The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  As Aby probed the atavistic impulses of modern civilization, he was drawn in 1907 to the study of astrology, which he saw as much more than dated mumbo-jumbo. Rather, it reflected the groping, fumbling way humanity had dealt with its existential helplessness in the cosmos before astronomy came along. He demonstrated how classical gods, in some medieval paintings, metamorphosed into astrological demons. He excitedly deciphered the Tarot cards, showing they weren’t simply playing cards, but had been used to make astrological predictions. In December 1909, he told Felix that he had made his discoveries after buying fifteen hundred books on astrology the previous year.24 These fearless forays into the occult had a way of leading to the edge of madness. Aby developed into a Faustian figure plumbing curious books and mastering esoteric documents. Unlike other rationalists, he felt the full, unsettling allure of superstition—perhaps this is why he forever stood on guard against unreason and the manipulation of emotion. In 1913, he carried on a fervent campaign against some astrological swindlers in Hamburg.

  In April 1909, Aby and Mary moved to 114 Heilwigstrasse, where they remained for life. The move was dictated by the books, now spreading like some metastasizing science fiction monster. In the old house, books overflowed every room, grew into the lavatories; the ceilings couldn’t support the weight any longer. The new house only temporarily solved the problem, for books, set in heavy oak bookcases, soon filled the basement billiard room, the hall, the drawing room, and the guest rooms on the first floor. Aby and family had to retreat to smaller rooms upstairs. (Though poor by Warburg standards, they always had maids and a butler.) To make room for more books, they moved the dining room from the ground floor to an upper floor. Aby’s friend, Fritz Schumacher, the city building master, saw how the books stamped out any room for a reasonable family life. “The sensitive wife, who really had to have space for her own work as a gifted sculptress, took these primitive events upon herself with touching patience, but the growing children looked full of wrath at the triumphal march of the hated books.”25

  Aby’s children also had to contend with his tyrannic moods and could never quite relax with the powderkeg Father. One moment, he could be a charming, sparkling personality, then he would suddenly feel betrayed by people and turn on them with a terrifying wrath. The children were exhausted by the unending mood swings. As Max Adolph later poetically described it: “We, his children, were living too near to the crater to visualize the majestic profile of the mountain at the time; but near enough to feel the earth tremble under our feet; to have an occasional dizzy glance down into the boiling crater; near enough to become afraid or nervous, and, when the nerves wore off, even worse: a bit callous.”26

  Max had asked Moritz to buy the adjacent property so that Aby could someday have a library next door, and Moritz reluctantly consented. For a long time, Max had urged Aby to build the library and thus separate his private and professional lives. Like a good Hamburg businessman, Max told Aby, he should leave his house daily and report to his office. But Aby wanted to be surrounded by his comforting books. When the library finally went up next door in the mid-1920s, he defeated its intent by joining it internally to his house behind their separate street facades.

  At this point, the library was open only to a tiny circle of colleagues and art experts. In 1908 Aby hired his first research assistant, Dr. P. Hübner. The next year, he helped organize the International Art History Congress in Munich and began to gain recognition in the art world. Despite long, frustrating years of obscurity, he remained supremely confident, telling a disciple in 1909 that the goal of his library was “a new method of cultural science, whose basis is the ‘read’ image.”27 That is, Aby would penetrate the symbolic codes of paintings and not simply analyze their surface charms.

  As a Jewish art scholar, Aby knew he was in a contradictory position. He saw himself as a futurist who stood uneasily between the stools of Zionism and assimilated Jewry.28 In his work he often had to negotiate permission from the Vatican and other ecclesiastical authorities to examine art firsthand. He operated in a sphere of German life where anti-Semitism was particularly pervasive and virulent. Some scholars he admired—including the great Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt—were openly hostile to Jews. Yet in 1909, Aby regretted that he couldn’t be an executor of Burckhardt’s estate, lamenting that “but there, as a Jew, I won’t even be considered.”29 Emancipation had liberated Aby into a world rife with reactionary anti-Semites who denounced Judaism as backward and benighted. His decision to compete in this world was a courageous but also curious one.

