The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  Of all the Warburgs, Fritz most savored the artistic experimentation of the Weimar years. Max’s tastes were more philistine: he liked slapstick and broad comedy in film and theater. Fritz had very catholic, sophisticated taste and would rush off to Berlin to catch the latest Max Reinhardt production. His unhappy marriage to Anna Beata also made him a familiar denizen of the St. Pauli district, where he seemed to charm the demimonde. The ladies in Hamburg’s red-light zone would lean from their windows and squeal excited greetings to “Uncle Fritz.” He once shocked Jimmy’s wife, Kay, by taking her to a local night spot where naked women rode around the bar on horseback, waiting for male customers to leap up into the saddle and ride off with them. Felix’s son, Eddie, experienced a similar surprise when Fritz took a field hockey team from the Salem school to a late-night restaurant in the St. Pauli district. As the young athletes sipped hot soup, they witnessed another form of sport being practiced inside curtained booths. Perhaps some underlying self-consciousness about his queer appearance drew Fritz to this world of easy and anonymous pleasures.

  Aby never delved into this raw side of life, never opened himself up to the quotidian world; he cared about exceptional people, not ordinary ones. His high-minded self-absorption only deepened after his emergence from Kreuzungen. In 1925, Mary sketched a drawing that suggested the impassable chasm between them. Aby sits bent over a book, sadly lost in thought, while through the window, one can see Mary in the distance, climbing a mountain with a jaunty, energetic step. The picture tells a tragic tale of the dreamer and the doer, introvert and extrovert. While Aby struggled with his demons in Switzerland, Mary had brought up three children, managed the house, and found solace in painting and sculpture. And she did it with a remarkable absence of complaint or self-pity.

  Carl Georg Heise speculated that Aby’s return to Hamburg sprang from a premonition that he wouldn’t live long and that he wanted to be near his family.2 If so, lost love proved hard to recapture. Aby might want to start afresh, but the children were scarred from his lengthy struggle. The dreamy Max Adolph loved his father’s warmth and admired his oratorical power to enchant and educate. He saw Aby as a prophetic spirit like Martin Luther, Karl Marx, or Friedrich Neitzsche, a titanic force of nature. Yet he also feared him. As he wrote, “Aby Warburg was a volcano.… Every volcano is an uncanny stranger to its nearest surroundings, however many scraps and fragments of their top formation the lava may contain. The next akin [sic] are rarely its nearest relatives in spirit.”3

  Emotionally sapped by his illness, the children found it hard to give full credit to Aby for his extraordinary achievement in escaping from the sanatorium. A certain compassion and sensitivity had been burned out of them. “And this blunting of our nerve ends earned us bitter epithets from his lips, when apparently we failed to appreciate his return from the hell of his illness; the miracle of living with a ‘revenant’ not from the dead but from the mad,” said Max Adolph.4

  Aby was an imperious German father who showed less tolerance for his wayward son than Moritz had shown for him. Thwarting Max Adolph’s ambition to become a painter, Aby shipped him off to a strict boarding school and made him read classics at various universities. In 1927, Max Adolph took a doctorate in philosophy from Berlin University and his dissertation on Plato impressed Aby with its intellectual power. As dynastic in his library as Max in the bank, Aby wanted Max Adolph to succeed him as director of the Warburg Library. In 1926, Aby took him on a Swedish pilgrimage to see Rembrandt’s Claudius Civilis, which he then had copied at great expense. Sensitive, eager to please, Max Adolph suppressed his own wishes.

  In his final years, Aby’s acquaintances spied a new serenity and sweetness in him. Toni Cassirer said all traces of sickness effectively vanished, yet this seems a gross overstatement.5 Aby knew he had received a reprieve from the gods and, far from being bitter about lost time, was deeply grateful for this last chance to work. Upstairs at home, he worked under a drawing of Nietzsche after his breakdown that had special meaning for him.

