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ARCHAEOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS
Nikolaus Himmelmann
Interviewed by Richard Candida Smith
Art History Oral Documentation Project
Compiled under the auspices
of the
Getty Center for the History of
Art and the Humanities
Copyright © 1996 The J. Paul Getty Trust
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LITERARY RIGHTS AND QUOTATION
This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Assistant Director for Resource Collections of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities.
# * #
Frontispiece: Nikolaus Himmelmann, 1996. Photograph by Wolfgang Klein, courtesy of Nikolaus Himmelmann.
CONTENTS
Curriculum Vitae ix
SESSION ONE: 20 FEBRUARY, 1995 (160 minutes)
TAPE I, SIDE ONE 1
Family background — Father's cardboard factory in Frondenberg — Family not devout — Wartime experiences — Continuous bombing of the region during the last year of the war hindered schooling — Father's membership in the Nazi Party — Himmelmann's studies at the district Oberschide — No opportunity to study Greek until he entered university — Interest in morphological biology — Admission to the University of Marburg as a medical student — After first year, Himmelmann switched his courses to Greek and archaeology — Studying with Friedrich Matz — Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg's concept of structuralism — Ernst Buschor's notions of "eternal native style" — Studying with Peter von der Muhl and Karl Meuli at the University of Basel — The relation of philology to the study of objects — Use of philological techniques to date sculptures at Sperlonga — Himmelmann's varied fields of study — Moving to Munich to study with Ernst Buschor — The Buschor stylistic method — Buschor's teaching style — His combination of hardheaded positivism with nature mysticism — Learning how to see — Buschor usually talked extemporaneously without a manuscript — Style not just a question of difference, but of system — Buschor's ideas often hard to grasp because they were expressed in mythologizing language.
TAPE I, SIDE TWO 18
Stylistic structures are historically determined — One semester of art history with Hans Sedlmayr — Other teachers at Munich: Heinz Kahler and Hans Diepolder — Buschor discounted all social and political context — Studying ancient history with Alexander Schenk von Stauffenberg — Influence of Stefan George on both Buschor and Staufifenberg — George's self-image as a "new Dante" — Himmelmann's readings in Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in philosophy and Friedrich Meinecke and Arnold Toynbee in history —
IV
Ernst Robert Curtius — The rebirth of Heidegger's reputation in 1950s Germany — Rudolf Bultmann's existential interpretation of Christianity — Carl Robert's grammar of hermeneutics — Contrasting Buschor and Matz as teachers and scholars — Excavating with Buschor at Samos — Buschor's excavation techniques — Himmelmann's dissertation on Attic grave reliefs — Oral examination with Buschor — Trips to Italy and a semester in Basel — Himmelmann's growing interest in nineteenth-century authors and their universal, concrete approach to problems — Alois Hirt — The Danish archaeologist Julius Lange relates the ideal nude to society and ethics
— Otto Jahn's recognition of realist trends in ancient art — Buschor's ideology had an affinity to Nazism, though he never identified with the party — In reaction to the faults of Buschor's generation, students embraced positivism — Bernhard Schweitzer — Himmelmann's studies in Egyptian archaeology — Comparing Greek and Egyptian physiognomic portraits — Martin Bernal, David Mamet, and the question of political correctness.
TAPE II, SIDE ONE 35
Ideology in archaeology — More on political correctness — Political turmoil in German universities in the 1 960s — Himmelmann's interest in sociology in the 1960s — Reading Jiirgen Habermas and Herbert Marcuse — Several fellow students and their subsequent careers — Himmelmann's work as an assistant in the classical collections of the Staatliche Antikensammlungen Miinchen in 1955 — Himmelmann discovers that he dislikes museum work as much as excavation — Travels to Italy, Greece, and Egypt on a fellowship — Teaching as a Phvatdozent at the University of Marburg, 1956-1962 — Called to chair at Saarbriicken — Research into Homeric-era art — In Homeric Greece art was connected to the social phenomenon of gift distribution
— Reading Moses Finlay — Developing models for understanding the relation of society, religion, and artistic form — Heuristics versus theoretics — Concern for the way in which theory must predetermine the answers of one's investigations — Himmelmann develops a preference for symptomatic studies, in which artistic form becomes an entry into a broader complex of social connections — Symptomatic findings relevant only for a given complex of problems — Examples of stylistic analysis: the meander motif as a geometricized representation of vine tendrils, suggesting to Himmelmann that geometric art is an
expression of biological forms — Work on animal sacrifice — Reinterpration of the Parthenon frieze based on studies of Greek conceptions of sacrifice — On the placement of gods in the frieze — Himmelmann's colleagues — Participation in congresses and symposiums — Involvement with the German Archaeological Institute.
TAPE II, SIDE TWO 52
Travels in the Mediterranean — Relations with Greek colleagues — Organization of the Akademisches Kunstmuseum der Universitat Bonn — Originally founded as a cast collection, the museum now has a fine collection of primarily Greek originals — Acquisitions and funding — Effects of cutback in university budget after reunification — Assessment of other classical museums — Dealers and collectors — Thoughts on the ethics of the antiquities market — Discovering forgeries and objects stolen during World War II.
SESSION TWO: 21 FEBRUARY, 1995 (115 minutes)
TAPE III, SIDE ONE1 59
More on Lange and his influence on Adolf Furtwangler — Detailed exposition of stylistic structuralism as applied to Himmelmann's theories on geometric art — On the paradoxical representations of gods and godesses performing their own sacrifices — The example of Artemis — In classical art deities are represented as an individuals whose powers are expressed in their own figures — The example of Aphrodite in the Parthenon pediment — Nude representations of antique divinities in Middle Ages and the Renaissance — The interpretation of religious motives and their relation to ethical characters — On the realistic, vulgar self-representation of craftsmen in Greek art — Religious motives behind artists' self-representations — On the peculiarities of Egyptian portraits — Authors who have helped Himmelmann in his understanding of Greek religion: Karl
Section of transcript that begins on page 62 and ends on page 69 was inserted from the beginning of Tape IV, Side One.
vi
Friedrich von Nagelsbach and Walter Burkert — Examples of human sacrifice motifs.
TAPE III, SIDE TWO 71
Religion at the core of social context in classical world — Critique of nineteenth-century interpretations of Greek society — Meaning of enlightenment in antiquity and in the eighteenth century — Himmelmann's assessment of why students selected him as their professor — How archaeology and stylistic analysis can provide an alternative to sociological theories in the exploration of modern social phenomena — Controversy over interpretation of the sculptures at Sperlonga — Student interests after 1968 — Effect of feminist scholarship on classical archaeology — Effects of reunification on archaeological work — Himmelmann's involvement with academies in Germany — Future research will focus further on archaeological aspects of Greek religion — More on Himmelmann's symptomatic approach and how it influences the form of his writings.
TAPE IV, SIDE ONE2 81
The organization of the Himmelmann's seminars — Comparing beginning with advanced classes — Comparing his own approach to teaching with that of Buschor's — Himmelmann's relations with Buschor after graduation — Buschor's mythical anthroposophic approach impedes acceptance of his practical contributions — Himmelmann's four sons and their careers — Meeting his wife — Combining family life with the demands of research and teaching — The influence of functional anatomy on Himmelmann's approach to archaeological objects.
Index 89
Richard Candida Smith, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and Dr. Claire L. Lyons, Curator for Special Collections at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the
2First section of this tape appears in the transcript under Tape III, Side One, pages 62-69.
VI 1
Humanities, interviewed Nikolaus Himmelmann at his home in Bad Godesberg, Germany. A total of 4.6 hours were recorded. The transcript was edited by Katherine P. Smith.
vm
CURRICULUM VITAE
Nikolaus Himmelmann(-Wildschutz), Professor Dr. phil., Dr. he.
Born January 3 1 , 1929, Munster, Germany
Married, four children.
1950 Studium der Klassischen Archaologie, Altphilologie und Alten
Geschichte in Marburg, Basel, Miinchen. Promotion im WS 1954/55 bei E. Buschor, Miinchen.
1955 Wissenschaftlicher Hilfsarbeiter bei den Staatlichen Antikensammlungen Miinchen.
1955/56 Reisestipendium des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts
1956 Assistent am Archaologischen Seminar der Universitat Marburg
1958 Habilitation in Marburg
Privatdozent
1962 Ruf auf den ord. Lehrstuhl fur Klassische Archaologie an der Universitat des Saarlandes in Saarbriicken
1963 Mitglied der Zentraldirektion des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts Berlin
1966 Berufung auf den ord. Lehrstuhl fur Klassische Archaologie in Bonn. Direktor des Akademischen Kunstmuseums
1967 O. Mitglied der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz (Korr. Mitglied seit 1974)
1974 O. Mitglied der Rheinisch-Westfalischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften
IX
1974 bzw.76 Rufe nach Miinchen und Basel.
1974 u. 83 Gastvorlesungen Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa
1976 Stellvertretender Vorsitzender der Zentraldirektion des
Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts Berlin
1981 Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
1983 Wiss. Beirat Unesco, Paris
1986 Corr. Fellow, British Academy
1987 Dr. Phil. h. c. Universitat Athen
1988 Ehrenmitglied des Rates der Archaologischen Gesellschaft Athen
1990 Kommandeur des griechischen Verdienstordens
(Phoinix-Orden)
Schriftenverzeichnis:
1 954 Photographisches Inventor der vollplastischen figur lichen Terrakotten des Museums antiker Kleinkunst in Miinchen. Miinchen, 1 954.
1 956 Ein klassicher Mddchenkopf. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN- PROGRAMM 1956, 3-6, Taf. 1,8.
Studien zum Ilissos-Relief. Miinchen 1956. 42 S., 30 Abb.
1 957 Zur Knidischen Aphrodite. I. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN- PROGRAMM 1957, 11-16, Taf. 1-6.
Epigraphischer Nachtrag zu 'Theoleptos'. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN-PROGRAMM 1957, 17.
Theoleptos. Marburg 1957. 44 S., 12 Abb.
1 958 Eine romische Bronze in Oxford. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN- PROGRAMM 1958, 1-8, Taf 1-9.
Ein archaisches Gemalde vom Friedhof am Eridanos. MITTEILUNGEN DES DEUTSCHEN ARCHAOLOGISCHEN INSTITUTS. ATHENISCHE ABTEILUNG 73, 1958, 1-5, Taf. 1, Beil. 1-2.
1959 Zur Eigenhart des klassischen Gotterbildes. Miinchen 1959. 42 S., 32 Taf.
Fragment eines attischen Sarkophags. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN-PROGRAMM 1959, 25-40, Taf. 7-12.
1960 Der Entwicklungsbegriff der mode men Archdologie. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN-PROGRAMM 1960, 13-40, Taf. 2-3.
Die Gotterversammlung der Sosias-Schale. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN-PROGRAMM 1960, 41-48, Taf. 4-12.
1961 Attisch-Geometrisch. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN- PROGRAMM 1961, 6-20, Taf. 1.
'Nach der Schlacht'. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN- PROGRAMM 1961, 1-5, Taf. 2-3.
1962 Der Mdander auf geometrischen Gefdfien. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN-PROGRAMM 1962, 10-43, 32 Abb., Taf. 3-10.
Sarkophag eines gallienischen Konsids.
In: Festschrift fur Friedrich Matz. Mainz 1962, 110-124, Taf. 31-39.
1 963 Zur Geneleos-Gruppe beim samischen Heraion. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN-PROGRAMM 1963, 13-17, 2 Abb., Taf. 3.
1964 Bemerkungen zur geometrischen Plastik. Berlin 1964. 29 S., 61 Abb.
1965 Beitrdge zur Chronologie der archaischen ostionischen Plastik. ISTANBULER MITTEILUNGEN 15, 1965, 24-42, Taf. 1-24.
Archaischer Bronzekuros in Wien. JAHRBUCH DES DEUTSCHEN
XI
ARCHAOLOGISCHEN INSTITUTS 80, 1965, 124-137, 12 Abb.
1 967 Eine geometrische Ekphora-Scherbe in Bonn. ARCHAOLOGISCHER ANZEIGER 1967,169-171, 2 Abb
Erzdhlung und Figur in der archaischen Kunsi. Weisbaden 1 967 (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Abhandlungen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse 1967, Nr. 2). 100 S., 8 Abb., 12Taf.
Die 'Schrittstellung' des polykletischen Diadumenos. MARBURGER WINCKELMANN-PROGRAMM 1967, 27-39, Taf. 5-7.
1 968 liber einige gegenstdndliche Bedeutungsmoglichkeiten des friihgriechischen Ornaments. Weisbaden 1968 (Akad. d.
Wiss. u. d. Lit., Abh. d. geistes- u. sozialwiss. Kl. 1968, Nr. 7). 88 S., 31 Abb., 8 Taf.
1 969 liber bildende Kunst in der homerischen Gesellschaft. Weisbaden 1 969 (Akad. d. Wiss. u. d. Lit., Abh. d. geistes- u. sozialwiss. Kl. 1969, Nr. 7). 49 S.
1 970 Mia ostotheke apo ten Kilikia ste Leukosia (griech). REPORT OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES CYPRUS 1970, 146-148, Taf. 25-26.
Der 'Sarkophag' aus Megiste. Weisbaden 1970 (Akad. d. Wiss. u. d. Lit., Abh. d. geistes- u. sozialwiss. Kl. 1970, Nr. 1). 30 S., 13 Abb., 6 Taf.
Sarkophage in Antakya. Weisbaden 1970 (Akad. d. Wiss. u. d. Lit., Abh. d. geistes- u. sozialwiss. Kl. 1970, Nr. 8). 24 S., 24 Taf.
Verzeichnis der Schriften von Friedrich Matz (Vorwort). Berlin 1970.
1 97 1 Archdologisches zum Problem der griechischen Sklaverei. Weisbaden 1971 (Akad. d.Wiss. u. d. Lit., Abh. d. geistes- u. sozialwiss. Kl. 1971, Nr. 13).
XII
Winckelmann's Hermeneulik. Weisbaden 1971 ( Akad. d. Wiss. u. d. Lit., Abh. d. geistes- u. sozialwiss. Kl. 1971, Nr. 12). 24 S., 14 Abb.
Sarkophage in Antakya und Bericht uber eine Reise nach Kleinasien. Archaologischer Anzeiger 1971, 92f
1972 Das Akademische Kunstmuseum der Universitdt Bonn. Berlin 1972. 47 S., 48 Abb.
Ein 'christliches' Sarkophag-Fragmenl von 238. Jahrbuch fur Antike und Christentum Jg. 15. 1972
Ein verkannter Nerva. Archaologischer Anzeiger Berlin 1972.
Die erste Ekloge Nemesians. Rheinisches Museum NF 115. 1972.
1973 Ein antikes Vorbild fiir Guercinos 'Et in Arcadia ego'? Pantheon Jg. 31. 1973.
Typologische Unter suchungen an romischen Sarkophagreliefs des 3. und 4. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. Mainz 1 973 .
1974 Sarcofagi romani a rilievo. Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Ser. Ill Vol. IV. 1974.
Ein kleinasiatischer Sarkophag in Rom. Melanges A.M. Mansel. Ankara 1974.
Lo Bucolico en el arte antiguo. Habis 5, 1974 (141-152) (2 fig.)
Sammler und archdologische Wissenschaft. Bonner Universitatsblatter 1974, S. 29-34. 5 Abb.
Nachruf auf Friedrich Matz. Jahrbuch 1974 d. Akad. d. Wiss. u.d. Lit. (Mainz) 1974.
