J a n e O.

N e w m a n

LUTHER’S BIRTHDAY

Aby Warburg, Albrecht Dürer, and Early Modern Media

in the Age of Modern War

Summary

At the height of World War I, Aby Warburg held a lecture on early modern
popular woodcut illustration and on Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514). He also dis-
cussed several nativity charts drawn for Martin Luther. Timed to coincide with the
400-year jubilee celebrations of the Reformation, the wartime talk suggests
parallels between early modern and modern uses of astrology, and underscores the
potential dangers in both periods of a widespread dissemination in popular print
forms of the ‘superstitious’ belief systems on which they relied. As much as
Warburg saw in his late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century materials the ways in
which print culture could have dangerous consequences during periods of social
and political strife, he also saw a remedial role for the fruits of both the historical
and the contemporary age of mechanical reproduction.

I. The Wanderstrassen of Early Modern Media Culture

Among the holdings of the Warburg Institute Archive in London

may be found five hand-drawn sketches by the art and cultural
historian, Aby Warburg, which suggest how he planned to illustrate
a lecture he held at the height of World War I. The topic is indicat-
ed by the heading, “Zu ‘Luthers Geburtsdatum’”, scrawled at the top
right of one of the drawings.1 The talk was to take as its main

1
The sketches may be found in the holdings of the Warburg Institute Archive
(WIA), III.90.2, F. 63-7. The title and date may be found on F. 63. Warburg
held the talk several times in both informal and formal settings, on 6 Septem-
ber, 1917 in his library ‘Kränzchen’ (the sketches appear to be from this date),
on 12 November, 1917 in Hamburg in front of the Gesellschaft für Hamburgi-
sche Geschichte, and on 23 April, 1918, for the Religionswissenschaftliche
Vereinigung in Berlin (still before the armistice). He ultimately published his
remarks two years later in the Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der
Wissenschaften. Philosophische-historische Klasse, Jahrgang 1920, 26. Ab-
handlung, under the title: Heidnisch-Antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu
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80 Jane O. Newman

focus a number of woodcut illustrations of polemical pamphlets

(Flugschriften) about astrology and single-sheet imprints
(Einblattdrucke) reporting prognostications and prophecies of
various sorts produced during the Reformation era, on the one hand,
and the analysis of several works by the famous German artist,
Albrecht Dürer, most prominently the copper-plate engraving known
as the Melencolia I (1514), from this same period, on the other.
Also to be discussed were contemporaneous hand-drawn and print
nativity charts for Martin Luther — hence, “Luthers Geburtsdatum”
— which testified equally as vividly to the ubiquity of astrological
thinking at the time.
Warburg had been working on the Dürer-Luther relation for some
years. But this lecture was special. Originally planned for early 1917
and postponed for various reasons, including Warburg’s ongoing
research into the topic and the wartime lack of coal to heat the
venue, it was finally held publicly for the first time in November of
that year as part of the 400-year jubilee celebrations of the beginning
of the Reformation organized by the Gesellschaft für Hamburgische
Geschichte.2 Jubilees of the Reformation had been both designed
and perceived as heavily ideological occasions since as early as
1617.3 The commemoration activities of 1917 with which Warburg’s
talk coincided were no exception, for they presented an obvious
opportunity, in the face of the endgame of the war and hunger and
cold both in the trenches and on the homefront, to engage in a
rousing (if somewhat desperate) wartime salute to what Tom Brady
has called the Rankean “Luther-to-Bismarck” “hegemonic narrative”

Luthers Zeiten. I quote the text below after Aby Warburg: Gesammelte Schrif-
ten. Studienausgabe. Ed. Horst Bredekamp et al. Erste Abteilung. Bd. I.2: Die
Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Berlin 1998, pp. 487-558, with page num-
bers indicated in the text.
2
On the dating of the various versions of the talk, see Claudia Wedepohl:
‘Agitationsmittel für die Bearbeitung der Ungelehrten’: Warburgs Reforma-
tionsstudien zwischen Kriegsbeobachtung, historisch-kritischer Forschung und
Verfolgungswahn. In: Kasten 117. Aby Warburg und der Aberglaube im Ersten
Weltkrieg. Ed. Gottfried Korff. Tübingen 2007, pp. 24-38, here pp. 26-28 and
30. I am grateful to Dr. Wedepohl for sharing the text of her article with me
before publication and for helping me negotiate my way through these and
other documents at the Warburg Institute Archive.
3
Johannes Burkhardt: The Thirty Years’ War. In: A Companion to the Reforma-
tion World. Ed. Po-chia Hsia. Oxford 2004, pp. 272-290, here p. 276-277.

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Luther’s Birthday 81

of “how [the] modern German[][state] came to be”.4 Highlighting

the careers of two of the modern nation’s most famous early modern
cultural heroes — Luther and Dürer — was part of the show.
Within a year of Warburg’s Hamburg talk, of course, any thought
that ‘ancient’ German achievements, religious, artistic, or otherwise,
could be reproduced to good ends in the present had been squashed
by the signing of the armistice that confirmed Germany’s defeat.
The rough sketches were drawn during the jubilee year itself,
however, when the ideological stakes of what a specifically German
modernity could celebrate about the legacy of both Dürer and the
Reformation continued to be extraordinarily high.5 When taken
together, their details suggest the theory behind Warburg’s under-
standing of the continuities between the earlier period and his own
time.6 Based on his preference for displaying visual evidence in a
fashion that relied not on the sequential, but, rather, on the simulta-
neous presentation of multiple and mutually illuminating materials,
for example, what the drawings’ networked proliferation of images
most calls to mind is one of Warburg’s signature concepts, that of
the Wanderstrassen of culture, which he defined as the trans-tempo-
ral, trans-medial circuit of paths along which a globe-trotting picto-
rial unconscious moved from east to west and among ancient
primitive and modern rational eras, from high and sacred visual
cultures to their low and profane equivalents, and back again.7 In
the fall of 1917, it was one of the more mono-directional of these
highways, however, the one that led directly from the astrological
mania of Reformation Germany up into his immediate wartime

4
Thomas A. Brady Jr.: The Protestant Reformation in German History. Wa-
shington, D.C. 1988 (= German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., Occasio-
nal paper No. 22), pp. 9-32, here p. 11.
5
There is some discrepancy in the actual hand written date of these sketches. F.
63 carries the notation “6/IX/907”, which would refer to 6 September, 1907.
This was likely a mistake of haste on Warburg’s part, as F. 64-7 of the series
all display the date “6/IX/917”, thus, 6 September, 1917. Again, my thanks to
Dr. Wedepohl for confirming Warburg’s habit of writing “907” for 1907,
“917” for 1917, and so on.
6
The second of the sketches (F. 64), numbered “II” and reproduced in Wede-
pohl (fn. 2), p. 35, suggests the arrangement of the “Anschauungsmaterial” as
Warburg intended to display it.
7
Warburg describes the ‘Wanderstrassen’ in his 1927 essay: Orientalisierende
Astrologie. In: Gesammelte Schriften I.2 (fn. 1), pp. 559-565, here p. 565.
Daphnis 37 2008
82 Jane O. Newman

context, in which Warburg was interested, as he worried about the

power of “superstitious” belief systems, such as those visible in and
disseminated by the cross section of early modern media he inten-
ded to display, to initiate and even exacerbate widespread and
ultimately uncontrollable ‘popular’ political movements and events,
such as the Peasants’ War (1525/26) in the Reformation-era or even
the war hysteria of his own time. For the same kind of astrological
thinking that he identifies as rampant in the sixteenth century had in
fact experienced a major uptick just prior to and during World War
I, along with any number of other irrational, or, if that is too strong,
at least credulous, explanations of the reasons for the disastrous
events sweeping across Europe.8 On Warburg’s mind as he pre-
pared his talk were thus undoubtedly the parallels between early
modern and modern uses of astrology, on the one hand, and the
appeal, yet also the potential danger in both periods of a widespread
dissemination in popular print forms of what he elsewhere identifies
as the vulgar “Pseudo-Mystik” on which they relied, on the other.9
And yet, as clearly as Warburg saw in some of his late fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century materials (and in the secondary criticism on
them that he cites) the ways in which print culture could have
dangerous consequences during periods of social and political strife,
he also saw — or wanted to see — the possibility of a remedial
role, even a part in a program of social healing, for both historical
and contemporary products of the age of mechanical reproduction. It
is thus that in the 1920 article he wrote based on his 1917-18
lectures, Warburg also subtly highlights how, in some ‘higher’
forms of print culture — and in certain of Dürer’s engravings in

8
Documents in Warburg’s library collection make it clear that the art historian
was deeply interested in, yet also concerned about such developments. See
Ralph Winkle: Masse und Magie. Anmerkungen zu einem Interpretament der
Aberglaubensforschung während des Ersten Weltkrieges. In: Kasten 117
(fn. 2), pp. 261-299, and below. Also see Wedepohl (fn. 2), p. 27, on War-
burg’s “zunehmend assoziativere Verkettung historischer und gegenwärtiger
Phänomene” during the war.
9
See Warburg: Orientalisierende Astrologie (fn. 7), p. 563. In his excellent
article, Aby Warburgs Kriegskartothek. Vorbericht einer Rekonstruktion. In:
Kasten 117 (fn. 2), pp. 39-69, here pp. 47 and 67-68, Peter J. Schwartz exami-
nes the extent to which Warburg was familiar with these trends and notes the
relation to the ‘Luther’ talk. He describes Warburg’s work as “das Transponie-
ren eines höchst aktuellen Anliegens in die Tonart der Reformation” (p. 47).