  In photos of Aby from the late 1920s, one sees a man with so many faces that he seems to possess multiple personalities. At moments, he resembles a portly, smiling Buddha. At other times he appears a broken figure with dark rings under his eyes, crushed by the burden of his scholarship and ravaged by the recent asylum terror. He still suffered from fits of rage and delusions and his demons never abandoned him. He couldn’t entirely banish the mumbo-jumbo that his rational mind so fervently resisted. For instance, his desk-top objects held a fetishistic significance for him and Aby grew agitated if visitors fiddled idly with them. Politely but firmly, he would advise visitors to leave everything in place, fearing that any loose play with these implements might realign his stars and unleash tides of cosmic evil. Many of Aby’s late scholarly interests—his fascination with airplanes, for instance—reflect these cosmic obsessions.

  The sovereign remedy for Aby was work. He felt like some undaunted explorer who had penetrated a remote, dangerous region and brought back a captured cargo of precious knowledge. As his mental powers revived, he returned with excitement to his prewar interests, even to a boyhood enthusiasm for postage stamps. Like semeologists of a later day, his intellectual empire widened to encompass such everyday cultural artifacts as stamps, coins, photos, posters, and advertisements, which he analyzed with the same intensity he once reserved for art works. A critic at large, he snapped at the “childish” advertising for HAPAG liners and waged a campaign against a cigarette firm with a brand called Nestor, deploring this profanation of the Greek classics. He even threatened to direct the full financial power of M. M. Warburg against the impious company.

  This impossible genius had attained cult status and enjoyed the patient tolerance granted to lovable, original, important cranks. By late 1925, he was teaching his first seminars at the Warburg Library. On December 20, 1926, he escorted Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann through the library, treating him to a disquisition on stamps. As they walked around, Aby made it clear who ruled in this little world. He showed Stresemann how much one could deduce about a country’s politics from studying its stamps and even gave Stresemann a reproachful lecture on scholarly precision. Presenting some contemporary German stamps that featured Goethe’s head, Aby said, “Herr Chancellor, will you please read the inscription here, if you can.” Smiling, Stresemann read, “Johann Wolfgang Goethe.” Aby retorted, “Incorrectly read, Herr Chancellor. Just look here, doesn’t it say, Joh period, Wolfg period, Goethe? And that is just the entire misfortune with our Weimar Republic, that everything is abbreviated and therefore too short.”6 Aby had an irrational hatred of abbreviations.

  However debilitated by illness, Aby still had spurts of superhuman energy and demanded that audiences sit through lectures that droned on for hours. Felix’s son, Eddie, would remember suffering through a five-hour marathon on “Why the King of England Sits in the Position of Neptune on the Pound Note.”7 To enter Aby’s world was to submit unequivocally to his tyranny. The first time a future assistant, Klaus Berger, visited the library, Aby expatiated for nearly five hours on the library’s aims. “Without disruption, without a pause. I felt as if I were nailed to the seat, before a great firework.”8 In 1927, Max sent two government officials with some surplus time on their hands to see the library. After a four-hour monologue by Aby, the flabbergasted men stumbled out the front door, dazed but uplifted. One confessed to the other, “This afternoon, my life acquired more depth than in the previous forty-eight years.”9 Intellectual luminaries also beat a path to Aby’s door. He corresponded with Thomas Mann about Babylonian astrology, a subject that concerned the latter for a new book, presumably Joseph and His Brothers.

  In his last years, Aby returned to his pioneering work on cosmological symbols in Renaissance art. Cheered by Hamburg’s decision to create a planetarium in the water tower of the city park, he began work on a novel exhibition about astronomy and astrology that he would later donate to the planetarium along with a small study library. Assem
bling an imaginative collage of 150 pieces, he demonstrated how humanity had progressed along a rising curve from superstition to scientific certitude. For the section on modern cosmology, Aby enlisted the aid of Einstein, who toured the library and afterward wrote Aby, “It was especially interesting for me to see how little expenditure it requires to lead credulous humanity around by the nose.”10 Aby was pleased by the accolades that tumbled in upon him. The planetarium, with his exhibition, opened on April 15, 1930, after his death.

