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Aby Warburg (1866-1929). The Survival of an Idea


Mathias Bruhn

Prof. Martin Warnke, who is head of our department kindly asks you to excuse that he couldn't
come; he would have been able to deliver his talk in Portuguese. Unfortunately, I am not able to,
in spite of the many occasions to get used to it, since people from Portugal belong to the
streetlife of Hamburg; in the quarter where I live you will not only count several Portuguese
restaurants, bakeries, or a football club; theres also a weekly sunday mass in Portuguese. As a
port city exchanging goods with trade partners from all over the world, it is no surprise that the
city of Hamburg has a old relationship with Portugal.

As a document of this relationship, the most important


medal that is awarded to Hamburg citizens is the so-
called Portugaleser; this used to be a coin in silver
that was slowly adopted by Hamburg merchants in the
16th century before it became an official currency as
the so called silver Bank-Portugaleser. This coin
expressed not only the importance of Portugal in sea-
trade but also stood for the tolerance of liberal
Hamburg that accepted Portuguese merchants of all
confessions to live and work in the city. You can
deduce this e.g. from the fact that these two different
versions of the medal already know a christian and a
jewish symbolism.

I do not mention this for reasons of politeness. Aby


M. Warburg, the person Id like to introduce you to
tonight, came from one of the richest bankers families in Germany, and the name Warburg is
usually not associated with the scholar, but with the Warburg Bank that is a global players with
headquarters in New York or London. Although the young Aby refused succeeding in the family
tradition and decided to study the humanities, the world of trading and the mechanisms of social
exchange remained one of the threads of his methodology. Not by chance Warburg took a look
at the arts from the viewpoint of economic history, and studied the patronage of merchants and
bankers. To a certain degree, the Portugaleser medal might stand as a symbol for various
problems Warburg had to face and the questions he had raised.
Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg in 1866 as the first heir
of a Bank that had played a central role in pre-war imperial
Germany. The legend says that he "sold" this privilege of
being the future head of the family for his brothers' promise
to support the scholar until the end of his life. The brothers
accepted this condition and so allowed Warburg to fully
concentrate on his studies, to travel, to support and engage
assistants and gather an impressive collection of books.

Warburg studied archeology and art history while he was


as well interested in medicine, psychology, or the history of
religion - in Bonn, Munich, and in Strassburg where he
finished his doctorate thesis on Sandro Botticelli's two
paintings "Birth of Venus" and "Primavera". He continued his
work by travelling to Florence and producing a number of small studies on single works of art
and their wealthy patrons, in particular bankers themselves, like the Medici or Sassetti, who
mediated between the demands of civic representation and the ideal principles of high art; and,
perhaps better known, by going to the United States and the reservs of the Hopi Indians in
1896, in order to study the ethnological aspects of rites and ceremonies in other cultures and
their difference to or similarity with the so-called western world.

After his return Warburg decided to set


up a library that would serve as a
private collection and as an institution
for public education. He called it "Kultur-
wissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg".
As has sometimes been stated,
Warburgs dissertation could be read as
the mission statement of the library and
its future structure; the study on
Botticelli synthesized philology, style
analysis, iconography, and other fields
in order to produce a more
comprehensive picture of the artistic
process. His main assertions were:

1. Classical patterns have always attracted artists for they keep the energy of antiquity and
recharge any work of art theyre implanted into. The Renaissance is characterized not only by
the use of these antique patterns, but also by the fact that they can always be distinguished by
both their gestures and their accessories from their environment on the painting (e.g. the hair of
Venus). Applying these antique forms means to surrender to the power of eternal forms that
lead their own life in the new context of the image. Certains forms thus become containers for
what Warburg would later call Pathosformel and moved accessories.

2. Secondly, the "program" of the paintings discussed here, commissioned by Lorenzo de'
Medici, was delivered by the famous poet Poliziano. All structures of the paintings have their
textual correspondence in his poem La giostra as well as in the sources he has used himself.
The works can be explained only by combining philological and visual analysis.

3. Both paintings belong together in that they not only tell the story of Venus but were to
commemorate a most beautiful Florentine woman, Simonetta Vespucci, a painters wife who had
died in her early years and who is depicted here, so Warburg demonstrates, as the Spring
goddess.

