Abstract
In 1905 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, German Aryanist and anti-Semite, envisioned nothing less than Germany’s entire political, religious, and social future springing from the discovered prizes of India’s spiritual riches—veiled in the mysterious secrets of the Holy Ganges—to be uncovered by Western sages. 2 Yet for Chamberlain and many other intellectuals during the Kaiserreich (1871– 1918) this was more than an academic exercise.3 Chamberlain’s observation signposts religion and the sense of spiritual crisis as cultural dilemmas that play a critical role at every analytical juncture of this book. His prophetic revelation implicitly suggests that knowledge of India becomes beneficial only when paired with cultural regeneration—the spark of new life. At first glance, the characterization of India as Germany’s indispensable source for renewal—rebirth—might seem a blatant exaggeration of this non-Western culture’s critical relevance for Wilhelmine Germany. Yet upon closer inspection of the prolific German literary, philosophical, and historical production on India’s culture and traditions, Chamberlain’s pronouncement appears perhaps less radical than it might seem on first reading.
Indology, born out of life, leads back to life; apart from academic results, it should, paired with life, create new life; a great purpose lies ahead of it.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arische Weltanschauung (1905)1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arische Weltanschauung (München: Bruckman, 1905). All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I would like to thank Susanne Myers for her support in substantially improving their accuracy and quality. Any remaining errors are mine.
For background on religious pilgrimages to the Ganges, see Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially 212– 14, which deals briefly with the Ganges and the city of Varanasi (Benares); also Steven J. Rosen, Introduction to the World’s Major Religions: Hinduism, vol. 6 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006).
For the early fascination with India, see Bradley L. Herling, The German Gītā: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Nicholas Germana, The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National Identity (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009). Still useful are several older works: Leslie A. Willson, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964); and Jean Sedlar’s India in the Mind of Germany: Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Their Times (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982). For a broader and more masterful account of the European encounter and fascination with Asia during the eighteenth century, see Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (München: C. H. Beck, 1998); for the long nineteenth century and specifically the German context, see Suzanne Marchand’s pathbreaking German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Familiarly, the first Oriental Renaissance was originally so named by Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Marchand, in German Orientalism, identifies a second Oriental Renaissance after 1850 that intensified post-1880.
For general background on the increasing German interest in “foreign” objects of culture, see James Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
An important predecessor to Bourdieu is Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000), which traces historically the European habitus during the medieval era to demonstrate how individual psychological perceptions are molded by society.
Evidence for the continuing general interest in Prussian history is the recent book by Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).
From a different angle, but also responding to the inadequacies of Said’s binary model—a one-way analytical street that restricts intercultural enquiry to exposing the colonizer colonizing Others—other scholars have begun to challenge this model in their work on the intercultural encounters between Germans and Indians. While this work extends beyond the scope of my purposes here, these critical new studies have opened up a new field in the German context that builds on the work of subaltern studies and hybridity (Homi K. Bhaba) to investigate the intercultural influences between Germany and India. See Andrew Sartori, “Beyond Culture-Contact and Colonial Discourse: ‘Germanism’ in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Intellectual History 4.1 (2007): 77–93; and Kris Manjapra, “The Mirrored World: Cosmopolitan Encounter between Indian Anti-Colonial Intellectuals and German Radicals, 1905–1939” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007); also Manjapra, “From Imperial to International Horizons: A Hermeneutic Study of Bengali Modernism,” Modern Intellectual History 8.2 (2011): 327–59.
Ibid., 39. In the case of Saussure’s langue and Chomsky’s generative linguistics, Bourdieu bemoans that neither account for the fact that language always exists in and functions inseparably from the social domain. See especially 43–44.
Ibid., 76 (italics in original).
Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 49. In reference to the Wilhelmine era, Steinmetz describes each of these three classes as “rooted in a different social source of status: the modern economic bourgeoisie, based in wealth and property; the nobility, based in titles and land; and the middle-class intelligentsia or Bildungsbürgertum, based in educational culture” (49).
For general background on the increasing German interest in “foreign” objects of culture, see James Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 113 (italics in original).
Ibid., 89. Habitus can be defined simply as a set of social practices and rewards. See Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 51.
An important predecessor to Bourdieu is Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000), which traces historically the European habitus during the medieval era to demonstrate how individual psychological perceptions are molded by society.
Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 106.
Ibid., 117 (italics in original). Bourdieu employs the term “institution,” in the sense to constitute—that is, to designate the parameters for selection, or distinction, in the social marketplace. In the case of education, for instance, Bourdieu explains “that one has only to assemble the different senses of instituer and of institutio to form an idea of an inaugural act of constitution, of foundation, indeed of the invention which, through education, leads to durable dispositions, habits and usages” (123).
Ibid., 81.
Evidence for the continuing general interest in Prussian history is the recent book by Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).