Die Lanzenschwinger-Bronzen Olympia B 1701 und 1999. Mit 4 Abb. Archaologischer Anzeiger 1974 S. 538-544 (1975).
Geometrisches Bronzepferdchen in Bonn. Mit 12 Abb.
Xlll
Archaologischer Anzeiger 1974. S. 544-554 (1975)
1 975 Drei hellenistishe Br omen in Bonn. Mit einem Anhang tiber den Dornauszieher Castellani. Weisbaden 1975. 34 S., 24 Taf. (Akad. d. Wiss.u.d. Lit., Abh. d. geistes-u. sozialwiss. Kl. Jg. 1975. Nr. 2).
Das Hypogdum der Aurelier am Hale Manzoni. Weisbaden 1 975 (Akad. d. Wiss.u.d. Lit., Abh. d. geistes-u. sozialwiss. Kl. Jg. 1975.
Nr. 7).
Der Terrakotten-Saal des Akademischen Kunstmuseums der Universitdt Bonn. (Faltblatt z. Eroffnung 9.6.75).
1976 Utopische Vergangenheit: Archdologie undmoderne Kultur. Berlin 1976 (Gebr.Mann Studio-Reihe).
Ihorvaldsens Aigineten. Ausstellung im Akademischen Kunstmuseum d. Universitat Bonn. Pantheon Jg. 34. 1976.
To Boykoliko stoicheio sten archaia techne. Aus: Epistemonike Epeteris tes philosophikes scholes toy Aristoteleioy panepistemioy, Thessalonikes 15, 1976.
1977 Ein mythologisches Relief in Ostia. Festschrift fur Frank Brommer, Mainz 1977.
Phidias und die Parthenon-Skulpturen. Bonner Festgabe Johannes Straub. Bonn 1977.
1 978 Die zeitliche Stellung der Siid-Metopen am Parthenon. In: Stele. Athena 1978.
1 979 Eine Beobachtung an der 'Oxford Bust'.
In: Studies in Classical Art and Archaeology. A Tribute to Peter Heinrich von Blanckenhagen. Locust Valley, NY., 1979.
Nachruf auf Ernst Langlotz.
In: Jahrbuch 1978 der Rheinisch-Westfalischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften. Opladen 1979.
xiv
Zur Entlohnung kunstlerischer Tdtigkeit in klassischen Bauinschriften.
In: Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts Bd. 94. 1979.
Ta glypta tou Parthenona kai o Pheidias.
In: Epistemonike Epeteris tes philosophikes scholes tou Panepistemiou
AthenonN.F. 11 1979(1980).
1980 Ein Sarkophagportrdt in Bonn.
In: Eikones. 1980 (Antike Kunst. Beih. 12).
Uber Hirten-Genre in der and ken Kunst. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1980. (Wiss. Abh. der Rheinisch-Westfalischen Akad. der Wiss., Bd. 65).
Ein alexandrinischer Genre-Typus.
In: Wiirzburger Jahrbiicher fur die Altertumswissenschaft. N.F. Band
6a, 1980.
La remunerazione dell'attivitd artistica ne/le iscrizioni edilizie d'etd
classica.
In: Artisti e artigiani in Grecia ed. F. Coarelli (Universale Laterza 577,
Rom-Bari 1980).
198 1 Realistic Art in Alexandria. Albert Reckitt Archaeological Trust Lecture, 1981, from the Proceedings of the British Academy, London, Volume LXVII (1981), Oxford University Press.
Osservazioni su 11 'arte geometrica in Studi Classici e Orientali. Pisa XXXI, 1981, 13-40.
Utopia del passato. Archeologia e culiura moderna. Introduzione di Salvatore Settis. Bari 1981.
1 983 Alexandria und der Realismus in der griechischen Kunst. Tubingen: Wasmuth(1983).
1984 Das Akademische Kunstmuseum der Universitdt Bonn. Das Haus und seine Geschichte. Koln: Rheinland Verlag, 1984.
xv
Saturn am Dom von Florenz.
In: Jahrbuch fur Antike und Christentum. Erg.-Bd. 1 1.1984 (Vivarium.
Festschrift Theodor Klauser zum 90. Geburstag).
Trecutul u topic. Arheologia si cultura moderna. Trad, de Alexandria Avram, Pref. de Petre Alexandrescu. (rumanisch). Bucaresti: Ed. Meridiane 1984.
1985 Ideate Nacktheit.
In: Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte. Bd. 48.1985.
La nudita ideate. In: Memoria dell'antico nell'arte italiana. 2. 1985: I generi e i temi ritrovati.
Ideate Nacktheit. Opladen 1985. (Abh. der Rheinische-Westf. Akad. d. Wiss. Bd. 73).
Antike Gotter in der christlichen Kunst. Vorbilder der Renaissance. (Zeitungstitel: Die bosen und die guten Nackten) Nr. 298. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 24.12. 1985.
1986 Die Archdologie im WerkF. G. Welckers.
In: Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker. Werk und Wirkung. 1986. (Hermes. Einzelschriften. H 49).
Eine fruhheltenistische Dionysos-Statuette aus Attika.
In: Studien zur klassichen Archaologie. Festschrift zum 60.
Gebursttagv. Friedrich Hiller. Saarbriicken 1986.
Erinnerungen an den Archdologen Ernst Buschor. (Zeitungstitel:
Schonheit vor aller Geschichte).
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 4.6. 1986. Nr. 126.
Ein tarentinisches Kalksteinfragment in Bonn.
In: Studien zur Mythologie und Vasenmalerei, Mainz 1986. (Konrad
Schauenburg zum 65. Geburstag am 16.4 1986).
Ostionische Thronfiguren.
In: Archaische und Klassische Griechische Plastik. Akten des
internationalen Kolloquiums April 1985 in Athen. Bd. I. Mainz 1986.
xvi
Antike Goiter im Mittelalter. Trierer Winckelmannsprogramme, Bd. 8, 1985(1986).
1987 Ostgriechische Thronfiguren.
In: Anadolou 21. 1987-80 (1987).
1988 Marmorlutrophore eines Menekles. In: Archaologischer Anzeiger. 1988.
Planung und Verdingung der Parthenon-Skulpturen. In: Bathron (FS Heinrich Drerup) 1988. (Saarbriicker Studien zur Archaologie u. Alten Geschichte. 3.)
1989 Herrscher und. Athlet. Die Bronzen vom Quirinal. Von Nikolaus Himmelmann mit Beitr. v. A.M. Carruba ( u.a.) Bonn, Akademisches Kunstmuseum, 20.6. -5.9.1989. Milano: Mondadori 1989.
1 990 Der Hellenismus in der Archaologie (ErofFnungsvortrag). In: Aktendesl3. Internationalen Kongresses fur Klassische Archaologie Berlin 1988. Mainz 1990.
Ideale Nacktheit in der griechischen Kunst. Berlin; New York: 1990. (IX, 126 S., 65 Abb.) (Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts. Erg-H. 26.)
Antisthenes.
In: Phyromachos Probleme. Mainz 1 990 (Romische Mitteilungen,
Erganzungsheft 3 1 )
Die Bronzen vom Quirinal. Erfahrungen mit einer Austelhmg im
Akademischen Kunstmuseum.
In: Bonner Universitatsblatter. 1990.
1991 Laokoon.
In: Antike Kunst. Jg 34. 1991.
Ein Ptolemder mit Keule und Kothurn.
In: Festschrift fur Jale Inan. Istanbul 1989 (ausgeliefert 1991).
xvii
Die Reihenfolge derjruhen Alexander-Portrdts, russ.
In: Mirovaja kul'tura. Tradicii i sovremennost' (World culture.
Traditions and nowadays (FS B. Piotrovski). Moskva 1991.
1 992 Der Parthenonfries im kleinen. Griechische Kunst u.die Rolle der Hopliten bei der Demokratisierimg Athens durch Perikles.
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 6.8.1992.
Der bdurische Aristokrat. Pindar s Portrdt als Dokument der
Selbstbescheidung.
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 16.9.1992.
Archdologische Forschimgen im Akademischen Kunstmuseum der Universitdt Bonn: Die griechisch-dgyptischen Beziehangenn. Mit einem Katalog von Wilfred Geominy. Opladen 1992. (Rheinisch- Westfalische Akad. der Wiss. Vortrage. G 316.).
Die Kleinen Jangen zum Lachen bringen. Einige archdologische Erkundungen zur Geschichte der attischen Komodie. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 11.11.1992.
Wer mafiig lebt, ist undankbar. Luxus und Ausschweifungen in der
a/tgriechischen Mdnnergesellschaft.
In : Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . 16.12.1 992 .
Grabstele eines Dichters der Mittleren Komodie in Lyme Hall. In: Kotinos. FS fur Erika Simon. Mainz 1992.
1 993 Das Bildnis Pindar s.
In: Antike Welt. Jg. 24.H. 1.1 993.
Der verkannte Einsichtige. Der Philosoph als idealer Politiker- das
Bild Platons.
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 24.2.1993.
Verstdndliches Erstaunen. Geile Alte als Erbauungsgeschenk fur heranwachsende Madchen: Die Antike fand's komisch. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 21.4.1 993 .
Realismus war keine Schande. Selbstdarstellung und Religion bei
xvin
Handwerkern der spdtarchaischen Epoche.
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 23.6.1993.
1 994 Antike zwischen Kommerz und Wissenschaft. 25 Jahre Erwerbimgen fiir das Akademische Kunstmuseum Bonn. Westdeutscher Verlag Opladen 1994. (Rheinische-Westfalische Akad. der Wiss. Vortrage. G 326).
Romische Adler
In: Macht und Kultur im Rom der Kaiserzeit, Hrsg. Klaus Rosen
Bouvier- Verlag, Bonn 1994.
Schlachten und Op/em. Archdologisches zu einem
Menschheitsproblem.
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 2.4.1994. Nr.77.
Realistische Themen in der griechischen Kunst der archaischen u.d. klassichen Zeit. Berlin 1994. (Jahrbuch d. Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts. Erg. -H.28).
1 995 Drang zur Entladung (Red.-Titel) Die Lehre vom Stil in der Archaologie.
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 4.1.1995. Nr. 3.
Die falschen Trdnen des Odysseus. Das Programm der Grotte des
Tiberius in Sperlonga.
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 18.1.1995. Nr. 5.
Weihgeschenke oder Ausstattungsluxus? Der soziologische
Hintergrund der Gruppen von Sperlonga.
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 25 . 1 . 1 995 .
Feister Odysseues. (Red.-Titel) Idealismus u. Realismus in der
friihgriechischen Kunst.
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 23.9.1995.
Wiirdiges Geflugel der Macht (Red.-Titel). Archaologie des
Bundesadlers: Wege zum Hoheitszeichen.
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 27.9.1995.
xix
1996 Ansichten von Sperlonga.
In: Gymnasium. 103.1996, 32-41.
Sperlonga. Die homerischen Gruppen und ihre Bildquellen. Opladen 1996.
Heros der Verzweiflang.
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 3.1.1 996.
xx
SESSION ONE: 20 FEBRUARY, 1995
[Tape I, Side One]
SMITH: The question we begin with is the simplest, which is, when and where
were you born?
HIMMELMANN: I was born [in 1929] in Minister, an old town in the northern
part of Westphalia, but later on I had nothing to do with Minister. I was brought
up in an industrial village in southern Westphalia called Frondenberg. At the
time it had about six thousand inhabitants, and my father [Carl] owned a
cardboard factory there, which meant that as a family we were rather isolated.
We were not rich people, I can't say that. The factory was rather obsolete and
we were always in difficulties, but in the eyes of the people there we were kind
of Honoratioren and as a child I had not many contacts.
SMITH: Was your father college-educated?
HIMMELMANN: No. He had just made the so-called Einjahriges, which
means the first classes of the high school . You know the German system at the
time: the age of fifteen or sixteen was sufficient to take up study in a technical
university, and [my father] studied the manufacturing of cardboard at the
Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt. He was not intellectually educated, nor
was he interested.
SMITH: What about your mother [Anna]. Could you tell us a little bit about her
background?
HIMMELMANN: She came from a small town in Hesse, where her father was a
veterinarian. She was only fifteen when the First World War broke out, and she
had no higher education. She became a nurse in a war hospital, and later on she
had no opportunity to study.
SMITH: Was your family religious?
HIMMELMANN: No. My father was Catholic, my mother Protestant, but
religion didn't play a great role in the family.
SMITH: How many brothers and sisters did you have?
HIMMELMANN: I had one brother [Wilhelm].
SMITH: And what line of work did he pursue?
HIMMELMANN: He took over the factory, but wasn't very lucky with it, and
the factory now is gone.
SMITH: It doesn't sound like there was much introduction to classical culture in
your family.
HIMMELMANN: No, and I think that this background explains my interest. It
was from lack of inspiration in my surroundings that I had the feeling that I
should go into things like that. You must consider the situation after the war. In
1945, when I was just sixteen, everything lay in ruins. Frondenberg is in the
Ruhrgebiet, which was the center of destruction in the last period of the war. In
my surroundings people were busy rebuilding. There was hectic activity all around, and that was just the opposite of my interests and my feelings. I planned for something meditative to study, but later on it turned out that I was very much mistaken [in my plan] because German universities became very turbulent and it was more management than study and contemplation. SMITH: Did you have difficult wartime experiences?
HIMMELMANN: Maybe less than other people, but the village was amidst a region which very much suffered from the war. I spent about two years in the shelter. Every night we went to the shelter so as not to be hit by bombs, and in the last year, or last one and a half years, [we went] even in daytime. I had no real schooling in the last part of the war. Afterwards, the front came nearer to the village, and there was a grotesque situation: my brother, a lieutenant, who was four years older, came with his military unit and took a position near the village, which meant he slept at his home and in the morning he went to the front. A grotesque situation.
SMITH: Yes. Frightening, and maybe comforting to your mother at the same time.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, but there was a real tragedy afterwards, when the Americans conquered the village. Of course he tried to hide in our home, but then he had to surrender and leave under his mother's eye into prisonership.
That was a real tragedy.
SMITH: But he returned?
HIMMELMANN: He returned about a year or so later, and rather suffered in
that time.
SMITH: What was your parents' attitude toward the Nazi regime? Do you
know?
HIMMELMANN: My father was a conservative, and in the first years he had
difficulties with them. He always found them unsympathetic. Just a week before
Hitler took over, my father made the error of inviting a speaker from the
conservative Deutsche Volkspartei, and in his speech the speaker had called Hitler
an Anstreicher. I don't know what it is in English . . . not an artist painter but—
SMITH: A house painter. Hitler was a house painter before he became a
politician.
HIMMELMANN: Yes. He tried in vain to be an artist too, a dilettante, but his
profession for a time was house painter. So my father had reservations. At the
beginning of the war he entered the party in the interests of his factory, but
internally he still had big reservations against them.
SMITH: That then must have been a problem during the de-Nazification period,
the fact that he had been a party member?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, but there were so many people who gave testimony for
him, he had no difficulties at all.
SMITH: I would assume that you went to a humanistisches Gymnasium?
HIMMELMANN: No, in a distance of about thirty miles there was nothing like
it, and in war times with all these raids I couldn't go so far every day, so I went
to a so-called Deutsche Oberschule, with no classics. Well, we had Latin, but no
other humanistic background— no Greek, to my great grievance. I always wanted
to learn Greek, but I had no chance.
SMITH: When did you learn Greek?
HIMMELMANN: When I began my studies at the university.
