by Ron Chernow
The wit of the five Warburg brothers signaled a revolt against the stuffy ways of their elders and their vestigial ghetto fears. It seemed the triumphant laughter of emancipation and enlightenment over confined superstition. This was seen in the endless teasing of Tante Malchen, the family’s great figure of fun. The youngest and homeliest of Sara’s four daughters, she grew into a dowdy, overweight woman with her gray hair parted beneath a bonnet and cap. For four years, she was married to a widower named Adolph Goldschmidt, who died of smallpox. Malchen never called him Adolph, but would just bark “Goldschmidt.”
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Aby Warburg, outfitted like a European banker-cum-cowboy, poses with a Pueblo Indian, 1896.
(Warburg Institute)
Tante Malchen’s Jewish orthodoxy inspired the brothers to heights of zany mischief. Aby was the ringleader. Once, he and his brothers hid Tante Malchen’s kosher veal roast. Then they marched into the dining room bearing a papier-mâché suckling pig, with an apple stuffed in its mouth. Another time, when she rang the bell for the next course, she discovered that her nephews had locked the maid in the pantry. Still another time, when Baron Mitsui visited the Warburgs, Aby told Tante Malchen that she had made a great impression upon the Japanese dignitary, who had asked him whether Malchen was “a painted Jewish war god.”8 Charlotte tried to suppress her laughter at these outrages perpetrated against her helpless sister-in-law. Then she, too, would burst out laughing, and an indignant Tante Malchen would throw up her hands, sighing, “Charlotte, you are the worst of them all!”9
The renegade Aby was determined to cast off the restrictions that bound German Jews, to test the limits of assimilation. He would struggle with forbidden feelings and subversive impulses. The whole drama of the contradictory German Jewish soul—pride and self-hate—was played out in his turbulent psyche. By adolescence, he not only had sold his banking birthright to brother Max, but had rejected all religious belief.
Aby decided to become an art historian—a choice that was highly controversial. He faced considerable family pressure to become a doctor, research chemist, or rabbi instead. As Max recalled, when Aby “visited his maternal relations in Frankfurt every single member of the family tried to dissuade him” from his chosen career.10 Aby particularly resented the Jewish orthodoxy of his Frankfurt relatives. Once, at a wedding, an uncle kept quizzing him about Jewish customs, inquiring, “Tell me now, my son, what is the name of the ritual slaughtering knife?”11 For Aby, this summed up a medieval, obscurantist Jewish world he wished to escape.
In Imperial Germany, Jews enjoyed less tolerance in the universities than in general society, and many professors were fiercely reactionary anti-Semites. As late as 1909, there were only twenty-five Jewish full professors in Germany. Since Napoleonic days, student fraternities had been hotbeds of anti-Jewish sentiment. When Aby went to study art history at the University of Bonn in 1886, he fought on the one hand to be liberated from his parents’ orthodoxy, and on the other to gain acceptance in an academic world hostile to Jews. As he said, “as a Jew, I had a bitter two-front war.”12
At first, he cooked for himself and lunched in a kosher household. Unfortunately, he was such an inept cook—he would pop open an umbrella to shield himself from flying bits of scrambled eggs—that he gave up the attempt to stay kosher; Charlotte and Moritz grew extremely upset. Instead of backing down, Aby, who was always fanatically principled, engaged in a pitched battle with his parents. He once said that he didn’t live to be happy but to fight and would never compromise on religious matters.13 He lectured Moritz, “Since I do not arrange my courses of study according to the quality of ritual restaurants but according to the quality of my teachers, I do not eat ritually.”14 Moritz and Aby viewed each other painfully, with mutual incomprehension: the father could only see the possibility for fulfillment within a Jewish context and the son outside of it: Aby was Charlotte’s favorite son, whom she spoiled with packets of fancy food, clothing, cigars, and wine. Yet she, too, suspected that some shame about being Jewish lay behind Aby’s obstinacy. “I am not at all ashamed to be a Jew,” Aby defended himself, “and on the contrary I am trying to show others that representatives of my kind are well suited, in accordance with their talents, to insert themselves as useful links in the chain of present-day cultural and political developments.…”15
Everything in Aby’s life suggested, at the least, a deep ambivalence about being Jewish. As a student at Bonn, Munich, and Strasbourg from 1886 to 1889, he ravenously absorbed German culture in the classroom, hastening his assimilation, but then encountered the baldest anti-Semitism in the street. In Strasbourg, in particular, he experienced abuse from the town guttersnipes and complained bitterly to Charlotte how he couldn’t leave the house without someone hollering, “There goes the Jew.” With heavy sarcasm, he noted that their “beloved German people” regarded Jews as interlopers with doubtful manners until they got to know them personally. Someday, Aby said, he would devote himself to solving the Jewish question so their descendants wouldn’t suffer professional discrimination.16 Aby always bristled at anti-Semitism, even as he tried to shake off his Jewish identity.
