Lea Dovev (Jerusalem) After the Storm – Three Pleas for Grünewald

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Lea Dovev
(Jerusalem)
After the Storm – Three Pleas for Grünewald
There is a no-man’s-land in writings about art, in which the machinations of
validity in art history and the discipline’s connivances cede to poetry – or to
silence. In this territory of uncertain frontiers, the probity of the would-be
normative product of research, method and historical distance is problematized;
and its linguistic shells are made to collapse. It is a vague terrain that
thrives at the outer edge of the academic habitat of art-historical ruses. And
in the perspective of today’s discontented reflection about under-interpretation
in art-historical procedures and their articulations, it acquires the status
of a corrective measure. For that which mainstream art history perceives as a
distrustful impulse to give free rein to a spectatorship allowing for a relative,
or anachronistic, effacement of historical distance may, in these provinces,
come into its own. In other words, what these liminal writings question is the
exclusivity, if not the sovereignty, of conventional scholarship.
The three encounters with the Isenheim altarpiece that my essay unfolds
do just that. The first of them is that of Erwin Panofsky, a pillar of academic
art history. It is a 1932 episode of displacement that, in 1939, was to become
silence and abstention. I propose to consider it as both a turning point and a
kind of rite of passage in the scholar’s life and career. The second account, by
contrast, comes from a self-willed dweller in the borderline reaches of art
history. This is the dense, self-conscious, poignantly private »Between Two
Colmars« (1973) by John Berger. 1 The third, which is straightforwardly literary,
negotiates art-historical learning and undermines it from a deceptively
impersonal vantage point. It is the long prose poem about Grünewald’s life
and works that opens Winfried Georg Sebald’s three-part ensemble After
Nature (1988).I shall read it in conjunction with the pivotal role that the Isenheim
altarpiece plays in the »Max Ferber« section of Sebald’s The Emigrants
(1993). 2
All three encounters – including Panofsky’s silence – belong to what I
have called the no-man’s-land of conversing with art. As such, it is quite appropriate
that their object be the peripheral, dismembered polyptych that
1 John Berger, Between Two Colmars [1973], in: idem, About Looking, New York
1980.
2 W. G. Sebald, Nach der Nature. Ein Elementargedicht, Nördlingen 1988; English
translation: After Nature, trans. by Michael Hamburger, New York 2002; and Die
Ausgewanderten, Frankfurt/Main 1993; English translation: The Emigrants, trans.
by Michael Hulse, London 2002.

after the storm – three pleas for grünewald
was attributed to a mysteriously elusive artist and whose later horizon was so
viscerally, so devastatingly, modern. For the Isenheim altarpiece has famously
had a momentous role in the construction of the idea of German quintessential
selfhood in the first decades of the twentieth century. A privileged
rhetorical site, this work was destined to engender vehement historiographical
fortunes and become a fulcrum of ruminations about the ordeals and
future horizons of this notion of collective entity. Consequently, the newly
emerging aura of the high altar was entangled with conflicting tenets regarding
the nature of modernity and the place of a hypothesized Germanness –
metaphysical as well as political – within it. The more it was established as an
epitome of outsider visual language, the more the Isenheim altarpiece became
an embodiment, not only of German identity, but of what modernity in art
was all about: namely, a persistent and heroic urge to transcend beauty, art,
civilization – an urge whose hour had come. The metaphoric road to Colmar
was grasped again and again as a secular pilgrimage and a promise of redemption.
Hence, counterbalancing this history after 1945 through careful contextualization
and impartial language entailed a political mission as much as it
was due to a change in academic tastes. By now, the underlying issue has
become, ultimately, a critical awareness of the workings of instrumental reason
within the humanities themselves and of their specific replications in art
history.
In this regard, the texts I shall discuss here constitute, of course, yet another
chapter not only in the polyptych’s later fate but in the fate of the concept
of Germanness writ large. It is precisely because they are not part and parcel
of art-historical displays that the encounters of Panofsky, Berger and Sebald
with the Isenheim altarpiece, different as they are from one another, delineate
together a site of reflexivity at the frontiers of art history. Shedding their own
light on the issue of invented identities – what came to be routinely and overreadily
fixated as a historiographical maxim – they enhance this received
claim, and undermine it at the same time. Long after the vehement nationalist
responses to the polyptych at Colmar have subsided into near-obsoleteness,
these texts now plead for Grünewald, remembering art history, playing
havoc with it, sublating it.
1. Background: The Makings of the Work
The sumptuous Isenheim polyptych comprises ten painted scenes and four
sculptural units. In its original state, this was a three-position constellation of
hinged panels. The first view (center-panels closed) shows the »Crucifixion«
(269x307 cm., split in the middle), with St. Sebastian and St. Anthony on the
flanking panels (232x76.5 cm. each). Underneath there is a horizontal predella
showing the »Lamentation.« The first opening of the central panels discloses
the second view, with the »Angels’ Concert« flowing into a composite
scene that incorporates elements of the »Nativity« and the »Virgin in the
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Garden.« The flanking panels of the central view depict the »Annunciation«
on one side, and the »Resurrection« on the other. Once a year, on the feast of
St. Anthony, the second opening was performed, exposing the third and ultimate
view – a carved and sculptured shrine with the figures of St. Anthony,
St. Augustine and St. Jerome, and a sculptural predella with Christ and the
twelve Apostles. (The sculptor was Nikolaus Hagenauer of Strasbourg.) The
flanking painted panels open up two vistas of wasteland despondency from
the life of St. Anthony – the »Meeting with St. Paul the Hermit« and the
»Temptation.«
Scholars today are more or less unanimous as to the origins and the intended
function of the great altarpiece now housed at the Unterlinden Museum
in Colmar. It was commissioned for the hospice and monastery church of
the Antonites in the hamlet of Isenheim in Alsace and was mounted there
around 1512-1515. (The work remained in situ until the panels were dismantled
and extracted from the carved framework after the French revolution,
hidden for safekeeping and later moved to Colmar.) The Antonites’ hospice
was a devotional high station and a ritualistic healing place for the disfigured
and dying victims of the recurrent ergotism epidemics, known as St. Anthony’s
fire. The order also treated sufferers from other diseases that were considered
to be of similar symptoms and nature, including syphilis – namely,
deadly inflictions associated with wasting of limbs, skin corrosion, hallucinations
and insanity. The ensemble reiterates the therapeutic and exorcizing
office of the altarpiece by means of the in extremis subject matter, close-up
portrayals of corporeal and spiritual agonies and their attending iconography
of evil (purportedly charged with fierce anti-Semitic tenets). 3 Furthermore, it
is the three-stage rhythm of the constellation itself that demarcates an itinerary
of hope for the sufferers. It starts with the dark of the tormented body,
going on to the paradisiacal light and the blazing resurrection (the fire of
disease metamorphosed into the fire of faith), towards the institutionalized
economy of sin and absolution in the form of the sculptured church authorities.
This effective program, as was often established, is thoroughly imbued
with emanations of Christian mystical writings. 4 The affiliations of the Isenheim
altarpiece in terms of contemporary theological and socioreligious turmoil,
however, are still being disputed. (Horst Ziermann has even noted that
the artist’s »profound knowledge of mysticism in literature and painting may
3 See the outstandingly pregnant work of Ruth Mellinkoff, The Devil at Isenheim.
Reflections of Popular Belief in Grünewald’s Altarpiece, Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London 1992.
4 In this vast field I should like to single out the work of Gottfried Richter who, in his
dual capacity as art historian and Christian theologian, presents a singularly perceptive
reading of the mystical theology of the Isenheim Altarpiece. Gottfried Richter,
Der Isenheimer Altar, Stuttgart 1997 (translated as: The Isenheim Altar: Suffering
and Salvation in the Art of Grünewald, Edinburgh 1998).

