Abstract
Christian Hönes, in this speech delivered in Basel in February 1877, impels his audience to bear witness to what he viewed as one of the most remarkable religious revolutions in history—what Friedrich Max Müller, the renowned German Indologist at Oxford, described as “the greatest event in our eventful century.”2 As we might expect, Hönes, a Protestant assistant pastor (Diakonus) in Weinsberg, a town in southwestern Baden-Würtemburg, foresaw this revolution in anticipation of India’s pending Christianization, yet many other German intellectuals heeded Hönes’s call with vastly different motivations for exploring India’s revolutionary transformation and in various ways—academic study, travel reports, and essays. During the early years of the Kaiserreich, for instance, some German intellectuals turned to Indian Buddhism as a sounding board for their own cultural reflections and spiritual disputations. Paul Wurm (1829–1911), Protestant deacon in Calw, also in Baden-Würtemburg, and later theologian and Lehrer at the Missionshaus in Basel, commented in 1880:3 “The philosophical atheism of our day, the pessimism of a Schopenhauer and v. Hartmann, warmed up our species for the wisdom of the Buddha.”4 Viewed from this perspective, Hönes’s plea also points implicitly to the spiritual void that so many intellectuals gradually sensed during the early decades of the Kaiserreich and from which many sought relief through their reformulations of Indian traditions.
On the shores of the Ganges the reader will now want to follow me, even if only by way of a sketch, in order to be a witness to one of the most marvelous acts of emancipation in the realm of religion.
Christian Hönes, Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen (1877)1
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Notes
Christian Hönes, “Die Reformbewegung des Brahmosomadsch in Indien als Schranke des Missionswesens,” Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen 6.88 (1877): 4.
Ibid., 4. Here Hönes cites “Max Müller: Eine Missionsrede.” Müller’s text was originally published as Eine Missionsrede in der Westminsterabtei am 3 December 1873 gehalten von F. Max Müller: Mit einer einleitenden Predigt von Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (Strassburg: Trübner, 1874): 52.
Calw is of course the birthplace of Hermann Hesse, son of a Protestant minister with strong Pietist leanings that deeply influenced the famous Nobel Prize winner. Radical Pietist enclaves existed throughout the predominantly Catholic southwest Germany, which probably also influenced Hönes and Paul Wurm. As we will explore in more detail in Chapter 3, Pietism’s special emphasis on introspection for achieving salvation played an influential role in how Germany’s “religious innovators” read India. See Hans Schneider, Radical German Pietism, trans. Gerald T. MacDonald (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2007), for a more detailed investigation.
Wurm, “Der Buddhismus,” Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift. Monatshefte für geschichtliche und theoretische Missionskunde 7 (1880): 145. Wurm also published a full-length monograph on Indian religion titled, Geschichte der indischen Religion im Umriss dargestellt (Basel: Bahnmaier’s Verlag [C. Detloff ], 1874). Wurm taught at the Basler Mission, which was founded in 1815 and heavily influenced by southwest German Pietism. For a short history, see Paul Jenkins, Kurze Geschichte der Basler Mission (Basel: Basler Mission, 1989).
For background on the history of Indian studies in France, see Roland Lardinois, L’invention de l’Inde: Entre Ésotérisme et Science (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 2007); also on Burnouf, see Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, L’archive des Origines: Sanskrit, Philologie, Anthropologie dans l’Allemagne du XIXe Siècle (Paris: Cerf, 2008), especially165–69; on Europe’s discovery of Buddhism, see Philip Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
An early example written in German for a more general reader is by the Young Hegelian, Karl Koeppen, Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung (Berlin: Schneider, 1857).
The Lalita Vistara, which contains a biography of the Buddha, is a Buddhist text written in a combination of Sanskrit and a vernacular. Composed by several different authors, the text probably dates to the third century CE. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Lalitavistara,” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/328358/Lalitavistara.
Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005): 126; also Hans Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswisenschaft und Moderne (München: C. H. Beck, 2001).
See Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, especially 56–120 for more elaboration on the political frustration felt by Protestant Liberals after 1848.
The sections on Leopold von Schroeder in this chapter and Chapter 4 are revised versions of an article that appeared in the German Studies Review as Perry Myers. “Leopold von Schroeder’s Imagined India: Buddhist Spirituality and Christian Politics during the Wilhelmine Era,” German Studies Review 33.2 (2009): 619–36. © 2003–2012 German Studies Association, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. I would like to thank the GSR and Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint this revised version of the essay.
Michael Baumgarten, “Der Protestantismus als politisches Prinzip im deutschen Reich,” Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen 1.9 (1872): 18.
Theodor Schultze, Christus, der Weltversöhner, der Welterlöser, der Weltbesieger, der Weltseligmacher,—und seine Kirche “die Eine,” “die Einige.” Eine Schlüssel zum klaren Verständniß der ganzen Bibel und somit die Offenbarung wirklich—offenbar (Oldenberg: Theodor Schulze, 1862): 7.
