With the focus on the interface between religion and art, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume address India as a trope of primaeval religiosity and imagined origins in Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, and national socialist Germany respectively. The book covers the period from 1880 to 1945, but with historical expeditions going back as far as 1800.

During this period, the trope played a vitally important part in how German people interpreted their personal experiences and in the construction of their collective national identity. Many Germans looked upon India as the cradle of Aryanism, with mythical origins ranging from a linguistic category to a diverse assortment of cultural, biological, and racist notions and, as a result, also saw India as a source of religious and spiritual regeneration.

German approaches to India not only blurred the lines between the real and the imagined, but they also had severe and lasting effects on many Indians. Although, geographically, the Indian subcontinent included the British Raj and some Dutch, French, and Portuguese colonies, the India of German scholars followed the mythical boundaries of ancient Indian culture as gleaned from Sanskrit and Pali texts. Because this narrative accorded Indian Muslims the role of ‘conquerors’ who had ‘subjugated’ the ‘original’ race, the Muslim population that had peacefully cohabitated in the subcontinent for approximately seven hundred years was not allowed a place. Although relations between Muslims and Hindus in India today are not the topic of this volume, in relation to the period under consideration, the omission presented us with a conceptual challenge we hope to encounter with a fresh view.

Behind Germany’s preoccupation with India lay the notion of the ‘religion of the future’. In this volume, it will be traced how, in the nineteenth century, scholars, in their attempt to bridge science with religion, turned to the religions of India to formulate a fundamental critique of Christianity (Thurner in this volume). After 1900, in search of religious experience, a wide range of religious seekers tried to fuse their bodies and souls with ‘The East’ (Jonker, Hannemann in this volume). In this ongoing search, India was used as a projection screen to recast the origins of European religion and reconceptualize its future. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews applied the debate to the inner development of their communities and speculated about the Gestalt (primary form) of the divine (Thumann 2015). In this ongoing debate, India was used as a kind of projection, a screen onto which to recast the origins of European religion and to reconceptualize its future.

The ways in which the past and future are linked is of central concern to religion. How religious groups root themselves in a meaningful past governs the drawing of boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and offers the main pointers towards how to proceed into the future together (Koselleck 1985: 211–59, see further below). This engagement may take multiple forms, including communications with the dead, ‘as many are resting in the ground’ (Jonker 1995: 188–211), or speculations about various godheads entering covenants with circumscribed groups (Pink 2016).

In an attempt to counter the challenge of accelerating globalization, some Germans tried to reground themselves by constructing a novel narrative about their origins in which racial and religious concepts were linked together. When confronted with colonization, Buddhists and Hindus in the subcontinent tried to reconcile their problems in much the same way. Whatever the outcomes, on both sides of the globe such endeavours tended to occur within much the same historical configuration, usually typified by modernity, a global clash, and worldwide communications. In this setting, Europeans and Indians produced ever-wider assortments of translations, as well as theosophical or theological speculations for all who wanted to read them, which resulted in unexpected explanations popping up in ways that often reinforced both sides. Appearing on the periphery rather than in the centre, such descriptions could take on very different forms. These became sites for cross-cultural borrowing and recasting, thereby creating the diffuse hybridity from which new religious forms could grow. However, although by 1900, Indians and Germans were engaging in exchanges on a vast array of subjects, it is noteworthy that they rarely directly shared information on their religious or spiritual development. Rather, they used each other as sounding boards (Chidester 2014), which instead resulted in numerous creative misunderstandings leading to the religious entanglements we wish to address in this volume.

To acknowledge the elusive nature of this encounter, we address a range of issues, including Protestant speculations on India, the creation of a cosmic theatre through music, the search for religious ecstasy, dance as an expression of racial origin, vegetarianism as a way of linking the body to the nation, and the construction of an Indo–German religion based on race. Between them, our authors target the broad field of religion as a malleable entity, subjected to opposites that shape past and future, self and other, pure and impure, above and below and connect the individual to the group.

Since many of our authors situate their findings outside the academy, they are able to contribute to our understanding of the non-academic reception of Indian knowledge production in Germany.

Interfaces and Entanglements

In Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire, Kris Manjapra states that ‘entanglements occur when groups alien from each other in many ways, begin to need each other like crowbars or like shovels to break apart or to dig up problems of the most pressing concern for themselves’ (Manjapra 2014: 6).