From a different angle, but also responding to the inadequacies of Said’s binary model—a one-way analytical street that restricts intercultural enquiry to exposing the colonizer colonizing Others—other scholars have begun to challenge this model in their work on the intercultural encounters between Germans and Indians. While this work extends beyond the scope of my purposes here, these critical new studies have opened up a new field in the German context that builds on the work of subaltern studies and hybridity (Homi K. Bhaba) to investigate the intercultural influences between Germany and India. See Andrew Sartori, “Beyond Culture-Contact and Colonial Discourse: ‘Germanism’ in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Intellectual History 4.1 (2007): 77–93; and Kris Manjapra, “The Mirrored World: Cosmopolitan Encounter between Indian Anti-Colonial Intellectuals and German Radicals, 1905–1939” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007); also Manjapra, “From Imperial to International Horizons: A Hermeneutic Study of Bengali Modernism,” Modern Intellectual History 8.2 (2011): 327–59.
Walter Leifer, India and the Germans: 500 Years of Indo-German Contacts (Bombay: Shakuntala, 1971): vii.
Douglas T. McGetchin, Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India’s Re-Birth in Modern Germany (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009): 55.
Ibid., 94–95.
Ibid., 130.
Robert Cowan, The Indo-German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies (1765–1885) (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010): 3.
For the British version of the “Aryan myth” during the nineteenth century, see Thomas Trautmann’s Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), which also has critical references to German Indology.
Another important work that examines the emergence of Orientalistik in Germany throughout the nineteenth century, and that does include Indology in the academic development that the book focuses on, is Sabine Mangold’s Eine “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft”—Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004).
The best example in this regard is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. The Arisophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935 (Wellingborough: Aquarian, 1985); or Sheldon Pollock’s essay, “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993): 76–133.
The details of these processes extend far beyond the scope of my work here, but for more general histories that include important insight on religious culture and society, and specifically church and state during the nineteenth century, see Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte: 1800–1866, Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (München: Beck, 1983); and David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). More will follow on Immanuel Kant in this monograph’s Chapter 6.
Rudolf Lill, ed., Der Kulturkampf: Quellentexte zur Geschichte des Katholizismus (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997): 9.
Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, trans. Christiane Banerji (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000): 200. For other important work on German liberalism, see James Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Protestant objectives and Prussian politics had of course been closely aligned long before this period, but after Bismarck’s rise to power his political strategy concerning the “deutsche Frage” and Reichsgründung became more explicitly linked with Protestant traditions leading up to and during the Kulturkampf. Bismarck manipulated denominational sentiment to consolidate his national prerogatives. See Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, bd. 2, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (München: C. H. Beck, 1992), especially 364–408.
The term Kulturkampf was coined by the well-known pathologist and liberal, Rudolf Virchow. For more background on Virchow, see Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848–1914 (München: R. Oldenbourg, 2002). There is a wealth of literature on denominational conflict and the Kulturkampf during the Wilhelmine era, but see especially Michael B. Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Ronald J. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 1871–1887 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998); Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Blackbourn Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); also Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 85–127.
My point here is not to ignore or simplify the deep complexities of defining German nationhood after 1871. Enlightenment values, Prussian dominance and regional independence, Pietism, and the emergence of empirical science, among other influences, played various roles in Germany’s attempt to define itself as a nation. These influences exceed my book’s focus. That said, I want to explore here the specific link between denomination and, generally, religious objectives and spiritual concerns as they became coalesced with assertions of nationhood in the Kaiserreich. For a detailed study of the link between Protestantism and politics during that era, see Gangolf Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik: Zum Verhältnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen: J. B. Mohr, 1994).
Nipperdey, Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland 1870–1918 (München: C. H. Beck, 1988): 49; for a more detailed analysis, see Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 61–78.
The “iron cage” refers of course to Max Weber’s well-known phrase “stahlhartes Gehäuse,” from “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1988), in which Weber posits that material goods have become an increasing and inescapable determinant of modern “life praxis” (Askese der Welt). Weber’s analysis can be applied to the broader dilemmas of the era deriving from empirical/material views of the world, and modern industrial capitalism. See Weber’s Religionssoziologie I: 203.
Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975); also Hugh McLeod, Secularization in Western Europe, 1848–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000).
Thomas Anz, Literatur des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2002): 18.
Examples are David Friedrich Strauss’s Der alte und der neue Glaube: Ein Bekenntniß (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1872); and Paul de Lagarde’s “Germanic religion,” as Fritz Stern calls it. On Lagarde and other radical thinkers of the era—namely Julius Langbehn and Moeller van den Bruck—see Stern’s older but still important, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). Eduard von Hartmann’s search for meaning in the unconscious was also influential and controversial. See Hartmann’s Die Philosophie des Unbewußtens : Versuch eine Weltanschauung (Berlin: Carl Duncker’s Verlag, 1869). Hartmann’s work clearly struck a cultural chord. Numerous Protestant intellectuals, for example, wrote critical essays on what they termed Hartmann’s “religion of pessimism.” Just two examples among others are Edmund Pfleiderer, “Der Moderne Pessimismus,” Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen 4.54–55 (1875): 231–356; and Hugo Sommer, “Die Religion des Pessimismus,” Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen 13.199 (1884): 241–80. The ten-year span between these two works signals the continuing relevance of Hartmann’s provocative ideas during the era. Unsurprisingly, Catholic thinkers criticized Hartmann’s work sharply.
