Negotiating Germanness with Indian Religious History: Transfers of Academic Knowledge and Notions of völkisch Belief

Abstract

Völkisch, racist, and essentialist constructions of religious belief flourished in the first half of the twentieth century. After 1933, debates on Germanness in the German Youth Movement, and among intellectuals, artists, and state functionaries helped shape the politics of national socialist (NS) institutions. Discussions that sought to ground religious experience in scientific and historical evidence, drew on a combination of the phenomenology of religion, speculations about the nature of primordial belief, biological and historical evolutionism, and race theory. The author examines the formation of a discourse in which knowledge about India was selected from the academic discipline of Indology and relocated to suit the positions of the contributors to the debate. Essentially, the field reproduced aspects of religion that emphasized confessionalism, rationality, nationalism, the arts, science, and ritual in relation to modernity.