German Visions of India

German Visions of India, 1871–1918
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German Visions of India, 1871–1918
Commandeering the Holy Ganges

during the Kaiserreich
Perry Myers
german visions of india, –
© Perry Myers, 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-29971-0
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ISBN 978-1-349-45290-3 ISBN 978-1-137-31692-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137316929
Myers, Perry. “Leopold von Schroeder’s Imagined India: Buddhist Spirituality and
Christian Politics during the Wilhelmine Era.” German Studies Review 33.2 (2009):
619–36. © 2003–2012 German Studies Association, all rights reserved. Reprinted
with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of
Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
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First edition: March 2013
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For Carlyn F. Myers
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
I Protestant and Catholic Champions and Their Visions of India
1 Restoring Spirituality: Buddhism and Building a
Protestant Nation 25
2 Catholic Visions of India and Universal Mandates:
Commandeering the Nation-State 53
II Breaking Out of the Iron Cage: Fringe Religious Innovators
and Their Detractors
3 Responding to Science and Materialism: Buddhism
and Theosophy 81
4 Buddhism’s Catholic and Protestant Detractors 113
III The Radicalization of Germany’s India
5 Ambivalent Visions of the British Raj: Spirituality
and Germany’s Colonial Champions 149
6 Prescriptive History and the Radicalization of
Community Building 169
Epilogue 199
Notes 201
Bibliography 239
Index 251
Illustrations
Figure 1.1 Leopold von Schroeder 29

Figure 2.1 Catholic Vicarages in India (1838) 68
Figure 3.1 Theodor Schultze 88
Figure 5.1 Hübbe-Schleiden’s “Pyramid of Power Potentialities” 155
Figure 5.2 Hübbe-Schleiden’s “Evolution in the Animal World” 157
Acknowledgments
As I contemplate the completion of this manuscript, somewhat in disbelief, I real-

ize the debts that I have accumulated to friends, family, and colleagues. Early on I
began to make a list of those who had written a support letter, made an insightful
comment at a conference, found a book for me in a library, read a chapter, or
posed a question that made me think about something in a different way. To all
of those people I give my heartfelt thanks. I hope that I have not missed any who
have contributed in some way, big or small, to this project.
First, I would like to thank my parents, who never said “no” to my at times
unusual adventures, which in effect was always a vote of support. I give special
thanks to my mother, who as a multidecade public school teacher modeled
for me the kind of educator that I would like to emulate. My family in Ger-
many, Karl and Renate Abel, has provided a hospitable summer home during
our stays in Bad Soden. Their generosity has provided the means to conduct
research and writing during our numerous stays in Germany. Also thanks to
Grit Liebscher and Frank Eisenhuth for providing a fantastic gateway to Ger-
many every summer.
Several institutions and granting agencies also deserve recognition. I received a
DAAD Faculty Research Visit Grant during the spring of 2010. My home insti-
tution, Albion College, also provided sabbatical leave during that same semester,
as well as generous financial support, which allowed me to spend a memorable
eight months working at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz.
The friendly and helpful staff at the Stabi made research easier and fun. While
in Berlin I was sponsored by the Friedrich Meinecke Institut at the Freie Univer-
sität. Its director at the time, Bernd Sößemann and his administrative assistant,
Gilda Langkau, were most helpful in arranging my sabbatical in Berlin. Also at
the FU, my thanks go to Sebastian Conrad and Claudia Ulbrich for their sup-
port. I also spent time in the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin, where Henner
Grundhoff helped me dig up archival references to India. A special thanks also
goes to Margrit Pernau from the Max Planck Institut for Human Development
in Berlin, who invited me to spend an afternoon discussing my research with her
and several graduate students. I would also like to thank the staff at Albion Col-
lege’s library who have never hesitated to help me find sources with those strange
and long German words. Here Nicole Garrett, Becky Markovich, Allie Moore,
and Mike VanHouten deserve special thanks for their help in several last min-
ute searches. During recent summers my library away from home has been the
xii Acknowledgments
Universtätsbibliothek at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt. There Anne-Marie

Kaspar, Maike Strobel, and Franziska Voss have been most helpful and deserve
recognition.
Over the past several years numerous people deserve my appreciation: Sai
Bhatawadekar, Joanne Miyang Cho, Robert Cowan, Jörg Esleben, Veronika
Fuechtner, Nicholas Germana, Pascal Grosse, Bradley Herling, Katie Kirch,
Christina Kraenzle, Sukanya Kulkarni, Eric Kurlander, Hiram Maxim, Doug-
las McGetchin, Kamakshi Murti, Erika Nelson, Diethelm Prowe, Mary Rhiel,
Peter Staudenmeier, George Steinmetz, Rodney Symington, Corinna Trautel,
Thomas Trautman, and George Williamson. Special thanks go to Nicholas
Vazsonyi, Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, and Sabine Mangold for their support.
When all is said and done a book needs a good editor and publisher. I would
like to give special thanks to Chris Chappell, Sarah Whalen, and Katherine
Haigler at Palgrave Macmillan, as well as the anonymous readers, for their help
in improving the quality of my work. Special thanks are also due to Kyriaki
Tsaganis at Scribe Inc., whose probing questions and excellent copyedits have
improved the book’s clarity. I am grateful to Lisa Kleinholz for creating the
index. Any errors remain my own.
Rarely does one work in a department as harmonious as Modern Languages
and Cultures at Albion College. I would like to express my appreciation to my
colleagues, both present and former: Catalina Pérez Abreu, Linda Clawson, Dianne
Guenin-Lelle, Eriko Ike, Julia Medina, Takami Mohri, Makiko Nakano, Marcie
Noble, Kalen Oswald, Rebecca Whitehead-Schwarz, Emmanuel Yewah, and
most importantly my former colleague in German and now sorely missed, Cathie
Grimm. Several other former and present colleagues at Albion deserve recogni-
tion: Geoffrey Cocks, Chris Hagerman, Bhindu Madhok, the late Selva Raj, Yi-Li
Wu, and Midori Yoshii.
I would also like to thank Nina Berman for her continued support
throughout recent, now many, years. Also an enthusiastic thank you goes to
Suzanne Marchand, whose research and generous feedback have helped me
tremendously to frame arguments better, and more precisely. Her insightful
comments on much of this manuscript have certainly made it better. Since
my graduate school days continuing to the present, Katie Arens has met every
request to read one more chapter, and one more chapter. I personally and
this book have benefitted tremendously from her support, keen insight, and
willingness to help.
I save the most important for last. I would like to thank Susanne, my spouse
who has always supported my adventures and the hardships they have incurred.
We have made them together. Without her this book would be half empty. I will
be forever grateful. My two daughters, Larissa and Marina, courageously departed
familiar schools and their friends in Michigan, and braved their own eight-month
sabbatical in Berlin. For their willingness to forego the security of the familiar and
their great attitudes about Papa’s endless research I am forever indebted. When this
book finds its place on the shelf, Susanne, Larissa, and Marina will still be my heart.
In the book’s context, translating from German into English poses particu-
lar problems at striking a balance between meaning, English syntax, and the
Acknowledgments xiii
expressive flair of these German India experts. Susanne Myers and I have pored
over quotations for hours trying to achieve that balance. The reader will notice
that at times the English translations are cumbersome, perhaps at times even
flamboyant, but this indeed reflects our attempt to respect the writing style of
these thinkers. I hope that we have achieved that delicate balance.
Introduction
Indology, born out of life, leads back to life; apart from academic results, it should,
paired with life, create new life; a great purpose lies ahead of it.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arische Weltanschauung (1905)1
In  Houston Stewart Chamberlain, German Aryanist and anti-Semite,

envisioned nothing less than Germany’s entire political, religious, and social
future springing from the discovered prizes of India’s spiritual riches—veiled in
the mysterious secrets of the Holy Ganges—to be uncovered by Western sages.2
Yet for Chamberlain and many other intellectuals during the Kaiserreich (1871–
1918) this was more than an academic exercise.3 Chamberlain’s observation sign-
posts religion and the sense of spiritual crisis as cultural dilemmas that play a
critical role at every analytical juncture of this book. His prophetic revelation
implicitly suggests that knowledge of India becomes beneficial only when paired
with cultural regeneration—the spark of new life. At first glance, the character-
ization of India as Germany’s indispensable source for renewal—rebirth—might
seem a blatant exaggeration of this non-Western culture’s critical relevance for
Wilhelmine Germany. Yet upon closer inspection of the prolific German liter-
ary, philosophical, and historical production on India’s culture and traditions,
Chamberlain’s pronouncement appears perhaps less radical than it might seem
on first reading.
Why was India one of Germany’s reference points for negotiating the era’s
social, religious, and political transformations? From the German Enlightenment
forward, a remarkable collection of German intellectuals from Herder and Goethe
to Nobel Prize winners Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Günter Grass have
turned to the Orient, frequently India, in pursuit of poetic and philosophical
inspiration, insights into the roots of Indo-Germanic languages, and religious
rejuvenation. During the Kaiserreich, the German fascination with India had
evolved far beyond the linguistic/cultural studies initiated by the Schlegels, Bopp,
Lassen, and others during the first half of the nineteenth century.4 From the
Prussian victory over France and the Reich’s founding on January 18, 1871, at
Versailles to the end of the Wilhelmine Empire in 1918, India had become an
important site for many intellectuals to explore new social sciences, spiritual alter-
natives to Western Christianity, and a frequent travel destination. As a result the
Wilhelmine era saw an extraordinary proliferation of academic and lay expertise
on India (some serious, some not), through which these thinkers reconstructed
2 German Visions of India, 1871–1918
their own spiritual identities, negotiated their political aims and denominational
agendas, and asserted national mandates, all with reference to India.
Specifically and pertinent to this study, India, because of the unique philologi-
cal linkage between German and Sanskrit, became for many thinkers in various
ways a bountiful cultural mirror for navigating the era’s perceived crisis of iden-
tity that traversed a first and then a second Oriental Renaissance.5 India was
an important subset for both, but especially during the Wilhelmine era, Indian
studies became a part of what Marchand has termed the “furor orientalis” due to
the increasing intellectual emphasis on establishing origins as a primary means to
reforge German cultural identity.6 As Marchand explains, the importance of India
for these thinkers emerged from the evolution of the Aryan/Semitic divide within
German oriental studies that “was propelled forward not only by an increasing
racial association being made between Teutons and Aryans, but also by the dif-
ferent sorts of involvement each subfield developed with European colonial
practices.”7 Moreover, and most significantly for Marchand, German forms of
Orientalism, particularly as they became manifest in biblical and classical scholar-
ship, had a great deal to do with the “crises of religious belief and the dissolution
of the humanities’ monopoly over cultural production.”8 Here Marchand’s com-
ments identify vividly, and as her work thoroughly examines, how critical aspects
of Germany’s long nineteenth century, and specifically Wilhelmine society and
culture (shifting modes of identity, religious paradigms, and political agendas),
became intricately entangled with institutional and intellectual practice—how
the Orient became a critical sounding board for negotiating the era’s dilemmas.
While in the case of Germany’s India at the fin-de-siècle, Marchand restricts her
focus primarily to its racial undercurrents, her analysis also opens up, as her pre-
viously cited comments indicate, a vast array of significant questions about the
linkages between German depictions of India and the social, cultural, and politi-
cal dilemmas that these India experts confronted during the Wilhelmine era.9
German Visions of India seeks to examine many of these complex questions by
exploring the travel impressions, missionary reports, religious and philosophi-
cal interpretations, and academic essays of a diverse set of German intellectuals
whose work paid particular attention to Indian religious traditions.
The image of India, as farfetched as this may seem, became a powerful sound-
ing board during the Kaiserreich for many intellectuals to renegotiate modern
definitions of science, culture, and religion—a potential field, in Bourdieu’s sense
of the term, for reformulating their destabilized sense of history and progress.10
Just as Chamberlain projects in 1905, German India experts sought to navi-
gate the unsettled religious, social, and political waters of Wilhelmine Germany
through their constructed visions of India. Before moving on to a more detailed
study of these various cultural and political agendas, in which this constructed
India played such a significant role, it will be helpful to elaborate the book’s
theoretical framework and situate my work’s place in the significant and still
flourishing field of research on German Orientalism.
Introduction 3
Theoretical Considerations and State of the Research

The very mention of the word Orientalism evokes of course the game-changing
scholarly work of Edward Said, whose Orientalism (1978), relying heavily on
Foucauldian discourse analysis, depicted the West’s, or specifically French and
British, literary and academic vision of the Orient as an assertion of power
and domination; and in the process, Said famously disregarded Germany because
of its purported colonial insignificance.11 In the case of German Orientalism,
Said’s work, flawed as so many have shown, initiated nevertheless a remarkable
and enlightening intellectual endeavor that has produced a wealth of prolific
work on Germany’s relations and interactions with non-European cultural Oth-
ers, as Germanists across virtually the entire spectrum of the humanities rebutted
Said’s disregard of Germany’s relevance to colonial and postcolonial discussions.
Yet Said’s emphasis on power relationships, though always important and implic-
itly inherent perhaps in all human interaction, has exhausted its usefulness as a
sole analytical framework.12 Marchand, for instance, rejects “the idea that Ger-
man ‘orientalism’ was a single, shared discourse,” and moreover, calls discourse
analysis into question because of its tendency to reiterate “what we know, namely
that people make representations for their own purposes; too rarely do they ask
about the variety of those purposes, or about the rootedness of those representa-
tions in weaker or stronger interpretations of original sources.”13 The complexity of
German Orientalism that Marchand points to is abundantly manifest in Germany’s
constructed India during the Second Reich and thus requires a more exhaustive
examination to flesh out the meanings of the diverse perceptions and wide-ranging
views embodied in that work—to provide a “thicker description” of Germany’s
India, to borrow a somewhat overused but still highly relevant term.14
Because Germany’s India experts indeed came from diverse academic and pro-
fessional backgrounds with contradictory and often conflicting aims, a study that
claims to provide such a thicker description must carefully examine the links
between what each set of performers in this sociocultural play had at stake in the
era’s debates about religion, science, and the nation and how their vested interests
became contested through their visions of India. A more detailed elaboration of
the historical context will soon follow, but for now let it suffice to say that India
became a “market place” for many German intellectuals through which they could
negotiate their religious, scientific, and political capital—to redefine and reassert
symbolic meaning in these interrelated spheres as they sought to engender what
Bourdieu terms a “profit of distinction.”15 Importantly and critical for my analy-
sis, Bourdieu, in his adamant criticism of Saussurian and Chomskyian linguistics,
argues that this “symbolic imposition” can only be understood in its social context.16
As he explains, “It follows that the exercise of symbolic power is accompanied by
work on the form of discourse which . . . has the purpose of demonstrating the
orator’s mastery and gaining him the recognition of the group.”17 George Stein-
metz insightfully employs this model in his assessment of Germany’s precolonial
ethnographic discourse on Africa. In reference to what he terms the “three-way
intraelite class struggle” during the Kaiserreich, for instance, Steinmetz posits that
group members “selected tropes and narratives from the ethnographic archive
that promised to showcase its socially constructed strengths, its existing hold-
ings of capital.”18 In a similar vein, though the East had become perhaps just an
object of European curiosity and was less instrumentalist for many, India’s history
and religious traditions nevertheless became an intellectual vessel through which
many German thinkers sought to reassert their import and agency in Wilhelmine
culture and society.19
Thus, as my study will show, these German India experts were attempting to
redefine “the set of prescriptions which govern the form of the public manifesta-
tion of authority,” to again cite Bourdieu, as they responded to the perceived
breakdown in traditional modes for forging identity and community coherence.20
Although Bourdieu’s thought is grounded in linguistic theory and in particular
the articulatory features of the habitus, his work has valuable applications for
understanding the mechanisms for establishing social conventions and commu-
nity consensus or, as Bourdieu puts it slightly differently, the “whole set of social
properties.”21 Importantly, these processes of “social magic,” as he describes them,
are embodied in all forms of human interaction and communication, including
speech, but also manners, gestures, clothing, and certainly also written produc-
tion.22 Bourdieu explains that “words”—or in my work, the profuse publications
of Germany’s India experts—“are programmes of perception and different, more
or less ritualized strategies for the symbolic struggles of everyday life, just like
the collective rituals of naming or nomination—or, more clearly still, the clashes
between the visions and previsions of specifically political struggles—imply a cer-
tain claim to symbolic authority as the socially recognized power to impose a
certain vision of the social world, i.e. of the divisions of the social world.”23 In
other words, to put it in more topic-specific terms, the object of my study—
German perceptions of India—seeks to uncover various manifestations of diverse
schemes for reformulating worn out strategies for establishing consensus in the
perceived unstable cultural, social, and political domains of the Second Reich,
or to cite Bourdieu again, for sanctioning new “rites of legitimation, or, quite
simply, rites of institution.”24
Thus Bourdieu’s thought provides an important theoretical framework
through which one can examine how Wilhelmine intellectuals attempted to
reestablish their identities and community consensus in the nation through the
sounding board of India. My goal here is to show how these India experts sought
to reconstitute “new definitions of acceptability . . . in the relationship between
a market and a habitus, which itself is the product of the whole history of its
relations with markets,” without succumbing to the one-way infliction of power
that Said assumes, nor to a disingenuous criticism of Wilhelmine ideologies that
Marchand warns against.25 As a result, the subtitle’s term commandeering in my
work then has little to do with Said’s emphasis on the imposition of power on the
cultural Other; rather, commandeering refers explicitly to the social, cultural, and
political maneuvering that informed and underlaid the India that many German
thinkers so ardently constructed—the attempt to commandeer social, cultural,
and political consensus in the Kaiserreich through a constructed vision of India.
By emphasizing how Germany’s India experts sought to refashion community
consensus through their vision of India—from various angles and frequently with
Introduction 5
idiosyncratic aims—we can gain deeper insight into the dynamic transformations
of Wilhelmine Germany.
With that in mind, the field of Indian studies and the wide-ranging fascination
with India during the Kaiserreich emerged during a time of extraordinary cultural
and political tensions, which explicitly informed the analyses, understanding, and
interpretation of Indian traditions. That is, German Indologen—eminent pro-
fessors in Indian Studies (Indologie)—and other intellectuals navigated concerns
with religious traditions (denominational conflict and secularization), scientific
imperatives (Darwinism and empiricism), and sociopolitical transformations
(German colonialism and nationalism). Specifically, these German intellectuals
were drawing on non-Western traditions to assemble an archive of knowledge
through which they could (a) assert denominational agendas—Catholic and Prot-
estant—as the established churches sought to solidify their roles in a more secular
world dominated by Bismarckian power politics and eventually imperial designs;
(b) negotiate what they perceived as faltering religious signifiers, sparked in part
by the scientific challenges to biblical exegesis as the primary source for estab-
lishing human knowledge and spiritual identity; (c) formulate a new paradigm
for the nation as Germany sought to identify itself during the age of empire,
with its inherent colonial competition among the European powers; all three of
these contentious domains were explicitly shaped by (d) new, innovative paths for
reshaping intellectual identity and rebuilding community consensus in response to
these perceived stresses in Wilhelmine culture.
As this study will show, these religious (denominational and spiritual) dilem-
mas, political agendas, and especially attempts to redefine community paradigms
to meet changing markers for building social consensus, became inextricably
entangled in the wider German examination of Indian cultural traditions. That
is, these spheres of national contention and cultural conflict, particularly religion
and the search for updated forms of spirituality, became intricately embedded in
German visions of India and will provide the organizational framework for this
study. This is not to suggest that these areas of cultural and political debate are
unrelated and can somehow be easily separated into neat categories. In fact, the
opposite is the case; all of these spheres of investigation are intricately intercon-
nected. For example, late nineteenth-century science and its inherent materialist
views of human life was perceived by many as a threat to the spiritual integrity of
human beings and stimulated attempts to reforge new avenues for achieving a sense
of spirituality; attempts to remodel this sense of spirituality became endemic to
shifting models of social science; political interests and denominational aims fre-
quently reinforced each other; and the effort to reconstruct intellectual identities,
both individually and as a nation, modeled new paths for community building
and was never completely absent from these India pundits’ field of vision. Just
as important, the underlying motivations and objectives of these intellectuals
regarding India were multifaceted and sundry, thus often conflicted, and do not
merge easily into a coherent, unified vision of India. The results of this study
will point to the wide-ranging and multivocal humanistic constructs of India
and thus by the same token to the complexity of the Wilhelmine era—providing
insight into the depth and intricacies of its dynamic cultural, social, and political
realms, which continue to spark debate and interest today.26
To this point my presentation of the historical context still remains somewhat
sketchy, but before providing a more detailed description of the social, cultural,
and political parameters relevant for this study, I want to first examine more
thoroughly the prolific scholarly work upon which my examination of Germany’s
India builds and is heavily indebted. Until recently, the question of how these cul-
tural and political questions of the Wilhelmine era might have been informed by
or became entangled in visions of other cultures had seldom been raised, except
under the auspices of Germany’s colonial agenda in Africa. These important ini-
tial studies then focused most frequently on Germans in Africa (Woodruff Smith,
Lora Wildenthal, Nina Berman, Sara Friedrichsmeyer, and Eric Ames). Other
scholars looked beyond this specific geopolitical framework to explore how the
assertion of gender identity and sexual desire became transposed onto cultural
Others (Suzanne Zantop) or how German and South American cultures inter-
mingle in what Mary Louise Pratt has called “contact zones.”27 More recently,
George Steinmetz’s pioneering work, The Devil’s Handwriting, merges Bourdieu’s
model of social distinction with Lacanian symbolic processes of identification to
explore how diverse precolonial images of three German colonies in three dif-
ferent geographical regions (Quingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa) underlie
distinct colonial policies.28
After Said’s publication, India too gained scholarly attention among Ger-
manists, yet this fruitful work has paid little attention to Germany’s prolific
publications on India during the Wilhelmine era primarily due to a greater focus
on early Romanticism. Two general temporal categories of scholarly work on the
subject can be identified, one that concentrates on the period of Germany’s origi-
nal plunge into Sanskrit studies, and the other that traces the longer thread of
Germany’s captivation with India from the Enlightenment to World War II, or
what one might term the “longue durée” of Germany’s India. Specifically, schol-
ars have concentrated their work on the birth of the Indo-Germanic era, in which
the Schlegel brothers put Sanskrit on Germany’s intellectual radar at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century.29 Here Wilhelm Halbfass focuses in India and
Europe (1988) on the theological and philosophical readings of canonical authors
such as Hegel and Schopenhauer and establishes the important influences of
Indian thought for nineteenth-century European thinkers. While Halbfass’s work
extends further in the century, Jean Sedlar, in India in the Mind of Germany:
Schelling, Schopenhauer and Their Times (1982), concentrates specifically on the
philosophical reception of India during the early part of the century; Leslie Will-
son’s A Mythical Image (1964), path breaking in its day, notably predating Said’s
work and still worth consulting, takes a broader approach and investigates the
image of India as it became projected in the philosophy and literary production
of German Romanticism. Several excellent recent studies have also been com-
pleted. Bradley Herling, in The German Gītā (2006), explores the reception and
interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth
century; Nicholas Germana, in The Orient of Europe (2009), analyzes the “mythic
image” of India in terms of competing national identities. These scholarly texts,
Introduction 7
all of which examine Germany’s India by focusing primarily on the first Oriental
Renaissance, make an important contribution to contextualizing and under-
standing Germany’s intellectual and cultural history but also provide a crucial
backdrop for corroborating India’s rejuvenated importance for German thinkers
at the end of the nineteenth century—the second Oriental Renaissance.
Second, several expansive chronological studies exist, which cover the longue
durée of the India-Germany connection. Raymond Schwab’s The Oriental Renais-
sance was the first major work on the subject in the post–WWII era, appearing in
French in 1950, but seemed to motivate only limited intellectual response in the
English-language academic world until after its translation in 1984. This seminal
work provides a wide-ranging and penetrating analysis of Europe’s scientific dis-
covery of Sanskrit and India, and insightfully explores the intellectual occupation
(literary, scientific, historical) with Indian traditions during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Though Schwab devotes brief sections to Schopenhauer
and “the Buddhism of Wagner,” the profuse writings by other German think-
ers during the Kaiserreich receive scarce attention. Walter Leifer’s India and the
Germans: 500 Years of Indo-German Contacts (1971), as the title of his book indi-
cates, covers the German encounter with India over several centuries. Leifer’s text
covers philology, philosophy, religious innovators, travel literature, and modern
economic relationships, yet his work, as he himself admits, “is not so much about
critical opinion and analysis, as only the fixation of facts.”30
More recent work, such as Jörg Esleben et al.’s anthology Mapping Channels
between Ganges to Rhein (2008) also covers a wide range of topics from German
philosophy, travel and literature, and popular media on the topic of India, and
thus corroborates the depth and magnitude of India’s importance for the Ger-
man psyche over two centuries to the present day. Christine Maillard’s L’Inde vue
d’Europe: Histoire d’une rencontre, 1750–1950 (2008) provides one of the broad-
est studies to date, both chronologically and thematically, which includes the
British, French, and German views of India across many fields such as philoso-
phy, literature, Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis, and more esoteric versions
in theosophy. The expansive nature of India’s penetration into Europe’s intellec-
tual mind-set illustrates the ideological import of the subcontinent for European
thinkers, yet Maillard does not provide a comprehensive analysis of these various
domains, choosing instead to document the importance and cultural breadth of
the European image of India.
Douglas McGetchin’s recent Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism (2009)
returns to the German scholar’s India to trace the diffusion of their academic
knowledge in early nineteenth-century Sanskrit studies, Romanticism, the
later Buddhist movement at the fin-de-siècle, and finally National Socialism.
McGetchin’s work highlights and astutely explores the historical and cultural
links with Germany’s particular interest in India: romantic visions, based on “a
concern for nature, sentiment and religious transcendence” that German think-
ers at the beginning of the nineteenth century identified in the translation of
Indian literary texts,31 or individual German states competing with each other
on the academic playing field by supporting Oriental Studies at their regional
universities.32 McGetchin devotes a chapter to Buddhism at the fin-de-siècle in
which he explains such intellectual interest with “the ongoing European thirst
for exoticism, the religious challenge and controversy that Buddhism presented
for Christianity, and the crisis of European cultures in the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century.”33 Though McGetchin correctly identifies these valid investigative
angles, he restricts his analysis primarily to a less comprehensive description of
theosophy and the Buddhist enthusiasts Karl Eugen Neumann and Karl Seiden-
stücker. McGetchin largely disregards the profuse writing of other Buddhists
and theosophists, for instance, who also employed India as a sounding board
in their intellectual exertions to battle the sociocultural transformations of their
day. Instead McGetchin focuses primarily on the public status and the signifi-
cant cultural discomfort that these religious innovators caused among Christian
Indologists—important aspects of their story but not the full picture.
Finally Robert Cowan, in The Indo-German Identification (2010), traces criti-
cal transformations in German cultural identity as preeminent thinkers from
Herder to Nietzsche constructed “origins” based on “their own quests to define
themselves ethnically, linguistically, culturally, and spiritually” through their
readings of Indian traditions.34 Yet Cowan’s thoughtful analysis of the interrelat-
edness of these domains, like so much other work on Germany’s India during the
era, remains focused on eminent philosophers. Both Cowan’s and McGetchin’s
scholarly contributions to our understanding of Germany’s India, especially dur-
ing the Kaiserreich, implore us to examine more specific contexts, delimited time
frames, and account for a broader selection of views that includes but also extends
beyond Germany’s eminent thinkers.
With that said, for the period of our concern, the Kaiserreich, the scholarly
activity cannot be so easily catalogued. An overview of the literature to date, which
focuses at least in part or primarily on this period, can nevertheless help us iden-
tify those important questions and themes that have been either overemphasized
or left unaccounted for. First, Sheldon Pollock, in his pathbreaking essay “Deep
Orientalism” (1993), traces specific links between the German social scientific
fascination with India and National Socialism. Also from the 1990s, Kaushik
Bagchi’s dissertation, “Orientalism without Colonialism? Three Nineteenth-
Century German Indologists and India,” applies Said’s model—Europeans
producing knowledge that inherently asserts authority over Indian culture and
traditions—to investigate how these important Indologists around the turn of
the twentieth century Orientalize Indians in their travel reports; Kamakshi Murti
expands and corrects Said’s work in her India: The Seductive and Seduced “Other”
of German Orientalism (2001) to argue that German thinkers from the seven-
teenth century to the present have Orientalized India; and Dorothy Figuiera,
in Aryans, Jews, Brahmins (2002), sketches the roots of German “Aryanism” as
it became embodied in the work of Friedrich Max Müller, Nietzsche, Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, and the Nazi publicist Alfred Rosenberg, and insightfully
sets their thought comparatively against reform-minded Indian subaltern voices
such as Rammohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda.35 Douglas McGetchin et al.
(Sanskrit and Orientalism, 2002) and Indra Sengupta (From Salon to Discipline,
2005) open up new analytical avenues on the history and development of Indol-
ogy as an academic field.36 With Saidian approaches gradually losing favor in our
Introduction 9
new millennium, important alternative angles for the German-India connection

have emerged. Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn’s L’archive des Origines (2008) remains
focused on Indology as a discipline but breaks new ground by accounting for the
social, political, and scientific context of the field’s national history and how it
interacted with broader trends in European social science.
In addition, several recent studies have made important contributions to our
knowledge of Indologists during the Kaiserreich from analytical angles outside of
the strict framework of Disziplinsgeschichte. Stefan Arvidsson’s Aryan Idols: Indo-
European Mythology as Ideology and Science (2006), for instance, which includes
a section on the Indologist Leopold von Schroeder that I will address in Chapter 6,
traces the European fascination with Aryan roots from the nineteenth century
to the Nazi period. Notable too is George Williamson’s The Longing for Myth in
Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (2004),
which addresses India and Indology only briefly but offers critical insights about
religion and spirituality leading up to and including the early decades of the Kai-
serreich. Also noteworthy is Tuska Benes’s In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology,
and Nation in Nineteenth Century Germany (2008), which examines the study of
language in the production of knowledge about the nation, race, and ethnicity.
Theodore Ziolkowski’s Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief
(2007) includes a chapter on travelers to India, but Ziolkowski limits his analysis
to the German fascination with India solely as a spiritual search, without explor-
ing the broader cultural and political links, which my work here proposes to
investigate.
Critical to my study, Marchand’s important and comprehensive German Ori-
entalism in the Age of Empire (2009) incorporates the German fascination with
India into her analysis of German scholarship’s encounter with the East during
the longue durée of German Orientalistik. Her insightful analysis of the German
scholarly fascination with the East challenges the inadequacies that underlie criti-
cisms of ideology and what she terms “knowledge-making practices.”37 In the case
of Germany’s constructed India, Marchand examines early German Vedic studies
and in particular the work of Friedrich Schlegel. For the era of my concern, she
first contextualizes Christian-Buddhist comparisons during the later decades of
the nineteenth century within the trend toward an “Oriental Christianity” and
second, as I have already briefly mentioned, emphasizes the racist discourse of
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and the Indologists Leopold von Schroeder and
Paul Deussen. Race is unquestionably a critical consideration for understanding
Germany’s India, especially at the fin-de-siècle, but my work seeks to concentrate
less on the paradigm of race in order to address what Marchand too suggests
about the specific case of Paul Deussen, which can also be more broadly applied
to an analysis of Germany’s India experts during the era: “their passions and pur-
suits cannot be reduced to a single formula.”38 Here, Marchand points again to
the complexity and multivocal nature of Germany’s imagined India that German
Visions of India will explore.
In summary, these important scholarly contributions offer illuminating
insights about the spiritual, religious, and intellectual vicissitudes of nineteenth-
century thought and culture, and have also significantly increased the depth of
our understanding about Germany’s India. Yet in the specific case of Wilhelmine
culture, society, and politics, this scholarly work is also frequently marked in ways
that affect an incomplete or in certain instances even obscured picture. Specifi-
cally, this work generally traces long, sweeping trajectories from the eighteenth
century to the post–World War II era, and frequently, earlier studies employ a
“one-way” binary analytical model—Germans Orientalizing others, geopolitically
and culturally. These more synthetical works have played a critical role in fleshing
out the broader continuities and links among various cultural domains (literary,
philosophical, academic), and have also triggered domain- and era-specific questions
about Germany’s relationship to the Orient, and specifically India. Yet unavoid-
ably, these studies tend to gloss over the detail of Germany’s constructed India
during the Kaiserreich and, more important, how Germany’s India exemplifies
the remarkable cultural debates about science and spirituality, denominational
hostilities, and political rivalries in Europe during the era. Moreover, in a related
sense, other work has frequently been read through the lens of 1933, which often
depicts the German fascination with India as protofascist and thus further con-
tributes to an epistemic deficit about how these intellectuals were responding
to larger patterns of social and cultural shifts unique to the Wilhelmine era.39
Studies have concentrated primarily on the academic publications of creden-
tialed Indolgists, while leaving a prolific amount of printed material largely
unexplored—especially pamphlets, travel literature, and journal essays—written
by Indologists and other India experts (theologians, missionaries, religious inno-
vators, travelers) intended for a more general readership. In response to these
deficits, my work here proposes to examine the various formulas that Germany’s
India experts forged during the Second Reich and explores how these diverse
analytical blueprints of India reflected and manifested their attempts to negotiate
the social, cultural, and political debates—commandeering the Holy Ganges as a
field, in Bourdieu’s sense, to reassert their symbolic capital in Wilhelmine culture
and society. In this regard, like Marchand, I believe that religion and the negotia-
tion of spiritual dilemmas played a crucial role in the Kaiserreich, a topic that
will weave its thread through every chapter of this manuscript—to enhance our
understanding of the entanglement of religion, spirituality, society, and politics
in Wilhelmine Germany.
Plan of the Book

In response to the deficits in the scholarship on Germany’s India during the Kai-
serreich that were just described, the monograph will be organized into three
main sections—spheres of cultural and political debate that carried significance
during the era. In each section, I will explore how a diverse set of German think-
ers with a common interest in and fascination with India constructed an archive
of knowledge—academic volumes and essays, travel reports, literature, and
religious/esoteric books and pamphlets—by which they maneuvered their way
through the twists and tangles of the cultural and political transformations of the
Kaiserreich.
Introduction 11
PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC CHAMPIONS AND THEIR VISION OF INDIA
By the start of the nineteenth century, despite Kant’s valiant philosophical effort
in his famous Critiques to save God by designating the divine as intuitively per-
ceived in noumena, though cognitively inaccessible in the phenomenological
world, the aftereffects of the Reformation and Enlightenment had thrust the once
ostensible political clout of religious institutions into a more precarious state.40
In response to the ongoing transformations in the conventional religious-political
paradigm as the nineteenth century progressed, German liberals built their politi-
cal model in part on a more secularized relationship between church and state,
as Rudolf Lill confirms: “One of the primary concerns of National Liberalism
during the nineteenth century was the assertion of a secularized social order and
a new determination of the ‘border between State and Church,’ with a corre-
sponding reduction in church influence in society.”41 Yet in the decades after the
failed revolutions in 1848, Protestant mandates gradually became more intri-
cately entwined with Liberal politics. In fact, as Dieter Langewiesche posits, “The
liberal Protestant educated middle classes’ conviction that they had to defend
the ‘independence of modern society and its culture’ from the Catholic Church
acquired a particular political dynamic in Germany, because in the decade of
the Reichsgründung, the national political and religious camps extensively over-
lapped.”42 As Bismarck forcefully forged the new German nation, especially after
the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the assertion of
liberal political objectives became more closely aligned with denominational
interests and specifically anti-Catholic.43
This link of course played a crucial role in the increasing denominational con-
flicts during the 1870s that reached their high point in the Kulturkampf.44 The
story is a familiar one, marked by noteworthy political actions and denomina-
tional assertions: the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870, or the May Laws
of 1872, which exiled Catholic Jesuits from Germany and closed their monas-
teries. Though the intricate political details of the Kulturkampf extend beyond
the scope of my study, I want to emphasize here the critical link that emerged
between religion, politics, and nation. That is, Protestant spiritual/confessional
agendas, especially during the 1870s and after, became comfortable bedfellows
with intensifying assertions to define the new German nation—a more overt
union between denomination and politics that is explicitly discernible, as we shall
see, in German Protestant assessments of Indian religion and culture.45
Importantly, the denominational entitlement enjoyed by Protestants found
concrete political outlets during the 1870s and motivated overt assaults on Cath-
olics and their institutional networks in Germany. Beginning in 1872 with the
aforementioned May Laws, for instance, the Prussian government, under the
leadership of Otto von Bismarck, passed a series of statutes directed at aggres-
sively limiting the political, cultural, and social agency of the Catholic Church
in Germany. These laws of the same year asserted the right of the state to control
the education and appointment of priests, and in 1874 the government passed
an additional law for expelling priests who resisted these state mandates. The
anti-Catholicism of the early 1870s became exacerbated when, on July 13, 1874,
at the height of the Kulturkampf, an attempt was made on the life of Bismarck.
Many Protestants blamed Catholics for the attempted murder, which lent politi-
cal support to this new wave of anti-Catholic laws, and by then included the
elimination of virtually all Catholic orders.46 Adding insult to injury, the Prussian
government passed further laws in April 1875 that allowed the government to
withhold financial support from those Bishoprics that refused to abide by these
insidious restrictions.47
Yet such aggressive political tactics frequently solidify resistance among a tar-
geted adversary and reverse the intended effect, as Helmut Walser Smith explains:
“The experience of persecution and resistance created the conditions for the for-
mation of a Catholic community that transcended, at least in part, differences of
class and status, a community that shared a common, emotive rhetoric, and that
was bound by a dense, tightly woven network of Catholic organizations.”48 More-
over, “it politicized the Catholic population; it bound Catholics into struggle,
into conflict, the obverse of which was confessional cohesion.”49 To put it simply,
Protestant attacks bred Catholic solidarity just as the Catholic Church struggled
to come to terms with such thorny issues as Darwinian science, democratization,
and everlasting unsanctioned biblical hermeneutics.
Thus in light of the challenges posed by modernization on Catholic theo-
logical doctrine and church hierarchies, which became exacerbated during the
Kulturkampf, such external attack proved quite convenient for Church cohesive-
ness because Catholics were forced to adapt and reassert their solidarity. As David
Blackbourn explains, “Catholic solidarity resulted partly from the tendency to
close ranks at a time of external attack and widespread contempt on the part of
non-Catholics.”50 Yet due to their position as a minority and the derision that
they frequently faced from the more dominant Protestants, Catholics “responded
by holding to the faith, closing ranks and wearing their religion as a badge of
identity.”51 The solidification of Catholic unity was nevertheless a direct result
of practical disadvantages for any young German Catholic with intellectual aspi-
rations. The opportunity for young, intellectually inclined Catholics to pursue
practical outlets for asserting their religious agency in Germany during this period
remained limited—Catholic education had become virtually impossible in Ger-
many during the 1870s and remained so until the Prussian Friedensgesetze in 1886
and 1887.52
This cursory amelioration between the Prussian government, still under Bis-
marck’s rule until March 1890, and the Catholic Church was due in part to the
political realities of the day. The Catholic Zentrumspartei had already become
an acknowledged political player in the 1870s and during the 1880s maintained
nearly 25 percent of parliamentary seats in the German government, thus com-
manding Bismarck’s attention in his attempts to forge the requisite political
cohesiveness to accommodate his partisan agenda.53 Yet despite such political
clout Catholics could hardly enjoy a newfound place in the cultural sun of Ger-
many’s fin-de-siècle. As Helmut Walser Smith has shown, even after Protestant
Kulturkampf sentiments had waned during the 1880s, anti-Catholic hawks still
retained a powerful voice in Germany’s political and cultural discourse.54 Fear
of ultramontanism, for instance, still remained a powerful propaganda tool for
Introduction 13
Protestants to raise awareness of potential Catholic threats to undermine Prus-

sian solidarity. Significantly, anti-Catholic sentiments also found concrete outlets
in the nationalist agendas of the Bülow Bloc and the Pan-German League after
the turn of the century, which as Smith argues, even threatened to initiate a
second Kulturkampf.55 Despite the renewed assertion of Catholic solidarity, the
significant Catholic influence in Germany’s political representation, and most
importantly, the rising empathy among Catholics for the German nation that
Thomas Nipperdey identifies, anti-Catholicism remained a daunting cultural
undercurrent for German Catholic thinkers, who still bore the cultural scars of
the Kulturkampf long after the 1870s and 1880s.56
This first section of the book then will explore these opposed denominational
agendas as they emerged during and after the Kulturkampf and investigate how
such confessional creeds became explicitly interwoven into the fabric of the reli-
gious and philosophical studies of India. This section will examine how Protestant
and Catholic India experts attempted to reconstitute their confessional group as
a cultural authority with explicit political outcomes. Chapter 1 will highlight the
work of the Protestant intellectuals Leopold von Schroeder (Indologist in Tartu
and later Vienna) and Rudolf Seydel (professor of philosophy in Leipzig and
Freemason) primarily during the 1870s and 1880s to showcase how the image of
Indian traditions became heavily implicated with the reassertion of spiritual and
political agency. Moreover, this chapter will foreground how German constructs
of India embody the attempt to reinvigorate a sense of spiritual congruity, and
show how Protestant political perquisites became explicitly linked with defin-
ing the emerging German nation. Importantly, by showing how work on Indian
religious traditions embodied a vision of India fused with attempts at spiritual
rejuvenation, especially in the case of von Schroeder, and confessional assertions
(Seydel) intended to buttress a Protestant Kaiserreich, this chapter will model the
different “uses” of Indian traditions for domestic purposes, both spiritual and
political, that will weave their way through the diverse German readings of India
that occupy this study.
Chapter 2 will extend the theme of religion and politics to explore how Ger-
man Catholic thinkers—primarily Jesuits and missionaries, many of whom spent
time in India—responded to the attacks on their intellectual agency and how
their efforts to forge confessional cohesion became transplanted onto an(other)
culture in the form of a universal Catholic mission—a transparent model for a
Catholic version of nation building. For some German Catholic intellectuals,
especially Jesuits, India became both a symbolic and, in some cases, a concrete
outlet—Catholic missions and educational institutions—for responding to their
frustrated domestic agendas in the Second Reich. Like their Protestant counter-
parts, these Catholic intellectuals projected their denominational agendas onto
India, aiming to circumvent the imposing geopolitical boundaries of the nation-
state, which jeopardized in their eyes the unambiguous universal objectives of the
Catholic Church.
BREAKING OUT OF THE IRON CAGE: FRINGE RELIGIOUS INNOVATORS AND THEIR DETRACTORS57
Many scholars of modern European history have earmarked the nineteenth cen-
tury as an era of secularization. Owen Chadwick’s work, however, points to the
complexities of secularization in nineteenth-century Europe, and repudiates any
simple definitions of the term.58 In Germany’s case, Thomas Nipperdey posits
that despite the continuing dominance of Christian influence during the era, a
general process of secularization had set in—a “relative de-Christianization of our
environment.”59 Most importantly, the era was marked by a “rationalization” of
virtually all aspects of modern human life, as Max Weber put it, and thus religion
seemed to be losing its relevance as the principal model for Western subjects to
explain their world. As Thomas Anz describes it, the period was marked by the
“disenchantment with revered myths and the critical examination of metaphysi-
cal certitude.”60 As a result, many thinkers sensed a crisis of spirituality and in
response sought to update and reformulate more effective religious paradigms.
At first, the appeals of these mostly Protestant renegades, examples of which will
already be introduced in Chapter 1, were certainly strident but carried little orga-
nizational impetus.61 This would quickly change, as a small but energetic Buddhist
movement emerged, and new religious innovators established such “fringe” reli-
gions as theosophy, and eventually monism and later anthroposophy.62 Yet their
importance lies not in their numbers but rather in understanding the reasons for
“their increasingly positive reception among the European elite,” as Marchand
explains with regard to the era’s Buddhist acolytes, and this holds true generally
for other religious alternatives.63 These attempts at religious remodeling of course
seem at odds with any sweeping generalizations about secularization in the nine-
teenth century, a view corroborated straightforwardly by David Blackbourn: “It
would . . . be wrong to attach the simple label of secularization to this period (or
to the century as a whole).”64 In fact, to assume secularization as a given skews
the picture of spiritual apprehension and requires a more thorough examination
of the era’s underlying religious contentions and sentiments.65 Unsurprisingly, the
German fascination with India in its various manifestations was heavily inter-
woven with religion by 1870, as Marchand also astutely demonstrates across the
realm of German accounts of the East in German Orientalism, despite the more
secularized social and political habitus of the nineteenth century. First, let us
briefly review in more detail the secularization processes and causes of a sense of
religious demise among intellectuals in Germany during the Kaiserreich, which
will provide a fundamental backdrop to Germany’s fascination with India.66
Undoubtedly, the construction of human knowledge based on the empiri-
cal analysis of historical data as it emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth
century escalated the threat to the biblically normed credibility of a Christian
worldview. In other words, “the fundamental ‘recipe’ of religious legitimation,” as
the renowned Peter Berger suggests, “the transformation of human products into
supra- or nonhuman facticities” came under severe pressure.67 The interpretation
and application of Charles Darwin’s work can be seen as the trigger, though as
James Secord has eruditely shown in his study of British readings in Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation, scientific challenges to traditional religious belief
Introduction 15
certainly predated the furor that surrounded Darwin’s work.68 Darwin’s Origin
of Species (1859), in which he applies a biological historicism to establish the
theory of natural selection and evolution, became nevertheless a harbinger of
cultural debates extending from biology education and biblical validity to socio-
economic modeling.69 From this point forward knowledge of human beings and
their civilization(s) became knowable through the revelations emerging from his-
torical facts that could be laid bare by Wissenschaftler, who were now successfully
competing with theologians and ministers to provide answers to questions about
culture, society, and human life—a domain reserved until the nineteenth century
for the established churches and their theological adherents. As José Casanova
summarizes, “If before, it was the religious realm which appeared to be the all-
encompassing reality within which the secular realm found its proper place, now
the secular sphere will be the all-encompassing reality, to which the religious sphere
will have to adapt.”70 This challenge to longstanding cultural traditions had enor-
mous repercussions for organized religion in Europe, both Protestant and Catholic,
as well as for many intellectuals who now sensed pressure on the unanimity of their
collective memory—a direct threat to the religious status quo and to their symbolic
capital afforded them as spiritual gatekeepers for the community.
For Germany, statistics verifying the decrease in importance of organized
religion attest of course to the secularization hypothesis. Church attendance
decreased, as did participation in other religious activities.71 Yet such statistical
evidence perhaps indicates the more general frustration with institutional reli-
gion, both Catholic and Protestant, as these organizations and their theologians
were seeking to redefine themselves—in the eyes of many not very successfully—
vis-à-vis the emerging scientific, socioeconomic, and political paradigms of the
late nineteenth century. These new paradigms sought to construct human knowl-
edge and our understanding of human experience and interaction in the world
without necessarily requiring the support of a theological framework—for many
a dismantling of reliable traditions, for others an objectification and degradation
of the human being as created in the image of God.
From the Enlightenment and escalating in the nineteenth century, theology
itself became subjected to new historicist analytical models and was no longer
shielded from the critical scrutiny originating from outside Church doctrinal
hierarchies. Two decades prior to Darwin’s revolutionary text, David Fried-
rich Strauss, for instance, had published his controversial book, Das Leben Jesu
(1835), in which he analyzed orthodox Christology’s version of the life of Jesus
and rejected the Gospel version as a humanly constructed myth.72 The book of
course received substantial criticism during the rest of the nineteenth century, yet
a new edition in 1872 went through 11 printings in 9 years.73 Strauss had indeed
struck a cultural chord of spiritual concerns that reverberated for a generation of
German thinkers. In response, many intellectuals of the era sought new avenues
for updating older and tired modes of spirituality that might more successfully
come to terms with such scientific challenges, or even coalesce with a scientifi-
cally understood universe.
The sense of spiritual discord during the second half of the nineteenth century
in Germany has been well documented.74 This cultural distress can be attributed
to many causes of course, but most importantly, German intellectuals became

deeply aware of the collapse in traditional sources of knowledge about the human
being—science circumventing the biblical notion of humankind as created in
the image of God. The result was a perceived breakdown in religious conventions
and the collapse of traditional avenues for establishing symbolic capital in the
sociocultural marketplace, to put it in Bourdieu’s terms—the dissolution of
long-established means for confirming individual and cultural identity.75 Many
responded in dramatic fashion, at times even desperation. Fritz Stern describes the
common spiritual distress in the introduction to his classic study, The Politics of
Cultural Despair: “They attacked the progress of modernity—the growing power
of liberalism and secularism. They enumerated the discontents of Germany’s
industrial civilization and warned against the loss of faith, of unity, of ‘values.’”76
As many German entrepreneurs and industrialists pushed Germany’s economic,
social, and political modernization forward, Stern’s case studies demonstrated a
tangible cultural anxiety among many of the nation’s elite thinkers. While Stern’s
work projects this discontent forward to the Fascist and National Socialist paradigms
in the twentieth century, he nevertheless identifies a palpable crisis of spiritual and
cultural identity sensed by many German intellectuals during the Wilhelmine era,
which later would also provide the ideological stuff for Zivilisationskritik.77
Spiritual dissonance then pervaded the intellectual’s outlook and played an
important role in how Germany’s India experts considered and evaluated the trea-
sure chest of India’s ancient religions—prized by some, demeaned by others, and
many who did both. Their responses and attempts to reforge a sense of spiritual-
ity hold particular relevance for exploring the German fascination with India and
thus deserve more attention. Part II will explore two avenues of reaction to this
spiritual crisis, Buddhism and theosophy, which were based on German appro-
priations of Indian religious traditions, as well as the counterresponse by both
Protestant and Catholic thinkers more aligned with traditional religious models.
First, Chapter 3 will depict German Buddhist acolytes such as Theodor Schul-
tze (Prussian civil servant), Karl Eugen Neumann (Indologist), and Paul Dahlke
(medical doctor), and their “fringe” counterparts in theosophy, especially Franz
Hartmann (medical doctor, world vagabond, and theosophical leader), to explore
how they engaged with Indian traditions as a sounding board for formulating
new discourses of spirituality. These “fringe” religious innovators were attempt-
ing to undermine what they viewed as the material/rational attack on human
spirituality, yet while still embracing “new” empirical science in a bold attempt to
redefine human identity and their distinctive status in the community.
By the final decades of the nineteenth century such spiritually innovative
groups who openly co-opted and frequently embraced Eastern religious tenets
had gained the attention of more mainstream Protestant and Catholic thinkers.
Theologians of both persuasions let their voices sound out on the matter and we
should not be surprised at their acerbic responses as they sought to restrain ram-
pant religious narratives.78 In fact, Protestant Indologists in particular shifted their
images of India—consciously and unconsciously—as they sought to reconfigure
and assert their own confessional perquisites in the community in response to
the perceived increasing esteem of these fringe religious innovators. Importantly,
Introduction 17
these Protestant rereadings of India’s religious traditions occurred just as the Ger-
man nation was attempting to define and assert itself as a colonial power. Thus,
as we will explore, Protestant images of Christian history, religious salvation, and
moral progress during the 1880s and after remained tacitly entangled with the
political dynamics of the era and found particular resonance in the reassertion of
Christianity vis-à-vis Buddhism—a Christian apologetics with explicit political
undertones in the age of empire.
Unsurprisingly, both Protestant and Catholic presses, beginning in the 1880s
and after, published a wealth of comparative texts and speeches that broached the
topic of Buddhism and Christianity. Ultimately, these texts were a response to
the increasing fascination with Buddhism, in part motivated by Rudolf Seydel’s
flamboyant claims about the similarities between Buddhism and Christianity;
the popularization of Schopenhauer by the Kiel Indologist Paul Deussen and the
musical philosophy of Wagner; and the small but active Buddhist and theosophi-
cal movements. Leopold von Schroeder, for instance, once an avowed Buddhist in
his youth (Chapter 1), underwent a self-proclaimed religious conversion around
1890 and now hoisted the banner of Christian apologetics in several popular and
frequently cited essays during the following decades; the renowned Indologist
in Kiel and Göttingen, Hermann Oldenberg, judicious in his famous and still
important today Buddha: Sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde (1881), also
suddenly joined the comparative fracas during the 1890s that he had till then
so notably avoided. Christian Pesch, an important Catholic Jesuit and theologian,
responded with unusual severity to the English journalist and poet Edwin Arnold’s
epic poem on the life of Buddha, The Light of Asia, originally published in 1879,
which to Pesch’s chagrin had gone through 31 printings in German by 1885.79
Chapter 4 then will revisit the link between religion and politics by investigat-
ing the particular analytical angles underlying the comparative studies of both
Protestant and Catholic thinkers. India experts of both denominations, especially
during and after the 1880s, responded in unique ways to the increasing vigor of
both religious innovators and colonial-era mind-sets. In the case of many Protes-
tants like von Schroeder and Oldenberg, their comparative work on Buddhism
transformed into a Christian apologetics, in which religious meaning became
underpinned by implicit political aims—what might be termed a “colonial con-
sciousness.” Catholic thinkers, who were certainly more distrustful of national
colonial aims—Catholicism’s India buffs were exercising their own confession-
ally idiosyncratic version of nation building—also responded to the rising voice
of religious innovation and to what they most frequently dumped into a single
decadent pot called modern culture, which included any non-Catholic religion.
In fact, Buddhism and Protestantism were often judged with little distinction.
Moreover, Catholics continued to assert the prerogatives of their universal mis-
sion, yet importantly, this chapter will conclude by showing how many Catholics’
constructed India reveals similar underlying motives to their Protestant coun-
terparts. That is, an explicit and uninterrupted entanglement between the
political motivations of their respective religious communities and their attempts
to reconstitute religious meaning remains manifest in both Catholic and Protes-
tant reactions to the growing fascination with India.
THE RADICALIZATION OF GERMANY’S INDIA: SPIRITUALITY,

COLONIAL DREAMS, AND ARYAN VISIONS
A significant backdrop to this shift in Protestant readings of India during the

1880s and 1890s of course is the German colonial movement, which gradually
began to emerge as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, became later
highlighted by Friedrich Fabri’s now famous colonial treatise, Does Germany Need
Colonies? (1879), and then achieved political confirmation at the Conference of
Berlin in 1884.80 In this context, Marchand’s work explores the more direct and,
in some cases, more practical colonial interventions of academic Orientalists—
the study of modern Oriental languages and contemporary culture at such newly
founded institutions as the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen (1887) or the
Deutsche Kolonialgeselschaft (1887), in which she analyzes the role of their pro-
duction of “colonial knowledge” in the “age of empire.”81 Though certain India
experts, such as Ernst Haeckel or Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, expressed ada-
mant colonial objectives, I am less concerned about the more concrete political
consequences of knowledge about India, as Marchand explores largely in other
contexts of Germany’s Orientalism, or as does George Steinmetz in his study of
the ethnographic influences on Germany’s colonial policies. As Marchand rightly
points out, Indology “continued to focus on the ancient Aryans and had little
time for study of modern Indian languages or cultures.”82 Yet in my analysis of
this work, I seek to verify the subtle manifestation of a “colonialist mind-set”—
consciousness—in the thought of several important Indologists after 1884, who
at least in practical terms were far removed from any colonial designs in the
political sphere.
Ultimately this confirms a longer tradition of German colonial agitation and
interest in the extra-European world than frequently assumed, which much
recent scholarship has thoroughly demonstrated.83 In fact, as Langewiesche posits,
“Wilhelmine Liberalism was particularly receptive to the idea of an imperialistic
German Weltpolitik, since its belief in the nation as the highest measure of state
existence and political action had prepared it for the idea of a German world mis-
sion.”84 Moreover, by the 1870s and 1880s German colonial desire, particularly
among liberals, coincided with increasing German nationalism—catapulting
certain positive images of Indian religious traditions into conflict with the emerg-
ing nationalist mandates of colonial power. While German colonial encounters
and nationalism are typically assessed in light of economic and political decision
making, the shift in attitudes toward Indian thought, particularly as it became
manifest as a sounding board for assessing Christianity vis-à-vis Buddhism, indi-
cates a more powerful current of support for the imperial motives and colonial
strategies of the German nation.
To put it more boldly, the imperial mandates and colonial perquisites of the
Kaiserreich also became more explicitly entangled in more radical attempts at
spiritual rejuvenation among other German India pundits. Specifically, certain
factions of such fringe religious movements as theosophy and monism—attempts
to update Western religion and spirituality—became frequently comfortably
compatible with Germany’s colonialist desires and nationalist prerogatives from
Introduction 19
the 1880s until World War I and found particular resonance in the shifting pseu-
doscientific framings for Germany’s images of the Indian Weltanschauung. While
Oldenberg, von Schroeder, and most other Christian apologists cannot be linked
in any explicit way to colonialism, this is not the case with other India experts
of the day such as the theosophist and colonial champion, Wilhelm Hübbe-
Schleiden. The more overt colonialist articulation of his India, which became
tangibly linked to his innovative religious model, is the subject of Chapter 5.
Here, I will explore the ambivalence of his positive vision of historical India as
a site of potential spiritual rejuvenation, which gradually became more palpa-
bly entangled with colonial politics and economic aspirations—and inherently
linked with competition with the British colonial project. To put it differently,
the radical pseudoscience, religious innovations, and imperial politics of these
thinkers became reinforcing spheres of knowledge and authority intended to
assert the prerogatives of German culture and the nation. Specifically, these India
pundits constructed a scientifically grounded spiritual revolution—based on
their understanding of Darwinian evolution and a vision of India. In shaping this
model, these thinkers also implicitly posited a spiritual “lack” in the purportedly
materially obsessed British colonial machine. Thus their subtle and at times overt
criticism of the British colonial model suggested that India’s contemporary flaws
could potentially be extirpated by a more capable colonial power—overtly but-
tressing more assertive German colonial aims.
Yet radical attempts at community innovation and spiritual rejuvenation dur-
ing the era were certainly not exclusively restricted to the imperial aims of the
Kaiserreich. In fact, many thinkers during the fin-de-siècle began to sense the sti-
fling outcomes of the Wilhelmine ethos. For those unwilling to follow the British
social reformer and theosophist Annie Besant (1847–1933) down the path of
total rejection of Western culture and Christian heritage, little relief seemed in
sight to resolve the negative forces that permeated European consciousness.85
As Roger-Pol Droit describes, “Europe was becoming ‘something without’ . . .
without God, without classes, without a vital force,” and confronted a “crisis
of foundations.”86 Thus the worship of “nothingness,” with which Droit defines
the culmination of the century, mirrors the intellectual’s fear of anarchy and the
devastation, which these radical thinkers associated with their sense of the utter
absence of values. It seems only logical then that the acute awareness of such
pending desolation would require drastic measures, which is the subject of Chapter 6.
Unsurprisingly, in 1899 Chamberlain, whom we have already briefly met
in the opening pages of this introduction, published The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century. This controversial and widely read text traces the historical
progression for what Chamberlain might have termed the Germanic millennium,
or at least eight hundred years of it, in which German civilization awoke to its
“world-historical standing as founder of a new civilization and new culture”87
This self-proclaimed triumph of Germanic civilization culminated in the nine-
teenth century, according to Chamberlain, and had achieved what he nebulously
termed the “triumph of method” (Triumph der Methodik), from which he con-
cludes, “We Germans and the people who stand under our influence are maturing
toward a new, harmonious culture, incomparably more beautiful than any earlier
one, about which history informs us; a culture, in which human beings will be
really ‘better and happier’ than they are now.”88 Chamberlain envisions a new
age, in which the world will be recast into one of harmony and beauty by a
German-centered cultural ethos: “We want to assemble a world” that embodies
“the beauty and the harmony of being.”89 For Chamberlain, “breaking out of
the iron-cage”—satisfactorily reconstituting a stable set of cultural values, which
would confirm spiritual identity and reestablish community consensus—seems
here predictably near, or at least hoped for.
As Marchand has shown, Chamberlain’s work is framed in terms of a reso-
lute racist agenda and, importantly, builds on Germany’s ability to extinguish
the Semitic roots of its religious heritage. The Foundations is a standard-bearer
of biological racism and Chamberlain was not alone. This radical turn in cul-
tural vision, which was permeated with universal prerogatives and frequently
unabashedly racist, filtered into the thought of many of Germany’s elite think-
ers, including the renowned Indologist Paul Deussen (1845–1919), whose
work Chamberlain greatly admired. This is not to suggest that this radical-
ization appeared out of nowhere in 1899 with Chamberlain’s magnum opus.
The extremist voice of Paul de Lagarde, the thundering Germanic vision of
Wagner’s operas, and Nietzsche’s vociferous pronouncement of the Übermensch
had already long anticipated the impending fanaticism of a nation in search of
meaning, finding nothingness, and then confronting the resulting frustration,
even desperation at the lack of new and viable cultural frames of reference. Yet
despite the substantial differences between these scholars, the pseudoreligious
inventions of Ernst Haeckel’s monism and Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden’s theoso-
phy contextualize the strident inspirational voice of Chamberlain, predict J. W.
Hauer’s radical Aryan Weltanschauung, and help account for von Schroeder’s
later and uncompleted Arische Religion (1923), as well as his long friendship
with Chamberlain.
The potential link between these Aryan ideological frameworks and National
Socialism comes as no surprise, has often been explored, and will continue to be
investigated. Scholars have frequently sought explanations, sometimes simplistic,
for the catastrophe of 1933 in the thought and sociocultural models of these radi-
cal thinkers: how they might have provided an ideological gold mine for the Nazi
think tank, or, to put it more strongly, served as the catalyst—the energy—for
lighting the ideological fire under the Nazi nation.90 Yet as the scholarly delibera-
tions from the Sonderweg and the verspätete Nation to the Fischer controversy
and the Goldhagen debate have shown, and as the more general difficulty of cor-
roborating definitive causality between ideology and acts without regard for the
underlying economic and social factors signals, claiming direct links or positing
any comprehensive explanation for Germany’s darkest hour has proven tenta-
tive at best.91 Thus rather than readdressing the link between National Socialism,
racism, and these völkisch utopias—analyzing the Wilhelmine past solely to proj-
ect its Nazi outcome, Chapter 6 will open up a more objective view of these
radical thinkers as credible forces within their own sociocultural context—how
they shared traditions, concerns, and outlooks with their more mainstream
counterparts.
Introduction 21
These thinkers and some of the fringe religious groups that developed in
Germany during the fin-de-siècle and pre-Nazi periods (decried today as the mar-
ginalized fringe), responded to the same spiritual crises as did more established,
socially conventional intellectuals, but they did so explicitly outside the tradi-
tional organizational hierarchies of church, state, and society. These groups and
their initiators shared the perception of sociocultural challenges to their identities
and their place in the community just as more mainstream thinkers like Weber,
Troeltsch, or the traditional churches had. Yet their lives and work tend to be
glossed over as irrelevant aspects of decried individuals though their visions of
India, as my study will show, derived from larger patterns of historical herme-
neutics as social response to change and progress. Much of the research to date,
therefore, skews the picture of these individuals as they tried to adjust and come
to terms with modernization processes and redefine community in a way that
might restore the spirituality of the human being.
Thus rather than exploring in detail the hyperbolic visions of these radical
thinkers I want to turn first in this chapter to the work of a man whom many
would consider a far more mainstream intellectual player of the era, the renowned
Kiel Indologist Paul Deussen. This final chapter then will investigate how Deus-
sen’s historical hermeneutics, as he applied it in his comparative religious studies,
culminated in what can be termed Schopenhauerian Christianity and provided
the requisite analytical, or to put it more boldly, prescriptive framework to bolster
more radical “Aryan” ideologies that were emerging in part from a constructed
understanding of Indian religions.92 Specifically, Deussen’s application of con-
ventional German historicism parallels more radical responses to modernization
processes—science, nation, religion—and the pervasive instability in intellectuals’
sense of values and cultural meaning. My goal here is not to burden Deussen
with the emergence of Germany’s fin-de-siècle Aryan Weltanschauung nor to add
another thinker from the Kaiserreich to the list of Nazi ideological predecessors.
Yet by reevaluating the link between Deussen’s historical hermeneutics and the
religious-secular community discourse presented by thinkers like Chamberlain
and von Schroeder in his later work, I hope to shed light on the misappropriation
of history as a tool to reconstitute the distinctive spiritual status of these quasi-
religious thinkers during the final decades of Germany’s Kaiserreich.
To pursue the link between intellectual and sociocultural agency as manifested
in these thinkers’ attempts to reconstitute new avenues for achieving a “profit of
distinction” for themselves and the nation can provide new perspectives on intel-
lectual life and the practice of history in pre-Nazi Germany. In other words, by
focusing on how their intellectual pursuits, specifically their historical assessments
of Indian religion, hoped to ground new, robust individual identities and com-
munity impetus within the confines of a dramatically changing symbolic order,
we can perhaps attain new perspectives on the failure of German intellectuals to
engage in community renewal in ways that might have preserved democracy in
Weimar and resisted the impending lure of Fascism.
Summary
German Visions of India not only will augment existing studies but, more impor-
tant, will provide a new and different avenue for analyzing the changing political,
social scientific, and spiritual domains during the Kaiserreich—in a transcultural
context—as German intellectuals attempted to form a newly founded nexus for
redefining the nation, which many thinkers negotiated at least in part through
their constructed knowledge of India. My study will provide new insight into
how Germany’s social scientific imagination about India became entangled in
religious remodeling, nationalist politics, and new paradigms of social science,
coded against the shifting narrative of community consensus in the Kaiserreich.
Significantly, the project will shed new light on the influence and role of reli-
gion and spirituality—not in the institutional sense—but rather as an important
frame of reference for defining the German Nation and for asserting political
agendas domestically and also among the western states of Europe. Moreover,
this monograph will argue that the search for stable models of belief and spiritu-
ality continued to underpin German intellectuals’ attempt to reinvigorate their
habitus in a world dominated by material science, secular politics, and indus-
trial capitalism, shedding new light on the role and meaning of secularization
during the era. In summary, this study seeks to investigate how German think-
ers framed unique religious, social, and political debates on the domestic front
through the looking-glass of another cultural tradition—India—and thus will
provide insight, less about India itself but rather about the internal dynamics of
Wilhelmine Germany.
PART I
Protestant and Catholic

Champions and Their
Visions of India
CHAPTER 1
Restoring Spirituality
Buddhism and Building a
Protestant Nation
On the shores of the Ganges the reader will now want to follow me, even if only
by way of a sketch, in order to be a witness to one of the most marvelous acts of
emancipation in the realm of religion.
Christian Hönes, Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen (1877)1
Christian Hönes, in this speech delivered in Basel in February 1877, impels

his audience to bear witness to what he viewed as one of the most remarkable reli-
gious revolutions in history—what Friedrich Max Müller, the renowned German
Indologist at Oxford, described as “the greatest event in our eventful century.”2 As
we might expect, Hönes, a Protestant assistant pastor (Diakonus) in Weinsberg, a
town in southwestern Baden-Würtemburg, foresaw this revolution in anticipation
of India’s pending Christianization, yet many other German intellectuals heeded
Hönes’s call with vastly different motivations for exploring India’s revolutionary
transformation and in various ways—academic study, travel reports, and essays.
During the early years of the Kaiserreich, for instance, some German intellectuals
turned to Indian Buddhism as a sounding board for their own cultural reflec-
tions and spiritual disputations. Paul Wurm (1829–1911), Protestant deacon in
Calw, also in Baden-Würtemburg, and later theologian and Lehrer at the Mission-
shaus in Basel, commented in 1880:3 “The philosophical atheism of our day, the
pessimism of a Schopenhauer and v. Hartmann, warmed up our species for the
wisdom of the Buddha.”4 Viewed from this perspective, Hönes’s plea also points
implicitly to the spiritual void that so many intellectuals gradually sensed during
the early decades of the Kaiserreich and from which many sought relief through
their reformulations of Indian traditions. Thus despite the more caustic assess-
ment of Eastern influence on Western thought by some, other German thinkers
during the early period of the Kaiserreich—also in the midst of contemplating
their newly forged nation and victory over France in 1871—constructed a vision
of India, and particularly of Buddhism, through which they could negotiate their
own religious, political, and social quandaries. Let us begin with a brief look at
the origins of that interest in Buddhism and what German readings of the revo-
lutionary Buddha portended for the first part of this book.
The Discovery of the Buddha

In 1844, after years of diligent work translating Sanskrit texts, the eminent
French scholar Eugène Burnouf (1801–52), published Introduction à l’histoire
du Buddhisme indien.5 The book’s publication proved to be a watershed moment
in placing Buddhism on Europe’s intellectual landscape.6 Burnouf ’s text served
as a fundamental frame of reference for renowned Sanskrit scholars, such as the
aforementioned Müller, and remained a foundational text for generations of
scholars. Importantly, Burnouf ’s work delineates the history of Buddhism as it
had evolved from the teachings and life experiences of its founder, Guatamo Bud-
dha.7 Burnouf ’s emphasis on the personal deeds of the Buddha and his influence
on Buddhism’s beginnings and further blossoming in India—a hermeneutical
angle that had been unfurled through various Sanskrit and Pali translations of
such texts as the Lalita Vistara—proved critical for how Europeans framed their
scholarly work.8 The European “discovery of Buddhism,” as Tomoko Masuzawa
explains, “was therefore from the very beginning, in a somewhat literal and
nontrivial sense, a textual construction; it was a project that put a premium on
the supposed thoughts and deeds of the reputed founder and on a certain body
of writing that was perceived to authorize, and in turn was authorized by, the
founder figure.”9 The importance of the Buddha as principal—a revolutionary
figure and religious initiator—had two significant consequences for ensuing
intellectual work on religious history in Germany. First, it proved conducive
for direct comparisons to the life of Jesus, which became a threatening mode of
inquiry for some and a stimulating enterprise for others as European intellectuals
attempted to map the world’s religions. Second, the Buddha, who was viewed fre-
quently as a revolutionary instigator, became easily deciphered by many German
thinkers as leader of an avant-garde religious group that served as the catalyst for
ending the dominance of the spiritually rigid and politically unyielding Brahmin
priests in ancient India. These two frames of reference—one comparative reli-
gion, the other investigating the seeds of socioreligious revolt—would, as we shall
see, prove opportune for Protestant German India experts who, after the failed
1848 revolution, sought to reassert their spiritual and political identities vis-à-vis
the Lutheran establishment but also a different priestly class—Catholics—in the
Kaiserreich.10 To put it more boldly, the picture drawn of the Buddha and of
Buddhism by Protestant German thinkers, particularly after 1871 and during
the 1880s, offered a unique means to rehearse a more assertive Protestant vision
for the emerging German nation during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Yet in the world of Protestant visions a revitalized German community is
explicitly derived from the rejuvenation of individual spirituality, a subject that
will receive more attention shortly. For now, let it suffice to say that the emerging
German nation requires a new spirit instilled by the heroic acts of “world historical
figures,” to put it in Hegelian terms, whose spiritual rejuvenation redounded to
the benefit of the community. Specifically, new frames of reference for achieving
Restoring Spirituality 27
individual spirituality were needed to provide the requisite cultural impulses for
social and political revolutions—to constitute the newly formed German nation.
The young Indologist Leopold von Schroeder modeled that Protestant hero in his
five-act Buddhist-conversion Trauerspiel from 1876, König Sundara.
Leopold von Schroeder’s Quest for

Spiritual Meaning and Buddhism
In 1872, as the newborn Second Reich was still basking in its victory over France,
Michael Baumgarten, professor of Lutheran theology in Rostock, summarizes his
vision of a revitalized Protestant Church in Bismarck’s Germany:11 “If we take
stock from all this, then the result is that the Church, for which Luther struggles,
the more it is grounded in the freedom of spirit, the more capable and determined
it is to effect in the people a moral rebirth, which wants to free the medieval State
from its unnatural fetters and to build a Kingdom, in which one should recognize
a preliminary stage of God’s Kingdom.”12 Here Baumgarten calls for a revival of
Luther’s reformatory power to free the emerging German nation from the fetters
of Catholic medievalism and implores the new state to assert political and reli-
gious precepts that would work in perfect harmony. Significantly this newfound
Germany, according to Baumgarten, constitutes a preliminary stage that precedes
God’s Reich—an unambiguous link between denominational objectives and the
prerogatives of the nation.
Importantly, the link between the Protestant institutional agendas and the
political aims of the nation makes up only part of the story. For any Protestant,
Baumgarten’s call for a rebirth of ethical standards (sittliche Wiedergeburt) neces-
sarily points to the rejuvenation in individual moral behavior as well—a link that
derives from Protestantism’s ingrained emphasis on individual fulfillment and sal-
vation. In 1862, for instance, the career Prussian civil servant Theodor Schultze,
who at the time had yet to break out of his strict Protestant upbringing’s ideologi-
cal shackles to become an important Buddhist acolyte (Chapter 3), maintained
that human beings were created solely “to seek fulfillment” as God’s children.13
Rudolf Seydel, one of our India experts to be discussed in more detail shortly,
elaborates more explicitly in a lecture to the Deutsche Protestantenverein in 1871:
“Every individual must abandon oneself to the Godly within his soul, must create
a space for heavenly salvation in his inner self: otherwise the liberational effect that
redeems from sin and relieves the pressure of past guilt cannot reach him.”14 In the
Protestant model for attaining salvation, as these examples demonstrate, the burden
of redemptive proof lies squarely on the individual’s shoulders.
Yet importantly for these Protestants, individual salvation always remained
unambiguously linked to the cultivation of community consensus. In other
words, community rejuvenation depends on a revitalized individual spiritual-
ity. In Baumgarten’s essay, for instance, he trumpets, “Protestantism is grounded
inwardly or facing God in the freedom of the spirit itself, which also lives in the
Church; externally or in the world it is the moral center of power, which leads
and raises the complete life of the people to a free Nation and towards God’s king-
dom.”15 Here Baumgarten subtly affirms that the reconstitution of community
standards is dependent on the blossoming of the individual spirit in the Church.

To put it another way, the reconstitution of the community’s frames of reference
implicitly depends on the individual pursuit of salvation and quest for a stable
model of spiritual cohesiveness.
As a result, confessional aspirations and the assertion of Prussian political per-
quisites during the era cannot be easily decoupled from the spiritual discord that
so many Protestant India experts of the era acutely sensed, vigorously debated,
and spiritedly sought to resolve.16 Their attempt to forge new narratives of spiri-
tual identity in the community must be acknowledged as an underlying factor in
how they framed and asserted their confessional and political agendas in a vision
of Buddhism.
Such links between Prussian political perquisites for the emerging Reich, con-
fessional objectives, and the longing for spiritual harmony resonate clearly in the
early work of von Schroeder (1851–1920), an important intellectual player in
the emerging field of Indology.17 Born among the German minority in Dorpat
(Tartu), Estonia, von Schroeder discovered early in life his passion for Sanskrit.
Beginning in 1875 in Leipzig, he studied the classical Indian language under
Hermann Brockhaus and Ernst Kuhn and moved to Tübingen later that year
where he continued his studies under the renowned Veda specialist Rudolf Roth.
Shortly thereafter he landed his first position as a docent in his home city of
Dorpat, where he completed his Habilitation in 1877. Two decades later in 1895,
motivated in part by the growing “Russification” movement, von Schroeder took
a position in Innsbruck, Austria, arranged by the University of Vienna Indologist
Georg Bühler, who von Schroeder eventually replaced in 1899 as a nontenured
professor after Bühler’s death.18 Von Schroeder remained in Vienna until his
death in 1920.
Today von Schroeder is perhaps most well-known as a Wagnerian and a friend
and supporter of the racist-Aryanist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whom we
have already briefly discussed. Von Schroeder’s book Arische Religion (1914–16),
published toward the end of his life, and other essays, particularly from his time in
Vienna, link his thought to emerging biological racism, völkisch cult movements,
and eventually National Socialism.19 Yet his youthful literary imagination offers
a different impression and provides unique insight into an emerging paradigm
for negotiating the era’s religious and political dilemmas through the constructed
image of a cultural Other: Indian Buddhism. Specifically, König Sundara’s plot,
for instance, conveys spiritual strife, denominational partisanship, and revolu-
tionary political agendas—issues that occupied von Schroeder and other thinkers
during the early Kaiserreich.
Importantly, the play was written, by von Schroeder’s own admission, during
a time of personal religious exploration and the tribulations of love. The latter
requires little comment, but the former was a common feature of the current
intellectual mind-set as German thinkers responded to the era’s sense of spiri-
tual discord. According to von Schroeder, for instance, in an essay from 1878,
the quest to define and attain something higher—more spiritually meaningful—
was an underlying feature for virtually all intellectuals of the era: “Everywhere
we recognize in a portion of the people a grappling and striving, a yearning for
Figure 1.1 Leopold von Schroeder.

