The following lecture was originally given in German at this year’s Schnackenhof Philosophietage, an annual 3-day event organised by my friend Reinhard Knodt and devoted to intellectual and cultural encounters between Eastern and Western traditions, at the Schnackenhof, a salon and centre for philosophy and the arts in the Franconian town of Röthenbach an der Pegnitz.
Choosing to speak in Germany on the topic of Indophilia in
German literature (and its greatest period at that) might look like carrying
coals to Newcastle – or “owls to Athens”, as the more poetic German idiom has
it. I can offer two excuses. The first is that the German love of India was
first stimulated by the translations produced by a handful of English scholars
in the 18th century: German authors of the classic and early
Romantic periods were thus mostly reading translations of translations. Scholars
such as William Jones were already reflecting on some of the intellectual
implications of the texts they worked on, too, and in a way that pre-empted
some of the concerns of German thinkers.
The second, more immediate prompt for choosing this subject
is a series of publications in English over the last few years (in particular the extremely valuable work of the appropriately named Nicholas Germana, on which I will draw fairly heavily in what follows) that put the
German interest in India in a new light. The interpretations they offer focus
in particular on the question of German national identity. To forestall
anxieties about what has become a vexed issue over the last hundred years, it
is important to make some historical distinctions. Historians have known for
some time that German identity in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries was first and foremost a cultural
topic; that it only gradually built up into a demand for political unity; and
that only still later, around the time of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, did it adopt
the notoriously aggressive, intolerant, militaristic stance that was to cause
such havoc in Europe during the 20th century.
That has not stopped some scholars judging, as if by reflex,
earlier German patriotic sentiments as forecasting later ones: the “benefit” of
hindsight is notoriously difficult to refuse. But many aspects of the German
self-image during the life of Goethe (1749-1832, frequently invoked as a
convenient period in German literary and cultural history) were far from being
as introverted or xenophobic as one might assume. Among them was the Indophilia
of these decades, which led directly to the foundation of Indology as a
separate subject in the German university system. An apparent paradox thereby
arose: Germany rapidly became famous for the outstanding quality of its
research on Indian languages and culture, even though it had no political
connection to the subcontinent at all.
Why was India of interest to those thinkers reflecting on
German identity? An answer begins to emerge if we look at the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), philosopher, poet, critic, and early
anthropologist, to list only some of his occupations. Herder’s tremendous
influence on European intellectual history is not disputed, but the nature of
that influence certainly is. Some 20th-century intellectuals, most
notably Isaiah Berlin in England, blamed Herder directly for shrouding the
universalism and rationalism of the Enlightenment in the fog of Romanticism.
Along with J. G. Hamann, Herder was framed as a member of a
“counter-Enlightenment”, undermining enlightened efforts by the likes of Kant
or Voltaire on behalf of universal, secularized Reason. Most dangerously, had
Herder not introduced the theoretical concept of the “folk” (Volk), the “people” as a discrete,
communal entity? Did he not further defend the spirit of the German “folk”
against French cosmopolitanism? Is that not the start of modern nationalism (and
we know where that ends up)?
The judgement is easy to make, but deceptive. When Herder
uses the expression “German” (deutsch),
its meaning is broader than we understand it today – closer to “Teutonic” (germanisch). That explains why, in his
collection of essays “On German spirit and art” (Von deutscher Art und Kunst, 1773), Herder could set up Shakespeare
as a representative of the German spirit. With the Holy Roman Empire as shattered as it was after the Thirty Years’ War, present-day Germans ought to
try to seek the “German spirit” outside
the boundaries of their own language and territory, not just in the area
between the Alps, the Rhine and the North Sea. To shape German identity in this
sense required being open to the world: not simply submitting to the
fashionable Francophile taste of the literature market, but seeking out deeper
“elective affinities”.
Such openness really did apply to the world, however, and
not just to Europe. Herder wanted to aid and enrich German culture through
non-European identifications too. He had two reasons for this: one to do with
literary history, the other with politics. I will discuss them, and their
influence on Romanticism, separately.