Only by referring to a variety of sources,


like classic literature, contemporary coins
and medals or medieval wallpaintings
Warburg can trace down the hidden
meaning of the paintings elements and
solve the riddle. This is what turns the
complexity of Botticellis paintings, though
strange in their composition and simple in
their overall object (the admiration of a
woman), into high art worthy of a noble
patron. Warburgs study on Poliziano as the
programmer in Lorenzos service and
Botticelli as his servant was in itself a concept and an idea that required a different type of a
library and should survive in an independent institution, his later KBW.

But their was one obstacle to this project. At the time of Warburgs promotion, there was no
university in Hamburg; public lectures where organized and held by private individuals and
societies; renowned teachers of this time, like young art historian Erwin Panofsky, were not
exactly professors but served this privately organized "Vorlesungswesen".

For this reason Warburg who knew Panofsky well,


was one of the initiators for founding a university,
improving the intellectual situation of the public
and through this promoting new fields of research,
and Panofsky was appointed one of its first
professors together with Warburg. Panofsky
applied Warburgs ideas in a slightly different
sense as he stayed in the realm of traditional art
historical objects; nevertheless his study Idea. A
concept in art theory that narrated the
development of the mannerist concetto was a
tribute to Warburgs own dissertation and helped it
survive. With Panofskys emigration to the United States in 1933 Europe lost one of the most
distinguished scholars who transplanted the tradition of German art history to the United States
(here a photo with two other emigrants: H. Janson and W. S. Heckscher) and thereby continued
to write the history of an idea, the survival of antiquity in different cultures.
Warburg himself did not live the rise of Nazi-Germany or
the outbreak of a second world-war - he had died in 1929.
But still, the setting up of an institution and his personal
mental disposition consumed his energies. After his return
from Florence in 1904 he had started employing
assistants for a professional library and invited scholars to
his private house; but only in 1919 the University became
reality, and only in 1926 the library building, next to his
own home, was finished. Having accomplished what he
always contended, Warburg was hardly able to enjoy this
late success. He was hospitalized in Ludwig Binswanger's
renowned neurological clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland
from 1921 on.

Warburg suffered strong depressions and symptoms of


schizophrenia, and his assistants, in particular Fritz Saxl
(whom you see in the left figure below), had to manage
not only the entire library but also its ongoing research for
a whole couple of years. When you read the early lectures of the Warburg Library in Hamburg,
you have to realize that most of them were delivered in his private home, and some of them in
the absence of Warburg who had initiated it all.

This is for example when


the later president of
Hamburg University, the
famous philosopher Ernst
Cassirer (right figure)
presented his ideas of
what he called the
"symbolic forms" of man:
the different means of
expressing human needs
and notions, and the
relation to their media, like
language, pictures, rites,
dance etc. Cassirer, a
Neo-Kantian theorist by
training, was a faithful
grateful in Warburg's rich
but still private library
since it covered all
aspects of ethnology,
religious history, philology, or astrology, and he also visited him in Kreuzlingen to support his
colleague.
Cassirer appreciated Warburg's approach, and it encouraged him to continue his manuscript on
the "symbolic forms" - an ambitious project which, in the end, resulted in a 4-volume
"philosophic encyclopedia" of mankind and its symbols. It became clearer and clearer that
Warburgs research was not only devoted to art historical subjects and historical empirism, but
that the central idea of his work was of a purely inter-disciplinary kind.

When the new library was opened in 1926, it was already a monument for the history of human
thought and the afterlife of antique tradition. From this moment on, Cassirer and his colleagues
were welcomed by an inscription above the inner door of the library where Warburg had placed
the greek word MNEMOSYNE for "memory", maintaining that the institute was devoted to the
study of the "survival of the Antique" (Nachleben).

Warburg applied the concept of exchange and migration not only to different epochs; he also
assumed that the various parts of Europe, the north and south, communicated with each other,
and that there was no supremacy of one over the other. Looking at flemish tapestries (1907), he
described how the energetic patterns of farmers working in the woods, depicted on these
images, echoed classical forms and thus, folklore belonged (as so-called low art) to the same
cosmos of art historical style analysis as high art. As all the others methods of art history, Style
could be integrated into his set of tools. He shows that pamphlets enabled people across
Europe to share a common Leidschatz, the common treasure of elementary passions and
gestures.

