matt

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mpley
Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft,
Judaism and the Politics of Identity
Matthew Rampley
Downloaded from oaj.oxfordjournals.org at University of Birmingham on December 7, 2010

1. See the website at: http://www.
warburg-haus.de/texte/forsch.html (accessed 12
January 2010).
2. The categories can be accessed online at: http://
www.welib.de/ (accessed 1 May 2010), and has also
been published as Elisabeth von Hagenow and Petra
Roettig (eds), Bildindex zur politischen Ikonographie
(Privately Printed: Hamburg, 1996).
3. See Elisabeth von Hagenow, Politik und Bild -
Die Postkarte als Medium der Propaganda (Privately
Printed: Hamburg, 1994); Hermann Hipp and
Ernst Seidl (eds), Architektur als politische Kultur -
Philosophia Practica (Dietrich Reimer: Berlin,
1996); Michael Beuthner, Joachim Buttler, Sandra
Frohlich, Irene Neverla and Stephan A. Weichert
(eds), Bilder des Terrors - Terror der Bilder?
Krisenberichterstattung am und nach dem 11.
September (von Halem: Cologne, 2003).
4. The new edition has so far included the
republication of the two-volume collected
writings of 1932, Die Erneuerung der heidnischen
Antike, ed. Horst Bredekamp and Michael Diers
(Akademie Verlag: Berlin, 1998); his Memosyne
picture atlas Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin
Warnke and Claudia Brink (Akademie Verlag:
Berlin, 1999); and the diary of the Warburg
Library, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen
Bibliothek Warburg, ed. Karen Michels and
Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Akademie Verlag:
Berlin, 2001).
5. Georges Didi-Huberman, LImage Survivante.
Histoire de lArt et Temps des Fantomes selon Aby
Warburg (Minuit: Paris, 2002); Philippe-Alain
Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion
(Zone Books: New York, 2007).
6. On the relation between Warburg and Walter
Benjamin see Cornelia Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in
Bildern. Symbol und Dialektisches Bild in Aby
Warburgs Mnemosyne-Atlas und Walter Benjamins
Passagen-Werk (Akademie Verlag: Berlin, 2004).
Sabine Flach et al. (eds), Der Bilderatlas im Wechsel
der Kunste und Medien (Wilhelm Fink: Munich,
2005) presented a series of wide-ranging analyses
of the Mnemosyne Atlas within the context of visual
culture and digital media.
7. Werckmeister, The Turn from Marx to
Warburg in West German Art History 1968
1990, in Andrew Hemmingway (ed.), Marxism
and the History of Art. From William Morris to the New
Left (Pluto: London, 2006), pp. 21320.
# The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcq033
Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft, Judaism and
the Politics of Identity
Matthew Rampley
In 1991 the Art History Department of the University of Hamburg initiated a
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research project in Political Iconography (Forschungsstelle Politische
Ikonographie).1 The project involved reorganising the slide holdings of the
Department according to social, cultural, and political thematic categories,
and quickly led to the publication of texts on the iconology of the political.2
Subjects included postcard as a medium of propaganda, the political functions
of architecture, and images of terror in the wake of the 2001 attacks on the
World Trade Center.3 The project marked a clear attempt to move beyond
the paradigm of art history, in terms of both its thematic orientation
and, more importantly, its inclusion of popular imagery in media that had
traditionally lain outside the purview of art history. As such it represented
an important early example of the developing field of image theory,
Bildwissenschaft, within Germany, which emerged at approximately the
same time as visual culture in America and Britain.
Sponsored by the Warburg Foundation (Aby-Warburg-Stiftung), the project
also made clear its intellectual ancestry through its mobilisation of iconography
as the methodological frame. Based in the Warburg Haus, the site of Warburgs
research library before its move to London in 1933, it was part of a wider
process, in which the Art History Department of Hamburg University has
played a leading role, of reviewing Warburgs legacy for the present. Hence,
although, most immediately, it drew attention to the political dimension of
his work, it raised broader questions about the relation of Warburgian
Kulturwissenschaft to contemporary image studies.
The Hamburg project was a prominent example of the renewed vigour with
which his legacy has been explored over the past two decades. The Warburg
Renaissance has been evident both in the new German edition of his
writings and also in the growth of critical studies of his thought.4 A
particular focus has been the place of Warburg within the landscape of
contemporary art history and visual culture. One of his most notable recent
interpreters, Georges Didi-Huberman, has employed Warburg as an ally in
his extended critical assault on art history, while for both Didi-Huberman
and Philippe-Alain Michaud, Warburg has taken on great significance as a
practitioner of visual studies avant la lettre.5 The contemporaneity of his work
has also been seen in terms of the affinities between his unfinished pictorial
atlas Mnemosyne and Walter Benjamins Arcades Project, while his attempt, in
the Atlas, to summarise his ideas in pictorial form had, for some, a clear
contemporary resonance in an era of the mass proliferation of the digital image.6
A recent rival interpretation, however, has suggested a different reading. In
his appraisal of the revived interest in Warburg during the 1990s, Otto
Werckmeister mounted a sustained criticism both of its focus, and of
Warburg himself.7 Specifically, Werckmeister highlighted the fact that most
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 317 335
Matthew Rampley

attention had been given to Warburgs anthropological writings; analysis of his

work on the social and artistic milieu of art occupied a distinctly secondary
place. For Werckmeister, the rediscovery of Warburg in the 1990s, drawing
back from deeper engagement with the latters work on the social history of
the image, was symptomatic of a broader disciplinary retreat from the radical
art historical work of the 1970s. In addition, although Warburg had attended
to the social matrix of artistic production, his own understanding was myopic
in its inability to grasp larger political, societal, and economic contexts.
Instead, he was drawn to the narrowly circumscribed world of the mercantile
elite of Florence the birthplace of the modern culture of self-conscious
urban commerce with which he personally identified.8 The limitations of
Warburgs political understanding were consonant with the ideological tenor
of the 1990s.
8. Warburg, cited in Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Aby
Warburg und der Antisemitismus (Fischer: Frankfurt
am Main, 1998), p. 107.
9. Warburg, Das Festwesen als vermittelnder
Ausbildner der gesteigerten Form, Warburg
Archive, vol. III, no. 63.4, p. 80.
10. This tapestry, which Warburg was
instrumental in bringing to the attention of art
historians, has been the recent object of critical
analysis, including examination of Warburgs role
interpretation. See Laura Stagno (ed.), Le Imprese
di Alessandro Magno in Oriente. Atti della Giornata

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Werckmeisters criticisms were primarily an invective against the state of Internazionale di Studi Genova, 11 Aprile 2005 (Arti
contemporary art history. In certain respects, they were also misplaced; the Doria Panphilj: Genua, 2006).
interest in Warburgs anthropological writings in part reflected the increasing 11. Airship and Submarine in the Medieval
centrality of globalism and post-colonial impulses within art history. Imagination, in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan
Antiquity, trans. D. Britt (Getty: Los Angeles,
Nevertheless, Werckmeister was right to highlight an important and largely 1999), pp. 33338.
unanalysed dimension of Warburgs work, and also to point out a significant
blind spot in much of the contemporary reception of the German thinker.
This article thus considers Warburgs understanding and engagement with
political discourses and ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In particular, I consider the following questions: to what extent
did he consider the political ramifications of his Kulturwissenschaft? To what
extent was Warburgs project politically driven? What were his own political
attitudes and values? In response to these questions I argue that while
Warburgs work was highly innovative in many respects, it was informed and
shaped by a set of traditional political attitudes that were the consequence of
Warburgs identity as a member of the cultural elite of Hamburg and as a Jew.

