Abstract
D. Theodor Christlieb (1833–89) juxtaposes above what for many thinkers was the essential dilemma of the Wilhelmine era: the oppositional nature of the material — here expressed as pecuniary greed that had purportedly emerged from an increasingly materialistic worldview— and the spiritual domain.2 Importantly, such thinkers as the Darwinist/monist Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Hübbe- Schleiden, whose theosophist vision of India we will explore more thoroughly in this chapter, exploited this material- spiritual clash to forge a model of spiritual rejuvenation and to assert Germany as the potentially better colonizer for the Raj.3 Yet first, I would like to return to the 1870s to explore in greater detail how German Protestant thinkers began to formulate a critical image of the British colonial machine that underpinned these later more concrete colonial/spiritual framings.
Because not just sheer money greed is to blame for the lengthy continuation of evil, rather since it has been acknowledged as evil, also the lack of trust in God, the fearful, human miscalculation of the material consequences, the incalculable criterion of the abundant, divine mercy that rests on every faithful act of selfrenunciation, has also been greatly disregarded.
D. Theodor Christlieb, Allgemeine Missions- Zeitschrift (1877)1
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Notes
D. Christian Gottlieb, “Der indobritische Opiumhandel und seine Wirkungen,” Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift. Monatshefte für geschichtliche und theoretische Missionskunde 4 (1877): 527.
In this chapter I will focus primarily on Hübbe-Schleiden. I have treated Ernst Haeckel’s vision of India elsewhere in “Monistic Visions and Colonial Consciousness: Ernst Haeckel’s Indische Reisebriefe,” Seminar 44.2 (May 2008): 190–209.
Numerous studies exist on the British-German relationship during the era. One might begin with Paul Kennedy’s The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism: 1860–1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980).
The Brahmo Samaj was a religious/social reform movement in nineteenth-century India. For background, see Frans L. Damen, Crisis and Religious Renewal in the Brahmo Samaj (1860–1884): A Documentary Study of the Emergence of the “New Dispensation” under Keshab Chandra Sen (Leuven, Belgium: Department Oriëntalistiek, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1983); also, the second half of Dorothy Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
For the actual text of the speech, see Keshab Chandra Sen, Keshub Chunder Sen in England: Diary, Sermons, Addresses, and Epistles (Calcutta: Writer’s Workshop, 1980).
Also important here is Partha Chatterjee’s brief account of Sen in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Chatterjee writes of Sen’s view of Christianity during his trip to India: “He seemed to suggest that the ideals of reason and rational religion that may have been suitable for Europe were not so for India” (40).
W. Germann, “Der Brahma Samadsch,” Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift. Monatshefte für geschichtliche und theoretische Missionskunde 2 (1875): 146. Germann does not cite the original source of the speech, only the discussion of it from Ch. Miss. Int., 341–50.
Hübbe-Schleiden was a well-known colonial propagator during the era. See his Ethiopien: Studien über West-Afrika (Hamburg: L. Friederichsen, 1879), which recounts his two-year stay in West Africa from 1875 to 1877. Here Hübbe-Schleiden exhibits blatant colonialist discourse based on his more racially charged views about the absence of Aryan roots in Africa. The reader confronts frequent statements in the text such as, “This world awaits the refining breed of a foreign master’s hand” (279); also see his Deutsche Colonisation: Eine Replik auf das Referat des Herrn Dr. Friedrich Kapp über Colonisation und Auswanderung (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1881); and Üeberseeische Politik: Eine culturwissenschaftliche Studie mit Zahlenbildern (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1881). For assessments of Hübbe-Schleiden’s role in German colonialism, see Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus, 121 and 144–47; and Klaus J. Bade, Friedrich Fabri und der Imperialismus in der Bismarckzeit: Revolution, Depression, Expansion (Freiburg im Breisgau: Atlantis Verlag, 1975): 14.
Hübbe-Schleiden, Das Dasein, als Lust, Leid und Liebe: Die alt-indische Weltanschauung in neuzeitlichen Darstellung. Ein Beitrag zum Darwinismus (Braunschweig: Schwetchke & Sohn, 1891): 32.
Ibid., 18. See Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Schriften zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1973): 36, for a more elaborate depiction of this concept.
The phrase “Jewel in the Crown” was coined during the British Rule in India under Queen Victoria (1819–1901), who added “Empress of India” to her title in 1876. See Antoinette M. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
In Philosophie Zoologique (1809), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argued that organisms adapt to their environment by developing characteristics that promote their survival or progress and that these acquired characteristics are passed on to their offspring (transformism). In Darwin’s model, adaptation is not the mechanism for evolution, but rather certain natural traits of an organism provide a better chance of survival and thus are passed on. Change or evolution is thus not the point of contention here, rather only the mechanism. For a concise explanation, see Richard Firenze, “Lamarck vs. Darwin: Dueling Theories,” Reports of the National Center for Science Education 17.4 (July–August 1997): 9–11, also available at http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/lessons/lam.dar.pdf.
Richard Garbe, Indische Reiseskizzen (Berlin: Gebrüder Pätel, 1889): 82–83.
The degree of support for the imperial policies and colonialist agenda of the Second Reich has been vigorously debated. For an overview, see Mommsen’s chapter, “The Causes and Objectives of German Imperialism before 1914,” in Imperial Germany, 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): 75–100.
Ibid. In other passages of Garbe’s text (59) he found no difficulty in lambasting the brutal despotism of the Moghuls and their suppression of Hinduism. Briefly, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, which he explains in his Phänomonologie des Geistes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986): 145–55, suggests that when two self-consciousnesses mirror one another a conflict results and one must win, leading to an unsatisfactory resolution because mastery, in Hegel’s model of self-consciousness, produces an asymmetrical relationship through mirroring the other and therefore becomes self-defeating—that is, the enslaved will eventually defeat the master. For a much more thorough explanation of the master-slave dialectic, see Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), especially 443–55.
Russell Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998): 40.
On Stanley, see Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost; on the Herero struggle against the Germans, see Horst Drechsler, “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (1884–1915), trans. Bernd Zöllner (London: Zed, 1980); on Carl Peters, see Arne Perras, Carl Peters and German Imperialism, 1856–1918: A Political Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004).
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© 2013 Perry Myers
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Myers, P. (2013). Ambivalent Visions of the British Raj. In: German Visions of India, 1871–1918. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316929_6
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