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3131761-4700 8 0 0 / 5 2 1 ~
Erwin Panofsky and Walter Benjamin: German Jewish Cultural Traditions and the
Writing of History in Weimar Germany
Anna Mary Dempsey
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
1998
OMI Number: 9838908
Copyright 1998 by
Dempsey, Anna Mary
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Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.
This microfonn edition is protected against unauthorized
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1998
Anna Mary Dempsey
All Rights Reserved
ABSTRACT
Erwin Panofsky and Walter Benjamin: German Jewish Cultural Traditions and the
Writing of History in the Weimar Republic
Anna Mary Dempsey
In this thesis, I have analyzed how Erwin Panofsky's and
Walter Benjamin's attitudes toward historical interpretation
developed within the fragmented culture of Weimar Germany. I have
evaluated the function served by the classical tradition--in
particular the works of the German Renaissance artist Albrecht
Dtirer--in the political and cultural rhetoric of the Weimar
Republic and in Panofsky's and Benjamin's methodological studies.
I specifically focus on how Panofsky's theory of iconology and
Benjamin's allegorical philosophy intersect with German idealist
thought and with German-Jewish political and philosophical
traditions.
I have compared their writings to studies by other German
writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
including Frederich Nietzsche, Aby Warburg and Thomas Mann and
have attempted to evaluate how Panofsky's, Benjamin's and Aby
Warburg's use of language is consistent with the Nietzschean
rhetoric circulating within Weimar culture. In concluding, I have
compared Panofsky's 1943 monograph of Albrecht Durer with Thomas
Mann's Doctor Faustus (1948). Although these two works were
written after the National Socialists came to power, I have
regarded them as "mournful" tributes to Weimar culture. In this
chapter and also throughout the dissertation, I have tried to show
how Panofsky and Benjamin utilized the Renaissance and classical
traditions as metaphors for their own commentaries about the death
and/or survival of enlightened German culture.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
Weimar Culture, Classical Antiquity and the Search for Order
The Production of Culture and the Search For Order
Nietzsche as Cultural Hero
DOrer as Hero and Symbol
German-Jewish Cultural Identity and the Renaissance
Conclusion
CHAPTER 2
Benjamin, Panofsky and the Language of Representation
Philosophical, Biographical and Shared Theoretical Foundations
German Idealist Traditions
Panofsky and Benjamin: Brief Curricula
Shared Theoretical Foundations
Image and Method
Panofsky and Melencolia I: Portrait of Artistic Genius
The Origin of German Tragic Drama and Albrecht DOrer
i.
p. 1
p. 22
p. 35
p. 42
p. 60
p. 74
p. 77
p. 82
p. 87
p. 90
p. 94
p. 101
Benjamin's Allegory: Philosophy, the Image and Baroque Tragic Drama p. 106
lconology: Panofsky's Method of Art Historical Interpretation p. 116
Summary: Panofsky's lconology and Benjamin's Allegory p. 126
The Subject/Object Duality and the Philosophy of Visual Representation p. 129
Panofsky and the language of Representation p. 129
Benjamin and the language of Representation p. 137
Epilogue: Panofsky and Benjamin's Philosphy of Representation p. 143
CHAPTER 3
The Study of History and German..Jewish Culture
Writing History: The Influence of Nietzsche p . 150
Panofsky: The Significance of the Renaissance and the "Classical" Baroque p . 153
Benjamin and the Writing of History: Theology and Science p. 168
Weimar Jewish Culture and the Writing of History p . 178
Conclusion p . 1 91
CHAPTER 4
Erwin Panofsky and Thomas Mann: Mourning Germany:
Faustus and Albrecht Durer through the Centuries p. 195
Panofsky and Mann p. 205
Politics: Mann and Panofsky p. 214
The Dionysian and its Appeal for Panofsky And Mann p. 221
ii.
Panofsky, the Nietzschean Hero and German-Jewish Messianism p. 227
The Dionysian, Sensuality and the Abstract p. 230
Abstraction and DOrer's Artistic Style p. 238
Faust, DOrer and Nationalism p. 241
Germany and Salvation p. 247
Memory and Heimat p. 254
BIBLIOGRAPHY p. 257
ILLUSTRATIONS p. 283
iii.
List of Illustrations
1. Albrecht DUrer. Melencolia I, 1514, Engraving,
Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald
Collection. (Photo: Hutchinson, Albrecht Durer, 1990,
plate 24) .
2. Still from Leni Rienfenstahl's film Olympia--Feast of
The Nations, 1936. (Photo: Adam, Art of the Third
Re i ch, 1992 , p. 25).
3. Pablo Picasso. Deux Femmes courant sur la plage (La
Course) (Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race)),
1922, Gouache on plywood. Musee Picasso, Paris.
(Photo: Fer, Batchelor, Wood, Realism, Rationalism
Surrealism, 1993, p. 72.).
4. Gino Severini. Maternita (Maternity), 1916, Oil on
canvas. Collection Jeanne Severini. (Photo: Fer,
Batchelor, Wood, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism,
1993, p. 12).
5. Poster of the Organization to Aid Mothers and
Children, Ca. 1935. Caption: "Germany grows through
strong mothers and healthy children." (Photo: Adam,
Art of the Third Reich, 1992, p. 16).
6. Otto Dix. Altes Liebespaar (Old Couple), 1923, Oil on
Canvas. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie Berlin.
(Photo: Otto Dix, Tate Gallery, 1992, p. 120).
7. Hans Baldung Grien. Death and the Maiden, 1509-1511.
Panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. (Photo:
Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art, 1985, p. 365).
8. Otto Dix. War, 1932. Triptych with predella, Mixed
Media on wood. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden,
Gemaldegalerie Neue Meister. (Photo: Otto Dix, Tate
Gallery, 1992, p. 170).
9. Matthias Grunewald. Isenheim Altarpiece (closed
Position), 1515, Panel (with framing). Musee
d'Unterlinden, Colmar. (Photo: Snyder, Northern
Renaissance Art, 1985, p. 342).
iv.
10. George Grosz. Leichenbegangnis: Widmung an Oskar
Panizza (Funeral Procession: Dedication to Oscar
Panizza), 1917-18, oil on canvas. Staatsgalerie,
Stuttgart. (Photo: Fer, Batchelor, Wood,
Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism, 1992, p. 287).
11. John Heartfield. German Natural History, photomontage,
1934. (Photo: Wieland Herzfelde, John Heartfield
1962, p. 167).
12. Albrecht Durer. Knight, Death, and Devil, 1513,
Engraving. (Photo: Panofsky, Durer, 1943, fig. 207)
13. Albrecht Durer. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
Ca. 1498, Woodcut. Staatliche Museen Preussischer
Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett (Photo: Hutchinson,
Durer, 1990, plate 15).
14a. Otto Dix. Melancholie (Melancholy), 1930, Mixed media
on wood. Otto Dix Stiftung. (Photo: Otto Dix, Tate
Gallery, p. 179).
14b. Dieter Kramer, Melancholie, 1970. Karl Ernst Osthaus
Museum, Hagen. (Photo: Bialostocki, Durer, 1986, p.
400) .
15. Georg Sluyterman von Langeweyde. "In einem kuhlen
Grunde ... " "on the cool land." Ca. 1930. Linocut.
(Photo: Schuster, Melencolia, 1989, fig. 331).
16. Orazio Gentileschi. David after His Victory over
Goliath. Rome, Galleria Spada. (Photo: Panofsky,
Essays on Style, 1995, p. 74).
17. Hubert Lanziger, ca. 1930s. The Flag Bearer. U.S.
Army Art Collection, Washington. (Photo: Adam,
Art of the Third Reich, 1992, p. 18).
18. Georg Sluyterman von Langeweyde. Victory or Defeat
Rests in God's Hand: Of Honour We Ourselves are
Lord and King, Ca. 1936, Woodcut. (Photo: Hutchinson
Durer, 1990, plate 37) .
19. Albrecht Durer. Hercules Defending Vice Against Virtue
(The Large Hercules), Ca. 1498, Engraving. Berlin,
Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz,
Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Hutchinson, Durer, 1990,
v.
Plate, 14).
20. Albrecht DUrer. Portrait of Maximilian I, 1519,
woodcut. (Photo: Panofsky, DUrer, 1943, fig. 229).
21. Lucas van Leyden. Portrait of Maximilian I, 1520.
Etching. Face engraved with the burin. (Photo:
Panofsky, DUrer, 1943, fig. 230).
22. Albrecht DUrer. Self-Portrait as Man of Sorrows,
1522, Drawing. Bremen, Kunsthalle. (Photo: Panofsky,
DUrer, 1943, frontispiece).
23. Albrecht DUrer. Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam,
Engraving, 1526. (Photo: Panofsky, DUrer, 1943, fig.
305) .
24. Film Still from Hans JUrgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film
From Germany, 1977. (Photo: Kaes, From Hitler to
Heimat, 1989, p. 37).
vi.
1
INTRODUCTION
Few areas of German history have elicited as much study
as the Weimar Republic of the 19205. Because of the cultural
experimentation that proliferated during the Republic's short
life, we have come to think of it as the Golden Twenties, the
high point of German "modernity in art, literature and
thought. "I In particular, images such as Marlene Dietrich in
a smoky cabaret, the sexually ambiguous dancers from Otto
Dix's Metropolis, the "clean lines" of Bauhaus experimental
architecture or the Expressionist sets from Dr. Caligary's
Cabinet come to mind. Architects, artists, filmmakers and
playwrights, indeed, all seemed to be exploring a variety of
new directions.
Prominent post-World War II historians considered the
experimenters--the avant-garde--as the progressive, rational
and cosmopolitan initiators of German modernism.
2
Those who
I Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper
& Row, 1968), p. 8.
: For many post World-War II historians of Weimar, "modernity" is
associated with a liberal left and a morally "correct" way of thinking,
whereas irrationalism or anti-intellectualism is equated with the
conservative right. Walter Laqueur claims that the left was the "party of
reason, progress and freedom and as the party which "sponsors worthy
causes which no one else was willing to back," [(Weimar: A Cultural
2
were opposed to modernity were labeled the conservative right
and were considered nationalistic and nostalgic purveyors of
non-rationalism.
3
Later critics have modified this judgment calling German
modernism a phenomenon not easily separated into two
polarized camps. Indeed, the cultural avant-garde and the
nationalist right often adopted similar rhetorical
Both the avant-garde and the conservative
right, for example, embraced the use of technology as a
History, 1918-1933. NY: G. Putnam's, 1974), pp. 73, 45]. Eberhard Kolb
writes that "On closer investigation of the 'golden twenties,' therefore,
the typical feature of the period is seen to be the split between
modernism and the fear of modernity, between radicalism and resignation,
between sober, factual rationality and the attraction of a profound
irrationalism of a mystical, contemplative, or chiliastic kind." [The
Weimar Republic, trans., P.S. Falla (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988) p.,-gs].
Work originally published as Die Weimarer Republik (Munich and Vienna: R.
Oldenberg Verlag, 1984).
Henry J. Turner claims that the victory of National Socialism was a
result of the "crisis of modernization", of "utopian antimodernism.
[that was] an extreme revolt against the modern industrial world and an
attempt to recapture a distant mythic past' ("Fascism and Modernization"
in Reappraisals of Fascism, NY: New Viewpoints, 1975, pp. 117-139).
Talcott Parsons concludes that National Socialism, in a fundamentally
important sense, represented "a mobilization of the extremely deep-seated
romantic tendencies of German society in the service of a violently
aggressive political movement, incorporating a 'fundamentalist' revolt
against the whole tendency of the rationalization of the Western world,"
("Democracy and Social Structure in Pre-Nazi Germany'- in Essays in
Sociological Theory, NY: Free Press, 1966, p. 123).
3 Modern art in general was seen as bearing marks of rationalism, a term
derogatorily used by fascists to decry those who espoused "non-German"
traits. For a contemporary historian's use of the terms see Eberhard
Kolb, The Weimar Republic, p. 95 and passim.
For similar trends in France, see Kenneth Silver Esprit de Corps: The
AIt of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 219-299.
3
societal necessity.s Both championed a return to a classic
tradition that they hoped would transform a bankrupt
present.
6
Each side argued that their opponent promoted an
aesthetically bankrupt or unhealthy culture. Certainly, the
German "cult of the body," which fused aesthetic with
biological/health concerns was embraced by anti-Semites who
spouted theories of racial superiority. But adherents of
Rudolph Steiner's anthroposophic teaching--a pedagogical
method, which joined Enlightenment thought to educational
reform--also utilized this rhetoric.' In fact, biological or
scientific reasoning often justified opposing positions.
8
5 See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and
Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1984). In the 1920s, "Nazi ideology was a reconciliation betwee:1
the anti-modernist, romantic and irrationalist ideas present in German
nationalism and the most obvious manifestation of means-ends rationality,
that is modern technology" (p. 125). Also see Moshe Postone, "Note on the
German Reaction to 'Holocaust,'" New German Critique 19 (Winter 1980): pp.
97-116.
6 See Peter Fritzsch "Landscape of Danger" in Dancing on the Volcano:
Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic, eds. Thomas W. Kniesche and
Stephen Brockmann (Camden House: Columbia S.C., 1994), pp. 29-46. "In the
age of Ebert and Stresernann, the far away, the fantastic, and the
protean, was represented by nostalgia for the imperial past,
neoconservative notions of eternal return, fascination with technology,
obsession with the American future and careful attention to the Bolshevik
experiment," (p. 41).
7 See the Weimar documents concerning the "the cult of the body"
translated in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay
Edward Dimendberg, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1994), pp. 673-692.
8 Certainly, the racialist anti-Semitic theories of the fascists and many
volkisch nationalists such as Oswald Spengler are well known. In an
attempt to rebut their claims, opponents of anti-Semitism also looked to
biological theory for support. In the June 1920 issue of Martin Buber's
Der Jude, Arnold Zwieg calls on Jews to recognize the specific nature of
4
Although an analysis of these rhetorical strategies is beyond
the scope of this study, this summary does suggest that
Weimar society is notable for its heterogeneity, dissonance,
and in particular for its fragmentation.
One Weimar critic, the German Jewish psychologist Erich
Fromm, pointed out that Weimar's democracy was a fractious
cacophony of voices, each demanding equal time and an equal
say in governing.
9
Otto Spengler's 1918 The Decline of the
West resonated strongly, particularly on the right, with
those who believed in the inability of the democratic
Republic to resolve social and economic problems.
Interestingly enough, Thomas Mann (prior to his liberal
position of the 1920s) and the German Jewish intellectual
Franz Rosenzweig also considered Spengler's nationalistic,
nostalgic work to be a remarkable breakthrough. 10
anti-Semitism and the difficulties and unfairness it has visited upon
them. He points out that anti-Semitism is international in character,
that its opponents are "extensions of the devil" ("die gepanzerte
Faust"), and that it is biological in nature; "We finally recognize
Anti-Semitism as a biological phenomenon, as one which affects each
person differently. . . we are searching for the root, which must
obviously lie in the true nature of the 'people' (Volkern)". Arnold
Zweig, "Der heutige deutsche Anti-Semitismus', [Der Jude, 3 (June 1920):
p. 139]. "Erkennen wir endlich den Antisemitism als biologisches
Phanonmen, . . . suchen wir seine Wurzel auf, die selbstverstandlich
unterhalb der eigentlich von 'Volkern' erfiillten Sphare liegen muss."
9 See Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farah Reinhardt Inc.
1941) .
10 Mann writes that Spengler's book "stands as something dignified,
prudent, magisterial, unassailable, irreproachable, yet brotherly. I
am as proud of this book as if I had written it myself." Thomas Mann,
Diaries, selected by Hermann Kesten, trans. Richard Winston and Clara
5
In other words, Weimar's liberal and conservative
thinkersll shared a deep disregard for the institutional
political status quo--what Fritz Stern has so aptly labeled
as "the politics of cultural despair". I:: Michael Makropoulos
has suggested that because the Weimar government was seen as
"compromising," as one without a clear identity or value
structure, there was a continuous search to find answers, to
find some kind of global solution that could substitute for
the vagueness and lack of direction. 13 Van der Will claims
that "dissonances, . in ordinary cognition became a basic
experience" .14 Relativism and nihilism became the rallying
Winston (London: Robin Clark, 1983). Entry for September, 18, 1918, p.
6.
See Stephen Aschheim, Cultural Catastrophe: German and Jewish
Confrontation with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: NYU
Press, 1996) regarding Franz Rosenzweig. Aschheim writes that "Franz
Rosenzweig--faced with the magnitude of the European catastrophe"-said of
Oswald Spengler, author of that right wing-apocalyptic work The Decline
of the West that he was "objectively probably the greatest philosopher of
history that has appeared since Hegel," (p. 37).
II Fritzsch, "Landscape of Danger," writes that: "Bauhaus architects,
social welfare officials, Communist visionaries, radical nationalists,
and certainly the National Socialists formulated their practice according
to the assumption that the material world was fugitive but also supple
and workable and that history was delinquent. They approached the
twentieth century as a state of permanent emergency in which the present
was contingent and the future a dangerous but opportune terrain that
required relentless renovation," (p. 45).
I:: Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair. See Introduction, xi-
xxx.
13 Michael Makropoulos "Tendencies of the 1920s: On the Discourse of
Classical Modernity" in Theory, Culture & Society (SAGE: London, Thousand
Oaks and New Delhi, 1995) 12 (1995): pp. 87-102.
14 Wilfried van der Will, "The Body and the Body Politic as Symptom and
Metaphor in the Transition of German Culture to National Socialism", pp.
6
points for those who wished to overthrow the political order
or simply to toss off societal ambiguity. Van der Will
asserts that "Josef Goebbels was right" in declaring in a
1935 article that the "confusing democratic pluralism" and
the political infighting of the governmental institutions of
the Weimar Republic helped to give rise to the victory of
National Socialism. According to Goebbels: "Never before
had particularism of every kind reveled in such orgies just
at a time when we badly need internal unity. "IS
Siegfried Kracauer, a Jewish liberal journalist and
cultural critic, claimed in 1922 that it was necessary "to
reach the fulfilled realm of a reality underneath an elevated
transcendent meaning" and to lead "a homeless humanity back
into the new-old fields of a god-imbued reality."16 Walter
Gropius's Bauhaus was an attempt to design such a "reality."
It was based on the "idea of a new unitary world that
contains within itself the resolution to all antagonistic
tensions."P
14-52 in The Nazification of AIt: AIt, Design, Music, AIchitecture and
Film in the Third Reich ed. Brandon Taylor and Wi1fried van der Will
(Hampshire: The Winchester Press, 1990), p. 19.
15 Van der Will, "The Body Politic," p. 19.
16 Siegfried Kracauer, "Soziologie als Wissenschaft" in Schriften 1.
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). Quoted and trans. in Makroupolous,
"Tendencies of the 19205," p. 91.
\7 Walter Gropius, Die neue AIchitektur und das Bauhaus (Mainz:
Kupferberg, 1965). Quoted and trans. in Makropoulos, "Tendencies of the
7
Large segments of the population, not only the
intellectuals, were alienated from the ruling elite. To some
extent, this pessimism was well founded. Although the
government of Weimar initially embraced the "progressive" and
"enlightened" concepts of a free-market economy, democracy,
modern science, and the emancipation of the "new woman,,18 and
the Jews, many of the repressive judicial and social
structures of the Wilhelmine era were left intact. Because
the government was unable to project a unified image, others
filled the vacuum with often disastrous results. Those most
associated with Weimar modernism in the popular
consciousness, such as the Jew and the modern woman, were
turned into scapegoats for all that had gone wrong with the
Republic--with the economic and social issues that the
government could not or would not clearly articulate.
Stereotypical images circulated, which transformed Jews and
the "modern" woman first into obj ects of ki tsch, 19 and later
1920s," p. 95.
18 As R. J. Evans has pointed out, women's emancipation was an important
issue during Weimar. Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century
Germany and the Origins of the T h i ~ d Reich (London: Allen and Unwin,
1987), pp. 224-263. Given the public awareness of the debate surrounding
the "new woman", issues concerning femininity were focal points for many
groups--particularly for those dismayed with Germany's loss in World War
I. For an evocative account of some of these reactions see Klaus
Theleweit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
19 See Saul Friedlander Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch & Death
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) for an analysis of the
8
into societal projections of h a t e . ~ Indeed, for Weimar
Germany, Jews could be considered a projection of a German
"other." They were a part of a German society that did not
consider them as fully integrated members of a "genuine"
Germanic tradition--despite the beliefs of many Jewish
intellectuals that they were Germans first and Jews second.
Many historians have argued that the majority of Jews
were assimilated Germans who did not see themselves as
separated from the larger German culture. ~ I Other scholars
have come to dispute this notion during the last ten years.
They claim that self-identification with Germany did not mean
complete assimilation. David Sorkin asserts that Jews were
economically assimilated rather than socially integrated, in
part, because they chose this path, but also because the
relationship between propaganda, kitsch and death.
~ In Cut With the Knife: the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch (Yale
University Press: New Haven and London, 1993), p. 52, Maud Lavin suggests
that women and Jews were associated with Weimar because they previously
had been effectively barred from the power structures of German society.
She observes that "during Weimar they could suddenly imagine occupying
positions within bourgeois society--and sometimes actually achieve them.
Because of the relative newness of this possibility and the fact that it
occurred during the twenties, at the same time as intensified
modernization, both groups chose to identify with modern elements of
German society". In Lavin's view, this turned women and Jews into an
easy target. Perhaps political expediency might be a better term. In my
view, as far as Jewish identity is concerned, its conflation with
liberalism and modernism is not all that clear. As noted above, the
boundaries between conservative and liberal groups were not distinct,
although Lavin has a point in assuming that each of their ideological
goals differed greatly.
'1
- Among these scholars, perhaps the most well known are Peter Gay, Weimar
Culture or Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History.
9
"larger" society would not let them become full members.=
German Jewish identity, in other words, involved a dual
standard--political acceptance and religious/social
toleration. Michael Brenner has suggested that Weimar Jews
were not "Jews beyond Judaism," as George Mosse has stated,
but were a distinct group within Germany that produced a
remarkable, lively and unique Jewish They were, in
other words, a distinct voice within this fragmented culture.
One could argue that many of Weimar's assimilated Jews
such as the art historians Erwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg,
would not have agreed with this conclusion. Deeply
identifying with the German culture of Goethe and Schiller,
they felt themselves to be, as Peter Gay remarks, outsiders
who became insiders.:
4
Like other members of Weimar Germany,
they sought to rescue German culture from the fragmented
chaos in which it found itself. Nevertheless, they were not
fully assimilated Germans, regardless of how "German" many
=
See David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry: 1780-1840 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Anti-Semitism and the question of
assLmilation will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 1. Suffice it
to say that "assimilated" inaccurately describes the position of German
Jews in Germany. See also Sander Gilman Pathology and Difference (Cornell
University Press: Ithaca, 1985) and Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and
the Hidden Language of the Jews (Johns Hopkins University Press:
Baltimore, 1986).
See Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar
Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).
24 See Peter Gay, Weimar Culture.
10
assumed themselves to be. Indeed, as Jacob Katz bluntly
stated over sixty years ago, "Jews have not assimilated into
the German people.,,25 Although German Jews were divided into a
variety of groups ranging from atheistic secular to orthodox
Ostjuden, they were for Germans an Other. As Enzo Traverso
puts it, "Instead of inaugurating a dialogue between Jews and
Germans, assimilation led immediately to a Jewish monologue,
which took place in the Germanic world. . True symbiosis
presupposed a pluralistic society capable of acknowledging
the Jewish tradition as well as Jewish otherness. ,,16
Walter Benjamin, one of the many notable Jewish critics
to emerge from Weimar's fragmented culture, suggested that
societal tensions were inevitable:
A generation that traveled to school in horse-drawn
trams is left out in the open in a landscape in which
nothing except the clouds remained unchanged, while in
the middle, in a force field of destructive currents and
explos ions, the tiny, fragile human body. 17
25 Jacob Katz, "Die Entstehung der Judenassimilation in Deutschland und
deren Ideologie" (Frankfurt a.M., 1935) 32. Reprinted in Emancipation and
Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History (Westrnead: Farnborough,
1972), p. 72.
16 Enzo Traverso, The Jews and Germany: From the "Judeo-German Symbiosis"
to the Memory of Auschwitz trans. Daniel Weissbort (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press), p. 40.
17 Walter Benjamin, "Erfahrung und Armut" , in Gessamelte schriften, eds.
Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1972), p. 214. "Eine Generation, die noch mit der pferdebahn zur Schule
gefahren war, stand unter freiem Himmel in einer Landschaft, in der
nichts unverandert geblieben war als die Wolken, und in der Mitte, in
einem Kraftfeld zerstorender Strome und Explosionen, der winzige
11
Like Gropius, Kracauer and many other intellectuals, Benjamin
attempted to make sense of Weimar's cultural chaos. He
developed a theory of history, albeit a negative and
destructive one, that attempted to explain the disjointed
present through an analysis of the past. The literary or
visual fragment was the essential building block of this
philosophy of history, a philosophy t h ~ t had its roots in
Nietzschean nihilism and Jewish messianic redemption.
Visual "fragments," in particular, occupied a central
place in Benjamin's methodological inquiries. Such images,
which were the products of the intersection of language,
cultural identity, and memory, could be arbitrarily
appropriated for contemporary use. He used them to illustrate
his belief that history is not a progressive process, but
was, instead, a chaotic cycle of destruction and repetition.
Benjamin, in his Origin of German Tragic D r a m a ~ for
example, plucked Albrecht DUrer's Melencolia I (Figure 1)
from its sixteenth century context and used it as a visual
metaphor for the chaotic sixteenth-century Baroque and for
gebrechliche Menschenkorper."
~ Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John
Osborne, intro. George Steiner (London and New York: New Left Books,
1977) (Verso paperback edition, 1985). Originally published as Ursprung
des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfort am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963)
12
his own troubled period. The once potent and fearsome gods
of antiquity that DUrer has rendered as allegorical symbols
(such as the Jupiter's magic square behind the seated figure)
represented, for Benjamin, the visual emblems of our dead
myths--myths which have lured us into a dream-like acceptance
of the status quo. On the other hand, DUrer's corpses of the
dead gods from Antiquity also jolt us awake. They force us
to recognize that history is not a progressive force. As in
Jewish messianic philosophy, Benjamin concludes that it is
only when humankind has descended into melancholic despair
that the path to redemption becomes clear.
Benjamin's interests in the afterlife of classical
culture and in the visual details and fragments which are the
building blocks of future cultural redemption were shared by
another German Jewish scholar--Aby Wa=burg (1863-1929).
Although Benjamin's analysis of Melencolia I in the Origin of
German Tragic Drama was based on the 1923 interpretation of
Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, colleagues of Warburg's at the
University of Hamburg, its "spirit" seems to echo that of the
older
This is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3, in reference to
Benjamin's Origin of Ger.man Tragic Drama where he enlists the help of the
Works of Albert DUrer in evaluating the significance of the allegorical
writing of seventeenth-century Germany. In this chapter, I contrast and
compare some of Panofsky's early writings on DUrer with that of
Benjamin's Origin and other essays on mimesis.
13
Both Warburg and Benjamin, who were interested in
reinterpretations of the classical tradition, viewed history
as an unreconcilable contest between the chaotic "dionysian"
and the serene "apollonian" forces articulated by Friedrich
Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy (1872). They both looked to
Durer's work as an example of this creative tension.
Significantly, Warburg and Benjamin viewed history, not as a
Hegelian rational process but as a destructive one.
30
Each
scholar attempted to construct a visual language of
representation and suggested that a montage-like
juxtaposition of images would illuminate historical patterns
of meaning.
This view would appear to be quite different from Erwin
Panofsky's neo-Kantian interpretation of art and of art
history. In his later writings, Panofsky defined artistic
meaning as that which emerged from the harmonious rather than
tense balancing of apollonian and dionysian forces.
Historical development, which was governed by rational
forces, could be decoded by a knowledgeable historian.
~ Benjamin's views regarding historical practice will be discussed in
Chapter 3. Although Warburg's theory of culture is only summarized in
Chapter 1, his views were important to the development of the Warburg
"School" theory of art history. The relationship of Warburg's to
Benjamin's have been explored by Wolfgang Kemp among others.
Nevertheless, the interrelationship among all these German Jewish
scholars warrants further study and explication.
14
Despite the apparent differences between Panofsky and
the other two scholars, there are significant similarities
among them. Like Warburg and Benjamin, Panofsky studied the
wOLk of Albrecht Durer. His engagement with Durer, which goes
back to his German doctoral dissertation of 1915
31
and
culminates in his influential monograph of 1943 The Life and
Art of Albrecht D u r e r 3 ~ , was one of the primary mechanisms he
used to develop his theory of artistic interpretation
(Iconology). Panofsky's early methodological essays on
cultural history, also reflect the Nietzschean tensions, the
Jewish intellectual influences, and the affective,
theological dimension that are evident in Benjamin's early
writings (as in The Origin of German Tragic Drama). As I
intend to show in the subsequent chapters, Panofsky's
writings are permeated with the traditions, ambivalence and
intellectual nuances that were woven into the critical
thought of many German Jewish writers including Walter
Benjamin. Indeed, the tension between a German and Jewish
identity, although at times camouflaged, remains a constant
presence in their methodological analyses of history and, and
31 Erwin Panofsky, DUrers Kunsttheorie Vornehmlich in Ihrem Verhaltnis zur
Kunsttheorie der Italiener. (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1995).
3 ~ Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht DUrer (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1943 (I have used the first Princeton
Paperback printing, 1971).
15
in particular, in their interpretations of the art of
Albrecht Durer.
In Chapter 1, I summarize the importance of the
classical tradition and its Renaissance afterlife for both
Jewish and conservative, nationalist writers. Although the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rebirth of
many historical and artistic traditions, each of these
traditions were, as George Mosse points out, fused with a
classical visual rhetoric that allowed the Germans to
construct a distinct national genealogy.D The visual culture
of Germany during the early twentieth century reflected this
desire to define a classical northern origin (the films of
Leni Riefenstahl are clear reminders of the effectiveness of
the German political appropriation of past classical culture,
see Figure 2) .
Indeed, political battles in the Germany of the early
twentieth century were often fought in the cultural arena. In
George Mosse's words, "the artistic and the political had
Proponents of a specific political ideology often
33 George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism
and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third
Reich (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975).
George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses, p. 15.
16
associated their own values with a "genuine" German culture
that reflected a classical antecedent in Antiquity, the
Renaissance or the eighteenth century Enlightenment. For
example, even before the National Socialists came to power,
the myth of the classical hero was fused with that of a
Nordic one in order to create a visual model of a racially
pure German "type. ,,35 Throughout the 1920s, the magazine Die
Sonne, Monatsschrift fur Nordische Weltanschauung und
Lebensgestaltung published articles on such "Nordic souls" as
Michelangelo's nudes, Nietzsche's Ubermenschen, and Goethe's
Faust.
36
Albrecht Durer, both the artist and his work, also
played an important role in the political sphere. The German
Renaissance revival--termed the Durerzeit--was, in part, a
reaction to what was perceived as French cultural hegemony in
Europe.
37
For the Germany of the late-nineteenth and early
35 See Peter Adams, Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
Inc.), pp. 23-39. Nevertheless, Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities
(London and New York: Verso, 1991, p. 141) reminds us that "In an age
when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals . . . to
insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism. . . the
cultural products of nationalismr-poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic
arts--show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and
styles."
~ Adams, Art of the Third Reich, p. 24.
37 Robin Lenman, John Osborne, and Eda Sagarra, "Imperial Germany:
Towards the Commercialization of Culture," in German Cultural Studies:
An Introduction ed. Rob Burns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
pp. 9-52.
17
twentieth centuries, a society in search of order, DUrer's
works were the embodiment of clarity and legibility. His
prints were reinvented, reinterpreted and circulated in
popular culture in part because the particular order to which
they adhered--linear perspective and human proportionality
established during the Renaissance--seemed to offer
dependable visual standards.
The Renaissance revival, or "altdeutsch vogue," grew out
of the 1876 Munich Applied Art Exhibition. One of its
backers, George Hirth, author of Das deutsche Zimmer der
Renaissance (1880) advocated a decorative style that was
specifically German. 38 By the time of Weimar, though artists
and artisans no longer adhered to these standards, the
"Renaissance revival" style remained popular. Indeed, the
DUrerbund, the organization founded by Friedrich Avenarius to
support the "healthy" German Renaissance revival culture,
persisted into the 1920s.
The Renaissance represented an ideal that had been
preserved in tradition and elevated to mythic, iconic status
by intellectuals as well. In Chapter 1, I provide a summary
of some of these studies. I have selected works about Durer
38 Lerunan et ai, "Imperial Germany," p. 39. Concerning art in Munich at
the turn of the century see Maria Makela, The Munich Secession: Art and
Arts in Turn-of-the-Century Munich (Princeton: Princeton University
18
from those writers who were important contributors to German
cultural history and, in particular, to art history.
Secondly, I have framed their contributions in a general
discussion of the Nietzschean legacy in Germany. Finally, I
have located certain of their contributions within a more
specific analysis of the German Jewish political, cultural
and religious traditions.
Chapter 2 has a narrower focus. In this chapter, I
examine the importance of the German idealist tradition and
Friedrich Nietzsche's reinterpretation of it in Benjamin's
and in Panofsky's methodological studies. I discuss how the
work of art--specifically DUrer's Melencolia I--was crucial
to the development of Panofsky's theory of iconology and
Benjamin's allegorical philosophy. I have chosen to focus on
Panofsky's early studies (those written primarily before he
left Germany in 1933) and on Benjamin's 1928 analysis of
seventeenth-century German tragic drama (The Origin of German
Tragic Drama) .
In particular, I have evaluated their interpretations of
the traditional philosophical concern with how the individual
makes "sense" of her experience of the phenomenal world. For
Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential thinkers of the
Press, 1990).
19
modern age--and whose theoretical conclusions were crucial in
the development of both Benjamin's and Panofsky's aesthetic
philosophies--it is impossible to know the natural world as
it really is. Rather, we interpret sensory experience
according to an a-priori set of rules. In other words, the
perceiving subject, organizes her experience of the natural
world according to a set of concepts that are divorced from
the world of objects.
39
For Benjamin and unlike Kant, the
"object world" of nature is an active agent--simultaneously
both destroyer and redeemer--in our apprehension of
phenomena. Panofsky, however, appears to support the Kantian
notion that agency primarily resides with the artist/creator
(at least as put forth in his and Fritz Saxl's 1923
discussion of Durer's engraving Melencolia I).
Nevertheless, as I intend to show, there are significant
similarities between Panofsky's and Benjamin's theories of
representation. Both of them are studies about the process
of historical transformation, a process not accounted for in
Kant's philosophy. In addition, both scholars amend Kant's
proviso that "true" knowledge of God is not possible.
Benjamin, in his early studies, intends to destroy the
39 For a useful summary of Kant's philosophy, see Roger Scruton, "Kant,"
in German Philosophers: Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 1-104.
20
idealized myth of the classical hero and to transform
traditional critical philosophy into an allegorical language
of representation--one that structures historical fragments
into mimetic patterns of redemptive possibilities that allow
for religious experience. Panofsky, in his essay "Perspective
as Symbolic Form," also introduces a "theological" dimension
to his theory of visual representation. His complex neo-
Kantian analysis, which investigates the history of visual
perception, nevertheless, metamorphoses from an historical,
scientific account of linear perspective into a philosophical
musing on transcendental and theological redemption.
Both Panofsky's and Benjamin's theories of visual
representation are essentially philosophies of history. In
Chapter 3, I evaluate the significance of the study of
history--specifically the classical traditions of the
Renaissance and the Baroque--for Panofsky and for Benjamin.
Friedrich Nietzsche's essay "On the uses and disadvantages of
history for life," which is important to any discussion of
twentieth-century Western history, is crucial to my analysis
of their interpretations of history.
In this chapter, I also investigate how German idealist
philosophy intersects with German Jewish traditions in
Benjamin's and Panofsky's theoretical conclusions. I have
specifically placed their studies within the German Jewish
tradition of language (the Given the historical
21
circumstances surrounding both German Jewish assimilation and
the early twentieth-century "Jewish revival" (as discussed in
Chapters 1 and 3), it seems to me that the contribution of
Panofsky and Benjamin to twentieth-century culture and
letters cannot be fully appreciated without this dimension--
whether they knowingly embraced some of these traditions or
not.
In the final chapter, Chapter 4, I have chosen to
compare Panofsky's 1943 monograph on Albrecht DUrer with
Thomas Mann's postwar novel Doctor Faustus. Both these
works, although written after the end of the Weimar Republic
are, in my view, commentaries about it. Panofsky and Mann
adapted traditional symbols of German culture--the works of
DUrer and the Renaissance figure Dr. Faustus--to convey, in
part, their own sentiments about past and present German
cultural identity. The authors' efforts are situated within
the wider intellectual and historical cultural context of
Weimar. In particular, I have attempted to evaluate how
their language is consistent with the Nietzschean rhetoric
circulating within Weimar culture. I have tried to show how
these two very different critics utilized DUrer's art as
metaphors for their own commentaries about the death of
enlightened German culture.
22
Chapter 1
WEIMAR CULTURE, CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY AND THE SEARCH
FOR ORDER
Even revolutionary movements backed their innovations by
reference to a 'people's past'. But what passes into
history and becomes the foundation for a national
ideology is not the actual memory of a society, not the
collective accounting of facts but what has been
selected, written, pictured, popularized and
institutionalized by those whose function it is to do
so .\
The Production of Culture and the Search for Order
Eric Hobsbawm argues that Germany specifically used
history in a negative fashion, to argue what it was against
and who were its enemies. In the political and cultural chaos
that was Weimar, any definition of national identity, however
insidious, simplistic, or noble, could assume importance in a
society searching for a cultural anchor.
During the Weimar Republic, the work of both Erwin
Panofsky and Walter Benjamin focused on aesthetic topics that
centered on classical traditions. Panofsky's studies, such
\ Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions" in Eric Hobsbawm
and Terence Ranger, editors, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
23
as "Albrecht Durer and Classical A..'1tiquity": (1921) or
Perspective as Symbolic Form
3
, (1924-1925) and Benjamin's
"Goethe's Elective Affinities,,4 (1924) or The Origin of
German Tragic Drama 5(1928) are thematically allied with the
work of other cultural critics of early twentieth-century
modernity. Many scholars, in particular Susan Buck-Morss,
have commented that Benjamin's analysis of Baroque tragic
drama is itself a commentary on the decaying and tension-
filled Europe of the 1920s.
6
Panofsky's writings on Albrecht Durer are also animated
Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 13.
: Erwin Panofsky. "Durers Stellung zur Antike," Jahrbuch fur Kunst-
geschichte I (1921/1922): pp. 43-92. Reprinted in Meaning in the Visual
Arts. Papers in and on Art History. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1955.
Phoenix edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 236-285.
3 Erwin Panofsky. "Die Perspektive als 'symbolische Form,'" Vortrage der
Bibliothek Warburg 1924-1925. Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1927.
English trans. Perspective as Symbolic Fonn. Trans. Christopher S. Wood.
New York: Zone Books, 1991.
4 Walter Benjamin, "Goethes Wahlverwandschaften", Written in 1919-1922.
published in Neue Deutsche Beitrage, 1924-1925. English version "Goethe's
Elective Affinities." Trans. Stanley Corngold in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W.
Jennings. (Cambridge MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1996), pp. 297-360.
5 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne,
intra. George Steiner (London and New York: New Left Books, 1977) (Verso
paperback edition, 1985). Originally published as Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels (Frankfort am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963). Also in
Gessammelte Schriften Vol 1, p. 203-. Eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhauser. Frankfort am Main: Surhkamp Verlag, 1972- ,
6 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1989). In this brilliant
analysis of Benjamin's final work, the Passagenarkaden, Buck-Morss
provides an insightful summary of the Weimar context in which Benjamin
worked. Her text has played an important part in the conclusions reached
24
by the cultural debates of Weimar Germany. For Panofsky and
many of his colleagues, their analyses of the Renaissance as
one of Western history's significant cultural flowerings and
a standard against which other epochs might be compared
cannot be separated from the critiques of their own society--
a society which was often considered as chaotic and
culturally adrift. Not until
the first railroads and industrial plants were
built ... were man and nature ... doomed to become less
interesting and less important than those antihuman and
antinatural forces that seem to determine our own
period--the forces of masses and machines--and of which
we don't yet know whether they are the manifestations of
an unknown God or an unknown Devil. The rise of these
new forces, not the Baroque movement, means the real end
of the Renaissance, and at the same time the beginning
of our own epoch of history, an epoch that is still
struggling for an expression both in life and in art,
and that will be named and judged by the generations to
come--provided that it does not put an end to all
generations to come.
7
The search for cultural coherence, for the type of
"order" exemplified in past historical epochs (particularly
those labeled classical) is, as I intend to show, evident in
the theories developed by Panofsky and Benjamin. Their early
studies are, in fact, centered on one of history's classic
artists, the sixteenth century Renaissance painter and
in this chapter.
7 Erwin Panofsky, "What is Baroque?" (1935), in Three Essays on Style, ed.
25
printmaker Albrecht Durer, and on perhaps his most famous
engraving, Melencolia I (Figure 1). The artist occupies a
central place in Panofsky's Idea (1924) and Perspective as
Symbolic Form (1924-1925) as well as in the development of
his theory of iconology. For Benjamin, DUrer is a central
character in his explication of the Origin of German Tragic
Drama.
Panofsky's and Benjamin's interest in the artist and the
afterlife of the classical is part of a European-wide
cultural focus on historical tradition. France, as Kenneth
Silver and Romy Golan have recently argued, saw a rebirth of
classical motifs articulated and disseminated in Picasso's
art.
8
Picasso's Deux Femmes courant sur la Plage (La Course)
(1922, Figure 3) or Trois Femmes a la Source (1921) are
reworkings of classical themes while Gino Severini's
Maternita
9
(1917, Figure 4) looks back to the nursing
Madonnas of the Renaissance. As David Batchelor suggests,
such naturalistic art works of the 1920s were conscious art-
Irving Lavin (Cambridge, MA and London: The M.I.T. Press, 1995), p. 88.
8 See Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit De Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-
Garde and the First World War, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989) and Romy Golan, Modernity & Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France
between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
9 Severini's reininterpretation of nursing Renaissance Madonnas was
certainly not unique to the avant-garde. An anonymous nationalist
artist, reworked this theme for a propagandistic poster and produced a
remarkably similar work to Severini's (Figure 5).
26
historical quotations of classical sources and not nostalgic
tributes to a simpler, rural past. They were "reflection[s]
on culture."lo Even the schematized paintings of Charles-
Edouard Jeanneret and Amedee Ozenfant were not cubistic
renditions but were, instead, illustrations of the classical
order--"a modern development of the classical tradition of
ancient Greece."ll Weimar's interest in classicism--defined
here as the civilization associated with ancient Greece and
Rome--is related to a search for order that arose from the
social dislocations, the moral/political resignation and
economic collapse caused by the defeat in World War I.
Because political institutions were not deeply rooted in the
German landscape, Germans felt a particularly acute sense of
helplessness. I: Cultural critics and artists sought a unifying
order, a cultural coherence, to which the spinning Weimar
culture could anchor itself. Many chose to look to the past--
10 David Batchelor, ", This Liberty and this Order': Art in France after
the First World War." Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the
Wars, ed. Briony Fer, David Batchelor, Paul Wood (New Haven and New York:
Yale University Press, 1993), p. 12.
II Batchelor, "Art in France," p. 25. Batchelor states that the L'Esprit
Nouveau manifesto of these artists linked Raphael, Poussin, Chardin,
Ingres, Corot, Cezanne, Seurat and Rousseau with "Greek art and 'Negro'
sculpture . . . all this work drew on a deeper level of reality than was
represented in the 'superficial sensations' of Impressionism and
Naturalism. "
12 Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future, (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 29.
27
particularly to antiquity--for that anchor .13
The resurgence of interest in the classical tradition
characteristic of Weimar Germany, was spurred by the debacle
of World War I and its aftermath. In addition, the fast pace
of change in the economic and cultural landscape,
particularly the unprecedented advances in technology, appear
to have produced a time that seemed out of control to many of
its observers. Indeed, rapid industrialization--whether in
the mechanization of agricultural output or in the explosion
of new media such as film and photography--is one of the
chief features of Weimar.14
13 Indeed, many other critics, not just those living during the Weimar
Republic, have transformed and "reinvented" classical antiquity in order
to address their own concerns. Certainly, artists of the
Renaissance, including Albrecht Dtirer--who, arguably brought the
traditions of the South to the North--returned to classical sources,
particularly those of ancient Rome. In Germany, critical art historical
interest in classical Greek culture began with the publication of J.J.
Winckelmann's 1755 seminal work, Gedanken tiber die Nachamung der
griechischen Werke in der Maleren und Bildhauer-Kunst. English trans.
Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture,
trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court
Publishing Company, 1987). Greek art was characterized, for Winckelmann,
by "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur." In the early nineteenth-
century, the classical norm were filtered through a Romantic lens which
balanced passion with Winckelmann's reserve. This revised norm, as Mosse
points out, gave way by the 1940s to the monumental architecture of the
Nazis. See The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and
Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third
Reich (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 30.