Warburg the Liberal

It is well known that political considerations occupied a prominent place in
Warburgs thinking, and this has been carefully documented, both in his
published texts and also in his private writings. As Warburg himself
recognised, The artistic interest of scholars is not free of political, social and
practical undercurrents, and he noted further that such interests are
implicit and therefore hav[e] all the greater impact . . . .9 These
undercurrents became in manifest in Warburgs work in a number of ways.
On the one hand he was sensitive to the less immediately obvious political
resonance of aspects of the cultural history of the Renaissance, while, on the
other hand, a significant number of his writings examined episodes in which
art was directly drawn into the political drama of the Renaissance.
Thus, he interpreted a mid-fifteenth-century arazzo of the medieval legends
of Alexander the Great (including his ascent with griffins and journey under
water while conquering Asia) in the context of the fall of Constantinople
in 1453.10 Specifically, Warburg attended to the role of Alexander as a
talisman of military and political conquest and rule for both the Ottoman
Sultan Mehmet II and the Burgundian court, serving as an emblem of
political conflict between Europe and Asia.11 One can also interpret his
concern with the Renaissance recovery of images of death and
dismemberment from classical mythology in this context. His essay on
Durer and Italy, for example, took Durers drawing of the Death of

320 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010


12. Warburg, Durer and Italian Antiquity
(1905), in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan
Antiquity, pp. 553 58.
13. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity,
p. 555.
14. See, for example, Warburg, The Entry of
the Idealising Classical Style in the Painting of the
Early Renaissance, trans. M. Rampley in
Richard Woodfield (ed.), Art History as Cultural
History. Warburgs Project (Gordon+ Breach:
Amsterdam, 2000), pp. 7 31.
15. See Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und der
Antisemitismus.
16. Warburg, Pagan-Antique Prophecy in
Words and Images in the Age of Luther (1920),
in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity,
pp. 597698.
17. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity,
p. 635.
18. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity,
p. 650.
19. Aby Warburg, The Theatrical Costumes for
the Intermedii of 1589, in Warburg, The
Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, pp. 349 402.
20. See Warburg, The Entry of the Idealising
Classical Style in the Painting of the Early
Renaissance.
Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft, Judaism and the Politics of Identity
Orpheus as the starting point for an investigation of the visual representation of
the Orpheus in antiquity and its recurrence in the Renaissance.12 This violent
myth Orpheus was torn to pieces by frenzied maenads attested to an
aspect of classical culture usually overlooked by art historians. For, Warburg
stated, the death of Orpheus was more than a studio motif of purely formal
interest; it stood for the dark mystery play of Dionysian legend . . . .13 The
Nietzschean formulation was deliberate; Warburg referred explicitly to the
philosopher on various occasions.14 However, it is also clear that the indirect
referent of such texts was modern anti-Semitism, with which Warburg
exhibited an enduring preoccupation.15 Specifically, he saw anti-Jewish
violence was as the expression of deep-seated psychic current, and the
sporadic outbreak of such aggression in the present continued a primal
impulse evident in the monstrous narratives of ancient Greek and Roman myth.
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Alongside such an interest in the less immediately obvious political
implications of Renaissance imagery, Warburg also turned frequently to the
direct political use of the image. His long essay on the use of woodcuts, in
particular, the use of astrological imagery, during the German Reformation
focused on the mobilisation of the visual by both the Catholic Church and
Luthers followers for propagandistic and political purposes.16 Warburg
analyses, for example, the way that Luther and Philip Melanchthon
appropriated various signs and wonders, including the discovery of a hideous
freak said to have been cast up on the banks of the Tiber in 1495 and of the
monstrous progeny born to a German cow in Saxony in 1523 and gave
them a political interpretation that made them into weapons of raw
aggression.17 Astrology was even used in relation to the person of Luther.
This included falsifying his date of birth in order to make this seem all the
more auspicious: . . . as daemonic a man as Luther was set among the stars
in his own lifetime (through a near-totemistic connection between his birth
and a pair of planets) in order to ascribe his otherwise unaccountable, even
superhuman powers to a higher, cosmic cause, dignified by the name of a
god.18
This essay was perhaps the most extended discussion of this subject, and it has
long been recognised that, having been completed in 1918, it was in part also a
response to the propaganda imagery generated by the First World War.
However, an engagement with the political deployment of art was evident
throughout his intellectual career; one of Warburgs earliest essays, from
1895, was a study of the Intermezzi celebrating the marriage of Grand Duke
Ferdinand de Medici to Christina of Lorraine in 1589, in which visual
pageantry was used to celebrate and legitimise a dynastic union.19 Other
examples included Warburgs lecture of 1914 on the emergence of classical
rhetoric in fifteenth-century painting, in which he examined the iconography
of Roman militarism and its transformation in the Renaissance.20 In
particular, Warburg examined the impact of the frieze on the Arch of
Constantine depicting the emperor Trajan slaying a barbarian opponent
(Fig. 1), starting with the way in which the figure of Trajan later came
to be seen as Constantine, and the meaning of the narrative of the frieze,
namely Trajan on horseback trampling down his enemies, reinterpreted as a
depiction of Constantine showing mercy towards them, in line with Christian
notions of kingship.
Finally, in a lecture on Rembrandt delivered in 1926, Warburg discussed the
artists treatment of the legend of the Oath of Julius Civilis for the Town Hall of
Amsterdam. Civilis had been the leader of a first-century rebellion against
Roman rule in the southern Netherlands. The story, recounted in Tacitus
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 321
Matthew Rampley

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Fig. 1. Frieze of Trajan conquering the Dacians, Arch of Constantine. Second Century AD. Rome.

HIstories, had become an important myth for Dutch patriots celebrating their 21. Aby Warburg, Italian Antiquity in the Time
recent independence from Habsburg Spain, and Warburg was interested in of Rembrandt, Warburg Archive, vol. III, p. 97.
the political connotations of that particular classical narrative.21 More 22. Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher
generally, as Schoell-Glass has argued, Warburgs lecture was a deliberate (Hirschfeld: Leipzig, 1890).
rebuttal of the highly popular and nationalistic and anti-Semitic reading of 23. See Charlottte Schoell-Glass and Karen
Rembrandt by Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt as Educator, which had turned the Michels, Einleitung, in Aby Warburg (ed.),
artist into an exemplar of the inward-looking spiritual Germanic racial Tagebuch der kulturwisenschaftlichen Bibliothek
character.22 Instead, Warburg argued, Rembrandt had appropriated the Warburg (Akademie Verlag: Berlin, 2001),
pp. xxvii xxxi.
classical language of Italian art and transformed it with a new rational matter
of factness (neue Sachlichkeit), a phrase quite consciously chosen for its
contemporary connotations in the 1920s.
The recently published diary of the Warburg library, which he and Gertrud
Bing kept from 1926 until his death in 1929, provides an almost continuous
running commentary on contemporaneous political events.23 His critical
comments on Mussolinis resurrection of the Roman symbol of political
power, the fasces, provide perhaps the best-known example of such an
engagement. Regarding Mussolini as leading Italy towards a schizophrenic
mania for power, Warburg understood fascism as the latest incarnation of a