In Herder and Hamann’s conception, the history of poetry
began in the Orient, where it retained the kind of purity and authentic force
that characterized the prophetic books of the Bible. But as mankind aged and
modern European civilization developed, poetry became duller, more mechanical
and prosaic. The literature of his own century was proof enough of that, so
Herder thought. By “oriental" poetry Herder initially meant the literature of
the Semitic peoples, above all the Hebrew literature of the Old Testament. During
the 1770s and 80s, as works in ancient Persian and Sanskrit began to be made
accessible, he grasped that there existed a still more distant and older
“Orient”, whose culture until now had hardly been glimpsed.
According to his expectations, the literary expression of
this Orient ought to be more sensuous, powerful, and yet also more innocent and
pure even than the Old Testament or the Koran. Herder’s expectations here were
shaped by his theory of language, influenced by Rousseau. Both thinkers saw the
languages of the East (or the South) as having arisen as expressions of human
feeling, above all feelings of love and wonder at God and Nature. Their entire
character was different from a modern rational language like French. Modern
German writers ought to assimilate some of that character, in order to become,
as Herder put it in 1767, true “German-Oriental writers”.
It was William Jones’s translation of the Sanskrit drama Sakuntala in 1789 that allowed Herder to
put his theory to the test – and find it confirmed. The drama Abhijñānaśākuntalam or “The Recognition of Sakuntala” was written
by the greatest Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa, between the 1st century
B.C. and the 4th century A. D. The freshness of the nature imagery,
the innocence of the heroine Sakuntala, and the sensibility in the handling of
the plot all impressed Herder immediately, to the point that he drew
comparisons with Shakespeare and Ossian (the supposedly ancient Celtic poet
whose works were only later revealed to have been the modern creation of the
Scot James Macpherson). As Jones’s translation was re-translated into German by
Georg Forster in 1791, the contemporary reception was so enthusiastic that the
historian Raymond Schwab spoke of a “Sakuntala era” in Germany.
The first early German Romantic writer to feel the charm of Sanskrit
poetry was Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). There is a strong possibility
that the famous “blue flower” in Novalis’ novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen,
a motif which was to become a symbol of German Romanticism in general, was
inspired by the descriptions of lotus flowers in Kalidasa’s Sakuntala.
The Oriental references in the novel’s first chapter are at any rate hard to
miss. On the (unforgettable) first page of the book, Heinrich recalls the tales
of a stranger who had told him of “treasures” and a “flower” in a distant land:
“It is not the treasures that have inspired such an inexpressible longing in me”, he said to himself; “I am unacquainted with greed: but I long to gaze on the blue flower. It occupies my mind incessantly, and I can do nothing else but ponder and dream of poetry. I have never felt thus before: it is as if I had been dreaming, or my slumbers had transported me into another world; for in the world that I otherwise inhabit who would have spared a thought for flowers? – and I had certainly never heard of such a strange passion for a flower. Where, in fact, did the stranger come from?”
He probably came from India. India was the land of “treasures”
par excellence, and the land in which a “strange passion for a flower” such as
the lotus was quite self-explanatory. Decisive in my opinion is the
identification of the flower with the beauty of a “gentle face”, a female face.
In Sakuntala, the heroine is
consistently described using floral metaphors, and in the drama’s first scene
she is compared with a “blue lotus petal” (blaues
Lotosblatt, in Forster’s translation). (The notes to Forster's translation reveal the confusion of the Indian sacred lotus, nelumbo nucifera, with the blue water-lily, nymphaea caerulea, below.)
The female face that was in Novalis’s
mind’s eye when he described the blue flower would surely have been that of his
beloved, the young Sophie von Kühn; and Nicholas Germana points out that in the
Hardenberg family correspondence, Novalis can be found using the nickname “Sakuntala”
for Sophie.
