Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School
Emily J. Levine
Abstract
Once dubbed a city of “festering merchants” where poets went to die, Hamburg was, by all accounts, an improbable setting for a major movement in the humanities. Yet through its mercantile spirit of openness and its civic tradition of cultural philanthropy, this “second city” on Germany’s periphery had important implications for Weimar cultural and intellectual history. This book shows how the scholars Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky emerged from a unique combination of factors, including a new university, family networks, Jewishness, and urban life. It also traces the instituti ... More
Once dubbed a city of “festering merchants” where poets went to die, Hamburg was, by all accounts, an improbable setting for a major movement in the humanities. Yet through its mercantile spirit of openness and its civic tradition of cultural philanthropy, this “second city” on Germany’s periphery had important implications for Weimar cultural and intellectual history. This book shows how the scholars Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky emerged from a unique combination of factors, including a new university, family networks, Jewishness, and urban life. It also traces the institutional development of the Warburg library, in which these scholars were active, to their divergent post-war receptions in the English-speaking world. These scholars have received increased attention in recent years for their contributions to the fields of art history and philosophy. But Hamburg, Dreamland of Humanists is the first book to consider their historical significance taken together in the time and place where their ideas took form. On one hand, the book sheds light on the intellectual impulses of these scholars’ work on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. On the other, it argues that their scholarship clarifies the familial, political, and economic pressures characteristic of the German-Jewish scholar in twentieth-century Hamburg. Insofar as these scholars were themselves engaged in understanding the origins of ideas, Hamburg, Dreamland of Humanists fittingly re-examines how context can be both constructive and destructive for cultural and intellectual history and the role that context might—and should play—in our analysis of ideas.
Keywords:
Warburg,
Cassirer,
Panofsky,
Hamburg,
art history,
philosophy,
Jewish history,
Weimar,
intellectual history,
urban
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226061689 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2014 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226061719.001.0001 |