322 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010


24. Warburg, Tagebuch der
kulturwisenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg,
p. 39.
25. Dazu gehort eine allgemeine Betrachtung
uber Voraussetzungen der kultmaigen
Bildbetrachtung (Verlust des
IchGrenz-Bewutsein durch das Gerat. . . das
Uebermacht Bewutsein als unorganisch
gestreckte erweitertete Cheirokratie, Warburg,
Tagebuch der kulturwisenschaftlichen Bibliothek
Warburg, p. 119.
26. This aspect of Warburg has been discussed by
Mark Russell in Aby Warburg and the Public
Purposes of Art in Hamburg, Canadian Journal of
History, vol. 39, no. 2, 2004, pp. 297324.
27. Warburg, Tagebuch, p. 541. The Tagebuch
contains a detailed commentary on the discussions
surrounding the drafting of the stamp design,
specifically in the entry for 21 December 1926,
Tagebuch, pp. 2325. See also Ulrich Raulff, Der
aufhaltsame Aufstieg einer Idee. Warburg und die
Vernunft in der Republik, in Raulff, Wilde
Energien. Vier Versuche zu Warburg (Wallstein Verlag:
Gottingen, 2003), pp. 72 116.
28. See Mark Russell, The Building of
Hamburgs Bismarck Memorial 18981906,
The Historical Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, 2004,
pp. 13356.
29. Letter of 27 July 1909, cited in Russell, Aby
Warburg and the Public Purposes of Art, p. 303.
30. Aby Warburg, cited in Diers, Warburg aus
Briefen. Kommentare zu den Kopierbuchern der Jahre
1905 1918 (VCH: Weinheim, 1991), p. 164.
31. Dietrich Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), p. 199 ff.
Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft, Judaism and the Politics of Identity
primal instinct towards self-dissolution.24 Describing a visual presentation on
Mussolini and fascism he was intending to prepare in 1926, Warburg noted
that it includes a general consideration of the conditions for the cultic
response to the image (the self s loss of consciousness of its own boundaries . . .
feeling of dominance as cheirocracy, extended and stretched through inorganic
means.25
These insights provide an important corrective to the traditional image of
Warburgian Kulturwissenschaft as politically disinterested scholarship; it is
necessary, however, to go beyond registering the mere fact of Warburgs
political engagement, in order to consider the kinds of political views such
engagement expressed. How might Warburgs political understanding be
characterised? An answer to this can be given if his wider activities are
considered. At first sight, this provides a mixed impression. One the one
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hand, Warburg played a prominent part in the local politics of Hamburg; he
actively contributed to programmes of popular education, supporting the
Volksheim (Peoples Home) an institution dedicated to working-class
education and, later, the establishment of the University of Hamburg.26
Warburg was also an admirer of Gustav Stresemann, and he saw the Weimar
Republic as a progressive advance over the Reich; he took exception to
lingering attempts to retain traces of Prussian militarism, and celebrated the
Treaty of Locarno of 1925 as a triumph of diplomacy and Besonnenheit, or
reasoned moderation, over the brute force of arms. Having drafted a stamp
design to celebrate the treaty its motto Idea vincit was based on
Stresemanns own comments he regarded Stresemanns death in 1929 as a
loss with incalculably bleak consequences.27 On the other hand, however,
he had been a strong, and public, supporter of Hugo Lederers Memorial to
Bismarck erected in Hamburg in 1906 (Fig. 2). As Mark Russell has
indicated, this act of support can hardly be counted as the most progressive
intervention by Warburg. The Hamburger Echo, the newspaper of the Social
Democratic Party in the city, dismissed Bismarckian Caesarism, labelling it
the greatest enemy of democracy. Encountering substantial opposition from
working class inhabitants, the monument stood, argues Russell, as a gigantic
symbol of the unwillingness of Hamburgs patricians to deal with the
exigencies of social change through political processes.28 While Warburgs
championing of Stresemann and Besonnenheit mark him out as
forward-looking, this has to be interpreted with caution. He was guarded in
his attitudes towards modern forms of political life and particularly towards
social democracy. In his private correspondence, for example, he expressed a
fear of the uncontrolled crowd of modern life, commenting that to me the
masses are tolerable only in a well-ordered state; a mediocre human animal
in a controlled situation is bearable, but as an individual that runs free [it
is] a completely intolerable product of imaginary liberation.29 While he was
committed to the notion of enlightened progressive reason, it is clear that he
was convinced that not all were equally able to exercise such reason, hence
his exhortation: Let us not make the same grave political error as that of
social democracy, which aims to obtain through the hostile mechanical
pressure of the masses what can only be attained by communal reason.30
In many respects Warburgs political views were closely aligned with those of
nineteenth-century German liberalism. As Dietrich Langewiesche has argued,
liberalism combined a political vision of the secular de-churched state as a
guarantee of the freedom of the individual to live a rational life with a
utopian belief in a civil society led by the educated middle classes
(Bildungsburgertum).31 While Warburg chose to maintain the existence of
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 323
Matthew Rampley

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Fig. 2. Hugo Lederer. Bismarck Monument. 1906. Hamburg.

324 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010


32. Konrad Jarausch, The Decline of Liberal
Professionialism, in Jarausch and Larry Jones
(eds), In Search of Liberal Germany. Studies in the
History of German Liberalism from 1789 to the Present
(Oxford: Berg, 1990) pp. 261 86.
33. The British psychologist Edward Bullough
described a similar concept with the term
psychical distance. See Bullough, Psychical
Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic
Principle, British Journal of Psychology, vol. 5,
1912, pp. 87118.
34. Vischer, Das Symbol, in Friedrich Vischer,
Kritische Gange, vol. IV (Meyer and Jessen:
Munich, 1922), pp. 420 56. First published
1887.
35. Vischer, Das Symbol, p. 425.
36. As late as 1907, the Handbook of the National
Liberal Party stated that Liberalism fights for the
independence of modern society and its
culture. . . from the one-sided clerical desire to
rule the world through the Church . . . (cited in
Langewiesche, p. 204).
37. See Hans Eckhardt, Privilegien und Parlament.
Die Auseinandersetzung um das allgemeine und gleiche
Wahlrecht in Hamburg (Landeszentrale fur
Politische Bildung: Hamburg, 1980), pp. 29 30.
Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft, Judaism and the Politics of Identity
a private scholar, his self-image was also aligned with the sense of liberal
professionalism that emerged in second half of the nineteenth century, in
which acquisition of Bildung was central to the process of middle-class
emancipation and self-assertion.32 In this context, Warburgs ideal of reason
had a very specific social and political connotation, which also shaped the
meaning of a number of key terms in his thought, including Besonnenheit
and Denkraum (cognitive space) a difficult term to translate but one
which implied the creation of a conceptual space both within the subject, in
which self-reflection can take place, and also between the subject and its object.33
The secular outlook of liberalism also informed Warburgs attitudes
towards religion. He readily adopted the ideas of writers such as Edward
Tylor, Tito Vignoli, Hermann Usener or Friedrich Vischer, who regarded
religious belief as the relic of an evolutionary prior stage of cultural and
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intellectual development. A notable affinity in this regard can be found
between Warburg and Friedrich Vischer, whose essay The Symbol proved
highly influential on his thinking.34 Specifically, Vischer had singled out
the doctrine of transubstantiation as an instance of the survival of a
primitive religious consciousness into modernity. As Vischer noted, the
significance of communion was understood to be founded on a real change
(Substanzveranderung) in the nature of the bread and wine being
consumed, involving a collapse in the distinction between sign and signified
that he saw as the characteristic of the dark, unfree symbolism of
primitive peoples.35 This notion resurfaced in Warburgs Mnemosyne Atlas,
the final plate of which juxtaposed photographs of the 1929 Lateran Accord
between Mussolini and Pope Pius XI and a reproduction of Raphaels 1514
fresco in the Vatican Stanza dEliodoro of the miraculous Mass of Bolsena of
1263, at which the host was said to have bled Christs blood. This choice of
a Catholic legend as the relic of a primitive consciousness was politically
charged, not least because many bourgeois liberals had supported the
marginalisation of the Catholic Church as essential to the development of the
German state.36
A sharper sense of Warburgs identification with the politics of liberalism
can be gained if he is viewed within the context of Hamburg. The latter had
long stood as the paradigm of a successful commercial city that was
essentially self-governing it was ruled by a Senate and a Citizens
Assembly and it stood in contrast to the imperial cities such as Munich,
Dresden, Wurzburg, or Berlin, which were so closely linked to the life,
culture, and politics of the court. It consequently had a reputation for being
more enlightened and democratic than other cities in Germany, and had
enjoyed such an image since the eighteenth century. However, closer
inspection revealed a more nuanced picture. Citizenship was not open to all,
and was linked to a restrictive property bar; in 1875, of the total population
of some 390,000 only 34,000 were officially enfranchised citizens
(Burger).37 There also existed the separate category of notables, who
dominated the political, social, and cultural institutions of the city, and who
strove hard to restrict the eligibility to membership of the citizen class. This
was closely linked to a resistance to universal suffrage; even in the years
immediately preceding the First World War, there was an ongoing debate as
to the extent of suffrage, or the definition of citizenship and democratisation.
Indeed, by 1918, due to the pace of reform that had taken place elsewhere
across the Reich, Hamburg had been left behind as one of the least
democratic German cities.
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 325
Matthew Rampley

