In the early days of October 1933, two small boats, the Hermia and the Jessica, set sail from Hamburg, bound for London. Their cargo, packed into 531 crates, consisted of 60,000 books and 20,000 photographs – the complete library of Aby Warburg, who had died in 1929.l Just months before, Max Warburg's brother–in–law Moritz Oppenheim had committed suicide with his wife in Frankfurt; and by the end of 1934 his daughter Renate, his would-be-successor Siegmund, his niece Ingrid and his cousin's son Karl would all have left Germany for England. He himself would endure a further four years of discrimination, beginning with his exclusion from the Hapag supervisory board, before finally leaving Germany. Yet almost exactly two decades before the departure of the Hermia and the Jessica, Warburg had been celebrating, along with the rest of the Hapag board, the launch of the Imperator, the leviathan liner created by that other great Hanseatic entrepreneur –and fellow-Jew – Albert Ballin. These contrasting events symbolise the alteration which Hanseatic bourgeois society had undergone between 1913 and 1933; for if the launch of the Imperator epitomised the inflated aspirations which had characterised North German capitalism on the eve of the First World War, then the departure of the Warburg library was a symptom of that crisis of bourgeois culture which lay at the root of Weimar's failure.