Rudolf Seydel, Die Religion und die Religionen (Leipzig: Verlag von F. G. Findel, 1872): 183.
Baumgarten, “Protestantismus als politisches Prinzip,” 50–51 (original set in quotation marks and larger font).
See Valentina Stache-Rosen, ed., German Indologists: Biographies of Scholars in Indian Studies Writing in German (New Delhi: Max Mueller Bhavan, 1991): 117–18, who points out that the Russian government had issued an ultimatum in 1895 “that all lectures in Dorpat and other Baltic universities be delivered in Russian.” Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991): 87, also indicates that the University of Dorpat was closed down in 1893 due to its continued use of German in the classroom.
Stefan Arvidsson’s Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, trans. Sonia Wichmann (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Marchand’s German Orientalism both have sections on von Schroeder that offer a more balanced and erudite analysis of the German-Estonian Indologist. I will devote more attention to his Arische Religion in Chapter 6.
Von Schroeder, “Einleitende Betrachtungen,” in Reden und Aufsätze vornehmlich über Indiens Literatur und Kultur (Leipzig: H. Haessel Verlag, 1913): 1–9. This essay originally appeared in the Baltischer Monatsschrift in 1878.
The dating is unclear in the play, but Buddhism flourished in India approximately from the sixth to fourth centuries BCE. Nor does von Schroeder cite any historical sources for the play. During the Chola Dynasty (300 BCE–1279 CE) in the Tamil region of southern India, Sundara Chola reigned during the tenth century CE. There is no indication that this was von Schroeder’s model. Interestingly the Cholas did resist Buddhist influence and remained faithful to their Hindu religious traditions. See K. A. Sastri, A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar (Madras: Oxford University Press, 1966).
Von Schroeder, König Sundara (Dorpat: Schnakenburg, 1887): 22.
The Baltic Germans were quite well established culturally in the Russian Empire. There is evidence in fact that von Schroeder had a positive disposition to the Russian tsars and was greatly distressed by the murder of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. See von Schroeder’s Lebenserinnerungen, 91 for his reaction to the murder. For a more detailed assessment of the Baltic Germans during the era, see John A. Armstrong, “Mobilized Diaspora in Tsarist Russia: The Case of the Baltic Germans,” in Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices, ed. Jeremy R. Azrael (New York: Praeger, 1978): 63–104.
Seydel was born in Dresden and attended the Kreuzschule there. He later studied philology under G. W. Nitzsch, and also theology and philosophy from 1852 to 1856 under the Leipziger Professor of Philosophy, Christian H. Weisse, under whom he completed his dissertation on Schopenhauer in 1856. Seydel was strongly influenced by the antimaterialism of Fechner, K. Snell, and E. von Hartmann, and exhibited early on a freethinking attitude toward Christianity. He became a Freemason at age 17 and was an early and avid advocate of the newly founded Protestantenverein. See Kurt Rudolf, Die Religionsgeschichte an der Leipziger Universität und die Entwicklung der Religionswissenschaft. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und zum Problem der Religionswissenschaft (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962): 79–86. To my knowledge, no secondary material exists on Seydel. Marchand discusses Seydel’s comparative work in German Orientalism, 270–75, in which she focuses primarily on the important theological debates surrounding the claims by some, including Seydel, that Christianity had borrowed heavily from Buddhism.
Seydel, Das Evangelium von Jesu in seinen Verhältnissen zu Buddha-Sage und Buddha- Lehre mit fortlaufender Rücksicht auf andere Religionskreise (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1882).
Seydel, Buddha und Christus (Breslau: Schottländer, 1884).
G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (1837; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986). After Hegel, who built on the work of his predecessor J. G. Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774; Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990), history became the dominant analytical paradigm for evaluating the progress of civilizations and their cultures. For a critique of Hegel’s thought as he applied it to India, see Ranajit Guha’s History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
Wilhelm Emanuel von Ketteler, Freiheit, Autorität und Kirche: Erörterungen über die großen Probleme der Gegenwart (Mainz: Franz Kirchheim, 1862). For further reference, see Karl Brehmer, Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler (1811–1877): Arbeiterbischof und Sozialethiker. Auf den Spuren einer zeitlosen Modernität (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2009); and Martin O’Malley, Wilhelm Ketteler and the Birth of Modern Catholic Social Thought: A Catholic Manifesto in Revolutionary 1848 (München: Utz, 2008).
Seydel, Katholicismus und Freimauererei: Ein Wort zur Entgegnung auf die vom Freiherrn von Ketteler, Bishof von Mainz wider den Freimauererbund erhobenen Anklagen (Leipzig: Hermann Luppe, 1862).
On Freemasonry, see Helmut Reinalter, Die Freimaurer (München: C. H. Beck, 2000); on Catholics and Freemasons, see Klaus Kottmann, Die Freimaurer und die katholische Kirche: Vom geschichtlichen Überblick zur geltenden Rechtslage (Frankfurt: Lang, 2009).
