THE NOMAD PAST:

GERMAN HISTORIES, ITALIAN JOURNEYS,

AND THE VISIBLE TEXTURE OF TIME

by

Peter A. Lawless

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(History)
in The University of Michigan
2009

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Geoffrey H. Eley, Co-Chair

Associate Professor Scott D. Spector, Co-Chair
Professor Kathleen M. Canning
Associate Professor Julia C. Hell
© Peter A. Lawless
2009
For Mom

ii
 Acknowledgements

As the present work has sought to explore unconventional and nomadic

landscapes of history and historiography, the itineraries of its writing have likewise

required a nomadism similar to those of its subject matter. Yet while these explorations

have required the crossing of oceans and national boundaries, while it has meant moving

through disciplinary and methodological boundaries, and while it has often meant passing

beyond the confines of my own expectations and uncertainties, this journey could not

have been possible had it not been for the rich territories of goodwill, assistance and

fellowship through which it passed. For as any traveler knows all too well, the

significance of exotic destinations always seems to fade before the memory of those who

joined us along the way, those friends and the mentors who, in the good times, shared the

pleasures of the journey and, in the bad times, helped shoulder its burdens. Indeed, even

the most stalwart of travelers – whether passing through windswept steppes or navigating

the labyrinthe of the archive – sometimes requires the encouragement of a friend, words

of advice from a fellow pilgrim, and a place to rest a weary head. And if such a journey

has any real reward, then its riches consist precisely in the people and places who made

the wanderer feel at home.

Thus, whatever its other modest virtues or merits, the present work has been

extraordinarily fortunate in the priceless coin of fellowship, encouragement and

assistance. The sources of this wealth are far too numerous to present here, and for most

iii
of these the following chapters must be testament in themselves to the measure of their

contributions and the measure of my gratitude. As for the others, I am deeply indebted to

the many institutions that formed the many ―homes‖ from which I was able to pursue my

explorations. Thanks thus are due to the Department of History at the University of

Michigan, the Department of History at University of Montana, and to the University of

Michigan‘s Rackham Graduate School. Among those, on the other hand, who provided

gracious assistance during research and travels further afield, I have to thank the

Fulbright Program, the University of Bielefeld, the Staatsarchiv Kanton Basel-Stadt, the

Goethe and Schiller Archives in Weimar, the German Historical Institute in Rome, and

the Warburg Institute in London. In all of these places, I have been fortunate to

encounter people whose combination of dedication to scholarship and welcoming

graciousness remain an inspiration to me in my own pursuits.

A still more profound debt of gratitude is owed to the community of historians,

scholars, and good people at the University of Michigan, a community upon whose

encouragement and guidance every word of the following work ultimately rests. Among

the most significant of these were the friends and colleagues that I met among my fellow

graduate students, friends that have become scholars in their own right and whose work

continues to inspire me. I would thus be remiss not to thank those with whom I shared

many an hour in the trenches of the seminar room: Mary O‘Reilly, Erika Gasser, Roberta

Pergher, Anne Berg, Erik Huneke, Tara Zara, Lenny Urena and so many others. In many

ways, however, this rich community of graduates was built on a foundation – at least for

iv
the German historians among us – laid down by the dedicated and professional mentoring

of Professors Kathleen Canning, Geoff Eley and Scott Spector. And to these more senior

advisors, scholars and friends, I also owe a debt that is impossible to fully reckon.

Indeed, the assistance and encouragement of these three scholars, along with that of Julia

Hell of the Department of Germanic Languages and Jonathan Marwil, have been

invaluable and irreplaceable; they have been not only as advisors in the task of navigating

the dissertation, but have also been also models of historical scholarship whose influence

will not soon be forgotten. Furthermore, and by no means the least among these friends

and fellows at University of the Michigan History, I could not proceed without thanking

the staff of the department – Shannon Rolston, Lorna Altstetter, Kathleen King, Sheila

Coley, Dawn Kapalla, Diane Wyatt, and many others – whose help, patience, and

dedication knows no bounds.

In similar fashion, the present work would have been impossible without the

infinite patience and kindness of my friends and family, the loved ones and companions

who had faith in me even when my faith in myself occasionally ebbed. My family is thus

owed perhaps the greatest debt of gratitude of all. In this, as in everything else, they have

given me more than I could ever repay; Susan Lawless, Cynthia Lawless and Peter

Lawless Sr. are with me in everything I do. As for others, there are too many to list here,

but among the foremost is Natalie Gulsrud, an unlooked for friend and companion whose

sense of wonder and unfailing optimism sustained and inspired me during year of

archival research. Finally, however, no expression of gratitude would be complete

v
without mentioning the two boon companions that brought life to what would otherwise

have been a much drearier journey. The first of these was a mountainous yet gentle Akita

named Cosmo - an irreplaceable friend of unmatched steadfastness and infinite patience –

and the second goes by the name of Seamus, the very soul of enthusiasm and good cheer

in the form of a German Shepherd. To them, as to so many others, I owe a profound debt

of gratitude for making this work possible.

vi
 Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

Abstract ix

Introduction:
The Territories of Historicism and the Visions of the Nomad 1

Part I - Fragments of Rome: Jacob Burckhardt and the Ruins of History

Chapter One
Basel, Berlin, Italy:
Burckhardt‘s Early Itineraries in the Age of Historicism 61

Chapter Two
The Subject as a Work of Art:
Anschauung as Remembrance in the Cicerone 123

Chapter Three
Rome, Capital of the Seventeenth Century:
Burckhardt, Urban Space and Baroque Modernity 165

Part II - The Library and the Archive:

Aby Warburg, Sigmund Freud and Fin-de-Siècle Italy

Chapter Four
Per Monstrum ad Astra:
The Library of Aby Warburg and the Labyrinth of Italy 221

Chapter Five
Auch ich im Archiv:
Sigmund Freud and the Italian Scene of Writing 289

vii
Part III - The Dialectics of Sightseeing:
Walter Benjamin, German Historicism and a Little Red Book

Chapter Six
Let‘s Go!
On the Road with Walter Benjamin and Auratic Historicism 336

Chapter Seven
Walter Benjamin, Karl Baedeker and the Porous Theater of Naples 392

Conclusion 432

Bibliography 457

viii
 Abstract

This study examines the relationship between German historical thought and the travel

cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it investigates how mobile forms

of visuality (art tours, sightseeing, urban experience) conditioned the reception of

historical traces and historically resonant spaces. Organized around the work and travel

of Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin, the

dissertation focuses on mobile and visual receptions of the Italian past, at both popular

and elite levels, and how these challenged and complicated the landscapes of historical

consciousness that had been shaped by nineteenth-century German historicism. By

examining Burckhardt‘s Cicerone and his journeys to Rome, Warburg‘s reconstructions

of the Italian Renaissance, Freud‘s Pompeian ―archive‖, and Benjamin‘s Neapolitan

Denkbild, this study reveals how Italian travel became an opportunity for exploration of

alternative set of historical reconstructions. Furthermore, by simultaneously reading these

phenomena alongside popular accounts of travel and visual culture – such as Baedeker

guidebooks and literary magazines – the dissertation brings into relief an experience of

history that emerged through encounters with material culture, through visual experience

and various forms of mobility and displacement. Thus, where conventional approaches

of the German historicist tradition – extending from Leopold von Ranke to Friedrich

Meinecke - tended to produce historical landscapes organized around linear narrative

forms and national geographies, the study reveals forms of historical representation that

ix
emerged at the margins of these historicist practices/territories. In terms of theory, the

dissertation borrows the concept of ―nomadism‖ from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,

a concept that captures a form of mobile alterity in both conceptual and physical spaces,

and shows how the work of Burckhardt, Warburg Freud and Benjamin represented

―nomadic‖ detours from the historiographical territories defined by German historicism.

Furthermore, the dissertation shows how these mobile, visually-oriented and historical

―nomadisms‖ manifested what Gilles Deleuze and Christine Buci-Glucksmann have

described as baroque representational forms. Ultimately, the dissertation describes

approaches that pursued historical experience not from within the methodological and

conceptual territories of classical German historicism, but instead embraced modes of

baroque historical experience whose representations were characterized by categories like

theatricality, visuality, allegory, simultaneity, and historical rupture.

x
 Introduction:
The Territories of Historicism and the Visions of the Nomad

The constructions of history are comparable to military orders that discipline the true life
and confine it to barracks.

Walter Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, (S1a,3)

The yellowing, leather-bound volume had already seen much use by the time it

was transformed into a child‘s scrapbook. In the past, it had been a register or ledger of

sorts, its pages neatly filled with careful, businesslike entries spanning the years 1791 to

1798. Nearly four decades later, however, a new owner took possession of the volume,

and conferred upon it both a new title and a new function. For the better part of three

years, from 1833 to 1836, the book became an anthology—or Sammelband as Burckhardt

described it—of historically oriented odds and ends that its youthful author would

collectively entitled Antiquities. On pages once filled exclusively with the lines and

figures of the accountant, new entries in the form of images, sketches and commentary

now appeared. The volume became a registry of a different kind, a young man‘s

collection of historical fragments and traces of various sorts. Coins, allegorical emblems,

maps, architectural plans, heraldry and dynastic genealogies were all here patiently

affixed and arranged in an attempt to organize, and render visible, the pieces of a past that

1
littered a young man‘s present. What had once been, in other words, an accountant‘s

ledger had become a child‘s historical Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities.1

The book in question belonged to a young Jacob Burckhardt and is described in

detail by Swiss historian Werner Kaegi in his seven volume biographical odyssey

dedicated to the Basel historian. For Kaegi, the collection of Antiquities represents an

illuminating glimpse into an early encounter between the youthful Burckhardt and the

traces, marks and fragments of a past to whose study he would later devote his life. But

whether or not such juvenilia can tell us much about the specific trajectory of

Burckhardt‘s intellectual biography, it nevertheless remains a remarkably suggestive

document, one that forces us to think about the ways in which relationships with the past

have been, and can be, constructed, organized and perhaps even undermined. In other

words, despite (or perhaps because of) its juvenile origins and its idiosyncratic character,

Burckhardt‘s Antiquities represents a peculiarly dense example of a particular kind of

relation to the past, one whose character is markedly at odds with the more conventional

and more legitimate historical ―imaginaries‖ of its era. Like Foucault‘s evocation of

Borges‘ ―Chinese Encyclopedia‖ at the opening of The Order of Things, Burckhardt‘s

anthology prompts us to pause and ask exactly what organizing principle governs this

fantastic collection. What are the criteria for inclusion and exclusion? What kind of past

1
The Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, refers to a largely early modern practice of encyclopedic
collection and display, a practice often deploying idiosyncratic categories of organization and presentation.
A rich literature has emerged in recent years regarding the relation between the Wunderkammer and the
development of modern forms of the museum. See for instance: Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor,
Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century (London: British
Museum Pubs., 2000); Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte and Jan Lazardzig eds., Collection, Laboratory,
Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); Peter M. McIsaac,
Museums of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting (University Park, PA: Penn
State Press, 2007).

2
is here made visible, and perhaps rendered sensible, to the young man who patiently

constructed this Wunderkammer?

In order to put such questions into perspective, however, we might recall that an

historical collection of a very different sort was just then taking shape in the German

academies to the north. Established in 1819 by Prussian reformer Karl vom Stein, the

Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde undertook the enormous project of

gathering, editing and publishing the extant sources of German medieval history. The

result was the Monumenta Germaniae Historica which, after its first volume was

published in 1826, was quickly recognized as one of the landmark achievements of

nineteenth-century German historical studies.2 Indeed, the Monumenta served as both a

symbol and example of an approach to historical scholarship that would come to be

known as German historicism, an approach that would achieve and maintain hegemonic

disciplinary status well into the twentieth century. And while the governing principles of

Burckhardt‘s juvenilia remain somewhat opaque, those that guided the specific project of

the Monumenta, and the more general aims of the German school, were certainly not.

With the rather unambiguous motto of Sanctus amor patriae dat animum ("Holy love for

the fatherland gives the spirit"), and with its roots in the era of Prussian reform, the

Monumenta openly declared itself a patriotic undertaking. Its task was that of salvaging

and restoring a past to the German nation, of making possible a coherent national

narrative where there had once been only mute fragments. To this end, such traces were

to be gathered together and made available for the kind of rigorous, critical research then

2
Harry Bresslau, Geschichte der Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Im Auftrage ihrer Zentraldirektion
(Hannover: Hahn‘sche, 1976).

3
being pioneered by Leopold von Ranke and his seminar at the University of Berlin. What

subsequently emerged from such seminars, and from projects like the Monumenta, was

the establishment of an historiographical tradition that would not only play an enormous

role in the construction of German national self-consciousness during the nineteenth

century, but would go far in defining the methodological character and commitments of

modern historical scholarship in Germany and beyond.

At the same time, while true enough as far as it goes, such a description of

German historicism nevertheless remains squarely in the realm of the commonplace, both

revealing too little and claiming too much about the tradition. Too little, because

historicism was always more than a mere set of innovative methodological and

institutional arrangements among German intellectual and academics. Too much,

because the origins of a recognizably modern, ostensibly rigorous and institutionally

legitimate study of the past are often crudely traced to those of an over-valorized German

historical tradition. What usually goes missing in such narratives—whether found in

antiquarian intellectual histories or in triumphalist quests for disciplinary origins—are the

cultural and ideological dimensions of German historicism. The point here is the fact that

historicism was a cultural and historical phenomenon, intimately linked to, and embedded

within a larger and historically specific complex of social and political projects.3 While

historicism was certainly an enormously successful and influential approach to producing

a visible and usable past, it was nevertheless an invention and not a discovery, an

3
See, for instance, the expansive formulation of Annette Wittkau in Historismus: Zur Geschichte des
Begriffs und des Problems (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992). ―Im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts
setzte sich dieses geschichtswissenschaftliche Erkenntnisverfahren nach und nach in allen Kulturbereichen
durch: Politik, Recht, Wirtschaft, Moral und Religion, ja selbst music und Kunst wurden mit Hilfe dieser
Erkenntnismethode historisch erforscht. Die Geschichtswissenschaft wurde zur Leitwissenschaft des
Jahrhunderts.‖

4
invention designed to appropriate (and encourage the appropriation of) the past in a

specific fashion for specific purposes. If History, therefore, can trace its origins as a

modern discipline to the German school of the nineteenth century, then ―discipline‖ must

surely be understood in the Foucaultian sense. For in the methods, the institutions and

the theoretical apparatus this tradition produced, there emerged a vision of the past that

was enforced as much as revealed, and a vision whose cultural influence extended

throughout the nineteenth-century academy and penetrated deeply into the historical

cultures and consciousness of modern Germany.4

Historicism, from this perspective, was both a powerfully integrative social

formation and a cultural optic through which territories of the past were to be

4
The literature on both the theories and practices of historicism is enormous, but it is also fragmented by
the various ways in which the term has come to be defined and described – both as a set of historical
institutions and as a body of thought that continues to play a role in contemporary discussions. One can see
in the following how historicism still remains a very mobile topic, with works ranging from Ranke to the
currents of the so-called New Historicism of the 80‘s and 90‘s. For a general institutional and intellectual
introduction, see the still very useful: Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History (Hannover, NH:
Wesleyan University Press, 1968). Also see Iggers‘, "Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,"
Journal of the History of Ideas 56, no. 1 (1995). Likewise useful are: Peter Koslowski, ed., The Discovery
of Historicity in German Idealism and Historism Studies in Economic Ethics and Philosophy (Berlin:
Springer, 2005); Arnaldo Momigliano, Historicism Revisited (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1974). Paul
Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996); Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the
Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Thomas Howard, Religion and the
Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. De Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-
Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Robert D'Amico,
Historicism and Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1989); Marjorie Levinson, Rethinking Historicism:
Critical Readings in Romantic History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Stephen and Catherine Gallagher
Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Friedrich Engel-
Janosi, The Growth of German Historicism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1944); Charles R Bambach,
Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Michael Birx,
Monika Steinhauser, and Verband fur Kunst-und Kulturwissenschaften Ulmer Verein, Geschichte allein ist
zeitgemass: Historismus in Deutschland (Lahn-Giessen: Anabas-Verlag Kampf, 1978); Horst Walter
Blanke, and Jorn Rusen, ed., Von der Aufklarung zum Historismus. Zum Strukturwandel des historischen
Denkens (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1984); Erich Fülling, Geschichte als Offenbarung. Studien zur
Frage Historismus und Glaube von Herder bis Troeltsch (Berlin: 1956); Thomas Nipperdey, "Historismus
und Historismuskritik Heute 1976," in Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie, gesammelte Aufsatze zur neuren
Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht); Annette Wittkau, Historismus: Zur Geschichte des
Begriffs und des Problems (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992); Roland Kamzelak, and Gotthart
Wunberg ed., "Historische Gedachtnisse sind Palimpseste": Hermeneutik, Historismus, New Historicism,
Cultural Studies (Paderborn: Mentis, 2001).

5
constructed, made visible, and rendered useful. Whether in its methodological and

theoretical innovations, or in its political and institutional commitments, historicism not

only produced a set of temporal landscapes through whose mapping Germany could

come to know itself, but also strictly governed the legitimate means by which such

landscapes could be explored and exploited. To be sure, if historicism defined historical

spaces that could be charted in relation to national, social and cultural discourses, in

terms of both substance and method, one must admit that a work such as that of

Burckhardt‘s anthology lies far outside its disciplinary boundaries. If the Monumenta is a

defining milestone in the construction and surveying of an historicist past, the Antiquities

can only appear at best as a child‘s fancy and at worst as a kind of dangerous alien

artifact. In its provenance as the work of a child, its emphasis on visual traces of the past,

its character as a palimpsest of overlapping narratives, its impulses towards collage, its

resistance to a central and linear telos, Burckhardt‘s scrapbook pursues its exploration of

the past in ways that would render it utterly senseless to the professionally trained,

nationally oriented and philologically sensitive writers of the German historical school.

And yet there the volume sits, quietly communicating with the past. It produces

meanings and moves in grammars perhaps comprehensible only to a young Swiss teen,

but it nevertheless represents, however obscurely, a relation or dialogue with the past. In

this, the scrapbook represents a sort of insistent externality, a willful and Eigensinnig

alterity in the face of the territorial regimes defined by historicism. Its landscapes lie

resolutely beyond the boundaries prescribed by legitimately scientific history, and in

territories defined by its own methods and its own movements. The scrapbook, in other

6
words, is a temporal outside that refuses to be brought within the disciplinary Heimat of

―conventional‖ and ―legitimate‖ historical practice.

What the scrapbook represents, to borrow a term from Gilles Deleuze, is a kind

of ―nomadism,‖ a sort of insistent externality that resists re-territorialization within the

historical topographies defined by historicism. Indeed, if the territories of German

historical consciousness in the nineteenth century were decisively shaped and informed

by the discourses of academic historicism, the scrapbook of the young Jacob Burckhardt

nevertheless bears witness to an ever-present possibility of movement, alterity and

escape, an alternate topos of historical memory and reflection which persists beyond the

boundaries of conventional methodologies and conceptual frameworks. In light of this,

the aim of the present work is to explore several such historical ―elsewheres‖ as they

emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ―elsewheres‖ whose alterity

emerged both beyond and in relation to the territorial contours of historical consciousness

that had been established and enforced by the powerful discourses of German historicism.

The object, in other words, is not to recapitulate or rehearse the institutional and

disciplinary history of German historicism, but to seek out and describe a set of historical

interventions that emerged on its margins and in its shadow.

The present work therefore hopes to trace the movements and methods of what I

have here called a ―nomad past,‖ a mode of historical reflection that evades enclosure in

conventional historiographical boundaries. To this end, the work is organized around a

series of historical interventions and expeditions conducted by Jacob Burckhardt, Aby

Warburg, Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin, and the first of several threads that the

following chapters trace out emerges in the marginal position each occupied in relation to

7
their contemporary historical institutions. Indeed, while each devoted a significant

portion of his intellectual efforts to questions of history, memory and temporality, none

of them could truly claim full membership in the Zunft, or guild, of German historical

scholarship. Taken together—from Burckhardt‘s border outpost in mid-nineteenth

century Basel to Benjamin‘s last moments in 1940 on the frontier between France and

Spain—these figures describe a persistent minor key and nomadic accompaniment to the

powerful major chords of German historicism, as this latter developed from the zenith of

influence in the mid-nineteenth century to its eventual decline in the twentieth.

Also tying these figures together, and forming a second thread that links the

discussion that follows, is the centrality assumed by Italy and Italian travel in their

professional careers and personal lives. Of course, for the author of The Civilization of

the Renaissance in Italy, the affinity for and significance of Italy may seem self evident.

In the course of periodic journeys from the late 1830‘s to the early 1880‘s, Italian travel

remained a defining feature of the Basel historian‘s career for nearly half a century. In

similar fashion, the Italophilia of Freud has long been remarked upon by observers and

commentators. Not only did Freud document his own ―neurotic‖ fascination with the

Italian South, emerging most prominently in recurring anxiety dreams involving travel to

Rome, but the experience of Italy‘s archeological landscapes also yielded a rich vein of

metaphorical reflection that penetrated deep into the architecture of psychoanalytic

consciousness. The Hamburg art historian Aby Warburg, Freud‘s German contemporary,

likewise found in Italy a source of ongoing inspiration and fascination. From his

participation in August Schmarsow‘s Florentine art historical seminar in 1888 until his

1929 death in Rome, Warburg‘s career was defined by an interest in the migratory

8
patterns of images and ideas, whether these traversed the boundaries between antiquity

and modernity or circulated in passages between Italy and Germany. And as Warburg‘s

career was drawing to a close, Walter Benjamin‘s 1924 journey to Capri and Naples also

represented a decisive moment in the development of his thought, a moment that would

continue to resonate in his writings until his death in 1940. ―One can speak of the origin

of the Passagen-Werk,‖ writes Susan Buck-Morss in the first paragraph of the Dialectics

of Seeing, ―in the simple historical sense of the time and place it was conceived. But if

‗origin‘ is understood in Benjamin's own philosophical sense, as ‗that which emerges out

of the process of becoming and disappearing,‘ then the moment is arguably the summer

of 1924, and the place is not Paris, but Italy.‖5 For all of these figures, then, each

hovering on the margins of professional historical discourse, methodological and

conceptual peregrinations seem intimately bound up with the spatial expeditions of

Italian travel.

For all these figures, Italy came to represent an ―elsewhere‖, a heterotopia that

could be located not only as a spatial elsewhere, but in all the various dimensions and

fields of alterity in which a nomad could wander: beyond national historiographies,

disciplinary institutions, methodological boundaries, familial expectations, and many

more. Central to the present argument, then, is a conception of nineteenth-century

cultures of travel and mobility that possessed not only a well-documented imperial and

expansive dimension, but also harbored parallel and countervailing, even if brief,

impulses towards de-territorialization. And in this respect, Italian travel represented a

unique and mobile laboratory for the kind of historical nomadism that we have described.

5
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1989), 8.

9
Italy, in other words, presented a unique set of both problems and opportunities for the

German historical imaginary. Even before crossing the Alps, for example, the German

traveler confronted an array of discourses that had settled like sediment in and around the

concept of Italy and the Italienische Reise. On the one hand there was the humanist Italy,

born from the pens of Winckelmann and Goethe, and extending its influence well into the

twentieth century. At its cultural zenith, this tradition transformed the Italian journey into

an obligatory pilgrimage for the German Bildungsbürgertum, a pilgrimage whose object

was largely one of aesthetic and sensual self-discovery or re-invention.6 Alternately, in

the course of the nineteenth century, such travel often took the form of a more scholarly

pursuit, with first the connoisseur and then the researcher approaching Italy as an object

of scientific investigation. Still later, Italy would be invited to shed its aestheticized aura

and emerge as an object of political reflection, initially as a laboratory and collection of

various political systems and later as a means of meditating on processes of national

unification. Ultimately, Italy would become associated with a recognizably modern

regime of leisure in which the Italian journey was transformed into a holiday or a

vacation. Likewise, confessional and regional concerns added still further variety to

possible orientations towards Italy. Whatever the case, however, the German vision of

Italy, with its rich variety of competing and conflicting discourses, was distinctly

overdetermined long before one reached the Brenner Pass. It was a place burdened by a

6
For the relations between the eighteenth-century humanistic traditions and the broader cultures of
education and Bildung in the nineteenth century see: Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus:
Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

10
tangle of personal memories, political histories, visions of utopia and omens of tragedy—

a place both outside history and yet a place irreducibly historical.7

Indeed, the experience of Italian travel itself presented special problems for the

German historical imaginary whose repertoire was governed by imperatives of narrative,

textuality, a linear perspective, and national memory. In the first instance, the brute

density of the material and cultural traces of the past in Italy seemed to demand, and yet

nevertheless resist, the impulse towards conventional linear historical narrative. The

Italian landscape was inundated not with history, but with histories; every surface that

tells a story conceals another surface that tells a second, while confessional, political,

cultural and individual histories were indissolubly bound together in a single, distinctly

non-linear landscape. At the same time, the Italian experience was almost uniformly

represented as an intensely sensual and affective phenomenon, the past and its traces

emerging with the immediacy of an intense visual spectacle. Thus, although textual

7
For classic and somewhat neglected statements on the general issues of travel and tourism, see Siegfried
Kracauer‘s ―Travel and Dance‖ in The Mass Ornament, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger‘s 1964 ―Eine
Theorie des Tourismus‖ [A Theory of Tourism]. Examples of more recent research might include works
such as the following: Reisekultur: von der Pilgerfahrt zum modernen Tourismus (München: Beck,
1991) edited by Bausinger, Beyrer and Korff; James Buzard‘s The Beaten Track: European Tourism,
Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1880-1918 (1993); James Clifford‘s Routes: Travel and Translation in
the Late Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Hall and Pierce‘s The Geography of
Tourism and Recreation Environment, Place and Space (London: Routledge, 1999); Tourism, Commercial
Leisure and National Identities in 19th and 20th Century Europe and North America (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2000) edited by Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough. Examples of more recent
monograph and essay literature include works such as Inderpal Grewpal‘s Home and Harem: Nation,
Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Maura
O‘Connor‘s The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1998);
and Rudy Koshar‘s German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Christopher Hennig, Reiselust.
Touristen, Tourismus und Urlaubskultur (Frankfurt a.M.: 1997); David Crouch, and Nina Lübbren, ed.,
Visual Culture and Tourism (Oxford: Berg, 2003); J. Culler, "The Semiotics of Tourism," in Framing the
Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); Christine Keitz, "Die Anfänge des
modernen Massentourismus in der Weimarer Republik," Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 33 (1993); Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture. Tourism, Museums and Heritage (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998).

11
records and fragments of the Italian past were legion, and were dutifully collected and

examined, such traces often seemed to pale before the kaleidoscopic jumble of the visual

and the sensual. Likewise, the movement of the traveler himself seemed to encourage a

resistance to the establishment of a stable frame of reference. As in Benjamin‘s

reflections in his essay on Naples, conventional boundaries between various temporalities

and spheres of life seem to become unstable and dissolve before the moving spectator. In

other words, to risk an art historical metaphor, the German traveler often brought what

might be called a ―Renaissance‖ sensibility, to a ―Baroque‖ Italy. Where the former

sought out a kind of a kind of realism carefully framed in point perspective, what was

encountered was a landscape of strange curving lines, encrusted with ornament,

delighting in illusion, and encapsulated in allegory.

The third, and final, thread which weaves its way through these nomadic

explorations manifests itself in a mode of historical reflection profoundly influenced by

visual and sensual encounters with traces of the past. If the edifice of German historicism

had been built, at least in part, on a foundation of philology and hermeneutics, a

foundation whose bedrock could be located in the interpretation and evaluation of written

texts, the historical meditations of Burckhardt, Warburg, Benjamin and, to lesser extent,

Freud all generate a past that comes alive in the form of images, and in contours defined

by visuality. ―Where I can‘t proceed from visual contemplation or observation,‖ as

Burckhardt once remarked for example, ―I accomplish nothing.―8 Furthermore, as Walter

Benjamin‘s investigations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual cultures revealed,

the technological and cultural imperatives of modernity summoned images and icons to

8
Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kunst der Malerei in Italien, ed. Christine Tauber (Basel: Schwabe, 2003).

12
life on vast new scales of production and reproduction, a process that in turn yielded a

visible past that crowded incessantly into the present. From various forms of

architectural historicism to the advent and advance of photographic technologies,

Benjamin‘s nineteenth century saw the past summoned into its various presents in

increasingly powerful scopic ways. As Benjamin recognized, such visual apprehensions

of the past—in a modern moment saturated with historical icons and imagery—could

have profound implications for modern historical consciousness in general and

historiography in particular. Indeed, if the study of history had never fully relinquished

its familial relations with other genres of literature, and if modern historiography

recognized itself in the production of coherent narratives and the interpretation of texts,

Walter Benjamin was no less certain that such textual and narrative imperatives had to be

revisited in light of a past that seemed ever more visible. The past, in other words, had to

be understood not merely as series of textual narratives which are collected, evaluated

and narrated by the historian, but instead as an ever moving constellation of images, a

constellation whose arrangement required new methods and whose geometries yielded

new histories. ―History decays into images,‖ he would declare with typical gnomic

concision, ―not into stories.‖ 9

9
The Literature on the historical dimensions of visual culture is likewise enormous and growing. For our
purposes, however, the following have been influential and useful: Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1988); Crouch, ed., Visual Culture and Tourism; Aruna D'Souza and Tim McDonough,
ed., The Invisible Flâneuse: Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New
York: Manchester University Press 2006); Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay ed., Vision in Context:
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight (New York: Routledge, 1996); Jonathan Crary,
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press 1990); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Michael Levin ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of
Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Dianne Harris, and D. Fairchild Ruggles, ed., Sites
Unseen : Landscape and Vision (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2007); Stephen Melville and
Bill Readings, ed., Vision and Textuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Griselda Pollock,
Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988); Gary

13
 But for the many observers of nineteenth and twentieth century European

culture—and particularly for that critical tradition that extends from Baudelaire to

Benjamin, Kracauer and others—an understanding of the visual dimensions of modernity

was not complete without a recognition of its ephemeral, fleeting, and mobile

dimensions. And in this sense, the threads of travel and visuality, which we have

detected in the reflections of Burckhardt, Warburg, Freud and Benjamin, find themselves

closely wound about one another. Baudelaire‘s modernity, for instance, as announced in

critical works like The Painter of Modern Life and the poetry of Flowers of Evil, is a

historical era best captured in its refusal of capture. It is a moment, for Baudelaire, of

fleeting encounters, serendipitous correspondences, imagined exotic journeys and actual

urban explorations, and the modern subject assembled itself in the midst of such ceaseless

circulations and peregrinations. The figure of the Flâneur, as it was later picked up and

interrogated in the work of Walter Benjamin, became the allegorical representative of this

visually-informed species of nineteenth-century subjectivity, a model of modern self-

construction which finds its constitutive elements and experiences in the urban

wanderings of a modern male gaze. Such movements and mobilities, of course, likewise

found echo in the development of modern and mobile representational forms, a

development that extended from the crude movements of early nineteenth-century

panoramas to the emergence of motion picture technology before the beginning of the

Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003); Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar
Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Rudolph Arnheim, "Space as an Image of Time," in
Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities, ed. Karl and William Walling Kroeber (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1978); Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through
Photography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture
Reader (London: Routledge, 1998); Vanessa R. Schwartz, ed., The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture
Reader (London: Routledge, 2004).

14
twentieth. In the gyrations and movements of such representations, modern subjects and

consumers of visual culture discovered a reflection that mirrored their own experience in

increasingly mobile modernity. Indeed, whether wandering the alleys and byways of

nineteenth-century Paris, or in the darkened spaces of the motion picture palace of

Weimar Germany, the experience of such mobile visuality seems to recur as a central

motif in modern subjectivity‘s attempts at self-constitution.

But if such mobile visual encounters did indeed become defining moments in the

construction of subjectivity, if such gestures of collection and reassembly form an

essential element of modern experience, then the phenomena of nineteenth and twentieth

century of travel and sightseeing reveal themselves as a related set of activities. Thus, if

Baudelaire‘s Flânerie constructed an identity from the journeys through the streets of

Paris, and if Baudelaire‘s short youthful trip to Mauritius expanded into a personal

mythology of exotic travel, the mobile gaze of the tourist or sightseer can be understood

in a similar manner. Like the Flâneur at home in Paris, Berlin, or London, the

movements of the traveler explored the boundaries between territories defining various

identities—personal, familial, national, historical—as well as the regions of disorientation

and de-territorialization that lay beyond. As Rudy Koshar writes in his German Travel

Cultures, and in a passage that could likewise describe experience of the nineteenth-

century Flâneur:

Tourism…is a form of leisure that potentially allows the individual to make sense
of an existential fact of modern life: the consciousness of displacement. In other
words, tourism may be a direct and tangible path to the feeling of being unsettled,
but in a pleasurable manner, without the physical and psychological costs that
displacement has for involuntary travelers. 10

10
Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 8.

15
Tourism, travel and sightseeing thus orbit around the same intriguing dialectical tension

between order and disorder that Walter Benjamin located in the pursuits of the collector,

that other allegorical figure inhabiting the landscape of nineteenth century Europe.11

And if travel, like collecting, was often aimed at conventional destinations or

conventional objects, the agency and subjectivity of its practitioners nevertheless

emerged in the unique and serendipitous manner in which its elements were arranged and

rearranged. ―The national-liberal travel culture rested on the metaphorical figure of the

collector traveler,‖ continues Koshar in relation to turn of the century travel, ―a specific

kind of traveler who had a quasi-mythical relationship with the sites and objects

encountered on tour. Traveling was an important source of collective (and collecting)

identity, but even when leisure travel aided the individual‘s attachment to a social group

or nation, it always had a deeply personal character.‖12

Therefore, while the visual and sensual dimensions of travel could carry with

them the baggage of familiar modes of identification—in the class-coded compartments

of the train or in hotels and restaurants favored by a particular nationality—they also

created spaces for highly personal experiences and individual interpretations, a field of

potential nomadic exploration that escaped the well defined boundaries of the homeland.

The present work will follow a similar set of visually and sensually inflected movements,

a collection of modern mobilities whose trajectories moved through the careers and

works of Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin. And

while these figures also carried with them, and felt the weight of, a rich variety of cultural

and territorial baggage, their Italian travels nevertheless revealed a certain porousness in

11
Ibid., 21.
12
Ibid., 27.

16
such territorial demarcations, boundaries and demands. What resulted, therefore, was not

merely a set of fleeting memories to be enjoyed at a later moment of rest, as the Flâneur

might over an evening glass of absinthe, but the opening of a space in which a nomadic

exploration of history—inflected by mobility and visuality—could accelerate beyond the

disciplinary territories that defined German historical thought in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries.

Before climbing aboard the train ourselves, however, and following the Italian

journeys of Burckhardt, Warburg, Freud and Benjamin, it is necessary to pause for

moment and define the disciplinary territories and historical homelands that marked the

point of their departures. For as the curves and epicycles of the planets make sense only

in relation to the gravitational forces exerted by the nearest star, so too do the nomadic

journeys of our various figures emerge only in relation to the methodological and

conceptual hegemonies of German historicism. As is doubtless already evident, the

present study relies on conceptual frameworks inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari, in the figures of the territorial domain and the movements of the nomad. But at

the same time, the powerful gravitational influence of nineteenth-century German

historicism is perhaps best configured if we link Deleuze to the insights of his colleague

Michel Foucault.13 For a closer look at the intellectual contours and institutional

frameworks of professional history in general, and those of nineteenth-century German

historicism in particular, reveals a constellation of phenomena whose outline is brought

most clearly into focus by the Foucaultian concept of discipline.

13
See Michel Foucault, ―Introduction‖ in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Mark Seem Robert Hurley, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983). See also: Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (London: Continuum, 2006).

17
 Of central importance, for the purposes of the present work, is the way in which

the concept of disciplinarity collapses conventional distinctions between theory and

practice, between intellectual and social phenomena. For where Foucault‘s earlier work

had focused on spaces produced through influence and rupture of various epistemic

discourses, the later work of Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality volumes

yielded an approach more sensitive to the mutually reinforcing character of discursive

phenomena and concrete practices. From this latter perspective, in other words, the

disciplinary formations of modernity—its schools, its prisons, its clinics—could be

reduced neither to the operations of concrete social formations nor to the discursive

fortunes of a particular epistemic moment. The model of the discipline is one in which

the experiences of the body and the reflections of the mind take shape in one and the

same process; indeed, for Foucault, disciplines are precisely those conjunctions of

concrete spaces and discursive formations in which things like bodies and minds may

emerge as concepts at all. The architecture and institutional organization of the prison,

for instance, is inextricably and dialectically linked to the discourses of surveillance it

generates, and vice versa. What Foucault presents, in other words, is an understanding of

human institutions that resists reduction to either intellectual or concrete social

categories. And from this vantage point, the histories of medicine, psychology, carceral

practices—and, yes, history itself—cannot be so easily contained in territorial categories

like base and superstructure, but may bleed or metastasize into the larger milieus of the

culture.

And yet, when one surveys the literature relating to the history of the historical

discipline, territorial bifurcations of theory and practice clearly define the scholarly

18
terrain. Not surprisingly, this topography has been largely conditioned by ongoing

developments of, and interactions between, the traditions of social history and the

emerging trends of cultural history. And while each of these currents has produced

extremely valuable and insightful additions to the discussion of history‘s disciplinary

development, the conversation has too often been conducted in two different languages

and with widely divergent conceptual outlooks. On the social history side of the ledger,

the study of the discipline has naturally tended to focus on the social and ideological

milieus in which the production of history emerged, the institutional and class formations

in whose orbit the theories and practices of professional historiography took shape.14 On

the other hand, however, disciplinary studies informed by what we would now call

cultural history have long gravitated towards critical and linguistic treatments, surveying

and reformulating the discipline as a relatively well-ordered body of literatures and

rhetorics.15 If, in the former case, the historical discipline seemed to resonate in the key

of ideology, the latter current reveals history in the tones of discourse.

14
Examples of this current can be found in Georg Iggers more ―history of ideas‖ inflected Concept of
German History, but also in more socially and institutionally inclined works like Fritz Ringer's, The
Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Wesleyan University
Press, 1990).
15
Literatures of this sort have coalesced around discussion of the literary dimensions of history and the
historical dimensions of literature. Historicism here emerges as an historical hermeneutic rather than a set
of concrete institutions. See: Hayden White, The Content of the Form : Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Hayden White, Metahistory: The
Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973);
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Timothy Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary
Historiography after Hegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Jörn Rüsen and his
colleagues have in some ways narrowed these divergent approaches in a variety of works. See: Jörn Rüsen,
Begriffene Geschichte: Genesis und Begrundung der Geschichtstheorie J. G. Droysens (Paderborn:
Schoningh, 1969); Jörn Rüsen, History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2005); Jörn Rüsen, Konfigurationen Des Historismus: Studien Zur Deutsche Wissenschaftskultur
(Frankfurt a.M.: 1993); Jörn Rüsen, Für eine erneuerte Historik: Studien zur Theorie D. Geschichtswiss
(Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1976); Jörn Rüsen, ed., Meaning and Representation in
History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).

19
 A second and vital dimension of Foucault‘s concept of disciplinarity is its role in

the production of knowledge and in the construction of subjectivity. While the later

volumes of the History of Sexuality explore the possibilities of aesthetic self-construction,

the more jaundiced textures of Discipline and Punish present subjectivity as an effect,

rather than agent, of disciplinary intervention. The self-representations of the subject,

along with all the categories by which it brings the world around it into visibility, are

shaped and invited by the forms and operations of disciplinarity. The structures and

spaces of clinical observation thus correspond to a certain configuration of subjectivity, a

self whose body requires the intervention and colonization of medical knowledges and

expertise. Indeed, the self here emerges most immediately through the forms and

visibilities yielded by the production of such medical knowledge. Or alternatively, the

subject of early penal incarceration is vastly different from the self-surveilling subject

that moves through the dystopic carceral society that Foucault invokes at the end of

Discipline and Punish. Indeed, if Foucault might wonder at the beginning of The Order

of Things what sort of discursive apparatus could produce a collection like that in Borges‘

Chinese Encyclopedia, only several years later he would focus on the configurations of

discipline and power that could generate such a menagerie. For if the old saying suggests

that knowledge is power, Foucault seems to reverse the directionality of the dictum. It is

not knowledge that yields power, but power in disciplinary form that produces and makes

visible the objects of knowledge—from the most abstract categories of human science to

the most intimate contours of the lived self.

By configuring the institutional history of German historicism in terms of

Foucaultian disciplinarity, we may therefore approach it from another perspective, and

20
with another set of questions. Viewed from this angle, in other words, the relatively

discrete phenomenon of the German Historical School may emerge in its fullness as both

a set of concrete social institutions and an accretion of various bodies of expertise and

knowledge. Furthermore, the disciplinary configuration of historicism permits us to see

the ways in which such knowledges and institutions conditioned the patterns of historical

consciousness and self-consciousness in the broader cultural spheres of nineteenth and

twentieth-century Germany. Indeed, such a configuration immediately produces a new

set of questions with which to interrogate the history of historicism. We might ask, for

example, what knowledges historicism constructs, what territories does it define, what

objects does it make visible and what forms of subjectivity does it enforce (or invite)?

In the first instance, then, and as with its counterparts in the human sciences, the

novel visibilities yielded by German historicism were accompanied by a set of strict

territorial regimentations, a process by which the historian, as well as history itself, had to

submit to disciplinary organization and observation. As a set of concrete social

institutions and professional milieus, the German historical Zunft that developed under

the auspices of historicism was extremely diligent in patrolling its territorial borders and

policing its members. In this way, the institutions of the German historical profession

were coordinated by strictly regulated systems and spaces of patronage and solidarity,

eventually coalescing as the most well-defended and uniquely influential territory in the

disciplinary landscape of the German academy. For example, the career and well-

documented (mis)fortunes of historians Karl Lamprecht—whom we will revisit in one of

the following chapters—is an illuminating example of the professional resistance and

personal vituperation that deviations from the legitimate practices of the Zunft could

21
produce.16 And although the last decades of the nineteenth century saw fissures

developing in both the theoretical and institutional edifices of historicism, German

academics—but particularly historians—with the rank of full professor continued to

enjoy exalted professional status and exercised formidable powers both within the

discipline and beyond. Furthermore, that such powers persisted into the controversies

and conversations of the twentieth century is borne out by the example of Eckart Kehr, an

example that wove its way likewise into the later lore of social science history in the

twentieth century. As told from this latter perspective, the controversy generated by

Kehr‘s work—his socio-economic readings of German foreign policy and navalism—

becomes a damning case study in the ideological backwardness and historiographical

conservatism of the educated middle classes and elites of Wilhelmine Germany, of which

the historical Zunft was a powerful and stalwart armature.17 But while such ideological

concerns may indeed have been operative, the more proximal cause was the disciplinary

power and self-policing apparatus of the historical profession. Without these

instruments, without the intricate systems of disciplinary influence and patronage, the

ideological terrain of educated Germany—whether conservative or no—could have

exerted little influence on the fate of Kehr.

The historical community in Germany during the era of historicist hegemony was

thus a remarkably cohesive and well organized social territory. But such structural

16
Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856-1915) (New Jersey: Humanities
Press, 1993); Luise Schorn-Schuette, Karl Lamprecht: Kulturgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Wissenschaft
und Politik (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984); Matti Viikari, Die Krise der "historistischen"
Geschichtsschreibung und die Geschichtsmethodologie Karl Lamprechts (Helsinki: Suomalainen
Tiedeakatemia, 1977).
17
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, "Einleitung" in Eckart Kehr, Der Primat der Innenpolitik, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1965), 21. See also Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History
(Middletown, Conn., 1968), 237-238.

22
solidarities, and their sometimes ruthless corollaries in disciplinary self-surveillance,

protected more than the institutional status and position of the (highly status conscious)

historical profession. They also managed and maintained the theoretical and

methodological legacies handed down within tradition of Rankean historicism, and these

in turn were the categories and concepts that produced the distinctly historicist historical

optic. If the church of historicism had its institutions, then it also had its catechism. Like

any catechism or creed, however, the varied doctrines which have been ascribed to the

German School do not form a smoothly coherent system and landscape of thought.

Indeed, if the work of Jörn Rüsen has deployed the Kuhnian term paradigm to

characterize the intellectual phenomena of historicism, then it is partly due to the internal

tensions that developed within its model of historical reflection. And to this day the basic

intellectual contours of what has come to be known as German historicism are still the

subject of debate. ―In the last few years,‖ Georg Iggers could declare as late as 1995, ―a

considerable number of books and articles have appeared in Germany, the United States,

and Italy on the topic. There is, however, no consensus in this literature on the meaning

of the term.‖18

That the historical discipline of nineteenth century Germany, however,

represented a discrete and relatively well bounded approach to historical reflection and

research is generally accepted; and it is in relations to the boundaries of this tradition and

its territories that the Italian journeys of Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Sigmund Freud

and Walter Benjamin represent methodologically nomadic alternatives. Indeed, while

precise details of German Historicism‘s constitutive intellectual apparatus are still open

18
Georg Iggers, ―Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,‖ Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.
56, No. 1, 129.

23
to question, its broader contours can be sketched out for purposes of further analysis and

orientation. For the present discussion, therefore, we may outline three fundamental and

relatively well documented principles that coordinated the conceptual territories of

German Historical School. In the first instance, then, and woven into the fabric of its

founding, is an understanding of history as an interpretative discipline, a hermeneutic

science that recognizes language and texts as the meaningful expressions of the historical

eras it seeks to illuminate. Alternatively, a second general pattern lies in the concept of

history as an individualizing science. In distinction from the natural sciences, which seek

to discover a field of ever more abstract and fundamental laws, historicism recognized its

objects in a landscape of individualities, a landscape of singular and unrepeatable events

and personalities. Finally, and in some tension with the former principles, there was a

commitment to a fundamental order of development and unfolding in the movements of

history. Thus, although history directed its gaze at a past composed not of laws, but of

individualities, there nevertheless remained a faith that a necessary order of some kind

lay behind the trajectories of such historical individuals and entities.

Of course, such a list is by no means exhaustive, and there remains a number of

other extremely important features that were essential the character of historicism. The

doctrines and discussion of methodological ―empathy‖ could easily be included here, as

well as the vision of history as an essentially immanent process, a process whose

movements and order could be glimpsed in their unfolding through the historical record.

In some ways, however, these latter can also be conceived as conceptual and

methodological corollaries of the first three principles we outlined. The interpretive

interventions of ―empathy‖, for example, can be linked to the hermeneutic tradition

24
which accompanied the development of historicism, and it emerges as the methodological

response to a historical field conceived in terms of discrete individual entities. Empathy,

in other words, is that hermeneutic tool by which the difference and otherness of

respective individuals and epochs is overcome and penetrated.19 In similar fashion,

furthermore, the principle of immanence is also a corollary of an individualizing science.

For if history obeys certain patterns of unfolding and development, such patterns emerge

from the nature and character of the individuals embedded within the historical field. No

appeal, in other words, to metaphysical or metahistorical phenomena was necessary to

represent the past ―as it really was.‖ Lastly, the long recognized historicist emphasis on

political and international history likewise rests on the precise identification of the

individuals that emerged as the true subjects of historicist thought. From this perspective,

and again in response to a Western European tradition wedded to natural law and

mechanical social thought, the true subjects of German historicism were found not in the

atomized individuals of social contract theory, but in the suprapersonal entities of the

historical peoples, spiritually expressed in language of the Volk and in the institutions of

the state.

19
The history of the concept of empathy, or Einfühlung, lies beyond the scope of this work. On the other
hand, however, some of its key figures intersect with our interests here. For instance, the term appears to
have been coined by Robert Vischer (whose work we will meet in a later chapter on Aby Warburg), and
was later developed in its aesthetic dimensions by Conrad Fiedler and Adolf Hildebrand. It also developed
in another direction, motivated primarily by the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, where it became a key to a
hermeneutical tradition that went on to influence the philosophy of historical thought and the many currents
of twentieth century phenomenology – from Husserl to Heidegger. In relation specifically to Dilthey see:
Austin Harrington, “Dilthey, Empathy and Verstehen A Contemporary Reappraisal,‖ in European Journal
of Social Theory, Vol. 4, No. 3, 311-329, 2001; Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human
Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. With regard to its earlier and more limited aesthetic
applications see: Robert Vischer, et al. Empathy Form Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893.
Translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the
History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). For the relation to literary historicism and hermeneutics see: Paul
Hamilton‘ discussion in Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996).

25
 In the first place, then, we have drawn attention to the hermeneutic dimensions

that formed a characteristic feature of German historicism, dimensions that were linked to

still older traditions of textual and documentary interpretation. These latter traditions

may have their ultimate source in the Protestant—especially Pietist—approaches to

biblical exegesis, and in commitment to the revelatory sufficiency of scripture.20 More

proximally, this tradition emerges with special relevance in the critical reflections of

figures like Herder and Schleiermacher. While the former went far in outlining a history

of discrete cultural individuals, manifest in the linguistic singularity of various historic

peoples, the latter contributed a theological model of textual criticism that would

influence the currents of both historicism and Romanticism. Schleiermacher‘s influence

was manifest in a variety of forms, but most profoundly in the historicity of documents

and in the empathetic methods by which they could be made to speak. This latter thrust,

for instance, was taken up later and most explicitly in the historical philosophy of Dilthey

where the concept of empathy becomes a decisive point of differentiation between the

natural and historical sciences. These various hermeneutic threads, however, were first

and most conspicuously crystallized in the work of Leopold von Ranke, perhaps

immediately influenced by theologian Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, a student of

Herder and colleague of Schleiermacher. In Ranke‘s hands, therefore, the close reading

and evaluation of textual evidence became the sine qua non of a rigorous

historiographical methodology. Indeed, if the Protestant bible was the adequate container

and vessel of theological knowledge, the creed of Sola Scriptura was similarly embraced

20
See: Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism. Thomas Albert Howard,
Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. De Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of
Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness.

26
as a principle of Rankean historical methodology. The world of the past could indeed be

reconstituted and rendered sensible or legible, but only through the careful and

meticulous reading and evaluation of the textual traces in which historical individualities

found linguistic expression.

The hermeneutic tradition that influenced the early historicism of Ranke,

however, had a variety of competing valences and its categories were deployed in a

number of spheres. In its Romantic formulations, those of Novalis and Friedrich

Schlegel, it could easily emerge in a nagging vision of texts as perpetually incomplete

fragments, perpetually evolving in the course of their interpretive histories. The

hermeneutic reflections of Dilthey, by contrast, would themselves become decisive in the

twentieth-century phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. For the one-time student

of de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, the question of close reading and documentary evidence

became acute when it came to exploring the means by which visual, rather than textual,

documents were to be interpreted. Thus, while each of the above outlined principles of

historicism made territorial demands on each of the figures we will examine, the opening

section devoted to the Basel historian perhaps best captures the tensions between textual

and visual interpretation. In this way, Burckhardt‘s many journeys to Italy represent

significant gestures of displacement, not only in spatial terms, but also in relation to the

disciplinary commitments of German historical scholarship. For in these travels,

Burckhardt‘s unique—and insistently marginal—vision of historical methodology (and

the temporalities that it reveals) finds expression in his singular attention to a past

manifest in visual traces and documents. In his visual apprehension of the past—from his

navigations through Italian museums to his mobile and visual collecting in Italian urban

27
spaces—we will see how Burckhardt explores a region beyond the textually valenced

territories of historicism. The interpretation of visual documents, in other words,

produces a kind of acceleration that takes Burckhardt beyond the linear, narrative and

textual imperatives of his German colleagues. Put differently, a visual hermeneutic

grounded in Anschauung gradually resolves Burckhardt‘s history into a form more

granular and fragmentary than the smooth linear continuities of the Rankean school, and

it finds the Swiss historian gravitating towards the synchronic or cross-sectional approach

that would come to characterize his distance from historicist practice.

The self-representation of the German Historical School as the study of discrete

individualities and historical subjects, in distinction from the natural law approaches of

the eighteenth century, forms a second and likewise decisive current of the tradition.

While the initial impact of Enlightenment universality and cosmopolitanism was

weathered in Rankean historiography and German Romanticism, producing in its wake a

self-consciously independent tradition of German thought, the nineteenth century

nevertheless saw defenders of German Kultur on perpetual watch for encroachments

from Western Zivilization. Foremost among these defenders was the German historical

Zunft, and it was against the atomism and positivism of Britain and France, historicism

deployed the concepts of its individualizing science. In his twentieth-century reflections

on the nature of, and tensions within, the traditions of German historicism, theologian

Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) explained the significance of such an individualizing

perspective:

Of decisive importance is the mystical-metaphysical sense of this concept of

individuality as in each case a particular concretion of the divine spirit in unique
persons and supra-personal communal organizations. The basic constituents of
reality are not similar material and social atoms and universal laws…but differing

28
 unique personalities and individualizing formative forces…This results in a
different idea of community: The state and the society are not created from the
individual by way of contract and pragmatic construction, but from the
suprapersonal spiritual forces which emanate from the most important and
creative individuals, the Volk spirit or the religious aesthetic idea.21

A little more than a decade after the more critical descriptions of Troeltsch, Friedrich

Meinecke amplified the significance of this current of historicism by placing it at the

center of his 1936 Enstehung des Historismus, a work which traced the origins of the

tradition up until its nineteenth-century institutionalization. What is clear, however,

especially in Meinecke‘s intervention, is the way in which the disciplinary territories of

historicism were inextricably bound up with a conception of the cultural, intellectual and

political autonomy of Germany in the face of ―Western‖ categories of universality and

cosmopolitanism.

In a significant sense, then, historicism represented a potent contributor to the

establishment of those concepts associated with a German special path or Sonderweg,

here in its earlier and more positive formulations. Indeed, given the perceived threat of

Western cultural and intellectual imperialism in the form of positivism, empiricism and

enlightened rationalism, the category of history became the decisive means by which

Germany and her human sciences could maintain their independence and national

character. History, in other words, and the institutions and methodologies of historicism,

constituted a vital bulwark against the mechanisms of Zivilization and the encroachments

of cosmopolitanism. However, while Aby Warburg was convinced that ―der Liebe Gott

steckt im Detail,‖ the devil, of course, may be found in the details too. In this case, the

21
Quoted from Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-
1933. 101.

29
devil emerged in the nature of the individuals identified by historicism as the proper

subjects of history. For, as Troeltsch describes it, an essential component of historicism

was its rejection of social theories built upon a foundation of ―social atoms and universal

laws,‖ a framework in which individual human beings form the atomistic premise of

subsequent, and mechanically ordered, social bodies. On the contrary, historicism‘s

emphasis on the cultural and historical integrity of Volk and language demands an

emphasis on historical subjects which express and embody these totalities. Such

commitments, therefore, reveal the intellectual foundation for the singular emphasis

placed on politics and the state in the conceptual framework of historicism. As with the

neighboring intellectual landscapes of German Idealism—a neighboring relationship that

was often fraught with tension—historicism held the state, as the expressive

representative of Volk consciousness, to be the true subject and individual agency of

history. The historical unfolding of the state, in relation to its people and in relation to

other states, thus became the natural focus for an individualizing and nationally oriented

German Historical School.

The question of individuation is picked up with particular resonance in the second

section of the present work, a section which treats the temporal reflections and Italian

travels of Aby Warburg and Sigmund Freud. Of course, as we pointed out above, all of

these currents are operative in all of the cases we examine, but the work of Warburg and

Freud seems particularly relevant in relation to the various ―individualities‖ that may be

mapped out and produced by the territorial interventions of history. If we follow Rudy

Koshar‘s reading of travel as a phenomenon linked to collecting, a phenomenon that

participates in Benjamin‘s ―dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder,‖

30
then the journeys of Freud and Warburg reveal an experience in which various forms of

individuation—historical, national, psychological, confessional and disciplinary—are

captured within a similar dialectical tension.

On the one hand, such tensions are immediately visible in a motto adopted by

Aby Warburg that seems to describe the forces of identification and dispersal that

suffused his life and work: ―Ebreo di Sangue, Amburghese di Cuore, d'Anima

Fiorentino.‖22 At the same time, though, Aby Warburg‘s conflicted sense of self-identity

was mirrored by similarly contending forces—of dispersion and reassembly—in his art

historical work and Italian travel. Thus, despite his perpetual and ongoing attempts to

situate his insights into a cohesive historical, psychological and anthropological

framework, Warburg‘s fascination with the details, the fragments and marginalities

represented a countervailing and centrifugal force within his work. But as we shall see,

this gesture of outward radiation and expansiveness also results in what we characterize

as an insistent historical nomadism whose migrations follow documents and fragments

across, beyond and through a variety of historical territories—national and disciplinary

alike. On the other hand, Freud‘s Italian reflections and obsessions similarly represent

moments of potential dispersion—of self, of confession, of psychoanalysis, of

temporality. But here such gestures of de-territorialization tend to yield to the centripetal

imperatives of Freud‘s textual practice, and are perpetually reconfigured and resituated in

a new territory defined by the psychoanalytic project. Thus, where Warburg‘s dialectical

needle always hovers near the pole of constructive disorder, Freud‘s compass unfailing

22
―Jewish by blood, Hamburger at heart, Florentine in spirit.‖ In Gertrud Bing, ―Aby Warburg,‖ in Aby
Warburg. Ausgewählte Schriften und Wurdigungen. Dieter Wüttke and Carl Georg Heise eds. (Baden-
Baden: V. Koerner, 1979).

31
leads him back to the orienting landscapes of his psychoanalytic texts and his Viennese

home and habitus.

Rounding out the conceptual and methodological apparatus of German

historicism, we find the third and final element of historicist doctrine in a commitment to

history as fundamentally coherent and expressive of an underlying order. Its original

expression, best captured in Ranke‘s well known dictum that all peoples are equal before

God, reveals its author‘s faith that historical research, like the revelatory power of

biblical interpretation, may disclose (even if indirectly) the underlying and meaningful

patterns that guide the movements of human history.23 The distinction, however,

between this vision and that of the various German Idealisms emerging at the same time

should not be overlooked. For where Hegel and his subsequent followers claimed to

deduce the movements of the world spirit through the rational exercises of speculative

philosophy, Ranke by contrast held that such a direct and immediate apprehension of

historical forces was impossible. Ranke, in other words, had no doubt that the mind of

God moved behind the motions of history, but if his patterns were to be perceived in

history, then this could only be glimpsed through the dark glass of careful research and

documentary interpretation. Indeed, while subsequent generations within the German

historical school would be less immune to the currents of Hegelianism—Droysen for

instance—the two traditions nevertheless maintained a careful and well cultivated

distance from one another. For while both tended to hold an optimistic vision of history,

23
See the introduction to: Leopold von Ranke, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to
1514, trans. Philip Arthur Ashworth (London: Bell and Sons, 1887). See also Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The
Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Theodore H. von Laue, Leopold Ranke:
the Formative Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950); Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell,
ed., Leopold Von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, 1st ed. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse
University Press, 1990).

32
a vision in which the Prussian state played an important, if not world historical role, the

speculative and rationalistic dimensions of Idealism could not appeal to German

historians who understood their practices as an interpretive science. If history was to be

understood, then its meanings would be revealed not in a Berlin philosophical seminar,

but in the careful and collective interpretive research of a rigorous historical science.

But in ways similar to Idealism, historicism also understood history as an

immanent process of unfolding, a natural process in which the individualities and

subjects of history developed with a necessity born of their originary Ursprung, or mode

of becoming. From this, furthermore, the historiography of historicism developed motifs

of historical mission and linear necessity that mirrored those of Hegel and Marx.

Burckhardt, for example, would take issue with Droysen‘s history of Alexander the Great

for its critical treatment of the Greeks who failed to recognize, and yield to, an historical

moment clearly represented by an emergent Macedon. Burckhardt, in other words, could

not so easily accept that the compass needle of history points in any inevitable and

unequivocal direction. Alternatively, Heinrich Treitschke‘s virulently nationalist

histories and polemics in the latter half of the nineteenth century were informed by a

Kleindeutsch faith in the historical mission of the Prussian state and the Hohenzollern

dynasty. So while it was rarely announced in the crude forms famously assaulted by Karl

Popper in his Poverty of Historicism, the German Historical School nevertheless

embraced a model of historical progression that tended to valorize the most ―successful‖

individuals as those most capable of realizing their fullest expression.24 In practice,

however, this slipped easily into the doctrine that seems to say: whatever circumstances

24
Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).

33
pertain at a particular historical moment, are precisely the circumstances that must be the

case, given the necessities and immanence of historical unfolding. Think here of

Candide‘s good Doctor Pangloss—but wearing a Prussian Pickelhaube. And thus here

again we see the powerful links that joined the discipline of historicism to whatever

political institutions with which it found itself confronted—in this case the Prussian

Monarchy and the German Empire. Since these had emerged victoriously in the course

of the nineteenth century, then it stood to reason that these were the necessary and

unavoidable instruments of historical necessity of that contemporary moment. But

whatever its ultimate intentions and incentives, the tradition understood the movements

of history as a process of necessary and linear development, a suprapersonal process

involving not individual human beings but characterized by the spiritual expressions and

interactions of peoples and states.

In this fashion, however, the links between past and present could only be

conceived in terms of supercession and obsolescence. And while the past could be

resurrected in the empathetic hermeneutics of historicist analyses, its true legacy in the

present was confirmation of the necessity of ―what is.‖ In this, furthermore, another

dialectical tension arises in the curious posture the German historical school adopted in

relation to the past, a posture in evidence as early as Ranke‘s first historical interventions

and bound up with the hermeneutic tradition as a whole. On the one hand, there were

powerful gestures of proximity, impulses to eliminate the distance between historian and

historical object through empathetic recovery and penetration. On the other hand, there

was an insistence on the otherness of the past, its inscrutable otherness and externality to

present historical configurations. In some ways, the historicist past emerges in the form

34
of the auratic object of art as described by Walter Benjamin. Returning the gaze of the

historian with a Sphinx-like gaze of its own, it confronts the beholder in the form of a

singular subjectivity, and its magical allure rests to some extent on this distance. For to

dissolve this auratic distance is to transform such historical otherness, and reify it in the

form of a material relic or objet d‘art. The reception of the past thus seems to shuttle

back and forth between reified or objectified nearness and a distance that preserves the

impenetrability of the historical other. It is this dialectic—between a past locked away in

the contours of its linear progression and a past that erupts in the material culture of the

present—that we examine most extensively in the final section of the present work. In

this instance, we follow an early journey in the peripatetic career of Walter Benjamin, an

expedition in the form of his 1924 journey to Capri and Naples. Walter Benjamin‘s

Italienische Reise took place at a pivotal moment in his career and personal life, an

unhappy marriage was its unflattering but immediate impetus, and the completion his

Habilschrift on Baroque Trauerspiel was its ostensible purpose. And while it was also a

moment of steep decline for German historicism, for both its institutional foundations and

its intellectual influence, this decline was mirrored by a profoundly modern and novel

pattern of historical reception. This pattern, visible here in the modern forms of historical

tourism, completes the process by which the past becomes an object of collection,

reproduction and commodification. ―One of the old men leads, and holds the lantern

close to a fragment of an early Christian fresco.‖ writes Benjamin in relation to a past

that has become a commodfifed fetish, ―Now he utters the centuries-old magic word

‗Pompeii.‘ Everything that the foreigner desires, admires, and pays for is ‗Pompeii.‘

‗Pompeii‘ makes the plaster imitation of the temple ruins, the lava necklace, and the

35
louse-ridden person of the guide irresistible. This fetish is all the more miraculous as only

a small minority of those whom it sustains have ever seen it.‖25

However, it is not the progressive process of commodification and reproduction

of the past that is most striking about Benjamin‘s Neapolitan Denkbild. Instead, the more

intriguing dimension of the essay is revealed in the complex spatial and temporal

geographies that Benjamin generates as he navigates the city with his collaborator, Asja

Lacis. Not only do these mobile, and visually inflected, explorations and reflections

prefigure the later work of the Arcades project, but they also map out a more porous

vision and experience of historical time, one whose secret passages and hidden

compartments undermine the strict polarity defined by history‘s proximity and history‘s

otherness. In other words, the porous character of Naples emerges for Benjamin as a

metaphor for a more porous understanding of history, neither locked away in auratic

distance nor fully objectified and pacified in the commodity form. And by undermining

such strict territorial and conceptual boundaries, Benjamin‘s nomadic travels through

Naples describe an alternate set of spaces where the past may emerge immediately in all

its strange otherness, a past whose insistent vibrations may be amplified into

revolutionary shockwaves within an otherwise complacent historical present.

As with other nineteenth-century disciplines that marked out territories and organs

in geographical, medical or psychological terms, German historicism produced similar

maps that were likewise criss-crossed with boundaries, borders, insides, outsides, utopias

and heterotopias. Like the body of the earth and the body of the patient, the body of time

underwent a process of categorization, registration and archivization, a process

25
Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, ―Naples‖ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1. Howard
Eiland, Michael W. Jennings, and Gary Smith eds. (Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press, 1996), 415.

36
administered by the historical knowledges and expertise of a set of disciplinary

institutions. Thus, the past emerges as an assemblage of organs, always already

‗organized‘ into distinct territories, regions, periods, methods and disciplines. For

German historicism, these territories emerged most clearly within the careful preserved

circle that enclosed its concrete institutional framework and reinforced its conceptual and

methodological apparatus. The visible contours and objects of the past that historicism

yielded were thus decisively informed by the contours of its central concepts—by its

textually oriented hermeneutic, its self-conception as an individualizing science, and by

the necessities of a linear unfolding of historical phenomena. To be sure, of course, any

meaningful encounter with the past necessarily involves such territorial arrangements and

orientations, and a rational survey of any field demands the imposition of frames of

reference, boundaries of significance, and hierarchies of phenomena. But as the

contemporary literatures of geography, urban design and many other disciplines have

reminded us in recent years, the organization of space is deeply implicated by regimes of

cultural, political and social power. And in the same way, the body of time has also been

the object of a certain disciplinary and disciplining gaze; its territories, its organs and its

movements have likewise been congealed into objects and summoned into visibility by

the clinical observations of its own doctors and surveyors. And as with other institutions

of disciplinarity, modern historiography—and the German Historical School in

particular—has similarly constructed its objects and knowledges, though here in

territorial configuration of time.

Visuality, Mobility and History

37
 A Prepatory Exploration of Concepts and Methods

Our train, then, is preparing for departure, and its tracks will follow the spatial

movements and temporal explorations of Burckhardt, Warburg, Freud and Benjamin. As

we have seen, however, our itinerary takes us into territories beyond those prescribed and

inscribed by the disciplinary cartography of the German Historical School. The

destinations and stations through which this train will move define, in other words, a set

of nomadic encounters with Italy and history, encounters that cross and re-cross a variety

of boundaries in a number of different dimensions. Most conspicuously, these journeys

move through national and cultural boundaries, from the spaces of Germany in the north

to the landscapes of Italy in the south. At the same time, however, these travels manifest

themselves likewise in a set of movements and transgressions that traverse—both through

and beyond—the temporal territories established by German historicism. As we prepare

to follow these movements and mobilities, our fellow travelers may wish to have a better

idea where these tracks are leading, what sort of territories come into focus through the

―nomad pasts‖ of Burckhardt, Warburg, Freud and Benjamin, and how these nomadic

spaces diverge from the temporal territories of German historicism.

While many of these issues must wait for the more sustained explorations of the

following chapters, it may be helpful to supply a brief guide to the concepts and

terminology that inform the itineraries of the present work, a Baedeker that outlines the

general theoretical contours of the landscapes we are traversing. In the context of the

present discussion, and as with any guidebook, the inclusion of this guide may aid the

traveler in initial moments of conceptual and territorial orientation, but it is nevertheless a

problematic undertaking in view of the theoretical regions it proposes to describe. It is

38
likely evident that the concept of a ―nomad past‖ draws heavily on the theoretical

interventions of Gilles Deleuze and his colleague Felix Guattari. Indeed, more

specifically, while we draw on a number of themes and metaphors inspired by the work

of these figures, the focus here is primarily on the reflections of Deleuze as they emerged

in the 1972 Anti-Oedipus—co-written with Felix Guattari—in its accompanying volume

A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988).26 The

almost willful difficulty of these works is notorious, and it is for this reason that a brief

overview of the topographies described by Deleuze may be helpful in the present context.

While Deleuze and Guattari‘s concepts emerge in what resembles a stream-of-

consciousness style of writing, it is made more difficult by the fact that this

consciousness adopts a posture of schizophrenic polyvocality, endlessly producing

thoughts that multiply, diverge and radiate in many different directions. At the same

time, however, the seemingly willfully opaque and elliptical style, the curious patterns of

structure and organization, must be understood as enactments of the kind of

philosophizing Deleuze seeks to explore and describe. The style of Deleuze, in other

words, emerges as the textual embodiment of a philosophy of becoming, a philosophy of

differentiation through mobility, movement and nomadism. Put a different way,

Deleuzian thought is not so much concerned with erecting, establishing and tracing a

coherent set of conceptual territories as it is with accelerating thought through and

beyond such categories.

26
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the
Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

39
 What Deleuze attempts to produce, in other words, is a body of thought without

organs, a body whose flows are not limited by an already present and confining

conceptual territory. But it is these imperatives that make the mappings and tracings of a

guidebook—a Let‘s Go: Deleuze!—particularly problematic. For it is precisely this kind

of mapping—or tracing, in the terminology of Deleuze—that the form and content of his

work aspire to escape. Indeed, as it is described in A Thousand Plateaus, the figure of the

nomad represents exactly these gestures and enactments of de-territorialized and de-

territorializing movement, a mode of thought defined, above all, by mobility rather than

congealed in abstract categories. Nevertheless, perhaps we may follow the example of

Wittgenstein and supply ourselves with a ladder to climb up and quickly survey the

general features of the Deleuzian landscape. Then, once we have been able to "see the

world rightly" from this more elevated position, we may likewise follow the author of the

Tractatus and dispense with such provisional and artificial aids. Or, to put it differently,

it may be helpful to pause for a moment as the train begins to leave the station, leaf

through our tourist guidebook, and trace out the most conspicuous sites and landmarks

that describe our destination. But once we are on our way, and certainly once we arrive,

such a guidebook may be safely stowed in our luggage or left behind at the hotel.

In The Anti-Oedipus, then, the first volume of a two volume work entitled

Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the primary focus (or targets) for Deleuze and Guattari are

the institutions and categories of psychoanalysis. The critique that emerges there

attempts to reveal what—in Foucaultian terms—might be called the disciplinary

imperatives embedded in both the theories and practices of the psychoanalytic tradition.

Since Deleuze and Guattari hold that there is no pre-existing deep structure within the

40
psyche—its primitive state is rhizomatic and nomadic—the structures of subjectivity and

consciousness are always the effect, not the cause, of discursive and disciplinary

territorialities. The stable configurations and categories of self-representation, in other

words, represent gestures of territorialization, a process of definition and coming to rest

in conceptual framework, much as a hermit crab might grow into its shell. From this

perspective, however, the interventions of psychoanalysis represent not so much the

restoration of equilibrium within the economy of psychological forces, as they do an

imposition of a new set of artificial territories and categories upon the analysand. The

emotional investments and geometries of the oedipal triangle—as Deleuze puts it,

―Mommy Daddy and Me‖—are revealed as simply another means by which subjects are

invited (or pushed) to coordinate their psychological landscapes in a particular fashion, a

fashion that is in turn consonant with the ideological demands of modern capital.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari broaden the scope of Anti-Oedipus

to examine a more expansive field of social and psychological formations. To this end,

they begin by distinguishing between two opposing representational strategies that define

the territorial configurations of both subject and socius: an ‗arborescent‘ model or logic

that they associate with psychoanalytic interventions, and a ‗rhizomatic‘ form that they

link to their own model of schizoanalysis. In relation to the former or tree-like logic,

growth and becoming are understood according to a strict genealogical and

representational model. What is becoming the case, in other words, can always be

defined in terms of what has been the case; the leaves can be situated by their relation to

branches and the branches in turn can be understood in relation to the trunk. The being or

phenomenon of any one part of the tree is thus always defined in terms of a pre-existing

41
model or template of the tree. Furthermore, from this arboreal perspective, there is

always already a deep structure whose unfolding is represented in the growth of the tree.

In the case of the human psyche, such structures are reproduced in development and

made explicit through psychoanalysis. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in their insistently

irreproducible style:

All of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as in

psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative,
crystallized into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed
within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain
balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already
there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory and language. It
consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis,
something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings;
tracings are like the leaves of a tree.27

Seen from this angle, Freud‘s psychoanalytic cartographies are not simply voyages of

enlightened discovery, but active attempts to trace these phenomena from a pre-existing

model. Put differently, Freud‘s psychoanalytic surveys emerge in the tracing and

reproduction of an abstract model, a template from within which the tree or the psyche—

or even an Italian journey—may be rendered meaningful. In Freud‘s arborescent French

garden, whenever a daydream or a neurosis emerges as an unruly new growth or

phenomenon—say, in a neurotic preoccupation with Rome—the gardener appears to

prune its wild forms back into the pleasing form of the ideal tree and the satisfying

geometry of the Oedipal triangle.

In place of this arborescent model of reproduction—understood in terms ranging

from the biological/genealogical to the representational—Deleuze and Guattari propose

27
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 12.

42
what they call a ―rhizomatic‖ logic. If the reproductive model of the tree sharply defined

and delimited the functions and possibilities of each constituent element (leaf, branch,

trunk), all governed by the deep structure and nature of the tree, the root-like rhizome

presents another set of reproductive possibilities. In this instance, any and all points on

the surface structure of the rhizome may emerge as sites of new growth, tendrils and roots

erupting in apparently random fashion from various sites on the original root.

Furthermore, such tendrils and roots themselves become the foundation for likewise

randomly erupting growths, all resulting in a reproductive phenomenon whose structure

cannot be understood in terms of a pre-existing or ideal model. For obvious reasons, the

tracings of arborescence must fail as a means of representing or reproducing these

rhizomatic processes. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari here distinguish ‗tracing‘ from what

they come to call ‗mapping‘, and describe the difference in a passage worth quoting at

length:

The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a
tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map
with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that
it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map
does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the
unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on
bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a
plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and
connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to
constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting,
reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall,
conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.
Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always
has multiple entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome, and
sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of flight as passageway
and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A map has multiple entryways, as
opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to the same." The map has to
do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged
"competence." Unlike psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic competence (which
confines every desire and statement to a genetic axis or overcoding structure, and

43
 makes infinite, monotonous tracings of the stages on that axis or the constituents
of that structure), schizoanalysis rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever
name is given to it—divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary,
or syntagmatic. (It is obvious that Melanie Klein has no understanding of the
cartography of one of her child patients, Little Richard, and is content to make
ready-made tracings—Oedipus, the good daddy and the bad daddy, the bad
mommy and the good mommy—while the child makes a desperate attempt to
carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst totally misconstrues.)28

The Deleuzian understanding of the psyche thus identifies a fundamental, and deeply

problematic, flaw in the conceptual framework and interventional commitments of

traditional psychoanalysis. For if the psyche resembles the rhizome rather than the tree in

its various transformations, developments, blockages and becomings, psychoanalysis is

bound to impose a normative structure rather than produce a descriptive structure.

Instead of thus ‗mapping‘ a field of unpredictable investments and psychological

structures, Melanie Klein insists on re-tracing and re-inscribing a ―ready-made‖ Oedipal

image on the rhizomatic processes of the boy‘s psyche. Indeed, it is this image of

violence that motivates Deleuze and Guattari in their critiques of Freud and the logic of

psychoanalysis, a violence where every psyche must submit its growths to the

dictatorship of arborescence and the careful pruning of the French gardener Freud.

From such distinctions between arborescent and rhizomatic logics, the

significance that Deleuze and Guattari attach to metaphors of territoriality, nomadism

cartography and representation may begin to emerge with greater clarity. For while the

logic of arborescence always proceeds from a blueprint or tracing of an underlying

structure or topography, the logic of the rhizome cannot be represented in such a

deductive fashion. The radiations of the rhizome, like the movements of the nomad, obey

the commandments—or invitations—of no pre-existing and abstract model. The

28
Ibid., 12-13.

44
territories they describe are exhausted in the becomings and movements of their concrete

movements. The rhizome and the nomad, in other words, are pieces on a chessboard in

which all the squares have become indistinct or invisible, a board that is only marked by

the lines and figures drawn by the comings and goings of the pieces themselves.

The metaphor of the nomad, therefore, becomes a significant figure in A

Thousand Plateaus. In a chapter entitled, ―Treatise on Nomadology‖, the spatial

consciousness of the nomad and his ‗war machine‘ is distinguished from the socio-

geographic understanding described by the authors as the settled, sedentary spaces of the

‗State apparatus‘. Where the limits, the organs and the operations of the latter take shape

in relation to reproductive, representational and forms of legal, administrative and

scientific territories, the spaces of the nomad take shape in the concrete actuality of

movement and mobility. Indeed, if the reproductive action of tracing—whether

understood in geographical, psychological, legal or sexual terms—is the ever present

abstract image that makes the spaces of the State apparatus meaningful, the material

processes, variabilities and peregrinations of Deleuzian ‗mapping‘ define the exterior

passages of the nomad. Where the State defines its forms and spaces in terms of the

arborescence of the law, the nomad determines itself in the actuality of its own

rhizomatic mobility. Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, explore the difference between

the sciences of the State and the ‗ambulant‘ knowledges of the nomad, and investigate the

distinction between the ‗reproducing‘ forms of the former and the ‗following‘ modes of

the latter:

A distinction must be made between two types of science, or scientific

procedures: one consists in "reproducing," the other in "following." The first
involves reproduction, iteration and reiteration; the other, involving itineration, is
the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences. Itineration is too readily reduced to a

45
 modality of technology, or of the application and verification of science. But this
is not the case: following is not at all the same thing as reproducing, and one
never follows in order to reproduce. The ideal of reproduction, deduction, or
induction is part of royal science, at all times and in all places, and treats
differences of time and place as so many variables, the constant form of which is
extracted precisely by the law [….] Reproducing implies the permanence of a
fixed point of view that is external to what is reproduced: watching the flow from
the bank. But following is something different from the ideal of reproduction. Not
better, just different. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the
"singularities" of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to discover a form;
when one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field of celerity; when one ceases
to contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a determinate direction, to be
carried away by a vortical flow; when one engages in a continuous variation of
variables, instead of extracting constants from them, etc. And the meaning of
Earth completely changes: with the legal model, one is constantly
reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of
constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of deterritorialization
constitutes and extends the territory itself.29

The nomad thus derives his or her knowledge in the actions of following and mapping,

actions informed by no external and abstract logos or nomos. Or put another way, the

law and knowledge of the nomad is coextensive with its own concrete movements, not in

relation to the traced and reproducible territories defined by the State. The nomad comes

to represent, in other words, the possibility of those minor sciences, minor literatures and

minor historiographies whose movements resist and traverse imperial boundaries defined

by the territorial abstractions of the State apparatus.

What then is the nature this strange territory of de-territorialization that is

described by the rhizomatic mappings and peregrinations of the nomad? ―It is in this

sense that nomads have no points, paths, or land,‖ write Deleuze and Guattari,

even though they do by all appearances. If the nomad can be called the
Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no
reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant, or upon something else as with

29
Ibid., 372.

46
 the sedentary (the sedentary's relation with the earth is mediatized by something
else, a property regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the contrary, it is
deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that
the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is the earth that
deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with a territory. The land
ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground (sol) or support. The earth
does not become deterritorialized in its global and relative movement, but at
specific locations, at the spot where the for- est recedes, or where the steppe and
the desert advance. […] The nomads inhabit these places; they remain in them,
and they themselves make them grow, for it has been established that the nomads
make the desert no less than they are made by it. They are vectors of
deterritorialization. They add desert to desert, steppe to steppe, by a series of local
operations whose orientation and direction endlessly vary.30

The nomad is present wherever a rhizomatic becoming or growth erupts and escapes

from the imperial models of arborescent law and science. Wherever a thought, a

literature or a desire territorializes precisely on the processes of deterrritorialization,

wherever difference in itself is opened up as a territory to be mapped rather than traced,

there is the space of the nomadic war machine. By contrast, wherever thought re-

inscribes and re-traces the contours and geographies that define the territory of State

power, wherever the abstractions of tree-logic are deployed to prune back rhizomatic

growth and return their energies to established images of territoriality, it is there that

thought becomes complicit with a sedentary imperium. In an example that could easily

refer to the territorial ambitions of German historicism, Deleuze and Guattari write:

Ever since philosophy assigned itself the role of ground it has been giving the
established powers its blessing, and tracing its doctrine of faculties onto the
organs of State power. Common sense, the unity of all the faculties at the center
constituted by the Cogito, is the State consensus raised to the absolute. This was
most notably the great operation of the Kantian "critique," renewed and developed
by Hegelianism. Kant was constantly criticizing bad usages, the better to
consecrate the function. It is not at all surprising that the philosopher has become
a public professor or State functionary. It was all over the moment the State-form
inspired an image of thought. […] In modern States, the sociologist succeeded in
replacing the philosopher (as, for example, when Durkheim and his disciples set

30
Ibid., 381-2.

47
 out to give the republic a secular model of thought). Even today, psychoanalysis
lays claim to the role of Cogitatio universalis as the thought of the Law, in a
magical return. And there are quite a few other competitors and pretenders.31

Indeed, it is against these well-drawn territories of thought—against a thought that

forever seeks to inscribe nations and organs onto the smooth surfaces of ―dark

continents‖ like the human body and human history—that the nomadic war machine

emerges as a resolute exteriority of thought, an unruly and ambulant outside that refuses

to be settled within the Limes of the State apparatus and its sciences.

Ultimately, the work of Deleuze and Guattari in The Anti-Oedipus and A

Thousand Plateaus is not a prescription for absolute becoming, a plea for a schizophrenic

leap into the flows of the nomad and the rhizome. Instead, it is reminder to look for those

moments of social becoming and psychological otherness that are ceaselessly emerging,

but almost always re-territorialized within conventional arborescent logics. In the same

fashion, and in relation to the territories of historicism, the nomadism of Burckhardt,

Warburg, Freud and Benjamin is always only partial or provisional. It moves beyond and

through conventional historical topographies, but its movements always feel the pull and

influence of incipient territoriality, either in the gravity exerted by traditional forms or in

the allure of new continents that must likewise submit to territorial organization. For

Deleuze, absolute nomadism emerges more as a limiting concept—a paradoxical gesture

of adopting deterritorialization as one‘s territory—and to travel that path in actuality, or

to pursue it to its ultimate terminus, would be to plunge into a sphere of absolute Ekstasis

that would be indistinguishable from madness.

31
Ibid., 376.

48
 In the present work, therefore, we merely hope to trace gestures of nomadism that

emerge in the temporalities and travels of our figures, those significant and perhaps

fleeting moments when a line of historical thinking reaches escape velocity and lifts away

from the gravity of historicism. But if we have seen how such metaphors—and

actualities—of movement, mobility and travel inform the works of Burckhardt, Warburg,

Freud and Benjamin, we have also noted the ways in which their reflections were

inflected by an emphasis on visuality and the visible traces of the past. And indeed, it is

in this attention to what we now might call visual culture that the historical nomadism of

our respective figures becomes most conspicuous and insistent. But if this is the case,

then how might we characterize—at the risk of borrowing Wittgenstein‘s ladder once

again—a mode of visuality that plays at the margins of territories and the adjacent spaces

of deterritorialization? What sort of scopic practice is it that hovers at the boundaries

between the representable and the unrepresentable, the material and the spiritual, the

Heimlich and the Unheimlich? What visual territories, in other words, emerge in the gaze

of the nomad?

In this relation, Deleuze may once again be of service. For in his later works,

from the 1980 publication of A Thousand Plateaus until his death in 1995, Deleuze‘s

critical attention was increasingly drawn to philosophical issues of art and aesthetics.

Alongside his two volume meditation on the epistemology of cinema and his work on the

art of British painter Francis Bacon, Deleuze also published a set of reflections on the

aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of the Baroque, entitled The Fold: Leibniz and the

49
Baroque.32 In some ways, this work represented a return to, and culmination of, themes

and issues that he had explored in the 1960‘s, in earlier theoretical works on Spinoza and

Leibniz. But in The Fold, Deleuze also sets out more explicitly to configure the Baroque

as a counter-modern epistemological and aesthetic model. Indeed, with The Fold

Deleuze was entering territory that was already resonating in post-structuralist

discussions regarding counter-enlightenment possibilities inherent in Baroque

deployments of space, in its fondness for repetition and quotation, and in its extravagant

use of parody and irony. The Baroque, with all its emphasis on playful artifice, with its

unsettled ambivalence between illusion and reality, with its material richness coexisting

with a deep spiritual uncertainty, appeared to resonate for many as an historical model

and mirror of a contemporary post modern condition. The Baroque, in other words,

represented the visual and aesthetic corollary of the nomad and the rhizome; it was an

expansive aesthetic—extending from the colonial statements of Latin American

architecture to the ramified ironies of Cervantes—that playfully shuttled back and forth

between the imperial gestures of territorialization and the dispersive impulses of

deterritorialization.

Furthermore, and not accidently, the theme of the Baroque (and its Renaissance

other) runs like a red thread through the works we will explore in the following chapter.

For it was precisely in the era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the

once derided aesthetic of the Baroque began to receive new interest among historians of

art and culture, an interest that set out to revise the jaundiced vision of the Baroque that

32
See: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (London: Athlone Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze,
Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Gilles Deleuze, Francis
Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London: Continuum, 2003).

50
had been presented through the lens of German neo-classicism. Indeed, this latter

tradition emerged in Winckelmann‘s critique of the perceived extravagance and

voluptuousness of the Baroque and Rococo, and long occupied a hegemonic influence in

judgments of taste and receptions of art history. By the end of the nineteenth century,

however, the orthodoxies of neoclassicism and the doctrines of ―stille Größe‖ were being

challenged with increasing frequency. In this same period, for example, Burckhardt

himself began to show an increasing fascination with the Baroque as a cultural

phenomenon. Letters and writings from the 1860‘s to the 1890‘s show the emergence of

an almost grudging interest in the era, an interest that developed from an unenthused

sense of professional responsibility to one born of a deep and genuine personal

fascination.33 Foremost among these writings was his posthumously published

Erinnerungen aus Rubens, an extended meditation on a mode of expression very different

from that of the High Renaissance. However, while Burckhardt confined his sentiments

to posthumous works and epistolary pronouncements, sentiments that he described as

Ketzerisch, a scholarly literature devoted to the Baroque began to emerge in the

generation that followed. Prompted in part by the early efforts of Heinrich Wölfflin and

Cornelius Gurlitt, scholarly work on the aesthetic culture of the Baroque underwent a

period of enormous expansion in the first decades of the twentieth century.34 The earliest

efforts, in consonance with the disciplinary trends of art history, were directed towards

the study of the Baroque as moment in the history of style. In the hands of a Wölfflin,

33
―In Sachen des Barocco werde ich immer ketzerischer. Schon ganz am Anfang unserer Reise erquickte
mich in der Kirche zu Feldkirch der genialste Barocco-Beichtstuhl den ich je gesehen, und es hieß sogleich:
Wenn doch der Max das sähe! — Hier in Mailand kann man in Barocco schwelgen.― Jacob Burckhardt,
Briefe; vollständige und kritisch bearb., ed. Max Burckhardt (Basel: Schwabe, 1949-1994). Vol. 6, 96.
34
Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1966); Cornelius Gurlitt, Geschichte des Barockstiles in Italien (Stuttgart: Verlag von Ebner and Seubert,
1887).

51
and with a method announced most famously in Principles of Art History: The Problem

of the Development of Style in Later Art, the Baroque represented a set of stylistic forms

that developed within a historical continuum, the Renaissance at one terminus and

Rococo at the other. The Baroque could be defined in terms of a set of formal

characteristics whose development was conditioned by previous forms and that likewise

conditioned the stylistic forms of subsequent eras. From this perspective, in other words,

the earliest art historical configuration of the Baroque was in the mode of a strict stylistic

historicism. The art of the seventeenth century was a distinct, individual and organic

totality whose formal expressions were governed by their position at a unique historical

moment of artistic style.

Yet if the first half of the twentieth century saw increasing challenges to the

notion of art history as ―history of styles‖, the definition of the Baroque likewise

underwent reevaluation. Indeed, in this period, it could be said that the concept of the

Baroque not only escaped the confines of a history of forms, but also escaped the bounds

of the art historical discipline. The result, during the 1920‘s and 1930‘s, was an

expansion of the concept not only into new territories of art historical scholarship, but

also into the domains of literature, history and aesthetics. Indeed, it was in this context

that Walter Benjamin published his 1925 Die Ursprung des deutsche Trauerspiels, a

reflection on a literary Baroque in the form of seventeenth-century German tragic drama.

Far from a purely historicized phenomenon, the Baroque here began to reveal a set of

resonances and relations with nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernities. In the

cultural impulse to allegory, for example, an impulse that Benjamin would explore

further in the Passagen-Werk, there emerged an almost uncanny resemblance between the

52
representational constellations of the Counterreformation and those of capitalist

modernity.

Appearing shortly after Benjamin‘s work, and more immediately influential, was

art historian Henri Focillon‘s 1934 Vie des formes.35 Responding to the still dominant art

historical historicization of style, Focillon presented a more structural interpretation of

the Baroque, an interpretation that posited the history of art as a series of cyclical

developments. From this perspective, the Baroque emerged not as a singular historical

phenomenon, but a more or less repeatable (and repeated) moment in which a given

―classicism‖ enters a period of decadent self-referentiality and extravagance. From this

perspective, the Baroque became disentangled from its seventeenth-century setting and

described a syndrome common to a variety of places and times. In similar fashion, and

also influential for contemporary theorists, Catalan writer Eugenio d‘Ors‘ 1935 Lo

Barocco amplified the notion of the Baroque as a trans-historical constant or type,

recurring in many times and many places. ―He even indulges,‖ Renee Wellek wrote

somewhat unsympathetically of d‘Ors in a 1947 survey,

in drawing up a table of the different variant or subspecies of homo barocchus,

where we find an archaic baroque, a Macedonian, an Alexandrian, a Roman, a
Buddhist, a Gothic, a Franciscan, a Manuelian (in Portugal), a Nordic, a Palladian
(in Italy and England), a Jesuit, a Rococo, a romantic, a fin-de-siècle and some
other varieties of the baroque. It pervades all of art history from the ruins of a
Baalbek to the most recent modernism, all literature from Euripides to Rimbaud,
and all other cultural activities including philosophy as well as the discoveries of
Harvey and Linné.36

35
Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (London: Zone Books, 1992).
36
Rene Wellek, "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 5, no. 2, Special Issue on Baroque Style in Various Arts, Dec. (1946); Eugenio d'Ors, Du
Baroque (Paris: Gallimard, 1935).

53
What thus began in the early century as a province of largely Germanophone art

historical investigation—including works by Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Riehl, Schmarsow and

Dehio—thus quickly expanded following the First World War into fields and disciplines

far beyond its origin.

In the era after the Second World War, perhaps channeled by contemporary

Spanish discussions of the concept, the Baroque emerged as a focus of debate among

Latin American critics regarding the cultural legacy of colonial histories. The issue here

revolved around the question of how to situate the Baroque in relation to the politics of

cultural emancipation in Central and South America. Propelled primarily by authors and

critics such as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, these reflections

ranged from a rejection of the Baroque as an imported expression of Spanish colonial

hegemony to positions that saw a Baroque that could be (and had been) appropriated and

counter-deployed in unique Latin American hybridizations. It was in these latter

perspectives that the tradition reemerged with some of the same culturally deconstructive

possibilities that Benjamin had identified several decades earlier, possibilities that

emphasized the inherently de-centered, poly-valent and disruptive qualities of the

tradition. For example, while discussing Baroque urban spaces and architecture in a 1972

Diacritics interview, Cuban born critic Severo Sarduy could remark:

The canonical structure of the Church was decentralized; in place of a central

aisle leading the worshiper from the entrance to the high altar, it took the form of
a building without specific entrances and exits, and whose plan was opened, just
as the urbanism of the baroque city was opened. In other words, the baroque city
was no longer a center around the cathedral, around the dome, but rather a
decentralized organization - "polysemous" shall we say - with various comings
and goings, with various interior sections. Thus we see here that there exists a
kind of underlying battle - which interests me much more than those battles and
those treaties that the biographers point out - between two forms characteristic of

54
 our western civilization: the circle and the ellipse. This struggle of circle and
ellipse has various manifestations; it is fought in several fields.37

In other words, while Baroque could be seen as an instrument of cultural hegemony, it

could also contain, within its own formal imperatives, the possibility for movements,

actions and agencies that undermined the social spaces constructed in accordance with

colonial power. The forms of the Baroque could be embraced and arrayed against the

very forces that wielded them as an instrument of power. The de-centeredness of the

tradition, in other words, presented an aesthetic regime that contained within itself spaces

for divergent movements of irony and self-parody. As Sarduy goes on to say, ―There is

no baroque without parody; parody is a distancing, grafting, and as we have already

seen—and you alluded today to Calderon's Life is a Dream—the Baroque stems from an

image which contradicts itself, which hollows itself out. The baroque is the blind spot of

the king.‖38

From the 1960‘s through the 1980‘s, the idea of the Baroque was further

amplified in the emerging literatures of post-structuralism and in the burgeoning

theorization of post-modernity. Sarduy‘s own association with Tel Quel circles in France

merged with an already growing interest in the seventeenth-century and eighteenth-

century as decisive periods in the birth of a reevaluated European modernity. As we have

already seen, for instance, figures such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze showed an

ongoing fascination with the ways in which knowledge and power found expression in

37
Severo Sarduy, "Interview: Severo Sarduy," Diacritics 2, no. 2, Summer (1972). See also: Severo
Sarduy, "The Baroque and the Neobaroque," in Latin America and Its Literature, ed. Cesar Fernandez
Moreno (Madrid: Siglio XXI Editores, 1978); Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975);
Francisco Cabanillas, Severo Sarduy: The Flight of Desire (Severo Sarduy: El Vuelo Del Deseo) (Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1992).
38
Ibid.

