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WARBURGS HAUNTED HOUSE

Georges Didi-Huberman

Translated by Shane Lillis

We could legitimately regard the Mnemosyne Atlas of Aby Warburg as a tool for
sampling, by means of juxtaposed images, the chaos of history. It would be a
matter of producing, through the atlass black plates studded with figures of all
kinds, transverse- and cross-sections of chaos, en route to finding new ways of
thinking about social and cultural temporality. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari
give us a language in which to index the philosophical power and audaciousness
the superior empiricism of Warburgs project: It is always a matter of defeat-
ing chaos by a secant plane that crosses it, they write, adding that it is as if one
were casting a net, but the fisherman always risks being swept away and finding
himself in the open sea.1 In other words, Warburgs aptitude for the astra (con-
cepts) always brought him in proximity to the monstra (chaos).

An earlier version of this text appears as part of an essay, 1. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?,
Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science, published in the cata- trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York:
log of the exhibition Atlas: How to Carry the World on Ones Columbia University Press, 1991), 203.
Back, organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofa, Madrid (November 26, 2010 March 28, 2011)
in collaboration with Sammlung Falckenberg of Hamburg
and ZKM Museum fr Neue Kunst of Karlsruhe.

Common Knowledge 18:1


DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1456881
English translation 2010 by Shane B. Lillis

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Caught in the pincers between his intellectual ambition which was to

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forge a Kulturwissenschaft encompassing every human science in one historical

Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
discipline and the intrinsic modesty of his attention to singular cases and the
details of philological erudition, Warburgs project can be understood only in
terms of its aims. The Mnemosyne Atlas stands between two horizons that its
author evoked or invoked, without ever, or almost ever, naming them. Further
back up the line, we find the horizon of the Enlightenment and its Romantic
turning point: Goya, or rather Baudelaire speaking about Goya, from the per-
spective of his sampling of chaos though it is Goethe, finally, whose notion
of affinity opened up ways to rethink the practices of observing, anthologiz-

s
ing, cross-checking, and collecting that would be used in Warburgs atlas.2 Fur-

Didi-Huber man
ther down the line, among Warburgs contemporaries who were (more or less)
unknown to him, we have August Sander with his atlas, Face of Our Time, Walter
Benjamin with his dialectical images, and Sigmund Freud with his magisterial
way of envisaging the power of the monstra.3 All of these, and others as well at
that time, sampled chaos and retrieved visual sections from it, in the way that an
archaeologist exhumes evidence in packets that are then made visible on what
Deleuze has termed planes of consistency (or immanence).4 It was in this spirit
that Goya, through the power of his etchings, inscribed Disparates, Caprichos, and
Desastres across the pediment of modernity. The Disparates demonstrate the art
of sampling the dispars chaos in space. Warburg does so too (and includes the
playful or Witz dimension of chaos) when he risks bringing together, on the same
plate, a sarcophagus and an aerial photograph, a dancing nymph and a dying old
man, a small bronze coin and a triumphal arch, a bust of a child and a souterrain
arranged for sacrifices, a biblical scene and an anatomy lesson, the monument
to Hindenburg and an advertisement for toilet paper.5 Warburgs practice pur-
sues the kind of knowledge obtainable through montage the nonstandard kind
recommended, practiced, and theorized in the same period by Benjamin in his
Arcades and Georges Bataille in his journal Documents.6
The Mnemosyne Atlas, moreover, could be leafed through as a collection of
Caprichos, presented explicitly as a sampling of the chaos in individual psyches
and collective imaginations. There are almost as many monsters of reason in
Warburgs atlas as there are in Goyas series: fearsome divinities of the ancient

2. Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Litera- Guattari, Mille Plateaux, vol. 2 of Capitalisme et Schizo-
ture, trans. Patrice Edouard Charvet (London: Penguin, phrnie (Paris: Minuit, 1980).
2006), 237.
5. Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: Gesammelte
3. August Sander, Face of Our Time (Munich: Schirmer Schriften, II 1, ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink,
Mosel, 2008). 2nd rev. ed. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), 21 (pl. 4), 25
(pl. 6), 27 (pl. 7), 29 (pl. 8), 125 (pl. 75), 129 (pl. 77).
4. For planes of immanence [or consistency], see Gilles
Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne 6. Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe
Boyman (New York: Urzone, 2001); Deleuze and Flix ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula,
1995), 333 83.
Oriental religions, titanomachias and psychomachias, female creatures with sev-
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eral breasts, monstrous serpents, hybrid creatures of the zodiac, deformed beings
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dancing together, cruel and proliferating metamorphoses, sadistic eroticism, diz-


zying falls, grotesque heads, and other multiform personifications of the night-
mare of reason.7 Walter Benjamin found that the surrealists took the monstra
seriously and that they sought, in their own way and in the same period to
make out an improbable inventory of the movements of the soul inscribed in
movements of desire and of the body.8 The theoretical lesson common to these
authors, who are nonetheless very different from one another, is that all knowl-
edge of the disparate brings into play the very structure, as well as the montage
character, of the images of thought.
And finally, the Mnemosyne Atlas works like a collection of Desastres: the
play of the astra and the monstra takes account of the cruelest and most violent
aspects of human history. The samples of spatial (or figural) chaos bear witness
to a psychic chaos with historical or political incarnations. For knowledge that
comes through re-montage always reflects on the de-montage of time in the
tragic history of society. I am thinking in particular of the last plates of Mnemos-
yne, where Warburg arranged photographic documents of the Lateran Accords,
approved by the tyrant Mussolini and Pope Pius XI (fig. 2).9 Of course, in these
montages, the salient question is one of cultural survivals. The montages operate
like transverse sections in the longue dure of relations between power and image
(for example, the throne of Saint Peter visible in Warburgs plate 79 refers subtly
to the effigy of the sovereign already visible in plate 1). But the montages also
treat the longue dure of the theologico-political paradigm: Eucharist, which is the
principal theme of plate 79, refers, in its own way, to the divinatory livers in plate
1 (figs. 1 2). Both are mysterious and mystical props of belief and power.

Dislocation of the World and Tragedy of Culture


There is also the issue, in this symptomatology, of political prophecy. In 1929
Hitlers Mein Kampf reached record sales in Hamburg, and the last plate in Mne-
mosyne displays the signs of a long, as well as recent, history of anti-Semitism,
political propaganda, and upheaval.10 Here we are, once again (and despite
differences of objects and styles), in the neighborhood of Warburgs anxious

7. Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 15 (pl. 1), 19 (pl. 10. Cf. Charlotte Schoell- Glass, Aby Warburg und der
3), 25 (pl. 6), 35 (pl. 22), 55 (pl. 32), 69 (pl. 39), 87 (pl. 47), Antisemitismus: Kulturwissenschaft als Geistespolitik (Frank-
103 (pl. 56), 105 (pl. 57). furt: Fischer, 1998), 233 46; Aby Warburgs Late Com-
ments on Symbol and Ritual, Science in Context 12.4
8. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Le surralisme: Le dernier
(1999): 621 42; Serious Issues: The Last Plates of War-
instantan de lintelligentsia europenne, trans. Mau-
burgs Picture Atlas Mnemosyne, in Art History as Cul-
rice de Gandillac, in Oeuvres, II (Paris: Gallimard, 2000),
tural History: Warburgs Projects, ed. Richard Woodfield
113 34.
(Amsterdam: G and B Arts International, 2001), 183 208;
9. Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 131 33. Wolfram Pichler and Gufrun Swaboda, Gli spazi di
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Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
s
Didi-Huber man

Figure 1. Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 192729, Warburg Institute Archive,


plate 1. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

contemporaries in this case, Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Tucholsky, and


John Heartfield. Benjamins magisterial organization of pessimism through
images,11 Tucholsky and Heartfields striking political montages in their Bil-
derbuch titled Deutschland, Deutschland ber Alles, published at the same time as
Warburg was preparing the last plates of his atlas,12 and Brechts several atlases of

Warburg: Topografie storico- culturali, autobiografiche 11. Walter Benjamin, Paralipomnes et variantes des
e mediali nellatlante Mnemosyne, Quaderni Warburg Ita- thses sur le concept dhistoire, crits franais (Paris:
lia 1 (2003): 99 105, 114 21; Georges Didi-Huberman, Gallimard, 1991), 350.
Limage brle, in Penser par les images: Autour des travaux
12. Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield, Deutschland,
de Georges Didi- Huberman, ed. Laurent Zimmermann
Deutschland ber Alles: Ein Bilderbuch (Berlin: Neuer
(Nantes: Ccile Defaut, 2006), 24 38.
Deutscher Verlag, 1929; Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973).
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Figure 2. Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 1927 29,