A similarly hierarchical value system informed its cultural institutions.38 The

Hamburg Kunsthalle (Fig. 3), founded in 1869 and expanded considerably
from 1886 onwards by its famous director Alfred von Lichtwark, came to
play an important role as an institute of public education. However, although
Lichtwark referred to museums as an expression of democracy that stood
open to the entire population, this was a restricted understanding of
democracy. Specifically, it was based on the contrast between the Kunsthalle,
a bourgeois institution, and the princely origins of many of the other
museums and galleries across Germany.39 Furthermore, while Lichtwark may
have believed in opening up culture to all, this was still with the caveat that
the state and its cultural guardians, the bourgeoisie, should remain in
control. As Lichtwark stated, tradition cant strike roots in a dynamic mass
of individuals, it must rely on the enduring principle, the state . . . .40 It was

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for the cultivated Burger to define culture and to set up aesthetic and
educational norms for the rest of society; hence, it is a wasted effort to
establish a new cultivated education [Bildung] from the bottom up.41
Although Warburg was, in other respects, at odds with Lichtwark, this view
Fig. 3. Georg Theodor Schirrmacher and
of culture was shared by both. Hermann von der Hude. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
A similar ideology underlay the Volksheim in Hamburg, with which Warburg 1863 1869.
was associated and at which he staged an exhibition and delivered a lecture
on Durer in 1905.42 Established in 1901 following the model of Londons
Toynbee Hall founded some 17 years earlier, the Volksheim was intended to
build bridges with the working classes and to promote a sense of community
through self-education and self-discipline.43 Situated in the working class
district of Rothenburgsort, with further branches set up in Barmbeck and 38. See Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity.
Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Sie`cle
Hammerbrook, it organised lectures, classes, and exhibitions, funded both by Hamburg (Cornell University Press: London and
subscription from participants and by the financial backing of Hamburg Ithaca, 2003).
notables, including mayors, a number of senators including Carl Cohn, 39. Alfred Lichtwark, Museen als
the first Jewish senator Johannes Petersen, the secretary of the Chamber Bildungsstatten, in Der Deutsche der Zukunft
of Commerce, and Abys brother Max Warburg. By functioning as a site (Bruno Cassirer: Berlin, 1905), p. 91.
where the educated bourgeoisie could encounter the working classes, it 40. Alfred Lichtwark, Hamburg: Niedersachsen
would provide the former with some kind of insight into the moral and (Georg Kuhtmann: Dresden, 1897), p. 66.
social life of the poor, while helping break down suspicion towards the 41. Alfred Lichtwark, Dilettantismus und
socially and economically better-off. Yet as Jennifer Jenkins has asserted, Volkskunst, in Lichtwark, Vom Arbeitsfeld des
democracy was not one of its projects. Ecstatic statements about creating Dilettantismus (Bruno Cassirer: Berlin, 1902),
one community . . . were intertwined with affirmations of the necessity of p. 23.
social hierarchy. A project of liberal patronage, the Peoples Home was 42. Aby Warburg, Durer als Spiegel seiner
driven by a sense of liberal guilt; after all, the destruction of social harmony selbst und seiner Zeit 100 Handzeichnungen.
was a sin.44 The manuscript of the lecture is held at the
Archive of the Warburg Institute, vol. IV, p. 47.
If we construct the social and cultural milieu into which Warburg was born,
we can begin to understand the political resonance of much of his writing, for in 43. On Toynbee Hall, see Asa Briggs and Anne
Macartney, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years
late nineteenth-century Hamburg the educated middle classes were seen very (Routledge, Kegan & Paul: London, 1984).
much as the guardians of culture and civic life. There is little in Warburgs
44. Jenkins, Provincial Modernity, p. 95.
work to suggest that he dissented substantially from this outlook. His
emphasis on communal reason as a bulwark against psychological and
cultural regression, when coupled with his unease at the rise of mass politics,
suggests that he had very much in mind the community of Bildungsburger who
had governed Hamburg for so long.
This vision underlay Warburgs approach to the study of the Renaissance. He
turned repeatedly to the achievements of specific prominent families, including
the Sassetti, the Tornabuoni, the Medici, or the Portinari. Examination of
Francesco Sassettis will, for example, which combined the down-to-earth
practical tenor of the successful Renaissance businessman (Warburg speaks of