  Aby was always susceptible to Jewish self-shame and even self-hatred. As historian Hans Liebeschütz noted, he couldn’t conquer his aversion to the ostentation of wealthy Hamburg Jews. He loathed elegant art books, which signified decadence to him. A warped idealism lay behind much late nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, which lamented the loss of a simpler precapitalist, rural past. Aby’s hatred of the materialism in his own background gave him a secret, tormenting affinity with the enemy—a tension, among others, that would tear his soul apart. The occasional kernels of truth in anti-Semitic lies and distortions resonated in Aby’s mind. Yet he was always extremely alert to any anti-Semitic slurs directed against him.

  Aby’s attitude toward organized religion hardened with time; he would no more attend a bar mitzvah than a church wedding, dismissing both as rank superstition. Though he had a talmudic section in his library, he used it to unravel obscure biblical references. In 1908, he was sent a questionnaire by the Hamburg Jewish community, which he returned blank and with a curt note: “… I am in no way subject to the Jewish Community, neither as member nor as object, rather I quite explicitly resigned from it and am to be regarded by it as a Dissident.”30

  While Aby might fancy himself a freethinker, the gentile world regarded him as a Jew. As with other German Jews, his Jewish identity pursued him like a shadow as he tried to escape it. With his prophetic antennae and gift for the Zeitgeist, he sensed the anti-Semitic undercurrents of the time and had fewer illusions than Max. Like other sophisticated Jews, he was stunned by the Dreyfus affair. He followed it closely and told his mother that no war or epidemic could so disfigure a people as such mob rule.31 In 1900, the old medieval charge that Jews committed ritual murders had again surfaced in a town near Danzig. Indignant over this, Aby tried to write an article about his generation of assimilated Jews, but he couldn’t finish it.

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  As Aby drifted further from his Jewish roots, Moritz grew closer to God. While Charlotte wrote her memoirs, he devoted himself to Jewish causes. As leader of the Jewish community, he could be blandly imperious. Though never a Zionist, he favored Palestine development and led the Palestine Trading Society. The group was bleeding money when Moritz chaired its meeting in 1907. While ardent Zionists wanted to perpetuate it, Moritz had other plans. He allowed the Zionists to speak and remonstrate for one hour. Then, as one participant recalled, “he stood up and explained: The Assembly has decided that the Society will be liquidated. Universal astonishment. How come? The old Warburg, on the sly, had bought up a majority of shares and could pass any resolution that suited him.”32

  For years, Moritz chaired the local Jewish boys orphanage and supported the Jewish Hospital, helping it to build a nursing home. In 1908, on his seventieth birthday, Moritz and his sons endowed the Talmud Torah School with a brand-new building that cost 175,000 marks. Yet when Max’s youngest daughter, Gisela, asked to go to the school, Max refused, alarmed that she might try to convert the entire family to Jewish orthodoxy.33 For his part, Aby resented that the money wasn’t being spent on his library and he wrote Felix a blistering letter, pointing out that “the courage to do something speculative in an intellectual connection—that is the greatest privilege of the private merchant!”34

  On January 29, 1910, a few hours after Aby paid him a bedside visit, Moritz died gently in his sleep. Max was then running for the Hamburg Bürgerschaft. Having delivered a campaign address that night, he didn�
�t get to bed until the wee hours. With her steely sense of ambition for her sons, Charlotte withheld the sad news from Max until the next morning.

  The rich banker was buried in a plain coffin of unvarnished wood, the Jewish way of symbolizing that everybody has equal status before God. It pained Charlotte and the brothers that Aby would attend neither the funeral nor the memorial service, or recite the mourner’s kaddish. When Max and Charlotte begged for some slight token of filial piety, Aby wouldn’t budge: “I am after all in the eyes of others an unreliable customer, but in my own eyes a political opponent of clerical elementary schools such as the Talmud Torah School, and above all I am a ‘Cherem’ [banned] through my mixed marriage and as the father of non-denominational children whom I shall never lead to Judaism.… The Mourner’s Kaddish is a matter for the eldest son: it signifies not only an external act, but at this public memorial service demonstrates acceptance of the moral inheritance. I will not make myself guilty of such public hypocrisy. No one is entitled to demand this of me.” Aby said that Max had long ago assumed the Jewish responsibilities of the firstborn, “to my unclouded and grateful satisfaction.”35 In his diary, Aby bitterly equated religion with superstition.36 For appearance sake, he agreed to be out of town or sick on the day of the funeral.37