One could adduce further individual motifs that other
writers of the time borrowed from Sanskrit literature. Goethe wrote a quatrain
in praise of Sakuntala, planned a
production of the play, and, according to Raymond Schwab, based his “Prelude on
the Stage” to Faust on Kalidasa’s prologue. I have a further suggestion à propos of the character of Ottilie in
Goethe’s Elective Affinities – a character
reminiscent of Sakuntala in some ways. At two points in the novel, Ottilie makes
a peculiar gesture, apparently bearing a strong similarity to the Indian namaskar – a quiet, gentle bow with
joined palms in front of the chest. Though the namaskar normally denotes respectful greeting, mixed with a certain
distance, in Ottilie’s case it is a gesture of refusal:
“She does this [refusing] with a gesture which is irresistible for one who has grasped its meaning. She presses the palms of her hands, which she raises above her head, together, and brings them to her breast while she leans gently forwards and fixes the supplicant with such a gaze that he gladly relinquishes all that he had demanded or wished for.” (Elective Affinities, Part I, chapter 5)
The meaning of (polite) refusal has a possible source in Sakuntala, however: the heroine is at
one point asked to embrace her spiritual father or guru Kanva, and instead
makes this gesture.
One could go on to discuss influences in art or music –
Schubert wrote an incomplete opera Sakuntala
in 1820, and Wagner was influenced by it in the first act of Parsifal – but more interesting is the
motivation behind these borrowings. It was not only the charm of a newly
discovered, paradisiacal land of literature and religion that prompted Novalis
to use Indian images as symbols of romantic longing, but a central plank of
Romanticism’s theoretical programme. This was laid down by Friedrich Schlegel in the concept of the “new mythology”.
The concept itself was not new. Herder was the first to use
this expression in his 1768 essay “Of the modern use of mythology”, in which he
defended the utility of mythological images against the theological objections
made by Christian Adolph Klotz. Klotz saw a potential threat to Christianity in
the casual poetic use of “pagan”, i.e. Greek and Roman, mythological motifs. Herder
replied that in a modern artistic context, the old gods certainly did not have
anything to do with the truth of religion, but then again, pace Klotz, neither did they have to: “We find use for another side
of them, their sensuous beauty. If I
make use of mythological ideas and images, inasmuch as certain psychological or
general truths are to be recognized sensuously through them, then mythological
persons are equally permitted”. They could be used as generally recognizable
images, and as prompts to one’s own fantasy: there would be “many difficulties in
creating a wholly new mythology for
us. – But working out how to construct an apparently new one with the ancients’
repertoire of images, that is easier... One applies the old images and tales to
cases closer at hand; puts a new poetic meaning into them, changes them here
and there to attain some new end.”
Around the same time William Jones had the same idea. Even
before he discovered the new world of Sanskrit literature, he complained that “European
literature has subsisted too long on the perpetual repetition of the same
images, and incessant allusions to the same fables”. Translations of Oriental
literature offered “a new set of images and similitudes”. In the 1780s Jones
became so fond of the gods of ancient India that he devoted a set of original
poems to them, including the “Hymn to Kama” (the god of love) or the “Hymn to
Narayana” (Brahma) – poems that, at the time, were hardly less popular than his
translations of authentic Sanskrit works.
All this was part of the literary background for the
Romantic “new mythology”. But there was another, theological-philosophical,
precondition: pantheism. The path to German pantheism was opened up by Spinoza,
Lessing, and Herder. It was necessary to entertain the – revolutionary – idea that
Jesus Christ was not the only true mediator between God and man. The world or
Nature was itself God. And according to Herder’s reformulation of Spinoza,
Nature was not a merely mechanical chain of causes and effects, but an organic entity
that had first to be felt and intuited. It would never be possible, as
theologians and Cartesian philosophers alike had hoped, to prove through pure
logic that the world existed. One could only feel it. And in order to reflect and mediate – to express – this
feeling of true being, one could utilize an entire pantheon of poetic and
mythological images, depending on which culture one belonged to. Vice versa, if
one wanted to understand the experience of the world of people in other cultures,
one should approach that experience through their religion, art, and mythology.
In this spirit Novalis wrote, in fragment 74 of his aphorism
collection “Pollen” (Blüthenstaub),
that:
Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than an intermediary that connects us with the deity. Man cannot possibly stand in an immediate relationship with the same. Man must be absolutely free in the choice of this intermediary. The slightest compulsion in this matter harms his religion... Fetishes, stars and planets, animals, heroes, idols, gods, a god-man. One quickly sees how relative such choices are, and is little by little led towards the notion that the essence of religion does not depend on the character of the mediator, but solely in one’s view of it, in one’s relation to it. It is idol-worship in the broadest sense when I actually take this mediator as God himself.