after the storm – three pleas for grünewald
Abb. 1: The Crucifixion from the Isenheim altarpiece, Musée Unterlinden, Colmar
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have been what led him to compose his paintings so that they must be read
from right to left.« This laconic suggestion seems to point to German Renaissance
Christian cabalist deposits in Grünewald’s work, which still await fullscale
research.) 5
This brings us to the controversial question of attribution. No documentation
concerning the identity of the Isenheim altarpiece’s creator has
reached us. On the strength of growing archival findings and concomitant
stylistic analysis of supposed variants, different options were considered
throughout the years, to be rejected in their turn and then reassessed. One
certainty, however, is common to this otherwise polemical field: that there
was no such painter as Matthias Grünewald. 6 The name was conjectured by
5 Horst Ziermann (with Erika Beissel), Matthias Grünewald, Munich, London and
New York 2001, 192.
6 For a meticulous critique and assessment of the extant research concerning the identity
of the painter, see ibid., 10-18.

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relatively late sources, notably by Joachim von Sandrart (1679), who admitted
his ignorance regarding the ingenious painter of this masterpiece, and all
he could tell was that »he lived mostly in Mainz, led a withdrawn and melancholy
life, and made a bad marriage.« 7 It is now widely accepted that the
creator of the Isenheim altarpiece was the documented artist Matthis of Aschaffenburg,
who also used the names Gothart and Neithardt, and can be
reasonably identified with the Mainz artist and hydraulics designer known as
Meister Matthis. He was born in Würzburg in 1480 or earlier, died of the
plague in Halle on September 1, 1528 and left an adopted young son. His
estate included some texts of Lutheran leanings. 8 Some scholars thought that
this double identity should be complemented or alternated with a third one,
that of a certain Matthis of Seligenstadt, a woodcarver. According to Ziermann
and Beissel, whose rigorous research of 2001 I find most convincing to
date, this third identification is improbable. Yet another speculation was that
Matthis of Aschaffenburg could be identified with the minor Frankfurt artisan
Matthis Grün, about whom we know that he married a converted Jewish
girl in Frankfurt in 1512 and died in 1532 together with his small child. Needless
to say, since its introduction this suggestion has ignited the imagination
of twentieth-century scholarly and popular publics alike. It also became a
troubling issue for advocates of nationalist and proto-Nazi penchants in
Grünewald’s reception history. The hypothesis that this Grün (»a non-entity,«
says Ziermann) was the purported creator of the Isenheim altarpiece was
refuted resolutely several times but never abandoned. 9 It reached its most
insightful expression, bitterly emphatic and pitch-perfect, in Sebald’s extraordinary
account of Grünewald in After Nature.
2. An Outline of Reception History
By 1905 the linkage of Grünewald and Germanness had already acquired the
status of a common topos in German-speaking culture. An increasing amalgamation
of scholarly discourse, private enunciations and renowned feats of
photographic editions made this ritualistic object of veneration into a shorthand
reference. »If a person asks, what is German?« wrote the painter Hans
Thoma to the art historian Henry Thode in 1905, »Then he absolutely has to
name Grünewald’s altar.« Thode replied that this rescuing of identity
through art was due to the meaninglessness of religion in modern times. 10
His observation prefigured the driving energies of a whole reception history
to come, which was to wrench the Isenheim altarpiece from its original reli-
7 Ibid, 25, 31.
8 Ibid., 29.
9 Ibid., 30 f.
10 Quoted in Hans Belting, The Germans and Their Art (Introduction to the English
Edition), New Haven and London 1998, 11.

after the storm – three pleas for grünewald
Abb. 2: The Resurrection from the Isenheim altarpiece,
Musée Unterlinden Colmar
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gious context and sociocultural function and abstract from the work’s visual
presentness a trans-historical code, deemed to reveal a trans-historical collective
spirit. In the same year Heinrich Wölfflin attributed to Grünewald (in
his monograph on Dürer), »elemental force,« »free rhythm« and »irrationality,«
which made him »a mirror in which the majority of Germans could
recognize themselves.« 11 This, for Wölfflin, was the painter’s merit for
present-day appreciation, compared with the »things that are alien to us« in
the Italianated Dürer: rationality, structure and the »fabricated object.« Obviously,
a far-reaching disruption of values had been at work since the twenty-four-year-old
Wölfflin had formulated a soaring humanist encomium to
the Italian Renaissance in his Renaissance and Baroque (1888). Even if he
never forsook his formative longing »to live forever in those regions,« 12 by
1905 he was ready to depart from his musings about the foreign pastures of
plenitude and equilibrium for the sake of commitment to what he now considered
as an untainted expression of the German Formgeist and its underlying
national spirit. 13 The axiological framework was already quite mature
when Heinrich Alfred Schmidt, in the first full-scale study of Grünewald
(1911), reiterated and expanded Wölfflin’s remarks, seeing in his protagonist
the uttermost manifestation of pure Germanness. 14
In 1911 Heinrich Piper published Wilhelm Worringer’s Formprobleme
der Gotik, which complemented his doctoral thesis, Abstraktion und Einfühlung
(1906-1908). Both conduct a dialogue with earlier empathy-based theories
of style, including Wölfflin’s. In a continuous climate of ideas, Worringer’s
text radicalizes the claim that the trans-historical »latent Gothic« was an essential
disposition of the German spirit: the negation of »organic activity of
will,« expressing the »psychical, spiritual activity of will, far removed from
any connection or conformity with the complex of organic sensation […] the
excited, jerky feverishness of the northern line undoubtedly throws a striking
light on the heavily oppressed inner life of Northern humanity.« 15
11 Heinrich Wölfflin, The Art of Albrecht Dürer [1905], trans. by Alastair Grieve and
Heide Grieve, London 1971, 10. For an overall outline of the Dürer-versus-Grünewald
polemics in German letters during the 1930s, see Keith Moxey, Impossible
Distance. Past and Present in the Study of Dürer and Grünewald, in: The Art Bulletin
86/4 (2004), 250-263.
12 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, Munich 1988, 22.
13 Indeed, Wölfflin did modify later his assessment of Dürer’s allegedly alien dimensions.
Cf. idem, Italien und das deutsche Formgefühl, Munich 1931, 6.
14 Heinrich Alfred Schmidt, Die Gemälde und Zeichnungen von Matthias Grünewald,
Strasbourg 1911. Walter Benjamin, who was intensely involved with the
Isenheim altarpiece, had a copy of »The Crucifixion,« taken from Schmidt’s book,
hung over his desk. Gershom Scholem, The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Harry
Zohn, Philadelphia 1981, 37.
15 Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic, trans. by Herbert Read, New York 1957, 43.