Daphnis 37 2008
Luther’s Birthday 83

particular — there can be discerned a way not to incite, but rather

to calm the unrest associated with such brewing storms. Some ten
years earlier, Warburg had in fact enlisted a number of Dürer
images to do this kind of disciplining work in an exhibit he curated
at the communal Volksheim in his native city of Hamburg.10 Even
though, as I show below, his 1917-8/1920 argument about the Me-
lencolia I in particular, and about its position in Dürer’s print
oeuvre, implicitly rides roughshod over some of the details of the
history of early modern print technology, as well as over the actual
chronology of Dürer’s mastery of its various forms (including
woodcuts and engravings), on the one hand, and suppresses a well
documented controversy over attribution to the great Nuremberg
artist of one of the works he discusses, on the other, Warburg’s
wartime claims make a great deal of sense when juxtaposed with the
Hamburg exhibit and talk of 1905. They were, moreover, in synch
with the way that the great artist had long been celebrated as a
German “cultural hero”, the original “Künstlerfurst”; they also
dovetailed nicely with several layers of art-historical scholarship on
Dürer circulating at the time.11 Filtered through such traditions, the
somewhat desperate form of patriotism that could easily have gotten
the better of any German during the dark days of the war may help

10
On the Volksheim exhibit, see Mark Russell: Aby Warburg and the Public
Purposes of Art in Hamburg. In: Canadian Journal of History/Annales cana-
diennes d’histoire 39 (August 2004), pp. 297-323. I return to the 1905 lecture
below.
11
Joachim von Sandrart (1606-88), one of the first German art historians and
theorists, calls Dürer a “prince of artists” in an inscription he wrote for Dürer’s
tomb in Nuremberg in 1681. See Jane Campbell Hutchison: ‘Ehrlich gehalten
nah und feren’: Five Centuries of Dürer Reception. Albrecht Dürer (1471-
1528) in German History. In Hutchison: Albrecht Dürer. A Guide to Research.
New York and London 2000, pp. 1-24, here pp. 8 and 15. A veritable industry
of Dürer scholarship had emerged in the years around an earlier quadricenten-
nial jubilee of his birthday in 1871 (the same year as the ‘victorious’ consoli-
dation of the German state, of course), and had peaked with the appearance of
the famous art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s complex, but ultimately quite
celebrational monograph on Dürer, first published in 1905 and already in its
third edition by the end of the war. See Jan Bialostocki: Dürer in the Agony of
German Ideologies. In: Bialostocki: Dürer and his Critics. Baden-Baden 1986
(= Saecula Spiritalia 7), pp. 219-263.
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84 Jane O. Newman

explain Warburg’s claims about early modern print culture and some
of their more obviously ideologically motivated details.12
In what follows, I argue that acknowledging both the political and
art historical contexts of Warburg’s wartime lectures helps us under-
stand the yoking together of Luther and Dürer in the essay that grew
out of them in ways that go beyond noting the thematic parallels he
insists on seeing between the two men’s positions on astrology.
These contexts also make clear why, in spite of the clear difficulty
he has in actually showing these parallels in a convincing or coher-
ent way, Warburg may have felt compelled to soldier on and insist
upon them as indicators of the inevitable, if difficult road to a
victory of ‘modern’ German ‘reason’ over inherited traditions of
irrational ‘superstition’. Understanding the ideological need to tell
the story of this victory at the time casts a new light, in turn, on the
somewhat peculiar evidentiary choreography of the essay and its
carefully calibrated, but often historically confusing handling of a
sequence of examples of Reformation-era media.13 Warburg’s
interretation of Dürer’s copper-plate engraving, Melencolia I, relies
particularly heavily on this sequencing, with engraving representing
a more ‘advanced’, more subtle and thus more ‘rational’ way of
dealing with the power of early modern astrological thinking than
the allegedly ‘earlier’ medium of the woodcut, which, because it
was identified as being a less sophisticated and ‘primitive’ form of
print culture that could not help but naively endorse popular actions
and beliefs, is necessarily also read as potentially more dangerous in
its appeal to an uncritical Volk. The implicit hierarchy of value that
emerges in this assessment of the period’s various print genres, with
elite and cerebral engravings privileged over rough and rabble-
rousing woodcuts in a number of ways, is not only at odds with the
historical record of Dürer’s achievements in the latter medium. It
also clashes with the principle often said to be at the heart of
Warburg’s famously interdisciplinary method, in which it was

12
Schwartz (fn. 9), p. 47, suggests that, on the whole, Warburg, while a patriot,
would have wanted to keep his distance from any overtly propagandistic use of
the Reformation during the war. His version of Dürer may ask us to modify
this claim.
13
The dates of some of the images lie, for example, fairly far outside the
parameters of those of the political events Warburg claims to find so distur-
bing, most prominent among them, the Peasants’ War.

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Luther’s Birthday 85

precisely the anti-hierarchical (and thus anti-binary) combination of

art historical, socio-economic and religio-anthropological analyses
that was to allow the inter-connectedness of all vectors of visual
culture — pre-modern and contemporary — to come to light.14 The
shakiness of some of Warburg’s assertions about both the sequenc-
ing and authenticity of Dürer’s work and the questionable stability
of his assumptions about the relation of the various early modern
print media to one another, especially in the case of Dürer, reflect
the bumpy road that his claims about the triumphant legacy of
Reformation-era culture had to travel to reach their jubilee-year
goal. The casualties of both fact and logic sustained in the process
nevertheless suggest the pressure under which the search in this
particular slice of early modern history for ways to manage modern
Germany’s fate stood at the time.15

II. Luther’s Birthday: Astrology and Popular Media Culture

during Times of Unrest

Understanding Warburg’s position on events occurring in World

War I Germany and on how Reformation print culture related to
them is no easy task. Several parameters are offered by E.H. Gom-
brich, who recalls in his famous “intellectual biography” of War-
burg, for example, that the art historian had sought to get involved
in the ‘patriotic’ war as early as 1914 by traveling to Italy to meet

14
This is of course the approach which has earned Warburg the reputation of
being one of the first Kulturwissenschaftler of the modern age. See Edgar
Wind: Warburg’s Concept of ‘Kulturwissenschaft’ and its Meaning for Aes-
thetics. In: Wind: The Eloquence of Symbols. Studies in Humanist Art. Ed.
Jaynie Anderson. Oxford 1983, pp. 21-35. On Warburg’s alleged turn away
“von binä-ren Oppositionsschemata”, see Wedepohl (fn. 2), p. 35.
15
Although calling it by another name, Bruce Holsinger has recently pointed to
how productive the Warburgian Wanderstrassen-model of following scenarios
of the pre-modern into their afterlives can be in his book The Pre-Modern
Condition. Medievalism and the Making of Theory. Chicago and London 2005.
Holsinger traces the “sacralized” “sedimentation” (p. 5) of a medieval pre-mo-
dern in the allegedly secular universe of French theory, disinterring remnants
of the ‘long Middle Ages’ as they vibrate at the heart of postmodern thought.
The Reformation era functioned in a similar way for Warburg and for many
other early twentieth-century German scholars, including Weber and Benjamin.
Daphnis 37 2008
86 Jane O. Newman

with Italian colleagues and found a journal there designed to encou-

rage them to support staying the course as part of the Triple Allian-
ce.16 In 1915, when the Italians broke with the Alliance, Warburg
symbolically broke with them, turning away from his interest in
Italian art and back to the art of another period of crisis for Germa-
ny, namely the Reformation, instead. Following up on some of
Gombrich’s descriptions of these and other of Warburg’s wartime
activities, recent scholarship has shown that, also beginning in 1914,
Warburg began to be consumed, almost to the exclusion of his pre-
existing art historical work, with compiling what has come to be
known as his Kriegskartothek, his wartime collection of citations of
newspaper and magazine articles from both the foreign and the
German press. The 72 file boxes into which the citations were
carefully sorted were ordered by topic — “Aberglaube”,
“Prophezeiungen”, and “De figuris coelis metereologiisque”, for
example — and tracked numerous trends, including the remarkable
resurgence of magical thinking in association with war-related
themes, in great detail during the World War I years.17 The rise in
astrological belief in particular — as well as in occultism, Spiritua-
lism, and other ‘irrational’ belief systems — may have been repre-
sented after the end of hostilities as a kind of desperate response to
the horrible and horribly uncontrollable rationalization of the means
of destruction.18 But, as the note-cards in the Kriegskartothek

16
E. H. Gombrich: Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography. [Orig. 1970] Chica-
go 1986, pp. 206-215, here pp. 206-067. On Warburg’s journal project, see
Anne Spagnolo-Stiff: L’Appello di Aby Warburg a un’intesa italo-tedesca. ‘La
Guerra del 1914-15. Rivista illustrata’. In: Storia dell’arte e politica culturale
intorno al 1900. La Fondazione dell’Istituto Germanico di Storia dell’Arte di
Firenze. Ed. Max Seidel. Venice 1998, pp. 249-270.
17
Again, see Schwartz’s remarkably thorough article (fn. 9), p. 50, for a detailed
description of the Kriegskarthothek and of the books about related issues that
Warburg collected, as well as for the list of headings.
18
According to Carl Christian Bry in his 1924 book, Verkappte Religionen. Kritik
des kollektiven Wahns, for example, myriad forms of such nonsense abounded.
Arnold F. Stolzenberg agreed in a 1928 issue of the journal Das evangelische
Deutschland, a publication of the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund. Ever-
ything and anything seems to have been acceptable leading up to and during the
war, Stolzenberg writes, as long as it could “den zwischen Diesseits und Jenseits
aufgerissenen Abgrund … überbrücken”. Bry and Stolzenberg are quoted in
Winkle (fn. 8), pp. 262-263.

