Uwe Fleckner and Peter Mack, eds., The Afterlife of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: The Emigration and the Early Years of the Warburg Institute in London. Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus 12. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Pp. 250, 52 illustrations. €39.95 (paper).

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsUwe Fleckner and Peter Mack, eds., The Afterlife of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: The Emigration and the Early Years of the Warburg Institute in London. Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus 12. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Pp. 250, 52 illustrations. €39.95 (paper).Mario WimmerMario Wimmer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAfter Aby Warburg’s death, his library needed to relocate in order to escape the Nazis. Considering different options, the collection and its staff were stranded in London. The volume under review commemorates the 1933 transfer of the Hamburg institute to its exile in London. Uwe Fleckner’s introduction and Isabella Woldt’s contributions shed new light on this transitional period. The transformation of a private collection with public access to a university institute turns out to be also a “family matter.” Woldt’s article adds important aspects to the well-known contemporary account by Fritz Saxl, Warburg’s library assistant and the Warburg Institute’s first director. All other contributions deal with the afterlife of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (K.B.W.) in Britain.Ever since the publication of Ernst Gombrich’s seminal intellectual biography (1970), the Warburg library has been acknowledged as one of Warburg’s major achievements. Other important contributions have fleshed out the history of the K.B.W. and its afterlife in British exile. Salvatore Settis gave a first historical account of the library that remains instructional to this day, and the 2001 volume Porträt aus Büchern edited by Michael Diers gave a more detailed account of various aspects of this story. A recent special issue of Common Knowledge (Winter 2012) on the Warburg library speaks to a broad range of aspects that echo Warburg’s vocation as a humanist. Looking at Warburg’s case, scholars over the past decades have sketched an institutional history of art historical knowledge, helped to reconstruct various aspects of the social history of the Warburg circle, and provided important contributions to the cultural history of a Warburgian mode of inquiry. The recent publication of his complete works in German may further these investigations on solid grounds. However, a fresh comprehensive account of the Warburgian universe remains a desideratum.The essays we find collected in the book under review can be understood as contributions to art historiography and in terms of an intellectual history of academic administration, as Peter N. Miller recently coined this novel field of study. Thanks to the intimate knowledge and erudite scholarship of the contributors, the reader is confronted with new materials and surprising insights into a history that only seems to be all too familiar. It becomes clear that the history of the Warburg library certainly has a lot to offer for any attempt of rethinking its future horizons, that is to say the new institutional and intellectual organization Warburg’s legacy demands.The contributions fall into two major categories: most deal with the history of the different institutions that sailed under the flag of Warburg and range from the consequences of the Great Depression on the library’s fate (Isabella Woldt) to the relations between the Institute and Oxford University and its impact on British intellectual life more generally (Michael Kauffmann, John Onians), the importance of the Warburg Institute’s journal for the dissemination of Warburgian scholarship (Elizabeth McGrath), or the family-like atmosphere and intellectual life at the Warburg Institute in the 1950s (Jennifer Montagu, Sydney Anglo). Particular attention should be given to Elizabeth Sears’s essay dealing with the diaries of Roger Hinks, who was both a member and careful observer of the Warburg circle in its London exile. Other contributions also deal with the role of individual scholars close to the library, namely, Gertrud Bing’s exchange with medieval art historian Hanns Swarzenski (Hanna Vorholt), Fritz Saxl’s interest in historiography (Dorothea McEwan), the impact of the library on Frances A. Yates’s work (Margaret M. McGowan), or Edgar Wind’s inquiry into the relation of images and ideas (Pablo Schneider). The pieces by Claudia Wedepohl and Alex Potts revisit Ernst Gombrich’s role in disseminating and translating Warburg’s scholarship for new audiences. Finally, Arnold Nesselrath reflects on how Warburg’s peculiar notion of Nachleben turned into the inflated concept of afterlife, an indication of a shift toward the normalization of an idiosyncratic intellectual practice, which, accordingly, marks the acceptance of Warburg’s intellectual legacy in today’s art historical inquiry.What these contributions into the history of Warburg’s creation and its institutional afterlife teach us is how the intellectual heritage of one of the major figures in twentieth-century humanities scholarship is a matter of symbolic, economic, and material investments that are at no point free of political conflict. After all, although the Warburg library seems to be alive, even more so is the discussion about its crisis. Since the K.B.W. became part of the University of London in 1944, it has lost some of its initial anarchic spirit. Is the Warburg library, a “center of European culture and a repository of the Western tradition that escaped Hitler and survived the Blitz,” as Anthony Grafton and Jeffrey Hamburger put it in the New York Review of Books (September 1, 2010), soon going to be “be destroyed by British bean counters”? Over the past couple of years the fate of the library became thematic in the thinking of public intellectuals around the globe. The library and its intellectual heritage seem to stand for a variant of humanities scholarship that needs to be defended. But what aspects of Warburg’s legacy will survive?Christopher Wood called the library an “enormous model” of Warburg’s mind that one can visit and walk through “retracing with your body the wiring of [a] very interesting brain” (“Dromenon,” Common Knowledge 18 [2012]: 106). Recently, David Freedberg, professor of Renaissance art at Columbia University, was appointed director of this embodied model of art historical inquiry or what has become known as the Warburg Institute. For Freedberg, Warburg’s work today calls for the rethinking of cultural memory between art and neuroscience: Yet will this anachronism prove to be productive? One may doubt that Warburg’s heritage can sustain a fling of humanists with laboratory science. What we can learn from the history of the Warburg library and its afterlife in different institutional settings is that the material form actually does matter and implies particular problems. However, Freedberg seems to be committed to preserve the character of the original collection and provide institutional support for work in Warburg’s “spirit.” After all, even the “world’s weirdest library,” as Adam Gopnik had it, can hardly be converted into a lab. From the perspective of the history of the humanities, the legacy of Warburg is certainly not found in the evocation of his specter but rather demands a rethinking of the intellectual, material, and economic conditions that enabled the kind of scholarship he had envisioned. And yet libraries age. Not unlike experimental systems, they experience a loss of ability to facilitate and produce fresh scholarship. If the Warburg is to remain “vital,” we have to move beyond antiquarian sentiment: the respect for this monument of scholarship calls for rethinking it in critical terms. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Humanities Volume 2, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Society for the History of the Humanities Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690592 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.