66       ROZHOVOR  INTERVIEW
Art History Is the Best Discipline:
Horst Bredekamp in Conversation
with Ladislav Kesner
Ladislav Kesner   Let me start with something personal.
It was said of Aby Warburg by Gertrude Bing that he was
‘Jewish by blood, Hamburger by heart, and Florentine
by soul.’ I was wondering, since you were born in the
north but have been living and working in Berlin for
two decades, where do your soul and heart belong?
Horst Bredekamp   To Hamburg, I have quite different
feelings towards Berlin. There was not one moment when
I felt at home, so to speak. It was always an enterprise to
be here.
LK  That is interesting, because I had the impression
that Berlin is the place where you would feel to belong.
Because you have spent here so much time and energy
developing projects, running institutes…
HB  If I am not mistaken, I have tried to shape the
university, and Berlin has shaped me all the more. I think
there is no town that is so demanding, so ‘wanting’. But
you asked about the feeling of being at home, and Berlin
is a fighting ground, something that takes hold of you and
you have to respond, you never relax.
LK  You were born shortly after the war in Kiel which
was essentially bombed flat. What would be the earliest
cultural experiences that you remember, being raised in
the early fifties in this destroyed city?
HB  I was born in 1947 and one of my very first
memories — if you call that cultural — is living together
with 18 people in one flat. That was the situation everyone
who had made the flight from what is now Poland and
from other parts of Eastern Europe had to live with and
the experience they went through. In Kiel ca. 85% of the
houses had been destroyed because it was a war harbour;
nobody thought that it could be rebuilt. In that very
moment, masses of people who had escaped from the Red
Army front came to the area. Many came to Schleswig-
Holstein as it was less destroyed in comparison, except for
Kiel. Families were crowded together in the few houses
that were not bombed, which is why we lived together
with many babies and young children, and that is my first
experience: never being alone but always together with
other people. My first memories are of the experience of
density.
LK  And the first experiences of art, of whatever kind?
UMĚNÍ  ART       1       LXII       2014
HB  My first experience with art came through the
impulse of my parents, who tried with much dedication
to rediscover what had been forbidden after 1933. They
developed a profound interest in modern arts and
both decided to join the film club, which was a small
institution, as well as the so-called ‘Abendschule’, which
was for people who had no time to study but who worked
in the daytime and learned in the evening. There they
took courses in modern art and theatre and film. And with
their first money they bought books on modern art —
Piccasso, etc. These were the first cultural impulses I came
in contact with.
LK  You studied for two years before devoting yourself
fully to art history, as well as psychology, anthropology
and psychiatry. What left the greatest mark on your later
professional career? Was there some kind of influence or
teacher or literature from that period that really shaped
your later thinking?
HB  At that time, I also studied medicine, but I did not
like my fellow students. That’s why I decided rather early,
already after the second semester, to switch disciplines.
However, I did not want to appear too weak to study
medicine. So I decided, before leaving, I would take
a so-called preparatory course — that is, anatomy with
human corpses. I wanted to be able to say to myself and
others that I did not change disciplines because I was too
shy or too weak to do medicine. So that left a very deep
impression and made it possible for me when I worked on
Michelangelo, Leonardo, and their anatomical studies, to
know what they had gone through.
The second discipline I began was psychiatry, still
in Kiel. That was a similar experience. I have forgotten
the name of the professor I studies with. He was one of
the last classic Freudians. I wonder if you can imagine
that he came into the lecture hall and said: ‘I want to
tell you that today I will cure somebody, a woman who
has a severe disease: she always wants to take a knife
and kill people — and I will treat her. She has a knife-
-tick.’ Then he did something that would be forbidden
today: He brought her in and showed her the packed
audience — the anatomical theatre — and he said:
‘Mrs So-and-so we talked about it, do you accept public
treatment?’ She answered: ‘Yes.’ And then he showed
[Alfred Hitchcock’s] Psycho, a film in which a woman is
killed in the bathroom. One could see how the woman
started to shiver and he could hardly keep her on her
UMĚNÍ  ART       1       LXII       2014
chair. He briefly stopped and then restarted the treatment.
The directness and severity of the treatment was one of
the deepest impressions made on me during all of my
studies. So these were two impulses from other fields.