14 See Detlev Peukert, Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity.
Trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). Originally
published as Die Weimarer Republik (Frankfort am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1987). He provides a useful definition of modernity: "modernity is
characterized by highly rationalized industrial production, complex
technological structures ... as far as culture is concerned, media
products dominate ... in intellectual terms, modernity marks the triumph
28
Because of all the technological changes, humanity's
relationship to nature and art was altered. To some extent,
all the "isms" of early modernity (from Impressionism, to
cubism, to verism) can be seen as efforts to grapple with the
uncertainties of humanity's evolving relationship with
technology and the changes it wrought in our interactions
with the world and with each other.
With so much uncertainty, tradition (defined as a German
culture "descended" from the Greeks and infused with distinct
Germanic traditions) was nostalgically reassuring. It
provided a starting place from which either to return to the
past or to construct a future utopia (the two end points in
Benjamin's writings). For Benjamin, the future-the "not-yet"-
was expressed in the archaic. 15 The archaic, in turn, was
preserved, albeit not explicitly, in allegorical images of
frozen, transformed nature. These images had a moral and
theological purpose. In Origin, they give a glimpse of the
origin of redemption.
In Germany in the visual arts, otto Dix appropriated the
art of such northern masters as Durer, Matthias Grunewald,
of western rationality," p. 82.
15 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 114.
29
Hans Baldung Grien and Pieter Bruegel. For example, his
images of aging women recall the themes of vanity and death
that Hans Balding Grien painted. In the Old Couple (1927,
Figure 6) Dix employed the old master method of using layers
of glazing and a meticulous brushstroke (as in Baldung's
Death and the Maiden, 1509-1511, Figure 7) .16 Such a method
was a distinct rejection of the free-formed painterly style
of Kirchner and other earlier Expressionists. Dix's War
Tryptich (1929-1932, Figure 8), to cite another example, is
rich in references to Christ's passion and martyrdom and can
be compared to Matthias GrUnewald's Isenheim Altarpiece
(1515, Figure 9). Much as GrUnewald attempted to illustrate
the heavenly redemption awaiting those who suffered dreaded
diseases such as the plague, Dix attempted to find some
"redeeming value in the destruction and carnage of the
bat tlefields . ,,17 In the center, Dix trans forms GrUnewald's
crucifixion scene into a soldier's grotesque death on an iron
bar while the sleeping soldiers in the predella appear to
recall Hans Holbein's Dead Christ (1521).
Georg Grosz also invoked the style of the classical
16 For a discussion of this painting and others by Otto Dix, see Keith
Hartley and Sarah O'Brien Twohig, Otto Dix 1891-1969 (London: The Tate
Gallery, 1996). On the Odd Couple, see Tate Gallery Catalogue, p.121.
17 Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in weimar Germany (New Haven and
30
Renaissance artists in his work.
In Funeral Procession:
Dedication to Oscar Panizza (1917-1918, Figure 10), Grosz,
though painting a futuristic canvas that depicts a fast-paced
urban life of residents and buildings which inhabit a sliding
perspectival scale, also reworked the form of the traditional
Renaissance allegory. 18 Despite the abstract styli zation, the
human figures are still evident. Grosz, in other words,
depicted a visual pandemonium that mirrored society's "moral
chaos"-a kind of visual overkill reminiscent of the works of
Hieronyrnous Bosch. 19 He transformed Bosch's and Pieter
Breugel's allegories, in an effort, as his contemporary Harry
Kessler suggested, to "achieve by pictorial means something
quite new ... something that painting achieved in earlier
periods (Hogarth; religious painting) . " ~ Grosz writes that
London, Yale University Press), p. 82
18 Grosz is frequently associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit art of
mimetic and political realism. His journalistic caricatures are allied
with the "naturalistic" clear editorial conventions of the day. However,
much of his work cannot so easily be characterized as "faithful" to
nature.
Prior to World War I, he had been associated with what is often
incorrectly termed the "subjectivist" and individualist art of
Expressionism. Even his later "realistic" works are highly suggestive of
previous artistic eras and techniques and require knowledge greater than
a simple awareness of the political issues of [the day. See Paul Wood,
"Realisms and Realities", in Briony Fer, David Batchelor and Paul Wood
Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: ALt Between the Wars, pp. 250-331
especially pp. 283-290.
19 Paul Wood, "Realisms and Reali ties," p. 285.
20 Harry Kessler, quoted in M.K. Flavell, George Grosz: A Biography, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 38. First published in Neue
31
One can certainly no longer live today as an old 'Dutch
master' . [but] one should use paper and slates to
show people the devilish mug concealed in their own
faces. . Do not fear looking back to your ancestors.
Multscher, Bosch, Bruegel. . and Altdorfer. Why
then the usual pilgrimage to the philistine French
Mecca? Why not return to our ancestors and set forth a
German
While the reuse of past visual techniques calls
attention to art--a method employed as well by artists of
other eras--the specific use of classical motifs during the
1920s was based on a distinct political Certainly
Jugend, May (1917): p. 2.
George Grosz, "Among Other Things, a Word for German Tradition", first
published as "Unter anderem ein Wort fUr die deutsche Tradition", Das
Kunstblatt 15, no. 3 (1931). Trans. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, pp.
501-502.
The term "classical" is defined very loosely. In Germany, it was
associated with a "Germanic" tradition that was believed to stretch back
to that of ancient Greece, but had through the centuries been transformed
into a distinct Northern idiom. Mosse points out that "the classical
theme reappeared continually throughout the nineteenth century and later.
. . [For example] the shield of Minerva was used to symbolize the
horrible fate which awaited enemies of the German people ... [Indeed] the
classics were always alive amidst German and
monuments of sacred flame--which recalled a long-lost heritage. . . (and
that] imitations of antiquity and of the Renaissance were used to create
a mystical German spirit," (Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses,
43-44, 58). This was particularly evident in architecture where classical
monumental forms of ancient Greece and Rome were reinterpreted by Wilhelm
Kreis in the late nineteenth century in his Bismarck towers and then by
Albert Speer during the "thousand-year Reich" of Adolph Hitler-symbols of
the power of the Reich and of its historical legitimacy through its
association with ancient Rome. (See Mosse, p. 50, where he cites
conversations he had with Speer).
Similarly, the German cult of the body of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, was "based on" the Greek ideal of beauty as
initially reinvented by Winckelrnann, then adapted by the Romantics, and
finally "aryanized" by later nationalist groups who transformed the ideal
of the healthy, beautiful body into a metaphor for the nationalist state.
As one Weimar ideologue wrote: "Body culture, gymnastics, physical
exercise and hygiene, sport in all its incarnations such as those played
32
many Weimar artists, historians and writers shared an
interest in classical which often bordered on the
sentimental and nostalgic, a trait they shared with artists
of the Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, others employed the culture of antiquity to
further a nationalist agenda. Classical art and its
association with civilization were metaphorically equated
with the country of origin while the non-classic was decried
as foreign or ubarbaric" (which in France, of course, meant
German) .!3
Nevertheless, Weimar's adaptation of the classic relates
to a search for an order that could control the chaos wrought
in the nude ... are a few of the descriptive names for the new
phenomenon ... The materialism and rationalism of the nineteenth century
have finally been vanquished. In all realms and walks of life, blood, new
impulses, and intuition are rising up once more against mere reason,
will, and the intellect." (Wolfgang Graeser, "Body Sense: Gymnastics,
Dance, Sport," first published in KOrpersinn: Gymnastik, Tanz, Sport
[Munich: C.H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1927, pp. 7-11], Reprinted
Weimar Sourcebook, pp. 683-685). Also see van der Wille, "The Body and
the Body Politic." He points out that the main journal of the nudity
cult was titled Die Schonheit, which by the 1920s promoted a "Greek
spirit in a German manner but as one member of the cult from the
Weimar period r.oted, 'They soon fell for ideas of eugenics and racial
hygiene: [for] the blue-eyed blond young lady with her soul full of
longing,'" (pp. 29-30).
!3 See Silver, Esprit de Corps, pp. 83-145, for a discussion of French
nationalism and attitudes toward the Germans during and after World War
I. He quotes the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who, speaking in 1917
exclaimed: "Here's what I think: we will do well to abandon all the
chimeras coming from a sick mind and return to the true ancient
tradition, old as the centuries, instead of making things without value.
For a while now, the cities of Europe have been ravaged by chese
barbarians. We don't need German influence, but rather that of our most
beautiful classic traditions," (pp. 100-101). Originally in La
Renaissance, 5, no. 19 (September 15, 1917): pp. 17-18.
33
by technological changes and the social and economic
displacements occurring after the First World War. In part,
it represents an effort to slow down the rate of change and
come to terms with it. Dix's methodical technique and Grosz's
"realistic" allegories are efforts that painstakingly
highlight the process of making and viewing art--a process
that had been "speeded up" by artists from the Impressionists
to the Italian Futurists who sought to capture the changing,
fleeting impressions of nature.
According to Edmond Violier, a French art critic of the
1920s, the classical method, which is a "conception which
tends with all its young energies toward a liberation from
the transitory and the exceptional--that is, from all
individualism--necessarily implies a universality of number
and duration ... [and is] define[d] as 'classical,' as opposed
to the direct technique".:4 In Germany, artists such as Max
Beckmann expressed a wish to rid art of the supposed
"mysticism" and individuality of the earlier art of the
Expressionists.
Emerging from a thoughtless imitation of the visible,
from a feeble, archaic deterioration into empty
decoration, and from a false and sentimental, timorous
:4 Edmond Violier, "Toward the Classical Order--Classical Technique,"
Bulletin de l'Effort Moderne 10 (January 1924): p. 15. Quoted in Silver,
p. 271.
34
mysticism, we are hopefully arriving at a transcendental
objectivity . .. as is evident in ... Grunewald and
Bruegel.
:::s
The imposition of an identifiable, "objective" and
organized method allowed the image to serve a didactic
function. Unlike Impressionism's transitory, naturalistic
images, which operate as transparent windows onto a fleeting
moment of reality, artists of the twenties often sought to
impart an ideological message in their paintings. The
allegorical cartoons of Grosz or Heartfield, for example, are
moral instructors. Although Heartfield's Deutsche
Naturgeschichte (Figure 11) combines pictorial and textual
language reminiscent of the emblems of the past, ~ 6 it also
functions as a contemporary political editorial. In his
commentary, Heartfield points out that the work has three
meanings: one related to the actual scientific process of the
metamorphoses of insects, a second to the equation of
progress with history (vis-a-vis the metaphorical association
of evolutionary science with history) and a third to a rather
wry political commentary on the "biological" and inevitable
:::s Max Beckmann, "Creative Credo." First published in Tribune der Zeit und
Kunst. Eine Schriften-Sammlung, ed. Kasimir Edschmid, vol. 13,
Schopferische Konfession (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1920), pp. 61-67.
Reprinted and trans. In Weimar Republic Sourcebook, pp. 487-489. Quote,
p. 489.
~ 6 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 60.
35
transformation of man into nature (despite humanity's best
efforts to civilize itself). Buck-Morss notes that the latter
specifically refers to the myth of historical progress, in
particular to the political "progression" of Germany from
democracy to National Socialism.:
7
Heartfield's questioning of the association of history
with progress (a concept born during the Enlightenment) is
also at the core of Benjamin's and Panofsky's early cultural
studies. Similarly, their interest in classical history, or
Benjamin's study of traditional allegory, is part of the
general cultural resurgence of interest in the "classical"
highpoints of a shared past. Certainly, the reinterpretation
of Antiquity during the Renaissance and the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment were important influences in Weimar's
own characterization of their golden classical age. As noted
earlier, history provided solutions for a present spinning
out of control. But, in particular, history provided the
heroes that the vanquished Germans of World War I sought.
Nietzsche as Cultural Hero
During Weimar Germany, difficult historical truths, such
:7 Buck-Morss, Dialectics, pp. 60-62.
36
as the defeat in World War I, were sanitized and mythologized
into simple explanations and encoded into and mapped onto
visual symbols that revamped past ambiguities. Richard
Bessel regards the image of the heroic soldier as one such
myth. "Our boys at the front" did not lose the war, so the
story goes, but were defeated by the cowardice of those at
home.::1! Bessel points out that, by the end of the war, the
soldiers had engaged in strikes against their commanding
officers and abandoned many of their military units. It was
necessary to create an image of the conquering hero in the
face of obvious defeat.
The contrast between the horrific conditions on the
battlefront and the somewhat insulated lives of the people at
home in the Reich was replayed as the reason for the loss,
allowing the soldiers to escape all blame for the defeat. It
was easier to accept the myth of the heroic soldier than to
confront the inconsistencies of reality. This may seem
extraordinary given that, as Bessel notes, a significant
number of "the heroes failed to show up.":.9 The propaganda
about the war was at odds with reality--the reality of a
::1! Richard Bessel, Germany, After the First World War (Oxford, England:
Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 263.
:.9 Richard Bessel, "The Great War in German Memory, the Soldiers of the
First World War, Demobilization, and Weimar Political Culture," German
37
disordered society, disconnected from its standardized but
ordered and traditional Imperial past. In the popular
cultural discourse, Germany had not really lost the war but
"something
Nietzchean concepts were invoked to supply the verbal
rhetoric to support the myth of a vital, triumphant Germany. 31
Nietzsche was transformed from his position as a supporter of
the individual who fought societal norms to one who supported
the status quo. One conservative nationalist claimed that
"Nietzsche stands as questioner, as fighter, as the solitary
one. He stands for the Reich as protector of the past, as
crusher of the present, as transformer of the The
philosopher supplied a vocabulary to encompass a variety of
ideologies, allowing Nazis, anti-Semites and radical
conservatives to dehumanize their opponents with the
appellation Untermenschen.
History 6 no. 1 (1988): pp. 20-34.
ro See Stephen Aschheirn, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1900
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) particularly Chapter V
"Zarathustra in the Trenches: The Nietzsche Myth, World War I, and the
Weimar Republic," pp. 128-163.
31 Nietzschean rhetoric has primarily been associated with the fascists
and right wing nationalists in Germany. Nietzsche, however, was
influential for the left, the avant-garde and German Jews. Nietzsche's
influence on Panofsky's and Walter Benjamin's Weimar writings will be
discussed in Chapter 3 and on the later writings of Panofsky and those of
Thomas Mann in Chapter 4.
3: Friedrich Hielscher, Oas Reich (Berlin: Oas Reich, 1931), p. 200.
Quoted in Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, p. 153.
38
Prior to 1914, Erwin Piscator, the producer of
experimental theater, commented that Nietzsche was the
"scourge of the middle classes." However, he helped to lift
them from their "petit bourgeois ideals." During World War I
this changed:
the entire intellectual elite of Europe rose as one man
in the defense of their "Cherished Heritage" which they
had till then viewed with some skepticism. . They
rose against 'enemies' like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and
Pushkin and Zola and Balzac and Anatole France and Shaw
and Shakespeare, and went to war with Goethe and
Nietzsche in their knapsacks. And so this generation
set the seal on its own spiritual bankruptcy. Whatever
they may have thought and whatever they may have done it
became evident on August fourth that all they had
thought and done was nothing."
Those whom Nietzsche had originally criticized
transformed his ideas into a heroic paradigm that could
inspire German society to throw off the weak yoke of the
loser. Nietzsche's Zarathustra, which was carried into the
battlefield by literate Germans, became the new model for
German nationalism--a nationalism that is evident ill the
writings of both the right and left. Utilized along with
other national icons (such as Durer's Knight, Death and
Devil, Figure 12), Nietzscheanisms gave impetus to the
33 Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre: A History, 1914-1929 (New York:
Avon, 1978), p. 11. Originally published as Oas Politische
Theater. (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1963).
39
formation of the myth of the vital and victorious German.
Unfortunately, the misappropriation of Nietzsche's ideas
by the fascist right has often obscured his interest in and
connection with liberal Enlightenment thought. Hitler's
transformation of the Ubermensch into the racialized blond
Aryan is well known. But Nietzsche's heroic individual
struggling against conformity also widely influenced numerous
"left-wing" and "anti-rational" Expressionist artists and
critics.
34
They found his championship of the individual's
potential for "self-creation"--coupled with his disdain for
materialism--to be particularly enticing. These artists were
responding, in part, to the failed 1848 revolution and the
idealists' claim that the state was the rational supporter of
individual freedom." Ultimately, many of these Expressionist
artists rejected Nietzschean individualism for Dadaism,
socialism or other movements that emphasized the collective.
According to Seth Taylor, Nietzsche's well-known
34 See Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheansi The Politics of German
Expressionism 1910-1920 (Berlin and New York, Walter Gruyter Press,
1990), pp. 1-59. "While it is true that Nietzsche assumed conservative
positions hostile to liberalism, he did so at a time when German
liberalism had betrayed its cosmopolitan origins and embraced
and imperialism. In other words, Nietzsche's antipolitics stood against
the developments in German history which reached their culmination in
fascism," p. 2.
3S See also Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the
Political Culture of Modern Germany (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 11-12.
40
irrationalism was "too rational" for the Expressionists
because his writings were actually the "climax of the
skeptical Enlightenment tradition.,,36 Nietzsche states
"that I am a pupil of earlier times, especially the Hellenic.
. I do not know what meaning classical studies could have
for our time if they were not untimely--that is to say,
acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time
and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.,,3' He
points to Goethe, as a "genuine" cultured individual, and
quotes from one of his letters: "'I have toiled for half a
century and allowed myself no rest, but have continually
striven and sought and worked as well and as hard as I
Perhaps it was this kernel of rational thought that
attracted many of those schooled in German idealist theory.
The late-nineteenth-century Neo-Kantians' emphasis on the
morally driven individual, their rejection of economic
materialism and their elevation of individual consciousness
in the historical process are related to Nietzsche's ideas.
39
36 Taylor, Left Wing Nietzscheans, p. 228.
37 Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for
Life", Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983) p. 60.
lS Nietzsche, "David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer", Untimely
Meditations, p. 9. He cites a letter to Goethe from Eckermann, March 14,
1830.
39 See Thomas Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German
41
Jakob Burckhardt's contention that the Renaissance "gave the
highest development to individuality, and where one of the
most precious fruits of the knowledge of the world and of man
here comes to maturity" is in keeping with these Nietzschean
sentiments.-IO
Although Dadaists rejected Nietzsche's heroic
individualism, the philosopher's writings remained
influential for them and for a variety of others, 4\ including
German Jews such as Aby Warburg, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin
Buber, Walter Benjamin, and as I will show, Erwin Panofsky.
For Aby Warburg, Nietszche's definition of creativity as a
force that emerges from primitive Dionysian pathos and
Apollonian serenity was particularly influential.
4
; Although
Social and Historical Thought, 1860-1914 (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1978) for a discussion of the neo-Kantian movement and in
particular his discussion of Hermann Cohen (pp. 105-116) and Ernst
Cassirer (pp. 171-173).
-10 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Vol. 2,
(New York: Harper & Row, 1929), pp. 303, 516.
4\ Nietzsche, "David Strauss", p. 5. Although Nietsche wrote that
"knowledge and learning is neither an essential means to culture nor a
sign of it" is not in keeping with the neo-Kantian view.
42
Margaret Iversen, ["Retrieving Warburg's Tradition", Art History, 16,
no. 4 (December 1993): p. 551] points out that Warburg owned a well-worn
and used copy of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy that is still in evidence
at the Warburg Institute today. Concerning Walter Benjamin, there is a
vast literature on the Nietzschean influence in his writings. See anyone
of the books listed in Benjamin (secondary literature) in the
bibliography.
For Nietzsche's influence on right-wing writers, see Fritz Stern, The
Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic IdeolO9Y
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961). For Nietzsche's
influence on the left, see Seth Taylor's Left-Wing Nietzscheans, passim.
42
the dark forces of Dionysius never disappeared, Warburg
fervently sought to contain them. Nietzsche, though enamored
of the Dionysian, wished "to organize the chaos
H
of the
Hellenic Greeks and transform these "dark" forces into
something "higher" so the Germans could become "the first-
born and [the 1 model [for 1. .. future cui tured nations. ,,13
To Warburg, as we shall see, the Renaissance artist and
humanist Albrecht DUrer, represented Nietzsche's heroic model
who could overcome--or at least keep at bay--the dark
Dionysian forces that, for Warburg, inhabited all men.
Durer as Hero and Symbol
During the early nineteenth century, Durer was perceived
as the exemplar of the lone artistic genius struggling
against all odds to create works of subjective genius.
44
By
the early twentieth century, he was deployed to support the
myth of the undefeated hero. The National Socialists, for
example, transformed Durer's ascetic Christian knight from
the Knight, Death, and the Devil into a teutonic soldier.
They associated him with the qualities of individuality,
43 Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," p. 123.
~ See Jan Bialostocki DUrer and His Critics. 1500-1971: Chapters in the
History of Ideas Including the Texts. (Baden Baden: V. Koerner, 1986) for
43
courage, fortitude, and, significantly, with a virile
masculinity--qualities necessary to lead the Germanic race
away from the bourgeois ineffectuality of Weimar. Prior to
the latter transformation, Durer's art was to undergo a
series of incarnations.
During the Kaiserreich of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, sculptural likenesses of the artist
could be found on the facades of many museums and schools.
45
His image decorated posters and invitations and stood as the
centerpiece at the German pavilion at the Chicago World
Exhibition in 1893. His life, in fact, served as the
inspiration for a variety of cultural organizations,
particularly that of Friedrich Avenarius's influential
Dlirerbund
The Dlirerbund, as an organization, sought to suggest
a useful analysis of the afterlife and reception of the art of Durer.
45 For a concise discussion of the after life of Albrecht Durer, see Jane
Hutchinson's Albrecht Durer, A Biography (Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990). Hutchinson remarks that Durer was the first
artist to be honored by having a monument dedicated to him in 1847, (p.
197) .
For an especially insightful account of Avenarius Durerbund and its
publication Kunstwart see Gerhard Kratzsch Kunstwart und Durerbund: Ein
Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus
(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969). Although labelled as
bourgeois vehicle for the promotion of a "healthy" culture, the Kunstwart
provided a forum for a number of political views ranging from the anti-
Semitic views of Nissen, Langbehn and Bartels to those of German Jews who
questioned what it means to be Jewish. Issues surrounding Jewish
identity were raised in a number of issues in the Kunstwart.
44
proper standards of taste in decorating, the arts and even in
everyday manners. DUrer was domesticated, so to speak. His
life and art were promoted as the arbiter of the culturally
appropriate. Reproductions of his animal drawings and some of
his watercolors were widely circulated and became ptililic
favorites.
47
Although the DUrerbund was primarily a cultural
censorship vehicle and disseminator of standards rather than
an educational organization, prominent art historians such as
Heinrich Wolfflin and Willhelm Pinder (who later supported
the Nazi regime) as well as the German Jewish painter Max
Lieberman were members. Its influence was so pervasive that
despite a decline in membership after World War I and a
cessation of its activities during the 1920s, the standards
it had set continued to influence German society.
In the journal of the DUrerbund, Der Kunstwart,
Avenarius published a wide variety of opinions ranging from
the relevance of Kant for contemporary culture to proposals
for the establishment of a "healthy" German culture. The
latter proved, of course, to be particularly insidious in the
hands of racial nationalists. In an early issue of Der
Kunstwart, Mornme Nissen, an ardent conservative and
nationalist who decried the new French art as anti-German,
n See Hutchinson, DUrer, p. 199.
45
appealed to viewers to look to the Renaissance for German
cultural standards. Like modernists such as Julius Meier-
Graefe, he stressed the unhealthiness of the art he viewed as
decadent. In "DUrer als Fuhrer," he claimed that "Di.irer
leads us from decadent feminism to a healthy manly art. He
works cleanly. ,,48
Support for DUrer as an exemplar of German culture was
not confined to the conservative bourgeoisie. Julius Meier-
Graefe, the supporter of foreign artists such as Cezanne and
Munch, followed Avenarius' lead in looking to DUrer for
historical justification. In his survey of nineteenth-century
German art,49 Meier-Graefe challenged German artists to both
aspire to and surpass the example set by the past
4 ~ o m r n e Nissen, "DUrer als FUhrer", in Der Kunstwart 15 (1904): p. 94.
DUrer leads us "von dekandente Feminismus zu gesunder Mannlichkeit der
kunst ... er arbeitete sauberlich".
Different cultural groups, not only racist nationalists, employed
biological/organic justifications for their particular viewpoint. In the
June 1920 issue of Martin Buber's Der Jude, Axnold Zwieg calls on Jews to
recognize the specific nature of anti-Semitism and the difficulties and
unfairness it has visited upon them. He points out that anti-Semitism is
international in character, that its opponents are "extensions of the
devil" (die gepanzerte Faust"), and that it is biological in nature; "We
finally recognize anti-Semitism as a biological phenomenon, as one which
affects each person differently. . . we are searching for the root, which
must obviously lie in the true nature of the 'people' (Volkern)". Arnold
Zweig, "Der heutige deutsche Antisemitismus', in Der Jude, 3, June 1920,
p. 139. "Erkennen wir endlich den Antisemitism als biologisches
Phanonmen, . . . suchen wir seine Wurzel auf, die selbstverstandlich
unterhalb der eigentlich von 'Volkern' erfUllten Sphare 1iegen muss."
49 J. Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart:
Julius Hoffmann, 1904). Trans. as Modern Axt: Being a Contribution to a
New System of Aesthetics (London: W. Heinemann, 1908).
46
cosmopolitan master: "Since DUrer there has been no German
painter and even in its golden age, the essential in German
art was almost always more draftsmanship than of a painterly
kind. . the German is a musician , a poet, he is always
less as a painter. . German art has never left the Gothic
Meier Graefe was in effect calling for German
artists to enter the international pantheon of great artists
by appealing to nationalist sympathies. He sought to inspire
them to "leave the Gothic behind," with "gothic" meant
pejoratively, in order to elevate German culture to
international acclaim as the modern artists' Renaissance
forbears had done.
According to Meier-Graefe, the artistic models that
German painters should follow, if they are to cast off the
yoke of mere "draftsmanship," were the great French
Impressionists and post-Impressionists such as Cezanne. To
make this more palatable to a nation that had in recent
memory been enemies of the French, Meier-Graefe wrapped his
exhortation in historical and nationalist sentiment. The
French artists were not "foreign" but were part of an
Cited in Peter Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siecle Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 244. Jensen states
that "How ironic it was that the apologists for the newest avant-gardes
so frequently marshaled nationalist rhetoric on behalf of artists whose
stature and livelihood depended upon their international commercial
47
international pantheon of great artists without national
allegiance. Meier-Graefe linked "foreign" modernists with
Durer and hoped to establish the history of a universal but
rarified cosmopolitan avant-garde, an aesthetically
adventurous culture of genius that transcended the bounds of
the political nation with a new cultural "nation." The
concern for the label "foreign" was certainly not misplaced.
A strange "paradox" of this era is that the German
Expressionists, who rejected contemporary French artistic
influences and looked to the German masters Grunewald and
Cranach for their inspiration, were unable to change the
public perception that German modern art was a distinctly
Franco-Jewish import. 51
The Expressionist artists cited their precursors in the
German "Gothic" period as influential rather than
contemporary French artists
5
: because the apparent subj ecti ve,
anti-classical sensibilities of Grunewald's Isenheim Altar
(Figure 9) or Durer's Apocalypse (1497/98, Figure 13) were
more in keeping with a contemporary German feeling. Kirchner,
connections," (p. 262).
51 See Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November
Revolution in Germany 1918-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990) .
5 ~
~ See Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: University of
California Press: Berkeley, 1974), p. 16.
48
for example denied that the Cubists of France or the
Futurists in Italy exerted any influence on Die Brucke and
instead found its "art historical corroboration in Cranach,
Beham, and other medieval German masters" such as Albrecht
DUrer. 53 The Renaissance master similarly inspired other
Expressionists and Neue Sachlichkeit artists. Paula
M6dersohn Becker had "great admiration" for DUrer, while
Erich Heckel looked to Hans Holbein, Lucas Cranach, and DUrer
for
Although Durer as a Renaissance artist was very much
inspired by the Italian painters and humanists, the German
Expressionists and avant-garde focused on how he differed
from his southern contemporaries. This reconstruction of a
past northern golden age served the useful political purpose
of allowing the avant-garde to locate their art within a
German national framework and the larger cultural discourse
circulating during the first third of the twentieth century.
It was a nod to tradition, to the collective memory of shared
experiences used to define identity.
Despite the avant-garde's claim that they had rejected
the Renaissance in favor of the Middle Ages, the influential
" Quoted in Peter Selz, "E.L. Kirchner 'Chronik der Brucke'," College Art
Journal X (1950): p. 50.
49
artists cited by them are still considered "classical."
Insofar as traditional texts in art history are concerned,
Durer is thought of as a titan of sixteenth-century humanist-
inspired "classical" art. In rejecting Raphael and the
artists who had entered the larger artistic/cultural dialogue
as standard bearers of a cosmopolitan golden age, the
Expressionists appeared to be searching for their own past-
for links to a German historical high point. The artists
they cited--Grunewald, Durer, Cranach, and Holbein--were
artists directly linked to this "golden" past.
Durer's imagery had consistently remained in the public
arena since the sixteenth-century and had achieved legendary,
symbolic status long before the early twentieth-century. 55
Indeed, the artist had become a symbol of German identity, a
figure whose reach extended well beyond the historical
context in which he During the 1920s, he was no
longer the arbiter of Renaissance rationale and reason but
Seltz, German Expressionist Painting, p. 16.
55
See Bialostocki, Durer, or Hutchinson, Albrecht Durer (pp. 187-206),
for their afterlife of Durer.
This is not a phenomenon associated only with Germany. As Romy Golan
has pointed out, even such French modernists as Leger and LeCorbusier who
have been associated with technology and the "pure" lines of modernism,
rejected the "machine" in favor of the more organic world associated with
the traditional and long-standing culture of the peasants. This seems to
be a rejection of the present or at least an attempt to redefine it
according a traditional past, Modernity & Nostalgia, pp. 61-84.
50
became instead the embodiment of a mythic, medieval and
distinct German sensibility. Artists such ~ s Otto Dix, like
the pre-war Expressionists, looked to him for artistic
inspiration. Dix claimed that his woodcuts were directly
inspired by those of Durer. Max Sauerlandt, a modernist
advocate and art historian who resided in Hamburg, wrote that
"In those years [the 1920s] arose the new, hard heroic
beauty, a beauty of truly tragic bearing, which had grown
strange to European painting since the heroic end of the
Middle Ages in GrUnewald and in DUrer's Apocalypse. , , 5 ~
During the four-hundredth anniversary of Durer's death,
in 1928, the Nuremberg town counsel organized an exhibition
to detail the artist's life, his teachers and the "popular
national culture so that visitors to Nuremberg as well as its
inhabitants may finally have a correct impression of its
medieval popular culture." ~ These DUrer festivities were
primarily an occasion to celebrate the historical culture of
Nuremberg as seen in the recreations of traditional folk
57 Max Sauerlandt Die Kunst der 1etzten dreissig Jahre, lecture delivered
in 1933 (Hamburg, 1948), p. 117. Quoted in Selz, German Expressionist
Painting, p. 16.
58 Stadtrat Nuremberg, Bericht tiber die Veranstaltungen und den Verlauf
des Dtirerjahres, 1928 (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtrats, 1928) p. 2
"Weiterer Ausste1lungen sollten einen Einb1ick in die Lebensverhaltnisse
des Mittela1ters gewahren. Vo1ksturnliche Veranstaltungen schliesslich
waren dazu bestimmt, den Besuchern Nurnbergs wie der Bevo1kerung der
stadt einen Eindruck von der mitte1a1ter1ichen Vo1ksku1tur zu
51
dances on the main square.
DUrer's art and life, since his death in the sixteenth
century, have been continuously in the scholarly as well as
the public eye. Matthias Mende, in 1971, cites over 10,000
articles and books in print on the artist and his work with
over 2000 entries alone about DUrer's Melencolia I. S9 These
include references from the sixteenth right through the
twentieth centuries. In the middle to late nineteenth
century, Durer had been associated with the artist/scientist
who pursues his art according to the rules of reason. Max
Allihn writes in 1871 that DUrer shows an "inclination for
theoretical research about proportion, perspective, and the
laws of aesthetics. Beneath the artist is a philosopher.
uoo
By the end of the nineteenth century, this belief In
reason and human progress gradually gave way to a concern
with subjectivity, irrationality and the veracity of
scientific progress. For example, Albert Schweitzer pointed
out the self-deceiving flaws in historical analysis in his
vermitteln."
S9
Matthias Mende, DUrer-Bibliography: Zur Ftinfhundertsten Wiederkehr
des Geburtstages von Albrecht DUrer (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1971).
00 Max Allihn, DUrer-Studien. Versuch einer Erklarung schwer zu deutender
Kupferstiche: DUrers von kulturhistorischern Standpunkte (Leipzig: R.
Wiegel, 1871), p. 112.
52
1906 The Quest for the Historical Jesus, while a decade
later, in one of Germany's most popular theological works,
The Idea of the Holy (1917), Rudolph Otto summarized the non-
rational elements in Luther's theology. 61 At the tenth
convention of the German Philosophical Society in Leipzig in
1928 the official summary noted that "The discussions in
Leipzig and their aftereffects revolved in large part around
the problem of the irrational. ,,6:
Those who interpreted the work of Durer were not immune
from these influences. An interest in the non-rational,
either as seen through a Nietzschean lens (as Faust or
Dionysius) or through a fantastical prism, was characteristic
of many of the works of Durer's interpreters. Moritz
Thausing, in his popular Durer monograph of 1876, proclaimed
that Durer's figure of Melancolia I shows that "human reason
despairs while at the edge of its power. It is the restless,
unliberated genius, Faust [who says] 'we can know
61 Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany,
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 42.
Felix, Krueger, ed. Philosophie der Gemeinschaft: 7 Vortrage, gehalten
auf der Tagung der Deutschen Philosophen Gesellschaft vom 1.-4. Oktober
1928 in Leipzig (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1922), p. 155. Cited and trans. in
Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture, p. 42.
63 Moritz Thausing, DUrer Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Kunst
(Leipzig: E.A. Saman, 1884), p. 450. "die menschliche Vernunft
verzweifelnd am Rande ihrer Kraft! Es ist der rastlos unbefriedigte
Genius, der Faust ... 'dass wir nichts wissen konnen'."
53
Nietzsche himself had chosen one of Durer's prints as a
visual symbol of the dearth of reason. He regarded the knight
of the artist's Knight, Death and Devil as an exemplar of the
inevitably futile struggle of the German h e r o . ~ In fact, the
death of reason was associated with a Faustian pessimism that
had become transformed into the German individual character,
a character drawn from Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Aby Warburg, the founder of the Warburg Library in
Hamburg, was influenced by Nietzsche's depiction of classical
Greek culture as one that emerged from the tense balance
between the Dionysian (primitive/subjective) and the
Apollonian (rational/clarity) .65 In 1905, in an analysis of
Durer's Death of Orpheus, he wrote of Durer's tenacity in
defining a theory of proportion:
But antiquity came to his aid through Italian mediation
not only in the stimulating Dionysian aspects but also
through Apollonian clarity: The Apollo Belvedere always
hovered before his eyes as he searched for the ideal
proportions of the manly body, and regarding Vitruvian
proportions, he compared them with actual nature. Durer
brooded with a faustian, ever-increasing intensity over
~ See Bialostocki, DUrer, pp. 256-278.
65 On Warburg see Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography
(London: The Warburg Institute, 1970); Dieter Wuttke,"Aby Warburg und
seine Bibliothek," Arcadia 1 (1966): pp. 319-333; Werner Hofmann, Georg
Syaroken and Martin Warnke, Die Menschenrechte des Auges. Ober Aby M.
Warburg (Frankfurt am Main, Europaischer Verlagsanstalt, 1980); Horst
Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass eds., Aby Warburg.
Akten des internationalen Symposiums Hamburg 1990 (Weinheim: VCH Acta
Humaniora, 1991).
54
the problem of proportions throughout his
For Warburg, the Dionysian, primitive pathos was not
conquered by Apollonian classic grandeur. Rather, the two
qualities existed side by side. In a later essay he noted
that "As modern religious studies have shown, the tragic,
classic restlessness belongs to the culture of Greek-Roman
antiquity, as it is embodied in the 'Doppelherme' of Apollo-
Dionysos . ,,67
Although Warburg subscribed to German idealist notions
of human progress, such progress was not inevitable. The
reverse of enlightened reason was the dark side of Dionysian
primitivism, to which mankind could easily But
despite this fear, or because of it, throughout his life
Warburg studied humanity's dark, irrational tendency in its
Warburg, "Tod des Orpheus," (1905) "Aber das Altertum kam ihm ja auch
durch Italiens Vermittelung nicht nur dionysisch anstachelnd, sondern
auch apollinisch abklarend zu Hilfe: Der Apollo von Belvedere schwebte
ihm vor Augen, also er nach dem Idealmass des mannlichen Korpers suchte,
and Vitruvius Proportionen verglich er die wirkliche Natur. Dieses
faustische Grubeln tiber das Mass hat Durer mit steigender Intensitat zeit
seines Lebens in Bann gehalten." (Gesammelte Schriften, Leipzig and
Berlin: B.G. Ttibner, 1932), p. 58
67 Aby Warburg, "Der Eintritt des Antikisierenden Idealstils in die
Malerei der Friihrenaissance" (1914) In Gesammelte Schriften, p. 176. "Die
tragische 'klassische Unruhe' gehore, wie ja auch die moderne
religionswissenschaftliche Forschung beweise, wesentlich zur kultur des
griechisch-romischen Altertums, das man gleichsam im Symbol einer
'Doppelherme von Apollo-Dionysos' schauen musse."
See Michael Diers, "Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural
History" in New German Critique 65 (Spring/Summer 1995): pp. 59-74, esp.
66-68.
55
guise as the mystical or astrological (not unlike the pre-War
Expressionists). Thus he would warn in "A Lecture on Serpent
Ritual" that "With these waves the civilization of the
mechanical age is destroying what natural science, itself
emerging out of myth, had won with such effort. ,,69 Emil
Waldman, writing during World War I, echoed these sentiments.
Sadly, he concluded that "Perhaps it is in our time. . such
that the connection between the sensual [Dionysian] and the
intellectual [Apollonian] is no longer possible, because we
are hopeless--torn apart by the tumultuous, rapids of our
thoughts. In Durer's case [however], this was still possible.
" "'0
For Aby Warburg, in the end there was hope that,
through man's rational exercise of conscience, the warring
tendencies might be overcome.
By the time of Weimar, the Faustian individual
struggling against the status quo had been appropriated and
transformed into a symbol of the nation--and at times tinged
with nationalist or racial overtones. It is remarkable that
even so enlightened a man as Gustav Pauli, the director of
69 J!iliy Warburg, "A Lecture on Serpent Ritual, Journal of the Warburg
Insitute 2 (1939): p. 289.
70 Emil Waldmann, Albrecht Durers Stiche und Holzschnitte (Leipzig; Im
Insel Verlag, 1917), p. 10. "Vielleicht ist unserm Zeitalter ... diese
Zusammenfassung von Sinnlichem und von Gedanklichem nicht mehr m6glich,
weil wir damit hoffnungslos in die reizenden Stromschnellen der
Gedankenkunst hineingerissen Wtirden. Bei Durer war sie noch m6glich."
56
the Hamburg Kunsthalle and a pupil of Anton Springer and
friend of warburg and Panofsky71 could write:
It would not be difficult to prove, in any of the works
of the mature DUrer, the permeation of Germanic with
Roman [Classic] form. .In any case, it is essential
to recognize that in Durer the Germanic element retains
the upperhand-despite all theorizing. The unconscious
will of the Race is stronger than the conscious striving
of the Intellect. lin
To readers of the late twentieth century, this statement
seems astonishing, given Germany's later history.
Nevertheless, it is in keeping with the cultural discourse of
the time.
In a view similar to Warburg's, Max J. Friedlander
suggests that the existence of a balance between "reason" and
"melancholy" appears to be the key to understanding DUrer's
Melencholia I.
Then again, especially as he was making the print of
Melencolia, his very soul was darkened by doubt. .he
71 Karen Michels notes that Panofsky received his appointment at Hamburg
largely through the efforts of Gustav Pauli. See Michels, "EThTin Panofsky
und das Kunsthistorische seminar, in Arno Herzig, ed. Die Juden in
Hamburg bis 1990: Wissenschaftliche Beitrage der Universitat Hamburg zur
Ausstellung 'Vierhundert Jahre Juden in Hamburg' (Hamburg: Hans
Christians Verlag, 1991), pp. 383-392.
71 Gustav Pauli, "Durer, Italien und die Antike", Vortrage der Bibliothek
Warburg, I, 1921-1922 (Berlin/Leipzig, 1923), pp. 66-67. "Es ware nicht
schwer, an irgendeinem der Werke des reifen DUrer die Durchdringung
germanischer Formgebung mit romanischer nachzuweisen. . . Als wesentlich
ist jedenfalls anzuerkennen, dass in Durer das germanische Element die
Oberhand behalt--trotz aller Theorie. Denn der unbewusste Wille der
Rasse ist starker als die bewusste Absicht des intellektes."
57
longed to hold to the simple belief that through divine
manifestation, clearness and light is possible. . The
sentence, in which the concepts of reason and of
melancholy are so extraordinarily bound together,
affords us the key [to the engraving's meaning]. '3
But Friedlander's words do not imply balance. Forebodingly,
they hint at the darker forces of "unreason" soon to
overwhelm those of light and reason.
The increasing importance of nationalism can be followed
in the successive editions of Heinrich W6lfflin's preface to
his very popular and often-quoted book, The Art of Albrecht
DUrer, first published in 1905. Although W6lfflin was of
Swiss origin, he taught at the German universities in Berlin
and Munich and was perceived as "representative" of German
public opinion."4 In these editions, W6lfflin reconciled the
importance of Italy and classical antiquity for DUrer with
the essential Germanness of DUrer's art."S This problem of the
North versus South in DUrer, however, was couched in a
different rhetoric in each of his editions culminating in the
73 Max J. Friedlander, Albrecht Durer (Leipzig: 1m 1nsel Verlag, 1921), p.
148 "Dann wieder, und besonders damals, als er den Stich der Melancholie
ausfuhrte, wurde seine Seele von Zweifeln verdunkelt. . . mag er
sehnsuchtig der schlichten Glaubigkeit gedacht haben, vor der aus
gottlicher Offenbarung alles licht und klar liegt. . . Der Satz, in dem
die Begriffe Vernunft und Melancholie so wunderlich eng miteinander
verbunden vorkommen, gibt den Schlussel."
74
See Bialostocki, Durer, pp. 309-313.
7S
Bialostocki, Durer, p. 309.
58
1920 version of his DUrer monograph.
In the preface to the first edition, Wolfflin attempted
to replace the DUrer of the Romantics, the artist who labored
long and lovingly in his father's house, with the
cosmopolitan German who traveled beyond his native land:
We like to call DUrer the most German of German artists
.sitting in his house at the Tiergartner Gate in
Nuremberg, sedately working away as his fathers had done
[But] He was responsible for. the break with
tradition in German art and the domination by Italian
models ... Ultimately he found the balance between his
own and foreign characteristics, but at what cost to his
own strength. 76
In the third edition to his book (1910), Wolfflin defended
the Germanness of DUrer against what he perceived as the
Expressionists' unwarranted attacks on DUrer the classicist
and adapter of Italian Renaissance art:
A fundamental change has recently taken place in our
views about the essential nature of German culture ..
On the one side there is Cranach, GrUnewald, and . . .
on the other ... DUrer the classic.. [perceived as]
the antithesis of those Expressionist tendencies ...
[always] present in German art ... Yet it would be a
mistake to see in DUrer nothing but a contrasting
principle ... For obviously there remains a fundamental
difference between the psychological state of mind of a
GrUnewald and of a DUrer. But if we view the history of
German art in perspective, we shall gladly admit that
what we call DUrer's circumspection, his need for
76 Heinrich Wolfflin, Die Kunst Albrecht Durers, first published 1905,
many other editions, fourth edition, 1920. Translated as The Art of
Albrecht Durer (London, 1971). Citation: Introduction to the 1st edition,
quoted from the 4th edition, Munich 1920, p. VII; English: 1971, p. 10.
59
complete representation, for restraint and order, is by
no means something that is foreign to German culture.
A decade later, Wolfflin appeared far more defensive in
his critique of DUrer's adaptation of Italian classicism. He
seemed to answer charges such as those made by Oskar Hagen,'
the reviewer of the third edition of the DUrer monograph, who
stated that Wolfflin placed too much emphasis on the Italian
influence in DUrer's art. In his response to Hagen, Wolfflin
stated that:
We are inclined to regard DUrer's wooing of Italian art
as something almost improper, something that ... went
against the natural course of development. . Is it a
cause for regret that DUrer stepped outside the narrow
confines of his native tradition. [but] could Durer
conceivably have reacted to Italian art so strongly as
he did if the 'Italian mode' had not somewhere been pre-
formed in his own nature ... Durer brought about a
fundamental change in the current view of the world.
79
By the 1940s, in opposition to the overtly racist
dialogue of the National Socialists, DUrer was once again
viewed as the exemplar of the "enlightened" German culture,
but one that had unfortunately died in a frightening world.
