlocutor von Einem, who in 1936 as a young scholar had published an edifying article on the “Future Tasks of Art History” which posed such questions as “which is more important for artistic development: the unity that divides one race from another, or the multiplicity of different peoples within the same race, for example the Germanic and Romanic within the nordic race” (“was für die künstlerische Entwicklung wichtiger ist, ob das Einheitliche, das Rasse von Rasse scheidet, oder das Viel- heitliche der verschiedenen Völker und Stämme innerhalb der gleichen Rasse, etwa des Germanischen und Romanischen innerhalb der nordischen Rasse”; 4). In 1947, von Einem was named head of the department of art his- tory at Bonn. Gerda Panofsky maintains that the Order and the hosts in Munich pulled a bait-and-switch on Panofsky, unveiling the enemy Schramm only when it was too late for Panofsky to back out. Accord- ing to her detailed account of the conversations, Panofsky made it completely clear to von Einem already in September 1966 that if the medal was to be presented by Schramm himself there would be no question of the Pour le mérite. But on June 5, 1967, Panofsky received a letter from Heydenreich strongly hinting that he should expect very soon a letter with the offer of the Pour le mérite. A couple of weeks later, according to Gerda Panofsky, Panofsky said to Heydenreich on the telephone that he would not accept the award if Schramm was involved. But the arrangements had been made. In a letter of July 20, 1967, only six days before the ceremony, Heydenreich reported that Schramm is “happy” (“glücklich,” underlined in the original) to give him the Order but “will surely do everything he can to retreat as a person behind his task” (“wird sicher alles tun, als Person hinter seinem Auftrag zurückzutreten”; Korrespondenz 5: no. 3444). A strange choice of 1242 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD words, mimicking the self-defense that Schramm or someone like him might be expected to offer, namely that already in his Nazi activities he was not really present “as a person” but only fulfilling duties. Soon the letter dated June 27 arrived from Schramm himself. Panofsky, having made his sentiments known to von Einem and Heydenreich, was furious but felt it was too late to pull out. Willibald Sauerländer, who succeeded Heydenreich as director of the Zentralinstitut, reports that Panofsky said in Badenweiler, just before the visit to Munich: “What can you do, it really is a little comical that I should receive the Blue Max directly from Mr. Hitler’s private Thucydides” (“Tja, dass ich mir von dem Privat-Thukydides von Herrn Hitler den blauen Max umhängen lasse, das ist ja wohl ‘n bisschen komisch”; Korrespondenz 5: 1052, n. 13). “Blue Max” was the colloquial designation of the military version of the Pour le mérite. In the spring of 1968, just after Panofsky’s death, outraged by Sch- ramm’s presumption in offering to deliver a eulogy, Gerda Panofsky recorded her memories of various meetings and conversations between August 1966 and April 1968, under the witty title “Chronique scan- daleuse du Pour le mérite.” In 2000, prompted by the historian David Thimme who was preparing his doctoral dissertation on Schramm, she transcribed her notes into a five-page typescript document. Dieter Wuttke, the editor of Panofsky’s correspondence, has expended con- siderable energy, for reasons unclear, in disputing Gerda Panofsky’s interpretation of the events.4 He insists that she exaggerates her hus- band’s misgivings about the award, his allergy to Schramm, and his sense of having been deceived. Wuttke, a distinguished philologist, born in 1929, the same year as Gerda Panofsky, has dedicated decades to the study and to the legacies of Warburg and Panofsky. He made contact with Panofsky already as a student in 1953. Yet in his resistance to Gerda Panofsky’s interpretation of the events surrounding the Pour le mérite he reenacts—unnecessarily—the defensiveness of the ex- Nazis. The “Chronique scandaleuse” is a most convincing document. On May 18, 1968, after Pan’s death, Herbert von Einem wrote directly to Gerda Panofsky to say that her recriminations against Schramm would have been understandable if they had been expressed
