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Art History Is the Best Discipline: Horst Bredekamp in Conversation with Ladislav Kesner

Ladislav Kesner Let me start with something personal. It was said of Aby Warburg by Gertrude Bing that he was ‘Jewish by blood, Hamburger by heart, and Florentine by soul.’ I was wondering, since you were born in the north but have been living and working in Berlin for two decades, where do your soul and heart belong?

Horst Bredekamp To Hamburg, I have quite different feelings towards Berlin. There was not one moment when I felt at home, so to speak. It was always an enterprise to be here.

LK That is interesting, because I had the impression that Berlin is the place where you would feel to belong. Because you have spent here so much time and energy developing projects, running institutes…

HB If I am not mistaken, I have tried to shape the university, and Berlin has shaped me all the more. I think there is no town that is so demanding, so ‘wanting’. But you asked about the feeling of being at home, and Berlin is a fighting ground, something that takes hold of you and you have to respond, you never relax.

LK You were born shortly after the war in Kiel which was essentially bombed flat. What would be the earliest cultural experiences that you remember, being raised in the early fifties in this destroyed city?

HB I was born in 1947 and one of my very first memories — if you call that cultural — is living together with 18 people in one flat. That was the situation everyone who had made the flight from what is now Poland and from other parts of Eastern Europe had to live with and the experience they went through. In Kiel ca. 85% of the houses had been destroyed because it was a war harbour; nobody thought that it could be rebuilt. In that very moment, masses of people who had escaped from the Red Army front came to the area. Many came to Schleswig-Holstein as it was less destroyed in comparison, except for Kiel. Families were crowded together in the few houses that were not bombed, which is why we lived together with many babies and young children, and that is my first experience: never being alone but always together with other people. My first memories are of the experience of density.

LK And the first experiences of art, of whatever kind?

HB My first experience with art came through the impulse of my parents, who tried with much dedication to rediscover what had been forbidden after 1933. They developed a profound interest in modern arts and both decided to join the film club, which was a small institution, as well as the so-called ‘Abendschule’, which was for people who had no time to study but who worked in the daytime and learned in the evening. There they took courses in modern art and theatre and film. And with their first money they bought books on modern art — Piccasso, etc. These were the first cultural impulses I came in contact with.

LK You studied for two years before devoting yourself fully to art history, as well as psychology, anthropology and psychiatry. What left the greatest mark on your later professional career? Was there some kind of influence or teacher or literature from that period that really shaped your later thinking?

HB At that time, I also studied medicine, but I did not like my fellow students. That’s why I decided rather early, already after the second semester, to switch disciplines. However, I did not want to appear too weak to study medicine. So I decided, before leaving, I would take a so-called preparatory course — that is, anatomy with human corpses. I wanted to be able to say to myself and others that I did not change disciplines because I was too shy or too weak to do medicine. So that left a very deep impression and made it possible for me when I worked on Michelangelo, Leonardo, and their anatomical studies, to know what they had gone through.

The second discipline I began was psychiatry, still in Kiel. That was a similar experience. I have forgotten the name of the professor I studies with. He was one of the last classic Freudians. I wonder if you can imagine that he came into the lecture hall and said: ‘I want to tell you that today I will cure somebody, a woman who has a severe disease: she always wants to take a knife and kill people — and I will treat her. She has a knife--tick.’ Then he did something that would be forbidden today: He brought her in and showed her the packed audience — the anatomical theatre — and he said: ‘Mrs So-and-so we talked about it, do you accept public treatment?’ She answered: ‘Yes.’ And then he showed [Alfred Hitchcock’s] Psycho, a film in which a woman is killed in the bathroom. One could see how the woman started to shiver and he could hardly keep her on her

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chair. He briefly stopped and then restarted the treatment. The directness and severity of the treatment was one of the deepest impressions made on me during all of my studies. So these were two impulses from other fields.

