History in the Making: On Sheldon Pollock’s “NS Indology” and Vishwa Adluri’s “Pride and Prejudice”

Taking up a recent publication on the history of ‘German Indology’ is often like walking into a fast-food outlet: you have a basic idea of what you will be served, and to some this may be part of the attraction. With few exceptions, these preparations implicitly or explicitly follow the recipe of Sheldon Pollock’s “Deep Orientalism?” (1993), albeit with the increasing tendency to drop (metaphorically) the invertebrate question mark, as if Pollock’s amorphous presumptions had meanwhile coagulated into hard facts. When Pollock set out in 1988–89 to theorize ‘German Indology,’ it was his declared ambition to adapt the theoretical premises of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978) in such a way that they could also be applied to “German Orientalism,” which Said had decided to ignore—a deplorable “lacuna” in the eyes of some (Adluri 2011: 253), in my view a necessary precaution to prevent his construct from disintegrating before he could complete it. Meanwhile, thanks to Robert Irwin (2006) and others, it has been thoroughly dismantled—a fact Said’s committed adherents may not have realized or choose to ignore. Pollock’s point of departure is the presumption that, contrary to Said’s notion of European ‘Orientalism,’ “as directed outward—toward the colonization and domination of Asia,...we might conceive of...[German Indology] as potentially directed inward—toward the colonization and domination of Europe itself” (1993: 77).


Sheldon Pollock's Presumptions
As Vishwa P. Adluri (2011) rightly notes in his recent contribution to this journal, I have criticized the premises and contentions put forward by Pollock (and others with similar views) in various publications (Grünendahl , 2008(Grünendahl , 2010(Grünendahl , 2012 and discussions, both online and elsewhere. The term "Beweisführung" in the title of my first paper on this subject already contains my critique in a nutshell, which pertains to the question of evidence. In short, I have made it a practice to establish whether a given discourse stands up to the evidence cited in its own support. 3 My approach is decidedly pedestrian, as it were, and I cannot boast of dealing with "mandarin 4 materials"-in fact quite the opposite, as will be seen. A 'history of German Indology in the NS period' lies beyond my scope, and in my view it is of no particular interest, least of all in 'political' terms. The lengths to which Pollock and others must go in order to make it appear politically relevant will become apparent in due course. In the present paper, frequent references to my earlier publications on these matters are inevitable. This is, first, because Adluri made them (along with other critical comments on Pollock's piece) the target of his article and, second, because there is no room here to repeat my earlier discussions of the same issues. I shall first exemplify my approach with regard to two key issues of Pollock's master narrative, and then turn to Adluri's emulation of it.

'Materiality'
The first issue is an echo of Said's basic presumption that the "considerable material investment" of European powers in the "Orientalist discourse" over "many generations" is unthinkable without "very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions" (1995: 6). Pollock broadens Said's stance by conceiving 'German Indology' in terms of a twofold 'materiality': first, "the size of the investment on the part of the German state in Indological studies throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries," 5 and second, "the volume of the production of German orientalist knowledge" (1993: 82)-on which see below (paragraph 1.2.3).

Minerva
As regards the first, Pollock does not specify "the German state" (1993: 82) or the particulars of educational governance and administration he sees at work between 1800 and 1945. As for the crucial "years around 1933" (118n5), he illustrates the supposedly substantial investment of "the German state" in Indology with an unspecified reference to "the Minerva Jahrbuch" (118n5 6 ), a directory of higher education worldwide. However, my examination of the Minerva yearbook for the year 1934, a volume of 1,978 pages, yielded no evidence of the kind Pollock ascribes to it. The only pertinent information Minerva supplies are sixteen (not Pollock's ominous thirteen) bare-bone references to German university institutes (and chairs) with Indological curricula. 7 In most cases, Indology was not even "substantial" enough to feature in the name of the institute. 8 More often than not, Sanskrit was taught at institutes of Indo-European comparative linguistics ('Indogermanistik'), not always by Indologists in the sense of scholars primarily concerned with Indian languages and literatures (including Prakrit, Pali, etc.), as distinguished from comparative linguists 9 whose interest in Sanskrit focuses on language, with little concern for literary content or other aspects of Indian culture.
For a comparative assessment of the supposedly prominent position of 'German Indology' around 1933 I also consulted earlier and later Minerva volumes. Assuming that the purported "substantial increase in the investment on the part of the NS state" (Pollock 1993: 95) in Indology 10 (and Indogermanistik) would have become increasingly manifest during the course of the NS regime, I checked Minerva 31 (1934) against 33 (1938). In doing so, I discovered that within this period two Indological chairs fell vacant, while the overall position of Indology remained as peripheral as it always had been in German academia, contrary to what Pollock would have us believe. 11 The next step in an assessment of the relative position of Indology would be to consider the above data in relation to those for other Orientalist disciplines, such as Near Eastern studies, first in Germany and then in other European countries. This aspect has received scant consideration from Pollock, and others, who operate on the tacit premise that the position of 'German Indology' and its "political economy" is unique-otherwise it would hardly merit their attention. This premise of preferential funding is difficult to maintain in view of the data provided by Minerva 31 (1934). Assuming further-in accordance with post-colonial theorythat this "political economy" should manifest itself first and foremost in 'the metropole,' let us briefly examine Minerva's bare-bone entry for Berlin, which offers the following data (1934, 31:  In short, the name of Heinrich Lüders is all the 'substance' Minerva provides on Berlin "programs in Indology." For comparison, this would then have to be put in relation to similar entries for other Orientalist departments at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, such as Seminar für Landes-und Altertumskunde des Orients, Institut für Semitistik und Islamkunde, Ägyptologisches Seminar and Sinologisches Seminar, the combined staff of which far outnumber the Indological section affiliated to the Indogermanisches Seminar. Another Berlin center of Oriental learning at the time was the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen (SOS), which took care of more practical issues (118-19; cf. below, page 194).
In 1933/34, the Berlin SOS had a staff of no less than forty-five teachers in contemporary Oriental languages and studies, only four of whom (none of them professors) taught subjects relating to India. 12 This evidence alone, 13 from a source brought into play-but apparently not evaluated-by Pollock himself, belies his presumptions of preferential funding for 'German Indology' on every possible count and, furthermore, exposes his statement about "substantial programs in Indology at 13 German universities" as entirely fictitious.

T.W. Rhys Davids
The same basically holds true for the only other source Pollock adduces in support of 'materiality,' namely, T.W. Rhys Davids's paper on "Oriental Studies in England and Abroad," read before the British Academy in 1904. Rhys Davids contrasts "the actual provision made at present in Great Britain for the teaching of Oriental subjects" (1904: 183) with provisions made in other European countries, 14 especially in Germany . In Pollock's brief reference to Rhys Davids, "orientalism in Germany" features only as " Aryan" (1993: 118n5). 15 However, Pollock tells only the part of the story that seemingly confirms his presumptions. Rhys Davids had used the term 'Aryan' for one of three categories in his table of Orientalist positions in Germany. The other two, namely, 'Semitic' and 'Other subjects,' 16 are not even mentioned by Pollock, and understandably so, I think, because they would have weakened his presumptions: Rhys Davids's table (1904: 186-87) lists "fifty-one fully equipped chairs, besides fifty other lesser posts" in Orientalist institutes in Germany; of these, the 45 (not 47, as Pollock would have it) positions in "Aryan" are roughly on a par with 43 in "Semitic" and are outnumbered by 56 in "Semitic" and "Other" combined.
If it had been found in a more advantageous (that is, 'German') context, Rhys Davids's primary division into Aryan and Semitic could have served as evidence of "the antithesis and finally essentialized dichotomy" (Pollock 1993: 82) between 'Aryan' and 'Semite' that lies at the center of Pollock's theorizing of 'German Indology.' Coming from a Briton, it is of little use for such purposes. Here it should be remembered that Rhys Davids's nomenclature in no way reflects the actual German practice: with one exception, 17 none of the German institutes he lists under 'Aryan' contains the telltale term in their name.
One may be tempted to attribute Rhys Davids's choice of term to an English usage that can be traced back at least to an (anonymous) report on "Oriental Studies at Cambridge" of 1871. 18 However, a more important factor seems to me to be Rhys Davids's racialist-or more precisely Aryanist-bias, documented, for example, in statements to the effect that Gautama Buddha "was the only man of our own race, the only Aryan, who can rank as the founder of a great religion" and that therefore "the whole intellectual and religious development of which Buddhism is the final outcome was distinctively Aryan, and Buddhism is the one essentially Aryan faith" (1896: 185), 19 which "took its rise among an advancing and conquering people full of pride in their colour and their race…" (187), who had gradually "Aryanised" (sic) (18, 34) Northern India.
Had similar pronouncements been unearthed in the 'archives of German Indology,' as it were, they would almost certainly have been hailed as the long sought-after proof for Pollock's presumptions. Again, coming from a Briton, they must have been considered less helpful, if not counterproductive, and consequently they are ignored in the discourses discussed here.
Clearly, Rhys Davids in no way corroborates Pollock's presumptions, be it with regard to preferential investment of "the German state" in 'Aryan' against, say, 'Semitic' studies, or with a view to the 'Aryan' leanings implied by Pollock's self-confinement to this isolated aspect of Rhys Davids's 1904 paper. Before turning to questions of ideology, I shall briefly address an aspect of Rhys Davids's paper that pertains to a central point of Adluri's emulation of Pollock's presumptions (which will be further discussed later on). When Rhys Davids contrasts the British fee-based system of university funding with the state-funded German system, he points specifically to the above-mentioned Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen (SOS), founded at the Königliche Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Berlin, in 1887 under the aegis of the Arabist Eduard Sachau, 20 best known among Indologists for his edition and English translation of Alberuni's India. Rhys Davids did not perceive the German system as a rival, let alone as an instrument of German domination (cf. below on Adluri's proposition); quite to the contrary, he recommended the Berlin SOS as a model, a proposition eventually taken up by British authorities with the foundation of the London School of Oriental Studies (SOS) 21 in 1916. It suffices to again consult volume 31 of Minerva 22 to assess the progress made up until 1933, by which time the range of Indian subjects taught at the London SOS by far outnumbered those represented at the Berlin SOS. 23 Thus the truism Pollock's construct eventually boils down to is that the entire educational system in Germany, universities included, has always been predominantly state funded.
My brief survey could be extended to the whole array of Minerva volumes, with much the same result. As was the case with the 1933/34 volume and Rhys Davids's paper of 1904, none serve to corroborate Pollock's presumptions. The same holds for recent evidence-based studies that in any way pertain to such issues (for example, Schreiber 2008), all of which confirms that Pollock's deep ruminations on "the political economy of Indology in Germany in the period 1800-1945" (1993: 118n5) are entirely unfounded. Nevertheless, his attendant admonition that this is an "important question" awaiting "serious analysis" (118n5) has become a kind of gospel, recited by others (among them Adluri) with increasing confidence, 24 but with very little to show as yet in terms of substantiation. Yet, all this while, dozens of 'histories of German Indology' are built on the-still unfulfilled-promises of that gospel, which in my view makes them look rather pretentious. I will venture to say that this system of belief (or pretension), which declares the analysis of some 'important question' an 'urgent desideratum,' cautioning on the one hand that the matter still 'awaits analysis' and a thorough assessment would be 'premature,' while on the other it boldly proceeds in anticipation of its inherent prophecy, has no purpose beyond its own perpetuation. I propose the term 'desideratum scheme' for this discourse strategy which provides the elusive basis of Pollock's master narrative and, by implication, of all the 'histories' that have evolved from it. 25 I conclude this section on 'materiality' with a brief examination of what Adluri has to say on this crucial component of Pollock's construct. It should be noted beforehand that I cannot reply here to every charge Adluri brings against my critique of Pollock, but I trust that in most cases the discrepancy between Adluri's charge and what I actually wrote is evident to anyone who cares to follow up his references to my articles. Adluri (2011: 258) declares it his "main concern" to answer my charge that Pollock fails to provide evidence for his presumptions. I can think of two possible strategies here: either Adluri explains why he considers my examination of Pollock's evidence such as Minerva incorrect (see Grünendahl 2006: 210-14), and then shows that Minerva (or whatever evidence of 'materiality' he may find in Pollock's piece) does after all corroborate his presumptions; or Adluri acknowledges the defects of Pollock's argumentation and undertakes to compensate them with fresh evidence. Adluri however does neither. On the issue of 'materiality,' as on virtually all other points of my critique to which he has taken exception, Adluri confines himself to echoing Pollock's stance without even mentioning, let alone refuting, my arguments against, 26 and he then proceeds to 'confirm' what he calls Pollock's "impression" 27 by means of decontextualized bits and pieces that have no relevance to the issue under consideration.
This pattern is applied twice to the 'materiality' issue. In the plain version, Adluri replies to my critique 28 "that [Pollock's] charges lack evidentiary support" (2011: 264) by merely reiterating Pollock's pronouncements on the supposed "political economy of Indology in Germany," 29 with accompanying variations on the 'desideratum scheme' (265). In the more elaborate version, Adluri extemporizes Pollock's remarks on 'materiality' 30 with the observation: Such matters are notoriously hard to quantify, 31 but Pollock's impression would seem 32 to be confirmed by the German self-understanding, especially as reflected in claims such as "Bonn-Benares on the Rhine" or "Germany-the Second Home of the Vedas"…(280).
That Adluri inflates a couple of trivial metaphors 33 into a testimony of "German self-understanding" gives a good idea of the intellectual force of his argument. That he then employs such trivia in an effort to "confirm" Pollock's "impression" of 'materiality' attests to a pitiable want of judgment as well as evidence.