Although many of the discussions on religious origins taking place in India and Germany seemed to pass each other like ships in the night, the image of people using each other to unearth their origins and develop new notions still fits the subject under discussion. Some of the actors appearing in this volume took their inspiration from others. During the heyday of the Indian–German encounter, it was not unusual to come across Indian Muslim missionaries guiding German life reformers, Indian dancers seeking cooperation with European choreographers, and German audiences understanding their deepest selves while watching them on stage. While some German vegetarians saw the ‘Mahatma’ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) as a model of future leadership, national socialist propagandists reached out to anti-colonial groups in India, each creating sites of empirical knowledge.

Other interfaces occurred in secluded spaces, where knowledge of the other reached recipients in a roundabout way. In this volume a range of actors have dug into the limited space of their minds to address, among other things, German vegetarians dreaming about sharing an Aryan heritage with Indians, German theologians studying the riches of Indian scriptures, a Wagner fan re-creating India in a musical drama, and national socialist scholars recasting the Protestant religious tradition as an Indo–German one.

The authors of this volume also examine how the upholders of several socio-political constellations used the concepts of Aryanism and pure primordial race to alter a perceived deadlock. Whatever form their search for their religious origins took while they were worrying about their futures, Indians and Germans essentially followed different paths. To continue with Manjapra’s imagery, they used their own crowbars to their own ends. Solutions appeared when the occasion arose and disappeared again once their needs were satisfied. Ultimately, however, the cross-cultural encounter failed to produce a stable link between the two world regions.

Addressing this bundle of research problems, we continue down the road along which Joanna Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander, and Douglas T. McGetchin set out Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India (Cho et al. 2014). Placing the focus on religion, including religious feelings, experiences, practices, symbols, expressions, projections, manipulations, movements, and organizations, we have traced forms of identity-making and nation-building processes involved in the German–Indian entanglement. As a result, the volume offers a global historical approach to religion from a modern transformative perspective (Conrad 2018; Maltese and Strube 2021).

The Historical Constellation

What did Germans know about actual, real-life Indians? In which historical constellation did their meeting occur? How did each digest global change? Before introducing the chapters, we offer some answers to set the stage.

When German writers and scholars started to think about the origins of India in the nineteenth century, their mental map of the subcontinent was by no means a tabula rasa. For centuries, German missionaries had either worked for British missions or founded German ones in Asia. Their activities helped constitute German perceptions of the non-Christian world, and provided images for German history textbooks and local church communities (Tyrell 2004: 13–37). German missionaries also promoted the British Empire’s ‘civilizing mission’, for which they tried to convert Hindu society to the European model (Osterhammel and Petersson 2003: 56). Even before German theologians started to reach out to the Indian scriptures, India was already a well-populated site.

The Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, and Hindu communities defended themselves against the Western invaders not only with mutiny, riots, Swadeshi bombings, and non-cooperation, but also with public debates, Friday sermons, books, daily newspapers, reading rooms, and indigenous schools. They gradually reframed their beliefs into world religions by sharpening their parameters through demarcating their mutual boundaries and imitating and recasting Christian organizational forms and fields. Such ‘empires of religion’ helped shape the individual and the nation in many ways (Bayly 2004: 325; Bergunder 2020).

The German mission was not a success. On the contrary, it caused opposition, which was at times violent. However, it more often took the form of a reformulation and revival of indigenous traditions. The new reform movements criticized Western lifestyles, which they regarded as corrupt, immoral, and characterized by unbridled freedom. As we illustrate in this volume, the revivals lent agency to Indian religious entrepreneurs who travelled to the West, set up their own missions, consulted Western colleagues, swapped ideas, and often found the freedom they needed to alter their traditions as they went along. In this volume, readers will encounter a range of different actors, including missionaries from the Lahore-Ahmadiyya Reform Movement who set up a Muslim mission station in Berlin and Indian dancers who performed around Germany during the Nazi period.

German writers, philosophers, and linguists designed a special place for India within their world horizon, to which they ascribed many positive qualities that whetted political appetites (Myers 2013). Once the German Empire was constituted, such speculations mingled with a wish to undermine the British Empire. Indian students and travellers were welcomed, and when the First World War took off, Indian revolutionaries received ample support. However, only after Germany lost the war did Indians in Berlin set up the organizations that grew into sites of daily encounters (Cho et al. 2014; Manjapra 2014).