LK During the years that you studied psychiatry did you read Karl Jaspers? I am asking because (as we will come back to later) in your work with John Krois on Verkörperung/embodiment you spent much time trying to rethink Cassirer and Peirce and similar sources of philosophy, but in my view, the whole German tradition of psychiatry and psychopathology, and Japers with his Allgemeine Psychopathologie in particular, is one of the most revealing sources of profound thinking on embodiment. So I was wondering whether there are some connections to that line of German psychopathology and Ausdruckstheorie?

HB This tradition is very important, but I must confess that at the time I had no knowledge of it. It only came to my mind later when I was working on the concept of mannerism, Entartung, and disease. At that time I was studying [Ernst] Kretschmer and Jaspers and only then did I find out that Jaspers came from medicine.

LK If we now jump in time to 1968: I was 7 years old when Russian tanks rolled in and one of my earliest memories is of those days. You were somehow — maybe rather heav-ily — involved in the student revolts of ’68, am I right?

HB Yes. Well, I started to study in 1967 and when, after one and a half years of serving in the German navy,

I came back, the world was rather changed. It was very astonishing and one could feel that something was in the air. I started to study in Kiel, which was one of the most dominant SDS [Sozialisticher Deutscher Studentenbund] centres that tried to get in contact with workers from the shipyards. There was this unbroken tradition of German marines, who had revolted in 1918, that came from Kiel: revolutionary soldiers refusing to enter into a new battle with the English army and then turning against the officers and then marching towards Berlin. So there was a kind of tradition of Kiel as a revolutionary city. That is why the agitation against the Vietnam War — that was the first protest — and then the quarrel with the university system and the structure of German society as such, and finally — the most dominant aspect — the fight against the generation of parents all came together in the years between 1966 and 1969.

LK I was astonished to learn how strong the opposition was from the conservative part of the German art history establishment towards young fellows, like yourself, even more so against Martin Warnke and others. So the stigma really begins here, with your attitude and participation in ‘68 affairs?

HB Yes, but not in Kiel. Wolfgang Müller was there, who was a very liberal man with great sympathies for young people. The quarrels started in Munich around the time I went to study there in 1969. There were hard and tough quarrels with heavy fights, really bodily fights within the university, including the destruction of furniture, etc. With

1 / Horst Bredekamp (on the right) and Franz-Joachim Verspohl in Marburg, ca. 1973

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Franz-Joachim Verspohl I have been friends since that time. And the political situation radicalised at a speed that was incredible to witness. After three quarters of a year the group had reached an extremity of opinion that caused it to disintegrate. Some went into the underground and there was one person we did not hear of again — he wanted to kill the Rhodesian dictator Smith and we heard that he was killed himself instead. So that was the situation in which the split of the left took place: into absolutely authoritarian Maoists, left-libertarians like Verspohl and myself, people who said ‘stop studying and becoming academics and instead go into factories’, and a small party that joined revo-lutionary front components, which later became the RAF. So I went through that, and after bitter, bitter discussions, Franz-Joachim Verspohl and I left the movement, arguing that further radicalisation leads to destruction. We stopped and stuck to art history — and felt guilty.

LK And it was Martin Warnke, I believe, who was able to take you as his students and under whose guidance you were able to write a dissertation.

HB Yes, that was two years later. From Munich I went to Berlin, where the situation was similar. Think of Berlin in 1970: a town that was exploding at that time, wonderful, but also very aggressive. I thought I would not find anybody to do my dissertation with, although I believe Tillmann Buddensieg would have taken me, and he also told me as much. Verspohl had gone to Cologne where he was forbidden to enter the institute, receiving ‘Hausverbot’ from Heinz Ladendorff. At that moment, Warnke wrote him: ‘If you have trouble somewhere: I have been appointed professor in Marburg and, if you like, you can write your dissertation with me.’ So Verspohl went to Marburg and wrote me: ‘This is a fantastic situation because not only is Warnke here but also Hans-Joachim Kunst and others.’ I left Berlin and went to Marburg and then, after another year or so, Heinrich Klotz was also appointed a professor there; he came from Göttingen. An incredibly active and friendly group formed, composed of Kunst, Warnke, Klotz, Verspohl, myself, and a number of students and assistants who were extremely dedicated. Out of this, Kritische Berichte emerged. This was the frame in which the early issues of the journal were produced.