One of the most famous articles by


Warburg was on Schifanoia and
international astrology (from 1912),
astudy on the Schifanoia Palace in
Ferrara, Northern Italy, commisioned by
the Este family and executed by
Francesco del Cossa (and Tura). The
astrological programme was closely
related to the biographical dates of the
patrons, and Warburg could once again
develop the idea of programming the
arts by disposing of classical and non-
classical sources. Warburg was now
able to draw on his abundant account of
methods and links; he demonstrated
that the structure of all paintings follows
a certain zodiacal scheme that is based
on oriental visual and literal sources.

Warburg himself claimed that the


Symbolism of the series is complicated,
phantastic and not easy to read. But
clever decipherment of a detective, in
oder to impress the reader with
erudition, was not his first intention,
since most of the analysis had already
been done by Heidelberg religion
historian and orientalist Franz Boll
(Sphaera, 1903). Warburg the
respected expert for Renaissance art,
wanted to show that Renaissance is an
unsufficient term that neglects the open borders of human knowledge and collective memory. He
wrote:

Kommilitonen! Die Auflsung eines Bilderrtsels noch dazu wenn man nicht einmal ruhig
beleuchten, sondern nur kinematographisch scheinwerfen kann war selbstverstndlich nicht
Selbstzweck meines Vortrages.

Having studies the exchange of north and south he now turned to the meeting point of east and
west, not looking at melting pots like Jerusalem, Venice, or hellenistic Greece, but at the east
within the west and its products. His plaidoyer for an interdisciplinary psychology of human
expression was not yet the schizophrenic and complicated theory that Gombrich later saw in it,
even though the immense number of references and evidences and the pathetic language of the
author seemed to betray the increasing degree of mental irritation and puzzling. This is the first
article where Warburg turns his results enthusiastically into a political statement on the situation
of art and cultural studies. He argues against a border patrol of disciplines, and he does so two
years before world-war one, an event that would destroy all his optimistic hopes of
acommunication between different worlds. Nevertheless Warburg went on studying his
international subjects, and in the 20s once again presented his results on the International Art
History Congress in Rome, where he once again used photograps, fixed on black boards, to
illustrate his topics. This was the modell for a later project, the famous Mnemosyne Atlas that
nowadays receives the most attention. More about that later.

As I have mentioned, Warburg died 3 years after the library had been opened. Another 4
years passed by, and the political change had made it impossible for the Warburg circle to
remain in the city. The assistants Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing as well as young scholars Edgar
Wind or Raymond Klibansky organised the transfer to London, pretending that it was a
temporary loan to the London University. The 60.000 volumes, notes, some 20.000 photographs
as well as all files and furniture never came back to Hamburg. After the war the library was re-
opened in London by Saxl and Bing to be incorporated into the University, now to be called The
Warburg Institute, with Saxl as its first director. Different in size and attitude, it somehow tried to
preserve the interdisciplinary idea and the classification system of Warburg, but was soon forced
to abandon the open structure as it grew to one of the biggest art historical libraries in the world.
MNEMOSYNE now took on a second meaning: the survival of a methodological concept within
a professionalized research and education environment. The original German word for
Mnemosyne, the Nachleben or Afterlife, became a metaphorical term for this always ambivalent
situation.
If you visit the library today you will still
see this inscription; but you have to
keep in mind that youll find a building
that didn't serve the public but for a few
years. In former times the library
consisted of 4 floors with book stacks
plus the contents of the impressive,
oval reading room. The order of the
different floors and the ways the library
was organized has caused some
dispute among scholars since it was
assumed that the KBW was more than
just as storage for books, but that it
had, in a certain sense, envisioned the
idea of a library as a creative place, a
generator that combines objects and concepts of all kinds in a limited space and thus could be
compared to a Kunstkammer rather than to a museum..

