The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  Einstein was the matchless ornament of the enterprise but could be a terrible prima donna. In 1928, he told Weizmann that he would resign if Magnes didn’t stop “sabotaging” the naming of an academic head. “For if this state of affairs continues the University will not only become a laughing stock in a matter of several years but it will also, indirectly, do serious damage in the eyes of the world, to Palestine and to all those who work for it.”57 He tartly ended this protest to Weizmann: “Kindly show this letter to Mr. Felix Warburg.”58 He also complained to Felix directly: “Pretend that a small stock corporation operating from Jerusalem under the management of a Mr. X, would be making transactions and investments which you consider impractical and absurd, and doing all this in your name and on your responsibility. Would you put up with such a state of affairs?”59

  The feud was temporarily settled in June 1928 when a Professor Selig Brodetsky was named academic head. Even Magnes himself sometimes chafed at the inordinate power of his patron, Felix M. Warburg. Once he wrote in his diary: “F. M. W. and his family are among the finest and noblest of human beings. They are inherently good and have a real sense of service to others. But just because they are rare among their kind they are called upon to assume burdens which they cannot carry.”60 He listed the stupendous range of Warburg responsibilities, then wondered: “how is it possible for one family, or the small group revolving about that family to breathe ‘soul’ into these institutions, each one of which requires deep understanding and constant personal attention?”61 The question would linger for another decade or so before it was answered by a radical democratization of power in Jewish affairs. As the Zionist movement gained strength, it would, among other things, terminate the reign of the Warburgs, Schiffs, Rothschilds, and other banking mandarins who had so long governed, unchallenged, the Jewish community.

  CHAPTER 18

  ––

  A Season in Hell

  It was ironic that Aby Warburg’s fame spread most rapidly while he was immured in the Binswanger sanatorium on Lake Constance. For all his fiery originality, before the war he had been mostly known only to a small group of cognoscenti. Often veering off into obscurity, Aby never catered to popular taste. Tortured by perfectionist madness, he didn’t publish even one book. As he once lamented, “Month of torment, despairing anxiety about work which still has to be done.”1 He scribbled tens of thousands of notes, cryptic fragments that foreshadowed large works that never materialized. As his assistant Gertrud Bing said, “All over his writings there are traces of wreckage: projects not carried out, promises of articles never written, and ideas which were never developed.”2 His final legacy would be a score of compressed, hermetic essays, written in a German of formidable density that would defy easy translation. Yet his influence would be enormous.

  Aby needed a vigorous disciple, a popularizer, and found one in Fritz Saxl, the able young Austrian who took charge of the twenty-thousand-volume library. The shy Saxl was the antithesis of Aby. He was a man of little small talk, while his mentor was a spectacular fountain of words. Where Aby brooded over decisions, Saxl acted with such intuitive dispatch that Aby dubbed him “Saxl à vapeur” or “Saxl, Full Steam Ahead.”3 Cordial and generous with colleagues, Saxl found Aby’s authoritarian manner maddening and never quite forgave Aby for making him drop his early research on Rembrandt. Saxl’s students would report about him a similar heavy-handed-ness.

  By 1920, the Warburgs, despairing that Aby would ever emerge from his Swiss asylum, named Saxl the library’s acting director, with Gertrud Bing his deputy. Max and Fritz sat on the library board. Working wonders, Saxl turned this private, inbred library into an outstanding public research institution. Taking the books stacked on shelves or heaped, higgledy-piggledy, around the library, he produced the first systematic catalogue. He gathered scholars from various disciplines, held seminars, offered lectures, and then published them. Saxl knew how to appeal to the public without cheapening the institution’s mission.

  By making books prohibitively expensive, Germany’s inflation hurt many private scholars who subsisted on family inheritances. When Max and Fritz could no longer buy books, they turned to Paul and Felix, whose dollars enabled Saxl to continue buying books uninterrupted. This, in turn, helped to attract top scholars. Both American brothers found Aby’s work rather arcane and probably supported it more from fraternal love than any great conviction of its ultimate worth. Ironically, despite Aby’s contempt for Anglo-Saxon culture, it was American money that saved his library in the 1920s, then English money in the 1930s.