'Ideology'
The pattern observed with regard to 'materiality' is also apparent in the treatment of the second issue: the premise of an ideological complicity between 'German Indology' and National Socialism.
1.2.1 The making of an 'identity problem' Pollock opens his deliberations on this subject with the following pronouncement: "In dissecting what…has to be seen as the dominant form of Indianist orientalism,…two components seems worth isolating: the German romantic quest for identity and what was eventually to become one of its vehicles, the emerging vision of Wissenschaft" (1993: 82). This axiom of German Wissenschaft as a mere "vision" and "vehicle" of an illusory "quest for identity" provides the basis not only of his "Deep Orientalism?," 34 but also of the entire discourse that evolved from it. If reiteration could compensate for lack of evidence, Pollock's hypothesis of a "German problem" that is basically "a problem of identity" (83) could by now be considered an established fact. 35 Pollock adopted this hypothesis from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's paper on "The Nazi Myth" (1990). However, their reference point "at the dawn of speculative idealism and of romantic philology…" (301) in Germany around 1800 was the discovery of Greece, not India. They philosophize on "the Nazi myth"-"the fashion by which National Socialism constitutes itself" (292)-with express disavowal of expertise. 36 In several steps, and with close reference to Hannah Arendt (1962), they determine that National Socialism is a racist ideology and that "there is no doubt whatsoever that the German tradition, and in particular the tradition of German thought, is not at all foreign to this ideology" (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1990: 295). But the the central question they derive from this assertion, namely, how NS ideology "was able to come into existence, and more precisely, why the German figure of totalitarianism is racism" (296), 37 they find unsatisfactorily answered by Arendt, and therefore proceed to the following "elementary structure, …articulated in two propositions": 1. It is because the German problem is fundamentally a problem of identity that the German figure of totalitarianism is racism.
2. It is because myth can be defined as an identificatory mechanism that racist ideology became bound up in the construction of a myth… [that is, the 'Aryan myth'] (296; emphasis in original).
These "propositions," then, provide the operational basis not only of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's discourse, but also of Pollock's presumption of a German "problem of identity" and its multiple echoes. That Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy can draw no support from Arendt will come as no surprise when we consider that, as early as 1945, she had warned against the "over-zealous experts of the 'German problem' " and their "complete disregard for truth" in "identifying fascism with Germany's national character and history" (93-95). Quite to the contrary: What is true of German political history is even more true of the spiritual roots attributed to Nazism. Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek or Roman.…Ideologically speaking, Nazism begins with no traditional basis at all, and it would be better to realize the danger of this radical negation of any tradition, which was the main feature of Nazism from the beginning…(95).
With regard to the present context it may be added that there is no evidence for the presumption that Indology contributed to fill the ideological void Arendt describes (see below). Unlike the "experts of the 'German problem'," she argued that the monstrosities of the NS regime were not "the consequence of certain German or European traditions. On the contrary, Nazism is actually the breakdown of all German and European traditions, the good as well as the bad" (96). 38 The discrepancy with Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's theorizing is evident and irreconcilable.
1.2.2 The making of "Indo-German as counteridentity to Semite" Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's presumption of a German 'identity problem' constitutes an important component of Pollock's discourse, as we have seen. But their actual "Construction of the Nazi Myth" 39 (and indeed the rest of their paper) is thoroughly inconsistent with Pollock's construct because the setting of the 'Nazi Myth' that they derive from their two key sources of NS ideology 40 is exclusively 'Nordic.' 41 Whatever attention the Indo-Germans/Aryans in India attracted during the NS era was firmly based on the notion that they had come to India from the North, 42 and that all propensities and accomplishments supposedly relating them, however remotely, to their 'Nordic'/European counterparts (simultaneously distinguishing them from earlier inhabitants of India), be it in terms of language, philosophical thought or 'conquering spirit,' were also of 'Nordic' origin 43 and gradually degenerated under the influence of 'Southern' climes and/or races.
These are the constituents of an ideology one encounters not only in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's source texts and other documents of the National Socialist era, but in a wide spectrum of literature ranging from philosophy in eighteenth-century France (Bailly 1779 44 ) to eugenics in twentieth-century America. 45 One may occasionally find it on the Indological periphery, too, especially in colonial England, 46 but I cannot see that it made any significant impact here. It is important to keep in mind that in the above ideological setting the notion of the Indo-German/ Aryan is exclusively 'Nordic.' 47 In order to establish a connection between National Socialism and 'German Indology' via the Indo-German/Aryan, as Pollock undertakes to do, one would need to show how the predominantly 'Nordic' configuration of the Indo-German/Aryan can possibly have evolved from Indology-an issue that has not been addressed yet, as far as I know.
The fundamental flaw of Pollock's narrative is that it hinges entirely on the exact reverse of the 'Nordic' notion. This reversal, which provides the basis for the 'founding myth' of the entire discourse machinery he set in motion, is enshrined in the grotesque proposition that "the Germans… continued, however subliminally, to hold the nineteenth-century conviction that the origin of European civilization was to be found in India 48 (or at least that India constituted a genetically related sibling)" (1993: 77). Even to the Romantic period, this assertion holds only with considerable qualifications, as will be shown in my forthcoming study of Friedrich Schlegel. 49 To make it the basis for theorizing any aspect of the NS period is rendered absurd by the above-mentioned source texts alone 50 (cf. below, pages 218-19).
So what can Pollock adduce in support of the central theme of a 'quest for origins in India' by which the Germans supposedly sought to mitigate their pressing 'problem of identity'? Here another discourse strategy comes into play, epitomized in Pollock's assertion: There is no need to trace further here the beginnings in the nineteenth century of the orientalist creation of Indo-German as counteridentity to Semite, still less the general place of India in the rise of German romanticism, for a good deal of work has already been done on those topics (1993: 83).
The assertion that there is 'no need' to trace the issue at hand any further because the factuality of the matter is sufficiently established already precludes all questions for evidence. Here Pollock puts such questions aside with a nod to four authorities, namely, Raymond Schwab, A.L. Willson, Fritz Stern and Ruth Römer (in Pollock's order), who however turn out to be irrelevant to the above issue, albeit for different reasons: (1) In Stern's (1961) account of "the rise of the Germanic ideology," 'India' or the 'Indo-German' do not feature at all, and in the chapter Pollock refers to, Stern (chapter 1) discusses Paul de Lagarde, who is known as an Orientalist, but not as a Romanticist, and certainly not as an Indologist-a species that does not occur at all in Stern's account.
(2) In Römer's (1985) elaborate contextualization of linguistics and race ideology, Indologists are few and far between, and of the five names she does mention, only one, the Norwegian Christian Lassen (also not known as a Romanticist), features in the chapter on "Die Indogermanen" that Pollock refers to. 51 She associates Lassen with 'race ideology' through his use of the term 'Arier' (not 'Indo-German'), but in a way that inspires little confidence in Pollock's proposition-or in Römer's credibility (cf. Grünendahl 2008: 471).
(3) As for Schwab, it should be sufficiently clear from my earlier comments (especially Grünendahl 2012 52 ) why I do not consider his muchquoted The Oriental Renaissance (1984( , first published in French in 1950 a product of serious scholarship. 53 (4) Finally, Willson (1964) 54 seems to fit Pollock's bill in so far as he focuses on "the rise of German romanticism." However, in Willson's entire narrative F. Schlegel is the only protagonist to whom Pollock's three criteria apply: he is a German, an Indologist in the sense that presupposes some knowledge of the Indian languages, and a Romanticist 55 (although the latter criterion calls for thorough differentiation). 56 Without going into the particulars of F. Schlegel's case here, it should be noted that he is of no help in providing Pollock with evidence for the supposed "orientalist creation of Indo-German as counteridentity to Semite." The oft-repeated claim that his famous essay entitled Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (Schlegel 1808) set the ball rolling by discriminating against Semitic languages ignores the details of his argument as well as his explicit caveat against such polarizations (see Grünendahl 2012: 35).
This brings us to the heart of the matter, namely, Pollock's claim that 'Indo-German' was "largely a Kontrastbegriff, 57 called into being by the social and economic emancipation of Jews" (1993: 82). This claim rests entirely on the authority of Klaus von See (1970), who inspired Pollock with an observation strictly confined to Paul de Lagarde. However, in Lagarde's writings von See found merely a "pale shadow" of the 'Indo-German,' conceived without recourse to "race theory" 58 -or to 'India,' one might add. All of this contradicts, rather than confirms, Pollock's model, which needs the racially defined Indo-German in order to establish the crucial association between Indology and racism, anti-Semitism and National Socialism.
These necessarily brief probings into Pollock's sources of authority already show that the factuality of his above assertions is far from established. No one could be more aware of this than Pollock himself, which suggests to me that his 'no need' stance is designed to distract from the weakness of his case by means of what may be called 'feigned factuality,' the perfect complement to the 'desideratum scheme' when it comes to evading questions of evidence.