Despite the discussion of the original structure, its


categories and keywords, it is, in my opinion, more
important to stress the ambivalence of different people
and mentalities coming together in this library. When Saxl
classified books, gave them call numbers and entitles the
different floors as Image Word Orientation Practice
he also stated how problematic it was to follow Warburgs
flexible and somewhat anarchistic practise. Warburg
always moved the books and re-classified them according
to his personal assumptions and spontaenous ideas, for
the significance of every book depended on its context
within the library, its neighborhood on the shelf. In this
respect, the entire library was moving most of the time
during its setting up in Hamburg. Assistants, at least two
on each floor, supervised by Saxl and Bing, had to take
care that Warburgs anarchism did not interfere with their
duties as library servicepeople. It was also Saxl who
introduced the series of lectures in 1921 in order to protect
Warburgs achievements from oblivion, and to gather a community of researchers around him;
and it was him, with Edgar Wind and Gertrud Bing, to continue the work on poster like picture
displays that summarized central interests of Warburgs work (see Gombrich). In the end, the
collection became a mixture of both a private, mobile, thematical reference library, and a public
library with a fixed system of call numbers. The library was partly integrated into the academic
structures of the young university, and Librarian Fritz Saxl finally managed to include it into the
Prussian inter-library loan system, as he later succeded in making it funded by the London
University.

Even though they did their best in supporting Warburgs research they could not avoid
standardizing the library, its divisions and contents in order to keep them usable. Even though,
for example, the Warburg Institute in London imitated the original building by erecting a house
with four floors in order to mirror the central issues of Warburg's iconology, Gertrud Bing,
Warburgs second assistant, had to change the order of books into Image Word Orientation-
Practice, turning the classification system into an ontological struture that ascends from the
religious reveration to enlightened practise. Following generations themselves considered
Warburg's discoveries as "bookish", daring and abstract, have altered the notion of what the
KBW was about.

As late as with the director Ernst Gombrich, famous for his easy-
to-read "history of art" and himself being an emigrant from Vienna,
a certain distance to the confusing treasures of Warburg's
collections became apprehensible in the London institute.
Gombrich clearly expressed his doubts in his first comprehensive
biography of the scholar. Still the Warburg Institute is devoted to
Warburgs original fields of research. It investigates the iconologic
relation of word and image; the passage of symbols throughout
history; the revival of antiquity in Renaissance and its presence in
modern life; the role of northern art, especially Drer or Flemish
North, for the lasting success of the Renaissance in the West; but
on the other hand, the Warburg is now identified as a typical art historical institution. To a certain
degree, this is not a proof for a lack of originality, but also a consequence of the fact, that so
many ideas of Warburg have been adopted and popularized as art historical methods.

Mnemosyne

One of Warburg's and Saxl's last and unaccomplished projects was the Mnemosyne Atlas: Even
though I cant go into detail here it is worth outlining its history and drawing some general
conclusions. The Atlas Project is now often quoted in academic lectures, and one might
compare it, in its size, its infinite structure and ambitious intention, to collective projects as
Proust's Recherche de la temp perdue. The title of it as well as the description of its function
was the object of long discussions between Warburg and Bing and took years to develop.
Menmosyne Atlas is thus only an abbreviated title for a much longer description, and the word
Atlas refers to the German meaning of it as Album or printed collection.

[The following paragraphs have not been part of my lecture; they paraphrase a publication by
Dutch Art Historian Peter van Huisstede who has written about the project in 1998.]
What is nowadays referred to as the Mnemosyne Atlas in fact consists of the remains of a
project that was unfinished when Warburg died in 1929. As mentioned, the idea came from
using images placed on large screens as instruments for the preparation of lectures and
exhibitions, like in his Roman Schifanoia conference. Only much later, nearly at the end of his
life, somewhere in the summer of 1927, Warburg formulated the idea of producing a systematic
Bilderatlas, based on suggestions made by his assistants, making his lectures and small
exhibitions a spin-off of this larger project in which he sought to present his scientific work, old
and new, methods and results, in a coherent and novel way. It was presumably Saxl once again
who hoped that, if Warburg is no longer able to publish linear texts, this would at least furnish
him with a means to document the width of his focus and his ideas. But once again, Warburg
took his time to move and re-arrange and explain, and so only a few number of photographs has
been taken from the different walls, which are preserved in the archive of the Warburg Institute
in London.While the first series consisted of about 43 screens, the second one, with a slightly
different focus, had grown to already 71 screens. And the experiment went on. Logically there
have been attempts to reconstruct the original structure, in particular by Bing and Gombrich in
the 1930s, in order to demostrate the programme of Warburgian research, but all attempts have
been considered as unsatisfying.