LK  During the years that you studied psychiatry did
you read Karl Jaspers? I am asking because (as we will
come back to later) in your work with John Krois on
Verkörperung/embodiment you spent much time trying
to rethink Cassirer and Peirce and similar sources of
philosophy, but in my view, the whole German tradition
of psychiatry and psychopathology, and Japers with his
Allgemeine Psychopathologie in particular, is one of the most
revealing sources of profound thinking on embodiment.
So I was wondering whether there are some connections to
that line of German psychopathology and Ausdruckstheorie?
HB  This tradition is very important, but I must confess
that at the time I had no knowledge of it. It only came
to my mind later when I was working on the concept of
mannerism, Entartung, and disease. At that time I was
studying [Ernst] Kretschmer and Jaspers and only then
did I find out that Jaspers came from medicine.
LK  If we now jump in time to 1968: I was 7 years old when
Russian tanks rolled in and one of my earliest memories is
of those days. You were somehow — maybe rather heav-
ily — involved in the student revolts of ’68, am I right?
HB  Yes. Well, I started to study in 1967 and when, after
one and a half years of serving in the German navy,
ROZHOVOR  INTERVIEW       67
I came back, the world was rather changed. It was very
astonishing and one could feel that something was in the
air. I started to study in Kiel, which was one of the most
dominant SDS [Sozialisticher Deutscher Studentenbund]
centres that tried to get in contact with workers from the
shipyards. There was this unbroken tradition of German
marines, who had revolted in 1918, that came from Kiel:
revolutionary soldiers refusing to enter into a new battle
with the English army and then turning against the
officers and then marching towards Berlin. So there was
a kind of tradition of Kiel as a revolutionary city. That is
why the agitation against the Vietnam War — that was the
first protest — and then the quarrel with the university
system and the structure of German society as such, and
finally — the most dominant aspect — the fight against
the generation of parents all came together in the years
between 1966 and 1969.
LK  I was astonished to learn how strong the opposition
was from the conservative part of the German art history
establishment towards young fellows, like yourself, even
more so against Martin Warnke and others. So the stigma
really begins here, with your attitude and participation in
‘68 affairs?
HB  Yes, but not in Kiel. Wolfgang Müller was there, who
was a very liberal man with great sympathies for young
people. The quarrels started in Munich around the time
I went to study there in 1969. There were hard and tough
quarrels with heavy fights, really bodily fights within the
university, including the destruction of furniture, etc. With
1 / Horst Bredekamp (on the right) and Franz-
Joachim Verspohl in Marburg, ca. 1973
68       ROZHOVOR  INTERVIEW
Franz-Joachim Verspohl I have been friends since that time.
And the political situation radicalised at a speed that was
incredible to witness. After three quarters of a year the
group had reached an extremity of opinion that caused it
to disintegrate. Some went into the underground and there
was one person we did not hear of again — he wanted to
kill the Rhodesian dictator Smith and we heard that he was
killed himself instead. So that was the situation in which
the split of the left took place: into absolutely authoritarian
Maoists, left-libertarians like Verspohl and myself, people
who said ‘stop studying and becoming academics and
instead go into factories’, and a small party that joined revo-
lutionary front components, which later became the RAF.
So I went through that, and after bitter, bitter discussions,
Franz-Joachim Verspohl and I left the movement, arguing
that further radicalisation leads to destruction. We stopped
and stuck to art history — and felt guilty.
LK  And it was Martin Warnke, I believe, who was able
to take you as his students and under whose guidance you
were able to write a dissertation.
HB  Yes, that was two years later. From Munich I went
to Berlin, where the situation was similar. Think of
Berlin in 1970: a town that was exploding at that time,
wonderful, but also very aggressive. I thought I would
not find anybody to do my dissertation with, although
I believe Tillmann Buddensieg would have taken me, and
he also told me as much. Verspohl had gone to Cologne
where he was forbidden to enter the institute, receiving
‘Hausverbot’ from Heinz Ladendorff. At that moment,
Warnke wrote him: ‘If you have trouble somewhere: I have
been appointed professor in Marburg and, if you like, you
can write your dissertation with me.’ So Verspohl went
to Marburg and wrote me: ‘This is a fantastic situation
because not only is Warnke here but also Hans-Joachim
Kunst and others.’ I left Berlin and went to Marburg and
then, after another year or so, Heinrich Klotz was also
appointed a professor there; he came from Göttingen. An
incredibly active and friendly group formed, composed
of Kunst, Warnke, Klotz, Verspohl, myself, and a number
of students and assistants who were extremely dedicated.