55
representational and scopic regimes of the Baroque era. And indeed, if subsequent years

saw a gradual cooling of the controversies related to post-structuralism, the literature of

the Baroque nevertheless continued to grow. Christine Buci Glucksmann‘s important

1984 La Raison baroque. De Baudelaire à Benjamin picked up the theme of the baroque

as a representational ―other‖, persisting alongside hegemonic ideologies of modernity and

marked by differentiations of class and gender. Omar Calabrese, on the other hand,

explored the semiotics of the Baroque and its contemporary manifestations in the 1992

Neo Baroque: Sign of the Times, drawing an explicit link between patterns of

signification in the baroque and those of modern mass media and culture. Indeed, more

recent work, such as Angela Ndalianis‘ Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary

Entertainment (2004), Greg Lambert‘s The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture

(2005), and Lois Parkinson Zamora‘s The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin

American Fiction (2006) has focused precisely on the links between modern culture and

Baroque aesthetic and representational sensibilities.39

39
The literature on the Baroque and its connections with modern representational forms is surprisingly
large, and it continues to grow, perhaps amplified by recent interest in visual culture and the colonial
cultures of Latin America. See: Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity,
trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage, 1994); Stephen Calloway, Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess
(London: Phaidon, 1994); Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, trans. Charles Lambert
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Timothy Hampton, "Introduction: Baroques," Yale French
Studies, no. 80, Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy (1991); Robert Harbison,
Reflections on Baroque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Robert Huddleston, "Baroque
Space and the Art of the Infinite," in The Theatrical Baroque, ed. Larry Norman (Chicago: 2001); Gregg
Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004). Lois Parkinson
Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006); Jose Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure,
trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Cesar Augusto Salgado,
"Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory," The Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445, Summer
(1999); Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004); Georges Teyssot, "Baroque Topographies," Assemblage, no. 41, Apr. (2000); Peter
Wollen, "Baroque and Neo-Baroque in the Age of Spectacle," Point of Contact 3, no. 3, April (1993);
Christopher Braider, Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2004); Elizabeth Armstrong, and Victor Zamudio-Taylor, Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-
Latin American Art (San Diego: La Jolla, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002).

56
 Of course, there is no clear and distinct path that leads unambiguously from

Burckhardt‘s almost grudging appreciation of the Baroque to Walter Benjamin‘s

explorations of the German Trauerspiel and eventually into contemporary critiques of

modernity. For most of Burckhardt‘s professional career, for example, the concept of the

Baroque was still a relatively indistinct set of ideas, its usage vaguely denoting the set of

stylistic movements ranging from Mannerism to Rococo. Largely, though not

exclusively, confined to the realms of fine arts in general and architecture in particular,

the Baroque had not yet become a term associated with the broader landscapes of

literature, philosophy, or even cultural history. However, as we‘ve seen in its relevance

to critiques of modernity, the Baroque of Burckhardt nevertheless shares a number of

important resonances with its genealogically related post-modern manifestations. This is

by no means to say that either Burckhardt‘s or Benjamin‘s reception of seventeenth

century culture represents post-modern critiques of modernity in nuce or avant la lettre.

But in their respective understandings of and reflections on the Baroque, early threads of

a genealogical relation emerge with some clarity, threads that combine and recur over the

course of a century, and present the Baroque as a conceptual vantage point from which

modernity may reflect upon itself.

Put another way, the theorization of the Baroque brings into relief a fundamental

de-centeredness and ironic non-identity that seems to lie at the heart of the project of

modernity. To use a set of circular metaphors that we will encounter once again in

relation to Burckhardt and Warburg, the Baroque captures that sense of self-reflective

curvature that aims at a nostalgic, circular and well-framed identity (depicted most

57
powerfully in the ―classical‖ aesthetic of the Renaissance) but it is also a curve that can

never quite bring the arc to completion as a circumference. Thus, in relation to the legacy

of Spanish Gongorism, Severo Sarduy uses the geometrical metaphor of the ellipse to

describe the nature of the Baroque.40 Where the circle possesses the radial symmetry of a

single central point, a symmetry that Sarduy also links to Renaissance representation and

Raphael, the ellipse is a polycentric figure that recurs in the Baroque, from the frescos of

Pietro da Cortona to the planetary motions described by Kepler. The Baroque curve is

the reflective folding by which modernity turns on itself and looks for its own reflection.

From this perspective, in other words, the Baroque is not the antithesis of the ―classical‖

but represents a field of self-reflective and self-citational tension that may open up in any

tradition. And it is in these porous spaces, pondered by such diverse figures as Wölfflin,

Benjamin, and Deleuze, that the Baroque inheres and manifests itself, in porous spaces

that open up between the points of the ellipse, between the literal and the ironic, between

the territorial state and the nomad. In other words, a primary source of fascination in the

Baroque has been the way in which it embraces, and attempts to represent, a tense

simultaneity of traditional territoriality and transgressive nomadism.

In these curving motions, then, and in these elliptical patterns of a baroque

modernity, our train has finally lurched into motion, and a new landscape emerges into

visibility through the windows of our compartment. And as we accelerate out of the

territories defined by historicism, the following chapters will follow our fellow

travelers—from Jacob Burckhardt to Walter Benjamin—as they explore a set of historical

landscapes inflected by modern forms of visuality and mobility. And if, as we shall see,

40
Sarduy, "Interview: Severo Sarduy."

58
such accelerations yielded novel and disorienting experiences of space and visibility, so

too did such movements trace out new conceptions and intimations of time and history.

In any case, however, the train is in motion and the next stop is Italy.

59
 Part I

Fragments of Rome:
Jacob Burckhardt and the Ruins of History

60
 Chapter 1

Basel, Berlin, Italy:

Burckhardt’s Early Itineraries in the Age of Historicism

While it would be impossible to draw a straight line between Burckhardt's

juvenile experiments and the corpus of his mature historical works, the Antiquities could

be described as the first notes of a leitmotif that runs not only throughout his intellectual

biography, but also through the subsequent reception of his scholarship. For in both the

life of the Swiss historian, and in the ―afterlife‖ of his works, Burckhardt remains

strangely resistant to the institutional categories and lineages with which historians

describe their disciplinary past. During an historical career that spanned over fifty years,

and in an age with a wide array of movements, schools, and increasingly centralized

institutions, Burckhardt assiduously cultivated the role and position of disciplinary

outsider. Though he enjoyed, for much of his career, the exalted status of Ordinarius,

with all the benefits and power such a position conferred, he nevertheless insisted on

remaining in his Basel chair, far from the centers of historical research in Berlin and other

German schools.41 Indeed, despite being honored by the invitation to assume the chair

41
Burckhardt‘s sense of frustration and alienation from his German colleagues is evident in a letter written
to Gottfried Kinkel from Berlin in April 1847: ―Es giebt aber nichts Einfältigeres unter der Sonne als die
Gelehrten dieser Nation. Der liebe Gott will auch bisweilen seinen Jocus haben, und dann macht er Philo-
logen und Geschichtforscher von einer gewissen Sorte, welche sich über die ganze Welt erhaben dünken,
wenn sie wissenschaftlich ermittelt haben, daß Kaiser Conrad II am 7. Mai 1030 zu Goslar auf den Abtritt
gegangen ist und dergleichen Weltinteressen mehr. Es sitzt hier eine rechte Clique dieser Art beisammen
und gönnen sich vor Neid den Sonnenschein nicht. Die gräulichsten Philister haben die Archäologie in
Händen, sie können aber nichts machen, was nicht styllos und jämmerlich herauskäme. Es ist in dieser
deutschen Studirstubenwelt [...] ohne Gleichen. Das wissen diese und andere Leute nicht mehr, daß wahre
Geschichtschreibung ein Leben in jenem feinen, geistigen Fluidum verlangt, welches aus Monumenten
aller andern Art, aus Kunst und Poesie ebensogut dem Forscher entgegenweht, wie aus den eigentlichen
Scriptoren.‖ Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe; vollständige und kritisch bearb., ed. Max Burckhardt, 10 vols.
(Basel: B. Schwabe, 1949-1994), Vol VI, 68.

61
vacated by Ranke, Burckhardt remained true to his home city and refused the

appointment.42 Confronted with the opportunity to take his seat at the very pinnacle of

German historical discipline, the Swiss Ordinarius chose to remain rather at its fringes,

far distant from the professional and political tempests that regularly swept the Prussian

capital and its university.

In similar fashion, despite near universal recognition from subsequent historians,

Burckhardt‘s works and historical reflections likewise occupy a curious periphery. For

even as he carefully held the disciplinary milieus of his mentors and contemporaries at

arm‘s length, he is likewise conspicuous in leaving behind no distinct school or

movement to historical posterity. While he could claim such subsequently distinguished

students as Heinrich Wölfflin and Paul Heyse, and enjoyed significant associations with

art historian Wilhelm Bode and Basel colleague Friedrich Nietzsche, there nevertheless

exists today no body of research, no school of thought, no ―ism‖ that explicitly bears his

name. As with the younger Nietzsche, it might be said that while he clearly influenced

many, he belongs in the last analysis to none.

Even in what we might call his posthumous existence, therefore, Burckhardt

seems to insist on standing alone, a square peg called to, but never quite accepting full

membership in, the pedigrees of subsequent historians. Nonetheless, within the historical

discipline, it would be hard to argue that Burckhardt‘s place in the canon is anything but

secure. He is universally recognized as both a founding practitioner and a model of

42
Beginning in the mid 1860‘s, Burckhardt‘s name began to appear as a possible candidate, first in
Tübingen and subsequently in relation to Heidelberg and Berlin. Burckhardt went out of his way to make
his lack of interest discretely known before any formal offers were made. Interestingly, the position at
Heidelberg was eventually filled by Treitschke, who would likewise fill Ranke‘s chair three years later
after Burckhardt again showed no interest in the Berlin post. Werner Kaegi, Jacob Burckhardt; Eine
Biographie, 7 vols. (Basel: B. Schwabe, 1947-1982), Vol 4, 18-31.

62
cultural history, paving the way for an historical methodology that emphasizes the

synchronic over the diachronic dimensions of the past, a methodology that stresses

cultural space rather than temporal direction and narrative. Likewise, his diagnosis of

contemporary political and historical trends in Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen would

become a classic of cultural historical criticism, its oft times dark, pessimistic view of

modern political life seemed astoundingly prescient to historians and critics of the

following century. However, even while works such as Civilization of the Renaissance in

Italy remain celebrated classics to this day, lauded for their stylistic and methodological

qualities, their substantive conclusions have in many cases long been rejected. A brief

glimpse at contemporary Renaissance scholarship reveals the continuing presence of and

admiration for Burckhardt; he remains a founding figure who must be approached and

engaged, even if only as a point of departure43. And indeed, it is precisely in the form of

such a departure that Burckhardt is manifest in such works. Though persisting as an

important founding figure, his significance is often measured in the distance that the field

has traveled away from his initial conclusions and perspectives.

Likewise, if the history of art also claims Burckhardt as a seminal founding

figure, here too the relationship is not without its strains. Burckhardt no doubt counts as

an enormously influential precursor to the modern discipline of art history, but he

nevertheless seems to remain precisely that—a precursor. His canonical position is

43
See: August Buck ed., Zu Begriff und Problem der Renaissance (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1969); Wallace Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1948); Wallace K. Ferguson, Renaissance Studies (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); J. B. Bullen,
The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Peter Ganz,
"Jacob Burckhardts 'Kultur der Renaissance in Italien' und die Kunstgeschichte," Saeculum 40 (1989); E.
M. Janssen, Jacob Burckhardt und die Renaissance (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1970); Anthony Hughes,
"Interpreting the Renaissance," The Oxford Art Journal 11, no. 2 (1988); Volker Reinhardt, Jacob
Burckhardt und die Erfindung der Renaissance. Ein Mythos und seine Geschichte (Bern: Akademie der
Geistes-und Sozialwissenschaften, 2002).

63
surely not in dispute, yet it nevertheless assumes secondary significance behind more

proximal figures such as Riegl, Wölfflin, Morelli, Warburg, and Panofsky. Burckhardt,

in other words, takes his place here just on the threshold of a discipline that emerged

formally only at the end of his career. Thus, although universally recognized—a

confrontation with Burckhardt seems unavoidable and obligatory for historians of many

stripes—he is also extremely difficult to place within the disciplinary categories and

currents that have taken shape since the end of his career.

In terms of reception, Burckhardt's star has always traced a rather elliptical orbit

within the larger system of the historiographical cannon, an orbit determined in large part

by the historical events outside the academy. With the publication of the great works of

the 1850's – The Age of Constantine (1853), The Cicerone (1855), and the Civilization of

the Renaissance (1860), Burckhardt had secured a position of profound—if not

unqualified—respect among his fellow members of the German historical Zunft, and had

achieved a wide and long lasting recognition as author of the popular 1855 guide to

Italian art.44 In the decades that followed, however, Burckhardt's apparent interest in

disciplinary recognition, institutional advancement or even further publishing during his

lifetime dramatically waned. While his relationship to the city of his birth would remain

complex and ambivalent, the 1860's found him reconciled to the deep ties that bound him

to Basel, and increasingly satisfied with a quiet life of scholarship at the provincial Swiss

university. Despite regular invitations to conferences, lectures, and symposia of every

kind (like the 1872 offer to fill Ranke's Berlin chair), Burckhardt politely, yet resolutely,

44
Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas (New York Pantheon, 1949).
Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (Stuttgart: Kroener,
1986). Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Oxford: Phaidon, 1995).

64
refused in the name of loyalty to the people and intellectual milieu of his home city. By

the time of the publication of Civilization of the Renaissance in 1860, and after the better

part of two decades trading time between Basel, Berlin, Zürich and Rome, Burckhardt

had settled for good at the University of Basel as Professor of History and Art History,

positions he would hold into the 1890's and commitments towards which he would

devote the majority of his energies for the rest of his life. Thus, while his reputation as a

scholar and an historian remained significant during the second half of the nineteenth

century, his personal reticence, his later emphasis on pedagogical obligations, and his

resistance to publication all worked to limit and circumscribe the influence of his

scholarship until his death in 1897.

It was only in the later years of the nineteenth century that the first signs of what

has since become an enormous secondary literature began to emerge. The posthumous

German publication of works such as Erinnerungen aus Rubens (1898), Griechische

Kulturgeschichte (1898-1902), and Weltgeschichtlichen Betrachtungen (1906), in

combination with an increasingly voluminous and well-developed literature related to all

things ―Nietzsche,‖ sparked a revival of interest in Burckhardt. Within this context, and

along with his ill-fated younger colleague, Burckhardt emerged in the role of early

prophet of cultural and historical pessimism, and fashionable precursor of aestheticist

Renaissancismus, articulating a set of anxieties relating to modernity that would become

manifest in the decades before the First World War. And it was precisely in these years,

just before the outbreak of the war, that a genuine monograph literature began to develop

around the work of Jacob Burckhardt, a literature that would continue to gain momentum

65
in the next decades with works by Karl Joel, Emil Dürr, Otto Markwart and Carl

Neumann.45

But if the reception of Burckhardt took its first impetus from enthusiastic former

students and was reflected in the aura of burgeoning Nietzsche studies, the historian that

reemerged in the years just after the war appeared in a somewhat different guise. In the

1920's and 1930's, while interest in his work remained undiminished, the qualities that

made his work essential for historians of cultural and modernity had subtly shifted.

Instead of the proto-Nietzschean cultural pessimist, the Burckhardt that emerged in works

like those of Walter Rehm and Karl Loewith is that of the committed (if melancholy)

cosmopolitan with grave uncertainties about the nature of nationalist politics, the

character of the modern Machtstaat and industrial modernity.46 This is a Burckhardt

deeply concerned that about the fate of European culture in a world conditioned by the

ruthless forces of power politics and modern materialism. Indeed by the mid 1930's,

given the general tenor of Burckhardt's inter-war reception, it is not entirely surprising

that the Third Reich found little use for the Swiss historian in National Socialist

historiography.

In another sense, however, the Third Reich had a profound impact on the

Burckhardt's historiographical fortunes. In the forced exile and emigration of large

portions of the German historical community to the Anglo-American world, the German

nation exported not only many of its best and most promising historical talents, but also

45
Emil Dürr, Freiheit und Macht bei Jacob Burckhardt (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1918). Karl Joel,
Jakob Burckhardt als Geschichtsphilosoph - Festschrift zur Feier des 450-Jährigen Bestenhens der
Universität Basel (Basel: Helbing und Lichtenhahn, 1910); Otto Markwart, Jacob Burckhardt:
Persönlichkeit und Jugendjahre (Basel: Schwabe, 1920); Carl Neumann, Jacob Burckhardt, Deutschland
und die Schweiz (Gotha: Verlag Perthes, 1919).
46
Andreas and Lionel Gossman Cesana, ed., Encounters with Jacob Burckhardt: Centenary Papers (Basel:
Schwabe, 2004).115.

66
exported its most prominent historiographical monuments and traditions. Thus, while

Burckhardt was by no means an insignificant figure in the English-speaking scholarly

world prior to the Second World War, his place within the canon was greatly expanded in

the course of the 1940's and 1950's. At the same time, however, if the Burckhardt that

had spoken to the generation after the First World War had shown an ability to shift his

colors, the protean historian yielded a new set of fascinations for a generation confronting

the aftermath of Nazism and the early frosts of the Cold War. The Burckhardt that

emerged at this point, in an intellectual landscape inhabited by various totalitarianisms

and ―mass men‖, was the besieged and pessimistic liberal, valiantly manning the ramparts

of traditional bourgeois/aristocratic culture against the onslaughts of socialized ideologies

and ―cultural leveling‖. With the new atavisms of ideological tribalism unleashing the

struggles of Fascism and Stalinism, many historians in the era of Cold War consensus

found in Burckhardt an engaging vision of historian as liberal bulwark against the

material and ideological tides of his day, an intellectual Einzelgänger and a committed

opponent of ―massification‖.47

By the end of the 1960's, however, the reputation of Burckhardt and his place

within historiographical discussions were once again undergoing a series of shifts. On

the one hand, even as Burckhardt achieved a degree of canonical centrality in fields such

as History and Art History, the 1950's and 1960's saw a gradual yet consistent

reassessment of Burckhardt's central theoretical and substantive contributions. By the

47
This is Burckhardt that begins to emerge with Friedrich Meinecke‘s late appreciation in: Friedrich
Meinecke, Ranke und Burckhardt; Ein Vortrag, Gehalten in der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften
zu Berlin (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1948). In this connection, see also: J.L. Herkless, "Meinecke and the
Ranke-Burckhardt Problem," History and Theory 9, no. 3 (1970); Heinz Angermeier, Ranke und
Burckhardt (AKG 69, 1987); Felix Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture?: Reflections on Ranke and
Burckhardt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).

67
mid-twentieth century, Burckhardt's understanding of the Renaissance had undergone a

long process of sustained critique and revision to the point of seeming obsolescence, the

concepts and practices that characterized his art history were quickly exchanging

methodological significance for historiographical interest. On the other hand, even as the

historical content of Burckhardt's work began to exercise less and less fascination for

historians, the late 1960's saw not the dimming of Burckhardt's star, but its transformation

into a figure of primarily formal and structural interest. In the hands of Hayden White

and Peter Gay, for example, it is Burckhardt the stylist and Burckhardt the writer that

comes to the fore.48 And if the latter understands the import of historical style in rather

more conventional terms than does the former, the interest for both lies less in what

Burckhardt had to say than in how he went about saying it. Of vital importance, with

regard to this development, is the way in which Burckhardt's reception would become

henceforth linked to the broader methodological crises that would unfold in the 1970's

and 1980's, and in which the interventions of historians like Hayden White would form

important early chapters. And while White takes issue with the ―ironic realist‖ that

emerges in the pages of Metahistory for an ostensible and irresponsible political quietude,

there is no lack of later critics who would find, in Burckhardt's methodological

idiosyncrasies and resistance to theoretical totalization, a model and precursor of a

possible post-modern historiography.49

48
Peter Gay, Style in History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974). Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The
Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
Interesting to note here the way White is reacting rather more to the Burckhardt as understood by the
immediately preceding generation of American academics.
49
Egon Flaig, "Ästhetischer Historismus? Zur Asthetisierung der Historie bei Humboldt und Burckhardt,"
Philosophisches Jahrbuch 94 (1987). Randolph Starn, "A Postmodern Renaissance?," Renaissance
Quarterly Spring (2007).

68
 In most varieties of reception, however, Burckhardt is manifest both as an icon of

modern historiography, and as the voice of a critical and perennial ―outside‖. Even

White, who constructs a rather unsympathetic portrait of Burckhardt, produces this image

precisely because of the Swiss historian's ironic and self-imposed detachment from the

social and cultural issues of his era. Indeed, it is perhaps this very stubborn externality or

alterity, this resistance to neat categorization and self-identity that seems to generate the

perennial interest in Burckhardt among modern historians. Regardless of the period of

reception, in other words, Burckhardt continually reappears as the historian of crisis, a

scholar whose critical and ironic posture with regard to his own era appeals to later

historians confronting their own political, cultural, theoretical and methodological crises.

From this perspective, Burckhardt's persistence as a figure of historiographical

interest has as much to do with his structural location within a landscape defined by the

historical discipline of the nineteenth century and beyond, as it does with the specific

nature of his political, social and cultural views. Unfortunately, much of the secondary

Burckhardt literature seems geared towards identifying these latter elements, finally

determining whether the Swiss historian was, in the last analysis, conservative or liberal,

anti-Semitic or not, or in nailing down his precise attitude about the nature of European

modernity. But if his younger Basel colleague, Friedrich Nietzsche, could declare that

the national identity of the German people consisted precisely in the perennial search for

such a national identity, one could also claim something similar about the ideological and

theoretical essence of Burckhardt's historical interventions.50 It may be true that every

50
―…the Germans are more incomprehensible, more comprehensive, more full of contradictions, more
unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, even more frightening to themselves than other peoples are -
they elude definition and are for that reason alone the despair of the French. It is characteristic of the

69
figure of historiographical interest manifests an irreducible complexity and ambiguity

that the categories of scholarship have difficulty in apprehending and representing, but

Jacob Burckhardt seems to insist on such ambiguity even more stubbornly than most.

Therefore, rather than trying to resolve such ambivalences and ambiguities, rather than

trying to discover or rehabilitate an essential (e.g. liberal, conservative, Nietzschean,

Romantic, anti-Semitic) Burckhardt, perhaps a more adequate picture is presented in the

structural and formal dimension defined by the Swiss historian's deployment of the ironic

mode. From this perspective, Burckhardt is best characterized by his stubborn and ironic

resistance, in both his lived career and the ―afterlife‖ of his posthumous reception, to

subsumption within a stable set of historiographical categories. Put another way, it is

precisely the critical irony and ambiguity of Burckhardt's essential political and

theoretical views that may paradoxically constitute the essence and value of Burckhardt's

historiographical untimely timeliness. For Burckhardt, in other words, the various

displacements described above (national, disciplinary, personal, ironic/stylistic) represent

far more than a set of superficial and accidental features that can be divorced from his

historiographical practice and outlook. Instead, in the insistent extra-territoriality that

suffuse both his life and work, the Basel historian resembles a tile that fits within no

mosaic, a nomad who rejects sedentary settlement, and a fragment that refuses the

integrating whole.

On multiple levels, therefore, from the most contemporary issues of reception to

the early historical experiments of the Antiquities, one quickly notices a recurring

Burckhardtian theme that describes an uneasy ―Schwebende‖ (undetermined, provisional,

Germans that the question 'what is German?' never dies out among them.‖ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1973), 155.

70
hovering) relation between topos and heterotopos, between fragment and whole, between

dissolution and integration.51 And yet these formal qualities of alterity, nomadism, and

fragmentation were neither personal idiosyncrasies nor mere stylistic gestures, but existed

instead in a constitutive and organic relation with his substantive historical, theoretical

and methodological commitments. If the Swiss historian's formal dispositions often

placed him in a curiously oblique relation to the disciplinary practices of his

contemporaries, these same formal dispositions secured him a certain historical vantage

point that was denied to other historians. As with the anthology of his youth,

Burckhardt's methods and commitments may have often diverged from those embraced

by the gathering hegemonic currents of German historicism, but precisely because of this

they permitted a set of relations with the past that were likely closed to those writing from

within more conventional ―territories‖.

But while the Antiquities anthology presents us with a metaphorical model for a

history—self-consciously constructed from fragmentary traces—such a fascination with

the ―historical fragment‖ should not be entirely surprising. Historians are perpetually

confronting an array of often disjointed and incomplete territories and temporal

constellations whose construction, documentation, and reconstruction are precisely the

object of their work. Indeed, foremost among such constellations is the fragmentary field

of documentary evidence that every historian encounters, and from whose uncertain,

51
―Schwebend‖ is used here to draw a link between Burckhardt and the critical vocabulary of Friedrich
Schlegel. By extension this connects with Benjamin's interest in Schlegel in The Concept of Criticism in
Romanticism. ―Schwebend‖ describes a kind of provisional critical hovering between text and
interpretation, being and discourse. Manfred Frank, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic
Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). See The
Concept of Criticism in Romanticism in Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard
Eiland Michael W. Jennings, and Gary Smith, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press, 1996-2003), Vol 1.,
116-200.

71
partial signals the latter seeks to recreate a temporal whole. This confrontation of

historian with historical fragment is one of the most primitive ur-relations in the

professional documentation, appropriation and representation of previous times. At the

heart of every such enterprise, we invariably discover a relation where a subject of

historical reflection is seeking to make sense of a necessarily fragmentary body of

evidentiary objects. And while the reaction between these two elements may produce a

child's anthology of cut-outs and pastiche, a multi-volume history of Rome, or nothing

more than a moment's reverie, the primal dyadic relation between present subject and

fragment of the past is always its pre-condition and determining factor.

What is important, therefore, is not that the practice of history or other less formal

modes of reflection must represent and reconstruct a past that is present (in varying

degrees) only in fragments. Instead, the historiographical distinctiveness of Burckhardt

lies rather in the way he understands and represents this relation between whole and

fragment, and how this understanding became manifest in the theories, methodologies,

and substantive conclusions of his historical representations. What is at issue is the way

in which any attempt to reconstruct the past must understand its task in relation to a

fragmentary body of evidence. What is the precise significance and significatory status of

the objects that mediate this confrontation with the past, and how are these objects taken

up and situated in a reconstructed historical continuum in the representations of the

historian? Thus, what makes Burckhardt‘s approach, in the Antiquities and beyond,

curiously compelling is the insistently visual manner in which he takes up, organizes, and

communicates with a set of historical and graphical fragments. So while Burckhardt‘s

anthology selects and discursively arranges its evidentiary fragments as any other history

72
would, it does this in a visual medium with formal imperatives and structural

consequences that are likely very different from those generated by conventional

narrative and textual genres like the historiographical essay, the monograph, or the

journal article. In other words, the striking thing about the anthology is not that its

constitutive elements are fragments, but rather the way in which these fragments are

situated in a representational medium defined by visual rather than textual characteristics.

But what sort of history is it that emerges from a source base and representational

framework that is committed to a visual appropriation of the past? Joining a broader

current of contemporary reflection on history and the visual, the present chapter seeks to

investigate the ways in which the formal historiographical embrace of a visual and

envisioned past conditions substantive historical conclusions and outlooks. Using the

example of Burckhardt in relation to the disciplinary milieu of his era, I hope to

demonstrate that a visual appropriation of the past yields not simply a new and

complementary means of surveying an already well explored domain of historical

objects, but carries with it a set of imperatives and orientations that may produce

temporal landscapes very different from those that take shape within the realm of textual

discursive and narration. The past that is seen, in other words, is perhaps very different

from the past that is read and written. In more specific terms, we might ask how

Burckhardt‘s well known emphasis on the optical or scopic experience of the past helped

determine the contours and conclusions of his historical works. What novel fragments

does it discover through its optical apparatus, and how does the organization and

arrangement of these manifest themselves in a representational framework decisively

conditioned by visibility?

73
 Another way to think about such questions is perhaps to borrow some

terminology from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. From this perspective,

we might ask how a Burckhardtian commitment to vision destabilizes and dissolves the

methodological and theoretical ―territories‖ established by the practices of German

historicism, and how such a commitment involves a re-territorialization of historical

phenomena in relation to another principle of differentiation.52 However, in order to

grasp these processes in a less abstract fashion, to bring into relief the ways in which a

visually oriented appropriation of the past can deconstruct and reconfigure a

textual/narrative approach, we may wish to deploy the Deleuzian terminology of territory

not only in its metaphorical significance, but also embrace it quite literally in its concrete

spatial meaning. For while Burckhardt's visual commitments (his political views, his

personal predilections) locate him as an extra-territorial in a variety of metaphorical

senses, such ―nomadic‖ transgression was mirrored in, and reinforced by, a variety of

similar movements and experiences in physical spaces.

Geography, in other words, here intersects with intellectual biography, and

transitions in space become associated with, and reflect, transformations of political,

theoretical, methodological commitments. Both literally and figuratively, different

spaces yield different visions, and territories of space are intimately bound up with

territories of vision. Indeed, Lionel Gossman's Basel in the Age of Burckhardt is

premised to a great degree on this conjunction of various geographic spaces—political,

cultural, disciplinary—and how these conditioned the intellectual micro-climate of Basel

52
See for instance the selection on ‗nomad thought‘ in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987), 374-380.

74
in the mid-nineteenth century, molding the intellectual biographies of figures like

Burckhardt and Bachofen.53 Thus, for example, we are unsurprised Burckhardt's

peripheral status within the Prussian-centered German historical Zunft is reflected in his

embrace of a Basel identity bound up with a Grossdeutsch provincialism, an identity

defined by its position just beyond the reach of powerful political and disciplinary

territories. Conversely, if Berlin tempted initially as a lively metropole of politics and

scholarship, it later came to represent a less congenial atmosphere determined by

careerism and urban philistinism.54 And where Köln would form an emotional and

biographical counterpart to experiences in Berlin, a brief idyll of Vormärz (pre-1848)

enthusiasm alongside friends like Gottfried Kinkel, an older Burckhardt took care not to

be overwhelmed by the (perhaps naive) passions he associated with it. For Burckhardt, in

other words, territories of space, territories of thought, and territories of affect, were

intimately and inextricably bound to one another. To move in one dimension was

invariably to travel in another.

Burckhardt would eventually reconcile himself to the extra-territorial (in all the

senses we have described) advantages of his Basel perch on the upper Rhine, and reject

53
Lionel Gossmann, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2002). Gossmann‘s presentation of the intellectual milieu of nineteenth century Basel of
course is part of a larger constellation of works that take the space of a particular region as a starting point
for Burckhardtian style cross-sectional history. Others include Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna:
Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981); Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National
Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002); Bernd Roeck, Florenz 1900: Die Suche nach Arkadien (Munchen: C.H. Beck, 2001).
54
Already in 1847, and with possibilities of a post secured by mentor Franz Kugler dwindling, Burckhardt
shows little love for Berlin in a letter to Eduard Schauenberg: ―Armer Junge! ich glaube gern, daß Siegen
noch schlimmer ist als Berlin, obschon das viel sagen will. Glaubst Du mir, daß ich am Sonntag nur schon
deshalb ungern spazieren gehe, um nicht Berlinern en masse zu begegnen? Drei Vierteile dieser Gesichter
sind bittersauer und gedrückt, der letzte Vierteil phi-" liströs gemästet. Rom ist doch auch arm, aber welche
Schönheit, Klarheit und Charakterfülle in diesen Gesichtern! mager zum Teil, auch alt und verwittert hie
und da, aber alles entschieden, ehern, nichts a priori Skrophulöses, Schwammiges, Formloses.― Burckhardt,
Briefe; vollständige und kritisch bearbeitet. Vol. II, 62-63.

75
the intellectual biographical spaces defined by Berlin and Basel, however, there remains

another set of territories that persisted as a source of professional and personal inspiration

throughout his adult life. For even as the compass arrow of Burckhardt's youthful and

student years had been directed largely to the north, to professional development in

Berlin and personal commitments in the Rhineland, that same arrow could already be

seen wobbling with equal urgency towards regions in the south, towards an Italy that

would remain an important territory for Burckhardt throughout his life and career.55 It

was Italy, after all, and the domains of the south, with all its Goethean and Romantic

associations and resonances, that would initially draw a young scholar on early tentative

exploratory journeys. It was Italy that would beckon Burckhardt over and over again in

his professional capacity as historian, scholar and researcher. And it was Italy where

Burckhardt found a peculiar personal equilibrium between an interest in historical time

and a passion for aesthetic experience. Indeed it was precisely this heterotopic and extra-

territorial ―elsewhere‖ that became the space in which Burckhardt would explore the

mutually defining relation between the presentations of the visual and the representations

of the historical.

55
In 1838, shortly after his first student tours of northern Italy, Burckhardt would write to Johannes
Riggenbach of the place the experience of the South had come assume: ―Erst jetzt taucht die Erinnerung
von meiner Reise ganz in ihrer Größe und halb als Ideal umgestaltet vor mir auf. Die Masse des
Unangenehmen verschwindet im Gedächtniß und nur die großen himmlischen Bilder bleiben und werden
mein alier-eigenstes Erbtheil. Dann und wann träume ich des Nachts von dem Gesehenen und sehe es noch
viel ungeheurer, noch viel wunderbarer.‖ Briefe, Vol. I, 99.
By 1881, during a stay in Genoa, he could look back on his relation to Italy as a form of elective affinity:
―Regt sich in mir der verdünnte Tropfen italienischen Geblütes, den ich durch diverse Mütter hindurch seit
dem XVI. Jahrhundert in mir habe ? genug, daß mir Alles so verwandt und selbstverständlich erscheint was
ich vor mir sehe. Mein Geschick will ich gar nicht tadeln; ich bin ein nicht ganz unnützer Basler geworden
und wäre doch nur ein unzulänglicher Italiener, aber es ist mir doch lieb daß ich hier das Gefühl der
Fremde nicht mehr habe. Es ist mir hier reichlich so heimisch zu Muthe als in Frankfurt oder in Dresden
und ich habe es leichter, mit den Leuten in Verkehr zu treten.‖ Briefe, Vol. VII, 261.

76
 Furthermore, despite the many intellectual and aesthetic lures of the rest of the

peninsula, it was clearly Rome that had the most profound impact on the Basel scholar,

and it is in relation to this ―eternal city‖ that the rest of this chapter will seek to trace a

peculiarly Burckhardtian, visually-oriented reconstruction of the past. In this fascination

with Rome, of course, Burckhardt would be neither the first visitor nor the last to be

captivated by the city so defined and marked by its own antiquity and historicity. While

other ―capitals of the nineteenth century‖, such as Paris and London, had busily and

continually built upon and concealed their ancient foundations, and where cities like

Berlin were the mere juvenile offspring of modernity by comparison, Burckhardt's Rome

could still be characterized as ruins containing a city rather than a city containing ruins. 56

In similar fashion, if the physiognomy of Rome was defined by the fragments, traces, and

ruins of an astonishingly rich antiquity, the city posed both challenges and opportunities

to those who would seek to understand and make sense of its spaces from a historical

perspective. Thus, if Paris were a blackboard, from which Hausmann could erase the

romance of the medieval city and rewrite it as an epic of modernity, Rome remained

throughout most of the nineteenth century a city in the form of a jumbled and crowded

palimpsest, a city whose history was perpetually written and rewritten on a single, seven-

hill page. Where the physiognomies of Paris and London were great geographical

narratives of imperial power and modernization, and where such narratives could only

56
The modern reception of the urban spaces of Rome has not seen the same attention as, for instance,
nineteenth-century Paris. However, there has been a literature developing around European experience of
Italian cityscapes, such as Catharine Edwards, Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture,
1789-1945 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999); Catharine Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual
Approaches to the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For review of the transformation
of Rome‘s physiognomy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see John Agnew, Rome (New York:
Wiley, 1995). For a look at the reception of Florence as well as the modernization of its urban spaces, see
Bernd Roeck, Florenz 1900: Die Suche nach Arkadien (München: Beck, 2001).

77
partially conceal schizophrenic social geography, Rome by contrast seemed to delight in

its own historical schizophrenia and insist upon the never complete coincidence of its

many identities.

In many ways, to be sure, it is precisely this plenitude of the past, this thoroughly

overdetermined field of historical significance, that would not only attract the fascination

of visitors from Martin Luther to Goethe, but would also exercise a nearly overwhelming

impression on the historically attuned traveler of the nineteenth century. This very

plenitude of historical, aesthetic, and political signs, narratives and spaces could open up

territories of interpretive exploration that could not be found in places where temporal

valences were more rigidly determined and policed. In other words, as a city quite

literally existing in historical fragments, Rome was also a domain whose meanings and

significance were both in perpetual decay and in perpetual renewal. And for every visitor

like Martin Luther who was horrified by this urbis mirabilis a ―city of man‖ reduced to

an all too human process of ruination and fragmentation, there were many such as Goethe

who encountered Rome‘s historical fragmentation as an opportunity of enormous creative

potential—whether aesthetic, intellectual, erotic, or even historical.57 For some, in other

words, the jumbled narratives of Rome—the city of Augustus, the city of Peter, and the

city of Victor Emmanuel—could yield nothing more than an ongoing staging of a

tragedy, an eternal and almost sacred symbol of historical dissolution. For others, Rome

57
For Luther‘s jaundiced response to Rome see: Russel Lemmons, ―‘If there is a Hell, then Rome Stands
upon it‘: Martin Luther as Traveler and Translator,‖ in Carmine Di Biase ed. Travel and Translation in the
Early Modern Period (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). For the impact of Goethe on German travel to Italy see:
Richard Block The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic and the Attraction of Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2006). Also, see the early survey of the varied phenomena of German interest in the
south by Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Das Klassische Land: Wandlungen der Italiensehnsucht (Leipzig: Seemann,
1927).

78
emerged as a grand urban staging of a Benjaminian Trauerspiel, an ongoing work of

perpetual fragmentation always requiring the interpretive participation of its players and

audience. Rather than a mythical symbol of decay, Rome could here present itself as an

allegory of history, a living jumble of allegorical fragments that insist upon, and yet

always elude, the interpretive completion or totalization of those who witness its

spectacle.

This peculiarly Roman constellation of historical fragmentation thus poses both a

particularly daunting problem and a welcome opportunity for the historian whose task is

one of gathering together traces of the past and arranging them in a coherent and

representative whole. While the density of historical traces, records, documents,

monuments, and narratives is fertile ground for the practice of history, it is also a

landscape lushly covered over with growths of every conceivable time and era, a fecund

space where even the most careful historical arrangements are easily overwhelmed.

Rome thus generates a set of methodological and theoretical issues that, while not unique

to the city or region itself, arise there with particular clarity and starkness. But how, then,

does the historian disentangle that crowded jumble of narratives inscribed within and

through the urban space? How can this often dissonant chorus of temporalities—in

narratives, documents, signs, traces and fragments—be assembled in a coherent whole

without doing injustice to the individual elements of which it is composed? Is it even

possible to adequately represent Rome in the textual, narrative, linear and sequential

forms that became the methodological standard for the nineteenth-century practice of

professional history, and whose use was pioneered in part by the great representatives of

the German historical school?

79
 Such questions would not deter figures like Leopold von Ranke or Theodor

Mommsen, whose great historical works on Roman history—the History of the Popes

(1834-1836) and the History of Rome (1854-1856) respectively—would be recognized by

contemporaries as monuments of modern historical scholarship. And yet one senses,

particularly with regard to Mommsen, that the fragmentary and unfinished state of his

Roman history had as much to do with the density of his chosen object as it did with its

extensiveness. Whether such density was present in an already crowded historiographical

field populated by giants like Gibbon and Niebuhr, or whether such density could be

found in the ever accumulating mass of fragments collected in Mommsen's Corpus

Inscriptionum Latinarum, a history committed to post-Hegelian, Prussian School linearity

and necessity could no longer synthesize such a vast field of historical fragments into a

coherent and sequential narrative.58 In this respect, Mommsen in particular, and German

historicism in general, resembled the figure of a collector whose collection had enlarged

beyond his narrative capabilities to define, encompass and adequately represent. Or, like

the great ―unfinished‖ modernist novels of the twentieth century—say, Kafka's Das

Schloß or Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften—the historicist narratives of the

nineteenth century discovered that subject matter of sufficient density and extensiveness

must necessarily exhaust the formal capacities of the narrative form itself. And while this

58
In relation to Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome and Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum see:
Lothar Wickert, Theodor Mommsen: eine Biographie, 4 vol. (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1959-1980);
Lothar Wickert, Drei Vorträge über Theodor Mommsen zum 70. Geburtstag (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann,
1970); Stefan Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen: eine Biographie (München: Beck, 2002); Josef Wiesehöfer,
Theodor Mommsen: Gelehrter, Politiker und Literat (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2005); Peter Kopf, Die
Mommsens: von 1848 bis Heute: die Geschichte einer Familie ist die Geschichte der Deutschen (Hamburg:
Europa Verlag, 2004); Joachim Fest, "Theodor Mommsen: Zwei Wege Zur Geschichte - Eine
Biographische Skizze," Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, July 31 1982; Albert Wucher, Theodor Mommsen,
Geschichtschreibung und Politik (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1956); Karl Friedrich Wilhlem
Zangemeister, Theodor Mommsen als Schriftsteller: ein Verzeichnis seiner Schriften (Hildesheim:
Weidmann, 2000).

80
may have been precisely the point for the modernist novelist intent on probing the limits

of twentieth century literary forms, it posed serious methodological and theoretical issues

for nineteenth-century historians committed to the narrative reconstruction of the past.

However, the recognition of this problem of representation, particularly with

respect to the historical landscapes of Rome, was by no means a discovery of the

twentieth, or even the nineteenth century. Since at least the eighteenth-century, visual

artists had struggled to represent the historical plenitude and schizophrenic non-identity

of Rome in ways that satisfied the formal demands of their own representational media.

But where some sought to visualize a lost classical or Christian wholeness—in nostalgic

visions of a ―golden age‖, for example, in the late-Baroque Claude Lorraine, or in

restored traditions of medieval sacred painting in the later ―Nazarenes‖ circle—others

would foreground the fragmentary character of Rome, highlighting a city composed of

cracks, fissures and ruins. The eighteenth-century Roman Vedute of Giovanni Piranesi,

reconstructs a Rome not rendered whole by situating it in a real or imagined historical

continuum, but by visually representing the past as a constellation of fragmentary

elements situated in a synchronic present. Piranesi experiments with the ways in which a

present Roman whole—in both its spatial and temporal character—can be presented

while still preserving and foregrounding a variegated, fragmentary character. Indeed,

from the perspective of a visually-oriented synchronic moment, the various strands of the

historical continuum manifest themselves almost necessarily as fragments (what

Burckhardt would later associate with his famous historical cross-sections). The vision of

the city is not imagined through appeal to a wholeness that exists in some distant past or

future, but as it takes shape in a present defined by the ruinous coincidence and inter-

81
penetration of many times and many narratives. What the visualized historical

landscapes of Piranesi bring into relief is a sense of an essential yet fragmentary

simultaneity, a snapshot conjunction between past and present, or between various

dimensions of one historical moment. Indeed, carrying this process one step further,

many of Piranesi's Vedute self-consciously present themselves as fragments of fragments,

as incomplete visual slices through a spatial and historical continuum that cannot be

totalized or fully apprehended by either artistic or historical representation. In the end,

Piranesi's visual documentation of traces of the Roman past not only produces a

fascinating rethinking of the historical representation—in terms of synchronization,

simultaneity, and representational irony—but seems also to challenge, dissolve and

undermine the posited continuities of more linear and diachronic approaches, continuities

and formal imperatives central to what would become nineteenth-century German

historicism.

Likewise inspired by the spaces of Rome, Edward Gibbon's famous account of his

'Capitoline Vision' is perhaps the most famous example of a historian‘s visual encounter

with the past, an encounter that captures both an historical and an historiographical

moment ―It was at Rome,‖ he would write some years after the fact in his memoirs, ―on

the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-

footed fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the

decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.‖59 Describing a moment of Gibbon's

continental tour and visit to Italy in the 1760's, subsequent readers have marveled at this

59
Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of Edward Gibbon (Boston: J. R. Osgood & co., 1877). See also Stephen
Bann, ―Envisioning Rome: Granet and Gibbon in Dialogue,‖ in Catherine Edwards ed. Roman Presences
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Catherine Edwards, ed., Writing Rome: Textual
Approaches to the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

82
compact visual miniature as the ―experience‖ that could be said to have launched a

million words in the form of the British historian's monumental, multi-volume work, The

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For our purposes, however, what springs to the

fore is not so much the relation of such an event, whether real or invented, to a celebrated

work of history which it ostensibly inspired. Rather, what is here particularly fascinating

is the way it serves to encapsulate and exemplify an experience of historical time in the

form of a spatialized scene—whether that space is described visually or verbally. In this

brief passage, in other words, this mere sketch of just a few lines, Gibbon envisions a

dense tableau for his readers in which all the strange relations between past and present,

between historian and historical trace, are congealed into a single image.

Such an image, of course, and the relations of which it speaks, are themselves

artifacts of a particular time and place, and the envisioned remembrances of Gibbon must

themselves be historicized and understood from the perspective of a particular personal

and disciplinary moment. After all, the image described by Gibbon, in which we find

him ―musing‖ on the Capitoline Hill, clearly announces its Enlightenment provenance,

displaying the same critical characteristics that would determine the contours of the

subsequent historical work. On the one hand, for example, Gibbon looks on as the flock

of ―fryers‖ passes before his critical eye, the clerics ironically inhabiting the ruined

remains of Empire whose downfall Decline and Fall would ascribe to the rise of the

Roman Church. Thus clearly marked for an age of enlightened and critical

historiography, committed to demystification on every front, the Roman ruins represent a

rich human narrative that has become buried beneath the encrustations of a dogmatic and

superstitious millennium. On the other hand, Gibbon takes the curious yet highly

83
significant step of situating himself in his own tableau. The scene describes not only an

uncanny vision in which monks pass through the fossilized remains of an empire laid low

by the solvent of emerging Christianity, but it also describes Gibbon's own presence

within this vision. Indeed, as it is constructed, the vision underscores less the monks

themselves than Gibbon's observation of them; what the reader sees is not merely ruins

and monks, but Gibbon seeing these ruins and monks. The immediate effect is a curious

re-framing of the historical moment in which Gibbon's own reflective moment is placed

within the historical tableau, and the result is a critical thematization of historical

representation itself, a thematization in consonance with Gibbon's larger Enlightenment

and critical commitments. Thus, while Gibbon's vision of the Capitoline Hill might

contain a host of other visual cues regarding historical methodological and theoretical

outlooks—and we will have more to say on this below—it may suffice for the moment to

simply recognize the ways in which historical practices and ideologies are intimately

bound up with the ways in which we conceive of and represent space and the traces of the

past within it. In short, our experience of time conditions our representation of space, and

our experience of space influences our representations of time.

In some ways, the views outlined above closely resemble the discussion that has

taken place over the last several decades regarding the formal dimensions of historical

literature, and how the various rhetorics of such literature may or may not affect the truth

claims of historical representation.60 This is neither the time nor place to revisit those

60
For this literature see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987); Hayden White, Metahistory: the
Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973);
Timothy Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992); F.R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford: Stanford University

84
debates in depth, debates which have ended more often in the exhaustion of partisans

than in a true consensus regarding the nature of historical prose. But to the degree such a

consensus has been established, it probably involves the rather grudging acceptance that a

certain ―exceptionalist‖ understanding of historical representation is no longer tenable,

that historical narratives, like any other, are at least influenced, if not determined, by

formal linguistic and verbal imperatives. However, as Gibbon (or indeed any visual

artist) might remind us, every reflection or representation is made under the influence of

experiences and rhetorics that extend beyond the limited categories defined by written or

spoken language. If history involves a ―tropics‖ of writing to some degree, we might also

wish to explore how historical representation is likewise penetrated by ―grammars‖ or

―rhetorics‖ of visuality and spatial organization. In much the same way that the

appearance of an author in his or her own narrative implies an ironic gesture as it

undermines the boundaries between narrative and narrative space, spatial representation

carries with it a similar set of possibilities and structures, formal properties that determine

the relation between observer and observed, and the contours of a space that implies a

temporal organization. Thus, while we might wish to be wary of over-burdening the

verbal analogies implied by terms like ―grammar‖ and ―rhetoric‖, the formal imperatives

of visuality—imperatives which are themselves historically grounded and according to

which any physical spaces can be conceived or constructed—decisively condition what

and how historical time can be represented.

Press, 2001); F.R. Ankersmit, History and tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994); Jörn Rüsen, History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2005).

85
 However, if the space of historical reflection, in Gibbon's formulation, is so

clearly an artifact of its Enlightenment context, what sorts of spatial ―musing‖ might

result if we were to invite another historian, perhaps from a later milieu or generation, to

the Capitoline perch. What sort of image would, for example, a Leopold von Ranke or a

Johann Gustav Droysen produce under similar circumstances? Would the elegiac mood

implied by Gibbon‘s moment of autumn vespers be replicated in the imagined scene of a

Droysen or a Mommsen, those some time students of Hegelianism, historical necessity,

and progress? Might we find Ranke—whose historical method hovered near a denial of

subjectivity in the face of the historical object—similarly peeking out from within the

frame of his own vision? Clearly, and this should not be overly surprising, the visualized

spaces that would likely emerge from the German historical imagination of the early

nineteenth century would be quite distinct from those of Gibbon and the Enlightenment.

But indeed, how might we conceive of historicist principles of representation in visual

terms, and what principles of spatial organization correspond with the representational

nature of their temporal commitments?

In Between History and Literature, Lionel Gossman takes up some of these issues

in a way that might illuminate the relations between various forms of representation—

whether they be fictional or non-fictional, verbal or visual—and explores their

implications for historical writing. Following the structuralist linguistics of Emile

Benveniste, Gossman distinguishes two dimensions of writing, discours and histoire.

Where the former denotes the level or time of narration and the latter corresponds to the

time of what is being narrated. Discours is thus the temporality of the narrator of

historical events, and histoire is the temporality of the narrated events. Furthermore, as

86
Gossman continues, eighteenth-century prose tended to hold these two planes apart,

creating a situation of ―ironic displacement‖ or distance between the narrator and what is

being narrated. Indeed, such ironic distancing finds its way even into the historical prose

of Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon. ―The Enlightenment historian,‖ writes Gossman:

tells his tale under the same conditions as the eighteenth-century novelist, and,
like him, engages the reader with him as ironic spectator of the historical scene or
tableau. The ultimate unifying center of eighteenth-century historical writing, it
has been said, is the narrator himself rather than the narrative of events: the latter
exists largely as a pretext for ―philosophical‖ commentary, and for the sake of the
community of philosophes that this commentary was expected to establish
between narrator and reader, and among readers.61

For Edward Gibbon, therefore, as much as for Lawrence Sterne, an enlightened historical

prose demanded the very same ironic distancing that we find operative in the Capitoline

Hill vision, a displaced narrator whose observations can themselves be observed. As

Gossman indicates, it is precisely this seemingly casual literary ornament—that of

Gibbon musing amid the ruins—that holds together the disparate fragments of the past

for the critical Enlightenment observer. Indeed, in this formulation, without the ironic

distance that is here spatially conceived as the watcher being watched, there can be no

adequate representation of the past.62

On the other hand, as Gossman goes on to describe, the situation in the following

century would be altered dramatically. ―It would not be too difficult,‖ he argues in a

passage worth quoting in full:

61
Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 243.
62
Of course, this dovetails with the link that Foucault draws, regarding the same moment, between modern
forms of watching and the modes of constructed subjectivity that are produced by such surveillance (first
external and subsequently self-surveillance). And it links as well to the very extensive literature on relation
between forms of narrativity and forms of subjectivity.

87
 to show that nineteenth-century historical narrative also shares important
structural features with nineteenth-century fictional narrative, notably the explicit
rejection of the clear Enlightenment separation of object and subject, past and
present, narrative and commentary or discourse, and the attempt to make them
continuous with each other. The dominant feature of both fictional and historical
narrative in the nineteenth century is the replacement of the overt eighteenth-
century persona of the narrator by a covert narrator, and the corresponding
presentation of the narrative as unproblematic, absolutely binding. The historical
text is not a model to be discussed, criticized, accepted or repudiated by the free
and inquiring intellect, but as the inmost form of the real, binding and
inescapable.‖63

From this perspective, in other words, the planes of discours and histoire that had been

held so carefully apart within Enlightenment find themselves converging into a single

dimension, a dimension in which a discursive historiography is adequate to, and co-

extensive with the narrated objects and events of histoire. And since discursive

representation of history is rendered here as an unproblematic enterprise, authorial

intrusion and intra-narrative critique could only serve to diminish the clarity (and

objectivity?) already guaranteed by an adequate regime of representation. With the

advent of the nineteenth century, eighteenth-century critical space between narrator and

narrated, the spaces once occupied by Gibbon and Sterne, are stitched up and papered

over with a new conception of narrative representation. And from the new nineteenth-

century vantage point, it is precisely this retreat of authorial presence and faith in the

transparency of representation—whether practiced by novelists or historians—that

underwrites the authenticity of the narrative.

The nineteenth-century rejection and reformulation of Enlightenment literary

categories is too vast a topic to survey here, the stations of its wanderings—from

Romanticism to Modernism—describing a dense knot of historical threads that the

63
Gossman, 251.

88
present work cannot hope to untangle. At the same time, it is within the context of these

processes, in milieus defined by the early nineteenth-century rejection of Enlightenment

categories, that the young Jacob Burckhardt began his own education in, exploration of,

and experiments with the forms of historical understanding and representation. Indeed,

the scholarly environment that Burckhardt first encountered as a young student was still

largely dominated by problems inherited from the first generation of post-Revolutionary,

post-Kantian and post-Enlightenment German intellectuals. Initially studying theology

under de Wette and Hagenbach, and subsequently learning history at the feet of figures

like Ranke, Böckh, and the younger Droysen, Burckhardt's intellectual landscape as a

student was one still defined by the legacies of German Idealism and the various strands

of a Frühromantik (early Romanticism) associated with the Jena circle. Thus, whereas de

Wette had been a follower of Schleiermacher, and Böckh, Ranke and Hagenbach had

been students of the same, the young Droysen and the nascent Prussian School had drunk

deep of the Hegelian currents then gathering strength in Germany.

Yet while the intellectual landscape of German speaking Europe in the eras of

reform and restoration was amazingly fertile in a variety of dimensions, it was a

landscape whose intellectual features shared a common ancestor in the attempts of

German Idealism and the Jena Frühromantik to come to terms with the critical coda by

which Kant had signaled the intellectual end of the eighteenth century. This work cannot

trace out the precise trajectory of these intellectual pedigrees, the ways in which an array

of diverse figures—from Fichte and Schelling to Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis—sought

ways to accommodate and extend the imposing edifice of Kantian Kritik at the turn of the

nineteenth-century. What is significant for our purposes, and for the legacy it would

89
leave for Burckhardt's generation, is the way in which that generation understood the

constellation of problems left by Kant's work, and the solutions they deployed to meet

these challenges. For in many ways, the characteristic features of nineteenth-century

narrative and representational regimes were, at least in part, conditioned in the early

century by the intellectual materials that the traditions of German Idealism and the

Frühromantik brought to bear on the Kantian legacy.

In more specific terms, the issue here is the way in which Kant's intervention had

both superseded and, at the same time, sharpened the Enlightenment distinctions between

reality and representation, between subject and object, between signifier and signified.

On the one hand, Kant's transcendental Kritik had transposed the space of cognition from

an external to an internal set of relations, grounding and securing the possibility of

knowledge in the cognitive faculties of the knowing subject. But in subjectively securing

the a priori forms of sensible intuition, Kant also opened up a necessarily opaque

noumenal domain—the realm of the Ding an sich—that was antecedent to the categories

conditioning concrete intuition. ―Here, of course,‖ as Manfred Frank writes in relation to

early German Romanticism,

we have the origin of Kant's dualism: there is a reality existing in itself, of which
we know nothing; opposed to this reality there is a consciousness, which must be
characterized as "completely without content" or "empty." Kant takes into
consideration that there could be a root that is common both to the reality existing
in itself and to consciousness, but which is itself unknown. The Kantian system
breaks into two parts; this common root would bind these two parts together into a
unity. This systematic unity can only be thought of as an idea. Here we have, by
the way, a crude, imprecise, and ad hoc definition of the second of Kant's core
theses: the unity in which reality and consciousness exist together cannot itself be
the object of our knowledge. This unity can only be spoken of in terms of
hypothetical concepts. They serve our reason, playing a necessarily regulative role

90
 in unifying our knowledge. But the "real pursuit" of them would, as Novalis says,
"lead into the realm of nonsense.64

Thus, while we can imagine an ontological totality, a unifying ground of reality in itself

and reality for itself, concrete experience and cognition is necessarily embedded in an

irreducible epistemological dualism, a situation in which being and knowledge can never

completely coincide. From Kant's perspective, in other words, an absolute ground can

take the form of an idea within consciousness, but as this idea cannot correspond to a

concrete, sensible experience, it necessarily remains a theoretical, heuristic, and infinitely

extendable construct. An epistemological bridge between subject and object is thus

theoretically possible, but it is a bridge whose completion is never quite complete, and

the realms it seeks to join must remain perpetually separate. Being and knowledge may

reflect and condition one another, in other words, but they do so as fragments which

thought can never completely restore to wholeness.

However, Frank's invocation of Novalis in the above quote also announces the

opening of a theoretical rift that constitutes an important line of contest among the

intellectuals described above. For while the generation of the Frühromantik and the

currents of German Idealism are too often either lumped together or rigidly separated into

movements of literary or philosophical significance, the actual relation between the

traditions is rather more complex than subsumption or opposition.65 The intellectual

biographical trajectories of the main figures of both movements—Fichte, Schelling,

Hegel, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Schleiermacher—describe a tangled web of

64
Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, Trans. Elizabeth Millan-
Zaibert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 29-30.
65
Ibid., 24.

91
overlapping interests, influences, and affinities, a web that extended from Jena to Berlin

and whose most intimate connections can be located in the last decade of the eighteenth

century. At the same time, however, it is along the theoretical fault lines generated by

their respective responses to Kant—and the notion of the Absolute—that a decisive

distinction can be made between the two currents. Indeed, as the Novalis quote signals, it

is precisely in their relation to (and the possibility of grasping) the idea of the Absolute—

the ostensible grounding totality that unifies the für sich and the an sich—that the

differences between Jena Romanticism and German Idealism spring most starkly into

relief. While the figures of the Jena circle could speak of a Sehnsucht nach dem

Unendlichen, and would celebrate the idea of a union between the subject and object in

the Absolute, this was a yearning for totality whose (living?) consummation was

impossible according to the philosophical principles of the Frühromantik. As Friedrich

Schlegel, for example, attempted to concretely demonstrate in the aphorisms of the

Athenäum, the human condition is one of essential fragmentation, a condition in which

wholeness can be progressively approximated aesthetically but which can never be

rendered whole through the offices of mere philosophy or reason.66 For early Romantics

such as Schlegel and Novalis, the unity of consciousness and being can be imaginatively

and aesthetically conceived in images like that of Heinrich von Ofterdingen's blaue

Blume, but such symbols also paradoxically represent the very impossibility of the

symbolic union of the sensible and the ideal. Indeed, in the hands of the early Schlegel,

66
Here we are very close to the subject of Walter Benjamin's dissertation: The Concept of Criticism in
German Romanticism. Benjamin follows Schlegel in suggesting that it is through the process of criticism
that original fragments are completed. The critic completes that upon which he or she deploys their critical
operations. See Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Klaus L. Berghahn ed., A History of German Literary Criticism,
1730-1980 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Michael Löwy, ―Revolution Against ‗Progress‘:
Walter Benjamin‘s Romantic Anarchism,‖ New Left Review, I/152, July-August 1985; Andrew E.
Benjamin and Beatrice Hanssen eds., Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (London: Continuum, 2002).

92
the relation with the absolute is best conveyed not in the ―presence‖ of the unifying

symbol, but in the ramifying approximations and detours of fragmentary allegory.67 For

the Romantics, in other words, the strivings of representation (in both philosophical and

literary senses) to adequately reproduce the domain of being in the face of

epistemological fragmentation are perpetually incomplete. And if the symbol, as Goethe,

Schelling, and Coleridge would have it, conveys the representational coincidence of

concrete particular and universal ideal, then it is rather allegory, as understood by

Friedrich Schlegel, that best describes the early Romantic relation between subjectivity

and the absolute.

The situation, however, as it was regarded by the prominent contemporary

exponents of Idealism was somewhat different, and it would be in Berlin that Burckhardt

would encounter these latter most fully. Within these circles—from Fichte to Schelling

and Hegel—the appropriation and extension of the insights of Kantian Kritik was

premised on the elimination of the Ding an sich as means of circumventing the same

dualism confronted by the Romantics.68 It was this imperative, therefore, to deduce a

common ideal unity that underlay the apparent duality of naive experience, that would

form the headwaters of modern philosophical dialectics, tentatively at first in the absolute

subject of Fichte, and with ever greater momentum in the great Hegelian epic of

historical dialectic. From the standpoint of this tradition, the epistemological dualism

described by Kant is merely the transitory artifact of a dialectical process that admits of

67
Likewise, it is here, among Schlegel's aphoristic fragments, that one first sees Benjamin's dawning
interest in allegory as an undervalued mode of representation.
68
Frank, 28-29. ―Early German Romanticism never subscribed to the projects of liquidating the thing in
itself (Ding an sich), which are characteristic of the beginnings of idealism from Salomon Maimon to
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.‖

93
both differentiation and reintegration, a process grounded in a primitive unity and yet also

promising a restoration of such unity at a higher level. Accordingly, the epistemological

fragmentation depicted by Schlegel need not be an essential and inevitable human

condition, but could represent a moment of necessary displacement in a larger historical

process whose terminus is defined by the reconciliation between the subject of

knowledge and the being of the world. Where history had become significant for the

Frühromantik in its ever closer (but never completed) approximation of subjective and

objective dimensions, German Idealism depicts history as a vast drama whose sequence

of acts concludes in the convergence of ideality and reality in the unity of the Absolute.

Put differently, German Idealism imagined a history that promised an historical

consummation of the relation between Self and Other, between knowledge and being,

while the Jena Frühromantiker conceive history as a graphic space in which vectors of

spirit and vectors of nature draw nearer to one another, but never quite converge. In this

sense, one could suggest that comedy (perhaps conceived in its darker forms) is the

historical genre of Idealism, while tragedy is the historical genre of the Frühromantik.

For both of these traditions, then, for the Frühromantiker as well as the

representatives of Idealism, the completion or correction of the Kantian critical project

would be realized through its extension into the dimension of time and with reference to

the motions of history. In consonance with a nascent century taking shape amidst rapid

historical transformation, intellectual currents would likewise invoke the concepts of

temporality and historicity as a means of addressing the most pressing theoretical

concerns. What is important, however, from the perspective of the present discussion is

the way in which history became a decisive constitutive concept in the emerging social

94
and human sciences, and how Romantic and Idealist notions of temporality conditioned

the intellectual landscapes of Burckhardt's student and early professional years. For if the

immediate impact of German Idealism and Jena Romanticism had long since passed, by

the 1830's when Burckhardt began his secondary studies, the fields of scholarship and the

generation of scholars that Burckhardt encountered in these formative years had been

decisively shaped by the generation of Hegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher and the Schlegel

brothers. It was within these landscapes, still defined by critical outlooks, theoretical

commitments, and practical methodologies espoused by Idealism and Romanticism, that

Burckhardt began to take shape as a scholar.

Indeed, if we are to trace the ways in which the mature Burckhardt would

eventually grow dissatisfied with some of these intellectual territories and find inspiration

in others, it is necessary to explore the ways in which these influences informed the early

shape of Burckhardt's historiographical perspective. In other words, if Burckhardt would

ultimately explore a specific set of visually oriented and synchronic approaches to

history, approaches whose orbit lay outside the representational and theoretical territories

defined by the historicist Zunft, such a move was made within an intellectual context still

conditioned by Idealism and Romanticism. While the main currents of German

historicism cannot be subsumed under the rubric of Idealism, the historiographical

commitments of its most influential practitioners, particularly among the generation of

historians after Ranke, clearly took shape under the influence of Hegel and his

followers.69 And as Burckhardt's early uncertainty regarding the political, theoretical, and

69
Indeed, Ranke is really the clear and glaring exception here, already intellectually formed before the full
force of Hegel enthusiasm came to dominate German scholarship in the early nineteenth century. It was
only with the next generation, most visibly in early Droysen, that the impact of Idealism—conjoined with

95
methodological commitments of his historical mentors—an anxiety that later crystallized

into a deepening dissatisfaction—these relations can be understood as a tension between

the representational legacies of Idealism and the Romanticism, legacies whose respective

epistemological and ontological commitments could produce very different

methodological commitments when applied to the nascent social and human sciences.70

Burckhardt's trajectory involves, in other words, the gradual rejection of a historiography

inclined towards historical teleologies and representational totalities of Idealism, and the

progressive embrace of a synchronic, fragmentary, perspectival, ironic and visually-

oriented historical practice.

How, then, did the intellectual currents described above come to define the

theoretical and methodological materials available to a young historian? In a pattern that

seems to replicate itself throughout Burckhardt's professional career, intellectual and

theoretical tensions find themselves easily inscribed or marked out in geographical terms.

For if, as we will discuss further below, Berlin came to represent the locus of

Burckhardt's reception of idealism and historicism, his home city of Basel was the scene

of his introduction to the still vital currents of Romantic methods and critique. For the

young Swiss, in other words, the distance separating Basel and Berlin was one of more

the currents of a liberal nationalism—becomes associated with historical theory and practice. And even
here, it is important not to understate the tensions between German historicism and German idealism,
especially with regard to the latter's insistence on the essential rationality of necessary historical processes.
Thus, while historicism could often speak in terms of historical necessity, the notion that these necessities
were evidence of a larger historical/philosophical enterprise—involving the cognitive unification of being
and knowledge—was an issue far beyond the ken of the German historical Zunft. Ranke, on the other hand,
is an interesting transitional character, who in many ways still has much in common with the Romantic
tradition. Indeed, his commitment to a theological ground to the movements of history, a ground
impenetrable to the representational, methodological, theoretical tools of the historian, comes close to the
Romantic notion of an Absolute which can never be fully approximated by the faculties of knowledge.
70
One might object at this point that the source of Burckhardt's historiographical idiosyncrasies lay more in
his veneration of Enlightenment historiography than in Romantic criticism, and this is true as far as it goes.
But we should remember that, despite the many differences, we have distinguished the Frühromantik here
precisely in the way it preserves the Enlightenment posture of uncertainty regarding representation.

96
than physical miles. It was also marked by distances between the desires of family and

personal calling, between the study of theology and the study of history, between two

important stations of his intellectual development. And whereas the academic faculty of

Burckhardt's Berlin years could count many luminaries, from Ranke and Droysen to

August Böckh and Franz Kugler, it was in Basel that the young Swiss spent his first

semesters as a student, and in Basel where he first came into contact with the intellectual

legacies of Romantic thought in the form of critical theology.

Burckhardt's theological studies at Basel, however, had been more a family

decision than one of true personal conviction. His younger brother, early identified as the

most promising of the sons, had been tapped for a commercial career, while a religious

vocation similar to that of the father was envisioned for the elder sibling. Despite a

conspicuous early interest in philology and history at Gymnasium, and despite a

precocious relation with Heinrich Schreiber, a friend of his father and historian at

Freiburg, Burckhardt seems to have been reconciled to a course of theological studies

after finishing at the Basler Paedagogium in the summer of 1836. Indeed, after

completing a nine month stay in French speaking Neuenburg polishing his language

skills, Burckhardt matriculated at the University of Basel in the theological Fakultät.

During this period, however, Burckhardt‘s letters and writings also a betray both a

fascination with, and a growing uneasiness regarding, the theological implications of his

Basel professors' lectures, an ambivalence that swiftly burgeoned into a crisis of religious

conviction that eventually propelled him out of both the city of Basel and the field of

theology.71

71
On Burckhardt‘s crisis of faith see Kaegi, Burckhardt: Eine Biographie. Vol. I.

97
 For the moment, however, the two decisive influences on the development of

Burckhardt‘s views during this Basel period were Karl Ludwig Hagenbach and Wilhelm

Martin Leberecht de Wette. As the leading theological scholars at the university in Basel,

it was under the influence of these two men that Burckhardt‘s own views would

crystallize during his two years as a student. For his part, Hagenbach‘s work as a scholar

bore the imprint of an early engagement with the legacy of Herder, as well as an

education under Neander and Schleiermacher in Berlin. And while he would steer a

more conservative course in later decades and defend the rights of the church in the face

of encroachments of political institutions, Hagenbach‘s views in the 1830‘s were still

linked to an Enlightenment confrontation with entrenched orthodoxy and a Romantic

insistence on revitalization of religious traditions.72 Above all, the strong currents of a

textually and historically sensitive theology were assembled by Hagenbach in a church

history that sought to hold itself above the fray of confessional controversy and strove for

an objective vision of Christianity in all its historical manifestations. The disputes and

conflicts generated by dogma and orthodoxy would be resolved in the image of the

church as an historical entity, a church whose truths were vouchsafed not in first

principles, but in all its various historical experiences and expressions. ―The Church is a

religious community, Burckhardt wrote in a note from the Hagenbach winter Vorlesung

of 1837/38, "that has its roots in the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth; it is a

phenomenon that is historically given, not simply an abstraction deduced from

72
On the roles of Hagenbach and De Wette see: Gossmann, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 211-213; and
Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the
Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000).

98
concepts.73 For the future historian and the young student struggling to define his own

religious outlook, it was precisely the historical dimension of his teacher‘s theological

views that made the greatest impression. To the extent that the truths of creation could be

known, such things would be revealed not immediately in transcendent ideas, but in the

movements and patterns of human history. The intellectual waters that Burckhardt was

thus entering under the guidance of Hagenbach were being driven by the currents of a

theology in which history emerged as a progressive revelation.

Like Hagenbach, Wilhelm De Wette also drew intellectual inspiration from that

tradition of critical and historicized theology extending back through Schleiermacher to

Herder. Unlike Hagenbach, however, de Wette had joined the University of Basel as an

already well known theologian in his own right. Long before his arrival in the Swiss city,

de Wette had been a Dozent in Heidelberg where he had worked closely with Friedrich

Creuzer and had been enormously influenced by the latter‘s approach to the study of

myth. Later, as a rising star in theological studies, de Wette had eventually been called to

Berlin to take a chair in the company of such figures as Schleiermacher and Neander.

However, after a controversy during the period of the Karlsbad decrees, a controversy

involving a letter of condolence that de Wette had written to the mother of Kotzebue‘s

assassin, calls went out for his resignation, and he left his post in Berlin for less political

charged environs at the University of Basel.

As for his system of theology, de Wette, like Hagenbach, was clearly a creature of

an historically oriented era, his theological positions replacing the revelatory dimension

73
Kaegi, Burckhardt: Eine Biographie, Vol I, 443. ―Die Kirche ist eine religioese Gemeinschaft die ihre
Wurzel im historischen Jesu von Nazareth hat; sie ist eine historisch gegebene Erscheinung… Die Kirche
ist kein blosses aus dem Begriff abzuleitendes Abstractum.‖

99
of scripture and creation with processes of history and mythopoesis. On the one hand,

and as a student of Creuzer, de Wette's positions consisted in the reconfiguration of

revelation in terms of myth, and the presentation of religious truth as a phenomenon more

visible in the course of history than the transcendent claims of traditional Christian

dogma. On the other hand, however, the task was not merely one of demystifying the

history of religious doctrine, but also one of re-situating theological truth on a firmer and

more rigorous foundation, a foundation buttressed by historical and philological insights.

For Burckhardt‘s teacher, it was in the realm of representation and historical

interpretation that the particular and the universal, the eternal and the temporal could

come closest to a point of mutual approximation. The revelations of history, in other

words, emerged in an ongoing process of signification, with the particulars of history

pointing towards the transcendent truths of religious faith. As a result, the question of

authorship, or of the provenance of specific doctrines or texts, would be replaced by a

method for which historical critique represented an ongoing process of revelation. To

survey the history of the church, its theologies, its dogmas and its communities, was to

survey the progressive attempts of mankind to express and interpret the transcendent in

terms of the temporal. Theology here converged with history under the auspices of

hermeneutics.

From such perspectives, history becomes a kind of concrete text or representation

that mediates the relation between theological subject and theological absolute. But what

is the precise nature of this mediation, and what conclusions does it come to regarding the

epistemological status of historical representation? Surprisingly, despite the way in

which the symbolic mode has been associated with Romantic thought, de Wette's

100
representational mode falls closer to the allegorical approach of Friedrich Schlegel than it

does to the classically defined Romantic symbol. As it had developed in the hands of

Goethe, Schelling and Coleridge, the idea of the Romantic symbol usually refers to a

rhetorical figure that concretely unifies a particular representation and a universal idea.

Opposed within this framework to mere allegory, the symbol was a concrete particular

that did not simply represent a corresponding universal idea, but contained the idea

within itself as the concrete presence (or co-presence) of the universal. Allegory, on the

other hand, became associated with a certain distance between representation and

represented, a figure whose ideal meaning is not contained within itself, but requires the

interpretive intervention of the literary, historical, or theological critic. For de Wette,

neither Romantic theology nor speculative Idealism could ever fully bridge the gulf that

separated brute historical facts from the various cultural and universal meanings to which

they were related. Instead, if such meanings could be wrested from historical events,

then this could only be approximated, and only through a close, rigorous, critical and

sympathetic engagement with actual experience in its a posteriori forms. The past would

reveal its meaning, in other words, first in a direct confrontation with brute historical

facts insofar as these could be rigorously determined, and then, through the application of

a sympathetic and intuitive interpretive methodology. For figures like de Wette (and to

some degree like Ranke) there was no doubt that history moved in accord with trans-

historical and spiritual forces, and in this conviction they were in agreement with the

powerful influences of Hegelian philosophy. Where they differed, however, was in the

manner such forces were understood to be active in human history, and the ways in which

such activity revealed itself. For de Wette, the meaning of history, and creation in

101
general, would be recognized not through a speculative and purely rational philosophical

idealism, not through the deductions of an a priori reason, but through a sympathetic and

critical reflection on history as a concrete field of signification.

De Wette and Hagenbach—but above all, the critical and historical thrust of their

theological commitments—would thus exercise a profound impact on both Burckhardt‘s

short term religious crisis, and on his ultimate decision to leave his home city for Berlin

and the field of history. In a letter written to friend and fellow student Johannes

Riggenbach in August of 1838, one finds Burckhardt‘s developing views on de Wette and

contemporary theology closely linked to his own inner spiritual conflicts. ―De Wette‘s

system,‖ Burckhardt declares in no uncertain terms, ―becomes ever more colossal before

my eyes; one must follow it, and nothing else is possible. Yet if the system of the teacher

seemed ever more ―colossal‖ and its influence ever more ineluctable, the student quickly

recognized its similarly colossal implications. ―But,‖ he continues immediately, ―every

day there disappears another piece of conventional Church doctrine in his hands. Today,

I finally recognized that he holds the birth of Christ to be a myth—and I with him. A

shudder overcame me today as many reasons occured to me why it must necessarily be

so.74 Indeed, so revolutionary were such implications, so potent was de Wette‘s system

in transforming tradition into mere signs, that Burckhardt suspected the professor himself

had been careful to guard against their full manifestation. ―Dewette guards himself

well,‖ he tells us in a critical moment, ―from pursuing the consequences too far, but I also

74
Ibid.

102
can report that he doesn‘t merely undermine conventional belief, yet also attempts to

rebuild, even while the rebuilt is less consoling than the original‖75

Therefore, in a process whose character should be now recognizable, Burckhardt

quietly, and with not a little suffering and self-doubt, set about marking a path of his

own.76 What was clearest to him, at least initially, was that the course envisioned for him

by his father and family was not one that he could steer with a clear conscience. While

his feelings for, and sensitivity to, religion remained largely intact, his faith was no

longer one that would allow him to serve in the capacity as a pastor, much less a position

such as that occupied by his father. ―With my present present convictions (if I may even

name it that),― he continues to Riggenbach, ―I could never accept a post as Pastor with a

clear conscience, at least in relation to the present state of opinion regarding revelation—

and that won‘t change soon.‖77

All that was left, then, was the final step. By the spring of 1839, despite

interventions on the part of concerned friends such as Riggenbach and Alois Biedermann,

Burckhardt had spoken with his father and informed his family of his decision to leave

Basel and theology for Berlin and the field of history78. The conversation between father

and son took place presumably sometime during spring holidays in 1839, though we

possess no record of its precise character. Instead, in a letter to Friedrich von Tschudi,

one of a number a friends who stood outside the circle of theology students, Burckhardt

writes laconically on the 29th of May 1839, ―My family knows, and suspects in part, what

75
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol I, 85.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid.
78
Biedermann was a theology student, and Riggenbach would subsequently switch to the same field from
medicine shortly thereafter.

103
my religious convictions are.‖79 In early September of the same year, 1839, having

drained the cup (―bis auf die Hefe‖) of his own personal crisis of faith, Jacob Burckhardt

finally took leave of his home city and set out on the road that would take him to Berlin,

to Ranke and to history.

In purely physical terms the road from Swiss Basel to the frontier of Germany is

not a long one. From the Münsterberg, across the Rhine, and through Kleinbasel, the

border with what would become a unified Germany was in as easy walking distance in

1839 as it is today. But in other ways, especially in Burckhardt‘s time, the road that led

north out of the city and towards the southernmost spurs of the Black Forest range

described a course that promised enormous cultural, political and intellectual distances.

For if modernity, with all its social, political and cultural implications, had been trickling

into the small world of Basel tucked away on the upper Rhine, its currents were already

much stronger and more violent in the German lands to the north. To be sure, forces of

liberalism, nationalism, industrialization had made themselves felt in Burckhardt‘s home

city. The wounds of the Basler Wirren (Troubles) and its civil unrest were still alive in

the memory of the city, and issues of confederation and confession were being felt with

increasing urgency throughout the landscape of Swiss cantonal politics.80 However, if

such currents and forces were doubtless transforming the landscape of pre-1848

Switzerland, the same forces were moving with even greater urgency and momentum in

the German domains to the north. The distance, then, between and Basel and Berlin in

1839 must be measured not only terms of miles, but also in terms of their relative

79
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol I, 112.
80
Kaegi, Burckhardt: Eine Biographie, Vol I.

104
positions in the increasingly rough social and political seas on the eve of the upheavals of

1848.

In any event, Burckhardt‘s journey from Basel that autumn snaked its way

through Bavaria and Bohemia before eventually landing him in Hohenzollern Berlin and

a modest student room off Unter den Linden. At the same time, the journey also led the

young scholar far from the relatively provincial world of Basel and plunged him deep

into the political, social and intellectual controversies simmering at the time in Prussia,

Germany and Europe in general. The result for Burckhardt, in the three years of study in

both Berlin and Bonn, was an intimate education in, and confrontation with, the various

political and intellectual currents that were then churning the troubled waters of Vormärz

Germany. The milieu that he encountered in Berlin was that of a city emerging as a

center of political and cultural modernity in Central Europe. In slightly less than three

decades the provincial capital of the Frederician Staat had become, first, a beacon for

reform and national/liberal hopes throughout Germany, and subsequently, a central

bulwark for the tasks and policies of Restoration. And although Burckhardt took up

residence some twenty years after the Karlsbad decrees, twenty years after Prussia had

chosen restoration over reform, the forces unleashed in the patriotic struggles against the

French continued to simmer everywhere below the surface of official political culture in

Berlin. In the streets of the city, in its institutions, its salons, and in its press,

Hohenzollern dynastic conservatism was confronted—sometimes openly, sometimes

not—by the powerful impulses of liberalism and German nationalism that would

eventually erupt in open revolt in 1848.81

81
Burckhardt himself found entrée into Bettina von Arnim's Berlin salon in his student years in the city.

105
 Perhaps nowhere was this pattern of change and tension more obvious than in the

city‘s university. Established as an institutional model and icon of Prussian reform, the

University of Berlin had been envisioned as a central pillar of a modern Prussian

Kulturstaat whose legitimacy and powers were to be bound up with the Geistliche

development of its individual citizens. However, following the retreat from reform, what

had been envisioned as state patronage of enlightened institutions gradually assumed the

character of intervention and bureaucratic control. For as the university was increasingly

becoming the focus of progressive politics, student radicalism, and undesirable elements

of various sorts, Prussian authorities took a keen interest in establishing a degree of

influence over its faculty and administration. The generation of reformers who had first

occupied the most prestigious chairs either retired or passed away during the 1820‘s and

1830‘s, found themselves replaced with figures no less eminent, but rather more in tune

with the political interests of the state. The Hegel, for instance, that joined the University

in 1818 was one who had long since, like many others of his generation, cast away the

republican sympathies of his youth and traded them for a historical philosophy that

celebrated and privileged the functions of state. Likewise, the onetime schoolmaster

from Frankfurt an der Oder, Leopold von Ranke, was offered a post in 1836 as much for

his political reliability as for promise he may have evidenced as a scholar of history.

With such imperatives driving appointments and politics at the university, a second

generation of scholars—politically more reliable than their predecessors, though no less

accomplished intellectually—had become established by the time Burckhardt arrived in

Berlin.

106
 Even so, the politics of the faculty and students at the university remained an

issue of concern for the Prussian state. While the divide between the faculty politics and

that of the state had diminished somewhat, the culture of the university, especially the

student body, was steeped in the nationalist and liberal currents that restorative policies

could neither dam up nor control. The proscription of liberal and nationalist minded

student Burschenschaften had been enshrined in official policy since the Karlsbad

decrees, and one of Burckhardt‘s first duties upon matriculation was that of swearing an

oath attesting that he would avoid political activities and association with outlawed

student groups. Yet even while Burckhardt did not go untouched by nationalist

sentiments that suffused the atmosphere of the university, he appears never to have been

seriously tempted to actively take part in the radical political activities forbidden by his

oath. The correspondence of this period does indeed show a growing fascination with the

notion of a pan-German national identity, a German identity in comparison to which the

tepid quality of Helvetic self-consciousness seemed provincial and unsatisfying. But to

the extent that such pan-German sentiment was more than just a minor dalliance,

however, Burckhardt‘s German patriotism was of a distinctly Grossdeutsch flavor.

Yet it was at this institution, with its complex and churning political currents, that

Burckhardt first came into close contact with the nascent institutions of German

historicism and the broader currents of an historically oriented scholarship that had drunk

deep from the works of Hegel and his followers. While Hegel had died nearly a decade

before Burckhardt‘s arrival, Berlin had continued as the center of historical scholarship—

in both theoretical and practical modes. With the already well-known Ranke at its

forefront, a figure who came to symbolize the innovative methodological tenor of the

107
era's scholarship, the historical Fakultät at Berlin in 1839 also boasted promising young

scholars such as Gustav Droysen, as well as stalwarts from the previous generation such

as August Böckh. The historical community into which Burckhardt was now being

introduced was thus one in the process of redefining its role as an interpreter of the past

and an educator of the present. At the heart of this role, in both theory and method, was

the idea that history formed the disciplinary keystone of the emerging edifice of the

human and social sciences. Indeed, if the previous century had sought out a critical

posture from which to survey how the geography of human experience had been

deformed by religious and political orthodoxy, the German historicism of the nineteenth

century seemed to have rediscovered a faith in the unifying absolute in the movement of

historical time. History could here be envisioned as the ‗Rosetta Stone‘ of the

Wissenschaften, filling the void left by the Enlightenment's liquidation of theological

meanings and temporalities.

Here, in some ways, Burckhardt's journey from Berlin to Basel, from theology to

history, also has the character of a religious conversion. Having been powerfully

influenced by the theological deconstructions of de Wette, and having been less enthused

about his attempts at reconstruction of the same, Burckhardt had reconciled himself to a

loss of the faith which his family and father still possessed. The turn to history was a

matter not only of personal inclination, but an issue of spiritual necessity, and the move

to Berlin, even then emerging as the urbis mirabilis of nineteenth-century historiography,

had all the qualities of a leap into a new faith. With the recent crisis of belief still raw in

his memory, he wrote Tschudi in December of 1839:

Were I only able to emerge from my doubts, even though that is an enormous
thing, I would be able to speak in a more heartfelt manner.... At the same time,

108
 there are other demons to overcome, especially, if one may put it this way, a
complete secularization of my views, as well as in all of my approach to all
things. A solace against this has emerged for me in the subject of my studies,
History, and it was the first impetus that lifted me from the discontents of my
fatalism and the perspectives based upon it.82

For the young Burckhardt, in other words, the flight to Berlin signified not only an escape

from the provincial confines of the home city and the constricting expectations of family,

but also the opportunity to soothe the injury of religious crisis in a rediscovered

enthusiasm for ‗revelations‘ vouchsafed by history.

However, if Berlin had become something of a station of historiographical

pilgrimage—for Burckhardt as well as for many others—the new faith, and its capital,

was not without its controversies, its schisms, and its heresies. Put differently, the

historical Fakultät, like the university itself, was by no means hegemonic in its

methodological and theoretical commitments. Its scholars and professors spanned a

number of generations, extending from the era of reform, through the conservative

restoration, and into the era of pre-1848 nationalism. Indeed, Burckhardt's four primary

academic influences and mentors in Berlin, Franz Kugler, August Böckh, Gustav

Droysen and Leopold von Ranke, easily spanned this enormous (yet paradoxically

compact) intellectual landscape that from extended from the Goethezeit to Vormärz

Romantic nationalism. The era of Goethe and Humboldt, for example, was still strongly

evident in the figure of August Böckh. Born in 1785, Böckh had long been a fixture at

the Berlin university, representing an older generation who had joined the institution in

the heady days of reform, but who were gradually giving way to younger colleagues. 83

By the time of Burckhardt's matriculation in 1839, Böckh's eminence in the fields of

82
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol I, 130-131.
83
It was Böckh, for instance that, delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1835.

109
classical studies and philology only underscored the fact that he represented a waning

generation of reformists and a declining mode of antiquarian history. On the other side of

the spectrum, a figure like Kugler was of a generation born in the nineteenth century, and

who had come of age only in the period of conservative reaction. And where Böckh

stood as the seeming apogee of a more traditional form of historical scholarship, a form

whose roots extended to the traditions of the Érudits of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, Kugler emerged, not only as a close friend of Burckhardt's, but also as

professional guide to the historiographical territories of art and culture.

At least initially, however, it was not the eminence of Böckh or the

approachability of Kugler that made the deepest initial impression on Burckhardt, but the

somewhat larger than life figures of Droysen and Ranke. ―Nun trat sie,‖ he writes of

these first encounters with Germany's emerging historical greats, ―plötzlich in

gigantischer grosse vor mich und ich mußte die Augen niedershlagen.‖84 Once having

collected himself, however, Burckhardt developed close scholarly relations with both

professors, attending seminars of both men in the early semesters of his Berlin years. Yet

although Ranke was seen as the more established of the two, the young Basler was drawn

initially and most powerfully towards the latter. Aged a scant thirty-one years in 1839,

and scarcely older than Burckhardt himself, Droysen was already an accomplished and

recognized scholar of classical antiquity. Besides precocious translations of Aeschylus

and a libretto for his friend Felix Mendelssohn, Droysen was best known for his

Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen (1833) and the several volumes of Geschichte des

Hellenismus (1836-43). Indeed, in the autumn of 1839 and winter of 1840, Burckhardt's

84
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol I, 131.

110
first year in Berlin, Droysen figured prominently as a primary influence on the student.

As Kaegi reconstructs it, Burckhardt's short lived choice of the Near East as his primary

field of study is likely due to the effects of study under Droysen at the time.85 And had it

not been for the intrusion of outside events, one could imagine a very different

Burckhardt who not only continued as a student of Droysen, but also went on to become

a leading scholar of near eastern antiquity.

As it turns out, however, having been called to a more secure position at the

University of Kiel, Droysen left Berlin in the spring of 1840, and would not to return

until 1859, when he was called back to a full chair in the historical Fakultät. In Droysen,

however, despite the short time of his acquaintance with his Swiss student, Burckhardt

first encountered a current of German historiography that was profoundly influenced and

conditioned by Hegelian Idealism. Indeed, while it would be misleading to understand

Droysen's work as the mere application, or uncritical intrusion, of Hegelian concepts

within the field of history, the impact of Idealism in its convergence with a

historiographic nationalism is not difficult to discern. Kaegi puts it well when he

describes Droysen' work:

One clearly glimpses here the total conception of history as it is sketched by

Droysen: it is a mechanical totality, articulated less in epochs than in the fates of
peoples, and it moves – internally and externally – towards a single ethical goal or
terminus. It represents one of the secularized forms of Christian historical
salvation with roots in the Middle Ages. It is impossible to imagine Droysen‘s
concept of history, and especially his understanding of Hellenism, without these
Christian currents and forms. But with the transposition of the center of gravity
from God to mankind, and its striving for freedom, an entirely new historical
motive force emerges, one that is configured exclusively in terms of the relations
between Near Eastern-European peoples.86

85
Kaegi, Burckhardt: Eine Biographie, Vol II, 36-48.
86
Ibid., 41.

111
Replacing the spiritual syntheses of religion with the posited syntheses of a universal

history, Droysen's Hegelian historiography can be read as a secularized historical

theology. Yet in this theological drama, it is not God that directs and judges the events

on stage, but instead the hand of historical necessity. And this drama does not describe

the travails of individual souls, but instead depicts the collective fortunes of peoples and

nations as the true subjects of history. The meaning of history for Droysen, the meaning

of that process Hegel would call a Schlachtbank (shambles, slaughterhouse) is here

completely contained in—and indeed justified by—that which it signifies, and this

significance is encompassed by both its genesis and its telos.87

What Droysen shared with the Idealist tradition was precisely this gesture or

interest in an ultimate synthetic closure or totalized fusion of epistemological and

ontological categories. And as with the Idealist currents, Droysen envisioned history as

the arena in which a lost authenticity is mourned or a promised utopia is heralded. In

either instance, however, what lies between is the bitter and ineluctable law of necessity

and the often grim historical pageant that it generates. Furthermore, this powerful vision

of necessity, as developed by Droysen and others, converged with political currents of the

day to become a powerful ideological instrument of Prussian-centered Kleindeutsch

nationalist sentiment. In the Macedonian state of Droysen's Alexander, or in the Republic

of Mommsen's Römische Geschichte, it is difficult not to recognize echoes of a

nineteenth-century Prussia confronted with a similar set of world historical challenges

and missions. As Demosthenes and the Greeks were to be overwhelmed by the ascendant

87
―Aber auch indem wir die Geschichte asl diese Schlachtbank betrachten, auf welcher das Glück der
Völker, die Weisheit der Staaten und die Tugend der Individuuen zu Opfer gebracht wurde, so entsteht dem
Gedanken notwendig auch die Frage: wem, welchem Endzwecke diese ungeheuersten Opfer gebracht
worden sind.― Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag,1955).

112
Macedonian power of Philip, then this was merely the work of the same necessity that

would bind the fate of Germany to the fortunes of Hohenzollern Prussia. Where the city-

state of Athens had once to bow before the imperial ascendance of Macedon, thereby

securing the extension of Hellenism throughout the eastern Mediterranean, so too would

the provinces of a fragmented Germany give way before the unifying, world-historical

mission of the nineteenth-century Prussian state.

From the perspective of the first year student Burckhardt, the departure of the

dynamic Droysen, and the still novel historiographical approaches he represented, was a

significant loss for both his own studies and for the university in general. ―It is even

more fatal for me, ‖ he would write at the time, ―since I was received quite well by him,

and could visit as often as I wished. The man is truly important, and in ten years will be

named among the greatest.‖88 Yet Burckhardt's flirtation with what became this current

of Hegelian-inspired and Prussian-dominated historiography would be rather short lived.

Indeed, surveying Burckhardt's later commitments, it is difficult to see how it could have

been otherwise. For while Burckhardt's student years in the emerging Prussian metropole

had been a means of expanding the limited horizons offered by provincial Basel, the next

decades saw him coming terms with the virtues and advantages of precisely such

provincialism. Where Droysen's Kleindeutsch historiography celebrated the historical

necessity of nineteenth-century Prussian hegemony—in the territories of both scholarship

and politics—Burckhardt would become the natural representative of an expansive,

Grossdeutch conception of German history. From this perspective, one which led him far

afield from the political sentiments of his Prussian colleagues, it was precisely the

88
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol I, 145.

113
recognition of provincial prerogatives that made possible a German—and perhaps

European—cultural unity. So while Droysen envisioned the political unification of

German-speaking Central Europe as a project in consonance with the German nation's

nineteenth-century world-historical mission, Burckhardt's work soon emerged as a

powerful if isolated counterpoint. If Europe had a future in the nineteenth century and

beyond, Burckhardt saw this not in grand unions or utopian syntheses of political and

cultural life. Instead, as we have already seen, Burckhardt was forever drawn to the

fragment—whether understood in political, theoretical or methodological terms—as an

element that should not so quickly be subsumed by the interests of general and universal,

an element that always exists in uneasy tension with political, cultural and scholarly

hegemonies.89

Burckhardt's dalliance with the historical outlook and methods of Droysen,

though thus initially quite potent, proved rather short lived and superficial. On the other

hand however, his Berlin relations with Leopold von Ranke would prove at once more

ambivalent, more pervasive, and more complex. Indeed while later commentators like

Friedrich Meinecke and Felix Gilbert were to make much of a supposed opposition

between the culturally interested student and the politically minded mentor, the relation

between Burckhardt and Ranke is not one that lends itself well to such easy

dichotomization.90 While Ranke is rightly associated with an historiographical approach

centered on politics and statecraft, and Burckhardt's embrace of Kulturgeschichte can be

89
We can express this interest in terms of either Enlightenment critical historiography (Voltaire, Gibbon
Diderot), or in terms of Romantically influenced critical aesthetics and theology (Schlegel, Schleiermacher,
de Wette). But either way, this represents a position of clear opposition to the sort of Hegelianism implicit
in Droysen's work.
90
Friedrich Meinecke, ―Ranke und Burckhardt‖, Werke, vol. 7 (München: Oldenburg Verlag, 1968); Felix
Gilbert, Politics or Culture?: Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990).

114
seen as a partial rejection of his professor's methods, the rather crude categorical

divisions of ―politics‖ and ―culture‖ perhaps more obscure here than they reveal. For if

Ranke shared an emphasis on politics and diplomacy with a younger generation of

historians like Droysen, Sybel and Treitschke, and if his approach to scholarship went far

in defining the methodological commitments of subsequent German historiography, it is

all too easy to overlook the particularities that made him a unique member of the

historicist tradition he is said to have founded.

Ranke's peculiar position within the intellectual constellation of German

historicism emerges most clearly when he is examined through the distinction, described

above, between Romantic and Idealist representational philosophies. Born in 1795, and

already 44 years old by the time Burckhardt arrived in Berlin, Ranke's historiographical

commitments had not been shaped by the Hegelian enthusiasms of his younger

colleagues, and indeed, the residues of Idealism that were implicit in the subsequent

formulations of the Prussian School would remain alien to the older man throughout his

career. Instead, aside from his very real gifts with regard to historical research and

narrative, Ranke's outlook was constructed from an old-fashioned social conservatism, a

healthy sensitivity to the interests of his political patrons, and an epistemological

sensibility influenced by an early engagement with the Romantic theology of Wilhelm

Leberecht de Wette. As with the younger Burckhardt, therefore, Ranke himself had

studied with de Wette while both were at the University of Leipzig. Yet where

Burckhardt's engagement with the theologian resulted in an apparent exchange of religion

for history—in terms of both faith and avocation—Ranke seems to have incorporated de

Wette's critical theology rather more directly into his historical theories and

115
methodologies. So if contemporary criticism has associated German historicism—

especially in its Prussian School forms—with Hegelian influences, its initial Rankean

influences have roots far deeper in the soil of German thought, extending from the

surface strata of Idealism and reaching all the way to the Romantics, Herder, and even

into Pietism.91

From de Wette, therefore, Ranke absorbed an understanding of history as a

spiritual narrative, and conversely, religion as an ongoing process of historical revelation.