The making of 'NS Indology'
On the basis of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's presumption of a German "problem of identity" and the equally unfounded presumption of an "orientalist creation of Indo-German as counteridentity to Semite," Pollock erects a construct in which "there come to be merged what hitherto seemed by and large discrete components of German orientalism, romanticism and Wissenschaft" (1993: 83). This leads him to the ensuing presumption that in the NS era, " 'orientalist' knowledge becomes part of the official worldview of a newly imagined empire" and is invested with a "special function" in the "attempt to colonize Europe, and Germany itself, from within" (83).
If one wanted to ground Pollock's presumptions on evidence, one would first have to outline this "official worldview" and its foundations, pref-erably on the basis of 'official' sources. A hitherto unexplored opportunity to assess "the volume of the production of German orientalist knowledge" (1993: 83) 59 in its bearing on the formation of NS ideology is provided by Das Schrifttum des Nationalsozialismus 1919(Unger 1934, a bibliography of 2,981 entries purporting to represent all titles essential for understanding the "Weltanschauung" of National Socialism from its roots in the post-Versailles era up to 1934, and extended to the nineteenth century with regard to history and "the race question." 60 Remarkably, not a single Indologist comes to light in this wealth of material. The only Orientalist listed is Paul de Lagarde, appearing under the rubric of "Die geistigen Grundlagen und ihre Vorkämpfer," though not in his capacity as an Orientalist, 61 while only one title in the entire bibliography, namely, Hans F.K. Günther's Die nordische Rasse bei den Indogermanen Asiens (1934), 62 actually pertains to India, but not in a way that lends support to Pollock's presumptions,63 be it with regard to the proposed 'Urheimat' of the Indo-Aryans (Günther opts for South-Eastern Europe) or the equation of language and race (which Günther dismisses), to name but two.

'Prehistory' in the making
This conspicuous lack of evidence for the implied impact of 'German Indology' on the official NS "worldview" (Weltanschauung) is reflected, albeit indirectly, in Pollock's pretentious list of "Texts of the National Socialist Period" (1993: 128-29), an omnium gatherum of twenty-six titles predominantly concerned with "(Indo-)Germanenkunde," and seldom with Indology. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of these titles have never been evaluated with regard to Pollock's claims, be it by Pollock himself or others. The fact that Paul Thieme's Der Fremdling im ¸gveda (1938) 64 features in Pollock's list at all, and, what is more, as a token of Thieme's supposedly "unchallenged participation in and acceptance of the Fragestellungen, the thematics, of NS Indology" (1993: 91), 65 speaks volumes about Pollock's scholarship. 66 What else does Pollock's list offer in support of his claims? Concerning the supposed 'prehistory' of NS Weltanschauung, Leopold von Schroeder is represented with no less than three titles, only one of which, Arische Religion , relates to Indological subjects, though not in a way that justifies Pollock's conclusion (see Grünendahl 2006: 218-19;cf. also Werba and Griffiths 2006).
Apart from that, von Schroeder only finds mention in Pollock's quote from a 1940 planning memo by chief NS ideologue Alfred Rosenberg concerning an "Institut für arische Geistesgeschichte" to be founded in Munich. 67 In it, Rosenberg names "L. v. Schröder: 'Indiens Literatur und Kultur,' Böthlingk 68 'Indische Sprüche,' Schacks Gedichtübersetzungen usw." 69 as vital for "the National Socialist Weltanschauung" 70 and recommends them for republication. What relevance Böhtlingk's collection of subhå‚itas and von Schroeder's lectures on literary history-cum-anthology could possibly have in this regard 71 is not imparted by Rosenberg, nor by Pollock 72 -who tacitly drops Rosenberg's third reference concerning the poetic renditions of Adolf Friedrich von Schack (1815-94), poet, translator, 73 historian of belles lettres and art collector. To include von Schack would definitely have shifted the focus away from Indology, which is where Pollock needs it to remain in order to utilize Rosenberg's memo as evidence of the supposedly all-pervasive antithesis (Indo-) German/Jew.
In the lines preceding Pollock's quote, Rosenberg envisages the "dissemination of the Indo-Germanic spirit" 74 in categories that are clearly at variance with those Pollock presumes, 75 and even the passage Pollock does quote can be brought to bear on his central 'antithesis' only by means of textual engineering: Rosenberg had seen the task of the projected institute in strengthening "the European consciousness" (not a specifically 'German consciousness') by increasing the awareness of Indian and Iranian thought; in view of "the sinking of the entire Palestinian [gesamtpalästinensische] tradition, a more ancient and far more venerable one" had to be "freed from burial" (Verschüttung). Pollock's translation of the crucial sentence 76 reduces 'gesamtpalästinensisch' to 'Jewish,' although it clearly comprises the Christian (and perhaps also the Islamic) tradition, and renders 'Verschüttung' as 'concealment,' which gives it the sense of secretive disguise, as if Rosenberg had seen conspiracy at work, where in fact he clearly coins a 'geological' metaphor of subsidence (Absinken) and sedimentation (Verschüttung).
Pollock crowns his Rosenberg quote with the observation: "Motives are not always easy to discern, no doubt. All we can know is that between this scholarship and basic ideologemes of the NS state there is distinct congruence; what we need to know is what made this congruence possible and how it worked" (1993: 95-96). If we take Pollock's 'Fragestellung' as more than a rhetorical question (or just another variation of the 'desideratum scheme'), the answer should be quite clear: what made the 'distinct congruence' between 'basic ideologemes of the NS state' and the (Indological) scholarship of Böhtlingk and von Schroeder possible here is Pollock's textual engineering, 77 and we have just seen 'how it worked.' What Pollock offers is not "all we can know," but certainly all he wants us to know, and perhaps his motives are not difficult to discern either, but that will not concern me here (cf. below).
As for von Schroeder, it should be kept in mind that his fanciful works featuring on Pollock's blacklist 78 were exactly those (among others) that had damaged von Schroeder's reputation as an Indologist, and not only in the eyes of Hermann Oldenberg and Erich Frauwaller (both of whom will occupy us further on). As may be expected, Pollock narrows his focus to von Schroeder's supposed 'Aryanism,' be it directly, as in his associative play with the title Arische Religion (above, page 202), 79 or indirectly, via his biographical sketch of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Schroeder 1918).
As a matter of fact, Pollock shifts a major part of the burden of proof onto Chamberlain, although-for reasons that will soon become apparent-his name does not appear on Pollock's blacklist. Chamberlain enters at the beginning of Pollock's chapter bearing the portentous title "Ex Oriente Nox: Indology in the Total State" (1993: 86-96), where he is portrayed as a prominent pronouncer of the crucial message: In the later NS search for authenticity, 80 Sanskritists, like other intellec-tuals…did their part in extrapolating and deepening this discourse [of 'Aryan origins' 81 ]. They finally would heed the words of the nineteenthcentury proto-fascist (and 'Wahldeutscher') Houston Stuart Chamberlain: "Indology must help us to fix our sights more clearly on the goals of our culture. A great humanistic task has fallen to our lot to accomplish; and thereto is aryan India summoned" (86).
Pollock presents the quote as an (unspecified) passage from Chamberlain's Arische Weltanschauung (1905). Pollock's construct presupposes, among other things, that his (equally unspecified) 'Sanskritists' took notice of Chamberlain's call (a point to be discussed later on), and that questions of Indo-German/Aryan origin, 'Urheimat,' 82 and so on, really concerned them. In this case one would expect these questions to feature prominently in their writings, which however is not the case, contrary to what Pollock would have us believe (cf. Grünendahl 2006: 217). But there is another argument against this construct, that being that it is built on a falsified quote: where Pollock has "Indology must help us…," Chamberlain's text reads "Der Indoarier muß uns helfen…" (1905: 25; emphases added). 83 What Chamberlain may have had in mind with this (restored) pronouncement remains to be explained by those who are determined to hold on to the belief that it can be related to Indology in some way (other than by manipulation). This is not the only such instance that has been observed in Pollock's narrative over the last six years, 84 but it carries special weight because it invalidates a crucial point of his argumentation. Together with the patent lack of evidential support, it should have raised doubts about the stability of his entire construct. So it may be asked, what has kept it intact all this while? The answer is mainly ignorance, I think, in both its passive and active form of not knowing and not wanting to know. Adluri provides an opportunity to watch both forms in operation.
To give an example of the passive variety, I assume in Adluri's favor that he is ignorant of the gurupara parå of the contemporary Indologists he tries to discredit with all sorts of associations; that he did not know what he was talking about when he suggested that Frauwallner's mention of "Prof. Wüst's department" 85 refers to the 'Ahnenerbe' (2011: 276) 86 ; and that he is equally unaware that his discourse is inconsistent not only with the well-documented history of Indology in Germany, but also with Pollock's master narrative (on which more below).
An example of active ignorance is his blatant indignation at my charge concerning Pollock's "doubtful citational praxis," which he dismisses as an "ad hominem attack" (Adluri 2011: 260) without giving the issue itself the slightest consideration, let alone disproving my argument. The case Adluri takes exception to here is my observation that a passage Pollock quotes as proof of Frauwallner's adherence to the "NS doctrine" concerning the "racially determined talent" of the "nordic Indo-Germans" (1993: 93-94) is actually a quote Frauwallner adduces from the Semitist Wolfram von Soden (Grünendahl 2006: 232;cf. below, pages 212-16). My other pertinent charge concerning his arguably more dubious Chamberlain 'quote' (discussed above; Grünendahl 2008: 464) goes unmentionedand, of course, unchallenged-although Adluri must have known it from my 2008 paper.

'NS Indology'
With the Chamberlain 'quote' thus rendered worthless as proof of the presumed involvement of 'German Indology' in the prehistory of NS ideology, it may now be asked what evidence Pollock adduces from the NS period itself.
His basic charge is that 'German Indology' inspired and accorded quasiscientific status to the National Socialist ideology and its division of the world into "betters and lessers" (Pollock 1993: 77;Adluri 2011: 254)that is, into Indo-Germans/Aryans and Semites/Jews. Pollock purports to show "how German Indologists qua Indologists, by means of their specific epistemological tools and sense of scholarly purpose as Indologists, helped to effect the 'fascisization' of Germany Indologically," and thus are implicated in the National Socialist genocide (1993: 88; emphasis in original). He contends that NS ideology "relied, more than any other state doctrine in European history, on the putative results of scholarlyarchaeological, philological, anthropological, Indological-research" (88). Against this purely hypothetical contention it may be argued that when it comes to the central issue-race-National Socialists would rather rely on the criterion of 'blood' than on science (see Grünendahl 2008: 472-73).
If one were to follow Pollock's contention, one would have to assume that, in order to have a formative influence on NS ideology, 'German Indology' must have supplied its "putative results" before the formal declaration of this ideology, that is, before Hitler's programmatic speech of 1920, entitled "Warum sind wir Antisemiten?" (cf. below, page 218). Not one of the titles on Pollock's blacklist, Indological or other, meets this basic chronological criterion (apart from those by von Schroeder previously discussed). Of the total of sixteen authors, eight can be considered Indologists, including Paul Thieme, who should not have been drawn into such a context, however desperate Pollock's want of evidence (cf. above, page 202). Little remains when the list is cleared of double entries, 87 derivatives, 88 minor writings and so on, and even less is of any 'political' relevance (cf. Grünendahl 2006: 217-18). Moreover, Pollock cannot even adduce incriminating publications for all the eight NSDAP members that he presents.
Whether these (or other) writings of Pollock's list of suspects actually supported or endorsed not only NS ideology in general, but anti-Semitism in particular-the central tenet of his construct-is yet another question, which would have to be decided on the basis of their publications; more specifically their Indological publications, because in all of this it is important to remember that Pollock proposes to focus on the complicity of "German Indologists qua Indologists." The question whether they were party members is an issue of "Personalpolitik" which he himself considers "peripheral" (1993: 78). Thus the parading of membership numbers alone cannot be counted as proof of his contention. But, surprisingly perhaps, the corroboration of this central issue by verifiable evidence has made little, if any, progress beyond Pollock's dubious presumptions and insinuations of 1988-89/1993.
Adluri indirectly acknowledges the persisting dearth of evidence with another sample of the 'desideratum scheme,' combined with an implicit proposal to switch from an ad rem to an ad hominem strategy: "Much work still needs to be done here, especially concerning the personal biographies of many of these Indologists" (2011: 265). In this regard, for once, Adluri ventures to depart from Pollock's model.

