Wednesday 10 September 2014

Blue lotuses and new mythologies: German Indophilia in the time of Goethe



The following lecture was originally given in German at this year’s Schnackenhof Philosophietage, an annual 3-day event organised by my friend Reinhard Knodt and devoted to intellectual and cultural encounters between Eastern and Western traditions, at the Schnackenhof, a salon and centre for philosophy and the arts in the Franconian town of Röthenbach an der Pegnitz


Choosing to speak in Germany on the topic of Indophilia in German literature (and its greatest period at that) might look like carrying coals to Newcastle – or “owls to Athens”, as the more poetic German idiom has it. I can offer two excuses. The first is that the German love of India was first stimulated by the translations produced by a handful of English scholars in the 18th century: German authors of the classic and early Romantic periods were thus mostly reading translations of translations. Scholars such as William Jones were already reflecting on some of the intellectual implications of the texts they worked on, too, and in a way that pre-empted some of the concerns of German thinkers.

The second, more immediate prompt for choosing this subject is a series of publications in English over the last few years (in particular the extremely valuable work of the appropriately named Nicholas Germana, on which I will draw fairly heavily in what follows) that put the German interest in India in a new light. The interpretations they offer focus in particular on the question of German national identity. To forestall anxieties about what has become a vexed issue over the last hundred years, it is important to make some historical distinctions. Historians have known for some time that German identity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was first and foremost a cultural topic; that it only gradually built up into a demand for political unity; and that only still later, around the time of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, did it adopt the notoriously aggressive, intolerant, militaristic stance that was to cause such havoc in Europe during the 20th century.

That has not stopped some scholars judging, as if by reflex, earlier German patriotic sentiments as forecasting later ones: the “benefit” of hindsight is notoriously difficult to refuse. But many aspects of the German self-image during the life of Goethe (1749-1832, frequently invoked as a convenient period in German literary and cultural history) were far from being as introverted or xenophobic as one might assume. Among them was the Indophilia of these decades, which led directly to the foundation of Indology as a separate subject in the German university system. An apparent paradox thereby arose: Germany rapidly became famous for the outstanding quality of its research on Indian languages and culture, even though it had no political connection to the subcontinent at all.

Why was India of interest to those thinkers reflecting on German identity? An answer begins to emerge if we look at the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), philosopher, poet, critic, and early anthropologist, to list only some of his occupations. Herder’s tremendous influence on European intellectual history is not disputed, but the nature of that influence certainly is. Some 20th-century intellectuals, most notably Isaiah Berlin in England, blamed Herder directly for shrouding the universalism and rationalism of the Enlightenment in the fog of Romanticism. Along with J. G. Hamann, Herder was framed as a member of a “counter-Enlightenment”, undermining enlightened efforts by the likes of Kant or Voltaire on behalf of universal, secularized Reason. Most dangerously, had Herder not introduced the theoretical concept of the “folk” (Volk), the “people” as a discrete, communal entity? Did he not further defend the spirit of the German “folk” against French cosmopolitanism? Is that not the start of modern nationalism (and we know where that ends up)?

The judgement is easy to make, but deceptive. When Herder uses the expression “German” (deutsch), its meaning is broader than we understand it today – closer to “Teutonic” (germanisch). That explains why, in his collection of essays “On German spirit and art” (Von deutscher Art und Kunst, 1773), Herder could set up Shakespeare as a representative of the German spirit. With the Holy Roman Empire as shattered as it was after the Thirty Years’ War, present-day Germans ought to try to seek the “German spirit” outside the boundaries of their own language and territory, not just in the area between the Alps, the Rhine and the North Sea. To shape German identity in this sense required being open to the world: not simply submitting to the fashionable Francophile taste of the literature market, but seeking out deeper “elective affinities”.

Such openness really did apply to the world, however, and not just to Europe. Herder wanted to aid and enrich German culture through non-European identifications too. He had two reasons for this: one to do with literary history, the other with politics. I will discuss them, and their influence on Romanticism, separately.

