Benjamin Hamlet Luther

Enchantment in Times of War: Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and the Secularization ThesisAuthor(s): Jane O. NewmanSource: Representations, Vol. 105, No. 1 (Winter 2009), pp. 133-167Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2009.105.1.133 .Accessed: 15/05/2015 09:29

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JANE O. NEWMAN

Enchantment in Times of War:Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and the Secularization Thesis

In a 2007 article in the New York Review of Books, the twentiethcentury is described as an experiment in secularism.1 Recent events, aswell as the persistent uptick in academic debates about the role of religionin culture in this country and abroad, may indeed suggest that this experi-ment has now come to an end. The argument I present here neverthelessproposes to test claims about the exceptional secularism of the twentiethcentury. By exploring the role the Protestant Reformation in particular wasasked to play at the beginning of that century in the story of the ascend-ing rather than descending arc of religions importance in the world ofpolitics, I ask whether there really is such a great contrast between thethen of a secularized worldview and our twenty-first century now, with itsreturn of religiosity once repressed.2 The place and time in which I am par-ticularly interested are Germany and the years around World War I. Mymain witnesses are the German-Jewish scholars Aby Warburg (18661929)and Walter Benjamin (18921940) and the texts in which they make theirclaims about the Reformation, Warburgs Pagan-Ancient Prognosticationin Word and Image in Luthers Day (1920) and Benjamins The Origin of theGerman Tragic Drama (1928). Like many of their contemporaries, these menwere wrestling with the challenge of living at a time of great conflict in ahighly sacralizedrather than secularizedworld with deep roots in anearly modern past.

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A B S T R A C T This article reads Aby Warburgs and Walter Benjamins work on the astrological move-ments of the Reformation era in dialogue with the theory of relations between the spiritual and the tem-poral developed in Protestant war theology during World War I. War theology developed themesalready present in historical Protestant doctrine, notably Luthers Two Kingdoms theory (Zwei ReicheLehre). Warburg and Benjamin were wrestling with the challenge of living at a time of great conflict in ahighly sacralizedrather than secularizedworld with deep roots in early modern Lutheranism. MaxWeber was working out his ideas about magic, Calvinism, and secularization at the same time. The arti-cle thus also suggests the need to reassess his theses about the emergence of a secular world purged ofirrationalism in dialogue with Warburgs and Benjamins work. / R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S 105. Winter 2009 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 07346018, electronic ISSN 1533855X, pages 13367. Allrights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the Universityof California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/rep.2009.105.1.133.

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In order to understand the context of Warburgs and Benjamins workon the Reformation during these wartime years, I explore, first, the theory ofrelations between the spiritual and the temporal developed in the Protestantwar theology (Kriegstheologie) of the time. An outgrowth of the sociopoliti-cal battles in late nineteenth-century Germany that have come to be knownas the Kulturkampf (the battle for civilization), World War I war theologydeveloped themes already latent, if disputed, in historical Protestant think-ing by framing Germanys mission in the Great War in light of divinewill.3 Because it was deeply embedded in battles over both historical Protes-tant doctrine, notably Luthers Two Kingdoms theory (Zwei Reiche Lehre), andcontemporary denominational ideology, with Lutheranism and Calvinisminvolved in hot contests over the religious soul of the German state, I offeran overview of war theologys relation to these issues.4 This relation helps toexplain those sections of Warburgs and Benjamins texts that are not at allabout a secularizing disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world, but thattake, rather, a Protestant version of the science of astrology as their mainconcern. As it turns out, Warburg and Benjamin appear to have understooda great deal about the historical dimensions of a specifically Lutheran astralscience; familiarity with its terms gives us a new way of understanding howboth early moderns and moderns could think magic, theology, and the secu-lar together.

Given that Warburg and Benjamin examined Protestant astrology as anexample not of the growing apart, but of the persistent de-differentiationof religious and nonreligious roles and institutions in the early modernperiod at the very same time that Max Weber (18641920) was working outhis ideas about magic (Zauber) and Calvinism, I also suggest the need toreassess Webers theses about the early modern emergence of a worldpurged of irrationalism in dialogue with their work.5 I thus conclude theintroductory parts of this essay with a brief discussion of the text in whichWeber most famously comments on the role of disenchantment in thesecular world, namely, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (origi-nally 19045, republished in 1920), before turning to a more detailed anal-ysis of my two main texts.6 If The Protestant Ethic can be read as an allegoryabout Germany in [Webers] own day, when discussions about Protes-tantism were de facto discussions of the fundamental legitimacy of theGerman Empire, so too may Warburgs and Benjamins work on the astro-logical politics in Luthers circle be understood as contributing to the earlytwentieth-century debates about the continuing role of religion in a milita-rized German state.7 As such, it belonged to a tradition of anxious analysesof the radical de-secularizationand thus about the re- rather than dis-enchantmentof the world around this most modern and rationalized ofwars.8

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The Two Kingdoms: Religion and the State during the Kulturkampf and the Great War

Although this particular context has been little explored to date,Warburgs and Benjamins early twentieth-century interest in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century versions of Lutheran astrological thinking can bebest understood against the background of the world of German Kultur-protestantismus (cultural Protestantism), the liberal nationalist Protestantismthat by the late nineteenth century had gone a long way toward defining aunited Protestant Germany as a Leitkultur (dominant culture).9 The politico-confessional situation in the recently founded German Reich and at the turnof the century was exceedingly complex. What is clear, however, is that anyand all references to Lutheranism were embedded in the ongoing strugglebetween and among the Christian denominations known as the Kul-turkampf (circa 18601890) and its early twentieth-century revival in the so-called second battle for civilization (circa 190714).10 The main sentimentsof those involved in the earlier contests can be heard in the words of afounding member of the liberal Protestant Association, Daniel Schenkel,for example, in 1862: We say with the very deepest conviction: The entirecultural progress of the peoples of our century rests on the basis of reli-gious, moral, and spiritual freedom, and for that very reason, on Protes-tantism.11 Schenkels position on the role in Germanys progress ofLutheran (rather than Reformed, or Calvinist) Protestantism in particularwas made more precise several years later by Wilhelm Scherer, the first offi-cial holder of a university chair in German literary history, who writes in1874, just three years after the unification of Germany: Luthers Bible wasthe decisive foundational act of a unified German culture and language. Itwas the act that created what we today call our nation. We associate ournational unity with Luther just as Italy associates its national unity withDante. Luthers Bible is our Divine Comedy.12

That the grand achievements of statist modernization were understoodin the post-1871 German nation as coterminous with a specific denomina-tion and its foundational figures, doctrines, and texts is manifest in suchwords. The actions undertaken subsequently to ensure the necessary cleans-ing of non-Protestants in general from Germany make it clear, moreover,that these sentiments were more than just idle chatter. Laws were passed inthe 1870s restricting the citizenship rights of Jesuit teachers and priests, forexample, and bishops who did not comply with the so-called May Laws wereimprisoned. In 1891, one Carl Fey even eerily writes of the racial darkness(Rassendunkel ) of the Catholic peoples who did not belong in the Germanland.13 Although most of these laws were officially rescinded by the early

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twentieth century, the renewed energy of the furor protestanticus andthus the ominous persistence of a still ideologically potent second battle forcivilization can be heard in a position paper written for the ProtestantUnion in Berlin in 1913: The spiritual and moral interests of a unified Ger-many are likewise [its] Christian interests. The spiritual and moral develop-ment of all of Germany, including her Catholics, rests on the Christianity ofthe Bible and the Reformation.14 The celebration of Lutheranism in par-ticular of course came to a head in the quadricentennial wartime celebra-tions of 1917.15

As ideologically transparent as this kind of political instrumentalizationof religion may appear to us, it was in fact not unrelated to doctrinal issuesthat were of pressing concern to the theologically astute. Luthers TwoKingdoms theory is of special interest in this regard, since it was clearly atthe heart of this kind of politico-theological thinking. Its terms underscorethe intimate relationship between religious forces and Mans sociopoliticallife in the creaturely realm, which allowed divinely mandated and con-trolled events to unfold with regularity in the regime of the here-and-now.16 Originally, Luthers own thinking on the topic had been notoriouslycomplex, and desperate attempts to clarify which phase of his thoughts onthe issue related most aptly to any number of the fateful events of Germanhistory based on his doctrine had abounded throughout the years.17 Butthe fundamental parameters of the Two Kingdoms theory had always beenclear. They articulated a model of two orders of government throughwhich God exercise[d] his lordship over mankind, the kingdom andgovernment of God and Christ, on the one hand, and the worldly, orsecular government, on the other.18 Luther himself seems to have believedthat, even though they were by definition separate, traffic between the twokingdoms was a binding norm. In the still pastorally inflected TemporalAuthority: To What Extent It Should be Obeyed (1523), for example, heargues that, for the real Christian, Mans salvation lay in the hands of Godalone; in this respect, His government had jurisdiction over the mostimportant of Mans duties, namely, righteousness. The kingdom of theworld played no small role in the achievement of this singular purpose,however. For one thing, the worldly kingdoms agentskings, princes,earthly magistratesalways already existed in the world only by Gods willand ordinance and, as such, functioned as guarantors of the externalpeace that permits the pursuit of the teachings of Christ. But the keypoint was the interlocking and parallel logic of the two systems: You satisfyGods kingdom inwardly and the kingdom of the world outwardly; tempo-ral authority must thus always be obeyed for the sake of ones soul. It is notsurprising that the Great Reformers original argument here, namely, thatthe civil law and sword represented crucial forms of divine service,