The Religious Field

What the different actors meant by the word ‘religion’ still needs to be asked here. The recasting of religion that took place in Germany and beyond by no means was an inevitable development. It constituted a field of endless choices, identifying crossroads, guessing which would be the best to follow, discarding alternatives, and making them invisible. Although the actors presented the results as ‘natural’ and ‘rooted in time immemorial’, invoking images of primordial transcendence as they went along, they put a peculiar choice on the table.

In his famous text Zur historisch-politischen Semantik asymmetrischer Gegenbegriffe (On the historical-political semantics of asymmetrical counter-concepts), historian Reinhart Koselleck (1985: 217) sets out the ‘dynamics of negation’ in three steps. Revisiting the binary codes of Hellenes/Barbarians and Christians/Heathens, which in the past the Western world often used to delegitimize and subjugate significant others, Koselleck first rethinks the intimate relationship between ‘spaces of experience’ (what happened in the past) and ‘horizons of expectation’ (what is expected in the future) on which such codes rested (Koselleck 1985: 216). Second, he noted that the more globalized the world became, the more people heightened their expectations for the future, which even extended to perceiving a ‘man of the future’ producing an ever-wider range of speculations about the essence of Germanness (Deutschtum). Third, the national socialists brought the old binary code to a new level by proposing superman (Übermensch)/non-human as a universal claim with totalitarian consequences.

Koselleck’s observations help outline the different shifts in the religious field addressed in this book. As will still become apparent, it has been a long stretch from the ‘noble savage’ and ‘innocent Indian’ who, around 1800, Germans sought to ‘uplift’ to the moment when an Indo-Germanic religion based on racial distinctions appeared. At the start of the uneven road, new concepts with which to classify the world were developed, thus creating a framework that in this book Simon Wiesgickl calls ‘second-order colonialism’.

When it ended, the religion of the Nazi perpetrators was promoting ‘pure Aryan bodies’ to express a ‘pure Aryan race’ on which the German nation sought to base itself (see Hannemann in this volume). Notions of primordiality, purity, and the feeling of belonging to a race of Übermenschen accompanied the shifts. In 30 April 1945, Alexander Kluge paints an eerie picture of German scholars on the day Hitler committed suicide, feverishly preparing for the administrative takeover of India after the final victory (Kluge 2014: 120). In this volume, we outline the contours of the religion that was ready for that future, one that urged the included to experience their sense of belonging with the help of purification, cosmic thinking, and the spiritualization of their origins. The excluded experienced the deadly cost (Goodrick-Clarke 2002; Von See 2003: 56–99).

As a matter of course, each shift brought forth religious actors and movements to counteract this ‘Aryan’ sense of superiority. In this volume, the readers will meet German vegetarians who refused to follow the lure of purity, but instead supported Gandhi and Indian anti-colonial movements (Hauser). Then, the Lahore-Ahmadiyya missionaries were Indian Muslims who did not support the Aryan myth. They headed a community of German converts who, while searching for religious experience, endeavoured not to seclude themselves from others but, on the contrary, to embrace ‘the whole world’, with cosmopolitism perhaps the best word to characterize their political leanings (Jonker).

After the First World War, the public discourse about the future of religion intensified (Gordon 2013: 150–78). For conservative participants in the debate, only a deep incision to cut away any alternatives could rescue that future. Progressive participants, conversely, insisted that the religion of the future adopt multiple religious forms. During this period, numerous spiritual experiments unfolded, for which leftists, life reformers, and far-right national socialists each nurtured their own plan. Depending on their goals, their instruments might include reforming the self, open-minded encounters with other religions, or a top-down religious narrative based on racial selection and ethnic cleansing. For as long as they lasted in these theatres, what people labelled as ‘religion’ assumed very different forms. The chapters ahead offer insights into the choices each of them required.

Contemplating this picture, two constellations add their own problems for today’s researchers. One is that the vast shadow that the national socialists left behind them still colours our view of the non-Nazi actors. Researchers looking for their stories should turn to private archives and family heirlooms to find new insights. The other problematic constellation is that for each historical stage during which religious entanglements were being probed, Germans focused on Hinduism and Buddhism as India’s ‘original’ religions, so cut Indian Muslim culture out of the equation. However, before the British colonists conquered the Indian subcontinent, Muslims ruled the territory and had created multiple levels of culture and ways of living together. During the period of colonization, they may have lost their empire, but Muslims remained as much a part of India as ever, and their presence in Germany was more likely than not to be as the representatives of other Indian religions. Stitching the pieces together again is a task that has not yet lost its impetus.