Indeed, it is this Romantic theological vision of history that distinguishes Ranke so

clearly from the Idealist gestures of Droysen described above. In this de Wettian

understanding of history as a progressive revelation, this faith that each historical

moment has a meaning that is not only divine but also ultimately inscrutable, we are

extremely far from Idealist universe in which history is a movement of legible ideas.

While Ranke would agree with his Idealist colleagues that the movements of history

essentially reflect the motions of Geist in the world (whether one understands this in

religious or intellectual terms), he would nevertheless embrace the Romantic notion that

such meanings can be approximated but never fully grasped or apprehended. For Ranke,

in other words, there is no privileged origin or telos, no special vantage point from which

to unlock the meanings inscribed in the fabric of time; there simply was no ultimate (or

eventual) unity of being and understanding from which to justify the course of history.

On the contrary, it was precisely from this perspective, rather than a theoretical

91
For the ur-history of the German historical school, see: Friedrich Meinecke, Die Enstehung des
Historismus (München: Leibniz, 1946); Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of
Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Horst Walter Blanke and Jörn Rüsen, ed.,
Von der Aufklärung zum Historismus. zum Strukturwandel des historischen Denkens (Paderborn: Ferdinand
Schoningh, 1984).

116
commitment to the justice of historical relativism, that Ranke could famously declare that

―Every epoch is immediate before God, and its worth rests not on what proceeds from it,

but on its existence, in its own self.‖92 In this way, Ranke's historiography is no less

committed to a meaningful historical process than German Idealism, but such meanings

are revealed to human beings only, as it were, through the glass darkly, and only through

the rigorous and critical study of events as they emerge in their immediate unfolding.

At the same time, however, Ranke combines these artifacts of Romantic theology

with a post-revolutionary commitment to a species of conservative corporatism that

likewise conditioned the nature of his historiographical work. Every epoch may indeed

stand in immediate relation to God—rather than mediated through a teleological

process—but the historical subjects that stand in such a relation are not the enlightened,

atomized individuals of eighteenth-century social contract theory. Instead, and here

clearly revealing his debt to the traditions of Herder and the Romantics, Ranke conceives

of history as a drama played by nations and peoples rather than individual agents and

actors. ―Peoples,‖ according to Ranke's well known dictum, ―are the thoughts of God.‖

And if it is the task of a rigorous history to most closely approximate and document the

movement of such divine thoughts, then the natural object for such study would be those

expressions and institutions of the Volk that are not merely transitory, but persist and

develop over time. The result for Ranke, therefore, is a methodological and a theoretical

emphasis on the history of states (and their interrelations) as the truest subjects of the

historical process, an emphasis that would in turn become a distinguishing feature of

92
―Jede Epoche ist unmittelbar zu Gott, und ihr Wert beruht gar nicht auf dem, was aus ihr hervorgeht,
sondern in ihrer Existenz selbst, in ihrem Eigenen selbst" Leopold von Ranke, Über die Epochen der
neueren Geschichte, ed. Hans Herzfeld (Schloss Laupheim: Ulrich Steiner Verlag, 1955), 30.

117
German historiography throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. While

Ranke may have differed from a later, more teleologically-oriented historicism in his

rejection of historical meaning as more than a regulative idea, he nevertheless converges

once again with those later traditions in their valorization of diplomatic and political

history.

For the purposes of the present discussion, however, it is Ranke's methodological

understanding of historical research and representation, his conception of the ideal

relation between the rigorous historian and the objects of research, that must be drawn

still further into relief. While Ranke clearly shows the influence of de Wette's critical

theology, one that necessarily foregrounds the interpretive operations of the critic in the

production of meaning, the historian was nevertheless also a product of the nineteenth

century, and shared its realist faith in the adequacy of representation to the being of the

objects narrated. In reaction to the approach of critical—and ostensibly partisan—

histories of figures like Gibbon and Voltaire, histories in which the presence of the author

saturates the narrative, Ranke was unconvinced that historical representation required the

explicit critical presence of an authorial interpreter. Instead, armed with a faith that such

representation could in itself achieve a close discursive approximation of the movements

of histoire, Ranke favored a narrative posture wherein the presence of the historian was

diminished. If every epoch was indeed equidistant from the divine, and the

representational media of scholarship could transparently document such historical

events, then the task of the rigorous historian was not to stand in judgment of the past, but

to reveal it as it was in itself. "This book,‖ he wrote of his 1824 Geschichte der

romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514, ―attempts to see all these and

118
other related histories of the Latin and Teuton Nations in their common unity. History

has been given the task of passing judgment on the past for the benefit of the present and

the future. The present attempt does not aim at such great responsibility. It merely

wishes to show the actual past".93 And this actual past, in other words, emerges most

pristinely in that mode of historical representation where the narrative presence of the

author is reduced. The object of historical representation rather than the critical subject

should henceforth take center stage, and many of the ideological and disciplinary claims

of historicist ―objectivity‖ would find their sources in this Rankean vision of the implicit

rather than explicit function of the historical narrator.

Confronted, then, with this exceptional figure, the young Burckhardt was initially

more than a little awestruck. In the course of time, however, even as the Swiss became a

recognized and valued student of the older professor, Burckhardt found his high

estimation of Ranke increasingly mixed with a growing uncertainty about the man and

his views. Throughout his later years, Burckhardt freely admitted and recognized the

intellectual debts he owed to the older historian, but the Basler's early work and views

show a desire to secure a degree of distance from those of his former mentor. Initially,

Burckhardt's concerns emerged more in relation to the perceived character—or lack of

it—in Ranke's overly flexible and inauthentic posture in professional, social and political

terms. As Burckhardt became more familiar with the Berliner milieu in which he found

himself, it quickly became apparent to him—through reputation and observation—that

Ranke was considered too much the creature of his conservative patrons, and too willing

to bend to whatever political winds seemed most powerful. Indeed, having been

93
Leopold von Ranke, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514, trans. Philip Arthur
Ashworth (London: Bell and Sons, 1887) vii.

119
welcomed into the left-leaning circle of Bettina von Arnim's Berlin salon, Burckhardt

related a story to his sister Louise involving the estimable professor:

Ranke was once at Bettina‘s; the conversation turned to the subjection of Poland,
Bettina was naturally deeply aroused against Russia and Ranke responded to her
ideas with complete agreement. Some time later he was again at Bettina‘s in a
large gathering; a big Russian diplomat engaged in conversation with him, during
which Ranke described the actions of the Poles as revolutionary. At this moment,
Bettina looked at him and, with a roll of her eyes, said only: Ugh! Ranke slinked
from the house as quickly as possible and has never again visited.94

The younger student seems to have quickly absorbed the general opinion in Berlin that,

despite all his very real gifts as a historian, a lecturer and writer, Ranke could all too

often prove an unreliable and superficial colleague.95 And while the younger man

maintained a respect for the work of the older scholar, the awestruck character of his

historical enthusiasm—once considered a replacement for a lost religious faith—was

tempered by a confrontation with its all too human high priests.

The reality of history in Berlin, from the perspective of Burckhardt, had therefore

been an experience partly of fulfillment and partly of disappointment. On the one hand,

Berlin had made possible the leap from theology into history, and it had solidified his

faith in the essential necessity of this choice. On the other hand, however valuable and

worthwhile intellectually, Burckhardt found the historical ―faiths‖ of Berlin a poor

substitute for his own lost belief, and an unsatisfying enterprise for a young Swiss student

seeking his own particular relation to the past. While de Wette's vision of an historically

grounded process of revelation—in its critical moments—had had such a profound

impact on his outlook, he would nevertheless remain underwhelmed by the way in which

94
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol I, 160.
95
Ibid. Burckhardt writes scathingly ―Es ist schade um den Mann, daß er bei den allerungeheuersten
Kenntnissen, dem durchdringendsten Geist, der größten Kunst im Umgang (er war auch mit mir sehr artig)
so spottwenig Charakter besitzt.‖

120
both his Basel and Berlin mentors sought to restore a meaningful ground to the human

sciences by invoking these same historical processes. History, in other words, was surely

the key, but not in the form reflected in the works of de Wette, Ranke and Droysen.

Where the former had produced a powerful critique, one which Ranke himself seems to

have absorbed productively, the younger Burckhardt could not accept on faith the

comforting presence of the absolute or divine (as did his Berlin professor) in the concrete

historical process. Still less could he embrace the Idealism of Hegel, and his younger

historical followers, and accept that the presence of such a meaningful historical ground

need not be taken on faith, but that it was available and comprehensible to the faculties of

reason and rationality.

For the somewhat more agnostic and pessimistic Burckhardt—the same that we

later find drinking deep from the work of the arch anti-Hegelian Arthur Schopenhauer—

history was emerging as a field not defined by the synthesizing movements of

individuals, nations and ideas, but marked by a perpetual and irreducible tension between

the concrete actuality of historical fragmentation and the fragile domain of cultural ideals.

For Burckhardt, once the faiths of Basel theology and Berlin historicism had been

abandoned, the task was one of finding a mode of historical representation where the

tensions between concrete and ideal, fragment and whole, past and present, would not be

resolved or fused, but would be arranged in a constellation of productive and critical

tension. It is towards this end that Burckhardt began to steer a more idiosyncratic

historiographical course in the 1840's, a course that converged in the embrace of a

distinct visual and cultural of appropriation and representation of the past. As with

Gibbon, still comfortably musing on the Capitoline Hill, Burckhardt's methodological

121
and theoretical innovations would be inextricably linked to the histories and temporalities

bound up in Italian landscapes.

122
 Chapter Two

The Subject as a Work of Art:

Anschauung as Remembrance in the Cicerone

―On the morning of the 29th of July 1837, five young travelers sat at an Inn in

Andermatt, Switzerland, five young men that not even an unpracticed eye would have

mistaken for English. They clearly lacked the two prerequisites of the travelling Briton: a

fat purse and spleen.‖ On the contrary, notable less for spleen than for an unconcealed

youthful Übermut, the five young men were a small group of Basel Studenten who had

set off on a summertime holiday in the Alps and would collectively relate their

adventures in an 1838 travel essay, ―Fünf Tage Jenseits der Alpen.―96 Pausing in

Andermatt, at the confluence of several roads and passes that could carry them to the

Berner Oberland of the West, Graubünden to the East, or the Göscheneralp pass to the

North, the young travelers turned their eyes instead southward, to the pass of St. Gotthard

and an Italy that lay beyond. With a literary enthusiasm apparently well versed in

sources ranging from the classics to Goethe‘s Italienische Reise and Eichendorff‘s Aus

dem Leben eines Taugenichts, the youths describe the moment of decision:

We sat there, with no more ideas, as Karl rose up with a meaningful expression:
I‘d like to make a suggestion to you, but you musn‘t interupt me — we stood in
tense anticipation — see, he began with a finger on the map, see what a short way
it is from here to Italy, to Italy, where the lemon trees blossom, to Italy, for which
you all long. Leave behind the Oberland and make an impetuous resolution!

96
Jacob Burckhardt, ―Wanderer in der Schweiz‖ 4. Jahregang, 1838. Nr.29-41.

123
 Then he showed a way on the map, that passed a short way through Switzerland,
but then there was Italy. Silence reigned for a brief moment, a few considerations
of Heinrich were set aside, and then we broke into noisy jubilation: off, off, let us,
dear Friends, get going.97
With the decision made, and with a youthful Sehnsucht nach Süden carrying them over

the St. Gotthard and across the Italian frontier, the rest of the essay describes the

adventures of the five friends over several days in the Tessin and along Lago Maggiore.

Complete with midnight coach rides, highway brigands, beautiful chamber maids and an

arrest by authorities for lack of valid passports, the ―Fünf Tage‖ presents an Italian

journey in the hues of a late Romantic novella, with all the simultaneous irony and

enthusiasm of a Hoffmann or an Eichendorff. The Italian south that emerges here hovers

somewhere between a lived experience and a region already determined by a complex

knot of literary tropes, clichés and expectations, already configured as a region in which

actuality and ideality readily blur into one another. But if this initial and extremely brief

brush with the ―storied‖ landscape to the south was nothing more than an adventurous

summer‘s lark for four of the young travelers, it marked the beginning of a lifelong

personal and professional passion for one of them. For amongst these young traveling

Basler—alongside Alois Biedermann, Theodor Meyer, Jacob Oeri, and Johannes

Riggenbach—was the not yet nineteen year old ―Karl‖, the youth who initially suggested

the journey and whom Werner Kaegi identifies as Jacob Burckhardt.98

97
Ibid. ―Wir saßen da, ohne an etwas weiteres zu denken, da hub Karl mit bedeutungsvoller Miene an: Ich
hätte euch was vorzubringen, ihr dürft mich aber nicht unterbrechen — wir standen in gespannter
Erwartung — seht, fuhr er fort den Finger auf der Karte, seht welch kleine Strecke es noch bis Italien ist,
nach Italien, wo die Zitronen blühn, nach Italien, nach dem ihr euch alle so sehnt. Laßt das Oberland fahren
und fasset einen raschen Entschluß! Dann zeigte er auf der Karte einen Plan, der wenig über die Schweiz
hinausging, aber es war doch Italien. Einen Augenblick herrschte Schweigen, einige Bedenklichkeiten
Heinrichs aber wurden beseitigt, dann brachen wir in lauten Jubel aus: dahin, dahin, laßt uns, ihr Freunde,
ziehn.‖
98
Kaegi, Burckhardt: Eine Biographie, Vol. 1, 516.

124
 Still two years away from his autumn 1839 departure for studies in Berlin, Jacob

Burckhardt‘s first encounters with Italy were as decisive for his intellectual development

as they were artifacts of an historical moment and an individual sensibility still clearly

defined in Romantic terms. But if these initial encounters and tours—taking place in the

summers of 1837, 1838 and 1839 respectively—were cast in the Romantic sensibilities of

an adolescent of the 1830‘s, they also mark the first encounters of an engagement and

fascination with Italy that would remain long after the political and aesthetic

Romanticism of Burckhardt‘s youth had metamorphosed into something more complex,

more ambivalent and perhaps more intimate. From a summer‘s afternoon in 1837 to a

final farewell to Rome in 1883, Italian travel emerged from this moment as an essential

feature and recurring motif in Burckhardt‘s intellectual biography. But indeed, while this

fascination with Italy remained for Burckhardt a remarkably consistent theme, the

character of this Italian experience, reception and representation would undergo an

equally remarkable process of transformation in the course of the historian‘s productive

life. In the course of university studies in Berlin during the next decade, and in the

course of a professional career that extended into the 1890‘s, the Italy (as ideality and/or

reality) that captured the imagination of Burckhardt in 1837 would give way to a more

subtle and ongoing intellectual relationship whose power never truly waned, yet which

became more sober, more measured and more complex with the passing years.

The Italian journeys of the late 1830‘s are thus, in many ways, the youthful

preludes to a career that became closely associated with Italian history in general and its

cultural and artistic dimensions in particular. Of course, this road from early Italian

sojourns to the mature historical research of the 1840‘s and the scholarly production of

125
the 1850‘s—the Age of Constantine, the Cicerone and Civilization of the Renaissance—

was by no means inevitable, but the impact of those early experiences seems to have

remained a powerful memory for Burckhardt during his student years. Writing to

Johannes Riggenbach shortly after his second and more extended journey in the summer

of 1838, this time only in the company of Jacob Oeri, Burckhardt described experiences

that still possessed a rich Romantic aura:

Italy to me (listen and marvel) is a land of painful memories; I dared not let
myself enjoy even a tithe of the whole corpus of nature and art; for the moment
my heart and feelings—still profoundly emotional—rather than my mind were
opened to the touch of the divine south, everything was transmuted into longing
for vanished friendship, such as I never wish to feel again on earth. […] What I
suffered one heavenly evening in Pisa will remain forever in my memory. I stood
sketching on the beautiful green meadow where Duomo, Campanile, Baptistry
and Camposanto rise, leaning against the wall of the Seminary. Looking at the
Byzantine arches of the Duomo, I inevitably thought of you and by a natural
association of ideas had to think of you all, so that I was in no fit condition to go
on drawing. (Camuph [Oeri] was asleep at the time in a near-by café. I walked
quickly along, following the old walls of the town and passing across the Arno,
where I was able to delight in a sunset that every artist in the world would have
envied me. The whole sky was deep blue; the Apennines were violet in the
evening light; the Arno flowed at my feet, and I could have cried like a child.99
At the same time, however, in the course of the student years of the 1840‘s, these same

Romantic inclinations found themselves focused on objects of a more German and

political nature. During an 1841 semester in the Rhineland at the University of Bonn,

and on leave from his studies in Berlin, Burckhardt became a member of a close circle of

friends gathered around the figure of Gottfried Kinkel, then a young radical scholar at the

Rhenish university. It was amongst these new friends that Burckhardt found the same

kind of belonging of which he speaks to Riggenbach above and which seemed to elude

99
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 1, 91. ―Ich spreche hier wenigmehr von Italien; der Rhein würde meine
Sehnsucht ausfüllen.‖

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him in Berlin. For a time, indeed, the Rhineland itself became an ersatz Italy in the

symbolic landscape of Burckhardt‘s intellectual biography, a culturally and aesthetically

rich ―elsewhere‖ that promised intellectual engagement and personal intimacies that

neither Berlin nor Basel had ever fully yielded. ―I don‘t speak much here of Italy;‖ he

wrote to one of these Maikaefer friends, Willibald Beyschlag, in 1842 ―the Rhine would

satisfy my yearnings.‖100 In the years before the deluge of 1848, in other words,

Burckhardt found himself swept up in a milieu where political intellectual and cultural

romanticisms were becoming fused in highly volatile combinations, romanticisms whose

focus was less on distant aesthetic utopias beyond the Alps and more on political and

national utopias of the here and now.

For the young Swiss Burckhardt, however, the sense of belonging he found

among Kinkel and his German friends, and the sense of enthusiasm he sensed enveloping

those Rhineland experiences were always more aesthetic and cultural in nature than they

were political. Too much the natural outsider, and with too strong a streak of latent

conservatism, Burckhardt increasingly found the radical political drift of his Rhenish

friends inconsonant with his own interests and proclivities. To the extent that these ties

had been defined in romantically conceived terms of a cultural revival of a German

speaking nation, as long as poetry and Schwärmerisch visits to the Cologne Cathedral

represented the political project of the Maikäferbund, the Basler could still feel very

much at home among his friends in Bonn. Yet in the five years that preceded the

revolutions of 1848, revolutions that would land Kinkel in a Prussian prison and lead to a

dramatic escape to Britain, it was precisely these political issues and questions that came

100
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 1, 242.

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to dominate the attentions of the Bonner group. Thus, in the second half of the 1840‘s,

and coinciding not accidently with the completion of Burckhardt‘s studies and his first

professional research trips, the relationship between the Basler and the Kinkel circle

cooled perceptibly, if by no means completely. Indeed, while Burckhardt would always

express a fondness for this Maikäfer era, and he would maintain a somewhat less intimate

correspondence with Kinkel and others, Burckhardt‘s brief dalliance with both

Romanticism, German nationalism, and the Rhineland would clearly come to an end by

1848. And it is perhaps no accident that, in two extended professional research visits

from 1846 to 1848, Burckhardt‘s attentions would be drawn away from the Rhineland

and return once again to Italy.

Upon returning to Basel in 1843, after completing studies in Berlin, Burckhardt‘s

personal and professional situation had given as little cause for comfort as did his

increasingly gloomy political outlook. Engaged initially as a somewhat unenthusiastic

editor for a conservative leaning Basel periodical, and somewhat later in the

underappreciated post of Dozent at the University of the same city, Burckhardt‘s

scholarly fortunes and aesthetic appetites seemed to have arrived at a state of perpetual

undernourishment. With relations to politically engaged friends like Gottfried Kinkel and

Hermann Schauenburg having cooled, and with prospects for advancement in the

Krähwinkel of Basel seeming ever more tenuous, Burckhardt began making concrete

arrangements for an Italian journey that had been on his mind since his final semesters in

Berlin. By the February of 1846, his duties as Redakteur and Dozent safely behind him,

Burckhardt could write a letter to a Maikäfer compatriot, Hermann Schauenberg, that is

worth quoting at length:

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 In four and a half weeks I leave for Rome, and have not answered you for as
many months; but I would like a word from you for my journey, so it's now high
time I wrote to you. You weather-wise fellows vie with each other in getting
deeper and deeper into this wretched age—I on the other hand have
secretly fallen out with it entirely, and for that reason am escaping from it: to the
beautiful, lazy south, where history is dead, and I, who am so tired of the
present, will be refreshed by the thrill of antiquity as by some wonderful and
peaceful tomb. Yes, I want to get away from them all, from the radicals, the
communists, the industrialists, the intellectuals, the pretentious, the reasoners,
the abstract, the absolute, the philosophers, the sophists, the State fanatics, the
idealists, the 'ists' and 'isms' of every kind—I shall only meet the Jesuits on the
other side, and among 'isms' only absolutism; and foreigners can usually avoid
both. Beyond the mountains I must strike up new relations with life and poetry,
if I am to become anything in the future; for I have quarreled inwardly with
the present state of things—quite quietly, without any special vexation; quite
gradually, the drops have hollowed out the stone, until I finally realized: it can't
go on. I shall probably remain a year in the south; you will get news from me, and
what news! Perhaps the Lord will send me a merciful little fever, to put an end to
a restless mind—all right, I have nothing against it; vogue la galerel even if it's
Charon's barque. Mysterious fate often means well towards us.101
For Burckhardt, the journey south is here still redolent of a mytho-Romantic

timelessness, and represents an escape from an array of encroaching historical currents

that collectively announced an approaching European modernity. And yet, where

Burckhardt‘s Italian adventures ten years earlier had been construed in terms of youthful

excitement and Romantic enthusiasm, the Sehnsucht of 1846 is already colored with

other notes and sensibilities that will become familiar aspects Burckhardt‘s outlook. If

we cannot say that Burckhardt displays the kind of spleen once reserved for English

travelers alone, there are already those other, and distinctly Burckhardtian, tones of irony,

elegy, and resignation that are so characteristic of his corpus. In ways that would not be

foreign once again to Eichendorff—in both the evocation of an extra-temporal South and

its simultaneous ironization—Italy comes here to represent a suspension of historical

101
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 1, 208.

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time, and in turn becomes linked with death itself, that other domain in which the actions

of time are mastered and subdued.

In some ways, however, the Italian trip of 1846 could very well mark the

beginning of a gradual retreat from the kind of Romanticism that characterized

Burckhardt‘s outlook during the first three decades of his life. It was in the period of

these journeys—travels that coincided with personal, professional and political

upheaval—that Burckhardt found former Romantic inclinations gradually giving way to

what could be characterized as the more detached, resigned and measured classical

sensibility that can be recognized in the works of the coming decades. The Italy that

therefore emerges from—and yet also conditioned—this change in sensibility was thus

very different from the one given youthful expression on the banks of the Arno or the

slopes along Lago Maggiore. From its first moments, indeed, the journey seemed to belie

the Romantic aura that had accompanied it in Burckhardt‘s imagination. ―The journey,‖

as Kaegi writes, ―turned out less romantic than Burckhardt had dreamt of it in Basel.

Nothing of the ‗übermenschlich schönen‘ landscape visions between Sestri and Spezia

are to be found in the sketchbook, none of the painterly little places clinging to cliffs are

recorded there as was once planned.‖102 On the contrary, in this instance, Burckhardt‘s

direction seemed rather more well-defined, with very little time left over for the kind of

aesthetic Schwelgerei that could perhaps have been expected from his previous

correspondence. Indeed, as his letter to Schauenburg hinted, Burckhardt‘s destination

was quite clear, and it was towards this destination that the young historian turned his

compass in the spring of 1846. ―In Burckhardt‘s heart, everything was drawn now to

102
Kaegi, Burckhardt: Eine Biographe, Vol. 3, 5.

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Rome continues Kaegi in the same passage in relation to the diaries, ―After the last

architectural sketch of the cathedral in Genoa, there follows without transition or ellipsis

the solemn entry: ‗Arrival in Rom 1. April 1846, Evening 8:30, entered through the Porta

Cavallegieri.‘ It was the first time in his life that he set foot on Roman soil.‖103 With this

laconic diary entry, in other words, and in language far more reticent than previous

communications, Burckhardt announced his entry into Rome, a city that would remain a

central source of historical and personal inspiration for the rest of his life.

However, if Burckhardt‘s entry into Rome signals a retreat from a Romanticism

conceived in terms of a quasi-mystical region of self-completion and ecstatic presence,

the historian nevertheless maintains and displays that species of Romantic irony that

understands the ultimate impossibility of such complete identity of self and world. One

could say that Burckhardt‘s reception of Italy undergoes a transformation in form and

sensibility from one like that of a Wordsworth, where there still exists possibility of

coincidence and mutual recognition between self and nature (or world), to that of an

E.T.A. Hoffmann, where two dimensions exist side by side yet can never be fully

reconciled. From this perspective, we see Burckhardt beginning to pursue the precarious

point of balance that he would attempt to maintain for the rest of his career, a personal

and historiographical balance between a Romantic over-identification with abstract

idealities and a priori first principles and an antiquarian impulse that mechanically

assembles mountains of unrelated and indigestible factual fragments. The Italy to which

103
Kaegi, Burckhardt: Eine Biographe, Vol. 3, 5. ―Im Herzen Burckhardt‘s draengte nun alles nach Rom,―
continues Kaegi in the same passage in relation to the diaries, ―Auf die letzte Architekturzeichnung vom
Dom zu Genua folgt ohne Übergang und ohne Lücke der feierliche Eintrag: «Ankunft in Rom 1. April
1846, Abends ½9 Uhr, durch Porta Cavallegieri eingefahren.» Es war das Erste Mal in seinem Leben, daß
er diesen Boden betrat.‖

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he now escaped would be one not conditioned by a naïve Romanticism of which he had

become increasingly suspicious, a Romanticism so easily translated into the dangerous

political commitments of his Rhenish friends. But nor would it assume the same

antiquarian mustiness that seemed to cling to the work of many Berlin acquaintances.104

The Italy that here emerged, in other words, would be neither a piece of Eichendorffian

fantasy like Das Marmorbild nor a project like Theodor Mommsen‘s vast, and

perpetually accumulating, collection of Roman inscriptions, Corpus Inscriptionum

Latinarum.

In turn, as the above distinctions became manifest in the contours of

Burckhardt‘s‘ historiographic practices and outlook, Italian and European pasts could be

vouchsafed to the present neither in the form of pristine ideal entities nor in lifeless

collections of atomized historical data. An authentic encounter with the past could be

experienced neither as a material given nor a truth deduced from first principles. Indeed,

to the degree one can ever speak of a Burckhardtian epistemology of history, the mature

work that begins appearing in the late 1840‘s and 1850‘s bears the marks of an increasing

engagement with Enlightenment and eighteenth-century historiographical literatures.

And as with the models of Gibbon and Voltaire, models that remained primary influences

in his methodological approach to cultural history, Burckhardt adopted a critical posture

in relation to the objects of research, a posture in which historian understands himself or

herself more as interlocutor with—rather than narrator of—historical events and entities.

104
For instance, notice Burckhardt‘s scorn for the mere piling up of facts which he linked to the traditions
of German antiquarian historiography, and against which he warns the younger Bernhard Kugler: ―Ich rathe
ferner zum einfachen Weglassen des bloßen Tatsachenschuttes - nicht aus dem Studium - wohl aber aus der
Darstellung. Von äußeren Tatsachen braucht man schlechterdings nur diejenigen zu melden, welche der
kenntliche und cha-racteristische Ausdruck einer Idee, eines Allgemeinen, eines lebendigen Zuges der
betreffenden Zeit sind.‖ Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 5, 76.

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It is, as we have described above, a historiographical relation that tends to emphasize the

ultimate incommensurability of narrative time on the one hand and the time that is

narrated on the other, an understanding that both recognizes and explicitly underlines the

critical space that opens up between histoire and discours. Where Burckhardt‘s early

Italian reveries had emphasized a sense of presence, authenticity, and self-identification

with the landscapes of a largely still unexplored Italian south, an identification in which

Italy becomes the symbol of union (even unto death) between subjective and objective

totalities, the era around 1848 shows Burckhardt assuming a more nuanced, more

critically distanced, but no less intimate interest in the cultural importance of Italian pasts

in relation to a European present.

This period of Burckhardt‘s early professional journeys to Italy thus coincided

with an increasing set of suspicions regarding the state of historical consciousness in a

modernizing nineteenth century. On the one hand, the methodological pathologies of

historical professionalization threatened to deliver a past where little could be glimpsed

but an ever increasing set of ever more detailed individual ―trees‖. On the other hand, the

naïve enthusiasms of romantically inclined historical consciousness presented sweeping

vistas of ―forests‖ which threatened to become utterly dissociated from the particularities

of their constituent elements. Given these considerations, it is unsurprising that his three

major works produced during the subsequent decade not only deal explicitly with

chapters of Italian history, but pursued these chapters in a way that sought to address the

above methodological and epistemological concerns. The work most closely associated

with the methodological alternatives developed by Burckhardt is Die Cultur der

Renaissance in Italien, first published in 1860 and whose methodological innovations are

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well known to every subsequent student of European historiography. And yet, in many

ways, Die Cultur der Renaissance might be viewed as only the third panel of a larger

triptych of works that appeared during the course of the 1850‘s and collectively

established the contours of Burckhardt‘s historical methodology. Indeed, while

Burckhardt had, by the late 1840‘s, conceived of an extended series of cultural historical

handbooks that treated the eras from the late antique to the Renaissance, the resulting

research instead eventually produced two monographs and a hugely successful guidebook

to Italian cultural artifacts. The two monographs, Die Cultur der Renaissance auf Die

Zeit Constantin der Grossen (1853), neatly bookend the span of the original handbook

project, while the (now) less celebrated Cicerone (1855) represented an impressive

synthesis of the Italian culture during these periods, and is here framed in the form of a

somewhat idiosyncratic guidebook for the educated nineteenth-century European visitor

to Italy. Indeed, to the degree that Burckhardt‘s methodological commitments and

evolutions have since become especially linked to the 1860 Cultur der Renaissance, it

has become too easy to ignore the methodological links of that work with both the

Constantin and the Cicerone, and the organic totality of which all three represent

individual fragments.

In comparison with the other two works of the period, however, the Cicerone in

particular has always occupied a somewhat problematic position within Burckhardt‘s

oeuvre, as this has since been defined by professional historians and students of art

history. While it displays an astonishing depth and range of art historical erudition, and

while it attempts an astonishingly broad synthesis of Italian cultural history, the Cicerone

presents subsequent readers with yet another example of Burckhardt‘s insistent

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intellectual idiosyncrasy. For while it is constructed by an obviously skilled historian,

and informed by what was then the most contemporary research, it would be impossible

to situate it within a recognized genre of professional historiography or art historical

scholarship. Indeed, writing from a rather more established and professionalized moment

of the art historical discipline, Aby Warburg would later claim—in seemingly less than

sympathetic terms—that the Cicerone was rather more ―a chapter from the literary

history of the Italian journey.‖105 It is uncertain, of course, as Christine Tauber notes in

one of the few published monographs devoted to the work, in precisely what sense

Warburg intended this pronouncement, but he clearly seemed interested in presenting the

Cicerone less as a work of foundational disciplinary import, and more as a species of

writing more at home in the literary genres of travel memoir and travel essay. Yet

regardless of such subsequent policing of disciplinary boundaries, it is clear that the

Cicerone‘s place within the genres of travel writing, historical literature, or art historical

scholarship has remained uncertain from the moment of its appearance in 1855.

On the other hand, however, it would be unfair to dismiss Warburg‘s judgment

too swiftly as an instance of ex post facto disciplinary hygiene. For without a doubt, the

Cicerone is deeply indebted to—if not completely defined by—the literary genres that

Warburg invokes. Writing in February of 1870 to Otto Mündler, and with characteristic

self-abnegation, Burckhardt himself would describe the work in part as a response to the

then paucity of effective guidebooks. ―All things considered,‖ he declares, ―I wish a

better man than me had written a Cicerone (according to the plan I had before me)—but

105
ChristineTauber, Jacob Burckhardts Cicerone. Eine Aufgabe zum Genießen (Tubingen: 2000), 97. A
suberb overview with which any exploration of the Cicerone in Burckhardt‘s corpus should begin.

135
what was there excepting Murray, in 1853, in the way of a guide to art which made any

attempt to take in the whole of Italy and all the forms of art?‖106 The ―Murray‖ to which

Burckhardt refers are the guidebooks of the British based Charles Murray firm that were

then among the only well established guides available for travelers in Europe. Indeed, in

this sense, part of the uniqueness of the Cicerone stems from the particular moment in

which it appeared, a moment of dramatic transition in the nature of travel and travel

writing during the mid-nineteenth century. With possibilities for leisure travel still quite

rare and limited to extremely narrow social strata, the first half of the nineteenth century

had been overwhelmingly dominated by a travel literature that understood itself as

precisely that, literature. Drawing on models from Goethe‘s Italienische Reise, to

Madame de Stael‘s Corinne and Stendhal‘s Promenades dans Rome, such literature took

the form of a travel memoir (real or fictional) related as a journey of moral, aesthetic, and

perhaps sensual education, a kind of Grand Tour redrawn in accordance with the needs,

interests, desires and anxieties of the educated bourgeois subject. Italy here became

character, backdrop, and landscape in a Bildungsroman, or a cultural Pilgrim‘s Progress,

that described the process of cultural edification undergone for, by and through the

individual subject and author.

By the middle of the century, however, this sort of travel literature was quickly

giving way in prominence to one of two alternatives. On the one hand, with increasing

opportunity for travel (though of course still remarkably limited in class terms), demand

was swiftly growing a literature in the form of the now familiar guidebook. The 1830‘s

and 1840‘s saw the rapid growth of firms like Murray or the German-based firm,

106
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol 5, 70.

136
Baedeker and Sons, a growth that reveals burgeoning interest not only in vicarious

experiences, but a desire to reproduce and experience an Italienische Reise of one‘s own.

Such guides tended to offer the reader more prosaic—though more practical—advice and

tips, involving anything from where to find a particular fresco by Raphael to how much

one should tip the hotel staff. On the other hand, the objects of interest to the growing

traveling public, whether those were Roman antiquities, Renaissance architecture or

Baroque sculpture, were undergoing a shift in legitimate stewardship from the wealthy

travelling connoisseur or dilettante to an increasingly professionalized body of academic

experts who claimed a monopoly on legitimate discourse regarding such objects. In other

words, Burckhardt‘s Cicerone appears at a moment in which the early nineteenth-century

bourgeois traveler/subject was increasingly being replaced—or disaggregated into—one

of two possible subject positions: tourist or expert. Indeed, the strange position that the

Cicerone occupies, as both travel guide and work of scholarship, reveals it as a work of

this threshold moment of transition in which traditional and emerging modes of traveling

subjectivity are still present in one and the same work.

To a Burckhardt traveling in the late 1840‘s and 1850‘s, however, the manner in

which the traveler reconstructs a visited domain—or the way in which the art historian

interprets the elements of a work or style, and the historian assembles the fragments of

Italian or Roman history—was far more than an idle issue of epistemological curiosity.

Unnerved by a modernity whose signature qualities seemed to include a willful historical

forgetfulness and a creeping disengagement with traditional cultural legacies, Burckhardt

presents the Cicerone as an invitation to re-engage with—and re-member—a past that

was quickly becoming fragmented and forgotten. Furthermore, and this is perhaps the

137
decisive point, the terms and conditions under which this re-engagement takes place are

important not only in the antiquarian interest of preserving a relation to the past, but also

important for the effect they have upon the subject of such experiences. The process of

cultural, aesthetic or historical Anschauung, in other words, is a process of exchange in

which both subject of historical knowledge and object of such knowledge come into

being and assume definition. In Burckhardt‘s normative configuration of ―healthy‖

subjectivity, to whose character we‘ll return below, the capacity for and exercise of such

Anschauung is a threshold requirement, a requirement that involves a construction of the

self through the critical re-membering and re-construction of cultural and historical

objects. Indeed, from this epistemological perspective, Burckhardt can be seen veering

into epistemological and psychological territories more akin to those of the

Enlightenment and the Goethezeit, and to the degree that it insists on a kind of early

nineteenth-century aesthetic subjectivity, the Cicerone is indeed somewhat regressive in

the way it mediates and understands the relation between observer and observed. For

Burckhardt, the task is one of reasserting a kind of aristocratic bourgeois aesthetic

subjectivity that appeared to be dissolving under the influence of modernity, a

subjectivity that becomes visible to itself only in a process of mutual and complementary

revelation with the objects of its experience. Put differently, one could say that the

Cicerone is an invitation not to a ―Room of One‘s Own‖, but to a Bildungsroman of

one‘s own, an educational experience in which self and world take shape, and become

visible to one another, in a process of mutual revelation and reflection. It is a plea, in

other words, for a mode of subjectivity that Burckhardt felt was disappearing from a

modernizing world hovering between the alternatives of the solipsistic hedonism of a

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Romantic self, and the objectification and atomization of tourism and expertise. If, for

Burckhardt, the fortunes of culture depended on a specific relationship of remembrance,

the latter in turn rested on a specific orientation of subject and object, a careful—rather

Goethean—balance of mutual definition.

The notion of Genuss, or pleasure, to which Burckhardt invites readers of the

Cicerone, must therefore be understood not simply as a somewhat esoteric aesthetic

category or experience, but also as an essential moment in the complex mutual

imbrications of culture, subjectivity and remembrance. Indeed, given the way in which

we‘ve outlined Burckhardt‘s epistemological and historiographical commitments, the

prominent role ascribed to the experience of aesthetic Genuss should come as little

surprise. For central to Burckhardt‘s normative notion of subjectivity is a free and

unfettered play of Phantasie whose operations—provided they are both refined and

measured—produce the enjoyment that correlates with a subjectivity both capable of

cultural remembrance and constructed in cultural remembrance.107 Thus, where

reconstruction of history is conceived in the terms described above, in terms of an

ongoing and never ending critical reconstruction of fragments, then it is these faculties of

pleasure and imagination that drive the critical ―afterlife‖ of fragmentary historical

remembrance, that propel a ―Baroque curve‖ of knowledge that never quite comes to rest

in the perfect circle of complete understanding and presence.108 It should also be obvious

that this epistemological scheme is precisely analogous to the social/cultural

107
We are in territory here coming very near that of Schiller‘s understanding of the political/historical
function of the aesthetic—to the degree that Burckhardt recognizes the social import of aesthetic
experience. And yet, given Burckhardt‘s own nature, and the intervening half century, the more optimistic
dimensions Schiller‘s aesthetics seem less tenable in 1850 than they might have a few decades earlier.
108
Used here in the Benjaminian sense.

139
framework—deployed by Burckhardt in Die Cultur der Renaissance and formalized in

Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen—that describes a tripartite historical topography

defined by the phenomena of Religion, State and Culture. Representing, in effect, the

three primary ―colors‖ of historical experience, the dimensions of religion, state and

culture combine in varying proportions (and degrees of hegemony) to define the

historical contours of any particular time. And if Burckhardt came to associate the

religious and political dimensions with degrees of compulsion and coercion, the realm of

culture was seen to emerge most profoundly and most forcefully in moments of relative

freedom from such compulsions and coercions.109 In the most famous example,

Burckhardt situates the cultural efflorescence of the Italian Renaissance in a moment of

deadlock between Papal and Imperial power, a moment that extended from the decline of

the Hohenstaufens to Charles V‘s sack of Rome in 1527. And similar to the historical

fortunes of Cultur, the fortunes of modern subjectivity are dependent upon the degree of

freedom it may assert in relation to the coercive forces—ideological or material—that

beset it on various sides. From the perspective of Burckhardt, in other words, the fate of

aesthetically attuned subjectivity and the fate of Cultur are inextricably intertwined, the

free development and expression of the one dependent on the free development and

expression of the other. Thus, while the Cicerone is a guide to aesthetic taste and

enjoyment, Burckhardt‘s Anleitung is part of a much larger task, namely that of

encouraging forms of aesthetic subjectivity whose character bears the faculties of

imagination and criticism required for the re-membering of European culture. For

109
This is, of course, the nub of Burckhardt‘s un-historicist denigration of politics and statecraft. As a set
of phenomena whose essence, in Burckhardt‘s view, rested ultimately on coercion and force, the state could
be recognized only as an amoral entity, that is, not a carrier of culture but its antagonist.

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Burckhardt, in other words, the subjective enjoyment and consumption of the Italian

cultural landscapes is a faculty bound up with an active, yet restrained,

Phantasietätigkeit, and this faculty of imagination is in turn required for the adequate

preservation and reconstruction of the past. One knows the past, in this sense, not just

when one ―sees‖ it, but only when one sees it with the pleasure linked to an active

subjective agency.

What this suggests, of course, is that Burckhardt‘s Cicerone is more than a

somewhat curious guidebook to the artistic heritage of the Italian peninsula, but also a

kind of prescription for an ailing European culture and its associated forms of

subjectivity, a prescription for exercises in a kind of aesthetic regeneration and

reeducation. This function only further explains the curious formal nature of the work.

As we‘ve seen, and as embodied in its name, the Cicerone was always conceived by

Burckhardt less as a rigid framework or itinerary, and more as a kind of literary

companion with which the mobile traveler may wish to converse from time to time.

While certainly written for an educated, and perhaps expert, audience, the Cicerone

presents itself eponymously as an interlocutor and not as an authority whose

pronouncements must be obeyed, and it is in this sense that the guide assumes the form of

an invitation rather than a set of directives. In other words, the Cicerone engages the

reader in a kind of ongoing conversation where the primary goal is one of education in

aesthetic perception, and the ultimate task is oriented towards memory, all the while

leaving the traveling subject the maximum degree of interpretive freedom. To this end,

Burckhardt avoided, as he saw it, the authoritative antiquarianism of contemporary

philology, history and archaeology, but also steered clear of the kind of prescriptive

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itineraries and rigid schema found in increasingly prevalent guides like Baedeker and

Murray‘s. At this formal level, organized according to genre of cultural object rather

than location or historical chronology, Burckhardt seems intent on constructing a work

that undermines and disrupts any overly schematic spatial or temporal reading. No

simple linear organization is provided; the reader or consumer is required to construct

historical, cultural and travel narratives of their own rather than simply insert themselves

into the subject positions encouraged by professional historiography or the popular

guidebook. Like the well known methodological ―cross sections‖ by which Burckhardt

disrupted the diachrony of traditional historicist narrative, and replaced this with a series

of synchronic cultural slices, the choice of genre as the primary organizational category

tends to dislocate and de-territorialize pathways of traveling and aesthetic experience that

were already becoming well worn and clichéd.

Under the auspices of this formal framework, the Cicerone both addresses and

constructs an ideal subject and partner, in an exercise of aesthetic conversation and

perception, a subject suited to very particular modes of aesthetic sensibility, critical

perception and cultural memory. At the same time, and in substantive terms,

Burckhardt‘s treatment of representative works, artists and styles models a set of

historical subject orientations that are defined and compared in terms of aesthetic posture

and sensibility. As indicated above, Burckhardt tends to draw a strong relation between

the contours of culture at any particular historical moment and a corresponding sort of

subjectivity that may emerge under (or propel) such cultural circumstances. The result—

linked with Burckhardt‘s overall comparative interests—is something close to a doctrine

of ideal types or allegorical figures, where specific stylistic forms or artistic

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individualities come to ―represent‖ or stand in for larger cultural phenomena within any

given cross-sectional slice of history. Burckhardt tends to associate specific cultural

moments with certain kinds of artistic subjectivity and style. Terms such Classical,

Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque thus not only represent and

embody distinct formal styles of artistic/cultural expression, but are also linked not

accidentally to a horizon of possibilities for the expression and construction of

subjectivity. For example, as Burckhardt‘s posthumously published Griechische

Kulturgeschichte attempted to demonstrate, classical Greek culture was presented as the

result of an historically specific relation between individual subject and the immense

demands of the traditional city-state. The form of culture in golden-age Greece, in other

words, was precisely linked to a subjectivity understood in a context that was determined

by the almost crushing centripetal forces of the Polis and tensions conditioned by the

agon.110 In similar fashion, and throughout the Cicerone, Raphael is not only the

representative and apogee of what Burckhardt understood as Italian Renaissance culture,

but also a specific mode of modern aesthetic subjectivity that had achieved ―classical‖

balance between interior and exterior, between objective necessity and a freely active

Phantasie. Indeed, where Raphael emerges as a type and model of a Renaissance

subjectivity still in ascendance, Burckhardt‘s Michelangelo haunts the Cicerone as a

titanic figure whose nature is both a stylistic high water mark and harbinger of decline.

In all of these cases, however, it is not so much the lives of the particular figures that

110
See Ingo Gildenhard and Martin Ruehl eds., Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politics in Germany in the
Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wilamowitz (London: Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced
Study, University of London, 2003); Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and
Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003); Jacob Burckhardt:
The Greeks and Greek Civilization, Trans. Sheila Stern (New York: Macmillan, 1999); Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999).

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interest Burckhardt—and by no means a cultural or art history conceived in terms of

biography, a la Vasari—but more in the ways that each of the figures represented an

horizon of subjective aesthetic orientations at any given historical moment.111 As the

Cicerone traces out the fortunes of the schools and styles of Italian art history,

Burckhardt‘s Anleitung also carefully constructs a taxonomy of aesthetic experience, a

gallery of possible, and mutually conditioning, relations between subjects and their

cultural contexts.

The birth of a specifically modern culture—as well as its eventual fate—is thus

closely linked by Burckhardt with the emergence and nature of a specifically modern

subject. The reflections, for instance, in the Culture of Renaissance in Italy are

intimately bound up with the development of certain forms or types of artist, politician

and soldier, social types whose sense of self Burckhardt took to be one of the hallmarks

of the era. And yet, in defining the Renaissance in this way, Burckhardt was not so much

drawing a line between Renaissance and Middle Ages, loosely defined, but between the

Renaissance and a more specific cultural phenomenon. Far from denigrating the cultural

traditions and expressions of the Middle Ages and the Germanic Gothic, the true

backdrop against which Burckhardt situates the Italian Renaissance is specifically the

residue of Byzantine influence and cultural practice that had persisted through the Italian

Middle Ages. As we‘ve seen, Burckhardt‘s fascination with the larger cultural formation

of the Renaissance, as it was for the likewise vital forms of the Gothic, was bound up

with a corresponding and essential subjective correlate, one that offered at least some

111
Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998).

144
space for individual self-expression and Phantasie. But at the same time, Byzantinism

becomes a by-word in Burckhardt‘s corpus for moribund traditionalism and empty

formalism, an environment which tended to discourage both the aesthetic and subjective

orientations Burckhardt came to associate with the Renaissance culture. Thus, if the

Renaissance was a form of cultural re-awakening, the sleep from which it awoke was one

Burckhardt associated with Byzantine traditions, not necessarily with Medieval culture as

a whole.112

As Burckhardt presents it in the Cicerone, stylistic Byzantinism emerged around

the 7th century A.D., and swept away the last vestiges of an Altchristliches (early

Christian) style that had hitherto contented itself with pouring the new wine of Christian

sensibility into the older wineskins of classical Latin forms. Indeed, Byzantine cultural

influence—and at times hegemony—would remain the dominant stylistic force in Italian

arts until the advent of Romanistic and Gothic alternatives in the next millennium. But

where a truly classical spirit had still flickered within the Altchristliches form, even as

only the dying embers of a once powerful tradition, Burckhardt regarded the cultural

record of the Byzantine style in Italy as one clearly marking the end of Mediterranean

classicism as a living tradition. Indeed, the high water mark of Byzantine influence in

Italy is situated, for Burckhardt, precisely at the moment of most extreme cultural nadir

between the high points of authentic and organic classical (Greek, and to a lesser extent

Latin) culture and the rediscovery and modern fusion of this tradition in the Italian

Renaissance. It is Byzantium, in other words, that Burckhardt presents in

112
This is one area where Burckhardt‘s views veer clearly away from his Enlightenment influences.
Already too steeped in Romantic historiography to so casually dismiss the Middle Ages, Burckhardt finds
his cultural counterexample in the ossified forms of Byzantine art.

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contradistinction with the cultural efflorescence of classical antiquity, the northern

Gothic, or the Italian Quatrocento. But what exactly, in Burckhardt‘s estimation, are the

qualities that define the cultural forms of Byzantinism, and in what ways does it come to

represent the cultural antagonist of antiquity and renaissance? And furthermore, for the

purposes of the present discussion, how does Burckhardt present Byzantinism to the

reader of the Cicerone? How does Burckhardt‘s description and modeling of the

Byzantine aesthetic relate to the ideal sensibilities of a culturally educated modern

subject, citizen and traveler?

In terms of the Cicerone, Burckhardt‘s reflections on the nature of Byzantinism,

and its place in his cultural-historical schema, come alive most fully and are most

extensive in the third and final section which treats the history of Italian painting and wall

decoration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the focus of these reflections turns once again on the

issue of fragments and their assembly in works of art. For it is with respect to remnants

of Byzantine mosaic, dating primarily from the 7th through the 9th centuries, that

Burckhardt undertakes a more explicit (and unsympathetic) thematization of the era and

its cultural expression. In this instance, we must take care not to suggest that

Burckhardt‘s target is mosaic as a genre in itself, a genre whose classical practice the

historian presents with great sympathy. It is with a general and evident favor, for

example, that Burckhardt treats the mosaics of the immediately preceding Altchristliches

period, recognizing in them a still living residue of a formerly powerful tradition. On the

other hand, however, Burckhardt distinguishes the character of Byzantine mosaic in such

a way that it becomes emblematic of a period of cultural decadence and relative decline.

In the same way, in other words, that the Byzantine era saw the increasing disintegration

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of classical architectural remains, where such uncomprehending fragmentation saw

elements being pillaged for more pedestrian uses, so too did the tradition of mosaic

display a seeming embrace of outward material forms at the expense of any organic or

creative cultural expression. What here differentiates the Byzantine legacy in Italy from

that of the Altchristliches era, or even Renaissance redeployment of the classical forms, is

by no means its interest in aging and ancient traditions, but the precise manner in which it

orients itself (and understands its relation) to those forms and fragments. For what

Burckhardt sees in Byzantine style is a moment in which once living and vital currents of

pagan antiquity are reduced to nothing more than forms and fragments, mere raw

materials to be mechanically assembled and reassembled in accordance with long held

cultural formulae. As Burckhardt puts it, the essence of Byzantinism did not so much

constitute a style in itself as it did represent the ‗ossification‘ and ‗fossilization‘

(Erstarrung) of the traditions which it had inherited.113

As a term describing a particular circumstance of cultural decline, Erstarrung is

one which Burckhardt regularly used in Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen that had

appeared two years before the Cicerone, and it captures a particular relation between

objective traditions (defined by prescriptions of form and material) and the subjective

dimension of cultural expression (defined by the relative presence of Phantasie).

Though, as in most instances, Burckhardt was little interested in explicit theoretical

ruminations on the precise meaning of the term, its significance is perhaps best captured

by the naturalistic/biological metaphor of fossilization. The term, in other words,

113
Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (Stuttgart:
Kroener, 1986), 695. ―Der Ubergang in das Byzantinische war begreiflicherweise ein allmaehlicher
[relative to the Altchristlich]; das Erstarren in den bisherigen Typen war eben der Byzantinismus.‖

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captures the sense of a cultural ―organism‖ that persists no longer with the suppleness of

an internally vital entity, but is present only as an external formal skeleton. And in turn,

the expression of such an ―erstarrte‖ organism can only be the product of mechanical

repetition and rote adherence to formal tradition. Describing this process in the 3rd

century, the same progressive Erstarrung of classical tradition that would reach its nadir

in Byzantinism, Burckhardt writes in Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen:

The new Christian subjects spread a sunset glow over ancient art, but new content
did not bring fresh quality. Mosaic was quickly claimed for the mighty programs
of the victorious faith. It spread sacred figures and stories over all available space
in the church, disregarding alike the laws of architecture as of painting. We can
only wonder that so many relatively excellent works make their appearance as late
as the sixth century. Ecclesiastical merit and completeness of the subject, along
with magnificence of execution, were the only relevant considerations. For the
artist's own joy in his work there is no room. Art had become serviceable to a
symbol which lay outside itself, which had not grown up with it and through it;
and the artist, even where his talent was considerable, was the nameless executor
of something universally applicable, as had once been the case in Egypt.114
In the service, to varying degrees in Burckhardt estimation, of ecclesiastical orthodoxy

and prescriptive classical models, aesthetic and cultural expression threatened to become

an exercise involving the mere manipulation of pre-established and prescribed formal

elements. Indeed, as the passage makes clear, it was precisely the sense of a living and

subjective ―joy‖ that this process gradually banished from the relations of aesthetic

expression. The artist, like the onlooker, here became a mere technician of cultural

expression, mechanically assembling and re-assembling meaningful fragments in accord

with externally sanctioned forms. The corollary of an ―erstarrte‖ culture, furthermore, is

an undernourished sphere of subjectivity, a subjectivity serviceable—as with its aesthetic

114
Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great, Trans. Moses Hadas (New York: Pantheon, 1949),
231-233.

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expressions—to a ―symbol‖ or principle of organization beyond the sphere of its own

agency. And to the extent that Burckhardt understood subjectivity as a domain that

permits the free and pleasurable activity of Phantasie and Kritik, Byzantinism represents

a cultural circumstance that discourages emergence of individualities that he came to

associate most closely with the Renaissance in particular and the modern era in general.

As he describes it in entries of the Cicerone regarding wall painting genres, the

cultural hegemony of Byzantinism persisted until at least the first century of the second

millennium, and could not be considered a spent force until at least the 13th century. In

discussing and comparing these emerging challenges and cultural currents, first in the

form of an indigenous Romanisch aesthetic and later in the first bloom of what would

become the Tuscan Renaissance, Burckhardt draws in an even clearer manner his

estimation of Byzantinism and its cultural/subjective imperatives. Describing the rise of

the Romanische style, Burckhardt draws a stark comparison with the then contemporary

forms of Byzantine tradition:

The defining feature of the new syle, the lively movement and the efforts towards
expressive gesture are here clearly at hand. In spite of all the meagerness of
execution, the participation of the viewer is engaged; art improvises again after
the long centuries of repetition and combination. Naturally, there mixes here also
a studied Byzantinism in this harmless narrative wall painting, and a pair of later
works (the frescoes of the fore hall in St. Lorenzo fuori,—and those of the chapel
of St. Sylvestro in the fore-court of SS. Quatro Coronati, both from the beginning
of the thirteenth century) are covered by later works of a more Byzantine manner.
The new impulse was even strong enough to penetrate into the realm of
monumental mosaic. In Santa Maria in Trastevere the semi-dome of the Tribuna,
and the surrounding wall, holds the first masterpiece of the Romanistic style in
Italy (1139-1153); even with all the crudeness of the forms, one greets here the

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 new currents, indeed the emergence of individual life; Christ and Maria, seated
together, his arm on her shoulder—this is also unbyzantine in conception.115
Burckhardt here begins to outline the momentous shift that he understood as the

transition from an ―erstarrte‖ cultural life embodied by Byzantine influence to the

reinvigorated forms of the High Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance. Where

Byzantine forms are characterized by mere Wiederholung and Kombinieren, by

mechanical and scripted expressions legitimated by traditional practices, the newer forms

are distinguished by what Burckhardt describes as the first glimmers of improvisational

gestures and expressions, even where these are still largely tentative and unrefined. If the

representation of the holy family had become, to use a term Burckhardt himself deploys,

―Egyptisch‖ in their precise adherence to well-established and nearly sacred aesthetic

formulae, the new millennium saw the gradual disintegration of these prescriptions and a

reemphasis on both the individuality of represented figures, and in the subjective activity

of the artist.

However, Burckhardt also takes care to add one more decisive actor onto this

increasingly active and improvisational stage of aesthetic expression, namely the

onlooker or viewer. For Burckhardt perceives that the relations here are not simply

limited to those between aesthetic objects and artist subjects, but also takes care to

115
Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens, 701. ―Trotz aller
Ärmlichkeit der Ausführung erwacht doch die Teilnahme des Beschauers; die Kunst improvisiert wieder
einmal nach den langen Jahrhunderten des Wiederholens und Kombinierens. Natürlich mischt sich
angelerntes Byzantinisches auch in diese harmlos erzählende Wandmalerei, und ein paar spätere Arbeiten
(die Fresken der Vorhalle von S. Lorenzo fuori,—und diejenigen der Kapelle S. Silvestro am Vorhof von
SS. Quattro coronati, beide vom Anfang des 13. Jahrhunderts) unterliegen sogar wieder einer mehr
byzantisierenden Manier. Allein der neue Antrieb war inzwischen schon genug erstarkt, um auch in die
monumentale Mosaikmalerei einzudringen. In S. Maria in Trastevere enthält die Halbkuppel der Tribuna
und die umgebende Wand das erste Hauptwerk des romanischen Stiles in Italien (1139—1153); bei aller
Roheit der Formen begrüßt man doch gern die neuen Motive, ja das beginnende individuelle Leben;
Christus und Maria zusammen thronend, sein Arm auf ihrer Schulter—dies ist auch im Gedanken
unbyzantinisch.‖

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introduce the Phantasietätigkeit of the ―Beschauer‖ as such to the equation. And for the

author of the Cicerone, of course, this is a decisive step. For in an important sense, it is

precisely on this interest in the ―Teilnahme des Beschauers‖ that the task of Burckhardt‘s

Anleitung is premised. It is not merely in the act of artistic creation or in the material

objets d‘art that they produce that the phenomenon of a modern aesthetically capable

subjectivity emerges. On the contrary, what Burckhardt appears to envision is a cultural

ecology, or set of relations, in which activity and agency of the onlooker is of no less

significance than that of the artist, where the objects of art are not merely objects but

participate in a conversation between producers and consumers. The enjoyment of, and

active conversation with, aesthetic expressions is thus a defining and necessary

characteristic of the individualized modern subject. Where both artistic forms, and hence

their interpretation, were rigidly regulated in traditional Byzantine forms, Burckhardt sees

the first hints of modern sensibility in improvisations of both artist and onlooker. And in

this sense, the Cicerone reveals itself as an attempt to invite readers and travelers into

these sorts of conversations, and reinforce the kinds of interpretive action from which, in

Burckhardt‘s view, a healthy modern subjectivity is woven.

In the cultural landscape of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, however, the

tentative individualism of the later Middle Ages blossomed into the fully realized

subjectivity that Burckhardt associates with the High Renaissance. Not surprisingly,

where he begins discussing the phenomena of the Renaissance, Burckhardt‘s focus tends

to shift from interest in the broad contours of a style—say, the Byzantine, or

Altchristlich—and begins to settle on individuals and individualities as expressions of the

new cultural sensibility. In other words, the nature of Renaissance innovation, coinciding

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with, and plotted along, the development of an expansive and expanding subjective

sphere, requires at its culmination a new set of dramatis personae—no longer styles or

movements, but individual artists, sculptors and architects. But even with Burckhardt‘s

seemingly encyclopedic mastery of the cultural landscape of the Quatrocento and

Cinquecento, an exhaustive mastery that would not disappoint antiquarian-minded

contemporary colleagues, two primary figures clearly come to dominate in the course of

the Cicerone: Raphael and Michelangelo. Where Byzantinism defined a benighted

backdrop of limited subjectivity and aesthetic agency, a backdrop against which the

Renaissance could be brought into relief, Raphael and Michelangelo come stand in for

two poles of aesthetic orientation opened up by the emergence of Burckhardt‘s

Renaissance artist/subject. Indeed, as we saw above, the significance of this polarity does

not simply represent a heuristic dichotomy between two individual artists with two

distinct styles. Instead, Burckhardt‘s fascination with the dyad, Raphael and

Michelangelo, also rests on the way in which the two represent specific modern ―types‖,

and define significant modes and postures of modern aesthetic subjectivity. The modern

subject in the mode of Raphael, in other words, represents for Burckhardt one

manifestation of the individualizing trends of the Renaissance, while the modern subject

in the mode of Michelangelo reveals another set of possibilities. And while Burckhardt

reconstructs them as titanic figures within a landscape of burgeoning individualities, the

modern subject is rendered by Raphael in a bright major key, while that of Michelangelo

is manifest, with more than a little dissonance, in a powerful minor.

From Burckhardt‘s perspective, the aesthetic and subjective posture of the

Renaissance discovers one of its most powerful examples—and reveals its extreme

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distance from the Byzantine style—in the figure of Michelangelo Buonarotti. Indeed, in

Michelangelo, Burckhardt discovers the artistic prototype for a kind of hyper-

individualized subjectivity that seems to appear and reappear throughout European

modernity since the Renaissance. Where strict Byzantine formalism had suppressed

every expression of aesthetic individualism, Michelangelo introduces what Burckhardt

sees as a new phenomenon—at least in the modern era—namely the artist as Prometheus

unbound, the artist as subject bound only to laws of its own self legislation. ―It was

utterly alien for him,‖ writes Burckhardt in the third section of the Cicerone:

to put himself in the service of a previous form of devotion, of previous church

types, or of the sensibility of any other man—or to see himself as bound in any
way by such considerations. The great capital of church conventions and tradition
of the Middle Ages was nothing to him. He constructed man anew, with a greater
physical power that already seems almost daemonic, and he creates out of these
forms a new earthly and Olympian world.116
In this sense, Michelangelo represents for Burckhardt the equivalent, in the aesthetic

sphere, of what a figure like Francesco Sforza signified in the political. Like the

Condottiere and statesman of the era, as is well described in the first chapter of Die

Cultur der Renaissance, the artist here rejects the models and strictures of convention,

and weaves reputation and power from the cloth of his own individual vision. If politics

had indeed become a work of art in the Renaissance—that is, a matter of self-generated

struggle and artifice—then so too did art itself become an ―art‖, and found its despots in

men like Michelangelo.

116
Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens, 824. ―Es lag ihm
ganz ferne auf irgendeine bisherige Andacht, einen bisherigen kirchlichen Typus, auf die
Empfindungsweise irgendeines andern Menschen einzugehen oder sich dadurch für gebunden zu
erachten. Das große Kapital der kirchlichen Kunstbräuche des Mittelalters existiert für ihn nicht. Er
bildet den Menschen neu, mit hoher physischer Gewaltigkeit, die an sich schon dämonisch wirkt, und
schafft aus diesen Gestalten eine neue irdische und olympische Welt.‖

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 Along with this new Renaissance type or personality, embodied for Burckhardt in

Buonarotti, there also emerges a distinct new governing principle or characteristic.

Where the author of the Cicerone understands Byzantine culture as a phenomenon

defined by a certain Erstarrung, by paralysis, ossification, or fossilization, it is the

principle of Bewegung or movement that determines the sensibility of Michelangelo.

Indeed, Burckhardt‘s Michelangelo reveals a modernity defined by a kind of restlessness

and striving daemonism—not an unfamiliar leitmotif in German letters—an emphasis no

longer on the representation of Being, but on the processes of Becoming. Surveying the

story of Genesis as depicted in the Sistine Chapel, Burckhardt writes:

In four great and five small fields that stretch along the middle of the vault, the
stories of Genesis are depicted. First among all artists, Michelangelo grasped the
creation not as a mere word with a gesture of blessing, but as movement. By this
alone there emerge the new motives for the individual acts of creation. With
sublime motions the powerful figures hover there, accompanied by spirits [....] —
so swift, that one and the same picture combines two acts of creation (for sun and
moon and for plants). But the highest moment of the creation (and the highest of
Michelango) is the vivification of Adam. Accompanied and surrounded by a
host of angels, supported and supporting, the Almighty nears the earth and allows
the spark of life to spring from his index finger and flow into that of the newly
awoken first man.117
Burckhardt‘s prose here powerfully underscores the theme of movement that pulses

through his reading of Michelangelo, with verbs like bewegen, schweben, wallen and

strömen conjuring the motions and actions depicted in the fresco. Indeed, in this restless

117
Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens, 826. ―In vier
größern und fünf kleinern viereckigen Feldern, der Mitte des Gewölbes entlang, sind die Geschichten der
Genesis dargestellt. Zuerst unter allen Künstlern faßte Michelangelo die Schöpfung nicht als ein bloßes
Wort mit der Gebärde des Segens, sondern als Bewegung. So allein ergaben sich für die einzelnen
Schöpfungsakte lauter neue Motive. In erhabenem Fluge schwebt die gewaltige Gestalt dahin, begleitet
von Genien, welche derselbe Mantel mit umwallt; — so rasch, daß ein und dasselbe Bild zwei
Schöpfungsakte (für Sonne und Mond und für die Pflanzen) vereinigen darf. Aber der höchste
Augenblick der Schöpfung (und der höchste Michelangelos) ist die Belebung Adams. Von einer
Heerschar jener göttlichen Einzelkräfte, tragenden und getragenen, umschwebt, nähert sich der
Allmächtige der Erde und läßt aus seinem Zeigefinger den Funken seines Lebens in den Zeigefinger des
schon halb belebten ersten Menschen hinüberströmen.‖

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subjectivity described by Burckhardt, this figure of perpetual motion searching for

individual expression, it is easy to detect the echoes of the Basler‘s judgment on his own

era. ―He is,‖ writes Burckhardt of Buonarotti, ―the complete opposite of the Ancients,

whose motives ripened slowly, and then developed over the course of a half millenium;

he seeks to create ever new possibilities, and he can therefore be called the primary

modern artist.‖118 Michelangelo, in other words, becomes the prototypical

revolutionary—here in the aesthetic sense—of the modern era, breaking the tablets of

tradition at every step in the name of personal ambition and a titanic need for self-

expression. Mirrored as we already saw by Franceso Sforza and Sir John Hawkwood,

Michelangelo also sees echoes in the great individualities periodically thrown up by a

modernity all too readily intoxicated by the cult of genius, the allure of the new, and

scorn for the conventional. In 1855, only seven years after the tumult of 1848,

Burckhardt could look north from his Roman haven, or look across the Rhine from his

perch in Basel, and find the spirit of Michelangelo alive and well in Paris, the Rhineland

and Berlin.

Burckhardt‘s portrait of Michelangelo is thus one that is characteristically

ambivalent. On the one hand, Burckhardt was fascinated by this subjective phenomenon

he detected emerging in the Renaissance. ―The signature of the last three hundred years,

subjectivity,‖ writes the historian of the artist:

Emerges here in the form of an absolutely limitless creativity. And to be sure, not
involuntarily and unconsciously as was the case in so many of the spiritual
impulses of the fifteenth century, but with a powerful deliberateness. It seems as

118
Ibid., 824. ―Er ist in dieser Beziehung das gerade Gegenteil der Alten, welche ihre Motive langsam
reiften und ein halbes Jahrtausend hindurch nachbildeten; er sucht stets neue Möglichkeiten zu erschöpfen
und kann deshalb der moderne Künstler in vorzugsweisem Sinne heißen.‖

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 if Michelangelo conceived of a world-postulating and creating art in the same way
that some philosophers have conceived of the world-creating Self.119
Michelangelo presents himself here as the distant ancestor of Fichte‘s self-postulated ―I‖,

the powerful modern dream of an individuality that creates and sustains itself from the

force of its own consciousness of self. And while Burckhardt spares nothing in the

admiration of the artist‘s powers, an artist who is nothing less than ―a magnificent fate for

art,‖ Michelangelo nevertheless represents modernity in the moment of excess. 120 In this

one figure is embodied the salutary expansion of the freely creative subjectivity of the

Renaissance and modernity, and also the darker side of such powers, the ruthlessness and

single-mindedness of purpose, the willful destruction of every boundary and convention,

the glorification of self-expression over significance of content or ideality.121 Where the

Byzantine style yields a model of an undernourished subjective sphere for the reader of

the Cicerone, Burckhardt‘s Michelangelo reveals a mode of modern individuality that is

at once enormously powerful and yet also dangerously swollen. ―The viewer,‖ writes

Burckhardt in this same vein of astonished ambivalence, ―will be curiously inclined to an

artist whose greatness impresses him utterly and whose mode of sensibility so totally

diverges from his own.‖122

The principle that governs Burckhardt‘s reception of Michelangelo is thus one

thoroughly steeped in an eighteenth-century enlightened Classicism that the Cicerone

119
Ibid., 639. ―Die Signatur der drei letzten Jahrhunderten, die Subjektivität, tritt hier in Gestalt eines abso-
lut schrankenlosen Schaffens auf. Und zwar nicht unfreiwillig und unbewußt wie sonst in so vielen großen
Geistesregungen des 16. Jahrhunderts, sondern mit gewaltiger Absicht. Es scheint, als ob Michelangelo
von der die Welt postulierenden und schaffenden Kunst beinahe so systematisch gedacht habe wie einzelne
Philosophien von dem weltschaffenden Ich.‖
120
Ibid.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid. ―Der Beschauer wird merkwürdig gestimmt gegen einen Künstler, dessen Größe ihm durchgängig
imponiert und dessen Empfindungsweise doch so gänzlich von der seinigen abweicht.‖

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deploys as an antidote to the daemonism of modern politics and culture. It clearly echoes

the Goethean diagnosis of Romanticism as a ―sickness‖ in relation to the ―health‖ of

classicism, and embraces Winckelmann‘s notion of a Stille Grosse that inhabits all great

and classical art. Conversely, Burckhardt depicts Michelangelo as the Schicksal, or fate,

of modern art, a fate that represents both the apogee of the Renaissance, and the herald of

subsequent cultural developments. Underscored is the notion of Michelangelo as the

decisive influence in the eventual decline of the aesthetic sensibility of the High

Renaissance, and the emergence of a modern culture understood in terms of Mannerism

and the Baroque. The artist was, in other words, the most powerful early prototype and

model for subsequent schools of the European Baroque culture of the late sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries. For Burckhardt, as for most mid-nineteenth-century criticism, the

Baroque was still primarily understood as the decadent expression of declining

Renaissance traditions, a critical posture that began to change only in the late century.

From this critical perspective, the hard-won and fragile balance achieved in the High

Renaissance between naturalism and ideality, had been overwhelmed and intoxicated by

the powers of an unleashed modern subjectivity, personified in the form of

Michelangelo‘s Promethean achievements. ―He left behind,‖ writes Burckhardt, ―an

unsettled and transformed Sculpture. None of his contemporaries were so strong that

they were not disoriented by the work of Michelangelo.‖123 And if Burckhardt saw the

highest achievement of the Renaissance conditioned by a careful sense of balance,

perspective and proportion—both in subject matter and in execution—the Baroque

represented a period fascinated with power, governed by a cultural interest in display and

123
Ibid. ―Er hinterließ die Skulptur erschüttert und umgestaltet. Keiner seiner Kunstgenossen hatte so fest
gestanden, daß er nicht durch Michelangelo desorientiert worden wäre.‖

157
spectacle, and drawn to explorations of a willfully de-centered and disproportionate

aesthetic sensibility. So powerful, in other words, was influence of Michelangelo in this

respect that the artist eclipsed, among his Renaissance contemporaries, the memory of the

figure Burckhardt held as the highest and most fully realized representative of

Cinquecento Italian culture: Raphael. ―The age of the artist,― he writes of Michelangelo,

―was deeply moved, in equal measure, by the good and the evil that lay in him; he

impressed them in daemonic fashion. Through him they completely forgot Raphael

within 20 years.‖124

Burckhardt‘s comparative taxonomy of culture, and its subjective corollaries, is

thus bounded, on the one hand by the Erstarrung of Byzantinism, and on other, the

striving subjective daemonism of Michelangelo. In the normative framework constructed

within the Cicerone, a framework that envisions a relatively free sphere of cultural and

subjective Phantasietätigkeit, both the example of Byzantine art and that of Michelangelo

veer dangerously near regions of cultural compulsion. Where the former demands

adherence to an external principle of ossified tradition, the latter emerges as a kind of

aesthetic despot governing by the force of his own titanic creative powers. In either

instance, the proposed conversation between artist, viewer, and tradition, degenerates into

a soliloquy, with either one pole or the other defining the terms of the aesthetic relation.

The critical role of the onlooker, a role essential to both subjective self-emancipation and

cultural remembrance, becomes dangerously occluded by the claims of traditional forms

and the modern cult of artistic genius. Between these poles, Burckhardt‘s image of

124
Ibid., 632. ―Die Zeit des Künstlers freilich wurde von dem Guten und von dem Bösen, das in ihm lag,
ohne Unterschied ergriffen; er imponierte ihr auf dämonische Weise. Über ihm vergaß sie binnen 20 Jahren
Raffael vollständig.‖

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Raphael rests in a posture of classical balance, rivaled only by Michelangelo in his

creative output, and unrivalled as a representative of a ―healthy‖ aesthetic subjectivity.

If, therefore, the Cicerone is an invitation to a conversation, Raphael represents the ideal

interlocutor.

―To speak of Raphael,‖ reflects Burckhardt in third section of the Cicerone, ―may

here seem almost superfluous. He gives everywhere so much, so much that is

unforgettable, so much unquestioned and immediate, that everyone who sees his

paintings may encounter him without a guide and may take with him a lasting

impression.―125 Paradoxically, in the figure of Raphael, the Cicerone comes close to

proclaiming its own superfluity. The power and presentation of Raphael‘s works are

such that the mediating speech of the Cicerone, or indeed any guide at all, becomes

almost unnecessary. The works of Raphael open up a relation between themselves and

the viewer with directness and immediacy that requires no guide other than that supplied

by the subjective agency of the participants. Put another way, for Burckhardt, the artistic

posture and expression of Raphael both models and fosters in the viewer the very kind of

aesthetic agency to which the Cicerone invites its readers. To embrace and enjoy

Raphael is to recognize and embrace a specific configuration of modern subjectivity, and

the external directives and principles of aesthetic tradition, art historical expertise, or the

Cicerone itself, become superfluous.

125
Ibid., 876. ―Über Raffael zu sprechen könnte hier beinahe überflüssig scheinen. Er gibt überall so viel,
so Unvergeßliches, so ungefragt und unmittelbar, daß jeder, der seine Gemälde sieht, ohne Führer
zurechtkommen und einen dauernden Eindruck mitnehmen kann.‖ And: ―Die Vortrefflichkeit der
einzelnen Motive entzieht sich durchaus der Beschreibung; es scheint sich alles von selbst zu verstehen.‖

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 In the figure of Raphael, as described in the Cicerone, the powerful tensions at

work in Renaissance modernity were Aufgehoben, and brought into a hard-won balance

and harmony. Where Michelangelo‘s titanic efforts expended themselves in an almost

violent assertion of individual self-expression and dominance, Burckhardt‘s Raphael is an

equally powerful creative power, yet one directed towards an harmonious Aufhebung of

the often conflicting imperatives of tradition, individuality, technique and subject matter.

The model here is of a subject in sovereign mastery over the elements that constitute and

condition its expression. The aesthetic demands of composition, color and content, the

desire for both naturalism and the painterly, the temptations of formal virtuosity and the

requirements of convention—all are here subordinated to the command of the self-

mastered subject and expressed in unified, internally coherent works of art. Indeed, it is

precisely this well-balanced, coherent singularity or individuality of the work of art with

which Burckhardt associates the work of Raphael, and by extension, Renaissance

aesthetic sensibility at its highest level of achievement. If the art works of Byzantinism

that preceded the Renaissance, and the Mannerist works that followed it, were governed

by external principles—in both their creation and in their reception—the signature of

both the Renaissance subject and its art is a certain self-sufficiency or quality of self-

containment. The Renaissance art work, in its formal execution and its philosophical

outlook, most fully realizes itself when it is neither compelled as a reiteration of

traditional convention, nor indulges in the ironic displacements and referential excess

(self- and otherwise) of the later Baroque. The guiding imperative was towards a

synthesis and harmonization of immensely powerful social, technical and individual

forces, and to combine all these elements in subjectivities and works that exist in

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themselves rather than for themselves. Thus, if the always incomplete mathematical

algorithm of the curve may represent the nature of the Baroque (with Michelangelo as the

prime mover)—always approaching but never quite achieving resolution—the symmetry

and self-containment of the circle (the dome, etc.) may be the symbolic equivalent for the

Renaissance.

It is thus Raphael, from Burckhardt‘s perspective, who most fully realizes this

Renaissance harmony of potentially destructive forces, Raphael whose self-mastery

yields an art that exercises control over the vectors of its individual expressive elements.

―No detail announces itself, or pushes itself forward;‖ writes Burckhardt of the frescoes

of the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican:

The artist knows exactly the tender life of his great symbolic realms, and knows
how easily the interesting individual element may overwhelm the whole. At the
same time, however, his individual figures have become the most important
studies of all previous painting. No better advice can be given than that one view
these works as often and as completely as possible, and depending on ability, get
to know them by heart. The treatment of the garments, and the expression of
movement in the same, the sequence offered by color and light—again an
inexhaustible fount of pleasure.126

It is not, therefore, that Raphael executes individualized movement, or any other

particular motive or technique, any more or less powerfully than Michelangelo. On the

contrary, for Burckhardt, Raphael‘s signature is the ability to subsume these powers to

126
Ibid., 863. ―Kein Detail präsentiert sich, drängt sich vor; der Künstler kennt genau das zarte Leben
seiner großen symbolischen Gegenstände und weiß, wie leicht das Einzel-Interessante das Ganze
übertönt. Und dennoch sind seine einzelnen Figuren das wichtigste Studium aller seitherigen Malerei
geworden. Es läßt sich kein besserer Rat erteilen, als daß man sie (wo nötig, auch mit bewaffnetem
Auge) so oft und so vollständig als möglich betrachte und nach Kräften auswendig lerne. Die
Behandlung der Gewänder, der Ausdruck der Bewegung in denselben, die Aufeinanderfolge der
Farben und Lichter bieten - wiederum eine unerschöpfliche Quelle des Genusses.‖ Or also p.853: ―Er
is immer so wenig symbolisch als moeglich; seine Kunst lebt nicht von Beziehungen, die außerhalb der
Form liegen, - so sehr ihm auch das Symbolische da zu Gebote stand, wo es hingehoert, wie die Fresken im
Vatikan zeigen.‖

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the requirements and harmony of the artwork as a whole, to fashion a coherent expressive

unity without the crowding and jostling (Gedränge) that the historian sometimes

associates with the legacy of Buonarotti.127 Raphael balanced the (sometimes too

schematic) quietude and tenderness of the Perugian school of his youth, with a sense of

movement and individual expression perhaps absorbed from Fra Bartolommeo and others

in Florence, and harnessed these in the service of the great works of his final years in

Rome and the Vatican. Throughout, however, one finds a subject that holds both external

necessity and internal artistic vision in a difficult yet powerful creative tension. From

Burckhardt‘s perspective, to paraphrase once again the phrase from the Cultur der

Renaissance, Raphael is the artistic subject as work of art.128

The art of the Renaissance, like its politics, here assumed its signature forms in

response to the appearance of new and characteristically modern modes of subjectivity.

Such modes, having bloomed in the space left by the decline of restrictive traditional

forms, emerged in a spectrum defined, on the one hand, by the explosive self-expression

of a Michelangelo, and on the other, the synthetic and self-contained power of a Raphael.

It is the appearance of this new genus of subjectivity—signifying the collection of species

defined by the poles above—that Burckhardt defines as the single most important feature

of a European modernity that extends from the early Renaissance to the nineteenth

century. It is in this sense that the Cicerone reveals itself not only as a guidebook to the

art treasures of Italy, but also as a kind of prepatory chapter in a train of thought that

127
Ibid., 865. Of the School of Athens in the Vatican: ―Trefflichste Verteilung der Lehrenden und der
Zuhörenden und Zuschauen den, leichte Bewegung im Raum, Reichtum ohne Gedränge, völliges
Zusammenfallen der malerischen und dramatischen Motive.‖
128

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would culminate in the Cultur der Renaissance of 1860. Thus, while Burckhardt was

never able to finish the planned sequel to Cultur, a sequel that had been envisioned as a

work devoted exclusively to the art of the Renaissance, the Cicerone stands in for this

absence as an aesthetically oriented prequel.

But as we‘ve seen, the Cicerone was also much more than an aesthetic adjunct to

the project of the Renaissance book. Aby Warburg‘s situation of the Cicerone in the

larger tradition of German travel writing holds true to a significant degree. As a self-

declared Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens, the Cicerone was for Burckhardt

clearly something more than an appendix to his art historical and cultural historical

scholarship. It is addressed, in other words, to a much larger reading and travelling

public, addressed to the practical concern of orienting and introducing that emerging

public to the cultural archive of Italy. But more than the purely practical hints of the

Baedeker or Murray model, and more than the texts of self-development embodied in the

travel memoirs of a Goethe, Stendhal, and de Stael, the Cicerone is even more clearly a

work of public pedagogy. From the standpoint of Burckhardt‘s increasingly pessimistic

reception of modernity, in both cultural and political terms, the Cicerone‘s invitation to

experience the Genuss of Italian cultural heritage was much more than an invitation to a

Romantic escape into a timeless aesthetic Arcadia. For Genuss, and the subjective

faculty of Phantasie with which Burckhardt associates it, requires and involves the

exercise of a kind of subjective agency whose disintegration marked a dangerous trend in

modern European culture. Inheritor of Renaissance legacies, the modernity of the

nineteenth century had become dangerously intoxicated by the dual modern despotisms

of mechanistic materialism and the cult of personality, despotisms secured only at the

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expense of cultural tradition and social memory. The Cicerone, is thus in some ways a

prescription for an ailing modern subject, a subject unmoored and held in thrall by a

Promethean modernity. In this sense, the guide to aesthetic Genuss is an invitation to

remember not only the traditions of European culture, but also for the modern subject to

remember its own constitutive function in the perpetual reconstruction and revitalization

of those traditions. The Cicerone was an exercise regimen for a sphere of cultural

memory and free Subjektivität threatened by peculiarly modern forms of atrophy.

And if the all roads had led to Rome in the time of Raphael and Michelangelo, if

those Renaissance models made their culminating achievement in the city of Popes

Alexander and Julius, so too was it towards the ancient city of Rome that Burckhardt was

increasingly drawn as he reflected on the character and the discontents of European

modernity. Indeed, for Burckhardt, Italy had been the birthplace of a modern world that

persisted into the nineteenth century, and by the High Renaissance Rome had become the

gravitational center of this cultural efflorescence. The urban physiognomy of Rome as

Burckhardt encountered it in the mid-nineteenth century had been decisively defined by

those early modern forms of aesthetic subjectivity, beginning in the Renaissance and

extending through the seventeenth century Baroque. The architecture and urban

geography of Rome, in other words, represented both an extreme antiquity and a unique

modernity, a certain timelessness and at the same time an obsessive preoccupation with

historicity, and it is to the urban physiognomy of Rome that we will turn in the

concluding chapter on the Swiss historian from Basel.

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 Chapter Three

Rome, Capital of the Seventeenth Century:

Burckhardt, Urban Space and Baroque Modernity

The reception history of Baroque aesthetics over the last century, a history that

emerged most conspicuously at the beginning of the twentieth century and once again at

its end, is not one usually linked with the work of Jacob Burckhardt. The Swiss historian

is of course remembered for the central place his thought occupies in the

historiographical landscape of Renaissance studies, and not primarily for his reflections

on the culture of the seventeenth century. Indeed, where Burckhardt is still perhaps best

known for his contributions in the field of Renaissance historiography, perpetually

rounded up when the issue and its disciplinary development are revisited, the obverse

appears to hold as well. On first glance, Burckhardt‘s reputation as a relatively

unsympathetic observer of those historical styles subsequent to the Renaissance—

Mannerism, Baroque and Rococo—seems not undeserved. ―One might ask‖ he writes in

the Cicerone on Baroque architecture, ―How it is that one can expect something by

focussing on these degnerate forms that the modern world has already long

condemned?‖129 For Burckhardt, as we saw above, it was in the cultural expressions of

Mannerism and the Baroque that the more extravagant legacies of Michelangelo found

both an echo and a powerful amplification. And where Michelangelo had opened the

129
Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (Stuttgart:
Kroener, 1986), 346.

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door to a kind of willful aesthetic subjectivity and cult of artistic genius, the artists of the

next generations were inspired to follow his dramatic lead. ―They well recognized― he

writes of these subsequent figures, ―that Michelangelo was celebrated less for his

greatness than for his fantastic will and a distinct outwardness of expression. And they

imitated him accordingly, where it fit and where it didn‘t. Their painting became the

depiction of effects without cause, of movements and muscular striving without

necessity.―130 In other words, Burckhardt‘s early estimation of late-sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century culture was conditioned primarily by the view that the Baroque was

not a self-sufficient and vitally organic style in itself, but represented merely grotesque

effects occasioned by the degeneration of Renaissance aesthetic sensibilities.

At the same time, however, even in Burckhardt‘s corpus of the 1850‘s, there is a

degree of tension between, on the one hand, nostalgia for the ―presence‖ embodied in

Renaissance classicism and, on the other hand, an Enlightenment aesthetic epistemology

that placed an emphasis on recognizing ―distance‖ in critical reception. If the latter

demanded a degree of displacement or irony in relation to objects of knowledge—be it

cognitive, ethical or aesthetic—the former manifested itself in the posture of self-identity

and organic authenticity. Indeed, the Raphael that emerges in the Cicerone often seems

to function as a spiritual antidote for a Swiss historian and a nineteenth century whose

130
Ibid., ―Sie sahen auch recht wohl, daß man an Michelangelo weniger das Große, als die phantastische
Willkür und ganz bestimmte Äußerlichkeiten bewunderte, und machten ihm nun dieselben nach, wo es
paßte und wo nicht. Ihre Malerei wird eine Darstellung von Effekten ohne Ursachen, von Bewegungen und
Muskelanstrengung ohne Notwendigkeit.‖

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powers of irony and ambivalence were well developed. But if this were the case, then the

effectiveness of this antidote proved largely transitory. For while Burckhardt‘s esteem

for the Renaissance and figures such as Raphael never waned—the ever-present

Burckhardtian ambivalences notwithstanding—Burckhardt‘s later works and reflections

show him rather more prepared to upset the applecart of an aesthetic classicism inherited

ultimately from Goethe and Winckelmann. The scholarship and correspondence of the

last three decades of his life, reflections quite deliberately withheld from publication

during his lifetime, show Burckhardt increasingly interested in configurations of aesthetic

subjectivity far removed from those simply defined by ―stille Größe‖ or a quiet and

harmonious classical ―health‖. The most well known example, and one whose

controversial reception Burckhardt correctly predicted, is the posthumously published

Griechische Kulturgeschichte. Famously derided by, amongst others, Nietzsche‘s one-

time philological opponent and Theodor Mommsen‘s son-in-law, Wilamowitz-

Moellendorf, Burckhardt‘s treatment of classical Greece re-envisioned the culture of the

Attic golden age not as the product of an almost superhuman power, freedom and

serenity, but as an era erected on an all too human foundation of extreme pathos and

violent social forces. As a longtime reader of Schopenhauer, and perhaps in

communication with Nietzsche, Burckhardt‘s nostalgic classicism thus found itself in the

second half of the nineteenth century increasingly tempered by an aesthetic colored more

starkly in hues of power, will, and the irrational. It would be going too far to suggest that

Burckhardt came to reject what he once saw as the hard-won and healthy aesthetic

subjectivity of a Raphael, but there is no doubt that he became more interested in the

dissonances that underlay that subjectivity.

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 It is in this same period, therefore, that Burckhardt also reveals an increasing

fascination with the Baroque as a cultural phenomenon.131 Letters and writings from the

1860‘s to the 1890‘s show the emergence of an almost grudging interest in the era, an

interest that developed from a distinctly unenthused sense of professional responsibility

to one borne of a deep and genuine personal fascination. Foremost among these writings

is his also posthumously published Erinnerungen aus Rubens, an extended meditation on

the expression of creative and aesthetic subjectivity at a very different moment, and with

a very different cultural landscape, from that of the High Renaissance. The book can be

understood in part as Burckhardt‘s impassioned response to the Rembrandt cult then

burgeoning among his contemporaries—and being put into the service of cultural

nationalism—but it is also a record of his reevaluation of the Baroque as an authentic and

legitimate object of study and veneration.132 Burckhardt‘s late interventions by no means

represent a thoroughgoing treatment of the Baroque as was later undertaken by the art

historical discipline; his reflections were more occasional and less programmatic than the

monographic studies that would follow. Credit for the embrace of the Baroque as a

legitimate art historical topic rests more properly with Cornelius Gurlitt (1850-1938), in

Geschichte des Barockstiles, des Rococo und des Klassicismus (1887-9) and with

Burckhardt‘s own student, Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), in Renaissance und Barock

(1888). In any case, like many of his contemporaries, Burckhardt shared and embraced

131
The term Baroque refers in Burckhardt‘s era primarily to architectural phenomena, and would generally
remain so until August Schmarsow‘s use of the term in relation to painting at the close of the nineteenth
century. Indeed, the term itself remains a topic of controversy until today, with commentators still
uncertain about either its precise origin or the extent of its conceptual adequacy. See Panofsky, Deleuze and
others for interesting discussions about the origin and meaning of the term. Erwin Panofsky, Three Essays
on Style, ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the
Baroque, translated by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

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the growing interest in seventeenth-century culture that characterized the late nineteenth

century, an interest that came to full fruition in the first half of the twentieth century.

As we saw in the introduction, the Baroque has been a seemingly perpetual source

of both fascination and controversy in the century and a half since Burckhardt‘s own

tentative reevaluations in the mid to late nineteenth century. It has been configured as the

degeneration of classicism as well as its dialectical supplement. It has been seen as a tool

of imperial and cultural hegemony, but also as a representational mode that undermines

the deployment of such powers. It has been read in terms of gender where it emerges as

the perpetual feminine other to masculinized forms of Cartesian epistemology or

classicist aesthetics. Common to all these, however, is a vision of a Baroque that

describes a set of representational styles born in an era of early crisis in European

modernity, and that nevertheless resonates with later modern crises. In other words, the

Baroque is often understood as a kind of perpetual otherness or the expression of a

negative moment in the dialectic of modernity, a moment that speaks of, and plays with,

fundamental qualities of de-centeredness and ironic non-identity that paradoxically lie at

the heart of the project of modernity. To use metaphors seen already above in relation to

the Cicerone, the Baroque can be captured in terms of a mathematical or aesthetic infinite

curve, a form that aims at the nostalgic circular identity of the Renaissance, but can never

quite bring the arc to completion.133 The Baroque in other words often seems to speak of

133
Only the latest among many, Deleuze uses this notion of curvature and folding as the ruling metaphor in
his book on the Baroque, The Fold. ―Inflection is the ideal genetic element of the variable curve or fold.
Inflection is the authentic atom, the elastic point. That is what Klee extracts as the genetic element of the
active, spontaneous line. It testifies to his affinity for the Baroque and for Leibniz, and opposes him to
Kandinsky, a Cartesian, for whom angles are firm, for whom the point is firm, set in motion by an exterior
force. For Klee, however, the point as a ―nonconceptual concept of noncontradiction‖ moves along an
inflection. It is the point of inflection itself, where the tangent crosses the curve. That is the point-fold. Klee
begins with a succession of three figures.1 The first draws the inflection. The second shows that no exact

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those elements within modernity that cannot quite be brought into harmonious relation

with its various classical expressions—from the Renaissance to Classical Modernism.

But care must be taken here, for the Baroque cannot simply be configured here as a

Manichean alternative to the Renaissance, nor can its ―curve‖ be understood simply as an

―other‖ to the circle. Instead, and importantly, the Baroque does not represent one pole

or the other of a dialectic, but must be recognized rather as the field of tension that exists

between the two poles. As the post-modern, in its non-vulgar sense, is not the negation

of the modern, so too is the Baroque not the negation of the tradition which it inherits.

Thus, in relation to reflections on the legacy of Spanish Gongorism, Cuban-French writer

Severo Sarduy uses the geometrical metaphor of the ellipse to describe the nature of the

Baroque.134 Where the circle possesses the radial symmetry of a single central point, a

symmetry that Sarduy also links to Renaissance representation and Raphael, the ellipse is

a polycentric figure that recurs in the Baroque in works ranging from the frescos of Pietro

da Cortona to the planetary motions described by Kepler. From this perspective, in other

words, the Baroque emerges not as the antithesis of the classical but as a field of tension

that opens up in any tradition between its practical being and its moments of self-

reflection. It is in these porous spaces pondered in diverse ways by such figures as

Wölfflin, Benjamin, and Deleuze—spaces that open up between the points of the ellipse,

between being and reflection, between the literal and the ironic and perhaps between

and unmixed figure can exist. As Leibniz stated, there can never be ―a straight line without curves
intermingled,‖ nor any ―curve of a certain finite nature unmixed with some other, and in small parts as well
as large,‖ such that one ―will never be able to fix upon a certain precise surface in a body as one might if
there were atoms.‖2 The third marks the convex side with shadow, and thus disengages concavity and the
axis of its curve, that now and again changes sides from the point of inflection.‖ Gilles Deleuze, The Fold:
Leibniz and the Baroque.
134
See the excellent discussion of Sarduy in relation to figurations of a Neo-Baroque in Gregg Lambert,
The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004).

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histoire and discourse—that the Baroque inheres and manifests itself. In other words, a

primary source of fascination in the Baroque has always been the way in which it

embraces, and attempts to represent, a tense simultaneity of traditional forms and

discursive reflection.

It is precisely in this tantalizing simultaneity of tradition and reflection that the

Baroque of the late Jacob Burckhardt resonates so well with that of twentieth century

scholarship. For the Baroque that emerges in Burckhardt‘s reflections in the second half

of the nineteenth century is one manifest, however problematically, as a supplement to,

rather than negation of the Renaissance. In one sense, after all, the Baroque presented an

interesting problem for a history of artistic styles, a mode of art historical analysis

towards which Burckhardt was increasingly drawn, but whose realization had to wait

until Wölfflin‘s mature work in the early twentieth century. In another sense, however,

the extravagant de-centeredness of the Baroque, its self-conscious representational

ironies, its field of tension between traditional ―text‖ and innovative ―commentary‖, its

play of materiality and spirituality, all clearly resonated for an historian with immense

reservoirs of ambivalence and irony, an historian whose diagnosis of modernity could

also be captured in the de-centered figure of a baroque ellipse. The Baroque could here

fascinate precisely because it represented a model of modernity in which past and present

were manifest simultaneously, a moment defined by the radical intrusion and hyper-

consciousness of the past on the one hand, and the no less radical desire to surpass and

transcend that past on the other hand. As it hovered—like Burckhardt himself—between

the literal and the ironic, the material and the ideal, between text and context, the Baroque

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opened up regions of very modern historicity in the porous spaces between its

representations of past and present.

