2 | Gertrud Bing, August 1933, WIA, The Warburg Institute.

Bing received the idea for the topic of her thesis as early as during her Munich years, namely from Christian Janetzky, a German philologist conducting, as private lecturer, a seminar on Literature and Philosophy in the eighteenth Century at the LMU during the Winter term 1917-1918. Janentzky became a full professor of modern German literary history in Dresden in 1922. Like Petsch, he signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State in 1933. One year later, he was dismissed because of his advocacy for professors Paul Luchtenberg and Rainer Fetscher, who were persecuted by the National Socialists. However, his retirement was revoked shortly afterwards because German was being considered too important a subject after all. Viewed in this context, Bing’s decision for a first reviewer of her dissertation from the German Studies department makes sense. However, instead of following Petsch, as her topic would have suggested, Bing explicitly criticises Petsch’s teacher, Erich Schmidt —and, implicitly, also the student— when she begins her thesis in medias res, stating that:

Die Geburtsstunde der modernen Philosophie ist der Augenblick (gleichviel wo er historisch liegt und ob er überhaupt eindeutig aufzuweisen ist), und wo man anfängt, die Sinneseindrücke unter die Sonde des Denkens zu nehmen, und wo man erkennt, dass sie nicht standhalten, dass die Welt, die sich dem Erleben durchaus als real und einheitlich darstellt, vor dem prüfenden Verstande in eine Vielheit unzuverlässiger Daten zerflattert. Von da an ruht der Gedanke nicht mehr, dass die sinnliche Wahrnehmung wandelbar in Raum und Zeit und als Erkenntnis trügerisch ist.

The birth of modern philosophy is the moment (regardless of where it may lie in historical terms and whether it can be pinpointed at all) when sensual perceptions are being put under the scrutiny of thought, and when it becomes evident that they do not stand their ground, that the world which to experience presents itself as thoroughly real and unified disintegrates before scrutinising mind into a multiplicity of unreliable data. From then on, the thought would no longer come to rest that sensual perception is subject to change in space and time, being epistemologically deceptive (Bing Diss., 1. Author’s translation).

Pointing out Leibniz’s influence on Lessing’s poetics is neither original nor new. Scholarship on Lessing around 1900 had long before Bing taken notice of it, dealing with it more extensively as well. Bing, however, contradicts the relevant biographies on Lessing, elaborating instead on Gustav Kettner’s study (Kettner 1904). Kettner had already researched Lessing’s “relationship with Leibnizian psychology” (Kettner 1904, 220 ff.) by drawing on Lessing’s own sources. Not only did Lessing study Leibniz’s Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain thoroughly, but he also translated several passages from them. As Kettner recalls:

Here Leibniz was first to disclose the unconscious life of the soul to psychology. He showed how our whole process of thinking and willing is rooted in small and obscure perceptions (perceptions petites et insensibles). Gradually developing from them were the confused perceptions of sensation and, finally, clear cognition (Kettner 1904, 221). 

Kettner recognised this Leibnizian gradual process distinctly in Emilia Galotti, and Bing would follow his interpretation.

What is innovative about Bing’s work is that, by conjoining the Leibnizian principle of continuity—it is expressed, amongst others, by means of the infinitesimal calculus as well as by the ‘necessary’ in the Theodicy—with the tragical concept in Emilia Galotti and Nathan, Bing shows that the cultural science of Warburg and Cassirer does not “miss the core issue [...] of grasping the world and its inner and outer [...] formation” (Petsch 1928, 616) —as Petsch would later put it with respect to literary studies—but, on the contrary, that it leads towards an understanding of culture. The direction Petsch came to pursue with his conception of literary studies in the following years was increasingly völkisch. Accordingly, in Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft he wrote:

But our approach to research may be called German in yet another sense. What we practice here steers clear [...] of any former, legislative or descriptive, statically recording or psychologically-explanatory ‘poetics’, without dismissing their methods as meaningless. [...] By contrast, we, by our means, seek to penetrate to the essence of poetry in such a manner as clearly only the German man can conceive and as our German poets have, at least since Lessing, conceived of it time and again (Petsch 1940, 9).