Most of the screens are devoted to Warburgs classical subjects as the relation between
Northern Europe and Italy; the survival of the Pathosformel through the interest of Renaissance
artists; the role of astrology; or the cultural aspects of festivities (Festwesen); Florentine civic
culture etc.

From the beginning, the logic of the Bilderatlas was problematic, as the different screens had
to mediate between problems on different levels: Were they to show chronologically, the
tradition of forms and gestures; or were they to make invisible things, like the function of a given
work of art, visible by relating it to similar or different objects? And how can the relation of
Pathosformel and Astrology be shown in a single exhibition concept? Warburg makes his own
experiments with layouts and headlines, and the complexity of his short languages shows in
how far he overcharges the objects:

Habe angefangen, die ganze Gtterwelt auszuschneiden, um sie zunchst kosmologisch-


monstrs, tragisch-griechisch, rmisch-heroisch zu ordnen als chronologisch-historisches
Phnomen.

Saxls idea to apply movable images as a visual aid proved indeed to be fertile soil for Warburgs
work with images. Warburg was used to work with sets of images and already in 1920 he spoke
generally of a kulturwissenschaftliche Bildgeschichte. Furthermore, throughout Warburgs work
we find storyboards for lectures and articles. There he would draw small rectangles and
squares standing for works of art and use lines and colors noting relations between these
elements. Also very often we find sheets with a textual synopsis on certain topics, and drawings
combined with text that layout the structure of a manuscript.

Several notes from summer 1927 inform us that Warburg contemplated on a printed
collection of images forming an Atlas that contained both research topics, astrology and
Pathosformel, hitherto treated separately. Only some weeks later another one states
optimistically that

[...] der Gesamtrahmen fr den Atlas formuliert sich (kulturwissenschaftliche Beschreibung) Von
berlebenden Prgekraft antiker Ausdruckswerte im europischen Geisteshaushalt (Kulturkreis)
[...] .

At the end of November 1927, Warburg returns from a journey to Italy. During his absence work
must have continued. At the end of 1927, first parts of the publication are presented to visitors of
the KBW. As Bing writes in the following entry of the scientific journal, work goes on without
interruption. Warburg himself was very eager to complete the project and looked out for an ade-
quate title. He discussed it via the diary entries with Getrud Bing, but he is not satisfied with the
first attempts which read: Mnemosyne. Kulturwissenschaftliche Betrachtung ber Stilwandel in
der Menschendarstellung der europischen Renaissance. Now he suggests

Titel: Mnemosyne. Bilderreihen zu einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Betrachtung der europischen


Renaissance.

After Bings comment to this Warburg, at half past four in the morning, comes up with the
following proposal:

Titel: Mnemosyne. Bilderreihen zu einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Betrachtung antikisierender


Ausdrucksprgung.

Warburg died on the 26th of October 1929. The journals make clear that texts would constitute
an important part of the publication of the Atlas; to interprete it as Art History without words
would clearly oversubtilize the matter. As we see, the Atlas was a highly dynamic project: it
changed, travelled, was used to design exhibitions, and stayed, until its very end, work in
progress.

There were other problems that made the work on the Atlas an infinite endeavour. Warburg
was a technophile. He was interested in telecommunication, the press and travelling; all these
new technologies enabled new forms of travelling, but also prolonged the old idea of migration
that connected civilizations from the beginning. Technology, for example in the form of
printing,was also the direct link between Drers engravings and the 28 telephones in his avant-
garde library building. He had already
written an article entitled Airship and
submarine in medieval imagination that
suggested that former societies had
anticipated what he called vehicles of
thought and imagination that we
dispose of today. Images were their
vehicles.