Walther Wüst
One would assume that Walther Wüst's political speeches of the period, collected in his Indogermanisches Bekenntnis (1942), should yield rich evidence in support of Pollock's 'NS Indology.' After all, Wüst was a high-ranking officer of the 'cultural' branch of the SS Ahnenerbe Foundation. 89 Yet, his writings of the period have received remarkably little attention from Pollock and others, apart from the odd decontextualized snippet thrown in here and there. A closer look reveals that Wüst's 'political' discourse may occasionally include excursions to "Indoarien," that is, India and Iran, 90 but his focus always remains firmly on the "Westindogermanen" of Europe 91 and their 'Nordic' character and origin. 92 When he does make any mention of Indology in the Indogermanisches Bekenntnis, it is in the endeavor to steer it away from philology and reshape it according to 'political' premises (see Grünendahl 2006: 212-13;cf. also Wüst 1939). In fact, Wüst's publications of the time are so dominated by '(Indo-)Germanenkunde' that one of Pollock's sources of authority, Klaus von See (see above), perceives him as an "Indogermanist" (1970: 77)-which, it should be added, does rough justice to Indogermanistik, too.
This reveals Pollock's fundamental misconception, if not deliberate misrepresentation, encapsulated in his assumption of a "propriety and need Wüst felt of legitimating the NS Weltanschauung by anchoring it in an ancient Indian darçana" (1993: 91). Quite to the contrary: whatever "erbverwandte Dauerüberlieferung" (hereditary long-term tradition) Wüst may have found in his monstrous comparison of Buddha and Hitler, 93 or in other comparisons between 'Indoarien' and 'Westindogermanien,' always served one purpose alone, namely, to prove the continuity of the traditions these Aryans had supposedly brought to India from their 'Nordic' home. Consequently, Wüst's aim cannot be to 'anchor' his Weltanschauung in an "ancient Indian darçana," but rather to show that this Weltanschauung was an integral part of the "racial constitution" (Rassenanlage) of the Aryans, which they took with them wherever they migrated. Wüst conceives the "Indian darçana" in question-Buddhismas a manifestation of this profoundly 'Nordic' constitution, later superseded by the influence of Southern climes and/or races (cf. above, page 199).
Such notions, which, as we shall see, are by no means specific to NS ideology, explain why Wüst's interest in India and Iran is strictly confined to what he conceives as their 'Aryan' testimony 94 : Aus der Bestimmung des Begriffes "arisch" ergibt sich, daß wir auch innerhalb des arischen Schrifttums mit zwei geschwisterlichen Quellströmen zu tun haben, mit dem iranischen und mit dem indoarischen. Der indoarische wird vornehmlich aus den vedischen Brunnenkammern gespeist, dem Rigveda, seinem wichtigsten Nachbarn, dem Atharvaveda, sowie dem Yajurveda… (Wüst 1934(Wüst : 732 = 1942 It is here, according to Pollock, where "Wüst brings to bear the full and ponderous apparatus of philological and historical Indology" in order to testify that the ancient åryas of India were those who felt themselves to be the "privileged, the legitimate" (Wüst's interpretation of årya) because they established the superiority of their race, their culture, their religion, and their worldview in the course of struggle with host populations (1993: 89).
What Pollock does not mention is that Wüst brings the "ponderous apparatus" to bear on this issue twice, and with different results. In the 1934 version quoted by Pollock, Wüst renders årya as 'Bevorrechtete,' 'Rechtmäßige,' 'hervorragend Strebende' (731). In the version presented as a speech to the Deutsche Akademie in 1939 and published in Indogermanisches Bekenntnis (1942), Wüst abandons the notion of the Aryan as 'privileged' that served Pollock's purpose so well and interprets årya as 'den in der Pflugzeile geradlinig Strebenden, den Adelsbauern' (34); an interpretation probably inspired by an etymology first proposed by F. Max Müller in 1854, albeit without Wüst's rhetorical bombast and without the ideologically motivated intention to turn the nomadic cattle herder into a domestic (seßhaft) "Adelsbauer." 96 It is the racial aspect that Pollock then accentuates with the note that Wüst had designated the ¸gveda "as an Aryan text 'free of any taint of Semitic contact ' " (1993: 89). This may easily be mistaken for a Wüst quote because Pollock does not indicate that it is in fact a snippet of a passage Wüst in turn cites from Chamberlain's Arische Weltanschauung (1905: 29), 97 his principal authority in this speech. The longest of Wüst's six quotes, prominently placed at the end of his oration, provided the raw material for Pollock's manipulated Chamberlain 'quote' (above, page 204). In continuation of a diatribe on traditional philology 98 (not quite what we were led to expect from Wüst by the likes of Pollock), Wüst closes with the following plea for a 'new Indology' that should be firmly centered in the here and now, like that of the more practically minded "cousins across the Channel": Nehmen wir uns ein Beispiel an den Vettern jenseits des Kanals, die unbeirrbar das betreiben, was das Indian Empire von Heute als Arbeit ermöglicht, was das Indian Empire von Heute fordert. Aber vielleicht verhallt meine Stimme ungehört. So hole ich mir denn als Nothelfer und Zeugen den heute vielbeschworenen prophetischen Menschen, der die Indologie, wohlweislich des 19. Jahrhunderts, "keine tote, in die geistlose Betrachtung von Präfixen und Suffixen ihr Ziel setzende Philologie" genannt hat, der "Jugend und Hoffnungsfreudigkeit durch ihre Schriften" wehen spürte, der sie mit den verpflichtenden Worten gefeiert hat: "Die Indologie, aus dem Leben geboren, führt zum Leben zurück." Der Mann, der so urteilte, ist Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Er mahnt uns, von Bayreuth her: "Man vergesse das eine nie: nur durch Denken kann Denken befreit werden; wer nicht den Mut und die Ausdauer besitzt, die Gedanken des Denkergeschlechts der Arier nachzudenken, der ist und bleibt ein Knecht, gleichviel, woher er stammt, denn er ist innerlich unfrei, blind, erdgefesselt….Der Indoarier muß uns helfen, die Ziele unserer Kultur deutlicher ins Auge zu fassen….Ein großes humanistisches Werk bleibt noch an uns zu vollbringen; dazu ist das arische Indien berufen" (1942: 49-50).
Wüst's punctuation clearly indicates that his quote is the result of some redactional work. The crucial last two sentences were taken from pages 25 and 3 (in that order) of Chamberlain's Arische Weltanschauung. Incidentally, Pollock's 'quote' presents them in exactly the same order as Wüst had put them, only without the dots he inserted to indicate the gap. Pollock's Chamberlain 'quote' thus actually turns out to be a 'Wüst quote,' except for the manipulation, which goes to show that Pollock's trick works both ways-and that it can be quite helpful in making history.
To assume that Chamberlain's ideas about Indology ever found any resonance among Indologists is as absurd as to propose that a random "catalog of commonplaces," which Pollock gathers from Wüst, Chamberlain and so on, by the means just described, is "characteristic of a great deal of Indological work of the period," motivated (predictably) by the "search for German identity and NS self-legitimation in the Aryan past" (Pollock 1993: 89). In fact, Wüst himself did not reflect Chamberlain's words, or his own echo of them, in his scholarly publications. This corroborates Michael Kater's (2001) observations 99 on Wüst's conservative attitude as a university professor and rector, but also on his ongoing concern about the academic standard of the 'Ahnenerbe.' 100 Maximilian Schreiber's study of Wüst's official role as dean and rector of the University of Munich 101 also yields no support whatsoever for Pollock's presumptions. 102 Wüst's recommendation of a more practical approach, shaped after the model of the "cousins across the Channel," clearly turns the table on the issue addressed in Rhys Davids's paper of 1904. Rhys Davids had sparked a significant development in England, culminating in the foundation of the London School of Oriental Studies, an institution firmly centered in the here and now, like its erstwhile Berlin model, the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen. Now Wüst in turn advocates the British approach as a counter-model to philology-based Indology in Germany. The fact that Wüst made this proposition in 1939, and that he republished it in 1942 and 1943, is an aspect to which we shall return later on.
This pastiche of snippets from Wüst and/or Chamberlain, enriched by largely unsubstantiated claims about, and decontextualized bits and pieces from, various works, directly feeds into yet another example of the 'desideratum scheme,' coupled with the unsupported assertion that a "flood" of further evidence could be adduced from other (unnamed) sources: Requiring more complex theorization 103 are those texts-issuing in a flood after 1933-that, without any overt commitment to National Socialism, 104 fully embrace the terms of its discourse by their unchallenged participation in and acceptance of the Fragestellungen, the thematics, of NS Indology (Pollock 1993: 91).
Pollock then adduces the 1936 Festschrift for the Indogermanist Herman Hirt in proof of his claim that "the question of the Urheimat (the original home of the Aryans)" was a "focal point of Indological work during the NS period" (91). As pointed out elsewhere (Grünendahl 2006: 217), the Festschrift Hirt contains not a single Indological contribution, and the 'Urheimat' question never occupied Indologists in Germany in any significant way.
While Pollock's flood narrative remains rather opaque, the Dutch Indologist Jan E.M. Houben tries to give it some substance with a bold claim, offered in his afterthoughts on the 1995 German Orientalist Conference (Deutscher Orientalistentag) in Leipzig, entitled "Promising Continuity with a Discontinuous Past." Under the rubric "Vergangenheit Bewaltigung" (sic) he declares that "the positive relations which some Indologists at least maintained with the German government and its disastrous ideology of the 'pure Aryan race' before and during the period of the Second World War period" were borne out by "selected articles and notices of the volumes 92-98 (1938-44) and 99 (1945-49) of the Zeitschrift für die Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft" (sic), among other things. However, in my reading of the approximately fifty Indological contributions to the said volumes of the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (Grünendahl 2006: 222-31) amounting to some seven hundred pages, I have found virtually nothing that could implicate Indologists in a "disastrous ideology of the 'pure Aryan race'." 105 The only Indological items that at least fit Houben's bill in that they deal with 'Aryans' and 'race' are two short contributions by the Austrian Indologist Erich Frauwallner. Although Frauwallner was a member of the NSDAP, and although he clearly defines the Aryans as a race invested with specific traits, the four pages he contributes to the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft during the said period offer nothing that could justify Houben's contention. Consequently, Houben's claim to 'evidence' must be considered fictitious. This is what I pointed out in my article of 2006, as well as in the online debate with Houben and like-minded members of the Indology list that Adluri refers to (2011: 257). In this debate, too, no proof was produced by Houben or other participants (except of their commitment to standards of academic debate).