There has long been a scholarly debate about secularization processes, which is still on going. See Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Hartmut Lehmann, ed., Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997); and William H. Swatos Jr. and Daniel V. A. Olson, eds., The Secularization Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967): 89.
Vestiges was originally published in 1844 and ignited a sensation in Victorian England. See James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation. The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
See Peter Bowler, Darwinism (New York: Twayne, 1993) for an excellent study of the various outgrowths and cultural applications of Darwinism in Europe during the late nineteenth century. For the dissemination of Darwin’s ideas in Germany, see Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); also Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 15.
The literature on this subject is immense, but for more general work on the Consequences of Modernity, one might begin with Anthony Gidden’s book of the same title (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Also from a historical-theoretical perspective, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s older Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975). For a more sociological approach, see Peter Wehling, Die Moderne als Sozialmythos: Zur Kritik sozialwissenschaftlicher Modernisierungstheorien (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1992), especially his first chapter. For broader surveys of intellectual culture in Germany and the formation of the Bildungsbürgertum, see the multivolume Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Werner Conze et al. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985–1992); and Jürgen Kocka, ed., Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987). For more focus on the sense of lost spirituality during the Wilhelmine era, see the introduction and part 1, “The Cult of Bildung,” from my book, The Double-Edged Sword: The Cult of Bildung, Its Downfall and Reconstitution in Fin-de-Siècle Germany (Rudolf Steiner and Max Weber) (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004); Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair; Fritz Ringer, The Rise and Fall of the German Mandarins, 1890–1933 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1969); and the introductory chapters of Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); for the interrelationship between science and spirituality in Germany, see Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
See Anz, Literatur des Expressionismus, especially 18–23.
Widespread interest in Buddhism among the educated is quite evident and theologians of the day felt compelled to respond to the Buddhist euphoria. Catholic and Protestant theologians filled their professional journals and wrote books on the subject. During the Kaiserreich two Protestant journals, Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen and Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift, contained many articles on Indian culture and religions, as did the Catholic journal, Stimmen aus Maria-Laach. Intellectuals also attempted to address their work to a wider audience. Alfred Bertholet, for example, professor of theology, responded to the request of the Christian Student Union of German Switzerland to deliver an address on the subject, later published in Buddhismus und Christentum (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1902); the series, Biblische Zeitfragen, late on the scene, began in 1908 to present important biblical issues to a lay audience. Here, see Otto Wecker’s Christus und Buddha (Münster: Verlag der Aschendorffschen Buchhandlung, 1908); and Peter Sinthern, Catholic Jesuit, responded with his Buddhismus und buddhistische Strömungen in der Gegenwart: Eine apologetische Studie (Münster: Verlag der AlphonsusBuchhandlung, 1906), less to Buddhism itself but rather to what he termed “multifarious Buddhist currents in the West” (xi).
Christian Pesch, “Das Licht Asiens,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 31 (1886): 255.
Friedrich Fabri. Bedarf Deutschland der Colonien? Eine politisch-ökonomische Betrachtung (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Berthes, 1879). See Hans Fenske, Preussentum und Liberalismus: Aufsätze zur preußischen und deutschen Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Dettelbach: J. H. Röll, 2002).
At the death of Madame Blavatsky in 1891, Besant became president of the Theosophical Society even though there were numerous splinter groups. Besant proved much more radical in her approach to God’s “secret doctrine.” She rejected Christianity outright and eventually moved the Society’s headquarters to Madras, India. Once in India she became deeply involved in the Indian nationalist movement. For more background, see Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); also Mark Bevir, “Mothering India,” History Today 56.2 (2006): 19–25; and his “In Opposition to the Raj: Annie Besant and the Dialectic of Empire,” History of Political Thought 19.1 (1998): 61–77.
Roger-Pol Droit, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, trans. David Streight and Pamela Vohnson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003): 167. Droit’s work on the European image of Buddhism should be considered with caution because it primarily considers only one specific line of reasoning, that of canon thinkers, without fleshing out the deeper complexities and variety of Europe’s broader fascination with Buddhism.
Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (München: Bruckmann, 1922).
Ibid., 34.
Ibid., 35.
Most important here is the work by George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1964); and GoodrickClarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism; more biased is the work by Daniel Gasman. See his Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (New York: Peter Lang, 1998) and The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004).
For an overview of these debates and a historiography of the Second Empire, see Matthew Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), which provides an excellent synopsis of each of these disputes among historians; also on the Historikerstreit and Sonderweg thesis, see the introductory chapter to Wehling, Die Moderne als Sozialmythos.
Copyright information
© 2013 Perry Myers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Myers, P. (2013). Introduction. In: German Visions of India, 1871–1918. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316929_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316929_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45290-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31692-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)