4Wuttke doubts the reliability of the “Chronique scandaleuse”: see the Korrespondenz (5: 1175, n. 4) and further comments in Kumulationen (55). See also Gerda Panofsky’s exasperated articles rebutting Wuttke’s assertions: her “Addenda et Corrigenda” to vol. 5 of the correspondence (esp. 27, 41, and 43–49), where she reproduces her notes of 1968, the “Chronique scandaleuse;” and “Cumulus- oder Quell(en)wolken am Briefeditionshimmel.” M L N 1243 by Panofsky’s first wife, the Jewess Dora, who “shared his fate as an emigré.” Gerda’s “duty” (“Aufgabe”), however, was to “have sympatheti- cally encouraged a readiness for reconciliation” (“die Bereitschaft zu Versöhnung verständnisvoll zu fördern”). He goes on to chastise her for having insulted (verletzt) Schramm. “That you once again open this painful divide,” he complains, “is to us incomprehensible” (“dass Sie . . . die schmerzliche Kluft nun wieder neu aufreissen, ist uns unbegreiflich”; Korrespondenz 5: no. 3518). It is impossible to say what Panofsky himself really felt; all sorts of things, no doubt. He died on March 14, 1968, only eight months after the prize ceremony in Munich. There is no measuring the residue of unsettled emotions that are left unabsorbed by the symbolic act of the bestowal. The completely tone-deaf quality of Schramm’s language in his correspondence must not have clarified Panofsky’s feelings. For example when Schramm wrote on June 27, 1967: “The statutes of the Order unfortunately compel us to include you among the foreign members, but in practical terms that makes no difference to us” (“Es hängt leider an den Statuten, dass wir Sie bei den auswärtigen Mitgliedern einreihen müssen, aber praktisch bedeutet das für uns keinen Unterschied”; Kor- respondenz 5: no. 3430). Pan must have cringed to read this. Schramm was assuring Panofsky that the members of the Order would not hold it against him that he was unfortunately not eligible for membership in the German sector of the Order. Hillebrecht in a letter of May 9, 1967, meanwhile, had handsomely assured Schramm that the award of the Order to Panofsky would not be obstructed by any worries about “quotas” . . . (Korrespondenz 5: no. 3418). Such gaucheries may be read as symptoms of the “violent nervousness” that characterized what has been called the period of “latency” in Germany, the twenty years following the war (Gumbrecht 24). In any event one can be sure that Panofsky carried back home to Princeton some regrets, just as one can be sure that Schramm’s guilty conscience was not cleansed by his public act. The Pour le mérite, even if latterly administered by the German state, was genealogically a Prussian order. The military class of the Pour le mérite had been discontinued already in 1918; the state of Prussia was formally liquidated in 1947. Yet it is as difficult to dissociate the Pour le mérite from Prussia as it is to disengage the civil order from the symbolic field of the more famous military award. The military medal, the “Blauer Max,” was a gold starburst with blue eagles (ill. 1). This is the Order Pour le mérite invoked by a certain dark joke of darkest wartime, a sample of Jewish gallows humor, reported by the philologist Victor Klemperer in his book of 1947, LTI, his parodic acro- 1244 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD
Fig. 1. The “Blue Max,” or Order Pour le mérite for military service. nym for Lingua Tertii Imperii, on National Socialism and the German language. Klemperer, who was married to a Gentile, lived in Dresden throughout the war. After September 19, 1941, as is well known, all Jews over the age of six were obliged by German law to wear a yellow star sewn to their clothing. In his chapter on the Judenstern Klemperer says that Jews used to refer to the yellow star as the Pour le Sémite.5 It seems unlikely that Panofsky knew this; Gerda Panofsky agrees. She adds that she also thinks it unlikely that he knew of Einstein’s rejec- tion of the medal.6 The civil order looks rather different from the military Order (ill. 2). But it is also a medal, attached to a ribbon and worn around the neck, high on the breast. Although it was established only in 1842, it
5The conductor Otto Klemperer, Victor’s cousin, was awared the Pour le mérite in 1967, the same year as Panofsky. 6Personal communication, June 26, 2016. I am extremely grateful to Gerda Panofsky for help and comments. M L N 1245
Fig. 2. The Order Pour le mérite for the Sciences and Arts. Source: 150 Jahre Orden Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, 1842-1992 (Bonn: Orden Pour le mérite, 1992). bears the double F of Frederick the Great. What is a military order? It is a symbolic wound. It appears on the breast as the double of a wound created by a bullet or shell. It marks a notional battlefield wound that has been suffered and overcome. The State in placing the medal on the chest symbolically wounds the soldier a second time, recalling to everyone that the State has the power to compel soldiers to expose themselves to fire and that the State controls the assignment of value to wounds, determining for example that a wound in the chest is more estimable than a wound in the back. Traditionally the sovereign creates vassals by performing a fictional act of violence: the sword resting on the shoulder. The would-be knight submits by exposing his neck to the blade. That moment was recreated at the award ceremony in the reading room of the Zentra- linstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich (ill. 3). The Zentralinstitut was established in 1947 in the building, designed by Paul Troost and erected in 1937, that had served as the administrative headquarters of the National Socialist party (Lauterbach). Panofsky is surrounded; he is being invested; everything is happening on the bodily scale. The prize-recipient puts his neck forward to take the medal, he accepts the 1246 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD