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would emerge to support later claims about Germanys sacred Protestantmission.19

The nation-rending socioreligious conflicts between Protestants andCatholics during the battle for civilization period of the preceding fiftyyears of course had to be subordinated to the patriotic need for a unifiedfortress Germania after the declaration of the more literal hostilities in1914.20 Church support of the bellicose nation nevertheless often remainedovertly affiliated with the Protestant legacy, as the title of Wilhelm Walthers1914 book, Germanys Sword as Consecrated by Luther, indicates in no uncertainterms.21 In theory, it was again the historical Lutheran doctrine of cujusregio, ejus religio, which in 1555 had yoked political jurisdiction and reli-gious observance firmly together in the first place, that set the stage for thisversion of the modern (and homogeneous) confessional state.22 Lutheranwar theology was more than just a propaganda tool, however; academic the-ologians were involved in its articulation from the very beginning.23 Some ofthe best known among them publicly endorsed the up-swell of militarismacross the nation almost immediately after war was declared in the so-calledManifesto of the Ninety-Three, for example.24 Others of course rejected thestate violence legitimated by this overlap of spiritual and statist concerns.The Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth thus writes of his horror at see-ing nearly all of my German teachers as signatories of the shocking mani-festo of the 93 German intellectuals, who, before the entire world, identifiedthemselves with the wartime politics of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ChancellorBethmann-Hollweg.25 Barths version of what he in fact seems to have beenthe first to christen as Luthers Two Kingdoms theory in 1922 involved adecisively antiliberal Protestant reading of the sources.26 More or less refus-ing any degree of immanence for God in the world, he disallowed the hijack-ing of Gods will or plan on behalf of any secular agenda at all. The positionled him later to help draft the so-called Declaration at Barmen of 1934,which denied the jurisdiction of National Socialism over German Christian-ity, which was a matter concerning Gods kingdom alone. But the theolo-gians among the ninety-three prominent intellectuals, including Adolf vonHarnack and Reinhold Seeberg, who saw the two kingdoms as joined morefirmly at the hip, signed on, seeing in the nations military efforts the fulfill-ment of Gods plan on the ground.

The problem with Barths version of the Two Kingdoms doctrine, basedon his so-called dialectical theology, was that the absolute separationbetween the two realms, between what Paul Althaus calls, in association withBarths teachings, Christs kingdom and the kingdom of the world,couldand also didquite easily tip over into its opposite, namely, a vexedlogic of accommodation that, practically speaking, if not in dogmatic terms,was not far from the one subtending war theology. 27 It was this rendering of


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the Two Kingdoms theory that lurked beneath the surface of the thought ofBarths contemporary and sometime colleague and friend, the GermanLutheran theologian Friedrich Gogarten, for example. In 1924, Gogartenmaintains that all institutions and functions of human life, including mar-riage, school, the state, art, and science must be recognized as ephemeral(unwirklich) insofar as they are merely the products of the creaturely, humansubject, the I. Only by opening ones eyes for the Thou of divine real-ity can Gods real law of things be recognized and the limited (un)realityof such institutions be destroyed.28 The consequences of this nearly mysti-cal optic could of course be a turning away from the world; it in any case byno means demanded activist resistance to a militaristic state (although it didresult in such resistance in the case of Barth). Rather, it was premised, ingood Lutheran fashion, upon waiting for God to bridge the gap betweentranscendence and the human world by His own means.29

Under such conditions, the confessionally Protestant state could ofcourse potentially do as it pleased. And in the opening months of the war,Germany did so with impunity, based on positions well within the logic ofwhat Gogarten calls the original Protestantism of the Reformers.30 Lutherhad indeed acknowledged the rights of secular power in his infamousAgainst the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, written in 1525,just two years after the Temporal Authority essay, in terms of the Two King-doms doctrine. There, he condemns the peasants struggles outright as somuch rebellion, reminding the perpetrators that they are absolutely sub-ject, as bodies, to the law of this world. For baptism does not make menfree in body and property, but [only] in soul. Nevertheless, for him tempo-ral rule and divine justice were not separate. The authorities merely steppedup to their ultimate responsibilities in the eyes of God when theypunish[ed] such scoundrels. Indeed, anyone who is killed fighting on theside of the rulers may be a true martyr in the sight of the Lord. Stab, smite,slay, he cries; those who die merely take the everlasting kingdom inexchange for the kingdom of this world.31 It was statements like thesethat earned the Reformerand the confession that then went by hisnamethe reputation of encouraging blanket subordination . . . to thestate.32 Applied to Germanys wartime adversaries, the idea that Germanysmilitary machine could carry out Gods will by any means necessary on boththe eastern and western fronts allowed pious Lutherans to march patrioti-callyand willinglyto their deaths under the banner of the nation, withtheir eyes fixed on some combination of an otherworldly and inner-worldlyprize. This was the same logic that permitted atrocities like the infamousRape of Belgium, with its anti-Catholic, battle for civilization hue tooccur, likewise as part of Gods plan for Germanys Holy War.33 Thus, com-ing from many sides, including the Protestant battles for civilization, their


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confessional twin, a militaristic war theology, and the ironies embedded inthe Two Kingdoms doctrine, the period between 1860 and 1918 saw a potentinjection of religious thinking into the secular realm of German politics.

Astrology, Protestantism, and Enchantment

Although it may seem somewhat counterintuitive, Warburgs andBenjamins interest in astrology in the early twentieth century may be readas forming a crucial, if vexed, piece of the same war-theological puzzle asthe Two Kingdoms theory. For them, official Protestant ideology quiteclearly informed the widespread interest in astral magic in Lutheran cir-cles during the early modern periodand also in the present. Other intel-lectuals and Protestant Church authorities in the Reich seemed almostwillfully to ignore the link, particularly as it drove the upsurge of alternativeand (to our minds) magical popular belief systems in the years aroundthe Great War.34 These perhaps somewhat more traditional thinkers, on theother hand, saw the rise in astrological beliefas well as in occultism, Spiri-tualism, and other irrational belief systemsbefore and after the war asjust so many desperate responses to the horrible and horribly uncontrol-lable rationalization of the means of destruction, and as testimony to thespread of subversive consolatory hidden religions, which in some caseseven smacked of unpatriotic ultramontanism.35 Hoping to be spared fromthe industrially enabled carnage, soldiers carried amulets into battle, forexample, and troops were madeand requestedto march through ornear the village where a notorious female visionary claimed to have spokenwith the Virgin Mary and several saints. A medium industry sprouted up,with its practitioners promising those left behind the possibility of renewedcontact with their war-dead, and countless prophecies about possible datesfor successful military engagements and even the end of the war were madeand believed on the basis of readings of favorable or malevolent conjunc-tions of the stars. According to Carl Christian Bry in his 1924 book, HiddenReligions. A Critique of Collective Delusion, myriad forms of such nonsenseabounded. Arnold F. Stolzenberg agreed, in a 1928 issue of the journal Dasevangelische Deutschland (Protestant Germany), a publication of the GermanProtestant Church Union. Everything and anything seems to have beenacceptable leading up to and during the war, Stolzenberg writes, as long asit bridge[d] the abyss that had opened up between the Here and theBeyond.36

The postwar dismissal by men like Bry and Stolzenberg of the wartimeupsurge of popular belief systems reveals their failure to grasp the logicalcontinuities between these beliefs and the historical Lutheran Two Kingdoms


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theory at the heart of the war theology the state had promoted.37 Because, Iclaim, both Warburg and Benjamin seem to have understood these continu-ities more clearly, we need to turn first to the role of astrology in the Refor-mation era that was their primary concern. Beginning already in the 1520s,for example, when Luther and his learned friend, Philip Melanchthon, laterknown as the praeceptor germaniae and the theoretical brains behind theReform, began formulating their ideas, insight into astral patterns func-tioned as one of the ways in which an ordinatio divina (divine order, orgovernment) that transcended human understanding could in fact be dis-cerned by denizens of the earthly realm.38 In Melanchthons mind in partic-ular, the two kingdoms were actually linked via the stars; astrology could thushelp reveal, by decoding signs, the original design of Gods providence.39