Erich Frauwallner
There is no room here to repeat the details of my observations on Pollock's treatment of Erich Frauwallner, but since they have received some attention from Pollock's champions, I may be allowed a few more words.
Pollock assigns special significance to Frauwallner. 106 His main reason for doing so is Frauwallner's "[reiteration of] an axiom of NS doctrine, that 'Wissenschaft in the strict sense of the word is something that could be created only by nordic Indo-Germans' " (1993: 93-94). Pollock does not intimate the details of the presumed ideological connection but in general, a compatibility between NS ideology and the notion of the predominantly 'Nordic' character of the 'Indo-Germans' and their supposed propensity towards philosophy can be assumed. However, Frauwallner himself introduces this notion not as an axiom, but as an assertion ("Behauptung"), and not of his own making, but as a quote from the Semitist/Assyriologist Wolfram von Soden. Frauwallner feels inclined to agree "on the basis of observations made so far." 107 Following the by now familiar pattern, Pollock gives no indication that the source of this supposedly crucial evidence is not the Indologist Frauwallner, but the Assyriologist von Soden. In my article of 2006 I confined myself to pointing out Pollock's manipulation of sources, without giving further thought to the article in question or to its author von Soden, be it as a Semitist/Assyriologist or a homo politicus. 108 In view of a recent publication by Jakob Stuchlik (2009), 109 which suggests that von Soden had practically anticipated Frauwallner's (or rather Stuchlik's 110 ) 'arischer Ansatz' (42-45, and passim), a revision of the issue may not be out of place.
Stuchlik defends Pollock's piece against my critique with grand eloquence, but without attending to a single point I addressed in my 2006 article. 111 But then, Stuchlik shows a similar indifference towards the particulars of Pollock's argumentation, and consequently, the manipulation of the von Soden quote finds no mention in Stucklik's narrative, which hinges entirely on select snippets from three pages of von Soden's (1936) lengthy paper. 112 In view of this narrow basis, Stuchlik's ambition to construct an ideological affinity between von Soden and Hitler is indeed awe-inspiring. In this endeavor he dismisses as 'flourish' (Floskeln) what von Soden had clearly intended as caveats against taking the supposed achievements of the 'Nordic' Indo-Germans as an entitlement "to look down in arrogance upon peoples whose dispositions in this respect have led them a different way" (1936: 556). 113 That is not all; von Soden goes on to comment on the basic hermeneutic problem all such comparisons between intellectual achievements are faced with, 114 yet Stuchlik presents the remark in such a way that it implies the opposite of what von Soden intended: [Von Soden] warnte jedoch davor, auf Grund dieser "Erkenntnis" anderen "Völkern" gegenüber unhöflich zu werden, zumal die "fremden Leistungen"…nicht wirklich erkannt werden könnten. Mit seiner Warnung sprach er Hitler und allen anderen Nationalsozialisten… bestimmt aus dem Herzem (2009: 45).
Clearly, these concluding words of warning are irreconcilable with the picture Stuchlik tries to paint, and therefore they have no place in his deliberations or in those of like-minded critics of von Soden.
As for the actual contents of von Soden's message, his notions of the Indo-Germans, their 'Nordic' origins, disposition, and so on, are not specific to NS ideology. As is well known (and has been mentioned on earlier occasions), they can be traced back to Arthur de Gobineau and other race theorists of the nineteenth century, and a Semitist like von Soden could easily have adopted them from Ernest Renan, for instance.
Pollock had left his readers to imagine how von Soden's wordspresented as Frauwallner's-can serve as evidence of an Indological contribution to the 'division of the world into betters and lessers' or to the 'domination of Europe.' Here it should be noted that in the authentic parts of Pollock's rendition Frauwallner's perspective is European, not specifically German. 115 Thus none of Pollock's arguments holds water. Yet, this is all he produces in support of his proposition that "Indian knowledge" served as a prop of 'Aryan identity' and the ensuing claim that "The very raison d'être of Indology for Frauwallner, as it seems to have been for so many scholars of the period, 116 is fundamentally conditioned by this racialism" (1993: 94). 117 Predictably, Pollock does not intimate how many such scholars he has encountered, who exactly they were and how they expressed their racialist convictions, all of which effectively precludes further debate.
Contrary to Stuchlik, Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz (2010: Preface) choose not to trace Frauwallner's racialism back to von Soden, 118 although they are well aware of the connection borne out by Frauwallner's reference. They are also aware that I criticized Pollock for removing the reference to von Soden and thus framing the quote into proof of Frauwallner's own 'racist' conviction. However, they confine themselves to the curt remark that I had "also adduced this quote by Frauwallner," albeit in a "muddled and awkward attempt to exonerate Frauwallner from the charge of complicity with National Socialist ideology." 119 As for the latter contention, I have no reason or cause to either indict or exonerate Frauwallner. What Franco and Preisendanz choose to ignore is that my case was not about Frauwallner (or von Soden), but about Pollock's manipulation of sources, among other inconsistencies in his discourse, all of which they carefully avoid to even mention, which leaves their readers without a clue as to why I "also adduced this quote" by von Soden in the first place.
Coming from Franco, a (former) assistant on "Professor Sheldon Pollock's project on Indology during the time of National Socialism in Germany" (cf. Franco 2004: vii), such criticism carries special weight, and I would have considered it a privilege to provide further comments and examples. However, my critics do not give a concrete reason for their discontent. Their critique seems self-contained in that it obviously needs no explication and offers virtually nothing of substance to relate to. 120 Only later, when they declare their allegiance to Pollock's master narrative with an impressive reiteration of the 'desideratum scheme' and a barrage of adjectives in lieu of serious arguments, 121 it emerges that their critique has a point after all, albeit one that does not call for further attention here.
As committed champions of Pollock's ideas they are bound to favor a flawless 'Indological' pedigree for Frauwallner's racialism, an objective that is not easy to achieve, as Pollock's efforts show. Franco and Preisendanz's candidate of choice for the role of Frauwallner's ideological patriarch is Hermann Oldenberg. In Stuchlik's narrative (2009: 43) Oldenberg only played a minor part in connection with von Soden's reference to Oldenberg's Vorwissenschaftliche Wissenschaft (1919). 122 Franco and Preisendanz (2010: xxvii-xxviii) place him center stage with an extensive quote adduced from his Die Literatur des alten Indien (1923), a literary history written for the educated general readership of the Deutsche Rundschau. 123 This they present as an "example" in support of their hypothesis that Oldenberg "seems to have been an immediate inspiration" 124 for Frauwallner: Frauwallners stark von der Berücksichtigung des Faktors 'Rasse' geprägte Bewertung der indischen Zivilisation war weder originell noch außergewöhnlich. Man betrachte zum Beispiel die folgenden Ausführungen des großen Vedisten und Buddhismuswissenschaftlers Hermann Oldenberg, den Frauwallner bewunderte und für brillant hielt und der eine unmittelbare Inspiration für ihn gewesen zu sein scheint (2010: xxvii-xxviii).
The quote thus introduced 125 provides no obvious clue as to why Franco and Preisendanz chose it, except perhaps that they thought Oldenberg's 'blood rhetoric' might impress their readers so much that they would not ask any further questions, such as: why Oldenberg? To which Franco and Preisendanz probably would reply, because Frauwallner "admired him." That however is not the point. Indologists may have admired Oldenberg for all sorts of reasons, Frauwallner perhaps among them, but that does not necessarily imply that they shared his racialist views, expressed in two oft-quoted introductions (see below) and passages like the one Franco and Preisendanz present-so the question is: where does Frauwallner refer to these? In both regards the reader has to take their word for it, because Franco and Preisendanz neither adduce evidence of Frauwallner's admiration for Oldenberg (let alone, for his racialist views), nor do they explain how the passage can possibly have been an "immediate inspiration" for Frauwallner's history and periodization of Indian philosophy, the topic that brought Franco and Preisendanz to the race issue in the first place. Neither does it transpire how this passage can be brought to bear on Frauwallner's quote of von Soden 126 when its central issue-that is, the assumption of a racial predisposition of the 'Nordic' Indo-German for 'science' (or, say, 'scientific philosophy')-is not addressed at all in the quoted passage from Oldenberg's literary history. With regard to this last point it may also be asked whether this specific conceptualization of the 'Nordic' Indo-German with 'scientific' propensity and so on, can be found anywhere else in Frauwallner's writings, except in the above context with relation to von Soden, and if so, how it is developed there.
Thus the only tangible result of Stuchlik and Franco and Preisendanz's ruminations on the Frauwallner/von Soden issue seems to be their perception that my critique of Pollock must be considered a "muddled and awkward attempt to exonerate Frauwallner from the charge of complicity with National Socialist ideology" (cf. above). As for Adluri, his reasoning is burdened by no such ruminations; he contents himself with an unqualified repetition (2011: 257) of Pollock's stance, as if no doubt had ever been raised about the authenticity of the latter's 'Frauwallner quote'in my view as clear a case of 'active ignorance' as that of Franco and Preisendanz and Stuchlik, mutatis mutandis.
Although Franco and Preisendanz's association of Frauwallner with Oldenberg is entirely arbitrary, it offers interesting perspectives, I think.
Oldenberg's occasional observations on the fate of the 'Nordic' Aryan under the influence of Southern climes and races (cf. above, page 199), for example, in the introductions to his Buddha (1881) and Die Religion des Veda (1917), have caught the attention of various post-Pollockian theorists searching for evidence in support of their preconceptions about 'German Indology.' That Oldenberg's pertinent observations are by no means representative of 'German Indology' transpires from the fact that little else of the kind has been produced-which goes some way towards explaining Oldenberg's popularity with these theorists (strictly confined to the incriminating passages, of course).
It almost goes without saying that Oldenberg cannot be considered the inventor of these racialist notions. However, as far as I am aware, there are no apparent German precursors for them, be it in Indology at large 127 or in the field of Buddhist studies where he ventilated them first. 128 As it happens, we have already encountered similar notions in Rhys Davids's 1894-95 lectures (above, page 194), and we can trace them back chronologically to his 1881 Hibbert Lectures (see especially pages 21-25) and to his Buddhism of 1877 (see chapter 2). Incidentally, this is exactly the time when Rhys Davids (1843Davids ( -1922 took Oldenberg (1854Oldenberg ( -1920 under his wing as "coadjutor of Mr. Rhys Davids in the translation of the Pali scriptures for Professor Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East" 129 (their Vinaya Texts were published in Müller's series in 1881-85). In the course of their long and intensive collaboration Rhys Davids supplied his 'coadjutor' with complimentary copies of his writings from 1877 onward. 130 It may be noted in passing that Rhys Davids, too, cannot be considered the originator of these notions, for which various further contemporary examples can be found.

