Culture, commerce, and the city: Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky in Hamburg, 1919--1933

This dissertation examines the intimate relationship between place and culture in Weimar-era Hamburg through the lives and works of its three most prominent intellectuals: the historian of art and civilization, Aby Warburg (1866-1929), the philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), and the art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968). Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg shared an intellectual interest in the historical development of what they called "symbolic forms" in art history and philosophy from the classical through the modern periods. Rather than offer an exegesis of their works, I use their lives and works to investigate three historical themes: Weimar culture and politics; the relationship between Germans and Jews; and Hamburg's particular history in relation to Germany. I argue that this circle's unconventional methodology, bridging contextualism and formalism, as well as metaphysics and epistemology, reflected the cultural, political, and economic institutions of its host city. Hamburg enjoyed a longtime reputation as a mercantilist city, but it was not an intellectual center. Yet Hamburg's cosmopolitanism resulting from its international trade, its tradition of cultural philanthropy, and its loose institutional structure ultimately granted its scholars a unique degree of cultural autonomy. This dissertation shows how and why the unlikely port city of Hamburg---and not Berlin with its century-old university---produced one of the most important interdisciplinary contributions to the humanities in the twentieth century.;The first chapter describes Warburg's role in the debate leading up to the University of Hamburg's founding in 1919 that pitted scholarly and economic interests against one another. The second presents Cassirer's appointment at the university as a testament to Warburg's vision of an open and liberal Hamburg, and Cassirer's potential departure as a threat to that vision. The third completes the triumvirate of the Hamburg School by placing Panofsky's groundbreaking work in the nascent field of art history in the context of Hamburg. The fourth focuses on the scholars' wives---Mary Warburg, Toni Cassirer, and Dora Panofsky---and views the circle through historical questions concerning gender and masculinity. The fifth chapter uses Cassirer's tenure as rector of the young university to describe the rise and fall of the "Republican moment" in German politics and ideas.