SMITH: So you continued at the Oberschule after the war?
HIMMELMANN: After the war I tried to get the so-called Abitur, the maturity
exams, and falsely I pretended to have been a soldier and went to a small town
next to us, but they found out and it wasn't possible, so I had to remain in school
for three more years. I didn't like the idea very much at that age— I was sixteen
already. Afterwards I began the study of medicine. I had always been interested
in science, in its morphological aspects.
SMITH: Like Adolf Portmann?
HIMMELMANN: He wasn't prominent at the time. I met his name only much
later I think, in the sixties. But my choice was not extraordinary at all. It was in
the German tradition of Goethe's morphology, and so it was not at all strange if
young people developed such interests. SMITH: You were relatively close to Essen and Diisseldorf? HIMMELMANN: The next bigger town was Dortmund. I went to school at Menden, about six kilometers away. The cultural center of the region, if you can speak of a cultural center, was Dortmund, which was destroyed completely in the last phases of the war. In those days I had a peculiar experience. My mother tried to give us some cultural [exposure] and I remember that opera was played in Dortmund until the last stages of the war. The town is about thirty kilometers from my village. One day we went there and we saw Die Walkiire. Wagner was great in Nazi times, and so they had a rather fine Walkiire that evening. You remember, at the end of Walkiire there are the flames surrounding die Walkiire? It's called Feuerzauber. On the way back in the train, I saw from the window big flames coming up over Dortmund as it was hit by an air raid. We couldn't hear any detonations because of the noise of the train. And so there was Die Walkiire in Dortmund. It was ghastly. SMITH: You were lucky. HIMMELMANN: Die Gotterdammerung .
SMITH: So you spent three years in a small town in the Ruhrgebiet during the rebuilding. You must have been developing your own personal interests, your reading at that time—
HIMMELMANN: Yes. Maybe it's symptomatic . . . another story. You know that the Deutschmark was introduced by the Americans in '47, and the notes were printed in America. From one day to the other they changed the notes and the currency, and everybody got a so-called Handgeld, a small sum to begin with. I think it was about seventy marks or so. Some people later on built up huge fortunes with this Handgeld, you know, all these active people. And I, with this sum, bought books— utterly unproductive things. I bought books which were available at the time, which didn't interest me; I just bought what was to be had. Some of these books I read only twenty years later.
SMITH: In 1949 you were eligible to enter the university. I know you wound up at Munich, but was that your first—?
HIMMELMANN: No, I began in Marburg, in Hesse, which was rather undestroyed— and I had at least a room to live in. In the bigger towns it was difficult to get a room, and the admission to the study of medicine was very restricted. I tried at Heidelberg and at Bonn. At Bonn the condition [for admission] was to help with the rebuilding of the university. You had to work for three months in cleaning stones from the old building. SMITH: Oh, the foundations.
HIMMELMANN: Yes. I got the admission without [doing that] because I had a good maturity certificate, but I didn't go [to Bonn] because I didn't find a room.
So I went to Marburg.
SMITH: To study medicine?
HIMMELMANN: To study medicine. Only for one semester.
SMITH: But then something led you into art and archaeology?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, my primary interest was Greek, and I began with Greek,
but in the same semester I made up my mind to study archaeology.
SMITH: Was there an archaeologist at Marburg?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, Friedrich Matz, who had a certain renown in Germany.
SMITH: What was his approach to the subject at that time, if you can recall?
HIMMELMANN: What I have to register as very positive was his very solid
knowledge and his universal overview of the field. His approach one would call
today structuralist, but the word "structuralist" has acquired quite a different
meaning from that which it had at the time.
SMITH: What would you say was the meaning at the time?
HIMMELMANN: Well, it was much more primitive then. It meant that you
could not judge the phenomenon of art by the outward look; there were certain
factors which came together in such a work of art and a certain abstract
background which you had to rebuild intellectually. I don't think that the word
meant for them very much which could be transformed into practical research.
SMITH: Contemporary structuralism has been based on linguistics or derived
from linguistics. Was there that kind of thinking, of the structure of a building as a language?
HIMMELMANN: No, the structuralism in German archaeology was home- made. It goes back to [Alois] Riegl, to the Vienna School in the late nineteenth century. In my youth the leading figure in this field was the Austrian [Guido] Kaschnitz [von Weinberg]. He was a pupil of the Vienna School. Among the questions he tried to solve there was the problem of regions of art schools. For example, in Greek sculpture we had to differentiate Attic from Laconian and so on. These structuralists tried to describe Laconian as something which was behind the concrete Laconian work of art, a bronze, for example. On another occasion, Kaschnitz analyzed a statue in Delphi as a work of the school of Argos, via reasons which are rather abstract. Not just by experience, by looking at the differences, but by trying to analyze it from interior factors. [His analysis] wasn't very clear, and it had not many consequences.
SMITH: Was social function one of the factors that would allow you to deduce the abstraction?
HIMMELMANN: No, it was more in the tradition of Blut and Boden. SMITH: I'm thinking in terms of the art history of Wilhelm Pinder and his sense that each group has its distinct eternal style. The generations change, but there remains nonetheless this interior essence. It's also not very clear how one knows
it.
HIMMELMANN: My later teacher, Ernst Buschor, had this approach already in the early twenties. His book on Olympia was a pioneer work. He saw the different local schools connected with the language of the respective part of Greece, the landscape, and the structure of the landscape. It was a bit mysterious, but [ultimately] the idea was in the Greek tradition.
You remember the work of Hippocrates on places. There a connection is made between the inhabitants of a country— a dry country brings forth a dry people, and so on. [Johann Joachim] Winckelmann introduced this idea into the beginnings of classical archaeology. From Winckelmann on, this idea was always virulent in German archaeology; it came up again in the twenties with Buschor and others. It had no direct connections with the Nazi ideology; scarcely any of these people had connections with the party. SMITH: Then you decided to go to Basel?
HIMMELMANN: Yes. Only for one semester. I stayed for three semesters in Marburg, passed my exams in the Greek language, and studied Greek as well, and then I went to Basel. Karl Schefold was the archaeologist there. SMITH: And that's who you wanted to study with?
HIMMELMANN: Yes. But I was very much attracted also by two philologists in Basel, so I continued with the same energy in Greek. [The philologists were]
10
Peter von der Miihl, who had the chair for Greek, and Karl Meuli, who had the chair for ethnology, for Swiss Volkskunde, but he was also an excellent philologist. He has written a very important study on animal sacrifice. I am now working on animal sacrifice, and I see that he was really a pioneer in that field. So I was absorbed by Greek studies at least as much as by archaeology. SMITH: For you, what is the relationship of philology and the object in the field of classical archaeology?
HIMMELMANN: Well, I think that philology was always and is still a certain ideal for me which I cannot attain. Philology gives the intellectual and spiritual background, which you would never gain just from the monuments, so I am still very much interested in reading sources and combining them with archaeological phenomena. It cannot be exaggerated, the importance of philology for archaeology, and I told my students always to study Greek as a second discipline. SMITH: Are the methods of source criticism, of Quellenforschung, in philology important for the study of the object in archaeology? HIMMELMANN: Yes, I think so. There are certain models which were developed in philology which you can apply to archaeology as well. For example, the model of lectio dijficilior, or pictorial traditions going back to certain archetypes. You can always apply these things to archaeology as well. I have a fine example for this from recent years. There is a colleague of mine
11
[Bernard Andreae] who interprets the huge sculptures from Sperlonga in Italy. Maybe you have heard about them. They are from the same workshop as the Laocoon in the Vatican. They were made for an imperial villa and placed there probably in Tiberian times. My colleague is of the opinion that these are copies from Hellenistic prototypes of the early second century. He relied on representations in small genders— as reliefs, cups, and small models and metal ware and so on— which were exactly the same as in the big sculptures. He took this as proof that the great sculptures existed already.
But I found out that these representations in smaller art were much earlier than his hypothetical big sculpture. So it's the other way around: the prototypes were developed in toreutics and small sculpture, and only later they were transferred into big sculptures. The iconography that is developed, for example, in easel painting is then transferred into bigger genera. In earlier epochs this was never the case; this is a typically late phenomenon. So it's just the other way around. The sculptures from Sperlonga are late inventions and have no Hellenistic prototypes in the same scale.
SMITH: In terms of your interests, what time period did you start setting for yourself— areas that you were going to investigate? HIMMELMANN: My answer will sound rather immodest. I have been interested in many fields, reaching from Homeric times into late antique, but that
12
does not mean that I am really universal. I have been a specialist in several
fields, I would say. I published on Homeric times, the so-called geometric
epoch, archaic, classic, late classic, Hellenistic, Roman, and late antique, but
mostly small treatises. With two exceptions I did not write veritable books. That
maybe explains this.
SMITH: What led you then to Munich?
HIMMELMANN: Munich was a flourishing school at the time. Style interested
us very much, and Buschor was the unmatched authority on judging style. I went
there because I thought this might be the way to a particularly archaeological
method— not just knowing things, but finding a method which produced really
archaeological insights.
SMITH: Insights pertinent to the object?
HIMMELMANN: To the object, yes, and practical things, like dating by
stylistic arguments. This was really very important. As you see now, it has
almost died out, at least in Germany, and younger people are no longer able to
date by stylistic methods.
SMITH: Could you give us a sense of what Buschor was like as a teacher?
HIMMELMANN: Well, that's difficult to say. He was a phenomenon very
much bound to his epoch; he was a representative of the epoch, and of the epoch
before. I wonder if that can be understood in America. There were German art
13
historians who knew Buschor and I wonder if they ever wrote about him. Do
you know any utterances on Buschor by German- American art historians or
archaeologists?
SMITH: Well, we were talking to Ernst Kitzinger as part of this project, and
Buschor was one of his teachers at Munich.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, and what did he say?
SMITH: Let's see if I can remember this properly. This was in 1931 to 1934,
and Buschor was very nationalist. He was beginning to move his theory into a
form that was sympathetic to the Nazi movement. He was becoming more
interested in racial attributes. The first word Kitzinger used [to describe
Buschor] was "stratospheric"— you know, up there in the clouds. He said that
Buschor believed there was a truth that was moving through the forms,
independent of the people who were making them. Does this make sense?
HIMMELMANN: Yes.
SMITH: You came to meet him twenty years later.
HIMMELMANN: But this fits into the picture. These are fragments of his
ideology, so to speak. To his background belong, on the one side, his teacher,
the positivist Adolf Furtwangler, a very pragmatic personality, utterly realistic.
On the other hand, he was very much influenced by the Nietzschean tradition and
the historical morphology of Oswald Spengler; this went into the mystification of
14
historical developments that shaped his mind. He saw forces under the developments— Weltgeist and things like that— and that was the background of the idea of style. Style is the phenomenon; it's the outer side of these forces which make development in history and in art history. And, as you said, the development, in a way, is independent from the personality. The personality has to find the idea of the development and then brings development forth. This was rather irrational, as people now say, quite rightly.
In Buschor's personality all this was strangely combined with a very realistic and concrete judgment. Everything he said— his judgment on classical sculpture on the Parthenon and so on— today sounds like mere mystification, with all these interior forces working in there. But at the same time he had a very sound and concrete art-historical judgment. He said, "This is made by Phidias and this is made by Agorakritos, and this is earlier than this." These judgments are well founded still today. For example, it's very important to see that the Athena Parthenos, of Phidias, which we know from copies of the shield and copies of the whole statue, is earlier than the Parthenon frieze, and this you can find out only by stylistic comparison. So you see how these Phidiasian statues— several Athenas and other statues— reveal the development of the workshop of Phidias, and their connection with the Parthenon. All these things are realistic and concrete, but if you read his works, now, you will hardly see
15
this background.
SMITH: In one of your short pieces that you sent me, you talked about his method of Sehubung, and I was wondering what kinds of exercises he gave you as students to teach you how to see.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, all his teaching was this kind of Sehubung. For example, he never used a manuscript. He didn't stand in front of you as all art- historical teachers do, but behind you. He stood behind you, and he described the pictures that were on the wall. He described them in a very low and tedious— langsam— slow voice, and in this kind of mystic tone, but at the same time you saw that there was something real developing, and you could have described this in realistic terms as well. And that was what I did later on. I translated this kind of stylistic description into terms that were more realistic and more concrete.
SMITH: What would those terms have been? You can say them in German, that's okay.
HIMMELMANN: Well, I translated it in terms of [Heinrich] Wolfflin's Kunstbegriffe , saying that a structure becomes more complicated, or it takes more depth, or that the contours lose their clarity. The material structures are developed together with other phenomena in a certain work of art. For me, style was not just difference between two works of art, but it was always a kind of
16
system. I always asked my students to show that the differences make up a
whole system, and only if this systematic character was shown would I accept it
as a stylistic judgment. For example, Attic grave reliefs. They are preserved in
large numbers and their development can be surveyed over one hundred years. I
asked my students to register not only the differences in the frame, but also the
way clothes were represented and the proportions of the figures, and the way they
were placed on the background— perspective and expression, and so on. Only if
all these aspects were considered and seen in their correlation would I accept the
difference as a stylistic development. What I describe now, Buschor said in a
few— for us now— mysterious sentences.
SMITH: Abstract kind of sentences, then?
HIMMELMANN: Not abstract; it was a kind of mythical language which he
used.
SMITH: So you talked about Stilanalyse being an objective method.
HIMMELMANN: Yes.
SMITH: Is that objectivity from the total system?
HIMMELMANN: Yes. I reflect on this problem from time to time. I wrote
articles on this problem, and I couldn't find a solution.
17
[Tape I, Side Two]
HIMMELMANN: I think as a practical method you cannot apply the same
stylistic ideas, the same Begriffe, over an unrestricted epoch. You cannot apply
terms you have developed for the classical epoch on the late antique. The
development in geometric times, for example, is so slow there is almost no
development at all compared to classical times. The rhythm of development is
quite different in different epochs of world history. Development in the twenties
of this century is almost explosive compared to classical times.
SMITH: With stylistic analysis I think of course of Wolfflin, but also, more
positivistically, [Adolph] Goldschmidt, where he would have his students
counting the number of folds on a medieval ivory. But I don't think you're quite
talking about something like that.
HIMMELMANN: No. I must confess that I read Goldschmidt only
superficially. I think that if he had any influence on classical archaeology I don't
remember it.
SMITH: Did you study art history at all during this period?
HIMMELMANN: I tried to for a short time in Munich with [Hans] Sedlmayr,
but he was too intellectualistic to me, and I didn't like his approach too much. It
was only for a part of one semester that I attended. There was another reason I
left: the art historians' seminar was so overcrowded already at that time that it
18
was even difficult to get at the books you needed. SMITH: The seminars that you took then would be with Buschor and— HIMMELMANN: In Munich, besides Buschor there was [Heinz] Kahler, a younger man, just the opposite to Buschor; his field was Roman history of art. But I didn't study very much with him. There was another archaeologist, a very quiet and unpretentious man called [Hans] Diepolder, an older pupil of Buschor' s. He was the director of the museum. I attended his lectures on Greek vase paintings. He was very sound, an aesthete with good judgment on quality. SMITH: In the seminars you took with Buschor, do you recall what kind of problems you personally tackled for your report? I know it's a long time ago. HIMMELMANN: Yes. Buschor had little or no historical approach in the political and gesellschaftlichen sense; that was a big shortcoming in his way of considering things. So you could study archaeology with him without ever reading political history or social history of the time. That was a big shortcoming, and that explains the reaction later on, when Buschor and his generation disappeared. The younger generation felt this lack and there was this strong reaction with its tendency to sociological archaeology and to archaeology on a historical background. So much that the now reigning generation of archaeologists take the monuments just to illustrate political concepts, so there is no real archaeology anymore as a particular method of knowledge. Some of
19
them use the monuments just to illustrate sociological facts.