His related interest in astronomy belonged, in turn, to what CharlotteMethuen calls a specifically Lutheran natural philosophy, whereby knowl-edge of the celestial bodies, for example, could give insight into Godsintended order for the world.40 Gods kingdom may thus be invisible, other-worldly, and transcendent, but by the logic of a Lutheran sidereal specula-tion, the inner-worldly realm was not irrevocably cut off from His blueprintfor Mankind, etched as it was intoand thus visible inthe starry patternsabove.41

Like their early twentieth-century avatars, rulers of early modern confes-sionalizing territories had had good reason, moreover, to be invested inmaintaining belief in (and yet, also themselves managing the disseminationof) lore about the role of astral forces of course, as it could help them con-trol how the populace negotiated their economic, social, and political lives.Lutheran princes and cities have been characterized as particularly hos-pitable to astrological thinking, in fact.42 In turn, reliance among theirsubjects on astrological almanacs and calendars belonged to a set of [all-consuming meaningful] coherent practices, including recourse to suchsacrally potent objects as church bells as apotropaic[ally] capable ofprotect[ing] against storms and lightning, and hymnals and prayer bookstreated as containers of healing . . . power that could also help produce agood crop.43

The phenomenon of infantrymen carrying amulets into the trenchesand making pilgrimages to local blessed sites some four hundred years laterdoes not seem so very different from such early modern practices. Whatthese activities make clear is that neither the early modern nor the moderncultures of Germany were disenchanted in any conventional understand-ing of the term. Precisely the opposite. In both cases, the worldly kingdomwas endowed with a highly charged sacrality emanating from some higherwill. As in the Reformation era, so too in the early twentieth century, all sec-ular events, social, political, and economic, could have cosmic significance.44


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The outbreak of interest in astrology and the occult at the height of theGreat War coincides logically, in other words, with the Protestant war theol-ogy officially associated with it.

It is in the company of such arguments that we may briefly reconsiderMax Webers early twentieth-century argument about disenchantment andProtestantism, which has of course been taken to articulate a very differentline of thought, one said to associate with this same early modern era a fun-damental discontinuity, or break, between the spiritual-religious and thetemporal-mundane, with secularization as the necessary result. Althoughmost often taken to mean the realm of economic activity when referring tothe secular, Webers theory was clearly applicable to (and its author activelyinterested in) the world of terrestrial politics and the development of thestate as well, which he describes as rationally ordained (rational gesatzt) inways not unlike those that endowed capitalism with its fateful force (schick-salvollste Macht).45 Weber is said to have been a convinced, albeit realisticnationalist who did everything in his power to promote steadfastness in thewar.46 He had been deeply involved, along with his cousin, the theologian,Otto Baumgarten, in Liberal Protestant politics just before the turn of thecentury and continuing on into the period when The Protestant Ethic firstappeared, participating in the Protestant Social Congress, for example, andpublishing essays in The Christian World (Die Christliche Welt), edited by thetheologian Martin Rade, the journal considered the most important theo-logical organ of the liberal cultural Protestants at the time.47 Weber was byno means a rabid ideologue, or even a believer, but the mix of somewhatarchaic religious and magical vocabularygesatzt and Schicksaltodescribe two of the allegedly most rational institutions of modern times res-onates with the various levels of secular enchantment theorized in the war-theological and astro-mystical movements discussed here. The choice ofsuch words suggests that his argument about the cultural consequences ofthe Reformation, consequences visible in the persistent (rather than dimin-ishing) correlations (Wahlverwandtschaften) (48; 82 and 49; 83) betweenthe secular and the divine, might have been designed to close the frighten-ing gap between Gods and Mans worlds in ways not unrelated to thosemore frequently associated with magical times.48

In his famous essay on Protestantism, Webers rendering of the TwoKingdoms doctrineand his attribution of different versions of it to the sev-eral Protestant denominations in which he is interestedcan be heard in hisclaims about the absolute transcendentality of God.49 For Luther, activityin the world, although a thing that belongs to the realm of the flesh (zumKreatrlichen), is a priori determined and willed by God; the fulfillment ofworldly duties in a Lutheran calling (Beruf ) is thus the only way to live inthe earthly kingdom in ways acceptabl[e] to His plan. Here, the description


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is of a predictably tight fit between the two realms. It is a traditional stance,one that respects tradition and represents an endorsement of obedience toauthority (4045; 7078). Webers description of Lutheranism resonateswith claims being made at approximately the same time by his contempo-rary, colleague, and friend, the theologian/historian of religion ErnstTroeltsch, about the fateful consequences for Germany of Luthers conser-vative respect for authority and for the whole of absolutist development inthe German Territories.50 They are clearly also referring (in a not necessar-ily sanguine way) to the Kulturkampf-related arguments about the implica-tion of the polity in Gods design that underpinned the logic of the wartheology that was to come.

At both a dogmatic and practical level, Webers Calvin understood therelation between the two kingdoms differently; they were more profoundlysundered from each other. The absolute invisibility of the hidden mysteryof the divine planand most prominently, of the details of Gods decisionsabout any given individuals salvationin Calvinism was of course inhu-man[e] and harsh, and created in Man a profound inner loneliness anddeep spiritual isolation from the otherworldly sphere. But it led toorexplained, according to Weberthe development of an inner-worldly sys-tem designed to cope with the salvation anxiety produced by the split bymeans of social activity . . . in the world in majorem gloriam Dei and labourin a calling [Berufsarbeit] . . . for the glory of God. For Webers Calvinists, thewonderfully purposeful [wunderbar zweckvolle] organization and arrange-ment of the cosmos were thus designed by God; work in that cosmosassuaged the concerns produced by the distance between the two kingdomsby allowing Man to promote the glory of God in labour willed by[H]im in the world. The association here with Reformed Protestantism ofan only apparently oxymoronic purposeful cosmic realm full of divinewonders, its communities of self-confident Reformed saints engaged inenchanted rational work on the ground, sounds curiously like a Protestantsacred magic in a Melanchthonian kind of way (6067; 93105).

Weber is of course most famously credited with having identified the six-teenth century as a time when a modern, rationalizing, and secular dis-enchantment of the world that followed in the wake of the early modern riseof capitalism began. Here, however, he argues that the unbridgeable gulfbetween Gods and Mans realms that Calvin recognizedand against whichLuther struggled in his Two Kingdoms theoryhad in fact already been cre-ated by a prior elimination of magic from the world. Preexisting trends in therepudiat[ion] of all magical means to salvation . . . which had begun with theold Hebrew prophets and, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought . . .[merely] came here [in Calvinism] to [their] logical conclusion, Weberexplains (6061; 9395). (Following a clear battle for civilizationrelated,


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dichotomizing logic, he subsequently adds that Catholic priests of coursecontinued to be magician[s] [Magier], when they dispensed atonement,hope of grace, certainty of forgiveness, and the like [71; 114].) It was thisprior elimination of magic that had in fact led to the need to create a confes-sional world in which the pursuit of worldly activity (weltliche Berufsarbeit)could actually re- rather than disenchant the world; reanimating its latentwonders as a way of relinking the world of the flesh (Kreatur) to the king-dom beyond was thus the main mission.51 Weber juxtaposes here the much-desired Lutheran unio mystico, the actual absorption of Man into Godindebted to medieval German mysticism, with what he describes as thedeeply different and modern Calvinist understanding of Man as a tool(rather than as vessel) of the divine will (6468; 1008). Rather than pun-ishing himself (after a Lutheran fashion) as a helpless and unrepentant sin-ner, the Calvinist observe[s] in his own conduct [the conduct] of Godand thus sees His finger in all the details of life (77; 123). But the two posi-tions are really not that different, and Weber is merely following MatthiasSchneckenburger, his source on the early modern doctrinal debates, inshowing that both denominations sought, each after its own fashion, toreconnect the two worlds. Both forms of Protestantismthe mystical andthe ethicalin fact traded in doctrines designed to sublate (aufheben), andthus retain and absorb, the lost function of magic rather than to reject it outof hand.52

Webers belittling dismissal of an ethnic explanation of these attitudesas the product of a Teutonic spirit (Ausdruck eines germanischen Volks-geistes) notwithstanding (39; 6465: Parsons translation slightly altered), heis clearly concerned about the afterlives of these early modern belief systemsin the here-and-now of his own early twentieth-century Germany. The scarequotes around the Teutonic spirit reference do suggest that he woulddistance himself from any number of nationalist-racist explanations ofGermanys cultural achievements. He does not retreat, however, from hisown patriotic desire to understand how best to maintain them. When hefamously asserts, then, that he is not in the business of judging the relativevalue of . . . cultures, he is clearly (if coyly) admitting that he is horrified bythe appal[ling] path that human destiny has taken more recently (xli;14) after the religious roots of search[ing] for the Kingdom of God(Gottesreich) have died out (119; 197). These lines were written before hehad traveled to the United States, and his reference immediately followingto the Faustian bargain that Man makes as a condition of any valuablework in the modern world is another indication that it is the destiny of hisown modern nation about which he is concerned here. Indeed, when twoof the most famous works of German literature, Faust, Goethes play about(ironically) an early modern conjurer, as well as his Wilhelm Meisters Journey


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Years, are mentioned explicitly in this connection (123; 203), the reader isreminded that the spirit (Geist) that is the topic of his book is a specificallyGerman one.