Source: Frontispiece from Leopold von Schroeder, Lebenserinnerungen, ed. Felix v. Schroeder (Leipzig: H. Haessel
Verlag, 1921).
something higher.”20 These sentiments had led him early in his life to the study of
Sanskrit, which became his professional calling. Yet his studies of ancient Indian
religious traditions always remained intricately linked to his personal attempt to
define his spiritual faith—a task that seems to underlie his entire life’s path and
work. In fact, his academic work as well as his more general essays and literary
production on Indian culture and religious traditions reveal a recurrent underly-
ing theme: the human endeavor to define and attain a higher sense of meaning in
a mundane world in which the traditional sources of intellectual identity seemed
under stress.
As a result, von Schroeder’s search for spiritual meaning becomes especially
palpable in his recollection of the period in which the play Sundara was composed.
In his autobiography, written during the later decades of his life and published
posthumously by his son Felix von Schroeder in 1921, von Schroeder corrobo-
rates this assessment. In his account of his youth, he frequently refers to the
influence of religion in his life’s path and how it directly impacted his work and
personal relationships during those early years. He recalls, for instance, his pre-
cocious marriage prospects, in which he laments a strained marriage proposal
that would later end with his fiancé breaking off the engagement. Besides his
unpromising financial outlook, von Schroeder explains one other difficulty with
his promise as a future husband: “In addition, my rejecting, critical, even unbe-
lieving standpoint vis-à-vis Christianity from back then found little approval
from the Mühlenschen family. Also my Buddhist tinted ‘König Sundara’ was not
received with understanding.”21 Here, in reference to Sundara, von Schroeder
links the play in hindsight with his own search for spiritual meaning and his
youthful Buddhist convictions. In his autobiography he recalls his early stance
toward the Christian Weltanschauung: “As I wrote König Sundara in Tübingen, I
stood completely distanced from it, was more likely to be called Buddhist than
Christian.”22 Von Schroeder had revised his spiritual identity, at least temporarily,
in his image of India’s social and religious reformer Guatamo Buddha.
Thus in a certain sense Sundara exemplifies the beginning of von Schroeder’s
lifelong quest to update his religious faith in an era of fundamental challenges
for any social scientist confronting the conflicts between new social science and,
for many, older, ineffectual religious traditions. Again reflecting in his autobiog-
raphy, von Schroeder contextualizes the dilemma in more explicit terms: “I had
lived with the idea of standing at the height of modern culture, which seemed
irreconcilable with Christian beliefs. The Weltanschauung of our classics, our phi-
losophers, our great men of science seemed superior to one based on Christian
belief, even in fact the only one compatible with progressive thought. But I had
to experience, that this way of viewing the world and life began to seem more
and more internally hollow and dissatisfying.”23 Though unmistakably distorted
by his later reembrace of Christianity (a subject to be discussed more thoroughly
in Chapter 4), von Schroeder’s assessment palpably manifests how the conflict
between new humanistic inquiry (social science and biblical criticism) and reli-
gious identity underpinned his academic and literary work—as we will explore
throughout this monograph, progressive history as von Schroeder, Seydel, and
others constructed it was never simple. Moreover, this tension is emblematic for
a generation of intellectuals who engaged with Indian religious traditions and
culture as they attempted to reconfigure their political and religious identities.
Thus a closer look at how this German intellectual analyzed and interpreted Bud-
dhism in his König Sundara can provide deeper insight into the ongoing debates
on religious meaning, denominational conflict, and the shifting social-scientific
paradigm for assessing knowledge of the human being during the Kaiserreich.
That is, Sundara illustrates vividly how von Schroeder’s engagement with Indian
religious traditions embodies an attempt to reconstitute spirituality under threat
and mirrors the cultural, social, and political debates of the 1870s.
The Transforming Power of the Buddha:

Christianity versus Sundara
Sundara is set at the height of Brahmanic power in India.24 The principal pro-
tagonist is the young King Sundara, who belongs to a long line of honorable and
respected monarchs. From the opening scene, trouble stirs as a monarchical ally
and long-term friend, King Tschitraketu, has become embattled with King Buru-
mitra over the latter’s tolerance of Buddhism. As Burumitra’s messenger explains,
“The poor were provided for, yet never has it happened in his Kingdom, that
those of other faiths, that Brahma’s worshipers had suffered an inconvenience,
because the strong arm of the noble King also protected them fairly.”25 Sundara’s
Brahmanic priests, the spiritual and political custodians of his kingdom, respond
acerbically as one might expect to the purported transforming power of Bud-
dhism under Burumitra’s more tolerant and enlightened reign. Sundara is thus
called to the aid of his ally, who remains faithful to the older traditions of the
Brahmanic faith.
Despite the appeal of such enlightened conviction Sundara senses the aura of
priestly tradition upon which his power rests and reluctantly acknowledges that
his monarchical agency and leadership depend on the endorsement of priestly
authority:
Since I began to hold the reigns of sovereignty

I sense that a chain heavy as lead hinders my own will’s direction
And a bitter drop of vermouth is mixed in the chalice of pure joy
That I cannot reign without these Priests
I must admit—constricts my soul.26
Here Sundara not only emphasizes priestly dominion as an institutional force but
also explicitly links it with his own spiritual well-being and political agency. Thus
although Sundara perceives the Brahmanic priests as a handicap that impedes his
political authority, he must acknowledge his dependence on their support. As
the King views it, that dependence has an even more significant consequence by
constricting his soul—an institutionalized religious hierarchy that restricts and
burdens his spirituality.
This argument from a historical never-never land must have had a clear
resonance for its European audience, especially among liberal thinkers such as
Baumgarten and especially Seydel, whose comparative religious work we will
soon explore in more detail. As the aforementioned scene shows, the underlying
links in Sundara to the precepts of German liberalism and Kulturkampf discourse
are quite tangible, as the Protestant von Schroeder would have viewed contem-
porary politics and Catholic religiocultural assertions. His own essays from the
period also corroborate this stance when he praises, for instance, the German
Romantics in the “Introductory Considerations” to Reden und Aufsätze for their
embrace of a “world literature,” a positive assessment that nevertheless neces-
sitates in his view that one overlook the Romantics’ “later Catholic reactionary
sentiments.”27 Thus von Schroeder’s literary imagination in the play’s framing
and his constructed vision of Indian religions become distinctly entangled with
cultural/political debates of his day.
Specifically, von Schroeder echoes in the same essay liberal precepts such as the
benefits of attaining knowledge and achieving progress while equally denigrating
priestly authority: “Thus it must again seem heartwarming and uplifting, when
we recognize that at no time and with no Volk the spark of the good and great has
been extinguished entirely, that everywhere one finds its quiet altars, even if only
guarded by few priests.”28 Moreover, he was an adamant German nationalist, as
demonstrated by his recollection of the Franco-Prussian War: “We also became
powerfully captivated in Livonia with the great events that unfolded in the West
in 1870 and 1871—Germany’s enormous battle against the overconfident French
nation appeared like a single glorious drive to victory.”29 Such blatant nationalism
among some German Liberals, who had become somewhat splintered after the
“new era,” is not surprising, yet von Schroeder continues:30 “We cheered Kaiser
Wilhelm, Bismarck and Moltke, celebrated the taking of Paris in the ways of stu-
dent fraternities, collected funds for the war-injured Germans and looked forward
to the great future that seemed to be emerging for the new German Reich.”31 Von
Schroeder’s veneration of Wilhelm and Bismarck reflect perhaps in part Baltic
idiosyncrasies, yet it also points to a paradox in von Schroeder’s thinking, which
becomes acutely manifest, as we shall see, in the revolutionary Sundara—a heroic
Buddhist king, advocate of social justice and religious freedom—when contrasted
with von Schroeder’s later and more familiar cult of Aryan religion.32 We will deal
with this subject more thoroughly later, but for now let us stick with von Schro-
eder’s valiant Buddhist hero.
As the play’s story continues to unfold, Sundara’s general Gonanda underscores
the authority of powerful and rigid traditions, perhaps similar to the Protestant
von Schroeder’s sense of Catholic cultural influences in Germany. Gonanda warns
that the Priests cannot be easily cast aside: “Oh esteem these priests, high and
mighty, they are the faithful pillars of your house! They have been so since old
times, they have protected your lineage from all harm.”33 In a statement echoing
the fears of many European Christians, the consequences of discarding centu-
ries of tradition threaten, according to Gonanda, the very foundation on which
the kingdom has thrived and found protection from disaster. Yet von Schroeder
will raise the stakes by implicitly linking this Kulturkampf analogous conflict to
another pressing problem, beyond the simpler question of institutional power:
the need to reconstitute spiritual agency during an era in which scientific assess-
ments of human subjectivity left little space for intellectual collaboration and
compromise between science and religion.
In other words, von Schroeder depicts these hegemonic struggles between his
spiritual identity and institutionalized tradition as implicitly entangled with the
enlightenment principles of new social science, a harbinger for the transformative
spiritual—Protestant—element in the plot. Sundara, for example, must choose
between promising revolutionary religious precepts—here Buddhist—with their
potential power for reconstituting spiritual agency and the safer bet of the reli-
gious status quo. Despite his conflicted state, he chooses the security of tradition
and rejects the enlightened Burumitra’s religious tolerance. An epic battle for reli-
gious sovereignty ensues, yet prior to the climactic event, von Schroeder inserts a
perhaps less than original but vital twist in the play that will eventually unleash
the transformative spiritual and social revolutionary power of his imagined Bud-
dhism. Here, of course, enters the heroine to make the battle between tradition
and renewal a little less straightforward—and a little more socially profiled in
relation to Wilhelmine Germany.
The reader now encounters Sundara in the garden of a young, beautiful, and
extremely impoverished maiden, Brijamwada, a pariah (the lowest class in the
Indian caste system). The King is immediately lovestruck, but the young girl
rejects his advances, horrified at the potential consequences of breaching caste
precepts. Her traditionalist responses to Sundara’s bold approaches embody the
inflexible and unalterable link between social class and their religious moor-
ings, as von Schroeder imagined them against his Indian backdrop. Brijamwada
responds, “Beware! I too am one of the poorest, unholy creations of this earth!
Companionship between you and me is sin, deserving the torture of hell!”34 Thus
human love remains subordinate to caste or social class in the older Brahmanic
model of religious belief and doctrine.
Sundara then, facing the girl’s socially and culturally reasonable rejection,
returns to his monarchical duties, though still lovestruck, and leads his kingdom
into battle against the heathens. As the battle progresses Sundara’s warriors con-
front near defeat, but the day is triumphantly saved by the King’s heroic efforts,
leading to the capture of Ananda, a Buddhist acolyte.35 Ananda, who has already
been introduced in a prior scene befriending Brijamwada’s pariah family, preaches
the Buddhist tenet of socioreligious justice to the outcast social classes: “It is not
true, what the Brahmins teach, that you are depraved, that iron gates divide one
caste from another.”36 Sundara’s priests, now buoyed by the military victory—a
concrete justification of their faith and its attendant class structures—and well
aware of the revolutionary threat that such Buddhist challenges posed to their sta-
tus and authority, call for the King to command Ananda’s immediate execution.
Von Schroeder again frames the scene under the rubric of social justice and
condemnation of institutionalized religious hierarchies as Ananda pleas for social
equality and salvation through love: “Whether pariah, whether Brahmin, all is
the same / Only love brings you salvation!”37 Ananda’s appeal of course reminds
Sundara of his love for Brijamwada, and he quickly reverses his earlier concession
to the priests that Ananda should immediately be burned at the stake.38 Thus, as
von Schroeder constructs it, Sundara has been transformed by the powerful mes-
sage of the Buddhist acolyte, here linked with his love for the girl—a doubling of
religious and secular values: “Forgive me, noble old man, if I dared to inflict upon
you such a hard test, / And teach me to face the gruesome death with the same
heroic courage.”39 The King then announces his transformation in terms reject-
ing the political status quo: “But I now go and search for a new Kingdom, / A
Kingdom of the spirit, that I will devote myself to completely, / Where I will live
as servant, not as King! / I will gladly relinquish the purple of the sovereign,—/
Sovereignty I perceived in the beggar’s garments!”40
Such insubordination to priestly power and Brahmanic tradition ultimately
splits the kingdom, and Sundara must flee at this point because only a handful of
soldiers are willing to spurn priestly authority in support of their insubordinate
leader. Von Schroeder then conveniently reunites Sundara with the girl, Brijam-
wada, and her family, a reunion arranged of course through Ananda, implicitly
linking political heroism and earthly (physical) love with the spiritual transfor-
mative powers of the Buddhist message—a subtle surrogate for the emerging
Protestant German nation. In other words, von Schroeder’s depiction of the
King’s transformation and his reunion with the pariah girl links human spiri-
tuality, social justice, and human love in direct opposition to institutionalized
religious praxis—a rejection of traditional religious politics, which has here been
bolstered by von Schroeder’s constructed India. What was probably unthinkable
in Wilhelmine Germany (the rejection of a religion—Brahminism/Catholicism)

becomes a necessity in this imagined India.
To conclude the play, von Schroeder introduces another element of Protestant
criticism of Catholicism, what David Blackbourn terms the “dependent-woman
motif.”41 Brijamwada is later captured by the priests and becomes the heroine in
the end by her own sacrificial suicide, saving the King and solidifying his conver-
sion by preventing Sundara’s temptation to renounce his new faith in order to
save her life from the revengeful priests. The play thus circumvents social revo-
lution while it advocates a religious and political transformation. Brijamwada
authenticates her powerful faith over the earthly (empirical) domain and, in von
Schroeder’s depiction, over priestly authority—a reconstructed version of Protes-
tant faith and political power—while striking a blow for “emancipating women
from clerical tutelage in the name of independence and civic maturity.”42 Sundara
is of course overwhelmed with grief, but the girl’s act embodies the supreme ges-
ture for establishing the power of Buddhist spirituality and the promise of a better
life beyond this fractured existence on earth. Standing at Sundara’s side, Ananda,
in a mild voice, implores the King:
Consider for what this girl has perished,—

Raise yourself to manly serious deed
And allow the birth of the purest, most beautiful fruit
From the pain of this deep anguish:
A life, fully dedicated to the Holy cause,
The cause of Buddha and the people’s welfare!43
Hearing Ananda’s compelling words, Sundara’s conversion becomes consum-

mated. He is to dedicate himself to the social and spiritual transformation Bri-
jamwada cannot participate in. In memory and honor of the girl’s bravery and
the recognition that he has finally understood and witnessed the invincible truth
of the Buddhist message, the King promises, “To devote myself fully to the cause of
Buddha, / So long that the sun illuminates my path!”44 Thus spiritual conversion
and a new sociopolitical model have been circumscribed by the resolute faith
of Ananda and Brijamwada, now embraced by the former King—a melding of
renewed spiritual, social, and political precepts that could easily serve as a model
for a German nation in transition.
In a preliminary summary, von Schroeder’s attraction to Buddhism, while
not widespread among the larger German community, nevertheless is here used
to underscore spiritual engagement and revolutionary politics, albeit examined
through the window of Eastern religious thought. This play exemplifies a subtle
link between Buddhist precepts, as von Schroeder depicts them, and the emerg-
ing Protestant mandates of the German nation. In consequence, referring to
Pollock’s important essay, von Schroeder’s text can be viewed as what he terms
“romanticism-Wissenschaft,” directing our attention “away from the periphery
to the national political culture and relationship of knowledge and power at the
core—direct[ing] us, potentially, toward forms of internal colonialism, and cer-
tainly toward the domestic politics of scholarship.”45 From this viewpoint, the
trajectory from the revolutionary Sundara and later to von Schroeder’s better
known Arische Religion becomes less circuitous precisely because the “imagined”
spiritual bounty of Indian Buddhism remained a socially and politically charged
reference point for such literature and public voices. That is, von Schroeder’s
work always remained subject to and entangled with the discordant path of Ger-
man cultural politics, even as he depicts a heroic conversion to Buddhism.
Yet, lest we get ahead of ourselves, von Schroeder’s Sundara also exemplifies
straightforwardly the kinds of identity negotiations that occurred among many
German intellectuals during the 1870s and, specifically, how they became pro-
jected through an imagined India. Von Schroeder’s triangular depiction of the
heroic spiritual convictions of Ananda and Sundara’s conversion to a more pow-
erful and spiritually rejuvenated set of socioreligious beliefs, imbued with earthly
love for Brijamwada, point specifically to a generation of thinkers who were strug-
gling with their own social, political, and religious identities—and who were not
satisfied with the answers provided so far by new social science. As they con-
fronted a fragmented world, which challenged their ability to shape political and
social agendas that traditionally were inextricably linked with religious models
now under threat, von Schroeder and others attempted to revise and reconstruct
their spirituality and sociopolitical identities through the appropriation of Indian
religious traditions. Yet von Schroeder’s early enthusiastic embrace of Indian Bud-
dhism, which found its most explicit—and Western—expression in Ananda’s
plea in the final scene for Sundara to raise himself to “manly serious deed,” per-
haps already pointed to more concrete forms in a vision of India. The cultural
evolution of that imagined India would eventually reverse tracks and merge into
“Aryan” Christianity, what might be termed a Germanocentric version of “muscu-
lar Christianity,” perhaps more spiritually derived than the British version but no
less motivated by the powerful enticements of empire and nation.46 Yet, already
in the 1870s, the cultural locomotion of that imagined India became a powerful
historical construct for imagining the new German Reich—spiritually derived
and motivated by the powerful prototype of a Protestant nation. These senti-
ments, here tacitly formulated in the literary imagination of this young romantic
Indologist, take a different and more concrete tact in the comparative work of
Rudolf Seydel, to which we now turn.
Rudolf Seydel’s Comparative Religion

and Progressive History
Rudolf Seydel (1835–92), associate professor of philosophy at the University
of Leipzig and a Freemason, has a career marked by a longstanding intellectual
engagement with Indian Buddhism.47 Working from translations—Seydel was
not an Indologist, nor could he read Sanskrit, though he did study it later in his
life—he published several controversial comparative texts on the similarities of
the Buddha and Christ during the 1880s. Seydel’s most comprehensive work, The
Gospels of Jesus in Relationship to the Buddha Saga and Buddha Doctrine, elabo-
rates in expansive detail the comparative textual record about the lives of the
Buddha and Christ, from which he infers distinctive similarities.48 His shorter,
pamphlet-length text, Buddha and Christ (1884), reaffirms the contentions of his
longer and more detailed magnum opus of comparative religion.49
Seydel’s work, based primarily on the textual comparison of the available
translated sources of the Buddha’s life and teachings and the Christian New
Testament, reveals far deeper concerns about what one might term the crisis of
community in Wilhelmine Germany. Specifically, his comparative religious stud-
ies are infused with an underlying agenda—how to define the nation after the
military successes of 1870 and 1871, which had set the ball rolling for Germany
to secure its rank among the European powers. As we might anticipate, Seydel’s
analytical model articulates forceful anti-Catholic sentiments and, more boldly,
endorses a new German Reich founded on a rejuvenated Protestant Church. To
make that case, as we will now investigate in greater detail, Seydel embarks on a
path of comparative religion that is based on an analytical model of progressive
history through which the world’s religions can be evaluated on a scale of relative
achievement. In this adaptation of the influential historical models of Herder
and Hegel, Seydel grounds the triumph of Protestant Christianity through his
constructed image of Indian Buddhism.50 To put it more bluntly, Seydel’s reading
of Buddhism based on comparative history is intricately entangled with the era’s
confessional-political dynamics and reveals the cross-fertilization between new
social science and religious agendas in the Kaiserreich. First though, a brief detour
from Seydel’s India is required to more thoroughly examine the Leipzig philoso-
pher’s comparative model of religious history and Kulturkampf rhetoric through
which his studies of Buddhism and Christianity were filtered.
Response to Bishop Ketteler: Seydel’s Anti-Catholicism

In 1862, Wilhelm Emmanuel, Freiherr von Ketteler—social activist, supporter of
the socialist Ferdinand Lasalle, and later Catholic Bishop in Mainz—published
his Freedom, Authority, and Church.51 Here, Ketteler presents his unconventional
Catholic position paper for the modern world of science, culture, and state, which
includes in a later chapter a harsh appraisal of Freemasonry. Ketteler’s vitriol, in
an otherwise much more progressive approach to the era’s cultural dilemmas,
at least by Catholic standards, instantly caught the attention of Rudolf Seydel.
Himself a member of the Freemason Loge zur goldenen Apfel, Seydel promptly
responded to Ketteler’s treatise in a short pamphlet, Catholicism and Freemasonry,
written and published in the same year as Ketteler’s work.52
In his rebuttal, Seydel traces the basic tenets of Freemasonry and emphasizes
what he asserts to be its fundamental premises of social equality, a deistic Welt-
anschauung, and the rejection of the idea of original sin—important derivatives
of Enlightenment universalism to which Freemasonry was heavily indebted.53
Specifically, he complains that the only basis for Ketteler’s criticism of Free-
masonry lies in its purported secret rituals, an attribute that others during the
era also harshly condemned. Such accusations were unsubstantiated, according
to Seydel, who then unceremoniously redirects his argument to the benefit of
Freemasonry’s cultural prerogatives without rebutting the accusation of its cryp-
tic practices.54 Rather in a classic bait and switch, Seydel bluntly contends that
secrecy does not make Freemasonry a closed community. In fact, the opposite is
the case. To prove his point, Seydel underscores the community-building aspects
of Freemasonry, which foster in his view the foundation for its universal pre-
rogatives: “Each unselfserving person, who so desires, and who honors God and
his Kingdom and loves his brothers, we embrace, regardless of whether he be a
Jew, Muslim or Heathen, Catholic or Protestant, Mystic or Nationalist, Mate-
rialist or Hegelian.”55 Thus Freemasonry embraces other religious traditions, as
well as those thinkers with diverse political and/or philosophical positions. The
inclusiveness of Freemasonry, as Seydel depicts it, generates the most conducive
spiritual basis for establishing a human community with implicit universal enti-
tlements. Seydel espouses Freemasonry precisely because of its explicit universal,
community-building features, which as we shall see paradoxically becomes the
basis for reasserting a revamped culturally and politically relevant Protestantism
to the detriment of the Catholic Church. In other words, such links between
the Protestant religion and its universal prerogatives, particularly as they became
defined in opposition to Catholicism, became the grounds for cultivating com-
munity adherence in the emerging German nation.
Seydel further builds his case by emphasizing Protestantism’s community-
building features specifically vis-à-vis Catholicism, a line of reasoning that
aligned well with other Protestant thinkers of the era, including von Schroeder,
and illustrates the emerging conflation of religious agendas and political objec-
tives and how these thinkers skirted the subsequent conflict with the principles
of Enlightenment universalism to the benefit of national particularism.56 Before
exploring this paradox in more detail through Seydel’s comparative texts on Bud-
dhism and Christianity let us first continue to better flesh out how explicitly
Protestant objectives merged with Prussian political agendas. Specifically, while
Seydel’s views may not be representative of all liberal thought during the era, it
gradually became the template for Protestant political positioning in the new
German Reich. As Dieter Langewiesche summarizes, liberals during the 1870s
perceived a rebirth of medieval “Ultramontanism: the Kaiser and the Reich versus
the Roman Pope; secular versus Church rule; nationality versus international-
ism,”57 an antagonism that also resonates with Wilhelm Oncken, professor of
history at the University of Giessen, who emphasized in 187358 “that every Cath-
olic, whose works should be guided through the beliefs that he professes, is a born
enemy of the Nation, because he considers it in his conscience obligatory, to do
everything he can that all Kingdoms and peoples are subjugated to the Roman
popes.”59 In this view, Oncken not only explicitly links politics with confessional
orientation but also more incisively delineates Catholic acolytes as enemies of
the state, who in this depiction of the Catholic worldview must always remain
subjugated to Roman papal authority. In sum, the denominational perquisites
of Seydel and other Protestant thinkers became overtly entangled in the political
and cultural identity of the emerging Second Reich.
These notions of the new Reich then exemplify the intricate entanglement
between national and Protestant identity in Germany, with its inherent anti-
Catholicism, that had emerged more tangibly after the failed 1848 revolution.
Liberal Protestants sensed the degradation of their symbolic capital in the political
marketplace and thus in response gradually sculpted their religious agendas as a

complementary tool for politically defining the Second Reich. As Adrian Hast-
ings explains in a more general sense, “Whenever a people feels threatened in its
distinct existence by the advance of a power committed to another religion, the
political conflict is likely to have superimposed upon it a sense of religious conflict,
almost crusade, so that national identity becomes fused with religious identity.”60 In
the case of German Protestant liberals, they too fused their religious aims with the
emerging political objectives of the Kaiserreich.
This fusion of political and confessional aims proves especially noteworthy
because of its explicit departure from earlier important liberal tenets concerning
the relationship of church and state.61 Moreover, their Protestant political vision
quickly catapulted into the Kulturkampf, in which Protestant denominational
agendas and the political objectives of the weiße. Revolutionär, Otto von Bis-
marck, coalesced into a designed attack on the Catholic Church—its institutions
and, most importantly, its cultural and social influence on the emerging German
Empire.62 Bismarck, with his calculated denominational appeals to Protestant
liberals, successfully combined the unrefined ingredients of their denomina-
tional interests and his political objectives to congeal nation and confession in
the Kaiserreich.63
In the same vein, Seydel charges that the foundation of the Catholic com-
munity is grounded in its members’ ability to acknowledge and assimilate
specific doctrines, which are established solely by Church authority. Yet accord-
ing to Seydel, a religious community that is united on the general recognition
and acceptance of such dictated doctrinal principles has critical disadvantages.
First, such a religious community is by definition exclusive rather than inclusive.
In the case of Catholicism, Seydel posits “that the further religious, moral and
intellectual education of members from other faith confederations and those that
deviate from church doctrine, that is the external and internal mission in its most
noble sense will thus be impeded. The Church, especially Catholicism, operates
through exclusion, through withholding membership in the community, while
the Freemasons operate through opening, through facilitation of the commu-
nity.”64 Catholicism restricts community building—circumvents its own external
and inner mission—through its doctrinal exclusivity rather than fostering it, as
Protestant Freemasonry purportedly does. A church based on such prescribed
doctrinal cohesion, according to Seydel, impedes the religious, moral, and intel-
lectual progression of other religious communities, whereas Freemasonry is
inclusive and thus encourages the establishment of community bonds across the
spectrum of religious traditions.
Second, Catholicism lacks what Seydel terms a sense of spiritual community
(Gesinnungsgemeinschaft), which serves as a temple to God, and in the case of
Freemasonry is grounded on “the God and human love that lives in the heart.
Everyone, who has this foundation in them, intertwines the confederation of
Freemasons with intense communal love.”65 The Catholic Church on the other
hand hinders the development of inner spiritual bonding and thus “engenders a
highly blemished practice, that destroys God’s Kingdom and hinders the Divine
from all sides, which lastly elicits the dark powers of imperiousness, lies, and
cruelty out of the human soul, and spawns an abominable mixture from them
combined with religion, that magically places the almighty Kingdom of God
into Satan’s hands.”66 According to Seydel, echoing closely von Schroeder’s anti-
Brahmin sentiments and logic in Sundara, Catholicism destroys God’s Kingdom
and delivers the human soul into the hands of Satan through its overbearing,
deceitful, and malicious practices.
While anti-Catholic rhetoric perhaps sufficed to carve out a cultural space for
a renewed and powerful Protestant Church, neither von Schroeder’s Buddhist
hero nor Seydel’s Freemasonry provided the requisite line of reasoning that could
affirm Protestantism as the ideological bedrock for the emerging German nation.67
Valiant monarchical conversions like Sundara’s and a rejection of Catholicism
embodied only preliminary steps in establishing Protestantism as the nation’s
religious cornerstone. That is, von Schroeder, Seydel, and other Protestant India
experts required a more compelling analytical model to bolster Protestantism into
the position of the Second Reich’s religious cornerstone. Seydel found it in the
comparative historical progression of Buddhism and Christianity.
Comparative Religion and Christianity’s

Cultural Distinction
In 1874, Paul Wurm, whom we have already briefly encountered, complained
about the lack of more general scholarly work on Indian religions. In response
to this lacuna in accessible scholarship on Indian traditions, Wurm worked from
translations—by his own admission he could not adequately read Sanskrit—to
publish his own general history. In the forward to his short text, Wurm describes
the importance of such comparative scholarly projects: “Because nowhere do
we find such a comprehensive, thousands-of-years-old History of Pantheism that
dominates an entire people like in the Indian religion. We recognize modern
Pantheism only as philosophy; the Indian one is Volksreligion, and namely one in
a people deeply couched in religion that advanced many ideas that we would like
to consider as originally Christian.”68 Wurm, even after the damaging and more
audacious assaults on biblical inerrancy—to put it in modern terms—levied by
the likes of David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, seems not to portend
the potentially disastrous consequences of such explicit historical correlations for
established Christian doctrine.69 By the latter half of the nineteenth century, and
especially during the 1880s and after, the cat was out of the bag as many theo-
logians and social scientists built on the earlier Enlightenment challenges posed
by Voltaire and others and began to critically examine Christianity through the
looking-glass of other religions.70
Despite the intellectual discomfort caused by this remarkable proliferation of
comparative work during the nineteenth century, Seydel defends and embraces
the comparative method unyieldingly in a series of lectures delivered to the
Deutsche Protestantenverein from January to April 1871. In these lectures,
held a decade after his response to Ketteler and still ten years prior to his major
comparative work on the Buddha and Christ, Seydel addressed the challenges
posed, for Protestants and Catholics alike, by the now well-established field of
comparative religion. In the preface to the published version of his lectures, Sey-
del outlines the task for the German Wissenschaftler, who practices what he terms
“unified, organic universal science.”71 In this view—a derivative of Hegel’s con-
cept of world history—Seydel implicitly envisions philosophy, and specifically
comparative religion, as the source for conclusive answers to the bothersome cul-
tural questions of the day—the “fruits of the science of comparative religion,”
which had emerged from the work of comparative linguistics.72 Here, in a line of
reasoning that also reminds us of Herder’s historical stages of cultural progression,
Seydel embarks on a more elaborate defense of historical religious comparison.
Importantly, Seydel’s model provides the tools for an effective hermeneutical
investigation of Christianity and, above all, the means by which the comparativist
can successfully weed out the right from the wrong, as Seydel contends:73 “Alone
if I would achieve what I aspired to, it would be clear to every one of my read-
ers, that there is no more adequate way than the pursuit of comparative religious
history, to learn to differentiate in Christianity what is right from wrong, the
permanent from the fleeting, the Divine from its human defacement.”74 Here
Seydel affirms that comparative approaches can yield powerful outcomes and
moreover that scholars can differentiate the correct from the incorrect, the per-
manent from the transient, and the Godlike from the humanly disfigured. In
consequence, comparative history could establish qualitative differences between
cultures—cultural relativism—a model that depended on and was supported by
purportedly verifiable social scientific results—a move that also conveniently bol-
stered the symbolic capital of Germany’s intellectual class as archival caretaker of
the cultural knowledge required for building community consensus.
It is not just the link between the distinction of a specific class of thinkers and
the coherence of German culture and the nation that becomes palpable; Seydel
and others, including those like Ernst Haeckel or Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden,
who looked to Darwin for hermeneutical inspiration, would also co-opt such
approaches to assert cultural distinctiveness based on historical progression to
the benefit of Christianity and the German nation. That is, comparative religious
studies could be easily utilized to assess a religion’s state of progress during an
era when the stakes of historical analysis had become more contentious. To put
it bluntly, after the challenges now posed to more traditional biblical exegesis
by modern historical-critical methods, thinkers like Seydel constructed idiosyn-
cratic historical models that challenged Christian orthodoxy and yet supported
the claim of Christian superiority, at least in its Protestant version.75
In fact, despite the perceived threat of such historical comparisons to estab-
lished Christian traditions and doctrines, Seydel envisioned his comparative
model of progressive religious history by contrast as a source for reconstituting
Christianity.76 To those ends, Seydel espoused specific ideas about what com-
parative work might have to offer. Namely, through comparative religious studies
Christianity could be purged of those faults that had been generated through
the centuries, which Seydel leaves for the moment undefined. In a slightly more
audacious application of his progressive historical model, he claims, despite the
blemish of Catholicism, that the superior qualities of all the world’s religions
coalesce in Christianity: “Also in our own religious life to name rot, what is rot,
the shell that is shell, and with the steeliest power of conviction to hold on to,
what raises our religion above all others, through which it equally emulates and
perfects the best in all others.”77 In this subtle comparative twist, “das Beste”
in Christianity, in spite of the faulty paths of its own historical development,
embodies those positive attributes of other religious traditions, which in their
cases have only been partially perfected. Unsurprisingly for a Protestant Ger-
man thinker in the 1870s, those distinctive features of Christianity have perished
under the dominion of the Roman Church, a point that Seydel affirms vocifer-
ously in his eighth lecture to the Protestantenverein, fittingly titled “Christianity,
the Perfected Religion”: “While the Church in Rome delivers to us the warning
proof, that religious bondage is the mother of delusion, the distortion of the real,
the degradation of the highest and noble. The Church of Rome has now sunk
to its lowest in the eyes of all Gebildeten, just when its principles of reign and its
grand unified organization gained its highest triumph.”78 That is, those charac-
teristics of Christianity’s historical progression that Seydel deems false, transitory,
and tainted by human influence are explicitly manifest in Catholicism. Such anti-
denominational rhetoric, as we have seen, became easily co-opted during the
Kulturkampf era by the Protestant-dominated Prussian government to support
concrete actions and policies that were aimed to purge Germany of Catholic
influence.
Shared Religious Practices in the Church and Nation

As Seydel continued his series of essays, the stakes of denominational conflict
became more pronounced as he laid down the claim that only Protestant Chris-
tianity can be equated with the Christianity of Jesus: “Conversely, Protestant
Christianity, the Christianity of Jesus, will attain the highest level of its true and
pure realization in the near future, God willing, precisely through its freedom
and apparent fragmentation.”79 Here, in an important addendum that makes
the political dimension of denominational conflict more tangible, Seydel alludes
to the future ascendancy of Protestant Christianity in this world. In this subtle
affirmation of the imminent dominion of the Protestant Church, the political
undertones are clearly detectable. Protestant Christianity will attain, God willing
(will’s Gott), its bona fide and untainted fulfillment on earth—an unambiguous
application of radical Protestant theology—and not in a promised future afterlife.
In Seydel’s model of comparative religion, the political ramifications are substan-
tial because God’s Kingdom becomes fulfilled through the political affirmation of
Protestantism as the cornerstone of the German nation.
To justify such an account in terms through which Seydel can link the reli-
gious and political spheres, he digs deeper into the depths of Protestant history
by turning to what he designates as the means to salvation (Heilsmittel) found
in Luther’s reformed Christian doctrine.80 Here, according to Seydel, Luther’s
reforms redirected biblical interpretation, redefined the means to salvation, and
rerouted the channels to reconciliation with God and diverted them away from
priestly dictates.81 Importantly, and again echoing his anti-Catholic sentiments,
Seydel stresses that spiritual salvation and the peaceful reconciliation with God
are achieved through individual quest, not through institutionalized rituals of

faith or theological dictates. Yet the successful culmination of these individual
spiritual pursuits becomes linked in Seydel’s account specifically with Protestant-
ism: “Only there does one find true Protestantism, only there has Ur-Christianity
been reconstituted through the Reformation, where the individual determination
of religious life has been granted the greatest possible freedom, to bring fruits,
to seek recognition, to practice shared religious rites, and to permeate life.”82
In Seydel’s model, spirituality is based on the experience of the individual, who
implicitly breaks out of institutionalized religious shackles just as von Schroeder’s
Sundara had. Only true Protestantism, which reestablished an original Chris-
tianity through the Reformation and provides the greatest individual freedom
for forging a religiously harmonious life, can bear fruit in the quest for spiritual
knowledge.
Thus a revived Protestantism, as Seydel envisions it, becomes defined not
through its hierarchies or doctrinal mandates, but through its espousal of individ-
ual spiritual freedom. Yet the spiritually fulfilled individual in Seydel’s Protestant
model carries explicit ramifications for the community as well. That is, the resto-
ration of an original Christian spirituality—attained through the greatest freedom
of individual religious practice—also generates the potential for spiritual revival
in the community. As Seydel explains, the fruits of the Protestant Reformation
become manifest in shared religious practices, which permeate life—creating the
potential basis for cultural and political applications.
For a Protestant intellectual of the era, speaking as the opening salvos of the
Kulturkampf were being launched, none of this may appear particularly surpris-
ing. Importantly though, Seydel’s version of individual spiritual freedoms and
mandates becomes intricately woven into the fabric of political debates and the
attempt of the emerging Second Reich to define itself as a nation. Returning to
Seydel’s first lecture, he posits that the basis of religion and spirituality cannot
be decoupled from the physical world and social interaction. That is, he reiter-
ates the community-building aspect of religious tenets when he posits that the
human drive to spirituality is a social act: “The bodily organism of the human
being, his own sensual nature, links him with the kindred realms of existence
of the external world, with the material that feeds, clothes, and protects him,
and with the sensual life of others, that promises to complete his own.”83 That
is, the human being, in terms of both the physical and spiritual, is explicitly
linked with the external world, which includes the spiritual life of others and is
manifest in “special unique assets (Lebensgüter), which the socialization, the life
community of kindred beings, carries within itself, and creates from within.”84
Seydel drives the analogy further, again echoing Hegel, by stating explicitly
that society emerges, in a virtually identical process, from the human drive to
forge community consensus.85 Moreover, just a year after the Reichsgründung
in 1871, he unambiguously links religious community building with the uni-
fication of the nation, both of which point toward and emerge from human
spiritual-bonding processes. In turn, the remaining step from a community,
bonded through spiritual and denominational consensus, to a Protestant Ger-
man nation was a small one.
As Seydel continues his lecture, the links between spirituality and politics now
become more explicit. He responds to what was one of the profound questions
of the era concerning the reconciliation of patriotic, political, and social inter-
ests with higher orders of the human heart and spirit: “Especially nowadays we
encounter frequently enough the adage as if nothing higher could be conceived
than patriotic, political and social interest, as if everything that might enter into
the human heart and spirit was to be subordinated to it.”86 Seydel, however, pro-
vides the answer to this dilemma: “The German people will show that they have
not forgotten their mission of acquiring the highest spiritual goods in pure form
for all of humanity, in the form of divine beauty and truth, and to lead humanity
together in the divine Kingdom of a free, truly Christian church.”87 In Seydel’s
mind, the German Volk—nation—possesses the requisite characteristics to
uncover the highest spiritual goods. Moreover, the German nation can be unified
in a free and truly Christian Church—in Seydel’s mind, a rejuvenated Protestant
Church. His envisioned Protestantism here becomes unequivocally entangled
with the mandates of the German nation. For Seydel, as he had emphatically
accentuated in his rebuttal of Ketteler, Protestant Christianity is defined by inclu-
siveness and based on the implicit assumption that it is endowed with a universal
spiritual mandate that became superimposed on the emerging paradigm for the
German nation.
The timing of Seydel’s speeches is of course critical for contextualizing these
claims about his nationalist sentiments. His concluding remarks from the eighth
and final lecture of the first set held in the Spring of 1871, just months after
the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and, most sig-
nificantly, just following the crowning of Wilhelm I on January 18, 1871, as
Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, reinforce my argument
for the intricate link between Seydel’s Protestantism and German politics.88 In
reference to the Prussian military victory over France, Seydel proclaims:
The latest rise of the German nation, the called bearer of the true Protestant Chris-
tianity, to a first rate power, her merger into a union, caused the ideology of a gen-
eral German church of the people to develop into the tangible form of an attainable
goal out of the unsteady appearance of a nebulous image, the construction of a
Protestant German throne of the Kaiser and the gained foundations of the King-
dom’s constitution, which grants a decisive influence on the intelligence and Bil-
dung of the present, allows the seed of hope, that the time is not all too distant, in
which yearning for a free church of the Holy Spirit, which has risen time and again
throughout the history of humanity, will finally find fulfillment.89
Thus, in Seydel’s view, the establishment of the German nation—the vessel of

Protestant Christianity—in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War carries
enormous consequences for eventually establishing a free church of the Holy
Spirit. Yet Seydel’s so-called Free Church, in which the German people would
become united in “a general German Church of the People,” becomes explicitly
linked with the establishment of a German Protestant crown and constitution.
At this point Seydel’s logic still remains unfinished in this era of increasing
comparative religious studies without a more powerful historical groundwork for
asserting Protestantism as the cultural and political bedrock for the Second Reich.
To a comparativist like Seydel, who was deeply dedicated to cultural Protestant-
ism, an analytical model intended to assert denominational objectives that could
be effectively superimposed on the political sphere required that the German
Protestant nation pass the examination of comparative progress. His comparative
work on the Buddhist and Christian narratives will provide the required results.
In his provocative analysis Seydel applies progressive history as a hermeneutical
tool to argue for the superiority of Protestantism in what he might have called the
“great chain of religions.”
Indian Ur-Religion and Its German Keeper

In March 1876, just two years after Paul Wurm’s call for more accessible work on
Indian religious history and the same year von Schroeder was composing Sun-
dara, the head pastor of the St. Nikolai-Kirche in Hamburg, Eduard Grimm
(1848–1932), delivered an address titled “The Teachings about the Buddha and
the Dogma of Jesus Christ.”90 In introducing the comparative topic of his talk,
Grimm remarks that many in his audience have probably already read and heard
much about the religious traditions of India. Though indicative of the widening
German interest in other religions, especially those originating in India, Grimm
appeals to his audience “to forget these things” yet to maintain nevertheless an
open mind just as one converted Brahmin once did.91 This unnamed Indian pun-
dit that Grimm refers to, whose impressions of European culture and social habits
purportedly shocked the visitor severely, claimed, as Grimm reports, that only the
Bible prevented his reconversion to his former religion. Grimm then summarizes
the significance of this event:92 “When a Brahmin was noble enough, despite the
thousand-year outgrowths, not to want to misconceive the core of the Christian
religion, I would think that we Christians are certainly obligated when observing
foreign religions not to focus our eyes on their farcical external shell, but rather
their noble and pure content.”93 Though the sense of a Buddhist peril would later
take hold among some of Germany’s elite thinkers, Grimm, like Wurm as we
saw earlier, seems to discount the possibility of any serious epistemological threat
to Christian tenets that historical comparisons with Buddhism or constructed
Buddhist narratives like von Schroeder’s might spawn. Yet as Seydel enthusiasti-
cally took up Grimm’s charge to uncover Buddhism’s presumed “precious and
pure substance,” his comparative conclusions would quickly invalidate that
assumption. Seydel’s reading of Buddhism vis-à-vis Christianity plainly unveils
a comparative agenda that sanctions a reinvigorated Protestant German nation
based on his comparative reading of Buddhism and sparked a hotly contested
debate among the intellectual crowd in the Kaiserreich.
In The Gospels of Jesus in Their Relationship to the Buddha Saga and Buddhist
Teachings (1882), Seydel does not disparage other religious traditions to make
his case, especially in light of his scathing appraisal of Catholicism. In fact, in a
unique twist to his comparative deductions, Seydel argues that inherent links exist
between all religions, a claim that proves advantageous in a comparative model of

religious history, which is intended to support the growing voices that espoused
a Protestant German nationalism.94 Specifically, Seydel and others employed a
progressive model of history to support the claim that the positive attributes of
the world’s diverse religions would converge in one perfected religion. As Sey-
del posits, “Accordingly, we had to expect that on the ground where all holy
streams flow together, and at the time in which this happened, the perfect religion
would arise.”95 In other words, Seydel identifies a fundamental link between all
religions on the one hand, yet in this politically charged conclusion, only one
religion can emerge that attains unqualified completion—a contradictory twist to
Enlightenment universalism, in which only Protestant, and implicitly German,
Christianity can become perfected.
Importantly, such contentions about the eventual predominance of German
Protestantism as the result of a historical progression were frequently based on
the assumption that Christianity had derived from a pristine original—an Ur-
Religion.96 Building here of course on the earlier work of the Schlegels, Bopp,
and others, German thinkers in the latter half of the nineteenth century began
to expand the idea of a common linguistic heritage with an Indo-Aryan Urvolk
and link such linguistic bonds to Germany’s cultural, and especially religious,
progression. Thus Seydel’s depiction of Christianity’s historical evolution echoes
other thinkers during the era that traced Christianity back to a pure, more pris-
tine Aryan origin.
In his third lecture to the Protestantenverein, for instance, Seydel outlines
the histories of Chinese and Japanese religion, which “from the middle of Asia
westward we reach the Motherland of the Indo-European or Aryan family of
peoples, which was discovered through the comparison of languages just 35
years ago,” where, as Seydel claims, “We uncovered the religious condition of
our ancestors in the original Aryan lands.”97 In this well-established argument, at
least for German thinkers during the Wilhelmine era, Seydel explicitly links Ger-
man cultural heritage to an original Indo-European Aryan cultural family tree,
establishing a critical channel through which he and others could trace German
religious history from a pristine Aryan original to a superior Protestantism in
the present.
To reinforce the purported perfection of this original religion, Seydel pro-
nounces that the God of the Ur-Arier in comparison to Chinese religious models
is “representative of a more substantive perception and more lively sense of the
Godly.”98 The critical distinction in this comparison between the Indo-Aryans and
the Chinese is embodied in the “union with God in the inner life of the spirit.”99
Seydel’s emphasis on the inner spiritual life, an important Protestant tenet, here
allows him to establish what he asserts to be the link between Indo-Aryan and
Protestant German culture: “In testimony to the highest grade of accomplished
culture the oldest religion of our fathers dedicates a cult of thankful praise to
the glowing God in heaven, because this culture sees everything good as coming
from above; next to it a cult of longing for peace in the consciousness of the guilt
of sin.”100 In this abstruse statement, Seydel posits that Christianity has attained
the highest level of cultural accomplishment (Vollcultur), always modeled as a
positive historical progression that originated in Indo-Aryan traditions—the reli-

gion of our fathers.
Yet to make this claim for a superior German Protestantism vis-à-vis Indian reli-
gious traditions, which could support the political aims of the Second Reich—if
present-day Indian religions were not to be the natural inheritor of such a pristine
original—Seydel equally requires a means of degrading India’s present religious
practices. Borrowing from the logic of his playbook on the Catholic Church, Sey-
del depicts the increasing influence of the priestly class’s (Brahmanen) theological
positions in ancient India. In an exemplary case of what Dipesh Chakrabarty has
termed a transition narrative (glorifying the past in order to degrade the pres-
ent), a common ideological strategy among the era’s colonialist campaigners, for
instance, Seydel deplores the degradation of the pristine Indian Ur-Religion as it
evolved through time: “Only the philosophical theology of the Brahmins, the
ruling caste of the priests, penetrated ever deeper into the depths of the Brahmin,
while the actual religion of the people has plummeted into a sensual, riotous
addiction of the imagination, like that of desire and of action, like that of faith,
of life and of cult, and rolling along the wheel of decay, yes even sinking into the
abyss of the gruesome and barbaric, of cruelty and lust.”101 In Seydel’s view, echo-
ing his earlier criticisms of Catholic hierarchies, which he judges to be disengaged
from its parish members, modern Indian religious practice has, like Catholicism,
plummeted into decay from its unspoiled beginnings.
Yet to make such a transition narrative work to the benefit of the Protestant
Church as inheritor of such a pure original, Seydel needed to establish traces of
that original in the Protestant present. Thus in the third lecture delivered to the
Protestantenverein, Seydel praises Brahminism for accomplishing the transition
to “an inner, spiritual possession of the Godly,” which sufficed in his view for the
achievement of what he terms an original unity.102 With undertones of the Protes-
tant Reformation—its emphasis on individual spirituality and responsibility—he
builds on this idea of an inner, spiritual, and original unity in the Indian religious
traditions of the Vedas. Seydel infers that a unified spiritual state should become
manifest in the world—a results-oriented take on spiritual unity with God. Yet
Brahminism, he claims, failed to fully utilize this reconciliation with God.103 As
Seydel judges, Brahminism only half filled the spiritual cup of the potential unity
between God and man: “Brahminism is only half perfected: it remains caught in
its ‘rejection of life’ (‘sein Leben lassen’), in the inner, spiritual sense.”104
By pronouncing the existence of an original unity in Brahminism, accom-
plished by an Aryan people with explicit cultural and linguistic links to Germany,
yet which remained unfulfilled and had come to decay in Brahminism’s histori-
cal progression, Seydel constructs the conceptual stage for the hermeneutical
theatrics required for positing a contemporary unity of human spirituality with
God—a rejuvenation of Indo-Germanic religious heritage—that could become
fully consummated only in German Protestantism. The inability of present-day
India to take advantage of its remarkable heritage—now in its most decadent
state at the end of the nineteenth century under the British Raj—conveniently
opens the door for Seydel’s Protestant Christianity to revitalize and reconstitute
the latent remains of the pure original in a revitalized Protestant Church and
assertive German nation. In his comparative, historical hermeneutics of Bud-

dhist and Christian narratives, Seydel will recast the cultural and religious links
between German and Indian traditions to validate Protestantism as the cultural
and political cornerstone for a spiritually superior Second Reich.
Buddhist Escapism versus Christian Community

Building: Protestant Germany’s Superiority
In 1882, Seydel published his most thorough and controversial application of the
comparative historical model in the aforementioned The Gospels of Jesus, followed
in 1884 by the pamphlet-length Buddha and Christ. In these texts Seydel inves-
tigates the textual record of the Buddha story, based primarily on translations
of the Lalita Vistara, which he compares side-by-side with the New Testament
account of Christ. In The Gospels of Jesus, Seydel elaborates in detail the specific
similarities in the two life chronicles, which includes important tenets such as the
trinity, birth legends, and the performance of miracles, among many other exam-
ples. While the validity of such comparisons was vigorously contested, Seydel’s
text nevertheless addressed a burning question of the day about cross-cultural
religious influences, an intellectual quandary for many comparativists, who still
clung to the idea of Christianity’s exclusivity, especially exacerbated by the incon-
venient historical fact that the Buddha chronologically preceded Christ.105 For
Seydel, this posed no problem because the impossibility of Christian influence
on the Buddha was evident.106 Moreover, in Seydel’s view, the Gospels are litera-
ture and thus were indisputably influenced by a diversity of thinkers as well as
social and cultural events: “The entire history of poetry like the fine arts, shows
us certain repeating types, and always newly considered themes, which travel hand
to hand from one artist to another, from one people to another, from one time to
another.”107 Such an appraisal of biblical texts, though certainly not new, proved
to be an irreverent challenge to the religious status quo for many thinkers. Yet this
ostensibly impartial account of artistic motives, types, and influences across his-
torical time nevertheless served Seydel to draw much more radical, biased cultural
conclusions as he applied it to Christian evolution: “How Christian devoutness
and Germanic depth of mind has transformed the image of the Madonna with
the Child, whose basic traits are verifiably attributable to the group of Isis with
Horuschild! Thus we possess then a highly interesting, indisputable example of
Christian recasting of the Buddha legend.”108 As Seydel sees it, the entire progress
of history points to a unidirectional Buddhist influence on Christianity, a case
that seemed indisputable to Seydel. Yet importantly, as Suzanne Marchand also
corroborates, for Seydel the Gospels of the New Testament recast the Buddha
legend—an improvement on the incomplete original.109
As a result, in a unique twist to his comparative religious hermeneutics, Seydel
co-opts his model of progressive history to bolster the development of his so-
called Free Church. That is, unshackled social science based on historical progress
allows Seydel to account for a Christian recasting of the pristine original in Bud-
dhism, now manifest in the Protestant Church. Seydel again employs the concept
of a pristine original religion, which serves to assert Germany’s Protestant version
of Christianity—bolstered by the leitmotif of his constructed Buddhism—as the

most progressive and advanced religion.
Seydel’s comparison of the Buddha and Christ birth stories illustrates this ana-
lytical tactic perfectly. Critical to Seydel’s argument, he first explains that Buddhism
originates from Aryan roots,110 and again reiterates the purported link between
the Indian Aryans and what he refers to as the European Aryans: “On this path,
primarily both of the Aryan peoples stand, the Greek and the Germanic, those
who were called more than others to uncouple the humane, moral-spiritual life
from the spell of constrictive religious traditions, to embody the real advance.”111
Here Seydel posits that the pristine Aryan religion, which originated in Vedic
India, sparked the development of a more humane, moral-spiritual life out of the
more constrictive religious traditions—a subtle denominational innuendo aimed
at the Catholic Church. Specifically, the Greeks and the Germans have achieved
a real advance—the world’s religious progression culminates in its most superior
form in Germany.
In the final chapter of Seydel’s The Gospels of Jesus, the political implications
of his comparative religious history become most explicit. In his conclusion,
Seydel reiterates what he considers to be the indisputable evidence for Buddhist
influence on the New Testament tradition: “An outstanding reliability of the
Christian written record in those external pieces of evidence is so inexistent,
that it is more likely to presume with great probability the influence of Buddhist
examples on the Christian literature of the Gospels and on the subsequent New
Testament writings.”112 To the chagrin of many thinkers of the era, Seydel states
in no uncertain terms that the New Testament was influenced at least in part
through Buddhism. The threatening repercussions posed by such conclusions
for the denominational, confessional, and doctrinal integrity of Christianity are
apparent, yet for Seydel, external influence proves to be no hindrance to the
conclusion that Christianity embodies the superior position in a progressive
religious history—superiority is attained through different means than uncon-
tested biblical exegesis, which validated older denominational traditions. Thus
progressive history provided a convenient tool for asserting the prerogatives of
a larger cultural/political project. Just as Strauss, Feuerbach, and others had
challenged the inherent “truth” of the historical Jesus earlier in the century,
so too did it prove straightforward for Seydel to turn the tables on critical his-
toricism to the advantage of Protestant Christianity: “But anyone who would
expect after this, that we would assume the equivalence between Buddhism
and Christianity, would be mistaken. Especially the most deliberately unbiased
viewpoint, we think, cannot help but recognize, despite all similarities in basic
ideas, terms of expression and moral commandments, a deep difference between
both that places the fuller revelation of God on the side of Christianity.”113 Sey-
del indisputably asserts that Christianity embodies a fuller revelation of God
than Buddhism. He recasts a social scientific model, historicism, to affirm the
superiority of Christianity by focusing on a purported flaw of Buddhism, a
trait emphasized by many other Indologists of the era: “The Energy of the Bud-
dhist, which one might want to compare with our characteristics, is initially the
power of renunciation, then the zeal of the mission in merciful love, in order
to achieve salvation of others that one hoped to win through inner and outer
extinction of all real life energy (Lebenstriebe).”114 That is, Buddhism rejects life
on this earth as a means to individual salvation, and thus Seydel concludes that
“the real existence as such which would be inseparably linked with suffering, is
not to beautify, to enrich, to exalt this existence, but rather to undercut its roots
appears to be the task: to the purposes here addressed, to overcome suffering.”115
Buddhism, in Seydel’s twisted account, which stands in stark contrast to the
heroic outcomes of von Schroeder’s Sundara, rejects earthly life—its improve-
ment and enrichment—and seeks to destroy its own roots. Seydel continues the
growth metaphor to argue how Christianity’s recasting of Buddhism liberates
an energy that engenders earthly action and progress: “Just as a multitude of
actions is thereby intended for the Kingdom of Heaven, an abundance of new
turns of expression points incessantly towards the fact, that the possession of
new life in the interior of the soul is not a quiet, enclosed possession, but rather
the possession of a fermenting seed, out of which a fruit bearing tree grows. The
tiny mustard seed shall become a tree in whose branches the birds of heaven
nest, the small amount of sourdough shall acidify a large amount of flour.”116
Spiritual unity with God then does not produce a detached inner comfort but
rather releases an energetic seed that produces earthly results, in which the
spiritual designs of heaven can flourish. Thus Christianity, as Seydel depicts
its Protestant version, thrives because it does not rebuff the world but rather
embraces earthly works as they become embodied in the community: “Not in
lonely flight from the world, rather in a community warm with life.”117
Thus where Christianity thrives due to its “call to action based in love,” Bud-
dhism atrophies due to its “moral of passivity, although it contains the most noble
and most Christian commandments.”118 Critical here is that Seydel conveniently
points out that Buddhism, having emerged out of the pristine tradition of the
Vedas, possesses the equivalent potentialities of Christianity. Thus Seydel is able
to maintain the special German link to these pure, original forms of spirituality
and at the same time argue for a more modern, rejuvenated version in Protestant
Christianity, yet does so without risking the potential capitulation to a Buddhist
sociocultural paradigm as von Schroeder’s Sundara suggests.
Similar to Seydel’s vigorous criticism of Catholicism—its inability to build
communities—Buddhism also has failed to unify spirit and action, which Seydel
judges to be the most critical manifestation of religious progress—a unity that
comes to fruition in the Protestant German state: “Christianity needed no such
development to attain the positive and rich content. The heavenly Kingdom, that
the true Messiah unexpectedly lets appear in the place of the theocratic-national
idea of Kingdom, is conceived as a real, structured, individualized world, filled
with activity, permeated by God and culminating in God, but not dissolved in
God, and certainly not dissolved in an empty infinity, that only leaves the bliss
of being free.”119 Here Christianity’s distinctiveness vis-à-vis Buddhism becomes
overtly linked to the assertion of the German nation; the Kingdom of Heaven,
which has superseded the idea of a theocratic nation by the hand of the true sav-
ior, is perceived as real, structured, individualized, and marked by agency in the
world—a Protestant German kingdom.
Moreover, Seydel envisions this Protestant nation as the catalyst for the revi-
talization of German culture. That is, a revitalized Protestantism, here a so-called
Free Church, becomes the mechanism for buttressing a renaissance of German
culture on earth:
The full word of Christianity is not the word of death, rather that of rebirth from
the Holy Spirit, and that of the creative formation of ‘a new heaven and a new
earth.’ Protestantism is destined to fend off and to complete the oriental one-
sidedness of the medieval ideal through the recollection of classical antiquity, of
the right to human freedom and human earthly goods. Its goal is classic Christianity
that integrates the spirit of holy love as the power, which gives content and form, in
full honor, to the reestablished natural, societal and spiritual forms, such as Raphael
and Michael Angelo understood to integrate it into the shapes of classical beauty
and masculinity.120
The renaissance of German culture as a manifestation of God’s will on earth—

here aligned with Europe’s artistic gentry—becomes authenticated in a thriving
German Protestant kingdom: “Not only should we give God, what is God’s,
but also to the Kaiser, what is his; God’s will should happen on earth, like in
heaven, and the meek will acquire the earth, as remaining seat of the future
heavenly Kingdom.”121 Such explicit links between God and nation also reso-
nate with other Protestants of the era such as W. Hönig, Heidelberg pastor
and editor of the protestantische Flugblätter, who expressed the idea in 1882 in
simple words: “The German Kaiser’s Kingdom is a creation of the Protestant
spirit.”122 As these thinkers envisioned the emerging European landscape, a
perfect spiritual and political community would coalesce in the Protestant Ger-
man nation.
Despite such reconfigurations of Protestant Germany constructed through a
vision of Indian Buddhism during the 1870s and 1880s, many German thinkers
of the era remained unsatisfied with such models that still seemed to redound so
clearly to Christianity. Thus many German India buffs began to espouse Indian
traditions in a more adoptive fashion—some embraced Buddhism outright, while
others generated new models of spirituality, such as theosophy, based on their
accounts of Indian religions. These fringe religious movements represent subtle
yet important cultural outgrowths that emerged alongside the creative attempts
of such thinkers like von Schroeder and Seydel to reconstitute spiritual well-being
and a Protestant worldview in harmony with Germany’s shifting political designs.
Yet these innovative movements were also implicitly political and concerned with
reinvigorating their cultural distinction and identity in the evolving German
nation. These novel religious pioneers manifest an important cog in Germany’s
constructed India and thus warrant a closer look.
First though, in response to the Protestant religious and political assertions
that have been our subject in this chapter, Germany’s Catholic acolytes and Jesu-
its did not just passively acquiesce to their cultural disenfranchisement in the new
German nation. Despite the cultural exile of many leading German Catholic
thinkers during the era and the deliberate dismantling of Catholic educational
institutions and influence, they too continued to seek new avenues for asserting
their religious and political agendas, which became intricately entangled in the
universal mission of the Catholic Church. Their attempts to renegotiate Catholic
symbolic power in the German nation can also be distinctly identified in the
constructed India of Germany’s Catholic India experts.
CHAPTER 2
Catholic Visions of India

and Universal Mandates
Commandeering the Nation-State
It is at the present time greatly reassuring for once to turn one’s eyes away from the
constant agitation against the Catholic Church, and to gaze across the Red Sea and
the Indian Ocean to a heathen land, in which the fundamental principles of equity
and justice toward the Catholics are more familiar, at least better followed than in
our modern Europe.
Fridolin Piscalar, S. J., Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (1871)1
On the eve of the Kulturkampf the Catholic Jesuit Fridolin Piscalar summa-
rizes the impending angst and frustration sensed by so many Catholics as Otto
von Bismarck began to forge the Second German Reich into a Protestant nation.
Piscalar’s posture exudes a sense of persecution that abounded especially among
German Catholics during the era, and rightly so as Bismarck embarked on a
hard-line legal harassment of the Jesuits and their institutions during the 1870s.
Though Piscalar’s aims were radically different than those of the Anglo-German
Aryanist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, with whose impassioned vision German
Visions of India began, Piscalar too gazes across the Red Sea—a striking symbol
of Jewish liberation from Egyptian captivity—to a heathen land, India, for Cath-
olic reprieve from Protestant assaults. Both Chamberlain’s and Piscalar’s India
become constructed as two different “Jewels in the Crown”—as the root of Ger-
man Aryan heritage in Chamberlain’s mind and as a cultural prototype of exem-
plary regard for Catholic tenets in Piscalar’s view. We will return to Chamberlain
and his Aryan vision for German cultural renewal in Chapter 6. For now, I want
to explore how the intense anti-Catholicism that confronted German Catholics
in the Kaiserreich influenced their readings of India and how they provide an
insightful illustration of Catholic strategies for redefining and reasserting their
social and political agency. Yet the convenient alliance of religious and political
objectives, as we have thus far examined, among Germany’s Protestants proved to
be far more complex in the case of Catholics than often assumed.
Repairing Protestant Damage: Archiving

Catholic Success in India
Fridolin Piscalar’s understated title to his essay “Indisches” promises at first glance
little in terms of insight into the complex confessional animosities of Wilhelmine
Germany. Yet the essay’s initial sentence and this chapter’s epigraph indubitably
highlight the tensions sensed by all German Catholics as the German Empire
emerged after 1871. Moreover, as Piscalar continues his essay, he designates India
as a corrective reversal of German history’s regrettable path since the Reforma-
tion. Specifically, the Catholic Indian mission and in particular its successes in
East India, as Piscalar informs us, carry the heavy burden of rectifying the damage
inflicted on the Catholic Church since the Reformation by Protestant confes-
sional assertions in the political domain: “The Indian mission has been a problem
child of the Catholic Church due to the thousands of obstacles mounted both
internally and externally against the Church. Yet it is indeed an undeniable fact
that especially in East India during the sixteenth century the losses inflicted by
the Reformation on the vilified Mother have been mostly compensated.”2 Here,
as Picalar describes it, Catholic successes in India compensate for and serve as
a corrective to the severe losses inflicted on Catholic institutions by the Protes-
tant Reformation. Piscalar’s account of Indian missions provides a clear example
then of how Catholic historical readings of India modeled Catholic successes and
sought to reassert Catholic agency—or to put it more boldly, Catholic achieve-
ments in India implicitly serve as an imagined proxy for undermining Protestant
triumphs in the German nation.
Importantly, the German Catholic account of Indian religions and the depic-
tion of its Catholic missions created an archive of knowledge about a cultural
Other—similar to the Protestant readings of India that we have already explored,
at least in terms of their underlying confessional prerogatives—that redounded to
the legitimacy and status of Catholicism in the world. That is, just as Protestants
read India through the double mirror of confessional objectives and the emerging
aims of the German nation, German Catholics, mostly Jesuits, also responded
in their constructed India from their own unique confessional slant that was
underpinned by the Catholic Church’s universal charge. As we explored in Chap-
ter 1, the melding of Protestant religious and political aims in their readings
of India during the Kulturkampf sanctioned the new German nation. Catholic
thinkers, on the other hand, also sought to assert their confessional objectives
in their accounts of India as a constructed surrogate for more openly opposing
the Protestant Kaiserreich. They sought to forge a universal network of Catholic
dominion, which could serve as an ideological corrective of sorts—a psychologi-
cal victory—in response to Protestant Germany’s national objectives and colonial
expansion.
My intent here is not to provide a complete picture of Catholic missions in
India during the era, a worthy project still awaiting its author, nor were the afore-
mentioned Catholic responses limited only to German Catholics or to Catholic
constructs of India. Yet Catholic depictions of India and their portrayal of mis-
sions there provide a unique glimpse into the German Catholic response to the
Catholic Visions of India and Universal Mandates 55
politico-cultural pressures inflicted on their Catholic identities in Wilhelmine

Germany. This does not suggest that Catholic India experts constructed their
vision of India in specific reference to the Second Empire, nor was India the
only site for German Jesuits to reassert their sense of confessional agency. Ger-
man Jesuits had ample global opportunities to exercise their universal aims due
to the Church’s extensive mission network—the Catholic Church had been a
colonial collaborator, though sometimes antagonist, associated with European
imperial designs for centuries.3 Yet India did indeed provide an imagined as well
as practical landscape for German Catholic thinkers to reassert their imperiled
Catholic identity—they transported their cultural frustrations in Germany onto
the European jewel that was India.4 Exemplary for India’s importance as an alter-
native outlet for their frustrated standing in Germany is the significant role that
German Jesuits played in the development of Franz Xavier College in Poona. As
Die katholischen Missionen claims in its report on the celebration of the college’s
twenty-fifth anniversary in 1895, the college’s growth and importance “shows
what the Priests expelled from German countries have achieved in foreign lands
during the time of exile.”5 The image of India and its Catholic mission at Poona
became a vehicle for German Catholics to respond to their dire circumstances in
Germany’s Second Reich, but more important, to reassert their distinction as a
cultural force in the religious marketplace.
This resonates especially in the work of Alfons Väth (1874–1937), a German
Catholic Jesuit who spent time in India on two extended occasions (1899–1903;
1910–16). In his historical depiction of the German Jesuits in India, specifically
Bombay-Poona, Väth praises their dedication, loyalty, and resilience in promot-
ing the Catholic faith under difficult circumstances: “The happy success is in no
small measure attributable to the German character. In other vicarages things
have not developed so smoothly as in Bombay. The situation demanded infinite
patience and quietude, tedious detail work. Only Germans could accomplish
this.”6 In Väth’s depiction, it is specifically the German character of the Jesuits
that facilitates the success of the mission effort, and most important, only Ger-
man Jesuits possess the requisite temperament to function in India.
This is not to suggest that Catholic Jesuits and other thinkers explicitly sought
to undermine colonial prerogatives or the imperial aims of the European pow-
ers. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, secularization pressures in
both the political and social spheres had gradually chipped away the political
power of the Catholic Church. During the long nineteenth century, beginning
with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and following the politi-
cal metamorphosis spawned by the Napoleonic code, then Darwinian science
after midcentury, and the social destabilization caused by industrial capitalism
and significant demographic shifts, the Catholic Church had long since lost the
luxury, despite Pope Pius IX’s claim of infallibility at the First Vatican Council in
1870, to singlehandedly orchestrate the political and cultural landscape without
significant challenge from various spheres of interest.7
Two features of Catholic responses to the severe cultural pressures in Wil-
helmine Germany nevertheless stand out that underpin German Catholic
visions of India. First, German Catholic accounts of India during the era reveal
a palpable sensitivity to the cultural threats to their confessional status and

intellectual agency in the Kaiserreich and thus are specifically anti-Protestant.
Anti-Protestant sentiment permeates, for instance, the scathing Catholic assess-
ments of liberalism, a sociopolitical concept that many Catholics viewed as the
foundation for Wilhelmine Germany’s Protestant underpinning. For these Cath-
olic intellectuals, liberalism served as a catchall phrase for constitutional models
of government, representational democracy, limits on aristocratic power, and even
human rights—the culprits in Catholic eyes for what they viewed as the modern
world’s present chaotic and unsound sociopolitical model and debauched cul-
ture.8 In fact, these Catholic thinkers viewed liberalism as modern society’s most
corrupt feature, as Christian Pesch (1853–1924), another prominent Jesuit of
the era, explains in an 1879 essay:9 “Thus liberalism has shown throughout its
history to be a system of contradiction and hypocrisy, a gradual but certain revolt
against God and the divine world order, and an unconciliatory enemy of all those
who espouse this order.”10 That is, Bismarck’s Second Empire and its underly-
ing Protestant base, both fashioned explicitly by liberalism, exemplify divisive
contradiction and destructive hypocrisy because, as Pesch brusquely assesses,
Protestantism opposes God’s order. Moreover, Pesch’s expression “divine world
order” becomes an ideological banner of sorts for a German Catholic worldview
because it overtly bolsters the Catholic Church’s claim as the singular, true Chris-
tian Church and the sole corrective to a depraved Protestant world—a worldview
that would be transplanted onto India by many Catholic thinkers.
Second then, the predominance of Protestant political prerogatives in the Sec-
ond Empire conflicted not only with Catholic agency in the nation but also with
Catholicism’s claim to a universal mission. That is, for Germany’s Catholic think-
ers the Church’s universal mandate became threatened by a German nation whose
political and cultural identity had become so explicitly entangled with Protestant
objectives. India and its Catholic missions then became a potential space for
reasserting Catholic universalism—to reconstitute Catholic agency beyond the
geopolitical purview of the nation-state. As a result, the reassertion of Catholic
universal mandates became subtly, but often overtly, critical of the geopolitical
circumscription of the globe—European powers carving up the world in safe-
guarded colonial portions. To reiterate generally, German Catholics constructed
their India in opposition to the Protestant German nation, and nationalism more
categorically, during the age of empire. Thus Catholic India became a surrogate
of sorts for German Catholic thinkers—usually Jesuits—to mitigate their frustra-
tion at home by renegotiating their Catholic identity and the Church’s objectives
on India’s spiritual battleground.
Winning the Kulturkampf in India

As we might expect, German Catholic India experts frequently framed their
accounts of mission work and success in comparative terms. That is, their assess-
ments of Catholic India were underpinned by a scathing anti-Protestantism that
served to bolster their claims of Catholic mission success. Specifically, German
Catholic Jesuits, who had frequently fled their native Germany to escape the
acerbic attacks of German Protestants during the Kulturkampf, recast their Cath-
olic identity through explicit anti-Protestantism in their Indian mission reports.
Father Edmund Delplace, for instance, who had recently begun his missionary
work in the Sunderbans in 1874, reports the gradual expansion and success of
the Catholic efforts there and ridicules Protestant endeavors in the region:11 “First
Protestantism has shown itself here as almost everywhere to be a Babylon, in
which hundreds of sects form, combat each other and then fall into lethargy. Ask a
protestant Bengalese to which religion he belongs, he will never answer you: I am
a Christian; seldom he says: I am a Protestant; the usual answer proclaims: I am a
Schitan or Dubit or Lutheran, etc.”12 In this reading, Protestantism in Bengal had
proven incapable of molding a unified religious identity and remained a com-
munity of alienated sects, divided and destabilized by intradenominational strife
that resulted in spiritual lethargy. The denominational sectarianism of Protestant
Christianity fails to provide a stable and reliable religious identity. As Delplace
depicts it, contradicting the arguments of Seydel that we explored in Chapter 1,
these heathen converts to Protestantism can only name their sect but are unable
to grasp the unifying feature of Christian faith—failing to engender a commu-
nity of Christians, as Catholicism purportedly does, that are spiritually bonded
through confession. The report must have been sweet music to the ears of Pesch
and other German Catholic thinkers of the era who read these mission reports and
certainly cherished any chinks in the Protestant armor.
As Delplace continues his anti-Protestant tirade, not only does Protestant
“division and disunity” prevent the fulfillment of spiritual need, he also reports
that many converts to Protestant sects become frustrated by what he describes as
Protestant disorientation.13 He alleges that these Protestant novices in India are
misguided Christians who quickly turn to Catholicism in search of answers
to their religious queries—spiritual remedies that Protestantism fails to bestow to
its converts. Thus Protestantism, in Delplace’s view, fails to provide the requisite
spiritual doctrine and practical rites to foster a stable community of believers. Yet in
a more insidious criticism of Protestantism, Delplace asserts that Protestantism’s
numerous sects are not a religion at all, as one frustrated Protestant convert in
Bengal purportedly recounts to the German Jesuit: “‘But Sahib,’ they said to me,
‘that is not a religion; the preacher baptized me, entered my name in his register;
then he gave me a Bible and let me go; but I don’t have time to read the Bible,
and then I don’t understand anything in it, no, that is not a religion.’”14 Thus
Protestant conversion rituals in this account are devoid of meaning—the con-
verted are formally registered yet spiritual substance is deficient in this confession
of Protestant faith.
In fact, Protestantism is not Christianity at all, as these Catholic Jesuits viewed
it, which becomes strikingly apparent in Catholic conversion anecdotes. Almost
fifty years later, Alfons Väth reports that in the city of Dharwar, which had become
an important station of mission activity primarily due to the development of the
railway line from Goa, Christian conversions there had gradually increased under
the influence of Catholic efforts. Moreover, in the village of Bettigeri, located just
outside of Dharwar, Väth describes the conversion success among the area’s weav-
ers: “Thirty Protestant weavers just converted to Christianity.”15 In other words,
Protestant Christianity, in this view, ranks no higher than the other heathen reli-
gious traditions across Asia that Catholics found so reprehensible.
Such acerbic judgments—anecdotes of failed conversion and Protestant disar-
ray on India’s spiritual terrain—buttress German Catholic attempts to reassert
their confessional identity and also serve to justify their sense of religious dis-
tinction vis-à-vis Protestantism. Yet the most poignant justification for Catholic
aims in India becomes manifest in their direct confrontations with Protestants.
Delplace reports, for instance, that the mission in Bashanti had enjoyed such
resounding success that a second mission in a neighboring village, Khari, had
now become indispensable. At the completion of the Catholic chapel there, Del-
place recounts the reaction of two visiting Protestants: “Suddenly two Protestant
catechists appear on Monday and attempt to invoke terror among all those wish-
ing to become Catholic. They also came to me and asked directly, how many
from their people have seen me. The answer proclaimed that I could not tell them
exactly at the moment; but by the way my chapel will soon be too small, and
then I hope to build a large church. In response both became enraged.”16 Here
Delplace displays enormous pleasure with the evident frustration of these two
Protestants who confront these purportedly thriving Catholic missions. Further,
as Delplace enthusiastically recalls, Catholic missions are in fact replacing Protes-
tant ones. Soon, he reports, a larger Catholic Church will be required. Catholic
thinkers who read such accounts must have been heartened, as Pesch certainly
was a few years later, as the steam of the Kulturkampf gradually lost its force,
when he boldly exclaimed, “Either Catholic or Liberal; both together are impos-
sible.”17 When Catholics considered their frustration that had been inflicted by
the domestic plots of Protestant political power brokers, India must have seemed
to offer a promising landscape for rerouting Catholic agendas, just as Fridolin
Piscalar describes in the epigraph to this chapter.
Such visions of India among disgruntled German Catholic thinkers as a
potential site for reestablishing Church perquisites resonates in one particular
report on Brahmins—the Indian priestly class that served as the evil protagonists
in Leopold von Schroeder’s play, König Sundara—and the Indian caste system.18
In an 1876 essay in Die katholischen Missionen titled “Indian Castes and their
Meaning for the Mission,” the author traces the historical development of the
Brahmin class. Here, in an assessment foregrounded in nineteenth-century racial
discourse, the essay affirms that because of the class’s positive social and class attri-
butes “it could not have been difficult to maintain and even raise their privileged
position in the Indian kingdom; because the Brahmin was not just the mediator
between the Gods and the lower classes, but also the teacher of the people.”19
Notably similar to Catholic priestly agency in European tradition, here the essay’s
author suggests that the Brahmin class serves not only as a window to God for
the needy and downtrodden but also as the people’s broker for knowledge and
spiritual insight. Yet, as the essay continues, the echoes of Catholic frustrations
during the Kulturkampf resonate in the contention that the essential cultural
role played by India’s priestly class had been undermined by political authority:
“Just as the English government from 1833 forward, namely at the instigation
of Macaulay’s English school model, made European education available to the
indigenous population, an unfortunate time began for the Brahmins, and they
can boldly date their demise from that year, 1833. As a result of the adoption of
the school reform the government made the admission to any civil office depen-
dent upon the level of education and not on caste. The Brahmins now isolated
themselves from these reforms, which threatened to rob them of their privi-
leges.”20 Specifically, Lord Macaulay’s school reforms provided access to European
education for certain select Indians, which essentially undermined the elite status
and traditional role of Brahmins in India.21 Though not mentioned specifically,
the analogous circumstances for Catholic priests in Germany during the 1870s
become easily deciphered in the sentiments expressed here.
Yet European depictions of Brahmins in India necessarily implied an exami-
nation of caste, a social model that seemed for most India experts to be severely
outdated and socially inferior by late nineteenth-century European perceptions
of democracy, participatory government, and shifting class markers. As we have
seen, in Catholic minds such sociopolitical transformations posed a disturbing
threat to traditional religious configurations, which becomes explicitly reflected
in this same essay: “While the Protestant emissaries consider the caste system
to be one of the most absurd occurrences in human history, which man should
bring to an end as quickly as possible, Catholic missionaries have always guarded
against throwing out the baby with the bathwater and to damn offhandedly the
entire caste system. In fact, it has, as most human arrangements do, its advan-
tages and disadvantages. As soon as in one location an entire caste has turned to
Christianity, caste is not only no barrier to a good Christian life, but can instead
even significantly contribute to it.”22 Here the essay becomes more clearly set in a
sociopolitical framework intended to criticize Protestant missions for their inabil-
ity to acknowledge the benefits of restrictive class structures and barriers. While
this Catholic author remains cautious about heaping too much praise on a socio-
class model that many Europeans would have considered a despicable repression
of human social agency, he nevertheless prescribes caste as a constructive social
paradigm for buttressing Christian prerogatives in India.
In fact, in an assessment that invokes the familiar transition narratives of the
colonial era, the author views the caste system as a vital means of teaching these
Indian heathens moral comportment: “When one takes a look at the weakness
and the lack of autonomy in the Indian character, then the caste system seems to
be, if not indispensable, a very useful means to give the individual a moral footing
and base.”23 Thus, from this Catholic viewpoint, caste, regardless of consider-
ations about social injustice or the continued reinforcement of human inequality,
provides an essential tool for forging the requisite staging ground for Christian-
ization. As one Catholic author reports from Colombo, Ceylon, “Every caste
has its own Church, and it is the pride of every member to keep their House of
God as beautiful and clean as possible. The Churches of the fisherman’s caste are
especially distinguished. Of course the apostolic delegation must visit all equally,
in order that no caste has the sense of being neglected.”24 Inherent Indian social
structures, as depicted here, bestow order and cleanliness to the local Churches,
each of which are explicitly linked with a specific caste. From this viewpoint the
rigor of caste circumscription directly benefits the Catholic mission and thus
must receive—as caregiver to child—special apostolic attentiveness.
Yet ever so careful to avoid bolstering any social model that might undermine
the perceived benevolence and equity of the Catholic Church, the essay care-
fully distinguishes the religious from the social domain: “If the castes were only a
religious arrangement, they would have collapsed long ago, but the caste system
is just as entangled with national life and national development, just as the class
differences among any occidental people. The aristocratic pride in its unjustified
form cannot be more vexing than the Indian’s pride for his caste with respect to
every other lower caste.”25 Significantly, the Brahmin class no longer carries
the social, cultural, and political agency of past eras, yet the remnants of
the Indian social model remain in force—lamentably entangled in new mod-
ern political realities that are intricately interwoven with Indian nationalism, or
what Väth refers to in more disparaging terms as “Indian self-love.”26 Thus in
an implicit indictment most likely directed at the self-importance of the Prus-
sian Junkers (Adelsstolz), the caste paradigm still offers to Catholic missionaries
the primary source for opening up access to the heathen natives who remain
so inextricably attached to their social traditions—an indispensable means for
accomplishing Catholic aims.
Such opportunities were certainly recognized by Fridolin Piscalar. In the sec-
ond installment of his essay “Indisches,” he posits, “Castes, as they subsist under
the Christians, are not only no heathen-religious formation, not even a purely
civil one, but rather under the care of savvy missionaries in many areas have been
shaped into a Christian religious association. And this is a good step forward in
the Christianization of the Indians.”27 Piscalar, also attentive to modern European
sensibilities about human fairness, resolutely denies any religious underpinning
of the Indian caste system. This clever assessment allows him to conveniently
avoid the problematic link between Catholic maneuvering, which might be seen
as succumbing to indigenous religious designs—when doctrinally infallible, com-
promise is no longer an option. Far more easily defensible is the Catholic Church
mission’s ability to transform caste arrangements into Christian configurations
for converting the heathen—the objective of saving souls justifies the means of
manipulating the Indian caste model rather than eradicating it as many other
European thinkers called for.
Yet opportune social paradigms remained insufficient to validate the case made
for Catholic superiority in India. Far more concrete examples were necessary.
Thus in an inherently hostile environment imbued with unreceptive heathen
natives and antagonistic Protestants, the reconstitution of Catholic identity and
community cohesion depended on the ability of Catholics to demonstrate suc-
cessful mission work in India. To put it more simply, beating the odds in the
game of competition for souls became the hallmark for Catholic claims of con-
fessional supremacy. Here Fridolin Piscalar’s informative essay exemplifies this
assessment model at work when he emphasizes the inferior position of Catholics
and the adversity confronted by their mission in a country colonized by the Brit-
ish and thus dominated by Protestants: “Fifteen years ago Catholics in Bombay
were considered only to be a multitudinous sect; disdained and neglected by the
British; ignored by the Hindus and Parsis, hated and repressed by the Muslims.”28
Thus, according to Piscalar, the substantial achievements of Catholic missions
in India have emerged against the odds of ridicule and hatred unleashed by the
English and the local population. Piscalar accentuates Catholic achievements by
emphasizing the hardship, adversarial conditions, and purportedly insurmount-
able odds confronted in India: “Such are the Catholics in a heathen Land, under
Protestant and heathen governors and civil servants of the British crown!”29 To
justify this claim, Piscalar highlights Catholic triumphs by citing the growth in
student population at mission schools—statistical evidence corroborating confes-
sional success stories was a common and frequent feature of mission reports.
In reference to St. Mary’s Institution, for instance, a Catholic school that
opened its doors in 1867, Piscalar writes, “Thus one came closer to the hea-
thens.”30 To support this conjecture, he alludes to the increased numbers of
Indian enrollments in Catholic schools, particularly Hindus from higher castes
and Brahmins, who send their children to the “Blackcoats”—the Jesuit schools in
India that bolster Catholic Christianizing objectives, or specifically the Cathol-
icization of India. Piscalar’s observations here manifest the more proselytizing
undertones that we might expect from a Catholic Jesuit, yet a closer look at his
essay reveals how European political and confessional conflicts, and specifically
rivalry with the Protestant Church, underpin his analysis of the Catholic missions
in India.
Significantly, improved moral behavior among the new converts was attrib-
uted to the influence of Catholic efforts. Catholic missions, as Piscalar’s report
underscores, illustrate Catholicism’s unique and autonomous capacity to facilitate
India’s moral progress: “Only this will I add, and with this close my letter, that
the Pastor of St. Peter in Bandora assured that in both of the parishes of the vil-
lage (5400 souls) since living memory only one single illegitimate child has been
born, whose father by the way was an Englishman, not an Indian.”31 With an
unmistakable dig at British immorality, Piscalar extols the ethical convictions that
Catholicism has bestowed on the populace of this small village. Implicitly, the
British have failed, despite their political clout, to disseminate the moral wisdom
of Western Christianity to the heathen, notably exemplified in the village’s single
illegitimate birth. Thus neither political authority nor confessional inroads, if
accomplished by the wrong church (Protestant), enhance moral comportment as
Catholicism can.
Piscalar is exercising his own idiosyncratic—confession specific—sort of
transition history that redounds to the Catholic mission in India and in turn
derides Protestants for their mission futility. Thus, as we might expect, Catho-
lic mission success stories resonate throughout many of the essays published in
Catholic journals such as Stimmen aus Maria-Laach and Die katholischen Mis-
sionen. Various essays in these journals praise the heroic missionary zeal in India,
carried out in horrendous climatic conditions and with scarce means. In 1882,
Die katholischen Missionen reports from Bombay (Poona) that five important
Catholic stations, Ahmednagar, Kirkee, Pune, Belgaon, and Dharwar, provide
an important launching pad for spreading the Catholic Gospel: “From here
they undertake, sometimes on foot, sometimes by rail, their apostolic sojourns
to smaller, scattered communities, that until now do without leaders, as well as

to the superstitious heathens, in order to preach the Gospel to them.”32 Signifi-
cantly, according to these Catholic mission reports, these efforts met with notable
success: “Also by the way it seems that the Catholic life is gaining breadth every-
where; because the number of confessions rose there during the last three years
from 9,000 to 13,400.”33 Any reader of Die katholischen Missionen during the era
would have been easily convinced of Catholicism’s gradual confessional triumph
over the Indian heathens to the detriment of Protestant efforts there.
These statistical verifications of Catholic mission success during the 1870s and
1880s continue throughout the Wilhelmine era. In a somewhat more humble
assessment of the Catholic gains, for instance, Die katholischen Missionen (1898–
99) reports in the section “News from the Missions: India” that “The State of
the Catholic Church in India is less flourishing than we might wish; the progress
that has been made gives us reason nevertheless to be thankful and confident.”34
For these thinkers, the statistical evidence always justified such claims: India now
possessed eight archbishops “with 29 suffragan bishops. Under these are 818
European and 1,580 indigenous priests; 150 orphanages with 8,617 children;
2,273 nuns,” and there were purportedly approximately 2 million Catholics in
India.35 These numbers are certainly exaggerated, at least in comparison with
British census results, which estimated the Catholic population in India closer to
1.3 million. Yet German Catholic Jesuits in India had an answer to that statistical
malady, citing the anti-Catholic predisposition of the British census office, whose
calculations “certainly were not calculated to the benefit of the Catholic party”
and thus were undoubtedly in need of adjustment to set the record straight and
would inevitably become more clearly in favor of Catholic objectives.36
Yet the confessional assertions made by these Catholic India experts points
toward a more substantial Catholic aim in the world—one that could compen-
sate for the cultural and social disenfranchisement of Catholic intellectuals in
Germany. Piscalar’s appraisal of the Indian missions, for instance, suggests that
the Catholic Church enjoys exclusive status within the Christian world—both
Protestants and Indian heathens are rival and inferior religious acolytes. Even the
prerogatives of the nation-state in colonial India, as we shall see, must remain
subordinate to Catholicism’s universal mandate.
Catholic Universal Mandates in India