SMITH: So your problems would then be the developing of stylistic
understanding?
HIMMELMANN: In the seminars, yes.
SMITH: Was that partly because Buschor just assumed that you would be
reading the historical and social analyses?
HIMMELMANN: I cannot say. There was so little interest in this, in the
background, that he didn't mention it very much. I told you that his lectures
were without manuscript and it was mostly comparing pictures in their formal
aspects.
SMITH: Did you take political or social history while you were a student?
HIMMELMANN: I took ancient history. In the German system you need two
more disciplines, and I took Greek and ancient history.
SMITH: And who did you study ancient history with?
HIMMELMANN: With [Alexander Schenk von] Stauffenberg; he had the chair.
There was a younger man called [Siegfried] Lauffer, who worked on Greek
slavery; that was pretty interesting. Stauffenberg carried on the ideas of the
twenties and the thirties of this century. You know maybe Stauffenberg 's
connections to Stefan George. And George's influence on Buschor was very
deep.
20
SMITH: That's interesting.
HIMMELMANN: George is one of the great factors in the history of German archaeology. The archaeologist here in Bonn at the time, Ernst Langlotz, was very much influenced by him, and so was Schefold in Basel. This was not just intellectual influence; George even influenced their behavior, attitude, handwriting, and so on.
SMITH: It's very difficult for Anglo-Saxons, I think, to appreciate the George phenomenon, because he doesn't translate well into English. HIMMELMANN: Yes, but in terms of aesthetic behavior, he was the venerated genius for this generation. SMITH: Very self-dramatizing, in some way.
HIMMELMANN: I wouldn't say this is dramatizing; it's sort of stylizing— making your behavior different from the everyday, the ordinary. There is distinction in speaking and writing and your clothes and in your interests. You remember that Stefan George liked to be portrayed as a kind of new Dante— you know this famous Dante portrait? George's portraits became always like Dante's, and this attitude was in marked contrast to the realistic tendencies of the epoch.
SMITH: In terms of your own interests and reading, who were the twentieth- century German authors that you were reading?
21
HIMMELMANN: Well, that is a wide field. At the time I read a lot. In the last twenty years I didn't read so much anymore because I am a very slow writer. There was little time left for reading. Well, it's difficult to answer. I am a great admirer of poets like Kafka or Joyce, but among the scholarly writers there are very few whom I would regard as essential. I read most of the authors who had had some influence, like the philosophers [Martin] Heidegger and [Karl] Jaspers, or historians like Friedrich Meinecke and Arnold Toynbee, but I cannot say that I was much influenced by them. I should not forget however Ernst Robert Curtius's Europaische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, not a book really, but a collection of marvelous essays. There may be still other authors whom I do not remember at the moment.
SMITH: Did you study philosophy as well while you were at the university? HIMMELMANN: I was for a time interested, but philosophy had no great appeal for me. I heard Julius Ebbinghaus in Marburg and Karl Jaspers in Basel, but most academic philosophers are not a very inviting kind of people, so I read a lot but I didn't attend many philosophical lectures.
SMITH: [Willibald] Sauerlander, who was also at Munich at the same time you were, said something to the effect that at least in art history [Edmund] Husserl was very influential. He was the rage, as they say in English, for a period— his phenomenological eidetics.
22
HIMMELMANN: That may be, but at the time I had no knowledge of him. I
could have had, via Heidegger, but in reality I hadn't.
SMITH: Was Heidegger taught in the school? He was at Marburg later wasn't
he?
HIMMELMANN: No, he had been in Marburg in the twenties, and then he
went to Freiburg and he died there. He became influential in the fifties and
sixties, strangely enough, by way of France. He had a very strong reaction in
France, with the existentialists and Sartre. Heidegger's presence in Germany
grew in the fifties, when I read his Sein und Zeit, but it didn't make so much of
an impression on me. Quite contrary to what he [said himself], I thought his
existentialism rather formalistic. I read some works of a colleague of his, a
theologian called [Rudolf] Bultmann. Bultmann's way of interpreting Christian
religion under existentialist aspects made a certain impression on me, and I still
return to it from time to time. Bultmann played quite a role in Germany after
'45. He had worked together with Heidegger in the twenties.
SMITH: I did want to ask you how the hermeneutic method was taught, how it
was presented, and the kinds of examples that might be used to introduce you to
hermeneutics.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, this was another part of Buschor's strength. It was not
completely original with him, but he had it from Carl Robert. Carl Robert was
23
the pioneer in this field, and Buschor at the time was one of the few people who understood Robert, I would say. He pushed it even further, in an almost radical way. He was mostly right when he said that in archaic pictures, for example, the situation is not coherent; there are different moments combined in the same picture, which looks as if a dramatic situation was represented. But in reality, moments which are widely different from each other are combined within the same picture. In the practical application this was a very prolific method.
There is an old saying by Goethe— Germans like to trace back everything they say to Goethe. Goethe once said, on seeing a picture I think from Pompeii, where two different moments are represented in the same picture, "You shall not think with the picture, but you should think the picture itself. " From this tradition Robert developed his grammar of hermeneutics, and from there Buschor took it over and developed it further.
SMITH: What were the primary texts that you were reading in terms of archaeological theory? Primarily German authors?
HIMMELMANN: There is little theoretical literature on archaeology. Almost none. What there is is of little importance because it has no practical influence. You have the introductions to handbooks and so on. I think theoretical literature in archaeology, at least in my youth, had no influence whatsoever. It was mostly the practical prototype that was given by some archaeologists, and that was really
24
the importance of teachers in that time. It made a big difference if you became a pupil of Matz or of Buschor because of their methods. You couldn't read about this; it was the practical application which made the difference. SMITH: Maybe you could explain the difference between the two of them then, since you studied under both of them.
HIMMELMANN: That's difficult, that's difficult. Buschor' s approach was much more original. Matz was more a scholar, with a huge knowledge; he combined things, as far as you can combine them intellectually. Buschor was a learned man too, but his interpretation rested less on detailed knowledge than on the visual ability to grasp a phenomenon as a whole and to put it into the right context. His ideal was not so much to explain things, to prove opinions, but to make things evident. But it's very difficult to describe. SMITH : What about the practical aspects of excavation? HIMMELMANN: Buschor was a successful excavator in Samos; he went there every year to dig in the precinct of Hera. I accompanied him when he returned to Samos for the first time after the war. That was in 1952 I think. He had the same attitude to Samos and the excavation as he had to universal art history— seeking intuition from the landscape and the people and the water and soil and climate— something for which everybody will have some feeling, but which is . . . well, mysterious. At the same time he was a very consequent and
25
gifted excavator. He developed methods for digging which are still applied today with considerable success. He was one of the first to lay trenches through areas, so you need not excavate a whole area; you make a trench and then see the profiles.
SMITH: Before he started digging, what kinds of anticipations did he have of what he would get? Did he have a pretty clear idea of what he would find? HIMMELMANN: Yes, I think so. As well as I remember he dug only in the Amyklaion, near Sparta, for a very short time, and then he spent his whole life in this one place in Samos. Of course he developed an inner feeling for things that came up there, and he expected things as they came out and was not surprised. SMITH: But he had been digging there for many years? HIMMELMANN: Yes, from the early twenties until his death in the sixties. Then a very strange thing happened after his death. At one place Buschor had dug up to a certain line, and his successor a few years later, dug about a meter or so beyond it and found the huge kouros of Samos— four and a half meters high, one of the most beautiful archaic sculptures. It was Buschor' s tragedy, but he was dead, so . . .
SMITH: Did he give you a body of materials to work up for your dissertation? HIMMELMANN: No, just problems. He didn't speak very much; he was rather taciturn. Also in his seminars . . . dropping one word, and after a while
26
another word. So we spoke two or three sentences about my dissertation. There appeared a book of a very fine Danish scholar, Friis Johansen, a person I esteem very much, a real humanist. He had written a study on Attic grave reliefs and Buschor thought it was not sufficient, so he just asked me if I would like to think things over. So I took that theme, and I didn't work very much on it materially. I formulated some problems, and then I went walking and promenading, and after half a year I put my thesis on the table. It was a rather meager product. SMITH: All the materials were in Munich?
HIMMELMANN: Well, the library had been destroyed in the war, but the collection of photographs was preserved— a wonderful collection of original photographs. And then for grave reliefs there was the collection of [Alexander] Conze, from the late nineteenth century, so I had no need for collecting. From the first day I could begin working on the problems. This explains why I could do it in such a short time. But still it was too short. There is a pupil of mine, a young lady whom I scolded because she took so much time for her dissertation- five or six years. I said I made my dissertation in such and such a time and she answered, "You just hunted an idea, but I had to do work on so much material." SMITH: Could you describe your oral examinations with the three teachers? Kitzinger gave an image of his examination with Buschor in which Buschor would hold up a photograph and Kitzinger would have to identify it, name the
27
place, the time, and the measurements.
HIMMELMANN: No, my examination was early in the morning, and I don't
remember it very much. No pictures, just a few questions, and that was rather
funny. Buschor put his questions— seemingly without being aware of it— in such
a way that you knew the answer he awaited, so I always gave the right answer
and the exam was passed.
SMITH: And then the other exams?
HIMMELMANN: There are few exams in the German curriculum, as you
know. I never passed an exam with Matz or Schefold.
SMITH: Your Habilitationschrift was at Marburg?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, at Marburg. My whole study with my dissertation
included was only eight semesters, and even at the time it was very short. I
really was not well equipped when I left university. Most things I learned only
afterwards.
SMITH: What about introduction to questions of iconography or iconology?
Was that discussed at all?
HIMMELMANN: In the sense, as I mentioned, of Buschor's hermeneutics, but
not in the sense of [Erwin] Panofsky and his iconology.
SMITH: What about connoisseurship, the ability to pick up something and
between your hands and your eyes to evaluate it?
28
HIMMELMANN: That was praised very much in Munich, but without practical
consequences, and at the time it was rather illusory to try to develop
connoisseurship if you couldn't travel and see collections and so on.
SMITH: Was your trip to Samos your first trip out of Germany?
HIMMELMANN: No, I went first already in '49 for a short stay in Viareggio to
learn Italian. On the way back I visited Florence and Venice. And then I studied
in Switzerland for a semester.
SMITH: At Basel, right?
HIMMELMANN: At Basel.
SMITH: And your parents were paying for your education?
HIMMELMANN: Yes.
SMITH: How did they feel about you becoming an archaeologist?
HIMMELMANN: They gave me every opportunity, but they had no
Verstdndnis.
SMITH: Understanding.
HIMMELMANN: No real understanding for what I was doing. They would
have liked if I would have stepped into the paternal firm.
SMITH: Cardboard?
HIMMELMANN: Yes. As to my private study, my sources were more in the
nineteenth century. I read a lot of Nietzsche. Emerson was among my favorite
29
authors. Maybe you have seen in the Utopische Vergangenheit[: Archdologie und moderne Kultur] that the motto is taken from Emerson. SMITH: Yes, I noticed. I notice in some of your essays there's an emphasis on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars; you pick up a question and then reflect on it and take it into a new direction. I was wondering if that involved reflections on the reading that you were doing while you were training? HIMMELMANN: Yes, very often I had the experience of finding with these authors things which we have forgotten nowadays and which can still be developed. If I hit upon a problem, I always try to find if authors of the nineteenth century have already noticed the problem, or if they have ideas on it. In most cases I find that these authors have a much more universal approach, and a concrete approach, and you come to the roots of a problem.
I had this experience almost in every case. For example, when I worked on the ideal nude for some time, I found that some authors had seen the problem already and developed it to a certain stage, and then it was forgotten— that was Alois Hirt in Berlin in the 1830s, and later another scholar whom I appreciate very much, a Danish archaeologist and art historian called Julius Lange. I wonder if you have ever heard about Julius Lange. Most of his books are in Danish, but Furtwangler was so much interested in his work that he had a book of his translated, Die Darstellung des Menschen in der antiken Kunst, which was
30
written about 1900. Lange had an approach which was excitingly modern. He saw the representation of the human figure, especially of the ideal nude and things like that, in connection with society. He spoke of an ethical meaning of the ideal nude. I found that a wonderful expression, and I developed this idea.
And so it is with other things. The nineteenth century is a century of realism, and that had been widely forgotten in archaeology by the 1920s, at least in Germany. There arose a new kind of idealism with the predilection of archaic art, of formal qualities, of abstract developments. My Bonn predecessor in the nineteenth century, Otto Jahn, was one of the first to detect the realist trends in ancient art. He has written wonderful treatises on it. So I always found something when I went back to the nineteenth and early twentieth century. SMITH: They allowed you to get at a social connection without becoming involved with a particular social theory?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, that is also something which makes it so stimulating to study them. They are not biased by later abstract theories. They still had a universal attitude.
SMITH: One of the things that's frequently written about German archaeology is how closely it got bound up into Nazi culture— which is almost an oxymoron. In the period after '45 were people trying to separate archaeology from the kinds of problems that had developed during the Nazi period? Was there that sense of
31
dropping certain things?
HIMMELMANN: This is a difficult question. In the thirties I was a child, so I cannot say what went on in these people, and reading them now, something is still lacking. I would have liked to speak with them. It's a pity that I didn't. But I think that things they have written are not the whole truth. The one who ideologically had a certain affinity to Nazism was Buschor, probably. He was never a member of the party, never had personal advantages from it, and he was always at a distance. He never identified himself with the party, but in his ideology he came rather near to it, if I see things rightly. There were a few opportunists, conformists, who had their career together with Nazis, people who as scholars were completely unimportant, and I think it's not worthwhile to consider them here. Then there were others who, if you read them now and if our young people read them, sound as if they were influenced by Nazism, but this is a very delicate thing.
In Nazism there were trends which were much older and which originally were quite independent from it. For example, George, who had so much influence on my predecessor Langlotz and his generation said things which superficially sounded near to Nazism, but as you know, George was a strong opponent of Nazism, and he rebuked any attempt by them to use him for their purposes. So if you read these things now it is never a proof that these people
32
were really, in their interiors, Nazis. And the time after the war, as I'm sure
you have read, was a kind of restoration— in the first years— and there was no
theoretical attempt to separate themselves from the tradition.
SMITH: Sauerlander talks about what he calls a "would-be Positivismus"
developing in art history. If you just dealt with the facts then you wouldn't have
to—
HIMMELMANN: Yes, that was the first reaction of the younger generation.
The older pupils of Buschor, when they felt, after the war, that something was
wrong in their teachers' generation, they reacted with positivism. There was a
kind of neopositivism, for example, with [Roland] Hampe, who was one of the
foremost pupils of Buschor.
SMITH: Were many of your fellow students veterans of the war?
HIMMELMANN: No, not many. There were some veterans, the oldest pupils
of Buschor, and they reacted with strong opposition to him after the war. But as
I said, in their field they clung to positivism. But this remained completely
within the realm of archaeology; it had no theoretical consequences.
As an example of what I said before, there is another archaeologist who played an important role, Bernhard Schweitzer, in Leipzig and later in Tubingen. He was mentioned lately by a young archaeologist as being near to Nazism, but this is completely wrong. Schweitzer was a conservative who had certain trends
33
from Nietzsche— this vitalism in the early twentieth century— and George and related ideas, but in his practical attitude he was always an opponent to Nazism. When the Russians conquered Leipzig, they made him the first rector of Leipzig University, which they would never have done if he had been compromised by Nazism. So it's very difficult.