LK But you were also able at that time to spend several months in Prague working on your dissertation….

HB Yes, it was the winter of 1972–73.

LK What were your impressions of Prague at that time and the situation at the academy?

HB I went there in a rather naïve way. As a liberal, left-wing oriented person, I knew that I was going to a country where my own ideals had been destroyed five years before. And I knew that I would come into a kind of hostile

society. On the other hand, I had no feelings of superiority at all; I came with curiosity and sympathy and I had the experience of a deep-going personal friendship with Eva Reitharová, who accommodated me in her flat — a huge flat in which I had a room of my own — without telling the police, which she and her husband should have done. I had very strange, even bizarre experiences with the National Library and colleagues.

LK Was there anyone among the Czech art historians whose work had some impact on your own work at the time?

HB I was very much impressed by the writings of Rudolf Chadraba, his work on the antichrist. I read through someone’s personal translation; I think it is still a masterpiece and it is sad that it is not translated — at least I don’t think it is translated into any other language.1 And then his book on Dürer: When I read Dürer studies today, I find that taking into account figures like the Pfeiffer von Niklashausen and other social heresies and movements is something that it would be fruitful to continue with. 2 Chadraba I got to know as a rather obscure person, but I still have an admiration for him. Then of course Kutal, Stejskal, Pavel Preiss and Josef Krása, they all offered very stimulating impulses and I had great respect for them.

LK Did you meet any of them in person?

HB Yes, I was invited to give a talk on the situation of revolutionary art history in West Germany. If I am not mistaken, it was Friday afternoon and I was so naïve — there were twenty people or so in the room of the institute, professors and assistants — and I heard that two-thirds of them did not want to hear anything about the topic but wanted to head into the weekend. And I think, behind their silence, they thought: ‘What a fool!’ In the course of the talk it nevertheless became very interesting because, I believe, they realised that I was not a rigid Marxist but somebody who appreciated their own work and had come as a colleague out of a kind of curiosity. So in the course of the discussion the atmosphere changed. But at the beginning it was quite bizarre.

LK The early seventies were among of the most difficult times in our modern history, the beginning of what communists called ‘normalisation’ after the liberalisation of the late sixties was crushed. And it was a time when universities and institutes were systematically purged of people who were considered politically unreliable; many institutions were completely personally decimated. Did you feel that people generally were afraid of meeting you, talking to you?

HB No, because there was a hidden agenda. I went to the National Library, where I wanted to work most of the

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time. I wanted to see the manuscripts of Matthias of Janov, etc. And I of course also wanted to see the literature that had been written in the past twelve years, also before ’68. There was a fantastic new development of reinterpreting the Hussite movement and not all the books were available in Marburg; that is why I had come to Prague. So during my very first stay I had a meeting with somebody from the rare books collection and I asked him: ‘How funny, I cannot find these titles by a number of authors.’ He asked me: ‘Who?’ I gave him a couple of names and he said: ‘Please wait a moment.’ He told me he would have a talk with the director. And I was led to the director’s or perhaps department director’s office. And I knew, as somebody had told me, that I should bring something as a present. So I had the book Autonomie der Kunst with me, in which I had written an essay on ‘Autonomie und Askese’ and I gave this Suhrkamp book as a present to the official.3 He obviously knew at least a bit of German and looked through it and saw that I had quoted Marx, so he exclaimed: ‘Oh you quote Marx!’ My reaction was: ‘Why not?’ His answer was: ‘Well, because you come from West Germany,’ and I said: ‘Well, but I see no reason not to deal with the tools he offers. I would describe my “position” as close to the “Frankfurt school”.’ ‘Aha,’ he said, and then we talked about Adorno and Horkheimer. He had a certain distance to that, but it was my carte blanche for the future. He said: ‘You will hear from me, please come tomorrow and go to the room of rare books.’ The man from the rare books department then came to me: ‘You do not need to go to the catalogue room, give me all the titles you want to get.’ And I got all the books I wanted to see, even though the cards in the catalogue were not there! And I said: ‘Well, this is bizarre.’ And he said: ‘Come to my room,’ and then: ‘You know, we passed through a very difficult time and a number of the historians you want to quote in your work are personae non grata. We had to remove the cards so as not to poison our youth.’ And I felt ashamed because I was in the privileged position of getting all the books that Czech scholars were not able to view. I felt terribly bad and thought: should I leave Czechoslovakia, or should I just work — in their name? In the end, I was opportunistic enough to say to myself: ‘I will write my dissertation in their name, in the name of those whose books I get only through this special permission.’4