As we have discussed so far, one unintended consequence of the pressure imposed
on German Catholics by Protestant political agendas during the Kulturkampf
was a newly forged cohesion in the German Catholic community. As the Kul-
turkampf was nearing its end, but well before the Peace Laws of 1886–87, the
Jesuit Gerhard Schneemann (1829–84), in his aptly titled essay from 1880, “Our
Successes in the Culture Wars,” lauds the solidarity that the era’s anti-Catholicism
had cultivated among Catholics in Germany:37 “This unbending adherence
of the entire people to the fundamental principles of their Church is the first
great success and the source of all other success, just as belief for Catholics is the
fundamental source for all moral behavior and the norm for the entirety of
life.”38 In this distinctly Catholic account of the Kaiserreich’s state of sociocul-

tural affairs, Schneemann explicitly extols Catholics for their unbending faith in
Church canon and the resulting moral comportment of the faithful. Defending
the faith, as Schneemann depicts it, consolidates Catholics and forges the requi-
site means for Catholic success, though he fails to elaborate any more specifically
what that might entail.
Despite the foregone conclusion of Schneemann’s assessment, his underlying
contentions hold true. Not only did German Catholics band closer together in
terms of their faith—a revival of the community of believers—in response to
the Prussian-Protestant assault on their traditions and institutions in Wilhelmine
Germany, but the Protestant melding of political and religious agendas also bol-
stered the politicization of German Catholics as they attempted to protect the
status and even survival of their cultural prerogatives in the Second Empire. As
Schneemann continues, his response to Protestant aggression against German
Catholics takes on more explicit political undertones: “The tribulation resem-
bled a fire that bonded all, Pope, bishops, clerics and people, together, rang out
in love and thus expanded the Church’s loving might, raised the honor of the
clerics, lifted Catholic awareness, strengthened church-religious life. Yet these
successes do not remain restricted to Germany.”39 In this brief retort to Protestant
political and cultural assertions in the Kaiserreich, Schneemann points to several
critical elements of the German Catholic response. First, Church organization
and hierarchies—from the Pope and Church clerics to the common Catholic
faithful—become more unified, which purportedly expands the Church’s loving
might (Liebesmacht). Second, the cultural and social status of Catholic clerics
has increased and, as a result, Catholic cohesion—the shared aims of the Catho-
lic community—has been strengthened. Third, renewed Catholic solidarity, in
Schneemann’s most political proclamation, is not limited to confessional reasser-
tions in Germany but also has repercussions beyond the borders of the Second
Empire. Here the universal mandates of the Catholic Church become most pro-
nounced. Schneemann subtly suggests that Catholic agendas extend beyond the
circumscribed geopolitical space of nation-states and thus are generated by what
an anonymous Catholic thinker, reporting in Die katholischen Missionen on vicar-
ages in peninsular India, more vehemently proclaims as “the one true Church,
founded by Christ.” That is, the Catholic Church is the solitary inheritor of all
truth and has been so ordained by Christ.40
Yet the frustrated attempts of many Catholic intellectuals to establish their
sociocultural identity in the new politico-religious paradigm of the Kaiserreich
belie Schneemann’s perhaps somewhat embellished claims of Catholic solidarity
and reinvigorated community cohesion. In fact for German Catholic thinkers
incited by the Kulturkampf, the emerging framework of the Protestant nation-
state and its geopolitical mandates during the age of empire posed a considerable
threat to their political influence and the cultural distinction of the Church and
its intellectual elites in Wilhelmine Germany. In response, German Catholic intel-
lectuals sought new geocultural avenues for circumventing the deepening bond
between the German nation’s political aspirations and Protestant religious objec-
tives. Christian Pesch, for instance, presents a defense of Church independence
vis-à-vis the state that reveals a unique Catholic response to the increasing politi-
cal and cultural mandates of Germany’s Protestant-influenced nation. Pesch
writes, “It all depends on the State grasping and fulfilling the divine intention.
Otherwise the State stands in opposition to the highest, absolute governing God
of the world, and the result will be—not the victory of the State over God’s order,
but rather after helpless wrestling the self-destruction of the State.”41 In this view,
typified by numerous articles in Stimmen that wrestled with the conflicts between
modern understandings of the nation and confessional mandates in the com-
munity, the Church implicitly possesses incontestable divine favor vis-à-vis state
prerogatives. In fact, according to Pesch, the political apparatus, not the Church,
bears the burden of proof in fulfilling God’s intentions. As he argues, when the
nation’s objectives go awry or come in conflict with God’s order—here defined as
religious directives exclusively manifest in the Catholic faith, its hierarchies, and its
institutions—the self-destruction of the state becomes inevitable. In this account,
to put it more bluntly, Pesch reasserts the Catholic Church and its institutions as
the sole gatekeeper for God’s truth. Neither Protestants nor a Protestant state can
make that claim.
One channel for German Catholics to band together against these alleged
political contradictions of divine prerogatives perpetrated by Protestants was
in their constructed vision of a Catholic India. That is, German Catholic India
experts aspired to reestablish Catholic cohesiveness by building a case for the
superiority of the Catholic Church in the global religious marketplace—a vision
of Catholic universalism—that could circumvent, or at least potentially com-
pensate for, the vicious cultural attacks on Catholics in Germany. To put it more
boldly, German Catholic thinkers envisioned India as an important target for
asserting their universal mandate—a Catholic version of nation building, not in
the sense of geopolitical boundaries but rather as a divinely ordained global com-
munity of the Catholic faithful.
Similar to the frequent anti-Protestant invective that we have reviewed thus
far, the universal prerogatives of German Catholics in India also resonate in their
mission reports. In an 1879 volume of Die katholischen Missionen, for instance,
one report surveys the ruins of the Ceylonese city of Anuradhapura. The author
underscores the zealous objectives of Catholic missions there, whose influence
would predictably spread throughout the world: “How much must still occur
there, not only in Ceylon, but also in India, China, in the entire Orient, in expan-
sive America, on the islands of the world seas, in Africa and even in Europe, until
the delectable legacy of the Redeemer, His teachings, His grace and His Church
have found the befitting glorification among all peoples! And here to bring about
what is lacking lays with us, the members of the combative, world-conquering
Church.”42 The worldwide objectives of the Catholic Church are apparent in the
global comprehensiveness expressed here, yet importantly, Europe is also targeted
as one among the continents stretching from the four corners of the earth that is
in need of Catholicism’s healing power. In this reading, the Catholic Church will
triumph in the global conquest for religious hegemony (welterobernden Kirche)
and become the sole avenue for religious salvation in the entire world—a shrewd
variant of nation building, especially for those disenfranchised German Catholic
Jesuits that could circumnavigate the thorny nuisance of rival Protestants and
imperial political agendas through their constructed India.
The emphasis on Catholic universal mandates permeated Catholic texts on
India throughout the era. In the 1880 essay previously cited, for instance, which
traces the historical development of Catholic vicarages in India, the extensive
aims of India’s Catholic Jesuits again resonate unabashedly: “When the Church
organization of the missionary lands is in the process of emerging and in turn has
been exposed to frequent, profound transformations, this provides not only proof
of the world-encompassing apostolic mission of the Catholic Church, according
to the conditions, but also of the consummate hierarchical unity, which, linked
with the unity in teachings, love and salvation of souls, declares the Church as
the true one, founded by Christ.”43 Here the author emphasizes the hierarchical
unity of the Catholic Church, which had been severely challenged in the Kaiser-
reich. Importantly, Catholic organizational cohesiveness is inherently linked with
the unifying attributes of Catholic doctrine, love, and missionary zeal—features
that had been first attacked and then undermined in Protestant Germany, at least
for the time being. In this reading, such frustrated, yet admirable, unifying
aspects of Catholicism become transplanted and rejuvenated in heathen India’s
religious arena.
Yet during the age of empire, Catholics not only were responding to mali-
cious Protestant political schemes at home in Wilhelmine Germany but also had
to negotiate the pervasive colonial assertions exercised by the European powers
across the globe. Thus to compete in the global cultural marketplace, German
Catholics needed to legitimize a Catholic universal agency that could arguably
transcend the political, economic, and cultural status purportedly gained through
the imperial circumscription of geopolitical space. To make this case in India,
Jesuits carefully avoided ruffling the feathers of the British authorities yet nev-
ertheless consistently underscored the Catholic Church’s religious aspirations by
downplaying the importance of national objectives. As the essay on vicarages
continues, “The apostolic seat, which was concerned in India with the saving of
countless souls, rather than mundane national interests, thus prepared, with great
respect for the sole rulers of India, a new constellation of the Church organiza-
tion itself.”44 Here, in this subtle twist to Catholic aims in India, the Catholic
Church purportedly creates a different kind of empire not under the rubric of
profane national interests that nation-states pursue on the colonial battleground,
but rather, the Church mission forges an organizational apparatus with a far more
significant purpose in mind: the saving of souls. From a Catholic viewpoint, no
geopolitical objectives can take the moral high ground in competition with such
elevated spiritual prerogatives.
Unsurprisingly then, Catholic appraisals of Indian religious traditions also
redound to Catholic spiritual certitude. Joseph Dahlmann (1861–1930), the
German Jesuit and Indologist who traveled across Asia from 1902 to 1905 but
devoted most of his published travel report to the time he spent in India, also
sanctions Catholicism’s moral supremacy.45 In his account of a Jain temple, for
instance, Dahlmann summarizes Christianity’s charge, which for this child of the
German Kulturkampf was undoubtedly an exclusive Catholic mandate: “I was
captured by the thought that the development of such rich, natural gifts, which
could be achieved under the guiding hand of Christianity, remains doomed to
failure under the influence of the idolatrous Jain idols.”46 Here, following com-
mon European strategies of demeaning the target to justify the Christian or
colonial mission, Dahlmann explicitly asserts Christianity—at least its Catholic
version—as the sole means to “civilize” India.
While “saving souls” or advancing the “civilizing mission” might appear at first
glance to be obvious Catholic mandates, their visions of India implicitly manifest
a far more powerful expansion of Catholic georeligious influence and dominance.
Delplace, here again in reference to the Sunderbans, corroborates such broad
intentions, for instance, when he elaborates Catholicism’s future prospects in
India: “My deepest desire is to open a mission, also for the heathen population,
as soon as possible. I know of multiple places which promise great success.”47 The
increasing number and extended reach of Catholic institutions, strikingly analo-
gous to the expansion of European colonial possessions, was the order of the day
for Catholic thinkers.
Yet notably, the Catholic Church would not be appeased with the theoretical
playmaking or promising future prospects manifest in Dahlmann’s or Delplace’s
entreaty.48 The Church transformed their proselytizing aims into concrete orga-
nizational demarcations, not unlike the geopolitical boundaries of the imperial
powers. Specifically, the Catholic Church mapped India (Figure 2.1), here based
on the 1838 papal bull Multa praeclare, by partitioning the Indian subcontinent
into twenty Catholic vicarages manned by a squadron of priests.49 The similarity
between Catholicism’s organizational frameworks in India and the geopolitical
markers that nation-states delineated in the colonial battlefields across the globe
are striking. To put it differently, how Europeans imagined world dominion,
whether geopolitical or in the name of God, required that nations or churches
tangibly map the imperially or spiritually conquered, inscribing their political or
confessional turf. Specifically, Catholic thinkers partitioned India into organiza-
tional segments under the rubric of Catholic universalism, yet not in the sense of
imposing political unity—as nation-states organized their possessions. Rather,
the Catholic Church circumscribed India as a tool for systematizing and mea-
suring a purportedly developing cohesive community of Catholic believers
there—a Catholic raj.
More significantly, Catholic thinkers maintained their focus in India on
advancing the world’s salvation and often rebuked the material gains deriving
from empire rather than seeking to use India to reform Christianity. Unsurpris-
ingly, these two starkly different aspirations—the political-economic and the
religious—became reinforcing sides of the same coin to a significant degree. With-
out a doubt, the nation-state—provider of the requisite protection from native
attacks frequently levied on missionaries—and the Churches, who provided a
lucrative model to colonial administrators for banding the natives together and
thus conveniently bolstering a more cooperative attitude among the colonized,
reinforced the respective aims of the other. Specifically, missionary work played
a role in social stabilization for colonial administrators in times of famine and
the outbreak of epidemics and potentially underscored beneficial European
values—valuable tasks for any colonial endeavor. The Empire and Church bol-
stered each other’s objectives in the global competition for geopolitical space and
souls.50 Yet the political aims of the imperial powers and those of the religious
missions, especially Catholic, melded less easily into a civilizing mission than
frequently assumed.
In considering the imposing Catholic map of vicarages in India, for instance,
little imagination is required to predict the potential for conflict, especially
between the Catholic Church and its host colonial power in India, the British
government. More concretely, the teachings of the Catholic Church frequently
conflicted in British India with the political and/or economic objectives of the
colonial authorities. Thus how German Catholics assessed both the European
engagement in India historically and the British Raj in the age of empire, which
many Catholics experienced directly during mission work, provides deeper insight
into my argument that the German Catholic vision of India is a manifestation
of confessional nation building intended to reconstitute the degraded symbolic
capital of Jesuit intellectuals in the Kaiserreich.
Catholic Historical Hermeneutics: Portuguese

Glory and Squandering God’s Mission
In 1891 the German Jesuit and missionary Adolph Müller travelled to the impor-
tant Catholic mission of Goa on India’s western coast to pay his respects at the
grave of the revered Franz Xavier.51 Müller’s report extols the striking Catholic
edifices, though by this time in ill repair, in the former Portuguese stronghold.
Recalling the more celebrated period of Catholic prosperity in India under the
Portuguese, he yearns for the Church’s former status in Goa: “At that time the
Portuguese patronage over the Catholic Church had real meaning. Oh, if today
the Indo-British government wanted to support the Christian and especially the
Catholic Church, the number of newly converted would amount to millions,
given the superbly organized mission ministries and the diligence of countless
missionaries to save souls!”52 Here Müller laments the historical passing of an
empire that had been intricately linked with the Catholic Church, yet notably he
also implicitly bemoans the concurrent British support for the Catholic mission
in India. In Müller’s assessment of Portuguese imperial history and his depiction
of ongoing Catholic mission work and future aspirations under the reign of the
British we confront two important elements of the German Catholic vision
of India. First, German Catholic India experts frequently frame their depictions of
India by historically tracing the Portuguese rise to power, beginning with Vasco
da Gama’s arrival in 1498 portraying the Indian colony’s eventual weakening at
the hands of the Dutch during the eighteenth century and culminating with the
devastating consequences for Catholic missions as Portuguese political muscle
weakened.53 Second, German Catholics emphasize the present state of the British
Raj, and especially its influence on the condition and effectiveness of Catho-
lic missions. Both the historical sketches of Portuguese India and such Catholic
appraisals of the Raj provide critical insight for understanding how German
Catholics implicitly, and in some cases overtly, asserted Catholicism’s universal
Figure 2.1 The Catholic vicarages in India after Gregor XVI’s papal bull, Multa praeclare, in 1838.
Source: Die katholischen Missionen. Illustrirte Monatschrift 8 (1880): 9.
mission—a global mandate to which nation-state imperatives were judged to be

subordinate.
Let us turn first to German assessments of the Catholic Church’s shared his-
tory with the former Portuguese Empire in India—a religious and political bond
that previously redounded to the aims of the Catholic Church. Though nota-
bly different, German Catholic readings are nevertheless similar to those of the
Freemason Seydel and other Protestant thinkers of the era in the sense that both
drew historical sketches that underpinned idiosyncratic denominational aims
through a constructed India. In the case of Catholic appraisals, historical depic-
tions illustrate the prosperity of better times for the Catholic Church. Väth, for
instance, retrospectively yearns for the former Portuguese crown in India as an
“outstanding sovereignty.” Moreover, Väth continues, “They also possessed the
power to protect the envoys of faith. Only they commanded the enormous sums
required for the long journey of the missionaries, their subsistence, the founding
of bishoprics, cloisters, institutions of all types, the building of churches, and
more generally the entire workings of the mission.”54 That is, the Portuguese pos-
sessed the resources to sponsor Catholic missions and maintained the underlying
power needed to spread the Catholic gospel. From a Catholic perspective, that
era embodied the unique and profitable melding of political and religious aspira-
tions that for these thinkers had become so misaligned in the Kaiserreich. Thus
in order to forge a Catholic vision of confessional nation building at the end of
the nineteenth century that would successfully transcend the restrictions of geo-
political frontiers, these German Catholic Jesuits in India eulogize the Portuguese
sustenance provided to formerly thriving Catholic missions yet equally stress in
their accounts the detrimental consequences for Christian missions provoked by
the Portuguese Empire’s gradual collapse.
In response to that entangled history of past Portuguese Catholic triumphs and
later failure, German Catholics bemoan the inability of the Portuguese—a former
indispensable ally of the Catholic Church—to successfully sustain its imperial
presence in India. Die katholischen Missionen reports in 1880, for instance, that
the Portuguese were the first predominant Catholic presence in India, reigning
on the Western seaboard of the Indian subcontinent approximately from 1500
to 1656. There the Portuguese had maintained an independent vicarage in Goa
until Pope Gregor XVI’s papal bull Multa praeclare (1838), which remapped
Catholic India. Despite the mostly congruous objectives of the Catholic Church
and the Portuguese Empire throughout those centuries, at least as these German
Catholics viewed it from their precarious intellectual perch in the Kaiserreich,
they also condemn the ineptitude of the Portuguese political leadership prior to
the nineteenth century to prevent the abatement of mission work and Catholic
infrastructure: “Since the middle of the seventeenth century the Portuguese gov-
ernment was little credit to the significant patronage of that first segmentation
of dioceses that the apostolic chair had entrusted it with.”55 In other words,
the Catholic Church and its mission in India under the Portuguese provided the
foundation for success in spreading the faith as well as other European values,
yet that nation-state had failed to reliably honor the effort. This line of argument
notably echoes Pesch’s appraisal from earlier in this chapter of the modern state
in Europe and the vulnerability of religious institutions and spiritual well-being

when political prerogatives—here those of the Portuguese—fail to remain aligned
with God’s purpose: state power will wane and the nation will decay.
Three years earlier in 1877, at the height of the Kulturkampf, Th. Hauser cor-
roborates this same view in his essay “Bombay and its Region,” which describes
Bazain, a larger city also formerly ruled by the Portuguese yet now abandoned
and left to decay: “Thus Bazain is nothing more than a memorial to vanished
greatness and power, and likewise a warning example of divine punitive justice
over a nation that becomes unfaithful to its assumed calling.”56 Despite the val-
iant efforts of Jesuits and Franciscans over generations, for which Hauser levies
intense praise in this essay, the Portuguese state failed in his view to fulfill their
end of the mission in the long run because of their inability to remain faith-
ful to God’s calling. The results are devastating for the Portuguese, according
to Hauser, who must suffer God’s punitive justice (göttlichen Strafgerechtigkeit).
Yet the inadequate spiritual convictions attributed to the Portuguese also have
proven disastrous for the Catholic mission in India: “Before us lies indeed a large
city with slender towers, with many churches, cloisters, and palaces—but all in
ruins, completely overgrown with thick shrubs and copious vines.”57 Väth, in his
historical assessment, corroborates Hauser’s diatribe on Portuguese inadequacies:
“Yet soon the preconditions of these church entitlements, the power and the
missionary zeal of the Portuguese kings should undergo a radical change. The
demise already began at the end of the sixteenth century. The vigor of the Por-
tuguese people had been exhausted through colonial endeavors. The immorality
and the opulent lifestyle in the colonies unnerved the heroic lineage. Craving for
pleasure and greed replaced the crusading spirit and the ambition for glory.”58
In this view, the former blissful marriage of state power and Catholic purpose
had succumbed to the deterioration of Portuguese morality and copious luxury
in their colonies. From a German Catholic perspective of India’s mission his-
tory, the emerging incongruity between Portuguese imperial aspirations there and
divine purpose—patently aligned with Catholic aims and now so misaligned in
the Kaiserreich—spawns disaster.
In the case of the former Portuguese Empire in India, religious and politi-
cal interests had bonded opportunely and served these Catholic thinkers as a
manifestation of a successful model for melding common imperial and Church
objectives. The vast building development of Catholic infrastructure—schools,
churches, and orphanages—under the Portuguese, which German Jesuits fre-
quently commend in their mission reports, attests to the successful amalgamation
of imperial political objectives and Catholic mission aims in that era. Yet long
before the British asserted their imperial power in India during the eighteenth
century, Portuguese influence had deteriorated and, in turn, support for Catholic
mission objectives inevitably dwindled. History’s path had proven unkind to the
Portuguese in India, yet Jesuit historical readings of that empire’s political col-
lapse were intended to buttress Catholic mandates there in the present.
For German Catholics, the parallels between their historical readings of the
Portuguese Empire’s demise and Protestantism’s political dominance in Wil-
helmine Germany—whose raison d’etres were purportedly no longer in harmony
with divine authority—must have seemed indubitable. The emphasis placed here
on the Portuguese failure in India subtly discloses a Catholic historical hermeneu-
tics from which implications about the demise of empires out of line with God’s
plan—Germany’s Kaiserreich or perhaps the British—could be drawn. To put
it more bluntly, in the mind’s eye of German Catholics, the Portuguese Empire,
analogous to the Second Reich under the influence of the Protestant Junkers or
the materialistic British, had failed to fulfill its obligation to God. As Germany’s
Catholic India commentators viewed it, Portuguese clout in India had faded due
to that empire’s failure to remain aligned with God’s guiding hand, and thus by
the same token the outlook for a Protestant-influenced Germany—no better har-
monized with divine purposes—had to be bleak.
Catholic Missions after Portuguese Supremacy

and the Ambivalence of the Raj
The unambiguous denunciation of an empire misaligned with its spiritual
foundation was not so straightforward for Catholics in India as it might seem,
especially when the present power—the British—held the key to India’s treasures.
Thus Catholic assessments of the British prove to be far more differentiated,
ambivalent, and at times even contradictory than those concerned with past Por-
tuguese deficiencies as Catholics attempted to carve out their universal mission
in competition with the privileged Anglican Church under the auspices of the
British Raj—an imperial force that Catholic missions still needed for support
and protection.
Undoubtedly, German Catholic thinkers of the era recognized the advantages
of the British colonial machine. An essay from 1890 in Die katholischen Mis-
sionen titled “Colombo, the Capital of Ceylon,” for instance, lauds the economic
and material progress under British power. This commentary on the British eco-
nomic stronghold and vital port city attributes improvements in medical care,
education, transportation, and agriculture to the British colonial administration,
which had also turned Colombo into a vital European hub for international
trade.59 In this view, material progress was specifically ascribed to the particular
strengths of British administration, as the essay further clarifies, “These expecta-
tions have already for the most part been fulfilled, thanks to the astute, prudent,
and dynamic British administration.”60 These important enhancements in daily
Indian life achieved by the British in Ceylon also had important repercussions for
Catholic missions. From a Catholic perspective, such material improvement in
Indian life prepared this heathen land for more important Catholic objectives, as
the report explains: “Exceedingly pleasing is the fact that a new blossoming phase
of the Catholic mission began with the substantial material upsurge of the last
decades, and the Catholic Church has attained a very honorable, influential posi-
tion despite the oppositional exertions of the English-Protestant Propaganda.”61
Here this Catholic report becomes more distinctly ambivalent, even contradic-
tory. Notably, material gains generate opportunity for the Catholic mission to
thrive and succeed—an effective imperial-church model under which the Catho-
lic mission could purportedly thrive across the globe. Yet the author explicitly
distinguishes the British colonial administration, which the Catholic Church

needed for protection and financial support, from the Anglican Church—in the
religious sphere Anglicans are merged with Protestants to form a single inferior
religious melting pot that has only hindered the work of the Catholic missions
in India.
As we have already seen, the anti-Protestantism in the Catholic vision of India
expressed here should come as no surprise, yet Catholic praise for the British
in India, whose administrative prowess and efficiency could potentially make
life significantly easier and confessionally more productive for German Catholic
Jesuits, also resonates distinctly in terms that attribute British success to policies
that probably seemed unthinkable in the Kaiserreich. The British colonial admin-
istration, for instance, was frequently regarded with admiration by Catholic
thinkers because of its more tolerant attitude than any of the other European
powers toward Catholic missions in India. Georg Weniger, writing in Stim-
men, analyzes the treatment of diverse faiths in the British military in India, for
instance, and applauds the religious freedoms enjoyed by its multidenominational
troops: “As soon as a young Catholic soldier [has] arrived at a military base, he
sees immediately that here his religious needs are well taken care of.”62 Moreover,
in an astute assessment of Great Britain’s underlying nondiscriminatory practices
among their colonial military forces, which must have seemed particularly rel-
evant for a German Catholic readership suffering from the assaults inflicted on
them by Protestant assertions in the Kaiserreich, Weniger posits, “Yet the Catho-
lic soldier also appreciates this impartiality; it makes him loyal. Even if he also
belonged formerly to secret political societies, even if a home-ruler enthused him
in his home country for Ireland’s independence and goaded him against England:
in the Army all is forgotten; he will be treated like every other, with indifference
to religion and nationality.”63 Weniger’s comments here read like a virtual plea to
the Prussian government for how things could be. Moreover, his tribute to British
military praxis echoes an implicit, yet detectable, criticism of the confessionally
biased melding of religious and national perquisites in Wilhelmine Germany,
at least when those prerogatives redound to Protestants. Though not explicitly
expressed in these terms, Weniger lauds the loyalty of British Catholic soldiers
to the nation, which could potentially be replicated in Wilhelmine Germany
through a similar model of denominational neutrality—resulting in an obvious
improvement to the Catholic status quo.
In a different context, Otto Pfülf, another Jesuit in a long line of German
Catholic intellectual refugees to Holland, also extols British colonial power in an
1890 essay in Stimmen.64 In response to the “suddenly unfolded colonial politics
of the powerful German Reich,” the British, according to Pfülf, have still man-
aged to expand their sphere of interest, protect their access to the seaways, and
foster free trade.65 In fact, the British colonial model, here explicitly juxtaposed
with German colonial expansion in East Africa, offers motivation and lessons
for both material and cultural aims: “Similar extensive problems should present
themselves for the future of the business man as well as the financial expert in
their respective fields, from the attentive consideration paid to the secondary
sources as well as the mutual links of all these parts of a great Reich. But also for
those whose horizon is turned toward neither political nor mercantile interests,
the British colonial empire offers a fruitful field for stimulation and instruction.”66
In Britain’s colonial model national purpose and religious mission are in harmony
without ostracizing any particular confessional group, strikingly similar to how
these German Catholics viewed the initial successes of the Portuguese in India—a
subtle though palpable juxtaposition of the British colonial model and a potential
Prussian political reproduction that could remedy the mistreatment of Germany’s
Catholics and acknowledge their potential for furthering the Kaiserreich’s colo-
nial aims.
Thus, as Pfülf continues, his assessment of British power reveals a subtle criti-
cism of Germany’s treatment of Catholics in the Second Reich. Echoing Weniger’s
earlier considerations, Pfülf also lauds the British for their confessional tolerance,
despite the favored position of the Anglican Church and especially British sup-
port for the Catholic mission—a far less likely course of action for the Prussian
government in Wilhelmine Germany.67 Importantly, according to Pfülf, the Brit-
ish sense of justice and its liberal legal structure in the colonies—a contradictory
praise of liberalism when compared with other Catholic assessments that we have
thus far considered—generates the conditions for a “happy native” and, though
left unsaid here, improves the prospects for Christianization: “But much else
that makes the life of the people happy and quiescent can certainly be achieved
through just, wise and liberal legislation. The British colonies have certainly pro-
vided proof in their deeds even if after many and frequently failed attempts.”68
Here Pfülf commends the British Raj—unthinkable praise in a German Catholic
assessment of Wilhelmine prerogatives and colonial management—for its sense
of justice and well-intentioned practices in the colonies that purportedly generate
minimal conflict with Catholic objectives.
Despite these commendations of British policy and colonial administration,
German Catholic historical readings of India during the final decades of the
nineteenth century, as we might expect, are equally underpinned by a deep sus-
picion of national—colonial—interests. Such skepticism was certainly informed
by the deeply entrenched antagonism between Prussian national perquisites and
Catholic objectives in the Kaiserreich but also due to the competition for cultural
influence that nationalism exacted from potential acolytes in India. Thus Ger-
man Catholics, some who had levied praise on British colonial administration,
also wrote essays in the same journals during the same era that offered less
favorable views of British conduct in India. In Hauser’s 1877 essay on the sur-
rounding areas of Bombay, for example, he admonishes the British for their
unrestricted material interests in Bazain: “During these years the English robbed
not just the residency, but also all of the possessions of the fathers on the island
of Bombay under the pretext that these possessions had supported the enemy in
the occurring siege of the fort during recent years, in reality though, only because
they lusted after their beautiful gardens and fields.”69 The British then, another
state in this long chain of failed imperial political powers, has succumbed to the
temptation of material gain and deprives, at least in Hauser’s account, the right-
ful owners of Bazain’s most cherished edifices and spaces—the Catholic fathers,
who the British conveniently accuse of supporting insubordination among the
Indians.70 Moreover, the British have allowed the near complete decay of Catho-
lic structures during their reign. In Tanna, the capital of Salsette, near Bombay,
Hauser bemoans the “few traces remaining from its earlier greatness. Of the nine
or ten churches that it formerly possessed, only a single one still stands. From the
Council of the Society, and from the cloisters of the Franciscans, Dominicans and
Augustinians only unrecognizable remains still exist, and even these are begin-
ning to disappear.”71 Thus the delicate balance between the British nation and
Church missions that Weniger and Pfülf commend proved ultimately frail when
Church infrastructure sparks the craving appetite of colonial visions or is left to
the fancy of weather and plunder.
In a related sense, such sentiments that advantageously position Catholicism
vis-à-vis the political and social substructures that underlie nations find frequent
expression in the anecdotal conversion stories that fill the Catholic mission
reports. Mission conversion anecdotes about Indians braving the consequences
of social castigation—suffering the “outcasting” associated with reneging on
caste perquisites, also embody implicit, yet clearly palpable political undertones.
Importantly, as we have seen, Catholic Jesuits willingly embraced caste when
such social hierarchies could be inscribed to the advantage of the Catholic mis-
sion. Yet mission success breaches those same traditions and thus subverts caste
hierarchies in other instances—the traditional frameworks for stable proliferation
and transfer of political power—at least when Catholicism profits in the process.
One particular conversion story presented in “News from the Missions” from
1884 on the Apostolic vicarage in West Bengal, for instance, exemplifies this
contradictory tact. Arumugan, a stately Indian Hindu prince, as the story relates,
succumbs to a severe illness of sorts but is healed by Catholic missionaries, which
motivates the young prince to convert to Catholicism. His father, the rajah (a
local prince or king), becomes outraged over his son’s conversion and resorts to
violent attacks on his insubordinate son and even plans his murder due to the
implied heresy of the conversion, which would have indubitable consequences
for political stability in the local kingdom. The son, who has taken the Christian
name Johannes, avoids the bloody designs of his father’s killing squad behind the
protective walls of the Catholic monastery. Years later, at a time when perhaps
the political repercussions of the conversion are less inauspicious in the kingdom,
the Catholic news reports that the father eventually regrets his own despicable
behavior and seeks to reembrace his son, who responds lovingly to his father’s
approaches yet resolutely defends the faith—the image of the perfect Catholic
acolyte: “Father, I forgive you and love you as your child, more dearly than before.
But from this day forth I belong to God, to whose service I have dedicated myself;
goodbye and save your soul, so that I might see you again in Heaven.”72 This
conversion story explicitly undermines any cohesive link between state and reli-
gion, even familial, that lies outside of Catholic order. For this Indian prince,
Arumugan, now Johannes, “remained from this time on with Father Franziskus
and zealously readied himself [sic] under his loving leadership to become an
emissary for the Christian belief.”73 The underlying political and sociocultural
mandates of this local kingdom—easily applicable to the broader tenets of the
nation-state—must succumb to the more significant and meaningful convic-

tions of the saved Catholic soul.
From a different angle, Catholic thinkers also applied this antinationalist view
more generally to Indian nationalism, which notably resonates, for example, in
Väth’s later assessment of the Indian independence movement, which had gained
significant momentum during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Retrospectively, Väth bemoans the predominance of national prerogatives over
spiritual ones during the “double jurisdiction” when the Catholic Church con-
fronted significant secular roadblocks to establish religious harmony in Goa and
Bombay.74 Then turning to the present, Väth laments: “The primary hindrance
lies here in the fact that the Goanese, in part Portuguese subjects, form the
strongest party. For them national consciousness prevails.”75 For these German
Catholic Jesuits, spiritual triumph should trump political prerogatives.
While such criticisms levied at the British Raj do not necessarily derive from
analogies drawn from the Kaiserreich, their appraisals of British educational
policy in India strike a familiar tone from the German culture wars about the
underlying conflict between nation and church that these Catholics had experi-
enced so directly especially during the 1870s.76 Moreover, they demonstrate the
palpable universal intent of these Catholic thinkers—a mandate that inevitably
conflicts with state authority. That is, while Hauser’s critical report on the districts
surrounding Bombay might be seen as coincidental, even exceptional, German
Catholic appraisals of British educational policy in India illustrate the inexorable
underlying tension between the politics of nation and the prerogatives of church.
For Catholic missions, education had long been a critical strategic initiative
and was seen as an essential tool to support proselytization. Moreover, Catholic
India’s educational institutions provided a concrete venue for zealous German
Jesuits to find a productive outlet for asserting their Catholic identities beyond
the physical borders of Wilhelmine Germany—a restricted sociocultural domain
that impeded their careers and hampered their religious aspirations. German
Jesuits, many of whom were professors in the mission schools, played an essential
role, for instance, in the expansion and success story of Franz Xavier College in
Poona, near Bombay, which Die katholischen Missionen confirms in a report from
1882: “While one banished the same teachers from Germany and dismissed them
across the borders as dangerous to the state and as cultural enemies, the Indo-
British government provides acclaim here in every way to the cultural promotion
and beneficial effects of the same men.”77 Here, not only does this comment
frame its assessment explicitly in terms of the ill-treatment that Catholic scholars
experienced in Germany, but German Jesuits in particular are lauded for their
efforts in the College. Moreover, the Catholic journal again extols British support
for its openness toward Catholic cultural prerogatives—a commendable bond, in
Catholic views, between state and Church.
Such stories of German Jesuit repute are not limited to the renowned and still-
important Xavier College but reverberate throughout the Catholic journal reports
on various mission schools in India. The St. Mary’s Institution in Mazagon (an
orphanage for boys), for example, also receives particular praise for the rise in con-
fessions from 9,000 to 13,400 during the three-year period of 1879 to 1881.78 And
in Bandora, the report continues, “the visit to the Holy Sacraments is very fre-
quent; at the time of the Jubilee more than 500 appeared in one day at the table
of the Lord. The number of the yearly confessions adds up to 10,000.”79 These
assessments statistically underscore—numbers have meaning in the manipula-
tive game of confessional competition and mission justification—the essential
role that Catholic educational institutions embody for asserting and validating
Catholic mission success.
Moreover, anti-Protestant undertones coalesce with Catholic universalism in
the abundant anecdotal conversion narratives frequently published in the Catho-
lic journal reports from India. That is, as we have already seen in the story of a
West Bengal prince, Arumugan, these reports are filled with remarkable, often
heroic, conversion stories that Jesuits purportedly personally witnessed. In the
same 1882 mission report, which emphasizes Catholic educational institutions
in India, the author relates one such story of personal transformation, lending
a depth of meaning that statistical evidence lacks. A converted Indian Catholic,
the essay begins, has regrettably reconverted to Protestantism, which the author
attributes to the temptations of earthly convenience: “In him the thought began
to involuntarily dawn, how in Protestant religion one lives more comfortably,
yet in the Catholic religion one dies better.”80 In other words, this Indian con-
vert has succumbed to the seductive pleasures of earthly life that Protestantism
purportedly favors, at least until that time in life when death’s prospects become
more conspicuous. The defector’s wife, who has remained a devout Catholic,
secretly baptizes their children in the Catholic Church. Her husband responds
to such insubordination by forbidding the family’s entrance or participation in
the Catholic Jesuit Church, as the report explains, until he himself confronts a
life-threatening illness. When life’s stakes reach their zenith, only Catholicism, as
this constructed Indian prodigal son now must begrudgingly acknowledge, suf-
fices for spiritual well-being: “He let the hated and reviled priest come to him,
asks him for forgiveness and makes a repentant confession. Now he calls the
entire family to his sickbed and explains to all loudly and ceremoniously his desire
to return to the Catholic Church and that it is just equally his will, that all of
his loved ones should profess the only true religion.”81 Here such Catholic suc-
cess stories underscore the critical importance of the educational mission, while
always glossed with anti-Protestant sentiments.
Yet such statistical and anecdotal evidence fails to conceal the emerging con-
flict between British educational policy and Catholic school operations during the
final decades of the nineteenth century—a conflict already candidly articulated in
Prince Arumugan’s conversion. Specifically, in response to the 1857 mutiny, the
British had sought to cultivate a more favorable outlook toward the Raj among its
Indian subjects—a bond between colonizer and colonized with concrete profes-
sional and economic benefits for educated Indians—through the establishment
of more and better educational institutions available to Indians.82 Thus state
education became a strategic component of British colonial administration and
promptly exposed the inherent conflict between religion and politics—Catholic
missions and British colonial aims. As the British asserted their educational strat-
egies intended to circumvent Indian insubordination, admiration for the British
colonial model hastily changed to criticism among many German Catholics,

including Pfülf, who as we have seen, held British tactics for managing their colo-
nial expansion in such high regard. The British state-sponsored schools suddenly
became the target for German Catholics to view the British colonial model less
favorably. Catholics were responding to what they viewed as a direct challenge to
one of their primary institutional tools for mission work and in their account, a
crucial and expanding source of conversion success stories.
Pfülf, for instance, describes in the same essay in which he lauds British colo-
nial strategy, how British financing of state schools impedes the fulfillment of the
Catholic mission: “Yet very costly priced state schools bring about an unbalanced
competition, and impose an unfair tax burden on those Catholics who with great
sacrifice maintain their own schools. It is no wonder that the Catholics raise
their voices time and again against these injustices.”83 After the 1857 rebellion
the British government had a distinct political interest in motivating Indians to
attend state-sponsored schools, which were supported through tax subventions—
Christianity was important, but political loyalty among the colonized and the
prevention of mutiny were more essential to the British colonial mission. Thus
Pfülf bemoans the competition that British state schools then posed to the Cath-
olic mission schools, primarily due to the financial burden imposed by these
special taxes levied on nonstate schools.
Mutiny and rebellion were certainly no friends of the Catholic mission either.
German Catholic India experts understood perfectly well the practical motiva-
tions behind this strategy, as Die katholischen Missionen reports in 1895: “Since the
victorious thrashing of the Indian mutiny in 1857 British political acumen had
to seriously consider how to fortify their dominion permanently and thus where
possible to earn the love of the subject people. The introduction of European
education and civilization seemed to be the most adequate means and became the
primary motto. The Christian religion on the other hand in this calculation was
completely left out of the game in order to treat the religious fanaticism of the
Hindus and Moslems with care. School and education were to bear no denomi-
national imprint whatsoever.”84 In this assessment, British policy following the
1857 mutiny demonstrates a logical political/administrative response to a threat-
ening example of insubordination that could potentially undermine their colonial
model. Yet, as the report continues, a more critical and Catholic-centered view
emerges. In Catholic eyes, political strategies—here regarding state-sponsored
schools—that become misaligned with God’s plan result in a far greater threat to
Western cultural supremacy: “The results were that thousands (today the yearly
number is 15,000) graduated from the English state schools, whose education
was based on principles estranged from God.”85 German Catholics in particular
were far too familiar with the battle over cultural institutions—in the Kaiserreich
during the Kulturkampf and now again in the British Raj—not to recognize the
disastrous consequences, at least for the Catholic Church, of losing control of and
influence over the nation’s cultural institutions. From a Catholic point of view,
public education with no explicit Church doctrinal underpinning results in an
estrangement from God and inculcates a self-evident precondition for the even-
tual demise of the nation.
For German Catholics the reconstitution of their national identity through a

vision of India required more than success in Christianizing the Indian popula-
tion but rather could only be adequately constituted by the purportedly verifiable
successes of the Catholic mission. Yet for German Catholics the British colo-
nial machine seemed at times an all too familiar reminder of their experiences
at the hands of German Protestants in the Second Reich. Thus when British
colonial policy threatened to undermine Catholic mission strategies in India,
Catholic frustrations were quickly triggered in response. More important, under
the rubric of the British Raj German Catholics envisioned their reconstituted
identity and status on the global religious marketplace in direct competition with
Protestant missions. As we have seen, these German Catholics held British respect
for confessional diversity in high esteem—for instance, the national cohesive-
ness achieved by their guiding principle that provided for the requisite religious
arrangements for Irish Catholics serving in the colonial military—and extol those
colonial policies that seemed to promote Catholic objectives. Protestantism, on
the other hand, both in Wilhelmine Germany and in India, was seen as the devi-
ous culprit of anti-Catholic sentiment and as Catholicism’s primary rival in the
pursuit of India’s spiritual spoils.
Yet such Protestant and Catholic historical accounts and the resulting projec-
tions onto Indian culture and confessional competition during the British Raj
were not the sole domain of Germany’s traditional churches. By the second half of
the nineteenth century, other German thinkers had become fatigued by the bur-
den of what they viewed as confessional lethargy and exhausted Western models
for attaining spiritual coherence. Moreover, these intellectuals, like the churches,
acknowledged the precarious position of the human being, who had become in
the eyes of many across confessional and cultural boundaries a material object of
empirical science and who now confronted a spiritual vacuum in a divinely for-
saken world based on the repulsive implications of Darwinian natural selection.86
Yet many of these thinkers were scholars who frequently accepted and supported
Darwinian theory and were at the same time deeply conflicted by the paradoxes
spawned by such religioscientific dissonance. In response, many German intellec-
tuals attempted to address the inadequacies of their confessional traditions, in some
cases by outright rejection, in others by resolving the injurious bifurcation of
the spiritual and physical domains by tapping into the treasure trove of Indian
spiritual traditions. As a result, numerous fringe religious movements, such as
Buddhism or theosophy, were gradually attracting more attention at home as a
legitimate religious alternative during the final decades of the nineteenth century.
To that story German Visions of India now turns.
PART II
Breaking Out of
the Iron Cage
Fringe Religious Innovators
and Their Detractors
CHAPTER 3
Responding to Science
and Materialism
Buddhism and Theosophy
Science separates consciousness from life—makes the former an accident of the

latter, which explores and discerns only through a materialist trajectory.
Paul Dahlke, Buddhismus als Weltanschauung (1912)1
No happiness is without blemish, nothing has constancy, and in the short span
of time that elapses in the rush of the moment, it would be foolhardy and
incomprehensible to cling to the goods of the world that disintegrate like dust in
our hands, instead of preparing the spirit for salvation where the spirit, without any
fear of new change, rests in the equilibrium of harmonious fulfillment.
Theodor Schultze, Das Dhammapada (1885)2
Theodor Schultze (–) and Paul Dahlke (–), Buddhist

acolytes at the fin-de-siècle—the former a lifelong Prussian civil servant and
the latter a successful physician—address in the epigraphs the perceived clash
between a scientific/materialistic worldview and a more spiritually oriented
one from different but related angles. Dahlke posits that modern science,
which treats consciousness—Dahlke’s term for human spirituality—as an iso-
lated domain, can generate only material results. Almost three decades earlier,
Schultze, in the introduction to his translation of the Dhammapada, bemoans
the repercussions for living in that world later described by Dahlke—its
unremitting tarnish on any sense of earthly happiness and the transience of
knowledge that is produced by material science.3 Yet Schultze, in a slightly
different twist, also laments the compulsive articulation of material desire—a
life bound by the pursuit of worldly goods. From his viewpoint, a worldview
that focuses on the mundane objects of earthly existence remains devoid of
meaning and carries no enduring value (in Staub zerbröckeln). Drawing the
analogy further, Schultze thus implies that a meaningful life should subordi-
nate material needs to spiritual ones and thus prepare the human individual
for eternal salvation.
These are not newly introduced concerns that suddenly appeared at the
turn of the century. As we have already seen, the sense of discord purportedly
caused by a materially driven world frequently weaves its way into the fabric of
Germany’s constructed India. Yet as we will explore in this chapter, some India
enthusiasts began to envision models for redefining community consensus that
more deliberately espoused Eastern religious precepts than what we have seen
among Germany’s India buffs so far. Significantly, these “fringe” religious inno-
vators turned their attention away from building the nation in more traditional
political forms, addressing instead the troubled modern European subject, whose
identity had become fractured by what Max Weber referred to as the “Entzau-
berung der Welt”—the perceived desacralization of the world.4 Specifically, these
thinkers made a more calculated turn to Indian traditions—Buddhism by some
(Schultze and Dahlke)—or the “occult” knowledge of ancient India by others—
theosophists—in a more decisive and emphatic embrace of Eastern tenets than
what we have seen earlier, for instance, in Leopold von Schroeder’s Sundara.
By the 1880s, some German constructs of Indian religious traditions adopted
Buddhism or constructed Western versions—theosophy—as more viable alterna-
tives to a fatigued and outdated Christian paradigm, which had succumbed in
their view to the dehumanizing bias of materialism. The German theosophist
Franz Hartmann (1838–1912), for instance, describes the quandary concisely
in the preface to his study of the sixteenth-century medical mystic Paracelsus:
“Modern science attempts to prove that man is an animal.” Yet as Hartmann
continues, he suggests that material science’s biases can be corrected by absorb-
ing the secret knowledge of ancient India’s religious pundits, who envision the
human subject from a nondualistic angle: “The teaching of the Adepts show that
he may be a god.”5 Thus, in Hartmann’s reading, Indian nonduality becomes the
potential force through which German thinkers could rejuvenate their human
status and subjectivity in a world driven by material science.
Put together, German accounts of Indian Buddhism on the one hand and
theosophy’s “secret doctrine,” concealed in the ancient knowledge of India’s reli-
gious adepts, were constructed through the prism of European cultural debates
about science and materialism and responded to the salient challenges posed to
the spiritual integrity and stability of intellectual identity during the era. In other
words, Buddhists and theosophists attempted to reforge their intellectual identi-
ties in the community as a by-product of their integrative vision of body and
mind.6 Specifically, these India pundits were attempting to reconfigure the socio-
cultural conventions that had provided the requisite symbolic capital for their
intellectual agency in the community—a model under severe pressure in Wil-
helmine culture. In consequence, traditional Protestant values, which had been
the hallmark for generating intellectual status in the social marketplace, become
a critical backdrop for this chapter’s story of how German thinkers interpreted
Indian religion, especially Buddhism. That is, I am suggesting that German reli-
gious innovators transposed their frustrated Protestant values onto their readings of
Indian Buddhism as a means to reconstitute intellectual identity and sociocultural
rank—a distinction in Bourdieu’s sense—as the Kaiserreich approached the cen-
tury’s end and after. Though we have already explored those values that affirmed
Responding to Science and Materialism 83
Protestant intellectual agency during the 1870s, a brief examination of the Prot-
estant identity paradigm from a different angle will help foreground the links
that I am proposing as the Kulturkampf waned and material culture continued
its purported assault on human spiritual integrity.
J. Websky, in his opening address at the Deutschen Protestantentage in Wies-
baden in 1907, clarifies Protestantism’s historical progress toward freedom and
introspection (Innerlichkeit): “And it was a significant advance on the path to free-
dom and introspection when Schleiermacher so forcefully asserted that religion
as the deepest source of all spiritual life rests on living, inner experience, and all
aspects of historical and dogmatic revelations must pass through this inner expe-
rience, if it should gain true meaning for our salvation.”7 As Websky’s assessment
of Schleiermacher’s theological model confirms, conventional modes for attain-
ing salvation since the Reformation and Enlightenment—still relevant during the
nineteenth century—were marked by what Kaspar von Greyerz terms “tenden-
cies toward individualism.”8
These tendencies had dramatic repercussions for Protestant identity and stan-
dards for human comportment in the community. Ernst Troeltsch, in The Social
Teachings of the Christian Churches (1912), for instance, describes the import of
this shift to individualism in the Calvinist version of Protestantism: “On the basis
of devastating recognition of sin and a pessimistic worldview, without any embel-
lishment or sentimentality, it is the individualism of certain pre-destination, the
sense of responsibility and obligation to personal service under the rule of Christ.
It expresses itself in the reflective and conscious form of Calvinistic piety, in the
systematic spirit of self-control and the independence from all earthly creations.”9
In other words, the Calvinist tenets of individual responsibility, the obligation of
personal service to Christ, self-discipline, and independence from the temptations
of the physical domain, became directly linked to the emotional security of immi-
nent salvation (Erwählungsgewissheit) and influential standards for behavior—the
foundation for what Weber referred to as “class socialization” (ständische Vergesell-
schaftung) in Protestant culture.10
The further implications drawn by Troeltsch and Weber, who also argued
famously for a direct link between a Protestant ethic and a “spirit of capitalism,”
which purportedly emerged from Calvinist predestination, are less our concern
here.11 Critical for our purposes in Troeltsch’s and Weber’s studies of modern
sociocultural transformations and the processes of social distinction, to borrow
Bourdieu’s term, is Protestantism’s marked devaluation of external, or public, reli-
gious praxis—ritual—and its increased emphasis on those religious forms that
were underscored by what von Greyerz refers to as “introspection” (Internalität).12
That is, the internalization of religious practice and ritual and the ascetic fulfill-
ment gained through hard work, discipline, frugality, and usually linked with
economic success, became primary features of the Protestant conception of com-
munity worth and, most importantly, the cornerstone for Protestant identity.
Significantly, the Protestant identity construct of many German India pun-
dits, which had been assembled through introspection, diligence, and a sense
of duty, had begun in their view to dramatically depreciate as an effective
symbolic marker under the pressures of striking socioeconomic and scientific
transformations—industrial capitalism and empirical science—during the final

decades of the nineteenth century. In response, as the notion that human knowl-
edge and intellectual identity based on scientific results and material worth
gained traction, some Protestant India experts began to reconfigure their identity
constructs in bolder forms and applications in the community than what we
have seen in the young von Schroeder or Seydel. To put it simply, these “fringe”
religious innovators were beginning to transpose the underlying precepts of
their Protestant identities onto their readings of Indian religion, especially Bud-
dhism, in more concrete forms. Thus in this chapter, I want to explore how
these more intentional German constructs of Indian religious traditions became
a powerful tool for updating Protestant models of atonement and community
consensus, thus potentially resolving their sense of cultural crisis during the
era. Importantly, these thinkers aimed less to charge the German nation than
others, yet their thought and social movements nevertheless maintained and
manifested subtle political undertones.
To explore their unique cultural role in the Kaiserreich, then, I would like to
outline several common features that link the spiritual models of these unique
religious innovations rather than provide a full account of German Buddhism
or theosophy.13 In other words, this chapter will focus less on German Bud-
dhism or theosophy as organized movements, nor on their role and influence
in the public domain as McGetchin emphasizes, but rather will seek to explain
how the thread of their underlying thought responds to the alleged devastating
consequences of Western culture’s materialist worldview—the material objecti-
fication of human life and the increasing preeminence of material wealth as the
fundamental source of symbolic capital in the social marketplace.14 To put it dif-
ferently, in their distinct but related models—constructed through their accounts
of Indian religious traditions—this group of India experts attempted to recon-
stitute human spirituality as the cornerstone for an updated human identity and
community consensus.15
In fact, like so many of their intellectual counterparts, these religious innova-
tors were responding to the sensed incongruity between religious tradition—a
Bible-normed Protestant worldview—and empirical science and the enormous
stress caused by derivative Darwinian social applications that were imposed upon
the revered status preserved for human identity in relation to the divine. More-
over, though none of these thinkers were socialists, their thought in some cases
nevertheless implicitly endorses a socioeconomic agenda that responds to the
same problematic that Marx and Engels identified in the isolation and trivial-
ity of individual economic production in an industrial capitalistic model. In a
world perceived to be driven by economic survival of the fittest and the purported
dehumanizing results of empirical science, they sought to establish a new social
consensus that could forge a more spiritually fulfilling state of being for the mod-
ern homo economicus.
Both the small Buddhist and theosophical movements in Germany were
loosely defined groups of intellectuals, mostly Bildungsbürger, who began to orga-
nize discussion groups and town hall meetings but projected their loudest voice
and proved most active in written media.16 They produced pamphlets, articles
and books, all of which were published in their own sets of journals or esoteric
publishing houses.17 Thus these fringe religious innovators are nevertheless an
important piece of the puzzle to provide a “thicker” description of German “uses”
of India during the Wilhelmine era and thus deserve attention in this context.
Specifically, these India experts offer a different variant of Germany’s spiritual
remodeling as it became transposed onto India: fringe religious innovators. First,
German Buddhists, not in the sense of institutional frameworks or confirmed
conversions but rather how some German intellectuals embraced Buddhist
doctrine as a viable alternative to Western Christianity, specifically intended to
resolve the perceived dilemmas of the era. Second, Franz Hartmann’s theosophy,
which, like German Buddhism, also responded to the predominance of a material
worldview by seeking to remodel Western society and religion through his read-
ing of ancient India. Though raised a Catholic, Hartmann’s theosophy addressed
the same issues and modeled theosophical solutions that correlate patently with
German Buddhist remedies. Important here are not the Buddhist or theosophical
movements themselves, nor their organizational frameworks, but rather I want
to underscore their cultural links by examining critical mutual themes in their
accounts of Indian religion. That is, the work of these German thinkers rep-
resents an important response to their sense of spiritual discord that had been
subjected to significant stress by the march of newer sociocultural forms emerg-
ing from empirical science and industrial capitalism and thus provides further
unique insight into the cultural dynamics of Wilhelmine Germany.
Notably, many of these fringe innovators sought to rejuvenate their symbolic
capital in the community through a utopian vision with little regard for the geo-
political concerns of their era. This is not to say that they ignored the broader
social ramifications of their spiritual mission or that they deliberately sought to
undermine the German nation, nor that political repercussions were absent
from their thought. Schultze, for instance, was a loyal and diligent civil servant
throughout a long professional career, serving last as counselor to the govern-
ment of Holstein until his retirement due to ill health in 1888 at the age of
64.18 Nor did all theosophists, for that matter, present a uniform antimaterialist
reading of modern European society. Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden (founder of the
first theosophical Verein in 1893 in Steglitz near Berlin), who will receive more
attention in Chapter 5, advocated a radically different vision for correcting Euro-
pean materialism than other theosophists like Hartmann or Rudolf Steiner (early
theosophist, and later founder of anthroposophy in 1913).19
The cultural distresses that occupied the minds of these thinkers, poignantly
illustrated in the opening quotes by Dahlke and Schultze, can be generally catego-
rized into two critical sociocultural spheres that will thread their way through my
analysis. First, these India pundits highlight what they viewed as modern Europe’s
socioeconomic discord, which resonates especially in Schultze’s account of Bud-
dhist doctrine. Schultze underscores the socioeconomic inequalities that he and
others perceived in Wilhelmine society as a by-product of a worldview dominated
by material desire—a palpable criticism of a sociocultural model based on indus-
trial capitalism. Nevertheless these thinkers were not socialist reformers in the
sense of Marx’s utopian proletariat vision. None of the German fringe religious
innovators were champions for the workers’ movement—they were too socially
elite for that—but they were utopian in the sense that they envisioned a harmo-
nious world for all those human beings who could restrike the balance between
spiritual and worldly life.20
Second, these intellectuals underscore the ostensible but very real conflict
between a material-based scientific worldview and a spiritual one. Dahlke and
Hartmann, for instance, concentrate especially on the individual loss of spiri-
tuality in a world in which knowledge derives primarily from the results of
empirical science. Both Dahlke’s Buddhism and Hartmann’s theosophical world-
view attempt to correct this skewed scientific paradigm by reforging the harmony
between the material and spiritual worlds—circumventing their artificial separa-
tion purportedly caused by the predominance of empirical science. That is, they
sought to reestablish the symmetry between the physical and spiritual domains,
which had until then been based on the God-like image of human beings, in order
to invalidate a view of mankind based on Darwinian biology with its inherent
devastating implications for community consensus—the fittest annihilating the
weakest. Thus Dahlke’s and Hartmann’s work—a Buddhist Weltanschauung in
the former, the secret wisdom of ancient India reformulated in theosophy in the
latter—embrace more forcefully than Schultze a spiritual model for potentially
rejuvenating the integrity of the individual subject. In other words, the conflict
between empirical science—viewed by these India experts as an objectification
and degradation of the human being—and spirituality hinders the reconstruc-
tion of the modern subject’s fractured identity and in turn obstructs a successful
reformulation of sociocultural consensus. By adapting Indian religious traditions
in response to these cultural dilemmas, these thinkers hoped that their distressed
community could be rebuilt on the shoulders of Germany’s most profound intel-
lectual insights.
Theodor Schultze: A Frustrated Sense

of Duty (Pflichtbewußtsein)
Schultze (1824–98) was born the son of a pharmacist in the northern city of
Oldenburg. He grew up, according to his friend and biographer Arthur Pfungst,
under the austere Protestant influence of his mother, who possessed a “particu-
larly strongly developed sense of duty.”21 Heeding his parental guidance, Schultze
too, as Pfungst relates, lived his life with an earnest sense of duty and practiced
rigorous self-discipline. For example, he ate conservatively, drank only water at
dinner, worked on Sundays, and unsurprisingly perhaps, never married.22 Profes-
sionally, Schultze studied law in Kiel, where he joined a fraternity (Burschenschaft)
and had a long and successful career as a government official, marked by the
same dedication and notable professional conscientiousness (Pflichtbewußtsein)
that underscored his private life.23 Around the age of 55 (1879), according to
Pfungst, he began to consider questions of religion and philosophy. A few years
later, in 1882 to 1883, he purportedly took up Indological studies.24 Notably,
Schultze’s occupation with religious matters actually began earlier than Pfungst
reports. In 1862, for instance, Schultze produced a self-published work, Christ,
the World Reconciler . . . , which conflicts with Pfungst’s account of this career civil
servant’s deferred religious ponderings. This early religious entreaty attests to an
unwavering devotion to a Protestant version of Christianity, an image of Schultze
that Pfungst apparently sought to diminish.
Schultze’s short text (64 pages) consists primarily of long biblical quotations,
and certainly contains no intimation of his later Buddhist sympathies. Yet for our
context some of Schultze’s comments provide insight into the weighty influence
of his Protestant upbringing, with its inherent emphasis on individual and spiri-
tual introspection: “All of us from the world’s greatest world ruler down to the
beggar committed the crucifixion;—crucify daily, almost hourly! All of us must
sink to our knees, beat our chests and call out: God, have mercy, poor sinner that I
am!”25 Here, as we would expect, the burden of Christ’s crucifixion lands squarely
on the shoulders of the individual sinner. Nor does Schultze consider any ritual
ablutions as a potential tool for resolving man’s sinful nature. In his view, the
relationship between God and man is not regulated through priestly hierarchy or
church conventions but rather through sincere individual repentance.
Moreover, in a noteworthy foreshadowing for his reading of Buddhism,
Schultze emphasizes the individual’s charge to become liberated from worldly
conventions (Zwangsjacke des Gesetzes). In this context, he discusses the task of
the Israelites in Egypt to free themselves from the shackles of heathenism and idol
worship, not through the power of community will but rather through the exclu-
sive engagement of the individual human being: “A salvation bearing freedom can
only be that one, reached by the individual self, who bears the straitjacket of the
law. Another freedom cannot exist on this earth, and I am convinced, nor in a
future life, because for all eternity God’s will must remain our law, and all earthly
concepts of the exalted, unbroken bliss will consist in the ability to follow His
law without doubt and qualms—small samples God already provides us here.”26
In this model, living by God’s law on earth derives from the individual’s inner
spiritual life. Here, though in different terms from what we will see in Schultze’s
Buddhism, introspection as the critical element for religious conviction and per-
sonal identity permeated his religious thought early on and would influence the
later Buddhist period of his life as well.
After his early advocacy for Christian life, Schultze, like many others of
his era, gradually became intellectually disgruntled with the inability of tradi-
tional Christian doctrine to provide updated solutions to the dilemmas that late
nineteenth-century scientific, social, and economic norms seemed to pose for the
spiritual integrity of intellectual identity. Many years after his 1862 Christian
testimonial and after his Buddhist turn, for instance, Schultze explains his dis-
enchantment and lack of hope in Western religious models in his quixotic The
Christianity of Christ (1891): “The Foundations of Christian belief have long
been undermined in all directions by modern philosophy, natural science, and
history, and yet the Christian churches stand there as apparently firm and well
preserved edifices.”27 By the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Schultze
describes with familiar tact, modern science—its empirical framework, sociohis-
torical applications, and Darwinian derivatives—had uprooted the foundations of
Christian belief and its institutions. In consequence, modern day Protestantism,
Figure 3.1 Frontispiece from Arthur Pfungst, Ein deutscher Buddhist (Oberpräsidialrat Theodor
Schultze): Eine biographische Skizze (Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns Verlag, 1901).
with its anti-Catholic obsessions that Schultze in fact criticizes, no longer seemed
to offer the requisite paradigm to return Christianity to its true roots. As Schultze
laments the present state of affairs, neither Luther’s nor Calvin’s reforms play any
role in modern Protestantism.28 Moreover, many intellectuals had lost confidence
in Christianity’s ability to renew itself in response to these deficiencies now that
its historical fallibility had been exposed by social scientific challenges to biblical
accuracy.
With so little hope for an effective reform of Western Christianity, Schultze’s
turn to the East becomes more logical. Despite the distinct Christian stand-
point and Protestant sentiments exhibited in his early work, Schultze’s shift to
a Buddhist worldview that Pfungst’s account depicts holds true. Specifically, for
Schultze and others, Buddhism seemed to offer the potential avenue to forge a
new framework for revitalizing Western spirituality, as well as provide the means
to resolve the era’s sociocultural stresses, which for many seemed so discernible
across the Wilhelmine cultural landscape.29
Reckoning with Christianity: Revising the

Ranking Order of Progressive History
The hope for revising what Schultze viewed as the materialistic social paradigm
of modern Germany resonates clearly in his work. The Christianity of Christ,
which was considered by Pfungst to be his “reckoning with Christianity . . . an
examination and statement of personal beliefs,” is framed in the context of social

questions that Christianity had failed to adequately acknowledge or in some cases
even address.30 In response to Christianity’s contention, for example, that bibli-
cal tenets and Church praxes have supported the emancipation of the socially
and economically repressed throughout its history, Schultze delivers an adamant
rebuttal based on his reading of the historical references. As he opines, the bibli-
cal record on slavery is weak: “Slavery is alluded to frequently in this context, yet
nowhere is it recommended to the masters, to free their slaves or at the very least
their Christian one.”31 Nor does the Bible promise much, as Schultze continues,
for the liberation of women from the shackles of a patriarchal social paradigm—a
remarkably progressive assertion for this loyal Prussian civil servant and Bildungs-
bürger. As Schultze might have put it in more modern terms, Christians have
talked the talk but have failed to walk the walk.
In fact, according to Schultze, Christianity’s historical record belies any claim
of support for the repressed and socially disenfranchised from their earthly bur-
den. Sociocultural models from the medieval ages to the nineteenth century have
depended on the enslavement of other human beings, as Schultze reports, and
have flourished unrestrained under Christianity’s watch, which responds only to
external conditions:
Not that a humanization of the character of the European nations through Chris-
tianity was the cause that purely personal bondage disappeared during the Middle
Ages, rather the reason must have laid with the transformation of the economic and
judicial relationships. This results clearly from the fact that lack of personal free-
dom, which was tied to the conditions of land ownership (bondage of the agrarian
class), continuously expanded and worsened, and that at the same time after the
discovery of America under the reign of Christianity, the purely personal bondage
reemerged there in a form worse than what was known during Antiquity.32
In other words, the humanistic model of freedom that gradually came to charac-
terize European society and culture in modern times was not generated by Chris-
tian tenets but rather resulted from changing economic and legal circumstances
over the centuries. To put it more bluntly, Christianity, according to Schultze, in
a dramatic about-face from his earlier years, has been only a passive respondent
to socioeconomic transformations, not an initiator of better and more just con-
ditions in that domain. Socioeconomic paradigms have been forged by external
conditions, not transformed by any benevolent influences of Christian doctrine.
In this derisive verdict, Schultze avows that Christianity has always acquiesced
to the socioeconomic forces of the age and has throughout its history readily
condoned inhumane community practices—social and political—if they were
viewed to bolster the faith’s status and power.
Importantly, Schultze’s incisive assessment of Christianity as a sociocultural
deadpan implicitly sanctions other religious traditions as potential alternatives to
resolve the perceived social ills of European modernity. Schultze, who could no
longer envision a revitalization of European culture through Protestant Chris-
tianity, put it in more concrete terms when he argued for a level playing field
in comparative accounts of the world’s religious dogmas: “When essentially the

same things are found in non-Christian lands, or already existed in pre-Christian
times, then one can assume with certainty, that they originated in human nature,
and not from belief in any religious dogma.”33 Here, maintaining his focus on
the social repercussions of religious faith, Schultze explicitly attributes the failure
or success of any religious tradition to resolve social dilemmas to its practitioners
rather than the underlying doctrines.
Yet Schultze’s core Protestant framework nevertheless guides his assessment of
comparative religion. As we might expect in Schultz’s reading, religious praxis,
specifically individual failure, is the culprit for any religious tradition’s ineptitude
for resolving social plight, not the precepts on which religious praxis is based. No
hint of Eastern euphoria filters into Schultze’s assessment here, only the distinct
echoes of Protestant introspection. Yet such bluntly crafted neutrality regarding
sacred cultural traditions, especially vis-à-vis Christianity, foreshadows the kinds
of religious innovation that Schultze and others would pursue at the turn of the
century as they combed other religious faiths for potential antidotes to what they
viewed as European society’s material decadence and spiritual deprivation. In
fact, Schultze implicitly challenges any religious ranking order that sanctioned
Christianity’s superiority, opening the door for considering Eastern alternatives.
The Buddhist Ascetic: A Corrective

to European Materialism
In 1885, as his personal indictment of modern Christianity still germinated,
Schultze published a translation of Buddhist poetry, Das Dhammapada.34 Schul-
tze’s introduction to the work provides important insight into his motivation
for seeking new “metaphysical” insight outside the confines of Christianity’s
stagnating doctrinal offerings. After briefly discussing Schopenhauer’s work and
that of the famous Oxford Indologist Max Mueller, Schultze concludes, “Every
perspective leads in fact, as well as this one, to the conclusion that acquaintance
with the ancient Indian religious philosophies holds high meaning for that part
of the contemporary European society that senses a metaphysical need, which
cannot be satisfied by traditional vocational means.”35 Here Schultze cogently
expresses his dissatisfaction with Christianity’s present theological responses
that dominated the institutional landscape. Moreover, for those in European
society with metaphysical needs, as Schultze depicts it—a subtle hint at the
potential symbolic capital to be gained in the social marketplace from a reju-
venated spirituality—ancient Indian religious traditions herald the potential
for renewed cultural relevance.36
Schultze’s more subtle suggestion at European discord resonates even more
decidedly in the work of another Buddhist acolyte of the era, Karl Eugen Neu-
mann (1865–1915), who signals, in the introduction to his translation of the
Dhammapada, Weber’s famous description of the modern subject’s imprisonment
in sociocultural fetters (stahlhartes Gehäuse), by underscoring the horrific cycle of
death and suffering as a perpetual earthly process:37 “One cannot expect a bet-
ter future, nothing continually more perfectly fulfilled, oh no, but rather must
acknowledge the horrible world of death and misery as an eternal correlate of

something without beginning or end as part of a world process that always main-
tains its equilibrium.”38 Yet as he continues, Neumann foreshadows the potential
solution to the spiritually disenfranchised modern subject: “Everything superior,
even the final step of holiness, develops from such acknowledgement.”39 In other
words, salvation is gained through the recognition of the divine in the mundane
world—not by overcoming the world, as inculcated in Christian dualism as these
Buddhist acolytes assumed, but rather by coming into harmony with the world.
Similar to Schultze’s view, accessing the wisdom of the East as a corrective for
Western empirical science and a means to reconstitute spiritual harmony also
resonates throughout Neumann’s work. In the afterword to his Dhammapada
translation, for example, he describes the significance of Buddhism’s cultural
place in Europe’s future: “Even if we have been freed today in the European mod-
ern ages from the conditions of medieval ignorance through the so-called exact
sciences and bask in the midday of this development: India stands unsurpassed as
the general picture of culture; and the most noble fruit of this thousand-year-old,
deeply rooted, and infinitely varied culture is Buddhism.”40 Neumann, twist-
ing the familiar model of progressive history to fit his hermeneutical purposes,
subtly derides Europe’s sense of scientific accomplishment—the freedom from
medieval uncertainty that the “exact” sciences purportedly inflicted on European
tradition—because modern knowledge still remains fragmentary when compared
to the perfect refinement found in India’s ancient, deeply rooted and infinitely
diverse culture. Most important, in Neumann’s reading, Buddhism has emerged
as the most revered legacy from India’s bountiful culture. Notably, Neumann’s
assessment of India’s religious legacy, like his Buddhist counterparts Schultze and
later Dahlke, is underpinned by the same link between materialist science, which
produces fragmentary, even disparaging knowledge about the human being, and
spiritual discord.
In response to these cultural dilemmas, these thinkers envisioned a potential
solution in the espousal of Indian Buddhism in Europe that could embolden
Europe’s frustrated thinkers to boldly pursue innovative spiritual paths and
reaffirm the vanishing “distinction” of Protestant identity. Returning to the intro-
ductory remarks in Schultze’s Dhammapada translation, he explains that the
Buddhist ascetic life empowers the individual to full self-control of the will, a
permanent cornerstone of Schultze’s Protestant worldview. Here, according to
Schultze, the Buddha’s “asceticism aims to achieve complete self-governance of
the will over those motives rooted in the domain of sensuality, he directs the
human being exclusively to his own spiritual power, places him introspectively
and unconditionally on his own feet, teaches him disdain for all physical goods,
sympathy with all living beings, with whom he should recognize himself as iden-
tical.”41 Buddhist ascetic life is based here on the exclusive spiritual power of the
individual to suppress sensually rooted motives—desire, to put it in more modern
terms. Moreover, Buddhism frees the human individual from the enticing web of
material gain and fosters empathy for all human beings—brotherly love, to put it
in Christian vernacular, or as Neumann expresses it in his comparative religious
appeal, “boundless sympathy.”42 Yet in an important twist to Schultze’s account of
Buddhist asceticism, the Prussian civil servant transposes Buddhist brotherly love
onto a practical framework of duty and obligation—the first hint of his ever so
subtle rereading of Buddhist precepts to redound to the austere values of his Prot-
estant upbringing. To put it more bluntly, Schultze’s depiction of Buddhist ascetic
life manifests a reconstitution of his sense of diminished Protestant values in a
world, which has purportedly objectified human life through material science—
what Weber referred to as the “rationalization” of the socioeconomic domain.
Specifically, a materialistic worldview, as Schultze continues his account of
Buddhist doctrine in the introduction to his Dhammapada translation, now
dominates modern European culture and society, yet Buddhism provides the
potential corrective. That is, the Buddhist worldview teaches “belief in an inde-
structible principle that effects justice in us as well as in the objective world, and
a firm trust that beyond the horizon of our consciousness the other shore of true
reality must lay.”43 As this appraisal demonstrates, Schultze had clearly not read
his Nietzsche well, whose disdain for Christianity’s promised heavenly riches after
a barren earthly life of patient suffering had been so vociferously elaborated in
The Genealogy of Morals. According to Schultze, the Buddhist ascetic embod-
ied principles, though still abstractly defined here, that sought to improve the
conditions of earthly life. Significantly for Schultze, Buddhist asceticism teaches
belief in the indestructible principle of justice as the vehicle for emending the
split between the material and the spiritual. Since Protestant Christianity in its
modern form no longer offered the doctrinal tools to reunify the spiritual and the
objective worlds, or to reforge modern Europe’s socioeconomic paradigm into
a more equitable model, his account requires a more explicit account of Bud-
dhism’s community ramifications to make the case for it as a viable alternative.
Let us turn then to Schultze’s The Rolling Wheel of Life and Firm Repose, the sec-
ond volume of his iconoclastic magnum opus, to explore more carefully how he
envisioned a more just socioeconomic model in his religion of the future.
The Buddhist Ascetic: Worldly Engagement

and Community Solidarity
Schultze published this second volume just one year after The Christianity of
Christ, both of which were later published as two volumes under a single title.44
Unsurprisingly, Schultze begins his second treatise with unremarkable historical
observations for that era’s India experts by pointing to the unique linguistic link
between Germany and India. Moreover, in a move reflecting the era’s increas-
ing anti-Semitism, he frames his historical comments by subtly suggesting that
Christianity’s modern demise is attributable to Semitic influence: “In the mean-
time we are much more ‘semitized’ and especially ‘judaized’ through Christianity
than we are conscious of, or that we are willing to admit.”45 In the second half
of the nineteenth century such anti-Semitic undertones marked the work of
many intellectuals and academics in a variety of social scientific fields. The more
pronounced anti-Semitic voices across Germany’s cultural landscape were gradu-
ally becoming a disturbing feature among the Kaiserreich’s intellectual elite and
cultural spokespersons, and have been well documented.46 In the case of fringe
religious innovators like Schultze though, I want to pay less attention here to
the racist thread of his constructed India but rather consider more thoroughly
how his reading of Indian Buddhism manifests a response to what he and oth-
ers perceived as the socioeconomic ills of modern European society—to address
what Dahlke would later describe as the era’s “thousands and thousands of social
afflictions.”47
As I have already indicated, Schultze’s embrace of Buddhism did not signify
an outright rejection of Christian tenets, as he would have understood them
from his rigorous Protestant upbringing. In fact, Schultze transposes deeply
embedded Protestant precepts—introspection, sense of duty and obligation
(Pflichtbewußtsein)—onto his reading of Buddhism as a means to remodel intel-
lectual identity in Germany’s threatening sociocultural marketplace. That is, in
contrast with Seydel’s attempt to revamp Protestant Christianity as the nation’s
religious foundation (Chapter 1), Schultze constructs a substantially different
variant of Protestant rejuvenation also glossed by Indian religious traditions.
Though Schultze never hints at the bold linkages between denominational and
national objectives like those emphasized by Seydel or von Schroeder, his reading
of Indian Buddhism nevertheless manifests the subtle undertones of a Wilhelmine
Protestant Weltanschauung in a Buddhist veneer.
As we have already seen in the introduction to Schultze’s Dhammapada trans-
lation, his account of Buddhism underscores the individual’s inner state as the
essential vehicle for reinscribing the harmony between the physical and spiritual
domains. Unsurprisingly then, Schultze’s depiction of the Buddhist ascetic begins
by highlighting “the tendency of the Indian spirit to turn deeply inward that
emerged early on,” a trait overtly manifest in India’s earliest religious artifacts, the
Vedas and Upanishads.48 Thus human spirituality in Schultze’s reading of Indian
religious tradition is based not on external ritual practices or doctrinal obedience
but rather on the personal, and most importantly here, individual quest for spiri-
tuality in the deepest inner caverns of the self. In other words, introspection, the
cornerstone of Protestant spirituality, which had emerged from the Reformation’s
emphasis on individual salvation and its Pietist turn inward, remains the anchor
for Schultze’s Buddhist hermeneutic. His emphasis on the Buddhist ascetic, or
introspection, then attests to the underlying link in his thought between his Prot-
estant view of individual salvation and his understanding of Indian spirituality.
Yet Schultze’s Buddhism was no isolated idiosyncratic application of Eastern
spiritual tenets. Other Buddhist acolytes of the era, for instance, also empha-
sized the individual engagement required to attain salvation. Subhara Bhikschu
(1852–1917), known as Friedrich Zimmermann prior to his conversion to Bud-
dhism, describes these vital characteristics in the introduction to the seventh
edition (1902) of his short but popular Buddhistischer Katechismus: “The Bud-
dha’s doctrine addresses all those, who do not expect salvation through divine
mercy without one’s own merit, but rather have enough courage and strength to
stand on their own feet, who are bold enough not to believe, but to know, who
do not follow authority blindly, but rather who desire to think for themselves.”49
In Bhikschu’s account, salvation must be worked for—earned—through individ-
ual courage and the acolyte’s energy to pursue spiritual certitude self-sufficiently.
Moreover, the Enlightenment precept challenging the individual to break out of

the shackles of Church doctrinal authority through cognition, and by engaging
the individual faculties of mind to know and not just believe, echo clearly in
Bhikschu’s reading. Similar to Schultze’s description, Buddhist salvation in Bhik-
schu’s account also requires the fulfillment of the traditional Protestant tenet that
foresees the path to salvation through individual agency.
A second feature of Schultze’s reading, which further corroborates the
implicit underpinning of Protestant precepts in his account of Buddhism,
responds to another common distress for the era’s thinkers: the predomi-
nance of a socioeconomic model—industrial capitalism—that sanctions the
accumulation of individual material wealth as the primary source of symbolic
capital in the social marketplace. In a straightforward assault on Western-style
capitalism, Schultze explains how Indian tradition calls for the outright rejec-
tion of material well-being, “which forms the basis of the most idiosyncratic
aspect of Indian religious life, namely asceticism through renouncement of
everyone that escalates even further to positive self-torment.”50 The retrench-
ment of Protestant austerity—the hallmark of the lifestyle that Schultze
zealously practiced both privately and professionally—in an era of material
lack (worker classes) and overabundance (industrial capitalists) seemed in his
mind to mark modern life. In consequence, Buddhism’s purported inher-
ent rejection of material gain seemed to provide the antidote to the spiritual
poison that a socioeconomic survival-of-the-fittest paradigm had inflicted on
European culture and society.
Yet to make the case for a Protestant-like Buddhism, which could revise the
unremitting materialistic motivations upon which industrial capitalism depended
and equally preserve the Protestant tenets of obligation and duty in the com-
munity that Schultze so diligently practiced, he needed to refute one of the
common reproaches made against Buddhism by many Western thinkers of
the era: it’s purported rejection of earthly life—the rebuke of human agency
in the community—or as Seydel had put it a decade earlier, Buddhism’s intrinsic
“live and let live.”51 Schultze resolutely disputes this assessment of Buddhist tenets
and insists that such disparaging views result from “inverted Christian prejudices”
and were intended to erect an impenetrable barrier to the proper understanding
of Buddhist teachings.52 Specifically, the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, seen by
many Western thinkers as proof in the pudding for Buddhism’s life-denouncing
Weltanschauung, does not cultivate worldly rejection, in Schultze’s view, nor deter
community building. In fact, the opposite is the case: “Indeed Nirvana, also
insofar as it is attainable in life, is described and praised as tranquility, though
it should not therefore be understood as Quietism, as the tendency to inactiv-
ity, flaccidness, and lethargy of spirit and body, rather it means peace of mind,
serenity of spirit with respect to suffering and the joys of life, self-control and the
absence of passion.”53 In Schultze’s account, Buddhism’s goal of meditative quiet
and tranquility does not correlate to passivity—an unthinkable characteristic for a
flourishing Protestant identity construct—rather it refers to an untroubled state
of mind vis-à-vis earthly suffering and the temptation of life’s pleasures. Nirvana,
in Schultze’s account, teaches self-control and disinterest for the material world,
both required for peace of mind in confronting the world’s commotion, yet does
not necessitate rejection of the world. Thus Schultze reformulates the purported
Buddhist precept of worldly renunciation to redound to the Protestant tenets of
self-control and a dispassionate fulfillment of duty.
As Schultze continues, he shifts his logic to more common philosophical idi-
oms of the era. Subjective idealism, a derivative of Hegel’s philosophical model
and Schleiermacher’s subjective theology, and moreover the bedrock of more
modern Protestant precepts, he argues, was nothing new to Buddhism:54
It already existed prior to Buddhism, but within it obtained not only a broader
empirical substantiation, but also came to full appreciation for the first time.
Because while it was in earlier times only the basis for the desire for salvation from
the chains of individualism, or at least constituted its framework, which made this
salvation appear desirable. It also now became the means, even in this life, to quiet
the mind and to strengthen the spirit. Here I run of course into a stubborn Euro-
pean prejudice, which wishes to make Buddhism appear as a religion of doleful,
powerless, and dispirited Weltschmerz. With great injustice!55
For Schultze, Western philosophical models initiate only individual recogni-

tion of the need for salvation but not the means to generate beneficial change
in spiritual praxis that Buddhism engenders. Specifically, in Schultze’s account,
the Buddhist form of subjective idealism comes to full fruition to soothe the soul
and strengthen the spirit—prerequisites in his view for revitalizing human spiri-
tuality and, in turn, the community. Moreover, Schultze again denounces those
European interpretations that rail against Buddhism as a religion of indifference,
powerless to affect positive transformations in the community, a complaint that
Neumann also echoes: “Whenever something new, great, and original appears,
there will never be a shortage of people, who will confront it, combat it, and pos-
sibly would like to suppress it, because they do not understand it or they do not
want to understand it.”56 Importantly, as Schultze explains, salvation comes to
full fruition in Buddhism through a process of introspection, also a common fea-
ture of traditional Protestant Christianity, a view that Neumann again expresses:57
“Just like a small branch from the old Bodhi tree was brought to Ceylon and was
planted, there though it grew and flourished and developed over 2,000 years into
a wonderful tree on earth that still lives and blossoms today.”58 Thus introspection
in Christianity had failed to fully develop.
For these Buddhist acolytes, Buddhism’s model of subjective idealism does not
reject the shared aims of worldly engagement but rather fosters those aspirations
that prompt community building. As Schultze explains, the individual quest for
salvation in the Buddhist ascetic model engenders “sympathy and good will . . .
towards fellow human beings as collectivity, and the awareness of solidarity, the
indispensable foundation for the improvement of the social conditions and cir-
cumstances in the present.”59 Here the socioeconomic ramifications of Schultze’s
Protestant-Buddhist community become most sharply defined. The Buddhism
that Schultze envisions serves as the vehicle for righting the tilted socioeconomic
ship and, at the same time, reconstitutes community solidarity.
Noteworthy in Schultze’s corrective vision for the pervasive imbalances in

Wilhelmine Germany, is the apparent lack of any class consciousness. In fact,
Schultze never acknowledges class in any fashion, which suggests that, despite
the potential class repercussions of such Buddhist social readings, these Bud-
dhist acolytes remained elitist thinkers. That is, they envisioned a diminution
of material culture in Europe that would result in a more equitable social world
without relinquishing their own privileged sociocultural status as civilized (gebil-
det) human beings. Specifically, Schultze foresaw a religious/spiritual revolution
that would correct the inequalities of an unjust socioeconomic model yet con-
veniently preserves the stable parameters of class definition. This loyal civil
servant of the Kaiser could not imagine a social revolutionary model for the
people. His Protestant-Buddhism remained locked away in an ivory tower
reserved for Germany’s elite thinkers and was never intended to invalidate
the sociocultural distinctions of class difference or design a new community
based on human equality.
Schultze’s statements above are his most concrete formulations for transform-
ing his ideas into praxis.60 That task would be left for others. In fact, Schultze
seems to intellectually squirm when other India experts accuse him of being a
Buddhist convert. Perhaps the grip of his Protestant cultural heritage was too
powerful to allow full acknowledgement or conversion. Schultze rebuffs, for
example, von Schroeder’s designation of both Schultze and Neumann as “apostles
of Buddhism” and his more pointed depiction of Schultze as a converted, pros-
elytizing “Buddhist.” Despite Schultze’s rejection of von Schroeder’s allegations,
he does not hesitate to set the religious ranking order straight: “However even if
it does not enter my mind to want to work as a Buddhist missionary, I am nev-
ertheless of the opinion that if one compares Buddhism and Christianity with
impartiality, if one considers both as actualities of human cultural history and
inquires about the values that both of these religions have had for the welfare of
humanity, one must rate Buddhism significantly higher than Christianity.”61 Such
categorical evaluations of Buddhism’s superiority vis-à-vis Christianity also reso-
nate clearly with Neumann, who articulates his account of progressive religious
history to redound to Buddhism: “The exalted founder of Christianity preached
to us Occidentals the new law for the first time, to love our neighbor as ourselves,
yes, to even sacrifice our own lives for him: the Indian, who feels united with
nature’s entirety, extended this limitless love to all living things.”62 Here Neu-
mann unreservedly acknowledges the Christian precept of brotherly love as the
foundation for an ideal community in which all human beings are willing to sac-
rifice themselves for others. Yet Christian love, as Neumann describes it, affords
only a step in the right direction, albeit a major one, for reestablishing harmony
in the world—to reforge a balanced symmetry between the spiritual and objec-
tive worlds. Indians, in Neumann’s reading, who possess the deepest empathy
for nature, were able to project this limitless love just as Christ first extended it
to all living beings. Yet material science and Darwinian hermeneutics in Europe
proved to be a formidable foe in German Buddhism’s attempts to reconstitute a
more harmonious worldview in which empirical science and a socioeconomic
model based on industrial capitalism might better acknowledge and foster human
subjectivity. Another German Buddhist of the era, Dahlke, took the charge to
relieve the modern subject of that burden.
Paul Dahlke: Biology and Faith Are the Same!