SMITH: Did you study Egyptian, Asian, or Roman archaeology at all? HIMMELMANN: Roman belonged to the field of the German classical archaeologist. Buschor and all archaeologists had to teach Roman archaeology as well. Egyptology was a different field; I never studied it in a university, but privately I read some literature and in the last twenty years, every problem I tried to trace back into Egyptian. SMITH: What led you to that connection?
HIMMELMANN: Well, as I see things now, I see a great influence of Egypt into Greek art, and not only in art but also in religion and society. For example, one of my last treatises, a kind of small book, is on the representation of craftsmen— how they represent themselves in their votive pinakes. I traced this back into the Egyptian way of representing craftsmen; there are many similarities. This study is also on the origins of the physiognomical portrait, and I compared this to Egyptian portraits. The differences and the similarities are equally interesting.
34
SMITH: What do you think of Martin Eternal's work, Black Athena?
HIMMELMANN: I have heard the name, and I've noted the book, to read it,
but I haven't read it yet. What I have heard about it leads me to another topic.
These last months I have become interested in the idea of political correctness.
We have this American theater piece, Oleannal
LYONS: Oh yes, the David Mamet play.
HIMMELMANN: We had a fine production of the play here, and it went under
the skin, as we say, and there I think he uses the term "political correctness." I
have a son working in Bethesda, in the National Health Institute, and he told me
there is already a lexicon of political correctness, so I asked him to send it to me.
[Tape II, Side One]
HIMMELMANN: I see this development coming with us here too, the
ideologizing of even such a harmless discipline as archaeology is making great
advances. Already today you cannot use certain terms for certain phenomena
because they tell you this is not correct, what you say. You know, Germans take
things over late, but they do it then very thoroughly.
LYONS: There's a small book I could send you of European folk tales and
mythologies rewritten in politically correct terminology. It gives you a perfect
sense of how it works; it's very funny.
HIMMELMANN: That would be wonderful. I was told that half a year ago in
35
Germany's leading political magazine, Der Spiegel, there was an article on
political correctness by a linguist whom I know quite well, and he thought it a
positive phenomenon.
SMITH: I think much of it is, yes. English, as you know, is a language where
the genders work differently, and there's no need to speak of humanity using the
word "man."
HIMMELMANN: Of course, yes, we have the same phenomena.
SMITH: You had no troubles in archaeology in 1968?
HIMMELMANN: Well, this is another delicate question. At the time I was
already the professor for archaeology here. I became a professor in '62 in
Saarbriicken, and in '66 I came here, and in '68, '69, I had this experience. My
position was rather complicated. On the one hand I was not . . . solidarischl
SMITH: In solidarity.
HIMMELMANN: I was not in solidarity with the establishment because I had
the feeling that reforms were necessary. On the other hand, the students
developed such an intellectual opportunism that I could not solidarize myself with
them either. So I sat between all chairs, as we say. But I must confess that my
students and many others in the university showed understanding for my position,
and they even named me for dean in 1968. They thought that I might be a
person to realize some reforms and they showed a certain confidence in my
36
attitude, but the conservative people didn't, so I had no chance.
SMITH: You were probably lucky.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, yet this was the other phenomenon which prevented me
from identifying myself with the students, because they left you at the next
occasion. You couldn't rely on them. They praised you for promoting their
ideas, but at the next corner they left you and went along with still loftier
concepts in mind.
SMITH: These were archaeology students as well?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, archaeology students were rather active. At the time
they had the feeling their discipline was so old-fashioned, so they had to show
that they were not old-fashioned themselves; they had to be modern and
progressive.
SMITH: To bring sociology into it?
HIMMELMANN: Yes.
SMITH: Did you read much sociology yourself?
HIMMELMANN: Well, at the time I took the development positively and I read
quite a lot, beginning with Marx and more recent sociologists, and I wrote on
some themes which were relevant. I wrote on Greek slavery, representations of
slaves, and this work on realism, and on craftsmen and on wages and so on, this
is still an interest today which I got at that time.
37
SMITH: Did you read [Max] Weber as part of this?
HIMMELMANN: A little.
SMITH: [Jiirgen] Habermas?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, yes I read Erkenntnis und lnteresse without much profit.
I read [Herbert] Marcuse quite intensely, and only a few months ago when I
wrote some aphorisms on my experiences in the university at the time I reread
Der eindimensionale Mensch. At that time and now, I find Marcuse a very
interesting and sensitive author, but politically an illusionist.
SMITH: Self-delusion.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, I wonder how people like him could develop such a
political influence. Even as a Utopia, what he said was completely unrealistic.
But still, looking back, I see positive trends, and sometimes I think it's a pity that
young people have lost so much of this interest they had at that time.
SMITH: Did you read [Theodor] Adorno or [Max] Horkheimer at this time?
HIMMELMANN: A little. My sources were Habermas and Marcuse.
SMITH: What about Hannah Arendt?
HIMMELMANN: Not that I remember.
SMITH: I presume you followed what they call the Historikerstreit, did you take
a position on that? That's a little later of course.
HIMMELMANN: Superficially, yes. It has been polarized of course. I see no
38
reason to push it in these extremes. Things which happened are so singular and
to make them relative to events in history centuries back is no use.
LYONS: Going back to your student days, who were the students you were
studying with? Did they go on in archaeology and are they teaching now?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, most of them. Almost all of them became practical
archaeologists, professors, museum people, and they stayed in the field, while
nowadays many people have to find something in other areas.
LYONS: What are some of the names of some of your contemporaries?
HIMMELMANN: [Hans] Walter became professor of archaeology in Salzburg,
[Friedrich] Hiller was in Saarbriicken, and Georgios Dontas became ephoros of
the Acropolis.
LYONS: They were mostly men, the students?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, but there were not many of us. The seminar with
Buschor was about ten people, art historians included.
SMITH: Kitzinger said Buschor didn't allow art historians to take his seminars.
That would be a change over twenty years.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, in my time maybe he needed them to fill the class. In
the thirties, when Kitzinger studied with him, there was an inflation in
archaeology students, but in my time there were mostly art historians.
SMITH: So, you finish your dissertation. What were the options open to you at
39
that time?
HIMMELMANN: What I wanted was to become an assistant in a university, but
the first thing I did was to become a Hilfskraft—an assistant of an assistant— in
the Munich museum [Staatliche Antikensammlungen Munchen]. There I tried to
do something useful, which was not possible under the circumstances, so I sat in
a dark corner and read Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. When I had finished with it, I
made a big photographic inventory of the terra-cottas in the museum, which still
had its things in storerooms; they were not on display at the time. Provisionally
they were in the Prinz Karl-Palais, only much later they went back to the
Glyptothek and the building in front of it.
SMITH: Were you thinking of a museum career?
HIMMELMANN: No, never. Neither museum nor excavation. I was never
interested in excavation.
SMITH: Aside from Samos, did you do any excavation?
HIMMELMANN: No, no handiwork.
SMITH: Is that because there's more than enough stuff lying around?
HIMMELMANN: No, working practically in excavations or in any kind of
handicraft, I lose my concentration. My thoughts go astray and it's completely
impossible. Also in my house here or in the garden, I am completely unable to
function, to the grief of my wife.
40
LYONS: So did you travel in Greece just independently to look at sites?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, I got this wonderful fellowship from the German
institute, which still you can have nowadays for one year.
SMITH: To be in Athens?
HIMMELMANN: Wherever you want.
SMITH: So where did you go?
HIMMELMANN: I went only to Italy, Greece, and Egypt, but nowadays many
young doctorates go to Iran and North Africa and Spain.
SMITH: Was it primarily to visit museums and sites, or did you also spend time
in libraries?
HIMMELMANN: I spent much time in Athens, making short trips in Attica,
and when I came home in the evening I sat in the library and looked for the
inscriptions and older travelers in the region and so on, but no systematic study
during this year.
SMITH: Then the job opened up at Marburg, to be the assistant?
HIMMELMANN: Yes. At the time it was rather easy. There were few
students, a few young doctors, and it was not difficult to get a job like that.
SMITH: And Matz was still the professor, so he remembered you perhaps?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, yes. And then I made my Habilitationschrift in
Marburg. This was the only attempt of mine to write a book, which failed
41
completely. My Habilitationschrift consists of a few pages, which strangely
enough was accepted by the faculty.
SMITH: But it had to be published somewhere.
HIMMELMANN: It has been published, I can show you. If you take the
citations out it's not twenty pages, I think. It consists mostly of the thick cover.
The text begins only at page eleven. Eleven to thirty-one, and it has quite a lot
of pictures. I think it's fabulous of the faculty that they accepted it. SMITH:
For your own students and assistants, what do you demand nowadays?
HIMMELMANN: It's the other way around; they deliver volumes.
SMITH: Ah, volumes, okay. So, not much museum work until you arrive here,
and then you become responsible for the museum. What were you doing until
1962, when you go to Saarbriicken?
HIMMELMANN: Well, I came back to Marburg at the end of '55, and then I
took my Habilitation in '58 or so, after three years, and then I was Privatdozent
in Marburg until 1962.
SMITH: Oh, so you continued teaching.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, and I was called to Saarbriicken at the age of thirty-two
or thirty-three and spent four years there.
SMITH: What was that university like at that time? What was the archaeology
program there?
42
HIMMELMANN: I like the memory of Saarbriicken. It was quite a new university, newly founded after the war by the French. There were young people like me, few students, a new institute which you could build up yourself, and wonderful surroundings. You had Mainz and Paris and Nancy before your door, and you had much time. I think this was the most wonderful time I had as an academic teacher. I remember it very fondly. SMITH: You did not have a museum, I would assume. HIMMELMANN: No. Something which inspired me very much was that students from all over Germany came to Saarbriicken. There were almost no books at the beginning, but they still came and made seminars with me until late into the night and they stayed in the library. There was so much common enthusiasm that for all of us it was a very fine time. All of them became successful teachers. The Greek, [Giorgos] Despinis was there at the time, and [Peter] Kranze, now in Nuremberg, and [Marianne] Bergmann, who is now in Gottingen, and others.
SMITH: What were the problematics that you were dealing with at that time? What were the issues that concerned you?
HIMMELMANN: Early Greek art. I developed my ideas on geometric art and archaic art mostly as a consequence of my study with Buschor— mostly formal aspects, structural aspects— and I wrote a few treatises on these problems.
43
SMITH: This was the Homeric period? HIMMELMANN: Yes.
SMITH: I read your translated essay, "On Representational Art in Homeric Society," and I noticed that in there you had argued that art was not an independent factor at that time. It strikes me in talking that you are constantly trying to bring together the formal and the sociological— to keep them distinct, but also to bring them together in a meaningful way.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, in that essay I showed that in Homeric times the work of art was never just a piece of art but it always had some use. There was no isolated work of art, no I 'art pour Van— that needs no comment. Most of the things which are mentioned in the epic have some practical use. All figured representations are votive gifts or ornaments. For example, this big picture of human life on the shield of Achilles, and the scene on the brooch of Odysseus and so on. I connect this with social phenomena, with gift taking and giving, and the prestige and value of possession and things like that. SMITH: Of course the gift brings to my mind Marcel Mauss, and I was wondering to what degree you were influenced by French anthropology? HIMMELMANN: No. If I read it, I read it very superficially, and I couldn't swear if I read it at all. But at the time, these ideas were already omnipresent. I remember, for example, I read at the time [Moses] Finley, and he had this idea
44
very much already, so I need not read the forefathers.
SMITH: But it had already been absorbed into archaeological context?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, I soon got to the practical problem of my object, and I
haven't done much theoretical study in this connection.
SMITH: Though your work seems more theoretical than most archaeological
work I have been looking at.
HIMMELMANN: I would not say so. Maybe from time to time I reflect on
things theoretically, but I would not call myself a theoretical character. I always
try to discover concrete phenomena, phenomena which have a certain
symptomatic, symbolical value; phenomena which are open to everybody but
which are not realized by people. This is always my interest, and even in my
theoretical attempts I always try to get at such an aim.
SMITH: Of course I notice, particularly in your Winckelmann essay, that you
are concerned about the way that method predetermines conclusions.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, yes, that is my deep belief, that you can never get
something out of a method which you haven't put into it before.
SMITH: Is this in some way a response or a reaction to your teachers?
HIMMELMANN: I think this is a commonplace truth which you will find in any
field in life. This is a universal truth.
SMITH: Yes, yes. But of course with some generations, I mean the generation
45
of 1968, theory is all important. Everyone's looking for the theory to explain
phenomena.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, but do you think that anything has come out of these
theories which was not in them before?
SMITH: Personally, no.
HIMMELMANN: And that is my answer to the computer age too, that nothing
comes out of the computer which you haven't put into it before.
SMITH: True. At one point you posed heuristics against theory, and I wonder
if you could talk about that just a little bit more.
HIMMELMANN: That is in the same direction. If I find a phenomenon
symptomatic or symbolic of value, in my mind it replaces theory. You need no
theory if you have found a phenomenon which by its mere existence explains
relations. That's why I am fascinated so much by the Old Testament, because in
this kind of literature symbolic acts and symbolic things play such a great role.
And so I think it's in my archaeology as well, a big phenomenon may be quite
simple and still can explain much more than the most developed theory.
SMITH: As far as one can take that phenomenon. But then of course that gets
back to what you said before, that the method only applies for a given period.
HIMMELMANN: To develop a method for a certain complex you just seek a
reasonable approach to concrete problems, and if you are successful the method is
46
already there. My aim is to find the phenomenon and to explain it, and in doing so I hope I develop more understanding than if I try to do it in an abstract way. I am just trying to remember an example to show you. For example, I have a few pages on the meander as an ornament, and in this small article I hope I prove that the meander is not an abstract ornament but is a Ranke. What is a Ranke in English?
LYONS: A vine?
HIMMELMANN: For example, as a vine, and this explains all forms of meanders. The moment you have found this solution, you understand a meander has many variations. In many complexes you find it, and if you have understood that it is a Ranke, all these things are explained by themselves— you need no theory. My teacher Matz had an abstract theory on the meander, but that is completely superfluous the moment you understand it's a Ranke. [reading from dictionary] Ranke: "climber, creeper, creeping vine . . . tendril!" A meander is a tendril, and the moment you have understood it's a tendril you understand it. Wherever you meet a meander you will understand it insofar as you can understand it as a tendril.
SMITH: Do you understand then why they used it?
HIMMELMANN: Why they put it here and not there, and why they gave it this finish and not that finish. Because the finish of a meander is not symmetrical. It
47
never has a symmetrical finish, and this is so because it's a tendril. It's a geometrized tendril. This is the kind of phenomenon I am looking for.
And so it is in hermeneutics. At present I am working on animal sacrifice. It's an old idea in Greek religion that the victim, the animal to be sacrificed, has to go to the altar by its own free will. That's the Vorstellung, the idea. This reminded me of a strange phenomenon in the Parthenon frieze: in the Parthenon frieze there are cows breaking out. They are always interpreted as animals who are trying to break out because they are afraid of being killed. In connection with this idea which I mentioned, it is quite the contrary: these cows are animals that with a demoniac force are going straight forward to reach the altar, to be killed as soon as possible. That's a very strange idea, but I can prove it. Mostly it is said that this is a genre motif invented to variate the monotony of the procession, but I can prove it's much older, and it comes originally as an isolated motif with no context of monotony. From other contexts I can show that it's the other way around, like this one [showing pictures]. It's always the animals behind, not the first ones, who are shown this way. This is one of several arguments to show that these animals are rushing forward . . . sich selbst zu opfern.
