This book examines the influence of Indian socio-political thought, ideas, and culture on German Romantic nationalism. It suggests that, contrary to the traditional view that the concepts of nationalism have moved exclusively from the West to the rest of the world, in the crucial case of German nationalism, the essential intellectual underpinnings of the nationalist discourse came to the West, not from the West. The book demonstrates how the German Romantic fascination with India resulted in the adoption of Indian models of identity and otherness and ultimately shaped German Romantic nationalism. The author illustrates how Indian influence renovated the scholarly design of German nationalism and, at the same time, became central to pre-modern and pre-nationalist models of identity, which later shaped the Aryan myth. Focusing on the scholarship of Friedrich Schlegel, Otmar Frank, Joseph Goerres, and Arthur Schopenhauer, the book shows how, in explaining the fact of the diversity of languages, peoples, and cultures, the German Romantics reproduced the Indian narrative of the degradation of some Indo-Aryan clans, which led to their separation from the Aryan civilization. An important resource for the nexus between Indology and Orientalism, German Indian Studies and studies of nationalism, this book will be of interest to researchers working in the fields of history, European and South Asian area studies, philosophy, political science, and IR theory.

August Wilhelm Schlegel proclaimed that “[i]f the regeneration of the human species started in the East, Germany must be considered the Orient of Europe.” How can this remarkable identification of Germany with the subjugated oriental ‘other’ be explained? In The Orient of Europe, Nicholas A. Germana explores 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. The ‘mythical image’ of India, however, underwent profound changes in the decades after 1815. The end of the Wars of Liberation and the onset of the Restoration era, led to the decline of the romantic 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. In this book, which engages with the most recent scholarship in the rapidly emerging field of German Orientalism, Germana challenges traditional Saidian Orientalist readings of German intellectual engagement with Indian thought and literature. German romantic and humanist fascination with India, he argues, is best understood within the context of debates about the nature of ‘Germany’ and ‘Germanness’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rather than in connection with nascent German “colonial fantasies.”

In the first comprehensive English-language portrait of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm as political thinkers and actors, Jakob Norberg reveals how history's two most famous folklorists envisioned the role of literary and linguistic scholars in defining national identity. Convinced of the political relevance of their folk tale collections and grammatical studies, the Brothers Grimm argued that they could help disentangle language groups from one another, redraw the boundaries of states in Europe, and counsel kings and princes on the proper extent and character of their rule. They sought not only to recover and revive a neglected native culture for a contemporary audience, but also to facilitate a more harmonious and enduring relationship between the traditional political elite and an emerging national collective. Through close historical analysis, Norberg reconstructs how the Grimms wished to mediate between sovereigns and peoples, politics and culture. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.