Contrary to an opinion gaining favour at the time, neither phenomenology nor formalism can provide a panacea for analysing the ‘essence’ of culture. Bing clearly took up a position in a debate which was ever intensifying in philosophy as well as in art and literary studies. Two years after Bing’s disputation, German philologist Oskar Walzel, publishing Content and Form in the Poet’s Work of Art (Inhalt und Form im Kunstwerk des Dichters), would peremptorily usher in a new epoch in literary studies. Walzel paved the way for a history of poetry without poets, which would eventually lead to a disembodied formalism attaching paramount importance to surface structures.This is entirely in line with the Russian formalist Osip Brik, who once declared that Evgenij Onegin could have been written without Puškin. In opposition to Cassirer, for Walzel — and Petsch, accordingly — what mattered was not the development of a poetic work of art but rather the “being of the poetic work, which is to be illuminated” (Walzel 1923).

It becomes evident that Cassirer’s strong recommendation of Bing for the Warburg Library was primarily due to scholarly reasons. By the time Bing submitted her thesis, Lessing scholarship had already experienced a golden age, as it were. Following the July Revolution of 1830, two important attempts were made to establish a scientific foundation for research on Lessing: the first scholarly edition of Lessing’s works and the first biography of Lessing based on precise documentary research. Karl Lachmann’s Neue rechtmäßige Ausgabe of Lessing’s writings, which Bing used, appeared in thirteen volumes from 1838 to 1840 (Lachmann’s edition of Lessing’s works has remained a model to this day. Franz Muncker expanded it to twenty-one volumes between 1886 and 1908. Two supplementary volumes and an index volume completed the edition). One could see in this an affront to Petsch, who had published Lessing’s Complete Works in six volumes in 1907. Ten years later (1850), Theodor Wilhelm Danzel’s carefully researched Lessing biography was published from his estate. Following in 1919 was a biography by Waldemar Oehlke, also used by Bing. However, the greatest influence on Lessing scholarship was exerted by Erich Schmidt and his two-volume study, which first appeared in 1884 to be reprinted and corrected time and again. It had remained the standard reference on the life and work of the early Enlightenment philosopher — the last edition, revised by Erich Schmidt, appeared in 1909, he died in 1913 — until Hugh Barr Nisbet’s 1000-page monograph on Lessing appeared in 2008. Setting the tone around 1900 were also Kuno Fischer’s interpretations of Lessing (Fischer 1881) and his treatise on Leibniz (Fischer 1855), both of which should be taken into account when reading Bing.

Even though Bing did not produce a biography of Lessing, she intensively dealt with Erich Schmidt’s view of Lessing. In fact, Bing’s thesis can be read, in a way, as a critical commentary on Schmidt’s analysis of the significance Leibniz had for Lessing. The teacher of Petsch, Schmidt was himself a disciple of Wilhelm Scherer, whom he succeeded as chair of German Language and Literature at Berlin in 1887. Before the University of Hamburg was founded and as part of the Litterarische Gesellschaft (Literary Society), Schmidt had given public lectures in Hamburg that were so well attended that tickets had to be issued for them, eventually (Richter 2011, 47).

It is not a coincidence that Leibniz and Lessing had always played an important role in the Warburg-Cassirer circle. Warburg, for example, repeatedly expressed that Lessing had been his “ideal” (Warburg [1927] 2010, 683f.) since school days and that only gradually had he come to realise that he had to “apply a correction”(Warburg [1927] 2010, 685) to Lessing. Warburg’s project of correcting Lessing is due to the “Laocoon essay”, in which word and image are differentiated on account of the different possibilities of expression afforded by poetry and painting, respectively. Whereas depiction can, as Lessing argues, show Laocoon’s sighs but not his cries, narration can convey emotionality much more inclusively and precisely (see Laocoon, chapter XVIII). Warburg presents a different analysis, declaring that his entire scientific work is dedicated to the proof that passionate experience can in fact be depicted by means of images (see Warburg [1927] 2010, 685). The kbw’s diary contains repeated references suggesting that Warburg intended to communicate his “correction to Lessing” to the public at the Lessing Congress in Hamburg in 1929. He had plans for a lecture by the title of The Transitory as influenced by Antiquity since the Renaissance period (Das Transitorische unter dem Einfluß der Antike seit der Renaissance), this is accompanied by the remark:

Bis zum Congress muß unser Bilderatlas, der doch eigentlich nichts anderes ist als ein Supplement zu Lessing.

