Une Machine à Penser

Carlo Ginzburg

Common Knowledge, Volume 18, Issue 1, Winter 2012, pp. 79-85 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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UNE MACHINE À PENSER

Carlo Ginzburg

An engine that helps you to think; an engine to think with, to think about. But what else, one could ask, are research libraries for? May we say that there is some-thing special about the Warburg Library?

II entered the Warburg for the first time in the summer of 1960. My mentor, Delio Cantimori, who was spending some time in London doing research, offered me a tour of the Library, commenting upon its peculiar arrangement. Before leaving the building we met Gertrud Bing (at the time, she was the Institute’s director), who exchanged a few words with Cantimori.

They were old friends. Cantimori’s connection with the Warburg went back to the thirties. In 1937 he had published an essay (“Rhetoric and Politics in Italian Humanism”) in the first issue of the Journal of the Warburg Institute and had contributed to the Bibliography of the Survival of the Classics, also published by the Institute.1 For many years he had been traveling across Europe, visiting

Common Knowledge 18:1

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1456890

© 2012 by Duke University Press

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1. A Bibliography of the Survival of the Classics, vol. 2, The Publications of 1932 – 1933 (London: Warburg Institute, 1938). Cantimori contributed forty entries, which are not included in the bibliography of his writings found in Gio-

vanni Miccoli, Delio Cantimori. La ricerca di una nuova crit-ica storiografica (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1970). See also Delio Cantimori, “Rhetoric and Politics in Italian Humanism,” trans. Frances Yates, Journal of the Warburg Institute 1.2

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(October 1937): 83 – 102. A longer, unpublished Italian ver-sion is included in Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinque-cento, ed. Adriano Prosperi (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1992): 485 – 511. Prosperi’s preface is the best available introduc-tion to Cantimori.

2. Carl Schmitt, Principii politici del nazionalsocialismo, ed. Delio Cantimori (Florence: Sansoni, 1935), 1 – 42; “Note sul nazionalsocialismo,” Archivio di studi corpora-tivi 5 (1934): 291 – 328. See also Cantimori, Politica e sto-ria contemporanea. Scritti 1927 – 1942, ed. Luisa Mangoni (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1991); Mangoni’s introduction, “Europa sotterranea,” is of fundamental importance. The debate over Cantimori’s politics in the thirties is still very much alive.

3. Delio Cantimori, “Appunti sulla propaganda,” Civiltà fascista 7 (1941): 37 – 56. Cf. Cantimori, Politica, 683 – 99.

4. Gertrud Bing, “A. M. Warburg,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1965): 299 – 313 (intro. to Aby Warburg, La rinascita del paganesimo antico, trans. E. Can-timori Mezzomonti [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1966]).

5. Annales E.S.C. 15.3 (May– June 1960): 556 – 68. A longer, unpublished Italian version is included in Canti-mori, Eretici, 551 – 62.

6. Cantimori, Eretici, 555 – 56.

libraries and archives, looking for traces left by sixteenth- century Italian heretics. The outcome of this long, painstaking work was an epoch- making book (Eretici italiani del Cinquecento, 1939). It is not surprising that this highly impressive young historian (he was born in 1904) attracted the attention of the Warburgians (Ger-trud Bing as well as, I presume, Edgar Wind). But Cantimori’s allegiance to fascism in the thirties would have made this relationship complicated, if not utterly impossible. It must be noted that Cantimori’s writings dealing with con-temporary Italian and German politics, including his deep interest in the work of Carl Schmitt (whom he introduced to the Italian public), were not unrelated to his scholarly work.2 Cantimori’s essay “Rhetoric and Politics,” for instance, was obviously inspired by his interest in contemporary propaganda, and vice versa.3 After a tortuous and painful trajectory, he became close to, then a member of, the Italian Communist Party, which he left in 1956. His wife, Emma Cantimori Mezzomonti, had been an underground member of the Communist Party in the thirties. She later translated into Italian a selection of Aby Warburg’s essays, with an introduction (her last essay) by Gertrud Bing.4

