Abstract
Four reasons suggest themselves why this study of aviation discourse and its links with war, fascism and modernity should begin with the art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg. First, Warburg deserves attention from the point of view of theory and methodology; he sets an example for a “cultural history” that escapes interdisciplinary “border guards.”1
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Notes
Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” (1912), in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, Los Angeles, CA 1999, pp. 563–91; here p. 585.
See Ulrich Raulff, “Von der Privatbibliothek des Gelehrten zum Forschungsinstitut. Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer und die neue Kulturwissenschaft,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 23/1997, pp. 28–43;
and Bernd Roeck, “Psychohistorie im Zeichen Saturns. Aby Warburgs Denksystem und die moderne Kulturgeschichte,” in Wolfgang Hardtwig/Hans-Ulrich Wehler (eds.), Kulturgeschichte heute, Göttingen 1996, pp. 231–54. It may be thought illu-minating in this context that Warburg studied in Bonn under Karl Lamprecht and others. But it is his nomadic, sometimes thoroughly eccentric, habits and especially his methodological rejection of anything absolute or cut-and-dried that account for the current interest in his work and ensure him a place in this book. On his academic career path
see Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, Oxford 1986, pp. 25–66;
Karen Michels, Aby Warburg. Im Bannkreis der Ideen, Munich 2007, pp. 27–34;
and Bernd Roeck, Der junge Aby Warburg, Munich 1997, pp. 41–53.
Gertrud Bing, “Aby M. Warburg. Vortrag,” in Aby M. Warburg, Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed. Dieter Wuttke, Baden-Baden 1980, pp. 455–64; here p. 464.
On the M. M. Warburg & Co. banking house, see Eduard Rosenbaum/Ari J. Sherman, M.M. Warburg and Co., 1938–1978, Merchant Bankers of Hamburg, Boston, MA 1979;
and on the Warburg family, Ron Chernow, The Warburgs. The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family, New York, NY 1994.
Despite an abundance of literature on the bourgeoisie, there is a need for research to demonstrate fully on an empirical basis, and in relation to the history of ideas, the nexus of scientific rationality, education, progress and liberalism. See the recently published: Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois. Between History and Literature, London 2013.
Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” in Hans Reiss (ed.), Political Writings, 2nd edn, Cambridge 1991, p. 58. p. 54.
See George L. Mosse, “Das deutsch-jüdische Bildungsbürgertum,” in Reinhart Koselleck(ed.), Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Teil II. Bildungsgüter und Bildungswissen, Stuttgart 1990, pp. 168–80.
Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany, New York, NY 1969, p. 103.
Quoted in Klaus Vondung, “Probleme einer Sozialgeschichte der Ideen,” in Vondung (ed.), Das wilhelminische Bildungsbürgertum. Zur Sozialgeschichte seiner Ideen, Göttingen 1976, p. 9.
See here Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge 1991 and Modernity and the Holocaust, Ithaca, NY 1989.
Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (orig. 1908), Princeton, NJ 1970, pp. 21f.
According to Dan Diner, it is precisely this transnationality, transterritoriality, or nonterritorial disposition of the Jews that could make Jewish history a new paradigm for historiography in the postnational age. See Dan Diner, “Geschichte der Juden. Paradigma einer europäischen Geschichtsschreibung,” in Dan Diner, Gedächtniszeiten. Über jüdische undandere Geschichten, Munich 2003, pp. 246–62.
On universalism as an “institutional imperative” of science, see Robert K. Merton, “The Ethos of Science,” in Piotr Sztompka (ed.), On Social Structure and Science, Chicago, IL 1996, pp. 267–76, 268f.
Shulamit Volkov, “Jewish Success in Science,” in Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites. Trials in Emancipation. New York, NY 2006, pp. 224–7, esp. 228ff.
Both the bourgeoisie and liberalism underwent a number of mutations in the course of the nineteenth century. They therefore require more detailed consideration than they can be given here. See inter alia Geoff Eley, “Liberalism, Europe and the Bourgeoisie 1860–1914,” in David Blackbourn/Richard J. Evans (eds.), The German Bourgeoisie. Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century, London 1991, pp. 293–317;
Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, Princeton, NJ 1999;
Jörn Leonhard, Liberalismus. Zur historischen Semantik eines europäis-chen Deutungsmusters, Munich 2001;
James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago, IL 1978.
On the Luftmensch metaphor, see Nicolas Berg, Luftmenschen. Zur Geschichte einer Metapher, Göttingen 2008.
Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth/C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology, Boston, MA 1948, p. 139.
Ulrich Raulff, Wilde Energien. Vier Versuche zu Aby Warburg, Göttingen 2003, pp. 72f.
Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’–Two Historical Categories,” in Koselleck (ed.), Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Cambridge, MA 1985 [orig. 1979], p. 265.
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday. An Autobiography, New York, NY 1943, p. 3.
Edward Grey, Twenty-Five Years. 1892–1916, vol. 2, London 1925, p. 20.
Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death, New York, NY 1918, pp. 4, 11.
On Warburg’s illness, see Ludwig Binswanger/Aby Warburg, La guarigione infinita. Storia clinica di Aby Warburg, ed. Davide Stimili, Vicenza 2005.
See Dorothea McEwan, “Ein Kampf gegen Windmühlen. Warburgs pro-italienische publizistische Initiative,” in Gottfried Korff (ed.), Kasten 117. Aby Warburg und der Aberglaube im Ersten Weltkrieg, Tübingen 2007, pp. 135–63; and Peter J. Schwartz, “Aby Warburgs Kriegskartothek. Vorbericht einer Rekonstruktion,” in ibid., pp. 39–69.
On the “nervous age,” see Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität. Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler, Munich 1998.
On the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, see Wilhelm Pinder, Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte Europas, Berlin 1926. It was Ernst Bloch, though, not the art historian Pinder, who made the phrase more widely known.
See Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Zurich 1935.
Cf. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans. Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, New York, NY 1978, pp. 129f.
See Joachim Radkau, Technik in Deutschland. Vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, Frankfurt/Main 1989;
and Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland 1880–1933, Paderborn 1999
The new library building in Hamburg was fitted with a pneumatic dispatch system, a book and a passenger lift, conveyor belts, and lifting tables, as well as numerous telephones with outside lines and for communication inside the building. See Tilmann von Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warurg. Architektur, Einrichtung und Organisation, Hamburg 1992.
Aby Warburg, “Airship and Submarine in the Medieval Imagination” (1913), in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, pp. 333–42.
Ernst Jünger, Das Abenteuerliche Herz. Aufzeichnungen bei Tag und Nacht, Berlin 1929, p. 224. Immediately after this (pp. 224ff.), Jünger moves on to his experiences at an airfield and describes the fliers there as conquerors of technology.
See Thomas Rohrkrämer, “Die Verzauberung der Schlange. Krieg, Technik und Zivilisationskritik beim frühen Ernst Jünger,” in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Der Erste Weltkrieg. Wirkung, Wahrnehmung, Analyse, Munich 1994, pp. 848–74, p. 865.
Heinrich Heine, “The Baths of Lucca,” in Travel Pictures, New York, NY 2008, p. 107.
On the flag dispute of 1926, see Bernd Buchner, Um nationale und republikanische Identität. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und der Kampf um die politischen Symbole in der Weimarer Republik, Bonn 2001, pp. 104–31.
On Redslob’s activity as Arts Secretary, especially in connection with the “hassle of stamp design,” see Annegret Heffen, Der Reichskunstwart. Kunstpolitik in den Jahren 1920–1930. Zu den Bemühungen um eine offizielle Reichskunstpolitik in der Weimarer Republik, Essen 1986, pp. 132–9.
On the Treaty of Locarno and the stabilization of European relations, see Ralph Blessing, Der mögliche Frieden. Die Modernisierung der Außenpolitik und die deutsch-französischen Beziehungen 1923–1929, Munich 2008.
On cave exit and light metaphors, see Hans Blumenberg, Höhlenausgänge, Frankfurt/ Main 1989.
Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg. Symbol, Art, and History, New Haven, CT 1989, pp. 142–77.
Ernst Cassirer, “Eidos und Eidolon. Das Problem des Schönen und der Kunst in Platons Dialogen,” in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. 2, Leipzig 1924, pp. 1–27.
Erwin Panofsky, “Idea.” Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie, Leipzig 1924.
On cultural-evolutionary theories and their relationship to the narrative of progress, see Bernd Weiler, Die Ordnung des Fortschritts. Zum Aufstieg und Fall der Fortschrittsidee in der “jungen” Anthropologie, Bielefeld 2006. Weiler’s considerations on the idea of progress in the critique of cultural anthropology focus especially on the figure of Franz Boas, whom Warburg met at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington before his trip among the Pueblo Indians.
On the scientization of the social, see Lutz Raphael, “Die Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen als methodische und konzeptionelle Herausforderung für eine Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22/1996, pp. 165–93.
Freud, Reflections on War and Death, p. 44. On the “spiritual affinity” between Warburg and Freud, see Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris 2002.
On the aesthetic and social modernist movements, see Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism. The Sense of a New Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, Basingstoke, UK 2007, pp. 43–69, 130–59.
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Esposito, F. (2015). Idea non vincit: Warburg and the Crisis of Liberal Modernity. In: Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362995_2
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