By the time of the Congress, our picture Atlas, which really is nothing more than a supplement to Lessing (Tkbw, 11 December 1927).

On January 4th 1928 he changes the title of the lecture to: The Influence of Antiquity on the Representation of the Transitory in Renaissance Artistic Culture (Der Einfluß der Antike auf die Darstellung des Transitorischen in der künstlerischen Kultur der Renaissance, tkbw, 191). Unfortunately, Warburg’s death prevented any further elaboration of his correction of Lessing. Cassirer, for his part, not only wrote a comprehensive study of Leibniz (Cassirer 1902), but his philosophy of culture is also clearly influenced by Leibnizian thought (Gelhard 2018). However, Bing’s connection to Warburg and Cassirer goes beyond a shared interest in the poet and the philosopher. Instead of anticipating, as was recently suggested (Tack 2020, 55) the Warburg circle’s preoccupation with Fortuna, Bing, in fact, shares the Warburg-Cassirer Circle’s interest in the formation of ‘modern consciousness’. By means of Lessing’s aesthetics or, more precisely, of Lessing’s concept of the tragic, Bing demonstrates how Lessing engenders in his dramatic plays a realm of individual freedom within the Leibnizian system of lawful necessity. Bing takes Kettner’s interpretation of Lessing a step further. Curiously, Kettner establishes no connection between his interpretation of drama and the significance of Leibniz for Lessing’s understanding of the tragic, which he had previously demonstrated. Only hinted at in Emilia Galotti, this notion is fully developed in Nathan. Tack’s interpretation, linking Bing’s interpretation of Nathan to Nietzsche’s Ecce homo and ultimately even to Warburg’s attitude towards his own Jewishness, thoroughly misses the point:

In any case, it is striking that Bing’s description of Nathan’s mystico-religious life stance is strongly reminiscent of the description given by Friedrich Nietzsche (Tack 2020, 54).

Neither can there be a line drawn between Bing (Nathan) and Nietzsche, nor is Bing’s account reflective of Warburg’s Jewishness, except for the fact that Nathan and Warburg are both of Jewish faith:

Accepting one’s fate on religious grounds, as expressed in Lessing’s Nathan, becomes amor fati for Nietzsche; the loving acceptance of one’s fate. Bing uses this terminology – amor fati – when, at the end of her life, she looks back on Warburg's fate and specifically his relationship to his Jewish identity (Tack 2020, 54).

Through Lessing, Bing argues —and Warburg, ever since beginning to study the afterlife of oriental antiquity, had applied himself to the very same topic— that reflection (Warburg refers to it as Besonnenheit) effects distance from the mere reactions aroused by affect. Accordingly, Bing concludes her chapter on Emilia Galotti thus:

Es gibt aber neben dem unbewußten Befolgen des Gesetzes, wie es in jedem Baum und jedem Tier vor sich geht, eine bewußte Einsicht und freiwillige Unterordnung darunter, wie sie nur dem Menschen oder Wesen von noch höherer Bewußtheit zukommt. Darin liegt eine Freiheit, die wieder Notwendigkeit garantiert.

There is, however, apart from an unconscious obedience to laws, which occurs with every tree and every animal, a conscious understanding of, and a voluntary subordination under, such laws, which is peculiar to man or beings of even higher consciousness. In it lies a freedom that, in turn, guarantees necessity (Bing, Diss., 72. Author’s translation).