LK You have not been back to Prague since that time….

HB I can only say yes, I have not been back, and I can only explain why by answering your very first questions: What were my feelings? My feelings were ambivalent: on the one hand, I felt the suppression that lay over the country; on the other hand, I felt a strong sympathy towards this town, because it was dark in a sense and not destroyed by modern buildings. I had the feeling that I was still in the town of Kafka — which may have been an illusion of course — but for me Prague was not something I had not expected. Quite to the contrary, I thought that

I was maybe the last generation that could smell the Prague of a whole tradition going back to the Middle Ages. And I heard so much about how after 1989 Prague was the first town whose atmosphere changed completely. So that was not planned, but I think, inside, I wanted to avoid destroying the integrity of my memory.

LK If we can now jump ahead in time, I wanted to ask briefly about the time when you came to Berlin in 1993. How difficult was it to take over the department and the entire faculty? Did you still have to deal with getting rid of some of those old cadres inherited from GDR times? How difficult was it on a personal level?

HB The years between 1993 and 1996 were surely the most difficult in my whole academic career. As I said, I was a member of the first wave of researchers who were nominated as new professors. After I had just completed my first days at Humboldt University there was a huge assembly of all the professors and employees — who were, more or less, two-thirds from the East and one-third from the West at the time. We had to build a new institute. I suggested Ruth Tessmar, who had been the dean of the former institute, and she turned out to be a liberal and friendly person. She was a professor of drawing at the university — Universitätszeichenlehrerin in the 19th-century tradition — and somebody said: ‘No. We are in a completely new situation, so it must be somebody from the West.’ And as I had been the one to suggest a name, somebody said, well, why don’t you do it? Five minutes later, I was the first dean of an institute that did not exist, yet. And in the next two years, I had to bring together the departments of Asian and African studies, of sociology and political science, and of cultural and art studies. A bizarre, huge institute. During that period, I got to know the internal system of the GDR in its real contours, which I would have preferred to avoid.

LK Did it shatter the remains of your leftist or left-liberal world view and ideals?

HB It did. Because I had to tell myself that I had not been intelligent and sharp-thinking enough to get rid of my illusion that the GDR was in a sense a post-Stalinist society. My ideal was that the GDR plus ‘68 would have made a better society than the society in which I had grown up. And that was very naïve thinking, as I thus got to know through bitter experiences.

LK I was going through the book commemorating 200 years of art history at Humboldt University5 and quite obviously the chapter covering 1989 to the present — which you wrote with Adam Labuda — is extremely short. It is too recent memory and perhaps it will take a longer period before someone can really asses it. My last question about that period: Did your position as a dean and head of department involve a lot of struggle or fighting with what

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in our country came to be called the ‘old structures’ — people inherited from the past, with their ways of thinking and handling things?

HB Well, everybody has their own perspective. If I put it into a very condensed view: I did not think much about it. Intuitively, I avoided contact with Olbricht, my predecessor, but I tried to do the very best to build up collegial relationships. One of the most happy moments in the last twenty years was when, at the end of the 1990s, an evaluation of the institute took place and at the end of the second day, when we had a general discussion, someone from the committee asked: ‘Do you have any questions for us, as we have been interrogating you two days straight?’ There was a silence and then Ulrich Reinisch, my colleague from the GDR, said: ‘Yes, I have a question.’ — ‘What question?’ He said: ‘Why didn’t you ask us if there have been quarrels between East and West in the last ten years?’ And then he was asked: ‘Well then, we will pose this question: have there been quarrels at all?’ And Reinisch said: ‘There have been no quarrels.’ To sum this up: I started in a left-liberal group of professors, I left this group after half a year because I saw that it was being instrumentalised by, say, old Stalinists and I joined the group around Volker Gerhardt and Jochen Sauer — Angela Merkel’s husband — that was predominately formed by East German professors who wanted to rebuild Humboldt University. They came from the internal opposition against the GDR. I switched in their direction and worked with them on this challenge.

