A “Grey Savior”: Kenneth Clark and the rescue of Hamburg’s Warburg Institute [original]

Michael Berkowitz

A “Grey Savior”: Kenneth Clark and the rescue of

Hamburg’s Warburg Institute

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Berkowitz, M. (2021). A “Grey Savior”: Kenneth Clark and the rescue of Hamburg’s Warburg Institute. In S.

Schüler-Springorum (Hrsg.), Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 30 (2021) (1. Aufl., Bd. 30, S. 262-240).

Metropol.

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michael berkowitz

A “Grey Savior”: Kenneth Clark and the Rescue

of Hamburg’s Warburg Institute

With the National Socialist rise to power in 1933 in Germany, academics who

were assumed to be Jews or otherwise vilified by the Third Reich beseeched col-

leagues in Britain, Western Europe, and the United States for appointments or

any opportunity to continue their vocation and find sanctuary.1 Even if renowned

scholars were not initially targeted, German universities were bastions of harass-

ment and ran ahead of antisemitic legislation.2 Individuals usually appealed for

their own relocation. Professional contacts, if they responded at all, treated them

on a case-by-case basis. Britain, especially due to the exalted reputations of Oxford

and Cambridge, was a beacon and a prime destination.3

The exuberance with which Cambridge University, for one, now boasts of its

openness to beleaguered Jews from 1933 to 1939, is suspect.4 The autobiography

by historian George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir, exudes gratitude

to Downing College, Cambridge, for accepting him.5 Mosse was the son of the

In honor and memory of Sharon Gillerman (z’’l).

1 See I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, trans. Martin Chalmers (London:

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998).

2 Robert Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and universities in the Holocaust

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

3 The archive of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning at the Radcliffe L ibrary,

Oxford University (SPSL) is an essential source for this and related projects. The finding aid

of nearly 400 pages gives some sense of the numbers of those who attempted to gain entry to

Britain.

4 For recent conference on Cambridge and refugees from Nazism see: http://www.crassh.

cam.ac.uk/events/28656 [accessed 1 July 2021].

5 After becoming a distinguished scholar, Mosse had a wonderful experience decades later

as a visiting professor at the college. He was happy to find the “snobbery” at Cambridge to

have substantially diminished; George L. Mosse, Confronting History (Madison: University

of Wisconsin Press), p. 93.

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A “Grey Savior”

241

publisher of the Berliner Tageblatt. As a teenager he and his family had the good

fortune to slip out of Germany soon after the Nazis were installed. His educa-

tion began in 1934 at a Quaker boarding school in Yorkshire, Bootham. Gerhard/

George was not, by his own estimation, a stellar student. In response to the Span-

ish Civil War, at Cambridge Mosse became an ardent anti-fascist. “It was there,”

he writes, “that my true political awakening took place.” But the refugees among

scholars were few and far between. Reflecting on his fellow exiles, he recalled that

their Jewishness “disappeared” at Cambridge. Perhaps most tellingly, while Mosse

felt little direct antisemitism, he concluded his two years at the elite university

with few lasting friendships or meaningful relationships with professors.6

In sum, the attempted resettlement of German Jewish scholars to the western

democracies was a fragmented, partial migration that has been examined largely

in light of its successes by H. Stuart Hughes, Werner Mosse, Martin Jay, Marion

Berghahn, Daniel Snowman, and others.7 Little effort has been spent, however, on

tracing those thousands who were murdered. In the 1930s there were few universi-

ties in the west that could rival Oxbridge in terms of the affluence of their colleges

and vast resources at their disposal.

This article addresses the rescue of Hamburg’s Kulturwissenschaftliche

B ibliothek Warburg, or Warburg Institute, which has not been well-integrated in

the sequestered history of the institute,8 and has been almost totally bypassed in

6 Mosse, Confronting History, pp. 74–92.

7 H. Stuart Hughes, The sea change: the migration of social thought (New York and London:

Harper and Row, 1975); Werner Mosse (coordinating editor) and Julius Carlebach et al.

(eds.), Second chance: two centuries of German-speaking Jews in the United Kingdom (Tübin-

gen: Mohr, 1991); Martin Jay, The dialectical imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School

and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1996); Marion Berghahn, Continental Britons: German-Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany

(New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); Daniel Snowman, The Hitler emigres revisited (London:

Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, Institute of Germanic & R omance

Studies, University of London School of Advanced Study, 2013); Daniel Snowman, The

H itler emigres: the cultural impact on Britain of refugees from Nazism (London: Vintage

Digital, 2010).

