Book Description

This Dissertation examines the German Romantic fascination with India, the country thought by many German Romantics to be the original home of the Urvolk, considered by these thinkers to be the direct ancestors of the German people themselves. In analyzing this German Romantic self-representation through India within the context of the Romantic critique of European modernity, the Dissertation considers this phenomenon as a case of the Romantic re-integration project. The Dissertation juxtaposes four figures - Friedrich Schlegel, Otmar Frank, Joseph Goerres, and Arthur Schopenhauer - who are particularly representative of those German Romantic thinkers who were influenced by Indian culture and who applied the Indian models to their interpretations of world history. These interpretations were rooted in the models developed by the missionaries and the Enlightenment thinkers who looked for the original monotheism outside the biblical tradition. The Romantics, however, highlighted not only the religious but also the national dimension of the connection between the original home of the Urvolk and its descendants in the modern German-speaking realm. In tracing the Urvolk's migration from India to the West, Friedrich Schlegel used as his explanatory model the Brahmanic narrative of the degenerated warriors becoming barbarians due to their failure to observe the dharma. This model was in tune with Schlegel's understanding of the Indian religion as a misread Revelation, and his understanding of the further world history as a degradation and fragmentation of the human race, but it was at odds with his German nationalist aspirations. With time, the correlation between these two dimensions changed. Frank proclaimed the return to the original Iranian-Indian heritage as the program of a religious and national reawakening of the German people; Goerres developed an all-embracing narrative of the original people and its Weltstaat; Schopenhauer portrayed the religious/philosophical history as a conflict between the "wisdom of all ages" and the "biblical theism". These theories represented four versions of a German-Romantic understanding of identity and otherness based on the Indian model, which predetermined the dualistic nature of German Romantic nationalism as dividing the human race not into multiple nations, but rather into the original civilization and the corrupt version of it.