SMITH: Of their own choice, yes. HIMMELMANN: Of their own choice. And this of course gives the Parthenon
48
frieze a quite different atmosphere. Imagine, there are animals shown sacrificing
themselves with a demoniac force, an inspired religious force. It's unbelievable.
We take the Parthenon frieze mostly as a harmless official pageantry, and this is
one of the several motifs in the Parthenon frieze which show the religious
atmosphere of the frieze and its religious intent.
SMITH: Of the gods descending into creatures.
HIMMELMANN: Yes. This is not citizens walking and pageantry, but this is
religiously inspired iconography. There are other things in the Parthenon frieze
which go into the same direction. For example, I notice that many of the young
people are shown with the corners of their mouths drawn low, as if they look
sad, or—
LYONS: Very serious.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, more than serious.
SMITH: These are the men on the horses?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, the young people on the horses. I found an explanation
for their expression with Aristophanes. In his Acharnians a man is organizing his
own procession on his farm, and his daughter acts as the bearer of the casket.
He calls her and says, "Now you bear the casket nicely and make a face as if you
had pepper in your mouth." There must have been a conventional kind of
religious expression, and this is shown also in the Parthenon frieze. Look for
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example at these, [showing pictures] These are some of the more clumsy sculptures on the Parthenon frieze, and that's why they exaggerate this. As I said, this is an observation which is symptomatic for the atmosphere of the Parthenon frieze. These cows offering themselves for sacrifice, and these people with their pious expression.
SMITH: When you make these observations, are they usually from studying the photographs, or do you return to the originals?
HIMMELMANN: From both if possible, starting from difficulties which you try to solve. For example, with the Parthenon frieze again, there is the problem of the eastern frieze. Where are the gods? Are they in the Agora? Most people think they sat down in the Agora to have the feast together with their Athenians. There are others who think they are in Olympus and they are looking from Olympus. If you try to solve this problem, you make an observation that shows quite clearly that they must be in Olympus, [more pictures] This is the furthermost group of the gods: that's Aphrodite, and then follow the heroes. If you look more closely, you see with her finger she is pointing down— not at the same height or higher, but she is looking down. That means the gods are in a very remote part of the world, on a high mountain, and they see the Athenian festival from above. I was very proud of this observation, but lately I found that an American art historian had made this observation already thirty years
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ago— Philipp Fehl. Do you know anything about him? I would be interested to
know what kind of man he is.
LYONS: He teaches in Illinois I believe. He's a Renaissance art historian, and I
think he's in charge of a big project of the Vatican. I've met him in Rome.
HIMMELMANN: He noticed it. Archaeologists have not noticed it for two
hundred years. The frieze has been studied for two hundred years now. Well,
these are the things I am interested in, and this replaces for me volumes of
theory.
SMITH: But it's still ideas.
HIMMELMANN: It's still ideas. Of course I'm not against ideas.
SMITH: I wanted to ask you a little bit about the community of scholars that
you feel closest to, the people that you exchange ideas with— even crazy ideas,
HIMMELMANN: Of course I have my contemporaries, my friends and
colleagues, and that is an international community. I am friendly with John
Boardman in Oxford, W. A. P. Childs in Princeton, Giorgos Despinis in Athens,
[Luigi] Beschi in Florence, [Tonio] Holscher in Heidelberg, and so on. Common
ideals? I don't know. People are so different. But we mostly understand each
other.
SMITH: Were these people you met in the fifties, or later?
HIMMELMANN: Even later.
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SMITH: At congresses or on research trips?
HIMMELMANN: I never went to congresses and symposiums until 1989. The first congress I attended I helped to organize myself, and that was the international congress in Berlin where I presented the introduction. My topic in the opening lecture was another phenomenon of symbolic value: I interpreted a coin showing Ptolomaios I. I analyzed the different ideas which are combined in this portrait. It is not just a realistic representation of King Ptolomaios, but it is imbued with ideological concepts that are symptomatic for the whole of Hellenistic art; that's why I chose it for the introduction. SMITH: What about your involvement with the Deutsches Archdologisches Institutl You've been very much involved with them, haven't you, in terms of administration?
HIMMELMANN: I'm the oldest member now, and I have been the vice president in the yearly sessions. [Tape II, Side Two]
SMITH: Do you travel in the Mediterranean on a regular basis? HIMMELMANN: I did, but in the last years I haven't so much, for problems of health on the one side, and on the other side I had little time because of over- stress in the university. We had hundreds of students in my last years. When I left I had about 180 archaeology students and hundreds of art historians. So in
52
'93, my last year, I traveled for a week or so. Now when I am free I travel
more, but mostly in countries which I haven't seen so much before. I went to the
United States last year.
SMITH: For the first time?
HIMMELMANN: No, I had been there for the first time in 1955, and then from
time to time I returned, but only on the east coast. This year is the first time I
am planning to go to Los Angeles.
LYONS: Would you come for the Lexicon [Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae
Classicae] meetings?
HIMMELMANN: No. I prefer to travel independently.
SMITH: Have you had much involvement with the Greek archaeological society?
HIMMELMANN: I'm an honorary member of the council. The Greek
colleagues were always fine. They treated me always very friendly. I have two
honorary degrees from Greek universities— Athens and Saloniki.
SMITH: One often hears that non-Greeks have a difficult time working in Greek
institutions, but you've not had that experience?
HIMMELMANN: With my kind of work, Gott sei Dank, I never had much need
to see their storerooms and so on. And in cases where I had, I was always
treated very kindly. No reason for complaint, I should say.
SMITH: You have been the director of the museum [Akademisches
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Kunstmuseum] , and I'd like to get a sense of how you would compare your museum with others of a comparable nature and size. How does it reflect your thoughts on how work ought to be presented and organized? HIMMELMANN: Well, this is a peculiar case; it's a scholarly collection. When it was founded its prime purpose was to collect problematical material for research, and the idea of display came only in the second place. It was founded as a cast collection at a time when casts still had contemporary importance and were regarded as the essence of European art itself. The first cast came here in 1817. You remember that in 1817 the Berlin museum offered a sketch by Raphael to get a copy of the cast of the Dioscuri from Monte Cavallo. And the Louvre offered an original Parthenon metope to get a set of casts of the other metopes in the British Museum. That was when the first casts were acquired here, and this was so until the middle of the nineteenth century when Otto Jahn took over here and developed an interest in originals. But greater acquisitions came only with [Georg] Loeschcke, at the end of the nineteenth century. From then on this area was developed, and it's now a very fine collection of mostly Greek originals.
Then we had the problem of display, and I did something to improve it. We have modern vitrines, but the surroundings are very sad. You see, the university has no great funds. In Germany there are almost no sponsors.
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Everything has to be done by the state. The state now is almost bankrupt and so
there is little development. There is a grotesque difference between these
luxurious vitrines, with the most modern lighting and so on, you have seen them,
and this cheap floor and ceilings; it's grotesque. But my successor may be more
successful in remedying this.
SMITH: Then you run the risk of becoming like the Americans, where the
director has to be a fund-raiser more than a scholar.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, yes. But I'm not sure if in Germany this will become a
rewarding affair. I raised some funds for the exhibition here in 1989 on the great
bronzes from the Quirinal. This exhibition was made possible by Olivetti. They
spent about a million and a half on it.
SMITH: Oh. And it toured?
HIMMELMANN: No, no. The objects were rather sensitive. The bronzes have
a very thin cast, and we were lucky that we got them at all.
SMITH: Which museums are your favorite museums?
HIMMELMANN: Well, this is a difficult question too. In my youth I would
have answered this spontaneously with the Athens National Museum, which in its
beginnings after the war was a wonderful place— also the way in which it
developed. The first time I came, in '52, there were four rooms; then it became
bigger and bigger, but it was still bright. Things were placed loosely but they
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made complexes and contexts, and it was an inspiring museum. Now things are
worn and the objects have a thick dark layer of oily soot. One of the highlights
of the modern display of ancient art is the new archaic room in the Metropolitan.
I spent hours and days when I was there last time. The Louvre's presentation of
archaic things is obsolete. The display at the Pergamon Museum in East Berlin
was very fine in the beginning, when things were returned from Russia. The
three halls which Carl Blumel arranged in the fifties are still very fine. It's a pity
they are going to change it, I understand. But those rooms are still very pleasant,
with living light the whole day. The objects are really living under the light,
which is in movement all the day over; it's fascinating. Maybe when you have
left I will remember other museums which are almost as good as these. The
tragedy is in the Italian museums. In Rome, in my youth, you could see much
more than nowadays.
SMITH: Is the problem money, or interest?
HIMMELMANN: Not in Italy. They spend huge sums on archaeology and they
have more archaeologists than ever before, but still it's a problem.
SMITH: What about the effect of the antiquities market on museums? You do
purchase stuff from time to time, I understand.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, yes. But more and more reluctantly, I must confess.
SMITH: Why is that?
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HIMMELMANN: I raised this problem in Utopische Vergangenheit . I polemized there against Mr. [Thomas] Hoving in the Metropolitan because he purchased in a very cynical way and his comments were unbearable. This was rather early, Utopische Vergangenheit; it was in the mid-seventies. Nowadays it's become commonplace, but I do not think that all these resolutions which are taken nowadays will have much effect. LYONS: Why not?
HIMMELMANN: Because of the private collectors. They don't care for it. From the time when these resolutions were taken, that is about ten years ago, big collections have been built up, especially in America. I think, for example, of [Barbara and Lawrence] Fleischman's collection, and others. As soon as the objects are in a private collection the museum feels free to acquire them because they have a harmless pedigree: you take it over, you inherit it from a private collection, so you have no scruples. So I cannot see that the resolutions have had much effect. They still are not useless. They make people feel more responsible, and so they have a certain moral effect, but the practical effect is not very great I think.
LYONS: It helps the archaeologist to know what to do and what ways to act with regard to unprovenanced material. HIMMELMANN: I gave a lecture on this problem only lately in the Dusseldorf
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academy, where I told of my experiences collecting for our museum. If you are
interested I will give you a copy. I told them that my main activity as a museum
director was to restore things to their original contexts by stylistic and
chronological analyses. This is the only thing you can do.
SMITH: Have you ever been involved with advising collectors or other museums
on acquisitions?
HIMMELMANN: In a few cases. I detected a lot of fakes; I have some
anecdotes and stories on that. My students and I discovered quite a few stolen
goods, which we restored to their original owners— from Turkey, but also from
Italy.
SMITH: How would you know that they were stolen?
HIMMELMANN: That was our work as detectives: we found them in old
publications or inventories. In my Marburg times, as an assistant, somebody
tried to sell me a wonderful shard of archaic Ionic ceramic, a wonderful piece. I
studied it, and under the dirt at last I noticed a penciled inventory number. It
was stolen from Buschor's excavation in Samos. During the war the Italians had
thrown all the finds on the floor to have the wood of the boxes for heating their
premises. So this man had excavated the piece from this heap of shards and tried
to sell it. I tell some stories of that kind in this lecture.
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SESSION TWO: 21 FEBRUARY, 1995
[Tape III, Side One]
HIMMELMANN: [referring to book noticed by Lyons] That is the book of the
Danish art historian [Julius Lange] who influenced me very much in my study. It
is a translation which Furtwangler had made in about 1900, is it?
LYONS: Yes, 1899.
HIMMELMANN: That's a fragment from a huge project which Lange had in
mind, the history of the representation of the human figure through all the ages.
LYONS: Has anything been written on Lange specifically, his contribution?
HIMMELMANN: Not to my knowledge. He wrote also on idealism. He was
an art historian, but at that time that meant to be an archaeologist as well.
I have prepared here some publications to illustrate what I said yesterday about my methods, or rather, the kind of knowledge at which I was always aiming. One example, as I mentioned, is the meander, which is a very intriguing ornament, different from most other ornaments in that you cannot put any symmetry axis into it. It's very fascinating and unique. Try to put any axis in it and you will never find one which makes it symmetric. You cannot make it an ornament that spreads over larger areas; otherwise it changes its nature, and it has a very peculiar dynamic. Before I wrote this article, it was mostly conceived as a sort of abstract ornament— abstract art in antiquity— and this I couldn't
59
believe. I made up my mind and I tried the hypothesis that it is a geometrized tendril. You see there are forms in between, where this hook, for example, makes a kind of volute, and other forms in between show that the meander is really a tendril, as you see quite obviously here, [showing pictures] That explains its peculiar kind of dynamics. It's not an abstract ornament, but it is the representation of a plant. And that brought me further into a big study in which I showed that all geometric ornaments in the eighth century B.C. are representations of plants, and this explains their peculiarities. You see here it's quite obvious that these were volutes, and this is a very fine example. SMITH: Do you have an explanation for why organic forms should be geometricized at that time?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, that is the habit of the whole decoration. You see, other things are geometricized as well. These triangles are leaves, and also the figures of animals and human beings are geometrized. So that's why we call this style and this epoch the geometric epoch, which as a term is irrational and absurd. To call the epoch "geometric" is only a habit, a convention. SMITH: Are you familiar with the thesis that the pottery designs are derived from textile work?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, that was a popular theory in the middle and end of the nineteenth century. This is another kind of tradition which I traced back into the
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nineteenth century and from the contrast of which I developed my own opinions. You see in the seventh century, all these geometric ornaments are replaced by organic ones. These are mostly the same ornaments but in organic form— not geometric as before. But the content is the same. SMITH: Does the tendril have religious content, do you think? HIMMELMANN: That's another question. It may have. The swastika is a fragment of a tendril. You find the swastika on votive plaques, and there it has a religious meaning, but in a Greek sense— not in the sense of a confession of faith but in representing the essence of nature. I think that this explains much of the geometric ornament and representation.
There is another theme which occupied me for a long time, for years. In the fifties, in Germany, we discussed the problem of the so-called sacrificing gods. There is this strange phenomenon that the gods perform sacrifice themselves, mostly by libations from a cup. For example, this is Apollo making a libation in his temple in Delphi and his mother and his sister are ministering, [showing pictures] There are hundreds of these representations, and the other gods are making libations too. This was hotly discussed in the fifties, and there were several theories about what this meant. The most accepted theory was that they were really making sacrifices and libations to other gods or in mythical contexts— you had to take these representations literally. Then I made an
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observation that was basic for an understanding of this phenomenon, which said that the gods were performing their own rites, their own sacrifices. The libation was a rite that was commonplace to all of them, to humans and to gods, but there were several rites that were restricted to special gods only. The gods perform their own rite, and the most obvious example is Artemis, [the following section inserted from Tape IV, Side One] She is performing a rite that is specific to her and which can be seen most obviously on Hellenistic votive reliefs. There you see her with a basket that contains the barley for the sacrifice, and torches with which she lights the fire on the altar. This rite is a marriage rite, and is performed by brides before marriage as a sacrifice directed to Artemis. It seems to be paradoxical that she herself is performing this rite, she who is never married, and at first sight one should think that it makes sense only with human beings. But here it's the goddess herself who is performing her own rite.
