ABSTRACT
“now, that the new book has been published, which is in many respects a synthesis of the life’s work of this man, I am doing my best to interest those, for whom it was written, in the problem raised in it.” 1 The synthesis is the book “Heidnisch-antike Weissagungen in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten” which at long last was published in May 1921 in the volumes of the Academy of Science of Heidelberg University. 2 The writer, Fritz Saxl, was the Director of the Warburg library in Hamburg in Warburg’s absence. Aby Warburg, who would spend the years from 1920 to 1924 in a sanatorium in Jena and then in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, had found in Saxl a devoted friend, collaborator and assistant. The addressee was the young philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who only some six months previously had visited the Warburg library for the first time 3 and had become a friend of Saxl. The letter was one of many written by Saxl with the aim of arousing the interest of Warburg’s friends and colleagues in this new publication: he hoped thereby to reach a wider readership for the book by persuading them to review it, whether in academic journals or daily papers. More than this, the response thus created would be a “comfort” to Warburg, “who is only half alive and already half dead, … to see that at least his work lives on.” 4