This is what constitutes the remarkable agreement between the thought of Bing, Warburg and Cassirer. Even though Bing, in her thesis, demonstrates a deep familiarity with, and a considerable command of, Lessing’s oeuvre — a fact that, due to her habit of not always bothering with providing a source for citations, or, for that matter, with highlighting citations, posed a few editorial challenges — he serves more so as an example to characterise the beginning of Enlightenment thought as the process of liberation from an otherwise immutable determinism. On this point, she criticises Erich Schmidt, who fails to detect any semblance of free will in Lessing. In fact, Schmidt announces rather harshly:

How still today, of all times, anyone can view Lessing as a proponent of free will seems more than paradoxical in light of documentary evidence (Schmidt 1923, 430).

For Schmidt, Lessing’s adherence to the notion of absolute ‘determinism’ is irrefutable and cannot be denied even on account of “motives of reason” (Schmidt 1923, 431). As Schmidt puts it:

But is necessity pouring from the insight of reason therefore less than necessity? Does the necessity of the good and the right by virtue of cognition cease to be a necessity? Not why I must, but whether or not I must, that is the question (Schmidt 1923, 431).

Bing does not object to this. In her commentary on Schmidt’s treatment of Lessing’s determinism, she does, however, introduce a psychological component to Schmidt’s concept of cognition. Whilst for Schmidt there is a distinction to be drawn only between knowing and not knowing, Bing broadens this polarity by differentiating between two modes of cognition (presented in detail in chapters two and three of her thesis): conscious cognition and what is known to religion as ‘revelation’, which is a kind of cognition that does not come about through comprehending causation but flashes up like lightning instead. Within the Leibnizian causal chain, such a disturbance would have to appear as an accident. Devoting an entire chapter to the “game of chance”, Kettner does not, however, establish a connection with his previous analysis of Leibniz (Kettner 1904, 230ff.).

Bearing this in mind, it is clear why Bing’s interpretative approach to chance in Emilia Galotti differs so completely from that of contemporary German studies. Of particular interest in this context is Waldemar Oehlke’s interpretation. Even though, like Bing, he acknowledges that Lessing is concerned with the problem of individual freedom in Emilia Galotti, Oehlke’s reading links the drama exclusively to a critique of absolutism (Oehlke 1919, 152). Moreover, he immediately discounts Leibniz’s influence as irrelevant:

As for the thoughts about the contradictions between a gentility revered with awe and an infamous procuration that have gradually and shyly taken root in the soul of the people, Leibniz and his posthumous ‘Nouveaux essais sur l’entendememt humain’ need not be called upon, which gave Lessing occasion in 1765 to study the dissection of the mental substratum of acts of will, the interrelationship between character disposition and dark instincts (Oehlke 1919, 145).

Contradictions and ambiguities in Emilia Galotti, which allot great importance to chance in the plot, have always posed a considerable challenge for interpreters, who tended to be concerned with resolving them. Bing, on the other hand, makes no attempt to unify them; in fact, they serve her as means to support her initial proposition about the beginning of modern consciousness in that they show that determinism and chance are not mutually exclusive but instead lay the foundations for Lessing’s tragical concept.

In his correspondence with Mendelssohn and Nicolai, Lessing explained that the aim of tragedy was to evoke compassion in the audience (Petsch [1910] 1967, 54ff.). To achieve this, according to Lessing, psychological motivation, or the causal chain of the characters’ actions, needs be comprehensible. Bing argues that Leibniz’s concept of the necessary serves as a prerequisite for Lessing’s concept of the tragic; in other words, a character suffers whenever he or she is subject to a constraint or compulsion that, in turn, determines his or her actions. According to Bing, Lessing addresses this impotence in the face of limitation on several levels: politically, psychologically and religiously. The dramatic struggle, in Bing’s view, is not waged by the characters against an evil outside world, but it takes place within themselves once they experience their subjection to regulations against which they are powerless. Bing interprets Emilia’s self-enforced suicide — her killing by her father’s hand — which for Oehlke guarantees the reinstatement of moral law (Oehlke 1919, 164), as one of the ways whereby Lessing defies the ‘spell of necessity’ (in this, Bing deviates from Schmidt’s interpretation as well): voluntary death as salvation from the despair of the immutable that cannot be swayed; in other words, the consciously chosen act of freeing oneself from this necessity: “The death of the heroine [is] the only action in this tragedy” (“Der Tod der Heldin [ist] die einzige Tat in dieser Tragödie”, Bing Diss., 71. Author’s translation):