77 Wolfflin, Die Kunst Albrecht DUrers, 4 ~ h edition, pp. VIII-IX. Trans. in
Bialostocki, Durer, p. 312.
78 Oskar Hagen, Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt, LIV, 1919, pp. 956-957. Also
see Bialostocki, DUrer, pp. 309-313.
79 Wolfflin, The DUrer Jubilee speech (1928), printed in his Gedanken zur
Kunstgeschichte. Gedrucktes und Ungedrucktes. (Basel 1941), p. 127.
Trans. in Bialostocki, DUrer, p. 313.
60
In Chapter 4, two of those accounts, Erwin Panofsky's 1943
monograph and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1948) are
evaluated as nostalgic but poignant farewells to the
Enlightened culture of Goethe and A passage from
one popular account by Eugen Ortner sums up this mood. In a
1943 romanticized monograph of Durer's life, the author
"recounts" Durer's deathbed scene with Willibald Pirckheimer,
the scholar and friend of the artist:
Pirckheimer sat and looked from wall to wall. He felt
the truth of humanity in the shelves and in the
cupboard. Then he stood up. By the light of the lamp,
he found the book of the "Apocalypse" and the "Great
Passion" ... And so he was approaching more and more of a
chaotic world. Then as though his friend stood behind
him .. . "Ecce Homo Germanicus!". . His heart loudly
pounded: A German. . he himself. He saw an endless
train of tragedy, of the entire German people that
followed the coffin through the Tiergarten Tur. 81
German Jewish Cultural Identity and the Renaissance
In the writings of Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and other
80 Significantly, both were published while the authors were in exile.
81 Eugen Ortner, Albrecht Durer: Deutsche Sehnsucht, Deutsche Form
(Berlin: Keil Verlag, 1943), pp. 103-104.
"Pirkheimer sass und blickte von Wand zu Wand. Die Weisheit der
Menchheit fullte dart die Regale und Schranke. Dann stand er auf. Beim
Schein der Lampe fand er die Bucher der "Apokalypse" und der "Grossen
Passion" ... Dann war es ihm, als ob der Freund hinter ihm stunde .. .
"Ecce Homo Germanicus!" ... Sein Herz pochte laut: Ein Deutscher .. .
Er sah einen endlosen Trauerzug, das ganze deutsche Volk, das ging hinter
einem Sarg her, durch das Tiergartner Tor hinaus."
61
German art historians of the early twentieth century, the
Renaissance was seen as a pinnacle of Western visual culture.
Two questions arise. Why was classical imagery, as filtered
through the screen of the sixteenth-century Renaissance, so
important for the cultural critics of early modern Germany?
In particular, how could DUrer be elevated to mythic,
symbolic status by German Jews even as he was being claimed
by anti-Semitic nationalists? In order to answer this
question, we must consider the history of Jewish identity and
tradition in Germany.
The Renaissance, with its elevation of secularism,
humanistic learned discourse and an emphasis on the cultured
individual, matches to some degree the spirit of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment, particularly the notion of
Bildung (an individual's efforts to improve and purify him or
herself through the CUltivation of knowledge). Cultural
progress, which results from the rational acquisition of
knowledge, is the ultimate goal of a "gebildete" society, of
which the Renaissance might be considered a prime example.
Bildung, though transformed into a moral imperative,
was, in point of fact, the political foundation for German
62
Jewish assimilation in the nineteenth century. Because the
Jewish concept of the attainment of perfection
through knowledge was seen as compatible with the
Enlightenment notion of Bildung, Germans and Jews, as David
Sorkin points out, were able to come to a "quid pro quo
agreement" .83 Jews would work to eliminate their Jewish
characteristics, their obvious distinctive traits, in return
for political recognition.
George L. Mosse argues that Bildung "transcended all
differences of nationality and religion through the unfoldjng
of the individual As such, it was an ideal
presumed to be compatible with the Jewish interest in
integration into the larger German society. Although Mosse
suggests that the concept of Bildung was particularly strong
during the Weimar Republic, critics have challenged Mosse's
notion as far too

The Jewish haskalah, or enlightenment, was associated with religious
and secular reform. It involved a practical program of educational change
encouraging Jews to adopt the language and interrrUngle with non-
Jews. With this change in ideology from traditional orthodoxy, the world
of man became separated from the world of God.
83 Sorkin, Transformation of German Jewry, See Introduction for a
discussion of this theme especially pp. 5-10 and 37-39.
84
George L. Mosse Gennan Jews Beyond Judaism, (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1980), pp. 3-4.
8S See Shularnit Volkov, "The Dynamics of Dissimulation: Ostjuden and
German Jews" in The Jewish Response to Gennan Culture. From the
Enlightenment to the Second World War. Ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter
Schatzber (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985),
63
Prior to World War I, Germany's attitude toward its
Jewish citizens was quite different to what it was after the
war. Intellectuals such as Theodore Mommson, during the
1870s, contended that the Jews, as a group should meld into
the German Mommson's hope was that the culturally
distinct ethnic groups in Germany would be blended into one
people, just as political unification was becoming a reality.
Hermann Cohen, the founder of the Marburg School of neo-
Kantianism in the late nineteenth century, alluded to such a
synthesis when he suggested that monotheistic religions were
fundamentally all similar. Cohen writes that "what they have
in common is the absolute and autonomous structure of the
ethical categorical imperative; the difference between them
lies in the authoritative sources that are invoked to support
and justify it ... In monotheism, the ethical imperative
has its source of authority in God, that is, in a pure and
absolute spirituality; in German idealism it has its source
in the Kantian Although Cohen had written of a
universal ethical morality he, like many other German Jews,
was ambivalent regarding the "disappearance" of a Jewish
pp. 195-21l.
86 Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and
Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1975), p. 50.
64
identity. Jewish efforts to assimilate, to stay quiet so to
speak, were instead often reactions to the recent entry into
Germany of their less-assimilated Eastern
Robert Weltch suggests that, in the late Wilhelminian
period, Jews experienced an identity crisis.
89
Some writers
tried to revitalize the German-Yiddish literary tradition,
whereas others sought to hide their Jewish roots. Many were
concerned with the estrangement of the Jews from the larger
culture and sought to explain how to mend the rift. In
general, there was a preoccupation with Jewish heritage. In
many branches of the arts, there was interest in looking back
to find an "authentic" past. As Jacob Katz asserts, in
nineteenth-century Germany, middle-class Jews had been
politically emancipated but "Judaism was
Who were the German Jewish middle class? According to
Katz, they were a people economically assimilated into a
layer of a "newly emerged middle class" but were culturally
Quoted in Tal, Chriscians and Jews in Germany, p. 61.
See Alphonse Silberman "Deutsche Juden oder judische Deutsche? Zur
Identitat der Juden in der Weimarer Republik" in Juden in der Weimarer
Republik ed. Walter Grab and Julius H. Schoep (Stuttgart: Burg Verlag,
1986), pp. 347-355.
89 Robert Weltsch, "Die Schleichende Krise der JUdischen Identitat: Ein
Nachwort," p. 693. Juden in Wilhe1mischen Deutschland, 1890-1914, ed.
Werner Mosse and J.C. Mohr (Ttibingen: Paul Siebeck Verlag, 1976).
90 Jacob Katz, "German Culture and the Jews" in The Jewish Response to
German Culture, p. 94.
distinct from it. They were generally endogamous; they only
married among themselves: "Jews remained almost exclusively
bound to their own kind. ,,91
65
Aby Warburg, from Hamburg's upper-middle class, was
keenly aware of his Jewish heritage because of his upbringing
in an orthodox household. Though he rejected his doctrinaire
religious upbringing, he remained attached to Jewish culture,
and collected books on JUdaism and Jewish mysticism. Among
Warburg's collection, are a number of newspaper articles on
anti-Semitism and Judischefeindlichkeit now preserved at the
Warburg Institute in London. The collection includes
selections of the Dreyfus case, one regarding the adoption of
Hebrew as the national language in Palestine, a number of
essays on Jewish organizations, and accusations of Jewish
ritual murder in 1900 and 1913. Although the accusations
even seemed ridiculous to those in the general press, the
organization most representative of the Jewish majority's
opinions, the Central Verein des Juden Glaubens, felt
compelled to respond to them. In order to defend Jews and
Jewish culture, the editorial board argued that a "man would
rather kill himself than allow a child to be killed. A Jew
91 Katz, "German Culture and the Jews," p. 85.
66
calls himself a man; to be Jewish is to be hurnan."C;:
In 1912, in Der Kunstwart, the magazine of the
Dtirerbund, Moritz Goldstein wrote an explosive article,
"German Jewish Parnassus," which elicited many responses. He
suggested that assimilation for Jews was an illusion and that
Jews' failure to admit their lack of recognition by German or
by European society stemmed from a fear that further
injustices would be done to them:
We Jews administer the spiritual property of a people
[Volk] who deny our responsibility and ability to do so
. They do not notice the role that we play in German
cultural life, and they, moreover, are anxious that
others also not know ... Let us not deceive ourselves:
we Jews. .have the impression that we speak as German
to German. But however German we may regard ourselves,
the others believe us to be Undeutsch. 93
After World War I, anti-Semitic rhetoric reached an
unprecedented stridency and intensity in a Germany that
undoubtedly called into question the Jewish belief in the
inevitability of their acceptance by a cosmopolitan society.
c;: "man sich lieber selbst toten lassen als das kind toten. . . Jude
heisst mensch sein; Judentum ist menschentum" It is difficult to know
which paper Warburg clipped this from since it is not clearly marked.
But many of the clippings appear to be from the Frankfurter Zeitung.
93 Moritz Goldstein, Kunstwart, XXV (March 1912): pp. 283-285.
"Wir Juden verwalten den geistigen Besitz eines Volkes, dass uns die
Berechtingung und die Fahigkeit dazu abspricht. . . [Sie] merken nichts
von der Rolle, die wir im deutschen Kulturleben spielen, und wachen
angstlich dartiber, dass auch die andern nichts merken ... wir Juden, ..
mogen den Eindruck haben, als sprachen wir als Deutsch zu Deutschen--wir
haben den Andruck. Aber mogen wir uns irnrnerhin ganz deutsch ftihlen, die
67
Jews were no longer able to adhere unquestionably to the
belief in the seemingly effortless and inevitable progress of
mankind. Indeed, one only has to look in the popular press to
discover the many qualms and uncertainties Jews had regarding
assimilation. Martin Buber's Der Jude, which began as a pro-
War journal in 1916, published a number of essays on the
question of assimilation and anti-Semitism in Germany
beginning in the 1920s. As a result, Bildung, which had been
associated with the disciplined acquisition of culture and
education and a progressive, cosmopolitan historicism, became
complicated with chaotic Nietzschian notions of catastrophe,
apocalypse, and
In fact, intellectuals of the Weimar Jewish revival
exploded some of the basic tenets of Bildung. But despite the
fact that Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Georg Lucacs
rejected crucial aspects of Bildung's tradition--in
particular the notion of gradual and rational human progress-
-in favor of an apocalyptic redemption, they incorporated the
notion that political/human regeneration resides in the
cultural sphere.
Other German Jews also adapted a modified notion of
andern flihlen uns ganz undeutsch".
Ascheim, Culture and Catastrophe, p. 46.
68
Bildung. Even Zionists, those Jews who sponsored a Jewish
homeland in Palestine, retained a version of it. Zionism drew
Western acculturated Jews with its fusion of a humanist
Bildung to the ideal of a Jewish national regeneration.
95
Indeed, Herzl's proclamation that "We have no intention of
yielding one bit of the [secular] culture we have acquired.
On the contrary, we are aiming for a broadening of culture,
such as any increase in knowledge brings" is in the spirit of
the eighteenth century Jewish Enlightenment thinker, Moses
Mendelssohn.96 As Sorkin proclaims, "the more virulent the
debate, the more energetic the celebration of the cult. ,,9" For
example, Walter Rathenau, the Jewish foreign minister of
Germany assassinated in 1922, spoke of the cultivated Jew as
one who "regards his beliefs--perhaps incorrectly--as a
filtered Deismus in the sense of the philosophy of the

95 Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the
First World War (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina
Press, 1996), pp. 2-6.
96 Theodore Herzl, from Address to First Zionist Congress (1897). Quoted
in Berkowitz, Zionist Culture, p. 3.
97 David Sorkin, "Jews, the Enlightenment and Religious Toleration-Some
Reflections," in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, XXXVII, 1992, p. 9.
Walter Rathenau, Deutsche Montags Zeitung, Berlin, Jan 9, 1911. "Er
betrachtet seinen Vaterglauben--vielleicht mit unrecht--als ein
abgeklarten Deismus im Sinne der philosophen des 18 Jahrhunderts."
69
The precursor to the enlightened cosmopolitanism of the
eighteenth-century was the culture of Renaissance
Italy. The definition of Renaissance humanist culture as one
that embodied the "ideal of religious toleration" would
certainly be an appealing model for German Jews suffering the
humiliation of Renaissance culture as a high
point of Western learning could serve as a model for
contemporary culture. Indeed, the ideal of Renaissance
humanist education survived into the early twentieth-century
in the West and still forms the basis for much of the studies
of the humanities.
loo
If humanist philosophy can be regarded as a "reformist
movement," which, at its core was a belief in self-
regeneration through learning,lm then it matches the German
conception of Bildung, which was the underlying principle
Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 64, notes that "This ideal arose
first in the fifteenth century against the background of medieval
controversy with Judaism and Islam and of the echoes of the polemics of
the Church fathers against ancient paganism. In the sixteenth-century,
the problem acquired a new poignancy in the face of religious dissent,
persecution, and war within Western Christendom. Without abandoning a
belief in the superiority of his own religion, Nicolaus Cusanus advocated
perpetual peace and toleration between the different creeds dividing
mankind."
100 Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, p. 19. Kristeller very specifically
defines Renaissance humanism as the study of grammar, rhetoric, poetry,
history, and moral philosophy as well as knowledge of Greek and Roman
authors. (p. 70).
101 J. R. Hale Renaissance Europe: Individual and Society, 1480-1520
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 288.
70
behind Jewish emancipation in Germany. Just as the
Renaissance humanist could reform him/herself through effort
and study, so could all individuals assimilate to the
enlightened German model exemplified by Schiller and Goethe.
In fact, the study of the humanist philosophy of the
Renaissance can be aligned with the traditions of Judaism.
The learned classical discourse of the small circle of
fifteenth-century humanists is in keeping with the "spirit"
of the midrashic interpretation of rabbinic literature. In
such an exposition, the rabbi winds through a variety of
arcane Hebrew and Aramaic sources in an ingenious effort to
explore all the interpretive possibilities of an obscure
biblical passage. This exercise was meant both to display
the rabbi's erudition and to please the audience familiar
with the The decoding of classical references in a
difficult painting or literary excerpt by the Renaissance
humanist is undoubtedly reminiscent of this process.
And for the twentieth century? Anson Rabinbach contends
that Jewish Messianism is evident in many guises, including
the writings of the literary critic Walter Benjamin and the
10: Sorkin, The Transformation of German-Jewry, p. 82, states that the
midrashic "Hebrew homily (derasha) ... was meant to impress and delight
through the range of its topics and the ingenuity used to solve a stated
problem. "
71
Jewish Weimar historian Ernst Bloch. 103 One might read
elements of Jewish mysticism, he contends, into writings of
many German Jews during this period.
I04
The method employed by
Aby Warburg in poring over the esoteric Greek and Latin texts
utilized by Italian Renaissance scholars in order to unlock
the iconography of a fifteenth-century painting is not far
removed from the religious midrashic method of the Jewish
Despite the fact that Warburg renounced the
Halachic or prescriptive Orthodox Judaism of his grandfathers
the scholarly methodology he utilized is suggestive of this
Jewish method of interpretation.
I06
103 Anson Rabinbach "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse:
and Modern German Jewish Messianism," New German Critique
1980): p. 84
Benjamin, Bloch
34 (Winter,
104 As noted by Gombrich and others, Warburg, like many other members of
Weimar and Wilhelminian Germany (including the Expressionists), was
particularly interested in the occult and mysticism. Perhaps therein may
lie some of the reason for his interest in Renaissance humanism. Hale
contends that "Expressed at its most mystical by Pico ... man had the
power so to shape his own development that he could become either
bestialized or spiritualized, it led to a reappraisal of how, and about
what men should think. Without this mystical element, which was
essentially private and contemplative, humanism would have lacked much of
its intensity," (Renaissance Europe, p. 288).
lOS See Sorkin, The Transformation of German-Jewry, p 82. Sorkin notes that
the "Hebrew homily (derasha). . . was meant to impress and delight
through the range of its topics and the ingenuity used to solve a stated
problem. "
106 Halachah is defined as a division of rabbinic law. Although the
literal Hebrew meaning is "to walk", its generally accepted definition is
"law". Halachah incorporates a wide range of subjects including the
regulation of human behavior and what "can be expressed as the
imperative" (see The Jewish People: Their History and Religion, David J.
Goldberg and John D. Rayner, NY and London: Penguin Books, 1987, p. 211).
The point that I wish to make is that Bildung was, for German Jews,
72
Midrash could be regarded as a traditional "mode of
cognition", as a means of exposing a philosophical concept or
truism.
1m
What is significant for our discussion is that the
"appropriation" of texts to create meaning is the essential
component of this process. 108 According to the midrashic
tradition, the commentator strings together details from
literary texts in a not-always-systematic effort to find the
patterns that enrich and illuminate the Bible's historical
a code of behavior. As David Sorkin puts it, Bildung was associated with
a "moral imperative." Its adherents were exhorted to continually strive
for self-improvement.
107 Ithamar Gruenwald, in "Midrash & the 'Midrashic Condi tion' ," in The
Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History ed. Michael
Fishbane (Albany: State University Press, 1993), 13. Gruenwald posits
that "what is said here about that theological, or engaged, nature of the
midrashic activity is equally true of the Christian homily and the
Islamic Hadith. In fact any type of ideologically engaged interpretive
undertaking shares the subjective and, in the view of the outsider,
somewhat distorting quality of Midrash. . . [but] a midrashic or
mythopoetic point becomes the cognitive looking glass through which a
biblical story is viewed and a religious world constructed. . . Midrash
is a mode of cognition and the major component in the creation of a
religious tradition," (pp. 13, 19).
108 See Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen, Walter Benjamin, trans.
Lairndota Mazzarins (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996), p. 3. They claim
that "the 'attitude of the commentator' constitutes a border-line form.
It refers to the Jewish tradition of commentary, putting it at the
service of literary interpretation. The original model of this procedure
is the exegesis biblical text. . . Commentary is the most legitimate form
of philosophy," (p. 3). In this regard, Warburg's focus on the singular
form that winds its way through history is a method in which an esoteric
historical "fact," through its process of artistic reinterpretation, is
elevated to a philosophy because it is itself a commentary on the
transformation process.
In addition, the demonic, catastrophic realm of the Lurianich
kabbalah is similar in sentiment to Warburg's Dionysian culture as it is
to Benjamin's redemptive transforrnative process. Language and the process
of transformation as related to Panofsky will be discussed in Chapters 2
and 3.
73
narrative. Warburg's last project, Mnemosyne (Memory), his
montage-like juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images that
illuminate a larger philosophical Weltanschauung, conforms to
this rich Jewish mode of interpretation. At the same time, he
transforms it into a visual language in the manner that
Walter Benjamin will do with plays and allegorical images in
The Origin of German Tragic Drama.
The Messianiclmidrashic belief in the redemptive power
of language, as I will discuss in Chapter 3, influenced the
writings of Walter Benjamin and may have informed the
methodological studies of Erwin Panofsky. Certainly Weimar
messianic thinking--with its emphasis on origins and its
recreation of an originary "authentic" experience and the
hoped-for, albeit apocalyptic, restoration of a Golden-Age is
in keeping with other cultural currents of the time. But its
specific concern with language as the key to redemption, was
a potent attraction for a number of secular German Jews.
Franz Rosenzweig claimed that "every translation is a
messianic act, which brings redemption nearer. "In9 In fact,
Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama represents an
attempt to find it in an originary mimetic language.
Furthermore, the midrashic emphasis on the illumination of
Furthermore, the midrashic emphasis on the illumination of
lost meanings and the revelation of hidden presences
uncovered through a learned reading of difficult texts may
not be far from Panofsky's "theological" response in his
early methodological studies or from his belief in the
humanizing potential of classical culture.
Conclusion
74
Melencolia I, as I discuss in the next chapter, is an
image both authors chose to analyze in each of their early
attempts to define a history of visual language. Perhaps no
other classical/Renaissance image so aptly encapsulates the
many themes with which I have been concerned thus far.
Certainly, DUrer's many references to the Greek astrological
gods would have been of interest to Weimar artists and
scholars preoccupied with the classical legacy and tradition.
In addition, the "meaning" behind Durer's print--that the
winged figure was mentally struggling to combine the tools of
the artist's trade with those of the mathematicians in order
to overcome the forces of unreason--might have resonated with
those Germans concerned with creating cultural unity in a
IW Quoted in Aschheirn, Culture and Catastrophe, p. 40.
75
Yet as a symbol of cultural identity, Melencolia I is a
curious choice given that its meaning has puzzled scholars
over the centuries. Nationalists and "cosmopolitans",
Enlightenment thinkers and Romantics, and German Jews steeped
in the tradition of Bildung have all given it a variety of
interpretations. For example, the winged figure has been
seen as the symbol of creativity and competence by some and
as the embodiment of laziness and torpor by others. 110 The
Romantics as well as modernists such as Otto Dix have
embraced her (although he remade her into a kitsch-like
figure, see Figure 13) .111 Significantly, so have German
nationalists who transformed her into a masculine,
sentimental symbol of the people (Figure 14).
Indeed, the attraction of Melencolia I (like DUrer's
Knight, Death and Devil) to a variety of liberal and
conservative thinkers throughout history has undoubtedly
transformed it into a cultural icon-not only for Germany but
for other Western artists as well. The print might, in fact,
be regarded as an encapsulation of art historical thought.
110 See Peter Klaus Schuster, Melencolia I: Durers Denkbild, 2 vols.,
(Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1989). Durer's print has been "interpreted" over
the centuries by a variety of artists including "modern" artists such as
Pissaro, Frederick Sandy, Giacometti, de Chirico, Magritte, and in 1970
as a "hippie" by the post-war German artist Dieter Kramer (See Figure
15) .
III See Otto Dix 1891-1969, Tate Gallery, p. 178.
76
Melencolia I may indeed, represent a "paradigm" of the
difficulty of defining meaning.
lI
:: For a people searching for
their origins and traditions, the print with its multitude of
references to the contradictory forces of rationality and
irrationality, of ecstatic creative possibility and torpid
dejection, is indeed an apt symbol for the chaotic German
culture of the 1920s.
II:: Michael Camille, "Walter Benjamin and Durers Melencolia I: The
Dialectics of Allegory and the Limits of Iconology," Ideas and Production
5 (1985): p. 59.
Chapter 2
BENJAMIN, PANOFSKY AND THE LANGUAGE OF
REPRESENTATION
77
We moderns have nothing whatever of our own; only by
replenishing and cramming ourselves with the ages,
customs, arts, philosophies, religions, discoveries of
others do we become anything worthy of notice, that is
to say, walking encyclopaedias . .. This antithesis of
inner and outer, indeed, makes the exterior even more
barbaric than it would be if a rude nation were only
to develop out of itself in accordance with its own
uncouth needs.
Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (p. 79)
Philosophical, Biographical and Shared Theoretical Foundations
Erwin Panofsky and Walter Benjamin have been among
this century's most influential cultural critics. Both were
born in 1892 into upper-middle-class German Jewish families
whose fortunes were to decline during the tumultuous Weimar
era. They reached intellectual maturity during a time when
economic uncertainty was matched by social angst and
distrust of political institutions. Panofsky's and
Benjamin's theories of artistic representation, despite the
rather esoteric nature of both, cannot, nevertheless, be
separated from the wider cultural matrix. Like other Weimar
scholars and artists, they sought to define rational and
unifying intellectual constructs during a time of
political, social, and cultural fragmentation. Rather than
comment on contemporary culture, during the 1920s they
generally looked to the past as the starting point for
their methodological investigations.
Although, by the end of their lives, Panofsky and
Benjamin had reached different conclusions regarding the
purpose of historical inquiry, their early studies show
marked similarities. Both grappled with the intellectual
legacies of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and with the
methodology of historical interpretation. In this chapter,
I focus on their shared interest in process, in the
theoretical underpinnings of how the discipline of history
is and should be constructed. Many of the topics with
which I will be concerned here--cultural history/identity,
the afterlife of antiquity, and Renaissance and Baroque
history--are guises under which Panofsky and Benjamin
explored historical interpretation and the nature of
representation. Specifically, their early studies are
theoretical works in progress. Though at times ambiguous
and contradictory, these investigations provide us with
remarkable insight into their intellectual struggles as
both critics attempted to define a systematic method for
interpreting history and its cultural objects.
78
79
As Gerhard Scholem, Benjamin's lifelong friend, wrote,
"For all his renunciation of system, his thought, presented
as that of a fragmentarian, retains a systematic tendency
[that is] deeply embedded in the processes of a mind
striving after order and cohesion."1 Later twentieth-
century scholars of Benjamin's work have supported
Scholem's contention. Concerning his essay on Goethe, for
example, Berndt Witte notes that Benjamin studied such
classical art because its emphasis on form and its
"striking constructedness" made it a "perfect object for an
interpretation based primarily on internal linkages. ".::
Benjamin is interested in method not to provide an
ultimate, difficult-to-grasp truth but to free the object
from its historical and aesthetic encumbrances, to return
it to its original (Ur) form where it may become the si te
of transcendental redemption.
3
For redemption to occur,
1 Gershom Scholem, "Walter Benjamin," in On Jews & Judaism in Crisis
(Schocken Books: New York, 1976), p. 182.
: Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. James
Rolleston (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 52.
Despite Benjamin's interest in "internal linkages" and in the method
used in classical art, Witte suggests that "the disturbing fact remains
that he compares his own project not with the rational research methods
of modern scholars, but with the magic practices of a pre-scientific
age" (52). For Witte, this "disturbing" quality manifested itself in
the dissolution of Benjamin's theory into an anti-theory of
subjectivity.
J In his later works of the thirties, such as "The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) this metaphysical concept takes
on a materialist cast. He hopes that the contemporary fetishized image
that is stripped of all its historical paraphernalia can reveal an Ur-
image, an image onto which the path to redemption is mapped, which in
80
criticism (method) must destroy the aesthetic cover of
"beauty" so that a genuine "truth" may emerge:
It is truth that shatters what still survives in all
appearance of beauty as the legacy of chaos: false,
deceptive totality--totality that would be absolute.
It is truth that completes the work, by shattering it
into shards, into a fragment of the true world. ~
Panofsky is also concerned with critical methodology.
Unlike Jakob Burckhardt's or Aby Warburg's generalized
theories of culture (both of which provided him with
inspiration), Panofsky's theory of iconology attempts to
fit the pieces of a puzzle together into a cohesive whole.
5
Iconology is a carefully delineated methodology for
understanding the history of western visual culture.
6
turn will be the inspiration for workers to move beyond capitalism to a
socialist utopia. This later conclusion, though political in nature,
still locates the image as a site for utopian redemption, just as in
the Origin study. This and other essays by Benjamin in Illuminations:
Essays and Reflections trans. Harry Zohn, ed. and an intro. by Hannah
Arendt (NY: Harcourt, Brace, & World Inc, 1955).
4 Walter Benjamin, Goethe's Elective Affinities in Gesammelte Schriften,
[6 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, with the
collaboration of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlang, 1972-1982)), I, p. 181. Cited in Berndt Witte,
Walter Benjamin, p. 63. Citations of Benjamin's essays from Gesammelte
Schriften are hereafter abbreviated with volume number and page. For
Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, I have used the
standard translation The Origin of German Tragic Drama, intro. George
Steiner, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), hereafter
abbreviated as Origin with page number following.
S Certainly Warburg is interested in specific details such as the
gestures of the figures in Botticelli's Primavera; nevertheless, he
does not tie them together in a carefully delineated, theory of
culture. Rather, his interest, as is Burckhardt's, is in understanding
the general cultural Weltanschauung--the spirit of an era. See Chapt. 1
concerning Warburg's theory of culture.
6 Panofsky's theory of Iconology is explained in the Introductory to
Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance
81
According to Panofsky's theory, meaning, or interpretation,
is divided into three stages. Generally recognizable and
universal gestures and expressions characterize the first,
or pre-iconographic (for example, a smile is associated
with happiness). The second or conventional/iconographic
level requires identifying culturally specific motifs (the
famous emblem of the dog in the Arnolfini Portrait as
associated with fidelity). At the final level, the critic
or viewer, armed with the requisite historical and cultural
knowledge, may get at the "intrinsic meaning" behind a work
of art though transcendent "synthetic intuition." Panofsky
attempts to find the "true" interpretation gleaned from the
study of historical symbolism, but his primary interest, as
I discuss in the subsequent pages, lies in the process used
to get there.
Although the writings of Panofsky and Benjamin share
many of the same philosophical foundations, their critical
studies cannot simply be grasped through an explication of
intellectual history alone. Nevertheless, the German
idealist tradition provides the general framework for their
theoretical analyses. In particular, the ideas of the
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1939) and reprinted as "Iconography
and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art" in
Meaning in the Visual Arts. Papers in an on Art History (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), pp. 26-54. Later editions in 1962,
1972. Edition used in text: Icon edition (New York and London: Harper
82
Enlightenment philosophers Kant and Hegel are crucial for
understanding the writings of both Panofsky and Benjamin.
Because of the centrality of Enlightenment thought to the
two scholars, it is necessary to outline some of the main
philosophical constructs that are relevant to the ideas
presented in this chapter. How German idealist philosophy
intersects with that of German Jewish traditions, and in
particular how Benjamin and Panofsky adapt these
philosphical strands, is the subject of Chapter 3.
German Idealist Traditions
Specifically, both Benjamin and Panofsky addressed the
Hegelian definition of history as a progressive process.
History, as Hegel defines it, is the chronicle of evolving
human rational consciousness that is driven by the need to
impose order on the natural world. Indeed, this notion had
its origins in the reason/nature opposition first addressed
by Machiavelli in The Prince. Nature, for Machiavelli, is
& Row, 1972), pp. 3-31.
1 George W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree
(Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1956). Hegel writes that "Reason
governs the world, and has consequently governed its history. In
relation to this independently universal and substantial existence--all
else is subordinate, subservient to it, and the means for its
development--The Union of Universal Abstract Existence generally with
the individual--the subjective--that this alone is Truth, belongs to
the department of speculation, and is treated in this general form in
logic.--But in the process of the World's History itself--as still
incomplete--the abstract final aim of history is not yet made the
distinct object of desire and interest," (p. 25).
83
to be equated with Chance and must be bent to the will of
humanity.8 He believed that political institutions would be
the key to this victory. Rene Descartes, on the other
hand, argued that nature was dependent upon
humanity's employment of a theoretical science that stands
outside human perception and subjectivity. In turn this
stance would enable us to become "masters and processors of
nature.,,9
This reason/nature debate continued in the writings of
Locke and Hobbes, each of whom gave it his own particular
slant, the former supplying American liberal democracy with
many of its fundamental precepts, while the latter
established the state as the mechanism that propels
rational man beyond the insecure natural world. It is the
Enlightenment thinkers of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, specifically Kant and Hegel, that are
of immediate relevance to our theme. Kant attempted to
construct a cosmopolitan history, one that is free from
8 Nature is to be ruled over by those individuals who are possessors of
the higher faculties of reason, those so to speak, who have the
knowledge to rule not only nature but also the weaker members of the
state.
9 Gregory Bruce Smith. Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Transition to
Postmodernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 24.
Smith also writes that "Machiavelli and Descartes, despite competing
visions of how to transform reality, share the idea of Nature as an
arena hostile to human well-being and locate man's salvation in a
Reason that stands outside the given and consciously constructed laws,"
(p. 26).
84
Machiavelli's warring institutions and ambitious political
men or Hobbes' competing groups. Humans collectively,
rather than individually, are propelled forward by Reason.
Though final knowledge and reality remain outside human
perception, this is of no concern, because we can enact
laws (laws that depend on the human categorical imperative
to impose rational, albeit anti-natural, constructs), which
eventually result in a republican, cosmopoli tan society. c:
For Hegel, history is born with the slave's work that
transforms and conquers nature. To do so, he must sublimate
his instinctual desires. Rather than cultivate nature, he
must negate it if he is to receive the honor that he
desires from his human masters.
ci
Eventually the slave
retreats into abstract thought where he rejects the natural
world and replaces his individual masters with a Christian
God. He will be able to overcome his resistance to the
natural world only when self-conscious reason reconciles
the distinction between the mind and nature. This
reconciliation occurs because the "slave" is able to impose
his will on the natural world through science and
technology. Once he has conquered nature, he creates the
10 See Smith, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Transition to Postmodernity,
pp. 38-4l.
11 Smith, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Transition to Postmodernity, p.
48.
85
nation-state, which allows for the evolution of human
progress. At some point, after society is refashioned
through the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis, the "Idea"--the cosmopolitan, humane society--is
realized. This brings about the end of history and with it
the abolition of difference and the return of man to an
ontological, spiritual state.
The History of the World is nothing but the
development of the Idea of freedom. But Objective
Freedom--the laws of real Freedom--demands the
subjugation of the mere contingent Will--for this is
in its nature formal. If the Objective is in itself
Rational, human insight and conviction must correspond
with the Reason which it embodies, and then we have
the other essential element--Subjective Freedom--also
realized . . . That the History of the World, with all
the changing scenes which its annals present, is this
process of development and the realization of Geist--
this is the true Theodicoea, the justification of God
in history. Only this insight can reconcile Geist
with the history of the world.::
What distinguishes Hegel's philosophy of history is
his emphasis on reconciliation--that opposing individual
differences can be reconciled for the greater good of the
collective. In Germany, after the revolution of 1848, many
questioned the validity of this conclusion. Nietzsche, in
particular, discounted Hegel's belief in the power of
reason. He argued against a teleological history governed
by Hegel's principle of rationality:
86
And now let us quickly take a look at our own time! .
. where has all the clarity, all the naturalness and
purity of this relationship between life and history
gone? .. what we see is certainly a star ...
interposing itself, the constellation really has been
altered--by science, by the demand that history should
be a science. Now the demands of life alone no longer
reign and exercise constraint on knowledge of the
past. .. Knowledge, consumed for the greater part
without hunger for it ... now no longer acts as an
agent for transforming the outside world but remains
concealed within a chaotic inner world. . this
antithesis of inner and outer, indeed, makes the
exterior even more barbaric than it would be if a rude
nation were only to develop out of itself.:}
Nietzsche's disruption of the German idealist
tradition was particularly influential for later German
philosophers and cultural critics.
c4
Specifically, his
equation of history with nihilism and his undermining of
the mind/world (subject/object or internal/external)
separation forced later critics to confront the idealist
tradition of Kant and Hegel. Indeed, as I argue in this
chapter and the next, the Kantian universals and Hegelian
progressive history that Nietzsche questioned influenced
German Jewish critics in the Weimar Republic, including
~ Hegel, Philosophy of History, pp. 456-457.
13 Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," pp.
77-78.
14 See Chapter I. For Nietzsche's influence on German intellectual
thought see, Stephen Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1880-
1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Also see Smith,
Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Transition to Postmodernity. Smith states
that Nietzsche's work became influential in academic circles during the
1920s and 1930s, (p. 68).
87
both Erwin Panofsky and Walter Benjamin.
Panofsky and Benjamin: Brief Curricula
Erwin Panofsky had hoped to lead the life of an
independent scholar. But the loss of his family's fortune
after World War I forced him to choose a different path,
one that ultimately led to university life in Hamburg. His
choice of an academic career at the University of Hamburg,
though necessary, was a fortuitous one. He joined the
faculty in 1921 as Chair of the Department of Art History,
with the title of Privatdozent (he was made professor five
years later). ~ 5 While there, he was able to interact with
Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and other important scholars
who contributed to the development of his studies of
antiquity, the Renaissance, and the theory of iconology.
With the advent of National Socialism, Panofsky was forced
to leave his post in 1933. He settled in the United States,
where he continued his work at New York University and the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
15 See William Heckscher, "Erwin Panofsky: A Curriculum Vitae", in Three
Essays on Style ed. Irvin Lavin with memoir by William Heckscher
(Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1995), pp. 167-196. First
published in Record of the Art Museum. Princeton University 28 (1969),
pp. 5-21. Also printed separately as Erwin Panofsky: A Curriculum
Vitae. A Paper Read at a SympOSium Held at Princeton University on
March 15, 1969, to Mark the First Anniversary of Erwin Panofsky's
Death, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University,
Princeton, 1969.
88
Many of Panofsky's best-known works were published
after his emigration to the United States--one of them, The
Life and Art of Albrecht DUrer (1943) will be discussed in
Chapter Four. These texts, written in English, show a
marked divergence from his earlier essays in German, which
are formulations of a theory of culture/aesthetics. In
this chapter, I generally plan to focus on some of the
studies of the 1920s and early 1930s, specifically the
analyses of DUrer's Melencolia I (l923),l6 "Albrecht Durer
and Antiquity" (1921-22) , 17 Perspective as Symbolic Form
(1924-25),18 the essay on "The History of the Theory of
Human Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles"
(1921),19 and the until recently unpublished lecture "What
is Baroque?"':::c My particular emphasis will be on Panofsky's
16 Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, "DUrers Kupferstich 'Melencolia I''':
Eine quellen und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung," (Studien der
Bibliothek Warburg II) (Leipzig and Berlin, 1923) .
.. 1 Erwin Panofsky, "Albrecht DUrer and Classical Antiquity," reprinted
in Panofsky Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 236-294. Originally
published as "DUrers Stellung zur Antike" in Jahrbuch fUr
Kunstgeschichte I (1921/22): pp. 43-92.
18 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. by Christopher
S. Wood (Zone Books: New York, 1994). Originally published as "Die
Perspektive als 'symbolische Form,'" in the Vortrage der Bibliothek
Warburq (1924-1925) (Leipzig & Berlin, 1927), pp. 258-330.
19 Erwin Panofsky, "The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a
Reflection of the History of Styles," in Meaning in the Visual Arts.
Originally published as "Die Entwicklung der Proportionslehre als
Abbild der Stilentwicklung" in Monatshefte fUr Kunstwissenschaft, XIV
(1921): pp. 188-219.
:0 Erwin Panofsky, "What is Baroque?" in Three Essays on Style, pp.17-
90. See Chapter 3 for a detailed discussion of this essay as it
relates to Panofsky's conception of history.
89
theoretical approach to analyzing works of art, the
critical choices he made in interpreting history and how
these "choices" compare to Walter Benjamin's in his study
of baroque tragic drama.
Benjamin's life, at least initially, was remarkably
similar to Panofsky's, although it later followed a
divergent path. Like Panofsky, Benjamin was ambivalent
about university life but pursued an academic career.
Benjamin attempted to obtain his Habilitation at the
University of Heidelberg prior to assuming a teaching
post.
2l
He soon realized that his chances for success were
slim given the degree of anti-Semitism at
Benjamin switched to the University of Frankfurt to
complete his studies because of its liberal reputation for
openness and specifically for its acceptance of Jewish
scholars. He withdrew his application for Habilitation when
it became clear that his study of early German tragic drama
:1 In the German academic system, a Habilitation is a "second"
dissertation required before someone can teach at the university as a
Professor.
22 For an excellent summary of Benjamin's early life, see Bernd Witte,
Walter Benjamin. Regarding other recent important analysis of
Benjamin's works (particularly the early studies) see: Michael
Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary
Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987); John McCole,
Walter Benjamin and the Antimonies of Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1993); Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter
Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1993); Uwe Steiner, "Traurige Spiele--Spiele vor
Traurigen: Zu Walter Benjamins Theorie des barocken Trauerspiels,n in
Allegorie und Melancholie (Frankfort a.M.: Willem van Reijen, 1992),
90
(Origin of German Tragic Drama) would be rejected. Instead,
he became an independent literary critic who wrote on a
wide variety of topics relating to modern industrial
culture.
Benjamin's writings, though not widely appreciated
during his lifetime, have since influenced scholars and
critics in a wide range of disciplines, from media studies
to Baroque literature.
23
His essays range from the famous
liThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, II':'; a
study of the destruction of the artistic aura in the age of
film and photography to critical evaluations of Baudelaire,
Kafka, and Baroque German tragic drama. In 1940, after he
was threatened with extradition to France following an
attempt to cross the Pyrenees into Spain, in order to seek
refuge from Hitler's Germany, he took his own life.
Shared Theoretical Foundations: Benjamin, Panofsky and the Warburg School
The writings of the Warburg school formed a critical
pp. 32-63.
:3 The literature would be too vast to cite here. Those whom he
influenced ranged from his student Adorno, through contemporary media
critics such as Anton Kaes (From Hitler to Weimar: The Return of
History as Film,) and the anthropologist Michael Taussig (Mimesis and
Alterity: a Particular History of the Senses, NY: Routledge, 1993) to
countless art historians and literary critics.
24 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction", reprinted in, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 219-254.
91
foundation for Benjamin's study of German tragic drama. He
had hoped, in fact, for a fruitful relationship with the
group of scholars associated with Warburg and his library.
Benjamin contacted Panofsky through Hugo von Hofmannsthal
in an effort to make a scholarly connection with the
Warburg circle. As Benjamin wrote to Scholem, Panofsky's
response seemed to him "a cool, resentment-laden letter of
answer. "25 Despite this response, Benjamin hoped that the
Warburg group would yet show some enthusiasm for his work.
To Sigfried Kracauer he commented that one could assume
that the most important scientific publications were
increasingly likely to come from Warburg and his
associates, and that he had recently heard indirectly that
"Saxl was very interested in his book."':" Benjamin never did
establish the relationship he had hoped for with the scholars
in Hamburg.
The book to which Benjamin was referring was the
Origin of German Tragic Drama, his literary explication of
the generally overlooked German allegorical dramas of the
:5 Walter Benjamin, Briefe, 2 Vols. Ed. Gershom Scholern and Theodor W.
Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978) I, p. 438. "schickte
mir einen kUhlen, ressentimentgeladenen Antwortbrief Panofsky's auf
diese Sendung ein."
26 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, I, 3, p. 90. "Er hat die Vermutung
bestatigt, dass die fUr unsere Anschauungsweise wichtigsten
wissenschaftlichen Publickationen sich mehr und mehr urn den
Warburgkreis gruppieren und dazu kann es mir nur urn so lieber sein,
dass neulich, indirekt, die Mitteilung kam, Saxl sei intensiv fUr mein
92
seventeenth century. In Origin, Benjamin relied on the
Warburg school's interpretation of melancholy and its
members' analyses of DUrer's famous print Melencolia I as
the foundation for his own theories regarding the afterlife
of antiquity and the significance of "baroque"
images/emblems. Benjamin's method of interpretation in
particular would seem to owe much to Aby Warburg's
conclusions. Indeed, both men, who did not travel the
conventional German academic path, are concerned with myth
and anti-myth, with the Dionysian irrationalism of the
antique and its revision in the Renaissance. They were
interested in the work of art within a general cultural
consciousness and not with the traditional notion of art as
'-'
the aesthetic, material repository of individual genius.-
Wolfgang Kemp points out that the ideas of both
scholars are not woven into a fixed theoretical nexus but
may be seen as "ideenfluchten," as elastic
conceptualizations. They were interested in the
fragmentary and incomplete as expressions of the transitory
Buch interessiert."
27 See Wolfgang Kemp, "Walter Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft", Teil
2, Kritische Berichte V (1975), pp. 5-25. Kemp writes that "Hier ware
Warburgs stutzend anzufuhren, dass die kollektiv und u n b e ~ ~ s s t
erfahrenen Extreme menschlicher Reaktionsfahigkeit (Pathos) das
vorrangig geschutzte Gut der Erinnerung sind. . . Und fur Benjamins
Theorie der didaktischen Bilder wurde gel ten, dass das
gesellschaftliche ext rem, klassenlose Gesellschaft der Urgeschichte, in
gleicher Weise also kollektive Ahnung unvergessen und die
93
nature of human culture. This interest is evident in the
montage-like construction and historical disjunctions (both
used contemporary newspaper clippings alongside references
to classical art) of their two great-unfinished projects:
Warburg's Mnemosyne and Benjamin's Passagen-Werk.
Benjamin and Panofsky, on the other hand, would seem
only to have Warburg's foundational studies as a point in
common. Although his theory of iconology owes much to
Warburg's essays on Renaissance culture, Panofsky's early
theoretical papers seem to take a different path from
Warburg's analyses of cultural Weltanschauung.
Panofsky appears to be more concerned with delineating
a precise method that will enable the scholar to ascertain
the meaning behind a work of A viewer who follows
his three-step method can intuit what a painting "means."
This method, as summarized in the "Introductory" to his
1939 Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of
the Renaissance, relies on the reasonable acquisition and
use of knowledge as the foundation for
Prior to leaving Germany in 1933, Panofsky's writings are
to some extent still methodological works in progress. Once
Kulturproduktion mitbestimmend erhalten bleibt," (p. 22).
:e See Michael Podro's discussion of Panofsky and Warburg and his
comparison of their methodologies in The Critical Historians of Art
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 158-215.