326 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010


Fig. 4. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Conrmation of the Franciscan Order by Pope Honorius III. 1482 1485. Florence, Santa Trinita
45. See Warburg, Francesco Sassettis Last
Injunctions to His Sons, in Warburg, The
Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, pp. 223 62. The
comments are cited from p. 239.
46. Warburg, The Art of Portraiture and the
Florentine Bourgeoisie, in Warburg, The
Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, pp. 185 221.
47. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity,
p. 190. In this essay, Warburg sees Francesco
Sassetti as just such a type of the honest and
thoughtful bourgeois living in an age of
transition. . . (p. 191).
48. Werckmeister, The Turn from Marx to
Warburg in West German Art History 1968
1990, p. 218.
Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft, Judaism and the Politics of Identity
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`.
the egocentric superman in quasi-antique disguise) with an old-fashioned
and backward-looking attitude of contemplative medieval religiosity led
Warburg to speculate on the wider complexities of the mentality of the
Florentine Quattrocento.45 He approached Domenico Ghirlandaios portrait
of Lorenzo de Medici and his household in his fresco of the Confirmation of
the Franciscan Order (Fig. 4) in Santa Trinita` in a similar way.46 Ghirlandaios
placement of the Medici family in the foreground of a painting ostensibly
dedicated to an historical event from the twelfth century the approval
of the Franciscan Order by Pope Honorius III in 1223 signified for
Warburg the rise of a pragmatic, commercially oriented bourgeoisie in
Quattrocento Florence. Warburg highlighted again the contradictory nature
of the citizen of Medicean Florence [who] united the wholly dissimilar
characters of the idealist whether medievally Christian or romantically
chivalrous or classically Neoplatonic and the worldly, practical, pagan
Etruscan merchant.47
For Otto Werckmeister, Warburgs interest is a projection or search for
historical correspondences, in which these figures counted as antecedents of his
own bourgeois banking background. Thus, . . . Warburg transformed early
Renaissance painting from a timeless aesthetic ideal . . . into an unapologetic
class culture of enterprising merchants. That class culture he transfigured into
an unacknowledged ideology of the modern subject . . . .48 The Florentine
Renaissance saw not merely the birth of the modern humanist subject, as
Burckhardt described it, but more specifically the birth of the modern
bourgeois individual, and a central aspect of Warburgs understanding of the
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 327
Matthew Rampley
cultural politics of the Renaissance was his outline of the particular struggle of the
nascent bourgeois class to establish itself.
Other commentators have also seen in Warburgs concern with the Medici a
search for self-legitimation and confirmation of the political role he believed
should accrue to his class.49 This is true to a certain degree, except that
Warburg was not simply projecting his own individual circumstances and
sense of politics onto the past; rather, his approach was driven by his
subscription to the wider liberal ideology that the mercantile bourgeoisie
should take a leading role in the cultural, and not merely the political life of
the state. Indeed, as other commentators have argued, the belief in the
necessary interconnection of cultural and economic life persisted throughout
the nineteenth century and only came to be questioned in the decade before
the First World War.50 Warburg himself was acutely aware of the symbiosis
of the two, and of the powerful role they played in his personal situation; he
referred openly to the dependence of his research enterprise on the support
of the Warburg bank, and this was not merely seen as a necessary evil.51 In a
letter to his brother Max he stated that it was his wish that a politically
successful and peaceable community can arise on the basis of the free
commercial culture of the bourgeoisie, [whose aim and duty is] to enhance
and maintain the ability and desire for work of everyone according to
their intellectual and material capacities.52 Warburg clearly endorsed the
intertwining of bourgeois enterprise and learning, and in so doing he
articulated a central trope of liberal thinking of the time.
Warburg the Jew
Thus far the argument has deliberately skirted around Warburgs Jewish
identity. This has been the topic of a considerable literature; given his status
as a prominent representative of the German Jewish intellectual community
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this is hardly
surprising.53 The basic facts of Warburgs personal background have thus
been exhaustively examined, and their link to his concern with anti-Semitism
acknowledged; his understanding of the politics and meaning of anti-Semitism
has, however, barely been explored. In order to pursue this issue, it is worth
considering, first, how Warburg responded to his own identity as a Jew.
In his biography of Warburg, Ernst Gombrich tended to minimise Warburgs
Jewish origins, or rather, he cast Warburg as a strong proponent of
Enlightenment, a commitment that involved an unambiguous rejection of
his Jewish heritage.54 Almost as soon as it was published, this view was seen
as problematic.55 It diverged significantly from the account by Warburgs
student Gertrud Bing, for example, for whom Warburg, although a German
patriot, remained ambivalent about his Jewish identity.56 On the one hand,
certain episodes, from his decision in 1887 no longer to submit to
orthodox strictures on kosher food, to his refusal in the 1920s to associate
his library with Jewish organisations in Hamburg in 1928 he rejected a
request for the library to host the inaugural meeting of the Akademie fur
die Wissenschaft vom Judenthum suggest a self-conscious distancing
from his background. On the other hand, he carefully documented aspects of
contemporary Jewish culture and experience; this ranged from noting
episodes of anti-Semitic violence to collect images of the Jews in Eastern
Europe encountered by advancing German troops during the First World
War.57 These all suggest a much more complex attitude on Warburgs part.
328 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010
49. Felix Gilbert argues that such historical
antecedents helped to strengthen his conviction
that he had a right to belong to the ruling group of
the empire. Gilbert, From Art History to the
History of Civilization, Journal of Modern History,
vol. 44, 1972, p. 390.
50. Wolfgang Mommsen, Kultur als Instrument
der Legitimierung burgerlicher Hegemonie im
Nationalstaat, in Burgerliche Kultur und politische
Ordnung. Kunstler, Schriftstellen und Intellektuelle in
der deustchen Geschichte 1830 1933 (Fischer:
Frankfurt am Main, 2000), p. 5975.
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51. As he stated in a letter to his brother Max (3
June 1900), I am really a fool for not insisting
even more that we should demonstrate, by our
example, that capitalism is also capable of
intellectual achievements of a scope which would
not otherwise be possible. Cited in Gombrich,
Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography,
p. 130.
52. Warburg, Letter to Max Warburg, cited in
Diers, Aby Warburg aus Briefen, p. 163.
53. See Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg
und der Antisemitismus. See also Schoell-Glass,
Aby Warburg: Forced Identity and Cultural
Science, in Catherine Soussloff (ed.), Jewish
Identity in Modern Art History (University of
California Press: Berkeley, 1999), pp. 21830.
54. Sir Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An
Intellectual Biography (Phaidon: London, 1986).
55. See Hans Liebeschutz, Aby Warburg
(18661929) as Interpreter of Civilisation, in
Publications of the Leo Baeck Institute. Year Book,
vol. 20, 1971, pp. 27 33.
56. Bing, Aby M. Warburg [1958] in Dieter
Wuttke (ed.), Aby Warburg. Ausgewahlte Schriften
und Wurdigungen (Valentin Koerner: Baden Baden,
1992), p. 463.
57. Warburgs experiences in Strasbourg are
recounted in Bernd Roeck, Der junge Aby Warburg
(C. H. Beck: Munich, 1997), pp. 6579. On his
response to the request by the Akademie, see the
Tagebuch der kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek
Warburg, entry for 21 January 1928. On the
images of the Eastern European Jews, see Michael
Steinberg, Aby Warburgs Kreuzlingen Lecture:
A Reading, in Aby M. Warburg, Images from the
Regions of the Pueblo Indians of North America,
(Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1995),
pp. 59109.

58. Warburg, Letter of 26 January 1887, cited in
Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und der
Antisemitismus, p. 253.
59. Warburg, Letter of 25 November 1889, in
Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und der
Antisemitismus, p. 255.
60. Warburg, Notes on the Serpent Ritual
Lecture, cited in Steinberg, Aby Warburgs
Kreuzlingen Lecture: A Reading, p. 87.
61. William Hagen, Murder in the East.
German-Jewish Liberal Reactions to Anti-Jewish
Violence in Poland and other East European
Lands, Central European History, vol. 34, no. 1,
2001, pp. 130.
62. Cited in Hagen, Murder in the East, p. 6.
63. For an extended discussion of this theme, see
Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. The East
European Jew in German and German Jewish
Consciousness 1800 1923 (University of Wisconsin
Press: Madison, 1982).
Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft, Judaism and the Politics of Identity
Warburg may have sought to distance himself from certain aspects of
Jewish orthodoxy, yet he could also never forget or be allowed to forget
his own identity; he was constantly reminded of this by anti-Semitic students
at the University of Strasbourg. Nor did he straightforwardly dismiss it. In a
much-cited early letter to his mother of 1887, in which he defended his
decision not to restrict himself solely to kosher food he argued:
I am by no means ashamed of being a Jew. On the contrary, I attempt to show to
others that representatives of my kind are well suited to using their talents in order to
t in as useful members into the development of culture and the state.58
This desire to gain acceptance by demonstrating the capacity of Jews to make a
useful contribution to German society was repeated in a letter to his mother
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written two years later, in 1889, in which he expressed the hope that despite his
markedly oriental appearance he and his descendants would be able to become
fully assimilated into German society.59 During the 1914 1918 war, Warburg
came to see real danger in the gradual emergence of anti-Semitism in German
society and he sought to emphasise the value of German Jews to the war effort
as a means of combatting it.60
In making such a profession of usefulness Warburg was, on the one hand,
giving in to the demands of wider civil society, in which Jews were expected to
demonstrate the extent of their assimilation. On the other hand, the urge to
assimilate stemmed from Warburgs own ambivalence about his Jewish
identity and also his sense of being a German. The liberal political tradition
to which he owed so much was fiercely patriotic, indeed had been a driving
force towards German unification, and Warburgs identification with liberal
notions of citizenship included a commitment to national identity that was
common amongst liberal Jews of his generation. This sense of belonging
to German culture was strengthened for many by the specific encounter
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of German Jews with
those from Eastern Europe fleeing the pogroms in Tsarist Russia from the
1880s onwards. Such contacts posed profound difficulties for German Jews,
who found little affinity with the culture of the Ostjuden, as they were
pejoratively termed.
William Hagen has demonstrated how far German Jews perceived
themselves to be from these so-called Ostjuden in his account of the 1917
conference of the liberal Central Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith
(Central-Verein deutscher Staatsburger judischen Glaubens).61 As one speaker
declared of Jewish immigrants from odz, then in Russia: These gentlemen
brought with them from over there their customs and practices in
unadulterated form, and if subsequently they didnt all prove harmful, still a
very large number of them have done their bit to greatly undermine the
reputation of the German Jews . . . .62 This was a common sentiment, and
there was a widespread fear that the putative backwardness of the Ostjuden
might threaten the position attained by the Jewish population of Germany.
Early twentieth-century liberal German Jewish opinion sought to extend to
such immigrants, and more generally to Jews in Central Europe, the
civilising cloak of German culture and language, with a concomitant
displacement of Yiddish and other signs of their backwardness.63 A German
patriot, Warburg, conformed to this model of liberal bourgeois Jewish
thinking, for which immersion in German culture was an essential factor of
identity formation.
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 329
Matthew Rampley

