Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School

Abstract

Money matters in Emily Levine’s recent tribute to the Hanseatic city. Hamburg, where Banko reigns, as Heinrich Heine quipped, emerges in this remarkable study as the centre of a peculiar ‘collaboration between ideas and place’, a place of financiers and philanthropists, amateurs and intellectuals, collectors and cosmopolitans, a place, in short, as the author puts it, of ‘banks and books’, producing and nurturing an exceptional library and an exceptional cohort of minds: Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, and what is known as the Hamburg School. Dreamland of Humanists is an intellectual history of sorts and a local history of sorts; but only of sorts. For it seeks to be an intellectual history that is also embodied, and a local history that is, at the same time, unbound. As an intellectual historian, Levine chronicles a triangular affair between ideas, institutions and intimate relationships shaping, and being shaped by, each other. Rather than being a book about Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, this is a book about the Warburgs, Cassirers, Panofskys. Indeed, wives, assistants and relatives not only matter to Levine’s story, but become crucial: they are the real ‘site of scholarship’ (p. 25). And as site matters, Dreamland of Humanists is a history of the particularity of place and, ultimately, of displacement and forced exile. It is the ‘locality of history’ that informs the author and her most important premise that ‘the story about the Hamburg School offers a corrective to our portrait of Weimar that is both geographical and intellectual’ (p. 284). In this respect, Levine’s book echoes two other great tributes to Hamburg’s Sonderfall, Jennifer Jenkins’ Provincial Modernity and Percy Schramm’s earlier scholarship on the Hanseatic middle class. Levine follows Jenkins closely in characterizing Hamburg as a city without royal resources where cultural institutions were left in the hands of its citizens, primarily of wealthy merchants and bankers creating, in effect, their own ‘cultural infrastructure’ and giving birth to private initiatives of Bildung. But this tradition of cultural entrepreneurship, argues Levine, did not merely constitute a German anomaly, obliging us to reconsider the ‘Prusso-centric’ approach to German history and German Jewish history. It also rendered Hamburg, already in the nineteenth century, a city ‘American style’, a truly transatlantic city in spirit and practice, which ensured both an Emersonian ideal of self-reliance and, as Carl Schorske put it, the survival of a ‘cool, rationalistic, civil humanism’ in times when nationalism and romantic passion would inflame German politics and power (p. 14). Rather than remaining provincial, then, Hamburg’s own modernism and local liberalism were expansive and centrifugal in Levine’s account, oriented beyond continental borders, cosmopolitan, or at least Anglo-French, rather than German. Provincial modernity, to Levine, implies transatlantic modernity.