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The bulk of the argument is unfolded between two constitutive assertions.
The opening chapter of the book states that »Gothic has nothing to do with
beauty […] Its true greatness has so little to do with our current conception
of art, which of necessity culminates in the idea of ›beauty,‹ that an acceptance
of the word for Gothic values can only cause confusion […].« 16 The
concluding chapter reaches the apex of the argument: namely, that »the Germans
[…] are the sine qua non of Gothic […] to disclose the latent Gothic
existing before true Gothic, this was the purpose of this sketch. To establish
the existence of this latent Gothic after true Gothic down to our own times,
another book would be needed.« 17
That the uncanny work at Colmar could have become a paragon of Germanness
is due in part to the foundational heuristics of the discipline of art
history, namely, the discipline’s self-imposed binary system of morphological
sets. For the nascent science, this modus operandi established a measure of
validation and a discursive transparency. The rhetoric of strife and struggle
that permeates the writing of Worringer and other early avatars of the essentialist
North-South opposition is grounded in this heuristics. Only within
such a binary typology of monolithic paradigms could formal homogeneity
become a value; divergence and difference be grasped as antagonism; and
acculturation be viewed as oppression, adumbration and thwarting of selfhood.
This purist aesthetics, which flourished within a framework of Hegelian
philosophy of history, had the sway of the political already implicated in
its very texture. In less than two decades it would be acted out to the full.
Among the outward manifestations of this sway was the removal of the Isenheim
polyptych from occupied Alsace and its ritualistic exposition in Munich
from 1917, in an atmosphere of national cataclysm. In the wake of the
Versailles treaty Germany returned the panels to Colmar in November 1919.
It was, as Ann Stiegliz has demonstrated in a seminal work, the active intervention
of Worringer’s admirer and publisher Heinrich Piper that amplified
the presence of the »Crucifixion« panel in the 1918 edition of Worringer’s
Formprobleme, tacitly instituting its centrality for Worringer’s thesis.
This was done by means of doubling the number of the reproductions and
restructuring the order of the whole graphic portfolio. 18 Other nationalistic
16 Ibid., 11.
17 Ibid., 180.
18 Ann Stieglitz, The Reproduction of Agony. Toward a Reception History of
Grünewald’s Isenheim Altar after the First World War, in: The Oxford Art Journal
12/2 (1989), 87-103. Proof of the impact of Piper’s intervention on the general reception
and understanding of Worringer may be found in the fact that in the 1957
influential English translation, Herbert Read announces on the front flap that the
text contains »the original illustrations,« although in fact it adopts Piper’s concept,
and the last illustration in Read’s edition is, as in Piper’s 1918 edition, the agonized
torso from the Isenheim »Crucifixion.«

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exaltations followed suit, popular, journalistic or literary, as well as art-historical.
Of particular interest are the publications of Oskar Hagen (1923) and
Friedrich Haak (1928). 19 Hagen saw Grünewald’s Germanness as a »musical«
transcendence of the visible, thus reinforcing for the painter an absolute
legitimacy within a quintessentially German philosophical tradition that
held music and the aural experience per se in the highest esteem, as opposed
to the plastic arts and the visual experience altogether. 20 Haak was more concerned
with the modernity of Grünewald’s quintessential German expressivity
of »rapture and delirium« – soon to become an ambivalent concern under
the Third Reich and its neoclassicist aesthetics of power.
3. Panofsky and »The things that happen now«
Erwin Panofsky’s moment of abstention stemmed from an earlier feat of displacement.
In 1933 the prodigious Jewish scholar opted to leave his homeland
permanently and seek refuge in the USA. 21 In the previous year he had
published in Germany the text of a lecture he had given in Hamburg in 1931.
He delivered a modified English version, again as a lecture, to an American
audience and had it published in 1939 in New York. 22 This was to become the
official credo of one of the most influential approaches in art history for decades,
envisioning a full-fledged prolegomenon for the discipline.
The German title summed up the aspiration of the text and implied its
contentious context. »Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung
von Werken der bildenden Kunst« strove, momentously, to shift the substance
of art-historical scholarship from form-oriented analyses and typologies
of style to an ultimately sign-oriented interpretation. Henceforth, art
history was to become a humanistic, text-prone project, thus redeeming pictorial
intelligibility from the former penchant towards allegedly autonomist,
self-propelling grand narratives of formal patterns. At the same time, the
move reflected concern and self-awareness as to the role that linguistic transpositions
played in the shaping of art-historical wisdoms. And since the discipline’s
early beginnings tended to explicate such form-oriented analysis in
19 Oskar Hagen, Matthias Grünewald, Munich 1923; Friedrich Haak, Albrecht Dürer.
Deutschlands grösster Künstler, Leipzig 1928.
20 »A tradition that tended to privilege aural over visual experience,« as Martin Jay
summed it up: idem, Downcast Eyes, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1993,
265. See also Belting, The Germans and Their Art (fn. 10), 7.
21 See Panofsky’s personal account in: Three Decades of Art History in the United
States. Impressions of a Transplanted European, in: Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in
the Visual Arts, New York 1955, 321-322.
22 Idem, Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der
bildenden Kunst, in: Logos 21 (1932), 103-119; reprinted in: idem, Aufsätze zu
Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. by Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen,
Berlin 1964.

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terms of collective psychologies and racial connotations of cultural grammars
(more on this below), Panofsky’s position involved a call for a radical
change of philosophy and rhetoric. For the deepest theoretical tenets of this
scholar, whose day-to-day work was not what might be regarded as politicsconscious
or critical – certainly not in terms of today’s proclivities – were
indeed rooted in a political disposition and its concomitant apprehensions.
Reading his trysts with Grünewald from this angle, the » Beschreibung und
Inhaltsdeutung« text, together with the later English version, makes them
both articles of faith, dissimulating manifests of resistance.
The procedure of making meaning proposed by Panofsky was to develop
on three graded and interdependent levels. It starts with the immediate experience
of seeing that requires little previous knowledge beyond shared cultural
commonplaces, and practically no deciphering. It combines retinal impressions
(»stain«) and their preliminary representational reconstruction
(»figure«). For Panofsky, however, this preparatory stage of reading the seen
involved not only the a priori shaping of distinct and intelligible entities out
of primary sense data but also the learned capability to see these entities as
signals (»halo«).
The second stratum called for an acquaintance with »secondary or conventional
subject matter« – iconography, or accepted semiotic spheres regarded
as text-dependent sources. The stain turned haloed figure now becomes
Christ. Panofsky claimed that the meaning discovered on this level
was distinctly present in the consciousness of both the artist and the public.
Needless to say, for Panofsky intentionality and reception coalesced as a
matter of fact in the history of cultures, and this is, again, a problematic focus
in today’s appreciation of his methodological assumptions. I would take the
liberty to remark here in passing that there was no use for a hermeneutics of
suspicion in Panofsky’s intellectual world, and he could never have endorsed
the possibility that within one and the same culture the studio’s wisdom
might, through its own encoded strategies, introduce into works of art
doubts about textual traditions and their primacy vis-à-vis the image. He asserted
that iconography »concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning
of works of art, as opposed to their form«; 23 and apparently, in the climate of
ideas that was so natural to him, he could not have considered the possibility
that pictorial intelligence could very well divert or thwart textuality. Today’s
critical readings of Panofsky are of course keenly aware of his reluctance to
acknowledge the viability of multiply motivated cultures: torn, tense, inconclusive
and full of errors and meanderings. 24
23 Introductory, in: idem, Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the
Renaissance, New York 1972 [1939, repr. 1962], 3 (emphasis added).
24 See Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, Cambridge, MA, 1994, 17 f.;
Christopher Wood, Introduction, in: Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic
Form, New York 1991. See also Lea Dovev, Signs of Effacement, in: Studio 133
(2002) [Hebrew].

