§ 32 Bildung, Kultur und Sport

The archer and the arrow: Zen Buddhism and the politics of religion in Nazi Germany

“…57 By the same token, the regime remained ambivalent towards the small community of Buddhists living in Germany, no matter how enthusiastically these groups parroted Nazi jargon. 58 In short, like the Orientalists of the nineteenth century, their interest in the eastern world was premised on a narrative of Asian cultural and racial decline, one in which the historical development of Buddhism was in turn invariably diagnosed as symptomatic of the waning of the Nordic 'racial spirit' in Central Asia and India. 59 In contrast to the Orientalist strain of Nazism, which rejected contemporary Asian religious practices and beliefs in favour of a mythic lost 'golden age', advocates for Japanese Zen framed their analysis instead from a perspective that owed as much to the New Buddhist reform movement as it did to the German völkisch agenda.…”