Paul Dahlke, like Schultze, was an armchair Indologist, but unlike Schul-
tze, he travelled to Ceylon at least seven times, learned Pali, and in 1924, just
four years before his death, founded a Buddhist center in Berlin-Frohnau. By
training, Dahlke was a successful medical doctor and herbalist in Berlin, which
provided the financial means for his travels and his Buddhist hobbies. Unsurpris-
ingly, Dahlke’s texts on Buddhism reveal the same cultural concerns that we have
explored in Schultze and Neumann and thus corroborate the common themes
underlying this version of Germany’s turn to the East. Yet because of Dahlke’s
medical training—educated in the natural sciences and medicine—his account
of Buddhism provides more comprehensive insight into the conflicts between
science and religion during the era and how these India experts sought to resolve
them through their readings of Indian traditions.63
In his pamphlet-length text from 1912, The Meaning of Buddhism for Our
Times, Dahlke prefaces his thought in two important ways. First, he too under-
scores the same social ills that Schultze and others emphasized, and bemoans the
continuing difficulty for European thinkers to create an effective Weltanschauung
in response.64 Dahlke follows Schultze’s thematic rubric by tracing the causes of
these maladies to the overwhelming materialism of the era: “This blind struggle
for existence, these continuing new goods of civilization, with which a highly
developed and never resting technology showers us, estranges us ever more, mak-
ing individual introspection, and solitude almost impossible.”65 Here Dahlke
describes the disoriented modern subject in familiar terms, as stranger to the
self, who under the barrage of modern materialism (Güter der Zivilisation) and
the uninterrupted pace of technological development—a notable viewpoint for a
physician who profited from many of those advances—is no longer incapable of
achieving any sort of inner solitude.66
Second, Dahlke describes “the more decidedly open split between belief and
science,”67 in which “the one seeks to assuage the afflictions of reasoning through
belief in a soul and God, the other in the cool calculations of a strictly mechani-
cal worldview.”68 That is, Christian doctrine’s present form—faith in an eternal
soul and God—stands juxtaposed to science, with its complete dependence
on mechanical calculation. As a result, Western religious tradition has failed in
Dahlke’s mind to formulate effective responses to the severe challenges posed
by historical hermeneutics and the materialistic view of human life. Moreover,
science remains harnessed by its dependence on the insular computations of a
mechanical worldview and thus restricts acknowledgement of the spiritual human
subject—an essential failure in Dahlke’s view for generating fuller knowledge of
the world. How to resolve this bias in both models—the exclusive material results
in objective science on the one hand and on the other, spirituality sanctioned
only by faith without the input of human cognition—underlies Dahlke’s Bud-
dhist ascetic.
Dahlke’s Buddhist model then attempts to reconstitute human subjectivity

by relinking human mind—spirit—and the modern scientific paradigm. In the
preface to Buddhism as Worldview (1912), Dahlke sets the parameters for that task
by categorically declaring the failure of Western philosophy—implicitly Christian
doctrine—and modern science to generate a cohesive and valid worldview: “After
philosophy, in its attempt to construct a worldview singly from pure thought,
collapsed under the weight of its own insignificance, the natural sciences made
themselves the bearer of a worldview and attempted, contrary to philosophy, to
realize it by ignoring human subjectivity, an attempt that despite all of its grandi-
osity always must fail, because the problem of integrating the human subject into
this worldview remains irresolvable.”69 Importantly, as Dahlke sees it, modern
philosophy and science have progressively folded under the weight of their own
insignificance because they have neglected to account for the human spirit in
their worldviews. Moreover, objective science proves by definition incapable of
doing so—the empirical model, as Dahlke views it, precludes the consideration
of human subjectivity.70
Thus the artificial division of the material and spiritual worlds hinders the
establishment of a seamless worldview that can incorporate the fullness of human
subjectivity. In response, Dahlke rhetorically asks how belief and science can be
considered as separate domains “when indeed both emanate from one and the
same circumstances of the world?”71 For Dahlke, as his rhetorical question sug-
gests, both science and belief are tangible phenomena. This appears perhaps quite
logical for scientific models and their results. Yet, according to the Buddhist phy-
sician, science and belief correspond methodologically because they both derive
their explanatory power mechanistically. As a result, science maintains authority
in the physical world only: “Science is in its classical sense always strictly materi-
alistic, and its notion of world processes is always strictly mechanistic.” Belief in
its present form, like science, applies a similar mechanistic model for establishing
modes of faith. To justify this argument, Dahlke explains that from this perspec-
tive belief “must present the world, even insofar as it is merely a coincidence, as
guided by a divine power.”72 Thus belief de facto hinges on a dualistic model of
God and humanity that German Buddhists rejected and sought to rectify. To
put the analogy more boldly, Western forms of Christian religious faith have also
become mechanistic, like modern science, and thus fail to foster a worldview that
can consummate the physical and the spiritual domains.
A quick glance at the table of contents of Buddhism as Worldview corrobo-
rates this contention. The first sections of the book explore belief and science in
broader terms before Dahlke addresses in individual chapters the important fields
of the natural sciences (physics, physiology, and biology) that as a trained medi-
cal doctor, he applied in his daily professional practice. Yet at the same time, he
deplored medical science because its results in his view clashed with his spiritual
sensibilities. That is, modern science treated the human being as a biological
object with little consideration for a more holistic approach, which would include
the inner state of human well-being. Modern biology, to Dahlke’s disdain, fails
to account for anything that is empirically unverifiable or intangible—what he
and many others viewed as the bias of a materialistic worldview—and thus proves
incapable to resolve the more essential questions of being and life.
These questions, which Ernst Haeckel also addressed in his widely popu-
lar book from 1899, Die Welträtsel (riddle of the universe), continues to baffle
modern science, as Dahlke explains: “Both inexplicable wonders from a scien-
tific stance—death, i.e. the apparent disappearance of energy on the one hand,
birth on the other—here dissolve into a single concept: Coming into being here
necessitates decay there.”73 In other words, science fails to adequately decode the
enigma of life because of its exclusive dependence on empirical observation and
its omission of the accumulated individual processes of becoming a self.
To make his case for correcting such unbalanced and biased analytical
approaches, Dahlke begins his discussion in Buddhism as Worldview by acknowl-
edging the increased scientific expertise gained by the study of physical processes
of procreation and genetic descent (Deszedenztheorie). Yet scientific results remain
deficient as an explanatory mechanism for these biological phenomena because of
science’s emphasis on physical and spiritual duality: “As one gifted with conscious-
ness I am unique, a unity, better a nonduality, and herein lies the reason why the
scientific answer never suffices and never can suffice. Inheritance demands for
one being to be unequivocally traceable back to another.”74 As Dahlke sees it,
biological science considers physical processes only as a chain of interconnected
events, from which he acknowledges a deeper understanding of the biological
mechanics of procreation. Yet the more critical question remains unaddressed:
“How is it possible that a human, living being can develop from a single cell is
not even referenced through this model.”75 In other words, scientific study does
not consider the energy source of life that initiates and propels this continuous
chain of biological events.
The ongoing debates on Darwinian theories of descent resonate here clearly,
yet in this context Dahlke addresses an even thornier issue for intellectuals
attempting to circumvent what they viewed as the scientific assault on human
spirituality. Specifically, Dahlke opines that modern understandings of Darwin-
ian evolution relate only remotely to Darwin’s original theory of natural selection,
and “survival of the most adapted.”76 Without providing any tangible rationale
for his contention, Dahlke merely concludes that evolution has been so construed
by many thinkers of the era in order to preserve the human hope of progress and a
better future life: “The human being must have something to hold onto in facing
the horrible wasteland of infinity; he must have something which points beyond
this life, to which he can link this life to something whole.”77 In other words,
as Dahlke further conjectures, during a time when the Bible no longer seemed
to provide a safe haven for confronting life’s hardships, nor was able to main-
tain the doctrinal credibility of a promised afterlife, then at least a worldview
based on progress (evolution) seemed for many the next best thing.78 Progress
replaced the spiritual security provided by Christianity’s promise of eternal life
in a flawless afterworld.
Thus Christian modes of salvation, though still socioculturally intact for
some, were dismissed by Dahlke as deficient. To explain, Dahlke concludes, in a
further idiosyncratic analytical twist, that evolutionary biology, here constructed
as a progressive history of development, can be explicitly linked to the same

ideological underpinnings of belief—Christian faith: “In the fact that science
as biology is at all capable of appropriating the model of development in the
form of evolutionary theory, and of working with it, shows its deep, essential
commonality with belief. Because where development in this sense takes place,
there is beginning; where there is beginning, there is an absolute; where there is
an absolute, there is belief.”79 That is, the chain of biological events that science
depicts chronologically is essentially comparable to the temporal link established
in the Christian worldview between creation and an absolute (God), which per
definition presumes belief—faith in a divine being. In other words, both biology
and faith, in Dahlke’s unconventional assessment, manifest a similar analytical
basis because both depend on evolution—progress (Entwicklungsgedanken)—for
determining knowledge—empirical results on the one hand and faith in God on
the other.
Importantly, as we have already seen, models of progressive history, either in
terms of science or religion, when established as the essential factor for generating
knowledge of the world, can be easily reconstructed to assert relative value. For
example, some applied Darwin’s evolutionary model as a measurement apparatus
for determining the relative progress of one species versus another—a biological
cultural relativism applied to societies and races—with similar applications in the
models of hermeneutical historical progression that we have already seen among
other India experts. The era’s socioeconomic survival of the fittest models, most
notably formulated by the British thinker Herbert Spencer and other Darwinian
derivatives, have been well documented.80 Yet in a surprising inference, Dahlke
maintains that the evolutionary-based determination of biological relative value
is no different than the assertion of one belief system’s superiority over another.
Specifically, this extraordinary correlation between mechanistic science and belief
in a divine being undermines any contention of cultural relative value: “To hold
one period of the world as more developed than another is a childish point of view.
Every moment shows singularly through its being, that it is the form of adapta-
tion, which in this moment is the only possible and necessary one!”81 Here, in the
world of cultural comparison and appraisal, Dahlke levels the playing field for
assessing Christian tradition vis-à-vis other religious models.
Moreover, in Dahlke’s view, the relative determination of value both in a sci-
entific and religious sense is deficient because neither religious faith nor empirical
science conveys any meaning about the essence of being. That is, both Western
science—exclusively materialistic—and Western religion—belief in a distinct
and separate divinity—provide only skewed human knowledge because of
their biases. Neither empirical results nor faith in a higher being can provide
any insight about the source and substance of life energy—which is grounded,
according to Dahlke, in individual consciousness.82 Thus each living being, and
in turn each community, attains and preserves distinction and cultural “value”
only through the unique individual harmony of body and spirit, which has been
artificially divided and fragmented by science and Christianity’s model of faith.
This disjunct can be reconciled only through what Dahlke refers to in his reading
of Buddhism as understanding (Begreifen) of the self.
Reconstituting the Self

For Dahlke, understanding (Begreifen) denotes the “inner” processes of human
consciousness, which precondition all functions in the physical world. In Bud-
dhism as Worldview, Dahlke explains this link in biological terms: “In consciousness
the individual experiences through introspection, intuition in oneself, that the
energy upon which one is grounded, is not ‘enduring in itself,’ not a ‘soul,’ but
rather in each moment springs open anew from its preconditions, according to its
preconditions. One experiences in one’s self, in one’s feelings, in one’s conscience,
that this power embodies a new biological value in each moment of being.”83
That is, the energy force though which we become conscious of ourselves is not
a soul, nor something enduring as it would have been understood in a Christian
worldview, but rather a manifestation of an uninterrupted process of coming into
being (neu Aufspringendes)—incessant renewal, or sublation, to put it in Hegelian
terms. Importantly, Dahlke elaborates what he refers to as the “Ich-Prozess,” or
intuition (Inschau), which he derives from the Buddhist precept of Kamma.84
He explains that through Kamma the human being experiences the self (feel-
ings, emotions, conscience), which continuously generates new biological matter.
In other words, in Dahlke’s cumbersome Kantian reading of Buddhism, human
consciousness produces the objective world.
To make this case, Dahlke argues that Buddhism rejects the “physical” concept
of a soul, the foundation of Christianity’s model of salvation. Rather Dahlke
redefines the soul as an energy force, or as “Kamma,” that becomes manifest in
the individual human being (Ich-Prozess): “Every living being exists on the basis of
his own unique and distinct individual energy.”85 Shifting the focus from the Chris-
tian soul to an energy force that is present in every individual human being has
two important consequences for Dahlke’s thought. First, it allows him to retract
the problematic concept of Christian duality—the strict separation of God and
human beings, ever so similar to the disconcerting division of the physical and
spiritual worlds, which in the minds of these Buddhist acolytes formed the crux of
the Western inability to effectively update its worldview. Yet the rebuff of Chris-
tian duality points to a more important second consequence. By emphasizing the
unity of the spiritual and physical worlds in the Buddhist concept of Kamma—
the energy of the social order—salvation no longer necessarily depends on an
external force—God. Rather it derives from human consciousness, as Dahlke
explains: “‘Consciousness comes into being in dependence on individuality; in
dependence on consciousness individuality comes into being.’ Because inherent
energy is indeed something that exists only in dependence upon its substance, as
opposed to a transcendental universal energy.”86 In Dahlke’s circular argument,
consciousness—individual awareness of being in the world—is interdependent
with the social order. Moreover, this inherent energy of the individual (Inkraft) is
no longer defined as an inaccessible transcendental universal power—noumena,
to put it in Kantian terms—separate from the physical world, but rather is inte-
grally linked with and part and parcel of the objective world.
Notably, Dahlke’s depiction of the inner self sounds strikingly familiar
to Schultze’s version of the Buddhist ascetic. By reinscribing the power of the
individual mind—the inner self in their Buddhist terminology—to establish

harmony between the spiritual and physical worlds, Dahlke’s Buddhism also
necessarily reconstitutes the symbolic capital of the individual thinker who has
remastered “introspection”—an updated version of Protestant salvation in the
age of material science. In other words, this unique link between the inner self
and the objective world that had gradually become the foundation for intellec-
tual status since the Reformation and Enlightenment also serves Dahlke as the
means to resolve the purported cleft between human spirituality and material
standards for determining knowledge in the world—a recalibration of intellec-
tual agency in the community. In fact, Dahlke asserts that the spiritual discord
of the modern subject will be mitigated through the power of the individual
to recognize one’s own agency: “Once I have understood that all that I do, say,
and think come into effect through me, then in turn such automatic inhibitions
in the free play of energies will rise again, that were lost with the dwindling of
faith.”87 In other words, in Dahlke’s reading of Buddhist precepts, the human
capability to “introspect” and thereby come into harmony with the social order
becomes the intellectual vehicle for reforging human spirituality in the commu-
nity after Christian faith’s nineteenth-century demise. In this reading, Buddhism
corrects the skewed knowledge of the human being that has been generated by
empirical science, with its purported disregard for human subjectivity. Moreover,
Buddhism also rectifies the inherent biases of religious faith that discount human
cognition’s spiritual relevance by reformulating the Protestant model of intro-
spection in Buddhist garb as the critical avenue for establishing knowledge about
the world.
Yet in order for a reconstituted individual harmony within the social order
to contribute to the symbolic capital of intellectual identity, it must also gener-
ate tangible consequences in the world as a Protestant worldview called for—a
model of community consensus that establishes accepted norms of behavior. In
Dahlke’s reading, Buddhist doctrine “yields a natural morality that no longer has
its roots in the quicksand of feelings, as does every morality based on belief, but
rather in the cool and secure depth of understanding.”88 That is, the modern sub-
ject’s introspective understanding produces a natural ethical system of behavior
without the imposition of a doctrinal code of conduct enforced by a Church or
priestly authority. Here, in a move intended to instill Buddhism as the corrective
antidote to Christianity’s outdated precepts in the Second Empire, Dahlke posits
that Christian tenets derive solely from the emotional sphere and are invariably
linked with human desire and its suppression and thus produce only moral beliefs
(Glaubensmoral). As a result, the Christian worldview proves unable to reestab-
lish the coveted harmony between the mundane and the spiritual world that
Buddhist introspection purportedly does. Moreover, Dahlke implicitly criticizes
modern Christianity’s inability to bolster the human being’s inner capacity for
understanding the world and thereby fulfilling Kant’s Enlightenment maxim,
“Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!”89
What makes these readings of Buddhism so Protestant? The answer lies in
their Buddhist reinscription of the Protestant modes of salvation as individual
cognitive agency. In other words, these Buddhist thinkers place the burden of
salvation—individual spirituality that is in tune with the social order (Kamma)—

squarely on the shoulders of human mind, to put it in more modern terms.
Protestant introspection, in their Buddhist model, becomes reformulated as indi-
vidual inner harmony with the physical world. Moreover, as we would expect
in a Protestant account of Buddhism, effective individual introspection carries
ramifications for the community that redound to the sociocultural agency of
Wilhelmine intellectuals. That is, individual understanding—a task implicitly
reserved for those with special intellectual capacity—generates the moral fabric
of any functioning society and in turn fosters community consensus. In this Bud-
dhist model, introspective thinkers recapture their symbolic capital, which had
become jeopardized under the utilitarian pressures of industrial capitalism and
empirical science’s degrading account of human life. As Dahlke explains, “It is the
unmitigated individual responsibility that forces each human being to morality,
and Buddhism is the true human religion, because it shows human beings that
they are individually responsible beings.”90 In Dahlke’s reading, the individual
becomes exclusively responsible for attaining salvation—spiritual agency—and
generating a model for demarcating moral behavior in the community—just as
we might expect in a Protestant worldview. Dahlke, like Schultze, reads Bud-
dhism to redound to the foundations of endangered Protestant precepts that had
become beleaguered, in their view, by Christian theology’s capitulation to the
pressures of a materialistic paradigm. Buddhism, as Dahlke summarizes more
boldly, is the only religion among all worldviews and philosophies that generates
a true moral, it embodies “the function of understanding”91 and, most impor-
tantly, it alleviates the incessant pressures of life’s struggle, it “soothes, it relieves
the stress from the battle for survival.”92
Thus Dahlke’s Buddhism, similar to the Buddhist narratives of Schultze
and Neumann, serves as a potential vehicle to resolve what seemed for many at
the turn of the century as an irreparable fissure between a worldview based on
modern empirical science and traditional definitions of religion and spirituality.
Specifically, Dahlke models the purported ideological conflict between religion
and empirical science to show how the bond between human spirituality and
the material world can be reforged through a Buddhist worldview. Yet, notewor-
thy and again similar to Schultze, Dahlke’s account of the Buddhist ascetic also
reveals the implicit underpinnings of Protestant precepts—standards of behavior
that had been forged by community consensus and constituted the formula for
distinction of Germany’s intellectual class. In other words, Dahlke’s Buddhism
shrewdly reconstitutes his Protestant identity—not in the denominational sense
but as a source for reinvigorating the symbolic capital of the introspective thinker
in the social marketplace, which for many intellectuals had come under severe
pressure in the Second Empire.
Such reassertions of intellectual status in the Kaiserreich were based on the
notion that German intellectual practitioners of the Buddhist ascetic could
reunify human spirituality and empirical science. Moreover, in the case of these
India experts, their constructed Buddhism provided the source for reconfiguring
the identity construct of the Wilhelmine Protestant intellectual as the keeper of the
key to life’s spiritual riddle in this world. Yet this reconstruction of intellectual
identity was not limited to the German Buddhists. Other thinkers of the era,
like the theosophist Franz Hartmann, whom we have already briefly met in the
introductory pages of this chapter, offers a different twist with remarkably similar
results to the project of intellectual rejuvenation during the Second Empire.
Franz Hartmann’s Theosophical India

The sociocultural anxieties that occupied Germany’s Buddhist acolytes—spiritual
discord and material views of human life sanctioned in their minds by both mod-
ern science and newer economic models—also resonate clearly in the work of
the theosophist Franz Hartmann. In the very first volume of the Lotusblüthen in
1893, a theosophical journal that Hartmann founded and edited, he writes in
the introductory essay: “The Question: ‘What is God?’ dissolves thus into the
question: ‘What am I?’”93 Here, in no uncertain terms, Hartmann dramatically
inverts Christian duality—the separation of the divine and the mundane—in his
claim that God is embodied within the essence of the human being. That is, God
does not exist in an inaccessible sphere, noumena in Kantian terms, but rather
the divine is explicitly manifest within the human spirit. Hartmann explains,
“Because when God is omnipresent, he is also in us, and we then only need
to become acquainted with the truth in our own being, in order to recognize
God.”94 In consequence, Hartmann’s theosophical worldview, as we have seen
among Germany’s Buddhists, reforges human sociocultural status as an embodi-
ment, rather than just a constructed image, of the divine—a grander depiction of
the human being than the Christian worldview offers. Thus in this chapter’s final
section I want to briefly explore Hartmann’s theosophical version for reasserting
the spiritual integrity of the human being to further corroborate the decisive
turn to India by some of Germany’s elite thinkers in search of spiritual rejuvena-
tion. Yet more critically, I want to show how Hartmann’s theosophical model
entered new territory for reinscribing intellectual agency than what we have so
far seen among Germany’s Buddhist acolytes. Specifically, Hartmann’s theosophy
envisioned the reconstitution of an elite class of thinkers—a redefined spiritual
class—who form a universal brotherhood and possess special insight into the
depths of spiritual secrets.
This brief section is not intended by any means to provide a full account
of the theosophical movement in Germany. Rather I want to reconstruct the
similarities between these various fringe religious innovators as they attempted
to formulate an updated spiritual vision for the Second Empire that was clearly
linked to the spiritual rejuvenation of the individual modern subject. Yet, most
importantly, Franz Hartmann’s theosophical model responded more overtly to
the perceived threat to the cultural identity of Germany’s intellectual elite by
subtly laying the ideological groundwork for a new class of elite thinkers with
special access to the spiritual secrets purportedly embedded in all religions. Thus
Hartmann’s theosophical framework provides an important foreground for the
more extreme forms of religious innovation that gradually began to appear at
the turn of the century. Specifically, Hartmann’s attempt to reconstitute indi-
vidual spirituality in an age of materialism took on powerful new definitions for
constructing intellectual identity and thus provides a fruitful backdrop to the

more extreme forms of occult religion that so easily melded with the prerogatives
of aggressive nationalist politics in some cases and the excessive proclamations of
Aryan brotherhood for the German nation in others.
Hartmann (1838–1912) was born to a Catholic family in Donauwörth in
central Bavaria. Soon his family moved to Kempten, a small town located in the
southwestern Bavarian region of Algäu.95 His Catholic upbringing, according to
Hartmann’s fellow theosophist and artist friend Walter Einbeck, influenced him
immensely and sparked his deep interest in the mystical secrets of Church rit-
ual—a fascination that accompanied him throughout his life.96 After completing
his studies as a pharmacist in Munich in 1862, he traveled to the United States
where he studied medicine in St. Louis and became a US citizen. Upon complet-
ing his medical training, he found employment at an eye clinic in St. Louis but
soon became dissatisfied with his medical work. The next period of his life by
any standard of measure was that of a vagabond. He studied American Indian
heritage in Mexico; spent time in New Orleans, where he was introduced to
American spiritualism; then bought a ranch in Texas, where he settled and mar-
ried. His new wife soon became ill and died after only seven months of marriage,
after which Hartmann sold everything and left.
His precise travels here become a bit sketchy, but at any rate his attraction
to the emerging esoteric religions of the era consistently spurred his curiosity.
Yet here too, similar to his earlier religious experiences as well as his professional
ones, Hartmann quickly found the new mysterious forms of American spiritual-
ism equally dissatisfying. At some point during his sojourn in the United States
though, Hartmann had been introduced to Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled,
which according to Einbeck had a powerful influence on Hartmann’s spiritual
explorations. As a result, he joined the American theosophical society and in
1883 travelled to Madras (Chennai), India, the emerging center of theosophical
study, as a representative of Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), who along with
Blavatsky was cofounder of and a primary player in the movement.97 Hartmann
remained in India for two years, absorbing the ancient wisdom of the Indian
pundits, during which time his fascination with Blavatsky’s teachings deepened.
In April 1885, Hartmann accompanied Blavatsky on a trip to Europe and his
childhood home, Kempten. At the time he planned to return to India but was
convinced to become the director of a tuberculosis clinic in Hallein, Austria, near
Salzburg. As fate would have it for this inquisitive vagabond, he would never
leave Europe again, devoting the remaining 27 years of his life to the German
theosophical movement.
The Coalescence of Love and Understanding: Theosophy’s

“Secret Doctrine” and Introspection Revisited
Hartmann, like Germany’s Buddhist acolytes, underscores in his work the spiri-
tual discord in modern life, which he viewed to be the result of the artificial
incongruity between the rational and spiritual domains in modern European cul-
ture: “Love without reason is blind and reason without love remains in the dark.
Nobody can create the light of truth from within; one attains it only when it is
inwardly revealed.”98 Here, the terminology may differ slightly from what we
have seen in Schultze and Dahlke, but the sentiment confirms their concurrence
about the state of affairs. The modern human being, as Hartmann elaborates, is
doomed to continuously flounder in the dark by pursuing insight through love
without understanding—the spiritual without the rational—or the reverse, scien-
tific wisdom detached from the spiritual.
Hartmann then, like Dahlke, whose training in the natural sciences gave him
particular insight into their practical applications, did not view scientific advance
as trivial.99 Hartmann indeed acknowledged the scientific progress made during
the era in his medical practice: “Certainly, the ‘exact’ sciences have made great
advances.” Yet, as we might expect, the progress of the natural sciences, according
to Hartmann, remain inadequate—an inept source for tapping into the essence
of being: “Yet due to the fact that the entirety of nature itself is just appearance
(Maya), an image in the mirror of eternity, thus all of science refers to the appear-
ance and not to the underlying true and real being.”100 Thus Hartmann concedes
the material benefits of scientific progress, but adamantly rejects its contribution
to uncovering and understanding the essence of human life. That is, science “has
no positive value for the individual recognition of the eternal and unalterable.”101
In other words, as Hartmann describes in metaphorical terms, scientific study
and its results remain bogged down in its “physical appearance, not the inhabit-
ants of the house, but rather the house in which he lives.”102 In Hartmann’s view,
to borrow a different metaphor, science is prone to judge the book by its cover.
Yet this purported deficiency in how science knows the world points to the
more critical concern underlying Hartmann’s work—his sense of spiritual dis-
harmony during the era, or specifically the breakdown in the stable identity
construct of the modern subject. For Hartmann, as we have seen among Ger-
many’s Buddhists, his sense of spiritual disharmony and how to fix it consistently
guide his thought. To rejuvenate human spiritual identity, however, required an
updated sociocultural model for reunifying the spiritual and physical spheres—a
new paradigm for establishing community consensus in modern Wilhelmine cul-
ture, intended here to reconstitute the symbolic capital of Germany’s intellectual
community in the Second Empire.
In 1894, Hartmann wrote an essay on a much-discussed topic of the day,
Freemasonry, a subject that we have already encountered in the life and work of
Seydel. Hartmann’s depiction of this cryptic faith provides unique insight into
his understanding of the requisite cultural framework for fostering a new model
of community consensus based on a revitalized intellectual agency. Hartmann
begins his account by linking Freemasonry to the occult East, because of its
similar tenets:103 “The liberation of the spirit from selfishness, intolerance, and
ignorance, the liberation from the limitations which fear, self-centeredness and
false perceptions and desires have burdened the human spirit with, and which
are connected to the low materialistic nature of man, to the intellectual animal
in a human being.”104 That is, Freemasonry unfetters the individual human spirit
from those self-centered attributes and the hollow satisfaction of material desire
generated by modern culture. Though somewhat camouflaged here, Hartmann
stresses the emancipation of human spirituality, which has been stifled by the pre-
dominance of material knowledge—science—for “knowing” the human being.
Specifically, Freemasonry emboldens individual spirituality as such, which “leads
to that worldview that is the oldest, which modern science aspires toward, and
which must be and remain the final one.”105 Thus Freemasonry’s liberating power
refocuses human epistemology on the essence of human life, which stands in
stark opposition to a scientific model of knowing the world that centers solely on
the physical. Notably, in Hartmann’s ostentatious assessment, this newly unveiled
epistemic framework “must” remain irrevocable (endgültig).
Importantly for Hartmann, and a central tenet of theosophy, Freemasonry
does not maintain a monopoly on generating the requisite freedoms to rejuve-
nate human spirituality. All religions embody what theosophists referred to as
the “secret doctrine.” That is, Freemasonry, all Christian faiths, and other world
religions manifest a spiritual essence at the core, but, to borrow Hartmann’s
metaphor, this absolute spiritual nucleus is contained by each religion in a dif-
ferent house.106 As Hartmann elaborates, “This true and real Freemasonry is
also taught in all religious systems that are based on truth; indeed this edifica-
tion, this awakening of the divine self-confidence in the physical human being,
through which the son of the earth becomes a son of heaven, in whom the high-
est ideal becomes realized, is the ultimate purpose and the single goal of any true
religion.”107 That is, Freemasonry and all religions, each in their idiosyncratic
form, offer a vehicle through which human beings can awaken their divine self-
consciousness while in this world and not in a promised afterlife. Thus the human
being who regains access to spirituality’s cryptic core, as Hartmann depicts it,
becomes the “son of heaven,” within whom the most divine ideals become mani-
fest. Here Hartmann subtly depicts the link between the individual powers of
introspection—self-consciousness of the divine that we have also seen among
Germany’s Buddhists—and common religious precepts across all traditions.
Hartmann continues his explanation in terms that Wilhelmine Buddhists
would have clearly understood: “This ‘edification,’ about which this is concerned,
is the construction of the temple of truth and comes to being through the rev-
elation of truth. The temple of wisdom is the inner human being himself, in
whom the truth reveals itself.”108 That is, only through the inner processes of
the human individual—introspection—can “real” knowledge (Wahrheit) become
uncovered and accessed. Yet, in Hartmann’s model, the human comprehension
of this purported “truth” carries even more powerful consequences. According
to Hartmann, human cognizance of God occurs only through the recognition
of the divine in one’s inner being. In other words, in Hartmann’s worldview,
the theosophical adept discovers God in the self—or in the human ego, to put
it in more modern terms. Thus introspection—self-identification—becomes
the highest ideal of human life, as he explains: “Therefore God is the highest
ideal of humanity and this ideal can only become realized in human beings in that
he becomes God himself. Yet when the essence of things is God, then the human
being is also already according to his true being like God and no longer needs to
become God; it only concerns him to really recognize that which is divine nature
in him, namely his true essence.”109 In this radical and iconoclastic teleology lies
the critical underpinning for reconstituting Hartmann’s theosophical adept—a

person who “perceives the truth in himself as his own essence, and this essence as
God, because the divine self-recognition of the human being in God (theosophy)
and the recognition of God in the human being is one and the same.”110 Here,
the disoriented modern subject regains the spiritual status—the human being
embodies the divine—that had depreciated under the pressure of empirical sci-
ence and the failed doctrinal responses of established Western religious traditions.
Yet in order to forge a new framework for reestablishing community consen-
sus Hartmann’s theosophical model still required a more grounded philosophical
argument to affirm the reunification of the human being and the objective world.
In his book on Paracelsus, Hartmann explicitly makes that case by asserting the
link between the modern spiritual subject, who has attained the inner knowl-
edge of truth, and nature: “There is nothing in the Macrocosm of Nature that is
not contained in man, because man and Nature are essentially one, and a man
who is conscious of being one with Nature will know everything in Nature if he
knows only himself.”111 The harmony between nature and man then, as Hart-
mann describes it here, comes about through the human process of identifying
the self, what he terms Ichbewusstsein—or Erkennen in Neumann’s terminology.112
In Lotusblüthen a few years later, Hartmann elaborates this process more boldly
and explicitly: “This more deeply embedded self, as we recognize in our own
contemplation of ourselves, is the cause of our ability to think, to feel and to act;
yet it is not our thinking, feeling and action itself. It is the source of our being and
therefore one names it ‘God.’”113 In this view, the rejuvenated human spirit does
more than revalidate the divine, it also embodies the unity of nature and God in
this world and thus becomes the single initiating force for community building.
As we have seen, in both the Buddhist and theosophical accounts, the human
understanding of the mundane world gained through the inner process of self-
identification—introspection—reconstitutes the accord between the physical and
spiritual domains and recasts the human being as the central figure in an “occult”
community. In other words, both German Buddhist and theosophical readings of
Eastern religion envision the individual mind, to put it in more modern terms, as
the vehicle for accessing and assembling knowledge about the world. Moreover,
human understanding, which is achieved through such inner spiritual processes,
also conveys validating meaning for confirming the human being’s eternal salva-
tion, as Hartmann explains: “All theories and all the supporting theories and
experiments presented in their favor . . . have no value whatsoever to convince the
human being of his immortality; to this end there is only one single way, namely
the achievement of that self-recognition that renders the human being immor-
tal.”114 That is, modern science carries no value for determining the essence of
the human being—acknowledgement and comprehension of the self fulfills the
promise of eternal salvation in this model. Notably similar to the internal ascetic
of Calvinist predestination, which covertly required worldly success to verify one’s
salvation status, theosophical access to the “secret doctrine” became predicated on
membership in a class of elite thinkers who made their mark in the community.
A Class of Elite Thinkers

Hartmann’s account of human introspection as the avenue for reforging the
union of human beings and God in the world—nature—does not appear on
first glance to be radically different from the model of spiritual rejuvenation
formulated by Germany’s Buddhist acolytes. Yet, upon closer inspection, Hart-
mann’s conclusions raise the stakes for those individuals who prove themselves
able to lay bare the fabrication of the material world. Specifically, Hartmann
models how those thinkers who have gained access to the light of truth through
self-insight can enhance their spiritual agency in the community—to elevate
themselves to a higher level of being: “No human being can possess true real-
ization of that which pertains to a higher level of existence than that to which
he belongs; yet he can indeed receive hints and guidance from those who stand
on this level, just as he can dispel that which hinders him to achieve this higher
level.”115 Thus Hartmann’s version of introspection bestows the potential on
those special thinkers with “the sense for the exalted and beautiful,” as he
describes it, to cultivate their dormant inner powers and attain a higher place
of being in the world.116
In this model, the status of the individual intellectual—theosophical
adept—becomes socially and culturally upgraded through a hermeneutics of
introspection—an idiosyncratic decoding and ranking of spiritual sagacity—
formulated as a community consensus that redounds to a class of theosophical
insiders. In other words, Hartmann similarly, though more boldly than Germany’s
Buddhists, constructs a model for spiritual renewal with more overt suggestions
about the ranking order of spiritual status. Conveniently, Hartmann’s model then
could easily be applied as an ideological framework intended to reforge the sym-
bolic capital of the intellectual in the community—an elite class of theosophical
thinkers who have gained insight into the light of purported truth: “Such enlight-
ened human beings, in whom the light of truth has been revealed, such great
spirits (Maha-Atma) were the founders of all great religious systems, who taught
those in their original purity, and such human beings also still live today, even
if unknown to the great masses and unreachable for the inquisitive.”117 Here the
sharper contours of an emerging elite class of thinkers—with suggestive links to
such religious innovators as Jesus and the Buddha—become palpable and linked
to their revolutionary potential: “A new era of intelligence begins, and new buds
on the tree of enlightenment begin to open.”118 Just as Romanticism’s genius poets
created their esoteric wonderland a century earlier, here too Hartmann’s version
of inner contemplation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that in this case bol-
sters the genius theosophist: “Yet the spirit that is unconsciously active in nature
will become self-confidence in the spiritually awakened human being, which will
lift him above physical nature, without which there would be no art, no idealiza-
tion of the natural. This spiritual self-confidence, which is the genius of human
beings, not science, lifts the human being above nature, yet does not place him
outside of it.”119 Thus the spiritually enlightened human being surmounts the
confines of material existence and modern science—viewed here as overpowering
and stifling features of Wilhelmine culture. Yet in Hartmann’s twisted version
the introspective thinker achieves this striking “self-consciousness” without relin-

quishing the intimate human link to nature—an esoteric space, both external
to and equally part of nature, in which the genius theosophist can idealize the
natural through art.
Such vague status markers for defining and differentiating the requisite sym-
bolic capital for status in the community of course preclude the configuration of
straightforward standards of accountability—who for instance earns membership
in this spiritual elite class. To put it simply, the theosophist’s claim of inner insight
into the essence of being becomes a cryptic yet equally indisputable characteristic.
Unsurprisingly then, Hartmann’s explanation for the recognition and legitimiza-
tion of individual spiritual accord reveals his model’s analytical circularity that we
might expect: “Because he himself is the truth, thus the acknowledgement of the
truth in its entirety lays in his self-perception; he does not need to draw conclu-
sions or make calculations to come to the basis of truth; he perceives that which
is for no other reason than because it is, and he perceives it because he himself is it,
and he perceives himself as everything.”120 Thus the theosophical thinker senses
the inner truth without verifiable content in the physical world. Herein lies the
slippery slope of what Richard Rorty in a different context has termed a “con-
versation stopper.”121 That is, a purported consummation of inner spirituality in
the theosophical adept cannot be challenged because it cannot be linked with
verifiable social markers.
Hartmann’s theosophical adaptation of Eastern traditions envisions the for-
mation of a class of elitist thinkers who possess the unique capability to perceive
truth through vaguely defined inner contemplations performed by the theo-
sophical adept—the human mind accessing the essence of spirituality. Hartmann
explains, “However the truth was there throughout time and available to all who
were capable to receive it; yet only a few had this capability, and those who were
able to lift the veil were not understood by the world and therefore persecuted;
others who recognized the truth did not have the capability to describe it in
an easily comprehensible form.”122 Here truth becomes available to any who are
responsive, though only an elite minority will prove able to unveil the spiritual
secrets within the human self. In this convenient twist, Hartmann anticipates the
criticism of any spiritual model whose claims cannot be disputed and that cannot
provide a set of spiritual exercises—rituals—intended to generate accessibility to
the purported secret doctrine.
The ennoblement of an elite class of thinkers in the community, who gain
symbolic capital through a vaguely defined code of spiritual insight, proved to be
a germane ideological reservoir for other religious innovators during the era that
sought to meld Wilhelmine imperial prerogatives, biological hermeneutics, and
religious rejuvenation. Specifically, one important German India expert of the
era—Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden (lawyer, colonialist agitator, and theosophist)—
combined Darwinian biology with Indian religious traditions as a hermeneutical
strategy for redefining spiritual mandates for the nation that conveniently under-
pinned the Kaiserreich’s colonial agenda. Yet before we turn to his more overtly
jingoistic readings of India’s treasures in Chapter 5, I want to explore first in
Chapter 4 the more subtle shift, particularly during the 1890s, among several of
Germany’s Indologists to a Christian apologetics in their accounts of Indian tra-

dition. Here we will see how Leopold von Schroeder, whom we have already met,
and Hermann Oldenberg, the renowned professor of Indology in Kiel, project
what might be termed a subtle colonial consciousness in their examination of the
era’s Western knowledge about Indian religion.
CHAPTER 4
Buddhism’s Catholic and

Protestant Detractors
What a tremendous life power Christianity constitutes, what a life force it contains,
this our particular era teaches us.
Leopold von Schroeder, “Buddhism and Christianity” (1893)1
Leopold von Schroeder’s exuberant declaration of Christianity’s “liv-

ing energy” in this 1893 essay stands in stark contrast to the favorable views of
Buddhism portrayed in his König Sundara, which von Schroeder composed less
than two decades before. As we have seen in Chapter 1, the youthful von Schro-
eder, by his own account, considered himself more a Buddhist than a Christian. Yet
by the 1890s, von Schroeder’s Buddhist convictions, which were more aligned
previously with other Buddhist sympathizers of the era like Dahlke, Neumann,
Schultze, or the theosophist Franz Hartmann, had undergone a dramatic trans-
formation. Thus von Schroeder’s explicit trumpeting of Christianity in “Bud-
dhism and Christianity” raises pertinent questions about the ever-transforming
German construct of Indian religions and traditions during the era. As we will
explore here in more detail, von Schroeder’s confessional about-face also marks
the transformation in reassessments of Indian Buddhism and Eastern religion by
other German India experts as the new century approached.
Importantly, as we have examined in the preceding chapter, a number of
German intellectuals had begun to explore Buddhism and Eastern thought as a
legitimate alternative to Christianity. Von Schroeder’s as well as other compara-
tive rereadings of Buddhism vis-à-vis Christianity occurred precisely when these
fringe religious thinkers fashioned more assertive challenges to Christian tradi-
tions. As a result, comparative religion and particularly its Buddhist-Christian
variety gained increasing attention during the final decades of the century, a fact
that Arthur Pfungst confirms in his assessment of Theodor Schultze’s Buddhist
endorsements, which as Pfungst noted confronts questions about Buddhism and
Christianity that “nowadays are being discussed at every tavern-table (Wirthshaus-
tisch) in Germany.”2 After several decades of growing interest in Buddhism—more
ostentatious comparisons of the Buddha and Christ; a marked sympathy for the
Buddha’s teachings by some, and in some cases adoption by the likes of Schultze
and others; and finally highlighted by the cultural noise created by emerging
theosophical converts such as Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden and Hartmann—many
of Germany’s India pundits responded defensively, some caustically, to this poten-
tial challenge to Christianity’s unrivalled status as Europe’s primary sociocultural
mediator. Specifically at the end of the nineteenth century and during the period
leading up to World War I, many India experts produced substantial comparative
work that mounted a demonstrable defense of Christianity vis-à-vis Buddhism.
Unsurprisingly, these various strains of anti-Buddhist reaction took on charac-
teristic confessional idiosyncrasies. That is, Catholic and Protestant assessments
of Buddhism’s more ostensible position in the religious marketplace reveal
the particular angles of confessional apprehension and their objectives as each
denomination’s acolytes attempted to negotiate the political and cultural dynam-
ics of the era. Through closer inspection of how various German India experts
formulated their anti-Buddhist positions we can gain further insight about how
these traditionally predominant confessional groups attempted to reinscribe their
agency in a rapidly transforming nation through the sounding board of India.
Here, as we have seen throughout this book, underlying political motivations,
but also the politics of confessional competition, became explicitly manifest in
the religious appraisals of Indian traditions, and specifically Buddhism. Catholic
thinkers too, who were certainly never positively disposed to Indian religions
responded to the growing voice of Buddhism in Germany. Let us begin then, in
a perhaps somewhat surprising place, across the English Channel, where Edwin
Arnold’s epic poem, The Light of Asia, which extolled the life of Buddha and Bud-
dhist tenets, had caused a firestorm of controversy that reverberated even among
German Catholic intellectuals on the continent.3
The Scourge of Buddhism: A Catholic Response

to Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia
In 1879, Arnold, British civil servant and journalist, published his still well-known
and highly controversial poem. While Arnold’s poetic acclaim of Buddhism
appears to have first been translated into German by Pfungst only in 1887, the
growing appeal of Buddhism as an alternative spiritual model seemed to have
already gained the attention of Catholic thinkers during the 1880s, who certainly
had access to the English version and could undeniably envision the potential fall-
out of a German translation—adding another threatening factor to their already
vulnerable status in the Protestant-dominated Kaiserreich. Suddenly, Buddhism
on the home front presented another potential thorn in the side of Catholic
prerogatives. This assessment resonates in the caustic and recurring responses to
Arnold’s poem by the German Jesuit Christian Pesch.4 In a period of less than two
years, Pesch published five separate essays in Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, denounc-
ing Arnold’s work in the first two and generally lambasting Buddhism in the
latter three. A closer look at Pesch’s account and other Catholic appraisals of Bud-
dhism provide another important angle in assessing their attempts to carve out a
revitalized sociocultural space—Catholic distinction in the Kaiserreich.
Buddhism’s Catholic and Protestant Detractors 115
Pesch’s first essay in Stimmen from 1886, “The Light of Asia,” borrowed
Arnold’s title and primarily summarizes the British journalist’s poetic version of
the Buddha’s life. Pesch’s analysis lacks acerbic judgments in the main body of the
article, yet his introduction and conclusion explicitly denounce Buddhism and
any favorable comparison to Christian tenets. In his introductory comments, for
example, Pesch acknowledges the irresolvable chronological quandary for Chris-
tian intellectuals in Europe posed by the indubitable academic consensus that
the Buddha predated Christ—a chronological nightmare for those attempting
to work out theories of religious diffusion that would redound to Christianity.5
Without referencing any of the Buddha apologists that we have already encoun-
tered, Pesch disputes the legitimacy of any comparative similarities between the
Buddha and Christ. In a classic strategy of offensive political positioning—attack
the adversary rather than defending one’s own views—Pesch questions the moti-
vations of Buddhist sympathizers rather than grappling with the evidential pros
and cons of historical diffusion: “Whoever wants to fight against Christianity
through Buddhism with any semblance of success, has only one way: that is, he
needs, aside from any historical context, to seek proof that Buddhism comes close
to Christianity in inner value and beauty.”6 Thus Pesch conveniently avoids pre-
senting historical evidence but rather plants seeds of doubt about the historical
coherence of Arnold’s favorable interpretation of the Buddha, or about any other
thinker for that matter who might cast a positive glance to the East in search of
spiritual renewal. In fact, according to Pesch, Arnold breaches the principles of
truth by recasting Buddhism in Christian garb: “Then the poet too violates the
truth and does not provide an ideal rendering, but rather in effect a distortion
of its subject. Arnold fell into this trap. His Buddha and his Buddhism are no
longer what the name implies. Many characteristic traits have been omitted, and
the narrator like the hero of the story speak a language that is for the most part
typically Christian, and cannot reproduce any Buddhist concepts, only Chris-
tian ones.”7 Notably, Pesch remains uncompelled to argue the complexities of
religious diffusion based on any available textual evidence—he rarely cites any
primary texts at all—rather he focuses solely on what he describes as Arnold’s
selective reading and borrowed Christian idioms. Thus as Pesch sees it, Bud-
dha’s British interpreter fails to present an accurate image of Buddhism, rather
only a distorted derivation based on the Christian original. Moreover, according
to Pesch, Arnold’s poetic creation reveals ulterior motives that seduce “the inex-
perienced reader to the opinion that Buddha taught things that he never even
considered, that are in fact the very opposite of his teachings”—in Pesch’s view, a
virtual falsification.8
Pesch’s conclusion to the essay reiterates the tactics of the introduction. In a
repetitive tirade, Pesch summarizes his assessment of Arnold’s work: “No, every
untruth as such is ugly. Buddhism, even less so as popular religion than as philo-
sophical system is untrue, and this desire to cover up this untruth with Christian
ideas is a new untruth.”9 Pesch maintains this acerbic tone in the subsequent
article, “The Buddha Legend and the Gospels,” when he posits “that Buddhism
in fact is not light, but darkness and the shadow of death.”10 Buddhism offers no
possible religious illumination to the spiritually avid explorer.
In the second text, Pesch relies heavily on well-known European secondary

work—primarily a comparative analysis of Buddhism and Christianity by Sam-
uel H. Kellog from 1885—to waylay any favorable historically derived views of
Buddhist traditions. Though the Protestant Kellog, according to Pesch, under-
stands little of Christian ascetics and celibacy, he is at least a believer who in
his comparative religious assessment “acknowledges Christ’s divinity with great
decisiveness and exaltation.”11 Yet Pesch still remains unwilling in these first two
essays to venture far beyond the confines of other critical works. To put it more
boldly, he selectively cherry picks disparaging appraisals of Buddhism to circum-
vent the relevance of historical chronology as a means for assessing comparative
religious originality and thereby undermines any favorable assertions about Bud-
dhist historical-cultural significance.
He achieves this goal by asserting that Buddhism is only legend—not
historical—an argument verified in his view by the “complete lack of definitive
historical information about Buddha.”12 Moreover, as Pesch continues, he posits
that sufficient historical accounts do not exist to justify the contention that Bud-
dhist texts predated the Gospels, which would, as Pesch certainly understood,
conveniently preclude Buddhist influence on the New Testament record.13 Pesch
does, however, acknowledge that a general picture of the Buddha’s life can be
drawn from historical accounts with a critical caveat: “But all of this without
the least chronological order and without any time specification.”14 Based on
this twisted analysis, Pesch arrives at an opportune conclusion: “With complete
certainty one can learn virtually nothing from Buddha’s life; one can construct
with relative probability a biography that exhibits only very few similar traits to
Christ’s life.”15 With this familiar historicist twist the Buddha’s life and teachings
remain undeserving as a comparative source for Christianity: “India’s historical
epoch first began long after Buddha; and the first attempts at an indigenous
historiography, as far as one can even speak of one at all, occur much later.”16 In
other words, history only begins and gains relevance with the historical documen-
tation crafted by a civilization’s scribes. Pesch conveniently co-opts historicism
then to assert that Buddha lived prior to historical time—the historical clock
only begins with narrative justification, which began in Buddhism’s case, as Pesch
asserts, after the life of Christ—rendering any potential Buddhist influences on
Christianity immaterial. Moreover, for any European thinker of the era, a civiliza-
tion without history obtains little cultural import and thus fails to pass the litmus
test for measuring religious significance.
Yet comparative religious history seems to have stalked this German Jesuit
because he follows these first two essays on Arnold’s epic poem with two fur-
ther articles that examine more specifically the comparative characteristics of the
Buddha and Christ, about which Pesch had to begrudgingly admit: “We in no
way deny that there are some similarities in the Buddha legend and the life of
Christ.”17 Unswervingly, though somewhat illogically, Pesch sets out to reject
these admitted similarities, here responding to those who claimed that Christian-
ity could have possibly derived in part under Eastern influences and was therefore
not exclusively a Semitic religion. Pesch summarily snubs such views—namely,
that Christianity could have originated under any other influences than those
deriving in and around the Mesopotamian basin—but offers no evidence for his
own appraisal: “Just like that, the first similarity that one suggests to find between
Buddha and Christ . . . holds meaning only in the imagination of a halfwit who is
bent on doing independent research.”18 Here again, Pesch attacks the messenger
rather than the purported facts.
Unsurprisingly, Pesch’s invective against Buddhism’s historical status was
not unique among Catholics. Similar historical assessments of Buddhism also
resonate in the far better informed Sanskrit scholar and Catholic Jesuit Joseph
Dahlmann, with whom we have already become acquainted in Chapter 2. In
1898, Dahlmann published Buddha: A Cultural Picture of the East, a longer study
that delivers a scathing account of Buddhist doctrine.19 Yet before taking a closer
look at Dahlmann’s study of the Buddha, I want to briefly take on the chronol-
ogy debate in his later work on the Thomas Christians, published in 1912. Here
Dahlmann offers a more assertive and biased Christian reading of historical cross-
cultural influences between East and West. In this study Dahlmann explores
nineteenth-century archaeological findings (coins and religious monuments) to
investigate the historical authenticity of the apostle Thomas’s mission to India
during the early Christian era.20 Critical for our purposes is less the validity or
accuracy of the Thomas legend itself but rather how Dahlmann constructs his
version of early Christian influences on Buddhist art in India.
In reference to the multitude of Buddhist monuments that Dahlmann had
personally visited in his prior travels in India, Dahlmann posits that early rep-
resentations of the Buddha fail to portray any human figure or likeness of the
revolutionary leader, rather “Buddha’s presence is hinted at only through sym-
bols.”21 Thus in Dahlmann’s reading, early representations of the Buddha
remained bound in the abstract and were unable to anthropomorphize the most
critical being in the Buddhist religion. Importantly, by accentuating the significance
of sacred imagery—a significant feature in the Catholic tradition—as a measure of
religious progress and fruition, Dahlmann concludes, in a shrewd chronological
twist, that Christian imagery in India had actually triggered a transformation in
Buddhist artistic representation: “Buddha, whose image was for a long period
fearfully avoided, appears suddenly in the monuments as God and redeemer, yet
not as one should expect in India, in Indian garb, rather clothed in vestments,
whose features confide foreign origination.”22 Specifically, Dahlmann’s expres-
sion “foreign origination” refers to Christian Romans, who traveled and traded
throughout India during the early Christian era. While cross-cultural influences
in South Asia are well documented, Dahlmann more boldly asserts that the Bud-
dha became personified as a God and redeemer solely through the influence of
Western Christianity. In Dahlmann’s view, the “Buddha personality . . . in its
essence the center of art,”23 has been brought to life and full artistic bloom primar-
ily through Christian influence, as he posits at the end of his manuscript: “Similar
to the coins in India’s Northwest, which show a double countenance, a Greek
one that indicates influence from antiquity, an Indian one that indicates influ-
ence from the Brahmanic-Buddhist world, the monuments of Ghandara speak
a double language: one, which delivers the key to understanding a new form
of Buddhism, and another, which sounds like an archaeological interpretation
of a Christian legend.”24 Buddhism then, as Dahlmann depicts here, progressed

to a new religious form by amalgamating various sacred traditions—Western
(Greek, Christian) and Indian (Brahmanic-Buddhist). Thus Pesch, who lacked
the requisite knowledge and linguistic skill to navigate primary Buddhist texts,
rebuts outright any potential links or influences between these two world reli-
gions. Dahlmann, on the other hand, offers a more assertive Catholic historical
account by positing that the glorious artistic remnants of India’s Buddhist heri-
tage emerged explicitly under Christian influence.
Yet despite such Catholic historical revisions, the importance of Buddhism as
an influential world religion seemed an indubitable fact and thus for Catholics
like Pesch and Dahlmann, Western interest in or favorable views of Buddhism
could not be easily ignored as the Catholic Church and its acolytes attempted
to defend Catholicism’s already pressured status in Wilhelmine Germany. Yet for
European religious thinkers of the era, denominational status and the efficacy of
theological tenets could be measured at least in part by the Church’s ability to
forge community consensus—cohesive ethical and moral standards of behavior.
That is, for many religious thinkers like Pesch, the worth of religious tenets could
be evaluated in terms of the palpable moral comportment of its devotees. For any
religion subjected to historicism’s microscope, the purportedly tangible transfor-
mation of the community’s ethical or moral attributes became a critical aspect for
assessing its rank and stature in the world’s religious marketplace. Thus Pesch, in
his final essay on the subject of Buddhism, seeks to gauge the consequences—
ethical and social outcomes—of Buddhist doctrine and influence, what he terms
in the essay’s title “The Moral Successes of Buddhism.”
Pesch begins this fifth essay by addressing a theme of significant concern to the
era’s religious thinkers: the dominance of materialism and such radical, modern
ideas as social democracy and communism, which seemed to suggest to many, as
Pesch posits, “the contention of the possibility of a general upbringing of the peo-
ple based on moral teachings without religion.”25 Significantly, Catholic thinkers
identified an explicit link between modernity’s emerging sociocultural models
and the rising experimentation with Eastern religious thought. Such sentiments
echo, for instance, in Dahlmann’s caustic treatise on the Buddha: “The image of
atheistic India becomes reflected in Buddhism. The corrosive elements of materi-
alism and nihilism attain copious expansion in its core and essence.”26 Moreover,
returning to Pesch, the era’s corrupt sociocultural forms and newfangled reli-
gious models have generated a religious vacuum in modern European culture
that places the burden of salvation solely on the individual’s redemptive perfor-
mance—a criticism that Dahlmann, Pesch, and others also frequently aimed at
Buddhism’s salvational model, which purportedly deprived religious devotees of
the communal and ritual framework offered by Catholicism.
In consequence, as these Catholic intellectuals contend, an ethical framework
for community consensus cannot evolve from Buddhism’s model of redemption
because of its emphasis on individual devotion and meditation—the attainment
of Nirvana, which Dahlmann describes as the “abyss of nothingness.”27 As Pesch
puts it closer to home and contextualizes in ethical terms, the “speculative mus-
ings” of reckless Western intellectuals in extraneous religious traditions such as
Buddhism fail to provide an adequate “religious education” in the community.28

Pesch invokes Catholic missionary reports from Japan to verify his contention
of Buddhism’s ethics generating deficiencies: “No model has ever been exhibited
with a greater moral inability to overcome polytheism or more generally religious
falsehoods.”29 Measured in tangible results, Buddhism’s countless deities prove
decidedly inept to generate the moral certitude that Pesch and other Catholic
thinkers posited in Catholicism.
Catholicism’s Light of the World

Thus far we have explored the pejorative assessments of Buddhism by two
important Catholic Jesuits, whose work lucidly illustrates the Catholic position
regarding competitive religious crusades. That Catholics held little regard for
Buddhism is unsurprising, yet their adamant reactions reveal greater anxiety than
the number of conversions to Buddhism or any other Eastern-oriented religious
movements might warrant. In other words, these Jesuit reports obviously mani-
fest Catholic apprehension about the increasingly unstable religious marketplace
in Wilhelmine Germany. Yet their response to Buddhism also reveals the particu-
lar idiosyncrasies of Catholic Jesuit attempts to reassert their cultural agency in
the Kaiserreich, as well as their underlying incentives to propagate Catholic pre-
rogatives both within and beyond Europe’s geopolitical borders. These features
of Catholic responses to Buddhism resonate especially in Dahlmann’s major text
on the Buddha, which we have already briefly explored but that now warrants a
closer look.
In the book’s first major section Dahlmann traces the initial motivations and
influences of Buddhism in India from an angle that we have not seen thus far
yet which explicitly divulges his particular denominational viewpoint. Like the
Protestant thinkers that we have already reviewed, Dahlmann too acknowledges
Gotama Buddha’s individual passion to discover redemption’s path—ever so sim-
ilar to Christ—as well as the Buddha’s reformatory impetus on India’s religious
landscape: “The longing for salvation was the driving power of philosophical life
in India. This longing led the prince Gotama away from his native grandeur to
the migratory life of the penitent ascetic and awoke in him the wish to seek a new
path to salvation.”30 Thus Buddha, in the view of Dahlmann and others, embod-
ied spiritually innovative attributes similar to Christ, at least insofar as both were
the principal catalysts behind their pioneering religious crusades.
Importantly, though Dahlmann openly concedes that the Buddha was a driving
force of religious reform, he nevertheless lambasts those same Protestant apprais-
als that viewed the Buddha as a revolutionary figure who sought to undermine
the Brahmin priestly class. Notably, Dahlmann’s appraisal of Buddhist origins
and development rebuffs any distinct historical break between Brahminism and
Buddhism, a characteristic consistently stressed by Protestant thinkers like Rudolf
Seydel and von Schroeder. In fact, Dahlmann, who closely studied and observed
Buddhist architecture and artwork during his travels, highlights the recurring
traces of Brahmanic influences in Buddhist edifices in India: “The buildings
show a development further in the past, and this art form unfolded on Brahmanic
ground.”31 More significantly, Dahlmann posits that Buddhist tenets, despite

their reformatory impulses, nevertheless maintained close doctrinal links to Brah-
manic origins: “The Buddha ideal belonged to the older Brahmanic philosophy.
And the name, from which the new school derives its sufficient denotation, Bud-
dhism, arose on a Brahmanic base and carries a Brahmanic imprint.”32 In fact,
Brahmanic tradition forged a unity between Buddhist acolytes and Brahma—
what Dahlmann interprets loosely as the Indian concept of divinity—whereas
Buddhism, void of its Brahmanic heritage, “unifies . . . humanity in the broth-
erhood of nothingness.”33 Dahlmann’s assessment contrasts demonstrably with
those Protestant views—highlighted by such Kulturkampf credos propagated by
Seydel, von Schroeder, and others—that envisioned the Buddha’s reformatory
movement as an unequivocal revolt against the Brahmin priestly class.
Why is Dahlmann’s alternate historical reading so important for assessing Catho-
lic accounts of Buddhism? Significantly, in the eyes of both Protestant and Catholic
intellectuals, the Brahmin priests exhibited palpable similarities to the Catholic clergy.
Thus the Kulturkampf-influenced Protestant account of Buddhism as a revolution-
ary attack on the Brahmin priestly class, also understood by Catholics under the
rubric of the era’s denominational tensions, must have poured salt on Catholic
Jesuits’ already severe cultural wounds. That is, any praise imparted to a religious
movement that arose and advanced by attacking established religious institutions
or priestly hierarchies must have struck fretful chords for Catholic thinkers. In
response, Dahlmann’s account of Buddhism presents a more favorable account
of priestly order and influence, in which Brahmin priestly tradition is depicted
not as a target of Buddhist religious reform but rather as a vital avenue—not an
obstacle—for Indians to update their religious spirituality during that era. Here,
Dahlmann’s reading reveals the underlying motivations for Catholic responses to
Buddhism—a Catholic rejoinder to Protestantism’s subtle co-optation of Bud-
dhist narratives to attack clerical agency and hierarchical frameworks. As these
Catholics viewed it, Buddhism depicted as a religious revolt against priestly
hierarchies emulated the ongoing threats to Catholic agency in the Kaiserreich.
That is, when more radical and innovative Protestant thinkers like Seydel and
von Schroeder referred to Buddhism as the Protestantism of the East, Catholic
intellectuals sensed with alarm the imbedded subplot of an updated reformation
theology that could be applied to Wilhelmine politics and culture. Thus the link
between Buddhism and Protestantism—reform and protest against the status
quo of Brahmanic and Catholic tradition—but also the emerging Buddhist and
Eastern-influenced movements, such as theosophy, generated a more threatening
scenario for Catholics than one might expect.
This assessment becomes further corroborated by Dahlmann’s acknowledge-
ment of Buddhism’s allure—its appeal to the masses—with which he also links
Buddhism’s threat to the status quo of priests: “It is a characteristic trait in the
picture of Indian skepticism that it [Buddhism] emerges with ruthless urgency
into the public and courts the favor of the masses. They come drawn in swarms,
all gatherings echo their quarreling cries. Religion is surrendered to mockery. The
monks are denounced as starvelings and blanketed with the lowliest invective.”34
As Dahlmann describes, Buddhism manifests those traits of modern European
culture that these Catholic thinkers so intensely bemoaned—unrestrained reli-

gious movements with appeal to the masses, here subtly emulating democratic
and proletarian scenarios that could undermine respect for priestly status and
authority, and in turn Catholic hierarchies and order.
Thus Dahlmann’s contrapuntal reading of Buddhism’s reformatory impetus
illustrates the perceived threat to Catholic mandates that Protestant accounts gen-
erated during the era. That sense of peril also resonates even more unabashedly in
Pesch’s incisive criticism of Arnold’s epic poem and his categorical denunciation
of Buddhism: “Thus according to Arnold’s opinion should the Buddha really
assume the position of Christ for East Asia? Should Christ not be the light for the
entire world, rather than for just those parts that Buddha has not already taken
into his possession? So much is certain: Numerous friends and admirers of Arnold
are definitely of this opinion.”35 Here Pesch shows his colors more strikingly than
we have seen thus far by staking out Christianity’s entitlement to seize the entire
world—Catholicism’s universal mission—and not just those geographical regions
still left unclaimed by Buddhist expansion. To put it more boldly, according to
the worldviews of Dahlmann and Pesch, no religious competitor can be toler-
ated, at least not if, as Pesch’s rhetorical questions explicitly illustrate, Catholicism
intends to fulfill its universal prerogatives.
Specifically, Pesch sarcastically proclaims his sense of Christian superiority
and overtly asserts Christianity’s universal mandate vis-à-vis Buddhism, here in
response to an unnamed author’s suggestion in a German cultural magazine that
the search for religious essence should begin in India: “A denomination without
God, without an individual soul, without personal bliss, without the power for
true civilization and moral exaltation: these are the ‘real remains’ of true and
genuine Religion, for which we must pilgrammage to India in order to become
familiar with and adopt! Those people do not even count Christ and his world
encompassing and salvational works any longer among the ‘real remains’ of
genuine religion.”36 Pesch’s one-and-a-half-year long obsession with Buddhism
becomes manifest here in terms that clearly reveal Catholic thinkers’ cultural
anxiety in Wilhelmine Germany—an angst that became frequently expressed
through the resolute avowal of Catholic prerogatives in the community. Thus
Buddhism, as Pesch describes it, embodies religious affirmation without God and
thus precludes personal salvation and prevents the generation of requisite virtues
needed for establishing a progressive civilization and an ethical community.
Such declarations of Christian superiority also echo in Dahlmann’s earlier
observations of Buddhist art and religious monuments made during his sojourn
through India and other parts of Asia (1902–5), which he formulated in Indian
Travels (1908). At Sanchi, for instance, a small archaeological site near modern
day Bhopal, Dahlmann appraises the potential of the Buddhist artistic remnants
there to provide an avenue for reconstituting spiritual vitality: “Countless times
the symbol is repeated. Where is the progress? Unsatisfied one’s glance turns to
another grave, from which a human being, buried in disgrace and shame, raised
humanity through his resurrection to new vitality.”37 In Dahlmann’s reading,
Christianity remains the unchallenged source for reconstituting spiritual vigor.
Pesch’s five-essay salvo during the mid-1880s and Dahlmann’s later work con-
sistently aimed to dismantle Buddhism’s legitimacy as an alternative to Christian
salvation yet equally divulge how Catholic thinkers sensed a threat to their cultural
position in the Kaiserreich and their universal prerogatives in the global religious
marketplace. Yet these two thinkers had little to say about other newfangled
religious designs—theosophy, for instance—that emerged from the German fas-
cination with the East. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the voices
of fringe religious innovators were becoming more conspicuous, and other Catho-
lic thinkers indeed took notice. The Catholic Jesuit Peter Sinthern (1870–n.d.), for
instance, broadened his critical comparative scope and took wider aim at the era’s
alternative religious currents in his Buddhism and Buddhist Currents in the Present
(1906). Importantly, Sinthern more overtly contextualizes his analysis in terms
of the threat that these religious innovations posed to European culture. Thus a
brief look at Sinthern’s work will better corroborate my argument that Catholic
responses to Buddhism and Eastern influences manifest an overt sense of threat to
Catholicism’s cultural agency in Wilhelmine Germany yet also charged Catholic
thinkers to reassert Catholic universal prerogatives.
Sinthern’s introductory remarks corroborate this assessment. He begins by
framing his analysis not just in terms of Buddhism’s growth throughout the
globe, a feature frequently commented on by other Catholic thinkers, yet signifi-
cantly Sinthern also more deliberately expresses his concern about the increasing
influence of Eastern religion at home: “Yet ever so soon the enthusiasm for Bud-
dha and Buddhism extended far beyond strictly scientific interest; the study of
Buddhism became the fancy for Buddhism to the detriment of truth-mindedness
and science; in fact, the enthusiasm for Buddha has even become a cultural-
historical phenomenon of the expired century.”38 Thus, more conspicuously
than Dahlmann and Pesch, Sinthern pointedly acknowledges the rising tide of
newfangled religious innovations and explicitly warns about the transformation
from a legitimate comparative scholarly inquiry to Buddhist fervor (Buddhismus-
schwärmerei). He cites, for example, the Buddhist movements in London, Paris,
and Berlin, and their theosophical offshoots as dangerous instances of such unen-
cumbered religious zeal and detrimental influence in Europe: “Thus particularly
the primary centers of modern culture are those in which Buddhism, follow-
ing a 1000-year hibernation, has become transplanted from the Far East to the
heart of the West and is enjoying a spiritual resurrection.”39 While Dahlmann
and Pesch berate Buddhism and any favorable comparative features in a slightly
more implicit defense of European Christianity, Sinthern overtly underscores the
mounting challenge to Western cultural values in the metropole by the rise of
Eastern-influenced religious innovations like theosophy—a far more threaten-
ing spiritual alternative due to its inclusive amalgamation of Eastern traditions,
Christian faith, and Western science.
Following his introduction, Sinthern turns to a general description of Bud-
dhism and here closely follows the arguments that we have frequently confronted
thus far in the works of Dahlmann and Pesch. Sinthern considers Buddhist
historical documentation to be based solely on legend, what he calls in more
derogatory terms “magical stories,” whose “contents would suffice to expunge any
credibility of its authors.” Echoing the era’s predominant historicist model precisely,
Sinthern posits that Buddhist narratives suffer from “nonhistoricity”—a view that
predictably labels the Buddha’s life and work as myth.40
Yet Sinthern, in his second major section, “Buddhist Currents in the Present,”
reveals more explicitly the underlying Catholic idiosyncrasies of his analysis. The
title of this section’s first chapter, “In Search of the World Religion” (notably des-
ignated in the singular), for instance, points unmistakably toward Sinthern’s most
important concern: the threat that the advance of Buddhism and its so-called
derivatives pose to Catholic universal mandates. Sinthern admonishes scholars
of comparative religion for their praise of any spiritual frameworks derived from
outside the scope of strictly Christian tenets: “Behind the praiseworthy efforts of
comparative religious study now lurks in many cases the idea of a traceable and
expandable World religion, an ideal religion that unifies the truth and beauty of
the purportedly 1000 rays of disintegrating religious thought to one view and
can join all peoples of the earth with the same bond of religious belief.”41 That
is, according to Sinthern, affirmative views of non-Christian traditions that have
been derived from comparative religious appraisals become problematic when
these contemporary Wissenschaftler also generate innovative, unifying religious
philosophies under whose influence all human beings could purportedly spiritu-
ally coalesce in an updated, progressive world religion. The problem lies here,
which Sinthern unabashedly asserts, in the threat posed to the universal mandate
of the Catholic Church. Sinthern rhetorically asks, why look to the East for reli-
gious rejuvenation, and delivers the answer we would expect: “Here we have the
true World Religion, ordained as such by God, wonderfully suited for the people
of all lands and times, a World Religion, not forged together by human folly out
of meager, incongruous parts, much more a World Religion from the hand of the
one, who through his creative command the majestic world was called into being,
a Religion equal to the universe, simple and grand, clear and beautiful.”42 Thus
Sinthern’s response to Buddhism and Buddhist-influenced religions is explicitly
framed in terms that expressly underscore Catholicism’s universal prerogatives—
the “true World Religion.” Yet while Buddhism still may have seemed more of
an enemy with limited traction among the broader European population, the
same could not be necessarily said for theosophy, a religious movement that
seemed to occupy Sinthern in particular because of its wider-reaching cultural
ramifications.43
As Sinthern continues this section then, he addresses the topic of theoso-
phy, in what he calls “The Buddification of Christianity through Theosophy.”
Here Sinthern categorically renounces all non-Catholic religions by positing
an explicit link between theosophy and Protestantism: “Theosophy attempts
the impossible, this unavoidable companion of decadent theological science.
The new Theosophy emerged from the soil of Protestantism.”44 This assessment
reveals Catholicism’s claim to exclusive religious truth—in Sinthern’s mind,
Buddhism, its offshoots, and Protestantism earn the same ranking among the
inferior. Thus in a recurring reminder of the denominational stakes at hand
during the Kaiserreich, even Protestantism, in Sinthern’s view, deserves relega-
tion to the religious waste bin.
Significantly, theosophy’s challenge to Catholicism proved particularly prob-

lematic because it was based on the idea, as we have seen, that all religions are
manifestations of a deeper unified religious truth—accessible only by an intel-
lectually exclusive spiritual elite and thus do not require established institutional
frameworks nor Catholic praxes. Thus establishing a definitive link between
Buddhism—what most Christians, Catholic and Protestant, considered an East-
ern manifestation of atheism—and what Sinthern refers to as “modern culture”
became an important analytical ploy to denigrate theosophy in Europe. Sinthern
posits, “Atheism increasingly reveals itself as the operative point in which modern
culture and Buddhism are one, as the real driving force that seeks to aid Buddhism
in different forms and through different paths in its quest for dominance.”45 Dif-
ferent forms and paths, in Sinthern’s reading, only camouflage Buddhism and
theosophy’s mutual goal to undermine and overthrow Christianity in Europe, a
view that Sinthern also more brazenly expresses: “Thus when we see Buddhism
and theosophy wander hand in hand through India, this has the simple reason
that the moral value of each resembles the other, like one egg to another. And
when ‘Christian’ Theosophy still maintains temporarily its Christian casing, this
lies solely in the reason that this lamb’s fleece is necessary in many places in order
not to reveal precipitously the heathen nature of the wolf.”46 Thus theosophists
only exhibit Christian garb to cover their heathen inner core, and according
to Sinthern’s tirade, ardently seek to bring “Buddhism to world dominion and
thus aid its victory over Christianity.”47 Theosophy is no friendly, legitimate
competitor in this reading—none existed for the Catholic Church—but rather
a malicious nemesis.
Yet in response to what Sinthern refers to as “our culturally infatuated time,”
Sinthern sardonically chastises European disregard for Catholicism’s universal
message: “Oh fortunate Europe, that you may envision your entire future culture
in the promising images of these living bearers of Buddhist wisdom.”48 Signifi-
cantly, returning to Pesch for just a moment, the Catholic Jesuit describes this
same sentiment in far more explicit denominational terms: “When one though
compares Buddha with our divine redeemer, compares Buddhism with the Cath-
olic Church, the son of Sakya with the Christian monk, Buddhist idol worship
with our cult in a way as if it concerns homologous things, this is sacrilege and
tasteless as well.”49 Moreover, Pesch concludes his final essay with an even stron-
ger indictment of Buddhist-Christian comparisons: the unequivocal charge that
any claims of Buddhist influence on Christianity can only originate from those
who he scathingly dismisses as “Enemies of Christianity.”50
An acute sense of assault on Catholicism by the era’s spiritual experimentation
also becomes palpably evident in the appraisals of these Jesuits—their assertions
of the Church’s universal mission that resonates in Sinthern’s speculation about
Catholicism’s chances in the East: “Should ever again a true culture emerge from
the ruins of Buddhism, should a new spring come again into being for the peo-
ple of the East, who languish under the undignified joke of Buddhism, it can
come only from God and the religion of the cross.”51 Unsurprisingly, if Catholics
considered their faith to possess the sole unifying universal spiritual truth, then
Sinthern, like the Catholic missionaries that we encountered in Chapter 2, also
felt compelled to cast a positive light on Catholicism’s global prospects: “Thank

God, the new day is already dawning, a Christian dawn already illuminates the
Eastern sky, a new life is beginning to stir within the Buddhist people and their
countries, and even if slowly, Christianity gains increasingly more territory; in the
predominantly Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia alone the Catholic Church
counts approximately one million brave, loyal Christians, mostly converted from
Buddhism.”52 The crass proclamation of a Catholic civilizing mission rings clearly
in Sinthern’s elated appraisal of purported mission successes in Southeast Asia.
While Catholic accounts are unquestionably consistent across the chrono-
logical scope of the Kaiserreich in their derogatory assessments of Buddhism,
the same cannot be said for Protestant interpretations. Specifically, as we briefly
explored at the beginning of this chapter, a substantial shift in Protestant accounts
of Buddhism occurred in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, espe-
cially from the early 1890s. Thus how and why many Protestant India experts
seemed to suddenly shift their comparative assessments of Buddhism and Christi-
anity will round out our picture of Buddhism’s detractors and help us to establish
another cog in Germany’s India during the Kaiserreich.
Comparative Religion and a Colonial Consciousness

