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Aby Warburg and Weimar Jewish Culture: Navigating Normative Narratives, Counternarratives, and Historical Context

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Aby Warburg and Weimar Jewish Culture: Navigating Normative Narratives, Counternarratives, and Historical Context Emily J. Levine Aby Warburg and Weimar Jewish Culture: Navigating Normative Narratives, Counternarratives, and Historical Context According to Gershom Scholem, Aby Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaftliche Biblio- thek Warburg – both in scholarship and in personnel – kept its distance from Judaism. “For about twenty-five years [Warburg’s library] consisted almost entirely of Jews whose Jewish intensity ranged from moderate sympathies to the zero point and even below. I used to define the three groups around the Warburg library, Max Horkheimer’s Institut für Sozialforschung, and the metaphysical magicians around Oskar Goldberg as the three most remarkable ‘Jewish sects’ that German Jewry produced. Not all of them liked to hear this” (Scholem 1988). To a certain degree, Scholem was correct. Born in Hamburg in 1866, Warburg trained in the field of the “new cultural history” promoted by such figures as Karl Lamprecht and Jacob Burckhardt, an approach that aimed to integrate the Schatten, or dark aspects of the classical heritage, into modernity. By 1912, he innovated the methodological approach he called iconology, which tracked the development of images over time. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as anthropol- ogy, numerology, and the occult, Warburg sought to understand how gestures in images reflected deep societal tensions between primitivism and modernization. His Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (literally, the Warburg Library of Cultural Science, hereafter, the Warburg Library), a library with 60,000 volumes at its peak, was devoted to revealing precisely these contradictory impulses that he called the Nachleben der Antike, or the afterlife of antiquity.¹ Although Warburg did not leave a prolific body of published works, his library, rich with symbol- ism, became an inspiration for the fields of memory, film, and visual studies and offered an open book for German Jewish history. The second generation of Warburg scholars, who are largely responsible for introducing Warburg and his library to the English-speaking world, affirmed Scholem’s judgment. Sir Ernst Gombrich, who served from 1959 until 1976 as the director of the London Warburg Institute (the postwar iteration of Hamburg’s Warburg library, which was incorporated into the University of London in 1944), towered over the image of Warburg. He created the Warburg many of us initially 1 The development of this library and a portrait of its most active scholars, Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky, is the subject of Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School (2013a). DOI 10.1515/9783110367195-008, © 2018 Emily J. Levine, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 118 Emily J. Levine encountered – the Warburg whose tensions were smoothed over and shadows turned into the heroic artistic creativity of Dürer’s great works. Gombrich white- washed not only Warburg’s scholarship and depression but also his Judaism. What the Austrian diplomat and historian Emil Brix called Gombrich’s “restrained fury” at the notion of a separate “Jewish culture” in fin de siècle Vienna applied to his treatment of Warburg, whose Jewishness, we are told, disappeared with his rejection of Jewish law (Brix 1997). Peter Gay’s assessment of the Warburg circle similarly reflects the sensibil- ity of this generation of émigré scholars. Preoccupied with his own “non-Jew- ish Jewishness” and eager to preserve the legacy of Enlightenment rationality, Gay assessed the Warburg library as “Weimar at its best;” ultimately, however, he argued that it conducted its work in what he called “peaceful obscurity” and “serene isolation” (Gay 1981, 33–34). This judgment reflects a bias that we have inherited about Weimar Jewish culture that is both geographical and intellectual. For Gay and subsequent scholars, Weimar culture denotes Berlin and intensify- ing romanticism. Insofar as Warburg and his friends were tethered to the Renais- sance and the Enlightenment – that is, a broad-based liberal humanism – their contributions are irrelevant to Weimar’s political and cultural trajectory and, as implied by Gay, George Mosse, and other scholars – this intellectual sensibility made them culturally and politically naïve. The current image of Warburg has swung in the opposite direction. He is no longer an Enlightenment figure but “toujours Nietzschenne.” He talks to butter- flies; he imagines a visit to the serpent ritual dance on the Hopi Indian reserva- tion; and he studies astrology and numerology.