This relationship with the Warburg — a largely unexplored chapter of Can-timori’s controversial biography — would repay closer scrutiny, but my concern here is different. Retrospectively, I am inclined to think that my first encounter with the Warburg Institute and its Library oriented (in many ways, mostly uncon-scious) my later involvement with them. At that time (May– June 1960), Cantimori had just published in Annales a long review of Au coeur religieux du XVIème siècle: a collection of essays by Lucien Febvre, the journal’s former director and cofounder.5 Cantimori opened his review with some autobiographical recollections, followed by a series of remarks, one of which drew a parallel between Febvre and Aby Warburg. Those two scholars and their respective scholarly traditions were (Can-timori noted) very different and nearly ignored each other, but they shared a rejection of traditional disciplinary boundaries, an impulse to convey the mean-ing of larger historical realities through significant details, and the art (“l’arte”) of rescuing articulate human voices from apparently marginal documents.6

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7. Cantimori, Eretici, 561.

8. D. J. Gordon, Gertrud Bing (1892 – 1964) (London: Warburg Institute, 1965), 26: “Saxl e Bing erano da un lato meno impegnati in questa esorcizzazione di demoni che per Warburg erano stati una realtà quotidiana, ma d’altro

lato erano meno sicuri che l’esorcizzazione fosse possibile” (Arnaldo Momigliano).

In his comments on Febvre’s essay “Sorcellerie: Sottise ou révolution mentale?” Cantimori evoked witchcraft trials like those preserved in the State Archive of Modena, as well as astrological tracts like those analyzed by Warburg and pre-served in the Library he had created.7

This review (which I read in an offprint bearing Cantimori’s signature and a handwritten dedication) affected me in many ways. The year before, since I had decided to work on witchcraft trials, Cantimori had directed me toward the Inquisition trials preserved in the Modena archives. Now I realized that my inter-est in witchcraft trials could be inscribed in a constellation that was familiar and, at the same time, unexpected. Cantimori introduced the parallel between Febvre and Warburg in a somewhat apologetic tone: “One should not regard as extrava-gant. . . .” Nowadays one may not realize that in 1960 the name of Warburg was scarcely known to historians (though it was well known to art historians, of course) while Febvre and Annales, the journal he had founded in 1929 with Marc Bloch, were at the very center of history as a discipline. In his review, Cantimori dismissed the center/periphery dichotomy (along with the notion of disciplinary boundaries) as meaningless. But at the same time he gave his readers (including myself ) a map to move into that unknown territory, the Warburg Library.

IIUnknown, and possibly full of traps. In commenting on Aby Warburg’s work on astrological tracts, Cantimori recalled the diffusion of magic and astrology in Nazi Germany. This remark did not entirely surprise me. I was aware that the research topic I had begun to work on — witchcraft and related issues — required a critical distance that had to be kept under control.

That distance was a fundamental concern for Gertrud Bing. She was deeply committed to preserving and developing Warburg’s intellectual legacy, but her approach was different from his. The difference emerges in the obituaries pub-lished after her death. “On the one hand,” Arnaldo Momigliano wrote, “Saxl and Bing were less committed to exorcising demons which had been for Warburg a daily experience; on the other, they were less sure that such an exorcising was pos-sible.” What happened in between was, on a personal level, Warburg’s lapse into madness, which lasted for many years; and on a historical level, Nazism and its appeal to the irrational. “Preoccupation with the irrational worried her [Bing],” D. J. Gordon crisply remarked.8 Cantimori once referred to the Warburgians as

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9. Fritz Saxl, “Ernst Cassirer,” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, 2nd ed. (1949; New York: Tudor, 1959), 47 – 51, esp. 48; Cassirer, “Der Beg-riff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswis-senschaften,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1 (1921 – 22): 11 – 39, esp. 11 – 12. This and other versions of Cassirer’s visit to the Library are discussed in Salvatore Settis’s essential essay, “Warburg continuatus: Descrizione di una biblioteca,” Quaderni storici 58 (1985): 5 – 38, esp. 7 – 11.