94
in the United States, he appears to be more concerned with
rational iconographic analyses that provide "answers" to
artistic meaning rather than to philosophical queries. 31:;
Benjamin's work after 1925 veers towards a Marxist,
materialist conception of history. Nonetheless, the earlier
Weimar writings of Panofsky and Benjamin, despite the
difference in their methodology, contain marked
similarities.
Image and Method
Panofsky and Melencolia I: Portrait of Artistic Genius
In the opening section of the essay on Durer's
Melencolia I (1923) Panofsky and his co-author Fritz Saxl
state that the engraving transforms the ignoble concept of
the dull and lethargic individual into what Warburg had
:9 Erwin Panofsky, "Introductory," Studies in Iconology, pp. 3-32.
30 Margaret Iversen emphasizes the neo-Kantian foundation of Panofsky's
theory of art. See Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory
(Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1993), pp. 148-167. Also see Michael Ann
Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1984). I believe that in his earlier
writings of the 1920s and early 1930s other influences are also clearly
present. Further analysis of this thesis will be presented later in the
chapter.
95
called the "thinking worker."3: Panofsky and Saxl follow the
rather complicated transformation of the melancholic from
the medieval copybooks, where she is presented as a figure
of sloth sitting immobilized at her spinning wheel, into a
figure of creative genius (Figure 1). The authors note
that the winged figure's frenzied engagement in thought, as
exemplified by the fixity of her stare, signifies that the
melancholic figure is one engaged not with the mundane
aspects of life but with the profound. Panofsky and Saxl
argue that the artist's highlighting of the compass and
book, rather than such mechanical parts as the spindle,
indicates this transformation of meaning.
32
They contend that the history of this allegorical
type, both visually and iconographically, is a complex
amalgam of medieval lore, complicated humanist texts, and
magical, astrological accounts of the humors and gods. The
authors base their interpretation of the transformation of
the earthy, mad melancholic into an emblem of artistic
genius on the writings of the sixteenth-century humanist
Agrippa of Nettesheim and his adaptation of Ficino's
interpretation of melancholy. In Ficino's conception, the
31 Panofsky and Saxl, " 'Melencolia I," pp. 50, 61. "unedle Komplex der
Tragen and Stumpfsinnigen" . .. [into] "der denkenden Arbeitsmenschen
[of Warburg]."
32" Panofsky and Saxl, "Melencolia I," p. 50. "Zirkel und Buch, nicht
Rocken und Spindel, sind jetzt die attribute der Gestalt."
96
melancholic humor (one of four types of personalities) is
comprised of three parts: 1). Human: related to "strenuous"
lifestyle choices ("ebensartn) 2). Natural: proportional
relationship between active cognitive engagement
(Denktatigkeit) and earthly black gall (associated with
reason and knowledge of the natural world) 3). Divine:
astrological influence of the planet Saturn.
Melancholic sickness or immobilization will occur if a
change in bodily, natural, or astrological circumstances
alters the appropriate "balance" in the individual. This
can be cured through a variety of remedies, remedies that
DUrer has included in the print. Dietetic prescriptions
(such as the enema on the floor near the seated figure)
prevent the thickening of the blood and difficulty with
digestion common to melancholics. A special strand of damp
weeds or medical herbs (twisted into the crown that rests
on Melencolia's head) fights off the "natural" buildup of
bile that affects the mental and spiritual well being of
those born under Saturn. To counteract this "divine" fate,
the benign influence of Jupiter (as seen in the magic
square behind Melencolia) is called on so that the
melancholic's creative potential might be fUlfilled.
33
33 Panofsky and Saxl, "Melencolia I", pp. 50-52. "Drei Kategorien von
Gegenmitteln waren es ja, die Ficino den Melancholikern ernpfahl:
diatetische, rnedikarnentose und rnagisch-astrologische; und alle drei
97
All three remedies prescribed by Ficino transform the
slothful medieval melancholic into the Renaissance creative
genius. But how complete or final is this metamorphosis?
Are the conflicting saturnine forces united into a cohesive
symbolic whole? In other words, do these competing
melancholic forces offset each other (the authors'
"geistige Einheit"34) or is the balance from which
creativity emerges tense and inherently unstable?
According to Panofsky and Saxl, each of the pictorial
motifs represents an opposing force that is balanced by
another of the composition's visual elements. For example,
the dog represents the "psychic" spirit of one who can
chase melancholic thoughts away (on the other hand, some
dogs also symbolize torpid melancholy), while the child as
the symbolic containment of the intellectual sphere holds
onto these thoughts. The active child can also be
contrasted with the physically inactive, mute lady who
Kategorien finden wir auf DUrers Stich genau in der ihnen zukornmenden
Rangordnung vertreten: die diaetetischen Mittel (urn mit dem
prosaischsten zu beginnen) bekarnpfen die "rnenschliche" Ursache, namlich
die Verdickung des Blutes und die Austrocknung des Gehirns infolge der
angestrengten Denkarbeit, ... Die rnedikarnentosen Mittel bekampfen die
'natUrliche' Ursache, die die auf der Verwandschaft zwischen der
Denktatigkeit und den Eigenschaften der 'erdhaften' schwarzen Galle
beruht, sie sind vertreten durch den Blatterkranz, den sich die Frau
urns Haupt gewunden hat ... Die rnagisch-astrologischen Mittel endlich
begegnen der 'hirnmlischen' Ursache, d.h. dern Einfluss derjenigen
Planeten, die zugleich die Sterne der geistigen Arbeit und der
rnelancholischen Erkrankung sind, des Merkur und namlich des Saturn, und
diese Mittel finden wir zu Haupten der Figur reprasentiert in Gestalt
eines jener 'rnagischen' Zahlen-quadrate."
98
searches for mathematical truths.
35
Panofsky and Saxl claim
that Melencolia has been, for the first time, raised to the
"sphere of the symbolic" and that she is now the embodiment
of the "mathematical arts.,,36
Melencolia I is, however, not just a simple,
metaphorical reference to creative endeavor. DUrer's
winged figure is also a creature that attempts to combine
her mathematical, mechanical skill with her artistic
imagination in a failed attempt--an inevitability--to reach
new heights of creative endeavor.
37
She aspires to but does
not grasp the divine because she is afflicted with an
"unholy inner insufficiency" ("unheilbaren inneren
Insuffizienz") .l8 Like her medieval predecessors, she is
immobilized into physical inaction. Unlike them, however,
her mind is actively engaged in a never-ending search.
Melencolia stands, so to speak, as an intermediary, a
34 Panofsky and Saxl, "Melencolia I," p. 63.
35 Panofsky and Saxl are referring to the Renaissance elevation of
geometry and Euclidean mathematical principles over non-mathematical
modes of translating space and ordering cognition. "Die mathematic is
'die' Wissenschaft der Epoche, und sie ist die Wissenschaft DUrers"
"Melencolia I", (p. 66).
36 Panofsky and Saxl, "Melencolia I," p. 68. Melencolia I: "erhoben in
die Sphare des Symbolischen: frtiher war es der 'Melancholicus', der
dargestellt wurde ... jetzt ist es die 'Melancholia.'. letztlich
mathematischen 'Kunste.'
37 Panofsky and Saxl, "Melencolia I," p. 73. The authors note that the
winged figure is closed within a box that she wishes to fly over but
cannot. The figure 'in Schranken eingeschlossen sieht, die er nicht
Uberfliegen kann und die er dennoch tiberfliegen mochten."
39 Panofsky and Saxl, "Melencolia I," p. 73.
99
modified symbolic form, between opposite worlds. Saturn,
the god who is both demon and creative inspirer and
Melencolia's ruling planet, hovers over her and guides both
her earthly and divine aspirations:
Like melancholy, Saturn, this demon of contrasts,
bestows the soul on the one hand with sloth and
dullness, but on the other hand also with the power of
intelligence and contemplation; like melancholy,
Saturn, also threatens to subjugate those, however
illustrious or intelligent they may be, with the
danger of melancholy or of false ecstasy. [and]
brings down a variety of men, whether godly or beastly
happy or in deepest despair [poverty] .39
In the final analysis, Melencolia I who embodies both
torpid dejection ("dumpfe Trubsal") and the "pure joy of
creativity" ("reine Schaffensfreude")--opposing qualities
necessary for the production of art--is a material metaphor
for historical transformation.
In other words, the authors' interpretation of Durer's
engraving appears as a visual symbol of the constructedness
of art and of art history. Panofsky and Saxl's struggle to
decode the complexly interwoven emblems is consistent with
an interpretation of a creature/artist/critic who is trying
39 Panofsky and Saxl, "Melencolia I," p. 19. "wie die Melancholie, 50
verleiht auch der Saturn, dieser Damon der Gegansatze, der Seele auf
der einen Seite die Tragheit und den Stumpf sinn, auf der andern die
Kraft der Intelligenz und Kontemplation, wie sie bedroht auch er die
ihm Unterworfenen, mogen sie an und fUr sich noch 50 erlauchte Geister
sein, stets mit den Gefahren des TrUbens oder der irren Ekstaste ..
Menschen, die von den andern verschieden sind, gottliche oder
tierische, glUckselige oder vom tiefsten Elend darniedergebeugte'."
100
to overcome theoretical limitations and contradictions.;8
Indeed, the authors are searching for the philosophical or
literary thread (in this case Ficino's text) that connects
the different historical and artistic objects into a
unified whole. This unity, nevertheless, is not static but
dynamic.
DUrer's Melencolia I is not a material symbol that
transcends her past. The superimposition of references to
antiquity, magic, Egypt and astrology gives the engraving
an encyclopedic quality that telescopes the process of
historical transformation. The dialectic balance of
opposing, creative forces are not contained and then
transformed into a Hegelian ideal. Rather, Panofsky and
Saxl's interpretation of DUrer's image, with the visible
presence of its many guises, is a richly textured metaphor
that operates on many different levels. For the purposes of
this chapter, the image is an apt symbol for an
interpretive process that is never-ending and is replete
with contradictions--one that offers us a glimmer of the
past and the historical process of transformation.
So it appears, without reference to all connections
40 For Kant, in the The Critique of Pure Reason, [trans., J.M.D.
Meiklejohn (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1934)], the relevant
experience of nature (of the object) is defined through human
cognition. He gives primary importance to the subject. Certainly,
Panofsky's privileging of the subject is consistent with other neo-
Kantian theorists such as Ernst Cassirer.
101
with astrology and medicine, with Marsiglio Ficino and
likenesses of children and planets, and even with the
justifiable perception that the engraving Melencolia I
might be seen as something else-as an ennobling
Temperament or as a picture of sickness: as self-
knowledge or as the Faustian expression "inability to
know". [But] it is the face of the old Saturn, that
gazes at us, [and on it] we have the privilege to
recognize DUrer's ways. 41
The Origin of German Tragic Drama and Albrecht Durer
Walter Benjamin's complex Origin of German Tragic
Drama is an analysis of the "mourning plays" of obscure
seventeenth-century German tragic dramatists. These dramas
are stories about ineffectual (or tyrannical), melencholic
Sovereigns and the Intriguers who plot to subvert their
power. Benjamin compares the flawed protagonists of these
plays with the more "completely realized" Baroque "tragic
hero" of Pedro Calder6n's Life is But a Dream. Benjamin
concludes, in Part I, that no universal lessons can be
gleaned from the German tales of death, despair and
destruction. The Sovereign, unlike a tragic hero, is a
figure of failure. He is doomed to reenact the useless,
41 Panofsky and Saxl, "Melencolia I," p. 76. "So scheint denn,
unbeschadet aller Zusammenhange mit der Astrologie und der Medizin, mit
Marsiglio Ficino und den planetenkinderbildern, doch auch die
Ernpfindung derer gerechtfertigt, die in dem Kupferstich Melencolia I
etwas anderes sehen Mochten, als ein, wenn auch noch 50 sehr
veredeltes, Temperaments--oder Krankheitsbild: ein Selbstbekenntnis und
einen Ausdruck faustischen, "Nichtwissenkonnens". Es ist das Antlitz
des alten Saturn, das uns anblickt, allein wir haben ein Recht, darin
102
self-destructive power plays that history recycles.
Benjamin's contrast of Calderon's mythic tragic hero
(one ultimately derived from the hero of ancient Greek
tragedy) and the flawed and human protagonists of the
Reformation mourning plays, provides the structure for his
critique of twentieth-century philosophical, historical and
literary analyses (those derived from Enlightenment
philosophy). In Part 2 of Origin, he proposes a new
philosophy of history, one derived from an "allegorical way
of seeing." For Benjamin, Baroque mourning plays and
Durer's Melencolia I are the material translations of this
philosophy of history.
The German Trauerspiel [mourning play] was never
able to inspire itself to new life: it was never
able to awaken within itself the clear light of
self-awareness. It remained astonishingly obscure
to itself, and was able to portray the
melancholic only in the crude and washed-out
colours of the mediaeval complexion-books. What
then is the purpose of this excursus? The images
and figures presented in the German Origin are
dedicated to Durer's genius of winged melancholy.
The intense life of its crude theatre begins in
the presence of this genius.
42
In his analysis of the German tragic drama, Benjamin
relies specifically on the discussion by Warburg, Giehlow,
auch CUrers Ztige wiederzuerkennen."
42 Benjamin, Origin, p. 158.
103
and Panofsky and Saxl of the four humors and their
relationship to human temperament. DUrer's melancholic
figure in Origin is, as in the above interpretations,
characterized by dark humor and indigence, but also by
creativity and artistic genius. Benjamin claims,
following Panofsky and Saxl, that Melencolia I is ruled
over by the planet Saturn, which
by virtue of its quality as an earthly, cold, and dry
planet, gives birth to totally material men, suited
only to hard agricultural labour--but in absolute
contrast, by virtue of its position as the highest of
the planets it gives birth to the most extreme
spiritual religiosi contemplativi, who turn their
backs on all earthly
DUrer's figure does not completely fall under the sway of
the Saturn because she is protected by the magic square of
Jupiter: "Saturn becomes the protector of the most sublime
investigations; astrology itself is under his sway. Thus
it was that DUrer could arrive at the intention of
'expressing the spiritual concentration of the prophet in
the facial features of
As in Panofsky's and Saxl's interpretation, Melencolia
I embodies the earthy, material and experiential world of
Saturn but avoids descending into the abyss because
Saturn's influence is mitigated by Jupiter's. Is she then a
43 Benjamin, Origin, pp. 149-150.
104
symbol of Ficino's earthbound genius, who desires to
apprehend the world of the divine? In other words, is
Benjamin's interpretation about artistic creativity?
Unlike Panofsky and Saxl, Benjamin is not interested
in the notion of artistic genius, nor in how the human mind
conquers or rises above the natural world. The still figure
that is engaged in a frenzied but futile mental activity
aimed at transcending the world of the material for that of
the divine is a symbol of failure.
45
She fails not because
she does not measure up to some metaphysical concept of
genius but because DUrer's Melencolia I represents "the
concept of the pathological state, in which the most simple
object appears to be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom
because it lacks a natural, creative relation to US."46
According to Benjamin, the most significant part of
DUrer's engraving (which he claims Panofsky and Saxl
missed) is the inert, massive stone. The stone refers to a
petrified nature--to the natural world that humanity has
vanquished. It is the reminder of a once-living object. As
a symbol of man's futile attempts to control and order a
dead world, the stone also becomes a metaphor for the
44 Benjamin, Origin, p. 151.
45 Architectural ruins and the modern city of Paris in Benjamin's later
work in the Passagenarkaden are similar to the allegories of decay and
destruction present in Origin.
105
history of human historical understanding, of how we have
set ourselves apart from the world of authentic experience.
This is an important point of difference between the
two interpretations. Panofsky and Saxl wish to unlock the
singular metaphysical concept and the heterogeneous
historical forces, which illuminate some aspect of the
subject, DUrer's, Renaissance world. Benjamin, on the other
hand, wants to allow the object world to speak to us. He
points out that "in the proximity of Albrecht DUrer's
Melencolia, the utensils of active life are lying around
unused on the floor, [but they are to be seen] as objects
of contemplation. 1117 Wri tten on the material obj ects in
disarray at Melencolia's feet are clues to the past.
Melencolia I captures the Origin's mournful quality in that
she stares, contemplating history's arbitrarily discarded
objects. Although these objects represent the past (the
gods of antiquity), they are also the ostentatious material
accoutrements of a Baroque that is on the edge of decay and
ruin.
4e
In DUrer's engraving especially, the ambivalence of
this is enriched by the fact that the animal [the dog]
is depicted asleep: bad dreams come from the spleen,
46 Benj amin, Origin, p. 140.
n Benjamin, Origin, p. 140.
48 Pens ky, Melancholy Dialectics, p. 85. Pens ky quotes Benj amin: "for
these are not so much plays that cause mourning, as plays for the
mournful. A certain ostentation is characteristic of these people."
106
but prophetic dreams are also the prerogative of the
melancholic. As the common lot of princes and martyrs
they are a familiar element in the Trauerspiel.
49
Melencolia I is in the final analysis a pictorial allegory
about ruin and failure--about the failure of man to
intervene in the destruction of his own relationship to the
natural world.
But Melencolia I also symbolizes redemption. She makes
possible, through her elevation to didactic, allegorical
symbol, the restoration of humanity's original relationship
to a pre-historic world.
The deadness of the figures and the abstraction
of the concepts are therefore the precondition
for the allegorical metamorphosis of the pantheon
into a world of magical, conceptual creatures, a
world which had once existed in the pre-history
of our "primitive" past.
50
Benjamin's Allegory: Philosophy, the Image and Baroque Tragic Drama
Allegory is a literary trope whereby an author lifts
objects from their conventional context and manipulates
them in order to generate new meanings. Because words or
images are wrenched from their typical function as mimetic
49 Benj amin, Origin, p. 152.
50 Benjamin, Origin, p. 226.
107
transcribers of nature, the author's intent is evident. For
Benjamin, allegory is more than an artistic device,
however. He uses it to deconstruct historical and
philosophical interpretations of meaning--to question the
traditional idealist conception of the symbol as a
universal, totalized entity. Taking his cue from Nietzsche,
Benjamin sought to amend Kantian universal philosophical
precepts and unmask Hegelian progressive
51 Many of Benjamin's early writings were attempts to amend the distinct
Kantian categories of experience and knowledge. See for example "On the
Program of the Coming Philosophy" in Walter Benjamin: Selected
Writings, 1913-1926 (ed. Marcus Bullock and W. Jennings, The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA and London:
1996, pp. 100-110). In the opening sentence to the essay he writes that
"The central task of the coming philosophy will be to take the deepest
intimations it draws from our times and our expectation of a great
future, and turn them into knowledge by relating them to the Kantian
system," ("Philosophy," p. 100). He then stated that Kant's system of
apprehending knowledge should be regarded as "a low, perhaps the lowest
order" because of its reliance on finite scientific categories
("Philosophy," p. 100). Benjamin wished to eliminate the Kantian
distinction between subject and object and introduce a theological
absolute. Nevertheless he retained elements of Kantian philosophical
precepts. In the closing of the essay he states, that "the demand upon
the philosophy of the future can ultimately be put in these words: to
create on the basis of the Kantian system a concept of knowledge to
which a concept of experience corresponds, of which the knowledge is
the teachings [Lehre]. Such a philosophy in its universal element
would either itself be designated as theology or would be
superordinated to theology to the extent that it contains historically
philosophical elements." ("Philosophy," p. 108)
Howard Caygill, in an important and insightful account of
Benjamin's concept of experience, suggests that Benjamin's concept of
"origin" in the German Tragic Drama is derived from the Hermann Cohen's
conception of it "as a means of uniting intuition and the
understanding, but it is given a quite different inflection by
Benjamin. The notion of 'origin' is situated in terms of the
traditionally Kantian refusal of the alternatives of an inductive
materialism and a deductive idealisrn--the form of the 'mourning play'
as an 'origin' cannot be inductively extracted from surviving examples
of the genre, nor deduced from ideal considerations in abstraction from
individual works." (Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, London
and New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 57).
108
Regarding the latter, Michael Jennings asserts that
"Benjamin's philosophy denies to history the existence of
any objective totality within which events occur and are
integrated. ,,52
Benjamin conceives of the allegorical form as a
"poetic response" to modernity's "degradation" of language,
degradation enshrined in Greek, Renaissance, and idealist
aesthetic thought.
53
Benjamin argues that the symbol during
these periods took precedence over allegory. With the
symbol's ascendance, tensions and arnbiguities--the stuff of
genuine human action that signal an actual dialogue with
the world--were resolved in favor of idealized narratives
where the "beautiful is supposed to merge with the divine
in an unbroken whole. , , 5 ~
Allegory moves the myth/symbol from its position as an
unchanging universal construct and puts it back in time. As
Howard Caygill asserts, "the symbol tries to make the
fini te participate in the infini te, to freeze the moment
into an image of eternity, while allegory inscribes death
52 Jennings, Dialectical Images, p. 46.
53 Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: the Philosophy of Walter
Benjamin, trans. Jane Marie Todd, (New York and London: The Guilford
Press, 1996), p. 98. Rochlitz' analysis of allegory is crucial to my
interpretation here.
54 Benjamin, Origin, p. 160.
109
into signification. ,,55 Rather than lull us into a dream-like
state of admiration, images such as DUrer's melancholic
figure jar us out of our complacency by disrupting
tradi tional modes of thought. 56 They allow us, in other
words, to "interrupt" the mythic, timeless narrative with
the "authentic" experience of death.
51
What is important to recognize is the central place
visual works of art hold in this methodology. 5e These
images provide us "flashes" of the past that we can
recognize in the present.
59
We re-experience, in other
words, the actual time of making and the moment the image
is recognized as a work of art.
60
These images are
55 Caygill, Walter Benjamin, p. 59.
S ~ Benjamin's famous remark regarding history should be noted here: "To
articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way
it really was'. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at
the moment of danger ... The danger is one and the same for [the
tradition and its receivers]. In every era the attempt must be made
anew to win tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower
it." (I.2, p. 695 and trans. as "Theses on the Philosophy of History,"
Illuminations, p. 257).
5, David S. Ferris, "Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History', pp. 8-
12 in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (Stanford University
Press: Stanford CA, 1996), p. 11.
56 Only those texts that are "visual" in nature fi t Benj amin 's defini tion
of allegory. "Das ursprungliche Interesse an der Allegorie ist nicht
sprachlich sondern optisch," (I, 2, p. 686).
59 Benjamin, I, 2, p. 695. These flashes of the past are recognizable to
us as images: ("Nur als Bild, das auf Nimmerwiedersehen im Augenblick
seiner Erkennbarkeit eben aufblitzt, ist die Vergangenheit
festzuhalten") .
60 Benjamin states that "the historical index of images does not only
say that they belong to a specific time [einer bestimmten Zeit], above
all it says that they first enter into legibility at a specific time
[sie erst in einer bestimmten Zeit zur Lesbarkeit kommen]" (5.1, pp.
577-78; N3, 1). Trans. in David S. Ferris, "Aura, Resistance, and the
110
transcriptions of a history, that, as Ferris puts it, "must
belong to a present. ,,61
Each now is the now of a defined recognition. .It is
not that the past throws its light on the present, or
that the present throws its light on the past; rather,
an image is a coming together, in a flash of lighting,
of what was with the now into a constellation [of
recognizability] . In other words, an image is
dialectics at a standstill.
6
:
Buck-Morss explains that the image functions as a
screen that stands at the intersection of dreaming/waking
(consciousness) and of frozen/transitory nature.
63
Behind us
are the discarded but known objects of a useless frozen
history, while before us lies the unknown. With their
decaying, overripened and overabundant accumulation of
visual emblems, aesthetic objects such as DUrer's engraving
are the embodiments (Wolin's "prefigurements") of
redemptive possibilities.
64
Only when the work of art is
"mortified", stripped of its historical "contents" and
aestheticization, is redemption possible: ~ 5
Event of History," p. 9.
61 Ferris, "Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History," p. 10.
62 Benjamin, 5, 1, p. 578; N3, 1. "Jetzt ist das Jetzt einer bestimmten
Erkennbarkeit. . . Nicht so ist es, dass das Vergangene sein Licht auf
das Gegenwartige oder das Gegenwartige sein Licht auf das Vergangene
wirft, sondern Bild ist dasjenige, worin das Gewesene mit dem Jetzt
blitzhaft zu einer Konste1lation zusammentritt. Mit andern Worten:
Bild ist die Dialektik im Stillstand."
~ 3 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 211.
64 Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 1994, 2
nd
Edition), p. 21.
~ 5 Benjamin notes that the "the introduction of this distorted
111
The object of philosophical criticism is to show that
the function of artistic form is as follows: to make
historical content, such as provides the basis of
every important work of art, into a philosophical
truth. This transformation of material content into
truth content makes the decrease in effectiveness,
whereby the attraction of earlier charms diminishes
decade by decade, into the basis for a rebirth, in
which all ephemeral beauty is completely stripped off,
and the work stands as a ruin. In the allegorical
construction of the baroque Trauerspiel such ruins
have always stood out clearly as formal elements of
the preserved work of art. 66
Benjamin's organization of The Origin of German Tragic
Drama is itself suggestive of an allegory because of the
disjunctive juxtaposition of the protagonists of German
baroque drama with Durer's winged figure from Melencolia I.
Removing an artistic icon from its traditional context
strips it of its mythic power and endows it wi th a new
function. When combined wi th reminders of inertia, death
and decay--such as references to the once-potent "dead"
gods of antiquity--Durer's Melencolia I functions as
forceful allegory. 6,
conception of the symbol into aesthetics was a romantic and destructive
extravagance which preceded the desolation of modern art criticism,"
(Origin, p. 160).
66 Benjamin, Origin, p. 182. Further analysis of Benjamin's conception
of history will be presented in Chapter 3.
67 See Rochlitz, who observes that "Retranslated into 'theological'
terms, Benjamin's symbol and allegory are principles analogous to those
that Nietzsche, following the romantics and Schopenhauer, called the
apollonian and dionysian. . . but whereas the Nietzschean principles
come together in Greek tragedy, Benjaminian allegory is radically
foreign to the 'symbolic' principle and cannot in any case be linked to
it. Allegory represents a 'sublimity' that is unfamiliar with the
beautiful appearance," (p. 103).
112
Allegory corresponds to the ancient gods in the
deadness of its concrete tangibility. There is then,
a pro founder truth than is generally believed in the
statement: proximity of the gods is indeed one of
the most important prerequisites for the vigorous
development of allegory." 68
Images of the dead Greek (classical) gods depicted in
the increasingly secular world of the Baroque are the
central protagonists in Benjamin's analysis in Origin.
These images, which were once fearsome, divine presences,
are now the empty reminders of a dead past. deadness
of the figures and the abstraction of the concepts are
therefore the precondition for the allegorical
metamorphosis of the pantheon into a world of magical
creature-concepts." 69
In the worlds of the Renaissance and Baroque,
classical deities survived as images on Tarot cards, as
astrological signs or as These dead gods,
embodiments of Baroque decay, are the
68
core of the allegorical way of seeing, [because]
the Baroque secular exposition of history as the
suffering of the world . . . is meaningful only in
periods of decline. The greater the meaning, the
greater the subjection to death, because death digs
out most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between
physical nature and meaning.
71
Benjamin, Origin, p. 266.
69 Benjamin, I, p. 399. Trans. In Buck-Morss, Dialectics, p. 165.
70 See Buck-Morss, Dialectics, pp. 159-201.
I, 1, p. 343, trans. Buck-Morss, Dialectics, p. 162.
113
Benjamin borrows Nietzsche's conception of the tragic
hero (from The Birth of Tragedy) as an "aesthetic
creation."
With his insight into the connection of tragedy to
legend, and the independence of the tragic from the
ethos, Nietzsche's work lays the foundation for a
thesis such as this ... For Nietzsche. . tragic
myth is a purely aesthetic creation and the interplay
of Apollonian and Dionysian energy remains equally
confined to the aesthetic sphere, as appearance and
the dissolution of appearance. '::
Unlike the heroes of classical tragedies, Baroque
tragic heroes are ordinary men. They are the "mute" heroes
who do not live on in tradition. Classical heroes, who play
an important role in the development of cultural
traditions, struggle with the deities in a mythic
reenactment of man's struggle with fate. They are
transformed into timeless symbols of humanity's universal
condition.
The protagonists of the Origin, on the other hand do
not battle gods but, rather, ambassadors, kings, and
figures of political A Baroque king, for
example, is simply "representative of history," a
7;:: Benjamin, Origin, p. 102.
73 Lutz P. Koepnick, "The Spectacle, the Trauerspiel, and the Politics
of Resolution: Benjamin Reading the Baroque Reading Weimar" in
Critical Inquiry 22 (Winter 1996): p. 278.
114
conventional figure who attempts to maintain order in a
violent and turbulent Although he is endowed with
absolute power, his indecisiveness renders him powerless
and unable to alter the dialectic relationship between
himself (as the "Sovereign") and the "Intriguer."'5 As a
figure of defeat (like the winged figure in Durer's
Melencolia I), the Sovereign is plunged into melancholic
contemplation of the past.
Unlike the death of the tragic hero, Benjamin
conceives of the inevitable death of the sovereign in the
Origin as no more than a repetition of countless other
deaths. No philosophical or moral truths can be drawn from
it because there are no mythic heroes. In an earlier essay,
"Trauerspiel and Tragedy" (1916), Benjamin notes that the
German tragic drama of the sixteenth century (the mourning
play)
is ennobled by the distance which everywhere separates
image and mirror-image. [It] presents us not with
the image of a higher existence but only with one of
two mirror-images, and its continuation is not less
schematic than itself. The dead become ghosts. The
mourning play exhausts artistically the historical
idea of [mythic]
14 See Max Pensky, Melencholy Dialectics, pp. 75-107 for a detailed
account of this.
'5 Caygill, Walter Benjamin, p. 60.
Walter Benjamin, "Trauerspiel and Tragedy," written in 1916 but
unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime, in Walter Benjamin: Selected
115
Without a moral ending or some point to the story, all we
as readers are left with is "carnage", and the empty
repetition of endless chaotic "presents."
In an effort to give meaning to this "void," Baroque
man "ostentatiously" fills it up with the fragmented shells
of his decaying world.
The baroque knows no eschatology and for this reason
it possesses no mechanism by which all earthly things
are gathered together and exalted before being
consigned to their end. The Hereafter is emptied of
everything which contains the slightest breath of this
world, and from [itl the baroque extracts a profusion
of things which customarily escaped the grasp of
artistic formulation and, at its high point, brings
them violently into the light of day, in order to
clear an ultimate heaven enabling it, as a vacuum, one
day to destroy the world with catastrophic
The Baroque viewer gazes at the display of dead
things, contemplating them and hoping to glean some kind of
authentic meaning before consigning them to destruction.
Lutz Koepnick maintains that these Baroque emblems are
aestheticized "substitutes for nature," images which have
been turned into spectacle.
79
On the one hand, Melencolia I
is the discarded shell of a nature degraded by the empty
Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, p. 57.
17 Pensky, Melencholy Dialectics, p. 81.
19 Benjamin, Origin, p. 47.
79 Lutz Koepnick, "The Spectacle, the Trauerspiel, and the Politics of
Resolution," p. 274.
116
search for universal precepts of knowledge. "Melancholy
betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But [on the
other hand,] in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces
dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem
them."sa Ruin and the degradation of beauty, in other words,
are the pre-conditions necessary for the apprehension of
truth and redemption.
During the Baroque period, the "redeemed" were those
who could rise above all the death, moral depravity and
political corruption by rejecting present worldly
materiality. Such common visual emblems as the skull were
reminders of the ephemerality of the material and the
hopelessness of contemporary reality. As such, they were
reminders that salvation was possible only through death.
Richard Wolin points out that it "is not in spite of but
because of the utter squalor and despair of its material
content," that salvation might be
The Baroque images which captured the political crises
caused by years of religious and political warfare, were
significant for Benjamin, because they could, in turn, be
appropriated as images of redemption for a Weimar decaying
from the aftermath of World War I, and wrenched by
80 Benjamin, Origin, p. 157.
81 Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin, p. 70.
117
inflation, uncertainty, and anti-Semitism. The study of
the "fragmented" allegories of the Baroque dramatists,
whose tragedies sprung from the early capitalist era, is,
in fact, the foundation for Benjamin's later explorations
of the ruined arcades of late nineteenth-century industrial
Paris and for his montage-like analyses of post-World War I
popular cuI ture. 82
lconology: Panofsky's Method of Art Historical Interpretation.
In his informative and important study, The Critical
Historians of Art, Michael Podro has suggested that two
"convergent" themes were present in Panofsky's work: the
coalescence of the ordering capacity of the mind with
external nature and the fusion of the perceptual and
Panofsky, in effect, seeks to find that
unifying thread between mind and nature, between the
subject and the object. Like Benjamin's conception of this
relationship, this thread is a mediating structure.
But unlike Benjamin's, Panofsky's definition of the
relationship between the viewing subject and the object of
9: Caygill, Walter Benjamin, p. 57.
83 Podro, The Critical Historians, p. 178. See also Michael Ann Holly,
Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History. Holly's book has been in
an invaluable guide to me in this undertaking.
118
contemplation can be evaluated through the location of an
Archimedean point, one that is given a-priori and that
stands outside history and its distortions. "It is the
curse and blessing of Art History that the art object may
raise the essential claim that it be perceived as something
other than just historical."84 One can view the past from
the present because this singular Archimedean viewpoint is
unchanging. Panofsky's historical thread, a cognitive
construct, runs alongside history, spatially joining its
subjective transformations to the mind's perception of
them. It is not Benjamin's Ur-form but, rather, Cassirer's
neo-Kantian unchanging symbolic form.
55
Panofsky develops his three-tiered method of iconology
as the "essential tendency of the human mind" to
cognitively organize the perceptions of reality/nature.
An unchanging construction (a mediator or symbolic form)
24 Erwin Panofsky, "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens" (1920), reprinted in
Aufsatze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft ed. Hariolf Oberer and
Egon Verhegen (Berlin: Hessling, 1964), p. 33. "Es ist der Fluch und
der Segen der Kunstwissenschaft, dass ihre Objekte r r ~ t Notwendigkeit
den Anspruch erheben, anders als nur historisch von uns erfasst zu
werden." Essay originally published in Zeitschrift fUr Asthetik und
allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1920), pp. 321-39. Trans. by Kenneth
J. Northcote and Joel Snyder as "The Concept of Artistic Volition,"
Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), pp. 17-34.
85 Although Panofsky uses a neo-Kantian model, with his reference to a
scientific absolute viewpoint (the Archirnidean pOint), he modifies
Kant's conception of causality. Podro sums this up quite succinctly:
"It is irrelevant to Panofsky's use of this parallel, that for Kant we
had to inject the concept of cause into experience. What was important
for Panofsky was that it was assumed to be a concept we did not derive
from experience but one which we brought to experience in order to give
it its intelligibility," (p. 181).
119
allows the historian an absolute view of the past. The
symbolic form acts to constrain the possibilities of the
myriad subjective interpretations that the historian/critic
may give to a work of art. As the mediator between
subjectivity and objectivity, it acts as a plane of
resolution. Onto this planar repository, historical
specificity is mapped. The critic who follows Panofsky's
three-tiered method can uncover meaning in a work of art
because the structured symbolic form/mediator is a
universal guide.
Panofsky's mediator differs from Cassirer's symbolic
form in that it does not, like Cassirer's, ultimately
evolve into an ideal that stands outside history. Instead,
it remains"embedded within its subjective/historical
conditions.:36 In Idea, the notion of "idea" as an
unchanging construct that organizes cognition and
perception is only a starting point for Panofsky. He is
primarily interested in the way the concept is clothed in a
variety of guises throughout the centuries--in the process,
86 See Sylvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky and Warburg: Symbol, Art and
History, trans. Richard Pierce (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1988). Ferretti suggests that Cassirer's symbolic form is an
ever-evolving concept that will ultimately be transformed into a
historically present ideal. Cassirer, she notes, searches for the core
of this ideal in the historical past. Feretti writes that "Cassirer
makes every effort to see already in Plato that ambiguity between idea
and image that is the principle of the development of modern art
theory," (p. 156).
120
that is, of transformation.
87
Humankind's need to visually
construct and spatially organize as, for example, in the
theory of linear perspective and the relationship of human
proportions to a stylistic ideal is taken as a starting
point not as an end point. From there, Panofsky employs
his theory to uncover the many historical guises under
which the fundamental cognitive principles can be found.
In "The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as
a Reflection of the History of Styles," Panofsky writes
that the
theory of human proportions was seen as both a
prerequisite of artistic production and an
expression of the pre-established harmony between
microcosm and macrocosm; and it was seen,
moreover, as the rational basis of beauty.
Perhaps the theory of proportions appeared so
infinitely valuable to the thinking of the
Renaissance precisely because only this theory--
mathematical and speculative at the same time--
could satisfy the disparate spiritual needs of
the age. ~ 8
What Panofsky seems to be saying, following the German
idealist tradition is that there exists an essential human
need to codify our relationship to nature. This
87 Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J.S.
Peake (New York: Icon Editions, 1968) originally published as Idea:
Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der alteren Kunsttheorie, Studien
der Bibliothek Warburg 5 (Leipzig: B. G Teubner Verlag, 1924).
98 Erwin Panofsky, "The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a
Reflection of the History of Styles" in Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp.
89-90. Originally published as "Die Entwicklung der Proportionslehre
als Abbild der Stilentwicklung" in Monatshefte fUr Kunstwissenschaft,
XIV (1921): pp. 188-219.
121
codification enables us to transcend the natural for
spiritual/theological possibilities. Although an "essential
tendency" (in the Cassirean sense), this codification is
given different forms in each historical era.
Panofsky describes Egyptian art as "constructed"
according to immovable and fixed proportions as though the
figures were "eternally arrested" in position waiting to be
magically resuscitated.
89
Classical Greek sculpture, on the
other hand, depicts a restrained, ideally proportioned yet
"alive" body. In the Middle Ages, although Greek classical
movement was retained somewhat, the figures move "under the
influence of a higher power" (fixed to the plane) rather
than according to the rules of vision.?C In the
Renaissance, the return and reinterpretation of classical
figural movement along with the use of perspective allowed
artists to construct a new ideal of beauty. This ideal,
which was derived from the classical, Vitruvian theory of
harmonious proportions, was based on the appearance of
natural, restrained movement.
Thus, on the one hand, the normative significance of
the human body for the interpretation of natural objects is
taken as a constant in the history of art. On the other
99 Panofsky, "The History of the Theory of Human Proportions," p. 98.
90 Panofsky, "The History of the Theory of Human Proportions," p. 90.
122
hand, the form it takes is continually changing.
9
: This
contradictory combination of transience and fixity is also
evident in the essay Perspective as Symbolic Form.
Linear perspective, simply put, is a type of
mathematical construction that allows for the visible
transcription of perception. Perfected by the artists of
the Italian Renaissance, linear perspective is a practical
set of rules that guide artists in their efforts to
reproduce a "window onto the world." In effect, this two-
dimensional material translation of vision organizes
perception as an easily reproducible representation.
In the first half of the paper, Panofsky relativizes
this process as culturally determined. Renaissance
perspectival images are arbitrarily derived from the
limited-range view of a single stationary eye and
"represent the planar cross section of the visual pyramid
[that] can pass for an adequate reproduction of our optical
image." Panofsky then states that "in fact, these two
premises are rather bold abstractions from reality. nO: We
see according to curvilinear rather than linear
perspective. Ours is a "projection not on a flat but on a
91 Not all human ideals are equal however, for Panofsky. See Chapter 3
for a discussion of the position of the Renaissance in the history of
Art.
~ Panofsky, "Perspective," p. 29.
123
concave surface. ,,93
In the second half of the essay, the linear
perspective of the Italian Renaissance is set up as a norm
with which other modes of translating vision are compared.
Perspective eventually comes not only to organize but also
to match perception with representation (understood as
mimesis). As a construction, it is all embracing and
reaches out to incorporate both the viewer and the object
within its field. Perspective, in effect, becomes "an
objectification of the subjective" despite Panofsky's
earlier claims to the contrary.94 Christopher Wood
criticizes Panofsky's conflation of spatial treatment with
a world philosophical view (the "identification of the art
object with the world object"), and notes that ultimately
"Panofsky was unwilling to perceive a divergence of
symbolic systems. ,,95
93 Panofsky, "Perspective," p. 31.
94 Panofs ky, "Perspective", p. 65. Also see Chris topher S. Wood's
"Introduction" to the Perspective essay. Wood claims that "On the last
page of Idea, Panofsky makes the fundamental neo-Kantian point about
the incommensurability of cognitive models ... In a footnote, however,
Panofsky admits a distinction between artistic perception and cognition
in general ... To some extent the perspective essay collapses this
distinction ... Perspective made a promising case study not because it
described the world correctly, but because it described the world
according to a rational and repeatable procedure ... Perspective
encourages a strange kind of identification of the art-object and
world-object," (pp. 12-13).
95 Wood, "Introduction", p. 24. For a comparison between Panofsky and
Cassirer and an analysis of "Perspective" see Michael Ann Holly,
Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, pp. 130-157. Also see
Keith Moxey, "Perspective, Panofsky, and the Philosophy of History," in
124
But "Perspective" is not so much about the scientific
veracity of linear perspective nor even about our need to
define a singular cultural Weltanschauung.
96
Panofsky's
"Perspective" essay expands in scope beyond its original
intention to historically evaluate the use of a specific
set of rules. In effect, the analysis of perspective
evolves into an underscoring of the importance of a visual
language in the interpretation of and construction of human
experience. The essay becomes an excursus on the nature of
artistic language as a creator of mystic, transcendent
reality. In other words, Panofsky uses the language of
perspective to explore a philosophy that embraces Kantian
abstractions but also seeks to go beyond Enlightenment
epistemology. Indeed, Panofsky's conclusion that
perspective "expands human consciousness into a vessel of
New Literary History 26 (Autumn 1995): pp. 775-786.
96 For an analysis of Panofsky's interpretation of perspective that is a
somewhat different approach from Wood's, see James Elkins, The Poetics
of Perspective, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994),
pp. 118-216. Elkins suggests that "Panofsky's fundamental enabling
concept is the metaphorization of perspective and not the specific form
that the metaphor takes, whether it is a mistaken reading or not. (p.
188) ... Chris Wood aptly compares Panofsky's affection for linear
perspective to 'Kant's reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism'.
This diplomatic solution is good for the essay. . . but a
responsible reading cannot ignore that it directly contradicts the
claims of the first section. (p. 200). . . It has been said that
"Perspektive als 'symbolische Form'" remains the most important essay
on perspective in our century. . . and I would once again broaden the
claim and consider it an essay about the concept of the Renaissance and
about the possibility of art history," (p. 204).
See also Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman
(Cambridge MA and London: The MIT Press, 1995), pp. 2-22, for his
analysis of Panofsky's essay.
125
the divine" approaches Benjamin's about the allegorical
image's redemptive potential.
97
In another essay, "Albrecht DUrer and Classical
Antiquity," Panofsky suggests that artistic interpretation
does not depend on viewing direct models from nature.
ge
He
points out that DUrer, who "had to start the Renaissance
movement himself," had not actually seen antique statuary
but, rather, only Italian copies of it. His inspired
translation of the Italian translation of the antique
resulted in the inception of the Northern Renaissance.
99
As seen in this essay and in "The History and Theory of
Human Proportions," the study of art history is not simply
about the search for normative ideals (that are given a-
priori) but about illuminating the nature of artistic
transformations and interconnections. How this objective
core fuses with subjective and historical immediacy to
produce meaning underlies much of Panofsky's early
writings.
~ Panofsky, "Perspective," p. 72.
98 Erwin Panofsky, "Albrecht DUrer and Classical Antiquity", in Meaning
in the Visual Arts, pp. 236-285. Orginally published as "Durers
Stellung zur Antike" in Jahrbuch fUr Kunstgeschichte I (1921/22): pp.
43-92.
99 Panofsky, "Albrecht DUrer and Classical Antiquity," pp. 282.
126
Summary: Panofsky's lconology and Benjamin's Allegory
In summary, Panofsky's iconology and Benjamin's
allegory concern mediation as method. The authors impose
language as the intercessor and partner in the mind/world
dialogue. Mediation in this sense does not refer to
compromise, to a balancing of opposites, but rather to
dissolution of oppositions. Benjamin and Panofsky focus on
the connective thread that allows the dualities to merge
which structure phenomenon and assure the legibility of
nature.
Their early studies are theoretical inquiries into how
we organize experience and knowledge. Benjamin and Panofsky
attempt to delineate the structure of the mind/world
relationship. Although both disagree with aspects of the
idealist conception of how knowledge is constructed
(certainly Benjamin more so than Panofsky), their theories
are clearly defined within this tradition. They both
respond to idealist philosophy's central premise: the
totality of the symbol as the cognitive encapsulation of
the mind/world dialogue. Nevertheless, in these early
studies, neither Benjamin nor Panofsky supports a Hegelian
reconciliation of these opposites. Rather, they are
concerned with the transcendental redemption that emerges
127
from the tension existing between the subject (mind) and
object (world) .100
Both Panofsky and Benjamin attempt to structure the
mind/world dialogue into a language of visual
representation that embraces a kind of theological
intention. DUrer's image of Melencolia I is not merely a
symbolic referent--a visual embodiment of crganized
cognitive principles that stand outside authentic human
experience. Though Panofsky's discussion of the
Renaissance and DUrer's image is firmly animated by a
reliance on "genuine" historic evidence, nevertheless, in
his early writings, as in Benjamin's, he transforms
historical wanderings into philosophical musings.