  Giving a great fillip to the Warburg library was the founding of Hamburg University, a cause so dear to Aby’s heart. On August 19, 1921, he was named an honorary professor in absentia. Soon students began to filter over to the Heilwigstrasse. Jewish scholars found a new openness in the Weimar universities. Among the prominent Jewish scholars appointed to chairs in Hamburg were Erwin Panofsky in art history and Ernst Cassirer in philosophy. Saxl wooed both for seminars and research. Although Panofsky and Cassirer had only an informal association with the library, they ended up doing a lot of writing, teaching, and lecturing there. Much of the creative output of Weimar scholarship would come from such private research institutions.

  After arriving as a university lecturer in 1920, Panofsky toured the library with Saxl, and it struck him with the force of a revelation. The rows of books seemed limitless, rising to fill every nook in the house. “The everlasting train of books seemed to lie there unperceived, as by a whiff of magic, which lay upon them like a magical spell.”4 When Panofsky later met Aby for the first time, the man made no less striking an impression. Panofsky called Aby a mixture “of brilliant wit and dark melancholy, the keenest rational criticism and most empathetic readiness to help,” marked by an “enormous tension between the rational and the irrational.”5 Like Aby, Panofsky sought to unlock the content and symbolism of paintings, which he thought a deeper means of engagement with the work of art than through connoisseurship and formal analysis. He began to conduct seminars at the Warburg library in 1921.

  ——

  Abu Warburg, circa 1925. (Warburg Institute)

  The neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer arrived in Hamburg in 1919. (At first, he and his wife, Toni, had balked at coming after receiving news that right-wing students were handing out anti-Semitic leaflets urging a boycott of Jewish professors.) Cassirer’s first glimpse of the library thoroughly captivated him, too. He told Saxl that he was afraid to return, lest he meander forever through this enchanted labyrinth of books. For her husband, Toni said, Aby’s library was like a mine shaft glowing with buried treasure.6 Cassirer would end up as the Warburg library’s most prolific author.

  Even as these scholars did honor to him, Aby walked along the shadow line of madness. He complained that the sinister demons he had investigated in art history had now taken their revenge and conquered him. Incarcerated in the closed wing at Kreuzungen, he filled diaries with indecipherable jottings. When Carl Georg Heise visited him, Aby gave him a book of Jakob Burckhardt’s essays with this dedication: “in gratitude for his visit to the inferno at Kreuzungen.”7 It was indeed a Dantesque journey for Aby. When Heise arrived, he was led into a garden where he heard frightful screams coming from the building. When they met, Aby said, “Did you just hear a lion roar? Imagine, that was me!”8 Aby talked distractedly, insisting that his wife, Mary, stood in grave danger in Hamburg and that Heise must protect her. Heise had to swear to send Aby a coded telegram, reporting on the status of these threats.

  The Warburgs were extremely attentive to Aby. Max always made sure to arrive exactly on time so as not to unnerve his older brother. Patient and long-suffering as always, Mary wrote daily and visited often, while also raising their three children. Sometimes stormy encounters occurred with family members. As Frieda recalled, “Mary and his other brothers and sister made him more nervous, and Felix was the only person who could calm him down.”9 At one point, Aby asked to see Max’s nine-year-ol
d daughter, Gisela, who was his favorite niece, and Alice took her to Switzerland. When the little girl arrived, Aby stood on the stairway beside a large male nurse. “This is the man who poisons me every night,” Aby informed Gisela.10 Since he feared people would steal his notes, his pockets were bristling with papers. When they dined, Aby heaped gargantuan portions on his plate, then only nibbled a tiny bit. The little girl saw that he was prey to strange compulsions and private rituals. In buttoning his collar, he thought it very important which way the button went in. Aby was a compassionate man who knew, even in madness, that he had upset his niece. That night, he called Alice at her hotel to say, “Tell my Gisela that not everything I said was true.”11