Das Weltgeschehen setzt sich zusammen aus den Einzeltätigkeiten der Monaden, von denen jede das eigne Selbst verwirklicht, die aber zu einem gemeinsamen Plan zusammenarbeiten. Das Ineinanderweben des Ganzen ist ein Bild nur für den unendlichen Geist. Ihm ist dieser ganze ungeheure Stufenplan mit der Unendlichkeit seiner Individuen, die sich in allen Stadien der Bewußtheit befinden, ein einziger Syllogismus, d.h. logisch verständlich und notwendig. Er sieht den Ursprung und Verlauf jedes Fadens, wo ein endlicher Verstand nur ein verwirrtes Stückchen des Gewebes wahrnimmt.

In Nathan, Lessing transforms this grim tragical insight into a rationale of the Enlightenment, leaving the immutable ‘syllogism’ of the Leibnizian system unchanged. But Lessing now focusses in on the moment of cognition itself:

World events are composed of the individual activities of monads, each of which realises its own self whilst cooperating towards a common goal. The interweaving of the whole presents an image only to the infinite spirit. To him, this whole enormous graduated scheme comprising the infinity of its individual beings, which are in various stages of consciousness, is a single syllogism, i.e. it is logically comprehensible and necessary. He sees the origin and the course of every thread, whereas a finite mind perceives only a tangled bit of fabric (Bing, Diss., 69. Author’s translation).

Thus, the second solution for resisting determinism, which Lessing proposes with Nathan, is conscious understanding of its immutability and voluntary submission to the law of necessity (Bing Diss., 72). Bing’s conclusion that Lessing “completed” (Bing Diss., 77) Leibniz’s concept of the necessary with Emilia Galotti and Nathan hinges on the moment of conscious liberation: psychologically, man is unfree regarding his passions, desires and longings; politically, he is at the mercy of rulers and of society in the absolutist eighteenth century; however, in the domain of religion, surely, he faces his hardest battle because he is powerless against his fate and against providence. Modern man cannot extricate himself from these circumstances either, but, according to Bing, he is no longer subject to them because he can reflect upon them (Bing Diss., 77). Pointing out the coexistence of reason and religion, which is expressed in two modes of cognition, Bing moreover rejects Schmidt’s interpretation of Lessing as a Spinozist (Schmidt, 1923, 432).

Thus, Bing not only shares Warburg’s and Cassirer’s interest in the emergence of modern consciousness but also their focus on the simultaneity of conscious cognition and affective reaction pertaining to the individual consciousness. This theme is prevalent in Warburg’s works. Particularly in his last years, he would turn his attention to Giordano Bruno. On his last trip to Italy, on which Bing accompanied him, the two made special arrangements to visit Bruno’s birthplace in Nola near Naples. If one compares Warburg’s notes on Bruno with Bing’s thesis, striking parallels become apparent. This is not surprising, considering that Lessing, too, occupied himself with Bruno’s writings early on (see here, amongst others, Lessing, Rettung des Cardanus) thus, the circle is complete: Warburg’s early engagement with Lessing leads him quite logically to Bruno. Erich Schmidt noticed the importance of Bruno for Lessing as well and kept emphasising it more and more throughout subsequent revisions of his biography. Whereas Bruno is mentioned only in passing in the 1899 edition of Schmidt’s book (Schmidt 1923, 512), the last revised edition elaborates on the connection between the two, stating explicitly:

If one compares his [Lessing’s] teachings with those of the most famous of all the Italians of the Renaissance and Reformation period, with Giordano Bruno’s, the first impression the roundup affords is striking. According to Bruno, the substance of all things rests in the act of divine thinking; in the Nolan, we thus find the fundamental idea of pantheism. (the fundamental idea of pantheism can thus be traced to the Nolan.) […] These strong correspondences are hardly coincidental but lend themselves to the assumption that an early influence by Bruno [on Lessing], which had not been obscured since, manifested itself all the more resolutely, as Lessing cast off old-fashioned and antagonistic views; and following this trail, an even richer prize may be won than is afforded by the attempts made to establish an immediate influence of Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’ on Lessing or to reap benefit from the profound speculations of Tertullian for the modern Enlightenment philosopher’s worldview (Schmidt 1923, 475).

