Emily J. Levine identifies Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), and Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) as the brightest stars in the constellation that she calls the “Hamburg School,” borrowing an expression Panofsky used in a 1922 letter to fellow art historian Kurt Badt. Although Panofsky used the expression half in jest—as the very existence of such a school was, at best, a matter of wishful thinking at the time—Levine wishes the reader to take the moniker seriously. But why should the geographic location that saw these three towering figures of the twentieth century operate together for a while be considered the defining feature of their intellectual projects?

The author formulates the “historical question” at the heart of her book as follows: “How did Hamburg present the particular ‘conditions for the possibility’ of the group of scholars that took its name? In other words, what made this place conducive to a certain set of ideas and not another?” (19). The underlying assumption is that “neither scholarship nor the ideas that constitute its subject emerge ex nihilo” (19), and Levine attributes this very premise to the members of what she here calls, more appropriately, the “Warburg School”: “The Warburg scholars made this premise central to their paths of inquiry. Indeed, the motto of the Warburg School might have been fons et origo—an embrace of the classical notion that ideas have a ‘source and origin’” (19). Rather than classical, however, such a notion might be better qualified as commonsensical. Levine claims that the book does “not argue for a one-to-one correlation between ideas and the city any more than between ideas and any other ‘external’ element” (20), and assures the reader that “the book’s aim is not so reductive,” maintaining instead that Dreamland of Humanists “advances a claim about how to think about ideas” (21). Regrettably, it falls short of meeting this ambitious target.

Besides the city, Levine claims to incorporate “the home as one previously neglected, but equally legitimate, precondition of intellectual life” (25). But the picture of the domestic life of the Hamburg elite that the author draws is merely anecdotal, as the book itself is a mostly anecdotal account of individuals and events, a positivistic collection of data that were, for the most part, already available through other published literature. In other words, the book is a compilation that reveals a considerable amount of diligence and industriousness, but lacks the erudition and insight that are essential qualities for anybody aiming to offer a dependable critical assessment of scholars such as Warburg, Cassirer, and Panofsky. If they ever shared a motto, it was undoubtedly Warburg's famous dictum, “God dwells in the detail,” which Levine dismisses as “a whimsical comment” characteristic of his “flair for the dramatic” (149).

Levine's main goals are to advocate the decentralization of cultural history and to emphasize “the unique historical circumstances of Weimar-era Hamburg” (6) as an alternative to a Berlin-centered cultural history of Germany. While the book may be deemed successful in this regard, its discussion of theoretical questions is superficial and cursory, relying mainly on generalizations and truisms. As if certain questions could or ought only to be asked in the aftermath of a war, for instance, Levine writes that World War I “permanently challenged firm beliefs held by Europe's leading intellectuals, in particular beliefs regarding the tools and expectations of academic work. Scholars faced a daunting set of questions: Were ideas mere projections of the mind? Was artistic genius a reflection of national characteristics? Might a scholar identify the origins of these ideas and images over time? And what were the possibilities and limits of these projects of inquiry?” (3). Another egregious example is the discussion of Warburg's Pathosformel, his “most innovative contribution to art-historical analysis” (54): Levine claims that Warburg came to believe that “the statuary classical motif concealed a corrosive process through which emotions battled with inherited traits beneath the surface” (54). Not surprisingly, given this convoluted formulation, she wonders, “But how on earth could Warburg prove this?” (54).

The key to understanding Warburg's interpretation, according to Levine, is that he was drawing on a new science, Charles Darwin's theory of evolutionism, and she summarizes Darwin's achievement and Warburg's reception as follows: “The implications of reducing men to beasts were enormous for the scholar of the Renaissance” (55). Such a simplistic view of the working of intellectual history prevents this book from affording more than a superficial grasp of the epoch-making work of Warburg and his associates. Especially when dealing with the rivalry between Cassirer and Heidegger, with iconology, and with the current renaissance of interest in Warburg's seminal work, Levine's account fails to provide a sense of what still makes these scholars poignant and relevant figures, whether because of their tragic fate, their powerful theories, or their intriguing personalities.

Two photographs that are reproduced in the book—one of the regal Cassirer towering over an obviously ill-at-ease Heidegger on the occasion of their famous debate in Davos, Switzerland, in 1929 (214), and one of Cassirer in the magnificent garb of rector of the University of Hamburg, the first Jewish rector of a German university (223)—are more telling, have more “punctum” (to use Roland Barthes's term), than the entire book in granting us a glimpse of an extraordinary era and intellectual moment.