REVIEWS
“If there is any example of an intellectual history with its feet on the ground, then it would be Levine’s thoroughly researched and beautifully told story of the Warburg library. More than a book about a place, an institution, and a handful of intellectuals, Dreamland of Humanists is an unparalleled geography of twentieth century intellectual life, and a key to its countless codes and mysteries.”
— German History
"In arguing for the importance of place and social setting in the formation of ideas, Levine crosses as many scholarly disciplines as Aby Warbug's Library of the Science of Culture did in its heyday. . . . Levine shows how crucially time, place, and people can affect what we finally study and ponder; but in the end, if we are lucky, we all make our own Dreamland of Humanists with the materials at hand."
— New Republic
"A thoughtful and massively researched book. . . . One learns a lot and is left with a lot to ponder."
— Key Reporter
“From its inception in the early 1900s to its relocation to London in 1933, the Warburg Library in Hamburg was a symbol of holistic cultural study and humanistic learning, while the men most closely associated with the Library—Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst Cassirer—were vital to the symbolic turn that marked so much of twentieth-century thought. Emily Levine skillfully weaves together three men, a library, and a city in this compelling study of a crucial moment in modern intellectual history. She significantly enhances our understanding of the ideas and the shared urban and institutional context of these pivotal thinkers, while recasting Weimar culture in light of a shifting focus from the capital to Germany’s ‘second’ city.”
— Warren Breckman, author of Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Radical Democracy
“Dreamland of Humanists is a deeply researched, well-structured, and elegantly written work of history that brings to life the city of Hamburg, a place that, thanks to its unique Hanseatic economic and political traditions, served as a welcome home for the Warburg Library and the three German Jewish intellectuals most closely associated with its name. Levine should be commended.”
— Peter E. Gordon, author of Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos
“Insightful, interesting, and sophisticated, Dreamland of Humanists not only contributes to our individual and collective knowledge of the Warburg school but it sheds new light on the intellectual and political struggles and ultimately tragic fate of Weimar culture as a whole. I would go so far as to state that this is a work that I have been waiting for.”
— Steven E. Aschheim, author of Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad
“Levine gets it right. Her accounts are characterized by an impressive intellectual reach and stupendous scholarship. . . . Levine offers more than a contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of twentieth-century Germany, the Weimar period, or the development of the disciplines of art history, cultural history, and philosophy. Dreamland of Humanists is an examination into the principal conditions under which great ideas can thrive—anywhere in the world.”
— German Studies Review
“Levine’s book succeeds very well, too, in carrying out another mission, and that is to understand exactly what difference the ‘Jewishness’ of the three protagonists made in their lives and ideas. . . . Never pushing the case too hard, Levine shows that all these figures lived and worked keenly aware of the cultural prejudices around them, trying, in various ways, to transcend them. Levine deserves much credit for having given us new insight into these figures by setting them firmly into the loamy soil of Hamburg. . . . This is a fine book, and I hope it will provoke the writing of more studies of liberal intellectuals and their hometowns.”
— Suzanne Marchand, Journal of Modern History
“During the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, a small coterie of intellectual and cultural figures succeeded into transforming Hamburg, however briefly, into one of the cultural capitals of Europe. Levine’s Dreamland of Humanists is an intellectual history of this important, and underappreciated, place and time. . . . Levine has contributed a major volume to the project of reestablishing the intellectual significance of Warburg, Cassirer, and Panofsky for twentieth century humanist thought, and the cultural transformation of the city that sustained them.”
— MAKE Literary Magazine
“It is a German history, Jewish history, cultural history, and intellectual history refreshingly unlike most of the work on the Warburg Institute. Levine, with unrivalled perspicacity, goes beyond her precursors who were wary of venturing beyond simply stating that the progenitors of the Warburgian project were mainly Jews. With rare exception, Jewishness has been viewed primarily as one among many elements in the combustible mix that pushed the Hamburg School out of Germany after the Nazi rise to power. Levine persuasively argues that Aby Warburg and his cohort, who came together over their historical interest in symbols and myths, must be understood by considering not only the fact of their Jewish origins and the ways they were perceived as Jews.”
