Dreamland of Humanists

Called by Heinrich Heine a city of dull and culturally limited merchants where poets only go to die, Hamburg would seem an improbable setting for a major new intellectual movement. Yet it was there, at a new university in an unintellectual banking city at the end of World War I, that a trio of innovative thinkers emerged. Together, Aby Warburg, Ernest Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky, developed new avenues of thought in cultural theory, art history, and philosophy, changing the course of cultural and intellectual history not just in Weimar Germany, but throughout the world.

In Dreamland of Humanists, Emily J. Levine considers not just these men, but the historical significance of the time and place where their ideas first took form. Shedding light on the origins of their work in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Levine clarifies the social, political, and economic pressures faced by of German-Jewish scholars on the periphery of Germany’s intellectual world. And by examining the role that this context plays in our analysis of their ideas, Levine confirms that great ideas—like great intellectuals—must come from somewhere.