Warburg Institute Archive, plate 79. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

images on the tragedies of contemporary history, composed from a communist


point of view, are all strikingly relevant projects.13
It is no coincidence that Brecht, too, invoked a cultural longue dure from
Homer or Aeschylus to Voltaire or Goethe in order to substantiate his strik-

13. Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, Quand les images pren-


nent position: Loeil de lhistoire, 1 (Paris: Minuit, 2009).
ing formula, according to which war, and the dislocation of the world or the

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world out of joint (die Welt aus den Fugen), is the bottom-line subject of art

Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
(das Thema der Kunst):

The dislocation of the world: that is the subject of art. It is impossible


to affirm that, without disorder, there would be no art, nor that there
could be one: we know of no world that is not disorder. No matter what
the universities whisper to us regarding Greek harmony, the world of
Aeschylus was full of combat and terror, and so were those of Shake-
speare and of Homer, of Dante and of Cervantes, of Voltaire and of
Goethe. However pacifistic [art] has been said to be, it speaks of wars,

s
and whenever art makes [a peace treaty] with the world, it is always

Didi-Huber man
signed with a world at war.14

A world at war? Should we not read the history of art, first of all, as a history
of forms? Warburgs atlas did not neglect this point of view and indeed can be
regarded as a collection of diagrams for visually sorting the world, its infinite
variability and formal invention: Disparates of circular forms and frontal walls,
fluid movements and tabular arrangements, horizontal confrontations and verti-
cal falls. . . .15 But Warburg, the founder of an anthropology of images and an
iconology of their intervals, referred any formal singularity to the play or con-
flict of corporeal, psychological, and cultural movements. Hence the importance
of those gestures and Pathosformeln whose constellations are displayed by the atlas
like so many Caprichos or psychomachias those powers of the imagination at the
crossroads between madness and reason, pathos and ethos.16 The history of images
according to Warburg must be thought of as a tragic story that always comes back
to a point between the worst of the monstra and the best of the astra, between
suffering and sophrosyne, between dislocation and re-montage, in order to make
a transverse- or cross-section in chaos, which is to say using Warburgs own
term a thought space (Denkraum).
There is, therefore, no form that is not, whether explicitly or implicitly,
the response to a war or, in any case, to historical pathos.17 The treasury of forms
is always, however cruel this conjunction of words may seem, a treasury of suf-
ferings (Leidschatz).18 Hence the anxious nature and melancholic roots of the

14. Bertolt Brecht, Exercices pour comdiens, trans. 17. Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne: Grundbegriffe II (Lon-
Jean-Marie Valentin, in LArt du comdien: crits sur le don: Warburg Institute Archive, 1928 29), III.102.3 and
thtre (Paris: LArche, 1999), 121; translation modified. III.102.4., 25, 80, etc.

15. Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 11 (pl. B), 18. Cf. Martin Warnke, Der Leidschatz der Menschheit
17 23 (pl. 2 6), 37 45 (pl. 23 26), 49 51 (pl. 28 30), 77 wird humaner Besitz, Der Menschenrechte des Auges: ber
(pl. 42), 103 (pl. 56). Aby Warburg (Frankfurt: Europische Verlagsanstalt,
1980), 113 86.
16. Cf. Salvatore Settis, Pathos und Ethos, Morphologie
und Funktion, Vortrge aus dem Warburg-Haus 1 (1997):
31 73.
nameless science that Warburg invented.19 Hence too the affinity of his under-
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taking with that of Benjamin, who wrote of history as the history of universal
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

suffering (Geschichte als Leidensgeschichte der Welt).20 Many aspects of their think-
ing would require retrieval and comparison for us to establish the scale and depth
of this affinity and to restore Warburgs work,21 not only to the context of the
German science of the mind, but also to the offbeat constellation of heterodox
Jewish thinkers to which, however discretely, he fully belongs.22
In an apt and moving testimony, Klaus Berger described Warburg as a man
who, in spite of his humor and constant punning, saw everything from the per-
spective (or on the plane of consistency) of pain: He never said: this is right,
this is wrong. He said: this is veiled by suffering.23 His theory of Pathosformeln
was founded on his thinking perhaps Attic, perhaps Nietzschean about
tragedy; his ideas about memory were aimed at a psychohistorical theory of the
conflicts between the monstra and the astra.24 Ernst Cassirer, in his magnificent
funeral eulogy for Warburg in 1929, perfectly expressed how his friend sought to
understand forms in terms of forces configuring energies that were in turn
seen as in the center of the storm and of the whirlwind of life itself :

He did not firstly cast his eyes upon works of art, but he felt and saw the
great configuring energies behind the works. . . . Where others had seen

19. Cf. Konrad Hoffmann, Angst und Methode nach of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin
Warburg: Erinnerung als Vernderung, in Aby Warburg. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 73 100; Beatrice
Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990, ed. Hanssen, Portrait of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg,
Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell- Panofsky), MLN 114.5 (December 1999): 991 1013; Adi
Glass (Weinheim: VCH-Acta Humaniora, 1991), 261 67; Efal, Warburgs Pathos Formula in Psychoanalytic and
Bernd Villhauer, Aby Warburgs Theorie der Kultur. Detail Benjaminian Contexts, Assaph, no. 5 (2000): 221 38;
und Sinnhorizont (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), 112 14; Villhauer, Aby Warburgs Theorie der Kultur, 87 103; Cor-
Marco Bertozzi, Il detective melanconico e altri saggi filosofici nelia Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern: Symbol und dialek-
(Milan: Feltrinelli, 2008), 95 137. tisches Bild in Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne-Atlas und Walter
Benjamins Passagen-Werk (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004),
20. Walter Benjamin, Origine du drame baroque allemand,
31 127 and 246 81.
trans. Sibylle Muller (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 179.
22. Cf. Michael Lwy, Juifs htrodoxes: Messianisme,
21. Cf. Roland Kany, Mnemosyne als Programme: Geschichte,
romantisme, utopie (Paris: ditions de lclat, 2010).
Erinnerung und die Andacht zum Unbedeutenden im Werk
von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin (Tbingen: Max Nie- 23. Klaus Berger, Souvenirs sur Aby Warburg, Trafic,
meyer Verlag, 1987), 179 85; Jochen Becker, Ursprung no. 45 (2003): 100.
so wie Zerstrung: Sinnbild und Sinngebung bei War-
24. Cf. Kurt Forster, Aby Warburgs History of Art:
burg und Benjamin, in Allegorie und Melancholie, ed.
Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images,
Willem van Reijen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 64 89;
Daedalus 105.1 (1976): 169 76; Marianne Schuller,
Marianne Schuller, Bilder Schriften zum Gedchtnis:
Unterwegs. Zum Gedchtnis: Nach Aby Warburg, in
Freud, Warburg, Benjamin: Eine Konstellation, Inter-
Denkrume: Zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft, ed. Sylvia
nationale Zeitschrift fr Philosophie 2.1 (1993): 73 95; Mat-
Baumgart, Gotlind Birkle, and Menthchild Fend (Berlin:
thew Rampley, From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburgs
Dietrich Reimer, 1993), 149 60; Ulrich Port, Kathar-
Theory of Art, Art Bulletin 79.1 (1997): 41 55; Rampley,
sis des Leidens: Aby Warburgs Pathosformeln und ihre
Archives of Memory: Walter Benjamins Arcades Project
konzeptionellen Hintergrnde in Rhetorik, Poetik und
and Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne Atlas, in The Optic of Wal-
Tragdientheorie, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fr Litera-
ter Benjamin, vol. 3 De-, dis-, ex-, ed. Alex Coles (London:
turwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 73 (1999): 5 42.
Black Dog, 1999), 94 117; Rampley, The Remembrance
determined and delimited forms, self-contained forms, he saw moving

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forces; he saw what he called the great Pathosformel that Antiquity had
created and left as a lasting patrimony to humanity. . . . But this capacity

Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
was not only the gift of the researcher, nor that of the artist. He delved
here into his own, most deeply felt experience. In himself, he had expe-
rienced and learned what he was capable of grasping and interpreting,
from the center of his own being and his own life. Early on he read the
harsh words he was familiar with suffering, familiar with death. But
from the heart of this suffering there came the force and the incom-
parable particularity of the gaze. Rarely has a researcher more deeply
dissolved his deepest suffering into a gaze and thereby liberated it. . . .
Warburg was not a scientist and a researcher in the impassive sense in

s
Didi-Huber man
which he might have contemplated, from on high, the playing out of
life, or delighted aesthetically in the mirror of art. He always remained
in the center of the storm and the whirlwind of life itself; he penetrated
into its ultimate and deepest tragic problems.25

Cassirer here obviously refers to two crucial and inseparable episodes in War-
burgs life. The most deeply felt experience of which Cassirer speaks is War-
burgs madness, which kept him enclosed, howling, and powerless, between the
walls of the Kreuzlingen sanatorium. Cassirer was one of the very few to visit
Warburg in the asylum (on April 10, 1924) and therefore knew at firsthand the
visceral war that Warburg had to wage against his most intimate monstra.
But Cassirer did not forget the historical context in which this conflict took
place. That Warburg kept himself in the center of the storm meant that his
monstra, however deep, were not merely subjective but cultural as well. He might
not have had his visceral war to wage, had there not been the social, obsidional,
and sidereal war that Warburg, between 1914 and 1918, experienced intensely to
the point of madness. It is no coincidence that in the midst of World War II, in
1942, Cassirer would devote himself to a study of the tragedy of culture, which
is a notion, found in Hegel and Goethe as well as in Georg Simmels classic essay,
that converges naturally with the anthropology of images dear to Warburg.26
Like Cassirer, Carl Georg Heise insisted on Warburgs indescribable suffering
in the face of what he called the Weltkatastrophe.27 Warburg carried the war on
his shoulders as a pagan Atlas or a Hebraic tzaddik would do: some 9 million dead
and 21 million injured crippled, disfigured surrounded the historian of the
Nachleben in 1918 (fig. 3). It is likely that Warburg grasped, as he always did with
the episodes of art history, the events of the war from the perspective of a terrify-

25. Ernst Cassirer, loge funbre du professeur Aby M. cept et la tragdie de la culture, in La Tragdie de la culture
Warburg, in Oeuvres, XII, crits sur lart (Paris: Le Cerf, et autres essais (Paris: ditions Rivages, 1988), 177 215.
1995), 55 56.
27. Carl George Heise, Persnliche Erinnerungen an Aby
26. Ernst Cassirer, Logique des sciences de la culture (Paris: Warburg (New York: Eric M. Warburg, 1947), 42 44.
Le Cerf, 1991), 211 12. See also Georg Simmel, Le con-
Figure 3. Ernst
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Friedrich, Krieg dem


Kriege! (Berlin,
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Internationales
Kriegsmuseum,
1924), 214
(Gueule casse).
Photo: Georges
Didi-Huberman

ingly long dure, that of a European civil war in which the monstra threatened
all human life and culture.28 That Warburg should sometimes have imagined that
he was responsible for this war should not be interpreted solely in terms of his
madness. Warburg, the man of culture, was at the center of a family of bankers
who participated directly in the goals of the German economic war while acting,
at the same time, on the level of global finance.29
Hence World War I, that tragedy for culture, was equally, in Aby War-
burgs eyes, a tragedy in culture. We can imagine, for example, the upheaval
he must have felt at the embrace of the word Kultur by German military pro-
paganda, beginning in 1914, in contrast to the word Zivilisation the former
meaning the eternal values of Germanic culture, and the latter the Anglo-
French world of technological and economic utilitarianism. We can imagine, too,
how Warburg, who understood culture in terms of spatial and temporal migra-
tions (Wanderungen), would have regarded the aggressive closure of borders, the

28. See Enzo Traverso, feu et sang: De la guerre civile of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York: Vintage, 1993),
europenne, 1914 1945 (Paris: Stock, 2007), 9 21, 35 127. 141 90; Niall Ferguson, Max Warburg and German
Politics: The Limits of Financial Power in Wilhelmine
29. Cf. Georges-Henri Soutou, LOr et le sang: Les buts de
Germany, in Wilhelminism and Its Legacy: German Moder-
guerre conomiques de la Premire Guerre mondiale (Paris:
nities, Imperialism, and the Meaning of Reform, 1890 1930,
Fayard, 1989), 33, 104, 120 27, 373 76, 743 44; Ron
ed. Geoff Eley and James Retallack (Oxford: Bergham,
Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth- Century Odyssey
2003), 185 201.
development of trench warfare, and the immobility of the front lines, which he

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recorded, sometimes with a fevered anxiety, in his notebooks. The 1914 18

Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
war was both a Kulturkrieg and a Bilderkrieg, mobilizing entire civil societies
but above all the cultural elites.30 A great number of intellectuals joined the
two fronts of the conflict, more often than not with a patriotic and nationalist
energy (to which even Warburg contributed).31 When discussing the European
crisis that Pierre Renouvin has diagnosed,32 we should mention foremost the
crisis of the mind to which Paul Valry pointed in 191933 (and which, in the
era of World War II, was even more ruthlessly analyzed by Jewish thinkers of
the next generation, such as Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and

s
Leo Strauss).34 The scale of this psychomachia may be measured, for instance, by

Didi-Huber man
the prodigious quantity of publications, testimonies, reflections, and narratives
devoted to the war as it was actually happening. The critic Julius Rab, who pro-
duced several anthologies during the war, estimated that there were 50,000 war
poems sent every morning to the German newspapers during World War I.
Toward the end of the first year of the conflict, some two hundred volumes of
Kriegslyrik had been published in Germany,35 to say nothing of the war narra-
tives produced, in which the entire spectrum of styles, from factual testimony to
novels, was to be found in vast quantities.36

30. Cf. Jrgen Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society, the Great War, in Roshwald and Stites, European Culture
1914 1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, in the Great War, 32 57; B. Vom Brocke, La guerra degli
1984); Christophe Prochasson, La guerre en ses cul- intellettuali tedeschi, in Cali, Corni, and Ferrandi, Gli
tures, in Histoire culturelle de la Grande Guerre, ed. Jean- intellettuali e la Grande guerra, 373 409.
Jacques Becker (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), 255 71;
32. Pierre Renouvin, La Crise europenne et la Premire
Prochasson, 1914 1918. Retours dexpriences (Paris: Tal-
Guerre mondiale (1904 1918) (Paris: Presses Universi-
landier, 2008), 51 67.
taires de France, 1969), 5 130.
31. See Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The
33. Paul Valry, La crise de lesprit, in Oeuvres, I, ed.
Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kan-
Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 988 1000.
sas, 1982); Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, eds., Euro-
pean Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and 34. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Critique de la violence, in
Propaganda, 1914 18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Oeuvres, I (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 210 43; Theodor W.
Press, 1999); Vincenzo Cali, Gustavo Corni, and Giuseppe Adorno and Max Horkheimer, La Dialectique de la raison:
Ferrandi, eds., Gli intellettuali e la Grande guerra (Bolo- Fragments philosophiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 13 20;
gna: Societ Editrice Il Mulino, 2000); Philippe Soulez, Hannah Arendt, La crise de la culture: Sa porte sociale
ed., Les Philosophes et la guerre de 14 (Saint-Denis: Presses et politique, in La Crise de la culture: Huit exercices de pen-
Universitaires de Vincennes, 1988); Martha Hanna, The se politique (1972; Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 253 88; Leo
Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers dur- Strauss, La crise de notre temps, in Nihilisme et politique
ing the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- (2001; Paris: Payot and Rivages, 2004), 81 117. Cf. Corine
sity Press, 1996), 78 105; Christophe Prochasson and Pelluchon, Leo Strauss: Une autre raison, dautres Lumires.
Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie: Les intellectuels et la Essai sur la crise de la rationalit contemporaine (Paris: Vrin,
Premire Guerre mondiale, 1910 1919 (Paris: La Dcou- 2005), 7 39.
verte, 1996); Prochasson, 1914 1918: Retours dexpriences,
35. Christophe Didier, Orages de papier: 1914 1918 (Paris:
273 361; John A. Moses, Pan-Germanism and the Ger-
Somogy, 2008), 18.
man Professors, 1914 1918, Australian Journal of Politics
and History 15.3 (1969): 45 60; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, 36. For generals works, see Lon Riegel, Guerre et lit-
ed., Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Knstler trature: Le bouleversement des consciences dans la littra-
und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: R. Olden- ture romanesque inspire par la Grande Guerre (littratures
bourg Verlag, 1996); Peter Jelavich, German Culture in franaise, anglo- saxonne et allemande), 1910 30 (Paris:
The intrinsic content of the psychomachia is difficult to formulate, but,
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given Warburgs arguments for a methodological broadening of boundaries, we