The modern Protestant Man haunted, as Weber writes, by the ghost ofdead religious beliefs and incarcerated in the iron cage (12324; 2034)of technical and economic rationalism, is thus the German who, failing tomaintain the re-enchantment of the world that his confessional ancestorshad begun, has too radically pried Mans world apart from Gods. Patriotthat he was, Weber may well have repressed the overt articulation of suchcritical assessments of the nation after 1914. Nevertheless, just one yearbefore war was declared, he had written, with reference to the rationaliza-tion of modern life, that those who oppose [rationalizations of this sort] arein no way necessarily to be understood as fools; I consider the use of theterm progress [Fortschritt] [in this context] very inopportune, consideringthe misunderstandings that may be all too implicated in it.53 Even if Weberdid not fully endorse the stances associated with all-out war theology at thetime, he may well have been worried about the consequences for Germanyof any further uncoupling of the secular from a more socially responsibleand politically defensible spiritual mission.54 Held up as one of the main the-orists of the secularization thesis, Weber was thus in fact interested inmodalities of re-enchantment, that is, in ways of seeing and living out tran-scendent significance in this world.

Germanys Mission: Warburgs Heroic Reformation

Among the holdings of the Warburg Institute Archives in Londonmay be found a single-page hand-drawn sketch by the famously eccentricart and cultural historian that suggests how Warburg was to illustrate a lec-ture that he held twice in 1917 and 1918. At the top right is scrawled:Luthers Birthday (Luthers Geburtsdatum, Luthers date of birth). Eventu-ally held as part of the four-hundred-year jubilee of the Reformation orga-nized by the Society for the History of Hamburg, the talk had been put offseveral times, not only because of Warburgs ongoing research into histopic, but also because of the lack of coal to heat the venue.55 Jubilee cele-brations of the Reformation in Germany had been highly political, secularaffairs since as early as 1617.56 This one, during the so-called turnip winterof 191617, one of the coldest winters in Germany on record, was noexception; it presented an obvious opportunity, in the face of hunger anddisillusionment both in the trenches and on the home front, to engagein a rousing (if compensatory) wartime celebration of the RankeanLuther-to-Bismarck hegemonic narrative of how modern Germany


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came to be, the very same narrative of course that war theology soughtto tell.57

Like Benjamins later work in the Tragic Drama book, the Jewish War-burgs interest in 1917 in a topic related to Luther and to Germanysnational religion was neither new nor idiosyncratic for more or less assimi-lated members of his faith; in two essays entitled Germanness and Jewish-ness (1915 and 1916), for example, Hermann Cohen argues that with theReformation, Germany had entered upon the world historical stage.58

Warburgs choice of subjects was politically loaded both in this sense and as amatter of class and professional identity.59 In his famous intellectual biogra-phy of the art historian, E. H. Gombrich indicates that Warburg had in factsought to get involved in the patriotic war as early as 1914 by traveling toItaly, for example, to meet with Italian art-historical colleagues, and found ajournal designed to encourage them to support staying the course as part ofthe Triple Alliance.60 In 1915, when the Italians broke with the Alliance,Warburg symbolically broke with them, turning away from his interest in Ital-ian art to the art of another period of crisis for Germany, namely, theReformation.61 The second time Warburg gave the talk in front of the Asso-ciation for the Scientific Study of Religion in Berlin nearly a year and a halflater, in April of 1918, was still before the armistice was signed. His remarksappeared in article form two years after that under the title Pagan-AncientPrognostication in Word and Image in Luthers Day.62

It is interesting to consider Warburgs essay against the background ofthe intersecting logics of Protestant war theology and the upsurge in astro-logical thinking during the war. The bulk of it deals with clearly related top-ics, most prominently, the visual and literal rhetorics of astral determinism inboth learned and popular materials from the Reformation period. Accord-ing to these materials, the starry conjunctions dominant at the time of theReformers birth could be read as either challenging or supporting theReformations theological and political aims.63 The two kingdoms are asinterlocked in this argument as they were in the more specialized theologi-cal debates described earlier. The final part of Warburgs study addresses theastrological lore about these same astral forces and their impact on theworld as it is visible in the work of the equally celebrated early modern sym-bol of Germanness, Albrecht Drer, in ways that resonate with both doctri-nal issues and the ideological agenda of the lectures original context in theLuther jubilee year.64 I address both parts in more detail in what follows. Butwhat is interesting to note here is that Warburgs preliminary LuthersBirthday sketch for how he intended to illustrate the lecture seems to offera direct theorization of how he would have the parallelisms between the sub-ject at hand and the wartime context of his presentation understood. Thehasty drawing indicates, for example, that he would have the multiple and


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mutually illuminating visual materials (astrological nativity charts, prognosti-cation pamphlets, a Drer engraving) displayed simultaneously, such thatthe web of both literal and figurative citations, of parallels and similaritiesbetween and among them, could be recognized by the viewing audience.The technique is at the conceptual heart of what subsequently becameknown as Warburgs signature concept of the Wanderstrassen (pathways),along which a globetrotting pictorial unconscious traveled from east to westand back again, as well as between and among the regimes of high visual cul-ture and its banal equivalents.65 In the Luther lecture, the pathway in ques-tion is also the one that runs from the early modern into his own fraughtwartime years, in which similarly enchanted politico-theological issues wereas intimately involved with a culture of astrology as they had been in Refor-mation times.

Indeed, following up on Gombrichs hints, recent scholarship has shownthat beginning in 1914, Warburg began to be consumed, almost to theexclusion of his pre-existing academic work, with the compilation of whathas come to be known as his Kriegskartothek, his wartime collection ofcitations of newspaper and magazine articles from the German and foreignpress. The seventy-two file boxes into which the citations were carefullysorted were ordered by topicSuperstition, Prophecies, Behavior DuringBattle, Meteorological Events, Germany: Religion and Ethicsandtrack the resurgence of these various kinds of magical thinking in theWorld War I years. The categories of course resonate with the early modernones at the heart of his talk. The boxes also held clippings and bibliographicnotes, as well as other media (postcards, press photos, references to booksthat he subsequently acquired). By 1918, there are said to have been morethan ninety thousand items in the collection, an indication of the frenzywith which he pursued his task.66 Warburg considered collecting these mate-rials as a way of charting, seismograph[icall]y, the various forms of religio-magical thinking rampant at the time of the world catastrophe of the war.

In the Luther essay, the research for which was consuming him at exactlythe same time, Warburg investigates the response of the Reformer and hiscoterie to the huge numbers of popular polemical pamphlets (Flugschriften)about astrology and single-sheet imprints (Eindruckbltter), with their prog-nostications and prophecies, primarily of imminent disasters, both naturallyand divinely caused and directed, that were circulating throughout the tenseyears of the so-called pamphlet wars of the early Reformation (152125). Hisinterest in pursuing the historical origins of the logic behind the parallelpractices he could observe in his own time is clear.67 Because, moreover, theybelonged to the same astrological culture, Warburg is able to link materialsassociated with the very focused topic of his occasional lecture, namely, themanipulation of Luthers nativity charts by his enemies and friends (hence,


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Luthers Birthday), with these larger prognosticatory trends, and expandupon their relevance for understanding the role of visual culture in both theearly modern and the modern contexts. The astrological Schlagbilder(headline images, 513) in which he was interested were thus part of a largerculture of early modern print and news, indeed, of the flood of what War-burg calls politico-intellectual propaganda/tendentious texts (490) thatfed a hungry market for sensational press during the Reformation years(51011). Like the contemporary materials assembled in the Kriegskar-tothek, the lecture examines materials emanating from a highly politicizedlandscape in which the confessional-magical and the confessional-secularwere closely intertwined.68

