Imaging the Uncanny Memory War and the Isenheim Altarpiece in 1917–19

‘A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life, the image of his epoch.’ Thomas Mann’s evocation in 1924 of war, memory and art also distils his emblematic encounter with Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Transported from Colmar to Munich in October 1917, exhibited between 1918-19 at the Munich Alte Pinakothek, it became the focus of an extraordinary moment of German national crisis and expiation widely imaged, projected, reported, and seen by countless visitors including Mann. This article’s concerns are two-fold. First is to explore neglected responses in word and image stimulated by the Altarpiece’s display and extensive photographic imaging, and their mediation of practices of ‘uncanny’ memory; queuing visitors were likened to ‘penitents’. Entwined with an acute sense of present trauma, this activates what Hans Belting terms as the borderline between image and art; devotion and distance –pivoting in 1918-19 on the Isenheim Altarpiece’s potency as an afterlife, re-staged to make present what appears absent: a medieval turbulence as a contemporary imaging and consciousness of pain. Second is to shed light on why and how this process becomes amplified in the War’s aftermath, in particular, via its writing as an Unheimlich past in Mann’s The Magic Mountain, echoed in Marc Bloch’s invocation of a convulsive memory of power, malady and sacred ‘healing’ in his Les Rois thaumaturges: both 1924. Thus, the the conclusions open insights into the significance of the recurrent, yet overlooked artistic figure of pre-modern memory within this constellation as pivotal to creating an imaginary of the unimaginable; of what is seen and unseen.