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Luther’s Birthday 87

confirm, there was widespread conviction that such beliefs were

effective at the time, as when it was reported that soldiers were
carrying amulets into battle, hoping to be protected by them from
the industrially enabled carnage of the trenches, and that troops
were being made — and had requested — to march through or near
the village where a notorious female visionary claimed to have
spoken with the Virgin Mary and several saints.19 Warburg’s col-
lection also included references to articles in the press about the
emergence of an active medium industry, with practitioners promis-
ing those left behind the possibility of renewed contact with their
war-dead, as well as about numerous prophecies of possible dates
for successful military engagements and even the end of the war,
based on readings of favorable or malevolent conjunctions of the
stars. The newspapers were full of reports of these kinds of earnest
fads. Warburg and a small army of helpers tracked both them and
reports of other war-related trends and events in great detail.
Both the Kriegskartothek categories into which Warburg sorted
his evidence and the ‘popular’ provenance of the materials he was
assembling were of course not unlike those associated with many of
the early modern documents at the heart of the “Luthers Geburts-
datum” talk. The parallels suggest that Warburg turned to the
research for the lecture as part of his worried search for precedents
for the ways that the media were involved in producing public
opinion at the time, including, for example, the war-hysterical
enthusiasm for the bombing of some of Europe’s most spectacular
cultural monuments, such as the cathedral at Reims. The early
modern astrological “Schlagbilder” in which he is interested were,
as he writes, part of a larger early modern “Sensationspresse”, a
virtual industry of solemnly melodramatic print and news produc-
tion that was particularly prolific during the tense years of the so-
called “pamphlet wars” (1521-5) that led up to the Peasants’
War.20 The choice of words here confirms that Warburg saw his

19
On the immense popularity of the female seer, Barbara Weigand, and her
visions, see Claudia Schlager: Seherinnen und Seismographen: Ausschnitthaftes
zur Trouvaille ‘Barbara Weigand’ aus Aby Warburgs Kriegskarthothek. In:
Kasten 117 (fn. 2), pp. 215-243.
20
On the pamphlet wars, see Helga Robinson Hammerstein: The Battle of the
Booklets: Prognostic Tradition and Proclamation of the Word in Early Six-
teenth-Century Germany, pp. 129-150, and Hans-Joachim Köhler: The ‘Flug-
Daphnis 37 2008
88 Jane O. Newman

early modern materials as forerunners of the contemporary materi-

als he was inventorying in the Kriegskartothek.21 He was not
alone of course in worrying about the power of the press to func-
tion as a “Störenfriede” in the run-up to and during the war.22
Even high-profile politicians (perhaps seeking to divert attention
from their and others’ roles in the process), including Reichskanzler
Bernhard von Bülow and his successor, Theobald von Bethmann
Hollweg, maintained in the spring of 1909, for example, that “Krie-
ge nicht von den Regierungen geplant und herbeigeführt worden
[sind]”, but, rather, are precipitated by the “leidenschaftliche
Erregung der öffentlichen Meinung, die durch Presse und Parlament
die Exekutive mit sich fortriß”.23 Indeed, although among the
countless explanations given for the outbreak of the war was the
power of the enemy press to spread lies about Germany’s dastardly
deeds, the equally as important role of the native press in stoking
the fires of the German people’s ‘patriotic’ support of the conflict
has been noted time and again.24 When the war broke out in 1914,
there were 4,221 newspapers in circulation in the Reich. Most
Germans got their information about war-time developments in the
form in which that information was disseminated in the press at the

schriften’ and their Importance in Religious Debate: A Quantitative Approach,

pp. 153-175 — both in: ‘Astrologici hallucinati’. Stars and the End of the
World in Luther’s Time. Ed. Paola Zambelli. Berlin 1986.
21
See Warburg: Heidnisch-Antike Weissagung (fn. 1), pp. 513, 490, and 510-
511.
22
He was also not alone in nearly becoming a professional ‘newspaper clipper’.
On the trends in both private and professional newspaper clipping services at
the time, see Anke te Heesen: Schnitt 1915. Zeitungsausschnittsammlungen im
Ersten Weltkrieg. In: Kasten 117 (fn. 2), pp. 71-85.
23
Bernhard Rosenberger: Zeitungen als Kriegstreiber? Die Rolle der Presse im
Vorfeld des Ersten Weltkrieges. Köln, Weimar, Wien 1998 (= Medien in
Geschichte und Gegenwart 11), here pp. 32-37.
24
It has nevertheless also been argued that the newspapers may have exaggerated
the so-called ‘war euphoria’ of the people who were in fact far more consumed
by “Verzweifelung” and “Angst”. See Wolfgang Kruse: Die Kriegsbegeiste-
rung im Deutschen Reich zu Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges. Entstehungs-
zusammenhänge, Grenzen und ideologische Strukturen. In: Kriegsbegeisterung
und mentale Kriegsvorbereitung. Interdisziplinäre Studien. Eds. Marcel van der
Linden and Gottfried Mergner. Berlin 1991, pp. 73-87, here pp. 75 and 78.

Daphnis 37 2008
Luther’s Birthday 89

time.25 Concerns about the power of the media to influence popu-

lar sentiment — and actions — were thus well motivated.
In this context, it is not surprising that Warburg is particularly
attuned in the “Luthers Geburtsdatum” lecture to the political and
ideological ramifications of the example of early modern astrologi-
cal thinking with which he begins, namely the response of the
Reformer’s friend and counselor, Philip Melanchthon, to a nativity
chart drawn for Luther that placed his birth year in 1484 (instead of
the now conventionally agreed upon 1483). The year had long been
predicted to be the one that would issue in “eine neue Epoche in der
abendländichen religiösen Entwicklung”, as Warburg writes (p.
500). Because this particular chart had been designed by a Catholic,
one Lucas Gauricus, it naturally identified this “new epoch” as a
disastrous one; by highlighting the unholy conjunction of threatening
astral forces (especially of the planet Saturn with the warlike planet
and god, Mars) in ascendance at the time of Luther’s birth, Gauricus
could associate him and his movement with all kinds of disasters,
both natural and man-made. Seeing in the horoscope an attack on
his friend’s authority (and sensing the propaganda disaster lurking in
the chart), Melanchthon attempted to launch what Warburg calls a
“literarische Gegenoffensive” (p. 520) by promoting the adjustment
of the chart by Protestant astrologers, among them, Johann Carion.
Again, the war-time genesis of Warburg’s essay echoes in the
choice of words. The new chart accepts the 1484 birth date, but
adjusts the time of day when Luther first saw the light. His nativity
can be said to have occurred under the influence of the more friend-
ly conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter (p. 502) as a result; in turn, his
identity as an agent of a now considerably less dire and bellicose —
and thus a more “heroic” and “jovial” — period of religious reform
can be reaffirmed. The dueling nativity charts, which Warburg
reproduces in the published version of the talk, provide him with a
particularly fine example of how astrological lore, articulated in
visual terms, was deployed in the early modern period to serve
“Politik” (p. 504) in ways not unlike those being used in his own
times.
In the jubilee-year lecture, which was, again, delivered at the high
point of a war being fought under the banner of an aggressive Li-

25
This was of course before radio had become a mass medium. See Rosenberger:
Zeitungen als Kriegstreiber? (fn. 23), pp. 38 and 69-71.
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90 Jane O. Newman

beral Protestant Kriegstheologie that saw Luther and his legacy as

the guarantors of Germany’s victory over the ‘enemy’ Catholics in
Belgium and France, it was of course the second and much more
optimistic version of the role of astral logic in Germany’s past that
ultimately had to win out.26 Nevertheless, what Warburg is really
struggling with here is that he ultimately has to admit that a more or
less permanent acceptance of the fateful power of a kind of starry
determinism, and thus an uncomfortable and unflattering sense of
‘un-freedom’, seems to have prevailed in both cases. Even if the
Wittenberg nativity charts were more upbeat about early modern
Germany’s fate at the hands of the Lutherans, that is, they still
suggested that the nation’s destiny was controlled by forces beyond
Man’s — and potentially even God’s — control.27 The possibility
that modern popular print culture might also collude (more or less
systematically) with promoting this same kind of ‘pagan’ helpless-
ness and defeatism was clearly an issue that concerned Warburg.
Indeed, he prefaces his discussion of a plethora of other examples of
Reformation-era illustrated print culture — broadsides, pamphlets,
and books — that testified to the astrological craze of the period,
with the remark that there is still an entire “Handbuch” to be written
about the topic. The provisional title he gives to this virtual tome —
“Von der Unfreiheit des abergläubigen modernen Menschen”
(p. 490) — is, he suggests, the actual topic of his talk, which can
itself serve only as a “ganz vorläufiger Beitrag” to this larger
project. Just as during “d[ie] kampfdurchtobte[] soziale[] und
politische[] Gegenwart” of the Reformation, so too in the early

26
On the ‘Kriegstheologie’ of the World War I period, see Helmut Walser Smith:
German Nationalism and Religious Conflict. Culture, Ideology, and Politics,
1870-1914. Princeton 1995, pp. 19-49 and 141-165. For an example of how the
prediction of victory for Germany in the war was based on the modern nation’s
inheritance of Luther’s mantel, see Wilhelm Walther: Deutschlands Schwert
durch Luther geweiht. Leipzig 1914.
27
Warburg’s argument skirts the issue of just how much in line the astrological
thinking of the Reformation era may or may not have been with Protestant
theological doctrine, particularly in terms of Melanchthon’s more pronounced
belief in a kind of Lutheran astral science, which explained how one could in
fact see God’s hand in the starry designs up above. For a reading of the
relation of Warburg’s thesis to historical Protestant doctrine, see my En-
chantment in Times of War: Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and the Seculari-
zation Thesis. In: Representations 105 (2009), pp. 133-167.