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The third and uppermost level of interpretation, the »iconological«
project, was to read ensembles of artworks as keys to comprehensive cultural
units. The latter’s inner accord was to be explored as dovetailed operational
modes in various areas of production, bound with shifting modes of constituting
a meaningfully coherent reality. This required »synthetic intuition,«
that is, »familiarity with the essential tendencies of the human mind, conditioned
by personal psychology and Weltanschauung.« Its aspired-for product
would be an »insight into the manner in which, under varying historical
conditions, essential tendencies of the human mind were expressed by specific
themes and concepts.« 25
Strikingly enough, in the initial German article Panofsky chose to use the
»Resurrection« panel from the Isenheim altarpiece to exemplify the preparatory,
so-called »descriptive« stage of immediate perception. There can be no
doubt that this pregnant and most unlikely illustration (tellingly, he designated
it as a »arbitrary example« [beliebiges Beispiel]) is all but arbitrary: for
Panofsky has opted to demonstrate the hypothesized procedure of retinal
registration of visual data, as it were, by an analysis of the work that was most
capable of refuting the very notion of allegedly pre-representational presentness.
The »Resurrection,« asserted Georges Didi-Huberman, was »[u]n
exemple pris dans la peinture la plus paradoxale, la plus violente, la plus bouleversée
qui soit«; 26 and thus, its function in this text was pivotal for Panofsky’s
underlying neo-Kantian thesis. Only a painting of this order and resonance
could buttress the leading idea of the whole iconological project that
Panofsky was exploring and maturing before his departure from Europe.
This idea, as Didi-Huberman saw it in terms of contemporary post-structuralist
French thought, was the following: »le symbolique précède et invente la
réalité, comme l’après-coup invente son origine.« 27 Bravely, the »Resurrection«
in this context is a thorn in the eye of modernist-expressionist art-historical
claims for art as enhanced form, those that have called for empathic,
direct and unadulterated experience. As Andrée Hayum has observed, »by
using this most expressive example of religious art to make such a point, he
[Panofsky] represents formal analysis as a severe state of dissociation.« 28
25 Panofsky, Introductory (fn. 23), 15 (emphasis in the original).
26 Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image, Paris 1990, 123.
27 Ibid., 125. Meta-art-historical discourse of the past three decades has dealt extensively
with the question to what degree Panofsky, here and elsewhere in his
lifework, allowed at all for precultural, prelinguistic and unreconstructed immediacies.
I believe that he remained undecided about the scope of the cultural preconditioning
of all experience throughout his work, in spite of his early roots in
Kantian epistemology as transposed by Cassirer. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy
of Symbolic Forms, trans. by Ralph Manheim, New Haven 1955.
28 Andrée Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece. God’s Medicine and the Painter’s
Vision, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford 1989, 144.

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The »Resurrection,« to sum up this topic, made the »Beschreibung und
Inhaltsdeutung« text a statement against the mystifications inherent in the
visualist tenets that art historians were prone to derive out of Lebensphilosophie
and quasi-psychological aesthetics. Given this assertion, Panofsky’s
strange choice reveals a multifaceted, tacit political context and implications.
For when he singled out this example, he may have been hinting also – to put
it crudely – that the overexposed, overmanipulated painting had become by
then so trivial and exhausted that it begged, as it were, to be returned anew to
the realm of open-ended spectatorship and conscientious scholarship, freed
from the constraints of political engagement and stripped of its metaphysical-nationalist
envelopes. It meant resurrecting, as it were, the »Resurrection«;
and along with it, liberating art history from its political abuse and
mystifications. Things like perceptiveness, understanding and empathy, he
seems to be reminding us tacitly, are cultural, not biological or metaphysical.
This decisive step enabled Panofsky, moreover, to intimate that despite its
apparent affinity with extant biologist and race-dependent hypertheories
that linked expressivity and hypostasized selfhoods, his notion of iconology
did not stem from these approaches, nor did it comply with them. Demythologizing
the »Resurrection,« displacing it, as it were, Panofsky could absolve
his iconological objective of nationalist and proto-Nazi rhetoric and
replace it with the purged language of operational modes or »mental habits«
– something akin, to my mind, to today’s more current notion of cognitive
style or epistemic paradigms. 29 But already in 1932, near the close of the German
chapter of his life, the quasi-innocent methodological prolegomenon of
1932 conceals a subversive import, political no less than straightforwardly
art-historical.
The American variation (1939) of Panofsky’s hermeneutic program received
a more modest title (it became an »Introductory«), and underwent
weighty modifications. One of these was the replacement of the core term
»iconology« by the guarded formulation of »iconographical analysis in the
deeper sense,« to be differentiated from »iconographical analysis in the narrower
sense.« (However, Panofsky saw fit to keep the term »iconology« in
the title of the American book and to explain the word tersely, somewhat in
the manner of an afterthought, on the book’s dust-jacket). Another resonant
adjustment consisted of the omission of Grünewald’s »Resurrection«, and
the introduction of another example altogether: the often-cited case of the
acquaintance lifting his hat in the street.
Both alterations were consequential. At that time, »iconology« was already
a key term and it had accumulated indelible meanings in German arthistorical
learning, most prominently so in Aby Warburg’s work. Moreover,
29 Panofsky was to elaborate the purged meaning and use of the iconological project
in his Gothic Architecture and Scholastics (1951). See Moshe Barasch, Approaches
to Art, 1750-1950, Jerusalem 1977, 185 [Hebrew].