In Herder and Hamann’s conception, the history of poetry began in the Orient, where it retained the kind of purity and authentic force that characterized the prophetic books of the Bible. But as mankind aged and modern European civilization developed, poetry became duller, more mechanical and prosaic. The literature of his own century was proof enough of that, so Herder thought. By “oriental" poetry Herder initially meant the literature of the Semitic peoples, above all the Hebrew literature of the Old Testament. During the 1770s and 80s, as works in ancient Persian and Sanskrit began to be made accessible, he grasped that there existed a still more distant and older “Orient”, whose culture until now had hardly been glimpsed.

According to his expectations, the literary expression of this Orient ought to be more sensuous, powerful, and yet also more innocent and pure even than the Old Testament or the Koran. Herder’s expectations here were shaped by his theory of language, influenced by Rousseau. Both thinkers saw the languages of the East (or the South) as having arisen as expressions of human feeling, above all feelings of love and wonder at God and Nature. Their entire character was different from a modern rational language like French. Modern German writers ought to assimilate some of that character, in order to become, as Herder put it in 1767, true “German-Oriental writers”. 

It was William Jones’s translation of the Sanskrit drama Sakuntala in 1789 that allowed Herder to put his theory to the test – and find it confirmed. The drama Abhijñānaśākuntalam  or “The Recognition of Sakuntala” was written by the greatest Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa, between the 1st century B.C. and the 4th century A. D. The freshness of the nature imagery, the innocence of the heroine Sakuntala, and the sensibility in the handling of the plot all impressed Herder immediately, to the point that he drew comparisons with Shakespeare and Ossian (the supposedly ancient Celtic poet whose works were only later revealed to have been the modern creation of the Scot James Macpherson). As Jones’s translation was re-translated into German by Georg Forster in 1791, the contemporary reception was so enthusiastic that the historian Raymond Schwab spoke of a “Sakuntala era” in Germany.

The first early German Romantic writer to feel the charm of Sanskrit poetry was Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). There is a strong possibility that the famous “blue flower” in Novalis’ novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a motif which was to become a symbol of German Romanticism in general, was inspired by the descriptions of lotus flowers in Kalidasa’s Sakuntala. The Oriental references in the novel’s first chapter are at any rate hard to miss. On the (unforgettable) first page of the book, Heinrich recalls the tales of a stranger who had told him of “treasures” and a “flower” in a distant land:

“It is not the treasures that have inspired such an inexpressible longing in me”, he said to himself; “I am unacquainted with greed: but I long to gaze on the blue flower. It occupies my mind incessantly, and I can do nothing else but ponder and dream of poetry. I have never felt thus before: it is as if I had been dreaming, or my slumbers had transported me into another world; for in the world that I otherwise inhabit who would have spared a thought for flowers? – and I had certainly never heard of such a strange passion for a flower. Where, in fact, did the stranger come from?”

He probably came from India. India was the land of “treasures” par excellence, and the land in which a “strange passion for a flower” such as the lotus was quite self-explanatory. Decisive in my opinion is the identification of the flower with the beauty of a “gentle face”, a female face. In Sakuntala, the heroine is consistently described using floral metaphors, and in the drama’s first scene she is compared with a “blue lotus petal” (blaues Lotosblatt, in Forster’s translation). (The notes to Forster's translation reveal the confusion of the Indian sacred lotus, nelumbo nucifera, with the blue water-lily, nymphaea caerulea, below.)

 

The female face that was in Novalis’s mind’s eye when he described the blue flower would surely have been that of his beloved, the young Sophie von Kühn; and Nicholas Germana points out that in the Hardenberg family correspondence, Novalis can be found using the nickname “Sakuntala” for Sophie. 

