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First I want to thank Peter Rudnytsky, Jack Spector, and Gilbert Rose for making the book into an opportunity for dialogue. It is welcome to respond to the commentators.
In concluding his discussion of the followers of Warburg and Freud, Jack Spector succinctly and cogently evaluates the ability of the classical tradition to comprehend contemporary political and cultural upheavals. As his essay explains, the possible limitations on that ability can be found not only in modernist critiques of classicist perspectives but also in the fascist abuse of classicism in the twentieth century. Analysis of Nazi propaganda, mentioned in the book and in Spector's essay, became one intellectual and political endeavor by classically trained scholars to expose and confront that abuse, an endeavor that entered into their scholarship and the war effort. My remarks here will further address how propaganda analysis directed itself against the deceptive and dangerous classical façade of fascism.
During the Second World War, émigré scholars from several disciplines-including art history, psychoanalysis, and film studies-began to interpret propaganda. Without the archival records, laboratory conditions, or focus groups available to scholars today, they in part adapted interpretive tools and concepts from their classical training. In my current research, I have begun to explore how they reapplied tools and concepts originally directed to the ancient world.1 Here I will consider how Ernst Kris employed the dramaturgic perspective within classicism to analyze propagandistic techniques and aims, and how his studies of propaganda shared elements with those of two cultural scientists from the Frankfurt School, who also worked in applied psychoanalysis, Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno.
As an art historian, Ernst Kris showed the influence not only of Sigmund Freud but also of Aby Warburg. Fritz Saxl—Warburg's successor as director of the Warburg Library—described Warburg's principle of art his