George Steiner offers a fascinating conjecture in his introduction to The Origin of German Tragic Drama by Walter Benjamin:
Allegory and emblem had begun to be studied seriously before Benjamin. Nevertheless, his contribution is at once solid and original. It draws on, it is exactly contemporaneous with Erwin Panofsky’s and Fritz Saxl’s monograph on Dürer’s “Melencolia, I” published in 1923. Benjamin was among the very first to recognize the seminal power of what was to become the Warburg Institute approach to renaissance and baroque art and symbolism. He sought personal contact with the group, but Panofsky’s response to the Ursprung (did he read it?) was dismissive. This marks, I think, the most ominous moment in Walter Benjamin’s career. It is the Aby Warburg group, first in Germany and later at the Warburg Institute in London, which would have afforded Benjamin a genuine intellectual and psychological home, not the Horkheimer-Adorno Institute for Research in the Social Sciences with which his relations were to prove so ambivalent and, during his life time, sterile. Panofsky could have rescued Benjamin from isolation; an invitation to London might have averted his early death. (19)
While Benjamin might have found a more immediately rewarding audience for his dialectical images among the group responsible for iconology, it seems to me that critics would have been deprived of their favorite “failed academic” to hold up as an example of the evil nature of the university system. I think that Benjamin’s insistence on viewing images through the lens of his own peculiar version of linguistic philosophy would have created just as much resistance in other environments. But still, it would have been nice if someone could have provided him with a ticket out of Europe before 1940.