The Chapters

This is the panorama against which the chapters are presented in chronological order. Simon Wiesgickl and Matthias Thurner address an epistemological shift in Protestant theology in which the study of Indian texts led to a new conceptualization, or ‘religionization’, of Christianity. Whereas Wiesgickl recounts how German Enlightenment thinkers perceived India as the cradle of mankind and Indians as ‘noble savages’ in need of ‘uplifting’, Thurner traces the next shift to the theologian Ernst Troeltsch’s search, with the help of Buddhism, for a religion of the future. Alongside these speculations, Julia Hauser describes a panorama of German vegetarians seeking purity through diet, spirituality, and ethnic cleansing while looking at Aryan India to justify their course. In their analyses of the ‘Indian’ musical score for the opera Mahadeva, Isabella Schwaderer and Markus Schlaffke trace how the fantasies of German males about traditional gender relations are projected onto the divine order of the world. Gerdien Jonker then follows with a description of Germans in search of religious ecstasy through the Lahore-Ahmadiyya Mosque in Berlin.

Once the national socialists came to power, this multi-faceted and still open-ended experiment was transferred to and fixed in academic institutions rooted in state racism, where, as Tilman Hannemann explains, German scholars in Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe think tank deployed several registers of scientific discourse—philology and linguistics, race theory and biology, literature, and arts—to promote life ethics centred on heroism, battle, and the will to dominate. Comparing the reactions of Dutch and German art critics at Indian dance performances on their local stages, Parveen Kanhai pinpoints the German idiosyncrasies through a Dutch lens. Baijayanti Roy traces national socialist propagandists to India, where they secretly forged fascist networks with Hindu and Muslim organizations, leaving behind in their wake a political spectre that survived the Second World War. Finally, Markus Schlaffke, Isabella Schwaderer, and Parveen Kanhai introduce the digital Menaka archive, which collects the traces of Leila Sokhey’s dance performances in Europe and allows for cross-referencing.

The authors of this volume only address the Indians who made an entry onto European stages, so the contemporary developments in colonial India from which their entry resulted are only studied through that lens. Thus, to explain why Indian dancers sought European stages at all, Sandra Schlage shows how the development of modern Indian dance was influenced by two opposing trends in artistic expression between Westernization and ‘revival’. At the same time, Parveen Kanhai follows Indian dancers onto European stages. Considering the scattered fragments of the German Indian dance encounter, Schlaffke and his co-authors ask how this common heritage is remembered today in India, Germany, and other parts of the world. Finally, Gerdien Jonker highlights the perspective of the Lahore-Ahmadiyya missionaries.

In hindsight, it becomes clear that the India of German scholarship, Protestant speculative thought, Indian ballet, Indian opera, and the religious projections of German Indologists, had little to do with the complexity of Indian society, just as it took scant notice of the complex Indian presence in Germany. Overall, imperial, republican, and national socialist Germans concentrated on ancient Indian texts while disregarding Muslim history and the diverse forms of religious expression found in contemporary India. As a side effect, this helped reinforce the one-sided vision of the Hindu motherland that the Hindu religious nationalists had meanwhile embraced.

Once more, this conclusion points to the systematic difficulties of trying to chart religious entanglements between Germany and India. The vision that German India seekers developed was essentialist and sustained an extreme form of right-wing politics that proved deadly for European Jews (Stern 1965). The religious views of Hindu nationalists claiming an exclusive right to a supposed primaeval past had catastrophic consequences for Indian Muslims (Van der Veer 2021). Some of these religious entanglements between India and Germany created blind spots on our mental map that are still with us today.

The chapters of this volume address the consequences. To sum up, during the nineteenth century German theologians tried to contextualize the Bible in Buddhist and Hindu texts, while German vegetarians fantasized about an alleged shared Aryan heritage with the Hindus. Indian operas gained popularity among the German middle classes, with the sounds they evoked playing out the cosmic theatre in their heads. Around 1900, the local parishes of Lutheran churchgoers were encouraging them to join a theosophical lodge and take a whiff of other religions. In the 1920s, this led to a veritable craze for seeking religious ecstasy with the help of Eastern religions. The 1930s saw middle-class audiences across Germany gleaning the essence of their Germanness (Deutschtum) from the fluent movements of Hindus dancing to the sounds of Indian orchestras. Nazi scholars bundled selective threads into an Indo–Germanic religion for the German people, while Nazi propagandists in India tried to strengthen their bonds with anti-colonial movements. However, this development has always been a matter of choice. Nothing about it was natural, just as no straight line ever existed.