Friedrich Schlegel agreed in fragment 234 of his “Athenäumsfragmente”:
“It is very one-sided and arrogant to say that there is only one mediator. For
the perfect Christian, to whom in this respect Spinoza perhaps approximates best,
everything would have to be a mediator”. In the last years of the 18th
century Schlegel became aware how important the Orient, and specifically India,
were to a full understanding of the imaginative, mediating possibilities of the
“new mythology”. In his “Discourse on Mythology” (Rede über die Mythologie, 1800) he talked of the “beautiful
confusion of the imagination...for which I know no lovelier symbol than the
colourful, teeming mass of the ancient gods”. By that he meant, of course, the
Greek gods; but he immediately continued –
The other mythologies must also be reawakened according to the degree of their profundity, their beauty, and their culture, in order to accelerate the development of the new mythology. If only the treasures of the Orient were as accessible to us as those of antiquity! What new spring of poetry could flow to us from India, if a few German artists with their universality and depth of understanding, with their innate talent for translation, had the chance... We must look for the highest Romanticism in the Orient, and as soon as we can draw from that source, then perhaps the surface southern glow that currently charms us so much in Spanish poetry will [by comparison] seem banally occidental.
At this point
Schlegel could still only speculate about Oriental cultures, without yet having
experienced any of their literary products at first-hand. In 1802 he travelled
to Paris in order to study oriental languages – first Persian and then
Sanskrit. By 1803 he was in the thick of his studies, and quite overwhelmed by
what he was finding. To his friend Tieck he raved: “everything, everything without exception comes from
India!” And yet by the time his studies culminated in his seminal 1808 book “On
the Language and Wisdom of the Indians” his philosophical outlook had
fundamentally changed. He was no longer a pantheist, but a Catholic; and India
was no longer a freely elected source for a pantheistic and polytheistic “new
mythology”, but the authentic historical source for the sole true monotheistic
religion. Why did Schlegel, and with him the Romantic movement, turn away from
their liberal pantheism?
The reasons for that lie in politics. I mentioned earlier
that a second element in Herder’s conception of German identity was political.
At the time Herder wrote, the motive for this was still liberal and
humanitarian. As a German, Herder believed he had a good reason for sympathy
with non-European peoples: they were the victims of modern European colonial
powers. They were politically weak, but on the other hand, morally strong and
virtuous, just as Herder imagined the Germans to be. In an extraordinary poem
from 1797 discovered by Nicholas Germana, bearing the title “German National
Glory” (Deutsche Nationalruhm),
Herder praised the German people for not
possessing a colonial empire like Britain or Spain, a fact that meant they
could stand by the side of the oppressed American Indians, Africans and
Indians. God would not bestow his blessing on a “people that feasts and revels
while weighed down with the burden of such guilt, sin, and blood, the burden of
gold and diamonds”; rather he would show his favour to “quiet Ethiopians and
Germans” instead.
Such sentiments of patriotic resistance were naturally
enhanced during the Napoleonic Wars, when, after the battles of Jena and
Auerstädt, Germany was in actual fact conquered by a European empire. This was
the period of the Heidelberg Romantics, Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and the
brothers Grimm, diligently collecting folk songs and tales from the “people” whose
culture had supposedly remained unaffected by corrupting French influences.
Philosophers turned patriots too, such as J. G. Fichte: once a revolutionary, now the
author of the “Speeches to the German Nation” (Reden an die deutsche Nation). The new, more patriotic spirit
marked the turn away from early Romanticism to High Romanticism: one could no
longer feel inspired by the radical-democratic spirit of the French Revolution,
now that its consequences for Germany were so severe. Romantics like Schlegel
sought more stable, conservative sources of support: the Catholic Church, the
old German Imperial Knights, and the new ideology of folk culture.
