Keywords

Negotiations about what it means to be ‘German’ proceeded in stages throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and engaged the attention of various actors in politics, literature, the arts, and academia.

Religion entered the debate from the very beginning, both at the level of individual experience and in the search for collective roots. An example of the former would be what Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) described as a sense and taste for the infinite and which Friedrich Schlegel’s (1772–1829) description of the Dome of Cologne captured for the nation. An expression of the latter, for example, was Jacob Grimm’s (1785–1863) Teutonic Mythology (1880–1886), which inspired Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) to use the original meaning of ‘the sun’ as the face of the gods for the ‘Teutonic nations’ and in the Indian Vedas (Müller 1868: 87). Indian religion, whether as an alternative or as common ground, could enhance subjective levels of experience and contribute to a collective construction of national identity. With the scientification of race in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the success of the German Youth Movement at the turn of the century, tensions between the two approaches increased.

Ulrich Linse gave four propositions for why the Youth Movement had felt the need to adopt an alternative culture. According to him, Asian religiosity was needed (1) to increase ‘physical … and spiritual potential’; (2) to resist moves towards a mass society by raising people’s consciousness of themselves as individuals and cultivating a stronger sense of subjectivism among them; (3) to allow a ‘new spiritual aristocracy’ to wrest control from party politicians; and (4) as ‘a political act of resistance’ (Linse 1991: 337, 345, 350, 354). A strong emphasis on people’s education (Volkserziehung), especially in literature, the arts, theatre, and through the popularization of science, characterized the Youth Movement’s subjectivist leanings.

Georg Biedenkapp (1868–1924), a school teacher who introduced the reformist Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) to a wider German public, proclaimed the pedagogical value of prehistoric research for modern society. As he (Biedenkapp 1906: 5) put it, ‘even those who stand entirely on the ground of modern science … need to remember the earlier promoters of mankind, the unknown cultural heroes, and to encourage their children to remember and thereby be grateful’. When the deities of the Ṛgveda are used as role models for negotiating German culture, many interpretations become possible. In my discussion in this chapter on the relevance of religion in determining national identity, I trace the ambiguous relationships between race, experience, scientific knowledge, and aesthetic enactment.

The social performativity of academic language and access to Indian religious history highlights the role of German Indology in this discussion because various actors either exceeded the boundary between university institution and religious field and/or based their argument on Indological research for religious ends.

In the following section, I outline the discipline’s sensitive position in the social and philosophical discourse on the role of religious history and the evaluation of religious experience. When the paradigm shifted from historicism to Lebensphilosophie and the phenomenology of religion, the religious field expanded significantly to encompass any emotion, experience, or everyday practice capable of religious meaning. This discursive formation was open to different modes of objectifying religious life, including the racial life ethics that saw life’s fulfilment in the German nation’s religious self-realization.

I then focus on two actors—Herman Wirth (1885–1981) and Walther Wüst (1901–93). The former resorted to Indological research in his pursuit of original experience, the latter personified the knowledge of Indology in public debates about collective meaning. In the institutional landscape of the national socialist regime, they both prominently represented the ideology of Heinrich Himmler’s (1900–45) Ahnenerbe Stiftung (Ancestral Heritage Foundation). However, to get a better idea of both their impact on public notions of ‘Germanness’ and of the differences in their approaches to this question, I shall concentrate on Wirth’s elaboration of original meaning, the rendering of this meaning in the experience of sensational forms, and the reception of the message in a place called Atlantis House, well before these actors—including a third one, Julius Evola (1898–1974)—began to converge around the SS-organization. In my conclusion, I present a systematized overview of their approaches that also applies to other domains of völkisch belief.

Indology, Nazism, and Germanness

Knowledge of the Other for One’s Own Changing Society

Throughout the nineteenth century, Western academic knowledge of large-scale societies and cultures from outside Europe was organized in various disciplines assembled today under the headline ‘Orientalism’. The role of religion as a social factor in Europe was downplayed and subjected to fundamental criticisms, which led to the ‘disambiguation of religious and secular perspectives’ (Eßbach 2011: 180–3). As a result, it also led to university disciplines like political science, economics, and sociology, which tasked themselves with explaining modern Western society, to presume that all that was neither modern nor Western, ‘to be thoroughly in the grip of religion’ (Masuzawa 2005: 16). This turned text-oriented Orientalist scholarship into a privileged lieu de savoir about alternatives to Christianity—as well as into a vast resource of topics for the critique of contemporary culture and the negotiation of social bonds.

Kippenberg (2002: Chapter 1) points to several pivotal philosophical concepts in this debate, such as society, nature, the world, or the individual. Among them, both Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) and Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788–1860) notions were, in different ways, informed by Indology. The social relevance of Orientalist knowledge was amplified at the turn of the twentieth century when secular sociologists like Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Max Weber (1864–1920) relocated religious cult and prophecy at the origins of sociality and social meaning. The experience of modern society as a worldly affair, implying the free and unpredictable association of individuals, contributed to a general ‘sense of the uncanny’ that posited ‘the problem of the insertion of the individual into the society … inside the horizon of religion’ (Eßbach 2011: 184). The psychologist Ernst Jentsch (1867–1919), who coined the term in 1906, begins his exposition of ‘uncanny’ with the ‘lack of orientation’ that the word unheimlich suggests in the German language: ‘someone to whom something “uncanny” happens is not quite “at home” or “at ease”’ (Jentsch 1997: 8, emphasis in original).

Indology, the academic discipline that ploughed through the ocean of Indian history and collected stocks of manuscripts from the subcontinent, was not free of contradictions. Although most of its members cultivated the ideal of the disinterested armchair philologist exclusively focused on language and textual tradition, the more publicized Indologists always featured imprecise demarcations, shifting designations and multiple crossovers. The famous first university chair of August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) from 1818 was not titled Indology, but Literature and Art History. This fact could actually serve as an argument in a recent debate on the connection between Indology and the romantic movement (Franco 2020; Grühnendahl 2015; Michaels 2015). Friedrich Max Müller, who edited the Ṛgveda as well as fifty volumes of the Sacred Books of the East, is ‘generally considered the founder of comparative religion’ (Klimkeit 2004: 31), which he himself preferred to call ‘science of religion’ (on Müller, see Molendijk 2019). The Protestant backgrounds of many scholars stimulated an approach that turned Hindu texts into ‘testimonies of deep and ancient wisdom that could now also be attained by the Western world’ (Ahlstrand 2020: 85). A student of Indology with science-related career aspirations could not be sure where he (in an exclusively male domain) would end up. Adluri and Bagchee (2020: 91n.3) offer a non-exhaustive list of eight ‘competing terms that have been in use for the discipline’, among them ‘Indo-Germanic’ and ‘Aryan’ studies.