Daphnis 37 2008
Luther’s Birthday 91

twentieth century, astral forces (associated in their sideral versions

with the demonic Olympian gods) were believed to be potent “poli-
tische[] Augenblicksgötter[]” (p. 492) with possibly “fatalistic”
designs on a manipulable (German) Mankind.
The bulk of the first part of Warburg’s lecture is in fact devoted
to getting a head start on examining the multiple traditions of this
kind of disempowering “Aberglaube” as it was encouraged in a
wide selection of popular print media — perhaps as a way to begin
theorizing how to resist or control it. Of particular interest is what
he calls “Saturnfürchtigkeit”, one of the most primitive
(“primitivste”) forms of astral determinism, and its penetration
during the Reformation era into what he calls “illustrative deutsche
Kunst” (p. 505). Warburg culls images from a wide variety of
media, from hand-drawn manuscript illustrations to the woodcut
prints that adorned the popular Volkskalender to both interior and
exterior wall paintings in Goslar, Hildesheim, and Göttingen. All
manner of visual artifacts displayed the power of the planets to
ensnare hapless Mankind in their starry nets, he shows. Particularly
threatening is the influence of the slow and heavy planet and god,
Saturn, which, in association with Mars, can pull Man into its
dangerous, even threatening orbit (pp. 506-508), as noted above. As
was the case with Luther’s nativity chart, so too in these images, it
was only the well placed intercession of Jupiter that could tilt the
conjunction in a more positive direction. Warburg’s focus on arti-
facts and images that documented this culture of powerlessness and
fear provides the wider context of his first example, namely, both
Gauricus’ and Melanchthon’s obsession with the power of this
particular set of astral arrangements to determine the direction of the
reform.
What is nevertheless ultimately crucial for Warburg is the dis-
agreement he emphasizes between the praeceptor Germaniae,
Melanchthon, and his circle, and their leader, Luther, precisely over
the role of this kind of astrological thinking and its relation to the
Protestant cause. He notes, for example, that Luther actually thought
very little of such beliefs, citing the earthy vernacular of the Tisch-
reden: “[e]s ist ein dreck mit irer kunst” (loosely translated: “your
[astrological] art is a load of crap”, p. 500). Luther claimed, accor-
ding to Warburg, that his birth date and time were exclusively of
God’s doing: “Summa, was von Gott geschicht, und sein Werk ist,
das soll man dem Gestirn nicht zuschreiben” (pp. 503-504). Luther’s
Daphnis 37 2008
92 Jane O. Newman

disinclination to endorse astral determinism is well known.28 But to

cast him, as Warburg does here, as an ‘enlightened’ modern over
against the learned Melanchthon, who appears in the argument as a
superstitious ‘primitive’, “ein heidnischer Zeichendeuter” (p. 496),
as a result, represents a nearly willful misreading of Melanchthon’s
efforts, which were in fact designed, as the materials that Warburg
quotes in fact make abundantly clear, to use astrology to have
Luther’s reform represent the fulfillment of God’s plan. Subsequent
scholarship has in fact shown that the opposite of what Warburg
claims was the case; for Melanchthon, “astral influences” were
themselves “subject to God’s will”.29 His related interest in
astronomy likewise belonged to a specifically “Lutheran” natural
philosophy, whereby knowledge of the celestial bodies, for example,
could give “insight into God’s intended order for the world”.30 But
because Warburg would have Luther function as a beacon of (and
model for) national achievement in initiating what he calls the
“innere intellektuelle und religiöse Befreiung des modernen Mensch-
en” from the “antike[] Dämonenfurcht” (p. 531) that drove popular
belief in astrology — in both the sixteenth century and in his own
time — and thus as a warrior in the “Entscheidungskampf um das
freie deutsche Denk-Gewissen” (p. 504, fn. 1 — my emphasis), he
must create a narrative that dissociates the great Reformer from the
debilitating kind of fear associated with the medieval tradition of
astrological prognostics derived from an eastern “heidnisch-antiker
Aberglaube[]” (p. 534). ‘Proving’ the existence of this fear on
Melanchthon’s part, and then showing Luther’s ‘progressive’ and
‘modern’ rejection of it, was the point of the opening anecdote.
In his article, Warburg goes on to gloss over and mystifyingly
dismiss as “Spott” the obviously still astrologically informed claim
that Luther himself makes, again in the Tischreden, about his own
“Saturnkindschaft”: “Ego Martinus Luther sum infelicissimis astris
natus, fortassis sub Saturno” (p. 505). Equally as strained is the

28
For an account of Luther’s commentaries on astrology, see Ingetraut Ludolphy:
Luther und die Astrologie. In: Zambelli (fn. 20), pp. 101-107.
29
On Melanchthon and astrology, see Stefano Caroti: Melanchthon’s Astrology.
In: Zambelli (fn. 20), pp. 109-121.
30
See Charlotte Methuen: The Role of the Heavens in the Thought of Philip
Melanchthon. In: Journal of the History of Ideas 57:3 (1996), pp. 385-403,
here p. 394.

Daphnis 37 2008
Luther’s Birthday 93

reading that follows of Luther’s cunning Foreword to the 1527

German edition of the well–known prognostication pamphlet by
Johann Lichtenberger, which is in fact reproduced in an appendix
(pp. 545-50) in full; there, Luther is allowed — somewhat confu-
singly, given Warburg’s argument in the body of the essay — to
unpack at length his own understanding of the “naturliche kunst der
gestirne” (p. 546) precisely as a kind of sacred astrology along
Melanchthonian lines, recommending that people attend to the
prophecies contained in the booklet not because Lichtenberger has
issued them, but, rather, because the “zeichen vnd warnunge [des
hymels] … so von Gott vnd Engeln geschicht” (p. 549). Warburg’s
claim regarding “Luthers … Ablehnung der gesamten Astrologie”
(p. 499), which, because it stood in contradistinction to “den
damaligen Planetenglauben” (p. 505) widespread at the time, was
supposed to indicate that he was striking out on a new and ‘modern’
path, is thus counter-intuitive, given the kind of data he includes. In
the context of the jubilee-year occasion of his talk, this somewhat
forced and in places quite contradictory celebration of the Refor-
mer’s devout rationality nevertheless makes sense as a way of
identifying Luther as a forerunner of a Germany ‘liberated’ from its
passivity and archaic fears.
If there is a certain lurching quality to the ‘modernizing’ narrative
that Warburg wants to tell about Luther’s relationship to Melanch-
thon’s version of the “heidnisch-antike Weissagung” tradition, it is
the story of early modern media history that Warburg tells in
tandem with it that is left to do the work of actually stabilizing the
argument in subtle ways. A clear pattern emerges, for example, as
Warburg’s illustrations of the tradition of astrological benightedness
mount up. The texts which he cites — and reproduces in the pub-
lished version of his talk — belong nearly exclusively to the canon
of what he calls “Massenliteratur” (p. 509) and the “illustrierte
Sensationspresse” (p. 510); prominent among his selections are a
series of popular prognostication pamphlets by astrologers such as
Paulus von Middelburg and Lichtenberger, but also by Johann
Carion, who was, we will remember, part of the Wittenberg coterie.
Any more ‘sophisticated’ media representations that are included,
such as “ein oberitalienischer Kupferstich” (p. 507), are rendered
“volkstümlich” by juxtaposing them with their German woodcut
reception (even when those woodcuts include some highly refined
examples, such as the “Titelholzschnitt” to Leonhard Reymann’s
Daphnis 37 2008
94 Jane O. Newman