LK Let’s turn a page. You have started and managed and have been the spiritus agens of several important initiatives here in Berlin: you have been a permanent

fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, bringing together several groups of image specialists. You have founded and managed Das Technisches Bild, more recently also the Kolleg-Forschergruppe Bildakt und Verkörperung, and you are just starting a new major excellence cluster Bild Wissen Gestaltung.6 Is any one of these initiatives closest to your heart, one that you were most happy about?

HB One should add Requiem, an enterprise to study Early Modern tomb culture, and the Goldschmidt Zentrum, focused on Romanesque art. I always had great luck to collaborate with dedicated young people. When you ask about the cluster Bild Wissen Gestaltung, which we are trying to establish now, or have established, then Das Technische Bild and the Kolleg-Forschergruppe Bildakt und Verkörperung are the two columns on which this huge, newly founded institution stands.

LK Can you try to summarise what the main goals of the new excellence cluster are? What do you hope that the cluster should achieve?

HB Commonly, pictures are understood as ‘representations’ of external things and phenomena. We hope instead that within the disciplines that are involved, among them 25 natural scientists, a sensibility for the non-representational status of pictures will be established and enriched. We hope that especially in the natural sciences a consciousness and knowledge of the specificity of thinking in and through pictures as tools and not as objective, passive reflections of thought will be developed. Working with this aim, we hope to develop a cultural theory of pictures and shaping (Gestaltung) that comes close to the Leibnizian concept of thinking, education, shaping, etc.

LK Which brings us directly to your life-long project. But before entering into this topic, I will quickly ask a mischievous question: Would you say that there is some pragmatic thinking behind the idea of the excellence cluster, namely, that through such an initiative art history could somehow gain more relevance by appealing to the sciences and to the needs of a technocratic society? And that it may gain, let’s say, more prestige or moral acceptance from an increasingly technocratic society that is marginalising the humanities all across Europe?

HB I have never followed strategic paths. I hope to be able to say that everything I have tried to achieve came from voluptus, a wanting deep inside through which one arrives at points one would never have thought of beforehand. I would never invest energy only in order to make art history ‘interesting’. The question of the value

2 / Horst Bredekamp in Berlin, Juli 2013Photo: Ladislav Kesner

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of art history is not my major issue. I am a dedicated art historian. I think it is one of the best disciplines ever developed; I defend it and think it is the best discipline in the world, but I would never follow an agenda to make it ‘strong’. Either it gains respect through its practice or it doesn’t. There is no strategy behind my work. I see another danger for art history: It could happen that through the interest other disciplines are finding in pictures, they will soon forget whence the impulse originated. So I think it could happen that in this huge ensemble of disciplines working on pictures art history may be lost. One has to beware of this.

LK We discussed this extensively in Brno, but I cannot leave out the question of your view on the relationship between art history and visual studies, which you quite programmatically spelled out in an article in Critical Inquiry a decade ago,7 and you presented an updated version of that argument at a recent conference in Brno.8 Your entire scholarly career, your books indeed give support to your view of art history as Bildwissenschaft. But still there is one doubt in my mind: Do you think art history is so conceived that it can develop a sort of conceptual apparatus and theory that can also be applicable and interesting for that enormous realm of contemporary, not historical, scientific imagery? I wonder whether the apparatus of Bildwissenschaft and art history has anything to offer on the level of general theory or even of individual interpretations to the specialised branches of scientific images and interpretations of scientific imaging in radiology, astronomy, microscopy, etc.