Fig. 3. Presentation of the Order Pour le mérite to Erwin Panofsky, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, July 26, 1967. Source: Orden pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, Reden und Gedenkworte 8 (1967), n.p. wound. On the left, settling the ribbon on Pan’s neck, is Schramm. Notwithstanding Heydenreich’s promise that the “person” Schramm would retreat, he is very much present. That is why we have ceremonies, after all; that is why we show up. Gerda is in the middle ground. The gentleman on the right is Werner Heisenberg. Looming right behind Pan, who looks vulnerable, is Heydenreich. Was Heydenreich friend or foe? The art historian William Heckscher, a student of Panofsky in Hamburg and Princeton, a Gentile and an anti-Nazi who left his country for good in 1936, said in a letter of February 13, 1968, that Heydenreich used to begin his wartime university lectures with the Hitlergruß (Gerda Panofsky qualifies this report by pointing out that this was required of all professors; Korrespondenz 5: no. 3494).7 The relationship between Heydenreich and Panofsky was not clarified by the strange story of the lost manuscript of Panofsky’s Habilitation of 1920, a book on Michelangelo. Panofsky seems to have left the manu- script behind in his office in Hamburg when he was expelled. Over the years, various people asked him what became of it. Panofsky believed
7Personal communication from Gerda Panofsky, June 26, 2016. M L N 1247 it to have been lost. In 2012, the manuscript was found in a locked cabinet in the Zentralinstitut in Munich, among Heydenreich’s papers. This made a sensation in the art historical world and, in Germany, in the national press. The text was swiftly published with an introduction by Gerda Panofsky. The best explanation is that Heydenreich rescued the manuscript from Panofsky’s office and brought it with him to Munich when he became founding director of the Zentralinstitut in 1947—and then somehow forgot that he had it. In a letter of 1948, Heydenreich, bizarrely, urged Panofsky to “write his Michelangelo book,” without mentioning that he himself possessed the only copy of the Habilitation (Gestaltungsprinzipien 11-16). In any event, Panofsky trusted Heydenreich. Gerda Panofsky, in a letter to Schramm of April 5, 1968, said that her husband told Heydenreich many times that he regretted accepting the Order. She pointed out to Schramm that there is no Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “overcoming of the past,” for those who were driven out in 1933 (Korrespondenz 5: no. 3513). The second, fictional wound, the medal, indicates the healing and overcoming of the real wound sustained on the battlefield. The military honor marks one who has overcome mere bodiliness through spiritual qualities such as foresight or bravery. The “peaceful” class of the Pour le mérite intensifies this conceit by singling out people who transcend entirely their bodies, namely scholars and artists (although Richard Serra would dispute this). The civil medal is no longer a fictional double of the wound, but rather a parody of the military medal. It is shaped differently, no longer really resembling a wound. It signals that the State considers this body valuable only as the support and container of a distinguished mind; that the State would not expose this body to fire. Not that the Bundesrepublik Deutschland had the authority to do this to Panofsky. Schramm’s remark about the Ger- man versus foreign status of Panofsky’s membership presumes that the recipient would have been pleased to submit his person to that State, as a citizen, even if only symbolically. If the medal symbolizes the State’s power to expose the citizen’s body, the Judenstern was an insignia that exposed a people, pulled them out of invisibility, constituted them in the street, in public, as a people, but only in order to exclude them. The Judenstern enacted a parodic reversal of those democraticizing and publicizing tendencies of modernity that make peoples visible (Didi-Huberman). The civil class of the Pour le mérite does not elevate an invisible people. It makes visible an elite embedded within the people, and puts them forward as a counter-elite to a warrior class, an aristocracy, or a plutocracy. In its latent anti-State quality, this prize is modern. 1248 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD
Fig. 4. Erwin Panofsky delivering acceptance speech after the presentation of Order Pour le mérite, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, July 26, 1967. Source: Erwin Panofsky, Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968: eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf Bänden, ed. Dieter Wuttke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001-11), vol. 5.