The Mnemosyne Atlas was not only an


invention of the KBW it had
predessors in other published forms of
encyclopedia and collections in the mid
19th century when the term Atlas was
introduced into the German bookmarket
language. But the Mnemosyne Atlas
was insofar the formulation of Warburgs
ultimate problem as it reflected the
collision of individual interest and
collective research, the analysis of mass
images versus the estimation of high art,
the reproduction of art and its original
process of production as an expression of
cultivation of mind and life through art. To
a certain degree, Warburg was
overstrained by the possibilities of new
media and the simoultaneous wish to
communicate the value of classic art. He
took close looks at popular, moving, and
reproduceable media that could even
more assert the survival of forms and
their intrinsic energies. His objects of
study where carpets, stamps, postcards,
pamphlets, chap books and even
technical media. This was a reason why
he was read, after his death by
Ethnographers and Anthropologists,
Orientalists, or Philosophers rather than
by art historians. These disciplines never
intended to distinguish between high or
low art, popular or court culture, and they
have done more for Warburg's
reanimation than the art historians of the
1950s and 60s.
Rediscovery

During his lifetime, Warburg was well-known among academics, and he also had bigger local
audiences when giving lectures in Hamburg or appearing on international conferences.
Nevertheless, he never became an intellectual star like, for instance, Sigmund Freud or
Friedrich Nietzsche who are so well-known even outside the university. He also did not cultivate
close relations with art critics and artists, for his time was fully devoted to reading, writing, and
travelling.

His own life being a travel of ideas and an attempt to lay his personal map out on the world,
he didnt have the spare time to exchange and mingle with painters or politicians, even though
he sometimes tried. To a certain degree, of course, he didn't need to. But Warburg's character
made it harder for his reputation to persist after his death and survive the effects of emigration,
prosecution, and destruction, or the political tensions of post-war restauration, cold war and
finally the social revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Also in his lifetime not everyone could intrude
his elite cosmos, as Wolfgang Kemp has shown when describing Walter Benjamin's failing
attempts to be admitted to this circle.

The remaining building in Hamburg was abused by Nazi organizations; after the war it was
no longer wanted back by the Warburg Family - the loss of this institution was seemingly a too
open wound to be cured; so the building was transformed into a film studio and occupied by
promotion agencies, even though, from time to time, journalists or writers reminded of the
unsolved problem of neglecting Warburg's heritage.

In 1990 an international conference, organized by Hamburg scholars Michael Diers, Horst


Bredekamp, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, found such an extraordinary resonance that it became
impossible to ignore the current situation of the former library building any longer; and finally in
1995 the premise was acquired by the city of Hamburg.

Shortly before, Martin Warnke, who had contributed to Warburg's memory by publishing a
series of articles about him, was awarded an important research grant that enabled him to
extend his own project called political iconography. This project had tried to apply Warburg's
methodology to a smaller but more actual aspect of artistic production: politics. Warnke tries to
uncover the languages of fine arts in terms of their patronage, political meanings, and public
functions, in order to distinguish it from mere classical or "christian interpretation. Warnkes
approach is less esoteric or complex, but clearly more pragmatic. Disposing of a larger amount
of money, he could create a collection of photographs and books that explicetely followed some
of Warburg's principles, i.e. a) using the "good neighborhood" of objects being brought in
variable contexts and b) using images to visualize abstract processes and ideas. This collection
was considered the proper follower of Warburg's own one and it was thus decided to place it in
the former KBW in 1995. It is today called "Research Department for Political Iconography" and
it formally belongs to the University's Institute of Art History. Other parts are the Warburg Archiv
that contains original and copied documents of his history as well as all his publications, and the
Archive of Scholarly Emigration. When most of the members of the German community and the
Hamburg schoo in particular were expelled, they turned to London, the U.S., Southern America
or Israel. By this, Warburg's method of Iconology became one of the most applied methods in art
history, even though people associated it more with the Warburg Institute and did not read his
writings in detail.
Warburg did not describe the development of the arts or the history of Western culture; he was
looking for the meaning and the functions of art for different societies, their role for different
social classes and the energy of cultural memory they preserve. This is what must be called
iconology (even though the terms is often used in other misleading senses). Warburg used his
"laboratory of the mind" (so he said) to cure the world from the ignorances of its heritage,
making the reader in his lecture room a "patient" to be cured from narrow-mindedness, from the
defects of western culture and psychic dependence. This is the main difference between a
Cultural history (written by contemporary scholars like Karl Lamprecht or Georg Steinhausen)
and a Library for Cultural Studies, searching for the presence of a problem. Defining the
relevance of the Antique was to go beyond modern history back to the roots of culture, where
east meets west. Unlike famous Swiss Historian Jacob Burckhardt, who was admired and
criticized as the "wise man from Basel", history was nothing to be narrated or reported as an
event. "Detail" did not so much mean the details of historical events, but the traces and clues
within an work of art that lead the interpreter beyond its framework. The arrangement of the
library therefore did not attempt to gather a large number of historical documents, but to
combine them in different and multi-dimensional modes. The detail of the image is not only a
sophisticated quotation of contemporary ideas, it is a hyperlink to cultural history.
In 1997 when the funds of our research department were nearly consumed, a new project was
given to the institute, and it was called "Warburg Electronic Library". The WEL is mainly based
on the collections of the research department and tries to digitize and classify its contents in a
new way. Librarians in the audience may know that the term "Electronic Library" is a technical
one, that means, it does not only stand for books on the shelf, but it means an information
system where all objects can be individually arranged and resorted, turning the public library of
a database into the personalized, the reference library of an individual.

