The Other Weimar: The Warburg Circle as Hamburg School

Part of series that examines the relationship between locality and the development of ideas, “The Other Weimar” argues that the careers of Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky, whose ideas have recently gained recognition, ought be considered in their historical context: Weimar-era Hamburg. Drawing on the history of Hamburg as a cosmopolitan and mercantile free-city, the article argues that Hamburg provided intellectual life with unique conditions that are reflected in Warburg’s work on the Renaissance, Cassirer’s “cosmopolitan nationalist” philosophy, and Panofsky’s entrepreneurial “third way” in art history, which, despite its passage to America, bears the mark of its origins.