Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around “Indianthusiasm.” Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis’ racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace.

Age of Entanglement explores patterns of connection linking German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the years after the Second World War. Kris Manjapra traces the intersecting ideas and careers of a diverse collection of individuals from South Asia and Central Europe who shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another’s worlds. Moving beyond well-rehearsed critiques of colonialism towards a new critical approach, this study recasts modern intellectual history in terms of the knotted intellectual itineraries of seeming strangers. Collaborations in the sciences, arts, and humanities produced extraordinary meetings of German and Indian minds. Meghnad Saha met Albert Einstein, Stella Kramrisch brought the Bauhaus to Calcutta, and Girindrasekhar Bose began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Rabindranath Tagore traveled to Germany to recruit scholars for a new Indian university, and the actor Himanshu Rai hired director Franz Osten to help establish movie studios in Bombay. These interactions, Manjapra argues, evinced shared responses to the cultural and political hegemony of the British empire. Germans and Indians hoped to find in one another the tools needed to disrupt an Anglocentric world order. As Manjapra demonstrates, transnational intellectual encounters are not inherently progressive. From Orientalism and Aryanism to socialism and scientism, German–Indian entanglements were neither necessarily liberal nor conventionally cosmopolitan, often characterized as much by manipulation as by cooperation. Age of Entanglement underscores the connections between German and Indian intellectual history, revealing the characteristics of a global age when the distance separating Europe and Asia seemed, temporarily, to disappear.

Indianthusiasm refers to the European fascination with, and fantasies about, Indigenous peoples of North America, and has its roots in nineteenth-century German colonial imagination. Often manifested in romanticized representations of the past, Indianthusiasm has developed into a veritable industry in Germany and other European nations: there are Western and so-called “Indian” theme parks and a German hobbyist scene that attract people of all social backgrounds and ages to join camps and clubs that practise beading, powwow dancing, and Indigenous lifestyles. Containing interviews with twelve Indigenous authors, artists, and scholars who comment on the German fascination with North American Indigenous Peoples, Indianthusiasm is the first collection to present Indigenous critiques and assessments of this phenomenon. The volume connects two disciplines and strands of scholarship: German Studies and Indigenous Studies, focusing on how Indianthusiam has created both barriers and opportunities for Indigenous peoples with Germans and in Germany.

Subhas Chandra Bose is among the most controversial figures of the Indian freedom struggle. 'The Sign Of The Tiger' unfolds those days of his political career, mostly unknown to Indians-when Netaji recruited Indian prisoners of war to form the Indian Legion under the aegis of the German army and describes how they fought valiantly against the British in the Second World War. Written from a German perspective, the book focusses more on Bose's political vision than on his magnetic personality. A refreshing and enlightening read, specially to all those interested in the mysteries of Indian freedom struggle and Bose's lesser known exploits.

Germany always enjoyed a natural sympathy from the Indians primarily because of Max Müller, that renowned Oxford professor of Comparative Philology of German descent who, while doing painstaking pioneering researches into ancient Indian scripture, called India "the very paradise on earth", without ever visiting the country. In spite of this, because of the latent racism among the German commercial classes and the social aloofness of the German diplomats in India in order to avoid giving any chance of suspicion to the British rulers, a normal relation based on mutual trust and friendship between the Germans and the Indians remained a desideratum. Yet during the chequered period between the two World Wars, Germany was compelled to reckon with the growing self confidence of the Indians. Even Hitler had to appease the Indians in order to save the German trade in India. The book is a pioneering work on the extra-ordinary German Indian relations between 1922 and 1939 and based on German archival materials.

How did the Bhagavadgãtà first become an object of German philosophical and philological inquiry? How were its foundational concepts initially interpreted within German intellectual circles, and what does this episode in the history of cross-cultural encounter teach us about the status of comparative philosophy today? This book addresses these questions through a careful study of the figures who read, translated and interpreted the Bhagavadgãtà around the turn of the nineteenth century in Germany: J.G. Herder, F. Majer, F. Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, W. von Humboldt, and G.W.F. Hegel. Methodologically, the study attends to the intellectual contexts and prejudices that framed the early reception of the text. But it also delves deeper by investigating the way these frameworks inflected the construction of the Bhagavadgãtà and its foundational concepts through the scholarly acts of excerpting, anthologization, and translation. Overall, the project contributes to the pluralization of Western philosophy and its history while simultaneously arguing for a continued critical alertness in cross-cultural comparison of philosophical and religious worldviews.