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the truly outlandish transferal – exchanging Grunewald’s »Resurrection« for
a hat – could not but imply an underlying hypothesis that there was no intrinsic
specificity to the encoding of meaning in art; namely, that art functions
like any other set of accepted signs, and should be studied accordingly.
In other words, the colossal move that Panofsky made pointed towards a
theory that, without saying so, presumed the homogeneity of one and same
semiotic continuum.
Yet, this pending hypothesis was passed over in silence by Panofsky, who
did not comment upon his decision to leave out the »Resurrection.« In the
original preface to the 1939 edition, he merely explained that the republication
of the text at hand »synthesizes the revised content of a methodological
article published by the writer in 1932 [namely, the »Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung«
text] with a study on classical mythology in mediaeval art
etc.«; 30 and that the reissuing of the German text in English (together with
others that were included in the same compilation) was done so as to make it
more accessible. Andrée Hayum has surmised that this move was motivated
by the refugee’s awareness that »what had become a familiar reference for the
German audience […] would have been somewhat esoteric in the America of
1939.« 31 This is likely, but partial. (Let us remember, the American version is
highly erudite and, moreover, it refers to numerous relatively obscure
works.) The less superficial reason for Panofsky’s demarche must be sought
elsewhere. Indeed, I believe that it can be conjured only from the background
motives for the deferral of »iconology,« which did surface later, obliquely
and almost casually.
In 1939 America, so it turned out, not only was this alien to the language
of American mainstream scholarship, but it had a suspected political aura.
Panofsky referred to it publicly in press for the first time, I believe, two years
before his death. In his 1966 preface to the French translation of Studies in
Iconology, he cites the »anguished cry« of none other than the then director
of the Metropolitan Museum (Francis Henry Taylor), who somehow managed
to link »iconology« with the infatuation of German students with Nazi
teachings. 32 This was symptomatic of a widespread apprehension concerning
the alleged incompatibility of, on the one hand, the European elitist rhetoric
of an over-philosophizing, hyper-erudite view of art – considered as »empty
vessels« (this, curiously, is the evocative Jewish-cabalist metaphor that Taylor
uses) – and, on the other hand, the allegedly all-American wholesome,
warm-hearted and »humanist« approach. (In a similar vein the then muchadmired
connoisseur and art historian Bernard Bernson had permitted himself
in 1934 the preposterous joke (?) that Panofsky was »the Hitler of Art
30 Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (fn. 23), v.
31 Ibid., 145.
32 Idem, Essais d’iconologie, Paris 1967, 4; idem, Korrespondenz 1910-1968, ed. by
Dieter Wuttke, Wiesbaden 2001, vol. 2, 448 f.

after the storm – three pleas for grünewald
History.«) 33 This obviously reflects a real controversial issue that cannot be
attributed to xenophobia or anti-Semitism alone. A widespread story had it
that it was the publisher who had asked Panofsky to leave out »iconology«,
or at least to remove it from the book’s title, claiming that it was too metaphysical
and intimidating for the American public; and, moreover, that it was
too evocative of »the things that happen now« in Europe. 34 Clearly, in 1939,
on that side of the Atlantic, the political guilt of Nazi Germany was bound
up with the guilt of metaphysics as such, an indecent and shadowy German
business. Indeed, whereas Panofsky did not eliminate »iconology« from his
subsequent work – far from it – he did attempt to minimize its speculative
dimension as far as Anglo-Saxon gentlemanly and positivist tastes were concerned.
And of course, he kept the hat and did not retrieve Grünewald’s
»Resurrection« – the symbol of the imminent historic salvation of Germany
as promulgated in the nationalist rhetoric since its turbulent exposition in
Munich.
But was this displacement due only to »the things that happened now« in
1939 Germany? Indeed, in itself the exclusion of one of the most loaded images
in modern history no doubt signaled the wish of the scholar who was
»expulsed into paradise« (as Panofsky regarded himself) 35 to keep clear of
the murky discourse of Germanness and its sequels. Also, it is quite reasonable
to suppose that he endeavored to become accessible to his new academic
environment in his land of adoption, opting for a less undemanding frame of
reference. Yet, curtailing the speculation about Panofsky’s motives at this
point would not do, for obviously he could have replaced Grünewald’s
»Resurrection« with any other artwork. Instead, he shifted the argument
from the sui generis density of art to the relatively simple conventions of
social manners, an everyday gesture. No doubt, this was partly due to what
Panofsky considered as good riddance, given his mordant criticism of the
language of German art history which, he argued, was »often recondite and
downright imprecise […] even before the Nazis made German literature unintelligible
to uncontaminated Germans […]. In short,« he said, »when
speaking or writing English, even an art historian must more or less know
what he means and mean what he says, and this compulsion was exceedingly
wholesome for all of us.« 36
33 Idem, Korrespondenz, vol. 1, 722, n. 3.
34 As reported to me by the late Professor Moshe Barasch, The Great Spirit Is Gone,
an interview with Lea Dovev and Dror K. Levi, in: Lea Dovev (ed.), Trusting Art,
special issue of Studio 133 (2002), 70-75 [Hebrew].
35 Ernst Gombrich, Icon, in: New York Review of Books 43/3 (1996).
36 Erwin Panofsky, Three Decades of Art History in the United States [1953], reprinted
in: idem, Meaning in the Visual Arts, New York 1955, 329-33. Panofsky’s
recently published correspondence, however, shows that his attitude towards the
intellectual proclivities of his land of adoption was much more ambivalent, not to
say critical, than the unidimensional exuberance that this article demonstrates. Pro-
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Was it, then, the switch to English that was responsible for the move from
aesthetics to anthropology? When all is said and done, I believe that it is quite
inconceivable that an eminent mind such as Panofsky’s could convert so
painlessly to the ethos of maximal closure in the study of art. Something
deeper than the effects of a welcomed exile must have been already at work,
long before he renounced the challenge and the burden of the Isenheim altarpiece.
Evidently, during the 1920s Panofsky was quite preoccupied with
what he deemed was the insurmountable specificity of art and entertained
doubts – never to be seriously hampered by them, to be true – about the
sustainability, sufficiency and adequacy of art-historical discourse. He famously
referred to the unique tension between art and historical scholarship
as »the curse and the blessing of the systematic study of art [Kunstwissenschaft]«
– for art presented a relentless demand to be grasped in the here and
now, depending for its full realization upon an »Archimedean,« non-situated
sense of self and enhancing this sense. The compelling presentness of art, he
argued, defies contextualization. Rooted in deep deposits of neo-Kantian
epistemology, Panofsky opposed this Archimedean position of free aesthetic
subjecthood to »history« and crowned it, peculiarly and tellingly, as »necessity.«
The historian could neither retreat in the face of this »necessity« nor
recognize and respond to it ex cathedra. 37 So was this the historian’s curse or
his blessing? I incline to think that the potential fruitfulness of this dilemma
never escaped Panofsky. At that imperative moment of his personal life and
professional career, however, he reached the point of acknowledged defeat.
He abandoned the struggle over the language in which things like Grünewald’s
»Resurrection« could be salvaged alive and whole for a non-mystifying
art history, and reverted to silence. 38
fessor Moshe Barasch, who knew Panofsky well, noted: »I doubt if he would have
written Perspective as Symbolic Form in the US at all. Maybe yes, probably not, but
I am sure that he would have never written the Early Nederlandish Painting in
Germany as he did in the US, he would have written it quite differently. [The encounter
with the English-speaking intellectual world] was a blessing, but it also
entailed a great loss.« Barasch, The Great Spirit Is Gone (fn. 34), 73.
37 Erwin Panofsky, Der Begriff des Kunstwollens [1920], in: Aufsätze zu Grundfragen
der Kunstwissenschaft, Berlin 1964, 33. (Translated by Kenneth J. Northcott
and Joel Snyder in: Critical Inquiry 8 [1981], 17-33.)
38 In his monumental monograph on Dürer (1943), Panofsky pays Grünewald minimal
attention, and his ironic distaste is obvious. He calls him »a Christian mystic«
merely on the strength of the fact that no secular works of his have survived; and a
poet »in spite of his proficiency in hydraulics«; and tongue-in-cheek also mentions
that in »Agony in the Garden« Dürer approached »the precincts of Grünewald’s
witchery.« Idem, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Princeton, NJ 1943, vol. 1,
146.