Indeed, Warburgs own self-understanding can be seen as structurally linked to

the wider social position of German Jews. There has been an enormous
literature on the question of the social interaction of Jews with Germans, and 64. Scholem, Jews and Germans, in On Jews and
positions have ranged from stressing the considerable degree of personal and Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays (Shocken Books:
formal social interaction, on the one hand, to the allegation of a complete New York, 1976), pp. 71 92. Marion Kaplan
absence of meaningful dialogue, on the other hand. Hence, authors such as (ed.), Jewish Daily Life in Germany 16181945
(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2005). See
Gershom Scholem remained trenchant critics of the idea of any actual or also George Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism
possible degree of social integration or dialogue, whereas other observers (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1985)
have carefully documented the complex interactions between Jews and and Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State. The
Political History of a Minority 18481933
non-Jews in Germany, including the increasing numbers of Jews who (Blackwell: Oxford, 1992).
married out, of which Warburg was, of course, a notable instance.64
65. Hannah Arendt, in Peter Baehr (ed.), The
However, even the most optimistic assessments have recognised the Portable Hannah Arendt (Viking: London, 2000),
renunciation of Jewish identity required in order to gain social acceptance;

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pp. 856.
Warburgs own marriage to the sculptor Mary Hertz was only possible after 66. Arendt in Baehr (ed.), The Portable Hannah
overcoming sustained opposition from both his and her parents. One of the Arendt, p. 87.
most powerful depictions of this situation remains that of Hannah Arendt,
67. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo
who emphasised the conflicting imperatives Jews were required to satisfy. As Indians of North America, p. 45. In his essay Durer
Arendt argues, they were compelled to be both Jewish and non-Jewish, the and Italian Antiquity, Warburg briefly mentions
same and yet distinct: Castagnos shield of David (in Warburg, The
Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, p. 557) and in his
1905 essay On Imprese Amorose in the Earliest
Conforming to a society which discriminated against ordinary Jews . . . Jews had to Florentine Engravings, he also mentioned in
differentiate themselves clearly from the Jew in general and just as clearly to indicate passing Salome and the legend of Judith and
that they were Jews; under no circumstances were they allowed simply to disappear Holofernes (The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity,
among their neighbours . . . This amounted to a feeling of being different from other p. 174).
men in the street because they were Jews, and different from other Jews at home
because they were not like ordinary Jews.65 68. David Freedberg, The Kachinas of Oraibi:
Ethnography, Photography and Iconoclash,
lecture delivered at the University of Karlsruhe,
Even in liberal circles, acceptance was often only gained through a self- 12 July 2002. See also Freedberg, Pathos a
exoticisation; it was precisely their cultural difference that made Jews Oraibi: Cio` che Warburg non vide, in Claudia
Cieri Via and Pietro Montani (eds), Lo Sguardo di
attractive in certain quarters. Under such circumstances, states Arendt, one Giano, Aby Warburg fra tempo e memoria (Aragno:
was frequently faced with the choice of becoming either a parvenu in order Turin, 2004), pp. 569 611. An English version,
to gain wider social acceptance, or a pariah and remain socially excluded. Pathos at Oraibi: What Warburg Did not See, is
Many attempted to navigate a course between these two extremes, failing to available online at: http://columbiauniversity.
org/cu/arthistory/pdf/
reconcile the irreconcilable. The consequence was that Jews felt dept_freedberg_pathos_at_oraibi.pdf (accessed
simultaneously the pariahs regret at not having become the parvenu, and the 12 January 2010).
parvenus bad conscience at having betrayed his people.66 69. Berensons attitude towards his Jewish
If we use Arendts analysis as a framework for approaching Warburg, other identity was discussed critically by Meyer
aspects of his work begin to become a little more comprehensible. David Schapiro in Mr. Berensons Values, (1961) in
Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society
Freedberg has noted the apparent paradox that while he was intensely (George Brazillier: New York, 1998), pp. 209
engaged with contemporary anti-Semitism its status as a modern 25. For an analysis of Schapiro, see Donald
counter-part to the primitive violence of ancient myth Warburg seemed Kuspit, Meyer Schapiros Jewish Unconscious,
remarkably uninterested in Jewish symbolic images. Only in his Lecture on in Catherine Soussloff (ed.), Jewish Identity in
Modern Art History (University of California Press:
the Serpent Ritual, in which the Biblical myth of Moses and the brazen Berkeley, CA, 1999), pp. 20017. On Berenson
serpent, St Pauls apparent imperviousness to viper bites, and Old Testament see also, Ernst Samuels, Bernard Berenson.
idolatry are mentioned, are Jewish and Biblical mythology or culture The Making of a Connoisseur (Belknap Press:
discussed in any depth.67 Freedberg reads this as a case of repressed origins, Cambridge, MA, 1979).

in which Warburgs dedication to the artistic culture of Renaissance Italy

functions as a kind of displacement activity.68 Indeed, in this respect parallels
can be drawn with Warburgs contemporary Bernard Berenson (1865 1959),
whose self-invention as a cosmopolitan aesthete and Renaissance art historian
was achieved through a deliberate repression of his own origins as the
Lithuanian Jew Bernhard Valvrojensky.69 Following Arendt, however,
Warburgs simultaneous affirmation and disavowal of a concern with Jewish