One could adduce further individual motifs that other writers of the time borrowed from Sanskrit literature. Goethe wrote a quatrain in praise of Sakuntala, planned a production of the play, and, according to Raymond Schwab, based his “Prelude on the Stage” to Faust on Kalidasa’s prologue. I have a further suggestion à propos of the character of Ottilie in Goethe’s Elective Affinities – a character reminiscent of Sakuntala in some ways. At two points in the novel, Ottilie makes a peculiar gesture, apparently bearing a strong similarity to the Indian namaskar – a quiet, gentle bow with joined palms in front of the chest. Though the namaskar normally denotes respectful greeting, mixed with a certain distance, in Ottilie’s case it is a gesture of refusal:


“She does this [refusing] with a gesture which is irresistible for one who has grasped its meaning. She presses the palms of her hands, which she raises above her head, together, and brings them to her breast while she leans gently forwards and fixes the supplicant with such a gaze that he gladly relinquishes all that he had demanded or wished for.” (Elective Affinities, Part I, chapter 5)

The meaning of (polite) refusal has a possible source in Sakuntala, however: the heroine is at one point asked to embrace her spiritual father or guru Kanva, and instead makes this gesture.

One could go on to discuss influences in art or music – Schubert wrote an incomplete opera Sakuntala in 1820, and Wagner was influenced by it in the first act of Parsifal – but more interesting is the motivation behind these borrowings. It was not only the charm of a newly discovered, paradisiacal land of literature and religion that prompted Novalis to use Indian images as symbols of romantic longing, but a central plank of Romanticism’s theoretical programme. This was laid down by Friedrich Schlegel in the concept of the “new mythology”. 

The concept itself was not new. Herder was the first to use this expression in his 1768 essay “Of the modern use of mythology”, in which he defended the utility of mythological images against the theological objections made by Christian Adolph Klotz. Klotz saw a potential threat to Christianity in the casual poetic use of “pagan”, i.e. Greek and Roman, mythological motifs. Herder replied that in a modern artistic context, the old gods certainly did not have anything to do with the truth of religion, but then again, pace Klotz, neither did they have to: “We find use for another side of them, their sensuous beauty. If I make use of mythological ideas and images, inasmuch as certain psychological or general truths are to be recognized sensuously through them, then mythological persons are equally permitted”. They could be used as generally recognizable images, and as prompts to one’s own fantasy: there would be “many difficulties in creating a wholly new mythology for us. – But working out how to construct an apparently new one with the ancients’ repertoire of images, that is easier... One applies the old images and tales to cases closer at hand; puts a new poetic meaning into them, changes them here and there to attain some new end.”

Around the same time William Jones had the same idea. Even before he discovered the new world of Sanskrit literature, he complained that “European literature has subsisted too long on the perpetual repetition of the same images, and incessant allusions to the same fables”. Translations of Oriental literature offered “a new set of images and similitudes”. In the 1780s Jones became so fond of the gods of ancient India that he devoted a set of original poems to them, including the “Hymn to Kama” (the god of love) or the “Hymn to Narayana” (Brahma) – poems that, at the time, were hardly less popular than his translations of authentic Sanskrit works. 

All this was part of the literary background for the Romantic “new mythology”. But there was another, theological-philosophical, precondition: pantheism. The path to German pantheism was opened up by Spinoza, Lessing, and Herder. It was necessary to entertain the – revolutionary – idea that Jesus Christ was not the only true mediator between God and man. The world or Nature was itself God. And according to Herder’s reformulation of Spinoza, Nature was not a merely mechanical chain of causes and effects, but an organic entity that had first to be felt and intuited. It would never be possible, as theologians and Cartesian philosophers alike had hoped, to prove through pure logic that the world existed. One could only feel it. And in order to reflect and mediate – to express – this feeling of true being, one could utilize an entire pantheon of poetic and mythological images, depending on which culture one belonged to. Vice versa, if one wanted to understand the experience of the world of people in other cultures, one should approach that experience through their religion, art, and mythology.