The celebrants in Munich, after having put the honoring noose around Pan’s neck, still awaited the victim’s healing words (ill. 4). And the specter did deliver them, with a slight qualification. In his acceptance speech, which can be heard on YouTube (“Münchner Rede”), he referred to the Pour le mérite as an “old order, from the start designed as international and, if you will, fostering reconcilia- M L N 1249 tion among peoples [völkerversöhnend]” (Korrespondenz 5: no. 3446).8 What did he mean? Internationalism was already inscribed in the francophile Frederick the Great’s phrase Pour le mérite. The order was given to Voltaire in 1750. The intention to invite non-Germans into the Order was also inscribed into Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s founding document of the “peaceful” class, even if in that text no propitiatory purpose is specified 150( Jahre 211-13). It might be noted that between 1918 and 1933 the members of the Order made little effort to use their medal as an instrument of reconciliation: no French or English scholar was offered membership in those years. Remember once more what Schramm had said: you are not among the Germans, you are among the Ausländer. Are those the two “peoples” whose “reconciliation” Panofsky was referring to, Germans and for- eigners? Of course not. The Jews were a third category that escaped the binarism “Germans and foreigners.” Panofsky’s assertion that the Pour le mérite was “if you like” (“wenn man will”) meant to reconcile peoples was an excessive politeness, for it brought reconciliation between Nazis and Jews under the cover of reconcilation between, say, Germans and French, or Germans and Americans. But these are not at all the same things. In her obituary of Panofsky of March 18, 1968, Doris Schmidt, the longtime art critic of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, wrote of the “flashing irony” (“blitzende Ironie”) in his response to the award of the Pour le mérite (“Ein universaler Geist” 14). This seems slightly overstated. Panofsky’s politeness and protests of modesty were habitual. “Of course my husband did not violate good form,” Gerda Panofsky writes, “regardless how he felt” (“Natürlich verletzte mein Mann die Form nicht, gleichgültig wie ihm zumute war”; “Addenda et Corrigenda”). Schmidt may have had in mind Pan’s frequent invocations in the speech of emotions: Verlegenheit, Empfindung, Hochgefühl, gêne, Liebe, Sympathie, Enthusiasmus. She may have read his brief roll call of distinguished members of the Order as ironic, beginning as it did with two military giants: one can only be embarrassed, he says, to see in the list, “not to speak of such figures as Bismarck and Moltke von[ Leuten wie Bismarck und Moltke ganz abzusehen], names like Bunsen, Theodor Mommsen, Droysen and many others.” Droysen was a slip—the historian had not in fact been a member of the Order. She was certainly thinking of Panofsky’s assertion that the day was “gilded” by the presence of so many friends. She must have noted that Panofsky in his address quickly
8The address is also archived on an audio CD accompanying vol. 5 of the Korrespondenz. 1250 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD turned away from the Order to offer praise and congratulations to the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. And she cannot have missed his expression of thanks to Schramm for the “Hamburg reminiscences” in his laudatio, reminding everyone that their friendship lay in the past. Panofsky often handled the ambiguity of his encounters with Ger- mans by stressing, if he could, his identity as a Hamburger. Hamburg traditionally commanded a patriotism that trumped the German state. On the occasion of the lecture following the presentation of the Order, Panofsky wrote on the title page of a copy of his book Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance belonging to my friend Hinrich Sieveking, an art historian and Hamburger, then a student in Munich: “Gratefully inscribed for Hinrich Sieveking by another loyal Hamburger” (in English!).9 Panofsky’s acceptance speech may be described as an ironic dis- course that slipped into the space between the scholar’s already- textualized writings—the basis for the award—and the somatic and vocal presence that arrive with maximum intensity at the moment of a speech, regardless of its content. Panofsky’s extreme politeness recalls the archaic context of rec- onciliation, Versöhnung, as a ritual termination of conflict. Sühne or expiation, originally