The following is an excerpt from the introduction to the author’s doctoral thesis, which is presented here slightly modified and in translation. The book will be published in Fall 2022 (Gertrud Bing, Gertrud Bing im Warburg-Cassirer-Kreis. Mit dem Text ihrer Dissertation von 1921, hrgs. von Dorothee Gelhard und Thomas Roider, Wissenschaftler in Hamburg, bd. 6, edited by Ekkehard Nümann, Wallstein Verlag).

Bibliographical References

• von Allesch 1914
  G. von Allesch, Über die Natur des Dramas, in “Kongreß für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft”, (Berlin 7-9 Oktober 1913), Stuttgart 1914, 368-376.
• Cassirer 1902
  E. Cassirer, Leibniz’ System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen, Marburg 1902.
• Cassirer [1940-1941] 2003
  E. Cassirer, Goethe Lectures 1940-1941, in Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, Hamburg 2003.
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  E. Cassirer, Ernst Cassirer, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte Vol. 18, Ausgewählter wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, hrsg. von J.M. Krois, Hamburg 2009. 
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  K. Fischer, Leibniz und seine Schule, Heidelberg 1855.
• Gelhard
  D. Gelhard, Das Denken der “neuen” Form bei Ernst Cassirer, in “Forum interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte”, VII, hrsg. von E. Müller und B. Picht, Berlin 2018, 22-29.
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  G. Kettner, Lessings Dramen im Lichte ihrer und unserer Zeit, Berlin 1904.
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  H.-H. Müller, Robert Petsch. Sein akademischer Werdegang und die Begründung der Allgemeinen Literaturwissenschaft in Hamburg, in M. Richter, M. Nottscheid (hrgs. von), Jahre Germanistik in Hamburg. Traditionen und Perspektiven, Hamburg 2011, 107-124.
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  R. Nicolaysen, Wandlungsprozesse der Hamburger Universität im 20. Jahrhundert, in M. Richter, M. Nottscheid (hrgs. von), Jahre Germanistik in Hamburg. Traditionen und Perspektiven, Hamburg 2011, 9-36.
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  W. Oehlke, Lessing und seine Zeit, Munich 1919. 
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  R. Petsch, Lessings Dramen, in J. lberg (hrgs. von), Neue Jahrbücher für das Klassische Altertum, Geschichte und Deutsche Literatur, Leipzig 1906, 206-228.
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  R. Petsch, Lessing, Augsburg 1922.
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  R. Petsch, General Literary Studies. Ein Programm, in “Hamburger Universitätszeitung” 10 (1928), 615-622.
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  R. Petsch, Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft, Berlin 1940.
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  M. Richter, Zwischen Allgemeinem Vorlesungswesen und Kolonialinstitut, in Id., M. Nottscheid (hrgs. von), Jahre Germanistik in Hamburg. Traditionen und Perspektiven, Hamburg 2011, 37-64.
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  E. Schmidt, Lessing. Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften, Berlin 1923. 
• Tack 2020
  L. Tack, The Fortune of Gertrud Bing (1892-1964). A Fragmented Memoir of a Phantomlike Muse, Leuven, Paris, Bristol 2020.
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  O. Walzel, Tragische Form, in “Kongreß für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft”, (Berlin 7-9 Oktober 1913), Stuttgart 1914, 388-391.
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  O. Walzel, Gehalt und Gestalt im Kunstwerk, Leipzig 1923.
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  A. Warburg, Vom Arsenal zum Laboratorium, in M. Treml, S. Weigel, P. Ladwig (hrgs. von), Werke in einem Band, Berlin 2010.
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