The Romantics also revised their image of India, however. Previously
the exact historical connections between India and other cultures had not been
of such great interest. Indian culture was very old, and probably older than
the Egyptian – more than that one did not dare to assert. Above all the early
Romantics wanted to use India as a source in their construction of a new mythology, essentially oriented
towards the future. But after 1806, Friedrich Schlegel and the Heidelberg
Romantics, especially Joseph Görres and
Friedrich Creuzer, became more interested in the past. They now tried to prove
that there had been a “special relationship” between India and the Teutons or
ancient Germans – an “Indo-German identification”, in Robert Cowan’s phrase. In
particular, this relationship was used to demonstrate that Germanic culture
derived from an older source than that of the French or other speakers of
Romance languages.
To this end Schlegel developed a new theory of the “migration
of peoples” (Völkerwanderung) in the
prehistorical era. Everything came from India still, as he had once said to
Tieck, but in different ways, through separate phases of migration. The
Germanic peoples came directly from the north of India (the red arrow on the diagram below); the peoples of the
Mediterranean and southern Europe, like the Greeks and Romans, came via a
longer and frequently interrupted route through Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (the blue arrow); and
the Egyptians were colonized by a group of Brahmins, who transmitted to them
the priestly culture of ancient India (the yellow dotted arrow).
Friedrich Schlegel's theory of prehistoric migrations, 1808
In 1810 Joseph Görres put forward a
still more grandiose hypothesis. There had been four migrations of peoples,
through which first America (green arrow below), then China and South-East Asia (red), then Northern
Europe (blue), and finally Africa and Egypt (yellow) were colonized or populated. India was the
birthplace of human culture as it covered the entire currently habitable surface
of the globe!
Joseph Görres' hypothesis, 1810
The claim for a direct Indo-German relationship was, it is
important to note, at this juncture still unaffected by openly racist
prejudices as they entered the debate on “Aryanism” in the later 19th
and 20th centuries. The relationships that interested Schlegel and
Görres were cultural and linguistic, not biological or genetic. Resistance to
their theories was equally expressed in cultural terms. The famous “Creuzer debate”
(famous to Indologists, anyway) between Friedrich Creuzer and Johann Heinrich
Voss around 1820 was sparked off by Creuzer’s supposedly insulting
interpretations of the origins of Greek culture and religion – above all, the
idea that the wild, erotic figure of Dionysus was central to Greek religion,
and that his cult had its origins in an early Indian “phallic cult” or “phallic
teaching”, summed up in the phallic lingam
of Hindu Shaivite ritual.
By the time the reaction against Romanticism arrived, the
connection between the Romantics’ picture of India and their veneration for the
ancient legends and culture of the German peoples was well-established. If one
wanted to attack Romanticism, one could do worse than begin by undermining the
enthusiasm for India. And that was precisely what Hegel did. In his “Lectures
on the Philosophy of World History” (1822), Hegel displayed an aversion to,
indeed even a hatred of, all things Indian that still startles the modern
reader. That the history of the world began in the East and travelled West was
as clear to Hegel as it had been to the Romantics; but that this history
manifested signs of decay from an original state of poetry and innocence was,
in Hegel’s view, no longer credible. India, ancient or modern, was simply
primitive, and nothing could be learned from it:
The life of the Indians is composed of...forms without spirit or emotional character...their entire condition must be grasped as one of dreamy reverie (Träumerei). Rationality, morality, subjectivity are annulled, disposed of... One wonders how a people so empty of spiritual substance and independence can become conscious of the highest life, of the truly substantial... The principle of Indian political life is arbitrary despotism and fortuitousness... Historiography the Indians do not understand in the slightest. They are wholly incapable of the kind of rational record-keeping [found in the writers of the Hebrew Old Testament]. Everything dissolves with them into exorbitant imagery. They are not capable of anything rational.