The above two terms, Indo-Germanic and Aryan, originally referred to broad categories of linguistic relevance, but they had potential for other uses as well. These derived from Friedrich Schlegel’s classification of Indo-European languages within a single tradition (Adluri and Bagchee 2020: 91; Franco 2020: 90–1; Kontje 2004: 105–8) and Müller’s classification of language and religion along Aryan, Semitic, and Turanic lines (Masuzawa 2005: Chapter 7). In the context of this study, however, they direct our attention to the era of national socialism and to representatives of the discipline who obviously combined their research with political and religious activities. Such people, for example, would include Walther Wüst, Indologist and professor of studies in Aryan culture and language (Arische Kultur- und Sprachwissenschaft), who was appointed rector of the University of Munich in 1941 and who delivered an inaugural speech carrying clear religious undertones in its title—‘Indo–Germanic Confession’ (Wüst 1942). Another is Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881–1962), a Protestant missionary in India, who then became an Indologist and scholar of religion, and as such became head of the Aryan Seminar/Institute at the University of Tübingen from 1940 to 1945 (on Wüst, see Junginger 2008, 2017b; Schreiber 2008; on Hauer, see Junginger 1999, 2017a; Poewe 2006). Hauer and Wüst both participated, to different extents, in SS and SD operations; Hauer chose for himself the role of scientific consultant, and Wüst replaced Herman Wirth as leading scientific curator of Himmler’s Ahnenerbe. However, given that Hauer also engaged in religious ritual and took on a leadership role in the German Faith Movement, one could raise concerns about the theoretical foundations of German Indology, which made it ‘so susceptible to being harnessed for the most diverse and the most inhuman ends’ (Adluri 2011: 259).

However, still missing is a genealogical approach that traces the use of both terms, ‘Indo-Germanic’ and ‘Aryan’, from their apparent linguistic origins, through to the institutionalization of German academia and its links to the racist turn in the second half of the nineteenth century, and then on to the anti-Semitic angle of national socialism. Over the past few decades, several debates have emerged within and about German Indology, gravitating around topics such as Romanticism and Orientalism (Poewe and Hexham 2015) and estimating the respective weight of scientific method and scholarly biography within the self-negotiation of the discipline (Adluri and Bagchee 2020: 101). They attest to the significance of an ongoing problem.

Example of History or Pre-Eminence of ‘Life’? Religion, the Social Bond, and the Individual

Without diving into a vast body of primary literature, it is important to address the crisis of historicism that restructured the negotiation of religion at the beginning of the twentieth century by introducing a scientific factor into the equation, although not in a way that limited it to a German national discourse. Historicism, an interdisciplinary school of thought that considered contemporary values and norms in the light of their historical development, took ground in the heyday of the Romantics between 1792 and 1815. In distancing itself from the societal ideal of the French Revolution and natural law, the historicist narrative favoured a genetic approach that formed ‘identity by mediating permanence and change to a process of self-definition’ (Rüsen 2005: 15) and thus instructed social and political orientation. According to Müller (1883: 31), who applied the genetic approach to comparative religion, historical education provides

an education which will enable a man to do what the French call s’orienter, that is, ‘to find his East’, ‘his true East’, and thus to determine his real place in the world; to know, in fact, the port whence man started, the course he has followed, and the port towards which he has to steer.

In Müller’s language, historicism reached out from the plane of nationalism to embrace the spiritual and ethical knowledge of the world’s religions. Such language, however, conceals the fact that the study of religious history, particularly Indological research, had already evolved into a ‘battlefield for the religion of the future’ (see Thurner, chapter 4 in this volume). Comparing religious traditions served the contemporary objective of competing for social meaning within a teleological framework. However, as the abundance of religious texts from all of human history replaced the reasonable revelation of the Enlightenment, in Müller’s day, the study of history faced severe criticisms precisely because of its lack of orientation. The historicist balance between permanence and change, closely attached to features deemed essential to nations and/or religions, was no longer able to guide its way through a present that needed, in the opinion of the philosopher Rudolf Eucken (1846–1926), ‘inner solidarity of conviction’, and offered ‘no thought-world which embraces the human soul’ (Eucken 1914: 71; cf. Kippenberg 1996: 92–3). It was another philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who asked in his 1874 essay, ‘The Use and Abuse of History’, for the ‘natural relation of an age, a culture and a people to history’ as a premise of ‘how history can serve life’ (Nietzsche 1909: 30). The current state of the science, according to Nietzsche (1909: 31), entirely disregarded this natural connection, with catastrophic results for the modern individual:

Life is no more dominant, and knowledge of the past no longer its thrall: boundary marks are overthrown, and everything bursts its limits. The perspective of events is blurred, and the blur extends through their whole immeasurable course. No generation has seen such a panoramic comedy as is shown by the ‘science of universal evolution’, history. … Let me give a picture of the spiritual events in the soul of the modern man. Historical knowledge streams on him from inexhaustible sources, strange incoherencies come together, memory opens all its gates and yet is never open wide enough, nature busies herself to receive all the foreign guests, to honour them and put them in their places. But they are at war with each other: violent measures seem necessary to escape the destruction [of] oneself.

Nietzsche’s flowery call to make academic knowledge relevant to everyday life did not remain unanswered, and the ‘crisis of historicism’ gained full momentum after the end of the First World War in 1918. Kippenberg (1996: 96–9) describes how Nietzsche’s notion of life as the will to power directed German Lebensphilosophie and the phenomenology of religion to conceive of religion as a mystical experience. Max Scheler (1874–1928) returned to Nietzsche in 1913, by pointing to a reading that could open many doors. ‘Life is not something that “adapts” itself or is “adapted”. To live is rather a tendency to shaping, to the formation, even to the lordly overwhelming and inclusion of a material’ (Scheler 1972: 315, quoted in Kippenberg 2002: 133; see also Renger 2021: 223–9 on Scheler’s own construction of mysticism between the sociology of knowledge and phenomenology).