1.2.4
The political impact of Indology I have pointed out this relationship not with the intent to shift the blame from Oldenberg to Rhys Davids, or elsewhere. As in other cases mentioned above, I see no need for such apologetic maneuvers because I con-sider the continuity constructs that try to establish a causal connection between these scholars (or others with similar views) and political ideologies such as National Socialism 131 entirely fictitious. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the incriminated notions had such wide currency that they cannot plausibly be derived from the Orientalist (or specifically Indological) corner-where they were by no means as common as Pollock and others imply.
That the incriminating notions themselves are virtually never discussed seems to me just one indication that the discourses they are made to serve by fair means or foul are entirely 'political.' These discourses display next to no concern for context, nuances 132 in their various manifestations, or for differences of opinion between those who show an affinity with such notions, as can be gathered from the reactions to my attempts to break the spell of Pollockian 'one-dimensionality' by introducing other aspects. 133 As in Said's case (above, page 189), I consider this 'one-dimensionality' to be a necessary stance in order to prevent such constructs from collapse before their eventual completion.
But the convincing derivation of these notions from 'German Indology' is not the only respect in which the Pollockian discourse can be considered a total failure. Even if Pollock and others had succeeded in that regard, they would still have to show by the example of at least one 'Indologist qua Indologist' that the presumed results of Pollock's elusive 'NS Indology' were actually taken up by NS politicians and ideologues. However, to this day, I have seen nothing that even addresses this question.
But let us briefly examine the issue from the opposite angle and ask whether the claim that "Indology was creating powerful theoretical foundations for National Socialism" (Adluri 2011: 259) can be substantiated by primary sources of NS anti-Semitism. For that purpose we return to the terminus ante quem mentioned above (page 206), namely, Hitler's programmatic speech of 1920, "Warum sind wir Antisemiten?" 134 While Hitler does refer to "the Hindus," he does so not with the intent to employ them as distant relatives in the "creation of Indo-German as counteridentity" (Pollock 1993: 83), 135 but merely as an illustration of "racial decline" (Rassensenkung) 136 due to the destruction of "national purity" (nationale Reinheit ;Hitler 1980: 195-96). This notion, together with those of the destruction of labor-based national economies by "international capital" (193-95) and of a systematic subversion of cultural identities , provides the basis of Hitler's anti-Semitism, which revolves around the antithesis between 'Nordic industriousness' and the "Hebrew" conception of labor as God's punishment for original sin (188-89).
It is necessary to mention these notions here in order to show their discrepancy with Pollock's propositions in terms of chronology as well as ideological content. It is difficult to imagine what Indology could possibly have contributed to NS anti-Semitism before or after it took shape in this programmatic speech of 1920. The protagonists of these notions, the "Northern tribes" (Nordstämme) of "blond, blue-eyed Aryans," hailed as the industrious originators of practically all "culturestates" (Kulturstaaten ;Hitler 1980: 186), are clearly a figment of nineteenth-century ideologies focusing on 'Nordic Aryans,' not on India. The accompanying notion of "the Hindus" as examples of "racial decline" can be considered a by-product of these ideologies, all of which had their point of departure in 'the North.' 'India,' contemporary or ancient, was at best of peripheral interest in such contexts, and consequently, Indology had no part to play in the formation of this ideology, least of all by inspiring a "racial kinship between European and Indian" (Pollock 1993: 83). However, the presumption of a "willingness to recognize" such a kinship is the elusive thread by which Pollock's contextualization with Indology hangs. With this presumption disproved, the other "topoi" Pollock tries to associate with 'German Indology' through this "willingness" 137 are left unsupported, and his entire construct concerning Indology's political impact is bound to collapse.
Apart from all the inherent flaws and grotesque propositions of Pollock's theorizing it is worth noting that its basic presumption does not bring him one step closer to his declared aim of extending Said's critique to 'German Orientalism.' With regard to 'ideology,' as also to 'materiality,' his entire discourse depends on the rigid exclusion of all aspects that cannot contribute to its telos, or worse, might jeopardize his 'heuristic concept' (cf. Pollock 1993: 78). Not surprisingly therefore, the established fact that the 'knowledge production' in other fields of 'German Orientalism' has always been on a par with Indology, if not stronger in terms of posts 138 and publications, 139 remains entirely unaccounted for in Pollock's narrative which, for the reasons explained above, is not an evidence-based study of Orientalism or Indology in Germany, but a sophisticated charge of anti-Semitism based largely on trumped-up 'evidence.'

Vishwa P. Adluri's Emulation
Vishwa P. Adluri's article purports to corroborate Pollock's discourse by "presenting some additional evidence in support of Pollock's claims" (2011: 260). He declares evidence his "main concern" (258-59) when he sets out to discuss various "Critical Responses" to Pollock, my own among them. However, the 'evidence' he then brings (or what may be taken as such at face value) does not pertain to the points I raised in my critique of Pollock's piece. Quite apart from frequently failing to address my actual critique, Adluri in effect sidesteps the central issue of Pollock's master narrative.

'Revectoring' 140
Pollock conceives 'German Orientalism' as "vectored not outward to the Orient but inward to Europe itself, to constructing the conception of a historical German essence and to defining Germany's place in Europe's destiny" (1993: 83). On the basis of this 'vectorization,' he then conceives 'German Indology' as an ideological hotbed of the "antithesis…essentialized [in the] dichotomy between 'Indo-German' and 'Semite' " (82; cf. above). Arguably the most remarkable intellectual achievement of Adluri's paper is that he defends Pollock against his "unthinking" critics (such as myself) 141 by "presenting some additional evidence in support of Pollock's claims" (2011: 259-60) without even mentioning the center around which his claims revolve, namely, the antithesis Aryan/Indo-German versus Semite/Jew as the supposed nucleus of anti-Semitism. In fact, the latter part of the dichotomy is conspicuous by its absence throughout Adluri's paper. With Pollock's master narrative thus enucleated, decontextualized quotes and distant echoes of it float around in Adluri's emulation like debris without a center of gravity. 142 The heart and center of Pollock's piece, the charge of anti-Semitism, is touched upon only once, in Adluri's closing assertion that 'German Indology' "provided the essential tools…[for] a discourse on Åryan origins, a new national identity, and a progressive displacement of the source of religious authority from a Hebrew-speaking Semitic Orient to a more suitable 'Åryan ' Orient" (2011: 279). 143 The absurdity of this omnium gatherum of unsubstantiated claims needs no further comment, I think. 'Aryan origins' and the 'problem of identity' have already been examined, while 'progressive displacement' is an echo of the 'Aryan bible' theme, the incongruities of which have been discussed elsewhere (see Grünendahl 2012: 66-74). It should be sufficiently clear by now that the object of NS anti-Semitism is not the "Hebrew-speaking Semitic Orient." Besides, this shift to an 'Oriental' focus is difficult to square with Adluri's earlier 'European vectorization.' But enough of 'floating debris.' 2.2 Indology as an instrument of domination Adluri's main theme combines Pollock's "two tropes: (i) 'the celebration of Aryan superiority,' and (ii) 'the willingness to recognize racial kinship between European and Indian' " (2011: 254-55, citing Pollock 1993: 83) 144 with the following case of the 'desideratum scheme': On the other hand, one would have to examine the means German scholars used to set themselves apart from Indians. Concretely, this would take the form of creating a narrative of "the degeneracy of the South Asian Aryans," even extending to "proposals for a eugenics program in India (calling for a revivification through racial planning of the debilitated South Asian Aryan stock)" (255, citing Pollock 1993: 83).
However, Pollock had introduced the quoted notion of "the degeneracy of the South Asian Aryans" as an example of the "Aryanism [that] was one conceptual building block…of nineteenth-century British work on India" (loc. cit.), not of "German scholars," as Adluri's pastiche implies. Adluri (256) tries to associate them with 'German Indology' via an unwarranted contextualization with G.W.F. Hegel and a lengthy quote and paraphrase of a review article (not identified as such) by Theodor Goldstücker. 145 Goldstücker (1821-72), first a student of Peter von Bohlen, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Christian Lassen and then "l'un des plus fidèles et des plus savants élèves d'Eugène Burnouf" in Paris (Windisch 1917: 150), was called to England by Horace Hayman Wilson in 1850 and spent the rest of his life as professor of Sanskrit at University College, London (from 1852), as a distinguished member of the Royal Asiatic Society and as president of the Philological Society. 146 Given these circumstances, and his feuds with Böhtlingk, Roth and others, it is difficult to see what relevance Goldstücker's views, expressed in a British review journal for the educated public, should have to the supposed agenda of 'German Indology.' Thanks to Adluri's "own research" we now see what this agenda is about, namely, "that German Indology was always far more preoccupied with the rivalry with its European peers than with legitimizing colonization" (which colonization this might have been is not specified, and probably awaits further research); in fact, "one can notice a preoccupation throughout its history with claiming a 'European' identity for itself," an outrageous claim indeed, it must be said, "albeit one that also takes into consideration its unique place among other European nations" (2011: 266). One stands in awe at the profundity of these insights, and realizes only too clearly that common sense is indeed an urgent desideratum here, to say nothing of evidence-based research.
Following Pollock, Adluri conceptualizes 'German Orientalism' in terms of an 'Aryan Heritage Foundation' concerned, first and foremost, with its "European prestige," 147 not with the Orient. Quite to the contrary, Adluri informs us: German scholars barely took notice of the Indians "other" than as a foil for their own critical consciousness and methodology. Indians, as a rule, only appear on the margins of this discussion. If it was necessary to put them down, it was only in order to establish one's superiority in the eyes of the other European nations (2011: 267).
This 'vectoring directed inward' à la Adluri is combined with the hypotheses that German Indologists claim to "somehow have privileged access to India's past," that they consider Indians "degenerate and hence incapable of interpreting their own texts," and that they see science as "a uniquely German capacity" (267). I cannot follow up all these hypotheses in detail, but I think the following two examples will give a fairly good impression of Adluri's approach.

Hermann Oldenberg
The central figure in Adluri's narrative is Hermann Oldenberg, who quali-fies for this position on account of his "seeming 'racism' " as well as his deep-rooted "disdain toward British scholarship" (2011: 268), which Adluri diagnoses as a particularly severe variant of the endemic German 'problem of identity.' 148 According to Adluri, Oldenberg is plagued by the problem himself, but at the same time he plays an important role in its therapy. Adluri turns him into "the father of a certain methodological self-understanding that runs through German Indology to this day" (274), dispensed for the first time in his article "Über Sanskritforschung," published in the Deutsche Rundschau (cf. above, page 215) 149 -a far-fetched choice for "methodological reflections on German Indology" (268), but then, Oldenberg's supposed disdain towards British scholarship is no less far-fetched, particularly in view of his long-standing cooperation with Rhys Davids (cf. above, page 217).
According to Adluri, Oldenberg's therapy is designed to counter-balance a supposed "inferiority complex vis-à-vis their British and French colleagues" (2011: 271) by claiming that "German Indologists" have a special advantage due to "their genetic and intellectual proximity to ancient India" (2011: 269). However, in the 1906 address to classical philologists , 150 quoted by Adluri in support of his grotesque proposition, Oldenberg sees the advantage of German scholars of the Indian past over their British colleagues ("Mitarbeiter") 151 in the advanced philological-historical method 152 they inherited from German classicists, 153 not in "genetic and intellectual proximity"-in fact, 'race' is not so much as mentioned in the entire address. 154 Adluri tries to offset this by suggesting an association between 'German Indology' and "the nascent discourse on the Åryan 'race' " (2011: 270) via an unspecified reference to Rolf Peter Sieferle's above-mentioned paper, in which however Indology is conspicuous by its absence. 155 For Pollock (1993: 86, 119n17) this was still a cause for discontent with Sieferle. Adluri generously overlooks Sieferle's 'omission' and boldly turns him into his chief witness for the above association, giving this exercise in 'feigned factuality' (above, page 201) its final touch with a reference to Erich Frauwallner and Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. 156 However, since both of the latter acquired their 'racial' notions from outside the realm of Indology, 157 neither lends support to Adluri's construct. From this point on, one can easily follow the making of the supposed "racial consanguinity" (Adluri 2011: 270) through its further stages by comparing Adluri's English rendition of Oldenberg's supposed pronouncements on 'race' with the original German texts and his own English version of 1890. This comparison shows that Oldenberg does not talk about race, but about "Volk/people." However, Adluri's construct of "German Indology's claims of privileged access to ancient India" due to "racial consanguinity" (2011: 270-73) demands "race" and "kin" (271), and therefore Oldenberg's "Volk/people" and "verwandt/related" have to yield. 158 The third component of Adluri's construct, "attributing degeneracy to India" (273-74), is erected partly by the same technique, 159 and partly by a tacit switch of sources: the keynote quote which is supposed to testify to Oldenberg's "rejection of Indian thought" (273) is not from the allegedly programmatic article of 1886, as the reference "1886: 406" suggests, but from the above address of 1906. 160 Ironically, this makes no difference because neither of the two sources concerns 'rejection of Indian thought.' As for the keynote quote from the 1906 address (predated to 1886), it is taken from a context dealing with "das ganze geschichtliche Werden auf allen Gebieten des geistigen Lebens" (Oldenberg 1906: 6). It should be added that Oldenberg attributes the absence of historiography in India to a general lack of historical consciousness, not to "degeneracy" (which would presuppose the earlier existence of such a consciousness). Finally, the fourth component of Adluri's construct, the supposed claim to "science as a uniquely German capacity" (2011: 274-78), leads us back to the prime suspect in these matters. 161