In this context, it is not surprising that Warburg is particularly attuned tothe ideological ramifications of the episode that represents the main con-cern of his essay, namely, the response of none other than Melanchthon tothe devastating terms of a Catholic-authored nativity chart for the Reformer,which had placed the former monk squarely in the path of destructive astralconjunctions at the time of his birth. Seeing the attack on his friendsauthority (and sensing the propaganda disaster lurking in such a claim),Melanchthon attempted to launch what Warburg calls a literary counter-offensive (520) on Luthers behalf, adjusting the exact time of his friendsnativity so as to push him into the path of a more favorable stellar alignmentat the moment when he saw the light. The wartime genesis of Warburgsessay echoes in his choice of words (propaganda texts, counter-offen-sive); the decision to read this particular selection of popular visual artifactsfrom the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries alongside, and not by chance, thegenuinely great art of the same period as visible in Drers Melencolia Iof 1514 (524) is also revealing.69 For, just as Weber references Goethes Faust,so too would Warburg have these two icons of national cultural achievementsupport his claims about the crucial role that Germany in particular playedin initiating the inner intellectual and religious liberation of modern man(531) from the ancient fear of demons, or spirits (531) in what he calls thedecisive battle for a free German intellectual conscience (504 n. 1: myemphasis). It is perhaps not by chance that Warburg associates a prior debil-itating kind of superstitious fear with the intervening medieval tradition ofastrological prognostics, which was in turn beholden to forms of easternancient pagan superstition (534) articulated, not surprisingly, by the turn-coat Italians. In any case, the modern astrological science associated withthe Germans can function as an example of national liberation here onlybecause of their association with the specifically Lutheran astral theorydescribed earlier. Warburg may thus be understood not only as deeply histor-ically informed but also as firmly within the tradition of his nations battlefor civilization and its war theology too when he requisitions Reformation


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materials for a celebratory narrative about the German past. His essay thusappears perfectly in synch with how Luther and company were being used ascultural weapon[s] in and around 1917.70

First among the many documents to which Warburg introduces us in hisessay is what was, in 191718, an unknown 1531 letter from Melanchthon tothe astrologer Johann Carion, in which, according to Warburg, it becomesclear that the rational humanist leader and intellectual powerhouse of theReformation (that is, Melanchthon) was actually something like an enlight-ened primitive. In this logic, the figurehead of the movement, the ex-Augustinian monk Luther, who initially denies Melanchthons astrologics inthe interest of claiming that the only causalities that truly exist are invisibledivine ones, becomesperhaps not so ironically, given the contextamodern.71 According to Warburg, Melanchthons letter reveals that hebelieved in the legitimacy of on-the-ground political reasoning based on theappearance of a comet that appears to be in Cancer as well as on a varietyof prophecies by a wench from Kitzingen, a citizen from Schmalkalden,and a Belgian virgin (494), all of which he then relates in the letter to a dis-cussion of the Danish King Christians and Emperor Charles Vs impendingmilitary moves and the more local and pressing issue of the support of someof the German princes and electors for the anti-imperial League of Schmal-kalden. The discourses of the allegedly magical, on the one hand, and of ahighly rationalized calculus of state, on the other, are clearly cozy bedfellowshere, the intimate exchange between them made easier by a reading of won-drous signs of various sorts. The role of the divine is, however, in no waydownplayed. For example, Warburg quotes Melanchthon as concluding withregard to the prophecies in particular: Overall I think that there is somegreat movement in the offing and I pray to God that he influences this eventto turn out well, such that both the church and the state are well served.The belief that the astrologically determined, the political-secular, and theconfessionally organized realms all intersect is captured in these last words,which testify not to a superstitious culture that is in any way left behind, butto what Robert W. Scribner has called the one-way Lutheran logic ofsacred action that flows from the divine to the human spheres.72 Thetranscendental divine causality and kingdom behind the movement of heav-enly bodies may well be something that men, as fallen creatures on earth,can only imperfectly understand. But if the border between the two realmsrepresented by the starry canopy, for example, is recognized as connectingrather than setting them apart, then trained astrologers and prophecy read-ers can see Gods political intentions for the Protestant world in His signs.

In the first part of the Prognostication essay, Warburg takes Melanchthonsletter to Carion, on the one hand, and, more important for his argument, thestruggles that Melanchthon then had with Luther over the nativity chart drawn


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by the Italian (and Catholic) astrologer Lucas Gauricus, on the other, as a signof the penetration of astrological thinking deep into the heart of Lutheranconfessional politics. In his chart (of which the only version we have datesfrom 1552, but which Warburg surmises is from around 1532, when Gauricusvisited Wittenberg), the Catholic had postponed the date of Luthers birthuntil 1484 (instead of the conventionally agreed upon year of 1483), andplaced his nativity on a day and at an exact time when the conjunction of theplanets Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn had occurred.73 The year 1484 had longbeen predicted by astrologers to be one in which, according to Warburg, anew era in the development of Western religion [would] begin (500). Themost widely disseminated version of this prediction had been in one JohannLichtenbergers prognostication pamphlet, we learn, a pamphlet that, firstpublished in Latin in 1490, had circulated widely before being translated intoGerman and printed in Wittenberg in 1527. Lichtenberger was following anearlier prognostication pamphlet of the Dutch Paulus von Middelburg (again,according to Warburg) in predicting the appearance of a religious man, who[would] provoke an ecclesiastical revolution (514) in the fall of 1484. MovingLuthers birth to that year thus made a great deal of sense. That many agreedat the time is quite clear in the names, those of Luther and Melanchthon,scrawled above the monk figures in a 1492 illustrated edition of Lichtenbergerthat Warburg consulted in the Hamburg State and University Library (fig.137). Warburg identifies the words as written in an old hand that most likelybelonged to the sixteenth century (516).

Of course the details of the Latin text that accompanied the CatholicGauricuss early sixteenth-century nativity chart for Luther invested thechanged date with a profoundly threatening significance; the man born onthat day will be a sacrilegious heretic, a most bitter enemy to the Christianreligion (Warburg, fig. 123). The much-predicted revolution is thus castnegatively as a way of stirring up opposition to his Reform by focusing on theintersection of the heavy planet, Saturn, with that of the dangerous planet,Mars, on his day of birth. This particular conjunction of other planets withSaturn was particularly problematic in Warburgs reasoning because of thelegacy of what he calls Saturnfrchtigkeit, fear of Saturnine influences(505, 507), identified with both the homophagic god of antiquity and withthe planet whose great distance from earth, flat light, and slow movementled it to be identified, in the discourses of medieval humoral psychology andtheology alike, not only with both literal and spiritual lethargy, sluggishness,and sin (acedia) but also, in the sixteenth-century mass media, with threaten-ing meterological disasters of all kinds, including the torrential rainfall andflooding predicted for 1524.

Warburg is fascinated by the way a wide selection of visual print culturefed the astrological hysteria associated with this particular prediction during


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the early modern period and includes numerous examples in his text (figs.131, 132, 133). Here again, parallels to his work in the Kriegskarthotekabound. In response to Gauricuss chart, he explains, the position of thestars at the time of Luthers birth wasat Melanchthons promptinganalyzed and recalculated, recalculated and analyzed, over and over againby several scholars belonging to the Reformers inner circle; a series of care-fully drawn alternatives to it was produced by Carion, Johann Pfeyl, and theofficial Wittenberg astrologer, Erasmus Reinhold (fig. 124). (Warburgreports that Melanchthon even went so far as to interview Luthers motherto get the exact details of the hour and minute at which her by then famousson first saw the light [501].) These charts acknowledge and adopt the newyear and date (namely, October 22, 1484) of Luthers birth from Gauricusbut tamper with the exact time of day in order to place Jupiter and Saturn ata careful remove from the sphere of Mars at the time of the Reformers birth(5024). In this way, Luthers nativity is deftly pushed out of the path of apotentially threatening astral conjunction even as his association with thenow optimistically interpreted prediction about the birth of a religious revo-lutionary in 1484 (502) is preserved. Because Gods plans for German reformwere understood to be everywhere legible in the heavens, Melanchthon andcompany were able to work deftlyand devoutlywith the lore of astralenchantment to ensure a correct reading that supported their confessionalprogram.