In this spirit Novalis wrote, in fragment 74 of his aphorism collection “Pollen” (Blüthenstaub), that:

Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than an intermediary that connects us with the deity. Man cannot possibly stand in an immediate relationship with the same. Man must be absolutely free in the choice of this intermediary. The slightest compulsion in this matter harms his religion... Fetishes, stars and planets, animals, heroes, idols, gods, a god-man. One quickly sees how relative such choices are, and is little by little led towards the notion that the essence of religion does not depend on the character of the mediator, but solely in one’s view of it, in one’s relation to it. It is idol-worship in the broadest sense when I actually take this mediator as God himself.

Friedrich Schlegel agreed in fragment 234 of his “Athenäumsfragmente”: “It is very one-sided and arrogant to say that there is only one mediator. For the perfect Christian, to whom in this respect Spinoza perhaps approximates best, everything would have to be a mediator”. In the last years of the 18th century Schlegel became aware how important the Orient, and specifically India, were to a full understanding of the imaginative, mediating possibilities of the “new mythology”. In his “Discourse on Mythology” (Rede über die Mythologie, 1800) he talked of the “beautiful confusion of the imagination...for which I know no lovelier symbol than the colourful, teeming mass of the ancient gods”. By that he meant, of course, the Greek gods; but he immediately continued –

The other mythologies must also be reawakened according to the degree of their profundity, their beauty, and their culture, in order to accelerate the development of the new mythology. If only the treasures of the Orient were as accessible to us as those of antiquity! What new spring of poetry could flow to us from India, if a few German artists with their universality and depth of understanding, with their innate talent for translation, had the chance... We must look for the highest Romanticism in the Orient, and as soon as we can draw from that source, then perhaps the surface southern glow that currently charms us so much in Spanish poetry will [by comparison] seem banally occidental.


 At this point Schlegel could still only speculate about Oriental cultures, without yet having experienced any of their literary products at first-hand. In 1802 he travelled to Paris in order to study oriental languages – first Persian and then Sanskrit. By 1803 he was in the thick of his studies, and quite overwhelmed by what he was finding. To his friend Tieck he raved: “everything, everything without exception comes from India!” And yet by the time his studies culminated in his seminal 1808 book “On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians” his philosophical outlook had fundamentally changed. He was no longer a pantheist, but a Catholic; and India was no longer a freely elected source for a pantheistic and polytheistic “new mythology”, but the authentic historical source for the sole true monotheistic religion. Why did Schlegel, and with him the Romantic movement, turn away from their liberal pantheism?

The reasons for that lie in politics. I mentioned earlier that a second element in Herder’s conception of German identity was political. At the time Herder wrote, the motive for this was still liberal and humanitarian. As a German, Herder believed he had a good reason for sympathy with non-European peoples: they were the victims of modern European colonial powers. They were politically weak, but on the other hand, morally strong and virtuous, just as Herder imagined the Germans to be. In an extraordinary poem from 1797 discovered by Nicholas Germana, bearing the title “German National Glory” (Deutsche Nationalruhm), Herder praised the German people for not possessing a colonial empire like Britain or Spain, a fact that meant they could stand by the side of the oppressed American Indians, Africans and Indians. God would not bestow his blessing on a “people that feasts and revels while weighed down with the burden of such guilt, sin, and blood, the burden of gold and diamonds”; rather he would show his favour to “quiet Ethiopians and Germans” instead.

Such sentiments of patriotic resistance were naturally enhanced during the Napoleonic Wars, when, after the battles of Jena and Auerstädt, Germany was in actual fact conquered by a European empire. This was the period of the Heidelberg Romantics, Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and the brothers Grimm, diligently collecting folk songs and tales from the “people” whose culture had supposedly remained unaffected by corrupting French influences. Philosophers turned patriots too, such as J. G. Fichte: once a revolutionary, now the author of the “Speeches to the German Nation” (Reden an die deutsche Nation). The new, more patriotic spirit marked the turn away from early Romanticism to High Romanticism: one could no longer feel inspired by the radical-democratic spirit of the French Revolution, now that its consequences for Germany were so severe. Romantics like Schlegel sought more stable, conservative sources of support: the Catholic Church, the old German Imperial Knights, and the new ideology of folk culture. 