In the case of Protestant Indologists, the shift in views, illustrated by von Schro-
eder’s remarks at the beginning of the chapter, reveals more than just a defiant
response to the heightened interest in Buddhism and the perceived threat to
Christianity’s status quo in Germany. Importantly, more testy comparisons—
Christian apologetics—emerged just as Germany was making substantial noise
on the colonial playing field. Germany’s colonial project then provides an impor-
tant backdrop for understanding why these German India experts became quite
suddenly more apologetic of Christian precepts and traditions—what might be
viewed as a subtle yet palpable colonial consciousness. To put it another way,
Christian apologetics—both Protestant and Catholic—beginning in the 1880s
and extending to World War I, became explicitly entangled in the attempt by
many German intellectuals to reforge community consensus in the nation, and
thus embodies unambiguous political ramifications. As German imperial aims
became increasingly the status quo in the Kaiserreich’s political objectives prior
to and after Bismarck’s fall from power in 1890, so too did many of Germany’s
India experts revise their comparative conclusions about the world’s religions.
To put it more bluntly, the comparative religious work of many India experts,
particularly Protestants, during the 1890s and thereafter manifests a palpable
link between their comparative religious conclusions and the colonial mind-set
of the Second Reich.
Germany’s late entry into the colonial game is a familiar story. Despite the
increasing political pressure to ensure Germany’s colonial slice of the imperial
cake, Germany’s powerful and astute chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had been
consistently cautious throughout his multiple decade reign concerning Ger-
many’s appetite for colonies. In 1884, bending to significant domestic pressure,
Bismarck had a change of heart and joined the “scramble for Africa,” which by
this time was essentially the only continent left for the taking.53 During Ger-
many’s colonial venture many of Germany’s India pundits began to delineate
an idiosyncratic comparative model of religion that implicitly underpinned the
colonial aims of the nation—or that at least in theory could undermine the Brit-
ish monopoly in India and preserve the cogent dreams of a German raj. One
can detect the subtle echo of that colonial model in the comparative framework
of several of the era’s important Indologists that emerged alongside other more
explicit colonial mandates that were linked with the spiritual rejuvenation of the
German nation (the subject of Chapter 5).
First though, by taking a closer look at the comparative writings of several
important Indologists after 1890, I want to explore how an implicit colonial
consciousness had become embedded in the psyche of many German intellec-
tuals. Here I want to examine several of these comparative texts that can help
contextualize and illustrate how Germany’s constructed India adjusted to the
political mandates of the nation and implicitly sanctioned its colonial aims. In
other words, as the colonialist mind-set of the Second Reich reached its peak dur-
ing the last two decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many
German Indologists, which surprisingly included the former Buddhist novice
von Schroeder, and the highly respected University of Kiel professor of Indology
Hermann Oldenberg, began to take a more critical stance toward what Buddhism
had to offer vis-à-vis Christianity.
For some Indologists, the foray into comparative religion met with substantial
resistance, while others enthusiastically trumpeted their comparative biases. Yet
despite these differences I believe that their work manifests similar patterns—
downgrading Buddhism to support the upgrade of Christianity on the scale of
historical progress—just as Germany attempted to carve out its colonial space
among the European powers. That is, the comparative work on Buddhism and
Christianity by these India pundits subtly but decidedly embodies the political
objectives of the nation in different ways than we have previously seen among our
Protestant nation builders or in the universal charge of Catholic missions. Here
Germany’s India implicitly bolsters the nation’s colonial objectives—an underly-
ing colonial consciousness.
Hermann Oldenberg’s “Über Sanskritforschung”

and the Beginning of History
Here our story begins with the important Indologist, Hermann Oldenberg
(1854–1920), professor in Kiel and later Göttingen, who produced important
Buddhist and Vedic studies. Oldenberg was born in Hamburg, the son of a Prot-
estant clergyman, and studied classical and Indian philology in Göttingen and
Berlin before his university appointments.54 Oldenberg authored many academic
texts but is best known for his Buddha: His Life, His Teachings, His Community
(1881). The book was one of the few texts on Eastern religion that was acces-
sible to a wider audience, and remained an important reference work for many
intellectuals long after its original publication. Max Weber, for instance, in his
work on Hinduism and Buddhism, which was published almost fifty years later,
cites it frequently. Oldenberg’s Buddha has been translated into several languages
and stayed in print long into the twentieth century, going through 13 editions
by 1959. The book’s popularity is certainly due to the work’s clarity and avoid-
ance of highbrow discourse, but probably also because Oldenberg avoided for
the most part the combative polemics of comparative religion that thinkers like
Seydel enlisted.
Despite Oldenberg’s more austere academic rigor and avoidance of more pop-
ular religious disputations during the early part of his career, he did not remain
immune to the more flashy debates triggered by those whose work we have por-
trayed in earlier chapters. Beginning in 1886 and spanning the next 14 years,
Oldenberg also hesitantly joined the fray of comparative religion by publishing
several essays in the Deutsche Rundschau on Indian-related topics, as well as a
collection of essays published in book form in 1910. These texts, which were
intended for a more general academic audience, illustrate Oldenberg’s unique
response to the more receptive appraisals of Eastern religion among many of his
intellectual contemporaries. Exploring these little-known essays will help better
contextualize Oldenberg’s work, particularly as it relates to how Germany’s imag-
ined India at the fin-de-siècle began to transform into a more assertive Christian
apologetics, yet also, to put it more boldly, will show how Oldenberg’s compara-
tive thought implicitly buttressed the ideological capital of a Protestant German
nation and its underlying colonial ambitions.
In the first of these essays from 1886, “On Sanskrit Research,” Oldenberg
sketches the history of European Sanskrit studies, beginning with the famous
British philologist William Jones, who was the first to suggest the similarities
between Sanskrit, classical Greek, and Latin.55 Yet before Oldenberg analyzes
Jones’s and other Western scholars’ work on India in detail, he prefaces his his-
torical task by first pointing to India’s bifurcated relationship to the West, the
“bygone life of such a strange people . . . that is kinned to our people, and whose
paths have departed so much from ours both externally and internally.”56 Here,
echoing Seydel, Oldenberg underscores the historical importance of India due to its
deep-rooted ancestral link to Germany on the one hand, yet equally points to
its present deviation both externally and internally—nineteenth-century code
for material and spiritual—from present German culture. Moreover, he implic-
itly acknowledges the growing stakes in the comparison of these two world
religions by recognizing the intricate relationship in their purported common
cultural ancestry.
After Oldenberg sets the stage for his historical exposé, he refocuses his atten-
tion on the emerging Western engagement with Indian religious traditions at
the end of the eighteenth century. He begins by acknowledging the work of
Jones—original translations of key Indian texts such as Sakuntala and the Laws of
Manu—yet opines that he had nevertheless erred by succumbing to a “fantasy in
aimless adventures.”57 While this might appear to some as a legitimate criticism
of Jones’s work, Oldenberg frames his appraisal in terms that divulge his more
acute concerns about certain kinds of conclusions drawn about Indian religions
by modern-day Indologists: “But parallel to the conclusion of this incomparable,
far-reaching finding grow fantasies in Jones’s works about prehistoric connections
that more or less link everything with everything. Just as things Indian are identi-
fied with items of the Old Testament, soon they will be related to South American
culture; Buddha is supposed to be the same as Wotan, the Egyptian pyramids and
sphinx are supposed to show the style of the same workers who built the Indian
cavern temples and who carved the old Buddha images.”58 Oldenberg does not
question comparative work in general but responds to what he viewed as exagger-
ated appeals that argued for the similarities between various religious traditions,
particularly those drawing links between Indian Buddhism and Old Testament
Christianity among others.
Despite Oldenberg’s criticisms of Jones he nevertheless acknowledges the sig-
nificance of his original discoveries, which eventually led to the deciphering of
the Vedas. In a view typical of many Indologists during this era, Oldenberg claims
that the beginnings of Vedic studies, which Jones’s work sparked, are notable
because they uncover and delineate a historical starting point. Significantly, these
ancient texts documented what many German intellectuals judged as Indian ahis-
toricity, a stance that Oldenberg asserts in a rhetorical question, “or should we say
lack of history?”59 In consequence, India’s purported ahistoricity allows Olden-
berg, here echoing Hegel’s concept of a world historical spirit, to reappropriate
the migration of the ancient Aryans—Indo-Germanic forefathers—who entered
the Indus valley from the North, as the revolutionary event that brought Poesie,
Kultur, and Religion to India for the first time. That is, Indian history begins with
Aryan cultural incursions—a critical link that German philologists exploited to
argue the linguistic link between Germanic culture and Indo-Aryan heritage.
As Oldenberg continues his exposition of Sanskrit studies he correctly points
to the German dominance in the field. He likens the importance of Rudolf
Roth and Otto Böhtlingk’s Sanskrit dictionary for deciphering many critical
and unpublished Vedic texts and leading to a more meaningful understanding of
Indian religious heritage, and even to the work of the Grimm brothers for their
enlightening insight into Germany’s mysterious cultural traditions.60 While the
importance of this new dictionary is unquestionable, Oldenberg earmarks the
text with momentous significance: “On this path they hoped to depict the sub-
stance of every word as more than a colorless term, but rather in its distinctiveness
and thus in its power and beauty. So the Veda would regain its influential sense,
the full richness of its expression; the thought of ancient times would appear to
us in a new form filled with life and reality.”61 Thus German academic and intel-
lectual prowess not only enhances the comprehension of these ancient traditions
but, more important, uncovers their spirit and essence, and in a much more
hegemonic framing even reconstitutes their power and beauty. That is, in Old-
enberg’s assessment, German Wissenschaftler have not only opened up academic
access to the roots of this most ancient religious archive but, even more note-
worthy, their work emboldens the Vedas to their full richness, and reconstitutes
their cultural force.
Yet, as Oldenberg continues, his arguments reveal even more culturally biased
comparative undertones—assertions that he had mostly avoided in his earlier
academic work. Specifically, the Vedas in his view remain unhistorical, at least
in comparison to Rome’s ancient history or the Old Testament narrative of the
Israelites. Unlike these cultures, with their explicit links to Western and German
traditions, the Vedas have no chronology and precede the story of civilization—at
least until the arrival of the Aryans with their traceable link to Germanic philo-
logical roots. In fact, in another essay from 1895, “The Religion of the Veda and
Buddhism,” Oldenberg asserts that the underpinnings for Vedic belief “are based
on the personification of nature’s power in superhuman grandeur.”62 That is,
despite the richness of the Vedas, Indian religion remained a nature religion until
this ancient civilization became “historicized” through the cultural riches brought
by the Aryan invasion. Moreover, according to Oldenberg, India only emerges
completely from its purported cultural void with the arrival of the Buddha, and
in close chronological proximity through contact with the ancient Greeks during
the expeditions of Alexander the Great.63
For Oldenberg, these external influences manifest a critical moment in India’s
historical progress. Turning his attention implicitly in his “Sanskritforschung”
essay to prevailing Western intellectual debates, he explains how historical time
emerges in India with the Buddha, again echoing Hegel’s depiction of world
historical personages—those heroes who move the masses and are in touch with
a world historical spirit—and here also bestowing India with civilization and
history: “If for the Vedic or Brahmanic philosophers all earthly history were of
absolute insignificance in comparison to the exclusive meaning and tranquility
effected through the transformation of the eternal, there came a point for the
disciples of Buddha, in which the eternal entered the temporal world, and also
provided him [Buddha] with a historical plot that affirmed his place alongside
or even within religious doctrine: the history of Buddha’s appearance and the life
of the community that he founded.”64 In other words, for those ancient Brah-
min philosophers, the eternal spirit remained severed—a separate domain—from
earthly life. Thus Oldenberg, here perfectly aligned with positivist or Hegelian
historical models of the era like Seydel’s, reinscribes the spiritual as part of the
mundane world through Buddha’s process of enlightenment and thus suggests
that the spiritual attains meaning in the earthly domain only through history.
This constructed assessment of evolving Indian traditions would remain a criti-
cal pillar for Oldenberg’s later comparative explorations of Indian religions and
Christianity as the pressure from other models of comparative religion with more
adoptive agendas continued to mount throughout the fin-de-siècle period and as
Germany’s colonial ambitions reached their most concrete form.
An Emerging Philological Nation: The Vedas,

German Language, and the Revered Greeks
During the years following the publication of Oldengerg’s Sanskrit essay, his
apparent reluctance to join the intellectual fray over the contentions about links
between the Buddha and Jesus must have remained seriously challenged. Yet in
1894 the stakes rose, at least at first, when the infamous Russian émigré Nicholas
Notovich elevated the comparative clamor to a new intensity. The intellectual
uproar resulted from Notovich’s notorious and concocted published claim that
during his travels in India he had discovered an ancient gospel text about the life
of Jesus.65 This text, which Notovich purportedly found in the Hemis monastery
in Ladakh, depicted Jesus’s life in India and thus implicitly claimed to unravel the
puzzle about the lost 18 years in the biblical account. The proposition of Jesus
in India, which ignited the comparative fireworks that one would expect, helped
buttress, at least briefly, the alleged historical/cultural similarities between early
Christianity and Buddhism.66
In 1895, just one year after Notovich’s remarkable contention, the stakes of
cultural comparisons had gradually reached a plateau of sorts. In that same year,
Oldenberg published “The Religion of the Veda and Buddhism.” While he does
not specifically address Notovich’s assertions in this essay, as many of his con-
temporaries did, Oldenberg’s comparative undertones become more prominent.
He now acknowledges, for instance, that the linguistic similarities between the
Vedic texts and ancient Greek, Latin, and German had initiated a logical transfor-
mation to comparisons between different mythological traditions.67 As a result,
Oldenberg opens up a space for his own engagement with Indian religions in
relation to Western traditions.
In this essay Oldenberg traces the roots of a pristine, original religious essence
that “leads back to the theogony of the Indo-Germanic peoples, that here a highly
original, transparent religious system exists, whose design originates visibly in the
primitive views and expressions about the powers of nature and its processes.”68
That is, Oldenberg circumscribes the origins of the gods (Theogonie) as specifically
linked to an Indo-Germanic people—for these thinkers an indubitable reference
to the common linguistic roots of Sanskrit and German—in which the clear
form of an original, pristine religion becomes discernibly linked with Germanic
culture. Oldenberg thus initiates in this essay a more demonstrable compara-
tive agenda. He begins by emphasizing the important discoveries of two British
Indologists, Tyler and Young, as well as the German, Wilhelm Mannhardt, who,
according to Oldenberg, recognized “that quite similarly to primitive weapons
and utensils, the religious essence of the most primitive peoples of the earth are
everywhere the same in their most basic characteristics.”69 These thinkers
have uncovered a set of similar features, in Oldenberg’s assessment, that underlie
the deepest religious essence for any Volk throughout the world.
Moreover, as civilizations evolve, religious precepts become palpably manifest
in cultural and political forms. Yet, as Oldenberg views it, here echoing his previ-
ous view of the Vedas as ahistorical, those forms remain absent from the Vedic
tradition: “Yet the singers of the Veda were neither patriots nor philosophers.
The tranquility and well-being of ancient India, the even temperedness of the
Indian people’s soul, to which the full depth and intensity of caste was always
foreign to the innate national being, was only scantily touched by suffering and
passions, which fills the history of Israel.”70 Thus in Oldenberg’s constructed his-
tory of India, the Vedic religious tradition remains detached from those political
and philosophical spheres, which for a Western thinker like Oldenberg form
the foundation for European notions of Western cultural superiority. In other
words, Indian religion during the Vedic era remained without history, was unaf-
fected by a modern sociocultural model—caste—and thus failed to awaken those
monumental historical actors, to echo Nietzsche’s terminology, so prominent in

the Western paradigm.71
Specifically, as Oldenberg continues, the Vedic tradition thus predates the
philosophical energy that later philosophers and thinkers would invest to uncover
what he terms “unity.”72 That is, cultural unity remained absent during the period
of the Vedas until the arrival, as Oldenberg argues, of the world historical Bud-
dha. In Oldenberg’s construction of the world’s cultural progression, Indian
history thus commences only when Buddhism emerges around the sixth century
BCE. Thus by tracing the evolution of religious traditions, Oldenberg tacitly lays
the intellectual groundwork for reinscribing a superior cultural heritage for Ger-
many vis-à-vis the other European powers—a transition narrative with a unique
Germanocentric twist, which conveniently circumvents the British and French
monopoly on Greco-Latin heritage.
Throughout the eighteenth century and reaching a pinnacle in German Clas-
sicism, the Greeks served as the standard bearer for cultural progress. Art historian
Johann Winckelmann, the dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and
later Goethe and Schiller’s classicism, envisioned Greece as the benchmark for
German culture.73 As Tuska Benes describes, until comparative linguistics and
Friedrich Schlegel’s appeal for the importance of Indian antiquity ushered in the
so-called Oriental Renaissance, “classical Hellas [had served as] the Urbild or the
primordial, ideal model of cultural development and nationhood that modern
Germans should emulate.”74 Greece’s great thinkers, its poets and artists, were
the role models for a German nation still struggling to define itself and negotiate
the inherent conflicts between Protestant Prussia and the predominately Catholic
Austro-Hungarian Empire. This played out in the political and denominational
domains, informed academic disputes—Orientalists versus classicists—and even-
tually emerged in the Grossdeutschland versus Kleindeutschland debate.75
Yet by the final decades of the nineteenth century, as we have already seen,
many intellectuals perceived new challenges to those social, political, and religious
conventions upon which their status and identity within the community had
been grounded for generations. To reverse the demise of their position required
innovative strategies to reconstitute their symbolic capital in the changing nation.
For some, the utility of the Greek image no longer seemed able to provide ade-
quate cultural capital to combat these stresses that had become so exacerbated
in the second half of the nineteenth century. Recategorizing the Greeks as an
essential link, rather than as the definitive benchmark in the great chain of reli-
gious and philosophical progression, as we shall see, would help shore up the
contention that German culture was uniquely positioned, vis-à-vis the British
and the French, to uncover and recrystallize that pristine yet presently corrupted
prototype found in India. Though perhaps not explicitly motivated by political
prerogatives, the German vision of Indian religious tradition among some India
experts nevertheless corroborates how political rationales subtly underlie the cul-
tural aspirations that became endemic in much of the published work on India
during the era.
Returning to Oldenberg’s “Religion of the Vedas and Buddhism,” I want to
corroborate how his historical depictions manifest a Germanocentric viewpoint.
Oldenberg begins by directly linking the emergence of Buddhism in India with

the magnificent rise of Greek civilization in the final centuries prior to the Chris-
tian era. By historically redrawing India’s religious roadmap and realigning it with
the emergence of the revered Greeks, he in turn elevates the status of Indian
traditions as a reagent for establishing cultural hegemonies in the West. Claims
to cultural superiority, at least in the perception of many Germans, had been
co-opted by the French and British as they forged an Enlightenment paradigm
intended to assert their status and rank in Europe’s cultural marketplace, but
which at the same time had important practical applications. Namely, cultural
symbolic capital based on a model of an enlightened Europe, for whose heritage
the British and French competed on the colonial battlefield, became easily linked
with civilizing missions in support of colonial endeavors. Thus at the end of the
nineteenth century German thinkers were now enviously contesting an Enlight-
enment model that seemed to buttress French and British cultural superiority.76
To make that case, Buddhism, according to Oldenberg, affords equal recogni-
tion for its deep substance and philosophical disputations with that of the Greek
traditions. That is, ancient Indian civilization, because of its emerging intel-
lectual preoccupation with belief and salvation (Heilstreben), embodies cultural
traits comparable to the Greeks. As Oldenberg posits, “For ancient Buddhism:
one of those religious historical formations that may, as the consummated occur-
rence of the deepest content, be classified as one of the classical models of human
faith and aspiration to salvation. We shall see that the predominant moods and
even more so the conceptual formulations in which the thought and life of the
Buddhist mendicant monks have moved find their contemporary counterpoint
in Greek territory.”77 Because of the already well-established philological links
between Sanskrit, Latin, and most importantly here, German, only Germany
could claim to embody the spiritual bond between Europe and India and equally
maintain its link to the cultural prestige of Greece. In consequence, Oldenberg’s
comparative hermeneutics subtly forge the germinating idea of a superior Indo-
Germanic philological nation that projects Germany as the modern European
progeny of both Greek and Indo-Aryan heritage. In other words, by equating
the emergence of Buddhism on an equal cultural plane with the revered Greeks,
Oldenberg contributes to what might be called an intellectual reservoir of ideas,
from which other more iconoclastic thinkers could draw, to more forcefully assert
the cultural superiority of a modern Indo-Germanic nation—one based on these
common philological roots—as the truer European descendant of a pristine reli-
gious heritage.
As Oldenberg continues, with an increasingly palpable assertiveness, he con-
structs his history of Buddhism as an intellectual blossoming, parallel to the
Greeks, in which “a world of spiritual formulations . . . by far exceeds all of the
old.”78 Again echoing Hegel, this spiritual/intellectual historicization of Indian
religious traditions in turn becomes manifest, just as in New Testament Christi-
anity, through the action of world historical personages: “They were, or at least
certainly appeared as people who were quite embossed with their own stamp as
great pathfinders, who were beyond compare with others, permeated with pow-
ers of a peculiar mystical perfection.”79 Here Oldenberg resolutely argues that
older forms of the nature gods had become obsolete in India and were replaced
by “powers and substances that are propelled by the mechanism of an imper-
sonal necessity and in whose movement the world’s course is aligned.”80 Thus
Oldenberg sets the stage for explaining how these two cultures during similar
eras became earmarked by parallel cultural/religious manifestations—community
configurations of believers began to materialize in parallel forms in Homer’s
Greece and Buddha’s India.
As a result, communities emerged and cultures germinated in the final centu-
ries of the pre-Christian era, which had specific historical ties to Germany, and
through which Germans could trace the unique evolution of their own tradi-
tions. From this viewpoint, if Indo-Germanic origins form the basis for implicitly
reasserting the cultural hegemony of Germany vis-à-vis the British and French,
then the stakes for direct comparisons between Buddhist and Christian precepts
become dramatically higher. Thus the assessments of Indian religions by many
Indologists around the turn of the century became explicitly entangled in a
unique Germanocentric transition narrative that required acknowledgment of the
pristine nature and revolutionary impact of Indian Buddhism, here linked with
Greek traditions, yet which equally asserted the ultimate supremacy of Chris-
tian precepts—specifically the superiority of their German formulation. That is,
Oldenberg’s gradual plunge into the comparative battlefield illustrates his sup-
port for the link between the pristine nature of an original Indian religion and
Greek traditions, which more easily merged into a superior German version of
Christianity. Others of course had argued such linguistic/cultural links, but Old-
enberg rearticulates this religious history to redound to the Protestant German
nation. First though, to lay the groundwork to make that case, Oldenberg had to
reformulate the image of the revered Greeks vis-à-vis India, and in turn German
Christianity.
The Greeks, Buddhism, and Christian Apologetics

In Oldenberg’s most explicit comparative foray to this point, he continues “Reli-
gion of the Veda and Buddhism” by building on the Germanocentric philological
links that we have thus far explored to address the specific attributes of Bud-
dhism and Greek tradition. Maintaining his line of historical reason, Oldenberg
elaborates how both religious traditions exhibit aspects of earthly rejection. The
Buddhist, as Oldenberg explains, rejects everything this-worldly, “gives up house
and possessions, wife and child: these are fetters that would chain him to earthly
life. He wanders as a homeless beggar.”81 Yet in a surprising and somewhat twisted
analysis, Oldenberg continues the analogy by asserting that the Greeks observe
their own unique form of hedonism and thus also reject the world. The Greek aco-
lyte “abides outwardly by the obligations as well as by the pleasures of daily life and
contents himself by freeing himself inwardly from the limitations of this life
through the secret powers of mystical teachings and the mystical cult.”82 While
this certainly echoes what one might term an austere, “Protestant” criticism
of Greek religious conventions, Oldenberg’s idiosyncratic characterization
more importantly allows him to persist in drawing further parallels between
Greek and Indian religious traditions as the critical predecessors for the com-
ing Christian era.
In another twist to Oldenberg’s comparative gymnastics, for example, he
depicts the concept of transmigration (Seelenwanderung), in which he elaborates
how both Buddhism and Greek religion embody similar conceptual models of
what could be called in Kantian terminology the noumenal and the phenomenal
world: “The thought of the times leading up to Buddhism swayed back and
forth precisely like Plato between the opposition of that which is being and the
transitory. On the one hand the world soul, the grand Being, untouched by all
suffering; on the other hand the world of appearance; the realm of Buddhism
sees in this world, just as Herkleitos, a continual flow of becoming and decay,
a restless chaining together of causes and effects that themselves become causes
and incalculably engender new effects.”83 Thus in both traditions, earthly life—the
phenomenal world—becomes manifest in a never-ending chain of cause and effect,
a model equally inherent as Oldenberg views it, in the thinking of such revered
Greek philosophical giants as Plato and Heraclitus.
Moreover, Oldenberg emphasizes the Greek and Buddhist pantheon to fur-
ther justify their purported kinship. Both traditions, as Oldenberg casts them,
claim that their gods live long lives yet are not eternal. Echoing Nietzsche, both
traditions exhibit monumental thinkers—Oldenberg names Pythagoras in the
Greek tradition—who comprise those attributes of earlier gods. As he explains,
“Especially enlightened men were deemed by both peoples to remember former
incarnations experienced by themselves and those of others.”84 Oldenberg, here
putting an exclamation point on his comparison for the Western reader, invokes
the venerated Plato: “True abstinence and purity, so teaches Plato, is the cleansing
of the soul of the world of senses, the liberation from the passions and desires, in
which the soul, as if transfixed by a nail to the body, is forced to be continuously
reborn into new incarnations.”85 In other words, Plato’s thought here testifies to
the Greek rejection of this-worldliness, a reading that allows Oldenberg to con-
clude: “The perspective from which we have considered Buddhism allows us to
recognize the closest kinship in the basic ideas of his worldview and the teachings
of the Orphics, the Pythagoreans, and Plato.”86 Thus Indo-Germanic culture,
with its direct philological link to modern Germany, eventually became manifest
in Buddhism, which embodies a close kinship with the underlying worldview of
the Greeks.
Such sentiments also resonate palpably among other important Indologists of
the era. For instance, Paul Deussen (1845–1919), another renowned Kiel Indolo-
gist, dedicated an entire book to the Greeks in his multivolume General History
of Philosophy (1911).87 Deussen introduces his work on the Greeks with a telling
comparison between Greek tradition and the philosophical toils of ancient India’s
sages: “The Indians delved deeper into the problems of being, the newer [philo-
sophical models] proceed scientifically more disciplined, but never has philosophy
been exercised more beautifully, more illuminatingly, more brilliantly than on the
coasts of Ionia in Asia Minor and on the shores of Illisos.”88 While lauding both
Greek and Indian philosophical traditions, Deussen’s contrast provides important
insight into how he makes his case for a religious ranking order. Here in the grand
historical transformations of religious philosophy that his vast study depicts,

Deussen’s account echoes the era’s debates over essence and form, or as Deussen’s
friend Nietzsche formulated in a related context, the Apollonian and Dionysian.89
In this context, Deussen posits that Indian traditions penetrate with greater
depth and method—intellectual discipline—the critical philosophical questions
of being, while the Greeks express these same philosophical questions and their
potential solutions with an elegance and lucidity without compare. In Deussen’s
assessment, Greece and India exhibit noteworthy features in their philosophical
schemes and outcomes worthy of emulation. Like Oldenberg, Deussen’s praise
and how he highlights each tradition’s respective strengths, however, implic-
itly suggest a lack in each model from which a newly updated philosophy—in
Deussen’s view, as we shall see later, Schopenhauerian Christianity—can forge a
balanced philosophically and spiritually grounded model for determining human
knowledge about the world. In other words, Deussen’s appraisal conveniently
preserves the cultural status of both the Indian and Greek traditions as mod-
els with unique strengths—a foundation to build on, yet in which both fail to
adequately unify form with essence.
To make this case, Deussen traces the historical thread of philosophical prog-
ress from the Vedas to the present in General History. This strategy lends support
to a hermeneutical model of historical progression that buttresses his pyramidic
scheme of purportedly ever-more accurate and enlightening religious philoso-
phies, and further shores up his eventual claim that Schopenhauerian Christianity
reaches the zenith of religious history. Thus Deussen applies a biological schema
to historicism by linking important philosophical traditions through an ethnic
family tree. The Greeks were members of what he defines as the “Indo-Germanic
family of peoples,” which was manifest in their cultural production and influ-
ence.90 Building on this evolutionary plot allows Deussen to appropriate those
positive Greek attributes as the aesthetic standard for Western culture, as he
explains: “Alongside the beauty of language and artistic composition it is her pen-
etrating influence on the intellectual life of occidental humanity.”91 Yet despite
these laudatory remarks, Greek tradition, according to Deussen, remains defi-
cient. In a formulation, which again recalls the era’s debate over form and essence,
Deussen posits that Greek thought, “which . . . proved itself to be deficient when
considering its own inner quality and its abyss . . . can only be grasped by human
beings through deep inner struggles.”92 That is, the Greeks have mastered form
but fail to provide an adequately accessible spirituality.
As Deussen continues, he praises the Greeks for their receptiveness, their abil-
ity to avoid the shackles of dogma, and their freedom from despotism, yet Greek
genius remains spiritually inefficient because it steers its creative energy primar-
ily toward the physical world “And where the Greeks (as through Socrates) were
directed to the consideration and exploration of inner nature, the inner percep-
tion soon became represented in outward, plastic figures (the ideas of Plato), and
precisely this hurried objectification of the inner perceptions hindered them in
their inward considerations to penetrate to the fullest depths of the ethical world
and its extremes.”93 That deep inner sphere, both for the Greeks and in Europe’s
Vedic ancestors, had originated in the objectification of nature. That is, the Greek
deities, similar to the original religious concepts of the Vedas, had come to sym-
bolize the physical characteristics of nature—“the nourishing earth, fertilized by
the heavens, and the sun that offers light and warmth, the wind and the rain,
thunderstorms and fire.”94 Following this line of thought based on a progressive
history that had led the Indians and the Greeks to eventually uncover the fallacy
of Naturreligionen, Deussen depicts how the Greeks eventually began to question
the coherency and origin of the world in theological terms.
Greek progress beyond nature religion, according to Deussen, leads to those
thinkers in the Greek philosophical pantheon so revered in Europe: Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle. According to Deussen, Plato turned his attention to the “pass-
ing aspects of nature that in the changes in appearances, certain forms or types
of things persist invariably, and these were those that he sought in his Ideas.”95
Deussen posits that Plato, following in the philosophical footsteps of Socrates,
believed to be able to identify these ideas in the objective world. Thus Plato’s
philosophical model achieves an organic whole that is based on one grounding
principle, namely, “that actual reality, that true and inner most essence of things
that all philosophies seek, must be sought not in the ephemeral appearances that
surround us, but rather in the eternal ideas that are expressed in them.”96 Plato’s
ideas, according to Deussen, flesh out the essence of being not from what appears
in the world but rather is derived from eternal ideas (ewige Ideen).
As Deussen continues, he posits that the burden of building on Plato’s embry-
onic formulations falls to Aristotle.97 Aristotle makes his own philosophical
mark through his remarkable discoveries in the human understanding of nature,
including zoology and physiology, which in Deussen’s view still have practical
relevance for today’s scientists. Yet Aristotle purportedly dropped the ball when it
came to “cosmological as well as psychological areas.”98 In Deussen’s view, Aristo-
tle, similar to Plato, grasps the “essence of things in the idea, in their conceptual
form, that is, in those objective designations that come to our subjective con-
sciousness.”99 Importantly, according to Deussen, this approach allows Aristotle
to “scientifically” explain the integral bond between idea and form, yet despite
his recognition of this fundamental link, Aristotle fails, as Deussen conjectures,
to adequately flesh out how an object’s essence becomes grounded in its material-
ity. The confusion of essence and object created the murky philosophical waters
that in Deussen’s view plagued Aristotle’s reasoning: “In contrast, the metaphysi-
cal opposition between matter and idea which had already been found by Plato
was blurred and ruined in the following era until Kant reconstituted it.”100 That
is, Aristotle remains unable to clarify definitively the fundamental relationship
between form and idea, providing Deussen with a platform from which he can
launch his idiosyncratic, progressive history of philosophy to the detriment of
the revered Greeks, yet which preserves the German link to those more pristine
religious and linguistic origins in the Indus valley.
Specifically for Deussen, the great Greek thinkers following Aristotle exhibit
a gradual but steady decline into the sluggishness of old age: “Greek philosophy,
comparable to a human life, has its youth in the hopeful and unbroken trust in
the power of human intellect, borne by the efforts of the pre-Socratic era, its era
of manhood in the heated and fruitful conceptual work of a Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle, and finally in the post-Aristotelian philosophy, its long-lasting old age
that slowly wastes away.”101 Here Deussen relegates generations of Greek phi-
losophy to the beautiful, yet obsolete, by invoking the Herderian metaphor of
birth, maturity, old age, and decay to illustrate the inherent deficiencies in Greek
thought as it eventually degenerated into slumbering decrepitude. Thus in an
important twist with significant parallels to how German intellectuals perceived
the ills of modernity, Deussen attributes the Greek collapse first to a “certain
fatigue of the philosophizing human spirit”; second, a dismantling of a sense of
community: “one no longer felt as in earlier times as a member of the city and
state collective; the individual with his requirements and rights stepped mean-
ingfully forward”; and third, an increasing disbelief in the gods.102 Based on this
logic, the path linking Indo-Germanic origins and Germany’s contemporary reli-
gious philosophy passed through the Ionian Island and its perfection of aesthetic
form yet required newer, innovative pathways to fully reconstitute physical and
spiritual unity in the community.
Returning to Oldenberg’s comparative appraisal and the conclusion to his essay
on the Vedas and Buddhism, Oldenberg circuitously references those thinkers
who might have been called the Buddhist apologists, whose “different orientation
of examination has shown us completely different images and would provoke
other comparisons.”103 Here he responds more forcefully to the growing voices in
support of sanctioning alternative religious traditions as a means to reconstruct
European spirituality by bringing his transition narrative of Buddhism full circle.
That is, Oldenberg reinscribes the Christian Gospels as the crowning religious
achievement in this Germanocentric historical account: “A halo his [Jesus’s] life, of
attending and majestic miracles, the expression of his paramount lordliness over
the universe crowns his image, like it cannot crown the earthly human image
of Pythagoras or Plato. Here Buddhism no longer seems to guide us towards
the close proximity of the regions of Greek philosophy but towards that of the
Gospels.”104 Thus Oldenberg more explicitly rejects the speculations of numerous
intellectuals of the era who argued that the Christian traditions could be seen
as partially derived or at least directly influenced by Buddhist precepts. From
Oldenberg’s viewpoint, Greek philosophy and Buddhism are only less adequate
predecessors on the historical ladder of religious progress, which in his view cul-
minates in Christianity.
Yet even more emphatically and summarily, Deussen, in the introductory
remarks to his volume on the Greeks, utterly dismisses Greek philosophical achieve-
ments: “With them the old philosophy expired, because something appeared
that accommodated every need more powerfully and with more vitality—
Christianity.”105 With one sweep of Deussen’s historicist pen Christianity becomes
elevated to the pinnacle of all religious models for addressing and fulfilling all
spiritual needs. To put it differently, through the application of hermeneutical
historicism Deussen and Oldenberg argue for depicting the emergence of Chris-
tianity as a more advanced synthesis of Greek philosophy and Buddhist tenets.
Moreover, Oldenberg’s essays in particular, intentionally or not, conveniently
fashion the requisite intellectual groundwork for positing Germany’s cultural
hegemony among the European powers.
As a result, Oldenberg’s comparative account critically buttresses Germany’s

potential claim as the legitimate inheritor of what now might be called Ger-
many’s Greco-Buddhist heritage. In Oldenberg’s version, he acknowledges the
many tangible similarities between Buddhist and Christian doctrine yet, in an
odd twist, asserts that such affinities must be explained through coincidental his-
torical interaction: “I contend that in all of these connections the uniformity of
the historical causes that have influenced on both sides are allowed to be and
must be sufficient to us to explain these similarities—in order to explain that
individual and scattered images approach us in near cultural regions that are so
closely related to those that had at the highpoint in Indian history firmly con-
stituted themselves into a meaningful whole in Buddhism, a firmly assembled
and meaningful whole, whose soul is filled with the breath of Indian life.”106
With this remarkable contradiction, such similarities are explained by historical
coincidence and are thus independent of any inherent characteristics in common
religious traits, as others had claimed. In one sweep of the Western intellectual
broom then, Indian Buddhism becomes relegated to one historical cog—albeit
an important one—and thus remains, analogous to the Greeks, only a stage in
the historical progression of Western Christianity’s path to cultural superiority.
Here the ambivalent image of the venerated ancient spiritual traditions of India,
now latent at best or corrupted at worst, held by so many German thinkers—a
Germanocentric transition narrative—becomes overtly manifest. Ancient Indian
religions, the culture from which Germany purportedly derives its deep philologi-
cal and spiritual origins, becomes in effect culturally disenfranchised in its later
forms such as Buddhism when directly compared with Christianity. That is, in
a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too historical hermeneutics, Oldenberg, along with
many of his Indologist contemporaries like Deussen, extols Indian and Greek
traditions as the root of Western civilization, conveniently circumventing the
British-French monopoly on Enlightenment mandates that were incumbent upon
their Greco-Latin heritage while circumscribing Western Christianity, particularly
in its Protestant German form, as culturally superior. To put it more boldly, Old-
enberg’s model, constructed on the similitude of Indian and Greek traditions and
their eventual ineptitude at fulfilling their doctrinal mandates, implicitly affirms
the cultural supremacy of Germany vis-à-vis the British and French.
As a result, both Oldenberg and Deussen’s audacious historical depictions
place Greek tradition—that exemplary civilization out of which European
political and philosophical traditions emerged—and, specifically in the case of
Oldenberg, Buddhist religion, the revolutionary inheritor of pristine Indo-Aryan
tenets, directly into the crucible of German cultural evolution. To carry the anal-
ogy further then, though neither Oldenberg nor Deussen ever make the zealous
assertions that others would later, that nation with the most concrete claim as
inheritor of these unique traditions could also lay claim as universal flag bearer for
European self-devised entitlements to cultural superiority throughout the globe.
That charge becomes more explicit in another Oldenberg essay.
Nation, Empire, and the Christian Community

To this point, Oldenberg’s essays have for the most part skirted more direct
comparisons between Buddhism and Christianity.107 Yet in a collection of essays
published in book form in 1910, one particular essay, “Buddhism and Christian
Love,” exhibits a more charged approach to comparative studies.108 Oldenberg
begins by admonishing those Buddhist sympathizers among his fellow Indologists
for their lack of scientific clarity.109 One specific case is Oldenberg’s assessment of
Richard Pischel’s work. Just four years prior to Oldenberg’s essay in 1906 Pischel
had published his Life and Teachings of the Buddha.110 As Oldenberg views it,
Pischel, a prominent Indologist (1849–1908) at the University of Halle and later
Berlin, had incorrectly interpreted the Buddhist concept of Maitri as equiva-
lent to Christian love. Oldenberg also categorically rejects Pischel’s explanation
of yoga and bluntly denies any link between this Buddhist meditative practice
and Christian love, as Pischel had conjectured. In contrast, yoga, as Oldenberg
elaborates in his reading of Maitri, is only “an exercise of peaceful goodwill, as
the warm rule of love.”111 Moreover, implicitly referencing the Christian precept
of brotherly love, Oldenberg discounts yoga as primarily “gymnastics for the
soul” (seelischer Gymnastik), which fares poorly by comparison to the substan-
tive communal impact of Christian love: “The hand [of Buddhism] does not
reach out to the next person to do good; no comforting, helping word resonates
to him. Rather with the same motionlessness, in which one is accustomed to
plunge into mystical ecstasy, one lets the phantom of benevolent feeling describe
its [yoga] motions over the universe in Indian boundlessness to its most extreme
limits and with pedantic symmetry.”112 Here the mystical ecstasy of Indian yoga is
acknowledged as individually rewarding, at least in its achievement of emotional
benevolence, yet remains communicatively deficient and communally barren in
comparison to the community-oriented outreach of Christianity with its com-
forting and supportive words intended for the good of others. This argument
should now begin to sound familiar. As far apart in their analytical approaches
as Oldenberg and Seydel might have been, as we will soon corroborate more
fully, their conclusions about the supreme status of Christianity in a Protestant
German nation coalesce.
First though, in Oldenberg’s assessment of Pischel’s purportedly misconstrued
comparison, the critical factor for distinguishing these two religious traditions
becomes manifest in how Christianity bolsters social/community agency. In other
words, Christian “brotherly love” embodies the revolutionary potential to change
communities and worlds. In this reading, Oldenberg’s analysis not only sanc-
tions a comparative politics of sorts—Christian apologetics—but also unveils the
proselytizing tendencies of Christian precepts, which proved so convenient for
European civilizing missions that became entangled with the European notions
of nation and empire.
Such sentiments also echo in the work of Richard Garbe (1857–1927), another
well-known Indologist of the era, who, like von Schroeder, also studied under
the renowned Rudolf Roth. Garbe introduces his India and Christianity (1914),
his contribution to the enduring comparative project, with a hopeful overtone:
“Despite the absence of every propagandistic tendency I sustain the hope that
my work will also provide practical use for those missionaries who operate in
India.”113 Regardless of Garbe’s ostensible lack of propagandistic motives for the
practical use of his comparative work for the missionaries of India, he neverthe-
less pledges to avoid the kind of polemical verbiage that one might expect among
Christian apologists of his day, and in general, Garbe’s text does not exhibit the
kinds of biased Catholic and Protestant discourse that we have seen from some.114
Yet as Garbe continues his introduction, he belies his vow of objectivity as he
explains what such practical applications of his Indian studies might imply: “I am
thinking here especially of the last chapter; because whoever wishes to gain influ-
ence on the religious life of the educated Hindu, can begin in my view nowhere
better than with the elements from Christianity that have already penetrated the
teachings of Hindu sects.”115 Here Garbe comes clean, so to speak, and reveals
his own sympathetic view of the Christian mission in India: by building on
those Hindu teachings that embody Christian elements, Westerners can hope to
sway—civilize—at least those better-educated Hindus to pursue a Christian life.
Returning to Oldenberg’s essay, “Buddhism and Christian Love,” he continues
to push the comparative contrast further by praising Buddhist precepts for their
normative qualities. Specifically, he acknowledges that Buddhist love as depicted
by the ancient Pali texts fosters respect for earthly life. With transparent bias,
however, he suggests that Buddha’s followers were incapable of meeting these
normative ideals: “One can doubt it when one confronts the apprehensive admo-
nitions in the community ordinances, the complaints about those who cause
quarrels and divisions.”116 That is, Indians were originally capable of constructing
laudable goals in their religious doctrine but in contrast to Western Christianity
prove incapable of effectively acting on those beliefs—putting them into com-
munity praxis.
Thus Oldenberg is willing to grant Buddhism credit for attempting to regulate
the sinful predispositions of human beings and he equally acknowledges that one
should not downplay the positive influence that the Buddha had for his followers.
Yet, despite these positive effects, Oldenberg, in a quite untypical metaphor for
this less than flamboyant scholar, points to Buddhism’s tendency to indifference:
“Yet one should not overlook the cool draft in this warmth that inheres in it.”117
Here Oldenberg’s more assertive stance provides a powerful tool for linking his
analysis of Buddhism with familiar denominational objectives that thread their
way through the entire era. Unsurprisingly then, Oldenberg turns to what he
viewed as Buddhism’s monk-like character.
Here Oldenberg maintains his emphasis on the interplay between religious
principles and community agency. For instance, he admonishes Buddhism for
its failure to turn its benevolent precepts into acts. In an explicit echo of Kul-
turkampf discourse, he deplores Buddhist almsgiving: “The point is that one
should give mainly alms to the cleric, the monk. One gives to him so that the
seeds of good works that one spreads in this field will bring fruit a thousand times
over in future rebirths. Not the most beautiful trait of Buddhism, how it never
tires of glorifying in true floods of uplifting stories, drastic and usually quite
crude, the virtue that most directly benefits the monks.”118 For any European
reader in 1910, Oldenberg’s acerbic observation explicitly alludes to the parallels

between Buddhist alms in which monks are the primary beneficiaries and Catho-
lic indulgences, which Martin Luther had so vociferously attacked as part of his
reformist agenda in the 95 Theses.119 The inherent teachings of the Buddha may
perhaps parallel many of Christ’s teachings, yet those doctrines, just as in the case
of Catholicism, had fallen into disrepute in Oldenberg’s view. In consequence,
Oldenberg’s transition history implicitly reformulates Seydel’s scheme and thus
also serves as a means to circumscribe Protestantism as a more valid religious
model for the still emerging German nation.120
The apparent link to a more assertive Protestantism becomes more pronounced
as Oldenberg pursues this line of reasoning further in the next section of the essay.
Here he argues that Buddhist thought fails to maintain its “this-worldliness.”
Buddhism, as he views it, displays “a very distinctive tendency toward the imper-
sonal and general . . . , to renunciation of the visible, tangible, to submerge and
to become blurred in boundlessness.”121 Moreover, as Oldenberg continues, the
Buddhist acolyte seeks to flee from all earthly pain and suffering by achieving
Nirvana, “the enigmatic yonder world of being and nonbeing.”122 For Olden-
berg this substantiates a critical distinction from Christian tenets, because seeking
Nirvana purportedly circumvents the germination of brotherly love, as he rhe-
torically suggests: “The plant of human love is certainly not foreign to the realm
of Buddhism. Yet can it grow in the climate that reigns there as in the Christian
world?”123 Buddhism then, in Oldenberg’s estimation, proves inadequate due
to its explicit pessimistic worldview, which, in a further important implication,
prevents Buddhism from fashioning a religious community: “In the organism
of a [Buddhist] church the lay-believers are not integrated.”124 Here, repeating
a theme we have already seen, Oldenberg suggests that Christianity is superior
because of its ability to bind human beings together, or to make use of an expres-
sion coined by Ernst Gellner, to prevent “social entropy.”125 Such an ideological
framework proved conducive to a German nation attempting to construct its
identity under the era’s political, social, and cultural pressures while building new
community bridges on the grid of colonial visions.
In concluding his essay, Oldenberg writes: “Where there is history, there is
change.”126 Here, “change,” or as many others of the era might have put it, “prog-
ress” (Fortschritt), serves as the analytical framework, through which he employs
a unique philological transition narrative to reconstitute German cultural iden-
tity. Yet transition narratives are inherently ambivalent and so too is Oldenberg’s
assessment of Buddhism’s revolutionary emergence from the depths of Vedic
tradition and Brahmanic hierarchy. Unsurprisingly then, Oldenberg seems to
intellectually twist and turn in his now most assertive attempt to refute more pos-
itive appraisals of Buddhist doctrine and historical influence: “We do not need to
gloss it over, when the voice of love is only mutedly audible to us in Buddhism
in contrast to the predominance of other tones.”127 Here, as throughout these
lesser-known essays, Oldenberg walks the tightrope of recognizing Buddhism’s
positive attributes, now for many Indologists containing undeniable similarities
with Christian tenets, while maintaining German Christianity’s link to the nation
and its implicit claim to universality.
Despite Oldenberg’s analytical tightrope act, his reputation as an important

academic and Indologist was never tarnished, nor can he be linked to colonial-
ism, nor for that matter to the supporters of the surfacing racially based theories
of Aryan superiority in any explicit way. Yet Oldenberg and other intellectu-
als of the era nevertheless fell into the crucible of cultural biases that implicitly
lent ideological support to the civilizing mission and sanctioned a blind eye to
colonialism’s appalling deeds. Moreover, Oldenberg’s case indicates the degree to
which a colonial consciousness permeated the intellectual community, especially
after Germany officially made the colonial team in 1884. While Oldenberg’s shift
to Christian apologetics is perhaps subtle, this is not the case with von Schroeder,
whose assessments of Buddhism during the 1890s stand in harsh contrast to his
receptive view of Buddhism in Sundara—a literal sea change from Buddhist revo-
lutionary to Christian crusader.
Returning to the Fold: Leopold von Schroeder’s

Reassessment of Christ and His Colonial Consciousness
Von Schroeder, who, as we have seen, embraced Buddhism in his early play, König
Sundara, as the potential transforming power to reconfigure Western spiritual-
ity—to return it to its heroic roots, capable of inspiring religious, social, and
political change. In consequence, the trajectory from heroic Buddhist king to
Christian apologetics becomes particularly instructive for explaining how von
Schroeder’s thought became so intricately entangled with European political and
cultural dynamics. To put it simply, von Schroeder viewed India as a cultural
battleground for Europe, as he explains in his essay “India’s Spiritual Meaning for
Europe” (1899). Here he argues that material benefits have to date dictated the
“desire for conquest by the European peoples,” yet at the turn of the century such
limited objectives have become nothing more than the trappings of old battles:
“Gladly we leave the possession of India to the British, but we see all the cultural
nations laboring in a noble competition for the extraction of India’s rich spiri-
tual treasures.”128 Here von Schroeder craftily employs liberal precepts of freedom
and tolerance to co-opt Indian Buddhism as a spiritual treasure trove, which he
could later easily rethematize to assert a more Western, Christian heroic cult—
Aryan Christianity. For now, let it suffice to say that von Schroeder’s constructed
Buddhism embodies German liberal tenets, which he will eventually reframe to
support his notion of a universal Germanocentric Christianity.
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, various reli-
gious innovators and their movements still remained small in nominal terms yet
had gradually gained the attention of many intellectuals, which von Schroeder, in
his 1893 text “Buddhism and Christianity,” summarizes: “Outside of Christian-
ity among the large mass of those who are forever finished with Christianity and
belief in miracles, many dream of a religion of the future that has borrowed its
outstanding characteristic traits, usually from Buddhism.”129 Here von Schroeder
openly acknowledges that for many, Eastern religious thought and philosophy
might provide a bona fide alternative to traditional Western Christianity. Yet
in response, von Schroeder’s work, in a complete about-face from his earlier
Buddhist sentiments, becomes far more hostile toward Buddhism than what we
have seen in our exploration of Oldenberg as these India experts attempted to
decode the striking parallels between Buddhist and Christian narratives.
Here I want to explore several of von Schroeder’s essays beginning in the 1890s
as a benchmark for exploring more deeply the causes and possible motivations
for Oldenberg’s entrance on the comparative stage and von Schroeder’s more
adamant readoption of Christian mandates—in my assessment a sociopolitically
motivated return to the fold. That is, von Schroeder’s work illustrates a notewor-
thy transformation and contradiction from his earlier assessment of Buddhist
spiritual perquisites that mirrors the shifting views about cultural Others in
the German academic community. To put it more boldly, much of this work I
believe provides a reservoir of ideas, just as we have seen in Oldenberg’s essays of
this period, that are capable of explicitly buttressing more hegemonic political
assertions in the Kaiserreich. Specifically, these mandarin academics shifted their
images of India—consciously and unconsciously—as they sought to reconfigure
and represent their own quasi-religious distinction in society, and as the German
nation attempted to define and assert itself in other geopolitical spaces.
Like Oldenberg, von Schroeder also frames his “Buddhism and Christianity”
in response to the rising status of Buddhism as a comparative benchmark for
Christianity. Yet von Schroeder never shied from the more unfettered discourse
practiced by some during the era. He readily takes up popular assertions while
crafting a historical comparison of these two religious models that now redounds
to the credit of a new breed of Christianity. Von Schroeder, just 16 years after
his sympathetic depiction of Buddhism in Sundara, now boldly proclaims a new
vision for his own religious convictions: “What a tremendous life power Chris-
tianity constitutes, what a life force it contains, this our particular era teaches
us.”130 Yet despite this implacable and evangelizing tone, von Schroeder the aca-
demic cannot ignore the scholarly debates of the day in which many respected
scholars had acknowledged the remarkable similarities between Buddhism and
Christianity.
In consequence, von Schroeder juxtaposes the salvation stories offered in both
religions, a comparison that Oldenberg, Pischel, and others also took account of
in their comparative work. Von Schroeder asserts that both saviors, the Christ
and Buddha, conquer evil. Here, in a move reminding us again of Kulturkampf
rhetoric, von Schroeder chooses to inscribe the Buddha’s defeat of Mara, Satan
in the Buddhist tradition, in terms of a revolutionary rejection of priestly hier-
archies. He posits that the priests’ strict literal interpretation of religious law and
ceremony undermine the vitality of Brahmanic tradition. Thus in this account,
Buddha and Christ ring in a new age “in which the gospel of salvation will be
preached in all places; quite similar to how Christ displaced the era of the law
through the preaching of the gospels.”131 In other words, von Schroeder under-
scores a new sociopolitical paradigm in Christian salvation narratives in which
“evil,” and priestly hierarchies have been replaced with revolutionary, spiritually
revamped models of salvation.
Yet both religions also emerged, according to von Schroeder, out of strong
nationalistic traditions, Brahminism and Judaism. Each, he posits, typifies a
“missions-oriented world religion . . . international, cosmopolitan.”132 Thus

he frames his comparison under the rubric of competing missions for worldly
predominance—both religions seek in his assessment to intervene globally and
be acknowledged as cosmopolitan. In this move, reminiscent of the types of argu-
ments supporting the colonial powers’ civilizing mission, von Schroeder asserts
that the Buddhist and Christian revolutions have set progress in motion, which
“lays primarily in the moral realm.”133
Here, the politics that Oldenberg’s work only hinted at begin to emerge in a
more pronounced fashion. In von Schroeder’s calculated departure from histori-
cal objectivity, both religious models exemplify what he refers to as pessimistic
religions—those that judge worldliness as the root of the problem yet envision
happiness and salvation not in terms of worldly rejection but rather in triumph
over the world.134 In this view the world becomes set in dialectical opposition
to spiritual action—religion in praxis. In other words, von Schroeder implicitly
authorizes the imposition of “superior” religious values in order to improve, or
to put it more explicitly, to hegemonize the world—a sophisticated twist on the
civilizing mission normally attributed to colonialist self-legitimization.
Moreover, von Schroeder inadvertently raises the political stakes of compara-
tive historical claims because the supremacy of one religion over another remains
justifiable primarily by proving historical provenance. Thus as the stakes for Ger-
man political agency and nationhood became more closely linked to colonial
successes during the 1880s and 1890s I believe that von Schroeder reinscribes
Indian Buddhism to assert Christian preeminence specifically in support of
German national prerogatives—blending the religious and the political and
uncovering the straightforward path from Oldenberg’s perhaps more sophisti-
cated comparative account to the more hyperbolic version needed to rally the
colonial mind-set.135
What justifies such an assertion that a historical reinterpretation ends up being
politically motivated? The answer lies within von Schroeder’s text. At this point
in “Buddhism and Christianity,” he turns to the work of the thought provoking
Seydel, whose contentious comparisons still remained on the intellectual burner
during the 1890s. According to von Schroeder, the way Seydel would have it
“almost the entirety of Christianity in his view appears virtually as a more noble,
refined Buddhism.”136 This would have been an arguable assertion for the von
Schroeder of Sundara.
Yet now, for this Baltic German the fun seemed to stop at Seydel’s innuendo.
In von Schroeder’s view, Seydel’s arguments and conclusions are fatally flawed
because of the impossible conclusions that his suppositions would impose on the
purported facts about Christ: “Christ is in Christian belief not just the son of
God, but he is also in an eminent sense a historical personality, and as are many of
his disciples.”137 In a quite remarkable and twisted application of historical logic,
von Schroeder argues that the substantial impact of Christ’s acts and teachings in
the world are proof that Christianity could not represent just some offshoot of
an older, more significant tradition because it was historically real in a way that
Buddhism seemed not to be. According to Seydel, as von Schroeder depicts it,
the Christian gospel’s substance would only represent a “poetic accoutrement,”
and such a view in von Schroeder’s mind borders “on the edge of lunacy.”138 Here
von Schroeder turns the tables on the spiritual transformations he so forcefully
emphasized in Sundara and now seeks to constitute the historical superiority of
Christianity vis-à-vis Buddhism. It appears that von Schroeder’s post-Sundara
analysis is no intellectual sleight of hand or subtle adjustment to a consistent
pattern of scholarly engagement but rather represents a radical departure in his
thought that attests to the political and cultural influence of the era.139
Thus von Schroeder’s discourse at this point in the text retains the underlying
patterns of Oldenberg’s arguments but now shifts to a more assertive criticism of
Buddhist traditions than we have seen from the Kiel Indologist. Again von Schro-
eder invokes Kulturkampf imagery to criticize what he terms the outsider nature
of Buddhism—its monk-like character—in another striking deviation from the
position held in Sundara: “Buddhism’s call for the complete annihilation of thirst
for being and the will to life is without doubt linked inseparably with its monk-
like character.”140 In Sundara, as we have seen, the Buddhist challenge to priestly
hegemony and authority constituted the very foundation for revolutionary,
spiritual salvation that transformed the king. Yet here, again overtly recapitu-
lating Protestant discourse, he invokes his reconstructed image of Buddhist
religious order to explicitly marginalize Catholicism and to reinscribe Protestant-
ism as the legitimate purveyor of a universal Christianity: “Christ founded no
order of monks, and if over the course of time monkhood developed copiously
within Christianity, it does not belong to its essence. The renewed evangelical
Church has in fact incontrovertibly annulled monkhood as it is opposed to the
essence of Christianity; the Reformation has overcome monkhood.”141 Here von
Schroeder reclaims a Protestant version of Christianity, which emerged in the
Reformation, to emphasize how the Protestant Church overcame the debilitat-
ing self-righteousness of the Pharisees—a characteristic that one would expect in
Buddhism, according to von Schroeder, yet in his view remains absent. Choosing
not to pursue this point further he retains his focus on Protestantism’s liberating
force and its role in facilitating Christianity’s universal charge.
He sets his sights on a more authoritative, engaged, and assertive Christianity
in the world by positing that Buddhist epistemology remains embedded in the
belief that through human action—perception and wisdom—one can overcome
the world.142 Yet von Schroeder now views this prior advantage, as he constructed
it in Sundara, as a fallacy, arguing instead, in an unmitigated realignment with
older forms of Christian doctrine, that only community with God—salvation
through Christ—offers the potential liberation from the grips of evil: “By con-
trast Christianity is the salvation from evil, from sin and guilt, from estrangement
from God, and thus the reconstitution of communion with God and to the status
of childhood with God.”143 Thus von Schroeder’s depiction links Christianity
with a supreme being, which he asserts does not exist in the Buddhist conception
of the universe.144 Critical for his reconstructed religious views, von Schroeder
stresses this difference to justify the superiority of Christianity in guaranteeing
human salvation—creating a religious justification for Christian supremacy and
in turn a political apologetic for the civilizing mission of a Protestant German
nation whose desires were now clearly aimed at redrawing the colonial map.
In concluding the essay, von Schroeder extends this line of thought to its full-
est political appeal—justifying colonial mandates with his version of Christian
doctrine by insisting on its civilizing mission. Specifically, von Schroeder moors
Christian teachings to their inexorable revolutionary mandate to change—
overcome—the world: “In Christianity lays the divine power to overcome the
world; but only then, when the humble and loving spirit of Christ has ascended
to full, absolute rule among its representatives and bearers, the Christians, can and
will win the victory.”145 Such seemingly twisted applications of a Christian loving
spirit, here linked with the ongoing redefinition of German national perquisites,
accented the solid bond between religion—both spiritual and denominational—
and politics that I have emphasized in this study.
The more explicit shift in von Schroeder’s work that we have depicted here,
which is subtly yet tangibly present in Oldenberg’s essays, points to how academics
and other intellectuals during the era exhibited an emerging colonial conscious-
ness that, like their European counterparts, was camouflaged by the purported
benefits of civilizing the world—and was linked with the prerogatives of the Ger-
man nation that had been forged here through the philological bonds between
Sanskrit and German. Just as Brecht’s Galileo refused to fully acknowledge the
community consequences of his scientific curiosity and motivations so too did a
generation of German Indologists become entangled, some unknowingly others
simply implicitly with the colonial consciousness of the era. Yet more assertive
models of Christian superiority among the German India experts certainly did
exist, which can further corroborate the powerful mantra of a Germanocentric
colonial consciousness.
Specifically, as the flame of colonial fever in the German nation became more
discernible, such sentiments frequently included a more competitive view of the
British Raj. In fact, as we shall see in our next chapter, there are frequent Protes-
tant essays from the 1870s on India that set the stage for envisioning Germany as
the better colonizer in India. Even though the German government never entertained
serious thoughts about replacing the British Raj with a German one, such images
nevertheless provide the ideological groundwork, intended or not, for real action.
That is, comparative religious work that validated Christian superiority in the
historical chain of religious evolution implicitly supported and justified aggres-
sive colonial policies and practices.
During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, for instance, several
explorers of India had already become more outspoken about their colonial
visions and von Schroeder himself later began to redefine Germany’s religiocul-
tural mandate in terms of Aryan supremacy. Yet in Germany’s imagined India
these colonial visions always remained uniquely embedded in models of spiritual
rejuvenation and the rejection of Western materialism. The theosophist and colo-
nial agitator Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, for instance, attempted to reconfigure
Western religion based on a vision of Indian traditions and the British Raj, which
explicitly cast Germany as the proper inheritor of India’s spiritual and material
treasure chest.
PART III
The Radicalization of
Germany’s India
CHAPTER 5
Ambivalent Visions of
the British Raj
Spirituality and Germany’s
Colonial Champions
Because not just sheer money greed is to blame for the lengthy continuation of
evil, rather since it has been acknowledged as evil, also the lack of trust in God,
the fearful, human miscalculation of the material consequences, the incalculable
criterion of the abundant, divine mercy that rests on every faithful act of self-
renunciation, has also been greatly disregarded.
D. Theodor Christlieb, Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift (1877)1
D. Theodor Christlieb (–) juxtaposes above what for many thinkers

was the essential dilemma of the Wilhelmine era: the oppositional nature of the
material—here expressed as pecuniary greed that had purportedly emerged from
an increasingly materialistic worldview—and the spiritual domain.2 Importantly,
such thinkers as the Darwinist/monist Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Hübbe-
Schleiden, whose theosophist vision of India we will explore more thoroughly in
this chapter, exploited this material-spiritual clash to forge a model of spiritual
rejuvenation and to assert Germany as the potentially better colonizer for the
Raj.3 Yet first, I would like to return to the 1870s to explore in greater detail
how German Protestant thinkers began to formulate a critical image of the
British colonial machine that underpinned these later more concrete colonial/
spiritual framings.
Let us return then first to Christian Hönes’s portrayal of India’s nineteenth-
century reform movement, the Brahmo Samaj, which we briefly introduced in
Chapter 1. Though unapparent in his opening appeal to his listeners to take
heed of India’s pending religious and social reform movement, which will pur-
portedly culminate in India’s Christianization, Hönes indirectly calls attention
to the inadequacies of the British by pointing to their inability to fully ignite
Christianity’s compelling reformatory force. A closer look at the details of Hönes’s
speech and the essays on India during the 1870s by several other Protestants,
all members of the clergy, provides evidence for a growing sense of competition
with the British and the emerging German stakes in the European colonial con-
test.4 These Protestant India pundits were undoubtedly the Christian apologists
that we might expect, yet they frame their investigations of India in ways that
manifest the links between religion and politics in a different variation than we
have seen so far. That is, the criticisms levied on the British Raj underpinned the
more audacious colonialist mind-sets that frequently coalesced with visions of
spiritual rejuvenation—a bond that, as we have just seen in our last chapter, Her-
mann Oldenberg and Leopold von Schroeder fleshed out, though perhaps more
opaquely, in their philological nation. Here I want to focus on the more discern-
ible competitive stance toward the British among several Protestant thinkers and
then illustrate how it gradually fused with a colonial model of spiritual renewal
and unity among several important members of Germany’s intellectual elite.
To begin, Hönes foregrounds this projected religious and social sea change
in India with the obligatory sketch of India’s religious history. He underscores
India’s “freedom” movements, which began with Buddhism’s rebuke of Brah-
min priestly authority four centuries prior to Christ and were now manifest in
nineteenth-century India in the Brahmo Samaj.5 Though Hönes acknowledges
India’s progress and its achievements in religious reform to date, the country,
as he explains, has failed to fulfill its potential: “The effects of these reforms
were profound and healing and extended into the present; yet for a full renewal
and transformation of the Indian people’s spirit it was not sufficient. We now
ask if such change is not now emerging through the influence of Christian and
European civilization!”6 Here Hönes resorts to a Eurocentric stand-by—the civilizing
mission—by insisting that the previous attempts to renew and transform the Indian
religious spirit have proven deficient, and perhaps only Christian and European
influence, as he rhetorically asks, can provide the requisite spiritual means to free
India from the burden of its past.
Yet, in Hönes’s assessment, the burden of India’s failure to modernize in spir-
itual and social terms also lies at the feet of its European colonizers. Despite
British attempts to make meaningful inroads into India’s Christianization, Hönes
implicitly criticizes the Raj because it has proven inadequate to “civilize” the
natives: “Just the acceptance of European education and Enlightenment by what
is after all a vanishingly small minority was in no way capable of bringing about
a real social uplifting of the Indian people, or to initiate a successful struggle
against the evil of an ancient 1000-year development.”7 That is, a minority of
enlightened Indians—a few intellectuals who have embraced European models
of Bildung and Enlightenment—has failed to eradicate the evil of a millennium
of inadequate progress and raise the social standing of its people.
Yet hope, according to Hönes, was emerging in what he terms the “Indian
Protestantism” of the Brahmo Samaj, especially under the leadership of Keshab
Chandra Sen. In particular, Hönes discusses in subsequent detail the movement’s
purported openness to Christianity: “They also did not avoid contact with Euro-
pean Christians and acknowledged openly their great veneration for Jesus Christ,
even if at the same time they could not make up their minds to acknowledge his
divinity.”8 In Hönes’s reading, the seeds for the germination of a Christian India
Ambivalent Visions of the British Raj 151
could be found in the Bramo Samaj, but the decisive ingredient to consummate
the conversion had failed to materialize under British dominion.
The political innuendo underpinning Hönes’s essay becomes most palpable in
his description of Sen’s famed six-month sojourn to England from March 1870 to
September of the same year.9 While in England, the renowned social and religious
reformer traveled extensively throughout the country and met with notable Brit-
ish politicians, intellectuals, and members of the clergy. On April 12 in London,
Sen delivered an address to many of these same notables. Hönes, who was in
attendance at the widely publicized speech, describes its contents in detail. Sen
begins the speech, as Hönes relates, by expressing his great desire, “to become
familiar with the social conditions in a Christian country,” and, moreover, in a
reading of Sen’s motivations that presumes the colonized’s dependence on the
colonizer for reform, “He also wished to be able to warmly convey personally
the needs of the Indian people to the English Statesmen.”10 Thus Sen looks to
the Indian colonizer, according to Hönes, as the stimulating force for social and
spiritual renewal, or to use a Christian idiom, India’s savior. More boldly, Hönes
opines that England had knocked at India’s gates and commanded, “Noble sister
stand up . . .” and India did so: “India stood up from its centuries-long leth-
argy, saw the degraded position in which it found itself, and requested help from
England. And this help was granted.”11 Sen proclaims, as Hönes retells it, that
through British influence India now stands at the threshold of dramatic reform:
“A wonderful change is readying itself.”12
Under the influence of the Brahmo Samaj, as Hönes continues his account,
India has indeed progressed. It now embraces, for instance, British philosophy
and science: “The work on the material welfare has equally made tremendous
progress.” India has also gained knowledge of the Bible: “The educated Hindus
have received and studied this wonderful Book and I am happy to say that in
many cases have learned to appreciate it.”13 That is, the material and social condi-
tions in the country have improved dramatically under the British, who have also
planted the seeds of Christian doctrine.14
Yet, as Hönes returns to Sen’s speech, his reading reveals an unambiguous
criticism of modern English society and culture, which he posits will prevent the
full rooting of the Christian seeds that had been planted by the British. By the
end of Sen’s sojourn in September, as Hönes explains, his experiences there had
tainted his views of the colonial power. According to Hönes, Sen enumerates a list
of deficiencies that the Indian reformer bemoans and Hönes does not refute: the
British “restless bustle”; “the monstrous roast beef ”; “the conduct of the elegant
ladies of fashion” the use of alcohol and prostitution; and British social divisions,
which Sen equates with the Indian caste system.15 In summary, Hönes, in his
concluding remarks on Sen’s speech, echoes German grievances about Euro-
pean spiritual decay at the hands of excessive Western and British materialism.
In Sen’s words, which could have easily been taken from the accounts of many
of our India experts: “England’s Christian life is more of a material nature than
a spiritual one.”16
While a degree of ambivalence in Hönes’s attitude toward the British would
not be surprising for a German theologian of any denomination, the sharp
contrast presented here seems to be constructed with a particular predisposition

for judging the Raj as a colonial failure in terms of its inability to uncover India’s
spiritual treasures and bring them to fruition. That is, Sen’s embrace of Chris-
tian tenets and Western cultural standards appears intentionally over calculated
by Hönes in order to showcase England’s moral ineptitude and spiritual vacu-
ity.17 This assessment of Hönes’s reading of Sen’s speech receives corroboration in
present-day scholarly work on Sen. In Frans Damen’s 1983 analysis of the Bramo
Samaj under Sen’s leadership and his depiction of the leader’s trip to England,
for instance, there were two important themes that highlight Sen’s image of the
colonial power that stand in marked contrast to the picture Hönes sketched.18
First, Sen appeals to the British not to “exploit his country, but reform it for the
good and welfare of the Indian masses,” a perspective conspicuously absent from
Hönes’s rendering of the speech. Second, Sen emphasized the “Oriental aspect
of Christ” and, according to Damen, stressed that “Christianity, although it was
an Oriental religion, had come to India in a foreign and repulsive Western garb,”
was divisive, and further argued that its “lack of spiritual life had shattered some
of his illusions.”19 While the latter theme fits well with Hönes’s subtle framing of
the British as decadent colonizers, the first does not. Hönes presents Sen as far
more open to Western cultural mandates and thus still in need of a better, more
spiritually attuned colonizer than Damen’s analysis suggests.
Based on Damen’s reading then by comparison, it becomes apparent that
Hönes seems to cherry-pick Sen’s speech and his reported experiences in England
with a specific agenda that serves to preserve support for a colonial model based
on civilization civilatrice—Christianizing the heretics—yet which is intended at
the same time to subtly underscore the deficiencies in Britain’s colonial model.
From this perspective, Hönes’s positive assessment of the Brahmo Samaj as a
potential Christianizing force that could lead to momentous social reforms and
religious revitalization takes on a new light. In other words, “Indian Protestant-
ism,” an expression that Hönes uses several times in his essay, is a reform “that
did not want to introduce anything new, but just wanted to liberate the existing
Church from abuses and intended to lead it back to its former purity.”20 Yet this
is a more than typical anti-Catholic innuendo. The liberation of the pure original
of India’s ancient religion still requires the guiding hand of the Western colonizer.
Here too we perceive the subtle reproach of the British colonial mission, which in
the eyes of Hönes had succeeded materially but failed spiritually.
Such subtle hints that the British had fallen short in their ability to take
advantage of India’s spiritual treasure also resonate in the essays of W. Germann,
a Protestant pastor, who published a number of essays concerning India in the
Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift during the 1870s and also took up the subject of the
Brahmo Samaj in 1875. Like Hönes, Germann addresses the movement in terms
of India’s potential for Christianization, yet his approach is more skeptical of the
Bramo Samaj as a conduit for such a religious revolution than the one Hönes pres-
ents. Like Hönes, however, he also distinctly lays the blame for the lack of mission
progress squarely at the feet of the British. Specifically, England has failed to create
an educational infrastructure—Germann describes them as “religionless govern-
ment schools”—that promotes the Christian mission. Moreover, Germann takes
special notice of Sen’s criticism of the British educational standards. Sen, in a speech
delivered in 1872 at the Bengal Social Science Association annual meeting that Ger-
mann here quotes, challenges the moral certitude of the British: “The leadership of
Shakespeare and Milton are not a sufficient foundation for moral character forma-
tion.”21 In spite of England’s considerable successes in the more practical spheres of
administration, health, and agriculture, for example, a point noted frequently by
many German India experts, the British have failed to provide the requisite cultural
foundation to inspire a broader Indian conversion to Christianity.
Specifically, Hönes and Germann acknowledge, even praise, the material suc-
cesses of the British colonial mission in their depiction of Sen and the Brahmo
Samaj, yet at the same time subtly denigrate the Raj’s inflated economic indul-
gence, British cultural decadence at home, and most critically for these religiously
oriented Germans, Britannia’s spiritual impotence. Importantly, their readings of
the Indian reform movement and Sen’s speech foreshadow the bolder invective of
Friedrich Fabri’s Does Germany Need Colonies? (1879) and subtly lay the ground-
work for criticizing the British inability to tap into India’s spiritual treasures.
Beginning in the late 1870s this ambivalent view of the Raj—acknowledgement
of the talents of the British colonial administration and envious of its material
successes while bemoaning their utter insensitivity to India’s spiritual wealth—
forms a common thread in the German construct of India.
Yet the most acerbic criticism of the British in India from Protestant theologi-
cal ranks comes from Christlieb, whose incisive words from his 1877 essay on
the Indo-British opium trade began this chapter. The professor of theology at the
University of Bonn focuses his scathing criticism on the British colonial power’s
material greed. As we have seen, Christlieb bemoans the British obsession with
material gain and the spiritual/moral delinquency of their colonial endeavors. As
Christlieb pronounces, the British Raj is not only afflicted with monetary greed
but far worse, even upon recognizing its own material obsessions, proves inca-
pable of the necessary trust in God to rectify this evil.
Importantly, Christlieb’s argument, though certainly more caustic, fol-
lows the pattern that we have also seen in Hönes and Germann. He implicitly
acknowledges the administrative, scientific, and economic strengths of the Brit-
ish colonial model, for example, when he points out that the British have taken
significant steps to reduce famine in India: “The most recent famine in Bengal
did not have the same horrific consequences due to the heroic efforts of the gov-
ernment, yet was most devastatingly felt in the districts, where the richest earth was
absorbed by opium planting.”22 Noteworthy is the palpable ambivalence in his
assessment, which acknowledges British material successes—the partial eradica-
tion of famine—yet equally decries the moral incertitude and spiritual corruption
of the British, who in his judgment remain preoccupied with the lucrative opium
trade. That is, in Christlieb’s assessment, morality and material success are explic-
itly inversely correlated—where the evil of monetary greed has not been subdued,
earthly achievements will also suffer. This analytical model, as we shall see, subtly
underpinned bolder German visions as the potentially better colonizer in what
the German India experts viewed as a spiritually rich India. Moreover, these Ger-
man thinkers imagined the potential consummation of spiritual fulfillment and
material gain in India—a Germanocentric colonial model intended to correct the

moral inadequacies of the British.
To put it more bluntly, these readings of the Raj point toward more radical
attempts to recalibrate the material and spiritual habitus in Germany, which to so
many intellectuals of the era seemed so misaligned. The spiritual renewal that these
German thinkers sought became easily melded with the geopolitical desires under-
lying the colonial agendas of the Kaiserreich, both of which became superimposed
on constructs of India by such religious innovators as the lawyer, colonialist, and
theosophist Hübbe-Schleiden. Let us turn then to this adamant colonial cham-
pion who devised a theosophist model of spiritual renewal in his India that was
distinctively similar to those of Germany’s Buddhist disciples and his theosophical
counterparts on the mystical fringe. Yet his ideas for spiritual renewal stand in stark
contrast in a significant way because Hübbe-Schleiden, like the Darwinist/monist
Ernst Haeckel, unabashedly embraced the colonial aims of Imperial Germany.
Evolution, Brahmins, and Colonialist Visions:

Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden’s Metaphysical Darwinism
Hübbe-Schleiden traveled to India during the height of German colonial ambi-
tions (1894–95) and soon after published a travel report, India and the Indians
(1898). Here I want to investigate how his attempt to reconstitute Western spiri-
tuality through a constructed vision of Indian traditions and “new” science became
uniquely entangled with his vision of colonial politics and competition with the
British. Specifically, Hübbe-Schleiden intricately linked his interpretation of Dar-
winian evolution with the emerging fringe religious movement (theosophy) and
his colonial vision for the nation. That is, Hübbe-Schleiden appropriated India’s
religious traditions in an attempt to resolve the challenges posed by new models of
Western science and the era’s purported spiritual inadequacies, and asserted the pol-
itics of German colonial desire. To put it more boldly, the envied Kulturnation India
served in Hübbe-Schleiden’s travel report as the metaphysical bedrock for reuniting
religion and science, and sanctioning Germany as a more capable colonizer.
Hübbe-Schleiden’s attempt to reconstitute modern spirituality, buttressed by
his version of Darwinian evolution, and his appropriation of Indian religious
traditions reveal his political agenda and provide a critical backdrop for under-
standing how that model became enmeshed with his support for the nation’s
colonial ambitions.23 Before turning to his travel report though, I want to briefly
explore his Being as Lust, Suffering, and Love (1891), published just a few years
prior to his trip to India. In this text Hübbe-Schleiden clarifies his model for
revamping Western spirituality through the lens of an “imagined” India. His
pseudoscientific religious model will set the stage for deciphering how his travel
account of India manifests his political and social vision for the emerging Ger-
man nation—a reconfigured German nationalism with universal implications.
Hübbe-Schleiden begins Being as Lust, Suffering, and Love by depicting a hier-
archy of species from the lowliest molecules to plants and finally to animals.
Unsurprisingly, he positions the human being at the apex of this organic pyramid
(Figure 5.1 here; figure 2 in Hübbe-Schleiden’s text).
Figure 5.1 Hübbe-Schleiden titles his graphic “The Pyramid of Power Potentialiaties in the
Process of Individualization.” Though hardly legible in this image, the top right triangle states
“Gottmensch.”
Source: Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, Das Dasein, als Lust, Leid und Liebe: Die alt-indische Weltanschauung in neuzeitlichen
Darstellung. Ein Beitrag zum Darwinismus. (Braunschweig: Schwetchke & Sohn, 1891), 17.
As Hübbe-Schleiden explains, the pyramid represents organic evolution

triggered by “individual internal causality,” which allows him to conveniently
preserve the agency and superior position of the human being, perceived by so
many thinkers of the era to be under attack from the purported consequences of
Darwinian natural selection. He posits that this individual internal causal force
is “the energy augmenting factor in evolution; only the desire of being, the desire
to become of all individuals is the basic cause of evolutionary development; only
its urge directed internally, or even more upwards to the apex of the evolution-
ary pyramid, increases the development, in its own energy spiral as well as in
the common spiral of the genealogical sequence of forms.”24 That is, accumu-
lated individual life forces propel evolution forward: “every individual strives
unconsciously or consciously toward the one highest pinnacle,” reminding us
of Humboldt’s concept of energia, though now formulated by Hübbe-Schleiden
in more modern language—human desire to “become.”25 In this model, evolu-
tionary progress is derived from individual energia and becomes the basis for his
Darwinian vision of human progress at the macro—universal—level, and as we
shall soon see, also across geopolitical space.
Importantly, Hübbe-Schleiden’s evolutionary pyramid has significant religious
implications. The pyramid, sketched to represent three-dimensionality, asserts
that wisdom (Weißheit) is linked at the pyramid’s apex with God and Man (Gott-
mensch). Thus Hübbe-Schleiden’s model of evolution, which became explicitly
linked with his constructed India, resolves one of the burning questions of the
day: in a Darwinian world, based on the apparent brutality of natural selection,
can an all-knowing and benevolent God exist? Though Hübbe-Schleiden never
formulates the question precisely as such, his pyramid nevertheless implicitly
addresses this problem because it envisions a rejuvenated modern spirituality—
the union of Knowledge, God and Man—as the three-sided apogee of a spiritual
natural selection.
Significantly, this unifying model of natural selection allows Hübbe-Schleiden to
draw social inferences. His depiction of evolutionary processes forges a link between
individual development and various species over time, as a nexus between individual
life energy and communities—implicitly states and societies—that evolves as part of
what he terms the “macrocosm” (Figure 5.2).26 In consequence, Hübbe-Schleiden’s
model embodies a powerful cultural/political tool because these links allow him to
subtly construct a pseudoscientific/religious model that also supports social evolution
based on qualitative distinctions. As his model suggests, such qualities can be rendered
distinguishable, both in the individual and community, by their respective degrees of
“wisdom”—the highest characteristic on his elaborate pyramid.27
In Being as Lust, Suffering, and Love the political implications of Hübbe-
Schleiden’s model for spiritual rejuvenation remain perhaps subtle, but how he
applies this model in his Indian travel report divulges a more unequivocal politi-
cal agenda and colonial consciousness. Let us turn then to Hübbe-Schleiden’s
account from India to explore specifically how his travel narrative and vision
of the Indian subcontinent become explicitly filtered through the prism of his
Darwinian model and German colonial mandates—a blending of the spiritual
and the political.
Figure 5.2 Importantly, Hübbe-Schleiden’s illustration “Evolution in the Animal World” begins
with lower forms but traces the purported progress of races and cultures, which he correlates to
species. Note especially that the so-called Aryans at the apex evolve into Indogermanen.
Source: Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, Das Dasein, als Lust, Leid und Liebe: Die alt-indische Weltanschauung in neuzeitlichen
Darstellung. Ein Beitrag zum Darwinismus. (Braunschweig: Schwetchke & Sohn, 1891), 91.
Metaphysical Darwinism in India

Hübbe-Schleiden’s travel report consistently envisions Indian culture to embody
a profound spirituality that allowed him to assemble a model of the country
from which he could draw parallels to Western cultural inadequacies and criticize
the West’s cultural failures. In an anecdote from his travel report, for example,
Hübbe-Schleiden recounts his curiosity about the name of a particular landing
bridge, “Pantscha-Ganga-Ghat” (Steps of the Five Rivers), which crosses the Holy
Ganges in the sacred city of Benares. He recalls that he questioned his young
Brahmin guide about the fact that there were not five rivers present but only the
Ganges. Were there perhaps tributaries that had since vanished, Hübbe-Schleiden
pondered, to which the Brahmin responded negatively. Hübbe-Schleiden then
rhetorically remarks further, as he recalls the story, “Then these other four rivers
have always only existed in fantasy,” to which his guide purportedly responded,
“Yes, certainly! Is that not enough?!”28 His guide’s response seemed significant
to Hübbe-Schleiden because in his mind it accurately exemplified the Indian
psyche—a magical world of fantasy with special access to the metaphysical and
spiritual and with little concern for the material world or empirical fact.
Hübbe-Schleiden’s insistence on the Indian psyche’s spiritual disposition is
emblematic of his entire travel report. In his praise for Indian spirituality, how-
ever, he underscores modern traces of an uncorrupted ancient Hinduism in
order to illustrate and contrast a spirituality he claims is no longer extant in the
West—German idealism has died at the hands of materialist worldviews: “The
Brahmin is a monist, and he subsumes idealism in the framework of his abstract
monism, which fully takes into account the facts of world existence in all detail.
In this theoretical and practical formation of his thought and life the Brahmin
far exceeds any Idealism of our occidental culture.”29 Thus the Brahmin monistic
worldview recovers a lost unity between science and spirituality, a recurring
theme among our fringe religious innovators, that reunifies the theoretical and
the practical—the spiritual and the material—and will become the fountainhead,
in Hübbe-Schleiden’s model, for reconstituting Western religion and asserting
political visions through a powerful union between Indian spirituality and West-
ern scientific paradigms.
Hübbe-Schleiden confirms this assessment when he envisions India’s future
based on a spiritual harmony between Europe and India that importantly did
not include England: “Other spiritual circles will come there from Europe and
will enliven Europeandom in India—different thinkers that are neither disposed
to Church bigotry, nor are superficially minded. They then will succeed in ini-
tiating a spiritual accord between Europeans and Hindus.”30 In other words, the
superficial British and the bigoted churches—here Catholic and Protestant—will
be superseded in their colonial and universal missions. Importantly, the extracted
archives of Indian religious erudition, in Hübbe-Schleiden’s model, become the
treasure chest of a lost superior type of European—a Germanocentric “jewel in
the crown,” through which German thinkers could reaccess and rejuvenate latent
Western spirituality and conveniently underpin their colonial visions—with sci-
entists like Hübbe-Schleiden as a new caste of leaders.31
To make his case, Hübbe-Schleiden builds on the theory that the Brahmins
had entered the Indus valley from the North, emerging from the Aryan hordes,
and had initiated the revered Vedic tradition. He emphasizes the Brahmin’s status
as an elite intellectual class with special priestly privileges. Unsurprisingly, Hübbe-
Schleiden’s report contains explicit racial undertones in a similar fashion to other
thinkers of the era that either studied and/or traveled India.32 The Indologist von
Schroeder, for instance, in a somewhat later but apt formulation illustrating the
era’s mind-set about the physical characteristics “of the Aryan Urvolk,” posits: “I
place special emphasis on the tall, strong, and evenly built body, the blond hair
and the bright, gleaming, predominantly blue eyes.”33 Thus Hübbe-Schleiden’s
emphasis on Brahminism, in congruence with the era’s racially constructed think-
ing, presumes a biological/racial nexus that coalesces in the special spiritual status
of the Brahmin class—a sociocultural rank with which he could easily identify. In
fact, Hübbe-Schleiden reports that during his sojourn in India: “[I] insisted that
I too am a Brahmin and demanded therefore to be greeted as one,” as if he were
Brahmin by racial/elite association.34
Continuing this line of reasoning, Hübbe-Schleiden invokes Nietzsche’s model
of the Übermensch to frame his argument about the elite status of Brahmins. He
argues that Nietzsche’s ideal of the superman falls short when compared to the
ideal of Brahminism. Hindus, Hübbe-Schleiden posits, think “more metaphysi-
cally and more spiritually” and seek their entire life to become “divine beings”
(Gottmenschen), a contention through which he appropriates Indian metaphysics to
affirm Darwinian evolution.35 Moreover, Hübbe-Schleiden suggests that the pursuit
of Brahmin ideals can reinitiate an evolutionary chain that will overcome the shack-
les of Western materialism—a spiritual posture that true Brahmins have maintained
for millennia and that remains accessible to those with the “will to power,” as
Nietzsche might have put it. In Hübbe-Schleiden’s version, “The more the spirit
claims importance, the less the human being feels bound by the materiality of his
being, the wider the perspective of his consciousness and the bigger the domain
of his ideas and interests, the higher his ideals and the richer his love, the more
exclusive his striving will be directed, to devote oneself, his personality, to the
great universal ensemble—to serve it selflessly and to sacrifice the material for
the spiritual.”36 Here, in an important extension of his model, Hübbe-Schleiden
implicitly defines and delimits class markers based on individual spirituality,
which becomes the engine for reasserting intellectual agency in the community
(“the great universal ensemble”)—an appropriation of Brahminism intended to
establish the potential for more political and universal applications of heightened
spiritual awareness. Here the class and racial markers, as derived through Hübbe-
Schleiden’s historical account of Brahminism, manifest a critical contrast to
Nietzsche’s thought with its tacit independence from racial markers and historical
origins—Ureigenschaften (original traits), as Hübbe-Schleiden might call them.
In Hübbe-Schleiden’s view, Nietzsche’s depiction of the superman fails to provide
a sociocultural blueprint from which a reinvigorated and ethnically derived Ger-
man elite could emerge—to lead the nation, and perhaps the universe.
To make this leap to a more palatable political model based on divisive Dar-
winian science and Indian religious traditions, however, Hübbe-Schleiden’s vision
of India must tackle another thorny issue: how to harmonize spirituality with the
assumed inherent brutality of Darwinian natural selection, which we have already
seen visually represented in his pyramid (Figure 5.1). Yet his India provides the
answer: the integration of body and spirit, which had seemed to rupture under
the rubric of empirical science, could now be recast in Hübbe-Schleiden’s imag-
ined elite priestly class of Brahmins—not just as a social class (caste) but also as a
group of elite thinkers, with whom he could identify. Thus he devises a survival-
of-the-fittest version of spirituality in which the survivors are elite thinkers who
have been able to immunize their epistemological praxis from an exclusive
dependence on material results. To justify this updated version of spirituality,
however, Hübbe-Schleiden needed a more spiritually friendly version of Dar-
winian natural selection.
Metaphysical Dynamism and a Mystic German Vitality