a juridical term denoting a payment or punish- ment, a restoration of civil peace, shares an etymological root with the English swoon, from Old English geswogen, to be overcome. But it is not Panofsky who is meant to pay, to be struck down. The aging scholar would seem to have been at his weakest in this moment; he seemed unable to rise to the fight. In hisDankesrede , he evades the very question that is on the mind of everyone in the room. He is like the country doctor in Franz Kafka’s story “Ein Landarzt” (1918), a doctor who is bidden and who comes and yet fails to heal. The country doctor in Kafka’s story was horrified to see a teeming rose-colored wound in the hip of the patient, a wound the size of a hand. He peers into the wound onto a mass of wriggling worms. “Ich habe deine große Wunde aufgefunden,” he says: “I have found out your great wound.” But before long the doctor finds himself lying in bed beside the patient. In the end he escapes, barely, in his car- riage: “lange klang hinter uns der neue, aber irrtümliche Gesang der Kinder:/Freuet Euch, Ihr Patienten,/Der Arzt ist Euch ins Bett gelegt!” (“For a long time, the new but inaccurate singing of the children rang out behind us: ‘Enjoy yourselves, you patients./The doctor’s laid in bed with you’”; 261).
9Thanks to Hinrich Sieveking for sharing his archive and his reflections with me. M L N 1251
Panofsky looks straight into their wound; it only makes him sad, world-weary. He can only pity them. He does not muster the anger that Gerda does. Resigned, he receives the symbolic counter-wound from the wounded. The initial wound, or trauma, had been the telegram he received in New York reporting the consequences of the decree of April 7, 1933. The telegram is the message that can be read. Letters as we have seen are difficult to read, tangled as they are in epistolary conventions, slow-moving as they are, out of sync with the impulse-giving emotions. Whereas the meaning of the telegram was unmistakable. After the investment ceremony, in the evening, they all moved a few blocks from the Zentralinstitut to the Ludwig Maximilian University where Panofsky delivered a two-hour lecture on “Titian and Ovid.” This became the last chapter of his posthumously published book, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (1969). The lecture culminated in a reading of Titian’s late painting Nymph and Shepherd, which the great iconologist interpreted as a depiction of the Trojan prince Paris, in his guise as shepherd, and his lover Oenone, a woodland nymph, the woman he had spurned for Helen (ill. 5). Panofsky ended the book, and his long sequence of publications, by describing Nymph and Shepherd as the aging artist’s ultima poesia. It may indeed have been Titian’s last painting; the artist was at least Panofsky’s age at the time he painted it, depending on the work’s date and the artist’s birthdate, which are both uncertain. For Panofsky, even a poesia will have a story line; he is unwilling to allow the painting, which depicts nothing but a shepherd playing a flute, a nude woman turning her back, and a goat nibbling at a spare tree, to vibrate in the semantically inert zone of pastoral. The scholar settles the picture with a text, a story he found in Ovid’s Heroides. After the fall of Troy, Paris, remorseful and gravely wounded, returned to Oenone. But Oenone refused to forgive Paris’s treachery and did not tend his wound with her magic herbs. Panofsky’s reading of the painting undermines his own apparent gesture of forgiveness in allowing the Order, earlier that day, to be placed around his neck. Below the surface of Panofsky’s double discourse—acceptance speech plus lecture—hides the idea that reconcilation is a mirage gen- erated by the fantasy that Jews and Nazis will in the end reconverge in the shared scholarly project. That project would involve a deciphering of the codes of historical art and poetry. In her report on Panofsky’s investment and lecture in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 28, 1967, entitled, “In Search of the Hidden Truth” (“Suche nach der verborgenen 1252 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD
Fig. 5. Titian, Nymph and Shepherd, c. 1570-75, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Source: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