Hegel’s persistent characterization of Indian religion as “dreamy”
is without doubt an indirect attack on the religion and literature of
Romanticism, on authors such as Friedrich Schlegel. But two more aspects of
Hegel’s interpretation deserve mention, representing as I believe they do a
retreat from the radical and subtle character of Romantic thought. “Reason” (Vernunft) is, as is well known, the
central category of philosophy for Hegel. It is realized step by step in the
various phases of world history, above all in two spheres of human activity: in
religion (or philosophy) and in politics. The most rational forms or end-states
of world history are Christianity and the modern (Prussian) state. Culture –
and this is the crucial difference between those two historicists Hegel and
Herder – is a thoroughly secondary affair. This intolerant and abstract
conception of Reason permits no choice between various “mediators”, as Novalis
and Schlegel had done, because all sensual specificity and cultural difference
is finally “resolved” (aufgehoben) in
pure philosophical rationality.
One might expect that such trust in the rational “end of
history”, to borrow a more recent and equally short-lived Hegelian-derived
catchphrase, would not survive such blows as D. F. Strauss’s Biblical
criticism or the revolution of 1848. But the end or splintering of Hegelianism
did not bring about any renewed reflection on the cultural pluralism of the
Romantics that had gone before it. Ludwig Feuerbach’s “Young Hegelian” critique of
religion unfortunately led all too rapidly into the crasser varieties of
materialism that predominated in the second half of the 19th
century. When Marx came along to “stand Hegel on his head”, nothing about the
prevailing image of world history was really altered. Modernity was now defined
economically, rather than theologically and politically: but whereas the
Indians according to Hegel had represented a primitive, irrational religion,
they now represented according to Marx and Engels a primitive economic system
instead, an “Asiatic mode of production”. There was still nothing to be learned
from the Orient. The technological development of the West would soon leave the
rest of the world behind, and the only remaining question was when this
development would be taken out of the hands of the capitalists and placed in
the trust of the socialist state.
It is clear enough that this modernity is still more or less
ours. We too inhabit an ever-expanding “technological space”, to use the
expression of Reinhard Knodt. But “technological space” does not rely solely on
reason and material development. It relies equally on a mythology. We believe in technology: it is an
apparently central, inalienable part of our narrative of mankind’s salvation.
If it sometimes throws up problems – the atomic bomb, ecological devastation –
then we think, and pray, that it will also solve them.
Technology is the universal “mediator” for our imaginations,
even in art, in architecture, in music. We are hardly conscious, most of us, of
how deeply our language and responses in the areas of culture, ethics and
aesthetics are conditioned by science and technology. (I would point to Adam Curtis as one of the few voices in the mainstream media who really highlights
this issue and its problematic twentieth-century history.) Without the
materialist myth of technology we would probably never have seen the rise
to prominence of the Bauhaus “international style” in architecture, of modern
serial music, of psychoanalysis, sociology, mathematical economics, ecology,
and many other phenomena of modern art and life. Raymond Schwab’s astonishing book The Oriental Renaissance draws
the comparison with the Romantic generation quite explicitly: Orientalism “led
to an enthusiasm for ideas that is only comparable with the enthusiasm of our
contemporaries for the world of technology” (221).
But the enthusiasm is, in the end, of a different sort. The
early Romantics knew that they were
working on a common “mythology”, that the symbolic “mediators” of our values
and ideas could, and should, be created and shaped by us. Symbols are human: they are given to us neither by God nor
by the laws of physics. The Romantics were more sensitive to that fact than we
are today. And so was one of the last great Romantics in a scientific age, born
on Indian soil but perhaps not coincidentally more popular in Germany than
almost anywhere else outside his native land: Rabindranath Tagore, who created
from the gods and rituals of Hinduism his own symbolic universe of poetry, music,
dance, art and festivals. If we want to make use of technology as aid and “intermediary”
without slavishly worshipping it, we have much still to learn, I would suggest,
from both Tagore and the Romantics.
Selected literature
Germana, Nicholas A. The
Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German
National Identity. Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing 2009.
Safranski, Rüdiger. Romantik: Eine deutsche
Affäre. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2013.
Schwab, Raymond. The
Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880.
Translated by Gene Patterson-Black und Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984.
Cowan, Robert. The
Indo-German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European
Destinies, 1765-1885. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010.
Figueira, Dorothy M.
Translating the Orient: The Reception of Sakuntala
in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Albany: State University of New York, 1991.
McGetchin, Douglas T.
Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India’s Rebirth in Modern
Germany. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2009.