— Michael Berkowitz, German Quarterly
“Dreamland of Humanists is more than a detailed chronicle of a unique research institute in exile. Levine’s main focus is the cultural life of Hamburg during the Weimar Republic and its effects on the three scholars who were involved in creating the Warburg Institute. If anything, her book is reminiscent of Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna in capturing the spirit of a particular city and a remarkable group of intellectuals. . . . Clearly written, copiously detailed and a fine example of intellectual and cultural history.”
— European Legacy
“Levine’s complex, multicausal view of intellectual history means that her book is not easily summarized; it is part biography, part history of ideas, part institutional and economic history. . .This consideration of Hamburg as a crucial factor in the thought of Warburg, Cassirer, and Panofsky adds an important dimension to those already individually well-studied figures.”
— Common Knowledge
“Levine’s is the work of a historian, and, although she affiliates herself with other modes of inquiry too, her book sits squarely in the tradition of the history of ideas: she reads the texts of important intellectual figures, and she gives them fresh valence by reading them against the backgrounds of their various contexts.”
— Journal of the History of Ideas
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dreamland of Humanists - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0001
[Ernst Troeltsch, dreamland of armistice, humanist dreamland, Fritz Saxl, Pierre Bourdieu, Berlin, Hamburg, Weimar, symbols, special case]
The introduction unpacks the book title’s meaning, which combines Ernst Troeltsch’s designation of post-war Germany as a “dreamland of the armistice,” a country cautiously optimistic about Germany’s future in a new Europe, and the art historian Fritz Saxl’s description of the Warburg project as investigating a “humanist dreamland” in art over time. It argues that the historical setting and the intellectual project shared the preoccupation with the relationship between symbols and meaning. Borrowing Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “social conditions of possibility,” the introduction argues that Weimar-era Hamburg offered conditions for cultural and intellectual life distinct from those of other German cities. While much scholarship has focused on Berlin and anti-humanist trends in Weimar, the introduction makes the case for a turn to Hamburg, whose “free city” status and cosmopolitan spirit, often referred to as its “special case” offer a corrective to our portrait of the Weimar Republic. (pages 1 - 26)
This chapter is available at:
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Culture, Commerce, and the City - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0002
[Aby Warburg, Max Warburg, Alfred Lichtwark, culture, city, Hamburg model, banking, Jewishness, Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Warburg library]
The first chapter argues that the relationship between the brothers Aby and Max Warburg and the Warburg banking family provide a civic exemplar of Hamburg’s unique urban landscape, the so-called “Hamburg model,” in which merchant families supported the city’s cultural life through their private wealth. That Hamburg possessed no tradition of state-sponsored art or culture was the source of both advantages and disadvantages of intellectual life. Warburg often complained about the city’s philistine cultural taste and experienced friction with its tastemakers like Alfred Lichtwark. Yet despite their Jewishness, the Warburg family wielded a tremendous amount of control on this urban scene. This chapter shows how this distinctive urban landscape shaped Warburg’s own intellectual upbringing and set the stage for his unique collection of books that would develop into the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg library). (pages 27 - 48)
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Warburg’s Renaissance and the Things in Between - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0003
[Warburg, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Burckhardt, Lamprecht, Nietzsche Renaissance, classical antiquity, cultural history, Nachleben der Antike, pathosformel]
Influenced by Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Warburg promoted a radically new understanding of how the Renaissance inherited a more complex aesthetic heritage from classical antiquity. Yet in the spirit of the cultural historian Karl Lamprecht, Warburg also wished to create an interdisciplinary methodology that would permit him to analyze this process in a holistic way. The second chapter argues that Warburg’s prewar writings on Botticelli and Ghirlandaio reveals how he took certain tropes from his mercantile home city, including, most notably the merchant, the widow, and the amateur “private scholar,” to develop a new portrait of Renaissance art and its social milieu. His approach, which connected perennial problems of form and content, and genius and predefined classical tropes, with the observation of a single detail, captured in such concepts as the Nachleben der Antike and the pathosformel, would become his greatest intellectual contribution to art history. (pages 49 - 71)
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University as “Gateway to the World” - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0004