Nativitätskalender (1515) by Erhard Schön, p. 508). The fact that

these ‘popular’ texts are adorned in each case with
“Holzschnittillustration[en]” of course indirectly affirms, for War-
burg, the point he wants to make about the “naïve” (p. 507) ‘primi-
tivism’ of the belief in the stars. Because of the allegedly easy
reproducibility of the woodcut, that is, and because of its appeal and
easy dissemination to the masses on a large scale, this form of print
culture was privileged, he argues, as the “mächtiges neues
Agitationsmittel für die Bearbeitung der Ungelehrten” (p. 511) at the
time. Precisely for this reason, it was dangerous if it landed in the
wrong hands. Class and medium hierarchy — as well as ‘low’ and
‘primitive’ belief in the stars — mirror and reinforce one another in
cunning fashion here.
This particular point is of great “pressegeschichtlich” interest to
Warburg (p. 510), especially insofar as political astrologers appear
to have preferred the more popular print genres when it came to
inciting great moments of social panic, such as the infamous
“Sündflutpanik” of 1524, he explains, when predictions of massive
storms and a catastrophic inundation caused by a particular con-
junction of the stars abounded in print. Such flooding would have
the same kind of dangerous leveling effect as woodcut illustration
itself, but with additionally catastrophic socio-political ramifications,
since earlier predictions of a literal deluge were subsequently
reinterpreted to refer figuratively to the cataclysmic challenge to and
flattening out of social hierarchy that occurred in the unrest of the
Peasants’ War years. Warburg cites in support of his argument about
the intersection of astrologically induced panic, a proliferation of
woodcut-illustrated mass media products, and social unrest the much
earlier work of the German historian of theology, Johann Friedrich,
in his book, Astrologie und Reformation Oder Die Astrologen als
Prediger der Reformation und Urheber des Bauernkrieges (Munich
1864), as well as the essay of his contemporary, the metereologist
G. Hellmann’s Aus der Blütezeit der Astrometeorologie (1914), in
which the power of “Massenliteratur” to cause social chaos is
described and assessed (p. 509). According to Warburg, Friedrich
argues that the “Ursachen der sozialen und kirchlichen Unruhen …
die zur Reformation und zum Bauernkrieg führten” were to be
found in several genres of astrologically informed and widely
distributed “Wahrsagungsliteratur” (p. 509). When we turn to
Friedrich’s book, we find confirmed there Warburg’s claims about
Daphnis 37 2008
Luther’s Birthday 95

the importance of what the Munich-based scholar calls “Epheme-

riden in deutscher Sprache” (p. 41), which, precisely with their “oft
beigefügten Holzschnitten”, were designed “diejenigen zu belehren,
welche des Lesens unkundig waren” (p. 42); the wide dissemination
of this kind of “astrologische Literatur” (p. 36), in both text and
image (“durch Druckschriften und Bilder”, p. 59) during the time of
peak innovations in the “Buchdruckerkunst” of the period (p. 40),
poured gas, Friedrich argues, on the fires of social turmoil.31
Hellmann’s 1914 collection of the woodcut illustrations that adorned
sixteenth-century prognostication broadsides, pamphlets, and books,
which he had located in libraries across Europe in the course of
several decades of work, confirmed to Warburg that it was the
deliberate design and production of Flugschriften illustrated with
woodcuts at strategic moments (for the 1521 Reichstag at Worms,
for example, p. 15) that had led directly to popular disorder, includ-
ing the mass hysteria and flight to higher ground associated with
predictions of the dreaded flooding when the year 1524 finally
rolled around (p. 18).32 The possibility that the popular media of
his own time were engaged in equally dangerous practices would
have been hard to miss.
Reading Warburg’s essay in conversation with his sources in
Friedrich and Hellmann, with their heavy emphasis on the ways in
which a message of astral determinism was delivered to a restless
and illiterate Volk by means of popular print forms illustrated with
woodcuts, calls attention to the fact that the first part of his talk is
concerned nearly exclusively with identifying ‘low’ media forms as
the vehicle of primitive and naïve superstition in the run-up to and
during the Reformation era. This narrative about the overlap of the
niveau of the medium with its message and audience structures the
second part of the talk as well, which concerns primarily the second
member of the dynamic German duo whom he was celebrating in
these dark wartime years, namely, Albrecht Dürer (pp. 522-531).
Warburg’s shift into the Dürer interlude is somewhat startling; the

31
Johann Friedrich: Astrologie und Reformation Oder die Astrologen Prediger
der Reformation und Urheber des Bauernkrieges. Ein Beitrag zur Reforma-
tionsgeschichte. München 1864.
32
See G. Hellmann: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Meteorologie. Nr. 1-5. Berlin
1914 (= Veröffentlichungen des Königlichen Preußischen Meteorologischen
Instituts 273).
Daphnis 37 2008
96 Jane O. Newman

line that he draws connecting Luther and the artist as “Befreier”

(p. 531) and comrades-in-arms in the struggle for German ‘freedom’
from superstition and fear is not prepared for in the opening pages
of the published essay based on the lecture, for example. Yet, Dürer
had long been identified as a “der deutscheste der deutschen Künst-
ler”, and at no time as heartily as on the occasion of the quadricenn-
tenial celebrations of his birth in 1871, as noted above. The actual
celebrations had to be put off a year, due to the ongoing Franco-
Prussian War, but were then observed all the more vigorously in
1872 in the aftermath of the German victory.33 To recall his artistic
triumphs in the context of restoring the hope for a nation now
threatened with defeat in its next war, and thus assimilate him into
an argument that would see promising antecedents in the early
modern period for ways that the modern German nation could be
redeemed, was thus not surprising. To make the story stick, howe-
ver, especially in terms of the issue of which print medium Dürer
favored in the delivery of this celebratory and conciliatory message,
was a bit more difficult.

III. Warburg’s Dürer: Woodcuts, Engraving, and Social Control

Just one year after Warburg’s death in 1929, a meeting of the

Congress of Aesthetics was held in Hamburg at the Kulturwissen-
schaftliche Bibliothek he had founded. The art historian and student
of Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, held a talk on that occasion on the
topic of Warburg’s singular “concept of Kulturwissenschaft”, which
was to become foundational for understanding his interdisciplinary
approach. “It was one of Warburg’s basic convictions”, Wind
writes,

33
For Dürer as the “most German of German artists”, see Heinrich Wölfflin: Die
Kunst Albrecht Dürers. (2. Aufl.) München 1908, p. v. Here Wölfflin disputes
the claim in interesting ways; later, in the subsequent celebration of the 500th
anniversary of Luther’s death in 1928, however, he reverts to a more celebrato-
ry assessment, claiming that Dürer’s art captures a “German way of seeing”.
See below. On Wölfflin, see Jan Bialostocki (fn. 11), p. 313. On the 1871/1872
Dürer celebrations, see Dürers Gloria. Kunst-Kult-Konsum. Ausstellungs-Kata-
log der Kunstbibliothek. Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin.
Berlin 1971, pp. 37-39.

Daphnis 37 2008
Luther’s Birthday 97

that any attempt to detach the image from its relation to religion and
poetry, to cult and drama, is like cutting off its lifeblood … [T]he image
is indissolubly bound up with culture as a whole … Warburg [forsook]
the traditional domains of art history and … enter[ed] into fields which
even professional art historians have tended on the whole to fight shy of
— the history of religious cults, the history of festivals, the history of
the book and literary culture, the history of magic and astrology.34

As liberatory as Wind’s depiction of Warburg’s methods here make

them and him sound in the context of how art history was practiced
at the time, the case of Warburg’s Dürer, particularly as he func-
tions as a mascot of a more rational Germany in the 1917 talk,
offers us a somewhat different view. The work of the great German
artist does indeed appear in Warburg’s interdisciplinary treatment as
deeply invested in the same complex early modern astrological
culture as Melanchthon, Luther, and the rest. Yet, the story told in
the talk of how he handled the threat of its “magic” over the course
of his career in print plays an important role in showing how
Germany could manage its own fate by overcoming the forces of
astral determinism — and the mass belief in them — that threatened
to convulse the nation, in both early modern and modern times.
Warburg identifies Dürer (somewhat counter-intuitively, given their
respective dates — Dürer: 1471-1528; Luther: 1483-1546) as the
successor to Luther in matters of rationality, as an even more lucid
master, in other words, not only of the ‘primitive’ tradition of
Saturnfürchtigkeit in particular, but also of the temptation to pander
to the masses via the correspondingly ‘primitive’ medium of the
woodcut. This version of Dürer was in fact not at all at odds with
the version given by one of the most famous “professional art
historians” of the early twentieth century, namely, Heinrich Wölf-
flin, or with accounts of the alleged ‘development’ of early modern
print media from less to more sophisticated that were surfacing at
the same time.
Art history had begun, that is, in the first decades of the twentieth
century to hold fifteenth- and sixteenth-century woodcuts in general

34
See Wind (fn. 14), pp. 25 and 33. For background on the context of early
twentieth-century ‘cultural studies’, see the essays collected in Kultur und
Kulturwissenschaften um 1900. Krise der Moderne und Glaube an die
Wissenschaft. Ed. Rüdiger vom Bruch et al. Stuttgart 1989.
Daphnis 37 2008
98 Jane O. Newman

in “high[er] regard” after “centuries of relative neglect”.35 Max

Geisberg’s still canonical multi-volume collection of prints, Der
deutsche Einblatt-Holzschnitt in der ersten Hälfte des XVI. Jahrhun-
derts (Munich 1923-30), testifies to the trend. Nevertheless, Geis-
berg had to work hard to “rehabilitate the aesthetic integrity” of the
medium (the collection in fact contains only “impressions” of
especially “good quality” which Geisberg apparently sought out to
reproduce, favoring them over rougher and more worn prints36).
For, beginning already with the work of early Expressionist artists
and of the Brücke collective in particular, the woodcut had begun to
be canonized as “an early form of popular art”. Vital as part of a
“collective cultural identity” for Germany and thus a vehicle of
renewal, to be sure, the woodcut had nevertheless also taken on a
kind of “primordial” expressive power, the very power that made it
potentially dangerous in its “primitivist” allure.37 In Warburg’s
1920 article (based on the 1917 lecture), the story of an ever more
sophisticated and ‘rational’ German art and artistry is helped along
by the introduction of a sequence of illustrations caught in the
crossfire of these trends, whereby a number of apparently deliberate-
ly selected images of Dürer’s work are arranged in such a way as to
provide a model narrative for how “das Deutsche” could be victori-
ous in its “Kampf wider [den] heidnisch-kosmologischen Fatalis-
mus” (Warburg, p. 529). Warburg’s Dürer’s road to reason follows a
path that leaves the “primitive” and destabilizing woodcut behind in
favor of the ‘higher’ and more sophisticated medium of engraving
— this in spite of a problematic chronology for and inconclusive
attribution to him of one of the works discussed, on the one hand,
and the history of his own production in the two media, on the

35
See David Landau and Peter Parshall: The Renaissance Print. 1470-1550. New
Haven and London 1994, here p. 170.
36
Landau/Parshall (fn. 35), p. 170.
37
See Robin Reisenfeld: Cultural Nationalism, ‘Brücke’, and the German
Woodcut: The Formation of a Collective Identity. In: Art History 20:3 (1997),
pp. 289-312, here pp. 289 and 305. Reisenfeld describes the numerous facsimi-
le reproductions of Dürer’s and other early modern artists’ woodcuts that
proliferated during the so-called Gründerzeit as part of the project “to invent a
shared legacy” for the newly united nation (p. 298), but downplays the rather
more explosive impact that the woodcut ‘primitivism’ of the Brücke had.