  Aby was as autocratic in his library as Max was in his bank. The year that Moritz died, he hired an assistant named Wilhelm Waetzoldt and was upset to learn after hiring him that the young man had just married. Aby assumed the right to intercede in the private decisions of his employees. With a later disciple, Carl Georg Heise, he demanded to see a picture of his wife, which he kept on view in the library for a month. “I must become familiar with her,” he told his astonished pupil.38 Once, a female candidate came to be interviewed for his art seminar. For a quarter hour, Aby paced back and forth in silence. Then, with his telepathic gifts, he suddenly burst out: “And what did your divorced husband do?” The startled woman admitted she had indeed been divorced.39

  Waetzoldt didn’t last long, but in 1911 he steered to Aby a twenty-year-old Austrian student named Fritz Saxl who shared the master’s interest in astrology. While visiting Hamburg’s Kunsthalle, Saxl came to the library and was struck by how the meticulous, demanding Warburg treated him as a fellow scholar, not as a youngster. Not that it was an equal relationship by any means. When Saxl began talking of his work, Aby quickly brushed it aside and expatiated on his own views. Saxl sat spellbound by the abundance of precise ideas that poured forth in a powerful rush. After finishing his doctoral thesis on Rembrandt in Vienna, Saxl went to work as Aby’s assistant in 1913.

  Saxl knew that working with Aby would be a rewarding but thankless task. The library was the looking-glass of Aby’s mind, mirroring all his quirks and obsessions. As one disciple said, in his library, Warburg sat like the spider in its web.40 When Saxl first saw it, it contained fifteen thousand volumes, mostly in German or Italian. It already contained sections on alchemy and numerology, as well as railway timetables, telephone books, lottery books, and old almanacs. This mad, wonderful mass of materials was expanding at a chaotic rate of about six hundred books a year.

  Arranged according to no ordinary system, the books were projections of Aby’s theories, tangible links in his chains of thought, their placement designed to show unexpected associations. He loved to handle books, ponder them, and rearrange them as his ideas evolved. As a pioneer of interdisciplinary study, Aby mocked the “border police” who kept academic subjects in hermetically sealed compartments. He was as much an ethnologist, social historian, or psychologist as he was an art historian.

  From his desk, Aby enjoyed a view of the rear garden and Alster canal. He seldom went for a stroll and spent most of his time wandering in an inner labyrinth of arcane symbols and lore. Aby often stayed up nights, poring over booksellers’ catalogues and jotting on index cards the titles of desired books. These cards came to occupy eighty boxes and Aby grew obsessive about their arrangement, too. As Saxl recalled, “Often one saw Warburg standing tired and distressed bent over his boxes with a packet of index cards, trying to find for each one the best place within the system; it looked like a waste of energy and one felt sorry.”41

  As Aby began to take private students, they became spectators of a magnificent, volatile showman. The portly little man would puff on a cigar, pace, drink tea, and lecture tirelessly until sweat stood on his forehead. There was something martial and imperious in his manner as he gestured with an emphatic wagging finger or exploded at an imprecise question. Despite a deep, personal interest in his students, he maintained a formal pedagogic distance. On one library shelf, he kept taboo books that he thought corrupted young minds—his “Giftschrank” or poison bookcase. Asked why he simply didn’t ban these books, he said that one had to have the devil present to fight him with his own weapons.42

  As Aby’s career flourished before World War I, he emerged from his cocoon. After having labored in solitude, he enjoyed several spectacular lecture triumphs and the recognition brought a profound, if fleeting, joy. His first great intellectual breakthrough came during an Italian trip with his pupil, Carl Georg Heise, in 1910. When they stayed at the elegant Hotel Danieli in Venice, Aby wouldn’t let Heise carry his red Baedeker about, lest they be taken for tourists, so Heise had to memorize the book instead. At the Palazzo Schifanoja in Ferrara, Aby studied frescoes whose enigmatic symbolism had puzzled scholars. For hours, he stood high on a scaffold, closely examining them, while Heise stood below. “Observers would have taken him for a detective rather than an art lover,” said Heise.43 When Heise briefly stared out the window at one point, Aby grew furious at this unforgivable inattention and hotly scolded him.