Warburg notes that Luther initially thought very little of this kind ofmagical thinking; Es ist ein dreck mit irer kunst, he writes in the earthy ver-nacular of the Table Talk, loosely translated: your [astrological] art is a loadof crap (500). He claims that his birth date and time were exclusively ofGods doing: that which occurs by virtue of Gods will and is his work weought not to attribute to the power of the stars (5045). This is a nearly will-ful misreading of Melanchthons efforts, which were in fact designed to useastrology to have his reforms represent the fulfillment of Gods plan. War-burg indicates that he sees what must ultimately have been a secret accordbetween the two men on the point when he quotes the obviously astrologi-cally informed Reformer, again in Table Talk, commenting on his own iden-tity as a child of Saturn: Ego Martinus Luther sum infelicissimis astrisnatus, fortassis sub Saturno (505). In a cunning foreword to the 1527German edition of Lichtenbergers prognostication pamphlet attributed toLuther, moreover, which Warburg reproduces in an appendix (54550) infull, Luther is allowed to unpack at length his own understanding of the nat-ural art, or science, of the stars (546) as a kind of sacred astrology alongMelanchthonian lines, recommending that people attend to the propheciescontained in the booklet not because Lichtenberger has issued them, but,rather, because the signs in sky and on earth are surely not mistaken.


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They are Gods and his angels work (549). Warburg thereby establishes thelinks between the otherworldly and the mundane embedded in Luthersthinkingand thus his ultimate endorsement of his partners logic concern-ing the confessional enchantment of the world.

The other iconically German figure of this same period in whom War-burg is interested, Albrecht Drer, responded to the pressures of a worldpermeated by what Warburg calls the multiple creaturely determinismsassociated with this kind of astrological thinking (528, 530) with evengreater clarity and force than the former monk.74 According to Warburg,Drer likewise believed that the world was enchanted, and that astrologicalknowledge could help negotiate redemption in the world. In a reading ofDrers Melencolia I that is heavily indebted to a densely researched article onthe engraving published in 19031904 by his late friend Carl Giehlow[,]who left us too early (526), Warburg tracks how ancient astral theories dis-tinguished between good and bad Saturnine influences on the body, andargues that the struggle between them informed Drers planning of theimage.75 The fact that these ancient theories had migrated, via MarsilioFicino and the so-called Picatrix text, into the northern humanist court con-text of Maximilian I (52728) and become accessible to northern human-ists and artists there, was the thrust of Giehlows learned piece. The argumentis important at a submerged level for Warburgs wartime claims about thespecifically German provenance of these elements of the great artists work.Warburg also and not surprisingly gives his reading of Drers image aspecifically Lutheran twist, noting that Melanchthon himself acknowl-edged his friend Drers achievement in the engraving in two places in hisDe anima text (529). Drers (Protestant) Melancholy resists the power of thestars to determine what Warburg calls Mans creaturely sublunar fate (dasSchicksal der beschienenen Kreatur) (528), a fate that could cause Melancholy tolay aside the tools of any activity at all, such as those visible at her feet. InWarburgs reading, her ability to do so, indeed, to become a thinking, work-ing human being (denkender Arbeitsmensch) (528) in the world, is enabledprecisely by looking up (as she is shown to be doing) into and being inspiredby Gods plan, whose light illuminates the world below from the cometshown in the upper left-hand corner of the image. (The reading resonateswith Webers rejection of a passive kind of Lutheran Protestantism andendorsement of its more active Calvinist twin.) Protected by a belief in thelegibility of Gods will in the stars, Drers Melancholy becomes heroic forWarburg, who, following Melanchthons original extension of astrology intoastronomy, sees astrology working hand in hand with mathematical reason-ing (indicated by the compass in Melancholys hand) to guarantee an accu-rate reading. The comet with a rising, not a falling, tail in the upper left,simulates the grace that links Gods world with Mans. The Lutheran astral


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magic that functions as an efficient conduit between the two kingdoms is cel-ebrated in no uncertain terms here.

For Warburg, both Luthers and Drers legacies for Germany lie in aratification of its new and sacrally endorsed mission. It is thus not surprisingthat at the end of the section on Drer, he designates both the monk andthe artist as liberators (531), heroes in that battle for the inner intellec-tual and religious liberation of modern man (531) that the Germans, onbehalf of all of modernity, seem poised to win. Like the ultimate accordbetween Melanchthon and Luther on the divine nature of astrology, buteven more so, Drers image is a document of the gradual victory, he writes,of Germanness (the grammar here is peculiardes Deutschen) in thebattle against a pagan-cosmological fatalism (529), a victory that finds itshigh point in the divinely magical force-field of the stars capable of actingas a roadmap of, and even supplement to, Gods purpose for Germany in thehere-and-now.76 There has been much debate about politically opportunisticor otherwise reactive shifts in Melanchthons original stance on the TwoKingdoms doctrine; he has been accused of being at an unpardonable dis-tance from a more Barthian version when, bowing to the state, he articu-lated his ideas about the cura religionis, the oversight of the church,being placed more firmly in the secular magistrates hands.77 His astrologi-cal theory would nevertheless suggest that, with Luther, Melanchthon in factbelieved deeply in the need to preserve continuity between the two realmssuch that the sublunar could continue to be understood as controlled by thedivine. In a beleaguered wartime Germany, Warburg seems willing to settlefor something like this kind of connection between Gods will and the state.

Even if he does not explicitly rely upon war-theological claims, Warburgscelebration of a specifically Lutheran Reformation in his lecture reveals hisconviction that in Germany, the secular and the spiritual realms remainedfirmly intertwined. Moreover, belief in astrology was not at all in conflict withthe ability to engage actively in rational reform based on Gods plan. ThatWarburg endorsed the cohabitation of modernity with something likeenchantment at an almost primordial level in his nations unconscious isclear when helike Weber, although in a much more upbeat wayconcludeshis argument with a quote from that other great German, Goethe. Warburgquotes Goethes Documents on the History of the Science of Color, wherehe states that the intertwined nature of a rational science like mathematicswith astrology, and thus the collaboration (rather than the contest) betweennoble reason and bleak fatalism, explains why superstition is in fact not atall uncommon in the so-called enlightened centuries (535). Warburg maystrain, in other words, throughout the lecture/essay to offer Luthers initialresistance to efforts to alter his date of birth, along with Drers use of astro-logical symbols in Melencolia I, as testimony to the history of the intellectual


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freedom of the modern European (534). But it is really the ProtestantMelanchthon and the great German Goethe (who seems to be drafted intoservice as an enlightened interpreter of Reformation thought to the mod-ern world) who use reason to locate the astrological path that leads fromGods otherworldly kingdom to the human world of science in Mans. Theyare thus the actual heroes of this jubilee-year tale.

It would be dishonest not to note that, as much in synch with thewartime celebrations of the German Protestant tradition as Warburgs lec-ture may have been, in the published version at least he lets slip that this his-tory may ultimately have to be read as a tragic (534), even doomed, one.What may be a postwar admission of this fact may not be by chance. For, likeWeber, Warburg refers in closing to a figure from a second Goethe text,namely, Faust (534). In a talk planned for and given in the bleak years of191718, when the German defeat was basically clear, this reference to theearly modern conjuror is as legible as a commentary on the contemporarycontext as Webers similar invocation of the mage, if in a more pointed way.For Warburg, Faust is the modern scientist par excellence who struggledvaliantly, yet ultimately in vain, to conquer an intellectual space of reasonbetween magic and rationality. (This failure may be why Warburg writes atthe very beginning that his talk about the Reformation period could func-tion as the first chapter of the handbook on The Un-Freedom [Unfreiheit]of Modern Superstitious Man that had yet to be written [490]). Why didFaust fail where Luther, Melanchthon, and Drer did not? Perhaps becausehe mistakenly wagered with the devil instead of with God. Warburg does notgive this reason, however, but closes, rather, with his famous claim: Athenswill of course always and repeatedly desire to be won back from Alexandria(534). The peculiarly recursive grammar of the sentencewhich suggeststhat reason somehow takes pleasure in repeatedly experiencing itself in thedangerous embrace of astrological magic even as it also repeatedly doesbattle with it in an effort to wrest itself freesuggests that the struggle onthe part of modern Germanys early modern surrogates, Luther, Drer,and now Faust, to find a smooth path from enchantment to science will beone in which the modern nation must engage. For Warburg, it was this sameNietzschean cycle that characterizes the eternal return of a highly confes-sionalized astrology in times of severe unrest in the German state.

Melancholy Germans: Benjamins Response

Walter Benjamins version of these debates in the Tragic Dramabook can be most compactly observed in the very first sentence of the lastsection of the second chapter, often identified as the melancholy chapter.