Also the WEL is not a library in the traditional sense, but a multimedia information system
containing images, texts, an other files, classified according to a flexible web of indexes. It is
entirely built on Internet technology and can be consulted through the www. Like in Warburgs
or in Martin Warnkes card box, all cards are classified thematically, i. e., not by names of kings
or artists but exclusively by keywords like "Piece" or Arrival; this is a merely comparative
access in Warburgs tradition. This is only possible when connecting all entries by hypertext in a
quasi three-dimensional way. Since we know Warburg's fascination for technology, we assumed
that he would have applied the computer in precisely this way and felt therefore legitimized to
name the project after him.

Peter van Huisstede has produced electronic versions of the Bilderatlas in oder to prove their
complexity as well as their history; this is an alternative of what could be done with Warburg's
heritage. Another one is the project I have been responsible for during the last couple of years
and which intends to preserve some of Warburgs ideas not materially, but in litteris, by
establishing a digital information system and to set up a flexible tool for art historical research
that not only stores and provides objects but also documents the use of these objects.
It is interesting to see that Warburg's person and his ideas, after having been neglected for a
certain period, have become recepted once again and even stronger than while he was alive.
Even though most art historians in the U.S. have somehow been influenced by what we call the
Hamburg School, that is the emigrated and expelled members of our local institute and their
direct descendants in America, the name Warburg was usually combined with a different
institution, the Warburg Institute in London that keeps up his tradition as well as it houses all his
former collections of books, photographs etc. The discussion of his works in France and their
recent translation into English have changed the situation dramatically. There is no conference
where his name wouldn't be mentioned at least once. When I attended a meeting in the U.S.
some weeks ago, almost every speaker quoted him.

When the interest in his work remained restricted to a small community, it had various
reasons: His refined and creative style of writing (which is, indeed much easier to read than
sometinmes pretended, but you have to read him very slowly); the limited number of
publications in relation to the lenght and intensity of his studies; and finally the complexity of his
method that he developed and refined during his lifetime and that provoked other scholars -
even friends - to draw the conclusion it may sometimes be advisable not to follow and not to
believe the author in spite of the fact that he was right, due to the intensity and scrutiny of his
being a detective of cultural history in all its details (Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail). In the end,
Warburg became one of those tragic names of academic life that are always mentioned with
reveration, but no longer really read.

This situation changed when, maybe by accident, scholars and biographers in the United
States, in England, France and Germany, started re-reading his texts after the war and realized
how much it had to to with all of their single disciplines. The Holocaust memory made the idea of
collective memory that Maurice Halbwachs had expressed a general metaphor for the global
catastrophe of modernity and the suffering of a whole generation. His memory was never lost
among scholars like Jean Seznec (Survival of the pagan gods), Pierre Bourdieu (On the
symbolic forms), Francis Yates, and through them it became known among artists, journalists,
and filmmakers. Artists like Richter, Kabakov, or Boltanski themselves used the idea and
concept of 'Mnemosyne' to express the inexpressable catastrophe of a collapsed european
memory and its self-destruction.

By re-reading Warburg, it was realized that every page of his printed articles corresponds to
500 pages of manuscript, thousands of notes and hundreds of books. Slowly people became
aware that Warburg must have produced one of the most fascinating archives and complex
libraries ever done; and that his work in total was an unparalleled survey of collective memory
and its various media.