The representational corollary of these baroque disorientations and

deconstructions, as Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man would later explore, can be found

in the figure of allegory. For where, as we have already seen, the Romantic symbol

claimed the status of a material particular that represented the unmediated presence of a

larger whole, Baroque allegory self-consciously presented itself as a mediating

abstraction, a pure sign that pointed to, rather than embodied, its referent. While

symbolic representation, of the sort proposed by Coleridge, tends to collapse the distance

between sign and referent, the point of allegory, in other words, was precisely the way in

which it captures, underscores and plays with the spaces that open up between meaning

and expression, between convention and improvisation. The almost obsessive embrace

of allegory in the Baroque can thus be read, as Benjamin suggests, as a representational

strategy born from an era of deep spiritual and intellectual crisis, a tropological

intervention aimed at capturing a universe in which fissures had opened up between truth

and its discursive expression.

As we have already noted, Burckhardt can be seen exploring those means by

which the tensions described above could be captured by an alternative and nomadic

mode of historical representation. With this in mind, a largely unremarked aspect of

Burckhardt‘s late journeys to Rome springs significantly into relief. For in the Reisen of

these later years, the Basel historian reveals an increasing engagement and fascination

with the emerging technology and representational possibilities of photography. Indeed,

far from viewing Burckhardt‘s late interest in the purchase and organization of his

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photographic collection as the idiosyncratic hobby of an aging scholar, the rest of this

chapter traces Burckhardt‘s photographic interests as an essential corollary to what we

have described as a baroquely inflected mode of historical representation. The

photograph, after all, as later observers such as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin

would note, not only represented a novel form of modern representation, but also an

amplification of precisely those representational tensions that emerged in the Baroque.

The photograph, in other words, was a means of historical recording in which the

tensions that fascinated Burckhardt could be captured and preserved.

In order to understand this, however, it may be helpful to pursue a brief detour to

the work of Siegfried Kracauer—German Feuilletonist, contemporary of Walter

Benjamin, and astute critic of the modern media forms of film and photography. In his

essays and work of the Weimar era, Kracauer explored the phenomena of photography

and illustrated magazines as further extensions of what he held to be a generalized

modern phenomenon that was seeing the progressive embrace of allegorical over

symbolic representation. Where the symbol represents the unity of medium and

mediated, Kracauer suggests that the photograph approaches a terminal limit in the

distances opened up between mediating representation and mediated object. Indeed, as

with allegory, photography represents a powerful abstraction away from the original

object of its gaze. But with the photograph, this process reaches a new and heightened

form, a form which not only involves a powerful degree of abstraction, but a dangerous

(though potentially useful) evacuation of the memory of the original object.

However, even as lived historical remembrance increasingly becomes replaced by

the abstractions of image memory, Kracauer points to film as a medium that carries the

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potential for the transcendence of the antinomies of photographic representation. ―The

capacity to stir up the elements of nature,‖ writes Kracauer,

is one of the possibilities of film. This possibility is realized whenever film

combines parts and segments to create strange constructs. If the disarray of the
illustrated newspapers is simply confusion, the game that film plays with the
pieces of disjointed nature is reminiscent of dreams in which the fragments of
daily life become jumbled. This game indicates that the valid organization of
things is not known, an organization that would designate how the remains of the
grandmother and the diva stored in the general inventory will some day have to
appear.135

Where photography ―assembles in effigy the last elements of a nature alienated from

meaning,‖ Kracauer envisions film a kind of dream work in which at least a provisional

meaning is imposed upon the denatured particles of a universe viewed through the

photographic eye. Film is thus a medium in which the extreme allegorical impulses of

photography rediscover a principle of organization, and potential for emancipation, in the

agency of the artist and the interpreter.

From this perspective, Kracauer‘s illustrated magazines can be understood as

radicalized descendents of the great emblem books of the seventeenth century. In both

instances, the natural world is rendered in the form of collections of abstract image-texts,

signs whose relation to their original referents appear ever more tenuous. Yet like the

Baroque emblem book, the images of photography present a world that remains atomized

and mute without the interpretive intervention of the artist, the reader, or the collector.

Indeed, it was due in part to this quality, that critics of allegory would describe it as a

ruination of representation, a fallen state where representation becomes an historical

135
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Levin (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press), 62-63.

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rather than natural phenomenon. Into the once pristine dyad of signifier and referent was

introduced an historically conditioned third term, an agent of interpretation required to

distill meaning from the materials of allegorical abstraction. In the Baroque such

intervention was likely understood as the province of a classically and humanistically

educated readership, while Kracauer appears to have something similar in mind in

relation to the work of cinematography, pastiche and collage, work which assembles and

reassembles meanings from a landscape of abstracted imagery. Likewise, Walter

Benjamin understood the work of the collector in similar fashion as he or she removes

cultural particles from their ―natural‖ milieus and reassembles them according to

meanings and interests of their own design.136 Without such intervention, as Benjamin

suggests, without an interpretive agency not so different from that seen in Burckhardt‘s

Anthology, modernity must increasingly present itself as a kind of petrified landscape of

opaque allegories, abstract signs and worn out commodities.

To the scholar, the cinematographer and the collector, however, we may wish to

add another figure of such interpretive agency. Though not one thematized directly by

Kracauer or Benjamin, this other interpretive type is nevertheless quite present in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For in the figure of the traveler or the voyager, so

central, for instance, to the modern imaginary of Baudelaire, there likewise emerges that

same set of modern impulses and imperatives towards the mobile (both spatial and

intellectual) collection, assembly and reconstruction of impressions.137 As with

136
See Benjamin‘s classic reflection on collections, their arrangements and re-arrangements: Walter
Benjamin, ―Unpacking my Library,‖ in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt ed., Harry Zohn trans. (New York:
Schocken Books, 1969).
137
―Le Voyage‖ and others in Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, Marthiel Mathews and Jackson
Mathews eds. (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1989).

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Baudelaire as he moved through the nineteenth-century urban spaces of Paris—a

collector of incidental glances, emotions, signs and representations—travel as such

demands a constant effort of interpretation and reinterpretation of novel sensory

impressions, a perpetual reconfiguration of unfamiliar and shifting semiotic landscapes.

And as with any other interpretive task, the traveler may display varying degrees of

improvisatorial agency and willingness to accept dissonances in produced meanings. In

rare cases, and on one end of the spectrum, we might encounter a traveler with the

interpretive panache of a Charles Baudelaire, soaking up the city and reconfiguring its

spaces as a text of his own making. On the other end of the spectrum, the traveler may

embrace the comforting assistance of conventional interpretations, relying more readily

on the prescriptions of popular guidebooks and other authoritative texts. In either

instance, however, the traveler emerges as a figure confronting the more generalized

problems of modern interpretation in peculiarly intense ways.

However, while Baudelaire is well known for embellishing stories of his own

travels beyond his native France, the distances he explored and navigated were largely

ones to be found in the Arrondissements of Paris.138 For Baudelaire‘s contemporary,

Jacob Burckhardt, duties as a scholar of cultural and art history required regular, and not

unwelcome, journeys well beyond the confines of his native Basel. Such duties

demanded periodic visits to a variety of European locales, but as we have seen, it was to

Italy in general and Rome in particular that the historian was repeatedly drawn. Yet the

Rome of the 1850‘s was a very different city than the Paris of Baudelaire in the same era.

If Paris became the occasion for Baudelaire to ponder a new horizon of representational

138
See Baudelaire‘s storytelling in regards to his brief travel to Mauritius and the degree to which it became
central to his exotic imaginaries. Claude Pichois, Baudelaire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989).

176
possibilities in one of the centers of European capitalist modernity, if Benjamin could

declare Paris the ―capital of the nineteenth century‖, the Rome that welcomed Burckhardt

in the second half of the same century was a very different creature. Thus, where

Benjamin had detected in Parisian modernity a set of representational correspondences

with the Baroque of the seventeenth century, Burckhardt‘s Rome was home and capital to

its original expression. Indeed, while many urban spaces in Europe and Latin America

bear the strong imprint of seventeenth-century aesthetic legacies, Rome perhaps more

than any other was (and is) defined by a Baroque sensibility. Even as its many other

pasts, from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, remain uniquely visible and accessible

in its urban landscapes, modern Rome nevertheless reveals itself first and foremost as a

city of the Baroque. As the center of Catholic Christendom and as an urban space largely

reborn and reconceived in the era of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Rome

persists until the present in its broader architectural outlines—despite some unfortunate

efforts in the eras of the Savoyard monarchy and Fascism—in the form bestowed upon it

in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rome, in other words, is the capital of the

European and Catholic Baroque, and it is in Rome—in its streets, its galleries, and in all

its complex historical geographies—that we find Burckhardt collecting, assembling and

reassembling impressions not only on the city itself, but also on its place in relation to

both its Baroque and its modern histories.

As we‘ve already seen, scholarship of the last century has explored the concept

of the Baroque not only as a discrete moment of stylistic expression, or just as a distinct

period of cultural history, but also as a trans-historical phenomenon signifying a

particular orientation between truth and representation, convention and improvisation,

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past and present. Therefore, while Rome‘s architectonic seems to announce itself as a

representative of the former sense of the Baroque, a particular and historicized cultural

moment, it also seems to permit and invite receptions of its unique urban spaces that

partake of the latter trans-historical interpretation of the term. To put it differently, the

spaces of Rome are largely conditioned by an objectively Baroque urban architectonic,

but it is also a city whose form embodies signature Baroque tensions (and play) between

past and present. As Walter Benjamin later demonstrated in response to the spaces of

nineteenth-century Paris, the landscapes of urban modernity are rich with archaeological

dimensions and strata into which the alert cultural historian may delve. These urban

spaces, however, exemplified by Paris and London, had tended to rapidly overlay

previous historical strata in the perpetual reconstructions of capitalist modernity; recent

pasts were here concealed beneath a veneer of novelty and repressed pasts could be

consigned to forgotten and moribund spaces like Benjamin‘s Parisian arcades. On the

other hand, the modern urban refashioning of Rome was a process that did not commence

until the second half of the nineteenth century, and was not pursued with true vigor until

in the era of Fascism. In other words, where the modernity of Paris and London has often

seemed premised on a pervasive and selective repression of previous historical strata,

Rome wears its archaeological dimensions with peculiar visibility, its spaces not

concealing but amplifying the interplay between its various presents and its innumerable

pasts. In this sense, the physiognomy of Rome far more resembles that of Benjamin‘s

Neapel than it does the Paris of the Passagen-Werk. It is a space likewise defined in

terms of a certain incomplete modernity, a porousness in the architectonic memory and

historical self presentation of the city where past and present are jumbled together in a

178
uniquely visible, fragmented and variegated manner. If the modern texts of Paris and

London present themselves no less as historical palimpsests, their earlier iterations

emerge only indistinctly on pages that have been powerfully repressed, rebuilt, erased or

torn out. Rome, on the other hand, at least through the early twentieth century, presented

itself as a text in which the earliest and latest revisions appeared with almost equal

legibility, the present continually rewritten above, around and between the ever persistent

signs and marks of the past.

Rome of the later nineteenth century was thus still a city of ruins, not only as an

urban space literally built upon and around material artifacts of past ages, but also in the

sense defined by the Baroque aesthetic of the emblem book or in Siegfried Kracauer‘s

illustrated magazines. As a region of a visibly over-determined historicity, a jumble of

fragments and signs pointing to meanings both present and absent, the historical

geography of Rome seems to demand and invite interpretive interventions that are

different from those required by Paris or London. If these latter self-consciously

presented themselves geographically and architecturally as symbols of modernity, as

cities whose modern novelties garbed themselves in the costume of an eternal and

privileged present, Rome emerges as a city of allegory, a landscape in which tensions

between past and present are visibly and self-consciously held in tension. Configured in

the symbolic mode, the cultural meanings inherent in the shape of urban spaces emerge

with an enforced pretense of self-identity and inevitability, all signs pointing to the

necessity of the present moment and marking out a textual/architectural mastery of the

present over the past. Where the interpretation of Paris and London thus appeared to

require the hermeneutic of a cultural archaeologist, one prepared to pry apart the strata of

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surface meanings from those repressed histories, the porous historical geographies of

Naples and Rome conversely seem to require interpretive interventions more similar to

those of the Baroque allegorist, the cinematographer or the collector.

In Burckhardt‘s fascination for Rome, then, in clear preference to Paris and

London, we might find once again echoes of that youthful fascination with the project of

the Anthology. Rome manifests itself here for Burckhardt as an enormous emblem book,

a great semiotic field requiring (and permitting) the same interpretive cutting, pasting,

assembly and reassembly that the Basel youth once practiced with his collection of the

Antiquities. From this perspective, Burckhardt‘s late interest in seventeenth-century

culture speaks not only to his interest in the historical phenomena of the Baroque, but

also a preparedness to engage the historical landscape of Rome with what we might call a

Baroque sensibility. From his journeys of the 1850‘s to those of 1875 and 1883, from

travels focused on the Renaissance to those increasingly aware of the legacy of the

Baroque, Burckhardt thus displays a willingness to embrace a mode of historical

interpretation that bears the marks of a closer engagement with the seventeenth-century

sensibilities. In other words, while it is possible to discern echoes of Renaissance

symbolic self-identity in Burckhardt‘s earlier works, the late travels reveal a Burckhardt

more prepared to leave open interpretive spaces of self-reflection and irony that can only

be called Baroque. Upon reading and re-reading the emblem book of Rome,

Burckhardt‘s historical epistemology more clearly recognizes the distances that separate

histoire and discours, and in Baroque fashion it embraces the tensions between artifacts

and their interpretation. If such spaces were discouraged by the forgetful contemporary

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physiognomies of Paris or London, the spaces of Rome nevertheless offered unique

opportunities to a cultural historian of the nineteenth century.

As we have seen, Burckhardt‘s first encounter with Rome in 1846 was announced

in somewhat more laconic fashion than we would expect, given his youthful enthusiasms.

―Ankunft in Rom,‖ he writes, ―1. April 1846, Abends ½9 Uhr, durch Porta Cavallegieri

eingefahren.‖ This was a Burckhardt for whom the more extravagant residues of a

youthful romanticism had gradually been worn away by an increasingly jaundiced view

of the political and cultural romanticism practiced in Germany by his comrades of the

mid-1840‘s Maikäfer period. At the same time, it would be a mistake to read this initial

entry as representative of Burckhardt‘s earliest experiences of Rome. As the late 1840‘s

were a watershed for the European political landscape, so too were they for Burckhardt‘s

intellectual biography, and it is in these initial encounters with Rome that we find a

variety of currents—residues of youth and premonitions of more mature reflections—

present in his reception of the city. Writing to Karl Fresenius only several weeks after his

arrival, April 21, 1846, Burckhardt reflects in a more enthusiastic and loquacious manner:

The enjoyment of Rome is a continual process of supposition and combination;

the ruins of many times lay in puzzle-like strata beside one another. To be sure, I
miss here the beautiful and completed edifice to whose towers and niches the
anxious soul may flee: ―Course and too colorful is Rome‖ says Platen without
injustice; but taking everything into account, it is even still the Queen of the
World and it leaves an impression, wonderfully combined of memory and
pleasure, like no other city. I can only compare it to Cologne; in Paris, the old
monuments are too few, and the modern horrors absorb the old too much.139

139
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol.3, 16. ―Der Genuß Roms ist ein beständiges Errathen und Combiniren; die
Trümmer der Zeiten liegen in gar räthselhaften Schichten übereinander. Zwar fehlt mir hier ein vollendet
schöner Bau, zu dessen Thürmen und Nischen die aufgeregte Seele flüchten könnte: «Plump und zu bunt ist
Rom» sagt Platen mit Recht; aber Alles zusammengenommen ist es eben doch noch die Königin der Welt
und giebt einen aus Erinnerung und Genuß so wundersam zusammengesetzten Eindruck wie keine andere
Stadt. Ich wüßte nur Köln damit zu vergleichen; in Paris sind der alten Monumente zu wenige und die
modernen Gräuelerinnerungen absorbieren die älteren zu sehr.‖

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In a passage that already prefigures the conceptual task of a Cicerone still several years

away, Burckhardt renders Rome precisely as a kind of unfinished city, a ruinous domain

that requires the active participation and agency of the observer—here in the form of

―errathen‖ and ―combiniren‖—to reconstruct. Indeed, it is precisely this unfinished state,

and in the aesthetic faculties required to restore it to the mind, that constitutes the

particular form of Genuss associated with the city. And as with the concept of Genuss in

the Cicerone, Burckhardt clearly links such enjoyment to an active faculty of memory

and remembrance. On the one hand, we still find here the poetic sensibility of

Burckhardt‘s youth, the presentation Rome as a place of ―aufgeregte Seelen‖, a landscape

to be compared in resonance only to Köln‘s own Gothic architectonic. On the other

hand, however, the city likewise begins to reveal its character not as a domain of

Romantic Schwelgerei and reverie, but as one inviting the pleasures of an active and

critical interpretive agency (as well as one of fundamental uncertainty).

That Burckhardt‘s earliest Roman visits, however, should have highlighted an

aesthetic of such uncertainty is not entirely surprising. Tapped by friend and mentor

Franz Kugler to assist in editing a new edition of the latter‘s Geschichte der Malerei and

Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, Burckhardt‘s stays in Rome (April-July 1846/October

1847-April 1848) coincided with mounting tensions between the city‘s ecclesiastical

government and a citizenry calling for political liberalization. These tensions, in

retrospect, clearly mark the waning power of the Papal States as an effective temporal

governing institution, and are linked with the larger Italian and European phenomenon of

political ferment driven by ascendant nationalism and liberalism. Ironically, however,

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Burckhardt had made his 1847 journey to Rome, in part, to steer clear of political storm

clouds that seemed of more immediate threat to Basel and Switzerland in the Sonderbund

crisis.140 In the event, with the quick defeat of the Catholic Sonderbund faction in

November of 1847, Burckhardt found that civil strife had reached a speedy conclusion in

his homeland only to follow him to the Italian peninsula. In subsequent months

therefore, and throughout the peninsula, Burckhardt found himself in an Italy where calls

for constitutional reforms and civil disturbances were swiftly increasing in frequency and

urgency.

Following the ultra-reactionary Gregory XVI, Pope Pius IX had initially been

celebrated as a reformer when he declared an amnesty for political prisoners upon his

1846 accession to the throne of St. Peter. Yet Papal resistance to further reforms soon

stiffened even as more calls for political modernization of ecclesiastical government

continued to mount unabated. Eventually, however, with street demonstrations becoming

a common occurrence in Rome, Pius relented, appointed a liberal ministry, and proposed

a constitution in March of 1848. Yet after an April 1848 decision that refused direct

assistance to a Piedmont at war with Austria, a decision overriding the will of the newly

appointed administration, the Roman situation deteriorated still further. On the night of

November 15, 1848, the Prime Minister of the Papal States, Pellegrino Rossi, was

assassinated and the Pope was forced to flee Rome. The six months that followed saw

the emergence of a short lived Roman Republic, complete with interventions from

140
For more on the Sonderbund War see: Joachim Remak: Bruderzwist nicht Brudermord. Der Schweizer
Sonderbundskrieg von 1847 (Zürich: Verlag Orell Füssli, 1997). The Sonderbundskrieg refers to what
turned out to be a relatively short conflict which resulted in the transformation of the loosely confederated
cantons of Switzerland into a more closely bound federal state. The war lasted a mere 27 days in
November of 1847 and pitted more conservative oriented Catholic cantons against more liberal leaning and
Reformed cantons, with latter emerging with the upper hand.

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Mazzini and Garibaldi, but in the summer of 1849 French troops dispatched by Emperor

Louis Napoleon recaptured the city in the name of papal restoration and invited Pius IX

to return from exile.

From Burckhardt‘s perspective, in the early months of 1848, most of these events

still lay in an obscure and uncertain future. But what had become evident, even in the

winter of 1847-1848, was that the ―eternal city‖ was being introduced to nineteenth-

century history in dramatic fashion. In other words, if the architectural spaces of the city

were conditioned by a jumbled mix of old and new, so too had its social and civic spheres

emerged as tense fields of traditional, liberal and radical currents. Indeed, a series of

short reports submitted by the young historian to the Basler Zeitung—and later collected

by Max Burckhardt—reveals Burckhardt‘s reflections on the contemporary political

situation in the city that had so captivated his historical imagination. On the New Year‘s

Day 1848, Burckhardt observed:

The new year began under not particularly fortunate auspices; in the political
atmosphere there swept a sultry Scirocco, one that could possibly break in the
form of a lesser or greater affray. The ground beneath the Pope is gradually being
eroded and dug away; no week passes without agitations; it occurs to no one that
one is obligated to wait at least for the results of Consulta di Stato and of the
Municipio before new steps might have authority. The leaders, above all, have an
interest in keeping Rome in a state of breathlessness and unrest, and it is towards
this that all resources are directed. 141

141
Max Burckhardt, "Rom 1848 : Berichte Von Jacob Burckhardt," Corona, Private Archive 208, no. 86
(1939). ―Das neue Jahr eröffnet sich unter nicht ganz günstigen Auspizien; in der politischen Luft herrscht
ein schwüler Scirocco, welcher vielleicht in einem größern oder geringern Krawall sich entladen wird. Dem
Papst wird mehr und mehr der Boden untergraben; keine Woche vergeht ohne Häkeleien; keinem
Menschen fällt es ein, daß man mindestens verpflichtet wäre, die Resultate der Consulta di Stato und des
Municipio abzuwarten, ehe man zu neuen Schritten eine Art von Berechtigung hätte. Das leitende Comite
hat vor allem ein Interesse, Rom beständig in Atem und Aufregung zu erhalten, und clazu werden nun alle
Mittel in Bewegung gesetzt.‖

184
The Rome here described, accelerated by the winds of a modern political Sirocco is one

increasingly removed from either the Romantic fantasies of Burckhardt‘s youth, or

indeed from the poised harmony of Burckhardt‘s Renaissance aesthetic. Instead, the

occupation of the city by the masses, the constant political confusion and unrest,

juxtaposes the spaces of the ancient city with the accelerations and movement of

modernity. Far from the idyll of Roma Aeterna, a classical and romantic retreat rendered

in the painterly hues of Claude Lorrain, Burckhardt instead discovers in Rome a

peculiarly dense and polarized form of urban modernity. Rome was not an Elysian field,

but instead a field where past and present collide in a seemingly inexhaustible variety of

fragments, a field that permits a singular aesthetic Genuss and one that generates

powerfully unstable political winds.

The tensions, in other words, that Burckhardt discovered with ambivalence in

Rome were thus in part tensions inherent in his own evolving reception of the city and the

peculiar mode of its entry into nineteenth-century modernity. In its earliest

manifestations, this reception was propelled by what might be called a Renaissance

aesthetic. That is to say, to look at his descriptions from the earliest 1846 letters is to find

a city configured with all the auratic and perspectival characteristics of a Renaissance

masterwork. The city emerges under the auspices of the picturesque, its subject matter

well balanced, and its lines of perspective converging on an ideal spectator who observes

at a distance. In one of his earliest missives, from Rome in May of 1846, Burckhardt

paints a picture of Rome for Wilhelm Wackernagel, as viewed from the frame of his

apartment window:

If I hadn‘t set aside completion of the sketch, you would find here a beautiful
depiction of the prospect that opens up above my table and stretches out beyond

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 my window. It is literally here a child‘s dream come true, it is palaces in
moonlight, and then to the left a sublime panorama from the Pantheon to Monte
Pincio, just now dipped in the most beautiful silver light, and finally to the right,
past a peaceful cloister and fallen walls, the dark pine groves of Villa Ludovisi;
beneath however, on the Piazza Barberini that lies just beneath my feet, ―my
friend the Triton‖ spouts his shimmering streams in the moonlight. Rising from
the streets below, I hear singing, also the ―laity‖ and the food-cart vendors, the
passage of the coaches returning from the Corso, and many other
indistinguishable noises.142

In this word landscape, all the enormous descriptive and ekphrastic skill of Burckhardt as

art historian is clearly visible. But it is precisely in this presentation of Rome as a

panoramic artwork, that Burckhardt‘s early reception of Rome becomes evident, not just

as an aesthetic object, but as an object with a very particular aesthetic relation between

observer and representation. Put differently, Rome is here still well framed and kept

viewed from a properly auratic (in the Benjaminian sense) distance, a dreamlike vision

that is at once immediately present, but where the line between privileged observer and

observed subject is clearly drawn.

As we‘ve seen elsewhere, the aesthetic described above carries with it an

epistemological premise that configures the artwork as a self-sufficient representation,

directed towards but ultimately indifferent to the presence of an observer. In this sense,

Burckhardt‘s urban aesthetic appears to partake of the same sensibility that would

characterize his reception of Renaissance art, a reception that defined its object in terms

142
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 3, 18. ―Wenn mir nicht das Zeichnen complett verleidet wäre, so sollten Sie
hier zunächst eine schöne Federskizze von der Aussicht finden, die über meinen Tisch weg durch das
Fenster hereinsieht. Es ist hier buchstäblich ein Jugendtraum wahr geworden, es sind die Palläste im Mond-
schein, dann links ein ungeheures Panorama vom Pantheon bis Monte Pincio, jetzt in das schönste
Silberlicht getaucht, endlich rechts über einige friedliche Klöster und zerfallene Mauern weg der schwarze
Pinienhain von Villa Ludovisi; unten aber auf dem barberinischen Platz, tief zu meinen Füßen, spritzt
«mein Freund der Triton» seinen schimmernden Strahl in die Mondnacht. [...] Von den Gassen herauf höre
ich Gesang, auch «Laien» und den Ausruf der Eßwaarenverkäufer, das Fahren der Karossen die vom Corso
zurückkommen und anderes un-unterscheidbares Geräusch.‖

186
of strict geometrical perspective, an overall harmony of elements, and an affective tone of

repose. However, even in this relatively early Roman journey, the intrusion of

contemporary history into these same streets of Rome appears to render such an aesthetic

increasingly untenable. In other words, where Burckhardt could once depict Rome in

much the same manner as the framed landscapes of the Renaissance, the urban and civic

form of the city now seemed to elude the order of such harmonious and structured

framing. Instead, Burckhardt‘s Rome begins to emerge in the more mobile and porous

fashion of a Baroque sensibility. Thus, while the Renaissance had observed a set of strict

geometries, in the convergence of perspectival lines towards a single ideal observer and

the separation of representational and observational planes, Baroque sensibility

understood such relations in very different ways. On the one hand, the Baroque envisions

both a mobile and a multiple spectatorship, the extravagant movement of its forms

inviting and encouraging a variety of perspectival vantage points. On the other hand, the

conceit of the frame, so essential to Renaissance sensibility, tends to lose its integrity in

the Baroque. From the illusions of trompe-l'œil ceiling painting to the seamless

integration of statuary with architecture, and architecture with urban context, the Baroque

erases the strict framed separation of artistic text/object with its context/environment. As

with the allegory, its most favored trope, the Baroque demands the participation of the

observer in the work of art, draws the viewer out of passive spectatorship and envelops

him or her in world where lines between reality and representation are called into

question.

By the end, then, of Burckhardt‘s first professional stays in Rome, the once

romantically picturesque city of the early correspondence gives way to one configured in

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a more complicated mode of reportage. In other words, Burckhardt‘s vision of Rome

begins to lose the distanced perspective of Renaissance aura, and emerges in the shifting

perspectives and collapsed framing of a Baroque sensibility. The aesthetic distance that

once characterized Burckhardt‘s privileged window perch begin to collapse and the

tumult of the city is brought into more intimate relation with the observer. For example,

in some of his last news notices sent off to Basel before his departure in April of 1848,

Burckhardt describes the conjunction of the Roman Carnival with the political turmoil

likewise erupting throughout the city:

March 7. –In the midst of the crazy hubub of Carnival there came the news of the
revolution in France, and the people thus lost what little sense that they still had
left.—The constitutional issue was moving ahead in the best way; in every
number of the Gazetta di Roma the government spoke of the most diligent efforts
of the relevant commission, and no one doubted that the next meeting would be
the one—but one can‘t ascribe the tension of spirits to the Carnival, since the tri-
color could scarcely have been said to dominate among the city‘s costumes.
Since the news arrived, everything is now quite different; on Friday and Saturday
evenings crowds with torches marched towards the French academy. [...], in order
to shout Vivats of every sort, especially Evvivà la republica!143

The landscape that Burckhardt describes here—in both form and content—is far more

reminiscent of Rabelais‘ Baroque than that of Raphael‘s Renaissance. The spaces of the

city have become crowded and confused by a mix of traditional carnival celebration and

modern political agitation. Indeed, the entire city in the neighborhood of the Corso

becomes a theater of masks, reversals and representations, a theater in which all are

143
Burckhardt, "Rom 1848 : Berichte Von Jacob Burckhardt." ―7. März. - Mitten in das tolle Treiben des
Karnevals hinein fielen die Nachrichten der französischen Revolution, und die Leute verloren dabei die
wenige Besinnung, die sie noch übrigbehalten hatten. - Die Konstitutionssache war eben im besten Gange;
in jeder Nummer der «Gazzetta di Roma» sprach die Regierung von den emsigen Anstrengungen der
betreffenden Kommission, und niemand zweifelte daran, daß der nächste Donnerstag der wahre Termin sei
- doch ließ man den Karneval die Spannung der Gemüter nicht entgelten, kaum daß in den
Maskenkleidungen die drei italienischen Farben einigermaßen vorherrschten. Seit jenen Nachrichten ist
dies nun anders; Freitag und Samstag abends zogen Scharen mit Fackeln nach der französischen Akademie,
[...], um Vivats aller Art, besonders Evvivà la republica!, auszurufen.‖

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audience and all are participants; the privileged observational space of the private box,

apartment window or café haunt is completely enveloped by the jumbled and jostling

performance it once sought to frame.144 Important here, however, is not only that the

politics of Rome is rhetorically linked to the excesses of Carnival, but that politics, and

the urban spaces in which it takes place, are represented in accord with a more Baroque

sensibility, an aesthetic of extravagant movements and powerful energies, of illusion and

display, of roles and reversals.

For Burckhardt, therefore, the political turmoil is framed as an amplification of

the carnival atmosphere, here spilling out of the frame defined in the calendar of festivals.

With the jostling masses in the streets, with the masks, the protests and the confusion of

the urban spaces, Rome shows an aspect that can no longer be represented adequately by

the perspectives of the Renaissance, but requires instead a representational mode more

consonant with the tensions and uncertainties of its present condition. Rome seems to

demand, in other words, a Baroque aesthetic.

With Rome still in the midst of such unrest, overwhelmed by the political carnival

that would eventually force the exile of Pope Pius IX, Burckhardt took leave of the city in

mid-April 1848. The decision, however, was linked less to fears of turmoil than to issues

involving career prospects. As we noted, during the stays of 1846-1848 Burckhardt had

144
In his own reflections on the 1788 Roman Carnival, Goethe likewise detected and explored the curious
baroque sensibility that it engendered, an exploration that Bakhtin later reviewed in his work on early
modern carnival: As Goethe writes: ―The long, narrow Corso, packed with people, recalls to us no less the
road of our earthly life. There, too, a man is both actor and spectator; there, too, in disguise or out of it, he
has very little room to himself and, whether in a carriage or on foot, can only advance by inches, moved
forward or halted by external forces rather than by his own free will; there, too, he struggles to reach a
better and more pleasant place from which, caught again in the crowd, he is again squeezed out.‖ Johann
von Goethe, Italienische Reise (München: Beck,1981); Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, Helene Iswolsky trans. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 244.

189
been working on editorial updates of Kugler‘s Geschichte der Malerei and Handbuch der

Kunstgeschichte, and the older scholar had simultaneously set about securing a position

in Berlin for his younger colleague. Indeed, it was with the prospective Berlin

appointment in mind that Burckhardt had conceived of the larger series of handbooks that

would eventually appear in truncated form as the Constantine and Renaissance books.

Simultaneously, however, friends in Basel had secured for Burckhardt an offer to act as

Kurator of the soon to be dedicated Augustinerstrasse Museum, and when it became clear

that the hoped for Berlin position would not be immediately available, Burckhardt steered

a course once again for his provincial outpost on the Rheinknie.

Burckhardt would remain in Basel for the next several years, and it was during

this period that he labored upon and finished the manuscript for Die Zeit Constantins der

Grossen. By 1853, however, with prospects for advancement in Basel still unsatisfying

and with the lure of the South still undiminished, Burckhardt undertook yet another

journey to Italy and Rome, a research journey aimed at collecting materials for the

project that would eventually become the Cicerone. In the previous chapter, and in the

pages of the Cicerone, we saw how this journey influenced Burckhardt‘s aesthetic

thinking at the time. And in many ways, Burckhardt‘s Anleitung zum Genuss remains

perhaps the best record of the effects of his travel in that period. For in the period from

the completion of Constantin through the Cicerone stay in Italy, there exists a distinct

silence in the source materials indicating Burckhardt‘s impressions. ―The Cicerone

journey,‖ as Werner Kaegi notes in his exhaustive biography, ―the most famous and at

the same time the least documented of Burckhardt‘s Italian journeys. There exists no

letter and no diary that records its stations. No sketchbook depicts its impressions. Only

190
his passport with its stamps shows its laconic itinerary.‖145 The Cicerone, as we have

already examined it, and perhaps the Civilization of the Renaissance, must be accepted as

the best record of the fruits of Burckhardt‘s Roman travel in the early 1850‘s.

The record, however, of Burckhardt‘s two subsequent journeys is documented

more fully, and it is in these travels—in 1875 and again in 1883—that Burckhardt‘s

reception of the Baroque and his reflections on Rome‘s unique urban modernity are

brought more completely into the foreground. Upon returning from the Cicerone-Reise,

and after securing a position for several years at Zürich Polytechnic, Burckhardt returned

home again upon the offer of a professorial post at the University of Basel in 1858.

Finishing the Civilization of the Renaissance in the security of this post, he went on to

serve out the rest of his professional career at the university in Basel, formally retiring

over three decades later in 1893. Yet the appointment in Basel also signaled another shift

for Burckhardt, a shift from the activities of research and publication that had

characterized the 1850‘s to a focus primarily on pedagogical duties as an Ordinarius. As

we have seen, Burckhardt by no means ceased research oriented writing, but the most

significant products of this later period would have to wait for posthumous publication.

Above all, then, Burckhardt‘s professional travel during this period became increasingly

oriented towards supplementing his activities as lecturer and teacher. Yet if Burckhardt‘s

scholarly focus was undergoing a transformation, so too were the political, cultural and

aesthetic landscapes of Italy and Rome not remaining unchanged, and it is in the journeys

145
Werner Kaegi, Jacob Burckhardt; Eine Biographie (Basel: Schwabe, 1947-1982) vol. III, 452. ―Die
Cicerone-Reise ist die berühmteste und zugleich die unbekannteste von Burckhardts Italienfahrten. Kein
Brief und kein Tagebuch hält die Folge ihrer Stationen fest. Kein Skizzenbuch gibt ihre Eindrücke wieder.
Nur der Paß zeigt mit seinen Stempeln das trockene Itinerar.‖

191
of 1875 and 1883 that we find Burckhardt reflecting the histories of both his own career

and that of Roman modernity.

Of course, Burckhardt‘s scholarly travels were by no means limited to Italy

during this period. The first two decades of Burckhardt‘s professorship in Basel saw a

number of excursions throughout Europe, with extended visits to France, the Low

Countries, Austria and destinations in Germany. But Burckhardt‘s impressions during

his two journeys to London—in 1860 and 1879—are particularly relevant for present

purposes in comparison with the professor‘s Roman stays of 1875 and 1883. For the

aspect of urban metropolitan modernity that presented itself in London was of a far

different sort than that presented by a Rome whose fitful and halting path into nineteenth-

century modernity had only recently been ratified in its establishment as capital of a new

Italian Grossstaat. London, by contrast, was for Burckhardt the very essence of the

modern metropolitan capital city, and the architectonic of the city represented very

different aspect from the exposed archaeological layers and ruination of Rome. The text

of London, in other words, was one dominated by the monumental passages of the

present, its shapes, its sounds and its smells all impressing upon the spectator the

privileged historical position of nineteenth-century imperial and industrial modernity.

For Burckhardt, contra Benjamin, even Paris paled in comparison to the impressions left

by London. ―Paris is a nice little town,‖ he writes in 1860, ―next to this London.‖146

The correspondence of the second London trip of 1879 is by far the more

voluminous of the two, and as Kaegi writes, these latter documents show that, ―the

146
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 3, 63.

192
second journey to England was among the most important journeys of his life.‖147 Above

all, London merged with, and came to represent, a particular mode of modernity whose

monumentality and dynamism were gradually radiating throughout Europe and beyond.

Indeed, it was this almost sublime monumentality and the sheer oceanic scale of the city

that made the most powerful initial impact on Burckhardt‘s sensibility. Describing his

initial railway entry into the city in July of 1879, Burckhardt writes to Carl Lendorff-

Berri:

Where London actually begins, no one can really say; travelling through the last
stations, one is already long in the city, and to be sure at great height, so that one
can observe into courtyards and down to the people in them (where a pair of old
pants hang drying from the wash). In between, of course, one saw St. Paul‘s and
many other impressive buildings that rise as much as possible out of the sooty
atmosphere. At Charing Cross Station I was overwhelmed for a moment by the
colossal character of the buildings and the goings on (the sea of omnibusses and
carts, etc. etc.), but now I‘m pretty blase about the whole thing and don‘t make
much of it.148

But even if quickly rendered blasé once again by the enormity and energies of London,

Burckhardt returns repeatedly to leitmotifs of London‘s superlative character, its

Colossalität and Monumentalität as perhaps the great city of European modernity.149

―You should really see London as an architect,‖ he writes to his nephew, ―the modern

147
Kaegi, Burckhardt: Eine Biographie, Vol. 4, 249.
148
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. VII, 36-37. ―Wo London eigentlich beginnt, kann kein Mensch mehr sagen; die
letzten Stationen hindurch fährt man schon lange in der Stadt, und zwar in der Höhe, so daß man vielen
Leuten in die Höflein hinein sieht, wo irgendwo ein Paar gewaschene alte Hosen trockneten. Dazwischen
freilich sah man S. Paul und eine Menge anderer feierlicher Gebäude aus dem Steinkohlendunst so gut als
möglich hervorragen. Im Bahnhof bei Charing-cross setzte mich noch einen Augenblick die Colossalität
des Baues und aller Veranstaltungen, das Meer von Omnibus und Droschken etc etc in Erstaunen, aber jetzt
bin ich schon blasirt und mache mir aus all dem Wesen nicht mehr viel.‖
149
Ibid., 46-48. ―Heut Vormittag entdeckte ich beim Bummeln in der Nähe von FleetStreet das ganz riesige
neue Justizgebäude, New Law Court, und in der Nähe davon Record Office, ein Archiv, Beides gothische
Burgen der opulentesten Art.‖

193
one, I mean. The motto is: enormous, splendid and functional.‖150 Indeed, even the great

collections in the museums and galleries were nearly overwhelming in the vastness and

expanse of their purview. In institutions such as the National Gallery and the British

Museum, Burckhardt found a stupefying wealth of art and artifacts from throughout

Europe and the world, a wealth made possible by the same unprecedented prosperity and

imperial power of which the city as a whole had become a symbol. Of the South

Kensington Museum, rechristened as the Albert and Victoria Museum in 1899,

Burckhardt writes, ―I feel there postively humbled by the powerful sensibility that, from a

immensely elevated perspective, established this singular collection, maintains it, and

hourly increases its holdings. ‖151

Mixed, however, with the appreciation of London‘s grandeur and energy are clear

notes of the critical pessimism with which Burckhardt greeted a modernity that was

making its presence felt throughout Europe. For the same power that had made possible

London‘s great museums and aesthetic monuments nevertheless had its source in forces

of utility and acquisitiveness that were ultimately antithetical to the cultural functions of

art as Burckhardt conceived them. Prompted by reflections on the new iron bridges

spanning not only the Thames, but also the Rhine in his own home city, Burckhardt

writes:

And what is all this great aesthetic stimulation to the Londeners when a colossal
uglification of the city‘s aspect can take place merely for the purpose of utility (in
comparison with which our new iron bridge is nothing at all). This is to say that
they have placed a high, infamous, and straight-lined iron bridge in the middle of

150
Ibid., 36-37. ―Du solltest aber London,das moderne meine ich, als Architect sehen! Das Motto ist: riesig,
prächtig und zweckmäßig.‖
151
Ibid., 81. ―Dort fühle ich mich förmlich im Schirm und Schatten des mächtigen Sinnes, welcher von
einem gewaltig hohen Gesichtspunct aus diese in der Welt einzige Sammlung gegründet hat, aufrecht hält
und stündlich vermehrt.‖

194
 the most beautiful views of the city, layed a railway line across it, and built an
abominably colossal ladies suitcase nearby (the main station of Charing Cross).
As I strolled in the moonlight the other night, along the nearby Waterloo Bridge
that once boasted wonderful painterly views of the Houses of Parliament,
Westminster Abbey and Lambeth Palace, I now found these views cut in half and
I truly could have wept. The deepening of twilight and the appearance of the full
moon made the scene really painful. Also, further down, around London Bridge,
there lay a similar iron-bridge horror that likewise leads to another colossal ladies
suitcase. Good God, what next will be sacrificed to the practical sense of the
nineteenth century! And how will things look in London in 100, or even 10, years
when the growing crowds of humanity make necessary still more decisions of this
sort?152

In these juxtaposed visions of moonlight softly bathing a landscape being deconstructed

in the name of modern utility, the residues of Burckhardt as Romantic, and the traces of

his historical nostalgia, are still very clearly in evidence. If London‘s architectonic and

cultural treasures were indeed made possible by a particular orientation to art and history,

namely ―von einem Gewaltig gesichtspunct,‖ it was a monumental orientation or vantage

point that tended more towards the absorption and effacement of the past rather than its

visible preservation. Unlike Rome, the monumentality of London was configured under

the sign of modernity; its collections, its architecture, its thoroughfares were all geared to

underscore the privileged vantage point of an ahistorical modern present. Where Rome‘s

monuments opened a space of historicity in the visible ruination of its monuments, where

its previous iterations were more plainly visible to the casual observer, the reconfigured

152
Ibid., 43. ―Und was hilft den Londonern alle die hohe ästhetische Anregung, wenn dann doch um der
bloßen Utilität willen eine colossale Verscheußlichung des Stadtanblickes eintritt, wogegen unsere neue
Brücke eine wahre Unschuld ist! Man hat nämlich eine hohe, infame, gradlinige Gitterbrücke mitten durch
den schönsten Hauptaspect gezogen und eine Haupteisenbahn drauf gelegt und einen gräßlichen colossalen
Damenkoffer (den Kopfbahnhof von Charing-cross) dran gebaut. Als ich gestern Abend im Vollmond auf
der (unten dran liegenden) Waterloobridge wandelte und den frühern wunderbar malerischen Anblick der
Parlamentshäuser, der Westminster Abtei und des Lambeth Palace entzwei geschnitten fand, hätte ich
wahrlich heulen mögen. Die Dämmerung und der aufsteigende Vollmond machten die Sache erst recht
schmerzlich. Auch weiter unten, gegen London bridge hin, liegt ein ähnliches Scheusal von Gitterbrücke,
welches ebenfalls zu einer colossalen Kopfstation führt. Ach Gott, was werden dem practical sense des
XIX. Jahrhunderts noch für Opfer fallen! Und wie wird es in 100, ja schon in 10 Jahren in diesem London
aussehen, wenn wegen Menschenzudranges immer schrecklichere Entschlüsse nöthig werden?‖

195
modern spaces of London increasingly allowed the past a voice only to the extent that it

had been pacified and absorbed as a style or mode—and not as a moment of critical

historical reflection. Instead of the visible historical tensions of Rome‘s legible pasts, the

past in London was being either replaced entirely or rebuilt in the simulacral forms of

architectural historicism, forms whose purpose was not so much the preservation of the

past, but one of making visible modernity‘s mastery over it.

In similar fashion, Burckhardt‘s suspicions extended likewise to the museums and

collections of the city. On the one hand, as we‘ve seen, Burckhardt surveyed these with

an enthused astonishment, nearly overwhelmed by their richness, but at the same time he

nevertheless harbored uncertainties about the nature and eventual result of such titanic

cultural accumulations. ―Then my astonishment increased considerably,‖ he remarks

once again to Alioth regarding the South Kensington Museum, ―What will become of our

art history if collecting takes place in this manner, and no one pursues any longer a more

comprehensive perspective? ‖153 Similar to his frustration with what he considered the

methodologically unreflective Sammeln of many in the German historical community,

Burckhardt here again announces his suspicions of the particularly modern fascination

with the mere collection and warehousing of historical artifacts. Here was an encounter

with the past that had been wholly conditioned by modern imperatives and logic of

accumulation, an encounter in which the relation with history dangerously resembled that

of the commodities piled on the wharves of the Thames. Here indeed was an astonishing

collection of fragments of the past, but one whose focus was on the extension of such

153
Ibid. ―Da wuchs denn mein Staunen noch um ein Beträchtliches! Wo soll das hinaus mit unserer
Kunstgeschichte, wenn auf diese Manier gesammelt wird und Niemand die eigentliche Gesammtübersicht
mehr macht?‖

196
collections rather than on their understanding. ―How much insight I‘m gathering, I don‘t

know yet;‖ he relates, apparently sensing his own state of interpretive exhaustion, ― in the

meantime, I‘m still in that state where the more one sees and notes, the dumber one

becomes. If things begin to clear up for me, I‘ll let you know.‖154

It might be tempting at this point, to link these impressions of Rome to the larger

discussions of a ―Baroque modernity‖ that has occupied more contemporary scholarship,

and to a certain extent this would be fair. A central and defining feature of the Baroque,

after all, announced first and most explicitly in Wölfflin‘s Renaissance and Barok, is the

impulse towards architectural monumentality. From this perspective, one could suggest

that nineteenth-century London resonates with the aesthetic of the seventeenth century

precisely in the way it deploys architectural monumentality as a visible display of its

regimes of power and imperial pretensions. Likewise, the archive as a central metaphor

and space of culture, as well as a generalized mania for accumulation and display of

knowledge, is a phenomenon to which Benjamin, for instance, gestures as an important

point correspondence between the spiritual crises of the nineteenth and seventeenth

centuries. But if London can indeed be read in terms of a Baroque modernity, à la Buci-

Glucksmann‘s Parisian modernity defined by Baudelaire and Benjamin, then it is a

Baroque with a very different outline from that of Burckhardt‘s Rome.155 Where London

captures the modern Baroque through the metaphors of the monument and the archive,

Rome supplements these with its own literal Baroque features and with a stronger sense

154
Ibid., 63. ―Wie viel Weisheit ich hier sammle, weiß ich noch nicht;einstweilen bin ich noch in
demjenigen ersten Stadium da man vor lauter massenhaftem Sehen und Notiren nur immer dümmer wird.
Wenn es anfangt sich abzuklären, will ich's Ihnen melden.‖
155
Elsewhere, Buci-Glucksmann reads Baudelaire and Benjamin to find a baroque modernity in the
reception of nineteenth-century Paris. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of
Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage, 1994).

197
of that other favored Baroque symbol: the ruin. In its nascent adoption of urban

modernity, and in the visual traces of its half-buried and half-ruined pasts, the

monumentality of Burckhardt‘s Rome seemed to present its history as the

interpenetration of past and present, rather than the absorption of the former by the latter.

For Burckhardt, in other words, Rome was not only a city defined by the Baroque, but

one whose contours made possible a radically different encounter with the past from

those offered by London.

Even if the imperatives of an industrial, political and cultural modernity had yet

to make a truly indelible mark on the Rome of Burckhardt‘s late visits, this is not to say

that the city persisted in a state of timeless stasis. Since the period of his stays in the

1840‘s and 1850‘s, in other words, the nineteenth-century had left neither Romae

Aeternae nor its rich cultural geographies completely untouched. In a history that we

need not recount here fully, the intervening years—between 1854 and 1875—had seen

the arrival and eventual culmination of the Risorgimento, consolidating the once

fragmented peninsula as a unified European power under the House of Savoy and the

constitutional monarchy of Victor Emmanuel II. Rome itself, while it had been

designated the capital of the new Italian monarchy in 1860, had remained under Papal

control and French protection until 1870, and was occupied by Italian troops only after

Louis Napoleon‘s defeat at Sedan in the Franco-Prussian war. Indeed, only officially

becoming the seat of the Italian national government in 1871, Rome‘s choice and

emergence as the capital city of the new state was always more complicated than it

sometimes appears in retrospect. In the first instance, while Rome provided the historical

stage for a new Italy to cast itself as the unified and legitimate power over the whole

198
peninsula, the city was also home to another set of historical resonances which were

linked to the temporal power and home of Catholic Christianity. Indeed, despite the de

facto resolution of the question of Papal power in 1870, these tensions persisted as a de

jure problem throughout not only the era of unification, but well into the twentieth

century. In many ways, Rome‘s ascension to capital status was as much a product of

compromise as it was a submission to the necessities of historical and cultural stagecraft.

After all, viewed in comparison with the rest of Italy (especially the North), the Rome of

1870 was still a relatively backward and underdeveloped municipality. While today

rivaled only by Milan in terms of size, Rome at the moment of unification was only the

fifth largest city in Italy, trailing Naples, Milan, Genoa and Palermo.156 Furthermore,

even with unification and the increase of its business and administrative functions, Rome

possessed only 0.8% percent of the Italian population, whereas Berlin boasted 1.7% of

the total national population, Paris 8.5%, and London a staggering 10.4%. But in many

ways, it was this very peripherality of Rome as a regional center that helped secure its

role as eventual capital. For not only did it possess the necessary historical resonances, it

was also considered, once the Papal issue was effectively settled, a kind of unthreatening

neutral territory among the various regional forces working to achieve unification.

By the time of Burckhardt‘s 1875 visit, and even more so in 1883, Rome had

assumed its new role, and its urban geography was gradually changing accordingly.

While real estate speculation, projects of feverish new building and the accompanying

crises—of the sort seen in the Gründerzeit of the German Empire—were likewise to be

seen in Rome and throughout the Peninsula, its urban transformation took place at a far

156
John Agnew, Rome (New York: J. Wiley, 1995), 10-11.

199
more moderate pace than that of Italy‘s neighbors to the north. In spite of this, Rome

nevertheless saw its share of changes in the era immediately following unification.

Along with the administrative infrastructure necessary to a new European capital, as well

as accompanying housing and services, Rome saw the introduction of significant changes

to the characteristic shape of its streets and squares. Indeed, almost immediately after the

successful capture of Rome by Italian forces in 1870, a new government commission was

established that was tasked with formulating and administrating a plan to remake the city

in accordance with its new role. ―There is instituted a commission of architects-

engineers,‖ read the charter of the commission, ―which should occupy itself with projects

that expand and beautify the city and which are then submitted for the approval of the

city council.‖157 But as John Agnew goes on to note in surveying the trajectory of

Rome‘s post-1870 urban modernization, ―What beautifying Rome entailed became clear

over the next 80 years. Above all it involved isolating as many as possible of the

monuments of Rome as ‗works of art.‘ In Baroque Rome streets and piazzas had been

seen as integral to the urban fabric, as elements in a spatial system that organized the

entire city. Now this integrated picture of the city was lost.‖ Thus, as we have already

seen, a central signature of the Baroque is the impulse towards an integration of the arts,

an expansive aesthetic where ‗frames‘ are broken and flow into ever larger and totalizing

works of art. And in this sense, the Baroque aspect of Rome had configured and

envisioned the city as an integrated whole—not a city that contained a set of discrete

monuments and objects d‘art, but an artwork itself that happened to contain a city.

157
Ibid., 32.

200
 If the seventeenth-century aspect and integration of the city was being thus

gradually deconstructed, the city nevertheless remained thoroughly Baroque in another

sense that we have already described. For also central to the Baroque, as later theorists

have proposed, is the tense and visible dialectic between past and present, renewal and

ruination, that seems to recur when Baroque sensibility manifests itself. Thus, while the

modern features of cities like London and Berlin appeared to overwhelm their pasts, the

political contexts and urban geography of Rome made a total and modern remaking of the

city a near impossibility. Even with all its growth and with all its municipal planning, the

face of Rome would remain defined by a unique mix of various historical strata. As one

more contemporary commentator has put it, ―the city has largely maintained its historic

skyline dominated by monuments from its ancient, Renaissance and Baroque building

epochs. Rome is not simply a montage of ruins within a modern city as is the case, for

example, with Athens. ‗It is a crumbling mixture of all its pasts, jumbled together and

still living, never dead but never freshly alive.‘‖158 Therefore, even as Rome partially

shed its pretension as a totalized Baroque urban space in its confrontations with

modernity, its Baroque character was only further amplified to the degree that these

processes only highlighted the ruinous historicity of its landscapes.

It was thus into this context, albeit during the very first and more modest

transformations of Rome, that Burckhardt made his late visits in 1875 and 1883, visits in

which we see the aging professor increasingly conscious of the Baroque, the historicity of

Rome and an ever greater sense of his own historical mortality. Initially, however,

Burckhardt seems to have been most impressed by the changes in the city since his last

158
Ibid., 9.

201
visits over two decades before. Writing to Max Alioth shortly after his arrival in early

April 1875, and alert to the city‘s new national and international status, Burckhardt

declares that ―Rome has changed enormously, evenings and nights the Corso is a little

piece of Paris; the invasion of other Italians and all their dialects is gradually more

apparent; I hear Milanese and Neapolitan, etc.‖159 Indeed, the years had not only brought

an influx of Italians from other regions, but also an immense increase in the number of

foreign tourists visiting the eternal city, travelers coming to make the modern pilgrimage

associated with the new devotions of sightseeing. Given its functions in relation to

Catholicism, and as a destination for academicians throughout Europe, Rome had of

course never been without its share of foreign voices. But from Burckhardt‘s

perspective, the throngs of these new Italian and European visitors marked a serious

change from the impressions of his earlier visits. ―What characterizes Rome at the

moment,‖ Burckhardt comments with more than a touch of grumpy condescension, ―is

the huge number of Germans; today in the imperial palaces they represented a sizable

majority. On this one day, I was strolling somewhat behind a party of Germans in the

Vatican, a party for whom an old Austrian was acting as Cicerone; you should have

heard what he was telling them!‖160 Indeed, perhaps since the English had already long

been visible fixtures as visitors in Rome, well before Burckhardt‘s own first visits, the

Basler surveys the massive increase in German visitors with especially intense suspicion

and irritation. Aside from regular gallery tours with Wilhelm Bode (1845-1929), who

159
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 6, 21. ―Rom ist enorm verändert, der Corso Abends und Nachts ein Stück
Paris; die Invasion der Italiener und aller ihrer Dialecte fällt bei Schritt und Tritt auf; ich höre Milanese und
Napolitanisch etc.‖
160
Ibid., 22. ―Was Rom für mich momentan besonders kennzeichnet das ist die große Menge von
Deutschen; heute in den Kaiserpalästen waren sie die beträchtliche Mehrzahl. Dieser Tage im Vatican ging
ich einer Partie Deutschen nach, welche einen alten ausrangirten Östreicher zum Cicerone hatten; Sie
hätten hören sollen, was Der ihnen erzählte!‖

202
would later become Director General of Prussian Museums in the early twentieth century,

Burckhardt attempted to avoid fraternization with the new German visitors whom he

viewed with an extremely critical eye. ―Otherwise, I don‘t know any Germans,‖ writes

Burckhardt,

but I see them in large numbers in all the galleries, etc.. Most of them belong to
that type of modern penitent pilgrim, the ones no longer drawn to Rome‘s churches
of indulgence with stones in their shoes and weals on their backs. Instead, these
must do their penitence in murderous boredom before art works in which they
have no interest. The Italians don‘t seem to me to suffer from the same effect; they
either simply walk on or they stay and look at things properly.161

Indulging here in a by no means original disparagement of tourist newcomers,

Burckhardt nevertheless detects something perfunctory and obligatory in the Sehweise of

these modern German penitents making their obeisance before the cultural relics of

Rome. Thus, where he sees the Italians still relating to works of art in a more authentic

and subjective fashion, the German visitors approach the same objects as if in the stations

of a dutiful passion, stations of an auratic—and horribly bored—reception that is

demanded in the scriptures of the little red Baedeker.

Of changes in the city‘s urban spaces and architectural features, on the other hand,

Burckhardt is even more explicit in the 1883 journey, Rome by this point having had

thirteen years of expansion and reconstruction as a capital city. Writing to Robert

Grüninger from Rome in August of 1883, Burckhardt declares with some melancholy:

After 37 years, Rome has changed enormously, and all the old streets are now to
small for this crowded melee. This evening I ―strolled‖ through Trastevere, but

161
Ibid.. 22. ―Sonst kenne ich keine Deutschen, sehe sie aber massenhaft in allen Galerien etc.. Die meisten
davon gehören zu jenen modernen Bußpilgern, die nicht mehr mit Steinen in den Schuhen und
Geißelstriemen auf dem Rücken den römischen Ablaßkirchen nachziehen, sondern ihre Buße durch
mörderliche Langeweile vor Kunstwerken, an denen sie nichts haben, abmachen müssen. Die Italiener
machen mir in den Galerien nie diesen Effect; entweder sie laufen fort oder sie sehen die Sachen recht an.‖

203
 the stroll soon lost its interest because of the crush of carts and down and out
people. They have buses circulating at will through through this city with no
sidewalks, and if the Italians didn‘t understand driving in traffic completely, then
there would be one accident after another. But they are fools to want to hold an
Esposizione mundiale, or World‘s Fair, in such city. [...] One hears a lot of talk
here about a great traffic artery to be built by breaking through the city, but about
its precise orientation one hears many different things. The most insistent of these
rumors relates to the route from Piazza Venezia to St. Peter‘s. Oddly enough, the
views of the Tiber from Ponte Sisto, both upstream and downstream, are not yet
completely spoiled. As for living in this city, or settling down in it, I no longer
have any interest.162

As with London, though, here in the narrow streets of the ancient city, the spearhead of

modernity takes the form of fleets of city busses, oceans of traffic and masses that

demand new arteries and a rationalized city plan. And while Burckhardt had long toyed

with the romantic idea of resettling in Rome, an idea that was never entertained in a truly

serious fashion, it is interesting to note that such a vision no longer seems appealing to

the aging critic of modernity and resigned Basler. The Rome of his youth, at this moment

at least, both as a material reality and as an emanation of his imagination, was very

clearly no longer the Rome of 1883.

On the other hand, neither in 1883 nor since has Rome‘s visible historical aspect

been fully or completely effaced by the changes brought about after unification. It

remains perhaps unique in the degree to which the archaeological strata of is histories—

ancient and modern—persist in visible and legible evidence for even the most casual

162
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 8, 141. ―Rom hat sich seit 37 Jahren ganz enorm verändert, und alle altern
Gassen sind jetzt zu enge für dieß Gewühl. Heut Abend «schlenderte» ich im Trastevere, das Schlendern
wird Einem aber verleidet durch diese Menge von Karren und abgerissenen Menschen. Man läßt in der
ganzen trottoirlosen alten Stadt Omnibusse nach Belieben circuliren, und wenn die Römer das Fahren nicht
vorzüglich verständen, so gäbe es Ein Unglück über das andere. Narren sind sie aber, in einer solchen Stadt
eine Esposizione mundiale, Weltausstellung haben zu wollen. [...] Man redet wohl viel von einer großen
Arterie die durch die Stadt gebrochen werden soll, aber über die Richtung verlautet sehr Verschiedenes.
Das Nachdrücklichste heißt: direct von Piazza Venezia auf S. Peter los. Merkwürdiger Weise sind die hoch
malerischen Tiberanblicke von Ponte Sisto aufwärts und abwärts noch nicht stark verdorben. Aber leben
oder gar ausleben möchte ich hier nicht mehr.‖

204
observer. Thus, even amid explicit uncertainties about the transformations in Rome, and

with a seemingly limitless tolerance for ambivalence, Burckhardt still finds traces of the

Rome he remembers, an eternal city that all the construction and deconstruction of the

late nineteenth century could not efface. ―For the rest, Rome is passably intact in all its

essential parts,‖ relates Burckhardt in mid-April 1875 with a somewhat more sanguine

opinion of Roman transformations,

Aside from the area around Santa Maria Maggiore, and it is still filled with
excellent architectural views and aspects like no other city on Earth; it is no
longer the classical beauty of individual building that is decisive. Instead, whole
groups have been thrown up together in many different periods as if in accord
with a uniform model.163

Taken as a whole, in other words, taken as a visible totality, Rome here remains passably

intact from Burckhardt‘s perspective. The ‗isolation‘ or atomization of the city‘s

aesthetic monuments described by Agnew had clearly not advanced enough to change

Rome in its more panoramic perspectives. It is, however, interesting that Burckhardt‘s

appreciation of this perspective recognizes the character of the city in its Baroque aspect

as an aesthetic totality, as an integrated urban landscape where individual monuments are

subsumed and enveloped by the effect of the whole. Thus, far from the individualizing

aesthetic of the Renaissance, a sensibility in which both artwork and subject matter strive

towards a discrete self-sufficiency, Rome persists for Burckhardt to the extent that it

becomes itself an immense Baroque Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art.

163
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 6, 32. ―Im Übrigen ist Rom noch in all seinen wesentlichen Theilen
ausgenommen die Gegend um S. M. maggiore, leidlich intact, und hat noch jene ganze Fülle vornehmer
architectonischer Anblicke wie keine andere Stadt auf Erden; es ist gar nicht immer die classische
Schönheit des einzelnen Gebäudes welche entscheidet, sondern ganze Gruppen sind wie selbstverständlich
in verschiedenen Zeiten nach einem gleichartigen großen Model zusammengestellt worden.‖

205
 It is not surprising, then, to find Burckhardt‘s reception in these later visits

assuming and appreciating the contours of a more Baroque sensibility. Indeed, along

with Burckhardt‘s already noted late fascination with Rubens, the late correspondence

reveals a significant shift in Burckhardt‘s once unsympathetic estimation of seventeenth-

century art and culture. As early as the 1875 journey, Burckhardt could write to Alioth

that his ―respect for the baroque increases by the hour, and he would be soon inclined to

see it as the true end and culmination of living architecture. It not only has the resources

for everything that serves a practical purpose, but also those of beautiful appearance.‖164

Still over a decade before the appearance of Cornelius Gurlitt‘s path-breaking

treatments, works that marked Baroque‘s reemergence as a legitimate topic,

Burckhardt himself was already showing early signs not only of a scholarly

reevaluation of the era, but indications of a true enthusiasm for its cultural producti on.

Only a year after the 1875 Rome visit, Burckhardt would again take up the topic in a

letter written during a trip to Milan. ―On the issue of the Baroque I am becoming ever

more heretical,‖ he writes, ―Already at the beginning of our trip, I found myself

enlivened in the church in Feldkirch by the most ingenious Baroque confessional, and

thought at once: If only Max could see that!—Here in Milan one can wallow in the

Baroque.‖165 Indeed, it was the persistence of this interest that no doubt led

Burckhardt‘s encouragement of Wölfflin in his own efforts of the late 1880‘s, efforts

that resulted in the latter‘s Renaissance and Barok (1888).

164
Ibid., 21. ―Mein Respect vor dem Barocco nimmt stündlich zu und ich bin bald geneigt, ihn für das
eigentliche Ende und Hauptresultat der lebendigen Architectur zu halten. Er hat nicht nur Mittel für Alles,
was zum Zweck dient, sondern auch für den schönen Schein.‖
165
Ibid., 96. ―In Sachen des Barocco werde ich immer ketzerischer. Schon ganz am Anfang unserer Reise
erquickte mich in der Kirche zu Feldkirch der genialste Barocco-Beichtstuhl den ich je gesehen, und es
hieß sogleich: Wenn doch der Max das sähe! — Hier in Mailand kann man in Barocco schwelgen.‖

206
 Therefore, while a thoroughgoing art historical literature was still only on the

horizon during Burckhardt‘s late trips to Rome, the journeys themselves reveal that

Burckhardt shared the new enthusiasm for the era, an enthusiasm that would become a

more generalized disciplinary phenomenon in the coming decades. This nascent

―heretical‖ interest in seventeenth-century culture, however, coupled with Burckhardt‘s

reflections on the paradoxically changed and unchanged urban landscape of Rome, finds

the Basel professor not only ―seeing‖ the Baroque freshly—and perhaps for the first

time—but also seeing with it. As we have already noted, Burckhardt describes Rome in

accordance with a mode of seeing and an aesthetic sensibility increasingly removed from

those that had been announced sympathetically in works devoted to the Renaissance. But

in these visions of Rome, visions defined by a reception of the city as itself a total work

of art, Burckhardt‘s engagement with Baroque aesthetics weaves its way even more

clearly into his curiously ambivalent reception of the histories made legible within

Roman urban space. Indeed, in reflecting on the tensions between past and present, in the

almost effortless shuttling between Rome as ancient ruin and Rome as modern ruination,

Burckhardt‘s correspondence likewise reveals an attempt to come to grips with the

inevitabilities of historicity, and an almost Baroque uncertainty (in both the modern and

early modern senses) as to whether and how these inevitable processes could be captured,

preserved, or above all, represented.

Simultaneously with reflections on the nature of Roman history and a more urgent

sense of personal mortality, Burckhardt conspicuously reveals a new interest that would

become perhaps the passionate obsession of his later years—the collection of

photographs. This obsession, increasingly central to the correspondence of his later

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years, focused almost exclusively on reproductions of artworks and appears to have

begun in earnest during the decade after his 1858 assumption of academic duties at the

University of Basel. Always emphasizing the value of direct Anschauung for cultural

historical methodology, Burckhardt quickly came to view the assembly and organization

of his collection as an absolute necessity in relation to his pedagogical duties. Writing to

the university in 1874 regarding impending research travel to Paris, Burckhardt explains,

―For the purpose of the lectures, on the other hand, I‘ll have to expand my own collection

by purchases primarily in Paris. This is the only place where individual folios and

consigments of publications, together with photographs, can be had in large selections

and for reasonable prices.‖166 But apparently Paris— ―as the only place‖—had not

completely satisfied the pedagogically urgent need for reproductions, as Burckhardt

writes only a year later of Rome, ―where I must refresh my memories and purchase

photographs, both for the purpose of my art historical lectures.‖167 In any event,

regardless of intended Behuf, Burckhardt would continue to collect photographs of

significant artworks on every one of his major travels of later life, and on an ever

increasing scale.

At the same time, Burckhardt‘s interest in such collecting was not merely

pedagogical in nature. Linked perhaps to his increasingly pessimistic outlook for the

artistic legacies of Europe, the historian saw in photography a means of preservation in

166
Marc Siebert, ―‗Wo ich nicht von der Anschauung ausgehen kann, da leiste ich nichts.‘ Jacob
Burckhardt und die Photographie‖ in Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kunst der Malerei in Italien, Christine Tauber
ed. (Basel: Schwabe, 2003). ―Zum Behuf der Vorlesungen dagegen werde ich meine eigene Sammlung
durch Ankäufe hauptsächlich in Paris vermehren müssen, welches der einzige Ort ist, wo vereinzelte
Blätter und Lieferungen von Kunstpublicationen sammt Photographien in größerer Auswahl und zu
leidlichen Preisen zu haben sind.‖
167
Ibid., 12-13. ―Wo ich meine Erinnerungen auffrischen und Photographien kaufen muß, beides zum
Behuf meiner kunstgeschichtlichen Vorlesungen.‖

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an era that seemed increasingly unconcerned with cultural remembrance. ―One day, he

laid his head in his arms as he stood at the lectern.― remembered Nicholas Bolt, a former

student of Burckhardt‘s, ―All of the students, even the most lively, became still. What

has happened? He lifts his head: ‚Gentlemen. A bomb has exploded in the Hermitage in

Petersburg. Heinous hands have planted it. We must have all art works

photographed.‘‖168 For Burckhardt, who would be nearly overwhelmed by anxiety in

1870 upon hearing rumors of the destruction of the Louvre, photography thus also

represented a powerful instrument with which to protect the memory of cultural artifacts.

Therefore, despite its limitations as a still relatively new form of reproduction,

Burckhardt nevertheless greeted the technology as a benefit not only to his own memory,

but to that of the nineteenth century as well.

For all of these reasons, therefore, issues of finding, buying, organizing and

transporting photographic reproductions becomes a central feature of the documents from

his late Roman journeys. While almost every missive contains at least a passing

reference to the state of his finds and purchases, others find Burckhardt relating

seemingly every detail of prices, quality, shops and purveyors. ―It was of the frescos in

Siena that I saw the most,‖ Burckhardt writes immediately upon his arrival in Rome, ―and

diligently purchased photographs, on which I‘ve already spent over 120 fr. (without

Rome).―169 Once in Rome, however, Burckhardt‘s purchases achieved an even greater

pace, his experiences seemingly dominated by a perpetual and urgent search for rich

168
Ibid., 14. ―Einmal legt er vor der Vorlesung am Pult den Kopf auf die Arme. Die Studenten, auch die
lebenstollsten, werden still. Was ist geschehen? Er hebt das Haupt: ‗Meine Herrn. In der Eremitage zu
Petersburg ist eine Bombe explodiert. Ruchlose Hände haben sie gelegt. Wir müssen alle Kunstwerke
photographieren lassen.‖
169
Briefe, Vol. 6, 17-18. ―Von der Freskenwelt von Siena habe ich das Meiste wiedergesehen und tüchtig
Photographien gekauft, an welchen ich bis jetzt schon über 120 fr. (ohne Rom) ausgegeben habe.‖

209
veins of photographic reproduction, dominated almost to the exclusion of the cultural

artifacts themselves:

If I only had 3 more months! But instead of being able to really contemplate
things, I have to go from one bottega di fotografo to another (something that is
completely against my grain), and while I get something from this, it‘s not much.
[...] I have to carry with me numberless reference samples, and have to rummage
through many reproductions that are underexposed or overexposed, all so I don‘t
miss the one print I‘m pursuing.170

Whether such collecting and shopping was truly an activity ―against the grain‖ for

Burckhardt seems belied by the record left in his correspondence, a record in which such

purchases and bemused self-reflection are by no means rare. In any event, by the end of

his 1875 Roman trip, Burckhardt had to turn his attention to the problem of delivering the

fruits of his labors back to his Basel home. Again writing to Max Alioth, Burckhardt

archly describes his preparations:

On photographs and other rubbish, I have now spent over 600 francs, and today I
had the shipping agent‘s help in my room; just like one has the carpenter come by
to measure a corpse for a coffin, this one had to have the measurements taken for
a crate that will hold the results of the 16 days of purchases that will be picked up
early tomorrow. For the last days (until Tuesday evening) I want to enjoy Rome
and buy nothing more.171

In an intriguing reversal, therefore, it is only with his photographic relics safely packed

away in the cargo ―casket‖ that would carry them safely on the journey to the north, does

170
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 6, 26. ―Wenn ich nur auch 3 Monate Zeit hätte! aber statt den Dingen
nachsinnen zu können, muß ich von einer bottega di fotografo zur andern ziehen und märten, was mir
vollkommen gegen den Strich ist, auch erreiche ich damit wohl etwas, aber nicht viel. [...] ich muß endlos
viele kunsthistorische Belegstücke mitbringen und oft ganz lahme und versengte Abdrücke
zusammenraffen nur damit ich dem betreffenden Blatt nicht noch einmal extra nachlaufen muß.‖
171
Ibid., 30-31. ―Ich habe nun an Photographien und anderm Schund über 600 francs verklopft und heute
den Spediteursgehülfen auf dem Zimmer gehabt; wie man den Schreiner kommen läßt um für einen Todten
den Sarg anzumessen, so hat dieser für das Ergebniß eines 16tägigen Kaufens das Maß für die Kiste
nehmen müssen, mit der er morgen früh aufrücken wird. Denn die letzten Tage (bis nächsten Dienstag
Abend!) will ich Rom genießen und nichts mehr kaufen.‖

210
Burckhardt resolve to enjoy Rome. Only then, in other words, does he resolve to enjoy

the actuality of the city rather than the virtuality of its photographic representations.

Amid the furious collection of photographs, however, amid the stockpiling and

organizing of representations of a changing Rome, another leitmotif likewise works its

way into the late correspondence, and reflections on, the eternal city. Complementing the

urgency of his project of photographic preservation are increasingly frequent notes and

intimations of his own mortality. ―Oh Grien,‖ he declares to Robert Gruninger in August

of 1883, ―I‘m back again in the old place, with pleasantly mild temperatures owing to a

deliciously delicate Tramontana. I could not have died peacefully without having seen

Rome once more.‖172 A few days later, writing to Gustav Stehelin, Burckhardt continued

in a similar vein:

For my life, since this morrning, there is not a lot more to be said; I have seen
Raphael once more in the halls of the Vatican, and can now peacefully die.
Actually, I wanted only to go to St. Peter‘s early this morning, but quickly
realized that everything was open! In the end, I bribed the garden doorman with 1
Lira and walked about the wonderful papal garden whose grounds I hadn‘t
trodden since those early times of Pio nono! I was completely alone in the little
Villa Pia where only the fountains speak, and the intoxicating smell from all the
southern flora presses in.173

A visit once again to the Vatican, a communion with Raphael and a stroll through the

gardens are related thus in the tones and hues of an elegiac summation, an experience that

resonates not only with memories of the early era of Pius IX—the 1840‘s and 1850‘s

172
Briefe, Vol.8, 134. „O Grien, ich bin wieder in dem alten Nest angelangt, bei köstlich milder
Temperatur vermöge deliciöser kleiner Tramontana. Ich hätte eben doch nicht ruhig sterben können ohne
Rom noch einmal gesehen zu haben.
173
Briefe, Vol.8, 136. ―An meinem Leben liegt seit heute Morgen nicht mehr viel; ich habe Rafael in den
vaticanischen Sälen noch einmal gesehen und kann nun ruhig sterben. Ich wollte heut früh eigentlich nur
nach S. Peter, merkte dann aber und erfuhr auch, daß Alles offen sei! Zum Schluß bestach ich noch den
Gartenportier mit 1 Lira und lief in dem wunderbaren päpstlichen Garten herum, den ich seit den ersten
Zeiten des Pio nono nicht mehr betreten hatte! ich war ganz einsam in der kleinen Villa Pia wo nur die
Fontaine redete und von all den südlichen Pflanzen ein betäubender Wohlgeruch eindrang.‖

211
when Burckhardt first came to Rome—but also with a sense of impending mortality. The

city, in other words, speaks to Burckhardt of both its own historicity but also of his own.

Put differently, the tensions between eternity and history that Baroque Rome embodies

also become a geographical echo and occasion for Burckhardt‘s insistent memories of

younger days and urgent premonitions of the far fewer days that remained.174 In effect,

the city of Baroque allegory itself becomes an allegorical mirror for Burckhardt‘s own

sense of personal historicity. His own pasts, his own all too historical future, find

themselves woven into the experience of an urban landscape that likewise wears these

characteristics with a unique clarity and distinctness. Where Paris, and particularly

London, had presented geographies that tended to conceal historicity beneath the eternal

present of privileged modernity, Burckhardt‘s Rome paraded all of its tattered historical

costumes at once, and reminded the visitor that all such costumes were once

representations of a powerful present. Rome possesses a geography and landscape that

simply resists the suppression of its pasts—much to the frustrations, for example, of later

Fascist efforts—and cannot conceal its perpetual ruination and reconfiguration.

Thus, as with Freud‘s much later reflections in Civilization and its Discontents,

Rome emerges for Burckhardt as the occasion for an extended and immense allegory, one

which captures the tension between a self-conscious present and a vast and ruinous

174
Another example: ―Ferner machte ich heut Nachmittag in reichlicher Gluthhitze einen eiteln Versuch
— nur par acquit de conscience — in Villa Ludovisi einzudringen, um die Statuen wieder zu sehen - Alles
war hermetisch verschlossen, da schlenderte ich vor Porta Salara und vor Porta Pia hinaus, legte meinen
Rock übenden Arm, ging bis nach S. Costanza und S. Agnese und ließ mir wieder einmal seit 30 Jahren die
beiden alten Kirchen durch einen guten alten Pater aufmachen. - Dann lag, im Kampf zwischen
Tramontana und Scirocco, die erhabene Campagna so eigenthümlich da und ich lief bis über Ponte
Nomentano und sah den Teverone wieder wie in den Zeiten meiner Jugend. Auf dem Heimweg erquickte
mich ein herrliches Fiaschetto Velletri in einer ländlichen Osterie. Wie altgewohnt sieht da Alles aus im
Vergleich mit der fluchwürdig gewordenen Straße, ehmals Via Flaminia, von Porta del Popolo aus! wo das
herrliche Rococo-Casino rechts bis auf kleine Trümmer verschwunden und ein vierstöckiges Scheusal
neben dem andern entstanden ist! —.‖ Burckhardt, to Max Alioth August 23, 1883.

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past.175 But where Freud may have highlighted the degree to which such pasts could be

submerged and repressed by the surface experiences of the present—though he chooses

the ―eternal city‖ precisely because its pasts are visible and cannot be completely

subsumed—Burckhardt‘s strolls through Rome suggest an urban experience that actively

undermines such repressions and radically relativizes the claims of any privileged

present—modern or otherwise, personal or otherwise. Indeed, following Freud, if the

city could be analogized with a ―psychical entity‖, then Burckhardt‘s Rome is one where

repressed pasts bubble up and announce themselves with an extreme clarity and

frequency. From this perspective, the urban geography of Rome is one uniquely

characterized by, and suffused with, the uncanny intrusions of the past into the present. It

is no accident after all that Freud, in his essay on the topic, illustrates the sense of

175
― . . . in mental life nothing which has been once formed can perish . . . everything is somehow preserved
and . . . in suitable circumstances (when, for instance, regression goes back far enough) it can once more be
brought to light. Let us try to grasp what this assumption involves by taking an analogy from another field.
We will choose as an example the history of the Eternal City . . .
. . . Let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity
with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into
existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the
latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius
Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would still
be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on.
But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand—without the
palazzo having to be removed—the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as
the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was
ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire
Nero‘s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of
today, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa;
indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the
ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only have to change the direction
of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other . . .
Perhaps we are going too far in this. Perhaps we ought to content ourselves with asserting that what is past
in mental life may be preserved and is not necessarily destroyed. It is always possible that even in the mind
some of what is old is effaced or absorbed—whether in the normal course of things or as an exception—to
such an extent that it cannot be restored or revivified by any means; or that preservation in general is
dependent on certain favorable conditions. It is possible, but we know nothing about it. We can only hold
fast to the fact that it is rather the rule than the exception for the past to be preserved in mental life. Thus
we are perfectly willing to acknowledge that the ‗oceanic‘ feeling exists in many people, and we are
inclined to trace it back to an early phase of ego-feeling.‖ Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents,
New York: Norton, 2005), 16-20.

213
repetition and uncertainty that he linked to the uncanny with an anecdote in which he

becomes hopelessly lost in the labyrinthine streets of an Italian city. To be sure, it would

be a mistake to shoehorn these later Freudian reflections into the much earlier Roman

ruminations of Burckhardt, ruminations that were neither thematized nor theorized as

explicitly as they would be in the subsequent psychoanalytic literature. Nevertheless,

Freud‘s Roman metaphor captures well the uncanny experience of historical crisis, as

both an urban and subjective phenomenon, in which the present becomes conscious of its

own fragile mastery of its pasts, in which the most recent scribblings on the palimpsests

of city and ego find themselves nearly overwhelmed by the graffiti of a vast and only

partially concealed historical text. And for Burckhardt, as for Freud, Rome becomes an

urban emblem of this very predicament, an allegory that captures a space of tension that

opens up between the never fully adequate representations of the present and the never

fully visible contours of the past.

From this vantage point, Burckhardt‘s mania for photography emerges in a

somewhat different light. Following Kracauer‘s reflections on the nature of photographic

representation, reflections that configured the medium as an extension and amplification

of the tensions in allegorical representation, Burckhardt‘s fascination with mechanical

reproduction and his mania for collecting assume the intriguing form of characteristically

Baroque representational strategies. For if the seventeenth century saw the pervasive

embrace of allegorical representation as a means of capturing the metaphysical and

epistemological antinomies of its own era—historicity and eternity, soul and flesh—the

abstracted representations of nineteenth-century photography likewise announced a

strategy to confront its own antinomies of present modernity and persistent pasts. Thus,

214
if the collected images in Kracauer‘s illustrated magazines occupied a similar functional

position as did the emblem books of the seventeenth century, then one could say that the

photograph carries out the same task as the allegory in the Baroque. In this sense,

photography reveals itself as the expression of an era that is both hyper-conscious and

dreamily self-deluded about the distances increasingly opened up between representation

of the past and the experience of history. In the latter instance, the photograph speaks of

a state of misrecognition to the degree that it purports and claims to capture a transparent

and objective reality, a past moment wie es eigentlich gewesen. In photography‘s claim

to secure the authentic presence of the represented subject matter, a pacification of the

past that delivers a once recalcitrant history in an image of pure visibility, the medium

announces a dreamed of solution to the uncertainties of historical reflection, and the

tensions between past and present. In the former case, the photograph announces a

hyper-consciousness of the past to the degree that it reveals its character as a

representational strategy, as a sign that points to, but cannot truly make present its

designated and depicted referent. It is of course this dual nature of the photograph,

claiming unmediated presence of the subject even while operating as a thoroughly

mediated sign, that has prompted subsequent theorists to describe its curiously uncanny

nature; the images in photographs appear to us as ghostlike apparitions, present in some

significant sense to the viewer, but also a reminder of what is irretrievably absent, distant

and other.

Like the Baroque allegory, in other words, the photograph can be understood as

signifying representation stretched to an extreme limit, its abstracted images tensely

holding together past and present, sign and referent, in a context where the distances

215
between these appear to be ever widening. Where the abstract seventeenth-century

allegory permitted the representation of a metaphysical relation, however tenuous,

between the ideality of spirit and the materiality of the flesh, the photograph likewise

presents an abstraction that purports to restore an historical relation between past and

present. But in this fashion, the photograph may also share with allegory the same status

as a ruination of representation (and representation of ruin), both in the supposedly

inadequate or incomplete delivery of its referent, and in the corollary that it requires the

intervention of historically situated interpretation. Similar to the ruin or the allegory (or

the Baroque allegorical representation of the ruin), the photograph hovers ambivalently

between claims of both preservation and transience, the eternal and the ephemeral, its

own material state of ruination or incompletion paradoxically becoming the sign for a lost

totality or ideality. Indeed, like the allegory in its relation to seventeenth century

metaphysics, the photograph becomes the strategy of choice for an era confronted with

similar antinomies of meaning making and representation—not ones, in this instance, of

heaven and earth, but instead of past and present.

Seen in this light, Burckhardt‘s late mania for collecting photographs can be

explained not only in terms of pedagogy and preservation, though these were no doubt

foremost, but may also speak to a curious representational correspondence between the

medium of photography, the ruins of Rome, and a European modernity unsure of its links

with the past. For a Burckhardt that had placed such novel emphasis on the importance

of the image and of Anschauung in relation to the interpretation and representation of the

past, photography had to have fascinated as a medium of such reflection. For an historian

who once said that, ―Wo ich nicht von der Anschauung ausgehen kann, da leiste ich

216
nichts,‖ the photograph clearly presented a mode of Anschauung whose nature

corresponded with his own presentiments about the nature of Rome in particular and

European modernity in general. Thus, even while Burckhardt was himself in little doubt

about the representational limitations of photography, it nevertheless provided a form of

presence even in the midst of historical ruin. ―I‘m living already in a morass of

photographs,‖ he reflects in a letter from Rome,

and I‘m only at the beginning. By and by, however, certain thoughts have occured to
me, not really in relation to me, but in relation to those that come after us: that
everything will fade, even while the least lithographic representation lasts; and one will
say: if one fades, then just make 1000 more—only the objects themselves are not eternal!
And I have seen much in the Camposanto in Pisa that is further destroyed than before, and
also in the Palazzo Publico in Siena.176

Thus, in a world in which everything is doomed eventually to fade, the photograph may

come to stand as the only representational signum of a past that is perpetually bleached

and faded by the intense light of subsequent presents. But in doing so, in becoming the

present sign of a lost history, the photograph also captures the tensions inherent in

Burckhardt‘s Rome, tensions born of the intimate links between its historical geographies

and an historically overdetermined semiotic landscape. In other words, while the

photograph may preserve the past, it does so by injecting it into the mediations of the

technology and subsequent arrangement and interpretation. Put differently, and

somewhat paradoxically, the past is made available, but only on the condition that it is

subject to the ravages of abstraction, time and historical reevaluation. Again, like the

176
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 6, 23. ―Ich lebe bereits in einem Morast von Photographien und bin doch erst
am Anfang. Allgemach kommen mir aber, nicht für mich sondern für die welche nach uns kommen,
gewisse Bedenken: das Alles wird verbleichen, während die geringste lithographische Ansicht dauerte; [...]
und man wird sagen: wenn eine verbleicht, so macht man 1000 neue — allein die Objecte selbst sind nicht
ewig! und ich habe im Camposanto zu Pisa Manches viel zerstörter angetroffen als früher, auch im Palazzo
pubblico zu Siena.‖

217
ruin, Burckhardt‘s photographs preserve the past only to the extent that they also reveal

their ever increasing distance from that past. The photograph may capture the historical

object or event, but does so only at the price of rendering this object as a sign, a

representation or cipher.

Conversely, it can be argued that, for Burckhardt, it was precisely this ruined and

mediated character of the photograph that made it such an attractive mode of

representation for a Rome that was similarly defined by ruination and unstable historicity.

For Rome itself, in the 1870‘s and 1880‘s, was not only an ancient city filled with signs

and wonders from a multitude of epochs, it was also a place clearly embarking on its own

confrontation with European urban modernity. What made Rome‘s pasts so accessible

and insistent, the dense and visible juxtaposition of its various histories, were precisely

the same features that made photography an attractive representational medium. For in

its own uncanniness, the photograph also captured the curious uncanniness of Roman

landscapes, the simultaneous presence and absence of history and its ghosts. And while

for a Leopold von Ranke, this representational mode would perhaps not have reached the

threshold necessary to see the past as it really was, an aging Burckhardt may have found

in this inadequacy the perfect visual emblem for an historical moment that resolutely

resisted capture from a single historical vantage point, and a landscape where history

perpetually dissolved from objects into signs.

Thus, very much like those sweeping curves and folds of the seventeenth century,

Burckhardt‘s fascination with photography and the baroque finds him veering ever closer

to closing the circle that began with his youthful experiments with the emblems of the

Antiquities. But even more immediate is the way in which his nomadic collection of

218
photographs comes near to establishing a new harmony that re-territorializes national

history onto the level of European cultural history. And to a degree, as his pedagogical

and preservational pronouncements indicate, this is true to a significant extent. From his

Grossdeutsch beginnings, Burckhardt remained a cosmopolitan concerned with the unity

and persistence of pan-European cultural legacies, and to the extent that his unique forms

of visual and cultural history disrupted textual and national historical narrative, this was

accomplished by foregrounding the contours of civilization in its Western forms.

At the same time, however, the deployment of the concept of the Baroque towards

these ends carries with it some strangely paradoxical consequences. For in capturing

modernity through the lens of the Baroque, one captures it by means of a concept

associated with movement, instability, irony and de-centeredness, a concept by its very

nature intent on breaking the frames of every territorializing effort it encounters. Thus,

where Spanish colonial power sought to reterritorialize the New World culturally by

means of the Baroque, it was in the Latin American Neo-Baroque of the twentieth

century that the form was appropriated and redeployed as a form of counter-hegemony.

In its insistent protean character, in its unsettled and extravagant motions, the Baroque

can thus represent both empire and the nomad. Therefore, even as Burckhardt‘s Europe

comes to an unsettled rest in the tensions and allegorical imagery of the Baroque and the

Baroque modern, its nomadic energies and imperatives would reassert in themselves in

the coming century.

219
 Part II

The Library and the Archive:

Aby Warburg, Sigmund Freud and the Labyrinth of Fin-de-Siècle Italy

220
 Chapter Four

Per Monstrum ad Astra:

The Library of Aby Warburg and the Labyrinth of Italy

In 1892, the aging and now celebrated author of the Civilization of the

Renaissance in Italy received a package from a still young and utterly unknown art

historian. The package contained a recently completed dissertation on the topic of

stylized ornamentation in the Primavera and Birth of Venus of Sandro Botticelli, and its

author, the eldest son of a major Hamburg banking family, was Aby Warburg. ―The fine

work,― wrote Jacob Burckhardt in a characteristically generous but reserved response,

―that I here return to you demonstrates the tremendous depth and multi-dimensionality

that research on the Renaissance has reached.‖177 This brief moment of personal contact

between Burckhardt and Warburg, only a few years before the 1897 death of the former,

nevertheless marks the beginning of the long career of the latter, a career whose contours

would be decisively informed by the work of the Basel historian and a similar fascination

with the significance of Italy in the cultural history of European modernity. If Italy had

been a territory of decisive personal and professional orientation for Jacob Burckhardt, it

was likewise for Warburg charged with symbolic overtones of breaks with disciplinary

tradition, religious faith, familial expectations, and national historiographies For it was in

pursuit of an education in the field of art history, a career path that steered the eldest

177
Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 10, 65. ―Die schöne Arbeit welche ich mit bestem Dank zurücksende,
zeugt von der ungemeinen Vertiefung und Vielseitigkeit welche die Erforschung der Höhezeiten der
Renaissance erreicht hat.‖

221
Warburg son away from a Rabbinical calling or a leading role in the banking business,

that Warburg first journeyed to Italy to participate in August Schmarsow‘s 1888 Florence

seminar.178 But the impact of the Italian experience would extend far beyond uncertain

early attempts at liberation from family obligations and the establishment of an

independent professional identity. Warburg met his future wife, Mary Hertz, an artist and

daughter of a Hamburg senator, during this early sojourn, and once married in 1895, the

couple set up residence once again in Florence until 1903. Indeed, it was likewise in

Florence that Warburg began his first researches in the issue of the relation between the

Renaissance and its reception of pagan antiquity—a dissertation on the theme of

movement and fluttering garments in Botticelli‘s Primavera and Birth of Venus.179 This

theme, in turn, of the complex interpenetrations of tradition, mythology, past history and

present experience would become the lodestar guiding and prompting him through his

subsequent geographical and intellectual journeys. As he would later describe himself, in

a phrase of simultaneous self-description and self-dispersal, and in a formulation that

captures a sense of what we might call his characteristically nomadic identity, Warburg

was, ―Ebreo di Sangue, Amburghese di Cuore, d'Anima Fiorentino.‖180

It seems fitting, therefore, that that we introduce the intellectual wanderings and

cartographies of Warburg by way of an anecdote from Burckhardt‘s later life, a Roman

encounter of the Basel historian who inaugurated a new era of Renaissance research and

similarly sojourned across boundaries of geographical, disciplinary and methodological

178
Hans W. Hubert, Das Kunsthistorische Institut in Florenz. Von der Gründung bis zum hundertjährigen
Jubiläum (1897-1997) (Florence: Ventilabro, 1997).
179
Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1969).
180
Gertrud Bing, ―Aby Warburg,‖ in Aby Warburg. Ausgewahlte Schriften Und Wurdigungen, Dieter
Wuttke and Carl Georg Heise eds. (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1979). ―Jewish by blood, Hamburger at
heart, Florentine in spirit.‖

222
territories. In a letter written during his 1875 journey to Rome, and between passages

describing the successes and frustrations of his growing photographic collection, Jacob

Burckhardt related the following anecdote to the Basel painter and architect, Max Alioth:

It was touching today in the great hall of the Capitoline Museum, where the
Centaurs stand; it was a public day and Romans of lesser means were also
strolling about; a good older woman accompanied by a child asked me with some
shock: where is it that such creatures could be found? And I had to reassure her
that these immaginazioni de' scultori seien, perchè, I added, sarebbe di troppo
l'intelligenza dell‗ uomo insieme colla forza del cavallo. But isn‘t it a wonderful
thing to sculpt for a people that takes even the most venturesome things for real?
A people that perhaps holds even feminine allegorical figures to be saintly
personages. While in the North, every child knows a priori that art is only a
lark.181

For a brief moment, in the nineteenth-century precincts of the Capitoline museum, the

Basel Ordinarius thus presents himself in the midst of a modern battle of centaurs, a

contemporary Theseus rescuing the Lapith women from the terrifying threat of the

centaur beast-men. In this instance, however, the instruments of victory are not sword

and shield, but a demystifying and rational Besonnenheit (detachment, deliberateness) or

Denkraum (space of thought or contemplation) that unmasks the strange figures as

nothing more than the fevered products of artistic and mythological imagination. But

while vanquishing one set of mythologies, Burckhardt nevertheless inscribes another in

its place. For in the space of only a few lines, Burckhardt reproduces a complex mythic

geography of European enlightened modernity, a topography richly inflected by

discourses of gender, class and nation. This modern Theseus, as always a figure of

181
Burckhardt, Briefe, Vol. 6, 22-23. ―Ganz rührend war's heute im großen Saal des Museo capitolino,
wo die Centauren stehen; es war Öffnungstag und auch armes Volk von Rom lief herum; eine gute alte
Frau mit einem Kind fragte mich ganz erschrocken, wo solche Creaturen vorkämen? und ich mußte sie
beruhigen daß dieß nur immaginazioni de' scultori seien, perchè, fügte ich weise hinzu, sarebbe di
troppo l'intelligenza dell‗ uomo insieme colla forza del cavallo. Aber ist es nicht eine herr liche Sache,
für ein Volk zu meißeln, das auch das Kühnste für wirklich hält? das vielleicht noch die allegorischen
weiblichen Figuren für sante persone hält? während ja im Norden jedes Kind a priori weiß, daß die
Kunst nur Spaß sei.‖

223
civilizing energy, here emerges from an enlightened north to penetrate the labyrinth of

myth and release the Italian woman and child of little means into the light of a

demystified history. The spell is once again broken, civilization is once again rescued

from fearsome superstition, and the slain monsters resolve themselves once more into

stone.