330 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010


70. Margaret Olin, Early Christian Synagogues
and Jewish Art Historians. The Discovery of the
Synagoguge of Dura-Europos, Marburger Jahrbuch
fur Kunstwissenschaft, vol. 27, 2000, pp. 728.
There were some exceptions, such as Ernst
Cohn-Wiener, author of Die judische Kunst. Ihre
Geschichte von den Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart
(Wasservogel: Berlin, 1929), or Rahel
Wischnitzer-Bernstein, who published Symbole
und Gestalten der judischen Kunst (Scholem: Berlin,
1935).
71. Thomas Willey, Back to Kant. The Revival of
Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought,
1860 1914 (Wayne State University Press:
Detroit, 1978), p. 23.
72. Key texts included: Lange, Die Arbeiterfrage.
Ihre Bedeutung fur Gegenwart und Zukunft
(Bleuler-Hausheer & Co: Winterthur, 1870);
Natorp, Sozialpadagogik. Theorie der
Willenserziehung auf der Grundlage der Gemeinschaft
(Frommann: Stuttgart, 1899); Cohen, Ethik des
Willens (Bruno Cassirer: Berlin, 1907).
73. Cohen frequently wrote on Jewish thought,
culture and identity, specifically, its place within
Germany. See Cohen, Deutschtum und Judentum mit
grundlegenden Betrachtungen uber Staat und
Internationalismus (Topelmann: Giessen, 1915) and
Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums
(Fock: Leipzig, 1919).
Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft, Judaism and the Politics of Identity
culture can also be seen as playing out the wider contradictory identities
demanded of emancipated Jews.
On the one hand, Warburgs lack of engagement with his own cultural
origins precisely with regard to the question of art was in conformity with
contemporary art historical norms. Indeed, he reproduced a wider tendency
by Jewish scholars in particular to avoid Jewish art. As Margaret Olin has
argued, it was a matter of no small concern to contemporary commentators
that most of the few studies on Jewish art were undertaken by non-Jews.70
However, Warburgs reluctance to consider Jewish culture in depth may also
be linked to the situation of emancipated liberal Jews of the nineteenth
century, who sought integration into German society through immersion in
universal humanistic Bildung. This shared attitude also explains the affinities
he found with Ernst Cassirer in his later years.
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As one of the last, and most powerful, representatives of Neo-Kantian
thinking, Cassirer was heir to a liberal philosophical tradition that sought to
address the social and political problems of Germany and the Reich by
recourse to Kantian notions of reason and moral freedom. To cite one
commentator: the neo-Kantians expressed the tentative and unsuccessful
efforts of a segment of the upper bourgeoisie to make peace with the
proletariat and to retain an attitude of cultural community with the West.71
Drawing on Kants political ideal of a community of self-legislating moral
wills, thinkers such as Friedrich Lange (1828 1875), Hermann Cohen
(1842 1918), or Paul Natorp (1854 1924) attempted to construct a
left-liberal social and political philosophy with the ethical subject at its
heart.72 Social order was thus centred either on individual moral imperatives
or on a community of rational, ethical beings. However, Cassirer and other
neo-Kantian thinkers, not least Cohen or the aesthetician Max Dessoir
(1867 1947), were Jewish.73 The commitment of Cassirer, Cohen and
others to Kantian ideas of community, moral autonomy and rationality were
consequently consistent with the outlook of the liberal middle classes, but
they can also be interpreted as part of the process of internalising bourgeois
German cultural values.
Jewish art culture played a fairly minor role as a topic of direct scholarly
investigation for Warburg, but his Jewish identity nevertheless informed it in
other ways. A fundamental aspect of his analysis of the Renaissance revolved
around the question of split identities. As noted earlier, his analysis of the
will of Francesco Sassetti, or his observations on the contradictory presence
of pious faith and mundane self-assertion in Ghirlandaios images of the
Medici led him to stress the contradictory mentality of the period. It is
possible to see in Warburgs interest in these inner conflicts, and in his
fascination with the opposition of pagan and Christian mentalities, and with
their uneasy co-existence, a link to his own experience of being a German
Jew. It has been widely recognised that Warburg saw in the Renaissance an
anticipation of many of the key social and cultural issues of his own time; the
Renaissance was a moment of conflicting cultural imperatives. What caught
his interest was the question of how individuals artists, donors, patrons
negotiated these differing demands. In this way, too, the Renaissance
pre-figured modernity, in particular, in relation to the position of the
German Jew. As with the wider question of Warburgs political interests the
crucial issue here, however, is not the mere fact that the Renaissance took on
this significance, but rather, the interpretative frame Warburg used to make
sense of it. In keeping with Warburgs broader attitudes, the dilemmas of
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 331
Matthew Rampley

Jewishness were viewed through the lens of the liberal ideology of the
emancipated bourgeois.
Competing Visions: Politics and Myth
Warburgs social, political, and cultural understanding reflected both his
position as the son of a wealthy banking family in the mercantile city of
Hamburg, and also the wider attitudes of assimilated Jews across Germany.
His grasp of political events also suffered severe limitations; a sense of this
can be gained when his response to the question of anti-Semitism is
examined in greater depth and, in particular, when it is considered in
comparison with other attempts to interpret its meaning and origin.
Warburg viewed anti-Semitic violence within the broader framework of his
74. On this episode see Schoell-Glass, Aby
Warburg und der Antisemitismus, p. 94 ff.
75. There are two boxes in the archive of the
Warburg Institute (IV 68 and 69) entitled
Judenfragen which contain newspaper cuttings
relating to both the Konitz murder and the ritual
murder in the Ukraine.
76. Cited in Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und
der Antisemitismus, pp. 88 9.
77. Sven Lutticken, Keep Your Distance. Aby
Warburg on Myth and Modern Art, Oxford Art

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Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2005, pp. 4559.
theory of culture as the eruption of a primitive Dionysian impulse. Three
particular contemporary episodes drew his attention in this context. The first 78. Alfred Julius Meier-Graefe, Der Fall Bocklin
was the discovery of a dismembered corpse of a nineteen-year-old man, und die Lehre von den Einheiten (Julius Hoffmann:
Stuttgart, 1905).
Ernst Winter, in the Prussian town of Konitz (now Chojnice in Poland) in
March 1900. The corpse appeared to have been expertly butchered, and the
Berlin-based anti-Semitic newspaper the Staatsburgezeitung (The Citizens
Paper) suggested that it had been a ritual act. It was thereby drawing on a
well-established myth that associated Jews with secret ritual murder, and the
mere suggestion of Jewish guilt by the paper led to an outbreak of
anti-Jewish violence in Konitz and neighbouring towns in West Prussia.74
The theme of ritual murder reappeared in a trial for ritual murder held
in Kiev in 1913, reports of which Warburg also collected.75 A third episode
was the recounting in the Frankfurter Zeitung in December 1905 of the
murder of a female teacher by Cossacks in Stavropol, in the Caucasus, on
account of her alleged revolutionary disposition, which the Cossacks saw as
betraying Jewish sympathies. This event was followed by wider anti-Jewish
pogroms across Russia in the same year. In response to the murder of the
teacher Warburg noted: Death of Orpheus: Return of the eternally
unchanging beast, genus: homo sapiens.76 In many respects, this was
commensurate with his wider theory of culture; his concern with the
survival of violent pagan mythic archetypes in the Renaissance guided his
approach to the present. As noted earlier, he implied an equivalence between
the rise of Italian fascism and the ongoing power of Catholic ritual. His
project of a historical cultural psychology revolved around the persistence
and transformation of primitive archetypes. Particular attention was paid to
mythic images of violence, such as the death of Orpheus, the murder of
Laocoon and his sons, the feats of Hercules, or the influence of baleful
astrological deities such as Saturn. The mythic representation of such primal
violence provided Warburg with a framework for interpreting both the past
and the present. However, his concern with myth not only formed a central
scholarly preoccupation, it also came to shape how he viewed history.
Sven Lutticken has recently explored Warburgs interest in mythic thinking
in terms of his enthusiasm for the paintings of Arnold Bocklin and the
latters ability to construct new mythic figures fit for the present.77 As
Lutticken states, Bocklin was taken up at the turn of the century by
nationalistic critics as a standard-bearer of modern German art (in opposition
to French modernism), and following Julius Meier-Graefes attack on him in
Der Fall Bocklin (The Bocklin Case, 1905), which outlined Bocklins defects
in comparison with Manet, raised the political stakes of support for either
painter.78 Having written on Bocklin before publication of Meier-Graefes