Out of this, Kritische Berichte emerged. This was the frame
in which the early issues of the journal were produced.
LK  But you were also able at that time to spend several
months in Prague working on your dissertation….
HB  Yes, it was the winter of 1972–73.
LK  What were your impressions of Prague at that time
and the situation at the academy?
HB  I went there in a rather naïve way. As a liberal, left-
wing oriented person, I knew that I was going to a country
where my own ideals had been destroyed five years
before. And I knew that I would come into a kind of hostile
UMĚNÍ  ART       1       LXII       2014
society. On the other hand, I had no feelings of superiority
at all; I came with curiosity and sympathy and I had the
experience of a deep-going personal friendship with Eva
Reitharová, who accommodated me in her flat — a huge
flat in which I had a room of my own — without telling
the police, which she and her husband should have done.
I had very strange, even bizarre experiences with the
National Library and colleagues.
LK  Was there anyone among the Czech art historians
whose work had some impact on your own work at the
time?
HB  I was very much impressed by the writings of
Rudolf Chadraba, his work on the antichrist. I read
through someone’s personal translation; I think it is still
a masterpiece and it is sad that it is not translated — at
least I don’t think it is translated into any other language.1
And then his book on Dürer: When I read Dürer studies
today, I find that taking into account figures like the
Pfeiffer von Niklashausen and other social heresies
and movements is something that it would be fruitful
to continue with. 2 Chadraba I got to know as a rather
obscure person, but I still have an admiration for him.
Then of course Kutal, Stejskal, Pavel Preiss and Josef
Krása, they all offered very stimulating impulses and I had
great respect for them.
LK  Did you meet any of them in person?
HB  Yes, I was invited to give a talk on the situation of
revolutionary art history in West Germany. If I am not
mistaken, it was Friday afternoon and I was so naïve —
there were twenty people or so in the room of the institute,
professors and assistants — and I heard that two-thirds
of them did not want to hear anything about the topic but
wanted to head into the weekend. And I think, behind their
silence, they thought: ‘What a fool!’ In the course of the talk
it nevertheless became very interesting because, I believe,
they realised that I was not a rigid Marxist but somebody
who appreciated their own work and had come as
a colleague out of a kind of curiosity. So in the course of the
discussion the atmosphere changed. But at the beginning it
was quite bizarre.
LK  The early seventies were among of the most difficult
times in our modern history, the beginning of what
communists called ‘normalisation’ after the liberalisation
of the late sixties was crushed. And it was a time when
universities and institutes were systematically purged of
people who were considered politically unreliable; many
institutions were completely personally decimated. Did
you feel that people generally were afraid of meeting you,
talking to you?
HB  No, because there was a hidden agenda. I went to
the National Library, where I wanted to work most of the
UMĚNÍ  ART       1       LXII       2014
time. I wanted to see the manuscripts of Matthias of Janov,
etc. And I of course also wanted to see the literature that
had been written in the past twelve years, also before ’68.
There was a fantastic new development of reinterpreting
the Hussite movement and not all the books were available
in Marburg; that is why I had come to Prague. So during
my very first stay I had a meeting with somebody from
the rare books collection and I asked him: ‘How funny,
I cannot find these titles by a number of authors.’ He
asked me: ‘Who?’ I gave him a couple of names and he
said: ‘Please wait a moment.’ He told me he would have
a talk with the director. And I was led to the director’s or
perhaps department director’s office. And I knew, as
somebody had told me, that I should bring something
as a present. So I had the book Autonomie der Kunst with
me, in which I had written an essay on ‘Autonomie und
Askese’ and I gave this Suhrkamp book as a present to the
official.3 He obviously knew at least a bit of German and
looked through it and saw that I had quoted Marx, so he
exclaimed: ‘Oh you quote Marx!’ My reaction was: ‘Why
not?’ His answer was: ‘Well, because you come from West
Germany,’ and I said: ‘Well, but I see no reason not to deal
with the tools he offers. I would describe my “position” as
close to the “Frankfurt school”.’ ‘Aha,’ he said, and then
we talked about Adorno and Horkheimer. He had a certain
distance to that, but it was my carte blanche for the future.
