Promising continuity with a discontinuous past.

By Jan E.M. Houben

This and other information about the history of the DMG can be found in a recently published booklet on the history of the Society (Die Anfänge der Deutschen Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1995). Another booklet also published last year by the society, Die Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, is devoted more to its present activities. According to this second booklet (p. 7), the 'knowledge' of Asia and related countries which the Society has traditionally sought to promote concentrates on the knowledge of languages, literatures, history, religions and philosophies, forms of law and society, archaeology, and the art and material culture of the people living in these areas. Nowadays, however, social and political scientific problems from the past and present are tending to receive the bulk of the attention. The booklet mentions 21 disciplinary areas, ranging from Japanology to Africanistics. Since its inception, many non-Germans have become members of this learned society, just as the founding fathers of the Society themselves were often members of other Orientalist societies such as the Asiatic Societies in Paris, London, and Calcutta. The first learned Orientalist society without explicit missionary intentions, incidentally, was the Dutch Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences), founded in 1779 in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in the what was then the Dutch colony of the East Indies. The British followed in 1784 with the foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The next Asiatic Societies were founded after the Napoleonic wars in Paris (1822) and London (1823).

The German Tradition of Indology
The present meeting of the German Oriental Society was the 26th in a series of meetings which started in 1921, also in Leipzig, and which have taken place regularly since then at intervals of a few years. The meeting opened on 25 September with an address by Professor Annemarie Schimmel (Prof. Em. Harvard University/Bonn), after which the conference was split into different disciplinary areas (Fachgruppen) and work groups (Arbeitskreise). As far as my own area of indology is concerned, the contributions of the participants were, generally speaking, qualitatively and quantitatively impressive. Attention was directed mainly towards the above- mentioned traditional concerns of languages, literatures, history, religions and philosophies, to a lesser extent to forms of law and society in the South Asian past. The contributions shed light on the progress of solid, mainly philological, research in the areas of Sanskrit etymology, Vedic literature and culture, manuscriptology, Indian medicine, Indian and Buddhist texts and philosophies, as well as on early German missionaries in South India.

The concentration on the languages and literatures, especially the emphasis given to the ancient sources, may seem esoteric to non-indologists, but is in itself justified in view of the enormous amount of important material of which a great part is still to be made accessible on the basis of manuscripts. Several of the contributions by indologists at the 'Orientalistentag' concerned texts and manuscripts of the so-called Turfan Collection, with which German indologists have had a special bond since Heinrich Lüders and Albert Grünwedel von Le Coq started their expeditions to the Turfan Oasis in Chinese Turkestan in 1902-1914. The lexicographic particularities of these texts are the subject of a German project, now in progress, for a special multi-volume dictionary of the Sanskrit texts in the Turfan Collection. Another enormous collection of material has been made in a cooperative enterprise between Germany and Nepal. Since 1970 more than 150,000 manuscripts comprising almost 5,000,000 pages have been filmed in this project under the guidance of Prof. Albrecht Wezler (Hamburg). The original microfilms are kept in Nepal, copies of the films have been sent to Berlin. None of the c. 30 contributions at this 26th meeting dealt directly with recent modern political or social themes, nor did modern theoretical developments in linguistic sciences attract much interest. Nevertheless, the rich material which generations of German indologists have been making available for scholarly research will be of great value for providing historical dimensions to modern theories in the fields of social, linguistic, political, and religious sciences. The continuity between German indology and its glorious past -- Böhtlingk and Roth's Petersburger Dictionary (1850-1875) and Wackernagels Altindischen Grammatik (1896) are still standard works for Indologists as well as for linguists, to mention just two examples -- was physically visible in the presence at the conference of two senior, leading scholars of German indology -- indeed of indology in general -- namely Profs. Wilhelm Rau and Paul Thieme, both actively participating in the discussions (the latter even presented a contribution).

Vergangenheit Bewaltigung
To the extent that indology in general owes a great debt to the contributions of German indology, it also has to come to terms with some of the more problematic aspects of the history of the latter. I am referring here, of course, to the positive relations which some indologists at least maintained with the German government and its disastrous ideology of the 'pure Aryan race' before and during the period of the Second World War period. Essential reading for a well-informed discussion on this sensitive topic should comprise S. Pollock's provocative "Deep Orientalism: Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj" (in Van der Veer and Beckenridge, The Postcolonial Predicament, Philadelphia, 1993), passages from Halbfass' India and Europe (Albany, 1988), and selected articles and notices of the volumes 92-98 (1938-44) and 99 (1945-49) of the Zeitschrift fr die Deutsche Morgenl„ndische Gesellschaft.
Besides the discontinuity of the years 1945-48 (on 4-6 June 1948 the German Oriental Society was re-founded in Mainz), another hiatus in the history of the Society was clearly felt in Leipzig: East German (DDR) indologists and orientalists were never officially represented in the refounded Oriental Society. The September 1995 DMG meeting in Leipzig was the first held on former DDR territory since the foundation of this state in 1949 and its collapse forty years later.
Under the theme of continuity and the discontinuous past of Germany and German indology, two contributions concerning the historiography of indology deserve a special mention. Dr. Luitgard Soni (Univ. of Marburg) reported on her investigations into the scholarly and personal career of a remarkable personage in German indology, Charlotte Krause who went to India as a young woman to do research on the Jaina tradition in the 1920s, and remained there till her death in 1980; the other contribution was the presentation of the plans to publish a "Who's Who in Western Indology" by Dr. Klaus Karttunen (Univ. of Helsinki, Finland), who has already collected a huge amount of data on well-known and less well-known Western indologists of the past. Contributions such as these show that Indology is reading maturity; it is only to be hoped that a well-informed discussion of the above-mentioned, more problematic sides of its history, and more generally of the problems of Orientalism and of indology "beyond Orientalism" (a book with this title in honour of Prof. W. Halbfass is now being edited by Drs. K. Preisendanz and E. Franco), will not be shunned either.