10. The title continues as follows: Erster Band. Die Erschei-nungen des Jahres 1931 in Gemeinschaft mit Fachgenossen bearbeitet von Hans Meier, Richard Newald, Edgar Wind, herausgegeben von der Bibliothek Warburg (Leipzig: Teub-ner, 1934). Fritz Saxl, “The History of Warburg’s Library

(1886 – 1944),” in Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, ed. Ernst Hans Gombrich (London: Warburg Institute, 1970), 336, mentions an attack (which I have not seen) in the Nazi magazine Völkischer Beobachter on Edgar Wind’s introduction to the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie.

11. See Michael Baxandall’s remark in Allan Langdale, “Art History and Intellectual History: Michael Baxan-dall’s Work between 1963 and 1985” (PhD diss., Uni-versity of California, Santa Barbara, 1995), 358. On the tension within Warburg’s thought, see Settis, “Warburg continuatus,” as well as (with respect to a specific issue) my introduction to Peur, révérence, terreur. Quatre essais d’iconographie politique (Dijon: Presses du Réel, 2011).

“highly rational salamanders,” able to pass through fire without burning them-selves. But Warburg himself got burned.

IIIAny interaction with reality (as I learned most effectively from Ernst Gombrich’s writings) implies filters. My encounter with the Warburg Library had been medi-ated by Cantimori and, more indirectly, by his relationship with the Warburg-ians — first of all, Bing. Cantimori and Bing were responding to Aby Warburg’s own work (and Bing, to his personality as well). Moreover, both were responding, as so many others have done since then, to the Library and its arrangement.

Ernst Cassirer’s comment after his first visit to the Library is famous. According to Fritz Saxl, who had walked him through the Library (at that time Warburg was a patient in Binswanger’s clinic in Kreuzlingen), Cassirer said: “This library is dangerous. I shall either have to avoid it altogether or imprison myself here for years. The philosophical problems involved are close to my own, but the concrete historical material which Warburg has collected is overwhelm-ing.”9 Some years later, Cassirer pointed out that the historical problem addressed by the Warburg Library was the survival (Nachleben) of antiquity. Philosophical perspective and historical specificity come together in the title of the bibliogra-phy published in Germany in 1934, immediately after the transfer of the War-burg Bibliothek from Hamburg to London: Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike.10 In the title of the second volume (A Bibliography of the Survival of the Classics), the adjective Kulturwissenschaftlich disappeared — a symp-tom of the Institute’s effort to adjust to the English intellectual landscape and also, perhaps, to overcome an unresolved tension within Warburg’s own think-ing.11 But that tension did not affect the physiognomy of the Warburg Institute Library, whose scope includes not only the survival of the classics in a broad sense, but also the much broader space that Aby Warburg regarded as his own,

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12. See Settis, “Nota final. 1995,” in Warburg continu-atus: Descripción de una biblioteca (Barcelona: Ediciones de La Central, 2010), 71 – 88.

13. Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1966). The paragraph in question is on pp. 52 – 53 of the English translation: The Night Battles, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).

defined by image and word and their relationship.12 In this sense, the current Library, notwithstanding its continuous expansion, still preserves the skeleton of Warburg’s private library. This biological metaphor might convey the continuity with Warburg’s original project, legitimizing his claim that the Library, through its arrangement, would offer, hidden on a shelf, a book that would provide an answer to a vital question related to the reader’s research project.

IVMany scholars from different disciplines and various parts of the world have undergone this experience. What follows is my own limited testimony.

In the summer of 1964, I was invited to spend one month at the Warburg Institute. To my great surprise, I was given a key to the building, which allowed me to spend extra hours in the Library. It was an unforgettable time. Some years before, I had begun to work on a research project based on a group of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Inquisition trials I had come across first in Venice, then in Udine. They dealt with men and women who called themselves benandanti, “good- walkers.” The men claimed to fight in spirit, four times a year, during the Ember Days, against the witches; the women claimed to see in spirit, four times a year, also during the Ember Days, the procession of the dead. All of this looked like a definite Friulian phenomenon: even the trial I came across by chance in the State Archive in Venice involved a Friulian cowherd. My attempts to put the trial into a larger comparative perspective had not gone beyond vague parallels. The Warburg Library seemed to be the ideal place to deepen my search.