At the same time, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) saw ‘the problem of religion’ in terms of a ‘conflict between the claims of the great religions of revelation and reconciliation having power over the soul’ on the one hand, but as ‘culture separating into independent areas of life—worldly affairs, art, poetry, science, [and] philosophy’ (Dilthey 1994: 289) on the other. This constellation significantly expanded the religious field and included competing players, namely the various dimensions of ‘life’, being able to express religious meaning. According to Dilthey, any effective connection with this meaning, its life-oriented causal connection (Wirkzusammenhang), takes place first on the level of subjective experience and secondly through its scientific recreation in the form of objectivation. ‘A comprehension of religious creations through recreation allows for an objective knowledge of religion’ (Dilthey 1994: 289). In the light of Dilthey’s approach, religious history could be used to provide practical options for the contemporary critiques of modern civilization (Kippenberg 2002: 135), with further consequences.

The objectivation of religious history within the phenomenology of religion contributed to the methodological lead of Lebensphilosophie. The first print of Rudolf Otto’s (1869–1937) Das Heilige (1917) included a portrayal—it was dropped in later editions—that intended to provide the reader with a first-hand Hindu experience of the goddess Durgā, introduced by Otto as ‘the great mother of Bengal’. While this attribute is not obvious, it could originate from Otto’s comparisons (Das 2021: 136) that depict ‘the dreadful’ as an expression of the numinous (Fig. 10.1). Otto’s commentary evokes an emotion based on an aesthetic assumption and transforms it, leading to another notion of the object that might acquire practical relevance to life knowledge: ‘the abominable and the dreadful, in primitive images of gods that seem so often repelling to us nowadays, have the effect of prompting genuine emotions of authentic religious awe on the primitive and the naive, even today, and even occasionally among us’ (Otto 1917: 65).

Fig. 10.1
A portrayal of the goddess Durga. A female figure with dark skin, wide eyes, a third eye, an elaborate headdress, and multiple hands, stand with her tongue handing out of her mouth. In one of her hands, she holds a severed head of a man.

According to Rudolf Otto, this image represents Durgā. The Victoria and Albert Museum (London) identified her as Kali. (Sources: R. Otto, Das Heilige (1917, p. 66); https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O432470/kali-painting-unknown/)

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Grounded in an appeal to the reader’s emotions directed by the knowledgeable authority figure of the phenomenologist of religion, Otto’s approach contained a fundamental flaw because, in the discussion on orientation by history, it discarded the explanation of religion out of ethical considerations entirely. Kippenberg (1996: 99–102) points to Weber, who presented a contemporary alternative to Lebensphilosophie as he ‘determined divergent maxims of methodical life conduct’ within ‘a limited number of intellectually justified responses to the world’, which he systematized from the findings of religious history (Kippenberg 1996: 101). Weber’s approach presented a methodological perspective that called for the historian’s ‘reflection on the means that were proven in practice’ (Weber, quoted in Kippenberg 2002: 188, emphasis in original). He thus directed the analytical focus on competing narratives about meaning, on how communicative strategies were employed for generating plausibility, and on how successful meanings continued to provide ‘options with the status of consistent foundations of conduct of life in the disenchanted world’ (Kippenberg 2002: 172). At the height of the historicism crisis, subscribing to either Otto’s or Weber’s position could represent an anticipation of one’s own practical life options (Kippenberg 1996: 101–2).

The Self-Realization of Life Through a Racist Evaluation of Religious Experience

Another voice in the debate, however, combined Lebensphilosophie and its Nietzschean outlook with an ethics that takes life itself as the supreme value. ‘The victory of life is the meaning of the world’ (Krannhals 1936: 3) is a dictum philosopher Paul Krannhals (1883–1934) came up with in 1928, and which was widely publicized between 1933 and 1945 in poetry, on postcards, in journal titles, or in military pamphlets. ‘Krannhals’s … writings on religious problems have been influential in wide circles of the German public and have had an impact on religious ideas and, not least, on political developments’ (Flasche 1993: 44). Nonetheless, given the extent to which Krannhals’s works have been popularized, research on him is virtually non-existent. Flasche (1993: 44–6) summarizes a monograph that appeared in an NS party-affiliated publishing house of the Nordic movement, the Armanen-Verlag (Krannhals 1933), and places him in the field of a national religion. Gossman (2009: 39) sees in Krannhals a ‘political theorist and sociologist’ and situates his ‘immanentist view’ in the circles around Alfred Rosenberg’s (1893–1946) The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930).

Subjective experience and the scientific recreation of ‘life’ proceed, according to Krannhals, through the ‘experience of the whole of nature as an organism … through its parts’ (Krannhals 1936: 404). This sensual notion is strongly reminiscent of a narrative in eighteenth-century pietist discourse that paraphrased the ‘gaze … into the heart and innermost nature of all creatures’—Abraham von Franckenberg (1593–1652) on a vision of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) quoted in Faivre (2019: 82)—as Zentralschau (holistic intuition) and inspired ‘nature language’, or romanticist ideas about transcendence. The pietist topic of the Zentralschau of nature could attract evidence from the sensual modes of certain bodily experiences, for example in mesmerism, and could affect how to conceive social relationships (Hannemann 2020b: 56–7).

Krannhals emphasized the significance of experience as an ‘absolute value’ of ‘religious consciousness’ that ‘subjects the entire tangible world to its evaluative power’ (Krannhals 1933: 1) on the one hand—and, on the other hand, he categorizes the quality of the experience in relation to its scientific evaluation. Scientific knowledge cannot replace the original experience. However, the ‘sense and purpose of the organization of knowledge is to bring us to the living experience of the idea of the whole’ (Krannhals 1936: 404). The organization of knowledge provides for a ‘scientifically based experience of unity’ that surpasses ‘the primitive, pre-scientific mythical experience of unity’ (Krannhals 1936: 403n1). Knowledge facts, if properly arranged around the ‘experience of nature as unity’, clarify the experience: they create ‘diversity awareness’ and allow for the experience to ‘become more and more vivid, to emerge more and more from the blurriness that is called mystical’ (Krannhals 1936: 404). In Otto’s Mysticism East and West (1926), the texts of Śaṅkara (c.788–820) reveal ‘at their core, the view of unity that we stand for’; however, ‘as the ideas of form that lie within it have not yet unfolded’, they belong to the preceding stage of ‘pure mysticism’ (Krannhals 1936: 404–5). Otto’s construction of mysticism unfolds through a contrasting comparison between Śaṅkara and Eckhart (c.1260–1328) (see Brück 2021: 237–43).