Thus, even in the hands of a scholar singularly alert to the various siren songs of

modernity and carefully distanced from the more voluptuous lures of religion, myth and

history, the most modern narrative of enlightenment cannot outpace its uncanny shadow

companion: myth. The self-cultivated gaze of allegorically inclined distance, towards

which we saw Burckhardt groping in the preceding chapter, seems haunted by presence

of an uncanny mythic supplement, a repressed mysticism that returns in the very narrative

of demystification. Of course, as a scholar constitutionally unable to share the

triumphalist currents of nineteenth-century historicism and positivism, Burckhardt was

well aware of the dark margins that necessarily hover around even the most brilliant of

lights and most enlightened ages. If the age of Constantine had its barbarian hoards in

the shadowed regions beyond the Limes, and if the creative efflorescence of the Italian

Renaissance had its counterpart in the egoism of unleashed individuality, the era of

European late modernity likewise had its own dark recesses, it own demons and monsters

which no enlightenment could ever truly and completely exorcise. Thus, though drawn

together by a common apprehension of these shadowed regions of the modern,

Burckhardt eventually cultivated a careful distance between himself and, for example, the

younger Nietzsche whose exploration and embrace of chthonic domains took on

dimensions that came to alarm his older Basel colleague. In the concluding remarks of a

224
1928 Hamburg seminar on Jacob Burckhardt, the Hamburg art historian Aby Warburg

would indulge in a bit of myth-making of his own:

Burckhardt was a necromancer, with his eyes open. Thus he conjured up spectres
which quite seriously threatened him. He evaded them by erecting his observation
tower. He is a seer such as Lynkeus (in Goethe's Faust); he sits in his tower and
speaks ... he was and remained a champion of enlightenment but one who never
desired to be anything but a simple teacher.182

As with Faust‘s Lynkeus, Burckhardt‘s visions are penetrating and far-reaching, but his

gaze is one that insists on a well maintained distance between the observer and the world

he surveys. And indeed, from his well protected tower post in Basel, the historian

preserved a critical and aesthetic distance from the world below, only too well aware that

the sculpture viewed from the tower comes to life once again as the fearsome centaur

when observed with too much intimacy.

It is more than a little ironic, therefore, that the work of this Lynkeus of Basel,

undertaken from a posture of well-guarded critical distance and ironic ambivalence,

should have helped inaugurate the late nineteenth-century enthusiasms that swirled

around the reception of the Italian Renaissance and its European counterparts. ―As a

result,‖ notes one observer, it was at precisely this moment that, ―the old qualifying

phrase, renaissance des beaux arts gradually gave way to the more definitely periodic

term la Renaissance, which was also used adjectively to denote a type or style of art.‖183

With the appearance of Burckhardt‘s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in

1860, the concept of the Renaissance underwent an important transformation, one

182
Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), III, 110. 4. Burckhardt und Nietzsche. See also E. H. Gombrich, Aby
Warburg: an Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, 1970), 255; Joseph Mali, Mythistory:
The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 181.
183
Wallace Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 144.

225
characterized curiously by both consolidation and dispersal. On the one hand, despite his

well documented allergy to the mixture of history with Hegelianism or speculative

philosophy of any sort, the life that Burckhardt breathed into the Renaissance was

animated not a little by the spiritual powers of Zeitgeist. As a consequence, the Italian

Renaissance was instantly transformed from an historical syndrome, a loose collection of

coincident phenomena, and consolidated into to an expressive cultural totality, a well

defined age whose various elements were unified internally and organically. On the other

hand, Burckhardt‘s exclusive focus on the Italian Renaissance and its relation to Western

antiquity had the paradoxical effect of making the era a phenomenon of truly

cosmopolitan interest. Thus, whereas Michelet had presented la Renaissance as a chapter

of a national narrative, a revolutionary break from the benighted epoch of the French

Middle Ages, Burckhardt resituated the Renaissance as a moment in the history of

Western modernity, a transition whose aftershocks were still being felt throughout

European civilization. If historians are sometimes said to ―make history come alive‖,

then it is doubtless to Burckhardt that we can charge with the nineteenth-century

―rebirth‖ of the Renaissance.184

184
Of course, an appreciation of the relatively distinct set of aesthetic and historical phenomena that would
eventually become associated with the term ―Renaissance‖ had been remarked upon well before
Burckhardt, observers from the era of Vasari until the eighteenth-century had long been intrigued by the
Italian Quatrocento and Cinquecento. But it was not until the first half of the nineteenth century that the
concept of the Renaissance, as a relatively well-defined and coherent historical period, became firmly
established. Thus, the seventh volume of Jules Michelet‘s History of France (1833-1862), entitled La
Renaissance, treated sixteenth-century France, and was one of the earliest works to examine the age as a
distinct era historical period rather than simply an assemblage of aesthetic categories and observations.
Indeed, whereas still other progenitors of the modern conception of the Renaissance can be found in a
variety of areas, including Sismondi, Stendhal and even in early Ruskin, its delimitation as an historical
moment distinct from the middle ages and terminating at some point in the mid-sixteenth century appears
to have gathered impetus from Romantic, but particularly Hegelian, currents that were penetrating
historical thought in the first half of the nineteenth century. See the still very useful and informative
Wallace Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought.

226
 As with any good gothic tale, where the necromancer or inventor is doomed to see

his creations take on a life of their own, even one carefully secured behind the walls of

his observation tower. In this instance, the Renaissance, which Burckhardt had

constructed in his compact 1860 volume, quickly took on a life of its own in the second

half of the nineteenth century, and became a key generative element in the various

Renaissance revivals that extended to the turn of the century and beyond. On the one

hand, and coinciding with the increasing professionalization of humanities scholarship

during the era, Burckhardt‘s work became a spur to research in an ever expanding realm

of academic Renaissance studies. Burckhardt‘s Renaissance emerged as an undiscovered

continent of historical interest, its revelation soon followed by the colonization of

specialists from a variety of disciplines and fields. More remarkable, and partly in

response to the popular reception of Burckhardt‘s work, was the way in which late

nineteenth-century interest in the Renaissance extended beyond both ―legitimate‖

disciplinary and scholarly boundaries. Indeed, while Burckhardt had maintained in his

later years a friendly though distanced relation and curiosity about Nietzsche, the

former‘s Renaissance had found a mutual resonance with the work of the latter in the

cultural phenomena of Renaissancismus or Renaissancekult, by the last decade of the

century. Drawn into this constellation of cultural fascination with the Renaissance were

not only fin-de-siècle discourses of aestheticism and decadence, but also currents of

nineteenth-century racialism and nationalism. Where the former were most visible in

British aestheticism, represented by figures such as Walter Pater and John Addington

Symonds, the threads of the latter extend from Gobineau‘s reactionary La Renaissance of

227
1877 to the Renaissance dramas of Gabrielle d‘Annunzio.185 In all these instances,

however, it the lure of the Renaissance was one in which Burckhardt‘s vision was

strongly inflected by the work of Nietzsche, an epoch of extravagant amorality and a

landscape of Übermenschen who acted ―beyond good and evil.‖ From within the well-

determined confining spaces of bourgeois social life and ethical propriety, so well

described by the later work of Walter Benjamin, the Renaissance became a magic mirror

in which was reflected the repressed double identity of the fin-de-siècle, a looking glass

beckoning with the image and promise of a world defined by passion and power rather

than Victorian convention.186

A strange creation indeed for a Burckhardt who had always sought a resigned and

critical distance from the images he brought to life in the Civilization of the Renaissance.

By the time of his death in 1897, the enthusiasms of his younger colleague had become a

generalized cultural phenomenon, and the uncanny visitor in the form of

Renaissancismus had taken on a spectral life of its own. Not only had the Renaissance

become an object of historical, sociological, and aesthetic interest, but the voluptuous

image of its reception had come to suffuse cultural production of every sort, from

185
See in this relation: Gerd Uekermann, Renaissancismus und Fin-de-Siécle: Die italienische Renaissance
in der deutschen Dramatik der letzten Jahrhundertwende (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985);
Reinhardt, Jacob Burckhardt und die Erfindung der Renaissance. Ein Mythos und seine Geschichte. For
German and nationally inflected versions of the Renaissance see: Karl Brandi, Das Werden der
Renaissance (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1910); Konrad Burdach, Reformation. Renaissance.
Humanismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963). For a more international
contextualization see Hilary Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992);
Walter Pater, The Renaissance (New York: Modern Library, 1873); John Addington Symonds,
Renaissance in Italy; the Fine Arts (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1967); Arthur Gobineau, The Renaissance
(London: W. Heinemann, 1913).
186
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), 212. ―The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to
dwelling. It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his
appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling's interior mat one might be reminded of the inside of a compass
case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet.‖

228
architecture and design to the arts and popular literature. Indeed, if Burckhardt had

himself long gazed into the mirror of the Renaissance for portents of a troubled

modernity, the turn of the century saw the Renaissance cult lose sense of the boundary

between self and reflected image; viewed from the careful distance of a tower retreat, the

seductive images of Borgias, Sforzas, Medicis remained a heuristically useful allegory,

but when gazed on too long, and with too much intimacy, the boundary between real

world and looking glass world began to disappear. As with the Centaurs in the Capitoline

Museum, an unreflective gaze could easily find the stone of sculpture transformed once

again into the fleshly terror of strange monsters.

What is particularly striking, however, in this phenomenon of Renaissance

enthusiasm, is the way in which the emergence of European modernisms was

accompanied contemporaneously by persistent spectral apparitions of European pasts.

Indeed, in works from Marx‘s Eighteenth Brumaire, to those of Aby Warburg, Sigmund

Freud and Walter Benjamin, the new spaces of modernity seem inevitably and invariably

haunted by spirits of their various histories. Whether as tragedy or as farce, the past

appeared to erupt precisely at the points where modernity insisted on its essential rupture

with the tissues that marked its historicity. In this larger sense, European modernity is

itself haunted by an uncanny Doppelgänger, a repressed past forever reemerging in the

cultures of nineteenth-century Parisian neo-classicism, in the political theater of the

Second Empire, or in the ur-drives of psychoanalytic subjectivity. Indeed, the very

concept of modernity, its vision of a utopian release from the mill-stone of its

accumulated pasts, invariably provokes and invokes the very spirits it seeks to exorcise,

the past perpetually reemerging as a returning supplement in the discourses of newness

229
and novelty. Thus, as definitions of post-modernity are forever tangled up with

modernity as its repressed other, so too did modernity and its modernisms rest uncertainly

on the founding absence of its own historicity. But it is from within this shadowy space

of absence that the distorted echoes of an uncanny past return. Even in the most brilliant

spaces of enlightened modernity, from the Capitoline Museum to the Paris Arcades, one

can find a centaur stirring, a mirror surface dissolving and a past that refuses to sleep.

Therefore, even as he described with admiration the careful gestures of distance

with which Burckhardt pursued his historical necromancy, Aby Warburg invokes the

counter example of Nietzsche in the same seminar summation above. Where Burckhardt

here seems to recognize the seduction of the historical powers and currents which he was

summoning, a recognition resulting in his carefully constructed ramparts of irony and

Basel provincialism, Warburg presents Nietzsche as one who refused the protection of a

similar Lynkean tower. Ironically, from Warburg‘s perspective, the philosopher who had

called for a critical rather than antiquarian or monumental history had listened too

intently and too long to the signals of the past. As Warburg puts it:

We have to recognize Burckhardt and Nietzsche as receivers of mnemic waves,

and that the awarenes they had of the world was arrived at in very different ways.
[...] Both are very sensitive seismographs that resonate down to their foundations
when they receive and transmit these waves. But an important difference:
Burckhardt received these waves from the world of the past, and he felt the
dangerous tremors they made. In response, he took care to strengthen the
foundations of his seismograph. [...] What type of seer is Nietzsche? His type is
that of the Nabi of the ancient prophets, who runs through the streets, rends his
garments, shouts ―woe!‖ and perhaps leads the people behind him. His originary
gesture is that of the leader with the Thyros staff who demands that all follow
him. From this, his observations on dance. In Jacob Burckhardt and Nietzsche,
two ancient types of seer collide in the border region between Romanic and
Germanic worlds. The question is: whether each type of seer can survive the
shock and agitations of his vocation. [...] Two pastor‘s sons stand in very
different relation to the sense of the divine in the world: one of these feels the

230
 diabolical breath of a demon of nihilism and secures himself in a tower. And the
other, wishes to make common cause with these spirits.187

In a language thus also suffused with metaphors of myth and biblical mystery, Warburg

describes a vision of the past whose reception and recording carries with it both the

possibility for critical enlightenment and the threat of a history that veers dangerously

into the orbit of myth. Far from being stranded in the present, Warburg‘s Renaissance

and Warburg‘s modernity were awash in the traces, echoes, ‗mnemic waves‘ and images

transmitted by an ever-present past. And for a Warburg that fought his own battles

against metal illness, battles waged with enormous suffering only several years before the

seminar noted above, the problem of integrating the spectral powers of historical memory

into the realm of the present was a task of utmost personal and professional significance.

But the phenomenon of the Renaissance cult is intriguing not merely as a

particularly colorful moment in the larger pattern of modernity‘s ambivalent, and

sometimes schizophrenic, manner of self-representation and self-definition. In the

cultural landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the uncanny mirror

of the Renaissance itself presented a double aspect to those who would look within it. As

we‘ve seen, the reflected image of the Renaissance was occasion for reflections and

187
WIA, III, 110. 4. Burckhardt und Nietzsche. ―Wir müssen Burckhardt und Nietzsche als auffänger der
mnemischen Wellen erkennen und sehen, dass das, was sie als Weltbewusstsein haben, sie beide in ganz
anderer Weise ergreift. [...] Beide sind sehr emfindliche Seismographen, die in ihren Grundfesten beben,
wenn sie die Wellen empfangen und weitergeben müssen. Aber ein groser Unterschied: Burckhardt hat die
Wellen aus der Region der Vergangenheit empfangen, hat die gefährlichen Erschuetterung gefühlt und
dafür gesorgt, dass das Fundament seines Seismographen gestärkt wurde. [...] Welcher sehertypus ist
Nietzsche? Er ist der typus eines Nabi, des alten Propheten, der auf der strasse lauft, sich die Kleider
zerreist, Wehe schreit, und das Volk vielleicht hinter her leitet. Seine ursprüngliche Geste ist die des
Führers mit dem Thyrosstab, der sich Gefolgschaft Alle zwingt. Daher seine Bemerkungen zum Tanz. Es
prallen in Jacob Burckhardt und Nietzsche in diesem Grenzgebiet zwischen Romanismus und
Germanismus die uralten Sehertypen zussammen. Die Frage ist, ob der Sehertypus die Erschütterung des
Berufes aushalten kann. [...] Zwei Pastorsöhne, die zum Gefuehl Gottes in der Welt ganz anders stehen:
der eine, der den dämonischen Hauch des Vernichtungsdämons fuehlt und sich in einen Turm setzt, und der
andere, der mit ihm gemeinsame Sache machen will.‖

231
meditations on the nature and possibilities that lay concealed or repressed beneath the

veneers of bourgeois modernity. On the other hand, the vision of the Renaissance could

also be configured as a drama of historical reception. For while the age of the

Condottiere, of titanic artistic talent, and of brutal political genius could be construed by

some as an inspiring tableau of a lost authenticity, a liberated space of aristocratic

egoism, the Renaissance could also reflect the present as a moment likewise troubled by

desires for historical rupture and yet haunted by the figure of historical tradition. In this

sense, interest in Renaissance was not only a delirium brought on by the return of

modernity‘s repressed pasts, but could also become a model for understanding the

interpenetration of past and present at moments of apparent historical rupture. For

beside the aesthetic construction of the self and state, with which Burckhardt had so

closely linked the Italian Renaissance, the Basel historian (and many others) had

presented the age also as a confrontation with, and reception of, the legacies of classical

antiquity.

Viewed from this perspective, however, our looking-glass Renaissance quickly

slips from the simply curious to the realm of the truly curiouser. Indeed, in this shift of

vision, from a Renaissance reflected in the gaze of modernity to a Renaissance itself

reflecting on antiquity, the seductive historical double that haunted the consciousness of

modernity reveals itself as phenomenon similarly haunted by its pasts. The drama of the

Renaissance in turn emerges as the stage of its own reflections on the drama of antiquity,

and modernity observes while the Italian Quatrocento and Cinquecento observe

antiquity. In the strange moment of double endoublement—where the ghost of the past is

pursued by its own persistent uncanny shadow—a degree of reflective distance opens

232
once again in the reception of the Renaissance in particular, and historicity in general.

The Renaissance genius is presented here not as a moment of possible authenticity, not as

an object of either desire or dread for the modern onlooker, but as an actor himself, an

actor who plays a role on a stage not of his own design and driven by an historical plot

written by an alien hand. Indeed, from the manner in which we have previously

discussed the terms, the Renaissance might be said to undergo a transformation from a

field of symbolic desire to a more distanced (or abstracted) allegorical representation of

the modern historical consciousness. Here again, the centaur may stir and the frame is

broken, but in this case the beast‘s movements betray its own representational character.

Like pieces of alienated Brechtian stagecraft, the images of the past here demand not the

emotional investment of the audience, but enforce instead a space of detached reflection.

Authenticity and utopia resolve into artifice and theater.

While the aging Hamburg art historian Aby Warburg could reflect with

circumspection on the figure of Burckhardt in his 1927 seminar, long after the

enthusiasms of fin-de-siècle Renaissance reception had run their course, it was

nevertheless at the height of these historical fever dreams that he began his career as a

scholar and collector. Indeed, if there can be said to be a red thread that runs though

Warburg‘s career—an intellectual biography that often seems intent on atomizing itself

into a dizzy profusion of details, fragments, stops and starts—then it is one that winds

itself around the issue of Europe‘s pasts and the way they continue to haunt and revisit its

various presents. Thus if Warburg‘s primary interest was in the ―renewal of pagan

antiquity,‖ the question was one bound up with questions about modernity‘s historicity,

the manner in which any historical present could never quite exorcise the ghosts of its

233
various pasts. Through his explorations of the Renaissance, and in the observations of

his present, Warburg sought to trace the ways in which modernity still resonated with

tremors and traces of pasts from which it could not disentangle itself. But as his

reflections on Burckhardt and Nietzsche indicate, Warburg was likewise convinced that

such historical tremors, traces and resonances carried ambivalent and uncertain signals in

the modulations of their frequencies and amplitudes. For the messages of the past,

received in the present and recorded by the seismographic work of the historian, could

speak in the tongues of either angel or demon, and could assume either Apollonian or

Dionysian form. For Warburg, therefore, a sensitivity to the manner in which the past

pervades the present could yield a gesture of enlightenment or signal the uncanny return

of long repressed cultural atavisms.188

188
It is interesting to note that the subsequent reception of Warburg has similarly followed a pattern of
tensions between interpretations that attempt to recapture either an Apollonian or a Dionysian Warburg.
The former is best represented in Ernst Gombrich geography. E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An
Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, 1970). In a well known riposte to Gombrich‘s
more positivistic and scientifically disciplined Warburg, Edgar Wind responded in an essay that is now
contained in Aby Warburg, Ausgewählte Schriften und Wurdigungen, ed. Dieter Wuttke and Carl Georg
Heise (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1979). On the other hand, Philippe-Alain Michaud reconstructs a more
mobile, dispersive and Dionysian Warburg, and connects these to contemporary developments in modernist
cinema. See Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New
York: Zone Books, 2004). Otherwise, the contemporary reception of Warburg began around the same time
as the reemergence of Benjamin in the 1960‘s. In more recent developments, interest in Warburg has been
amplified by contemporary currents of culturally-oriented history, questions of cultural memory, and
literatures surrounding the field of visual studies. For instance see: Dorothee Bauerle,
Gespenstergeschichten für ganz Erwachsene. Ein Kommentar zu Aby Warburgs Bilderatlas Mnemosyne,
vol. 15, Kunstgeschichte (Munster: Lit, 1988); Horst Bredekamp, ed., Aby Warburg: Akten Des
Internationalen Symposions, Hamburg 1990 Schriften des Warburg-Archivs im Kunstgeschichtlichen
Seminar der Universität Hamburg; Vol. 1 (Weinheim: VCH, 1991); Michael Diers, Thomas Girst, and
Dorothea von Moltke, "Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History," New German Critique,
no. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (1995); Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol,
Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Kurt W. Forster, "Aby
Warburg's History of Art: Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images," Daedalus 105 (1976);
Beatrice Hanssen, "Portrait of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg, Panofsky)," MLN 114, no. 5, Comparative
Literature Issue (1999); Werner Hofmann, Georg Syamken, and Martin Warnke, Die Menschenrechte des
Auges: Über Aby Warburg (Frankfurt a.M.: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1980); Dieter Wuttke,
Dazwischen : Kulturwissenschaft Auf Warburgs Spuren, 2 vols. (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1996); Dieter
Wuttke, Aby M. Warburg-Bibliographie 1866 bis 1995: Werk und Wirkung (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner,
1998); Roland Kany, Mnemosyne als Programm: Geschichte, Erinnerung und die Andacht zum

234
 For Warburg, in other words, the fascination with the past—its images, texts,

traces and relics—possessed the double resonance of familiar (and familial) territorial

safety and nomadic transgression. On the one hand, the texts, images and territories

through which he travelled can be understood as a seductive refuge in moments of

personal anguish. On the other hand such experiences could carry him into strange and

disconcerting regions, from terrifying images in an illustrated Balzac volume to a life

beyond the comfortable certainties of the familial sphere. Throughout Warburg‘s life,

therefore, the visions and representations he explored seemed to vibrate with a sense of

both seductive wonder and a nagging sense of dread and pathos. Describing one such

image laden experience, in a childhood memory during an illness of his mother, Warburg

relates:

A single visit to the bedside of my poor and distracted-looking mother, the

company of an inferior Jewish-Austrian student who had to function as my
tutor, made for an atmosphere of inner despair which came to a climax when
my grandfather arrived and said: 'Pray for your mother', whereupon we sat
down on suitcases with Hebrew prayer-books and rattled out something. Two
things served as counterpoise to these deeply disturbing events: a grocery shop
downstairs, where, for the first time, we could contravene the dietary laws and
eat sausages, and a lending library which was full of stories about Red Indians.
I devoured these books in masses, for they obviously offered a means of
withdrawing from a depressing reality in which I was quite helpless ... the
emotion of pain found an outlet in fantasies of romantic cruelty. This was my
inoculation against active cruelty. 189

Warburg‘s memories of these experiences thus echo many of the same themes that

emerged in his reflections on Burckhardt above. The image of an ―elsewhere‖—in this

Unbedeutenden im Werk von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1987);
Matthew Rampley, "From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg's Theory of Art," The Art Bulletin 79, no. 1,
Mar. (1997); Robert Galitz and Brita Reimers, ed., "Aby Warburg: "Ekstatische Nymphe... trauernder
Flussgott," in Portrait eines Gelehrten, ed. Robert Galitz and Brita Reimers, ed. (Hamburg: Doelling und
Galitz, 1995).
189
Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. 20.

235
instance configured in the spatial realms of the American West rather than the temporal

terms of an undiscovered past—arises here as a line of flight, a retreat from pain. At the

same time, it also emerges as a crossing of boundaries in the form of dietary restrictions

and imaginary travels. However, while these ―elsewheres‖ had their lures—as Warburg‘s

Burckhardt well understood—they also had their costs; while it was true that such images

and visions could liberate, they could also overwhelm even the canniest of adventurers.

The Nietzschean danger of yielding to such lures was something which Warburg—

perhaps recognizing his own tendencies towards melancholy and the fragility of his

mental states—seems to have felt with particular acuity throughout his life. Even so,

Warburg was perpetually intrigued by the territories that lay just beyond the familiar and

the conventional. In secret passages of undiscovered historical currents, in rare and

abstruse texts found in unexpected places, in a journey to America that would take him to

the most distant spaces of the continent, or in the exotic landscapes of the Italian

Renaissance, Warburg was fascinated by these accelerations and deviations into new and

indistinct territories. And yet he was also acutely aware of the ways in which this

fascination with deterritorialization presented risks and challenges to the integrity of his

own psychic and professional life.

As with the catalog of his own passions, the library and institute that would

eventually bear his name was at once an attempt to bring order to the fragmented Western

cultural memory, and an extra-territorial (and ultimately nomadic in both metaphorical

and literal senses) outpost peering into esoteric and exotic regions of the past. The

contours of Warburg‘s work, in other words, are defined to a great extent by such

tensions, the desire to discover the living centaur, and the fear that it may escape its

236
confinement in the museum, the archive or the library. Indeed, this vision of a library

that contains both desires and dangers—a volatile storehouse of the past which can

emerge either as a space of enlightenment or as a relentlessly self-ramifying labyrinth—

seems to have haunted Warburg throughout his life. As is now part of an accumulating

Warburg lore, some of his earliest memories reveal an acute sense of the power of the

visual image in his psychic life.190 In 1873, for example, the six year old Aby had been

struck with typhoid fever, and as his brother Max would later recall it, the young

Warburg‘s fever dreams were accompanied by fantastic images come to life from the

illustrated pages of Balzac‘s Petites miseres de la vie conjugate, whose pages had so

intrigued the youth. But far from discouraging Warburg from further explorations in the

books he encountered in the family library—the delicate state of health in which the

illness had left the boy required careful monitoring—such textual adventures became the

natural outlet for a child protected from more strenuous activities. While such events

seem mark out in nuce the twin territories of book and image that would come to define

the contours of his personal and professional interests, another youthful anecdote—one

with similar mythic or biblical overtones—finds Aby Warburg pursuing the passions of

reading and looking that would later propel him beyond the confining expectations held

for the eldest son of the Warburg family. As his brother Max would again relate, in this

instance in the course of a memorial address upon his elder brother‘s death in 1929:

When he was thirteen, Aby made me an offer of his birthright. He, as the eldest,
was destined to enter the firm. I was then only twelve, rather too immature to
reflect, and so I agreed to purchase his birthright from him. It was not a pottage
of lentils, however, which he demanded, but a promise that I would always buy
him all the books he wanted. After a very brief pause for reflection, I consented. I
told myself that when I was in the business I could, after all, always find the

190
Ibid., 18-19.

237
 money to pay for the works of Schiller, Goethe, Lessing and perhaps also
Klopstock, and so, unsuspecting, I gave him what I must now admit was a very
large blank cheque. The love of reading, of books ... was his early passion191

Lentils or no, when it became clear to the family that Aby was interested neither in a

career in the family firm nor in a rabbinical education, but was intent instead on a

scholarly career, it was indeed to Max Warburg that fell the duty of leading the family

concerns. True to his word, however, the younger brother generously funded the

establishment and maintenance of the institution that would eventually become the most

lasting legacy of his brother‘s unconventional scholarly pursuits, the

Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek (and later Institut) Warburg.

The Warburg family thus remained, for its eldest son, both a foundational

territory and a point of departure. The territory of this family can trace its provenance

back to at least 1559, when a certain Simon von Cassel, migrated from Hesse to the city

of Warburg in Westphalia.192 By the time of Aby Warburg‘s birth in 1866, the family

had been living in Hamburg, after an extended sojourn in Paderborn, since the late

eighteenth century. After the disruptions of the Napoleanic era, and building upon

connections with the Rothschild family, the hitherto modestly successful banking fortune

of the Warburg‘s expanded dramatically in the course of the early nineteenth century.

Further expanding these emerging possibilities in business and finance, the remnants of

Hamburg‘s legal restrictions on its Jewish inhabitants were lifted in 1868, only two years

after the arrival of the first son of Charlotte and Moritz Warburg. A succession of

siblings soon followed, with Max Warburg born in 1867, Paul in 1868, and Felix, Olga,

191
Ibid.
192
Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New
York: Random House, 1993). 3.

238
Fritz and Louise following in the 1870‘s. With the beginning of this latter decade,

punctuated by the Franco-Prussian War, the family saw its further ascendance in the

ranks of the national banking community during the conflict, and proved able to weather

the subsequent financial crises with rather more success than many others in similar

circumstances. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the family had come to enjoy

the fruits of its remarkably astute business acumen. Where Moritz Warburg had helped

found the Commerz-Diskonto bank in 1871, his son Max would become a board member

of Albert Ballin‘s Hamburg-American shipping line (HAPAG) and emerge as an advisor

to Germany‘s political and business elites.

During the course of the long nineteenth century, then, the family of Aby

Warburg saw its fortunes dramatically rise from a provincial banking concern to a major

player in the financial and political landscapes of Imperial Germany. In the face of these

expansions of opportunity, the family thus showed an eagerness to explore the more

cosmopolitan realms to which it now had access. In relation to this, the Warburgs saw

the purview of their activities extending well beyond Germany and Hamburg. While the

well travelled Max nearly died during a trip to South Africa, Paul Warburg married into

the New York Loeb family, settled in America, and was sworn in as a member of the

Federal Reserve Board on the eve of World War I. But the most unconventional

traveler—in relation to the spaces of the Warburg family—was Aby Warburg. For if the

other siblings found themselves scattered in pursuits on either side of the Atlantic, Aby‘s

journeys were different in the sense that they pierced the boundaries drawn by familial

expectations of calling and career. Max Warburg‘s tale of relinquished birth rights aside,

the initial and most conspicuous gesture, by which Aby announced the path he intended

239
to tread, was his decision to attend university and pursue a career as a scholar and an

academic.

Warburg‘s education and early career, however, resonates not so much as a

gesture of Nietzschean flight and Dionysian nomadism, but as one in consonance with the

more Apollonian tasks of scientific research and rigorous scholarship. It was thus not to

the distant lands of the American ―Red Indian‖ that Warburg initially set off as a student

in 1886—a trip that he would eventually make on the occasion of his brother‘s marriage

to Nina Loeb—but to the philosophical and historical Fakultäten at the University of

Bonn. As his thoughts on Burckhardt indicate, Warburg‘s scholarly convictions and

outlook, both as a student and throughout his career, were profoundly marked by the

impact of the currents that were then defining the intellectual landscape of the late

nineteenth century. Above all, and like his contemporary Sigmund Freud, Warburg was

early convinced of the enlightened missions of science and scholarship. Indeed, still

uncertain about prospects in the field of art history, Warburg entertained the notion of

pursuing a career in medicine, and even attended several semesters of courses in

psychology as a post-graduate in Berlin. In any event, though this latter psychological

interlude eventually came to naught, a positivistic faith in progress and in the unity of

scientific and cultural advancement remained a central motif in his early work, and was

also an important point of orientation throughout his career—even when that point found

itself in tension with other forces and commitments.

Though attending seminars in a variety of fields, including history and

philosophy, Warburg‘s semesters in Bonn found him gravitating towards the field of art

history. At the time, the two primary figures of the Fakultät, and the scholars into whose

240
orbit Warburg soon found himself drawn, were Carl Justi and Henry Thode. Of an older

generation, and already a well established figure in the art historical community, Carl

Justi (1832-1912) had secured a name for himself with a three volume 1866 work on

Winckelmann and, at the time of Warburg‘s studies, was completing a likewise

magisterial treatment of Velázquez. Somewhat laconic and less approachable than the

younger Thode, Justi nevertheless came to be associated by Warburg with the kind of

careful and deliberate scholarship that Warburg also prized in Burckhardt. Henry Thode

(1857-1920), the younger and more academically flamboyant colleague of Justi, had

habilitated as a Privatdozent at Bonn in 1886 largely on the basis of his controversial

book, Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien. In this

work, Thode countered the Burckhardtian thesis of the Italian Renaissance as a

reencounter with, and rediscovery of, classical pagan antiquity. According to Thode‘s

counter-narrative, the primary and most proximate source of the transformations of the

Italian Renaissance were announced in the Christian and worldly humanism that had been

inaugurated by St. Francis and his followers. However, while Warburg initially found in

him an engaging scholar who was a scarce ten years older than himself, Thode‘s

enthusiasms—which would later include everything from zealous Wagnerism to proto-

racialist tendencies—made his 1889 appointment as director of the Städelschen

Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt a.M. not an overwhelming loss for Warburg.193

Ironically, given Warburg‘s chosen discipline of art history, the Bonn figures that

exercised the greatest impact on the young student, and whose influence continued to be

felt throughout his career, were the historian Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915) and the

193
Thode‘s first wife was Wagner‘s daughter, Daniela von Bülow (1860-1940)

241
philosopher and philologist Hermann Usener (1834-1905). If Justi came to represent for

Warburg a staid but meticulous model of scholarship, Karl Lamprecht appealed to the

more expansive and discursive impulses in the young Hamburger. The Lamprecht of the

late 1880‘s, though this was still several years before the Methodenstreit that would

accompany his multi-volume German History of the 1890‘s, was already in the process

of revealing himself as both an extremely gifted and volatile scholar.194 Habilitated in

1880 under Bonner historian Wilhelm Maurenbrecher, Lamprecht stayed on at Bonn for

nearly a decade, first as a Privatdozent and then as außerordentlichen Professor. In 1890,

he accepted a call to a chair at Marburg, but only a year later he moved on once again to

Leipzig, a post secured by Maurenbrecher which he held for the remainder of his career.

It is exceedingly difficult, from perspective of the current historiographical moment, to

adequately gauge the enormous response that Lamprecht‘s personality and work aroused

in the German historical community of the time. On the one hand, the term

Kulturgeschichte, under whose banner he called for a radical reorientation of the

practices of contemporary German historicism, Lamprecht had in mind a very different

concept than the one used and contested in current historiographical parlance. On the

other hand, while the German historical Zunft still persists in a variety of contemporary

forms and outlooks, its modern disciplinary power is only a pale shadow of the forces

that were arrayed against Lamprecht under the self-policing auspices of academic

historicism. But in the figure of Karl Lamprecht, the still nearly hegemonic

194
Karl Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte (Berlin: Weidmann, 1909-1920). See also: Chickering, Karl
Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856-1915); Schorn-Schuette, Karl Lamprecht:
Kulturgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik. Viikari, Die Krise der "Historistischen"
Geschichtsschreibung und die Geschichtsmethodologie Karl Lamprechts. Iggers, The German Conception
of History. Karl Lamprecht, What Is History? Five Lectures on the Modern Science of History, by Karl
Lamprecht, trans. E.A. Andrews (New York: Macmillan Co., 1905).

242
methodological and conceptual framework of the German historical school, experienced

the first shock of what would become a generalized crisis by the end of the nineteenth

century.

When Lamprecht called for a new approach to history, a Kulturgeschichte that

would cast out the treasured idols of German historicism, it was largely a call to

reconsider the individualizing dimensions of the tradition, the Rankean legacy that

understood history to be the study of discrete historical actors and agencies—whether

these were in the form of ―Great Men‖ or in states that acted on the stage of world

diplomatic and military history. Having drunk deep of the positivist currents of the day,

and quite familiar with the methodological successes of the natural sciences, Lamprecht

sought to revisit the old distinction that had served to shield the historical sciences from

encroachments by their neighbors in the natural sciences. In this view, where the natural

sciences were distinguished by methods of generalization and abstraction—methods that

brought the variegated phenomena of nature under progressively more abstract natural

laws—the study of history was presented as a science of individualities, its focus on the

singular and unrepeatable event, situation or person. What Lamprecht was calling for, at

the risk of oversimplification, was a refocusing of the methodological lens of history

from the actions of states and individuals to the movements of impersonal forces and

social phenomena. Imbued with a certain positivist optimism, Lamprecht was in no

doubt that the laws and forces that governed history were at least as legible as those of

nature, and the benign harmonies discovered in the latter would be discovered likewise in

the realm of history. Indeed, from this perspective, Lamprecht‘s Kulturgeschichte seems

to emerge as the optimistic and preceding counterpart to the Kulturpessimismus of the

243
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; where the former was confident in the

ineluctable laws of historical progress, the latter glimpsed a history that was caught in the

clutches of decline and degeneration.

For a German historical community still governed by the mandarins of Neo-

Rankean historicism, Lamprecht‘s suggestions were nothing less than an abomination.

At best, Lamprecht‘s intervention was an unwelcome blurring of the bright line between

the natural and historical sciences, a line whose careful definition was a bedrock principle

of the discipline‘s self-representation. In this, the sensitivities of an aging historical

school were apparent in the degree to which they rejected absorption into the domain of

positivist sciences, and recoiled from the unique status the historical discipline in

Germany had long enjoyed. At worst, however, the call for the methodological

revolution of Kulturgeschichte was greeted as the dangerous salient of an advancing

historical materialism, a history focused not on Frederick the Great, the state, or the

German Volk, but on ostensibly abstract entities like economic class, social milieu and

cultural environments. To be sure, Lamprecht was a scholar who seems to have been

uniquely unconcerned and insensitive to the toes of fellow historians, but the

controversies that came to surround his work reveal that the Zunft was already highly

aware of the increasingly fragile state of historicism‘s disciplinary hegemony.

In Hermann Usener, on the other hand, Warburg‘s encounter with the broad

historical horizons of Lamprecht‘s Kulturgeschichte was complemented by a scholar

whose interests centered on the philological and quasi-anthropological study of human

mythologies and their historical development. ―In these lectures by the great Hermann

Usener,‖ writes Ernst Gombrich of the Hamburg scholar‘s student days, ―Warburg first

244
came into touch with that powerful trend in nineteenth-century thought which tried to

apply the findings of modern science to the subject matter of the humanities. Psychology

and anthropology seemed to offer the key to the classics which a student of Greek

civilization could only disregard at his peril.‖ 195 What impressed Warburg, in other

words, was the way in which Usener was reconfiguring and resituating the phenomenon

of myth in the disciplinary territories of the emerging psychological and

anthropological sciences—territories outside the charmed regions of historicist

hegemony. In this, Usener represented an important figure in a larger constellation of

work then applying psychological explanation to phenomena traditionally located

within the purview of religious studies, aesthetics, philology and hermeneutics. Thus,

besides the influence of Usener in relation to such fields, Warburg also became familiar

with the wider literature emerging around conceptions of myth and symbolic expression

that were grounded in the psychologies of perception and emotional response.

The general thrust of this nineteenth-century literature on such psychologies of

sensuous perception and expression—a literature that had accumulated around the work

of Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887), Karl Köstlin (1819-1894), Hermann Lotze

(1817-1881) and Robert Vischer (1847-1933)—proposed the revising of both

eighteenth-century conceptions of aesthetic objectivity and the Hegelian variants of

aesthetics which express the movements of the historical dialectic. 196 This literature

195
Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography., 28. On Usener see Antje Wessels,
Ursprungszauber: Zur Rezeption von Hermann Useners Lehre von der religiosen Begriffsbildung (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2003); Robert Vischer, et al, Empathy Form Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-
1893, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the
History of Art and the Humanities, 1994).
196
See Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Aesthetik, oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (Leipzig: C. Macken, 1846-
57); Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Mode und Cynismus. Beiträge zur Kenntniss unserer Culturformen und
Sittenbegriffe (Stuttgart: K. Wittwer, 1888). Robert Vischer, Drei Schriften zum ästhetischen Formproblem

245
hoped to explore the question of symbolic meaning and aesthetic experience as a set of

phenomena to be situated in the sphere of subjective psychology. From this

perspective, the subject of experience takes precedence as the author of the meanings it

invests in the objects of natural and symbolic phenomena. What governs such the

products of such experience is not the movement of Hegelian spirit through history, or

the contours of an object with intrinsic aesthetic properties, but the ahistorical and

natural laws that inform the human psyche. 197

For Usener, the all too human impulse towards representation and signification

had its source in mythopoetic gestures that are themselves grounded in the basic

psychological expressions of anxiety and desires for control. At certain historical

moments, the forms of organized religion emerge to collect and stabilize the volatile and

expressive responses of mythology, and this may be further amplified through a

―vernunftgemässen logischen Denken‖ (reasonable logical thought) that yields a still

greater distance from the realm of immediate psychic reflex, but the primitive

psychological roots of mythological thinking remain active in every age. Describing the

relation between the psychological processes of symbolic representation and subsequent

modes of textual and iconic representation, Usener thus writes:

The two main operations of all mythical representation are personification and
metaphorical visualization. Tito Vignoli was mistaken when he held that myth
was already given in personification. A concrete image must also rise from the
depths of consciousness and unite itself with the personified rerpresentation. It is

(Halle/Saale: M. Niemeyer, 1927). Karl Reinhold von Köstlin, Prolegomena zur Ästhetik (Tübingen: L. F.
Fues'sche Buchdruckerei); Hermann Lotze, Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland (München: Cotta,
1868).
197
See Hermann Usener ―Mythologie―, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Leipzig: Teubner, 1907). ―Die
Naturwissenschaften haben in gerechter Auflehnung gegen die mit den Tatsachen selbst in Widerspruch
geratene Spekulation Hegels und Okens Protest erhoben und die Unzulässigkeit einer "Naturphilosophie"
siegreich behauptet. Unvergleichlich schwerer ist es der Geschichtswissensehaft geworden, sich aus den
Banden Hegelseher Philosophie zu lösen.‖

246
 in this way that the mythic image or motif emerges, and likewise with a symbol
and concrete visual representations of the divine. It is these two elements that
form the origin of all religious representation, and as we saw earlier, of all
representations of early man. But language and poesis are also rooted in this
mysterious ground. It involves nothing less than the awareness of the spiritual
constitution and modes of movement that find their opposite in rational thought
and the sciences [...].198

In this formulation, then, we catch a glimpse of the predicament with which the later

Warburg thought Burckhardt and Nietzsche had been confronted, a predicament whose

presence he also felt in his own work. In a circumstance where all symbolic

representation emerges from mythopoesis, the representational operations of discursive

reason may ultimately confront and describe the nature of myth, but they can never truly

escape from their own rootedness in magical thinking. Every enlightenment, in other

words, carries with it its own mythical inheritance, and must perpetually wrest itself from

the encroachments and anxieties of symbolic reflex. ―Athens,‖ remarked Aby Warburg

in a 1917 essay on the significance of astrology during the reformation, ―always wishes

to be newly re-conquered from Alexandria.‖199

Though he remained true to his first interest in the field of art history, Aby

Warburg was thus profoundly influenced by the history of Lamprecht and the

philology/psychology of myth as envisioned by Usener. The former opened up for

Warburg an expansive new territory of historical reflection, a territory no longer limited

198
Ibid., 58. ―Die beiden Hauptvorgänge alles mythischen Vorstellens sind Beseelung (Personifikation) und
Verbildlichung (Metapher). Tito Vignoli war im Irrtum, wenn er durch die Personifikation den Mythus
schon für gegeben ansah. Es muß gleichzeitig aus der Tiefe des Bewußtseins ein Bild aufsteigen und sich
mit der beseelten Vorstellung zu einer bildlichen vereinigen. So entsteht das mythische Bild oder Motiv, so
ein Symbol, so eine konkrete bildliche Gottesvorstellung. In diesen beiden meist vereinigten Vorgängen
liegt der Ursprung aller religiösen Vorstellungen, also wie wir früher sahen, überhaupt aller Vorstellungen
der älteren vorgeschichtlichen Menschheit. Aber auch Sprache und Dichtung strecken ihre Wurzeln in
diesen geheimnisvollen Grund.‖
199
Aby Warburg, ―Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luther‘s Zeiten‖, in Gesammelte
Schriften, 534. ―Athen will eben immer wieder neu aus Alexandrien zurückerobert sein.‖

247
to states and individuals, but extending into every region of social, economic, cultural,

political and religious study. Lamprecht revealed a past whose various moments and

dimensions—from the smallest and most modest episodes to events and movements of

the most monumental proportions—could be brought into communication with one

another under the auspices of his broadly conceived Kulturgeschichte. Thus, if

traditional currents of German School historicism had sought to domesticate and enclose

historical phenomena within boundaries set by markers of discipline, period,

methodology and field, Lamprecht envisioned an historical practice in which such

borders became infinitely more porous and traversable. Under the influence of Usener,

on the other hand, Warburg developed a life-long interest in the history and development

of symbolic expression, an interest that carried with it a conviction in the inextricable

significance of mythopoesis in the historical representations and self-representations of

human culture. From both men, however, and in consonance with the intellectual

currents of the time, Warburg acquired an image of human history that was profoundly

and decisively inflected by the psychology of human representation. For Warburg, the

vast multitude of instances where human beings employ symbols, signs and images—

whether in fear or in reflection—emerge as a field to be charted and traced in an

historical study of representation, a study that links and indexes the transformation of

symbolic forms to the movements and renewals of human history.

Though Warburg went on to continue his education with semesters of advanced

study in Munich and Strasbourg, the true punctuation of his early academic years was his

participation in a seminar conducted by art historian August Schmarsow in Florence.

Where the journey from Hamburg to Bonn had been a tentative first step in his

248
intellectual explorations, the journey to Florence both confirmed and amplified his

conviction in his choice of calling. In the course of this visit, after all, Warburg

discovered an exotic territory that would remain a source of life-long intrigue, and the

landscapes of Florence and Italy soon came to represent points of orientation to challenge

and complement the significance of the Hamburg Heimat. As the eventual home of

Warburg‘s library and collections, Hamburg seems a space associated with, or imagined

as, a sphere of familial assimilation and intellectual Denkraum, a space of reassembly,

restoration and stock-taking. In Warburg‘s personal and professional geography, the

spaces of Italy often seem regions of seductive intellectual distance, a place that could

signify a sense of exotic and independent exploration, or at other times, produce a

nagging sense of self-dispersal and intellectual disintegration. The allure held by the

kaleidoscopic fragments of Italy‘s history of visual culture, had its reverse side in the

Hamburg home to which Warburg perpetually returns to resolve his Italian Bruchstücke

into a legible mosaic. Like Nietzsche, Warburg felt his own strong Drang nach Süden,

and like Burckhardt he felt the need to construct his own tower of Lynkeus in the

Hanseatic north.

From 1888 to 1905, therefore, Aby Warburg‘s career was decisively shaped by

his experiences in Italy, but above all by the city of Florence and the cosmopolitan

intellectual milieu that had settled there in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, it was during the months of his participation the 1888-1889 Schmarsow seminar,

that Warburg first encountered the two female figures who went on to become his close

companions for rest of his life. In the first instance, while conducting research on what

would eventually become his Botticelli dissertation, Warburg made the acquaintance of

249
Mary Hertz, a young artist and daughter of a Hamburg Senator, likewise abroad on a

family Kunstreise of her own. ―Miss Hertz,‖ wrote Warburg in a letter to his Hamburg

family, ―who is an excellent painter, has such a surprising interest, simple and yet

profound, in all artistic things that I really take pleasure in being a cicerone, an

occupation which, as you know, is not otherwise my hobby.‖200 The two immediately

struck up a close friendship, one whose intimacy remained undiminished in subsequent

years marked by frequent separation. Ultimately, however, after nearly a decade of

friendship, and over the initial hesitations of Warburg‘s family, the Jewish Warburg and

the Protestant Hertz were wed in 1897 and set up an expatriate household in Florence the

following year.

On the same first Florentine journey on which he met Mary Hertz, Warburg also

first came into contact with another figure who became the ever-present other woman in

his life. While conducting research assigned by Schmarsow on the development of

fifteenth-century Florentine relief sculpture, Warburg became aware of an anomaly of

historical periodization, the sort of anomaly towards which his professional work seemed

to gravitate. As it had been reconstructed in conventional art historical understanding of

the time, the Italian Quatrocento was signified by a gradual transition to ever greater

degrees of representational naturalism. From this perspective, the Renaissance, as the

heroic liberation from medieval symbolism and stale allegorical convention, manifested

itself most conspicuously in a new attention to the perceived contours of a living human

200
Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. 44. Nevertheless, Warburg undertook a job on the
side during his first Florentine stay, updating information on the city‘s museums for the Baedeker firm. In
his correspondence with the firm, Warburg wrote, for instance, in 1888: ―Sehr geehrter Herr Baedeker,
heute Morgen schickte ich Ihnen eingeschrieben die Correcturbogen und die Beschreibung der vier Saele
der Selbstbilnisse....‖ Interestingly, over half the letter is devoted to the plumbing and quality of the water
supply in the museums, a detail that reveals what German tourists were probably concerned about as they
planned their own journeys to the South. WIA, GC, Warburg Letter to Baedeker, 1898.

250
and natural world, and the index of its advance was the degree to which its forms

embraced an increasingly prevalent verisimilitude. But in the relief sculpture of the era,

Warburg discovered that such Renaissance naturalism was often accompanied by equally

powerful gestures of ornamental stylization. Contrary to the naturalistic naiveté that

Ruskin, and his many followers, found in the era before Raphael, Warburg‘s observations

seemed to indicate an era no less interested in ornamental ideality and the free play of

artistic imagination. Above all, Warburg located these observations in phenomena that

he came to call ―bewegte Beiwerke,‖ in the fluttering hair, richly folded drapery and

wind-blown garments that formed the ―accessories in motion‖ of the Quatrocento. In

turn, the threads of these accessories led Warburg to the motif of the female nymph, the

same figure who emerged with such insistent movement and extravagant ornamentality in

Botticelli and the other masters of the ostensibly naturalistic Italian Renaissance.

Like Mary Hertz, these figures of the striding, mobile and flowing nymph—

figures such as those depicted in Botticelli‘s Primavera and The Birth of Venus—

accompanied the Hamburg historian for the rest of his life, and the insights contained in

the 1891 Botticelli dissertation continued to inform Warburg‘s thought far longer than is

usually the case with such works. In what would become a signature of his method,

Warburg pursued the elusive figure of the nymph even as the trail she left extended

beyond the formal domains of Renaissance art history, following her provenance to both

the contemporary literature of the Renaissance and into the classical field of Roman

sarcophagal relief art. For Warburg, the significance of the nymph was bound up with its

status as an image of antiquity that had been taken up and translated by a moment of

Renaissance modernity. What intrigued Warburg, in other words, was the manner in

251
which such images persisted through time, and yet resonated in different ways in various

historical contexts. As the student of Usener, Warburg was alert to the multi-valent

character of such symbolism, and understood that its manifestation could signal either a

return of primitive totemism, or announce an enlightened gesture of power over symbolic

representation and its originary anxieties. As with the symbols and icons he continued to

explore in the following decades, the resonant figure of the nymph announced itself as an

ambiguous cultural memory, one that could represent retreat into reflexive mythical

thinking or advance into the reflection of enlightenement and Besonneheit. In other

words, the identity of the classical figures of feminine mobility—figures reborn in the

Renaissance work of Botticelli and others—seems to hover between that of the Nymph

and that of the Maenad. Where the former indicated a cultural memory of antiquity that

had been mastered by, and accommodated within, modernity, the latter recalled the

atavistic roots of the symbol in the ecstatic feminine violence of the Dionysian Maenads.

It is this vision of the symbolic legacy of the past—the perpetually recurring and

highly charged mnemic images who gaze into the present with a Janus face both

threatening and benign—that pervades nearly all the reflection of Warburg‘s subsequent

work. Like the library of his parent‘s home, complete with the ―satanically‖ illustrated

editions of Balzac, the archive of Western cultural memory harbored countless fragments

of such volatile symbolic experience.201 While the Botticelli dissertation stopped short of

pursuing these reflections fully, Warburg continued to explore the curious pattern of

201
In this instance, Warburg‘s charged symbols closely resemble the Benjaminian concept of the dialectical
image. In both cases, an historically resonant fragment of the past is unearthed and brought into volatile
relation with the present. The shock of this encounter can be explosive and undermine the conventional
contours of historical consciousness. For more on these connections see: Matthew Rampley, "From
Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg's Theory of Art."

252
dualities that seemed, from his perspective, to have inhabited and pervaded the culture of

the Italian Renaissance. In subsequent years, these explorations were given more definite

theoretical contours in Warburg‘s concept of symbolic Polarität, a concept describing the

multivalent or polyvocal character of the images that perpetually emerge and recur in

cultural history. While such polarities were not always configured in terms of classical

versus modern, or mythos versus logos, the general framework of mutually present and

overlapping opposites is a motif that runs throughout Warburg‘s work. Indeed, as

Gombrich presents the issue, Warburg‘s notorious difficulty in achieving a satisfactory

conceptualization of his problems—not to mention the often fragmentary character of his

admittedly tortured writing process—may owe much to theoretical and constitutional

commitments that tended to multiply meanings and amplify conceptual tensions. As

Warburg was fond of remarking himself, ―Der Liebe Gott steckt im detail,‖ and the task

of subsuming such details into a holistic vision was something he seems to have both

desired and resisted. Warburg often appears as a scholar fascinated by harmony,

dreaming of an idiosyncratic library in which the pieces of his work could be situated in

mutual consistency, but one also with peculiarly attentive eye for the anomaly, the

supplement, and the ill fitting remainder.

The work of Warburg around the turn of the century therefore returns again and

again to issues of opposites in apparent tension. In his reflections, for instance, on

Ghirlandaio‘s frescos in Florence‘s Santa Maria Novella, Warburg pursues the trail of the

elusive Renaissance nymph. One of these frescos, commissioned by the Tornabuoni

family in the era of Lorenzo de Medici, depicts on first glance a suitably sober recitation

of the birth of St. John the Baptist. But a second look, beyond the immobile matrons in

253
the heavy fabric and costume of Renaissance Florence, reveals a strange apparition in the

form of a striding nymph, complete with billowing gown and captured in a moment of

mobility. According to Gombrich‘s sketch of these reflections, Warburg‘s attention was

drawn to this work in the course of conversations with the Dutch author A. Jolles. For a

short period, the two had agreed to explore the question of the nymph in the form of an

imaginary exchange of letters in which Jolles played the (now familiar) role of one whose

aesthetic enjoyments have led to an uncanny erotic desire—in the form of the Tornabuoni

nymph. In a passage that could have been lifted directly from Wilhelm Jensen‘s 1903

novella, Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy, Jolles writes of the striding nymph that follows

the grave figures into the holy scene:

Behind them, close to the open door, there runs—no, that is not the word, there
flies, or rather there hovers—the object of my dreams, which slowly assumes the
proportions of a charming nightmare. A fantastic figure—should I call her a
servant girl, or rather a classical nymph?—enters the room ... with a billowing
veil. […] is this the way to visit a sickroom, even with congratulations? This
lively, light-footed and rapid gait, this irresistible energy, this striding step, which
contrasts with the aloof distance of all the other figures, what is the meaning of it
all? ... It sometimes looks to me as if the servant girl rushed with winged feet
through the clear ether instead of running on the real ground... Enough, I lost my
heart to her and in the days of preoccupation which followed I saw her
everywhere ... In many of the works of art I had always liked, I discovered
something of my Nymph. My condition varied between a bad dream and a fairy
tale. […]
... I lost my reason. It was always she who brought life and movement into an
otherwise calm scene. Indeed, she appeared to be the embodiment of movement ...
but it is very unpleasant to be her lover ... Who is she? Where does she come
from? Have I encountered her before? I mean one and a half millennia earlier?
Does she come from a noble Greek lineage, and did her great-grandmother have
an affair with people from Asia Minor, Egypt, or Mesopotamia?202

But if Jolles is intent here on replaying the fin-de-siècle motif of the aesthetic vision

come to life, a Pygmalion or Norbert Hanold overwhelmed by erotic reverie in the

202
Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 107-108.

254
Tornabuoni chapel, Warburg resists what he considers a false, fashionable, and ultimately

dangerous intimacy with the symbolic apparitions of the past. As always, he too is

intrigued by the multiple juxtapositions of a religious fresco that is, one the one hand,

rendered in the style of Renaissance realism, and on the other hand, grants admittance to

a curiously displaced figure of classical ideality and fancy. Such juxtapositions he wishes

to pursue, but not in the fevered fashion of Renaissancekult aestheticism or in the pious

bromides of Ruskin‘s followers. Warburg‘s well documented distaste for interpretive

approaches is revealed in a passage in which he archly characterizes the European

pilgrims on aesthetic pilgrimage in the cities and museums of Italy:

The modern languid art-lover who has gone to Italy to refresh himself feels
greatly superior to so much trivial realism and turns away with a discreet smile.
Ruskin's word of command sends him to the cloisters, to a mediocre Giottesque
fresco, where he must discover his own primitive mentality in the charming,
unspoiled and uncomplicated Trecento work. Ghirlandaio is not that kind of
rural, bubbling brook for the refreshment of Pre-Raphaelites, nor is he a
romantic waterfall which inspires that other type of tourist, the superman on
Easter holiday with Zarathustra in the pocket of his tweed cape, seeking fresh
courage from its mad cascadings for his struggle for life, even against political
authority ... Life weighs heavily on the Tornabuoni, but they are too proud to tell
this immediately to every hurried tourist. Only when he lingers in silence and
does not tire of silently enquiring after their fate will they allow him to share the
sufferings of their lives which stiff brocades and the heavy folds of Lucca
cloth hide so splendidly.203

The secret of the nymph, in the opinion of the art historian defending his territory, will

not yield itself to the overheated and under-informed speculations of the ―Übermenschen

in Osterferien,‖ those sentimental travelers who regularly descended on Italy with

Baedeker in one hand and Nietzsche in the other. But if these latter came to Italy to see

reflections of their own imagined Renaissances—in the guise of naïve spiritualism or in

203
Ibid., 111.

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the costume of earthy and egoistic hedonism—the Tornabuoni frescos could only

frustrate their desires.

Warburg proposes, in other words, something entirely different from the simple

registration of the frescos in the competing and conventional options of spiritual

primitivism or revolutionary realism. Instead, he searches the work and his sources for

the outlook of Ghirlandaio and the patron, Giovanni Tornabuoni, from whose perspective

the apparently disparate and idiosyncratic elements of the frescos may have rested

comfortably together. In this light, the Renaissance of the Tornabuoni takes shape in

typical Warburgian fashion as a volatile, though not always dissonant, combination of

themes, tones and leitmotifs. This polyvocal Renaissance was not without its violent

tensions, but those tensions were not those mirrored in the gaze of the Ruskin innocents

or the hedonisms of Nietzsche and Pater. In the apparition of the nymph, or in the

depiction of Tornabuoni family likenesses in the fresco depicting Zacharias‘ sacrifice,

Warburg finds aesthetic realism, religious devotion, and pagan motifs joined together in

ways that aroused no sense of disharmony for the Renaissance mind of the Tornabuoni.

With respect to the Zacharias fresco, Warburg goes to great length to identify and

catalogue the images of the specific Renaissance individuals depicted. Indeed, far from

finding a gesture of irreligiosity in the intrusion of the Tornabuoni into the scriptural

scenes, Warburg observes that this practice was only an extension of the long-held

tradition of fashioning wax images of patrons, which were in turn mounted in their

associated church or chapel. A vigorous and worldly Renaissance realism, in other

words, was not necessarily inconsonant with a still devoted and vibrant religious faith.

An Etruscan merchant of knightly lineage has staked his honour on being buried
in a building in which the Virgin Mother of the Saviour born in the land of

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 Canaan is worshipped, and on telling her story in the images on its walls.
(Originally an act of individual magic, a personal thank-offering, an ex-voto,
sympathetic magic, social self-satisfaction.) The members of his family appear,
according to a carefully thought-out ceremony, in solemn groups.
Exuberant vitality, the awareness of a germinating, creative will-to-life, and an
unspoken, maybe an unconscious opposition to the strict discipline of the Church
... demand an outlet for their accumulated pent-up energy in the form of
expressive movement. And thus a diligent search begins in the permitted sacred
story for a pretext; after which the classical past must lend its protective,
indisputable authority as a precedent to allow the search for freedom of
expression, if not in words then at least in pictorial form. […]
One must understand the extent of the energy that went into the arrangement of
the external ceremonial and that made for a clear articulation of the social element
... and also the extent of the energy that went into the expression of religious
associations ... understand, that is, the extent of the psychological oscillation
between a cool political attention to physiognomies and (hot) demonic,
superstitious, subjective literal magic, devout religious or pagan gestures
reflecting the ideal. Only then can one grasp the true liberating significance of the
enhanced expressive movement of the body.204

Thus, while Warburg still sees in the Tornabuoni cycle, a set of powerful impulses

towards liberation from antiquated forms of spiritual expression, there are also gestures

pointing towards accommodation and a reconceived harmony (and persistent tensions)

between the worldly affairs of Medicean Florence and the spiritual demands of

ecclesiastical propriety. Interestingly, and even with these clear suggestions of a more

ambivalent and complicated reception on the part of Warburg, also visible in Gombrich‘s

reconstruction is an impulse to rescue and recover a Warburg of enlightenement and clear

progressive historical trajectories. These latter were, without a doubt, a major set of

elements in Warburg‘s thinking, but Gombrich seems over-willing to tidy up and

reassemble, here and elsewhere, the Hamburger‘s thought into a coherent system and

world view.205 Thus, despite the somewhat more ambivalent conclusion of a Renaissance

204
Ibid., 123.
205
See for instance Michael Steinberg‘s interpretive essay in Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the
Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. Michael Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

257
in tension to which Warburg seems to arrive, Gombrich seems intent on reasserting a

more univocal set of interpretations. ―That these frescoes are fundamentally irreligious,‖

Gombrich writes, ―Warburg has no doubt. He finds it understandable that they should be

a scandal to a devout Catholic. This display of earthly splendor seems to him

incompatible with true Christian devotion.‖206 Nevertheless, if Warburg had configured

his work on the Renaissance in terms of a certain Polarität, so too was his methodology

and outlook governed by a seeming oscillation between a pole of conceptual

consolidation, that Gombrich wishes to restore, and a pole of conceptual dispersal and

disaggregation. And while Gombrich no doubt captures well the former moment in

Warburg‘s thought, the Hamburger was also quite sure that God is less likely to be found

in an abstract theory or coherent system than in the detail, the granule and the fragment.

Throughout his most sustained period of Florentine expatriation (1897-1904), in a

circulating milieu of acquaintances that included Aldolf Hildebrand, Arnold Böcklin,

Conrad Fiedler, Isolde Kurz, and Jesse Hillebrand, Warburg pursued his vision of a

Renaissance born of the expressive cultural tensions of Polarität and Kompatabilität.

Such researches eventually culminated in works such as the essay ―Franco Sassetti‘s Last

Injunction to His Sons‖, which expanded on the themes of the Tornabuoni work, and a

series of pieces on the cultural exchanges between Renaissance Italy and its Flemish,

Burgundian and German counterparts to the North. The 1902 ―Flemish Art and the

Florentine Early Renaissance‖, the 1905 ―Artistic Exchanges between North and South in

the Fifteenth Century‖, and the 1907 ―Peasants at Work in Burgundian Tapestries‖, find

Warburg still exploring the persistence of antique imagery in the era of the Renaissance,

206
Gombrich, E. H., Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, 1970), 114.

258
but he complicates that set of temporal interpenetrations with questions of spatial and

geographic circulation. Where the Tornabuoni and Sassetti works had revealed a rich

field of appropriation and resistance between early modern Italy and the cultures of

classical antiquity, Warburg sought a similar field of porousness and exchange between

the seemingly disparate realms of Northern and Southern Europe in the fifteenth century.

Significantly, in relation to these migrations of Gothic, Renaissance and Classical

imagery, Warburg again comes to focus on the figure of an image in motion. In this

instance, however, the phenomenon of interest is not the nymph, but the production and

exchange of tapestries and wall-hangings in the early modern era.

What made these particularly intriguing was not only the pervasive nature of the

form, for which masters of both North and South submitted designs and cartoons, but also

the reproducible and mobile character of tapestry weavings in an era before the general

implementation of oil on canvas. As Warburg relates it in ―Peasants at Work in

Burgundian Tapestries‖:

The tapestry, which we now admire as a mere aristocratic fossil in a show

collection, brings with it from its origins some rather more democratic features:
for by its very nature the woven tapestry arazzo (arras) was never the product of
unique, original creativity. The weaver, as the anonymous purveyor of the image,
could repeat the same subject as often as the client demanded. Nor was the
tapestry, like the fresco, permanently attached to the wall: it was a mobile support
for the image. In the history of methods of reproduction and dissemination it
figures, in a sense, as an ancestor of printing— the same craft whose cheaper
product, wallpaper, has appropriately enough usurped the position of the tapestry
in the bourgeois home.207

Long before the age of ―mechanical reproduction‖ of visual artifacts, Warburg glimpsed

a Renaissance that was not without its own robust culture of reproducible and

207
Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European
Renaissance (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 315.

259
transportable art, a culture that he would later pursue in the spatial and temporal

peregrinations of wood block prints, astrological manuscripts and tarot card art. The

point, however, was that the nineteenth century had no monopoly on the reproduction,

transmission and circulation of visual imagery. Visual images, with all their symbolic

and mnemic resonances, had long been migrating throughout the European and

Mediterranean worlds, and the territories with which academic historians and aesthetic

dilettantes sought to enclose the past were far more porous and traversable than their

border guards were prepared to allow.208

By 1904, however, Warburg had begun to feel an increasing sense of professional

anomie and a lack of inspired direction, a sense that only magnified his mercurial

tendencies and the melancholic moodiness. Warburg was always keenly aware of what

seemed a fragile and volatile mental constitution, and while he could be outwardly

charming and wry, his family and closer associates were also quite familiar with the

abrupt changes in mood that could almost instantly overwhelm him. On one such

occasion, during a visit to Florence by family friends, Warburg revealed the kind of

depressive agitation that was not an uncommon phenomenon in the household. ―Finally,‖

as biographer Ron Chernow relates the scene,

like some wandering, restless apparition, he approached his startled visitors and
said that if he were institutionalized, he hoped they would care for Mary. Aby was
then thirty-three. Already, his mind alternated between delirium and lucidity. […]
After he snapped out of the depression, the visitors were amazed that he could

208
Ibid., 319. Warburg seems to have been fond of the images of border guards in relation to his
transgressive territorial investigations: ―If we refuse to be distracted by the current tendency to regulate art-
historical inquiry by posting border guards, then it becomes evident that monumental pictorial forces are at
work within this ‗inferior‘ region of Northern European applied art; and there is no historical difficulty in
assigning all of this Burgundian genre art to its true place within a general stylistic evolution. In the few
surviving tapestry inventories, scenes from the life of the common man appear frequently enough to make
them a typical iconographical feature of court tapestry art from the beginning of the fifteenth century on-
ward.‖

260
 step back and analyze his behavior so clinically. He told the couple he planned to
check into a Swiss clinic that spring—perhaps Kreuzlingen, to which he was later
confined.5 Among other things, he worried inconsolably about the damage he was
doing to his young family.209

Though such intimations of instability were not uncommon, the self-imposed pressures of

writing, the distractions of his adopted Florence, and a career forever hovering on the

margins of secure professional recognition had begun to take their toll on Warburg. In

1904, therefore, the Warburgs decided to return to Hamburg, with the hopes that a degree

of distance from the Italian milieu would yield the necessary perspective to continue the

work he was then doing on Flemish and Italian art.

The return to Hamburg, however, was likewise bound up with another venture

that had increasingly come to fascinate Warburg. Since his youthful and nearly obsessive

interest in reading, Warburg had been an inveterate purchaser and collector of books.

Letters to his family, for instance, from his first student forays to Florence, are filled with

requests for funds to buy the necessary volume for this project or the complete edition of

that. By the turn of the century, however, he had begun to toy with the idea of

establishing an art historical library in his home city of Hamburg, to be funded by the

civic-minded generosity of the Warburg clan. Already in the summer of 1900, Warburg

had written to his brother Max—no doubt reminding him of their youthful contract—in

the hopes of securing financial backing from the family concern. ―In the last analysis,‖

he writes,

we are all rentiers, and terribly interest-minded. Something like a library can only
be founded by means of sacrifices. We must have the courage to do this.
After all, what do we do for art? Two paintings by Consul Weber meet the
total of our annual requirements. I would not hesitate for a moment to enter
my library as a financial asset in the accounts of the firm. If I don't conk out

209
Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family, 114.

261
 before, my book will not be the worst the firm will have achieved. Don't
laugh; I am by no means blinded by pride; on the contrary, I am really a
fool for not insisting even more that we should demonstrate by our example
that capitalism is also capable of intellectual achievements of a scope which
would not be possible otherwise. If one day my book is mentioned in connection
with and as a complement to Jacob Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance,
this will be the compensation for what I and you have done.210

By November of the same year, with Max Warburg positively inclined to the project, a

more systematic collection of volumes began even before Aby‘s return from Florence. 211

After the 1904 homecoming, and with the increased pace of his library purchases, it

quickly became apparent that the size of the collection would soon become

unmanageable without a dedicated space in which to house it and a formal staff to

maintain it. In 1909, therefore, Warburg acquired a property at Heilwigstrasse 114 to

become the library‘s home, and hired a specialist in Renaissance collection, Dr. P.

Huebner, to formalize its organization. ―When I enetered the library for the first time in

1911,‖ long time Warburg assistant and colleague Fritz Saxl would later relate, ―it was

clear that Warburg had lived many years in Italy. Although broadly conceived, its

holdings were primarily German and Italian works. The library held at that time around

15,000 volumes, and every younger student like me must have felt a bit of befuddlement

at the sight of it.‖212 Indeed, despite the disruptions of war and defeat in the following

210
Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 129-130.
211
Ibid., 131-132. The seriousness of the funds at issue is revealed in a November letter from Aby to the
family: ―... I am looking forward to receiving the Statutes of the Library. I have had the same idea as you,
i.e. to contribute my own present library as the basis. I still have all the major bills since my university
days, from which it appears that since 1889 I have invested about 10,000 M. in my library. During the last
few years, I spent about 2,500-3,000 M. With 3,000 M. I can make do, with 4,000 I am free, and with 5,000
I can achieve something really good and unusual. In this latter case the taking of photographs on a larger
scale would also be possible.
My scholarly work progresses and gains shape and wants to be communicated; the discovery as such no
longer stands in the centre of my own inner concern. Unfortunately, the first signs of fatigue are also
present (unmotivated states of worry), but I hope to overcome them ....‖
212
Fritz Saxl, ―Die Geschichte der Bibliothek Aby Warburgs (1886-1944),‖ in Warburg, Ausgewählte
Schriften und Wurdigungen. ―Als ich 1911 die Bibliothek zum ersten Mal betrat, war deutlich, daß

262
decade, disruptions largely relieved by contributions and assistance from the American

branch of the family, Warburg‘s library continued to expand, reaching a total of around

20,000 volumes by 1920.

For the first two decades of the twentieth century, the library retained the

character of an open, but privately held collection. But if the library was ultimately

envisioned as a center for research—and as an organized territory of intellectual re-

collection and supplemental archive of Warburg himself—the arrangement and content

of the collection likewise reflected the capacious and idiosyncratic interests of its

namesake. Describing the project of reorganization undertaken in 1920, as the library

was being reconfigured as an art historical institute with links to the University of

Hamburg, Fritz Saxl writes of the unique organizational character of the institution:

Everywhere in the library there were small groupings of books that denoted
specific avenues of thought—even while precisely this extraordinary richness
appealed to the scholar, it simulataneiously made it much more difficult for him
to find what he sought. When the philospher Ernst Cassierer used the library for
the first time, he decided henceforth to either stay away completely—at which he
succeeded for some time—or to imprison himself there for years—which he often
later did with some pleasure. Warburg‘s new aquisitions naturally always had an
inner coherence. But there were also many ―trial balloons‖ and idiosyncratic
―arabesques‖ that, for an institute serving a larger public, were somewhat less
attractive or wanted.
The first and most urgent work of stabilization [Stabilisierungsarbeit] undertaken
in the library consisted in the normalization of Warburg‘s system of organization,
such as it had developed by 1920 (i.e. to here extend it and to there prune it
back). There was simply no on-hand classification system that could really be
used as the library was devoted to the study of cultural history—and indeed a
unique perpsective on it. It should hold the essential materials, and make them
available in subdivisions that led students to books and ideas with which they

Warburg mehrere Jahre in Italien gelebt hatte. Obwohl umfassend angelegt, enthielt sie vor allem
Deutsches und Italienisches. Sie besaß damals etwa 15000 Bände, und jeder jüngere Student, wie ich, muß
sich bei dem Anblick verwirrt gefühlt haben.‖

263
 might not yet be familiar. It seemed risky to do this in too rigid or mechanical
fashion.213

Warburg‘s own Tower of Lynkeus, a library and research station here situated in

Hamburg rather than in Basel, thus still encompassed the intellectual tangents and curves

of thought that characterized Warburg‘s thought. The fragments, details, trial balloons

and arabesques with which Warburg was fascinated, the strange passages and marginal

territories that he pursued through his research, found concrete expression in a library

that took shape as the idiosyncratic personal album of Warburg‘s journeys, the

expeditions he undertook through the European memory of its antiquities, its

renaissances and its modernities. It is tempting, furthermore, to compare Warburg‘s

library to Sigmund Freud‘s magic writing pad, that vision of a memory record

configured as a supplemental substrate or archive. However, where Freud‘s metaphor

might have wound its way into the formal disciplinary organization of psychoanalytic

knowledge—a process we will explore in the following chapter—Warburg‘s supplement

emerged in the concrete form of the house on Heilwigstrasse 114. And if Freud‘s

practices of ―archivization‖ always returned the experiences of Italy, archaeology and

classical literature into the well ordered spheres of psychoanalytic writing, Warburg‘s

library seems to resist easy categorization and translation into a rationalized archive. The

213
Ibid. ―Überall in der Bibliothek gab es kleine Büchergruppen, die eine bestimmte Denkrichtung
anzeigten—so sehr gerade dieser außerordentliche Ideenreichtum den Gelehrten erfreute, er erschwerte es
ihm gleichzeitig, sich in der Bibliothek zurechtzufinden. Als der Philosoph Ernst Cassierer die Bibliothek
zum ersten Mal benützte, beschloß er, ihr entweder gänzlich fern zu bleiben—was er eine Zeitlang
durchgehalten hat—oder sich dort für Jahre in Gefangenschaft zu begeben—das hat er später öfter mit
Freuden getan. Warburgs Neuanschaffungen hatten natürlich immer eine innere Kohärenz, es gab aber auch
viele ―Versuchsballons‖ und persönliche Arabesken, die in einer für ein größeres Publikum bestimmten
Institution weniger erwünscht erschienen.
Kein verfügbares Klassifikationssystem ließ sich anwenden, da diese Bibliothek dem Studium der
Kulturgeschichte —und zwar aus einem ganz bestimmten Blickwinkel—gewidmet war. Sie sollte das
wesentliche Material enthalten und es in Unterteilungen darbieten, die den Studenten zu Büchern und Ideen
hinleiteten, mit denen er noch nicht vertraut war. Es schien bedenklich, dies in zu starrer Form zu tun.‖

264
dispersed territories of Italian experience—the arabesques of historical nomadism,

disciplinary transgression, and professional marginality—find themselves mortared into

the very stones of the Warburg‘s tower retreat, and they haunt the territory of the library

like spirits of restless and insistent deterritorialization.

Following Warburg to the Hamburg library were those persistently recurring

images in Western visual culture, those images that are charged with the psychological

energies of their initial symbolic presentation, and emerge in Warburg‘s concept of the

Pathosformel. The term describes those symbolic expressions that continue to carry and

transmit a memory of their own psychic ur-formation, and that perpetually reappear and

resonate in the history of Western visual expression in a recurring process of re-working

and re-mastery. For Warburg, Western civilization has been subject to its own centuries-

long project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. In this case, however, the original trauma

lies in the pre-historical ur-anxieties and fears whose terrors prompted the compensating

reflex of sympathetic magic and symbolic expression. To name and to represent was to

assert mastery over a universe inhabited by inscrutable forces of personal animus. But

the affective and emotional energies that went into these symbolic formulae continued to

resonate long beyond their first appearance, and depending on nature of the mind or

seismograph that picks up their signal, they may reemerge as images of demonic

malevolence or in the sublimated and mastered forms of benign spirituality. However, if

Warburg first came to recognize these recurring forms, or Pathosformeln, in his Italian

researches and in his Renaissance studies, his return migration to Hamburg soon revealed

the degree to which such formulae were themselves insistently migratory, wandering and

reappearing not only various historical eras and periods, but also capable of traversing

265
the porous cultural boundaries between Northern and Southern Europe. In the spaces of

the newly established library, Warburg soon found that his Pathosformeln had come to

Germany as well, and had arrived a very long time ago.

From 1904 until the outbreak of the First World War, Warburg‘s scholarly

attention was thus increasingly drawn to the ways in which the Pathosformeln of

antiquity had traveled nomadically out of their original Mediterranean sphere, and come

to circulate in regions beyond the Alps. Building upon the work that he had already done

on the cultural exchanges between north and south during the Middle Ages and the

Renaissance, Warburg produced a series of works and fragments focused on the

penetration of antique imagery into the representational ecology of the German north:

―Dürer and Italian Antiquity‖ (1905); ―The Gods of Antiquity and the Early Renaissance

in Southern and Northern Europe‖ (1908); ―On Images of Planetary Deities in the Low

German Almanac of 1519‖ (1908). All these reflections, however, culminated in

Warburg‘s essay, ―Pagan-Antique Imagery in Words and Images in the Age of Luther.‖

Published first in 1920, but first delivered as a paper in 1917, the essay is not only a

formidable piece of scholarship—tracing the prevalence and metamorphoses of antique

astrological currents during Luther‘s Reformation—but is also a intensely personal and

timely statement about a culture in crisis that finds itself hovering between

representational polarities of enlightenment and atavism. For Warburg, in other words,

the Renaissance returns once more as a mirror within which to gaze on an image of the

present, a contemporary moment whose fantastic advances in science and knowledge

were matched only by an astonishing propensity for violent cultural atavism.

266
 Of the many idiosyncratic interests that Warburg had cultivated and that

subsequently came to inform the contours of his library, the phenomenon of astrology—

its historical persistence and representational development from antiquity into the

modern era—came to have special significance during this period. Gombrich, as always,

is quick to remind the reader that such interests were conducted purely in the most

enlightened scholarly spirit, even relating Warburg‘s efforts to unmask contemporary

practitioners as the charlatans he thought they were. But while this is true enough as far

as it goes, Gombrich‘s solicitude for Warburg‘s credentials as a champion of enlightened

ratio—as we have seen before—sometimes overshoots its mark and conceals the more

nomadic and discursive dimensions of Warburg. This latter was the scholar who

navigated border regions and found history in second-hand shops, the nomadic

intellectual that allowed himself to be carried away by the labyrinthine lures of fragments

and anecdotes. This aspect of his practice carried with it certain costs for Warburg, and

it may even have been less prized than his other qualities by the historian himself, but it

nevertheless played an important role in his development and his work. And thus we

find—in ―Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther‖—

Warburg making yet another unique turn into the tangled passages and cultural side

streets of astrological thought in the era of the Reformation.

The published edition of the paper is preceded by a preface that is also dated

1920. As such, this latter must have been written during a moment of relative lucidity in

the period of mental instability that followed Warburg‘s psychological breakdown of

1918. Despite these circumstances, and with the resignation of one suffering

confinement in multiple dimensions, Warburg writes that he has, ―nevertheless allowed

267
this fragment to appear, partly in the expectation that this initial attempt will be of use to

a later researcher, and partly because, however good or bad the present weaver, the

opportunity of threading in new strands from abroad will long be denied to German

scholarship.‖214 Even before his breakdown, which occurred as the war reached its own

ultimate climax in 1918, Warburg felt with special intimacy the closing and the swift

assertion of territorial boundedness that accompanied the commencement of hostilities,

and that interrupted the cosmopolitan flows in which he had lived and studied. Though

greeting the war with a grim foreboding, and too old to find himself in arms, Warburg

hoped at first to play a part through activities of wartime charity work. Eventually,

however, as Saxl relates it, Warburg‘s own health and background forced him to

withdraw from such activities. In the end, he found himself with little more to do than

follow the news, collect newspaper clippings and look on as colleagues such as the

young Fritz Saxl were called up for duty. ―He telephoned around,‖ writes Saxl, ―talked

to people in the street and to his friends who were in touch with Berlin, he read foreign

newspapers, but the contradictions could not be cleared up.‖215 By October of 1918,

with pressures and anxieties weighing down an already fragile constitution, Warburg‘s

psychological situation worsened and he suffered the breakdown that led to his

commitment at the Kreuzlingen clinic of Ludwig Binswanger, a confinement that would

last until 1923. By the time the Luther paper was published, Warburg‘s formerly mobile

world had closed in around him in dramatic fashion, and it is perhaps not surprising that

214
Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European
Renaissance, 597.
215
Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 208.

268
his 1920 preface ends with a dedication to his wife and the, ―memory of the winter of

1888 in Florence.‖

Warburg opens the Luther paper with a suitably classicist gesture towards the

spiritual kinship of classical antiquity and Germany. ―Es ist ein altes Buch zu blättern:‖

he writes quoting Goethe‗s Faust II, ―vom Harz bis Hellas immer Vettern.‖ But almost

immediately thereafter, he declares his distance from this tradition by announcing that

the works he examines fall within the ambit of art history only, ―in the widest

sense…insofar as that term covers image-making in all its forms.‖ Thus, despite the now

somewhat ironic Goethe quote with which he began, Warburg announces an

investigation into territories very different from those of conventional German

classicism, a tradition born with Winckelmann and persisting well into the twentieth

century. As objects of art, Warburg freely admits that his visual documents are of little

worth. ―They stem from prints or printed books;‖ explains Warburg,

they lack aesthetic appeal; and without the texts that relate to them (whether
printed with them or not), they are unpromising material for the purely formal
concerns of present-day art history, in that their strange illustrative quality stems
from their content. The idea of examining a mere "curiosity" for its relevance to
the history of human thought is one that comes more naturally to historians of
religion than to historians of art. And yet it is one of the prime duties of art history
to bring such forms out of the twilight of ideological polemic and to subject them
to close historical scrutiny. For there is one crucial issue in the history of style and
civilization—the influence of antiquity on the culture of Renaissance Europe as a
whole—that cannot otherwise be fully understood and resolved.216

Put differently, to trace the criss-crossing and tangled threads of antiquity‘s passage

through Renaissance Europe, and Germany in particular, Warburg proposes a shift in

focus. For such purposes, the standard and conventional canon of art historical discipline

216
Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European
Renaissance. 598.

269
was far too insensitive and restrictive, and the cultural historian (or historian of religion,

as the case may be) must look to those regions of representation and expression that lie

beyond the purview of limiting disciplinary boundaries. What interests Warburg, in other

words, what he seeks to trace and follow, are not the well worn art historical issues of

style, school, genre or provenance, but a content and a subject matter for which canonical

legitimacy is meaningless. And, more specifically, the content at issue is the various

ways and varied forms by which traces of antique symbolism found their way into the

visual lexicon of Germany in the era of the Reformation.

It is astrology, therefore, and the visual images by which it found representation

in Reformation, that Warburg chooses as his vehicle for this particular expedition.

Indeed, as he unfolds his findings in the paper, complete with his signature erudition and

careful mapping of extremely esoteric literatures, Warburg reveals a Reformation that

teems with astrological sciences, premonitions, controversies, and anxieties. He follows

it even into the conversations and correspondence of Philipp Melanchthon and Martin

Luther, revealing the degree to which even these leaders of Protestant reform gave ear to

the counsels of astrological auguries. Not only had astrological ―science‖ persisted since

antiquity, in parallel with the spiritual institutions of Christianity, but its practice

continued to flourish, transmitting as it did its original pagan imagery throughout Europe.

But if this pagan imagery of astrology was pervasive in the era of the Renaissance and

Reformation, it was of a very different character from that envisioned in the serene

classicisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ―A classically rarefied version of

the ancient gods,‖ as Warburg puts it,

has been so successfully imposed on us, ever since Winckelmann, as the central
symbol of antiquity, that we are apt to forget that it was entirely the creation of

270
 humanist scholars: this "Olympian" aspect of antiquity had first to be wrested
from its entrenched, traditional, "daemonic" aspect. Ever since the passing of
antiquity, the ancient gods had lived on in Christian Europe as cosmic spirits,
religious forces with a strong influence in practical affairs: indeed, the cosmology
of the ancient world—notably in the form of astrology—undeniably survived as a
parallel system, tacitly tolerated by the Christian Church.217

In shifting the focus to the visuality of astrology, briefly bracketing for a moment any

admiration for the idealized pagan imagery of a Raphael or a Botticelli, we immediately

encounter a sphere in which the reception of pagan antiquity in the Renaissance emerges

in a more contested and ambivalent aspect. For in the variety and multiplicity of

fifteenth- and sixteenth-century astrological representation, Warburg finds a

corresponding variety in the ways by which such visual survivals were received and

accommodated in those eras.

It was not, therefore, the already well-documented persistence and pervasiveness

of astrology in Reformation Germany that interested Warburg, but the rich and varied

textures of antique reception manifest in that historical moment. Indeed, the most

concrete task of Warburg‘s paper is that of outlining the opposing conceptions of

astrology held by Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, and the opposition that thus

wove its way into even the highest levels, and the most intimate partnerships, of the

Protestant community. In the views of the two reformers, neither of whom completely

rejected the value of astral portents and readings, Warburg marks out the poles of

possible response to the hints and imagery of astrology. Reading, for example,

Melanchthon‘s correspondence with Johann Carion, in which the former requests

astrological advice on issues ranging from politics to his recently born daughter, Warburg

identifies Melanchthon as a more ―faithful‖ believer in the value and significance of

217
Ibid.

271
astrology. But again, the distinction Warburg wants to draw here is not between one of

belief and non-belief, but one between differing intellectual orientations and postures in

the reception of astrological signs. Thus, if Luther emerges as somewhat less credulous

than his colleague in these matters, this signals for Warburg a different orientation

towards, rather than a complete rejection of, astral augury.

In this particular instance, as described by Warburg, the astral sign and figure of

Saturn emerges with particular urgency, and was bound up with the contemporary

controversies and bitter polemics surrounding the astrological significance of Luther‘s

contested date of birth. Of special interest was the literature generated in relation to the

―Great Conjunction‖ of 1484, and the rich landscape of prophecy and divination that

emerged around it. Among the more colorful of these latter were portents claiming the

impending arrival of the appearance of a prophet monk born at the time of the

conjunction and under the often sinister and malevolent sign of Saturn. By the 1520‘s,

the literature of the ―Great Conjunction‖ was resurrected into renewed topicality by

events in the early years of the Reformation, with partisans on both sides clashing over

Luther‘s precise date of birth and the specific meaning of this to the ―Great Conjunction.‖

In a passage that was perhaps directed also at his own moment of world war and rampant

propaganda, Warburg writes of the Reformation:

The fear of natural signs and wonders, in the heavens and on the earth, was shared
by all Europe; and the press of the day exploited it for ends of its own. The
invention of printing from movable type had lent wings to learned thought; and
now the art of pictorial printing enabled images—their language an international
one—to fly far and wide. These stormy petrels darted from North to South and
back again, and every party sought to enlist in its own cause the "pictorial
slogans" (as they might now be called) of cosmic sensationalism.218

218
Ibid., 622.

272
For Warburg, in other words, the figure of Saturn—under whose influence Luther‘s birth

took place in all accounts—assumed an immediate theological, political and astrological

significance, all inflected by a burgeoning and swiftly circulating visual culture. Indeed,

from Warburg‘s perspective the transformation of contemporary visual representations of

Saturn became a useful way of mapping the various receptions and resonances of pagan

imagery. ―We shall take Saturn as our guiding star through this astral labyrinth,‖ writes

Warburg, ―because in the age of the Reformation the fear and awe of Saturn stood at the

very center of astrological belief.‖219

The political and theological moment of Reformation was thus one acutely aware

of, and inflected by, a parallel and much older configuration of astral space and human

time. In the course of the essay, Warburg ultimately traces out two primary poles or

variants of this awareness as it was manifest among Luther‘s contemporaries, and situates

each by tracing their respective responses to the sinister and melancholy sign of Saturn.

The first of these emerges most prominently in the astrological compendium and

prophecies of Johannes Lichtenberger (1440-1503), published in both Latin and German

in 1488 and 1490 respectively. Lichtenberger‘s Practica was largely a collection and

recitation of work already done by others such as the Paduan professor Paulus von

Middleburg, but its publication in the vernacular and its liberal use of woodcut

illustrations contributed to the enormous popularity it came to enjoy in the following

decades. The astrological controversies surrounding the emergence of Martin Luther and

the reform movement only further amplified the interest in Lichtenberger‘s interpretation

of the 1484 great conjunction, and the degree to which Luther‘s appearance had been

219
Ibid.

273
presaged by the astral alignments of the late fifteenth century. In the political and

theological polemics that raged in the following century, battles waged increasingly in

the emerging cultures of printed word and image, Lichtenberger became a standard work

of interest and available to a wide variety of readerships. Indeed, even after the lines of

conflict had been drawn between Luther‘s supporters and his Catholic opponents,

Lichtenberg‘s text and images found themselves deployed and redeployed by partisans of

both sides. So profound and persistent was its influence, that Warburg—always sensitive

to the migratory patterns of his documents—notes that historical records of its

consultation extend to as late as 1806, following the Battle of Jena.220

But what interested Warburg was the way in which Lichtenberger‘s images

presented the figure of Saturn, as the ruling figure in the house of Scorpio under whose

sign Luther had been born. ―The history of the influence of antiquity, as observed

through the transmission, disappearance, and rediscovery of its gods, has some

unexplored insights to contribute to a history of the meaning of anthropomorphic

thought,‖ writes Warburg as he traces the various manifestations of Saturn:

In the transitional age of the early Renaissance, pagan-cosmological causality was

defined in classicizing terms through the symbols of the gods; and these were
approached in due proportion to their degree of saturation with human quality:
from a religious daemon-worship at one extreme to a purely artistic and
intellectual reinterpretation at the other.221

In relation to Lichtenberger‘s imagery, Warburg‘s primary focus is on Saturn‘s relation to

the supposedly moderating and more congenial influence of Jupiter. Indeed, the visual

representation of this confrontation between the sinister, melancholy, and sometimes

revolutionary aspect of Saturn and the stabilizing function of Jupiter had particular

220
Ibid., 623.
221
Ibid., 645.

274
salience for an era in deep political and religious turmoil. But for Warburg,

Lichtenberger‘s images speak with the visual tones of a distinctly atavistic spirituality,

that ―religious daemon-worship‖ which formed one of the poles of possible

representation. ―Lichtenberger,‖ Warburg writes of the Practica, ―shows us a pair of

debased, repellent planetary spirits contending for the control of human destiny; the

object of their struggle, man himself, is absent.‖ The pattern by which Lichtenberger

here receives and interprets the symbolic remnants of antique culture is steeped in what

Warburg understands as an anthropologically primitive posture of spirituality and

representation. The nomadic orientation of the classical pantheon here emerges as

personified forces of fate and demonic presences whose struggles determine the fortunes

of an impotent mankind. The images capture a representational posture in which

humanity confronts historical and natural worlds that are governed by entities of absolute

otherness and range far beyond the limited sphere of human control.

In looking to the other terminus of the spectrum, the opposite representational

pole in the reception of antique themes and astral imagery, Warburg turns to the

contemporary Renaissance figure of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). By the 1520‘s, Dürer

had long enjoyed a distinguished reputation throughout Europe as an accomplished artist

and engraver with contacts both north and south of the Alps. Indeed, Dürer‘s travels in

Italy, first in 1494 and 1495 and then from 1505 to 1507, form a seminal chapter in the

history of artistic exchange between the Renaissances of Germany and Italy. Though he

remained in Nuremburg during the balance of his career, he carried on correspondence

and maintained contact with a variety of well-known artists to the south, including

Raphael, Leonardo and Giovanni Bellini. It is not Dürer‘s works from his Italian

275
journeys that interest Warburg, however, but Dürer‘s 1514 engraving, Melancolia I. In

this instance, the example could not be a more legitimate representative of the art

historical canon, with an enormous art historical literature devoted to both Dürer and the

engraving. In the iconological field alone, for instance, and within Warburg‘s immediate

orbit, Erwin Panofsky opened his career with a 1914 dissertation on the Nuremburg artist,

Dürer‘s Kunsttheorie: vornehmlich in ihrem Verhältnis zur Kunsttheorie der Italiener,

and jointly authored a 1923 study with Fritz Saxl entitled, "Melancholia I": Eine quellen-

und typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen.222

Dürer‘s Melancolia, however, provided a rich document for iconological

investigation not only for Saxl and Panofsky, but also for Warburg, both in his Luther

essay and elsewhere.223 In his 1905 fragment on Dürer‘s Death of Orpheus, for instance,

Warburg had already been intrigued by the way in which the artist had responded to the

works of his Italian contemporaries, but had nevertheless brought a different

temperament to bear on the antique themes and formulae that he found there. ―Antiquity

came to Dürer by way of Italian art,‖ suggests Warburg,

not merely as a Dionysian stimulant but as a source of Apollonian clarity. The

Apollo Belvedere was in his mind's eye when he sought for the ideal measure of
the male body, and he related the truth of nature to the proportions of Vitruvius.
This Faustian tendency to brood on questions of measure and proportion never
left him, and indeed intensified; but he soon lost interest in the antique as a source
of agitated mobility in any Baroque or Manneristic sense.224

222
Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Dürer's "Melancholia I": Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche
Untersuchungen (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1923). See also, Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer. 2 vols.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943).
223
See the fragment on Dürer‘s Death of Orpheus in Aby Warburg, ―Dürer and Italian Antiquity,‖ in The
Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 553-558.
224
Ibid., 556.

276
There is thus in Warburg‘s Dürer an impulse to rework the forms of classical tradition in

ways that set him apart both from the Olympian vitality of the Italian milieu and from the

sinister demonism exemplified by the images in Lichtenberger‘s Practica. In the case of

Melancolia I, a work overflowing with allegories of astrological and pagan import,

Warburg finds Dürer subtly transforming these visual rhetorics from a narrative of a

battle between personified (super)natural forces to a story signifying an internal spiritual

conflict. ―Here,‖ writes Warburg,

the cosmic conflict is echoed in a process that takes place within man himself.
The daemonic grotesques have disappeared; and saturnine gloom has been
spiritualized into human, humanistic contemplation. Deep in thought, the winged
figure of Melancholy props her head on her left hand and holds a pair of
compasses in her right; she is surrounded by technical and mathematical
instruments and symbols, and before her lies a sphere.[…]
Dürer shows the spirit of Saturn neutralized by the individual mental efforts of the
thinking creature against whom its rays are directed. Menaced by the "most
ignoble complex," the Child of Saturn seeks to elude the baneful planetary
influence through contemplative activity. Melancholy holds in her hand, not a
base shovel, but the compasses of genius. Magically invoked, Jupiter comes to
her aid through his benign and moderating influence on Saturn. In a sense, the
salvation of the human being through the countervailing influence of Jupiter has
already taken place; the duel between the planets, as visualized by Lichtenberger,
is over; and the magic square hangs on the wall like a votive offering of thanks to
the benign and victorious planetary spirit.225

And somewhat earlier:

The truly creative act—that which gives Dürer's Melancolia I its consoling,
humanistic message of liberation from the fear of Saturn—can be understood only
if we recognize that the artist has taken a magical and mythical logic and made it
spiritual and intellectual. The malignant, child-devouring planetary god, whose
cosmic contest with another planetary ruler seals the subject's fate, is humanized
and metamorphosed by Dürer into the image of the thinking, working human
being.226

225
Ibid., 645.
226
Ibid.

277
In Dürer‘s engraving, the visual themes and spirits of antiquity make yet another

appearance, but here the tale is one in which these are received and transmuted in a

process of rational reflection or contemplation, a gesture of meditative distancing with

which Warburg associated the term Besonnenheit. In this instance of the ―renewal of

pagan antiquity,‖ the primitive anxieties of symbolic expression were re-synthesized and

re-expressed through the creative agency of the artist, who in both form and content

announces a reasserted human power in the face of the highly charged memories

contained in the Pathosformeln. Dürer finds a symbol of man‘s subjugation and

powerlessness before malevolent cosmic forces, and sublimates it into an allegory of self-

emancipation through reflection and rational contemplation.