HB I can only underline my conviction that there is one, in my view decisive, argument that privileges art history as the discipline responsible for these kinds of images and pictures as such and not as a tool for doing something with them: that is the appreciation of details and form. I do not see any other discipline, apart from archaeology, that trains the student to have respect for shapes, form. And we talked about this in Brno: I of course have the greatest sympathy for the field of visual studies, but I see the losses of researchers who come from epistemology and not from the internal qualities of what they are investigating and doing their research on. Visual tools, in my view, have to be treated first and foremost in a strictly formal, analytical way. I take this as a metaphor for respecting the details of construction and the internal structures of shaping ‘Gestalt’. In this sense there is no distinction between a late Gothic Madonna and the microscopic observations of optogenetics. It is on this level that both fields require a trained eye and a trained language in order to grasp, reflect, abstract, and historicise the given forms and their productive changes. This is my conviction.

LK Again, those initiatives we discussed and all those meetings, conferences, and also the journal Bildwelten des Wissens — all of this provides quite a huge sum of

evidence that meaningful cooperation and dialogue between the humanistically educated art historian and the image scientist can happen and is happening here in Berlin, of all places. On the other hand, you yourself said in the interview with Christopher Wood: ‘My further goal is to break down the arrogance of science.’9 So am I right in assuming that the dialogue with scientists is still an open, on-going process, and that there is still a lot to do to persuade them to be more receptive or responsive to what art history has to offer?

HB Yes, that is always a process. And it takes years to get both: a respectful understanding for what scientists are doing and respect from their side. So it is not a given, and I always, on certain occasions, feel we are brought back to the situation of, say, twenty years ago when scientists would leave the room as soon as they realised that humanists and even art historians were present. We could not have created the cluster Bild Wissen Gestaltung without the mutual trust we had developed over years of discussions with scientists. And the same holds true for the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, where I have been member since 1996 and where scientists regularly encounter humanists at general meetings.

LK It seems to me that this line of work that you and others have developed here in Germany is so important and so under-appreciated when compared to the tradition of Anglo-American visual studies, which are much more oriented towards social and political aspects, not to mention the French tradition of thinking, which is so fashionable and so overblown in my view…

HB Well…

LK One hopes that the time is finally ripe for the pendulum to swing back and for more and more people, students especially, to find inspiration in this more analytical, philosophically founded approach to image science, rather than post-structuralistically inspired visual studies. Anyway, I would like to switch over to your work on embodiment and your cooperation with the late John Krois.10 This, to me, is quite a paradigmatic situation of a meaningful dialogue between a philosopher and an art historian. I was happy enough to meet John Krois shortly before he died, when he presented his theory of haptic pictures, and I was deeply impressed. Your mutual cooperation, which began in 1991 — was it mostly a happy coincidence or was there later in part also a programmatic effort to demonstrate the possibility of a systematic dialogue between philosophy and art history, something which harks back to Hamburg and the times of intense cooperation between people like Cassirer on the one hand and Warburg and Saxl on the other?

HB Well, there was no planning. It was only a coinci-dence of interests and sympathy that caused us to find each

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other again at Humboldt University after having spent a year together at the Wiko. We decided to offer seminars together. In my cellar I found a huge Leitz-folder for Was ist Ein Bild, a class we gave in 1996 — from Plato to Panofsky. John Michael Krois was in my lectures, and I was in his, too, and these were most happy moments. When I gave my lecture on Leibniz, I said, to the surprise of the audience: ‘Dear commilitones, there is somebody in the room who knows more about this topic than me.’ John Krois would come to the podium and give the lecture in my place, at least the first 45 minutes, after which a discussion would follow. These were extremely happy moments of collabora-tion. And we would have continued like that.