When Aby complained about abuse, Moritz was quick to sympathize and agreed that Germans often behaved like coarse upstarts. At the same time, he insisted that Hamburg was exempt from such vulgarity. He told Aby how anti-Semites had distributed broadsides on the streets only to have the mayor vigorously denounce them. He struck a typically Panglossian note: “… we are lucky here in Hamburg that it provides no soil for such nasty acts.”17 This sense of Hamburg as an exceptional situation, a shining refuge, would be a recurring theme in Warburg history.
Aby chose a field of study that paid tribute to his mercantile upbringing but did so in a very Christian context. He specialized in the art of Quattrocento Florence, which had been a tradition-bound city-state ruled by merchant princes—not unlike Hamburg. Early on, he reacted against the prevailing tendency to study only the formal properties of paintings, which turned the critic into a gifted aesthete, and he broke sharply from the connoisseur approach embodied by Bernard Berenson. He didn’t think art history could be separated from the broader history of culture and ideas. Instead, he tried to reconstruct the social and economic world that had spawned Quattrocento art. To this end, he delved into arcane and unconventional records, such as business contracts of the Medici family.
In 1888, Aby studied in Florence and even did some freelance research on local museums for a revised Baedeker edition. Henceforth, Italy would be his second home, his special place. With his wonderful ear for language, he learned to speak Italian fluently. Short and dark, he was inordinately proud when people mistook him for an Italian. Afterward, people said his gestures and manners were expressive, delicate, and distinctly Florentine.
That December, Aby was pleased to escort through the Florence galleries a young Protestant woman named Mary Hertz. The daughter of a Hamburg senator, she had two brothers, Wilhelm and John, who had been Aby’s fraternity brothers in Bonn. Aby and Mary had long chats before the cozy fireplace in the hotel where she stayed with her father. With an enthusiasm that surely alarmed Charlotte, Aby wrote, “Miss Hertz, who is an excellent painter, has such a surprising interest, simple and yet profound, in all artistic things that I really take pleasure in being a cicerone.…”18 The first New Year’s card that Aby received from Germany that year came from Mary.
Eight years would pass before Aby mustered the courage to marry Mary Hertz. During that time, he said, he was haunted by his parents’ reaction. The German Jewish community was on the verge of an epidemic of intermarriage. By the early 1900s, every fourth Jew who married in Hamburg did so outside the faith. But there was no precedent among the Warburgs. Intermarriage was a great community taboo for a simple reason: The Jews were a tiny minority who would rapidly fade away if intermarriage became fashionable. The ban on such marriages before emancipation had, ironically, safeguarded the community. So a leading Jewish family, supposed to set an
example, couldn’t lightly allow its eldest son to break the former taboo.
