Surprising Aryan Mediations between German Indology and Nazism: research and the Adluri/Grünendahl debate

Abstract

Whether or not Indology contributed to Nazism and the Shoah from the eighteenth century onward should be a straightforward empirical question examined with historical methods based on archival documents,1 original publications, insights, judgments of truth, and awareness of moral or existential bias of both the researcher and the researched. In the "Indologiestreit" between Vishwa P. Adluri (2011) and Reinhold Grünendahl (2012) published in this Journal, however, the question about the Nazification of Indology is overshadowed by Edward W. Said's political-literary narrative.2 Why? What is Said's mesmeric reproach of British and French depictions of the "Orient" all about? And why does it haunt the arguments of Adluri and Grünendahl? More curiously, why does Said omit German Indologists from his indictment of Western imperial power, sexual, and biblical fantasies of the "Orient"?3