Daphnis 37 2008
Luther’s Birthday 99

other, both of which made this more or less progressive narrative

difficult to defend.
Warburg moves swiftly through a series of print images associa-
ted with Dürer in the second half of his lecture — from a woodcut
of a man suffering from the “Franzosen-Krankheit” of syphilis that
illustrated a “fliegendes Blatt” by the early modern Nuremberg
doctor, Theodoricus Ulsenius (1496) (Tafel LXXXIII in Warburg) to
a copper-plate engraving, the so-called “Sau von Landser” (1496),
that depicts the incredible natural anomaly of a pig with two bodies,
eight feet, but only one head (Tafel LXXXIV in Warburg), to,
finally, the magnificent Melencolia I of 1514 (Tafel LXXXVI in
Warburg), also an engraving. In each case, the artist is deeply
indebted to, yet takes a different approach to the astrological culture
and “Geist [seiner] Zeitgenossen” (p. 528), according to Warburg.
An elaborate zodiac sphere prominently displaying the fateful year
of 1484 adorns the image of the syphilitic, for example. Dürer relies
in the second example, the “Sau von Landser” engraving, on a
popular — and woodcut-illustrated — “Naturgreuel-Extrablatt” by
Sebastian Brant in which the appearance of this kind of ‘natural
wonder’ was taken as an augury for momentous political events to
come. The Melencolia I, finally, with its encoded message about
how the planet Jupiter, signified in the image by the magical
“Zahlenquadrat” that hangs above the head of the apparently heavy-
hearted female character at its center, can balance out “den gefähr-
lichen Saturn” (p. 527), with its power to produce lethargy and
despair, likewise belongs to a period in which a culture of belief in
the power of the stars was still strong.
And yet, Warburg’s point in presenting these images in this
sequence, which is made to represent Dürer’s entire oeuvre and
career, is not to suggest that Man — or the German Volk — should
face the probability of illness, natural malformation, and despair
engineered by astral forces beyond his control with some kind of
fatalistic resignation. Rather, what he sees in this series of images is
the artist’s gradual movement away from such beliefs, his refusal,
Luther-like, to accept that either he or Germany or Mankind in
general has to submit to being manipulated by the stars. Thus, the
rough woodcut of the syphilitic man is represented as one of
Dürer’s “Frühwerken” (p. 524), which displays not his beholdenness
to, but, rather, only his “Vertrautheit” with the tradition of
“Weissagungspraktik”, as Warburg writes. Already by the time of
Daphnis 37 2008
100 Jane O. Newman

the “Sau von Landser”, the Brantian “mythological” belief in the

supernatural origins of prodigies has been “overcome” (“die Über-
windung des babylonischen Geisteszustandes … [ist] eigentlich
schon vollzogen”, p. 525) and left behind, as has been the medium
of the rough woodcut that decorates the Brant text. Indeed, because
there is no longer any overt reference to astrological lore in the
Dürer “Sau”, Warburg characterizes it as a depiction of primarily
“naturwissenschaftliche[s] Interesse”. Finally, well beyond the
archaic tradition and medium represented by the Ulsenius print,
Dürer encodes in the Melencolia I engraving an explicit thematics of
active victory over astral determinism; in the presence of a potenti-
ally dangerous conjunction of the stars (of Saturn with Mars, for
example), a man-made talisman like the magic square can be requis-
itioned to stand in for Jupiter and thus used to actively manipulate
and resist the influence of the stars. For Warburg, the engraving
signals the final “Umformung” by Dürer of the inherited “magische
Mythologik” at the hands of a “denkende[r] Arbeitsmensch[]”
(p. 528), who is simultaneously a figure for the “genius” artist
himself. He concludes: “der Saturndämon [wird] unschädlich
gemacht durch denkende” — we are to understand: rational and self
determining — “Eigentätigkeit” (p. 53). By virtue of this progres-
sion from magic to science to art — and from woodcut to engraving
— Dürer may not only join, but in fact surpass Luther in his role as
a “Befreier … gegen die feindliche Nativitätsstellerei” (implicitly, of
Melanchthon) with which Warburg had begun. The artist can thus
serve as a model for how to play a role in the “Entscheidungskampf
um das freie deutsche Denk-Gewissen” (p. 504, fn. 1 — my empha-
sis) and achieve an “innere intellektuelle und religiöse Befreiung des
modernen Menschen” (p. 531) writ large. The struggle for and the
liberation of Germany were of course goals that Warburg desperate-
ly wanted to achieve in his jubilee-year talk.
The irregularities in this developmental narrative are several. The
most jarring detail is that the ‘popular’ woodcut of the syphilitic
man and the ‘scientific’ engraving of the monstrous pig of course
both date from the same year, 1496. Rather than representing
different stages of Dürer’s career and choice of medium, then, the
two images testify to what recent scholarship argues was in fact
Dürer’s well known understanding of the two media as
“gleichrangige Ausdrucksmittel”. As the offspring of a family of
goldsmiths well versed in the working of metal, but living and
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Luther’s Birthday 101

working in Nuremberg, one of the centers of innovative work in the

area of woodcut illustration associated with the prominence of the
profession of book publishing there, Dürer was particularly well
positioned to work across what, before him, had been a more
pronounced medial divide.38 By c. 1496, he had already designed
and cut his famous “The Men’s Bath”, for example, which is
characterized by a “stark linear elegance” not conventionally associ-
ated with the ‘primitive’ woodcut medium.39 The ‘later’ years
(1513-4) associated with the so-called “Meisterstiche”-engravings,
including the Melencolia I, were of course followed by the years of
some of highest productivity for Dürer of highly sophisticated
woodcuts, including the Ehrenpforte and the Grosser Triumphwagen
for Emperor Maximilian I, leading to what scholars now in fact see
as the “künstlerische Annäherung beider Techniken”.40 The equal
value attributed at the time to both media — woodcuts and engrav-
ings — by the commercial market that was so important to Dürer is
indicated, finally, by the fact that, interleafed in the volumes of
Hartmann Schedel’s famous Weltchronik, there can be found a good
number of ‘primitive’ woodcut illustrations alternating with copper-
plate engravings, indicating a “heterogeneous” and inclusive manner
of dealing with the various kinds of print objects at the time.41 The
woodcut was thus by no means the “poor cousin of the print family”
when Dürer was active.42 The notion that he had ‘developed’,
‘moved on’, or in any way transcended a ‘primitive’ medium
designed only for the illiterate would have startled those familiar
with his oeuvre in an even cursory way.
Somewhat more puzzling, and yet symptomatic of the pressure
under which Warburg may have felt to depict Dürer as moving from
the ‘pre-modern’ and ‘primitive’ woodcut to the more sophisticated

38
See Rainer Schoch: Albertus Dvrer Noricus Faciebat. Bemerkungen zur Rolle
der Druckgraphik im Werk Albrecht Dürers. In: Albrecht Dürer: Das
druckgraphische Werk. Band I: Kupferstiche, Eisenradierungen und
Kaltnadelblätter. Ed. Rainer Schoch et al. Munich, London 2001, pp. 9-23,
here pp. 9-10.
39
Landau and Parshall (fn. 35), p. 172.
40
See Schoch (fn. 38), p. 15, also for a compa-rative graph of numbers of
engravings and woodcuts produced over the course of Dürer’s career.
41
See Schoch (fn. 38), p. 10.
42
See Landau and Parshall (fn. 35), p. 169.
Daphnis 37 2008
102 Jane O. Newman

and ‘scientific’ engraving, is the choice he seems to have made in

selecting the image of the syphilitic man to reproduce. A note in
Warburg’s text indicates that Karl Sudhoff’s edition of the image in
his Graphische und typographische Erstlinge der Syphilisliteratur
aus den Jahren 1495 und 1496 (1912) was his source for an inter-
pretation of the woodcut (p. 524, note 1). And indeed, when we turn
to the Sudhoff collection, we see that included there as Tafel VI is
the same rough black-and-white version impression of the image we
find in Warburg’s published text.43 But, according to Sudhoff, this
version of the image of the syphilitic has been manipulated “auf
barbarischer Weise”, and is in any case from the second edition of
the broadsheet, reproduced (probably illegally) in Augsburg. It may
have been for this reason that Sudhoff also includes as Tafel V —
and thus in his text, before the version that Warburg reproduces and
cites — the much cleaner and more sophisticated original version of
the woodcut produced in Nuremberg earlier that same year. Its color
wash and clean lines suggest a less rushed, earlier impression (the
purloined image shows signs that the block was worn down by the
time it was used) and certainly make a more elegant impression.
Warburg seems to have passed over this first version and reprodu-
ced the second somewhat mangled one instead. With the top of the
image lopped off to fit a smaller frame — the cut marks mar the
illustration with dark lines on the right side — and a different ex-
planatory text than the one that appears in the original print, War-
burg’s choice ‘primitivizes’ this ‘early’ Dürer print in decisive ways,
making it easier to align with the illustrations adorning the ‘popular’
prognostication treatises that were his subject in the first part of the
talk. Even more interesting is Sudhoff’s matter-of-fact statement in
his commentary on the image that the woodcut can in any case not
be solidly attributed to Dürer (“man hat ihn ohne völlig sichere
Begründung Albrecht Dürer zugeschrieben”, p. 8). Although in-
troduced to it by Sudhoff’s text, then, Warburg has clearly silenced
the art-historical dispute about Dürer’s authorship of the image in
his efforts to drive home his narrative about the artist’s increasing