Echoing the earlier Lamarckian-Darwinian debate on trait inheritance, Hübbe-
Schleiden argues that the experiences of parents cannot be transferred to their
children.37 What a human being learns and attains, Hübbe-Schleiden suggests, is
derived from subjective experience. Revealing his underlying purpose, namely to
open up the possibility for an evolutionary model of human spiritual progress,
he speculates that if every human child must attain all the “most essential, most
valuable results of human spiritual development” from scratch, then progress
would become impossible.38 To resolve this pseudoscientific dilemma, Hübbe-
Schleiden posits, in a somewhat less than watertight argument, that the Brahmin
resolves this paradox through the concept of reincarnation: “Therefore the
Brahmins have always understood development individually, in that individuals
develop one after another through the process of evolution in countless embodi-
ments according to the thread of their own self-initiated causality.”39 That is, the
individual human being becomes the energy source for progress—the trigger—
which becomes manifest in infinite embodiments—reincarnations—over time.
According to Hübbe-Schleiden’s interpretation of Brahmin metaphysics then, the
human spirit proceeds—just as physical species do—through similar evolution-
ary states that nature propels over time and that predictably will continue to
reoccur in the future.
Here Hübbe-Schleiden’s attempt to relink the spiritual with the physical/expe-
riential worlds remains paramount to his understanding of evolutionary science.
In a significant move that clearly illuminates the stakes in the conflict between
science and religion in that era’s language, Hübbe-Schleiden describes Indian
reincarnation (Wiederverkörperung) as a “metaphysical Darwinism.”40 Moreover,
the concept of rebirth (Wiedergeburt) provides the catalyst for an evolutionary
process out of which a more spiritual culture can emerge under the guise of a
Darwinian worldview.
In Hübbe-Schleiden’s model, these evolutionary processes depend on indi-
vidual “self-sacrifice,” yet Hübbe-Schleiden inserts a unique twist that provides
a space for the individual human being to circumvent the assumed inherent
brutality of natural selection. In this subtle yet important tactic he reconstructs
Darwinian natural selection to justify the sacrifice of colonial victims in order

for these German Brahmins to unfold as universal spiritual leaders—a power-
ful sociocultural and political outcome for his reading of Darwin. According
to Hübbe-Schleiden’s metaphysical Darwinist model, the world is determined
by what he terms a “self-acting law of nature,” which conveniently allows for
human beings to shape the world through individual action: “Nature can be bent,
yet not the law that determines nature.”41 This is a critical point for thinkers of
the day who were struggling to reconcile their threatened religious worldviews,
which were in conflict with modern science, because it maintains, even asserts,
individual agency in a Darwinian—Gottlose—world. Thus Hübbe-Schleiden
appropriates the Indian concept of reincarnation as a justification for reinscribing
spiritual progress as another possible result of Darwinist natural selection. Yet as
we shall soon see such progress was intended only for a select elite and intended
to preserve the status quo of incumbent class (caste) structures.42
First, as Hübbe-Schleiden continues, the split modern intellectual subject can
become a spiritual Übermensch in a Darwinian world: “In any case this ideal is
the more or less conscious goal toward which every Hindu strives. Though no
one assumes to reach this ideal personality in their current embodiment; every-
one knows that he will always return to earthly life as a better and more noble
personality until he, just as eventually all of humanity, reaches this goal, even if
only after many million years.”43 Here, a universal human prototype—a German
intellectual—ignited by individual drive and energy strives to become “a bet-
ter and nobler personality,” who can now become a “world historical” leader, in
Hegelian terminology, and set the world in motion for a new spiritual age predi-
cated on German universal mandates. Again echoing the influence of Nietzsche,
Hübbe-Schleiden constructs an imagined Brahmentum based on the achievement
of higher spirituality that engenders an elite class reaping earthly rewards, not
salvation in a promised afterlife, as Christian doctrine avowed.
Thus the link between Brahminism and distinctive class boundaries becomes
critical for Hübbe-Schleiden’s model for rejuvenating the German intellec-
tual’s identity as it became reconfigured spiritually and socially. Significantly,
his proposed model became easily aligned with the prevailing political objec-
tives of the expanding German Empire. That is, in a significant extension of
Hübbe-Schleiden’s thought, his metaphysical Darwinism becomes the catalyst
for assessing not only those individuals but also social groups—communities—
that have progressed to different levels on his metaphysical pyramid, as we have
already seen (Figure 5.1).
Caste and Class

In Hübbe-Schleiden’s Indian travel report such community applications become
particularly manifest in his assessment of Indian caste conventions. In defense of
the Indian imposition of caste rule, and oddly aligned with the Catholic views that
we have seen, Hübbe-Schleiden rhetorically asks: “And does not our ’best society’
also ostracize and boycott all, who sin against their prejudices and conventional
concepts? Do our finest social circles not segregate themselves also against all
those of lower status with equal pride?”44 That is, social class becomes justified so
long as the standards are culturally—spiritually—legitimate for determining such
distinctions. Moreover, Hübbe-Schleiden’s assessment of Indian caste reveals his
unsympathetic view of the increasingly powerful proletarian classes in Europe:
“This so much vilified ‘caste’ order is thus also the primary reason that made it
possible for just a handful of British to govern the Indian Reich with 300 mil-
lion inhabitants, even though 60 million of these are fanaticized Muslims who
easily tend toward resistance.”45 The rigidity of India’s caste system, according to
Hübbe-Schleiden, provides a social model particularly conducive to the subjuga-
tion inherent in a successful colonial politics.
In fact, according to Hübbe-Schleiden, the Indians are entirely content in
their poverty: “One can certainly call the larger mass of Hindus poor, because
they own little and live frugally; but they are simply devoid of needs and feel best
with the simplest life style in their warm climate. Poverty in the sense of European
pauperism does not exist in India.”46 Here, in a reading aimed at Europe’s surging
proletariat and the breakdown in traditional class structures, Hübbe-Schleiden’s
take on Indian poverty explicitly contrasts the “happy” colonized native with the
European pauper, who, as Hübbe-Schleiden unmistakably suggests, creates his
own dissatisfaction. Moreover, this overt support for the politics of conventional
class designations, as he viewed them in India, implicitly condones the colo-
nial master’s dominion over the colonized. That is, in a move succinctly linking
political agendas with spiritual rejuvenation, conventional class structures remain
intact—even vital to his model for reconstituting Western spirituality.
In Hübbe-Schleiden’s rereading of the Indian caste system, he assumes that
social order—here perfectly aligned with a Protestant ethic—is determined by
behavior rather than birth, and thus social outcasts who have failed to follow
Hindu social order become deservedly ostracized. Here, the social mores and hab-
its of present Indian society, which received much attention and criticism during
the era by Europeans, become palpably entangled with the prevalent Western
doctrine of a civilizing mission. In a related sense, Richard Garbe, another impor-
tant Indologist of the era that we have already encountered, emphasizes in his
travel report the visible decadence in India, particularly in view of modern Hindu
religious practices carried out at the Holy Ganges in Benares: “The smell of filth,
rotting vegetables and flower garlands that served as offerings, defies descrip-
tion . . . The Temple is nothing more than a cowshed,” and “The Hinduism of the
ordinary man is a stupid, accursed fetish worship, in which one must diligently
search for any sort of higher thought.”47 Such malicious judgments served as ideo-
logical justification for an intellectual, elite caste of German thinkers, who were
asserting an updated model for recalibrating the spiritual and political engines of
the German nation, yet which also conveniently buttressed the colonial aspira-
tions of Germany’s imperial champions.48
To such ends, these travel accounts often emphasized those deplorable Indian
outcasts—any Indian no longer in touch with their spiritual legacy, as Hübbe-
Schleiden depicts them. These present-day Indian decadents have lost touch with
what Hübbe-Schleiden and others considered a latent spiritual treasure, originat-
ing from a pristine Aryan religious tradition, which the British, in the view of these
German thinkers, had also proven unable to tap into. During the era such transi-
tion narratives had most frequently become expressed in the civilizing mission of
the European powers. Yet in the case of Hübbe-Schleiden, despite his apparent
concurrence with the “civilizing” creed, he acknowledges that Western attempts
to improve or “Europeanize” India will fail to achieve the desired improvements
in modern Indian society: “Through the attempt to make brown Europeans out
of Hindus, they will not be improved. What can bring about the lifting up of
Hinduism should begin only out of the spirit of the original Brahminism of the
ancient Aryans.”49 Here, this racially charged appraisal demonstrates clear traces
of a transition narrative—modern Hindus are in need of improvement—while
the religious heritage of elite Hindus still provides the vestige of a pure spiritual-
ity, which remains discernible in the vision of this Western theosophist.
Yet Hübbe-Schleiden’s Indian travel report reveals more explicit political
undertones. As we have seen, he appropriates Indian religion first as a means to
criticize and circumvent modern Europe’s emphasis on material culture, and then
to provide the sounding board for rejuvenating an elite class of German Brahmins
with colonial aspirations—conveniently preserving the traditional class structures
of the German nation, which were now under threat by the demands of a grow-
ing proletariat. Surprisingly enough, this model would also provide the source
for many intellectuals to explicitly assert a more important place for German
colonizers in their constructed India as well as a means to assert Germany as a
better colonizer than the British.50 In fact, Hübbe-Schleiden’s historical narrative
sought to criticize the British colonial enterprise because of its purported singular
attention to the material spoils of the Raj.
Here the blending of religion and politics becomes explicitly pronounced.
Throughout Hübbe-Schleiden’s report a subtle yet palpable criticism of the Brit-
ish becomes evident, which corroborates the ambivalent image of England as an
effective colonizer that we have seen thus far. As Hübbe-Schleiden continues,
his assessment takes on a different tone regarding the British colonial model.
He emphasizes, for example, the obsessive British pursuit of material benefits
in India, and more adamantly their failure to utilize India’s spiritual potential
“because they [the British] do not intend to promote the idealistic culture of
the Indian Aryans, rather only the materialistic one of the European Aryans.”51
In consequence, only Germans are able to fully appreciate and transform the
dormant roots of a once vibrant Indian spirituality—now latent under the mate-
rial, solely economic, designs of British dominion. This position also resonates
in Garbe’s initial impressions upon his arrival in Bombay: “The first step onto
Indian soil is an event, which will powerfully move the mind/spirit (Gemueth) of
every German, in which some of the receptivity of our Nation for the fairy-tale
world of the Orient lives, for whom India is not just the land of cotton, indigo
and wheat.”52 As Garbe opines, German culture embodies a special receptive-
ness for the fairy-tale world (Märchenwelt) of the East, and thus in his view
Germans are uniquely capable of envisioning an India beyond just purveyor of
material riches.
Returning to Hübbe-Schleiden, his constructed history of Indian tradition,
which he links to what he terms an “original” Christianity (Urchristentum),
remains critical to justify a turn to the East—to the ideal of Brahmin—a vital
ploy to overcome the ills of a materialistic and spiritually deprived modern Euro-
pean society. Yet conveniently, in a further repercussion of his grand scheme,
these Indo-Germanic roots—based on the link between Sanskrit and German,
and which importantly predate Greco-Latin heritage—serve to circumvent the
British and French claims to cultural supremacy and their status as superior colo-
nizers. By conveying an image of analogy between Germanic heritage and Aryan
roots, Hübbe-Schleiden lays the foundation for bolstering German prerogatives
on the playing field of colonial geopolitics.
That said, most German travelers to India, like Hübbe-Schleiden or Garbe,
were usually in awe of a very well-oiled British colonial machine. Richard Garbe,
for instance, implicitly praises one British civil servant in his ability to main-
tain “happy natives”: “I have rarely found again in India such a fine relationship
between the population and the representatives of the British regime as the one
that Mr. Boevey had with the people of Ahmedabad. The firmness of his charac-
ter, paired with great mildness and friendliness, seemed to have earned a general
love for this outstanding civil servant.”53 Failing to question the easily discernible
master-slave status of the British overlord and his colonial subject—every Ger-
man intellectual had certainly read his Hegel—Garbe, as the passage continues,
fails to acknowledge the precarious position of the master and noticeably basks
in his surrogate status as colonial lord: “Then not only did the faces of the people
attest to the extraordinary popularity of the Kollektor Sahib, but also the flowers
and bouquets that were brought to us.”54 Yet praise for the colonial talents of the
British and other colonial powers also took more concrete forms among Ger-
many’s colonial enthusiasts.
Hübbe-Schleiden too expends significant energy in his travel report to depict
the economic, medical, and agricultural projects of the British colonial admin-
istration in India. Specifically, as he describes it, the British have effectively
improved the struggle against famine and protected Indian farmers from exor-
bitant interest rates. Moreover, he continues, they have successfully combated
the plague and improved sanitation.55 Garbe, too, confirms Hübbe-Schleiden’s
impressions of the British colonial machine, when he describes its role in its
colonial capital, Calcutta: “First, I believe to be correct in defending the Eng-
lish energy and perseverance against the criticism of filth and putridity in their
building of this majestic Metropole out of nothing.”56 Here the British civilizing
mission receives explicit praise.
Thus Hübbe-Schleiden and others again acknowledge the enormous mate-
rial success of the Raj, which Hübbe-Schleiden predicts will pave the path to
India’s eventual emergence as a world power: “And that England has taken on
India is without doubt the greatest luck for India; also the blossoming of that
good fortune is now just in its beginnings. In another one hundred years a new
world power may have grown in India on this basis.”57 In terms of what Hübbe-
Schleiden would categorize as the material and political aspects of colonial rule,
the British are an indubitable success.
Yet Hübbe-Schleiden nevertheless discloses his own colonial aspirations for
the German nation in his praise for the British administration in India when
he bemoans the comparative inadequacy of German colonial organization. In

other words, Britain embodies superior colonial attributes—administrative and
economic—that Germans should admire in formulating their own colonial
vision but have failed to emulate. In Hübbe-Schleiden’s somewhat twisted logic,
he enthusiastically praises, for instance, the British civil service in India and posits
how it should serve as a model for German colonial endeavors: “All that our civil
servants could learn from those in India . . . The responsibility of all civil servants
to their superior agencies is obvious; yet a civil servant who should be called to
work for the nation must also be accountable to public opinion. He must always
be aware that he represents the Nation, the German people, and that the honor
of our culture before the judgment of humanity depends on him.”58 Here Hübbe-
Schleiden links the responsibility of the German civil servant, his cognizance of
the political mission as it becomes formulated from colonial hierarchies (superi-
ors), with the grand cultural schemes of the German nation.
These examples demonstrate the German admiration for and envy of Brit-
ain’s superior colonization talent that these Germans personally witnessed, and
equally illustrate their ideological support for the German mandate, even right,
to colonize the world.59 That is, such praise for the British only camouflages the
predominant view held by these German India experts that foresaw Germany’s
destiny to empower the world—emulating the British material model, which
would become improved and enhanced by Germany’s universal proliferation of
its reconstituted spirituality—metaphysical Darwinism.
In Hübbe-Schleiden’s version, India’s spiritual culture has been left untapped
by the British and awaits rehabilitation by a more effective colonizer. As we
have seen, he retains the political undercurrent by leaving the imagined colo-
nial door open for Germans in India—open for a better colonizer than the
British—while he paves the path with the universal aspirations of his metaphysi-
cal Darwinism. That is, Hübbe-Schleiden imagines that another spiritual circle
(Geisteskreise)—a Brahmin class of German thinkers—will be the more capable
colonizer to uncover the rich spiritual resources of Indian tradition.60 Thus
Hübbe-Schleiden’s implicit criticism of the British failure to tap into India’s most
precious “jewel”—its deep spirituality—becomes most palpable with increasingly
explicit geopolitical ramifications. In fact, in the introduction to his Indian travel
report, Hübbe-Schleiden identifies that European power—Germany—with the
requisite cultural gravity to fully grasp the Indian spirit: “More likely we Germans
are more capable of understanding and living in a foreign spiritual culture like the
Indian one; because there is no European people so similar to the Hindus as we
Germans, and no other people holds so much congruence in its historical devel-
opment with that of the Hindus, as we. One could really in a certain sense name
Germany a ‘European India’ and we Germans the ‘Western Hindus.’”61 In this
passage, Hübbe-Schleiden’s new metaphysical-Darwinian model, which echoes
the spiritual intuition required to access Madame Blavatsky’s “secret doctrine,”
becomes politically charged in its cross-cultural—colonial—implications. India,
in the mind’s eye of the relentless colonialist Hübbe-Schleiden, becomes the spiri-
tual source through which an original German idealism can be rejuvenated, and
equally provides the means to assert the cultural (spiritual) superiority of the
German nation—a cultural nationalism with universal implications. “Das Land

der Dichter und Denker” becomes “Das Weltreich” of the same.
In Hübbe-Schleiden’s unique colonial model, his geopolitical aspirations in
India fail to assert perhaps the expected—the unqualified submission of the
colonized—yet his vision of India nevertheless embodies an explicit colonialist
mind-set, which resonates in the introduction to his Being as Lust, Suffering, and
Love. Here Hübbe-Schleiden bemoans Germany’s lackluster overseas policy: “As
far as the prospect is concerned to realize the benefit that this text strives to
provide in the context of European cultural life, I would like to point to the fact
that as I began fourteen years ago to write my colonial-political texts, that even
men, from whom one would expect great understanding of overseas policy,
repeatedly responded: ‘Those are all pretty fantasies, yet basically only inge-
nious nonsense!’” Hübbe-Schleiden then continues, now in reference to the
Berlin Conference of 1884:
And then seven years later (1884) as our government began to implement these
plans, as the German drive to action, awoken from its long winter hibernation,
rubbed its eyes and saw that the most fruitful lands of our earth lay outside of
Europe and in some cases still stand at our disposition, that to cultivate them
through the education of the primitive people to work, is a universal cultural mis-
sion, whose solution offers the measure for the future viability and potential of our
nation, since then one pays little attention anymore to those, who still consider it
an ingenious nonsense.62
Here the discourse of a civilizing mission becomes patently tangible. Moreover,

the reinvigoration of European cultural life and national perquisites—colonial
ambitions—also become explicitly linked in Hübbe-Schleiden’s call to the Ger-
man nation to “awake from a long hibernation” and fulfill the German drive—
eine Welt-Kulturaufgabe—to cultivate the world as a potentially better alternative
to British colonialism.
In summary, Hübbe-Schleiden’s special version of German Brahminism, which
evolved within the framework of religious/scientific discourse—metaphysical
Darwinism—becomes powerfully linked to Indian traditions in such a way as to
sanction Germany’s entitlement to disseminate this newly constituted spiritual-
ity throughout the globe—a transnational German nationalism. Such implicit
political assertions of superiority were founded on explicit cultural links between
Germany and India: “Even if India is not the cradle of humankind, perhaps not
even the Motherland of the Aryans, the Hindus are nevertheless the older broth-
ers of our own culture.”63 Here Hübbe-Schleiden’s shrewdly constructed image
of a pure and original Indian spirituality becomes overtly linked with German
cultural heritage—“older brothers”—and what he has redefined as metaphysical
Darwinism, which implicitly undermines the colonial entitlements of the British,
French, and other Europeans to global—universal—cultural dominance. To put
it differently, only Germany, as the rightful inheritor of these older pristine spiri-
tual traditions—India’s younger brother—can revitalize them, a task that Britain
has ignored and modern Indians are incapable of achieving.
Looking to our next chapter, the biological imperative of Hübbe-Schleiden’s

theosophy provides recourse to a different set of metaphors that allow for histori-
cal change, if that change is in the service of something that accommodates both
nature and culture, for the improvement of the species. His “colonial conscious-
ness” nevertheless contradicts his exceedingly naïve, unhistorical vision of the
world in which all living beings are unified in body and soul—an Enlighten-
ment model for all human and living kind. Yet how this intellectual envisioned
Enlightenment science and applied it in a theosophical Weltanschauung seems to
cause no apparent contradiction with what must have been his certain knowledge
of the social inequities and brutality resulting from colonialism—derived from
the brutality of what Russell Berman has termed “instrumental rationality.”64
From a stricter Darwinist evolutionary perspective, colonialism is unsustain-
able because in places like India, the “fittest” were clearly not surviving nor was
the “species” served. Yet at the same time, Hübbe-Schleiden sees the failure of
colonialism in India as somehow related to the British inability to follow through
on implementing the best of its ancient spiritual knowledge. Thus there is a place
in the sun prescribed for the new German nation: as better moralists and scien-
tists who might have a justification for colonization. Though Hübbe-Schleiden
cannot be accused of such violence as was Henry Morton Stanley in the Congo,
Carl Peters in East Africa, or Lothar von Trotha’s defeat of the Herero, his vision
of India remains a product of a colonial consciousness—less violent indeed but
just as hegemonic—and underpinned by invidious sights on the British Empire.
Science will do what morality could not in a world vision that claims the right of
nations to social and political engineering.65
While such universal mandates did not always translate into specific geo-
political policies and actions, colonial ventures always require ideological
underpinning. Some Protestant theologians and thinkers like Hübbe-Schleiden,
Garbe, and others—intentional or not—provided it. As we have seen, particu-
larly in Hübbe-Schleiden’s appraisal, modern India requires revolution, uplifting
(Hebung), in the present era if their unique spiritual vestige is to resurface—
India has the treasure chest, but the West, specifically Germany, has the key. As a
result, the dreams of unlocking such treasures provided the requisite ideological
capital for the German Empire’s colonial champions like Peters to spread blood
and terror throughout Africa, and justification for the massacre of the rebellious
Herero. Such toxic conflations of religion—both traditional Christianity and
emerging ones, such as theosophy—and politics fueled violence across the globe
as European and German colonizers, frequently under the auspices of a civilizing
mission, sought to harmonize their religious precepts with the requisite violent
behavior of colonial ambitions. In our next chapter we will explore how that
vision continued to take on more radical forms in the conflated social scientific
formulations about Indian religion particularly after the turn of the century—less
colonial perhaps, but still infested with visions of German universal purpose.
CHAPTER 6
Prescriptive History and

the Radicalization of
Community Building
What differentiates our time and situation from all those preceding is this: that
the entire surface of the globe of modern civilization is linked together or at least
is in the process of being linked together. This is of the highest significance for our
problem. We lack a rescuing barbarism that, as during the times of the decaying
Roman world empire, could again replenish the exhausted contents of faith.
Paul Dahlke, Die Bedeutung des Buddhismus für unsere Zeit (1912)1
Dahlke’s reflection seems in part to echo the globalization speak of our

present era, which envisions the world as increasingly flatter, to borrow Thomas
Friedman’s term.2 Yet even in 1912, as we have seen—comparative religions,
global denominational missions, and the colonial mandates of the nation-state—
there was also ample reason to envision the world as intricately related.3 Most
importantly for our context, however, Dahlke’s ill-fated expression—“a rescu-
ing barbarism”—points to the stakes of spiritual revitalization and community
renewal that always seemed to underlie German readings of Indian traditions, but
also to the anxiety, even desperation, that these intellectuals sensed as their world
edged closer to the suffering and devastation of trench warfare. This generation’s
disquiet, a theme that has meandered its way throughout this book, resulted from
the era’s unrelenting cultural, political, and scientific clashes that H. S. Cham-
berlain summarized in his 1898 Foundations: “It oscillates between empiricism
and spiritism, between Liberalismus vulgaris, as one wittily named it, and the
impotent attempts of senile reactionary cravings, between autocracy and anarchy,
between declarations of infallibility and the most stupid materialism, between
adoration for Jews and anti-Semitism, between millionaire economics and pro-
letarian politics.”4 Though left unmentioned in Chamberlain’s appraisal, one can
surmise that the conflicts that seemed to haunt Germany’s intellectuals through-
out the Wilhelmine era had found little reprieve in Bismarck’s forged national
integration of the Kaiserreich. In fact, at the turn of the century the sought-after
spiritual and cultural sanctuary that had so often been conveniently linked with
the prerogatives of the German nation seemed no less at hand, as Thomas Anz
explains: “Behind this yearning for more intensity in life stood the unease about a
culture that one blamed for no longer providing development of the individual’s
vital energies and needs or to isolate them from other aspects of life.”5 That is,
the fragmented modern subject, as Anz describes, sought an innovative and more
intense life—a rejuvenated spirituality in the community—that would regenerate
the human and cultural vitality of the Kaiserreich.
Notably, on the eve of World War I’s pending disaster Leopold von Schroeder’s
worldview had again evolved beyond his youthful flirtation with Buddhism and
later Christian apologetics. Advancing in age and nearing the end of his career
and life, von Schroeder claimed in his unfinished multivolume Arische Religion
that spiritual rejuvenation held far greater importance for Western culture than
the era’s imperial objectives, economic dominion, or social questions. For this
India expert, as he explains in the introductory paragraph, the ultimate struggle
“is the great struggle about faith that must complement knowledge, where this
fails and collapses due to its nature—the struggle about religion, about God,
about the question whether we even still want to have religion, should have and
will have a religion, a faith, a God—and how the case of affirmation in this reli-
gion will look.”6 Here von Schroeder posits that the essential dilemmas of the day
extend beyond the purview of science that in its isolated form offers little to the
spiritual pioneer who sought to respond to the very sociocultural, scientific, and
political quandaries that Chamberlain, Dahlke, and so many other thinkers of
the era stressed.
Significantly, von Schroeder’s remarks are unambiguously directed at the natu-
ral sciences, which in his view objectified human life under the microscope of
empirical observation, and what he terms “historical-critical research,” both of
which “have undermined simple faith.”7 Yet von Schroeder fails to acknowledge
the contradiction in his own analytical scheme when he employs that very same
historical-critical model—in the form of comparative religion—to bemoan that
“among the Aryan bearers of Christianity there is a powerful current that asserts
itself, [but] which rejects Christianity.”8 Echoing the conventional comparative
historical models of the era that have been consistently though idiosyncratically
employed at every juncture in Germany’s constructed India, von Schroeder’s
framing in Arische Religion divulges a palpable contradiction between the sci-
entific standards of historiography and the expected outcomes of that work.
That is, von Schroeder belies his own depiction of scientific inadequacies when
he employs his version of historical hermeneutics to posit a link between the
ancient pristine religions and modern innovative religious campaigns. To put it
more boldly, von Schroeder practices history in a form that one might term “pre-
scriptive history”—a model that bolstered more deliberate and extreme religious
visions based on Indian traditions and that sought to foster a new community
paradigm for the German nation.
Seen from this perspective, Dahlke’s “rescuing barbarism” signposts a more
spiritually radical version of hermeneutical historicism—the emergence of more
prescriptive historical appraisals that sought to provide innovative solutions to
the perceived cultural/spiritual inadequacies of the era. To put it differently,
Prescriptive History and the Radicalization of Community Building 171
such prescriptive history fostered the requisite analytical narratives with which
some of Germany’s India experts could fashion new, profound quasi-religious
accounts of German spirituality, culture, and the nation that extended beyond
the revamped spiritual ideals of European Buddhists or the first generation of
German theosophists. Thus Dahlke’s plea illustrates a more profound expression
of German aims to reconstitute and revitalize the modern subject’s fissured iden-
tity in the community—for those who purportedly possessed only the timeworn
precepts of Europe’s denominational traditions to negotiate the pervasive cultural
clashes that Chamberlain and others emphasized.
Thus Chamberlain’s assessment of Indology’s importance in Western culture,
with which this monograph began, is worth repeating because it too reveals a
powerful underlying strand in Germany’s constructed India as the Kaiserreich
reached its final decade: “Indology, born out of life, leads back to life; apart from
academic results, it should, paired with life, create new life; a great purpose lies
ahead of it.”9 To put such visions into practice, these German India experts con-
tinued to sift through the subcontinent’s spiritual treasures, and some constructed
more radical historical prescriptions that sought to revitalize Christianity and the
German nation under the rubric of Aryan purity. Such pervasive applications of
causal-genetic historicist models manifest the pent up cultural anxiety during
the final decades of the Kaiserreich, but more importantly illustrate the extreme
potentialities of such prescriptive histories that were left to the unchecked whims
of the nation’s cultural and political crusaders.
Because of the well-documented biological racism that frequently permeated
their thought, this link between Germany’s radicalization of its constructed India
and historicist models appears perhaps more discernible in the Aryan revelations
of Chamberlain or von Schroeder’s later work. By this time of course biological
racism had become a dominant paradigm for many of the era’s thinkers, including
Chamberlain and von Schroeder, but also the renowned Indologist Paul Deussen,
with whom we have dealt only marginally thus far. As Suzanne Marchand has
shown in the case of several of the era’s Indologists, the racist narratives in their
work remain indubitable.10 In 1915, for instance, in the forward to the third edi-
tion of Arische Weltanschauung, Chamberlain exclaims: “It does not matter if we
are ‘Aryans,’ rather that we are becoming ‘Aryans.’ In this respect there remains
for all of us an enormous task to achieve: the inner liberation from Semitism that
envelopes and suffocates us.”11 Here Chamberlain’s entreaty reveals the palpable
aspirational link between anti-Jewish dictates and the progression of Germany’s
aspired spiritual and cultural rejuvenation.
Many past and present-day scholars have read such statements and the works
of these thinkers as a critical source for fleshing out the “roots of Nazism.”12 Yet
my concern here is not to project these more radical historicist accounts of India
forward to National Socialism, nor to provide any definitive frameworks that
might have originated in the Kaiserreich for deciphering the sources of later fas-
cist designs. Nor do I seek to offer a full review of the prolific outgrowth of fringe
religious movements during the Wilhelmine era—important work still left to be
undertaken. Rather, in this final chapter I want to explore how the concerns and
approaches of these iconoclastic thinkers were forged through the framework of
accepted historical models—progressive history—and constructed through the

window of India. That is, I want to explore how some German intellectuals trans-
formed their accounts of Indian traditions into more radical prescriptive histories
as they sought to rejuvenate mind, body, and spirit and reforge community con-
sensus in the German nation. Significantly, the underlying analytical models that
influenced these thinkers originated in far less radical intellectual spheres—far
more mainstream accounts of Indian traditions perhaps than we might expect.
Thus I want to turn first to the work of Deussen, the renowned and respected
Kiel Indologist, whose historical hermeneutics illustrate a prescriptive subtext
that became easily transformed into more than just a Christian apologetics—
Schopenhauerian Christianity—and influenced the more calculated radical
readings of India’s spiritual treasures.13
Paul Deussen’s Vedanta and the Historical

Thread of Religious Philosophy
To this point, Deussen has received only marginal attention, though he was a
significant intellectual player who received frequent mention among the era’s
other thinkers.14 Chamberlain, for instance, in his historical overview of Europe’s
academic study of India in Arische Weltanschauung, dedicates a separate chapter
to Deussen, whose work he describes in terms of its vast analytical and synthesiz-
ing significance: “It was reserved for Paul Deussen to make the works in which
Indian thought gained its purest expression accessible to us and provide us with a
wide overview about the entire development.”15 While the accessibility of much
of Deussen’s work, especially his multivolume General History, may have certainly
been a critical factor for Chamberlain’s appreciative assessment, his reverence for
his work also suggests far greater significance for the implicit spiritual innova-
tions in Deussen’s thought. Specifically, Deussen’s philosophical-religious texts
provided an important analytical role model that sociocultural innovators could
refashion to construct their own historical hermeneutical prescriptions for resolv-
ing the nation’s spiritual and cultural dilemmas. Thus Deussen’s India provides
an important backdrop to the more deliberate readings of India’s religious tradi-
tions that other more radical thinkers utilized in their quest to revitalize German
spirituality and the nation after the turn of the century.
Deussen is known today mostly for his work on the Vedanta and his interpre-
tive reading of the Upanishads.16 Yet while much of Deussen’s work is based on
linguistic interpretations of Sanskrit original texts, he was also educated in theol-
ogy and philosophy, and thus published a wide range of more accessible work.
In his General History, for example, Deussen selectively traces the theological/
philosophical traditions that were highly relevant, at least in his mind, to Western
traditions (conspicuously absent are Islam, Japanese Shinto, Chinese Confu-
cianism, and other Asian traditions). Deussen’s encyclopedic work begins, as we
might expect, with the Vedas and Upanishads, advances to the Greeks, winds its
path through European medieval thought, turns to Kant and German idealism,
and reaches its apex, as Deussen contends, in Schopenhauer’s philosophical read-
ing of Indian Buddhism. Deussen’s historical account of religious progression,
which underscores Indian traditions as a religious starting point and the original
source of a coherent, pristine religious model—as well as providing the requisite
spiritual stuff for Schopenhauer to reconstitute Christianity—illustrates the pow-
erful analytical engine of a historical hermeneutics that redounds to a revamped
Christian worldview. Though Deussen’s work maintains a palpable academic
neutrality when compared with the likes of Chamberlain and others, his work on
the Vedanta and his General History nevertheless can help us better flesh out the
important link between then conventional historicist models as German thinkers
applied them to India and the radical historical applications of Chamberlain and
von Schroeder—a critical final cog to round out our understanding of the idio-
syncrasies of Germany’s constructed India during the Kaiserreich.
In the first volume of his General History, Deussen underscores the literary
development of ancient Indian texts, and thus confirms the value of comparison:
“Both Mimamsas according to Vedantic views consist of two parts that show a
deep analogy with the Old and New Testament.”17 Yet Deussen leaves no doubt
about the expected outcomes of his comparative work, which foresees religious
evolution as culminating at an apex of Western cultural superiority: “With the
exception of the Egyptians and Chinese, who by the way were only called to play
a supporting role in this drama, there are only two families of people who are
the bearers of all higher culture, and thus also of all philosophical endeavors: the
Semites and the Indo-Germans.”18 Here Deussen casts the Egyptians and Chinese
into the waste bin of philosophical bygones and implicitly suggests that Western
traditions form the catalyst for all higher culture. Yet more significantly, Deussen’s
remarks subtly link Germany to the two central agents of elite European culture,
the Semites and the Indo-Germans.
The significance of Deussen’s historical framework, especially for Chamber-
lain and other radical thinkers, lies in the forged nexus between Germanic culture
and an original Urvolk—a position that we have now become deeply familiar
with among so many of our India experts encountered in this study. Deussen
too envisions a direct cultural and linguistic link between India and Germany:
“After Sanskrit . . . became known in Europe, it was an equally great, far-reaching,
as well as obvious and not to be missed discovery, that Indians and Persians in
Asia, Greeks and Romans, Celts, Germanic peoples and Slavs in Europe were the
descendants of a homogeneous, original people, from the Indians to the East and
the Germans as the lineage farthest west (reaching to the far west of America),
with a common language and religion that one gave the entirely appropriate
name, Indo-Germans.”19 Here Deussen defines this Indian-German link as the
historical end product of a broadly defined set of evolving European ethnological
groups stretching from the Mesopotamian basin to the British Isles. His claims
also reveal the underlying competitive vibes of the imperial age, but more impor-
tantly illustrate how he asserts Germany’s privileged status among the European
powers, which in his view loosely spans the British Empire’s former geopolitical
frontiers at its grandest moment—including Britain’s former American colonies.
In consequence, Deussen’s historical depiction of Western philosophy, specifically
the German language’s unique link to India, which was by then a well-established
philological premise, became the foundation for his “Schopenhauerian
Christianity,” yet also provided the common thread for asserting other formula-
tions of an updated German Christianity—an arische Weltanschauung.
That religious thread began for Deussen in India. Thus he begins his depiction
of the Vedanta in his pathbreaking translation of the Sechzig Upanishad’s (1897) by
categorizing ancient Indian religious tradition as one of the world’s “significant”
philosophies.20 In the introduction, for instance, he utilizes an established com-
parative strategy to posit that the Upanishads and the New Testament enhance
and complement one another: “The New Testament and the Upanishads, both of
these highest products of the religious consciousness of humanity . . . serve each
other most beautifully in elucidation and complement each other.”21 In fact, as
Deussen further claims, the Upanishads provide essential religious lessons “when
we want to bring our Christian conscious to its consequential and fully sufficient
development.”22 Here, in an explicit formulation of the “uses” and potentialities of
progressive history, Deussen views the Upanishads as an essential building block
for bringing Christianity to full fruition in the modern era—for reconstructing
its thrust and imperative for development and recapturing its lost dynamism.
Yet Deussen’s reading of Indian traditions is also informed by the problem-
atic that occupied so many intellectuals: the delinking of spirituality from the
material world. Specifically, Deussen’s work and his analytical strategy respond
to the sociocultural disquiet that other thinkers confronted and were attempt-
ing to negotiate. Unsurprisingly then for Deussen, Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta
embodied a religious model that proved especially appealing because of its
emphasis on nonduality—perceived by some as the antidote to modern Western
science’s emphasis on empirical knowledge.23 Thus Deussen’s fascination with the
Vedanta, like the German captivation with Indian religious traditions in general,
can be seen in part as a response to the increasing predominance of empirical sci-
ence for determining and governing knowledge of the world. As we have already
explored, the concept of nonduality, though German thinkers did not always
designate the concept with this term, proved particularly appealing to German
intellectuals throughout the later decades of the nineteenth century—Buddhists and
theosophists—but also for more established and respected German scholars like
Deussen, who sought in the Upanishads, and most importantly in Shankara’s
important commentaries, a critical sounding board for modeling an alternative
to the predominant material worldview that had purportedly caused the fractured
spirituality of the modern subject.
The ancient Indian religious traditions, as Deussen explains, embody a histori-
cal evolution that progresses from the Rig Veda to an inextinguishable spiritual
spark, “just like the sparks of a philosophical light struck by the Rig Veda con-
tinues to glow on and on until they finally flare into such a bright flame in the
Upanishads that can enlighten and warm us even today.”24 Deussen further iden-
tifies the Vedanta, combined with the Upanishads, as a starting point for spiritual
progression by classifying its contents as a theological-philosophical system.25
Here Deussen subtly delineates the Vedanta as a critical subplot within the
grand narrative of concrete philosophical models from which Western thinkers
could draw comparisons and analogies with their own philosophical tradi-
tions. That is, Western thinkers could study Eastern religion through a Western
hermeneutical microscope and in turn justify their favorable appraisals of West-

ern philosophical progress.
To this point, Deussen’s appraisal of the Vedanta reminds us perhaps little
of Christian apologetics. Yet Deussen’s broad study nevertheless fleshes out a
comparative historical thread from the Vedas to Schopenhauer in a far more
comprehensive fashion that redounds to more modern, innovative Western read-
ings of Indian traditions—perhaps less informed by a colonial consciousness but
certainly no less prescriptive in its adamant reinscription of Christianity as the
foremost universal cultural force. Specifically, Deussen’s historical hermeneutics
invokes Kant’s philosophical innovations in Critique of Pure Reason to reinforce
first the significance of comparative similarities.26 In India, Greece, and most
importantly, beginning with Kant’s first Critique, for instance, Deussen posits
that empiricism has been rejected as the window “for the final exploration of
the essence of things.”27 Here Deussen links Eastern and Western philosophi-
cal models—a critical bridge between India’s pristine spiritual origins and a
revamped religious model—yet, more important, by rejecting the predominance
of empiricism he sets the stage for asserting a more “metaphysical” view of the
world. Specifically, as we shall see, Deussen lays the foundation for asserting
Western models as superior offshoots of these more ancient Indian traditions—a
revamped Christianity based on his own rejuvenation of Schopenhauer at the end
of the nineteenth century.28
To make this case, Deussen requires a philosophical version of the era’s tran-
sition narratives that will preserve the essence of Indian thought as Germany’s
cultural birthright, yet through which he can update and remodel contemporary
Western spirituality. Thus Indian philosophy, despite its acclaimed nonduality—
the critical element for Germany’s spiritual innovators—is beset with what
Deussen terms “false empirical assumptions,” which Kant’s critique has purport-
edly corrected because it “provides the true scientific foundation of the Vedanta
system; and it stands to hope that the Indians, whose orthodox dogmatics, still
valid today, we are here depicting, will adopt the teachings of the ‘Critique of
Pure Reason,’ with thankful veneration once they come to their knowledge.”29
In this religious-philosophical transition narrative, conventional Indian doctrine
maintains its validity and thus emerges as the philosophical pretext upon which
Western, specifically German, epistemological models could be reforged.
Continuing this line of argument, Deussen posits in General History that
Schopenhauer utilized and corrected Kant’s innovative critique in order to craft a
critical understanding of the unity of form and essence, which as Deussen and oth-
ers viewed it, the Greeks had also failed to accomplish. Specifically, Schopenhauer
imbues Kant’s discoveries with substance—a unified system of empirical facts and
spirit: “Kant’s teaching is only the trunk, Schopenhauer’s teaching would hang in
the air without its Kantian base. Both combine to form a single organic union,
and the time will come and is not far away, in which one will no longer speak of a
Kantian and a Schopenhauerian system, rather one will be allowed to speak only of
an all-encompassing Kantian-Schopenhauerian system of philosophy that is con-
sistently based on facts, with a very satisfying, miraculous basis (Wunderbau) for
religious as well as philosophical needs.”30 In other words, Schopenhauer’s work
brings the Kantian model to completion and thus engenders a universal unity—a
majestic philosophical edifice (Wunderbau). Significantly, Deussen’s application
of such expressions as “universal,” “Wunderbau,” and “System” to Schopenhauer’s
thought reveals the powerful ideological potential of such historicist renderings
that propose what are, in essence, master philosophical narratives of religion, and
also foreshadows the excessive applications found in von Schroeder’s and Cham-
berlain’s Aryan visions.
First though, Deussen’s final section of the second volume of General His-
tory, titled “The Fulfillment of Critical Philosophy by Schopenhauer,” explicitly
clarifies the essential role Schopenhauer’s thought plays in Deussen’s history of
religious philosophy. For Deussen, Schopenhauer’s philosophical model repre-
sents the culmination of critical philosophy and thus, unsurprisingly, Deussen
dedicates nearly fifty pages to a biographical account of Schopenhauer’s life—a
tribute that no other philosopher was granted—before examining his philosophi-
cal thought in detail. While a full review of Deussen’s reading of Schopenhauer
exceeds the scope of the present study’s focus, a brief explanation of how the
Frankfurt philosopher purportedly brought Kant’s critical philosophy to comple-
tion provides insight into how Deussen reinscribes Indian thought—a prescriptive
historical hermeneutics—under the tutelage of Western sociocultural mandates.
To put it more boldly, Deussen, buttressed by his interpretation and application
of Schopenhauer’s reading of Indian traditions, sought to revamp the course of
and thus reposition Christianity as the apex of a progressive history of religions,
which provided the requisite intellectual framework in more conventional form
that other more radical thinkers co-opted to fashion their innovative spiritual-
cultural-national visions.
In Deussen’s judgment, Schopenhauer’s embellishment of Kant’s momentous
groundwork hinges on the human being’s innate cognitive capacity to perceive
causality. Yet, in Deussen’s view, Kant muddled the nuanced differences between
human perception and concepts of objects in the world because Kant proposed
that these concepts are cognitively a posteriori constructs of the human mind—a
mistake that Schopenhauer corrects: “He proves clearly and convincingly that
the perceivable world is indeed conditioned by the forms of perception, space,
time and causality, but beyond this stand on their own feet as well.”31 In other
words, Schopenhauer’s model proves, at least in Deussen’s account, that perceived
objects in time and space and their causality are conditional yet independent and
thus the world of concepts forms a separate domain.
While this philosophical exposé may appear to have strayed far from the spiri-
tual and philosophical musings on India by Rudolf Seydel, the German Buddhists
and theosophists, or other India experts, Deussen’s historical hermeneutics in fact
mirror their accounts more precisely than appears at first glance. Importantly,
in Deussen’s reading, Schopenhauer’s solution to Kant’s philosophical quandary
stems directly from his interpretation of Indian tradition: “Next he recognized along
with the Indians that the key to the puzzle, with which nature with its mystical pow-
ers and occurrences confronts us, can only be found where the whole of nature
opens from within and allows as an exception a look into its ultimate depths,
that is into our own inner being.”32 Here, Deussen depicts how Schopenhauer
reinscribes Indian thought to denote the human inner sphere as the domain in
which the link between subject and object can be philosophically grounded—the
key to the puzzle lies in human will.33
Deussen builds on this link to Indian thought, in which subject and object—
will and thing-in-itself—had already been discovered yet still lay buried in the
philosophical graveyard of India’s present-day cultural inferiority in order to trace
his philosophical transition narrative to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s triad of
space, time, and causality, Deussen points out, is “common practice” in Indian
philosophy, which, as Deussen claims to have shown in the first volume of Gen-
eral History, receives mention “no less than seventeen places in the great chief
work of the System of Vedanta, the Commentaries of Shankara to the Brahma
Sutras.”34 Thus only the final task of uncovering this pristine truth lay in waiting
for Germany’s greatest philosopher, Schopenhauer.
Deussen then depicts Kant’s transcendental consciousness, a concept that has
bewildered Western thinkers for more than two centuries: “[As] timeless, that is
never, spaceless, that is nowhere, without causality, that is absolutely not, and
because all perception consists in the fact that we process every thing in space,
time and causality, thus transcendental consciousness remains unrecognizable,
is a complete noli me tangere.”35 In other words, in Deussen’s reading, we know
intuitively, not empirically—perceived yet objectively undetectable—that human
cognition orders the data of the objective world.
In this reading, Deussen, like so many other philosophical counterparts, skirts
what T. K. Seung has termed Kant’s “transcendental illusion,” which conveniently
allows the Kiel Indologist to forge a critical link between Schopenhaeur’s correc-
tive to Kant’s model and Indian traditions.36 That is, Deussen posits that Kant’s
now infamous strict division between phenomena and noumena is nothing new
but rather represents a modern account of an ancient Indian tenet: “The Veda
already differentiates the transient empirical consciousness from the transcenden-
tal, the great, endless, boundless being that exists but through perception, which
like a lump of salt that has dissolved in water is tasted everywhere and yet can be
found nowhere.”37 Just like dissolved salt, which we can taste but cannot see, an
infinite, unbounded human mind exists that manifests itself in cognition. Just as
Kant attempted to save God by projecting noumena as certain but not observable,
Schopenhauer, in Deussen’s version, casts human consciousness in the form of a
world soul—extant but not materially intelligible.
Importantly, Deussen’s take on Schopenhauer’s version of the human mind
and its explicit link to Indian traditions suggests an underlying bond between
Eastern and Western religious philosophy—Indian and Christian scripts: “The
Upanishads are for the Veda, what the New Testament is for the Bible; and this
analogy is not just simply extrinsic and accidental, rather it is one that penetrates
deeply and is founded in a general law of evolution of the religious life that
appears in both spheres.”38 Here the distinct undertones of the “final word” on
human knowledge and wisdom become recognizable: “Whether or not the final
word of all human wisdom lay in this grand doctrine of Schopenhauer, that we
want to leave to the future to decide.”39 Despite Deussen’s candidness, Scho-
penhauer’s importance remains unsurpassed in his view because his definitive
critical philosophy is explicitly linked to and improves on earlier thinkers and

their philosophical models.
As Deussen continues, he posits that the Greeks also envisioned such sweep-
ing implications. Specifically, Deussen references Plato’s idea of the “world soul,”
for instance, which reappears in related forms among the Neoplatonist Philo and
most importantly the New Testament, and later Spinoza.40 Thus Deussen’s his-
torical hermeneutics traces a “great chain” of critical philosophy, to slightly twist
A. O. Lovejoy’s phrase, from the Vedas, to the Greeks, biblical tradition, and
Kant’s penultimate achievement in the Critiques, that Schopenhauer then brings
to a more complete and meaningful conclusion—at least as it came to be under-
stood and acknowledged in the iconoclastic world of late Wilhelmine Germany.41
Moreover, Deussen addresses a burning question in terms that Chamberlain
will also employ when he implies that Schopenhauer has indeed settled the issue
of human kind’s place in an organic hierarchy—now under pressure from so-
called Darwinist interpretations of the world. Yet Darwin, in Deussen’s mind and
in the view of so many other thinkers during the era, had still failed to resolve
the other burning question of the day: what is the tangible core of human spiri-
tuality based on in a world in which traditional Christian tenets no longer bond
the community? To put it more boldly, Deussen sought to transform Schopen-
hauer’s thought into a more dynamic and socioculturally pertinent model that
could address the religious and community quandaries of the German nation—
Schopenhauerian Christianity provided the formula for restitching the spiritual
fabric of the nation.
Schopenhauerian Christianity
Deussen turns in the penultimate section of General History to Schopenhauer’s
magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, in order to bring critical
philosophy, at least in Deussen’s view, to its culminating form. According to
Deussen, Schopenhauer makes a clear break from a traditional Christian world-
view that imposes a dualistic model of an authoritative and inaccessible divinity,
which had come to be denoted by the “dark word God.”42 As a corrective, Scho-
penhauer’s model embodies an affirming will, which Deussen describes “as will to
life, this will is the inner, being-in-itself essence of the entire world, as the negat-
ing will it comes in this world of affirmation and in opposition with it and its laws
break through in the moral actions of pure justice, brotherly love and renuncia-
tion.”43 In this important twist, Schopenhauer turns Christian duality on its head
by fusing life rejection and affirmation into one essence that becomes manifest in
moral action, pure justice, brotherly love, and renunciation—the rejection of an
egocentric human spirituality. In consequence, this model pinpoints the entire
burden of being human within the inner realm of the individual human spirit—a
move, as we have already seen, that is overtly grounded in Protestant readings of
salvation—rather than deriving benevolence or evil from some noumenal divine
being as Kant’s model envisioned. Most significantly for our purposes here,
Deussen’s account also includes the subtle outlines of an emerging prescriptive
framework for establishing community coherence. That is, Deussen’s account
suggests that individual spirituality and community cohesiveness are embedded

in and derive from the Schopenhauerian affirmation of human will.
Moreover, in a further implication of Deussen’s interpretation, he again hints
at the universal comprehensiveness implicit in Schopenhauer’s thought and how
his account of human will verifies what previous cultural traditions have always
sensed and maintained but were unable to affirm: “Thus Schopenhauer through
his analysis of consciousness as both components of will and intellect opened
not only new paths for psychology, but also found the way to prove scientifically
what the deepest spirits in India and Greece had felt and maintained, without
ever being able to prove it.”44 Thus Schopenhauer’s model reconstitutes the apex
of Western religious traditions because it validates scientifically what the Indi-
ans and Greeks were only able to intuit—an updated Germanic Christianity
that provides cultural cohesiveness with universal applicability. To put it more
boldly, Deussen’s account of Schopenhauer reveals an unambiguous prescriptive
historical account that fosters the contention that German cultural traditions
have gradually progressed from the Indo-Aryans and the Greeks to bring the
Western philosophical tradition to a congruous spiritual (Deussen employs the
term Psychologie) and scientific apex. With this hermeneutical maneuver, Deussen
implicitly reinscribes European Enlightenment attributes, with their undertones
of cultural superiority, to which the British and French laid special claim, in favor of
German prerogatives in reformulating and reasserting an updated master narra-
tive for European culture.
To make a stronger case that Deussen’s take on Schopenhauer embodies philo-
sophical reformulations of Indian traditions that redound to German cultural
superiority, I want to explore further how Deussen emphasizes the universal
application of Schopenhauer’s thought. In his description of Schopenhauer’s view
on the relationship between body and soul, Deussen again points to the inability
of Indian, Greek, and what he terms “newer” philosophy to avoid constituting
the essence of human kind in perception or through cognition (im Kopfe).45 The
quintessence of human life is to be found not in the cognitive human functions,
according to Deussen, but rather “in desire, . . . in the heart.”46 Thus Deus-
sen’s claim just a few pages later that “will” equates with “the divinity, Brahmin,
the thing in itself ” appears contradictory. Disregarding his own “transcendental
illusion,” Deussen reconfirms on the one hand the requisite link between Scho-
penhauer and Indo-Aryan traditions, yet explicitly reinforces his philosophical
transition narrative that culminates in the superiority of Schopenhauer’s account
of human will.47
Thus Schopenhauer’s model, as Deussen explains, possesses the critical insight
not only to avoid the misreadings propagated by the ancient Indians, Greeks, and
more modern philosophical models but also to unite all religions: “Finally not to
be overlooked is that all religions are in agreement, not to attach a metaphysical,
eternal meaning beyond the grave to intellect and what in the course of life is
thought and perceived or not perceived, but rather only to the works in which
will is expressed.”48 Here Deussen claims that all religions are in essence united,
not in their multifarious intellectual and theoretical manifestations but rather
through their common link to the eternal, metaphysical realm that purportedly
lies beyond empirical life. From this reading it remains only a minor intellectual
maneuver to envision Schopenhauer’s thought as the unifying and conclusive
model for reconstituting human spirituality—an implicit universal mandate with
dangerous consequences when co-opted to endorse an arische Weltanschauung.
The implications for Deussen’s prescriptive historical hermeneutic, here con-
structed in the context of religious philosophy, might not appear to be such a
radically authoritative tool at first reading. Yet its ideological potentialities take
on more powerful significance when viewed in the light of some of the era’s fringe
religious innovators who keenly admired Deussen’s work. That said, Deussen
was no radical religious iconoclast. He founded no religious movements and his
thought and intellectual energy remained entrenched in intellectual deliberations
on the bothersome questions about modern spirituality that confounded so many
intellectuals throughout the era. Yet embedded in Deussen’s historical account
of religious philosophy is an analytical framework—a reservoir of ideas—upon
which the imagined potential of a newly constituted German spirituality could be
based. That is, Deussen’s history of religious philosophy implicitly embodied the
requisite philosophical narrative of Aryan visions for rejuvenating religion and
culture in the Kaiserreich. In order to make this case let us first flesh out more
precisely the prescriptive historical hermeneutics of Deussen’s Schopenhauerian
Christianity before turning to those constructed Aryan worldviews that Cham-
berlain, von Schroeder, and others generated during the era.
The Application of Schopenhauerian

Christianity: “Die Ethik”
In the final section of General History, Deussen depicts under the rubric of new
philosophy a system of metaphysics for human life, or specifically ethics—
the application of Schopenhauer’s model in the community. Echoing ongoing
debates about material views of the world, Deussen argues that “the entire empiri-
cal order of nature is based on an error that, as the Indians say, is only illusion
(maya), that, as Parmenides and Plato teach, is in truth nonbeing, that, as Kant
proved, is only appearance, not thing-in-itself.”49 Thus, according to Deussen,
the Indian-Platonic-Kantian model, deeply inculcated with Christian precepts,
forms the philosophical foundation for Schopenhauer’s concept of will. If this is
the case, then it logically follows from Deussen’s modeling of Schopenhauer that
human beings possess the cognitive capacity through human will to access the
essence of the objective world—the thing-in-itself.
Such striking affirmations of the human capacity to penetrate the imper-
meable casing that purportedly concealed the link between subject and object
prepared the path for spiritual rejuvenation of the human being. Yet more specifi-
cally, Deussen’s model of ethics reinscribed an intellectually elite class of German
thinkers who possessed the special capacity to access the occult secrets of the
spiritual substance found in each religious tradition—a more mainstream and
ostensibly conventional path for unveiling the covert secrets of Isis.50 Such elitist
twists in Deussen’s reading of Schopenhauer also resonate in the critical quest of
Christians to decipher the meaning of life after death. Importantly, by the early
decades of the twentieth century the Christian model of posthumous paradise

or eternal damnation had of course taken a cultural beating. Yet intellectuals
like Deussen remained strikingly resistant to accept the soul’s vacuity in their
worldviews, which had come under siege by the challenges posed by scientific
paradigms of human life and evolution. Nor could these thinkers easily embrace
the biological decomposition of the human body at death as the culmination of
their mortal life on earth. To address this arduous question, Deussen turns to
what he terms the “Immortality of the soul” in this final section.51
Here, Deussen posits that “the human being is on the one hand appearance,
that is, body, on the other thing-in-itself, that is, will.”52 In other words, the
human body lives in the world of perception and can be empirically explained
yet also embodies a spiritual essence, which Schopenhauer has defined as “will.”
Deussen then claims that “Immortality consists in the independence of his being-
in-itself essence from the laws of the time and causality; it is not really to be
thought of as living on in time, rather is, as Schopenhauer says, an indestruc-
tability without duration.”53 Deussen offers no systematic line of reasoning to
underpin such a claim, yet despite this analytical deficit he remains nevertheless a
scientist and feels compelled to provide proofs for this overt declaration of spiri-
tual immortality. To do so, Deussen rehashes the Indian concept of reincarnation
in order to justify his argument that the soul continues ad infinitum, which
importantly also generates tangible repercussions for earthly life: “Immortality
appears then as a type of soul transmigration, a doctrine, which in India, from the
ancient past to today, forms the core of religion and has unbelievably great practi-
cal effects, because it shows us that all suffering in life should be considered as
self-induced through actions attributable to an earlier birth, and at the same time
is a strong drive to avoid all evil that entails in a future existence without fail its
retribution.”54 Here, in this overtly prescriptive assessment, Deussen underscores
the soul’s immortality in terms of its practical application in the community. Spe-
cifically, reincarnation serves as a primary causal force in achieving higher ethical
standards in this world and not, as so many others of the era emphasized, as the
doctrinal underpinning of Buddhism’s purported rejection of the world.
In this reading, Deussen has his sights set on the reformatory—prescriptive—
potential of a model that requires the avoidance of evil in order to break the
anticipated chain of anguished future rebirths. That is, with idiosyncratic
undertones of Max Weber’s assessment of the Protestant work ethic, Deussen
contends that human works in the objective world determine our destinies.55 Yet
in Deussen’s view, Christianity had failed to generate laudable ethical standards of
behavior in the community: “Unfortunately Christianity has left aside this com-
forting tenet, so obvious it was to its doctrine, to the detriment of so many fearful
hearts.”56 Thus, in a move that is more explicitly prescriptive, Deussen calls for
a new ethic modeled on his Schopenhauerian reading of Indian reincarnation
yet constructed in Western terms and, critically, with universal implications—a
reconstituted model of Christian good works derived from Indian doctrinal
traditions.
As Deussen continues, the prescriptive nature of his historical analysis and
how it redounds to an updated and more progressive and universally applicable
Christianity becomes more tangible. That is, Deussen’s prescriptive history of

religious philosophy explicitly links renewed Christian spirituality, based on Scho-
penhauer’s account of Indian traditions, with reconstituted community consensus.
Specifically, he discusses freedom of will and explores the philosophical prereq-
uisites for achieving the most important task of human life, “the fulfillment of
ethical obligation.” As we might expect, Deussen attributes Schopenhauer, “this
most Christian of all philosophers,” and his pathbreaking reading of Buddhism to
hold the key to this transformation: “That every moral action can be explained as
an intervention of the metaphysical, being-in-itself, free will in the causal coher-
ence of the world of appearances.”57 From this viewpoint, human behavior in
its ethical or moral sense represents the intervention of free will—causality in
the objective world. In consequence, Deussen co-opts Schopenhauer’s depiction
of will to reconstitute human agency during an era in which the human being
had been relegated in the eyes of many to the position of scientific object and
thus implicitly no longer reaped the benefits of distinctive spiritual status. That
is, Deussen co-opts Schopenhauer’s concept of will to reconstitute human spiri-
tuality and in fact Western Christianity more generally—a newly defined and
reinvigorated Christian community.
Yet Deussen’s account provides more tangible depictions of Christianity’s
spiritual reinscription and cultural import that were based on Schopenhauer’s
corrective to the long thread of religious philosophical enterprise. As Deussen
further develops his model, which culminates in a reinvigorated universal Chris-
tian ethics, he conveniently assumes “that an abolition of egoism is possible only
through the abolition of the entire empirical being.”58 Thus in Deussen’s account,
the elimination of egoism in a reconstituted Christianity becomes implicitly
linked with Buddhist renunciation of the world.
Significantly, gaining the upper hand on egoism—the successful sublation
(negation and reconstitution) of empirical existence—has explicit repercussions
for the community. According to Deussen, all evil (Bosheit) originates in egoism.
Here Deussen’s reading of Schopenhauer becomes even more heavily implicated
as a tool for revamping Christianity in which the human ego’s influence on behav-
ior in the community must be diminished: “Both [Shopenhauer’s teachings and
Christianity] find an improvement in our action and omissions alone insufficient,
like they can also be achieved through the influence of motives, and demand an
inner change toward God and away from sinful existence, as Christianity says,
away from the empirical character of affirmative will to the no less positive nega-
tion of this empirical character, as Schopenhauer expresses the very same thing
with other, unmystical words.”59 Critical here is the fundamental assumption
that underlies Deussen’s link between Indian metaphysics and Schopenhauerian
Christianity: an ethics of spiritual transformation. Moreover, as Deussen now
points out, Schopenhauerian Christianity, derived from that German philosopher
who deserves the “Honorary title of philosophus christianissimus,”60 becomes the
superior religious paradigm—a prescription for the spiritual ills of those “worthy
world religions, Brahminism, Buddhism and Christianity . . . , in which all three
in accordance designate salvation from this existence as the highest goal, because
this existence is according to Brahminism the kingdom of error, according to
Buddhism the kingdom of suffering, according to Christianity the kingdom of

sin, and thus must certainly be a condition which arises from the condition from
which we need salvation.”61 Thus Schopenhauer’s model of human will with its
purported ethical implications becomes the unifying salvational remedy for what
Deussen designates as the world’s “worthy” religions—any others become rel-
egated to inferiority and are considered unfit for incorporation into the world’s
religious elite.
This prescriptive historical account of religious philosophy that culminates in
Schopenhauerian Christianity illustrates how Deussen generated the ideological
capital—a reservoir of ideas grounded in the era’s conventional historical praxis—
for asserting a new universal, sociopolitical, and cultural model. To put it more
bluntly, Deussen co-opts Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Indian metaphysics,
particularly in light of his reading of the Indian concept of reincarnation, to
reinvigorate what had become for many intellectuals a worn-out and culturally
depreciated Christianity. Deussen’s revamped Christian ethics provided a correc-
tive to those models for determining human knowledge, which most intellectuals
during the era presumed to have been forged under the guise of Darwinian natu-
ral selection and underpinned by a survival-of-the-fittest worldview. For many,
such a worldview meant scientific validation and support of egotism, material
self-interest, and the justification of unethical behavior—a fragmentation of the
community. That is, Schopenhauer’s facelift of Christianity, as Deussen presents
it, embodies the means to counter the injurious social and cultural affirmation of
a material and self-centered world: “Not in the single acts that arise with necessity
from egoism, rather it lays in what is our inborn empirical character, what the
Bible names sin, and whose abolition is demanded by all profound religions as
the highest task and the actual purpose of earthly existence.”62 Here, again echo-
ing Hegelian terminology, Deussen posits that the Christian human being must
sublate (aufheben) other religious traditions to offset the innate human disposi-
tion to act in self-interest—egoism—which all religions target as the root of sin.
Thus in Deussen’s reading, while worthy world religions such as those practiced
by the Indo-Aryans or Greeks acknowledge and aim to overcome moral and ethi-
cal deficiencies, only Schopenhauerian Christianity can effectively rout worldly
evil. Thus Schopenhauer’s work embodies the unique philosophical framework
for overcoming an exclusively empirical worldview: “Only a complete abolition
of this empirical character through rebirth that cannot be achieved through our
own selves, rather only Christ living within us (Gal. 2:20), only a change of will
by freedom of choice, from the affirmation which just this empirical character is,
to negation that is considered by religions as God, can lead to salvation from this
existence.”63 Here in Deussen’s most explicit expression of Christian tenets that he
has recalibrated through his co-optation of Indian philosophical traditions vis-à-
vis Schopenhauer, only Christ can generate the requisite inner transformation to
overcome what Deussen defines as our empirical character—egoism.
Further corroboration of Deussen’s revitalized Christian conviction resonates
explicitly in his response to one of Germany’s most important iconoclastic think-
ers of the nineteenth century, David Friedrich Strauss. Deussen, in The Philosophy
of the Bible, a separate volume in General History, addresses one of Strauss’s most
incendiary questions from The Old and the New Belief (1872) in which this con-
frontational intellectual challenged the era’s thinkers to their spiritual cores by
negating his own rhetorical question: “Are we still Christians?” Decades later,
in response to his inflammatory declaration, Deussen challenges Strauss’s repu-
diation of Christianity’s relevance by submitting that “after all the damage to
Biblical belief through historical and scientific criticism, the question proposed
at the beginning: ‘Are we still Christians?’ is answered with a confident yes!”64
Significantly, Deussen’s response lays out clearly the ideological framework—
prescriptive historical hermeneutics—for asserting Christianity’s superiority,
which he claims is imbued in the “Indian-Platonic-Christian Idea.”65 Thus Deus-
sen’s philosophical history concludes that the ancient Vedas of India manifest a
spiritual and theological purity out of which all other religious traditions sprang
and culminate in Schopenhauer’s philosophical model. In fact, Deussen posits
that Christianity represents a mélange of two religiocultural traditions, a “gradual
amalgamation of two basically very different worldviews, the Biblical and the
Greek”—the supreme amalgamation of all meaningful religious paradigms.66
Only a small ideological step remains before reaching the universal fulminations
of Aryan worldviews.
Yet Deussen, as previously mentioned, had no apparent organizational imper-
atives that might have emerged from his account of Schopenhauer. He never
sought to found any social, religious, or political movements, nor did he ever
become a member of any of the emerging quasi-religious alliances of the era.
Perhaps he was too grounded in Christian traditions for that. Yet, as we have
seen, Deussen’s thought nevertheless underscores a critical link between religious
philosophy and human action—ethics as Deussen depicted it—that bolstered
the requisite ideological framework for establishing a new community consen-
sus. That is, his revamped Christianity based on Schopenhauer’s concept of will,
which in Deussen’s model could generate more effective standards for ethical
behavior, served as a seemingly flawless philosophical framework for rejuvenating
the congruence of German spirituality and nation. The application of Deus-
sen’s thought then became an effective philosophical avenue for reenvisioning
Germanic Christianity—a historically based prescription for a Germanocentric
remodeling of Christianity that Chamberlain, von Schroeder, and others would
formulate more ardently just before the disastrous consequences of European
competition and rancor began to transpire in the trenches of World War I.
History Gone Mad: Leopold von

Schroeder’s Arische Religion
My purpose here is not to trace the specific influences between Deussen and the
era’s more radical cultural innovators, nor to show that their religious insights
were solely attributable to the renowned Indologist Paul Deussen. Nonetheless,
it is critical to see how these thinkers analyzed India and interpreted religious
history by employing similar analytical models to bolster their attempts to rein-
vigorate the spirituality and cultural integrity of the German nation. By more
thoroughly fleshing out the link between more conventional historical models
and their radical Aryan applications we can gain better insight into how histori-
cist views of religion became easily co-opted for more Germanocentric purposes by
the era’s religious iconoclasts. Thus I would like to turn first to the Baltic German
Indologist von Schroeder, and then his close friend Houston Stewart Chamber-
lain, both of whom held the work of Deussen in high regard.
Von Schroeder explains in the forward to what he viewed as his magnum opus,
Arische Religion, that through ethnic comparison—the contrast of different Aryan
peoples—and their corresponding religious forms one can decipher and verify an
underlying religious commonality.67 As he continues, he alludes to Chamberlain’s
short text, Arische Weltanschauung, to also reiterate that Indian thought embodies
the “fountain of youth for the renewal of our religion and philosophy.”68 Though
not expressed explicitly here, von Schroeder believed just like Chamberlain that
this rejuvenation required that Christianity be decoupled from its Semitic roots.
Shortly after the emergence of Buddhism, as von Schroeder explains, “Then came
Christianity, originating with the Jews, but soon adopted at once by peoples with
Aryan roots, and interspersed, bonded, and embellished with Aryan thought
and sensibilities, Aryan philosophy and religion.”69 Here von Schroeder, unsur-
prisingly for the era, frames historical religious progress in terms that distance
Christianity from its Jewish roots. Thus von Schroeder’s comment contradicts his
argument that all religions are linked by a common spiritual thread and points
toward what I want to emphasize here: how von Schroeder’s historical model of
religion implicitly links religious progress to the reconstitution of a new Ger-
manocentric paradigm for the community.70
After tracing the history of Western, primarily German, definitions of reli-
gion from Hegel to Schleiermacher and then to Harnack, von Schroeder posits
that “Religion is the belief in a spiritual being or powers that rules outside of and
above the human sphere, the feeling of dependence on this being and the need to
put oneself in accord with this power.”71 Von Schroeder then, perfectly aligned
with the analytical deductions of Deussen, links religion as he defines it here to
Sittlichkeit—ethics, which in von Schroeder’s mind is different from morals. This
is an important distinction because Sittlichkeit exudes more explicitly a set of
behavioral norms or conventions, which allows von Schroeder to argue that reli-
gion can only be defined within the community:72 “We can define custom (Sitte)
as the sum of actually valid life norms in a human community, whose compliance
is demanded by this community, or by its highest authority, and whose violation
will be threatened with punishment.”73 That is, the essence of religion builds
the foundation for community consensus, which becomes enforced through
humanly created codes of justice—law (Recht). In von Schroeder’s most political
formulation, a rejuvenation of spirituality then consequentially results within the
framework of community cohesiveness that becomes reinforced by law.
Moreover, von Schroeder emphasizes the human obligation to a higher
authority—“demand of a higher, supernatural will”—an argument that he will
employ to draw links between Aryan ancestors and Wilhelmine Germans.74 In
the introduction to Arische Religion, the links are ever so subtle, but von Schro-
eder argues that the obligations to a higher being is the universal thread running
throughout humanity: “Human behavior that is deemed to be demanded by a
higher being and power can naturally be quite different, and also in reality the
morals of the different human beings and peoples is very different. Nevertheless
we will see that also here, just like in the religions of all peoples, a common core
exists that indicates deep-seated, common roots.”75 Here von Schroeder sets the
stage for his entire two-volume work by positing that all religions are rooted in a
common core. Over the next approximately six hundred pages he applies what he
terms the historical-critical method that in his view had so far failed to adequately
depict this discernible lineage—a purported common core—between an Aryan
Urvolk and the Aryan German race in the present.
To construct this argument von Schroeder argues first that religion is a univer-
sal phenomenon common to all human beings: “Religion is a universal human
occurrence, appearing everywhere, that is most deeply and intimately grown
together with the essence of the human being as we know him. Every people
has a religion, even if so raw and imperfect—just like every people also possesses
its own language.”76 Moreover, von Schroeder describes what he terms the three
roots of religion, by which he claims that all religious models of the past are in
essence, to put it simply, a different side of the same coin: “Looking at the three
roots of religion, the worship of nature corresponds obviously with that of the
senses, the cult of souls and spirits with the spiritual, the belief in a highest benev-
olent being that demands virtuousness with the ethical part of human nature.”77
Von Schroeder’s history of religions traces these common features of religion over
thousands of years from the Vedas, Judaism, and to Buddhism. Critically, he
posits that such underlying unity is most evident in the Indian traditions: “Brah-
min is . . . the highest, benevolent, creative being, Vishnu the nature god, Shiva
the god of the soul. Worship of nature, the cult of the soul, belief in a highest,
benevolent, creative being—all three roots of religion were represented equally
strong and powerfully grand in this triad.”78
As von Schroeder continues his historical depiction he posits that the Greeks,
in contrast with Indian traditions, were able to transform this concept of the
divine into a more humanistic notion, which he describes as “Human, all too
Human.”79 Yet as we might expect, the thread of religious progress in von Schro-
eder’s account winds its way progressively to culminate in Christianity. Here
von Schroeder again emphasizes the underlying link between all world religions
by citing the radical and influential work of his close friend Chamberlain’s The
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Von Schroeder notes that Chamberlain
attributes the fusion of the Jewish Jahweh and the Aryan triad to the Chris-
tian dogma of the trinity.80 In other words, Christianity is a manifestation of the
crowning achievement and form found in Aryan religion—the definitive unifier
of all religious traditions.
Such readings of religious history also embody implicit prescriptions for
delineating Germany’s modern inheritance of such traditions. Von Schroeder,
for instance, posits that these unifying characteristics are common to all human-
ity yet “appear especially clear and harmoniously developed with the Aryan
peoples . . . lives and operates on and on, theoretically and practically, through
all times including today.”81 Thus those attributes that distinguish Aryan heri-
tage are identifiable among the modern era’s proper inheritors—an implicit
political reading of religious heritage that redounds to a Germanocentric account

of religious history. Moreover, von Schroeder’s reading points to the underlying
universality of his project—the inherent assumption that a revamped model of
Christianity embodies the most pristine religious features that all religious tradi-
tions strive for.
This is a point worth exploring a bit more thoroughly. Stefan Arvidsson, in
his book Aryan Idols, offers a more restricted view of von Schroeder’s universal
emphasis than I am proposing here. In Arvidsson’s account, the term universal
delineates a common core for all religions that he correctly attributes to modern-
istic religious ideals. Yet he categorically delimits von Schroeder’s neotraditionalist
religious ideals as “pluralistic, national, ethnic, locally anchored”—that is, not
universalistic.82 Arvidsson’s definition here assumes that nationalistic or locally
anchored religious ideals cannot be applied universally. Yet in the case of von
Schroeder and these other iconoclastic thinkers, I would suggest that an addi-
tional layer of meaning be added to von Schroeder’s Germanocentric religious
model that includes its applicability beyond national cultural boundaries. Thus
Arvidsson is correct when he describes the neotraditionalist camp as seeking “to
recreate or vitalize a traditional religion that could serve as a counterbalance to
modernization, which is said to be marked by materialism, moral decay, and
general ugliness.” Yet he concludes the paragraph by stating that “neotraditional-
ist thinkers are not interested in missionary activity but instead try to create or
vitalize nationally or locally anchored religions.”83 In the case of von Schroeder
this strict division proves less straightforward.
While there is no evidence that von Schroeder set his sights on practical orga-
nized outlets (establishing religious organizations or missions) for spreading the
Germanocentric gospel, I would nevertheless argue that von Schroeder’s thought
manifests explicit undertones of universal applicability and thus contributed to
the ideological narratives—articulated by Deussen as ethics—that bolstered more
iconoclastic renderings of the German link to Aryan roots. Thus while Arvidsson
acknowledges the importance of ethics in von Schroeder’s account of religious
history, he fails to adequately explore the neotraditionalist’s underlying univer-
salist framework that became so easily applied beyond the cultural borders of
Wilhelmine Germany—a twisted universal application of a religious common
core whose root source derived in India and became manifest only in Germany.
In fact, that universal core served as the means for von Schroeder to account
for a progressive ethics that redounded to an updated German version of spiritu-
ality and culture. As von Schroeder continues in the following chapter, “Morals,
Poetry, and Thought,” he attempts to draw specific links between human religious
thought and ethics.84 Here, like Deussen, von Schroeder forges a hermeneuti-
cal reading with consequences for the community. First, he cites examples from
various religious traditions across the globe in which religious communities apply
explicitly defined means for determining individual moral status. Fire rituals, for
example, in some communities test moral fortitude, von Schroeder relates, or
in other instances guilt is determined by an individual’s ability to hold scalding
iron without pain or injury. He further describes the consumption of poison
without ill effect as a procedure in other cultures for vindicating the accused.
Significantly, he emphasizes the similarity of these examples across time and reli-
gious tradition in order to verify his assertion that diverse religious communities
are ultimately founded on common underlying models for generating commu-
nity consensus—the means, or rituals, are unique but the need to forge social and
ethical consensus is not.
Von Schroeder’s description of these rituals represents a historical cog in his
progressive history that culminates in his contention that Christianity is mor-
ally superior. To construct this argument von Schroeder focuses on the historical
evolution of religious ethics. He underscores ethics as “feminine moral[s],” which
is embodied in the Indian Upanishads and later Buddhism but reaches its high-
est development in Christianity. Moreover, he posits that the progress of religion
results in a fusion of the feminine and masculine gender—here turn-of-the-
century code for the reunification of Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian or
the spiritual and physical: “The greatest abundance and perfection in the organic
world will be created from grappling out of love that seeks the annulment of
contradictions, through loving reciprocal argument and the unification of both
genders. Equally one may hope and expect that from this grappling and unifica-
tion of masculine and feminine moral new, beautiful creations will emerge. Yet
the path upwards, the final goal has already been shown to us with the grand
ideals of Christianity.”85 Thus the progress of religion—in terms of the reunifica-
tion of the physical and spiritual domains, but also in terms of a higher form of
ethics—culminates in Christianity. Here, as we have already seen in Deussen’s
historical readings, religion becomes a source for rejuvenating human spirituality
that generates decipherable behavioral effects.
In consequence, von Schroeder’s emphasis on ethics, like Deussen’s, responds
to a world purportedly plagued by the undermining of morals and religion yet
also asserts an updated Christian community in Europe that only “Christianity’s
grand ideals” can reveal. Here von Schroeder takes a clear swipe at the modern
humanistic approaches to moral behavior that relegate religion to the junk heap
of bygone worldviews: “Because morals cannot live without religion, without a
mystical foundation, upon which it rests since primitive times and will rest until
the end of all days. Change in this religious foundation according to the newly
won knowledge is of course the necessary condition of its dynamic, continuing
existence.”86 That is, religion has and always will serve as the foundation for eth-
ics, yet importantly, is conditioned upon newly gained spiritual knowledge—an
implicit prescription that presumes the unique ability of an intellectual elite to
access religion’s deepest secrets.
Yet these historical models of religious history—turned discernibly more
prescriptive during the Wilhelmine era’s final decades—also carried undertones
of racism as they traced historical progression from an original Aryan unity to
a modern Germanic racial purity. Von Schroeder posits, for instance, that the
civilizational decline in Greece, and later in the Roman Empire, is directly corre-
lated with the decline in the “blond complexion of the Aryans.”87 Von Schroeder
attributes such declines to racial mixing, which had been at one time avoided,
and thus formerly resulted in remarkable cultural creations: “How brilliantly the
Aryan spirit also triumphed here and freely calls to life from within itself great
ideal creations in art and science, law and state.”88 Here prescriptive history meets
racial social science and nation.
In fact, the failure of India to maintain racial purity, according to von Schro-
eder, is the primary causal factor in India’s fall as the crucible of spiritual purity:
“The Indians have assumed for us in general the so called oriental type, despite
all attempts by the Aryan immigrants to seclude themselves from the ‘black skin,’
the darkly colored original inhabitants of the country.”89 Thus von Schroeder
explicitly links a civilization’s historical progress with its ability to maintain racial
purity: “All great spiritual progress of humanity consists, already since centuries,
almost exclusively in nothing other than the further development of individual
Aryan lineages,—in which only the Jews among the non-Aryan peoples have
played a truly meaningful role.”90 Despite the racist vitriol, von Schroeder
acknowledges the Jewish contribution to human advance but nevertheless attri-
butes the modern engine of historical progress to a different set of Aryans.
At this point von Schroeder shifts focus and posits that an important conse-
quence of racial purity manifests itself in what he terms “great personalities!” who
abounded among the Aryan peoples. Notably, as we have seen among many of
Germany’s India experts, von Schroeder draws conclusions that redound to an
elite class of thinkers who sought spiritual harmony in a world denominated by
empirical science “because all great spiritual progress can be attributed in the end
almost always to the occult-manifest power of great personalities, great individu-
als.”91 Von Schroeder’s description of that heroic individual echoes Nietzsche’s
Übermensch: “Among all families of peoples is the Aryan the hero,—the victori-
ous, conquering hero.!”92
Importantly, here again von Schroeder draws conclusions in his assessment
of these heroes—a victorious class of scholars and artists—that affirms their pre-
dominance in the world: “Thus the rule of the earth fell to them inevitably,
naturally and self-evidently.”93 In von Schroeder’s account, a pure and dominant
race had originated in the Indus Valley that held explicit links—race, language,
and religious creed—to Germany. To make this case, he turns to Chamberlain’s
Foundations, which depicts what von Schroeder describes as an original trait of
the Aryans in India, the “characteristic of fidelity.” Fidelity and devotion, accord-
ing to von Schroeder, are also detectable characteristics of the Germanic people
and exemplify traits that have faded among other peoples of the earth.94 Von
Schroeder then reiterates and underscores more explicitly such commendations
of Germanic heritage: “It is as if it [Germanic heritage] was created and predeter-
mined from nature not for law, but rather for the magnificent freedom of God’s
children—and herein lies the reason why especially the Aryans embraced Chris-
tianity so quickly and easily and considered it soon as completely its own.”95 Yet
in von Schroeder’s view, just as these characteristics—“pious and free at the same
time”—are manifest in the Aryans, Chamberlain, as we will soon explore in more
detail, beautifully and convincingly showed that they form what von Schroeder
describes as “the essence of the Germanic peoples.”96
While projections forward to National Socialism’s racist discourse might
appear more palpable at this point, I want to remain focused instead on how these
thinkers were attempting to reconstitute their identities in a world in which the
spiritual glue of community consensus seemed to no longer be adequately derived