He said: ‘You will hear from me, please come tomorrow
and go to the room of rare books.’ The man from the rare
books department then came to me: ‘You do not need to
go to the catalogue room, give me all the titles you want to
get.’ And I got all the books I wanted to see, even though
the cards in the catalogue were not there! And I said:
‘Well, this is bizarre.’ And he said: ‘Come to my room,’
and then: ‘You know, we passed through a very difficult
time and a number of the historians you want to quote in
your work are personae non grata. We had to remove the
cards so as not to poison our youth.’ And I felt ashamed
because I was in the privileged position of getting all the
books that Czech scholars were not able to view. I felt
terribly bad and thought: should I leave Czechoslovakia,
or should I just work — in their name? In the end, I was
opportunistic enough to say to myself: ‘I will write my
dissertation in their name, in the name of those whose
books I get only through this special permission.’4
LK  You have not been back to Prague since that time….
HB  I can only say yes, I have not been back, and I can
only explain why by answering your very first questions:
What were my feelings? My feelings were ambivalent:
on the one hand, I felt the suppression that lay over the
country; on the other hand, I felt a strong sympathy
towards this town, because it was dark in a sense and
not destroyed by modern buildings. I had the feeling that
I was still in the town of Kafka — which may have been an
illusion of course — but for me Prague was not something
I had not expected. Quite to the contrary, I thought that
ROZHOVOR  INTERVIEW       69
I was maybe the last generation that could smell the
Prague of a whole tradition going back to the Middle Ages.
And I heard so much about how after 1989 Prague was the
first town whose atmosphere changed completely. So that
was not planned, but I think, inside, I wanted to avoid
destroying the integrity of my memory.
LK  If we can now jump ahead in time, I wanted to ask
briefly about the time when you came to Berlin in 1993.
How difficult was it to take over the department and the
entire faculty? Did you still have to deal with getting rid of
some of those old cadres inherited from GDR times? How
difficult was it on a personal level?
HB  The years between 1993 and 1996 were surely the
most difficult in my whole academic career. As I said,
I was a member of the first wave of researchers who were
nominated as new professors. After I had just completed
my first days at Humboldt University there was a huge
assembly of all the professors and employees — who were,
more or less, two-thirds from the East and one-third from
the West at the time. We had to build a new institute.
I suggested Ruth Tessmar, who had been the dean of
the former institute, and she turned out to be a liberal
and friendly person. She was a professor of drawing at
the university — Universitätszeichenlehrerin in the 19th-
century tradition — and somebody said: ‘No. We are in
a completely new situation, so it must be somebody from
the West.’ And as I had been the one to suggest a name,
somebody said, well, why don’t you do it? Five minutes
later, I was the first dean of an institute that did not exist,
yet. And in the next two years, I had to bring together the
departments of Asian and African studies, of sociology
and political science, and of cultural and art studies.
A bizarre, huge institute. During that period, I got to know
the internal system of the GDR in its real contours, which
I would have preferred to avoid.
LK  Did it shatter the remains of your leftist or left-
liberal world view and ideals?
HB  It did. Because I had to tell myself that I had not
been intelligent and sharp-thinking enough to get rid of
my illusion that the GDR was in a sense a post-Stalinist
society. My ideal was that the GDR plus ‘68 would have
made a better society than the society in which I had
grown up. And that was very naïve thinking, as I thus got
to know through bitter experiences.
LK  I was going through the book commemorating 200
years of art history at Humboldt University5 and quite
obviously the chapter covering 1989 to the present —
which you wrote with Adam Labuda — is extremely short.
It is too recent memory and perhaps it will take a longer
period before someone can really asses it. My last question
about that period: Did your position as a dean and head of
department involve a lot of struggle or fighting with what
70       ROZHOVOR  INTERVIEW
in our country came to be called the ‘old structures’ —
people inherited from the past, with their ways of
thinking and handling things?
HB  Well, everybody has their own perspective. If
I put it into a very condensed view: I did not think much
about it. Intuitively, I avoided contact with Olbricht, my
predecessor, but I tried to do the very best to build up
collegial relationships. One of the most happy moments in
the last twenty years was when, at the end of the 1990s, an
evaluation of the institute took place and at the end of the
second day, when we had a general discussion, someone
from the committee asked: ‘Do you have any questions for
us, as we have been interrogating you two days straight?’
There was a silence and then Ulrich Reinisch, my colleague
from the GDR, said: ‘Yes, I have a question.’ — ‘What
question?’ He said: ‘Why didn’t you ask us if there have
been quarrels between East and West in the last ten years?’