Indeed it was. Besides a large amount of evidence related to my project, the Library offered me the opportunity to make a real breakthrough, condensed into one page and a half of the book I ultimately wrote: I benandanti (1966).13 “The evidence which bears the closest resemblance to the Friulian is Bavarian,” my paragraph began. What followed relied upon an offprint from a local Bavar-ian journal, Oberstdorfer Gemeinde- und Fremdenblatt. Even the title of the essay, by Karl Hofmann, conveyed some local flavor: “Oberstdorfer ‘Hexen’ auf dem Scheiterhaufen: Ein finsteres Kapitel aus der Geschichte unserer Heimat mit einem kurzen Ueberblick über den Verlauf der Hezenprozesse im Allgemeinen” (“ ‘Witches’ from Oberstdorf at the stake: A dark chapter from the history of our native country, with a short overall view of the history of witch- trials in general”),

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14. Ginzburg, Night Battles, 191 n. 59.

15. Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna. Una decifrazione del sabba (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1989), translated into English as Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Ray-mond Rosenthal (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990).

16. Ginzburg, Night Battles, 191 n. 59.

17. Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998).

Oberstdorf 1931. The documents discovered by Hofmann dealt with a shepherd named Chonradt Stöcklin. In 1586, Chondradt told the Oberstdorf judges that, some years before, a dead person from the same town had appeared to him. Since that time, Chonradt would fall periodically into a swoon, followed by a journey in spirit into the beyond. He denied being a witch: as a member of the “nocturnal band,” he was asked to pray 30,000 Ave Marias during the Ember Days. Later, pressed hard by the judges, he confessed that he had gone many times to the witches’ sabbath. He died at the stake with the women he had accused of being witches.

Hofmann’s essay is unsatisfactory.14 But the case he discovered provides a piece of precious evidence — a nearly perfect parallel with the women benandanti put on trial by inquisitors in the same years on the other side of the Alps. For me, this was the beginning of a long comparative journey from Friulian benandanti to Siberian shamans.15

VCould I have come across Hofmann’s essay in another library? “To the best of my knowledge,” I wrote in my book, “[these Oberstdorf documents] have not been analysed, or even cited, by other scholars.”16 I had no clues whatsoever that would have directed me to Hofmann’s essay. Today, checking the word Hexen in the online catalog of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, I would indeed come across the title of Hofmann’s essay: a precious (although, at first sight, not especially promising) needle buried in a haystack amounting to 1,463 entries. But in 1964, online catalogs did not exist. Only an open- stack library would have offered me the opportunity to come across that essay, and even then only a library whose shelves included one or more labeled “Witchcraft” or “Witch trials” or, perhaps, “Magic.”

Today, Hofmann’s offprint (classmark FDB 125) is located in the Warburg Library near Wolfgang Behringer’s more recent book (FDB 125.B23), putting Chonrad Stoeckhlin’s case in a different, and much broader, perspective, as is clear even from the title of the English translation: Shaman of Oberstdorf.17 On the same shelf, one can find other books — some of them bearing Aby Warburg’s ex libris — related to witchcraft and witch persecution. Only a short walk separates the section on “Magic” from the section on “Science”: a contiguity that played a

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18. Gertrud Bing, Fritz Saxl (1890 – 1948): A Biographical Memoir . . . Reprinted on the Fiftieth Anniversary of His Death (London: Warburg Institute, 1998), 12; Karen Michels, “Ein Versuch über die K. B. W. als Bau der Moderne,” in Porträt aus Büchern. Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute, Hamburg- 1933 – London (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1993), 71 – 81.

central role in Warburg’s approach. It was marginal, however, in mine. But that difference did not impede my research: any library will interact with its readers, and also the other way around. In the case of the Warburg Library, the inter-action, both conscious and unconscious, with its arrangement is a fundamental part of the readers’ experience.

Une machine à penser: it was not by chance that Fritz Saxl dreamt of Le Corbusier (or Gropius) as a possible architect for the Warburg Library in Ham-burg.18