The Romantics also revised their image of India, however. Previously the exact historical connections between India and other cultures had not been of such great interest. Indian culture was very old, and probably older than the Egyptian – more than that one did not dare to assert. Above all the early Romantics wanted to use India as a source in their construction of a new mythology, essentially oriented towards the future. But after 1806, Friedrich Schlegel and the Heidelberg Romantics, especially  Joseph Görres and Friedrich Creuzer, became more interested in the past. They now tried to prove that there had been a “special relationship” between India and the Teutons or ancient Germans – an “Indo-German identification”, in Robert Cowan’s phrase. In particular, this relationship was used to demonstrate that Germanic culture derived from an older source than that of the French or other speakers of Romance languages. 

To this end Schlegel developed a new theory of the “migration of peoples” (Völkerwanderung) in the prehistorical era. Everything came from India still, as he had once said to Tieck, but in different ways, through separate phases of migration. The Germanic peoples came directly from the north of India (the red arrow on the diagram below); the peoples of the Mediterranean and southern Europe, like the Greeks and Romans, came via a longer and frequently interrupted route through Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (the blue arrow); and the Egyptians were colonized by a group of Brahmins, who transmitted to them the priestly culture of ancient India (the yellow dotted arrow). 

Friedrich Schlegel's theory of prehistoric migrations, 1808

 

 In 1810 Joseph Görres put forward a still more grandiose hypothesis. There had been four migrations of peoples, through which first America (green arrow below), then China and South-East Asia (red), then Northern Europe (blue), and finally Africa and Egypt (yellow) were colonized or populated. India was the birthplace of human culture as it covered the entire currently habitable surface of the globe!

 Joseph Görres' hypothesis, 1810

 

The claim for a direct Indo-German relationship was, it is important to note, at this juncture still unaffected by openly racist prejudices as they entered the debate on “Aryanism” in the later 19th and 20th centuries. The relationships that interested Schlegel and Görres were cultural and linguistic, not biological or genetic. Resistance to their theories was equally expressed in cultural terms. The famous “Creuzer debate” (famous to Indologists, anyway) between Friedrich Creuzer and Johann Heinrich Voss around 1820 was sparked off by Creuzer’s supposedly insulting interpretations of the origins of Greek culture and religion – above all, the idea that the wild, erotic figure of Dionysus was central to Greek religion, and that his cult had its origins in an early Indian “phallic cult” or “phallic teaching”, summed up in the phallic lingam of Hindu Shaivite ritual. 

By the time the reaction against Romanticism arrived, the connection between the Romantics’ picture of India and their veneration for the ancient legends and culture of the German peoples was well-established. If one wanted to attack Romanticism, one could do worse than begin by undermining the enthusiasm for India. And that was precisely what Hegel did. In his “Lectures on the Philosophy of World History” (1822), Hegel displayed an aversion to, indeed even a hatred of, all things Indian that still startles the modern reader. That the history of the world began in the East and travelled West was as clear to Hegel as it had been to the Romantics; but that this history manifested signs of decay from an original state of poetry and innocence was, in Hegel’s view, no longer credible. India, ancient or modern, was simply primitive, and nothing could be learned from it:

The life of the Indians is composed of...forms without spirit or emotional character...their entire condition must be grasped as one of dreamy reverie (Träumerei). Rationality, morality, subjectivity are annulled, disposed of... One wonders how a people so empty of spiritual substance and independence can become conscious of the highest life, of the truly substantial... The principle of Indian political life is arbitrary despotism and fortuitousness... Historiography the Indians do not understand in the slightest. They are wholly incapable of the kind of rational record-keeping [found in the writers of the Hebrew Old Testament]. Everything dissolves with them into exorbitant imagery. They are not capable of anything rational.