Panofsky's writing is, in fact, a mimetic
encapsulation of the transformation process. Just as linear
perspective is transformed from mathematical
organizer/mediator to a transcendent reality, Panofsky's
focus shifts and expands from an historian's to that of a
theologian/philosopher:
100 Rochlitz, in The Disenchantment of Art, states that "the history of
nature, the primitive history of meaning or intention, is that process
defined by a theology of history whereby the name deteriorates into a
sign, into intention and meaning. Compared to the name, the symbol and
allegory are imperfect modes of reference, but compared to the sign
pure and simple, they are privileged: positively or negatively, they
reveal the absence of that lasting correlation--that of the name--
between a "symbolic form' in the broad sense (in Ernst Cassirer's
sense) and a "referent' that would be predestined to it by the divine
word" ... (p. 103).
Perspective, in transforming the ousia (reality)
into the phainomenon (appearance), seems to
reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for
human consciousness; but for that very reason
conversely, it expands human consciousness into a
vessel for the divine. Perspective seals off
religious art from the realm of the dogmatic and
symbolic, where the work bears witness to, or
foretells, the miraculous. But then it opens it
to something entirely new: the realm of the
visionary, where the miraculous becomes a direct
experience of the beholder, in that the
supernatural events in a sense erupt into his
own, apparently natural, visual space and so
permit him really to "internalize" their
superna turalness. 101
Benjamin also tries to illuminate, an authentic
128
(originary) experience--the mimetic, connective thread that
joins physical nature to humankind. He wishes to illuminate
the original dialogue between man and nature that lies
hidden beneath the aesthetic cover that historic time has
imposed. Benjamin removes artistic objects from their
original context, empties them of their traditional
meanings and appropriates them for his own purposes. Rather
than ferret out the arcane, "correct" interpretation of
seventeenth-century German tragic drama, rather than find
the meaning behind the Sovereigns' deaths, Benjamin points
out that these protagonists simply reenact (repeat) past
reenactments. By eliminating the chronological continuum in
which the image/character is traditionally placed, Benjamin
101 Panofsky, "Perspective," p. 72.
129
tries to illuminate, an authentic (originary) experience--
the mimetic, connective dialogue that once joined physical
nature to humankind.
Exposing the truth or finding an answer is, thus, not
the end point for Benjamin. His purpose is ideological--in
his later writings, quite distinctly so. He wishes to
illuminate the mimetic relationship between mind and nature
as contained in the image unburdened--"mortified"--by
history. With the "mortification" of the image, the
redemptive potential present in the original mind/world
(subject/object) relationship is recovered.
The Subject/Object Duality and the Philosophy of Visual Representation
Panofsky and the Language of Representation
As early as 1920, Panofsky considered that artistic
activity should not be about "the portrayal of subjects,
but about formulations of material, [which] concern not
events but results. ,,10: In Idea, Panofsky suggested that
Durer reached a similar conclusion about artistic practice:
l O ~ Panofsky, Der Begriff des Kunstwollens," p. 33. "Die ktinstlerische
Tatigkeit ... nicht Ausserungen von Subjekten darstellen, sondern
Formungen von Stoffen, nicht Begebenheiten, sondern Ergebnisse."
130
"DUrer arrived earlier than the Italians at realizing the
problematic nature of the relationship between law and
reality, rule and genius, object and subject. He recognized
both the impossibility of establishing one universally
valid norm of beauty and the impossibility of being
satisfied with simply imitating that which was given to the
senses."I03 Panofsky seems to be setting up an oPPosition,
a problematic relationship between subject and object and
between mind and world, the nature of which is key to
understanding his theory of cultural history.
Margaret Iversen grounds Panofsky's use of this
antinomy firmly in Kantian aesthetics. She contends that,
for Panofsky, there had to be a complete separation of the
subject from the object in order for his scientific,
obj ecti ve account of history to emerge. :('4 She bases her
conclusions on an analysis of essays such as "Albrecht
DUrer and Classical Antiquity." In them, notes Iversen,
Panofsky's passion for ordering and setting up a system of
universals that would clarify the meaning of Renaissance
103 Panofsky, Idea, p. 122.
l04 Margaret Iversen, "Retrieving Warburg' s Tradition", Art History 16
(No.4, December 1993): p. 546.
"As a consequence of his remoteness, his attitude to classical art, had
to be that of a 'conquistador': It was for him a lost 'kingdom' which
had to be reconquered by a well-ordered campaign ... If something is to
become an object of knowledge it must be split off from the subject
and, if necessary, denigrated and conquered."
131
art supersedes the conflicted nor.-methodological
conclusions of Aby Warburg. She argues that Panofsky
defuses the extreme "primitive" quality of Warburg's
Apollonian and Dionysian pathos formulae by defining them
as "classes of particulars" which are "reconciliation of
opposi tes. ,,105
Indeed, in Idea, Panofsky concludes that "in its
attitude toward art the Renaissance thus differed
fundamentally from the Middle Ages in that it removed the
object from the inner world of the artist's imagination and
placed it firmly in the 'outer world.' This was
accomplished by laying a distance between 'subject' and
object' much as in artistic practice perspective placed a
distance between the eye and the world of things--a
distance which at the same time objectifies the 'object'
and personalizes the 'subject'. "l';E
Yet Panofsky writes in this same essay that the
Renaissance did not achieve a true subject/object split,
which he regarded as inconceivable in the sixteenth
105 Iversen, "Retrieving," p. 542. "While Panofsky continually interprets
both antique and Renaissance art as an harmonious reconciliation of
opposites, Warburg sees antiquity as a cultural mint which coined
enduring expressions of both sides of the opposition. His view of
Laocoon as a 'vivid embodiment of dire human suffering' suggests that
for him it represented not modernization but the very superlative of
pain and tragic pessimism. Panofsky's aim, here as elsewhere, seems to
have been to turn Warburg's dynamic, conflicted, heterogeneous
antiquity into an homogeneous, harmonious whole."
century:
It knew no more of a conflict between genius and
rule than of conflict between genius and nature;
and the compatibility of these two opposites, not
as yet set apart from each other, was clearly
expressed by the concept of Idea as reinterpreted
in the Renaissance: this concept secured freedom
to the artistic mind and at the same time limited
this freedom vis-A-vis the claims of
Subject and object are, in Panofsky's view, not clearly
split off from each other but are, rather, intertwined.
132
In yet another example, in the essay on "Perspective,"
Panofsky notes that, with the symbolic form, there is "an
objectification of the subjective," by which he is
referring to how the mind orders the phenomena of the world
according to rational cogni ti ve schema. c'}8 Again, this
ambiguous language might seem to support Iversen's
conclusions. However, Panofsky later suggests that the
relationship between how the mind structures the natural
phenomena it perceives and the actual objects themselves,
is interdependent and not oppositional. The subject and
object are not Iversen's polar opposites, which balance
each other as though on a seesaw.
Panofsky does, as Iversen asserts, diminish the role
of artistic authorship in the creation of meaning. He does
106
Panofsky, Idea, pp. 50-51.
107
Panofsky, Idea, p. 68.
108
Panofsky, "Perspective,
"
p.6.
133
indeed invest power in the conceptual (the cognitive
process) but only as part of a process of transformation.
He is interested in "subjectivity"--in the Dionysian and
irrational sense--but not in the subjective view of the
critic. The process of transformation of the symbolic form-
-its contextualization, in other words--is far too
important for a complete surrender of subjectivity. The
significance of the trans formative process, the historical
context, is evident in Idea, where he traces the concept of
"idea" through history:
the concept of the "Idea" was already transformed
into the concept of the "ideal" (Ie beau ideal)
during the Renaissance. This stripped the Idea
of its metaphysical nobility but at the same time
brought it into a beautiful almost organic
conformity with nature: an Idea which is produced
by the human mind but, far from being subjective
and arbitrary, at the same time expresses the
laws of nature embodied in each object.
109
In fact, Panofsky's conclusions approach those of
Benjamin's when he considers the agency of the object. In
other words, for Panofsky, there is not clear separation of
the subject/object but, rather, a fusion and a
The viewer's experience and perception of
the visual must be combined with what is "actually" given
in nature so that a "true" language of representation can
be delineated. A-priori cognitive principles and
134
experiential perception are fused into a new language and
mapped on to a two-dimensional plane. For Panofsky,
Renaissance linear perspective is the perfect example of
such a fusion. It becomes a norm not because it is the way
we see but because it shows us how to see, and quite easily
at that.
Panofsky in these early essays is, therefore, not
simply employing Cassirer's neo-Kantian symbolic forms as
cognitive universal concepts that mediate between the mind
and nature. He is attempting to construct his own theory
of knowledge such that visual language is not merely the
coordinator between the mind and the world. Rather, it
exists as an active facilitator and as an integral part of
the acquisition of knowledge and experience.
Language as mimetic representation is evident in
Panofsky's and Saxl's essay on Melencolia I (1923),
specifically in their description of the attributes
associated with the figure of Melencolia. Panofsky and Saxl
highlight the earthy sensuality of the melancholic through
the use of a literary language that evokes all the senses,
as though to enable the reader mentally to recreate and
experience the world of the melancholic. Although they
carefully delineate the humanist literary tradition behind
'09
- Panofsky, Idea, p. 65.
135
each of the objects in the engraving--in order to place
DUrer's work within a distinct Northern Renaissance
tradition--at the same time, the authors also incorporate
an "earthy" language into their descriptions of the
melancholic to remind us of the mundane origins of the
melancholic humor. In their discussion of the engraving's
details, Panofsky and Saxl point out that there is a
"discrete, disguised" Klistierspritze (enema) hidden on the
floor which is necessary for the regulation of digestion
(associated with one of Ficino's remedies for a disabling
melancholy, a remedy which includes suggested precautions
for the user!) .::0 When speaking of the types of men who are
born under Saturn--the leather worker, carpenter, etc.--the
authors note that "the leather worker belongs to. . the
'trades which stink', and these on the other hand belong to
Saturn, because he. himself stank. as the god of
those who cultivate the fields with dung," a play on
earthiness indeed, as though to invoke mimetically a dung-
smelling farmer fertilizing his fields with manure--a
:10 Panofsky and Saxl, "Melencolia I", p. 51. "das wichtigste die
Regelung der Verdauung ist, so sehen wir am Boden, diskret verhtillt,
eine Klistierspritze 'das ist die allgemeine Vorschrift bei
melancholischer Veranlagung' sagt ja Ficino, 'das wenn es not tut,
durch klistiere, der Unterleib stets glatt und gereinigt sei.'" "The
most important regulation for digestion, hidden discretely on the
floor, is the enema. 'it is the general prescription for the
melancholic temperament, says Ficino, which if it is necessary, to
purge [use the enema] the abdomen should be smoothed and cleansed".
136
traditional melancholic association with earthly
essentials.
ll1
In his later monograph on DUrer, Panofsky discards
this type of language for a summary list of Saturn's
workers.
1l2
In part, this change is due to the differences
between English and the picture-painting characteristic of
the German language itself. Nevertheless, the evocative
earthiness of his earlier language is not simply a result
of differences between German and English.
Panofsky is suggesting that metaphysical, cognitive
concepts merge with and are given shape and meaning by a
physical nature. He is referring not to a nature that is an
extension of man's reality but to an experience that both
stands outside and fuses with it. What emerges from this
fusion is a visual language that orders and constructs
11: Panofsky and Saxl, "Melencolia I," pp. 60, 66. "die Lederarbeit
gehort ... zu den 'Gewerben die da stinken', und diese wiederum gehoren
zum Saturn, weil er ... selbst stinkend war ... d.h. als Gott des
Ackerdungers." Panofsky and Saxl's play on language is similar to the
more elevated use of ekphrastic language used by the humanists to
arouse che imagination to mentally reconstruct the visible (as in the
portrait of a loved one) .
1 1 ~ In the DUrer monograph cf 1943, Panofsky is less evocative in his
interpretation of Melencolia I. His language is simply descriptive and
referential without the qualifying adjectives used in the earlier work.
Those born under Saturn "were hard-working peasants or labored in stone
and wood---for Saturn had been a god of the earth---privy-cleaners,
grave-diggers, cripples, beggars, and criminals," (p. 166).
On the other hand, when evaluating Durer's early engraving technique,
Panofsky's language is evocative. This may have more to do with the
abstract nature of the topic. He appears to be less "comfortable" with
subjects directly associated with the sensual. His dismissal of the
DUrer's aging wife Agnes as a "tergament who did everything in her
power to make his life miserable," attests to this. (DUrer, p. 6).
137
experience and dispels chaos. Unlike Cassirer's complete
dismissal of the object, Panofsky's conclusions concerning
the dialogue between the subject and object are consistent
with Benjamin's insistence that the latter are endowed with
their own agency. Meaning emerges from the dialogic play
between subject (the viewer) and the object (natural
material form).
In the "Perspective" essay, where Panofsky's
conclusions about theological transcendence approach those
of Benjamin's, linear perspective is not merely a
facilitator between the subject (the artist) and the world.
Rather, it is a catalyst that propels a reciprocal dialogue
between them. The object and subject are joined through a
visual language that structures experience and translates
this dialogue into a physical two-dimensional reality.
Benjamin and the language of Representation
For Benjamin, the artistic image is constructed
through montage. As in Durer's Melencolia I, fragments
with myriad past interpretations are taken out of their
specific historical context and assembled into a work of
art such that the ebbs and flows of historical time are
visually, albeit anamorphically rendered on the work of
art. Images, for Benjamin, obtain living presence by being
138
"blasted" out of history into a new continuum
that simultaneously alludes to a pre-historic origin and
points toward a redemptive future. The utopian future,
however, is mapped onto the image as a potentiality.
Transcendent possibilities (meanings), intuited from the
constellation of subject/object relationships are visible
on the allegorical image. Meaning erupts at the boundary,
as form is about to dissolve into chaos, such as when the
Renaissance image gives way to the Baroque.
Because meaning is constructed through a seemingly
random assemblage of fragments and relayed by the
subject/critic, it is possible, that Benjamin's methodology
allows his theory of culture to disintegrate under the
weight of subjectivity.l13 Indeed, Benjamin writes that, in
allegorical reading, "any person, any object, any
relationship can mean absolutely anything else."1:4
Because Benjamin's writings are far from unambiguous,
containing overtones of nineteenth-century romanticism, his
theoretical philosophy might be considered as far too
subjective.
Benjamin's statement that "we ought to be clear that
we are doing no more than inventing an abstract concept in
113
114
See Berndt Witte, Walter Benjamin, pp. 50-55.
Benjamin, Origin, pp. 174-175.
139
order to help us come to grips with an infinite series of
varied spiritual manifestations and widely differing
personalities" appears to support this contention. i15
Nevertheless, beneath this ostensible romantic guise is a
methodology that limits the range of subjective
possibilities. "Classification" or method is applicable
when "it is not treated as simply a sum of rules or
conventions but as 'structures. ,,,116 Benjamin, in other
words, wants to escape from a theory that is driven by and
constrained by order and reason. He wishes to avoid the
separation of the subject from the
Benjamin seeks to remove the individual from a
privileged position and place the object in his/her stead.
Quoting Nietzsche, he writes:
115
The entire comedy of art is neither performed for
our betterment or education. . for it is only as
an aesthetic phenomenon that the existence and
the world are eternally justified--while of
course our consciousness of our own significance
hardly differs from that which the soldiers
Benjamin, Origin, p. 40.
116 Benjamin, Origin, p. 44.
117 Schwartz writes that "the new order of linguistic knowledge is
constituted inside the closed space of representation itself; meaning
arises through the dominant logic of representation. Nature falls
silent. Knowledge no longer connotes interpretation (dialogue), but
the organization of order (disposal)." Ullrich Schwarz, Rettende Kritik
und antizipierte Utopie: Zum geschichtlichen Gehalt aesthetischer
Erfahrung in den Theorien von Jan Mukarovsky, Walter Benjamin und
Theodor W. Adorno, (Munich: W. Fink, 1981), p. 140. Quoted and trans.
in Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wolf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p.
270.
painted on canvas have of the battle represented
on it.:"':
Benjamin is arguing, following Nietzsche, that the
140
creator/author is not the initiator of cultural
"Art so firmly occupies the center existence as to make man
of its creations."120 Rather, the object itself elicits and
conditions a set of responses that the viewer receives and
translates into a constellation of meaning. When this
state of affairs is recognized, all philosophical
speculation ends.
Benjamin compares his method of combining allegorical
fragments to viewing astral constellations, the components
of which, like stars, are independent entities. Each
individual entity (the star or allegorical fragment) is
"selected" and arbitrarily joined with other entities to
li8 Benjamin, Origin, 103. Benjamin cites Nietzsche, Die Geburt der
Trag6die, (Leipzig: Fritz Koegel, 1895), p. 155.
119 What is significant for Benjamin is that the aesthetic realm is
independent of authorial production (reminiscent of the idealist
philosophy of Kant). The subject/viewer can transcend his own
subjective immersion, which results in his own disintegration through
distance (in this regard, the critic can act as mediator, as a limit to
subjective imponderables): "Only by approaching the subject from some
distance and, initially, foregoing any view of the whole, can the mind
be led, through a more or less ascetic apprenticeship, to the position
of strength from which it is possible to take in the whole panorama and
yet remain in control of oneself" (Origin, p.56).
1:0 Benjamin, Origin, p. 155.
Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, pp. 210-215. She notes that
Benjamin's "unfolding of concepts in their 'extremes' can be visualized
as antithetical polarities of axes that cross each other, revealing a
'dialectical image' at the null point, with its contradictory 'moments'
as axial fields: ... The axes of these coordinates can be designated
with the familiar Hegelian polarities: consciousness and reality," p.
141
create an image. Over time, multiple viewers create
multiple images. What is significant for Benjamin is not
the meaning behind these images, but rather, the dialogue
that produces them (the "lines" that connect the stars) .
The relationship of the selecting subject to the
object world, like a child's to the world around him, is
the original context within which humanity viewed nature.
In his autobiographical work, "A Berlin Chronicle,"
Benjamin illustrates his mimetic theory of original
representation in the examples of a child's relationship to
Nature. Lc2
To understand the world, the child visibly
reproduces his/her perceptions of it. As a bird flies
overhead, the child, in her efforts to make sense of the
creature she sees and of its actions, imitates the bird and
moves her arms as though in flight. Such mimetic language
is "not the production of the same but the generation of
the similar; it makes difference possible and with
difference, productive freedom."L:3 All forms of
communication/language, including dances of the first
peoples, were mimetic in nature and changed the unknown
into multiple, fragmented but comprehensible realities.
210.
1::;: Walter Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle", Reflections; Essays,
Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans., Edmund Jephcott, ed.
Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt, 1978).
142
With the onset of historical time, the nature of
communication changed. Language, both textual and spoken,
became "an archive of nonsensuous similarities, nonsensuous
correspondences,,,1:4 and singular meaning. Know I edge no
longer ensued from an engagement with the world but through
the subject's (our) organization of it--the consequence of
which has been the destruction of nature.
Absence of language (in its current non-mimetic form)
is central to Benjamin's conception of redemption. The
"recovery" of an original language can only occur through
melancholic, quiet contemplation. In Origin , BenJamin
notes that Socrates' defiant calculated silence, his
sacrifice without speech allows him to circumvent the
fates' decision for him.
1
'::5: The non-mimetic mode of
communication must be replaced by an allegorical,
experiential one:
It is the attempt of the moral man, still dumb, still
inarticulate--as such he bears the name of hero--to
raise himself up amid the agitation of that painful
world. The paradox of the birth of the genius in
moral speechlessness, moral infantility, constitutes
the sublime element in tragedy. 126
An authentic language, therefore, can arise when the "word
1::3 Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle", p. 268.
1::4 Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic faculty," in Reflections, p. 335.
1:5
Benjamin, Origin, p. 117.
~ 2 6 Benjamin, Origin, pp. 109-110.
143
as the pure bearer of meaning" is transformed into an
element of a "language in the process of change," and when
the mind/nature and subject/object dichotomies are
dissolved:
The mourning play is nature that enters the purgatory
of language only for the sake of the purity of its
feelings; it was already defined in the ancient wise
saying that the whole of nature would begin to lament
if it were but granted the gift of language.:':"'
Epilogue: Panofsky's and Benjamin's Philosophies of Representation
This section began with Margaret Iversen's assertion
that Panofsky attempts to separate the objective from the
subjective. Conversely, as noted above, Witte accuses
Benjamin of allowing his theory of culture to sink under
the weight of its overriding subjectivity. Before 1933,
Panofsky appears interested in the theological dialogue
concerning irrationality, subjectivity, transcendence and
the art object. In the "Perspective" essay, he merges the
Kantian dualisms into a theological totality. 1::8 After
Panofsky's emigration--which does, it should be said,
1::7 Benjamin, "Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy," in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, p. 60.
1::8 Stephen Schwarzschild, in "Adorno and Schoenberg as Jews between Kant
and Hegel," [The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XXXV (1990)) writes that,
in technical neo-Kantian terms "objects are produced, not reproduced,
by the imagination, which is the 'transcendentally idealistic' ground
of the empirical world, and this imagination is primarily the
'schematization' of the inner sense, i.e. time, concretized through the
144
follow the rise of Hitler to power--Renaissance images
provided an idealized, ordered reality. At the core of his
theory of culture now is a Kantian essential form, a
universal construct that structures existence and bridges
the philosophical, conceptual realm with the phenomenal
world. Visual imagery and the esoteric texts from which
they spring derive from cognitive processes that reflect
the Enlightenment association of language with mastery of
the world.
The subject and object are split, the dialogue ends,
and rational cognitive universals now form the basis for
the structure of human knowledge. In Gothic Architecture
and Scholasticism, written during the 1950s, Panofsky
declares that the Gothic cathedral is a rational, static
structure that can be "correlated" with a scholastic
treatise.
1
:
9
The high Gothic cathedral, which was
"articulated through an exact and systematic division of
space," represented "one final and perfect solution" which
"reconcil[ed] the seemingly irreconcilable."13(
Benjamin, too, does not completely reject the
mathematics of rhythm and tone'," (p. 465).
1:9 Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: An Inquiry
into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion in the Middle
Ages (New York: Meridien Books, 1957), p. 2.
145
Enlightenment. 131 He rejects Hegelian morality regarding
the progressive march of history, but retains the Kantian
conception of the "uniqueness" of the art-work and the
relevance of "form/structure" in the production of
experience (though he rejects universal categories of
experience) .132 In Benjamin's view, one can perceive an
"authentic experience" through a return to an original
language that allows nature to speak with and through a
subject (generally the critic) in order to give voice to a
130 Panofsky, Gothic Architecture, pp. 39, 44, 67.
131 This is evident even in Benjamin's later "materialistic" studies.
See for example, Rudolphe Gashe, "Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian
Themes in Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,'" in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and
Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York:
Routledge, 1994), pp. 183-204. He suggests that although Benjamin
transformed Kant's conception of beauty, a conception that reflects the
viewing subject's experience of pleasure, he retained the elements of
uniqueness that Kant associated with the aesthetic. Gashe states that
"The uniqueness of the artwork, its quality of being one, is thus
clearly a function of sensibility, in Kantian terms, of its being an
object of nature, nature, however, having for Benjamin connotations of
fallenness, entanglement and fate," (p. 188).
Wolin also illustrates Benjamin's debt to the Enlightenment: "Yet not
even Benjamin, for all his reservations about "progress," was so
antagonistically disposed toward Enlightenment ideals. He went so far
as to provide himself with the following methodological watchword for
the Passagenwerk, one that would have been worthy of Kant or
Condorcet." Wolin quotes Benjamin:
"'To make arable fields where previously only madness grew Going
forward with the sharp axe of reason refusing to look left or right, in
order not to succumb to the horror that beckons from the depths of the
primeval forest. The entire ground must be made arable by reason in
order to be purified from the jungle of delusion and myth. That is
what I would like to accomplish for the nineteenth century'."
[Benjamin, V, pp. 570-571) (cited and trans. in Wolin, Walter Benjamin,
p. xxiv)].
132 See Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art, pp. 95-97.
146
non-Kantian Absolute.:)] Benjamin's definition of the
Absolute is a conception of history that incorporates the
Jewish messianic tradition--a tradition in which future
redemption emerges from the apocalyptic rather than through
a Christian reconciliation. Indeed, images of decay and
death allow for this redemption because they are the potent
reminders that only the Messiah can lift us from our
inevitable plunge into chaos.
CONCLUSION
Whether Panofsky or Benjamin split the object from the
subject, for the purposes of this study, is less important
than why Renaissance mimetic language occupied such a
central place in their methodological analyses. The
relevance of the Baroque for Benjamin or of the Renaissance
for Panofsky does not involve the elevation of one periodic
style or art over another. Benjamin's interpretation of
Baroque allegories and Panofsky's assessment of Renaissance
linear perspective are not so much investigations into the
past as they are methodological inquiries into the
structure of human knowledge--of how we organize our
133 Also see Michael Jennings. Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's
Theory of Literary Criticism.
147
experience of the world.
As discussed at the beginning of this chapter,
philosophers have long attempted to define the nature of
our relationship to the natural world. Often they have
described it as a dialogue between the viewer/subject and
physical reality/object. Eventually, this relationship came
to be seen as antagonistic, with the subject seeking to
conquer the world of nature/experience. By the beginning
of the twentieth century, neo-Kantians such as Ernst
Cassirer ultimately banished the object. To Cassirer, the
world of nature was one of mere appearances, an Idea that
evolved from the human mind.
Panofsky's theory of iconology, which has served as a
foundation for the study of art history, owes a great deal
to these neo-Kantian traditions. Indeed, he borrowed and
adapted the notion of Cassirer's symbolic form, an ideal
derived from our innate cognitive drive to symbolize, in
developing his three-tiered methodology.l34 Nevertheless, in
Panofsky's early studies, there is an affective and
theological--a non-Kantian--dimension in his writing. For
example, in the essay on Melencolia I, artistic creation is
Got the material result (the symbolic form) of a perfect
balance of opposing forces, the result of which is an
148
abstracted homogenous mapping of a singular philosophical
Weltanschauung onto a work of art. Rather, Melencolia I is
the product of dynamic creative forces and traditions which
cannot be harmoniously transformed into a singular ideal.
Similarly, in Idea and in "Perspective as Symbolic Form",
Panofsky grapples with the notion of a theological
transcendence which is clearly reminiscent of Walter
Benjamin's conception of redemption in the Origin of German
Tragic Drama.
Benjamin, unlike Panofsky, completely rejected
Cassirer's assessment of the subject-object relationship.
He sought instead to recapture an originary mind-world
dialogue where agency rested with the object. Visual
allegorical transcriptions of classical traditions were,
for Benjamin, powerful material objects which could both
destroy and redeem. Allegorical images, on the one hand,
highlight the bankruptcy of a deadened present but
simultaneously point to a redemptive future. Benjamin was,
in effect, constructing a new philosophy of history.
The study of history--specifically the classical
traditions of the Renaissance and Baroque--is crucial to
Panofsky's and Benjamin's methodological investigations
134 See Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, p. 129.
149
into the language of visual representation. Because the
theoretical studies of both scholars occupy a central niche
in contemporary scholarly circles, an understanding of the
social context in which they were produced is crucial. In
the next chapter, I have chosen to situate their early
writings within the German Jewish tradition of language,
because it seems to me that--given the historical tensions
surrounding both Jewish assimilation and the "Jewish
revival" as outlined in Chapter 1--Panofsky's and
Benjamin's contributions to the humanities cannot be fully
appreciated without this dimension.
150
Chapter 3
THE STUDY OF HISTORY AND GERMAN JEWISH CULTURE
Writing History: the Influence of Nietzsche
As for modern German literature and thought, it is hardly
an exaggeration to say that they would not be what they are
if Nietzsche had never lived. Name almost any poet, man of
letters, philosopher, who wrote in German during the
twentieth century and attained stature and influence--
Rilke, George, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Ernst Junger, Musil,
Benn, Heidegger, or Jaspers--and you name at the same time
Friedrich Nietzsche.
1
The publication of Nietzsche's second essay "On the
Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" has been cited
as the source for the crisis of historicism of the late
nineteenth century.: Although one publication can hardly be
the cause for this crisis, nevertheless, the writings of
Nietzsche perfectly embraced his contemporaries' sentiment
that the historian had become the passive (non-modern)
scholar wallowing ineffectually in the archives.
3
Was the
1 Erich Heller, The Importance of Nietzsche: Ten Essays, (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 2.
2 See Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of
Historicism (Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 1995), pp. 2-
8.
3 Bambach (Heidegger, Dilthey and the Crises of Historicismj, p. 7.
Bambach asserts that "Classical historicism was committed to the ideas
of value-free judgment and neutral perspective as the very essence of
historical objectivity. But these values were themselves possible only
on the basis of a neutral temporality that allowed for another
151
historian as Nietzsche puts it, part of a "race of eunuchs
needed to watch over the great historical world-harem? For
it almost seems that the task [of the historian] is to
stand guard over history to see that nothing comes out of
it except more history, and certainly no real events!"4
Historical progress, according to Nietzsche, leads to
nihilism. But this is not a fatal prognosis. Once released
from the bounds of historical prescriptions, "the man of
deeds and power" may find the path that leads to personal
autonomy and freedom.s Otherwise, when propelled by an
evolutionary process, men and nations are "given over to a
restless, cosmopolitan hunting after new and ever newer
things"6, what Benjamin would later "borrow" in his study of
the commodity form.
Indeed, for Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche's theory of
history is at the heart of the Origin of German Tragic
Drama. Benjamin's rejection of history as a Hegelian
spiral, progressively moving towards an Ideal, undoubtedly
had its roots in the philosopher's writings. His conception
illusion: a causally demonstrable continuum of historical effects.
Modernism breaks with classical historicism in that the modern
experience of history is causal, discontinuous, and ironic," p. 9.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for
Life," in Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 84.
5 Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," p. 67
6 Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," p. 74.
152
of an "original" language can clearly be traced to some of
Nietzsche's statements about history:
The superhistorical thinker beholds the history of
nations and of individuals from within,
gradually even coming wearily to avoid the endless
stream of new signs: for how should the unending
superfluity of events not reduce him to satiety, over-
satiety and finally to nausea. . The question of the
degree to which life requires the service of history
at all, however, is one of the supreme questions and
concerns in regard to a health of a man, a people or a
culture. For when it attains a certain degree of
excess, life crumbles and degenerates, and through
this degeneration history itself finally degenerates
too.'
To what degree Nietzsche may have also influenced
Panofsky is difficult to ascertain. We do know of course,
that Nietzsche corresponded with Jacob and that
Aby Warburg kept a much annotated copy of Nietzsche's Birth
of Tragedy in his library--and that both of them may be
considered as Panofsky's intellectual mentors/predecessors.
Indeed, if we allow that Nietzschean philosophy was well-
known by most scholars during the early twentieth century,
as Erich Heller claims, then Panofsky would surely have
been aware of Nietzsche's characterization of history.
Panofsky's assertion that DUrer is a "conquistador" of
Italian Renaissance forms and a perfector of its style
suggests a Hegelian developmental history. Yet his doubts
Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life", p. 67.
8 See Heller, The Importance of Nietzsche, pp. 39-54.
153
about humankind's rational and inevitable march toward
progress connote a resistance to the legacy of the
Enlightenment.
9
Panofsky's scepticism, in which the forces
of the irrational/subjective occasionally surface, suggests
that Nietzsche's nihilistic view of the endless, pointless
(perhaps non-progressive) march of history may have crept
into his wri ting. 10
Panofsky: The Significance of the Renaissance and the "Classical"
Baroque
Panofsky's approach to the study of art history grew
out of an Enlightenment model of aesthetic theory and
historical progress. In this model, mankind is
distinguished by universal characteristics of reason--that
is, rational cognition. From this assumption derives the
premise that humanity is ever evolving towards a
progressive ideal.
For Panofsky, the Renaissance of the Italian
Quattrocento, as expressed in his American essays,
represented a high point in the revival of the visual
9 Discussed at the end of this chapter and extensively in Chapter 4.
10 For a further discussion on the influence of Nietzsche on Panofsky
and on German Jews see Chapter 4, "Mourning Germany: Erwin Panofsky and
Thomas Mann."
culture of classical Antiquity:
Wherever a classical image, that is, a fusion of
a classical theme with a classical motif, had
been copied during the Carolingian period of
feverish assimilation, this classical image was
abandoned as soon as mediaeval civilization had
reached its climax, and was not reinstated until
the Italian Quattrocento. It was the privilege
of the Renaissance to reintegrate classical
themes with classical motifs after what might be
called a zero hour [the Middle Ages] [This
reintegration of classical themes with classical
motifs] seems to be characteristic of the Italian
Renaissance as opposed to the numerous sporadic
revivals of classical tendencies during the
Middle ages, [this] is not only a humanistic but
also a human occurrence.
tl
What seems to be significant for Panofsky is not the
perfection of a style born in Antiquity but rather the
revival of the humanist outlook that DUrer's and
154
Michelangelo's art embodied. Paul Oskar Kristeller, whose
views of Renaissance philosophy Panofsky shared,:: regarded
"the classical humanism of the Italian Renaissance.
[as] a very significant phenomenon in the history of
Western civilization," exerting a profound influence on
llErwin Panofsky, "An Introduction to Iconography and Iconology" in
Meaning in the Visual AIts. Papers in and on AIt History (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1955). (Phoenix edition used in text. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 50, 54.
1: Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York
and London: Harper & Row, 1969), (Icon Edition, 1972, edition used in
text), p. 4. (First published, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksells Gebers
Forlag AS, 1960). Panofsky writes that "I am happy to note that
Kristeller's general view of the Renaissance ... agrees with mine," (p.
4)
155
art, music, philosophy, science and other human
Indeed, in Panofsky's later essay, "Renaissance and
Renascences," he states
The Middle Ages had left antiquity unburied and
alternately galvanized and exorcised its corpse. The
Renaissance stood weeping at its grave and tried to
resurrect its soul. And in one fatally auspicious
moment it succeeded. This is why the medieval concept
of the Antique was so concrete and at the same time so
incomplete and distorted; whereas the modern one,
gradually developed during the last three or four
hundred years, is comprehensive and consistent but, if
I may say so, abstract. And this is why the mediaeval
renascences were transitory; whereas the Renaissance
was permanent. Resurrected souls are intangible but
have the advantage of immortality and omnipresence.
Therefore the role of classical antiquity after the
Renaissance is somewhat elusive but, on the other
hand, pervasive--and changeable only with a change in
our civilizations as such.:4
Countless scholars have taken Panofsky to task for
setting up the style of the Italian Renaissance as
aesthetic norm for Western visual culture.
c5
In one
13 Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton
University Press: Princeton NJ, 1980), pp. 1-2. Although in the opening
pages of the first chapter, Kristeller frames his account of Italian
humanism within its historic context, this historical and cultural
philosophy has implications far beyond its historic moment: "Yet the
works of the humanists, and those of the Renaissance thinkers
influenced by humanism, were still widely read down to the eighteenth
and early nineteenth century and thus continued to nourish many
secondary currents of thought and literature during that period. The
ideal of humanist education dominated the secondary schools of the West
at least to the beginning of this century, and it still survives in the
term humanities as we use it," (p. 19).
14 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, p. 113.
15 See, among others, Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of
Art History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984),
Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge:
M.I.T. Press, 1993), and Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History:
156
critic's judgment, other styles were considered "lacking in
relation to the ideal of Renaissance art.
p1E
Indeed,
Panofsky's conclusion that "the medieval renascences were
transitory" and that the Italian Renaissance constituted
the beginning of the era does reflect a belief in
the importance of the Renaissance in the history of art.
Although its establishment as a preeminent cultural epoch
is not surprising within the context of the German
philosophical tradition of the late-nineteenth and early
twentieth-centuries,li Panofsky's conclusion is derived from
his perception of the period's historical influence--that
is, from its "permanence." The Renaissance stamp on
subsequent artistic movements, in other words, is, for
Panofsky, the relevant criterion.
In Renaissance and Renascences he traces the
historical wanderings of classical motifs through their
muted in the Middle Ages up till their
glorious rebirth and fusion with classical content in the
Italian Quattrocento.
18
The styles of renascences"
may be "lacking" not because they are inferior artistically
Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1989).
16 Iversen, Alois Riegl, p. 150.
n See Chapter I for a more detailed discussion of this phenomenon.
19 Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, p. 83.
157
but because they have had less historical resonance. He
moves away from the Renaissance as a tense balancing of
opposites and sets up the Italian Renaissance as a
rejuvenation of a classical, static ideal.:
9
His conclusions in the early methodological studies,
whereby he seeks to understand the dynamic process by which
the classical norm was transformed and transferred
throughout history, and unlike those he reached in
Renaissance and Renascences, are broadly conceived. In the
early works, Panofsky views culture as a tenuous balance
between the mind and the world; between the subject and the
object. Contradiction and subjective change are inherent in
the historical process, and they clothe the exterior of the
universally shared symbolic form. The form and shape of
these "clothes"--that is, the transformation process rather
than the end product--is what interests Panofsky. In Idea,
he writes,
We can understand how this opposition [between
idealism and naturalism] could affect art
theoretical thought for such a long time and
force it again and again to search for new, more
or less contradictory solutions. To recognize
the diversity of these solutions and to
understand their historical presuppositions is
worthwhile for history's sake, even though
19 Panofsky, in Renaissance and Renascences, writes "That the Venetian
forger relied on the fact that in his age no basic difference was felt
between the buona maniera greea antiea of an Attic relief and
Michelangelo's moderno si glorioso; and it took four hundred years to
separate the ingredients of his compound," (p. 41).
philosophy has come to realize that the problem ,_
underlying them is by its very nature insoluble.--
158
As noted earlier, in the second half of Perspective as
Symbolic Form, Panofsky elevates the Renaissance's
practical treatment of perspective to an artistic standard.
But in that essay his position on the Renaissance is not as
clearly defined as it is in his later English texts.
Although he sets up perspective as the mode of visual
representation, Panofsky also regards it as a historically
conventional treatment of perception. Here and in other
writings of the 1920s, this ambiguity suggests that he is
still refining his theoretical position about art history
and specifically about the historical conditions under
which the "most important" works of art were produced.
Panofsky was not convinced that cultures continually
evolve to progressively "higher" planes. For example, he
thought that the early twentieth-century Expressionists had
more in common with the Mannerists of the sixteenth-century
than with either the Impressionists of the nineteenth-
century or with the artists of the Italian Renaissance:
And Expressionism--in more than one respect related to
Mannerism--was accompanied by a peculiar kind of
speculation that, though often using such
psychological terms as Ausdruck ("expression") or
Erlebnis ("experience"), actually led back to the
tracks followed by the art theorists of the late
~ o Panofsky, Idea, p. 126.
159
sixteenth century: the tracks of a metaphysics of art
that seeks to derive the phenomenon of artistic
creativity from a suprasensory and absolute--in
today's language
Panofsky's hypothesis is based on the assumption that
sixteenth-century Mannerism and twentieth-century
Expressionism were movements away from the restrained,
representational ideal that characterized Renaissance art.
In fact, it would appear that stylistic evolution, for
Panofsky, was not a teleological process and occasionally
even reversed direction.
His application of his still-developing theory of
visual representation is evident in a lecture he gave on
Baroque art. Although this essay has only recently been
published, Panofsky gave versions of it over a span of many
years.-- Undoubtedly an argument could be made that this
essay is unrepresentative of Panofsky's judgments on the
Renaissance and But given that he used it a
:1 Panofsky, Idea, pp. 110-111. (Italics are mine).
:: Erwin Panofsky, "What is Baroque?" pp. 17-90.
:3 Irving Lavin provides a summary of Panofsky's ambivalence and ultimate
rejection of this essay which he summarizes in a long footnote.
(Panofsky, Three Essays on Style, p. 201, note 12). From this
footnote, I have chosen a brief chronology of Panofsky's changing
attitude towards this lecture that he had originally delivered in the
19305:
"April 27, 1935, to Fritz Saxl: 'Ich habe hier einen sehr generellen
Vortrag tiber Barock dreirnal in Princeton und zweirnal in anderen Orten
halten mtissen" (WI) [Warburg Institute].
June 22, 1946 to Heckscher: "I am sending along an unpretentious lecture
of my own fabrication which you may pass on to Mr. Daniells if you are
160
number of times over the decade spanning 1935-1946, (He
wrote it in 1935, and sent it to William Heckscher in 1946
so that another writer might comment on it) Panofsky's
later suggestion that the ideas in his essay were
"superfluous" seems to me to be more of a statement of his
own ambivalence about delimiting the Baroque period
according to art-historical standards--standards which were
still in flux when he wrote this essay. In this regard, it
might be viewed as a transitional working document between
his early theoretical and later studies. Given that the
Baroque was still an "undefined,,:4 historical concept and
style when Panofsky wrote this essay, the exploration of a
Baroque style would seem to be an apt choice for someone
constructing a theory of visual cultural history. He may
have chosen this particular period for study because it had
not yet been "firmly" defined by historians and may have
sure that he will return it. I may want to use it again if the occasion
offers. It isn't very good and full of typographical and other errors
but he may get some ideas, if only by way of opposition" (GCl [Getty
Center].
November 14, 1967, to P. Chobanian, librarian, Ripon College: "The
lecture was given thirty years ago, when the term Baroque was not as yet
employed in the sense of a definite or at least definable period of art
history but merely in a derogatory sense. In the meantime a whole
library has been written about Baroque as an art-historical concept so
that what made sense and even may have been necessary in 1938 would be
entirely superfluous today. For this reason the lecture was never
published and I still do not like to have it circulated in writing"
(AAAl [Archives of American Art].
:4 See notes 30 and 31.
161
provided an opportunity to speculate on the nature of
visual language.
Panofsky suggests that, after the Renaissance, art
dips into the extremes of mannerism, a style that is "a
revival of preclassic tendencies ... [which] means certainly
both an enormous increase of spiritual intensity and
emotional expression, and an enormous loss of harmony" as
compared to the style of the High But
Renaissance harmony, he continues was an equilibrium that
could not last, something he referred to in the earlier
essay on DUrer in Idea. (This notion is consistent with
Hegelian historical process and with Nietzsche's view of
historical development that "the demand that greatness
shall be everlasting . . . sparks off the most fearful of
The subjective/objective antinomy that the
Renaissance had seemed to bring into balance, for Panofsky,
split open: "No sooner had it been achieved in Rome than
it was opposed by an anticlassic tendency that first

developed in Tuscany."- In other words, the Renaissance
balancing of the subjective with the objective was not a
25 Panofsky, "Baroque", p. 29.
26 Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," p.
68. But struggle, for Nietzsche, was something positive--and necessary-
-in the transformation of culture.
162
harmonious reconciliation of oppositions but a tense
balance.
The Renaissance is, on the one hand, the important
starting point from which European "modern" culture
evolved. On the other hand, the Renaissance ideal is doomed
from the start.:
e
The balance of dualities was tension-
filled, an Auseinandersetzung that could not possibly
sustain itself. The Renaissance style was one that
temporarily overcame internal contradictions but that could
not be permanently harmonized. This suggestion that the
Renaissance was an unstable high-point of Western culture,
but one distinguished by the genius of Durer and Leonardo,
recalls Nietzsche's suggestion:
Supposing someone believed that it would require no
more than a hundred men educated and actively working
in a new spirit to do away with the bogus form of
culture which has just now become the fashion in
Germany, how greatly it would stengthen him to realize
that the culture of the Renaissance was raised on the
shoulders of just such a band of a hundred m e n . 2 ~
Panofsky concludes that artistic development first had to
degenerate into mannerism before self-correcting with
:7 Panofsky, "Baroque", p. 29.
28 This is where Cassirer and Panofsky differ. See Sylvia Ferretti,
Cassirer, Panofsky and Warburg: Symbol, Art and History, trans. Richard
Pierce (New Haven and London; Yale University Press, 1988), passim.
29 Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," p.
69.
163
Poussin and seventeenth-century classicism.
30
The "Baroque is not the decline, let alone the end, of
what we call the Renaissance era. It is in reality the
second great climax of this period and the beginning ... [of
the] Modern with a capital M.,,31 What is important here is
)0
For a discussion of the Baroque by one of Panofsky's
contemporaries, see Hermann Voss, Die Malerie des Barock in Rom
(Berlin: Im Propylaen-Verlag, 1924). It is interesting to note that
Voss spends most of his introduction discussing "History and Historical
Description" ("Geschichte und Geschichtschreibung") in terms of the
philosphical polarities of objectivity and subjectivity (pp. 7-13). He
castigates the two schools of historic thought, the idealistic and the
materialist/national, as "vom libel" (harmful) (p. 14). History,
including the classical or the Baroque, cannot for Voss be easily
dissected into historical periods.