[Aby Warburg, Max Warburg, University of Hamburg, World War I, Hamburg, Berlin, revolution, republic, Kreuzlingen]
The third chapter examines the longstanding debate over the purpose of scholarship in a commercial city without a scholarly tradition. Warburg, for his part, often mediated between the camps of merchants and academics and stirred local pride with constant references to Berlin. This chapter shows how Aby and Max Warburg played an instrumental role in leading the city towards the ultimate founding of the University of Hamburg. Tabled because of the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the university was ultimately founded in the spring of 1919 in the midst of revolution. Born of the republic, the university would draw on Hamburg’s distinct internationalism, a potential asset in the new Europe. Broken by the war and unsatisfied with the university’s traditionalism, Warburg, however, would ultimately turn his intellectual sights to his library and retreat to Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, where he would recover from a mental breakdown. (pages 72 - 92)
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Warburg, Cassirer, and the Conditions of Reason - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0005
[Kant, neo-Kantianism, Cassirer, Hermann Cohen, Marburg School, Warburg library, symbolic forms]
The fourth chapter shows how Ernst Cassirer fulfilled Warburg’s vision for Hamburg as a city of serious scholarship and validated the scholarly utility of his library, the latter of which would bring Warburg out of his wartime depression. This chapter traces Cassirer’s intellectual origins in Marburg neo-Kantianism under the tutelage of Hermann Cohen to his transformation to become the author of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, a multivolume work that found its intellectual home in the Warburg library. Through an examination of Cassirer’s interwar works, this chapter argues how the relationship between Warburg and Cassirer could be an antidote to Warburg’s mental struggle, and that Cassirer’s work reflected their shared scholarly enterprise. Though Cassirer expanded Kant’s critical philosophical lens to include other symbolic forms, and Warburg struggled to make logical sense of irrationality, both balanced what was lost and gained in the transition between reason and myth. (pages 93 - 120)
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Socrates in Hamburg? Panofsky and the Economics of Scholarship - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0006
[Panofsky, art history, America, philanthropy, inflation, Phaedrus Hamburgensis]
The fifth chapter argues that Erwin Panofsky’s life and career reveals an interdependence of commerce and culture that was characteristic of this art historical circle. Through an analysis of Panofsky’s little-known play Phaedrus Hamburgensis in 1927 and a lecture delivered in the same year by Warburg to the Chamber of Commerce on the “inflation” of the Baroque, this chapter shows how an awareness of the material conditions of scholarship permeated this scholarly circle. This chapter also argues that Warburg’s 1895 America trip provided not only intellectual motivation, but also the American philanthropic paradigm that he would emulate to found a private institute of scholarship of his own. Despite these scholars’ anxiety that Hamburg was not a place of serious scholarship, an anxiety brought into relief by the inflation crisis, Hamburg’s tradition of philanthropy better positioned its intellectual institutions to address these economic challenges. (pages 121 - 147)
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Iconology and the Hamburg School - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0007
[art history, iconology, Hamburg School, Panofsky, contextualism, formalism, Wölfflin, Riegl, Kunstwollen, Ernst Gombrich]
The sixth chapter argues that Panofsky forged a “third way” between the formalist and contextualist approaches of his art historical mentors, Wölfflin and Riegl. Influenced by Warburg’s early work, Panofsky’s methodology solidified around these scholars’ shared interests in symbols and drew on Hamburg’s combined resources: the library’s unique index of images, the Kunsthalle’s collection of local and modernist art, and the absence of an established and hierarchical department. To connect a particular insight with a more general principle, Panofsky and the Hamburg School promoted iconology—a holistic approach to analyzing images over time. While Ernst Gombrich would later criticize the cultural-historical assumption that art is representative of the Zeitgeist, this chapter argues that understanding Panofsky’s early work as a revision of Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen and his engagement with Cassirer’s symbolic forms offers a more complete view of iconology’s origins. (pages 148 - 174)
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Private Jews, Public Germans - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0008
[privatdozent, Rembrandt, Cassirer, Panofsky, Warburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Jewishness, Germanness]