after the storm – three pleas for grünewald
4. John Berger: Political Moments between Two Colmars
People have often registered their visit to the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar
as a solitary experience. This was true for Heinrich Piper, among numerous
others: as an utter revelation of the self to itself, the encounter seemed to
have required seclusion, whether metaphorical or factual. John Berger was
there all alone, too. Except for an old guard, »[t]he gallery was deserted,« he
notes in »Between Two Colmars,« a succinct essay that draws a seismographic
outline of the writer’s two visits to the Isenheim altarpiece, in 1963
and 1971. 39 Spanning the space of ten years between them, Berger (who
moved permanently to a small village in Savoie in 1973) now contemplated
these two moments of spectatorship as signals of a personal history, which
for him was marked by his political engagements and growth. It starts with
the great expectations and resolutions of the pre-’68 years, later evolving
from hope to dissolution and defeat, to be metamorphosed into another
modus of hope in front of the altarpiece. It is a condensed and crystallized
Bildungsroman, the story of an overtly politically minded confrontation
with history that was transformed – sublated, rather – into an immensely
private, Godless Christian credo of love. Still and again, it is a chronicle of the
age-old pilgrimage to Colmar, a redemptive itinerary.
For the writer and for young people all over Europe and the US, a fierce
theoretical opposition to the prevailing order was taking shape around 1963
that engendered hopes for viable political amendments. In a neo-Marxist
framework, Berger was bound, according to his own later insight, to see the
work as wholly infected with bleakness and resignation. In 1963 he found
himself aware of a single, all-encompassing meaning in the Isenheim altarpiece:
»I saw the Crucifixion as the key to the whole altarpiece and I saw
disease as the key to the Crucifixion.« The privileged position of hope
heightened the need to combat evil and acquiescence. Death, birth and resurrection,
celestial music and the wasteland of chimeras, accord and discord, all
looked to him as carriers of one and the same infection. This perspective, he
maintained then, was also valid in terms of art-historical conventions, for the
desolation was embedded »in the altarpiece« – part of its original capacity
and function at the hospice of the Antonites and a reflection of the »widespread
sense of damnation« in many parts of Europe during the early sixteenth
century. Hence, as Berger summed it up, for Grünewald »disease represents
the actual state of man. Disease is not for him the prelude to death – as
modern man tends to fear; it is the condition of life.«
Ten years later, normalization and stasis took the place of earlier hopes for
change: »between the different political systems, which share the control of
almost the entire world, anything can be exchanged under the single condi-
39 John Berger, Between Two Colmars (1973), in: idem, About Looking, New York
1980, 134-140. All subsequent citations from Berger refer to these pages.
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tion that nothing anywhere is radically changed.« Upon his second visit
Berger returns the Isenheim altarpiece to art in order to be able to see it,
again, politically – because by now, the sense of what politically engaged
spectatorship is has changed drastically in view of the new conditions of reality.
He is now attentive to details and to the whole, recognizes the hinging of
the composite polyptych and its attending hermeneutical rhythm and is actively
aware of the situational and mental environment of seeing. The work is
not exempted from history, but the notion of history is expanded to include
self-conscious spectatorship. His second response to the here-and-now of
the work is no more valid than the first, Berger maintains matter-of-factly,
but different.
The tremendous experience that the second Colmar has given Berger is
located in a notional field, which, as I see it, is intimately linked to the philosophy
of Emmanuel Levinas. His new understanding has to do with a radically
altered perspective on the way painting is political through being moral.
(Berger had previously outlined the general substratum of this approach in
his Ways of Seeing. 40 The quasi-Levinasian thesis of love, whose emanations
are discernible in »Between Two Colmars,« is most evident in the chapter on
the representation of women in the earlier book.)
The argument unfolds in four moments. The first consists of a close look
at the physicality of the Isenheim altarpiece, painted »inch by inch« – a devotional
attention to pain, which Berger perceived to be a »faithfulness that
came from the empathy of love.« Love, as put forward in a few glaringly
laconic lines, is a keen, total acceptance of the unique and fully realized presentness
of the beloved. As such, it is deeply attuned to what painting is all
about, and in particular to Grünewald’s relentless depiction. The second
moment, however, challenges the first, for it refutes this very adherence to
what is – that is, to the surface of the seen. Love negates reification since its
sine qua non condition is the total acceptance of the ever-open otherness of
the beloved. Bestowing on the beloved »a value which is untranslatable to
virtue,« love means recognizing the irreducibility of its object of passion,
never letting it deteriorate to the condition of »a filled contour.« For the
lover, the person loved is not »a surface encountered but a horizon which
borders.« So here comes the third moment, stating that since love is a matter
of a singular attention rather than the high point of consummation and appropriation,
the metaphorical modus of love is listening, not seeing. »A person
loved,« says Berger, »is recognized not by attainments but by the verbs
[Berger’s emphasis] that can satisfy that person.« It is a state of being-for, the
very essence of non-reification. Thus, love has two mutually exclusive
dimensions – it involves total attention to and acceptance of the seen, and it is
intrinsically foreign to the fixity of object-oriented, self-centered »seeing.«
40 John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London 1972.