8 Uwe Fleckner and Peter Mack (eds.), In The Afterlife of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Biblio-

thek Warburg: The Emigration and Early Years of the Warburg Institute in London (Berlin

and Boston: De Gruter, 2019); Dieter Wuttke, “Die Emigration der Kulturwissenschaft-

lichen Bibliothek Warburg und die Anfänge des Universitätsfaches Kunstgeschichte in

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Michael Berkowitz

242

broader treatments of assistance rendered to Jews in Hitler’s orbit. To the extent

that attention has been paid to the Warburg Institute in London, the subject has

been its impact on art history and visual culture in Britain, which was indeed

serious, yet still undervalued in wider circles.9 No doubt attention also has been

given to the Warburg Institute as a result of the “material turn” in art history, and

more generally, in the social sciences and humanities.10 If the story of the Warburg

Institute is an outstanding example of Jewish rescue in the face of Nazism, why

does it occupy such a minor place in the historiography of rescue? Why is there

no plaque outside the current building recognizing its importance in this context,

especially since it would shed a strong, positive light on Britain in providing safe

harbor for refugees?

It is important at the outset, to complicate this story even further. In the con-

text of historical interpretations of the Holocaust and rescue, the period concerned

precedes the Holocaust per se– falling close to the Nazi takeover in January 1933.

No one could know then what would befall the women and men of the Warburg

Institute. But there was little doubt about what could be expected for a library such

Großbritannien,” in: Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 5, No. 10 (1984), pp. 133–146; M Seller, “Das

Exil der Wiener Schjule der Kunstgeschichte und das Warburg-Institut in London,” in:

Friedrich Städler (ed.), Vertriebene Vernunft. Emigration und Exil österreichischer Wissen-

schaft, 1930–1940 (Münster: Lit, 2004); Dorothea McEwan, “Exhibitions as Morale Boost-

ers: The Exhibition Programme of the Warburg Institute, 1938–1945,” in: Shulamith Behr

and Maian Malet (eds.), Arts in Exile in Britain, 1933–1945: Politics and Cultural Identity

(A msterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 267–300.

9 The Warburg Institute is well-integrated in the thoughtful Insiders/Outsiders project of

Monica Bohm-Duchen; see Hans Christian Hönes, “‘A very specialized subject’: Art History

in Britain,” and Michael Berkowitz, “Émigré Photographers,” in: Monica Bohm-Duchen

(ed.), Insiders/Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Visual

Culture (London: Lund Humphries, 2019), pp. 97–104, 63–76.

10 Among those recognized as significant markers in the “material turn” and “agency” see

Dror Wahrman, “Media, History, and Art: Some Methodological Reflections,” in: Media

History 24: 1 (2018), pp. 154-158, and Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); see also Iris Clever and Willemijn Ruberg, “Beyond

Cultural History? The Material Turn, Praxiography, and Body History,” in: Humanities 3

(2014), pp. 546–566; Alma-Elisa Kittner, “Objects of Migration: On Archives and Collec-

tions, Archivists and Collectors,” in: Visual Anthropology 34: 4 (2021), pp. 385–404 [https:-

doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2021.1944777]; Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (eds.), Material

Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (London: Routledge, 2010).

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A “Grey Savior”

243

as the Warburg Institute’s. It was founded by the son of a prominent Jewish family,

and members of its surrounding body were, in large part, of Jewish origin.

Since their coalescence following World War I and the revolutionary upheav-

als in its aftermath, the Nazis became famous for burning books by Jewish authors

and books that had anything to do with Jews, if they were not expressly antise-

mitic. These public performances were featured in American newsreels, and not

always criticized. Budd Schulberg, in viewing film collected for the Nuremberg tri-

als, wrote that one newsreel included “a racy, happy-go-lucky narration by Lowell

Thomas that begins, ‘Well, looks like these young Heidelberg students are having

a hot time for themselves tonight …’ and continues in this tone, a simple Simon

describing a world tragedy in the jocular terms of an apple-ducking contest.”11

British and French movie audiences witnessed similar newsreels.

The Warburg Institute was perceived as a “Jewish” institution, which was an

inaccurate characterization. The Warburg was never expressly devoted to Juden-

tum: neither to Judaism, nor to the history of the Jewish people, nor to Jewish

themes. By no means did it deliberately cater to a Jewish public. But topics that

later would be recognized as “Jewish Studies” were included in its remit of excavat-

ing “mythologies.” There was, in fact, nothing like the eclecticism of the Warburg

library, as Emily Levine illuminates in her brilliant study.12 The last decade has

witnessed a series of conferences and studies dedicated to the institute’s history,

which also may be a consequence of the aforementioned “material turn” and delib-

erate engagement with “transnational” phenomena.13 Yet significant dimensions

of its move to London remain unaddressed.

11 Budd Schulberg, “The Celluloid Noose” (1946), 3, typescript photocopy; published in: The

Screen Writer: A publication of the Screen Writers Guild, Inc. (August 1946), 1; Folder 39,

WWII: “The Celluloid Noose,” Budd Schulberg Collection, Dartmouth College, Hanover,

NH.

12 Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg

School (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013). See also Aby Warburg,

Images from the region of the Pueblo Indians of North America; translated with an interpre-

tive essay by Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); see

Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism, trans. Samuel Pakucs Willcocks

(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008).

13 See Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris (eds.), Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the

Transnational (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), pp. 1–22.

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