Page - 259 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

sedlmayr and schapiro correspond 259 Sedlmayr’s work has tended to be viewed more openly because slightly less tainted although Aurenhammer and others have directly con- fronted this very question.66 (Sedlmayr’s anti- Semitism broke out into the open in publications after 1938, but as Aurenhammer has pointed out, it has less obvious importance for his work, in comparison to a figure like Strzygowski.67 But what Beaman has observed about the reception of the absence of völkisch and racial elements in Ernst Jünger’s work also applies to Sedlmayr: that “National Socialism included a hodgepodge of intellectual currents so that nonracial variants within that range can hardly be turned into doc- uments of resistance.”68 The question nonetheless still deserves further consideration. These are all difficult matters and I am not certain how to situate these letters in relation to them although I am certain that to continue to pose these questions is the main point. One of the interesting things about the Sedlmayr letters to Schapiro is that they may be taken as an enact- ment of these thorny issues. For whatever ques- tions Sedlmayr may have been forced to answer after the war in the de-Nazification process had already flashed before his eyes in the break with Schapiro (and likely others). Though self-right- eous and sure of his views, Sedlmayr agonized over the impossibility of carrying on a discussion once his politics became known: Ihrem letzten Brief hat mich Ihre Auffassung unserer ‘ideologischen’ Differenzen am aller- meisten erfreut. Ihre Auffassung ‘these differen- ces become important only in so far as they affect our scientific work’ ist die meine. Nur nehmen sie unrichtig an, ich, irgendjemand, könnte ‘above the battle’ bleiben. One the one hand the two could agree that ide- ologischen’ Differenzen only matter where they concern the work. But they do not seem to agree on the effects on the work: Why, Sedlmayr asked, couldn’t Schapiro separate their scientific from their political discussion? He repeatedly called for a neutral, a rational, an unemotional discus- sion all the while Schapiro contended that “there is no reasoning with a stubborn reactionary.” Sedlmayr asks Schapiro: I do ask you not to discuss my opinions – which must be very strange to you: american, communist and jew (I hope not offend- ing) because I am too deeply convinced of the bar- renness of discussion where there is no common basis. Such a common platform we have e.g on the scien- tific field, where our discussions have been fruitful and will continue to be so. (1 November 1934) He has second thoughts on this and finally he is un- able to keep from himself the possibility that the separation between political views and art history cannot be sustained: I guess you will try to deduce from that ‘sociological’ difference given the difference in our attitudes towards Kunstwissenschaft and I am sure not without results. Here we are on common basis in the estimation of ‘Strenge,’ of rational and critical methods. We are – it seems to me – separated through our views on art. I can not get rid of the su- spicion that – in spite of your fine gifts in observing forms and form-differences – you must fail to grasp the true object of our studies i.e. ‘art’ in its very pe- culiarity and marrow. For similar reasons why the ablest scholar will fail to grasp religion if he is a posi- tivist: for lack of experience of a specific kind. I mean experience of what art meant in the past, not in our days. It is a short step from Sedlmayr’s insistence on his rationalism and his attribution of a mysti- cal apprehension of art, invisible to a communist and a Jew like Schapiro, to the latter’s critique of Sedlmayr’s work in his article of 1936. 66 Aurenhammer, Zäsur oder Kontinuität (cit. n. 2), pp. 43ff. 67 Aurenhammer, Zäsur oder Kontinuität (cit. n. 2), pp. 43–44; Sauerländer, Der Münchner Protest (cit. n. 1), p. 196, n. 24. 68 Neaman, A Dubious Past (cit. n. 62), p. 16.