Erich Frauwallner
Curiously enough, the Austrian Erich Frauwallner has become a favorite target of accusatory claims concerning 'German Indology,' which all hinge on his notion of a specifically 'Aryan contribution' to Indian philosophy (recently magnified into an all-encompassing "arischer Ansatz" by Stuchlik). 162 The Frauwallner debate has now received a new impetus thanks to Adluri's creativity and his revelation of "what must surely count as one of the most telling documents of the obsession with German primacy in the field of Indology" (2011: 276). It is a project proposal, or rather the draft ("Entwurf") of a project proposal, 163 dated January 31, 1943, which Frauwallner sent from Vienna to Walther Wüst in his capacity as curator of the SS Ahnenerbe. It proposes the compilation of an affordable practical Sanskrit-German dictionary ("Handwörterbuch") based on the existing Sanskrit-German dictionaries, but with revisions and additions where required. 164 Adluri focuses on the intricate details of NS administration, such as organizational structure, Frauwallner's party membership number and accession date. Understandably, he did not consider it his task to unfold the history of nineteenth-century Sanskrit lexicography or the part played by German scholars therein, 165 and I for one am relieved at his reticence in this regard. What deserves special notice is how Adluri shows the lengths to which Frauwallner was prepared to go in appealing to "the duty of German scholarship not to let this proud heritage become obsolete, but refurbish and update it" by financing his Viennese project. 166 (Let he who never wrote application prose cast the first stone!) If we consider that Frauwallner's draft proposal was written for bureaucratic consumption, we can still sense the impact it must have had on the scholarly world at large. If we consider it further in terms of 'materiality,' we get an idea of the sheer scale on which Frauwallner was planning the domination of Europe by 'German Indology': for the entire project he budgeted for no less than two research assistants, each with a total of three hours of work per day over two years, with an extra allowance of 130 Reichsmark per month for copying material. One hesitates to imagine how the world of Sanskrit lexicography would have looked today, had Frauwallner's draft proposal succeeded.
All things considered, one can readily acknowledge that Adluri has presented a promising apprentice piece here, although it still lacks the sophistication observed in Pollock's treatment of Rosenberg's memo.
In both examples, Oldenberg's as much as Frauwallner's, Adluri rests his case not on philological works, but on peripheral material written for the general readership, memos for internal consumption, and so on. What separates the likes of Pollock and Adluri from the object of their theorizing-apart from fundamental flaws such as the reversal of the 'Nordic' notion (above, page 199)-is their (inadvertent or intentional) misconception of philology. In 1864, when Hippolyte Taine explained to the young Gabriel Monod why contemporary studies of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and Bible exegesis-in short, philological disciplines based on historical-critical principles-had "their heart and centre in Germany," it was without any sense of rivalry, but with a clear understanding of what philology on historical-critical principles is about: En premier lieu, ils sont philologues, ils vont aux textes mêmes, ils lisent les manuscrits et les documents inédits, ils viennent à Paris, à Oxford, à Dublin, étudier les variantes. Leurs études sont de première main. Le défaut de l'éducation universitaire est de donner la science de seconde main, par des manuels, des résumés, des cours, des éditions toutes faites. Avant tout, un écrivain, un historien doit se mettre face à face et sans intermédiaire avec les monuments et les documents, tels qu'ils sont, frustes et mutilés, avant toute rectification et restauration. 167 In later years, relationships between French and German academics were complicated by political events, and also by individual scholars who wore their resentment on their sleeves. Not unlike Pollock, they were prepared to go to great lengths in their attempts to discredit their perceived rivals, and 'German philology,' or what they conceived as such, was one of their prime targets in this endeavor. But even then, a basic acknowledgment of the philological method occasionally surfaced, albeit in the form of backhanded compliments (cf. Grünendahl 2012: 56, 90, and passim).
A similar development can be observed in Britain, as testified by early (albeit unsuccessful) attempts to establish the principles of historical philology there in the 1830s (see Grünendahl 2012: 48), by the editorial history of M. Monier-Williams's A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899) and by Rhys Davids's paper of 1904. The cooperation between Rhys Davids and Oldenberg may be taken as just one illustration that such relationships were by no means one-sided. 168 This is also attested by Wüst's plans for a 'new Indology,' shaped after that of the "cousins across the Channel," which he held on to as late as 1942.
Of course, the First World War caused many changes and ruptures in European academia, as it did in virtually every walk of life. The Great War and the post-Versailles era may be considered the point of "breakdown of all German and European traditions" that Hannah Arendt had in mind (above, page 198). 169 But even after these cataclysmic events one finds examples of fruitful cooperation, despite the restrictions imposed by the Union académique internationale and other organizations founded in the wake of the Versailles conference.

