Guided Pathway

The promise of finding a model for the (re)birth of reason in the West in an earlier period would have been a particularly welcome one after the collective implosion of the continent during World War One (1914-18) and in its immediate aftermath too, when Warburg had been caught up in the political, social, and economic turmoil of the years leading up to his breakdown and retreat to the Kreuzlingen sanatorium in 1921 (see Newman 2009). This turmoil of course persisted after his return to Hamburg in 1924, both for Warburg himself and for the German nation, which was enduring the very worst moments of the post-World War I inflation in the very same year that Warburg appears to have begun work on the Atlas project via attention to some of the images displayed in Panel 70, among them Rembrandt van Rijn’s “The Rape of Proserpina,” c. 1630 (see Leuschner). It is interesting to read the Mnemosyne project in general and Panel 70 in particular in this context, as a specifically German response, in other words, to the wartime and post-war European conditions of crisis arising from the unleashing of destructive energies capable of destroying both individuals and states.