43
See Karl Sudhoff: Graphische und typographische Erstlinge der Syphilislitera-
tur aus den Jahren 1495 und 1496. München 1912 (= Alte Meister der Medizin
und Naturkunde in Facsimile-Ausgaben und Neudrucken 4), Chapter 2, “Die
astrologische Vision des Dichterarztes Ulsenius vom Sommer 1496”, pp. 8-10,
here p. 10.

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Luther’s Birthday 103

sophistication and ‘rational’ progression from woodcut to engraving

form.
A further (albeit indirect) proof that the problem of attribution
was well known at the time is given at note 1 on page 10 of Sud-
hoff’s commentary, in which he thanks one “Herr Johann Ueltzen”
for having shared the “Negativplatte” of the corrupted woodcut with
him for reproduction. “Ueltzen” had been the author, already in
1900/1901, of an article entitled Das Flugblatt des Theodoricus
Ulsenius mit Dürers Illustration, published in the Zeitschrift für
Bücherfreunde. Monatshefte für Bibliophilie und verwandte Inter-
essen.44 In that essay, Ültzen unpacks at length the “brennende
Streitfrage” of the “Autorschaft Dürers” of the image. While he
ultimately concludes that “[d]ie Illustration … mit grösster Wahr-
scheinlichkeit von dem auch sonst für die Medizin verdienstvollen
Albrecht Dürer herrühr[t] …” (p. 151), he can cite in the pro-Dürer
column only a number of mid- to late nineteenth-century Dürer
scholars, among them J.D. Passavant and Moritz Thausing, whose
claims are based primarily on biographical information. Also ad-
duced are several connoisseurship-based testimonials to the image’s
provenance in letters from museum officials in Dresden and Lon-
don. Such assessments, Ültzen claims, far outweigh the one con-
argument he gives, namely that Ulsenius was actually thought to
have been active in Basel rather than Nuremberg, where he might
actually have had a good chance of meeting the great artist and
asking him to illustrate his text. The evidence is nevertheless at best
circumstantial in both cases, and it is perhaps for this reason that in
the text Warburg cites in connection with his discussion of this
“early” “Dürer woodcut”, Sudhoff must demur and refrain from
endorsing the earlier scholar’s claims. While we have no indication
that Warburg knew the Ültzen piece, he nevertheless seems to have
accepted its claims in his unproblematic attribution of the woodcut
to Dürer because he needed to, because he needed, in other words,
to construct for Dürer an ‘early’ and ‘superstitious’ stage that could
then be left behind on the way to greater enlightenment.45

44
See Johann Ültzen: Das Flugblatt des Theodoricus Ulsenius mit Dürers Illu-
stration. In: Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde. Monatshefte für Bibliophilie und
verwandte Interessen 4 (1900/1901), pp. 151-153.
45
In all fairness, it should be noted that in 1971, the catalogue of the 500-year
jubilee exhibit in Nuremberg still attributes the syphilis woodcut to Dürer.
Daphnis 37 2008
104 Jane O. Newman

Wind’s claims about Warburg’s innovations vis-à-vis establish-

ment art history notwithstanding, Warburg was, finally, no maverick
in unrolling a developmental narrative about Dürer’s relationship to
various print forms in this way, a narrative based at least in part on
a hierarchical assessment of the media, their audiences, and their
message, as well as a desire to show that the products of print
culture could educate Germans in the most literal sense of the term
by ‘leading’ them ‘out’ of an ‘earlier’ primitive stage of their
culture into a more reasonable and ‘modern’ one. Already by 1905,
the well-known German art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin, had told
this same tale about the artist in his monograph, Die Kunst Albrecht
Dürers, also in terms of a comparative media analysis. Wölfflin
juxtaposes — and hierarchizes — Dürer’s use of the woodcut versus
the engraving in direct terms in his book time and again.46 When
compared with the copper plate engraving Kupferstichpassion,
which is “raffiniert” and designed “für Kenner”, he explains,
Dürer’s Kleine Holzschnittpassion is “die volkstümlichste” of the
two. It is unmistakably cut, moreover, in such a way as to maximize
its “populäre Wirkung” by finding “den einfachsten und schlagend-
sten Ausdruck für die Sache” (pp. 206-208), he states. When juxta-
posed with the early woodcut of St. Jerome in his study (1511),
which is ”konservativ” in its use of late 15th century techniques,
Dürer’s later engraving of the same scene (1514), produced at
approximately the same time as Melencolia I, likewise provides an
example of richer and innovative uses of line (“Neuerungen”) and
‘color’. Indeed, “[d]er Holzschnitt konkurriert prinzipiell nicht mit
dem Kupferstich” on any number of technical levels (pp. 247-249),
Wölfflin declares, both here, in his individual analysis of images,
and in general at the end of the book in his summarizing arguments
about Dürer’s “style” (p. 336).

Interestingly, although the exhibit organizers, like Warburg, chose a later

(1498) impression to display, they appear to have selected a version with a
color wash not unlike the original that Sudhoff included. Sudhoff is cited in the
additional materials to the catalogue entry in the image. See Albrecht Dürer
1471-1971. Ausstellung des Germanischen Nationalmuseums. Nürnberg 1971,
p. 224.
46
See Wölfflin (fn. 33). Bialostocki (fn. 11) discusses the distinctions Wölfflin
makes between Dürer’s woodcuts and engravings, here pp. 316-323.

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Luther’s Birthday 105

Another famous — perhaps one of the most famous — early

twentieth-century scholars of Dürer, Erwin Panofsky, agreed.47 In
his well-known The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1943), first
written and published in English and in his new home of the United
States, after he had fled the National Socialist regime, Panofsky
writes that, in spite of Dürer’s astonishing early achievements in the
medium, “woodcuts were, on the whole, more ‘popular’ in character
than engravings and therefore cheaper to acquire”. They were,
moreover, “ill suited for a display of ‘art for art’s sake’ where
connoisseurs might revel in pictorial refinements” (p. 49). When
Dürer moved into “the field of engraving”, however, he “took up a
technique … diametrically opposed to the older and indigenous craft
of the woodcutter” (p. 62). A narrative of woodcut primitivism
versus Dürer’s ‘later’ achievements as an engraver lives on. That
Panofsky’s progressive story about early modern media production
intersects with Wölfflin’s is not surprising. Wölfflin’s well known
Dürer book was in its third printing by 1918. Panofsky had first
become involved in studying the Nuremberg artist in his dissertation
in 1914, and would thus clearly have relied on the senior scholar’s
work. The fact that his and Fritz Saxl’s subsequent monograph on
the Melencolia I, Dürers ‘Melencolia I’. Eine Quellen- und
Typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (1923) was written in close
collaboration with the circle of art and cultural historians who had
begun to gather around Warburg in Hamburg and continues to cite
Wölfflin (p. 71, note 1) could explain a conduit to — or at least a
familiarity with — the earlier scholar’s work in that circle.
Panofsky’s and Saxl’s book of course focuses explicitly on
completing — and yet, also amending — the argument about the
engraving that Warburg himself had begun to make some years
before. In 1923, Panofsky and Saxl disagree, that is, with Warburg’s
substantive claims about the Melencolia I, finding the
“‘dämonischen Zweikampf’ zwischen Saturn und Jupiter” that was
playing itself out in the image “nicht ohne weiteres als einen für den
letzteren ‘siegreichen’” (p. 58). That such a shift of interpretation
between approaches to Dürer’s work that were closely related in
terms of iconographical methodology emerges after the end of the
war makes sense, since it would have been difficult to promote the

47
Bialostocki (fn. 11) declares that Panofsky’s Dürer monograph became “a
‘Summa’ of Dürerology for about three decades”, here p. 361.
Daphnis 37 2008
106 Jane O. Newman