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That sentence reads: The great German dramatists of the baroque wereLutherans (138; 317).78 It is striking that among the countless line-workersin the crowded cottage industry of scholarship on Benjamins thought andon the Origin of the German Tragic Drama (emphasis added) in particular,none save Klaus Garber has remarked at any length on the implications ofthis opening claim.79 Benjamin of course famously and pointedly indicateson its dedicatory page that he was working on the Tragic Drama bookconceived 1916 and written 1925throughout the very darkest of thewartime and postwar years. The fact that he stood in active correspondenceabout early modern religious history and doctrine with his close friend, theProtestant theologian Florens Christian Rang, during its compositionindeed, Rangs death in 1924 meant, according to Benjamin, that his bookhad lost its only actual reader (seinen eigentlichen Leser)suggests the con-text in which the implications of the volatile theopolitical conflicts of theearly modern period for German modernity might have been presented tohim.80 Benjamin repeatedly identifies his Baroque playwrights as GermanProtestants (deutsche Protestanten: 98; 276) and often discusses their texts inthe context of the ongoing religious conflicts (65; 245) of the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries. Because he examines their astroreligious con-cerns within an explicitly confessional frame, we may be permitted to askhow his arguments might intersect with the wartime debates about religionwith which I have been concerned so far.

Benjamins assertion about the Lutheran identity of the playwrightswhose works are the main subject of his book is of course all the more curi-ous since it could be debated whether it is even true. After all, the lowernobility and patrician sponsors of the Baroque dramas about which he waswriting may not have been Lutherans but, rather, crypto-Calvinists, leavingus to wonder about the confessional affiliation of the playwrights in theiremploy.81 Benjamin may not have been aware of this wrinkle. Had he been,it might help explain the Weberian echoes in the passage that follows theopening statement quoted earlier, in which, without naming it as such, it isthe problem of how Lutheranism configured the Two Kingdoms theory thatconcerns him most: Whereas in the decades of the Counter-reformation[,]Catholicism had penetrated secular life [das profane Leben] with all the powerof its discipline, the relationship of Lutheranism to the everyday (Alltag) hadalways been antinomic. The rigorous morality of its teaching in respect ofcivic conduct stood in sharp contrast to its renunciation of good works. Bydenying the latter any special miraculous spiritual effect [geistliche Wunder-wirkung]), making the soul dependent on grace through faith, and makingthe secular-political sphere a testing ground for a life that was only indirectlyreligious . . . it did, it is true, instill into people a strict sense of obedience toduty, but in its great men it produced [only] melancholy. . . . Human actions


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were deprived of all value. Something new arose: an empty world . . . a rub-bish heap of . . . inauthentic actions (13839; 317). (This commentary onthe ways in which, in the hegemonic German Protestant confession, namely,Lutheranism, not Gods world, but, rather, only the world of things [Ding-welt] towers oppressively over the horizon of the Trauerspiel [134; 312] helpsus understand Benjamins famously opaque claim much earlier in the TragicDrama book that the baroque knows no eschatology [66; 246].) Benjaminsargument about the seventeenth-century afterlives of sixteenth-century doc-trine could be construed as a reflection on the downside, so to speak, ofearly twentieth-century dialectical theology, with its absolute separation ofthe two kingdoms.

The depressing image of a completely reified, secularized world evacu-ated of the divine aligns well of course with Benjamins biting explanation ofthe relation of the workaday world to modern mans quest for salvation inthe fragment, Capitalism as Religion, that was probably written at approxi-mately the same time. There he writes that capitalism is an essentially reli-gious phenomenon designed to correct the problem it had created byenticing the miraculous spiritual effect[s] (geistliche Wunderwirkung) ofworks back into everyday life by other means.82 The Lutheran faith, hecontinues in the Tragic Drama book, refused this more or less Calvinist solutionto the gap between the transcendent and the mundane that, for Benjamin(here disagreeing with Weber), the Reformation had to a certain extentitself opened up. Continuing to stare the rubbish heap of their existencedirectly in the face and frozen in an emptied world, Lutherans have towaitand wait and waitfor Gods intervention through grace. Hence thebleak rule of [their] melancholic distaste for life (13940; 31819: Osbornetranslation altered).

As a commentary on the disastrous economic and political situation inand for Germany, both on the homefront and on the world stage after thewarand thus after the promise that the nation was fulfilling the work ofGod had been irreparably brokenthe words ring true. Instead of gloryingin the possibility of a divine plan being revealed in the victories of war, theLutheran baroque of the postThirty Years War periodlike the historicalperiod to which many commentators at the time compared it, namely, WorldWar Iwas likewise paralyzed by a satanic ensnarement in history (14142;320). When Benjamin quotes the contemporary cultural critic Arthur Hb-scher here to the effect that this is the reason that seventeenth-centurybaroque nationalism never took the form of political action, and couldnever express itself as the revolutionary will of Sturm und Drang or theromantic onslaught on the philistinism of state and public life (141; 320), aWeberian criticism of the passivity of official Lutherandom and its failure todo what was right for the nation can be heard. Warburgs Prognostication


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essay is quoted (sometimes footnoted, but sometimes not) countless times inthis and the final chapter of Benjamins book. It may have given Benjaminthe idea to convert Webers claims about Calvinist abandonment andloneliness in the world into a Lutheran dilemma, and then to use it toinvestigate the seventeenth-century interest in astrology as a way of trackingthe more recent failure in Germany to develop a religious program in anymore than a merely functionalized way. Like his contemporaries, Benjaminin any case considered the early modern periodas well as his own worldas deeply invested in understanding the relation between the here-and-nowand the beyond.

Benjamins ideas about the implications of an astrally organized earlymodern world linked to a Lutheran tradition nevertheless differ significantlyfrom Warburgsand resemble more the precarious approach of aBarthian-Gogartian typejust as his more downbeat Baroque differs fromthe heroic German Renaissance that Warburg saw emerging out of theReformation era. He continues: The heritage of the renaissance fromwhich this age [the Baroque] derive[d its] material concerning the onlyindirectly religious life (138; 317) deepened the contemplative paralysisof its great men. Benjamin is clearly referring to Drers engraving here,and the image makes its appearance in the very next sentence, albeit inrefashioned form: It accords with this [the claim about the contemplativeparalysis of great men caught in a Lutheran world] that in the proximity ofAlbrecht Drers figure Melencolia, the utensils of active life are lying aroundunused on the floor, as objects of contemplation. This engraving anticipatesthe baroque in many respects (140; 319). And yet it does so, antithetically toWarburg, primarily in its indication of the imprisonment of a melancholyBaroque man in the satanic paralysis mentioned earlier. Benjamin writes,for example, that the vain activity of the [courtly] intriguer[s] (who popu-lated the Baroque plays) must be understood as the undignified antithesisof passionate contemplation (14142; 320); the sovereign and his lackeysare similarly trapped in the depths of the creaturely realm (146; 324), theiraccess to the absolute transcendentality via grace that Warburg found inMelanchthons and Drers Lutheran worlds denied. There are no heroeshere.

Given that they reverse Warburgs claims in nearly every respect, it is per-haps surprising that these pages (14551; 32329) are primarily a tissue ofextensive citations from both Warburg and Giehlow (upon whom Warburgtoo had depended), as well as from Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxls 1923book on Drers Melencolia, in which they had taken it as their mission tocomplete Warburgs work after the master had died.83 Benjamin lifts the sub-stance of his argument directly out of these texts, interweaving long quotesfrom them (again, sometimes footnoted, often not) on the stellar tradition


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(148; 326) and the development of humoral psychology out of its science,for example, as well as some of the lengthy passages from the medieval andRenaissance texts his scholarly contemporaries had quoted, with citations onmelancholic astral-humoral issues from his own seventeenth-century texts.(Do we have to wonder why the Warburgians did not respond entirely posi-tively when he sent them this semi-plagiarized text?) 84 Yet he does so, in theend, only to refute them. By dwelling on the radical separation of Man fromGods world, that is, and his incapacitating immersion in the life of crea-turely things, Benjamin in fact tracks how baroque Lutheran melancholiadiverges from the optimism of the earlier Reformation theories of sublimemelancholy (151; 329) inventoried by Warburg and the others. This, again,nearly Barthian absolute refusal of commerce between the two worlds meansthat, for Benjamin, even the most pious of his baroque Lutherans canhear[] nothing of the voice of revelation (Offenbarung :152; 330) in the sec-ular world. It is not that their world is disenchanted, however. Rather, it ismerely a world in which enchantment fails to redeem.85