Wahrheit”), Doris Schmidt identified latency as the unspoken theme of the whole event. She speaks of Panofsky’s “power of divination” that permits him to “approach” meaning rather than merely disclose it (15). Her defense of iconology, Panofsky’s hermeneutic, against the suspicion that its excessive erudition fails to hear the promise of freedom proffered by every work of art, hints at the stirrings in 1967 in the German universities of a new art history, a gathering rebuke to the learned pieties of the fathers that had underserved the artwork’s dynamic and ultimately political reach. Her remarks seek to conjure a repetition of a scholarly Weimar, a liberal-reactionary alliance against a Marxist art history. But the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. That alliance will never come about because scholarship is precisely not, and has never been, a space of reconciliation. The abandonment of the Jewish scholars by their Gentile colleagues was the most hideous episode of all. In failing in the 1930s to read the signs well, that is, in creating latency rather than dispelling it, the scholars gave up their M L N 1253 chance for a second chance. The Germans’ offer of the Pour le mérite and Panofsky’s acceptance lock them into their enmity. By deriving the picture from Ovid, Panofsky deferred a reading. He moved laterally, from painting to poem, not deeper into the paint- ing. “Culture,” the favored object of post-war historical scholarship, recedes only further from view. Ernst Cassirer, Panofsky’s mentor and friend in Hamburg, had described his own project, before the war, as a “philosophical anthropology” that mapped the path leading out of the practical, everyday sphere of manipulation and towards the free and autonomous realm of the spirit, or “culture,” where pragmatism and materiality are overcome through symbolization. In this way man escapes his finitude and arrives at understanding. Cassirer exposed himself to the charge—made explicitly by Martin Heidegger during their debate at Davos in 1929—that a philosopher ought not to know in advance where his thinking is leading (Gordon). Abandoning all at once, it seemed, its confidence in the construct “culture,” modernity, which might have amplified the solutions of the Renaissance, instead came close to destroying itself.10 This fate had been foreshadowed already in the 1570s by Titian’s blasted landscape, a blighted pastoral. After the war, it was precisely the ones who drove old Cassirer out of Germany—the ones now seeking redemption—who undertook the reconstruction of “culture” (Haverkamp 15-16). The unforgiv- ing, meanwhile, the ones designated by the rubric Frankfurt School, redefined modernity as endless self-critique. For Panofsky, skeptical of both parties, there was no meaningful task left for modernity unless it was the reset of Cassirer’s philosophical question as a merely historical reckoning, an archeology of a failed project.11 He came as a specter, but as an admonishing specter, perhaps not as weak as he appeared. He took advantage of the power of the voice to collapse time. We all know how much more affecting is the recorded voice of the deceased than an image. Everyone in Munich had seen photographs of Panofsky since 1933, but few had heard his voice. Some in the room had last heard the voice in 1933: Schramm, for example, whose request for a meeting with Panofsky when he visited Princeton in 1957 had been rebuffed (Korrespondenz 5: no. 1053, n. 13). Pan did not permit Schramm or anyone else, however, to hear
10In a letter of March 9, 1933 to Margaret Barr, Panofsky described the Renaissance as a “dying period of history” soon to be “replaced by another era, more similar to the middle ages . . .” (1: no. 357). 11The literature on Panofsky’s art history and its transformations in his American period has grown; see most recently Beyer and Wood. 1254 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD the voice of the past they wished they could restore; rather he made them listen to the voice of a future they had irreversibly created in 1933. He could not fail, for he was in the stronger position. They who are incapable ever of finding the right words must always fail, and undoubtedly they sensed this when they put themselves in the humiliating position of repeating their crime on a symbolic, theatrical level. Even the obituarist Doris Schmidt, for all her good will, when she tries to praise Panofsky speaks of his Schicksal and his Rasse; she says that he possesses “wisdom” and that the “goodness” in his face reminded her of Martin Buber . . . (“Ein universaler Geist” 14). The lecture on Ovid, even if not strictly speaking an occasional piece—he gave the same lecture in