Also, see Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-
1750 (Yale University Press: New York and New Haven, 1957). By and
large, as Wittkower, a German-Jew and friend of Panofsky and a leading
scholar of the Baroque has noted, seventeenth-century art was religious
in nature (like its predecessors) (pp. 42-43). Nevertheless, at this
time a secular art emerged which established the groundwork for the
style of the modern period. Baroque art, thus, is not so easily
classified as religious or secular. "The bow stretches from an
appealing worldliness to tender sensibility, to sentimental and mawkish
devotion, bigoted piety, and mystic elation," (p. 138). I have chosen
to use the term, Baroque classicism, as coined by Wittkower, to
describe the art of Poussin and other artists who were the inheritors
of the Renaissance, classical tradition.
For Italian painting and architecture during the Baroque period,
classical style was an important influence. Even an artist such as
Annibale Carracci, who produced mythological scenes in the Farnese
gallery "quite different from the comparative simplicity of
Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling" (p. 67), was influenced by the
classical tradition of Roman sarcophagi. As Wittkower notes, Annibale's
paintings of ideal landscapes, in fact, laid the groundwork for the
landscapes of Poussin (pp. 69-71).
31 Panofsky,"Baroque," p. 88.
Wilhelm Hausenstein, another contemporary of Panofsky's, suggested that
the Baroque was the initiator of Modern art. "The Baroque is a moral
history. What has been attempted in later epochs, has been attempted
here. It is impossible to outdo it. Bode uttered a blasphemy when he
suggested that art history stopped with Tiepolo ... For Meier-Graefe,
on the other hand, it began with Constable and Delacroix. . . [but] the
development of painting already began in the Baroque." Vom Geist des
Barock (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1924), p. 126.
"Barock ist eine moralische Geschichte. Was liberhaupt von einer schon
164
that the High Renaissance, narrowly defined as cinquecento
Florence, Rome, and Venice, "smooth[ed]" away its conflicts
before it imploded into mannerism.
3
: Panofsky, in this
instance, approaches Nietzsche's historical "abyss" where
"that breach between inner and outer must again vanish
under the hammer-blows of necessi ty" . 33
Classical principles are not abandoned but simply
restated as "the paradise of the High Renaissance regained
after the struggles and tensions of the mannerist period,
though still haunted (and enlivened) by the intensive
consciousness of an underlying dualism, such as that
between the subjective experience of phenomenal reality and
spaten Zeit gewagt werden kann, ist dort gewagt. Unmeglich, es zu
Uberbieten. Bode 5011 einman das Blasphem gesagt haben, die
Kunstgeschichte here mit Tiepolo auf ... Die andre heisst Meier-
Graefe. FUr ihn fangt die Kunst mit Constable und Delacroix an. .
wiewohl die Entwicklung der kunst zur Malerei gerade schon im Barock
beginnt."
It is important to note, here, that Panofsky was primarily reacting to
the conclusions reached by his great predecessor, Heinrich Welfflin,
whose classic Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development
of Style in Later Art defined how many understood both periods.
Panofsky was criticizing Welfflin's emphasis on form rather than on
context. [Welfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), 7 ~ h ed.
Trans. M.D. Hottinger (New York: G. Bell and Sons Ltd, 1932), Reprint
(New York: Dover, 1950)]. (Walter Benjamin's conclusions regarding the
Baroque were a reaction to the lectures that he had heard Welfflin
deliver in Berlin during the 1920s).
Welfflin defines the Baroque in comparison to the Renaissance:
"in place of the perfect, the completed, it gives the restless, the
becoming, in place of the limited, the conceivable, it gives the
limitless, the colossal. The ideal of beautiful proportion vanishes,
interest concentrates not on being, but on happening" (Principles, p.
10) .
32 Panofsky, "Baroque," p. 88.
II Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," p.
90.
165
an objective account of it."34 The Baroque utilizes
than smoothes over "dualisms" so as to create a revitalized
aesthetic. Baroque artists could, in other words,
transform conflict into a new art. As an example, one can
look to Baroque architecture, which "breaks up . . so as
to express a free dynamic between mass and the energies of
the structural members and displays a quasi-theatrical
scenery that integrates the conflicting elements into a
spa tial ensemble." 35
What then is the relevance of the Renaissance/Baroque
as a stylistic and historical category for Panofsky? What
does this categorization of the Renaissance tell us about
his conception of history and in particular of an
evolutionary, progressive one?
Baroque "classicism" cannot be viewed as a Renaissance
of the seventeenth-century that adapted but nevertheless
adhered to sixteenth-century The art produced
by these new "classicists" is imbued with a different
feeling and presence from that produced in the past.
34 Panofsky, "Baroque," p. 45.
35 Panofsky, "Baroque," p. 45.
36 Although the term "Baroque classicism" would appear to be an
"oxymoron," Wittkower uses it in relation to artists such as Poussin.
Similarly, in Renaissance and Renascences, Panofsky describes some of
the art of the seventeenth century as classic: "the acme of
seventeenth-century classicism, as represented by Poussin, was reached
within the general framework of the Baroque. . . " (p. 68).
166
In Gentileschi's David after his Victory over Goliath
(Figure 16), the "moment of David's triumph becomes
transformed into a scene of melancholy brooding over the
transience of human life. ,,3
7
Of Baroque people, Panofsky
writes that "while their hearts are quivering with emotion,
their consciousness stands aloof and 'knows. ,,,38 This
combination of internal emotion and external quiet is
similar in sensibility to Benjamin's interpretation of
Melencolia I and the emblems of Baroque tragic drama. Even
though Benjamin could not have known Panofsky's essay, his
concept of the Baroque as a kind of Renaissance fruition
(albeit for Benjamin a decadent one) bears a marked
similarity to Panofsky's (at least as put forth in the
essay "What is Baroque?").
Panofsky writes that the classical ideal associated
with the Renaissance is "not so much paralleled by a
normative philosophy about art as by a constructive theory
for art," a method unclouded as yet by metaphysics and
history.39 This statement underscores the emphasis Panofsky
places on method and process. Although history is
distinguished at its core by objective, cognitively derived
37 Panofsky, "Baroque," p. 75.
38 Panofsky, "Baroque," p. 75.
39 Panofsky, Idea, p. 110.
167
universals (Cassirean symbolic forms), the distortions and
directional change of historical time give art objects
their form and distinct meaning. Distortions and
transformation of historical meaning, indeed, occupies much
of Panofsky's attention--as it does Benjamin's.
Thus the answer to the question "what is Baroque?"
(or, for that matter, what is the Renaissance? or what is
an enlightened culture?) is not that of a style whose
characteristics are delimited by a chronological timeline.
In the essay on the Baroque, art objects are not simply
symbolic mappings of a particular cultural Weltanschauung
or expressions of stylistic evolution. Panofsky's essay
might be considered a reflection of the validity of history
as an unfolding, synthesizing process.
In this regard, his method clearly reinforces the
agency of the subject (the critic himself). About the
interpretation of the present culture, he states that
history has left modernity as yet unnamed and unjudged:
"our own epoch of history, an epoch that is still
struggling for an expression both in life and in art, and
that will be named and judged by the generations to corne--
provided that it does not put an end to all generations to
168
come. ,,40 Like Benjamin, who follows Nietzsche, Panofsky's
assessment of history remains open-ended. Hegel's
contention that being and thought come together on the high
plane of history is a judgment, at least at this moment in
time, far from Panofsky's thought.
Benjamin and the Writing of History: Theology and Science
A conception of history is central to Benjamin's
cultural theory. To look for a conventional definition in
his writings, however, is to get mired in a web of
complexly interwoven contradictions. Benjamin regards
history as a process that pulls us simultaneously toward
destruction and cultural redemption. On the one hand, he
wishes to destroy the conception of history as a linear
narrative that rationally chronicles the story of human
progress. On the other hand, he wishes to uncover an
authentic past, a past that is hidden within a culture's
visual treasures. 41
How does Benjamin both reify and malign history? This
40 Panof.sky, "Baroque," p. 88.
41 Richard Wolin suggests that, for Benjamin, the point of obtaining
knowledge is the "possession of objects and not their emancipation.
Knowledge in this [is] identical with the Nietzschean 'will to power".
Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. 57.
169
seeming contradiction results from his separation of
history into historical process and a theory of knowledge.
As with many other intellectuals after World War I,
Benjamin regarded the current structures of knowledge as
bankrupt. Hegelian evolutionary history could not account
for the differences and peculiarities that led to the war
debacle. Following Nietzsche, Benjamin wished to destroy
this universalizing process as a mode of human experience
and knowledge. He would replace it with a theory that
highlighted a theological and philosophical, rather than a
scientific, evolutionary cognitive mode at the center.
Indeed, this phenomenon is not Weimar's alone--although
Weimar's chaos and political apathy lent certain urgency to
the universalist claims of its intellectuals.
Benjamin's early writings do not always make clear
what the path to redemption is. In Origin, though he wishes
to rediscover the Ur-dialogue between man and nature, he is
not interested in a return to a "primitive" originary
state. He points, rather, to some future experience that
replicates and also transforms this "original" dialogue.
Even in his later essays, where he is most optimistic about
the positive social revolution that will ensue from
concrete experiences, Benjamin maintains his belief in a
transcendent, redemptive criticism: "The dialectic image is
170
a flashing image. Thus, the image of the past. . is to
be held fast as an image that flashes in the Now of
recognition. Redemption, which is accomplished in this way
and only in this way, can always be attained only as that
which in perception irredeemably loses itself."4:
Benjamin's method of inquiry involved accumulating
fragments, quotations that he reordered with scarcely a nod
to their chronological historicity (for example, his use of
DUrer's Melencolia I as a representative of Baroque tragic
drama). His method, adopted from the Baroque tragedies he
studied, encouraged the "pil[ing] up [of] fragments
ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal in the
unremitting expectation of a miracle.,,43 Benjamin was not
concerned with "historical accuracy" or finding the "true"
meaning behind a work of art. "Truth is an intentionless
state of being. The proper approach to 'understanding' (a
dialogue with) a work of art is not one of intention and
knowledge, but rather total immersion and absorption in it.
4: Benjamin, "Zentralpark", I, p. 682. "Das dialektische Bild ist ein
aufblitzendes. So, als ein im Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit aufblitzendes
Bild, ist das des Gewesenen. . . Die Rettung, die dergestalt, und nur
dergestalt, vollzogen wird, larettbar sich verlierenden gewinnen.
Trans. and discussed in Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin, p. 126. On the
next page, Benjamin comments that "Redemption emerges from the tiny
fissure in the continuing catastrophe," (I, p. 683, my translation)
"Die Rettung halt sich an den kleinen Sprung in der kontinuierlichen
Katastrophe."
43 Benjamin, Origin, p. 178.
171
Truth is the death of
How does this approach correlate with his overriding
interest in method? With allegory, the "piling up" of
historical fragments should be obvious in order to
highlight the artificiality and randomness of the Hegelian
historical process that has clouded the possibilities for
redemption. There is no movement toward, only away from, a
unitary ideal. Such an ideal, the equivalent of "truth
content," existed in the past of pre-History. Prior to
conventional historical time, humanity's connection to
nature (reality) was a mythic one. No individual conceived
of him or herself as separate from, but only as intimately
related to, and part of the surrounding world. With the
introduction of "progressive" historical time, humankind
began to perceive itself as distinct from and superior to
its natural surroundings.
Benjamin intends to unmask and destroy this history,
to strip away the layers of constructed barriers that have
masked humanity's original (Ur) association with nature.
Once the layers of conventional historical interpretation
have been removed, an Ur-image of humankind's genuine
relationship to the world will be visible. But Benjamin
does not wish to recapture the past (as in the Romantics'
44 Benjamin. Origin, p. 36.
172
return to a mythic origin). He wishes to destroy our false
conception of an unchanging, ever-present infinite time.
Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the
transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in
the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is
confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as
a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about
history that, from the very beginning, has been
untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a
face-- or rather in a death's head.
45
By incorporating death into the historical narrative, he
creates an authentic history, one in which history is re-
historicized to incorporate qthe finite," the actual and
repeti ti ve lived moment. 46
Benjamin's conception of history and its positive
destructive potential closely matches Gershom Scholem's
definition of the messianic apocalypse:
The construction of history in which the
apocalyptists revel has nothing to do with modern
conceptions of development or progress, and if
there is anything, which, in the view of these
seers, history deserves, it can only be to
perish ... [the apocalyptists'] optimism, their
hope, is not directed to what history will bring
forth, but to that which will arise in its ruin,
free at last and undisguised.
r
45 Benjamin, Origin, p. 166.
46 See Caygill's illuminating analysis of Benjamin's Origin in Walter
Benjamin: the Colour of Experience, (pp. 52-61).
41 Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books,
1971), p. 10. The notion of the Messianic age of redemption as the end
of history is discussed by Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of
Redemption, p. 60 and passim.
173
A messianic Origin, figures prominently in Benjamin s
construction of history. This origin is not a temporal
moment in the past, but represents a future potential that
recreates but also transcends the original world before the
fall.
49
"Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming. . it
needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and
reestablishment. ,,49
Baroque emblems, with their highly overdetermined
symbolism, make the construction of meaning obvious; they
highlight our historical time travel and an original
dialogue between man and nature. As images whose
theological function has been replaced by artistic
symbolism, they are repositories of a dead history which
replaces one artificial construction with another (what
Nietzsche called the eternal return). Thus, in calling
attention to historical constructedness, Baroque images
highlight the bankruptcy of history. But why did Benjamin
choose a Renaissance image as the figure emblematic of
Baroque tragic drama? Does he distinguish between
Renaissance and Baroque classicism? Or, for that matter,
should he?
Gunter Gebauer and Christophe Wulf suggest that the
~ 8 See Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin, pp. 90-106, for a lucid analysis
of the kabbalistic influences in Benjamin's Origin.
174
reconstruction of the Renaissance was, in fact, one of
Benjamin's central concerns. Like the 1920s in Germany, the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were characterized by a
resurgence of interest in the classical--in regenerating
and transforming past myth into symbols that would no
longer function as mimetic embodiments of an awesome
nature.
50
According to Benjamin:
Whereas the Aristotelian insights into the
psychical duality of the melancholy disposition
and the antithetical nature of the influence of
Saturn had given way, in the middle ages, to a
purely demonic representation of both, such as
conformed with Christian speculation; with the
Renaissance the whole wealth of ancient
meditations re-emerged from the sources.
According to Warburg, in the Renaissance, when
the reinterpretation of saturnine melancholy as a
theory of genius was carried out with a
radicalism unequalled even in the thought of
antiquity, "dread of Saturn [occupied] the
central position in astrological
For Benjamin (as for Warburg), this dread was
conquered, transformed into instruments of contemplation,
and scattered at the feet of Melencolia, a visual
transcription of Baroque allegory. The image contains the
49 Benjamin, Origin, p. 45.
50 Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, ALt, Society,
trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1995), pp. 269-280. The authors suggest that the "particular
relation between the individual and the world and knowledge disappears
with the transition from the Renaissance to classicism. Up to that
point there had existed a mimetic continuum in which a human being had
not yet made itself an object of knowledge and reflection" (p. 270).
51 Benjamin, Origin, pp. 150-151.
175
remnants of an antiquity that has been recombined with
medieval imagery (such as the slothful, unmoving housewife)
into a complex allegorical work whose "new" Renaissance use
and interpretation depends on knowledge of these origins.
In Melencolia I, the symbol of the stone is "a reference to
the genuinely theological conception of the melancholic,
which is to be found in one of the seven deadly sins. This
is acedia, dullness of the heart, or sloth. ,,5': It is also a
necessary pre-condition to the recovery of authentic
experience. Melancholic allegory slows down the
progression of an inauthentic history so as to enable the
recovery of the Ur-representation.
Benjamin, however, is not searching for lost meaning
but for lost possibilities. He takes liberties with
historical chronology--using the sixteenth-century
Melencolia I as an emblem of the Baroque--to destroy our
sense of complacency. He uses history, so to speak, to
shock the image into the "now-times" (Jeztzeiten) of
explosive power.
Allegory transforms progressive historical time to the
apocalyptic time of the Messiah. But where does Benjamin
take us from there? What path leads from the present to the
Messianic future? In Origin, Benjamin destroys and
176
transforms history, but not until his later writings on the
material dialectic does he provide a key to the attainment
of a future utopia.
53
Indeed, the tragic dramas of the
Baroque are failed forms that double back on themselves.
Ultimately in the death-signs of the baroque the
direction of allegorical reflection is reversed; on
the second part of its wide arc it returns, to redeem .
. Allegory, of course, thereby loses everything that
was most peculiar to it: the secret, privileged
knowledge, the arbitrary rule in the realm of dead
objects, the supposed infinity of a world without
hope. All this vanishes with this one about-turn.
54
This "about-turn" occurs because German baroque tragic
drama is ultimately not able to give up :he artistic
concern with an idealized beauty. Like its classical
predecessors, in the end, Baroque drama fails: "With the
banal equipment of the theater--chorus, interlude, and
durnbshow--it is not possible to realize the transfigured
apotheosis. ,,55
But Benjamin reminds us that all ideas are "monads"
which unfold over time and incorporate a plenitude of
failures and possibilities. Redemption emerges from the
52 Benj amin, Origin, p. 155.
53 It is no surprise that one of the writers with whom Benjamin felt a
close affinity was Franz Kafka, for whom metamorphosis was itself a
central theme but who also provided no clear answers.
54 Benjamin, Origin, p. 232.
55 Benjamin, Origin, p. 235.
177
dialectical tension between antinomies. "The dialectic
which is inherent in origin ... shows singularity and
repetition to be conditioned by one another in all
essentials. . Philosophical history, the science of the
origin, is the form, which in the remotest extremes,
reveals the configuration of the idea--the sum total of all
possible meaningful juxtaposition of such
Although the allegorical potential of Baroque tragic
dramas remains "unrealized," it is through this failure
that the allegorical method manifests its transcendental
power. As Caygill puts it, Benjamin intends to celebrate
"meaninglessness. When allegory turns upon itself, the
occasion for mourning becomes one of affirmation. . This
is not a return to a symbolic affirmation of the presence
of the eternal in the finite, but an allegory of the
finitude of the In Origin, Benjamin proposes a
"negative aesthetics," 58 a radical rejection of the
idealist conception of beauty, because "related as it is to
the depths of the subjective, it is basically only
knowledge of evil." 59 But in the final about-face, he
56 Benjamin, Origin, pp. 46-47.
51 Caygill, Walter Benjamin, pp. 60-61.
58 Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: the Philosophy of Walter
Benjamin, trans. Jane Marie Todd. (New York and London: The Guildford
Press, 1996), pp. 113.
59 Benjamin, Origin, p. 233.
178
resurrects the aesthetic qualities of the German mourning
play, which he suggests "is conceived from the outset as a
ruin, a fragment. Others may shine resplendently as on the
first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the
very last." 60
Panofsky and Saxl's interpretation of Durer's
Melencolia I is an apt metaphor for this juncture in
Benjamin's thought (1925). The winged figure, surrounded by
the tools of her trade and by classical references to a
destroyed past, sits quietly in frenzied contemplation,
waiting for inspiration--or redemption?
Weimar Jewish Culture and the Writing of History
The German Jewish nineteenth-century championship of
the Enlightenment ideals of Hegel and Kant dictated that
adherence to reason, a moral ethical code, and a
monotheistic religion stripped of any overt "Jewish
peculiarities" would insure Jewish integration into the
larger German culture. Jewish religious reformists had
initially adopted Enlightenment principles (in their Jewish
form known as Haskalah)61 during the eighteenth century in
60 Benj arnin, Origin, p. 235.
61 Louis Jacobs, The Jewish Religion: A Companion (Oxford: Oxford,
179
an effort to broaden the intellectual appeal of Judaism.
Eventually, the movement was extended to the secular arena
and became the foundation for Jewish emancipation.
For both Jews and non-Jews, belief in Enlightenment
values signaled an acceptance of a universal human
community that was to be distinguished by a moral code of
Concerning Jews, however, the price for
admittance into the universal community, given their
supposed inferiority, was moral regeneration. Through the
internalization of the Enlightenment German ideal of
Bildung (continual self-improvement through education and
moral and cultural refinement), Jews could assimilate into
the larger German culture.
63
World War I called Enlightenment values into
1995), p. 223, defines the Haskalah as "the movement which originated
in eighteenth century Germany with the aim of broadening the
intellectual and social horizons of the Jews to enable them to take
their place in Western society. The term Haskalah, in Medieval Jewish
literature, is from the Hebrew word sekhel, the intellect,' but, as
here applied, refers to the attitude of attraction to general
knowledge, secular learning and western culture."
02 See David Sorkin, "Jews, the Enlightenment, and Religious Toleration-
-Some Reflections", The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, XXXVII, 1992,
pp. 3-16. Sorkin points out that "Virtue was to take the place of
belief as the criterion of admission. The Aufklarer [adherents of
Enlightenment principles) envisioned a society of virtuous men rather
than a society of believers ... The problem was that throughout Europe
the enlighteners had grave doubts about the Jews' actual or even
potential Ttigend [virtue). They were torn by conflicting images of
Jews," (p.7).
63
See, among others, David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry
1780-1840 (Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 1987) and
especially George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Indiana
University Press: Bloomington, 1985).
180
Many German Jewish soldiers had fought proudly
beside their German comrades during the war, seeing this
service as a duty to their Fatherland. They then
discovered that their war service was not enough to
persuade their fellow Germans to accept them as full-
fledged citizens. Anti-Semitism remained a fact of life on
the battlefield and at home. After the war, the Jewish
soldiers returned to a society that increasingly attempted
to downplay their wartime contributions in an effort to
deny the soldiers (and thus all Jews) a stake in the new
Republican State. The idea of Bildung, with its
underpinnings of the inevitability of human progress, which
had provided the moral and political imperative for Jewish
acceptance, seemed to be a bankrupt concept.
Among intellectuals, mystical elements that
contradicted the Enlightenment values of reason and
rationalism crept into their studies. Leo Baeck, a leading
German liberal rabbi, modified his belief in the rational
Judaism espoused by the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann
64 See Anson Rabinbach, "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse:
Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism," New German
Critique 34 (Winter 1985): p. 78. Also see Uriel Tal, Christians and
Jews in German: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich,
1870-1914, trans. Noah Jonathan Jacobs (Cornell University Press:
Ithaca and London, 1975), Werner E. Mosse ed. Juden in Wilhelminischen
Deutschland 1890-1914: Ein Sammelband. George L. Mosse, Germans and
Jews: The Right, the Left and the Search for a 'Third Force" in Pre-
Nazi Germany (H. Fertig: New York, 1970), Gershom Scholem, "Jews and
Germans," in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner
181
Cohen in order to incorporate elements of the irrational.
65
As Rabinbach observes, Jewish intellectuals were, in fact,
characterized by a new sensibility.66 Although they had
rejected the overtly religious traditions of their
grandparents, they had adopted a new secular JUdaism that
had either reframed an earlier mystical tradition based on
the Kabbalah (as did Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin)
or had broadened the Enlightenment universals to
incorporate a distinct Jewish nationalism (the Zionism of
Martin Buber or Franz Rosenzweig) .
Despite the resurgence of Jewish culture during Weimar
(which in part reflected the broader European jettisoning
of Enlightenment values in favor of the irrational or
nationalism), many German Jews clung to the principles that
had been the basis of their political emancipation. The
conflation of Bildung and Jewishness was never stronger
than during the Weimar Republic, particularly in the
acceptance of the Enlightenment valorization of the power
of reason and culture as factors in the process of moral
regeneration.
67
We know from Benjamin's letters to Gershom
J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), pp. 71-92.
65 See Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar
Germany (New Haven and London: Yale t:r' Press, 1986), pp. 43-44.
66 Rabinbach, "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse," p. 8l.
67 See Mosse, "Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability,"
in the Jewish Response to German Culture, eds. Jehuda Reinharz and
182
Scholem that he was particularly interested in the Jewish
messianic tradition. Benjamin's notion that images such as
Durer's Melencolia I, which are the independent entities
onto which history in its destructive and constructive
potential is displayed, had its origin in the Kabbalistic
notion of redemptive utopia:
[I] realized quite clearly that my concept of
origins in the book on tragedy is a strict and
compelling transfer of this first principle of
Goethe's from the realm of nature to that of
history. Origins--the concept of the primal
event, carried over from the pagan context of
nature into the Jewish concept of history.6e
But did he simply reject Enlightenment values in favor of
the irrational and the mystical? What of Panofsky? Are
elements of Jewish tradition and religion in any way
incorporated into his studies of the Renaissance?
One important aspect of the Jewish tradition concerned
language, specifically as it related to history and law. As
noted in Chapter I, rabbinic literature could be divided
into two genres: Mishnah and Midrash. The former concerns
Walter Schatzberg (Hanover and London: University of New England Press,
1985), pp. 1-16. Masse's earlier The Crisis of German Ideology:
Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlop,
1964) deals with this theme at greater length. Also see Steven E.
Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations
with National Socialism and Other Crises (NY: NYU Press, 1996) pp. 31-
44. Aschheim, in particular, provides a good summary of the reception
of Bildung by German Jews.
68 Benjamin, cited in Pensky, Dialectics, pp. 218-219.
183
an explication of legal precepts, while the latter is an
interpretive verse-by-verse description of scripture. What
is distinctive about the midrashic method is the central
place accorded the rabbi. Rabbinic exposition can be
terse, fanciful, allegoric, or straightforward depending
upon the purposes to which it is being put. The key,
however, is that each "interpretation" is a piece with
others of an interwoven mesh. Listeners learn not so much
from the conclusion to the "story" but from the process by
which it is reached and from how each interpretation is
connected to a rich history of past conclusions.
What is particularly significant for us is that
midrashic interpretation is not about the transmission of
fixed immutable truths but rather about messages that can
be adapted and transformed according to historical
necessity. The midrashic approach is silent about answers
or solutions to lex metaphysical problems. It is
essentially a literary discourse in which complex, esoteric
texts are related to other slightly less complex texts.
Through this hermeneutical process, divine will or
theological transcendence is illuminated.
69
69 Itamar Gruenwald, \\Midrash and the 'Midrashic Condition":
Premliminary Considerations" in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish
Exegesis, Thought, and History ed. Michael Fishbane (Albany: State
University of New York Press), pp. 6-22. Also in the same text, Moshe
Idel, \\Midrashic versus Other Forms of Jewish Hermeneutics: Some
184
The process of fitting together highly arcane
allegorical emblems (or iconographic motifs and symbols) to
uncover an Ur-meaning (for Benjamin) or artistic
interpretation (iconological significance for Panofsky)
parallels the kabbalistic method of uncovering lost
meanings or finding hidden presences. Kabbalah is a
cognitive process that unveils meaning only within the
context of the Messiah's return. Truth, hidden creatively
among a mass of riddles, must be "intuited" through the re-
connection of its broken fragments prior to redemption.
Such truth is the repository of messianic potential.
What is significant about the midrashic and
Kabbalistic approach to texts is the elevation of
interpretation over the singular search for dogmatic
truths. With the Kabbalah, this is especially relevant,
because traversing the endless interpretive paths can lead
to transcendence and redemption.
The perambulations of language and their association
with the divine are crucial to understanding Benjamin's
embrace of Jewish tradition in the development of his
cultural theory. For Benjamin, given the ascendance of
historical convention, spoken and written languages have
Comparative Reflections," pp. 45-58.
70 See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [first
185
primarily become repositories of facts. Nevertheless,
language always retains elements of the original mimetic
relationship between mind and the world. In Benjamin's
cultural theory, the allegorical image illuminates the
artificial and false constructedness of a language that no
longer captures an authentic experience (as in the original
dialogue between mind and world) and, in doing so, destroys
it and points out a path to future redemption.
Panofsky also grapples with theological transcendence
and redemption, as evidenced in the Perspective essay. Like
Benjamin, he attempts to resolve the subject/object
antinomy (the philosophical mind/nature dichotomy) in favor
of a theory of knowledge and representation in which a
mimetic language emerges between the subject and object (a
kind of tense balance existing between the two) .
In the Perspective essay, Panofsky writes that
although perspective reduces the appearance of reality to
"mere subject matter," it also expands the potential for
humani ty to become a "vessel" for the divine. 71 Like
Benjamin, Panofsky contends that the path to the divine is
through the transcendent potential of artistic creation.
published in 1941) (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), pp. 8-13.
71 Panofsky, "Perspective," p. 72.
186
The subject/object duality that is merged "into a vessel
for the divine" gives equal agency to the phenomenal (the
artist and nature) and to the cognitive processes that
stand apart from it. For Panofsky, acquiring knowledge has
a distinct goal: the experience of the divine. Later in
the essay, he states this explicitly:
But then it opens to something entirely new: the
realm of the visionary, where the miraculous
becomes a direct experience of the beholder, in
that the supernatural events in a sense erupt
into his own, apparently natural, visual space
and so permit him really to 'internalize' their
supernaturalness.':
Whether or not Panofsky was influenced by the Jewish
mystical tradition is difficult to s a y . ~ 3 I have not
uncovered any archival documentation that indicates a
direct Jewish influence in his writings, although his fears
concerning anti-Semitism and his political sympathies may
12 Panofsky, "Perspective," p. 72.
~ .
- Even though Jews had made substantial progress toward economic and
cultural emancipation during the nineteenth-century, in the beginning
of the twentieth-century there was a considerable rise in anti-Semitism
and with it questions as to whether it was possible for Jews to
"assimilate". Richard Wolin writes that "as a result, for Central
European Jewry the liberal option seemed to have played itself out, and
the historical alternatives appeared to be the either/or of socialism
or Zionism", the latter which he associates with the messianic idea.
Wolin claims that "it is clear, however, that at unusually trying
moments in the life of the Jewish people, when the traditional,
rational content of Judaism failed to address their true spiritual
needs, the messianic idea proved a crucial element of cultural and
religious cohesiveness". (Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical
History of Ideas, (University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst MA, 1995)
46, 51.
187
be gleaned from some of his letters.
74
Nevertheless, one might speculate that Panofsky's
lecture on Baroque art retains an importance beyond its
discussion of artistic periodization and style. Although he
gave a number of versions of this lecture over the years,
the fact that he chose not to publish it (that is to reach
a definite conclusion concerning the definition of the
"name" Baroque) signals Panofsky's own ambivalence about
historically delimiting this particular artistic style.
Indeed, it points out the symbolic importance attached to
"narning"--to the delimiting of speculative queries because
future questions and choices are now "framed./I
In many cultures, to name something, to let it enter
into language, endows it with significance. In the Jewish
74 Concerning his fears about a r1s1ng anti-Semitism in the United
States see Dr. Panofsky & Mr. Tarkington: An Exchange of Letters,
1938-1946 (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1974), pp. 40-59.
I will discuss them in Chapter 4. Regarding specifically American
politics, Panofsky considered himself generally to be a Democrat. But
he expressed a great deal of cynicism, when he was in the United
States, about liberal beliefs in helping the unemployed, etc.
Nevertheless, he was fearful that if the Republicans won, he would be
forced again to emigrate: He expressed these concerns to Siegfried
Kracauer in November, 1944 after hearing a speech by Thomas Dewey:
"Komisch, dass aile unannehmlichkeiten, einschliesslich deutschen
Patriotismus' und endlich Nazitums, im GrUne von den liberalen und
demokratischen Ideen des 18. Jahrhunderts abstammen. Jedenfalls, wenn
Mr. D. gewahlt wird, ist es Zeit sich fUr einen Exodus vorzubereiten."
(Strange, that all unpleasantries including German patriotism and
finally Nazism should have originated with democratic ideas of the
eighteenth century. In any case, if Mr. Dewey is chosen, it is time to
prepare myself for another exodus). (Schriften des Warburg-Archivs im
Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminar der Universitat Hamburg, Bd. 4). Reprinted
in Siegfried Kracauer-Erwin Panofsky 1941-1966, ed. Volker Breidecker
(Akademie Verlag: Berlin, 1996), p. 36.
188
tradition, the name of God is left unuttered not because
God is insignificant but because man cannot grasp his
significance. Thus the act of naming carries with it a
connotation of understanding and completion. In not
publishing a lecture that had been given a number of times,
Panofsky retained the right to speculate on a period and on
its influence in the development of a language of visual
representation.
Although he chose not to include this essay in any of
his published lectures, despite the fact that he gave
versions of it over several years, I would like to suggest
that it represents a bridge between his American and German
years. His statement that the Baroque, with its abundances
and artistic excesses is particularly characterized by a
new self-conscious sense of humor "based on the fact that a
man realizes that the world is not quite what it should be,
but does not get angry about it, nor think that he himself
is free from ugliness and from the major and minor vices
and stupidities that he observes" appears to be also a
commentary on the twentieth century and the failure of
Enlightenment values.'s In the late 1930s, rather than
lauding the German Enlightenment tradition, Panofsky
qualifies it:
Thus the real humorist, in contrast with the
satirist, not only excuses what he ridicules but
deeply sympathizes with it; he even glorifies it,
in a way, because he conceives it as a
manifestation of the same power that shows itself
in the things reputed to be grand and sublime,
whereas they are, sub specie aeternitatis, just
as far from perdition as the things reputed to be
small and
Human reason does not inevitably propel humanity
forward towards some political or cultural ideal. The
189
umbrella of culture does not provide a refuge from the dark
side of human nature, as hoped for by many German Jews.
Rather, the progressive, rational development of culture is
constrained by human limitations. Indeed, Panofsky's
sentiments are part of a post-Bildung Weimar framework that
embraced many Jews and non-Jews. But unlike Benjamin's
messianic, redemptive utopia (initially theological and
after 1924, communist/political), Panofsky ultimately
rejects his flirtation with theology and redemption in
favor of a qualified return to the Enlightenrnent/Kantian
fold.
In 1921, Panofsky suggested that "the actual
transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (and, in
a sense, beyond it) can be observed ... [in] the first German
7S Panofsky, "Baroque," p. 80.
76 Panofsky, "Baroque," p. 80.
190
theorist of human proportions: Albrecht DUrer. , , ~ 7 Panofsky
concludes that DUrer surpasses even the Florentines,
Alberti and Leonardo, not only because of the abundance and
variety of his measurements but particularly because of his
"critical self-limitation." This essay appears to reflect
Panofsky's misgivings about the Enlightenment promise of a
rationally progressive human history. But even in this
early essay, he does not reject Enlightenment tradition out
of hand. Rather, Hegelian conceptions of history as the
highest plane of truth give way to the Kantian notion that
truth and God stand outside cognition and can never be
fully known. Although in his early writing he also
speculates about theological transcendence (as in the essay
on "Perspective
H
), he never fully abandons the
Enlightenment and the values of Bildung associated with it.
One must continue the heroic struggle to overcome the anti-
Enlightenment forces of irracionality. Panofsky's Kantian
ideals, in other words, must be viewed through a
Nietzschean lens. '8
n Panofsky, "The History and the Theory of Human Proportions as a
Reflection of the History of Styles," in Meaning in the Visual Arts:
Papers in and on Art History (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1955), p. 99.
Originally published as "Die Entwicklung der Proportionslehre als
Abbild der Stilentwicklung," Monatshefte Fur Kunstwissenschaft 14
(1921): pp. 188-219.
78 See Chapter 4.
191
Conclusion
Luria taught that in the beginning everything was
filled with divine infinity. To create the world, God
had to abolish His own infinity. He withdrew into
Himself and made space for matter. This is how the
cosmos, the Earth, and man came into being. And this
is also how evil came into being. From His exile, God
let His light shine, but a ~ a catastrophic moment the
enormous power of this light shattered all the
spheres, and light became dispersed into space. With
the dispersion of divine light began the Diaspora of
the Jews, whose task it was to gather the stray sparks
and in that way restore the cosmos to its former
perfection.
79
Anson Rabinbach has suggested that Messianism (rooted
in the Kabbalah) may take either of two extremes: immersion
in esoterica or revolutionary politicizing. Benjamin's
writings, particularly those of his materialistic phase,
seem to represent the latter. Essays such as "The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" are undoubtedly
motivated by political intent. In Origin, this intention
is also evident in Benjamin's manipulation of historical
imagery to illuminate possible paths to divine redemption.
Benjamin's goal, however, is theological rather than
political. Like Panofsky, he is a scholar who reads and
79 Carl Friedman, The Shovel and the Loom., trans. Jeannette K. Ringold
(Persea Books: New York, 1996), p. 92.
192
relies on erudite texts. Benjamin grapples with uncovering
a neo-Kantian-like mediator that negotiates between the
mind and the world (an "original" mimetic language).
Panofsky's theoretical foundation, however, is an
unchanging rational construct that is clothed in transitory
historical circumstances. Perspective is a symbolic form
not in its historical manifestation but in the way that it
activates and enables man to visually map the world.
Historical data and visual transformations simply obscure
and obstruct its essential character--the construction of
order and the banishment of chaos.
For Benjamin, as for Panofsky, history and its
multiplicity of interpretations shroud the kernel of
meaning (truth) and transform it into myth (Benjamin) or
distinct cultural manifestations (Panofsky). Uncovering
the origin or symbolic form is important, but the means
used is even more significant. Like Panofsky's conception
of perspective, Benjamin's constellation is a mediator
between the natural world and our experience of it.
Both Panofsky's and Benjamin's theories of culture are
philosophies of history. In writing about historical
transformation and the process that brings this about, they
seek to activate not only the memory of the past but also
the nature of its constructedness. They endow the object
193
with agency at the same time they empower the critic and
reinforce the organic nature of methodology as creator of
meaning. For Panofsky, one can retrieve meaning though his
three-step method, with the art historian or knowledgeable
viewer as guide. For Benjamin, the philosopher or literary
critic is the conduit through which an origin or
transcendent meaning is translated.
As with many other Weimar authors discussed earlier,
Panofsky's and Benjamin's emphasls on method and process
represents an effort to establish order in a chaotic world-
-a desire to move away from the abyss. Perhaps this desire
exemplifies the kabbalistic or mystical understanding of
chaos as the absence of God, as the complete removal of
divine presence. Adherence to process, even to a
fragmentary, transitory one keeps chaos in abeyance and
allows for the possibility of divine presence. Thus the
redemptive possibilities mapped onto a single fragment or
the symbolic form transformed into a plentitude of
historical interpretations can create a visual web, a web
conceived through a mimetic language that might barricade
against a fall into chaos. For Panofsky and Benjamin, as
German Jews in the late 1920s and early 1930s, language,
with its mystical, transcendent possibilities, represented
the tenuous thread that joined their Enlightenment-based
194
German Jewish identity to contemporary reality. After
1933, the thread was irrevocably broken.
Prior to his death in 1940, Benjamin warned of the
impending catastrophe at the hands of the Fascists. But,
even then, under these horrific political conditions, he
wrote of a future redemption. In the collected fragments,
"Thesis on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin warns that
Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the
spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that
even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he
wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be
victorious.
80
A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel
looking as though he is about to move away from
something he is fixedly contemplating. . The angel
would like to stay, .. But a storm is blowing from
Paradise. . [which] irresistibly propels him into the
future.
81
We know that the Jews were prohibited from
investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers
instruct them in remembrance, however. .This does
not imply, however, that for the Jews the future
turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second
of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah
might enter. 8:
80 Benjamin, "Thesis on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations,
VI, p. 257.
61 Benjamin, "Thesis on the Philosophy of History," IX, Illuminations,
pp. 259-260.
82 Benjamin, "Thesis on the Philosphy of History," XVII, B,
Illuminations, p. 266.
195
Chapter 4
ERWIN PANOFSKY AND THOMAS MANN: MOURNING GERMANY
After World War II, as the Allies began the process of
denazification, Germans responded to the debacle of the recent
past in a variety of ways. Anton Kaes, a German film
historian, points out that the early 1950s was the period of
the German Heimat (homeland) film, a genre devoted to a "dream
world" of beautiful German country landscapes and people.
1
Like American Western films of the period, these vehicles
repressed the horror of the recent past in favor of an idyllic
arcadia. German "peasants" and American cowboys were idealized
and sanitized--untainted by the more sinister aspects of each
country's past. In similar fashion, historians (including
those who studied the Holocaust) either ignored the Third
Reich as a horrible aberration or else referred to it
obliquely. ::
In an attempt to reconfigure a defeated but "better"
Germany, the "good" German culture of the distant past was
Anton Kaes, From Heimat to Hitler: The Return of History as Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 14-15.
2 For a concise summary of the historiography of recent German history, see
Richard Evans, Rethinking German History: Nineteenth Century Germany and
the Origins of the Third Reich, (London: Allen and Unwin,198?). Fritz
Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic
Community, 1890-1932 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969),
specifically addresses German scholarly writing prior to the takeover by
the National Socialists. For a more specific account of recent debates
regarding the Holocaust, see Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism
and the "Final Solution" edited by Saul Friedlander. (Cambridge MA:
brought to the fore.
3
As in the Weimar period, the
conflation of myth, history, and identity continued. In
particular, Germans looked to those emblems and historical
196
figures that had remained in memory--cultural icons such as
Faust, Goethe, and Durer. The prominent historian Friedrich
Meinecke suggested that the Germans renew themselves by
reading Goethe every Sunday and that they return to the roots
of the classical past.
4
This response, as Kaes suggests, was
typical of post-World War II thought. Hard historical
questions concerning German nationalism and the role it played
in German culture and history remained unasked. Instead,
nationalist sentiments stayed "buried" within the German
psyche for another generation.
5
This chapter evaluates the narrative strategies employed
by two survivors of the Nazi years: Erwin Panofsky and the
German writer Thomas Mann. I intend to analyze how religion
and nationalism intersected as Panofsky and Mann framed their
conceptions of cultural identity in, respectively, The Life
and Art of Albrecht Durer (Panofsky, 1943, here the single
volume 1955 edition) and Doctor Faustus (Mann, 1948, here the
Harvard University Press, 1992).
J See Anton Kaes, "Literatur und nationale Identitat: Kontroversen urn
Goethe 1945-49", in Kontroversen, alte und neue: Akten des VII.
Internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses 10, ed. Albrecht Schone (TUbingen:
Nietmeyer, 1986), pp. 199-206.
4 See Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat, especially the Introduction
"Images of History" regarding Meinecke, p. 13.
'Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat, pp. 13-16.
1992 Vintage International edition).
Faustus and Albrecht DOrer through the Centuries
The historical figures of the Renaissance artist
Albrecht DUrer and the legendary, fictional Doctor Faustus
have been mythologized by German intellectuals and
disseminators of popular culture for over 400 y e a r s . ~ Not
197
surprisingly, they were commodified by the "culture" producers
of the twentieth century. Elevated to iconic status, they
were enlisted in the rhetorical wars of the time. Prior to
the modern period, Faust had been delineated as a demon, a
leader, a ne'er-do well, and a romanticized artistic loner.
By the end of the nineteenth century, he had become associated
with nationalism and had emerged as a German leader, hero, and
model. Faust was transformed from his demonic beginnings, as
Peter Michelsen puts it, into the "Gelerter dem Burgertum"
.,
(the teacher of the bourgeoisie) or, in Ernst Bloch's words,
as the "best example of the utopian individual."a
Otto Spengler, author of The Decline of Civilization in
the West (1918) and one-time correspondent of Thomas Mann,
labeled Faust as the necessary destroyer of the spent
6 See Marguerite De Huszar Allen, The Faust Legend: Popular Formula and
Modern Novel. (New York and Frankfort am Main: Peter Lang, 1985).
7Peter Michelsen, "Faust und die Deutschen", in Vierhundert Jahre Faust:
Ruckblick und Analyse, ed. Peter Boerner and Sidney Johnson (Ttibingen: Max
Niemeyer Verlag, 1989), p. 240.
8 Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Gesamtausgabe, 5, (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959) Engl. Trans. The Principle of Hope, Vol. 5 of
Collected Writings, Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight
198
rationality that had characterized the decadent
Zivilization prior to World War I. Spengler, however,
conflated Faust not only with the defeated Germans but also
with all of Western civilization.
When Goethe sketched the first Urfaust, he was Parzival.
When he finished the first part, he was Hamlet. In the
beginning of the second part, he was the cosmopolitan
man of the 19th century, which Byron understood
beforehand would be the form our "soul" would assume in
the next, the last century.?
In his popular study of 1922, Nietzsche: Versuch Eine
Mythologie, Ernst Bertram suggests that German culture should
return to its volkisch roots and form a Nietzschean re-
vitalized Kultur:
o
that was independent of Western
Zivilization.
11
Bertram's Nietzsche, "the last great German,"
is transformed from an iconoclast into a supporter of a new,
authoritarian, and nationalist Germany. Bertram suggests that
Durer's Knight (Figure 12), as a true military hero, can serve
as the model of the Nietzschean hero who will lead the German
(Cambridge MA: M.l.T. Press, 1986), p. 1188.
90swald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse Morphologie der
Weltgeschichte, Vol 1, 5. (Munich: 1920), p. 159. Quoted in Peter
Michelsen "Faust und die Deutschen," p. 239. My translation.
"Als Goethe den Urfaust entwarf, war er Parzival. Als er den ersten
Teil abschloss, war er Hamlet. Erst mit dem zweiten Teil wurde er der
Weltmann des 19. Jahrhunderts, der Byron verstand ... im voraus, welche
Gestalt unser Seelentum in den nachsten, den letzten Jahrhunderten annehmen
wird."
10 Ernst Bertram Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie, originally published
1922 (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1965), p. 15.
