Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg on 13 June 1866, the eldest son of a Jewish banker. Photographs show him as a short, shy-looking man with powerful dark eyes. In a questionnaire he once imagined for his own amusement, he described himself as "a small gentleman with a black moustache who sometimes tells stories in dialect."212 Unable to reconcile himself to his father's demands to embrace both Jewish orthodoxy and the family banking business, he suffered from long bouts of anxiety and melancholia. To find relief, he sought experience of the world in books, and became deeply interested in the early philosophies of Greek and Rome, in the cultures of the Renaissance, in Native American civilizations and in Buddhist religion. He seemed unable to accept the constraints of any one discipline or school of thought. An eclectic curiosity dominated all his undertakings.
His passion for books and images began in his childhood. Among the earliest intellectual experiences he could remember was seeing, at the age of six, the striking illustrations of Balzac's Petites miseres de la vie conjugale, depicting melodramatic family scenes in which weeping women, angry men, screaming children and amused servants acted out the misfortunes of bourgeois married life. The boy became obsessed by them, and they vividly haunted his dreams. A couple of years later, he started devouring books "full of stories about Red Indians." These images and adventures offered him, he was later to recall, "a means of withdrawing from a depressing reality in which I was quite helpless." Unable to voice his anger and frustration, what Warburg called the emotion of pain, he sought and found "an outlet in fantasies of romantic cruelty. This was my inoculation against active cruelty."213 His siblings remembered him always surrounded by books, reading every scrap of paper he came across—even the family encyclopedia, which he perused from the first to the last volume.
Not only reading but collecting books became for Warburg a vital need. On his thirteenth birthday, determined to follow neither his father's career nor his family's religion, the voracious adolescent made his younger brother Max the offer of his birthright: he would exchange his privilege, as the eldest son, of entering the family firm, for the promise that Max would buy him all the books he ever wanted. Max, aged twelve, agreed. From then on, the many books purchased with funds supplied by the faithful Max became the core of Warburg's library.
Warburg's collecting passion was never entirely haphazard. On the contrary; from very early on, his reading seems to have been directed towards certain very specific questions. Most of us, looking back, find it astonishing to recognize in our first books inklings of an interest that did not become apparent until much later, which nevertheless apparently stirred us long before we could put our interest into words. The emotions of Warburg's childhood books finally found an explanation in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laokoon, a classic text that he read for the first time when he entered Bonn University at the age of twenty.214 Lessing's Laokoon became for him a magical touchstone. "One must be young," the aged Goethe had written almost sixty years earlier, "to understand the influence that Lessing's Laokoon had on us, tearing us away from the passivity of contemplation and opening up free realms of thought. The utpictura poesis [the classical comparison between the aesthetics of painting and those of poetry], so long misunderstood, was all of a sudden brushed away; their summits seemed very different to us, and yet they seemed very close in their foundations."215 In Lessing's work the young Warburg recognized not only the power of an argument that attempted to explore the different creative systems of images and words, but above all the notion that each age recaptures for its own reasons an aspect of tradition upon which it builds its own sym- bology and meaning, what he was to call "the survival of antiquity, a problem of a purely historical nature."216 The question that began to take shape for Warburg was how our oldest symbols are renewed at different ages, and how their reincarnations link and reverberate in each other. One of the most resonant words in his intellectual development was Kompatibilitat, compatibility217— experience by association—so it's not surprising that he chose to explain his own library with a definition borrowed from the critic Ewald Hering. For Warburg his
library was memory, but "memory as organized matter."-
218
The library that Warburg began to assemble in his adolescence, which in 1909 he transferred to his new house on the Heilwigstrasse in Hamburg, was above all a personal one, and it followed a uniquely idiosyncratic cataloguing system. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a controversy raged in Germany about the best method of organizing a library. The opposing parties argued, on the one hand, for a hierarchical order of subjects to guide the reader from one field of knowledge to another, and on the other, for an order based on the size of a volume and its date of acquisition. (The latter, incidentally, was a system that had been employed successfully in certain medieval libraries.)219 For Warburg, neither method was satisfactory. He demanded from his collection a fluidity and vivacity that neither enclosure by subject nor restrictions of chronology allowed him. Fritz Saxl noted in 1943 how Warburg had reacted to the idea of such mechanical cataloguing, which, in an age of increased book production, was rapidly replacing the "much more scholarly familiarity which is gained by browsing." According to Saxl, "Warburg recognized the danger" and spoke of the "law of the good neighbour." The book with which one was familiar was not, in most cases, the book one needed. It was the unknown neighbour on the shelf that contained the vital information, even though one might not guess this from its title. "The overriding idea was that all the books together—each containing its larger or smaller bit of information and being supplemented by its neighbours— should by their titles guide the student to perceive the essential forces of the human mind and its history. Books were for Warburg more than instruments of research. Assembled and grouped, they expressed the thought of mankind in its constant and in its changing aspects."220
Not only books. Warburg had a remarkable memory for images, and was able to weave complicated tapestries of iconographical connections which he then attempted to expand upon in fragmentary essays. While poring through antiquarian catalogues, he would jot down on small cards the titles that caught his attention, accompanied by dense commentaries in what he called his "thick eel-gruel style,"221 filing them in separate boxes according to a complicated (and variable) system. Those who knew him spoke of the "instinct" that guided him in compiling important bibliographies on whatever subject interested him at the time, an instinct that led him to rearrange (and keep rearranging) the books on the shelves following the lines of thought he was at any given moment pursuing. As Warburg imagined it, a library was above all an accumulation of associations, each association breeding a new image or text to be associated, until the associations returned the reader to the first page. For Warburg, every library was circular.
Warburg dedicated his library, with its oval reading room (which he called die kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the Warburg Library of Cultural Science), to the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses. For Warburg the history of humankind was an ongoing, constantly changing attempt to give tongue and features to archaic experiences, less individual than generic, embedded in social memory. Like many scholars of his generation, he had been influenced by the theories of the German neurologist Richard Semon, who had argued for a physiological theory of emotions.222 According to Semon, memory is the quality that distinguishes living from dead matter. Any event affecting living matter leaves a trace (what Semon calls an engram) that can be animated when we remember. For Warburg these engrams were in fact pure symbols alive at the core of every culture, and what interested him was why a given period (the Renaissance, for example, or the Enlightenment) would be so affected by certain of these symbols, or by certain aspects of them, that they would shape the voice and style of its literature and art. Because of its haunting power, Warburg wonderfully described this active memory as "a ghost story for adults."223