COMMON KNOWLEDGE

could say that a parallel war was being waged in Europe over the boundaries
of thought.37 Numerous writers and intellectuals sought to reclose boundaries
that had already begun to open and to join the fighting in the trenches, where
perspectives were entrenched on the historiographical front lines. In his fiction
Ernst Jnger, for example, glorifies immemorial warriors and justifies combat
as an inner experience and as the advent of a new world, while celebrating the
dark magic of a total mobilization guided by the spirit of heroism.38 Even
after the war, he argued that the essential thing is the saving of a particular
nomos, a mode of being that affirms itself in culture and that we protect in com-
bat.39 Jngers ideas are close to those of Carl Schmitt on sovereignty and on the
nomos of the earth, which must be defended from any invasion, any contami-
nation, and every enemy.40 Likewise Oswald Spengler, in his preface to the first
edition of The Decline of the West (dated December 1917), hoped that his book
might not be entirely unworthy of the military sacrifices of Germany.41
Warburg, on the other hand, extended a hand to intellectual friends in
countries at war with Germany, for instance, through the publication of a Rivista

Klincksieck, 1978); Jean Kaempfer, Potique du rcit de 37. Aby Warburg, Art italien et astrologie internationale
guerre (Paris: Jos Corti, 1998), 211 73; Nicolas Beau- au Palazzo Schifanoia Ferrare, Essais florentins (Paris:
pr, crire en guerre, crire la guerre: France, Allemagne, Klincksieck, 1990), 215. Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman,
1914 20 (Paris: CNRS, 2006). For works about wartime LImage survivante: Histoire de lart et temps des fantmes selon
France, see Jean Vic, La Littrature de guerre: Manuel Aby Warburg (Paris: Minuit, 2002), 35 50.
mthodique et critique des publications de langue franaise (aot
38. Ernst Jnger, Orages dacier: Journal de guerre (Paris:
1914 aot 1916) (Paris: Payot, 1918); Andr Ducasse, La
Christian Bourgois, 1970), 5 and 31; Jnger, La Guerre
Guerre raconte par les combattants: Anthologie des crivains
comme exprience intrieure (1997; Paris: Christian Bour-
du front (1914 18) (Paris: Flammarion, 1932); Maurice
gois, 2008); Jnger, Le Boqueteau 125 (2000; Paris: Chris-
Rieuneau, Guerre et rvolution dans le roman franais de
tian Bourgois, 2008), 8 9; Jnger, Feu et movement
1919 1939 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 2000), 11 215;
[original title: Mathmatique guerrire], in Le Boque-
Leonard V. Smith, Le corps et la survie dune identit
teau 125, 195 208; Jnger, La mobilisation totale, in
dans les crits de guerre franais, Annales: Histoire, sciences
Ltat universel, suivi de La Mobilisation totale (Paris: Galli-
sociales 55.1 (2000): 111 33; Bernard Giovanangeli, ed.,
mard, 1990), 17; Jnger, Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges (Berlin:
crivains combattants de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Bernard
Neufeld and Henius Verlag, 1930); Jnger and Edmund
Giovanangeli-Ministre de la Dfense, 2004); Prochas-
Schultz, Die vernderte Welt: Eine Bilderfibel unserer Zeit
son, 1914 1918: Retours dexpriences, 161 272. For works
(Breslau: Wilhelm G. Korn, 1933).
about wartime Germany, see Maurice Boucher, Le Roman
allemand (1914 1933) et la crise de lesprit: Mythologie des 39. Jnger, Le Mur du temps (1963; Paris: Gallimard,
inquitudes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961); 1994), 98.
Klaus Vondong, ed., Kriegserlebnis: Der Erste Weltkrieg in
40. Carl Schmitt, Thologie politique. Quatre chapitres
der literarischen Gestaltung und symbolischen Deutung der
sur la thorie de la souverainet, in Thologie politique
Nationen (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980);
(Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 1 75; Schmitt, Le Nomos de la
Hermann Korte, Der Krieg in der Lyrik des Expressionismus:
Terre dans le droit des gens du Jus Publicum Europaeum
Studien zur Evolution eines literarischen Themas (Bonn: Bou-
(2001; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008),
vier, 1981); Hans-Harald Mller, Der Krieg und die Schrift-
70 86 (on nomos) and 256 78 (on the Great War).
steller: Der Kriegsroman der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1986). 41. Oswald Spengler, Le Dclin de lOccident: Esquisse dune
morphologie de lhistoire universelle (1948; Paris: Gallimard,
1976), 11.
Figure 4. La Guerra

61
del 1914. Rivista
illustrata for the first

Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
three months, August,
September, October
(Hamburg: Broschek,
1914)

s
Didi-Huber man
illustrata in 1914 and 1915 (figs. 4 and 5).42 His suffering in the face of the conflict,
though, never brought him farther than a defense of deserters and pacifists, and
a refusal to participate in war-related activity himself.43 But Warburgs influ-
ence is detectable in the more vehement reflections on the war of, for instance,
Karl Kraus the anti-Jnger par excellence. Kraus depicted the Great War in
mythological terms:

What mythological confusion is this? Since when has Mars become the
god of commerce and Mercury the god of war? . . . I understand sacri-

42. Aby Warburg, Georg Thilenius, and Giulio Pancon tische Initiative, in Kasten 117: Aby Warburg und der Aber-
celli- Calzia, eds., La Guerra del 1914 15: Rivista illus- glaube im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Gottfried Korff (Tbingen:
trata dei mesi Novembre Dicembre Gennaio Febbraio (Ham- Tbinger Vereinigung fr Volkskunde, 2007), 135 63.
burg: Broschek, 1915). Cf. A. Spagnolo-Stiff, Lappello
43. Cf. Luc Rasson, crire contre la guerre: Littrature et
di Aby Warburg a unintesa italo-tedesca: La guerra del
pacifismes, 1916 38 (Paris: LHarmattan, 1997); Andr
1914 1915. Rivista illustrata, in Storia dellarte e politica cul-
Loez, 14 18. Les refus de la guerre, 19141918. Une histoire
turale intorno al 1900: La fondazione dellIstituto Germanico
des mutins (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).
di Storia dellArte di Firenze, ed. Max Seidel (Venice: Mar-
silio, 1999), 249 69; Dorothea McEwan, Ein Kampf
gegen Windmhlen: Warburgs pro-italienische publizis-
Figure 5. La Guerra
62

del 1914 15. Rivista


illustrata for the
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

months of November,
December, January,
February (Hamburg:
Broschek, 1915)

ficing cotton for ones life. But the other way round? People who adore
fetishes will never go so low as to think that the commodity has a soul. . . .
Each state is at war with its own culture. Instead of being at war with
its own unculture. . . . What is undertaken for the profit of the state is
often achieved at the cost of the world.44

By 1909, long before he tied the rise of Nazism to the Last Days of Mankind,45
Kraus had shown how the motifs of progress and apocalypse can combine.46
In opposition to the politics of classing other nations as enemies and closing ones
borders to them, Kraus (among others) embodied a genuine cosmopolitanism of
the Warburgian kind. In offering the most rigorous and abundant formulations
of cosmopolitan politics, Benjamin publicly defended Kraus and, at the same

44. Karl Kraus, La Nuit venue (Paris: Lebovic, 1986), 105, Bouveresse, Satire et prophtie: Les voix de Karl Kraus (Mar-
109, 123. seille: Agone, 2007), 39 120.

45. Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind (New York: 46. Karl Kraus, Le progrs, in La Littrature dmolie
Ungar, 1974). Cf. Jacques Bouveresse and Gerald Stieg, (1990; Paris: Payot and Rivages, 1993), 137 46; Kraus,
eds., Les Guerres de Karl Kraus, special issue of Agone: His- Apocalypse, in La Littrature dmolie, 147 64.
toire, Politique et Sociologie, nos. 35 36 (2006); Jacques
time, exposed the fascist component of Jngers writing, its glorification of war

63
[made as] an unbridled transposition of the theses of art for arts sake.47

Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
The author of One-Way Street did not confuse the scale of the Euro-
pean psychomachia with its actual content: he was able to diagnose a crisis of
narrative corresponding to the crisis of history. Positivist historicity was not an
epistemic model through which the present could any longer be deciphered and
understood. In Experience and Poverty, Benjamin dared to say, contradicting
the patriotic and heroic proprieties that in 1918 people returned from the
front . . . not richer but poorer in communicable experience.48 In The Crisis
of the Novel, he suggested, following the example of Alfred Dblin, that we

s
can see in documentary montage an alternative to the dead ends of traditional

Didi-Huber man
narrative, including the war narrative of epic ambitions.49 Benjamins essay The
Storyteller invokes immemorial survivals in the popular art of storytelling.50
These survivals he understands as a means of calling upon Mnemosyne across the
tragedies of culture, in facing which Clio could only become sick sick (accord-
ing to Charles Pguy in 1917) of modern barbarities.51

Warburg Facing the War: Notizksten 115 118


World War I left no one the opportunity to remain indifferent or unscathed.
Some were plunged into the heart of combat. The ethnologist Robert Hertz,
student and friend of Marcel Mauss, died at the front in the Meuse in April 1915,
not without having left behind while on duty traces of his enlightened thinking.52
One of the two great founders of the Annales school, Lucien Febvre, fought on the
fronts of Ourcq, in Reims and Douaumont: he was the initiator and theoretician
of a method of combat called crossfiring, but meanwhile he never stopped fill-
ing notebooks, making maps of the front lines, drawing what he saw around him,
collecting photographs (fig. 6).53 He never really integrated this experience of
the war into his later analyses except, perhaps not accidentally, in his text entitled

47. Walter Benjamin, Thories du fascisme allemand. 50. Benjamin, Le conteur: Rflexions sur luvre de
propos de louvrage collectif Guerre et guerriers publi Nicolas Leskov, in Oeuvres, III (Paris: Gallimard, 2000),
sous la direction dErnst Jnger, Oeuvres, II (Paris: Gal- 114 51.
limard, 2000), 198 215; Benjamin, Karl Kraus, Oeuvres,
51. Charles Pguy, Clio (1932; Paris: Gallimard, 2002),
II (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 228 73. Cf. Michel Vanoost-
17.
huyse, Fascisme et littrature pure: La fabrique dErnst Jnger
(Marseille: Agone, 2005). 52. Robert Hertz, Un ethnologue dans les tranches, aot
1914 avril 1915: Lettres sa femme Alice, ed. Alexandre
48. Walter Benjamin, Experience and Poverty (1933), in
Riley and Philippe Besnard (Paris: CNRS, 2002).
Selected Writings, vol. 2, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 731. 53. Cf. Henri Febvre, Lucien Febvre, mon pre, post-
face to Lucien Febvre, Vivre lhistoire, ed. Brigitte Mazon
49. Benjamin, La crise du roman: propos de Berlin
(Paris: Robert Laffont-Armand Colin, 2009), 993. I wish
Alexanderplatz de Dblin, in Oeuvres, II, 189 97, 192.
to thank Henri Febvre and Brigitte Mazon for giving me
access to these documents.
64
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Figure 6. Lucien Febvre, Carnet de guerre, 1914 18. Ink and colored pencils on
paper, 16 x 25 cm. Collection Henri Febvre. Photo: DR

Living through History of 1943.54 Marc Bloch, Annaless other founder, elabo-
rated on his experience in the trenches by accumulating plans, lists, reports of
operations, stories, drawings of friends, and photographs of devastated nature
(figs. 7 and 8).55 After World War I, he would publish Rflexions dun historien
sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre (1921) and, after World War II, Critique
historique et critique du tmoignage (1950).56 Blochs analyses are parallel to
those of Warburg, whose work Bloch undoubtedly did not know. The parallels
between the attitudes of Bloch and Warburg to the war have been well analyzed
by Ulrich Raulff.57 It would be worth extending this analysis to questions of
method; for example, their shared comparativism and their mutual interest in
the historical content of images.58 As Reinhart Koselleck has shown, any muta-

54. Lucien Febvre, Vivre lhistoire, in Vivre lhistoire, 57. Ulrich Raulff, Parallel gelesen: Die Schriften von
21 35. Aby Warburg und Marc Bloch zwischen 1914 und 1924,
in Bredekamp et al., Aby Warburg, 167 78.
55. Marc Bloch, crits et photographies de guerre,
in LHistoire, la Guerre, la Rsistance, ed. Annette Becker 58. Cf. Bloch, Pour une histoire compare des soci-
and tienne Bloch (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 111 292. I ts europennes, in LHistoire, la Guerre, la Rsistance,
wish to thank Yves Bloch for giving me access to his note- 347 80; Bloch, Photographies ariennes, muses, arts
books. populaires, in LHistoire, la Guerre, la Rsistance, 393 406.
Bloch, Projet dun enseignement dhistoire compare des
56. Bloch, Critique historique et critique du tmoi-
socits europennes: Candidature au Collge de France,
gnage, in LHistoire, la Guerre, la Rsistance, 97 107. Bloch,
in LHistoire, la Guerre, la Rsistance, 443 50.
Rflexions dun historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la
guerre, in LHistoire, la Guerre, la Rsistance, 293 316.
65
Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
s
Didi-Huber man
Figure 7. Marc Bloch, Carnet de guerre, 1914 18. Photographs pasted on cardboard,
23 x 20 cm. Collection Yves Bloch. Photo: Georges Didi-Huberman

Figure 8. Marc Bloch, Carnet de guerre, 1914 18. Photographs pasted on cardboard,
23 x 20 cm. Collection Yves Bloch. Photo: Georges Didi-Huberman
tion of experience implies a change of method in the work of a historian.59 Of
66

course, my own hypothesis regarding Warburg is that this change, which was of
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

epistemological significance, was embodied in the Mnemosyne Atlas and in the


theoretical orientation that its compilation brought to light.
It was as a man of the Enlightenment that Aby Warburg first of all wanted
to respond to the irrational fury of the world conflict. While the family bank nat-
urally participated in the German war effort, he himself had to attend painfully
to the Jewish census ( Judenzhlung) ordered in October 1916 by army officers
who wanted to expose the so-called underrepresentation of Jewish combatants
on the front.60 Warburg thought, however, that the astra could fight efficiently
with the monstra on the ground of ideas and so devoted much energy to founding,
with the ethnologist Georg Thilenius and the linguist Giulio Panconcelli-Calzia,
the Rivista illustrata already mentioned, in order to maintain the European intel-
lectual tissue so as, notably, not to cut German intellectuals off from their Ital-
ian colleagues.61 We can read, for example, in the Rivista a note by the director
of the Berlin museums, Wilhelm von Bode, on the duty of protecting works of
art in enemy territory, along with a factual account of religious persecutions on
the Russian front.62 Faced with a war that he considered, on an anthropological
and even metaphysical level, an Urkatastrophe, Warburg pursued his work as a
struggle against certain ideas (those that set man against man, that seek to close
borders or dig trenches) and, on the other hand, as a struggle on behalf of other
ideas (those that open borders, that recognize the porosity of cultures and trace
the perpetual migrations of intellect). He was enthusiastic about the idea of a
League of Nations and about efforts toward the reconciliation of Germany and
France. When, in 1926, Aristide Briand and Adolf Stresemann received the Nobel
Prize for Peace in the name of that difficult reconciliation, Warburg undertook
the publication of a postage stamp a cross-border image with a significant
motto: Idea vincit.63 This formulation appears as well in his manuscript for the