Hegel’s persistent characterization of Indian religion as “dreamy” is without doubt an indirect attack on the religion and literature of Romanticism, on authors such as Friedrich Schlegel. But two more aspects of Hegel’s interpretation deserve mention, representing as I believe they do a retreat from the radical and subtle character of Romantic thought. “Reason” (Vernunft) is, as is well known, the central category of philosophy for Hegel. It is realized step by step in the various phases of world history, above all in two spheres of human activity: in religion (or philosophy) and in politics. The most rational forms or end-states of world history are Christianity and the modern (Prussian) state. Culture – and this is the crucial difference between those two historicists Hegel and Herder – is a thoroughly secondary affair. This intolerant and abstract conception of Reason permits no choice between various “mediators”, as Novalis and Schlegel had done, because all sensual specificity and cultural difference is finally “resolved” (aufgehoben) in pure philosophical rationality. 

One might expect that such trust in the rational “end of history”, to borrow a more recent and equally short-lived Hegelian-derived catchphrase, would not survive such blows as D. F. Strauss’s Biblical criticism or the revolution of 1848. But the end or splintering of Hegelianism did not bring about any renewed reflection on the cultural pluralism of the Romantics that had gone before it. Ludwig Feuerbach’s “Young Hegelian” critique of religion unfortunately led all too rapidly into the crasser varieties of materialism that predominated in the second half of the 19th century. When Marx came along to “stand Hegel on his head”, nothing about the prevailing image of world history was really altered. Modernity was now defined economically, rather than theologically and politically: but whereas the Indians according to Hegel had represented a primitive, irrational religion, they now represented according to Marx and Engels a primitive economic system instead, an “Asiatic mode of production”. There was still nothing to be learned from the Orient. The technological development of the West would soon leave the rest of the world behind, and the only remaining question was when this development would be taken out of the hands of the capitalists and placed in the trust of the socialist state.

It is clear enough that this modernity is still more or less ours. We too inhabit an ever-expanding “technological space”, to use the expression of Reinhard Knodt. But “technological space” does not rely solely on reason and material development. It relies equally on a mythology. We believe in technology: it is an apparently central, inalienable part of our narrative of mankind’s salvation. If it sometimes throws up problems – the atomic bomb, ecological devastation – then we think, and pray, that it will also solve them.

Technology is the universal “mediator” for our imaginations, even in art, in architecture, in music. We are hardly conscious, most of us, of how deeply our language and responses in the areas of culture, ethics and aesthetics are conditioned by science and technology. (I would point to Adam Curtis as one of the few voices in the mainstream media who really highlights this issue and its problematic twentieth-century history.) Without the materialist myth of technology we would probably never have seen the rise to prominence of the Bauhaus “international style” in architecture, of modern serial music, of psychoanalysis, sociology, mathematical economics, ecology, and many other phenomena of modern art and life. Raymond Schwab’s astonishing book The Oriental Renaissance draws the comparison with the Romantic generation quite explicitly: Orientalism “led to an enthusiasm for ideas that is only comparable with the enthusiasm of our contemporaries for the world of technology” (221).

But the enthusiasm is, in the end, of a different sort. The early Romantics knew that they were working on a common “mythology”, that the symbolic “mediators” of our values and ideas could, and should, be created and shaped by us. Symbols are human: they are given to us neither by God nor by the laws of physics. The Romantics were more sensitive to that fact than we are today. And so was one of the last great Romantics in a scientific age, born on Indian soil but perhaps not coincidentally more popular in Germany than almost anywhere else outside his native land: Rabindranath Tagore, who created from the gods and rituals of Hinduism his own symbolic universe of poetry, music, dance, art and festivals. If we want to make use of technology as aid and “intermediary” without slavishly worshipping it, we have much still to learn, I would suggest, from both Tagore and the Romantics.

Selected literature



Germana, Nicholas A. The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National Identity. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009.
Safranski, Rüdiger. Romantik: Eine deutsche Affäre. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2013.
Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880. Translated by Gene Patterson-Black und Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Cowan, Robert. The Indo-German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765-1885. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010.
Figueira, Dorothy M. Translating the Orient: The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Albany: State University of New York, 1991.
McGetchin, Douglas T. Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India’s Rebirth in Modern Germany. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2009.