Chapter seven considers to what extent the experience of German Jewish scholars in Hamburg differed from that of Berlin or Frankfurt. To this end, it investigates how Warburg, Cassirer, and Panofsky navigated the scholarly choices of private scholar and Privatdozent and managed their rise to visibility in their respective fields, art history and philosophy. Focusing on a posthumously published lecture, delivered by Panofsky in 1921 titled, “Rembrandt and Judaism,” as well as Warburg’s carefully managed public response to Cassirer’s receiving a job offer from the University of Frankfurt, this chapter offers a contrast to the traditional portrait of humanist German-Jewish scholars as deluded and naïve. Rather, this chapter argues that a different view of Jewishness and Germanness emerges from the distinction between private and public worlds, and from an understanding of the political positioning these scholars of symbols undertook when presenting their ideas to different audiences. (pages 175 - 196)
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Cassirer’s Cosmopolitan Nationalism - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0009
[humanism, Ernst Cassirer, Heidegger, Leibniz, Lessing, Goethe, Kant, Davos, cosmopolitan nationalism, Toni Cassirer]
Chapter eight shows how Cassirer’s life and work bore out the political implications of the Warburg circle and, in particular, the substantive connection between Hamburg, the Weimar Republic, and their scholarly humanism. Insofar as Cassirer focused on such classic eighteenth-century German philosophers as Leibniz, Lessing, Goethe, and Kant, thinkers for whom a cosmopolitan outlook was central to their life and work, Cassirer, like the political tradition of the Weimar Republic, was increasingly on the defensive to prove the Germanness of this project. This chapter argues that in both his 1928 speech for the Celebration of the Constitution and his 1929 Davos Debate with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Cassirer defended his unique brand of intellectual and political “cosmopolitan nationalism,” a delicate balance of loyalty to both a distinct cultural group and wider humanist project. Toni Cassirer’s recollection of the event testifies to the extent to which lives had become symbolic of ideas. (pages 197 - 221)
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The Enlightened Rector and the Politics of Enlightenment - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0010
[Cassirer, rector, University of Hamburg, antirepublicanism, Weimar, festival, Mandarin, Philosophy of Enlightenment]
Chapter nine focuses on Cassirer’s tenure as rector at the University of Hamburg during the academic year of 1929–1930, which represented one last attempt to carry on Warburg’s vision of a humanist Hamburg. Yet when Cassirer assumed his post Warburg had died and he faced political conditions vastly different than those in 1928, including fierce nationalism, anti-Semitism, and antirepublicanism from the students. Within these institutional constraints, Cassirer tried to create a reception for a Weimar festival and ceremonial culture and presided over two university events at which he promoted—albeit to no avail—his unique brand of “cosmopolitan nationalism.” In contrast to the portrait of Cassirer as a non-political “Mandarin” intellectual, I argue that classic work, The Philosophy of Enlightenment, published in 1932, should also be read as a sublimated political critique. (pages 222 - 243)
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The Hamburg-America Line: Exiles as Exports - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0011
[exile, emigration, World War II, Cassirer, Panofsky, translation, iconology, English, German]
Chapter ten addresses the divergent trajectories of Cassirer and Panofsky in exile and reveals how generational differences between these scholars were manifest in their respective attitudes towards acclimation in their new environments and the translation of their ideas for new contexts. Cassirer’s commitment to the power of interpretation and the importance of precise narratives is increasingly evident in such works as An Essay on Man (1944) and The Myth of the State (1946). In contrast to Cassirer, who never felt entirely at home in America nor with the English language, Panofsky’s youth allowed him to begin a new career in America and, following his move, he never wrote in German again. This chapter provides historical context to the often assumed distinction between the “German” and the “American” Panofsky and argues that this context is necessary to understanding the intellectual choices he made against the backdrop of emigration and World War II that altered iconology in the English-speaking world. (pages 244 - 274)
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Nachleben of an Idea - Emily J. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.003.0012
[Nachleben, reception, World War II, Weimar, exile, politics of Enlightenment, Gombrich, Warburg, Panofsky]
The epilogue addresses the complicated legacy of Warburg’s reception and takes the Nachleben of the Warburg scholars as the object of their own analysis. While interest in Panofsky has declined, enthusiasm for Warburg continues to rise. Yet Warburg died in 1929 and did not have to revise his ideas in the wake of exile or World War II. Thus, this chapter argues that it is all the more important to historicize the divergent reception of these scholars and to correct the portraits for which the second generation of the Warburg School, in particular, Gombrich, is largely responsible. The reinvention of the Warburg school in exile reinforces the importance of context in analyzing their ideas. (pages 275 - 284)
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