In the first 1928 volume of Das organische Weltbild, Krannhals (1936) organizes scientific knowledge with respect to (a) sociology: social bonds within mechanistic society and organic community; (b) political science: the organic state as realization of the German will for life; (c) economics: based on either money or blood as measure and value (see also Gossman 2009: 176n2), with ample reference to Henry Ford’s (1863–1947) Today and Tomorrow (1926); and (d) the place of science vis-à-vis the soul in the concretization of value judgements. The German soul addresses ‘the innermost being of the world as irrational’, affirms Krannhals (1936: 325), thus echoing Otto’s idea of the holy with both an immanent and a völkisch twist. However, since ‘our own law of life is form’, and even more, ‘the essence of the whole cosmos announces itself in its form’ (Krannhals 1936: 331), the soul leads from the perception of form, to its evaluation, to will and aspiration (Krannhals 1936: 354). For Krannhals (1936: 353), life ethics favourably evaluates ‘everything that is useful for the preservation of the individual … the species or the intermediate stages’, which means groups such as the Volksgemeinschaft (Krannhals 1936: 371) or races—the ‘interdependence of Nordic and Eastern soul’ set against Judaism, (Krannhals 1936: 453–4). Accordingly, the second volume features the organization of the experience of nature (a) in the German homeland and (b) in an ‘organic history’ of German arts and architecture. Considered in this framework, (c) religion as worldview and active belief formation through aesthetic experience realizes the self-awareness of nature in reshaping the German consciousness. ‘It is … as if nature, acting upon us as objective destiny, in its unconscious reasonableness, were striving towards our conscious reasonableness, towards our conscious reason, that is, towards its own consciousness’ (Krannhals 1936: 753).

To sum up, Krannhals’s organic worldview takes up a crucial point of romantic epistemology: the ‘subject’s awareness of an object develops and realizes the powers of the object’. It assigns to the ‘artist and philosopher’ who accomplish the ‘self-awareness of nature’ (Beiser 2003: 148), the role of religious experts who guide nature and its organic components towards a teleological fulfilment of meaning. Romantic epistemology derived from a specific discussion that led to an ‘internal teleology’ residing in the concept or essence of nature itself (Beiser 2003: 142–3), thus opening up a wide range of possibilities to project one’s own ideas of salvation into the fuzziness of natural objects. The nationalist leanings of someone like Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, are beyond question—see Tzoref-Ashkenazi (2004); on his view of nature and the transcendence of the German nation in Gothic architecture, see Hannemann (2020a: 106–9). However, the combination of religious history as experience and national socialist ideas of salvation expressed through destructive völkisch anti-Semitism with the aim of total annihilation, as well as in the apocalyptic designation ‘Third Reich’, and its Christian connotations that played out ambiguously (on Adolf Hitler, see Auffarth 2021: 140–3), provided a framework in which a limited number of topics related to Indology could be chosen. Namely those considered meaningful for that particular social and intellectual setting. The question then is not so much to what extent the Romantics gave a leg up to national socialism, but, more in line with Weber’s ‘intellectually justified responses to the world’, how this setting favoured a ‘type of human being that it gives the best chances of becoming dominant, by way of external selection or inner selection of motives’ (Weber 2012: 321), within a world of relationships essentially conceived as struggle.

Herman Wirth and the ‘Arctic Vedas’: Constructing Primordial Aryan Experience and Sensational Forms

The Artist-Philosopher-Prehistorian from Youth Movement to Ahnenerbe Foundation

Herman Wirth was not an Indologist at all, and there had been a wide consensus in his time that ‘the maverick Dutch scholar’ (Gossman 2009: 46) better not be considered part of the scientific establishment (for short biographies see, Pringle 2006: 57–61; Wiwjorra 2017). However, neither his chequered reputation among colleagues nor the apparent ‘conceptual depth’ (Mees 2008: 142) of his claim about the birth of monotheism out of Atlantis, nor the more exhausting intricacies of Sinnbildforschung (literally the study of meaningful imagery or symbols), a term that Wirth himself introduced for the collection and systematization of paleo- and ideographic signs, will be discussed in particular detail (for relevant literature, see Staudenmaier 2013: 28n9). My focus is instead on Wirth’s involvement in non-academic contexts, on how he produced meaning, and on the significance of India-related research topics for his work. Wirth attended courses in German studies, history, folk studies, and music at the universities of Utrecht and Leipzig. In 1910, he submitted his PhD on Der Untergang des Niederländischen Volksliedes (The Decline of the Dutch Folk Song) in Basel (Wirth 1911). After serving in Belgium for the German army during the First World War, for which he incidentally received the title of honorary professor, he joined the Youth Movement in the Netherlands to renew his musical studies and promote Dutch awareness through the Landsbond der Dietsche Trekvogels (Fig. 10.2). In 1924, he migrated to Germany where he initially settled in the university town of Marburg.

Fig. 10.2
A photograph of Herman Wirth, along with a troupe of musicians, seated on chairs in the midst of a garden.

Herman Wirth as a Trekvogel, front row, second from right. (Source: H. Wirth, What is what about the Dietsch Trekvogel? (1920: frontispiece))

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In the early 1920s, Wirth was already directing his attention to the study of prehistoric ‘primordial writing’ (Urschrift). In 1928, with the financial support of Ludwig Roselius (1874–1943), a coffee trader in the port city of Bremen, he published his principal book, Der Aufgang der Menschheit (The Ascent of Mankind), which ran to a second edition and several reprints until 1934. A series of books and articles followed in quick succession, accompanied by intense lecture activity and plans to open a monumental prehistoric open-air show or ‘auratic space’ in which to experience his ‘interpretation of prehistoric intellectual and religious history’ (Wiwjorra 2017: 904). While Wirth’s museum project failed to materialize, his interests in prehistoric culture soon yielded employment opportunities for him as they inspired the creation of the Ahnenerbe Foundation in 1935. He was given his own department, the ‘Pflegstätte für Schrift- und Sinnbildkunde’ (Support Centre for the Study of Writing and Symbols). However, after a brief rise to honorary president, he was replaced in 1938 by Walther Wüst, whose academic credentials turned out more favourable in the eyes of the powerholders.