A new situation emerged ten years ago, when John Krois became fed-up with analytic philosophy and the institutional victory of this heresy in German-speaking philosophy. He said: ‘Horst, my discipline is in danger because a strand of philosophy is taking over that is a dead-end, and because it is a dead-end, it is trying to get as many positions as possible. And Humboldt University has fallen into these hands. I do not know what to do.’ In that very moment, I got the offer to run the campaign for the Kollegforschergruppe Bildakt and we decided to join forces. We both created this and it is one of the most unbearable tragedies in my intellectual life that this great, shy, sovereign philosopher, who had deep sympathy for art history, died of cancer. We used to make jokes when discussing things and always came back to the question: Which is the better discipline: philosophy or art history? I of course always said philosophy, but he relentlessly said: no, art history is much better than philosophy. That de-monstrates the atmosphere in which these two disciplines came together in order to recreate at least the atmosphere of the Hamburgian school or Warburg library: a most liberal collaboration of philosophers and art historians.

LK Well, which again is in my view such a remarkable achievement, especially given the way philosophy is used in much of recent art historical theory, which is often quite content with a very superficial quoting of a few, all too fashionable names, repeated ad nauseam.

HB We have the same view on that. Yes, it is an artistic approach of climbing up in the circus of ideas.

LK I really think, again, that it is probably one of the lasting achievements of your cooperation that, indeed, within this initiative and now with the excellence cluster the willingness to enter into a mutual dialogue between philosophy and image disciplines can continue. By the way, what contemporary philosophers do you read?

HB My favourite is Wolfram Hogrebe from Bonn. I also read Markus Gabriel, of course, as well as philosophers of embodiment — Alva Noë, Evan Thompson, and also Shaun Gallagher, whom we had as a fellow for a few months last year. These are not fashionable thinkers and that is what

I like most. They do not go to the market, so to speak, and they know that they have a very difficult standing in their given intellectual field in America, but they are fighting for something that is parallel to us. Their problem is that, up to now, they do not distinguish between the world and the shaped world, while we draw a line between the world as such and the shaped forms that approach us. That is what we continuously discuss with them and also with people doing research on mirror neurons. So these are the authors I am reading, but I must confess that Wolfram Hogrebe is currently my favourite — and of course Thomas Nagel. I am just reading his latest book; the final chapter of my Bildakt book11 goes in the direction of Thomas Nagel’s, say, worldview.12 It is very impressive.

LK If I may once again touch on the social role of what you have been doing, that is, in Bildwissenschaft and art history: You have written a lot on Warburg, who at one point has a beautiful saying about the Bildersalat which surrounds us and, if anything, the Bildersalat is getting more and more dense. Do you see a role of art history and Bildwissenschaft as somehow to provide tools to help manage, to meaningfully engage with that Bildersalat from which there is no escape?

HB It may sound banal, but I would answer in the same way as I did when you asked about the relations to visual studies. The only way to study pictures is concreteness, analysing the shaped form and comparing. Many fields are waiting for the art history of our times and I sometimes feel a sadness that I cannot follow up. Being involved with the organisation of the cluster, etc., hinders me from applying all these new tools. What I would have liked to do, and one should do, perhaps as a dissertation, is trace a history of the pictures on Facebook, for example. And all the other tools that are extremely interesting and very fast-moving. I talked with Hubert Burda, the journal tycoon, who is still an art historian; he tries to follow up on these recent developments and his newest book, In Medias Res, was an attempt to shape this frontier. I thought that it was a very interesting book. It is well thought through, well put.

LK There is an interesting moment in your interview with Christopher Wood when you come across Warburg’s notion of the destruction of Denkraum and you sound a little bit pessimistic because you talk about the basically negative situation.13 And obviously it would be quite easy to extend that view into a pessimistic, gloomy view of the contemporary world and the ways of modern communication, how they are emptying that Denkraum. But on the other hand, it is exactly your work — for instance, on images in Galileo, in Darwin — your whole scholarly career that seems to me to show that there are many, many images, especially scientific images, which literally open new Denkräume and new possibilities for truly thoughtful reflection.

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HB Yes, hopefully.

LK So would it be correct to say that it is mostly media images which inundate all of us, which consume so much attention and energy of all people to the point of really flattening the Denkraum, while on the other hand there is a whole other world of images, scientific and also artistic images, that potentially open new Denkräume?