Recently, the understanding of Warburg's method has once again undergone several
revisions; two of them may be mentioned, one by Frankfurt Art Historian Klaus Herding, who
connected him to Freud's concept of "Psychohistory", and one by Charlotte Schoell-Glass from
Hamburg; she is editor of Warburgs Diaries. She also demonstrated in how far antisemitism and
the attempts to extinguish it by unveiling the history of cultural misunderstandings were a motor
for Aby Warburg's ambitious and self-exploiting work. Warburg, a scholar from Hamburg and a
cosmopolitan who called himself a Jew by blood, a Hamburger by heart and a Florentine in his
soul. Schoell-Glass shows in how far Warburg's work was devoted not only to the history of
culture but also to their present relevance in society; she assumes that antisemitism in particular
was the motor, the hidden thread or motive for a research that tried to analyze processes of
western culture in order to understand and extinct the roots of superstition, of antisemitism, or
political radicalism.
Research is thus more than just objective and
empirical exploration that is legitimized in itself by
its unforseen discoveries. Research has to trace
the social meaning of cultural and natural
phenomena and contribute to a "Second
Enlightenment" as Warburg called it. While Freud
tried to formulate a "psychohistory" that defines
man as a being that is caught in a web of
subindividual forces and superindividual
demands, Warburg wrote a history of images that
teaches us the function of images in general, i.e.:
as an organ to express social expectations and needs, and thus as a means of religious or
political communication.

I would concede that anti-semitism has increased Warburg's fears and his pessimism, adding
that his personal disposition made it easier for the disease to break out, being a symptomatic
expression of the difficult cultural transition of his time.

A choice of recent titles on Aby Warburg

(See also the re-edition of his complete works, Berlin 2000-)

Robert Galitz, Brita Reimers (ed.): Aby M Warburg. "Ekstatische Nymphe... trauernder Flugott".
Portrait eines Gelehrten, Hamburg 1995 (unfortunately out of print)

Aby Warburg: The renewal of pagan antiquity: contributions to the cultural history of the
European Renaissance, Introduction by Kurt W. Forster, Translation by David Britt, Los Angeles,
CA (Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities) 1999

Bernd Roeck: Der junge Aby Warburg, Mnchen 1997

Martin Warnke, coll. Claudia Brink (ed.): Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Berlin 2000

Marc Baratin (ed.): Le pouvoir des bibliothques: la mmoire des livres en Occident, Paris 1996

Tilmann von Stockhausen: Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: Architektur,


Einrichtung und Organisation, Hamburg : Dlling und Galitz, 1992

Expo. Cat. Il cosmo incantato di Schifanoia. Aby Warburg e la storia delle immagini astrologiche,
ed. Cinzia Fratucello and Christina Knorr, Ferrara 1997

Charlotte Schoell-Glass: Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus: Kulturwissenschaft als


Geistespolitik, Frankfurt am Main 1998

Michael Diers (ed.): Portrt aus Bchern: Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute, Hamburg -
1933 - London [Begleitpublikation zur Ausstellung in der Staats- und Universittsbibliothek
Hamburg - Carl von Ossietzky, vom 3. - 23. November 1993], Hamburg 1993

Michael Diers: Von der Ideologie- zur Ikonologiekritik: die Warburg-Renaissancen, in:
Frankfurter Schule und Kunstgeschichte [beruht auf Referaten des Symposiums Frankfurter
Schule und Kunstgeschichte Ende Juni 1991 im Museum fr Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt am
Main] Berlin 1992, S. 19-39

Horst Bredekamp / Michael Diers / Charlotte Schoell-Glass (ed.): Aby Warburg: Akten des
internationalen Symposions [Hamburg 1990], Weinheim 1991

Matthew Rampley: The Remembrance of Things Past. On Aby M. Warburg and Walter
Benjamin, Wiesbaden 2000

Marianne Koos (ed.): Begleitmaterial zur Ausstellung "Aby M. Warburg. Mnemosyne", Hamburg
1994

Expo. Cat. Aby M. Warburg: Bildersammlung zur Geschichte von Sternglaube und Sternkunde
im Hamburger Planetarium (Katalog zu den Ausstellungen 25.1.1993 - 13.3.1993: "Aby
Warburg. Mnemosyne"), hrsg. von Uwe Fleckner, Hamburg 1993

L'art et les Rvolutions, Akten des 17. Intern. Kunsthistorikerkongresses, CIHA, Straburg 1992,
Sektion 5

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