By sketching this spectrum of Renaissance representational forms, a spectrum

described by the distance between the images of Lichtenberger and Dürer, Warburg

hopes to illuminate the distance between Melanchthon and Luther in terms of their

respective receptions of astrology. Where Melanchthon still finds himself agitated by an

astrological literature such as Lichtenberger‘s, in which the theologian continues to detect

truly supernatural forces, Warburg‘s Luther confronts the signs of astral portents in a way

more similar to that of Dürer. ―Luther and Dürer thus coincided to some extent in their

resistance to the myth of the great conjunction,‖ Warburg concludes,

With them, we find ourselves embarked on the struggle for the mental and
religious liberation of modern humanity—though as yet only at an early stage.
Just as Luther still went in fear of cosmic portents and omens (not to speak of the
antique lamiae), Dürer's Melancolia has yet to break quite free of the superstitious
terrors of antiquity.227

227
Ibid.

278
Though both figures are still firmly embedded in a landscape populated by mysterious

forces and uncanny correspondences, Luther and Dürer here emerge as representatives of

an early gestural current of representational liberation from the imagery of totemism and

sympathetic magic. In each case, the external and fateful conflict between

Lichtenberger‘s Saturn and Jupiter undergoes an Aufhebung into the sphere of an interior

and humanized spiritual struggle. And in this latter case, the struggle is carried out by

means of a carefully cultivated and hard won space of detachment (Besonnenheit) from

the immediate and primitive reflexive responses aroused by the culturally charged

symbolic memories of the Pathosformeln. For Luther, in other words, the astrological

imagery of a book like the Practica could be taken seriously, but only in relation to more

marginal or external phenomenon, and never in relation to internal spiritual conditions.

To underscore this point, Warburg includes an extended anecdote, humorously related by

a seventeenth century commentator. As Luther was one day reading Lichtenberger‘s

Practica and making preparations for a new translation, he was approached by a Dr.

Justus Jonas who was stunned that the reformer should be so interested in a work so

closely associated with his vilification:

"Why translate him? He is against you." Luther asked him why. Jonas said:
"Lichtenberger says you have the devil; and you have no devil."
Then Master Luther smiled and said: "Now, Doctor, look more closely at the
picture. Where does the devil sit? Not in the monk's heart but on his back. That
is quite right! In my heart dwells my Lord Jesus, and there the devil shall never
enter, now or hereafter. And yet I think he does sit on my back, through the
agency of the pope, the emperor, and the great potentates, and all those in the
world who claim to be wise. If he can do no more, he makes a fearful roaring in
my ears.228

228
Ibid., 629.

279
"Now, Doctor, look more closely at the picture.‖ In a dictum that could easily have been

penned by Aby Warburg himself, Luther thus invites his interlocutor to participate in a

deeper and more sustained moment of reflection on the image. In this posture of

contemplation, he transforms the image from one that depicts his diabolical nature, to one

that merely asserts his more earthly and material concerns. The devil may indeed plague

him as a burden on his back, but such forces can never truly penetrate into the spiritual

recesses of his heart.

The Luther essay displays Warburg‘s characteristic ability to follow the most

minute and mobile of historical traces to produce a novel work of scholarship, but it is

also a powerful reflection on the historical moment of its writing. For while Warburg

presents Luther in the costume of a celebrated and heroic figure, an historical personality

resonant with themes of national liberation, the moment of the Reformation emerges as a

deeply ambivalent era. Indeed, if the German sixteenth century had seen the

simultaneous presence of a primitive symbolism and a more emancipatory

representational rhetoric, so too was the early twentieth century the scene of such

tensions and crisis. Writing in the midst of a world war, and undermined by an

increasingly uncertain mental state, Warburg was well aware of the fine line that both

individual and civilization walked between the threats of primitive fear and the hopes of

rationality and clarity. However, even as the convulsions of European war began to draw

to a close, Warburg‘s suffered a setback in his more personal and psychological struggle,

a setback that ultimately reached a climax in a 1918 breakdown and his several-year

commitment to the clinical care of Ludwig Binswanger.

280
 The circumstances of Warburg‘s breakdown and the years of his recovery even

today retain the character of an ellipsis in the biography of the art historian. Documents

from this era are protected by the Warburg Institute and have not been made available to

researchers, and the latter have—to varying degrees—studiously respected the wishes of

the Institute. For the present discussion, suffice it to say that the years from 1918 to his

gradual recovery in 1923 seem to represent a disorienting amplification of the tensions

we have traced in Warburg‘s personal life and professional methods. For during the

period in question, Warburg suffered in a realm defined both by radical retreat and

terrifying self-dispersal. On the one hand, the depressing confinements of war were

profoundly deepened by the necessity of clinical commitment, all the territories he had

once mapped and explored resolved themselves into the four walls of a Kreuzlingen

clinic. On the other hand, the nomadic character of his thought, with all its accelerations

and its arabesques, had traced such a tangled map that even the familiar landmarks and

topographies of the self had become lost or indistinct. The schizophrenia he detected in

the history of European symbolic representation had thus come to haunt the historian

himself. Regardless of how one chooses to interpret Warburg‘s illness, the path by

which Warburg eventually recovered both himself and his health is, on the contrary, very

well known in the literature relating to the art historian. After showing signs in 1923 of a

generalized and sustained improvement in his condition, Warburg made a bargain with

Binswanger that if he could write and deliver a lecture before the staff and other patients

of the Kreuzlingen clinic, then he would be deemed ready to return to his former life.

What emerged was the remarkable Schlangenritual (Snake Ritual) text on totemistic

practices of the Pueblo Indians—whose rites he observed nearly 20 years earlier during

281
his 1895 journey to America—that marks the end of the biographical ellipsis formed by

his painful years of psychological instability.

The essay itself lies outside the scope of the present work, but it picks up and

continues the same themes that intrigued Warburg before his breakdown: the

emancipation of self and civilization through a conscious process of mastery over the

volatile psychological energies bound up in symbolic representation. Here again, the

subject matter seems to mirror and recapitulate his own personal struggles as Warburg

attempts to exorcise his own demons in a difficult process of synthesis and

representation.229 The story, however, of Warburg‘s self-willed recovery through an act

of writing has naturally been a tantalizing one for the literature around the

Schlangenritual text. In the excellent interpretive essay accompanying his translation of

the work, for instance, Michael Steinberg declares that Warburg‘s:

psychological resolution culminates in the writing of the Kreuzlingen lecture of

April 1923. The act of writing is by no means a secondary element in this
process; it is the lifelong conjunction of Warburg's psychological and scholarly
energies. There are two points to be made here. First, his biography proceeds
through his writings: letters, diaries, and scholarly texts. Thus his intellectual and
personal biography needs to be traced in terms of the genealogy of texts. Second,
the recovery (in a clinical sense) of the person is achieved through the writing of
a text (the Kreuzlingen lecture), and that recovery is also the recovery of writing
itself.230

There is, doubtless, a great deal of truth in such interpretations, in which the act of

writing emerges as a self-restorative process. In this vision, however, of a written act of

self-constitution, this inscribed social contract with oneself (or one‘s selves), the

emphasis on Warburg‘s discursive writing may subordinate and overshadow the

importance of Warburg‘s images. But as we have seen, the relationship between words

229
See Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, 1.
230
Ibid., 71.

282
and images in Warburg‘s work is a complex one, and not one in which images are

merely the incidental supplement to written texts. ―If I am to show you images,‖ writes

Warburg in the first sentence of Steinberg‘s translation, ―most of which I photographed

myself, from a journey undertaken some twenty-seven years in the past, and to

accompany them with words, then it behooves me to preface my attempt with an

explanation.‖ Thus, as Warburg frames it, it is the words that accompany the images,

rather than the reverse, and indeed it is precisely the words that disappear from

Warburg‘s last major project.

The final period of Warburg‘s life, which ended a scarce five years after his

Kreuzlingen recovery, was dominated by his interest in a work which he came to call

Mnemosyne. As he described it in 1927, the work was to take shape not as a discursive

text, paper or monograph, but in the form of an elaborately conceived ―atlas‖ or album of

images tracing the evolution and manifestation of the expressive formulae to which his

work had long been devoted. As Gombrich notes, the writing process was always one

accompanied by certain degree of pain and anxiety for Warburg, and the insistently

fragmentary character of his corpus seems to bear this out. And subsequently, in the

years after his recovery, such difficulties of composition were apparently only further

amplified. Fritz Saxl, having served as an educational officer in the Austrian armed

forces, returned once again to Hamburg with a method of display that he had used during

his wartime presentations, a method that immediately intrigued and appealed to

Warburg. Fairly simple in essence, Saxl‘s presentational tool consisted of large flat

panel covered with black cloth on which images and visual fragments of various sorts

could be easily arranged and rearranged. If the migratory nature of Warburg‘s thought

283
had always been hard to press into the linear confines of discursive writing—and had

barely been encompassed by the organization of his library—here was a method which

allowed Warburg to more nimbly arrange his thoughts in the two dimensional space of

the black panels. As Gombrich writes:

He was always so deeply convinced of the complexity of the historical processes

that interested him that he found it increasingly vexing to have to string up his
presentation in one single narrative. Every individual work of the period he had
made his own was to him not only connected forward and backward in a
'unilinear' development—it could only be understood by what it derived from and
by what it contradicted, by its ambiente, by its remote ancestry and by its
potential effect in the future. Even in his early notes Warburg had been fond of
mapping out these complex relationships in diagrammatic form in which the
work he was studying was represented as an outcome of various forces.231

Thus, while the difficult task of writing out his ideas in standard form certainly had its

value for Warburg, the mode of visual presentation that culminated in his Bilderatlas

captured a dimension of his thought that could be rendered only poorly in textual form.

The complicated avenues and channels through which his thinking often traveled—

passages that seemed to tunnel through the territorial boundaries of discipline, geography

and historical epoch—could find expression only in the more porous mode of

representation that characterized the panels of the Atlas.

God, according to Warburg‘s most favored motto, was hidden in the detail, and if

one follows the French origins of the word ―detail‖, then the pastiche like process of

―cutting out‖ and reassembling visual fragments in Mnemosyne was truly a spiritual

exercise. As with the protean textures of Warburg‘s thought the panel series of the

Bilderatlas, and the objects arranged within them, underwent nearly constant

reconception and revision. The last series, as it was envisioned shortly before Warburg‘s

231
Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 284.

284
death, was to consist of a total of 79 panels, with each black frame containing a series of

images tracing a particular theme in a representational history that extended from

antiquity to modernity. Thus typical of Warburg‘s passion for the marginal, the

unexpected and the fragmentary, the Bilderatlas included photos from contemporary

illustrated magazines depicting images with links to antique formulae. In a panel

devoted, for instance, to the characteristic theme of the striding figure of the classical

nymph, Warburg not only attaches an image from Ghirlandaio‘s Tornabuoni cycle, but

he also includes a contemporary photograph of a female golfer in mid-swing—likewise

capturing the flowing and mobile gesture of the accessories in motion. The thematic

motifs of the ―Judgment of Paris‖—traveling from antiquity to the Renaissance—are

drawn together in a panel which culminates in Manet‘s arch-modern Dejeuner sur

l‘herbe. Alongside a reproduction of Delacroix‘s Medea, on a panel devoted to the motif

of Kindermord, Warburg situates an advertisement graphic for ―Malt-Crème‖, the cover

art of a fish cookbook, and an image from a HAPAG poster.232

Aside from the very occasional caption or panel title, the tangled fibers of

cultural memory that link these images for Warburg are nowhere explained or elucidated

in textual form. But for Warburg, this was precisely the point. As with Walter

Benjamin‘s Arcades Project, a work which has also been linked with the currents of

modernist pastiche, the object of the Bilderatlas was precisely that of breaking such

fragments out of the congealed territories of conventional historical narrative, of putting

those fragments into motion and revealing the interrelations that resist simple linear

exposition. Far from being a merely useful outlet for a thinker still recovering from

232
Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas: Mnemosyne, ed. Michael Diers, Horst Bredekamp, Kurt Forster (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2003).

285
mental illness, and a scholar still deeply pained by the writing process, Warburg‘s late

interest in the Bilderatlas should be interpreted as the culmination of a life‘s work that

was devoted to capturing the living mobility of Western cultural forms. And if this was

indeed a scene of a somewhat idiosyncratic form of writing, then the emphasis is surely

on the scene rather than the writing

In the panels of Mnemosyne, therefore, in the photos and reproductions that

accumulated as the gnomic map of antiquity‘s persistent renewal, the Bilderatlas brought

Aby Warburg‘s career to a final coda, the resolution of a lifelong thematic development

in which the visual image had emerged as a powerful, durable and self-sufficient carrier

of social and civilizational memory. Indeed, composed exclusively of images with little

or no commentary, the Bilderatlas seems a fitting final statement from a scholar who had

striven to understand the nature of art and the visual image as an object and document of

historical interest. Where the legacies of Hegel and his followers had found only the

reflection or expressions of more fundamental historical forces, and where others such as

Wölfflin had retreated behind the ramparts of stylistic formalism, Aby Warburg always

resisted such gestures of conceptual absorption and closure. Like the black background

that surrounds Warburg‘s Mnemosyne images, the dark borders that snake around the

pictures like hidden passages and labyrinthine detours, Warburg‘s work was always

aimed at recovering a sense of the porousness of history. Whether he was discovering

hitherto unknown connections between the visual lexicon of classical antiquity and

moderns such as Manet, or tracing the subtle web of mutual influence between Medicean

Florence and a still Gothic northern Europe, or deciphering the complex interrelations

between historical texts and visual representations, Warburg‘s approach was perpetually

286
expansive and ramifying. The disciplinary and scholarly maps that he produced in these

navigations, maps with both false starts and marvelously novel passages, seem primarily

concerned with generating and pursuing new connections that ceaselessly radiate outward

and grow lushly from his work. To the frustration of both his contemporary colleagues

and later observers, such rhizomatic movements always made following the trail left by

Warburg a difficult task. The Hamburg historian seems to have had far less interest in

maintaining territorial integrities of discipline, periodization or methodology, than in

searching out the porous spaces and liminal phenomena that resist such territorialization.

Indeed, as he traversed the steppes and deserts of these nomadic spaces—whether in a

Florentine archive, a Danish second-hand shop, or amongst the Pueblo Indians—the war

machine that propelled these various peregrinations was that of the visual image.

However, if this war-machine of visuality was to gain momentum, to accelerate

and traverse the various territorial boundaries that sought its encirclement and capture,

then Warburg‘s images eventually and ultimately had to be freed from the

commandments of speech, writing and the text. For as Warburg sought to map out the

strange passages and resonant memories, the visual/iconic document or representation

had always seemed drawn into the orbit of textual representation, always configured as a

supplement to illustrate, and be embedded within, frameworks and territories of written

or indexical narrative. In this sense, therefore, the Bilderatlas emerges as something

more than a map of antiquity‘s mnemic after-effects in Western civilization. Rather than

a narrative tracing in which the images might become congealed in the territorial matrices

of discipline, period and method, it is instead a map that prompts its elements and

representations into perpetual motion. For Warburg, in other words, the task was not one

287
of merely recovering the image and translating it into the archive of the written text or

commentary. The task, on the contrary, was one of showing how images, and their

cultural resonances, could complicate, undermine and even dissolve the narrative

territories that they encounter.

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 Chapter Five

Auch ich im Archiv: Sigmund Freud and the Italian Scene of Writing

The conceptual wanderings and methodological journeys that accompanied Aby

Warburg‘s oscillations between Florence and Hamburg, and between the rationality of

Athens and the mysticism of Alexandria, were always an idiosyncratic and intensely

personal journey. His peregrinations through libraries and second-hand shops, through

the ancient Mediterranean and the American West, were traced as an exploratory

landscape that no guidebook or Baedeker could ever truly encompass—even his own art

historical library struggled to draw a coherent circle around its patron‘s intellectual

migrations. For his contemporary and fellow Italophile, Sigmund Freud, the lure and

landscapes of Italy were manifest under the guidance of another star, and configured in a

set of coordinates very different from those laid out in Warburg‘s nomadic explorations.

For if we have linked Warburg to the Deleuzian figure of the nomad, we could perhaps

associate Freud‘s travels with those of Kafka‘s K in Das Schloss. Like the protagonist in

Kafka‘s novel, Freud seems to encounter the unknown territory—on in his case, Italy—

from the perspective of a surveyor; the nature of his calling is to chart, record, map and

make legible the spaces and experiences he explores. But as with K, Freud‘s impulses

toward survey, orientation and registration seem haunted and frustrated by a landscape

that refuses to cooperate. Thus, in a passage from his essay on the uncanny, Freud relates

an experience with which Kafka‘s K would have been highly sympathetic:

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 As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a
provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of
whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women
were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the
narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time
without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street,
where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once
more, only to arrive by another detour at the same place yet a third time. Now,
however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was
glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before,
without any further voyages of discovery.233

But if Freud often finds himself thus lost in the labyrinthine spaces of Italy, it is not a

map such as that of Warburg that he seems to desire. Rather, what Freud persistently

seems to seek—in terms borrowed again from Deleuze—is a tracing, a model or a

topographical representation of Italy. Where Warburg seems to wish to multiply and

amplify the portals and passages that he finds in Italy, Freud also finds such

multiplications and amplifications intriguing, but is nevertheless overcome by the

disturbing feeling of the uncanny which they seem to generate. The end result for the

psychoanalyst is an uneasy hovering between, on the one hand, a nearly obsessive

interest in Italy and Italian travel, and on the other hand, a recurring effort to render or

reproduce the experience of Italy in a legible, textual and rational tracing. To put it in the

terms that we will explore in the chapter below, the Italian journeys of Freud almost

233
Sigmund Freud, "Das Unheimliche", in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: 1999 (1919). The
literature on Freud‘s essay and related issues of the uncanny as a phenomenon of modernity is vast.
Especially interesting is the work of the past decades looking at the architectural/spatial dimensions of the
uncanny, and how those spaces may in turn be gendered and otherwise marked semiotically. See for
instance: Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Jo Collins and John Jervis, ed., Uncanny Modernity:
Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties (London: Palgrave, 2008). Robin Lydenberg, "Freud's Uncanny
Narratives," PMLA 112, no. 5, Oct. (1997); Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the
Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York:
Routledge, 2003); Maria M. Tater, "The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny,"
Comparative Literature 33, no. 2 (1981); Mladen Dolar, ""I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding Night":
Lacan and the Uncanny," October 58, Rendering the Real, Autumn (1991).

290
inevitably end up in the spaces where they began—in a Viennese study, in the circle of

psychoanalysis and in the archival recordings of his texts.

Of course, the texts of Freud have long been recognized as defining landmarks in

the landscape of fin-de-siècle modernity. And as they took shape in an intellectual

topography defined by the nascent decline of a once hegemonic historicism and the

emerging discourses of European modernism, they both opened and occupied a set of

novel spaces within which problems of cultural and subjective historicity could be

explored. In this relation, Freud has naturally attracted enormous attention from scholars,

and has become an inescapable figure in the historiographies of remembrance and

modern subjectivity. Furthermore, like Warburg, Freud‘s career spanned the era from the

late nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century, and the trajectory of

the latter reflects the same early interest in medicine and positivist natural science that

would continue to influence the contours of their thinking throughout their careers—even

where these were pursued to conclusions far removed from their starting point. Above

all, however, the troubled and much fraught relation between past and present, the mutual

entanglement of what now is and what once was, forms a red thread running through both

men‘s work, and also a sphere of common concern with modernity and its troubled

memories.

As with Aby Warburg, the experience of travel in Italy and reflection upon its

various pasts—its Renaissances and Antiquities—became inextricably linked to

explorations and meditations on the nature of historical and psychological memory. The

interpenetration of Italian history with its contemporary fin-de-siècle landscapes came to

represent a nearly inexhaustible source of fascination as each man wrestled with

291
questions regarding the uncanny relations between the European present and its half-

remembered pasts. Thus, the curious charge and resonance that images of Italy enjoy

within Freud‘s corpus has not gone unremarked. From his first forays to the South—

marked most conspicuously by anxiety dreams about a Rome that both beckoned and

threatened—to his later years of Roman conquest and yearly vacation/pilgrimages to the

Italian peninsula, Freud‘s reflections and sentiments about Italy suffuse a great deal his

work. Indeed, whether as psychoanalyst, holiday-maker or amateur collector of

antiquities, Freud‘s career was accompanied by an insistent Italian leitmotif.234 The lure

of the South was such that, already in his seminal 1900 Interpretation of Dreams, Freud

includes a self-analysis of a series of his dreams related to Rome:

Like so many boys of that age, I had sympathized in the Punic Wars not with the
Romans but with the Carthaginians. And when in the higher classes I began to
understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race, and anti-
Semitic feelings among the other boys warned me that I must take up a definite
position, the figure of the Semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my
youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity
of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church. And the increasing
importance of the effects of the anti-Semitic movement upon our emotional life
helped to fix the thoughts and feelings of those early days. Thus the wish to go to
Rome had become in my dream-life a cloak and symbol for a number of other
passionate wishes. Their realization was to be pursued with all the perseverance
and single-mindedness of the Carthaginian, though their fulfillment seemed at the
moment just as little favored by destiny as was Hannibal's lifelong wish to enter
Rome.

234
On Freud‘s Collections/Collecting, his fascination with Italy and its archeological metaphors: Kurt
Ebeling, and Stefan Altekamp, eds., Die Aktualität des Archaeologischen (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2004);
Jeffrey Prager, Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000); Donald Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth. Meaning and
Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1982); Rolf Haubl, Der Psychoanalytiker als
Archäologe. Eine Einführung in die Methodologie der Rekonstruktion (Stuttgart: 1996); Donald Kuspit, "A
Mighty Metaphor. The Analogy of Archaeology and Psychoanalysis," in Sigmund Freud and Art. His
Personal Collection of Antiquities, ed. Lynn Gamwell/Richard Wells (New York: 1989); Richard H.
Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2005).

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After these initial hesitations, and perhaps through the assistance of his own interpretive

ministrations, Freud nevertheless broke through these Roman anxieties in 1901 and

would go on to visit the city at least six more times during the course of his life. ―Why

then are we leaving this ideally beautiful and swimmingly peaceful place?― he writes to

his wife of his decision to push still further south while on a 1900 Tyrolian holiday,

―Only because we have a short week left, and our hearts are directed to the South, to fig

trees, chestnut, laurel, cypress, houses with balconies, antique relics and the like.‖235

For Freud, therefore, the intrigue and fascination of Italy was bound up with its

function as a kind of magic mirror in which the image of modern memory was distilled

and illuminated. Indeed, Italy came to represent a uniquely uncanny space in modernity,

a space in which the shadow spaces of half-remembered (and half-buried) histories still

seemed to hover at the edge of vision. On the one hand, such a conception made Italy a

singularly useful occasion for reflection on the nature of individual and cultural memory,

a domain from which to launch enlightened forays into undiscovered zones of desire,

myth and history. And indeed, the self-representation of Freud—as individual subject

and as a man of science—is pervaded by Enlightenment discourses of pacification of the

unknown through rational illumination. Even the dark spaces and absences of Italy‘s

uncanny historical landscapes, as Freud perceived them, had to be brought into the light

of modern scholarship. But if Freud often configured his projects in terms of such

modernist triumphalism—the shadowy architectures of Italy/past/memory transformed

into transparent spaces a la Le Corbusier—they also display another aspect of modernist

235
Sigmund Freud, Unser Herz zeigt nach dem Süden: Reisebriefe 1895-1923, Christfried Tögel ed. (Berlin:
Aufbau, 2002), 128. ―Warum wir also diesen ideal schönen u ruhigen, schwammreichen Ort verlassen?
Nur weil wir nur noch eine kurze Woche haben u unser Herz, wie sich gezeigt hat nach dem Süden zeigt,
nach Feigen, Kastanien, Lorbeer, Zypressen, Häuser [n] mit Balkonen, Antiquaren udgl.‖

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discourse, an aspect highlighted by perpetual and persistent anxiety that such projects of

Enlightenment can never quite be realized and are never fully complete. In other words,

Italy became a region of fixation—Freud himself was explicit in describing his own

obsessive interest in psychoanalytical terms—a region which demanded further inquiry

into the field of memory, but one that always seemed to resist complete elucidation. To

put it differently, Italy became closely associated with both the desires of science and the

anxieties aroused by its persistent incompletion. Indeed, at the root of Freud‘s continual

and uncanny return to Italy as a thematic obsession there seems to be a fascination with

those aporia and shadow spaces that they cannot quite bring to light. The uncanny

landscape of Italy, in other words, carried with it a strange admixture of desire for, and

revulsion of, the unknown that still seems to inhabit its crevices and hidden

compartments. Thus, even as Freud sought to illuminate these crevices and

compartments, he was nevertheless plagued by a sense that such spaces resonate with

threatening energies and uncanny powers.

In his 1919 essay, ―Das Unheimliche,‖ Freud draws a quote from Friedrich

Schelling as he surveys possible definitions for the strangely recalcitrant concept. In

Philosophie der Mythologie of 1835, Schelling had pithily defined the uncanny—in a

passage relating to Homer and mythology—as ―the name for everything that ought to

have remained secret or hidden but has come to light.‖236 It is this definition that seems

to have intrigued Freud most, and from which the theory of the uncanny as the return of

236
Freud, "Das Unheimliche". See also Ernst Jentsch, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny," in Uncanny
Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008.); Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. 26-27; Friedrich
Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Markus Zisselsberger
Mason Richey (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007).

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the repressed drew its first energy. But in many ways it also captures the mixture of

transgression and desire with which Freud pursued his explorations of Italy and memory.

In Freud‘s work, therefore, a significant theme emerges that encompasses two conflicting

desires. On the one hand, there is the desire to bring something to light, to share a secret,

to breathe life into something long thought forgotten and dead. On the other hand, one

finds the anxiety of lost mastery, the fear of uncontrollable forces, and the secret that

should have remained hidden. The cultural geographies and historical legacies of Italy

became a field that Freud sought to map out and trace, a region that he perpetually

surveyed for a means to reveal that which was hidden, and yet also a space in which to

master the uncanny otherness brought to light. In the following pages, therefore, we will

examine the ways in which Sigmund Freud set about charting these strange territories of

memory, and the strategies with which he sought to tame the fearsome creatures and

uncanny apparitions aroused by the light of remembrance.

In both the myths and histories of the genesis of psychoanalysis, as handed down

from Freud‘s earliest formulations, a curious preoccupation with themes of travel,

mobility and exploration seems to recur with significant regularity. The correspondence

between Freud and Wilhelm Fliess, an intimate communication that extended from the

late 1880‘s into the first decade of the twentieth century, is an invaluable record not only

of the emergence of psychoanalytical thought, but also the simultaneous appearance of

what would become Freud‘s lifelong love of—or obsession with—travel. Freud‘s

enthusiasm for both interests becomes a leitmotif of this correspondence to such an extent

that the urgings of Reiselust and meditations on nascent psychoanalysis often seem to

blend imperceptibly into one another.

295
 Writing to Fliess in December of 1897, Freud‘s reflects on the frustrations

accompanying his psychoanalytic work, reflections which then quickly turn to the desire

for travel and the neurotic nature of his Roman Fernweh:

On such quiet days as yesterday and today, however, everything in me is very

quiet, terribly lonely. I cannot talk about it to anyone, nor can I force myself to
work, deliberately and voluntarily as other workers can. I must wait until
something stirs in me and I become aware of it. And so I often dream whole days
away.—All of this is only introductory to our meeting—in Breslau, as Ida
proposed, if the train connections suit you. You do know that what happened in
Prague proved I was right. When we decided on Prague last time, dreams played a
big part. You did not want to come to Prague, and you still know why, and at the
same time I dreamed that I was in Rome, walking about the streets, and feeling
surprised at the large number of German street and shop signs. I awoke and
immediately thought: so this was Prague (where such German signs, as is well
known, are called for). Thus the dream had fulfilled my wish to meet you in
Rome rather than in Prague. My longing for Rome is, by the way, deeply neurotic.
It is connected with my high school hero worship of the Semitic Hannibal, and
this year in fact I did not reach Rome any more than he did from Lake Trasimeno.
Since I have been studying the unconscious, I have become so interesting to
myself.237

In this fabulously nomadic passage—or rather, in this dramatic narrative of nomadism

and its territorializing other—Freud casts himself in the lead role of an almost Joycian

odyssey. The scene begins with Freud well-ensconced in the scene of writing, though

here beset by frustrations and blockages of loneliness and anomie. Into these spaces

there immediately emerge traces and images of travel and movement, supplemental

memories that carry Freud‘s thoughts far abroad to dreamscapes of Breslau, Prague and

Rome. From the constrictions of frustrated writing, there thus leak fantasies of travel and

escape to the presence of friends and desired destinations. But even as these nomadic

travels reach their greatest distance from the conscious/discursive spaces of his Viennese

237
Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff
Masson, trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 285.

296
study, Freud returns these traces of waywardness (and wayward traces) back to the scene

of writing, a scene in which these various nomadic wanderings are returned once again to

the Heimat of psychoanalysis and to the pages of a letter to a colleague. To the extent, in

other words, that travel became a significant constitutive metaphor in his

psychoanalytical work of the era, all roads did in fact seem to lead to Rome, but these

same roads seem to lead back to the spaces of writing and psychoanalysis.

Such preoccupation with images and metaphors of travel, however, were by no

means a thematic idiosyncrasy of either Freud or the early stages of the psychoanalytic

movement. At a 1912 meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, for instance,

Alfred Freiherr von Winterstein delivered a paper entitled, ―On the Psychoanalysis of

Travel,‖ that resulted in a lively discussion among the participants. In an article based on

the conference paper, and subsequently published in the journal Imago, Winterstein

suggested:

In the majority of cases of reported anaysis we can ascribe the spontaneous and
seemingly inexplicable appearance of an urge to travel [...] to sexual roots,
whether it has to do with the satisfaction of the Libido (Homosexuality!) the
realization of infantile fantasies and arousals, [...] or directly as graspable as
sexually symbolic death wishes (travel together—death together—coitus). The
rest of the cases could be ascribed to criminality or death wish in terms of their
motivating factors. 238

Indeed, if Freud‘s own interest in both the theory and practice of travel continued

unabated throughout his life, so too did it continue to recur as a theme in the literature of

238
Quoted from Christfried Tögel, ―Gestern Träumte ich wieder vom Reisen.‖ in Unser Herz zeigt nach
dem Süden: Reisebriefe 1895-1923 (Berlin: Aufbau, 2002), 16. ―In der Mehrheit der von uns zur Analyse
herangezogenen Fälle konnten wir den spontan und in scheinbar unerklärlicher Weise auftretenden Trieb
zum Reisen [...] auf seine psychosexuelle Wurzel zurückführen, mochte es sich nun um den Wunsch nach
wie immer gearteter Befriedigung der Libido (Homosexualität!), um die Verwirklichung infantiler
Phantasien und Regungen, [...] oder um direkt als sexualsymbolisch aufzufassende Todeswünsche
(gemeinsame Reise - gemeinsames Sterben - coitus) handeln. In den restlichen Fällen wurde Kriminalität
und Todeswunsch als treibender Faktor nachgewiesen.‖

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psychoanalysis that burgeoned in the first half of the twentieth century. As late as 1936,

in a letter to Romain Rolland, Freud remarked on a paper by Viktor Tausk that presents

the urge to travel as either a response generated by escapist anxiety or as a desire for self-

liberation from the parental sphere. Thus, within the body psychoanalytic thought, the

theme of Reiselust remained a theoretical well from which its practitioners would draw

repeatedly in the first half century of the movement‘s history.239

But if psychoanalysis had not been slow to identify travel as an object of

theoretical elucidation and thematization, the role of such mobility represented for Freud

far more than an object of reflection. Especially with regard to Freud‘s many Italian

sojourns, travel was not merely a phenomenon upon which to reflect, but itself became a

significant occasion for such meditation and rumination. In this sense, and during his

many summertime pilgrimages to Italy, travel was perhaps more significant as a space of

practice and experience than it was as a phenomenon to be theorized. For not only were

Freud‘s journeys inflected by already well-developed turn of the century bourgeois

discourses regarding the physical and mental benefits of holiday travel—whether these

manifest in the physical rejuvenation of the spa or as spiritual edification in the encounter

with Italian culture—but the landscapes of Italy presented a peculiarly rich field of

images that would continue to shape and define Freud‘s understanding of his own

psychoanalytic concepts. It was, for instance, under the spell of Italy that Freud‘s

interests in archaeology and collecting emerged in earnest, interests that would go on to

penetrate and inform the deepest strata of his psychoanalytic conceptual framework.

Though the passage from the Interpretation of Dreams—a passage that we noted in our

239
Ibid.

298
reflections on Burckhardt—is well known, it is by no means isolated in its evocation of a

metaphoric correspondence of half-buried ruin and the human unconscious, an evocation

that was informed by Freud‘s travelling experiences in, and reflections on, the historical

landscapes of Italy. The archeological topography of Pompeii, for instance, was a theme

to which Freud returned not infrequently in his writings. For instance, besides his

extended interpretation of Wilhelm Jensen‘s Gradiva, a novella set in Pompeii and which

we examine in greater detail below, Freud relates the following exchange in his case

study of the ‗Ratman‘:

To illustrate my brief statements on the psychological distinctions between what

is conscious and what is unconscious, and on the wear and tear to which all
consciousness is subject, while the unconscious remains relatively unchanged, I
refer to the antiquities displayed in my consulting room, remarking that they were
in fact merely grave goods and that for them burial meant preservation. Pompeii
had only started to decay once it had been unearthed.—He goes on to ask whether
there was any guarantee as to how one would react towards what one found out.
One person might behave in such a way as to overcome the reproach, but another
might not, he thought.—No. I reply, it is in the nature of things that the emotion is
always overcome, usually while the work is still in progress. After all, people are
making every effort to preserve Pompeii, but anyone would wish to be rid of such
tormenting ideas240

Indeed, in this case study example, we find an archaeological and Italian theme not only

emerging as a constitutive metaphor for Freud‘s own conceptual heuristic purposes, but

also a Pompeian image that penetrates the deliberately arranged and protected sphere of

the psychoanalytic session, an image that is deployed in the setting of actual clinical

practice. To put it differently, therefore, the scene of Italy seems never far removed from

Freud‘s writing or clinical practice, and it is a scene that persists not merely as an

240
Sigmund Freud, The "Wolfman" and Other Cases, ed. and trans. by Louise Adey Huish (New York:
Penguin Classics, 2003), 142.

299
accidental rhetorical ornament, but one whose metaphors significantly shape the

conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis.

However, even if he seems to deploy the archaeological Pompeian metaphor with

such sovereign assurance in the clinical encounter with the ‗Ratman,‘ the experience of

Italy and its topographies of memory nevertheless possessed for Freud a persistently

troublesome—even uncanny—aspect. Freud‘s own admission to Fliess of the neurotic

character of his Roman obsessions, and the ferociously self-conscious effort with which

he returns the nomadic peregrinations of his letter above back into the spaces of

psychoanalytic observation, reveals an understanding of his Italian dreams as vehicles of

dispersion as well as psychoanalytic crystallization. He seems well aware that his

particular Drang nach Süden contains both constructive and destructive moments, on the

one hand a rich source of reflective inspiration and imagination, on the other hand a set of

experiences that perpetually threaten to carry him away, an urge and landscape that

eludes the conceptual containment of his of his well-lit—and ever so Heimlich—

psychoanalytic framework. Without doubt, this reverse side of the Italian medal was part

of the charm that Italian travel and holidays held for Freud, but it was also one that would

yield tensions that continued to haunt his thought well into the twentieth century.

It is perhaps these very tensions—this sense that Italy had acquired in his own

thinking/desiring a resonance of both psychoanalytic enlightenment and a stubborn

inscrutability or ineffability—that explains another dimension of Freud‘s preoccupation

with travel. Besides the frequent journeys, to both Italy and elsewhere, a significant part

of Freud‘s travelling practice involved extensive reading and research on the nature of

prospective destinations, often well before any firm plans for departure had yet been

300
made. On the one hand, this practice no doubt represented a kind of ersatz travel for

Freud, the kind of pleasant anticipatory exploration long familiar to readers of travel

literature and guidebooks. On the other hand, and perhaps not surprisingly, Freud

pursued these explorations with much the same scientifically-informed curiosity and

discipline with which he pursued his cartographic charting of the unconscious. The Italy

of Freud, like the unconscious of psychoanalysis, was a region of strangely resonant and

seductive power, but it was also a region enveloped in darkness, partially hidden beneath

the contoured strata of present consciousness.

That Italy, as both metaphor and intimate subjective experience, should be

configured as a space of alluring inscrutability, a space both demanding and resisting the

colonization of psychoanalytic enlightenment, is not surprising given the geographical

and colonial configurations that Freud deploys throughout his work. Writing, for

instance, of the strange and exotic land of female sexuality, Freud declares that, ―We

know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed

of this distinction, after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‗dark continent‘ for

psychology.‖241 In the same way, then, that female sexuality becomes linked to

discourses of colonial desire (and vice versa), so too does the space of Italy become a

similarly charged object of colonial fascination for Freud. The dark continent of Italy,

and the neurotic intrigue it held for Freud, had to yield to the enlightened psychoanalyst

in the same way that Africa was yielding to the cartographic consciousness of European

science and empire.

241
Ibid.

301
 As with any careful explorer, therefore, Freud approached his prospective travels

in Italy with the same study and interest that would befit any colonial voyage of

discovery or campaign of conquest. Even several years before his first journeys to Rome

(1901) and Pompeii (1902), Freud appears to have developed more than a passing interest

in the careful study of the geography of these regions, an interest that became a means of

pleasurable escape from the difficult work then leading up to the publication of The

Interpretation of Dreams. ―I notice with sorrow,‖ he wrote to Fliess in April of 1897,

how far down the overwork and tension of the last years have brought me. Do not
imagine that therewith I want to contradict my own etiological theory. I long for
a few beautiful days; for several weeks when I happened to have a free hour I did
no more than cut open books, play solitaire, study the streets of Pompeii, and the
like.242

A year and a half later, Freud‘s anxieties about his work on the Traumdeutung, were still

accompanied by the pleasurable haunting of desire for an Italian elsewhere:

I am not sufficiently collected, to be sure, to do anything in addition, other than

possibly studying the topography of Rome, the yearning for which becomes ever
more tormenting. The dream [book] is lying still, immutably; I lack the incentive
to finish it for publication, and the gap in the psychology as well as the gap left by
the [removal of the] thoroughly analyzed sample [dream] are obstacles to bringing
it to a conclusion which so far I have not been able to overcome.243

As in the simultaneous gestures of escape and reassertion of control that we witnessed in

Freud‘s letter to Fliess regarding his work and imagined Roman travel, we see here a

similar doubling of Italy as object of both desire and mastery; it is a daydream space of

escape from frustrating work, but one that must submit to an almost clinical survey and

examination of its anatomy. If we were to present these scenes of Italophilia in

allegorical form, we might imagine the seductive figure of Italia, the traditional female

242
The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 236
243
The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 332.

302
allegorical personification of Italy, reclining on Freud‘s office couch as the good

psychoanalyst gazes on with fascination. But while he permits himself this intrigue, it is

an indulgence that he can allow himself only when it is configured in terms of the gaze of

the clinician, only when he may play the good doctor and intrepid explorer who maps and

charts her undiscovered territories under the auspices of enlightened discourse and

psychoanalytic science.

The fair Italia, in other words, is permitted to speak and share her secrets, but

only on condition that she may be mapped out and rendered according to the coordinates

of psychoanalysis. In a significant sense, then, Freud is not only examining and studying

maps, but also producing them. He constructs, as it were, a cartographic double of a

recalcitrant Italian experience with all the Cartesian geometries of visibility that his

science of psychoanalysis can deploy. Indeed, the interesting question arises, as to

whether the production of a psychoanalytically charted map/double—a production aimed

at illuminating and explicating an uncanny experience of otherness—is not itself

implicated in the generation of Unheimlich effects. For in the deceptively simple words

of Alfred Korzybski, a dictum illustrated in the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Jean

Baudrillard, ―the map is not the territory.‖244 Or, to put it rather more in the context of

the present discussion, the case study is not the patient, the words of the ‗talking cure‘ are

not the experience of health, and Italy is more than its topography. In his On Exactitude

in Science, for instance, and regarding the necessarily frustrated desire for complete

244
Alfred Korzybski, ―A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and
Physics,‖ a paper presented before the American Mathematical Society at the New Orleans, Louisiana,
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December 28, 1931.

303
cartographic representation, Borges relates the framed narrative of an imaginary explorer

in the age of the baroque:

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the
entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied,
and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of
the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following
Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears
had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness
was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the
Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by
Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of
Geography.

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658245

The power granted by abstraction, in other words, the power to conceptualize and

understand, thus ultimately founders on the absurdity of its own representational hubris.

The dilemma of the cartographer—whether he charts the Antarctic, Italy or the

unconscious—presents the following difficult options: either one re-presents reality on a

one-to-one scale, in which case the representation becomes unusable or indistinguishable

from the original, or one decreases the level of specificity, in which case the model may

only approximate that which it seeks to reproduce. In the instances of both Borges‘

Empire (which is complete but has become tattered) and Freud‘s psychoanalytic

geography (which may only approximate the domains it seeks to survey), an uncanny

245
J. L. Borges, ―A Universal History of Infamy,‖ trans. by Norman Thomas de Giovanni (London:
Penguin, 1975). Or see this passage Lewis Carroll‘s 1893 Sylvie and Bruno Concluded: ―That‘s another
thing we‘ve learned from your Nation,‖ said Mein Herr: ―map-making. But we‘ve carried it much further
than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?‖ ―About six inches to the
mile.‖ ―Only six inches!‖ exclaimed Mein Herr. ―We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried
a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the
country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!‖―Have you used it much?‖ I enquired. ―It has never been spread
out, yet.‖ said Mein Herr: ―the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out
the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.‖ (L.
Carroll, Sylvie and Brumo Concluded, 1893).

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doubling occurs in which illuminations of the map seem haunted by the supplemental

presence of the corresponding actuality. There is always something or somewhere left

over—a region, according to Borges, ―inhabited by Animals and Beggars‖, but perhaps

also by nomads—which refuses to be brought into the clean well-lit spaces of discursive

representation and scientific abstraction. Indeed, from these perspectives, it seems that it

is precisely on the tattered margins of such forms of enlightened representation that the

ineffable shadows of the uncanny are generated.

Freud, however, was by no means unaware of the difficulties that confront the

explorer of the unconscious. Indeed, it is perhaps this very consciousness of the problem

that led him, in his rhetoric and reflections, to identify his own project so frequently with

those of the explorers of the physical world. But even so, his geographical metaphors

alone seem to suggest his faith in the eventual and adequate representation of the

psychological spaces; as the ‗dark continent of Africa‘ had been resolved into an ever

clearer space of visibility, so too could the topography of psychic phenomena gradually

emerge into greater focus. Indeed, it is partially against this recurring need within

Freud‘s work to capture, pin down and crystallize the seemingly mobile and resistant

forms of psychic life that the ‗schizoanalytic‘ interventions of Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari were directed. And not surprisingly, in works such as Anti-Oedipus and A

Thousand Plateaus, the images and metaphors of cartography and mapping come under

critical scrutiny as they relate to the understanding of social and psychological

phenomena. For these latter, as we have already seen, the vision of a ‗reality‘ or

‗actuality‘ of deep structure and ontological priority is the effect—rather than the

object—of such cartographic impulses and ‗tracings‘. The very concept of a

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representational model of the world—of the unconscious, of Italian spaces, of anything

that caught up in processes of becoming—is haunted by the ghost of referentiality; the

greater its expansiveness and the more precise its representations, the more it invokes and

arouses the presence of an otherness which it is said to reflect.

But as we‘ve seen, if the post-structuralist interventions of Baudrillard, Deleuze

and Guattari had taken the step of eliminating this doubling by undermining the

metaphysical assumptions that undergird distinctions between actuality and virtuality,

Freud‘s response seems to have been one of doubling down on the representational

powers of psychoanalysis.246 If there still persisted uncharted territories of stubborn

otherness, in human consciousness and its representations, then it was not the

understanding of charting (or tracing) itself that required modification, but a further

extension their reach and power.

For Freud, the result is a constant struggle to outpace the uncanny phenomena that

seem to perpetually hover at the margins of the psychoanalytic project. As in the letter to

Fliess, where Freud encounters a kind of ambulant uncanny in his Roman dreams, there

emerges a forceful and almost automatic reflex which strives to contain these phenomena

once again within the enlightened conceptual territories of psychoanalysis. To put it

another way, and in a manner that likewise captures the intimate relation between

memory and the spaces that supplement it, we find Freud struggling to erect and maintain

an archive or home within which he may assign a law of organization and hierarchy to

246
See for example, Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1994), 1. ―Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept.
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of
a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.
It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the
territory.‖

306
the objects of memory, objects that otherwise seem destined to escape into the realm of

the unrepresentable. Indeed, it is this archival impulse in Freud, this mal d‘archive, upon

which Derrida focuses in his 1995 meditation on ‗Freudian Impressions.‘ Extending his

previous reflections on the supplemental memory function of Freud‘s ‗magic pad‘,

Derrida explores the notion of the archive as a similar supplement. Tracing the

etymology of the term, Derrida underscores its links not only to an arkhe understood as

an origin or founding principle, but also to the concept of an arkheion, the house or

domicile of the Greek magistrates or archons. The archive, in other words, reveals part

of its nature etymologically as a space of familiarity—a home, a territory or a domicile—

from which, and within which, a certain domain of law is enacted and operative. As

Derrida puts it:

It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place. The
dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional
passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the
secret to the nonsecret. (It is what is happening, right here, when a house, the
Freud‘s last house, becomes a museum: the passage from one institution to an-
other.) With such a status, the documents, which are not always discursive
writings, are only kept and classified under the title of the archive by virtue of a
privileged topology. They inhabit this uncommon place, this place of election
where law and singularity intersect in privilege. At the intersection of the
topological and the nomological, of the place and the law, of the substrate and the
authority, a scene of domiciliation becomes at once visible and invisible. I stress
this point for reasons which will, I hope, appear more clearly later. They all have
to do with this topo-nomology, with this archontic dimension of domiciliation,
with this arche, in truth patriarchic, function, without which no archive would
ever come into play or appear as such.247

The archive, in its Freudian sense and beyond, is for Derrida a territory or home within

which traces of memory are brought together under the auspices of an organizing arkhe

247
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 2-3.

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or principle. It involves a ‗topo-nomological‘ practice, one in which a space (topos) is

designated whose contours are both the embodiment and exercise of an organizational

law (nomos). Indeed, as Derrida shows in his reflections on the Freud house in

Hampstead, London that has become the Freud museum, the archive is originally a space

of patriarchal law, a secure and Heimlich domain that is carefully governed and

monitored by the presence of a father/archon.

But as E.T.A. Hoffmann revealed in The Sandmann, and as Freud would come to

note in his explorations of the concept of the uncanny, the home of the father like the

home of the archival law is very often the space where the Heimlich gives way to the

Unheimlich. Indeed, as we saw with our Deleuzian territories, the spaces upon which one

traces the law or the archive are precisely the spaces whose disjunctions and articulations

seem to nourish the experience of the uncanny, that strange visitor that makes its

presence felt in the most familiar of spaces. It is no accident, therefore, that Derrida links

his Freudian impression with the psychoanalytic literature of the death drive and the

compulsions of repetition. For if the archive is a space of law, then it is also a site of

originary oedipal violence, a space in which the reinstatement (or repetition) of the arkhe

is bound up with a gesture of forgetting and effacement. The law of the father is

overthrown, so that the law of the father can be reasserted ad infinitum. And as with the

―fort-da‖ game described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the doublings of the

archive preserve the ―impressions‘ of the past even as they overpower and efface the

memory of what produced them.248 But in this sense, the archive (like the

consciousness) emerges as a haunted house, a space of patriarchal law that nevertheless

248
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition, Vol. 18, 14-15.

308
resonates with the murder of the father, a collection of traces and footprints that is

nevertheless haunted by the absence of the feet which left them. The desired memory is

thus brought back to life—or back into light—but only at a price. For while the memory

returns, it may only return in the figure of an uncanny supplement—a mechanical doll, a

prosthetic limb—whose movements and gyrations obey laws of the archive and not their

original model.

The tension between this desire for presence as reproduction, and the

simultaneous revulsion at the nagging lack of presence in the reproduced object, is one

that Derrida locates in the different resonances that the concepts of archive and

archeology take on within Freud‘s work. Thus, even as Freud busily constructs the

archival edifice of psychoanalysis, he nevertheless dreams and fantasizes about the

ostensible presences of archeology.

As we have noted all along, there is an incessant tension here between the archive
and archaeology. They will always be close the one to the other, resembling each
other, hardly discernible in their co-implication, and yet radically incompatible,
heterogeneous, that is to say, different with regard to the origin, in divorce with
regard to the arche. Now Freud was incessantly tempted to redirect the original
interest he had for the psychic archive toward archaeology (the word "archiv," by
the way, appears already in the Studies on Hysteria (1895) [SE 2]).20 […] Each
time he wants to teach the topology of archives, that is to say, of what ought to
exclude or forbid the return to the origin, this lover of stone figurines proposes
archaeological parables. The most remarkable and the most precocious of them is
well known, in the study of hysteria of 1896. […] It is the nearly ecstatic instant
Freud dreams of, when the very success of the dig must sign the effacement of the
archivist: the origin then speaks by itself.249

Archaeology, in other words, here stands in for an experience of pure presence, where the

trace is encountered in the substrate and matrix of its own making. For Freud, the trace

here speaks with its own voice, and not with the mechanical echoes and ventriloquism of

249
Archive Fever, 92.

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the archivist. In this sense, we may understand why Freud indelibly marks and

configures Italy as an ever recurring space of archaeology, as a region of desired yet

always elusive presence. Italy, in other words, is cast as an extra-archival topos, a space

of otherness outside the Heimlich confines of bourgeois Vienna study and the enlightened

sphere of psychoanalytic discourse. Yet at the same time, if this presence of otherness

beckons as the non plus ultra of Freud‘s enlightened project, we nevertheless find him

returning again and again to the archive, always translating his archeological dreams back

into the matrix of his archival edifice. Even thus as he is lured by the desired figure of

Hoffmann‘s Olympia—or perhaps in this case Italia—Freud reasserts his archive and

finds himself in the uncanny embrace of a mechanical doll. His efforts to save and

preserve that which is no longer present, seem thus to have the side-effect of generating

the most curious and strange of uncanny artifacts.

The image of Italy, for Freud, resolves itself into a space of nomadic desire, a

space of pristine archeological memory that emerges in forms not yet touched by the

interventions of the law-giving archivist. It is not surprising, then, to find that Derrida

focuses special attention on Freud‘s 1907 essay, "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's

Gradiva.‖ This latter piece represents Freud‘s first exploration of the ways in which

psychoanalysis might engage with a work of art or literature, an exploration that Freud

later continued with the more well-known (and rather problematic) essays on

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The occasion for this early attempt was the

novella by Wilhelm Jensen entitled, Gradiva, Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück, which

was published in 1903 and seems to have been called to Freud‘s attention by Jung.250

250
Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva, Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück (Dresden: Reißner, 1903).

310
 Likely unfamiliar to most contemporary readers, and yet also curiously familiar in

its themes, the story itself may require a brief retelling in order to better situate it within

the contexts we have thus far marked out. Jensen‘s Pompejanisches Phantasiestück

focuses on the adventures of one Dr. Norbert Hanold, a particularly well disciplined and

precociously successful docent of archeology. On a wall in Hanold‘s study there hangs a

one-third size plaster cast of a bas relief that had once caught his eye on a research trip to

Rome. The relief depicts the figure of a young woman in mid stride, with soft wavy hair

and garments falling in ―voluminous folds‖, a young woman certainly not of divine

origin, but with a quiet grace and nonchalance intriguing to Hanold in any event. As the

story unfolds, Hanold increasingly finds his scholarly discipline disrupted by recurring

and insistent meditations on the figure he comes to name Gradiva, or ―the girl splendid in

walking.‖251 His mind is continually drawn to reflections on the woman represented in

the figure. To what family sort of family circumstance did she belong? In what ancient

landscapes or cityscapes did she tread? On what errand might she have been as she was

captured by the relief in her curiously resonant stride? Had she hailed from Pompeii, and

what doom had it been that awaited her there? Such questions return with ever greater

frequency and urgency until Hanold is soon completely diverted from his work. Indeed,

where his scholarship and research had once formed nearly the entirety of his life, to

exclusion of the more mundane interests of sociability other human interests, Hanold

soon finds himself grown cold to, and uninterested in, his former researches and work.

Hanold settles on the notion that he has been confined too long in his little study and a

251
Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy, trans. Helen M. Downey (New York: Moffat, Yard &
Company, 1918), 4-5.

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journey might do some good in clearing his mind. Indeed, a spring excursion to the

South might even serve to restore to life his own failing scholarly interests.

Thus, several days later, and without having any explicit intent to do so, Hanold

arrives in Pompeii and settles at the Hotel Diomed in hopes of some respite from the pall

of dissatisfaction that seems to dog his every step. The next day, again after a night

troubled by dreams of Gradiva, Hanold sets out for a tour of the ruins. But here too he is

still deserted by his scientific muse, and haunted by a sense that ―he lacked something

without being able to explain what.‖ 252 Wandering the streets of the once-buried city,

he looks in vain for sparks of his old scientific interest or for hints of whatever it was that

propelled him here out of the north. Even with the approach of twilight, the ruins and

their natural surrounding seem to arouse only a further sense of that anxious indifference,

now following him like a shadow. ―With a calmness bordering closely on indifference,‖

writes Jensen of Hanold, ―he let his eyes pass over the all-pervading beauty, and did not

regret in the least that it was growing pale and fading away in the sunset, but returned to

the Diomed, as he had come, dissatisfied.‖

After yet another troubled night of dreams, Hanold finds himself again wandering

the streets of Pompeii, looking for something that he himself cannot name. But under the

mid-day sun, a time when other tourists have retreated to the shelter of hotel and Albergo,

Hanold glimpses a figure moving through the ruins, a figure that appears to be the very

image of Gradiva come to life in the lonely heat of the Italian afternoon. And while she

appears in all the hues and vitality of a living being, it is at once apparent to Hanold that

this is indeed Gradiva, and it is precisely this that has brought him so far from home. In a

252
Ibid., 35.

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feverish dream state, one in which the very stones of Pompeii seem to have come to life

once again, the young archeologist follows the figure and confronts her once again in the

House of Meleager. He addresses her first in Latin and then in Greek, but she soon

returns his queries in Hanold‘s native German tongue. Convinced this is his Gradiva,

revivified by the noon-tide magic of Pompeii, he declares that he recognizes her and

knew that her voice would sound as it did. When she asks how this could be the case,

since they have never spoken before, Hanold replies: "No—not talked—but I called to

you when you lay down to sleep and stood near you then—your face was as calmly

beautiful as if it were of marble. May I beg you—rest it again on the step in that way."

With this, the apparition abruptly gathers herself and, with a look of something between

pity and contempt, disappears once again into the streets of the ruined city.

Hanold returns to the Hotel, even more overwhelmed by the dream-like

experience he has had in which the past seems to have been brought to life before him in

the figure of the striding Gradiva. Intent on catching a glimpse once again of the

apparition, he returns the next afternoon to the silent streets amid the ruins. On both this

day and the next, Hanold again encounters the ghostly young woman who passes like

spirit through the ruins in the silence and heat of the bright afternoon sun. On the first

day, she meets his strange questions with a solicitude and patience as one might with a

child or someone suffering from a fever brought on by the heat of the day. On the

following afternoon, their meeting is interrupted by another pair, a young couple on tour

from Hanold‘s German homeland who delightedly and familiarly greet the Gradiva

beside him. Surprised by this sudden intrusion, and shocked by the familiarity with

which the couple had addressed the apparition which he thought his own, Hanold swiftly

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withdraws. ―In order to get a little more light on the matter,‖ writes Jensen, ―by an

attempt at meditation, a remote place in solitary silence was absolutely required; at first,

however, he was impelled to withdraw as quickly as possible from the sphere of eyes,

ears and other senses, which use their natural functions as suits their own purpose.‖

But as Hanold wanders once again confusedly through ruins, it begins to dawn on

him the extent to which his mind had been clouded by strange delusions over the last

several days, the manner in which boundaries between dream and reality had become

blurred and indistinct. Slowly, and still indistinctly, he begins to piece together the

puzzle within which he has found himself as he rambles half-consciously through the

crumbling cityscape. By chance, or perhaps by way of something more, he once gain

encounters his Gradiva as the two simultaneously seek shelter from an afternoon

thundershower in the ancient city‘s Casa di Diomed. And it is here then, that Hanold‘s

Gradiva gradually reveals the secret towards which the young man was still groping

confusedly. For Gradiva‘s true name was Zöe Bertgang, the daughter of an eminent

German zoologist who had accompanied her father to Pompeii while the latter conducted

field research. Indeed, not only was this apparition in truth a fellow traveler from his

own country and from Hanold‘s living present, but she also reminds the young scholar

that she and he had been the closest of childhood friends. Indeed, it was only when

Hanold had been led away by his researches, and been attracted by the powerful muse of

his scientific calling, that the two had grown distant and estranged. Hanold, it seems,

under the influence of his archeological work, had retreated from all connections that had

linked him to the mundane world of the present and retreated into a world inhabited only

by traces and relics of a distant past. She had loved him in their former life, but when she

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first encountered him again in Pompeii, she found herself vexed by what she took as yet

another example of his willful self-isolation and indifference. On subsequent meetings,

however, she realized that Hanold had been indeed suffering under a strange delusion out

of which she undertook to gradually draw him. ―Yes, now I recognize,‖ Hanold says in

dawning realization, ―—no, you have not changed at all—it is you, Zöe—my

good, happy, clever comrade—it is most strange.‖ And as the rain begins to ease outside

the shelter of the Casa di Diomed, Hanold likewise realizes that while Zöe means ‗life‘ in

Greek, the name Bertgang is a German transliteration of the Latin term Gradiva—the one

‗splendid in walking‘. With these realizations, and finally recognizing that his

distractions and despairs had led him circuitously and unconsciously to this point, it

dawns on Hanold that he has been seeking Zöe all along. The search, however, had been

translated in his fantasy life by the work to which he had devoted himself to the exclusion

of all else, transposed from a desired recovery of his own memories into a recovery

understood in archeological terms. Thus, as the sun once again emerges from behind the

retreating thunderheads, young Hanold and Zöe Bertgang are united once again, share a

kiss in the living present of Pompeii and envision a future marriage.

It is this story, then, to which Freud turns his psychoanalytic gaze in the 1907

―Delusion and Dream in Jensen‘s Gradiva.‖ But the re-presentation of the general

contours of Jensen‘s novella that we have just given not only functions as a means of

situating the work in the context of the present discussion, it also enacts precisely those

forms of tracing and archivization that we described above in the present chapter. For in

the retelling of the story—in its condensation and abstraction—we have in essence

produced a cartographic image of the original, reproduced the novella in a form where all

315
that is left is the impression it has left on the substrate or our current discussion of Freud.

And the nature of this impression, this trace left by the novella, is determined as much by

this work, as it is by the original. Jensen‘s novella, in other words, is remembered and

reproduced by means of a textual supplement, a mechanical doll whose task is not to play

chess but to record and recreate the presence of a story that is nevertheless quite absent.

We have summoned the work back to life, but it can appear only as an echo, an abstract

tracing or perhaps merely as a ghost of something which cannot be truly present.

Furthermore, as Derrida observes in the case of Freud‘s reading of Gradiva, the

practices of archivization (here in its psychoanalytic dimension) are bound up with

similar gestures of recapitulation, reproduction and repetition. Literary exegesis, in the

case of Freud, thus often makes its first appearance in the form of a supplemental

reproductive appendage, an extensive gloss or summary in which he registers the

impression that a text or document has made in the substrate of his psychoanalytic

archive. And as Jensen makes an impression on Freud, and Freud in turn makes an

impression on Derrida, so too do our present concerns become complicit in the

archivization of archives. But for Freud, this gesture of restoration through repetition is

particularly conspicuous in those works which hover around those issues of the uncanny

which come to haunt psychoanalysis. When it comes to the Unheimlich, in other words,

Freud can be found repeatedly repeating things, circling and returning to the same strange

phenomena that forever seem to elude stable expression in the archive of psychoanalysis.

In what sometimes seems like an elaborate game of psychoanalytic ―fort-da,‖ the

uncanny is summoned by a Freud determined to exorcise it, but is then brought back later

by a Freud who is aware of its persistent presence. Freud desires to bring the uncanny

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into the well lit spaces of his psychoanalytic archive, but the brilliant illumination of

these spaces seems only to further darken the shadows which hover on its margins. ―And

let us note in passing a decisive paradox to which we will not have time to return,‖ writes

Derrida in Archive Fever,

but which undoubtedly conditions the whole of these remarks: if there is no

archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of
memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression, then we must
also remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition
compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And
thus from destruction. Consequence: right on that which permits and conditions
archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to
destruction, and in truth menaces with destruction, introducing, a priori,
forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument. Into the "by
heart" itself. The archive always works, and a priori, against itself.253

On the ―decisive‖ issue of the link between the memory supplement and the repetitions of

the death drive, Derrida slyly announces that it is one to which he will not return or

repeat. But if the French critic resists the tempting obsession of such repetition, the

Viennese doctor seems bound to further ramify and expand his archival reproductions at

every opportunity.

In her seminal reading of Freud‘s essay, Das Unheimliche, Hélène Cixous

explores terrain similar to the one we‘ve described above, a terrain that reveals in Freud a

persistent return to the issue of the uncanny, a return that seems to breed only more

instances and experience of uncanniness. The further Freud pursues the threads of the

strange and fantastic, in other words, the less he appears in the guise of the

psychoanalytic cartographer and the more he emerges as a prisoner in his own archive or

a wanderer ensnared within his own labyrinth. After describing the theater of starts and

stops, of hesitation and uncertainty, that Cixous finds in Freud‘s various supplemental

253
Derrida, Archive Fever, 11-12.

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preliminary remarks—supplements that Cixous compares to a puppet theater of

mechanical dolls—she next focuses on the distorted repetitions that characterize Freud‘s

gloss and description of E.T.A. Hoffmann‘s Sandmann. This latter piece, yet another

work of literary fiction, forms the interpretive ground and pretext for Freud‘s exploration

of the uncanny, and its scenes and contours are extensively reproduced by the author of

―Das Unheimliche.‖ ―Next comes Freud's narration of the Sandmann,‖ writes Cixous,

and the account is faithful (or so it would seem); it is not a paraphrase. Freud
delights in having to rewrite the tale structurally, beginning with the center
designated as such a priori. The whole story is recounted then by the Sand-Man
who tears out children's eyes. Given the fact that Freud's approach is that of
inverted repetition, one sees how he rewrites the tale for demonstrative purpose: a
reading that is reclosed as that in the Unheimliche is now closed on the Heimliche.
The reader gets the impression that Freud's narrative is not as Unheimlich as he
claims: is that new element which should have remained hidden doubtless too
exposed here? Or did Freud render uncanniness something too familiar? Was the
letter stolen? The two versions of the Sand-Man have to be read in order to notice
what has been slipped into one version from the other. As a condensed narrative,
Freud's story is singularly altered in the direction of a linear, logical account of
Nathaniel and strongly articulated as a kind of "case history," going from child-
hood remembrances to the delirium and the ultimate tragic end.254

As Cixous‘ reading reveals, Freud seems particularly conscious in this essay of the

Sisyphean character of his attempts to trace the uncanny into his psychoanalytic,

etymological, or exegetical maps. He starts, but then pauses again. He proceeds in a new

direction, only to shift the orientation along other routes. He returns again and again to

his reproduction of Hoffmann‘s story, each time finding the Unheimlich transformed

once again into the Heimlich when its traces are captured in the matrix of his archive.

And as we saw in Derrida‘s description of the archive, Freud‘s desire to capture the

254
Hélène Cixous, ―Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's ‗Das Unheimliche,‘‖ New Literary
History, Vol. 7, No. 3, Thinking in the Arts, Sciences, and Literature (Spring, 1976), pp. 525-548 and 619-
645.

318
uncanny seems perpetually frustrated by the erasure of the same uncanny at the moment

of capture.

In similar fashion, though Freud does not explicitly thematize the Unheimlich in

the earlier work, Delusion and Dream in Jensen‘s Gradiva treats related issues of the

strange and the fantastic, and is likewise pursued with persistent gestures of repetition.

As with his nomadic dream desires of Italy that are always rerouted back into the

territorial spaces of the Traumdeutung, and like the spoken words of his patients that are

always adumbrated by careful inscription in the case study, the fantastic encounters of

Gradiva find themselves reiterated in the supplementary archive of psychoanalytic

exegesis. And yet even as he writes, even as he presses his pen into the substrate of his

writing block, he is, like Norbert Hanold, plagued by the sense of something missing, a

nagging and uncanny dream of presence that hovers at the boundaries of his archival

visions.

In the very opening lines of his treatment of Jensen‘s novella, we find Freud

creating that magic circle into which he hopes to draw and reproduce both the uncanny

events of the story and the uncanny manner in which a work of literature mirrors the

work of psychoanalysis. ―In a circle of men,‖ writes Freud,

who take it for granted that the basic riddle of the dream has been solved by the
efforts of the present writer, curiosity was aroused one day concerning those
dreams which have never been dreamed, those created by authors, and attributed
to fictitious characters in their productions. The proposal to submit this kind of
dream to investigation might appear idle and strange; but from one view-point it
could be considered justifiable.255

255
Sigmund Freud, Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003).
111.

319
Freud‘s first gesture, in a seemingly paradoxical gesture of magical invocation, is thus to

create a circle of enlightenment, a gendered space of men who have come to recognize

the new spheres of knowledge illuminated by psychoanalysis. But once situated within

this circle of men, Freud‘s discourse immediately pauses with the same signature moment

of hesitation and doubt described so well by Cixous. Freud announces—in a kind of

textual stutter or conceit of uncertainty—that such investigation may seem ―idle or

strange‖, only to patch over the matter by appealing to a dizzy proliferation of points of

view. To put it differently, the territorial interiority and integrity of the space of

illumination, the circle that Freud marks out before all else, is disrupted in its first

encounter with—or impression of—the object of his reflections.

But the problem here is more complex than it at first appears, and it is one that

propels Freud into the border regions between the archival interiority of the circle and the

benighted regions beyond. For as we‘ve already intimated, what interests Freud about

Jensen‘s Gradiva is less Norbert Hanold than it is Wilhelm Jensen. If, as Freud suggests,

Jensen‘s work seems to reproduce the very phenomena that psychoanalysis had taken

such care to elucidate and explore, with what posture does the nascent science meet the

literary double that returns its gaze in the pages of Gradiva? The psychoanalytic project,

in other words, here draws perilously close to a vision of itself as a supplement, a ghostly

reproduction of a set of truths already enunciated and represented in literature. On the

one hand, of course, the story may be understood as gratifying testimony to the

universality of psychoanalytic theory and practice, an illustration of the way its concepts

emerge independently in a variety of spheres, and indeed it is in this tone that Freud

pursues his reading. On the other hand, however, Gradiva emerges as an uncanny visitor,

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a Doppelgänger that seems to pantomime the movements of psychoanalysis from beyond

the canny confines of Freud‘s circle of men. The question that emerges for Freud, and

with an urgency that explains the vigor of his reflections, relates to the status of

psychoanalysis as an independent and legitimate field of knowledge. For while the

thematic convergences of Gradiva and psychoanalysis are tantalizing and suggestive,

they also underscore the risks attendant to the mutual imbrications of science and fiction.

What does psychoanalysis find, in other words, when it returns the gaze of the literary

simulacrum? What occurs in this strange chance encounter between fiction and

psychoanalysis, an encounter similar to that between Hanold and Zöe that Freud

describes as ―the destiny which has decreed that through flight one is delivered over to

the very thing that one is fleeing from?‖256 Like the unhappy heroes of ancient myth,

psychoanalysis seems to return the gaze stare of an uncanny other only to find itself

transformed into stone, no longer the subject of illumination but fossilized itself as a

supplementary object in the archive of literary history.

The eerie similarity between the dreamscapes of Jensen‘s Gradiva and the magic

circle marked out by Freud is not merely the occasion for his intervention, but also the

thorny subtext over which Freud broods in the Delusions and Dreams essay. How may

psychoanalysis learn from a literary Phantasiestück and not itself become absorbed into

the territory of mere fiction? ―Story-tellers are valuable allies,‖ Freud opens generously,

and their testimony is to be rated high, for they usually know many things
between heaven and earth that our academic wisdom does not even dream of. In
psychic knowledge, indeed, they are far ahead of us ordinary people, because they
draw from sources that we have not yet made accessible for science. Would that

256
Ibid., 151.

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 this partisanship of literary workers for the senseful nature of dreams were only
more unequivocal!257

What thus begins with declaration of common cause between the psychoanalytic circle

and the realm of the arts, ends with as much equivocation as Freud himself detects in the

pronouncements of fiction. But even if we accept the premise that the lessons of

literature are indeed far too equivocal in their representations of psychic phenomena,

Freud assures us that the present investigation may nevertheless bear fruit. ―It may

perhaps afford us,‖ he writes,

from this angle, a little insight into the nature of creative literary production.
Actual dreams are considered to be unrestrained and irregular formations, and
now come the free copies of such dreams; but there is much less freedom and
arbitrariness in psychic life than we are inclined to believe, perhaps none at all.
What we, laity, call chance resolves itself, to an acknowledged degree, into laws;
also, what we call arbitrariness in psychic life rests on laws only now dimly
surmised. Let us see!258

According thus to Freud, what had once been the realm of fantasy, and what had once

been the irrational domain of the dream, may find their various phenomena—once only

―dimly perceived‖—ushered into the circle of the law and what Derrida might have

called the patriarchal archive. Fiction may be a valuable ally to psychoanalysis, but to

enjoy such status it must submit itself to the archival recording apparatus of Freud.

Where there had once been only darkness, Freud nevertheless steels himself for the

simple command, ―Let us see!‖—a command that also resonates in the form of a

question.

In the wake of this query/command, Freud proceeds again in the now

recognizable gestures of advance and hesitation, movement and pause. But once such

257
Ibid.
258
Ibid., 113-114.

322
preliminaries are dispensed with, once the nature of his inquiry is several times set forth

and amended, Freud arrives once again at the story which appears to have prompted these

methodological peregrinations. ―It so happened,‖ relates Freud as author of a

psychoanalytic story that will now come to frame that of Jensen‘s Gradiva,

in the group of men who started the idea, that someone remembered that the bit of
fiction which he had most recently enjoyed contained several dreams which
looked at him with familiar expression and invited him to try on them the method
of Traumdeutung. He admitted that the material and setting of the little tale had
been partly responsible for the origin of his pleasure, for the story was unfolded in
Pompeii, and concerned a young archaeologist who had given up interest in life,
for that in the remains of the classic past, and now, by a remarkable but absolutely
correct detour, was brought back to life. During the perusal of this really poetic
material, the reader experienced all sorts of feelings of familiarity and
concurrence. The tale was Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva, a little romance designated
by its author himself ―A Pompeian Fancy."259

It is interesting to note here how the appearance of the story—again in the circle of

men—has its source likewise in the equivocal promptings of memory, and a certain

pleasure accompanied by ―all sorts of feelings of familiarity and concurrence.‖ In this

sense, Freud‘s enframing tale is also not without its uncanny aspects, as Jensen‘s work

surfaces in the memory of his own milieu, confronting Freud as a peculiarly familiar and

resonant double of psychoanalytic observation—even down to the specificity of

―remarkable but absolutely correct‖ detours. But how then to proceed in the face of this

literary Doppelgänger and simulacrum of psychoanalysis?

Freud‘s reply to this is immediate, but is not necessarily surprising when

presented in the context of the discussion above. For even as he prepares to shed the light

of his psychoanalytic exegesis on the phenomenon of Jensen‘s novella, he bids the reader

259
Ibid., 114.

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pause once more and set aside the text which he is producing. ―In order that my further

references may be too familiar material,‖ explains Freud,

I must now ask my readers to lay aside this pamphlet, and replace it for some time
with Gradiva, which first appeared in the book world in 1903. To those who have
already read Gradiva, I will recall the content of the story in a short epitome, and
hope that their memory will of itself restore all the charm of which the story is
thereby stripped.260

In one sense, this is just another pause, and another repetition, in a text ostensibly devoted

to the explication of such detours and repetitions. On the other hand, however, this

gesture of repetition and recapitulation is perhaps more important to Freud than his more

extensive textual elucidations that follow. It is this move, in which Freud claims to

restore the text of Gradiva to memory that is the necessary moment of capture by which

the fantastic story is pressed into the matrices of the psychoanalytic archive. Indeed,

while Freud signals that this detour will only be in the form of a short ―epitome‖—a term

likewise used in relation to the preserved abstracts of lost works of antiquity—his

reproduction of the novella occupies more than half of the entire Delusion and Dreams

essay. Like Derrida‘s Archive Fever, each of whose chapters announce themselves as

preliminary supplements in titles like ―Exergue,‖ ―Preamble‖ and ―Forward,‖ the first

half of Freud‘s essay on Jensen‘s Gradiva consists of just such an extended prologue,

abstract or supplement. But as with Derrida‘s supplemental archive, this moment of

impression, capture and preservation is also one of destruction and erasure. By

reproducing the story within the confines of his own analytic archive, Freud indeed

invokes the presence of Jensen‘s novella, but only in the form of the traces it leaves in the

magic pad of Freud‘s essay, only in a form that also confirms its pacification and

260
Ibid.

324
absence. In the moment of archival repetition, in other words, the object of uncanny

desire and wonder, the double represented by this ―Pompeian Fancy‖, is transmuted into

the mechanical doll or phantom limb that obeys a new set of laws and commandments.

Like Spalanzani‘s Olympia in Hoffmann‘s Sandmann, the status of Jensen‘s story here

seems to oscillate between uncanny desire at a distance and lifeless mechanism in

proximity. Archival repetition, in other words, may capture the uncanny, but can

reproduce it only as something lifeless and soulless—something not very uncanny after

all.

The more Freud desires to capture the image of the uncanny, the greater his

efforts to sculpt or represent its living aspect, the more it emerges in the form of a stone

monument and relic in his archive. For a later Freud, however, the one probed in Cixous‘

reading of the 1919 essay on the uncanny, this problematic disappearance of the desired

object at the moment of archivization haunts his reflections with greater urgency than it

does in the earlier text of Delusion and Dream. It is in relation to this curious ineffability

of the uncanny, after all, that Cixous explains the hesitations and detours that characterize

Freud‘s later essay, the recurring dilation and closure of interpretive possibilities by

which he approaches and retreats from his object. Such gestures, as we‘ve seen, are

likewise present in the essay on Jensen‘s Gradiva, but here the general trajectory is

towards the pole of capture and pacification. For the task in this work is not one of

exploring and elucidating the phenomenon of the uncanny, but one of configuring the

observations of fiction in such a way that they can safely be brought within the magic

circle of psychoanalysis. And as Derrida points out—but refuses to repeat—it is the

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action of repetition that lies at the very heart of the archival impulse, the obsession that

generates the fevers of the mal d‘archive.

But here again, the old problem still reasserts itself, even if less distinctly and

explicitly than it does in Das Unheimliche. For in the oscillations between marking the

territorial boundaries of psychoanalysis and fiction, and registering the archival

impressions of the literary uncanny, the principle of distinction that emerges to define the

spheres of science and literature is one defined by the clarity and distinctness with which

each describe the objects of their interest. The principle, in other words, that shields

psychoanalytic methodology from identifying with its literary double is its ability (or

perhaps frustrated desire) to make present the objects of its discourse. As a patient may

be only dimly aware of the psychic phenomena of which the analyst had long and

explicitly suspected, thus also does the literary work only dimly perceive its own

psychologically oriented contours before the intervention of a Freudian reading, case

study, or reproduction. And yet, as we‘ve seen, it is precisely such presence that haunts

the archive since the latter only reproduces it in the form of ruins, traces and impressions.

In a predicament that becomes even more apparent in his later studies, Freud seems

caught between two desires that cannot be reconciled. On the one hand he wants the

closure and distinctness of his scientific archive, and on the other hand he imagines an

archive without archivist or medium of recording, an archive in which the trace

announces itself in its own voice and in immediate presence.

The tangled logics of these seemingly incompatible desires find themselves

knotted up in Freud‘s text, resulting of course in the same persistent profusion of

qualifications, supplements, prologues and epicycles. Even where Freud concludes his

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―epitome‖ of Jensen‘s work—a preparation for commentary in which the good doctor

cannot seem to resist comment—he opens his exegetical remarks with following elliptical

introduction:

It was really our intention to investigate with the aid of definite analytic method
only the two or three dreams which are found in the tale Gradiva; how did it
happen then that we allowed ourselves to be carried away with the analysis of the
whole story and the examination of the psychic processes of the two chief
characters? Well, that was no superfluous work, but a necessary preparation. Even
when we wish to understand the real dreams of an actual person, we must concern
ourselves intensively with the character and the fortunes of this person, not only
the experiences shortly before the dream, but also those of the remote past. I
think, however, that we are not yet free to turn to our real task, but must still
linger over the piece of fiction itself, and perform more preparatory work.261

And a few lines later:

The imaginative representation of the story of illness and its treatment, which we
can survey better after finishing the story and relieving our own suspense, is really
correct. Now we wish to reproduce it with the technical expressions of our
science, in doing which it will not be necessary to repeat what has already been
related.262

Freud‘s representational perambulations now seem to hover in a nearly vertiginous state

of confusion. He has indulged in an extensive and circuitous survey of Gradiva, but also

reassures his readers that such a detour was by no means superfluous. However, even as

this prepatory abstract draws to completion, he discovers that he cannot yet come to grips

with his ―real task.‖ On the other hand, and only a few moments later, he arrives at the

conclusion that he may now ―reproduce‖ the ―correct‖ story of Jensen in the language of

psychoanalysis without, of course, repeating ―what has already been related.‖ Freud thus

appears again in the familiar modes of a hesitant interpretive advance and a nearly

obsessive impulse towards representational recapitulation.

261
Ibid., 159-160.
262
Ibid.

327
 But conspicuous here is the question of how the essentially ―correct‖ story will

now be made to speak with help of Freud‘s exegetical and terminological corrections,

how Jensen‘s Gradiva will now play chess on the board, and according to the rules, of

psychoanalysis. To put it another way, Freud himself seems to be aware that the point at

which he embarks upon his ―real task‖ of interpretation from a psychoanalytic viewpoint,

is precisely the point at which the Gradiva emerges not as the double of psychoanalysis,

but in the form of an illustrative (and already illustrated) archival supplement.

Anticipating concerns about such an overcoding of the novella, Freud replies in the

following—and once again preliminary—set of remarks:

we wish to repeat, Wilhelm Jensen has given us an absolutely correct study in

psychiatry, in which we may measure our understanding of psychic life, a story of
illness and cure adapted to the inculcation of certain fundamental teachings of
medical psychology. Strange enough that he should have done this! What if, in
reply to questioning, he should deny this intention? It is so easy to draw
comparisons and to put constructions on things. Are we not rather the ones who
have woven secret meanings, which were foreign to him, into the beautiful poetic
tale? Possibly; we shall come back to that later. As a preliminary, however, we
have tried to refrain from interpretations with that tendency, by reproducing the
story, in almost every case, from the very words of the writer; and we have had
him furnish text as well as commentary, himself. Anyone who will compare our
text with that of Gradiva will have to grant this.263

To those who might object that Freud is putting words in the mouth of Jensen and his

Gradiva, performing a bit of psychoanalytic ventriloquism, Freud rejoins (and wishes to

repeat) that he has in fact faithfully reproduced the contours of the original work. He has

made present Jensen‘s work in such a way that any observer would ―have to grant‖ that

Freud has taken no undue license with the original. Put differently, and as Derrida might

phrase it, the gesture here seems to be one of ―outbidding‖ those who might question

whether Freud‘s Gradiva has emerged as a mere simulacrum of the original model. The

263
Ibid., 153-54.

328
proliferation of copies and traces and reflections of the original is driven by Freud‘s need

to reassert a degree of presence to the object of his investigation, even as he seeks to

install its image and representation as a useful object in the library of psychoanalysis.

Perhaps, however, the time is right to pause briefly, and indulge ourselves also

with moment of repetition and capture. As with Freud‘s essay on the uncanny, our

reflections seem to have produced a similar dizzy proliferation of doublings and

mirrorings. Setting aside for a moment the narrative impressions left by Freud, Derrida,

Cixous or the present text, we might return again to Wilhelm Jensen‘s Gradiva. This

latter, we will recall, is the story of a young archeologist who has seemingly himself

become fossilized and embedded in the discourse of his science whose task is one of

recovering a distant past. Driven by what appear to be strange dreams and uncanny

presentiments, Norbert Hanold is carried away to Italy in search of something he has

become conscious of only in dimly perceived feelings of lack. Upon encountering what

he first understands to be a revivified figure from the past of his discipline, he gradually

emerges from this delusion under the care and careful ministrations of his Gradiva who

gradually resolves into Zöe Bertgang. In this narrative of recovery, Jensen depicts a

transformation from a state of extreme alienation—Hanold‘s almost pathological

estrangement both from himself and others—to a state of quite literally recovered

presence. Hanold, prompted by portents aroused by indistinct erotic impulses, recovers

his present at the same time that he recovers his individual memory. In this sense, we see

that it is not Gradiva/Zoe who has been revivified and brought to life from tomblike

encasement in the soil of Pompeii, but rather it is Hanold himself that had become a relic

himself, a fossil caught within the stony matrix of his scientific pursuits. As it emerges in

329
Jensen‘s Gradiva, then, the narrative is one of recovered self-memory and recovered

individual history, a tale in other words describing the perils of becoming lost in the

archive.

Upon taking up his investigation of Jensen‘s Gradiva, then, Freud‘s response as

we have seen is to construct a narrative of his own, one that frames, encapsulates and

records the contours of the former. But like the original Gradiva, Freud‘s text begins

with the appearance of a strange phenomenon that is prompted to consciousness by the

complex machinery of memory: ―someone remembered that the bit of fiction which he

had most recently enjoyed contained several dreams which looked at him with familiar

expression and invited him to try on them the method of Traumdeutung.‖ Within Freud‘s

Heimlich circle of men, ―someone‖ has recollected a story that has ―looked at him with

familiar expression,‖ someone has detected the presence of an uncanny visitor that

doubles the observations of psychoanalysis. As it is the task for Jensen, thus also it is the

task of Freud to resolve these uncanny phenomena through a process of demystification,

a process in which such dreamlike apparitions are restored to presence and actuality. We

have already seen how Freud‘s Italian experiences and his reception resonated for him as

(not unproblematic) images and metaphors of presence, and such images no doubt played

a role in his selection of Jensen‘s work as an object of exploration. But as Derrida points

out in his own reflections on Freud, the father of psychoanalysis here seeks still deeper

and more fundamental strata than those unearthed by either archeology or Jensen:

When he wants to explain the haunting of the archaeologist with a logic of

repression, at the very moment in which he specifies that he wants to recognize in
it a germ or a parcel of truth, Freud claims again to bring to light a more originary
origin than that of the specter. In the outbidding, he wants to be an archivist who
is more of an archaeologist than the archaeologist. And, of course, closer to the
ultimate cause, a better etiologist than his novelist. He wants to exhume a more

330
 archaic impression, he wants to exhibit a more archaic imprint than the one the
other archaeologists of all kinds bustle around, those of literature and those of
classical objective science, an imprint that is singular each time, an impression
that is almost no longer an archive but almost confuses itself with the pressure of
the footstep that leaves its still-living mark on a substrate, a surface, a place of
origin. When the step is still one with the subjectile. In the instant when the
printed archive is yet to be detached from the primary impression in its singular,
irreproducible, and archaic origin. In the instant when the imprint is yet to be left,
abandoned by the pressure of the impression. In the instant of the pure auto-
affection, in the indistinction of the active and the passive, of a touching and the
touched. An archive which would in sum confuse itself with the arkhe, with the
origin of which it is only the type, the typos, the iterable letter or character. An
archive without archive, where, suddenly indiscernible from the impression of its
imprint, Gradiva's footstep speaks by itself! Now this is exactly what Hanold
dreamed of in his disenchanted archaeologist's desire, in the moment when he
awaited the coming of the "mid-day ghost."264

Like Norbert Hanold in other words, Freud seems caught here between two desires. On

the one hand he wants to take hold of the uncanny apparition of the novella, and on the

other hand he wants to register this presence in the recording apparatus of

psychoanalysis. He searches for the point at which his archive collects not only traces

and imprints, but also summons the presence of that which leaves those traces and

imprints. In short, as when ―Gradiva‘s footstep speaks for itself,‖ Freud desires an

archive that speaks for itself, a story in other words that does not need to be repeated,

reproduced or recapitulated. Like Hanold‘s erotic desires that are initially translated to

consciousness in the familiar imagery of his archeological practice, Freud‘s desire for

presence likewise emerges paradoxically in his perpetual and obsessive gestures of

repetition and re-presentation.

But if Hanold completes his recovery through recognition of his affection for Zoe,

in a remembered presence that replaces the alienation of a premature archeological burial,

Freud‘s desire for presence must remain frustrated. Rather, his choice is to dig deeper, to

264
Derrida, Archive Fever, 97.

331
excavate ever more remote locations and record these ever more meticulously in the

archive of his science. Whether in the literary form of Jensen‘s Gradiva, in the nomadic

daydreams of lonely hours, or in the many actual visits and tours of his own, Freud‘s

Italian journeys always return once again to the scene of writing in his Viennese study.

Every journey is punctuated by a return to the space of the archive, the study adorned

with his own collection of antiquities, the recordings of his letters to Fliess and the circle

of men that returns to enframe (and repeat) the Gradiva in the territory of psychoanalysis.

Indeed, as Freud draws his reading of the novella to a close, and attempts to envelop it

within a psychoanalytic framework, the image of the circle of men once again reasserts

itself in a final gesture of capture:

One of the circle who, as was explained at the beginning, was interested in the
dreams of Gradiva and their possible interpretation, put the direct question to
Wilhelm Jensen, whether any such similar theories of science had been known to
him. Our author answered, as was to be expected, in the negative, and rather
testily. […] Either we have presented a true caricature of interpretation, by
transferring to a harmless work of art tendencies of which its creator had no idea,
and have thereby shown again how easy it is to find what one seeks and what one
is engrossed with, a possibility of which most strange examples are recorded in
the history of literature. Every reader may now decide for himself whether he
cares to accept such an explanation; we, of course, hold fast to the other, still
remaining view. We think that our author needed to know nothing of such rules
and intentions, so that he may disavow them in good faith, and that we have
surely found nothing in his romance which was not contained in it.265

Thus overcoming this last possible disruption in the question of authorial intent, Freud

recloses the circle and comfortably enfolds Gradiva in the archival arms of

psychoanalysis. In all his repetitions and restorations and perorations, Freud can finally

come to the conclusion that his own words have never strayed from those of Jensen, and

his own text is really nothing more than the amplified and demystified presence of the

265
Freud, Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva, 210-211.

332
original Gradiva. Thus, as Freud sits writing in his study, his own cast of a striding

nymph gazing down from above the desk, the circle of psychoanalysis is closed, the

traces of Gradiva are registered and the archive is complete.

As we conclude our own exploration of Freud‘s archival re-territorialization of

Italian experience and its uncanny haunting of his corpus—an exploration that has

surveyed a burgeoning field of supplements, prologues, and epilogues—we might end

with a postscript or afterword of our own. For the question remains, after all, how we

should interpret those other archives, impressions and doubles invoked by Cixous,

Derrida and the present text. In what ways do these represent either porous interpretive

openings or archival fossilizations of their own? In this instance, Derrida might be of

particular help. In the postscript of Archive Fever, a work originally delivered before

conference at the Freud House in London, Derrida suddenly announces a change of

scenery. ―By chance,‖ he writes in a passage dated from Naples in May of 1994,

I wrote these last words on the rim of Vesuvius, right near Pompeii, less than
eight days ago. For more than twenty years, each time I've returned to Naples, I've
thought of her.
Who better than Gradiva, I said to myself this time, the Gradiva of Jensen and of
Freud, could illustrate this outbidding in the mal d'archive? Illustrate it where it is
no longer proper to Freud and to this concept of the archive, where it marks in its
very structure (and this is a last supplementary thesis) the formation of every
concept, the very history of conception?266

It requires no appeal to magical thinking, however, to suggest that there is more than

simple fortune and serendipity at work in Derrida‘s change of setting. As the critic closes

his own doubling of Freud and Jensen, how better to outbid his models and predecessors

than through an Italian journey and gesture of presence himself? And if Derrida is right

in linking the repetitions of the archive to transgressions of erasure, should we not always

266
Derrida, Archive Fever, 97.

333
expect our suspect to return to the scene of the crime? However, since Derrida has seen

fit to raise the stakes, it seems fitting that the present reading of Derrida, Freud and

Jensen should likewise raise the bid yet another notch. With this in mind, then, perhaps a

Neapolitan journey of our own is in order, a journey which will embark in the following

chapter in the company of Walter Benjamin, Asja Lacis and the Angel of History.

334
 Part III

The Dialectics of Sightseeing:

Walter Benjamin, German Historicism and a Little Red Book

335
 Chapter Six

Let’s Go!
On the Road with Walter Benjamin and Auratic Historicism

Instead of entering the space of a theater, wouldn‘t you be stepping down to the street?

Walter Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, (R1,3)

The experiences of the traveler and the tourist contain, in miniature, the

fundamental experiences and challenges of modern subjectivity. The traveler, like the

modern in general, is confronted with a constantly shifting field of novel phenomena, the

disintegration of recognized social, cultural and perhaps historical certainties, and is

nevertheless challenged to situate these new experiences in a meaningful new conceptual

framework.267 The tourist or modern traveler, in other words, is not simply coincident

with modernity, but must stand alongside Walter Benjamin's Flâneur, Prostitute and

Collector as one of its ideal types. The nineteenth-century Italienische Reise, indeed

contained both elements of a Benjaminian dialectic of modern technology and

representation. On the one hand, it is an embrace of the newness of modern travel, of

modern technology and modern material means, but on the other it provides the aura of

267
See Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000). Koshar provides an interesting short
overview of some of the ways tourism has been configured in modern criticism. He especially argues
against the view of tourism as merely an adjunct of a ―Culture Industry‖ as defined by Horkheimer and
Adorno. See also Christine Keitz, "Zwischen Kultur und Gegenkultur: Baedeker und die ersten
Arbeitertouristen in der Weimarer Republik," Reisen und Leben 19 (1989).

336
antiquity, ur-history and nature within which to wrap this newness and confer meaning

upon its dislocating dimensions. In an edifying visit to Arcadian landscapes, in the

surveying of the vast cultural wealth from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, in a

stroll through Pompeii and a climb up the slopes of Vesuvius, the modern traveler is

pleasantly schooled in the project of making meaning in confrontation with novelty, and

is assured that their own apparently dislocated era can be contained in still greater and

more sweeping narratives of universal history and the natural world. Thus, the following

chapters trace out and explore this Benjaminian dialectic that situates the reception of

historical objects on a spectrum between an ―auratic historicism‖ of distance and a reified

world of collected and commodified historical objects. However, in order to begin this

exploration, we must turn initially not to Benjamin‘s Italian journey of 1924, but to the

last days and months of Benjamin‘s life in 1940, a period of final reflections on the

nature of historical representation, and a final flight from the gathering storms of a Nazi

occupied Europe.

Looking northwards, therefore, from the border between France and Spain on a

June day in 1940, the prospect offered Walter Benjamin would have seemed all too

familiar to the Angel of History. As imagined in Benjamin‘s final fragmentary

meditation, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, the allegorical figure of the angel watches

helpless and wide-eyed as the wreckage of the past piles up before its gaze. And though

it would pause—though it would make whole once again the broken fragments gathering

at its feet—it cannot. A strong wind blows out of the past, pressing the angel forever

backwards into the future, a wind that bears the name of progress. From that perspective

in 1940, from the path on which Benjamin sought refuge from occupied France in transit

337
through neutral Spain, a rising tide of historical wreckage could likewise be perceived

approaching from the north. But where the angel of history is ineluctably driven into the

future, Benjamin himself was no less sure that the tide of destruction rising before him

would soon overwhelm his momentary refuge. After his belated and reluctant flight from

Paris, Benjamin and his fellow refugees had eventually been halted by border officials at

the outpost town of Port Bou, and sensing the menace of the forces gathering behind him

in France, Benjamin chose the only alternative that still seemed available. In a moment,

all the complex geographies and trajectories of Benjamin‘s passage through European

modernity had emptied into a seemingly shrunken and hopelessly narrowed future. The

alleys, the arcades and the one-way streets that Benjamin had traveled had run ultimately

into one final cul-de-sac: a last passage in the form of a vial of morphine and a solitary

suicide.

Of course, the irony of this final episode—delayed flight, initial refusal of transit,

and suicide on the eve of unforeseen reversal—has come to form an obligatory station of

pilgrimage in Benjamin reception, a dramatic last act that has doubtless contributed much

to the fascination his work has exercised on subsequent commentators.268 At the same

268
See Vanessa Schwartz, ―Walter Benjamin for Historians‖, The American Historical Review, Vol. 106,
No. 5 (Dec., 2001), pp. 1721-1743. Also Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography (London:
Verso, 1996). In the vast literature and cottage industry that has grown up around Benjamin, his writings on
history and historicism tend to get embedded in larger issues related to his broader understanding of
cultural history. A recent and very valuable specific look at Benjamin‘s late ―Theses on History‖ is
Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin‘s 'On the Concept of History' (New York: Verso,
2005). See also in relation to issues of history memory and mythology: Norbert Bolz and Bernd Witte eds.,
Passagen: Walter Benjamins Urgeschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (München: W. Fink, 1984);
Jasiel Cesar, Walter Benjamin on Experience and History: Profane Illumination (San Francisco: Mellon
Research University Press, 1992); Christopher Fynsk, "The Claim of History," Diacritics 22, no. 3/4,
Commemorating Walter Benjamin, Autumn-Winter (1992); H.D. Kittsteiner, Johathan Monroe and Irving
Wohlfarth, "Walter Benjamin's Historicism," New German Critique, no. 39, Second Special Issue on
Walter Benjamin, Autumn (1986); Heiner Weidmann, Flânerie, Sammlung, Spiel: Die Erinnerung des 19.
Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (München: W. Fink Verlag, 1992); Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of
Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Michael Steinberg, ed., Walter Benjamin and the

338
time, however, one can‘t help suspecting that Benjamin himself would have viewed the

aura of tragic drama that has enveloped his intellectual biography with a touch of ironic

amusement. For beyond the simple irony of a message delivered too late, or a possibility

gone unrecognized, what remains is the irony of an intellectual life that was devoted to

―waking‖ modernity from mythic dreams, but that nevertheless becomes itself the subject

of dramatic mythologization in after-life. Indeed, the true irony is that Walter Benjamin

has been so often cast in the role of tragic protagonist—battling mythic forces beyond his

control, and doomed to an inevitable, if somehow cathartic, fate. For to consign his

history to the realm of myth is to embed it firmly in the domain from which he sought,

throughout his life, to retrieve history as such. On the contrary, as it is conceived in

Benjamin‘s final works, the primary danger confronting European modernity was the

manner in which consciousness of history, and the ruptures of modernity, found

themselves perpetually cloaked in precisely these sorts of archaic and mythic costumes,

the way in which a waking recognition of history was continually deferred by the dream

sleep of mythic representation.