How to Draw Religious Knowledge from the Dawn of Mankind: India and Indology as Resources for Human Experience

In conveying his research to a larger audience, Wirth suggested adopting a primordial monotheism in which nature converges on Christian belief, in the ‘trinity of God the Father, [that is] His revelation in the three seasons’ (Wirth 1931: 30). The triad of the deity has certain attributes or modes that are highly changeable according to the interpretative context—God the Father, the Son of God or Lightbringer, the Mother Deity, or the All-Mother Earth (Winter 2010: 163–4). Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87) and his theories on prehistoric mother right have undoubtedly contributed to this matriarchal notion (Löw 2016: 222–4; Winter 2010: 168). However, the influence of the Swiss historian goes far beyond that and enters the methodology of Wirth’s Sinnbildforschung (symbol research) itself. Bachofen’s method of deciphering symbolic language distinguished between an original natural symbol depicting material activities and later attributions introducing new readings. ‘Later times did not create further natural symbols, but they instilled them with a new intellectual meaning’ (Kippenberg 1984: xv). Wirth did not hold to the reasoning that ‘symbols refer both to the human realm of drives and a prophetic overcoming of everything natural’ (Kippenberg 1984: xv); instead, he adopted a widespread anti-intellectual understanding of Bachofen that favoured the original meaning. This step forced him to adjust the entire repertoire of symbolism known to contemporary archaeology, palaeography, linguistics, anthropology, and history of religions to the supposed qualities of the primordial source, hence his generally elusive and sometimes capricious readings of the material. He applied ‘identical content to … cultural elements selected on the basis of their external similarities, for he assumed a supposedly unbroken continuity with their tradition’ (Löw 2016: 183).

If that is the case, where did the original model or conjecture come from? In his introduction to The Ascent of Mankind, Wirth highly estimates ‘the Vedic philosophers of India, who, as forest hermits, returned to an ancient Stone Age primitiveness of lifestyle’ (Wirth 1934: 12) and thus made an example for today’s artist-philosopher. Accordingly, the study of Vedic texts would enable the latter to access the prehistoric era of mankind. Academic research on the age of Vedic language, however, carried the ‘inherited burden of a humanistic–theological view of history’, which resulted in the ‘scientific working hypothesis of an Eastern origin of the “Indo-Germanic” original people’ (Wirth 1934: 428). Tilak’s (1903) ‘groundbreaking study’ (Wirth 1934: 69n1), The Arctic Home in the Vedas, assumed a pivotal role in integrating India’s religious traditions into Wirth’s primordial model, in which the origins of both the Indo-Germans and the Americans were located in the north Arctic, the seat of Atlantis. Tilak’s interpretation of the ‘Vedic dawns’ picks up the Taittirīya Saṃhitā 4.3.11, which speaks of ‘Three Maidens’ and ‘Thirty Sisters’ or thirty dawns divided into ‘five groups’ (Tilak 1903: 116–17). These metaphors provide Wirth with similarities to northern motifs in grouping them alongside the three Norns of the Edda and associating them both with the winter solstice and the ‘Ur-Nordic division of the month into six weeks of five days each’ (Wirth 1934: 79). The observation of the sun’s path across the year establishes the primordial horizon of experience which, in the first step of his argument, functions to lend historical plausibility to Wirth’s arrangement of symbols: since twilight reigns in the polar circle for sixty days, a dawn of thirty days implies a ‘more southern origin of that tradition’ (Wirth 1934: 79), thus drawing the attention of the reader away from the ambiguities of interpreting two different textual traditions and towards the supposed evidence of a moment of separation between north and east at some point back in history (Fig. 10.3).

Fig. 10.3
A circular illustration titled Vedic dawns has earth in the center of space. A flat disc around the earth on the equator stretches till the edge of the circle. Text below reads, the sun is about 16 degrees below the horizon. 3 diagrams of directions of Nord-Deutschland, and Am Ganges are below.

Primordial Aryan experience inferred from observation of the sky: an explanation of the Vedic dawns and the changing orientation of the ecliptic in Iceland, North Germany, and India. (Sources: B. G. Tilak, The Arctic Home (1903); H. Wirth, The Rise of Humanity (1934: 69))

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The second step of the argument merges the Indian god Agni with the Old Norse god Heimdall into the manifestation of God’s son within the divine triad, namely the Lightbringer, who is assigned the task of performing the regeneration of life at the winter solstice. Based on the common ground of Nordic–Eastern experience, Wirth confidently unfolds the ‘complete similarity of the myth of Agni with that of Heimdall as local variant[s] of the Atlantean-Nordic mysterium of Yule’ (Wirth 1934: 380, 1936: vol. 1, 442–3). A narrow selection of titles by German Indologists (Deussen 1921; Grassmann 1876, 1877; Kirfel 1920; Oldenberg 1917) changes into an enchanted garden of references, offering the reader a plethora of countless fruits from the trees of mythology, etymology, and ideography. However, their juxtaposition often yields a mixed basket, as, for example, the yātudhāna of Rig-Veda 10.87.10 (‘triple tear the magic spirit’s root’; translated in Grassmann 1877: 367) turns into a rakṣa (demon) mentioned three lines before, for the sake of heroic scenery at ‘the battle against Rakṣasa Indra’, which is yet another instance of the ‘struggle of light with the force of wintry darkness’, or ‘the much-glorified winter solstice myth’. Hence, ‘Agni, the Rakṣa slayer, is asked to tear the triple root of the Rakṣa: the triple root of the tree of life is the winter course of the sun’ (Wirth 1934: 164).