Benjamins response to de-secularization is thus quite distinct from War-burgs (and Webers). Once it has been lured into the world, the enchant-ment he sees can become extremely dangerous, creating a debilitating statefrom which one could only be redeemed by the unlikely miracle of unde-served grace. Did his own melancholy produce Benjamins alternativeresponse? It would be difficult to explain the difference between his andWarburgs positions in this way, given that Warburg, as he was completingthe Prognostication essay in 1918, was slipping into a depressive madnessthat landed him in a Swiss clinic; only gradually was he to claw his way backup to reason, some say using his art historical work as a ladder. Rather, Ben-jamins postwar text indicates that it may have been only after the not per-sonal, but rather national, defeat of 1918 that he could produce hisdepressingly accurate account of the loss of a Lutheran Germanys soul. Hisfamously opaque insights into Baroque melancholia in the Tragic Dramabook may thus be read as a comment on the devastating effects of the con-fessional logic that subtended the nations actions in the war. He is of coursefar more explicit about his stance in the nearly contemporaneous short ded-icatory essay (Zuschrift) penned for his friend Rangs vehemently pacifistpostwar book, entitled A German Builders Guild (1924), which argued forGermanys moral necessity to pay hefty war reparations to the Belgians andthe French.86 In that book, the Protestant theologian suggests that, as a wayof saving the nations spiritual life (Geistesleben), Germans must takeresponsibility for the war damages and the destruction of human life [pri-marily] among civilians wreaked upon France and Belgium by his countrysmilitary during the war. They must pay for, indeed, even individually assisttheir former adversaries to rebuild.87 Although he had had doubts about


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Rangs analysis of the situation, Benjamin writes, he nevertheless supportshis friends (somewhat implausible) project and has hopes for its impact(Wirkung).88

The concept of reparations of this sort of course relies heavily on whatappears to be the confessionally alien logic of activity and works in thesearch for redemption, and may have resonated with something Benjaminhad noticed in his early modern Lutheran plays, namely, that the play-wrights of the German Baroque had in fact also played important publicroles and fulfilled political duties (56; 236) in the world. Much of his anal-ysis of the German plays in this section in fact turns on just how engagedtheir courtly protagonists do or do not stay with the detritus that surroundsthem as the result of their investments in Machiavellian political plots. Mostof them nevertheless ultimately fall into madness (14445; 32223) andtreachery as a result of the fact that the world in which they move knows nohigher law (kein hheres Gesetz) (15657; 333). The failure to respect or begoverned by a logic that links the two kingdoms is thus clear in the Germancase. Benjamins final argument in this chapter nevertheless targets a figurewhose creaturely life was successfully illuminated by the reflection of a dis-tant light, shining back from the depths of self absorption (we obviouslythink of the Drer image here), and is revealing of his political position inthe war. Germany was not the country which was able to have imagined it.Rather, this figure was Hamlet. That it is only in the bosom, as Benjaminwrites, of a figure from a play by the iconic English Bard, the poster boy ofone of Germanys greatest enemies in the war, that mournful images canbe transformed into a blessed existence, is of course somewhat perverse.Referring to what he calls (with justification) the crude theater of the Ger-mans, Benjamin not so coyly concludes: The rest is silence, especially onthe German front lines (15758; 33435).89

Again, it would be unfair not to acknowledge that Benjamin goes on, inthe third and final chapter of the Tragic Drama book, to posit a theory ofBaroque allegory that, in mysterious fashion, can in fact redeem the bleakconfusion and desolation of human existence in which Germany wascaught (232; 405). The passages in which this theory is developed are never-theless some of the most arcane and difficult to understand in this arcaneand difficult book. They involve a series of metaphors that indicate thatwhen such a redemption occurs, it is mostly by chance, as when those wholose their footing turn somersaults in their fall and, in an abrupt aboutturn, rediscover themselves, no longer in the earthly world of things,but, rather under the eyes of heaven (232; 406). The exchange of the heav-enly for the earthly kingdom comes here without warning and, indeed,entirely without work. It is an agentless redemption, in other words, thatrecalls the Lutheran doctrine of grace developed by some of the early


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twentieth-century dialectical theologians mentioned earlier. The fact thatone can only clumsily stumble into it, if at all, nevertheless suggests therareness of its occurrence. Indeed, it seems more likely that, even if there is abrief glimpse of heaven, the somersault will end in a fall. And fall Germanydid, and it fell hard, out of a dismally jingoist wartime enchantment into thehard realities of a postwar modernity whose heroic side was, by 1928, verymuch harder for Benjamin than for Warburg to discern.

Notes

1. H. Allen Orrs claim to this effect may be found in A Mission to Convert inthe January 11, 2007, issue of the New York Review of Books 54, no. 1.

2. On debates over the two paradigms of historically decreasing levels of reli-giosity versus historically rising rates of religious participation in the earlymodern period, and thus of the descending versus ascending importanceof religion in modernity, see Philip S. Gorski, Historicizing the SecularizationDebate: Church, State, and Society in Late Medieval and Early ModernEurope, ca. 1300 to 1700, American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (2000): 13867,here 139.

3. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 19141918 (Cambridge,1998), 125.

4. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, The German Theological Sources and ProtestantChurch Politics, in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth, eds., Webers Protes-tant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Context (Cambridge, 1993), 2749, here 31. Catholicswere also deeply implicated in these debates, as I show later in the essay.

5. On the de-differentiation rather than differentiation between the religiousand the secular during the Reformation era, see Gorski, Historicizing the Sec-ularization Debate, 13941.

6. Webers intellectual, political, and institutional contexts have of course beenexplored in great and good detail by many scholars. See, for example, the valu-able essays in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jrgen Osterhammel, eds., Max Weberand His Contemporaries (London, 1986). I cite several of the important contribu-tions to this volume, as well as essays from Lehmann and Roth, Webers ProtestantEthic, later in the essay. Warburg and Benjamin are not mentioned in theseexcellent books.

7. See Harry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 18701923 (Cam-bridge, Mass., 1988), as cited in Graf, The German Theological Sources, 29.On the afterlife of Protestantism for discussion of the Empire, see 30.

8. On de-secularization in the early modern period, see Gorski, Historicizingthe Secularization Debate, 159. I discuss Webers implicit lamentnot unlikeJacob Burckhardts somewhat earlier oneabout the modern loss of de-differ-entiation later in the essay. On parallels between Burckhardts and Webersarguments about the emergence of an ominous secular modernity in the earlymodern/Renaissance period, see Wolfgang Hardtwig, Jacob Burckhardt und


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Max Weber: Zur Genese und Pathologie der modernen Welt, in Umgang mitJacob Burckhardt: Zwlf Studien, ed. Hans R. Guggisberg (Basel, 1994), 15990.

9. I develop parts of what follows at greater length and in the context of Ben-jamins concern with a Lutheran Hamlet in my essay, Hamlet ist auch Sat-urnkind: Citationality, Lutheranism, and German Identity in BenjaminsUrsprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Benjamin Studien 1 (2008): 17188.

10. For an excellent overview of these movements, see Helmut Walser Smith, Ger-man Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, and Politics, 18701914(Princeton, 1995), 1949 and 14165. I am grateful to Professor Smith at Van-derbilt University for providing me with the original German of some of hisarchival documents.

11. Daniel Schenkel, Die kirchliche Frage und ihre protestantische Lsung (Elberfeld,1862), 12. Unless otherwised noted, all translations are my own.

12. Wilhelm Scherer, Die deutsche Spracheinheit, in Vortrge und Aufstze zurGeschichte des geistigen Lebens in Deutschland und Oesterreich (Berlin, 1874), 4570,here 55.

13. Cited in Smith, German Nationalism, 41 and 54. On the disproportionate impacton Catholics of discriminatory policies in the professions across the boardthrough the beginning of the twentieth century, see Thomas Nipperdey, MaxWeber, Protestantism, and the Debate Around 1900, in Lehmann and Roth,Webers Protestant Ethic, 7381.

14. Smith, German Nationalism, 151, 160. 15. See Gnter Brakelmann, Der deutsche Protestantismus im Epochenjahr 1917 (Wit-

ten, 1974).16. Luther uses at least two German terms to refer to these two kingdoms in his

work, Reich (realm, kingdom) and Regiment (ruled jurisdiction, government).See W. D. J. C. Thompson, The Two Kingdoms and the Two Regiments:Some Problems of Luthers Zwei-Reiche-Lehre, Journal of Theological Studies N.S.20, no. 1 (1969): 16485, here 164 and 16573.

17. Paul Althaus, referring in 1957 to the role the Two Kingdoms theory played inthe National Socialist period, suggests that the doctrine has had a fateful(verhngnisvoll) impact on German history for centuries ( Jahrhunderte). Seehis Luthers Lehre von den beiden Reichen im Feuer der Kritik, Luther-Jahrbuch (1957), 4068, here 40.

18. The quotes here are from Thompson, The Two Kingdoms and the Two Reg-iments, 16485, 164 and 16573.

19. Martin Luther, Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should be Obeyed,Selected Writings of Martin Luther, ed. Theodore G. Tappert, 4 vols. (Philadel-phia,1967), 2:267319, here 282, 280, 275, 282, 291, 286, 293.

20. See Smith, German Nationalism, 165.21. See Wilhelm Walt

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