  During Aby’s time in Switzerland, his illness gave him a two- or three-hour reprieve each afternoon in which he could think clearly and receive visitors. The fearful clouds that gathered around him momentarily dispersed and his remarkable powers of self-analysis resurfaced. Even in the grip of some compulsion, he often recognized the absurdity of his behavior. He knew that his hands were clean and that he kept washing them needlessly. He was both trapped within himself and able to stand apart from himself—his old split personality in grotesquely magnified form. He didn’t want sedation, which would dull his mental powers. He exchanged letters with Saxl, who sent him lists of new books, and stayed abreast of Hamburg matters. Every Easter, Saxl spent weeks at a nearby hotel and walked twice daily along the lake to see Aby. In some cases, the mental illness heightened Aby’s power to penetrate imagery. As Gertrud Bing said, “[Saxl] spent his days at the hospital taking down at Warburg’s dictation ever more poignantly worded interpretations of remembered facts and pictures … and these he would later write out in his own room.”12

  Aby always spoke gratefully about the clinic director, the remarkable Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. As Max said, “I believe that it was in large part not only the doctor Binswanger, but the human being Binswanger and his wife who brought him [Aby] back to life.”13 Binswanger was the scion of a distinguished psychiatric family. His father, Robert, had directed the Kreuzungen clinic before him, and Uncle Otto taught psychiatry at Jena. (In fact, Aby apparently went to the Jena clinic before permanently transferring to Kreuzungen in April 1921.) Ludwig himself had studied with C. G. Jung and formed a lasting friendship with Sigmund Freud. If Binswanger was, loosely speaking, a disciple of Freud and formed part of his Viennese circle at one point, they disagreed about many things. Binswanger used psychoanalysis as the foundation of every patient’s treatment, but rarely relied upon it exclusively.14 Instead, he pioneered an eclectic therapy called “existence analysis” in which he examined the total person in his social surroundings, drawing upon anthropology no less than psychotherapy.15

  Versed in many disciplines, Binswanger was an ideal therapist for the multifaceted Aby. One is tempted to say that Binswanger took the same broadly eclectic approach to people that Aby did to paintings. They got on famously. With boastful accuracy, Aby told Binswanger, “You won’t get many patients of my intelligence who also know that they are ill.”16 While Aby contended that psychoanalysis met little success with him, we know that it figured prominently in his treatment. For instance, Binswanger and Aby agreed on the importance of Aby’s nursemaid to his emotional development.17 We also know that Aby avoided discussing the Oedipus myth with colleagues because it had such a troubling resonance for him.

  Many observers have commented upon the parallels between the thought of Aby Warburg and Sigmund Freud: their common fascination with psychological symbolism, the struggle of rational against pagan impulses, the sublimation of primitive urges into art, and the need for liberation from repressed fears. As one Aby Warburg scholar observes: “It shows clearly the complexity of Warburg’s existence, that in his influence as a scholar he can be placed near Freud and at the same time he could have been his patient.”18

  Interestingly enough, Freud took a personal interest in Aby’s case. On November 3, 1921, he wrote to Binswanger: “You currently have in your fine institution … a Professor Warburg of Hamburg, a man in whom I take a great interest, as much for his clear-sighted works, as for the fact that he is the cousin of my most intimate lady friend (a former patient). May I inquire what is happening with him and whether you concede any chance that he will again be capable of work?”19 The reference to the female friend may refer to Helene Schiff, the daughter of Aby and Sara’s daughter, Rosa, who married Viennese banker Paul Schiff. Family lore claims that Helene was in love with Freud and was one of his patients.

  At times, Binswanger contended that Aby’s madness would fade away if only he lived long enough.20 But now the doctor gave Freud a prognosis of unqualified gloom. Since childhood, he noted, Aby had been ruled by obsessive fears and compulsive behavior. The 1918 breakdown, in his view, marked a transition from neurotic to psychotic behavior, with muscular tension that hadn’t yet subsided. He gave an interesting description of Aby’s dual personality. Usually mad in the morning, Aby was often calm enough to have tea with him or make excursions in the afternoon. “He is apparently interested in everything, has excellent judgment about people and the world, his memory is outstanding; nevertheless, one succeeds only for a short time in getting him to focus on scholarly topics.” Binswanger ended the letter on a gloomy note, saying Aby would probably never conquer his madness or work creatively again.21 Thanking Binswanger for the information, Freud never renewed the inquiry.