Aby’s situation was complicated by the fact that even as he flouted his family’s sacred wishes, he relied on them for money. Just as Jewish merchants once supported the son who became a rabbi or talmudic scholar, so Aby wanted his family to bankroll his secular scholarship. Instead of making him humble, dependency made him importunate, a self-righteous enfant terrible demanding his due. A bullying tone often crept into his begging letters. Starting in Florence, he began to shock his parents with his omnivorous appetite for books. After one five-hundred-mark binge, he wrote Moritz, “I now possess the nucleus of an exquisite library: this is the indispensable tool of my trade and I may well have to come to you two or three times with a similar request before I am able to supplement my library from my annual cheque.…”19
Aby took full advantage of the deal by which Max would become the banker and buy him books in return. Even as a boy, Aby was such an impassioned reader that he found it hard to focus on his homework. By age twenty, he bought books and even photographs with single-minded intensity, the collecting already showing incipient signs of an overmastering compulsion. As a bibliophile, Aby was terribly indulged by his family, much as when he was a sickly child. Later, the brothers would often resent the immoderate financial demands of the library, but they always accommodated his wishes. In 1890, Max told Aby not to concern himself with current troubles at the family bank. “The moment you start to look more closely into the firm you will inevitably be assailed by so many worries that they are bound at least to detract from your ability to work. What use is that to you? The way you want to live you will always be able to live thanks to a very wealthy father; the balance sheet will never need to worry you.…”20
Fortunately, Aby’s work held promise of justifying the sacrifice. In late 1891, he completed a doctoral thesis on Sandro Botticelli, which deciphered the mythology of two of his paintings. A minor detail had arrested his attention: the flowing hair and drapery of classical figures in Renaissance art. Later celebrated for his aphorism, “The good Lord lives in the details,” Aby already had a gift for disclosing large truths from incidental, overlooked features.21 The wind whipping through hair and gowns made him question the orthodox view that classical art had introduced perfect poise into the Renaissance; Aby suspected more primitive forces at work. He began to see classical art less as a matter of serenity felt than of serenity achieved by conquering latent, disturbing forces. Much as Friedrich Nietzsche had spied the Dionysian side of classical drama, so Aby felt the secret tug of the pagan in its art. His dissertation was a great success, and he proudly mailed out a hundred copies to family, colleagues, and friends. It initiated his most enduring concern: the afterlife of classical art in the Renaissance.
The Jews had always been a bookish people, with some medieval Jews even picturing heaven as an enormous library. During his Botticelli research, Aby began to envision a unique sort of library. As he attempted to encompass the entire Renaissance world view, he roamed freely across many disciplines, from psychology to philosophy, poetry to religion. Yet he had to visit one specialized library after another to get the rich synthesis he desired. As libraries grew, it became ever harder for scholars to browse in stacks and discover new material. Instead of combing library shelves, they had to submit request slips for known books, preventing happy, accidental discoveries. Aby now envisioned a library that would cut across disciplines, expose unexpected connections, and invite the scholar to rove its shelves, much like an intrepid explorer in a labyrinth. His student purchases already began to form the rudiments of such a dreamlike library.
After his dissertation, Aby took a last, abortive fling at a “practical” career and briefly studied medicine in Berlin. Then he did a year of military service with the horse artillery in Karlsruhe. Rising early to swab out horse stalls provided some needed respite from heavy mental labors. With his pint-sized body, Aby had trouble mounting the tall cavalry horses and in his first two days tumbled off his horse six times; he said he needed another three centimeters in his legs. Although the officers teased him, he was an ardent soldier and a good sport and wound up an Unteroffizier or sergeant. Aby was always deeply patriotic and enjoyed military uniforms as much as Max did.
Leaving the army in 1893 with his career plans still uncertain, Aby returned to Florence. With his army experience behind him, he fell prey to depression and anxiety. He was alternately merry and feverish, hopeful and despairing. Already he was so engrossed in art that others found it either riveting or exhausting to listen to his endless theorizing. When Felix and Frieda stopped in Genoa on their honeymoon, Aby took them to see some Leonardo da Vinci frescoes in a dimly lit cloister. Staring at the picture, Aby launched into a marathon lecture, only to turn around and find the newlyweds kissing instead of paying studious attention. He was irate. “You two are carrying on as if you had invented matrimony,” he declared.22 A prophet in search of disciples, Aby had no patience with dabblers and dilettantes and demanded a consuming dedication.