from religion but instead from the empirical accounts and applications of natu-
ral selection. These iconoclasts were attempting to reconstitute their community
through accounts of Indian traditions based on more conventional historical
models, which became formulated in racist and nationalistic frameworks. Spe-
cifically, von Schroeder’s depiction of Aryan racial purity and its positive cultural
ramifications are directly linked with the physical world: “That the entire, rich
and versatile character, temper, and spiritual disposition of the Aryans is carried and
supported by the strength, health and beauty of the body. So equipped he may enter
certainly confident into the great contest with other peoples.”97 Thus the rich
spirit and diverse character of the Aryans, in von Schroeder’s reading, fashions the
requisite traits for that “universal” battle for religious and cultural superiority in
the world. Von Schroeder’s model then implicitly embraces a universal religious
core that progresses to its highest form in German Christianity and bolsters Ger-
man spirituality’s symbolic capital in the global religious marketplace, as well as
for those intellectuals who practiced it.
Von Schroeder’s Germanocentric Christianity finds further support in his
reading of another important academic topic of the day concerning India’s ethnogeo-
graphic heritage, which had been hotly contested: “the question about the homeland
of the Aryans.”98 During an era in which the threads of progressive history were
the primary means to justify links between an original and pure religious tradi-
tion and its modern day reconstitution, the answer to this question becomes the
crucial analytical paradigm for measuring civilizations on the hierarchical scale
of historical progression. Yet significantly, this question, though framed here in
geographical terms, contains implicit cultural undertones: “Yet this discussion
was nothing less than unfruitful and its final result now already appears clearly;
the old Asian hypothesis will be dropped and the homeland of the Aryans proves
to be with ever increasing certainty—Europe!”99 In this remarkable historical her-
meneutical twist, though von Schroeder names Europe as the inheritor of Aryan
tradition, he means Germany, which he explicitly spells out in his biography of
Chamberlain from 1918.
Von Schroeder wrote this biography as German losses in the trenches had
reached unfathomable numbers and the Second Reich neared its end. Thus he
lashes out at the French, who mock the traditions of the French revolution—
Freedom, Equality, Fraternity—by putting these ideals into practice, here citing
Chamberlain as “not obeying, not honoring, not loving.”100 While German ani-
mosity toward the French during the era might not be particularly surprising,
the more important point here is how von Schroeder envisions a Germanocentric
political alternative: “We Germans want and need a completely different politi-
cal ideal, and indeed one that could also bring salvation to other peoples, if they
would understand it and abide by it. It consists in the self-sacrificing subordi-
nation of the individual to the entirety of the State. We need a new political
organization with an absolute ethical (sittlicher) foundation, with a consciously
planned structure, as Kant already demanded and like Chamberlain specified
as scientific-organic structure.”101 Here von Schroeder’s political vision and his
cultural mission are not bounded by Germany’s geopolitical borders, rather
his response to the French embodies explicit missionary zeal—a decree with
universal implications.
As von Schroeder continues, his depiction of German mandates for fashioning
those cultural forms that could reconstitute the world’s well-being become even
more forceful: “Germany, the land of Luther and Kant, is the real homeland,
the refuge, yes throughout the entire world the only refuge of true freedom that
can rest alone on self-control and a sense of obligation, on true morality, and
that has to be carried, represented, and realized by dutiful personalities.”102 Here
von Schroeder explicitly links religious innovation and politics, and even more
audaciously asserts “that the German and Christian worldviews do not stand in
opposition to each other, rather harmonize most beautifully.”103 Here the cross-
fertilization of progressive historical accounts that lead from Deussen to von
Schroeder become more explicit and illustrate the ease with which such histori-
cal models became prescriptive remedies for the world’s dilemmas and thus by
definition political—serving to bolster the mandates of the German nation but
also subtly delineating the requisite intellectual traits for accessing new paradigms
intended to generate spiritual unity and community consensus.
So far we have only made fleeting reference to the infamous Chamberlain.
Yet here I want to return to Chamberlain in closing to further corroborate how
German historicist models provided the requisite analytical framework to fos-
ter more radical visions of Germany’s spiritual preeminence. Thus to conclude
this chapter’s excursion into the iconoclastic visions of Germany’s constructed
India as the Kaiserreich neared its end, I want to briefly examine how Cham-
berlain also incorporated Germany’s insights about Indian traditions into his
more radical prescriptions for rejuvenating German culture and the nation—an
updated Germanocentric Christianity forged through his Arische Weltanschau-
ung.104 That is, Chamberlain’s brief work exemplifies lucidly the radicalization
of German intellectual attempts to rejuvenate consensus—their distinctive status
in the nation—under the rubric of a prescriptive history of religions. Specifi-
cally, Chamberlain employed a hermeneutical model of progressive history—like
Deussen, who the British-born Chamberlain greatly admired, and like von Schro-
eder, his intimate friend—to construct an updated and more radical template for
community building in the nation.
Commandeering Sanskrit’s Revitalization

in Europe’s Philological Wasteland
As the era’s thinkers attempted to sort out the relentless dispute over the
determinants of human and cultural knowledge, Chamberlain also joined the
fray and his work irrefutably manifests the biological racism of the era that
had become a recurrent diagnostic framework. Yet here, I want to emphasize
how Chamberlain reframes German historical accounts of Indian religion
and culture in his own idiosyncratic way to address the pervasive sentiment
among so many of Germany’s thinkers during the Wilhelmine era that their
symbolic capital in the sociocultural marketplace no longer carried weight in
the Kaiserreich.
Chamberlain’s historical diagnosis in Foundations (1899) manifests his

dynamic vision for German culture and the nation. Yet despite the fact that he
paid significant attention to the ancient Orient this extensive text has little to say
about Indian traditions.105 In the six-year span between its publication, however,
and 1905, the year in which Chamberlain’s pamphlet-length Arische Weltanschau-
ung greeted Germany, India’s religious traditions had become the backbone of
his cultural master narrative, which he refashioned to assert Germany’s rise to
cultural maturity. On the first page of the first chapter, for instance, Chamberlain
proclaims that Germany has progressed “to the necessary maturity through our
own—un-Greek—works.”106 Here Chamberlain borrows from Deussen’s play-
book on the status of Greek philosophical heritage in Europe to posit that the
Germans have now matured beyond what Deussen and others concede as the
artistically and philosophically adept Greeks. Yet, in Chamberlain’s view, German
thought, as it has evolved from the Middle Ages to the present day, has advanced
to a more complete and independent “humanism.” Thus while the prescriptive
hermeneutics of Deussen and others frequently remained far more subtle and
couched in revamped implications for what they most frequently described as
ethics, Chamberlain designates the community ramifications of this new human-
ism as the centerpiece of his vision. In his mind this denoted more than just
intellectual exercises: “Rather the degree to which the strength of our soul is
increased; it does not just teach, rather it forms; and always solely the example
affects formation. Education is the supply of material that I—depending on my
organization—may or may not transform to my own life’s components, and that
I rework in some way by means of this sought after assimilation; whereas in this
example full life directly affects full life. Through example I will be motivated
to action, to inspired ventures, whose possibilities might have otherwise never
occurred to me.”107 Here Chamberlain’s prescriptive historical reading takes on
palpable political undertones because as Chamberlain sees it, a renewed spiritual
power (Seelenkraft) engenders a fuller life that in turn generates action and stimu-
lates calculated deeds in the community—not just an ethics, as Deussen called
for, but rather a bolder call to ethical action.
Thus we begin to see here the more tangible outlines of more Germanocentric
historical readings of world religions and the potential for practical applica-
tions. Moreover, Germany’s historical hermeneutics also began to reveal more
radical dimensions when Chamberlain predicts, for instance, “the birth of a new
[sprout], the gradual strengthening and growth of a fresh sprout of the inde-
fatigably rich European tribe, of the European spiritual aristocracy.”108 Here the
hyperbole of radical sociocultural reforms becomes more overt; yet such dictates
can hardly be designated as domestically contained revelations that are confined
to the geopolitical borders of the nation-state. In fact, as we shall see, Chamber-
lain’s rejuvenated “European spiritual aristocracy” signposts far more extensive
objectives for the emerging German nation.
First though, Chamberlain’s extraordinary and radical vision becomes herme-
neutically feasible through his application of the analytical tools constructed by
less extreme thinkers like Deussen. That is, Deussen’s historical accounts of reli-
gious philosophy emboldened such frustrated iconoclasts like Chamberlain in
their quest to reformulate progressive models of history into potentially more

concrete applications for lifting Germany’s status—Aryan worldviews—in the
European and global sociocultural marketplace. Yet rather than projecting Cham-
berlain’s work to 1933, I want to maintain our focus on the sociocultural and
political disquiet of the Kaiserreich’s final chapter. Specifically, I want to first
explore how the British-German iconoclast appropriated conventional histori-
cal models to construct his Aryan vision before discussing how Chamberlain’s
appeals bolstered Germany to reassert its sociocultural, and thus implicitly, politi-
cal standing in the world.
After the opening prelude in his Arische Weltanschauung, dedicated to the birth
of a new era for German culture, Chamberlain embarks on a historical overview
of the intellectual pursuits that have unfortunately in his view led the “human-
istic triumph carriage even deeper into the philological swamp.” Yet despite that
scholarly dead end in which the study of human language had become decoupled
from its spiritual essence, India’s linguistic and literary traditions, according to
Chamberlain, still afforded the requisite cultural resource for satisfying the Ger-
man “craving” (Heisshunger) for knowledge and freedom.109 To validate this claim
Chamberlain traces in an all too familiar account the history of Sanskrit stud-
ies throughout the nineteenth century. Though nothing appears surprising here,
Chamberlain ascribes to German Indologie a profound inner life—a spiritually
driven force that only a select class of elite thinkers could access. As Chamberlain
posits, not even the renowned German-Oxford Sanskritist Max Müller fulfilled
these covert qualifications. As is frequently the case among followers of the occult
during the era, these requirements remain nebulous, yet in Chamberlain’s eyes,
Müller lacked “a trifle, upon which all depends: the inner experience of that, what
the Indian thinker so inexpressibly labored to formulate in words, not with the
goal of building a beautiful, consistent system, not in order to prove that they
‘are right,’ rather in order that others would experience inwardly the same inef-
fability.”110 Here Chamberlain demarcates the discernible outlines of an elite class
of thinkers who possess special insight—distinction—for retrieving the deep-
est occult secrets of spiritual discourse at its root source. In fact, Chamberlain
explicitly claims that “the greatest findings are only available to the selected.”111
Moreover, as Chamberlain continues, these chosen intellectuals (Auserlesenen)
embark on “the heroic attempt to transform the word into deed, not to prove
the transcendental essence of the human being, rather to let them experience
it.”112 Here Chamberlain unequivocally calls for these select thinkers to valiantly
transform their ideas into action by example—to convince by demonstrating
to other human beings that they, as special thinkers, embody a transcendental
essence. That is, Chamberlain implores Germany’s intellectual elite to revitalize
their spirituality in demonstrable forms—a praxis that implicitly signals politi-
cal ramifications—action in the community that Chamberlain frames under the
rubric of an Aryan worldview.
Notably, the rational path to that worldview, at least for Chamberlain and
others, had been etched into the diagnostic historical logic of Deussen’s Scho-
penhauerian Christianity. Thus Chamberlain closes his historical overview of
nineteenth-century Sanskrit studies by providing a segue to what he terms “the
key to open the gate through which we could enter. To have delivered this key,
is primarily the merit of Paul Deussen, Professor of Philosophy in Kiel.”113 As
Chamberlain continues, he underscores Deussen’s importance for laying the
analytical groundwork for deciphering the treasures of India’s spiritual origins—
the norm upon which the distinction of a socioculturally operative elite class
of thinkers hinged. To put it more simply, Deussen’s hermeneutical history of
religious philosophy supplied the requisite analytical model from which Cham-
berlain refashioned calls to action for an elite class of German thinkers in the
community: “It was reserved for Paul Deussen to make accessible for us the
works in which Indian thought won its purest expression, at the same time also
to provide expansive overviews of their entire development.”114 In fact, to access
the deepest secrets of spiritual life, according to Chamberlain, requires more
than that which German diligence could generate. Specifically, Deussen, a rare
elite philosopher who possesses “special and rare characteristics,” proved capa-
ble of generating “the complete understanding of the recited, the intuitive and
immediate capture of each thought, an eagle-eyed look at the meaning of each—
sometimes very farfetched—comparison.”115 Thus in Chamberlain’s assessment,
Deussen’s thought provided the ideological framework to ultimately address the
“inner alienation, a disunity with our selves . . . , the lack of harmony in our
spiritual life (Seelenleben).”116 Moreover, from this point of view, Deussen’s con-
structed India designates a reinvented Germany as the modern inheritor of India’s
philosophical and religious traditions. Yet, more boldly, Chamberlain dares to lay
the key to that spiritual treasure chest at the feet of those German thinkers with
the intellectual endowment to reclaim Germany’s spiritual birthright. To put it
differently, Chamberlain utilizes Deussen’s hermeneutical historical key to unveil
his Aryan worldview for those German thinkers with the cultural and cognitive
acumen to recoup it.
Chamberlain’s Elite Class of Aryan Thinkers

Following his historical summary, Chamberlain proclaims the significance of
Aryan thought as pure, completely untouched from outside influence; embraced
and embodied by the entire people (Volk); and hardly systematic yet absolutely
organic.117 Unsurprisingly, as he elaborates each of these vague notions, he clarifies
the purity of Aryan thought in terms of race. Yet significantly, Chamberlain’s
account echoes historical frameworks that have thread their way throughout
this book. Specifically, contact with the “genuinely” racially pure Indo-Aryans
affirms the intricate link between Germany and ancient India: “Because this
gives us an exaggerated picture of virtues and the unvirtuous that we are also
born with; and indeed seems to be a nearer one in many ways between Ger-
manic peoples (namely Germans) and Indo-Aryans than between Germanic
peoples and Hellenes.”118 To put it differently, German character, according to
Chamberlain, is a modern manifestation of the best of the Greeks and the purity
of the Indian ancients: “We find all this again with the Indo-Aryans and thus
view ourselves in a magnifying mirror.”119 Such twisted arguments that challenge
the predominance of Greek heritage for European culture and reroute Europe’s
cultural inheritance from India to Germany we have already seen in Deus-

sen’s Schopenhauerian Christianity, but also among many of the Kaiserreich’s
Buddhist acolytes, whose doctrines were purportedly far too passive for this
Anglo-German iconoclast’s taste.
Yet Chamberlain nevertheless felt compelled to address the small but con-
spicuous Buddhist experiment that from his viewpoint could not be so easily
incorporated into his Germanocentric hermeneutics. In tune with the cultural
trends and historical models of the era, Chamberlain acknowledges that Buddha
was Aryan himself but that over time his “Indo-Aryan thought” deviated from its
“symbolic-transcendental ideal in religion and from its aristocratic tribal constitu-
tion of the fathers.”120 Moreover, Chamberlain depicts Buddhism’s relevance for
Europe in explicitly historical terms: “Buddhism—that until now has unfortu-
nately monopolized the attention of Europeans to an unfortunate degree to the
detriment of all serious and humanistically facilitated occupation with Indian
thought—is in its origination, as said, indeed Indo-Aryan, but in its further
development and in its entire historical formation is a through and through un-
Aryan, anti-Aryan and moreover unoriginal appearance.”121 Here Chamberlain
bemoans the European fascination and attraction to Buddhist doctrine without
acknowledging any of its potential for resolving Europe’s spiritual dilemmas that
many Western intellectuals highlighted. In one fell swoop Chamberlain discards
Buddhism to one of religious history’s exhausted, unoriginal curiosities—an un-
Aryan historical oddity.
As Chamberlain continues, he discounts Buddhism’s contemporary rel-
evance by rehashing common Catholic and Buddhist reproaches—Buddhism’s
purported rejection of all worldly pursuits. Yet Chamberlain points to another
important transformation evoked by Buddhism that not only allegedly affected
the religious movement’s descent toward irrelevance but also provides particular
insight into how Chamberlain formulated his Aryan worldview: “The Brahmins
had no churches, no saints; all that was introduced by Buddhism, and in place
of constant development, mythological metaphysics, with the majestic, ancient
Aryan (altarischen) imagination of the new, regenerating God-human who
again and again brings salvation to the world, stepped now the rigid, infallible
dogma, the ‘revelations of the lord.’”122 With this tacit sanction of the Brahmin
priestly class Chamberlain’s thought becomes curiously aligned with one aspect of
Catholic views of Buddhism in which Jesuits unhesitatingly criticized Buddhist
doctrine but frequently paid tribute to India’s priestly hierarchies. That is, for
both Chamberlain, and similarly for Catholic intellectuals, the Brahmin priestly
classes signified an elite group of superior thinkers to guide the nation—a ranking
order that Catholic Jesuits defended and Chamberlain envisioned for Germany’s
future. Thus, in a bold assessment, he attributes what could be termed their theo-
pormorphic characteristics (the attribution of God-like traits to human beings) to
the Brahmin priestly class. Yet regrettably, the Aryan worldview propagated by
these divine human beings—what Chamberlain terms, like Hübbe-Schleiden,
Gott-Menschen—had been in his view supplanted by the rigid and dogmatically
concocted infallibility of the Buddha. In this reading Buddha becomes identi-
fied as a false prophet rather than as a revolutionary figure who reinvigorated
India’s stagnated spiritual life, which had developed under the preeminence of an
out-of-touch and self-perpetuating priestly class—for Chamberlain a correctable
problem during the midst of what he designated as the German millennium.
At this point, Chamberlain readdresses the same link between ethics and
community that Deussen and von Schroeder underscored, and which critically
manifests more political undertones. Though he terms it differently than Deus-
sen and others had, Chamberlain posits that the pure Aryan worldview’s organic
nature is derived “from the metaphysical activity of an entire people” that found
its purest form in India, and which he unequivocally links, in stark contrast to
Europe’s unsettled state of affairs after the turn of the century, with ancient India’s
community coherence and solidarity: “Our European philosophy runs only along-
side our world; it could disappear tomorrow without having the least significance
for our nations; in contrast the Indian worldview was the soul of the Indian
people, it determined the external design of its life . . . The time of the greatest
expansion of power of the Indian people was also the heyday of its metaphysics;
and as philosophy had lost its prevalent position, the people perished.”123 Thus, in
a strikingly familiar argument, Chamberlain bemoans the philosophical-religious
vacuum that seemed to incessantly torment German intellectuals during the Kai-
serreich and applauds Indian traditions for their spiritual coherence, which in his
view had spawned India’s most significant period of power—an explicit political
derivative of a house in spiritual order. Yet in his most tangible application of
progressive history, here formulated through a distinctive transition narrative,
Chamberlain opines that the congruence of philosophical heights and political
clout in India gradually decayed due to Indian philosophy’s loss of status and
preeminence as a source of national identity. Such transition narratives, as we
have already seen, fashioned the requisite historical pathways springing from the
world’s most pristine cultural heritage, now gone sour, and bolstered the case for
German cultural predominance in Europe—an essential segue for asserting Ger-
man political mandates vis-à-vis the other European powers.
To legitimize modern Europe and, more important, Germany as the inheri-
tor of Indo-Aryan culture, Chamberlain posits that intellectual mavericks will
fail to successfully design innovative and effective philosophical models, yet
the generation of a pure arische Weltanschauung derives from “an entire people
of thinkers.”124 That is, in a move that redounds to an elite class of specifically
German thinkers—the reinscription of the special cultural and political status
formerly attributed to German Dichter and Denker—Chamberlain restricts his
definition by clarifying that even in ancient India not every individual could
be classified as a philosopher. Importantly, the people are purportedly inca-
pable of attaining higher philosophical reflection, yet each individual could at
least acknowledge the presence of such special thinkers and hold them in high-
est esteem “because he recognized in a philosopher the venerable human being
that he unquestionably subordinated himself to, and the results of such think-
ing served him as guideline of his life and as foundation of his national and his
religious convictions.”125 Thus India’s philosophical model embodied an imag-
ined ideal world in which a rejuvenated and unquestioned intellectual class of
German thinkers could break the shackles of sociocultural disenfranchisement,
or what Chamberlain terms “spiritual anarchy.”126 Chamberlain’s analysis then

asserts the reestablishment of social hierarchies based on his intrinsically vague
standards for designating the distinctive philosopher—Gott-mensch—by assert-
ing an explicit link between spiritual rejuvenation and political mandates: “The
professional thinker (that is the Brahmins) formed the highest caste; the proudest
monarch descended from his throne, in order to welcome a famous thinker.”127
Here the amalgamation of cultural and political mandates becomes most explicit
yet inherently dependent on the reinauguration of an elite class of thinkers to
lead the nation. That is, based on Chamberlain’s account, Germany had to reaf-
firm its political status and reconstitute its spiritual authority—here depicted as
philosophy—on the shoulders of its greatest thinkers who are able to reformu-
late and disseminate India’s spiritual treasures for the global cultural marketplace.
In an unstated yet astounding consequence of Chamberlain’s model, which he
implicitly derives from the era’s conventional historical frameworks, the nation’s
political form becomes irrelevant if only led by a philosopher-king.
Yet, like theosophy’s secret doctrine, such vague claims are difficult to measure
and verify. Thus in order to make his case less susceptible to reproach Cham-
berlain resorts to a common argument utilized by many religious innovators of
the day in which the standard of measure is derived from what he terms “‘inner’
knowledge”—knowledge easy to claim by the claimant, but ever so difficult
to challenge by the doubter. In an even bolder move that aligns with the rac-
ist cultural models of the era, Chamberlain posits that this inner spirit can be
transposed onto one’s “external nature.”128 With such distinctive and discernible
attributes, Chamberlain asserts, elite thinkers can decipher, but more signifi-
cantly, craft standards of moral meaning in the world—on the surface a minor
step removed from Blavatsky’s theosophical secret doctrine, yet with extraordi-
nary consequences for assembling and reifying the governing determinants for
community consensus. Chamberlain ascribes this “avowed belief,” as he calls it,
to Germany’s “greatest and genuine Germans . . . the avowed belief of Herder and
Kant, Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Wagner, Frederick the Great and Bis-
marck.”129 In this model access to the deepest cultural archives of knowledge and
spirit become explicitly linked with the founders of German political and cultural
solidarity—Germany’s world historical figures, to put it in Hegelian terminology.
Yet as we have seen, if the Greeks excelled in form and if India provides the
spiritual aesthetics with little regard for worldly outcomes—“the form of the
Indian is thus almost reprehensible everywhere,” Chamberlain opines—then it
is left up to the Germans to reunify form and spirit, both of which were required
for rejuvenating Western culture.130 As a result, what was missing in India—
form—and in the West—spirituality, brought asunder by material culture—can
be rejuvenated, according to Chamberlain, when religion again becomes “the
bearer of science.”131 In fact, in a bizarre and, for modern readers, farfetched
claim, Chamberlain asserts that the utilization of cause and effect—presumably
an essential trait of any defendable historical analysis—destroys science. In con-
sequence, in a world led by such Gott-Menschen there is no proof in the pudding
for claims about the reunification of spirit and object.
To describe it more explicitly, Chamberlain explains: “Especially that god of

the Indo-Aryans, ‘that can never be proven’ (as it is stated in one Upanishad),
because it is given not through external, but rather through inner experience;
yet it was in reality the god of all deeply religious Germanic Christians in all
times.”132 Moreover, in a comment that egregiously co-opts Nietzsche’s criticism
of nineteenth-century historicism, Chamberlain then summarizes: “Religion is
presence, not past and future.”133 As a result, only the reemergence of a new circle
of German philosopher-kings who cannot be held accountable to any conven-
tional political or scientific standards not of their own making can bring this
rejuvenation about.
Epilogue
Also in you are all elements unified that can lead to a new, free spiritual blossoming,
comparable to the highpoints of human life!
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arische Weltanschauung (1905)1
In Chamberlain’s concluding remarks to his hyperbolic vision for renewed

inner well-being in Germany, the burden of rejuvenation, as the epigraph above
explicitly describes, lays on the shoulders of the individual. This inner state,
which in Chamberlain’s mind will fulfill the promise of a unified Greek and
Aryan lineage, cannot be achieved, as he explains, through steel, modern technol-
ogy, or “phantasies of evolution.”2 On the surface Chamberlain’s claims and those
of others that we have explored throughout this book arose perhaps from honest
attempts to restore spiritual sanctuary in the modern world. Yet religious pre-
rogatives and political objectives remained consistently entangled—some more
explicitly than others yet always present. Chamberlain’s concluding comments
illustrate the depth of this link.
As Chamberlain summarizes at the end of his work, he expresses his most
Eurocentric viewpoint, here based on a more Christian centered postscript to
his hermeneutical history that redounds to his notion of a spiritually rejuvenated
Christian Philosopher King: “Christ gave us something that all Aryan (altarische)
thinking would have been incapable of giving. Indeed the idea of the God-
Human . . . is a familiar thought for the Aryans (besides for all Indo-Germanic
peoples in some form), by contrast, it is a completely unknown thought to the
Semites; but the living example differentiates itself from the speculative idea,
like day from night. In that Christ stands much closer to nature than the Indian,
he stands closer to God.”3 Thus, in Chamberlain’s assessment, a purer form of
Indo-Aryan thinking had been embodied in Christ. Christianity’s own root
source then transcends the spiritual purity of India, and more specifically, can
again be rejuvenated in modern Germany.
Germany then, in Chamberlain’s mind, becomes the crucible for the “amal-
gamation of Indo-Aryan thought and the depth of feeling and Indo-Aryan inner
freedom with the Greek sense for form and the Greek appreciation of the healthy,
beautiful body.”4 Significantly, as Chamberlain continues, this rejuvenated state
of harmony between form and the aesthetic becomes manifest in “an inner state of
feeling, an orientation of thought and desire”—traits reserved for a special class
of German thinkers.5 Specifically, Chamberlain proclaims, in a statement with
significant political ramifications for the German nation, that the requisite
intellectual tools to establish spiritual congruence and permanence have always

been carried, and will continue so, on the backs of a German Brahmin class:
Yet do we stroll today quickly ‘through the humid night,’ did we not see in Ger-
many’s great men the ‘peak of humanity’ newly shining? Who only directed their
eyes upward once, learned to hope. And because these men cast their light equally
across the past as over the future, in that they captured the almost extinguished
beams of the distant summits and stoked new flames in the focus of their spirit,
thus I believe to be able to ensure that at least those of us who did not reject to be
disciples of the true masters of our race, will ‘soon’ grow into the special way of the
Aryan worldview and then will sense as if they have entered into possession of an
until now unlawfully denied title.6
As Chamberlain’s assessment here definitively illustrates, his constructed history

of Indian traditions, as well as those of Paul Deussen, Leopold von Schroeder, and
others, manifest an audacious attempt to rejuvenate spirituality and the cultural
identity of a generation of intellectuals through the propagation of a Germanocen-
tric intellectual caste system of sorts in which an elite class of distinctive German
thinkers would become acknowledged as the sole inheritors of its essential secret
doctrines. Germany’s India was always intricately entwined with the cultural and
political mandates of the German nation.
Thus, in summary, the “emancipatory reason” of the Enlightenment that
Russell Berman describes in Enlightenment or Empire (1998) certainly unleashed
the historical hermeneutical models—the potential “vehicle for a genuine
knowledge of another culture”—that German Visions of India traces during the
Kaiserreich.7 Yet, as we have seen, emancipatory reason conveniently perverted to
“instrumental rationality”—Commandeering the Holy Ganges—when these India
experts failed to hold Enlightenment reason to its own standards.8 As we have
seen throughout this book, because Germany’s India experts failed to engage in
“value free” Enlightenment practice, their historical models that portended cul-
tural rejuvenation—from Catholic universal mandates, Buddhist and theosophist
spiritual recalibrations, Christian apologetics, and to Aryan worldviews—were
unquestionably vulnerable to be adapted for world visions that claimed the right
to social and political engineering. Specifically, Chamberlain’s and other historical
depictions of a renewed intellectual elite at the end of the Second Reich palpably
reconstruct the sentiments of the now-obscure German poet, Emanuel Geibel
(1815–84), who, though certainly in a different context, famously wrote decades
earlier in an 1871 collection of poems, Heroldsrufe: “And yet again the world will
be healed through Germandom.”9 Thus such corrupted historical models proved
incapable of providing effective opposition to immoral and malicious utopian
political designs. Moreover, the attempt to reconstitute community in the face of
deteriorating cultural institutions and exhausted religious ideas became perhaps
an inadvertent catalyst—the generator of a reservoir of ideological undercurrents
based on conventional historical models—that could be conveniently reformu-
lated to bolster National Socialism.
Notes
Introduction
1. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arische Weltanschauung (München: Bruckman, 1905). All
translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I would like to thank Susanne Myers for her
support in substantially improving their accuracy and quality. Any remaining errors are mine.
2. For background on religious pilgrimages to the Ganges, see Gavin Flood, An Introduc-
tion to Hinduism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially 212–
14, which deals briefly with the Ganges and the city of Varanasi (Benares); also Steven
J. Rosen, Introduction to the World’s Major Religions: Hinduism, vol. 6 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 2006).
3. I will use the terms Kaiserreich, Second Reich, and Wilhelmine era interchangeably, all
three of which refer to the period from the coronation of Wilhelm I in 1871 to the fall
of the German Empire under Wilhelm II in 1918.
4. For the early fascination with India, see Bradley L. Herling, The German Gītā: Herme-
neutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 (New York:
Routledge, 2006); and Nicholas Germana, The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of
India and Competing Images of German National Identity (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge
Scholars, 2009). Still useful are several older works: Leslie A. Willson, A Mythical Image:
The Ideal of India in German Romanticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964);
and Jean Sedlar’s India in the Mind of Germany: Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Their Times
(Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982). For a broader and more master-
ful account of the European encounter and fascination with Asia during the eighteenth
century, see Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen
Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (München: C. H. Beck, 1998); for the long nineteenth cen-
tury and specifically the German context, see Suzanne Marchand’s pathbreaking German
Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2009).
5. Familiarly, the first Oriental Renaissance was originally so named by Raymond Schwab,
The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans.
Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984). Marchand, in German Orientalism, identifies a second Oriental Renaissance after
1850 that intensified post-1880.
6. Marchand, German Orientalism, 297. Marchand describes the “furor orientalis,” as con-
sisting of those academics from theology, classics, art history, and of course, Orientalistik,
who vigorously championed “the claims of the Orient to historical, religious, philo-
sophical, and/or artistic priority (and sometimes even superiority) over and against the
dominant tendency to isolate and exalt ancient civilizations conventionally hailed as
special, especially Greece and Israel” (215). The Indologist’s shifting view of Greece will
become an important topic in Chapter 4 of this monograph.
202 Notes
7. Ibid., 298. Marchand insightfully points out that those cultures the Germans treated
with high regard tended to be places in which Germany had no colonial interests,
whereas concerning those areas where the opposite was the case, such as China and the
“Islamic world,” German appraisals tended to be far more critical. On China, see George
Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qin-
gdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
8. Marchand, German Orientalism, xxxiii.
9. Those intellectuals who engaged with India were indeed frequently credentialed
Indologists, yet what I refer to as India experts includes a far broader set of thinkers
than those holding chairs in Indology at German universities. Academics from a broad
range of fields such as philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences also felt com-
pelled to say something about India. Moreover, Protestant preachers speaking from the
pulpit and publishing journal essays, Catholic Jesuit missionaries reporting from the
confessional frontlines in India, and avant-garde religious innovators, in some cases
with little or no credentialed knowledge of the Indian subcontinent, also contributed
to Germany’s knowledge making about India. Because this group defies any specific
categorization other than intellectual or thinker with an opinion about India, I use
such terms as India expert, pundit, guru, or authority interchangeably, yet without
intending to ascribe a definitive expertise; rather, simply, in this book an India expert
designates anyone who felt obliged to join the discussion of India and found a pub-
lished avenue to express it.
10. The term field for Bourdieu denotes an arena in which social agents contend for sym-
bolic capital. That is, a field could be any sphere of interest from art, religion, class,
science, or politics, where stakeholders seek to distinguish themselves. See Pierre Bour-
dieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984): 466–88.
11. For Said’s reasoning for Germany’s irrelevance for his work, see Orientalism (New York:
Pantheon, 1978), especially 18–19.
12. Dorothy Figueira, to cite just one critical example particularly relevant to my work here,
argues in Translating the Orient: The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) that Said’s work is built on the fallacy
that all discourse is political and thus reduces all academic work on the cultural Other to
a calculated power grab: “The Orientalist’s scholarly frenzy was nothing but a deliberate
attempt at cultural hegemony” (3). The critical literature on Said is now massive, but
one might begin with Aijaz Ahmad’s essay, “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and
Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” in his In Theory: Classes, Nations,
Literatures (London: Verso, 1992): 159–220.
13. Marchand, German Orientalism, xxi (italics in original).
14. The term “thick description” derives from Clifford Geertz’s seminal essay, “Religion as
a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic
Books, 1993): 87–125.
15. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond Matthew Adam-
son (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991): 73. See page 39 for a more
detailed description of Bourdieu’s use of the term marketplace, which can be seen as any
field of human interaction where symbolic capital becomes negotiated, evaluated, and
ritualized into a set of established sociocultural practices. Bourdieu is not indebted to
economic theory in any significant manner but does employ economic terminology to
emphasize what might be termed the “transactive” nature—the give and take—of inter-
personal and intercultural interaction.
Notes 203
16. Ibid., 39. In the case of Saussure’s langue and Chomsky’s generative linguistics, Bourdieu
bemoans that neither account for the fact that language always exists in and functions
inseparably from the social domain. See especially 43–44.
17. Ibid., 76 (italics in original).
18. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 49. In reference to the Wilhelmine era, Steinmetz
describes each of these three classes as “rooted in a different social source of status: the
modern economic bourgeoisie, based in wealth and property; the nobility, based in titles
and land; and the middle-class intelligentsia or Bildungsbürgertum, based in educational
culture” (49).
19. For general background on the increasing German interest in “foreign” objects of cul-
ture, see James Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old
Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Andrew Zim-
merman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2001); and H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethno-
graphic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2002).
20. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 113 (italics in original).
21. Ibid., 89. Habitus can be defined simply as a set of social practices and rewards. See
Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 51.
22. An important predecessor to Bourdieu is Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process: Socioge-
netic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, UK: Blackwell,
2000), which traces historically the European habitus during the medieval era to dem-
onstrate how individual psychological perceptions are molded by society.
23. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 106.
24. Ibid., 117 (italics in original). Bourdieu employs the term “institution,” in the sense to
constitute—that is, to designate the parameters for selection, or distinction, in the social
marketplace. In the case of education, for instance, Bourdieu explains “that one has only
to assemble the different senses of instituer and of institutio to form an idea of an inaugu-
ral act of constitution, of foundation, indeed of the invention which, through education,
leads to durable dispositions, habits and usages” (123).
25. Ibid., 81.
26. Evidence for the continuing general interest in Prussian history is the recent book by
Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
27. Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Ger-
many, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Mary Louise Pratt,
Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).
28. From a different angle, but also responding to the inadequacies of Said’s binary model—a
one-way analytical street that restricts intercultural enquiry to exposing the colonizer
colonizing Others—other scholars have begun to challenge this model in their work on
the intercultural encounters between Germans and Indians. While this work extends
beyond the scope of my purposes here, these critical new studies have opened up a new
field in the German context that builds on the work of subaltern studies and hybrid-
ity (Homi K. Bhaba) to investigate the intercultural influences between Germany and
India. See Andrew Sartori, “Beyond Culture-Contact and Colonial Discourse: ‘German-
ism’ in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Intellectual History 4.1 (2007): 77–93; and Kris Man-
japra, “The Mirrored World: Cosmopolitan Encounter between Indian Anti-Colonial
Intellectuals and German Radicals, 1905–1939” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007);
also Manjapra, “From Imperial to International Horizons: A Hermeneutic Study of Ben-
gali Modernism,” Modern Intellectual History 8.2 (2011): 327–59.
204 Notes
29. The term Indo-Germanic was coined by one of the early German Indologists, Julius von
Klaproth. See Osterhammel’s Die Entzauberung Asiens, 85; also Schwab, Oriental Renais-
sance, 184.
30. Walter Leifer, India and the Germans: 500 Years of Indo-German Contacts (Bombay:
Shakuntala, 1971): vii.
31. Douglas T. McGetchin, Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India’s Re-Birth in
Modern Germany (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009): 55.
32. Ibid., 94–95.
33. Ibid., 130.
34. Robert Cowan, The Indo-German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and
European Destinies (1765–1885) (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010): 3.
35. For the British version of the “Aryan myth” during the nineteenth century, see Thomas
Trautmann’s Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),
which also has critical references to German Indology.
36. Another important work that examines the emergence of Orientalistik in Germany
throughout the nineteenth century, and that does include Indology in the academic
development that the book focuses on, is Sabine Mangold’s Eine “weltbürgerliche
Wissenschaft”—Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004).
37. Marchand, German Orientalism, xxiii.
38. Ibid., 302.
39. The best example in this regard is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of
Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. The Arisophists of Aus-
tria and Germany, 1890–1935 (Wellingborough: Aquarian, 1985); or Sheldon Pollock’s
essay, “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj,” in Orientalism
and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge
and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993): 76–133.
40. The details of these processes extend far beyond the scope of my work here, but for
more general histories that include important insight on religious culture and society,
and specifically church and state during the nineteenth century, see Thomas Nipperdey,
Deutsche Geschichte: 1800–1866, Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (München: Beck, 1983);
and David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). More will follow on Immanuel Kant in this mono-
graph’s Chapter 6.
41. Rudolf Lill, ed., Der Kulturkampf: Quellentexte zur Geschichte des Katholizismus (Pader-
born: Schöningh, 1997): 9.
42. Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, trans. Christiane Banerji (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000): 200. For other important work on German liber-
alism, see James Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1978).
43. Protestant objectives and Prussian politics had of course been closely aligned long
before this period, but after Bismarck’s rise to power his political strategy concerning
the “deutsche Frage” and Reichsgründung became more explicitly linked with Protestant
traditions leading up to and during the Kulturkampf. Bismarck manipulated denomi-
national sentiment to consolidate his national prerogatives. See Nipperdey, Deutsche
Geschichte, 1866–1918, bd. 2, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (München: C. H. Beck,
1992), especially 364–408.
44. The term Kulturkampf was coined by the well-known pathologist and liberal, Rudolf
Virchow. For more background on Virchow, see Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopular-
isierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die
deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848–1914 (München: R. Oldenbourg, 2002). There is a wealth
Notes 205
of literature on denominational conflict and the Kulturkampf during the Wilhelmine

era, but see especially Michael B. Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the
Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2004); Ronald J. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholi-
cism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 1871–1887 (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 1998); Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and
Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1995); Blackbourn Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bis-
marckian Germany (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism
in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); also
Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 85–127.
45. My point here is not to ignore or simplify the deep complexities of defining German
nationhood after 1871. Enlightenment values, Prussian dominance and regional inde-
pendence, Pietism, and the emergence of empirical science, among other influences,
played various roles in Germany’s attempt to define itself as a nation. These influences
exceed my book’s focus. That said, I want to explore here the specific link between
denomination and, generally, religious objectives and spiritual concerns as they became
coalesced with assertions of nationhood in the Kaiserreich. For a detailed study of the
link between Protestantism and politics during that era, see Gangolf Hübinger, Kul-
turprotestantismus und Politik: Zum Verhältnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im
wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen: J. B. Mohr, 1994).
46. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, bd. 2, 374–75.
47. Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 40–41.
48. Ibid., 44.
49. Ibid., 47.
50. Blackbourn, History of Germany, 224.
51. Ibid., 227.
52. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, bd. 2, 416. These laws more or less reversed
the anti-Catholic laws of the 1870s, with the exception of reinstating the Order of Jesuits
in Germany.
53. On the role of the Zentrumspartei after 1890, see Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–
1918, bd. 2, especially 541–54.
54. See especially parts 2 and 3 of Smith’s German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, which
thoroughly treats the denominational conflicts and debates in Germany after the 1880s’
demise of the Kulturkampf.
55. Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 142. As Smith shows, Bülow, German
chancellor from 1900 to1909 and remembered especially for his promotion of the Bagh-
dad railway, sought to consolidate the German nation through an anti-Catholic cam-
paign (141). The “Los von Rom” movement in Austria, which Smith treats in chapter 7,
is another example of powerful anti-Catholic sentiment long after the Kulturkampf.
56. Nipperdey, Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland 1870–1918 (München: C. H. Beck,
1988): 49; for a more detailed analysis, see Smith, German Nationalism and Religious
Conflict, 61–78.
57. The “iron cage” refers of course to Max Weber’s well-known phrase “stahlhartes
Gehäuse,” from “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Gesam-
melte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1988), in which Weber
posits that material goods have become an increasing and inescapable determinant of
modern “life praxis” (Askese der Welt). Weber’s analysis can be applied to the broader
dilemmas of the era deriving from empirical/material views of the world, and modern
industrial capitalism. See Weber’s Religionssoziologie I: 203.
206 Notes
58. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975); also Hugh McLeod, Seculariza-
tion in Western Europe, 1848–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000).
59. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte: 1800–1866, 403.
60. Thomas Anz, Literatur des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2002): 18.
61. Examples are David Friedrich Strauss’s Der alte und der neue Glaube: Ein Bekenntniß
(Leipzig: Hirzel, 1872); and Paul de Lagarde’s “Germanic religion,” as Fritz Stern calls it.
On Lagarde and other radical thinkers of the era—namely Julius Langbehn and Moeller
van den Bruck—see Stern’s older but still important, The Politics of Cultural Despair:
A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1963). Eduard von Hartmann’s search for meaning in the unconscious was also influ-
ential and controversial. See Hartmann’s Die Philosophie des Unbewußtens : Versuch eine
Weltanschauung (Berlin: Carl Duncker’s Verlag, 1869). Hartmann’s work clearly struck
a cultural chord. Numerous Protestant intellectuals, for example, wrote critical essays
on what they termed Hartmann’s “religion of pessimism.” Just two examples among
others are Edmund Pfleiderer, “Der Moderne Pessimismus,” Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-
Fragen 4.54–55 (1875): 231–356; and Hugo Sommer, “Die Religion des Pessimismus,”
Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen 13.199 (1884): 241–80. The ten-year span between
these two works signals the continuing relevance of Hartmann’s provocative ideas during
the era. Unsurprisingly, Catholic thinkers criticized Hartmann’s work sharply.
62. Some of these movements will be explored in more detail in later chapters. For now
briefly, theosophy originated under the leadership of the Russian émigré Helene Bla-
vatsky and the American Henry Steele Olcott in New York. The movement was based
on the idea that there is a core of truth in all religions. Monism can best be described
as a pantheistic nature religion founded by the German zoologist and Darwinist, Ernst
Haeckel. Anthroposphy came later, founded in 1912 by Rudolf Steiner, who had been
a leading figure in the German theosophical society but who rejected the increasing
embrace of Eastern tenets by Blavatsky’s successor, Annie Besant.
63. Marchand, German Orientalism, 270.
64. Blackbourn, History of Germany, 216.
65. Important work in Germany’s case has already emerged on various aspects of religion
and spirituality during the nineteenth century (George Williamson, Smith, Blackbourn,
Sperber, Gross, Marchand), to which my work is deeply indebted.
66. There has long been a scholarly debate about secularization processes, which is still
on going. See Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians
Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Hartmut
Lehmann, ed., Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen
Europa: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1997); and William H. Swatos Jr. and Daniel V. A. Olson, eds., The Secularization
Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
67. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1967): 89.
68. Vestiges was originally published in 1844 and ignited a sensation in Victorian England.
See James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation. The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and
Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2000).
69. See Peter Bowler, Darwinism (New York: Twayne, 1993) for an excellent study of the
various outgrowths and cultural applications of Darwinism in Europe during the late
nineteenth century. For the dissemination of Darwin’s ideas in Germany, see Alfred
Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914
Notes 207
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); also Robert J. Richards, Dar-
win and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago, IL: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1987).
70. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1994): 15.
71. Nipperdey, in Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, bd. 1, Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist
(München: C. H. Beck, 1990), cites various statistics concerning participation in the
Lord’s supper, church weddings, and church attendance. See especially pages 504–5.
72. Among others, one of the most significant offshoots of Strauss’s work of course was
Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig: Reclam, 1957), an anthropo-
logical study of Christianity that led to an entire generation of theologians such as Adolf
von Harnack, Albrecht Ritschl, and Ernst Troeltsch attempting to reconstruct Protestant
theology as a historically valid social science.
73. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, bd. 1, 509.
74. The literature on this subject is immense, but for more general work on the Conse-
quences of Modernity, one might begin with Anthony Gidden’s book of the same title
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time
and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Also from a
historical-theoretical perspective, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s older Modernisierungstheorie
und Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975). For a more sociologi-
cal approach, see Peter Wehling, Die Moderne als Sozialmythos: Zur Kritik sozialwissen-
schaftlicher Modernisierungstheorien (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1992), especially his
first chapter. For broader surveys of intellectual culture in Germany and the formation of
the Bildungsbürgertum, see the multivolume Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, ed.
Werner Conze et al. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985–1992); and Jürgen Kocka, ed., Bürger
und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987).
For more focus on the sense of lost spirituality during the Wilhelmine era, see the intro-
duction and part 1, “The Cult of Bildung,” from my book, The Double-Edged Sword: The
Cult of Bildung, Its Downfall and Reconstitution in Fin-de-Siècle Germany (Rudolf Steiner
and Max Weber) (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004); Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair; Fritz
Ringer, The Rise and Fall of the German Mandarins, 1890–1933 (Hanover, NH: Univer-
sity Press of New England, 1969); and the introductory chapters of Richard Noll, The
Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1994); for the interrelationship between science and spirituality in Germany, see Anne
Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
75. Specifically, and from a more practical perspective, there were fewer jobs for pastors
and priests as industrial capitalism and commercialization redirected cultural assets
elsewhere.
76. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, xi. Stern is referring generally to the antimodern-
ists that his case studies in the book analyze in detail.
77. See Anz, Literatur des Expressionismus, especially 18–23.
78. Widespread interest in Buddhism among the educated is quite evident and theologians
of the day felt compelled to respond to the Buddhist euphoria. Catholic and Protestant
theologians filled their professional journals and wrote books on the subject. During
the Kaiserreich two Protestant journals, Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen and Allgeme-
ine Missions-Zeitschrift, contained many articles on Indian culture and religions, as did
the Catholic journal, Stimmen aus Maria-Laach. Intellectuals also attempted to address
their work to a wider audience. Alfred Bertholet, for example, professor of theology,
responded to the request of the Christian Student Union of German Switzerland to
208 Notes
deliver an address on the subject, later published in Buddhismus und Christentum (Tübin-
gen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1902); the series, Biblische Zeitfragen, late on the scene, began in
1908 to present important biblical issues to a lay audience. Here, see Otto Wecker’s
Christus und Buddha (Münster: Verlag der Aschendorffschen Buchhandlung, 1908);
and Peter Sinthern, Catholic Jesuit, responded with his Buddhismus und buddhistische
Strömungen in der Gegenwart: Eine apologetische Studie (Münster: Verlag der Alphonsus-
Buchhandlung, 1906), less to Buddhism itself but rather to what he termed “multifari-
ous Buddhist currents in the West” (xi).
79. Christian Pesch, “Das Licht Asiens,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 31 (1886): 255.
80. Friedrich Fabri. Bedarf Deutschland der Colonien? Eine politisch-ökonomische Betrachtung
(Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Berthes, 1879). See Hans Fenske, Preussentum und Liberal-
ismus: Aufsätze zur preußischen und deutschen Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts
(Dettelbach: J. H. Röll, 2002).
81. See Marchand, German Orientalism, and her chapter “Orientalism in the Age of Impe-
rialism,” 333–86; and Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting.
82. Marchand, German Orientalism, 344.
83. See the recent works of Nina Berman, Mangold, Marchand, Pratt, Zantop, and others
that corroborate this assertion.
84. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 237.
85. At the death of Madame Blavatsky in 1891, Besant became president of the Theosophi-
cal Society even though there were numerous splinter groups. Besant proved much more
radical in her approach to God’s “secret doctrine.” She rejected Christianity outright and
eventually moved the Society’s headquarters to Madras, India. Once in India she became
deeply involved in the Indian nationalist movement. For more background, see Anne
Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); also Mark
Bevir, “Mothering India,” History Today 56.2 (2006): 19–25; and his “In Opposition
to the Raj: Annie Besant and the Dialectic of Empire,” History of Political Thought 19.1
(1998): 61–77.
86. Roger-Pol Droit, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, trans. David
Streight and Pamela Vohnson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003):
167. Droit’s work on the European image of Buddhism should be considered with cau-
tion because it primarily considers only one specific line of reasoning, that of canon
thinkers, without fleshing out the deeper complexities and variety of Europe’s broader
fascination with Buddhism.
87. Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (München: Bruck-
mann, 1922).
88. Ibid., 34.
89. Ibid., 35.
90. Most important here is the work by George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology:
Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1964); and Goodrick-
Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism; more biased is the work by Daniel Gasman. See his
Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (New York: Peter Lang, 1998) and The
Scientific Origins of National Socialism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004).
91. For an overview of these debates and a historiography of the Second Empire, see Mat-
thew Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2008), which provides an excellent synopsis of each of these disputes among historians;
also on the Historikerstreit and Sonderweg thesis, see the introductory chapter to Weh-
ling, Die Moderne als Sozialmythos.
92. Marchand, in German Orientalism, discusses what she also terms Deussen’s “Schopenhau-
erian Christianity,” but as previously mentioned, she emphasizes the racist undertones in
Notes 209
Deussen’s work. Like Chamberlain’s case, race is critical to an understanding of either of

these thinkers. Yet I will concentrate on other motivational factors in their constructed
India.
Chapter 1
1. Christian Hönes, “Die Reformbewegung des Brahmosomadsch in Indien als Schranke
des Missionswesens,” Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen 6.88 (1877): 4.
2. Ibid., 4. Here Hönes cites “Max Müller: Eine Missionsrede.” Müller’s text was originally
published as Eine Missionsrede in der Westminsterabtei am 3 December 1873 gehalten von
F. Max Müller: Mit einer einleitenden Predigt von Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (Strassburg:
Trübner, 1874): 52.
3. Calw is of course the birthplace of Hermann Hesse, son of a Protestant minister with
strong Pietist leanings that deeply influenced the famous Nobel Prize winner. Radi-
cal Pietist enclaves existed throughout the predominantly Catholic southwest Germany,
which probably also influenced Hönes and Paul Wurm. As we will explore in more detail
in Chapter 3, Pietism’s special emphasis on introspection for achieving salvation played
an influential role in how Germany’s “religious innovators” read India. See Hans Schnei-
der, Radical German Pietism, trans. Gerald T. MacDonald (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow,
2007), for a more detailed investigation.
4. Wurm, “Der Buddhismus,” Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift. Monatshefte für geschichtliche
und theoretische Missionskunde 7 (1880): 145. Wurm also published a full-length mono-
graph on Indian religion titled, Geschichte der indischen Religion im Umriss dargestellt
(Basel: Bahnmaier’s Verlag [C. Detloff ], 1874). Wurm taught at the Basler Mission,
which was founded in 1815 and heavily influenced by southwest German Pietism. For a
short history, see Paul Jenkins, Kurze Geschichte der Basler Mission (Basel: Basler Mission,
1989).
5. The study of Sanskrit, as well as discussions of the Vedas and Brahminism, preceded
Eugène Burnouf ’s text, but his work did influence Indological studies in a profound way
during the era. For background, see Marchand’s German Orientalism, especially 123–41.
6. For background on the history of Indian studies in France, see Roland Lardinois,
L’invention de l’Inde: Entre Ésotérisme et Science (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, 2007); also on Burnouf, see Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, L’archive des Origi-
nes: Sanskrit, Philologie, Anthropologie dans l’Allemagne du XIXe Siècle (Paris: Cerf, 2008),
especially165–69; on Europe’s discovery of Buddhism, see Philip Almond, The British
Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
7. An early example written in German for a more general reader is by the Young Hegelian,
Karl Koeppen, Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung (Berlin: Schneider, 1857).
8. The Lalita Vistara, which contains a biography of the Buddha, is a Buddhist text written
in a combination of Sanskrit and a vernacular. Composed by several different authors,
the text probably dates to the third century CE. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v.
“Lalitavistara,” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/328358/Lalitavistara.
9. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism
was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2005): 126; also Hans Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswi-
senschaft und Moderne (München: C. H. Beck, 2001).
10. See Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, especially 56–120 for more elaboration on the
political frustration felt by Protestant Liberals after 1848.
210 Notes
11. The sections on Leopold von Schroeder in this chapter and Chapter 4 are revised ver-
sions of an article that appeared in the German Studies Review as Perry Myers. “Leopold
von Schroeder’s Imagined India: Buddhist Spirituality and Christian Politics during the
Wilhelmine Era,” German Studies Review 33.2 (2009): 619–36. © 2003–2012 German
Studies Association, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the Johns Hopkins
University Press. I would like to thank the GSR and Johns Hopkins University Press for
permission to reprint this revised version of the essay.
12. Michael Baumgarten, “Der Protestantismus als politisches Prinzip im deutschen Reich,”
Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen 1.9 (1872): 18.
13. Theodor Schultze, Christus, der Weltversöhner, der Welterlöser, der Weltbesieger, der
Weltseligmacher,—und seine Kirche “die Eine,” “die Einige.” Eine Schlüssel zum klaren
Verständniß der ganzen Bibel und somit die Offenbarung wirklich—offenbar (Oldenberg:
Theodor Schulze, 1862): 7.
14. Rudolf Seydel, Die Religion und die Religionen (Leipzig: Verlag von F. G. Findel, 1872):
183.
15. Baumgarten, “Protestantismus als politisches Prinzip,” 50–51 (original set in quotation
marks and larger font).
16. A glance through the table of contents in the Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen from the
1870s and 1880s divulges many titles dealing with the era’s sense of spiritual anxiety.
Aside from numerous essays in response to Eduard von Hartmann’s “religion of pessi-
mism,” others contended with related topics such as nihilism (Stephan Gätschenberger,
“Nihilismus, Pessimismus und Weltschmerz”) or conflicting Weltanschauungen (A. H.
Braasch, “Die materialistische und idealistische Weltanschauung”).
17. The importance of von Schroeder’s work, for instance, is well attested in Ernst Win-
disch, Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie, 3 bd. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1917–21).
Various texts by von Schroeder receive mention in several academic debates, and Win-
disch describes von Schroeder’s contribution to research on the Akhyana-Hymnen in
significant detail. See Windisch, Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie, 410–12. In his auto-
biography, von Schroeder also mentions frequent contact with major Indologists of the
era such as Albrecht Weber, Otto von Böthlingk, and Berthold Delbrück. See his Leb-
enserinnerungen, ed. Felix v. Schroeder (Leipzig: Haessel, 1921): 84–85. Von Schroeder’s
self-proclaimed academic breakthrough came in 1878 at the Deutsche Philologensam-
mlung, where he delivered a paper on his work concerning the Maitrayani Samhita to
“a circle of the best orientalists,” which “came across as generally convincing and won
them over so completely, that since then the Maitrayani Samhita has been indubitably
acknowledged as an ancient Veda.” Von Schroeder, Lebenserinnerungen, 85.
18. See Valentina Stache-Rosen, ed., German Indologists: Biographies of Scholars in Indian
Studies Writing in German (New Delhi: Max Mueller Bhavan, 1991): 117–18, who points
out that the Russian government had issued an ultimatum in 1895 “that all lectures in
Dorpat and other Baltic universities be delivered in Russian.” Benedict Anderson, in
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 1991): 87, also indicates that the University of Dorpat was closed down in 1893
due to its continued use of German in the classroom.
19. Stefan Arvidsson’s Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, trans.
Sonia Wichmann (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Marchand’s
German Orientalism both have sections on von Schroeder that offer a more balanced and
erudite analysis of the German-Estonian Indologist. I will devote more attention to his
Arische Religion in Chapter 6.
Notes 211
20. Von Schroeder, “Einleitende Betrachtungen,” in Reden und Aufsätze vornehmlich über
Indiens Literatur und Kultur (Leipzig: H. Haessel Verlag, 1913): 1–9. This essay origi-
nally appeared in the Baltischer Monatsschrift in 1878.
21. Von Schroeder, Lebenserinnerungen, 84.
22. Ibid., 228.
23. Ibid.
24. The dating is unclear in the play, but Buddhism flourished in India approximately from
the sixth to fourth centuries BCE. Nor does von Schroeder cite any historical sources
for the play. During the Chola Dynasty (300 BCE–1279 CE) in the Tamil region of
southern India, Sundara Chola reigned during the tenth century CE. There is no indica-
tion that this was von Schroeder’s model. Interestingly the Cholas did resist Buddhist
influence and remained faithful to their Hindu religious traditions. See K. A. Sastri,
A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar (Madras: Oxford
25. Von Schroeder, König Sundara (Dorpat: Schnakenburg, 1887): 22.
26. Ibid., 7.
27. Von Schroeder, “Einleitende Betrachtungen,” 5.
28. Ibid., 1.
30. For a more detailed description of the “neue Ära” and German liberalism leading up to
the Reichsgründung, see Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, especially 85–127.
32. The Baltic Germans were quite well established culturally in the Russian Empire. There
is evidence in fact that von Schroeder had a positive disposition to the Russian tsars and
was greatly distressed by the murder of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. See von Schroeder’s
Lebenserinnerungen, 91 for his reaction to the murder. For a more detailed assessment of
the Baltic Germans during the era, see John A. Armstrong, “Mobilized Diaspora in Tsar-
ist Russia: The Case of the Baltic Germans,” in Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices,
ed. Jeremy R. Azrael (New York: Praeger, 1978): 63–104.
33. Von Schroeder, König Sundara, 8.
34. Ibid., 41.
35. Ananda was a real historical figure, who became an important disciple of the Buddha
and the Buddha’s personal attendant.
37. Ibid., 69, 72.
38. Burning at the stake is a Christian idiom, which von Schroeder here applies to India. To
my knowledge burning at the stake was never employed in India as a punitive measure.
I would like to thank the late Selva Raj for assisting me in clarifying this point about
Indian practices.
40. Ibid., 85.
41. As Blackbourn points out, it would not be correct to assume that Protestants sought to
publicly emancipate women, nor does von Schroeder’s depiction of Brijamwada indicate
this, yet many Protestants indeed alleged that female “feelings were . . . being abused
by the clergy in ways which seemed to violate the rules of bourgeois family life.” Black-
bourn, “Progress and Piety,” in his Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German
History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987): 150.
42. Blackbourn, Populists and Patricians, 150. Von Schroeder’s depiction of the girl, Brijam-
wada, as the courageous heroine in the final scene also raises issues about his view of
gender. Despite the role of Brijamwada in the play, I have yet to discover any indication
212 Notes
in von Schroeder’s work that might point toward an attempt to reconstruct female gen-
der definitions in less traditional ways.
44. Ibid., 119.
45. Pollock, “Deep Orientalism,” 81–82.
46. “Muscular Christianity” is a movement associated with Victorian England and Charles
Kingsley’s novels, in which attempts to reconstruct male gender identity under pressure
became manifest in combined images of physical strength, religious assertion, and socio-
cultural agency, and intricately manifest in British visions of empire. See Donald E. Hall,
ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1994). I would like to thank Katie Arens for pointing out this possible
link to a German version of “muscular Christianity.”
47. Seydel was born in Dresden and attended the Kreuzschule there. He later studied philol-
ogy under G. W. Nitzsch, and also theology and philosophy from 1852 to 1856 under
the Leipziger Professor of Philosophy, Christian H. Weisse, under whom he completed
his dissertation on Schopenhauer in 1856. Seydel was strongly influenced by the anti-
materialism of Fechner, K. Snell, and E. von Hartmann, and exhibited early on a free-
thinking attitude toward Christianity. He became a Freemason at age 17 and was an
early and avid advocate of the newly founded Protestantenverein. See Kurt Rudolf, Die
Religionsgeschichte an der Leipziger Universität und die Entwicklung der Religionswissen-
schaft. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und zum Problem der Religionswissenschaft
(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962): 79–86. To my knowledge, no secondary material
exists on Seydel. Marchand discusses Seydel’s comparative work in German Orientalism,
270–75, in which she focuses primarily on the important theological debates surround-
ing the claims by some, including Seydel, that Christianity had borrowed heavily from
Buddhism.
48. Seydel, Das Evangelium von Jesu in seinen Verhältnissen zu Buddha-Sage und Buddha-
Lehre mit fortlaufender Rücksicht auf andere Religionskreise (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel,
1882).
49. Seydel, Buddha und Christus (Breslau: Schottländer, 1884).
50. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (1837; Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986). After Hegel, who built on the work of his predecessor J. G.
Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774; Stuttgart:
Reclam, 1990), history became the dominant analytical paradigm for evaluating the
progress of civilizations and their cultures. For a critique of Hegel’s thought as he applied
it to India, see Ranajit Guha’s History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia
51. Wilhelm Emanuel von Ketteler, Freiheit, Autorität und Kirche: Erörterungen über die
großen Probleme der Gegenwart (Mainz: Franz Kirchheim, 1862). For further reference,
see Karl Brehmer, Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler (1811–1877): Arbeiterbischof und
Sozialethiker. Auf den Spuren einer zeitlosen Modernität (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner,
2009); and Martin O’Malley, Wilhelm Ketteler and the Birth of Modern Catholic Social
Thought: A Catholic Manifesto in Revolutionary 1848 (München: Utz, 2008).
52. Seydel, Katholicismus und Freimauererei: Ein Wort zur Entgegnung auf die vom Freiherrn
von Ketteler, Bishof von Mainz wider den Freimauererbund erhobenen Anklagen (Leipzig:
Hermann Luppe, 1862).
53. On Freemasonry, see Helmut Reinalter, Die Freimaurer (München: C. H. Beck,
2000); on Catholics and Freemasons, see Klaus Kottmann, Die Freimaurer und die
katholische Kirche: Vom geschichtlichen Überblick zur geltenden Rechtslage (Frankfurt:
Lang, 2009).
Notes 213
54. Seydel, Katholicismus und Freimauererei, 7.

55. Ibid., 17.
56. For a discussion of the tensions in German Freemasonry between moral universalism as
it derived from the Enlightenment and national particularism, which became especially
exacerbated between French and German Freemasons after 1871, see Stefan-Ludwig
Hoffmann, “Nationalism and the Quest for Moral Universalism: German Freemasonry,
1860–1914,” in The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the
1840s to the First World War, ed. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001): 259–84. Hoffmann shows how nationalism and moral
universalism became conflated among German Freemasons and were “inextricably inter-
twined until 1914” (284).
57. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 201.
58. A quick glance, however, at the table of contents of the Protestant-influenced journal,
Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen, reveals numerous essays concerning the development
of the new Prussian state and its religious underpinnings. Unsurprisingly, there are
also numerous articles that are clearly anti-Catholic and frequently attack the Order of
Jesuits.
59. Wilhelm Oncken, “Das deutsche Reich im Jahre 1872. Zeitgeschichtliche Skizzen,”
Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen 2.22 (1873): 61 (original emphasized with enlarged
font).
60. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 191. Hastings’s work makes an
excellent contribution to the debate over definitions of nation and nationhood, sparked
especially by Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1983); Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Hastings
disputes the claim that the nation and nationalism are phenomena that are exclusively
modern and emerged from the Enlightenment.
61. Lill, Kulturkampf, 11.
62. Weiße Revolutionär (white revolutionary) is the subtitle to Lothar Gall’s biography, Bis-
marck: Der weiße Revolutionär (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1980) and refers to what has been
commonly referred to as the “revolution from above,” which occurred during the process
of national consolidation after the 1866 war with Austria and leading up to the Franco-
Prussian War of 1870–71. See Gall’s chapter, “Die ‘Revolution von oben,’” in Bismarck,
373–455; and Blackbourn, History of Germany, especially 184–95.
63. Protestant Liberals foresaw what Langewiesche describes in his Liberalism in Germany
as a “de-churched (entkirchlichte) state as a guarantee of the freedom of the individual
to live a rational life: this liberal ideal raised learning to a central cultural value” and
moreover, a state that possesses “undivided administrative power” (180). Similary, as
Nipperdey points out, Bismarck also sought the modernization of the Prussian state and
thus both found a common enemy in the Catholic Church. For more detail, see Nip-
perdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, bd. 2, 359–64.
64. Seydel, Katholicismus und Freimauererei, 19.
65. Ibid., 21.
66. Ibid.
67. For the most comprehensive work on the link between Protestansim and politics in
Wilhelmine Germany, see Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik; also Friedrich
Wilhelm von Graf and Hans Martin Müller, eds., Der deutsche Protestantismus um
1900 (Gütersloh: Kaiser, Gütersloher Verlag, 1996).
214 Notes
68. Wurm, Geschichte der indischen Religion, iii. According to his own account, he did study
Sanskrit under the renowned Rudolf Roth, but after his calling to the Basler Mission his
teaching duties no longer allowed him to continue his studies.
69. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1835); Feuerbach,
Das Wesen des Christentums. For background, see George S. Williamson, The Longing for
Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
70. For background, see Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; and Kippenberg, Die
Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte; also for related contexts, Zimmerman, Anthropology
and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany; and Penny, Objects of Culture.
71. Seydel, Religion und die Religionen, viii.
72. Ibid., iv.
73. Both Kant and Herder wrote some comparative texts, as did Hegel at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. After the publication of The Sanscrit Language by Sir
William Jones in 1776, in which Jones noted a striking similarity between San-
skrit, Greek, and Latin, Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Weißheit und Sprache der Indier
(Heidelberg: Mohr & Zimmer, 1808) became the spark for many German thinkers
to explore the roots of Sanskrit in search of an Ursprache with potential links to
German. The actual title of Jones’s text is “The Third Anniversary Discourse on the
Hindus, delivered 2nd of February, 1786” in The Works of Sir William Jones, vol. 1
(London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799). I would like to thank Thomas Trautman
for clarifying this title.
74. Seydel, Religion und die Religionen, v.
75. The scholarly work on the emergence of historical criticism in the nineteenth century
is significant. One might begin with Williamson, Longing for Myth; also Otto Ger-
hard Oexle’s edited volume, Krise des Historismus—Krise der Wirklichkeit: Wissenschaft,
Kunst und Literatur, 1880–1932 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007); and
Michael Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1984); For more background on the emergence of religious-historical
approaches in nineteenth-century Germany, see Gerd Lüdemann and Martin Schröder,
eds., Die Religionsgeschichtliche Schule in Göttingen: Eine Dokumentation (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987).
76. For a more detailed analysis of how Protestants dealt with the science versus belief prob-
lem (Wissenschaft-Glaube), see Claudia Lepp, Protestantisch-liberaler Aufbruch in die
Moderne: Der deutsche Protestantenverein in der Zeit der Reichsgründung und des Kul-
turkampfes (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996), especially 189–219.
77. Seydel, Religion und die Religionen, v.
78. Ibid., 185.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid., 182–83.
81. Ibid., 170.
82. Ibid., 184.
83. Ibid., 1.
84. Ibid., 2.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., 3.
87. Ibid.
88. On the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, see Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War:
The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2003).
Notes 215
89. Seydel, Religion und die Religionen, 185.

90. The German title of Eduard Grimm’s address is “Die Lehre über Buddha und das
Dogma von Jesus Christus.” I was unable to ascertain the site and audience of the
address. I am citing the printed version in Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-fragen 6.90 (1877):
345–73. Grimm, like Seydel, was also a member of the Protestantenverein and the Allge-
meinen evangelisch-protestantischen Missionsverein. Though he never studied Sanskrit
formally, he gave popular lectures on the world’s diverse Weltanschauungen at the Kolo-
nialinstitut in Hamburg, where he taught theology from the winter semester of 1908–9
until 1919. This biographical information can be found at Biographisch-Bibliographisches
Kirchenlexikon, www.kirchenlexikon.de.
91. Grimm, “Lehre über Buddha,” 345.
92. Grimm gives credit for this anecdote to Friedrich Max Müller, Essays, bd. 1 (Leipzig:
Wilhelm Engelmann, 1869–79): 364.
93. Grimm, “Lehre über Buddha,” 346–47.
94. See Blackbourn, History of Germany, especially184–203; also Nipperdey, Deutsche
Geschichte, 1866–1918, bd. 2, 250–65.
95. Seydel, Religion und die Religionen, 165. It is important to note here that Seydel employs
the subjunctive II (hypothetical) tense, which suggests that this purported progression is
yet to be completed.
96. Marchand, in German Orientalism, corroborates this point in her assessment of late
nineteenth-century New Testament studies “in which so much inquiry . . . focused on
the origins of Christianity question” (269).
97. Seydel, Religion und die Religionen, 48–49.
98. Ibid., 49.
99. Ibid., 50.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., 57. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and His-
torical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). To summarize, a
transition narrative praises and glorifies the past in order to explicitly criticize the present
as decadent and corrupt.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid., 64. The expression “sein Leben lassen” literally means to leave life, to die.
105. The Buddha’s death is dated around 472 BCE, which seemed to make Christian influ-
ence on the Buddha’s life and teachings chronologically untenable. In many of the pri-
mary texts that I discuss in this book the authors explore the chronology question. Those
with more sympathetic views of Eastern religion embrace the accepted chronological
facts of religious history, while those less sympathetic either deny the historical timeline
altogether or reconstruct diffusion theories that reject categorically any Buddhist influ-
ence on Christianity. We will explore these arguments in greater detail in Chapter 4.
106. Seydel, Buddha und Christus, 18.
107. Ibid., 19.
108. Ibid.
109. Marchand, German Orientalism, 273. Specifically, Marchand states that “Seydel
argued . . . Christianity had absorbed universal and this-worldly, positive elements
from ‘European Aryan’ religions, endowing it with a less contradictory set of ethics and
a greater scope for individual freedom than Buddhism permitted.” While Marchand
acknowledges that these India experts were “loyal to some sort of cultural Protestantism”
(275), she does not pursue in this context just how entangled Seydel’s account of Bud-
dhism and Christianity was with his confessional perquisites for the German nation.
216 Notes
110. Seydel, Evangelium von Jesu, 116.

111. Ibid., 118.
112. Ibid., 295.
113. Ibid., 320.
115. Ibid. (italics in original).
116. Ibid., 326.
117. Ibid.
118. Ibid., 328.
119. Ibid., 325.
120. Ibid., 336–37 (italics in original).
121. Ibid., 328.
122. W. Hönig, “Die Bedeutung der religiösen Frage für unsere nationale Entwicklung,” Prot-
estantische Flugblätter 17.2 (1882): 11.
Chapter 2
1. Fridolin Piscalar, “Indisches,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 1 (1871): 466. Piscalar was
a Jesuit, who departed for India on September 12, 1867, according to the Annalen
der Verbreitung des Glaubens zum Vortheil der Missionen (1868): 198. In Alfons Väth’s
Die deutschen Jesuiten in Indien: Geschichte der Mission von Bombay-Puna (1854–1920)
(Regensburg: Verlag Jos. Kösel & Friedrich Pustet, 1920): 242 cites Piscalar’s date of
birth as 1841, but no date of death is given. Piscalar departed India in 1870.
2. Piscalar, “Indisches,” 466.
3. On Catholic missions in India, see Christopher Becker, History of the Catholic Missions
in Northeast India, 1890–1915 (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1980); and Kenneth Ballhatchet,
Caste, Class, and Catholicism in India, 1789–1914 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1998).
4. While a statistical justification of German Catholic Jesuit presence in India goes far
beyond my purposes here, notable is the predominance of German Jesuits in Franz
Xavier College in Poona, near today’s Mumbai. Another example is the important posi-
tion of the German Section of the Society of Jesus beginning around the middle of the
nineteenth century, which according to Alfons Väth, completely took over responsibility
for the Bombay-Pune mission during the height of the Goa schism in 1858. See Väth,
deutschen Jesuiten in Indien, 66. The spelling of the College name in these German essays
varies. I will use “Xavier” except in original citations.
5. Anon., “Das Colleg des hl. Franz Xaver in Bombay und seine Bedeutung für die indische
Mission,” Die katholischen Missionen. Illustrirte Monatschrift 23 (1895): 7. The authors
of many of the essays in this journal, which began publication in 1873, and Stimmen aus
Maria-Laach are unidentified. In some cases the journals present translated essays writ-
ten by non-German Catholics. I have avoided using these texts and have concentrated
on sources written explicitly by German authors or at least approved by the journal’s
German editors.
6. Väth, deutschen Jesuiten in Indien, 97. At the time, these writers used the name Bombay
rather than the currently used name of Mumbai. I will do the same to maintain consis-
tency. The same holds true for the formerly used Madras, now called Chennai.
7. As early as 1848, following the failed German revolution, Catholics began to respond to
these threats to their cultural authority. Exemplary is the establishment of Catholic mis-
sionary crusades in Germany. See Gross’s chapter, “Revolution, the Missionary Crusade,
and Catholic Revival,” in War against Catholicism, 29–73.
Notes 217
8. Pesch, “Christlicher Staat und moderne Staatstheorien,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 16

(1879): 428.
9. Pesch was a Catholic Jesuit, who was forced to complete his Catholic education in Hol-
land during the 1870s due to the anti-Jesuit laws. After returning briefly to Germany,
Pesch was appointed as chair of a Catholic dogmatics group in Ditton-Hall, England
in 1884, where he remained until 1895, before taking a similar position in Holland.
Pesch published extensively on Catholic dogmatics and also Church history. His years
in England are particularly insightful here because during his sojourn there he published
a series of essays in Stimmen aus Maria-Laach on Buddhism, which will receive more
attention in Chapter 4. See the online Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon,
http://www.bautz.de/, for more biographical detail.
10. Pesch, “Christlicher Staat und moderne Staatstheorien,” 429.
11. The Sunderbans is a heavily forested area in the eastern Indian state of Bengal, which
includes the Ganges delta, whose waters deliver into the Bay of Bengal.
12. Edmund Delplace, “Missionärs-Leben im Ganges-Delta,” Die katholischen Missionen 2
(1874): 233. Delplace explains in the same paragraph that Schitans are Anglicans and
Dubits are Baptists.
13. Ibid., 233.
14. Ibid.
15. Väth, deutschen Jesuiten in Indien, 183.
16. Delplace, “Missionärs-Leben,” 263.
18. See Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) for an excellent study of caste during the Raj;
also Ballhatchet, Caste, Class, and Catholicism in India.
19. Anon., “Indische Kasten und ihre Bedeutung für die Mission,” Die katholischen Mis-
sionen 4 (1876): 8.
20. Ibid., 10.
21. On Lord Thomas Macaulay’s school reforms, see Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R.
Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2006), especially 81–83.
22. Anon., “Indische Kasten,” 11.
23. Ibid., 12.
24. Anon., “Colombo, die Hauptstadt Ceylons,” Die katholischen Missionen 18 (1890): 214.
25. Anon., “Indische Kasten,” 12.
27. Fridolin Piscalar, “Indisches II,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 2 (1872): 243.
28. Piscalar, “Indisches,” 468.
29. Ibid., 471.
30. Ibid., 470.
31. Piscalar, “Indisches II,” 253.
32. Anon., “Das apostolische Vikariat Bombay (Puna),” Die katholischen Missionen 10
(1882): 163.
33. Ibid., 209.
34. Anon., “Nachrichten aus den Missionen: Vorderindien,” Die katholischen Missionen 27
(1898–99): 208.
35. Ibid., 208. Here the “Nachrichten” are citing statistics from the Bombay Catholic Exam-
iner (1899), page 143.
36. Ibid., 210.
218 Notes
37. Gerhard Schneemann was born in Wesel, in today’s North-Rhein Westphalia, to a

wealthy Catholic family. He studied law, then theology in Bonn, and later joined the
Society of Jesus in 1851. In 1856, Schneemann took his vows as a priest in Paderborn
and then after 1860 served as professor of Church history in Bonn, Aachen, and later at
the Benedictine abbey Maria-Laach. During the early 1870s, like so many other Jesuits,
Schneemann fled to Holland where he spent the remainder of his life until his death in
1885. Schneemann was one of the founders of Stimmen aus Maria-Laach. Based on his
many essays in Stimmen aus Maria-Laach and other venues, Schneemann was known as
an ardent defender of papal infallibility. For more information, see the Deutsche Biog-
raphie, http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz78788.html; and in volume 30 (1886) of
Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, 167–89, there is a longer obituary of Schneemann.
38. Schneemann, “Unsere Erfolge im Culturkampfe,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 19 (1880):
316.
39. Ibid., 317.
40. Anon., “Die apostolischen Vikariate von Vorderindien,” Die katholischen Missionen 8
(1880): 7.
42. Anon., “Die buddhistische Ruinenstadt Anuradhapura,” Die katholischen Missionen 7
(1879): 188.
43. Anon., “apostolischen Vikariate von Vorderindien,” 7.
44. Ibid., 10.
45. Joseph Dahlmann, Indische Fahrten, 2 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1927). Dahl-
mann was undoubtedly a progeny of the Kulturkampf. Still in his teens during the
confessionally turbulent 1870s, Dahlmann was forced to leave his native Germany for
Feldkirch, Austria, to pursue his intellectual interests and complete his Catholic educa-
tion. Dahlmann eventually became a well-known Sanskritist, producing important texts
on the Maharabata. For a more elaborate analysis of Dahlmann’s impressions of India and
his Catholic mission, see my essay, “Making Invisible Empires: Joseph Dahlmann’s India
and His Catholic Vision during the Wilhelminian Era,” in Mapping Channels between
Ganges and Rhein: German-Indian Cross-Cultural Relations, ed. Jörg Esleben, Christina
Kraenzle, and Sukanya Kulkarni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008): 160–
87; also Rabault-Feuerhahn, “Wer spricht im Text? Literarischer und wissenschaftlicher
Reisebericht Bonsels’ Indienfahrt und Dahlmanns Indische Fahrten,” Cahiers D’Études
Germaniques 38 (2000): 201–14.
46. Dahlmann, Indische Fahrten, vol. 2, 198.
47. Delplace, “Missionärs-Leben,” 264.
48. Neither was Dahlmann for that matter. In 1905 he sought and was granted an audi-
ence with the Pope, in which he argued for the establishment of a Catholic University
in Tokyo, which was granted. Dahlmann then help found Tokyo’s Sophia University in
1913, where he became Professor of Sanskrit until his death in 1930. The university
website provides a brief history of Dahlmann’s efforts. See “The Society of Jesus and
the Founding of Sophia University,” http://www.sophia.ac.jp/eng/aboutsophia/history/
spirit/spirit_02.
49. Just in the vicarage of Bombay-Poona from 1848 to 1919, Väth lists a total of 366 Ger-
man Jesuits that served there. See the “Anhang,” which begins on page 241 in Väth’s
deutschen Jesuiten in Indien.
50. See Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996): 97–100, for a succinct description of the cultural prerogatives of the
French prime minister, Jules Ferry, who coined the term “mission civilisatrice” (civilizing
mission) in the late 1880s. On the civilizing mission in the German colonies, see Nina
Notes 219
Berman’s Impossible Missions? German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in

Africa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). One of the most abusive cases of
the link between colonial and religious prerogatives is of course the Belgian Congo, in
which millions of Congolese died during the Belgian obsession with rubber. See Adam
Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
51. Franz Xavier (1502–52) was an important Catholic missionary in Asia. Born in Spain,
Xavier devoted his professional life in service to the Catholic missions, a significant por-
tion of which he spent in India. His renown among Catholic Jesuits in India receives
frequent mention in their writings. The well-known Franz Xavier College in Poona is
named in his honor. See Gordon Johnson, C. A. Bayly, and John F. Richards, eds., The
New Cambridge History of India, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1987) for a more thorough account of the early Catholic missions in India under the
Portuguese.
52. Adolph Müller, “Eine Pilgerfahrt nach Goa zum Grabe des hl. Franz Xaver,” Die
katholischen Missionen 19 (1891): 103.
53. Vasco da Gama was a Portuguese explorer during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, who discovered the sea route to the East Indies. Da Gama is the subject of
many works and background information on his life and travels is abundant. See espe-
cially Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
55. Anon., “apostolischen Vikariate von Vorderindien,” 8.
56. Th. Hauser, “Bombay und seine Umgegend,” Die katholischen Missionen 5 (1877): 133.
57. Ibid., 133.
58. Väth., deutschen Jesuiten in Indien, 30.
59. Anon., “Colombo, die Hauptstadt Ceylons,” Die katholischen Missionen,181.
60. Ibid., 181.
61. Ibid., 182.
62. Georg Weniger, “Der katholische Soldat in der britischen Armee Indiens,” Stimmen aus
Maria-Laach 28 (1885): 372.
63. Ibid., 370.
64. Otto Pfülf (1856–1946) was born and grew up in Speyer. After gymnasium (secondary
school) he began to study Church history in Würzburg in 1875, but he left for Holland
after one year in the midst of the Kulturkampf. Once there he joined the Society of Jesus.
He completed his studies in Holland and later England. He became a lecturer of Church
history from 1886 to 1888 at the Jesuit College in Ditton, England. From 1889–1913,
Pfülf served as editor of the important Catholic journals Stimmen aus Maria-Laach
and Stimmen der Zeit, in which he published over 300 essays. Only in 1913 did Pfülf
return to Mainz, Germany, later Münster, and then eventually moved to Rome, where
he played an important role in the training of priests at the Vatican. Toward the end of
his life he returned again to Germany, where he survived World War II in a hospice for
priests in Neuburg/Donau. He died there in 1946.
65. Pfülf, “Das britische Kolonialreich und seine Bedeutung für die Gegenwart,” Stimmen
aus Maria-Laach 39 (1890): 281–82.
66. Ibid., 287.
67. Ibid., 288–89.
68. Ibid., 299.
69. Hauser, “Bombay und seine Umgegend,” 81.
220 Notes
70. After the 1857 mutiny in India the British were obviously extremely sensitive to any
potential insubordination regardless of its source. See Christopher Hibbert, The Great
Mutiny: India, 1857 (New York: Viking, 1978).
71. Hauser, “Bombay und seine Umgegend,” 83.
72. Anon., “Arumugan, der standhafte indische Prinz,” in Beilage für die Jugend (supple-
ment), Die katholischen Missionen. Illustrirte Monatschrift. 12 (1884): n.p.
73. Ibid., n.p.
74. As Portuguese power gradually declined in the seventeenth century in India, and in turn
its support for the supply of missionaries there, the Holy See in Rome began to send
missionaries to India through the Congregation of Propaganda, which worked inde-
pendently from the Portuguese crown. The Holy See also began to appoint its own
apostolic vicars in formerly Portuguese jurisdictions in western districts, but also in other
parts of India. This eventually generated conflicts between these appointed vicars and
Portuguese clergy over Church authority that came to a head in the nineteenth century,
especially in Bombay, which in 1794 was divided into two rival Catholic jurisdictions—
Padroado and Propaganda. This “Indo-Portuguese Schism,” the “double-jurisdiction,”
was finally resolved only in 1886. See the online Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www
.newadvent.org/cathen/06602a.htm; also see Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in
India, 1757–1808 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). A broader but
highly important work on this topic is Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in
Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (London: Longman, 1993).
76. Educational mandates played a prominent role in the Kulturkampf. For an assessment
of education during the era, see Nipperdey’s chapter, “Das Bildungswesen,” in Deutsche
Geschichte, 1866–1918, bd. 1, 531–601; and Christa Berg, ed., Handbuch der deutschen
Bildungsgeschichte, bd. 4, 1870–1918, Von der Reichsgründung bis zum Ende des Ersten
Weltkriegs (München: C. H. Beck, 1991).
77. Anon., “apostolische Vikariat Bombay,” 166.
78. Ibid., 209.
79. Ibid., 211.
80. Ibid., 210.
81. Ibid., 211.
82. On education in India, see Judith E. Walsh, Growing Up in British India: Indian Autobi-
ographers on Childhood and Education under the Raj (New York: Homes & Meier, 1983);
and Clive Whitehead, Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education
Service, 1858–1983 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).
83. Pfülf, “britische Kolonialreich,” 291. The taxes to which Pfülf refers were imposed on
nonstate schools. The intention was to steer native Indians to British education (indoc-
trination) and thus generate more loyal Indian subjects.
84. Anon., “Das Colleg des hl. Franz Xaver in Bombay und seine Bedeutung für die indische
Mission,” Die katholischen Missionen 23 (1895): 7.
85. Ibid., 8.
86. A discussion of Catholic and Protestant accounts of Darwin’s scientific model is far
beyond the scope of my work here, but virtually all Catholics and most Protestants,
except the most reform minded, would have considered any Darwinian influence in
their worldviews an abomination. For background to the scientific debates of the era, see
especially Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert.
Notes 221
Chapter 3
1. Paul Dahlke, Buddhismus als Weltanschauung (Breslau: Walter Markgraf, 1912): 196.
2. Schultze, Das Dhammapada: Eine Verssammlung, welche zu den kanonischen Büchern der
Buddhisten gehört (Leipzig: Otto Schulze, 1885): xi.
3. The Dhammapada is a collection of Pali verses that contain the essential teachings of the
Buddha. Schultze translated from F. Max Müller’s English version into German.
4. Weber’s famous phrase comes from his well-known 1917 speech, “Wissenschaft als
Beruf,” later published in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes
Winckelmann. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Siebeck], 1988): 594. Weber’s term “Enzau-
berung” is usually translated as disenchantment, but this term fails to adequately call
attention to the “sacral” loss in the modern subject that Weber’s work underscores.
5. Franz Hartmann, The Life of Philippus Theophrastus, Bombast of Hohenheim: Known by
the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of His Teachings Concerning Cosmology, Anthro-
pology, Pneumatology, Magic and Sorcery, Medicine, Alchemy and Astrology, Philosophy and
Theosophy (London: George Redway, 1887): x.
6. This rarely translated into social action, but there were exceptions. The most perva-
sive manifestation of social action was the theosophical movement in India, especially
under the leadership of Besant, who actively promoted and sought social reform for
India under British rule and played a role in the free India movement. On Besant, see
Mark Bevir; also Anne Taylor’s biography of Besant; and Gauri Viswanathan’s chapter on
Besant and theosophy in Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
7. J. Websky, “Der Protestantismus als das Christentum der Innerlichkeit und der Frei-
heit,” Protestantischer Flugblätter 42.5 (1907): 42 (larger font in original).
8. Kaspar von Greyerz, Religion und Kultur: Europa (1500–1800) (Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, 2000): 334.
9. Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, bd. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr,
1994): 623.
10. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Frankfurt:
Zweitausendeins, 2010): 683–88. For a more detailed elaboration of the Bildungs-
bürgertum’s identity construct, see the introductory chapters to my The Double-Edged
Sword; M. Rainer Lepsius, “Das Bildungsbürgertum als ständische Vergesellschaftung,”
in Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Teil 3: Lebensführung und ständische Vergesell-
schaftung, M. Rainer Lepsius (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992): 9–18; also Max Scheler, Die
Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Bern: Francke, 1960).
11. See Weber, “protestantische Ethik,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I. The
debate over Weber’s thought-provoking thesis has been immense and long lasting, and
reaches far beyond the scope of my work here. One might begin with Greyerz, Religion
und Kultur, especially 331–41.
12. Greyerz, Religion und Kultur, especially 331–41.
13. For a short history of Buddhism in Germany, see Hellmuth Hecker, Buddhismus in
Deutschland: Eine Chronik (Hamburg: Deutsche Buddhistische Union, 1973). Much
work on German theosophy and other fringe movements is still to be done. Corinna
Treitel’s The Science of the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Bal-
timore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) has initiated this work, which
devotes a chapter to theosophy in Germany; also Maria Carlson’s “No Religion Higher
Than Truth”: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922 (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), which has an excellent outline of theosophical
doctrine in chapter 5. There has been significant scholarly work on theosophy outside
222 Notes
of Germany, especially Blavatsky, Olcott, and Besant. These works focus on England,
the United States, and India, but less on continental Europe. See Bruce F. Campbell,
Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1980); Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1994); also in the British context, but highly rel-
evant for a deeper understanding of these European religious and cultural movements,
see Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Mod-
ern (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004); further, see Peter Staudenmaier’s
“Between Occultism and Fascism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race and Nation
in Germany and Italy, 1900–1945” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2010) and his vari-
ous essays on anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner.
14. See McGetchin’s Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism, especially 120–40.
15. The work of Ferdinand Tönnies and later Max Weber are two important examples of
the era’s consternation over the definition of community and the modern human subject
as modern cultural forms—empirical science, rationalization of the economic market-
place, and the decreasing importance of traditional religious institutions—threatened to
unravel traditional forms of community consensus.
16. The Bildungsbürger can be defined as an educated—intellectually, morally, and
spiritually—citizen in nineteenth-century Germany. This “self-formation” was derived
from the Enlightenment ideal of self-realization and linked as well with the Pietist con-
cepts of introspection and duty in the community. See the introductory chapters to my
The Double-Edged Sword.
17. Examples of Buddhist journals during the era are Der Buddhist, Buddhistische Welt, and
Buddhistische Warte, all edited by Karl Seidenstücker during the first two decades of the
twentieth century, and Neue buddhistische Hefte (1918), edited by Dahlke. Theosophist
journals came on the scene earlier. Examples from the late 1880s and after are Wilhelm
Hübbe-Schleiden’s Sphinx, which was later published as Metaphysische Rundschau, and
then Neue metaphysische Rundschau, among others. Another important publisher of eso-
teric material was Eugen Diederichs Verlag. See Justus H. Ulbricht and Meike G. Wer-
ner, Romantik, Revolution und Reform: Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag im Epochenkontext
1900–1949 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1999).
18. The German-Danish war in 1864 had ended Schultze’s career temporarily when the
Prussian government annexed the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. As a civil servant
of the Holstein government, Schultze had pledged allegiance to the Danish King. After
the annexation he requested from King Christian IX to be released from his obligation,
which was granted. This move, however, so angered the Prussian government that Schul-
tze was dismissed from service. He was allowed to reenter government service two years
later and remained there until his retirement. See Arthur Pfungst, Ein deutscher Buddhist
(Oberpräsidialrat Theodor Schultze) (Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns Verlag, 1901): 9–10.
19. Franz Hartmann expresses his good wishes to Hübbe-Schleiden’s initiative in “Kurzer
Abriss der Geschichte der Theosophischen Gesellschaft” in Lotusblüthen 1 (1893): 85,
but later founded his own theosophical society in Leipzig.
20. This stands in glaring contrast to Besant’s theosophical movement. Besant was a strong
proponent of social reform and after moving to Chennai (Madras), India, she partici-
pated in the first Indian National Congress, which sought to free the country from Brit-
ish rule.
21. Pfungst, Ein deutscher Buddhist, 5. For further background on Schultze, see Hecker,
Lebensbilder deutscher Buddhisten, vol. 1 (Konstanz: Universität Konstanz, Sozialwissen-
schaftliche Fakultät, Fachgruppe Soziologie, 1996): 216–18.
22. Pfungst, Ein deutscher Buddhist, 15–16.
Notes 223
23. Hecker, Lebensbilder, vol. 1, 216.