This is not only a Hellenistic phenomenon; we find it already on a cup in Copenhagen from classical times, where it is quite obvious because here you have Artemis again with the basket in her hand at an altar, bringing the same sacrifice, and the inscription makes it quite clear that it is Artemis herself who is doing this. There are other examples, maybe a bit less obvious but nevertheless quite clear, such as Aphrodite, who offers incense at an altar. It's the goddess herself, as is shown by the presence of Eros. Another obvious example is Demeter on a
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cup in Brussels, who is offering ears of barley on an altar. She is identified in the inscription. So she is offering her own product, and she is performing a rite and sacrifice which at the first sight makes sense only if performed by human beings out of gratefulness toward the goddess. Here you have the goddess herself bringing the rite that usually is offered to her.
This seems to be a paradox, and there are several explanations possible. My idea is that the gods are representing their own character, their own holiness, and they are, so to speak, ideas of themselves. I see a connection between this kind of representation of gods representing their own holiness and their own character, their own peculiarities, and the Ideas of Plato. In Phaedrus there is a wonderful vision of the gods who move in carriages in the sky, and they are followed by human beings who try to follow them. Plato says, as they move in the sky, every god is performing his own essence, representing that which is his character. So I think that as a category the Ideas of Plato are already prefigured in these kinds of representations, which belong mostly to the first half of the fifth century; that means they are more than a century older than Plato. SMITH: Do all the gods and goddesses participate?
HIMMELMANN: Most of them. This kind of representation belongs to almost all of them. I generalized this concept, saying that in archaic art a statue of a goddess or a god is without physiognomical individual traits, but in classical art
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the gods get an individual appearance, and the essence of this individuality lies in the fact that they are enjoying or enduring their own strength. The power they dispose of, they represent in their own figure. Obvious examples are those gods who have strength of intoxication and of love and things like that— strengths that affect the body. A beautiful example is Aphrodite lying in the lap of her mother in the Parthenon pediment. She is relaxed, she is enjoying her own sense of relaxing love. The most obvious case of course is Dionysus, who is intoxicated by his own gift, by his own wine. He tumbles and he shouts; you know these different representations of Dionysus.
Another topic that occupied me for some time was the representation of nude gods in the Middle Ages. Look for example at these pictures in a medieval encyclopedia of 1022. It contains a chapter on ancient gods that are represented mostly nude. These are the male gods, Apollo, for example, and here are the female gods, [showing pictures] Panofsky and his school always tried to find antique prototypes for these representations of gods, but this is not possible because here are goddesses shown nude that in antiquity never are shown this way— Minerva and Diana because of their virginity and Juno of course because of being a matron. These figures were invented by the medieval illuminator, who wanted to characterize them as heathen idols by showing them nude. I mentioned the other problem that even in the Renaissance antique goddesses are shown nude
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who by their character were never shown this way in antiquity. A good example is Minerva on the base of the Perseus of Cellini. I asked myself why, in an age when antique iconography was already well known, Minerva is shown nude, contrary to her representation in antiquity? My answer was that this is still a tradition from the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages differentiated two kinds of nudity: there was a criminal nudity, a bad nudity, that was the nudity of the heathens; and on the other side there was a nudity of positive allegories. The most obvious example is the representation of chastity; for example, here, in an English manuscript from the twelfth century, chastity with the unicorn is shown in this way. This iconography is still to be found in the Renaissance, where on a Gonzaga medallion you see chastity shown as a nude girl, [showing pictures] And so my explanation of the nudity of the Minerva of Cellini was that she is an allegory of chastity, and this is proved by the inscription, where she is named a casta soror— the chaste sister of Perseus.
The next topic was that of my last published essay, on realism in Greek art. I came back to an observation which I had made already in 1957 when I saw that Greek craftsmen, in their self-representations, in votive tablets for example, or in votive bronzes, represented themselves in a very accentuated way as banausoi, even showing themselves with thick, long phalloi or with a bald front and an ugly beard and things like that. The most extreme example is a votive
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plaque from the Acropolis, where two hetaerae are shown making love with their clients. From the site and from the gender of the monument itself, which is without doubt a votive plaque and as such has a parallel from a well-known vase painter, you cannot deny that this is a votive gift. For a votive gift it is a very strange phenomenon. I tried to explain these features, especially on the background of a famous poem by Hesiod, the Works and Days, where I find the same religious attitude to realism, but I cannot explain this here for lack of time.
In my treatise I tried to connect this phenomenon with the beginning of the physiognomical portrait, which is as you know a Greek achievement. The first known portraits of this kind are those of Pindar and Themistocles. Before these the Greek portrait had no personal traits. From archaic art we have numbers of portrait statues in the sense that a certain statue means a certain person, but they never have traits that are specific to a certain individual. The Pindar, from about 450 B.C., is the first example where we know the name, we have the portrait, and we can say that it is not an ideal portrait but that it's a votive gift by the man himself. Pindar had this portrait made by a contemporary artist, and the way he looks in his portrait is the way that he himself wanted to be seen; it's a self- interpretation. It is very astonishing then that he underlines so much these almost barbarian features, farmer-like features. Typologically he resembles centaurs, and this must have a meaning. Centaurs generally are uncivilized creatures— they
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are drunk and voluptuous and so on— but there was one centaur who was wise. [Chiron] was the educator of famous heroes— Achilles, Peleus, and others. Chiron was a Thessalian, but he was near to Pindar's home. In his poems Pindar mentions Chiron with great fondness. When Pindar represents himself here as a centaur-like type and with these realistic traits, I think it is a message of Selbsterkenntnis [self-knowledge], which is another maxim which he mentions in his poems.
In archaeology for centuries there has been a theory that the first physiognomical portraits showed a forced individualism, and they originated from people like Themistocles, who were arrogant individualists with very strong self- consciousness. I think it is just the contrary. The idea of realism in a portrait is that of Bescheidenheit , of moderateness— sophrosyne in Greek. I read this from the portrait itself and from related phenomena, as the statues of athletic victors who bow their heads to demonstrate sophrosyne. Or the votive tablets of craftsmen I mentioned before, who represent themselves with drastic realism, leaving not the slightest doubt as to their social condition— they too are practicing sophrosyne. That I think is the background of the physiognomical portrait. SMITH: Are you proposing a reinterpretation of the banausic image? HIMMELMANN: Yes, I think that the craftsmen themselves stressed a realistic representation of themselves, and that this had a religious meaning. It's very
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difficult, or almost impossible to understand this religious motive. But it must be this way. For example, there is this strange votive relief, [shows picture] Most votive reliefs show the human being standing in front of the god in an attitude of veneration. But this votive relief from Athens, about 460, shows the craftsman sitting at his working table in front of the goddess and giving her his gift. I ask myself what can be the meaning? He is not adoring her; he is sitting there busy with his everyday occupation as a goldsmith and he wanted to be shown this way. It's an authentic self- representation. There must have been a strong religious motive for the man to appear in his actual banausic existence, his social condition being recognizable to the goddess from whom he wants support. This has to do with the conception of natural religion and should not be compared to Christian humbleness, which is something quite different. LYONS: Is it that the act of creation is itself an act of veneration? HIMMELMANN: That sounds a bit sophisticated and modern. I can't really explain it, but I think it's important to register it. It hadn't been seen as a problem before '57, and I think the main task is now to see it as such. Even if you can't solve the problem, you have already a criterion to explain the beginnings of the physiognomical portrait as a parallel to the other phenomenon.
Yesterday I mentioned that I always trace back my problems into the Egyptian epoch. The Egyptian portrait possesses very strange phenomena, which
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show that the portrait in the ancient culture meant quite different things from
what it means now. For example, these statues of a man of the eighteenth
dynasty show him as a young man and as an old man. But these were not made
in different stages of his life; these two statues are absolutely contemporary.
That can only mean that he is shown in two different roles. And so you have to
research further what the meaning of this can be.
SMITH: Is there a relationship between the move toward realism and the idea of
representing the essence of the gods?
HIMMELMANN: No, I can't see that connection. They are probably on
different planes. If you wish, you can say that enduring suffering or enjoying his
own qualities is a kind of realism, but realism in the sense of physiognomical
representation, but not as representing reality.
SMITH: In one of your essays you talk about Greek religion as a form of
Wesensschau.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, that's what I meant with the Platonic Ideas. The
representation of the gods aims at their essence; they are representing their own
faculties, their own powers, [end of insert from Tape IV, Side One]
SMITH: In terms of your reading in religion, who are the authors that you feel
have been most helpful to you in terms of understanding Greek religion, or the
phenomenon of religion?
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HIMMELMANN: Certain modern authors, but mostly I still turn to people of the nineteenth century. As to the idea of Bescheidenheit , for example, I owe much to an author whom nobody knows nowadays, called [Karl Friedrich von] Nagelsbach. Nagelsbach 's Homerische Theologie was written in the middle of the nineteenth century.
A contemporary author, of my age, is Walter Burkert in Zurich. I was there a fortnight ago and had my lecture on these Parthenon cows and on animal sacrifice and Burkert is a specialist on these matters. It was very interesting to discuss them with him. LYONS: What was his reaction?
HIMMELMANN: He accepted it wholesale. I had so many proofs for this that it couldn't be otherwise. The ideal of a perfect sacrifice is that the animal comes willingly, as I told you yesterday. If it is reluctant, if it breaks out, the sacrifice is spoiled. It's impossible that on the Parthenon and in other contexts there are represented spoiled sacrifices, that would be absurd. So it can't be otherwise. LYONS: We were talking about it more over dinner. We wondered if there are also representations of human sacrifice in which there might be some willingness. HIMMELMANN: They are very seldom, and they have only mythological character; there is no indication of that sort. There are no realistic representations of human sacrifice. And it is open to question if there have been
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cases of human sacrifice in historical times; the examples in the literary tradition
are far from being secure.
SMITH: Yes, because the literary examples ... I mean Iphigenia is not
voluntary—
HIMMELMANN: Well, she might be voluntary.
SMITH: She might be?
HIMMELMANN: Yes. I don't remember exactly now. There are several
contexts where the story is told and there she seems to be willing to go. Oh,
now I have a wonderful example that is very touching. That is Cassandra in
Aeschylus' Agamemnon. She stands in front of the palace where she is expecting
to be murdered, and then she goes into the palace by her own free will, while the
chorus compares her to a theelatos bous— that means a cow that goes to the altar,
driven by divine impetus, that is, willingly.
[Tape III, Side Two]
SMITH: Is religion a central category to the work you are doing, would you
say?
HIMMELMANN: In the background it may be, yes.
SMITH: Is it what infuses the social context?
HIMMELMANN: It does so very much. In Altertumswissenschaften there have
always been tendencies since the middle of the nineteenth century to regard the
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Greek classical epoch as an age of enlightenment, and I think that this is basically wrong. If you read enlightened authors, like Xenophon or Plato or many others— philosophers and nonphilosophers— you find that in their practical everyday behavior they were religious people. They made sacrifices and offerings and prayed. Socrates, who is the central figure of enlightenment, was a deeply religious man who offered at every occasion.
There is this famous story, you remember that scene in Plato's Phaedon. Socrates swallowed the poison and then he lay on the bed, and after a while his legs became cold, and he couldn't move them. He had covered himself with a blanket, and in his last few seconds he uncovered and said to his friend [Crito], "Remember, we have to offer Asclepius a cock." This has been interpreted as if he had made a vow a long time before, which he now remembered and he wanted to realize. I think it is quite different. This offering is meant for the occasion. He thinks that the separation of soul and body, for which he had prayed earlier, is a kind of clinical operation which is under the protection of Asclepius, and since he has now the feeling that this operation was successful, that his soul is already almost separated from the body, he is grateful and he wants to show his thankfulness to the gods. That is why he wants the offering to be made. If this man, who is the personification of the Greek enlightenment, is so deeply imbued with religious motives, I think that this cannot be discarded as a testimony.
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SMITH: Are those religious motives similar to what contemporary religion is, or what current Christianity involves? Can it be understood in the same terms, or are we talking about a different phenomenon, a different system of motives and emotions?
HIMMELMANN: As for content, it is completely different, I would say. The need for these things will always be felt, I think, but you can't compare them directly. Enlightenment in our age means something quite different. Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was aimed at the roots of religion, but in antiquity, with very few exceptions, it did not touch the roots of contemporary religion. Alexander the Great, for example, who was a pupil of the enlightened Aristotle, made bloody offerings every day. There was a kind of diary of the court of Alexander, and over periods we can follow his life day by day. Almost every day he performed an animal sacrifice that must have taken him hours. He stood there personally and killed the cows and oxen and so on. His religious motivation must have been very, very strong.
SMITH: I'm going to ask you a question that's going to require you to be a little bit immodest, which is, given that you had so many students, what do you think that you offered that was unique during the course of your career that would attract so many people? HIMMELMANN: To have so many students is not at all unique nowadays; that
73
is the case in most German universities. Some of my colleagues have the same
numbers or even more.
SMITH: Right, but you did say that you promoted more than most.
HIMMELMANN: I promoted more. Maybe it was easier with me, I don't
know. I did no research into their motives.
SMITH: But do you have sense that how you approached the subject was
different from your colleagues?
HIMMELMANN: Well, there are some colleagues of my generation that had
similar approaches, and we could understand each other quite well. With
younger people and with other people there are sometimes problems of
understanding. For example, one of my former students, a very original talent,
was inspired by my essay to write an article on the Pindar portrait. We
corresponded, he gave me his draft, and I found that he had misunderstood me.
So there are problems, which I wouldn't have with my contemporaries.
SMITH: He misunderstood you in what way?
HIMMELMANN: This is a thing which happens often. I had published the
main idea in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He read the small article and
he had this idea of what he could make of it. When I published an ampler
version later on, his idea had become fixed, so although he read my second
contribution, he didn't realize its message; he had only his idea in his mind. This
74
happens very often. Later on when we corresponded he saw that he hadn't really understood what I meant. It was a harmless affair.
SMITH: One of the things which seems to me somewhat unusual, perhaps less so in Germany, is your concern with connecting modern practices with the ancient roots and meanings that archaeology reveals. I'm thinking of your article on the eagle as the symbol of the state— your article on the butchers. It's actually rather pervasive and of course it's essential to the whole argument of Utopische Vergangenheit . HIMMELMANN: Yes, yes.
SMITH: What has led you to be concerned about this relationship between the classical past and the present?
HIMMELMANN: I think that it's very important for archaeology to explain its raison d'etre. If you ask, why do you study archaeology? I always say that the idea of archaeology is to help us to get at a distance from our own world. From this distance we can judge and consider our own civilization much better and see that everything is conditioned by history. We can gain knowledge about the roots of today. I think that is a very important aspect of archaeology as a study— to give it meaning and a reason to exist and to be supported. This gives a kind of Kulturkritik, a Zivilisationskritik, which is much more founded than a Kulturkritik that comes from a mere ideological basis.
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For example, if you study the Roman eagle in its different contexts, you realize the difference between symbolical meaning of the eagle in antiquity and nowadays. Its use as a symbol shows that the idea of the state in antiquity was quite different and much more human than our idea of the state. Our state is something very abstract, an anonymous power overriding human needs. In antiquity this concept of state did not exist. Even might in the state was still something which was bound to certain persons and was not an abstract thing in itself. This makes quite a different kind of Kulturkritik than a Kulturkritik that builds up only on modern sociological theories. That's my idea. SMITH: I think you were suggesting last night that when you write newspaper articles you get a lot of phone calls and you get plunged into controversies. HIMMELMANN: That is not the usual reaction. Mostly the reactions are positive. Controversy arose only in the last case, which made some stir in Germany and elsewhere. SMITH: And which was that case?