² Interestingly, we lack a rounded understanding of his relationship to Judaism. For some scholars, it is critical that this new Warburg obsessively kept tabs on antisemitic incidents on the Eastern front, scribbling down aphorisms and thoughts on scraps of paper and storing them in Zettelkasten that are now searchable. Others regard Warburg’s iconol- ogy as useful for understanding Nazism (Didi-Huberman 2008). Other than his watchdog attitude towards antisemitism, however, Warburg was not, according to this reading, really a Jew.³ Although I am not seeking to rehabilitate Warburg as a Jew, I contend that we obtain a skewed portrait not only of Warburg but also of Weimar Jewish culture by overlooking the Jewish and Republican features of his life and work. 2 Examples of this “newer” Warburg can be found in works by Didi-Hubermann (2002); Michaud (2004); and Steinberg (1995). 3 Charlotte Schoell-Glass (1998, esp. 53) argues that antisemitism is the primary explanatory principle in Warburg’s art-historical scholarship. Warburg and Weimar Culture 119 Just as the “old Warburg” told us more about the émigré generation than about Warburg himself, this “new Warburg” reveals 1970s Parisian post-struc- turalist approaches and the 1990s effort by art historians in Hamburg to rebuild that field (Papapetros 2003, esp. 171–174). Yet these portraits do not tell us about Warburg “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (how it essentially was), to borrow Ranke’s dictum about the past. They contribute to narratives – about the Enlightenment, totalitarianism, or Jewish identity – in which Warburg is a mere pawn. Although such narratives are not unique to Weimar Jewish history, the field certainly lends itself to such transference. Steven Aschheim (2007, 93) has explored this phenom- enon in his work Beyond the Border; the question of the vicissitudes of Weimar German Jews as icons in competing narratives informs my reconstructive treat- ment of Warburg and his milieu. Indeed, many of our portraits of Weimar Jews such as Warburg seem to be inventions of necessity in service to claims about the fate of European Jewish culture as a whole. This essay moves beyond both the normative and counternarratives of German Jewish history to situate Warburg’s life and career in the time and place in which his work was formed.⁴ While acknowledging that we historians inevita- bly invest personally in our subjects, in my examination of Warburg, I intend to use historical context to ameliorate the effects of that transference.⁵ Warburg’s own scholarly approach can be a helpful guide here. In a series of articles about the early Renaissance, he articulated his greatest scholarly innovation – that social context was critical for understanding art. Just as one cannot, according to Warburg, comprehend the work of Botticelli or Ghirlandaio without situat- ing their painting in the broader milieu, so too, one should treat Warburg’s own context as an organizing principle rather than as mere atmospheric “setting.”⁶ As an alternative to these competing Warburgs, this essay draws on three inter- related contexts as interpretive frameworks – the urban, financial, and the politi- cal. Such attention to context does not imply a reductive explanation of ideas by their context. Rather, this account of Warburg as embedded in various institu- tional contexts enriches our understanding of the Warburg circle and suggests a 4 Whereas Peter Jelavich’s contribution in this volume attempts radically to supplant the Gay- Mosse narrative with one that focuses on popular culture, my revision seeks to refocus the nar- rative of Jewish intellectuals in a way that revises the political and cultural implications of their work. 5 In this respect, this essay dovetails with a theme latent in the contributions from Shulamit S. Magnus and Matthias Morgenstern in this volume – locality’s effect on the prospects and reali- ties of distinct Jewish communities. 6 While intellectually probing, Sylvia Ferretti’s study (1989) is typical in its disembodied account of Warburg. Even Gombrich lacked the necessary urban context, according to Felix Gilbert (1972, 381). 120 Emily J. Levine model for reintegrating the plurality of paths taken by Jewish intellectuals in the Weimar Republic. Warburg reportedly said he was a “Hamburger at heart, Jew by blood, [and] Florentine in spirit” (Bing 1960, 113). It is worth emphasizing the first of these elements because this multifaceted identity seems to converge in his Vaterstadt, the city of Hamburg, which is the key to enriching our portrait of Weimar Jewish culture. Hamburg has long confounded German historians, challenging gen- eralizations of Germany as autocratic, aristocratic, and insular. As an imperial “free city,” a legal status awarded by Emperor Frederick I in the twelfth century, Hamburg enjoyed republican self-rule by a local senate whose members came from merchant families and whose politics balanced local and international interests. For this reason,
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