And then he was asked: ‘Well then, we will pose this
question: have there been quarrels at all?’ And Reinisch
said: ‘There have been no quarrels.’ To sum this up: I started
in a left-liberal group of professors, I left this group after
half a year because I saw that it was being instrumentalised
by, say, old Stalinists and I joined the group around Volker
Gerhardt and Jochen Sauer — Angela Merkel’s husband —
that was predominately formed by East German professors
who wanted to rebuild Humboldt University. They came
from the internal opposition against the GDR. I switched in
their direction and worked with them on this challenge.
LK  Let’s turn a page. You have started and managed
and have been the spiritus agens of several important
initiatives here in Berlin: you have been a permanent
UMĚNÍ  ART       1       LXII       2014
2 / Horst Bredekamp in Berlin, Juli 2013
Photo: Ladislav Kesner
fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, bringing
together several groups of image specialists. You have
founded and managed Das Technisches Bild, more
recently also the Kolleg-Forschergruppe Bildakt und
Verkörperung, and you are just starting a new major
excellence cluster Bild Wissen Gestaltung.6 Is any one of
these initiatives closest to your heart, one that you were
most happy about?
HB  One should add Requiem, an enterprise to study
Early Modern tomb culture, and the Goldschmidt
Zentrum, focused on Romanesque art. I always had great
luck to collaborate with dedicated young people. When
you ask about the cluster Bild Wissen Gestaltung, which
we are trying to establish now, or have established, then
Das Technische Bild and the Kolleg-Forschergruppe
Bildakt und Verkörperung are the two columns on which
this huge, newly founded institution stands.
LK  Can you try to summarise what the main goals of
the new excellence cluster are? What do you hope that the
cluster should achieve?
HB  Commonly, pictures are understood as
‘representations’ of external things and phenomena. We
hope instead that within the disciplines that are involved,
among them 25 natural scientists, a sensibility for the
non-representational status of pictures will be established
and enriched. We hope that especially in the natural
sciences a consciousness and knowledge of the specificity
of thinking in and through pictures as tools and not as
objective, passive reflections of thought will be developed.
Working with this aim, we hope to develop a cultural theory
of pictures and shaping (Gestaltung) that comes close to the
Leibnizian concept of thinking, education, shaping, etc.
LK  Which brings us directly to your life-long project.
But before entering into this topic, I will quickly ask
a mischievous question: Would you say that there is some
pragmatic thinking behind the idea of the excellence
cluster, namely, that through such an initiative art history
could somehow gain more relevance by appealing to
the sciences and to the needs of a technocratic society?
And that it may gain, let’s say, more prestige or moral
acceptance from an increasingly technocratic society that
is marginalising the humanities all across Europe?
HB  I have never followed strategic paths. I hope to be
able to say that everything I have tried to achieve came
from voluptus, a wanting deep inside through which
one arrives at points one would never have thought of
beforehand. I would never invest energy only in order to
make art history ‘interesting’. The question of the value
UMĚNÍ  ART       1       LXII       2014
of art history is not my major issue. I am a dedicated art
historian. I think it is one of the best disciplines ever
developed; I defend it and think it is the best discipline
in the world, but I would never follow an agenda to make
it ‘strong’. Either it gains respect through its practice
or it doesn’t. There is no strategy behind my work.
I see another danger for art history: It could happen
that through the interest other disciplines are finding
in pictures, they will soon forget whence the impulse
originated. So I think it could happen that in this huge
ensemble of disciplines working on pictures art history
may be lost. One has to beware of this.
LK  We discussed this extensively in Brno, but I cannot
leave out the question of your view on the relationship
between art history and visual studies, which you quite
programmatically spelled out in an article in Critical
Inquiry a decade ago,7 and you presented an updated
version of that argument at a recent conference in Brno.8
Your entire scholarly career, your books indeed give
support to your view of art history as Bildwissenschaft.
But still there is one doubt in my mind: Do you think
art history is so conceived that it can develop a sort
of conceptual apparatus and theory that can also be
applicable and interesting for that enormous realm of
contemporary, not historical, scientific imagery? I wonder
whether the apparatus of Bildwissenschaft and art history
has anything to offer on the level of general theory or even
of individual interpretations to the specialised branches
of scientific images and interpretations of scientific
imaging in radiology, astronomy, microscopy, etc.