Like the Surrealists, whom he had read and from whom he had drawn inspiration

in the 1920‘s, Benjamin had recognized a powerful mythic dimension in the experience

of urban modernity. Yet where Aragon and Breton had reveled in the dream-like

surrealism of modern life, exploring and celebrating such experiences for their own sake,

Benjamin was concerned to take Surrealist insights a critical step further. ―Whereas

Aragon persists within the realm of dream,‖ Benjamin writes in relation to the aims of the

Demands of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Irving Wohlfarth, "Et Cetera? The Historian
as Chiffonnier," New German Critique, no. 39, Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin, Autumn (1986);
Gerard Raulet and Uwe Steiner, eds., Walter Benjamin: Aesthetik und Geschichtsphilosophie (Bern: Lang,
1998).

339
Passagen-Werk, ―here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening. While in

Aragon there remains an impressionistic element, namely the ―mythology‖…, here it is a

question of the dissolution of ―mythology‖ into the space of history.‖269 It was not

enough, in Benjamin‘s estimation, merely to recognize the manner in which a

mythologized phantasmagoria suffused an ostensibly de-mystified modernity. On the

contrary, if an essential component of an unfolding European modernity emerged in the

dream state of mythic representation, then the task of a truly critical history was one of

both recognizing and waking from the mythic images that were thrown up like sparks

from the clash and clamor of the modern era. Put another way, if modernity for

Benjamin had come to conceive its history as a kind of spectacle—one that narrates and

explains the forces that have come to shape the present—the most dangerous form such a

spectacle can take is one informed by traditional dramatic forms of classical tragedy. The

province of tragedy is, after all, the realm of myth, and its motions are guided by the

struggles between finite mortals and the transcendent powers of nature and the gods,

struggles whose ultimate terminus is never fully in doubt. The fate of the hero is always

already written, the plot ineluctably leading to its inevitable conclusion, and the audience

left with nothing more than the sorrow and pity of catharsis. Indeed, in both its

traditional formal elements and in the economies of spectation that govern the relation

between audience and spectacle, classical and bourgeois drama rendered a template that

for Benjamin had been extremely inviting and extremely dangerous for the modern

construction of is various pasts. The presentation of history in these traditionally

dramatic terms carries with it not only the colorful costumes of mythic inevitability—the

269
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999), N1, 9.

340
tragedy of decline or the comedy of progress—but it also seals the past from the present

with the unities of time and space on the stage, and encourages a detached yet empathetic

posture among the audience. ―Overcoming the concept of ‗progress,‘ writes Benjamin in

the Arcades Project, ―and overcoming the concept of ‗period of decline‘ are two sides of

one and the same thing.‖270 There is, in other words, a degree of affinity between the

concepts of epic theater developed by Brecht and Benjamin‘s vision of historical

representation as a form of spectacle. Despite all the well known personal tensions

between the two—or rather, between the Benjamin who was fascinated by Brecht and the

Benjamin in communication with Adorno—each shared the conviction that revolutionary

energies had been locked up by the forms and methods of, respectively, dramatic and

historical representation.271 In both cases, the wall that had come to define the relation

between spectator and spectacle, a wall that allowed only a passive union of empathetic

reception, had to be broken down. The strict inevitabilities of mythic representation had

to be replaced with the possibility for action and choice, and the spatial and temporal

strait jackets that contain the action on stage had instead to be called into question by a

different set of methodological and dramaturgical techniques.

At the same time, however, while modernity had been cloaked in a mythic and ur-

historical phantasmagoria, Benjamin recognized that this regressive tendency was

balanced by the advance of industrial technologies and cultural phenomena that were

relentlessly eroding auratic pretensions such as ―distance‖ and ―tradition‖. The classical

locus of Benjamin's reflections on this is, of course, in the 1935/36 ―Das Kunstwerk im

270
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N2,5.
271
See Andrew E. Benjamin, The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (London: Routledge,
1989). Gerhard Kaiser, Benjamin. Adorno; Zwei Studien (Frankfurt a.M.: Anthenaum-Fischer-Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1974).

341
Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.‖ Here, in relation to the artwork,

Benjamin describes the decline of aura in the face of modern technologies of

reproduction. The ―auratic‖ quality of the artwork—its perceived remove or distance

from the observer, its embeddedness in a past or tradition—suffers a decline in the face of

modern modes of reproduction, whether these be in film, photography, or other

representational technologies that allow for mass production and reproduction. For the

literary critic and aesthetician in Benjamin, a sense of loss is clearly registered in this

progressive collapse of aura. Yet for the materialist Benjamin, the progressive reification

of aesthetic objects through the demands of technological modernity nevertheless

represents an historical opportunity. If art and its social domains have been colonized

and transformed by the technologies and economic imperatives of modernity, it may

likewise suggest the possibility of a salutary synthesis of culture and technology that

would permit the emergence of a truly socialist aesthetic. While the commodification of

art in the modern context was perhaps unavoidable (e.g. the translation of an auratic

singularity into a work of art to be produced and reproduced) it was of course only the

extreme, if necessary, formulation of a reifying bourgeois culture that had opened the

door to its own Aufhebung. The eye of the camera, for example, as the representative

mode of modern reproductive technology, may enforce a regime of modern reified vision,

but it may also provide a glimpse into the possibility of a more humane and socialist

manner of representation.

For Benjamin, the optics of modern aesthetics were not coincidently bound to

those of contemporary historiography. If the object of art, and its associated forms of

perception, construction, and social function, had been undergoing a radical

342
transformation through the modes of modern mechanical reproduction, so too did the

object of history confront a moment of reckoning with emerging perceptual categories

and representational regimes. In the same way that the art work, for Benjamin, presented

itself in the nineteenth century in the dialectical tension between the ―art for art's sake‖ of

aestheticism and a mass-produced (and reproduced) art in the form of a commodity, the

object of historical reflection was subject to similar forces, imperatives defined likewise

by the tension between auratic tradition and the reifications of the commodity form. The

object of historical reflection in the nineteenth century was thus bound to become visible

in, and gravitate towards, representational polarities defined ever more strictly by auratic

distance and commodified nearness. In the former case, the image of the past found itself

constructed with an emphasis on its fundamental otherness, on its stubborn self-

sufficiency, and on its perceived organic wholeness. From this perspective, the present

gazes back at the past in the same way that the aesthetic subject confronts an artwork still

enveloped in auratic tradition. In Benjaminian terms, it is a relation of two subjective

singularities, a relation between the gaze of an observer and an entity that defiantly and

mysteriously returns such a gaze. In the latter case, however, the past emerges in a

nearness that arises only in the relation between self-sufficient subject and a pure object,

an object whose ―nearness‖ is characterized by its ready assimilation to the brute material

relations of possession, manipulation, manufacture and reproduction. Here, the trace and

image of the past is stripped of its auratic cloak and injected—as a reified object among

other reified objects—into the material economy of present historical circumstance. The

past, in other words, is here severed from the tissues that define its distance, and invited

into the present on the condition that it relinquish its aura and circulate in the present as a

343
commodity to be bought and sold. In this latter instance, then, the value of the past and

its traces thus migrates from the intrinsic value of use to the relational value of exchange.

The image of the past, like the objet d'art at the same historical juncture, becomes an

object, a product and a commodity. Therefore, if the nineteenth century saw the

reception of artistic representation gradually transformed by dialectical pressures

enforced both by material developments and the aestheticist reaction against such

influences, then the representation and reception of the past could not remain immune to

the same dialectical forces. Like that of the isomorphically similar aesthetic object, the

status, nature and modes of visibility of the historical image or trace would be governed

by the tensions that Benjamin describes.

Of central importance for Benjamin, in other words, is the problem of concept

formation in the various domains of historical reflection, as it emerges in the context of

the dialectical forces that condition cultural modernity. Indeed, given the era in which

Benjamin had reached intellectual maturity—an era which saw historical epistemology

debated by philosophers such as Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, historians

such as Friedrich Meinecke and a theologian such as Ernst Troeltsch—it is not surprising

that his own meditations on historical knowledge would bear the residue of controversies

that formed a central feature in the intellectual landscape of the previous several

decades.272 However, if theoretical questions concerning the epistemological and social

status of historical objects can be seen as a point of initial orientation for a younger

272
See: Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History (Hannover, NH: Wesleyan University Press,
1968); Charles R. Bambach, The Crisis of Historicism: Neo-Kantian Philosophy (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1987); Berthold P. Riesterer, Karl Löwith's View of History: A Critical Appraisal of
Historicism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970); Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung der Historismus (Munchen:
Oldenbourg, 1959). Erich Fülling, Geschichte als Offenbarung. Studien zur Frage Historismus und Glaube
von Herder bis Troeltsch (Berlin, 1956).

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Benjamin—weaned on the esoteric debates of neo-Idealism, neo-Kantianism and

historicism—the approaches of such schools would seem to a later, and increasingly

materialist, Benjamin to be hopelessly sterile and academic. To be sure, the problem of

the relation between past and present—how the former is received, constructed and

represented in the context of the latter—would remain at the very center of Benjamin's

work until the end of his life, his own approach to its description and solution would take

shape within the matrices of culture, modernity and materialism that increasingly came to

dominate the contours of his intellectual outlook in the 1920's.

While the problem of historical knowledge thus remained decisive for Benjamin,

its solution was unlikely to be found in the philosophical systems of the previous

generation. In the general outlines of this diagnosis, Benjamin was not alone and

certainly not the first. Indeed, Benjamin had studied for a short time under Georg

Simmel whose work was already pointing the way to a more materialist and culturally

oriented sociology, a sociology that decisively influenced a group of students that

included not only Benjamin himself but Siegfried Kracauer as well.273 In similar fashion,

the work of Karl Mannheim undertook a self described sociology of knowledge that

sought to explain political epistemology in terms of social formations and dynamics.

Thus, in an atmosphere increasingly oriented away from the abstract philosophical

narratives of neo-Idealism and neo-Kantianism and towards a fuller reckoning with

273
See especially: David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel,
Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology:
The Transition in German Historical Thinking, trans. Hayden V. White (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1959); Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985); Helmut Lethen, "Kracauer's Pendulum: Thoughts on German
Cultural History," New German Critique Spring-Summer (1995); Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass
Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Georg
Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. Mike Featherstone David Frisby (London: Sage, 1997).

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sociological and cultural phenomena, Benjamin's own turn achieved crystallization in the

well known shift to dialectical materialism in the years 1924 and 1925. But here again,

while the terms in which Benjamin sought to explain the mutual relations between art,

literature and history had shifted, the central issues remained largely untouched. The

status and character of representation—whether aesthetic, social or historical—was to be

explained not through transcendental categories or the movements of world spirit, but

through the dialectical tensions that organized a material present. In a move decisively

introduced in Einbahnstrasse of 1925 and ultimately pursued through the various

convolutes of the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin sought out a way of conceiving aesthetic

and historical phenomena that was grounded in an accounting of cultural, technological

and material processes.274

For Benjamin, then, the past as it is constructed, introduced, and rendered useful

in the domain of the present is defined and made manifest in the dialectic polarities which

describe the character of cultural modernity. As suggested above, such polarities are

defined by the ―distance‖ of aura and the ―nearness‖ of the commodified object. But how

exactly are we to conceive of the historical object in terms of nearness and distance, in

terms of auratic entity and reified object? What, we might ask for the purposes of the

present work, does it mean that an object defined by a certain kind of historicity, by its

appearance in the present as a trace of the past, becomes entangled in a social, historical

and technological dialectic that governs the character of contemporary representational

processes? In short, what exactly is the nature of this Benjaminian historical object

274
See Asja Lacis' autobiographical reflections in Revolutionär im Beruf; Berichte über proletarisches
Theater, über Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin und Piscator (München: Rogner & Bernhard), 1971.

346
through whose mediation the present constructs an adequate and useful representation of

the past?

The application of pressure to the deceptively simple notion of an historical

―object‖ reveals not so much a neat set of conceptual categories, but an extremely

unstable, highly contentious and historically contingent array of definitions. Indeed, in

its most extreme formulations, the idea of an ―object‖ of history tends to assume two

important and opposed forms. On the one hand, the object may be identified with an

actual entity or event towards which the formal research of the historian, or the informal

work of social and personal memory, is directed. In this case, the object of history is the

very figure of Julius Caesar, an individual whose existence is circumscribed and

embedded within a set of historical circumstances whose status can be described in terms

of an irreducible past-ness. The object here is a life and an individual that is no longer

present, the definition of whose contours and influence is the aim and goal of historical

reflection. On the other hand, however, the historical object can conversely be described

as those traces of the past which persist into the present, and whose concrete and material

―presence‖ resonates with historical significance. In this case, of course, the historical

object can denote the various traces and relics that permit a figure such as Julius Caesar

to persist as a figure of possible historical reflection in the present. For such objects, we

would look to existent contemporary texts such as the Commentaries, or to fields such as

numismatics or archeology. If we were to put this in terms of Saussurian linguistics, the

notion of an historical object masks a theoretically significant equivocation, uncertainly

situated between the description and identification of an historical object as referent and

an understanding of the same object as sign.

347
 From this perspective, the concept of an ―object‖ of history does not so much

describe a relation between past and present, but instead goes far in obscuring the rich

variety of possible relations such a concept could designate. Furthermore, what should

quickly become apparent is the way in which Benjamin's reflections on the dialectics that

govern modern aesthetics can be mapped precisely onto the tensions that inhere in the

construction of historical objects. On the one hand, if the object of history is understood

as an entity removed from the experience of the present (or whose relation to the present

is grounded in a strictly observed and rigid matrix of continuity), as an object defined by

its distance from, and non-existence in, the present, we can quickly recognize the tissues

of Benjaminian ―aura‖ progressively gathering about the past. On the way such

continuities enforce a stratified and ―auratic‖ past, a terrain of stratification that requires a

critical ―blasting‖ to disaggregate, Benjamin writes:

The destructive or critical momentum of materialistic historiography is registered

in that blasting of historical continuity with which the historical object first
constitutes itself. In fact, an object of history cannot be targeted at all within the
continuous elapse of history. And so, from time immemorial, historical narration
has simply picked out an object from this continuous succession. But it has done
so without foundation, as an expedient; and its first thought was then always to
reinsert the object into the continuum, which it would create anew through
empathy. Materialist historiography does not choose its objects arbitrarily. It does
not fasten on them but rather springs them loose from the order of succession. Its
provisions are more extensive, its occurrences more essential.275

In this vision, too, we begin to perceive in clearer outlines Benjamin's critique of

historicism as a methodological approach to the (re)construction of historical objects. As

with its contemporary aesthetic counterpart in the various currents of aestheticism, the

governing impetus and defining principle of European historicism was its effort to erect a

regime of representation that preserved the object—in this instance, historical—from the

275
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, N10a,1.

348
material interests and encroachments of the present. The call for a history wie es

eigentlich gewesen—for a history that engages its object as self-sufficient entity, a history

that relied on such concepts as Einfühlung and other vagaries of historical hermeneutics,

a history for whom an understanding of the past relied precisely on the degree of its

removal from the present—could result in nothing less than the auratic mythologization

of a past. What Benjamin understood as historicism was a relation to the past whose

concerns with ―auratic‖ distance had produced a convoluted intellectual armature, a class

of privileged historian interpreter/acolytes whose methods rendered the sole legitimate

representation of the past, and—ultimately—a principle of historical representation that

bound potentially revolutionary energies of the present in the congealed matrices of

distance, tradition and ―large contexts.‖ Under the determined ministrations of European

historicism, the past could be secured (and pacified) in a well defended historical

―garden‖ or ―zoological park‖, a domain of edification whose well defined historicist

walls preserved past from present and present from past. Yet if Oskar Kokoschka, as

Carl Schorske once argued in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, had set off an explosion in the

―garden‖ of Austrian aesthetic culture, or if Brecht had destroyed the ―fourth wall‖ of

traditional bourgeois drama, the task for Benjamin was that of blasting asunder the walls

erected by European historicism, and exploding the congealed pasts that had accumulated

in its rigidly maintained ―garden‖.276

However, even while nineteenth-century academic historicism was scoring its

greatest victories in policing legitimate boundaries of past and present, the ―object‖ of

history was erupting into the present in a huge variety of more immediate and concrete

276
Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).

349
forms, challenging at every step the claims of auratic historicism. Here, such historical

―objects‖ entered—and proliferated in—cultural domains precisely as objects, as

historical ―signs‖ that had been wholly absorbed in, and rendered proximate to, the

concerns of the present. The past here emerges as a ―style‖, as a form of ornament or

object of collection from which all meaning is denied save those the present bestows

upon it. In this sense, the fashionable ―historicism‖ of nineteenth-century architecture

and other cultural domains—as opposed to the historicism of German historiography—

can be understood precisely as the introduction of the past into the present as a

commodity, a past that can be produced, reproduced and instrumentalized.

As should be gradually more apparent, Benjamin's understanding of the tensions

that governed historical perception not only allows us to map these two disparate forms

of nineteenth-century historicism—historiographical and cultural—onto a common

dialectical framework, but permits us to connect this dialectic to more generalized

Benjaminian themes relating to the decline of aura and the rise of mechanical

reproduction occurring simultaneously in a variety of social and cultural domains. On the

one hand, Benjamin's critiques of nineteenth- century aestheticism find their corollary in

his vehement rejection of the theories and methods of academic historicism, while on the

other hand, the commodification of the aesthetic object in the face of mechanical

reproduction mirrors the reduction of historicity to style, ornament and object of

exchange. Indeed, in the Arcades Project, Benjamin remarks on the transformations in

the aesthetic of history that accompany these transformations, replacing the narrative with

the materiality and fragmentarity of the epic drama:

Universal history appears, to the Saint-Simonian Barrault, as the new work of art:
―Shall we venture to compare the last of the tragic or comic authors of Rome with

350
 the Christian orators intoning their eloquent sermons? No, Corneille, Racine,
Voltaire, and Moliere will not come back to life; dramatic genius has
accomplished its mission….In the end, the novel will fail no less in respect of
what it has in common with these two genres as in its relations to the history of
which it is the counterfeit…. History, in fact, will again take on a powerful
charm…; it will no longer be only a little tribe of the Orient that will make for
sacred history; the history of the entire world will merit this title. Such history
will become a veritable epic, in which the story of every nation will constitute a
canto and the story of every great man an episode.‖ [E. Barrault,] Aux artistes; Du
Passe et de l‘avenir des beaux-arts (Paris, 1830), pp. 81-81. The epic belongs to
the organic age; the novel and drama, to the critical.277

Even while a material dialectic was transforming the respective tectonic relations of base

and superstructure in European modernity, Benjamin discerns a complementary set of

dialectical tensions active within the sphere of culture itself. The dialectics of materialist

history, in other words, is mirrored in a separate cultural dialectic of historical and

aesthetic representation.278

As we have suggested above, even as this dialectical tension seemed to be

reaching ever more extreme formulations, even as technology was undermining aura and

remaking the past into a vast repository of second-hand and cut-rate collectibles, the

decline of aura also presented a new set of possibilities. For if the commodification of

the past and its traces threatened to produce a wholly reified and objectified orientation

towards historicity, it nevertheless occasioned the opportunity for precisely that

277
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, U15a,1.
278
Benjamin argued that within the superstructure there was a separate (and relatively autonomous)
dialectical process, ―no less noticeable (…) than in the economy,‖ but proceeding ―far more slowly.‖ It is
this dialectic that makes possible the transition to a socialist society. It plays itself out between the
collective imagination and the productive potential of the new nature that human beings have brought into
being, but do not yet consciously comprehend. Moreover, this dialectic has developed not by ―burying‖ the
dead past, but by revitalizing it. For if future history is not determined and thus its forms are still unknown,
if consciousness cannot transcend these horizons of its socio-historical context, then where else but to the
dead past can imagination turn in order to conceptualize a world that is ―not-yet‖? Moreover, such a move
itself satisfies a utopian wish: the desire (manifested in the religious myth of awakening the dead) ―to make
[past] suffering into something incomplete,‖ into something incomplete,‖ to make good an unfulfilled past
that has been irretrievably lost. Susan Buck Morss, Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1989), 124.

351
―constellation of awakening‖ that Benjamin sought in a new and revolutionary relation to

the past. The decline of aura, the decline of an experience of the past in the form of a

distant and irreducible otherness signifies at the same time an end to the mythologized

slumber from which the present had confronted the past in the nineteenth century. In a

European modernity awash in ever more intimate encounters with, and reproductions of,

historical traces—whether enacted by the architect, the photographer, the tourist or the

collector—the enforced historicist localization of the past in the past was becoming

increasingly untenable. ―While the relation of the present to the past,‖ writes Benjamin

in the Arcades Project, ―is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-

been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.—Only

dialectical images are genuine images (that is , not archaic): and the place where one

encounters them is language. *Awakening*.‖279 Thus, although the commodification

and objectification of historical traces reduced the significance of historicity from an

auratic value to exchange value, it nevertheless propelled history at high velocity into a

potentially revolutionary collision with the present280.

An intriguing convergence thus emerges in Benjamin's thought between the

dialectical fortunes of modern aesthetics and the field of historical epistemology. Of

central importance is the way in which these processes become manifest, are rendered

visible, and subsequently leave their traces. Beginning at least as early as the mid-

279
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, N2a,3.
280
See also in this context: ―The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space
(not to represent ourselves in their space). (The collector does just this, and so does the anecdote.) Thus
represented, the things allow no mediating construction from out of ―large contexts.‖ The same method
applies, in essence, to the consideration of great things from the past—the cathedral of Chartres, the temple
of Paestum—when, that is, a favorable prospect presents itself: the method of receiving the things into our
space. We don‘t displace our being into theirs; they step into our life.‖ Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project,
H2,3.

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1920's—emerging tentatively in the essay Neapel and then realized more fully in

Einbahnstrasse—Benjamin's materialist turn is characterized by emphasis on the spatial

fields in which the dramas of cultural and historical dialectics are produced and enacted.

In other words, simultaneous with his materialist turn, Benjamin begins to turn his critical

gaze to the way in which space functions as both a register and an organizational matrix

for the perception of historical and aesthetic phenomena. But if this emphasis on

spatiality was to have a critical or revolutionary moment, if it were to recognize rather

than further mystify the dialectical tensions that define its concrete forms, new methods

of experiencing, exploring and documenting such spatial domains would be required. To

the extent that the energies of historical and aesthetic objects had been contained by

conventional spatial imperatives, to the extent that such objects could only be made

visible in the rigid ―spectational‖ relations we saw in the metaphor of traditional dramatic

form, a richer and more subversive encounter with the forms of spatial organization

needed a far less rigid economy of spectation. From this perspective, in other words, the

revolutionary potential bound up in modern constructions of historical time was

dependent on revolutionary modes of understanding the spaces of modernity. History is

congealed in spatiality—the task is one of finding a way to blast it out.

In true dialectical fashion, therefore, it is in that most modern of experiences, in

the jostle and shock of the urban thoroughfare, that Benjamin discovers an economy of

spatial experience that may dispel the vapors of mystification thrown up by modernity

itself. In the modern street, after all, the rigid conventions of the theater and its attendant

modes of legitimate spectation are utterly meaningless. As Baudelaire had documented

in the previous century, a stroll on a city avenue takes form as a series of impressions and

353
shocks whose shape is governed solely by the movements of the traveler, the subjective

arrangement of impressions, and the vagaries of chance. As Benjamin puts it in

reflections on Baudelaire:

Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out his
having been jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unique experience. The luster of
a crowd with a motion and a soul of its own, the glitter that had bedazzled the
Flâneur, had dimmed for him. To impress the crowd‘s meanness upon himself, he
envisaged the day on which even the lost women, the outcasts, would be ready to
advocate a well-ordered life, condemn libertinism, and reject everything except
money. Having been betrayed by these last allies of his, Baudelaire battled the
crowd—with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind. This is
the nature of something lived through (Erlebnis) to which Baudelaire has given
the weight of an experience (Erfahrung). He indicated the price for which the
sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the
experience of shock. He paid dearly for consenting to this disintegration—but it is
the law of his poetry, which shines in the sky of the Second Empire as ―a star
without atmosphere.281

In the travels and travails of the Flâneur, then, Benjamin's allegorical representative of

this mode of urban experience, it is precisely the experience of the onlooker that defines

and grounds the meaning of modern spectacle. To make a Benjaminian analogy, the

modern street produces meaning not in the manner of tragedy as defined in his

Habilschrift, the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, not as a self-sufficient ritual to

whom the presence of the onlooker is incidental, but in the same manner as the German

Baroque Trauerspiel. ―The spectator of tragedy,‖ writes Benjamin, ―is summoned, and is

justified, by the tragedy itself; the Trauerspiel, in contrast, has to be understood from the

point of view of the onlooker.‖282 Indeed, as if to underline this connection between the

281
Benjamin on Baudelaire: Walter Benjamin, ―On Some Motifs from Baudelaire‖, Illuminations, pp. 192-
193.
282
Walter Benjamin. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (London: Verso, 1985) 119. ―The spectator of
tragedy is summoned, and is justified, by the tragedy itself; the Trauerspiel, in contrast, has to be
understood from the point of view of the onlooker. He learns how, on the stage, a space which belongs to

354
―dramaturgy‖ of the street and that of the Trauerspiel, Benjamin reminds us that while

the tragedy was born as a rite bound to and connected with a specific ritual space, the

Trauerspiel finds its antecedents in the street spectacles of the Trionfi as these had been

practiced in Renaissance Italy. Their images [those of the Trauerspiele] are displayed in

order to be seen,‖ writes Benjamin,

arranged in the way they want them to be seen. Thus the Italian Renaissance
theatre, which is in many ways an influential factor in the German baroque,
emerged from pure ostentation, from the trionfi, the processions with explanatory
recitation that flourished in Florence under Lorenzo de Medici. And in the
European Trauerspiel as a whole the stage is also not fixable, not an actual place,
but it too is dialectically split. Bound to the court, it yet remains a traveling
theatre; metaphorically its boards represent the earth as the setting created for the
enactment of history.283

In both instances, in the German tragic drama and the splenetic reflections of Baudelaire,

a peculiar perceptual regime is born from eras of profound spiritual dislocation, eras in

which materiality enlarged its claims at the expense of transcendence and the presence of

symbolic sensibility retreated before the ramified meanings of allegory. Allegory, for

Benjamin, is a mode of signification that announces a condition of radical immanence, a

condition in which objects and things become signs and in which signs point merely to

other signs. Where the symbolic mode makes a claim for the ―presence‖ of the

transcendent, allegory defers its meaning in the play of signs, and significations remain

inert without the interpretive intervention of the onlooker, the collector, or the Flâneur.

But if the Baroque Tragic Drama, in Benjamin's estimation, had been able to arrest the

slide into the abyss of allegory through a theological sleight of hand, and if Baudelaire

an inner world of feeling and bears no relationship to the cosmos, situations are compellingly presented to
him.‖
283
Ibid.

355
had been isolated in its embrace—at once behind and ahead of his era—European

modernity of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had produced social and

technological conditions that increasingly enforced regimes of perception of an

allegorical rather than symbolic cast.284 Indeed, in the commodity form of modern

Capital, Benjamin discerned a force whose unyielding imperative of exchange was

progressively banishing aura and transcendence from the domains of sense and meaning.

In place of these, there emerged a melancholic landscape of ―petrified‖ objects, objects

with no intrinsic meaning—or use—save those announced in the relation of exchange.285

The meaning of objects, the meanings of history, the meanings of nature, are here

justified and exhausted in the arrangements of the collector, the relation of ownership,

and the satisfaction of the consumer. For Benjamin, the image of the chaotic urban street

thus captures, in nuce, the dialectical tensions inherent in European modernity, tensions

that enforce the progressive decline of auratic perception and announce an increasingly

pervasive process of reification and objectification.

284
Bainard Cowan, ―Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory,‖ New German Critique, No. 22, Special Issue
on Modernism (Winter, 1981), pp. 109-122. For more on the representational nature of symbol and
allegory in their modern trajectories and interpretations see: Gail Day, "Allegory: Between Deconstruction
and Dialectics," Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 1 (1999); Theresa M. Kelley, Reinventing Allegory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Rampley, "From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg's
Theory of Art."; Matthew Wilkins, "Toward a Benjaminian Theory of Dialectical Allegory," New Literary
History 37 (2006); Samuel Weber, "Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth and Allegory in Benjamin's
Origin of the German Mourning Play," MLN 106, no. 3, German Issue, Apr. (1991); Joseph A. Mazzeo,
"Allegorical Interpretation and History," Comparative Literature 30, no. 1, Winter (1978); Craig Owens,
"The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," October 12, Spring (1980); Timothy
Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992); Vance Bell, "Falling into Time: The Historicity of the Symbol," Other Voices 1, no. 1 (1997);
Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1989).
285
Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 166. ―Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized
and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer
is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape.‖ Also see:
Benjamin, Arcades Project, J55,13. ―The allegories stand for that which the commodity makes of the
experiences people have in this century.‖

356
 To step from the theater and into the street, is for Benjamin to make a leap from

tragedy to Trauerspiel, from symbol to allegory, from auratic transcendence to reified

immanence, from transcendent myth to material history. And while modernity casts its

melancholic gaze on the world it has created to find only a ruinous landscape of

fragments, objects and trinkets, it nevertheless may also glimpse the possibilities inherent

in an historical domain whose rigid stratifications and congealed narratives have likewise

been shattered and exploded. If the petrified landscape of allegory, in other words, spells

the death of mythic transcendence and auratic consciousness, it may in turn prove fertile

ground for that constellation of awakening for which Benjamin had sought. At the very

moment of the most radical reification, the object of history like the object of art is

released from the mythologies of transcendence, progress, tradition and continuity. Like

the onlooker invited to participate in the performance of epic drama, like the collector

free to savor the disorder in the unpacking of his books, like the child who constructs an

historical narrative from the images of a family emblem book, modernity first discovers

its historical agency when released from the imperatives of auratic meanings and awakes

from the sleep of mythic transcendence. The very moment that history becomes a

landscape of pure objects, reified in the commodity form and dissected by the

photographic eye, is also the moment of most powerful revolutionary potential, the

moment at which questions regarding the legitimate relation of past and present emerge

in their starkest forms.

If this confrontation between the imperatives of aura and reification, between

history as transcendence and history as kitsch, forms an essential characteristic of

European modernity, it may seem fitting that Benjamin's mature reflections on this

357
process spring from encounters on Italian soil and find their first staging on Neapolitan

streets. As we have already seen, Italy had long figured as a central region of interest for

German historians. From Leopold von Ranke's search for the ―hand of God‖ in the dusty

folios of the Venetian archives to Jacob Burckhardt's experiments in Italian cultural

history, German historical thought of the nineteenth century found a virtually

inexhaustible source of professional fascination and personal inspiration in the tangled

historical landscapes of Italy. In the palimpsest of possible temporalities that crowded

the Italian context, in the histories of classical civilization, Christendom, Renaissance and

an emerging European modernity, German scholars discovered a useful theater in which

to investigate and reflect upon the jumbled temporalities of a German nineteenth

century.286 In the very different works of a Ranke, a Mommsen or a Burckhardt, Italian

pasts of classical antiquity, of Christendom and of Renaissance are staged as a spectacle

for a modern audience. And as a new entity called ―Germany‖ was gradually being

erected on the ever uncertain ground of European modernity, many of its foundational

stones—hewn from invented continuities and shoring up imagined missions—were

supplied from the quarries of Italian history and the research of German historians.287

286
On the historical import of Italian travel for German travelers and scholars alike, see: Arnold Esch and
Jens Petersen eds., Deutsches Ottocento (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000). Especially in this
volume: Bernd Roeck, ―Johann Jakob Bachofen, Jacob Burckhardt und Italien‖; Arnold Esch, ―Auf
Archivreise: Die deutschen Mediävisten in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: aus Italien-Briefen von
Mitarbeitern der Monumenta Germaniae Historica vor der Gründung des historischen Instituts in Rom.‖;
Volker Sellin, ―Abdankung der Geist vor der Macht? Das Verhältnis von Kultur und Politik nach 1870.‖
Karl Christ and Arnaldo Momigliano eds., L'antichita Nell 'Ottocento in Italia E Germania/Die Antike im
19. Jahrhundert in Italien Und Deutschland (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988); Arnold Esch and Jens
Petersen, eds., Ferdinand Gregorovius und Italien: Eine Kritische Wurdigung (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer,
1993); Klaus Heitman und Teodoro Scamardi eds., Deutsches Italienbild und Italienische Deutschlandbild
im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: 1993); Gunter Oesterle, Bernd Roeck, Christine Tauber, eds., Italien in
Aneignung und Widerspruch (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1996); Linda Marie Puetter, Reisen durchs
Museum: Bildungserlebnisse deutscher Schriftsteller in Italien (1770-1830) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms,
1998).

358
 But while German historians went far during the nineteenth century in securing a

monopoly on the legitimate interpretation of the past—whether German, Italian, or

otherwise—the ―lure of Italy‖ and the historical fascination it exercised was a

phenomenon by no means restricted to professional academics. For even as the

connoisseur, collector or enthusiast were being banished from the sober precincts of the

academy, generations of Germans from the educated classes were coming to see Italy not

only as edifying domain of potential historical insight, but as an increasingly proximate

realm that resonated with social and subjective significance. For educated Germans,

having drunk deep of Goethe's Italienische Reise and later of Burckhardt's Cicerone, the

concept of ―Italy‖ would resolve itself into a rich tangle of signs, instantly evoking

associations of materials prosperity, spiritual education, aesthetic taste, historical

knowledge, and every manner of corporeal satisfaction. Italy, in other words, emerged as

commodified collection of cultural signs, a set of commodities whose consumption

assumed an essential role in the construction of German middle-class subjectivity. In

private souvenirs and objets d'art, in classical public architecture, and in the ever

increasing opportunities for actual travel to the Italian peninsula, educated Germans

adorned the formal edifices of state, the informal institutions of the public sphere, and the

cozy domains of private life with the ornaments of Italian culture. As the century

progressed, the expanding material resources of these classes, the increasing ease of

convenient transportation, and explosive advances in technologies of mechanical

representation, the signifying power of Italy was brought within the grasp of ever

widening segments of the population. From reproductions of Italian masterworks, to

illustrated magazines and books, and eventually to the possibility of an Italian journey of

359
one's own, the uncertain modern conflicts of German middle class subjectivity could find

security in the collection, evocation and consumption of Italy's aesthetic and historical

wealth. The Italienische Reise, glimpsed once only in the now auratic reflections of a

Goethe, a Herder, or a Burckhardt, was now becoming an eminently reproducible

experience. ―Italy‖, in other words, with all its signifying resonance in social, cultural

and subjective spheres (and now as an industry, a product, and an object of consumption),

thus increasingly became manifest in the form of the commodity fetish, a set of

talismanic objects whose ostensible resonance with an idealized history secured their

bearer from the vicissitudes, conflicts and banalities of a lived and quotidian history.

In the following chapters, we will take a closer look at the ways in which these

dialectical poles—a construction of temporality grounded in an auratic historicism and

one defined by a reception of the past into the reified field of commodified and

reproducible modern culture—are implicated in concrete representational configurations

of time and space in Italian contexts. In the pages of the German periodical, Italien,

aimed at an educated and scholarly elite, we will trace out the residues of an auratic

historicism that sought to preserve the experience of Italy and its histories in a matrix of

mythic timelessness on the one hand, and a sweeping historical totality on the other.

Conversely, a review of a contemporary Baedeker guide from 1926 will yield a glimpse

of an alternate approach to the re-construction of Italian spaces and times. In the formal

qualities of the Baedeker, and in its criteria for its selection of objects of interest, a more

modern form of traveling consciousness is revealed where the appropriation of traveling

spaces is predicated on the collapse of aura and a reconfiguration of tourism as a

revealing mode of modern consumption. Finally, we will turn to the contribution of

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Benjamin and Lacis in the form of the Neapel essay. What will emerge here is a

prefiguration of Benjamin's later Denkbilder and the Passagen-Werk, in its forms as a

mobile and fragmentary cityscape, but also an early attempt to navigate between the

above regimes of temporal and geographical representation. To this end, therefore,

perhaps we can enlist the services of Benjamin's Angel of History, and invite this

allegorical figure to an Italian Journey of its own. If, in Benjamin's formulation, the

Angel is fated to witness the past as an ever rising tide of historical wreckage, we might

ask how its historical visions would be transformed if viewed, respectively, through the

pages of a culturally oriented journal, through the lens supplied by a small red Baedeker,

or through the experience of a Neapolitan stroll in the company of Walter Benjamin and

Asja Lacis.

There are few concepts in the intellectual history of modernity that are more

lushly overgrown with significance than that designated by the deceptively innocuous

term of ―historicism.‖ Even a cursory Begriffsgeschichte of the term would extend at

least as far back as the eighteenth century, where Peter Hans Reill, for instance, located

its origins in multiple currents including Pietism and Leibnizian philosophy, and it would

extend to the present day with current incarnations such as the New Historicism advanced

by critics like Stephen Greenblatt in the 1980's and 1990's.288 Of course, any concept

whose history spans such an enormous period of time is unlikely to remain unchanged or

completely stable in its definitions and uses, and historicism boasts a perhaps a more

288
Peter Hans Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1975); See Stephen Greenblatt especially in Shakespearean Negotiations: the Circulation
of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Also Stephen
Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000); Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996).

361
protean and slippery character than most. Indeed, the longevity of historicism as a useful

intellectual concept owes perhaps as much to its malleability and lability as it does to any

stable set of agreed upon meanings. These definitional difficulties are amplified when we

consider that the career of historicism is a phenomenon that cannot be framed completely

within the domain of intellectual history or the ―history of ideas.‖ From its earliest

incarnations, historicism has always been linked with, and has resonated within, a variety

of political, social and institutional histories. Whether we see it in its nascent forms as a

rejection of the natural law historical theories of the French Enlightenment, or we see it in

later manifestations as a theoretical bulwark for Prussian nationalism, or we see it

merging later with socialist thought and Darwinist residues to produce an evolutionary—

rather than revolutionary—progressivism, historicism has always been much more than a

set of theoretical meditations on historical methodology.289 The career of ―historicism‖ is

thus characterized by a rich tangle of often contradictory intellectual layers, and operative

in a wide variety of historical domains—the political, the social and, yes, the cultural.

In most comprehensive terms, therefore, it may be helpful to view historicism less

as a singular and continuous concept and perhaps more as a persistent arena for reflection

and debate on the legitimate place of history in the explanation of human phenomena.

And while such a broadly conceived definition may appear to sacrifice specificity for

comprehensiveness, it nevertheless allows us to link the various manifestations of

historicism both with one another and with the larger contexts in which it was always

embedded. What such a definition allows, to put it somewhat paradoxically, is the

289
Besides Iggers see: Jörn Rüsen, Konfigurationen des Historismus: Studien zur deutsche
Wissenschaftskultur (Frankfurt: 1993); Annette Wittkau, Historismus: Zur Geschichte des Begriffs und des
Problems (Göttingen: 1992).

362
historicization of historicism. Here, the boundaries that marked historicism as a

phenomenon of intellectual or institutional history reveal themselves to be extremely

porous, and the tradition can be reframed within the larger framework of what John

Toews, in the nineteenth-century German context, has called the process of ―becoming

historical.‖290 While in many ways framed within a classical history of ideas, Toews‘

notion of ―becoming historical‖ underlines the fundamental relation between intellectual

historicism and social ―commitments to a cultural reformation that would create

communal solidarity through subjective identification with public memory.‖291 If the

early nineteenth century saw the revolutionary emergence of history as a fundamental set

of discourses informing construction of modern subjectivities, academic historicism may

be recognized as a relatively more formal piece of a larger puzzle that included not only

professional historiography, but also artifacts of public memorialization and the tissues of

social memory. Thus, if Toews reminds us that, ―It is important to recognize that the

historicism of 1840 was not synonymous with [...] Romantic historicism,‖ the term itself

nevertheless persists and remains useful to the extent that its intellectual formulations are

inseparable from the larger scale and ongoing insertion of historical thinking into the

construction of national, social and subjective identities.292 Indeed, it is precisely this

relation to these central meaning-making processes that goes far in explaining both the

curious persistence of historicism as a useful intellectual concept and the perennial

debates and polemics that surround its legitimate application. The fortunes of

290
John Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-
Century Berlin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Also in relation to historical consciousness
is: Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2004). And in more intellectual historical dimensions: Peter Koslowski, ed., The
Discovery of Historicity in German Idealism and Historism (Springer, 2005).
291
Ibid., ii.
292
Ibid., xix.

363
―historicism‖, in other words, closely track the attempts of moderns to think, understand

and identify themselves through historical lenses, and while the term itself is most closely

associated with its intellectual manifestations, these cannot be separated from the broader

social, political and cultural energies that have conferred upon the term both perpetual

life and perpetual controversy.

In terms of his own life as well as that of the concept itself, Walter Benjamin's

explicit engagement with historicism must be understood as a relatively late arrival.

Although, the issue of historical consciousness remains a consistent and central theme in

Benjamin's oeuvre throughout his intellectual career, it is not until extremely late that the

concept of ―historicism‖ emerges as a decisive and discrete formulation. Indeed, while

Benjamin's understanding of historicism certainly becomes manifest in the Passagen-

Werk, only with the theses of ―Über den Begriff der Geschichte‖ of 1940 does Benjamin

turn his full attention to the problems of what he calls ―historicism‖. Of course, as Toews

warns us that Romantic historicism was a very different animal than the historicism of the

1840's, we can be still more certain that the concept of historicism that occupied

Benjamin's thoughts in 1940 is no less a distinct creature. This is all the more true when

we recall that by the time of ―Über den Begriff der Geschichte,‖ historicism in its more

restrictive sense—an institutionally hegemonic and intellectually continuous array of

methodological and theoretical approaches to the practice of formal historiography—had

long been recognized as essentially moribund, an increasingly old-fashioned province of

dusty antiquarians and conservative university chair holders. The energetic assaults of

positivist history in the late nineteenth century, the injection of debased mutations of

Darwinist thought, the emergence of Neo-Idealism at the turn of the twentieth century,

364
and the challenges mounted by new sociological and anthropological discourses—all of

these contributed to a decline of historicism in its manifestation as a distinct school

associated with German scholarship.293 By the 1920's, the last generation whose

intellectual formation took place exclusively under the once hegemonic auspices of

German historicism were writing elegiac retrospectives on the merits and failures of the

historicist outlook. The already declining currency of Prussian School national-liberal

optimism had been rendered almost completely bankrupt by the disasters of Wilhelmine

power politics and the First World War. From this perspective, for instance, Friedrich

Meinecke would write his reflections of the dangers of historicist relativism and its

relation to political power in Die Idee der Staatsräson of 1924, and theologian Ernst

Troeltsch would publish Der Historismus und seine Probleme a year before his death in

1923.294 These both critical and sympathetic accounts of traditions of scholarly German

historicism represented perhaps the last attempt, within the tradition itself, to salvage

what was possible from the wreckage of the previous years. Therefore, if Benjamin's

emphasis on the term in 1940 is to have any meaning at all, we have to look further than

the rarefied institutional histories of German historiography. For Benjamin, in other

words, despite the decline of historicism‘s academic hegemony and the retreat of its self-

identified intellectual representatives, a ―historicism‖ of some sort was alive and all too

well in the summer of 1940.

293
One should distinguish here between ―historicism‖ as the unquestioned guiding methodological
commitment of German historical scholars, and the Zunft which represented this community. If historicism
was in decline, the ―guild‖ of German historians was still alive and quite well.
294
Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History (Hannover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1968).
Chapter 7.

365
 Obviously, for a Benjamin writing in 1940, the problems of Staatsräson or

historical relativism that had so preoccupied Meinecke and Troeltsch in the early 1920's

had been eclipsed for some time by more pressing and immediate concerns. As with

most socialist intellectuals of his generation, the Benjamin of the inter-war period was

less concerned with salvaging the long hallowed traditions of German historicism than

with determining the latter's relative complicity in the eruption of a barbarous World War

and in the nourishment of emerging, and equally barbarous, political regressions such as

Italian Fascism and the National Socialism. Such were the central issues for the

politically and intellectually committed left of the 1920's and 1930's, Benjamin's own

confrontation with these problems extends at least from his conversion to Marxism in

1924-25 until it reached an acute and eventually lethal significance in the summer of

1940. That historicism thus emerges into the foreground of his work in this last and most

threatening moment, that it should become the target of his final meditations on the

forces that had forced him into a precarious exile, should alert us to the importance of the

issue in his thinking of the time, but also to the specific nature of the concept in the

context of his work.

But in order to reconstruct Benjamin's somewhat idiosyncratic concept of

historicism, it might help to briefly survey some of conceptual sediments that had

gathered about the concept since its inception 150 years earlier. German historicist

thought of the nineteenth century had no doubt produced ―pearls‖ of modern

historiography, but it was perhaps the ever-present grain of historical relativism buried

within that had been the, both irritating and constructive, Ursprung of such works. On

the one hand, it was of a piece with claims of sober detachment and legitimizing

366
objectivity.295 It formed the intellectual foundation for a rejection of French-centered

Enlightenment narratives and indices of ―progress‖ and ―natural law‖. Each epoch,

according to Ranke, had to be recognized as equally close to God, an expressive organic

totality that had to be judged not according to any trans-historical conception of value

such as ―Reason‖, but on its own terms. Alternatively, and in the course of time, the

dangers of such relativism could be seen in the way that political Macht, as a value in

itself, tended to fill the space evacuated by the trans-historical values of Geist. The

historical record itself was to be the ultimate arbiter of historical justification, and the

success of significant historical individualities—in this case the state—had to be

measured within the courtroom of historical fortune and power politics. For early critics

like Jacob Burckhardt, and for later ones such as Meinecke and Troeltsch, the potential

strengths of a certain historical relativism had spun out of control and resulted in the

elevation of state power to the sole value according to which historical entities could be

judged. It was partly due to such concerns, of course, that Burckhardt sought to balance

the political effects of Prussian politically-oriented historicism with a reassertion of value

and the ideal in the cultural realm. In each of these cases, doubts about historicism

centered on an all too enthusiastic participation in Prussian and Imperial nationalist self-

legitimation, with its motivating sources and resultant effects primarily in the domains of

politics and diplomacy.

By the beginning of the twentieth-century, ―historicism‖ was being re-conceived

not merely as an intellectual armature of a set of political and national imperatives, but in

295
This is precisely the current that would be embraced and valorized within American historiographical
traditions. See Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: The―Objectivity Question‖ and the American Historical
Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

367
terms of its social and class character. The process of re-imagining the social field in its

more synchronic dimensions was already underway by the first two decades of the

twentieth century, with figures such as Tönnies, Weber and Simmel attempting to expand

the narrow political interests of ―Prussian‖ historicism to explore a field of historically

informed social phenomena. However, it is with Lukács that historicism and its

conceptual frameworks would begin to be explicitly identified as phenomena and

manifestations of social and class conflict. Central to this critique was Lukács' 1923

Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, a work that figures prominently in Benjamin's

writings from his 1924 stay in Capri and Naples, and in his eventual conversion to

Marxism during the same period.296 As Benjamin put it in a July 7, 1924 letter to

Gershom Scholem:

While proceeding from political considerations, Lukács arrives at principles that

are, at least in part, epistemological and perhaps not entirely as far-reaching as I
first assumed. The book astonished me because these principles resonate for me
or validate my own thinking. (…) Regarding communism, the problem with
―theory and practice‖ seems to me in effect to be that, given the disparity that
must be preserved between these two realms, any definitive insight into theory is
precisely dependent on practice.
…But, since I have been here, this has not prevented me from seeing the political
practice of communism (not as a theoretical problem but, first and foremost, as a
binding attitude) in a different light than ever before. I believe I have written you
that much of what I have arrived at thus far in thinking about his subject was
greeted with very surprising interest by those with whom I discussed it—among
these individuals was a wonderful Communist who has been working for the party
since the Duma revolt....297

296
Also, Benjamin continues: ―…In conclusion: Bloch reviewed Lukács‘ History and Class Consciousness
[Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein] in the March issue of the Neue Merkur. The review seems to be by
far the best thing he has done in a long time and the book itself is very important, especially for me.
Naturally I am unable to read it now.‖ To Gershom Scholem, Capri, June 13, 1924. In Gershom Scholem
and Theodor W. Adorno eds., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, trans. Manfred R.
Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
297
Ibid.

368
In reinterpreting the Weberian concept of social rationalization from a Marxist

perspective, Lukács presented contemporary social and scientific postivisms not as

symptoms of Protestant worldly asceticism, but as a form of ideological false

consciousness generated by bourgeois commodity forms. With this move, centered on

the concept of Verdinglichung, Lukács had taken aim at the naive positivist optimism that

lingered in both bourgeois and socialist thought, an optimistic faith in a salutary,

inevitable and evolutionary process of social and scientific progress. At the same time,

Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein broadened and deepened the currents of Marxist

ideology critique, opening the way to further materialist exploration of the relations

between theories of knowledge and class consciousness. For Benjamin, Lukács' work

was a revelation, and it was in the engagement with Geschichte und

Klassenbewußtsein—along with his relationship with Asja Lacis—that the first

indications of his transition to Marxism become apparent. Over the course of the next

fifteen years, Benjamin's often idiosyncratic brand of materialism would bear the traces

and residues of the Lukácsian work—and the Italian journey—that conditioned his initial

turn to Marxism.298

Above all, the echo of Lukács can still be found in Benjamin's later thematization

of historicism. To some extent, one can view the concept of historicism in Benjamin's

―Über den Begriff der Geschichte‖ as the extension and translation of Lukács' critique of

commodity from reification into the domain of class-based historical epistemology. As

298
On the relation between the work of Benjamin and Lukács see: Bernd Witte, "Benjamin and Lukács,
Historical Notes on the Relationship between Their Political and Aesthetic Theories," New German
Critique, no. 5, Spring (1975); Ferenc Feher, "Lukács and Benjamin: Parallels and Contrasts," New
German Critique, no. 34, Winter (1985); Edzard Kruckeberg, Der Begriff des Erzahlens im 20.
Jahrhundert: Zu den Theorien Benjamins, Adornos und Lukács (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981).

369
with Lukács, the proximal target for Benjamin were those currents of Marxist thought—

whether objectively lived or subjectively formulated—whose trust in evolutionary social

progress, or the inevitability of revolution, betrayed dangerous traces of bourgeois

historical ideologies. An essential dimension of such ideologies, for Benjamin, was

precisely the residue of an optimistic and scientistic positivism that conceived of

dialectical materialism as kind of natural law that would inevitably result in the

redemption of human history in the promise of a classless utopia. ―It was in the context

of a conversation in which I was describing how this works,‖ Benjamin tells us of his

position on these currents, ―—comparable, in method, to the process of splitting atoms—

liberates the enormous energies of history that are bound up in the ―once upon a time‖ of

classical historiography. The history that showed things ―as they really were‖ was the

strongest narcotic of the century.‖299 In this case, Benjamin's concerns focus on that

element of historicism that stresses a vision of historical time as an organic continuum

that unfolds and develops according to its own inner logic. History emerges here as a

mere mechanism, a narrative whose final chapter is already implied in the necessary

motions of the first.

It is to this problem, therefore, that he devotes the first of his theses in ―Über den

Begriff der Geschichte,‖ in the allegory of the chess-playing automaton.300 So long as

socialism construes the game of revolution as a mechanical process, so long as it resigns

itself to function as an automaton observing a natural and calculable course, then it is

always fated to lose the match. But if, according to Benjamin, we conceal the dwarf of

299
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, N3,4.
300
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt., trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books
1969), 253.

370
―theology‖ beneath the apparatus, and allow it to pull the necessary levers, the historical

chess game can be won. To be fair, of course, this injection of messianic theology into

the works of dialectical materialism has been the source of endless controversy in the

history of Benjamin reception.301 But for our purposes, the point is clear: the machine of

history is unlikely to produce—in and of itself—a winning game of chess or, still less, a

revolutionary moment of historical redemption. Indeed, as the allegory of the Angel of

History tells us in the same work, it is precisely this faith in the mechanical continuity of

history, ever advancing and ever progressing, that resists the redemptive efforts of the

angel.302 In both cases, furthermore, we find Benjamin gesturing to a somewhat altered

posture with regard to history. Instead of situating ourselves comfortably within the

continuum of an automatic narrative, we are invited to lift ourselves above or lower

ourselves beneath—on a vertical axis—an apparently sequential, determined and

horizontal series of historical events.

In order to understand this vertical (or perpendicular) movement of Benjamin, we

might imagine ourselves, for instance, in a very long queue where information is passed

back and forth strictly along the line of those waiting with us. In this situation we are

completely dependent upon the mediating communications of the individuals in front of

us and behind us for information regarding, say, whether there are any concert tickets

left, whether the band is any good, or what it is we are waiting for at all. Stories are

passed back to us describing what awaits those ahead, or what has happened to those

behind, but these are necessarily partial and subject to the interests of the intervening

301
For extensive discussion of these issues see Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin‘s ‗On
the Concept of History,‘ (New York: Verso, 2005); Kittsteiner, "Walter Benjamin's Historicism."
302
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 257-258.

371
communicants. We are, as it were, locked in a closed series, and firmly embedded in a

process whose only known object is that of waiting. And nevertheless, we wait.

Benjamin's proposal, in other words, is not one of looking back to a utopian golden age at

the rear of the queue nor looking forward to the rewards supposedly received at the head

of the queue, but one of imaging what it would mean to step out of this great moving

queue of history, and situate ourselves at right angles to the line of its movement. What

Benjamin suggests is that the redemption of history is not vouchsafed to those at the

terminus of the historical queue, but is something that can emerge only from a new

relation between the members of the line. In the gesture of stepping out of our queue, in

moving vertically to the horizontal plane of history, we necessarily interrupt the

narratives that pulse along its length and determine the self-understandings of its

members. Indeed, to take this step, is to disentangle oneself from the narrative

mediations of the line. From our new position, our relation to those individualities in the

line is no longer mediated by the contours of the line itself; instead each individual, each

story, each hope, each disaster within the queue can be engaged in its singularity and is

available to us immediately. The energies of these experiences are no longer drained and

forgotten in the conduit of the line. Indeed, it is their very immediacy that occasions that

spark of recognition—that flash of lightning at a moment of danger—where past and

present are drawn together, and the energies of the past collide directly with the present.

The past, for Benjamin is thus redeemed in its recognition by the present, and the present

is redeemed by the infusion of revolutionary potential from the past.

If the space of criticism, for Benjamin, is secured by thus stepping out of and

demolishing the grand narratives of progress and the constrictive long-term continuities

372
of historicism, it should come as little surprise that Benjamin's critical gaze turns towards

the isolated fragments, half-buried fossils and crumbling ruins that lie just below the

surface of the larger edifices of long term historical narratives. While such broadly

conceived historical narratives may be useful in policing the order and self-

understandings of the historical queue described above, they nevertheless represent a

static matrix where the position of each element within the line determines its own

meaning and the meaning it may attach to other portions or individuals of the queue. The

task, however, is one of undermining these perceived continuities and allowing history to

express itself through its fragmentary elements rather than as a supposedly expressive

totality. Where historicism invites us into the museum of the past through the grand front

entrance decorated with allegories of progress, of national accomplishment, and of

cultural achievement, Benjamin grabs our hand and takes us through an alleyway to the

rear door used by janitors and cafe staff. Without a trace a philistine hesitation, he

carefully avoids the displays in the main halls to find greater illumination in the jumbled

disorder of the storerooms and in the commodified kitsch of the museum gift shop.

It is essential, furthermore, to emphasize the specific domains from which

Benjamin seeks to secure his critical insights. Indeed, one of the idiosyncrasies of

Benjamin's cultural criticism is the manner in which it cannot be simply mapped in a one

to one way onto the material landscape of class interest and ideology. Where Adorno

could distinguish an ideologically debased popular culture from the potentially critical

spaces of high culture—the former drawing its energies from the mystifications of

modern culture industries and the latter seeking a critical exterior to this ideological

matrix—the critical moment for Benjamin resides precisely in embracing, and drilling

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deeper into, the desiderata of the popular culture in which Adorno had found so little

critical nourishment. This is to say, in other words, that the geography of culture is not

co-terminous with the geography of ideology and class interest; indeed, from this

perspective, popular culture cannot so easily be dismissed as a region of entertaining

baubles whose object is the ideological mystification of the masses, and the rarefied

spaces of high modernism do not necessarily represent a refuge from such mystifications.

Put still differently, the object of granularizing history and attending to these fragments is

not to then set about re-locating and re-situating these fragments as this or that

representative of a particular social formation or class interest. For Benjamin, on the

contrary, such fragments, and the stories they tell, embody in themselves the dialectical

tensions of the cultural sphere as a whole. By attending closely, we find in the objects of

modern commercial and industrial culture not merely the mute carriers of the messages of

capital, but a landscape of objects alive with confused chatter about utopian hopes and

regressive anxieties.

Cultural history, as practiced by Benjamin, engages the traces and detritus of the

past as the overdetermined images and wishes of a dreaming collective. And as with

psychoanalytical Traumdeutung, the meanings one finds in these objects are almost

always multiple and rarely reducible to an unequivocal source, whether this be a single

repressed sexual desire or a single hegemonic class formation. Thus, for Benjamin, the

fragmentary artifacts of past culture, from whatever source or sphere they may be drawn,

each contain a story of the dialectical tensions that conditioned the shape of modern

culture. In a deserted boutique, say, of a long forgotten Paris arcade, we may stumble on

a collection of sea shells. If we were to put one of these to our ears, we might fancy that

374
we hear an echo of the distant ocean, and if we look at it through the eyes of Adorno we

may see a natural object transformed by a commodified culture into an inert bauble, a

collector's item to be consumed as a mere object of ownership and entertaining

distraction. But released from its context and blasted out of the historical strata that have

buried it, the shell emerges from Benjamin's perspective as an object vibrating with the

historical tensions that conditioned its appearance as a cultural object. It speaks now of a

nostalgia for a natural past—a utopian dream of ur-history or a childhood memory—and

now as a representative of the modern mania for collection, for the transformative power

of the collector's will to order. Reading Strindberg, for instance, Benjamin describes the

way in which the experience of Arcade becomes a repository for these kinds of objects

and memories:

Extinct nature: the shell shop in the arcades. In ―Pilot‘s Trials,‖ Strindberg tells
of ―an arcade with brightly lit shops.‖ Then he went on into the arcade…. There
was every possible kind of shop, but not a soul to be seen, either behind or before
the counters. After a while he stopped in front of a big window in which there
was a whole display of shells. As the door was open, he went in. From floor to
ceiling there were rows of shells of every kind, collected from all the seas of the
world. No one was in, but there was a ring of tobacco smoke in the air…. So he
began his walk again, following the blue and white carpet. The passage wasn‘t
straight but winding, so that you could never see the end of it; and there were
always fresh shops there, but no people; and the shopkeepers were not to be seen:
the unfathomability of the moribund arcades is a characteristic motif.303

Only when lifted out of the context of its discovery, only when blasted out of the

narratives that have congealed upon it, can we now see how the shell has left an

impression on the historical casing within which it was embedded, an impression that

reveals the hopes, fears, and utopian wish images that have defined its trajectory as an

element of culture.

303
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, H1a,3.

375
 It should be clear now that the historicism of which Benjamin speaks in the

Passagen-Werk and in ―Über den Begriff der Geschichte‖ can be understood not simply

as the hegemonic intellectual expression of classical German historiography, nor

comprehended as the mere reflection of a particular class formation. While it is both

aware and informed by these conceptions, Benjamin's concept of historicism might rather

be understood as a kind of centrifugal force within cultural receptions and representations

of history. That is, historicism might be conceived here as any of those cultural gestures,

narratives, or imperatives that seek to restore continuity and totality to an increasingly

fragmentary historical consciousness. These may appear, of course, in a variety of

narrative guises—in the certainties of ―progress‖, in the un-ruptured continuities of

organic development, in the mechanisms of natural law. In every instance, however, the

goal is always to re-envision history as a total process, to reassemble the fragments and

singularities of the past into a stable and rigid matrix, to force the members of our now

unruly metaphorical queue back into line.

In this context, Benjamin's reflections on the role and character of nineteenth-

century representational strategies—from Neo-Classicism to Art Nouveau—are

particularly illuminating. It is no accident, Benjamin suggests, that this era of

unprecedented social, political and technological transformation also saw the massive

injection of both ―history‖ and ―nature‖ into its representational repertoires. ―There is an

effort to master the new experiences of the city,‖ he writes for example in the Arcades

Project, ―within the framework of the old traditional experiences of nature. Hence the

schemata of the virgin forest and the sea. (Meryon and Ponson du Terrail)‖304 Or further:

304
Ibid., M16a,3.

376
 When did the excavations begin? Foyers of casinos, and the like, belong to this
elegant variant of the dream house. Why a fountain in a covered space is
conducive to daydreaming has yet to be explained. But in order to gauge the
shudder of dread and exaltation that might have come over the idle visitor who
stepped across this threshold, it must be remembered that the discovery of
Pompeii and Herculaneum had taken place a generation earlier, and that the
memory of the lava-death of these two cities was covertly but all the more
intimately conjoined with the memory of the great Revolution. For when the
sudden upheaval had put an end to the style of the ancient regime, what was here
being exhumed was hastily adopted as the style of a glorious republic; and palm
fronds, acanthus leaves, and meanders came to replace the rococo paintings and
chinoiseries of the previous century. *Antiquity*305

Benjamin's primary concern here, as seen above, is with a dialectic taking place within

the cultural sphere itself, a dialectic between, on the one hand, technologies that

undermine traditional auratic conceptions of art and history and, on the other, the

resistances thrown up by aestheticism and historicism to combat this disintegration of

aura. Within the field of these tensions, the eruptions of the ―new‖ in European

modernity, found themselves obsessively and perpetually cloaked in the costumes of

historical and natural motifs. Train stations would become temples, iron-work would

twist and bloom in fantastic botanical forms, and a journalist of this modernizing era

could confidently declare that, ―In the nineteenth century, ancient Greek architecture

once again bloomed in its classical purity.‖306

From a Benjaminian perspective, as we will see later, such historicisms and

aestheticisms must be configured merely as rearguard actions, resolutely defending their

objects from the reifying and reproductive interventions of photography, recorded sound

and reproducible culture in general. But as with the response to the above technologies,

305
Ibid., L1,1.
306
See also: ―On the Gare du Nord: Here they have entirely avoided that abundance of space which is
found in waiting rooms, entryways, and restaurants around 1880, and which led to the problem of the
railroad station as exaggerated baroque palace.‖ Benjamin, Arcades Project, F2a,2.

377
so too would the technologies of tourism and travel find resistance among those who

would seek to restore and revivify an aesthetically and historically integrative traveling

experience in the face of an increasingly fragmented, reproducible, and commodified

tourist industry. And of course, in Benjaminian fashion, we can locate such resistance

not merely in the manifestos of aestheticism or in the great tomes of scholarly

historicism, but even in the pages of a Zeitschrift dedicated to the educated and edifying

appreciation of all things Italian.

Three years after Benjamin's own transformative Italian Journey in 1924—three

years after the fateful encounters with Lukács and Asja Lacis had nudged him fully into

the broad current of inter-war Western Marxism—a German periodical appeared that

exemplifies much of what Benjamin might have later identified as the hoarse last gasps of

historicist and aestheticist recuperations of history and art. Edited by Dr. Werner von der

Schulenburg and published in Heidelberg by the Niels Kempmann Verlag, the periodical

appeared in December of 1927 under the title Italien: Monatsschrift für Kultur, Kunst und

Literatur. Schulenburg himself was a long-time student and observer of Italy and its

cultural relations with Germany. An author of a variety of historical novels with Italian

setting, Schulenburg was also a scholar with interests in the Germany reception with

Italy. Among the products of these latter interests, Schulenburg edited a volume devoted

to Burckhardt‘s Italian experience. In later years, Schulenburg would go on to serve as

cultural attaché in Rome under the Nazi regime. His sentiments, however, were clearly

that of the conservative and national opposition, and Schulenburg eventually became

implicated in political improprieties that centered around the staff of the German embassy

in Rome. Nazi authorities eventually sought his arrest, but Schulenburg was able to sit

378
out the end of the war while in hiding in Bavaria. As for Italien, it seems to have been

envisioned as a continuation of the work of Karl Hillebrand‘s Italia, a periodical likewise

focused on the cultural encounters between Italy and the Germany. From the outset,

Schulenburg‘s periodical addressed itself to an educated and culturally literate elite

readership, and the magazine would cater to these tastes with edifying pieces such as

Hugo von Hofmannsthal's reflections on Goethe's Sicilian travels, Robert Michels‘

thoughts on the psychology of Italian emigration, and the report of the German Konsul on

the nature of Mussolini's regime.307 Indeed, before the end of its relatively short three

year run in 1930, the Italy that the magazine constructed was most definitely not the

debased realm of Baedeker tourist kitsch, but one that could still speak and inspire the

―northern‖ spirit with its combination of ―southern‖ aesthetic, and historical and

intellectual treasures.

From the very introduction of the inaugural issue, penned by Schulenburg

himself, the unmistakable scent of cultural pessimism in its national-conservative

Weimar variants clearly announces itself. After lauding the long and mutually enriching

cultural exchange between a German ―North‖ and an Italian-Mediterranean ―South‖, an

exchange in which Germany emerges as the rightful inheritor and amplifier of Italian

traditions, Schulenburg turns his attention to the dangers of the contemporary cultural

moment, a moment in which the heritage of the past is threatened by the corruption and

philistinism of an increasingly materialist present. Worth quoting at length, Schulenburg

declares:

307
Werner von der Schulenburg ed., Italien: Monatsschrift für Kultur, Kunst und Literatur, Jahregang 1
(Heidelberg: Niels Kampmann Verlag, 1927).

379
 In the recent years, however, new forces have been unleashed by invisible
spectres [...] in order to lead the German people into a colorless and formless
Materialism. To be sure, the methods of these spectres rest on organizational and
formal concepts – since it could not be any other way – handed down out of Italy;
whether these spirits make their home in the Near East, the Wild West or in the
less refined social strata of our homeland. They work openely with a finely
executed disposition of the masses; and they quietly keep their ledger with a great
Milanese credit bank. But they have reasons to close their eyes, and the eyes of
their adepts, to the light of the South. They wish to suppress this last and deep
knowledge - a knoweldge with which Italian culture can still supply the North -
this clarity and distinctness of thought, this organically conditioned individuality.
They pursue this all in order to introduce instead gray, anti-human and uncertain
concepts that are anchored in their own egotistical aims, rooted in goals that lead
back into chaos and will destroy the great work of two thousand years. They
direct all their resources to this; they twist, lie and deceive. In the place of the
southern sun, they wish to erect a great gold piece instead.308

The stage of a once bright ―comedy‖ of progress—dramatically rendered as the diffusion

of Geist and Kultur from Mediterranean forebears to modern Europe descendants—had

darkened into a tragedy of threatening decline.

In searching for the source of this descent into crass materialism, Schulenburg

marches out the usual suspects of national-conservative pessimism. Those responsible

for the modern debasement of Kultur have made their home, we are told, ―im nahen

Osten, im wilden Westen,‖ and even in, ―den ungeistigen Schichten unseres

Heimatlandes.‖ And although thus framed in a rather oblique and Salonfähig fashion,

308
Ibid., 2. ―In den letzten Jahren, sind jedoch neue Kräfte in Bewegung gesetzt worden von unsichtbaren
Geistern, welche sich aus guten Gründen den Tatsachen solcher kulturelen Bedingungen und
Auswirkungen entgegenstemmen, um das deutsche Volk einem farb- und formlosen Materialismus
entgegenzuführen. Zwar stützt sich die Technik dieser Geister – weil es eben nicht anders geht – auf die
aus Italien überkommenen Organisations—und Formenbegriffe; ob diese Geister nun im nahen Osten, im
wilden Westen oder in den ungeistigen Schichten unseres Heimatlandes zu hause sind. Sie arbeiten
öffentlich mit einer auf das feinste durchgeführten Gliederung der Massen; und sie führen im stillen ihr
Hauptbuch mit einer grossen Mailänder Kreditseite. Aber sie haben Gründe, ihre und ihrer Adepten Augen
vor dem Licht des Südens zu verschliessen. Sie wollen diese letzten, tiefen Erkenntnisse, welche jene
Kultur dem Norden zuzuführen imstande ist, diese limpidezza, diese Helligkeit des Denkens, diese
organisch bedingte Freiheit des Individuums niederhalten, um graue, menschenfeindliche, zweifelhafte, in
ihren egoistischen Zielen verankerte Begriffe dafuer einzusetzen; Begriffe, welche in das Chaos
zurueckführen und die Riesenarbeit von zwei Jahrtausenden auslöschen müssen. Sie verwenden alle Mittle
dafür; sie drehen, verfälschen und betrügen. Sie wollen an die Stelle der südlichen Sonne ein grosses
Goldstück hängen.‖

380
Schulenburg's suspects are clear and unoriginal enough in their general outlines—in a

broad and perhaps half-concealed anti-Semitism, in fear of encroaching Americanism,

and in anxiety regarding the coarse and uncultured masses at home who are dangerously

susceptible to both American and Socialist brands of materialism. Under the influence of

these dangerous forces, the continuity of tradition from antiquity to the culture of modern

Germany and Europe was threatened with rupture, fragmentation and dissolution into the

crass common denominators of modern materialism.

At the same time, the metaphorical frame in which Schulenburg situates his

historical conception—the role of Italy in European culture and the danger of its loss for

the present moment—is particularly revealing. While the rising and setting of the sun, as

metaphor for the fortunes of cultural and individual enlightenment, is perhaps not

original, in Schulenburg's curious universe, the sun of European culture unquestionably

rises in the South. If Europe's morning was lit by the light of Hellenic and Italian

antiquity, if its skies were brightened by the Italian Renaissance, then it is only in

modernity that an ominous twilight appears imminent. Conversely, the modern

opponents of such spiritual traditions are depicted as Unsichtbar, as unseen and unseeing

spirits operating in darkness and in secret. They seek to replace the clearness and

distinctness of the Southern sun with the merely reflected light of coins and precious

metals. What emerges is a metaphorical framework wherein it is only tradition and the

continuity of history that vouchsafe clarity of vision and cultural insight. If modernity is

to be an enlightened age, then it must be illumined by the increasingly distant sun of

Italian history and the universal values classical antiquity.

381
 Even more broadly, it is worth noting the way in which Schulenburg constructs a

cultural history of Europe while using language and images drawn from natural history.

Again, this is by no means original to Schulenburg, but in his appeal to natural metaphors

and organic concepts, we can clearly recognize the outlines of that general syndrome

identified in Benjamin's conception as historicism. In this case, Schulenburg can be

linked to that broader current of Weimar Kulturpessimismus, announced most

influentially in Spengler's 1918 Der Untergang des Abendlandes, and whose

reconstruction of history as an organic process yielded a gloomy prognosis of inevitable

decline. In accord with this tradition, Schulenburg presents the ―ascent‖ of European

culture, and the stewardship of its German inheritors, in rhetorical terms as an eminently

natural process. Here, the rise of this European tradition, in its classical forms, wears the

natural costume of the dawning day. As surely as the sun rises in the morning, as surely

as its brilliance daily warms a distant earth, so too does Mediterranean antiquity mark the

―morning‖ of European culture and brilliantly illuminate the historical epochs that follow.

Indeed, the metaphor of the sun precisely captures the concept of an (aesthetic-religious)

auratic origin or singularity we have seen described by Benjamin. Like the antiquity that

Schulenburg seeks to recover, the sun is precisely that kind of auratic object that is both

always and immediately present (in the self-generated warmth of the latter or in cultural

legacies of the former ), yet whose presence is guaranteed only in the carefully preserved

atmosphere of distance that surrounds it. History, like the sun, is available to us, but only

on condition that it is mediated by the intervening and protective insulations of space or

time. With its motions guided, like the sun, by inscrutable natural laws, with its cycles

turning irresistibly and perpetually, history is here cloaked in a powerful and mythic aura,

382
and the province of the historian merges imperceptibly with that of the priest. Indeed, for

conservatives like Schulenburg and Spengler, not only has history become a dramatic

tragic drama, but the always foreseen defeat of the tragic hero seems to be drawing ever

closer.

Curiously, however, Schulenburg injects an almost theological note—and one that

might have amused Benjamin—in the supra-natural manner in which his natural drama

draws to a close. Although the rise and nourishment of European cultural traditions are

inscribed in the certainties of natural and mythic phenomena, the forces that threaten their

dissolution arise under the auspices of inauthenticity, artificiality and the Unheimlich.

What we don't find here, in other words, is the more thoroughgoing pessimism of a

Spengler for whom the Morgenrot of culture presupposes an eventual and inevitable

twilight Abendrot. Instead, for Schulenburg, decline is an interruption, an unnatural

product of Geister or spirits, and a product of the artificialities of a modern, mass-

produced and spiritually debased materialism. The darkness these latter bring results not

from the natural cycle of fading day, but announces itself in the uncanny ―eclipse‖ of the

sun of historical tradition by means of that most symbolically artificial of all objects—a

coin. Thus, redemption may be had, but only on condition that modernity turn its eyes

from the Babylon of urban modernity to the ―heavenly city‖ of classical and Italian

culture.

But if Schulenburg sketches the rough contours of Italian space as they emerge in

the territories of a pessimistic modern historicism, the manner in which this tradition

saturates the construction of physical spaces only becomes fully evident when we, as it

were, join it for a walk in the landscapes it describes. Such a walk, as a mobile reception

383
of physical space, has a long history as an element in the genre of Reisebeschreibung.

Though it can perhaps trace its beginnings to the religious pilgrimage of the Middle

Ages, the modern descriptive ―stroll‖ has its roots as far back as Johann Gottfried

Seume's 1801 Spaziergang nach Syrakus and extends at least as far as Benjamin's own

Denkbilder, with the Neapel essay foremost among them.309 Yet whereas Benjamin's

Denkbilder radically transformed the genre, the form itself was more congenial to the

leisurely and subjectively oriented Reisebeschreibungen of the early nineteenth

century.310 Nevertheless—or perhaps because of this—the pages of Italien were a

welcome home for travel description of this sort. Whether in the diaries of nineteenth-

century German artist August Geist, in the ―Umbrische Spaziergänge‖ of Alfred

Steinitzer, or Adolf von Hatzfeld's ―Positano und Pompeji‖, the Spaziergang emerges as

a favored means of constructing and reflecting upon Italian physical and temporal

landscapes.

In both the proximity of their respective itineraries and in the distance of their

conceptual frameworks, Adolf von Hatzfeld's ―Positano und Pompeji‖ offers a unique

contrast with Benjamin's own configuration of Naples that we will explore later.311

309
For histories of the Pilgerfahrt see section one of Bausinger, Beyrer and Korff ed., Reisekultur
(München: Beck, 1999).
310
For eighteenth and early-nineteenth century travel narratives see: Italo Michele Battafarano ed.,
Italiensiche Reise – Reisen nach Italien (Gardolo di Trento: Reverdito, 1988); Peter ed. Brenner, Der
Reisebericht: Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur (Bonn: Suhrkamp, 1988);
Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Wolf Jäger eds., Reisen im 18. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Winter, 1986);
Wolfgang Griep ed., Sehen und Beschreiben: Europäische Reisen im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert
(Heide in Holstein: Wolfgang Griep 1991); Jurgen C. Jacobs, Wiedergeburt in Rom: Goethes "Italienische
Reise" als Teil seiner Autobiographie (Paderborn: Schoningh, 2004); Ludwig Schudt, Italienreisen im 17.
und 18. Jahrhundert (Wien: Schroll, 1959); William Stewart, Die Reisebeschreibung und ihre Theorie im
Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Bouvier, 1978); Irmgard Scheitler, Gattung und Geschlecht:
Reisebeschreibungen deutscher Frauen 1780-1850 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1999); Linda Marie
Puetter, Reisen Durchs Museum: Bildungserlebnisse deutscher Schriftsteller in Italien (1770-1830)
(Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1998).
311
Italien, 183-189.

384
While Benjamin makes his own journey to Naples from Capri, just off the western tip of

the same Sorrentine peninsula, the construction of his journey will yield far different

temporal perspectives than those that emerge in Hatzfeld's journeys in the same

Sorrentine environs. Where, as we shall see, Benjamin plunges into the urban Neapolitan

landscape, closely attending to the fleeting, fragmentary, and porous character of its life

and architectonics, Hatzfeld's journey is at once more landward and more vertical. It

thrusts the reader up from the southern facing harbor of Positano and carries the narrative

to the commanding heights of the surrounding massifs. The result, for both its historical

and spatial organization, is one related more to the aesthetic category of the ―picturesque‖

than to Benjamin's kaleidoscopic visions. The temporal frameworks assembled in the

strolling reflections of Hatzfeld will assume the forms of natural and or aesthetic

phenomena, forms in which time is framed and conceived in an image of history that

speaks to the viewer only on condition of a requisite auratic distance.

As the narrative begins, Hatzfeld configures his spaces in natural, mythic and ur-

historical temporalities. ―The heart,‖ he tells us of this region in the opening lines, ―and

living pulse of the Gulf of Salerno is Positano, and its crown is the three-peaked Mt. St.

Angelo.‖312 This small town is the living heart of the Gulf of Salerno, and its small

harbor and narrow streets are nestled on the steeply sloping flanks of the Sorrentine

Peninsula's southern facing uplands. ―Like a great beast,‖ we are told, ―these mountains

lay along the sea, and in a paw that strikes the sea rests Postitano. ‖313 The town—both

literally and metaphorically—is thus initially and powerfully situated in natural and a-

52
Ibid., 183. ―Das Herz und lebendige Puls des Golfes von Salerno ist Positano, seine Krone der
dreigekuppelte Monte St. Angelo.‖
313
Ibid. ―Ein ungeheures Tier liegt diese Gebirge am Meer, und an seiner Pranke, die es in das Meer
schlägt, ruht Positano.‖

385
historical contexts. Yet even as Hatzfeld turns his gaze from the majestic surroundings to

the town itself, the boundaries that might distinguish natural, historical, and aesthetic

territories remain indistinct and ill-defined. Where the mountains boast ―Terraces and

columns,‖ the pink houses of the city bloom with gardens of ―Palm and Ailanthus, and

steel-blue Carob. The slopes are covered with Aloe and thousands of house-sized

cacti.‖314 Indeed, once the proper Ausblick is arrived at, Hatzfeld changes register from

Nature to Art, and the town recalls ―to memory the painting of Toledo by El Greco, with

a landscape dominated by gold-brown.‖315 Nature, art and mankind emerge here in

classic Arcadian harmony, a harmony where each element mirrors and complements the

other, and where the vicissitudes and ruinous fragments of historical time do not yet

penetrate. For Hatzfeld, in other words, the experience it brings to mind is that of a

―morning awakening, the first glimpse of the peak, with the early sun‘s soul-stirring play

of light. It is the radiance of noble, long past ages.‖316

If this small community on the Gulf of Salerno recalls, for Hatzfeld, the Spanish

Baroque of El Greco, it shimmers likewise in the Arcadian light of Claude Lorrain‘s

French Baroque. An ur-historical harmony of art, nature and spirituality settles on and

envelops the town, and its contours emerge in an auratic vision of the Golden-Age, a

paradise unmarked by the ―Fall‖ of historical time. In an explosion of Expressionist

color that barely obscures the presence of an equally Expressionist nostalgic spirituality,

Hatzfeld describes the landscape:

314
Ibid., 184. ―Terassen und Säulen, Palmen und Eilantus, und die stahlblaue Karobe. Die Abhänge
bedecken Aloe und tausendfach die Haushohen Kakteen.‖
315
Ibid. ―das Bild Grecos in die Erinnerung, das er von Toledo malte, mit dem die Landscaft
beherrschenden Gelbbraun.‖
316
Ibid., 184. ―…morgenliche Erwachung, das erste Blick in die Kuppel, mit ihrem die Seele erhebenden
Lichtspiel der frühen Sonne. Es ist die Ausstrahlung edler, längst vergangener Zeiten.‖

386
 Over the upward- thrusting movement of this landscape, there descends a
paradise-like fecundity in places where flat surfaces emerge. Light green flickers
next to steel-blue tropical shadows. Along with northern oak and silver-trunked
nut trees there bloom fragrant and fruit-bearing Orange and Lemon. In between,
there stand prickly and convoluted groups of turquoise Cacti and Agave. From
the lush swells of meadows, streams crash down into the sea below. In the moist
ground bamboo grows, and here poisonous snakes make their home.317

In this aesthetic, natural, and almost theologically configured garden, Hatzfeld discovers

a timeless realm of plenty, a realm where the divided territories of the present—both

temporal and geographical—find union once again in the botanical presence of

Mediterranean orange and lemon trees, northern oaks and oriental bamboo. Indeed, true

to a conception rather more in common with El Greco than with Claude Lorrain, Hatzfeld

even populates his garden with the ominous presence of poisonous snakes.

Conversely, almost as an inversion of Dante's stroll up the slopes of Paradise,

historical time enters Hatzfeld's descriptions with a climb up the 1500 meter slopes of

Monte St. Angelo. As the elevation increases, Hatzfeld is astonished at the degree to

which the landscape changes. However, even as this landscape begins to change, so too

do the geographical and temporal associations. ―As we reached a high plateau,‖ he tells

us, ―we were newly surprised by the change in the landscape. A grove of German beech,

in colors of violet-brown, waited there for spring. And at their feet was gold-brown

autumn foliage, Lederblumen and anemones, just like at home in the northern spring.‖ 318

317
Ibid. ―Über die nach oben gerichtete Bewegung dieser Landschaft sinkt paradiesische Fruchtbarkeit
herab, dort, wo sich Tragende Fläche bildet. Helles Grün funkelt neben stahlblauen tropischen Schatten.
Mit nordischen Eichen und silbersstämmigen Nussbäumen wächst die blüten duftende und fruchttragende
Orange und Zitrone. Dazwischen stehen zackig und verworren türkisblaue, gehegebildende Kakteen und
Agaven. [...] Über saftige, schwellende Wiesen stürzen die Bäche zum Meer. In den feuchten Gründen
wächst Bambus, der Wohnort der giftigen Schlangen.‖
318
Ibid., 185. ―Als wir ein hohes Plateaus erreicht hatten waren wir von neuem überrascht von dem Wechsel
der Landschaft. Deutscher Buchenwald in violetter Braunheit wartete auf der Frühling, zu Füssen
gelbraunes Herbstlaub, Lederblumen und Anemonen, wie bei uns im nordischen Frühling.‖

387
The ripe summer of an Italian paradise is thus exchanged for a more northern landscape

still awaiting the moment of its blossoming.

From this new vantage point at the heights of Monte St. Angelo, furthermore,

―almost like a Frankish landscape,‖ the entire region is laid out before Hatzfeld319. From

here Capri is distantly visible to the west, the Gulf of Salerno to the south and the slopes

of Vesuvius to the north and east. Beyond the slopes of the volcano, one can see not only

the more populated regions along the gulf—stretching from Vesuvius to Naples—but

also a landscape populated with historical traces. As Hatzfeld describes it, at the feet of

Vesuvius, ―there lay the blue gulf, […], clear and peaceful,‖

And along its shores city after city, and the lush red, pulsing life of Naples nestled
amidst a luxurious green. Here flared up and died the last of the German
Hohenstaufens, who still had the courage throw their minds into their beliefs. To
the right is the mountain spur that pushes into the sea and where Virgil once lived.
And far in the distance, Ischia rounds off the horizon (but perhaps also opening it
up), flying away like an enormous wasp. 320

What is striking here, of course, is the way Hatzfeld maps a set of geographical and

temporal associations onto his hike out of the paradise of Positano. As the elevation

increases, the physiognomy of the landscape not only shifts from ―South‖ to ―North‖—

conveniently mapping the direction of cultural and historical diffusion—but the

perspective shifts from one of myth and ur-history to one of history and transience. What

comes to mind for Hatzfeld, from this new vantage point, are not the eternities of Art and

Nature, but a grand sweep of history populated with Latin poets, German emperors, and

319
Ibid. ―…fast wie eine fränkische Landschaft…‖
320
Ibid. ―…liegt der blaue Golf, […], klar und ruhig und an seinen Ufern Stadt um Stadt und in üppiges
Grün gelagert Neapel mit seinem in satter roter Gegenwärtigkeit pulsierenden Leben. Hier verloderte der
letzte deutsche Hohenstaufe, der noch den Mut hatte, seine Sinne in seinen Glauben zu werfen. Rechts
schiebt sich die Halbinsel in das Meer mit dem Bergzug, wo Virgil wohnte, und ganz in der Ferne schleisst
Ischia den Horizont ab, wie eine riesige Wespe, davonfliegend, man könnte auch sagen den Horizont
öffnend.‖

388
modernizing urban spaces. Historical time thus manifests itself here in its most

panoramic and most auratic forms, its developments, its truths, and its motions all clearly

comprehended in a dramatic and distant totality.

It is therefore no coincidence that Hatzfeld turns his gaze—at this precise

narrative moment of heightened historical sensitivity—to his description of Pompeii.

And where Positano had assumed the costume of an almost mythic Arcadian paradise,

Pompeii occasions reflections on the Unheimlich transience of history and the uncertain

fates of those that dwell within its currents:

It is a feeling of surprise, and enormous joy and a growing sense of anxiety about
the uncanniness of this place and of the fate of man. One has the feeling, as one
closes one‘s eyes, as if one‘s body has been frozen with awe and sinks back into
the millenia, helplessly into the unknown. One can‘t hear it, this wonder in itself,
this singularity, as present and past are brought into living contact.321

What leaps from this passage, however, is not simply the configuration of Pompeii as a

region of Unheimlichkeit, a configuration that has been common currency among modern

travelers to the ruins at the feet of Vesuvius. Instead, for our purposes, what springs into

relief is the way in which Hatzfeld links a certain ―situated-ness‖ in history with the

sensual regime of vision. To close one's eyes in such a place, he imagines, is to sink

―zurück in die Jahrtausende, hilflos ins Ungewisse.‖ To suspend, in other words, one's

visual relation with the traces of the past, is to suspend at the same time one's historical

position with regard to that past. Authentic historical consciousness thus presents itself

as intertwined with a visual regime that defines the auratic relation of historical subject

321
Ibid., 187. ―Es ist ein Gefühl von Überraschung, einer ungeheuren Freude und einer aufsteigenden
Angst vor der Unheimlichkeit sieses Ortes und des Schicksals seiner Menschen. Man hat ein Gefühl, das
einem die Augen schliesst, als erstarre der Leib und sinke zurück in die Jahrtausende, hilflos ins
Ungewisse. Man kann es nicht hören, dies Wundarbar in sich, dies Einzige, da Gegenwart und
Vergangenheit sich lebendig berühren.‖

389
and historical object; for the subject of historical perception, it is vision that guarantees

one's own temporal position and that of the historical object. As with the visual

conventions of theater, the drama of history (or historicism) demands a strict observation

of such optical regimes. To close one's eyes is to forget the strict separation of subject

and object, to collapse the carefully drawn boundaries of the fourth wall, and merge

dangerously with the action and characters on the stage. The risk of not ―seeing‖ in

accord with these conventions is the transformation from subject of historical or aesthetic

reception to object of such reflections. Thus, if Hatzfeld had discovered an authentic and

powerful ―vision‖ of history in the panoramic views from Monte St. Angelo, such an

historical perception is immediately dissolved in the collapse of the visual relations upon

which it is grounded and guaranteed.

But even as Hatzfeld and Schulenburg were reinforcing these traditional and

auratic modes of historical perception, even as they sought to mobilize an educated and

culturally literate readership to preserve such ―visions‖ of temporality, Italian travel and

historical reflection had long since ceased to be the monopoly of only the most elite

segments of German society and academia. By the time Italien ceased publication in

1930, one could already speak of a travel and tourist industry whose enormous expansion

found in Italy a destination uniquely fascinating for growing numbers among the German

middle classes. And although these newcomers had themselves drunk deep of the

German cultural traditions that had made Italian travel so attractive, they would also

bring with them new imperatives and new desires. In this well-organized and less elite

emergence of leisure oriented travel, Italy would be constructed not only as a potentially

edifying encounter with historical and cultural treasures, but also as an occasion to

390
engage in modern forms of consumption and their associated forms of display. Though

still resonant with history, Italy was quickly emerging as an industry, a market and an

escape. But if anything truly united these new travelers—with all of their bourgeois

concerns, anxieties and expectations—it was a ubiquitous little red book with the name

―Baedeker‖ embossed in gold along its spine.

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 Chapter Seven

Benjamin, Baedeker and the Porous Theater of Naples

With a weary sigh and a shrug of resignation, Walter Benjamin's Angel of History

steps off the train and onto the platform in the busy terminal of 1924 Naples. Amid the

bustle of porters, the tangle of the baggage, the happy reunions and sad farewells, the

other travelers take little notice as the small winged figure with sad wide eyes makes its

way through the station to the portals that mark the threshold of the city beyond. Passing

through and pausing for a moment before the still greater bustle of a Neapolitan evening,

the angel reaches into a somewhat shabby overcoat, producing a small red book. And

with Baedeker in hand, like so many of similarly arriving visitors, the angel of history

sets out to explore the city.

Anyone noticing the strange appearance of Benjamin's allegorical figure would

perhaps have thought it odd that such a being would require the services of Karl

Baedeker and Sons. The ancient city of Naples, of course, must be more than a little

familiar to one whose task has been to survey the unfolding of history itself. But for the

Angel, as for so many others of mortal persuasion, there is something comfortingly

recognizable in its presentation of the city before it. The books of Baedeker and Sons,

after all, clutched like secret keys or talismans by generations of German travelers,

presented their readers with a familiar collection and arrangement with which to navigate

a potentially chaotic experience. Indeed, while the substance of their hints, suggestions

392
 and starred entries may have varied—from one period to another, and with respect

to one destination or another—their formal organization proved extraordinary in its

continuity and popularity. Having long ago superseded earlier forms of the literary travel

companion—the countless personal accounts of travel abroad that littered the first half of

the nineteenth century—the power and success of the Baedeker model was rooted

precisely in its elevated and extremely impersonal presentation. Indeed, it provided

generations of middle-class German travelers precisely the satisfying forms of efficient

organization and streamlined overview, in the face of a still exotic destination like

Naples, with which the travelers had become increasingly familiar in their daily

experiences in Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt. In its pages, the daunting labyrinth and

bustle of a foreign destination—its histories, its cultures and its geography—would take

shape in efficient and sensible itineraries. A reassuring diagram or tracing, in other

words, was what Baedeker offered the tourist, a diagram that could comfortably enclose

and organize the experience of the traveler, providing the framework for a relation with

the exotic histories and geographies he or she encountered abroad.322

322
Research into the nineteenth century emergence of the guidebook, and its related cultures of popular
travel, has become more sustained in the past two decades, but the literature is still relatively sparse. For a
more general set of reflections of the phenomenon of popular travel in the modern German context, see
Rudy Koshar German Travel Cultures (Munich: Berg, 2000). Also, Esther Allen, ―Money and the Little
Red Books: Romanticism, Tourism, and the Rise of the Guidebook‖ LIT 7:213-26. 1996. For a closer look
at popular travel in the era of Weimar, see the work of Christine Keitz in ―Zwischen Kultur und
Gegenkultur. Baedeker und die ersten Arbeitertouristen in der Weimarer Republik‖, Reisen und Leben
(19:3-17, 1989), and ―Die Anfänge des modernen Massentourismus in der Weimarer Republik‖, Archiv
für Sozialgeschichte (33:179-209, 1993). In the context of National Socialism, and in relation to the
cultural politics of leisure and travel, Sheila Baranowski‘s recent Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and
Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) is a useful addition to
still developing literatures on the KdF (Strength through Joy) program and other Nazi cultural
interventions. On the other hand, research specifically on the Baedeker publishing house has suffered due
to the destruction of its headquarters and archives in Leipzig during the Second World War. Helmut
Frühauf, Das Verlagshaus Baedeker in Koblenz, 1827-1872 (Koblenz: Rheinische Landesbibliothek, 1992)
is a good place to start, and indispensible is Alex Hinrichsen ed., Baedeker-Katalog. Verzeichnis aller
Baedeker-Reisefuhrer von 1832-1987 mit einem Abriss der Verlagsgeschichte (Minden: Usrula Hinrichsen,

393
 As some commentators have already noted, the peculiarities of the travel guide of

the first half of the twentieth century are thus manifest less in their content than in their

form.323 Yet if this quality poses problems for analysis, if the interpretation of form can

speak less equivocally than that of content, it is nevertheless the formal characteristics of

the travel guide that offer insight into the expectations and categories with which the

German tourist of the era traveled. The mere fact of the enormous and consistent

popularity of the Baedeker series—the name survives even today as a synonym for

reliable and sober guidance—reveals the depth to which such books satisfied the needs

and expectations of an increasingly well traveled public. To take a closer look at the

Baedeker form, in other words, is to dig deeper into the ways in which educated and

traveling Germans were invited to select, organize and navigate a potentially chaotic set

of exotic experiences.

To invoke such terms as selection, collection and arrangement as we reflect on the

formal character of the travel guide, may remind us once again of an Angel and its

histories that we left on the steps of the Naples train station. For if that Angel cannot

close its eyes to the disaster that perpetually mounts before it, it nevertheless continues to

collect and catalog the forces and motion of the histories unfolding in its mournful gaze.

Like the traveler, the Angel of History and its professional acolytes are tasked with

organizing and arranging an often foreign and chaotic field of exploration where the

1988). Furthermore, while the monograph literature on this still somewhat thin, excellent collections
continued to appear. An early and excellent volume on the broader German context is Hermann Bausinger,
Klaus Beyrer, and Gottfried Korff, eds., Reisekultur: Von der Pilgerfahrt zum modernen Tourismus
(Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991); Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough eds., Tourism, Commercial Leisure
and National Identities in 19th and 20th Century Europe and North America (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2000) takes on a more expansive survey beyond exclusively German contexts.
323
Christof Thoenes, ―Die deutschsprachigen Reiseführer des 19. Jahrhunderts‖, Deutsches Ottocento
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000).