How to Pass on Religious Knowledge in Sensational Forms: Readings of the Rising Sun

The tree of life was a prominent and much-discussed feature of Atlantis House in Bremen. An example of expressionist architecture, the use of this building could be adapted to fulfil multiple functions, whether as a modern centre of science and culture, a gym, or a sanctuary for primordial religions. It was financed by Wirth’s patron Ludwig Roselius and designed by the artist and architect Bernhard Hoetger (1874–1941) in 1930/1. One’s attention is drawn to the Nordic head of the gods, which, in keeping with Hoetger’s treatment of Wirth’s ideas, hangs against the tree of life beneath a metal disk of the sun—a wounded, crucified wooden figure of perhaps Jesus, or perhaps the Agni Lightbringer. In a radio feature, Jacobi (1932: sec. 9, 2) describes how ‘Odin, dying every year at the Yule solstice, establishes a new life. The theme of self-sacrifice for a new life, for a great thought, recurs in all religions’. Marie Adelheid of Lippe (1895–1993), a friend of Roselius and later secretary of the blood and soil ideologist Walther Darré (1895–1953) also expressed the idea of self-sacrifice when quoting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) ‘Die and become!’ (Lippe 1921: 49). This topic is about ‘the new transcendence of the national religion’ and a religious reinterpretation of the First World War that transformed ‘senseless death on the battlefield’ into ‘a sacrifice’ on the ‘altar of the fatherland’ (Auffarth 2023: 202).

On entering Atlantis House between the ‘mighty oak beams’ (Jacobi 1932: sec. 9, 1) of the triple root and performing the ascent of mankind by climbing an ‘unreal’ staircase infused with ‘undersea mood’ lighting (Jacobi 1932: sec. 11, 1), the visitor enters the Sky Hall and proceeds into a ‘dramatic culmination’ (Uhl 2014: 83) of symbolic progression. The aesthetic narrative engages the public because Hoetger’s expressionist depiction of transcendence produces an architectural space of sensational forms that can not only accommodate völkisch thought and phenomenology of religion but can also connect them with the ancient Nordic heritage. As Meyer (2011: 30) put it, the ‘notion of sensational forms does not assume the primacy of senses as harbingers of religious experience, but calls to focus on authorized forms that organize such experience’. This, she claims, is because they are received embedded in ‘semiotic ideologies’ that ‘identify significant categories of signs and define their relations to reality in particular ways that organize the material world’.

Wirth distinguished between three different arm postures of the Lightbringer (Fig. 10.4)—the horizontally spread arms at the summer solstice forming a cross, the downward hanging arms in the ‘sinking half of the year’, and the raised arms, either stretched out in the manner of the light prayer of Fidus or bent into a circle over the head, as a symbol of ‘the restorer of all life’ who appears at the winter solstice and rises during the spring (Wirth 1931: 14–15; see also Uhl 2014: 86). Originally, in 1928, he associated another ‘characteristic’ and ‘cultic’ posture with the winter solstice—‘one hand raised, the other lowered’ (Wirth 1934: 386, 603). This form is later either missing or listed under a cross form (Wirth 1936: vol. 2, 303, plate II). The sensational forms of the Sky Hall featured both variants of the raised arms, with the following description focusing on the circled head. ‘On the shimmering silver front of the Sky Hall there is a relief, the central element of which is a gilded round disc’ (Uhl 2014: 84). See Fig. 10.5.

Fig. 10.4
3 crude drawings of stick figures demonstrate different arm postures. The arm postures include horizontally spread arms forming a cross, or with forearms hanging downwards, or lifted upwards, or arms encircled around the head.

The three arm postures of the Lightbringer, examples from North America (1) and Brazil (2). (Source: H. Wirth, What is German? (1931: Pl. III))

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Fig. 10.5
2 photographs taken in a hall in a museum. 1, 3 dancers dressed in flowing gowns lift their hands above their heads in a stance in art dance. 2, a statue of a human figure with hands raised above the head, which is placed on a high platform. Text on the walls is in a foreign language.

The Sky Hall in Atlantis House with Hoetger’s relief of the Lightbringer in the background. Art Dance (c.1932) and Setup for the ‘Day of the SS’ (1933). Photographs by Rudolph Stickelmann. (Source: Staatsarchiv Bremen 10,B FN 7 370-014; 10,B FN 7 1219-045)

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It encloses another small circle and rests on a pedestal that appears to hover above the horizon; a series of rays emanating from the disk remind one of the movement of an eclipse. One way of appreciating the significance of Hoetger’s relief is to recognize that it is an expressionist rendition of a pictograph captured at Laguña Creek, Arizona, in 1914 and thus a symbol that had been taken from its original social context and instilled with new intellectual meaning (Kidder and Guernsey 1919: 194, plate 90, j; Uhl 2014: 86–8). Its significance within the arrangement of the Sky Hall adheres to Wirth’s statement that in ‘runic writing’,

_ and provide alternate forms ‘for the Son of God as “year-man”, exactly as in prehistoric North American rock drawings’ (Wirth 1931: 15).

In this overall setting, indistinct notions of restoration, self-sacrifice, and the immanence of life were evoked and acted upon, using speech, gesture, or material reproductions that responded to a given context. The traditionalist Julius Evola rejoiced in the sight of the Sky Hall: ‘Sunniness, solar fire, light, lucidity, glory are leitmotifs wherever the memory of the primordial home of a Nordic race in the Far North is preserved’ (Evola 1934: 95; Sedgwick 2004: 98–109). The mimetic appropriation of the arm postures of the Lightbringer took up a ‘main impulse of expressive dance: to grasp the body as the centre of the synthesis of mysticism and modernity’ (Schwaderer 2020: 151). This was to make an Apollonian point against the ecstatic current of art dance, in anticipation of linking the subject with the recreation of original collective meaning rather than enacting its desire for primal orgiastic experience (Fig. 10.5 left; Brunotte 2017: 178–9). A statue of the Lightbringer by Hoetger, now lost, adopted the head-encircling gesture on ‘The Day of the SS’ in November 1933 (Fig. 10.5 right) and set the heroic tone for a motley gathering of academics who followed Roselius’s call to the second Nordic ‘Thing’ (assembly) in May 1934. A few hundred guests, including the Reich minister of food and agriculture Walther Darré, attended the event.