‘jovial’ and ‘rational’ side of this most German of images as having

been ‘victorious’ in any way at that point. But twenty years later, in
the Preface to his English-language monograph, Panofsky seems to
return to a more celebratory role for the artist and the engraving,
declaring that with Dürer’s achievements in the “graphic arts” in
particular, “Germany finally attained the rank of a Great Power in
the domain of art” (p. 3). The claim is clearly unsettling, given the
post-World War II date of the study. His argument about the Melen-
colia I nevertheless follows up on his and Saxl’s earlier disagree-
ment with Warburg by suggesting that certainly during the second
war, an idealized vision of German culture, with its celebration of
reason, had been crushed, perhaps even more decisively than during
World War I.48 And yet, perhaps in exile, there was a way in
which the inheritance of a future, better Germany could be saved.
Part of Panofsky’s argument here continues to resonate with
Wölfflin, albeit the Wölfflin of a somewhat later date, who had
argued on the occasion of the Dürer jubilee-year festivities in 1928
that Dürer exemplified a “German way of seeing the world”.49
After the first war, this is perhaps the more authentic and primal
Germanness that had to be redeemed, the one in which Warburg had
still believed.
Warburg’s wartime lectures on Luther and Dürer thus seek to
craft a narrative about the way forward for Germany out of an
assessment of the two figures’ relationship to early modern media
culture. It has been my argument that he develops his more or less
situationally and ideologically driven claims there about Dürer in
particular based on assumptions about — and traditions of scholarly
assessment of — various genres of early modern print illustration,
assumptions that he then absorbs into a thesis about how images
could be used not only to ensnare the Volk in a disempowering web
of supernatural forces, but also to show them the way to break out
of it by means of proto-Enlightenment reason, not only to incite, in
other words, but also to defeat social unrest. Assembled in War-
burg’s Kriegskarthotek were of course primarily examples of how
the press had disseminated the former, more or less inflammatory

48
See Keith Moxey: Panofsky’s Melancholy. In: Moxey: The Practice of Theory.
Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History. Ithaca and London 1994,
pp. 65-78.
49
Wölfflin’s 1928 talk is cited in Bialostocki (fn. 11), p. 313.

Daphnis 37 2008
Luther’s Birthday 107

kinds of messages by reporting on all manner of irrational behaviors

and beliefs during the war. The question remains how Warburg
might have been planning to counteract such trends in his own work
as an art and cultural historian, had he not descended, that is, into
his own miasma of melancholy and depression, which landed him in
a mental health clinic not long after he held the 1918 version of the
talk — which coincided of course with Germany’s impending
military collapse. Might he have considered continuing to champion
Dürer’s oeuvre in order to illustrate how images could be used to
introduce audiences to their ultimately more rational — rather than
to their superstitious and even volatile — sides? Had he done so,
could he have in fact done so effectively on a broader level that
reached beyond the limited learned audiences of the Gesellschaft für
Hamburgische Geschichte and the Religionswissenschaftliche
Vereinigung in Berlin and out to a broader public as a way of
countering the massive amounts of popular media (dis)information,
the extent of which he had been archiving in Hamburg for some
four years?
As noted at the outset, the 1917 jubilee was not the first time that
Warburg had turned to a discussion of Dürer or to the role of his art
in an age of social upheaval, both during the Reformation era and
more recently too. In the spring and early summer of 1905, he had
mounted an exhibit of images by Dürer at the public settlement
house, or Volksheim, in the Rothenburg section of Hamburg that
may suggest how he thought images could be used to teach the Volk
more rational behavior. As Mark Russell points out, it was the
“patrician elite” of Hamburg, to which Warburg and his family of
bankers belonged, that had “financed and directed” the Volksheim,
seeing its mission to be one concerned above all with “the eradica-
tion of class conflict” in their increasingly volatile city. With it huge
shipyards and a burgeoning worker population that had allowed the
Social Democrat party to make significant inroads in the “citizens’
assembly” in the elections of 1904, Hamburg was to be rocked in
1906, just one year after the exhibit, by a “general strike, riots, and
looting” after the city government proposed to “alter the suffrage
laws in order to restrict working-class representation”. An earlier
dockworkers’ strike in 1897 had nevertheless already made it clear
that this was the kind of “industrial strife” with which the city
fathers were going to have to reckon as the price for the rapid

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108 Jane O. Newman

growth and prosperity of their Free Hanseatic city.50 Thus, when,

on 14 May, 1905, Warburg held an opening lecture entitled “Dürer
als Mensch und Künstler”, to introduce what the Hamburger Frem-
den-Blatt of 31 May, 1905, in its review took to be his “Ziel-
publikum”, namely, “die Arbeitsbevölkerung” of Rothenburg (III.
60.3, [3]), he may have intended not only to teach the workers how
to appreciate art in general, in the hopes of integrating them more
peacefully into the mores and fabric of the city as a way of postpon-
ing further strife, but also, perhaps, to show them how they could
themselves, like Dürer, ‘progress’ from being mere puppets in the
production of social disorder to being rational masters of their own
political destiny.51 That Warburg intended to present the artist as a
model is in any case clear from the notes he indicates he will use as
the “Schluss” of his lecture: Dürer’s life and career represent a “Ka-
pitel aus der Selbsterziehung [des] Menschengeschlechts zur Aufklä-
rung uber (sic) sich selbst und die Welt durch Arbeit an sich. Dürer
war ein Vorarbeiter der Aufklärung, was jedem Arbeiter des Gehirns
und der Hand zum Leitspruch dienen kann” (III.60.1, F. 26).
Given this claim, it is not surprising that in his notes, Warburg
indicates that the 100 images displayed in the Volksheim (which
were “Nachbildungen”, III.60.1, F. 3-4, reproductions of the origi-
nals after the collection of “588 Z[eichnugen] die letzlich von der
Reichdrückerei veroffentlicht sind” [sic] put together by “G.R.
Lippmann in Berlin”52) were chosen and hung in such a way as to
give a sense “von der künstlerischen Entwicklung Dürers, von der
Art seines Sehens” (F. 14) on the road to Enlightenment. A review
of the lecture in the Hamburger Fremden-Blatt of May 17 confirms
that he did, reporting his words: “die künstlerische Entwickelung
(sic) Dürers [werde] deutlich vor Augen gestellt, der sich, von

50
Russell: Aby Warburg (fn. 10), pp. 302-303. In what follows, the shelf
numbers of the holdings of the Warburg Institute Archive that reference the
1905 Hamburg talk, which was never published, are cited parenthetically in the
text.
51
Russell (fn. 10) argues convincingly that, while Warburg was something of an
elitist and “feared the prospect of social chaos”, he also “understood the need
for working-class participation, if restricted, in the city’s politics” (pp. 303-
304).
52
The collection to which Warburg referred was actually put together by Fried-
rich Lippmann: Desseins d’Albert Durer [sic] in Facsimile. Publiés par
Frédéric Lippmann. Berlin 1883.

Daphnis 37 2008
Luther’s Birthday 109

ängstlichen Tasten in seiner Jugend, im reifen Alter zu immer

freieren Schaffen emporgearbeitet habe” (III.60.3 [2]). The story of
liberation from fear and maturation into a greater degree of
“freedom” is uncannily close to the kind of narrative about the great
artist’s ‘development’ told by Wölfflin, for example, in his volume
on Dürer, which appeared the very same year, and of course fo-
reshadows the shape Warburg gave the artist’s career twelve years
later. It may well have also been the case, finally, that, already in
1905, Warburg intended to stake his claim for Dürer’s development
on an argument about media choices. Although his notes appear to
indicate that he referred primarily to “Handzeichungen”, a further
review of the exhibit and lecture from the Hamburgische Corre-
spondenz, which survives in a clipping filed in among these prepara-
tory materials, makes clear that it was more than just “drawings”
about which Warburg spoke, indeed, that there may have also been
woodcuts displayed at the Volksheim: the exhibit “enthält eine
sorgfältige Auswahl Durerscher (sic) Holzschnittkunst und wird
gewiß noch mehr als die früheren Ausstellungen der Gesellschaft
lebhaftes Interesse in der Arbeiterbevölkerung, für die ja die Volks-
heimveranstaltungen in erster Linie bestimmt sind, finden”
(III.60.[24]). Some version of the notion that there was a develop-
ment from the primitive woodcut (appropriate for recalcitrant
‘workers’) to ‘enlightened’ engravings (addressed to worker
‘citizens’ with an appropriate level of Bildung) may thus have
played a role here too.
Warburg seems ultimately to have thought that his pedagogical
efforts to find models for modern behavior in the production of
early modern print culture were in vain; a handwritten note dated 11
July, 1905, next to what appears to be a list of slides he showed on
the exhibit’s opening day, laments: “Die Ausstellung hat sich im
ganzen als nicht anziehungskräftig bewäßt (sic), war also für die
betr. Kreise eine Niete” (III.60.3 [4] 1). Several weeks later, howe-
ver, the anonymous author of a commentary in the Monatliche
Mitteilungen des Volksheims, again preserved in a clipping in
Warburg’s files, seems not to have agreed. With specific reference
to the impact even of “Ausstellungen, ‘die nicht wirken’”
“Ungebildeten und [Unge]schulten gegenüber”, he writes of the
Dürer exhibit in particular: “Der Besucher des Volksheims weiss,
dass diese unsere Bilder von ‘Kennern’ hingestellt wurden und dass
sie ihn trotzdem nicht packen, erweckt in ihm eine Art Unsicherheit,
Daphnis 37 2008
110 Jane O. Newman

die bei ernsteren Naturen der Anfang genauen Prüfens ist” (III.60.3).
The fact that Warburg returns in 1917, in times of equal, if not
greater social turmoil and despair, to the possibility that the case of
Dürer might indeed provide a way out, indicates at the very least
that he was one of the “more serious natures” who understood how
to use early modern visual culture to address modern ills.

Daphnis 37 2008