  At the end, Aby, in his early sixties, focused his energies on the problems that had preoccupied him for a lifetime. With intimations of mortality, he wanted to employ every spare minute constructively and told Max, “One must arrange one’s life, as if one lived forever, but be ready every day to die.”11 When Aby sat for a painting by Mary, he was impossibly skittish, as if he needed to be in constant motion. In a pleasant return to scenes past, he made peace with Italy, which had so deeply wounded him in 1915. Both in 1928 and 1929, he made extensive trips there with his assistant, Dr. Gertrud Bing, whom Kenneth Clark would praise for her “nun-like” devotion to Aby.12

  Fritz Saxl had recruited Bing to work at the library and he and Aby vied for her favor. Since Saxl was married, Aby became enraged whenever his young rival expressed the slightest interest in divorce. Bing was cool, smart, slim, and ambitious. She had short hair, dark eyebrows, and no-nonsense glasses that sharpened a look of keen intelligence. In one photo with Aby, she looks very self-possessed and emancipated, as if she knew her worth. Having fallen under Aby’s spell, she was slavishly loyal to him and followed his wishes without protest. She likened him to an Old Testament prophet in eloquence and wrath and felt that something in his gaze stared straight through her.13 She was the great romance of his life and enhanced the mental ardor of his two culminating trips to Italy.

  During this period of miraculous rebirth, Aby’s relations with Mary were cordial but distant. She either didn’t know about the affair with Bing—the Warburgs thought her amazingly naive—or chose to look the other way. The failed marriage strengthened Mary’s dedication to her own art. She was tolerant of Aby’s endless travels with Gertrud; the 1929 trip alone lasted much of the year. It is heartbreaking to read the letters she exchanged with Aby in his absence. He would babble on about his scholarly escapades with “Bingia,” as he styled his traveling companion. Or he would grow indignant about books or papers tardily forwarded from Hamburg. But of inquiries about Mary, her life, her work—we hear hardly a word. When he wrote her from a Rome hotel at Christmas 1928, he said nothing more than “Merry Christmas” and that she should give the children whatever presents they wanted.14 Until the end, Aby never lost the mutually reinforcing egotism of the genius and of the pampered, spoiled eldest son.

  Asking nothing for herself, Mary seemed glad that her husband had survived the asylum and approved of his decisions to extend his journey. In 1928 and 1929, she met Aby and Bing when Aby returned to his old “repair shop,” the Heinsheimer clinic in Baden-Baden, for cures. In fact, the Warburgs felt grateful to Bing for taking care of Aby. With this sickly, older man, she probably acted more as a nursemaid than a mistress. He was so exhausted on their travels that he often had to cancel appointments for days on end and consult doctors. In 1928, when Aby briefly considered his first American trip since the 1890s—a project vetoed by Dr. Binswanger—his brothers made it a precondition that Gertrud accompany him.

  Aby’s last Italian trips were gigantic scholarly sweeps through churches, palaces, and universities. He traveled heavily laden with books. It was a final chance to study essential works of art and Aby was thrilled by the warm reception he received from librarians and curators who remembered him from earlier days. Both Stresemann and Konstantin von Neurath, the German ambassador to Rome, helped to open doors. Reverting to his earlier political beliefs, Aby showed von Neurath how the antique cultures of the Mediterranean had influenced Germany and how this necessitated closer North-South links.15

  The capstone of Aby’s career was to be the “picture atlas” he planned to publish under the title Mnemosyne, his library’s motto. It was intended as a summary statement of his interdisciplinary approach to Western culture, with special emphasis on the influence of classical art in the Renaissance. He took panels and packed them with collages of imagery that showed unexpected relations among symbols over time. Onto some forty screens, he crowded fifteen hundred images that included paintings, drawings, engravings, and woodcuts as well as stamps, coins, photographs, and posters. As if shaping his theories with his hands as well as his mind, he constantly reworked their arrangement, much as he had the organization of his books. He was writing a history of the Western mind in pictorial design. Once again, Aby saw the story of Western civilization paralleling that of his own psyche.16 This mosaic would remain incomplete, though largely finished, at his death.