Conflicting Evaluations of the Origins at the Conference of the Coffee Magnate

After publication of Wirth’s (1933) counterfeit edition of The Ura Linda Chronicle, presented as the ‘Oldest Testament’ of the North, his research methods were heavily criticized. He consequently, only a few days before the meeting in Atlantis House, became the subject of a panel debate in Berlin, from which Walther Wüst surfaced as his principal defendant (Simon n.d.). Junginger (2008: 114–19) ascribed Wüst’s support as resulting from a personal conversion. Wirth did not attend the Bremen conference, but two who did, Evola and the folklorist Hans Naumann (1886–1951), mentioned his name while distancing themselves in the same breath. Roselius framed the aims of the conference in terms of a romantic quest for knowledge, to ‘search for distant lands and [to] seize them’, he addressed the ‘men of science, men of art, and men of bold action’ before him, encouraging them ‘to proclaim the essence of the Germanic race’ (Roselius 1934: 7–8). However, the proceedings of the conference show a polyphonic register of differing voices. Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), a ‘devoted ethnographer and disgruntled patriot’ (Marchand 1997: 153), gave an insight into his speculative Ur-histories of the culture circles he placed all over the globe to correlate North and South, East and West in shifting configurations. However, he passed over in silence the location of Atlantis that he had established near the West African coast. Instead, he expected the culture circles to fade away amid the ‘present emotion’ that had emerged among the German people, ‘equal to the creation of a new religion’ (Frobenius 1934: 214). Walther Wüst’s Ur-religion features the Kafiri tribes of the Hindukush, who ‘preserved pieces of Indo-Germanic culture that we can grasp with our hands’ and their creator god Imra who is meant to have revealed ‘basic themes of the ancient Indo-European, Stone Age mystery of the course of the sun’ (Wüst 1934: 161).

His assessment corresponds with mainstream German racial research that the Indologist had adopted in his defence of Wirth (Schreiber 2008: 41–2, 47–8). In general, the Kafiri were supposed to ‘give an idea of the direction in which one may think of the Aryan Indians from India’s early history as deviating from the characteristic image of today’s Hindu populations’ (Günther 1934: 80). As Evola and Wüst were the only contributors who incorporated Indological knowledge into their respective arguments, we will briefly discuss their versions of Aryan primordialism and how they relate to and differ from Wirth’s approach.

Evola’s thought evolved with the early traditionalist school of René Guénon (1886–1951), which, in the wake of the latter’s The King of the World (1927), detected significant traces of ‘Indo-Aryan memory’ of Atlantis in the myth of Śvetadvīpa, the ‘White Island’ (Evola 1934: 95; Godwin 2011: 161). Located in the north and ‘surrounded by the White or Arctic Sea’, Evola associates it with a selection of symbols—swastika, throne, and lion—which, in his view, all point to ‘the transcendent authority of the empire‘(Evola 1934: 95). While at first glance this approach seems to be related to Wirth’s Sinnbildforschung and likewise draws on Bachofen’s categories, Evola turns both the method and the substantive conclusions upside down (Sedgwick 2004: 100). Wirth’s great error, he states, was in ‘attributing the mother cult to the Nordic and the Nordic-Atlantean culture’ (Evola 1935: 192). However, the ‘primordial concept of the rite is most closely associated with the ideal of transcendent masculinity’ (Evola 1934: 96, emphasis in original). Thus, he stresses the origin of symbolic meaning ‘in the transcendent, beyond humans, peoples, and history’ (Hakl 2019: 59), not in the material activities of human beings. His understanding of the transcendent included the leitmotif of male virility and the kṣatriyaḥ ethos as a foundation of holy war. In this sense, the Bhagavadgītā refers, according to Evola, to the ‘solar origin’ of ‘the doctrine of liberation through the pure deed’, which translates the motive of self-sacrifice into ‘death and victorious resurrection’ (Evola 1935: 118).

Junginger (2008: 127–8) points to the growing interest that Wüst took in Evola’s statements at a time when it was obvious that Wirth’s position at the head of the Ahnenerbe was compromised. Wüst’s shift ‘from the voelkish narrow-mindedness of a Herman Wirth to Evola’s aristocratic idea of an imperial Reich’ (Junginger 2008: 135) shows a disregard for ideological consistency—a significant observation that leads us to question the validity of his academic arguments in public. Wüst began his contribution to the second Nordic ‘Thing’ by placing himself within the linguistic parameters of his discipline as expressed in the pairing of Friedrich Schlegel and Franz Bopp (1791–1867). Besides, with the inclusion of Schopenhauer, Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), Goethe and Richard Wagner (1813–83), he referred to the ‘leading spirits of the German nation’ (Wüst 1934: 155). Making a case for Roselius’s question about, as the title states, the ‘Indo-Germanic components of the Ṛgveda and the problem of primal Indian religion’ required not just the philological skillset of Indological research but also an appeal to India-related protagonists of German ‘art religion’ and ‘national religion’—an ‘antagonistic pair of twins’ (Eßbach 2019: 10)—to assist in the following proceeding.

Wüst’s consideration of Indo-Germanic themes in the Ṛgveda calls for dramatic dialogue, since ‘the root of the drama lies in ancient Indo-Germanism’ (Wüst 1934: 157), from the heroic fight and demarcation of religious-ideological differences, to an echo of Nietzsche’s admiring statement about ‘those Brahmans [who] believed … that the priests were more powerful than the gods’ (Nietzsche 1997: 54), and thus the ‘absolute power’ of the priests ‘within this combat area’ (Wüst 1934: 157). In the next step, he establishes a methodological framework for textual analysis, presented as a tentative systematization of Hermann Oldenberg (1854–1920), ‘the master of Vedic mythology’ (Wüst 1934: 159), and his initial study of the Vedas: consanguineous, collateral, elementary, independent, and coincidental parentages build five strata of origin in line with racial proximity. Conceptually, these categories organize philological and historical knowledge by patterns of ancestry: ‘the consanguineous stratum is by and large identical with the Indo-Germanic-Aryan stratum’ (Wüst 1934: 158). Rhetorically, they prepare the listeners to receive Adalbert Kuhn’s (1812–81) ‘famous, not to say infamous, example of κλέος ἄφθιτον’ (Katz 2010: 361), or ákṣiti Śrávaḥ, the ‘imperishable fame’ attributed to the hero both in Homer’s Iliads and in the Ṛgveda – Wüst refers to Ṛgveda 1.9.7 ‘pṛthú Śrávaḥ … ákṣitam’ and integrates the supposed analogy into his argument as a ‘striking example of the consanguineous stratum within the Vedic language’ (Wüst 1934: 158).

