Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School by Emily J. Levine (review)

The Northern German city of Hamburg is the main protagonist in Levine’s book, and the cultural conditions, contexts, and institutions the city provided for the stupendous intellectual production that took place there in the first half of the twentieth century, frame, underlie, and inform this interesting monograph. Levine’s “Tale of One City” is one of transformation, for it tells the (hi)story of Hamburg as a city that reinvented itself from a thriving (but culturally unaware and unambitious) mercantile center to a hub of humanist scholarship—an unlikely transformation, perhaps, as Levine points out with reference to Heinrich Heine’s sardonic characterization of nineteenth-century Hamburg as a materialist and philistine city of merchants and a poor intellectual reputation. How, then, was it possible that only two generations later Warburg, Cassirer, and Panofsky, an outstanding trio of twentieth-century pioneers in the humanities, emerged from this very city? What changed, so that the Hanseatic city, whose identity for centuries had been defined as a marketplace of goods and by the percentages of import and export (and with precisely these percentages, from the eve of the First World War, Levine opens up her book [1])—emerged as an entirely different marketplace, marked by the export of ideas, scholarship, and deep cultural knowledge?

In order to answer these questions, the author traces what might be dubbed a “materialist history of ideas” with a focus on the social settings, economic contexts, institutional processes and politics that enabled and propelled the development of ideas and fostered a climate of intellectual exchange and knowledge transfer between individuals and collectives in various contexts, disciplines, and institutions. Informed by the work of British historian R.G. Collingwood, who in The Idea of History examines the “conditions for the possibility of knowledge” (cited in the programmatic quote Levine chose as a motto for her book) and by Pierre Bourdieu’s analyses of “force fields” and “social conditions” that impact the possibility of knowledge (24), Levine presents a history that is as much about the sociology of knowledge as it is about knowledge and ideas themselves. In her own words, her book “does not offer a traditional philosophical argument, but it does offer a way of thinking about ideas” (25). Reflective of a tradition of social history that is more closely associated with British and European rather than American scholarship, Levine’s methodology also recalls the work of art historian Michael Baxandall and his examination of the social forces and circumstances shaping works of art. And, of course, Levine’s study is methodically inspired by Warburg’s, and—to a lesser extent—by Cassirer’s and Panofsky’s own approaches. True to Warburg’s legacy, it is sincere, thorough, and well-researched, mediating with ease and elegance between diverse disciplines and discourses, and invested in examining crossroads and “in-between” spaces (Hamburg’s unique relationship between culture and commerce, the Weimar interwar period, and the precarious position of German-Jewish intellectuals being some of these.) Like Cassirer’s work, it aspires to a phenomenology of knowledge, without, however, sharing Cassirer’s idealistic underpinnings. The influence of Panofsky makes itself felt perhaps most decidedly through the mediation of Bourdieu, who appropriated, among other things, Panofsky’s notion of “habitus” (24 and 278–279).

By the time the reader has completed the tour de force through ten chapters, 284 pages of text, and nearly 90 pages of notes (plus a 42-page bibliography and a very thorough index), the fact that the commercial city of Hamburg became the site of this unconventional interdisciplinary endeavor does not seem all that unlikely any more. Levine’s first chapter, “Culture, Commerce, and the City,” unfolds a panoramic history of Hamburg from the middle of the nineteenth century to, roughly, the advent of the Nazis. Building on publications such as Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s 2003 volume Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and National Culture: Public Culture...