59. Reinhart Koselleck, Mutation de lexprience et Racconigi: Aragno, 2004), 345 76; Paolo Sanvito, War-
changement de mthode: Esquisse historico- anthro- burg, lantagonismo Italia-Germania e la Guerra: Analisi
pologique, in LExprience de lhistoire (Paris: Gallimard, di un cortocircuito politico e interiore, in Aby Warburg e
1997), 201 47. la cultura italiana: Fra sopravvivenze e prospettive di ricerca,
ed. Cierivia and Micol Forti (Rome: Sapienza Universit
60. Cf. Chernow, Warburgs, 141 90; Schoell-Glass, Aby
di Roma-Mondadori Universit, 2009), 51 62.
Warburg und der Antisemitismus, 119 53; Mark A. Rus-
sell, Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and the 62. Warburg, Thilenius, and Panconcelli- Calzia, La
Public Purposes of Art in Hamburg, 1896 1918 (New York: Guerra del 1914, 16, 22 23.
Berghahn, 2007), 180 219.
63. Cf. Ulrich Raulff, Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg einer
61. Warburg, Thilenius, and Panconcelli- Calzia, La Idee Idea Vincit: Warburg, Stresemann und die Brief-
Guerra del 1914. Cf. Spagnolo-Stiff, Lappello di Aby marke, Vortrge aus dem Warburg-Haus 6 (2002): 125 62;
Warburg; Dorothea McEwan, Idea Vincit. La volante e McEwan, Idea Vincit, 345 76.
vottoriosa idea: Una commissione artistica di Aby War-
burg, in Lo sguardo di Giano: Aby Warburg fra tempo e
memoria, ed. Claudia Cierivia and Pietro Montani (Turin-
Grundbegriffe: The idea overcomes everything is possible (Idea vincit alles

67
ist mglich).64

Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
But the founder of modern iconology knew that any cultural psycho-
machia will be embodied in polarized images that, successively, translate and
betray ideas, make them in turn accessible and incomprehensible, simplified or
placed in mises en abymes. Thus Warburgs battle of ideas was accompanied
by a battle of images: a struggle against certain images (propaganda, lies, anti-
Semitism) in favor of others (survivals, comparisons, deconstructions of ideol-
ogy). This struggle presupposed, in Warburgs mind, collecting documentation
on the war, and the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek began to accumulate an

s
extensive collection of the kind at the very start of the hostilities. If we bear in

Didi-Huber man
mind the private or familial character of the research institution that Warburg
founded, the amount of material it amassed regarding the war is considerable.
At least fifteen hundred such works were acquired by the Library between 1914
and 1918, and innumerable photographs around 5,000, according to the cata-
log, though many have been lost, probably during the transfer of the Library to
London in 1933. Today one can consult some 1,445 war-related items, distributed
in three catalogs. There are press photographs, images bought for use by the
German army, postcards, postage stamps. . . . Even if reduced to a third of its
original quantity, and even if Warburg seems to have given up organizing it into
an atlas, this iconographic documentation gives one an impression like that given
by the plates of Mnemosyne: both are brilliantly organized disorders, profusions
of images in which extraordinary affinities appear, sending us back to the most
fundamental motifs of the Warburgian Kulturwissenschaft.
We are confronted in these images with monuments of a longue dure,
collapsed under bombs, and with Doric columns speckled with the impact of
machine-gun bullets (fig. 9). There are aerial perspectives, most of a lunar or pre-
historic appearance, suggesting that destruction leads to archaeology (fig. 10). On
the ground, the front is overrun with barbed wire and the vegetation devastated,
as if in an exaggeratedly blackened engraving, a ghostly landscape in the manner
of Hercules Segers, or the remains of an apocalypse drawn by an Expressionist
painter (fig. 11). Everywhere the stigmata of the Urkatastrophe, but everywhere,
equally, we find signs of the devastations technological management, as in docu-
ments where the military demands that the war be reproducible in photographic
or cinematographic images (fig. 12). In this nightmare collection, aerial explo-
sions, the terrifying new technology of this war, disseminate pretty little white
clouds in the sky, similar to those that art historians are accustomed to seeing
in paintings of the Italian Primitives (fig. 13). The image of a dirigible hit by a

64. Warburg, Mnemosyne. Grundbegriffe II, 1 (dated July


6, 1929).
68
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Figure 9. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 18, Warburg Institute Archive,


A 2611. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

Figure 10. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 18, Warburg Institute Archive,
T 4156. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London
69
Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
s
Didi-Huber man
Figure 11. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 18, Warburg Institute Archive,
T 3421. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

Figure 12. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 18, Warburg Institute Archive,
T 3597. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London
fighter plane has both the implacable appearance of a technological document
70

and the pathos of a mythological fall, somewhere between the chariot of Phaeton
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

and the plunging of the damned into hell (fig. 14). The image of a horse bizarrely
suspended above the sea has the involuntary splendor of a shot by Sergei Eisen-
stein (fig. 15). But batches of canes stacked in a carvers workshop remind us of
how the war crippled, disfigured, and reduced men (fig. 16).
Elsewhere appear, one after another, in an apparent jumble, military
parades, the gestural language of maritime signaling, Hagia Sophia at Constan-
tinople occupied by the German army, the searchlights of antiaircraft defenses at
night, villages in ruins, mock-ups for battlefield strategy, catalogs for paper cloth-
ing, carcasses of tanks, women weeping farewells for departing sailors, church
altars covered in military commemorative plaques, ships exploding, the equip-
ment on gun turrets, the funeral of a Jew (killed in combat?), naval shipyards in
full activity, bombs left on a beach, houses destroyed from the inside, bridges bro-
ken in two, monuments to the dead, army libraries, the meeting of the very latest
submarine and a sailing ship from a previous century, the reprocessing of trash,
subterranean vehicles, an elephant from a zoo requisitioned for the war effort,
wide-open coffins, dismantled pylons, an orchestra at the front, field ambulances,
a blockhouse in the forest, breadmaking in a time of shortage, rations tickets,
misery in the streets, a row of flayed cattle in an abattoir, a makeshift military
cemetery, soldiers occupying a shtetl in central Europe, an Orthodox Easter pro-
cession on the Eastern front. . . .
It is clear that, in Warburgs eyes, this iconographic cacophony meant
as much as the gestural disorder of an attack of hysteria would have meant in
the eyes of Freud. This visual kaleidoscope was for Warburg a collection of
symptoms, working outside, crossing surfaces, swarming in depths. Given the
necessity of interpreting the symptoms in all their manifestations, Warburg
established, at the heart of his Library, a set of tools for archiving and classify-
ing into files the innumerable motifs of this great modern psychomachia. His
Kriegskartothek comprised, in 1918, seventy-two boxes, holding 90,000 files.65
What remains today, in the London archive, are three boxes of files (Notizks-
ten), numbered 115, 117, and 118, that bear witness to the intense methodological
enterprise the historical, archaeological, philosophical, and philological work
carried out by Warburg and his collaborators on the iconographic materials that
he collected. Claudia Wedepohl went through these boxes in 2002. Kasten 115 is
titled War and Culture (Krieg und Kultur): it comprises a list of objects (med-
als, postcards, war museums), as well as theoretical tools necessary for the lists

65. Cf. Gottfried Korff, Einleitung, in Korff, Kasten


117, 11; P. J. Schwartz, Aby Warburgs Kriegskartothek:
Vorbericht einer Rekonstruktion, in Korff, Kasten 117,
39 69.
71
Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
s
Didi-Huber man
Figure 13. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 18, Warburg Institute Archive,
T 4632. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

Figure 14. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 18, Warburg Institute Archive,
T 4809. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London
72
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Figure 15. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 18, Warburg Institute Archive,
A 193. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London

Figure 16. Aby Warburg, Kriegskartothek, 1914 18, Warburg Institute Archive,
A 383. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London
interpretation (the sociology of Max Weber, for example). Kasten 117 is devoted

73
more particularly to the superstitions of war (Aberglaube im Krieg) and gathers

Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
all kinds of material, both historical and ethnological, and has already been the
subject of a conference (fig. 17).66 Kasten 118 is entitled War and Art (Krieg und
Kunst) and covers a considerable field, from propaganda images to the futurist
manifestos of F. W. Marinetti. A diary consisting of 134 pages on metal rings,
completes this apparatus by establishing the basis for an index in which the vari-
ous writings reveal their collective engagement in and around Warburgs project.
The entries of this index range from the Prehistory of the war to the different
geographical sectors of its occurrence, and from Religion to Techniques of

s
Hygiene, Poetry, Ethics, Munitions Factories, War Literature, Celes-

Didi-Huber man
tial Figures, and Cinema.67

Toward a Critical Anthropology of the War


The project in cultural history and iconology that Warburg undertook on
the Great War belongs to those paper storms that, beginning in 1914, were
unleashed around the European intellectual world. His undertaking belongs,
more specifically, to the German phenomenon of Kriegssammlungen, war collec-
tions, which flourished on a large scale; notably, at the Kaiserliche Universitts
und Landesbibliothek of Strasbourg (which, by the end of the nineteenth century,
had become a model for Warburgs future Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek),
the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the Deutsche Bcherei of Leipzig, and the univer-
sity library of Jena. There were also the extraordinary private collections of The-
odor Bergmann in Frth and of Richard Franck in Berlin and Stuttgart, the latter
a veritable institution, employing no fewer than twenty-four people full time
and in 1921 holding about 45,000 works (plus 2,150 periodical titles).68 A work
by Albert Buddecke on the German Kriegssammlungen, which appeared in 1917,
already listed 217 collections, public and private, devoted to the Great War.69
But what radically differentiates the Warburgian project from all of these
collections, often put on show in public exhibitions for patriotic ends, is of course
its critical content.70 Warburg opened the way to a genuine political iconology

66. Korff, Kasten 117. Kriegssammler im Ersten Weltkrieg, in Korff, Kasten


117, 87 115.
67. London, Warburg Institute Archive, IV.64.1.
70. Cf. Susanne Brandt, Vom Kriegsschauplatz zum
68. Cf. Didier, Orages de Papier, 16 27.
Gedchtnisraum: Die Westfront 1914 49 (Baden-Baden:
69. Albert Buddecke, Die Kriegssammlungen: Ein Nach- Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2000) and Exposer la
weis ihrer Einrichtung und ihres Bestandes (Oldenburg: Grande Guerre: La Premire Guerre mondiale reprsen-
Gerhard Stalling, 1917). Cf. Anke te Heesen, Schnitt te dans les expositions en Allemagne de 1914 nos jours,
1915: Zeitungsausschnittsammlungen im Ersten Welt- in Becker, Histoire culturelle de la Grande Guerre, 139 55;
krieg, in Korff, Kasten 117, 71 85; Alexandra Kaiser, Christine Beil, Der augestellte Krieg: Prsentationen des
. . . das Material zu sammeln, das dieser Krieg in solcher Ersten Weltkrieges 1914 1939 (Tbingen: Tbinger Ver-
Flle schuf wie keiner vorher: Kriegssammlungen und einigung fr Volkskunde, 2005).
Figure 17. Aby Warburg,
74

Kasten 117, 1914 18,


Warburg Institute Archive.
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Photo: The Warburg Institute,


London

and, consequently, to all of the historical and anthropological analyses (which


flourish today) of images produced in the time of the Great War.71 His war col-
lection was guided, indeed, by anthropological concerns, which explains his early
transcendence of the then-established hierarchy, in which works of art rank well
above other images in a crowded visual field. The works of war art acquired by

71. Cf. Bodo von Dewitz, Zur Geschichte der Kriegspho- Nosis, 2000); Jean-Marie Linsolas, La photographie
tographie des Ersten Weltkrieges, in Die letzten Tage der et la guerre: Un miroir du vrai? in Vrai et faux dans la
Menschheit: Bilder des Ersten Weltkrieges, ed. Rainer Rother Grande Guerre, ed. Christophe Prochasson and Anne
(Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum-Ars Nicolai, Rasmussen (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2004), 96 111; Ger-
1994), 163 76; Thomas Noll, Sinnbild und Erzhlung: hard Paul, Bilder des Krieges, Krieg der Bilder: Die Visual-
Zur Ikonographie des Krieges in den Zeitschriftenil- isierung des modernen Krieges (Paderborn-Munich: Ferdi-
lustrationen 1914 bis 1918, in Rother, Die letzten Tage, nand Schningh-Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004), 103 71;
259 72; Alain Sayag, Wir sagten Adieu einer ganzen Paul, Visual History: Ein Studienbuch (Gttingen: Vanden-
Epoche (Apollinaire). Franzsische Kriegsphotographie, hoeck and Ruprecht, 2006); Stephne Audoin-Rouzeau,
in Rother, Die letzten Tage, 187 96; Dieter Vorsteher, Combattre: Une anthropologie historique de la guerre moderne
Bilder fr den Sieg: Das Plakat im Ersten Weltkrieg, in (XIXe XXIe sicle) (Paris: Le Seuil, 2008), 99 145.
Rother, Die letzten Tage, 149 62; Marie-Monique Huss,
Histoires de famille: Cartes postales et culture de guerre (Paris:
the Library in Hamburg between 1914 and 1918 are outstanding for their medi-

75
ocrity.72 A psychomachia, unlike the events treated by art history, is not suscep-

Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
tible to temporal or other limits that a careful methodology might impose, and
it instead will launch a vast anthropology of images and an analysis of the beliefs
that they reconfigure and ceaselessly retransform. Kasten 117 was the object of
specialist attention because its subject, the superstitions of war, entered directly
into such an anthropological design. It is clear, for example, that fundamental
motifs of the Mnemosyne project like the unsettling duality of triumph and
martyrdom, or the crucial notion of demonization73 were already at work in
Warburgs Kriegskartothek.74 It is not by chance that the disastrous anthropomor-

s
phisms that Bataille and his friends examined in the journal Documents between

Didi-Huber man
1929 and 1930 should have ended up under the influence of Marcel Mausss
work as the theme of a Collge de sociologie whose discussions, between 1937
and 1939,75 drafted an anthropology of war that Ernst Kantorowicz, Georges
Dumzil, and Franco Cardini would later ground historically.76
Much recent historiography of the Great War has adopted this anthropo-
logical viewpoint.77 Some historians have written of the war from the perspective
of myth,78 but by now most have at least taken account of the difficulties intrinsic
to distinguishing what are beliefs or rumors from what are facts or testimonies,
notably on the controversial question of German atrocities.79 The historian
can legitimately try to distinguish true from false in this generalized system
of uncertainty, constantly interweaving its competing discourses; but the

72. Cf. Kriegsbilder, 1, ed. Garde-Reserve-Division (Selbst- rire chez les Indo-Europens (Paris: Presses Universitaires
ver, 1917); Konrad Escher, Kunst, Krieg und Krieger: Zur de France, 1969) (republished Paris: Flammarion, 1996);
Geschichte der Kriegsdarstellungen (Zurich: Rascher, 1917); France Cardini, La Culture de la guerre, Xe XVIIIe sicle
War Pictures, ed. Imperial War Museum (London: Walter (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
Judd, 1919).
77. Cf. Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, Penser la Grande
73. Warburg, intro. to Mnmosyne, 39 40. Guerre: Un essai dhistoriographie (Paris: Seuil, 2004),
209 33; Becker, Histoire culturelle de la Grande Guerre;
74. Cf. Ralph Winkle, Masse und Magie. Anmerkungen
Audoin-Rouzeau, Combattre.
zu einem Interpretament der Aberglaubensforschung
whrend des Ersten Weltkriegs, in Korff, Kasten 117, 78. Cf. Mario Isnenghi, Il mito della grande guerra (1989;
261 99. Bologne: Societ Editrice Il Mulino, 1997), 179 260.