Bonn and Freiburg—must be read as carefully as the relatively uncommunicative Dankesrede. In effect, with his doublet of speeches in Munich he split himself between the conventional genre of the acceptance speech, involving expressions of gratitude, and the genre of the scholarly paper. Neither here nor there is the speaker “present.” See by way of contrast Sigmund Freud’s acceptance of the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt in 1930: although Freud did not deliver the address in person, he is very much present in the text in the sense that he seized the occasion to defend psychoanalysis against its critics. Many of the generic paradoxes of the prize acceptance speech would seem to have been suspended in Munich on July 26, 1967. Since Panofsky was not a poet, there was no question of him symbolically rising to claim the work, no problem of authorship. A scholar produces scholarship, he reports on his findings. And yet the writings have a strongly authored quality. And it is differ- ent when spoken: a lecture is a transitional zone where a scholarly text is amplified orally, archaically, before it is committed to print. The speech act that accepts a literary prize is ambiguous: first, the (modern) writer is automatically thrust into some version of an outsider or oppositional position. The writer is unwilling ever to have to express gratitude. Second, the writer is unwilling to abandon her outpost of textuality to deliver a non-poetic, non-fictional speech in her own voice. Whereas the scholar is understood to be a figure of civil society and so must exceed his textual existence. His scholarship is not “literature,” there is no disgrace in “offering” it. The university mimicks society, with its “senates” like the one Panofsky was elected to in Freiburg. The university professor is after all a teacher: there is more to him than his published texts. The medium of the teacher is public speech. There is no discursive discontinuity between his work and his acceptance speech. M L N 1255
The article by Doris Schmidt in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 28, 1967, reported that the prize lecture was delivered not in German but in a beautiful English (15). But Pan’s English, as you can also hear on YouTube—for example a lecture given at UCLA on November 19, 1967—was heavily accented (see “Panofsky lecturing at UCLA”). Hinrich Sieveking, who heard Panofsky’s lecture on Titian and Ovid in Munich on that day, told me with a touch of hyperbole that no one understood a word. Panofsky’s lecture was doubly coded, first by the allegorical content, and second by the linguistic noise. The audience in Munich was straining to hear the signal of a continuity. They wanted an assurance that “culture” had been “carried across” the chasm, “translated,” intact. In this respect they were not so unlike Adorno, who had hoped in New York, in his “hiding place,” compos- ing his “sacred texts,” “to secure some of our insights, which might in future times prove not entirely worthless for humanity” (Erdle 11-12). Adorno returned to Germany, for good, already in 1949. Panofsky sent a different signal: his codings announced a translatio artium from Europe to America. In a letter to Herbert von Einem, responding apparently to Einem’s expression of surprise that the lecture in Bonn had been in English, Panofsky denied—disingenuously? epistolary irony is hard to read—that there was any meaning in the gesture, denied that it was a gesture at all. He assured the ex-Nazi von Einem that he had not intended to convey ressentiment or deliver a politi- cal manifesto (Korrespondenz 5: no. 3485). Pan refused to allow the form and the content of his address to realign—this was the famous criterion, devised by Panofsky, of a real “Renaissance” as opposed to the false or incomplete “renascences” of the middle ages, the sort he had mocked when writing to Schapiro after the war about Schramm and other opportunists now looking forward to Germany’s “inner renascence” (Korrespondenz 2: no. 1027). You most earnestly wish to communicate with me, he says. I oblige today by delivering two messages, he says. A short message that you will understand, but which says little; and then a long message that says everything. But that longer message, a message without bounds, will be unintelligible to you, because I am unwilling to translate myself back into German.
New York University 1256 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD
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