With his Atlas, Warburg a/empted a scholarly savage of European cultural memory. Founder of poli=cal iconography and history of visual media. Art history as a laboratory of cultural- scien=fic picture- history. Each day, Warburg wrote in 1917, turns me more and more into a historian of the image. Warburg strongly emphasized the value of a picture beyond the limits of the arts; they were, for him, the nervous organs of percep=on of the contemporary internal and external life. (E. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, p. 355). The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne shows the product of Warburg s concept of art history as a science of images or, as he wrote in 1925 26, across the work- of- art- history towards a science of pictorial shape as its final goal. 31
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, a piece of social cri=cism produced with graphic designer John HearVield in 1929: Tucholsky managed to combine vicious a/acks on everything he disliked about Germany in his days with a declara=on of love for his country. In the last chapter, under the headline Heimat, he wrote We have just wri@en "no" on 225 pages, "no" out of sympathy and "no" out of love, "no" out of hate and "no" out of passion and now we would like to say "yes" for once. "Yes" to the countryside and the country of Germany. The country where we were born and whose language we speak. (...) And now I would like to tell you something: it is not true that all those who call themselves 'naqonal' and who are nothing but gentrified militants have taken out a lease on this country and its language just for them. Germany is not just a government representaqve in his tailcoat, nor is it a headmaster, nor is it the ladies and gentlemen of the steel helmets. We are here too. (...) Germany is a divided country. We are one part of it. And whatever the situaqon, we quietly love our country unshakably, without a flag, or a street organ, no senqmentality and no drawn sword. (Heimat, in Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Berlin 1929, p. 226) 32
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) 33
These on the Concept of History: history in the language of photography. Perspec=ve of disaster and catastophe and the thesis flash back across Benjamin s concern over the complicity between aesthe=c ideology and the fascist aesthe=ciza=on of poli=cs and war. Theses Theses ques=on a historicism that undestands itself as a version of realism by evoking the authority of so- called facts. For Benjamin there is no fascism without realism, an ideology tha both belongs and does not belong to the history of photography. Aim: to measure the extent to which the media of technical reproduc=on lend themselves to social and poli=cal forces. Interest in the effects of technology upon our undertanding of aesthe=c Rise of photography and the issue of The work of art in the age of its technological reproduc=on as the problem of fascism and inaugurates a rethinking of a series of concepts, such as crea=vity and genius, eternal value and mystery [...] whose uncontrolled (and at present uncontrollable) apllica=on would lead to a processing data of Fascist sense, IllumanQons, p. 218. Adressing these ques=ons is a call for responsability The possible convergence of photography and history is oden located by Benjamin in the historiographical event 34
The tradition of bourgeois society may be compared to a camera. The bourgeois scholar peers into it like the amateur who enjoys the colorful images in the viewfinder. The materialist dialectician operates with it. His job is to set afocus [festzustellen]. He may optfor a smaller or wider angle, for harsher, political or softer historical lighting-but hefinally adjusts the shutter and shoots. Once he has carried off the photographic plate-the image of the object as it has entered social tradition-the concept assumes its rights and develops it. For the plate can only offer a negative. It is the product of an apparatus that substitutes lightfor shade, shade for light. Nothing would be more inappropriate than for the imageformed in this way to claimfinalityfor itself. [GS 1: 3.1165]6 35