11 See Harry Levin, "A Faustian Typology" in Vierhundert Jahre Faust:
Rtickblick und Analyse. Eds. Peter Boerner and Sidney Johnson (Ttibingen: Max
Niemeyer Verlag, 1989), 1989, p. 9.
199
people away from Western decadence.:'::
Just as his knight was read as embodying the militarist
fantasies of conservative nationalists such as Bertram, DUrer
himself was also "remade" into a genius, scholar, and nation
builder. The artist limned the boundary of popular and elite
cultures and \oJas claimed by different sections of the
political spectrum as their symbolic representative. He was
the model for the conservative DUrerbund, whose members
included Heinrich W6lfflin and the Impressionist Jewish artist
Max Liebermann. For nationalists and anti-Semites, such as
Julius Langbehn and Momme Nissen, DUrer was the heroic
exemplar of the best of German culture. Members of the German
cultural avant-garde were also responsive to DUrer's life and
art. The Expressionist painter Ludwig Kirchner and the Neue
Sachlichkeit artist Otto Dix remarked that Durer and the
German masters of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, not the
French modernists, were their artistic sources of
inspiration. 13
DUrer's art--particularly the Meisterstiche, master
prints of the early 1500s, Melencolia I (Figure 1) and the
Knight Death and Devil (Figure 12)--had its own historical
life.
14
The figure of Melencolia I has been embraced by
countless artists over the centuries as the personification of
the artist, an "adoption" that has continued unabated to the
12 Bertram, Nietzsche, pp. 42-50.
13 See Chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion.
14 Refer to Chapter 1 and the beginning of Chapter 2 for more a more
200
present day (Figures 13-15). The life of Durer's Knight
has taken a somewhat different historical course. Generations
of Germans thought of it as a Romantic symbol of the
inevitability of death. By the end of the nineteenth century,
the Knight was viewed as an emblem of German nationalism and
inspiration. Copies of it could be found inside many German
homes. During the 1930s, its adoption by Fascist ideologues
culminated in the Nazi era's jingoistic conflation of the
Knight with the likeness of Adolph Hitler (Figure 17) .:5
Perhaps what is most interesting here is the way in
which the Faust and Durer myths became increasingly
intertwined in the public consciousness with the German
nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moller
van den Bruck, a conservative who inspired fascistic
nationalists, conflated Faust with Durer. He claimed that a
"Faustian nationalistic" politics, with which he associated
Durer, could in turn be associated with Germany's "whole
history, with its Van den Bruck's Faustian
nationalist, like Nietzsche's Dionysius, is wholly unlike the
"rationalists and pacifists. [who] draw their conclusions
from the premises of their party ... but not from the
detailed discussion of this phenomenon.
15 See Jane Hutchinson, Albrecht Durer; A Biography, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), pp. 201-202.
16 Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Kunstwart, XVIII, 22 (1912): p. 501.
Quoted in Gerhard Kratzsch, Kunstward und Durerbund: Ein Beitrag zur
Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus, (Gottingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), pp. 164-165. Trans. in Jan Bialostocki,
Durer and His Critics, 1500-1971: Chapters in the History of Ideas
Including a Collection of Texts (Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koerner,
1986), p. 232.
201
premises of reality." ~ 7 For nationalists such as van den
Bruck, the foundations of a politically and culturally
powerful new Germany were to be found in the history of the
Valk.
18
Durer and Faust, symbols of the volkisch Geist, could
serve as the "heroes" of a strong, teutonic, and united
Germany.
Although Faust was held up as the Nietzschean embodiment
of nationalism and anti-rationalism, he was also celebrated as
the model of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and rationalism.
Friedrich Avenarius, the bourgeois founder of the DUrerbund
and of its journal Der Kunstwart, wrote a play in 1919 titled
Faust. His protagonist, a Faust in the mode of Goethe's
classical, Enlightenment model, could easily have been
replaced by his DUrerbund DUrer. In Faust, Avenarius'
protagonist, as in Panofsky's interpretation of DUrer's winged
figure Melencolia I, is a symbol of the failure of the
Enlightenment rules of reason. This Faust appears to
symbolize the defeat during World War I of the traditional
enlightened culture associated with nineteenth-century
Germany.
Jan Bialostocki suggests that, for Aby Warburg, Faust
was equivalent to Nietzsche's Dionysius, the opposite of the
17 Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das Dritte Reich (Berlin: Ring Verlag,
1923), ii-iv. Translated in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton
Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1994), pp. 332-334.
18 Although the German word translates as "people", it is used in this case
as a reference to mythic German tribes who inhabited the forests of an
older Germany prior to their "civilization".
202
rational and calm Apollo of classical art.:? Although
Warburg identified Faust as the antagonist of classical
reason, Faustian irrationality, which was equated with a
Nietzschean inspired Dionysian emotion, complemented rather
than opposed the calm and rational classic. In his discussion
of DUrer's Death of Orpheus, Warburg suggests that the Orpheus
myth was "not only a studio motif of pure, formal interest to
artists but, rather it [suggested], in the spirit of the pagan
past, an actual event out of the dark mystery plays of the
Dionysian myth, which could be relived with passion and
understanding. ,,20 The primitive and unquantifiable passion of
the Dionysian was necessary for creativity. For Warburg, the
artist had to experience its Pathos if his art was to attain
the perfection of the art of the classical Greeks. In
Warburg's view, the artists of Quattrocento Florence and
Albrecht DUrer of Nuremberg were able to reach this
The sinister child-devouring Planet demon, whose battles
in the cosmos with other planet rulers determine the
destiny of creatures dependent on them, is transformed
by DUrer, through a humanizing metamorphoses, into the
19 Bialostocki suggests that Warburg returns "to the idea of the 'Faustian'
quality in DUrer, but without the element of nationalism which makes his
idea of the artrist much more universal and-for us today-more convincing,"
Durer, p. 335.
:0 Aby Warburg, "DUrer und die Italienische Antique" (1905) in Ausgewahlte
Schriften und WUrdigungen, ed. Dieter Wuttke with Carl Georg Heise (Baden
Baden: Saecula Spiritalia, 1979), p. 126.
" ... der Tod des Orpheus nicht nur ein rein formal interessantes Atelier-
motiv, sondern ein wirklich im Geiste und nach den Worten der Heidnischen
Vorzeit leidenschaftlich und verstandnisvoll nachgefUhltes Erlebnis aus dem
dunkeln Mysterienspiel der Dionysischen Sage war ... \\
:1 The notion of the classic grandeur (grosse Stille) of the ancient Greeks
and the Renaissance vs. the Dionsyian sublimb (a kind of passionate
release) of the later Michelangelo and the Baroque has its art historical
origins in Winckleman's conception of Classic art. (See Chapter 1).
203
plastic embodiment of rational
What is significant about DUrer's accomplishment is that he
did not conquer but rather "transformed" the Dionysian
qualities of the "sinister" child devourer into an
enlightened, rational being. Rationality and order, in other
words, have their foundation in the chaotic and disordered
world of Dionysios.
Other writers also characterized DUrer's art as
Dionysian/Faustian. Walter Benjamin referred to DUrer's
Melencolia I as a metaphor for the excesses of the Baroque,
while Thomas Mann associated DUrer's works with the sensuous
creativity of the unfettered irrational. Of St. Jerome, Mann
wrote that it was
intimately bound up with the Mannlichkeit und
Standigkeit [Manliness and steadfastness], the
knightliness between the Devil and Death; passion, odour
of the tomb, sympathy with suffering, Faustian
melencolia--and all of it composed into an idyll of
peaceful, industrious domesticity, with the sun shining
warm on the death's head through the bottle-glass in the
window-panes, and hour-glass and lion lending dignity
and a glimpse of the eternal to the modest, humble
Ii ttle scene.
But it was not the DUrer of the St. Jerome in which Mann
Warburg, "Italienisehe Kunst und internationale Astrologie irn Palazzo
Sehifanoia zu Ferrara" (1912), Gesamrnelte Sehriften (Leipzig and Berlin
B.G. TeUbner, 1932), p. 528.
"Aus dem kinderfressenden, finsteren Planetendarnon, von des sen Kampf
irn Kosrnos mit einern anderen Planetenregenten das Sehicksal der beschienenen
Kreatur abhangt, wird bei DUrer durch hurnanisierende Metamorphose die
plastische Verkorperung des denkenden Arbeitsmensehen."
, J
Thomas Mann, Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter,
(London: Martin Seeker Ltd., 1933), p. 151.
204
was interested, but rather, in DUrer's Melencolia I. In
Doctor Faustus, the Devil regards himself in "DUreresque"
terms. The demon exclaims, "German I am, but that I should
once in good DUreresque style freeze and shiver after the
sun ... ," to which Adrian LeverkUhn replies, "Extraordinarily
DUrerish. You love it. First 'how will I shiver after the
sun'; and then the hour-glass of the Melencolia. Is the magic
square corning toO?,,24 Few art historians have commented on
this relationship between Mann's Faust, the composer Adrian
Leverktihn of Doctor Faustus, and DUrer. It is worth quoting
from one at length here:
Mann has a special sympathy with DUrer, the archetypal
German artist, and he employs DUrer's work and
personality in the context of the Reformation as a model
for the modern artist, Adrian LeverkUhn. By using
DUrer's age, his city, his house, his study, his
friends, his style, his art, his creative genius, his
melancholia and his apocalyptic vision, Mann is able to
suggest that in spite of the contemporary barbarity [the
narrator and friend of LeverkUhn] Serenus Zeitblom
records, there still remains some continuity in our
experience and in our relationship to the past, even if
history is merely an eternal recurrence of madness and
destruction. ~ 5
A contemporary of Thomas Mann, Erwin Panofsky, has
provided the most influential interpretation of DUrer's art.
Panofsky's interpretation of DUrer's life and art, however,
appears to be quite different from Mann's. Although Panofsky
concludes that Melencolia I is a kind of self-portrait and
24 Thomas Mann, Faustus, pp. 226-227.
:5 Jeffrey Meyers "DUrer and Mann's Doctor Faustus," in Art International
17 (1973): p, 63. See also B. Rosasco, "Albrecht DUrer's 'Death of
Orpheus': Its Critical Fortunes and a New Interpretation of its Meaning",
in Idea: Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 3 (1984), pp. 19-41.
205
that it represents a personification of reason rather than
the mad and destructive demonic, nevertheless, like Mann he
employs Durer's art to define and delimit German culture.
Panofsky and Mann
Mann's Doctor Faustus (1948) and Panofsky's Albrecht
Durer (1943), though written after the end of the Weimar
Republic, provide remarkable insight into the Weimar
intellectual tradition of the Germans who were forced to leave
Germany. Both men were members of the upper-middle class, and
both were steeped in the intellectual traditions and classical
learning of their time. One would expect their views of
culture to share many similarities. However, Panofsky and Mann
were each a product of a distinct religious/cultural milieu.
As noted in Chapter 1, given that German-Jewish assimilation
was only partial at best, Panofsky's status as a Jew would
have conditioned his understanding of German culture and
Certainly, as Alphonse Silberman points out, the
co Although there were a number of Jewish organizations at the University
of Hamburg where Panofsky taught art history, I could not find his name
among the lists of members, nor could I find mention of his name in the
minutes of the meetings of any Hamburg Jewish organizations located at the
State Archive in Hamburg or in the Central Archives for the History of the
Jewish People in Jerusalem. This is rather striking in that the Warburg
family is frequently mentioned. Even Aby Warburg, who tended to be
somewhat reclusive, participated in cultural organizational life in
Hamburg. See Stephen Schwarzschild, "Adorno and Schoenberg as Jews" in the
Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XXXV (1990): p. 454. "As for so very many
acculturated Jews of that period, 'high culture' had become Adorno's
religion--in this case an impressively relevant dialectical Messianism."
Adorno reading Beethovens' 'nUssa Solemnis and 'et vitam ventura as a
glorification not of the transubstantiation but of "the hope of eternal
life of humanity." As discussed in Chapter 3, the study of the "high
culture" of the Renaissance might have had a similar import for art
historians such as Panofsky.
206
majority of German Jews accepted the "Verblendung" of the
Jewish German identity despite the submission and the
suffering they were forced to Jews by the late 19th
century, so to speak, experienced "the same secular trends as
Germans, [but also] encountered pressure to repress their
Jewishness, their ethnic and spiritual "otherness", in order
to achieve German citizenship.:e
Although many Jews, like Panofsky, were remarkably
acculturated and saw themselves primarily as German, they
could not have ignored the virulent anti-Semitism, which
accompanied Jewish political and economic emancipation in the
nineteenth and twentieth Aby Warburg, Panofsky's
mentor and colleague in Hamburg, for example, had assembled a
rather extensive collection of anti-Semitic news
Indeed, Weimar was a time of rising anti-Semitism, when a
decreasing number of Jews were allowed to earn their living in
the universities, which were in fact often instigators of
anti-Semitism.
31
As Gershom Scholem, a lifelong friend of
:7 Alphons Silbermann, "Deutsche Juden oder jtidische Deutsche? Zur
Identitat der Juden in der Weimarer Republik" in Juden in den Weimarer
Republik, d. Walter Grab and Julius H. Schoep (Stuttgart and Bonn: Burg
Verlag, 1986), pp. 347-355.
28 See Marion Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany:The Campaign
of the Judischer Frauenbund 1904 1938, (Westport, Connecticut: Greensward
Press, 1994), p. 17.
29 See Jehuda Reinharz "Jewish Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Central
Europe" in Leo Beck Institute Yearbook XXXVII (1992): pp. 147-167.
30 These newspaper clippings are stored at the Archive of the Warburg
Institute in London. The Institute's director, Nicholas Mann, was kind
enough to let me consult them before they had been catalogued.
31 Fritz Ringer points out that the number of Jews decreased from 16-17% of
the total University faculty in 1873 to only 1.5% in 1933. This trend had
begun even before the National Socialists were a significant power in
207
Walter Benjamin and Panofsky's contemporary from a similar
upbringing, recalls,
the real situation within this class is nowadays largely
misjudged. This is due to the manifest contradiction .
. between the ideology which professed assimilation or
declared it as already achieved and the actual behavior
in important situations of life and the psychological
reality. . An important factor, often played down in
contemporary literature was the social contact with non-
Jews or rather its absence. 3:
Ultimately, Panofsky had to recognize that the
enlightened culture of Goethe and Schiller had spawned the
darker side of the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s. I have
already discussed Panofsky's struggle in the 1920s and early
1930s with the Enlightenment philosophy of history.}3 At the
center of this belief, to which many "assimilationist" Jews
still adhered,34 albeit somewhat modified, is an insistence on
Germany. Disproportionately, a number of German Jewish faculty members were
Dozenten rather than employed Professors. Leo Baeck Institute Year Book,
XXXVI (1991): p. 211.
3: Gershom Scholem, "On the Social Psychology of the Jews in Germany:
1900-1933", in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933: the Problematic
SymbiOSiS ed. David Bronsen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag,
1979), pp. 17-18.
33 It is worth repeating Hermann Cohen's comparison of Kant and Hegel:
"Here the world-wide difference between Hegel and Kant manifests itself;
for Kant would have said: what is rational is not actual but ought to
become so." Hermann Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, Berlin 1904, p. 333.
Cited in Stephen S. Schwarzschild, "Adorno and Schoenberg as Jews Between
Kant and Hegel," The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XXXV (1990): p. 445.
34 As noted in Chapters 1 and 3, German Jews continued to hold onto the
Aufklarung (Enlightenment) values, despite the fact that even academics and
intellectuals increasingly moved toward "irrational", volkisch concepts of
cultural identity. Enzo Traverso claims that the so-called Jewish-German
"symbiosis" was not a dialogue but rather a Jewish "monologue"-"thus the
'Judeo-German symbiosis' became a cultural phenomenon purely within the
Jewish community, unconnected with any social life in common between the
two groups that were supposed to comprise it. In fact, the Germans never
seriously considered the idea of a cultural synthesis with the Jewish
tradition. At best, they accepted the Jews, provided the latter no longer
regarded themselves as Jews, provided they had abandoned Judaism." (The Jews
and German : From the 'Judeo-German S iosis' to the Memor of Auschwitz,
Linco n and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 7.
208
an objective core which unites all humankind inevitably
and progressively in the march to transcend ethnic, racial,
and cultural boundaries. The war of course, changed the
thinking of those that adhered to or struggled with this
liberal, enlightenment-based philosophy. For Panofsky and also
for Thomas Mann, the non-political individual who had
initially embraced Goethe's rational aesthetic, this battle
and its resolution are contained within the pages of Albrecht
DUrer and Doctor Faustus.
Mann's Doctor Faustus retells the traditional myth of
Faust, the malevolent Doctor of the original "Chap Books." As
in the older stories, Faust (LeverkUhn) signs a pact with the
devil in order to allow himself the possibility of discovering
his musical genius. For a moment, he seeks to go back on the
bargain. But in the end he declines to do so and instead
composes The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus. Ultimately, he
confesses his tale to the narrator (Serenus Zeitblom) and a
group of his comrades and gives himself up to the Devil and
death, and in doing so loses his soul but gains artistic
freedom. (He is allowed just enough time in which to create
his brilliant masterpieces.)
Mann tells the story of a musical genius who trades the
human, moral restraints that limit his creative potential for
those demonic, subjective forces that can unleash creative
genius. His pact with the Devil allows him both to work
Originally published as Les Juifs et l'Allemagne: de la 'symbiose judeo-
allemande'a la memoire d'Auschwitz, Paris: La Decouverte, 1992).
through and to transcend human frailty. In doing so, as
Mann writes it, the limitations of reason and intellectual
order are subsumed within a Dionysian fury of unbounded
subj ecti vi ty. 35
Panofsky's interpretation of Durer's Melencolia may be
209
compared with Mann's Faust. Both the engraved brooder and the
ambitious musician are grasping creatures who test human
mettle. They attempt to reach beyond the experiential to a
divinely inspired creative genius. They seek to merge the
rational/objective with the irrational/subjective into an art
that exemplifies a universal experience. In fact, in
describing the melancholic humor represented in Melencolia I,
Panofsky could be writing the story of Adrian Leverkuhn,
Mann's Faust: "The action of the melancholy humour, which
Aristotle had likened to that of strong wine, seemed to
explain, or at least to concur with, those mysterious
ecstasies which 'petrify and almost kill the body while they
enrapture the soul' .,,36 Great art, for both Mann and
Panofsky, is distinguished by destruction, mystery, and
irrationality, which exist alongside rationality and
intellectual genius. Nevertheless, for both authors, these
polarized concepts do not exist in a harmonious balance. One
emerges as the victor.
In Doctor Faustus, Mann transforms traditional legend
35 See Irvin Stock, Ironic Out of Love: The Novels of Thomas Mann (North
Carolina: McFarland, 1994), esp. pp. 151-155.
~ 6 Panofsky, DUrer, p. 165.
210
into an evaluation of German culture. In The Story of a
Novel, Mann calls Faustus a giant "montage"--a montage of the
history of German culture and of his own artistic
experiences. 37 On the one hand, he places Faust in the
present, in the contemporary inferno of Nazi Germany, while at
the same time, he invokes the German past through the use of
archaic language and symbols (particularly evident in
Leverkuhn's long dialogue with the Devil). The medieval terms
used by the Devil and the frequent references to Durer and his
art are allusions to German cultural history and
Panofsky's narrative, although it is the biography of
Germany's famous Renaissance artist, is also a commentary on
present German culture. In the opening paragraphs of the text,
Panofsky writes that Durer, despite or perhaps because of his
"Italianizing" or humanizing of the German love for detail,
represents the German contribution to the great cultural
"fugue" of the history of style. Durer, in other words,
represents a high point in the history of German art and
Western culture.
The Germans so easily regimented in political and
military life, were prone to extreme subjectivity and
'7 f
- Thomas Mann, The Story 0 a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus,
trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).
Originally published as Die Entstehung des 'Doktor Faustus:' Roman eines
Romanes. (Frankfort am Main: S. Fischer, 1949).
38 Among the many studies of Mann, history and art, see: Dagmar Barnouw,
"Fascism, Modernity, and the Doctrine of Art from Mario and the Magician to
Doctor Faustus. Michigan Germanic Studies 18 (1992): pp. 48-63. Volker
Dorr, ", Apocalypsis cum figuris:' DUrer, Nietzsche, Doktor Faustus und
ThomasManns 'Welt des magischen Quadrats.'" Zeitschrift fUr deutsche
Philologie, 112 (1993): pp. 251-270. Dominick La Capra, "History and the
Devil in Mann's Doctor Faustus,"in his History, Politics and the Novel,
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 150-174.
211
individualism in religion, in metaphysical thought
and, above all, in art. Owing to this individualism,
German art was never able to achieve that
standardization, or harmonious synthesis of conflicting
elements, which is the prerequisite of universally
recognized styles. 39
Panofsky believes that by transcending the German
peculiarities of style and incorporating the "universal"
qualities of Italian humanism, DUrer elevated German art into
the cosmopolitan world of artistic genius. DUrer not only
represents the preeminent German contributer to style but also
"saves" Germany for art history. His is an art that allows
German culture to supersede that of the contemporary "dark
ages" of the National Socialist period. DUrer's inspired
rationality, so to speak, transcends even an irrational
historical moment.
Mann's "DUrer," on the other hand, is a Faustian
representative of a "demonic" German archaic world rather than
of a cosmopolitan enlightened one. His DUrer, unlike
Panofsky's, subsumed the rational, ordered language of art
within the Dionysian world of irrationality. Although Mann
also celebrates individual genius, his artist utilizes the
forms of an older non-rational time--a time prior to the
constraints imposed by contemporary political, nationalist,
and cultural order. In doing so, LeverkUhn emerges from the
false comfort of a reasoned order into the individualistic,
unconstrained world of sense and genius. The composer
39 Panofsky, Durer, p. 3.
transcends reasons's limitations through demonic
inspiration--and successfully transforms his art.
212
Panofsky's winged figure does not succeed in overcoming
her limitations, although her struggle to comprehend abstract
reasoning appears to continue. In his view, Melencolia I is a
spiritual portrait of the artist who intensely searches--
through sheer mental concentration--for artistic truths. She
sits, surrounded by her tools in disarray, lost in thought,
while waiting for divine inspiration to emerge. Panofsky
regards her as a "spiritual portrait" of the artist, who
continuously searches but is frustrated by and cannot accept
the impossibility of his position. Unlike Mann's artist,
Panofsky's Melencolia I represents a creator who cannot
transcend the unhappy present because the promise of future
discovery has been denied to her. As the symbol of Germany's
cultural greatness, she is, for Panofsky, a symbol of defeat--
she is a creature consigned to the pages of the past with no
hope of a creative future.
Both books, then, bid farewell to the German idealist
tradition. The authors appear to be unequivocal about the
death of the German culture they had known. The protagonists
of Doctor Faustus and DUrer turn against the German tradition
that they have previously embodied. Yet the authors reach
different conclusions about the future of a national art,
specifically that of Germany. For Mann, it is reinvented--
displaced from the nation to a heroic individual. For
Panofsky, DUrer's winged creature Melencolia, whom he
213
identifies with both artistic creativity and the artist,
sits immobilized. She may be understood as a symbol of
mourning, an emblem of the lost cultural hopes of the German
Jews. Keith Moxey has claimed that Panofsky's book is a
testament to the world he left behind--a world whose future is
destroyed by a culture he had loved. ~ ' ; Yet it remains alive,
embodied and embalmed in the art of such past creators as
Albrecht Durer and the inheritors of the humanist Renaissance.
For Panofsky, in other words, a "better" Germany may be
found only in the past, in the enlightened rational world of
Goethe, Schiller, and Humboldt and in the Nuremberg of the
sixteenth-century humanist scholar Willibald Pirckheimer. The
literary and philosophical traditions of Renaissance humanism
and of its eighteenth-century philosophical children are
forever preserved in the art of Pirckheimer's artist friend.
Reason, Panofsky's symbolic archimedean thread, connects the
cultural pinnacles of the past with each other and allows
present and future generations to directly read each of the
preserved artistic stories.
For Mann, on the other hand, Germany's past humanist
world has been forever destroyed. The historical and cultural
records that remain are not legacies because there was no
"enlightened" collective. After World War II, the world of
culture gives way to that of the "irrational," subjective
40 See Keith Moxey "Panofsky's Melencolia" in The Practice of Theory:
Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics and Art History (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 65-78.
214
genius.
Politics: Mann and Panofsky
Mann's comment that he is an "unpolitischer Mensch"
(apolitical person) is well known. Although the validity of
his statement is debatable, Schrader and Schebera note that
his later stance is not apolitical.
41
His early lack of
commitment to Weimar's institutional political order was
replaced by 1930 with an active involvement in repudiating
Nazism while he lived in Germany and later as an emigrant
living in the United States. Not all intellectuals were as
clear in their political sympathies. We do know that Walter
Benjamin in later life did not consider himself German
although he was unable to entirely reject his cultural
heri tage. 4 ~
Panofsky's public position on his German Jewish heritage
is less clear. As noted earlier, he does not appear to have
been a member of any Jewish academic or political organization
41 Barbel Schrader and JUrgen Schebera, The Golden Twenties: Art and
Literature in the Weimar Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988), p. 190. The authors note that by 1930, Mann had "finally donned the
cloak of political commitment" warning of the inevitable terrors if the
Nazis were to rule. Although his political stance and support of the
Democratic institutional structure is clear at this time, his political
sympathies were evident even as an "apolitical." Because ideological wars
during Weimar were often fought in the cultural rather than political
arena, aesthetics itself by default must be considered politicized.
(Though aesthetics never escapes "ideology" in some eras it seems to be
more "consciously" grounded in it.)
42 See this discussion in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. Also see Richard Wolin,
Walter Benjamin, An Aesthetic of Redemption, 2
nd
edition (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1994) pp. 1-11 and passim.
215
during his tenure at Nonetheless, some notion of
his relationship to a political identity can be gleaned from
his private correspondence during the time when his personal
situation in Germany became untenable. In the summer of 1932
Panofsky wrote to Walter Friedlander that "now, the victory of
widespread barbarism has been decided. . [and] I have already
exposed my position so that I will be the first to leave when
the government is taken over by the idiots.,,44 One letter
dated April 12, 1933, to Gustav Pauli is worth quoting at
length:
I, and others like me, are really deeply entwined with
Germany, and especially with that most German of
Germany, as it is embodied in you and a few others, and
so deeply engrained is it that a separation would go to
the very life, not only in the sense of "Kultur" (which
is important but only in an accidental [probably meant
as cultural] sense) but also especially to the very
depth of feeling. Those whom I most admire and love on
this earth are pure Germans and (which is a comfort for
me in these days as you have also movingly expressed in
your letter), I almost always saw my affection returned
especially from those [most German of Germans] and
sometimes I believed myself to be connected with those
peop17 in a special in a way in which the race
was overcome. -
o As already noted, I could not find his name on the "Mitglieder" lists of
any Jewish academic organizations. Nor could I find Aby Warburg's although
his cousin Aby S. and his brother Max were very involved in Jewish and
cultural organizations in the city. Although it's difficult to say what
role Aby may have had, one would presume that his brothers would have
discussed cultural matters with him given his expertise or interest in art,
anthropology, history, religion (particularly Judaism and related political
and current events) and a variety of other cultural areas.
H Erwin Panofsky, June 2, 1932 letter to Walter Friedlaender: "Jetzt, wo
der Sieg der allgemeinen Barbarei entschieden ist. . . Ich habe mich
ziemlich exponiert und werde wohl unter den ersten sein, die bei der
endgiltigen Regierungstibernahme durch die Idioten gegangen werden".
(Nachlass Walter Friedlander, Leo Baeck Institute, New York). See Horst
Bredekamp for a discussion of this and other correspondences in "Ex Nihilo:
Panofskys Habilitation" in Erwin Panofsky: Beitrage des Syrnposions Hamburg
1992, ed. Bruno Reudenbach (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), pp. 31-52.
45 Gustav Pauli Nachlass, Hamburg Kunsthalle, Letter from September 30,
1933. "Ich, und viele meinesgleichen, bin wirklich mit Deutschland, und
besonders mit dem deutschesten Deutschland, wie es sich fur mich in Ihnen
Panofsky's cry that he is emotionally connected with
those most "German of Germans" is extraordinary given the
persecution he and other Jews suffered in 1933. (He had, in
fact, attempted to help a number of his Jewish colleagues,
including Rudolf Wittkower and Walter Friedlander, find
academic positions outside Germany.46 On the one hand,
216
Panofsky's lament can only be understood if we recognize that
he clearly identified with Pauli's enlightened, cultured
world. Nevertheless, his appreciation of German culture was
related, albeit not always consciously, to his identity as a
displaced German-Jew. Perhaps this is most poignantly
expressed later in the above letter, when Panofsky writes that
even for a Jew there is a home: "die eben auch fur einen Juden
eine Heimat ist." Later, while living in the United States
and a year after the publication of his two-volume DUrer
monograph, Panofsky was, not surprisingly, pessimistic about
und ein paar anderen Menschen Ihrer Art verkorpert, so tief verwachsen,
dass eine Trennung sehr ans Leben gehen wurde, nicht nur im Sinne der
'Kultur' (die wichtig ist, aber doch nur im Sinne des Akzidens), sondern
gerade auch im Sinne des Geftihls. Die Menschen, die ich auf Erden am
meisten liebe und verehre, sind reine Deutsche, und (das ist das
Trostliche, das gerade in diesen Tagen und in Ihrern Brief den
ergreifendsten Ausdruck gefunden hat) fast irnmer sah ich meine Zuneigung
gerade von dieser Seite her erwidert und hatte rnanchrnal die Empfindung,
auch --oder gerade--jenen Menschen in einer besonderen, tiber den Rasse-
Gegensatz herubergreifenden Weise verbunden zu sein."
I read a transcription of this letter at the Warburg Archiv in Hamburg. I
am grateful to Karen Michel for pointing out its importance to me. The
translation is my own. Letter published in: Hanna Hohl, Saturn Melancholie
Genie. Erwin Panofsky zu Ehren. Ed. Uwe M. Schneede, Exhibitions Catalog,
Hamburg, 1992, p. 60. Also see, Bredekamp, "Ex nihilo: Panofskys
Habilitation," p. 38.
46 See correspondence between Margaret Barr and Erwin Panofsky. Princeton
University Library. I read transcriptions of these letters at the
Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar Archive, University of Hamburg, Hamburg
Germany. I am grateful to Karen Michels for suggesting that I review them.
217
the political intentions of the German people. In a letter
to Betty Trotter, Booth Tarkington's secretary, he remarked
Speaking of "protest vote": one of the most frequent
objections to Vansittart is that Germany before Hitler
had about three million Communist voters, from which it
is concluded that there must be that many anti-Nazis.
Nothing could be "wronger" ... my guess is that at least
two thirds of those who voted Communist in 1932 are now
happily absorbed by the Nazis, and the fact that ..
the events of and after July 20, 1944 have strengthened
rather than weakened the German resistance would seem to
bear out Vansittart's tenet that the Nazi movement was
and is a people's, and not a junker's or industrialist's
movement--although the junkers and industrialists "took
it up" in the hope of controlling it.
P
Within this letter Panofsky referred to the anti-Semitism
within the Republican party: "You will hardly know it, but the
head of the Republican Committee of Pennsylvania has seen fit
to distribute millions of violently antisemitic pamphlets in
this neighborhood, and the slogan 'Well, these boys will cease
to be that way after election' did not work so very well in
Germany." With Booth Tarkington he pursued his fears
concerning rising anti-Semitism within the United States only
to be soothed by Tarkington that "naturally, after what
happened in Germany, I know how such a gesture would loom
large in your minds ... [but] It's impossible for me to take
seriously any worry over anti-Semitism in this country. The
. . d ,,48
worry 1S an Lmporte one.
As is evident from this exchange of letters, Panofsky's
47 Erwin Panofsky, Dr. Panofsky & Mr. Tarkington: An Exchange of Letters
1938-1946, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton: Princeton University Library,
1974), p. 43.
48 Erwin Panofsky, Dr. Panofsky & Mr. Tarkinton, p. 44.
218
relationship to German culture changed as he was forced to
acknowledge his Jewish identity. Indeed, as I will show in the
subsequent paragraphs, his problematic relationship to the
land of his birth is evident in the pages of Albrecht DUrer.
Mann's public (unlike Panofsky's very private) political
sensibilities, despite his earlier claim to be the
unpolitischer Mensch of the Weimar Republic, are clearly
delineated in both his early essays and in Doctor Faustus. In
"An Appeal to Reason," written in 1930 during Weimar, Mann is
clearly affected by the political conditions. He writes that
the ascendance of National Socialism was synonymous with a
new mental attitude [that] was proclaimed for all
mankind, which should have nothing to do with bourgeois
principles such as freedom ... faith in progress. As
art, it gave vent to expressionistic shrieks from the
soul; as philosophy, it repudiated the reason and the
mechanistic and ideological conceptions of bygone
decades; it expressed itself as an irrational
throwback ... by its absolute unrestraint, its orgiastic
radicallyantihumane, frenziedly dynamic character.'?
During and after World War II, their political
sensibilities took on a different guise. Panofsky found his
home in the physically remote but paradisiacal Princeton and
in the neo-Kantian inspired iconography and iconology of his
later years.
50
Cultural meaning no longer emerged from a
49 Thomas Mann, Originally published as "Appell an die Vernunft," Berliner
Tageblatt (October 18, 1930). Translated as "An Appeal to Reason", in The
Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward
Dimendberg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1994), p. 150.
so As noted in Chapter 2, Panofsky, in his early studies characterized the
meaning behind the work of art as one fraught with tension. After his
219
tense balance between opposi ties (an Auseinanderseztung:
l
)
as in the early writings but could reside instead in a
Cassirean abstract essence or symbolic form, an objective
construct separated from subjective experience. Artistic
"truth" in the earlier essay on DUrer's Melencolia I appears
to be more of a compromise between the struggling partners of
form and content, between subjectivity and objectivity.s: In
the later work, meaning ultimately resides in a symbolic form,
a kind of spatial repository that stands outside this
struggle.
emigration to the United States in 1933, he seems to have given up
struggling with the methodological issues that preoccupied him in Germany.
His later studies, such as those Gothic ALchitecture and Scholasticism are
less concerned with grappling with theoretical processes and more with
finding the interpretive answer. As Michael Holly notes: "Panofsky sees
neither the individual stones of the edifice nor the thrusts and
counterthrusts of the architectural structure. Instead he regards the
cathedral as embodying in stone, a historical argument or metaphysical
explanation of the world." (Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, p.
170)
51 See Chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion of this. I am not suggesting
that Panofsky's early writings do not show a strong neo-Kantian influence.
Indeed, Perspective as Symbolic Form is undoubtedly neo-Kantian in spirit.
Nevertheless, other influences were also clearly present in the early
writings (particularly an affective, theological one). Suffice it to say,
here, that in "Ober das VerhiHtnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie:
Ein Beitrag zu der Erorterung tiber die Moglichkeit, kunstwissenschaftlicher
Grundbegriffe'" (Zeitschrift fUr Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft
18, 1924-5). Panofsky defines the meaning (Sinn) of a work of art as a
balance between sensory data and a-priori principles. But this balance is
fraught with tension, in that artistic purpose actively and continually
transforms itself. Borrowing Riegl's term for the will to art, the
Kunstwollen, he defines this "will" as a tense balance among opposites
(Auseinandersetzung), (p. 139).
In the later study "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline"
(from 1940 and found in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on ALt
History lGarden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955) I have used the Phoenix edition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Artistic meaning (the
"tendency" of an age) and artistic perception can be objectively described
through a-priori given rules of order. The meaning of a work of art, for
Panofsky, has been transformed from the organic Kunstwollen into a static
ideal. Even though meaning may be hidden beneath the visible forms, because
of the unitary nature of the work of art, the art historian can unlock this
hidden meaning.
s: See Chapter 2 for a lengthy discussion of this theme.
220
Mann's views also changed with his emigration from
Germany. In words reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's earlier
work on the German tragic drama, Mann writes, "beauty is
linked to death." Goethe's Apollonian and classic Stille is
replaced by Dionysian Angst. But Mann takes this further in
his association of beauty with the putrefaction of life. He
clearly renounces his earlier Goethean ideal: "For everything
that has depth is wicked; life itself is profoundly wicked, it
has not been thought up by morality, it knows nothing of
'truth', but bases on semblance and artistic lie, it mocks
virtue, for its essence is ruthlessness and
Mann replaced Goethe with Nietzsche and the rational with the
irrational. In Mann's view, Nietzche's madness was a
"sacrificial deed for humanity. ,,54
There is the interweaving of Leverktihn's tragedy with
that of Nietzsche, whose name does not appear in the
entire book-advisedly, because the euphoric musician has
been made so much Nietzsche's substitute that the
original is no longer permitted a separate existence.
There is the taking of Nietzsche's experience in the
Cologne bordello and of the symptomatology of his
disease; there are the devil's quotations from Ecce
Homo; also the borrowings from diet menus to be found in
Nietzsche's letters from Nice. --
Through individual suffering, Mann's artist is reborn--
53 Mann, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events,"
(Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, 1947), reprinted in R.C. Solomon,
Nietzsche, A Collection of Critical Essays, (Garden City: Anchor, 1973),
p. 366.
54 Mann, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events," p.
370.
55 Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: the Genesis of Doctor Faustus, P. 32.
221
as Nietzsche's Dionysius. Dionysius' triumph represents a
defeat for the enlightened, progressive culture that so many
Germans had strongly embraced.
The Dionysian and Its Appeal for Panofsky and Mann
Both Mann's Doctor Faustus and Panofsky's Durer can be
viewed through the veil of Nietzchean rhetoric. Nietzsche
had, like the artist DUrer before him, become a "life" model
for a variety of groups during Weimar. He had, in fact, been
transformed in the public domain into a cultural icon, a
mythic symbol for both the left and the right. This is, in
part, due to the ambiguity and contradictions in his writings.
Different political organizations sprinkled their propaganda
and rhetoric with references to him and his "ideas" in order
to validate each of their own ideological platforms.
The fascist appropriation of Nietzsche is certainly well
known. But, as Seth Taylor notes in Left Wing Nietzscheans,
the cultural avant-garde also looked to Nietzsche for
inspiration and validation.
56
The Dadaist R. Hulsenbeck
writes that Nietzsche provided a "humanistic defense of the
individual. ,,51 On the one hand, Nietzsche encouraged an
elitist individual expression that some translated as a
withdrawl from society. But he also exhorted the individual to
improve him or herself in order to remake society. Taylor
56 Seth Taylor Left Wing Nietzscheans (Berlin: Walter de Greuter, 1990).
57 Taylor, Left Wing Nietzscheans, P. 226.
222
remarks that World War I forced the avant-garde to make a
choice between these two options.
Mann, in his interpretation of Nietzsche's writings and
of "Nietzscheanisms" as well, chose the latter. By the 1920s
he rejected the "non-political," anti-Western, nationalist
position of his 1918 Reflections of an Unpolitical Man and
decided to support the Republic. In 1922 he wrote, "humanity.
. . it is truly the German mean, the Beautiful and Human, of
which our finest spirits have dreamed. . . whose meaning and
aim we take to be the unification of our political and
national life, when we yield our still-stiff and unaccustomed
tongues to utter the cry: 'Long live the republic' !,,56
By the late 1930s, Mann had conflated the philosopher
with the triumphant Dionysian hero.
His life was intoxication and suffering--a highly
artistic state, mythologically speaking the union of
Dionysos with the crucified. Swinging the thyrsus he
ecstatically glorified the strong and beautiful, the
amorally triumphant life and defended it against any
stunting by intellectualism--and at the same time he
paid tribute to suffering as none other."59
Mann opens his essay "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of
Contemporary Events" by comparing Nietzsche to Hamlet. He was
a "personality of phenomenal cultural plenitude and
complexity, summing up all that is essentially European ... [He
was] dragged by fate practically by the hair into a wild and
58 Thomas Mann, "Von deutscher Republik: Aus einem Vortrag," Berliner
Tageblatt, no. 469 (October 17, 1922). Trans. In The Weimar Republic
Sourcebook, p. 109.
59 Thomas Mann, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary
Events," p. 365.
223
intoxicated prophesy of barbaric resplendent force, of
stifled conscience of evil, a state devoid of all piety and
raging against its very own nature." Not only is the reader
reminded of Benjamin's interpretation of Hamlet as the
ultimate tragic figure (and hence the literary equivalent to
DUrer's internally raging melancholic) but also of Mann's
characterization of the protagonist in Doctor Faustus. Adrian
Leverklihn has a similar educational and family background to
Nietzsche. Like the latter, LeverkUhn has unusual romantic
liaisons, contracts the dreaded sexual disease syphilis, and
dies on the identical day at an identical age.
6C
Mann's composer leads a "Nietzschean" life, a life that
embraces the irrational Dionysian frenzy that is embodied in
the individual unencumbered by societal strictures. Indeed,
Nietzsche's Dionysius can be understood as the epitome of the
"free individual," the subversive Ubermensch who breaks the
traditional and routinized strictures of conventional society.
In conquering his own limitations, the Nietzschean individual,
as a heroic model for a Weimar society so desperate for
heroes, could transform society. Such a notion appealed both
to the fascists and to German Jews.
Nietzsche's symbols, particularly that of the Dionysian
hero, were nationalized and transformed by the volkisch right
(and then the Nazis) into the "climactic German, the
embodiment of Uberdeutschum . . . the incarnation of the
60 T.J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1974), p. 369.
224
timeless nordic experience, . and a continuing
metaphor for the ongoing German confrontation with the
world. , , ~ l Ernst Bertram, in his 1918 biography of Nietzsche,
appropriated Nietzsche's rhetoric as an exhortation to
overthrow the ordinary rationalist present in favor of the
mythic, heroic timeless one of the philosopher. In Bertram's
view, Durer's Knight from the Knight, Death and the Devil, an
image that Nietzsche loved for its symbolic references to a
German hero, was a model of what Germany needed after the
defeat of World War I. His interpretation was derived from
volkisch, nationalist sentiments, which exhorted the German
populace to take action against foreign enemies as did DUrer's
Nordic Knigh t . ~ : :
Ironically, this was also true for German Jews. Although
Nietzsche wrote that Jews "turned religion, cult, morality,
history, psychology, one after the other, into an incurable
contradiction to their natural values, " , , ~ he was among the few
non-Jews to cry for the abolition of anti-Semitism and to laud
Jewish culture as a descendent of that of Greek antiquity:
The entire problem of the Jews exists only within
national states, inasmuch as it is here that their
energy and higher intelligence. . . accumulated from
generation to generation in a long school of suffering,
must come to preponderate to a degree calculated to
arouse envy and hatred so that in almost every nation. .
61 Stephen Aschheirn, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 152.
6: Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche. See the Chapter titled "Ritter, Tad, und
Teufel," pp. 42-63.
63 Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Anti-Christ," in The Portable Nietzsche, ed.
and trans. Walter Kaufmann (NY: Viking Press, 1968), pp. 592-3. Italics
are Nietzsche's.
225
. there is gaining ground the literary indecency of
leading the Jews to the sacrificial slaughter. [but]
in the darkest periods of the Middle Ages. . it was
the Jewish freethinkers, scholars and physicians who .
. held firmly to the banner of enlightenment. . If
Christianity has done everything to orientalize the
occident, Judaism has always played an essential part in
occidentalizing it again: which in a certain sense
means making of Europe's mission and history a
continuation of the Greek. 6-1
One rabbi exhorted the Jews with "the will to Judaism! , , ~ :
Zionists, and in particular Martin Buber, cited Nietsche's
concept of Machtwille, the internally driven desire for self-
transformation, as a call for Jews to regenerate themselves.
This rhetoric resonates quite well with Jewish Messianism. It
also resonates with the theories of the German-Jewish art
historian Aby Warburg. 036 Nietzsche's conception of the
Dionysian hero, his notion of an individual working through
mediocrity in an effort to attain excellence, is at the core
of Warburg's theory of the Renaissance and the struggle
between the Dionysian (irrational) and the Apollonian (the
forces of reason) .
If we are to heed Donald Preziosi, Nietzsche was
~ 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits,
trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1986) aphorism 475, p. 175. Italics are Nietzsche's.
65 Caesar Seligmann, "Nietzsche und das Judentum," in Judentum und moderne
Weltanschauung: Flinf Vortrage (Frankfort am Main, 1905), pp. 76-79. Cited
in Aschheim, "Nietzsche and the Nietzschean Moment in Jewish Life," Leo
Baeck Institute Yearbook XXXVII (1992): p. 199. Also see George L. Mosse,
"The Secularization of Jewish Theology" in Masses and Man: Nationalist and
Fascist Perceptions of Reality (N.Y.: H. Fertig, 1980), pp. 250-259.
66 See Chapter I for further explanation regarding Warburg's thesis
concerning the Apollonian/Dionysian split and struggle in the cultural
Weltanschauung.