  In 1912, Aby presented his detective work in Ferrara at an art history congress in Rome that he had helped to plan. He correctly predicted that this would be the last such congregation of scholars for a long time. It was fitting that Aby first blazed a trail in the scholastic firmament on the eve of the coming darkness. He declined to chair the conference, saying a Jew shouldn’t preside over a world organization because that might be used to discredit it.44

  Aby revealed the mysteries of the Palazzo Schifanoja frescoes by relating the symbols to their patron’s horoscope. It was a dazzling display of erudition, exhibiting a mastery of astrology from Egypt to India. It also vindicated Aby’s painstaking case-study approach, showing that works of art often carried secret cargoes of forgotten lore that could only be unearthed by scholars steeped in the period. By branching beyond the conventional bounds of art criticism, Aby had discovered the frescoes’ hidden meaning. The Rome speech launched a new school of criticism, and Aby rushed bound copies to Paul and Felix. But the breakthrough provided no lasting satisfaction and only made Aby more resentful of his inferior status in Hamburg’s merchant world. “How difficult it is to endure one’s own futility in the Hamburg crepuscule,” he wrote after the congress.45 The city, he felt, slighted his contribution to local culture. Nevertheless, he was now committed to the bruising fight for a Hamburg University and had to stay. That year, he turned down a university chair offered in Halle. In February 1912, the Hamburg Senate made Aby an honorary professor in recognition of his work and for the moment he felt happy and vindicated.

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  Now forty-five, Aby would have no further chances to be freed from financial reliance upon his brothers. When Paul and Felix visited, Aby would arrange special classes and tours to explain his work to them. They were motivated by brotherly love, not family vanity, as they indulged Aby’s perfectionism. This generosity may only have strengthened his autocratic nature. The book purchases became greater, the demands upon his brothers more importunate. Aby’s pleas wavered between blustering assertions of his own superior worth and abject beggary, an unfortunate situation that kept him in a state of perpetual adolescence.

  Aby became more querulous in dealing with people. If somebody didn’t acknowledge a book he sent or was slow to answer a letter, he grew indignant. He frequently upb
raided book dealers for poor service and threatened to go elsewhere. Spoiled and brilliant, he even gave a tongue-lashing to the Hamburg school authorities over the stench in the ground-floor urinal of the city library. While Aby had a small coterie of devoted friends, whom he treasured, he was often at war with his native town. When Hugo Vogel painted three murals, meant to celebrate the history of Hamburg commerce, for the banquet room of the Town Hall, Aby led a vitriolic attack against them.

  Right before World War I, Aby acted as a special consultant to HAPAG, a job that came through brother Max. Contemptuous of what he saw as the tacky decor of its ships, he hoped the line would give more artistic commissions to talented contemporary artists. Despite his Renaissance focus, Aby championed modern artists and adored Expressionist paintings. He even had a Franz Marc painting of colored horses in his house and loved to invent nonsensical stories to explain to visitors the vivid shades.

  In June 1912, Aby learned that HAPAG planned to hang a large portrait of the kaiser in an admiral’s uniform on the main stairway of the new steamship the Imperator, which would be the largest passenger ship in the world. Aby thought imperial dress more appropriate. He was also upset by the banal color photos and kitschy reproductions that hung in the salons and corridors. Albert Ballin allowed Aby to hire two painters, Kayser and Bruck, to do paintings for the Imperator’s dining room. When Ballin didn’t like the finished product, he had the pictures removed, and Aby felt humiliated in the artists’ eyes. He pleaded for a chance to make his case against the decision. Ballin graciously consented and even invited Aby on the Imperator’s test run. Instead of responding to this generous invitation, Aby refused to go, pleading hay fever, and his services were terminated. Perhaps because of this rift, Aby ranted about Ballin’s despotic rule of the shipping empire. He thought Ballin needed the intoxicating stimulant of power and elegance, but that Max shouldn’t be seduced by his mentor. “You’re only a part of his entourage, which consists, in part, of men who are worth nothing and yet whom he doesn’t want to do without.”46