after the storm – three pleas for grünewald
This, so I propose, is the meaning of the »verb« in this context: for, as
Berger states rather cryptically and without further comment, for Grünewald
»the verb was to paint: to paint the life of Christ.« The resonances of
this fundamental Judeo-Christian term are far-reaching, since this single sentence
brings us to the apex of the Colmar revelation, in which the meaning of
love, painting and religiosity are coalesced. And it is this single-minded vision
that enables the Isenheim altarpiece to become newly ethical and political
for Berger, at this particular moment of spectatorship. In the fourth and
last moment of his account, Berger associates his claims about the ethical
nature of love with his own experience upon his second visit to Colmar.
Alone under the shifting winter light in the gallery, he could now see the
dispersed, unfixed and fragile light of the inner panels and thematize it as the
essential experience of attentive – therefore, ethically empowered – selfhood.
»The first time I saw Grünewald I was anxious to place it historically. In
terms of medieval religion, the plague, medicine, the Lazar house. Now I
have been forced to place myself historically. In a period of revolutionary
expectation, I saw a work of art which had survived as evidence of the
past’s despair; in a period which has to be endured, I see the same work
miraculously offering a narrow pass across despair.« 41
5. W. G. Sebald: History after Nature
The painter Max Ferber, the fourth of Sebald’s Emigrants, was fifteen years
old in 1939 when his Jewish-German family sent him to England. He thus
survived his parents, a Munich art-dealer and his wife, who, clinging to their
shattered world, did not escape in time and were murdered in 1941. Having
lived all his recluse life in an existential exile, in the atrophied, friche urban
landscape of Manchester, and after a lifetime of inner and outer silence, he
now recounts the story to the elusive narrator. The very coming-to-be of the
telling, it turns out, is momentously connected with the recluse’s difficult
decision to go to France – a journey he undertook even though he was »particularly
afraid of the train ride« – to see the Isenheim altarpiece. Ferber, who
had known the paintings only from reproductions, had always felt that they
(and especially the »Entombment«) had the greatest relevance for his own
work, for he knew himself to be »in tune with the extreme vision of that
strange man.« (Ferber’s own art is an endless project of portraiture, effaced,
destroyed, resumed again, entombed and resurrected, leaving behind the accumulated
remnants of the endeavor.) In front of the altarpiece, for the first
time, his whole being came into focus, a revelation that led him close to taking
his own life: »Mental suffering is effectively without end […] there are
always more torments to come. One plunges from one abyss into the next.
41 Berger, Between Two Colmars (fn. 39), 140.
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When I was in Colmar, said Ferber, I beheld all of this in precise detail, how
one thing led to another and how it had been afterwards.« Later the narrator
repeats it emphatically: »In Colmar, at any rate, said Ferber after a lengthy
pause, I began to remember.« 42
In his old age, when Ferber sums up his life he employs an image that he
may have well retained from the »Angels’ Concert« of the Isenheim altarpiece:
the canopy of the Jewish Temple, full of uncanny sprouting shoots and
hovering, condemned faces in the dark: »The fact is that that tragedy in my
youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth
evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so
much in the shade and dark in recent years.« 43 The historical bloodline that
connects the painted panels to the present-day desolation of the survivor is
left implied. The Isenheim altarpiece as the epitome of German racist upsurge
in modern history is not hinted at, and the exile who undertook the
pilgrimage that gave him back his severed selfhood and the voice to tell it
seems to defer, if not to obliterate altogether, this irrevocable dimension of
work. The narrator himself, a master of sly innocence, listens impartially and
registers how exile, deportation and survival acquire a compelling sense of
universal doom. Its immediate agents in The Emigrants are of course concretely
historical and political. Yet art, the fons et origo of consciousness regained
– the perspicacity of how »things led to one another« – is grasped as
both utterly true and ultimately decontextualizing. Art, so the encounter
tells us, absorbs history and historicity. The Isenheim altarpiece – whose
colors Ferber perceives as being infected by illness, and the depicted suffering
as »spreading to cover the whole of Nature« (as if he were citing word for
word John Berger’s impressions upon his first visit to Colmar) – comes to
bear witness to that which for Sebald is an existential condition of loss and
decrepitude: the »natural history of destruction.« 44
The Grünewald chapter of After Nature (which preceded The Emigrants)
seems to be of a different slant in this regard, for it readily lets surface the
political residues of the painter’s modern history. The poem does that in
multiple ways, the more obvious of which are the references to the personal
fates, under the Nazi regime, of some Grünewald scholars. These are interpolated
into the fantasized life of the unknown artist, that the Sebald-persona
narrator invents out of art-historical hypotheses, gaps and failings. But the
place of Grünewald within the discourse of Germanness and the link that
this received image of »martyred Germany« has had with the political history
of destruction is evoked throughout the interlacing of sham life and real
predicaments by means of the account of Grünewald’s works, which com-
42 Sebald, The Emigrants (fn. 2), 171 ff.
43 Ibid., 191.
44 W. G. Sebald, The Natural History of Destruction, trans. by Anthea Bell, New
York 2003.

after the storm – three pleas for grünewald
bines a would-be ekphrastic rendering and highly associative response. Imperceptibly,
the conspicuous, deceptive protocol is unmasked and exposed as
a plot, a product of literary intrigue and in-depth research. At issue, finally, is
the secret logic of conversing with art, with art history, with history – and the
crucial place of Grünewald’s later history within this discourse. 45
It is the encounters with faces that the poem unravels as evidence, seal of
truth and source of understanding (which creates a dialectical opposition to
the prevailing concern with the impossibility of portraiture and with facelessness
in The Emigrants). The first canto starts with the painter’s self-portraits,
so the (un)reliable narrator confirms, that are inserted into scenes from
whence they gaze at us intently. The countenance encapsulates the tragedy of
the eyewitness, an engaged observer and commiserator:
»[…] Always the same
gentleness, the same burden of grief,
the same irregularity of the eyes, veiled
and sliding down into loneliness.« 46
It »shines forth,« says the narrator, from a drawing »later destroyed by an
alien hand’s pen and wash« and goes on to interpolate dryly that it was Wilhelm
Fraenger, »whose books were burned by the fascists,« who had discerned
a likeness of Grünewald inside a work done by Holbein and seen this
as »strangely disguised instances of resemblance.« Indeed, the poet affirms,
»[…] in such works of art
men had revered each other like brothers […].« 47
117
It is obvious that the recognition of an unknown master’s concealed portraits
is a tenuous and highly conjectural demarche. But faces constitute dialogical
presence and are the genesis of empathy. (It is not for nothing that the narrator
mentions as if incidentally that he himself had encountered in a Bamberg
train station a face from a work by Grünewald.) Therefore, the allusion to
Fraenger’s culture of humane understanding and to its subsequent fate casts
an additional shadow on the paradox of Grünewald’s reception by a nationalist
movement that led to the Nazi regime – in which all that faces had stood
for in the experience of human beings past and present was obliterated.
»Little is known of the life of Matthaeus Grünewald of Aschaffenburg,«
says Sebald at the beginning of the second canto, and goes on to profess his
trust in Joachim von Sandrart’s laconic summing up of Grünewald’s life
45 Sebald’s tone of authoritative proficiency may well mislead a reader unversed in
the scholarly polemics concerning the painter; indeed, a great number of After
Nature reviews and comments seem to have surmised that Sebald’s account was
based on established facts.
46 Sebald, After Nature (fn. 2), 6.
47 Ibid.

