Dreamland of Humanists by Emily J. Levine;

Author:Emily J. Levine; [Levine, Emily J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

The Hamburg-America Line: Exiles as Exports

There are seven illustrious Schools,

Competing for Pan like wild mules.

But they all quite agree

That the best thing would be

If the others would take him, the fools.1

ERWIN PANOFSKY

It was a strange adventure to be landed with some 60,000 books in the heart of London and to be told: “Find friends and introduce them to your problems.”

FRITZ SAXL

As a result of wartime emigration, Hamburg finally became in Warburg’s vision a “Gateway of Knowledge,” a place from which ideas, like goods, were exported. That the Hamburg School proved so easily exportable was testament to the cosmopolitan quality of its scholarship, which flourished in Hamburg so long as the city’s cosmopolitan identity reigned. Although these scholars found new homes, oases from the war when a national imperative usurped this Hanseatic tradition, they did not believe that the cities of their exile—London, New York, Princeton—were their final destinations. In 1936 Panofsky, then at Princeton, wrote to Saxl in London, “Incidentally, I am planning a reunion for our whole circle of friends in Honduras or Liberia, at some point in the year 1940. Then things will probably have advanced so far that Jews and liberals will no longer be desired even here.”2 Should the political situation once more become unfavorable, the cosmopolitan intellectual circle planned to relocate. The Hamburg School had become a humanist dreamland, to exist only in the minds of its members. An examination of their ideas during the period of their emigration reveals how a changing set of geographical, cultural, and political contexts were both constructive and destructive for their intellectual trajectories.

With the onset of National Socialism in Germany, Warburg, Cassirer, and Panofsky each met a different fate. Warburg, who had died in 1929, escaped the trauma of the Second World War, and his early death exempted him from the postwar reflection that forced the reconsideration of so much of interwar philosophy. The Warburg Library, too, went into exile: following negotiations between the American Warburgs, various London donors, and the Nazis, nearly sixty thousand books and photographs, along with various machinery, were piled onto two ships of the Hamburg line, the Hermia and the Jessica, and sailed to the London port in December 1933. In 1944, supported by the English philanthropist and art collector Samuel Courtauld and a rising interest in the use of images in historical study, the library would be incorporated into the University of London, where it subsequently was used for several decades of collaborative research. But in 1933, at the time of the exile, the library’s security was not a sure thing, for soon after the books left the port, as Bing recalled, “responsibility for decisions on emigration passed from the Hamburg authorities to the central party offices in Berlin.”3

The Cassirers, too, escaped only just in time. After his brief return to Hamburg in the summer of 1933, Ernst Cassirer emigrated with his family first to Oxford and then in 1935 to Sweden, whose academic culture he assimilated in a remarkably short period of time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.