394
confusing hubbub and bustle of Naples confronts the weary traveler on the threshold of

the train station. Likewise, the historian confronts a similarly exotic dimension of signs,

meanings, and experiences. Indeed, the historian is a traveler whose task is precisely that

of navigating and organizing both the past itself and its relation to the present.

Furthermore, the diagrams, tracings and geographies of the past that German

historicism produced throughout the nineteenth century, had been powerfully absorbed

and assimilated in the larger social and cultural imaginaries of the era. Of the variety of

movements, forces, desires and anxieties that sought to make, remake or restore a still

inchoate sense of German identity, history was a common denominator. History, in other

words, was a field of battle, a means of legitimization and the most potent of form of

argument. From whatever perspective, the definition of a distinctly German experience

was almost always performed in relation to the discourse of history and the institutions of

German historical scholarship. In a German world where such difficult issues were being

thought out and negotiated at all levels—local and national, cultural and political,

material and spiritual—the imperatives and logics of German historical thought likewise

penetrated into nearly every sphere of social concern. Far more than an exercise of

rarefied scholarship, German historicism was woven into the very fabric of national self

consciousness and the conflicts that surrounded it. Historicism offered the institutional

and intellectual force behind a discursive framework whose latticework upheld the

edifice of German identity.

Indeed, it was precisely this insight—the manner in which a particular mode of

historical consciousness could be found to have penetrated broader spheres of cultural

and social import, far removed from academic historical practice—that emerged as a

395
central theme in the later works of Walter Benjamin. Whether in his ruminations on such

wide ranging topics as children‘s books, fashion, cinema or collecting, an underlying

concern with the character of time and remembrance of history and personal memory

remains consistent. Above all, however, it is in the autobiographical geographies of the

Denkbilder and the convolutes of the Passagen-Werk where we find Benjamin

experimenting with modes of remembrance that challenged the certainties of a dominant

and all pervasive historical consciousness.

What the Denkbilder (literally translated as ―thought images‖) present in their

respective explorations of places such as Naples, Moscow, Berlin and Marseilles are a

series of subversive readings of urban spaces as geographical texts, an attempt to map out

the ideological and historically situated contours of particular urban geographies. For

Benjamin, to move through such spaces was not merely a mundane matter of moving

from point a to point b, but was instead to experience a set of concretized ideological

structures and materialized historical conceits. Embedded in the bricks and mortar of the

humblest edifice, laid into the stones of every street, were the unconscious residues of the

arguments, hopes, propositions and anxieties that had formed a city‘s past and present.324

From this perspective, the Baedeker series/model presents a potentially

illuminating, if challenging, object of analysis. From its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth

century, the series had become the most popular and persuasive guide for travel among

the emerging German traveling public. By the early twentieth century, the little red

books had long been the companion of choice for travelers both within and beyond the

324
See Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life (Palo
Alto CA: Stanford University Press, 2007) for an examination of Benjamin‘s Denkbilder in the broader
context of Frankfurt School deployment of the form. Also, Britta Leifeld, Das Denkbild bei Walter
Benjamin: Die unsagbare Moderne als denkbares Bild. (Frankfurt: Lang, 2000).

396
borders of Germany. Therefore, while it may be extremely difficult to establish the ways

in which the guides were put to use in concrete individual circumstance, there can be

little doubt that Baedeker offered an ―invitation‖ whose character travelers of several

generations had found congenial to their expectations and requirements. We can be fairly

certain, in other words, that the dialogue or invitation that Baedeker presented was one

that was at least consistent with the meanings and uses of travel as it was then emerging

and understood at the time.

What the Baedeker presented to its public was a conspicuously pervasive

―invitation‖ to organize and navigate the experience of leisure travel in a particular

fashion or form. At first glance, the precise form and character of this invitation seems

peculiarly opaque. Part of the appeal of the guides was no doubt a straightforward and

terse presentation, a presentation whose priorities were convenience and ease of use.

Where travel books of the early nineteenth century had been fashioned more as literary

companions—the subjective reflections of likeminded travelers—the Baedeker offered

itself less as a loquacious Cicerone, and more as a quick and reliable resource on a

variety of basic concerns. While in a number of editions an authority on the region

would be enlisted to write an introduction or overview in some fashion, the pages of the

red book limited themselves, by and large, to a highly abstract presentation of

transportation schedules, museum hours and hotel possibilities. The invitation it offered

was not that of a chatty authorial presence, but one of an easy-to-use index of

information.

On the one hand, as some commentators have suggested, the relatively dry and

open-ended presentation of the Baedeker may have yielded the occasion for greater

397
improvisation, and permitted experiences not guided at every moment by a strong

authorial presence. The Baedeker tourist is simply provided a set of loose suggestions, a

handy set of directions, and pointers with which to navigate between the choices he or

she may choose to make.325 However, if the voice of the Baedeker was not manifest in a

narrative framework, was not organized by the subjective pronouncements of an earlier

traveler, the guides nevertheless make a distinct and defining presence felt. If the

Baedeker can be said to have informed the experiences of its readers, then this is manifest

in the selection of those features which may have interested the traveler, and the

corresponding organization of selected elements into an inviting formal framework. The

resonance of the Baedeker among its German audience must be sought in its criteria of

selection and the character of its organization, and to understand its influence it is these

dimensions that we must bring into greater focus.

What then is the precise form and character of the invitation that is found in the

Baedeker that is clutched by our newly arrived Angel as it stands before the Naples train

station? What we discover, in the first instance, is the well known preamble with which

the Baedeker publishing house greets the reader, assuring the user that the greatest efforts

have been made to keep its contents reliable, and declaring that the firm maintains the

most scrupulous methods when it comes to recommendations and suggestions. ―In

relation to innkeepers and other establishments,― the Baedeker firm declares to their

readers, ―the editor emphasizes his complete independence from any concern other than

325
Critical examinations of modern tourism have tended to frame it within the question of agency and the
degree to which tourism is an element of a ―Culture Industry‖ or whether it possesses critical or
emanicpatory dimensions as well. See Hans Magnus Enzensberger‘s ―Eine Theorie des Tourismus― in
Einzelheiten I. Bewufitseins-Industrie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1962) for the classic formulation of
tourism as debased culture, and see Koshar‘s German Travel Cultures (2000) for an attempt to move
beyond this—interestingly using Benjamin's notion of collection as theoretical ground.

398
that of the welfare of the travelling public. He regards the mention of an establishment in

his books in this sense as a sign of trust and confidence. He will report oversights or

mistakes as soon as is possible. His recommendations are in no way for sale.―326 There

should be no question, the traveler is assured, of any interest other than that its readership

is served when it comes to the merits of the establishments it mentions.

With such obligatory formalities out of the way, the book proceeds with a short

overview of the city‘s history and significance, authoritatively contributed by a scholar or

researcher, ostensibly with extensive experience in the region. Given the interests and

purposes of the educated classes that made up the majority of the German traveling

public, such an overview would, in Italy, focus primarily on the historical and aesthetic

contexts that the traveler may have occasion to visit. In comparison with the literary

reminiscences and memoirs of the preceding era, what we immediately observe is the

exchange of subjective—if knowledgeable—reflection, for the sober and reliable remarks

of an ostensibly ―authoritative‖ expert. In this, of course, the Baedeker follows the

general trends that had come to prevail among the academic disciplines whose portfolios

included objects of potential tourist interest. If the guidebook had undergone a radical

transformation in the character and form of the information it imparted, this was likewise

in line with the shifts in the way knowledge was being produced and legitimated. In

history, archeology, art history or geography, the era of the connoisseur and educated

amateur had been left behind in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Replacing

326
Karl Baedeker, Italien von den Alpen bis Neapel (Leipzig: K. Baedeker, 1926). vi. ―Den Gastwirten
gegenüber betont der Herausgeber seine Unabhängigkeit von jeder andern Rücksicht als dem Wohle des
reisenden Publikums. Er betrachtet die Nennung in seinen Büchern in gewissem Sinne an sich schon als ein
Zeichen des Vertrauens. Versehen oder Irrtümer wird er baldmöglichst berichtigen. Seine Empfehlungen
sind auf keine Weise zu erkaufen.

399
these more informal arrangements, as we have already discussed in reference to the field

of historical scholarship, were the relatively more formalized modes of inquiry enshrined

in the institutions of academic research. Legitimate knowledge could be produced first

and foremost from within the disciplinary matrices of professional scholarship, and such

expertise was a necessary component of any guide that would help direct the tourist

through the array of sights and curiosities of the exotic destination. As with so much of

life in domestic, political and cultural spheres, the discursive power of disciplinary

expertise had penetrated into the experience of the traveler. And while the Baedeker of

1926 forgoes the intrusion of an identifiable professorial contributor—a departure from

previous decades—the aesthetic and historical interests of the traveling Baedeker reader

are announced in the only two sections that are situated between the preliminary remarks

and the guide itself. The first of these is an extensive time-line style overview of Italian

history, stretching from the classical era to the present. The second is an index of Italian

artists and the locations of their works.327 Clearly, while leisure travel had changed the

face of the Italian Journey, its ostensible cultural purposes had remained at the center

tourist concerns.

But if the tourist could be comforted that the information was not only reliable,

but also sanctioned by scholarly authority, we also find here the traces of an underlying

framework guiding and informing the course of the challenging encounters of travel.

Where the Goethean model of subjective reflection, bound to a narrative of personal

transformation, had receded as the dominant form of travel narrative, what emerges in the

pages of the Baedeker is a manner of leisure travel understood as a set of technical

327
Ibid., xxiii-xxxv.

400
problems to be overcome and a body of knowledge to be absorbed. However much,

therefore, figures such as Goethe or Heine would remain powerful models for the practice

of travel and its meanings for the individual, the activities of the tourist had assumed the

cast of a technical challenge whose successful completion required authoritative expertise

and objective observation. And it was precisely these that the Baedeker guides provided

in abundance.

The traveler of the early twentieth century, like travelers from any era, harbored a

number of anxieties as to the most efficient means of absorbing the most from his

journey. The era of the aristocratic Grand Tour, already a relic when Goethe embarked

on his own journey, had been left far in the past for the majority of German travelers, and

as the circles for whom leisure travel to destinations like Italy had widened, so too was

there a corresponding foreshortening of the time and resources available for the average

holiday. From months or years to weeks or months, travel had become a far more

condensed affair, with both time and financial resources exercising imperatives on the

middle class that had been less pressing on their aristocratic forbears. A successful

journey, in other words, was one necessarily extremely well organized and exhaustively

planned.

Thus, if Baedeker provided such organization and facilitated such planning, we

can also observe the ways in which the traveler could find him or herself necessarily

dependent on the organization and planning the red guides offered. With too little time

and resource to engage in a more leisurely self discovery of the city, and nevertheless

highly aware of his or her lack of knowledge with regard to the sights and sounds around

them, the traveler was bound to encounter the destination through the helpful passages of

401
the Baedeker. And if this is the case, then how might the Naples of 1924 emerge from

the pages in the eyes of the Angel of History? How does such a text invite its reader to

encounter the city? What pieces does it suggest as of special interest, what means of

habitation and sustenance, what anxieties does it seek to allay? As a key, in other words,

to the city of Naples, what doors does it unlock, what doors does it bar and what doors

pass by unnoticed by guide and traveler alike?

What we discover in the pages of the Baedeker, beyond the introductory remarks,

is a guide supremely attuned to the educated middle-class sensibilities of its readers.

Conspicuously, the issues of money and remuneration arise early, often, and always in a

neatly organized fashion. Remarks on begging, tipping, and negotiation of prices figure

prominently at the very outset, and speak to a general concern of the traveler for the

maintenance of his own finances, but also with what is considered customary and

reasonable in the Neapolitan context. In similar fashion, the question of exchange is also

handled carefully, though with obligatory warning that circumstances and figures in this

area are subject to frequent change. Aside from these monetary concerns, incidentals

such as portage, customs, municipal authority, holidays and the like are laid out

concisely, and always in an extremely terse, uncommented fashion.328 What emerges

from such concerns is a materially coordinated geography of the city that describes a

topography dominated by the landmarks of train terminals, hotels, restaurants, banks,

post offices and government bureaus.329 The stations of bourgeois organization and

comfort are laid out like a constellation for navigating tourists, marking out a set of

concrete pathways and priorities amid a potentially confusing foreign milieu. In this

328
Ibid., ix-xx.
329
Ibid., ix-xx

402
process, therefore, a first set of reductions is accomplished and a criterion for selection

established, a distillation or abstraction of the landscape of the sort that is performed by

any cartographic representation. However, despite the rather banal character of this

constructed urban space, we would do well not to overlook the conspicuous geography

that emerges from the motive force of the travelers‘ interests and anxieties. What has

begun to unfold, therefore, from the Baedeker ―gaze,‖ is a specific vision of urban

physiognomy—where the traveler had once only been confronted with formlessness—

whose contours and geometries are determined by concerns of finance, habitation,

communication, transportation and sustenance.

But to establish a geography of this sort, to mark out one‘s orientation in such a

way, is already to establish a certain character of encounter with the urban space. In the

maps and descriptions of the Baedeker, in other words, the traveler is invited to structure

his or her experience according to many of the familiar categories of modern life in the

northern city, categories and their imperatives to which he or she had become accustomed

at home. A cartographic network of well defined directions, meticulously collected time

schedules, and well established boundaries produce a relation to the city that would be

easily recognizable and navigable for the German traveler.

We should not, of course, be overly surprised that such an initial reduction of the

Neapolitan landscape should take place in the dialogue between the tourist and the

Baedeker. Tourists of any era, be they pilgrims of the Middle Ages, aristocrats on tour or

the bourgeois traveler of the early twentieth century, all possess certain fundamental

needs and carry with them a degree of anxiety toward how these should be satisfied. Yet,

precisely because of the basic material needs and concerns of travelers from various eras,

403
it is easier to trace the contours and relations that are, nevertheless, distinct to each. The

―natural‖ concerns and forms of one era, in other words, will often seem inscrutable to

another. In this sense, what is telling in regard to the Baedeker model are the degree and

character of its abstractions and reductions. While it is true that any means of orientation,

any diagrammatic or cartographic representation, involves a series of abstractions or

reductive moments, it could be argued that the Baedeker and its ―invitation‖ virtually

insist on remaining at the level of such abstraction. To put it otherwise, if the spaces and

temporalities of an urban space are often experienced through coordinates beyond those

that can be graphed spatially and temporally, the Baedeker appears to insist on these

alone. Thus, where an early pilgrim to Rome would organize the urban experience in

terms of religious holidays, spaces of worship, religious orders where lodging could be

sought, the Baedeker tourist confronts a far more rarefied space, a region in which

navigation and orientation—and all the meanings that could be associated with these—

are organized in the most abstract spatial and temporal terms.

What emerges from the Baedeker is a tracing, in the sense suggested by Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari, where the spaces and the selected elements of possible tourist

interest are not related internally or organically to one another, but whose distribution is

governed by an overarching and abstract set of organizing principles.330 Indeed, in this

330
See Deleuze and Guattari‘s distinction between ―mapping‖ and ―tracing‖ in Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12. ―It is our view that genetic axis and profound structure are above
all infinitely reproducible principles of tracing. All of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In
linguistics as in psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallized into
codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is
to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious
that is already there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory and language. It consists of
tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The
tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree.‖ (my italics)

404
instance, it is the logic of the minute and the imperatives of the meter—the structures of

time and space—which condition and inform all possible contents within the diagram.

To be sure, this may have been both useful and comforting to the visiting German

traveler, but it nevertheless represents only one among many possible alternatives for the

organization of experience in an urban landscape. In other words, it is in its highly

abstract formal qualities that the Baedeker most powerfully exercises its determinations

on its readers. For it is the form that in turn governs the nature and shape of the elements

that may appear within it and the relationship of the traveling observer with those

elements.

From this perspective, travel in the Baedeker mode could be said to bear a

familial resemblance to the great scientific and commercial expositions that had become

so prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or to the public museums

that had sprung up at the same time. Indeed, Baedeker‘s presentation suggests striking

similarities with that of a museum program, its own pages slipping almost imperceptibly

at times from museum interiors to urban exteriors. Meticulously mapped out in space

and always including carefully organized time tables and hours, the Baedeker efficiently

propels its reader through a city become museum—a space organized for observation and

visual consumption.

The relationship, however, between the museum-goer and the objects on display,

between the visitor to an exhibition and the array of curiosities laid out before him or her,

is historically contingent and carries with it an ideological component. As a great deal of

recent research in the field of museum studies has shown, the museum emerges at a

405
particular moment in time and proceeds to organize the objects of the collection and the

forms through which they are viewed by visitors.331 In this process of organization,

selection and reduction, items of interest are plucked out of original or previous contexts

and placed within the abstract space of a museum, whose organization itself is largely

driven by its function as region of display. In other words, the formal architectural

contours of the museum derive their general features from their function as a space of

visibility. The spaces thus produced tend necessarily to be abstract and easy to navigate

containers of pure space. For what counts here is not the space itself, but its ability to

efficiently reveal and display the items it houses.

Yet, as commentators such as Benjamin himself have been able to show, the

abstract forms of organization in institutions like the museum, the exposition—or the

present day department store—nevertheless were both symptomatic of, and helped to

reinforce a set of concrete relations between objects and observers. As Benjamin

suggests, it was the great exhibitions of the nineteenth century that represented the first

school of the new forms of consumption that would have fully emerged by the turn of the

331
In the Arcades Project, Benjamin situates the museum in a familial relation with the other great spaces of
nineteenth century visual consumption: the exposition and the department store. They are ―collective
dream houses‖ in which knowledge, power and consumption are brought into a kind of magical contact.
―Museums unquestionably belong to the dream houses of the collective. In considering them, one would
want to emphasize the dialectic by which they come into contact, on the one hand, with scientific research
and, on the other hand, with "the dreamy tide of bad taste." "Nearly every epoch would appear, by virtue of
its inner disposition, to be chiefly engaged in unfolding a specific architectural problem: for the Gothic age,
this is the cathedrals; for the Baroque, the palace: and for the early nineteenth century, with its regressive
tendency to allow itself to be saturated with the past: the museum." Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich,
p. 36. This thirst for the past forms something like the principal object of my analysis—in light of which
the inside of the museum appears as an interior magnified on a giant scale. In the years 1850-1890,
exhibitions take the place of museums. Comparison between the ideological bases of the two: Walter
Benjamin, Arcades Project, Rolf Tiedemann ed., trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), 406-407.

406
twentieth century.332 Within the halls of such institutions, observers confronted a series

of reified objects whose mode of organization could both elicit a range of desires and

channel these into systems of difference and ideological frameworks.

Above all, the museum and its related forms reinforced the conceit of a

privileged, yet strangely disengaged standpoint. It was the privilege, in other words, of

the ideal, educated middle-class museum-goer to be able to survey—at a single glance—

the vast eons of natural history or the collected legacy of human artistic achievement.

However, the price at which such omniscience is granted is destruction of the contexts

from which both emerge. The observer is invited to situate his position and understand

his subject orientation as a consumer of visual images and cues whose organization yields

a narrative of privilege and power. The subject, in other words, enters a realm of

disassociated objects and is invited to participate in a purely specular mode of

consumption.

From this perspective, the Baedeker‘s presentation of urban spaces such as Naples

becomes rather more clear. What is created here is a spatially and temporally abstract

landscape whose ultimate aim is that of producing a realm of maximum visibility. In

order to accomplish this, the field of possible objects, in this case an entire living urban

landscape is rendered as a series of distinct and visually consumable ―sights‖,

Sehenswurdigkeiten, or numbered ―tours‖. But to transform Naples in such a way, to

construct a geography of the tourist, necessarily produces a relation to, and vision of, the

city that involves a distinct reduction of its multiplicity and variety. As the tourist moves

through the city—in the same ways as would a visitor to a museum—the historical and

332
Ibid., 201. ―The world exhibitions were training schools in which the masses, barred from consuming,
learned empathy with exchange value. ‗Look at everything; touch nothing.‘‖.

407
cultural geographies of that city must likewise take their shape from the forms implied by

such a relation.

The city into which the Baedeker invites the visitor to Naples is a city understood

and visually organized in the form of a museum. Both the selected content and the

organizational form of the guide‘s presentation can be read with more clarity. What the

Baedeker produces is a highly abstract space in which are located a series of interiors

which house the items of historical and aesthetic interest that have drawn the tourist to

the city. One could say, in other words, that the monuments and museums that form the

vast majority of the Baedeker‘s content—a content consistent with the interests of an

educated traveling public—extend their logic and forms into the city that surrounds them.

The urban space emerges as a series of artifacts to be observed and consumed in a fashion

similar to that of the museum experience or perhaps the environment of the nascent

department store.

But the museum character of Baedeker‘s urban space is revealed perhaps more

clearly in what it chooses not to represent than in what it selects for inclusion. We have

already seen the ways in which any representation of any landscape—whether literary,

cartographic or otherwise—involves a series of selections and reductions, each chosen in

order to highlight the mode of orientation consistent with the purposes of the

representation. With this in mind, what gets left out of such representation can reveal as

much about the purposes and functions as what is included. In the case of the Baedeker,

such exclusions are particularly illuminating and highly conspicuous.

The guides and literary companions of a century earlier had been organized in

most cases in relation to the experience of an educated individual traveler, and its content

408
devoted to wide ranging meditations on the culture, food, weather, religion, and dangers

of the region described. Such extended subjective accounts no doubt lent themselves to

precisely the sort of concrete, embodied reflections that they related. Likewise, with the

Goethean model of travel, still deeply resonant among the German Bildungsbürgertum,

travel was represented first and foremost as an experience of personal development and

education. Leisure travel in general, and travel to Italy in particular, was understood as a

unified experience of sensual, spiritual and intellectual import. Obviously, the cityscapes

that emerged from such memoirs and companions assume forms that correspond to such

interests. A city such as Naples was constructed from the elements of a highly

personalized experience—woven together from personal relations, letters of introduction;

the ever present native cicerone, a boring evening at an indifferent restaurant and the

bodily complaints and pleasures that accompanied the traveling experience. Above all,

and in this the residues of the Grand Tour and Enlightenment sensibilities, the traveler of

the early nineteenth century exhibited a zeal for reflection of an anthropological and

cultural sort. Every encounter and every experience was the occasion for a meditation on

the cultural specificity not only of Italy, but also of Italians. Comparisons of the

respective national ―characters‖ virtues and vices of ―Italia‖ and ―Germania‖ course

throughout these works as a powerful and persistent current.333 What emerges is a

thoroughly embodied and culturally sensitive map of the urban experience as a German

traveler abroad. This of course, is not to valorize the traveling experience of the early

nineteenth century or present its forms as a somehow more authentic mode of travel. But

it is an unmistakable aspect of its historical contours that earlier modes of travel exhibited

333
Christof Thoenes, ―Die deutschsprachigen Reiseführer des 19. Jahrhunderts‖, 2000.

409
and even celebrated a great degree of immersion in the living culture and social forms

they discovered.

By the era of Baedeker‘s supremacy at the end of the nineteenth century, the

experience of travel was rapidly becoming one of far greater appeal to ever larger spheres

of German society. Middle class affluence made leisure travel a possibility where it had

once been the province of aristocrats and scholars. At the same time, and in direct

relation, the infrastructure of travel and tourism had become far more mature and

sophisticated than had been the case only decades earlier. An industry dependent on the

foreign traveler had grown enormously, centering with ever greater sophistication to the

needs, desires and anxieties of visitors. On the one hand, such a well developed

infrastructure—catering to an increasing number of moderately endowed travelers—

made possible a vastly more secure and efficient journey or holiday. On the other hand,

however, as the tourist experience became more streamlined, the possible forms and

varieties of experience became more powerfully restricted. A canon of sights, hotels,

restaurants emerged that would pattern almost unconsciously the character and

experience of the destination. Likewise, it permitted a greater ability to avoid many of

the difficulties and annoyances that had formed such a large portion of earlier traveling

experience.

In this new streamlined experience, so beautifully presented in the maps and terse

descriptions of the Baedeker, an extremely conspicuous absence makes itself felt. For if

the little red guidebook had invited the traveler to experience a city like Naples as a kind

of museum, as a space neatly organized for secure transit and maximum visibility, the

cultural life and rhythms of the living city seem to disappear almost completely.

410
Nowhere in its pages, so meticulous in the presentation of hotels, museums and transit

centers, does one find any extended discussion of the culture and material life of its

citizens. What Baedeker presents in other words, is an Italy without Italians and a Naples

without Neapolitans.

What the Baedeker produces, in other words, is an urban environment

reconstructed for the traveler as a vast interior, organized in the familiar form of museum

and in accord with nineteenth-century modes of scopic consumption. The museum, after

all, is constructed as a middle-class institution, addressed to an educated bourgeoisie, and

is organized as a means by which a specific class may understand and celebrate its own

aesthetic tastes and historical accomplishments. By definition, the museum enforces the

exclusion of lesser educated and culturally suspect classes. It is a region of edification,

education and enlightenment and is designed for those classes capable of such

improvement and leisure. In accord with the exclusions and inclusions implicit in the

form, a landscape emerges that is populated by nothing more than monuments, relics and

historical curiosities. The tourist is invited into the same relation with the urban

landscape as that of the museum-goer to the objects on display. The result is a rather

abstracted dialogue between a de-contextualized set of historically and aesthetically

―significant‖ objects and a curiously disembodied posture of observation. A maximum of

visibility and movement is achieved, but only within the diagrammatic contours as

produced by the Baedeker.

As the museum‘s technologies of visibility and the arrangement of its displays

generated powerful narratives imbued with the interests of particular and historically

determined classes, so too does the Baedeker reinforce a narrative that situates the visitor

411
as a privileged observer whose powers of vision are the culmination of the historical and

aesthetic movements laid out before him or her. In the same way that regimes and

structures of vision were implied in the forms of power exercised in contemporaneous

colonial adventures, so too does the museum form of travel situate the educated observer

as the inheritor and rightful steward of the historical and cultural legacies on display. In

the artistic and historical treasures of Naples, in the ruins of Pompeii, the middle-class

traveler surveys all with sovereignty born of the assurance in his or her own culminating

position in the narratives on display.

Unfolding from the Baedeker—the cityscapes and museum-forms by which it

constructs a destination like Naples—is a relation between past and present, a relation

bearing a strong familial similarity to the contours of universal history as imagined by

Walter Benjamin. With the Neapolitan present safely bracketed from the pages of the

guide, barred from the halls of the museum and the secure domain of the hotel, the

relation established to the city is one between educated, historically sophisticated

travelers and a landscape of almost completely monumental and antiquarian interest. In

the itineraries and geographies constructed from the Baedeker maps, a universal cultural

history begins to emerge whose narrator and culminating figure is nothing less than the

educated middle class at the turn of the twentieth century.

At this point, to visit once again our newly arrived angelic tourist, we can begin to

discern the strange comfort with which this traveler clutched the little red guide in its

immortal hands. The disembodied vision of ruins, relics, and monuments, stretching

back through time and surveyed from the privileged position of a culminating subjectivity

is one all too familiar to the Angel of History. As the Baedeker constructs the Neapolitan

412
milieu in a linear perspective where all vectors converge in the pupils of the privileged

observer, where its histories and geographies follow clearly marked and nearly inevitable

trajectories, so also do times and spaces find their form and presentation in the grim

universal histories of the Angel‘s vision. A narrative uncoils from the eyes of the

observer—whether angel, historian or tourist—and winds itself around a landscape and

forcefully determines its shape. It is a gaze, a vision, and a narrative in the form of a

diagram, powerfully determining and conditioning the elements that can be included and

made visible in the field that it describes.

We should thus not be surprised to find the Angel of History close its guide, place

it once again in its pocket and set off into the city with an air of resigned disappointment.

The helpful Baedeker has reminded it once again that here is a city it knows very well,

and a city it will always know well. Its ruins and monuments will always be there,

provided one has the proper eye for them—or the proper guidebook. If the Angel

recognizes the Naples it has found in the pages of its Baedeker, then it is because the

contours and forms of historical consciousness are deeply implicated in the ways in

which an urban landscape is constructed by both inhabitants and visitors. The interests

and ideologies embedded in the temporal perspectives brought to bear on an urban

landscape exert an enormous influence on the nature and distribution of the landmarks

that can be found within it. Indeed, such construction and reconstruction of cities may

take place in the brute material domain, in the violent and concrete redistributions of

Haussmann‘s Paris, but also in the imaginative organization of city spaces that every

subject undertakes in order to navigate a complex environment. The city, in other words,

is always a construct of both masonry and ideology, erected not only from the material

413
skeleton of stone and steel, but also one woven together from more flexible and transitory

tissues. These living tissues of cultural, spiritual and historical consciousness are no less

decisive in the organization of the form of urban life than the ossified edifices and

thoroughfares through which they move. The experience of urban space is always shaped

by such forces as temporal and historical consciousness. In the gaze of the Angel of

History, passing into the Neapolitan milieu, there is also revealed a city whose shape had

been coordinated, at least in part, by the historical consciousness of German travelers and

whose shape had been determined by the powerful cultural dialectics of auratic

historicism and modern regimes of representational and commodity reproduction. The

organization of time and space, the reflections between subjects and objects, the modes of

inclusion and exclusion that had for decades determined the shape of German historical

institutions and imaginaries can thus be found woven even into the experience of a

holiday in Naples.

Curiously enough, at the precise time the Angel of History stepped from its train

at the Naples terminal, two other travelers could be found entering the city from the more

ancient threshold of quays and docks on the city‘s great bay. To be more precise, we

should say that we would find a man and a woman stepping gingerly off a ferry that had

brought them on the short trip to Naples from Capri. Indeed, an even more perceptive

eye might remark that the relation between the couple was perhaps somewhat uncertain.

They are assuredly not married, but they may or may not be in the process of becoming

lovers. At any rate, an air of expectant adventure, surely intellectual and perhaps erotic,

accompanies them as the city‘s bustle welcomes them.

414
 Yet perhaps it would be overly hasty to claim that this couple arrives at precisely

the same time as the Angel. For while all three step into Naples at the same hour on the

same day in 1924, the man and the woman are conducting an experiment in which the

temporalities and geographies of the city will emerge in a manner vastly different from

those of the Angel and its Baedeker. From the perspective of our newcomers, an urban

landscape will emerge with alternate historical sensibilities and geographic sensitivities

that will bear little resemblance to the neat coordinates and disembodied visions of the

Baedeker's guidebook and Werner von der Schulenburg's Italien. To put it differently,

we may understand our two visitors as cartographers of a sort, cartographers who set

about generating not a diagram, but a map in the Deleuzian sense. For such a map, there

can be no book, no pre-existing guiding framework that will already have organized the

task of navigation.334 Instead, the shape of the city will here emerge from concrete

experiences occasioned by the movement through it. And as we shall see, the pathways

that it produces will be infinitely more tangled than the smooth thoroughfares blasted

334
See Deleuze and Guattari‘s distinction between ―mapping‖ and ―tracing‖ in Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12. Important here is the distinction between the concepts of
―tracing‖ and ―mapping‖, where the former emerges from an already coded set of deductions and the latter
from the concrete operations/movements of individual elements within a given system or frame. ―The
rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not
reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map
from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map
does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters
connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of
bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and
connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can
be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation.
It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.
Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways; in
this sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome, and sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of
flight as passageway and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A map has multiple entryways, as
opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to the same." The map has to do with performance,
whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‗competence.‘‖

415
through the city by Baedeker or the vistas glimpsed from the heights of Monte St. Angelo

by Adolf von Hatzfeld.

Though his letters speak only vaguely of both his journey and his partner, Walter

Benjamin‘s excursion to Naples from Capri in 1924 nevertheless produced an

enormously fertile textual record. In cooperation with Asja Lacis, a Lithuanian socialist

actress close to the circle around Bertholt Brecht, Benjamin set out to describe the city in

an essay entitled simply ―Naples.‖335 Benjamin had been in Capri visiting Ernst Bloch

and his wife, and was there ostensibly to finish a Habilschrift whose progress and outlook

had long been a source of anxiety. Taking leave from a domestic life in Berlin that was

gradually feeling more unhappy and restrictive, Benjamin journeyed to Capri where a

thriving German expatriate colony had long since been established. While the precise

contributions of Benjamin and Lacis in the formulation of the ―Naples‖ essay remain

uncertain, the influence of her person is well documented in Benjamin‘s own writings,

and the presence of Lacis was to be felt in a number of subsequent works (e.g. One Way

Street, ―Moscow Diary,‖ etc.) in which he would more clearly mark out new intellectual

pathways. Indeed, in dedicating One Way Street, Benjamin would write, ―This street is

named / Asja Lacis Street / after her who / as an engineer / cut it through the author.‖336

However, what interests us here is not the task of determining the relative degrees of

authorship of Benjamin and Lacis, but instead the character and mode of exploration they

together produced in the Naples essay. For what emerges from this piece is not merely a

335
See Asja Lacis' autobiographical reflections in Revolutionär im Beruf; Berichte über proletarisches
Theater, über Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin und Piscator (München, Rogner & Bernhard, 1971).
336
Walter Benjamin, ―Naples,‖ Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926. Marcus
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings eds. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996), 444. ―Diese Strasse heisst /
Asja-Lacis Strasse / nach der / die sie als Ingenieur / im Autor durchgebrochen hat.―

416
prefiguration of Benjaminian themes as they would become manifest in later cityscapes

and the Passagen-Werk, but also an early indication of the way his work would seek to

understand how traditional patterns of historical consciousness were both embedded in

urban geographies and potentially undermined by subversive cartographies. As Benjamin

puts it:

To construct the city topographically—tenfold and a hundredfold—from out of its

arcades and its gateways, its cemeteries and bordellos, its railroad stations and
its…, just as formerly it was defined by its churches and its markets. And the
more secret, more deeply embedded figures of the city: murders and rebellions,
the bloody knots in the network of the streets, lairs of love, and conflagrations.‖
337

From the very outset, therefore, the city that emerges from the Naples essay is one

very different from that one would find in the Baedeker or Italien, and it is with an earthy

cultural anecdote of life in Naples that Benjamin plunges his reader into the streets of the

city. The avenue into which Benjamin first invites his readers is virtually blocked by a

procession dedicated to the solemn humiliation of a priest who has committed a

transgression before the community.338 The procession moves slowly forward in a mood

of condemnation, until its way is barred by yet another procession in celebration of a

wedding. Both parties stop and look expectantly to the humiliated priest who

immediately rises and offers his blessing to the newlyweds and the audience. For

Benjamin, the anecdote speaks to the powerful vitality of Catholicism in Naples, a

Catholicism whose fortunes are never far from both condemnation and subsequent

renewal. Indeed, the streets of Naples here become the theater for a narrative more

complex than can be envisioned by the historicist imagination. It is a narrative of

337
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, Rolf Tiedemann ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996), 83.
338
Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926, 414.

417
intersecting movements, sudden reversals, and unexpected transitions. The story of

Catholicism in Naples, in other words, cannot be understood in terms of a museum

outline or from the linear organic developments of standard historical narratives, but must

instead be glimpsed from amid the rituals and performances that constitute the theater of

Neapolitan urban space. Thus, as Benjamin strives to make clear throughout the essay,

Naples is a region that seems particularly resistant to either linear narrative or linear

navigation. The shape of its historical development, the patterns of its institutions and

trajectories of its streets appear to elude what we have called a Deleuzian diagrammatic

consciousness. According to Benjamin, and in contrast with what he calls the Nordic

city, the shape and experience of Naples is governed thoroughly by what he calls

―porousness.‖ ―As porous as this stone is the architecture,‖ writes Benjamin,

Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In

everything, they preserve the scope to become a theater of new, unforeseen
constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation appears
intended forever, no figure asserts it "thus and not otherwise. 339

Like the limestone cliffs on which the city nestles, the city is shot through with channels,

pockets, pathways and caves. In all aspects, in its spiritual life, its modes of commerce,

its architecture, its familial structures and arrangements, Naples appears to resist the

settled boundaries and distinct categories that Benjamin associates with the Northern city.

There is, as Benjamin describes, a certain celebration of unfinishedness, a resistance to

permanent form that is indistinguishable from the onset of decay. The opportunity for

renegotiation, re-design is always preserved in an ad hoc and improvisatory organization

339
Ibid., 417.

418
whose porous flexibility governs the social, cultural, and ideological morphology of the

city.

Naples is, in short, a landscape whose features stubbornly resist translation into

diagrammatic cartography and the geographic/historicist consciousness that governs its

distributions. For Benjamin, the city emerges as a place in which the neat organizational

dyads of life in a northern city are subject to either indistinct differentiations or sudden

and curious reversal. Interiors and exteriors, observer and observed, work and leisure—

all of the binary categories that Benjamin suggests have so thoroughly marked and coded

the modern German city—are in Naples reproduced in far less distinct and far more

transient forms. As opposed to this Neapolitan porousness, Benjamin would later

describe the nineteenth-century interior in a very different fashion:

The difficulty in reflecting on dwelling: on the one hand, there is something age-
old—perhaps eternal—to be recognized here, the image of that abode of the
human being in the maternal womb; on the other hand, this motif of primal
history notwithstanding, we must understand dwelling in its most extreme form as
a condition of nineteenth-century existence. The original form of all dwelling is
existence not in the house but in the shell. The shell bears the impression of its
occupant. In the most extreme instance, the dwelling becomes the shell. The
nineteenth-century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived
the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his
appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling‘s interior that one might be reminded of
the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies
embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet. What didn‘t the nineteenth
century invent some sort of casing for! Pocket watches, slippers, egg cups,
thermometers, playing cards—and, in lieu of cases, there were jackets, carpets,
wrappers, and covers. The twentieth century, with its porosity and transparency,
its tendency toward the well-lit and airy, has put an end to dwelling in the old
sense. Set off against the doll house in the residence of the master builder Solness
are the ―homes for human beings.‖ Jugendstil unsettled the world of the shell in a
radical way. Today this world has disappeared entirely, and dwelling has
diminished: for the living, through hotel rooms; for the dead, through
crematoriums.‖340

340
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, 221.

419
In opposition to this black and white division of space in the nineteenth-century modern,

and despite the most fantastic accounts from other travelers, Benjamin‘s Naples is a city

of gray, a city where boundary lines and spheres of life bleed into one another and

transition from one to another takes place in such fine degrees as to be almost

imperceptible.341

Thus if the Northern city may have assumed, to borrow a Weberian formulation,

the form of an iron cage—a series of rationally allocated cells whose neatly organized

interlocking structure informs the patterns of life and consciousness of its inhabitants—

Benjamin‘s Naples resembles a continually inhabited ruin in which passageways and

avenues of thought are perpetually in a state of repair and disrepair. There exists here no

ultimate or ideal form to be permanently established, no configuration not already in

communication with its past or yielding simultaneously to an emerging future. Indeed,

this is suggested in Benjamin‘s description of the fate of a philosophical conference that

was held in Naples to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the city‘s university.342 In the

dusty heat of the Neapolitan summer and in competition with various municipal

festivities, the designs of European philosophy collapsed into confusion of lost papers,

lost money, and lost visitors. The great minds and designs of European philosophy

proved no match for a Neapolitan landscape that escaped and seemingly denied the most

341
―Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926, 415. ―Fantastic reports by
travelers have touched up the city. In reality it is gray: a gray-red or ocher, a gray-white. And entirely gray
against sky and sea.‖
342
Ibid., 415. ―No more grotesque demonstration of this could be provided than in the convocation of an
international congress of philosophers. It disintegrated without trace in the fiery haze of this city, while the
seventh-centennial celebration of the university—whose tinny halo was supposed to be, in part, formed of
that congress—unfolded amid the uproar of a popular festival. Complaining guests, who had been
summarily relieved of their money and identification papers, appeared at the secretariat.‖

420
subtle categories and finely tuned rationality of the conference attendees. Amid the

bustle of Naples streets, the conference died not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The characteristically porous and tangled architecture of the Neapolitan urban

environment extends into–and perhaps has its source in—the most fundamental material

aspects of life in the city. While Benjamin locates the fundamental organizational

element of the Northern urban life in the well defined precincts of the individual

household, the Naples essay traces a far different basic structure. Indeed, what strikes

Benjamin most profoundly are the indistinct boundaries between public and private life,

categories that he suggests strongly define the ―Nordic‖ cityscape. ―This is how

architecture, the most binding part of the communal rhythm, comes into being here:‖

writes Benjamin,

civilized, private, and ordered only in the great hotel and warehouse buildings on
the quays; anarchic, embroiled, village-like in the center, into which large net-
works of streets were hacked only forty years ago. And only in these streets is the
house, in the Nordic sense, the cell of the city's architecture. In contrast, within
the tenement blocks, it seems held together at the corners, as if by iron clamps, by
the murals of the Madonna. 343

On the contrary, activities, rituals and performances that the northerner might consider

elements of a strictly intimate interior nature, Naples conducts out of doors and in the

streets. Alternately, various spheres of life coded in the north as ―public‖ are invited into

the heart of the Neapolitan household. With doors and windows widely open to a busy

street, for example, a family dinner may spill out onto the avenue or a short nap may take

343
Ibid., 416. See other examples in ―Naples‖ on this comparison between northern and Neapolitan spaces:
―The stairs, never entirely exposed, but still less enclosed in the gloomy box of the Nordic house, erupt
fragmentarily from the buildings, make an angular turn, and disappear, only to burst out again.‖, 417.
―Similarly dispersed, porous, and commingled is private life. What distinguishes Naples from other large
cities is something it has in common with the African kraal: each private attitude or act is permeated by
streams of communal life. To exist—for the northern European the most private of affairs—is here, as in
the kraal, a collective matter.‖ 419.

421
place around the corner. The activities that are thus strictly organized in the North as

private, familial, and strictly enclosed, merge in Naples indistinguishably with the life of

the city beyond the walls of the household. The very kitchen that had served up the

family dinner may likewise be available to the passerby, offering various house

specialties to Neapolitans for whom even the times and places of refreshment are mobile

and porous. As Benjamin relates it:

Not the least example of such virtuosity is the art of eating macaroni with the
hands. This is demonstrated to foreigners for remuneration. Other things are paid
for according to tariffs. Vendors give a fixed price for the cigarette butts that, after
a cafe closes, are culled from the chinks in the floor. (Earlier, they were sought by
candlelight.) Alongside the leavings from restaurants, boiled cat skulls, and
mussels, they are sold at stalls in the harbor district. Music parades about—not
mournful music for the courtyards, but brilliant sounds for the street. A broad cart,
a kind of xylophone, is colorfully hung with song texts. Here they can be bought.
One of the musicians turns the organ while the other, beside it, appears with his
collection cup before anyone who stops dreamily to listen. So everything joyful is
mobile: music, toys, ice cream circulate through the streets.344

In this latter gastronomical relation, Benjamin finds the coffee culture of Naples

particularly illuminating. In the Neapolitan coffee bar, we are told, one has traveled far

afield from the model and attendant cultural imperatives of, say, its Viennese counterpart.

Where the latter encourages long and leisurely stays, and whose structures encourage the

formation of the intellectual groups that assemble there, the espresso bar of Naples is an

infinitely more mobile and variable space. As Benjamin notes, short stays are the rule,

and a longer sit would be met with impatience by the staff.

The true laboratories of this great process of intermingling are the cafes. Life is
unable to sit down and stagnate in them. They are sober, open rooms resembling
the political People's Cafe—the opposite of everything Viennese, of the confined,
bourgeois, literary world. Neapolitan cafes are bluntly to the point. A prolonged
stay is scarcely possible. A cup of excessively hot caffe espresso (this city is as

344
Ibid., 417.

422
 unrivaled in hot drinks as in sherbets, spumoni, and ice cream) ushers the visitor
out. The tables have a coppery shine; they are small and round, and a companion
who is less than stalwart turns hesitantly on his heel in the doorway. Only a few
people sit down here, briefly. Three quick movements of the hand, and they have
placed their order. 345

The coffee house of Naples is but a brief station in the daily routine of its inhabitants, and

does not invite the long and ongoing groupings and associations that may define the

Northern establishment. Like the family home, the coffee house here resists enclosure

into a stable interior space associated with a distinct and established set of activities.

Instead, it represents an important node in a transitory urban network that extends

through the city's spaces, a mobile network whose shape in turn defines the porous shape

of daily life in Naples.

Likewise, in a similar set of boundary reversals, municipal order is guaranteed as

much by organized crime syndicates, the Camorra, whose tentacles extend all along the

Bay of Naples, as it is by the police or civil authorities.

So it does not occur to an injured party to call the police if he is eager to seek
redress. Through civic or clerical mediators, if not personally, he approaches a
camorrista. Through him, he agrees on a ransom. From Naples to Castellamare,
the length of the proletarian suburbs, run the headquarters of the mainland
camorra. For these criminals avoid neighborhoods in which they would be at the
disposal of the police. They are dispersed over the city and the suburbs. That
makes them dangerous. The traveling citizen who gropes his way as far as Rome
from one work of art to the next, as if along a stockade, loses his nerve in Naples.
346

Indeed, as Benjamin suggests, it is often these more formal municipal and spiritual

authorities that may act as intermediaries between a citizen seeking the redress of some

grievance and the criminal organization. These latter will determine the most reasonable

form of potential penalty, and see in turn that the indicated terms are subsequently

345
Ibid., 421.
346
Ibid., 414.

423
satisfied. Like all else, the line between the law and criminality is drawn with a distinct

lack of clarity, and the borders such lines mark seem to invite, rather than forbid, their

transgression. The law of the city and the interests of crime thus not only coexist with

one another, but inhabit similar spheres of activity in almost natural congeniality and

cooperation.

Even the times and rhythms of the city, according to Benjamin, appear to obey the

ad hoc laws of porousness. If the Northern city, by contrast, is organized in space with an

increasingly strict rationality, so too had its temporal forms been structured and defined.

Such organization, as we have already seen, bleeds even into the patterns of leisure travel

presented by the popular Baedeker mode. The imperatives of train schedules, meal times,

museum hours and the like formed a temporal latticework that governed the shape of the

daily lives that took take place within clockwork forms of both work and leisure. For

Benjamin, the Neapolitan scene is one where, once again, such strict borderlines have the

same faded, indistinct gray quality of the city itself. If the days of the week elsewhere

strictly adhere in their character to the activities designated to them—Sundays for

worship and leisure, weekdays for business and public life—each Neapolitan day at least

partially participates in the qualities of the others. The tune played by street musicians,

Benjamin writes, ―is both the residue of the last and prelude to the next feast day.

Irresistibly, the festival permeates each and every working day. Porosity is the

inexhaustible law of life in this city, reappearing everywhere. A grain of Sunday is

hidden in each weekday. And how much weekday there is in this Sunday.‖347

347
Ibid., 417. ―Irresistibly, the festival penetrates each and every working day. Porosity is the inexhaustible
law of life in this city, reappearing everywhere. A grain of Sunday is hidden in each weekday. And how
much weekday there is in this Sunday!”

424
 Of particular significance for Benjamin, however, is the visual organization and

enactment of Neapolitan life. Throughout the essay, Naples is figured as a kind of theater

in which life itself is performed as a piece of perpetual improvisation. ―Porosity results

not only from the indolence of the southern artisan,‖ Benjamin writes,

but also, above all, from the passion for improvisation, which demands that space
and opportunity be preserved at any price. Buildings are used as a popular stage.
They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theaters. Balcony,
courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stage and boxes.
Even the most wretched pauper is sovereign in the dim, dual awareness of
participating, in all his destitution, in one of the pictures of Neapolitan street life
that will never return, and of enjoying in all his poverty the leisure to follow the
great panorama. What is enacted on the staircases is an advanced school of stage
management.348

That Benjamin and Lacis should reach for this metaphor of theatricality is not surprising.

The former was then attempting to finish a Habilschrift on the character of Baroque

tragic drama, while Lacis was herself involved in the socialist theater and a member of

the Brecht circle.349 And yet, the metaphor seems more than a figure of biographical

convenience, for in fashioning their presentation, each of their commitments to drama

decisively informs their reception of the theater of Naples. Indeed, as the form and

ideological thrust of theater-going experience can be at least partially graphed in

geometrics of spatial organization and lines of sight, so too does the Neapolitan theater

reveal its nature in the formal organization of its spectacle.

Therefore, for example, if Brecht‘s Epic Theater represented a critique of

bourgeois sensibilities and its attendant theatrical expectation, the theater which emerges

348
Ibid., 416-417.
349
In her autobiography, Lacis describes her first encounters with Benjamin on Capri, and how she found
his description of the Habilschrift fairly opaque. But she does remember remarking on the similarities
between Benjamin's and Brecht's concepts of allegory as related to dramatic forms. Asja Lacis,
Revolutionär im Beruf; Berichte über proletarisches Theater, über Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin und
Piscator.

425
in the streets of Naples for Benjamin and Lacis is one with an exotic set of relations—

between stage and audience, between observer and observed. And if Brecht had

transformed the drama into a machine of porosity by deconstructing the conventions of

the ―fourth wall‖ and empathetic reception, Benjamin and Lacis likewise envisioned a

landscape in which a rich variety of northern bourgeois walls had been reduced to ruins

or rendered extremely porous. The result is an urban experience based not on the

passive, narrative moralism of bourgeois theater, but on a more engaged material

encounter, one in which the strict separations of players and watchers is called into

question.350

While the ―spectacle‖ of poverty, in a northern city for instance, might take on the

moralistic colors and privileged viewpoints of a bourgeois drama, such theater in Naples

appears to obey a less certain and established set of principles. ―At the hospital San

Gennaro dei Poveri,‖ writes Benjamin,

the entrance is through a white complex of buildings that one passes via two
courtyards. On either side of the road stand benches for the invalids, who follow
those going out with glances that do not reveal whether they are clinging to their
garments with hopes of being liberated or with hopes of satisfying unimaginable
desires. In the second courtyard, the doorways of the chambers have gratings;

350
See also Michael Steinberg, Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). In the final section, Steinberg discusses the relationship between
Benjamin and Hoffmannstahl and the reemergence of a ―neobaroque‖ ideology in the first decades of the
twentieth century. For Steinberg, the rehabilitation of the baroque in Hoffmannstahl is a move which seeks
to overlay a fragmented modern socius with ideological visions of baroque ―totality‖ that are presented in
the form of baroque ―theatricality‖. Steinberg goes to some length to show Benjamin‘s own view of
Baroque theatricality took a course that carried it far from Hoffmannstahl‘s conservative modernist
dramaturgy. In this sense, Benjamin‘s own sense of the essentially fragmented and polyvalent character
would lead him towards a theater of smooth ideological surfaces and into the ―alienated‖ landscape of
Brechtian Epic Theater. But where Steinberg sees theatricality as a way in which the Baroque and
―neobaroque‖ assert the sense of ideological totality, Benjamin‘s view accepts this but would go one step
further to suggest that it is this very notion of theatricality that eventually undermines the claims of a
totalized ideology. Theatrical representation eventually becomes recognized and thematized precisely as
representation with all the epistemological and ontological uncertainty that such a recognition may
generate.

426
 behind them cripples display their deformities, and the shock given to
daydreaming passers-by is their joy.351

To be sure, the theatrical dimensions of such an encounter would be hard to overlook; all

the elements of performance, display, audience and stage are there. And yet, it is also

clear from the presentation that the dramatic exchange between visitors and invalids is

one more complex and more tangled than would be admitted by a traditional drama.

Who, we might ask, is situated here as the audience, and who as the performer? Are not

each the occasion for a mirroring of the other, does not each elicit a certain set of

anxieties and desires in the other? The relations involved in this performance involve a

multi-directionality that the structures of more traditional dramatic forms would allow.

Put differently, one could say that the entire cityscape of Naples forms a stage in which

every participant is both actor and observer, and no privileged wall or box seat defines its

proper vantage point.

If Benjamin and Lacis present Naples as a kind of spectacle, then the forms of this

spectacle are strikingly similar to the forms being developed by Brecht at the same time

as Epic Theater. As Brecht sought to correct traditions of dramatic presentation

stretching from Aristotle to nineteenth-century bourgeois drama, we likewise see

Benjamin and Lacis attempting to create new relations within the theater and optics of an

historically conscious mode of travel. And if Brecht could criticize the pretenses of

bourgeois realism for its familiar postures of empathy, verisimilitude and supposed

objectivity, Benjamin and Lacis perform a similar task in relation to spectacles of

Neapolitan culture, geography and history. The claim of porousness thus emerges, not

simply as a characteristic of a reified object called Naples, but a term describing the

351
Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926, 415.

427
relation between viewer and viewed, a relation that yields entirely new constellations of

historical thinking and unprecedented forms of mobile agency.

What emerges in the Naples essay, therefore, is an almost Brechtian mode of

dramatic narrative. It is constructed from a series of anecdotes and reflections, each

selectively self contained in much the same way that the Brechtian scene exists and

points not towards the next scene, but to itself and its own interpretation. The stations

and stages of the essay represent relatively independent occasions for the reflection, and

consciously avoid a dramatic narrative whose pieces are granted meaning in the

resolutions of an ultimate terminus or are guaranteed from the perspective of a privileged

audience.

We must also remember that the methods of Epic Theater were to disrupt the

unities of time, place and action that governed drama in Aristotelian poetics. For Brecht,

such unities and the empathetic response they invite necessarily discourage a critical

posture on the part of the viewer. Instead, traditional dramatic conventions had conspired

to situate the spectacle as a mirror of fate, a representation of human life as a natural and

necessary drama of suffering and pain. Dramatic narrative presents the world to its

passive audience as a given, a story that was thus, and only thus. Epic drama, on the

other hand, deploys methods such as the alienation effect so that the audience may

critically participate in the discovery that ostensibly natural categories have their genesis

in social and material conditions. In this critical space, opened by the Brechtian drama,

the audience is encouraged to reflect on the possibilities of what has been and what is

becoming—possibilities that are necessarily obscured by the linear perspective and

empathetic posture of the naturalistic attitude.

428
 Where Brecht seems to unlock a set of new social and historical perspectives

through the radical refashioning of formal dramatic conventions, Benjamin and Lacis

undertake a similar reconstruction of the spectacles in which the traveler participates. In

contrast with the popular Baedeker model and the elite forms of Italien, the authors of the

Naples essay set about a redistribution of the conventional relations and narratives that

inform a more standard bourgeois holiday. While the former examples either encouraged

their audiences to situate themselves as privileged observers of a vast historical spectacle

or find themselves coordinated in a strict linear landscape of cultural objects of

consumption, Benjamin and Lacis undertake a performance of their own, and invite the

reader to understand the moment of foreign travel as a powerful moment of interpretive

agency. The fourth wall, as it were, between tourist and destination is broken down, and

the audience member likewise becomes conscious of his own performance. The ultimate

aim of this transformation, however, is one of exposing alternate models of historical and

social organization. The forms of the tourist spectacle are no less implicated in a set of

historical ideologies and imperatives than the forms of conventional dramatic spectacle.

Indeed, if certain philosophies of history could be reinforced by, and embedded in,

bourgeois drama, so too was the experience of travel likewise conditioned by hegemonic

historical discourse.

Such discourses, embodied and most fully realized in the institutions of

historicism, not only informed the shape of academic research, but had become

implicated through their extensive influence in nearly every aspect of German historical

consciousness—whether this was located in the monograph, the theater piece, or the

experience of travel. The conventions embraced by these historical discourses

429
encouraged a specific set of relations with the past, and a specific set of imperatives from

which the past was to be reconstructed and represented. And as with the Angel of

History, the past that emerges from such a perspective must emerge as either a linear

collection of disasters or the ongoing development of human progress. In either case, the

Angel, the historian, or the audience can only helplessly watch the spectacle; history is

understood as either a series of natural organic developments or as a debased and

commodified collection of fragmentary historical kitsch. From such a perspective,

absorbed by educated Germans and encouraged by the forms of the Baedeker model,

Naples could only emerge as a set of objects, artifacts and ruins; as allegories, in other

words, of unavoidable and unalterable historical and social forces. Regardless of whether

the elements of this drama were configured as tragedy or comedy, their meaning is

always already situated in the diagrams of plot. Naples would become a resonating sign

for what necessarily must be, and obscured are all the spaces and temporalities that could

have been à la Hatzfeld.

The Naples essay is therefore an experiment in a different kind of performance, a

spectacle in which relations between observer and observed and conventional unities are

radically called into question. The traveler here is not rendered as a privileged yet

passive audience, admiring the majestic sweep of Neapolitan fortunes and misfortunes—

its art, its treasures, its ruins, its souvenirs. We find here a mode of travel whose forms

resist and elude the imperatives that govern conventional Baedeker tourism and what we

have called auratic historicism. Yet by detaching the spectacle from such strict forms, a

new space for meditation on historical forces, both at home and abroad, becomes

possible. The city that emerges from within this new perspective is not simply a record

430
and relic of a naturalized historical process, but shows itself as a living entity, perpetually

in construction and perpetually in decay. Put differently, the Naples represented by

Benjamin and Lacis emerges more as a region of lively and disturbing historical

possibilities and less as a realm of traditional historical narrative or commodified tourist

experience.

But it is nevertheless in the form of ruins, relics or wreckage that the Angel of

History must render the spatial and historical landscapes of Naples. Indeed, it is in this

that we may understand the feeling of déjà vu felt by the Angel as it perused the pages of

its small red Baedeker. For the prospect offered by the Baedeker is one quite familiar to

the Angel. In the pages of the guide, the Angel may observe the well cataloged spectacle

of a history in fragments as it is played out in the theater of Baedeker‘s maps and

suggestions. But the Angel cannot stop and hold these fragments together. The winds of

historicism that drive it backwards into the future are never at rest. Indeed, before it

knows it, our Angel finds itself receding once again into the future, first from the streets

of 1924 Naples, and then past that lonely night of Benjamin‘s 1940 suicide. And as it

looks down sadly at the now still figure of Walter Benjamin growing smaller in the ever

widening distance, it ruefully and ironically mutters a single word—progress.

431
 Conclusion

If the Angel of History is doomed to wing its way relentlessly into the future, the

itineraries described in Nomad Past have revealed historical landscapes very different

from those glimpsed through Benjamin‘s angelic historiography or in the traditions of the

German Historical School. Where the these latter methodologies and concepts tread

historical paths informed by imperatives of textuality, individuality and linearity, the

present work has brought into relief historical trajectories of a very different sort. Instead

of historical visions and rhetorics that embed the past in the certainties of narrative

realism or in the ultimate rest of the telos, the Nomad Past has sought to present a set of

historical constructions defined in terms of their porousness, their incompletion and their

interruptibility. From this perspective, the interventions of Burckhardt, Warburg and

Benjamin reveal modes of historical construction that insist on travelling beyond—

across, through, or beneath—the neat spaces and well-trodden narrative tracks laid down

by the conventional histories of their disciplinary contemporaries. Their pasts were

characterized, in other words, by a restless nomadism that refused to travel along the

standard avenues and traditional arteries of historiographical practice.

To invoke once more a Baroque metaphor, the Nomad Past has sought to

reconstruct a mode of historical representation that is analogous to the seventeenth-

century mathematics of calculus and complex topologies. Like Baroque explorations of

curvilinear spaces, our various nomad pasts likewise encountered historical topographies

that seem to elude expression in the conventional historical formulae. If the Baroque, in

other words, sought a mathematical language with which to describe a world whose

432
panoply of forms and processes extended far beyond that which could be described in

classical methods, so too does a nomadic history proceed from the conviction that the

linearities and articulations of historicism are—by themselves—inadequate to a world

with far more complex historical spaces. As with the spatial mathematics of the Baroque,

such historical topographies (could we call them non-Euclidean historiographies?) must

come to grips with stubborn remainders and uncertain variables, with disrupted historical

narratives and dissolving historical narrators. Indeed, as Baroque calculus exchanged the

sureties of the point and the necessities of the circle for subversive approximations of

curvilinear space, nomad pasts insist on escape from conceptions of historical spaces that

are neatly defined in terms of concepts like progress, objectivity and narrative linearity.

In the end, however, this is all but an elaborate way of pursuing the meaning of

Walter Benjamin‘s dictum that, ―history decays into images, not into stories.‖ For to

understand history in the terms of images is to recognize that the rhetorics and

methodological concepts of traditional historiography are inadequate to represent

historical ―topographies‖ conceived in spatial and visual terms, inadequate to describe

spaces whose contours escape the logics of conventional narrative forms. To pursue a

nomad past in these terms is thus to ―map‖ an historical space whose boundaries are no

longer determined by the arcs of grand narratives, the vectors of historical teleologies, or

by the individualizing points of agency and authorship. What emerges instead is a past

where the imperatives of beginning, middle and end are upended, where once clearly

marked territories of national and cultural narratives begin to dissolve, and a more multi-

dimensional and porous set of historical spaces opens up to the historian.

433
 In this way, the experience of the past is opened up and explored much as one

might navigate a city or a landscape, the past is approached in the same way that Jacob

Burckhardt traveled through Rome and Walter Benjamin moved through Naples. Indeed,

in this manner, Benjamin‘s mobile and visually-inflected Denkbilder emerge as an

alternative model for the practice of historical reflection, a model that replaces the idea of

the storyteller with that of the traveler or tourist. Rather than a nineteenth-century

Rankean narrator who constructs his histories in terms of continuities of time and place,

continuities grounded likewise in the conceit of authorial integrity, we approach the past

as one might plunge into a unfamiliar city—in all the modes of traveling collection and

epistemological pastiche that we linked to the mobile experience of modernity. For

where, after all, does the city (any city) begin and where does it end? Which broad

avenues are significant, and which hidden alleyways are even more significant? In which

direction must we move as we pass through its precincts, and according to what

sequence? What would it even mean to describe the space of such a place in terms of a

single narrative perspective or teleological movement? For anyone short of perhaps

James Joyce and his Dublin Odyssey, conventional narrative thus tends to collapse in the

face of a modern urban experience characterized precisely by its discontinuities, its

porous passages and its ephemeral encounters. And in the same way, to engage the past

not as a narrator, but as a Flâneur, collector or traveler, is likewise to encounter a more

unruly and nomadic space, a region described best in terms of image and montage rather

than those of text and narrative.

It is from this vantage point, then, that we have sought to describe the nomadic

histories of Burckhardt, Warburg (and the counter-example of Freud), and Benjamin as

434
each traced out visually inflected pasts at the margins of a historiographical moment that

was dominated by the texts and narratives of German historicism. At the same time,

however, it is not enough to simply situate these histories, explorations and Denkbilder as

more refined and mature examples of the sort we saw in Burckhardt‘s early and

idiosyncratic collection of Antiquities. A central task of the present work, in other words,

is one of pressing beyond a simple, and all too appealing, understanding of these

interventions as idiosyncratic supplements to ―regular‖ or conventional historical

practices and epistemologies. For to situate them in this manner is to dismiss them in the

same fashion that we too easily dismiss any other liminal mode of historical

representation or reconstruction. By configuring them as supplements or merely curious

alterities, we come perilously close to pacifying the very nomadism that makes them so

valuable; we come close to reterritorializing their deterritorializations in a form that no

longer threatens conventional historiographical approaches. As in the case of

Burckhardt‘s Antiquities, to pause for a moment and consider these historical approaches

is to recognize not only a living encounter with history, but a past that opens up radical

new ways of conceiving the relation between past and present. As brief glimpses into

historical worlds constructed in radically different ways, the value of such approaches

lies in the radical challenge they pose to the ways in which history is constructed and

represented. And if the practice of history is something more than the rote application of

well-worn methods, concepts, rhetorics and approaches, then we should be ever alert to

those more nomadic movements of historiography—not only as they move beyond and

across conventional territories, but as they call the very status of those territories into

question. If freedom is always and everywhere the freedom to think differently, as Rosa

435
Luxemburg once claimed, then a living engagement with the past always and everywhere

consists of the freedom to encounter that past differently.

It is with these concerns mind that the Nomad Past set out to explore the specific

ways in which cultures of visuality, travel and consumption worked together to shape

(and reshape) the experience, production and consumption of historical knowledge within

the modern German-speaking world. In what ways, in other words, does a visually

inflected experience of the past produce an alternative landscape of temporal experience

and historical belonging/identification? The preceding chapters have sought to determine

how mobile forms of visuality (art tours, sightseeing, urban experience) conditioned the

reception of historical traces and historically resonant spaces, and how ideologies of

temporality were implied (and subverted) by regimes of visual consumption. Indeed, in

examining the German visual encounter with Italy and the traces of its various histories, a

primary focus has been that of discovering how the visual experiences of travel and

mobility could either reinforce or subvert powerful, nationally-oriented historical

narratives and imaginaries. The Nomad Past, in other words, has sought to reveal the

ways in which the mobile and visual consumption of Italian spaces (and Italian histories)

complicated the sense of historical ―situated-ness‖ that had emerged so powerfully in the

course of the German nineteenth century.

Our discussion of Burckhardt, for example, examined the ways in which his

visual and synchronic reception of the Italian past opened a cosmopolitan and aesthetic

alternative to nationalist historiographies of Prussian school historicism. From his early

professional peregrinations to the pages of the Cicerone, and ultimately to his final visual

(and photographic) encounters with Rome, Burckhardt produces an ―invitation‖ to a

436
visual reception of Italy‘s historical pasts and aesthetic monuments, an invitation that

encourages a reconstruction of subjectivity in relation to its experience of time. More

specifically, Burckhardt pursues a reframing of the nineteenth-century subject‘s relation

to historical narratives, and insists on its imaginative and pleasurable activity in the

process of such historical reconstruction. Thus, in the example of the Cicerone,

Burckhardt draws a close link between the experience of aesthetic pleasure (Genuss) and

the cultural value of historical remembrance, a link that is established above all through

the active agency and participation of the subject as viewer, traveler and human being.

Likewise, in Burckhardt‘s late journeys to London and Rome, we found the historian

ruminating on the changing forms of nineteenth-century urban experience even as he

experimented with ways of representing those changes in visual forms. Furthermore, in

the face of a century that seemed intent on eliding and obscuring its pre-modern pasts, the

Basel historian found—in the technology of photography and in architectonic of Rome—

a mode of subjective experience that both permitted and encouraged a degree of agency

in interpretive pleasures of Errathen and Kombinieren. What Burckhardt explored, in

other words, was a nomadic space that still allowed movement for alternative and

idiosyncratic modes of historical interpretation. Italy became for Burckhardt a temporal

and visual space constructed not from the materials of great texts, grand narratives and

national historiographies, but primarily from the interpretive agency of the travelling and

collecting subject.

On the other hand, in the figures of Aby Warburg and Sigmund Freud, we

encountered German receptions of Italian pasts as they emerged at the turn of the

twentieth century. This moment of emerging modernisms was, somewhat paradoxically,

437
also one in which the status of the past—and its stubborn significance for modern culture

and modern subjectivity—emerged as a theme of vital import. Announced most

powerfully in the currents of Renaissancismus (or Renaissance-cult), and still present in

the residual traditions of German classicism, the Italian past emerged as a landscape in

which to explore and contest the individual and cultural significance of history for

Germans at home and abroad. It was an historical region whose reception (and

consumption) produced highly charged confrontations among elite national

historiographies and the fashionable historicisms in architecture and the arts. In response

to these currents—characterized by equal measures of horror and fascination—Aby

Warburg embarked on a career of nomadic research whose geographical span extended

from the Arizona desert in the American West to the Laurentian Library in Florence. At

the same time, however, Warburg‘s nomadism was manifest not merely in geographical

terms, but was propelled into novel methodological and epistemological territories by his

commitment to a visually-inflected and spatially-mobile form of cultural history, a

history that moved across categories and boundaries formed by established historical

periods and categories. In these visually constructed historical spaces, furthermore,

conventional borders between North and South, between antiquity and modernity,

between text and image became ever more indistinct. Such explorations culminated, of

course, in Warburg‘s final Mnemosyne project, an experiment that realized a truly mobile

and nomadic cultural history by disentangling historical images from textual exposition.

Thus, while Warburg gravitated towards an historical vision that was disaggregated into

ever smaller imagistic elements, if his methods produced dissolution of conventional

narratives of German history and academic historicism, they nevertheless went far in

438
demonstrating Benjamin‘s dictum that history indeed decays into images rather than

stories.

By contrast, while no less engaged with issues of visuality and travel, Sigmund

Freud‘s fin-de-siècle preoccupation with Italian history seems to emerge with a greater

emphasis on moments and modes of construction and reconstruction. Where Warburg‘s

methodologies tended to produce a disaggregated and porous field of mobile images—a

past in which traces, elements and variables proliferated faster than the Hamburg

historian could stitch them into coherent narratives—Freud scrupulously returns his

visual and nomadic wanderings into the newly constructed and emerging framework of

psychoanalysis. Indeed, if Warburg‘s library took shape in response to that scholar‘s

idiosyncratic mode of collecting and arranging its elements, Freud‘s collections (and

recollections) are always made to obey the law of his psychoanalytic archive. Whereas

the Warburg library thus became a space of collection always threatened by the

centrifugal force of its leader‘s nomadic interests, the Freudian archive seems to exercise

a powerful centripetal force on its constituent elements. In this way, Freud‘s excursions

to Italy—whether in fantasy, in fiction or in actuality—are almost always accompanied

by a return journey, a moment of recapitulation in which observations and experiences

are returned to (and impressed in) the archival matrix of psychoanalysis. Hence, we

discover those curious and uncanny doublings and re-doublings that emerge in Freud‘s

attempt to ―record‖ Italian insights (and sights) in the scenes of psychoanalytic writing.

Yet Freud‘s very attempts to manage and represent his travelling experiences—in what

he considers to be the clarifying light of psychoanalysis—are precisely the gestures that

generate those shadows of uncertainty and uncanniness that hover around his Italian

439
experiences. Thus, if Warburg‘s archival methodologies seem to produce a dispersive

and schizophrenic (yet mobile) field of disaggregated images, Freud‘s well-lit circle of

psychoanalysis seems haunted by presences that its archive can never quite fully capture.

The third section of the Nomad Past reflects on a moment in the mid-1920‘s, in

which Italian travel and German tourism were becoming available as modes of

consumption available to wider social and cultural spheres. At the same time, however,

this moment saw the marked decline of the institutional power of German historicism,

and in this convergence of trends, the historical resonances of travel became still more

urgent. History and travel, in other words, found themselves engaged with, and

confronted by, emerging spheres of consumer culture that applied their own

epistemologies and ideologies to the objects of the past. A recognizable modern tourist

culture, in other words, was in the process of emerging, and the modes of its consumption

were in turn influencing the ways in which the past was likewise produced, exchanged

and consumed. In this fashion, therefore, the auratic traditions of German historicism—a

tradition in which the past assumes an almost aesthetic distance from the present—found

themselves increasingly confronted by a past that could be bought and sold, a past

inserted as a commodity in circulation with other commodities of modern capital.

―Everything that the foreigner desires, admires, and pays for is "Pompeii." writes

Benjamin in relation to this commodification of time, "Pompeii" makes the plaster

imitation of the temple ruins, the lava necklace, and the louse-ridden person of the guide

irresistible.‖352

352
Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, „Naples―, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1. Howard
Eiland, Michael W. Jennings, and Gary Smith eds. (Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press, 1996). 415.

440
 By reading Benjamin‘s ―Naples,‖ therefore, in relation to a contemporary

Baedeker travel guide and alongside essays from the German arts magazine Italien, we

discovered a variety of modes and methods by which visitors may be invited to

experience (or consume) similar landscapes—the city and region of Naples in that

moment of the mid-1920‘s. Yet each of these texts presents its respective landscapes in

accordance with very different sets of visual principles and ideological coordinates. In

the texts of Benjamin, Baedeker and Italien, readers are encouraged to reconstruct the

historicity of the Neapolitan environment in ways that situate the traveler in a specific

and ideologically charged relation to the historical traces around him or her. In the end,

however, what Benjamin provides is a model of sensitive spatial and historical

experience that refuses to embrace either the auratic (and anesthetized) historicism of

Italien or the brute materiality of history as tourist kitsch. Put differently, Benjamin

resists the temptation of territorializing the past in terms of either a crude ideality or a

crude materiality. Instead, the ―Neapel‖ Denkbild pursues a more nomadic recovery and

representation of Naples, a process of mapping (not tracing) in which the emphasis on

visuality, mobility and agency (through Flânerie) produces an historical topography that

is radically porous in both temporal and spatial terms. Thus instead of engaging the city

as a sequence of narratives, or in the subjective role of storyteller or narrator, Benjamin

constructs the spaces and times of Naples in the casual movements and fragmentary

anecdotes of the tourist and collector. Indeed, as if referring back to his Neapolitan

insights, Benjamin later remarked in the Passagen-Werk that, ―The constructions of

history are comparable to military orders that discipline the true life and confine it to

441
barracks. On the other hand: the street insurgence of the anecdote.‖353 And thus the

anecdote was for Benjamin the antidote to a history disciplined by the grand narratives of

historicism of which he was critical; the anecdote was, in Deleuzian terms, precisely that

nomadic ―war machine‖ that permitted Benjamin to envision historical spaces that could

not be represented from the perspective of traditional historicism. Like Burckhardt‘s

Rome and Warburg‘s Bilderatlas, Benjamin‘s ―Naples‖ releases history from its bondage

to narrative by recovering its fragmentary, anecdotal and ruinous dimensions.

In the end, therefore, what the Nomad Past seeks to show are those ways in which

the construction of historical consciousness was not merely a contest conducted at home

or in the multi-volume tomes of German historicism, but was something negotiated at

various levels of discourse and practice, in various modes of embodied and visual

experience, and in spaces that extended far beyond the familiar domains of region and

nation. The various strands of the Nomad Past—its themes of travel, visuality and

historiography--thus converge to reveal more complicated topographies of cultural,

intellectual and social history. However, if these strands of travel, visuality and

historiography are indeed to retain a mobile and transgressive character, we should take

care that they don‘t come to rest too quickly in those ready-made territories and

conceptual frameworks that always threaten to capture and halt the movements of any

kind of nomadism. Put differently, we must recognize that the meanings of the nomad

take shape in the course of its concrete movements and not in the image or abstract

territories across which it travels; and in turn, those territories and concepts that it crosses

always run the risk of being themselves reified and transformed into rigid categories.

353
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, (S1a,3)

442
From this Deleuzian perspective, the nomad is forever confronted by the lure of

settlement, its mobile concepts congealing into settled territories and neat sedentary

concepts. The moving strands of the present work are, in similar fashion, by no means

immune to this form of methodological deceleration and these moments of conceptual

ossification. So as we reflect on the preceding chapters, we would be remiss if we did

not examine the points at which our own explorations threaten to slip into those overly

neat categories, those concepts and binaries that represent the capture and settlement of

the nomad.

The preceding chapters have often invoked a distinction between those historical

approaches based on textual and narrative models and those historiographies informed

primarily by visual and optical imperatives. Where a narratively-oriented historiography

might insist on formal requirements like strict sequential development, authorial integrity

and an emphasis on primacy of textual interpretation, the more optically oriented

historiographies could explore historical landscapes characterized by synchronicity,

disruption of sequence and fragmentation. But at the same time, such distinctions can all

too easily crystallize into rigid categories and crudely defined territories. For if this

distinction between narrative history and visual history may hold in the abstract, it is

precisely in this dimension that the movements of nomadism are arrested. The domain of

the nomad is always and everywhere the sphere of practice, and in this domain, crude

distinctions such as that between narrativity and visuality tend to become more or less

exclusive. The distinctions we are making here, in other words, should be taken as purely

analytic and provisional, a mode of categorization that recognizes no purely narrative and

no purely visual historical approach. In practice, therefore, as Hayden White and others

443
long ago showed, even visually-oriented historians like Burckhardt may operate

according to certain narrative tropes and rhetorics. And conversely, even the most

textually and philologically oriented histories often pursue their arguments in visually

sensitive ways. Theodor Mommsen‘s History of Rome, for example, a work that is firmly

rooted in the author‘s philological skill and textual erudition, nevertheless opens with a

rich visual tableau, a cartographic and geographic overview of the Mediterranean world

as it might have been glimpsed at the dawn of the Roman Republic. To transform the

―visual‖ and the ―narrative‖ into new and mutually exclusive territories would be to bring

the movements of a nomadic past to a standstill, and even if while such territories may

briefly flare into existence, the ultimate goal is always that of showing the provisional

and porous character of such boundaries.

In the same way, the chapters above often hover perilously close to a hard and fast

distinction between the aesthetics of the Renaissance Classicism and the aesthetics of the

Baroque. Indeed, the temptation offered by this simple binary distinction is only further

amplified by the degree to which these aesthetics also suggest political, historical or

cultural orientations. But here again, such a neat and abstract opposition is untenable in

any but the most abstract dimensions. Leaving aside the degree to which these categories

are used primarily as metaphors and analogies (and it is only in this sense that any

Postmodern condition could possess characteristics of the Baroque), the present work

uses the terms in ways that are by no means mutually exclusive. On the contrary,

Renaissance and Baroque bleed into one another, presume one another, and communicate

with one another in ways analogous to the relation between the concepts of Modernity

and the Postmodernity. While a Baroque aesthetic may revel in incompletion, in illusion

444
and in polyvocality—and in the tensions that thus result—the realism and seeming

naiveté of the Renaissance is always already present to the Baroque as an interlocutor and

a point of departure. Where the Renaissance, as we have seen, was characterized by its

fascination the completion and repose of the circle, the Baroque merely represents the

stretching and distortion of this circle into a de-centered (or multi-centered) ellipse. The

relation, therefore, between the concepts of Renaissance and Baroque, at least as they are

deployed in the present work is dialectical rather than absolute, a difference borne of

intimate confrontations rather than complete otherness.

By the same token, however, the distinction between the aesthetics of the

Renaissance and the Baroque is decisive for the argument of the Nomad Past. For if the

approaches of narrative and visual-oriented history are not so easily disentangled from

one another, the nomadisms we have described are defined primarily by the Baroque

rhetorics and visual aesthetics that they appear to deploy. In short, the characteristic

element of our various nomad pasts is located not in visuality as such, not merely in their

emphasis on a scopically and optically-oriented history, but on a particular approach to

the visual that is characterized here in terms of the Baroque. This Baroque visual

idiom—with its antinomies of spirit and flesh, meaning and signification, ideality and

materiality—permits in turn an approach to historical representation in which such

tensions and antinomies are put to work rather than suppressed. The landscapes that

emerge from such a baroquely nomadic historiography do not take shape in satisfyingly

sequential narratives, nor do they rest upon the narrative integrity of a sovereign authorial

presence, but they emerge instead as an assemblage of fragments, ruins and images.

Their histories consist rather of lateral cross-sections, anecdotes and image-albums

445
(Bilderatlas) that represent history in terms of constellations rather than stories, as

mosaics rather than paintings. From the Baroque aesthetic that permits these modes of

historical collection and display, another vision of history emerges whose detours,

ruptures and crooked timbers are no longer forced into the smooth regimentations of

story and narrative.

In response to these reflections, it might be natural to wonder what becomes of

our pasts when their narrative constellations thus decay into the images of their

constituent stars. What happens to the landscape of history when its territories find

themselves deterritorialized by the journeys of a nomad past? However, as Deleuze and

Guattari make clear that deterritorialization is not an end in itself, and a schizophrenic

multiplication of selves and meanings is but a station in a larger process, so too does the

present work by no means wish to valorize a deconstructed or deterritorialized history for

its own sake. In the past several decades, a good deal of literature has explored the

rhetorical and formal imperatives that shape the writing of History, and many have

claimed that the recognition of these imperatives ultimately entails the rejection of

historical representation as a practice with claims to any truth value. Yet whether such a

conclusion is celebrated or rejected, it rests on a vision in which History is cast out of the

pristine sphere of logic, and plunged into the arena of rhetoric; where History had once

been cloaked in the mantle of Truth, we are assured that it now speaks only in the

rhetorical tongues of persuasion and power.

On the other hand, while the formal analysis of historical literature (either textual

or visual) may represent an epistemological slippery slope for some—a slope whose end

is greeted with either glee or resignation—the present work is committed to quite another

446
view. To be sure, such linguistic turns, literary deconstructions and conceptual

deterritorialization may confront us with histories and representations whose contours are

more fragmentary, disjointed and dispersed than those presented by traditional narrative

realism. Indeed, under such pressures and through these critiques, the constellations that

have inhabited our historical skies for so long may change their shapes or even disappear

altogether. But at the same time, such pressures also permit and produce spaces for those

movements of nomadism in our arrangement of historical landscapes. Where there once

was only a Big Dipper—eternal and unchanging—we are once again freed to exercise a

degree of agency in the creation of new constellations: a bear, a plow or even a coffin

with a trail of mourners. Indeed, this is precisely the sort of metaphorical ―blasting‖ to

which Benjamin refers when he seeks to release individual fragments of the past from the

congealed larger meanings of history and historicism. The deterritorialization of the past,

the disaggregation of its traces out of the matrix of conventional history, is thus not an

end in itself, but a decisive station in encountering it anew, a moment of disorientation

that may reveal hitherto unexpected landscapes and geographies. From this perspective,

to ―blast‖ away the ossified forms of received history, to deterritorialize the constellations

and meanings that have long comforted us, is not the ―end‖ of historical representation

but instead represents the very precondition of its living practice. It is the otherness of

the nomad, and all its freely deterritorializing motions, that reveals a vision of the past

that is as wondrously incomplete and protean as the present.

As we reach the end of the present work, however, we find that our final station

resides not in the territories and nomadisms of the early nineteenth century, but in the

historiographical terrain of the present moment. In some ways, of course, the present

447
moment is one very different from those we have described in the Nomad Past. The

disciplinary territories marked out by the institutions and discourses of the German

Historical School have long since dissolved, and have been replaced by a far more

variegated historiographical landscape. The German historical Zunft, while still quite

present and not without its share of influence, possesses now only traces of its former

hegemonic powers and disciplinary solidarity. The special German paths that historicism

helped to pave, were in the twentieth century first reversed and then abandoned

altogether. Indeed, the issues that now confront the historiography of Germany have long

been defined not by the frameworks and interests of nineteenth-century historicism, but

by the powerful gravitational pull of Germany‘s catastrophic twentieth century. The

territories of history, in other words, can no longer be so easily mapped onto the

territories of nation and ideology. In a world of ever advancing globalism, and in the face

of technologies of communication and ―mechanical reproduction‖ that would have

astounded Benjamin, the territories of historiography have become increasingly porous,

and its institutional structures more varied. Thus, in many ways, history circulates today

with unimaginable speed and often through previously unknown or unexpected passages.

At the same time, however, the past that we have described may nevertheless

have much in common with the present moment. While the border guards that once

manned the ramparts of discipline, field and ideology are no longer so watchful as they

once were, while the territories that we inscribe and narrate into the contours of the past

are perhaps less indelible than they once were, the historical discipline is nevertheless

still disciplinary. Thus, both historian and history are—and perhaps necessarily—still

conditioned by the practices of disciplinary tradition and the discourses of the

448
historiographical present. Furthermore, if advances in technology and communication

have had a profound influence on contemporary historical practices, the nineteenth and

twentieth century worlds of Burckhardt, Warburg, Freud and Benjamin also envisioned

their pasts through the lens of a rapidly changing and accelerating modern world. Indeed,

the nomadic explorations that we have traced owed much of their impetus to social and

technological transformations within their respective moments of modernity. The

increasing ubiquity and availability of convenient modes of transportation not only made

possible the rapid expansion of nineteenth-century leisure travel, but also made possible

new forms of mobility for the historian and researcher. The emergence of photography

and other forms of ―mechanical reproduction‖ likewise exerted a gradual but decisive

influence on the ways in which historians ―envisioned‖ the past, introducing a vast new

horizon of documentary sources and traces. Thus, where the experience of the past in the

twenty-first century is being reconfigured—literally before our eyes—by memories and

histories delivered by television and the internet, the period from Burckhardt to Benjamin

similarly represents an era readjusting its past through the rapidly changing lens of its

present.

In Archive Fever, Derrida ponders similar questions when he looks at Freud‘s

archival interventions and wonders what forms such an archive might have assumed at

another historical moment and within a different technological landscape. If the present

work has examined the ways in which new forms of visuality and mobility conditioned

the ways in which history could be conceived and written, Derrida in turn reflects on how

technological transformations in the form of the archive—any archive—inform the

content of what is there archived. ―This means that,‖ writes Derrida,

449
 in the past, psychoanalysis would not have been what it was (any more than so
many other things) if E-mail, for example, had existed. And in the future it will
no longer be what Freud and so many psychoanalysts have anticipated, from the
moment, for example, became possible. […] But the example of E-mail is
privileged in my opinion for a more important and obvious reason: because
electronic mail today, even more than the fax, is on the way to transforming the
entire public and private space of humanity, and first of all the limit between the
private, the secret (private or public), and the public or the phenomenal. It is not
only a technique, in the ordinary and limited sense of the term: at an
unprecedented rhythm, in quasi-instantaneous fashion, this instrumental
possibility of production, of printing, of conservation, and of destruction of the
archive must inevitably be accompanied by juridical and thus political transfor-
mations. 354

Like the nineteenth-century, therefore, the present moment confronts a situation where

the forms and objects of archivization, historicization and remembrance are undergoing

an episode of radical transformation. And in the course of this transformation, the ways

in which historians document and envision the past—or record and preserve it for the

future—must likewise emerge in new and unexpected ways. As the mobilities and

visibilities of historical traces and records accelerate in the coming century, as the

political and institutional spaces of professional history encounter the spaces of an

increasingly digitalized world, so too will the territories by which we remember and

organize the past be reconfigured and reorganized.

And thus we return to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) and

Burckhardt‘s anthology. For beginning in the 1990‘s and continuing until present, the

MGH has been gradually emerging as the dMGH. The Monumenta Germaniae

Historica, in other words, has undertaken the project of the complete digitalization of its

357 volumes and 166,285 pages, a project available online as the digitalisierte

Monumenta Germaniae Historica (dMGH). Originally begun over a decade ago as the

354
Derrida, Archive Fever : A Freudian Impression. 17.

450
elektronische MGH (eMGH), in which the volumes were translated into CD-ROM form,

the current ―digital‖ approach has pursued a web-based model. Indeed, while the eMGH

was welcomed at the time as an important resource by the historical community, its

digital revision is aimed at addressing concerns about the visual nature of the documents.

As Bernhard Assmann and Patrick Sahle describe it in a report entitled, ―Digital ist

Besser‖:

Die neuere texttheoretische Forschung fasst unter dem Begriff der

„bibliografischen Codes― zusammen, dass die Materialität und Visualität der
Druckausgaben Informationen liefert, die zur angemessenen Rezeption der Texte
benötigt werden. Für die MGH bedeutet dies z.B., dass es wichtig ist, die
spezifischeHistorizität einer Ausgabe möglicherweise schon an ihrer visuellen
Erscheinung erkennen zu können, um ihren editorischen Status einzuschätzen und
die eigene Benutzung daran auszurichten.
Diese und weitere Überlegungen haben die MGH schließlich im Jahr 2003
bewogen, das Paradigma der geglätteten Volltextdatenbank durch einen Ansatz
der Retrodigitalisierung zu ersetzen, der zunächst auf die Verfügbarkeit der
Druckausgaben als Bilddigitalisatesetzte355

Thus, not only has the MGH been rendered in a searchable text format, but its current

digital approach will now reproduce the texts in the form of digitized images so that the

―materiality‖ and ―visuality‖ of the documents may be preserved to some degree. At the

beginning of the twenty-first century, then, one of the great models of the textually

oriented and hermeneutically inclined tradition of German historicism finds itself drifting

ever closer to the alternative model presented by the youthful anthology of Jacob

Burckhardt. No longer simply a visual supplement or appendage, the image—digital or

355
Bernard Assmann, and Patrick Sahle, Digital Ist Besser : Die Monumenta Germaniae Historica Mit Den
Dmgh Auf Dem Weg in Die Zukunft - Eine Momentaufnahme, vol. 1, Schriften Des Instituts Fur
Dokumentologie Und Editorik
(Koln: 2008). 8.

451
otherwise—takes its place beside the text as both archival object and mode of

archivization.

Furthermore, if the reception of modern forms of visual culture represented an

important element in the historical nomadism of our figures—from Burckhardt to

Benjamin—then the visual and digital influence of the World Wide Web likewise

presents similar opportunities. The visual dimensions of Burckhardt‘s anthology, as we

have seen, were an essential part of his fragmentary youthful project. It revealed a

history that emerged in the form of pastiche or briccolage, a history whose visual ―de-

tails‖ dissolved original contexts and reconstructed them as historical images. In this

way, the visions of Burckhardt‘s ―Antiquities‖ not only shows another means of

communicating and representing the past, but also demonstrates the way that an active

and mobile visuality enforces both the deterritorialization and the reterritorialization of

traditional texts and documents. We might ask, in other words, what happens to the

historical text or document when it is lifted out of its well controlled narrative

environment—the monograph, the collection, the archive—and it is transferred into a

realm of ―cutting and pasting‖, a realm initially explored in nomadisms of Burckhardt‘s

Anthology, in Warburg‘s Bilderatlas or in Benjamin‘s Passagen-Werk? What new

historical territories and deterritorializations of the past may emerge from such

movements and reconfigurations?

Thus, where the nineteenth-century saw new forms of historical reflection

emerging through, and conditioned by, rapidly changing cultures of mobility and

visuality, the present moment confronts a similar set of possibilities, here amplified by

the inflections and interventions of a digitized history. As Assmann and Sahle put it in

452
relation to the dMGH, the digitalization of historical documents creates more than just

another supplemental repository or archive. Instead, by situating the texts into a

contemporary web-based or virtual setting, the dMGH represents a fundamental re-

contextualization of the dusty volumes of the Monumenta, instantly breaking them out of

their textual territories and accelerating them into the unbounded spaces of the Web. And

the results are not just technical in nature, but cut to the core of what a collection like the

MGH can do:

Explizit gemachte Verweise gehen über den Rahmen der MGH nicht mehr nur
virtuell, sondern auch real hinaus. Wenn alles nur noch einen Klick entfernt ist,
dann verschwimmt die Grenze zwischen innen und außen. Die Ressourcen für die
Mittelalterforschung wachsen zusammen. Bei der Verlinkung zu weiteren
Ressourcen wie dem Marburger Lichtbildarchiv oder digitalisierter
Sekundärliteratur geht es teilweise um automatische oder zumindest
automatisierbare Prozesse,
teilweise ist aber eine intellektuelle Nacharbeit nötig und sind fachliche
Entscheidungen gefragt. Damit fließt aber neues Wissen in die alten Bände ein.
Ihr wissenschaftlicher Wert wird erneut merklich gesteigert. Die Editionen
gewinnen an Aktualität.356

A simple shift, therefore, in the method of archivization or in the technology of its

representation may not only expand our understanding of how to use such archives, but it

also represents the opportunity for novel and nomadic visions of the past itself, a past that

is imagined through the visual and mobile interconnectedness of the World Wide Web.

Indeed, as the photograph emerged as a point of fundamental reorientation in the way that

modernity understood time, movement and memory, so too will the virtual and

rhizomatic architectures of the internet likely condition the way in which the twenty-first

century remembers and organizes its own pasts.

356
Ibid., 42

453
 Several decades ago, to contextualize these issues in another way, critics and

historians such as Hayden White began to document the manner in which the writing of

history partook of the same tropes and structures of other literatures of the modern era.

The past, in other words, was thus bound to emerge in consonance with the formal

imperatives of nineteenth-century narrative, in its strict linearity, in its authorial integrity

and in its complement of traditional tropes. And while such observations prompted more

than a few historians and scholars to declare the end of history as a rigorous human

science—declarations made with either resignation or glee—the literature nevertheless

had the salutary effect of requiring historians to become more sensitive to their own

textual practices, and the ways in which these too could carry and transmit unwanted

ideological baggage. But such literature may also alert us to the impact that the Internet

may likewise have on both the form and content of historical knowledge in the current

century, alert us to things of more intimate disciplinary concern than internet plagiarism

or sites like RateMyProfessor.com. In other words, if history is written—or archived,

understood and experienced—in forms drawn in part from its cultural and disciplinary

habitus, then what sort of history emerges from the age of the internet, and how might it

be different from that which characterized the previous centuries?

The cultures, organizations and accessibilities of the internet, after all, are of a

radically different nature than those of the printed text. Indeed, if the visual temporalities

of Burckhardt, Warburg, Freud and Benjamin explored those spaces just beyond the

territories of a textually oriented historical discipline, if their nomadisms were among the

first to undertake a visual reorganization of historical reflection, then the contemporary

moment emerges as one in which such impulses could be powerfully amplified and

454
generalized. For example, where the printed text, in any of its historiographical genres,

has its expansive and avowedly inter-textual moments, it is also a space of enclosure and

boundedness (or bindedness), a space that at least rhetorically insists on its internal

coherence and on the integrity of authorship. While a textual collection like the MGH

might have its moments of dispersion, moments that bring it into unforeseen contact with

other texts and contexts, it is nevertheless precisely what it says it is—a collection. As

Derrida might have put it, the Monumenta is an archive, a space of law under which its

documents are submitted to a set of powerful organizing principles. In terms that

Deleuze might prefer, the MGH manifests itself as an example of arborescent logic, a

space that produces and reproduces historical knowledges and territories. On the other

hand, as it is woven into the contemporary spaces of the Web, the digital MGH takes

shape in a very different environment. In contrast to the traditional forms of the text—

both material and discursive—the structure of the Web is rhizomatic rather than

arborescent, its utility and power bound up in its unbounded and interconnected nature.

Thus, one might ask where a book begins and where it ends, or one could enquire if a

collection is complete, but such questions become meaningless when applied to the

internet. Where, after all, does the internet begin and where does it end? And when can

we say that it is complete? Indeed, even with respect to specific regions of the internet,

such questions are meaningless. Once inserted into the Web, as the authors of ―Digital ist

Besser‖ describe, the dMGH immediately bleeds into adjacent virtual territories. With a

simple click, the space of the dMGH arrives in that of the Marburger Lichtbildarchiv, and

from there to a nearly infinite number of linked territories. And if the accelerations of

Burckhardt and the others produced a set of nomadic histories, then the visualities and

455
mobilities of the present—as manifest in both virtual and material spheres—will

doubtless yield novel encounters with, and organizations of, the past. What such

dispersed and rhizomatic archives and histories will look like is impossible to tell. From

this perspective, new forms of nomadism can be seen emerging, nomads that wander

territories and gather speed in the virtual Steppe of the World Wide Web. In the

emerging fields and landscape of digital history, in other words, the contemporary

moment may represent a unique opportunity to glimpse a vision of pasts that are as

mobile, visual and nomadic as the present.

456
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