Aby developed a growing interest in ancient rites that had lingered on in the Renaissance, often in camouflaged forms. When stripped of its masks and with its symbols decoded, Aby spied at the bottom of European civilization surviving traces of an ancient barbarism. In the evolution of Western culture, he saw a conflict between rational and magical thinking that mirrored his own fragmented psyche. The streak of depression in the Warburg genes made him preternaturally alive to the darker tides that flowed in European culture.
To encounter pagan forces in their pure state and to observe how “primitive” man exorcised his demons, he decided to visit the Indians of the American Southwest after Paul’s wedding in November 1895. He had first encountered these Indians in adventure books as a boy, when his mother lay ill with typhus. For Aby, it would be like a voyage to classical Greece—not the Greece of exquisite statues, but of orgiastic rites and Maenads dancing with snakes writhing in their hair. As Aby said, “two thousand years ago, in Greece—the very country from which we derive our European culture—ritual practices were in vogue which surpass in their blatant monstrosity even the things we see among the Indians.”23
In all likelihood, Aby decided to attend Paul’s wedding only because it coincided conveniently with this professional ambition. It would be his sole American trip and farthest voyage from Germany. He formed a close friendship with Nina’s brother, Jim Loeb, who took him to Harvard to view the art collection and meet Charles Eliot Norton, professor of fine arts. In their aesthetic interests, collecting, worship of German culture, and later decline into madness, Aby and Jim Loeb would lead curiously parallel lives.
Aby’s approach to art history had an affinity with archeology and ethnology. Having met a staff member of the Smithsonian Institution on the boat to New York, Aby went to Washington to review its Indian collections before setting out for the Southwest. The visit to the Pueblos would be a journey into his own psyche, a study of the contending forces shaping his life. He traveled alone by train to Chicago and Denver, ending up in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Because he was twice associated by marriage with Kuhn, Loeb, he enjoyed a free pass on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad.
The Indians found the little German paleface no less strange and exotic than he found them. He spoke no Indian tongue; they spoke no German. He looked like a visitor from another world. In photos from the trip, he smiles out from beneath a small cowboy hat and colorful neckerchief, even as he wears a banker’s suit with black vest and watch chain. He looks happy and relaxed, uncharacteristically so, as if temporarily released from the weighty burdens of European culture. For once, he didn’t seem to be troubled by all the psychosomatic ailments that plagued him at home.
During one stage of his trip, he administered a fascinating test to children in a Hopi Indian school. He told them a German fairy tale that included a lightning storm, then asked them to draw the lightning. Twelve of the already Americanized children drew the li
ghtning in naturalistic, zigzag fashion. Two of them, however, reverted to tribal custom and drew it as an arrow-headed snake, much as it appeared in their magic ceremonies. It was for Aby an instance of the persistence of tradition and myth beneath the veneer of modernization.
As spring approached, Aby traveled from Santa Fe and Albuquerque to the remote Indian reservations. A Jewish trader from Milan popped up and took him on extended trips. Together they braved snows and sandstorms and slept in tents. Once, a Catholic priest took him to a distant village so he could witness Indians in colorful tribal garb participating in a Mass. Held in native tongue, the entire service had to be translated for the priest.
Everything on the trip seemed a prelude to Aby’s visit to two isolated Hopi towns. (The Hopis form part of the Pueblo tribe.) For two days, he rode in an open buggy beside a Mormon guide across a gorse-covered desert; for the last leg, an Irishman escorted him to the cliffside villages. The Indians allowed Aby to observe secret rites. He witnessed ceremonies in which hunters mimicked their prey, hoping to procure first by magic what they would subsequently procure in reality. Most importantly, he studied the snake-dance rituals that occurred every August when the Hopis invoked magic to ensure their harvest rains. They rounded up a hundred undulating serpents, dipped them in consecrated water, then stored them underground until the sixteen-day ceremony began. During those rites, the Indians hurled the live snakes at serpentine sand drawings of lightning. Through skillful handling, the Indians would cunningly induce the poisonous snakes to engage in ecstatic dances for days on end.