24. Ibid., 17.
25. Schultze, Christus, der Weltversöhner, 41.
26. Ibid., 35.
27. Schultze, Das Christentum Christi und die Religion der Liebe. Ein Votum in Sachen der
Zukunftsreligion. (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Friedrich, 1891): 4–5. This volume was
later combined with the companion work, Das rollende Rad and published in 1893 as
Vedanta und Buddhismus als Fermente für eine künftige Regeneration des religiösen Bewußt-
seins innerhalb des europäischen Kulturkreises.
28. Ibid., 77.
29. The literary work of Gerhart Hauptmann, especially his play The Weavers (1892), and other
naturalist artists of the era frequently depict the hardships of demographic and economic
transformation that were part and parcel to Germany’s industrialization. For historical
background, see Wolfgang Mommsen, Der autoritäre nationalstaat: Verfassung, Gesellschaft
und Kultur im deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt: Fischer,1990), especially 234–56.
30. Pfungst, Ein deutscher Buddhist, 31.
31. Schultze, Christentum Christi, 74.
32. Ibid., 75.
33. Ibid., 77.
34. Schultze could not read original texts in Pali or Sanskrit. His German translation is based
on F. Max Müller’s English version. Karl Eugen Neumann’s translation of the Dhamma-
pada into German from the original Pali had yet to appear.
35. Schultze, Dhammapada, vi.
36. Ibid., vi.
37. Weber, “protestantische Ethik,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I. Weber’s
term has traditionally been translated as “iron cage.” For a discussion and criticism of
this term, see Dirk Käsler, “Ein ‘stahlhartes Gehäsue’ ist kein ‘Iron Cage,’” http://www.
literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=16239.
38. Neumann, Das Wahrheitspfad, Dhammapadam: Ein buddhistisches Denkmal (München:
Piper, 1921): 114. Neumann grew up in Vienna, studied at a commercial college in
Leipzig, and later worked at a bank and studied Buddhist texts at night. He later stud-
ied comparative religion, Chinese, Indology, archaeology, medicine, and astronomy
in Berlin and eventually completed his doctorate in Halle in 1890. He spent a year in
India in 1894 and later worked at the Oriental Institute in Vienna, where he began
his translations of Pali texts. His translations, especially Die Reden Gotamo Buddhos
(Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1956), which was the first translation of many original Pali
texts into a European language (German), were held in high regard by such renowned
authors as Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Stefan Zweig, but his books never
sold well. He died in financial difficulty on his fiftieth birthday in 1915. See Stache-
Rosen, 157–58.
39. Neumann, Wahrheitpfad, Dhammapadam, 115.
40. Ibid., 121.
41. Schultze, Dhammapada, viii.
42. Neumann, Die innere Verwandtschaft buddhistischer und christlicher Lehren: Zwei bud-
dhistische Sutta und ein Traktat Meister Eckharts (Leipzig: Spohr, 1891): 9. See Horst
Thomé’s introductory essay, “Modernität und Bewußtseinswandel in der Zeit des Natu-
ralismus und des Fin de siècle,” in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16.
Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed., York-Gothart Mix, bd. 7, Naturalismus, Fin de siècle,
Expressionismus, 1890–1918 (München: Hanser, 2000): 15–27.
43. Ibid., viii.
224 Notes
44. Schultze, Der Buddhismus als Religion der Zukunft: Das rollende Rad des Lebens und der
feste Ruhestand (Frankfurt: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, 1901).
45. Schultze, rollende Rad, 1. To be fair, Schultze does not focus on the Semitic heritage or
Jewish influence on Christianity as other thinkers did.
46. Particularly relevant for our context is Marchand’s German Orientalism, especially chap-
ter 7, “The Passions and the Races.”
47. Dahlke, Die Bedeutung des Buddhismus für unsere Zeit (Breslau: Walter Markgraf,
1912): 4.
48. Schultze, rollende Rad, 12.
49. Subhara Bhikschu (formerly Friedrich Zimmermann), Buddhistischer Katechismus
zur Einführung in die Lehre des Buddha Gotamo (Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke & Sohn,
1902): v.
50. Ibid., 39.
53. Ibid., 63.
54. Subjective idealism during the early nineteenth century derived from Enlightenment
thought and can be simply defined as the idea that reality is primarily dependent on the
human mind (cognition). For a more in-depth elaboration, see Herbert Schnädelbach,
Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
56. Neumann, innere Verwandtschaft, 3.
57. Ibid., 8.
58. Ibid., 6.
60. Neither Pfungst nor Hecker mention Schultze’s participation in any Buddhist
organisation.
61. Schultze “Buddhismus und Christentum, was sie gemein haben, und was sie unters-
cheidet (zwei öffentliche Vorträge von Dr. L. von Schroeder). Kritische Bemerkungen
von Th. Schultze,” in Die Gesellschaft: Monatschrift für Literatur, Kunst und Sozialpolitik
Jg. 10 (February 1894): 230. Von Schroeder’s work from the 1890s and thereafter will
receive our attention in the following chapters.
62. Neumann, innere Verwandtschaft, 9.
63. Stache-Rosen, German Indologists, 154–55. Also see Hecker’s Lebensbilder, vol. 2, 13–36
for more background on Dahlke.
64. Dahlke, Bedeutung des Buddhismus, 3.
65. Ibid., 19.
66. Medical technological advances were also significant during the era. By the late nine-
teenth century numerous vaccines had already been developed by Louis Pasteur and
others, and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen began to put his x-ray machine to medical use in
1895.
68. Ibid., 4.
69. Dahlke, Buddhismus als Weltanschauung, 6.
70. I have avoided translating the German “Ich” into the Freudian term “ego.” There is no
indication that Dahlke borrowed from Freud in his thinking, though any intellectual
of the era would have certainly been familiar with Freud’s work. Using the term ego
here would evoke other implications about Dahlke’s thought that are not necessarily
warranted.
Notes 225

75. Ibid., 149.
76. Ibid., 179.
77. Ibid., 179–80.
78. Ibid., 180.
79. Ibid., 181.
80. See Bowler, Darwinism.
82. Ibid., 196.
84. Ibid., 10. The term Kamma is the Pali term, which in modern English usage is usually
known as “Karma” (Sanskrit), which can best be defined as the law of moral causation.
86. Ibid., 56.
87. Ibid., 11.
88. Ibid., 12.
89. Kant, Was ist Aufklärung? (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985): 55.
90. Ibid., 12.
91. Ibid., 13.
92. Ibid., 14.
93. Franz Hartmann, “Theosophie,” Lotusblüthen 1 (1893): 5. The author(s) of many arti-
cles in this journal are unnamed, though most likely Hartmann penned many of the
texts or, at least as editor, influenced any text that he did not compose.
94. Ibid., 5.
95. The biographical information on Franz Hartmann is from Walter Einbeck, “Zum
Gedächtnis an Dr. Franz Hartmann (1838–1912),” Theosophische Kultur. Sonderheft 2.
(Leipzig: Theosophischer Kultur, 1925).
96. Ibid., 3.
97. Olcott was president of the theosophical society from its founding in 1875 until his
death in 1907. For background on Olcott, see Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist:
The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington: University of Indian Press, 1996).
98. Franz Hartmann, “Theosophie und Okkultismus,” in Einbeck “Zum Gedächtnis an
Franz Hartmann (1838–1912).” Hartmann’s essay originally appeared in Neue Lotus-
blüten 3 (1910).
99. In Franz Hartmann’s medical field, for instance, by the late nineteenth century dramatic
scientific advances had been made in understanding the eye and various eye problems
such as glaucoma and cataracts.
100. Franz Hartmann, “Die weisse und schwarze Magie oder: Das Gesetz des Geistes in der
Natur,” Lotusblüthen 1 (1893): 51. Hartmann composed this text originally in English
as “Magic, White, and Black.”
101. Ibid., 52.
102. Ibid., 56.
103. Franz Hartmann, “Licht vom Osten: Eine Untersuchung der Grundlage, des Wesens
und der Geheimnisse der echten Freimaurerei,” Lotusblüthen 1 (1893): 22.
104. Ibid., 16.
105. Ibid., 20.
226 Notes
106. See Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; and Kippenberg’s Discovering Religious
History in the Modern Age, trans. Barbara Harshay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2002) on the definition of world religions.
107. Hartmann, “Licht vom Osten,” 17.
108. Ibid., 16.
109. Ibid., 48. Hartmann uses the masculine singular form here, which I have maintained in
the translation.
110. Ibid.
111. Hartmann, Life of Philippus, 184.
112. Hartmann, “Theosophie,” 6.
113. Ibid., 7–8.
114. Hartmann, “Die geistig Toten,” Lotusblüthen 1 (1894):127–28.
116. Ibid., 19.
117. Ibid., 19–20.
118. Hartmann, “Die Weisheit der Brahminen,” Lotusblüthen 1 (1894): 314.
120. Hartmann, “Theosophie,” 11–12.
121. Richard Rorty, “Religion as Conversation-Stopper,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (Lon-
don: Penguin, 1999): 168–74.
Chapter 4
1. Von Schroeder, “Buddhismus und Christentum, was sie gemein haben, und was sie
unterscheidet,” in Reden und Aufsätze vornehmlich über Indiens Literatur und Kultur
(Leipzig: H. Haessel Verlag, 1913): 85.
2. Pfungst, Ein deutscher Buddhist, 2.
3. Edwin Arnold (1832–1904), born and raised in England, attended King’s College Lon-
don, and later Oxford University. At 24 he became the principal of Deccan College in
Poona, India, where he began to learn Pali and Sanskrit. He later returned to England
where he worked as a journalist for the Daily Telegraph. During this time he composed
The Light of Asia or the Great Renunciation: Being the Life and Teaching of Guatama,
Prince of India and Founder of Buddhism (London: K. Paul, 1879). The only biography
of Arnold to my knowledge is Brooks Wright, Interpreter of Buddhism to the West (New
York: Bookman Associates, 1957).
4. Pesch, “Das Licht Asiens,” 254. Pesch cites a German title to the poem but does not
indicate whether this is his own translation. He also refers to the thirty-first printing of
the poem in 1885 but also does not indicate whether this is a German translation or the
English version.
5. Ibid., 253.
6. Ibid., 254.
7. Ibid., 255.
8. Ibid., 256.
9. Ibid., 267.
10. Pesch, “Die Buddha-Legende und die Evangelien,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 31 (1886):
388.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 390.
Notes 227
13. Ibid., 391. Pesch repeats this same argument in “Buddha und Christus,” Stimmen aus
Maria-Laach 31 (1886): 517.
14. Pesch, “Buddha-Legende und die Evangelien,” 392.
15. Ibid., 393.
16. Ibid., 399.
17. Pesch, “Buddha und Christus,” 505.
18. Ibid., 506.
19. Dahlmann, Buddha: Ein Culturbild des Ostens (Berlin: Dames, 1898).
20. Dahlmann, Die Thomas-Legende und die ältesten historischen Beziehungen des Christen-
tums zum fernen Osten im Lichte der indischen Altertumskunde (Freiburg: Herdersche
Verlagshandlung, 1912). This subject has long been debated and discussed in academic
and lay circles. For background, one could start with Stephen Neill, A History of Chris-
tian Missions, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1986).
21. Dahlmann, Thomas-Legende, 93.
22. Ibid., 97.
23. Ibid., 93–94.
24. Ibid., 173. Gandhara (Gundara, Eng.) is an ancient archaeological site located in today’s
Pakistan-Indian border region, near the city of Peshawar, Pakistan.
25. Pesch, “Die sittigenden Erfolge des Buddhismus,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 33 (1987):
119.
26. Dahlmann, Buddha, 119.
27. Ibid., 160.
28. Pesch, “sittigenden Erfolge des Buddhismus,” 122–23.
29. Ibid., 128.
30. Ibid., 18.
31. Dahlmann, Buddha, 167. For more detail on Dahlmann’s travel observations, see my
essay, “Making Invisible Empires: Joseph Dahlmann’s India and His Catholic Vision
during the Wilhelminian Era,” in Mapping Channels between Ganges and Rhein: Ger-
man-Indian Cross-Cultural Relations, ed. Jorg Esleben, Christina Kraenzle, and Sukanya
Kulkarni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008).
32. Ibid., 28.
33. Ibid., 31.
34. Ibid., 117–18.
35. Pesch, “Buddha-Legende und die Evangelien,” 387.
36. Pesche, “sittigenden Erfolge des Buddhismus,” 132. Pesch cites two essays that he leaves
unnamed, nor does he cite the authors, who refer to the Schlegels’s studies that explored
Indian religious traditions in search of an Urreligion that might be linked to German.
The essays appeared in the Magazin für die Literatur des In-und Auslandes 8: 657; and the
Allgemeine Zeitung 181.B (1886).
37. Dahlmann, Indische Fahrten, vol. 1, 293.
38. Sinthern, Buddhismus und buddhistische Strömungen, 1.
39. Ibid., 2.
40. Ibid., 11.
43. I make this point based not on any statistical evidence about theosophical conversions,
but rather on the prolific production (pamphlets, journals, speeches) of various German
theosophical leaders beginning in the 1880s. Important theosophical acolytes such as
Hübbe-Schleiden, Franz Hartmann, and Steiner (theosophist and later founder of the
Anthroposophical Society), for instance, understood well the potential of innovative
228 Notes
emerging print mediums and generated volumes of theosophical “propaganda,” which

dwarfs the number of Buddhist publications in Germany by comparison. Steiner alone
wrote multiple volumes of essays and tirelessly delivered talks and speeches, which now
represent in print over 300 volumes.
44. Sinthern, Buddhismus und buddhistische Strömungen, 74.
47. Ibid., 75.
48. Ibid., 126.
49. Pesch, “sittigenden Erfolge des Buddhismus,” 132.
50. Ibid., 519.
51. Sinthern, Buddhismus und buddhistische Strömungen, 128 (italics in original).
52. Ibid., 129.
53. The European powers met in November 1884 in Berlin and essentially carved up Africa,
with Germany finally receiving its share of the remaining colonial spoils. See Woodruff
Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1978). Older but still useful works on Bismarck and colonialism are Gordon Craig, Ger-
many: 1866–1945 (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), especially 116–24; Wehler,
Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1969); also Carol Aisha
Blackshire-Belay, “German Imperialism in Africa: The Distorted Images of Cameroon,
Namibia, Tanzania, and Togo,” Journal of Black Studies 23.2 (December 1992): 235–46.
For a general history of European colonialism in Africa, see Thomas Pakenham, The
Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912 (New York: Random House, 1991).
54. See Stache-Rosen, German Indologists, 124–25.
55. Hermann Oldenberg, “Über Sanskritforschung,” Deutsche Rundschau 47 (1886): 393.
There are numerous biographies on William Jones, but one of the best analyses in the
context of my work here is Trautman’s chapter on Jones in Aryans and British India.
56. Oldenberg, “Über Sanskritforschung,” 386.
57. Ibid., 388–89.
58. Ibid., 389.
59. Ibid., 395.
60. Ibid., 401. Roth and Böthlingk worked on the dictionary over a span of three decades
(1852–1875). The work was financed and printed by the Petersburg Academy of Sci-
ence and thus is often referred to as the Petersbürger Wörterbuch. See Heinrich von
Stietencron’s essay, “Attraktion und Ausstrahlung: Das Wirken Rudolf von Roths,” in
Indienforschung im Zeitenwandel: Analysen und Dokumente zur Indologie und Religions-
wissenschaft in Tübingen, ed. Heidrun Brückner, Klaus Butzenberger, Angelika Malinar,
and Gabriele Zeller (Tübingen: Attempto Verlag, 2003): 77–89.
62. Oldenberg, “Die Religion des Veda und der Buddhismus: Eine religionsgeschichtliche
Studie,” Deutsche Rundschau 85 (1895): 204.
63. Many books exist on Alexander’s reign and his expeditions, but one might start with A. B.
Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1988).
65. This provocative text was originally published in 1894 in French as La Vie inconnu de
Jésus-Christ.
66. The text did not stand the test of academic scrutiny for long and was soon exposed as
a sham. Many Indologists, however, responded frequently to Notovich’s claims in their
Notes 229
less linguistic/technical works, usually in the context of introductory remarks about the
state of Indological studies.
67. Oldenberg, “Religion des Veda,” 194.
68. Ibid., 197.
69. Ibid., 200.
70. Ibid., 206–7.
71. See Nietzsche’s 1874 essay, “The Uses and Disadvantages of History,” in Thoughts Out of
Season. Part II. (London: George Allen & Unwin, n.d.).
73. See the older, but still useful E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study
of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers of the
Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1935); also see Marchand’s excellent study, Down from Olympus: Archaeology
and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1996).
74. Tuska Benes, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-
Century Germany (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2008): 161.
75. See Marchand’s German Orientalism, especially 53–101; also, with more emphasis on
philology, see Benes’s In Babel’s Shadow, especially 159–96.
76. Many prominent German thinkers and political figures during the late eighteenth cen-
tury, none other than Goethe and Frederick the Great, viewed France as that culture to
emulate. Yet after the bloody terror of the French Revolution and the later demise of
Napoleon, attitudes toward French culture began to shift and German thinkers became
more aligned throughout the nineteenth century with the nationalistic sentiments of
Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “Reden an die deutsche Nation.” For general background to the
beginnings of nationalism in Germany, see Blackbourn, History of Germany; J. Breuilly,
ed., The State of Germany: The National Idea in the Making, Unmaking and Remaking of a
Modern Nation-State (London: Longman, 1992); and M. Levinger, Enlightened Nation-
alism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
77. Oldenberg, “Religion des Veda,” 211–12.
78. Ibid., 212.
79. Ibid., 213.
80. Ibid., 214.
81. Ibid., 217.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid., 218.
84. Ibid., 221.
85. Ibid., 223.
86. Ibid., 224.
87. Paul Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der
Religionen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1894–1917).
88. Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte, II.1 (1911; Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1921): v.
89. Deussen attended the elite gymnasium (secondary school) Schulpforta near Naumburg
with Nietzsche. See Deussen’s autobiography, Mein Leben for more detail.
90. Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte, II.1, 1.
91. Ibid., v.
92. Ibid., 3.
93. Ibid., 3–4.
94. Ibid., 14.
95. Ibid., 217.
230 Notes
96. Ibid., 246.

97. Ibid., 315.
98. Ibid., 317.
99. Ibid., 315.
100. Ibid., 317.
101. Ibid., 390.
102. Ibid., 391–94.
104. Ibid., 225.
107. Oldenberg did however publicly reject Seydel’s claims about Buddhist influence on
Christianity in a review of Ernst Windisch’s book, Mara und Buddha. The review is
titled “Der Satan des Buddhismus” and appeared in the Deutsche Rundschau 88 (1896):
473–75.
108. Oldenberg, “Der Buddhismus und die christliche Liebe,” in Aus dem alten Indien: Drei
Aufsätze über den Buddhismus, altindische Dichtung und Geschichtschreibung (Berlin: Ver-
lag von Gebrüder Paetel, 1910): 1–22.
109. Ibid., 2.
110. Richard Pischel, Leben und Lehre des Buddha (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1906).
111. Oldenberg, “Buddhismus und die christliche Liebe,” 5. Importantly, Maitri (Sanskrit)
or Metta (Pali), according to The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, comp.
Stephan Schuhmacher and Gert Woerner (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), s.v. “Maitri,”
means literally “kindness, benevolence; one of the principal Buddhist virtues.” The Ency-
clopedia further elaborates that in practice this is “the feeling of kindness . . . directed
first toward persons who are close to one another and then gradually extended toward
persons and other beings who are indifferent and ill-disposed toward oneself.”
112. Oldenberg, “Buddhismus und die christliche Liebe,” 5.
113. Richard Garbe, Indien und das Christentum: Eine Untersuchung der religionsgeschichtli-
chen Zusammenhänge (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1914): vi. This text is a compilation of
numerous essays, as Garbe points out, that had been previously published in scholarly
journals, many in the Deutsche Rundschau.
114. On Christian apologetics, see Marchand’s German Orientalism, especially 267–79.
115. Ibid., vi.
117. Ibid., 8.
118. Ibid., 11.
119. See Heiko Overman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (New York: Doubleday,
1992), especially 50–81.
120. It is no coincidence of course that during the decades leading up to World War I the
Protestant League asserted itself as a “national” organization and such movements as the
“Los Von Rom” movement became established. See Smith’s German nationalism and
Religious Conflict for a thorough examination of the entanglement of denominational
issues and German nationalism.
121. Oldenberg, “Buddhismus und die christliche Liebe,” 14–15.
122. Ibid., 15.
123. Ibid., 15–16.
124. Ibid., 16.
Notes 231
125. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, especially 63–87, in which he argues that in industrial
societies the “nation” becomes the means through which a society maintains and oversees
its social infrastructure.
127. Ibid., 21–22.
128. Von Schroeder, “Indiens geistige Bedeutung für Europa,” in Reden und Aufsätze, 167.
129. Von Schroeder, “Buddhismus und Christentum,” 86.
130. Ibid., 85.
131. Ibid., 91.
132. Ibid.
133. Ibid., 92.
134. Ibid., 100.
135. See McLeod, Secularization in Western Europe, 81, for his discussion of what he terms the
“blending of religious and the patriotic” in Germany during the era.
137. Ibid., 103–4.
138. Ibid., 104.
139. Von Schroeder claims to have struggled with his religious convictions until experiencing
a reconversion to his Christian roots during his late thirties. This would place the event
around 1890 and just prior to the publication of his essay “Buddhismus und Christen-
tum.” In his autobiography he references a 1912 speech at the Jahresversammlung der
christlichen deutschen Studenten titled “Rufen Gottes,” in which he depicts his reconver-
sion experience as a “true inner reversal” (Lebenserinnerungen 229). This speech was pub-
lished a few years later in pamphlet form by the Furche-Verlag as “Das Rufen Gottes,” in
1917. Von Schroeder inserts it as a chapter in his Lebenserinnerungen, 228–40.
141. Ibid.
142. Ibid., 121.
143. Ibid., 118.
144. Ibid., 122.
145. Ibid., 127.
Chapter 5
1. D. Christian Gottlieb, “Der indobritische Opiumhandel und seine Wirkungen,” Allge-
meine Missions-Zeitschrift. Monatshefte für geschichtliche und theoretische Missionskunde 4
(1877): 527.
2. Christlieb was educated at the Tübinger Stift and was heavily influenced by Würtem-
berg Pietism. After a stint in England as pastor of the deutsche Gemeinde in London
(Islington) from 1858 to 1865, Christlieb later became a professor of practical theology
in Bonn in 1868, where he remained until his death. For more information, see the
Deutsche Biographie, http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz8315.html.
3. In this chapter I will focus primarily on Hübbe-Schleiden. I have treated Ernst Haeck-
el’s vision of India elsewhere in “Monistic Visions and Colonial Consciousness: Ernst
Haeckel’s Indische Reisebriefe,” Seminar 44.2 (May 2008): 190–209.
4. Numerous studies exist on the British-German relationship during the era. One might
begin with Paul Kennedy’s The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism: 1860–1914 (Lon-
don: George Allen & Unwin, 1980).
232 Notes
5. The Brahmo Samaj was a religious/social reform movement in nineteenth-century India.

For background, see Frans L. Damen, Crisis and Religious Renewal in the Brahmo Samaj
(1860–1884): A Documentary Study of the Emergence of the “New Dispensation” under
Keshab Chandra Sen (Leuven, Belgium: Department Oriëntalistiek, Katholieke Univer-
siteit Leuven, 1983); also, the second half of Dorothy Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins:
Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2002).
6. Hönes, “Reformbewegung des Brahmosomadsch,” 6.
7. Ibid., 7–8.
8. Ibid., 13.
9. Ibid., 9.
10. Ibid., 15.
11. Ibid., 18.
12. Ibid., 19.
13. Ibid.
14. A positive view of England’s material successes is common, especially among colonial
supporters, but there were other voices in Germany. For instance, in a short essay, “Indi-
ens Bankerott,” from Das Ausland 52 (1878): 1027, the unnamed author presents a more
gloomy economic outlook for the Raj: “The truth is that under British rule Indian soci-
ety as a whole has been impoverished in alarming ways and the poor situation continues
to worsen.”
16. Ibid., 23.
17. For the actual text of the speech, see Keshab Chandra Sen, Keshub Chunder Sen in Eng-
land: Diary, Sermons, Addresses, and Epistles (Calcutta: Writer’s Workshop, 1980).
18. Also important here is Partha Chatterjee’s brief account of Sen in The Nation and Its
Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993). Chatterjee writes of Sen’s view of Christianity during his trip to India: “He
seemed to suggest that the ideals of reason and rational religion that may have been suit-
able for Europe were not so for India” (40).
19. Damen, Crisis and Religious Renewal in the Brahmo Samaj, 91.
21. W. Germann, “Der Brahma Samadsch,” Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift. Monatshefte für
geschichtliche und theoretische Missionskunde 2 (1875): 146. Germann does not cite the
original source of the speech, only the discussion of it from Ch. Miss. Int., 341–50.
22. Christlieb, “indobritische Opiumhandel,” 466 (italics represent enlarged font in
original).
23. Hübbe-Schleiden was a well-known colonial propagator during the era. See his Ethi-
opien: Studien über West-Afrika (Hamburg: L. Friederichsen, 1879), which recounts his
two-year stay in West Africa from 1875 to 1877. Here Hübbe-Schleiden exhibits blatant
colonialist discourse based on his more racially charged views about the absence of Aryan
roots in Africa. The reader confronts frequent statements in the text such as, “This world
awaits the refining breed of a foreign master’s hand” (279); also see his Deutsche Colo-
nisation: Eine Replik auf das Referat des Herrn Dr. Friedrich Kapp über Colonisation und
Auswanderung (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1881); and Üeberseeische Politik: Eine cultur-
wissenschaftliche Studie mit Zahlenbildern (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1881). For assess-
ments of Hübbe-Schleiden’s role in German colonialism, see Wehler, Bismarck und der
Imperialismus, 121 and 144–47; and Klaus J. Bade, Friedrich Fabri und der Imperialismus
in der Bismarckzeit: Revolution, Depression, Expansion (Freiburg im Breisgau: Atlantis
Verlag, 1975): 14.
Notes 233
24. Hübbe-Schleiden, Das Dasein, als Lust, Leid und Liebe: Die alt-indische Weltanschauung
in neuzeitlichen Darstellung. Ein Beitrag zum Darwinismus (Braunschweig: Schwetchke
& Sohn, 1891): 32.
25. Ibid., 18. See Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Schriften zur
Sprache (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1973): 36, for a more elaborate depiction of this concept.
26. Hübbe-Schleiden, Dasein, als Lust, Leid und Liebe, 91. For Ernst Haeckel’s version, see
my essay, “Monistic Visions and Colonial Consciousness.”
27. Ibid., 17.
28. Hübbe-Schleiden, Indien und die Indier (Hamburg: L. Friederichsen, 1898): 31–32.
29. Ibid., 25.
30. Ibid., 265.
31. The phrase “Jewel in the Crown” was coined during the British Rule in India under
Queen Victoria (1819–1901), who added “Empress of India” to her title in 1876. See
Antoinette M. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in
Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
32. Such racial undertones became more pronounced in the work of Chamberlain and later
von Schroeder, whose work we will explore more thoroughly in the following chapter.
33. Von Schroeder, Arische Religion, 2 vols. (Leipzig: H. Haessel Verlag, 1914): 183.
34. Hübbe-Schleiden, Indien und die Indier, 10.
35. Ibid., 32.
36. Ibid., 131.
37. In Philosophie Zoologique (1809), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argued that organisms adapt to
their environment by developing characteristics that promote their survival or progress
and that these acquired characteristics are passed on to their offspring (transformism).
In Darwin’s model, adaptation is not the mechanism for evolution, but rather certain
natural traits of an organism provide a better chance of survival and thus are passed on.
Change or evolution is thus not the point of contention here, rather only the mecha-
nism. For a concise explanation, see Richard Firenze, “Lamarck vs. Darwin: Dueling
Theories,” Reports of the National Center for Science Education 17.4 (July–August 1997):
9–11, also available at http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/lessons/lam.dar.pdf.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 137.
41. Ibid., 138.
42. Ibid., 139.
43. Ibid., 27.
44. Ibid., 78.
45. Ibid., 80. Beginning on the prior page, Hübbe-Schleiden explains that crime is not a
problematic issue for the British.
46. Ibid.
47. Richard Garbe, Indische Reiseskizzen (Berlin: Gebrüder Pätel, 1889): 82–83.
48. The degree of support for the imperial policies and colonialist agenda of the Second
Reich has been vigorously debated. For an overview, see Mommsen’s chapter, “The
Causes and Objectives of German Imperialism before 1914,” in Imperial Germany,
1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1998): 75–100.
50. The Raj was of course showing clear fault lines by the 1890s as the Indian indepen-
dence movement had gained significant steam. The Indian National Congress had been
234 Notes
established in 1885 and Gandhi’s return to India from South Africa was less than two
decades away.
52. Garbe, Indische Reiseskizzen, 27.
53. Ibid., 49.
54. Ibid. In other passages of Garbe’s text (59) he found no difficulty in lambasting the
brutal despotism of the Moghuls and their suppression of Hinduism. Briefly, Hegel’s
master-slave dialectic, which he explains in his Phänomonologie des Geistes (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1986): 145–55, suggests that when two self-consciousnesses mirror one
another a conflict results and one must win, leading to an unsatisfactory resolution
because mastery, in Hegel’s model of self-consciousness, produces an asymmetrical rela-
tionship through mirroring the other and therefore becomes self-defeating—that is, the
enslaved will eventually defeat the master. For a much more thorough explanation of the
master-slave dialectic, see Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G. W. F.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), especially
443–55.
55. Hübbe-Schleiden, Indien und die Indier, 232–37.
56. Garbe, Indische Reiseskizzen, 125.
58. Ibid., 226.
59. Ibid., 125, 129.
60. Ibid., 265.
61. Ibid., 2.
62. Hübbe-Schleiden, Dasein, als Lust, Leid und Liebe, viii.
63. Ibid., 11.
64. Russell Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998): 40.
65. On Stanley, see Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost; on the Herero struggle against the
Germans, see Horst Drechsler, “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and
Nama against German Imperialism (1884–1915), trans. Bernd Zöllner (London: Zed,
1980); on Carl Peters, see Arne Perras, Carl Peters and German Imperialism, 1856–1918:
A Political Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004).
Chapter 6
2. Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005).
3. See Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Das Kaiserreich Transnational:
Deutschland in der Welt (1871–1914) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004);
and Conrad’s more recent, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (München:
C. H. Beck, 2006) for a more detailed analysis of just how “globalized” the Kaiserreich
had become.
4. Chamberlain, Grundlagen, 33 (italics in original). For Chamberlain’s biography, see
Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamber-
lain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); also Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann’s
Houston Stewart Chamberlain—Zur textlichen Konstruktion einer Weltanschauung: Eine
sprach-, diskurs-und ideologiegeschichtliche Analyse (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008).
5. Anz, Literatur des Expressionismus, 54.
Notes 235
6. Von Schroeder, Arische Religion, 1–2.

7. Ibid., 3.
8. Ibid., 9–10.
9. Chamberlain, Arische Weltanschauung, 21.
10. See Marchand’s chapter, “The Passions and the Races,” in German Orientalism.
12. For instance, Goodricke-Clark, The Occult Roots of Nazism.
13. Marchand also uses “Schopenhauerian Christianity” in reference to Deussen. See her
German Orientalism, 300–311.
14. Deussen has attracted some scholarly attention (Bagchi, Marchand).
16. Three of Deussen’s major works receive attention in Chamberlain’s brief chapter and are
often cited by other Indologists during the era: Die Elemente der Metaphysik (Leipzig:
Brockhaus, 1877); Das System des Vedanta nach den Brahma-Sutras des Cankara über Die-
selben als ein Compendium der Dogmatik des Brahmanismus vom Standpunkte des Cankara
aus (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1883); Sechzig Upanishad’s des Veda aus dem Sanskrit über-
setzt und mit Einleitungen und Anmerkungen versehen (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1897).
17. Chamberlain, Arische Weltanschauung, 21. Mimamsa, according to the Encyclopedia Bri-
tannica, means “reflection” or “critical investigation.” For more basic background, see
Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Mimasa,” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/
topic/383181/Mimamsa.
18. Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte, I.1, 8 (1894; Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1922).
20. According to The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, comp. Stephan Schuh-
macher and Gert Woerner (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), s.v. “Vedanta,” the term Vedanta
means literally “end of the Vedas, as contained in the Upanishads.” For more detailed
analysis of the Vedanta, see Arvind Sharma, The Philosophy of Religion and Vedanta: A
Comparative Study in Relgion and Reason (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1995); and Hans Torwesten, Vedanta: Heart of Hinduism, trans. John Phillips
(New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985).
21. Deussen, Sechzig Upanishad’s, x.
22. Ibid., xii.
23. Shankara (788–820 CE) was an Indian philosopher who developed the philosophical
system, Advaita Vedanta. The term advaita means nondual. For background on Shan-
kara, see Natalia Isayeva, Shankara and Indian Philosophy (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1993); and George Cronk, On Shankara (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth,
2003).
24. Deussen, System des Vedanta,18.
25. Ibid., 21.
26. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995). For more back-
ground on Kant’s Critique, see Jill Vance Buroker, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: An
Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
27. Deussen, System des Vedanta, 48.
28. A wealth of literature exists on Schopenhauer, but one might begin with Michael Tanner,
Schopenhauer (New York: Routledge, 1999).
29. Deussen, System des Vedanta, 57.
31. Ibid., 428.
32. Ibid., 429.
236 Notes
33. For an excellent work on the role of Kantian philosophy during the later half of the
nineteenth century, see Klaus Christian Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German
Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1991).
35. Ibid., 459 (italics in original). The translation of noli me tangere is “do not touch me.” In
other words, transcendental consciousness as Deussen describe it here is inaccessible.
36. T. K. Seung, Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2007): 17.
38. Deussen, Sechzig Upanishad’s, vii.
40. Ibid., 459.
41. The reference here of course is to A. O. Lovejoy’s well-known book titled The Great
Chain of Being.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 489.
45. Ibid., 494.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 508.
48. Ibid., 495.
49. Ibid., 547.
50. The reference here of course is to Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, a benchmark text in
theosophy.
52. Ibid., 549.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 550.
55. See Weber’s “protestantische Ethik,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I. See
Wolfgang Hardtwig, Geschichtskultur und Wissenschaft (München: Deutsche Taschenbu-
chVerlag, 1990). Though he does not discuss Weber specifically in this context, Hardtwig
does offer a relevant description for my discussion of what he terms the “Sakralisierung
von Politik und Ökonomie,” 126–33.
57. Ibid., 554.
58. Ibid., 558.
59. Ibid., 562.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 563.
62. Ibid., 571.
63. Ibid.
64. Deussen, Die Philosophie der Bibel (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1913): ix. This text is vol. II.2 of
Allgemeine Geschichte.
65. Ibid., v.
66. Ibid., 4–5.
67. Von Schroeder, Arische Religion, v.
68. Ibid., 6.
69. Ibid., 9.
Notes 237
70. Ibid., 8–9. Aridsson argues in Aryan Idols (162) that von Schroeder is less anti-Jewish
than either Chamberlain or Wagner, yet I would suggest that this is more a question of
degree rather than substance.
71. Von Schroeder, Arische Religion, 24. Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) was a prominent
Liberal theologian in Germany.
72. Moral can be more closely associated with individual behavior, at least in the sense that
von Schroeder employs the term, while Sitten are more explicitly linked with social
conventions.
74. Ibid., 32.
75. Ibid., 35.
76. Ibid., 36.
78. Ibid., 122.
79. Ibid., 124. Von Schroeder’s expression here refers undeniably to Nietzche’s polemical
work published in two volumes (1878–80), Menschliches, Allzumenschliches.
80. Von Schroeder, Arische Religion, 130.
81. Ibid., 131–32.
82. Arvidsson, Aryan Idols, 164.
83. Ibid., 163.
85. Ibid., 164.
86. Ibid., 169.
87. Ibid., 178.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., 179.
90. Ibid., 189.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid., 191.
93. Ibid., 192.
94. Ibid., 198–99.
95. Ibid., 205.
96. Ibid., 206.
98. Ibid., 214.
99. Ibid., 215.
100. Von Schroeder, Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Ein Abriß seines Lebens (München: J. F.
Lehmanns Verlag, 1918): 90.
101. Ibid.
102. Ibid., 91.
103. Ibid., 93.
104. Chamberlain, British-born but German by circumstance and conviction, is a fascinating
intellectual of the era and has received significant attention among scholars. See Arvids-
son’s Aryan Idols, especially153–56; also Marchand’s German Orientalism, especially
311–21.
105. Marchand in German Orientalism points out that 512 of the 531 pages in the first vol-
ume of Chamberlain’s Foundations deal with “events that predated the Resurrection”
(311), yet there is virtually no reference to the Vedas or any other aspect of Indian tradi-
tion that predated the Christian era.
238 Notes
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid., 13.
109. Ibid., 15.
111. Ibid., 25.
112. Ibid., 24.
113. Ibid., 27.
114. Ibid., 28.
115. Ibid., 28, 31.
116. Ibid., 36.
117. Ibid., 38.
118. Ibid., 41.
119. Ibid., 42.
120. Ibid.
121. Ibid., 43.
122. Ibid., 47.
123. Ibid., 48.
124. Ibid., 50.
125. Ibid.
126. Ibid., 54.
127. Ibid., 50.
128. Ibid., 65, 62.
129. Ibid., 65–66.
130. Ibid., 76.
131. Ibid., 80.
132. Ibid., 85.
133. Ibid. See Nietzsche’s essay, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” in
which he laments the preeminence of history for determining human knowledge.
Epilogue
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 85–86.
4. Ibid., 88.
5. Ibid., 89.
6. Ibid.
7. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, 17
8. Ibid., 40.
9. The poem’s title is “Deutschlands Beruf,” in Heroldsrufe: ältere und neuere Zeitgedichte
(Stuttgart: Cotta, 1871). Geibel’s familiar original reads, “Und es mag am deutschen
Wesen / Einmal noch die Welt genesen.”
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Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
Africa, 3, 6, 72, 125–26, 167, 228n53, Bagchi, Kaushik

232n23 “Orientalism without Colonialism?,” 8
afterlife, 181 Baumgarten, Michael, 27–28, 31
ahistoricity, Indian, 128–29 Bazain, 70, 73–74
Alexander the Great, 129 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 197
Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift, 149, 152, Benes, Tuska, 131
207n78 In Babel’s Shadow, 9
American theosophical society, 105 Bengal Social Science Association, 153
Ames, Eric, 6 Berger, Peter, 14
Anglican Church, 71–72 Berlin Conference (1884), 166, 228n53
anthroposophy, 14, 85, 206n62, 222n13, Berlin-Frohnau Buddhist center, 97
227n43 Berman, Nina, 6
anti-Catholicism, 11–13, 27, 36–39, 41–42, Berman, Russell, 167
53, 59, 62–64, 73, 78, 88, 120, 141, Enlightenment or Empire, 200
213n58, 213n63, 216n7 Bertholet, Alfred, 207n78
anti-Protestantism, 56–58, 60–62, 64, 72, Besant, Annie, 19, 206n62, 208n85, 221n6,
76, 123–24 222n20
anti-Semitism, 92–93, 171 Bhagavad Gita, 6
See also racism Bhikschu, Subhara
Anz, Thomas, 14, 170 Buddhistischer Katechismus, 93–94
Apollonian-Dionysian debate, 135, 188 Bible, 5, 12, 30, 89, 99, 151
Aristotle, 136, 137 Gospels, 116, 137
Arnold, Edwin New Testament, 36, 47, 48, 116, 132,
The Light of Asia, 17, 114–19, 121 173–74, 177–78, 214n96, 215n96
Arumugan, Indian prince, 74, 76 Old Testament, 128–29, 173
Arvidsson, Stefan Bildungsbürger, defined, 222n16
Aryan Idols, 9, 187, 236n70 Bismarck, Otto von, 5, 11–12, 27, 32, 38,
Aryanism, 2, 8–9, 20–21, 32, 45, 48, 53, 53, 56, 169, 197, 204n43, 213n62,
105, 128–29, 142, 146, 204n34, 213n63
232n23 assassination attempt on, 12
radical, 171, 176, 181, 184–200 fall from power, 125
theosophy and, 157, 159, 162–63, 166 Blackbourn, David, 12, 14, 34, 211n41
asceticism (self-control), 91–96, 97, 101, Blavatsky, Madam, 165, 197, 206n62,
103, 108 208n85
atheism, 124 Isis Unveiled, 105
252 Index
body-soul relationship, 179, 181–84 Protestant sympathizers and, 25–51

body-spirit integration, 100, 102, 160 Schopenhauer and, 183–84
Böhtlingk, Otto, 128, 228n60 Buddhist art, 117, 119–21
Bombay-Poona area, 56, 60–62, 75 Bühler, Georg, 28
Bopp, Franz, 1, 45 Bülow Bloc, 13, 205n55
Bourdieu, Pierre, 2–4, 6, 10, 16, 82, Burnouf, Eugène, 209n5
202n10, 202n15, 203n16, 203n24 Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme
Brahmentum, 161 indien, 26
Brahminism
Catholics and, 58–61, 119–20 Calvinism, 83, 88, 108
elite thinkers and, 141, 158–61, 163, 186 caste system, 32–33, 59–60, 74, 130, 151,
Oldenberg on, 129 161–67, 197
“original” Christianity and, 164 Catholicism, 5, 11–13, 15–17, 31, 34, 50,
Protestants and, 26, 30–31, 33–34, 39, 53–79, 145
44, 46, 143–44 anti-Buddhism and, 114–18, 121–24,
Schopenhauer and, 183–84 195
Brahmin priests, 26, 31, 34, 46, 119–20, British Raj and, 71–78
120, 143, 145, 150, 195, 197 Buddhist alms and, 141
Brahmo Samaj, 149–53, 231n5 church vs. state and, 37–38
British colonialism, 3, 19, 35, 126, 142, comparative religion and, 40–41, 48
173–74, 212n46, 220n70, 221n6, education and, 12, 75–78
233n31 fringe religions and, 16–17, 105
Catholics and, 58–59, 61–62, 65, 67, hierarchies and, 46, 65
71–78 Indian caste system and, 161
education and, 58–59, 75–77, 162–63 Indian conversion stories and, 57–58,
German competition with, 146, 166–67, 74–76
232n14 India mission of, 54–62, 119, 124–25
Protestants and, 46, 149–67 Indian vicarages map, 68
British culture, 131–33, 138, 164, 179, Portugal and, 67–71
204n34, 209n6 Protestants vs., 11–13, 26, 37–39, 121
Brockhaus, Hermann, 28 Prussian laws limiting, 11–12
brotherly love, 139, 141, 178 solidarity of, 62–64
Buddha, Guatamo, 26–27, 30, 35–36, universal mission of, 13, 17, 51, 54, 56,
47–49, 113, 115–17, 119, 121, 123, 62–69, 76, 121–25, 200
109, 129–33, 141, 143–44, 195–96, See also anti-Catholicism
215n105 Catholic Missions, The, 55
Buddhism, 7–8, 14, 16–17, 25, 141, Catholic Zentrumspartei, 12
207n78 Ceylon, 64, 97
Catholic detractors and, 113–25 Chadwick, Owen, 14
Chamberlain and, 195 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 46
Christianity compared with, 39, 44–50, Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 1–2, 8–9,
113–16, 126, 129, 139–46 28, 53, 169–73, 176, 178, 184, 189–
European discovery of, 26–27 200, 237n104
fringe religions and, 14, 17, 78, 81–82, Arische Weltanschauung, 1, 171–72, 185,
84–100, 139, 171, 174, 195, 200 191–93, 196, 199, 235n17
Greek civilization and, 132–39 Deussen’s influence on, 21, 178, 185,
priestly authority vs., 150 191–96
Protestant detractors and, 48–49, 125–46 The Foundations of the Nineteenth Cen-
Protestant shift in attitude toward, 125– tury, 19–20, 169, 186, 192, 237n105
26, 113, 185–86, 188 von Schroeder’s biography of, 190–91
Index 253
Chatterjee, Partha, 232n18 Christian apologetics and, 125

China, 45, 64, 172, 173, 202n7 Darwinism and, 86
Chomskyian linguistics, 3, 203n16 Freemasonry vs. Catholicism and, 37–38
Christian apologetics, 17, 111, 125, 133, fringe religions and, 82, 84, 86, 92–97,
139, 142–46, 172, 175, 200 102–3, 106, 108–10
Christianity Greeks and, 137
Aryan, 142, 171, 181, 184–91, 199 intellectual elite and, 161
Buddhism compared with, 9, 17–18, 37, Protestants and, 26–27
39–41, 44–50, 96, 121, 124, 129–33 radical prescriptive history and, 169–98
Catholics defend, vs. Buddhism, 114–22 comparative religion
German Buddhists and, 87–90, 92–93, Catholics and, 113–25
98–100, 102 colonial mind-set and, 125–26
Germanocentric, 184, 190–91 global links and, 169
India-Greek link as precursor to, 135, 137 Oldenberg and, 127–33, 138–42
“muscular,” 212n46 Schultze and, 90
Schopenhauerian, 21, 172–84, 193–95, Seydel and, 39–50
209n92 von Schroeder and, 170, 173–78
Semitic influence on, 92–93 See also historicism; spirituality; and
universal mandate and, 121 specific individuals and religions
von Schroeder’s about-faces on Buddhism Conference of Berlin (1884), 18
and, 29–30, 113
Confucianism, 172
See also Bible; Catholicism; Protestantism;
Congo, 167, 219n50
Protestant Reformation; and specific
Cowan, Robert
individuals and works
The Indo-German Identification, 8
Christianization of India, 25, 150–53
Christian Philosopher King, 199
Dahlke, Paul, 16, 82, 86, 91, 93, 97–103,
Christlieb, D. Theodor, 149, 153, 231n2
106, 113, 122, 169–71, 222n17
church-state relationship, 11–12, 37, 64, 70,
Buddhism as Worldview, 81, 85, 98–103,
75–77
224, n70
civilizing mission, 66–67, 125, 139–40,
142, 144–46, 150, 152, 162–64, 166– The Meaning of Buddhism, 97, 169
67, 218n50 Dahlmann, Joseph, 65–66, 218n45, 218n48
class structure, 3–4, 83, 96, 159, 161–67, Buddha, 117–22
203n18 India Travels, 121
colonial consciousness, 111, 125–27, 129, Damen, Frans, 152
141–46, 156, 167, 175 Darwin, Charles, 14–15, 40
colonialism, 5–6, 17–19, 125–26, 162–67, Lamarck vs., 160, 233n37
169, 232n23 Origin of Species, 15
fringe religions and, 18–19, 146, 154–57 Darwinism, 5, 12, 19, 55, 78, 178, 183,
German Catholics and, 54, 65–67, 70–73 206n69, 220n86
German, vs. British, 72–73, 132, 149–67 colonialism and, 110, 167
German, vs. French, 132, 164, 166, German Buddhists and, 84, 86–87, 96,
219n50 99–100
commandeering, 4, 191–94 metaphysical, 149, 154–67, 155, 157
community consensus, 4–5, 20–22, 36, See also survival of the fittest
222n15 Delplace, Edmund, 57–58, 66
Buddhism vs. Protestantism and, 40, 42, denominational conflict, 5, 10–13, 41–44
47–50 See also anti-Catholicism; anti-
Catholics vs. Buddhism and, 118–19 Protestantism; and specific
Catholics vs. Protestants and, 57 denominations
254 Index
Deussen, Paul, 9, 17, 20–21, 171–85, 187– Figuiera, Dorothy, 202n12

88, 200, 208n92, 229n89 Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, 8
influence of, 21, 178, 185, 191–96, form vs. essence, 135–36, 175
235n16, 236n35 Foucault, Michel, 3
General History, 134–38, 172–81, Franciscans, 70, 74
183–84 Franco-Prussian War, 1, 11, 25, 27, 31–32,
The Philosophy of the Bible, 183–84 43
Sechzig Upanishad, 174 Franz Xavier College, 55, 75, 216n4,
Deutsche Kolonialgeselschaft, 18 219n51
Deutsche Protestantenverein, 27, 39–43, Frederick the Great, 197, 229n76
45–46 Free Church, 43–44, 47, 50
Deutsche Rundschau, 127 Freemasonry, 13, 35–39, 69, 106–7, 213n56
Deutsche Zeit-und Streit-Fragen, 25, 207n78, French, 3, 131–33, 138, 164, 166, 219n50,
210n16, 213n58 229n76
distinction, 3, 6, 21, 83 Revolution, 56, 190–91
divine Freud, Sigmund, 224n70
humans as (Gott-Menschen), 195, 197, Friedman, Thomas, 169
199 Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, 6
human spirit and, 104, 107–8 fringe religious innovators, 14–19, 21, 50,
Droit, Roger-Pol, 19, 208n86
78, 81–111, 113, 118–19, 122, 158,
duality, 91, 98–99, 101, 104, 174, 178
171
See also German Buddhists; theosophy;
early Christian era, 117, 130
and specific individuals
earthly rejection, 94–95, 133–34, 141, 195
egoism, 183–83
Gall, Lothar, 213n62
Egypt, 128, 173
Gama, Vasco da, 67, 219n53
Einbeck, Walter, 105
Gandhi, 233n50
Elias, Norbert, 203n22
Garbe, Richard, 162–64, 167, 234n54
elite thinkers, 109–11, 159–63, 181–82,
India and Christianity, 139–40, 163,
189, 193–200
empiricism, 5, 16, 84, 86, 87, 96, 98–99, 230n113
103, 170, 174, 175, 183, 190 Geibel, Emanuel
energia, 156 Heroldsrufe, 200, 238n9
Engels, Friedrich, 84 Gellner, Ernst, 141, 213n60, 230n125
Enlightenment, 1, 11, 15, 32, 36, 39, 45, Germana, Nicholas
56, 94, 132, 138, 150, 167, 179, 200 The Orient of Europe, 6
Esleben, Jörg German Brahminism, 161, 166, 199–200
Mapping Channels, 7 German Buddhists, 84–100, 174, 176, 195,
ethics, 27, 181–85, 187–88, 190, 192, 196 221n13, 222n17
ethnographic discourse, 3, 18 German language, 1, 2, 9, 92, 129–30, 132,
Eurocentrism, 199 146, 164, 173, 189, 214n73
evolutionary pyramid, 154–56, 155, 157, Germann, W., 152–53
159–61 German nationhood, 205n45
See also Darwinism See also nationalism
Germanocentricism, 131–33, 137–38, 146,
Fabri, Friedrich 154, 158–60, 184–85, 187, 190–92,
Does Germany Need Colonies?, 18, 153 195, 200
Fascism, 10, 16, 21 globalization, 169, 234n3
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 39, 48, 207n72 Goa Catholic mission, 57, 67, 69, 75,
Fichte, Johann G., 229n76 216n4
Index 255
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 131, 197, Oldenberg and Germanocentric, 129–33,
229n76 137–39
Grass, Günter, 1 prescriptive, 135–39, 170–84, 192
Greeks, ancient, 117, 127, 129–39, 164, radical prescriptive, 170–73, 184–200
172, 175, 178, 179, 183, 186, 188, Seydel and comparative model of, 36, 40,
192, 194–95, 197, 199–200 45–50
Gregor XVI, 68, 69 See also specific individuals, religions, and
Greyerz, Kaspar von, 83 works
Grimm, Eduard Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, 213n56
“The Teachings about the Buddha,” 44, Holland, 72
215n90 Holy Ganges, 1, 10, 158, 162, 201n2,
Grimm brothers, 128 217n11
Homer, 133
habitus, defined, 203n21 Hönes, Christian, 25, 149–53, 209n3
Haeckel, Ernst, 18, 20, 40, 149, 154, Hönig, W., 50
206n62, 231n3 Hübbe-Schleiden, Wilhelm, 18–20, 40,
Die Welträtsel, 99 85, 110, 114, 146, 149, 154–67, 195,
Halbfass, Wilhelm 222n17, 227n43, 232n23
India and Europe, 6 Being as Lust, 154–56, 155, 157, 166
“happy” native, 162, 164 India and the Indians, 154, 158–65
Harnack, Adolf von, 185, 207n72, 237n71
human will, 177–84
Hartmann, Eduard von, 206n61, 210n16,
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 156
212n47
Hartmann, Franz, 16, 25, 82, 85, 86, 104–
identity, 5, 16, 35, 78, 82–84, 93, 103–4,
10, 113–14, 222n19, 225n99, 227n43
108–11, 171, 189–90
Hastings, Adrian, 38, 213n60
“Indian Castes and their Meaning for the
Hauer, J. W., 20
Mission” (anonymous essay), 58–60
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 223n29
Indian independence movement, 233n50
Hauser, Th.
Indian mutiny (1857), 76, 77, 220n70
“Bombay,” 70, 73–75
Hegel, G. W. F., 6, 26, 36, 40, 42, 95, 101, individual
128, 129, 132, 161, 164, 183, 185, German Buddhists and, 87, 91, 93, 94,
197, 212n50, 214n73, 234n54 95, 100–104
Heraclitus, 134 Protestantism and, 26–28, 42, 46, 83, 94
Herder, J. G., 1, 8, 36, 40, 137, 197, radicals and, 190, 199
212n50, 214n73 theosophy and, 104–6, 108–11
Herero, 167 world shaped by, 161
Herling, Bradley Indo-Aryan heritage, 44–46, 132, 179, 183,
The German Gī-tā, 6 195, 199
Hesse, Hermann, 1, 209n3 Indo-European languages, 1, 45, 92
Hindus, 61, 74, 77, 126, 140, 158–59, Indogermanen, 157
161–63, 165–66, 211n24, 234n54 Indo-Germanic nation, 1, 6, 130, 132, 134,
historical-critical method, 170, 186, 214n75 135, 137, 164, 173, 189, 204n29
historicism, 21 Indologists and India experts, defined,
Buddhism vs. Christianity and, 47–48, 202n9
144–45 industrial capitalism, 16, 22, 56, 83–85, 94,
Catholics and, 67–71, 73, 116–18, 123 96, 207n75, 223n29
emancipatory reason and, 200 introspection, 87, 90–91, 93, 95, 101–3,
German Buddhists and, 91, 97, 99–100 107, 109–10, 118
Hegel and, 212n50 “iron cage,” 205n57, 223n37
256 Index
Jain temple, 65–66 Macaulay, Lord, 58–59

Japan, 45, 119, 172 Maillard, Christine
Jesuits, 11, 13, 17, 50, 53–57, 62, 65, 67, L’Inde vue d’Europe, 7
70, 72, 74–76, 116–19, 122, 195, Maitri, 139, 230n111
213n58, 216n4, 217n9 Mann, Thomas, 1, 223n38
Jesus Christ, 15, 26–27, 35–36, 47–49, 96, Mannhardt, Wilhelm, 130
109, 113, 115–17, 119, 121, 129–30, Mara, 143
141, 143–44, 162, 199 Marchand, Suzanne, 2–4, 18, 20, 47, 171,
Jews and Judaism, 143–44, 186, 189 202n7, 212n47
See also anti-Semitism; Semites; racism German Orientalism, 9–10, 14, 201n5,
Jones, William, 127–28, 214n73, 228n55 201n6, 208 n92, 211 n19, 215n96,
215n109, 224n44, 237n105
Kaiserreich, defined, 201n3 Marx, Karl, 84, 85
Kamma, 101, 103, 225n84 master-slave dialectic, 234n54
Kant, Immanuel, 101–2, 104, 134, 136, Masuzawa, Tomoka, 26
172, 175–78, 180, 190–91, 197, materialism, 5, 16, 22, 81–86, 91–92, 94–
214n73, 235n33 97, 99, 100, 102–7, 146, 163–65, 183,
Critique of Pure Reason, 11, 175–76, 197, 205n57
235n26 material-spiritual split, 83, 92, 96, 98, 149,
Katholischen Missionen, Die, 58, 61–64, 68, 153, 158, 160, 163–64, 174
69, 71, 75, 77, 216n5 May Laws (1872), 11
Kellog, Samuel H., 116 McGetchin, Douglas, 84
Ketteler, W. E. F. von, 39, 43 Indology, 7–8
Freedom, Authority, and Church, 36 metaphysical realm, 90, 174–75, 179–80
Kuhn, Ernst, 28 Moghuls, 234n54
Kulturkampf, 11–13, 31–32, 36, 41–42, Moltke, Helmuth von, 32
38, 54, 56, 58–62, 70, 77, 83, 120, monism, 14, 18, 20, 149, 154, 158, 206n62
140, 143, 204n43, 204n44, 218n45, morals, ethics vs., 237n72
220n76 Mueller, Max, 90
Müller, Adolph, 67
Lacan, Jacques, 6 Müller, Friedrich Max, 8, 25, 26, 193
Lagarde, Paul de, 20, 206n61 Multa praeclare (1838), 66, 68, 69
Lalita Vistara, 26, 47, 209n8 Murti, Kamakshi
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 160, 233n37 India, 8
Langewiesche, Dieter, 11, 18, 37, 213n63
Lasalle, Ferdinand, 36 nationalism, 3, 5, 13, 17–19, 31–34, 43, 64–
Lassen, Christian, 1 67, 69, 70, 73, 75, 105, 139, 143–44,
Latin, 127, 130–32, 138, 164 166, 190, 213n56, 230n120, 230n125
See also Rome, ancient National Socialism, 7, 8, 16, 20–21, 28,
Laws of Manu, 127 171, 189–90, 200
Leifer, Walter Neoplatonists, 178
India and the Germans, 7 Neumann, Karl Eugen, 8, 16, 95–97, 103,
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 131 108, 113, 223n38
Liberalism, 11, 16, 18, 31–32, 37–38, 56, Dhammapada, 90–91, 223n34
58, 73, 213n63 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 20, 131, 134, 135,
Lill, Rudolf, 11 159, 161, 188, 189, 198, 237n79,
Lotusblüthen, 104, 108 238n133
Lovejoy, A. O., 178 The Genealogy of Morals, 92
Luther, Martin, 26, 27, 41, 88, 191 Nipperdey, Thomas, 13–14, 213n63
95 Theses, 141 Nirvana, 94–95, 118, 141
Index 257
nonduality, 174, 175 Buddhism and, 25–51, 114, 120, 123,

Notovich, Nicholas, 129–30, 228n66 125–29, 139–42, 145
noumena, 11, 101, 104, 134, 177, 178 caste system and, 162
Catholics and, 11–13, 17, 34, 36–37, 57–
Olcott, Henry Steel, 105, 206n62, 222n13, 65, 70–71, 76, 78, 120, 123, 131, 145
225n97 colonial mind-set and, 126–29, 133, 167
Oldenberg, Hermann, 19, 111, 126–46, fringe religions and, 16–17, 82, 84
150, 230n107 German Buddhists and, 87–94, 96, 102–3
Buddha, 17, 126–27 German nation and, 39, 41–50, 131
“Buddhism and Christian Love,” 139–42 Greek culture and, 131, 138
“The Religion of the Veda,” 129–34, See also anti-Protestantism; Christianity;
137–38 and specific individuals
“On Sanskrit Research,” 127–29 Protestant League, 230n120
Oncken, Wilhelm, 37 Protestant Reformation, 11, 42, 46, 54, 83,
Orientalism, 1–3, 8, 9, 201n6, 202n11, 202n12 93, 102, 120, 145
Oriental Renaissance, 2, 7, 131 Protestant work ethic, 181
first vs. second, 2, 7, 201n5, 201n6 Pythagoras, 134, 137
Pali, 97, 140 Quingdao, 6

Pan-Germanic League, 13
papal infallibility, 11, 37, 56, 218n37 Rabault-Feuerhahn, Pascale
Paracelsus, 82, 108 L’archive des Origines, 9
Parmenides, 180 racism, 9, 20, 28, 58, 93, 159, 163, 171,
Peace Laws (Friedensgesetze, 1886–87), 12, 188–91, 194–98, 208n92, 233n32
62, 205n52 rationalization, 14, 16, 92, 106
Pesch, Christian, 17, 56–58, 63–64, 69, Reichsgründung, 11, 42, 204n43, 211n30
114–22, 124, 217n8 revolutions of 1848, 11, 26, 37, 216n7
“The Buddha Legend,” 115–16 Rig Veda, 174
“The Light of Asia,” 115, 226n4 Romanticism, 6, 7, 31, 34, 109
“The Moral Successes of Buddhism,” Rome, ancient, 117, 128, 188
118–19, 227n36 Rorty, Richard, 110
Peters, Carl, 167 Rosenberg, Alfred, 8
Pfülf, Otto, 72–74, 77, 219n64, 220n83 Roth, Rudolf, 28, 128, 139, 214n68, 228n60
Pfungst, Arthur, 86–88, 88, 113–14 Roy, Rammohan, 8
Piscalar, Fridolin, 53–54, 58–62, 216n1 Russification movement, 28
“Indisches,” 53, 54, 60–61
Pischel, Richard, 143 Said, Edward, 3–4, 6, 8–9, 202n11,
Life and Teachings of the Buddha, 139 202n12, 203n28
Pius IX, 56 Orientalism, 3
Plato, 134–37, 178, 180 Sakuntala, 127
Pollock, Sheldon, 34 salvation, 95, 102–3, 108, 118–19, 122,
“Deep Orientalism,” 8, 204n39 143, 145–46, 178, 183–84
Portuguese, 67–71, 73, 75, 219n51, Sanskrit, 2, 6–7, 26, 28–29, 35, 39, 117,
219n53, 220n74 126–30, 132, 146, 164, 172, 173,
Pratt, Mary Louise, 6 193–94, 209n5, 209n8, 214n68,
Protestant ethic, 83, 162 214n73, 218n45
Protestant identity paradigm, 83–84, 91 Saussurian linguistics, 3, 203n16
Protestantische Flugblätter, 50 Schiller, 131, 197
Protestantism, 5, 11–15 Schlegel, Friedrich, 9, 131, 214n73
British Raj critiqued by, 149–67 Schlegel brothers, 1, 6, 45, 227n36
258 Index
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 83, 95, 185 Seidenstücker, Karl, 8, 222n17

Schneemann, Gerhard, 218n37 self, inner, 100–104, 107–10
“Our Successes in the Culture Wars,” self-consciousness, 107, 110, 234n54
62–63 Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen, 18
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 6, 7, 17, 25, 90, 135, Semites, 20, 116–17, 173, 185, 199
172–84, 212n47 Sen, Keshab Chandra, 150–53, 232n18
The World as Will, 178–80 Sengupta, Indra, 8
Schopenhauerian Christianity, 21, 172–84, Seung, T. K., 177
193–95, 208n92, 235n13 Seydel, Rudolf, 13, 17, 27, 30–31, 35–50,
Schroeder, Felix von, 29 57, 69, 84, 93–94, 106, 119, 120, 127,
Schroeder, Leopold von, 9, 13, 17, 19, 129, 139, 141, 144–45, 176, 212n47,
21, 29, 37, 50, 84, 93, 96, 111, 119, 215n95, 215n109, 230n107
120, 126, 139, 150, 159, 171, 173, Buddha and Christ, 36, 47
176, 180, 196, 200, 210n11, 210n17, “Christianity,” 41, 43
210n19, 211n32, 233n32 The Gospels, 35, 44–45, 47–48
Arische Religion, 20, 28, 35, 170, 184–91, Katholicismus, 36–37
236, 236n70, 237n72, 237n79 Protestantenverein lectures, 27, 39–46
“Buddhism and Christianity,” 113, 142– Shankara, 174, 177, 235n23
46, 231n39 Shiva, 186
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, 190–91 Sinthern, Peter
“India’s Spiritual Meaning,” 142
Buddhism and Buddhist Currents, 122–25,
König Sundara, 27–35, 39, 42, 44, 49,
208n78
58, 82, 113, 142–45, 211n24, 211n38,
Smith, Helmut Walser, 12–13, 205n55
211n41, 211n42
Smith, Woodruff, 6
Lebenserinnerungen, 29, 210n17, 211n32,
“social entropy,” 141
231n139
“social magic,” 4
Reden und Aufsätze, 31
Socrates, 135, 136
Schultze, Theodor, 16, 27, 82, 85–97, 101,
soul, 101, 181, 186
103, 106, 113–14, 222n18
Spencer, Herbert, 100
Christ, the World Reconciler, 86–87
The Christianity of Christ, 87–89, 92, 223n27 Spinoza, Baruch, 178
Das Dhammapada, 81, 85, 90–93, spirituality, 5, 9, 10, 13–16, 19–22, 129
221n3, 223n34 British vs. German colonialism and, 165–66
Pfungst biography of, 86–88 Deussen on Schopenhauer and, 174–75,
The Rolling Wheel of Life, 92–93, 224n45 179, 181
Schwab, Raymond German Buddhists and, 81–83, 86–88,
The Oriental Renaissance, 7, 201n4 90–99, 102–3
science-spiritual divide, 2–3, 5, 10, 14–15, German nation and, 22
32, 81–87, 91–92, 96–100, 103, 106, metaphysical Darwinism and, 158–61
108, 136, 170, 174, 181, 197 religious innovators and, 84, 86
reuniting, 19, 154–57, 160–61, 166–67 search for unity and, 158, 188, 191
See also materialism; spirituality Seydel and, 28–30, 32, 37–39, 42–43,
Secord, James 46, 49
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, theosophy and, 104–7, 109–10
14–15 von Schroeder and, 28–30, 32–35
“secret doctrine,” 82, 105, 107–10, 165, See also science-spiritual divide; spiritual
197, 200, 208n85 rejuvenation; and specific individuals
secularization, 5, 11, 14–16, 22 and religions
Sedlar, Jean spiritual rejuvenation, 26–27, 121
India in the Mind of Germany, 6 colonial agenda and, 146, 154–57, 162–66
Index 259
Deussen on Schopenhauer and, 174–75, Upanishads, 93, 172, 174, 177, 188, 198,
181–84, 188 235n20
radical prescriptive historicism and, 169– Ur-Religion, 45–46, 227n36
72, 185, 188, 192, 197, 199–200
Stanley, Henry Morton, 167 Väth, Alfons, 55, 57, 60, 69–70, 75, 216n4,
Steiner, Rudolf, 85, 206n62, 228n43 219n49
Steinmetz, George, 3–4, 18, 203n18 Vatican Council, First (1870), 56
The Devil’s Handwriting, 6 Vedanta, 172–75, 177, 235n20
Stern, Fritz, 206n61 Vedas, 9, 46, 48, 49, 93, 126, 128–31, 135–
The Politics of Cultural Despair, 16, 37, 141, 159, 172, 177–78, 184, 186,
207n76
209n5
Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (journal), 53,
Victoria, Queen, 233n31
61, 64, 72, 114, 115, 208n78, 216n5,
Virchow, Rudolf, 204n44
217n9, 218n37, 219n64
Vivekananda, Swami, 8
St. Mary’s Institution, 61, 75
Strauss, David Frierich, 39, 48, 183–84, völkisch movements, 20, 28
207n72 Voltaire, 39
Das Leben Jesu, 15
The Old and the New Belief, 184 Wagner, Richard, 7, 17, 20, 28, 197
subjective idealism, 95, 224n54 Weber, Max, 14, 21, 82, 83, 90–92, 126–
subject-object link, 177, 181–82 27, 181, 205n57, 221n4, 221n11,
survival of the fittest, 94, 99, 100, 160, 167, 222n15, 223n37, 236n55
183 Websky, J., 83
symbolic capital, 3–4, 6, 10, 16, 21, 51, 67, Weniger, Georg, 72–74
82–85, 90, 94, 102–3, 106, 110, 131, Wildenthal, Lora, 6
132, 190, 191, 202n10, 202n15 Wilhelm I, Kaiser, 32, 43
Williamson, George, 9
theosophy, 8, 14, 16–20, 50, 78, 82, 84–86, The Longing for Myth, 9
104–11, 114, 120, 122–24, 146, 149, Willson, Leslie
154–67, 171, 174, 176, 197, 200, A Mythical Image, 6
206n62, 208n85, 221n6, 221n13, Winckelmann, Johann, 131
222n17, 222n20, 227n43 Windisch, Ernst, 210n17
Thomas Christians, 117
workers, 86, 94, 162–63
Tönnies, Ferdinand, 222n15
world historical spirit, 26, 128, 131–32,
“transcendental illusion,” 177, 179
161, 197
transition narratives, 46, 59, 61, 131, 133,
world soul, 177–78
138, 141, 175, 177, 196, 215n101
trinity, 186 World War I, 19, 114, 170, 184, 190
Troeltsch, Ernst, 21, 207n72 Wurm, Paul, 25, 39, 44, 209n3, 209n4
The Social Teachings, 83
Trotha, Lothar von, 167 Xavier, Franz, 67, 219n51
Tyler, 130
Young, 130
Übermensch, 20, 159, 161, 189
ultramontanism, 12, 37 Zantop, Suzanne, 6
universalism, 37, 45, 142, 161, 165–67, Zimmermann, Friedrich. See Bhikschu,
175, 179–84, 186–88, 190–91, Subhara
213n56 Ziolkowski, Theodore
See also Catholicism Modes of Faith, 9

German Visions of India

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German Visions of India, 1871–1918

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Commandeering the Holy Ganges

Figure 1.1 Leopold von Schroeder 29

As I contemplate the completion of this manuscript, somewhat in disbelief, I real-

Universtätsbibliothek at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt. There Anne-Marie

In  Houston Stewart Chamberlain, German Aryanist and anti-Semite,

Theoretical Considerations and State of the Research

new millennium, important alternative angles for the German-India connection

Plan of the Book

PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC CHAMPIONS AND THEIR VISION OF INDIA

Protestants to raise awareness of potential Catholic threats to undermine Prus-

to many causes of course, but most importantly, German intellectuals became

THE RADICALIZATION OF GERMANY’S INDIA: SPIRITUALITY,

A significant backdrop to this shift in Protestant readings of India during the

Protestant and Catholic

Christian Hönes, in this speech delivered in Basel in February 1877, impels

The Discovery of the Buddha

Leopold von Schroeder’s Quest for

standards is dependent on the blossoming of the individual spirit in the Church.

Figure 1.1 Leopold von Schroeder.

The Transforming Power of the Buddha:

Since I began to hold the reigns of sovereignty

in Wilhelmine Germany (the rejection of a religion—Brahminism/Catholicism)

Consider for what this girl has perished,—

Hearing Ananda’s compelling words, Sundara’s conversion becomes consum-

Rudolf Seydel’s Comparative Religion

Response to Bishop Ketteler: Seydel’s Anti-Catholicism

marketplace and thus in response gradually sculpted their religious agendas as a

Comparative Religion and Christianity’s

Shared Religious Practices in the Church and Nation

are achieved through individual quest, not through institutionalized rituals of

Thus, in Seydel’s view, the establishment of the German nation—the vessel of

Indian Ur-Religion and Its German Keeper

between all religions, a claim that proves advantageous in a comparative model of

positive historical progression that originated in Indo-Aryan traditions—the reli-

assertive German nation. In his comparative, historical hermeneutics of Bud-

Buddhist Escapism versus Christian Community

of Christianity—bolstered by the leitmotif of his constructed Buddhism—as the

The renaissance of German culture as a manifestation of God’s will on earth—

Catholic Visions of India

Repairing Protestant Damage: Archiving

politico-cultural pressures inflicted on their Catholic identities in Wilhelmine

a palpable sensitivity to the cultural threats to their confessional status and

Winning the Kulturkampf in India

to smaller, scattered communities, that until now do without leaders, as well as

Catholic Universal Mandates in India

life.”38 In this distinctly Catholic account of the Kaiserreich’s state of sociocul-

Catholic Historical Hermeneutics: Portuguese

mission—a global mandate to which nation-state imperatives were judged to be

in Europe and the vulnerability of religious institutions and spiritual well-being

Catholic Missions after Portuguese Supremacy

distinguishes the British colonial administration, which the Catholic Church

nation-state—must succumb to the more significant and meaningful convic-

colonial model hastily changed to criticism among many German Catholics,

For German Catholics the reconstitution of their national identity through a

Science separates consciousness from life—makes the former an accident of the

Theodor Schultze (–) and Paul Dahlke (–), Buddhist

transformations—industrial capitalism and empirical science—during the final

Theodor Schultze: A Frustrated Sense

Reckoning with Christianity: Revising the

examination and statement of personal beliefs,” is framed in the context of social

in comparative accounts of the world’s religious dogmas: “When essentially the

The Buddhist Ascetic: A Corrective