HIMMELMANN: The Sperlonga case, the two last articles. That is my colleague, Andreae, who built up in the last thirty years a big theory on the meaning and the background of the sculpture groups in the grotto at Sperlonga. That's a methodological problem, and I tried to show that his assumptions have no historical base.
76
SMITH: So that generated controversy. HIMMELMANN: Yes, it was a controversy. LYONS: Did you correspond or discuss it with him directly? HIMMELMANN: Yes. We are good colleagues, and it's not a personal affair. SMITH: In terms of your students, you've mentioned that after '68 they become more sociologically minded. Are the subjects of their interests changing? Are they becoming more interested in daily life, for example, as opposed to monuments? Is there a parallel to what in the Anglo-American countries is called "new archaeology"?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, the interest is more in topics that have a sociological background and meaning. For example, votive gifts are now mostly interpreted as testimony of civilian prestige— not so much for religious motives but as a phenomenon of social ambitions. It is a part of the truth, but only a part. SMITH: Did the rise of feminism after the sixties, plus, I would assume, the increase in the number of women students affect the kinds of subjects that your students are interested in and the kinds of things that you needed to be thinking about as a teacher?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, it has influence and mostly, I should say, it's positive. Without running after fashions, I am always open to inspiration from new problems and new phenomena. I gave a course of lectures on the representation
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of women in antiquity, and that was one of my best lectures in recent years. I
had many female students, and most of them had fine careers. Three professors
from my school are women. There was no reason for any difficulties.
SMITH: Has feminist scholarship changed the way you think about classical
Greece now?
HIMMELMANN: There are extremes of feminist scholarship which I am rather
critical of, like Eva Keiils in America. This is not I think a tolerable kind of
scholarship since it does not respect the facts. I don't like it. But if it is
founded, I think it's important and I myself am reflecting upon it. In the lecture
I mentioned, I tried to give my answers and my ideas on it. This has a religious
dimension too of course, and in many feminist articles nowadays this religious
dimension is not duly taken into account. That's my criticism.
SMITH: Did you have many students who were being influenced by Marxist
ideas in the sixties and seventies?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, very much so, but it didn't promote their productivity.
Mostly after some years they dropped it again— no lasting influence.
SMITH: What have been the effects of the reunification on the archaeological
field in Germany? Have you been involved in the transformation of the
archaeological institutes in the east?
HIMMELMANN: Before the unification I always tried to have contact with the
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colleagues beyond the border, and I had rather good contacts. I was even a guest
professor twice in Jena at the university. After the unification we tried to help to
rebuild the institute, but it had no interior or ideological consequences
whatsoever. Most of the colleagues were very much hampered in their work by
the conditions, so they couldn't publish the way we could. But that does not
reflect on their qualifications.
SMITH: Through the German Archaeological Institute have you been involved in
what's going to happen with the Pergamon Museum?
HIMMELMANN: No. The museum is part of an independent foundation. The
German Archaeological Institute has no influence on its development.
SMITH: I'd like to get a sense of the Bonn intellectual community, or the people
that you feel closest to here.
HIMMELMANN: There has always been a certain exchange of knowledge and
opinions, especially with people representing Greek and Latin philology with the
Kunstgeschichte, ancient history, and philosophy. I am a member of a small club
of scholars in Bonn. The club was founded in the middle of the nineteenth
century. We discuss things seven times a year; it's a sort of private academy. It
includes scientists and historians, jurists, philologists, and myself. There are real
academies of which I am a member. Besides the British Academy, where my
membership is kind of platonic, there is the Dusseldorf academy and the Mainz
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academy where I gave the lectures that are published. There is some exchange after the lectures. Well, there is a certain Umwelt. SMITH: What are you working on now?
HIMMELMANN: My present interest is Sperlonga, which I hope to finish soon. I'll give a lecture in the Diisseldorf academy in June, and that will be printed, and then I hope the controversy for me will be over. It lasted much too long. I have other interests, but this had to be brought to an end. The rest of my life I'll spend on the archaeological aspects of Greek religion. My first contribution is on animal sacrifice, which I completed and which I am now editing. I'll go on with representations of gods, and my next field will be heroes and heroism and the religious meaning of heroes and their archaeological aspects. I am too old and I haven't got enough time to make a philological study of the history of religion, so I must concentrate on pictorial sources. This will occupy me in the next years. SMITH: Are you planning to write a book, or a series of short essays? HIMMELMANN: Essays are my usual kind of expression; I never realized a veritable book.
SMITH: Does your symptomatic approach tend to limit the length of your expositions? Do you think there's a correlation? HIMMELMANN: I don't quite understand. SMITH: Well, yesterday you talked about looking at an object as a symptom
80
rather than approaching things with a theory. If you look at things as symptoms
then you write what you need to explain the symptom. Could that be a factor in
why your work tends to be short?
HIMMELMANN: Yes, yes, this is surely a reason for the form of my
publications.
SMITH: Will you continue to be involved with the museum?
HIMMELMANN: No. I've dropped most of my honorary functions and I'm no
more involved. Sometimes voluntarily I take over things that are offered to me. I
wrote an essay for the Naples exhibition— things like that.
[Tape IV, Side One]
[Note: First section of Tape IV, Side One appears in this transcript under Tape
III, Side One, pp. 62-69]
SMITH: We talked a little bit about the seminars. You mentioned, and I
thought it was interesting, that you preferred doing the beginner's seminar to the
advanced seminar.
HIMMELMANN: Yes, not because it was easier; that would be quite wrong. I
preferred it because you had more opportunities to talk about primary things. For
me it was much more stimulating to give a beginner's seminar, because while
talking on primary matters I got a new feeling for the problems, while in the
advanced seminar you hear people who are rehearsing things they have read.
81
They have lost the feeling for problems, for principal things. So the upper seminar is sometimes frustrating— they read and they repeat. You always recognize the sources, and that's very disillusioning.
SMITH: You had also mentioned that the beginner's seminar was organized as a Sehiibung. Could you give an example of how you would teach them to see? HIMMELMANN: Yes, mostly I would choose the topics for a seminar with this idea in mind. For example, I offered a seminar on white-ground lekythoi. I take a painter like the Achilles Painter, and then we see how he develops his representation of an eye or the clothing of women, the folds and so on. You show development within the oeuvre of a certain painter, but you show also the development from an early painter to a later one. I gave seminars on Attic grave reliefs and other genres under the same aspect, but also other seminars that were not so much concentrated on stylistic development but on iconographical and historical topics. But the Unterseminar was mostly a Sehiibung. SMITH: How would you distinguish your approach to Sehiibung from Buschor's?
HIMMELMANN: In the Unterseminar it was not principally different. Of course I didn't go so far as he did. We mentioned yesterday that for him stylistic development was not only a phenomenon on the surface, and not only a phenomenon that can be explained psychologically. If you have the development
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of the Achilles Painter you can explain this in a personal, psychological way; it's more perfection and more routine and he wants to make more of an impression and he stresses his means of expression. You can explain this development psychologically. That Buschor never tried to do. For him, stylistic development was an expression of some mythological power, the developing of Hegel's Weltgeist or something; something that was given and the artist is only performing what is already in the development itself. So we had a different background. But, practically, what I did in the Untet seminar was quite similar to Buschor' s approach.
SMITH: How much contact did you maintain with Buschor after you left Munich?
HIMMELMANN: Not much. When I became independent, the first article I published was correcting an error of his. Maybe it's not very pious by a student in a first article to contradict his teacher, but I don't think that he was offended by this. I spoke to him later on and I couldn't detect that he was irritated. But then in 1960 I published Der Entwicklungsbegriff der modernen Archaologie, and that he disapproved of very strongly. Here I tried to put my finger on the theoretical foundations of stylistic developments. And since for Buschor stylistic development was something anonymous, something coming out of the Weltgeist, he had to disapprove of any attempt to explain it in the history of our discipline.
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From that time on we had no more intellectual contact.
Our personal contact had been very weak even before. We were completely different characters. May I say something to this difference too: we were completely different characters from our temperaments, but also from our Weltanschauungen . Buschor lived completely in this realm of anthroposophy . His world was the world of nature and of mythical powers, and he had a certain religious feeling for nature. I came from a small industrialist village in Westphalia. I had grown up with modern industry and I knew modern workers. For me, most of the values Buschor represented were not real. I could not accept that he had such an aversion against the modern world, modern civilization. He just did not realize what industry and economics and social problems and things like that meant, while I was very much imbued by all these problems. For him it was just a perversion of the original meaning of mankind. So we had no way of compromise.
SMITH: What do you think that younger archaeologists today have to learn from the work of somebody like Buschor?
HIMMELMANN: Yesterday I tried to explain that nevertheless and in spite of this mythical and anthroposophic attitude, Buschor' s scholarship was sound and concrete and plastic and had great practical use, but because of his mythical kind of expression it's almost impossible to transfer that to modern students. They
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just can't read him and can't make use of his writings. That's a pity because they could learn quite a lot from it, but there is no means of understanding, that is my experience.
SMITH: But people will read Heidegger.
HIMMELMANN: Well, maybe they read him, but how many will understand it? I would have my reservations about that.
SMITH: There was one other question we wanted to ask you, and it is of a personal nature. We've been asking everyone about their family life. Could you just tell us about your wife [Anna-Elisabeth] and your children. HIMMELMANN: First we lived in Marburg, later in Saarbriicken. Our children went to primary school there, or to kindergarten, and then we came here. Most of their life they spent in Bonn. Our oldest son is handicapped, but he was still able to have a profession. He has become a plumber and he is very good in his profession. Firms were very eager to employ him and he had no problems finding work. He works very well, and we are relieved that he has found his own position. The other three boys went very different ways. I always tried to prevent them from doing the same thing their father did, and I was successful in two cases. One of our sons has become a medical doctor. He studied here and in Munich and he became an assistant in Zurich. He is now in a laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, working on gene
85
manipulation and things like that— molecular medicine. Our third son became a stage director and has been rather successful. He has worked in the theaters in Hanover, Saarbriicken, Nuremberg, and Lucerne, which is a very progressive theater— small but very progressive. He needs four jobs every year to live very comfortably. That's interesting, isn't it? But the problem is that our communities and the Lander are nearing bankruptcy, and the big towns have no more money to spend for operas. So as jobs become scarce he has to live on two or three a year, but that is still tolerable. Our second son is the one who stayed nearest to me. He has a Ph.D. in linguistics. He studied in Munich, and then he spent time in Los Angeles and in Manila, and he made expeditions to Celebes, in Indonesia.
SMITH: How did you meet your wife, and what was her background? HIMMELMANN: Her father was a veterinarian, like my grandfather. She studied modern languages, especially Spanish, and was a secretary in different places. Once she worked as an assistant to the cellist Pablo Casals. She was always much interested in art and music. We met in Sicily where she acted as a tour guide for Swiss people who wanted to see ancient Sicily. That is long ago. SMITH: Have you found tensions in combining your career with family life, in terms of the travel that you need to do your research? HIMMELMANN: I think this would be normal, but with us it was not a thing
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that brought problems; there was mutual understanding. We had no problems as you meet often nowadays, with the children in school and with drugs and things like that. Never. It depends on the surroundings I think.
As to the questions you put earlier about my intellectual development, if I may return to this point, I remember a detail that might complete the picture. Among the teachers I had in science there was one who attracted me very much. He was an anatomist called Alfred Benninghof. He taught anatomy on a functional basis. That means he didn't describe an organ, but he explained it from the function it had. Years later, when I had to make an introductory speech at the academy of Diisseldorf, I mentioned him as one who influenced me most, even in my archaeological work, because it was really very fascinating to see how an organ developed and got its form from the function it had. That was very revealing for me, and I still profit from the idea— it explains why phenomena have a symptomatic or even symbolic value.
SMITH: That's actually quite interesting, the way these ideas outside of the field can come in and turn the soil.
HIMMELMANN: I had a very curious experience. I told you I studied medicine only for one semester, and at the end of the semester, to occupy myself with something practical, I went to the pathology clinic in Dortmund that was mostly occupied with dissecting miners and their lungs. If pathologists could
87
detect they had black lung, the relatives got a higher pension. One day, the doctors there made a preparation for the microscope. They had these machines that could cut a very thin slice from an organ. They put it under the microscope, showed it to me and asked me, "What kind of organ is this?" I had never seen that organ, but being taught by Benninghof, I tried to find out what kind of function it might have had and what kind of cells were there, and I said it was the prostate, and that was right. It was Benninghof s instruction that made me able to analyze the function of an organ which I had never seen.
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INDEX
Andreae, Bernard, 12, 76-77 Aristophanes, 49-50
Benninghof, Alfred, 87-88
Bergmann, Marianne, 43
Bernal, Martin, 35
Beschi, Luigi, 51
Blumel, Carl, 56
Boardman, John, 51
Bultmann, Rudolf, 23
Burkert, Walter, 70
Buschor, Ernst, 10, 13-17, 19-20,
23-28, 32, 33, 34, 39, 43, 58,
82-84
Hampe, Roland, 33
Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 83
Heidegger, Martin, 22, 23, 40, 85
Hiller, Friedrich, 39
Himmelmann, Anna (mother), 1-2, 3,
6 Himmelmann, Anna-Elisabeth (wife),
85,86 Himmelmann, Carl (father), 1-2, 4-5 Himmelmann, Wilhelm (brother), 2,
3-4 Hirt, Alois, 30 Holscher, Tonio, 51 Hoving, Thomas, 57
Cellini, Benvenuto, 65 Childs, WAP, 51 Conze, Alexander, 27 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 22
Jahn, Otto, 31, 54 Jaspers, Karl, 22 Johansen, Friis, 27 Joyce, James, 22
Despinis, Giorgos, 43, 51 Diepolder, Hans, 19 Dontas, Georgios, 39
Ebbinghaus, Julius, 22 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 29-30
Fehl, Philipp, 5 1
Finley, Moses, 44-45
Fleischman, Barbara and Lawrence, 57
Furtwangler, Adolf, 14, 30, 59
George, Stefan, 20-21, 32-34 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 5, 24 Goldschmidt, Adolph, 18
Habermas, Jiirgen, 38
Kafka, Franz, 22
Kahler, Heinz, 19
Keiils, Eva, 78
Kitzinger, Ernst, 14, 27-28, 39
Kranze, Peter, 43
Lange, Julius, 30-31, 59 Langlotz, Ernst, 21, 32 Lauffer, Siegfried, 20 Loeschcke, Georg, 54 Louvre, 56
Mamet, David, 35
Marcuse, Herbert, 38
Matz, Friedrich, 8, 25, 28, 41, 47
Meinecke, Friedrich, 22
Meuli, Karl, 1 1
89
Muhl, Peter von der, 1 1
Nagelsbach, Karl Friedrich von, 70 Nazism, 4, 6, 10, 14,31-33, 34 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 14, 29-30, 34
Panofsky, Erwin, 28, 64 Pergamon Museum, 56, 79 Plato, 63, 69, 72
Riegl, Alois, 9 Robert, Carl, 23-24
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 23 Schefold, Karl, 10, 21, 28 Schweitzer, Bernhard, 33-34 Sedlmayr, Hans, 18 Socrates, 72
Spengler, Oswald, 14-15 Stauffenberg, Alexander Schenk von, 20
Toynbee, Arnold, 22
Wagner, Richard, 6
Walter, Hans, 39
Weinberg, Guido Kaschnitz von, 9
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 10, 45
Wolfflin, Heinrich, 16, 18
World War II, 2-3, 5, 6, 27, 33, 43, 58
90