The attempt to objectify Indo-Germanic religion proceeds by assigning the Indian gods to one of the five strata. The association of Indra, ‘the personification of the Indo-Aryan will to war’, and Agni, ‘the ancient Aryan god of fire’, with ‘the actual Indo-Germanic stratum’ is ‘a more or less known fact’, Wüst (1934: 159) tells his audience. Passing to his own findings, he then outlines an ‘ancient Indo-Germanic, Stone Age, monotheistic Wheel religion … which used to be erroneously listed under the category philosophy’ and manifested itself with the Sun Chariot of Ṛgveda 1.164, in the cakra or wheel, the sun, and the swan that represents ‘according to the ancient Indo-Aryan view nothing other than the human soul’ (Wüst 1934: 159–60). The series of apodictic statements continues with a rather unexpected translation as the ‘universal preaching [of the Buddha] is no more than letting the word cakra, the German word Jul, be heard’ (Wüst 1934: 160). These readings are no doubt based on Wirth’s commentary on the Ura Linda Chronicle, in which the latter, referring to an invented deity of that book, contemplates the Indian remnants of Indo-German origins. ‘In Indian cult symbolism, the motif of the swan escorting the boat with Wralda’s Yule, the … cakra, has remained popular to this day’ (Wirth 1933: 279). Wüst’s reasoning leads to the above-mentioned religion of the Kafiri, in which Wirth’s mysterium of the winter solstice is performed by the ‘Godfather’ Imra, who, in ‘cutting off the head of a large snake in the spring’, assumes the role of the Lightbringer. ‘The latest measurements’ bolster the argument with the authority of race theory by ‘showing that a high percentage of these people have blond hair and blue eyes’ (Wüst 1934: 161). Unrelated in content but quite relevant to the structure of the argument, the presentation concludes with a tedious calculation of the age of the Ṛgveda texts.

The strategies Wüst adopted in his defence of Wirth drew only partially on the symbolic hermeneutics that ordered the experience of nature in the latter’s work. More important was a salient feature of German Indology, that is ‘how German Indologists constantly invoked the rhetoric of Wissenschaft’ – a strategy, however, that in the given context did not limit itself to ‘claims of German precedence in Indology’ (Adluri 2011: 277). Wüst 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. The authority of science was also invoked to elevate the speaker’s position and put him on par with the leading figures, both of his discipline and of the national religion. The furnishings of the Sky Hall underlined this form of self-exaltation, from the names of Germanic ‘men of will and action’ (Roselius 1934: 7) affixed to the walls—including Martin Luther (1483–1546), Wagner, Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934), and Hitler—to the accompanying exhibition Väterkunde, which featured, among other artefacts, a replica of the Thrundholm sun chariot, to Hoetger’s rendering of the Lightbringer dominating the background.

Conclusion

In the tension between collective community building using national religion and a more individualistic orientation towards art religion and sensational forms, Wüst structures the former when he assembles scientific tropes within racial categories. At the same time, he assigns the meanings of the latter rather arbitrarily, for they seem to fit into his line of reasoning. Wirth and Evola represent different approaches because they try systematically to regulate the experience of sensational forms by setting an original activity that is displayed through the symbolic form, or by the essential determination of the form backed by the unquestionable authority of transcendence. These three ways of objectifying religious life—scientific classification in racial rhetoric, subjective experience embedded in a supposed original meaning, and boundaries drawn along unconditional antagonisms—reflect the condition of the subject facing the control mechanisms of power (Foucault 1982), put into radical effect by the choices available within the political system. The rhetorics of Wüst, Wirth and Evola coexisted, intertwined and in competition with one other, as legitimizing strategies within the national socialist regime, and as a discursive formation that relied on the contemporary debates of Lebensphilosophie, phenomenology of religion, and racial life ethics. Considered as modes of governmentality and as such expressions of national religion, they contrasted sharply with the self-experiments of subjective religiosity so common in the generation of the German Youth Reform Movement (cf. Jonker, chapter 9 in this volume). Nonetheless, the men claimed to address the same need for replacing a sense of profound alienation.

Given the aesthetics of knowledge (Borrelli and Grieser 2019) that branded Atlantis House a location of science, arts and the progress of mankind in the service of people’s education, the dialogue at the conference performed science on a stage while the messages about German origins were simultaneously passed on as body knowledge at the level of sensual and bodily experience in search of a lost continent that could be regained by ascending to Sky Hall (for different, but related strategies of bodily practices, see Hauser, chapter 3 in this volume).

Knowledge about religion in India was key for the various actors competing for relevance, but for different reasons. While Wirth’s vision of the Arctic homeland of mankind could easily focus on European and North American artefacts alone, which for the most part he preferred to do, integrating Indological studies not only allowed him to connect his ideas about Germanness to mainstream linguistic research, but, with Tilak’s ‘Arctic Vedas’, it also gave him a welcome foundation on which to build the original experience of mankind and thus the basis of Indo-Germanic religion. It is even likely that Wirth was already aware of Tilak’s book before he started his own research around 1920 (Biedenkapp 1906), thus prominently displaying the entangled histories of Indian anti-colonialism and the German Youth Reform Movement. As a review in 1904 states, The Arctic Home in the Vedas had a limited but favourable reception in German Indology: ‘it is to be recognized that, from the perspective of an Arctic homeland, Indo-Aryan traditions, particularly the oldest ones, appear in a completely different light from that of the current point of view’ (Klemm 1904: 283).

Obviously, however, Wüst is uneasy with this particular voice. Favouring the leading authorities of the discipline, he passes over in silence the prime evidence of Wirth’s endeavour. His public and career-oriented approach plays out by wielding the authority of scientific method and of fact in general, thus emphasizing the role of Indology, and not least his own expertise, in the construction of those national values that emerged under the conditions of a multi-voiced German discussion about building the components of religious identity and social purpose.