HB  I can only underline my conviction that there is one,
in my view decisive, argument that privileges art history
as the discipline responsible for these kinds of images and
pictures as such and not as a tool for doing something with
them: that is the appreciation of details and form. I do
not see any other discipline, apart from archaeology, that
trains the student to have respect for shapes, form. And
we talked about this in Brno: I of course have the greatest
sympathy for the field of visual studies, but I see the losses
of researchers who come from epistemology and not from
the internal qualities of what they are investigating and
doing their research on. Visual tools, in my view, have to
be treated first and foremost in a strictly formal, analytical
way. I take this as a metaphor for respecting the details
of construction and the internal structures of shaping
‘Gestalt’. In this sense there is no distinction between
a late Gothic Madonna and the microscopic observations
of optogenetics. It is on this level that both fields require
a trained eye and a trained language in order to grasp,
reflect, abstract, and historicise the given forms and their
productive changes. This is my conviction.
LK  Again, those initiatives we discussed and all those
meetings, conferences, and also the journal Bildwelten
des Wissens — all of this provides quite a huge sum of
ROZHOVOR  INTERVIEW       71
evidence that meaningful cooperation and dialogue
between the humanistically educated art historian and
the image scientist can happen and is happening here in
Berlin, of all places. On the other hand, you yourself said
in the interview with Christopher Wood: ‘My further goal
is to break down the arrogance of science.’9 So am I right
in assuming that the dialogue with scientists is still an
open, on-going process, and that there is still a lot to do to
persuade them to be more receptive or responsive to what
art history has to offer?
HB  Yes, that is always a process. And it takes years to
get both: a respectful understanding for what scientists
are doing and respect from their side. So it is not a given,
and I always, on certain occasions, feel we are brought
back to the situation of, say, twenty years ago when
scientists would leave the room as soon as they realised
that humanists and even art historians were present. We
could not have created the cluster Bild Wissen Gestaltung
without the mutual trust we had developed over years of
discussions with scientists. And the same holds true for the
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften,
where I have been member since 1996 and where scientists
regularly encounter humanists at general meetings.
LK  It seems to me that this line of work that you and
others have developed here in Germany is so important
and so under-appreciated when compared to the tradition
of Anglo-American visual studies, which are much
more oriented towards social and political aspects, not
to mention the French tradition of thinking, which is so
fashionable and so overblown in my view…
HB  Well…
LK  One hopes that the time is finally ripe for the
pendulum to swing back and for more and more people,
students especially, to find inspiration in this more
analytical, philosophically founded approach to image
science, rather than post-structuralistically inspired
visual studies. Anyway, I would like to switch over to your
work on embodiment and your cooperation with the late
John Krois.10 This, to me, is quite a paradigmatic situation
of a meaningful dialogue between a philosopher and an
art historian. I was happy enough to meet John Krois
shortly before he died, when he presented his theory of
haptic pictures, and I was deeply impressed. Your mutual
cooperation, which began in 1991 — was it mostly a happy
coincidence or was there later in part also a programmatic
effort to demonstrate the possibility of a systematic
dialogue between philosophy and art history, something
which harks back to Hamburg and the times of intense
cooperation between people like Cassirer on the one hand
and Warburg and Saxl on the other?
HB  Well, there was no planning. It was only a coinci-
dence of interests and sympathy that caused us to find each
72       ROZHOVOR  INTERVIEW
other again at Humboldt University after having spent
a year together at the Wiko. We decided to offer seminars
together. In my cellar I found a huge Leitz-folder for Was ist
Ein Bild, a class we gave in 1996 — from Plato to Panofsky.
John Michael Krois was in my lectures, and I was in his,
too, and these were most happy moments. When I gave my
lecture on Leibniz, I said, to the surprise of the audience:
‘Dear commilitones, there is somebody in the room who
knows more about this topic than me.’ John Krois would
come to the podium and give the lecture in my place, at
least the first 45 minutes, after which a discussion would
follow. These were extremely happy moments of collabora-
tion. And we would have continued like that.
A new situation emerged ten years ago, when John
Krois became fed-up with analytic philosophy and the
institutional victory of this heresy in German-speaking
philosophy. He said: ‘Horst, my discipline is in danger
because a strand of philosophy is taking over that is
a dead-end, and because it is a dead-end, it is trying to get
as many positions as possible. And Humboldt University
has fallen into these hands. I do not know what to do.’ In
that very moment, I got the offer to run the campaign
for the Kollegforschergruppe Bildakt and we decided to
join forces. We both created this and it is one of the most
unbearable tragedies in my intellectual life that this great,
shy, sovereign philosopher, who had deep sympathy for
art history, died of cancer. We used to make jokes when
discussing things and always came back to the question:
Which is the better discipline: philosophy or art history?