HB That is, I think, a perfect explanation of the situation we find today. And that also means one neither has to be too pessimistic nor radically optimistic. This is a two-sided situation. I also see the dangers of the presentism of our times. Just yesterday I wrote the foreword to the new book in our Actus and Imago series on Paragone as Mitstreit, i.e. as a controversy, and I argued there that the presentism of our times, which goes together with a false understanding of the digital, is turning out to be very problematic, even dangerous, for all that we believe in. Then again, the finger on the smartphone that opens the world is Lucretian seeing, it is seeing and touching in one, and it is fantastic how society in billions of bites each day creates new worlds.

LK My last question is again more personal. It was my experience when I had an administrative position in a major museum that it takes all one’s energy all the time, to the point where I was unable to do any serious writing. And that was an impulse to leave. I know that others have had the same experience. In this respect you are a living enigma to me. How are you able to reconcile your role as a manager, as a leader, as somebody who is really turning initiatives into a tangible reality with all the networking, policy-making, etc., required, and at the same time keep up with your scholarly life? How you can manage all of that?

HB Well, I do not manage it [laughs]. My experience is that it is quite the opposite. Without writing one page a day, I cannot do administration. It is not that I cannot do research because I do administration, it is the other way around. I could not do administration if I did not do research each day. So when I come home, I have my evening Stulle [laughs] and I read and write.

LK So you are able to write scholarly stuff even during the semester….

HB If I do not do it, I cannot do my administrative work. I would crumble if I did not continue to write even throughout the semester. I am currently writing a book on Charlemagne. And I could not do my regular work if I did not do so, I would leave the job.

LK But you once told me that you can really only do serious writing during the summer and Christmas vacation when you go to your tusculum, disconnected

from email and everything, and that is really the cherished time for your writing while doing nothing else.

HB That is also true. I am always distracted. But nevertheless, the student assistants offer incredible help because they push me; they come in the morning to get the orders [laughs]. I give them the tasks by number — each item has a number, and at the end of the year we approach 3000; in the evening, I get the results of the day. This helps a lot, and I hope it is not only a burden but also an inspiration for them.

LK So you survive the burden and stress of running and managing the institutes just by sticking to your writing and scholarly work. Which is nonetheless admirable.

HB No, the sacrifice is on the human side, family and friends: ‘Die Rechnung geht nicht auf.’ But I cannot help it.

LK Let’s finish on a lighter note: I was watching you in a football match during the semester-end party and it was obvious that you play more than occasionally? Do you play regularly? Is that something that keeps you ticking?

HB Yes.

notes

1 Rudolf Chadraba, Staroměstská mostecká věž a triumfální symbolika v umění Karla IV., Praha 1971.

2 Rudolf Chadraba, Albrecht Dürer, Praha 1964. — Idem, Dürers Apokalypse. Eine ikonologische Deutung, Prag 1964.

3 Michael Müller, Horst Bredekamp et al., Autonomie der Kunst: zur Genese und Kritik einer buergerlichen Kategorie, Frankfurt 1972.

4 Horst Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte: Bilderkampfe von der Spätantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution, Frankfurt 1975.

5 Horst Bredekamp — Adam Labuda (eds), In der Mitte Berlins. 200 Jahre Kunstgeschichte an der Humboldt-Universität, Berlin 2010.

6 For more comprehensive information, see https://www.interdisciplinary-laboratory.hu-berlin.de/.

7 Horst Bredekamp, A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft, Critical Inquiry XXIX, 2003, No. 3, pp. 418–428.

8 Horst Bredekamp was a keynote speaker at the international conference ‘Art History and Bildwissenschaft: interfaces, interactions, antinomies’, organised by the Department of Art History, Masaryk University, and the Moravian Gallery in March 2013.

9 Horst Bredekamp, Iconoclasts and Iconophiles: Horst Bredekamp in Conversation with Christopher S. Wood, Art Bulletin XCIV, 2012, No. 4, pp. 515–527.

10 The works of John Krois on this subject are collected in: Horst Bredekamp — Marion Lausche (eds), John Michael Krois. Bildkörper und Körperschema, Berlin 2011.

11 Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts, Berlin 2010.12 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Oxford 2012.13 Bredekamp (see note 9).