75. Cf. Georges Bataille, La Sociologie sacre du monde con- 79. Cf. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atroci-
temporain, ed. Simonetta Falasca Zamponi (Paris: ditions ties, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
Lignes and Manifestes, 2004); Roger Caillois, Quatre essais versity Press, 2001); Olivier Forcade, Information, cen-
de sociologie contemporaine (Paris: Olivier Perrin, 1951), sure et propagande, in Encyclopdie de la Grande Guerre
75 153; Didi-Huberman, Ressemblance informe, 31 164; 1914 1918: Histoire et culture, ed. Stphane Audoin-
Denis Hollier, ed., Le Collge de sociologie, 1937 1939 Rouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker (Paris: Bayard, 2004),
(Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 403 59, 494 501, and 607 40. 451 64; Prochasson, 1914 1918: Retours dexpriences,
13 14 and 69 121.
76. Cf. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Mourir pour la patrie
(Pro Patria Mori) dans la pense politique mdivale, in
Mourir pour la patrie et autres textes (Paris: Presses Univer-
sitaires de France, 1984), 105 41; Georges Dumzil, Heur
et malheur du guerrier: Aspects mythiques de la fonction guer-
anthropologist or the archaeologist of discourses, la Michel Foucault will
76

situate any critique of language and images on another level.80 Warburg char-
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

acterized that level as Kulturwissenschaft and just as one must not confuse the
Kriegskartothek of Warburg with the patriotic Kriegssammlungen that were its
contemporaries, so one must dissociate the problems posed by Kasten 117 from
the positivist issues raised in historical writings of the period that classed the
superstitions of war as simply errors. Examples of this distinction abound.
Contrast Waldemar Deonnas article of 1916, The Increase of Superstitions in
Times of War, with Yves de la Brires critique, written in the same year, of pro-
phetic oracles that proliferated from the beginning of the conflict.81 Or again,
contrast Lucien Roures 1917 Superstitions du front de guerre with Guillaume
Apollinaires more cheerful and far less accusatory Superstitions de guerre, also
of 1917.82
In 1918, Albert Dauzat devoted a book to the legends and superstitions of
war, in which the positivist viewpoint, deriving straight from Auguste Comte or
Gustave Le Bon, is clearly stated:

All troubled periods, and in particular in wartime, by increasing the


general anxiety and credulousness, give birth to a great number of false
rumors that, since they correspond to the general state of mind, are
quick to be accepted by the simple minds of the masses. Acting on weak
and sensitive brains, these rumors provoke hallucinations, even pro-
phetic visions. Finally, as dangers multiply, the rumors tend to waken
and develop ancestral superstitions. Despite the advanced state of our
civilization, the global conflict could not escape this law. To the curi-
ous observer it has offered an abundant and picturesque selection of the
most varied facts, of which we would not have suspected, five years ago,
the possible and fast, as well as multiple appearance around us.83

Against this simplistic viewpoint (which is an evolutionist perspective, in the


trivial sense of the term), the Warburgian analysis of the Nachleben rendered pos-
sible an understanding, at a much more fundamental level, of the anachronistic
coexistence of a hypermodern war with so many archaisms of social behavior.
The psychohistorical viewpoint associated with the Nachleben made such para-
doxes of temporality intelligible, with Warburg showing himself in 1916 17 to
be once again close to Freuds analyses, in this case defining the indissoluble

80. Cf. Prochasson and Rasmussen, Vrai et faux, 9 32. 82. Guillaume Apollinaire, Contributions ltude des
Superstitions de guerre, in Oeuvres en prose compltes, II,
81. Waldemar Deonna, La recrudescence des superstitions
ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michael Dcaudin (Paris: Gal-
en temps de guerre et les statues clous, LAnthropologie 27
limard, 1993), 492; Lucience Roure, Superstitions du
(1916): 243 68. Yves de La Brire, Le destin de lEmpire alle-
front de guerre, tudes 153 (1917): 708 32.
mand et les oracles prophtiques (Paris: Beauchesne, 1916).
83. Albert Dauzat, Lgendes, prophties et superstitions de la
Guerre (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1918), 7.
relations between psychical evolution and regression.84 In 1925 Walter Ben-

77
jamin would rethink how a war so technologically novel brought on a psychotic

Wa r b u r g s Ha u n t e d H o u s e
state in which chemical weaponry clouds of gas came to seem like ghosts, as
unfathomable as they were ruthless.85
Warburg, who defined the history of images as a history of ghosts for
grown-ups, thus approached the Great War not only as a struggle against and in
defense of certain ideas, but also as a struggle with ghosts a struggle in which
the whole of European civilization was engaged, whether consciously or not.86
His analysis of war superstitions doubtless led to his revising his ideas about
the Nachleben at work in the psychomachia of his time.87 We should not be sur-

s
prised to find in the files of Kasten 117 analyses of wartime spiritualist phenom-

Didi-Huber man
ena (apparitions of the dead) and mystical phenomena (the symmetrical cases of
Barbara Weigand in Germany and Claire Ferchaud in France) that have since
been studied in detail by historians.88 Warburg situated these phenomena in an
anthropology or psychohistory in order to verify the survivals at work in each
cultural symptom as it was added to the Kasten 117 collection. Hence it is essential
to recall the coexistence of this Kriegskartothek with Warburgs research, in the
same years, on the religious and political imagery of another period of schism and
cultural crisis the Reformation, haunted as it was by chimerical beings, pope-
donkeys, monk-calves, and other monstrous sows of Lutheran propaganda.89 But
as Nietzsche had done in his time, and as Bataille would soon do as well, Warburg
played dangerously with the conflagration he was investigating. Arranging and
rearranging on his worktable the images of his Kriegskartothek, was Warburg not
making himself the soothsayer or haruspex of the psychomachia that enfolded
and passed through him? Like the first plate of Mnemosyne, relating to divination
(fig. 1), so the last plate, relating to contemporary history (fig. 2), appears to be an
exercise in political divination or presentiment.

84. Sigmund Freud, Confrences dintroduction la psycha- la mmoire, 1914 1930 ( Paris: Armand- Colin, 1994),
nalyse (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 431 53. 15 55 and 103 38; Jay Winter, Entre deuil et mmoire:
La Grande Guerre dans lhistoire culturelle de lEurope,
85. Walter Benjamin, Les armes de demain: Batailles au
trans. Christophe Jaquet (Paris: Armand Colin, 2008),
chloractophnol, au chlorure de diphnylarsine et au sul-
25 38, 67 91. On Claire Ferchaud: Ferchaud, Notes auto-
fure dthyle dichlor, in Romantisme et critique de la civili-
biographiques, II. Mission nationale (Paris: Librairie Pierre
sation (Paris: Payot, 2010), 107 11.
Tqui, 1974); Claude Mouton, Au plus fort de la tourmente:
86. Warburg, Mnemosyne. Grundbegriffe II, 3 (dated July Claire Ferchaud (1978; Montsurs: ditions Rsiac, 1983).
2, 1929).
89. Aby Warburg, La divination paenne et antique dans
87. Cf. Gottfried Korff, Im Zeichen des Saturn: Vor- les crits et les images lpoque de Luther, Essais flo-
lufige Notizen zu Warburgs Aberglaubensforschung im rentins (Paris: Klincksieck, 1990), 245 94. Cf. Claudia
Ersten Weltkrieg, in Korff, Kasten 117, 181 213. Wedepohl, Agitationsmittel fr die Bearbeitung der
Ungelehrten: Warburgs Reformationsstudien zwischen
88. Claudia Schlager, Seherinnen und Seismographen:
Kriegsbeobachtung historisch-kritischer Forschung und
Ausschnitthaftes zur Trouvaille Barbara Weigand aus
Verfolgungswahn, in Korff, Kasten 117, 325 68.
Aby Warburgs Kriegskartothek, in Korff, Kasten 117,
215 43. Cf. Annette Becker, La Guerre et la foi: De la mort
We might say, then, that Warburgs atlas (and his own role as a modern
78

Atlas) came about to show, despite the dangers inherent in the realization, that the
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

varied meanings of the Latin word superstes all point in the same direction. The
word means survivor and testimony but also superstition. Emile Benveniste
showed that superstes signifies, foremost, the one who remains, not above but
beyond or after some occurrence. Superstes involves specifically the act of surviv-
ing, of getting over, as we say of someone who survived an ordeal or got over
a bereavement and thus has been a witness to it.90 The superstes assumes the
suprestitio as the property of being present as a witness to an event from which
he or she is far away in space and time. Hence the superstes is the soothsayer of
a history (whether past, present, or future) in which he or she did not physically
participate. This capacity for presence is fascinating and worrisome at the same
time. Does it not characterize the poetics of all great historians? Whatever the
case, we know that it is the capacity for presence that brought the Romans for
whom divination was an exogenous, alien practice: a Babylonian or Etruscan
practice to distinguish the dangerous supertitio from their own official religio.91
By approaching the extremes of the Great Wars cultural phenomena, Warburg
withdrew to an area of thought above questions of truth and falsity, and far away
from any religion. His Kriegskartothek in this way differs radically from the Ger-
man Kriegssammlungen and from the epic narratives of Jnger, with their patriotic
and bellicose religion. Still, it must be said that Warburg came unsettlingly close
to his objects of study the images that he regarded as so many busy ghosts. His
Library remains haunted to this day, and tampering with it is inadvisable.

90. mile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-


europennes, 2 vols. (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 2:276.

91. Benveniste, Vocabulaire, 2:276 79.

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