Hamburger Fremdenblatt, Nr. 299, 28.10.1929. With the kind permission of State Archive Hamburg and Dr. Gerda S. Panofsky.
P7 Added in
handwriting.
№ 299 A issue
of
by Prof.
Dr.
Warburgpassed away
a heart attack.
If you wanted to preface an account of the life which
ended on
you might do best to choose that
wonderful line found in
“He who is tied to a star
will not turn back.” For never before have the paths
of a scholar’s existence, which seemed to lead into
territory not only uncharted but virtually off-limits,
been steered by such an inevitable and immutable force,
and never before has a scholarly mind been capable of
completely transforming this demonic drive into
deliberate intention as in this case.
Thus nearly all that was to determine
sense was presaged: his clear awareness of
the necessity to merge the previously
separate scholarly methods of formal analysis,
iconographic interpretation, and source
interpretation, thus making the image
speak and the word become incarnate; his absolute
attention to seemingly irrelevant details whose careful
study he viewed as the precondition
for all knowledge; and also the will (or rather, the compulsion),
albeit only prefigured in that casual phrase,
to view the history of human civilization as a
history of human passions,
which, in its terrible simplicity –
wanting to have, wanting to give, wanting to kill, wanting to
die – must constantly remain the same,
on a level of existence only ostensibly covered up by civilization.
It is for that very reason that the creative mind must
simultaneously reveal and restrain it
in ever-changing cultural creations.
There would not even have been an awareness
of the challenge to write the history of
these forms of expression and in doing so
describing them as both expressions and forms, had
not been certain of one fact imperative
in his thinking: the fact that
it was in Greek
antiquity that this
dual mental struggle – the fight
for the revelation and restraint of human
primal fervor – was battled out for the first time
and that the victory monuments of this battle,
the “forms” of Greek religiosity and Greek
thought no less so than the “forms” of
Greek art, had an entirely different meaning
within
than had previously been thought.
For their meaning was not just that of “norms” providing
reference points for creative thought in pursuit of an ideal,
but also that of
and giving expression to passions
grown voiceless; and
in either meaning, both as
the medium of sacred harmony and
as demonic Medusa,
be forgotten, reclaimed, and
overcome time and again.
As a young man, he had already been stirred
by the challenge to express all of this. Yet
he could not foresee the paths
it would lead him on. He had begun by
comparing works of art with the writings
of
the vanishing point all of these three lines
seemed to connect to proved to be the center
of a circle containing an infinite number of radiuses.
understand not just poetry and art theory,
but also cult, language, philosophy,
mathematics, and science, in short the sum total
of what Cassirer
as the world of “symbolic forms”. He did not stop there:
he also included ritual as well as legal and economic matters
as the practical preconditions for the constant cultural
exchange not just between peoples but
also between eras in his studies.
ruled by an enormous tension, which
one might call – in order to have an expression for it – a
tension between the rational and the irrational.
It was this very tension, however, found in himself just
as in the objects of his studies that gave his
nature its inner coherence. This did not result
in romantic dissociation, but in a
fascinating combination of dazzling wit
with dark melancholia, of sharp intellectual
criticism with empathetic readiness to help others;
and it was most articulately reflected in his style,
which forced his passionately fervent thinking into
an incomparably strict and at the same time complicated
and succinct language. These tensions in particular,
which would have blown apart a merely
contemplative existence, caused a
kind of activity far exceeding the influence
of a scholar no matter how renowned.
Controlled by his star, he had to control;
himself ready to sacrifice, he demanded sacrifices;
and he intervened in all matters of active life with the same force
with which he – knowing for years that death might strike
at any hour – drove his own body to the highest level
of achievement. Thus he managed to build
wonderful library
instrument of his intellectual work but also its concrete
representation, and he forced the
realization of his many scholarly
and non-scholarly plans, whose
impact we are still in the midst of experiencing.
What he did not need to force but
what instead resulted on its own
from the immediate radiance
of his nature was the emergence of
an intellectual community which –
in a curious contradiction – was preconditioned by
both the atmosphere of
dearly beloved
will live on beyond his life.
In everything he did and prompted others
to do, he never thought of himself: he never
wished for servants to his person, only for
a crew for his Columbus ship; and the
many whom he gave the inner and outer
opportunity for scholarly work witnessed
a humanity in him which can only exist in
strong and strict characters.