For a discussion of the tensions in German Freemasonry between moral universalism as it derived from the Enlightenment and national particularism, which became especially exacerbated between French and German Freemasons after 1871, see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Nationalism and the Quest for Moral Universalism: German Freemasonry, 1860–1914,” in The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, ed. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): 259–84. Hoffmann shows how nationalism and moral universalism became conflated among German Freemasons and were “inextricably intertwined until 1914” (284).
Wilhelm Oncken, “Das deutsche Reich im Jahre 1872. Zeitgeschichtliche Skizzen,” Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen 2.22 (1873): 61 (original emphasized with enlarged font).
Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 191. Hastings’s work makes an excellent contribution to the debate over definitions of nation and nationhood, sparked especially by Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Hastings disputes the claim that the nation and nationalism are phenomena that are exclusively modern and emerged from the Enlightenment.
Weiße Revolutionär (white revolutionary) is the subtitle to Lothar Gall’s biography, Bismarck: Der weiße Revolutionär (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1980) and refers to what has been commonly referred to as the “revolution from above,” which occurred during the process of national consolidation after the 1866 war with Austria and leading up to the FrancoPrussian War of 1870–71. See Gall’s chapter, “Die ‘Revolution von oben,’” in Bismarck, 373–455; and Blackbourn, History of Germany, especially 184–95.
For the most comprehensive work on the link between Protestansim and politics in Wilhelmine Germany, see Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik; also Friedrich Wilhelm von Graf and Hans Martin Müller, eds., Der deutsche Protestantismus um 1900 (Gütersloh: Kaiser, Gütersloher Verlag, 1996).
Wurm, Geschichte der indischen Religion, iii. According to his own account, he did study Sanskrit under the renowned Rudolf Roth, but after his calling to the Basler Mission his teaching duties no longer allowed him to continue his studies.
Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1835); Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums. For background, see George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
For background, see Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; and Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte; also for related contexts, Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany; and Penny, Objects of Culture.
Both Kant and Herder wrote some comparative texts, as did Hegel at the beginning of the nineteenth century. After the publication of The Sanscrit Language by Sir William Jones in 1776, in which Jones noted a striking similarity between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Weißheit und Sprache der Indier (Heidelberg: Mohr & Zimmer, 1808) became the spark for many German thinkers to explore the roots of Sanskrit in search of an Ursprache with potential links to German. The actual title of Jones’s text is “The Third Anniversary Discourse on the Hindus, delivered 2nd of February, 1786” in The Works of Sir William Jones, vol. 1 (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799). I would like to thank Thomas Trautman for clarifying this title.
The scholarly work on the emergence of historical criticism in the nineteenth century is significant. One might begin with Williamson, Longing for Myth; also Otto Gerhard Oexle’s edited volume, Krise des Historismus—Krise der Wirklichkeit: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur, 1880–1932 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007); and Michael Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984); For more background on the emergence of religious-historical approaches in nineteenth-century Germany, see Gerd Lüdemann and Martin Schröder, eds., Die Religionsgeschichtliche Schule in Göttingen: Eine Dokumentation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987).
For a more detailed analysis of how Protestants dealt with the science versus belief problem (Wissenschaft-Glaube), see Claudia Lepp, Protestantisch-liberaler Aufbruch in die Moderne: Der deutsche Protestantenverein in der Zeit der Reichsgründung und des Kulturkampfes (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996), especially 189–219.
On the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, see Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
The German title of Eduard Grimm’s address is “Die Lehre über Buddha und das Dogma von Jesus Christus.” I was unable to ascertain the site and audience of the address. I am citing the printed version in Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-fragen 6.90 (1877): 345–73. Grimm, like Seydel, was also a member of the Protestantenverein and the Allgemeinen evangelisch-protestantischen Missionsverein. Though he never studied Sanskrit formally, he gave popular lectures on the world’s diverse Weltanschauungen at the Kolonialinstitut in Hamburg, where he taught theology from the winter semester of 1908–9 until 1919. This biographical information can be found at Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, www.kirchenlexikon.de.
Grimm gives credit for this anecdote to Friedrich Max Müller, Essays, bd. 1 (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1869–79): 364.
See Blackbourn, History of Germany, especially184–203; also Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, bd. 2, 250–65.
Seydel, Religion und die Religionen, 165. It is important to note here that Seydel employs the subjunctive II (hypothetical) tense, which suggests that this purported progression is yet to be completed.
Ibid., 57. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). To summarize, a transition narrative praises and glorifies the past in order to explicitly criticize the present as decadent and corrupt.
W. Hönig, “Die Bedeutung der religiösen Frage für unsere nationale Entwicklung,” Protestantische Flugblätter 17.2 (1882): 11.
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Myers, P. (2013). Restoring Spirituality. In: German Visions of India, 1871–1918. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316929_2
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