I of course always said philosophy, but he relentlessly said:
no, art history is much better than philosophy. That de-
monstrates the atmosphere in which these two disciplines
came together in order to recreate at least the atmosphere
of the Hamburgian school or Warburg library: a most
liberal collaboration of philosophers and art historians.
LK  Well, which again is in my view such a remarkable
achievement, especially given the way philosophy is used
in much of recent art historical theory, which is often
quite content with a very superficial quoting of a few, all
too fashionable names, repeated ad nauseam.
HB  We have the same view on that. Yes, it is an artistic
approach of climbing up in the circus of ideas.
LK  I really think, again, that it is probably one of the
lasting achievements of your cooperation that, indeed,
within this initiative and now with the excellence cluster
the willingness to enter into a mutual dialogue between
philosophy and image disciplines can continue. By the
way, what contemporary philosophers do you read?
HB  My favourite is Wolfram Hogrebe from Bonn. I also
read Markus Gabriel, of course, as well as philosophers of
embodiment — Alva Noë, Evan Thompson, and also Shaun
Gallagher, whom we had as a fellow for a few months last
year. These are not fashionable thinkers and that is what
UMĚNÍ  ART       1       LXII       2014
I like most. They do not go to the market, so to speak, and
they know that they have a very difficult standing in their
given intellectual field in America, but they are fighting
for something that is parallel to us. Their problem is that,
up to now, they do not distinguish between the world
and the shaped world, while we draw a line between the
world as such and the shaped forms that approach us.
That is what we continuously discuss with them and also
with people doing research on mirror neurons. So these
are the authors I am reading, but I must confess that
Wolfram Hogrebe is currently my favourite — and of
course Thomas Nagel. I am just reading his latest book; the
final chapter of my Bildakt book11 goes in the direction of
Thomas Nagel’s, say, worldview.12 It is very impressive.
LK  If I may once again touch on the social role of what
you have been doing, that is, in Bildwissenschaft and art
history: You have written a lot on Warburg, who at one
point has a beautiful saying about the Bildersalat which
surrounds us and, if anything, the Bildersalat is getting
more and more dense. Do you see a role of art history
and Bildwissenschaft as somehow to provide tools to help
manage, to meaningfully engage with that Bildersalat from
which there is no escape?
HB  It may sound banal, but I would answer in the same
way as I did when you asked about the relations to visual
studies. The only way to study pictures is concreteness,
analysing the shaped form and comparing. Many
fields are waiting for the art history of our times and
I sometimes feel a sadness that I cannot follow up. Being
involved with the organisation of the cluster, etc., hinders
me from applying all these new tools. What I would have
liked to do, and one should do, perhaps as a dissertation, is
trace a history of the pictures on Facebook, for example.
And all the other tools that are extremely interesting
and very fast-moving. I talked with Hubert Burda, the
journal tycoon, who is still an art historian; he tries to
follow up on these recent developments and his newest
book, In Medias Res, was an attempt to shape this frontier.
I thought that it was a very interesting book. It is well
thought through, well put.
LK  There is an interesting moment in your interview
with Christopher Wood when you come across
Warburg’s notion of the destruction of Denkraum and you
sound a little bit pessimistic because you talk about the
basically negative situation.13 And obviously it would be
quite easy to extend that view into a pessimistic, gloomy
view of the contemporary world and the ways of modern
communication, how they are emptying that Denkraum.
But on the other hand, it is exactly your work — for
instance, on images in Galileo, in Darwin — your whole
scholarly career that seems to me to show that there are
many, many images, especially scientific images, which
literally open new Denkräume and new possibilities for
truly thoughtful reflection.
UMĚNÍ  ART       1       LXII       2014
HB  Yes, hopefully.
LK  So would it be correct to say that it is mostly media
images which inundate all of us, which consume so much
attention and energy of all people to the point of really
flattening the Denkraum, while on the other hand there is
a whole other world of images, scientific and also artistic
images, that potentially open new Denkräume?