226
significant for Panofsky as w e l l . 6 ~ Panofsky interprets
Melencolia I as the personification of the artist who
intensely searches to conquer his human limitations. Although
a symbol of DUrer, she is also, in Panofsky's narrative, a
type of Ubermensch. Elsewhere in the text, Panofsky is more
direct in referring to the artist's Nietzschean-like struggle:
"DUrer thought of reality as something infinitely enigmatical,
holding some sort of secret which had to be 'pulled
out' ... truth was 'hidden' or, still more significantly,
'buried' in nature. ,,6E Unlike Nietzsche's struggling hero,
Durer's Melencolia does not succeed in overcoming her
limitations and rejuvenating, so to speak, German culture. In
somewhat contradictory fashion, DUrer, the artist who saves
Germany for art history, is nevertheless unable to attain the
level of genius he desires. Nietzsche may have inspired
Panofsky's rhetoric of heroic struggle, but Melencolia I does
not attain Nietzschean victory.
61 Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science,
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 111-121. Preziosi
suggests that we should should stop looking for Panofsky's "purported
protosemiotisms" when evaluating the history of art history. A more
valuable undertaking would be to reread him throught the screen of the
writings of Kant, Hegel, Saussure and "most especially of Nietzsche."
Preziosi quotes Karl Jaspers:
[Nietzsche's] contradictions show us what he is driving at. Existence both
provides and is a product of exegesis ... It is now objectivity and now
subjectivity ... it is constantly questioning and questionable",
(Nietzsche, [(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969)], p. 290).
Preziosi notes "that such a (re) reading of Panofsky's iconology--to
grill him through the grid of Nietzsche so to speak could very well do him
justice at last. Such a step remains to be taken," (p. 121).
From my point of view, Preziosi's suggestion is a valid one. Given
that Nietzschean rhetoric was widely circulated in Germany during the first
part of the twentieth century, and specifically among German Jews,
Nietzsche seems to be a reasonable "screen" through which to read Panofsky.
68 Panofsky, DUrer, p. 274.
227
Panofsky, the Nietzschean Hero and Gennan-Jewish Messianism
The conflation of the Nietzschean hero who strenuously
transforms himself into the prudishly moral, singularly
directed, and upstanding bourgeois gentleman of the early
twentieth century is in keeping with the German-Jewish
dialogue of the time. As noted above, personal regeneration is
very much at the core of Messianic philosophy. But it is also
the political foundation for the transformation of Jews into
Germans. Jews, as a noted preacher in late nineteenth-century
Hamburg exhorted, were to conduct themselves with the highest
of moral standards. ,,9 Sinnlichkeit (morality) and
appropriate decorum were what would distinguish them from
their Eastern cousins and thus facilitate the process of
assimilation with the non-Jewish Jews should,
according to proponents of assimilation, continually refine
themselves in an effort to attain both moral and cultural
perfection (as defined by Enlightenment This
"9 See David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Sorkin quotes Edward Kley (1789-
1867), a preacher in Hamburg who reminds German Jews that a "concerted
effort must be made to overcome the 'centuries of development' (Bildung)
that separate Jew from Gentile". Sorkin notes that Kley exhorted Jews to
"choose an occupation that brought honor. . . [and to] show that you are
worthy, moral". (pp. 87-89).
George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal
Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H., Fertig, 1985).
71 See Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and
Ideology in the second Reich, 1870-1914. Trans. Noah Jonathan Jacobs
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975). This position was
espoused by German Jews such as the German Jewish philosopher Hermann
228
process of assimilation was considered to be the
"reasonable" outcome of a Jewish rational struggle for
accommodation with their Gentile brethren.
Panofsky's interpretation of Melencolia I as a figure
who attempts to exhaustively "work through" and overcome her
limitations is in keeping with the Nietzschean hero of the
early twentieth century. In particular, his interpretation of
DUrer's winged figure is similar to a Jewish rhetorical
version of the heroic. In Midrashic Judaism, the "hero" (the
"aware" Jew) is one who listens and waits, taking into account
what went before but at the s a ~ e time responding to the
immediacy of his situation. To achieve success, which in
traditional JUdaism may be equated with knowledge or
understanding, the "heroic" individual must earn it. As
Lionel Rubinoff puts it with regard to Jewish identity,
midrashic receptiveness or listening remains the source
of its structure. Is this perhaps what Goethe meant when
he wrote: 'What from your fathers you receive as heir,
earn in order to possess it' ... the essence of Judaism
. . . emerges dialectically from the tension between
immediacy and tradition--a tradition to be achieved in
action and thought. 7:
Although Melencolia actively seeks to overcome her
limitations, she fails in her attempt. DUrer's Hercules
(Figure 19), a figure also engaged in active thought is, on
the other hand, "successful." He dispenses with doubt and, in
Cohen, one of the individuals responsible for the nineteenth century
revival of Kant.
72 Lionell Rubinoff "Jewish Identity and the Challenge of Auschwitz," pp.
130-152 in Jewish Identity, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
229
Panofsky's interpretation, engages in the appropriate
moral action. Panofsky provides an elaborate and circuitious
interpretation of the print. He points out that many of his
colleagues regarded this print as a parody of the myth of the
heroic Hercules. In this parodic view, Hercules stands
passively waiting, apparently unwilling to defend Virtue.
"Even worse," notes Panofsky of this particular interpretation
of the print, Hercules seems ready to deflect her blows rather
than engage in some type of offensive action. Panofsky argues
that DUrer could not have possibly produced such a hero: "all
the details which seem to support a satirical interpretation
of the engraving are no less susceptible of a 'serious' one.
And it is the latter which is more in harmony with DUrer's
psychology. ,,-:'3
Panofsky suggests that the cock seen on Hercules'
headgear signifies "courage, victory and vigilance. [It
is] the only creature capable of striking fear into the heart
of the lion. ,,-4 Because of the cock's symbolic reference to
bravery, Hercules is a hero in the conventional sense. Since
t h i ~ is not obvious from the print itself, the author supplies
the narrative, enabling the viewer to understand Hercules as a
man of action. In Panofsky's interpretation, Hercules is at a
crossroads of decision, ready to plunge forward with Virtue.
DUrer's work represents the hero prior to this action. This
particular print, in which Virtue and Vice do battle for the
73 Panofsky, Durer, p. 76.
230
soul, is seen as a snapshot of action that continues
before dnd after this frozen frame, a reference to the ongoing
process of Nietzschean struggle.
Panofsky's interpretation of the mythic Hercules as a
figure actively engaged in thought and poised on the brink of
a decision is similar to the Jewish scholar's internal
midrashic, interpretive dialogue. The action in Durer's
Hercules is but a piece of a continuing mythic narrative. To
understand the meaning behind the image, we must engage in an
interpretive process that places the work within a speculative
series of events. The artist's selection of this part of the
story must have resonated with the Jewish scholar who valued
- ~
introspection and the intellectual process. - Given that
Durer represented the apogee of humanist thought and artistic
endeavor, values that Panofsky himself respected, it is not
surprising that he should have been skeptical about any of his
colleagues suggesting that Durer represented a "parody" of the
story of the heroic Hercules.
The Dionysian, Sensuality and the Abstract
Just as Nietzsche's concept of the "hero" evolved from
-4
, Panofsky, Durer, p. 75.
75 See Anson Rabinbach, "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin,
Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism", New German Critique, 34
(Winter 1985): p. 85. "Thought focuses on the restoration of lost
meanings, suppressed connections, and is often linked to a sense of
redemption through language and through the reading of texts which reveal
the hidden presence or traces of a Messianic epoch. Whereas the prophetic
tradition involved public testimony, the Messianic tradition involves an
esoteric or secret form of knowledge."
231
one who challenges conventions to one who champions them,
the interpretation of Nietzsche's "Dionysian" also involved an
equally circuitous transformation. In fact, the polarity
Dionysian/Apollonian had become almost a commonplace for
intellectuals of the early twentieth Cultural
historians in particular conflated this philosophical duality
with a host of related oppositional pairs. Jacques Derrida
reminds us that such oppositions are the traditional
structures for interpreting works of art because they enable
the historian to distinguish an inner or true meaning from the
external "veil. "'8 For Aby Warburg, the Dionysian, which he
equated with the "primitive" or emotional unknown, existed
side by side with the quiet grandeur and harmonic closure of
the classic Greeks.
By the time of Weimar, the Dionysian had been associated
with the irrational, primitive, creative, instinctual,
individualistic and demonic and with a variety of other terms.
Thomas Mann uses the term in Doctor Faustus as a metaphor for
the subjective, for the "instinctual" rather than evil. His
instinctual is equivalent to the "natural," the opposite of
artifice, contrivance and civilization. Civilization, in fact,
76 See Chapter I for a summary of different art historians on this
relationship.
77 As noted earlier rational/irrational, modern/volk, Jew and
cosmopolitan/German were among the polarized categories into which cultural
groups (identities) found themselves tossed. This rhetoric, the narrative
strategies which encoded such polarizations, has had a powerful legacy.
Perhaps our contemporary obsession with modernism and its opposites (the
"traditional" or even post-modern) has been framed by this past historical
debate.
78 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian
232
tore Kultur and creativity from their original, natural
surroundings.
Karen Drabek Vogt claims that Mann sought to expand his
earlier conception of a classical Western humanism into one
that includes the shaman of The Magic Mountain with the
priests of older religions and with sickness itself. 7? The
Dionysian is thus a metaphor for nature and simplicity, for
humanity freed from the bonds of sterile intellectual
contrivances. Mann's Faust attempts to combine the intellect
with these Ur-forces. Leverklihn may be viewed then as a
"successful" Melencolia. Rather than trying to rise above the
experiential to seek higher truths, the composer transcends
the abstract by returning to nature. Leverklihn returns to the
experience of the senses--to the Dionysian. Creativity
emerges, in Mann's Doctor Faustus, when the irrational wins:
when the subjective/sensual/natural allied with the
demonic/Dionysian conquers the abstract intellectualisms
embodied in contemporary culture.
Mann characterizes the culture of the closing years of
wartime Germany as an artificial empty civilization. Yet all
is not lost. His composer evokes hope for the future in the
single figure of the woman (a non-intellectual) who comes to
his side as he collapses after his confession to his
companions. Thus Dionysian and natural is associated with
McLeod (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 22.
79 Karen Drabek Vogt, Vision and Revision: The Concept of Inspiration in
Thomas Mann's Fiction (New York: Peter Lang, 1987).
233
the feminine. Significantly, the vehicle for Leverktihn's
transformation is the prostitute, Haetera Esmerelda, who
seduces him and gives him syphilis. The traditional
association of woman as feruae fatale, the embodiment of evil
and temptation, is retained, albeit transformed. Leverktihn
allows himself to become infected with death so that he may
step beyond the bounds of ordinary ordered existence. He
behaves "stupidly with reason" in order to ultimately save
himself and art from the sterility of aestheticism and
Adrian, the artist who so admired mathematics-
-the science of order and rational structure--and disdained
sensual contact, ultimately embraces in a single instant the
sensual and with it the irrational Dionysian.
Given the concern with reason and the Dionysian,
Panofsky's interpretation of Melencolia I can certainly be
compared to that of Mann's Faustian composer. Indeed, both
are revitalized creatures. Melencolia, for example, is
transformed from a "slouch"--whose "swarthy" forebears were
afflicted with accedia and the darkened spirits of melancholy-
-into the "spiritual self-portrait of Albrecht She
is not subject to the slothful fits of her ancestors. Instead
her genius has paralyzed her body, not her mind, into
inaction. In similar fashion, Mann's Leverktihn is free of his
body; he has allowed his corporeal being to be destroyed by
disease in order for the spirited frenzy of his genius to
9Q Vogt, Vision and Revision, p. 139.
234
emerge: "Genius is a form of vital power deeply
experienced in illness, creating out of illness, through
illness creative."e:
An important difference thus emerges between the two
authors. For Mann, artistic creation depends on the
body/material, whereas, for Panofsky, the artist must
transcend his material limitations. Panofsky's Melencolia must
work through and defy her corporeal, irrational nature to
attain the expressive power of genius.
At this point, it is worth noting that body,
materiality, or sensuality (and perhaps also femininity and
sexuality) often occupy the same position as the subjective or
experiential in the polarity subjectivity/objectivity. The
material--sensuality or "form"--is often separated from the
abstract idea that codifies it into being. Margaret Iversen
has ccrnmented, in her study on the historiography of Aby
Warburg, that Panofsky has modified his own studies in art
history and turned "Warburg's dynamic, conflicted,
heterogeneous antiquity into a homogeneous, harmonious
whole. "e3 She notes that Panofsky "reinstated" the "fixity"
of the mind/body opposition that Warburg had treated as a
"dynamic, dialectic polarit [y] . ,,84 Indeed, Panofsky's 1943
81 f
Pano sky, Durer, p. 171.
82
Mann, Faustus, p. 355.
eJ Margaret Iversen "Retrieving Warburg's Tradition," Art History, 16 No.4
(Dec. 1993): p. 542.
84 Iversen, "Retrieving Warburg's Tradition," p. 541. Panofsky's early
studies are ambivalent regarding the mind/body opposition. In my View, in
these theoretical writings, Panofsky's interpretation of terms such as
235
interpretation of Durer's art to some extent fixes the
mind/body, subjective/objective dialectical categories into
distinct competing concepts. Like his colleague Ernst Cassirer
who retreated into the study of abstract philosophy as the
Nazi terror increased its grip on German Panofsky
himself increasingly favored the world of the abstract/mind
over that of the body/sensual. Nevertheless, as discussed
below, he was somewhat ambivalent about this conclusion.
For Weimar Jews, the separation of the sensual from the
conceptual carried a particular weight. Jews who wished to
assimilate had to take care that they remained within the
narrow, safe bounds of a carefully scripted morality that
frowned on obvious references to sexuality. Despite the
efforts of assimilated Jews to behave as morally upright
Germans, both prior to and during the Nazi era, propagandists
cited Jews as sexual predators and often regarded them and the
sexually emancipated "new woman" as bearers of cultural
degeneracy. 815
Contradictory stereotypes of Jews abounded.
In an essay on the notorious Jewish author Otto Weininger,
Riegl's Kunstwollen approach Warburg's tension filled dynamic one. This
ambivalence is also evident in his 1923 study of Melencolia I and in
"Albrecht Durer and Classical Antiquity" (1921), which Iverson discusses.
See my analysis in Chapter 2.
85 See T. Lipton, Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a German Intellectual in
Germany, 1914-1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 92-93.
13l.
86 Gottfried Feder, a Nazi ideologue, claimed that "The insane dogma of
equality led as surely to the emancipation of the Jews as to the
emancipation of women. The Jew stole the woman from us. We must kill the
dragon to restore her to her holy position as servant and maid". Quoted in
Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics, Claudia
Koonz (N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1987), p. 56. Koontz convincingly argues
that "The Jew and 'The New Woman' provided powerful metaphors against which
people could direct their anger and the anxieties generated by Hitler's
John Hoberman comments that such assumptions had long been
part of folkloric tradition.8
7
236
This placed Jewish males in a rather difficult position.
On the one hand, Jews had to "prove" their manhood, while, on
the other, they had to repress obvious references to
sexuality.88 Such stereotyping existed long before the
beginning of the twentieth century. Sander Gilman has pointed
out that renowned physicians from the early-nineteenth century
believed that Jews were physically weak and were predisposed
to nervous disorders because of their Although
these doctors suggested that such disorders could be overcome-
-and indeed Jewish men proved their physical bravery during
the Napoleonic wars--nevertheless, as Mosse notes, Jews
throughout the nineteenth century were depicted as puny and
weak, a weakness which anti-Semites associated with the Jews
"inability" to control sexual passion.?O
How did Jewish men of the early twentieth-century
respond to this stereotyping? Otto Weininger's answer was to
warnings kept nazis in a constant state of alert," (p. 56).
8
7
See John M. Hoberman "Otto Weininger and the Critique of Jewish
Masculinity,", in Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger Ed. Nancy
A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1995), pp. 141-153.
88 Both Sorkin (The Transformation of German Jewry) and Mosse
(Sexuality ... ) have remarked on the German Jews efforts to maintain high
moral standards and a puritanical restraint.
89 Sander L. Gilman, "Jews and Mental Illness: Medical Metaphors, Anti-
Semitism and the Jewish Response," Journal of the History of the Behavioral
Sciences, 20 (1984): p. 153.
90 George L. Mosse, "Jewish Emancipation : Between Bildung and
Respectability", in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the
Enlightenment to the Second World War, eds. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter
Schatzberg (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985), pp.
1-16.
237
attempt to excise Judaism from his life by publishing a
diatribe against Jewish culture (Sex and Character, 1903).
Weininger's reclamation of his masculinity coincided with the
death of his Jewish self (this self-inflicted psychic wound
may be related to his early suicide) .?l Hoberman concludes
that "terrified by the critical Aryan gaze, Weininger tried
desperately to achieve that state of invisibility we call
total assimilation; or, in Anna Freud's famous phrase,
'identification with the
Certainly Weininger's response to the anti-Semitic
association of Jewish masculinity with paradoxically either
effeminacy or predatory male sexuality is extreme. But, as
Hannah Arendt notes, there were a number of Jews who repressed
their Jewishness (whom she labeled "pariahs") .33 What is
significant is that the racist, biological views which
circulated in the popular press, encouraged hysterical
responses among the general population to which Jewish
organizations, such as the Central Verein des judischen
Glaubens, felt the need to At the very least, as
91 See Harry Zohn, "Fin de Siecle Vienna: the Jewish Contribution" in The
Jewish Response to German Culture, pp. 137-149. Zohn calls him a self----
hating Jew who shot himself at the age of 23 right after he had received
his Ph.D. and published his "original and sensational book," (p. 141).
9: Hoberman, "Otto Weininger," p. 153. For another very interesting view on
sexuality and German culture in the Weimar Republic, see the provocative
book by Maria Tatar Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). Tatar also discusses sexual
violence and misogyny in relationship to German cultural "heroes" and
ideals.
93 Hannah AIendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the
Modern Age (New York: Grove, 1978).
94 See Chapter I. As an example of such fabricated stories, Jewish ritual
murder of babies began to circulate in the European popular presses,
238
Mosse reminds us, Jewish males were exhorted to exhibit
morality and restraint-an appropriate, "healthy" manliness---
in order to be "acceptable" Jewish Germans.}:
For Panofsky, as evidenced in his Durer, questions of
sensuality/emotionalism/irrationalism seem to have resolved
themselves through distantiation. He focused instead on the
"safer" values associated with the abstract ideals of the
Kantian Enlightenment. He stressed the "respectable" values of
reason and rationality over that of the irrational and the
sensual.
Abstraction and Durer's Artistic Style
When speaking of the evolution Durer's late style,
Panofsky evaluates it according to the artist's use of
abstract stylizations. He argues that Durer's
late pen drawings ... are marked by an almost diagrammatic
transparency of the linear pattern. Form-indicative
curves are virtually abandoned in favor of straight
lines, spaced at wide and generally equal intervals,
parallel wherever the surfaces are frontal and strictly
governed by the rules of perspective convergence where
they are foreshortened.?b
Panofsky reduces the art of the later drawings to form, symbol
and line, to an art that is one step-removed from the material
forcing Jewish leaders to respond to the ludicrous accusations.
95 George L. Mosse "Jewish Emancipation," p. 4.
96 Panofsky, DUrer, p. 204.
239
sensuality it is meant to evoke.
Panofsky concludes that strict adherence to theory
appears to signal the artist's successful adaptation and
transformation of the rules of the Italian masters of the
Quattrocento. For example, the "cubistic forms" of his late
engravings--the abstract prisms, pyramids, cylinders, and
other volumetric shapes--suggest rather than mimetically
depict German sixteenth-century landscapes. For Panofsky,
DUrer's geometric forms "reflect a reasoned theory. ,,3- But,
argues Panofsky, the artist does not seek to challenge but to
enhance naturalism. Durer's cubes are, in this regard,
heightened approximations of reality--a reality in which
clearly delineated theoretical rules are foregrounded. For
Panofsky, the artist's later works are planar illustrations of
art theory.
The artist's geometrical constructions call attention to
technique rather than to its Although DUrer is,
of course, not creating a twentieth-century-like
deconstruction of form in the sixteenth century (as in
Picasso's art), nonetheless Panofsky's use of the word
"cubism" is not accidental. He is suggesting that DUrer's
masterful rendition of form foreshadows the later master's and
that theoretical constructions in one era can be linked to
97 f
Pano sky, Durer, p. 202.
98 See Keith Moxey, "Hieronymus Bosch and the World Upside Down: The Case
of The Garden of Earthly Delights," in Visual Culture:Images and
Interpretation, eds., Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey
(Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press: 1994), pp. 104-140. See
also Joseph Koerner Durer and the Moment of Self-Portraiture (Chicago:
240
those of another because "how" an artist creates--the
intellectual tools he brings to the process--are more
important than "what" is being portrayed.
Panofsky claims that DUrer's interest in geometric
shapes is a result of a new artistic (aesthetic) awareness of
a more exacting mimesis. He writes that this gives to the
artist's later works, unlike his earlier prints, a
"puritanical" quality that results in more, rather than less
of an emotional impact.
3g
For the author, this quality is
associated with a sober constrained order:
As in Beethoven's late fugues, Michelangelo's late
drawings or Rembrandt's late pictures we feel that the
outward receptacle had to be made as rigid and
impervious as possible in order to withstand the
pressure of an inward passion by far exceeding that
which, in earlier periods, could be contained within
more shapely and pliable vessels. We sense that the
'mechanical' quality of poses and gestures, the anxious
respect for the frontal plane, and the reduction of
space to the barest essentials conceals and thereby
betrays, like the 'set face' of a man about to kill or
die, an emotion too intense to be conveyed save by
repression. DO
For Panofsky, rational order and "mechanical quality"
contain and harness an unbridled inner passion that could have
destroyed the art work. Not only does he emphasize Durer's
carefully delineated theory of art--and its universalist,
humanist associations--but he highlights the heroic efforts
University of Chicago Press, 1993).
99 Panofsky, Durer, p. 204.
100 Panofsky, Durer, p. 205.
241
required to make it. Durer's art appears to theoretically
and visually encapsulate Panofsky's own Nietzschean struggle
with German art and culture. The artist's rendition of
abstract "mechanical" form as a containment vehicle for
heightened Dionysian irrationality mirrors Panofsky's
elevation and acceptance of Kantian abstract essences over the
irrational. On the other hand, Panofsky's interpretation of
Durer's art, also suggests a dialectic tension between the
rational and the irrational. The heroic effort required to
repress the Dionysian, testifies to its powerful presence and
to Panofsky's awareness of it.
Faust, Durer, and German Nationalism
In Doctor Faustus, Mann injects comments about what it
means to be German throughout the novel. He refers to the
political situation in Germany during the early 1930s,
lamenting that peace is "between the fires of fanaticism. , , : ~ :
In the words of his undergraduate Deutschlin, a character who
symbolizes the superficiality of the "educated" Weimar elite,
the Germans are capable of "mixing everything all up and
thinking they can put freedom and aristocracy, idealism and
natural childlikeness under one hat. " l C ' ~ Zei tblom, the
101 Mann, Faustus, p. 87.
102 Mann, Faustus, p. 84.
242
estranged humanist, replies that "it is all up with
Germany ... She is marked down for collapse, economic,
political, moral, spiritual ... for it is madness and
despair ... the national new birth of ten years ago ... which then
betrayed itself to any intelligent person for what it was by
its crudity, vulgarity, gangsterism, sadism, degradation,
filthiness."lo3 The opposition is portrayed as dirty, degraded,
and dark. Cleanliness and order are important for the
humanist, as they initially are for Mann's Faustus, the
composer Leverktihn. Rather than embrace the order of his
mathematical and theological studies, however, Leverktihn
ultimately rejects it. The objective, so to speak, becomes
subsumed within the subjective.
Helmut Koopman suggests that, after 1933, Mann became
increasingly disenchanted with the hope of a renewal of German
enlightened culture. 104 As noted earlier, Mann had initially
embraced the Enlightenment values of Goethe and other authors
who celebrated reason and its acquisition through education
(Bildung). The acquisition of Bildung was also associated with
the inevitability of cultural progress and the banishment of
medieval "volkish" superstition. In the opening of the novel,
Mann writes: "To a friend of enlightenment the word and
conception 'the people' has always something anachronistic and
103 Mann, Faustus, pp. 84-85.
104 Helmut Koopmann, "Mit Goethes Faust hat rnein Roman nichts gemein: Thomas
Mann und sein Doktor Faustus, in Vierhundert Jahre Faust: Rlickblick und
Analyse, ed. Peter Boerner and Sidney Johnson (Tlibingen: Niemeyer, 1989),
pp. 213-228,
243
alarming about it; he knows that you need only tell a
crowd they are 'the folk' to stir them up to all sorts of
reactionary evil. ,,:05
By the middle of the novel, members of "the Folk" have
become associated with the Devil and the Dionysian. Although
they are conflated with darkness and frenzied irrationalism,
they are no longer "evil." Genius flourishes in the dark,
volkisch and unfettered (uncivilized) release of emotion. To
open himself up to this orgiastic state, Leverktihn ultimately
"sells his soul." If the composer wishes to grasp greatness
and produce musical works of genius, the Devil reminds the
initially reluctant Leverktihn that he has no choice:
Do you believe in anything like an ingenium that has
nothing to do with hell? Non datur! The artist is the
brother of the criminal and the madman. Do you ween
that any important work was ever wrought except its
maker learned to understand the way of the criminal and
madman? .. Where nothing is, there the Devil too has
lost his right and no pallid Venus produces anything
worth while! ... a genuine inspiration ... is not
possible with God ... It comes but from the devil, the
true master and giver of such rapture. :
After the war, Mann's views on the outcome for German
culture were not optimistic. Yet, as Eric Blackall suggests,
all was not completely bleak. ")-: There was some hope for
salvation. This hope rests not with the renewal of German
civilization but as noted above, with a return to something
105 Mann, Faustus, p. 37.
106 Mann, Faustus, pp. 236-237.
107 Eric A. Blackall. "What the Devil?! "--Twentieth-Century Faust" in
244
much older than an intellectualized Zivilization. Mann's
regenerated time is a reference to the non-history prior to
written records. In a rather interesting, albeit
contradictory, comment, Mann claims that, prior to the war,
the Jews were the "true" Germans:
This is now really the door-knob. I am already
outside ... The Germans should leave it to the Jews to be
pro-German ... With their nationalism, their pride, their
foible of 'differentness,' their hatred of being put in
order and equalized, their refusal to let themselves be
introduced into the world and adopted socially, they
will get into trouble, real Jewish trouble .... 08
Mann contends in a suggestive, parodic manner, that the
German may be the ultimate outsider because of his inability
to coexist like the Weimar cosmopolitan Jew (and so real
Jewish trouble may loom over the horizon for the German--the
possibility of marginalization) . :J? Again, in a rather strange
twist, the author claims that the Nazis' annihilation of
German Jews was, in effect, a destruction of their own
identity: Germans placed themselves as outsiders when they
eliminated their mirror image, their ultimate Other. Germany
eviscerated her second face, her enlightened cosmopolitan
self. As a result, there could be no future for German
culture. In destroying her Jews, Germany destroyed herself.
For Panofsky, the Nazis also killed German national
Vierhundert Jahre Faust, pp. 213-228.
108 Mann, Faustus, p. 408.
109 Koopman, "Mit Goethe's Faust," p. 225.
245
culture, as he knew it. Whereas Mann rejected the Germany
of Goethe, as well as that of the Fascists, Panofsky could
not. The Germany that remained for him was one with only a
past and no present or future. Where Mann's Doctor Faustus may
be viewed as a parody of Goethe's Faust, Panofsky's DUrer is a
lament. His artist could not engage in parody but only in a
divinely inspired, sober self-transformation associated with
genius. Thanks to DUrer, German art is transformed from its
indigenous forms to the universally superior style of the
Renaissance: "It was by means of the graphic arts that
Germany finally attained the rank of a Great Power in the
domain of art, and this chiefly through the activity of one
man Albrecht DUrer. "l"'J
Although Panofsky characterized DUrer's art as
expressive of the universal quality of genius, his description
of the artist's technique is also indicative of specific
cultural values unique to his own time. When comparing DUrer's
woodcut of the Emperor Maximilian of 1519 (Figure 20) with an
engraving of the same subject by Lucas van Leyden (Figure 21),
Panofsky concludes that Lucas' Maximilian, though modelled on
DUrer's woodcut, is more "decorative" and "luminary" than
DUrer's "volumetric" Maximilian. Panofsky goes so far as to
accuse the Netherlander of omitting certain of the details
DUrer had included in his woodcut and of creating "a curious
crossbreed between engraving and etching ... [and] a very
1"0
Panofsky, Durer, p. 3.
246
significant concession to the Early Flemish type of
portrait painting; [in that] the pattern of the coat and its
lapels has been omitted, not in order to strengthen the
impression of abstract volume, but, on the contrary, in order
to bring out the textural difference between dull velvet and
shining silk." 111
Panofsky's criticism of Lucas' style as decorative
implies that the artist displays the northern "characteristic"
concern with particularity and texture.:
1
: This would contrast
with Durer, whose interest in volume and space presumably
signals a more cerebral (mathematical) quest to depict an art
more compatible with the Renaissance artists of the South. In
this regard, it is not surprising that Panofsky views Lucas'
art as "archaic" and not as progressive or as significant as
the "proto-Romantic" and "cubistic" art of the German Durer.
That the artist eschews one realism for the sake of another
(he literally disregards surface for depth) does not appear to
be relevant to Panofsky's quest to place the German artist in
the pantheon of forward-looking creators.
Durer reserves Germany's place in the "great fugue" of
the history of style, because his art is more closely
affiliated with the art of the Italian Renaissance artists
than with Northern "gothic" painters. The distinction between
"southern" and "northern" artists is of course not a new one--
111 Panofsky, Durer, p. 20l.
11: For example, van Eyck might be considered as an exemplar of the Northern
emphasis on detail and "stuffs" (cloth, velvet and other such textures) .
247
as for example, in Wolfflin's increasingly defensive
introduction to his monograph on Durer and to the artist's
incorporation of southern stylistic elements into his northern
style. But for Panofsky to place Durer firmly in a humanist,
cosmopolitan orbit signalled an effort on the author's part to
reclaim him from the nationalists for Western enlightened
culture.
Durer is the Renaissance artist who "drew inspiration
from the ambient air" of Leonardo and other great artists to
the South but nevertheless "did not adopt a given prototype
but condensed his impressions into an invention of his own,
sufficiently original to startle, yet sufficiently imbued with
indigenous tendencies to invite emulation.,,1:3 Although tied
to a cosmopolitan and universal, timeless world of genius,
Durer reinterprets it in an "indigenous" fashion. His art
represents Germany's contribution to art history and the
history of cultural genius. Given Panofsky's background as a
German Jew and the transformations of Durer's art and life,
Panofsky's choice for his first major monograph in English
(Durer as the artist/representative of the lost world of
Goethe and Schiller) is affirming of the cultural milieu in
which he was raised.
Germany and Salvation
Religion and religious identity plays a significant role
248
in Mann's Doctor Faustus. What role, for example, does the
Devil play in Mann's novel? Faust, as associated with the
Devil, has a particularly sinister and fascinating history.
It conjures up all kinds of fears forcing the reader (or the
viewer of some terrifying prints) into a heightened state of
awareness. Mann's Devil, however, is not the apocalyptic
destroyer of humanity. Rather, the seeds of destruction were
sown in German history. 114 All the endless chatter of the
bureaucrats and students has resulted in an immobilization of
their thoughts. The repetition of intellectual, pithy
statements have frozen artists and students into inaction.
Mann's protagonist, Leverktihn, attempts to destroy this stasis
for a new beginning, a revamping of culture. The composer's
sacrifice, his destruction of the flesh, has obvious parallels
with Christianity.
Christian theology proclaims the universalist notion
that all individuals are naturally equal and as such are the
essential units of political life."= Progress is achieved
through self-sacrifice, through an abnegation of self-interest
for the good of the universal community. Leverkuhn's
individual sacrifice can be placed within this Christian
context. His death allows for a glimmer of redemption and
hope.
113 Panofsky, Durer, p. 213.
ll4 Reed, Thomas Mann, p. 401.
ll5 See Gordon Lafer, "Universalism and Particularism in Jewish Law: Making
Sense of Political Loyalties" in Jewish Identity, ed. David Theo Goldberg
and Michael Krausz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 177-
249
By allowing himself to embrace the diabolical,
Leverklihn paradoxically embodies the redemption inherent in
suffering. Interestingly enough, this act is an affirmation
of Lutheran Protestantism, studies of which began to resurface
after World War I. As noted by the theologian Alister E.
McGrath, "Luther's proclamation of the hidden presence of God
in the dereliction of Calvary ... struck a deep chord of
sympathy in those who felt themselves abandoned by God. ,,:::'6
The Jews were also abandoned but could do nothing about
it. Religion and its Enlightenment transformations did not
give the right answers or moral guidance. The hopes that Jews
placed in the Enlightenment and the belief that political
acceptance would be the reward for "assimilation" turned out
to be false. Historically, the formation of German Jewish
identity was constructed through the bonding of theological
tenets with changing social conditions. Unlike Christian
theology, moral progress in rabbinic thought is understood as
the striving of individuals in a collective to maintain
relational ties to the larger autonomous group (e.g. the
village). In other words, relationships rather than
individuals are the essential political entity.::-
After the Enlightenment, the autonomous Jewish community
was transformed with the introduction of state absolutism.
211-
11. Alister E. McGrath, Martin Luther's Theology of the Cross: Theological
Breakthrough (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 179.
117 See David Sorkin The Transformation of German Jewry and also Gordon
Lafer. "Universalism and Particularism in Jewish Law", Jewish Identity, pp.
250
Intellectual and religious authority was undermined.
Because the Jewish Haskala concept of the attainment of
perfection through knowledge was seen as compatible with the
Enlightenment, Jewish assimilation was thought to be a
reasonable compromise between traditional Orthodox thought and
the new secularization. This was a political expedient. The
traditional Jewish group was simply broadened to include non-
Jews. As noted earlier, through the acquisition of German
knowledge (Bildung) and efforts to assimilate publicly to
German "ways," most German Jews believed that their cultural
progress and assimilation were inevitable. As David Sorkin
has written, Bildung was transformed into a "pedagogical
imperative" whereby Jews would seek to "demonstrate
worthiness" by continually improving and purifying
themselves. 118
Panofsky's interpretation of Melencolia I may be a
reference to the Nietzschean hero/artist who continuously
strives to improve himself. More than the scholarly St.
Jerome, Melencolia shows the human difficulty in attaining
this goal. Could she be considered as a metaphor for the
Jews' journey? Indeed. When Hitler denied their ties to the
larger culture, he severed the relational covenant of
Germany's Jews to Germany. He ended the political conditions
under which the partially assimilated Jews could function. As
177-211.
118 See David Sorkin, Transformation of Gennan Jewry, Introduction and
Chapter I, pp. 3-106.
251
in the mystical Jewish Kabbalist literature, God withdrew
into himself to make room for evil and destruction.
Panofsky's interpretation of Durer's Melencolia as a creature
frozen into physical inaction may then indeed be seen as a
metaphor for the plight of German Jews. This defeated,
unmoving genius becomes a symbol for a mourning people,
mourning for a lost culture than cannot be regained--that of
Jewish Germany. It is a culture in which the humanistic
legacy of Durer and Goethe has been severed. She is "a
creature being reduced to despair." To quote Panofsky, who
quotes Durer's reference to the fallibility of thought, "The
lie is in our understanding, and darkness is so firmly
entrenched in our mind that even groping will fail.,,::9
Panofsky echoes Durer's sentiment in his conclusion to
his chapter on Durer's last works. The author refers to the
self-portrait of 1522 as Durer's Man of Sorrows (Figure 22)
which he regards as the epitome of the artist's late period:
It represents Durer himself in the nude, with thinned
dishevelled hair and drooping shoulders, his body
ravaged by his lingering disease. But physical pain and
decay are interpreted as a supreme symbol of the
likeness of man unto God. Durer carries the scourge and
the whip of the Passion. He who had once styled his
person into the image of a 'Beau Dieu' now likened
himself to the man of Sorrows. He had renounced the
'fables of the world,' and he sensed that his days were
counted. 120
Panofsky's suggestion that Durer, in the end, only found
salvation in his art could be a reference to himself or even
119 Panofsky, Durer, p. 171.
252
to Ernst Cassirer, another German Jew who ultimately found
solace within philosophical abstract thought. Undoubtedly,the
demise and decay of German-Jewish culture could not have been
far from Panofsky's psyche as he was writing his monograph.
DUrer, as the Man of Sorrows, and Panofsky's choice for the
frontispiece, seems to be an apt symbol for the plight of the
enlightened culture of Germany and of German Jews. The
selection of DUrer's engraving of the learned Erasmus of
Rotterdam (Figure 23) as the cover of the book may signal the
hope that Enlightened humanism may still be preserved--but
only in the pages of an historical text such as The Life and
Art of Albrecht DUrer.
For Thomas Mann, struggling hero is
victorious through his art, an art that will continue to
exist. At the end of the novel, Adrian dreams of an older
time, of a simpler "healthy" one. The composer, with the
help of the Devil, destroys the elitist musical forrn--the
world of the Nazis--in hopes of finding a new music that
appeals to the mass of individuals. He sees art as a "servant
of a community which will comprise far more than the
'educated' and will not have culture but will perhaps be a
culture. We can only with difficulty imagine such a thing;
and yet it will be, and be the natural thing: an art without
anguish, psychologically healthy, not solemn, unsadly
120 Panofsky, Durer, p. 241.
253
confiding, an art per du with humanity." Mann, ever the
triumphant celebrant of a humanist philosophy, could not have
made a more eloquent plea.
In Panofsky's Durer, however, there is no cultural
salvation in the present or apparently in the future. The
German enlightened culture in which Panofsky has so earnestly
believed, in which he had sought his identity, existed only in
the past--in history (if indeed it ever actually did). His
only option was to retreat into his study of this history.
Like Durer, as the Man of Sorrows, Panofsky could only mourn
the ideal of an enlightened Germany.
Mann, on the other hand, could be read differently.
After Leverkuhn's death, Zeitblom writes that "my guess,
which amounts almost to certainty, is that a mystic idea of
salvation was behind his frustrated attempt to escape. The
idea is familiar to the older theology and in particular to
early Protestantism: namely, that those who had invoked the
Devil could save their soul by 'yielding their bodies.'" He
concludes with: "When, out of uttermost hopelessness--a
miracle beyond the power of belief--will the light of hope
dawn? A lonely man folds his hands and speaks: 'God be
merciful to thy poor soul, my friend, my
121
Vogt,
122
Mann,
123
Mann,
Vision and Revision, p. 54.
Faustus, p. 322.
Faustus, p. 508.
254
Memory and Heimat
In his 1931 study of Proust, Samuel Beckett wrote that
"there is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has
deformed us." We are anxiously dominated by a past that
refuses to loosen its grip. Our memory is what Proust has
called "the painful synthesis of survival and annhilation. "1':,
What of the survivors?
Hans Jurgen Syberberg, the German film director who made
Hitler, a Film From Germany (1977), suggested that Hitler, in
appropriating German myths--her symbolic traditions--had
destroyed her identity (Figure 24) .1,,5 As Hans-Georg Gadamer
declares, tradition is a fundamental component of
For adherents of a humanist Enlightenment philosophy, such as
Thomas Mann and Erwin Panofsky, tradition/history was the link
between the fleeing past and the onrushing future. By
destroying German myth and tradition, Hitler destroyed
Germany's history. In doing so, he demolished memory and the
security of home, of a Heimat, creating both actual and
metaphorical refugees.
As emigrants living outside Germany, Mann and Panofsky
are certainly Heimatlos. But theirs is a loss not just of
place but of personal identity. To escape this loss, Mann
1:4 Quoted in Richard Terdiman, Present Modernity and the Past Memory
Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 159.
125 See Kaes, Heimat, pp. 39-72.
See Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994).
255
simply steps outside history, outside of what had been for
him the only history--the classical one of Goethe. He moves
to the pre-Classical past. Panofsky cannot. His DUrer,
perhaps a sywbol of the vanished Enlightened culture of the
gebildete German Jew, struggled vainly to be included, only to
be forever excluded. As Andrew Benjamin claims, one might
regard this exclusion as the "logic of the synagogue," where
the Jew as ultimate Other is forever blinded in the search for
identi ty. 1:7 Panofsky thus may be considered as this Jewish
Other--a "true" lost German. Like Melencolia I, he is forever
blinded, never to see that for which he mourns.
Syberberg, the director of Hitler, closes his film with
Beethoven's Ode to Joy, animating a set-piece of the large
black stone from DUrer's Melencolia I--the emblem of Germany's
ideals par excellence. ~ 2 8 These symbols, he suggests, may
live on but only as celebrations of irrationalism, what the
French see as Faust II. 129 And so Mann's Faust (individual
art) remains. But, like music itself, it cannot be frozen in
time or stilled. Its Dionysian spirit, the spirit of German
culture, is transiently embodied in the ephemerality of music:
127 Andrew Benjamin, Art, Mimesis and the Avant Garde (Routledge: NY 1991),
p. 86. Benjamin states that "the Jews are caught. . . within an inescapable
double bind. They are necessary for the very possibility of Christian
thought ... Necessity is however also at work on another level. It is as
essential that Jews be excluded in order that what they are taken to have
begun may continue. . . It inscribes Jews within a law that positions them
as its inevitable and persistent transgressors."
128 Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat, p. 70.
129 Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat, p. 70.
256
But take our artist paradox: grant that
expressiveness-expression as lament--is the issue of the
whole construction: then may we not parallel with it
another, a religious one, and say too (though only in
the lowest whisper) that out of the sheerly irremediable
hope might germinate? It would be but a hope beyond
hopelessness, the transcendence of despair--not betrayal
to her, but the miracle that passes belief. For listen
to the end, listen with me: one group of instruments
after another retires, and what remains, as the work
fades on the air, is the high G of a cello, the last
word, the last fainting sound, slowly dying in a
pianissimo-fermata. Then nothing more: silence, and
night. But that tone which vibrates in the silence,
which is no longer there, to which only the spirit
hearkens, and which was the voice of mourning, is no
more. It changes its meaning; it abides as a light in
the night" (Doctor Faustus, p. 491)
257
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Figure 1
Albrecht Durer. Melencolia I, 1514
Engraving.
National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection.
283
Figure 2
Still from Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia-Feast of the
Nations, 1936.
284
Figure 3
Pablo Picasso. Deux Femmes courant sur la plage (La Course)
(Two Women Running on the Beach (the Race))
1922, Gouache on plywood. Musee Picasso, Paris.
285
Figure 4
Gino Severini. Maternita (Maternity)
1916, Oil on Canvas
Collection of Jeanne Severini.
286
..
_:fi
i ~ _ . ~
ti
I
Figure 5
Poster of the Organization to Aid Mothers and Children
Ca. 1935
287
Caption: "Germany grows through strong mothers and healthy
children.
Figure 6
Otto Dix. Altes Liebespaar (Old Couple), 1923.
Oil on Canvas
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz
Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
288
..
't
..
. , --
Figure 7
Hans Baldung Grien. Death and the Maiden
1509-1511
Panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
289
290
Figure 8
Otto Dix. War, 1932
Mixed Media on Wood, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
291
Figure 9
Matthias GrUnewald. Isenheim Altarpiece (closed position)
1515, Panel with framing
Musee d'Unterlinden, Colmar.
Figure 10
Georg Grosz. Leichenbegangnis: Widmung an Oskar Panizza
(Funeral Procession: Dedicaation to Oscar Panizza)
1917-18, oil on canvas
Staatsgallerie, Stuttgart.
292
293
Figure 11
John Heartfield. German Natural History, 1934.
Photomontage.
Figure 12
Albrecht Durer. Knight, Death, and Devil
1513
Engraving.
294
Figure 13
Albrecht DUrer. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Ca. 1498, Woodcut
Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz,
Kupferstichkabinett.
295
Figure 14a
Otto Dix. Melancholie (Melancholy)
1930, mixed media on wood
Otto Dix Stiftung.
296
Figure 14b
Dieter Kramer, Melancholie (Melancholy)
1970
Karl Ernst Osthaus Musseum, Hagen.
297
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Figure 15
Georg Sluyterman von Langeweyde. "In einem kilhlen Grunde"
"On the cool land"
ca. 1930, linocut.
298
299
Figure 16
Orazio Gentileschi. David after His Victory over Goliath
Rome, Galleria Spada.
Figure 17
Hubert Lanzinger, The Flag Bearer
Photo: US Army Collection, Washington.
300
301
Figure 18
Georg Sluyterman von Langeweyde. Victory or Defeat Rests in
God's Hand: Of Honour We Ourselves are Lord and King
Ca 1936, Woodcut.
Figure 19
Albrecht DUrer. Hercules Defending Vice Against Virtue
(The Large Hercules)
Ca. 1498, Engraving
Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz,
Kupferstichkabinett.
302
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Figure 20
Albrecht DUrer. Portrait of Maximilian If 1519
Woodcut.
303
Figure 21
Lucas van Leyden. Portrait of Maximilian I
1520
Etching. Face engraved with the burin.
304
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Figure 22
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Albrecht DUrer. Self-Portrait as Man of Sorrows, 1512
Drawing
Bremen, Kunsthalle.
305
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Figure 23
Albrecht DUrer. Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam
1526, Engraving.
306
Figure 24
Film Still from Hans Jtirgen Syberberg's
Hitler, a Film from Germany, 1977.
307
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