Emily Levine ponders the unexpected efflorescence, in Hamburg, of a serious school of humanist scholarship an eventuality that came to pass between 1919 and 1933, Germany s years of democratic experiment and sets up a deeply riveting account of how Hamburg ultimately became a place where ideas, in addition to market goods, were exported. She begins with the founding of the University of Hamburg in 1919 (guided by Aby Warburg a man with a vision, a family with means, and a civic tradition). Hamburgers sought to create a preeminent international university whose intellectual life would assume the characteristics of this city: pioneering in spirit, open-minded, and oriented toward the outside world rather than exclusively toward Germany. We meet Ernst Cassirer, the first chair of philosophy at the city s new university (denied a professorship in Berlin because he was a Jew). Cassirer notably promoted a frame of vision that placed German thought into the context of European intellectual history, an agreeable stance for partnering with Hamburg s reimagined urban identity. Art historian Erwin Panofsky soon joined Cassirer in 1921. His revolutionary art historical approach, later dubbed iconology, would propel him to the status of one of Germany s leading art historians, and, years later, give him prominence as a scholar in postwar America. Levine tells the story of Aby Warburg and how he inspired an intellectual movement that would ultimately transcend its time and place. This context of Jewishness, family, money, and the city, illuminates certain themes in Warburg s, but also Cassirer s and Panofsky s, work just as their ideas offer a new historical portrait of Weimar-era Germany. Levine s title combines a Weimar chronological moment, The Dreamland of Armistice with an art historical concept, Humanist Dreamland and places the city of Hamburg as just one among many historical forces, including economics, Jewishness, politics, and the family, themes that illuminate, in turn, the theoretical impulses in the works of her three scholars. Reciprocally, their work tells us much about Hamburg in the interwar period."
Emily Levine ponders the unexpected efflorescence, in Hamburg, of a serious school of humanist scholarship an eventuality that came to pass between 1919 and 1933, Germany s years of democratic experiment and sets up a deeply riveting account of how Hamburg ultimately became a place where ideas, in addition to market goods, were exported. She begins with the founding of the University of Hamburg in 1919 (guided by Aby Warburg a man with a vision, a family with means, and a civic tradition). Hamburgers sought to create a preeminent international university whose intellectual life would assume the characteristics of this city: pioneering in spirit, open-minded, and oriented toward the outside world rather than exclusively toward Germany. We meet Ernst Cassirer, the first chair of philosophy at the city s new university (denied a professorship in Berlin because he was a Jew). Cassirer notably promoted a frame of vision that placed German thought into the context of European intellectual history, an agreeable stance for partnering with Hamburg s reimagined urban identity. Art historian Erwin Panofsky soon joined Cassirer in 1921. His revolutionary art historical approach, later dubbed iconology, would propel him to the status of one of Germany s leading art historians, and, years later, give him prominence as a scholar in postwar America. Levine tells the story of Aby Warburg and how he inspired an intellectual movement that would ultimately transcend its time and place. This context of Jewishness, family, money, and the city, illuminates certain themes in Warburg s, but also Cassirer s and Panofsky s, work just as their ideas offer a new historical portrait of Weimar-era Germany. Levine s title combines a Weimar chronological moment, The Dreamland of Armistice with an art historical concept, Humanist Dreamland and places the city of Hamburg as just one among many historical forces, including economics, Jewishness, politics, and the family, themes that illuminate, in turn, the theoretical impulses in the works of her three scholars. Reciprocally, their work tells us much about Hamburg in the interwar period."
Über den Autor
Emily J. Levine is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Born in New York City, she lives in Durham, North Carolina.
