| This dissertation is concerned with German academic and popular interest in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and how competing images of India signaled profound differences in thinking about the nature and status of German identity.;Much of the writing on German orientalism in the past two decades has concerned the issue of to what degree it resembles orientalism in France and Great Britain, i.e. countries with direct economic and colonial ties to South Asia. What is often overlooked is the explicit identification of Germany with India that is frequently found in the writings of German Indophiles, in this period. The present work shows how German thinkers, especially those associated with the Early Romantic movement, set India up as an "ideal mirror", in which they could perceive the image of the Germany they longed for---a nation whose greatness lay not in political and military power, but in the realm of culture and the spirit. Such an image was especially important during the years of French occupation and the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. Indian mythology and symbolism were proclaimed as the original sources of German mythology and folklore, just as the Germans themselves were declared to be the direct racial descendants of ancient Indians.;The end of the Wars of Liberation, and the onset of the Restoration era, led to decline of the romantic mythical image of India. As statist visions of German unity rose in prominence, especially in Prussia, this image of the connection between Germany and ancient India took on a new complexion. Politically volatile romantic "Indomania" gave way to a new, more acceptable, ideology---the ideology of Wissenschaft. Linguistic scholars such as Franz Bopp, powerful cultural icons like G.W.F. Hegel, and state officials exercised great power and led Sanskrit studies and Indology in a new direction beginning in the 1820s. The final chapter and conclusion examine the impact of these forces. |
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