332 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010


79. Warburg, Bocklins Heimgang 18. Januar
1901, cited in Lutticken, Keep Your Distance.
Aby Warburg on Myth and Modern Art, p. 52.
80. Lutticken, Keep Your Distance. Aby
Warburg on Myth and Modern Art, p. 56.
81. Warburg, Images from the Regions of the
Pueblo Indians of North America, p. 50 ff.
82. On myth in nineteenth-century German
intellectual life, see Wolff-Daniel Hartwich, Die
deutsche Mythologie. Die Erfindung einer Kunstreligion
(Philo: Berlin and Vienna, 2000); George
Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany.
Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to
Nietzsche (Chicago University Press: Chicago,
2004).
83. Creuzer was the author of Die Symbolik und
Mythologie der alten Volker, besonders der Griechen
(Heyer und Leske: Darmstadt and Leipzig, 1819).
Karl Mullers Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen
Mythologie (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft:
Darmstadt, 1970) was first published in 1825.
Usener was the author of Gotternamen (Friedrich
Cohen: Bonn, 1896).
84. Ernst Cassirer, Die Begriffsform im mythischen
Denken (Teubner: Leipzig, 1922). Cassirer
published a further work on myth under the
auspices of the Warburg library, Sprache und
Mythos: ein Beitrag zum Problem der Gotternamen
(Teubner: Leipzig, 1925).
85. Cited in Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und
der Antisemitismus, p. 105.
Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft, Judaism and the Politics of Identity
text, Warburg did not become involved in this particular debate. In any case he
was more interested in the Swiss artists use of the mythopoetic power of the
image. and in particular, in his reactivation of classical myth.79 To cite
Lutticken: In Warburgs view, Bocklins tableaux seem to have been
convincing confrontations with the darker side of Antiquity, the artist
successfully working through impulses that might prove dangerous in lesser
hands by imposing aesthetic unity on them.80
This was a recurrent theme in Warburgs writings, although he was most
often concerned with the Renaissance reactivation (and transfiguration) of
such Dionysian antiquity. Such an aesthetic reworking of ancient myth was
also vital as a means to countering the disruptive social and cultural effects of
modern technology, an idea he put forward most directly at the conclusion
of his lecture on the s ritual of the Pueblo Indians.81 Warburgs approach can
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also be placed, however, within the context of a wider fascination with myth
that originated in the aesthetics of German Romanticism. The first
expression of such a fascination was in the calls for a new mythology by
Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling, which would displace discredited
forms of religious life and could also serve as the foundation of a new social
and political order.82 A secular version of such a concern with myth also
evolved in the comparative mythographic studies of writers such as Friedrich
Creuzer, Karl Otfried Muller or, later, Warburgs teacher Hermann
Usener.83 Such works sought parallels between ancient Greek myths and
those in Sanskrit epics, or the mythologies of other Indo-European cultures
such as the Celts or the Germans.
Warburgs tracing of the migration of symbolic images through time and
space was an extension of the philological interests of the mythographers.
Where Usener or Muller search for semantic, morphological, or logical
constants and variations in the inherited stock of Indo-European myths,
Warburg examined the recurrence or transformation of the mythic images
of classical antiquity. He did not see in myth the basis for a new religion,
but he nevertheless saw it as having a crucial social function in that myth
counted as a step on the path away from immersion in immediate
perception and towards symbolisation, and hence the sublimation of raw
emotional experience. This focus was strengthened when he met Cassirer,
and their shared interest in myth found material expression in the fact that
the first volume of the Studien der Bibliothek Warburg was an analysis by
Cassirer of mythical concepts.84
Interpreting contemporary events in the light of mythic archetypes produced
a poetic, tragic vision; violence represented the return of ancient primal
impulses. An instructive instance of his understanding was his response to a
series of spalliera paintings by Botticelli of the Wedding-Feast of Nastagio
degli Onesti, recounted in the Decameron, in which a rejected lover had torn
out the heart of his beloved. Regarding this as an example of the penetration
of the thin Christian Catholic veneer by a demonic undercurrent,
Warburg added: Something similar actually happened. At the Colonna-
Baglioni blood wedding of 1500 Filippo di Braccio ripped Astorre Baglionis
heart out of his chest and tore it to pieces with his own teeth.85 There was
thus a continuum of mythic legend and historical events which he saw as
recurring in his own times. However, this reading of the present in terms of
archetypes prevented Warburg from analysing their more specific nature or
proximate causes. It was sustainable only by excluding the massive social,
economic, and political differences that separated the varying events.
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 333
Matthew Rampley

Closer attention to the question of the response to anti-Semitism highlights

the shortcomings of Warburgs approach, for it contrasted with other attempts
to explain anti-Semitic violence. It was a matter of no small concern in liberal 86. Hagen, Murder in the East, p. 19.
Jewish circles in the immediate aftermath of the First World War that the
establishment of new states in central and eastern Europe was accompanied 87. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture. The Outsider as
Insider (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1992),
by a marked rise in outbreaks of anti-Semitism. The Allgemeine Zeitung des pp. 3235.
Judentums im deutschen Reich (General Paper of the Jewry in the German
Empire), the monthly publication of the Central Union of German Citizens
of Jewish Faith, reported numerous outbreaks in Poland, Russia, and
Romania. However, the accounts were emphatic that this was a modern
phenomenon to be seen as the consequence of recent developments,
including the re-assertion of repressed national identities. As William Hagen
states: . . . in German-Jewish liberal eyes, the primary danger facing the

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Polish and other eastern Jews was not so much sporadic physical assault,
costly though this was. It was, rather, the threat of ruthless anti-Semitic
ideologies of Christian middle-class formation guiding the policy of extreme
nationalist governments in the new postwar states . . . .86 Subsequent
scholarship has tended to support this latter view, but what is of greater
interest are the grounds for such a difference of opinion on Warburgs part.
For in contrast to Warburgs mythic interpretation, the correspondents of
the Allgemeine Zeitung saw anti-Semitism as linked to a complex range of
contemporary social and political factors.
Many of his Jewish contemporaries saw the conditions for the rise and
exercise of anti-Semitic violence in the absence of legal and constitutional
frameworks safeguarding their co-religionists in Poland, Russia, and Romania.
Warburg, in contrast, had little to say about its specifically modern
appearance. Nor indeed was he able to provide much of a solution, other
than by the formation of a beneficent visual imagery that might sustain some
kind of alternative regime of visual representation. Here too the limits of his
political horizons become apparent. While he celebrated the work of artists
such as Rembrandt, Bocklin, or Botticelli for countering the most primitive
impulses sustaining classical imagery, his own choice of motto to celebrate
the Treaty of Locarno idea vincit couched in the antiquated language of
bourgeois humanist learning, could hardly have been more inappropriate as a
means to inspire wide-scale adherence to the progressive ideals of
Stresemann and the new mass democracy of the Weimar Republic.

Conclusion
In his famous study of Weimar Germany, Peter Gay identified Aby Warburg as
an exemplar of the intellectual culture of the 1920s.87 A closer analysis
indicates, however, that much of Warburgs thought was founded on a set of
beliefs and values that were rooted in the ideology of the Wilhelmine liberal
bourgeoisie. This becomes particularly evident when his political views and
his understanding of cultural politics are scrutinised; specifically, Warburg
held to the utopian image of a community based on Bildung and measured
reason (Besonnenheit). Affirming the happy coexistence of commerce and
culture, he implicitly saw his own class as occupying a leading role, a view
that motivated his scholarly interest in the economic elite of Renaissance
Florence.
An important question to ask in response to such observations might be: why
should this be a matter of such concern? Ultimately, because recent decades
have witnessed a mythification of Warburg, which treats him as providing a

334 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010


88. The key proselytiser in this regard has been
Georges Didi-Huberman. See his Artistic
Survival. Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism
of Impure Time, Common Knowledge, vol. 9, no.
2, 2003, pp. 273 85.
Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaft, Judaism and the Politics of Identity
model for a renewed kind of visual theory that would renew or even replace the
discipline of art history.88 In contrast, this discussion suggests that before
appropriating him in the service of contemporary debates, it is necessary to
come to terms with the historical situatedness of his ideas, and with their
social and ideological connotations. The analysis undertaken here raises
important questions as to the ability of Warburgian Kulturwissenschaft to
mount the kind of challenge with which it is often credited. It may not
ultimately put into doubt his relevance for the present, but it does highlight
the need for a more critical approach to this work. Only then can we identify
a Warburg who might still speak to us today.
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OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 335