Conclusion
Although restrictions of time and space did not allow me to follow Pollock's master narrative and Adluri's emulation through all their contortions, it should have become sufficiently clear that they rest on unsubstantiated claims, presumptions and misrepresentations. Nonetheless, Adluri's discourse is carried by the ambition of making history in yet another sense, in that it purports to ring the death knell for "the first phase of Orientalism" (2011: 256), old-style philology-in short, everything that can be associated with 'German Indology' and its "rhetoric of science and scientificity," which had only "been used to obscure the Indologists' actual practice" (257). In this endeavor, too, Adluri merely echoes Pollock, who "had set the stage for radically rethinking…[the] scholarly dogmas on India" (257) by declaring that "in a postcolonial and post-Holocaust world,…these traditional foundations and uses of Indology have disappeared,…crumbled" and led to a feeling of "impotence" and "loss of purpose" (Pollock 1993: 111, 113); in short, Indologists "no longer know why they are doing what they do" (88). Consequently, we can only expect an "Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz" (114) from "selfconsciously responsible scholarship in late twentieth-century America" (112). As Pollock's post-Orientalist messianism would have us believe, only late twentieth-century (and now twenty-first-century) America is intellectually equipped to reject and finally overcome "Eurocentrism" and "European epistemological hegemony," that is, "a preemptive European conceptual framework of analysis [that] has disabled us from probing central features of South Asian life, from pre-western forms of 'national' (or feminist, or communalist, or ethnic) identity or consciousness, premodern forms of cultural 'modernism,' precolonial forms of colonialism" (115).
So far as Pollock's messianism has not already incarnated itself in his own 'Zukunftsphilologie,' the eschatology is outlined clearly enough: the path from the 'Deep Orientalism' of old to a new "Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz" leads to the 'New Raj' across the deep blue sea. Adluri has evidently internalized this message when he suggests that some docility (or servility?) would be due on my part in order to avoid the impression of a "serious disconnect between American and German approaches to Indian studies" (2011: 260). 170 Without questioning Adluri's expertise in these matters, I should like to ask how he can possibly demand my advance acceptance of Pollock's "substantive criticism" of 'German Indology' (260) when virtually all his 'evidence' has turned out anything but "substantive," 171 when therefore his discourse probably does not even deserve to be called criticism, when it has as little to do with "Indian studies" as it has with evidence-based historical studies, 172 to say nothing of "morally sensitive scholarship" (Pollock 1993: 79). Notwithstanding, Adluri feels entitled to expect an "acknowledgment that at least some of… [Pollock's] criticisms may be partially valid or any acknowledgment of the extensive evidence of the complicity of particular Indologists in National Socialism" (2011: 260).
The absurdity of Adluri's admonition can be illustrated by the example of Walther Wüst. There is no doubt whatsoever that Wüst was a committed National Socialist and a high-ranking officer in the SS Ahnenerbe. And yet, in spite of his very obvious involvement in the NS state, the 'evidence' Pollock produces gives all but "extensive" proof of a specifically Indological aspect to Wüst's involvement, despite the effort Pollock makes to shape it accordingly. At the root of this evident asymmetry lies the fundamental flaw of Pollock's narrative, the fictitious claim that "the Germans…continued, however subliminally, to hold the…conviction that the origin of European civilization was to be found in India" (1993: 77; cf. above, page 199). However, as shown, 'India' had no such role to play in NS ideology; in fact it had no particular role at all in NS contexts, and neither did Indology have a notable one, German or other. So how can I possibly heed Adluri's admonition that my critique would have been "rhetorically more convincing had…[I] been able to show that German Indologists had since distanced themselves from their work" (2011: 261), when it is yet to be shown, even in Wüst's case, precisely which Indological(!) 'work' they should have distanced themselves from? 173 In his pastiche of snippets picked from my articles of 2006 and 2008, Adluri claims that my "main criticism of Pollock and other post-Orientalist critics is that…'they lack every disciplinary prerequisite' " (2011: 258). This snippet is taken from the general introduction to my 2008 review article. Here I should like to point out that the charge of dilettantism 174 is certainly not my 'main criticism' of the post-Orientalist constructs of Pollock and others-this has always been their blatant want of 'concrete evidence' 175 -and, more importantly, that I have never leveled the charge of dilettantism at Pollock, contrary to Adluri's insinuations. 176 To a dilettante one might concede occasional distortions, so long as it can be assumed that they are not intentional. In Pollock's case I see no room for such concessions.
As for Adluri's charge that I have attacked Pollock's "motivations," I have explicitly refrained from such psychologizing 177 which must be all too familiar to Adluri from the authors he names on his list (2011: 265). 'Psychological' argumentation is indeed a staple of the discourse we are dealing with here (including Adluri's paper 178 ). If one wanted to subject its protagonists to the same process, one would have to take into account their possible discontent with 'German Indology' resulting from, say, an unsuccessful application for a Berlin chair (1988), an unaccomplished presentation at an Orientalistentag or unfulfilled expectations of an academic career at Marburg, all too trifling to go into, but not irrelevant enough to be left out of such considerations.
Adluri chooses to grace his paper with a title borrowed from Jane Austen-which may be seen as sufficient cause for intervention. As for "jingoistic pride" (2011: 264), chauvinism and the like, my allegiance is with Johann Gottfried Herder (1794): "Unter allen Stolzen halte ich den Nationalstolzen sowie den Geburts-und Adelsstolzen für den größten Narren." Adluri's all-purpose charge of 'prejudice' is probably intended to discredit my "reaction" to Pollock's "intuitions" as "overhasty and unthinking" (2011: 259; cf. above). Is this to imply that my reaction was preconceived, perhaps because I did not know, or did not take into account, all evidence that could have been adduced in support of his presumptions? If so, Adluri gives no intimation of what I may have overlooked. Neither does he indicate how Pollock's presumptions can be upheld when the supposed evidence is invalidated or insufficient, the product of manipulation or downright fictitious, as shown with regard to the key issues of 'materiality' and 'ideology.' Finally, let me briefly return to the 'desideratum scheme,' defined above as a conglomerate of presumptions revolving around the pronouncement that the analysis of some 'important question' still to be carried out is an 'urgent desideratum.' I cannot see that Pollock and others have come any closer to the 'important questions' of the 'political economy' of 'German Indology,' or its supposed complicity in NS ideology, and so on. On the one hand, the promoters of the 'desideratum scheme' may be all too willing to concede that, with such analyses still a desideratum, a thorough assessment of the question would be 'premature.' Yet, on the other hand, they not only anticipate the outcome of the pending analysis, 179 they actually thrive on its imaginary returns. This seems to encourage emulators to make even bolder claims, which happen to meet the constant demand for new 'coinage' necessary to keep the scheme afloat-by now a familiar 'market mechanism.' As the emerging 'knowledge system' grows ever bigger, one may easily forget that the entire scheme still rests on hitherto unwarranted presumptions or 'intuitions.' 180 The necessity of a crash seems to be inherent in such schemes. Said's 'knowledge system' was eventually exploded from the outside, so to speak. In Pollock's case, his critics have now received unexpected assistance from an insider: 181 two decades and several "new disciplinary histories" (Adluri 2011: 265) of 'German Indology' later, Adluri not only proves beyond doubt that the 'desideratum scheme' is still an indispensable discourse strategy to keep the system afloat, he simultaneously reduces it ad absurdum. 182 His adherence to Pollock's notion of a "premature" stage tacitly implies that maturity will follow, that eventually this discourse will come to intellectual fruition. I for one take his reasoning as a strong sign that it is already past its prime.
8. Exceptions are Halle, Hamburg, Königsberg, Leipzig, and Tübingen. 9. The distinction becomes apparent when one looks at their publications and curricula.
14. With brief references to the Netherlands, France, Austria, and Russia (Rhys Davids 1904: 185, 189-90). 15. Pollock 1993: "See the table prepared by Rhys Davids, which shows for the year 1903 a total of 47 professors (26 of them full professors) for 'Aryan' orientalism in Germany (…which he juxtaposes to the four professorships in England, the colonial metropole)." 16. Rhys Davids notes that these "are usually Assyriology and Egyptology" (1904: 186), which implies that other Oriental (and African) subjects have not been taken into account. I cannot verify or augment Rhys Davids's statistical data because no source is provided.
17. On the renaming of the Munich "Seminar für arische Philologie" in 1877 (and later), see Grünendahl 2006: 212n7. 18. Published in the first volume of the Indian Antiquary: "As the Oriental Languages, now represented in the University, naturally separate into two main groups the Board beg to recommend the establishment of two independent Oriental Triposes: (1) the Semitic, and (2) the Aryan.… In the Aryan group, Sanskrit holds the first and foremost place" (Anonymous 1872: 31; emphasis in original).
19. Compare Rhys Davids 1896: 16-18, 91-92, especially 185-87. 20. Rhys Davids 1904: "In Berlin, for instance, an Oriental seminary has been established, in close connexion with the University, and presided over by the eminent Arabist Hofrat Sachau, an honorary member of our Royal Asiatic Society and a member of the Berlin Academy"; cf. his various memoranda on the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen, compiled in Sachau (1912). 25. I shall return to the 'desideratum scheme' below (page 229). 26. For example, the Minerva issue is not even mentioned by Adluri. 27. Or "intuition"; see below.
28. Branded beforehand as a case of "extraordinary resistance to any degree of historical contemplation" (Adluri 2011: 264).
29. Plain reiteration is the attitude of choice, as seen in Stuchlik 2009: 75n319. 30. Adluri 2011: "According to Pollock, 'the size of the investment on the part of the German state in Indological studies throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries…and the volume of the production of German orientalist knowledge…almost certainly surpassed all the rest of Europe and America combined' (1993: 82)"; cf. above, page 191). 31. As for this and the related subterfuge that "Exact statistics of the state of Indology in Germany are hard to come by" (2011: 286n38), Adluri may start by consulting the web site of the project "Kleine Fächer" at Potsdam University: "Potsdamer Arbeitsstelle 'Kleine Fächer,' ein Projekt im Auftrag der Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, gefördert vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung und ausgeführt von der Universität Potsdam" (www.kleinefaecher.de).
32. Emphasis added to highlight vagueness of expression. 33. Clearly coined for Bonn as the first center of Sanskrit learning in Germany; similarly 'Isar-Athen' for Munich as an eminent seat of Greek studies. The triviality unfolds when one follows Adluri to his sources.
34. The absurdity of Pollock's accompanying proposition that "The romantic search for self-definition…comprised initially a complex confrontation with…Latin-Christian Europe…" (1993: 82) should be evident to anyone familiar with German Romanticism around 1800, or at least with the history of the term 'Romanticism' itself. These issues will have to be discussed elsewhere.
36. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1990: 291: "We are not historiansmuch less historians specializing in the study of Nazism… [and] have read little of the epoch's endless, monotonous literature." 37. Compare Pollock 1993: 83. 38. Arendt 1945: "The real trouble lies not in the German national Character but, rather, in the disintegration of this character, or at least in the fact that it no longer plays any role in German politics.…The Nothing from which Nazism sprang could be defined in less mystical terms as the vacuum resulting from an almost simultaneous breakdown of Europe's social and political structures.…The truth was that the national State, once the very symbol of the sovereignty of the people, no longer represented the people, becoming incapable of safeguarding either its external or internal security.…This social truth of the breakdown of European class-society was answered by the Nazis with the lie of the Volksgemeinschaft." A similar perspective can be found in Steiner's observations on the fragility of humanistic traditions as "a barrier against political bestiality" in twentieth-century Europe (1971: 30), which Pollock forges into the "memorable phrase: The humanities in Germany failed to humanize" (1993: 112;cf. Grünendahl 2012: 20).
41. The range of propositions from an 'Arctic home' via Atlantis to Scandinavia, Northern Germany, and further to the south and east cannot be discussed here.
42. This is epitomized by Günther 1934. 43. Including the svastika symbol; see, for example, Günther 1934: 33 (cf. also below, note 92 Havell 1918 andWaddell 1929; see also Tilak 1903. 47. So far as the writings of the respective ideologues show any interest in 'India.' 48. Rather an eighteenth-century conviction, associated first and foremost with J.G. Herder, and rendered obsolete simultaneously with the advent of Indology, as will be shown in my study of F. Schlegel. 49. For a preliminary note, see Grünendahl 2012: 18-21. 50. Further confirmation of this absurdity can be drawn, for example, from a comparison with Günther (1934) 1993: 128-29). Stuchlik (2009: 52 and 165n933) tries to contextualize Rosenberg's reference to von Schroeder with an assortment of quotes from, and observations on, the latter's Arische Religion of 1914-16, which does feature on Pollock's list-but not in Rosenberg's memo. Thus, Stuchlik's contextualization turns out to be entirely fictitious. That Rosenberg's memo refers instead to von Schroeder's Indiens Literatur und Kultur (1887) seems to be of no concern to Stuchlik, who betrays no knowledge whatsoever of the latter work, be it in the said observations or anywhere else in his book.
132. Pollock's implicit claim to "a more nuanced methodological reflection" as well as to "morally sensitive scholarship" (1993: 79) seems to bear witness to a remarkable sense of irony (cf. below).
134. Hitler's keynote speech at an NSDAP gathering in Munich, August 13, 1920 (Hitler 1980 149. Actually, it was published twice in the Deutsche Rundschau, namely, in the main series (volume 47, 1886, pages 386-409) and in the "Halbmonatshefte" (volume 3, 1885-86, fascicle 18, pages 421-443), soon followed by an English translation: "The Study of Sanskrit" (Oldenberg 1890). (Why Adluri prefers to render his quotes from the German text in his own words instead of availing himself of Oldenberg's authorized translation will soon become apparent.) The German version was republished in Oldenberg (1899).
150. The particulars of location and audience are not given in Adluri's reference (2011: 290).
151. No sense of rivalry here. 152. Not "the principles of comparative linguistics," as Adluri pronounces (2011: 269) in his obvious ignorance of the difference between the philological-historical method and comparative linguistics, which, contrary to Adluri's deliberations (269), feature as little in Oldenberg's address as does Franz Bopp, the founder of the discipline.
154. Besides, the claim of racial consanguinity on account of linguistic relationship-had it been raised here-would automatically have included his British colleagues, too.
155. That Sieferle mentions F. Schlegel is owed not to the latter's essay of 1808, but to a review of 1819, in which he took up the term 'Arier' from the 'proto-Iranist' work under review (a circumstance omitted in Pollock's account); for further details see my forthcoming study.
156. Adluri 2011: 270: "Walter Demel…has already shown just how deeply ingrained racial prejudice was in German academic life of the eighteenth century. Other scholars such as Rolf Peter Sieferle…have demonstrated how closely linked the nascent discourse on the Åryan 'race' was to German Indology; and one knows of course of how deeply implicated German Indologists such as Frauwallner and Hauer were in National Socialism." 157. On Frauwallner see below; on Hauer's notion of race as the 'Leitidee' of his future research, cf. Grünendahl 2008: 468-73. 158. Compare Adluri 2011: 270: "…from their features the distant past, the bygone existence of that strange race [Volkes] looks back at us that is kin [verwandt] with our race [Volke]…," with Oldenberg 1886: 386: "…aus deren Zügen uns ferne Vorzeit, vergangenes Leben jenes seltsamen Volkes anblickt, das unserm Volke verwandt ist, und dessen Wege sich doch von unsern Wegen äußerlich und innerlich so weit entfernt haben," and Oldenberg 1890: 16: "…from whose features distant times and the past life of a strange people look down upon us-a people who are related to us, yet whose ways are so far removed in every respect from our ways." 159. Compare Adluri's quote (2011: 274) for another switch from "Volk" to "race." 160. Which Adluri readily conceded on inquiry, though without drawing the obvious consequence that, without this keynote quote, little remains of his construct of Oldenberg's 1886 article as the defining moment.
161. Adluri's treatment of Heinrich Ewald's article of 1837 cannot be discussed here.
165. The prefaces to the volumes of Böhtlingk and Roth's Sanskrit-Wörterbuch (1855-75;1879-89) as well as to Monier-Williams's A Sanskrit-English Dictionary may give a first impression here. Compare Zgusta 1988. 166. Frauwallner 1943: "Es ist daher gerade eine Pflicht der deutschen Wissenschaft, dieses stolze Erbe nicht veralten zu lassen, sondern zu erneuern und weiterzuführen" (cf. Adluri 2011: 277). It should be noted in passing that the draft proposal lacks the formula of salute and other incriminating paraphernalia one would expect in official documents of the period.
169. Hitler's programmatic speech of 1920 (above, page 218) can serve as an example here.
170. That 'American approaches in Indian Studies' cannot be equated with Pollock's approach is unmistakably clear since 1994, with Richard W. Lariviere (1996).
171. That the entire discourse initiated by Pollock stands on shaky ground is implicitly confirmed by Adluri himself, first by acknowledging that Pollock's operational base is an "intuition" (2011: 266), and second by the need he feels for "presenting some additional evidence in support of Pollock's claim" (260; emphasis added)-additional to what, it may be asked.
172. Compare above, note 102. 173. The inadequacies of Pollock's list of works of the National Socialist period (1993: 128-29) have been sufficiently discussed already; Adluri's "References Cited" have no compromising Indological titles from the NS era to offer, apart from Frauwallner's much-discussed paper "Der arische Anteil an der indischen Philosophie" (1939), which, however, does not pertain to Pollock's antithesis, let alone to anti-Semitism-a sum total that is all but "substantive." German consciousness based on linguistic identity. Nonetheless, any such inquiry would have to begin with Indology, if only because it provided the essential tools in this process, that is, a discourse on Åryan origins, a new national identity, and a progressive displacement of the source of religious authority from a Hebrew-speaking Semitic Orient to a more suitable 'Åryan' Orient" (for the 'Aryan Bible' theme shining through here, see above, page 221).