  Aby would always stress his own powers of self-regeneration rather than the treatment he received. By spring 1923, he was starting to exorcise his private demons and thought he might go home. Saxl gained Binswanger’s permission to conduct an extraordinary test of Aby’s fitness to leave: Binswanger agreed that if Aby could prepare and deliver a competent lecture to the inmates, he could go. Clinic doctors doubted Aby could succeed.

  For his subject, Aby reached into his own remote past and that of Western civilization. He decided to talk about the Serpent Ritual of the Pueblo Indians, which he had studied in the American Southwest nearly thirty years before. It was a splendid choice for reasons both profound and mundane. A colorful yarn accessible to a lay audience, it was apt to give confined people a pleasing sense of mental travel. And the theme held special meaning for Aby, who believed that the terrors of mental illness had given him special insight into mankind’s conquest of its own primitive fears. This same process had led to the creation of art that created a consoling and objectifying distance from that terror. Aby might be a lonely tormented genius, but he also saw himself as Everyman. Weeks before the lecture, he wrote in his diary, “Sometimes it looks to me as if, in my role as psychohistorian, I tried to diagnose the schizophrenia of Western civilization for its images in an autobiographical reflex.”22 In lecture notes, he wrote, “All mankind is eternally and at all times schizophrenic.”23

  As was his wont, Aby worked on the speech in an all-consuming frenzy and completed it in a few weeks. In April 1923, he delivered it before an audience of inmates, guests, and staff doctors. Entitled, “Reminiscences from a Journey to the Pueblo Indians,” it would, for a long time, be his only study available in English. In traveling to the Southwest, Aby explained, he had hoped to observe the transition from lower to higher forms of paganism, mirroring what had happened in ancient Greece. “Two thousand years ago in Greece—the very country from which we derive our European culture—there were certain ritual practices in vogue which surpassed in their blatant monstrosity the things we see among the Indians.”24

  Aby confessed that he hadn’t spoken the Indian tongues or even seen the snake dance ritual firsthand, but he had discussed it at length with the Pueblos. Dreading famine, the Indians tried to avert it through symbolic manipulation of the rain-producing lightning. The zigzag pattern of the slithering snake’s body made it a natural emblem for lightning. By gathering serpents from the desert and dancing with them, the Pueblos tried to master the lightning symbolically. This formed a key transitional stage in the cultural progression
from magic to higher logic.

  The lecture contained a surprising finale, for Aby didn’t take a simplistic, progressive view of history. He pointed out that science and technology had superseded the old myths that had once interpreted natural phenomena for humanity. However, he saw new threats arising from this. He flashed a photo he had taken in San Francisco showing a top-hatted man striding down the street, with electric wires strung above him and a building with a pseudo-classical rotunda in the background. “In this copper-snake, invented by Edison, he [modern man] has wrested the lightning from nature.… The modern Prometheus and the modern Icarus, [Benjamin] Franklin and the Wright Brothers who invented the aeroplane, are those fateful destroyers of our sense of distance who threaten to lead the world back into chaos. Telegraph and telephone are destroying the cosmos.”25 These technological forces, Aby contended, had destroyed the space needed for the healthy contemplation of natural phenomena. Symbols were good, he thought, because they permitted mankind to meditate upon the universe in tranquility.26

  The lecture was a stunning success, and the doubting doctors marveled at Aby’s triumph. He had elevated his suffering not just into a tool of personal enlightenment, but into an aid and source of solace to fellow sufferers. Self-absorbed for so long, he had now acknowledged his common humanity. On his lecture draft, he wrote, “The images and words are intended as a help for those who come after me in their attempt to achieve insight and thus to dispel the tragic tension between instinctive magic and analytic logic. They are the confessions of an (incurable) schizoid, deposited in the archives of mental healers.”27