HB  That is, I think, a perfect explanation of the situation
we find today. And that also means one neither has to be
too pessimistic nor radically optimistic. This is a two-sided
situation. I also see the dangers of the presentism of our
times. Just yesterday I wrote the foreword to the new book
in our Actus and Imago series on Paragone as Mitstreit, i.e.
as a controversy, and I argued there that the presentism of
our times, which goes together with a false understanding
of the digital, is turning out to be very problematic, even
dangerous, for all that we believe in. Then again, the finger
on the smartphone that opens the world is Lucretian
seeing, it is seeing and touching in one, and it is fantastic
how society in billions of bites each day creates new
worlds.
LK  My last question is again more personal. It was
my experience when I had an administrative position in
a major museum that it takes all one’s energy all the time,
to the point where I was unable to do any serious writing.
And that was an impulse to leave. I know that others have
had the same experience. In this respect you are a living
enigma to me. How are you able to reconcile your role as
a manager, as a leader, as somebody who is really turning
initiatives into a tangible reality with all the networking,
policy-making, etc., required, and at the same time keep
up with your scholarly life? How you can manage all of
that?
HB  Well, I do not manage it [laughs]. My experience
is that it is quite the opposite. Without writing one page
a day, I cannot do administration. It is not that I cannot
do research because I do administration, it is the other
way around. I could not do administration if I did not
do research each day. So when I come home, I have my
evening Stulle [laughs] and I read and write.
LK  So you are able to write scholarly stuff even during
the semester….
HB  If I do not do it, I cannot do my administrative
work. I would crumble if I did not continue to write even
throughout the semester. I am currently writing a book on
Charlemagne. And I could not do my regular work if I did
not do so, I would leave the job.
LK  But you once told me that you can really only
do serious writing during the summer and Christmas
vacation when you go to your tusculum, disconnected
ROZHOVOR  INTERVIEW       73
from email and everything, and that is really the
cherished time for your writing while doing nothing else.
HB  That is also true. I am always distracted. But
nevertheless, the student assistants offer incredible help
because they push me; they come in the morning to get the
orders [laughs]. I give them the tasks by number — each
item has a number, and at the end of the year we approach
3000; in the evening, I get the results of the day. This
helps a lot, and I hope it is not only a burden but also an
inspiration for them.
LK  So you survive the burden and stress of running and
managing the institutes just by sticking to your writing
and scholarly work. Which is nonetheless admirable.
HB  No, the sacrifice is on the human side, family and
friends: ‘Die Rechnung geht nicht auf.’ But I cannot help it.
LK  Let’s finish on a lighter note: I was watching you in
a football match during the semester-end party and it was
obvious that you play more than occasionally? Do you play
regularly? Is that something that keeps you ticking?
HB  Yes.
notes
1  Rudolf Chadraba, Staroměstská mostecká věž a triumfální symbolika
v umění Karla IV., Praha 1971.
2  Rudolf Chadraba, Albrecht Dürer, Praha 1964. — Idem, Dürers
Apokalypse. Eine ikonologische Deutung, Prag 1964.
3  Michael Müller, Horst Bredekamp et al., Autonomie der Kunst: zur
Genese und Kritik einer buergerlichen Kategorie, Frankfurt 1972.
4  Horst Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte: Bilderkampfe
von der Spätantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution, Frankfurt 1975.
5  Horst Bredekamp — Adam Labuda (eds), In der Mitte Berlins. 200
Jahre Kunstgeschichte an der Humboldt-Universität, Berlin 2010.
6  For more comprehensive information, see https://www.
interdisciplinary-laboratory.hu-berlin.de/.
7  Horst Bredekamp, A Neglected Tradition? Art History as
Bildwissenschaft, Critical Inquiry XXIX, 2003, No. 3, pp. 418–428.
8  Horst Bredekamp was a keynote speaker at the international
conference ‘Art History and Bildwissenschaft: interfaces, interactions,
antinomies’, organised by the Department of Art History, Masaryk
University, and the Moravian Gallery in March 2013.
9  Horst Bredekamp, Iconoclasts and Iconophiles: Horst Bredekamp
in Conversation with Christopher S. Wood, Art Bulletin XCIV, 2012, No.
4, pp. 515–527.
10  The works of John Krois on this subject are collected in: Horst
Bredekamp — Marion Lausche (eds), John Michael Krois. Bildkörper und
Körperschema, Berlin 2011.
11  Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts, Berlin 2010.
12  Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Oxford 2012.
13  Bredekamp (see note 9).