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(whom the great majority of scholars reject as wholly unreliable), on the
strength of his
»Portrait in a Würzburg museum
[…] aged eighty-two,
Wide awake and with eyes uncommonly clear.« 48
It is the submerged political drive of the poem that requires the faith in Sandrart,
from whom we inherited the condensed image of the painter who »led
a withdrawn and melancholy life, and made a bad marriage.« 49 On this
ground the narrator-figure can now adopt for the master of the Isenheim
altarpiece the persona of Matthis Grün, who, as we know, had married a
Jewish girl in Frankfurt. Sebald disregards the polemical muddle concerning
this slight hypothesis and stipulates it as fact so that it can induce his account
of the historical persecutions of the Jews in Frankfurt. And again, he resorts
to the nationalist and racist environment of the painter’s reception when he
remarks that
»In the compendium book about the historical
Grünewald which Dr. W. K. Zülch produced
in ancient Schwabach type,
in the year 1938 for Hitler’s birthday
the story of this extraordinary union
could not be admitted.« 50
From here on, the accelerated rhythm of fantasy gains momentum. The
scholarly controversies over the identity of the unknown master lead, by
means of poetic license, to a postulation of exchanged identities with strong
overtones of homosexual love (an echo of the »bad marriage« Sandrart had
mentioned. Hence also the compassionate vignette about the Jewish girl allegedly
condemned to abandonment and madness. The death of Grünewaldalias-Grün’s
young child equally contradicts all that fact-finding scholarship
knows to date). The grieved witness to the »pathological spectacle,« human
cruelty and cosmic disorder finally resorts as a last refuge to »the work undertaken«
– to no avail. He will die in self-willed, metaphoric blindness.
The Grünewald chapter in After Nature is the opening prose poem in an
apparently unconnected compilation of three life-stories, the second being
an account of the eighteenth-century botanist W. G. Steller, and the third – a
48 Ibid., 9.
49 Ziermann, Matthias Grünewald (fn. 5), 25, 31.
50 Ibid., 14. Scholars who have endorsed the Grün hypothesis, such as, notably, Hans
Jürgen Rieckenberg (1974), have sometimes blamed the scholars who rejected it as
anti-Semites. One of those so blamed was Heinrich Feuerstein (Matthias Grünewald,
Bonn 1930) who, as Horst Ziermann has remarked bitterly, died in a concentration
camp. See Ziermann, Matthias Grünewald (fn. 5), 30 f.

after the storm – three pleas for grünewald
first-person rumination of a Sebald-persona, with marked autobiographical
concurrencies. A thin, barely discernible network of coincidences and mirroring
details, however, binds together the three disparate lives and turns
them into a fabricated whole. Recurrent key images and names turn the arbitrary
flow of events into a sequence loaded with hidden meaning and dark
pertinence. Some of these carry a tremendously secret significance, such as
the images of snow that emerge at pivotal points of the book’s compass. Others
are overtly more technical and crafted. Thus, for example, at a place called
Windsheim the literary Grünewald meets with the etchers Barthel and Sebald
Beham, heretics, mystics and supporters of the Peasants’ Revolt. This is an
ominous encounter, signaling the great master’s imminent itinerary of doom,
when his awareness of the apocalyptically indifferent core of history and nature
shall drive him to the refusal to see, and to his death.
»Brothers, he said, when they were walking
along the Windsheim woods,
I know that the old coat is tearing
And I am afraid
of the end of time.« 51
Having witnessed the victims of the mass massacres,
»he ceased to leave his house.
Yet he could hear the gouging out
of eyes that long continued
between Lake Constance and
the Thuringian Forest,
For weeks at that time he wore
a dark bandage over his face.« 52
119
Indeed, his coming death is evoked as the end of seeing and registering,
which is also the end of Sebald’s poem:
» […] the optic nerve
tears, in the still space of the air
all turns white as
the snow on the Alps.« 53
51 Sebald, After Nature (fn. 2), 34 f.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 37. Max Ferber, let us remember, went from Colmar to the Alps, where he
found himself on the verge of killing himself and was saved by a »mysterious butterfly
man« (Nabokov?) whose portrait he subsequently endeavors to recapture,
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The poem is titled »Like the Snow in the Alps«; Grünewald’s »Virgin of the
Snow Miracle« (The »Maria-Schnee« altarpiece) is central to it throughout; it
ends with the death of seeing in metaphorical snow. Max Ferber went to the
Swiss Alps from Colmar and came close to committing suicide there; Steller,
the protagonist of the second poem in After Nature, is fatally attracted to the
northern snows and indeed dies a violent death in the snow. But Windsheim
is also the place where Steller was born and where the mother of the authorial
narrator in the third prose poem finds momentary refuge, having escaped
bombarded and burning Hamburg, and realizes that she is »with child.« And
so on: it is a tight pattern, much of it submerged in quasi-private opacities.
There is a subtle interplay between the work’s protocol-like tone and the
network of coincidences. It binds together the three lives and turns them into
a three-faceted construction. The apparent factuality becomes unstable and
suspended; at issue is the telling itself. The quiet registration of fantasy tacitly
negotiates the notions of accountability, truth and fiction. For Sebald’s literary
syntax of links, allusions and interpolated untitled photographs finally
makes his own art a premonition of a singularly predestined and depoliticized
universe. Art absorbs history and thus resurrects the senseless piles of
wreckage, which is, famously, the only landscape Walter Benjamin’s angel of
history can perceive. For this angel, as Sebald has posited so excruciatingly
(in The Natural History of Destruction) – quoting Benjamin’s Theses on the
Philosophy of History – the same smoky sky hovers over the bombarded
German cities and the death-camps’ incinerators. 54 The crux of the matter is
the horrendous virtue of airborne perspectives and their ensuing ethics,
which make possible the metamorphosis of the equity of suffering into artistic
form. Yet, contrary to some of his critics, I hold firmly that Sebald, a
writer whose moral seriousness and compassion are absolute, has made this
dilemma the shaping drive of his work from beginning to end. Differing
opinions are much more disparaging. Such, for example, is Ruth Franklin’s
resolute stance: »Sebald’s patterning amounts to an aestheticizing of catastrophe,«
she writes, »and thus it annihilates causality. We appreciate the
beauty of the image that the writer discerns, but it adds nothing to our understanding
of why things happened as they did.« 55 Needless to say, whereas
Franklin’s approach and other similar critiques overlook a basic divergence
between literature and historiography, they are grounded in a perennial field
of apprehensions relating to the tyranny of self-contained form versus the
claim of ethical and political commitment. Less acerbic pronouncements of-
54 »[The angel’s] face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage […].«
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (9th), quoted in: Sebald,
The Natural History of Destruction (fn. 44), 67.
55 Ruth Franklin, Rings of Smoke, in: The New Republic, September 19, 2002, online:
.

after the storm – three pleas for grünewald
ten harbor similar malaise, whose core is what might be regarded ultimately
as Sebald’s metaphysics, a »religious sensibility in a disenchanted, physically
devastated universe ›after nature‹ […] a place and time in which the ordinary
constraints of history give way to an immense penumbral continuum of human
suffering.« 56 Probing further into this weighty issue transcends the
scope of the present essay.
To recapitulate the oblique regard that the three texts discussed above cast on
Grünewald’s reception history, I cannot think of a neater formulation than
that offered by James Elkins in his critical, often abrasive survey of art-historical
writings sui generis. Regardless of their objectives, style or philosophy,
he says in the closing lines of his book, »our dry, distant, and beautiful
texts […] appear as history, as facts, as discoveries, as stories, even sometimes
as truths, and they function in all those capacities; but they are also our way
of recording who we are. We need to begin to think about how our quizzical,
convoluted, dry, and distant writing tells the story of our lives.« 57
56 Mark Anderson, The Edge of Darkness. On W. G. Sebald, in: October 106 (2003),
103-121.
57 James Elkins, Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts, New York and London 2000,
297.
121