  On January 19, 1929, Aby presented fragments of his picture atlas at a lecture in Rome, flashing through 250 pictures in a two-and-one-half-hour tour de force. He was boyishly excited by the plaudits he received. The lecture not only exhibited Aby’s brilliance, but his courage, his stamina. During the first ten minutes, he suffered a mild heart spasm, but then developed such steam that the institute director had to hint that Aby was exceeding his allotted time—an affront Aby wouldn’t forget. For future speeches, Aby needed a doctor in attendance. Often he started out slowly, struggling for breath, then ended up roaring and gesticulating and exhausting his audience.

  During lectures, Aby liked to fasten his gaze on a single listener and often planted a friend in the front row for that express purpose. For his speech in Rome, he eyed a young man named Kenneth Clark, who found the experience a revelation. Under Aby’s influence, Clark abandoned the connoisseur’s approach to art to plunge into symbolic studies. Aby’s method so intrigued him that he rejected an invitation to assist Bernard Berenson in Florence and left this stunning tribute to Aby: “Warburg was without doubt the most original thinker on art-history of our time, and entirely changed the course of art-historical studies.”17

  Despite his weak heart and diabetes (he took insulin), Aby pressed ahead with his plans. By a marvelous coincidence, this expert on symbols was present in Rome for the signing of the Lateran Treaty, which reconciled the Vatican with the Italian state. Holding up small binoculars, Aby stood in St. Peter’s Square with two hundred thousand other spectators as the Pope delivered his blessing. Upset by the blatantly Fascist symbolism, he studied closely a film of Benito Mussolini signing the treaty. “I was astounded by the pretty Caesarean malice of the play of his lips,” he wrote Mary.18

  It seems poetically just that idyllic scenes graced the last months of Aby’s tortured life. In Naples, he and Bing stayed at the Excelsior Hotel, which had a view of the blue sea and smoking Vesuvius. They breakfasted with Berenson at I Tatti, even though the latter disliked German Jews. As Berenson once observed, “They may have Jewish noses and souls but their minds are super-German and that to me and not their Jewishness makes them a public danger.”19 While consulting with Berenson about the Fogg Museum at Harvard—Berenson planned to donate his villa and library to the university—Felix urged him to meet with Aby, and this may have been the origin of their breakfast. In any event, Aby and Bing admired the setting and Berenson’s grandiose library before they motored up through Verona and Mantua and left Italy forever.

  In his last days in Hamburg, Aby wasn’t free of the lifelong quarrels that had bedeviled him. The university had hoped to create an archeology professorship for him, which he thought might lift his oppressive work burden. When it didn’t materialize in the spring of 1929, he grew furious and told the head of the Kunsthalle that if he were healthy and ten years younger, he would consider moving his library to Rome.20 He never entirely made peace with the cultural backwater that was his ancestral town.

  Aby’s relations with his brothers also never lost a certain uneasy edge. Whatever money they gave, Aby wanted more and even solicited Frieda for fun
ds. As Jimmy Warburg recalled, “The money for the library came in annual donations, sometimes accompanied by audible groans, from his brothers in the banking business. Aby had no compunctions about assessing them for what he considered the only worthwhile product of their mundane endeavors.”21 If his brothers protested, Aby flatly predicted that his library would outlast M. M. Warburg & Co. He couldn’t stop his compulsive book collecting and in 1929 pushed his bed away from the walls to make room for more shelves.22

  On August 21, 1929, the five brothers posed for a last photo at a board meeting of the library. The gray-haired Max sat in the middle, still virile and confident. Fritz looked cheerful, but off balance, peripheral. Two months away from the stock market crash he had predicted, Paul seemed downcast. Felix alone seemed radiant, with a broad, beaming smile. Sad and wistful, Aby sat to the side, his hair and mustache white. At the last minute, this historian of symbols cupped his hands and held them up toward his brothers in a begging posture. It was a poignant jest. The brothers had delivered on their promise to support him, but at considerable cost. Aby’s ceaseless demands had always carried a tacit criticism of their business lives. So it was proper and fitting that he offered them this final laugh at his own expense.